187 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (2). 187-188 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial the current issue of studies in second language learning and teaching brings together six contributions written by scholars from poland and abroad which deal with a wide array of issues related to learning and teaching additional languages in different educational contexts. first, weronika szubko-sitarek reports the findings of two experimental studies conducted within the lexical decision task paradigm which aimed to investigate the cognate facilitation effect in the process of recognizing words in a third language by polish unbalanced trilinguals who, in addition to their mother tongue, were proficient in english and had variable command of german. in the next paper, sane m. yagi and saleh al-salman make a strong case for the use of tracking software in writing pedagogy as a tool for providing invaluable insights into the process of composing texts, but also a method of stimulating reflection and promoting strategic learning. the research-based contributions by ewa waniek-klimczak and aleksandra wach, in turn, shift the emphasis to sociolinguistic issues. the former presents the findings of a qualitative study which examined the acculturation patterns of three recent polish immigrants to the united kingdom, who were expert users of english, in relation to their formal and informal language learning experiences, while the latter uses questionnaire data obtained from a respectable sample of polish-speaking english majors to shed light on their preferences concerning pronunciation norms based on the native-speaker model and the lingua franca core. the last two papers included in this issue report the findings of studies exploring the role of anxiety in learning foreign language skills and subsystems. in the first of these, christina gkonou examines the interfaces between speaking and writing anxiety manifested by greek learners of english as a foreign language in a private school setting and, in the second, magdalena szyszka taps the relationship between the level of anxiety of polish advanced learners studying english in a teacher-training college and their self-evaluation of the segmental and suprasegmental aspects of their pronunciation. i believe that the broad 188 range of issues tackled in the individual contributions, the diversity of the theoretical perspectives and research paradigms adopted, and the valuable pedagogical implications offered will all make this issue of ssllt an engaging and stimulating reading for a variety of audiences. miros aw pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl 407 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (3). 2014. 407-408 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.3.1 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial the title of this special issue is very deliberately wide in scope. one reason for its breadth is that the age question is somehow difficult to contain. it is very obvious to most of us these days that age is a “macrovariable” which connects to a veritable multitude of genuinely isolable and measurable factors. this is not a matter of dispute between those who favour and those who do not favour the critical/sensitive period hypothesis. the common ground between these two groups (or at least large sections of them) is that the significance of initial age of learning may be difficult to determine precisely because of the fact that it cannot be disentangled from other, interrelated, variables; that age of onset is a confounded indicator of maturation because it co-varies with a great variety of factors: social, cultural, psychological and neurological. another reason for the broad, inclusive approach is that i wished not to remain within the usual rhetoric of work on the age question. of course, the matter of the critical/sensitive period often crops up, and it acts as a discrete backdrop to much of what is said. there are large tracts of discussion here, however, to which the veracity or otherwise of the critical/sensitive period hypothesis is without much relevance. the problem explored in such cases rather is simply what happens at a particular age or stage, the focus being sometimes on particular sets of circumstances. the quest in these instances is to discover what the elements may be—innate, social educational, and so on—of an explanation for the way things turn out. in a way it is perhaps regrettable that i did not find a treatment dealing with “third age” scenario; next time perhaps! i am very happy, anyway, with the extremely diverse and interesting range of material gathered together here, and with the array of theoretically and practically important topics that are covered across the articles nestling between these covers. the warmest thanks are due to our contributors for their hard work, their wonderful insights and their excellent observance of deadlines! i trust that their endeavours will induce enlightenment in their readers but also 408 real enjoyment! i must also acknowledge the never-failing support and encouragement of the general editor of ssllt, miros aw pawlak. david singleton trinity college dublin, ireland university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary state school of higher professional education in konin, poland dsnglton@tcd.ie 375 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (3). 2016. 375-376 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.3.1 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial the present issue of studies in second language learning and teaching brings together six papers, the first two of which are conceptual in nature and the remaining four constitute reports of original research studies. the issue opens with a contribution by diane larsen-freeman, who superbly demonstrates how classroom-oriented research can be approached from a complex systems perspective (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008), arguing that this theoretical stance is perfectly suited to reflect the intricacies and realities of second language learning and teaching, as well as providing examples of research methods that can be employed for this purpose. in the following paper, adriana biedroń and mirosław pawlak consider the extent to which the findings of research on individual difference variables can inform teaching practice, focusing upon factors that are not easily amenable to external manipulation, that is intelligence, foreign language aptitude, working memory and personality, and arguing that even if variables of this kind can indeed be modified, the extent to which this can be accomplished in the classroom is extremely limited. the first empirical paper included in this issue, authored by ali al-hoorie, touches on the blatantly neglected issue of unconscious influences on second language learning motivation and reports the results of a study in which a computerized implicit association test (greenwald, mcghee, & schwartz, 1998) was used in order to investigate the mediating effects of implicit attitudes on selected components of the l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2005, 2009). he demonstrates that such attitudes indeed moderate the relationship between explicit attitudes towards speakers of english and learning english and ideal l2 self, being more relevant for males than females and correlating negatively with first language group affiliation. subsequently, julie dearden and ernesto macaro report the results of a small-scale study which explored the attitudes of 25 teachers from three institutions of higher education in austria, italy and poland towards english-medium instruction in content classes, showing with the help of semi-structured interviews 376 that there exists withinand between-country variation that can be attributed to individual factors and educational and political considerations. paola vettorel and sara corrizzato tackle the issue of how pedagogical intervention can lead to raising teachers’ awareness of world englishes and english as a lingua franca. specifically, using a variety of data collection instruments, such as questionnaires, reflections in e-learning discussion forums, interviews and final reports, they provide evidence for a positive impact of two university-run teacher education programs on the views and classroom practices of pre-service teachers. in the last contribution, hien hoang and frank boers report the findings of a research project which investigated the extent to which adult learners of english as a second language are able to use multiword expressions when retelling a story to which they have been exposed through reading and listening, showing that the recycling of such expressions is much lower than that of single words and that their use is often inaccurate. all of these contributions represent stateof-the-art developments in sla theory and research and, as such, they are bound to constitute important points of reference for researchers, program coordinators as well as practitioners. mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references dörnyei, z. (2005). the psychology of the language learner: individual differences in second language acquisition. london, uk: lawrence erlbaum. dörnyei, z. (2009). the l2 motivational self system. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 9-42). bristol, uk: multilingual matters. greenwald, a. g., mcghee, d. e., & schwartz, j. l. k. (1998). measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: the implicit association test. journal of personality and social psychology, 74(6), 1464-1480. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.74.6.1464 larsen-freeman, d., & cameron, l. (2008). complex systems and applied linguistics. oxford: oxford university press. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: miros aw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: krzysztof kwiatkowski (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) vol. 2 no. 4 december 2012 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (trinity college, dublin) simon borg (university of leeds) piotr cap (university of ód ) anna cie licka (texas a&m international university, adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) kata csizer (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) krystyna dro dzia -szelest (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabry -barker (university of silesia) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of ód ) jan majer (university of ód ) paul meara (swansea university) anna micho ska-stadnik (university of wroc aw) anna ni egorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) terrence odlin (ohio state university) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) pawe scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) david singleton (trinity college, dublin) odzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) merrill swain (university of toronto) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of ód ) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – pozna 2012 editor: miros aw pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak krzysztof kwiatkowski anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydzia pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam pozna proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print and online, with the print edition being the original version. published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, pozna contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy wiat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. wierzawska 1, 60-321 pozna indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: central and eastern european online library (ceeol) the mla international bibliography the mla directory of periodicals linguistic abstracts ebsco efforts will also be made to include studies in second language learning and teaching in the index of journals published by the polish ministry of science and higher education, and to have it listed by the european reference index for the humanities (erih) and the thomson reuters master journal list. special issue: languages in the globalised world: interpreting multilingual literacy and cross-cultural encounters guest editors: théophile munyangeyo françois pichette studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 2, number 4, december 2012 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors .................................................................... 461 editorial ......................................................................................... 465 articles: romuald gozdawa-go biowski – does euro-english have native speakers? making sense of conflicting views ................................................................... 467 robert michael bianchi – glocal arabic online: the case of 3arabizi ........ 483 ralph krüger – working with corpora in the translation classroom .......... 505 pawe sobkowiak – cross-cultural perspective of fl teaching and learning in the polish context .......................................................................................... 527 muñoz de cote, sylvia van dijk – intercultural challenge to language learning ........................................................................................... 543 théophile munyangeyo – the rhetoric of disenchantment through symbolism ............................................................................................... 561 reviewers for volume 2/2012 ......................................................... 579 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 581 461 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors robert michael bianchi is a recent doctoral graduate of lancaster university and an assistant professor in the english department at virginia commonwealth university in qatar, where he teaches composition, critical thinking, and research skills. he has been teaching for over 20 years. an avid language learner, he has varying degrees of proficiency in some 15 languages. his research interests include bilingualism, code-switching, script-switching, diglossia, and identity-related language use. the author is particularly interested in localized linguistic responses to globalization, especially the emergence of mixed codes in online contexts. he enjoys creative writing and travelling in his spare time. contact details: (e-mail: rmbianchi@qatar.vcu.edu) luz maría muñoz de cote is professor at the language department at the university of guanajuato, mexico. she is particularly interested in research related to dialogical approaches to teaching and learning as well as teacher development. she has been a teacher trainer for over 15 years. she is currently the director of the language department at the university of guanajuato after a year coordinating the tesol ba program. contact details: (e-mail: luzmaria@ugto.mx) sylvia van dijk is professor at the education department at the university of guanajuato, mexico. her main research interest is children’s rights and within this field she has published extensively. she is currently coordinating the educational research master program. romuald gozdawa-go biowski is a professor of linguistics at the institute of english studies, the university of warsaw, poland. his research interests include applied linguistics (testing, pedagogical grammar, formulaic competence, applied contrastive syntax), theoretical linguistics (the generative paradigm) and recent 462 developments in language teaching methodology, in particular content and language integrated learning, intercultural communicative competence, lingua francas, and euro-english(es). he has written a book on interlanguage growth, four manuals of english grammar for polish secondary schools and adult learners and numerous papers in academic journals in poland and abroad. he coauthored a testing manual and six collections of tests of english for polish learners and codeveloped attainment standards and the model of foreign language testing at the university of warsaw. contact details: (e-mail: r.gozdawa@uw.edu.pl) ralph krüger is a split-site phd student in translation studies at cologne university of applied sciences, germany and the university of salford, uk. at cologne university of applied sciences, he teaches specialised translation, translation technology, project management and translation theory at ba and ma levels. at the university of salford, he taught general translation at ba level and specialised translation at ma level. his phd thesis focuses on a corpusbased investigation of explicitation and implicitation in scientific and technical translation and is situated within the framework of cognitive linguistics. contact details: (e-mail: ralph.krueger@fh-koeln.de) théophile munyangeyo currently teaches translation, interpreting (french-english both ways) and written communication skills in the school of languages at leeds metropolitan university, uk. he is research ethics coordinator, and supervises and examines phd students in language learning and teaching. some of his publications explored literary representations and reading theories applied to french and francophone writings. in this research area, he explored the fiction/reality dichotomy, the notion of subjectivity in creative writing and proximity between the fictional space and the social context of postcolonial francophone novels, especially in relation to the concept of literature of engagement and disenchantment in fictional narratives. dr théophile munyangeyo has researched, presented conferences papers and given lectures at universities in and outside the united kingdom as guest lecturer on interpreting (principles, practices and ethics), especially public service interpreting; bilingual and multilingual education; language acquisition (second and third language acquisition); language policy; discourse analysis and language learning and teaching. contact details: (e-mail: t.munyangeyo@leedsmet.ac.uk) francois pichette is professor of linguistics at teluq/universite du quebec a montreal, canada. his teaching and research interests include language acquisition and 463 development, reading and writing, and second-language vocabulary acquisition. dr. pichette has also taught spanish and french at universities in mexico and the united states, and has published in several peer-reviewed journals such as the modern language journal, the canadian modern language review, the canadian journal of applied linguistics and foreign language annals. contact details: (e-mail: pichette.francois@teluq.uqam.ca) pawe sobkowiak, phd, is a senior lecturer at the school of law and administration, adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland, where he teaches business english and business communication to students of management. his main research interests include different aspects of teaching business english, the professional development of language teachers as well as, more recently, the development of learners’ intercultural competence and intercultural teaching. contact details: (e-mail: pawelsob@amu.edu.pl) 187 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (2). 2018. 187-191 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.2.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial we welcome you to our special issue of studies in second language learning and teaching (ssllt). our focus is language learning strategies, or lls. we have been discussing the need for this special issue for years. over coffee, sodas, or chardonnet at many conferences and via emails and skype, we discussed urgent issues in lls assessment, research, and instruction. ssllt, like many journals, has published numerous articles involving lls, and other journals have had special issues on lls. however, the time is ripe for a special issue that systematically includes lls for all language skill areas, all major cross-cutting language subsystems such as grammar, and some important yet often ignored topics, such as strategies for learning culture and for technology-enhanced language learning (tell), which greatly advances decades of research on computer-assisted language learning (call). we have gathered articles from a talented team of researchers, most of them well-known and the others rising stars. the articles in this special issue directly involve lls research in several world regions and allude to such research in many more regions. at the most fundamental level, lls are conscious, teachable, intentional, self-regulated thoughts and actions used for learning the target language. selfregulation is the key to strategies, as noted by oxford (1999, 2011, 2017). the articles in this special issue generally describe or define lls as having many of these features, though phrased in various ways. a more detailed definition of lls is given in the paper by oxford and gkonou (this issue) and oxford (2017). note that learning another language necessarily involves learning another culture, and many strategies assist in these intertwined learnings. our special issue title, language learning strategies: linking with the past, shaping the future, has a triple meaning arising from three perspectives: learner, teacher, and researcher. here is how we see it through the lens of knowledge and audacious hope: 188 · each learner’s current and future self-regulatory lls use (we consider all serious lls to be self-regulatory) and language attainment are based on his or her own personal learning history, cognition, and fluctuating emotional and motivational states. also influential in the learner’s past, present, and future use of lls are attitudes and beliefs of the learner, the family, the community, and the culture; affordances in formal (classroom) or informal learning contexts; and the role of demographic factors, such as the learner’s socioeconomic status. learners might not consider how their lls use is related to all these elements and how these elements are associated with each other, but teachers and researchers should consider these as interacting, shifting, melding, and altering parts of a complex dynamic system (oxford, 2017). · the second meaning of our title concerns what the teacher has done, is doing, and will do in multiple areas, such as gaining a strong understanding of learners, culture, contexts, and strategies; noticing each learner’s needs; offering strategy instruction or strategy assistance that fits the learner, addresses the learning tasks, and promotes learner self-regulation; providing relevant linguistic and cultural content; planning and assessing effectively; and encouraging the individual’s excitement about learning. this asks a lot of teachers, who deserve much more recognition than they receive in many or most cultures. · the third meaning of the title of our special issue relates to lls researchers’ role, past, present, and future. their studies, publications, and presentations from the past and present can pave the way for future lls research. lls researchers can both learn from and enlighten teachers, teacher educators, and language learners in diverse cultures and settings. using their knowledge and staying open to serendipity and epiphany, lls researchers can create new theories; work with teachers to develop innovative designs for future strategy instruction and strategy assessment; and devise improved techniques for research design and analysis. the special issue begins with this editorial by the two of us, rebecca l. oxford and mirosław pawlak, who offer an overview and raise some key factors. a cluster of articles then addresses lls in the four skill areas in this order: listening, reading, writing, and speaking. fortunately, listening is no longer viewable as the most ignored area of lls research, as witnessed by yajun zeng and christine c. m. goh’s article on extensive-listening strategies as influences on metacognitive awareness and listening achievement. kouider mokhtari, dimiter m. dimitrov, and carla a. reichard also center on metacognitive awareness, but in reading, not listening. their article concerns the revision of the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi), reports on testing for the 189 measure’s factorial invariance, and includes specialized information on assessment for second language learners. a vast view of writing strategy research comes from rosa m. manchón, who looks at past and future research agendas in terms of conceptualizations, inquiry methods, and research findings. mirosław pawlak writes about the importance of context in the use of speaking strategies for two communicative tasks. the next three articles concern language subsystems: pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. pronunciation, as a subsystem, contributes to two language skill areas, listening and speaking, and also affects reading. therefore, the informative, critical article on researching pronunciation learning strategies, written by mirosław pawlak and magdalena szyszka, is very much needed. peter yongqi gu describes the validation of an internationally important online questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies for esl learners, while mirosław pawlak analyzes grammar learning strategies, laments the inadequate research on those strategies, and offers a new, practical, and theoretically sound grammar learning strategy inventory. two articles are heavily cultural. julie m. sykes and andrew d. cohen describe explicit strategies for interlanguage pragmatics, a culture-and-language topic that needs much more attention. rebecca l. oxford and christina gkonou write about learning strategies in relation to culture, which is inextricably interwoven with language for all learners, including the refugees and immigrants mentioned in the chapter. four articles deal with overarching issues in lls. mirosław pawlak and zuzanna kiermasz deal with foreign language majors’ use of learning strategies for second and third languages, and their article is important especially because third language learning strategies are rarely explored. relationships among self-directed learning, autonomy, and lls are highlighted in the article by melissa williamson hawkins. yalun zhou and michael wei talk about strategies in technologyenhanced language learning, or tell, which offers opportunities now that were not dreamed of a decade ago. mixed-methods strategy research is the focus of carmen m. amerstorfer, who also discusses the utility of a traditional lls survey, the strategy inventory for language learning, or the sill (oxford, 1990). the final article (pawlak and oxford) wraps up the special issue by pointing out key elements in and across the other articles. it also speculates about what the future might bring in terms of lls assessment, research, and instruction. because a number of the articles in the special issue mention quantitative or mixed-method studies, and several report using the sill, we need to say a word about the statistical analysis of lls questionnaire data. with 5-point likertscale items, as used in the sill and a multitude of other psychological and educational measures, it is appropriate to use parametric procedures rather than 190 having to use nonparametric procedures, which are necessary for 3or 4-point likert-scale data.1 we sincerely hope that you enjoy this special issue. we anticipate that your discussions about lls over coffee, sodas, or chardonnet will be as spirited as ours have been. we encourage you to follow up on any leads and references in the articles. we hope to hear from you if you have new ideas, suggestions, or questions about lls. rebecca l. oxford university of maryland, usa university of alabama at birmingham, usa rebeccaoxford@gmail.com mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references dörnyei, z. (2005). the psychology of the language learner: individual differences in second language acquisition. mahwah, nj: erlbaum. ferguson, g. a., & takane, y. (2005). statistical analysis in psychology and education (6th ed.). montréal: mcgraw-hill ryerson. gunning, p. & oxford, r. l. (2014). children’s learning strategy use and the effects of strategy instruction on success in learning esl in canada. in r. l. 1 a brief detour into statistics and the social pressure of academic criticism is needed here. dörnyei (2005) criticized the sill for being analyzed with interval-level parametric significance tests. data from 3or 4-point likert-scale items, which to our knowledge have not been used in lls research, violate the distribution-normality assumption for parametric procedures (plonsky, 2015), and in such cases nonparametric procedures are needed. however, data from 5-point likert scales (as found in the sill) resemble interval-level data due to the wider range of the scales, thus permitting the use of parametric statistics (see hatch & lazaraton, 1991; jaccard & wan, 1996; mizumoto & takeuchi, 2018; oxford, 2011). parametric statistics can also be used with likert-scale data if the sample is sufficiently large (ferguson & takane, 2005). nevertheless, the injunction against using (acceptable) parametric analyses for the 5-point likert-scale sill cast a shadow over much quantitative lls research, and researchers like gunning and oxford (2014) shelved their parametrically-attained findings and reported only nonparametric results in a major strategy-instruction study. a more justifiable criticism of the sill focused on the cumulativity of responses across strategy items and categories and the varying “grain size” of strategies, problems that could be relatively easily resolved with careful redesign of the inventory. 191 oxford & c. griffiths (eds.), language learning strategy research in the twenty-first century. special issue, system, 43, 82-100. hatch, e., & lazaraton, a. (1991). the research manual: design and statistics for applied linguistics. boston: heinle & heinle. jaccard, j., & wan, c. k. (1996). lisrel approaches to interaction effects in multiple regression. thousand oaks, ca: sage. mizumoto, a., & takeuchi, o. (2018). modeling a prototypical use of language learning strategies: decision tree-based methods in multiple contexts. in r. l. oxford & c. m. amerstorfer (eds.), language learning strategies and individual learner characteristics: situating strategy use in diverse contexts (pp. 99-102). london: bloomsbury. oxford, r. l. (1990). language learning strategies: what every teacher should know. boston: heinle & heinle (now cengage). oxford, r. (1999). relationships between second language learning strategies and language proficiency in the context of learner autonomy and self-regulation. revista canaria de estudios ingleses, 38, 108-126. oxford, r. l. (2011). teaching and researching language learning strategies (1st ed.). harlow, essex, uk: pearson longman. oxford, r. l. (2017). teaching and researching language learning strategies: self-regulation in context (2nd ed.). new york: routledge. plonsky, l. (ed.). (2015). advancing quantitative methods in second language research. new york: routledge. 291 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (2). 2021. 291-296 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.2.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review understanding formulaic language: a second language acquisition perspective editors: anna siyanova-chanturia, ana pellicer-sánchez publisher: routledge, 2019 isbn: 9781138634978 pages: 278 the discussion of mechanisms enhancing the acquisition of formulaic language (fl) has been flourishing in recent decades, progressing from describing the concept to revealing its use in various registers: spoken, written, and hybrid. with each domain of linguistics approaching fl in a distinct way, the book understanding formulaic language: a second language acquisition perspective by anna siyanova-chanturia and ana pellicer-sánchez presents a more inclusive view of recent research contributions emerging from different fields, in addition to pointing to critical gaps that need to be addressed in future research. the appeal of the book is that it covers a broad range of topics related to fl, from theoretical perspectives to practical applications. this breadth of coverage is the first effort to foster mutual understanding among linguists and to emphasize its connection with second language acquisition (sla). the book opens with a description of fl from an sla perspective, defining the term very broadly as: 292 strings of letters, words, sounds, or other elements, contiguous or non-contiguous, of any length, size, frequency, degree of compositionality, literality/figurativeness, abstractness and complexity, not necessarily assumed to be stored, retrieved or processed whole, but that necessarily enjoy a degree of conventionality or familiarity among (typical) speakers of a language community or group, and that hold a strong relationship in communicating meaning. (p. 5) this inclusive scope is specifically rooted in three approaches: cognition/ psycholinguistics in part 1, socio-culture/pragmatics in part 2, and pedagogy in part 3. each part is comprised of 3-6 chapters contributed by leading researchers across the fields. nearly all the chapters are structured as follows: an introductory section including operational definitions; a general overview of recent studies of formulaicity and its contribution to the acquisition of first language (l1) and/or second language (l2); and, lastly, discussions of research gaps which serve as recommendations for future contributions. part 1 opens with stefanie wulff’s chapter, which provides a concise overview of fl using a usage-based approach. the author examines empirical evidence central to processing and learnability, such as perceptions of form and frequency. she concludes by highlighting the greater role that fl plays in facilitating the acquisition of l1 rather than l2. given the lack of evidence demonstrating its effectiveness in acquiring the latter, the author proposes a more optional path to learning fl for l2 populations. in chapter 2, anna siyanova-chanturia and diana sidtis examine the role that non-compositional idiomatic constructions perform in l1 and l2 development and review a range of psycholinguistic paradigms concerning online processing of fl, such as eye-tracking. the contributors stress the importance of familiarity over frequency in enhancing the learning experience. like wulff, siyanova-chanturia and sidtis underscore the fundamental role of fl in facilitating l1 development. similarly, in chapter 3, kathy conklin and gareth carrol explore diverse factors that influence the processing of fl in l1 and their equivalents in l2. to frame this comparison, two types of fl are examined: idioms and collocations; evidence from cross-language studies, including english-japanese and english-german, is reviewed. the authors conclude that when some features in l1 and l2 are shared, such as form and meaning, the processing of cross-language fl equivalences would likely be effortless. this section closes with chapter 4 by phoebe lin, who examines speech prosody in studying fl. she defines the concept as strings of sounds rather than words. by reviewing studies concerning childhood and post-childhood acquisition of fl, the author stresses the significant function that prosodic characteristics, such as timing and pitch, play in processing fl. the author also makes a strong argument that encountering more l2 oral output maximizes the possibility of acquiring various fl prosodic elements. 293 part 2 begins with kathleen bardovi-harlig summarizing how fl is defined and viewed in pragmatics research, where the term “conventional expressions” is frequently employed. with reference to a wide range of language learning mechanisms, such as interaction and language transfer, the author delves into how noticing such expressions in l2 is considerably less challenging than producing them. drawing on l1 data, chapter 6 by nancy bell and stephen skalicky tackles the dynamic association of humor and fl: the former has been long regarded as non-formulaic due to its deviation from expected linguistic patterns but recent evidence reveals that humor is highly formulaic in nature. the authors speculate that integrating humorous formulaic elements into l2 classes increases the possibility of recalling vocabulary and noticing new linguistic forms. this part of the book closes with chapter 7 by istvan kecskes, who underscores the importance of fl from the perspective of intercultural pragmatics, insisting that both individual and societal experiences influence the learnability of fl. the author, therefore, supports the assumption that fluency in intercultural communications entails getting immersed into the target culture and using fl. given this understanding, he explains why l2 learners have lower accounts of producing already existing fl, emphasizing that their lack of involvement in the target culture results in modifying some formulaic parts to create new prefabricated ones. building on the preceding contributions, the third and last part of the book (part 3) includes six chapters providing implications for better ways of teaching and learning fl. in chapter 8, ana pellicer-sánchez and frank boers focus on three pedagogical approaches specific to formulaicity and vocabulary, namely, intentional learning, incidental learning, and semi-incidental learning. while incidental learning seems to facilitate the acquisition of fl, the discussion showcases the effectiveness of the other two types in guiding l2 learners successfully towards acquisition. other pedagogical techniques maximizing learners’ uptake are also laid out, including font style and sound patterning. in chapter 9, henrik gyllstad and norbert schmitt elaborate on the current application of assessing fl by providing a detailed characterization of seven tests, each developed with a goal of measuring different knowledge areas, such as the productive collocation test (schmitt, dörnyei, adolphs, & durow, 2004) and disco (eyckmans, 2009). a comparison between testing single word items and fl reveals the complexity of assessing the latter. with the hope of advancing the design of future fl tests, the contributors offer extensive descriptions and suggestions, covering diverse topics, ranging from establishing more explicit definitions of constructs to integrating technology into assessment. next, chapter 10 by tom cobb introduces corpora and underlines the usefulness of data-driven approaches for providing meaningful learning opportunities. the main argument is that concordance programs increase the amount of language exposure, making 294 the learning of various types of fl even more probable. the author suggests that learning can be maximized by addressing the role of internal and external instructional factors, such as learners’ motivation, when developing instructional activities. chapter 11 by phil durrant elaborates extensively on the vital role of fl in the context of english for academic purposes, emphasizing that joining a knowledge community and achieving academic success require both understanding and producing fl patterns. interestingly, the chapter also outlines many concerns about students using fl, especially concerns that grading could be negatively influenced if such formulas are considered plagiarism and/or lack of intellectual independence. in chapter 12, sylviane granger offers an overview of the study of fl in learner corpora, with a focus on collocations and lexical bundles. as reported in research, limited numbers of fl occur in l2 texts. almost all instances of these expressions are found among the top frequent fl produced by l1 populations. the author stresses the influence of language transfer, positive and negative, to indicate why the diversity of fl produced increases when l2 learners reach higher proficiency levels. she ends by calling for more replication and mixed-method studies to fill gaps in existing research. the concluding chapter by alison wray seeks to explore the central question: “why don’t second language learners more proactively target formulaic sequences?” (p. 248). she presents in-depth explanations grounded in all the three, broad, yet distinctive perspectives outlined in the preceding chapters, offering readers extensive opportunities for reflection on the study of fl. overall, the key contribution of the book is that it presents the first unifying attempt to challenge the traditional one-way understanding emerging from each field of linguistics. despite covering a wide range of topics, considerable attention to detail can be noticed throughout the chapters. this manner of presentation enhances the understanding of critical issues concerning the complexity and dynamics of fl, inviting readers to develop their own research interests and conclusions. as attested by wray (2002), developing a more holistic understanding is particularly important due to the complicated nature of fl. instead of viewing fl through one lens and mainly in the form of lexical units, this inclusivity is indeed worthwhile for researchers, scholars, and graduate students from various linguistics backgrounds. given the breadth of topics covered, from theorizing acquisition of fl to discussing its implications for instruction, readers are offered a bigger picture of mechanisms shaping the acquisition of fl. while the book offers many enriching opportunities to better understand the phenomenon in question, a few limitations can be observed in part 3. what is noticeable here is that rather than establishing an inclusive overview of topics, a narrower discussion of frameworks and findings seems to be laid out. given the absence of findings significantly shaping the ways in which fl is being discussed 295 today, it might be crucial to develop understanding from all pedagogical approaches. those not familiar with corpora, for instance, could benefit from a more comprehensive discussion of other registers, genres, and technologies. although framing the discussion around analyses of the top concordance lines seems useful, covering a range of research topics could provide opportunities for reflection helpful for drawing one’s own conclusions and enhancing understanding. as demonstrated best by conrad (2002), corpus research is not limited to presenting concordance outputs; it goes far beyond that to offer rich insights into language uses and registers. if the discussions were extended to include diverse topics, this part could offer readers the foundation required to conceptualize fl more inclusively. regardless of this limitation, part 3, among others, seems less abstract as it shifts from conceptual frameworks to grounded practices, making it a valuable resource for readers interested in exploring current pedagogical practices. on the whole, it is apparent that the book has surely achieved its purpose, with most chapters dedicated to exploring the phenomenon inclusively and informatively. a rich contribution like this is sorely needed with today’s growing number of diverse research findings targeting fl. when it comes to readership, the edited collection can be recommended for researchers, specialists in the field of linguistics, and graduate students interested in consolidating their knowledge of fl from a range of linguistic perspectives. reviewed by ella alhudithi iowa state university, ames, usa ella@iastate.edu references conrad, s. (2002). corpus linguistic approaches for discourse analysis. annual review of applied linguistics, 22, 75-95. eyckmans, j. (2009). toward an assessment of learners’ receptive and productive syntagmatic knowledge. in a. barfield & h. gyllstad (eds.), researching collocations in another language (pp. 139-152). pargrave macmillan. schmitt, n., dornyei, z., adolphs, s., & durow, v. (2004). knowledge and acquisition of formulaic sequences: a longitudinal study. in n. schmitt (ed.), formulaic sequences: acquisition, processing and use (pp. 55-86). john benjamins. wray, a. (2002). formulaic language and the lexicon. cambridge university press. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: edyta olejarczuk (poznań university of technology) language editor: melanie ellis (language teacher training college, zabrze) vol. 7 no. 1 march 2017 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, university of new south wales, sydney) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo) kata csizér (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) robert dekeyser (university of maryland) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) carol griffiths (fatih university, istanbul) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) sarah mercer (university of graz) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) bonny norton (university of british columbia) terrence odlin (ohio state university) rebecca oxford (university of maryland) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (university of pannonia, trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto) elaine tarone (university of minnesota) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) stuart webb (university of western ontario) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2017 editor: mirosław pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak anna mystkowska-wiertelak edyta olejarczuk © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · scopus · web of science emerging sources citation index (esci) · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · infobaseindex · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the clarivate analytics (formerly thomson reuters) master journal list. special issue: individual differences in second language development guest editors: kees de bot szilvia bátyi studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 7, number 1, march 2017 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors ....................................................................... 9 editorial .......................................................................................... 13 articles: simone e. pfenninger – not so individual after all: an ecological approach to age as an individual difference variable in a classroom ............... 19 kees de bot, fang fang – circadian rhythms and second language performance ...................................................................................... 47 peter d. macintyre, laszlo vincze – positive and negative emotions underlie motivation for l2 learning .............................................................................. 61 david singleton – language aptitude: desirable trait or acquirable attribute? .......................................................................................... 89 yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer – affective and situational correlates of foreign language proficiency: a study of chinese university learners of english and japanese .................................................................. 105 wander lowie, marijn van dijk, huiping chan, marjolijn verspoor – finding the key to successful l2 learning in groups and individuals ............ 127 szilvia bátyi – the role of attitudes in the development of russian as a foreign language: a retrospective study ...........................................................149 book reviews: mirosław pawlak – review of zoltán dörnyei, alastair henry, christine muir’s motivational currents in language learning: frameworks for focused interventions .................................................................................... 169 notes to contributors .....................................................................175 9 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors guest editors szilvia bátyi got her phd from the university of pannonia in veszprém, hungary in 2011, and in 2012 she joined the academic staff of the department of applied linguistics at the same university where she works as an assistant professor. she participated in several projects, edited books and volumes, attended and organised international conferences and teaches at the ba, ma and phd levels. her research interests include biand multilingualism, linguistic landscape and language attrition. contact data: institute for hungarian and applied linguistics, university of pannonia, 8200 veszprém, egyetem u. 10 (szilviabatyi7@gmail.com) kees de bot got his phd from the university of nijmegen in the netherlands. his interests range from bilingual processing to language attrition and language development over the lifespan, language and aging and circadian rhythm in language learning. his main research topic now is what counts as evidence in applied linguistics. he has published in the main leading journals in the field of applied linguistics and published a book on the history of applied linguistics with routledge in 2015. he recently retired from the university of groningen, the netherlands and is now working at the university of pannonia in hungary. contact data: institute for hungarian and applied linguistics, university of pannonia, 8200 veszprém, egyetem u. 10 (c.l.j.de.bot@rug.nl) contributors fang fang got her ma degree (cum laude) in applied linguistics from the university of groningen, the netherlands in 2015. now she is working as a customer service executive at booking.com. she intends to build a career in the travel industry. contact data: 16f lujiazui investment tower, 360 pudian road shanghai 200122, china (ff19881129xx@outlook.com) 10 huiping chan, phd obtained her doctorate degree at university of groningen, the netherlands in the department of applied linguistics in 2015. her research work includes writing and speaking development, vocabulary learning, and modeling language development from the perspective of dynamic systems theory. contact data: dept. of applied linguistics, university of groningen, po box 716, 9700 as groningen, the netherlands. (huipingchan1981@gmail.com) yinxing jin got his phd from the university of groningen, the netherlands and is now a lecturer at the hainan normal university, the people's republic of china. his research interests lie primarily in positive and negative emotions in relation to learning a foreign language. contact data: foreign language college, hainan normal university, 99# south longkun road, 571158, haikou city, hainan province, p. r. china (busicontact@yahoo.com) merel keijzer is an associate professor of applied linguistics at the university of groningen, where she also holds a post as rosalind franklin fellow. a member of the dutch national young academy, her main research interests are the social, cognitive and neurobiological effects of bilingualism in older adulthood. contact data: dept. of applied linguistics, university of groningen, po box 716, 9700 as groningen, the netherlands (m.c.j.keijzer@rug.nl) wander lowie holds a phd in linguistics from the university of groningen, the netherlands and is chair of applied linguistics at this university. he is also a research associate of the university of the free state in south africa and associate editor of the modern language journal. his main research interest lies in the application of dynamic systems theory to second language development (learning and teaching). he has published more than 50 articles and book chapters and (co-)authored five books in the field of applied linguistics. contact data: university of groningen, department of applied linguistics, oude kijk in’t jatstraat 26, 9712 wk groningen, the netherlands (w.m.lowie@rug.nl) peter d. macintyre is a professor of psychology at cape breton university, sydney, nova scotia, canada. his research areas include the psychology of language and communication. he has published numerous articles and chapters on language anxiety, willingness to communicate, motivation and other topics, and has co-authored or co-edited five books including positive psychology in sla (2016, multilingual matters, with tammy gregersen and sarah mercer), motivational dynamics in language learning (2015, multilingual matters, with zoltan 11 dörnyei and alastair henry), and capitalizing on language learner individuality (2014, multilingual matters, with tammy gregersen). contact data: cape breton university, 1250 grand lake road, sydney, ns, canada, b1p 6l2 (peter_macintyre@cbu.ca) mirosław pawlak, professor of english at the faculty of philology, state university of applied sciences, konin, poland; and the department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts in kalisz, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland. he received his doctoral and post-doctoral degrees as well as his full professorship from adam mickiewicz university in poznań. his main areas of interest are sla theory and research, form-focused instruction, corrective feedback, classroom discourse, learner autonomy, learning strategies, grammar learning strategies, motivation, willingness to communicate and pronunciation teaching. his recent publications include the place of form-focused instruction in the foreign language classroom (2006, adam mickiewicz university press), production-oriented and comprehension-based grammar teaching in the foreign language classroom (co-authored with anna mystkowska-wiertelak, 2012, springer), error correction in the foreign language classroom: reconsidering the issues (2014, springer), applying cognitive grammar in the foreign language classroom: teaching english tense and aspect (co-authored with jakub bielak, 2013, springer), as well as several edited collections on learner autonomy, form-focused instruction, speaking and individual learner differences. mirosław pawlak is the editor-in-chief of the journals studies in second language learning and teaching (www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl), konin language studies (http://www.ksj.pwsz.konin.edu.pl/?lang=en), and the book series second language learning and teaching (http://www.springer.com/series/10129). he has been a supervisor and reviewer of doctoral and postdoctoral dissertations. contact data: department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, nowy świat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (pawlakmi@ amu.edu.pl) simone e. pfenninger is assistant professor at the university of salzburg, switzerland. her principal research areas are multilingualism, psycholinguistics and individual differences (e.g., the age factor) in sla, especially in regard to quantitative approaches and statistical methods and techniques for language application in education. recent books include beyond age effects in instructional l2 learning: revisiting the age factor (2017, multilingual matters, co-authored), the changing english language: psycholinguistic perspectives (2017, cambridge university press, co-edited), and future research directions for applied linguistics (2017, multilingual matters, co-edited). she is co-editor of the second language acquisition book series for multilingual matters. 12 contact data: department of english and american studies, university of salzburg, erzabt-klotz-straße 1, 5020 salzburg, austria (simonepfenninger.eu) david singleton is emeritus fellow at trinity college dublin, and professor at the university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary and at the state university of applied sciences, konin, poland. he served as secretary general of the international association of applied linguistics and as president of the european second language association. his publications focus on cross-linguistic influence, the lexicon, the age factor in language acquisition and multilingualism. he is coauthor of key topics in second language acquisition and beyond age effects in instructional l2 learning (2017, multilingual matters), and co-editor of the multilingual matters sla book series. in 2015 he received the eurosla distinguished scholar award. contact data: institute for hungarian and applied linguistics, university of pannonia, 8200 veszprém, egyetem u. 10 (dsnglton@tcd.ie) marijn van dijk is associate professor in developmental psychology at the university of groningen, the netherlands. she studies processes of development and learning from a complexity approach. specific topics are language learning, parent-child and teacher-child interaction, reasoning, and feeding. most studies concern repeated observations of behavior in naturalistic circumstances and the analysis of intra-individual variability. contact data: dept. of developmental psychology, university of groningen. grote kruisstraat 2/1 9712ts groningen, the netherlands (m.w.g.van.dijk@rug.nl) marjolijn verspoor is professor of english language and english as a second language at the university of groningen, the netherlands. her main research interests are second language development from a dynamic usage based perspective and instructional approaches in foreign language teaching. contact data: dept. of applied linguistics, university of groningen, po box 716, 9700 as groningen, the netherlands (m.h.verspoor@rug.nl) laszlo vincze is a postdoctoral researcher at the swedish school of social science at the university of helsinki, finland. the main focus of his research is on bilingualism and communication. his latest publications have appeared in journal of multilingual and multicultural development, international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, and applied linguistics review. contact data: swedish school of social science, university of helsinki, helsinki, finland (laszlo.vincze@helsinki.fi) 541 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (3). 2016. 541-546 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.3.9 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book review positive psychology in second language acquisition editors: peter d. macintyre, tammy gregersen, sarah mercer publisher: multilingual matters, 2016 isbn: 9781783095346 pages: 388 as stated elsewhere (gabryś-barker & gałajda, 2016), positive psychology is a new branch of general psychology, which is just over twenty years old. thus, its applications to teaching and learning second and foreign languages have not taken a very prominent place in scholarly research, and, as a consequence, in its practical classroom dimension. positive psychology derives from humanistic approaches represented most prominently by abraham maslow and jeremy bruner, in relation to novel understandings of educational processes, and by gertrude moskowitz, in relation to foreign language instruction. the main aim of positive psychology, as declared in positive psychology manifesto (sheldon, frederikson, rathunde, csikszentmihalyi, & haidt, 2000), is the discovery and understanding of those factors which make it possible for individuals and the communities in which they function to develop and be happy. these factors are registered by positive psychology in the development of positive traits in people, their positive emotions and feelings, and also in contextual factors mostly related to enabling institutions. so, naturally, positive psychology approaches to teaching and learning second/foreign languages (s/fl) and research in this area will range from emphasis on positivity on 542 the level of emotions and feelings, the motivations and attitudes of teachers, learners and others involved, and strengths of these people as facilitating different aspects of language learning processes, to a significant role assigned to educational institutions. educational institutions are the agents enabling success and development not only of learners but also those of teachers (gabryś-barker & gałajda, 2016; macintyre & gregersen, 2014). the volume edited by gregersen, macintyre and mercer fulfils the promise made by positive psychology in relation to teaching and learning languages in the classroom and beyond it. the book is a collection of papers representing three perspectives on positive psychology: theoretical, empirical and applied. the volume opens with an introduction by the editors and already at this point the reader will see that the book he/she is about to engage with will be a journey of discovery which excites and makes one look forward to what is ahead. one could hardly imagine a better introduction to a volume on positive psychology than this highly personalised and warm-in-tone introductory text, in which each individual editor reflects on those elements of the book cover image that are meaningful to them. the image shows a hand in water causing ripples; each of the three constitutive elements of hand, ripple and water resonate with the three editors personally as well as with their professional lives as positive psychology practitioners, and, in fact, pioneers of this approach in sla studies and language instruction. positivity is felt right from the beginning and sets the tone for the whole volume. the following chapter is “toward a psychology of well-being for language learners: the ‘empathics’ vision” by rebecca oxford, a pioneer and a true enthusiast of positive psychology in language learning and teaching. she presents a model in the form of a clever acronym of features which are believed to make learners develop, thrive and thus achieve success in their learning endeavours. the empathics model stands for nine dimensions conducive to learning, that is, e: emotion and empathy, m: meaning and motivation, p: perseverance (including resilience, hope and optimism), a: agency and autonomy, t: time, h: hardiness and habits of mind, i: intelligences, c: character strengths, and s: self-factors (self-efficacy, self-concept, self-esteem, self-verification). the discussion of each of these dimensions is wellinformed and well-grounded in scholarly research. it is in fact a source not only of discussion of classic publications in the area (the above dimensions), but also of those most recent ones in psychology, pedagogy and language acquisition/learning and teaching. this author strongly emphasises the interactional and dynamic character of the dimensions involved in learning. at the same time, as enthusiastic as she is for positive psychology, oxford also points to flaws in this fairly new area of research only now being pioneered in its applications. the flaws are seen in the clear lack of contextualisation and in an absence of focus on cultural issues, which are both essential factors in s/fl learning and teaching. 543 the first part of the book entitled “part 1: theoretical” brings together three papers which introduce the constructs fundamental to positive psychology. in “seeing the world through your eyes: empathy in language learning and teaching,” sarah mercer discusses the concept of empathy and places it in the pedagogical context of language instruction. apart from an informed presentation of the concept, what is especially valuable here is the focus on empathy issues in teacher training and sensitising both trainers and trainees to them. in the text “the dynamics of past selves in language learning and well-being,” joseph falout demonstrates how various factors that form the past self of a learner can have an impact on learning success and generally his/her well-being. in the final chapter in this part, written by ana maria barcelos and hilda simone coelho and titled “language, learning and teaching: what´s love got to do with it?,” the authors present the concept of love as seen by researchers in education and psychology, but also those in biology. by trying to find commonalities between the three areas of study, they conclude their overview with a strongly expressed need for focus on studying love in language teaching and learning by posing questions for further study. each of the chapters in the theoretical part of the volume is complemented with an extensive list of references relevant to each of the discussed concepts. some of them bring the reader back to seminal publications but also allow him or her to be updated on the latest research in the areas discussed in this literature overview part of the volume. “part 2: empirical” consists of seven original empirical studies focusing on different fl instructional settings and demonstrating the results of research on language success and well-being from a positive psychology perspective. it opens with a text by tammy gregersen, peter macintyre and margarita meza entitled “positive psychology exercises build social capital for language learners: preliminary evidence,” presenting ways of building networks between people (learners, teachers) which constitute a significant source of their well-being. this includes a sense of belonging, personal safety and appreciation by others and, therefore, these networks are seen to build social capital. in this exciting text, the positive psychology exercises (ppes) presented by the authors rely upon a set of techniques involving laughter, physical activity, interacting with animals, listening to music, expressing gratitude and engaging altruism. each of these techniques can be personalised according to the needs and proclivities of individual learners in conversation partners, a peer-monitoring group activity carried out by research assistants and students involved in a project on positive psychology. the study carried out in the above format showed that personalized encounters developed positive emotional engagement and social contacts, thus building social capital. other chapters in the empirical part of the book take up the issues of hope and resilience in novice teachers, for example, in phil hiver`s 544 “the triumph over experience: hope and hardiness in novice l2 teachers;” flow, as experienced by fl learners in eva czimmermann and katalin piniel’s text “advanced language learners´ experience of flow in the hungarian efl classroom;” and the theme of enjoyment and fl anxiety in an interesting empirical study by well-known scholars researching affectivity issues, jean-marc dewaele and peter d. macintyre, in “foreign language enjoyment and foreign language classroom anxiety: the right and left feet of the language learner.” the remaining three chapters in this part focus on the role of a positive self in language achievement, demonstrated by j. lake´s “accentuate the positive l2 self and its relationship to l2 proficiency;” positive affectivity and development of motivation in zana ibrahim´s “affect in directed motivational currents: positive emotionality in long-term l2 engagement;” and, finally, the self-regulated learner in “project perseverance: helping students become self-regulating learners” by r. kirk benlap, jennifer bown, dan p. dewey, linea p. benlap and patrick r. steffen. each of the above chapters illustrates very well what positive psychology research in sla stands for and how it can contribute to the well-being of a learner/teacher. the studies discussed present—i do not hesitate to say this— truly innovative research projects. they demonstrate the results of well-designed scholarly studies of what positive psychology can do in a fl classroom in terms of creating a learning environment conducive to both academic achievement and well-being of (mostly) fl learners. i hope that in future empirical studies on positive psychology in sla, there will be more direct focus on teachers and creating conditions for their well-being as, in this part of the book, this is not adequately represented. teachers are major agents of change in their classrooms and, for this reason, their well-being should also become a major focus of the study of positive psychology in language classrooms. the chapters in this part of the book provide the reader with a thorough bibliographical background to the issues presented in empirical studies, which will allow the reader to deepen his or her theoretical understanding and knowledge of the issues touched upon. the third part of this volume, “part 3: applied,” aims at presenting examples of positive psychology techniques in practice. it consists of four chapters on fl classroom teaching and a final chapter by the editors of the volume. in the opening chapter, “happiness in esl/efl: bringing positive psychology to the classroom,” marc helgesen goes back to the first model of seligman´s perma, which stands for positive emotion, engagement, positive relationships, meaning and accomplishment, and focuses on the role of positive emotions in the classroom by designing a set of activities that promote positivity in a fl classroom. tim murphey in “teaching to learn and well-become: many mini-renaissances” takes up the idea of task-based learning and teaching, and turns his classroom (and beyond) language tasks into mini-renaissances, that is, tasks 545 with a creative element allowing learners to become teachers in what murphey calls “interactive-helping” task-focus approach. as his initial results show, the learners learnt more than through a regular teaching approach, also demonstrating higher levels of enjoyment and engagement. on offering a short overview of studies on the effects and advantages that positive psychology tasks bring, in the chapter entitled “why and how to use positive psychology activities in the second language classroom” candy fresacher presents a set of activities she used with her university students in a language programme which aimed at the development of management communication skills. these activities may be of use to the reader as they can be easily adapted to different learners and different contexts. music is a great resource for the fl classroom and a positive psychology perspective on its use is presented in m. carmen fonsecamora and francisco herrero machancoses´s chapter “music and language learning: emotions and engaging memory pathways.” the authors, following schopenhauer, argue that the objective of their text is “to explore the power of music beyond the pleasure and enjoyment it causes” (p. 363). and indeed the authors meet this challenge by presenting a fairly extensive body of literature and research exploring music and human well-being, together with the role of melody and rhythm in language learning. however, what is missing from this chapter seems to be the practical aspect as no tasks or activities are proposed to follow their overview. one cannot help the feeling that this text should therefore have been placed elsewhere in the volume and not in its practical section. the concluding chapter of the book, written by peter d. macintyre, tammy gregersen and sarah mercer, once again justifies the need for positive psychology research in the context of sla, showing how it can expand present interest in integrative approaches to sla. it points to the need for combining two dimensions in teaching and learning languages: the cognitive and the affective. the editors rightly state that their volume expands the range of topics which respond to this approach and at the same time derive from the assumptions of positive psychology. they summarise the above by stating that the chapters: “(1) synthetize the positive and negative . . . (2) build on historical antecedents and exiting knowledge . . . (3) integrate across the levels of analysis . . . (4) [and] build constituency and reach out to powerful stakeholders . . . (5) description or prescription?” (p. 374-379). the book positive psychology in second language acquisition is one of the very few publications in this new area of study. it is thoroughly thought through and consistent both in its content and structure. it provides the reader with a detailed bibliography in each of the chapters, constituting in itself a valuable source for a particular topical area. the book can be recommended to a wide spectrum of readers as it caters for different scholarly and practical needs. first of all, it offers a solid background on the principles of positive psychology for 546 those who are not familiar with this new branch of psychology. it also presents reliable and rigorous research in this area for readers who may have some reservations about the scholarly character of studies grounded in positive psychology. additionally, the book demonstrates how the principles of positive psychology can be applied to foreign language instruction, which thus may become more innovative and creative. the practical examples presented here can be adapted to fl teachers’ individual contexts and enrich them with a new dimension relevant not only for cognitive development but also for affective and personality growth of both teachers and learners. one aspect that is perhaps missing from the text (which i would have expected to find either in the opening or in the concluding chapter) is a more direct defence of positive psychology as a new area of study and a scholarly discipline against the criticism it has received in some academic circles, which consider it to be a branch of self-help ideology. this should, however, have been addressed directly by the editors. on the other hand, the book defends itself as a worthy source of knowledge on the theory, research and practice of positive psychology in specific areas of foreign language teaching and learning. i fully endorse and recommend the volume for its expertise and scholarly discipline on the one hand and for the excitement and creativity it encourages on the other. reviewed by danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia, katowice/sosnowiec, poland danuta.gabrys-barker@us.edu.pl references gabryś-barker, d., & gałajda, d. (2016). preface. in d. gabryś-barker & d., gałajda, (eds.), positive psychology perspectives on foreign language learning and teaching (pp. vii-viii). bristol: multilingual matters. macintyre, p., & gregersen, t. (eds.). (2014). positive psychology [special issue]. studies in second language learning and teaching, 4(2). sheldon, k., frederikson, b., rathunde, k., csikszentmihalyi, m., & haidt, j. (2000, january). positive psychology manifesto. manifesto presented at the akumal 1 meeting (1999) and revised at the akumal 2 meeting, akumal, mexico. 349 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (2). 2016. 349-354 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.2.10 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book review second language socialization and learner agency: adoptive family talk author: lyn wright fogle publisher: multilingual matters, 2012 isbn: 9781847697851 pages: 203 the book under review touches upon a very up-to-date and practical topic of linguistic development of children in the transnational adoption process, focusing on adoptees from russia and the ukraine living in american families. its principal component is a case study which examines language socialization (cf. ochs & schieffelin, 1984) and identity formation as well as family bonding from the perspective of language use in three distinct families. as the author states in the introduction, the main aim of the publication is to “discuss the role language plays in forming a family across linguistic and cultural differences, how learning and using a second language (for children and adults) relates to establishing bonding relationships in the family, and how children themselves develop agency in language socialization process” (p. 1). with this purpose on mind, it presents an in-depth analysis of language samples of adoptive families, which are examined from the perspective of learners’ agency (cf. ahearn, 2001; al zidjaly, 2009). more specifically, the main emphasis is placed on the role of children 350 themselves in the process of socialization, which refers both to their own language socialization in the new cultural and linguistic context as well as to their parents, who need to embrace the process of becoming the members of a bilingual family. the book offers an innovative way of understanding and researching language socialization, and it is definitely worth attention as it does not put parents in the dominant position but highlights the role of youngsters in becoming members of a new community. the volume is comprised of seven chapters, of which the three initial chapters are intended to establish the theoretical background for the further, research-oriented chapters 4, 5 and 6, whereas the closing part offers concluding remarks, seeking to reconcile theory and the collected empirical evidence. in the first introductory chapter, lyn wright fogle outlines the central themes discussed in detail in the subsequent parts of the volume. it is crucial to highlight the author's perception of learner agency as not only traditionally viewed readiness to act and participate in interaction which triggers language learning, for example, in the language classroom, but also as unwillingness and resistance on the part of learners (cf. morita, 2004). these are particularly noteworthy because the occurrence of both types of agency is further supported by the empirical data included in the publication. the second chapter focuses specifically on the dominant theoretical constructs of the book, that is socialization, agency and identity, and develops the outlined ideas in a comprehensive manner. fogle explains the crucial role of language acquisition for becoming a member of a society, which is especially important in a second language context, with the adoptees arriving in america without any knowledge of english or with very limited proficiency in the case of older children. importantly, the author indicates the role that linguistic ideologies play in socialization and language acquisition, and how parents’ preconceived beliefs may change in the course of family formation with the active role of adoptees. in the following chapter, the author discusses the issue of transnational adoption, focusing not only on the tendencies concerning adoptions in the usa but also on related topics of the language and culture of the adoptees as well as the acquisition of a new language and culture after arrival, also touching upon problematic deficit-oriented approaches (valencia, 1997), understood here as the perception of adoptees’ l1 as a potential obstacle negatively influencing the process of l2 acquisition. apart from offering a theoretical background concerning adoptive families, the chapter functions as a transition to the research part of the book as, towards the end, the author outlines the research questions and offers a justification for the choice of participating families as well as describing the data collection tools used. the subsequent chapters are devoted to a description of research findings and present the analysis of the collected language samples, with each of them 351 concentrating on a separate adoptive family. more specifically, the fourth chapter is devoted to the sondermans and presents socialization and agency by means of most prevalently exhibited elements of the family’s interaction, that is, narratives and children’s resistance. although resistance is deemed a negative factor in language acquisition, especially in a language classroom, the study shows how it can move conversations to different topics in child-initiated narratives, which may, in fact, translate into meaningful moments of identity creation and linguistic development as it oftentimes involves a transition from the hereand-now to the pre-adoption period, thus allowing a reconciliation between the present and the past. the fifth chapter describes the jackson-wessels, a family of four with two parents and two adoptive children from russia, in which children agency operates as their participation in conversations and posing questions. the author shows how children seek attention by excessive use of questions, which serve a number of functions, such as participating in interaction, requesting clarification of words and concepts and directing parents’ attention to specific issues. the presence of metalinguistic talk gives valuable insights into how new meanings and concepts are established and how their understanding is negotiated. talking about language, defined in the book as languaging (swain, 2006), not only positively affects communication and alleviates existing problems with comprehension of world and language but also benefits cognitive development in youngsters. the sixth chapter, describing the goellers family, presents data including recurrent instances of code-switching, which are frequently speaker-oriented, and shows the process of identity-creation and adoptees’ agency from the angle of code choice. it demonstrates how language may serve as a common ground for some members of the family and how it may exclude others from interaction because of their unwillingness to communicate in a given code or their insufficient level of proficiency. there is clear evidence of microand macrolinguistic factors influencing the language policy in the family, and the author presents instances of ideology-driven conflicts, related, for example, to linguistic purism or beliefs concerning overuse of russian instead of developing english. the chapter also discusses problems of language maintenance (zentella, 1997) and attrition (sato, 1990) as it shows the difficulties that adopted children experience with the maintenance of their native tongue. in the final chapter, the author points to the dominant role of children and the effects that their agency has on caregivers and, more generally, to the influence of transnational adoptive families on the cultural landscape of the family life in the united states. these conclusions will definitely help cater for adoptive children’s needs in terms of language, but also with respect to their belonging in the society. the implications stemming from this book should be taken into account by policy makers as they may initiate steps that need to be taken in order 352 to ensure adoptees’ first language maintenance. this is because the mother tongue is an asset rather than an obstacle for these children, since it “validates adoptees’ prior experiences and knowledge and provides a way to deal with emotional difficulties and talk about problems as they arise” (p. 174). the author’s engagement with the topic is without doubt strong as she includes an epilogue in which readers can find an update on the participants’ lives four years past the study as well as invaluable advice on transnational adoption, given by the parents who contributed to this research project. it must be admitted that the book is of considerable value as its author has accomplished a difficult task of investigating learners’ agency outside the classroom and demonstrated that almost every case of socialization is different as it hinges upon specific circumstances and individual factors associated with the types of agency that children engage themselves in. for this reason, the choice of an ethnographic case study over other research designs, which might have held more promise of generalizability, constitutes one of the greatest assets of this publication. because of the research design and the way in which the study is presented, this volume is suited not only for researchers but also for anyone (e.g., secondary or tertiary level students) looking for guidance on how to conduct similar studies, not least because of the great precision in the analysis of the data. in addition to specialists, the book might also constitute a valuable resource for parents of transnational adoptees struggling with linguistic problems, ideological issues and identity construction in second language development as it gives them a chance to see how similar families communicate, establish family relationships and deal with difficulties that each adoptive family of this kind may face. it is illuminating how this book shows identity creation in discourse, as visible in power distribution, negotiation of topic and language, and, finally, construction of a shared family history by learning about the preadoption lives of the children. another great positive of this publication is the fact that it avoids a patronizing tone which would seek to instruct parents what they should do; quite the opposite, the book maintains its professional attitude while being descriptive in nature. yet the issues discussed by the author are not of minor significance as they are clearly associated with language-related ideology and might be of importance for language policy-makers and educators. for instance, the issue of deficit-oriented approaches appears to be crucial from the point of view of linguists, but it is of no lesser importance to adoptive parents, who may tend to see children’s mother tongue as an obstacle which prevents the adoptees from acquiring the second language. in consequence, those parents’ attitudes may situate the first language and its culture in danger of being neglected and, in the long run, lead to attrition. thus, the author’s description of topics related to language maintenance, so closely linked to identity construction 353 and influencing language policy, comprises an invaluable and multidimensional report on transnational adoption without idealizing either the process itself or the possibility of developing bilingualism in these families in the future. even though the book is without doubt a valuable addition to the literature, it could have been beneficial for the research part to go beyond the context of adoptees from the post-soviet countries, who, despite being a large group in the united states, by no means constitute the only group of transnational adoptees in that country. the contrast between the united states and eastern european, russian-speaking countries as well as the relationships between the countries may actually have an influence on the language behavior of some of the elder adoptees. it might also be considered somewhat ethically doubtful to audio-record intimate family life situations such as the ones shown in the book, although, in fairness, it is difficult to suggest how else such valuable and detailed could data be gathered. moreover, it seems that some of the issues brought up in this publication might be of interest to a family psychologist rather than an applied linguist which, in turn, poses a question to what extent it is warranted for both the author and the discipline of language studies itself to delve into such topics. nevertheless these concerns do not outweigh the overall positive evaluation of the publication and its relevance in view of the fact that theme of the book and in particular its research part are innovative, thus making the volume a valuable contribution to second language acquisition literature. reviewed by zuzanna kiermasz university of łódź, poland zuzannakiermasz@gmail.com references adhearn, l. m. (2001) language and agency. annual review of anthropology, 30, 109-137. al zidjaly, n. (2009). agency as an interactive achievement. language in society, 38(2), 177-200. morita, n. (2004). negotiating participation and identity in second language academic communities. tesol quarterly, 38(4), 573-603. ochs, e., & schieffelin, b. (1984). language acquisition and socialization: three developmental stories and their implications. in r. schweder & r. levine (eds.), culture theory: essays on mind, self and emotion (pp. 276-320). cambridge: cambridge university press. 354 sato, c. (1990). the syntax of conversation in interlanguage development. tübingen: gunter narr. swain, m. (2006). languaging, agency and collaboration in advanced second language proficiency. in h. brynes (ed.), advanced language learning: the contribution of halliday and vygotsky (pp. 95-108). london: continuum. valencia, r. (1997). conceptualizing the notion of deficit thinking. in r. valencia (ed.), the evolution of deficit thinking: educational thought and practice (pp. 1-12). washington: falmer. zentella, a. c. (1997). growing up bilingual: puerto rican children in new york. malden: blackwell. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: edyta olejarczuk (poznań university of technology) language editor: melanie ellis (language teacher training college, zabrze) vol. 7 no. 2 june 2017 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, university of new south wales, sydney) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo) kata csizér (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) robert dekeyser (university of maryland) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) carol griffiths (fatih university, istanbul) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) sarah mercer (university of graz) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) bonny norton (university of british columbia) terrence odlin (ohio state university) rebecca oxford (university of maryland) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (university of pannonia, trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto) elaine tarone (university of minnesota) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) stuart webb (university of western ontario) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2017 editor: mirosław pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak anna mystkowska-wiertelak edyta olejarczuk © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · scopus · web of science emerging sources citation index (esci) · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · infobaseindex · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the clarivate analytics (formerly thomson reuters) master journal list. special issue: multilingual practices and their pedagogical implications in a globalised world guest editors: théophile munyangeyo françois pichette studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 7, number 2, june 2017 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors ....................................................................185 editorial .........................................................................................189 articles: khawla m. badwan – “did we learn english or what?”: a study abroad student in the uk carrying and crossing boundaries in out-of-class communication ................................................................................ 193 neva čebron – tracing intercultural and interlinguistic moves within and beyond student mobility programmes: the case of the ierest project .....211 matteo santipolo – bespoke language teaching (blt): a proposal for a theoretical framework. the case of efl/elf for italians ..................233 betty lanteigne – unscrambling jumbled sentences: an authentic task for english language assessment .......................................................... 251 larisa ilynska, tatjana smirnova, marina platonova – application of lsp texts in translator training............................................................... 275 saadia gamir – realities of and perspectives for languages in the globalised world: can language teaching survive the inadequacies of policies implemented today at leeds beckett university? ........................... 295 daniel tomozeiu – an ever closer union . . . of linguistic diversity ........317 marie rivière – plurilingual reading practices in a global context: circulation of books and linguistic inequalities.......................................................335 notes to contributors .....................................................................355 185 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors guest editors théophile munyangeyo holds a phd degree from the university of nottingham (june 2001) and he is a senior fellow of higher education academy. he has extensive teaching experience on communication theories and models; communication approaches (written & oral); semantics and pragmatics; translation and consecutive interpreting (theory and practice) applied to french-english (both ways), and research skills. the focus of his research has mainly been on translation and interpreting, critical analysis of fictional narratives, multilingual literacy and plurilingual competence, european linguistic diversity, the concepts of language proficiency and native or near-native fluency in language learning, enhancing learner engagement in e-learning provision, language learning through the year abroad experience, language acquisition and language transfer in a multilingual learning environment, language policy in education and self-directed learning. in the area of language learning and teaching, dr munyangeyo examines and supervises research work, from ba dissertations to phd theses in language learning and teaching. contact details: school of events, tourism, hospitality & languages; leeds beckett university; headingley campus, 106 macaulay hall, leeds, ls6 3qn. united kingdom (t.munyangeyo@leedsbeckett.ac.uk) françois pichette is professor of linguistics at teluq/universite du quebec a montreal, canada. his teaching and research interests include language acquisition and development, reading and writing, and second-language vocabulary acquisition. françois pichette has also taught spanish and french at universities in mexico and the united states, and has published in several peer-reviewed journals such as the modern language journal, the canadian modern language review, the canadian journal of applied linguistics and foreign language annals. contact details: université téluq, département sciences humaines, lettres et communications, 455, rue du parvis, québec, g1k 9h6, canada (francois.pichette@teluq.ca) 186 contributors khawla badwan has a doctorate degree in education from the university of leeds. she currently works as lecturer in tesol in the department of languages, information and communications at manchester metropolitan university. her interdisciplinary research interests lie in the areas of tesol, sociolinguistics, study abroad narratives, higher education, multilingualism and globalisation, and the relationship between theory and practice in language teaching and learning. contact details: department of languages, information and communications, manchester metropolitan university, 431 geoffrey manton building, manchester, m15 6bg, united kingdom (k.badwan@mmu.ac.uk) neva čebron, phd, started teaching esp at the tertiary level in 1991, first at the university of ljubljana, faculty of maritime and transport studies, and later at the university of primorska, faculty of humanities of koper, slovenia. she began considering intercultural topics in her teaching materials produced with the ccbc project (www.2cbc.net) and further engaged with the core issues related to acquiring intercultural communicative competence within international research groups working on the labicum project, the permit project, and most recently the ierest project. her research and professional interests centre also on corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, translatology and teaching methodology. contact details: department of applied linguistics, faculty of humanities, university of primorska, titov trg 5, koper 6000, slovenia (neva.cebron@fhs.upr.si) saâdia gamir is a french and arabic lecturer at leeds beckett university. her scholarly activities are in presenting at conferences (2010, 2011, 2012, 2014. 2015), textbook publishing for learners of arabic (2011) and external examining for uk universities arabic learning programmes (2009-2012; 2011-20105). her research interests are in classroom processes and materials development to increase learners’ motivation and engagement in learning, in general, with special emphasis on developing their intercultural communication and cross cultural awareness. in addition to studying learner contribution in language acquisition, her current research examines teachers’ use of film to develop learners’ speaking ability in the target language. contact details: school of events, tourism and hospitality, languages; leeds beckett university, headingley campus, leeds ls6 3qn, united kingdom (s.gamir@leed sbeckett.ac.uk) larisa ilynska is the head of the institute of applied linguistics of riga technical university (rtu) since 1999. she has authored over fifty publications, including 187 four resource books for students majoring in various scientific technical domains. her research interests lie in semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, translation of scientific technical texts. she is an honorary member of the latvian association of interpreters and translators. contact details: institute of applied linguistics, faculty of e-learning technologies and humanities, riga technical university, 1 kronvalda blv. riga, lv-1010, latvia (larisa.ilinska@rtu.lv) betty lanteigne is a fulbright scholar. she has taught linguistics and academic english at undergraduate and graduate levels in the united arab emirates for over ten years, also supervising master’s research in applied linguistics. her areas of research and teaching interests are sociolinguistics and language assessment, pragmatics, and applied linguistics, with particular interest in task-based language assessment and culturally specific language assessment. prior to her academic career in linguistics, for ten years she taught english as a second/foreign language to in the usa (oregon, missouri, and pennsylvania), in palestine, qatar, and kuwait. contact details: department of english, american university of sharjah, p. o. box 26666, sharjah, uae (e-mail: blanteigne@aus.edu) marina platonova is an associate professor of contrastive and comparative linguistics at the institute of applied linguistics and the dean of the faculty of elearning technologies and humanities at riga technical university (rtu). she is the author of more than 30 publications. her research interests lie in the fields of translatology, terminology and text linguistics. she is the member of the board of european master’s in translation network and an honorary member of the latvian association of interpreters and translators. contact details: institute of applied linguistics, faculty of e-learning technologies and humanities, riga technical university, 1 kronvalda blv. riga, lv-1010, latvia (marina.platonova@rtu.lv) marie rivière is doctor in applied linguistics and editor of textbooks in a language education publishing house. her research focuses on plurilingual cultural practices in a global context. her research topics include the impact of power relations between cultures and between languages on collective and individual literacy uses. she also investigates emotional and identity aspects of plurilingualism and pluriculturalism, and their impact on language learning and teaching. contact details: diltec laboratory, université sorbonne nouvelle paris 3; c/ sant salvador 87, ático 3a – 08024 barcelona, spain (mnriviere@yahoo.fr) 188 matteo santipolo is currently associate professor in modern language education at the university of padua (italy). he has been visiting professor at the university of melbourne (australia), at the university of kwazulu natal-durban (south africa), at the university of malta, at tribhuvan university, kathmandu (nepal) and at the national university of tucumán (argentina). his main research interests revolve around foreign language education (in particular italian, english and spanish as second/foreign languages), the teaching of the sociolinguistic aspects of foreign languages, sociolinguistics and language policies. he has held seminars and conferences in more than 30 counties around the world and he is author of more than 120 scientific publications. contact details: department of linguistics and literary studies, university of padova, piazzetta gianfranco folena, 1; 35137 padova, italy (matteo.santipolo@unipd.it; matteo.santipolo@gmail.com) tatjana smirnova is an assistant professor specializing in linguistics and translation at the institute of applied linguistics, faculty of e-learning technologies and humanities at riga technical university (rtu). she is the head of curriculum design and testing committee of the institute of applied linguistics, a member of the working group on the advancement of institutional research capacity of riga technical university. contact details: institute of applied linguistics, faculty of e-learning technologies and humanities, riga technical university, 1 kronvalda blv. riga, lv-1010, latvia (tatjana.smirnova@rtu.lv) daniel tomozeiu is a senior lecturer in the faculty of social sciences and humanities. his portfolio combines teaching, research and programme management. his background is in communication and negotiation. since he joined the university of westminster in january 2008, he has been involved in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and he has launched and managed a number of successful academic and professional courses. his research focusses on intercultural and professional communication. he has experience in successfully bidding for grants, conducting research and managing large international research consortia. he is prince2 practitioner certified and has recently completed a certificate in coaching and mentoring with the institute of leadership and management (ilm). contact details: department of modern languages and cultures, university of westminster, united kingdom (d.tomozeiu@westminster.ac.uk)) studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: achilleas kostoulas (university of graz, austria) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (pedagogical university of kraków, poland) vol. 8 no. 1 march 2018 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, university of new south wales, sydney) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo) kata csizér (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) robert dekeyser (university of maryland) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (curtin university, perth) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) carol griffiths (fatih university, istanbul) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) sarah mercer (university of graz) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) bonny norton (university of british columbia) terrence odlin (ohio state university) rebecca oxford (university of maryland) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (university of pannonia, trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto) elaine tarone (university of minnesota) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) stuart webb (university of western ontario) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2018 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: jakub bielak achilleas kostoulas mariusz kruk aleksandra wach © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 100 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · scopus · web of science emerging sources citation index (esci) · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the clarivate analytics (formerly thomson reuters) master journal list. special issue: emotions in second language acquisition guest editor: jean-marc dewaele studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 8, number 1, march 2018 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ....................................................................... 9 editorial .......................................................................................... 15 articles: jean-marc dewaele, mateb alfawzan – does the effect of enjoyment outweigh that of anxiety in foreign language performance? .............21 audrey de smet, laurence mettewie, benoit galand, philippe hiligsmann, luk van mensel – classroom anxiety and enjoyment in clil and non-clil: does the target language matter? ................................................................... 47 liana maria pavelescu, bojana petrić – love and enjoyment in context: four case studies of adolescent efl learners ................................................ 73 andrew s. ross, damian j. rivers – emotional experiences beyond the classroom: interactions with the social world ................................. 103 katalin piniel, ágnes albert – advanced learners’ foreign language-related emotions across the four skills .......................................................... 127 carmen boudreau, peter d. macintyre, jean-marc dewaele – enjoyment and anxiety in second language communication: an idiodynamic approach .....149 notes to contributors .....................................................................171 9 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors ágnes albert is assistant professor at the department of english applied linguistics at eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary and holds a phd in language pedagogy. her research interests include task-based language learning and individual differences in foreign language learning, in particular learner creativity and positive emotions associated with language learning. in her dissertation, she examined relationships between learner creativity and language performance at the micro-level, with the help of oral narrative tasks. contact details: department of english applied linguistics, eötvös loránd university, 1088 budapest, rákóczi út 5., hungary (albert.agnes@btk.elte.hu) mateb alfawzan is lecturer of applied linguistics and tesol at shaqra university, kingdom of saudi arabia. currently, he is pursuing a phd in english language and applied linguistics at the university of birmingham, uk. his research interests include foreign language anxiety and enjoyment, language teacher education, and teacher professional development. contact details: university of birmingham, department of english language and applied linguistics, 3 elms road, edgbaston, birmingham, b15 2tt, united kingdom (mma749@bham.ac.uk) carmen h. e. boudreau is a third-year medical student at dalhousie university, halifax, nova scotia, canada. she received her bsc psychology hons. and a canadian psychological association certificate of academic excellence at cape breton university, sydney, nova scotia. there, she completed her honors thesis, presented in this edition of studies in second language learning and teaching. currently, she is a member of the dalhousie university couples and sexual health lab, where she is working on research that examines the role of interpersonal communication in couples dealing with sexual dysfunction. contact details: department of psychology, cape breton university, sydney, nova scotia, canada b1p 6l2 (carmen.boudreau@dal.ca) 10 jean-marc dewaele is professor of applied linguistics and multilingualism at birkbeck, university of london. he does research on individual differences considering psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, pragmatic, psychological and emotional aspects of sla and multilingualism. he authored emotions in multiple languages (2010, palgrave macmillan) and co-edited several books on multilingualism and sla. he is general editor of the international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism. he received the equality and diversity research award from the british association for counselling and psychotherapy (2013) and the robert gardner award for excellence in second language and bilingualism research (2016) from the international association of language and social psychology. contact details: department of applied linguistics and communication, birkbeck, university of london, 26 russell square, london wc1b 5dt, united kingdom (j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk) benoit galand has a phd in psychology and is a professor at the department of psychology and educational sciences (université catholique de louvain, belgium). he is a member of the interdisciplinary research group on socialization, education and training (girsef) and an associated member of the school environment research group (gres, university of montreal, canada). his research interests include motivation and engagement in learning, violence and bullying at school, and teachers’ professional practices. contact details: université catholique de louvain (ucl), place cardinal mercier 10/l3.05.01, b-1348 louvain-la-neuve, belgium (benoit.galand@uclouvain.be) philippe hiligsmann is professor of dutch language and linguistics at the université catholique de louvain, belgium. his research focuses on contrastive linguistics (dutchfrench) and on second language acquisition (in particular dutch by french-speaking learners). he is the spokesman of the assessing content and language integrated learning research project (université catholique de louvain & université de namur). contact details: université catholique de louvain (ucl), collège erasme, place blaise pascal 1/l3.03.11, b-1348 louvain-la-neuve, belgium (philippe.hiligsmann@uclouvain.be) chengchen li is a phd student in the department of foreign languages education, college of foreign languages and cultures at xiamen university, xiamen, china. she is also an affiliate phd student at birkbeck, university of london, uk, sponsored by the china scholarship council (2017-2018). her research interests include positive psychology of foreign language learning and foreign language teacher education. contact details: university of london, department of applied linguistics and communication, birkbeck, 26 russell square, london wc1b 5dt, united kingdom (lichengchen@stu.xmu.edu.cn) 11 peter d. macintyre is professor of psychology at cape breton university, sydney, nova scotia, canada. his primary research focus lies in the psychology of communication processes, in both the native and second languages. he has published numerous articles on motivation and emotion, and co-authored capitalizing on language learners’ individuality (with tammy gregersen, 2014, multilingual matters), motivational dynamics in language learning (co-edited with zoltan dörnyei and alastair henry, 2015, multilingual matters), and positive psychology in sla (co-edited with tammy gregersen and sarah mercer, 2016, multilingual matters). he received the robert gardner award for his contribution to second language learning (2004) from the international association of language and social psychology. contact details: department of psychology, cape breton university, sydney, nova scotia, canada b1p 6l2 (peter_macintyre@cbu.ca) luk van mensel is a postdoctoral researcher at the pluri-ll research group of the university of namur, belgium. he has published on a variety of subjects in sla and sociolinguistics, and is the coordinator of the research project assessing content and language integrated learning (clil): linguistic, cognitive and educational perspectives. contact details: université de namur (unamur), rue de bruxelles, 61, b-5000 namur, belgium (luk.vanmensel@unamur.be) laurence mettewie is professor of dutch language and linguistics at the university of namur, belgium. her research focuses on societal aspects of multilingualism, multilingual education and emotional and socio-affective factors involved in sla, in linguistically and politically polarized contexts such as belgium and canada. contact details: université de namur (unamur), rue de bruxelles, 61, b-5000 namur, belgium (laurence.mettewie@unamur.be) liana maria pavelescu is an esol tutor at guildford college, uk. she holds a phd in language teaching from birkbeck, university of london, uk. her research interests include emotions and motivation in foreign language learning, the psychology of language learning and professional development in foreign language teaching. contact details: guildford college, stoke road, guildford, surrey, gu1 1ez, united kingdom (lpavelescu@guildford.ac.uk) bojana petrić is senior lecturer in the department of applied linguistics and communication at birkbeck, university of london, uk. her research interests are multilingual 12 writers’ academic literacy practices and experiences. she has co-authored experiencing master’s supervision: perspectives of international students and their supervisors with nigel harwood (2017, routlege) and co-edited thinking home: interdisciplinary dialogues with sanja bahun (2018, bloomsbury). she has recently co-founded the professional, academic, and work-based literacies sig within the british association for applied linguistics. she is the book reviews editor for journal of english for academic purposes and recently served as deputy chair of the european association for the teaching of academic writing. contact details: department of applied linguistics and communication, birkbeck, university of london, 26 russell square, london wc1b 5dt, united kingdom (b.petric@bbk.ac.uk) katalin piniel is assistant professor at the department of english applied linguistics at eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary, where she obtained her phd in language pedagogy. she is particularly interested in conducting research on the dynamic interrelationship of individual differences in foreign language learning, with a special focus on emotion, including language anxiety. recently, she took part in a research project exploring the motivations, beliefs, and strategies of deaf foreign language learners. contact details: department of english applied linguistics, eötvös loránd university, 1088 budapest, rákóczi út 5., hungary (brozik-piniel.katalin@btk.elte.hu) damian j. rivers is associate professor (communication) at future university hakodate, japan. he holds an phd in applied linguistics and an msc in social psychology. he is co-author of beyond native-speakerism: current explorations and future visions (2018, routlege), editor of resistance to the known: counterconduct in language education (2015, palgrave macmillan) and co-editor of isms in language education: oppression, intersectionality and emancipation (2017, mouton de gruyter), the sociolinguistics of hip-hop as critical conscience: dissatisfaction and dissent (2017, palgrave macmillan), native-speakerism in japan: intergroup dynamics in foreign language education (2013, multilingual matters) and social identities and multiple selves in foreign language education (2013, bloomsbury). contact details: future university hakodate, faculty of systems information science, center for meta-learning, 116-4 kameda-nakano, hakodate, hokkaido, 041-0803, japan (rivers@fun.ac.jp) andrew s. ross is a lecturer at southern cross university, australia. he holds a phd in applied linguistics. he is a co-editor of the sociolinguistics of hip-hop as critical 13 conscience (2017, palgrave macmillan) and the forthcoming volume discourses of (de)legitimization: participatory culture in digital contexts (2018, routlege). his research interests include emotions and identity in language education, political and new media discourses, and critical studies in communication. contact details: centre for teaching and learning, southern cross university, southern cross drive, bilinga, 4225, queensland, australia (andrew.ross@scu.edu.au) audrey de smet is a phd student at the institute of language and communication (université catholique de louvain, belgium). after studying dutch and french linguistics and literature, she completed her teacher training degree in those subjects for upper secondary education. she then worked on a research project entitled multilingualism as reality in school at the vrije universiteit brussel. her current research under the supervision of philippe hiligsmann (université catholique de louvain) and laurence mettewie (université de namur) focuses on the role of socio-affective variables in clil, as a part of the larger assessing content and language integrated learning research project. contact details: université catholique de louvain (ucl), collège erasme, place blaise pascal 1/l3.03.33, b-1348 louvain-la-neuve, belgium (audrey.desmet@uclouvain.be) 313 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (3). 313-314 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial this first special thematic issue of studies in second language learning and teaching deals with the learning and teaching of grammar. this seems to be a very fitting topic given the fact that the role of this language subsystem in foreign language pedagogy has never ceased to be a source of considerable controversy and that the teaching of language forms has never been abandoned in the foreign language context. for one thing, even though there is now a broad consensus that teaching formal aspects of the target language is facilitative and may even be indispensable for gaining full mastery of that language, there is much less agreement as to how it should most beneficially proceed. in particular, there are heated debates, often fuelled by staunch allegiance to theoretical positions, concerning the models of grammar that should be adhered to in designing pedagogic intervention, the selection of structures to be taught, the choice of instructional techniques and procedures to be applied, the intensity and timing of instruction, or the nature of the syllabus that should be followed. the contribution of learning and teaching grammar becomes an even more important issue in the foreign language context where the teaching of language forms has always been part and parcel of instruction and the challenge is not to inject elements of focus of form into predominantly communicative activities, but, as fotos (1998) so aptly put it, to shift the focus from forms to form, by attaching greater importance to meaning and message conveyance in the course of largely code-focused instruction. there is also the crucial question concerning the influence of mediating variables such as individual, linguistic and contextual factors, all of which, most likely in intricate and unpredictable combinations, determine the effects of teachers’ attempts to introduce and practice specific linguistic features and learners’ attempts to master them in terms of explicit and primarily implicit knowledge. the present issue brings together six papers related to different aspects of learning and teaching foreign language grammar, written by both prominent 314 scholars in the field and polish researchers, which are both theoretical and empirical in nature, and offer crucial insights for pedagogy. in the first of these, hossein nassaji reports the results of a study that addressed the effectiveness of oral negotiations in responding to written errors made in two esl classes, examining the impact of non-negotiated direct reformulation, feedback with limited negotiation (i.e., prompts with reformulations) and feedback with negotiation. in another two research-based papers, anna broszkiewicz compares the impact of contextualized practice activities and focused communication tasks on the acquisition of english past counterfactual conditionals, whereas bielak and pawlak investigate the utility of langacker’s (1987, 1991) cognitive grammar in teaching english tense and aspect. simone pfenninger, in turn, focuses on the role of age in the acquisition of five inflectional morphemes in english by examining the productive and receptive performance of early and late learners in formal instructional settings. the last two contributions are devoted to the discussion of the acquisition of specific aspects of grammar. first, mercedes durham compares the rates of complementizer deletion and factors influencing such deletion in e-mails composed by native and nonnative speakers of english, while terence odlin explores issues involved in the transfer of collocations in terms of its lexical and syntactic peculiarities in different contact situations. it is my hope that these contributions will, on the one hand, be a source of inspiration for researchers in pursuing new lines of inquiry when it comes to learning and teaching foreign language grammar and, on the other, will provide useful guidelines on how this subsystem can be mastered more effectively. if the two goals can in fact be attained, this special thematic issue can be said to have served its purpose. miros aw pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references fotos, s. (1998). shifting the focus from forms to form in the foreign language classroom. elt journal, 52, 301-307. langacker, r. w. (1987). foundations of cognitive grammar: vol. 1. theoretical prerequisites. stanford: stanford university press. langacker, r. w. (1991). foundations of cognitive grammar: vol. 2. descriptive applications. stanford: stanford university press. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: miros aw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: mariusz kruk (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) vol. 1 no. 2 august 2011 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (trinity college, dublin) simon borg (university of leeds) piotr cap (university of ód ) anna cie licka (texas a&m international university, ifa uam) kata csizer (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) krystyna dro dzia -szelest (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabry -barker (university of silesia) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of ód ) jan majer (university of ód ) anna micho ska-stadnik (university of wroc aw) anna ni egorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) terrence odlin (ohio state university) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) pawe scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) david singleton (trinity college, dublin) odzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) merrill swain (university of toronto) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of ód ) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – pozna 2011 editor: miros aw pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak mariusz kruk anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydzia pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam pozna proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print and online, with the print edition being the original version. published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, pozna contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy wiat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. wierzawska 1, 60-321 pozna studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 1, number 2, august 2011 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors .................................................................... 183 editorial ......................................................................................... 187 articles: weronika szubko-sitarek – cognate facilitation effects in trilingual word recognition ............................................................................. 189 sane m. yagi, saleh al-salman – using tracking software for writing instruction ........................................................................................... 209 ewa waniek-klimczak – acculturation strategy and language experience in expert esl speakers: an exploratory study .............. 227 aleksandra wach – native-speaker and english as a lingua franca pronunciation norms: english majors’ views ................................... 247 christina gkonou – anxiety over efl speaking and writing: a view from language classrooms ............................................................. 267 magdalena szyszka – foreign language anxiety and self-perceived english pronunciation competence ................................................. 283 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 301 183 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors saleh m. al-salman is a professor of theoretical/historical linguistics and translation at the university of jordan. he holds a phd in linguistics from state university of new york at buffalo, 1981. currently he is the director of the english language unit at the arab open university (headquarters) in kuwait. he taught previously at universities in the usa, jordan, saudi arabia, qatar, and the united arab emirates. his research interests include: linguistic theory and its practical applications, language development, languages in contact, bilingualism, and translation. he has received research awards/fellowships from fulbright (usa) and daad (germany). contact details: arab open university, jabriya, block 3b, st. 111, bldg. 37, p. o. box 3322, safat, postal code: 13033, state of kuwait (e-mail: salehalsalman@ hotmail.com) christina gkonou is a phd researcher at the department of language and linguistics, university of essex, uk. she works as a graduate teaching assistant in linguistics and psycholinguistics and as an efl teacher at the same university. she holds a ba in english language and literature from aristotle university of thessaloniki, greece, and an ma in tefl from the university of essex, uk. in her phd research, she focuses on the relationship between efl anxiety and speaking and writing performance of adult efl learners in instructed language settings in greece. contact details: department of language and linguistics, university of essex, wivenhoe park co4 3sq, colchester, united kingdom (e-mail: cgkono@essex.ac.uk) weronika szubko-sitarek is an assistant professor at the department of psycholinguistics and english language teaching at the university of ód . her main research interests include the multilingual mental lexicon, multilingual lexical acquisition and processing, bilingual lexical access and the facilitatory 184 cognate effect in multilingual lexical recognition. this article is the result of a study she conducted, under the supervision of professor jan majer, as part of her phd project concerning multilingual lexical recognition in the mental lexicon of third language users. contact details: institute of english, university of ód , 90-514 ód , al. ko ciuszki 65, poland (e-mail: weronikaszubko@uni.lodz.pl) magdalena szyszka is an efl teacher and a teacher trainer at regional educational centre for foreign languages, teacher training college in opole, poland. she teaches efl methodology, english phonetics and voice production. her main research interests are second/foreign language acquisition and, in particular, foreign language anxiety, language learning strategies and english pronunciation. she is currently working on her doctoral thesis concerning the relationship between foreign language anxiety and pronunciation. contact details: regional educational centre for foreign languages, teacher training college in opole, ul. hallera 9, 45-867 opole, poland (email: mszyszka@ nkjo.opole.pl) aleksandra wach, phd, works at the school of english, adam mickiewicz university as an efl teacher and teacher trainer. her main professional interests include: learning and teaching grammar, the application of music in teaching, teacher training, and, currently, the application of new technology in foreign language learning and teaching. contact details: school of english, adam mickiewicz university, al. niepodleci 4, 61-874 pozna , poland (e-mail: waleks@ifa.amu.edu.pl) ewa waniek-kilmczak is profesor of english linguistics and the director of studies in the institute of english at the university of ód . she teaches courses in phonetics, phonology, accents of english and spoken discourse. her main research interests are the acquisition and usage of the second language sound system, cross-linguistic phonetics and phonology and pronunciation teaching. her recent publications include socio-psychological conditioning in esl pronunciation: consonant voicing in english spoken by polish immigrants to britain (pwsz press, 2009), temporal parameters in second language speech: an applied linguistic phometics approach (university of ód press, 2005), and edited collections of papers issues in accents of english i and ii (cambridge scholars publishing, 2008 and 2010). contact details: institute of english, university of ód , 90-514 ód , al. ko ciuszki 65 (e-mail: ewaklim@uni.lodz.pl) 185 sane m. yagi obtained his ba from the university of jordan, his ma from the university of kansas, and his phd from the university of auckland. he is an associate professor of computational linguistics at the university of jordan. he taught previously at universities in america, new zealand, malaysia, saudi arabia, oman, and the united arab emirates. his research interests include computational morphology and lexicography, computer-assisted language learning, and english language teaching and learning. he has co-authored a number of papers and a few software titles in these fields. contact details: english department, faculty of foreign languages, university of jordan, amman 11941, jordan (e-mail: saneyagi@yahoo.com) 189 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (2). 2017. 189-191 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.2.1 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial this special issue opens with a series of articles that deal with the need to make language learners able to communicate effectively in an increasingly diverse world filled with english varieties. in the first text, khawla badwan reports the testimony of a study-abroad student in the uk, addressing the discrepancies between language classroom goals and real-life unpredictable needs. badwan explains how those differences stem from the frequent need for teachers in nonoccidental countries to develop specific skills aimed at obtaining high scores on specific language tests rather than making language learners aware of varieties of english and at ease with them. a case is made for language teachers to embrace a plurilithic view of english. in the second text, neva čebron suggests that using the materials developed through the intercultural education resources for erasmus students and their teachers (ierest) project can diversify learning opportunities, leading to innovative approach to enhance learning beyond classroom experiences. čebron argues that in a multilingual and multicultural context, the linguaculture can be a norm that informs the leaning process by which the language transfer facilitates communicative encounters. for learners to be more adventurous, likely to engage in second language learning outside the classroom settings such as the erasmus sojourn scheme, the level of preparedness should seek to minimise factors that are likely to impede the complete cultural and linguistic immersion. čebron suggests that there is a need for teachers to develop a deeper awareness of communicative processes and the way they relate to cross-cultural competencies. čebron concludes her article by asserting that learners’ exposure and engagement can be achieved through rethinking learning beyond students’ mobility by integrating new communication paradigms into the preparation for international experience that various “intercultural paths” offer while abroad. in the third text matteo santipolo takes this suggestion further by suggesting a method for teaching english variation. santipolo then suggests a method 190 for teaching english variation in italian schools through blt, a student-centered approach. the author begins with a well-documented overview of the foreign language offer in the italian school system, underscoring the variability in teacher qualification and teaching contexts. santipolo then makes us realize that little attention has been devoted to the kind of english being taught. the author proposes that the concepts of utility and usability should form the criteria for selecting the language elements to be taught, rather than the traditional teaching sequences based on increased complexity and difficulty. in the fourth article, that plurithic view of english is then suggested for language assessment. betty lanteigne discusses the relevance of including jumbled sentences (such as “want taxi dubai you?”) and their validity as test items in english classrooms. since the need to reorder words to understand spoken language does occur in reality, the author discredits the inauthentic label assigned to such sentences. after compiling and analyzing 54 jumbled sentences uttered in real-world communication by low-proficiency speakers, lanteigne argues in favor of including such items on the basis that they reflect real-life communication in places where english is used as a lingua franca. the following article also pleads for emphasizing sociological aspects of language in education, this time taking us from language learning to translator training. larisa ilynska and her two colleagues investigated the effects of including lsp texts in developing thematic, linguistic and cultural competence. a strong point of this article is the difficulty for translators – as for readers in general – to identify intertextual references that require some sociolinguistic knowledge. the authors argue that intercultural competence is difficult to develop, and that a solution lies in the reading, analysis and translation of popular lsp texts, complemented with pre-reading and post-reading tasks. our special issue closes with another set of thematically-related articles, which deal with wider social issues. saadia gamir shares her personal and critical reflections as a language tutor about new language provision in the uk and at her university in particular. based on recent official survey figures, she discusses what she perceives as a crisis for foreign language learning at various levels of education in uk schools as a consequence of recent reforms, budget cuts and class time shortage. a striking point of her argument is a drop in the number of university students reaching a high level in languages, compared to other academic subjects. it his article, through a solid documentation protocol, daniel tomozeiu provides an overview of the diversity in linguistic rights of the minority language communities in the 28 eu member states. in the public sphere, it appears that minority languages enjoy visibility in the education and the media, more so than in the judiciary and public services. the author reflects on the ways in which the 191 status of minority languages are determined by historical influences. suggestions are made to enhance education in minority languages with calls for better coordination among organizations and better clarification in official documents. language minority may have rights but they also need access to language resources. the final article is about book-reading practices in various languages, in this era where globalization results in increased media availability. marie rivière presents the results of 24 interviews with plurilingual readers living in western europe, about their access to books in their different languages. perhaps unsurprisingly, printed and digital books in less dominant languages do not circulate as easily and visibly as those in dominant languages, and are less numerous and more expensive in local and online supplies. interestingly, rivière demonstrates how language domination both causes and results from economic advantages. we hope the readers will enjoy the texts we selected for this special issue. théophile munyangeyo leeds beckett university, uk t.munyangeyo@leedsbeckett.ac.uk françois pichette université téluq, québec, canada francois.pichette@teluq.ca 355 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (2). 2016. 355-358 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.2.11 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book review beliefs, agency and identity in language learning and teaching authors: paula kalaja, ana maria f. barcelos, mari aro, maria ruohotie-lyhty publisher: new york: palgrave macmillan, 2016 isbn: 9781137425942 pages: 237 when i first heard about beliefs, agency and identity in foreign language learning and teaching by paula kalaja, ana maria f. barcelos, mari aro and maria ruohote-lyhty, i could hardly wait for its release. investigating similar issues from the polish perspective, i was eager to read what new contributions the authors would make and what research gaps the book would fill. the volume consists of ten chapters organized into five sections: introduction (chapters one and two), part i (chapters three and four), part ii (chapters five, six and seven), part iii (chapters eight and nine) and conclusion (chapter ten). the two opening chapters explain the purpose of the volume, point to the specificity of the presented studies (contextual, longitudinal, qualitative/interpretative) and elucidate the key issues listed in the book title which are relevant to the studies to be reported, that is, beliefs, agency and identity. in part i, aro presents her two related studies on foreign language learning, as narrated by young learners who, during the course of the study (school 356 years one, three, five and at the age of twenty-one), turn into young adults. reading about the participants’ beliefs (chapter three) on how english is learnt and hearing the learners’ authoritative ideologies and the way they connect them to their personal experiences over a span of time was really fascinating. in chapter four, aro comes back to the two of the same participants, this time investigating their agency. it transpires that, during the school years, the learners’ sense of agency was influenced by the extent to which their learning preferences coincided with the teacher’s methods, whereas, as adult learners, they learnt how to use their own strengths as learners. part ii is the only part of the book in which two authors submit their chapters. barcelos (chapter five) traces the development of beliefs of six student teachers of english in brazil about the language teaching profession, their motivation to become teachers and their future teacher identities. she provides information about the brazilian educational context in which the teaching profession is mainly seen as a badly-paid job performed in poor working conditions by teachers whose professional identities are weak. kalaja’s two following chapters focus on the development of beliefs about languages of foreign language majors, mostly student teachers enrolled in an ma programme. in chapter six, using a sentence-completion task, she identifies four repertoires: affection, aesthetics, vitality and challenge, according to which the perception of language can be interpreted. drawing on visual and verbal data, chapter seven focuses on the learners’ images of language learning and teaching in a year’s time. both contributions by kalaja can provide insights into the finnish educational context and serve as important points of reference for future studies with regard to the interpretation of beliefs (repertoires) and the selection of research tools (students’ drawings). that said, i am not sure why the visual narrative study focused on investigating the image of a language classroom in the not-so-distant future (a year). to my mind, asking for images in at least five years’ time could have provided more interesting responses. i found part iii, with ruohotie-lychty’s two chapters complementing each other, the most engrossing. chapter eight investigates the beliefs of teachers of foreign languages when they were still newcomers in the field, having worked for three or four years. the results of the study, including the identification of eight repertoires, are really insightful as it turns out that it is not the environment but the individual teacher’s construction of the environment that affects the teacher’s beliefs (p. 170). those teachers who find the environment more restrictive tend to be more dependent than those who perceive the environment as supportive. chapter nine is a fascinating account of the development of identities of foreign language teachers (n = 5) over the period of a decade in which the changes and continuities are traced. the findings show that, with 357 years of practice, most teachers consider students’ needs, although there are still those who resist changes in their practices. the study also implies that the stories of continuities may not suggest a stable identity but rather the effort exerted on the part of the teachers who try to diminish the importance of professional life and protect their conceptualizations of themselves (p. 200). the concluding part provides the implications of the seven studies in terms of methodology, theory and practice, their evaluation and suggestions for further research. the book is a successful contribution, both in terms of its organization and, in a way, novelty. the authors of all chapters provide orderly discussions of their studies, with clear introductions preceding each part and well-organized tabular summaries presenting the main information about each study, which makes the content easy to follow. the writers seem to suggest that this collection is somewhat ground-breaking as there are no other comparable studies in the field (p. 206). this seems true with regard to the span of time of some of the presented studies, the employment of visual modalities in the exploration of beliefs, the inclusion of similar studies in terms of topic, method and approach or the treatment of beliefs, agency and identity, however close to one another conceptually, in one volume. on the other hand, i would appreciate to know why the generation of the data happened when the participants were twenty-one (chapter three) and nine years in the profession (chapter nine), rather than earlier, given that the previous data in both studies were regularly collected with annual intervals. failure to provide such an explanation might leave the reader with the impression that the last rounds of data generation were conducted on account of planning to write the very volume, rather than the planning of the study. my other objection refers to the presentation of the content. although the book counts 237 pages, the essential text is rather short, due to tabular summaries and, above all, return translations of the learners’ accounts. i acknowledge the argument that some linguistic nuances can be lost in translations, the whole pages devoted to original sentences in finnish or portuguese, languages not so popular worldwide, were somewhat irritating to me. publishing the book in english and addressing it mainly at international teacher educator readership, the authors can hardly presuppose that readers of the book will compare the translations with the original accoounts so as to check their conformity. perhaps the placement of original words in an appendix may not have diverted the reader’s attention from the continuity of the text and would have been a sounder option. these small reservations apart, i really think that the book fulfils its purposes and language teacher educators should make sure it finds its place on the shelves of their elt libraries. it may also prove useful for language teachers, especially those 358 who are concerned about self-reflection and enjoy comparing their own work situations with other professional contexts. i am confident that kalaja, barcelos, aro and ruohotie-lyhty’s collection may really set the tone for the future research of identities, beliefs, agency and emotions of both language teachers and learners of all ages. reviewed by dorota werbińska pomeranian university in słupsk, poland dorota.werbinska@apsl.edu.pl 13 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (1). 2017. 13-17 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.1.1 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial teachers have known for a long time that language learners differ and that a one-size-fits-all does not exist. still in the days of structuralism, language and its users were seen as being a “thing” to be learned and taught, and since the goal of the learning was the same for all learners—proficiency in the language—the road to that goal should be uniform as well. language was seen as a set of structures that had to be mastered, and this led to the audio-lingual method in which learners had to drill patterns and make no mistakes, since mistakes could be engrained as good as correct patterns. it was argued that the audiolingual method allowed for individual variation, since learners could choose their own goals and repeat parts of the curriculum on their own. it may be seen as a somewhat unusual perspective, but the mentalist stream that was initiated by zellig harris and noam chomsky paved the path for an approach in which the focus was on possible patterns rather than a limited set by not providing fixed patterns but emphasizing the creative possibilities of language and its development. learners were assumed to be endowed with a general and universal grammar that allowed them to acquire any language. what the universal grammar actually consisted of was less clear. also, the generative movement refrained from making too strong claims about how a language should be taught, so the theory did not restrict the options for individual learners. dell hymes in 1966 introduced the term communicative competence in reaction to chomsky’s competence/performance distinction that seemed to exclude any role of social factors in language learning and use. parallel to this more or less cognitive view of language learning, the interest moved from a focus on the language a la structuralism to a focus on the learner. in the communicative approach that emerged, language structures only existed as part of a communicative setting, which by definition is social and individualized. language was used to convey communicative intentions and did not exist by itself. in their ground-breaking article on communicative competence in 14 language teaching, canale and swain (1980) argued for different types of competence: grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic. so structural aspects were seen as only a part of the larger concept of competence. this implies attention to the individual learner. traditionally the main sources of individual differences were attitude/motivation, language aptitude, age and learning styles (van els, bongaerts, extra, van os, & janssen-van dieten, 1984). for motivation, the work of gardner has been very influential. his attitude/motivation test battery that was originally developed for the french-canadian context has been applied widely. in the last decade, the role of a leading motivation theorist has been taken over by dörnyei, who developed a new framework based on personality psychology in which the individual’s selves play a crucial role. language aptitude has had an interesting history, beginning with the early work by carroll and sapon in the 1960s who developed the modern language aptitude test (mlat). the aim was, according to the authors, “the prediction of how well, relative to other individuals, an individual can learn a foreign language in a given amount of time and under given conditions” (carroll & sapon, 1959, p. 16). a similar test but with a wider age range was the pimsleur language aptitude test. both tests consist of subtests for working memory, pattern recognition and phonetic discrimination ability. aptitude tests are fairly good in predicting success in language learning. one of the remaining questions is to what extent aptitude can be defined and measured independently of general intelligence. interestingly, the mlat has no component on motivation, while this is generally agreed to be a crucial factor. more recently meara (2005) developed his llama test, an online aptitude test that includes the components used by carroll/sapon and pimsleur. another issue with aptitude tests is whether they are stable over the lifespan. the work on dynamic systems theory has cast doubt on carroll’s assumption that it is relatively stable (see also singleton’s contribution to this volume). but some components, such as rote learning and auditory discrimination are trainable and thus not necessarily stable. the study of individual differences has also undergone a fundamental change recently. the traditional motivation and attitude studies used questionnaires as the main method, while in more recent studies a wide range of procedures and data are used. a good example is macintyre’s (this volume) work on the relation between attitudes and tasks as measured by continuous real time physical reactions, such as heart rate, skin resistance, pupil dilatation and cortisol production. there is very little research on this topic, unfortunately. in group studies, differences between individuals are often seen as noise that lowers the effects found. as the papers in the volume edited by dörnyei, macintyre, and henry (2015) show, noise in data is no longer seen as a nuisance, but as a valuable 15 source of information. from a dynamic perspective many variables play a role and since they interact over time, the development is only partly predictable. while questionnaires continue to be a widely used data collection method, other methods, including various types of neuro-imaging data have been employed. in particular for the role of emotions, brain imaging may provide clues about the structure and workings of the emotional brain. age as a factor in individual differences has a long history and a full treatment is beyond the scope of this introduction. for an overview see aronin and singleton (2010). in fact, the interest in age has been limited to the first decades of life with only recently a growing interest in language and ageing. there is a tendency to see “the elderly” as a group with specific characteristics such as bad memory and cognitive and physical decline. the suggestion of the existence of the elderly as a group is basically wrong. the variation between individuals is at least as large as in the larger population. being old is not a grouping factor, nor is age-related decline necessarily a problem when it comes to bilingualism and language learning. of course, in teaching languages to elderly students some of their shared characteristics have to be taken into account: weaker memory, slowing down of cognitive processes and reduced auditory and visual acuity are relevant factors that should inform language teachers’ decisions about what can be done in class and beyond. in recent years the interest in the role of affective variables has grown through the work of deweale and various others. it is linked to interest in positive psychology (macintyre, gregersen, & mercer, 2016). the most important message from that research is that in our research we should not purely focus on what goes wrong and leads to negative feelings, but also on more positive aspects. emotions have not played a role in second language development (sld) until recently. they were seen as irrelevant personal issues that should not murk our view of cognitive processes that for a long time were the focus of research in sld. cognition is now seen as inseparable from emotions (swain, 2013). the contributions to this volume do not cover all aspects of individual differences. there are also new additions, such as the one on circadian rhythm by de bot and fang, which is based on research in chronobiology, the branch of biology that looks at physical and psychological factors in the distribution of processes over the day. while there is extensive research on day/light rhythms as it affects human behavior and pathology, there is hardly any research on humans and nothing at all on humans learning and using language. in their article, de bot and fang report on a number of experiments in which the question to what extent early types (larks) and late types (owls) perform certain tasks better or worse depending on the time of the day was tested. their findings are mixed, and no clear effect of chronotype has been found. this is partly due to the lack of variance in the timing of their sleeping habits. 16 yinxing, de bot, and keijzer present a study on learner anxiety in chinese learners of english and japanese. the study focused on two factors: student cohesiveness, defined as “a second factor contributing to classroom environment is student cohesiveness, which has been conceived of as ‘the friendship students feel for each other, as expressed by getting to know each other, helping each other work with homework, and enjoying working together (trickett & moos, 2002, p. 1)’” and teacher support “defined as ‘the help and friendship the teacher shows toward students; how much the teacher talks openly with students, trusts them, and is interested in their ideas (trickett & moos, 2002, p. 1).’” the data show that teacher support, which was positively related to student cohesiveness and negatively to fl anxiety, did not show a direct relationship with fl proficiency. fl anxiety, which was negatively associated with fl proficiency, showed a better predictive power than student cohesiveness and teacher support. there are two papers in which age is the core issue. pfenninger reports on a series of studies on the effects of age of onset of language learning. results of multilevel analyses indicate that macro-contextual factors (i.e., the wider school context) have a mediating effect on the relation between age of onset and l2 proficiency increase, exerting both positive and negative influences and thus suggesting that age of onset effects are malleable, which is what one would expect if we are dealing with an individual difference variable. she claims that “an id model that assumes that age is a ‘fixed factor’ as suggested by ellis (1994, p. 35) is not entirely satisfactory.” an approach to individual differences based on complex dynamic systems theory is presented by lowie, van dijk, chan, and verspoor. they present data from a year long study of writing in english by two identical twins in taiwan. the data show that even for identical twins, with the same genetic profile and similar situations of learning and use, substantial differences in the individual developmental paths emerge. the interaction between variables over time leads to these differences. macintyre and vincze tested ten positive emotions (joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love) and nine negative emotions (anger, contempt, disgust, embarrassment, guilt, hate, sadness, feeling scared, and being stressed) against existing theories of individual differences and sla. on the basis of a large scale project in south tyrol in italy, they conclude that a variety of emotions, not just one or two key ones, are implicated in l2 motivation processes in a high-contact context. singleton discusses the stability of language aptitude as fixed trait. he traces the history of aptitude as an individual difference in the light of recent work on stability of traits that shows that other factors, such as intelligence, which also were regarded as stable, are in fact malleable and sensitive to training. 17 bátyi looks at the role of attitudes in the development of russian as a foreign language. the core issue is to what extent positive or negative attitudes, as they may have developed in the case of russian in hungary, play a role in the learning or unlearning of language skills in that language. using a mix-method set up with quantitative data in combination with first person accounts, she concludes that attitudes may have played a role in acquisition but that it is not clear whether these findings reflect attrition or non-acquisition, since no data on proficiency before a period of non-use are available. the contributions to this special issue show the changes in perspective on individual differences as fixed and stable characteristics of learners to one in which essentially none of them is completely stable. all of them dynamically interact with their environment. this is a perspective that will change the panorama of research on individual differences substantially. kees de bot university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary c.l.j.de.bot@rug.nl szilvia bátyi university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary szilviabatyi7@gmail.com references aronin, l., & singleton, d. (2010). multilingualism. amsterdam: john benjamins. canale, m., & swain, m. (1980). theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. applied linguistics, 1, 1-47. carroll, j. b., & sapon, s.m. (1959). modern language aptitude test. san antonio, tx: the psychological corporation. dörnyei, z., macintyre, p., & henry, a. (eds.). (2015). motivational dynamics in language learning. bristol: multilingual matters. macintyre, p., gregersen, t., & mercer, s. (eds.). (2016). positive psychology in sla. bristol: multilingual matters. meara, p. (2005). llama language aptitude tests: the manual. swansea: lognostics. mercer, s., & macintyre, p. (2015). introducing positive psychology to sla. swain, m. (2013). the inseparability of cognition and emotion in second language learning. language teaching, 33, 195-207. van els, t., bongaerts, t., extra, g., van os, c., & janssen-van dieten, a. (1984). the learning and teaching of modern languages. london: edward arnold. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: edyta olejarczuk (poznań university of technology) language editor: melanie ellis (pedagogical university of cracow) vol. 6 no. 4 december 2016 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, university of new south wales, sydney) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo) kata csizér (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) robert dekeyser (university of maryland) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) carol griffiths (fatih university, istanbul) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) sarah mercer (university of graz) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) bonny norton (university of british columbia) terrence odlin (ohio state university) rebecca oxford (university of maryland) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (university of pannonia, trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto) elaine tarone (university of minnesota) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) stuart webb (university of western ontario) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2016 editor: mirosław pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak anna mystkowska-wiertelak edyta olejarczuk articles are licensed under the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · directory of open access journals (doaj) · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · infobaseindex · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the thomson reuters master journal list. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 6, number 4, december 2016 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors ....................................................................555 editorial .........................................................................................559 articles: andrew d. cohen – the teaching of pragmatics by native and nonnative language teachers: what they know and what they report doing ..... 561 qiong li – variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features ........................................................................................... 587 ali h. al-hoorie – unconscious motivation. part ii: implicit attitudes and l2 achievement ........................................................................................ 619 anna mystkowska-wiertelak – dynamics of classroom wtc: results of a semester study .....................................................................................651 jelena bobkina, svetlana stefanova – literature and critical literacy pedagogy in the efl classroom: towards a model of teaching critical thinking skills ........................................................................................... 677 paweł sobkowiak – critical thinking in the intercultural context: investigating efl textbooks ................................................................................... 697 book reviews: mirosław pawlak – review of kohn bitchener, neomy storch’s written corrective feedback for l2 development ............................................ 717 paola vettorel – review of marie-luise pitzl, ruth osimk-teasdale’s english as a lingua franca: perspectives and prospects. contributions in honour of barbara seidlhofer............................................................................. 725 reviewers for volume 6/2016.......................................................... 733 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 737 555 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors ali h. al-hoorie is a lecturer at the english language institute, jubail industrial college, saudi arabia. his research interests include motivation theory, research methodology, and complexity. he is currently a doctoral candidate at nottingham university working under the supervision of professors zoltán dörnyei and norbert schmitt. he also holds an ma in social science data analysis from essex university. contact data: p.o. box 10099, the english language institute, jubail industrial college, jubail industrial city 31961, kingdom of saudi arabia (hoorie_a@jic.edu.sa) jelena bobkina holds a phd in slavic philology and indo-european linguistics from the university of granada (spain) since 2007 and an m.a. in english philology and russian philology from the university of latvia since 1993. in recent years she has been teaching english language and linguistics at the english department of the complutense university of madrid. her research interests and publications relate to the field of language teaching and applied linguistics. contact data: departamento de inglés i, facultad de filología, edif. a universidad complutense de madrid, ciudad universitaria s/n, 28040, madrid, spain (jbobkina@filol.ucm.es) andrew d. cohen was a peace corps volunteer in rural community development with the aymara indians on the high plains of bolivia. as a professor, he taught esl at ucla, language education at the hebrew university of jerusalem, and second language studies at the university of minnesota before retiring in 2013. he was also secretary general of aila (1996-2002). cohen is co-editor of language learning strategies (oup, 2007), author of strategies in learning and using a second language (routledge, 2011), and co-author of teaching and learning pragmatics with noriko ishihara (routledge, 2014). he has also published numerous book chapters and journal articles. contact data: 1555 lakeside drive #182, oakland, ca 94612, usa (adcohen@umn.edu) 556 qiong li is a third year phd student in the department of modern languages at carnegie mellon university. her primary research interests include second language pragmatics, technology-enhanced pragmatics learning and teaching, and chinese as a second language (l2). she is currently working on computer-mediated communication and data-driven instruction on l2 chinese pragmatics learning and teaching. contact data: carnegie mellon university, 5000 forbes ave, department of modern languages, baker hall 160, pittsburgh, pa, usa, 15213-3890 (qiongl@andrew.cmu.edu) anna mystkowska-wiertelak is assistant professor at the department of english studies of the faculty of pedagogy and fine arts of adam mickiewicz university, poznań/kalisz, poland as well as senior lecturer at the institute of modern languages of the state university of applied sciences in konin, poland. her main interests comprise, apart from teacher education, second language acquisition theory and research, language learning strategies, learner autonomy, form-focused instruction, willingness to communicate, and motivation. her recent publications include production-oriented and comprehension-based grammar teaching in the foreign language classroom (with mirosław pawlak, springer, 2012) and willingness to communicate in instructed second language acquisition (with mirosław pawlak, multilingual matters, 2017). anna mystkowska-wiertelak is assistant to the editor of the journal studies in second language learning and teaching (www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl). contact data: department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, nowy świat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (mystkows@amu.edu.pl) mirosław pawlak, professor of english at the faculty of philology, state university of applied sciences, konin, poland; and the department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts in kalisz, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland. he received his doctoral and post-doctoral degrees as well as his full professorship from adam mickiewicz university in poznań. his main areas of interest are sla theory and research, form-focused instruction, corrective feedback, classroom discourse, learner autonomy, learning strategies, grammar learning strategies, motivation, willingness to communicate and pronunciation teaching. his recent publications include the place of form-focused instruction in the foreign language classroom (2006, adam mickiewicz university press), production-oriented and comprehension-based grammar teaching in the foreign language classroom (co-authored with anna mystkowska-wiertelak, 2012, springer), error correction in the foreign language classroom: reconsidering the issues (2014, springer), applying cognitive grammar in the foreign 557 language classroom: teaching english tense and aspect (co-authored with jakub bielak, 2013, springer), as well as several edited collections on learner autonomy, form-focused instruction, speaking and individual learner differences. mirosław pawlak is the editor-in-chief of the journals studies in second language learning and teaching (www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl), konin language studies (http://www.ksj.pwsz.konin.edu.pl/?lang=en), and the book series second language learning and teaching (http://www.springer.com/series/10129). he has been a supervisor and reviewer of doctoral and postdoctoral dissertations. contact data: department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, nowy świat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (pawlakmi@ amu.edu.pl) paweł sobkowiak, phd – senior lecturer at the school of law and administration, adam mickiewicz university, poznań, where he teaches business english and business communication to students of management. his main research interests include different aspects of teaching business english, professional development of language teachers as well as, more recently, the development of learners’ intercultural competence and intercultural teaching. contact data: school of law and administration, adam mickiewicz university, aleja niepodległości 53, 61-714 poznań, poland (pawelsob@amu.edu.pl) svetlana stefanova holds a phd in english language and literature from uned (spain). her doctoral thesis is a comparative study of the fiction of caryl phillips and j. m. coetzee. her primary research interests include postcolonial and gender studies, transnational literature, and english language teaching. she is professor of english morphology, syntax, and semantics at the international university of la rioja, spain. contact data: departamento de inglés y sus didácticas, facultad de educación, universidad internacional de la rioja, calle/ almansa 101, edificio 1, 28040 madrid, spain (svetlana.stefanova@unir.net) paola vettorel is assistant professor in the department of foreign languages and literatures, university of verona, italy. her main research interests include elf and its implications for elt. her recent publications include: elf in wider networking: blogging practices (2014, mouton de gruyter); new frontiers in teaching and learning english (ed., 2015, cambridge scholars); “promoting awareness of englishes and elf in the english language classroom” (co-authored with l. lopriore, 2015, in h. bowles & a. cogo (eds.), international perspectives on english as a lingua franca: pedagogical insights, palgrave/macmillan); and “weand elf-informed 558 classroom practices: proposals from a pre-service teacher education programme in italy” (2016, journal of english as a lingua franca). contact data: university of verona, department of foreign languages and literatures, via lungadige di porta vittoria 41, 37129 verona, italy (paola.vettorel@univr.it) 15 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (1). 2018. 15-19 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.1.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial this is the first special issue devoted specifically to emotions in second language acquisition (sla). influenced by the positive psychology movement (fredrickson, 2001), there has been a shift away from an exclusive focus on negative emotions in sla to a more holistic analysis of both negative and positive emotions among learners (dewaele & macintyre, 2014; macintyre & gregersen, 2012; macintyre, gregersen, & mercer, 2016; macintyre & mercer, 2014). we are not claiming that nobody had considered positive emotions and affect in sla before 2012, as indeed many researchers prepared the ground (e.g., arnold, 1999; broner & tarone, 2001; cook, 2000; dewaele, 2005; kramsch, 2006). moreover, educational psychologists did point to the pivotal role of positive academic emotions that sustain motivation (pekrun, 1988, 2014; pekrun, goetz, titz, & perry, 2002a, 2002b).1 however, none of the sla studies created the kind of wave of interest in emotions in sla that we are currently witnessing. it is possible that now the time is ripe, as the success of the biennial psychology of language learning conferences illustrates, as well as the establishment of the new international association of psychology of language learning during the second conference in finland in 2016. the current issue shows a way forward, with increased emotional granularity (see e.g., galmiche, 2017) and a variety of research methods (both quantitative and qualitative, including case studies). although english figures in the language profiles of all the learners, it is not the only target language, as french and dutch are also studied. the learners who contributed data to the research projects reported in this issue study/studied in four different continents and have 1 pekrun et al. (2002b) show in their literature search on the effect of emotions on learning and achievement (for the period 1974-2000) that anxiety is the most frequently researched emotion (n = 1200) but that a wide range of other negative emotions (n = 195) and positive emotions (n = 119) have been considered. 16 diverse first languages, including canadian and british english, arabic, french, romanian, mandarin and hungarian. they range from primary and secondary school pupils to university students and adult learners. the emotions are also considered over different time scales, ranging from seconds to months. what all authors have in common is the interest in the variety of sources of individual differences in emotions experienced by their participants, including effects of the context in which the target language is used (both inside and outside the classroom). the source of variation in emotion can thus range from the joy or frustration in not finding the right word in a specific task, to having a lovely or a harsh teacher, to having a more or less supportive peer-group, to having experienced the joy and/or anxiety of authentic communication in the target language outside the school. learners’ emotions are also linked to the more diffuse influence of the wider sociopolitical, historical and cultural context in which they live and which shapes their emotions and attitudes towards their languages. all the authors point to the pedagogical implications of their findings. the first one is the importance of teachers’ creating a positive classroom atmosphere, which resonates with dewaele, gkonou and mercer (2018), who pointed out that teachers are like conductors, attuned to the dynamic interaction of their own emotions and that of their students, that is, members of their orchestra. once the members of the orchestra reach the optimal emotional temperature, the role of the conductor is merely that of a discrete guide (dewaele, 2015). the second pedagogical implication is that extracurricular (emotional) experiences in the target language can help boost learners’/users’ investment in mastering the new language. in the first paper of this special issue, dewaele and alfawzan focus on the combined effect of foreign language enjoyment (fle) and foreign language classroom anxiety (flca) on foreign language (fl) performance in two very different contexts: two london-based secondary schools with 189 pupils studying mostly french as an fl and 152 current and former saudi learners of english as a fl in saudi arabia. the quantitative data show similar patterns in the two contexts: fle was found to have a slightly stronger positive effect on performance in the fl than flca. fle and flca are also at the heart of the second paper by de smet, mettewie, galand, hiligsmann and van mensel, based on quantitative data from 896 pupils in french-speaking belgium. the study focuses on the comparison of two target languages (i.e., english and dutch) in two educational contexts (clil, content and language integrated learning, and non-clil) at different instruction levels (i.e., primary and secondary education). pupils reported significantly less flca in clil than in non-clil. the political-historical context played an important role with english fl learners experiencing significantly more fle and less 17 flca in comparison to dutch fl learners (dutch being the official language of flanders, often depicted in quite hostile terms in french-speaking belgium). differences also emerged between primary school pupils who reported more fle and flca compared to pupils in secondary schools. our call for more work on fl pupils’ emotions is also echoed in the third paper by pavelescu and petrić. the authors explore the positive fl learning emotions of four adolescent english fl students in romania taking the sociocultural context into account. using multiple qualitative methods to elicit data on participants’ emotional experiences of learning english inside and outside school over a period of one semester, the researchers identified two major positive emotions, namely love and enjoyment. love in particular is found to be the driving force in the learning process when there is a lack of enjoyment in certain classroom situations. the paper argues that language learners need to be seen as social beings and that their dynamic emotions are fluctuating within a particular sociocultural context. in the following contribution, ross and rivers explore the positive and negative emotional experiences of eight university-level english second language (sl) learners (with portuguese, spanish, chinese and japanese as l1) within an esl environment in australia, where the target language is more frequently experienced in social interactions than in the formal language-learning classroom. semi-structured interviews highlighted the range of emotional experiences of hope, enjoyment and frustration the participants had encountered in their daily lives beyond the classroom, which affects their investment in english. in their paper, piniel and albert come to similar conclusions following a different path. following pekrun’s (2014) model of emotions in an academic context, the authors investigate the qualitative feedback from 166 hungarian university students of english on emotions experienced while listening, speaking, reading and writing in english. enjoyment and language anxiety are mentioned most frequently, and these emotions vary not only according to the specific skill but depend also on the year of study and the context of language use (i.e., in class or outside class). crucially, students listed more positive feelings in connection with outside classroom language learning situations. in the final paper, boudreau, macintyre and dewaele use the idiodynamic approach to focus on the dynamic relationship between fle and flca among 10 anglo-canadian university students with french l2. the analyses show that fle and flca operate independently of each other on a second-per-second time scale, but they may interact in converging or diverging patterns in relation to specific events, or just move forward and follow unpredictable trajectories. this special issue demonstrates that emotion has become a focus of innovative research in sla. the studies feature a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches that are beginning to map out the role of emotions in language 18 learning and use. there is much more that can be done and researchers around the world are trying out new ways to study emotion in diverse contexts. we sincerely hope that the present issue will stimulate researchers’ hearts and minds and encourage them to join in the fascinating search for answers on the mysterious dynamic relationships between elusive emotions and sla. this area of research is not just academically rewarding as the pedagogical implications have the potential to challenge the established view of fl learning and teaching as emotionless, clinical, germ-free absorption and transmission of linguistic knowledge. jean-marc dewaele birkbeck college, university of london, uk j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk chengchen li college of foreign languages and cultures, xiamen university, china lichengchen@stu.xmu.edu.cn references arnold, j. (ed.). (1999). affect in language learning. cambridge: cambridge university press. broner, m., & tarone, e. (2001). is it fun? language play in a fifth grade spanish immersion classroom. modern language journal, 85, 363-379. cook, g. (2000). language play, language learning. oxford: oxford university press. dewaele, j.-m. (2005). investigating the psychological and the emotional dimensions in instructed language learning: obstacles and possibilities. modern language journal, 89, 367-380. dewaele, j.-m. (2015). on emotions in foreign language learning and use. the language teacher, 39(3), 13-15. dewaele, j.-m., & macintyre, p. (2014). the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom. studies in second language learning and teaching, 4, 237-274. dewaele, j.-m., mercer, s., & gkonou, c. (2018). do esl/efl teachers´ emotional intelligence, teaching experience, proficiency and gender, affect their classroom practice? in j. de dios martínez agudo (ed.), emotions in second language teaching (pp. 125-141). berlin: springer. fredrickson, b. l. (2001). the role of positive emotions in positive psychology: the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. american psychologist, 56, 218-226. 19 galmiche, d. (2017). shame and sla. apples – journal of applied language studies, 11, 25-53. kramsch, c. (2006). desire in language: the neglected dimension of language learning. in s. duxa, a. hu, & b. schmenk (eds.), grenzen überschreiten. menschen, sprachen, kulturen. festschrift für inge christine schwerdtfeger zum 60. geburtstag (pp. 209-224). tübingen: gunter narr. macintyre, p., & gregersen, t. (2012). emotions that facilitate language learning: the positive-broadening power of the imagination. studies in second language learning and teaching, 2, 193-213. macintyre, p., gregersen, t., & mercer, s. (eds.). (2016). positive psychology in sla. bristol: multilingual matters. macintyre, p., & mercer, s. (2014). introducing positive psychology to sla. studies in second language learning and teaching, 4, 153-172. pekrun, r. (1988). emotion, motivation und persönlichkeit. münchen/weinheim: psychologie verlags union. pekrun, r. (2014). emotions and learning. geneva: unesco. pekrun, r., goetz, t., titz, w., & perry, r. p. (2002a). academic emotions in students’ self-regulated learning and achievement: a program of qualitative and quantitative research. educational psychologist, 37, 91-106. pekrun, r., goetz, t., titz, w., & perry, r. p. (2002b). positive emotions in education. in e. frydenberg (ed.), beyond coping: meeting goals, visions, and challenges (pp. 149-174). oxford, uk: elsevier. 275 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (2). 2017. 275-293 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.2.6 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl application of lsp texts in translator training larisa ilynska riga technical university, latvia larisa.ilinska@rtu.lv tatjana smirnova riga technical university, latvia tatjana.smirnova@rtu.lv marina platonova riga technical university, latvia marina.platonova@rtu.lv abstract the paper presents discussion of the results of extensive empirical research into efficient methods of educating and training translators of lsp (language for special purposes) texts. the methodology is based on using popular lsp texts in the respective fields as one of the main media for translator training. the aim of the paper is to investigate the efficiency of this methodology in developing thematic, linguistic and cultural competences of the students, following bloom’s revised taxonomy and european master in translation network (emt) translator training competences. the methodology has been tested on the students of a professional master study programme called technical translation implemented by the institute of applied linguistics, riga technical university, latvia. the group of students included representatives of different nationalities, translating from english into latvian, russian and french. analysis of popular lsp texts provides an opportunity to structure student background knowledge and expand it to account for linguistic innovation. application of popular lsp texts instead of purely technical or scientific texts characterised by neutral style and rigid genre conventions provides an opportunity for student translators to develop advanced text processing and decoding skills, to develop awareness of larisa ilynska, tatjana smirnova, marina platonova 276 expressive resources of the source and target languages and to develop understanding of socio-pragmatic language use. keywords: translator training; language for specific purposes (lsp); allusion; bloom’s revised taxonomy 1. introduction the paper presents a discussion of the results of extensive empirical research into efficient methods of educating and training translators of special texts in the field of business and finance, telecommunications and computers, and civil engineering and architecture. the methodology is based on using popular scientific lsp texts in the respective fields as one of the main media for translator training. the aim of the paper is to investigate the efficiency of this methodology in developing linguistic and thematic competences of the students. the methodology has been tested on the students of professional master study programme called technical translation implemented by the institute of applied linguistics, riga technical university, latvia. the program is a member of the european master in translation network (emt). the group of students included representatives of different nationalities, translating from english into latvian, russian, and french. 2. application of language-for-specific-purposes (lsp) texts in translator training the master students already possess an advanced level of linguistic competence. many of them have a comprehensive level of thematic competence, which allows making use of more complicated tasks in the student-centered learning process and setting more ambitious targets. however, there are certain aspects of the language use that remain a challenge even for an advanced speaker. such manifestations of the intertextuality as allusion, allegory, idiom, proverb and quote may become “culture bumps” (leppihalme, 1997, p. 4) in the process of decoding the source text. they may become a challenge when their meaning has to be re-encoded in the process of translation. overcoming these challenges, students both promote their foreign language competence and increase their awareness of the source culture. expanding traditional pedagogical applications in second language acquisition, we employ focused textual analysis of popular scientific lsp texts, which helps students develop sound background knowledge in the subject field and master figurative language use. traditional methods of lsp translator training include development of advanced foreign language reading and writing skills, knowledge of terminological application of lsp texts in translator training 277 resources available in the working languages, and promotion of background knowledge in the field of specialization. however, taking into consideration that contemporary scientific and technical texts increasingly display features of genre hybridity, it is useful to expand the range of genres lsp translators will be able to deal with. the present authors propose to use reading, analysis and translation of popular lsp texts in the field of specialization in addition to other traditional methods of lsp translator training as this methodology offers a number of advantages. first, reading popular scientific texts on economics, business, architecture, and so on, student translators get acquainted with new scientific and technical concepts in a comprehensible and entertaining way, developing both thematic and terminological competences. they also learn professional jargon that may eventually become part of the professional lexis. second, as popular lsp texts are characterized by application of expressive resources of the language such as metaphors, allusions, puns, idioms, and lexical innovations used to promote interest, students develop their perception of figurative language use, which they would hardly encounter if they translated purely technical or scientific texts. third, students raise their cultural awareness and sociopragmatic competence by decoding allusions, which appear on the interface of linguistic and cultural knowledge (lennon, 2004, p. 31), and by analyzing the references to the events which are topical in the source community. it is important to stress that instructors have to explain to the students the difference between approaches to translation of popular lsp and traditional scientific and technical texts, that is, to ensure that students are aware of the differences between genres and conventions of text production. thus, in designing a curriculum of translation practice modules, the learning outcomes should be formulated to account for a higher level of foreign language knowledge, and at the same time to precisely formulate the components of advanced competences that students should develop. the methods that are traditionally used in translator training include development of core competences: linguistic competence in the working languages placing particular emphasis on the student’s native language, thematic competence in the fields of specialization addressing both the conceptual framework of a particular discipline and terminological resources, and socio-pragmatic competence making translators effective communicators between languages and cultures. developing a translator profile within the technical translation study programme, the components of translator competence set by the emt are used as the basic framework of reference (european commission. . ., 2009). the core components addressed within the framework are translation service provision competence (interpersonal and production dimensions), language competence, larisa ilynska, tatjana smirnova, marina platonova 278 intercultural competence (sociolinguistic and textual dimensions), as well as technological, thematic and information mining competences. 3. core competences of an lsp translator translator training and relevant curriculum design have recently become one of the main areas of interest of translation scholars. campbell and halle (2003) stress, “much . . . work is concerned with identifying the components of competence and proposing curriculum models that incorporate these components and suitable teaching strategies” (p. 205). bloom’s revised taxonomy is a tool that can be efficiently used in identifying the elements of competences and skills in curriculum design to redefine academic excellence. it can be adapted to any field of study and help formulate relevant and measureable learning outcomes. the revised taxonomy consists of two dimensions, namely, knowledge and cognitive processes; each dimension is organized into subcategories (cf. munzenmaier & rubin, 2013, pp. 18-19). the translator competences set out in the emt manual can be related to four categories of knowledge dimension “arranged from the most concrete to the most abstract” (european commission. . ., p. 18), namely, factual, conceptual, procedural and metacognitive knowledge. factual knowledge is closely related to the thematic competence of a translator. it is the knowledge about facts and specific details within a certain field that are essential to decode the message. it also includes the mastery of terminology in the given field and other related fields. taking into consideration that technology and science are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, it is important to make students aware of common and distinguishing features of a subject field. jones (1985) argues that in the context of language for special purposes (e.g., in economics, telecommunication, civil engineering and architecture, etc.), domain specifications are well-defined, which still does not guarantee the basis for wideranging and powerful predictions of language behavior in new situations. conceptual knowledge is also closely connected with the thematic competence of a translator. according to munzenmaier and rubin (2013, p. 18), it is the knowledge of “classifications, principles, generalizations, theories, models, or structures pertinent to a particular disciplinary area.” a translator should be familiar with the conceptual structure of the field of specialization in both working languages. moreover, understanding of inherent interdisciplinarity of any subject field is necessary for the formation of new conceptual knowledge, as interdisciplinarity incorporates a variety of models from other fields. the establishment of a network of relevant background knowledge is the key aspect of cross-curricular learning. application of lsp texts in translator training 279 developing procedural knowledge, a translator at the same time advances one’s translation service provision competence, its production dimension in particular. in bloom’s taxonomy, procedural knowledge “refers to methods of inquiry, very specific skills, algorithms, techniques, and particular methodologies” (munzenmaier & rubin, 2013, p. 19). for example, a translator should master translation strategies, identify translation problems, and select appropriate methods for their solution. metacognitive knowledge is the awareness an individual should have of one’s personal growth and life-long learning needs. developing a spirit of curiosity, ability to analyse and summarise are mentioned as some of the aspects of the thematic competence of a translator and are closely connected with the knowledge management function. in designing the curriculum that would account for the changing requirements set forth to the professional profile of an lsp translator, it is important to address the core competences and skills which a student translator can develop only with appropriate tutoring. the competence that is most difficult to develop without guidance is intercultural competence and its elements, the sociolinguistic and textual dimensions. according to emt manual (european commission. . ., p. 6), the dual perspective should be taken into consideration in developing this competence, comparing and contrasting discursive practices in the working languages. the sociolinguistic dimension covers awareness of social, dialectal, and stylistic variations of the languages, as well as the ability to discriminate between the registers and select the one appropriate for a given communicative situation. the textual dimension of intercultural competence may potentially pose the greatest challenge not only for student translators but also for experienced professionals, because it is inherently connected with the ability to decode, uncover and reproduce implicit meaning. if a translator fails to pick up contextual clues, decode the meaning communicated by such intertextual references as allusions, or make the references to the sources culture specific knowledge understandable to the target audience, the process of communication across the cultures may be seriously impeded. it is stipulated in the manual that a translator should be able to understand and analyse the macrostructure of a document, including the information communicated by graphic expressive means; to summarize and extract the most relevant information from the source text; to identify, contrast and reproduce to the degree possible elements, values and references of the cultures represented; as well as to compose the document in accordance with the conventions of the genre and rhetorical standards. a master student in translation is expected to possess an advanced level of foreign language knowledge. however, considering the growing complexity of the contemporary language and the growing rate of linguistic innovation and larisa ilynska, tatjana smirnova, marina platonova 280 language change, language skills of a translator should be developed on a lifelong basis. translation is an exercise in languages, and every act of translating promotes the knowledge of the working languages. by decoding the meaning of the source text, recreating its rhetorical function and stylistic coloring, students use languages to advance their linguistic competence. translation as a means in second language acquisition has been discussed since the times of ancient greece. at present, this issue has not lost its prominence. translation as a tool in second language learning is considered from numerous perspectives (see krawutschke, 2008; leonardi, 2010; witte, harden, & ramos de oliviera harden, 2009). talking about the role of translation in language instruction, france (2005, p. 256) maintains that “it should be noted that among the exercises of the rhetoric classes, translation always had an important place and is still regarded as one of essential ways of acquiring the mastery of a foreign language.” steiner (1998, p. 490) adds to the point: “inside or between languages human communication equals translation. a study of translation is a study of language.” another competence that should be specifically addressed in curriculum design is thematic competence, which implies not only the knowledge of the conceptual framework and terminology of particular fields, but also development of the spirit of curiosity, analysis and summary. 4. intertextuality in lsp texts in the case of lsp translation, it is not always easy to draw a line between some elements of textual and thematic competence because the ability to decode references to the previous texts is a core element of both competences. the mastering of “systems of concepts, methods of reasoning, presentation, controlled language, and terminology” (european commission. . ., p. 7) (thematic competence) is inherently connected with the ability “to grasp the presuppositions, implicit information, allusions, stereotypes and intertextual nature of a source text” (p. 6) (textual competence). thus, it may be maintained that a translator should have a thorough understanding of the intertextual nature of any text taking into consideration the specific character of lsp texts that are produced and decoded in special thematic fields. the transmission and comprehension of information within professional communication is based on the knowledge of not only one special subject field but also of the entire body of world knowledge for production, reception, and interpretation of lsp texts. in the process of translation, the degree of intertextuality of a text increases because the translated text belongs to networks of both the source and target language texts, and it may contain the references to both source and target culture and require activating various levels of background knowledge. application of lsp texts in translator training 281 within his intertextual theory, barthes (as cited in allen, 2011) stresses the role of the reader in the interpretation of the text. the reader is seen as a co-creator or even a single creator of the meaning of a text. he distinguishes two types of readers: passive “consumers,” who read the work for stable meaning encoded by the author, and “writers of the text,” who are essentially co-authors of the text, and are involved in the analysis and production of the text. allen (2011, p. 74) supports and expands this view maintaining that “the modern scriptor, when s/he writes, is always already in a process of reading and re-writing. meaning comes not from the author but from language viewed intertextually.” from the pedagogical perspective, it is necessary to train student translators to identify intertextual references, to select an appropriate strategy for transferring them into the target language, and applying the most efficient compensation mechanism to account for inevitable meaning loss in the process of translation. it is particularly challenging in a multilingual classroom, when background knowledge is not shared by all participants. what is usually considered to belong to the universal knowledge of the western civilisation may appear to be only relatively universal or not universal at all. according to gerard genette (1997), intertextuality is a textual strategy which may appear in the form of quotation or allusion that imply “a relationship of co-presence between two texts or among several texts” (p. 1). allusion as the type of intertextual references that translators have to deal with in translation of lsp texts can be conditionally classified into three categories with regard to degree of universality and compatibility. the first group comprises allusions that can be considered to be relatively universal, belonging to the general world knowledge or establishing reference to widely known facts, events, personalities or artefacts. these allusions rarely pose any significant challenge in translation. however, it is expected that the users possess the necessary individual background knowledge to decode their meaning. the second group includes allusions that are shared by both source and target languages as a result of close language contacts, and thus are also quite easily transferrable across the working languages. the third group covers allusions that are specific for a particular language, culture or field of knowledge. these allusions pose considerable challenge in the process of interlingual transfer, and should be analyzed individually in a particular context. it is important to stress that in the case of lsp text translation the degree of universality of allusion will greatly depend on the thematic field of the discourse. within the framework of professional communication, for instance, economists and architects will use references to different realms of knowledge and operate with different sets of allusions. the following extract provides insights into the types of challenges student translators have to face decoding allusive references in the source text: larisa ilynska, tatjana smirnova, marina platonova 282 dorothy and her troop presented their requests to the wizard, who demanded that they first vanquish the wicked witch of the west, representing the mckinley/rockefeller faction in ohio (then considered a western state). the financial powers of the day were the morgan/wall street/cleveland faction in the east (the wicked witch of the east) and this rockefeller-backed contingent from ohio, the state of mckinley, hanna, and rockefeller’s standard oil cartel. (brown, 2008, p. 18) allusive references in the excerpt can be established at several levels: allusions to f. baum’s book the wizard of oz and allusions to political and economic landscape of the usa at the end of the 19th century. in this case, two seemingly unrelated fields of reference overlap and are explained one in terms of another, which requires a complex approach to text analysis and lateral thinking to elicit relevant information and decode the author’s propositions. the text is abundant in references that can be identified only by advanced learners of english, and due to extreme information density, it is complicated to establish appropriate relationships between units of information. items of professional economic vocabulary are often based on allusions. if the source and target readers share the background knowledge referred to by an allusion, allusion can be easily reproduced in translation; however, in the opposite case, it may become a stumbling block for a novice translator. for example, such professionalisms denoting the types of takeover strategy as scorched earth strategy and lady macbeth strategy, which come from the dictionary at the investopedia website (www.investopedia.com/dictionary), can be relatively easily represented in russian by means of calques, and they will be transparent for the target audience. at the same time, the item mad hatter taken from the same source and denoting an incompetent ceo prone to making spontaneous unsubstantiated decisions may not be so easily decoded because it is highly context dependent and may appear ambiguous if transferred literally. the context of use has a major impact on the meaning of another item of professional vocabulary in the sphere of business and finance: may day. this traditional signal of emergency acquired new meaning on may 1, 1975, when the us government liberalized domestic financial markets (zweig, 2015). in the context under discussion, the lexical item has a positive connotation, signifying change and liberation, rather than emergency and distress. a translator specializing in the field of finance should be aware of these varying meanings. the main difficulty in translation of allusions lies in the fact that student translators sometimes simply do not identify a certain reference as being an allusion. contemporary search engines allow to find any relevant information quickly and efficiently; the problem is if a student does not know what to search for or whether it is necessary to search for additional information, because they perceive the text literally. the following excerpt from the source text (st) currency application of lsp texts in translator training 283 wars: the making of the next global crisis by james rickards (2011) and the target translation (tt) by a student translator may well illustrate this point. the student failed to identify the phrase we the people as a reference to the preamble to the united states constitution and translated the phrase literally, ultimately failing to communicate the message of the source text. st: the media, governments and business interests assure the public that we the people have the knowledge to make these decisions. tt: интересы средств массовой информации, правительства и предприятий заверяют общественность, что у нас, у людей[emphasis added], имеются знания для того, чтобы принимать эти решения. decoding of allusions in a foreign language is complicated for the users because they can be ambiguous and polysemic. the author can activate only one facet of meaning, and the readers will have to determine which meaning is relevant for a specific context. one of the learning activities that can be used to promote competence in decoding and translation of allusions is an awareness test where students have to determine whether an allusion is universal (group 1), matching in the source and target languages (group 2), or languageor culture-specific (group 3). if students are not familiar with a certain allusion, they are invited to check the meaning of the item in question and to consider its use in various contexts. in such a way, students develop textual competence and enhance background knowledge. awareness raising activities are one of the mechanisms to minimize the possible effects of differences in prior knowledge among the students within a group. at times, intertextual reference would not be recognized by the majority of the readers and sometimes the reader, on the contrary, may extract more information from the text than originally encoded by the author. in other words, the scope of meaning communicated by an intertextual reference may not always fully coincide on the part of the author and the reader. nevertheless, at least some information encoded in an intertextual reference should belong to their shared knowledge. nord (1991) and leppihalme (1997, p. 80) consider cultural familiarity of the source text allusion to the target readers a major success factor in translating allusions. 5. methodology of lsp translator training popular lsp texts as a medium for translator training have a number of important benefits and some minor drawbacks that can be easily overcome if addressed properly. using these texts instead of purely technical texts devoid of genre, register, and style variations provides an opportunity for student translators to larisa ilynska, tatjana smirnova, marina platonova 284 develop advanced text processing and decoding skills, dealing with translation of stylistically marked vocabulary to become aware of expressive resources of both the source and target languages and to develop sensitivity to specifics of socio-pragmatic language use. popular lsp texts also offer considerable benefits with regard to development of factual and conceptual knowledge as well as training of advanced terminological competence. in contrast to purely technical texts that make use of standardized terminological resources, popular lsp texts contain not only the terms used in a particular field, but they are also abundant in professionalisms and ad hoc lexical units denoting new, innovative or imaginary concepts. knowledge about the status of a particular lexical item within a particular language for special purposes is important for an lsp translator and allows them to make informed choice in the process of translating professional vocabulary. moreover, taking into consideration that many professionalisms and ad hoc items often do not have target language counterparts, student translators learn to solve potential translation problems, thus developing their procedural knowledge. each message of an original text communicates the individual author’s opinion, attitude, or assessment, which may or may be not shared by the reader. one of the new competences a translator should develop is the ability to stay up to date with the rapid changes occurring in the working languages: new words, new meanings of existing words, and buzz words which come and go out of fashion and get obsolete very quickly (e.g., linguistic memes and folk etymology). thus, one of the challenges student translators have to face is translation of novel pieces of professional vocabulary coined for a particular purpose to refer to a concrete media event. such items are launched, become topical and disappear as soon as the event is not in the headlines anymore. translating items of this kind, novice translators, apart from the obvious exercise in dealing with non-equivalent vocabulary, also promote their awareness of the current issues discussed in the source language media, thereby developing their sociolinguistic competence. it is very important to identify and estimate the effect of such factors as information density and vocabulary load on language change. two examples of such ad hoc items are professionalisms baby bills and mini madoff. the former is defined by the investopedia dictionary as a hypothetical nickname for the smaller companies that would have been formed if microsoft had been broken up for violation of antitrust rules in 2000. these companies have never been formed, and the event itself is not topical any more, but the term is still listed in professional databases (e.g., investopedia and the financial dictionary at the free dictionary: http://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com) and may potentially appear in economic press. according to the investopedia dictionary, mini madoff is used to denote financial con men application of lsp texts in translator training 285 who are accused of or have committed crimes similar to those of bernard madoff. the attribute mini implies that the runners of financial pyramid schemes are not as notorious as bernard madoff. both items in question do not have established target language equivalents (i.e., lexical items in latvian and russian); moreover, events or personalities referred to may not be familiar to the target audience. thus, student translators not only have to decide on the choice of relevant translation strategy, but they also have to consider the amount of additional information they have to supply to the target audience to ensure the message of the source is understood and interpreted correctly. in the case of translation of mini madoff, students are invited to pragmatically adapt the unit and refer to a fraudster better known in the target culture: ponzi (as in ponzi scheme) or even mavrodi, an infamous founder of a pyramid in russia. thus, students not only consider the pros and cons of various translation strategies, but they also develop factual knowledge in their field. professionalisms may be not only languagebut also country-specific, and students have to develop an understanding of regional varieties of the source language. language of business in use in the united kingdom and the united states of america differs considerably. thus, tasks aimed at appreciating these differences promote both factual and socio-cultural knowledge of the students. for instance, such professionalisms as pay czar clause, a clause found in financial institutions’ employment contracts that would subject compensation terms to the u.s. government’s approval, and maquiladora, a factory located near the united states-mexico border, may be encountered in the u.s. press and will not be transparent for the speakers of english outside the usa. at the same time, it is important to dispel misconceptions student may have concerning certain items as belonging to a national variety of english. for example, big mac index, also known as big mac ppp, a survey done by the economist magazine (http://www.economist.com/topics/big-mac-index) that is used to measure the purchasing power parity (ppp) between nations using the price of a big mac as the benchmark, is a term that is nowadays widely applicable across the world. it is not typical of the usa only; despite a common stereotype that macdonald’s is a symbol of usa driven market globalization. frequent use of professionalisms is characteristic not only of the field of business and economics. popular scientific texts on architecture and civil engineering also make use of pieces of professional vocabulary that strictly speaking cannot be considered terms, for example, frog denoting a depression in the bed surface of a brick (masonry institute of washington, 2012, p. 53), camelback truss, a professional variant of a term crescent truss (camelback truss, n.d.), and bull stretcher, a header laid on its edge so that the end of the unit is exposed (masonry institute of washington, 2012, p. 42), and many more. larisa ilynska, tatjana smirnova, marina platonova 286 contemporary popular lsp texts are the main source of new vocabulary, the medium through which knowledge is disseminated among the general public, and the type of text that most quickly reflects the changing nature of multimodal discourse. using popular lsp texts in translator training allows building student awareness of linguistic innovations that enter lsp vocabularies through these texts. 6. foregrounding strategies in lsp texts apart from being a great source of novel or ad hoc lexical units as well as items of professional jargon, popular lsp texts provide opportunity to practice strategies and methods for treatment of elements of foregrounding in translation. coined by the prague linguistic school (cf. garvin, 1964, pp. 9-10), foregrounding is defined as “use of the devices of the language in such a way that this use itself attracts attention and is perceived as uncommon.” foregrounding raises interesting questions when two or more languages are involved. foregrounding is also considered to be the main effect produced by literary code switching (montes-alcalá, 2013, p. 216). usually the appropriate codes are determined by different contextual and intertextual cues. texts draw upon multiple codes from wider contexts, both textual and social (cf. chandler, 1994-2016). the theory of codes provides an instrument for text analysis, taking into consideration various aspects of text production. as a textual strategy, foregrounding is used by authors to make the text more appealing to the prospective readership and may potentially become a challenge if its effect should be recreated in another language in the process of translation. foregrounding may contribute to the total meaning of the text expressed in references, images, quotations or citations. if meaning in the source text is transmitted using foregrounding strategies, student translators are not always capable of recognizing the relationships between information units. textual and stylistic analyses are employed to bring implicit information into the foreground to ensure the message of the text is interpreted accurately. the following examples illustrate the types of texts used in training lsp translators that feature the application of various foregrounding techniques aimed at bringing some information into focus. the explosion of mind-boggling technological “tools” mushrooming from the global envelopment of the internet into cellular telecommunications, powerful financial and investment software, wireless computing connectivity, and high-volume electronic data management. all were developed by techno-wizards with laudable intentions, but were promptly adapted by what came to be known as the “black hat” community of high-tech fraudsters, saboteurs, and terrorists. (goldman, 2010, p. 5) application of lsp texts in translator training 287 the excerpt from the text fraud in the markets: why it happens and how to fight it by peter goldman is a good medium for practicing the translation of interdisciplinary popular lsp texts featuring the use of a variety of foregrounding techniques. the text addresses the issues of market and finance, ict technologies, online fraud, and forensic techniques. considering such terms as cellular telecommunications, wireless computing connectivity, and high-volume electronic data management as well as the professionalism “black hat” community, students develop their thematic competence. at the same time, analyzing such stylistically loaded pieces of vocabulary as mind-boggling, mushrooming, and laudable intentions from a contrastive perspective, students not only advance their linguistic competence but also promote their procedural knowledge in dealing with elements of foregrounding in translation, that is, selecting the target language counterpart with the same expressive value and within the same register as the respective source language units. sometimes relevant contextual information can be found in the text itself, the so-called co-text, which, according to brown and yule (1983), provides an expanding context that affects the interpretation of the text, such as the following: the façade of the rucellai palace is famous for its meticulous grading of the classical orders, from doric at the bottom to corinthian at the top. . . . juicy oak garlands are crammed into narrow crevices over the doors. bifora windows, familiar in italian gothic, now acquire three tiny classical columns framing and splitting the openings, capped by a tiny entablature, which completes a separate little architectural universe. (harbison, 2009, p. 144) this extract from the book travels in the history of architecture by robert harbison provides student translators an opportunity to activate and expand their background knowledge on architecture considering such terms as doric and corinthian order, bifora window, and entablature. at the same time, as the text is highly expressive, presenting unique aesthetic vision of the author, the students have an excellent opportunity, in translating the text, to practice the transfer of a wide range of rhetorical techniques, numerous instances of foregrounding (e.g., juicy oak garlands crammed into narrow crevices, separate little architectural universe) and excel in their own talent development producing a creative translation that causes equivalent response with the target readership. 7. the case study the present case study reflects on the results of the ongoing research on the efficiency of the application of popular lsp texts in lsp translator training. the study was performed in two groups of master students in translation rendering larisa ilynska, tatjana smirnova, marina platonova 288 from english as the source language into latvian, russian, and french. the sample consisted of 14 students, 4 male and 10 female in the age group from 24 to 27. at the moment, the sample is too small to make reliable conclusions, so the results of the analysis are preliminary. the sample task (given in the appendix) consisted of reading, analyzing and translating a popular text on architecture. students were informed about the expected level of background knowledge and the desired learning outcomes: to demonstrate sound level of thematic competence in architecture and civil engineering (factual and conceptual knowledge) and linguistic competence, to be able to identify and decode intertextual references in the text, to organize and manage knowledge, to be able to identify elements of foregrounding in the text, to identify figurative language use, to decode implicit meaning in contexts and to analyze the text from a contrastive perspective. english was used as the language of instruction, and possible translation variants and solutions to potential translation problems were back translated into english to ensure the students followed the line of reasoning. during the pre-reading stage, the students were invited to activate and demonstrate their background knowledge on the subject, constructing a mind map of concepts related to the thematic field of gothic architecture. it was expected that the students would possess different levels of factual and conceptual knowledge, so this activity was aimed at raising awareness of existing knowledge and levelling this knowledge across members of the group. after reading the text, students had to check their preliminary knowledge against new information they learned. the instructor should have made sure students did not miss any of the terms in the given subject field: internal elevation, two-tier system, flying buttress, arcade, partition, buttress, tracery, portal, nave, and chancel, as well as the terms belonging to other thematic fields, for example, bishop’s seat, royal patronage, raise money, coronation church, tax levied, and social unrest. completing task 2, students were supposed to identify at least three allusions in the text: to a personality, to a biblical scene and to an architectural style. it should be expected that the students would not be familiar with the personality of suger, a french abbot, a proponent of the spread of gothic style, but they should be capable of identifying an allusion in the text. analyzing and decoding religious references is always a sensitive issue, as depending on the composition of the classroom, students may or may not experience more or less difficulties in decoding the allusion to a biblical scene, annunciation. all students in the sample had to consult the dictionary to understand the item in english, and 73% needed additional explanation with regard to the exact scene portrayed by the carved group. the reference to romanesque style was successfully decoded by all students, although the differences between gothic and romanesque styles had to be readdressed. application of lsp texts in translator training 289 the next task involved detailed stylistic analysis of the text. analyzing the instances of foregrounding, students displayed their skills in identifying and interpreting figurative language use. students identified many vivid manifestations of the author’s individual style: “the structural system is refined by eliminating the gallery, turning it into a skeleton of itself, spidery frameworks pierced by little arcades, following the century-long saga with baited breath, the nave and chancel walls are being dematerialized to admit light filtered through colored glass.” however, less expressive instances of foregrounding were not noticed and had to be identified by the instructor and discussed: crucial ingredient, raise money on the back of this earlier achievement, ‘wrong’ smiling angel, and such graphic stylistic devices as the use of italics (didn’t get their cathedrals). discussion of the elements of foregrounding helped students identify potential translation problems and suggest methods for their solution. students were asked to translate the text at home, and their translations were peer-discussed in the classroom. activities of this kind proved to be very useful in lsp translator training as they simultaneously promote development of thematic, linguistic, and intercultural competences. the students displayed interest in looking for additional information on the subjects addressed, actively took part in discussion of translation challenges, and exercised their own creative talent in producing the target text. 8. conclusions the analysis of popular lsp texts provides opportunity to structure student background knowledge and expand it to account for linguistic innovation. application of popular lsp texts instead of purely technical or scientific texts characterized by neutral style and rigid genre conventions provides opportunity for student translators to develop advanced text processing and decoding skills, to develop awareness of expressive resources of the source and target languages and to develop understanding of socio-pragmatic language use. performing pragmatic and stylistic text analysis, student translators have to consider the layers of complexity of meaning representation and make a final decision concerning the optimal, most acceptable translation variant. thus, the knowledge of lexical relationships should be an integral element of a translator’s linguistic competence. students should be motivated to advance their mastery of both their native and working languages, read and analyze popular and scientific lsp texts, develop their perception of figurative language use, such as metaphors, puns and wordplay, and raise their cultural and socio-pragmatic literacy. the novelty of the suggested methodology is that students are trained to spot and decode relevant explicit and implicit information in the text, to make informed choice in selecting the most appropriate translation strategy, and to larisa ilynska, tatjana smirnova, marina platonova 290 promote their curiosity in acquiring new knowledge and imagination in transferring this knowledge across languages and cultures. translation is primarily a linguistic activity, and the very act of translating promotes the knowledge of the working languages. by interpreting and transferring the meaning of the source text, reproducing its rhetorical function and expressive potential, students become more proficient language users. application of lsp texts in translator training 291 references allen, g. (2011). intertextuality (new critical idiom). new york: routledge. brown, e. h. (2008). the web of debt: the shocking truth about our money system and how we can break free. baton rouge, la: third millennium. brown, g., & yule, g. (1983). discourse analysis. cambridge: cambridge university press. camelback truss. (n.d.). in dictionary.com. retrieved from http://www.dictionary. com/browse/crescent-truss campbell, s., & hale, s. (2003). translation and interpreting assessment in the context of education measurement. in g. alderman & m. rogers (eds.), translation today: trends and perspectives (pp. 205-224). clevedon: multilingual matters. chandler, d. (1994-2016) semiotics for beginners. retrieved from http://visualmemory.co.uk/daniel/documents/s4b/ european commission, directorate general for translation, emt expert group. (2009). competences for professional translators, experts in multilingual and multimedia communication. retrieved from http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/trans lation/programmes/emt/key_documents/emt_competences_translators_en.pdf france, p. (2005). the rhetoric of translation. in one hundred years of ‘mlr’: general and comparative studies. modern language review, 100, 255-268. garvin, p. l. (ed.). (1964). a prague school reader on aesthetics, literary structure and style (pp. 7-10). washington: georgetown university press. genette, g. (1997). palimpsests: literature in the second degree. lincoln: university of nebraska press. goldman, p. (2010). fraud in the markets: why it happens and how to fight it. new jersey: john wiley. harbison, r. (2009). travels in the history of architecture. london: reaktion. jones, r. (1985). second language performance testing: an overview. in h. p. hauptman, r. leblanc, & m. wesche (eds.), second language performance testing (pp. 15-24). ottawa: university of ottawa press. krawutschke, p. w. (ed.) (2008). translator and interpreter training and foreign language pedagogy. amsterdam: john benjamins. lennon, p. (2004). allusions in press. berlin: de gruyter. leonardi, v. (2010). the role of pedagogical translation in second language acquisition: from theory to practice. bern: peter lang. leppihalme, r. (1997). culture bumps: an empirical approach to the translation of allusions. clevedon: multilingual matters. masonry institute of washington. (2012). pocket guide to brick and cmu construction. kirkland, wa: masonry institute of washington. larisa ilynska, tatjana smirnova, marina platonova 292 montes-alcalá, c. (2013). writing on the border: english y español también. in i. martín-junquera (ed.), landscapes of writing in chicano literature (pp. 213-230). new york: palgrave macmillan. munzenmaier, c., & rubin, n. (2013). bloom’s taxonomy: what’s old is new again. the elearning guild. retrieved from http://educationalelearningresources.yol asite.com/resources/guildresearch_blooms2013%20%281%29.pdf nord, c. (1991). text analysis in translation: theory, methodology and didactic application of a model for translation-oriented text analysis. amsterdam: rodopi. rickards, j. (2011). currency wars: the making of the next global crisis. new york: portfolio/penguin. steiner, g. (1998). after babel: aspects of language and translation. oxford: oxford university press. witte, a., harden, t., & ramos de oliviera harden, a. (eds.). (2009). translation in second language learning and teaching. oxford: peter lang. zweig, j. (2015, april 30). the day wall street changed [blog message]. retrieved from moneybeat blog at the wall stret journal website: http://blogs.wsj.com/mon eybeat/2015/04/30/the-day-that-changed-wall-street-forever/ application of lsp texts in translator training 293 appendix the sample task pre-reading tasks you are going to read a text on gothic architecture. before you read, make a list of terms denoting elements of gothic buildings you already know. organize them into a mind map. add any other relevant concepts to represent your understanding of gothic architecture. read the text and compare your ideas with the ideas of the author harbison, r. travels in the history of architecture, pp. 116, 118 at chartres there is a marked increase in scale made more forceful by simplifying the internal elevation. the structural system is refined by eliminating the gallery, turning it into a skeleton of itself, the lower stage of a two-tier system of flying buttresses that are no longer heavy vanes of stone as at laon, where they formed almost solid partitions. at chartres they have become spidery frameworks pierced by little arcades, forecasting the next development at reims and amiens in which the buttress starts to resemble a fragile tracery, allowing the walls to do the same and matching them in the other dimension until every solid element partakes of the single striving after height and lightness. for completeness perhaps we ought to mention important towns of the early thirteenth century that didn’t get their cathedrals. it turns out that a crucial ingredient in almost every successful case is a suger-figure, a powerful and effective bishop who for his own purposes wants a large new cathedral. sometimes, as at reims, the coronation church, he can depend on royal patronage. elsewhere, as at chartres, he has already made his seat a centre of learning and can raise money on the back of this earlier achievement. moving stories are told about how the whole community pitches into the task, dragging heavy loads, donating skills, following the century-long saga with baited breath. there are also the stories of construction halted by popular riots or insurrection, as at reims, where the grievance was a heavy tax levied to fund the construction. it has been shown that column-figures for the portals at reims were sometimes carved long before they could be set in place and held over during delays caused by social unrest, so that groupings were revised, and we wound up with the ‘wrong’ smiling angel in the famous annunciation group. while the nave and chancel walls are being dematerialized to admit light filtered through coloured glass, façades and portals are disappearing under sculptural multitudes that far outdo romanesque schemes in complexity and extent. post-reading tasks 1. find the items of professional vocabulary that do not pertain to the field of architecture and civil engineering. identify the field to which they belong. 2. identify intertextual references in the text and uncover their implicit meaning. 3. find instances of foregrounding. specify their function. 4. analyze potential translation problems. decide on the most appropriate translation strategy. 409 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (3). 2014. 409-418 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.3.2 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the effectiveness of early foreign language learning in the netherlands kees de bot university of groningen, the netheralnds university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary c.l.j.de.bot@rug.nl abstract this article reports on a number of projects on early english teaching in the netherlands. the focus of these projects has been on the impact of english on the development of the mother tongue and the development of skills in the foreign language. overall the results show that there is no negative effect on the mother tongue and that the gains in english proficiency are substantial. given the specific situation in the netherlands where english is very present, in particular in the media, a real comparison of the findings with those from other countries is problematic. keywords: early foreign language learning, the netherlands, english, vocabulary, syntax 1. introduction in this contribution an overview of the research on early foreign language teaching in the netherlands will be presented. research on this topic started in the early 2000s with a number of small-scale projects and, more recently, a large, government-funded project was finished. the findings will be presented along kees de bot 410 with some ideas and related research on future developments. first, a brief history of the provision of bilingual education in the netherlands will be presented. internationally there is a lot of research on early foreign language teaching, but we will not deal with that here since there is an excellent overview by nikolov and mihaljevi djigunovi (2011). 2. bilingual streams in secondary education bilingual education started in 1992, when a group of parents whose children attended secondary education in the dutch section of international schools demanded that their children would have access to a form of bilingual education, too. international schools cater for children of ex-pats and embassy personnel, and they are not government-sponsored, which allows some freedom in the curriculum. a large part of the program in such schools is taught in english, and dutch is taught as a second language. according to ministerial regulations, teaching in dutch schools needs to be done in dutch, unless the aim is to enhance levels of proficiency in a foreign language. this “loop” in the regulations has been used to set up bilingual streams in a small number of schools in the early 1990s. this “grassroots” movement of parents pushing for some form of bilingual education led to a program with an english stream in three schools in 1992. the number of bilingual schools grew rapidly to some 130 schools in 2014. while the intention was to provide bilingual education in various languages, in particular german in the border region in the eastern part of the netherlands and french in the south, in effect almost all schools opted for english. at present there are only 23 schools that have a german-dutch bilingual program; the rest is english-dutch. over the years the european platform for internationalization of education, a government-sponsored organization, has been active in developing bilingual education by forming networks of schools, providing training for teachers and supporting schools in developing a high quality program. there is now a well-developed quality control and accreditation system. there is a standard that schools aspiring to have a bilingual program are supposed to meet. it deals with the participation of native speakers, levels of english proficiency of the dutch teachers, internationalization activities like school exchanges and the proportion of the program to be taught in english. it is now set on 50 % for the first four years and 30% for the last two years. it could be argued that the development of bilingual education is the most important innovation in foreign language teaching in last 50 years, and research has now shown its effectiveness. an early but very important study was the one by huibregtse (2001, see also admiraal, wetshoff, & de bot, 2006). in this largescale project, 584 pupils in bilingual schools and 749 pupils in normal schools the effectiveness of early foreign language learning in the netherlands 411 have been tested twice a year over a period of 5 years. four cohorts of pupils have been followed over 5 years. there were tests of receptive vocabulary, reading skills and oral proficiency. in addition, there was an extensive questionnaire on language use, attitude, motivation and socio-economic background. the main findings were that the bilingual group outscored the control group for lexical skills (when corrected for general aptitude and beginning level), reading comprehension, oral proficiency, pronunciation, and grades in the final national examination for the subjects taught in english (typically geography, history and mathematics). the most important finding, politically, was that here were no negative effect on dutch proficiency according to grades in national examinations. the huibregtse study has been extremely influential because it provided schools with strong arguments to set up a bilingual program and silenced doubts about its effectiveness. the huibregtse project looked at some of the early adopters and there is certainly the risk of a hawthorne effect, as with all innovations: schools, teachers and pupils feel “special,” and may therefore be more motivated and willing to invest extra time and energy in the teaching program. these factors may be the real cause for the advantages mentioned. therefore it was decided to set up a replication study in the late 2010s, the otto (onderzoek twee talig onderwijs research project on bilingual education) project (verspoor, de bot, & van rein, 2011). the otto study used the same instruments as the huibregtse study but also included a special group of schools, the reformed schools, in which the pupils for religious reasons have no or very limited access to tv, movies and computer games. altogether, there were four groups: religious bilingual religious mainstream nonreligious bilingual nonreligious mainstream the findings of this project are basically the same as those in the huibregtse project, but in addition show that out-of-school contact plays a crucial role in the development of english: the best results are found in the nonreligious bilingual schools, followed by the religious bilingual, nonreligious mainstream and religious mainstream. 3. early english teaching so the system of bilingual secondary schools was well established and is now moving from the highest school types (preuniversity) to lower types and has shown to be effective there as well. the success of bilingual education in secondary education led to demands by both parents and schools to introduce kees de bot 412 some form of bilingual education in primary education as well. there has been and still is substantial resistance against the introduction of english teaching in the early grades since there is the common fear that time spent on english goes at the expense of the development of dutch. though a wealth of research findings in other countries has shown that the introduction of bilingual education is not harmful for the development of the mother tongue, there appeared to be a need to also show this for the dutch setting. one of the big debates with respect to early foreign language teaching has to do with the optional age to start (muñoz, 2006). while in the layman’s view the assumption of the earlier the better still lingers on, there is now no final conclusion on this issue. also, the terms used in the debate are not always clear. while in european policy documents an early start is at the beginning of primary education, which in many countries is at age 4 or 5, other research, in particular from spain, seems to take 8 years as an early start. still, many proponents of a really early start, which in the netherlands includes both schools and parents, have chosen the first grade to start teaching english. the motives of schools to start with early english are not always purely educational. there is competition between schools and early english is used as a unique selling point to attract more pupils. but up until recently, the empirical support for an early start was lacking. as nikolov and mihaljevi djigunovi (2011) mention in their review of the literature: “no comparative study was found on how weekly exposure impacts on outcomes” (p. 97). 4. empirical evidence: some early projects research on the effects of an early start began with a number of small-scale projects reported on in goorhuis-brouwer and de bot (2010). the studies followed three groups of children longitudinally from their entrance in the school till the end of second grade. the reynel test for language comprehension in dutch and english was used, and after one year of english the dutch pupils reached an age equivalent for english monolingual children of 2 years and 5 months and a mean score for language production of 2 years and 1 month. there was normal development of dutch proficiency: the large majority of the children had scores within the normal standardized range. an interesting finding was that there were no negative findings for non-dutch children. if anything, they showed similar development in dutch and were equivalent or better than the dutch children in english. numbers are small for this group, so no hard conclusions can be drawn for this particular group. the same holds for children who showed a low score at the beginning and who might have problems in their language development. these children improved somewhat more (but started lower) than the average children in the studies. the effectiveness of early foreign language learning in the netherlands 413 5. the foreign languages in primary schools project (flipp) as with bilingual education in secondary education, the dutch ministry of education was keen to monitor at an early stage what the effects of an early start might be. the main worry was that starting early with english might go at the expense of the mother tongue development. the main questions in the flipp study (unsworth, persson, prins, & de bot, 2014) were: 1. how do the english language skills of the children develop over time? 2. what is the relationship between the development of the children’s english language skills and the development of dutch as a first and a second language? the project was a 2-year longitudinal study with three measurement times: at the beginning of schooling, at the beginning of second grade and the end of second grade (2010/2011/2012). the first factor looked at was the total number of minutes of english per week. the assumption was that the development of children’s lexical and grammatical knowledge would be related to amount of exposure. earlier findings for the dutch setting showed an improvement after 1 year of 3 hours per week, though there was a stagnation after 2 years (goorhuisbrouwer & de bot, 2010). with two years of 1 hour per week, there was only rudimentary understanding and no productive skills development (aarts & ronde, 2006). the second factor was the teachers’ proficiency in english. is a native speaker needed for significant development, or is a fairly high level of proficiency of regular teachers sufficient? research by larson-hall (2008) suggests that differences between native speaker teachers and nonnative speaker teachers become relevant after hundreds of hours of education only. there were three factors in the design: early/late start (age 4 or 8/9) english proficiency of teachers (a2-c1) number of minutes/week of english lessons many factors are likely to play a role in language development, and in order to measure language development as “pure” as possible, working memory, nonverbal memory, iq and contact with english were controlled for. the language tests for english included receptive vocabulary, phonology, morphology and syntax, while for dutch, only vocabulary data have been gathered. the design was as follows: 1. participants 168 early foreign language teaching (eflt) children from 14 schools 26 control children from 3 schools 2. testing kees de bot 414 pretest: start of school year (no english) posttest i: end of first school year (1 year of english) posttest ii: end of second school year (2 years of english) 3. independent variables number of minutes of english per week (up to 60 min per week/ 60-120 min per week/120+ min per week) proficiency level teacher (native vs. nonnative, and for nonnative teachers, a/b/c levels, according to cefr) 4. dependent variables english receptive vocabulary test peabody picture vocabulary test (ppvt-4; dunn & dunn, 2007) score: total number of items correctly answered english receptive grammar test test of reception of grammar (trog2; bishop, 2003) score: total number of items correctly answered dutch receptive vocabulary 6. main results of flipp the eflt children improved significantly for both vocabulary and grammar in english. there is a significant effect for the number of minutes of english lessons per week: 60 min or less per week leads to significantly lower scores for english, compared to children with more than 60 min but less than 120 and the children with 120 min or more. the language proficiency of the teacher is a good predictor of the results for vocabulary after 1 year and of the results for grammar after 2 years: children with a nonnative-speaker teacher of english at level b (cefr) score significantly lower than children with a native-speaker teacher only or a native-speaker and a nonnative at c level. the dutch vocabulary of pupils develops according to age norms. only a few students’ scores fell below age-appropriate norms, and that number becomes even smaller in the course of time. the pupil monitoring system data are consistent with this analysis as are data from teachers’ perceptions. eflt children with a non-dutch (and non-english) language spoken at home score similarly to ageand socio-economic status (ses)-matched monolingual dutch-speaking children. the numbers are too small to draw far-reaching conclusions from these results, but they are consistent with earlier findings for the same population by goorhuis and de bot (2010). in terms of age of onset of english instruction, the data show that in the course of 2 years, the later starters make more progress than the early starters, the effectiveness of early foreign language learning in the netherlands 415 which also corresponds with previous research (e.g., nikolov, 2009). a real comparison between an early and late start can only be made when children who start with english in grade 7 can be compared with eflt children in grade 8. the control variables (age, ses, contact with english outside school, working memory, iq) explain comparatively little variance in the results. 7. cito 2012 project the national testing agency (cito) carried out a longitudinal study with a representative sample of 1,400 pupils in the 8th grade to test english proficiency (cito, 2012). in order to test the impact of an early start, six bilingual schools with pupils who had been taught english from grade 1 to 8 were added to sample. the main findings of the study were that pupils in bilingual schools reach higher levels of speaking proficiency, but not of other aspects of proficiency. an interesting additional finding was that attitudes of pupils decline over time: while english is something new and exciting in the first few years, it becomes an ordinary school subject in later years. 8. conclusion the findings so far indicate that an early start with english leads to higher levels of proficiency compared to controls. there are no indications that more english goes at the expense of the development of the mother tongue. there may be additional cognitive advantages, but these have not been tested in this study. one of the problems in the flipp study was that schools change rapidly: some schools that had been labeled as providing 1 hour of english per week by nonnative teachers may the next year decide to have 3 hours with a native speaker teacher. such changes are normal but problematic for longitudinal research such as this one. but it means that a real evaluation can only be done once the system has settled and stabilized. that may take a couple of years. the positive results found will be important for the development of early english teaching in the same way the huibregtse study was important for the growth of bilingual education in secondary education. one important aspect has not been taken into consideration in the studies: what happens in the classroom? it is possible that 1 hour of really good teaching is more effective than 3 hours of mediocre teaching. however, what constitutes good teaching in this context is not so easy to define. in the near future a number of issues will come up: will it be possible to find schools that do other languages, like spanish, turkish or chinese? kees de bot 416 will it be possible to have more than one foreign language in primary education, or will english remain the most important and only one? how can we achieve optimal articulation between levels, that is, what happens to the pupils that enter secondary education with a fairly high level of proficiency? will they be mainstreamed until the other pupils who came with less english have caught up, or will there be accommodation and differentiation in the english lessons? there is a need for improved teacher education. several teachers felt they were not really equipped to teach english because in their preservice training, english, though officially part of the curriculum, had effectively been neglected. multilingualism in preschool and day care: a fairly recent development in the netherlands is the call for more multilingualism, which actually means more english in preschool education and daycare. the official stance is that daycare can only be provided in dutch, but as with the development of bilingual streams in secondary education and primary education as described above, there is pressure from (generally higher educated) parents to have the option to provide daycare that is done partly in english. one of the problems that will come up is that there is again a problem of articulation between levels in the educational system, this time between preschool and primary education: if some children come into primary education with a relatively high level of proficiency in english, the need of differentiation according to level already starts in grade 1. on the other hand, as far as there are any data on the very early foreign language learning in an educational setting, they do not seem to point to large gains in proficiency. in a project on teaching english as a foreign language to 3-4year-olds in commercial institutes in china, first indications are that the children appreciate the lessons, but gain very little from them (sun, steinkraus, & de bot, 2014). to what extent an early basis for english will be beneficial in the long term is unclear. the focus of this special issue is on the age-factor. this debate has evolved from the question whether language learners after the critical period are able to acquire a language at native level to the realization that there may be some gifted and very dedicated learners who manage to become fluent enough to pass for natives. for the majority of learners this is neither a goal nor a necessity. in this respect the english as a lingua franca movement is relevant: most communication in english will increasingly be between speakers of nonnative or nonstandard varieties of british/american english and in that situation the native norm becomes basically irrelevant. the effectiveness of early foreign language learning in the netherlands 417 still the question remains whether an early start with foreign languages in school is a good idea. the findings from the projects reported on here suggest that an early start does not go at the expense of the development of the mother tongue and that there are substantial gains in english proficiency. what the best starting age is cannot be deduced from our data: as mentioned, a real comparison between an early and a late start is only possible when sufficient numbers of learners have gone through the full 8 years of primary education. even if in that comparison the early starters outperform the late starters it will have to be shown that the investment in time and energy was worth it. if there is only a slight difference, a late start may be preferably in terms of efficiency. a final point is to what extent our findings are generalizable to other situations/settings/countries. similarly to the nordic countries, the language setting in the netherlands is such that english is becoming a second rather than a foreign language: it is very present in the media and in the linguistic landscape. contact with english is almost unavoidable. the data from the flipp project show that children at the age of 4 already enter primary education with some english they have picked up in various ways. the omnipresence of english and the generally positive attitudes towards the language make the situation in the netherlands different from countries like germany, france and spain, in particular with respect to dubbing or subtitling of foreign movies and tv programs. it is quite likely that there will be an interaction over time between learners’ developing proficiency and the use of resources from the environment: higher proficiency allows for more efficient use of language in the ambiance, and that will enhance proficiency again. the dynamics of that process are still to be explored. acknowledgements the author is grateful to the anonymus sslt reviewer who provided extensive support in improving the article. kees de bot 418 references aarts, r., & ronde, s. (2006). tweetalig onderwijs met vervroegd engels in het basisonderwijs. levende talen tijdschrift, 7(2), 3-14. admiraal, w., westhoff, g., & de bot, k. (2006). evaluation of bilingual secondary education in the netherlands: students’ language proficiency in english. educational research and evaluation, 12(1), 75-93. bishop, d. (2003). test for reception of grammar second edition (trog)-2. new york: pearson. cito (2012). balans van het engels aan het einde van de basisschool. arnhem: cito. dunn, l. m., & dunn, d. m. (2007). peabody picture vocabulary test (ppvt-4). minneapolis: pearson. goorhuis-brouwer, s., & de bot, k. (2010). early english language teaching in the netherlands: the impact on first and second language acquisition. international journal of bilingualism, 14(3), 289-302. huibregtse, i. (2001). effecten en didactiek van tweetalig voortgezet onderwijs in nederland (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of utrecht. larson-hall, j. (2008). weighing the benefits of studying a foreign language at a younger starting age in a minimal input situation. second language research, 24(1), 35-63. muñoz, c. (ed.). (2006). age and the rate of foreign language learning. clevedon: multilingual matters. nikolov, m. (2009). the age factor and early language learning. berlin: walter de gruyter. nikolov, m., & mihaljevi djigunovi , j. (2011). all shades of every color: an overview of early teaching and learning of foreign languages. annual review of applied linguistics, 31, 95-119. sun, h., steinkrauss, r., & de bot, k. (2014). a multiple case study on the effects of temperamental traits in chinese preschoolers learning english. international journal of bilingualism. advance online publication. doi: 10.1177/13670069 14534332 unsworth, s.,persson, l., prins, t., & de bot, k. (2014). an investigation of factors affecting early foreign language learning in the netherlands. applied linguistics, 1-24 (volume not yet known). doi:10.1093/applin/amt052 verspoor, m., de bot, k., & van rein, e. (2011). english as a foreign language: the role of out-of-school language input. in a. de houwer & a. wilton (eds.), english in europe today: sociocultural and educational perspective (pp. 147-166). amsterdam: john benjamins. 561 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (4). 561-577 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the rhetoric of disenchantment through symbolism théophile munyangeyo leeds metropolitan university, uk t.munyangeyo@leedsmet.ac.uk abstract the symbolism of flowers has always been a significant part of cultures around the world due to their functional meaning in daily life. from their decorative to their aromatic role, flowers and their symbolic meaning trigger emotions, convey wishes and represent thoughts that can not be explicitly expressed. in this regard, an elaborate language based on flower symbolism was developed in many societies, to convey clear messages to the recipient. however, in some cultural contexts, although the flower symbolism has social connotations, it is mainly associated with economic references. as flowers are an essential precursor to fruits, they are inevitably a source of expectations and hence foster a set of hopes and dreams, which can ultimately lead to excitement or disappointment. through a discourse analysis based on factional narratives, this article explores the parameters through which the symbolism of bifaceted meaning of flowers fictionalises a space that refers to the social reality. this association between the fictional world and social reference has highlighted that writing can profoundly be a means of representing social events through the rhetoric of symbolism. through a sociological reading approach, this paper aims to analyse how the symbolism of flowers informs the rhetoric of disenchantment that can foster a content-based pedagogy in language learning where silencing practices engender imagery to exercise the freedom of expression. keywords: disenchantment, discourse analysis, representation, sociological reading, symbolism théophile munyangeyo 562 symbolism in literature has always been used as a practice of representation that provides the reader with the meaning that goes beyond what is obviously signified. since symbolism can convey a significant range of meanings, it can therefore turn written words into a very powerful medium of communication. in critical analysis context and classroom settings, symbolism has traditionally been perceived as one of the techniques used to dissimulate meanings, aiming to make texts complex products that make critical thinking a literary exercise. in this way, linguistic signs could convey symbolism within the paradigm of implicatures, which are confined within and shaped by the concept of genre. pedagogically speaking, language learning based on the study of representation narratives would therefore seek to unveil the symbolic message conveyed by text by establishing direct correlations between creative writing and critical reading. if language learners’ attempts to understand symbolism of fictional narratives have always been informed by the idea of genre, it is interesting to see how in some cases literature can be used in teaching factual content, especially when the edges of borders between social realities and fictional representations are blurring in the texts. in fact, many african novelists have used symbolism to fictionalise a space that refers to the social reality, in order to express postcolonial disillusionment. by associating the fictional world with social reference through symbolism, the rhetoric of disenchantment has highlighted that writing is an eloquent means by which to represent social events. it is in this regard that the representation of disillusionment in postcolonial literature remains the hallmark of socially and politically engaged discourse. many african writers and literary critics recognise that post-independence fictional texts reflect the realities of a continent embroiled in political and economic turmoil. in this regard, these texts turn into voices of the voiceless people to express disappointment and despair, the agony of watching powerlessly the collapse of hopes and dreams of independence. they denounce the greed, corruption and violence of the african political elite. the beautyful ones are not yet born, (armah, 1968) reinforces the message of les soleils des indépendances (kourouma, 1970). henceforth, the expression of disenchantment highlights the social responsibilities of african writers to their societies. the extent to which these writers respond to the social injustice and economic deprivation of their fellow citizens underlines perceptions of fatalism. in the context of dictatorial repressive measures adopted to silence emerging voices, writers borrowed imagery to portray a realistic picture of the failed elite as culprit of the nightmare of neo-colonialism. however, as the silencing strategies lost their mystique through literature of exile, a mosaic of onomastic references narrowed the gap between fiction and social realities. until the end of the 1980s, the main the rhetoric of disenchantment through symbolism 563 focus for this intergeneric modulation remained the challenging of dictatorial tyranny and neo-colonial manipulation. it represented configurations of independence as fraud, betrayal, robbed hopes and unfulfilled promises. in the 1990s, new themes came to light: democracy and good governance imposed on the continent by the west, such as françois mitterrand’s politics of conditionality through the call for multiparty democracy during the france-afrique summit that took place in la baule on 20th of june 1990.1 this call coincided with the breton woods’ institutions conditional policy of structural adjustment programmes.2 this new wave of renewed hopes promised peace, political stability, sustainable development and the end of nepotism engendered by tribalism. but as with the dawn of independence, promises of democracy were quickly transformed into disappointment and despair. the aim of this study is to examine the novelists’ representation of disillusionment vis-à-vis independence and democratic promises through a sociological reading of two novels: tchichellé tchivéla’s les fleurs des lantanas (1997) and alain patrice ngagnang’s la promesse des fleurs (1998). the study seeks to explore the way the symbolism of flowers has been used to unveil a set of postcolonial hopes and dreams that led to ephemeral excitement and deep disappointment. it unveils the manner in which the symbolism of flowers informs the rhetoric of disenchantment, where silencing practices may engender imagery to exercise the freedom of expression. it demonstrates how flower symbolism strengthens the focus and structure of political stance through african literature of engagement. in both texts, the rhetoric of disenchantment informed by symbolism renews the contract between the writer and his society, and unveils the parameters, tensions and absurdities of african failure and misfortune. 1 during the france-afrique summit that took place in june 1990 in la baule (france), french president told sub-saharan african leaders that multiparty democracy was, with immediate effect, a condition for any new french aid. good governance as an instrument for achieving political and economic reforms that contribute to political and social stability became the performance indicator to secure aid and maintain cooperation between france and its african traditional partners. 2 by bretton woods institutions we refer to international monetary fund and the world bank. their structural adjustment programme was about the implementation of free market policy that fosters sustainable production and trade opportunities, which are informed by clear economic reforms and fiscal discipline. this policy, which primarily aimed to reduce borrowing, also sought the implementation of democratic and good governance initiatives and was imposed upon developing countries as a precondition for any new loans. théophile munyangeyo 564 the corpus with the new wave of multiparty democracy in africa of the 1990s, which was imposed as the politics of conditionality, the continent was faced with political repressive measures due to the resistance to changes. in a continent with traditional perceptions of political power as the main source of economic wealth, the new multiparty system exacerbated divisions based on tribal and regional identities. thus, nepotism became the norm of governance. during this decade, the escalation of violence perpetrated by dictatorial regimes reflected a miscarriage of hopes and dreams for those who were waiting for the benefits of democratic ideals through the multiparty system. in a muzzled society, the expression of this disenchantment took the path of the symbolic representation of african ills in narratives. tchichellé tchivéla’s les fleurs des lantanas (1997) and alain patrice ngagnang’s la promesse des fleurs (1998) are inspired by this bitter taste of disillusionment. born in pointe-noire, tchichellé tchivéla served his native country congo at different senior positions. as medical doctor and army officer with the rank of colonel, he was director of the military hospital of brazzaville. after a brief political career as minister of tourism and environment between 1992 and 1995, tchivéla became governor of kouilou region (pointe-noire). les fleurs des lantanas is his first novel where the very caring medical doctors face powerlessly the repressive forces of ministers, military officers and regional governors who enjoy being feared rather than being loved by people under their rules. tchivéla’s narrative is informed by intergeneric modulation, which establishes blurring similarities between experiences he witnessed in his different roles and those of his characters in this novel. under a dictatorial regime in african imaginary congo, bukadjo, a medical doctor in les fleurs des lantanas, is put in jail for refusing to help a dignitary’s mistress to cheat and pass the nursing examination. despite his lack of interest in politics that he displayed by refusing to join the ruling party, his courageous action to defend his values of professional integrity brought him false accusations of being the activist of an opposition political party. he languished in prison over many years. after his release from prison, doctor bukadjo was transferred to a rural area hospital where his popularity among his patients and within the local community represented a threat to motungisi, a powerful regional governor. in a hunting party organised as means of eliminating and hence silencing permanently any potential political opponents, doctor bukadjo was unlawfully killed. through the description of the despots’ opulent life and the representation of their violent actions to keep power unchallenged, tchitchellé tchivéla the rhetoric of disenchantment through symbolism 565 used the symbolism of the flowers of lantanas to highlight the misfortunes that the multiparty democracy of the 1990s generated for many african nations. the concept of disillusionment through which the latin phrase homo homini lupus3 seems to be attested is also reflected by alain patrice nganang’s narratives. writer, poet and academic, alain patrice nganang was born in 1970 in cameroon. educated in both cameroon and germany, nganang is one of the young african writers who embraced and cherished the western democratic ideals, expressed the disappointment in the african leaders whose governance failed to foster those universal values. in nganang’s writings,4 there is a clear narrative of witness in which subjectivities that are embodied in the protagonists have meaningful symbolism in the real cameroon. in la promesse des fleurs, young men seeking to fulfil their democratic aspirations passively watched their fate of living an endless vegetative life being shaped by a country which was falling into chaos. despite having an officially recognised multiparty system, political leaders continued to be the forces of darkness that kept the youth’s expectations of democratic governance as a mirage. nganang’s narrative depicts the sad experience of frustration of young african democrats who found themselves having to face a sad reality of enduring mistreatments by oligarchic regimes of a fictitious cameroon. although the young characters in this novel were trying hard to turn their democratic dreams into tangible achievements, they realised that in the end their wishes for a better and fairer cameroon were chimerical thoughts in a world of fantasies. the pessimistic view of this narrative over the uncertain future of african democracy has mirrored the political governance in the real world of african despots, which seems to turn the novel into a voice of voiceless. the african writer and social responsibility perhaps before talking about the concept of engagement in writing, it is appropriate to ask one question: does readership shape the scope of writing? jean paul sartre (1968, p. 170), in qu’est-ce que la littérature? states that there is a cause and effect relationship between writer and reader. whilst the writer aims to unveil the object by displaying emotions or ideas on paper, the reader attempts to appropriate them into his or her own perceptions of the 3 the literal translation of the latin phrase homo homini lupus is ‘man is a wolf to [his fellow] man.’ this phrase is also sometimes translated as ‘man is man’s wolf.’ it means that man preys upon man, which is used to refer to bad things that people do against each other. 4 apart from la promesse des fleurs, there is also nganang’s (2001) temps de chien. théophile munyangeyo 566 world. sartre supports the idea that the origin of the writer’s engagement is concomitant with the act of writing: il n’est donc pas vrai qu’on écrive pour soi-même; ce serait le pire échec . . . l’acte créateur n’est qu’un moment incomplet et abstrait de la production d’une œuvre . . . l’opération d’écrire implique celle de lire comme son corrélatif dialectique et ces deux actes connexes nécessitent deux agents distincts. c’est l’effort conjugué de l’auteur et du lecteur qui fera surgir cet objet concret et imaginaire qu’est l’ouvrage de l’esprit. (sartre, 1968, pp. 49-50). [it is not true that one can write for himself. that would be the worst failure . . . the creative act is an abstract idea and an incomplete task . . . writing enterprise involves reading as its correlative dialectic and both connective acts require the two distinct agents. it is the concerted effort of the author and the reader which will make the masterpiece emerge from imaginary and reality.] given the nature of the individual’s relation to the reality of everyday existence, the writer’s attitude to daily life in his community always displays a set of influences whilst attempting to codify the literary work. in this regard, it seems true that engaged writing fulfils a mission. vassily novikov asserts that for the engaged writer, the world appears exactly as he has depicted it in his work. the author calls on the reader to see the world and judge events within his own frame of reference, in terms of his own truth. in his work, the writer impresses the reader with the emotional quality of his thoughts and imagery and seeks to influence his thoughts and feelings, subjecting them to his own will and to his own ideals. (novikov, 1982, p. 12) in les testaments de sartre by michel-antoine burnier, sartre defines the writer’s mission of engagement in these terms: l’écrivain «engagé» sait que la parole est action: il sait que dévoiler, c’est changer et qu’on ne peut dévoiler qu’en projetant de changer encore. et encore, il sait que les mots, comme dit brice parain sont des « pistolets chargés». s’il parle, il a choisi de tirer, il faut que ce soit comme un homme, en visant des cibles et non pas comme un enfant au hasard, en fermant les yeux et pour le seul plaisir d’entendre des detonations. (burnier, 1982, p. 15) [the engaged writer knows the power of the words. he knows that unveiling generates change that one can only reveal by seeking further changes. he also knows that words, as brice parain says, are loaded pistols. whenever he speaks, he aims to shoot. this should be like an adult shooter who steadily hits his target instead of acting like a child who shoots with closed eyes for the sole purpose of listening to detonations.] the rhetoric of disenchantment through symbolism 567 sartre rejects the idea of literature being created for its own sake. for him, literature remains a social product and therefore cannot resist committing itself, at least implicitly, to social issues. if there is a wide recognition of the writer’s engagement, this is even more significant among african writers who have a deep susceptibility for social and political commitment though their texts that depict socio-political issues in their societies. despite claiming the status of artists and apolitical intellectuals who invest energy in fictional creative writing, writers are members of their societies, and hence, are sensitive to observable experiences of their communities. writing about chinua achebe’s engagement in his texts as a self-assigned mission to respond to the realities of his society, ademola omobewaji dasylva argues that the merit of nigerian writings is their relevance, explicitly and implicitly, to the social context in which they are set. for achebe, any african who tries to avoid the big social and political issues of contemporary africa will end up being completely irrelevant like that absurd man in the proverb who leaves his house burning to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames. (dasylva, 2003, p. 209) in les damnés de la terre, frantz fanon (1984) goes further to say that it is very obvious that the african writer is politically engaged because he is the voice of his community in their struggle for freedom. by dichotomising the space of literature and the political world, many literary critics recognise that the aesthetic of representation and interpretation that shapes the interconnection between the fictional and real world in african writings is vividly present in all literature of engagement. although it has to be noted that the most significant feature of meaning construction in writings of engagement is the reference to aesthetic interpretation and artistic modulation of social environment as a mode of transmission to yield the correlation between fiction and reality, the fullness of portrayal is sometimes so accurate that it becomes obvious that social experience is the dominant source of african literature. given that post-independence africa has been characterised by painful experiences of dictatorship, social injustices, frustration and disillusionment, it is quite understandable to see a proliferation of african texts in which writers attempt to mobilise their society into consciousness of democratic values. in this way, novelists seem to confirm that the literary work cannot keep its distance from the world it reflects. it is in this context of socially and politically portrayed disillusionment that we can fit the two novels la promesse des fleurs and les fleurs des lantanas, which use the symbolism of flowers to represent the africa’s ride into democratic governance at the dawn of 21st century as a mirage. théophile munyangeyo 568 social and political engagement/disenchantment in fictional africa the most basic boundary line between non-fictional studies and fictional writings determines the fundamental opposition between the two concepts. in attempts to designate what is literary and what is not, conflicting perspectives extend to every level, from the real and the factual (non-fictional) to unreal, literary, invented and imaginary narratives (fictional). the traditional reliance of novelists on imaginary raw materials out of which they create their writings had made novels pure fictional genres. however, beyond the first step of the imaginative process, writers apply their creative skills in many ways. despite the fact that a close correlation between the political engagement of the protagonists and their creator has always marked criticism of the literature of disenchantment after the independence period, attitudes of creating an imaginative world, inherited from the fictional writing tradition, have never ceased to weigh upon postcolonial literature in francophone africa. from engaged writer to implied reader, dialogism was latent where the reader encountered a range of complex perspectives rather than a single viewpoint shaped by the author. direct discourse between author and reader was mediated by the threat of political censorship and fictional representation took precedence over social reality in narratives. however, during the last decade of the 20th century, criticism of african literature has been undergoing significant changes. novelists living in exile and those belonging to the blooming new era of multiparty democracy of the 1990s, and their subsequent quest for freedom of expression, have brought new mechanisms of narration, where the representation of political and social ideologies weighed upon fictional narratives. this problematic representation of social practice in the novel made it difficult to draw a line between fiction and reality. in the overall meaning of the text, the narrative is often matched with the context, where the author uses biographical and historical information in parts of his writings. national or quasi-national boundaries play a role in structuring the framework within which literary narratives are organised. in their quest for democratic institutions and desire to reach an audience of people irritated by african dictatorship, these novelists write in ways designed to capture the attention of potential readers. the spatial limits of the novel coincide almost exactly with the areas that the authors themselves know best, usually confined to africa in general, and to their own society in particular. in this regard, it is that tendency towards representing the contemporaneity of fiction and social practice in a novel that reflects the idea of the political commitment of african novelists. however, the assumption of over-reliance on social and the rhetoric of disenchantment through symbolism 569 political material raises important questions concerning the place or status of these african writings within literary genres, and their long-term evolution. by analysing some of the texts of the 1990s in the sub-saharan african, one can observe how the fusion between the literary topography and the real social and spatio-temporal boundaries are represented. this allows the illumination of tensions which frequently characterise the fictional narrative and social practice in african literature. although these texts engendered by the literature of engagement cannot be read as a transparent african portrait, they seek, however, to reflect a coherent sense of the political ideology of authors in a fictional africa. beyond the problematic definition of these novels within the domain of literary genres, where the high rating of reality in fictional writings generates controversial views, the place of literary merit of these texts that still use symbolism as a rhetorical feature of communication can be illustrated and can prevail over thematic perspectives. the rhetoric of disillusionment through the symbolism of flowers explaining how symbolism provides meaning to writing, alfred north whitehead states: the human mind is functioning symbolically when some components of its experience elicit consciousness, beliefs, emotions, and usages, respecting other components of experience. the former set of components are ‘the symbols’, and the latter set constitute the ‘meaning’ of the symbols. the organic functioning whereby there is transition from the symbol to the meaning will be called ‘symbolic references’. (whitehead, 1985, pp. 7-8) from rhetoric as a process of social influence that constructs discursive meaning through a structured mode of communication in language, it is possible to integrate other communication media that include linguistically or socially built symbols to inform systems of meaning construction. as john dewey writes: meaning does not belong to the word and signboard of its own intrinsic right. they have meaning in the sense in which an algebraic formula or a cipher code has it. but there are other meanings that present themselves directly as possessions of objects which are experienced. here there is no need for a code or convention of interpretation; the meaning is as inherent in immediate experience as is that of a flower garden. (dewey, 1934, p. 83) the rhetorical functions of symbolism can be interpreted within its cultural perspective. in this regard, it is widely recognised that flowers have been and are théophile munyangeyo 570 still used to convey meanings and feelings in many cultures. some florists provide customers with information on the language of flowers to help those who give flowers as gifts to romantically express their feeling and “say it with flowers.” the beauty and feminine quality of flowers have influenced the tradition of naming girls after flowers in many cultures throughout history and continues today. in folklore and symbolism of flowers, plants and trees, ernst lehner states that the construction of meaning in the symbolism of flowers is often informed by traditions and social beliefs. for instance, the flower symbolism associated with the cherry blossom is education, but in china, the cherry blossom is a symbol of feminine beauty and also represents the feminine principle and love. in japan, cherry blossoms symbolize the transience of life because of their short blooming times. falling cherry blossoms are metaphors for fallen warriors who died bravely in battle (lehner, 1960). in an african context, flower symbolism has mainly social and economic references. as flowers have a decorative function and are an essential precursor to fruits, they are inevitably a source of expectation. therefore, they foster a set of hopes and dreams, which can hence lead to excitement or disappointment. in order to express the postcolonial disillusionment in the new formation of independent africa, novelists have often used imagery and symbolism to fictionalise a space that refers to the social reality. this association between the fictional world and social reference has highlighted that writing is a means by which to represent social events through the rhetoric of disenchantment. while the plot of fictional narratives of post-independent realities in africa moves the story along through protagonists who are bogged down in political misadventures, the symbolism of flowers works under the surface to tie the story’s external references to major themes. whilst the meaning construction informed by written words can lead to the understanding of the signified at one level, the use of symbolism in literature takes the reader’s de-coding agility to another level of references. the transition from one reference to another is what makes symbolism an integral part of the writing. in the african cultural context, lantana flowers primarily play a decorative role and therefore the symbolism of these flowers is associated with beauty. in his novel les fleurs des lantanas, tchivéla represents leaders who mismanage economic and political institutions. politicians, civil servants and military officers are portrayed in their total lack of humility. they abuse their power by using beautiful women as their main source of entertainment, some kinds of toys that they cherish when they are shining and that they throw away when their beauty fades like flowers. in les fleurs des lantanas, marshall sokinga tells his mistress nwéliza, who was planning to leave him: “metstoi bien ceci en tête: les femmes, c’est moi qui les quitte, jamais le contraire” the rhetoric of disenchantment through symbolism 571 (p. 16) [get this into your head: i am the one who leaves women, never the other way round]. tchivéla uses the beauty of flowers to symbolise the everlasting youthful appearance of mistresses. if the lantana flowers reflect the beauty of young girls who are forced to be mistresses of the most powerful men of the country’s leadership, they also symbolise the fact that these objects that serve as ornaments represent the country’s elite, who are useless in terms of carrying our sustainable development plans. they are people whose promises were too good to be true, whose message of collective freedom, democracy and good governance did not last long, whose appearance in suits is enviable to many, but whose moral stance on human rights makes them look as ugly as faded lantana flowers. these unscrupulous leaders live in high opulence, driving mercedes cars and living in villas fenced with lantanas while the living conditions of their fellow citizens are unbearable. even the hospital bursar kita mbala drives a blue metallic peugeot 504 (“la 504 bleu metallise” [p. 100]) that he parks in front of his house hedged with lantanas. thus, the lantana flowers are symbolically presented as a reflection of the luxurious life of african dictators. using the symbol of flowers of lantana, the author presents clearly the picture of the opulence and political power obsession. it is this perceptive portrayal of an african fictional space full of genuine african absurdities that establishes a strong link between fiction and reality. for some critics, any african literature that ignores such correlation between fictional narrative and social life becomes, as simon critchley terms it, “a bacchanal of absolute sovereignty, and writing becomes a solitary masturbation that negates reality and posits a fantasized reality in its place” (critchley, 1997, p. 52). the double meaning of the symbolism of flowers that coalesces around the dichotomy of fiction/reality implies that the reader can enjoy a meaningful dialogue with the text through the enterprise of interpretation. standing in the full glare of the new colonial masters, despots who rule by nepotism appear to be far more tyrannical than colonialists. they accuse people who express different opinions of treason and threatening national security; their governance is characterised by excessive arbitrariness, and prison has become a weapon to silence opponents. it is in this context that in les fleurs des lantanas, doctor bukadjo before his arrest and imprisonment in solitary confinement for his refusal of joining the ruling party, was repeatedly warned, “il vous est interdit d’adresser la parole à qui que ce soit, de lire des livres, d’écouter la radio” (p. 126) [you are not allowed to talk to anybody and you can neither read books nor listen to the radio]. thus, the drifting away of the nation from the fundamentals and ideals of independence becomes the socio-political reality, which the writer’s imaginative enterprise portrays as a vehicle of political discourse. théophile munyangeyo 572 apart from the decorative and aromatic role of the flowers, the lantanas are tropical plants, which are considered poisonous to cattle and sheep. the suggestion in the novel is that this poisonous plant represents power and anyone who attempts to lay hands on it will die pitifully in jail like doctor bukadjo, the main protagonist of les fleurs des lantanas. furthermore, these plants are also used for fencing. therefore, within the context of corruption, nepotism, embezzlement and dictatorial politics, the lantanas reflect a territorial defence mechanism with the symbolism of building an autarchic space within a wider physical and social environment. these practices can only lead to the disillusionment of those who previously believed in post-independence good governance. in les fleurs des lantanas, even tom who, like his fellow members of parliament, used to applaud and blindly approve all governmental projects, indicates his disappointment: notre pays était mal gouverné, notre parlement ligoté, notre presse bâillonnée, notre peuple exploité, notre jeunesse terrorisée et il qu’était insupportable de vivre dans un pays où l’on n’avait pas besoin de preuves pour emprisonner, ni de procès pour condamner. (p. 173) [our country was badly governed, our parliament was handcuffed, our press gagged, our people were exploited, our young people were terrorised, and it was unbearable to live in a country where there was no need of evidence to be incriminated and no trial to be found guilty.] despite the apparent fatality generated by the endless series of painful experiences of exclusion and violence, when the lantanas hedges are trimmed, they quickly rise again. in this regard, in les fleurs des lantanas, after doctor bukadjo’s death, his wife finds she is pregnant: lorsqu’ils s’aperçurent qu’elle était enceinte, les ntangu explosèrent de joie . . . elle accoucha d’un garçon dans une clinique privée de mabaya; l’enfant reçut, ainsi qu’avait souhaité son père, le nom de dumuka que portait le grand-père maternel du docteur bukajo. quand ils le virent au premier anniversaire de la mort du médecin, les ntangu admirent que le petit dumuka était « la photo de son père », le docteur n’est pas mort, non, il est encore vivant parmi nous. (pp. 198-99) [when they realised she was pregnant, all ntangu went wild with joy . . . she gave birth to a baby boy in the private clinic of mabaya. to fulfil his father’s wish, the child was given doctor bukadjo’s maternal grand-father’s name of dumuka. as he was born on the first anniversary of doctor bukadjo’s death, all ntangu believed that he was the true image of his father. the doctor is not dead; no, he is still alive among us.] the symbolism of rebirth of lantana flowers is used to suggest that, despite the evil triumphal narrative of the novel that unveils all drifts of unethical regime, this the rhetoric of disenchantment through symbolism 573 rhetoric of disillusionment through the symbolism of flowers is, to some extent, a way of witnessing and revitalising consciousness to fight for good over wickedness. in la promesse de fleurs, nganang creates a narrative world that closes itself to africans in general and to the cameroonians in particular. although at the beginning of his novel nganang asserts that “bien sûr, toute ressemblance avec des personnes, des quartiers, des villes, ou même des pays ne peut être que fortuite” (p. 7) [of course, any resemblance with real persons, places, cities, or even countries can only be accidental]. he immediately and explicitly names his country as a source of inspiration: “lancinante, mais vraiment lancinante est cette voix qui, en de nombreuses questions dans notre dos, nous rappelle notre mauvaise conscience d’être l’arrière-train de la vie, d’être les papiers hygiéniques du cameroun” (p. 14) [nagging, but truly languishing is this voice which, in response to the series of questions weighting upon our shoulders, reminds us the bad conscience of being on the worst side of life, being the toilet paper of this cameroon]. from the narrator’s mouth, he goes on to laugh at some african writers who only criticise dictatorial regimes from exile: “il y en a qui sont prêts à s’exiler pour que leurs héros vivent! regarde ngugi! regarde soyinka! regarde beti! ça, ce n’étaient pas des écrivains pour talk show! peut-on se dire écrivain e avoir peur de la mort?” (p. 83) [there are some who are ready to go into exile so that their hero can survive. look at ngugi! look at soyinka! look at beti! these where not talk show writers! can somebody call himself writer and be scared of death?]. in nganang’s novel, symbolism is not as subtle as in les fleurs des lantanas. from the very title, it is obvious that the symbolism of expectations from flowers implies either excitement or disappointment. flowers potentially bear fruits and are thus unequivocally a source of expectations. they foster a set of hopes and dreams, which can lead to excitement or disappointment. nganang’s fictional world is ridden with questions about expectations from multiparty democracy. the symbolism of flowers in la promesse des fleurs seems to present democratic ideals and good governance as the line of sight whilst fighting the corrupt elite of independent africa. in la promesse des fleurs, one of the protagonists beauregard, disait que la dé-mo-cra-tie nous sortirait de la pauvreté, qu’elle ferait bouger des montagnes, passer notre quartier de vallée en amont, et même ressusciterait nos morts. il disait que la dé-mo-cra-tie était la solution à tous nos problèmes, qu’elle nous guérirait de toutes nos maladies, et même du sida; il disait qu’elle nous guérirait de toutes plaies, de toutes nos souffrances et qu’il suffisait de se battre pour elle pou aller au paradis. (p. 163) [was saying that de-mo-cra-cy would end our poverty, would shake mountains, would change our village of valleys into hills, and would even resuscitate the dead. théophile munyangeyo 574 he was saying that de-mo-cra-cy was the solution to all our problems; would cure all our diseases, even aids; he was saying that it would heal all our wounds, all our sufferings and fighting for it would lead us to paradise.] in la promesse des fleurs, nothing has an obvious correlation with its internal reference; one thing seems to stand for something else. the names of protagonists convey symbolic meaning, which reflect the beauty of flowers, as in the case of beauregard whose name could mean good looking as a symbol of blossoming flowers or a man with skills of attention to details. his name does not necessarily represent his own character. it has instead been used a symbolism to depict the absurdity of the social and political environment in which the character lives. this is a world where people with good potential and core skills are nevertheless condemned to the failure. nganang’s fictional representation of social and political elements presents ideals of equal opportunity and good governance as objects of contemplation or core values to fight for. apart from beauregard the political activist, people in general have the same hopes and dreams of reaping the fruits of the flowers of democracy: mon père voulait que je devienne juge pour punir tous ceux qui lui causaient des ennuis; il voulait que sandra devienne médecin pour s’occuper de lui quand il tomberait malade; il voulait que mami devienne plus tard également quelqu’un d’important dans ce cameroun de malheur, par exemple architecte, pour lui construire une belle maison de retraite. il avait des rêves de grandeur pour nous. (p. 99) [my father wanted me to be a judge so that i could punish those who had given him grieves; he wanted sandra to be a doctor to take care of him whenever he would feel sick; he also wanted mami to become an important person in misfortunate cameroon, such as an architect, in order to build him a nice retirement house. he had great dreams of our success.] however, these expectations from multiparty democracy never materialise. the narrator describes how his father voyait mirabelle qui, après une licence de lettres, vendait de l’huile de palme à côté de notre mère et n’avait même pas pu se trouver un mari; il voyait gustave-lemagistrat qui était devenu sauveteur avec une maîtrise en droit dans la poche . . . , il voyait le docteur roger qui avait certes pu avoir un travail dans un ministère, mais qui n’était jamais payé et devait vivre d’espoir et de dettes: mon père voyait tous ces diplômés de notre quartier se promener dans leur misère qui ne se distingue point de la sienne et comprit que nous avions été jetés dans un monde dans lequel nous étions d’emblée les perdants du combat que nous n’avions même pas commencé. (p. 100) [saw mirabelle, who holds a bachelors degree in arts, selling palm oil next to our mother and who has not even found a husband; he saw gustave, who aspired to be the rhetoric of disenchantment through symbolism 575 a magistrate judge, working as a lifeguard with a masters degree in law in his pocket; . . . eventually, he saw doctor roger who managed to get a job in a ministry, but had never been paid and had to live on hopes and debts; my father saw all these graduates from our compound hanging around in a vegetative state like him and understood that we were confined in a world where we definitely were losers of a fight that we had not even started.] in la promesse de fleurs, the narrator, who plays the omniscient role of the novelist, says regrettably that living in cameroon requires fighting for your prey: “nous savions que notre cameroun est une jungle; nous savions que tout se joue dans des chambres closes, derrière des chemises fermées, sur des tables emplies de dossiers, en notre absence” (p. 162) [we knew that our cameroon is a jungle; we knew that all deals are made behind closed doors, inside closed files placed on tables at which we do not have seats]. through the symbolism of the promises of flowers that have never materialised, the author highlights challenges that african writers have engaged with to denounce the inability of the postcolonial african leadership to give people the necessary energy and opportunities to move forward. to avoid creating fictional narrative, which represents the real social and political context of african countries, the african novelists of engaged literature often borrow the symbolist aesthetics that use the suggestive representation of images that offer their readers a reference to various experiences of reality that goes beyond the texts in their hands. although the promises of flowers have not been fulfilled, nganang’s text does not end on a pessimistic note as the title might imply. the determination of the protagonists to fight for their prey and revitalize their hopes that new flowers might lead to fruits is a symbol of rebirth. through recourse to symbolism, the rhetoric of disenchantment unveils african ills in order to highlight the fact that the poetic of denunciation does not intend to lull the oppressed africans into fatalism. it advocates complacency to give up the fight due to the vicious cycle that seems confirm that the fatalism of african history is reaping itself. from the situation of unscrupulous corruption and exacerbated embezzlement, the rhetoric of disillusionment becomes a credo with which to reject violence and exclusion, the quest for a more inclusive social policies and political stability where each and every one can benefit from the worth of national resources. conclusion the search for purposeful and democratic governance has not been a success. it was waiting for godot that samuel beckett created; it was like watching the beauty of flowers fading away, dissipating any hope for bearing fruits. the writers whose work i have explored here denounce the institutions of postindependent africa, which drifted and lost a sense of values they had fought for. théophile munyangeyo 576 this is a very interesting point that raises one major issue: reading fictional narratives in this particular context mirrors retrieving some realities of african history. in this way, it seems that some fictional texts of african literature that reflect the representation of disillusionment could become pedagogical tools for teaching history. such a shift from fiction to reality in reading literature poses genuine concerns in relation to the definition of genres. how could language learners understand the meaning of fictional narratives in a social and political environment where the understanding of symbolism is no longer part of critical reading but rather the simple association between twin worlds? if the content of novels can be the source of factual elements of social and political context, teaching and learning the functional meaning of symbolism in literature needs to be redefined so that the concept of genre can embrace its geographical identities. to this end, the african novel that reflects the literature of political engagement would lose its traditional identity of fictional narrative and hence become another type of communication that novelists use to fulfil their social roles in their communities. since the literature of disillusionment reflects the failure of flowers to bear fruits in most of african countries, it is with no surprise that the novels of the 1990s depict the disappointment in the results of the new wave of multiparty democracy. the texts present democratic values as a cure for the pains and frustration that have damaged the african social fabric. this rhetoric of disenchantment diachronically portrays the post-colonial or post-independence abuse of power entertained by neocolonialism. flower symbolism allows the novelist to create a fictional space in which he could fulfill the african writer’s tacit social mission of realistically depicting historical events in order to denounce the false promises of democracy. they try to objectively reveal all absurdities that reflect cynicism, depression due to deprivation and fatalism that characterised the unethical governance driven by a dirty complicity between dictators and former colonial masters. knowing the needs, hopes and dreams of their society allows the writers to use the symbolism of flowers to fully and realistically portray the misfortune that their fellow countrymen endured. since the fictional narratives of these novels offer very few challenges in identifying themes due to the simplistic manner of interpretation that the narrative flow offers, the use of symbolism of flowers limits the reader’s linear approach in his or her perceptions of meaning. the variety of interpretations informed by symbolism renders the texts plural. in this case the symbolic input can move from one social reference to another, depending on the degree of reflection that the reader possesses. consequently, it is appropriate to conclude that in the heart of the symbolism of flowers in la promesse des fleurs and les fleurs des lantanas, disillusionment dominates the socio-political discourse through the mediation of the narrative of representation. the rhetoric of disenchantment through symbolism 577 references armah, a. k. 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(1985). symbolism, its meaning and effect (4th ed.). london: macmillan. 211 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (2). 2017. 211-232 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.2.3 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl tracing intercultural and interlinguistic moves within and beyond student mobility programmes: the case of the ierest project1 neva čebron university of primorska, slovenia neva.cebron@fhs.upr.si abstract the paper presents the core aims and objectives of the teaching materials developed within the ierest (intercultural education resources for erasmus students and their teachers) project, and shows how the innovative approach adopted for these activities can be implemented in the classroom. the ierest teaching modules are innovative in that the approach adopted draws strongly on the notions of critical cosmopolitanism (holliday 2012) and intercultural communicative competence (byram 1997 and 2012). the activities in the modules promote a view of culture as a negotiated „process” among individuals, small or large groups and intercultural communication as a co-construction of meaning conveyed across linguistic and cultural boundaries, thus rejecting explicitly any “essentialist” attitudes and simplistic overgeneralisation of “otherness.” the approach to language use in intercultural encounters observes how the above concepts are expressed in a number of contexts, while also building on the view that intercultural communication among bilinguals often takes advantage of a lingua franca, a foreign language that all the participants in the communicative activity have in common because they had learned it. taking into account the concept of “linguaculture” (risager 2012) the modules seek to raise awareness of the negotiating process in rendering meaning through a linguistic and cultural blend of both the target language and the speake’s first language. 1 www.ierest-project.eu. to access the complete set of ierest resources see also http://www. ierestproject.eu/humbox.html or http://humbox.ac.uk/group/19. neva čebron 212 the paradigm shift proposed by the ierest modules indicates a need to rethink current practices in intercultural education and to acknowledge societal changes in multilingual europe and beyond. keywords: intercultural teaching modules; linguaculture; racism; ethnocentrism 1. introduction one of the main benefits of student mobility within the erasmus programme is often quoted to be gaining greater (inter)cultural awareness, which in turn leads to enhanced intercultural communicative competence (byram 2012; chen & starosta 1998-99; deardorff 2004; fantini 2000/1), an important skill, which increases and strengthens erasmus students” employability in a globalized world. by acquiring (inter)cultural awareness students expand and deepen their understanding as to how cultural values and conventions affect our attitudes and behaviour (byram 1997; chen & starosta 1998-99), a competence that helps them to develop empathy and mediate more effectively between cultures and languages in intercultural encounters. similar views are expressed in the green paper on learning mobility, which makes the claim that “learning mobility adds to human capital, as students access new knowledge and develop new linguistic skills and intercultural competences” (commission of the european communities, 2009/329, p. 2). however, studies by a number of researchers (dervin 2009; holmes & o”neill, 2012) point out that development of (inter)cultural awareness is not naturally acquired through exposure to intercultural contacts in an international environment, nor does residence in a foreign country of itself produce positive representations of that country (anquetil, 2006; byram & zarate, 1995; dervin 2008). what is more, such an exposure to (inter)cultural contacts does not in itself abate students’ stereotypical perceptions of “otherness,” but can sometimes even enhance prejudice (starkey & osler 2009; starosta 2014). these findings led us to the conclusion that students should be guided to gain applicable insights into salient issues of intercultural communicative competence, in order to derive benefit from their study period abroad. whereas there is no doubt that a period of time spent abroad within the erasmus sojourn scheme is extremely beneficial for students of foreign languages, the complete immersion into the foreign language and the exposure to communication in a foreign language in a number of new communicative situations can be quite challenging. ideally, students spend the exchange period in the country where the language of their studies is the official language, spoken tracing intercultural and interlinguistic moves within and beyond student mobility programmes. . . 213 by the majority of the population. quite often, however, students find mobility opportunities only in a country where other languages are commonly used, while english is mostly used as a “lingua franca” in academic and social environments. in both such cases students gain confidence in using a foreign language, acquire greater fluency in expressing their own meaning, but they also frequently report various stages of frustration in the communication process. to help students cope better with the difficulties of actual language usage in intercultural situations, it was felt that they needed to develop a deeper awareness of processes governing the wording of our thoughts in communication and how these processes are linked to the cultural backgrounds of the participants in a conversation. building on the concepts of linguaculture and the transnational paradigm (risager, 2008) we propose that students can be led to consider aspects of linguistic and cultural complexity present in an international experience as part of preparation for the erasmus mobility. the present paper illustrates how the above listed insights and considerations are integrated in some segments of the materials produced within the ierest (intercultural education resources for erasmus students and their teachers) project. namely, this european project proposes to help students explore intercultural issues and integrate new communication paradigms during their study or work sojourn abroad by following various “intercultural paths” developed within the ierest modules. in particular, we will describe here the approaches used to dealing with the topic of racism and ethnocentrism within the pre-departure module activity entitled anti-discrimination study circle (see also appendix a). the activity illustrated here follows the general framework suggested by the ierest approach; however, some tasks were slightly adapted to the specific needs of an international group of advanced learners of foreign languages, majoring in english. the paper discusses also the results of a small-scale action research carried out by students within the activity, as well as the feedback reported in their journals and during the focus-group discussion. in the end, implications and recommendations of the pilot course of the ierest project are considered. 2. the ierest educational resources in its introduction, the manual published as the outcome of the ierest project clearly states the underlying principles guiding the compilation of the ierest resources. first, both study abroad and intercultural education literature state that immersion in a different environment does not in itself reduce stereotypical perceptions of “otherness” (shaules, 2007; strong, 2011); in addition to experience, interculturality needs reflection and analysis (alred, byram, & fleming, 2002; jackson, 2010; vande berg, 2009). this analysis and reflection should take neva čebron 214 students to understand why we create divisions, how they are expressed in language and how unreflective use of language can even deepen such divisions by hurting people’s feelings, as well as the fact that we use such language without considering the effect it can provoke (beaven, et al, 2015, p. 9) clearly, the ierest resources search for a new paradigm to enhance students” intercultural competence by focusing on a critical assessment of the linguistic means available in language. the materials devise a fresh approach by which to guide students to deal with intercultural matters that they may face during their mobility period. as a consequence, a need to redefine the concept of intercultural competence and the concept of intercultural communicative competence emerges. the rethinking of these key concepts draws on authors and researchers who have recently discussed the elusive problem of defining intercultural competence (byram, 2012; deardoff, 2009; dervin, 2009; rathje, 2007; spitzberg & changnon, 2009) and pointed out the polysemic nature of the term “intercultural,” which is often used interchangeably with a number of variants derived from “culture,” such as “cross-cultural,” “transcultural, „intercultural,” all used as labels for the same meaning (beaven, comas-quinn, & sawhill, 2013). furthermore, byram (2012), holliday (2012) and others discuss the problem of a proliferation of rather confusing terminological variants in the field of „interculturality,” all entailing very different ways of treating cultural matters in intercultural contacts, thus indicating the coexistence of multiple and sometimes contradictory approaches to facilitating the process of developing (inter)cultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence. hence the need to better define the process of (inter)cultural communication negotiation. a helpful analysis of the sociological paradigms that govern the way we think about intercultural communication within the academy and in everyday attitudes can be deduced from holliday (2012, 37-49), who proposes two distinctive trends in approaching intercultural topics, namely, neo-essentialism and critical cosmopolitanism. on the one hand, holliday recognises the main aspects of neo-essentialism mainly in liberal multiculturalism, describing it as an interest in celebrating and sharing artefacts, festivals, ceremonies, dress, food, and customs as a “bland,” “indulgent” superficiality that can mask a neo-racist attitude as celebrating recognition of cultural diversity, while drawing lines and creating divisions between people from different cultural backgrounds, particularly between the inner circles (western groups) and the outer circle (non-western groups), and also alienating personal identities as though they were a “spectacle” (holliday, 2012). on the other hand, the notion of critical cosmopolitanism is, according to holliday, supported by max weber’s (1964, quoted in holliday 2012, p. 38) social action theory, which views “culture as a negotiated „process” that is far more difficult to pin down” (holliday, 2012, p. 38), since the precise tracing intercultural and interlinguistic moves within and beyond student mobility programmes. . . 215 nature of human behaviour can never be determined. this view of culture eludes any attempt at describing it in terms of prototypical nationalist or ethnic culture. thus, intercultural communication can be explained as “the dialogue between underlying universal cultural processes and the particularities of national or other structures” (holliday 2012, p. 46) and as a process of negotiation and co-construction of meaning that has “the potential to be transported across the cultural boundaries” (holliday 2012, p. 43). in order to be able to negotiate meaning and thus mediate between cultures and languages, intercultural communicative competence builds strongly on the linguistic element (byram, 1997), an element that holliday does not seem to address specifically when proposing to build intercultural competence on “universal cultural processes” that help learners transcend intercultural lines (holliday 2012, p. 48). however, byram (2012, p. 92) in his latest writing places language at the centre of intercultural communicative competence, claiming that “intercultural communication should be viewed as mediation among bilinguals who take advantage of a lingua franca, a foreign language that all the participants in the communicative activity have in common because they had learned it.” such a transnational communication process is further deconstructed in karen risager’s research. by focusing on conversations in which participants speak from different cultural backgrounds even if they speak the „same” language, for example english, she identifies “the need of a linguaculture concept that is linked with the language of the individual (the idiolect), and that allows for the idea that when the individual moves into a context other than the first language context, a new facet of cultural complexity is created” (risager, 2008, p. 4). since language is learned and developed in social interaction, learning and communicating in a second language becomes just an extension of the meaning negotiating process acquired in the mother tongue, exploiting the resources from the first language linguaculture in the process of sense making in the new language. however, the personal connotations of words and phrases will be transferred from the first language to the second languages in a kind of language mixture, “where my foreign language is supplied with linguacultural matter from my first language” and the learners need to “establish an association, and this task has to be accomplished on the basis of my growing understanding of some of the associations common among native speakers” (risager, 2008, p. 6). the addressees, on the other hand, interpret the message by integrating it in their own linguacultures and their knowledge of the world. the transnational paradigm proposed by karen risager seems to meet adrian holliday’s concept of critical cosmopolitanism at this point, both in terms of emphasizing the process of deconstruction of meaning in actual encounters of individuals, as well as in analysing communication as a cultural and social neva čebron 216 practice. intercultural communicative competence thus becomes a critical reading of the meaning negotiating process within an intercultural encounter, prompting an individual to draw on the awareness of his/her cultural and linguistic background, while also compelling him/her to open to new conceptualisations of meaning. the resulting communication should help break down barriers and divisions produced by cultural stereotypes, prejudice and even racism, which is one of the main goals of the ierest resources. 3. piloting ierest teaching materials: a case study this paper presents the approach used in piloting one of the units of the ierest manual, namely, activity 2 from the pre-departure module, entitled anti-discrimination study circle (see also appendix a). the main aim of this activity is to encourage students to reflect on discrimination and new forms of racism appearing in our societies that go beyond skin colour, race or ethnicity. it shows how the role of power is related to the idea of essentialism and how it can touch upon everyone through implicit or explicit processes of communication, grounded in the popularised view of culture as a divisive set of national boundaries that still very much pervade the normal way of thinking. in order to trigger critical evaluation of such practices, self-reflection and questioning of our own behaviour and language use, students are introduced to analytical tools (see also appendix c) derived from critical discourse analysis (cda) (jiwani, & richardson, 2011; van dijk, 1984, 1987), guiding them to identify specific language choices through which discrimination is created and perpetuated. initially students analyse examples of language use by examining the media (tv news and the internet) and popular discourse; at the second stage, they are asked to apply the newly acquired analytical skills in a small-scale research evidencing suspect practices in their own environment. we considered it particularly important to facilitate students” questioning those resources in language that we tend to take for granted, but can inform racist language by creating divisions, or else help us overcome such divisions once we perceive them, expose them and reject them. the approaches described here expand slightly the activities proposed by the ierest manual, introducing additional opportunities for students to study, research and analyse language use in their first language (or better “linguaculture”) and transfer these insights to situations where they engage in conversation in their second language, in this case english as “a lingua franca.” our adapted version drew mainly on two objectives of the activity antidiscrimination study circle, namely: tracing intercultural and interlinguistic moves within and beyond student mobility programmes. . . 217 — explore the role of power in dominant discourses (media, political, institutional) and reflect on how these discourses lead to perceiving people from other backgrounds in certain ways. — understand how key concepts such as stereotyping, ethnocentrism, essentialising, and prejudice can lead to misunderstandings and misrepresentations of people from other horizons. however, the linguistic objectives of this activity were modified to some degree, in order to reflect better additional tasks introduced in our group. in terms of language analysis, we aimed at observing the following: — consider the problematic nature of using certain terms in your mother tongue (derogating expressions or even ethnic slurs for various minorities and nationals from other cultures). — consider the process of acquisition and interiorisation of the connotative meaning of vocabulary in general and, specifically, of derogating expressions in a second language. thus, the expected outcomes achieved at the end of the piloted activity were adapted as follows: — recognize and explain the problematic nature of using certain terms (e.g. ethnicity, race, nation) to frame identity. — recognize how the subjective worldview inherent in a number of frequently used expressions may be influenced by your primary and secondary socialisation and by the dominant discourses (media, political, institutional); and how the worldview inherent in these expressions influences your perceptions of yourself and (your interactions with) others. — recognise when misunderstandings may be the result of stereotyping, ethnocentrism, essentialising and prejudice. — recognize the process of transferring your personal connotations of words and phrases from the first language to the second languages and the process of perceiving and acquiring new, subtle meaning variations. the activity was taught as part of a course on intercultural mediation to a group of 22 undergraduate students. the majority of the students participating were slovene, along with a few students from slovakia, macedonia, romania, poland and italy, visiting our institution within the erasmus mobility exchange programme. the course based on the ierest resources module 1 lasted throughout the term (60 contact hours), devising some 20 hours to activity 2 (anti-discrimination study circle). the majority of students studied english as their major and were able to communicate in english at an advanced level, so that the course was held in english. neva čebron 218 4. the tasks the activity included two main tasks, namely, a critical reading of the mediated texts/messages and a research of denigrating vocabulary used in each student’s environment. at the first stage, students were introduced to the concept of „discrimination” (i.e., the denial of opportunities and equal rights to individuals and groups based on some type of arbitrary bias such as gender, race, social class, etc.) by reflecting on their personal experiences and/or commenting on episodes that happened to others, including those reported in the media. the focus of this task was then geared towards a critical reading of the language used in the media as illustrated by a video clip of a report by al jazeera from 2013 on the “go home!” campaign organized by the uk government and aimed at cutting the number of undocumented immigrants. based on insights from cda, summarized in a handout (see also appendix c), students were guided to observe specific language strategies in expressing contempt and nuances of racism (euphemisms, intensifiers, hedging, down-toning) in the video clip and in the comments made by the viewers. as an extension of this task, students analysed various media reports and blogs discussing recent immigration issues in their mother tongue and in english (american, english and international sources) along the lines proposed by the cda tools. the results of the research in various languages was then compared and contrasted. at the second stage, an expansion of the original teaching materials was introduced. based on a research on race, racism and racist talk (elamé, 2006), the focus of students” research was reverted to biased language and ethnic slurs in everyday conversations. students were divided in a number of small groups, each researching a slightly different aspect of vocabulary or drawing on different language tools, such as vocabularies and language corpora, to identify biased or even racist language practices. one strand of research analysed the denigrating language popularly used to discuss various minorities and national cultural stereotypes in their first language, another one identified frequently used racist language (subtle or overt) in the media, yet another group investigated the response to commonly used denigrating expressions and ethnic slurs among primary school children. students worked on their research assignments independently for a month and finally presented the results in a presentation with discussion in a focus group. they wrapped up their findings and comments in a reflective essay. tracing intercultural and interlinguistic moves within and beyond student mobility programmes. . . 219 5. findings the initial discussion with the students regarding racism and racist language practices in their own environment indicated that they had very little awareness of these issues and their response was one of overt denial. especially slovene students claimed that the slovene language had not developed racist or biased language due to the history of colonisation of the region, the very limited number of speakers of the slovene language and few contacts with peoples of other races. they supported their claim alleging that even the word zamorec (a slovene biased word for a black person) originally meant just “a person from overseas.” their research soon proved them wrong. even a rather superficial investigation of the language strategies in expressing contempt, bias and nuances of racism in the media yielded interesting results. students discovered that newspapers were particularly rich in expressing subtle bias when reporting on recent migrations. little distinction was made between begunec (refugee), pribežnik (immigrant), migrant (an adopted word with a somewhat more formal connotation), azilant (asylum seeker), ilegalni prebežnik (undocumented immigrant), frequently suggesting that they were all just economic migrants, undeserving of readers” sympathy. furthermore, migrations were mainly described as a “problem” or a “crisis” threatening to “flood” or “swamp” with a “wave” our “way of life” and our “already impoverished economy,” apparently as a natural phenomenon that one cannot control. the government thus decided to erect a barrier of razor wire, declaring that it was just a “technical obstruction” (a technical term) or “fence,” meant to “protect the population” and not to “intimidate” anyone. the range of vocabulary retrieved from comments to newspaper stories and blogs showed more overt bias or even hostility, talking frequently about “illegals” or even the “byzantine” (a term with negative connotation suggesting backwardness and lack of sophistication), who would only cause “chaos” and linking migrants to criminals, human trafficking, fraud, harassment and aggression. very similar were the results of the research of the daily papers in the other countries included in this research, although in some countries the papers seemed to emphasize the religious element more, identifying the migrants often as muslims, thus eliciting resentment towards migrants among readership, due to historical tensions between religions in the local environments. the analysis of a few articles and blogs in english supplied a wider set of vocabulary to name migrants and their activities, focusing mainly on the skin colour (blacks, browns, niggers), or the religion (various denominations of islam), who come flooding or swarming into the gates of our world and want to rip it apart with their backward culture, primitive political habits and destructive neva čebron 220 (anti)social norms. students also recognized instances of mitigation of the message (prejudice is something almost automatic in our society.), reversal (they impinge upon white people’s rights.) and apparent concession (i have no problems with any race but if he’s going to live in . . . [a country], he needs to ensure respect for the culture he’s joining and make sure he becomes one of us!), and many more. they found such language disturbingly aggressive towards minorities, but also recognized that they had difficulties grasping the connotative meaning of the vocabulary they were less familiar with or concepts not yet clearly mapped in their first language, or words that exist in their language as well but refer to a different concept in english, for egzample, reference to islamic sects, “coloured people,” “aliens.” similarly, students discovered that it was difficult to render in english precisely the meaning of some biased language, which they found mainly in blogs discussing issues related to local ethnic minorities and bordering nations. examples of such ethnocentric vocabulary in slovene referred mainly to traditional ethnic minorities mingling with slovenes in their immediate environment, like the romani peoples (cigan, cigo), or more recent migrants from the balkan region, such as the bosnians (čefur), or the albanians from kosovo and macedonia (šiptar), or any person from the southern yugoslav republics (južnjak). other examples express prejudice against inhabitants from our neighbouring countries like the italians (lah) or people from german speaking countries (švab). the italian students contributed some uniquely italian disparaging expressions for more recent migrants from africa in their country, such as vu-comprà (a hassling street seller of colour), marocchino (any dark skin person), but also a denigrating word for slovenes and other nations from former yugoslavia: sciavo (slang for “slave”). the realisation that we often have such words at the tip of the tongue and even use them carelessly, triggered quite some reflection as to what attitudes and values we project unawares. students further discovered that our colloquial vocabulary shows bias also towards women, older people, the lgbt community and people with all kinds of handicap, thus creating quite stark divisions between members of our society and allowing prejudice to thrive. they considered the implications of transferring such expressive vocabulary between languages. they admitted that it was tempting to adopt such vocabulary, along with all kinds of swearwords, from other languages, since foreign biased words are not anchored in our value system, rendering fuzzy their exact connotative or expressive meaning and their bias. as a consequence, we can offend or even hurt people’s feelings inadvertently. some students wanted to research the origin of such prejudice, as well as the extent to which denigrating words were used among students of primary schools. they went to various schools and administered to a hundred elementary school pupils aged between 10 and 15 years a simple questionnaire (see also appendix d), thus collecting a revealing sample of data. tracing intercultural and interlinguistic moves within and beyond student mobility programmes. . . 221 the answers can be summarized in just a few lines: — pupils immediately recognized all denigrating words and slurs quoted in the questionnaire and were able to explain their biased meaning, as well as the group of people they referred to. — they learned these words mainly outside the school, in the family, among their peers or from the media, as shown in chart 1. figure 1 environments where pupils from the elementary school learned biased words — they were able to describe all the negative connotations of such words and reported harboring some negative feeling for people designated by such words, although they rarely had any direct contacts with persons from these ethnic groups and, therefore, had little first-hand experience or contacts with them (chart 2). figure 2 frequency of direct contacts with people described by denigrating words 40% 21% 13% 26% where did you learn denigrating words for other nationals? from friends at school from the movies and the media at home 42% 26% 9% 23% have you ever met/do you know people designated by these denigrating words? none not directly, but have heard od them i know a few and i like them i know a few and i do not like them neva čebron 222 — still, almost a third of the interviewees openly expressed negative attitudes towards these ethnic groups, while half of the pupils claimed that people from different ethnic groups were no different from themselves, though they may have some different customs and should thus be treated as equals (chart 3). figure 3 attitudes to people from ethnic groups designated by racial slurs the final focus-group discussion among students led to the conclusion that we should be more aware of the language we adopt even in light conversations, because it became obvious that expressions such as “lažeš kot cigan” (you lie like a gypsy), “delam kot zamorc” (i work like a nigger – work hard at menial jobs as a servant) can create divisions in our minds when we do not reflect on our language. such lack of cultural and language awareness can lead to an early conditioning to ethnocentrism, racism and even xenophobia. the responses acquired from pupils surprised our students as to how impressionable their young minds were and how easily they adopted discriminatory stances from their environment. recommendations were formulated as to the various manners to improve our behavior, in order to avoid creating divisions through language between peoples in our society and beyond. 6. students’ feedback in their reflective essays students acknowledged that issues raised during this course led them to a new awareness of how language can be used to create new divides among ethnic and social groups or to promote and reinforce stereotypes and prejudice. at the same time, they emphasized the need to sensitize their environment to observe language critically, to realise the damage and even pain 25% 22%35% 18% what are your feelings towards people described by such slurs? a normal person such as me a person with different customs a person whose manners i do not approve of i do not know tracing intercultural and interlinguistic moves within and beyond student mobility programmes. . . 223 we can cause by reproducing denigrating language patterns and, therefore, to shun from biased expressions. some of their views quoted below emphasize mainly the intercultural insights gathered within the course: in many cases, negative stereotypes are being spread within countries in order to manipulate with people’s beliefs and create tension between different ethnic groups that would maybe otherwise coexist peacefully. stereotypes are being used as a powerful strategic weapon in politics all over the world. (borut – not the real name) the problem is that people talk about intercultural communication instead of interpersonal communication. in this way, they emphasise that people come from different cultures so there must be some differences. if we talk about interpersonal communication people tend to see similarities between humans instead of differences. (robert – not the real name) even if we never completely eradicate certain bad, negative stereotypes, we are becoming more aware of them and of the effect they have on us. we should always bear in mind that as much as someone may look or feel weird to us, it goes the other way around too. the need for tolerance is essential, though sometimes it is a difficult exercise. look beyond the stereotype! (melissa – not the real name) i think that in our modern society people should learn from childhood the meaning of respecting each other and respecting the different, not to judge anything or anybody they do not know, not to block the evidence and external signs, but observe the similarities rather than the differences. we should not speak about cultures as closed entities but as something that influences one another and so it is part of each other’s culture. only after having managed to reconstruct a balanced society where equality prevails, it is possible to coexist. (vane – not the real name) a solution that could help the decrease of racism could be the exchange of discriminating words with other terms. because it is already difficult to be in a place where everything is new: behaviour, language, life style, and it is even more difficult to live in a place where you are clearly not welcome. (marija – not the real name) other students focused more on the use of language and the consequences of ethnically biased expressions: language must serve as a tool for improving a dialogue between cultures. it should be a language of unity, tolerance and peace. a more conscious perception can help to negate much of that racism in language. while we may not be able to change the language, we can definitely change our usage of the language. we can avoid using words that degrade people. we can make a conscious effort to use terminology that reflects a tolerant perspective, as opposed to a discriminative perspective. the important thing is to respect each other as equal human beings who share and exercise the same rights, inhabit the same world and breathe the same air. if the human kind manages to succeed in this, the world will be a much nicer and friendlier place. yet there is still a lot of work ahead of us. (erika– not the real name) neva čebron 224 pupils’ opinions was based on what their parents implemented in their earlier childhood and not on what they actually experience. we noticed similar patterns in other groups that were conducting surveys on other ethnic slurs. this was a clear reason why we should be aware of the discriminatory vocabulary, this goes especially for parents and what they say to their children. this is important because young children are more prone to the bias hidden in such expressions, which can lead to unnecessary violence or discrimination against people that mean you no harm. this course opened a new perspective to us and made us aware of the damage the usage of such discriminatory vocabulary may cause, a fact that we did not even consider before. (lea – not the real name) it is encouraging to notice that even a rather short course on intercultural issues can engender such enthusiasm among students and have them reflect deeply on their own values, believes and language practices. in our view, the approach introduced in this pilot was particularly productive, because it proposed to students to, first, observe practices in their own environment and, later, expand their observations to a larger group of people and languages. they were able to draw conclusions from their own experience and then generalize their findings, internalizing their newly acquired knowledge as a responsibility to share with younger generation and their environment. 7. conclusion the research showed that a critical study of language use in our environment – everyday conversations and media discourse can have implications for communication in “lingua franca,” thus enhancing students” intercultural awareness and sensibility. it has revealed that a divisive set of practices persists in our understanding of communication across cultural boundaries. it is particularly important to have students observe and investigate these aspects of relating among people, in order to help them grasp how these divisions are created and how the meaning that we ascribe to words influences our attitudes, as well as our relating to persons from various groups, unless we reflect and become aware of our own bias. students” conclusions and recommendations propose that language can actually be a tool, which helps us overcome the distances and differences among individuals. what we need is the will to observe critically our own wording of reality around us, to perceive the cultural prejudice inherent in many casual conversations, expose such language practices and try to alter them. this may, in turn, help us develop empathy and aid us to see through stereotypes and prejudice, thus enhancing greatly our ability to understand and relate to people in an intercultural encounter. the findings of this research seem to confirm that both, foreign language learning and developing intercultural competence draw on the meaning negotiating tracing intercultural and interlinguistic moves within and beyond student mobility programmes. . . 225 process acquired in the first linguaculture, as proposed by risager (2012). developing a deeper awareness of this negotiating process and an understanding of the principles at work in transnational interactions can help us establish a dialogue between underlying universal cultural processes and the particularities of national or other structures, thus enabling a process of negotiation and coconstruction of meaning that can help us communicate more successfully across cultural boundaries, as advanced by holliday (2012). this seems to imply that the kind of empathy needed to perceive and understand particularities of different cultural backgrounds is also required to understand and interiorize the mapping of new meaning in a second language, thus expanding our field of knowledge of the world. such an attitude to intercultural communication in international encounters seems to open new opportunities to successfully engage with people and situations that students meet within their erasmus sojourn. references alred, g., m. byram, & m. fleming. (2002). intercultural experience and education. clevedon: multilingual matters. anquetil, m. (2006). mobilité erasmus et communication interculturelle. bern: peter lang. beaven, a. et al. (2015). ierest, intercultural education resources for erasmus students and their teachers. koper: annales university press. beaven, a., comas-quinn, a., & sawhill, b. (2013). introduction on case studies of openness in the language classroom. in a. beaven, , a. comas-quinn & b. sawhill (eds.), case studies of openness in the language classroom. dublin, ireland; voillans, france: research-publishing.net byram, m. (2012). conceptualizing intercultural (communicative) competence and intercultural citizenship. in j. jackson (ed.), the routledge handbook of language and intercultural communication. london and new york: routledge taylor & francis group. byram, m. (1997). teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence. clevedon: multilingual matters. byram, m., & zarate, g. (1995). defining and assessing intercultural competence: some principles and proposals for the european context. language teaching, 29, 14-18. chen, g., & starosta, w. (1998-99). a review of the concept of intercultural awareness. human communication, 2, 27-54. commission of the european communities. (2009). green paper: promoting the learning mobility of young people. retrieved from http://eur-lex.europa.eu/ legal-content/en/txt/pdf/?uri=celex:52009dc0329&from=en. neva čebron 226 deardorff, d. k. (2004). in search of intercultural competence. international educator, spring 2004, 13-15. deardorff, d. (2009). synthesizing conceptualizations of intercultural competence: a summary and emerging themes. in d. deardorff (ed.), the sage handbook of intercultural competence (pp. 264-270). thousand oaks, ca: sage. dervin, f. (2008). métamorphoses identitaires en situation de mobilité. turku: university of turku, humanoria. dervin, f. (2009). the others as impediments to “integration” into finnish society: the case of exchange students in higher education. research on finnish society, 2, 19-27. elamé, e. (2006). comunicazione interculturale e vocabolario discriminante nella lingua tedesca, francese e italiana. migration studies, autumn 2006, xliii/163, 578-586. fantini, a. e. (2000, 2001). intercultural competence: an essential ingredient for the new millennium. cisv interspectives, 18, 89-91. holliday, a. (2013). understanding intercultural communication: negotiating a grammar of culture. london and new york: routledge taylor & francis group. holliday, a. (2012). culture, communication, context and power. in j. jackson, j. (ed.), the routledge handbook of language and intercultural communication. london and new york: routledge taylor & francis group. holmes, p., & o’neill, g. (2012). developing and evaluating intercultural competence: ethnographies of intercultural encounters. international journal of intercultural relations, 36(5), 707-718. hoskins, b., & sallah, m. (2011). developing intercultural competence in europe: the challenges. language and intercultural communication, 11(2), 113-125. jackson, j. (2010) intercultural journeys, from study to residence abroad. melbourne: palgrave macmillan. jiwani, y., & richardson, j. e. (2011). discourse, ethnicity and racism. in t. a. van dijk (ed.), discourse studies: a multidisciplinary introduction (pp. 241262). london, uk: sage. rathje, s. (2007). intercultural competence: the status and future of a controversial concept. language and intercultural communication, 7, 254-266. risager, k. (2012). the cultural dimensions of language. in j. jackson (ed.), the routledge handbook of language and intercultural communication. london and new york: routledge taylor & francis group. risager, k. (2008). towards a transnational paradigm in language and culture pedagogy. in j. menard-warwick (ed.), tesol quaterly, 42(3), 617-640. shaules, j. (2007). deep culture: the hidden challenges of global living. clevedon: multilingual matters. tracing intercultural and interlinguistic moves within and beyond student mobility programmes. . . 227 spitzberg, b., & changnon, g. (2009). conceptualizing intercultural competence. in d. deardorff (ed.), the sage handbook of intercultural competence (pp. 2-52). thousand oaks, ca: sage. starkey, h. & osler, a. (2009). antiracism, citizenship, and education: european ideals and political complacency. in j.a. banks (ed.), routledge international companion to multicultural education (pp. 348-359). new york: routledge. starosta, w. j. (2014). sojourning through intercultural communication: a retrospective. in m. k. asante,y. miike, & j. yin (eds.), the global intercultural communication reader. london and new york: routledge taylor & francis group. strong, d. (2011). discourse of bi-national exchange students: constructing dual identifications. in f. dervin (ed.), analysing the consequences of academic mobility and migration (pp. 51-66). newcastle upon tyne: cambridge university press. van dijk, t. a. (1984). prejudice in discourse. amsterdam: benjamins. van dijk, t. a. (1987). communicating racism. ethnic prejudice in thought and talk. newbury park, ca: sage. vande berg, m. (2009). intervening in student learning abroad: a researchbased inquiry. intercultural education, 20, 15-27. al jazeera english. (2013). uk immigration and human rights law updates: uk’s “go home” campaign faces legal action. retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=4d3ej9mczq4 neva čebron 228 appendix a: anti-discrimination study circle – brief description of activities (adapted version) task brief description of procedures task 1 waking up to racism in our lives • introduce the activity and its objectives. • stimulate class discussion on students’ experiences of discriminatory practices in their own environment and elsewhere. • provide explanations of some theoretical concepts (e.g., “discrimination,” “racism” and “neo-racism”). task 2 “go home!” • show a video clip of a report by al jazeera on the “go home” campaign in the uk. • split the class into groups and ask them to answer the questions in attachment 1. • discuss the answers to the questions in plenary. task 3 focus on language • provide further explanation of the concept of discrimination by investigation of students’ national and local media. • introduce discourse analysis. • ask students to analyse the comments posted under the al jazeera video clip with the help of attachment 3. task 4 localisation of racism • ask students to research denigrating vocabulary in use in your environment (books, blogs, media, dictionaries, conversations). • in pairs students design a simple questionnaire and administer it to a group of elementary school children (aged between 10 and 15 years). • help students analyse the answers and ask them to reflect on the results. • ask students to prepare a presentation of their findings. • encourage a class discussion in order to summarise the main point of the activity. • ask students to wrap up their observations a reflective essay. tracing intercultural and interlinguistic moves within and beyond student mobility programmes. . . 229 appendix b: “go home” campaign (task 2, unit: anti-discrimination study circle) answer the following questions in your group. 1 what message is implied in the “go-home” campaign? 2 who is the campaign aimed at? 3 what attitude does the campaign express towards all immigrants, whether legal or illegal? 4 how are the illegal immigrants named and referred to? 5 how are the immigrants described? what qualities or characteristics are attributed to them? 6 what is the political motivation behind such a campaign (i.e., to win votes)? 7 the reporter uses the term “racial profiling.” what does this term mean? what ideological stance does this term suggest (e.g., towards immigrant groups)? 8 which representatives of society or authorities are asked to give an opinion on the matter? what arguments do they present about the immigrants and against the campaign? 9 how do you know whose point of view is presented? is it that of the “dominant group,” or of the “out-group”? 10 can you identify any euphemisms, intensifiers, or down-toning? what effect do these devices have on the presentation of the issue? neva čebron 230 appendix c: focus on language: cda tools (task 3: anti-discrimination study circle unit) contemporary ethical and racial prejudices are mostly denied in everyday conversations and in mass-mediated contexts; however a subtle wording strategy betrays underlying attitudes towards “out-groups.” thus arguments, e.g., about them and us, can also be advanced by using less direct strategies such as disclaimers. these disclaimers are semantic manoeuvres that combine an overall strategy of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, and include moves such as: apparent denial: “i have nothing against immigrants, but . . .” the speaker first introduces a mitigating claim, but gives no evidence that he/she has nothing against “them.” the preliminary denial often serves just as a face-keeping move to introduce a generally negative assertion. denials are a strategy of defence, presupposing explicit or implicit accusations, and can be divided in several types: 1. act-denial: “i did not do/say that at all”; 2. control-denial “i did not do/say that on purpose,” “it was an accident”; 3. intention-denial “i did not mean that,” “you got me wrong”; 4. goal-denial “i did not do/say that, in order to . . .’ subtle denial: “they claim /allege that ‘quotation of somebody’s words’ . . .” observe what effect is achieved by explicitly quoting the official replies from the government spokesperson. quotes are a device of distancing from an opinion, meaning “i did not say this, they did . . .,” as well as a strategy rendering the information more factual or objective. apparent concession: “of course some muslims are tolerant, but generally . . .” conceding exceptions makes the claim sound more objective and helps the speaker/writer to appear more tolerant. apparent empathy: “of course asylum seekers endure hardships, but . . .” showing empathy and understanding for the “out-group” makes the speaker/writer to appear more tolerant. apparent ignorance: “now, i don’t know all the facts, but . . .” this is a face-saving strategy, since the speaker/writer admits in advance a lack of knowledge, allowing them to make an even wilder claim. reversal: “we are the real victims in all this . . .” the roles of the victims and the perpetrators are inverted with this clever manoeuvre. transfer: “of course, i have nothing against them, but my customers don’t like to deal with black personnel . . .” blaming others for one’s own position, actions etc. gives the speaker/writer an excuse for their behaviour. mitigation: “the message may sound rather unpleasant, still they . . .” “this may be a loaded connotation, but . . .” tracing intercultural and interlinguistic moves within and beyond student mobility programmes. . . 231 using intensity markers such as emphasising particles (“really,” “very,” “absolutely,” “only”)” or expressions mitigating and attenuating the claim (“doubtfully,” “questionably,” “trivial,” “insufficient”) can be an important aspect of the discourse as they either sharpen or tone down its ideational content and help construct a particular (perhaps “non-racist”) identity for the speaker or writer. (adapted from van dijk et al., 1997 and jiwani, y., & richardson, j.e., 2011) neva čebron 232 appendix d: students” questionnaire for elementary school pupils (task 4: anti-discrimination study circle unit) 1 what do you understand under the word “šiptar” (or “cigan” or “čefur” or “zamorc” and similar)? 2 where did you first come across this word? 3 how do you imagine such a person and what are his/her characteristics? are they different from you? 4 what is your experience with persons denoted by the word “šiptar” (or “cigan” or “čefur” or “zamorc” and similar)? 401 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (3). 401-420 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl age effects on the acquisition of nominal and verbal inflections in an instructed setting simone e. pfenninger university of zurich simone.pfenninger@es.uzh.ch abstract this study examines evidence for the hypothesis (e.g., muñoz, 2006) that an early starting age is not necessarily more beneficial to the successful learning of l2 inflectional morphology in strictly formal instructional settings. the present author investigated the quantitative and qualitative differences in the production and reception of 5 selected inflectional morphemes in english written performance and competence tasks by 100 early classroom learners and 100 late classroom learners of the same age. while an earlier age of first exposure and a longer instructional period was not associated with higher accuracy scores, the findings suggest distinct patterns in the productive and receptive knowledge abilities of inflectional morphology; the late classroom learners’ superiority seems to be rooted in their greater reliance upon memory-based item-by-item associative learning, as they are significantly stronger on tasks that might cause semantic difficulties, whereas the early classroom learners are marginally better on pattern-based processes for certain morphemes. this finding possibly supports ullman’s (2005) proposal that, as procedural memory declines with age, older starters have difficulty in discovering regularities in the input and thus over-rely on the declarative memory system in l2 learning. keywords: english morphology, second language learning, second language teaching, age effects, instructional setting simone e. pfenninger 402 based on lenneberg’s (1967) idea of a critical period and its implications for second language learning in a naturalistic setting, dozens of governments all over europe have introduced policies to accelerate the exposure to second language (l2) english of school children in recent years, including switzerland. in 2004, the swiss conference of cantonal ministers of education decided to introduce l2 english into the primary school curriculum in order to foster multilingualism in future generations and to ensure more proficient l2 speakers. however, there has been considerable controversy about the effectiveness of early l2 learning in an instructional setting, particularly in light of the recent findings that different aspects of language have different critical periods and are more sensitive to variables such as age of first exposure (aoe), length of instruction (loi), and biological age (ba) (dekeyser, alfishabtay, & ravid, 2010). for instance, l2 learners’ difficulty with inflectional morphemes is well-documented in immigrant as well as classroom studies (jia & fuse, 2007; jjang, 2004; larson-hall, 2008; mcdonald & roussel, 2010; muñoz, 2006; among many others). in an input-poor environment such as the classroom, it is particularly difficult for the learners to engage in the phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexicosemantic processes involved in l2 morphology acquisition. despite a relatively high number of existing morpheme studies that examine age-related effects, many of them are conducted in naturalistic learning situations or immersion/clil1 programs, while those that actually provide evidence from foreign language learning settings focus on the l2 morpheme acquisition order and/or the rate of acquisition of grammatical functors and therefore primarily test different-aged learners. there are also particularly few studies to date with a respectable number of participants. furthermore, while a number of researchers (e.g., kempe, brooks, & kharkhurin, 2010) have demonstrated that there is a large variety of mechanisms and processes operating in l2 learning, research is still incipient on the role of explicit versus implicit learning and early versus late learning in strictly formal instructional settings. this calls out for detailed analyses such as the present study, which examines inter-learner variation (early clil learners vs. late non-clil learners of the same age), with a good sampling of one (age-sensitive) aspect of language. the main aims of this study are: (a) to examine whether early classroom learning and late classroom learning yield different levels of proficiency in inflectional morphology, and (b) to analyze whether the two kinds of learning are possibly different in nature, that is, if the two groups exhibit different difficulties with producing inflectional morphology and detecting violations of the latter in receptive tasks. 1 clil = content and language integrated learning. age effects on the acquisition of nominal and verbal inflections in an instructed setting 403 previous research on age and l2 morpheme acquisition the explanations for possible age effects on the acquisition of morphology in the literature are manifold and intimately connected with the question as to whether l1 acquisition and l2 acquisition/learning are subserved by one and the same system or by two separate mechanisms (see bird, lambon ralph, seidenberg, mcclelland, & patterson, 2003). in many naturalistic studies that postulate a single system connectionist model (e.g., clahsen & felser, 2006; mcdonald, 2006, 2008), it is pointed out that l2 morphosyntax seems to be more vulnerable to processing difficulties than l2 lexico-semantics (independent of the l1) and therefore more susceptible to age. such difficulties have been linked to resource limitations that might lead to the inability (a) to access and retrieve stored l2 knowledge (semantically-related difficulties) and/or (b) to detect phonological discriminations in the input (phonologicallyrelated difficulties), similar to the difficulties of native speakers under specific types of stress manipulation (mcdonald, 2006, 2008; mcdonald & roussel 2010). for instance, mcdonald & roussel (2010) compared the performance and competence of 15 native speakers and 23 nonnative immigrants in a series of tests (phonological ability tasks, lexical access tasks, past tense grammaticality judgment [gj] tasks, and past tense production tasks). they suggested that late starters have poor vocabulary and slow lexical access compared to early starters or native speakers, possibly due to less practice, or, in connectionist terms, less strengthening of the connection between the phonological and the semantic representations (gollan, montoya, fennemanotestine, & morris, 2005), and/or due to “interference from having two phonological representations, one from each language, active at the same time” (mcdonald & roussel, 2010, p. 431). this is reflected in their problems with irregular past tense forms, for example, the production of overregularization errors. as regards point (b), the significant role of sound perception in the acquisition of morphemes has been well-documented in recent years (see, e.g., collins, trofimovich, white, cardoso, & horst, 2009; ellis, 2006; ellis & larsenfreeman, 2006; goldschneider & dekeyser, 2001). as dekeyser (2005) rightly points out, “the meaning of morphemes and the distribution of their allomorphs cannot be acquired without the phonological capacity to extricate them from the flood of sounds in every sentence” (p. 2). many naturalistic studies (e.g., mcdonald, 2006, 2008) suggest that since (particularly late) l2 learners have difficulty with decoding surface form information, it makes it harder for them to recognize l2 nonsalient inflections and they thus tend to produce unmarked forms or forms with phonological errors and struggle with the detection of those forms in gj tasks. simone e. pfenninger 404 late learners’ phonological and semantic difficulties with l2 inflectional morphology have also been explained in terms of pinker’s (1999) dualmechanism account, according to which there is not a single system connectionist model underlying l1 and l2 processing, but there are two separate systems, one of which draws on phonological knowledge and the other one on semantic knowledge. famously, ullman’s declarative-procedural model posits that the procedural system, which underlies the (implicit) processing of aspects of grammar, is less involved in l2 than in l1 processing, possibly due to maturational (hormonal) changes after the onset of puberty, which makes late learners overrely on the declarative system during l2 morphosyntactic processing. for instance, in order to process morphologically complex words, late learners mainly rely on full-form storage, while morphological parsing is underused or even absent (ullman, 2005, p. 143; compare also the shallow structure hypothesis by clahsen & felser, 2006). evidence for this has been provided by studies that showed that computation of irregular forms is increasingly deficient as age of arrival (aoa) increases (e.g., birdsong & flege, 2001). attempting to define the temporal boundaries of a sensitive period for morphosyntactic processing in a naturalistic setting, a number of scholars (e.g., ionin & wexler, 2002) suggest that the decline begins very early. typically, age 6 is described as one of the stages of life when the cognitive decline is particularly accentuated for morphosyntax, that is, when children start following an adult path of morpheme acquisition (dekeyser, alfi-shabtay, & ravid, 2010, p. 414), even though the opposite (that is, no critical period for morphosyntax) has also been suggested (cf. flege, yeni-komshian, & liu, 1999). as concerns the offset point of a sensitive period for morphosyntax, numerous researchers (e.g., dekeyser, alfi-shabtay, & ravid, 2010; johnson & newport, 1989) suggest that the acquisition of l2 morphosyntax is constrained by the completion of brain maturation at about the age of 15-17 years. other immigrant studies have shown that aoa effects exist but take years to emerge. for instance, jia & fuse (2007), who investigated the acquisition of a similar range of morphemes by 10 native mandarin-speaking children and adolescents with different ages of arrival in the united states, found that aoa was not a great predictor of l2 morphological proficiency. only with the third person agreement (3ps) and the regular past morpheme did the early arrivals achieve greater proficiency, and this aoa effect only appeared after “several years” (p. 1280) in the immigrant setting. generally, even after having lived in an english-speaking country for 5 years, only one morphological structure investigated (progressive aspect -ing) was mastered by all the participants (defined as over 80% accuracy). likewise, paradis’ (2005) study with l2 child learners (mean age: 5.7, mean number of years of exposure to english: 9.5 months) yielded that “although esl children will eventually age effects on the acquisition of nominal and verbal inflections in an instructed setting 405 achieve native-speaker levels of accuracy with grammatical morphology, it is unknown how long it takes, and large individual differences in rates of development may persist past the early stages” (p. 183). it should be noted that 9.5 months of exposure to english in the target country would mean several years of input in the l2 classroom. in most classroom studies, there is the consensus view that there should be no advantage for an earlier start. concerning the perception of l2 sounds, fullana (2006) emphasizes the importance of the learners’ l1 phonological system and their stage of l1 phonological development when they start learning the l2, rather than the neurophysiological maturation. following flege (1991), she suggests that the l1 phonetic inventory is established at the age of 5-7 so that the l2 learning success in phonology by learners that start after that age is not dependent upon the starting age anymore. furthermore, since the learners “maintain their phonetic learning ability” (fullana, 2006, p. 42), they should be able to attain native-like phonological skills with increasing exposure to the l2. in testing the perceptual discrimination skills (e.g., detecting word-final consonant voicing and consonant clusters) of 281 different-aged learners (ages 8, 11, 14 and 18+) who were part of the barcelona age factor (baf) project, fullana (2006) found that the youngest starters (8-year-olds) obtained significantly lower correct discrimination scores than the other starting age groups (e.g., the 14-year-olds) after 200 and 416 hours of instruction. only after 726 hours did the early starters catch up with the other groups (see also garcía-lecumberri & gallardo, 2003). as concerns age-related effects on the development of morphological features, muñoz (2006) tested the same group of different-aged learners of the baf project. she observed that older learners are superior in morphological acquisition “even after a number of years of instruction” (p. 107); they learn the use of the grammatical functors faster and show more accurate use (higher suppliance in obligatory context percentages), which is in line with prior descriptions of the initial short-term advantage and the initial fast rate of late learners in the areas of morphosyntax, vocabulary and metalinguistic knowledge, that is, skills that strongly depend on rule acquisition (singleton & ryan, 2004; snow & hofnagel-höhle, 1978). however, it has often been suggested (e.g., birdsong, 2006) that this was probably due to the late learners’ cognitive advantages at testing. for instance, muñoz (2006) found that in both early and late learners, “morphosyntactic learning seems to boost at around age 12, coinciding with the cognitive growth associated with puberty” (p. 32). larson-hall’s (2008) study is similar to the present one in that she tested the receptive knowledge of l2 morphosyntactic and phonological mastery of 200 l2 english learners (l1 japanese) divided by ages of onset (the early simone e. pfenninger 406 clasrooom learners [ecls] starting in primary school at the age of 9, the late classroom learners [lcls] starting in middle school at the age of 13) and length of instruction but with a similar age at testing time (age range 18-21). larsonhall only found some modest statistical advantages on the phonemic discrimination task, but not on the morpheme task, for the early starters. she concluded that “no clear advantages for a younger starting age among the earlier starters was seen” (p. 56), since the ecls’ phonological advantage could probably be attributed to the larger amounts of total input; when the total hours of input were controlled, age was not entirely separate from amount of input but interacted with it. one major drawback of her study, however, is that her early starters were integrated in the same classes as the late (beginning) learners, which might have had a leveling-down effect on the early starters. german vs. english inflectional morphology the learners in the present study speak a swiss german dialect (see discussion below). in both swiss german and english, there is no obvious semantic difference to guide the choice between regular and irregular past tense forms, and both languages use nominal and verbal inflections to mark tenses, plurals, and subject-verb agreement, albeit not exactly to the same extent. the most noteworthy difference is that in contrast to english and high german, there is no form of the simple past or preterite in the swiss german dialects (reese, 2007); the swiss only make use of the present perfect, which corresponds to the english simple past and present perfect. consequently, the use of verbal and nominal inflections by the swiss learners is expected to show l1 transfer as an accelerator (owing to the learners’ familiarity with a similar inflectional system) as well as an inhibitor (due to the l1-l2 discrepancies just outlined). interestingly, dekeyser, alfi-shabtay, & ravid (2010) suggest that if the l1 and the l2 are “relatively closely related” (p. 432), the decline as a function of age in learners below the age of 18 is less marked than if the two languages are not related. research questions in this study, i will analyze the learning outcome of five selected english bound morphemes in the l2 production and perception of 100 ecls and 100 lcls 6 months into l2 english learning at middle school. the five morphemes are: past regular, past irregular, plural regular, plural irregular, and 3ps. the preceding discussion motivates the following research questions (rqs): age effects on the acquisition of nominal and verbal inflections in an instructed setting 407 1. are there any significant between-group discrepancies in the accuracy scores? 2. are there any age-related differences in terms of relative difficulty (tense-related vs. nontense-related morphemes, regular vs. irregular morphemes, salient vs. nonsalient morphemes)? it must be noted that the present study is not intended to gauge the relative strength of the various features of saliency reported to influence acquisition of morphology. neither do i analyze the sequential mastering of the l2 morphemes; the sole emphasis is on the accuracy scores of same-aged learners with differing ages of first l2 exposure in a classroom. thus, the question that is at stake here is not whether older learners experience a faster learning rate (a hypothesis which has been firmly established), but rather whether their learning rate is fast enough for them to catch up with (and possibly even surpass) the ecls within 6 months of l2 english learning at middle school. method participants one hundred ecls (52 females and 48 males) and 100 lcls (51 females and 49 males) participated in this study. they differed in age of first exposure (aoe of ecls: 8, aoe of lcls: 13) and length of instruction (loi of ecls: 5 years and 6 moths, loi of lcls: 6 months), but had the same ba at testing (13 years and 6 moths). note that since the first early english learners in switzerland began middle school in summer 2010, this was the most mature age group in the swiss educational system that had previously attended an official early english program. it is important to mention that the swiss conference of cantonal ministers of education promotes an implicit (clil2) learning approach at primary school level, that is, they officially declare that it is one of the main goals of early english learning in switzerland to focus on spoken english, particularly vocabulary (formulaic language), leaving formal grammatical instruction to teaching at secondary school level. in the clil program that they attended, students received on average 90 min of early english per week in two 45-min classes. none of the participants had stayed outside of switzerland for longer than one month. the learners spoke the zurich standard dialect, which is one 2 note that in switzerland, the term clil refers to a situation where english may be the central focus of the lesson, but the teacher is free to incorporate it into, or combine it with, other subjects or conduct classroom business in the l2. simone e. pfenninger 408 of the largest in switzerland. besides standard german as the first l2,3 all of the participants had had french as a school subject for 2.5 years, with two years in primary school (two 45-min classes per week) and six months in middle school (three 45-min classes per week). this means that for the ecls, english represented the second foreign language (or l3) to be learned at school, while for the lcls, it was the third l2 (or l4). since the participants all attended the same school in the state system (a typical middle school in the canton of zurich), it is hoped that the type and amount of english input the groups received did not differ significantly. all the learners knew the rules for english past tense, plural and 3ps formation. the classes of the participants were intact but not mixed, since at the school where the learners were tested, ecls and lcls do not come together in the same l2 class. the control group included 20 native speakers that attended the same school at grade level 6. it should be emphasized that the control group was not included to compare the learners with native speakers, but to ensure the validity of the tests. the testing session took place 6 months after the learners had entered middle school. depending on the size of the classes, at least five testing sessions of 45 min each were conducted with each class. materials in this paper, written production as well as grammaticality judgment data are examined. the production tasks were supposed to elicit different structures: an argumentative essay on the pros and cons of casting shows and an oral spot-the-difference task elicited 3ps and plural markers, while oral and written narratives elicited past morphemes, encouraging students to narrate “what happened in the silent movie ‘the triplets of belleville.’” as was the case with an earlier analysis of mine that investigated the l2 article system (pfenninger, 2011), the retelling task proved to be a reliable instrument in this analysis as well, since the learners had to use a certain set of verbs and nouns in order to describe the sequence of events in the silent film. every participant produced between 450 and 900 written words, of which the first 200 of each essay were selected, thus amounting to 400 written words per student. the gj task, which tested regular morphology, was presented in written form to the learners, which has the advantage over an auditory gj task in that it avoids the problem of phonological decoding, which is difficult for many l2 learn 3 most german swiss become bilingual between dialect and standard german during the first few years of elementary schooling at the latest, but standard german is primarily a literary and written language and rarely spoken. age effects on the acquisition of nominal and verbal inflections in an instructed setting 409 ers in an instructed setting (jiang, 2004, p. 608). in order for the participants not to draw on their explicit l2 knowledge, the task was timed; the students had a maximum of 15 minutes to make their judgments (approx. 10 s per sentence), which, for their age, was necessary in order for them to read and understand the sentences. of the 82 items of the gj task, 18 were relevant to the discussion of the mastery of l2 morphology. they were partly adopted from mcdonald’s (2006) gj task; the sentences were made ungrammatical in that regular past, plural and 3ps endings were omitted, and sentence contexts, verb/noun endings and salience of the tested inflections were carefully controlled. data scoring and procedures following mcdonald & roussel (2010), morpheme productions in obligatory contexts were coded as correct, irregularized, regularized, omitted, misformed, overused, substituted, or ‘other’ forms. in keeping with ionin & wexler (2002), i counted as irregular any verb or noun form that involved a change to the stem, as opposed to simple affixation; thus, cried was counted as irregular. no difference was made between the so-called irregular no change verbs with zero vowel change (e.g., cut-cut) and irregular change verbs with internal vowel change (e.g., swim-swam). unmarked forms were regarded as either present (omission of 3ps) or past (omission of regular or irregular past tense) depending on the tense used on other verbs in the sentence. if the target word was the only verb in the sentence, the tense of the previous sentence was considered. agreement errors (such as was for were or vice versa), as in but when they was in new york (quagmire, lcl, narrw), were included in the category ‘other’. overgeneralizations such as taked and childs counted as regularized past and plural morphemes respectively. in those cases where a (regular or irregular) past tense form was additionally marked for 3ps, as in other peoples cames (janey, lcl, narrw), the error was counted as a misformation of an irregular past morpheme as well as an overuse of the 3ps. after each context was scored, the score values were added applying pica’s (1983) famous suppliance in obligatory context (soc) analysis, according to which learners can score 1 point for the correct form, half a point for a morpheme misformation and 0 points for no morpheme, that is, the unmarked form. since connectionist theories have established that while token frequency promotes the retention of irregular forms, it is type rather than token frequency that facilitates learning of regular morphology (ellis & larsenfreeman, 2006, p. 565), i also counted and analyzed the different lexical items as data. furthermore, since soc analyses have been criticized for focusing too strongly on the grammatical aspects of l2 acquisition and thus ignoring funcsimone e. pfenninger 410 tional use of the l2 (muñoz, 2006, p. 109), i also analyzed the learners’ production of each of the error types described above. results table 1 presents the percentage correct in obligatory contexts by token counts, while table 2 presents the same by type counts. with the mastery of structure defined as over 80% accuracy (jia and fuse 2007, p. 1288), all structures but one (3ps) were mastered by the two learner groups, which is not surprising. as is described in various naturalistic and classroom studies (e.g. zhang & widyastuti, 2010), subject-verb agreement morphology is mastered late and is highly susceptible to error. differences in percentage points between groups are small for all the morphemes, except for the correct suppliance of irregular past morphemes, where the ecls scored 10 percentage points lower than the lcls. table 1 comparison of soc percentage scores (tokens) for the two groups morpheme ecls (n = 100) lcls (n = 100) percentage difference control group (n = 20) plural regular .92 .91 -1 1.00 plural irregular .88 .91 +3 1.00 past regular .85 .84 -1 1.00 past irregular .85 .95 +10 1.00 3ps agreement .72 .68 -4 1.00 table 2 comparison of soc percentage scores (types) for the two groups morpheme ecls (n = 100) lcls (n = 100) percentage difference control group (n = 20) plural regular .93 .91 -2 1.00 plural irregular .84 .87 +3 1.00 past regular .86 .81 -5 1.00 past irregular .79 .93 +14 1.00 3ps agreement .65 .67 +2 1.00 table 3 sheds light on the distribution of the error types of past morphology produced by the two starting age groups, while table 4 shows the results of the corresponding gj items. in the written production data, the range in individual accuracy with past regular morphemes was 50% to 100% age effects on the acquisition of nominal and verbal inflections in an instructed setting 411 (soc scores) for both ecls and lcls; with past irregular morphemes it was 34% to 100% for the ecls and 64% to 100% for the lcls. while the ecls produced significantly more overregularizations and misformations than the lcls for irregular verbs (besides having significantly lower correct scores in general), the overall rate of unmarked regular and irregular past tense forms in the production tasks was similar for both groups. interestingly, the perceptual salience of the 3 allomorphs of the regular -ed morpheme, namely the two nonsyllabic /t/ and /d/ and the syllabic / d/, had an influence on the past tense marking in the lcl data: 42.86% of the unmarked forms showed a deletion of the final syllabic allomorph, while 57.14% were omitted nonsyllabic inflections. in other words, the lcls seem to have had slightly more trouble producing the regular past morpheme across its 3 allomorphs than the ecls, who did not omit missing syllabic forms at all. by contrast, in the gj task, the lcls performed significantly more accurately on detection of the absence of both the syllabic and the nonsyllabic allomorphs (see table 4). table 3 performance on past morphology by ecls and lcls morpheme ecls (n = 62) lcls (n = 81) c/p (n = 20) chi-square (1df) p past regular (tokens) % % % correct 70.59 85.15 100 4.38 .036 unmarked 5.88 3.96 0 n.s. n.s. unmarked with /t/ or /d/ 0 2.97 0 n.s. n.s. participle 0 0 0 n.s. n.s. misformation 23.53 7.92 0 7.76 .005 past irregular (tokens) % % % correct 60.38 89.31 100 66.9 < .0001 regularized 13.21 5.12 0 11.0 .001 unmarked 5.66 3.34 0 n.s. n.s. participle 3.77 .22 0 20.1 < .0001 misformation 9.43 1.56 0 25.2 < .0001 other 7.55 .45 0 n.s. n.s. c/p = control group n.s. = not significant bold types = significantly higher scores (i.e., lower error rates) it is important to mention here that the ecls created a lot less contexts for using the past regular than the lcls.4 even though the learners were explicitly encouraged to tell the story in the past, 38% of the ecls avoided using past forms altogether (using the present simple and present perfect instead) and 4 note that the data still yielded a sufficient number of tokens for the two types to be contrasted. simone e. pfenninger 412 thus did not contribute any scores (compared to 9% of lcl ‘avoiders’). the picture looks similar for the past irregular: while the lcls produced a range of verbs besides be, which was used in 20.13% of the cases, the ecls used inflected be to a greater extent (54.08% of all the irregular verbs, to be precise). this kind of avoidance might be in part due to the l1-l2 difference variable described above; however, the between-group difference is still striking and might be tentatively interpreted as a lack of knowledge on the part of the ecls. table 4 percentage scores of past tenses judged correctly by ecls vs. lcls sentence no. ecls (n = 100) lcls (n = 100) t p c/p (n = 20) 52/44 (walked) .95 .97 n.s. n.s. 1.00 63/66 (visited) .92 .97 n.s. n.s. 1.00 74/78 (cleaned) .95 .98 n.s. n.s. 1.00 19/27 (end) .26 .45* 2.825 < .01 1.00 35/23 (taste) .13 .24* 2.007 < .05 1.00 77/77 (cook) .26 .45* 2.825 < .01 1.00 n.s. = not significant * significantly higher scores table 5 outlines the results for the production of the 3ps, regular and irregular plural, while tables 6 and 7 include the results of the critical morphemes in the gj task. table 5 also reveals that the ecls produced significantly more misformed 3pss and irregular plurals than the lcls, and they overused the 3pss and irregular plurals significantly more often in contexts where these markers were not required. langman & bayley (2002), who analyzed the production data of english morphology by nine untutored chinese learners of hungarian in a naturalistic setting, were able to discern two main strategies of the use of inflectional morphology; while four learners attempted to inflect correctly only those verb forms whose inflections they knew (like my lcls), the remaining three inflected “(nearly) everything as a strategy for getting the ‘right form’” (p. 70), similar to my ecls (see also pica, 1983). table 5 performance on 3ps agreement by ecls and lcls morpheme ecls (n = 100) lcls (n = 100) c/p (n = 20) chi-square (1df) p third person sing. (tokens) % % % correct 67.86* 59.48 100 7.19 .007 unmarked 19.69* 29.74 0 31.9 < .0001 unmarked with /s/, / / or /t / 2.72 3.25 0 n.s. n.s. overuse 7.81 5.64* 0 4.40 .036 participle 0.68 0.51 0 n.s. n.s. age effects on the acquisition of nominal and verbal inflections in an instructed setting 413 misformation 3.23 1.37* 0 9.02 .003 other 1.02 0 0 n.s. n.s. plural regular (tokens) % % % correct 90.28 87.80 100 n.s. n.s. overuse 1.04 0.48 0 n.s. n.s. unmarked 4.76 5.02 0 n.s. n.s. unmarked with /s/, / / or /t / 0.47 0.24 0 n.s. n.s. misformation 5.47 6.46 0 n.s. n.s. plural irregular (tokens) % % % correct 70.59 77.99* 100 8.60 .003 overuse 9.69 5.18* 0 8.91 .003 regularized 16.96 15.86 0 n.s. n.s. unmarked 0.69 0.65 0 n.s. n.s. misformation 2.08 0.32* 0 7.93 .005 c/p = control group n.s. = not significant * = significantly higher scores (i.e., lower error rates) table 6 percentage scores of 3ps agreement judged correctly by ecls vs. lcls sentence no. ecls (n = 100) lcls (n = 100) t p control group (n = 20) 27/19 (cries) 1.00 .98 n.s. n.s. 1.00 39/47 (repairs) 1.00 .98 n.s. n.s. 1.00 66/63 (watches) 1.00 .95 n.s. n.s. 1.00 49/49 (brush) .05 .15* 2.341 .02 1.00 54/40 (kiss) .16 .31* 2.541 .01 1.00 62/62 (like) .21 .27 n.s. n.s. 1.00 n.s. = not significant * = significantly higher scores table 7 percentage scores of regular plural markers judged correctly by ecls vs. lcls sentence no. ecls (n = 100) lcls (n = 100) t p c/p (n = 20) 22/33 (pigs) 1.00 1.00 n.s. n.s. 1.00 55/71 (matches) .97 .94 n.s. n.s. 1.00 67/67 (houses) .95 .95 n.s. n.s. 1.00 25/29 (glass) .42 .37 n.s. n.s. 1.00 30/30 (player) .32 .31 n.s. n.s. 1.00 53/43 (park) .50 .47 n.s. n.s. 1.00 n.s. = not significant the results of the tested regular plural forms in the gj task (table 7) are in line with previous work (e.g., mcdonald, 2008), where it was found that simone e. pfenninger 414 plurals are not as susceptible to processing deficits as past regular or 3ps. the accuracy scores on regular and irregular plural morphemes are almost identical in the ecls’ and lcls’ written performance tasks. the range in individual accuracy with plural regular morphemes was 40% to 100% for the ecls and 44% to 100% for the lcls; with plural irregular morphemes it was 50% to 100% for the ecls and 40% to 100% for the lcls. both groups omitted the nonsyllabic marker significantly more often than the syllabic allomorph: 100% of the forms omitted by the ecls and 95.45% by the lcls were nonsyllabic. table 8 variable article usage in ecls and lcls (standard deviation/mean) age group ecl lcl past regular correct 100% 147% past irregular correct 137% 103% 3ps correct 64% 76% plural regular correct 47% 61% plural irregular correct 72% 76% finally, if we test for fluctuation within the ecl sample and the lcl sample by relating the mean scores to the standard deviations, it becomes obvious that variation among lcls is slightly more marked than among ecls (table 8). it should be noted that if the measure standard deviation/mean approaches or exceeds 100%, then the fluctuation within the sample is greater for this value than any tendencies of the sample as a whole. discussion my results lead to several conclusions. unsurprisingly, both groups performed below the native speaker controls in their perception and production of the five morphemes, with the lowest accuracy scores for the 3ps for both lcls and ecls. also, they all manifested variability in their use of bound morphology, with similarly high standard deviations in the area of 3ps and irregular plural, yet clearly higher standard deviations in the lcl data for the past regular and irregular and the plural regular marker. in the gj task, the accuracy rates were highest across the plural morpheme and lowest across the 3ps marker. interestingly, all the learners overwhelmingly accepted the forms with correct inflection as grammatical, whereas the rejection rate is never over 50% in the ungrammatical sentences, which reflects a general problem with detection in a receptive task and might point to a general morphological insensitivity (see dekeyser, 2005; jiang, 2004). i will take up this issue in a forthcoming article. age effects on the acquisition of nominal and verbal inflections in an instructed setting 415 as regards the age factor (rq 1), the ecls did not seem to be stronger on l2 morphological production and detection despite their 5-year advance in l2 learning. with respect to rq 2, the two aoe groups were found to perform differently: the lcls’ performance is characterized by an increased importance of salience (higher scores on the production and detection of salient inflections than the ecls); a striking pattern of irregular > regular, that is, they are stronger on the production of irregular forms than the ecls across all tasks; and more lexical variety for the past simple verbs, that is, they create many more contexts for the use of the irregular past morphemes than the ecls. by contrast, the ecls overregularized more irregular past and irregular plural nouns (besides having a tendency to avoid using past forms altogether); they produced more misformations of the irregular past, irregular plural and 3ps; and they showed more difficulties in detecting omitted salient endings in verbs with a /s/, / / or /t / final phoneme. all of these phenomena are semantically-related issues. when it comes to phonological difficulties, we can observe some modest but inconsistent advantages for an early starting age: the lcls’ error rate on unmarked forms of the 3ps (nonsyllabic allomorph) was significantly higher than the one of the ecls. however, in the gj task, the two groups had similar scores in their judgment of (phonologically related) 3ps and plural morphemes; the lcls even had significantly higher accuracy scores in the detection of regular past violations. the findings can be tentatively interpreted as providing qualitative evidence for the different learning mechanisms involved at different ages, that is, how l2 learning takes place at different ages, as illustrated in ullman’s (2005) declarative-procedural model mentioned above. however, some of the findings also seem to support the single system view: in the production tasks, which by nature impose more processing demands on the learners, the ecls outperform the lcls. third person agreement morphology is highly susceptible to age of onset of acquisition, as it is a structure “in which fine phonological discrimination is necessary for one to perform accurately” (mcdonald, 2008, p. 983). phonological ability, however, decreases with age and is also highly susceptible to processing load, which explains the observed task effect. furthermore, it has to be borne in mind that the ecls had attained a state of cognitive development that was similar to that of the older learners with whom they were being compared by the time they were tested; thus, their rate of learning of morphosyntactic structures in those 6 months at middle school should be similar. also, both learner groups in this study began learning the l2 after the establishment of l1 phonetic categories (which is typically simone e. pfenninger 416 defined as the age of 5-7, cf. the discussion above), which means that neither of the two groups was at an advantage in terms of starting age. thus, since the evidence from all the bound morpheme categories tested here paints a somewhat mixed picture, a further investigation of the frequency effects for the regular and irregular verbs is in order (see pfenninger, 2011). besides not being subject to the same linguistic constraints, the two groups do not seem to employ the same strategies either (cf. langman & bayley, 2002): ecls have a greater tendency to inflect all possible forms (cf. their significantly higher overuse of irregular plural and 3ps morphemes and the proportionally more misformation and agreement errors on the 3ps), hoping some will match the target, while the lcls are more selective, that is, they tend to omit inflections they do not know. conclusion in conclusion, an earlier onset of l2 learning (and thus a greater amount of exposure and input) does not seem to be relevant for the accuracy of regular/irregular plural, regular/irregular past tense, and 3ps morphemes. while the findings indicate that rule-based mechanisms as well as memory-based item-by-item associative learning processes coexist in both groups, memorybased processes seem to be the predominant strategy in the lcl data: in most semantically-related areas the lcls’ performance was shown to be stronger, while the elcs were marginally better in some phonologically-related areas. if we try to explain why an earlier aoe does not seem to be advantageous in the field of bound morphology, we have to come back to the learning situation at the primary school level. one possible scenario is that after the 5year period of learning english, the ecls have not reached a proficiency level beyond the initial stage of beginners because of the amount and nature of the input they received. in a multitude of studies (e.g., ellis, 2006; goldschneider & dekeyser, 2001), formal, explicit instruction of morphosyntactic structures has been found to be quite effective. implicit learning processes, by contrast, are often doubted to be effective in instructed contexts, mainly due to a lack of massive input, a focus on fluency at the expense of accuracy, and/or cognitive disadvantages of learners beyond early childhood (e.g., dekeyser, 2003; ellis & larsen-freeman, 2006). furthermore, it is well-known that the early elementary l2 language course typically progresses much more slowly than any high school course: with an average of two 45-min lessons of instruction per week it is perhaps not unusual for the ecls to be still at the initial point of english morphology after 5 years (cf. also de graaff & housen, 2009). age effects on the acquisition of nominal and verbal inflections in an instructed setting 417 it is also possible that since the primary teachers in switzerland are advised not to engage in explicit grammatical instruction, the students might acquire and internalize erroneous forms over the years, which are then difficult to eradicate at middle school level afterwards. furthermore, we cannot know for certain if the input that the ecls received in primary school was native-like. the quality of input has been found to play an equally important role as the quantity, both in an instructed and naturalistic setting (see e.g., flege’s [1991] accented l1 input hypothesis). however, for practical reasons, the input that these students were exposed to could not be measured in this study. another explanation can be provided in terms of the language background of the two groups: the lcls’ superiority can be seen as a direct influence of their previous knowledge of french. since the lcls studied english as an l4, they might have profited from l2 learning strategies and cognitive learning mechanisms they developed while learning l3 french. recent works on the influence of previous knowledge of foreign languages within a cognitive approach (e.g., williams & lovatt, 2003) found that learners who know many languages are more likely to exploit similarities between the items of new foreign languages and features in other languages that they know. thus, the more languages with a rich inflectional system (such as high german and french) the learners know, the more this knowledge could contribute to their morphological sensitivity. finally, in pfenninger (in press) i show that while the two starting age groups described in this paper do not differ in terms of their motivational intensity (quantitative difference), they differ in terms of the structure of their motivational profile (qualitative difference), which reveals that the crucial factors must lie in the kind of input the two populations received in the past, that is, different learning experiences (curricular vs. extracurricular l2 acquisition). simone e. pfenninger 418 references bird, h., lambon ralph, m. a., seidenberg, m. s., mcclelland, j. l., & patterson, k. 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(2010). acquisition of l2 english morphology. a family case study. australian review of applied linguistics, 33(3), 29.1-29.17. 149 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (1). 2017. 149-167 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.1.8 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the role of attitudes in the development of russian as a foreign language: a retrospective study szilvia bátyi university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary szilviabatyi7@gmail.com abstract the article reports the findings of a retrospective study which looked at hungarian learners’ attitudes towards russian people, the russian language and teachers of russian. mixed-methods sequential explanatory design (ivankova, creswell, & stick, 2006) was applied which combines the collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data in two consecutive phases. first person accounts turned out to be a useful and relevant resource for exploring individual differences in proficiency in russian. differences in attitudes appear to play a role in the developmental process, but to what extent this refers to attrition or non-acquisition is unclear. keywords: attitude; motivation; retention; russian; foreign language 1. introduction the current literature (szilágyiné, 2006; see also dörnyei, csizér, & németh, 2006) suggests that russian lessons were not effective in hungarian schools, where it was taught as an obligatory subject from 1945 to 1988, mainly due to attitudinal factors towards the occupants. however, the period of occupation can be divided into three phases (szilágyiné, 2006), and during the final phase, the students were probably less affected by the negative attitudes towards the russian language and people. this study examines the attitude of the learners szilvia bátyi 150 in the final phase by means of a motivational survey and in-depth interviews. russian language proficiency was ascertained by means of a lexical test (recognition and recall) tapping the number of words the participants knew from a set of words in russian. the assumption was that many factors play a role in the lexical development (i.e., acquisition and attrition) of words. by means of a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design (ivankova, creswell, & stick, 2006), the study explored the extent to which a negative attitude towards the speakers of the language may have played a role in the recall of russian words in russian as a foreign language. the main goals of this study were to measure the impact of attitude(s) on proficiency in russian and to identify different factors contributing to low or high language retention by analysing first person accounts. 2. teaching and learning russian in hungary russian teaching in hungary between 1945 and 1989 is considered by many people, including linguists (dörnyei et al., 2006; enyedi & medgyes, 1998) and former learners and teachers of russian, to have been a failure. it is thought that one of the main causes of this failure was the general negative attitude towards learning russian; this was also the main assumption of this study. i supposed that among the measured variables, negative attitudes towards the language and the speakers of the target language (at that time the russian “invaders”) would have the strongest impact on the degree of language retention. between 1944 and 1945 the red army invaded hungary and drove out german soldiers and their allies from the country, an act referred to officially as liberation for 44 years. due to several political events and agreements, russian soldiers remained in hungary until 1990, their number remaining at around 100,000 (molnár, 1996). the relationship the citizens had with the soldiers changed from hatred to indifference during this period. the historical memory of hungary is still processing the horrors of the first years of the invasion (1944/45) (see pető, 2014), but as ungváry (2002) notes, on an individual level there were those for whom the appearance of soviet soldiers meant life, and others for whom it meant captivity, rape and uncertainty. for the majority of people the soldiers became almost invisible as they lived in their barracks functioning as a “state in the state” (molnár, 1996). thus, people had no or limited contact with the russians in hungary during the greater part of those 40 years. russian was initially introduced to hungarian schools as a non-compulsory subject and only at some levels of the education system. at that time there was no history of russian teaching in hungary; therefore, basic materials and other essentials were lacking. there were no trained teachers, no textbooks, no teaching aids and no cyrillic letters available in the printing houses. lendvai (2005) claims that russian language teaching and learning failed due to the lack of appropriate methodology, the role of attitudes in the development of russian as a foreign language: a retrospective study 151 real opportunity for practice and the resulting lack of interest and/or positive attitude towards the language, as evident from the following quote from bognár (2008) exemplifying the hungarian prejudice against russian: between the end of the wwii and 1989, russian was the compulsory foreign language in schools in hungary. almost all students started learning it at the age of 10 in the fourth or the fifth grade of primary education and studied it for at least four years in primary school and another four years in secondary schools. thus, russian was the number one foreign language. for obvious reasons, teaching russian to hungarians became synonymous with total failure in language education: after eight years of study of the language, the vast majority of hungarians could hardly survive in russian. a fine example of counter-motivation in education. (p. 6) this quote makes two basic assumptions that may not be valid: (a) that the teaching of russian was a failure and (b) that this was due to a negative attitude. however, the compulsory nature of russian may not have affected each period, school type, and level equally. moreover, this assumption ignores the fact that some students were actually successful in acquiring the language to the extent that they were able to attend soviet union schools/universities, for both long and short term educational periods (lendvai, 2005). however, there is little systematic research on russian language teaching and learning in hungary. one exception is szilágyiné hodossy zsófia (2006), who compiled a comprehensive book on foreign language teaching in primary schools between 1945 and 1995 in hungary. she divides the russian period into three phases with different characteristics: · pluralism (1944-1949) was characterized by the fact that besides russian other languages were taught in schools. the goal of russian teaching was to teach the culture of the neighbouring nations. the period was characterised by a lack of basic conditions (teachers, books, dictionaries, teaching aids) for teaching the language. · centralisation (1949-1956) was characterized by the fact that no other foreign languages were taught in schools apart from russian. the teacher training problem was seemingly solved by 7.5-month russian training programs for teachers of other foreign languages, where, besides learning the language, they also had to gather knowledge about the culture, history, politics and geography of the soviet union. · gradual liberalisation (1957-1988) was characterized by the fact that following the 1956 revolution restoration to previous times was impossible and gradually other foreign languages began to re-emerge in the educational system. in russian teaching, ideology became less important, and there was an attempt to encourage students to use the language in real-life situations (szilágyiné, 2006). as a result most of the students had pen pals in the soviet union. szilvia bátyi 152 the failure of 40 years of russian teaching becomes clear from vágó’s (2000) discussion of the main tendencies of foreign language teaching in hungary during the 1980’s and 1990’s. as she claims, the declaration of free language choice in hungary happened in a european context, where, in most countries, it became clear that the main task of institutional education was to give answers to the global, regional and local challenges amongst which the development of communication competencies was of high priority. foreign language knowledge, especially the knowledge of western languages, began to be valued in the hungarian labour market, which created a need for its institutionalisation voiced by the parents (vágó, 2000). this period was also characterised by the low level proficiency of the adult (older than 14 years) population; for example, in 1994 only 11.8% of adult hungarians claimed to speak a foreign language, and 3.6% spoke two foreign languages besides the mother tongue (which is/was the european norm) (terestyéni, 1995). according to vágó (2000), these low results stem from a complete lack of motivation due to the long isolation of the country and the disinterest in the compulsory learning of russian. she also claims that positive attitudes towards foreign language learning were formed in the 1980’s and stabilised in the 1990’s. in summary, some authors (e.g., szilágyiné, 2006) stress the lack of appropriate teaching conditions, such as the lack of teaching materials, as the main causes of failure. others (e.g., vágó, 2000) blame the low proficiency in russian speaking among hungarian citizens on the inefficiency of its teaching, the obligatory nature of the subject, a lack of interest, a lack of real-life situations in which the language might be used and the negative attitudes towards the speakers due to past experience. however, it is important to note that the claims are based on impressions, not on empirical findings. the present study tried to establish empirically what the attitudes of students learning russian between 1958 and 1988 were and indirectly measure the impact of these attitudes on the development of lexical skills in russian. 3. attitudes and motivation in fl learning attitudes and motivations are very complex, multidimensional constructs, which implies difficulties in their operationalisation. as dörnyei et al. (2006) suggest, motivation is “intended to explain nothing less than the reasons for human behaviour. because of this ambitious aim, there is no general consensus on the definition of the notion . . .” (p. 9). the concepts of attitude and motivation in the study of l2 learning often overlap and are in interaction with each other, given the fact that, for example, attitude towards the l2 community is a component of motivation. the idea of studying l2 attitudes and motivations by breaking them the role of attitudes in the development of russian as a foreign language: a retrospective study 153 down into components, that is, attitudinal/motivational factors, comes from social psychology. gardner (1985) developed a questionnaire, the attitude and motivational test battery (amtb), which proved to be a powerful instrument for measuring attitudes and motivation of l2 and foreign language learners. a host of studies have grown out of gardner’s tradition since then, many of them identifying other important factors (e.g., kimura, nakata, & okumura, 2001; the intrinsic-instrumental-integrative motive). dörnyei et al. (2006) in their longitudinal study (1993-2004) included items from existing instruments and combined them with gardner’s general idea, extending the clusters with linguistic selfconfidence, cultural interest, ethnolinguistic vitality, milieu. vígh-szabó (2015) mentions typological proximity between languages as a factor of high motivation. a difference between the original study by gardner and dörnyei et al.’s research is the presence/lack of the target language community in the vicinity of learners, that is, second language and foreign language settings. gardner’s general idea with the amtb was to study the situation where the l2 community (french canadians) was present in the country; thus, it was not a typical “foreign language learning” situation. while in hungary, as dörnyei notes, a “foreign language learning situation was faced where students learnt languages as school subjects with very little (if any) direct contact with members of the l2 communities” (p. 10). based on this discussion, dörnyei et al.’s language disposition questionnaire would appear to be the right choice to investigate russian as a fl in hungary; however, it measures real-time opinions and is therefore not suitable for a highly retrospective study. furthermore, it focuses on generalizable motives rather than on situation-specific motives (e.g., attitudes towards the l2 teacher). therefore, gardner’s amtb may be a better instrument, especially when supplemented with personal interviews. csillagh’s (2015) analysis of the swiss context highlights important motivational factors in language learning, pointing out that “theoretical developments have gradually moved away from the notion of a clear-cut division between internal and external factors in favour of a more complex representation of l2 motivation” (p. 433). she found that different contextual elements play an important role in university students’ motivation and attitude. language learning does not happen in a vacuum, and the context is multi-layered including a linguistic, social, economic and political sphere. dörnyei et al. (2006) refer to russian teaching and learning in hungary as dramatically ineffective: in 19791982 not more than 2.9% of the hungarian adult population spoke russian, which decreased by 1994 to 1% (terestyéni, as cited in dörnyei et al., 2006). they claim that hungarians were reluctant to learn russian “because it represented the oppressive power” (p. 4) and they also lacked positive language attitudes. however, as previously mentioned, there is no empirical evidence on language attitudes and motivation from the period. szilvia bátyi 154 3.1. measuring attitudes retrospectively there is little research on the accuracy of retrospective attitudinal data. gutek (1978) presents data that shows that with the passing of years the accuracy of attitudes does not necessarily deteriorate. her research shows that “the assumption that attitudes in the past are recalled less accurately over time is unwarranted” (p. 399). a review of the literature on the reliability of recall data (dex, 1995) also shows that many types of retrospective data collection are actually sufficiently reliable, though of course for validity purposes very specific data with clear points of reference are needed. 3.2. measuring effectiveness of fl teaching retrospectively foreign language learning through instruction requires a large amount of time, effort and devotion invested by both the students and teachers. measuring the effectiveness of this effort retrospectively is not really possible, but it is possible to measure how much of the foreign language is retained. the assumption is that the better the language is taught, the more entrenched its forms are, and the better it is retained; but it is also a well-known phenomenon that if foreign language knowledge is not maintained (due to disuse or reduced input), it will start to decline. this phenomenon is called foreign language attrition, the non-pathological decrease of language skills in a language that had previously been learnt through instruction by an individual, a definition adapted from köpke and schmid (2004). in this study, we cannot be sure how much had been learned to begin with, but we will assume that common nouns that occurred in all the textbooks were at least seen by the participants and the more words are remembered at the time of the study, the fewer words were forgotten and the higher the proficiency is. in the remainder of this article, the term attrition will be used, but it should be interpreted as the combination of non-acquisition and attrition. the research question is whether there is a link between words remembered and attitude towards the russian language or its people. 4. the study 4.1. participants in this study 39 participants (29 females and 10 males) who had learnt russian between 1958 and 1988, that is, the period called “gradual liberalisation,” were tested. participants were recruited and selected by the snowball approach (goodman, 1961). to help prevent the occurrence of any age effect, the age range of the role of attitudes in the development of russian as a foreign language: a retrospective study 155 participants was limited to 40-56. participants were divided into three age categories (40-45: 9 participants, 46-50: 14 participants, and 51-56: 16 participants). the main criterion for selection was having had russian as a mandatory subject before the dissolution of the soviet union (before the 1990s; see bátyi, 2015). 4.2. instruments and procedure several data collection instruments were used in the study to collect both qualitative and quantitative data: the amtb, a short interview and a lexical test. 4.2.1. amtb the participants were asked to fill in an adapted online version of the attitude and motivation test battery (amtb). in the questionnaire, the participants were asked to indicate on a 7-point likert scale to which extent they agreed with the statements. there were seven randomized clusters: 1. attitude towards learning foreign languages (atlfl) (e.g., “if i were visiting a foreign country, i would like to be able to speak the language of the people”), 2. attitudes towards russian people (atrp) (e.g., “russians are a very sociable, warm-hearted and creative people”), 3. integrative orientation (int.o) (e.g., “studying russian was important for me because it enabled me to better understand and appreciate russian art and literature”), 4. instrumental orientation (inst.o) (e.g., “studying russian was important to me because i thought it would someday be useful in getting a good job”), 5. attitudes towards learning russian (atlr) (positively worded items and negatively worded items, e.g., “russian was an important part of the school programme”; “learning russian was a waste of time”). 6. anxiety in russian class (anx) (e.g., “i always felt that the other students spoke russian better than i did”). 7. attitudes towards the teacher (att), which included positive and negative features (e.g., “friendly-unfriendly,” “organised-disorganised”); unlike other parts of the questionnaire, participants had to indicate on a 6point likert scale to what extent the positive or negative adjective characterised their teacher. table 1 shows cronbach’s a and the mean for each cluster. szilvia bátyi 156 table 1 reliability measures and means for the clusters atlfl atrp int.o inst.o atlr (pos) atlr (neg) anx att cronbach’s a .773 .928 .887 .571 .898 .914 .925 .912 mean 5.800 4.600 3.900 3.500 4.700 3.000 2.700 5.800 4.2.2. the interview the interview, as a complementary instrument, helped to “put flesh on the quantitative bones” (singleton & pfenninger, 2015, p. 12). while in the questionnaire attitude was operationalized by closed statements, the interview with the same questions elicited more detailed answers, which provided a degree of triangulation. 4.2.3. the lexical test one hundred words were chosen to test participants’ lexical knowledge. the stimulus words were selected from books that were used at the time of the language learning (e.g., hlavács & rédey, 1969; kecskés, 1986; szilágyi & oszipova, 1989). it was important that the selected words appear in the word lists of most of these books. only nouns were selected, and they were categorised into the following groups: people (e.g., boy, grandmother), places (e.g., house, shop), school-related (e.g., pen, desk), animals (e.g., dog, elephant), food and drink (e.g., milk, bread), body (e.g., hair, head), nature (e.g., air, tree), abstract (e.g., peace, song). to avoid a trigger effect, each level (recall and recognition) contained the same number from each category in a randomised order (bátyi, 2017). both on the recall and recognition level, 50 nouns were used as stimuli. on the recall level, participants were asked to translate a given word from hungarian to russian, and on the recognition level, from russian to hungarian. 4.3. design and analyses the results of the lexical test served as the dependent variable. for such a complex construct as foreign language non-acquisition or attrition, it is important to be careful when drawing conclusions as predefined variables may not always fully explain variations. for this reason, i opted for a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design, which implies “collecting and analysing quantitative and then qualitative data in two consecutive phases within one study” (ivankova et al., 2006). after the group level analysis, i looked at the individual data to find patterns in the quantitative and qualitative data. as a result of this approach, it was possible to put the participants into four categories or learner profiles. the role of attitudes in the development of russian as a foreign language: a retrospective study 157 as for the quantitative analyses an independent t test was used to compare the number of successfully retrieved words on the recall and the recognition level. a multivariate regression analysis was conducted to reveal the predictor variables, that is, to what extent the independent variables predict language attrition and/or retention. from the dependent variables (recall and recognition) a composite variable was created (their correlation was very high: r = .955, p < .001). for this part of the analyses, the results of the amtb were used as independent variables. traditionally, contact with and use of the language since the onset of attrition is taken into account; however, in this case, only a few participants mentioned the fact that once or twice they had given directions in russian, had had a short conversation in the language or had read russian on signs, which is why this dimension could not be included in the analyses. the following variables (extralinguistic aspects) were chosen: age (3 levels, see section 4.1), sex, language exposure (the number of years of studying russian), attitude towards russian people (atrp), attitude towards russian language (atlr) and attitude towards the teacher (att). in the case of atlr and att, i wanted to create composite variables as both had positively worded and negatively worded items. the correlation of the positive and negative components of the atlr (r = -781, p < .001, n = 39) enabled me to create the composite variable (after item reversal). for the teacher questionnaire the correlation between the two components was low (r = -.386, p < .005, n = 39), so i decided to include them separately: negative attitude towards the teacher (attneg) and positive attitude towards the teacher (attpos). 5. results 5.1. quantitative analyses previous research (de bot & stoessel, 2000) suggests that participants recognise more words than they recall due to the fact that recognition and recall include different processes. the present results confirmed these findings: there was a significant difference between the two lexical test scores presented in table 2: t(8) = -9.664, p < .001 table 2 summary of scores on the lexical test n m sd min max recall 39 18.74 16.23 0 1 recognition 39 26.26 16.30 50 50 szilvia bátyi 158 it is also important to note that the min-max-value range is very wide. in order to better visualize the spread of individual results, the z-scores were calculated for each participant and are presented in figure 2. figure 2 the spread of individual scores on the lexical test table 3 shows the variables which have predictive power on the level of retention. 61.3% of the variance is explained by the attitude towards learning russian (atlr), number of years of studying, and sex. table 3 multiple stepwise regression analyses (questionnaire) variable r r square adjusted r square atlr .691 .478 .464 atlr/language exposure .773 .598 .576 atlr/language exposure/sex .802 .643 .612 note. atlr = attitude towards learning russian. 5.2. learners’ profiles while the multiple regression analysis works best with reduced numbers of variables, the pattern-seeking analysis on the qualitative side can include all of the relevant variables. learner profiles were created to enable detection of commonalties among them in the interview data. to reduce the number of variables from the amtb, only clusters that showed clear differences among participants were used. the findings demonstrated few differences among the participants on the following factors, which were almost all positive: attitude towards russian people, attitude towards the teacher, and attitude towards learning foreign languages. therefore, these factors were not included in determining the profiles, and four measures remained: attitude towards learning russian (atlr; r = -781, n = 39, p < .001), integrative and instrumental orientation (r = .725, p < .005, n = 39), anxiety, and the score on the lexical test. -4 -2 0 2 4 the role of attitudes in the development of russian as a foreign language: a retrospective study 159 for each participant, a mean for each factor was calculated on the independent variables (e.g., atlr) and categorised as high (3.6-7) or low (0-3.5). also, participants were split into two groups according to their score on the lexical test: high (51-100) and low (0-50). table 4 shows the distribution of the participants in the different learner profiles. most participants were categorised according to these measures, although some of them (marked with asterisk) showed some “deviations” from the pre-set categories. table 4 learners’ profiles (the numbers are the codes of participants) profile 1 profile 2 profile 3 profile 4 factors low test score low atlr low orientation high anxiety low test score high atlr high orientation high anxiety medium test score high atlr high orientation low anxiety high test score high orientation high atlr low anxiety participants 15 64 1 18 16 26 39 37* 38* 51* 5 61 44 2 55 32** 3 43 63 27 29 56 36 28 19 48 25 42 52 21 41 49 23 58 17 53*** 50**** 54**** note. * the participant fits the category except for anxiety; ** the participant fits the category except for atlr; *** the participant fits the category except for anxiety; **** the participant fits the category except for orientation. participant 67 is exceptional as he/she does not fit any of the categories. table 5 presents the means and standard deviations for each profile. the maximum score was 100 (50 points each for recall and recognition). participants in profile 4 scored higher than the participants of the other profiles. table 5 summary of the lexical test scores of the learner profiles profile 1 profile 2 profile 3 profile 4 n 10.0 6.0 7.0 15.0 m 17.1 16.0 36.6 80.0 sd 15.1 10.0 11.4 17.1 szilvia bátyi 160 in the next section the four learner profiles are further analysed with reference to the participants’ recollections and links and references to the (russian) teaching and learning context of the period. 5.2.1. interview data 5.2.1.1. profile 1 overall, learners in this group lacked the motivation to learn russian, which was fuelled by different negative components of the teaching and learning context. most of them could not take the subject seriously due to the ineffective teaching methods. #37 (at the college) in the first lesson our reading proficiency was assessed, and the results were catastrophic, even we, students could give this diagnoses . . . our teacher then gave us the task to take the text and decide word by word if it was a noun or a verb . . . so all you had to do was saying: one, two, one, one, etc. participant #37 explained that the class was very heterogeneous in the sense that students came with very different language proficiency backgrounds, and the above detailed strategy of the teacher to cope with the situation was insufficient and ineffective, resulting in low motivation in the class. besides low motivation, low requirements can lead to a negative attitude, as was confirmed by another learner from the group, who claimed to have had several russian teachers, none of whom put high demands on the class. #38 there were no high requirements. we had a vocabulary copy book with 10-20 words in it and all you had to do was to learn the words by heart and get your 5 . . . it (russian) was never as serious as history or math. [5 is the highest grade in the hungarian school system.] there was no real interpersonal contact between citizens and russians in the period, which could have hindered the formation of a positive attitude towards the target language. a good requirement in the schools was to have penfriends from the target language community, although it was not obligatory in all schools. the success of this strategy to motivate learners was dependent on how it was implemented by the teacher. one of the learners (#1) from profile 1 noted that in their school it was compulsory to have a penfriend, but the letters they sent were the same for the whole class and included sample sentences such as “it is raining here” or ‘i am fine.” the response was translated by the teacher, which led to disinterest and ignorance among the students. the lack of instrumental motivation is exemplified by participant #26, who claimed that he had no language aptitude and that this explains the low proficiency the role of attitudes in the development of russian as a foreign language: a retrospective study 161 he had achieved in russian, but, nevertheless, he learnt english when he lived abroad because he “needed” the language for communication. another component which contributed to the formation of negative attitudes was the compulsory nature of the subject: #37 well . . . it was compulsory, there was nothing to love or not to love in it. #1 the political system was such that we were forced to learn it and it showed in our russian learning . . . we did not learn it for fun at all! #64 because it was compulsory the only goal was to survive. #16 we were not in a good relationship, i considered it as necessary evil. generally, in the interviews there were no indications that the attitudes towards the language would have been shaped by the attitude towards its speakers, but in this extract a learner refers to negative feelings: #51 at high school, where my mind was just opening up i learned what damage the red army caused in the country and since then i had negative feelings. i wasn’t adult enough to handle it separately from the language and the people. at the university it changed totally because i was in love with russian literature and wasn’t angry with the language any more. however, i had no motivation to learn it. 5.2.1.2. profile 2 in this learner profile participants also scored low on the lexical test (< 50); however, their attitude towards learning russian was positive as well as their integrative and instrumental orientation (> 3.5). based on the questionnaire results, the only factor that could have contributed to the low performance are the high values on the anxiety measure. the interviews were analysed to find the sources of the anxiety of these learners. anxiety is a complex and multi-element construct (see, e.g., the anxiety scale in horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986), and reconstructing it from the recollections of the participants is only one way to gather information; however, the interviews revealed multiple factors. participant #5, for example, mentioned the teachers with whom she had no particular problems, the tasks she partly liked, her attitude towards russians which, eventually, had no negative effect on her language learning (#5), and, finally, she briefly referred to the class as a community which, in her opinion, was somehow not good. unfortunately, she did not elaborate on this remark. another participant (#55) reported on the traumatic experience when at secondary school she had become part of a class in which the teacher was not willing to say a word in her mother tongue, and only russian was used. by the szilvia bátyi 162 end of the first year, she almost failed but finally managed to survive the secondary school class with an acceptable level in russian. participant #32 talked about the assignments and recitations in each class and punishment from the strict teacher, although her attitude towards the teacher was positive. others (participants #32, #44 and #2) referred to obligatory russian learning as a “compulsion” and “duty.” it is generally assumed that due to the russian invasion the attitude towards learning the russian language was negative. apart from the quote from participant #51, none of the interviewees referred to negative attitudes; they all seemed to be rather neutral in this respect: #5 it was two different things what we learned at school and what we learned from our parents. in the school they tried to teach us the russian culture, e.g., the tretyakov gallery, the monuments and famous buildings of moscow, generally the culture. what i heard at home, that when they trooped into the town my parents found their behaviour very strange and unusual, and their thinking was so different from ours. so, for me it was hard to compare these two things, you know, what i heard from my parents and their experience and at school . . . there was this dichotomy. it was because at that time it was hard-core socialism. and it was strengthened in the education too, the big soviet brothers, their culture, and . . . that we should be like them and follow them. that was in fashion to say so . . . interestingly it did not influence my learning of russian. i was interested in what i learnt at school [emphasis added]. 5.2.1.3. profile 3 this profile has only one distinctive feature in comparison to profile 4, which is the score on the lexical test: regardless of the high attitude measures and the low anxiety, the participants in this group performed low on the vocabulary test. an interesting pattern emerging from the interview data of this group is that throughout the school years, participants lost their interest and motivation in learning russian and the teacher had a key role in shaping their negative attitude. the following extracts describe a decrease in motivation and attitude. #3 i liked our primary school teacher very much, she had even no diploma, but she was very enthusiastic. i think i chose teaching english as a profession because i felt i had language aptitude . . . our secondary school teacher was less good . . . i set myself to a minimal program. the methods of the teacher were not inspiring either, we had to learn rules by heart in hungarian, and the words, no communication method could be traced. #56 i had very nice russian teachers and i loved the lessons too. but later, at high school, i could see we were not improving. the teacher had a great taste of humour . . . but we were not forced to study. then i started learning english four years later and it was much more intensive. i think not because of the difference between the languages but probably the methods were more effective. the role of attitudes in the development of russian as a foreign language: a retrospective study 163 #29 my favourite was the primary school teacher, she could make me study. the second was the high-school teacher . . . at the university we basically repeated the highschool material. effectiveness and methodology were far away from each other. #36 i had a brilliant teacher in primary school, but in the second year we got our formmaster as a russian teacher, who was a good teacher, but usually we put russian aside and talked about class-related issues. at the university the teacher was just terrible. in addition to negative feelings towards the teacher, participants also mentioned the ineffective teaching methods that had hardly any practical relevance: #36 it was very lexical without any practical knowledge. we wouldn’t be able to ask a glass of water. if they had dropped us in moscow we would have been able to find our way without any maps because we knew by heart where everything was. and we also knew the content and characters of swan lake by heart, although i think i would never need that knowledge. 5.2.1.4. profile 4 most of the participants (15) were put into this category due to the high scores on the lexical test, which was accompanied with high instrumental and integrative orientation, a positive attitude towards learning russian and low anxiety. with only a cursory look at the interview data, it becomes evident why these participants performed well on both the recall and recognition test: many of them took russian as a major at university or took part in the 7.5 month russian training programs for teachers of other foreign languages. but it is not clear why they decided to continue their russian studies and what factors played a role in forming their positive attitude towards learning the language. first of all, as most participants in the previous profiles, they did not identify the language with politics, as evidenced by participant #54: “many (older) people identified the language with the system, because both were mandatory, but i looked at them as separate things.” in the following extract the participant refers to age-related issues in connection with the attitude towards russian people saying that schoolchildren are not interested in political issues: #25 in my opinion we were a lucky generation. we didn’t have to be scared that our parents would be taken from us if their way of thinking was different or they were not members of the party. my parents were not members and i know there were some problems but we, children, knew nothing about it. they really protected us from any information . . . the truth is that i wasn’t interested. i wasn’t concerned or affected . . . i was a kid and all i cared for was that i could go and ride my bicycle, play tennis or play with my doll. szilvia bátyi 164 another participant, who spent some time in russia during her school years, also talked about russians positively regardless of the fact that her father was in russian captivity: #21 i can only talk about russians positively . . . they have a very deep spiritual life despite the fact that they had to suffer through the years of communism . . . both, the educated and ordinary people are likeable, hospitable and warm-hearted. my father was in russian captivity but he also described them very positively. another factor which is revealed by the interviews is the role of the teacher in forming positive attitudes in the classroom towards learning the foreign language: #42 i loved my primary school teacher very much and i think i learned everything from her which is more or less stable since then. #23 i loved it very much. our teacher taught in a playful way, she used word-cards and authentic material. 6. discussion and conclusion this paper investigated a commonly held assumption that learning russioan was ineffective in hungary because hungarians did not want to identify with its occupants. thirty-nine hungarians who learnt russian as an obligatory foreign language between 1958 and 1988 were tested. after the amtb was administered, the participants were interviewed and then tested with a lexical test. two levels of lexical knowledge were tested: recall and recognition. in line with de bot and stoessel’s (2000) study, participants recognised more words than they recalled. regression analysis showed that the extent of retention is predicted by the attitude towards learning russian (atlr) and the length of language exposure. the explanatory power of time spent on learning russian is not surprising, but contrary to expectations, attitudes towards the speakers of russian (i.e. russian people) have no impact on the number of retained word. if the context of language learning at that time is considered, these results are easily accounted for. students in the period in question had had very few or no opportunities to have contact with the target language community (not only in hungary but elsewhere in europe too; see littlewood, 1984), which means that their attitude towards learning the language could only be shaped in school by the teacher. this fact is reflected in the present findings, which show that attitude towards learning russian has the strongest predictive power. because the learning experience was limited to the classroom, the teacher played a key role in shaping the students’ the role of attitudes in the development of russian as a foreign language: a retrospective study 165 attitudes and in keeping their interest alive by using engaging methods and in setting requirements to the right level. based on the results of the lexical test (scores) and the attitude and motivation questionnaire, four learner profiles were created to explore further how the learners felt about the russian people and the language. the interviews confirmed the finding that the learners did not have a negative view of the russian occupants, and that teaching methods were highly ineffective, which was probably related to the low atlr scores. the group with higher atlr scores and medium lexical test scores were on the whole more positive about their teachers and lessons, especially those in elementary school. the one group with high scores were highly motivated with low anxiety, but most importantly they had continued exposure to russian. it is not clear whether the motivation played a role in exposure, but having used more russian was clearly related to the high scores. from both the regression analysis and interviews, it may be concluded that rather than the attitude towards the russian people, the attitude towards learning russian was a strong predictor of retaining lexical items. the other strong predictor was the amount of exposure. thus contrary to the main assumption, negative attitudes towards russian speakers and the extent of retention are not related. authors (dörnyei et al., 2006; vágó 2000) often refer to the russians as invaders and as such the main sources of negative attitudes towards learning their language by hungarians. our participants obviously had no negative attitudes towards russian people as a whole as they did not identify the language with politics; they claimed they were simply too young to have any opinion on the topic. results do show that teaching and learning russian was not very effective. participants complained of spending too much time on learning rules while getting little or no communication practice (see lendvai, 2005; szilágyiné, 2006; vágó, 2000). this study clearly demonstrated that the assumed connection between positive attitudes and language retention is more complicated than often assumed: the classroom environment and the role of the teacher have more impact on the extent of retention than, for example, the political environment or attitudes towards the speakers with whom students have no or limited contact. although foreign language teaching methods and opportunities have changed tremendously since the dissolution of the soviet union, in many countries, including hungary, it is still often the case that students have no real-life opportunities to use the language with the speakers of the target language (and form their attitudes), which often limits language use and language input almost 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(2015). a kontrasztív szemlélet az észt mint idegen nyelv tanításában és egy készülő segédanyag tervezete [the contrastive approach in the teaching of estonian as a foreign language and the draft of a teaching aid]. folia uralica debreceniensia, 22, 311-325. 379 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (2). 2019. 379-395 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.2.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt promoting efl students’ accuracy and fluency through interactive practice activities kim mcdonough concordia university, montreal, canada https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3165-9687 kim.mcdonough@concordia.ca masatoshi sato universidad andrés bello, santiago, chile https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7111-3406 masatoshi.sato@unab.cl abstract this study examined the effectiveness of interactive activities at facilitating efl students’ production of english relative clauses. thirty-seven efl learners in chile carried out interactive activities designed to elicit relative clauses. preand posttests were used to examine whether carrying out the activities facilitated the students’ production of relative clauses. all interactions were audio-recorded and the transcripts were analyzed to determine how accurately and fluently the students produced relative clauses before, during, and after the practice activities. whereas accuracy was defined as errors involving relative clause formation, fluency was operationalized in terms of the number of pauses, false starts, and self-corrections that occurred within relative clauses. the results showed that the students produced significantly more accurate relative clauses on the posttest; however, their production of dysfluencies remained unchanged. implications for the use of interactive activities are discussed. keywords: interactive activities; skill acquisition theory; accuracy and fluency; structural priming; efl kim mcdonough, masatoshi sato 380 1. introduction despite the widespread acceptance of communicative language teaching (clt), a persistent challenge for communicatively-oriented l2 teachers remains how to provide students with opportunities to meaningfully produce the target language orally so that they become accurate and fluent language users. while accuracy refers to error-free speech, fluency here refers to utterance fluency, which is measured in terms of disturbances to speech rate and to the flow of speech, such as pauses and reformulations (segalowitz, 2010). in some early discussions of clt (e.g., brumfit, 1984), accuracy and fluency were presented as distinct and polarized concepts, with each one associated with particular types of classroom activities. for example, whereas fluency-oriented activities involved genuine communication and spontaneous production, accuracy-oriented activities were more tightly-controlled and less meaning-oriented (koponen & riggenbach, 2000). in contemporary clt classrooms, the emphasis is often on fluency-building activities. for example, rossiter and colleagues’ review of esl textbook and teacher resources (rossiter, derwing, manimtim, & thomson, 2010) found that the most common fluency-building activities were free production activities, such as role plays and discussions. however, free production activities often fail to elicit grammatical structures that are difficult to acquire (collins & white, 2014). in addition, they may not provide students with enough meaningful and repetitive practice so that they can develop the skill to retrieve linguistic forms with greater proceduralization or automaticity (dekeyser, 2010; gatbonton & segalowitz, 2005; rossiter et al., 2010; sato & mcdonough, in press). the importance of repetition/rehearsal activities can be understood through reference to skill acquisition theory (dekeyser, 2001, 2007a, 2017), which states that the language learning begins with the acquisition of declarative knowledge (i.e., knowledge that or knowledge as objects of thought). through repeated practice, students become better at putting declarative knowledge to use to produce grammar more accurately, effortlessly, and frequently, which corresponds with the relatively quick development of procedural knowledge (tavakoli, campbell, & mccormack, 2016). over a much longer time frame, students continue to use the grammar in a variety of contexts, which results in the development of the automatized knowledge that underlies fluent and accurate language use. put simply, knowledge of grammar rules and vocabulary is not sufficient to ensure spontaneous and accurate language use. instead, opportunities to draw upon that knowledge for communication through rehearsal and systematic practice build procedural knowledge and may eventually lead to automatized knowledge. importantly, such practice needs to be meaningful, as opposed to mechanical, because a type of knowledge developed in a given context is best transferred to the same or a similar promoting efl students’ accuracy and fluency through interactive practice activities 381 context (i.e., transfer appropriate processing, see gatbonton & segalowitz, 2005; lyster & sato, 2013). that is, if the instructional goal is to help students develop accuracy and fluency during interactive, spontaneous language use, practice activities need to approximate that context. thus, a crucial question for communicatively-oriented l2 teachers is how to design and implement practice activities that facilitate proceduralization especially for structures that are difficult for students to learn. as defined by dekeyser (2007b), practice refers to “specific activities in the second language engaged in systematically, deliberately, with the goal of developing knowledge of and skills in the second language” (p. 8). in some clt contexts, this type of systematic and deliberate practice has been implemented through teacherfronted interaction, in which the instructors ask individual students questions that target specific content or language points (e.g., sato & mcdonough, in press). however, teacher-fronted interaction has been shown to elicit low quantities of student talk, in part because instructors tend to ask questions to evaluate learner knowledge or to verify that students have understood key concepts (e.g., musumeci, 1996; nassaji & wells, 2000) as opposed to engage in authentic communication. alternatively, having students interact with each other creates more practice opportunities (loewen & sato, 2018; philp, adams, & iwashita, 2014; sato & ballinger, 2016). hence, instructors have incorporated pair and small group activities into their instructional routines, such as during the ‘produce’ phase of a ppp lesson, or by asking students to complete a communicative task in task-based or task-supported classrooms. despite their potential, such activities have been the subject of considerable debate by both instructors and students, who have expressed doubts as to whether they facilitate the acquisition of new linguistic knowledge or the development of grammatical accuracy (burrows, 2008; carless, 2003; mcdonough, 2004; sato, 2017; watson-todd, 2006). researchers have proposed several design and implementation factors that may increase the likelihood that interactive activities can provide systematic practice for specific language forms, such as modeling peer interaction (kim, 2013; kim & mcdonough, 2011; leeser, 2004; swain & lapkin, 1998) and training students how to interact (fujii, ziegler, & mackey, 2016; nakatani, 2010; sato & ballinger, 2012; sato & lyster, 2012). researchers have also highlighted the importance of embedding structures into activities that students are likely to find enjoyable and have face validity in communicative classrooms, such as role plays and decision-making or information-gap activities (dekeyser, 2010). similarly, gatbonton and segalowitz (2005) have called for activities in which functionally-useful utterances are produced and elicited, both naturally and repeatedly. to create such activities, we drew upon insights from structural priming research to elicit repeated production of a grammatical structure in a non-mechanical kim mcdonough, masatoshi sato 382 manner. structural priming is the tendency for speakers to produce a structure that was present in the recent discourse, rather than an alternative structure that can express a similar meaning (bock, 1986). the occurrence of structural priming during interactive activities has been demonstrated by researchers using the confederate scripting or scripted interaction technique developed by branigan and colleagues (branigan, pickering, & cleland, 2000), in which participants engage in interactive activities with an interlocutor who has been scripted by the researcher with target grammatical structures. l2 studies adopting this methodology have shown that l2 students’ production of the target grammatical structures is influenced by the scripted interlocutor’s language use, with such effects evident when they interact with more proficient peers (mcdonough & mackey, 2008) and with same-level classmates (mcdonough & chaikitmongkol, 2010; mcdonough, neumann, & trofimovich, 2015). in this exploratory study, therefore, we investigated whether interactive activities inspired by the scripted interaction structural priming method would provide chilean efl students with opportunities to produce relative clauses. drawing on the premise of skill acquisition theory, we focused on accuracy and fluency. according to the theory, the impact of practice on knowledge structures (i.e., proceduralization) can be observed in the decrease of error rate and the increase in processing speed (dekeyser, 2017). based on prior studies that have demonstrated positive effects for carrying out interactive activities embedded with primes or models of specific grammatical structures (e.g., mcdonough & chaikitmongkol, 2010; mcdonough & mackey, 2008; mcdonough, neumann, & trofimovich, 2015), we predicted that the students would produce more accurate relative clauses after engaging in repeated interactive practice. furthermore, since prior studies have shown that interactive practice facilitates learners’ oral fluency (e.g., sato & lyster, 2012; towell, hawkins, & bazergui, 1996), we predicted that repeated production of relative clauses while interacting with another learner would promote more fluent production of that structure. 2. method 2.1. participants and instructional setting the participants were 37 second-year undergraduate students (28 women, 9 men) enrolled in an english education degree program at a university in chile. they ranged in age from 19 to 29 years, with a mean of 21.9 years (sd = 2.6). they were all l1 speakers of spanish who had studied english previously in elementary, secondary, and university settings for a mean of 10.8 years (sd = 4.3). six participants had previously travelled to an english-speaking country, staying promoting efl students’ accuracy and fluency through interactive practice activities 383 for one or two semesters. based on the university curriculum, they had recently completed efl classes at the b1 level in the common european framework of reference (cefr). the students’ efl class focused on the use of language as a medium for communication and implemented interactive communicative activities. typically, the activities were led by the teacher facilitating meaningful interactions with the students based on the textbook. the textbook was theme-based (e.g., health, economy, travelling) and specific grammatical structures were targeted in each unit. according to the instructors and course materials, students had been taught relative clauses, the linguistic target of the current study, via explicit rule explanations in a previous course that focused on relative clauses. relative clauses are a structure that l2-english learners struggle to acquire regardless of their first languages (keenan & comrie, 1977). although it was assumed that the students possessed a certain degree of knowledge of subject relative clauses, which are the least marked, this assumption was checked by administering a grammar test. based on a power analysis using the software package r (smallest obtained effect size = .54, sample size = 37, two-tailed test for paired samples, p = .05), the power of the obtained sample was .89. 2.2. materials the materials included (a) a grammar test, (b) interactive activities, and (c) oral tests. while the grammar test was designed to ensure the students’ prior knowledge of relative clauses, the oral tests elicited the students’ spontaneous use of relative clauses before (pretest) and after (posttest) they carried out the interactive activities. the interactive activities provided students with models of subject relative clauses (i.e., primes) and elicited production of relative clauses. for both the oral tests and interactive activities, the participants were paired with senior students (4th year) in the same degree program with higher english proficiency (approximately c1) who were research assistants in the second researcher's applied linguistics laboratory. we chose senior students as interlocutors for two reasons. first, previous research comparing learner-learner and learner-native speaker interactions has shown that social relationships affect learners’ language production patterns (fernández dobao, 2012; sato & lyster, 2007). we considered senior students to be more authentic conversational partners than unfamiliar native speakers or researchers. second, to ensure the validity of priming, it was important for interlocutors to deliver primes accurately and fluently. 2.2.1. grammar test as described previously, relative clauses had recently been taught in the students’ efl class. the grammar test was created to ensure that the students had kim mcdonough, masatoshi sato 384 some declarative knowledge of subject relative clauses that could be accessed during the interactive activities. the test contained 25 randomized items, with 10 subject relative clause items and 15 distracters. each item presented a sentence with four underlined segments, with one of the underlined segments containing a morpho-syntactic error. the students were instructed to select the segment that contained the error. the relative clause items targeted three error types: incorrect relative pronouns (*henry aaron, which played baseball with the braves for 20 years, was voted into the hall of fame in 1982), omitted relative pronouns (*bushido is the traditional code of honor of the samurai, were the military nobility of medieval and early-modern japan), and resumptive pronouns (*john wayne, who he appeared in over 200 movies, was the biggest box-office attraction of his time). the distracters contained errors that were unrelated to relative clauses, including prepositions, plurals, pronouns, word formation, and verb forms. 2.2.2. interactive practice activities to provide the students with systematic practice at producing relative clauses, two information-exchange activities used in a previous structural priming study about relative clauses in an esl setting were used (mcdonough, kielstra, crowther, & smith, 2016). the topics targeted in the trivia questions included arts/advertising and world records. each trivia activity contained 12 questions for the interlocutor to ask the students, for a total of 24 questions. although our focus was on relative clauses, we did not want the students to simply parrot back the interlocutor’s utterances or engage in mechanical practice. also, it was important to prevent the students from noticing the target structure and to maintain their focus on meaning so that they engaged in meaningful production. therefore, the interlocutor’s questions contained an equal number of relative clauses and prepositional phrases as primes (or models) that would hopefully encourage the students to produce questions with post-nominal modification. to encourage production of post-nominal modification, the students were given 24 question stems (12 per activity) that ended with a head noun (e.g., what’s the company…?). the students referred to the background information provided with each item (e.g., coca-cola has the longest continuous olympic sponsorship) to complete the question fragment, such as by producing a relative clause (what’s the company that has the longest olympic sponsorship?). however, it is important to note that the students could complete the fragment using other forms of post-nominal modification, such as participles or prepositional phrases. excerpt (1) from an interactive practice activity illustrates the nature of their turn-taking and use of the question fragments. promoting efl students’ accuracy and fluency through interactive practice activities 385 (1) interactive practice between peer interlocutor (pi) and learner (l) pi: what’s the city that has the most museums? (scripted prime question) l: the country? pi: the city l: the city, rome. i don’t know pi: london l: london (laughing) pi: your turn l: uh, who’s got a campaign that’s called “real beauty”? (created from question fragment) pi: dove l: yeah good 2.2.3. oral tests the preand posttests were two information-exchange activities used in the same previous study (mcdonough et al., 2016). the activities were based on illustrations that depicted a variety of people who lived in the same neighborhood, and each student received information about eight neighbors. the two activities were counterbalanced to account for possible differences in task difficulty or ordering effects. the goal was to describe each individual neighbor (their appearance, activities, and location) until their interlocutor could recognize them within a larger illustration. the participants’ materials provided functionally-useful stems that the students could use when describing their pictures, such as johan is a musician… and natalia is an artist… to avoid any influence from the interlocutor’s picture descriptions during the tests, a student described all their neighbors first, after which their interlocutor gave picture descriptions. although the interactive practice activities targeted questions, the test activities provided declarative sentence stems to test whether students could generalize their production of relative clauses across sentence types. in addition, whereas the interactive practice tasks involved a two-way flow of information with both interlocutors alternating turns, the oral tests required a one-way flow of information with each interlocutor taking longer turns. 2.3. procedure the materials were administered over a two-week period. the grammar test was administered during the students’ regularly-scheduled efl class, with the students given 15 minutes to complete the 25 items. the instructions stated that each sentence contained only one error that they should identify. approximately 2-3 days later, they scheduled individual sessions with the senior students to carry out the oral tests and interactive practice activities. in the first kim mcdonough, masatoshi sato 386 session, the students carried out the pretest (10 minutes), followed by the first practice trivia activity (15 minutes). ranging from 2 to 3 days later, they had another individual session with a different senior student to carry out the second practice trivia activity (15 minutes), which was followed by the posttest (10 minutes). prior to starting each activity, the senior students explained its communicative goal and demonstrated how to use the stems with practice items. the second researcher was present during the sessions to provide assistance to the seniors as needed. the sessions were recorded using digital audio-recorders. 2.4. analysis the relative clause items on the grammar test were coded for accuracy, with one point awarded for each correctly identified error. the audio-recordings of the oral tests and interactive practice activities were transcribed and verified by research assistants, after which the transcripts were analyzed for the occurrence of accurate relative clauses. a relative clause was operationalized as a subordinate clause modifying a head noun that contained a relative pronoun and a tensed verb. in addition to accuracy involving relative pronouns (i.e., presence when required and correct relationship to the head noun), which had been included on the grammar test, additional accuracy criteria emerged from the production data. therefore, to be considered accurate, the relative clause was also required to have correct word order and subject-verb agreement with the head noun. errors involving other aspects of the main or relative clauses, such as word choice, plurals, or determiners were not considered when coding relative clauses. examples of relative clauses produced by the participants are provided in table 1. table 1 relative clause coding relative clauses coding decision stella is a cooker who prepares food all the days for the children in the house. accurate what’s the company that has the longest continuous olympic sponsorship? accurate what are the emotions the advertisements target? accurate johan is a musician who play the piano very well. inaccurate: s-v agreement error what’s the cigarette advertisements feature cowboys, horses, and ranching? inaccurate: missing relative pronoun what’s the vodka that the most iconic bottle? inaccurate: missing verb the students’ relative clauses were also coded for fluency in terms of disruptions to the speech flow, which were operationalized as the following dysfluencies: filled and unfilled pauses (minimum of 400 milliseconds), false starts, and self-corrections (see kormos, 2006; lennon, 1990; sato, 2014). we chose promoting efl students’ accuracy and fluency through interactive practice activities 387 hesitation markers as the index for fluency based on findings that they not only may represent cognitive processing but also influence listeners’ perceptions (fulcher, 1996; segalowitz & freed, 2004). all dysfluencies that occurred within the relative clauses (from the beginning until the end of a relative clause) were summed, and an average score was obtained by dividing the number of dysfluencies by the number of relative clauses each participant produced. an independent rater coded a subset of the data (20%) and the interrater reliability values were as follows: accuracy r = .93 and dysfluencies r = .96. any disagreements were resolved by the researchers. alpha was set at .05 for all statistical tests. 3. results to check treatment fidelity, first the students’ performance on the grammar test was analyzed to determine whether they had existing declarative knowledge of relative clauses and could thus potentially benefit from interactive practice. for the 10 relative clause items, the students’ mean score was 7.05 (sd = 1.48), which confirmed the instructors’ report that the students had received explicit information about relative clause formation in a previous efl course. second, the interactive practice data were analyzed to ensure that the peer interlocutors (i.e., senior students) delivered the relative clause primes provided in the materials and that the participants produced relative clauses. as expected, the interlocutors delivered the 12 relative clause trivia questions accurately and without dysfluencies when carrying out the interactive practice activities with all 37 students. finally, as shown in table 2, the students produced a mean of 15.92 relative clauses during the interactive practice activities, with more occurring after the interlocutors’ relative clause questions than after their prepositional phrase questions. a paired-samples t-test confirmed that the students produced significantly more relative clauses after the interlocutors’ relative clause questions than preposition phrase questions, which would be expected based on the logic of structural priming: t(37) = 2.62, p = .013, d = .54. table 2 relative clause production during interactive practice activities sum m sd after relative clause questions 312 8.43 1.82 after prepositional phrase questions 277 7.49 1.68 total 589 15.92 2.72 having taken steps to check treatment fidelity, we next addressed the question as to whether carrying out the interactive practice activities helped the students produce relative clauses more accurately or fluently. for accuracy, as kim mcdonough, masatoshi sato 388 shown in table 3, the students produced more accurate relative clauses on the posttest (m = 6.19) than they did during the pretest (m = 4.43). in addition, their production of dysfluencies per relative clause decreased from the pretest test (m = 1.19) to the posttest (m = .77). table 3 accuracy and fluency scores over time pretest posttest statistical comparison m sd m sd t p d accurate relative clauses 4.43 2.24 6.19 2.00 4.50 .001 .83 dysfluencies per relative clause 1.19 0.81 .77 .56 2.26 .030 .60 individual paired-samples t-tests were carried for accuracy and dysfluencies separately using an adjusted alpha level of .025 to account for multiple comparisons (.05/2). whereas the students’ accuracy improved significantly over time, their dysfluencies rate did not significantly decrease (see table 3). the effect sizes (cohen’s d) approached medium (between .60 and 1.00) for accuracy but were small (.60) for dysfluencies. in sum, the findings revealed that students’ production of accurate relative clauses increased significantly over time, but the change in their fluency did not reach statistical significance. 4. discussion the current study explored whether carrying out interactive practice activities created based on the logic of structural priming would positively impact efl students’ accuracy and fluency. the first finding was that the students’ accuracy improved over time, which provides further evidence that peer interaction can have a positive impact on efl learners’ production of grammatical structures (mcdonough, 2004; sato & lyster, 2012) and extends the findings of previous studies that implemented interactive tasks inspired by structural priming in both efl and esl settings (mcdonough & chaikitmongkol, 2010; mcdonough & mackey, 2008; mcdonough, neumann, & trofimovich, 2015). it is important to stress that while the duration of practice was relatively short, the students engaged in massed practice of a targeted grammatical structure. this type of practice differs from pedagogical activities distributed over time that do not encourage students to engage in repeated, meaningful practice. moreover, the target structure (relative clauses) has been found to pose processing difficulty for both comprehension and production for l2 learners in general (izumi, 2003) and students can avoid using the structure (see collins & white, 2014). in our study, students could use prepositional phrases (e.g., who’s the advertiser for the slogan just do it?) to express the same meaning in relative clauses (e.g., who’s the advertiser that uses the slogan just do it?). hence, it is encouraging that promoting efl students’ accuracy and fluency through interactive practice activities 389 the students managed to improve their spontaneous production skills1 of such a difficult structure over a short period of time. having students carry out interactive practice activities in pairs or groups may be an effective way to supplement teacherfronted clt activities and to create opportunities for students to improve their accuracy during communicative interaction. while interactive practice had a positive effect on the students’ accuracy, it did not affect their production of dysfluencies. this finding supports those of tavakoli et al. (2016) who examined a short-term practice intervention and concluded that breakdown fluency (i.e., silence and pausing) was slower to improve and less impacted by practice than accuracy. it may be the case that distributing the activities over a longer period of time, rather than having students engage in massed practice during a short period of time, could enhance the effectiveness of the activities (see suzuki & dekeyser, 2017). in addition, during the course of proceduralization (i.e., gaining a faster and more accurate control over declarative knowledge), students may monitor their speech production more closely (kormos, 2006; sato & lyster, 2012), which may lead to more, rather than fewer dysfluencies. reflecting on our objective of creating interactive practice activities that instructors can use to help their students develop accurate and fluent speech, this exploratory study has experimental limitations that may pose issues for the transferability of the findings. first, due to time constraints in the students’ efl class, the students interacted with senior students outside class time rather than carry out the tasks with their classmates. although interacting with peers from the same degree program has greater ecological validity than interacting with native speakers, to ensure greater transferability, the study should be replicated by having students in the same class carry out the activities as part of their normal instructional routine (see sato & loewen, 2019). these types of activities have been shown to facilitate wh-question development when thai efl learners interacted with both higher-level peers and same-level classmates (mcdonough & chaikitmongkol, 2010; mcdonough & mackey, 2008), so it is plausible that interaction between same-level classmates would also facilitate accurate production of relative clauses. therefore, it is important that future studies implement the materials in an actual classroom setting where they have been integrated into the instructors’ lessons plans, rather than administered a “one-off research activity” (mcdonough, 2015, p. 227). our goal in future studies is to provide instructors with these activities and observe how they incorporate them into their lessons and describe students’ interactions while carrying them out. 1 we prefer to use the term “spontaneous production skills” because we did not directly measure the students’ “procedural knowledge.” it is possible that the type of knowledge obtained in the exit oral tests was a result of faster processing of declarative knowledge (see dekeyser, 2017). kim mcdonough, masatoshi sato 390 although our materials were inspired by the logic of structural priming, i.e., the senior student interlocutors were scripted with relative clauses as a tool for eliciting production of relative clauses, our aim was not to test theoretical claims about the occurrence, strength, or persistence of structural priming. instead, our main focus was to explore whether the basic premise of structural priming could be applied to the design of interactive activities as a tool for eliciting non-mechanical, meaningful production of a target structure. to test theoretical claims about structural priming, such as whether it is a form of implicit learning or if various cognitive abilities are implicated in its occurrence or persistence, more tightly-controlled experiments are necessary, along with more sophisticated statistical analyses. finally, due to our focus on helping students improve their production of relative clauses, all students carried out the interactive practice activities. in our setting, it was not appropriate to deny some student practice opportunities to have a control group. including a control group would provide greater empirical evidence that carrying out practice activities is more effective than not practicing, and this may be an avenue for future research in more tightly-controlled settings. finally, in light of the possibility that the development of fluency may require greater practice, our future studies aim to explore the benefits of implementing a greater number of interactive practice activities over a longer time period. despite the limitations, the findings provide some pedagogical implications. studies have shown that instructors in esl settings also face some of the challenges associated with implementation of communicative activities in efl settings (douglas & kim, 2015; plews & zhao, 2010), such as mismatches with students’ expectations and integrating a focus on form. to help address some of these challenges, it is important to provide students with opportunities to use a target structure naturally and repeatedly during communicatively-oriented activities. our focus on trivia provided an optimal way to elicit relative clauses through functionally-useful utterances while maintaining a primary focus on meaning. trivia activities could be adapted to target a wide variety of grammatical structures, including other forms of post-nominal modification (prepositional phrases and participles), question forms, and adverbial clauses. second, having students interact with a more senior student in the same degree program was particularly useful because they were able to provide appropriate models of the target structure without being an authoritative figure. this type of interaction can be implemented into other activities such as poster carousel tasks (lynch & maclean, 2001) by asking seniors to be the audience. surveys prepared in class and administered outside class time (rossiter et al., 2010) to the students’ peers could promote effective practice. in intensive and academic english programs, students from a higher level or more advanced classes could be asked to engage with lower-level students. promoting efl students’ accuracy and fluency through interactive practice activities 391 5. conclusion in conclusion, this exploratory study about the effectiveness of interactive practice activities inspired by the logic of structural priming showed that students who engaged in interactive practice activities produced more accurate relative clauses. however, their production of dysfluencies did not significantly change after carrying out the practice activities. having empirically-validated the activities for promoting accuracy, our future research will explore the effectiveness of implementing interactive practice activities in authentic clt classrooms by working with instructors who are interested in incorporating interactive practice into their instructional routines. in addition, through additional activity design and validation studies, we aim to identify interactive practice activities that also positively impact students’ fluency development, thereby providing instructors with additional activities for use in clt classrooms. acknowledgements we would like to thank the research assistants who helped with data collection and coding: phung dao, alexandre dion, nicolas hubert-smith, mayuri kewlani, maxime lavallee, golnaz rasouli, estefanía valencia, camila valenzuela, mélanie vergara, and paula viveros. funding funding for this project was provided to the first author through the canada research chairs program [grant number 950-221304] and to the second author by a fondo national de desarrollo científico y tecnólogico grant from the ministry of education of chile [grant number 1160838; 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(2006). continuing change after the innovation. system, 34, 1-14. 483 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (4). 483-503 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl glocal arabic online: the case of 3arabizi robert michael bianchi virginia commonwealth university, qatar rmbianchi@qatar.vcu.edu abstract the term glocal has been used to describe phenomena that simultaneously blend both global and local elements (see featherstone, lash, & robertson, 1995, p. 101). nowhere is this more evident than in the existence of 3arabizi, itself a blended language composed of english and vernacular arabic, written in latin letters but using arithmographemes, that is, numerals as letters to represent hard-to-transliterate sounds because they do not exist in english (see bianchi, 2012).1 as part of a doctoral study investigating online language choice involving arabic and english, this paper examines the unique stylistic and topical functions of 3arabizi when compared with its linguistic forbears, that is, arabic and english in a multilingual web forum. the findings indicate that 3arabizi is used for more informal, intimate and phatic communication than either arabic or english, though these latter two languages or codes are not entirely formal in form and purpose either. keywords: arabic, english, script, cmc, glocal 1 the name 3arabizi itself reflects a fascinating peculiarity of this blended language; its frequent use of arithmographemes. in this case, the 3 represents arabic’s voiced pharyngeal fricative / /, traditionally written as in the arabic script. notice the visual similarity between 3 and (cf. tseliga, 2007, for arithmographemes in latinized greek). robert michael bianchi 484 in computer-mediated communication (cmc) contexts, 3arabizi has developed as a unique hybrid language consisting of vernacular arabic (va) written in latin script interspersed with english. using corpus and discourse analysis methods, this report discusses the stylistic and topical differences between 3arabizi, arabic, and english as encountered in the mahjoob.com corpus of web forum messages. background modern communications technologies such as personal computers and mobile phones have spread so quickly that they have not always easily adapted to local linguistic realities and conventions. this has occasioned an increase in linguistic diversity in electronic contexts such as script-switching in cmc environments (palfreyman & al khalil, 2003). the most common form of cmc script-switching has been latinization of a non-latin-scripted language (see palfreyman, 2001). crystal (2001) attributes the source of this trend to the fact that the latin script was forced upon early cmc adopters even though it was not their native script because earlier computer encoding systems such as ascii were latin-script based. this situation resulted in several latin script-based “makeshift” orthographies such as latin-scripted greek (see koutsogiannis & mitsikopoulou, 2003), latinscripted japanese (nishimura, 2003), and latin-scripted arabic (palfreyman & al khalil, 2003; warschauer, el said, & zohry, 2002). in recent years, the apparent necessity for latinization in cmc has diminished due to multilingual and script support for most cmc applications (androutsopoulos, 2007; palfreyman & al khalil, 2003). despite this, latinization of non-latin-scripted languages continues (al share, 2005; palfreyman & al khalil, 2003), posing interesting questions about code choice and code use. indeed, latinization, which began as a response to a constrained orthographic choice, is now a bona fide linguistic resource for its users (lee, 2007; pavlenko & blackledge, 2004). within the present study, 3arabizi is a prime example of such a new linguistic resource. the data mahjoob.com is a website owned by emad hajjaj, a popular jordanian political cartoonist based in london. the website is jordan-based and its users appear to be mainly jordanian and/or palestinian as well. nevertheless, the site’s popularity extends far beyond jordan and palestine as its advertising shows. structurally, mahjoob.com contains an arabic website and an english one. as of november 2008, the arabic featured 35 forums, 1,330,999 posts, 58,855 threads, and 28,025 members while the english site featured 41 forums and subforums, with 982,084 messages (or posts), and 13,724 members. the 41 glocal arabic online: the case of 3arabizi 485 forums range in content from professional ones focused on engineering, architecture, health and studies for example, to forums on hobbies such as cooking and tv, to forums on relationships, jokes, local culture and politics. in terms of poster profiles, circumstantial evidence suggests that the majority of posters are teenagers and young adults. linguistically, despite such an official division of the website by language, even the most superficial browsing of the english forums makes it clear that forum posters freely post in both arabic-scripted arabic and latin-scripted arabic, that is, 3arabizi within the english forums whereas the arabic forums are far more homogeneously arabic-script in content. method once the english forums had been selected for further analysis, a purposive sample of all messages posted between march 2007 and may 2008 was collected and compiled into a corpus containing 460,220 messages, spread across 21,626 discussion threads, within 41 topical forums. in order to categorize each message as containing a particular code, wordlists based on the arabic gigaword and the british national corpus (bnc) were used to scan each message and classify it as being written in arabic, english, or a mixture of the two. later, a third wordlist was created to annotate messages written in 3arabizi. while other codes were detected in this process, that is, mixed script codes, a “muslim english” code (see mujahid, 2009) and a non-bnc english code, they accounted for less than 15% of all messages combined. consequently, they will not be dealt with further here. once annotation of messages had been completed, a computation of messages revealed that, overwhelmingly, messages were composed in arabic (32.3%), bnc english (17.5%), and 3arabizi (35.5%). in other words, these three codes alone accounted for over 85% of all messages in the corpus. thus, these three dominant codes in the corpus were selected for a thorough cross-linguistic stylistic and topical comparison. in order to carry out this comparison, the ten most frequently encountered lexical words in each of these three languages were identified using the frequency list function of wordsmith 5.0 corpus analysis software. to sum up, the method adopted in this study is to first identify the ten most frequent open class lexical items in each of the three main monoscriptal codes in the entire corpus, that is, arabic, bnc english, and 3arabizi. this “first brush” gives an overall sense of what the topical foci of each of these codes might be. next, the top ten frequent words of each of these codes words are hand-checked using a 100-line concordance in order to establish their respective usage patterns in the corpus, suggesting, in turn, broad stylistic differences between the codes themselves. robert michael bianchi 486 methodological limitations and other considerations this study describes only the broadest salient topical patterns associated with each code as suggested by the top ten frequent lexical items along with examination of random samples of 100 concordance lines of each of these frequent items. these highly frequent words are used as the measure in determining to what extent each code resembles or differs from the others in terms of topical content (baker, 2006). where specific topics, references, and functions are cited for the concordance line of a specific lexical item, it is important to bear in mind that these were determined solely by inferring them from the immediate context of the item within the boundaries of its concordance line of between 10-15 words. this was done because the time-consuming process of referring back to the original message for each of the 3,000 concordance lines in order to specify beyond doubt the topic of each concordance line would have proven highly unfeasible. however, additional clues as to topic, reference, and function of an item were provided by the presence of smileys and other stylistic features such as standard grammar and formal vocabulary. and while several lines appeared relatively ambiguous in terms of topic, such lines still exhibited stylistic features such as smileys or discursive functions such as criticisms. admittedly, in several cases, an utterance could have been construed as belonging to more than one topic, for example wearing hijab as a form of female dress or as a form of islamic practice. callahan (2004) notes that such overlapping and blurring of boundaries between topics is often apparent in corpus discourse analysis, although in the present study consistency in making categorizations and judgments was of utmost importance. another important limitation should be mentioned here. the method involved working with data from a single website at a specific juncture in time, that is, the 14-month period between march 2007 and may 2008. thus, generalizations beyond the data about the functions of 3arabizi, arabic, and english on other websites or in other contexts are unwarranted. indeed, especially with reference to topics, it is clear that local, regional and world events will likely have played a role in shaping the content of the corpus so that data collected at the present time from this same website might yield very different results for 3arabizi, arabic, and english. a couple of final notes on the citation of example lines from the frequent lexis concordances are in order. first, rather than writing line 1 in full i employ the shorthand l1 here. second, in each boxed concordance line, the concordance word has been bolded to set it apart from the other words in the concordance line. third, where present, smileys are indicated by italics. fourth, english words written in arabic script are bolded and italicized. these same conventions are used for the translations of concordance lines provided below the original boxed concordance lines where necessary. glocal arabic online: the case of 3arabizi 487 identifying the top ten open class lexical words in the main codes once wordlists for each of these codes had been compiled, it was decided to identify the top ten open-class lexical words in each wordlist as a means of detecting topical content, following the lead of baker (2006). baker showed that by focusing on only the most frequent lexical items in a given code, it would be possible to generate initial hypotheses about the topical focus of that code. for instance, in the current data set, if the word allah occurred frequently in 3arabizi, it would be worthwhile to explore whether 3arabizi texts might be used to talk about god or religion. pragmatically, this relatively small number of items also made it easier to compare the surface topical similarities between the main codes and provide a deeper level of analysis for each of these. clearly, a number greater than ten lexical words could have been selected, but given the vast number of items in each wordlist, a cut-off point had to be selected especially since a certain amount of repetition was observable among frequent lexical items in each wordlist such as arabic’s top ten frequency items yawm ‘day’ and al-yawm ‘the day’ and bnc english’s thanks (wordlist item no. 93) and thank (wordlist item no. 116). in light of the above, the claims made about the topical and stylistic features for each of these codes cannot be taken as absolute or exhaustive for each code. at best, they are an indication of salient themes and styles associated with each code in the context of its most frequent open class lexis. nevertheless, the in-depth analyses of the top ten lexical items from each of the three main codes did in fact reveal certain distinctive characteristics of each of these three codes. in order to select the top ten open class lexical items for each code, the ucrel claws7 tagset2 was used as a measure of determining whether a given lexical item was an open class one. in the case of 3arabizi, several homograph cases were encountered in which a word could have been either english or latin-scripted arabic. these ambiguous items were hand checked to determine whether they functioned as open class items or closed class items such as prepositions. if an 3arabizi item functioned as an open class noun, adjective, or verb in 50% or more of all cases, it was kept in the 3arabizi top ten list. once all ambiguous items had been discarded, the remaining top ten lexical items for all three codes were compiled into a table for comparison (see below) and annotated in terms of language (vernacular/standard, formal/informal), topic (sports, religion, relationships, etc.), discursive function (rhetorical question, assertion, exclamation, etc.) (see callahan, 2004), level 2 ucrel stands for university centre for computer corpus research on language, a corpus linguistics research centre at lancaster university, uk. the original claws (constituent likelihood automatic word-tagging system) is a part-of-speech tagging system developed at lancaster, oslo, and bergen universities in the early 1980s (garside, 1987). robert michael bianchi 488 of involvement of text composer and/or addressee with the text (involved for first and second person references, noninvolved for third person references), and stylistically with respect to whether it contained smileys or not. findings: stylistic and topical functions of arabic and bnc english in order to provide a general sense of the kinds of words featured in arabic, bnc english, and 3arabizi, table 1 below displays the top ten lexical words for all three codes (note that grammatical or closed class words such as pronouns, articles, determiners, modal verbs, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions and prepositions are not included in the table). instead, the focus here is on open class content words (lexical nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs), which help to reveal more about topics: table 1 top ten lexical words across arabic, bnc english, and 3arabizi3 rank arabic bnc english 3arabizi 1 ‘god’ know allah ‘god’ 2 ‘he said’ think know 3 4 ‘by god’ good think 4 ‘people’ people love 5 ‘day’ love time 6 ‘he blessed’ time good 7 ‘i want’ see wallah5 ‘by god’ 8 ‘the day’ go man 9 ‘and he saved’ thanks people 10 ‘good’ want way table 1 reveals a number of interesting lexico-semantical similarities across the codes. for instance, arabic, bnc english, and 3arabizi share one semantically related highly frequent concept in common: people. this indicates that in all three codes references to people are common, suggesting that 3 words in the bnc english and 3arabizi lists are given in capitals reflecting the wordsmith 5.0 convention of displaying frequency wordlist items in capitals. 4 this word can be translated as ‘and god’ according to context. 5 this word can also be translated as ‘and god’ according to context. glocal arabic online: the case of 3arabizi 489 perhaps the topic of people or generalizing statements employing the word people may be prevalent across all three codes. another concept that these codes have in common is good (see arabic: item 10, bnc english: item 3, and 3arabizi: item 6). again, on the surface, these words imply that something (or someone) is frequently described in a positive manner. other sets of similarities are discernible between these three codes. for instance, in addition to the concept of people, arabic and 3arabizi also show the concept of allah/god to be highly frequent as both codes feature the words allah (‘god’) and wallah (‘by god’ or ‘and god’).6 such surface lexical similarities in word list items suggest that perhaps the topic of god or religion may be commonly discussed in both of these codes. when the wordlists of arabic and bnc english are examined in conjunction, again, considerable overlap is apparent. bnc english and 3arabizi also share a number of lexical items in common. in fact, these codes feature a total of six identical words within the top ten frequent words in their respective subcorpora. in addition to the words people and good (which also had semantic counterparts in arabic), bnc english and 3arabizi have four other top ten words in common: know, think, time, and love. the words know, think, and love suggest that personal viewpoints, opinions, and feelings may often be expressed frequently in bnc english and 3arabizi. as an aside, the fact that 3arabizi shares semantically related concepts in common with both arabic and bnc english serves to underscore 3arabizi’s code-mixed nature as a “fused lect” between arabic and english (cf. auer, 1998; mclellan, 2005). an important cautionary note needs to be borne in mind: surface similarities should not be taken too uncritically, and without further evidence from samples drawn from specific concordance lines, it would be premature to conclude that these three codes employ the common concepts cited here in the same manner. indeed, when concordance line data is presented below, ample evidence will be offered to highlight that such seemingly similar lexis is in fact often employed in different ways by users of these three codes. having provided a brief overview of the similarities between the three codes, 3arabizi’s top ten frequent lexis will now be highlighted and contrasted with both arabic and bnc english. table 2, which summarizes the findings for arabic, reveals some very interesting points about the use of this code in the mahjoob.com forums. for instance, it is clear that arabic is stylistically heterogeneous, that is, that it ranges from very formal and standard usage indicated by the modern standard arabic (msa) labelling, to highly informal, involved and nonstandard usage as indicated by 6 the only difference between these items is the script in which they are composed in each code, that is, in arabic the words are written in arabic script as and , while in 3arabizi these same words are written in latin script as allah and wallah respectively. robert michael bianchi 490 the presence of va forms within the list. interestingly, the more formal elements show a clear link to the topic of religion especially to islam and to the prophet mohammed in particular. more of this will be discussed in below. but first, a summary of bnc english’s topical and stylistic features will be given. table 2 arabic top ten lexical words showing topical and linguistic features rank arabic top ten lexical words translit eration meaning language: msa vs. va recurrent topics involved vs. informational smileys 1 all h ‘allah/god’ msa 66% religion (islam), christianity, palestine informational 60% 30% 2 la ‘he said’ msa 64% religion (islam, mostly hadith) 64%, humour 36% informational 100% 8% 3 7 wall h ‘by god’ va 69% general, religion (15%) involved 67% 32% 4 als ‘the people’ msa 55% general, religion (islam 35%) informational 60% 10% 5 yawm ‘day’ va 60% islam (25%), romance, narratives, politics, jokes, food involved 61% 19% 6 salla ‘may (god) bless (him)’ msa 100% prophet mohammed (100%) informational 100% 0% 7 badd ‘i want’ va 100% general (no religion), songs, food, clothing, relationships involved 100% 47% 8 alyawm ‘the day,’ i.e., ‘today’ va 50% general, news, religion involved 66% 32% 9 wasallam ‘and may (god) save (him)’ msa 100% prophet mohammed (100%) informational 100% 0% 10 tayyib ‘good’ va 97% jokes, love, food, songs, well-wishing involved 80% 74% as demonstrated in table 3, in contrast to the arabic top ten lexical items featured above, the bnc english highly frequent items reflect a much greater topical spread. additionally, a high percentage of utterances reflect a more involved style of discourse where either first person i, we, or second person you are found as this example from the bnc english concordances illustrates: 32 lol..tough one! i dont know what i would do..contented 7 this word can also be translated as ‘and god’ according to context. glocal arabic online: the case of 3arabizi 491 table 3 bnc english top ten lexical words showing topical and stylistic features rank bnc english top ten lexical words topics involved vs. informational smileys 1 know general, relationships, songs/lyrics, politics, religion, food, clothing involved 90% 25% 2 think general, posting, songs/lyrics, local and social issues, relationships, homosexuality involved 98% 7% 3 good varied: food, health, politics, fashion, religion, songs/lyrics, hobbies involved 58% 32% 4 people qualified groups, e.g., jordanians, jews, palestinians, etc., generic references, lack of jokes informational 59% 8% 5 love (noun or verb) general: affection, romance, songs/lyrics, hobbies involved 84% 19% 6 time general: relationships, food, work, songs/lyrics involved 62% 19% 7 see general: songs/lyrics, local culture, posting, relationships, religion involved 93% 17% 8 go general: songs/lyrics, health and fitness, internet, places involved 91% 18% 9 thanks general: well-wishing, health/fitness involved 100% 58% 10 want general: songs/lyrics, posting, relationships, family/children, local culture, sex involved 80% 13% findings: stylistic and topical functions of 3arabizi 3arabizi is the most linguistically unconventional of the three codes by virtue of its mixed nature, featuring both english and arabic lexis, the latter written in latin script often with numerals. its linguistic hybridity is observable in its top ten frequent lexical items seen in table 4 below: table 4 3arabizi top ten lexical words showing topical and stylistic features rank 3arabizi top ten lexical words language: va vs. english topics involved vs. informational smileys 1 allah ‘allah/god’ va 100% general: relationships, child-bearing, health/fitness, condolences, (no religion) involved 100% 42% 2 know mostly english general: marriage/marital status/relationships, fashion, family involved 100% 21% 3 think mostly english general: palestine/israel, gender roles, islamic practice, posting involved 94% 17% 4 love mostly english general: male/female romantic behaviour, romance/marriage, songs/lyrics, food, hobbies involved 80% 26% 5 time mostly english general: posting, gender issues, islam, middle east, business/work involved 80% 20% robert michael bianchi 492 6 good mostly english general: sports, food/cooking, posting, relationships involved 87% 36% 7 wallah8 ‘by allah/god’ va 100% general: posting, marriage, local culture (no religion) involved 100% 62% 8 man va 50% general: gender roles, relationships, jokes involved 74% 41% 9 people va 25% general: posting to mahjoob, local/social issues, islam involved 72% 9% 10 way mostly english general: family/relationships, local content, arabic songs, food/cooking involved 74% 18% despite surface lexical commonalities between both arabic and bnc english, the frequent lexis of 3arabizi had to be scrutinized for topical focus and stylistic functions to reveal to what extent 3arabizi resembled (or differed from) the other two codes. as in arabic, allah ‘allah/god’ was the most frequent word in 3arabizi. however, in contrast to its arabic counterpart, allah occurred in only four religion-related utterances out of the 100 concordance lines examined, that is, in those on belief in god, becoming muslim, prophet mohammed’s wife aisha, and islamic songs. most of the remaining lines revealed functions such as wellwishing, congratulating, and offering blessings invoked on behalf of a first person singular or plural, a second person addressee, or a third party. several of these also mentioned the addressee by name or contained terms of endearment such as 7abebii ‘love’. a much smaller number of lines reflected intentions via the arabic expression of hope, in sha’ allah ‘allah/god willing.’ interestingly, three lines featured curses directed at others as in the following: 80 allah yokheth.hom wa7ad wa7ad may allah/god take them away one by one 42 lines contained smileys, highlighting the personalized function of allah in several cases. linguistically, va, which was linked to personalized content in arabic, characterized the majority of lines though a few lines exhibited latin-scripted msa as in this stylistically formal utterance despite the smileys: 12 in happyfacesmallsmile jazzaki allah khayran huggingfriend …in happyfacesmallsmile may allah/god grant you a portion of goodness huggingfriend… lexically, throughout the concordance, content ranged from utterances featuring mainly arithmographemic latin-scripted arabic to those mainly composed in english. in terms of topics, frequent references were connected to relationships, marriage, families, and having babies as in this line about wishing for a baby boy:9 8 wallah can also mean ‘and god’ according to context. 9 pink and blue is the name of a forum devoted entirely to expectant and new mothers. glocal arabic online: the case of 3arabizi 493 19 a pink or a blue? blue bi ezn allah tab3an. how r ur prepar … a pink (girl) or a blue (boy)? blue allah/god willing of course. how r ur prepar… others topics concerned health and illness, condolences, food, cars, and specific countries such as canada, jordan, and kuwait. although it occured in seventh place, it is opportune to discuss the lexically and semantically similar term wallah ‘by allah/god’ at this point. as with its arabic counterpart, wallah functioned mostly as an intensifier in 3arabizi. however, while a few lines of its arabic counterpart were found to mean ‘and allah/god,’ no such usage was detectable for wallah in 3arabizi. stylistically, wallah was used almost exclusively in involved utterances while its arabic counterpart occurred in noninvolved utterances roughly 33% of the time. regarding smileys, compared to its arabic equivalent, wallah exhibited almost twice the number, that is, 62 of 100 lines, suggesting a comparatively more personalized and light-hearted use of wallah in 3arabizi. further, virtually all lines contained va as opposed to msa, underscoring the informal connotation of wallah: 86 wallah saba2teeni stickingtongueout hey, you beat (fem. sing.) me to it stickingtongueout 56 o5te fa 7adret janabha will stay in amman till aug!!! wak wallah gaharatne …my sister, so her royal highness will stay in amman till august!!! anyway, she really used to boss me around in terms of topics and functions, a whole range was apparent: school subjects, food, mobile phones, money, sports, smoking, posting to mahjoob.com, jokes, shopping malls, summer vacation, cars, downloading cds, references to the middle east such as places, and people such as jordanian girls and saddam hussein. others lines concerned wearing hijab, friends, family, marriage including choosing a wife, romantic relationships, and relationship advice. discursively, self-disclosure statements and personal narratives were very common as were well-wishing statements, exclamations, questions, opinions, and assertions. briefly, wallah was similar to its arabic counterpart in terms of topics but had apparently no connection to the theme of religion. the next set of 3arabizi items discussed here are the stative verbs know and think, both also found in the bnc english top ten list. interestingly, in clear contrast to their bnc english counterparts, both know and think were frequently accompanied by latin-scripted arabic items such as discourse markers e.g. ba3den ‘and then’, 5ala9 ‘that’s enough’ or the arabic subordinate conjunctions inno, eno, and enno ‘that he/she/it is’ or eny ‘that i am’. as ostensibly english-language items, perhaps it is not surprising that their respective concordance lines contained relatively little latin-scripted arabic robert michael bianchi 494 compared to both allah and wallah, which featured such items in almost each line of their concordances. nevertheless, sporadic use of vernacular latin-scripted arabic appeared to underscore text-producers’ attempts to forge a direct link to local, popular arab culture. some noteworthy latin-scripted items present in the concordance lines were arabic proper names such as 7attar, cultural terms such as a7maq ‘fool’, ashkaljeyeh ‘trouble-maker’, fay3a ‘hip, cool’, 9atyat ‘rude girls’ or very short phrases and exclamations like (ma) 2dert 2adal sakta anymore ‘i couldn’t keep quiet anymore’. topically, like their bnc english counterparts, know and think exhibited a variety of themes: video clips, food, gender issues, relationships, single life and marriage, health, (female) dress and clothing, children and family, friends, music and arabic-language songs, islam and muslims, morality including terrorism, career/work, studying, politics including references to arabrelated places and politics especially palestine and israel, and forum posting. stylistically, the vast majority of lines revealed involved style with i/i or you/u as the most frequent subjects. both concordances exhibited a mix of formal and informal english alongside 3arabizi, especially netspeak features. discursively, both know and think were similar, featuring assertions, opinions, and self-disclosure statements, as well as various types of questions, though think also revealed several statements of intent. regarding smileys, know had 21 lines with smileys while think had only 17 lines, suggesting that more serious discussion often took place with these words as seen here: 93 it is completely illogical to think that blowing yourself up in brief, know and think behaved similar to their bnc english counterparts with the exception that va elements occurred, typically highlighting arabic cultural content such as names, expressions and exclamations. love was the fourth most frequent 3arabizi item. it should be noted that as with bnc english, in 33 lines love was found to function as a smiley (see footnote 84 above). and in three more lines, love was part of an author id, that is, happy love. consequently, as was done for its bnc english counterpart, the 33 concordance lines containing the smiley love were eliminated from the concordance and a randomized sample of 33 new concordance lines containing valid cases of love was collected and appended to the original concordance in order to carry out a fuller analysis. and as with bnc english, the 3arabizi top item love featured several topics in common with its bnc english counterpart as well as topics observed across other bnc english and 3arabizi frequent item topics: social commentary and critique, posting, personality types, well-wishing, a qur’anic verse translated into english, and references to music, both arabic and english-language as seen here: glocal arabic online: the case of 3arabizi 495 47 ek o3’neyeh ismha ever lasting love blushingface (do you) have a song named ‘everlasting love’? blushingface unsurprisingly, as with its bnc english counterpart, a large number of love’s lines dealt with topics related to love: male and female romantic behaviour and across cultures, falling in love, relationships and advice, and marriage and proposals. regarding discursive function, love was often used phatically toward an addressee, that is, in love u and love ya with or without a term of endearment such as sis. further, stylistically, 80 concordance lines exhibited involved discursive features while 26 contained smileys, indicating an overall personalized style in the use of the word love. other utterances featured narratives, personalized questions, assertions, and especially positive evaluations of places such as jordan-specific people, for example: i love her outgoing personality or i just love this guy huggingfriend, and even local food such as the popular middle eastern vegetable stew, molokhia: 94 i love el mlo5eyyeh lovefilled i love molokhia lovefilled notice this use of latin-scripted arabic content for local cultural references as seen with the other frequent 3arabizi lexis. again, arabic discourse markers, expressions, and exclamations were also observed. the next 3arabizi item was time, also found in bnc english. in terms of topics, the same kinds of themes were discovered as with its bnc english counterpart and elsewhere in the other concordances: forum members and their posts, sports like football and games, cooking and food, photography, gender issues and differences, and female rights, for instance not wearing hijab, islam, its teachings, religious leaders and followers, middle east politics, rulers, and wars involving palestine, israel, lebanon, and afghanistan, playing songs such as english songs as well as latin-scripted arabic references to arabic songs and singers, business, work, study, time management, vacations, friendship, relationships, marriage, motherhood and child rearing, and health and skin care. beyond specific references to arabic proper nouns such as 3olama2 (i.e. ulama ‘ulema,’ islamic religious scholars), in the time concordance lines, latinscripted arabic items, while relatively infrequent, served similar functions as seen before: exclamations, untranslatable expressions, and discourse markers. stylistically, 80% of time’s lines were involved. however, only 20 lines contained smileys, suggesting that most utterances were more serious than frivolous. this was seen in several utterances featuring self-disclosure statements, serious questions, criticisms, personal narratives, warnings, assertions, and advice, using expressions containing robert michael bianchi 496 time: “at the same time,” “any time,” “at this/that time,” “some time,” “from time to time,” “the first/last time,” “a long time ago,” and “it’s time to.” the sixth most frequent 3arabizi item was good, which also occurred in bnc english, and it resembled its bnc english counterpart in several ways. first, good in 3arabizi had a similar number of lines containing smileys to its bnc english counterpart (36 and 32 respectively). next, both concordances featured a majority of involved utterances. however, good in 3arabizi exhibited substantially more involved lines than in bnc english, that is, 87% vs. 58%. nonetheless, both concordances featured either positive or negative, that is, “not good,” evaluations of people (e.g., mahjoob posters) and things. moreover, personalized greetings (e.g., “good morning/evening/night”), well-wishing (e.g., “good luck”), compliments (e.g., “good job/one”), questions about quality (e.g., “is it good?”), and advice (e.g., “a good way”) were common in both 3arabizi and bnc english uses of good. 3arabizi topical similarities to the bnc english concordance of good were evidenced by references to sports such as football, food and cooking, health and fitness, work, study and careers, pastimes such as songs, art and photography, posting to, reading, and moderating the forums as well as discussing or addressing specific posters, and middle east politics including anticorporatism. curiously, there were no obvious references to religion. other common references involving good in 3arabizi were to love, marriage, relationships, parents, children and childrearing, clothing, cars, and shopping. the next most frequent 3arabizi item was man, which had no counterpart item in the top ten lists of the other two codes. hand checking of the concordance revealed that in 85 lines it was used to refer to males. the reminder of instances were either references to author ids, for example, “k_man,” football clubs, for example, “man city” for manchester city, or latin-scripted classical arabic where “man” means ‘who’ or ‘whoever’.10 also, three more lines were examples of the msa relative pronoun man ‘who’ that had been transcribed using latin script. in each of these cases, quotations in classical arabic were evident. in terms of discursive function, references to man were found in 46 lines to consist of vocatives and/or exclamations rather than as subjects or objects of verbs: 42 specially for zalmate offersflower welcome back, man huggingfriend weenak …specially for my man offersflower welcome back, man huggingfriend where’ve you been? in this example, notice the semantic redundancy of jordanian va zalamate ‘my man’ and the vocative use of english man later on. such utterances underscore the 10 two more lines were excluded because they appeared to have been wrongly identified as 3arabizi due to verse numbers being attached to the first word in each verse, creating pseudoarithmographemic latin-scripted arabic items such as “8for man did not come from woman….” glocal arabic online: the case of 3arabizi 497 use of man to express peer relationships between males. in this regard, there were no less than 11 occurrences of the awkward-sounding hybrid english cum latinscripted arabic expression ya man ‘hey, man,’ which combines the arabic vocative marker ya meaning ‘hey’ or ‘yo’ with the english word man, as exemplified here: 40 eyeswatering wallah ya man kolo tamam bs zae ma 2olt enta elsho’3ol fo2 rasi eyeswatering really, man, everything is fine but as you said, work is over my head in fact, involved utterances using man were evident in 74 lines out of the 85 lines where man occurs meaning ‘male.’ stylistically, va and netspeak were very frequently encountered and mixed throughout the concordance in over 50 lines, further suggesting informal communication. among these utterances, complimenting, greeting, inviting, well-wishing, and thanking were very common. moreover, 35 of the 85 lines contained smileys as the above examples illustrated, indicating informality, playfulness, and affection. in this last connection, the public expression of affection and emotion between males, which is very acceptable in arab culture, was frequently observed here as suggested by the huggingfriend and eyeswatering smileys. this is so despite pressure on males to project a virile heterosexual image toward others as seen here: 39 man ana shaaab mish benet beatinghandwithbatbeatinghandw man i am a guuuyyy not a girl beatinghandwithbat beatinghandwithbat 96 i love you man (7ub akhawi bas) offersflower offersflower i love you man (but only brotherly love) offersflower offersflower 77 hate it when you see a nickname of a man that says something like, strawberry this last example appears to have been written by a female. nonetheless, it underscores expectations for men to be macho on mahjoob.com (see references to gay friends in bnc english above). recurrent topics were marriage, divorce, and relationships including desirable qualities in a male partner, women’s rights vis-à-vis men, harassment, and male-dominated society. topics common to the other top ten concordances were computers, food, tv and movies, money (e.g., “money can’t buy u…a decent man”), american politics, middle east government and politics involving jordan, palestine, and israel, islamophobia and anti-shi’ism, and childrearing. discursively, several lines were parts of narratives or jokes. the remaining utterances consisted of assertions, self-disclosure, and questions often expressing incredulity such as “man get a grip, what the hell are you talking about?” people was the next item in the 3arabizi list, also found in bnc english. in contrast to man, people featured in fewer lines with latin-scripted arabic, that robert michael bianchi 498 is, 29 out of 100. apart from discourse markers, latin-scripted arabic here tended to consist of hard-to-translate expressions and proper names such as majlis nowab ‘assembly of deputies.’ stylistically, while involved usage was found in 72% lines, smileys were found in only nine lines. further, netspeak was found in less than one third of the concordance. forty percent of lines concerned people in a general sense, indicating that generalizations were relatively common. combined, these features suggest generally involved but serious discussion, as was the case with bnc english people. this observation was confirmed by the relatively weighty topics frequently encountered: relationships and marriage, gender issues, warning and criticisms about posting to mahjoob.com, study and careers, appearance and dress, nonhumorous narratives, politics and economics, especially of palestine and jordan, social issues such as war, injustice, corruption, poverty, and unskilled social classes, and, related to these previous themes, islam at the centre of a theological and social debate including references to jihad and de facto religious police as seen here: 55 does sharee3a allows people to become ameer by force too? does sharia (islamic law) allow people to become rulers by force too? 93 religious groups to run wild in the country and apply islam on poor people.... in terms of discursive function, references to specific kinds of people were usually part of generalizing assertions about “other people,” “few people,” “some people,” “many people,” “lots of people,” “most people,” and “people you know.” more descriptive references were to “old people,’ “muslims,” “people in jordan,” “maan and zarqa people,” and “our people.” briefly, assertions and opinions followed by questions were the most typical types of utterances involving people, as was the case in bnc english. the final 3arabizi item was way. typically, this word occurred in expressions describing a manner or method of doing or being as in “a timely and prompt way,” “the same way,” “is no way to treat…,” and “a sane way.” other examples were as parts of discourse marker expressions such as by the way, any way, or as an amplifier, for example way better and “no way u can compare.” occasionally, way preceded prepositional phrases as in “islam is the way of life” and “your twisted way of thinking.” stylistically, 74% of utterances were involved, though smileys were found in only 18 lines. as with people above, way appeared to be featured most often in serious topics: health and fitness, gender and equality, family issues, marriage and relationships, and heated discussions about moderating and freedom of speech in posting: 4 u are distroying this site by your way, and treat us as ur childs and u are the fathers here, 5 follow up on your word and keep this thread. freedom of speech is a two way road, after glocal arabic online: the case of 3arabizi 499 other more serious topics11 were politics and social criticism, especially involving arabs in general as well as palestine, israel, lebanon, and political parties like hamas, fatah, hezbollah, and the muslim brotherhood, and religion, especially islam including this attack on islam presumably by a christian poster: 94 christians to adopt islam, but not the other way around? shu el islam msh le3beh? …(ok for) christians to adopt islam, but not the other way around? what?! islam isn’t a game (and christianity is)? less serious topics were also present such as food and cooking, songs, especially arabic ones featuring latin-scripted arabic singers and song titles, jokes, cars, and computers. as for latin-scripted arabic, as seen in the rhetorical question above, arabic language expressions were often employed in order to add emphasis to an assertion, a question, or a suggestion. other utterance types were statements of self-disclosure, narratives, advice, descriptions, and compliments. summary and conclusions table 6 summarizes the main features of 3arabizi when compared with both arabic and english within the corpus: table 6 topics and stylistics of 3arabizi, arabic, and bnc english feature 3arabizi arabic bnc english lexical items people, god people, god, want, know people, want, know topics broad range of topics: mostly light, especially humorous with cultural references more restricted range of topics, strong focus on islam and politics broad range of topics: mostly light, but several serious social and taboo issues such as homosexuality and premarital sex raised stylistics highly involved and informal style including a very high proportion of smileys, 3arabizi most common in discourse markers often informational and formal, but also some involved, informal language, smileys rare a mix of formal and informal with more involved style and smileys than arabic but less than 3arabizi it can be concluded that arabic exhibited the closest link to the topic of religion, especially islam, as evidenced by several of its items and its numerous stylistically classical and msa utterances. surprisingly, though, arabic also fea 11 generally, topics touching on politics, religion, nationality, and social issues were labelled serious, whereas those pertaining to hobbies and pastimes were dubbed nonserious or light. robert michael bianchi 500 tured numerous vernacular forms, signalling a clear break from accepted practice when writing arabic perhaps due to the online environment. remarkably, arabic diglossia between msa/classical arabic as the high language and va as the low language seemed to be reproduced in cmc texts examined here. indeed, va lexis was used for more mundane and frivolous topics, underscoring the role of vernacular style as a common feature of humorous style while classical/msa lexis appeared primarily in religion-related lines. this seems to concur with bentahila’s (1983) findings based on spoken contexts about the functional and topical distribution of classical arabic and va in morocco. in contrast to arabic, bnc english featured a more diverse variety of topics ranging from hobbies to work and study, from computers to cooking, and from religion and politics to cars, with a range of styles from formal english grammar, spelling, and punctuation to informal netspeak-style english. interestingly, bnc english, in particular, revealed references to relatively taboo and sensitive topics such as homosexuality, sex, and women’s rights, perhaps indicating that such “western” topics and issues were better expressed in a language other than arabic. 3arabizi exhibited a similar range of style and was also topically closer to bnc english with a diffuse range of topics overall. however, in contrast to bnc english, the frequent samples of latin-scripted arabic in 3arabizi helped to draw a clear link between it and local va culture as typified by the frequently phatic use of latin-scripted arabic lexis such as allah and wallah. as with arabic, 3arabizi vernacular use often betrayed humour and levity. that several items in 3arabizi were identical to items in both arabic and bnc english emphasized that it is a linguistically-mixed code (cf. mclellan, 2005; smedley, 2006). in brief, 3arabizi, when compared to the other two principal codes in the corpus, appears to serve more phatic functions especially when its arabic items such as allah and wallah are used. however, its relatively frequent english content underscores its status as a mixed code reflecting a glocal reality in which english script (i.e., latin script) and lexis link its users to the wider world while its arabic lexis and discourse markers help these same users to maintain connections to their local arabic roots. there are several implications of this study for further research in the field. first, the demonstrable existence of vibrant hybrid forms of language such as 3arabizi in cmc contexts invites further research into such mixed codes that clearly reflect glocalness. second, in terms of literacy, it is evident that the development of new user-driven written genres in the absence of institutional or educational support is not only possible, but may even be widespread. third, the phenomenon of script-switching and borrowing implied by the existence of 3arabizi poses important questions about the cognitive processes entailed when such borrowing occurs. fourth, for the field of corpus linguistics, glocal arabic online: the case of 3arabizi 501 the method used here has shown that a multilingual corpus can be profitably annotated and compared for lexical, topical, and stylistic features across codes. ultimately, the very existence of 3arabizi as a unique glocal linguistic phenomenon suggests that in an ever shrinking world, the seemingly futile aspirations for expression of cultural autonomy and individuality in the face of globalizing and homogenizing forces can in fact be realized in the form of hybrid codes such as 3arabizi, providing fascinating sociolinguistic compromises that straddle and bridge the global-local divide. robert michael bianchi 502 references al share, b. 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(2006). code-switching and identity on the blogs: an analysis of taglish in computer mediated communication (master’s thesis). auckland university of technology, auckland, australia. retrieved from http://repositoryaut. lconz.ac.nz/theses/378/ tseliga, t. (2007). “it’s all greeklish to me!” in b. danet & s. c. herring (eds.), the multilingual internet: language, culture, and communication online (pp. 116-141). oxford: oxford university press. warschauer, m., el said, g. r., & zohry, a. (2002). language choice online: globalization and identity in egypt. journal of computer-mediated communication, 7(4). 695 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (4). 2017. 695-714 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.4.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt a case study of a hungarian efl teacher’s assessment practices with her young learners gabriella hild university of pécs, hungary gabriella.hild@aok.pte.hu the case study aims to provide insights into how a hungarian efl teacher used tests, assessed her young learners and gave feedback to them in the classroom. this qualitative, exploratory study was a follow-up to a large-scale project. in this single-case study, data were collected from an efl teacher and five of her seventh graders on what tasks she used to assess them and how. the participants were interviewed. for the purpose of triangulation, the students were also audioand video-recorded while doing four speaking tasks, and two classes were observed. the results revealed that for the teacher with decades of teaching experience there was room for improvement in her knowledge of age-appropriate teaching methodology and that some of her beliefs and practices reflected a lack of understanding how children develop. she had difficulty diagnosing her students’ strengths and weaknesses. the learners were rarely provided with feedback on their performance and language development; therefore, they did not see how much they had progressed. low achievers had a hard time catching up with their peers; and they lagged further behind. the teacher seemed to be more interested in what her students did not know rather than focusing on what they could do. keywords: early language learning; assessment of young language learners; diagnostic assessment; dynamic testing; early foreign language teaching in hungary gabriella hild 696 1. introduction the increasing popularity of starting to learn foreign languages (henceforth fls) at an early age is a world-wide tendency (de bot, 2014; garton, copland, & burns, 2011; nikolov, 2009a, 2009b, 2016a; nikolov & mihaljevic djigunovic, 2006, 2011). the significance of effective language learning in primary school is crucial since “the foundations for later language learning are laid” in early language programs (commission of the european communities, 2003, p. 7). although common wisdom suggests that children behave like sponges when it comes to learning a new language, success in early language learning is not automatic. young learners’ special characteristics and needs are to be considered and catered for to ensure that the benefits of an early start are realized (johnstone, 2009; mckay, 2006, p. 5). in an exploratory study examining hungarian early-start programs, nikolov (as cited in medgyes & nikolov, 2014, p. 516) highlighted the importance of meeting these special requirements by claiming that since the findings on the language teaching methodologies and practices were “devastating,” the pupils would have been better off if they had not learned a fl at all. the process of language development is slower in young learners than in their older peers; therefore, generating and maintaining motivation is crucial for positive outcomes in early language programs (nikolov, 2011). it has been well established that children’s motivation is largely shaped by classroom experience, the teacher, and later by peers (nikolov, 1999b). providing young learners with the feeling of success and showing them how much they have progressed are essential means of maintaining motivation at early ages (mckay, 2006, p. 14). in order for young learners to see that they are making progress, teachers should offer detailed feedback and inform them on their strengths and weaknesses on a regular basis. two recent trends in educational assessment, diagnostic and dynamic testing, can assist language teachers in accomplishing these requirements and, consequently, in boosting their students’ learning potential (nikolov & szabó, 2012). unlike in traditional testing procedures in which the aim is to assign grades to performances, in diagnostic assessment the focus is on identifying students’ strengths and weaknesses, and then, on the basis of the results, improving their abilities. dynamic assessment integrates assessment with teaching (lantolf & poehner, 2006, p. 6). unlike in traditional settings, where teachers take the position of standing back and listening, here, they collaborate with and support students (poehner, 2008, p. 15; sternberg & grigorenko, 2002, p. 29). in order for teachers to be able to apply dynamic assessment, they need to be equipped with “diagnostic competence” (edelenbos & kubanek-german, 2004, p. 260). diagnostic competence is “the ability to interpret students’ fl growth, to skillfully a case study of a hungarian efl teacher’s assessment practices with her young learners 697 deal with assessment material and to provide students with appropriate help in response to this diagnosis” (edelenbos & kubanek-german, 2004, p. 260). 2. literature review research on how teachers assess young language learners (henceforth ylls) is fairly limited (nikolov & mihaljević djigunović, 2011; rea-dickins, 2004). in a case study investigating teachers’ performance during assessment in the classroom of english as an additional language in england, rea-dickins and gardner (2000) revealed a lack of systematicity in assessment practices. the reliability of the information the teachers elicited through observation-driven assessment was questionable, which, then, threatened the validity of the inferences they drew for the individual students. the findings also shed light on the teachers’ lack of knowledge of developmental theory. this caused them further difficulties with regard to how to interact appropriately with the students and interpret their abilities. in a study carried out in germany and the netherlands, edelenbos and kubanek-german (2004) observed the diagnostic behavior of primary school teachers of english. the results revealed that many teachers found the task of capturing their students’ level of ability challenging. the amount of time they spent on diagnosing their learners was limited (11.3% of the lesson time, p. 266). similarly to the study by rea-dickins and gardner (2000), during classroom observations no systematicity regarding the application of diagnostic procedures could be found. butler (2009a) reviewed studies conducted on teacher-based assessment in three asian countries: korea, taiwan and japan. he emphasized the importance of central specifications of assessment procedures and noted that such guidelines existed in none of the three countries. in korea and taiwan, the government recommended that teachers apply teacher-based assessments or informal observation-based assessments, such as portfolios. however, classroom observations revealed that the teachers found it challenging to use these forms of assessment, which had been traditionally less valued in east asia (butler, 2009a). the difficulties mainly stemmed from teachers’ lack of time and knowledge to apply teacher-based assessment, large class sizes, and the lack of assistance given to teachers in how to utilize the information gained through these assessment procedures. in japan, teachers were not required to carry out assessment at primary school level; however, they did apply some form of self-assessment. butler (2009a), however, pointed out that how accurately these assessments demonstrated students’ performance and how the information collected during these procedures could be utilized to improve teaching was often unclear. in hungary, similarly to the international arena (e.g., brumen, cagran, & rixon, 2009; butler, 2009a, 2009b, 2015; edelenbos & kubanek-german, 2004; gabriella hild 698 peng & zheng, 2016; wilden & porsch, 2016) research on teachers’ assessment practices is fairly limited. a few studies, however, explored classroom assessment. in a retrospective study (nikolov, 2001) which examined 185 hungarian adults’ language learning experiences, all the participants claimed that in primary school the assessment of their performances had always induced anxiety in their classrooms. other studies (bors, lugossy, & nikolov, 2001; nikolov, 2003; 2008) reported similar trends: students dreaded and disliked most tests and assessment. the most common forms of assessment were translation and tests of vocabulary and grammar. oral competence was tested primarily by having students recite a text they had crammed. in other words, the dominance of the grammar translation and audio-lingual methods and activities inappropriate for young learners, which also prevail in english as a foreign language (efl) classrooms in hungary (lugossy, 2009; medgyes & nikolov, 2014; nikolov, 1999a, 2001, 2009c), were found to be typical ways of assessment. in terms of classroom activities appropriate for this age group, in their review of research on early language learning programs in europe, edelenbos and kubanek (2009, pp. 52-53) stated that one of the eight aims of these programs was “to improve the level of communicative competence reached by students through their educational system.” a study by lundberg (2007), conducted in sweden to improve teaching efl in young learners classrooms, found that using communicative and authentic materials and involving pupils in the planning and evaluation of teaching and learning stimulated the motivation of the participating students aged 10 to 11 the most. in contrast, “a slow pace and a lack of physical activities, too much revising and too few challenges, lack of variety, uninteresting material, too much silent work on your own, inconsistency of target language use and isolated lesson units without cohesion” proved to be demotivating (lundberg, 2007, p. 30). the objective of the present case study is to offer more data on classroom assessment practices and their impact on ylls. it provides a thick description of how a hungarian english-as-a-foreign-language (efl) teacher assessed and gave feedback to her students, and of what assessment tasks she used and how. the study is a follow-up to a large-scale project (nikolov & szabó, 2012), which consisted of three phases. the first phase aimed to explore teachers’ classroom assessment practice and to establish a baseline to build on good practice. next, building on the experience of the first phase, a list of 18 tests was drawn up. a total of 18 efl primary school teachers volunteered to choose eight that they considered suitable for their students’ language proficiency. they were asked to pilot and evaluate them according to a set of given criteria. based on the results of the previous phases, diagnostic tests were developed and piloted in the third phase. the ultimate aim of the project was to design, pilot, and calibrate diagnostic tests hungarian primary school efl teachers could use for diagnosing their students’ progress. a case study of a hungarian efl teacher’s assessment practices with her young learners 699 in the first phase of the large-scale project, 12 primary school efl teachers volunteered to choose and characterize 10 tasks they had used successfully with their students for testing their efl knowledge (hild, 2014b). they were given a form and asked to complete it for each task they chose. the findings of this qualitative exploratory study coincided with the results of studies on fl teaching and learning in hungary (medgyes & nikolov, 2014; nikolov, 2009c). they indicated that the teachers did not have a clear view of what task, task difficulty, skills and subskills meant and, thus, had difficulties when applying these categories to the tasks they chose (see hild, 2014a; hild & nikolov, 2011 for more details). while describing learners’ performances they applied loose and fuzzy terms and no clear criteria. they put emphasis on errors and accuracy rather than fluency and vocabulary, and on what students could not do, as opposed to what they could achieve. feedback was often provided in the form of rewards (red points) for top performance only. lower achievers, however, did not receive any reward, which may easily result in a motivational decrease in less able learners. the description of the assessment procedures of the tasks showed that the students were rarely, if at all, provided with detailed feedback regarding their strengths and weaknesses. the results also suggested that the teachers tended to separate teaching and assessment. they did not scaffold their students’ performance during assessment, which would have assisted learning and the successful completion of the tasks and also revealed prospective development. many of the activities the teachers had chosen were not in line with the needs and cognitive abilities of their pupils. this qualitative exploratory study (creswell, 2003; mackey & gass, 2005) is a follow-up to the large-scale project. my aim was twofold. firstly, since only reading and listening tasks developed and piloted in the large-scale project had been analyzed (nikolov & szabó, 2012), i intended to find out how the oral tasks had worked. secondly, since the literature on classroom assessment is fairly limited, i intended to explore early efl teachers’ assessment practices from an emic perspective involving one teacher. the present article aims to answer three research questions: 1. what kind of oral assessment tasks did the teacher use in her class? 2. how did the teacher assess and give feedback to her students? 3. what did the teacher and her students think about the diagnostic speaking tests? gabriella hild 700 3. method 3.1. participants an efl teacher, anikó (all participants’ names are pseudonyms), and five of her seventh graders from her class of 17 students, robi, béla, balázs, anett and lili, agreed to participate in the study. after lili fell ill, her classmate, anett, replaced her in the study. the participating students were aged 12 to 13. they all attended the same class in a prestigious primary school in a large town in southwest hungary. it is one of the schools affiliated to the university in town, where in-service teachers do their teaching practice. therefore, its teaching staff is considered to be well qualified. 3.2. data collection data were collected with semi-structured interviews with the teacher and the students. for the purpose of triangulation (mackey & gass, 2005, p. 181), the students were also audioand video-recorded while doing four speaking tasks, and i also observed two classes and took notes. the datasets elicited during the interviews and video recordings were analyzed for themes and issues (creswell, 2003, pp. 190-195; mackey & gass, 2005, pp. 178-179). the participants’ answers were translated into english. the students were asked about their opinion of the oral tasks immediately after completing them so that the drawback of selective recall or memory loss could be minimized (mackey & gass, 2005, p. 174). they were also interviewed at a later stage during which the following topics were addressed: · typical english classes: tasks, work mode, activities; · assessment in class: self-, peer-assessment and teacher assessment; · the diagnostic tests they had piloted with their teacher a month earlier in the framework of the final stage of the large-scale project. the questions of the interview with the teacher tapped into the following topics: · the students: general abilities, language proficiency, motivation, out-ofschool language use; · typical english classes: tasks, teaching materials, work mode, assessment, practice, tasks popular and unpopular among students; · assessment procedures in class; · piloting the diagnostic speaking tests: the teacher’s opinion about the tasks and the assessment procedures. the language of the interviews was hungarian since the aim was not to test the participants’ language proficiency but to elicit information regarding their views a case study of a hungarian efl teacher’s assessment practices with her young learners 701 and experiences. while piloting the oral tasks with the students english was used, except for the introductory discussions and discussion of their opinions about the tasks. however, the students were also told that they were free to switch to their mother tongue whenever they felt the need. 3.3. procedure in january 2011, teachers who had participated in the third phase of the largescale project were sent an email inquiring if they were willing to take part in a follow-up study. one teacher volunteered to participate with her students. the students’ parents signed a consent form in which they agreed to their children’s participation in the research. the interview with the teacher was conducted in two sessions during her breaks between classes because otherwise it would have taken up too much of her time. before i started to work with the students the teacher allowed me to observe two of her english classes. the week after the interviews with the teacher, the students carried out the four oral tasks in pairs. i audioand video-taped one pair at a time during their regular english classes in a free classroom; thus, i did not use their free time. they were highly motivated and intrigued knowing they were participating in a research study. in order to put them at ease i informed them that this was not a test and their performance would remain confidential and would not count towards their assessment at school. i explained to them in detail the steps of the procedure. the interviews with the students were carried out during class time the week after all of them completed the oral tasks. i interviewed them in their classroom; therefore, the environment was familiar. 4. results and discussion 4.1. oral assessment tasks and classroom activities as has been mentioned in the literature review, in young learners’ fl classroom, short, communicative and interesting activities should constitute the core of their teaching. as to the oral tests anikó used in class to assess her students’ language learning development, the findings revealed that she mostly required the students to cram texts in the coursebook and recite them in class; this practice was in line with the results of other hungarian studies on early language learning (bors et al., 2001; nikolov, 2003; 2008). contrary to the communicative approach, anikó believed that “having students cram a text” was a good “method” because it could be assessed “objectively,” and it “is even good for the less able learners: they do not have to think about what to say.” when some gabriella hild 702 of the students tried to talk “right off the top of their head,” that is, use the fl freely to express an idea because they had not learned it by heart, anikó considered it “unacceptable.” one of the boys, robi, reported similar tendencies: “it has also happened that one of my classmates did not learn it [the story from the textbook] but told us the way he remembered it. she [anikó] said it was ok, but next time he should learn it by heart.” anikó also added: “those who are more able and creative may change it [the text] in whatever ways they can.” such a distinction between low and high achievers can demotivate the less able children and, thus, make them lag further behind. children are more likely to participate in the activities willingly if they find the tasks interesting and enjoyable, that is, if they are driven by intrinsic motivation (nikolov, 1995, 1999b). in terms of classroom activities, during the interviews both anikó and her students reported that most of the time they covered the exercises and texts of the coursebook, project 3 (hutchinson, 2003). although anikó claimed that she had regularly supplemented the book, as one of the students, anett, put it, these activities tended to be “a little bit similar” and were mainly form-focused. one of the exceptions was a reading diary, which the students enjoyed and which seemed to have a positive impact. three out of the five participants read books in english out of school. variety, which is a must in an early language learning classroom, did not characterize anikó’s classes. as two of the participating children replied when asked about the most and the least frequently used tasks, there were no such activities, because “what we do we do regularly.” in the interview the students mainly mentioned classroom activities such as gap-filling, “true or false,” and, the activity described by béla in this way: “there is a picture, and we have to write down what the people were doing yesterday at 12.” robi mentioned another activity: “there was this exercise when there was a word, have; and we had to replace it for will have.” throughout the interview with anikó it became evident that she attributed particular importance to grammar. she believed that “it is necessary to give a grammatical basis to their [students’] knowledge so that they can use the language accurately. naturally, the emphasis is not on this, but i strive to keep them in balance, grammar and vocabulary, so that they feel that both are important.” anikó feared that her students did not like practicing grammar, but believed they “[should do] it properly, anyway.” when it comes to teaching grammar to ylls, teachers should ensure that in the classroom the focus is on the meaning, and, while paying attention to the meaning, young learners can implicitly use their inductive logic to infer the underlying language rules and gain knowledge of the grammar (mckay, 2006, p. 42). providing learners with forms and rules and expecting them to apply those to specific cases, which was often the case in anikó’s classroom, are cognitively too demanding for this age group and, hence, highly demotivating. a case study of a hungarian efl teacher’s assessment practices with her young learners 703 the two classes i observed also provided valuable information about anikó’s classroom practices. before the first class i observed anikó told me: “i cannot show you anything about these students today; whether they will participate or not; you will not see anything about them.” she was proved right. the whole class was devoted to discussing the homework, which was to make a “spidergram,” a list of words organized in a cobweb fashion. the students were to collect words in connection with traffic and group them under headings such as rules, people, jobs and vehicles. in class the students mostly did nothing but shouted or read aloud the words they had previously collected at home in connection with the topic of traffic and completed their lists with new words whenever it was necessary. those who came up with unfamiliar words did have the opportunity to use english freely and explain the meanings of these words, which most of them did really well. but the rest took the easy way out and rather gave the hungarian equivalent without the teacher encouraging or helping them to use the english language. on those few occasions when the students had an opportunity to use english, anikó did not provide them with feedback on their performance. she mainly asked for more words that could go under the various headings of the spidergram. however, as mentioned earlier, providing detailed feedback is especially important in the case of children since it helps them see how much they have progressed, motivating them to succeed (edelenbos, johnstone, & kubanek, 2006, p. 80; edelenbos & kubanek, 2009; mckay, 2006, p. 23). although the task itself might allow for more use of english in context, the aim seemed to be to gather as many words as possible. during the class, however, it did not turn out what the students were supposed to do with the complete spidergram, which covered a whole a4-size piece of paper. since children easily get diverted (mckay, 2006, p. 6), it is preferable to apply shorter activities in the classroom. interesting, engaging and challenging tasks can motivate them to participate and pay attention (mckay, 2006, p. 41). spending the whole 45-minute class on collecting words proved neither short nor interesting/challenging. this was reflected in the students’ behavior; they lost interest and started to talk and fidget towards the end of the class. in the first 30 minutes of the second class i observed, the students carried out a motivating oral task. they were to give a presentation in pairs about an object they invented. however, as it later turned out, these presentations had been written previously by the students and then corrected by anikó. therefore, the students’ opportunity to use the language freely and improve their communicative skills was again compromised. except for one case, neither during nor after the presentations did anikó take the opportunity to encourage the students to use the target language in context by asking further questions or inviting the classmates to inquire about these objects after the presentations, but gabriella hild 704 instead she said: “what else have we got for today?” initiating discussion would have also allowed for all the other students to participate in classwork rather than just listening to their peers. giving immediate feedback about students’ performance is very important so that they know in what area they should improve (alderson 2005, p. 208). however, besides thanking the students for their performance, anikó failed to comment on their presentations. the remaining 15 minutes of this class were devoted to revision. they discussed a story from the coursebook, which they had covered in the previous lessons. afterwards, anikó quizzed the students on the vocabulary of the story. she gave the english definitions of certain words and expressions in the story on the basis of which the students were to give the english terms. they often did not wait for the teacher to ask them to reply but shouted the answers, which anikó had no problem with. she was content if she heard the correct answer and did not attempt to find out who said it, which was often impossible. it seemed that she assessed the vocabulary knowledge of the whole class, rather than the individual students’ vocabulary. as for the feedback, she sometimes corrected the students or thanked them for the correct answer, which had no diagnostic value. the class was finished off with a competition. she asked for two volunteers who had to stand next to one of the desks. she said words, expressions or sentences in hungarian, and the student who was quicker to translate them into english could take a step forward. the winner, who received a red point as a reward for good performance, was the student who reached the teacher’s desk first. the other student’s performance was neither rewarded nor commented on. as mckay (2006, p. 192) pointed out, “vocabulary is best assessed in an integrated way through language use in language use tasks.” however, these two latter tasks required the students to memorize words, expressions and sentences out-of-context, and had little communicative value. 4.2. classroom assessment the results regarding the teacher’s assessment practices were in line with the findings of the first phase of the large-scale project and other international studies carried out in this field (butler, 2009a; edelenbos & kubanek-german, 2004; rea-dickins & gardner, 2000). while describing the students’ language knowledge, the unclear terms anikó used revealed that she had difficulties with capturing her students’ level of ability. she failed to define their proficiency levels in relation to any criteria: “well, they are at a good level . . . they can communicate and talk.” she also added: “the majority has very good abilities. two of them are at a little lower level, but even they have abilities above average.“ a case study of a hungarian efl teacher’s assessment practices with her young learners 705 feedback is a crucial element of assessment. it should always come right after students’ performance, and be individualized and stimulating for further learning (alderson, 2005, p. 208; nikolov, 2011). shohamy (1992, p. 515) emphasizes that “for assessment information to be used effectively it needs to be detailed, innovative, relevant and diagnostic, and to address a variety of dimensions rather than being collapsed into one general score.” the development of strategy use, which is one of the main aims of early language learning, can also be assisted by providing students with regular feedback on their performance (nikolov, 2011). feedback should be provided regularly to enable young learners to see they are progressing and achieving what they are expected to (nikolov, 2011). the interviews and the classroom observations demonstrated that the feedback anikó gave to her students was often too general or fuzzy and contained hardly any specific information on the strengths and weaknesses of their performance, which suggests she did not bear in mind any criteria for assessment. after a test, anikó usually distributed the papers and only provided a general evaluation of the class’s performance. according to one of the students, robi, on such occasions she told the whole class that “there were very good ideas she could give red points for. but there were quite a lot of mistakes, too.” according to lili, in tests anikó “underlines the mistakes or puts a question mark next to them.” after getting back their test papers, as béla voiced it to me, they sometimes “correct the mistakes, and . . . write down the correct version in our exercise book.” lili reported that “it happens that she [anikó] goes up to a student and discusses with him what he needs to practice.” when anikó sometimes took the students’ exercise books home, as lili put it, “to check if we have done everything, and if we have done it correctly,” she did not talk to them individually, but “correct[ed] our mistakes, . . . and . . . [gave] it back to us to see it.” during the interview anikó mentioned that when she took home the students’ exercise books, the comments she usually wrote were like this: “this was good or wrong. nice job. well done. . . . this was unsatisfactory, and you can do better than that,” which gave hardly any clue to the students as to what they should practice or improve. one of her best students, balázs, also complained that when anikó was not satisfied with his performance she only said: “i expect more from a student at your level,” which balázs did not consider very useful since “when i do what she asked, i don’t understand why she is saying that.” in terms of detailed, individual feedback, anikó stated that the students usually received such “feedback after we finish a topic, or, at least, at the end of each semester, when they get a mark for their end of term test.” on such occasions, she informed the students who had “performed at the level expected of them,” whom anikó would have “expected more of, who should add what to his performance and who should practice what.” gabriella hild 706 in class, as a reward, anikó gave red points rather than marks, unless some students put in an “outstanding performance,” which deserved grade 5. those who did not perform well did not receive anything because, as she formulated it, “they can see anyway that it did not go well and they need to do more, because out of 10 only seven were correct.” when asked about classroom assessment and feedback, the students also described techniques contradicting one another. two stated that during an oral test anikó took notes, but after it she only said, “it was good,” without further detail. three students claimed that the teacher read out her notes and told them what to pay attention to next time. robi, for example, stated: “she tells us what exactly we need to pay attention to. for example, i tend to forget about the future tense.” this implies that anikó did not always provide the students with information about the strong and weak points of their performance, and they had no idea what to improve. the two “good” students, balázs and béla, claimed that they did not really receive any feedback on their performance because they did not make mistakes: “i don’t make mistakes, so she doesn’t tell me anything.” according to them, however, anikó commented on the lower achievers’ performance more often. as béla formulated it, “she doesn’t usually come up to me, . . . but it happens more often if somebody is not so good at english.” this practice suggests that in anikó’s class feedback mainly focused on what the students could not do and rarely on what they did well, which is not conducive to early language learning (mckay, 2006, p. 9, nikolov, 1999a). the students’ reports also suggested that anikó concentrated on accuracy while giving information on their performance. contrary to principles of dynamic assessment, anikó believed that if the aim was progress testing, as she formulated it, “to find out what they [the students] could do,” no assistance was acceptable. this belief is in line with the assessment traditions in hungarian education in general, not only in fl classrooms. in the classroom of ylls, selfand peer-assessment play an essential role in the establishment and development of learning strategies, one of the main aims of early language learning (nikolov, 2011). however, anikó was not content with the idea of applying self-assessment because then the assessment “will not be objective or realistic.” she believed that “then the assessment will certainly not be appropriate and relevant . . . because students cannot really decide if that sentence was grammatically correct or not. the best ones may be able to judge it, but it isn’t for sure.” her concern, which then proved right while i was piloting the oral tasks with the students, was that students disregarded grammatical mistakes and only concentrated on whether they understood what their classmates had said, or, in other words, on the meaning they meant to convey. hence, she thought that “it is done properly only when i do the assessment.” as ioannou a case study of a hungarian efl teacher’s assessment practices with her young learners 707 georgiou and pavlou (2003, p. 99) also stated, although communication is the priority in the early language learning classroom, accuracy does count and also has to be dealt with. however, the focus should be on meaning, especially if the aim of the task is to assess communicative ability (ioannou-georgiou & pavlou, 2003, p. 99), which was the case in these oral tests. therefore, the students did what they were supposed to do at this age. 4.3. the teacher’s and the students’ opinion about the diagnostic tests in the interview anikó was also asked to give her opinion about the diagnostic speaking tasks she had tried out with her students a month earlier. although anikó was an experienced efl teacher at a school known for its english language program, she provided little concrete information as to what exactly she liked or disliked in the diagnostic tests she had tried out with her students. besides emphasizing how easy most of these tasks were and that her class had already covered most of the topics and grammatical structures the tests focused on, she did not go into any detail regarding how well the tasks had worked with her students. while describing her experiences with the diagnostic tests anikó was thinking in terms of normative and holistic testing following the traditions typical of the hungarian educational system. anikó was concerned that the scoring guide on how many words and mistakes an utterance could contain to be worth a particular number of scores did not take into account the differences between students’ language knowledge: “for some students a 3-word sentence would be an excellent performance, whereas others can say 5 or 6-word-long sentences.” she also added that though this assessment procedure was “more nuanced, it was more difficult to follow. so, now is it five, four or three points. and then how shall we convert it into grades? our kids and educational system think in terms of grades.” although she realized that this method was, as she put it, “more nuanced” and provided more detailed information on students’ knowledge, she still preferred “grades,” that is, holistic testing. anikó mainly had problems with those tasks that had multiple solutions, such as the picture description activities or the 99 questions. for example, in one of the picture description tasks, she could not decide if “the man is walking or going somewhere, or the girl is putting the picture on the wall or taking it off.” in these cases anikó told the students to write about what they thought there was in the picture. however, as she formulated it, this “made checking more difficult, and . . . lengthy . . . since it took us a whole class [to complete it]. it takes time for all of them to ask if it is ok in this or that way, because there were so many variations.” in class, she usually solved this kind of problem by specifying the grammatical structures students should use to formulate sentences. in gabriella hild 708 order to make assessment, as she put it, ”straightforward,” she also applied this technique while piloting the diagnostic task of picture description: “i had to make sure and convince the students not to overcomplicate the description of the pictures. so they should use this structure: this is a man who does this and that. and this is where they should stop.” in other words, anikó prevented the students from demonstrating how they could use english creatively and freely, which was one of the main objectives of these tasks. during the interview, the students stated that the oral diagnostic tests they had tried out with anikó were mostly unfamiliar to them. they remembered doing activities similar to the 99 questions, when they had to write and then ask their partner questions. they also mentioned that they sometimes described pictures. however, the students’ report suggested that during these tasks the focus was on practicing grammatical rules rather than on using the language for communicative purposes: “when we discussed present continuous there was this exercise where there were pictures, and we described what the people in the picture were doing at that moment.” similarly to anikó, the only difficulty the students had with the written tasks was that some of the pictures were, as they put it, “blurred.” this really meant that in some cases more than one description of the picture was appropriate. in the classroom of communicative language teaching, this should not cause any problems. multiple solutions can increase the opportunities for learners to use the fl creatively and come up with as many ideas as they can, which is one of the aims of early language teaching. though the students hardly ever carried out self-assessment in class, they claimed they did not find it difficult to follow the instruction and assess their performance while doing the diagnostic tests. however, according to robi’s report, when they were asked to do it, some of them did not take it seriously and wrote the maximum score everywhere, suggesting that they attributed little importance to their own opinion: “some of us thought that ouch, it is not anikó who will check it, we have to do it. then i will write a 2 [the maximum score] everywhere to fool them.” 5. conclusions the aims of the paper were to determine: (a) what kind of oral assessment tasks a primary school efl teacher used in class, (b) how she assessed and gave feedback to her students, and (c) what the teacher and her students thought of the diagnostic tests they had previously tried out in the last phase of the large-scale project. since little is known about teachers’ classroom practices, a qualitative, exploratory approach was adopted (dörnyei, 2007, p. 39). as a follow-up to the a case study of a hungarian efl teacher’s assessment practices with her young learners 709 large-scale project, the case study intended to provide a more in-depth look at assessment practices in the early language learning classroom. the findings were in line with the results of the first phase of the large-scale project (hild, 2014a, 2014b; hild & nikolov, 2011) and other hungarian (bors et al., 2001; nikolov, 2003, 2008) and international (butler, 2009a; edelenbos & kubanek-german, 2004; readickins & gardner, 2000) studies carried out in this field. the study shed light on deficiencies in the teacher’s knowledge of ageappropriate methodology and assessment practices. instead of short, intrinsically motivating tasks where the focus is on fluency rather than accuracy, teaching and practicing grammatical rules, memorizing out-of-context words and the monotony of the use of the coursebook activities or similar tasks characterized anikó’s classes. she considered having students recite a text the best way to assess oral skills. since she attributed great importance to accuracy, even at the expense of creative language use, she accepted the “more able” students’ deviations from the original text, but discouraged the less able learners from using english freely. the students’ creative language use was limited even when they presented their own inventions because anikó wanted them to stick to the written version of their presentations she had previously edited for them. as for classroom assessment, anikó rarely provided her students with detailed feedback on their performance. when she, however, did so, she found it hard to diagnose their strengths and weaknesses. she did not apply any criteria but provided her students with a general, often fuzzy description of their language knowledge and skills. instead of focusing on fluency and emphasizing what the students did know, she was more concerned with how many mistakes they had made and whether what they had said or written was accurate. similarly to the outcomes of the first phase of the large-scale project, rewarding the best performances and ignoring the other students’ results were also typical of anikó’ assessment practice. according to her, scaffolding students while doing a task was not consistent with testing their knowledge. she refrained from the use of selfand peer-assessment because she believed students tended to focus on meaning rather than accuracy. hence, she was of the opinion that only she could do a proper job when it came to assessing students. with regard to the diagnostic tests anikó had previously tried out in the last phase of the large-scale project, she formulated only a few general thoughts. she believed that her students had been able to tackle them easily. she had problems with the tasks that had several possible answers. in the picture description tasks, where the students came up with several ideas, she had difficulty scoring the answers. she wanted tests where there was only one correct solution, the number of which could then add up to a grade. even though she realized that the diagnostic tests allowed her to obtain a more comprehensive gabriella hild 710 analysis of students’ language competence, she still preferred tasks where the assessment was more “straightforward.” these findings suggested that she insisted on the normative and holistic testing methods, which are typically applied in the hungarian educational context, and found it hard to deliver diagnostic assessment. however, since children learn fls slowly, it is essential to test their progress regularly to maintain their motivation by showing them how much they have developed and that hard work was worth the effort. 5. limitations and implications for further research despite its valuable findings, the research porject has limitations. one of them concerns the number of the participants. this qualitative, exploratory study set out to provide a more in-depth perspective and, therefore, was designed to work with only a few participants; however, only one teacher could be recruited. further research is necessary to find out more about how teachers diagnose their students’ strengths and weaknesses, how they give feedback and how they use the information they gained from tests. it would also be interesting to see how other efl teachers would use these diagnostic tests, how they could follow the assessment instructions, and whether and how they would use them in the long-run. a further limitation of the paper is that data were mainly collected through self-reports. more classroom observations would be necessary to support and supplement the information elicited by the questionnaire and the interviews. however, the teacher seemed to be threatened by the thought of me observing her classes. therefore, besides the two classes i had observed, i was not provided with other opportunities. on the basis of the results of the large-scale project the case study was a follow-up to, a list of can do statements, as well as topics and task types have been developed, which teachers can adopt in their own contexts (for more details, see nikolov, 2016b). acknowledgments this study is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation (hild, 2014b) completed at the university of pécs, hungary. a case study of a hungarian efl teacher’s assessment practices with her young learners 711 references alderson, j. c. 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(2016). learning efl from year 1 or year 3? a comparative study on children's efl listening and reading comprehension at the end of primary education. in m. nikolov (ed.), assessing young learners of english: global and local perspectives (pp. 191-212). new york: springer. 227 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (2). 227-245 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl acculturation strategy and language experience in expert esl speakers: an exploratory study ewa waniek-klimczak university of ód , poland ewaklim@uni.lodz.pl abstract acculturation and language proficiency have been found to be inter-related both from the perspective of second language acquisition (schumann, 1978, 1986) and socio-psychological adaptation in cross-cultural contacts (ward, bochner, & furnham, 2001). however, the predictions as to the effect of a particular strategy on success differ, with assimilation believed to create most favourable conditions for sla and integration for general well-being. the present study explores acculturation patterns in three expert users of english as a second language, recent polish immigrants to the uk, in relation to their language experience. the qualitative data were collected with the use of a questionnaire and analysed with respect to language experience and socioaffective factors. the analysis aimed at better understanding of the relationship between language learning in a formal context and language use in a natural setting on the one hand and the relationship between language expertise and acculturation strategy choice on the other. the results show that in spite of individual differences, expert language users tend to adopt an assimilation rather than integration acculturation strategy. this may suggest that attitudes are related to expertise in english as a second language in a more conservative way than advocated by cross-cultural approaches. keywords: acculturation, sla, language attitudes, language shock, culture shock, expert learners, polish immigrants to the uk ewa waniek-klimczak 228 the globalised reality brings a new understanding of cross-cultural contacts and communication. with english as a language of international communication, teachers and learners across europe change their priorities and attitudes towards english, which is increasingly viewed as culturally unspecified. the perspective adopted by proponents of a lingua franca approach (jenkins, 2000, 2003; seidlhofer, 2005) seems to make it possible to use english as a tool for expressing every speaker’s native culture through the medium of a different language. a major argument for l1 induced modification of english comes from the observation that europeans are more likely to communicate with other non-native speakers than native speakers of english (seidlhofer, 2005). however, in a polish context this does not need to be the case, with the enlargement of the european union in may 2004 creating conditions for an increased likelihood of direct contact with the target culture not only for those poles who decided to seek employment in the uk or ireland, but also for their relatives and friends from poland. thus, it is not only a scientific curiosity, but also a practical necessity to explore the effect of immersion and learn from the experience of polish learners who have had the opportunity to test the effectiveness of formal instruction in english as a foreign language for communication in a natural language environment. in particular, the observation of the most successful, expert language learners may provide further insights into the nature of the intricate relationship between identity, culture and the development of second language proficiency. this paper hopes to contribute to the discussion of both expert language learner characteristics and immigrant language development by exploring the views and attitudes of three educated polish speakers who moved to the uk to continue their studies in 2005 and have subsequently decided to set up their homes in this country. there are two major reasons for undertaking this study: firstly, the study aims to extend the understanding of the nature of a complex relationship between language and culture experience and the acculturation strategy adopted by expert english as a second language (esl) speakers; secondly, given an increased likelihood of direct contact with native speakers of english in the polish context, the study hopes to provide independent evidence that can be used in further discussion of teaching and learning priorities in polish schools. although the three case studies presented here do not provide enough data for generalizations, the study hopes to contribute to a growing body of research in the field of immigrant language experience and its implications for language instruction. acculturation the situation in which an individual brought up in a certain culture (and language or languages) comes in direct contact with a different culture (and acculturation strategy and language experience in expert esl speakers: an exploratory study 229 language) creates conditions for acculturation, originally defined as comprehending “the phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact with subsequent changes in the original culture patterns of either or both groups” (redfield, linton, & herskovits, 1936, p. 149 as cited in berry, 1997, p. 14). as an element of culture, language has been predicted to be particularly sensitive to crosscultural experience, with researchers agreeing that language fluency acts as one of the main factors predicting sociocultural adaptation (ward, 1996; ward, bochner, & furnham, 2001; ward & kennedy, 1999). not surprisingly, then, the pattern of acculturation has been postulated to function as a predictor of success in second language acquisition. in the model proposed by schumann (1978, 1986), acculturation, defined as “social and psychological integration of the learner with the target language group,” is claimed to be “a major causal variable in sla” (schumann, 1986, p. 379). the variable comprises social and affective factors based on social psychology research; in a more recent formulation, a framework for acculturation research (berry, 1997, p. 15) includes group (situational) and individual (personal) variables, with moderating factors active prior to acculturation and occurring during acculturation. thus, acculturation comprises a number of factors whose values contribute to the process of adaptation, that is, “changes that take place in individuals or groups in response to environmental demands” (berry, 1997, p. 15), viewed as a long-term outcome of culture and language contact. traditionally associated with immigration, acculturation involves patterns of adaptation chosen by members of a non-dominant group; these patterns have been generalized on the basis of bi-polar answers to two major questions about cultural maintenance on the one hand, and contact and participation on the other (berry, 1997). a positive attitude towards cultural maintenance and a negative one towards contact and participation within the dominant culture and/or language group leads to separation of a nondominant group member/s; a reverse situation, that is, a negative attitude towards maintenance of the native culture and positive toward the dominant culture, results in the strategy of assimilation. in the case of two ‘minuses’ a group or a person faces marginalisation, and can be said not to feel they belong to either community; finally, if a group or a person values both their own original culture and the culture of the majority community, conditions are met for integration. the results of much of the psychological research show that it is this final strategy that is most helpful in reaching long term health and wellbeing (see phinney, horenczyk, liebkind, & vedder, 2001 and ward et al., 2001, pp. 91-92 for a review). ewa waniek-klimczak 230 with respect to the dominant community language proficiency, however, the effect of acculturation strategy may differ. evaluating the predictive power of three strategies: assimilation, preservation and adaptation (corresponding to assimilation, separation and integration in berry, 1997), schumann (1986) assumes that it is the assimilation strategy that is the best predictor of success. the adaptation strategy, corresponding to integration (“the group adapts to the life style and values of the [target language] tl, but maintains its own life style and values for intragroup use” [schuman, 1986, p. 381]) is claimed to have a varied effect due to a different degree of language contact with the target language community. as it is the amount of interaction with native speakers that is claimed to have a decisive impact on sla, adopting the values and life-style of the target language group seems to guarantee success. this view has been supported by two types of research: firstly, extensive research in the acquisition of english pronunciation (e.g., bongaerts, van summeren, planken, & schils, 1997; flege, 1988; flege, bohn, & jang, 1997; flege & lui 2001; flege, schiru, & mackay, 2003) shows that language experience and the amount of native speaker input may determine the acquisition of the target sound system in children as well as in adults. secondly, socio-phonetic studies of ethnic group affiliation provide ample evidence for the relationship between language and group identity (e.g., gatbonton & trofimovich, 2008; gatbonton, trofimovich, & segalovitz, 2011; sachdev & giles, 2004). expert language users the conditions for ultimate attainment (e.g., moyer, 1999), features of a good language learner (e.g., rubin, 1975), especially from the perspective of learning strategies and learning styles (e.g., anderson, 1991) or personality factors (biedro , 2011) have been in the centre of attention in sla studies over the years. interestingly, however, there seems to have been a shift in the direction of interest, and after a long period of exploring the causes of problems in language learning, there has been a growing interest in such cases when learners reach high proficiency levels, sometimes against all odds, as in the case of nearnative pronunciation of adult speakers (binghader, 2010; bongaerts, planken, & schills, 1995; bongaerts et al., 1997; ioup, boustagi, el tigi, & moselle, 1994). although a negative effect of age predicted by the critical period hypothesis has been supported by many studies, especially with respect to l2 phonology, a combination of individual learner characteristics, affective variables and language experience (‘input enhancement’ in ioup, 1995) may lead to ultimate attainment. with success defined in terms of reaching a native-like level of proficiency, however, it is difficult to operationalise the concept of a good language acculturation strategy and language experience in expert esl speakers: an exploratory study 231 learner or ultimate attainment with respect to a holistic language profile of a second language user in a natural context. arguably, although language testing can provide information as to the level of linguistic competence, testing communicative and pragmatic competence needed for everyday life verges on the impossible. however, the observation of a dominant target-language community and learning how highly successful sla speakers function within this community in comparison to other members of their non-dominant, l1 community, provides grounds for selecting individual learners who function as expert language users. the concept of expertise in language learning can be defined with respect to both independent measures and socially-based evaluation; for instance, in her quantitative analysis of the beliefs of two expert language learners, mercer (2010) used the criterion of high proficiency and recognition of the expertise level in a particular socio-cultural context (conditions for being awarded the english department ‘excellence award’ at an austrian university; p. 59). while a university setting provides clearly defined social conditions, the term expert language user will be extended in this paper to selected members of a polish non-dominant community in a university town in the uk on the basis of their linguistic function in a target community. the estimate of language proficiency in these speakers is based on their position within the community: they hold at least an ma from a british tertiary level institution and do not work doing manual labour (in fact they either study or work for the university). the study the general aim of the study is to explore the attitudes and beliefs of highly successful esl polish speakers whose language learning experience includes formal learning before they decided to move to the uk and intensive interaction in a naturalistic setting once they took up employment and studies in the english environment. more specifically, the study concentrates on language experience and acculturation strategy in those members of a polish speech community in britain who are believed to have achieved the status of language experts within the non-dominant (polish) group by means of their educational and occupational advancement in the dominant (british) group. participants the study was carried out among polish-born and polish-educated immigrants to the uk. they hold at least a ba level diploma from poland and at the time of the study were either working towards their ma or phd or just completed these degrees as a result of their continuing education in the uk. ewa waniek-klimczak 232 all participants had been living in the uk for at least 5 years before the recording. the educational profile was selected because of the interest in the learning experience of those young immigrants whose motivation for staying in the uk seems to extend beyond sojourn; moreover, as the study is concerned with the profile of expert esl users, it was necessary to select the individuals who could be assigned this role on the basis of their social status in both communities, the non-dominant and dominant ones. the participants were approached through a network of polish university and school friends in poland and the uk; the three participants whose experience and attitudes are explored here live in the same part of britain, the north east, in relatively small towns. although they have a connection through the same university, they do not study or work together. their life stories bear a number of similarities: they were born in 1983 and came to the uk in 2005, they took up studies and after a certain period of time decided on permanent residence in the host country. before coming, all the participants experienced formal training in english – as the length and intensity of this training varies, it will be further described in the findings section. as already mentioned, at the time of the study all participants studied and/or worked for a british university, which requires everyday usage of english in a natural setting. data collection procedure the data were collected with the use of an open-format questionnaire (see appendix), with the questions first read and then answered by participants. the format of a questionnaire rather than a structured interview was selected to minimize the interlocutor effect and avoid speech accommodation: as the researcher is polish and the questionnaire/interview was conducted in english, the effect of the nationality of an interviewer might have had an effect on the results (dowd, zuengler, & berkowitz, 1990). the answers to the questionnaire were recorded with the permission of the participants; the recordings were then transcribed and analysed. the data were coded for answers to key questions regarding language experience and acculturation strategy. language experience was analysed on the basis of questions no. 2-3, 69. the acculturation strategy was operationalised in terms of the beliefs and attitudes towards l1 and its culture (q no. 5, 12-19) and the proportion of involvement in the target language and culture (q no. 10, 21). additionally, affective factors of language and culture shock were considered on the basis of questions no. 6-9 and 20-21. the interpretation of the data follows schumann (1986) and berry (1997) with respect to acculturation; language experience is analysed for language learning as well as acculturation strategy. acculturation strategy and language experience in expert esl speakers: an exploratory study 233 findings this section presents major findings based on the analysis of the questionnaire data. the three aspects: language experience, acculturation strategy and affective factors, are first introduced and then discussed for each participant. language experience. all three participants came to the uk after an extensive formal education in english, with two of them – maja and pete – completing three years of english major tertiary level education, and miriam having the experience of english major at a high school level. however, for all of them communicating in english in a specific local context proved challenging. their beliefs with respect to most helpful elements of language experience point to the importance of natural interaction where, as one of the participants puts it “you have to react.” as the participants interacted with speakers using local accents, understanding the accent was another major challenge and a helpful language experience. maja. maja considers herself a speaker of polish as her first language, with english coming second. she started learning english at high school, at the age of 15, but later on decided to take up english as her major and graduated from an english teacher training college in poland. before she decided to stay in britain, she had come to the uk for a summer in 2004 to work as an au-pair and believes that it was a useful language experience. however, when she came to live in the northeast of england she realized she used what she refers to as “book” english, very “rp and formal.” looking back on her language experience she reflects: i lacked this fluency and this natural flow and now it has improved so much, after a couple of months it started to become easy to understand people and then after a couple of years you sort of get to pick up the local vocabulary, accent and it is just easier to speak, to listen and to be understood. and it is important because many people when we came, couldn’t understand us because our accents were so strong and we were using words that they found quite strange, so i would say now [my english] has improved a lot. in developing english skills while in the uk, she found interaction with local people most useful, she stresses full immersion as the most important factor and says: “interaction is most helpful, day in day out, sometimes embarrassing, but you have to react, so it was the most useful thing.” although english is a dominant language in her daily life now, maja believes she uses around 60 per cent english and 40 percent polish. her continewa waniek-klimczak 234 ued polish experience comes mainly from using it at home (she has a polish boyfriend); however, besides using polish in communication in the home environment and when she meets polish friends, maja reads polish books and watches polish television, so she believes her english and polish language inputs to be fairly balanced, with polish still strong in her everyday experience and english the language in which she works, studies and communicates with the outside world. miriam. for miriam polish is her first language, although she declares using english in all contexts (her boyfriend is english, so she uses english at home) and mentions the internet communicator talks with her family in poland as the only occasions when she would use polish now. her english education started very early, at the age of 8 or 9, at school and during private classes, and continued in an english-major high school, but miriam says she was not the best student then and did not spend much time studying english. however, she was very much interested in the media and movies, so a lot of her input english came from authentic sources. her english improved during her stay in the uk, she believes she is more fluent, more confident now, with english words coming first and occasional problems with polish equivalents when they are needed. she finds interaction, everyday use of english at work, as well as watching the english tv and reading in english very useful. in contrast to english, the polish input is minimal in the case of miriam – she mentions watching polish films on dvd occasionally, but even here she adds that she prefers polish directors of more european than strictly polish interests, such as pola ski or kie lowski. other than films, she declares no polish input through the media or books. pete. unlike the two previous speakers, pete declares english to be his first language now and explains that he feels this way because this is the language he uses most often, thinks in it and works using it; he uses his second language – polish, only in emails and the internet communicator-based contacts with his family in poland. he started learning english very early – around 6 or 7, with school classes accompanied by private tuition and a lot authentic english input. describing his attitude to english learning in poland, he says: “i have always exposed myself to english as much as i could and i definitely found that useful.” he had 3 years of university english education before coming to the uk and assesses his english on arrival as good. however, he feels there was a difference between individual skills, with reading and writing much stronger than speaking and listening, which he feels improved a lot with eveacculturation strategy and language experience in expert esl speakers: an exploratory study 235 ryday exposure and interaction in english. he stresses the difference between learning and acquisition and says: i didn’t feel like i was learning english. . . . i think it must have been more like acquisition, i didn’t record new vocabulary, i must have picked up a lot of slang, everyday expressions, fixed expressions from friends, people i work with . . . being exposed and thinking in english – that’s the basic thing that people don’t take into account but thinking in english helps a lot. another aspect of language input that pete stresses is exposure to different accents; reflecting on initial challenges in the uk, he talks about problems with understanding local people in a pub where he worked as a waiter. this was a frustrating experience, as with the fast tempo of work there was no time to negotiate the meanings and local customers were often not patient enough to repeat when he did not understand them. in the long run, however, he says exposure to the accents helped a lot and he concludes by saying: “when i arrived [all four skills] were good, now they are very good, but there is always room for improvement.” acculturation strategy. the degree to which speakers value the nondominant group culture versus that of a dominant group has been accepted as a key factor in defining the adopted acculturation strategy (berry, 1997). in connection with predictions for sla, acculturation strategy is treated as one of social factors, with distance, dominance, enclosure, cohesiveness, size, congruence, attitude and intended length of residence in the target language area as additional aspects (schumann, 1986). as the approach adopted in this research is based on personal decisions and the personal approach to the perception of group characteristics, some of the social factors will be mentioned in connection with acculturation strategy. the ones which seem to be shared by the three participants include a low level of distance and enclosure, small cohesiveness, relatively small size of the group, positive attitude and intended permanent residence. the question of congruence and dominance between the cultures is more difficult to assess on the basis of the data, however, participants’ beliefs seem to suggest a relatively high degree of dominance of the target culture and small congruence between the cultures. maja. when maja says: i can take some things that i like in the english culture and i can at the same time stick to the things i like in the polish culture, so it’s a mixture, but i would still describe myself as a polish person, ewa waniek-klimczak 236 there seems to be a clear indication that she has adopted an integration acculturation strategy. this is further strengthened by her relatively tight links with poland – she declares following polish news and watching polish television. at the same time, however, she stresses the need to integrate, with polish traditions and customs worth keeping but not at all costs. her beliefs are further illustrated on the basis of her in-group observation and experience: there is also a question of keeping their own little gangs and groups and not willing to communicate, integrate with the local community and this is the danger, because you know, i know people who have been here as long as me, so 5-6 years and they don’t speak english, they still need help, they are not willing to try, they criticize not only the society but also the system, the benefit system, although many of them use it – many of them get council houses and other benefits, so you know, it is dangerous. so it is important to know who you are but also because we are here it is important to go out and see and check who the people you live with are as well so that’s that. she is convinced about the need to preserve the polish language in immigrant children, as it is not only a part of cultural heritage but has the potential of being beneficial for children who speak both english and polish (“there is research showing that bilingual children are more intelligent than monolingual ones”). however, she stresses that polish needs to be seen as the additional language, with english more important. she believes proficiency in english decides about success in the dominant group and explains that the negative opinions on the attitude of the dominant group towards the polish group tend to be spread by those who are not able to communicate and blame the dominant community for not understanding want they want. at the same time she praises polish upbringing and polish values, saying that in contrast to the british who are “welfare state children and they can’t be bothered, that’s their favourite expression” she comes from the culture that values hard-work and achieving success. in fact, she believes that her polish background helped her a lot in the uk, and she clearly values her polish experience. at the same time, however, she notices how she has changed and how her experience makes her appreciate certain elements of the british culture. when she and her polish boyfriend go to poland (for a week each year) they like meeting family and friends but “there are things that we don’t like as well, because we’ve been here for so long, our personalities have changed and our attitudes have changed, so you could see these differences between cultures and attitudes.” the above data support the conclusion that maja tends to choose integration rather than assimilation strategy. it is important to notice, however, that it is language competence in english that she regards to be crucial for acculturation strategy and language experience in expert esl speakers: an exploratory study 237 success in her chosen country of residence. being able to speak english means that she feels it doesn’t really matter that she is of polish origin, she is not ashamed of it, but does not take a special pride in it, either. as this attitude brings her closer to assimilation, the overall pattern can be described as integration with an assimilatory tendency. miriam. the positive attitude towards the two cultures is shared by miriam; however, in her case the interests and involvement in the life of the polish community both in poland and in the uk and the degree to which she identifies herself as a pole seem to be much weaker. in fact she mentions changes in her involvement over the last months, but she attributes them to a recent economic turmoil and the relevance of the decisions taken in the uk for her own position. her national and cultural identity seems to be in the process of change, as she confesses being confused about her nationality or the need to preserve polish language and customs. apart from occasional contacts with her family in poland and yearly visits, she does not have many contacts with the polish people or the language. she feels that her origins should not really matter, so although when asked, she will say she is polish, this is not how she defines herself or wants to be defined. she is aware of many stereotypes of polish people, but stresses the positive elements, such as the opinion that poles are hard-working, punctual, motivated and ambitious. her experience in britain makes her believe that she needs to put more effort into getting a good job not because she is polish, but not a native speaker of english. reaching native-like proficiency in english seems the most important goal and in the process of language transition, the cultural transition seems to follow. thus, miriam seems to be closer to assimilation than integration at the moment. pete. the opinions voiced by pete leave no doubt that he has chosen the assimilation strategy. it seems a conscious decision, based on his earlier interests in the english language and british culture. even before coming to the uk he says he never really fully identified with the polish culture, and having to choose between the two nationalities, he would probably say british now. pete does not follow the news about poland, nor does he think he “would be interested in developing relationships with polish people here in the uk.” he does visit poland every year, but treats it like a holiday, goes to different places in the country, and tries to enjoy himself. with respect to polish customs and traditions, he recognizes the need in his family, especially the grandmother, who he knows would like him to stick to some, but he himself does not feel it is really important. nor is it important for him to be recognized as a pole – in fact he admits that he probably hides it rather than manifests it. however, he ewa waniek-klimczak 238 goes on to say that having a polish name means that regardless of his personal merits and language skills, on paper, when applying for a job, it may affect his chances in the economic downturn. this does not stop him from regarding himself highly qualified, fully prepared to compete both in terms of professional and language skills. the assimilation tendency seems to be evident when pete describes himself as not being very foreign in britain, but feeling at the same time fully true to himself. affective factors. the affective factors (schumann, 1986) include language and culture shock, motivation and ego-permeability. while the last two aspects have not been addressed directly in the questionnaire, it seems evident from the description of the participants’ profile as language learners that they are highly motivated (it will not be attempted to define the type of motivation here) and gifted learners of english. the reported degree of language and culture shock, however, varies and provides further insights into the process of adaptation on the one hand and the development of language expertise on the other. maja. when talking about her initial experience in the uk, maja tells a story describing the language shock she experienced when faced with the specific accent in the area where she decided to study. one of her english friends said she could not speak english and she insisted she could. but then when she started working in a call centre, she realized what he had meant – she found it very difficult to understand the callers, who would be impatient and negative. in one case, a caller said he didn’t believe she could help him and wanted to speak to someone else – being a very ambitious person, she recalls this experience as particularly negative, but also very useful, as it helped her realize how important it was to integrate with the local community. language experience seems to have been more stressful than culture experience, at least at the beginning of maja’s stay, as she came with a group of polish students on the basis of previous arrangements for employment and housing made through a work agency in poland. social life, entertainment meant mainly staying with polish friends then, but this was the time when she was not sure she would want to stay so she would concentrate on working a lot, earning and saving as much money as she could. this was a shared feeling among the group for the first few months; however, some difficulties which she describes are related to changing the country, such as not knowing where to shop, how to buy insurance, where to pay the bills, how to get a tv license, knowing “what is expected of you as a citizen.” talking about her experience, maja proves to be very reflective and fully aware of the stages she went through: acculturation strategy and language experience in expert esl speakers: an exploratory study 239 it is all connected with acculturation, everybody goes through this process. at first they are excited but also anxious, then they are overwhelmed but in a positive way, and then they go into the phase when they start to question and they are negative towards the language and culture and this is difficult – that’s the phase when many people go back to poland or wherever they are from. and in the end they become integrated and they accept what they have. it is in this context that maja mentions the major cultural difference which was difficult for her – the experience that english people avoided confrontation at all costs, that their being always very polite meant not telling you what they really thought. it was overcoming this difference between the two cultures that she believes to have been a major difficulty. thus, language and culture shock provide maja with the experience that she is fully aware of and can use to her advantage in becoming an expert user of the second language and in becoming adapted to the dominant group. her attitudes and beliefs in relation to language and culture shock further support the claim that she is closer to integration than assimilation in her choice of the acculturation strategy. miriam. unlike maja, miriam avoids talking about difficulties she may have experienced. from the very beginning of her stay in the uk, she studied full time, pursuing her major interests in media and public relations. the transfer to the uk as a student seems to have made her transition relatively unproblematic. in connection with the initial experience, she mentions being away from her family as the main challenge, with no major difficulty in any other area. she says she is not shy, has no problems socializing with non-polish-speaking people, and the international contacts she has made during her studies make her feel comfortable in the international setting. in the british environment, however, she is very much aware of the negative effect that her not being a native speaker of english has on the prospects of getting a good job in her field. it is in this context that she expresses a certain degree of language anxiety when she says: “it may be more stressful knowing that you might not know certain expressions or you might make a mistake in writing which would be unprofessional and i would not like to come across as such a person.” however, it is the difficulty that seems to have accumulated with time, when her position and expectations changed. the degree of language or culture shock that she experienced seem to be relatively low overall, and the increased anxiety level connected with the need to satisfy the highest expectations and goals she sets for herself seem to correspond to assimilation rather than integration. ewa waniek-klimczak 240 pete. transferring to the uk to continue his studies helped pete overcome potential difficulties as far as social life or everyday routine is concerned. talking about challenges, he mentions the food – he believes many people complain about it in the uk, and it took him some time before he “found [his] way around it.” the most important challenge, however, was the language. being a highly proficient speaker of english on coming to the uk, pete seems to have experienced a high level of anxiety when he was confronted with the local accent he could not understand. the language shock he experienced working as a waiter with local customers, impatient and negative when he did not understand them made him feel “low,” he says his self-esteem then was low. however, the initial difficulty seems to have strengthened his desire to achieve native-like competence in all skills, and he repeatedly mentions an exposure to different accents as a major linguistic advantage of a natural environment in the uk. the degree of language and culture shock he experiences now can be estimated as very low, with both the language and culture being highly enjoyed. discussion: the language profile of expert esl users language skills in english prove to be essential for all expert esl users reported above. the formal learning they had before coming to the uk provided the basis for further language development and it seems evident that having a sufficient level of proficiency in english to take up studies in the uk affected their experience and lowered the degree of language and culture shock on arrival. however, the awareness of being able to communicate in english before coming clearly raised expectations and may have resulted in a relatively strong negative reaction to communicative difficulties in the local community. the major challenge mentioned by maja and pete in connection with their early experience at work is the language: knowing that they had come with the background of a three-year english major at the tertiary level, it is not difficult to imagine the effect of what they described as ‘communication-based negative reaction’ on their self-esteem. in both cases, the environment outside work helped – initially it was the polish environment, then studies with maja and the university employment with pete. with language experience, the exposure to different accents and natural english speech, they became confident in their language skills. interestingly, it is only miriam who voices her language anxiety: although she is at a very high proficiency level, she believes that her success in her profession may be determined by achieving a full native-speaker proficiency in english and she seems to doubt whether that is possible to attain. the attention paid to the language, a deep conviction that english is the key to success in the uk, is shared by all three particiacculturation strategy and language experience in expert esl speakers: an exploratory study 241 pants; however, the difference in their experience results in a different degree of language and culture shock they experienced. with the background of english-based studies, maja and pete experience a higher degree of anxiety at the beginning of their stay due to their higher expectations, while miriam pursues other interests and continues her media studies, not expecting to be fully proficient in english on arrival. after a period of 6 years, the expectations of all participants seem to shift towards enjoying their expert position; having gone through a period of low self-esteem and anxiety at an early stage, maja and pete seem better prepared for dealing with the challenge of full adaptation to the dominant group than miriam. however, as her anxiety is connected with the prospects of successful competition in a job market, and refers to potential problems with reaching a full native-speaker competence, she can be still regarded an expert sla user. the acculturation strategies adopted by the speakers differ to some extent; the criteria based on berry (1997) motivate the conclusion that assimilation strategy dominates in the case of pete and miriam, with maja closer to integration. it is this strategy that has been found to be most positive in terms of personal well-being in the psychological and socio-psychological studies (ward et al., 2001), that is, cultivating cultural affinity and having a strong sense of belonging to the culture of origin is believed to help maintain a truly balanced life in a new culture. however, assimilation strategy has been predicted by schumann (1986) to create optimal conditions for the acquisition of the target language. with a dynamic nature of the strategies and their close affinity in terms of a positive approach towards the target language and culture, schumann’s claim requires more in-depth studies to be verified. when individual elements of the model are investigated, results show a positive effect of a smaller distance from the dominant group and a higher proportion of english interaction on target-like production of selected elements of the sound system (waniek-klimczak, 2005, 2009). the observations made in the present study seem to suggest that both assimilation and integration may be chosen as acculturation strategies in the case of expert esl users. at this stage of the study it is not possible to discuss the linguistic advantages of one strategy over the other; while further studies are needed to investigate this issue, it would be extremely interesting to explore the dynamism of the relationship between acculturation strategy, language development and general well-being in an immigrant setting. conclusion the context of immigration creates special conditions on the acquisition of the second language, with the effect of language shock mediating culture ewa waniek-klimczak 242 shock. although very limited in scope, the data presented in this paper strongly suggest the need for the connection between the two. the three expert esl users discussed here valued their language training and experience in so much as it provided the basis for further development in the course of direct interaction with the native speakers, exposure to different accents and styles of speech. however, they felt that exposure to authentic, culturally specified materials, british films and music that they found interesting was more useful than formal training they had received. their experience suggests that it is the exposure to culturally-bound, community specific use of english and natural interaction that are needed for success in sla. the attitudes and beliefs towards learning the language expressed by the expert esl users discussed in this study suggest that the ability to communicate effectively in direct interaction with the native speakers of the language hinges on the exposure to natural language, different accents and different styles of speech. problems with communication experienced by learners with many years of intensive training in english seem to suggest a need for more varied input in the process of formal language instruction, with focus on fluency and selfconfidence in language usage. on the one hand then, conclusions that can be drawn on the basis of the above observations lead in the direction of a ‘preenglish-as-a-lingua-franca-era’, with the exposure to native varieties of english, the elements of culture, the use of language in specific situations regarded a priority. on the other hand, however, it needs to be stressed that language development in the context of immigration may be enhanced not only by the positive attitude towards the target culture, but also the culture of origin, with confidence in speech and fluency mentioned by all three participants as key elements they needed to develop in the uk. consequently, the views of the participants can be interpreted as pointing towards exposure to native-speaker accents and natural speech as crucial, with self-confidence and fluency the most important aims in language teaching and learning. acculturation strategy and language experience in expert esl speakers: an exploratory study 243 references anderson, n. j. 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(1999). the measurement of sociocultural adaptation. international journal of intercultural relations, 23, 659-677. acculturation strategy and language experience in expert esl speakers: an exploratory study 245 appendix language attitude survey 1. where and when were you born? 2. what was your first language? 3. what is your first language now? second language? what other languages do you speak? 4. when did you come to the uk? 5. how would you describe yourself with respect to nationality now? 6. how much english did you know when you came? did you have any english classes before coming the uk? for how long? did you have any other language experience that you found useful? 7. how would you assess your language skills in english on arrival to the uk? and now? 8. how did you learn english while in the uk? what did you find most useful and helpful? 9. how much english do you speak in everyday life now? how much english/polish do you speak in the following situations: a. at home? b. at work? c. with friends? d. at church? 10. are you a member of a polish club or association? would you join one if it was available close to your place of residence? 11. do you subscribe to any polish newspapers or magazines? do you enjoy reading polish newspapers/magazines? how often do you do it? 12. do you follow the news about poland? where do you get most of the polish news from? 13. what other sources of polish do you have? books/films/radio? 14. how often do you go to poland? do you like it there? 15. do you think that it is important to preserve polish language and customs while living in the uk? 16. do you think that children born to polish parents in the uk or brought to the uk for permanent/longer residence should speak polish? can their bilingual situation affect their success in this country? in what way? in your experience, do you think that polish is going to be an advantage or a disadvantage for such a child? 17. how important is it for you to be recognized as a person of polish origin? 18. would you like to see more polish newspapers, radio stations or tv channels in polish and schools of polish? 19. are you aware of any stereotypes of polish people in the uk? what has been your experience of being a pole in this country? do you think that your nationality affected your experience? 20. what was the most important challenge for you on coming to the uk? what degree of difficulty did you experience in the following areas: a. work b. everyday life routine c. social life d. entertainment 697 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (4). 2016. 697-716 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.4.7 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl critical thinking in the intercultural context: investigating efl textbooks paweł sobkowiak adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland pawelsob@amu.edu.pl abstract the multicultural world has made intercultural teaching necessary. it should focus on students’ ability to comprehend quickly and accurately, and then act appropriately and effectively in a culturally complex environment in order to achieve the desired goal. intercultural competence is important for successful communication across cultures, and so is critical thinking since the two, if they are not “parallel” (bennett, 2013), at least overlap (deardorff, 2009). this article tries to shed light on the linkage between intercultural and critical thinking skills and reports on the findings of research done on whether and to what extent efl textbooks used in polish schools contribute to fostering critical thinking skills in students. the study analyzed the cultural content of 20 coursebooks to check whether they go beyond merely depicting the target culture, or various foreign cultures, and involve students in practicing critical thinking, that is, prompt them to explore intercultural encounters and processes, and scrutinize how diverse cultures influence their own understanding of reality. the research revealed an insignificant and limited capacity of the textbooks to develop students’ critical thinking. keywords: critical thinking; intercultural competence; efl textbooks paweł sobkowiak 698 1. introduction while facing representatives of foreign cultures human beings often tend to appeal to stereotypes, prejudices and overgeneralizations, which yields a range of misunderstandings and impedes intercultural interactions. the critical thinking (ct) tradition recommends instructing individuals to use their mental abilities and entails self-improvement in thinking through introducing standards that help assess thinking so that eventually errors or blunders of thought are limited. such an approach results from the assumption that humans possess the capacity for good reasoning which can be nurtured and developed. according to paul (1992), “to think well is to impose discipline and restraint on our thinking – by means of intellectual standards – in order to raise our thinking to a level of ‘perfection’ or quality that is not natural or likely in undisciplined, spontaneous thought” (p. 2). good critical thinkers are able to process and interpret the available data, make assumptions, monitor implications of their decisions, analyze various points of view and frames of references before making any assessment, and above all, to distinguish between reasoning and subjective reaction. since living abroad and travelling, and thus having contact with diverse cultures, are so commonplace nowadays, there is a need to constantly develop students’ intercultural competence (icc) in a foreign language (fl) classroom; equally important seems practicing systematic critical reflection because its micro-skills help solve problems in cross-cultural encounters. therefore, teaching for ct should become a priority in education. this article tries to explore ct and its relationship with icc and seeks to examine the potential of english-as-a-foreign-language (efl) textbooks used in poland for developing both ct and icc. 2. critical thinking defined dewey (1910) described critical thinking as an active process of purposeful reflection during which judgment is suspended. building on his work, ennis (1985) depicted it as “reflective and reasonable thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do” (p. 45). the researcher claimed that ct comprises not only the two lower levels of bloom’s learning domains taxonomy (knowledge and comprehension), but also a significant portion of higher-order thinking: the top three levels (analysis, synthesis, and evaluation). ct goes beyond recalling factual knowledge and concepts, and prompts individuals to reason and solve problems. it incorporates creative activities, such as formulating hypotheses, questioning and investigating, noticing similarities and differences, comparing and contrasting, finding alternatives, exploring viewpoints and drawing conclusions. in a similar vein, hallett (1984) equated ct with the development of logical critical thinking in the intercultural context: investigating efl textbooks 699 reasoning abilities, whereas according to scriven and paul (2003, p. 2), it is a “disciplined process, not an end” and a “learned skill, methodical, thought out, not random.” it “takes time, energy, skill and dedication” (petress, 2004, p. 463). facione (2010) defined ct as the ability to reflect and withhold judgment before making a decision. in his opinion, ct, conceptualized as an intellectual ability “has a purpose (proving a point, interpreting what something means, solving a problem)” and “can be a collaborative, noncompetitive endeavor” (p. 4). creative or innovative thinking “leads to new insights, novel approaches, fresh perspectives, and whole new ways of understanding and conceiving of things” (p. 14). the researcher asked an interdisciplinary panel of 46 scholars to conceptualize the cognitive and affective elements of ct. on the basis of their contributions, he identified six essential cognitive skills (analysis, interpretation, inference, evaluation, explanation, and self-regulation) and a set of dispositions conducive to practicing ct. analysis involves exploring relationships among statements, questions, concepts or descriptions used in the text. it helps distinguish components working together (parts and subparts) and their relationships (cause-effect, co-cause, co-effect or symbiosis). it includes examining ideas, detecting and analyzing arguments, asking quality questions which are helpful to specify, amplify, verify or validate, and questions designed to probe for more information, challenge and motivation (petress, 2005). finding the similarities and differences between two approaches to the solution of a given problem, comparing and contrasting them, or pointing to the main thesis in an article and identifying its supporting reasons exemplify analysis in practice (facione, 2010). interpretation allows “comprehending and expressing the meaning or significance of a range of experiences, situations, data, events, judgments, conventions, beliefs, rules, procedures, or criteria.” it “includes the sub-skills of categorization, decoding significance, and clarifying meaning” (p. 5). as examples of interpretation, facione mentions reading a person’s intentions and emotions from facial expressions, distinguishing the main idea from subordinate ones in a text, paraphrasing someone’s ideas, or clarifying what a sign or graph means. inference helps identify elements needed to consider relevant information, form hypotheses and deduce the consequences. it involves subskills of questioning evidence, conjecturing alternatives and reaching conclusions by resorting to inductive or deductive reasoning. to illustrate inference, facione (2010, p. 6) lists reflecting on the implications of the advocated position, synthesizing the related ideas into a coherent picture or developing options for addressing a particular problem. the skill of evaluation allows assessment of the credibility of a person’s perception, experience, situation, judgment, belief or opinion and the logical inferential relationships among their representations. if we compare the strengths and weaknesses paweł sobkowiak 700 of alternative interpretations, determine the credibility of a source of information or judge if the evidence provided supports the conclusion drawn, we engage in evaluation (p. 6). explanation allows presenting the results of one’s reasoning in a coherent and convincing way. this includes “stating and justifying that reasoning in terms of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, and contextual considerations upon which one’s results were based” (p. 6). the researcher exemplifies explanation by the following activities: designing a graphic representation of the subordinate and superordinate relationship among concepts/ ideas or referring to the evidence on the basis of which the author’s position on a particular issue has been accepted or rejected. the sixth cognitive skill, self-regulation, helps an individual “look back at all dimensions of critical thinking and double check itself” facione (2010, p. 7). the researcher calls it “metacognition,” because it “raises thinking to another level” and is the key to responding correctly to the ic situations. by working together with the other five cognitive skills, self-regulation involves monitoring and correcting the interpretation offered, examining and correcting the inference made or reviewing and reformulating earlier explanation. self-regulation helps an individual reconsider in an inner dialogue his/her assumptions, opinions, beliefs and initial judgments. when developed, it allows maintaining a high level of performance in stressful ic encounters. as examples, the scholar mentioned separating personal opinions concerning a text from those of the author, reconsidering one’s own interpretation or judgment following further analysis of the facts, revising answers in view of the errors discovered in the previous analysis or changing the conclusion due to misjudging the importance of certain prior factors. except for the cognitive skills constitutive of ct, facione (2010) elaborated on its affective domain and identified the dominant personal attributes characteristic of a critical thinker. they include: inquisitiveness with regard to a wide range of issues, concern to become and remain well-informed, alertness to opportunities to use critical thinking, trust in the process of reasoned inquiry, self-confidence in one’s own abilities to reason, open-mindedness regarding divergent world views, flexibility in considering alternatives and opinions, understanding of the opinions of other people, fair-mindedness in appraising reasoning, honesty in facing one’s own biases, prejudices, stereotypes, or egocentric tendencies, prudence in suspending, making or altering judgments, willingness to reconsider and revise views where honest reflection suggests that change is warranted. (p. 11) ct requires integration with creative thinking. according to paul (1992) it involves our working out afresh our own thinking on a subject, and because our own thinking is always a unique product of our self-structured experience, ideas, and critical thinking in the intercultural context: investigating efl textbooks 701 reasoning, it is intrinsically a new “creation,” a new “making,” a new set of cognitive and affective structures of some kind. (p. 4) ct allows to make and shape ideas and experiences so that they may be used to structure and solve problems, frame decisions, and effectively communicate with others. 3. critical thinking and intercultural competence deardorff (2009), one of the few researchers who analyzed the linkage between ct and icc, maintains that icc “promotes effective and appropriate decisionmaking, but within contexts that are culturally complex” (p. 479). by referring to decision-making which requires the application of ct, the author points in her definition indirectly to the relationship between ct and icc. in addition, in her earlier research aimed at identifying the requisite skills and processes necessary for competent intercultural relations, deardorff (2006) mentioned two of the six ct skills included in facione’s work: analysis and interpretation.1 other ct skills she listed were: comparative thinking, cognitive flexibility and the ability to withhold judgment and relate. since these three skills demand that an individual reflect on his/her own inferences and judgments, they exemplify self-regulation. furthermore, deardorff (2006, p. 254) mentioned attitudes conducive to competent ic communication, that is, respect, openness and curiosity, two of which are convergent with facione’s open-mindedness and curiosity, the components of the critical spirit. similarly, for milton bennett (2013), developed ct is an asset in ic encounters; he claims that the cognitive skills significant for ct and icc overlap and are integral to effective cross-cultural communication. in his opinion, developing icc “parallels the development of critical thinking” (p. 109). references to the skill can also be found in janet bennett’s (2009) tripartite framework of icc made up of mindset (knowledge), skillset (skills), and heartset (attitude) (p. 97). the skillset (behavioral dimension) requires practicing such ct skills as analysis, interpretation, inference, empathy, active listening and information gathering. bennett also includes within this skillset the ability to solve problems while building and maintaining relationships, which demands practicing all the ct skills identified by facione (miller & tucker, 2015, p. 122). the scholar’s heartset involves attributes of competent ic communicators, such as “curiosity, initiative, non-judgmentalness, open-mindedness and tolerance of ambiguity” (bennett, 2009, p. 97). they align with facione’s critical spirit and foster effective self-regulation. 1 while referring to facione’s work, i refer to the book published in 2010. however, the scholar’s earlier publications on ct appeared much earlier, in the 1990s. hence, deardorff was able to quote his research in 2006. paweł sobkowiak 702 while discussing icc, stier (2006, pp. 6-7) emphasized its dynamic character and interactional context, claiming that it helps recognize cultural peculiarities, situational conditions and actors involved. similarly to bennett, he made a skill of coping with problems originating in ic encounters an important element of intrapersonal competencies constitutive of his icc definition. another component he mentioned is interpersonal competencies, which refer to interactive skills and help detect and accurately interpret variations in non-verbal cues, subtle signals and emotional responses, acquire verbal and non-verbal language, and suitable turn taking. furthermore, they make the person more aware of his own interaction style and help him to respond appropriately depending on the context. the scholar believes that ic education should foster ct, enabling students “to analyze intercultural encounters, processes and scrutinize culture-influences on one’s view of the world” (stier, 2006, p. 8). ct skills seem to be crucial in developing students’ ability to grasp and critically analyze discursive biases in ic encounters or in public discourse and their own perceptions of reality. these skills help recognize the relative, non-transparent and contextual nature of cultural knowledge. stier’s conviction about the importance of ct for developing icc can be noticed in his definition of the concept. the researcher defines icc as “the ability to reflect over, problematize, understand, learn from, cope emotionally with and operate efficiently in intercultural interaction-situations” (p. 9). thus, the cognitive skills of analysis, interpretation, inference, evaluation, explanation and selfregulation, and the dispositions described earlier, seem to be helpful, if not indispensable, in gaining this multifaceted ability. analysis has been identified as a salient component of icc by ting-toomey (1999, p. 269) in her four step o-d-i-s model. she claims that effective ic communicators should be aware of personal and cultural assumptions, cognitive complexity and the importance of frame-shifting when encountering the unfamiliar. they need to be able to mindfully withhold their subjective evaluations in such situations, the first natural reactions typical of human beings, and reverse the usual order of response by adopting special strategies. before they effectively assess what other people are doing or saying to them, they should observe, describe, interpret and suspend judgment. only then will they be able to engage appropriately. careful observation (sharpened perception), followed by as objective description as possible (analysis) and avoiding speculations, guesses or value judgments, allows an individual to interpret (analyze) the situation or make educated guesses. the ability to describe and objectively analyze before making any assessment (suspending judgment) seems to be the foundation of ic communication; any subjective responses should wait until the stages critical thinking in the intercultural context: investigating efl textbooks 703 of description and interpretation (in the sense of analysis)2 have been completed. thus, ct skills are correlated with the components of the o-d-i-s model, which is presented in table 1, and seem to play a very important role in it. table 1 ting-toomey’s (1999) o-d-i-s model versus facione’s (2010) critical thinking skills concept the constituents of the concept o-d-i-s model observe describe interpret suspend judgment ct skills self-regulation analysis, self-regulation analysis, explanation, interpretation, inference, self-regulation self-regulation the above discussion shows that ct and ic skills overlap. thus, students in a fl classroom which aims at developing their icc should be engaged in using ct on a regular basis, since ct “entails effective communication and problem solving abilities and a commitment to overcome our native egocentrism and sociocentrism” (paul & elder, 2006, p.4). competent critical thinkers approach ic encounters well equipped to reduce bias, partiality and prejudices which impede such contacts, and, thus, their chances for successful cross-cultural interactions are high. although some researchers (miller & tucker, 2015) analyzed the contribution of using ct skills to students’ icc development, no study was undertaken to analyze the relationship between the two concepts in efl textbooks. the current article is an attempt to fill in this research gap. 4. research: rationale, aim and methodology the present research stemmed from the author’s interest in adapting and implementing ic teaching and learning to the polish context, where the majority of student population is homogenous ethnically and had gone through a largely mono-cultural socialization. few cultural minorities live in the country, and teachers are mostly polish graduates of local english departments. consequently, 2 ting-toomey’s (1999) model derives from die exercises (describe, interpret, evaluate), introduced in the mid-1970s by janet and milton bennett to ic training at the university of minnesota. in 2008 the dae version of this exercise was offered: interpretation was replaced with analysis since the word interpret in ordinary language usage is perceived as a synonym of evaluation and is associated with subjective reactions including judgment. analysis as the word used in the context of science, math and other problem-solving endeavors seems to be more adequate (nam & condon, 2010). there are also other, similar tools, for example, osee (observe, state, explore and evaluate) (berardo & deardorff, 2012). paweł sobkowiak 704 students do not have much access to cultural worldviews different from those of their own, both in the classroom and outside it, and cannot experience the difference between their own perception and that of people from other cultural backgrounds. in such a situation, education authorities should recognize the importance of incorporating into fl curricula content enabling students to see the world beyond their own limited experience and increase their capacity to engage in unfamiliar situations with representatives of diverse cultures. it is in the fl classroom that students should attain the ability to put together, and thus experience cultural differences as preparation for ic communication. since, as was shown earlier in the article, there is a linkage between icc and ct, appropriate ic content of textbooks, together with exercises designed to develop students’ ct may, to a certain degree, make up for the lack of direct contact with multicultural classmates or teachers from different cultures. the study aimed at investigating the cultural sections of elt textbooks used in polish high schools and checking whether their contents bring ct language explicitly and systematically into the classroom, and encourage discipline and restraint in students’ thinking, thus stimulating their development in this area. the research was meant to answer the following specific questions concerning students’ engagement in critical reflection on the presented culture material, namely, whether, and to what extent the examined textbooks prompt learners to: 1. reason things out on the basis of evidence and good reasons, that is, analyze and interpret cultural input in the presented artifacts, with their constituencies, patterns and relationships among them; 2. ask questions eliciting in-depth cultural background of the presented content and then, by means of inferencing, formulate appropriate explanations and evaluations; 3. challenge cultural biases, prejudices and stereotypes and thus practice self-regulation and control over the affective domain. most of the examined books have a separate section devoted to teaching culture through presenting and exploring diverse cultures (except for the new english file series and oxford matura trainer, where whole books had to be examined). the research focused on the textbooks used in poland since it was part of a larger project which attempted to assess whether icc was developed in fl classrooms in the polish context.3 a content analysis of 20 efl textbooks, all of which are listed in the appendix, was carried out in the summer of 2015. six titles targeted at high school 3 the findings of the previous studies were published in sobkowiak (2012a, 2012b, 2013, 2014, 2015a, 2015b). critical thinking in the intercultural context: investigating efl textbooks 705 students aged 15 to 18 were examined: oxford matura trainer (two levels), new matura explorer (four levels), matura prime time plus (four books), new english file (four levels), matura solutions (four books) and framework (two levels). most of the textbooks (except new english file) have a seal of approval granted by the polish ministry of education and are recommended for use in polish fl classrooms, so they can be considered as constituting a representative sample. the books were selected at random. a mixed-methods approach of quantitative and qualitative research was applied. first, following a thorough review of the literature on ic learning and teaching, as well as on ct (aleksandrowiczpędich, 2005; berardo & deardorff, 2012; byram, 1997; byram & fleming, 2000; corbett, 2003; facione, 2010; houghton, 2012; kohls & knight, 1994; kramsch, 1993; liddicoat & scarino, 2013; sercu, 2000), a list of ten most typical ic tasktypes was compiled. these activities were considered to have potential for developing both students’ icc and ct, namely engaging them in analyzing, interpreting, inferencing, evaluating, explaining and self-regulating. second, to increase the validity of the study, the list was checked by two experts who confirmed the activities’ capacity to develop both icc and ct. in the quantitative part of the study, all the textbooks were examined in search of the identified activities. a reading passage oriented towards a specific cultural issue with a set of exercises which accompanied it (i.e., a reading comprehension exercise, a vocabulary exercise, and a listening passage with a follow-up comprehension exercise) was treated as one example of an activity aiming at exploring culture and simultaneously practicing ct (one item in the tables in the results section). a separate, single task designed for learners to write a short passage, preceded by their individual searches of the available sources, was also considered as one activity (one item in the tables). the main concern was to count the frequency of the exercises fostering students’ ct in the analyzed textbooks. to increase the reliability of the results, the sample was double-checked for the presence of such tasks. data collection and their analysis were conducted by the present author. all the books were considered separately to facilitate the identification of the ones with the highest numbers of the singled out tasks.4 at the qualitative stage of the study, the cultural input in the sample was analyzed, that is, all the texts with the accompanying exercises and the context in which they appeared. this was done to consider the nature of cultural presentations and their contexts, and assess their potential for nurturing students’ ct skills. 4 the same data were used to analyze the potential of efl textbooks for developing students’ icc in sobkowiak (2015b). paweł sobkowiak 706 5. results and discussion very few tasks identified for the purpose of the study are firmly grounded in the framework of constructivist pedagogy, which is conducive to nurturing students’ ct and assumes that learning emerges through a process of purposeful reflection and dialogue. in the sample, there is a scarcity of authentic, open-ended, real-world tasks with a large capacity not only to develop different ic competencies but also to help students practice a range of ct skills in classroom discussion, debates and other knowledge-building interactions. students are not confronted with problems to solve, and if there is no problem, there is no point in thinking critically. images of culture are not approached critically, that is, learners are not encouraged to consider why culture is presented in a particular way, or what alternative presentations would be possible. they are not prompted to support the presented judgment with reason and evidence or consider possible criteria on which to base this judgment. nor are they asked to make sound inferences and analogies, or find and analyze correlations between the images presented in the textbook and their own perceptions and experiences. questions such as: “is the author’s thinking about the world justified from our perspective?,” “how does he/she justify it from his/her point of view?,” or “how can we enter his/her worldview to appreciate what he/she has to say” do not appear in the sample. consequently, students have no opportunities to reconstruct (translate) the logic of the writer of the text they are reading into the logic of their own thinking and experience. only such disciplined intellectual work “would result in a new creation – the writer’s thinking for the first time could exist within the reader’s mind” (paul, 1992, p. 5). furthermore, no section was found in the sample with explanations regarding how the principles of ct can be applied to any ic exercise, especially to the task of making decisions in culturally complex situations. this lack of intellectual standards by which one could appropriately assess his or her thinking makes it impossible to move from the superficial to the substantial in fostering quality ct. besides, without students’ prior exposure to a particular foreign culture, such guidelines seem requisite for the successful completion of the activity. table 2 lists ic activities that provide ample opportunities for using ct and specifies which sub-skills are activated while performing them. those exercises encourage students to analyze, advocate and criticize ideas, to reason inductively and deductively, and prompt them to reach conclusions based on sound inferences drawn from the material provided, which results in the development of their ability to distinguish facts from judgment and belief from knowledge. the rubric was created by the present author and used to assess the potential of the examined textbooks for fostering ct in students. the tick in the table (ü) critical thinking in the intercultural context: investigating efl textbooks 707 indicates that a particular activity has been classified as having such potential. the distribution of ic activities stimulating ct in the sample is shown in tables 3-8. table 2 ic exercises fostering critical thinking skills exercise type skill/disposition practiced analyzing interpreting explaining inferencing evaluating selfregulation openmindedness reducing one’s biases, prejudices and egocentrism suspending judgment exploring foreign cultures ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü exloring learners’ culture ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü contrasting/comparing cultures ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ethnographic project ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü critical incident ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü developing socio-cultural pragmatic abilities ü ü ü ü ü ü ü reflecting on values, assumptions and beliefs ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü exploring non-verbal communication ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü interpreting visual and verbal cultural representations ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü conflict mediation ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü table 3 distribution of ic exercises fostering ct in new matura explorer exercise type level elementary pre-intermediate intermediate upper-intermediate exploring foreign cultures 4 5 8 exploring learner’s culture 1 6 2 7 contrasting and comparing cultures 1 1 1 2 ethnographic project critical incident developing learners’ socio-cultural pragmatic abilities reflecting on values, attitudes and beliefs 5 exploring non-verbal communication interpreting visual and verbal cultural representations 1 1 conflict mediation total 7 7 8 23 table 4 distribution of ic exercises fostering ct in new matura solutions exercise type level elementary pre-intermediate intermediate upper-intermediate exploring foreign cultures 11 13 8 4 exploring learner’s culture 4 4 1 contrasting and comparing cultures 2 ethnographic project critical incident developing learners’ socio-cultural pragmatic abilities reflecting on values, attitudes and beliefs 2 exploring non-verbal communication 1 interpreting visual and verbal cultural representations conflict mediation total 15 20 11 4 paweł sobkowiak 708 table 5 distribution of ic exercises fostering ct in matura prime time plus exercise type level elementary pre-intermediate intermediate upper-intermediate exploring foreign cultures 3 8 2 4 exploring learner’s culture 5 12 2 4 contrasting and comparing cultures 6 2 3 ethnographic project critical incident developing learners’ socio-cultural pragmatic abilities reflecting on values, attitudes and beliefs 1 exploring non-verbal communication 1 interpreting visual and verbal cultural representations 1 conflict mediation total 17 22 7 8 table 6 distribution of ic exercises fostering ic in new english file exercise type level elementary pre-intermediate intermediate upper-intermediate exploring foreign cultures 5 2 2 exploring learner’s culture contrasting and comparing cultures 2 ethnographic project critical incident developing learners’ socio-cultural pragmatic abilities reflecting on values, attitudes and beliefs 2 exploring non-verbal communication interpreting visual and verbal cultural representations 1 1 conflict mediation total 5 2 3 5 table 7 distribution of ic exercises fostering ct in framework and oxford matura trainer exercise type level framework (elementary) framework (pre-intermediate) oxford matura trainer (basic level) oxford matura trainer (advanced level) exploring foreign cultures 10 5 1 3 exploring learner’s culture 1 1 1 contrasting and comparing cultures 1 ethnographic project critical incident developing learners’ socio-cultural pragmatic abilities reflecting on values, attitudes and beliefs 1 exploring non-verbal communication interpreting visual and verbal cultural representations conflict mediation total 11 6 3 4 critical thinking in the intercultural context: investigating efl textbooks 709 table 8 the overall distribution of ic exercises fostering ct in the investigated textbooks exercise type no. exploring foreign cultures 98 exploring learner’s culture 51 contrasting and comparing cultures 21 ethnographic project critical incident developing learners’ socio-cultural pragmatic abilities reflecting on values, attitudes and beliefs 11 exploring non-verbal communication 2 interpreting visual and verbal cultural representations 5 conflict mediation total 188 albeit exploring foreign cultures prevails in the sample (98 items/activities), in two textbooks not a single example of such an exercise has been found (new matura explorer. pre-intermediate, new english file. intermediate). the distribution of this activity type in the analyzed textbooks ranges from 1 to 13. however, no textbook contains ethnographic projects, which could provide students with unrivalled opportunities to investigate and analyze cultures, interpret and explain their findings, and exercise the meta-cognitive ability to self-regulate, a “heartset” skill common to ct. in most cases, cultures are presented and treated in isolation, and explored implicitly: learners are expected to read a text on a specific aspect of a foreign culture and do the accompanying exercises focusing on a comprehension check or vocabulary practice. students are not expected to explore anything on their own, nor are they required to perform any tasks involving observation, analysis or assessment of (a) foreign culture(s). they do not have much chance to practice ct and, thus, realize that cultural diversity with its own internal validity and value is a norm, and any culture is multi-dimensional. consequently, exposed to a body of factual knowledge about a particular country, the learners, positioned as external observers of cultural facts and deprived of the opportunities to interpret cultural practices considered relevant to increase their capacity to communicate in ic situations, passively consume the information about iconic figures, natural wonders, prominent architecture, regional food, and so on. a considerable number of the exercises activate only lower-order learning and thinking, focus more on recall than reasoning and do not engage students in genuine intellectual work. they seem to be very superficial, and kill students’ curiosity and the desire to question deeply; if we want to generate curiosity, the exercises must evolve into disciplined inquiry and reflection. in other words, every answer should generate more questions. this was not observed in the analyzed sample. some chapters of the examined books have end quizzes of a multiple choice type that require only rote-learning. although exercises refer learners paweł sobkowiak 710 to their culture, they are not vehicles of in-depth exploration. consequently, they give students a rationale for using the cognitive skills described earlier to a very limited extent. for example, while exploring famous artists pablo picasso and vincent van gogh (new matura solutions. elementary), students are asked to write a short text about another artist, writer or musician. this will involve searching for information in various sources. however, in the book, this is not preceded by any discussion of the factors that have made both artists famous, how the perception of fame has changed over the years, and what it looks like across cultures. such an approach excludes practicing self-regulation since the first prerequisite to using it is the awareness of cultural assumptions made by everyone arising from cultural backgrounds. only after students realize that cultural conditioning leads people to viewing situations in a predetermined way and that their reactions are typical of the ones considered appropriate in their native culture will they habitually stay alert to cultural differences and check their own understanding of cross-cultural encounters. since self-regulation helps double check earlier explanations, interpretations, inferences and evaluations, it is an extremely useful tool in reformulating initial judgments. without such prior coverage, students’ compositions will focus on presenting factual information, and little learning for both ct and icc will take place in the process of completing the task. the second most common ic activities nurturing ct in the sample stimulate learners to explore their own culture (51 items). their distribution ranges from one to 12. however, in as many as six books such exercises do not appear at all (30% of the sample). in only four books do students have an opportunity to explore their native culture five times or more (20%). this reveals that even if there are activities referring students to their own culture, they do not work on this frequently enough, nor on a regular basis, so students’ chances to exercise ct, together with proper affective attitudes towards otherness, and be released from the confinements of ethnocentrism, are very limited. not a single exercise promotes looking at well-known polish culture practices from a different perspective than the polish one. learners are not invited to look afresh at their home culture nor to view themselves as others might see them. naturally, people do not observe others from any other viewpoint than that determined by their own cultural conditioning and, thus, do not exercise “detaching themselves from their usual behaviors and mindsets and standing back and gaining a different perspective,” so students should be made aware of it in a fl classroom. this would help them communicate appropriately and effectively with foreigners in the future (kohls & knight, 1994, p. 66). the third most frequent activities uncovered in the analyzed textbooks prompt learners to compare and contrast cultures (21 recordings). such activities critical thinking in the intercultural context: investigating efl textbooks 711 help correct the inferences made earlier, and help review and reformulate former explanations. they prompt students to reconsider their assumptions, opinions, beliefs and initial judgments. they are also conducive to developing the affective domain, especially open-mindedness regarding divergent worldviews and flexibility in considering alternatives and opinions. their distribution in the sample ranges from one to six. however, in as many as 10 textbooks, such tasks have not been found at all (50% of the sample). cultural comparisons introduce students to different cultural practices and help them relativize their own cultural practices. however, to achieve this, students have to activate a range of ct micro-skills, which were not found in the examined coursebooks. critical incidents (situation judgments) present students with a real-life ambiguous conflict provoked by differences in cultural values and behaviors, and encourage them to use ct skills to analyze the situation, reflect on it, form hypotheses, find cause and effect, clarify meanings, explain the reasons for miscommunication, and, by deducing the consequences (reaching conclusions by resorting to inductive and deductive reasoning), make appropriate decisions that would settle the conflict. by providing access to meaningful content, such real-life scenarios can help students understand abstract concepts better and enable them to embrace multiple perspectives. critical incidents are useful in probing the cultural assumptions people make in interactions with foreigners and allow for providing alternative interpretations. not only do they sensitize learners to cultural differences and develop their ic sensitivity and competence, but they also contribute to fostering ct. yet no critical incidents have been found in the analyzed textbooks. the cultural input of the examined books does not give students much access to reflecting on their own values, attitudes and beliefs, nor on the ones of strangers (11 times). the distribution of this exercise category in the sample ranges from one to five. however, in 15 of the books, such tasks do not appear at all (75% of the sample). it is their huge disadvantage since such exercises provide opportunities to monitor and correct one’s interpretations and reconsider assumptions, opinions, beliefs and initial judgments. the frequency of another ic activity type promoting ct, namely interpreting visual and verbal cultural representations, is even smaller: in the whole sample there are only five examples. such exercises, which involve students mainly in clarifying meaning and asking questions designed to probe for more information, were found in only five books (25% of the sample) and only once in each. this shows that the examined textbooks will not prepare students to analyze how messages are constructed or to explain, interpret and understand them across cultures. non-verbal communication is practiced in the sample even less frequently. in fact, two examples are included only in two textbooks; that is, in the paweł sobkowiak 712 majority of the sample (90%) nothing is done to make students aware of the differences in this area of ic communication. no exercises designed to work on students’ socio-cultural pragmatic competence have been found in the sample, either. activities designed to activate this domain prompt students to verify and validate their assumptions, decode significance and clarify meaning. if learners are to produce situationally appropriate utterances, they have to be able to determine what can be said, to whom, and where, when and how. such practice in a fl classroom is extremely important since how we do it in our native language is a powerful influence working against the appropriate use of a fl. 6. conclusion and implications for future research the literature review has uncovered that ct skills help learners develop icc and contribute to more appropriate and effective communication across cultures. thus, developing knowledge of other cultures and communicative practices in a fl classroom has to parallel fostering the ability to critically reflect on and adapt knowledge by means of reasoning. however, ct is not a hallmark of the investigated textbooks, and their capacity to develop students’ ct is very low. the study revealed that their cultural contents do not involve many activities which promote students’ purposeful reflection: out of 10 activity types identified as fundamental for fostering ct, four were not found in the sample at all. although the coursebooks provide some opportunities to explore foreign cultures, and contrast and compare them, which requires reasoning, they do it very superficially and mostly indirectly, merely by providing texts for reading. the examined material does not stimulate students to go beyond appraisals of the presented culture material and pursue alternative interpretations. neither the questions nor the activities accompanying the texts allow learners to think more deeply, or analyze their feelings, interpretations and responses. the exercises with the highest potential for nurturing ct, that is, ethnographic projects and critical incidents, were not found in the sample at all. students seem to be expected to be passive recipients of the information presented in the textbooks rather than active learners: the activities included in them do not require meaningful participation from students, nor do they prompt them to inquire or react in various ways to the input provided. no explicit or systematic framework for ct was found in the sample. in a similar vein, students are not encouraged to take the ownership of their thoughts: in the books, there are no stimuli to question the presented content, find alternative solutions or recognize one’s limitations regarding exploring different viewpoints, making conjectures and drawing conclusions. very limited opportunities to practice ct will not be conducive to developing open-mindedness critical thinking in the intercultural context: investigating efl textbooks 713 toward cultural diversity, mindfulness or respect for otherness, the pillars of cross-cultural understanding. neither this lack of teaching for ct will contribute to reducing students’ biases, prejudices and egocentrism, nor to challenging stereotypes deeply ingrained in them concerning particular cultures and their communities, which will constitute serious impediments to an effective ic dialogue. the study demonstrated that fl textbooks need refurbishing. in particular, more ct language and open-ended questions should be included so as to encourage the development of independent cognitive and reasoning skills in their users. a considerable effort has to be made to assure that ct is taught through coursebooks so that they promote more opportunities for student-centered discovery that promotes reasoned discourse. it has to be remembered that active involvement in classroom activities does not equate with learning ct; what matters is not that students are merely engaged, but how they are engaged. the present study is characterized by some constraints which should be addressed since they provide agenda for future research. the findings obtained provide a crude picture of fostering ct in the sample. to help validate the current analysis, a more detailed qualitative investigation of the textbook content should be undertaken. it will increase the credibility of interpretations and provide a more reliable answer to the research questions. furthermore, observations of classes where the investigated textbooks are used and interviews with both students and teachers using them would help determine more reliably whether and to what extent ct is practiced at school (textbook content can be a springboard to teaching for ct if it is wisely complemented by the teacher). as for the future research agenda, it would be justifiable to explore the available fl syllabi and check whether they contain explicit and systematic frameworks for ct teaching. furthermore, the analysis of fl teacher training programs (both preand in-service) would demonstrate whether they include separate modules designed to instruct teachers how to reconcile content coverage with fostering of ct. since the current study analyzed ct in an ic context, it would also be useful to measure whether and to what extent students’ performance in ic interactions changes over a period of exposure to ct instruction. the results could provide arguments for convincing educational authorities to emphasize teaching for ct. paweł sobkowiak 714 references aleksandrowicz-pędich, l. 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(2012b). dialog interkulturowy na lekcji języka angielskiego w kontekście polskim. neofilolog, 38, 107-128. sobkowiak, p. (2013). intercultural dimension of fl teaching in the polish context. in m. kleban & e. willim (eds.), pase papers in linguistics (pp. 291309). kraków: jagiellonian university press. sobkowiak, p. (2014). intercultural teaching in the polish context. in m. pawlak, j. bielak, & a. mystkowska-wiertelak (eds.), classroom-oriented research: achievements and challenges (pp. 185-202). cham: springer. sobkowiak, p. (2015a). interkulturowość w edukacji językowej. poznań: wydawnictwo naukowe uam. sobkowiak, p. (2015b). developing students’ intercultural competence in foreign language textbooks. us-china education review b, 5, 794-805. stier, j. (2006). internationalization, intercultural communication and intercultural competence. journal of intercultural communication, 11, 1-12. ting-toomey, s. (1999). communication across cultures. new york: guilford. vande berg, m. (2007). intervening in the learning of us students abroad. journal of studies in international education, 11(3-4), 392-399. paweł sobkowiak 716 appendix investigated textbooks dooley, j., & evans, v. (2014a). matura prime time plus. elementary. newbury: express. dooley, j., &evans, v. (2014b). matura prime time plus. pre-intermediate. newbury: express. dooley, j., & evans, v. (2014c). matura prime time plus. intermediate. newbury: express. dooley, j., & evans, v. (2014d). matura prime time plus. upper-intermediate. newbury: express. dummett, p., benne, r. r., inglot, m., & polit, b. (2015). new matura explorer. upper-intermediate. warsaw: nowa era. falla, t., & davies, p. a. (2011a). new matura solutions. elementary. oxford: oxford university press. falla, t., & davies, p. a. (2011b). matura solutions. pre-intermediate. oxford: oxford university press. falla, t., & davies, p. a. (2012). matura solutions. intermediate. oxford: oxford university press. falla, t., & davies, p. a. (2013). new matura solutions. upper-intermediate. oxford: oxford university press. goldstein, b. (2005). framework. pre-intermediate. london: richmond. harding, r., markowska, m., sosnowska, j., & szuwart, j. (2014). oxford matura trainer. repetytorium z języka angielskiego. poziom rozszerzony. oxford: oxford university press. [advanced level]. hughes, j., polit, b., wardyńska, e., & michalak, i. (2014). new matura explorer. intermediate. warsaw: nowa era. hughes, j., łubecka, a., & polit, b. (2015). new matura explorer. elementary. warsaw: nowa era. jones, c., & goldstein, b. (2005). framework. elementary. london: richmond. manin, g., gryca, d., sobierska, j., & sosnowska, j. (2014). oxford matura trainer. repetytorium z języka angielskiego. poziom podstawowy. oxford: oxford university press. [basic level]. naunton, j., łubecka, a., & polit, b. (2014). new matura explorer. preintermediate. warsaw: nowa era. oxenden, c., latham-koenig, c., & seligson, p. (2005a). new english file. elementary. oxford: oxford university press. oxenden, c., latham-koenig, c., & seligson, p. (2005b). new english file. pre-intermediate. oxford: oxford university press. oxenden, c., & latham-koenig, c. (2006). new english file. intermediate. oxford: oxford university press. oxenden, c., & latham-koenig, c. (2008). new english file. upper-intermediate. oxford: oxford university press. 359 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl correction note correction for: vanhove, jan. 2015. analyzing randomized controlled interventions: three notes for applied linguists. studies in second language learning and teaching, 5(1), 135-152. weighted t-test for cluster-randomised experiments in vanhove (2015), i wrote the following on the subject of analysing in which whole groups, rather than individual participants, are assigned to the experimental conditions (cluster-randomised experiments): a conceptually straightforward approach [for taking clustering into account] is to calculate the mean (or another summary measure) of each cluster and run a t test on them rather than on the original observations. when the number of observations differs from cluster to cluster, a t test in which the cluster means are weighted for cluster size is recommended (see, e.g., campbell, donner, & klar, 2007). this analysis is easy to compute and report, and it perfectly accounts for violations of the independence assumption: the type-i error rate is at its nominal level (i.e., 5%). (p. 145) i regret that the recommendation to weight cluster means for cluster size does not stem from m. j. campbell et al. (2007) but from m. k. campbell et al. (2000, pp. 193194: “when the size of the clusters varies widely, it is preferable to carry out a weighted t-test, using cluster sizes as weights”), from where it can be traced back to kerry and bland (1998). more importantly, using cluster sizes as weights does not perfectly account for violations of the independence assumption, that is, it does not guarantee that the type-i error rate will be at its nominal level (see http://goo.gl/gglzs7 for simulation results). as for appropriately weighting cluster means in the analysis of cluster-randomised experiments, hayes and moulton (2009) point out that, while “theoretically possible” (p. 178), it requires that the intraclass correlation (icc) be known with great accuracy, which is not usually the case. in the absence of an accurate icc estimate, hayes and moulton do not recommend use of the weighted t test. 360 in conclusion, weighting cluster means for cluster size is not generally recommended. unweighted t tests on cluster means are still available as a straightforward alternative with a nominal type-i error rate, whereas multilevel models offer greater flexibility as regards the inclusion of covariates, modelling more complex designs, and so on. inflated type-i error rate for cluster-randomised experiments figure 1 in the same article showed how the type-i error rates for cluster-randomised experiments varie as a function of the icc and the number of participants per cluster (m) when the data are inappropriately analysed by means of a t test on the participants’ scores. due to an error in the underlying analytical derivation, this graph slightly exaggerates the type-i error rate inflation. the graph below is based on the correct formula provided by hedges (2007) and fixes this. the take-home message stays the same, however: ignoring clustering drastically increases type-i error rates, more so for larger clusters and larger icc values. references campbell, m. j., donner, a., & klar, n. (2007). developments in cluster randomized trials and statistics in medicine. statistics in medicine, 26, 2-19. campbell, m. k., mollison, j., steen, n., grimshaw, j. m., & eccles, m. (2000). analysis of cluster randomized trials in primary care: a practical approach. family practice, 17, 192-196. 361 hayes, r. j., & moulton, l. h. (2009). cluster randomized trials. boca raton, fl: chapman & hall/crc. hedges, l. v. (2007). correcting a significance test for clustering. journal of educational and behavioral statistics, 32(2), 151-179. kerry, s. m., & bland, j. m. (1998). analysis of a trial randomised in clusters. bmj, 316, 54. 203 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (2). 2016. 203-224 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.2.2 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the use of articles in l2 english: a phraseological perspective justyna leśniewska jagiellonian university, cracow, poland justyna.lesniewska@uj.edu.pl abstract while it is a well-known fact that speakers of article-less mother tongues, such as polish, experience problems with articles in english, this study seeks to investigate the problem from a different perspective. namely, it poses the question of whether the correct use of the article system of the l2 is indeed a purely grammatical task (as it is universally perceived), or whether the correct use of articles is to some extent aided by the mechanisms that underlie the formulaic character of language. the study was conducted with 90 polish upper-intermediate and advanced users of l2 english, who completed a test on article use, which made it possible to compare patterns of article use between contexts of different collocational strength (defined in terms of the frequency of occurrence in a corpus). the statistically higher success rates for article use in high-frequency collocations (with the grammatical “rule” being the same) indicate that phraseological aspects of language use may indeed play a role in what is usually perceived as the correct application of grammatical rules. keywords: articles in esl; determiners; formulaicity; phraseological aspects of second language acquisition justyna leśniewska 204 1. introduction 1.1. articles in esl articles are notoriously difficult to acquire for learners of english as a second language (esl), especially for speakers whose l1 lacks articles. the problem has been extensively researched (a brief overview is provided below), but almost exclusively as an aspect of the development of learners’ syntactic competence. the use of articles is well-established as a grammatical topic, and most esl textbooks and grammars give extensive sets of “rules” which specify how articles are used (holmes, 1988; hsu, 2008). the only exceptions are certain untypical uses of articles which occur in idiomatic expressions. those uses, usually labelled as “fixed” or “idiomatic” (holmes & moulton, 1993; orlando, 2009), include such expressions as living hand to mouth, all of a sudden, in front vs. in the back, or game of cat and mouse. this category is made up only of those uses of the definite, indefinite or zero article which cannot be explained by the rules. consequently, idiomaticity is simply a convenient label for those cases of article use which fall outside the syntactic regularity. the regular uses, which constitute the majority of article uses, are seen as governed by extensive lists of “rules.” major rules, which involve countability, definiteness and specificity (ekiert, 2007), are accompanied by minor rules, often called “rules of thumb” (faerch, 1986) in pedagogical grammars. one example is the principle that no articles should be used with names of cities. those “rules of thumb” always (rather frustratingly for learners) come with exceptions (e.g., the hague). therefore, being able to use articles correctly in english is generally seen as the result of the eventual mastery of rules of grammar, with the exception of the idiomatic or fixed uses, which have to be memorized. however, in view of the growing evidence that language processing is to a considerable extent formulaic (see the overview below), this article explores the possibility that even those uses of articles which appear to be rule-governed, that is, syntactically regular, may in fact be aided by the mechanisms which are responsible for formulaicity in language use. 1.2. phraseological aspects of l2 acquisition and use it is a widely recognized fact nowadays that formulaicity plays an important role in language processing. the now widely made distinction between two modes of language processing is often attributed to john sinclair (1987, 1991), who distinguished between the “open choice principle” and the “idiom principle.” the first one is the use of articles in l2 english: a phraseological perspective 205 a way of seeing language text as the result of a very large number of complex choices. at each point where a unit is completed (a word or a phrase or a clause), a large range of choice opens up, and the only restraint is grammaticalness . . . it is often called a ‘slotand-filler’ model . . . at each slot, virtually any word can occur. (sinclair, 1991, p. 109) the open choice principle operates, therefore, like traditional grammar-centered models of language: there are a number of syntagmatic choices available for each slot along the paradigm. on the other hand, the idiom principle holds that “a language user has available to him or her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analysable into segments” (sinclair, 1991, p. 110). a distinction of this kind was made even earlier, in a seminal paper by pawley and syder (1983), which sought to explain what the authors saw as “two puzzles for linguistic theory”: native-like selection and native-like fluency. what they claimed was that “fluent and idiomatic control of a language rests to a considerable extent on knowledge of a body of ‘sentence stems’ which are ‘institutionalized’ or ‘lexicalized’” (p. 191). the ability to recall larger chunks from memory does not mean that the chunks are not analysable into segments. the idiom principle can be seen as enabled by chunking, a concept deriving from psychology (chase & simon, 1973; gobet et al., 2001), which has found support in the field of language. chunking occurs at all levels of language (nation, 2001, p. 319). complex words, for example, are usually processed as wholes, not as combinations of individual morphemes. morphemes, in turn, are processed as units, not as sequences of individual phonemes. chunking enables the grouping of smaller units into larger wholes, but also the analysis of the wholes into segments if needed. the main advantage of chunking appears to be reduced processing time, and, therefore, faster language comprehension and production (ellis, 2001). the disadvantage of chunking is that it takes up storage space: language users need to store chunks (combinations of items) in addition to the components that are already stored separately (nation, 2001, pp. 320-321). therefore, it makes sense that high-frequency items are stored as chunks, reducing processing time, since they occur often enough to make up a large proportion of the overall language produced. low-frequency items, on the other hand, do not “deserve” separate storage space, they are recreated “by rule” when needed (aitchison, 1987). this line of thinking was further developed by wray (2002a, 2002b), who argued that “formulaic processing is the default,” and that “construction out of, and reduction into, smaller units by rule occurs only as necessary” (wray, 2002b, p. 119). this is an explanation for the existence of irregularities in language: if we only create and understand utterances by applying rules to words and morphemes, it is difficult to see why irregularity should be tolerated, let alone why an justyna leśniewska 206 item or construction should progress from regular, to marked, to antiquated, to a fossilized historical relic. (p. 118) hoey’s concept of lexical priming (2005) is based on the idea that lexical patterns are responsible for the structure of language, and that grammar is merely an outcome of the pervasiveness of collocation. hoey presents collocation as a psychological concept: the recurrent co-occurrence of words is enabled by priming: as a word is acquired through encounters with it in speech and writing, it becomes cumulatively loaded with the contexts and co-texts in which it is encountered, and our knowledge of it includes the fact that it co-occurs with certain other words in certain kinds of context. (p. 8) grammar emerges from recurrent patterns of word combinations. a strong view of the importance of collocational competence has been advocated by ellis (2001), who argues that language users store chunks of language in long-term memory and acquire the experience of how likely particular items are to co-occur. a crucial role is played by associations between items which are observed to appear in the vicinity of each other. language users are able to break up the chunks according to the grammar rules of the language, but can produce and comprehend them without reference to those rules. a lot of learning can also be accounted for in terms of learning by association, as a result of encountering certain word combinations. recently, the number of studies of various aspects of formulaicity has been growing rapidly. a number of different research strands have been feeding into this trend: traditional phraseological approaches, large-scale corpus analyses of learner language, discourse analysis and historical linguistics, and psycholinguistic investigations into the mechanisms which underlie formulaicity. despite this fastgrowing body of research, the emerging picture is far from clear due to a plethora of different phenomena that are investigated in connection with formulaicity, under a host of names, such as formulaic sequences, multi-word expressions, lexical bundles, interactional routines, language chunks, and so on.1 i shall follow here those authors (e.g., meunier, 2012) who use the term formulaicity as an umbrella term to encompass a wide range of language phenomena related to the fact that language production is not based solely on the use of individual lexical items according to syntactic rules. 1 for an informative and inspiring review of the current state of research on formulaic language, see wray (2012); for an excellent overview of the issues involved, see weinert (2010). the use of articles in l2 english: a phraseological perspective 207 it seems likely that formulaicity in language is connected to the frequency of occurrence of certain phrases. while the relationship between frequency of occurrence and formulaicity is by no means a straightforward and simple one, and frequency is by no means the only determinant of formulaicity (see wray, 2012, for a discussion), there is definitely some relationship between the two (ellis, 2012). support for this view comes from recent studies on the speed of processing of lexical bundles, which clearly show frequency effects (tremblay & baayen, 2010; tremblay, derwing, libben, & westbury, 2011). even though it has been argued that the psychological validity of the idiom principle has not been empirically proven to a satisfying extent (siyanova-chanturia & martinez, 2015), the pervasiveness of formulaicity in language, as attested for by the vast body of literature mentioned above, strongly suggests that formulaicity may affect the use of articles in l2 english. currently the only recognized form of interplay between formulaicity and the use of articles is the existence of some odd uses of articles frozen in idiomatic expressions; but the real extent of that interplay is likely to be much broader. it stands to reason that the idiom principle is to some extent a driver of correct article use. the study reported here was carried out in order to provide an initial exploration of this possibility. 1.3. research on articles in esl among the various research findings pertaining to article use by learners of english as a second language, perhaps the most robust finding is that article use strongly depends on crosslinguistic factors: speakers of article-less languages find them much more problematic (e.g., hawkins et al., 2006; ionin, zabizarreta, & maldonado, 2008; snape, 2008; zdorenko & paradis, 2008). many studies focus on the problems with articles which learners face in the early stages of l2 acquisition. they note that the indefinite article, in particular, is acquired late, and that beginners tend to overuse the definite article (bitchener & knoch, 2010; huebner, 1983; young, 1996). it has also been established that difficulty in using english articles is caused to a great extent by the problems learners face when determining the countability of nouns (butler, 2002; white, 2009). it has also been demonstrated that more errors in article use occur with abstract nouns than with concrete nouns (hua & lee, 2005; ogawa, 2008). an exploration of learners’ article use with abstract nouns (amuzie & spinner, 2013) has shown that the level of accuracy in article use is related to more nuanced categories within the abstract noun category, based on the nouns’ degree of boundedness, which in turn determines their countability. another important fact about l2 article use is that articles may remain a problematic area of l2 use even at relatively advanced justyna leśniewska 208 levels of proficiency (e.g., díez-bedmar & papp, 2008; master, 1997; parrish, 1987), thus becoming a marker of nonnativeness in otherwise proficient output. this state of affairs is usually attributed to the complicated and elusive nature of the rules governing article use in english. it has been suggested (shintani & ellis, 2013) that the main source of difficulty is that articles do not comply with the “one to one principle” (andersen, 1984), because a single morpheme performs multiple functions. also, as master (2002, p. 332) notes, articles occur very frequently, which makes continuous rule application more of a challenge. it is also true that, alongside other function words, articles are normally unstressed and may be perceived by learners as less salient in the input. a large number of studies on articles in sla revolve around the role of universal grammar. the functionalist perspective in particular has inspired a large number of studies on l2 article use which investigate the influence of putative syntactic, semantic and discourse universals on the systematicity and variability of interlanguage (e.g., chaudron & parker, 1990; huebner, 1983; parrish, 1987; thomas, 1989; young, 1996). such studies look at, for example, the encoding of definiteness and specificity, as well as the tendency to mark the topic/comment distinction and the distinction between new, continuous, and reintroduced referents (e.g., jarvis, 2002). it needs to be emphasised that virtually the entire body of research on articles deals with the problem from the perspective of syntax, as illustrated by the above review. at the time of the writing of this article, a thorough search for studies that specifically address the issue in question—phraseological effects on the seemingly rule-based use of articles in esl—yielded just one result, a study by leńko-szymańska (2012) which tackles this very problem by means of a corpus-based analysis of learner writing, compared with baseline data from a native speaker corpus. leńko-szymańska extracted all cases of three-word combinations including articles from the learner corpus and identified 3-grams (combinations of three words which occur together frequently enough to be classified as lexical bundles) with articles in the native corpus, such as one of the, go to the, part of the, there is a, he was a, there is a, and so on. she then looked at how the use of articles in 3-grams compares to the total number of article uses in the corpora. one very interesting finding which emerged from this study is that, in 3-grams, the definite article occurs much more often (ca. 30% of the uses) than the indefinite article (ca. 17% of the uses). in the learner data, the also occurs more often in bundles than a/an, across all levels of proficiency. a corpus approach like this one has some limitations: it does not take into consideration correctness—some, probably many, uses of articles in the learner corpus may be incorrect; and it does not provide any data about the use of the zero article. however, this approach has the benefit of clearly showing how the use the use of articles in l2 english: a phraseological perspective 209 of articles in lexical bundles becomes more frequent as proficiency increases. in fact, at advanced levels, the frequency of the use of the definite article in bundles by l2 learners reaches that of native speakers, and for the indefinite article it is actually higher than the native norm. at the same time, the rule-based uses of articles fall below the native norm, even at the advanced level. this finding is extremely interesting: it suggests that there may be a phraseological effect at play affecting the way learners of english use articles since articles are more likely to be used by learners if they are part of a frequent combination of words. 2. research question and predictions the research question posed by this study is: does the idiom principle account to some extent for the correct article use by learners of english? the idiom principle as such cannot be directly observed since it refers to learners’ mental processes. as was mentioned above, there are reasons to believe that there is a connection between formulaicity and frequency of occurrence. this study, therefore, makes the assumption that the frequency of occurrence of certain phrases in language is roughly indicative of the mode of processing. very generally speaking, word combinations which are perceived as “typical” and which occur frequently are more likely to be processed using the idiom principle, while the combinations which are rather rare are likely to be processed in the open-choice manner. the assumptions formulated above imply that when comparing two contexts of the use of an article in which the relevant grammatical rule for article use is the same, but in one instance the article is included in an open-choice combination of words, and in the other, in a combination generated by the idiom principle, learners should be more successful with the use of the article in the latter case. it is therefore expected that the correctness of the use of articles appearing in frequently used word combinations will be significantly higher than for the same articles appearing in relatively rare combinations. it should be noted that the corpus-based frequency information on the selected word combinations most likely does not correspond precisely to how often the phrases were actually encountered by the particular group of l2 english speakers who participated in this study; however, for the purposes of this study, the assumption was made that there is at least a rough, general correspondence between frequency of occurrence and the likelihood of l2 users encountering a certain word combination. the above research question was explored in a test-based study involving adult learners of english at the b2/c1 level of the common european framework of reference for languages (cefr; council of europe, 2011). the learners’ l1 was polish, an article-less language. justyna leśniewska 210 3. method 3.1. participants the participants were 90 polish university students majoring in english or linguistics. the students’ placement in groups for their english-as-a-foreign-language classes reflects their level of advancement. for the purpose of the study, this general indication of the level of advancement was considered sufficient. the first group (group 1, n = 44) was at the b2 level of the cefr, whereas the second, more advanced group (group 2, n = 46) was at the c1 level. all participants were between 20 and 22 years of age, with the mean age slightly lower for group 1. 3.2. instrument and procedure the one-page test used in the study (see appendix a) consisted of sentences in english from which all the articles had been removed. the participants were asked to put in the missing articles in the right places. the tests included a total of 12 pairs of target items (presented in a mixed-up order) which included exactly the same structures with articles: the definite, the indefinite, and the zero article. the pairs are included in table 1. grammatically speaking, the reason for the use of the article was identical in item a and b of each pair, that is, the same grammatical “rule” applied in both cases. for example, items 5a and 5b both represent partitive expressions (a type of phrasal quantifiers) used to impose countability on noncount nouns (quirk & greenbaum, 1973, p. 67). items 10a and 10b are both examples of the use of the indefinite article with referents that can be classified as countable, indefinite, and nonspecific (downing & locke, 1995, p. 429). however, the items differed in one important aspect: the articles in the a items were included in frequently occurring word combinations, whereas the b items were relatively more of an “open choice” type of word combination. table 1 test target item pairs pair no. item a item b 1 a friend of mine an acquaintance of mine 2 what a shame what a remarkable player 3 twice a day five times a semester 4 the sooner the better the smaller the pot, the more critical the problem 5 a cup of tea a spoonful of syrup 6 the day i die the food i brought 7 help the poor open to the insured 8 hit (someone) in the face cut in the hand 9 speak english learn kurdish 10 get a job live in a luxury apartment 11 have kids eat carbohydrates 12 the centre of attention the ecology of waterways the use of articles in l2 english: a phraseological perspective 211 3.3. test preparation test preparation relied on a combination of researcher intuition, native speaker judgements, and frequency measures from corpus examination. the most challenging step in the process was to find suitable word combination pairs which would qualify as, respectively, more idiom-principle-driven and more open-choice in character. a brainstorm session between two linguistics researchers aimed at identifying pairs of word combinations that were perceived by the researchers to be more typical and frequent, versus more open-choice combinations. intuitive ratings thus formed the basis for the initial selection of word combination pairs. those pairs were then submitted to two colleagues who were native speakers of english, which led to further elimination of pairs for which there was no interjudge agreement, the replacement and changes to some word combinations, and a resulting group of 20 word-combination pairs. the frequency of co-occurrence for those initial intuition-based pairings was verified using two corpora: the british national corpus (2007; bnc) and the corpus of contemporary american english (davies, 2008-; coca). those corpora were deemed adequate due to their size (100 million and 450 million words, respectively) and representative character.2 the bnc is made up of written (90%) and spoken (10%) language, and contains texts from a wide range of sources (for example, different kinds of journals, periodicals, newspapers, academic books, popular fiction), in order to represent a wide cross-section of british english. the coca is also a balanced corpus, made up of texts representing spoken language, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts. while both corpora were used in the initial search in order to locate suitable pairs for the test, a specific threshold was set with reference to the coca corpus, the frequency findings from which were considered more reliable because of its larger size. the frequent combination in each pair had to occur at least 40 times more often than its rare counterpart in order to be included in the test. the rare items had a frequency of 0.02 per million words or less. the frequent items had a frequency of 0.18 or more. while it was impossible to determine a perfect set of criteria which could be applied if there was a way to extract the items automatically, this frequency requirement was considered to provide sufficient support for the intuitive judgements. not all intuition-based pairs corresponded to corpus-based frequency data, nor were frequency counts always similar in both corpora. consequently, the 12 2 the facts that the bnc is no longer being updated and that the texts come from before 1994 were considered of no importance in the case of this investigation because none of the items that were selected were sensitive to language change or technological advancement. justyna leśniewska 212 pairs which showed the most convincing difference in the frequency of occurrence were retained. the full list of items and frequencies is provided in appendix b. the 12 pairs (24 target items) were presented hidden among other sentences in the test, which not only helped to provide more context for the target items but also to make the relationship between the pairs of the target items less noticeable. it should be noted that all the articles were removed from all the sentences included in the test. only some of the missing articles in the test were the actual target items. since all articles were removed, the number of missing articles was larger than the number of the target items under investigation. for example, in the case of pair no. 3, which tested the use of the indefinite article in expressions of frequency, the more frequent of the two combinations, twice a day, appears in item 7: “by midsummer, herbs and vegetables in containers may need water twice day.” whereas its counterpart, the open-choice combination five times a semester, can be found in item 4: “we meet regularly, five times semester, at departmental meeting.” the noun phrase departmental meeting also requires an article, but whether the participants inserted it or not was not taken into consideration, as this noun phrase was not one of the target items. such missing articles outside the target items helped distract the test takers from any pattern in the test design they might be able to discern. an initial version of the test was piloted with three native and three nonnative speakers of english to ensure that the removal of articles did not create ambiguous or incomprehensible sentences, as well as to check if, for all the target items, all the native speakers always provided the same response. the target items which did not meet this criterion were replaced. variation in the native speakers’ choices of articles in the test outside the target items was considered of no importance. rare or difficult lexical items were avoided in the test. care was taken to ensure that both the frequent and the rare combinations of words were composed of “ordinary,” relatively frequent lexical items which are expected to be known to learners of english at the intermediate and higher levels. two experienced teachers of english were consulted about the likelihood that all the words used in the test would be known by our target audience. teachers were convinced that all items would be known by our test participants, and posttest conversations with a few participants confirmed that no lexical item in the test was new to them. difficult words, due to their greater length and other difficulty-inducing factors, could affect the processing of the test sentences in ways which could not entirely be controlled for, and they could interfere somehow with article use. for the same reason, the test was composed in such a way as to avoid false cognates (for speakers of l1 polish) or any ambiguity. in contrast to most tests on article use, which tend to have the classic format of a cloze test, the instrument used in this study elicited article use in a the use of articles in l2 english: a phraseological perspective 213 slightly different way: the text did not have gaps indicating where the participants needed to provide articles. the rationale for choosing this test design was that it is more similar to the actual use of articles than a cloze test. in a cloze test, the test taker receives a signal that an article may be missing at a specific location. in the case of those tests where the zero article is one of the options, the difference between the two formats is admittedly minor, but it still exists as in the gapped version the test taker is specifically prompted, or encouraged, to consider using an article at a specific place, and in the design employed in this study there is nothing in the test that suggests the need for an article at a specific place. 4. analysis, results and discussion in the analysis of the data, dichotomous scores were compiled: 1 point was awarded for inserting a correct article and 0 points for failing to insert an article or for inserting an incorrect one. in the case of test items with the zero article, 1 point was given for not providing an article and 0 points for providing the indefinite or definite article. the mean item score was calculated for the frequent and for the rare uses for all 90 participants, as well as for each group separately. those mean item scores are presented in table 2. a t test was performed to compare means. table 2 mean item test scores for frequent and rare uses rare combinations frequent combinations t test all participants (n = 90) 0.68 0.85 t = 9.50; p < 0.00001 group 1 (less proficient, n = 44) 0.53 0.75 t = 7.44; p < 0.00001 group 2 (more proficient, n = 46) 0.82 0.94 t = 6.64; p < 0.00001 as shown by the very low p value yielded by the t test for all 90 participants as a group, the mean for the frequent combinations was significantly higher than that for the rare ones. in other words, for the same articles and the same grammatical rule, the participants tended to be more successful when using the articles in those combinations that occur more frequently and less likely to be correct with the less frequent combinations. when analysed separately, both groups showed higher success rates in the case of the frequent combinations than the rare ones. in both cases the difference was statistically significant. however, in the case of group 2 (more proficient) the difference between rare and frequent combinations was smaller: a justyna leśniewska 214 difference in means of only 0.12, compared to a difference of 0.22 in the case of the less proficient group 1. the fact that the difference between the rare and frequent combinations became smaller as the level of proficiency increased is understandable: ultimately, with very advanced language competence, there would be very little difference as articles would be used mostly correctly in all cases for both the frequent and rare word combinations. it should be noted that the predicted higher means for frequent items were not obtained in the case of all the pairs on the test, as shown in table 3. out of the 12 pairs of frequent-versus-rare items, the differences between the means for the frequent items and their rare counterparts as shown by a t test was statistically significant (at p < .05) for nine item pairs, and not significant for three pairs. the items for which the effect was not observed included: what a shame and what a remarkable player, get a job and live in a luxury apartment, and the centre of attention and the ecology of waterways. in the case of the first pair it is relatively easy to come up with a possible explanation for the observed lack of any effect of formulaicity. while the phrase what a shame is definitely much more frequent than the rather open-choice word combination what a remarkable player, the nouns player and shame differ in the degree to which they are countable. first of all, player is a concrete and shame an abstract noun, and, as was noted in the literature review above (see e.g., amuzie & spinner, 2013), the degree of success in article use depends on this distinction (with abstract nouns being more difficult to use correctly with articles) but also on other more nuanced distinctions which result from the degree of boundedness of a given noun. it is, therefore, possible that the abstract and less countable character of shame reduced the phraseological advantage which was expected on the basis of the phrase what a shame being frequent. for the pair get a job and live in a luxury apartment, one plausible explanation is that the combination live in a luxury apartment was generally very easy for the test takers, with apartment being a clearly countable, concrete noun. the mean scores for both items were very high (0.89 and 0.90, respectively), which means that the effect of formulaicity, if any, may not have registered because of a kind of ceiling effect for the rare combination. for the last pair which did not show a difference, the centre of attention and the ecology of waterways, it is difficult to provide a plausible explanation for this fact. the use of articles in l2 english: a phraseological perspective 215 table 3 test scores compared for item pairs (n = 90) version article target item m sd t p (t) a a a friend of mine 0.80 0.40 4.75 <.0001 b an acquaintance of mine 0.48 0.50 a a what a shame 0.79 0.41 -0.37 .71 b what a remarkable player 0.81 0.39 a a twice a day 0.89 0.31 1.83 .04 b five times a semester 0.79 0.41 a the the sooner the better 0.84 0.36 10.35 <.0001 b the smaller the pot, the more critical the problem 0.23 0.43 a a a cup of tea 0.99 0.11 1.94 .02 b a spoonful of syrup 0.90 0.25 a the the day i die 0.94 0.23 4.83 <.0001 b the food i brought 0.68 0.47 a the help the poor 0.73 0.45 2.99 <.01 b open to the insured 0.52 0.50 a the hit (someone) in the face 0.69 0.47 4.04 <.0001 b cut in the hand 0.40 0.49 a zero speak english 1.00 0.00 2.52 .01 b learn kurdish 0.93 0.25 a a get a job 0.89 0.32 -0.24 .81 b live in a luxury apartment 0.90 0.30 a zero have kids 1.00 0.00 3.34 <.01 b eat carbohydrates 0.89 0.32 a the the centre of attention 0.61 0.49 0.6 .55 b the ecology of waterways 0.57 0.50 figure 1 means for the frequent and the rare combinations for both groups 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 gr.1-frequent gr.1-rare gr.2-frequent gr.2-rare justyna leśniewska 216 table 3 shows mean scores for rare and frequent items for all the participants. the means were also calculated for the two groups separately, and the results are presented in figure 1. as can be seen in this figure, response patterns were very similar for both groups. two item-related issues need to be addressed. one is the possible effect of adjectival premodification on the use of articles with nouns. in two of the test items the noun happened to be premodified by an adjective (a remarkable player, a luxury apartment), which introduced the possibility of another variable confounding the results as there are reasons to believe that adjectival premodification may somehow interplay with article use by l2 english learners. trenkic (2008) found that learners from article-less language backgrounds tend to omit articles more in adjectivally premodified (art+adj+n) than in nonmodified contexts (art+n). she also offered a “syntactic misanalysis account” (trenkic, 2007), which links the failure to use articles to the fact that articles are treated as adjectives. in this study, the two items which included premodified nouns in the target items belonged to the “rare” category, thus potentially contributing to the expected lower scores for those items because of a variable that was not taken into consideration. however, for the two pairs in which the two items occur, what a shame and what a remarkable player, and get a job and live in a luxury apartment, the expected effect was not observed. in other words, the learners were similarly successful in providing an article in both the rare and the frequent item, despite the fact that the rare item was additionally more likely to be more difficult due to the use of an adjective. thus, in this study, the issue of adjectival premodification did not appear to play a role in article use, at least as far as one can tell on the basis of the two target items which featured adjectival premodification. another issue which needs to be addressed is the level of difficulty of some of the words. it is true that some of the “rare” items feature words of somewhat lower frequency than the “frequent” combinations. however, all the lexical items in both types of expressions were expected to be familiar to the learners, as explained in the instrument and procedure section. an interesting finding concerns the types of wrong test answers provided by the participants. as stated above, in the process of compiling dichotomous scores, 1 point was awarded for a correctly supplied article, and 0 points were given for failing to insert an article or for inserting an incorrect one. out of the 512 answers for which the score was zero, an overwhelming majority—475 answers, almost 93%—were answers which were wrong because no article was provided. only 37 answers were cases in which a wrong article was supplied. this indicates that, regarding article use by learners from articleless l1 backgrounds, failing to provide an article is much more common than providing an incorrect one. of course, failing to use an article can also be seen as a case of the use of articles in l2 english: a phraseological perspective 217 wrong article choice, namely, the choice of the zero article. however, it is impossible to distinguish between the use of the zero article and failing to use any article (cf. leńko-szymańska, 2012), nor is it certain that making a distinction of this kind is feasible. the concept of the “zero” article is in itself problematic and not universally recognized by linguists (berezowski, 2009). it should be noted that the format of the test used in this study, which did not provide a prompt to use an article in specific places in the text (as, for instance, a gapped article test would do) may have contributed to the notable underuse of articles. as far as the present analysis goes, whatever the reason for failing to use an overt article, it remains an interesting finding in its own right that the participants were much more inclined not to use an article than mistaken as to which of the overt articles (a(n) or the) should be provided. 5. conclusion this article argues that the perception of article use (outside of idiomatic uses) as being purely rule-governed may be incomplete and should be broadened to include what is here called the phraseological perspective. the study presented here provides some initial evidence in support of this claim. the results presented above do offer support for the view that frequencydriven conventionality in language plays a role in the use of articles in l2 english. the overall results show that the polish learners’ use of articles is consistently more successful in the case of those word combinations that are frequent. the difference in mean scores between rare items and their frequent counterparts was very clear and significant. there is, therefore, some learner sensitivity to the frequency of linguistic forms in the input, which is here interpreted to be a sign of the open-choice principle at work. the exact nature of the psycholinguistic reality behind this phenomenon is beyond the scope of the present discussion. here, it can only be said that there is some formulaicity-related mechanism at work which affects the use of articles by l2 learners. this is an important point because accounts of article use in l2 do not generally take that mechanism into consideration and treat the use of articles as purely grammatical processes. in this study, this phraseological effect appears to be more visible in less advanced learners of english, which was to be expected as with rising competence the learners’ performance with respect to both categories of article use should be gradually improving. it is worth noting that, even though the gap between the scores for rare and frequent combinations is smaller in the case of group 2 than group 1, it is nevertheless statistically significant, which provides further evidence for the fact (mentioned in the literature review) that articles remain an area of difficulty even at advanced levels of english proficiency. justyna leśniewska 218 this study is not without shortcomings, such as the fact that the pairing of what a shame with what a remarkable player inadvertently introduced an additional difference, that of the degree of concreteness/boundedness of the noun. further testing will require adjustment in this regard and should also offer better control of the syntactic context in which the test items appear. the topic addressed by this study, however, is an intriguing one and definitely deserves further inquiry, possibly with more rigorously designed or fine-tuned tests. the present study relied on researcher intuition in designing the research instrument, for lack of any other viable method of constructing the tool needed to investigate the issue. a test constructed without reliance on researcher intuition would be superior to the one used in this study. also, it is possible that other measures of formulaicity could be used, for example, the mutual information (mi) score of the words in a string, which has been found to be more closely/strongly related to the processing speed of native speakers than the raw frequency of the string as a whole (ellis, simpson-vlach, & maynard, 2008). since the present study showed higher success for frequent combinations over rare ones by polish esl learners, a similar phenomenon would likely be observed in the case of speakers of other article-less languages. research with such populations is thus warranted. it would also be interesting to see if phraseologyrelated effects obtain in the case of learners from other l1 backgrounds. the use of articles in l2 english: a phraseological perspective 219 references aitchison, j. 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(2008). the acquisition of articles in child second language english: fluctuation, transfer or both? second language research, 24(2), 227-250. the use of articles in l2 english: a phraseological perspective 223 appendix a the test used in the study the text below does not have articles. write the articles in the correct places, as in the example. example: he is most wonderful person i’ve ever met. 1. motorised boats harm ecology of waterways, unless their use is kept at low level. 2. glucose, or blood sugar, is produced in our bodies when we eat carbohydrates. 3. we meet regularly, five times semester, at departmental meeting. 4. time matters. please try to send it in as soon as possible sooner better. 5. i want to choose foreign language that few people want to study. maybe i'll learn kurdish. 6. plants in pots and containers require more water than you actually might think, smaller pot more critical problem. by midsummer, herbs and vegetables in containers may need water twice day. 7. you should give him spoonful of this syrup every three hours. 8. i'll remember you until day i die. 9. i see that you haven’t eaten any of food i brought you two days ago. can i make you cup of tea? 10. old leftist political parties are re-emerging to demand that government again expand its role in economy to help poor, even at price of discouraging foreign investors. 11. i was lucky ball didn't hit me in face. 12. new version of insurance policy makes number of alternatives open to insured. 13. do you speak english? 14. i was recently asked about my hopes for future by friend of mine. what i know is that i'd like to have kids. and i'd like to live in luxury apartment one day. 15. immediately after graduation i need to get job. it doesn’t necessarily have to be in my field, and i’m prepared to move anywhere where i can find work. acquaintance of mine was recently offered position in berlin and he moved there without moment’s hesitation. 16. what remarkable player he is. his performance today really impressed me. what shame he didn't get picked for team. 17. every member of royal family enjoys star status; they are used to being centre of attention and there is strong unstated rivalry between them. 18. he was cut in hand in same fight, according to testimony. justyna leśniewska 224 appendix b test items and their frequency in the bnc and coca pair version a/b article target phrase frequency label bnc (100,000,000 words) coca (450,000,000 words) raw per million raw per million 1 version a: a a friend of mine high 230 2.30 1,327 2.95 version b: an acquaintance of mine low 1 0.01 33 0.07 2 version a: a what a shame high 120 1.20 173 0.38 version b: what a remarkable player low 0 0.00 0 0.00 3 version a: a twice a day high 142 1.42 754 1.68 version b: five times a semester low 0 0.00 0 0.00 4 version a: the the sooner the better* high 28 0.28 135 0.30 version b: the smaller the pot, the more critical the problem low 1 0.01 0 0.00 5 version a: a a cup of tea high 619 6.19 876 1.95 version b: a spoonful of syrup low 0 0.00 1 0.00 6 version a: the the day i die high 11 0.11 81 0.18 version b: the food i brought low 0 0.00 1 0.00 7 version a: the help the poor high 21 0.21 241 0.54 version b: open to the insured low 2 0.02 0 0.00 8 version a: the hit (someone) in the face high 26 0.26 115 0.26 version b: cut in the hand low 0 0.00 2 0.00 9 version a: zero speak english high 174 1.74 1,328 2.95 version b: learn kurdish low 0 0.00 0 0.00 10 version a: a get a job high 299 2.99 1,749 3.89 version b: live in a luxury apartment low 0 0.00 0 0.00 11 version a: zero have kids high 42 0.42 1,158 2.57 version b: eat carbohydrates low 0 0.00 11 0.02 12 version a: the the centre of attention** high 85 0.85 392 0.87 version b: the ecology of waterways low 1 0.01 0 0.00 notes. * the frequency count includes both punctuation versions: the sooner the better and the sooner, the better; ** the frequency count includes both spellings: center and centre. 21 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (1). 2020. 21-44 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.1.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the dynamism of strategic learning: complexity theory in strategic l2 development carmen m. amerstorfer university of klagenfurt, austria https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1746-2258 carmen.amerstorfer@aau.at abstract learners of foreign languages (l2s) apply strategies to support learning processes and l2 development. they select strategies according to their individual needs and preferences and adjust their strategic actions to suit situational circumstances and contextual conditions. a holistic investigation of strategic l2 learning processes requires the integration of numerous interconnected, flexibly-interacting influences, which are at constant interplay with each other and whose development is difficult to predict. validated as effective in other fields of applied linguistics, complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) can also provide an appropriate frame for researching strategic l2 learning. based on state-of-the-art methodological guidance for complexity research, this article presents the re-analysis of empirical data from a previous study through a complexity lens. it further examines the suitability of cdst in strategy research, explores its practical value, and demonstrates that a complexity perspective can generate new, profound information about strategic learning. keywords: cdst; complex dynamic systems; complexity theory; dynamism; language learning strategies; strategic language learning carmen m. amerstorfer 22 1. introduction curiosity and skepticism are two of the forces that keep researchers ahead of the game. in combination, they fuel the work of scholars around the globe. this article is inspired by a curiosity about strategic language learning in combination with skepticism about complex dynamic systems theory (cdst), which is steadily gaining popularity in applied linguistics. learners’ actions to support language learning have been researched since the mid-1970s (hosenfeld, 1976; rubin, 1975). tightly integrated in the complex, flexible processes of foreign language learning, strategies are notoriously difficult to define. learners select strategies according to personal preferences and situational circumstances and adapt them to suit dynamic, contextual changes. this article presents the application of a complexity approach to the re-analysis of data from a previous study about language learning strategies (amerstorfer, 2016). it explores whether new, valuable knowledge about strategic language learning can be gained with research methods for complexity theory and evaluates the practical significance of cdst for strategy research. the clarification of some key issues regarding strategic language learning and a review of the literature about strategy research are followed by comprehensible and concise explanations of cdst. the two themes merge in an empirical study about strategic language learning, which leads to an evaluation of the practical value of cdst in strategy research. 2. language learning strategies (lls1) and strategic language learning the beginning of research into lls is marked by tentative attempts at describing lls and how they support successful language learners in developing a foreign language (l22) (hosenfeld, 1976; naiman, fröhlich, stern, & todesco, 1978; rubin, 1975; stern, 1975). realizing the complexity involved in strategic language learning generated increasingly comprehensive descriptions of lls (oxford, 1990; wenden, 1987). despite continued efforts at defining the concept and functions of lls (cohen, 1998; oxford, 1999), the absence of a precise and generally acknowledged definition and the emergence of some discrepancies concerning terminological issues resulted in criticism about an ambiguous overall concept of lls and a weak theoretical foundation (dörnyei, 2005; dörnyei & skehan, 2003; ellis, 1994; macaro, 2006). 1 lls refers to language learning strategies in the singular and plural form. 2 l2 refers to any language(s) a person develops after the age of three, which is after the person’s native language (l1) has commonly been well established (dewaele, 2011; lorette & dewaele, 2015). l2 does not imply any information regarding the number of languages a person knows. the dynamism of strategic learning: complexity theory in strategic l2 development 23 a substantial content-analytic study of 33 definitions of learning strategies (oxford, 2017) resulted in the latest, comprehensive definition: l2 learning strategies are complex, dynamic thoughts and actions, selected and used by learners with some degree of consciousness in specific contexts in order to regulate multiple aspects of themselves (such as cognitive, emotional, and social) for the purpose of (a) accomplishing language tasks; (b) improving language performance or use; and/or (c) enhancing long-term proficiency. strategies are mentally guided but may also have physical and therefore observable manifestations. learners often use strategies flexibly and creatively; combine them in various ways, such as strategy clusters or strategy chains; and orchestrate them to meet learning needs. strategies are teachable. learners in their contexts decide which strategies to use. appropriateness of strategies depends on multiple personal and contextual factors. (p. 48; original italics) it is difficult to reduce the complex notion of lls to a one-liner. it may be possible if the definition follows a thorough discussion of all related issues (e.g., griffiths, 2018b). oxford (2017) chose to include the related issues in her latest definition, which makes it so comprehensive. besides defining the concept, oxford clarifies the use and the characteristics of lls, which has been criticized as too complex to be usable from a pragmatic point of view (thomas, rose, & pojanapunya, 2019). nevertheless, concurring with thomas and rose (2019, p. 254), oxford’s (2017) definition is “the best we have right now” as it explicitly emphasizes dynamism, flexibility, and complexity and stresses the importance of context involved in strategy choice and application. instead of a restricted perception of lls with limited value for theory and practice (dörnyei, 2009), the lens is widened to a broad, holistic understanding of strategic l2 learning (amerstorfer, 2016; gao, 2010; gu, 2012, 2018; oxford, 2017). strategic l2 learning distinguishes itself by definition from non-strategic processes through the component of consciousness (cohen, 1998, 2018; griffiths, 2008; oxford, 2011; williams, mercer, & ryan, 2015), which necessitates a distinction between l2 learning and l2 development (larsen-freeman, 2015a). the two concepts are inseparable and commonly used synonymously, but their differences are relevant for the current discussion. in general, l2 learning concentrates on the learner as the agent of actions to progress in the development of knowledge, ability, and skills in the target language. l2 learning means actively studying a language, which implies conscious efforts on behalf of the learner to increase l2 proficiency. strategic l2 learning is deliberate although the degree of consciousness involved in choosing a strategy can decrease with its repeated, successful application. automatized strategy choice becomes habitual, “which no longer reflects the learner’s attention, awareness, intention, or cognitive effort” (oxford, 2017, p. 40). l2 development, on the other hand, describes the unlimited, non-linear alterations in l2 knowledge, ability, and skills and includes effortless processes carmen m. amerstorfer 24 that are beyond a learner’s consciousness, for example, when a lexical item transfers from passive to active vocabulary. besides progress, l2 development can also include undesirable, unintentional l2 alterations, for instance, habitually over-using gap-fillers such as like and you know or adopting a rare accent or regionally acceptable grammatical structures that deviate from the standard. also temporary restrictions to the learning progress are possible. for instance, an inability to master simple constructions of the passive voice (e.g., a net is used to catch a fish) can inhibit the correct use of more complex constructions of the passive voice (e.g., a net had been used to catch a fish). occasional regressions are the norm in l2 development (larsen-freeman, 2015a) although the overall aim is progress. 3. researching strategic l2 learning quantitative methods have dominated lls research (mizumoto & takeuchi, 2018) with the strategy inventory for language learning (sill; oxford, 1990) as the most frequently used instrument for data collection (white, schramm, & chamot, 2007) due to its easy handling for researchers and participants (amerstorfer, 2018b). if adapted to suit specific purposes and research environments, the sill is still a valuable and popular research tool despite its early publication date (amerstorfer, 2018b; rose, 2019). other instruments for quantitative data collection that have also contributed to lls research are, for example, the motivated strategies for learning questionnaire (pintrich, smith, garcia, & mckeachie, 1991), the vocabulary learning questionnaire (gu & johnson, 1996), the survey of reading strategy (mokharti & sheorey, 2002), the language strategy use inventory (cohen, oxford, & chi, 2006), and the metacognitive awareness listening questionnaire (vandergrift, goh, mareschal, & tafaghodtari, 2006). however, in recent years, qualitative and mixed-methods approaches have gained popularity (e.g., amerstorfer, 2018a; gkonou, 2018; griffiths, 2018a). while statistical results achieved through quantitative research methods can generate information about large numbers of learners, case studies with a qualitative orientation focus on the strategic behavior of individuals and result in detailed descriptions of situated l2 learning. both approaches reveal valuable insights, but the outcomes of group studies cannot be generalized for individual learners, and the results of individual case studies are not generally true for groups of learners. contextual circumstances and individual learner differences are too fundamental in educational research to allow generalizations in either direction. complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) merges multiple, heterogeneous datasets and analyses them within the context in which they occur. it recognizes the flexible relationships between the individual influences on learners and acknowledges the naturally arising, dynamic alterations in l2 learning situations. the dynamism of strategic learning: complexity theory in strategic l2 development 25 cdst can change one’s perception from a narrow view on isolated lls and strategy categories (e.g., social, cognitive, affective strategies) to a broad perspective of strategic learning, where l2 learning is understood as “emergent from and dynamically interconnected with the environment” (larsen-freeman, 2018, p. 59). dörnyei, macintyre, and henri (2015a) note that by 2010, research in sla3 had undergone a “dynamic paradigm shift” (p. 1). cdst had become an important theme in the literature although most work had been theoretical in nature (p. 1). the body of cdst-related literature in the strategy field is also steadily expanding with whole chapters being dedicated to the discussion of complexity in strategic learning (oxford, 2017; wang, 2018). other recent examples of complexity-related strategy research, albeit without overtly building on cdst, have been published by cohen and wang (2018) and sasaki, mizumoto, and murakami (2018). cohen and wang (2018) conducted an empirical study about fluctuation in the functions of lls with a reference to complexity theory in the discussion of the findings. sasaki et al. (2018) investigated the developmental trajectories in l2 writing strategies in a mixed-methods study that incorporates a multitude of contextual influences. further empirical work is underway by oxford and gkonou (in press), who analyze the complexity of emotion regulation strategies, and macintyre and gregersen (2019), who conduct a pre-post, nonverbal strategy training study with change-point analysis. 4. complex dynamic systems theory and l2 development complex dynamic systems theory entered the spheres of sla after it had already been applied for about 40 years to research in natural sciences like physics, biology, and meteorology. what language teachers and researchers (e.g., van lier, 1988) had already known for decades, namely that teaching is complex and that no two lessons and no two students are ever the same, could now be investigated in a scientifically appropriate manner. cdst takes a comprehensive approach rather than isolating individual aspects of l2 learners (e.g., emotions, beliefs), learning processes (e.g., strategy use, turn taking), or learning contexts (e.g., teaching materials, educational policies). a holistic perspective is valid and vital because l2 classrooms rarely display simple cause-and-effect incidents with predictable outcomes; instead they exhibit overall complex, intertwined, and constantly changing situations (de bot, lowie, & verspoor, 2007; dörnyei, macintyre, & henri, 2015b; larsen-freeman, 2015b, 2018; mercer, 2011, 2013). 3 in concurrence with larsen-freeman (2015a) and oxford (2017), the term acquisition is exclusively used to refer to the academic field of second language acquisition (sla). carmen m. amerstorfer 26 the agents in l2 classrooms, learners and teachers, are at permanent interplay with each other, albeit at fluctuating levels of intensity and in varying constellations. on an individual level, the agents are characterized by a host of interconnected personal features, such as their self-concepts as actors in the l2 classroom, individual preferences regarding learning and teaching, anxieties and inhibitions, motivation, and much more. learners’ and teachers’ identities outside the l2 classroom are also valid components. for example, the status they have in the communities they belong to, their religious faith, and their positions within family constellations influence their perceptions of themselves and their actions. the agents in l2 classrooms belong to a “unique network of individual cultures” (mercer, 2016, p. 14) and are engaged in a “symbiotic co-adaptive relationship” (ushioda, 2015, p. 47) with context, which integrates social, psychological, and environmental processes. the significance of an individual’s cultures and sub-cultures as well as the reciprocal relationships between contextual elements and the agents in l2 classrooms are flexible and fluctuate across time. the features that characterize learners and teachers as well as contextual aspects in and around the classroom are intertwined in complex systems, which are by definition “composed of at least two but usually a multitude of interrelated components which may themselves be complex systems” (mercer, 2011, p. 63). nested within each other (bronfenbrenner, 1995, 2005; davis & sumara, 2006; oxford, 2017; oxford & amerstorfer, 2018), complex systems have blurry boundaries that do not clearly demarcate one system from related systems and the context. as a complex system, l2 development is thus embedded in its spatial and temporal environment. a change in one feature anywhere in the system may affect other features within the immediate system, other features in connected systems, or the overall system as a whole. such changes initiate new alterations whose outcomes are difficult to foresee. moreover, dynamic systems can attain so-called “attractor states” or simply “attractors,” which describe “the outcome or pattern [a system] has fallen into through self-organisation” (hiver, 2015, p. 25). as opposed to de bot et al. (2007), who contrast attractor states with repeller states, hiver (2015) emphasizes that “attractor states are not necessarily perceived as pleasant or desirable states that a person wishes to be in” (p. 21). furthermore, “attractors do not actually exert a pulling force of attraction in the way that gravity or magnets do” (p. 21). attractor states simply describe what a system is doing at a specific moment before it further evolves towards the next attractor state in another critical moment. it has been emphasized in the literature that complex dynamic systems are in a constant state of flux. nevertheless, continuous movement and development can cause a system to reach and retain a form of equilibrium or “dynamic stability” (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008a, p. 43), which does not mean stagnation but continuous adaptation to maintain a certain balance. the dynamism of strategic learning: complexity theory in strategic l2 development 27 cdst enables researchers to analyze the complexity and dynamism of l2 development, which integrates learners’ cognitive involvement and social interaction (larsen-freeman, 2017; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008a) as well as psychological and environmental processes (ushioda, 2015). cdst can bring order to what may seem chaotic and examine the relationships between individual features, the symbiosis of interconnected sub-systems, and the behavior of a system as a whole. it is suited to analyzing the combination and relation of multiple components as it investigates “the collective functioning of the interrelated parts of the system as one organic whole [that] cannot be deduced from an understanding of the individual components” (mercer, 2011, p. 64). 5. the study the study investigates one l2 learner’s strategy use as a dynamic system. the case under investigation was part of a larger study conducted previously (amerstorfer, 2016), whose data are now re-analyzed from a complexity angle. the current study draws on best practice in related domains (e.g., mercer, 2011), explores new methodological terrain in lls research, and aims to resolve the following questions: 1. what are the purposes of the lls used by the learner? 2. to what degree is the complex and dynamic nature of lls observable? 3. what new insights does the complexity approach reveal that were not gained in the original study? 5.1. methodology hiver and al-hoorie (2016, 2020) offer guidance in the implementation of a cdst-oriented research approach in applied linguistics. they present a detailed set of guiding questions (2016) and a selection of research methods for cdst that is suitable for qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods research in the field (2020). the methodology of the current study is oriented towards process tracing (beach & pedersen, 2013; bennett & checkel, 2015), which takes hypothetical statements as a starting point and analyses empirical evidence to make inferences “that update our confidence in the presence of a hypothesized causal mechanism” (beach & pedersen, 2013, p. 73). process tracing was selected as a suitable method to test and refine two hypotheses about lls which were developed from an extensive literature review and the findings of the original study because it can “clarify the scope of conditions under which a hypothesis is transferable to other cases” (hiver & al-hoorie, 2020, p. 112). carmen m. amerstorfer 28 hypothesis 1: due to their flexible and dynamic nature, the participant’s strategies can have varying purposes depending on contextual influences. hypothesis 2: psychological influences such as emotions, self-confidence, and motivation affect the participant’s strategic actions. 5.1.2. research environment the original study (amerstorfer, 2016) was conducted at an austrian vocational school whose educational philosophy demands a large amount of self-regulation on the part of the students. about half to two-thirds of the english lessons per week follow a communicative approach and are traditionally teacher-centered. in the remaining lessons, the students complete assignments, which must be submitted electronically by a certain due date. they do this independently of the teacher and in cooperation with peers. during these cooperative learning periods, the teacher functions as a consultant. the innovative teaching approach cultivates learner cooperation and, consequently, enhanced social skills. it demands advanced time-management and discipline from the students, who in return enjoy an increased amount of autonomy in comparison to more traditional, teacher-centered education. 5.1.3. data collection the original study investigated the lls use of five teenaged learners of english as a foreign language (efl) whose first language is german. over the course of four weeks, each participant was engaged in an initial interview, in which a strategy inventory (oxford, 1990) was administered, three classroom observations during cooperative learning lessons, and three semi-structured, retrospective interviews. the overall objective was to gain a holistic notion of the individual participants as strategic efl learners, which was supported by questions about the participants’ private lives and their study habits in and outside of school. the strategy inventory was immediately followed by questions related to the indicated frequency of strategy use. here the focus was on the statements that received the lowest and highest possible ratings on a 5-point scale from never or almost never true of me to always or almost always true of me. the lesson observations were video-recorded and followed by semi-structured stimulatedrecall interviews. all interviews were conducted in german (for details about the research design, see amerstorfer, 2018a). the 2016 study confirmed that research in l2 development profits from a retrospective perspective (dörnyei, 2014; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008b). the interviews revealed details about strategic learning that could not have the dynamism of strategic learning: complexity theory in strategic l2 development 29 been detected in observations. they provided opportunities for the participants to express their personal views and opinions, which “help identify aspects of context that seem salient to particular individuals, and thus help constrain the multitude of potential contextual factors to be considered” (ushioda, 2015, p. 49). although any interview’s capacity to access participants’ memory and awareness is limited, the retrospective interviews were invaluable in the 2016 study. 5.1.4. casing and agents cdst requires the specification of the phenomenological validity and the boundaries of a system, although “boundary does not imply closure” (hiver & al-hoorie, 2016, p. 745). the system under investigation is the strategy use of 18-yearold efl learner sabrina (pseudonym) over four weeks. the phenomenological validity of the case is underpinned by what is already known about strategic language learning and sabrina’s strategy use. out of the five cases in the original study, sabrina’s case was selected at random to avoid selection bias (hiver & al-hoorie, 2020). other agents in the system are cooperation partners, other students in sabrina’s class, and a teacher, with whom sabrina engaged in the observed efl lessons. influences by people outside of the immediate school environment (e.g., sabrina’s family members) were not considered. the variables that were isolated to analyze sabrina’s case were strategic learning actions and factors that demonstrate a direct or indirect influence on her lls. 5.1.5. data analysis the sources of data for the current study are sabrina’s interviews (one semi-structured initial interview and three semi-structured stimulated recall interviews) and the strategy inventory (oxford, 1990). the transcribed interview data underwent multiple rounds of coding in the data-management software atlas.ti until further coding could not contribute new information to the analysis. during the coding process, strategic actions were identified and their situational purposes analyzed. furthermore, contextual influences on sabrina’s strategy use were marked, and connections between individual influencing factors in the system were outlined. potential causal influences on the application of lls were hypothesized, and, as hiver and al-hoorie (2020) suggest, the predictions of a wide range of alternative explanations were drafted together with supporting and counter evidence to counteract confirmation bias. the memo function of the software was used to note down any thoughts that occurred to the researcher during the coding process. these memos were invaluable in the interpretation of the data and the emerging insights. carmen m. amerstorfer 30 5.2. results 5.2.1. contextual information sabrina generally likes going to school and especially enjoys the cooperative learning pedagogy promoted at her school. while her favorite subjects are accounting and math, she feels ambivalent about studying efl. on the one hand, she values learning english in school because it is a universal language that enables her to watch the latest movies before their dubbed versions come to the local cinemas. moreover, sabrina listens almost exclusively to english music and thinks that she will need english in her later work-life. on the other hand, she finds learning foreign languages difficult and cumbersome and struggles to achieve positive grades in english and spanish. if it were not mandatory in school, sabrina probably would not study english. she never reads or writes in english for pleasure. nevertheless, she uses some english expressions for fun when talking with friends in german, for instance, sweetie, swag (even though she does not know what it means), and yolo (acronym for you only live once). sabrina enjoys working autonomously during cooperative learning periods because she can take breaks and listen to music. she favors creative tasks such as designing posters and writing texts but complains that teachers often underestimate the amount of work they require. sabrina owns a laptop computer and a smartphone, which she uses daily for school and private matters. if sabrina needs support with her homework, she calls or texts a classmate. 5.2.2. results of follow-up questions related to the strategy inventory with regard to the 12 statements rated never or almost never true of me (table 1) in the 50-item strategy inventory (oxford, 1990), sabrina explained that some of the strategies simply do not work for her, for example, using rhymes (item 5) or acting out new english words to remember them (item 7). preparing flashcards to study vocabulary (item 6) takes too much time. instead, sabrina prefers to read new words and phrases repeatedly to memorize them. as sabrina does not know any people whose first language is english, some statements do not apply to her or are restricted to using english at school (items 14, 35, 48, and 49). sabrina mentioned a school excursion to england in the previous year, but she lost contact with her host family. she does not read in english except for school (item 16) and does not have a specific strategy for reading in english (item 18). when asked why she never or almost never makes up new words if she lacks the right ones in english (item 26), sabrina explains that she tries to rephrase instead by using other, familiar english words. she adds in a dismissive voice that she would rather say a the dynamism of strategic learning: complexity theory in strategic l2 development 31 word in german than make up words that do not exist and are bound to be wrong. sabrina gives no explanations for items 20 (“i try to find patterns in english”) and 43 (“i write down my feelings in a language learning diary”). table 1 strategy statements with the lowest possible rating item in the inventory strategy statements with the lowest possible rating (never or almost never true of me) 5 i use rhymes to remember new english words. 6 i use flashcards to remember new english words. 7 i physically act out new english words. 14 i start conversations in english. 16 i read for pleasure in english. 18 i first skim an english passage (read over the passage quickly) then go back and read carefully. 20 i try to find patterns in english. 26 i make up new words if i do not know the right ones in english. 35 i look for people i can talk to in english. 43 i write down my feelings in a language learning diary. 48 i ask for help from english speakers. 49 i ask questions in english. regarding the statements with the highest possible rating (table 2), sabrina explains that she is fond of a british accent and tries to imitate it as much as possible (item 11). before she reads out words in english, she tries to imagine how they are pronounced (item 12) with a british accent because that sounds cool and fun. during english conversations at school, sabrina uses hand gestures (item 25), which has proven very useful to her. sabrina pays attention when someone speaks in english (item 32) because she finds what they say interesting. furthermore, careful listening supports comprehension and thereby increases the learning progress, in her opinion. to sabrina’s mind, trying to find out how to be a better learner of english (item 33) mainly applies to vocabulary learning. she believes in trial and error to determine which strategies work best for her and how she can memorize words more easily. sabrina does not explain her rating for item 45 (“if i do not understand something in english, i ask the other person to slow down or say it again”). table 2 strategy statements with the highest possible rating item in the inventory strategy statements with the highest possible rating (always or almost always true of me) 11 i try to talk like native english speakers. 12 i practice the sounds of english. 25 when i can’t think of a word during a conversation in english, i use gestures. 32 i pay attention when someone is speaking in english. 33 i try to find out how to be a better learner of english. 45 if i do not understand something in english, i ask the other person to slow down or say it again. carmen m. amerstorfer 32 5.2.3. purposes of sabrina’s strategies sabrina’s data show instances of strategies with clearly definable, seemingly single purposes, for example, evaluating how much time is available to complete an assignment and planning further action accordingly (2:3, 3:14, 3:20).4 these two strategies, which always co-occurred, were additionally aimed at lowering the distress sabrina experienced due to the rising time pressure before the approaching submission date of the assignment. the purposes of other strategies were also multi-faceted, for example, consulting an online dictionary (2:5) or another person (2:4) to find out the translation of an unknown phrase. these strategies fulfill two purposes: first, getting an english-german translation and second, avoiding a mistake, as sabrina states in the interview: interviewer: . . . and all of a sudden you asked me something. sabrina: yes, because i couldn’t find anything useful in the online dictionary and then i prefer asking a person rather than writing down something wrong. (2:4)5 some strategies were directly connected to l2 use, for instance, mixing german and english (4:3, 4:13) “to avoid stopping in the middle of a sentence” (4:15). others were aimed at creating favorable conditions for learning, for example, optimizing concentration (2:13, 3:5, 3:8), taking breaks to drink water (4:4), and listening to music to relax between tasks (2:14). the following situations represent examples of strategies with purposes that are not directly connected to l2 learning. sabrina’s partner was busy with a different assignment because she had frequently been absent from school and had to catch up on what she had missed (2:2). in order to prevent a delay or even missing the joint assignment’s submission date, sabrina took the initiative and started working on it by herself. even though sabrina felt frustration in that situation, she would later share the results with her absent partner to save her the time and effort. the strategic actions of disregarding the prescribed mode of pair work and supporting her uncommitted partner are not directly linked to l2 learning, so technically they are not lls. nevertheless, they are important, contextual aspects of the complex system of sabrina’s strategic l2 learning. sabrina does not want to fall behind in english, so the purposes for her actions are connected to her own achievements and l2 progress. simultaneously, she wants to help her peer catch up on what she has missed, which displays good social competence and empathy. 4 in parentheses there are code numbers of quotes in atlas.ti. 5 in this situation, the researcher did not answer sabrina’s question and clarified that her sole intention was to observe. the dynamism of strategic learning: complexity theory in strategic l2 development 33 keeping good relations with peers is a strategy purpose that was observed on multiple occasions. in one situation, for instance, sabrina and her partner, who was present in that lesson, divided the workload of a task. each student answered half of the questions in a text. while sabrina was concentrated on reading, her partner interrupted her and asked a question, which sabrina immediately answered (3:6). although helping others is not an actual lls, it is crucial in sabrina’s strategic learning for five reasons. first, it generally contributes to good relationships with peers, which adds to a positive classroom atmosphere and hence to a pleasant learning environment. second, sabrina profits from helping her partner because the two students are a team and will be jointly graded. third, sabrina’s support has a motivational effect on the partner, which will consequently increase the partner’s investment in the completion of the assignment, hence contributing positively to the joint achievement and therefore benefitting sabrina. fourth, having a good reputation as a reliable and caring cooperation partner increases sabrina’s popularity in the class. as foreign languages are sabrina’s sore point, her kindness will pay off when she needs help and her peers support her in return. fifth, it is in the nature of human beings that helping others makes us feel good about ourselves. however, sabrina is a person who generally cares for others, so her motives were probably genuine. 5.2.4. complexity and dynamism of lls sabrina used numerous strategies during the observed lessons and adjusted the strategic actions according to the intended purposes and situational circumstances. she demonstrated flexibility in the way she applied strategies when she ended or altered strategic actions according to contextual influences. for example, sabrina halted a dictionary search when she spontaneously remembered an english expression while looking it up. in another situation, sabrina altered a set of peer-interview questions, which her partner had developed, although it was not sabrina’s agreed responsibility (4:5, 4:9). sabrina’s partner was supposed to conduct the peer-interview but was again absent during that lesson. deciding to do the peer-interview herself caused sabrina to adjust the questions according to her interpretation of the task. the original team decisions were complemented by a strategic change of action caused by the altered conditional circumstance of her partner’s absence. another example of the flexibility of sabrina’s strategic actions occurred just before the actual peer-interview. sabrina’s supposed peer-interview partner appeared to be intensely concentrated on a different task when sabrina was ready to start the interview. so, due to sabrina’s thoughtful nature and the new situational circumstances, she spontaneously invited a different student as interviewee (4:6). carmen m. amerstorfer 34 sabrina’s approach towards reading english texts also exhibits complexity. as she reflects, it simply depends on how intensively you deal with an assignment. . . . this is how you learn english . . . so, if you only quickly read over a text, it is obvious that nothing will stick with you, that you won’t remember anything. but if you really deal with it intensively, it’s different. (3:23) for sabrina, intensive reading in an l2 generally implies large investments of effort and time. specifically in this situation, it further involved a partner, a set of questions about the content of the text, mono-lingual and bi-lingual online dictionaries, and a vocabulary book to keep record of new words and phrases. at the time of reading, sabrina was already aware that her investment in reading the text would affect her understanding of a short video on the same topic, the quality of the peer-interview (both of which were part of the same assignment), and her participation during a group discussion in a follow-up lesson. another example of complexity was noted in sabrina’s strategic manner of handling unknown phrases in a given text (2:9). she translated them into german and then searched for “simpler” expressions in english that she could use in an imminent group discussion. while she was clarifying the vocabulary of the new text, sabrina was already planning strategic actions for a lesson in the future. she anticipated how she could participate in the discussion without making mistakes and embarrassing herself in front of her peers and the teacher. 5.2.5. psychology in strategic l2 learning sabrina tries to avoid mistakes to prevent unwanted consequences like ridicule and bad grades. moreover, she applies strategies to reduce distress and frustration generated by the approaching submission deadline and her uncommitted cooperation partner. overall, she manages to maintain a positive attitude, for example, by persuading herself that the tasks are better suited for individual work rather than pair work (2:11) when she finds herself working alone on an assignment that was designed for two. this reflects sabrina’s optimistic attitude towards life in general and efl learning in particular. instead of complaining about her absent partner, sabrina quickly came to terms with the changed situation and assigned it a positive value, which had a self-motivating effect. furthermore, sabrina decided to share the completed tasks with her partner to support her recovery. for sabrina, it is vital to maintain valuable relationships with peers. a more egoistic person would find it unfair to share the results of assignments with a lazy student. they would believe that such students do not deserve any special treatment particularly due to the greater investment by a single the dynamism of strategic learning: complexity theory in strategic l2 development 35 person completing the tasks rather than a pair. on the contrary, sabrina felt sorry for her peer and decided to help. supporting others is crucial to sabrina, which was noticed on several occasions during the lesson observations (3:6, 3:13, 3:15, 4:7). the strong sense of community in sabrina’s class builds on mutual support and respect,6 which was demonstrated, for example, by using earphones in order to keep the classroom quiet (4:2), preventing others from being distracted (4:6), lending things to others (4:8), and a polite tone among the students (4:18). sabrina is compassionate towards her classmates and appreciates that they are empathetic too (3:17). in fact, sabrina explained that over the years, solid friendships have developed within the class community (4:7). in addition to the students, the english teacher also contributes to the pleasant learning atmosphere. she does not interrupt students during cooperative learning lessons and provides a secure environment in which individuals are not embarrassed or ridiculed. for example, she provided opportunities for confidential, individual consultations when returning written exams (3:9). the teacher’s sensitive actions reduce stress and anxiety, demonstrate respect and support, and have a role-model effect. due to the group cohesion and the positive relationships among the students and with the teacher, sabrina and her peer-interview partner showed no l2 anxiety when they spoke in english (4:11, 4:12), although sabrina repeatedly mentioned a fear of making mistakes. the psychological effect of some strategic action was not always immediate. for instance, when sabrina did not know the english word for remote control during the interview, she used a hand gesture instead (4:16). her interview partner correctly guessed the german word fernbedienung to interpret the gesture. after the interview, the two students searched for the word in the dictionary, which created a sense of togetherness and affirmation that it is acceptable to have gaps in vocabulary knowledge. this experience contributed to sabrina’s self-confidence as an l2 user. demonstrating mutual empathy during l2 conversations, for instance, by active listening or backchannelling, puts students at ease and contributes to a secure learning environment. sometimes sabrina lacks motivation and does not make much progress during cooperative learning lessons. in an interview, she expressed a realistic and pragmatic attitude towards temporary lapses of motivation: sometimes i’m not motivated at all . . . i’m not making any progress but . . . i have to finish at home or work really fast in the next lesson . . . being lazy during cooperative learning will sooner or later fall back on you. (3:16) 6 for more information about the interpersonal relationships in sabrina’s class, see amerstorfer (in press). carmen m. amerstorfer 36 in such situations, sabrina considers her options. she can either finish the tasks in her leisure time or work at a faster pace in the following lesson. procrastination is not an option because it would lead to further problems and eventually bad grades. overall, the data show that sabrina appreciates the innovative teaching approach at her school and the methodological variety in the cooperative learning assignments. sabrina radiated pride when talking about the positive relationships she cultivates with peers and teachers and the strong solidarity among the students in her class. all of this contributes to sabrina’s positive attitude despite her fear of mistakes and her poor achievement in foreign languages. 5.3. discussion complexity research about lls requires a holistic perspective on contextualized l2 learning. all strategic actions must be considered, including those that are not directly targeted at language improvement. it is essential to acknowledge a wide context, situational circumstances, and dynamic relationships between individual agents. furthermore, a suitable research methodology that integrates a multitude of dynamic influences and facilitates the analysis of situated strategic learning is necessary. the 2016 study, whose data is the basis of the current study, used a grounded theory approach, an inductive research method that does not impose any hypotheses on the data. in contrast, process tracing deducts hypotheses from existing knowledge and tests them against the new information. although the fundamentally different methodological approach of the current study led to additional findings, the re-analysis of the 2016 data caused some problems because the original study was not designed with cdst in mind. in retrospect, integrating self-report (e.g., keeping a diary) in addition to the observations and interviews could have enriched the case with insights from the student’s perspective. moreover, a longer duration of the study could have elicited further information on the developmental trajectory of the learner’s strategy use even though a long duration is not a binding criterion for complexity research or process tracing. “recycling” the 2016 data was not a smooth process. the first rounds of data analysis were aimed at identifying all expressions of strategic l2 learning, categorizing them according to their types and functions (oxford, 2011),7 and defining their specific intended purposes. however, the typological conceptualization did not contribute any significant value to the study and was terminated after three problems repeatedly occurred. first, some strategies did not fit in the typology, for example, strategies for successful and rewarding learner cooperation. 7 see oxford (2011, pp. 102-136) for a summary of strategy types, strategy functions, and examples of related tactics, as reported by learners. the dynamism of strategic learning: complexity theory in strategic l2 development 37 second, some strategies had multiple purposes and could therefore not be clearly categorized. third, some strategies occurred in combination with other strategies. in these instances, the strategy combinations were analyzed as joint acts of strategic learning rather than separating and categorizing the individual (language) learning strategies. these problems led to the crucial realization that a complexity approach can only add practical value to strategy research if the attention is on practically relevant issues. in other words, while categorizing strategies may be interesting to researchers in the field, the benefits of identifying typological variation have only limited practical value. hence, the categorization was discontinued. the purposes of strategies are flexible are dynamic. learners select strategies to suit specific, situational purposes, for instance, to determine the meaning of a word by looking it up in a dictionary. however, individual strategies can have multiple purposes, some of which may not be initially intended but may develop during a learning situation. for instance, finding the translation of a word in a dictionary can additionally lead to example sentences and learning about synonyms, antonyms, and phonetic symbols. although these were not the originally intended outcomes of the dictionary search, they can lead to further investigation and other strategic actions. a holistic view of strategic learning combined with a cdst-oriented research approach can reveal such wide-ranging processes and trigger complex considerations and intricate reasoning. compared to the original study, the complexity study disclosed more profound information about sabrina’s strategies, for instance, the multi-faceted nature of helping others. furthermore, the new study shows examples of attractor states, for instance, when sabrina was deeply concentrated on a task and strategically ignored all distractions to optimize concentration. this pattern ended abruptly with an interruption by sabrina’s partner. further revelations concerned the interaction of agents and their psychological ramifications, which were noted, for instance, in the teacher’s encouraging sensitivity or the frustration caused by sabrina’s partner. the study further highlighted information that was neglected in the 2016 study, for example, sabrina’s advanced awareness of the benefits of careful listening. despite the newly gained knowledge, one crucial question remains, which has been critically debated by strategy researchers around the globe. what are the practical implications of complexity theory in strategy research? one article that revises a single case cannot adequately answer this question. however, this article demonstrates that a complexity perspective can generate new, profound information about strategic learning even through reviewing previous data. for example, the reanalysis uncovered a major problem induced by sabrina’s idiosyncratic way of handling unknown vocabulary. obviously, translating unknown words and phrases into german helps sabrina to understand what an expression means. but translating the new expressions back into “simple” english carmen m. amerstorfer 38 phrases is not ideal for her l2 development because sabrina’s approach hinders vocabulary growth and consequently impacts conversational skills and variety. sabrina should instead study and practice the new expressions rather than using their simplified versions in conversations. the reason for sabrina’s unusual approach is the fear of misusing the l2 in front of her peers and the teacher. sabrina wants to avoid mistakes, which, in her opinion, would make her the target of ridicule and embarrassment, even though such a scenario is only hypothetical and unlikely to occur in her class. sabrina is unaware of the drawbacks of her individual way of handling new vocabulary, which is paradoxical because she thinks that being a good language learner is mainly concerned with vocabulary learning. the depth of sabrina’s problem was only discovered in the complexity study, which shows that a cdst-oriented research approach can have practical benefits for students’ efl development because it intertwines multiple strands of dynamic, situational information and hence enables conclusions of practical relevance. informed by complexity studies, teachers can act upon their students’ problems in targeted strategy instruction, which, in sabrina’s case, could be conducted during the individual coaching sessions offered at her school. 6. conclusions students select and apply strategies according to their needs and situational circumstances, both of which change across time. they assess the effectiveness of strategies, make suitable adaptations, and use strategies or strategy combinations flexibly. cdst acknowledges the dynamism and complexity of strategic learning, which gives it a favorable appeal over more traditional, rigid theories despite restricted methodological guidance. this article shows that complexity research about strategic learning can result in practical benefits to l2 learners and teachers. through the discovery of information that would remain disclosed without a holistic perspective that acknowledges complexity, learners and teachers can achieve a clearer awareness of strategic actions. teachers can deduce information about students’ specific skill and knowledge areas and can hence design individualized, targeted strategy instruction that supports l2 development. complexity theory enables researchers to analyze a multitude of interconnected influences in contextualized strategic learning situations. instead of exploring isolated features of a phenomenon, cdst holistically combines a host of dynamic factors that affect one another. confirming its practical relevance to strategy research, this article intends to inspire other researchers in the field to examine the suitability, value, and practicability of a complexity perspective in their own work. given the increasing interest in cdst and methodological guidance for the dynamism of strategic learning: complexity theory in strategic l2 development 39 complexity research in applied linguistics, further studies about strategic learning, either reviews of previous data or specifically designed new studies, will contribute valuable knowledge to the strategy field in the future. acknowledgements i would like to express my gratitude to andrew cohen, andy gao, carol griffiths, phil hiver, peter macintyre, rebecca oxford, and mirosław pawlak, who recently engaged in an email thread about cdst in strategy research. thanks for the personal opinions and scholarly advice. carmen m. amerstorfer 40 references amerstorfer, c. m. 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(2015). exploring psychology in language learning and teaching. oxford: oxford university press. 693 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (3). 2014. 693-718 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.4.6 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contextual factors, methodological principles and teacher cognition rupert walsh university of portsmouth, uk rupert.walsh@port.ac.uk mark wyatt university of portsmouth, uk mark.wyatt@port.ac.uk abstract teachers in various contexts worldwide are sometimes unfairly criticized for not putting teaching methods developed for the well-resourced classrooms of western countries into practice. factors such as the teachers’ “misconceptualizations” of “imported” methods, including communicative language teaching (clt), are often blamed, though the challenges imposed by “contextual demands,” such as large class sizes, are sometimes recognised. meanwhile, there is sometimes an assumption that in the west there is a happy congruence between policy supportive of clt or task-based language teaching, teacher education and supervision, and curriculum design with teachers’ cognitions and their practices. our case study of three efl teachers at a uk adult education college is motivated by a wish to question this assumption. findings from observational and interview data suggest the practices of two teachers were largely consistent with their methodological principles, relating to stronger and weaker forms of clt respectively, as well as to more general educational principles, such as a concern for learners; the supportive environment seemed to help. the third teacher appeared to put “difficult” contextual factors, for example, tests, ahead of methodological principles without, however, obviously benefiting. implications highlight the important role of teacher cognition research in challenging cultural assumptions. keywords: communicative language teaching, teacher cognition, methodological principles, contextual factors, othering rupert walsh, mark wyatt 694 1. introduction amongst the research community, language teaching methodology is a controversial topic of discussion. language teaching methods, such as communicative language teaching (clt), have historically been subject to fierce polarising debate, leading to them being stereotyped and demonized by critics, before being “packaged up” neatly, as if ready for the dustbin (hunter & smith, 2012). attacks on clt have sometimes focused on the native-speakerist ideology it is said to represent and the unequal power relationships that have helped it colonize the world (pennycook, 1989), where, bax (2003) has argued, it is used indiscriminately in diverse socio-cultural learning contexts that do not need it. and yet, despite such criticisms, sometimes supported by documented cases of classroom practitioners rejecting clt (kumaravadivelu, 2006), there have been vigorous ministerial attempts in recent years to implement clt methodology and its off-shoot, task-based language teaching (tblt), in contexts such as china, hong kong, india, japan, libya, malaysia, the philippines, singapore, south korea, taiwan, thailand, turkey and vietnam (butler, 2011; kırkgöz, 2008; orafi & borg, 2009; wedell, 2008). the huge and ever-growing demand for “good” communication skills in english worldwide and the perception in many countries that students lack such skills, together with clt’s avowed focus on developing communicative competence (richards, 2005), help explain the attraction. despite the popularity of clt with policy-makers, though, observational studies in many of the contexts where clt methodology is mandated have suggested limited uptake. wedell (2008), for example, highlights that what may be seen happening in classrooms in china and malaysia is very different from the practices anticipated by curriculum designers. similarly, butler (2011) focuses on the struggles teachers throughout asia have faced trying to apply clt and tblt methodology in their classrooms, this often resulting in “greatly compromised” adaptations. such teachers are often criticized, butler continues, for providing “poorly implemented or lost-in-translation versions of the original” (p. 49). this gap between the expectations and the reality, between the “intended curriculum and how it is enacted,” has led to interest “in understanding the factors which may cause disparity between the two” (orafi & borg, 2009, p. 244), which in turn has fuelled research into teacher cognition, the study of “what teachers think, know and believe” (borg, 2006, p. 1). once teachers were viewed simply as “mechanical implementers of external prescriptions” but are increasingly seen, borg continues, as “active, thinking decision-makers who [process and make] sense of a diverse array of information in the course of their work” (p. 7). however, while in recent years research exploring teacher cognitions and practices in relation to clt has started to emerge (e.g., sato & contextual factors, methodological principles and teacher cognition 695 kleinsasser, 1999; mangubhai, marland, dashwood, & son, 2004; wyatt, 2009), evidence from such research that accesses teachers’ voices and thus provides insights into how they think and act is not always drawn upon by theorists writing about what teachers ought to do. this situation leads to various imbalances, particularly given the gaps between elt in bana (britain, australasia and north america) countries and tesep (tertiary, secondary and primary english language education in the rest of the world); holliday (1994, p. 3) suggests that the former have exported a “particularly narrow interpretation” of clt to the latter. in this climate, in tesep contexts including those in various parts of asia, teachers’ supposed misconceptions of clt (butler, 2011), rather than their actual beliefs, have tended to be the common focus of research, this focus in itself perhaps contributing to the “othering” practices of some bana practitioners (holliday, 2006), for example, of the type described by bax (2003), when the non-native speaker “other,” presented in terms of “regional or religious cultural stereotypes,” is viewed prejudicially as somehow inferior, “traditional,” “uncritical and unthinking” (holliday, 2006, pp. 385-386). this all suggests a need, therefore, for more teacher cognition research worldwide, exploring the complexity of teachers’ institutionally-influenced behaviour in tesep contexts as well as their “actual” beliefs, as this research can then inform curriculum development and educational policies at large in those contexts. however, an alternative research strategy can also be employed to address the current imbalances described above, namely to further explore teacher cognition in western contexts in relation to clt (our strategy in this article). one common assumption, for example, is that in bana countries “there is considerable freedom to develop classroom methodology as a sophisticated instrument to suit the precise needs of language learners” (holliday, 1994, p. 4). however, statements such as this need questioning since, despite all the rhetoric on the exporting of clt methods, apart from several studies conducted in australia (sato & kleinsasser, 1999; manghubhai et al., 2004) and canada (farrell & bennis, 2013), there has been relatively little exploration of teachers’ cognitions and practices regarding clt in bana countries. accordingly, one might ask to what extent teachers in these countries do have the freedom to teach according to methodological principles perfectly aligned to learners’ needs, regardless of whether or not these principles relate to clt. or, rather than relating to “ideal instructional practices” (borg, 2006, p. 279), however these teachers conceive these, are their cognitions “situated,” reflecting negotiated social practices (johnson, 2006)? or do contextual factors intrude more significantly, influencing teachers to take practical decisions seemingly at odds with their declared methodological principles? addressing a relative gap in the literature, the present study focuses on teacher cognition in relation to clt in an under-researched uk context. rupert walsh, mark wyatt 696 2. literature review teachers wondering how to teach are not short of advice. for example, a recent debate in elt journal addressed the question: which should be more influential, the teaching context or methodological principles? in opening this debate, penny ur (2013, p. 470) argues that, while working within external constraints, teachers should adopt “their own situated methodologies, driven directly by the question ‘how are my students likely to learn best?’”; this is a focusing question which, at face value, it would seem hard to disagree with. however, ur also holds the view that since methodological approaches frequently promoted on teacher education programmes, such as clt or tblt, can be rejected as unsuitable by teachers in diverse contexts, for example, those working with large classes focused on high stakes exams in tesep countries, it might be better if theorists stopped promoting these approaches, instead encouraging “localized methodologies” (p. 473). in counter-argument, duncan hunter (2013) questions firstly whether teachers do conform to theory-driven methods, suggesting instead they might generate new practices autonomously in a principled way. secondly, he suggests practices should not simply be driven by unfavourable contexts that can inhibit the kind of creativity that might support learning; rather, inspired by principles, teachers might still be able to push the boundaries. it is increasingly recognized that teachers’ beliefs are crucial in shaping their behaviour (kumaravadivelu, 2001), and hunter (2013, p. 480) criticizes ur’s treatment of these, arguing that rather than being “merely the passive products of a particular context,” these beliefs have the potential “to interact autonomously with, and interpret features of [the] environment.” this immediately suggests that more attention needs to be paid to these beliefs by theorists such as ur (2013) and that existing teacher cognition research (e.g., borg, 2006) could be consulted more closely by any such theorists wishing to argue how context and methodological principles should shape teachers’ behaviour. we now turn then to this emerging teacher cognition research area for insights. one strand of teacher cognition research has focused on the interpretation of teachers’ methodological principles. much of this work has focused on grammar teaching or literacy instruction, as borg (2006) reports, in citing studies from contexts including the uk, the usa, hong kong, singapore and colombia. however, borg also highlights an emerging clt theme, with several of the most influential of these studies emanating from australia. these include sato and kleinsasser (1999), who interviewed and then observed 10 secondary school teachers of japanese, exploring their practical understandings of clt, and mangubhai et al. (2004), who used observations and stimulated recall interviews to assess a secondary school teacher of german’s practical theory of contextual factors, methodological principles and teacher cognition 697 clt. while the teachers in the sato and kleinsasser (1999) study, whose levels of experience and qualifications were mixed, “held varying, even fragmented views” of clt, which reflected “the challenges these teachers faced” (p. 501), greater consistency was found in the mangubhai et al. (2004) study of one very experienced and highly qualified teacher. indeed, the authors identified an extensive overlap between the principles that informed her work and “common” clt features; these included a focus on developing students’ communicative competence, engagement in spontaneous interaction, the promotion of fluency and the use of activities that encouraged the negotiation of meaning, as well as a facilitative teacher role. however, besides these clt features, the teacher’s cognitions also contained principles drawn from different strands of education in general, for example, matching lesson content to students’ attention spans and encouraging intercultural tolerance. none of these features of general education, though, was considered inconsistent with clt, while non-clt features that might include, for example, de-contextualised grammar exercises or grammar translation techniques, were not in evidence. other more recent studies have reported a similarly complex picture, for example, wyatt and borg (2011), which highlighted how two omani state school english teachers (thus working in a tesep context), studying on an inservice teacher education programme that had introduced them to communicative tasks (cameron, 2001), appeared better able to cope with contextual challenges than a third; they appeared to teach more closely according to their methodological principles and the needs of their learners, as they perceived these. indeed, the cognitions and practices of these teachers, assessed in terms of how they provided a realistic context for the target language, encouraged meaning-focused interaction through closed pair and group work, and managed learner-centred error correction, for example, through anonymous feedback, elicitation and peer checking, seemed compatible with a “weaker” form of clt. however, some of their principles can better be classified as relating more closely to supporting child development and education in general, for example, being friendly with learners, patient and motivating, than with clt in particular (though these “general” principles were not incompatible with this; indeed, they appeared to support it). weaker versions of clt, for example, with lessons structured as presentation – practice – production (ppp) and thus including a pre-planned focus on form, have also been observed in other studies conducted in tesep contexts, for example, hong kong (carless, 2003). indeed, there is very little evidence in teacher cognition research, in both bana and tesep contexts, of stronger forms of clt, these typically characterized by tblt lesson paradigms and the centrality of meaning-focused tasks, with any form focus likely related to emergent needs rupert walsh, mark wyatt 698 and provided towards the end of a teaching session (ellis, 2003). since stronger versions of clt are sometimes promoted on teacher education programmes, the apparently limited uptake of this methodology, as captured by the few teacher cognition studies available, might provide some support for ur’s (2013) arguments, if one neglects the likely educational value of learning about a range of methods that might be drawn upon eclectically. though teacher education might vary in impact, courses that engage in awareness-raising, like the delta (borg, 2011) and the celta, which is claimed to provide “skills, knowledge and hands-on practice” (ucles, 2014), are thought more likely to influence teachers’ cognitions than those that do not (borg, 2006). when teachers trained through more traditional transmission-type courses have been found not to implement clt, this has sometimes been ascribed to the teachers’ lack of understanding of the methodology, for example, by karavas-doukas (1996) in greece. alternatively, in tesep countries, context is sometimes blamed for “gaps” between teachers’ declared methodological principles and practices, for example, in richards and pennington’s (1998) study of hong kong novices who abandoned clt to develop survival skills. it seems that, despite apparently valuing clt, teachers in some tesep environments, such as the vietnamese educators in hiep’s (2007) study, can face numerous constraints in employing it: systemic (traditional exams and large class sizes), cultural (beliefs about roles and relationships) and personal (e.g., limited experience in designing activities for monolingual classes with learners who perceive no real need to communicate in the target language). accordingly, in some of these tesep contexts, for example, hong kong (carless, 2003), where the adoption of specific clt methodological practices is mandated by educational authorities and enshrined in materials, there is a danger that teachers might feel themselves reduced to mere “implementors of professional theories” (kumaravadivelu, 2001, p. 541), although it might be an over-simplification to suggest the teachers themselves would actually accept this position (hunter, 2013). a concern that inappropriate methodology might be foisted on students has contributed to the development of a “postmethod” approach centred on supporting learner autonomy, a goal that might only be achieved if teachers themselves are reasonably autonomous, able to draw on context-sensitive methodological principles guided pragmatically by their learners’ needs (kumaravadivelu, 2001). as yet, though, there is still limited teacher cognition research documenting such “postmethod” practices, even though a concern to support learners’ needs (a methodological principle drawn from education in general) emerged, according to a corpus study that subjected several decades’ of elt journal articles to computer analysis to identify trends in choice of lexis (hunter & smith, 2012), in the discourse of the 1970s, pre-dating the naming of clt. contextual factors, methodological principles and teacher cognition 699 in stimulating principled teacher behaviour, learners’ needs can be seen as contributing positively to the context, unlike the negative factors described two paragraphs above. set in a bana environment characterized by ongoing professional development and small multilingual groups in suitably-resourced classrooms, conditions which might facilitate a focus on learners’ needs, according to holliday (1994), our own study asks the extent to which the participating teachers’ cognitions and practices relate to their methodological principles or seem situated in relation to the context. as noted above, teacher cognition research in relation to clt in bana countries is rare, and of the studies available both sato and kleinsasser (1999) and manghubhai et al. (2004) focus on teachers in secondary schools. some insights into what can take places in contexts characterized by the “ideal” “private language school ethos” (holliday, 1994, p. 4) are offered, though, by farrell and bennis’ (2013) study of two celta-qualified teachers in canada (one with 19 years’ experience and the other a “novice” with 2 years and 6 months’ experience), both teaching small classes in a language centre. farrell and bennis found that the beliefs and practices of the more experienced teacher tended to converge (around what appears to be a weak form of clt), although not entirely; for example, despite a stated preference for “practice activities to be communicative . . . target grammar was only practiced communicatively in one of three [observed] lessons” (p. 172). contextual factors, such as time constraints, “made it difficult [for him] to put his beliefs fully into practice” (p. 174). furthermore, while the teacher emphasised that it was “important to have a variety of [error correction] techniques because different students have different learning styles,” he was observed to use one technique predominantly, “possibly [because he] felt that each student could gain from that particular method” (p. 174). in the case of the “novice” teacher in the same study, a “divergence rather than convergence between his stated beliefs and classroom practices” was observed, possibly as he was experimenting with a number of approaches and techniques, which suggested to the researchers “that many of his beliefs were not stable at the time of the interviews” (p. 174). interestingly, this novice teacher also seemed to make “instructional decisions based on keeping his students happy,” unlike his more experienced colleague, who “focused more closely on needs associated with learning outcomes” (p. 175). these findings demonstrate therefore that even in bana contexts where conditions include small class sizes, well-resourced classrooms and the availability of appropriate books and classroom material, teacher cognition research can reveal a more complex picture than one of a purely methodologically principled teacher focus on learners’ needs, of the type holliday (1994), above, suggests we might find. our research, set in a similar bana context, is described below. rupert walsh, mark wyatt 700 3. the study 3.1. research context and participants our research took place at a large adult education college in southern england, which provides efl courses for international students, who are mostly arabic, asian and european. their classes are of mixed nationality and gender. class size is typically small (6-15) and classroom layouts tend to be facilitative of interaction. clt methodology is actively promoted at the college, as is evident in its promotional literature, which also stresses that students will improve their grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation, and skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening through the course. the college takes students from beginner to advanced levels and, while some classes are qualification-focused (e.g., ielts), most are general efl, including summer school courses. students, studying for 25 hours per week, progress from one level to another at intervals generally through successfully completing in-class tests, though this is sometimes left to the discretion of the individual teachers; the tests used, typically drawn from the relevant teachers’ books, can be classified as achievement tests (hughes, 1989) since they assess how well students are able to manipulate the grammatical and lexical forms they have been introduced to. classes observed in our study were general intermediate-level efl summer school courses. three teachers, all british, employed at the college volunteered to participate. guaranteed confidentiality, anonymity and the right to withdraw at any stage, in accordance with the ethical guidelines required by the university that had authorized this research, they were observed and interviewed once each. their details are included in table 1. table 1 the participating teachers teacher (pseudonym) qualifications experience andrew had completed the celta and cert tesol. was studying for the delta 2 years 6 months bethany celta and pgce 12 years caroline celta, dip tesol and ma 30 years as the table demonstrates, qualifications and experience varied considerably. however, all had or (in andrew’s case) were working towards advanced qualifications. he was also different in not being “experienced,” if we follow definitions used in other teacher cognition studies, for example, mok (1994) cited in borg (2006), which set a requirement of at least three years for this. in farrell and bennis’ (2013) terms, he was in fact a “novice.” however, given the way tblt has become dominant in the last decade (littlewood, 2007; ur, 2013), contextual factors, methodological principles and teacher cognition 701 it is likely that, since andrew’s teacher education was more recent, he may have encountered a stronger form of clt than had bethany and caroline earlier. evidence, for example, that provided by a teacher in andon and leung (2014), suggests there may have been a move towards tblt on teacher education courses such as the delta. besides drawing on their formal education, the three teachers in our study were able to benefit additionally from a thorough in-house professional development programme at the college involving regular observations, progression targets and encouragement of reflective practice. this included an emphasis on supporting learners’ needs, a requirement too of the uk governmental standards agency, ofsted, which inspected the college. having introduced the participating teachers and their context, we now describe our research methodology. 3.2. research methodology to assess the relative importance of context and methodological principles in shaping the teachers’ work, “non-participatory observations” (cohen, manion, & morrison, 2007) focused on the participants’ teaching practices while their cognitions were elicited through semi-structured interviews (kvale & brinkmann, 2008). interviews followed observations to stimulate recall (bailey & nunan, 1996) and explore the rationale for classroom decisions, a procedure which also reduced the risk of the observed teaching being influenced by the observee’s knowledge of the research focus. such risks were further minimised by the nature of the interviewer/interviewee relationship; the observer (the first researcher) was an outsider and had not met the research participants before contacting the college with a request to conduct the research. at the time of engaging in this research, the observer was delta qualified, experienced in efl adult education settings in the uk and overseas, and was studying for a further post-graduate qualification. to assess practices for evidence of methodological principles, criteria related to differing versions of clt, including strong and weak, were developed, as in other teacher cognition studies (e.g., wyatt & borg, 2011). so, questions such as the following were posed: did the lesson suggest a tblt, ppp or other structure? to what extent was language contextualized? how meaning-focused was the interaction? how prominent were pair and group work? how were language errors addressed? in order to reduce the subjectivity of the observations and the potential for “attribution error” (kennedy, 2010) and therefore also increase the reliability of subsequent analysis (mcdonough & mcdonough, 1997), a tool (first piloted) was rupert walsh, mark wyatt 702 developed (see appendix a). this allowed for the recording of timings and participation patterns, felt to be of interest since clt is characterised by the active ontask participation of students (thornbury, 2004); this tool would support the narrative recording of events. lessons were not video or audio-recorded to reduce intrusiveness. each classroom observation lasted 40-50 minutes. data analysis commenced immediately afterwards, with participation patterns scrutinised and notes written up. features of the lesson were assessed against criteria. as the goal of the interview was to elicit cognitions in an unrestrictive manner, a semi-structured interview format was employed (see appendix b), allowing participants to contribute freely to the conversation within the guidance of a loose framework (dörnyei, 2007). interviews lasted approximately 30 minutes and were tape-recorded; this was to allow for subsequent analysis and to free the interviewer to focus on the conversation rather than on recording what was said (kvale & brinkmann, 2008). there were five stages. after the study’s broad aims and ethical safeguards were restated, general questions were asked, in a friendly conversational way to help build rapport, about experience and training. next, to encourage teachers to express their methodological principles in their own words, there were general questions about their practices; these questions avoided potentially ideologically loaded terms such as clt and tblt, which might have triggered pre-conceived notions. subsequently, a short stimulated recall process was employed, as used in similar teacher cognition studies, for example, mangubhai et al. (2004), but without the video. this involved presenting detailed observational data, already filtered by the observer, as neutrally as possible in summary form, emphasising staging and participation patterns, exploring the rationale behind classroom decisions and enquiring whether this was typical of the teacher’s work. notwithstanding the lack of video, the process thus employed involved a more precise focus on classroom events to prompt recall than that found in “typical retrospective ethnographic interviews” when informants might be asked to remember only “in the abstract” actions taken and values or strategies linked to these (dempsey, 2010, p. 350). follow-up questions explored the possible impact of contextual factors, such as the needs of the particular learners in the class. there was then space for further comments. interview data were transcribed and then coded, for example, for descriptions of clt and non-clt practices; for instance, if a teacher mentioned believing in meaning focused tasks, this was coded as clt. methodological principles and situated cognitions were compared across different interview segments and with reference to observational data. qualitative descriptive accounts were then developed and are presented below. contextual factors, methodological principles and teacher cognition 703 4. findings 4.1. andrew andrew’s lesson, with 8 young adults (3 chinese, 2 arab and 3 european) of intermediate ability, was in a very informal setting for a classroom, with sofas and bean bags instead of chairs and no tables. regarding the structure of the lesson, there was an initial emphasis on building context and engagement with a real-life situation (described below) before presentation of grammar, itself heavily linked to this context. the lesson began with a hypothetical discussion from picture prompts on what it would be like living in a jungle, followed by reading tasks based upon a woman’s true “life in the jungle” story. there was subsequent personalisation of content, leading into meaning-focused activities that indirectly provided exposure to the present perfect simple and continuous tenses, before there was an explicit focus on form. this style of presentation struck the observer as reminiscent of typical delta trainee lessons he had witnessed; andrew of course was completing the delta at the time. the lesson was also characterised by considerable student participation and interaction, entirely in english; all tasks were completed in pair work, and feedback was elicited from the students themselves, including the correction of errors such as when a student was given multiple opportunities to pronounce the word bite correctly. furthermore, the session had an informal, cafe-style feel, partly created by the layout, with casual conversation involving both teacher and students during all stages. in summary, although elements of the lesson were clearly consistent with general education principles, such as an interest in learners, the lesson was also characteristic in many ways of a stronger form of clt, as outlined by ellis (2003), above, given the way that it was structured around a meaning-focused task. however, while features of tblt were dominant, there may have been other influences too. for example, the focus on form towards the end was of a fairly explicit nature. in the subsequent interview, andrew suggested his preferred teaching style matched the style observed in his lesson; first, set an activity “to activate schemata . . . so that (the students) are not just going head first into something which they have no idea about” and then present the language in context to encourage learners to notice the form of language for themselves. furthermore, he asserted that contextualisation was a high priority in his teaching: i think noticing things is a big part of learning . . . learning english and (this kind of activity) puts it in context and it gives it some kind of real world relevance, and i would always, i think, i would always present language in context before and give the students the opportunity to guess what it means before teaching it, definitely . . . rupert walsh, mark wyatt 704 he adds that he achieves this predominately through “skills-based activities.” finally, having provided sufficient contextualisation, andrew teaches the form of the language. regarding student participation, andrew values opportunities to “chat and talk” to create a relaxed “buzzy” environment in which learners, involved as part of “a big community helping each other learn,” feel like practising their english. he also prefers involving students in error correction, his reasoning being that, in order to foster genuine learning, he wants “students to work for their answers”. andrew emphasized, though, that he would vary his teaching style if the contextual factors were different. his limited experience had included a year teaching in secondary schools in thailand (a tesep context), and he reported that with children “you might need to be a little bit less openly communicative and a little bit more directive in terms of (achieving some) tangible task output”; this practice might suggest a form of communicative task such as that described by cameron (2001), allied to a weaker form of clt, rather than the “deep end” clt (thornbury’s [2004] term for strong clt), which andrew indicated a preference for elsewhere in the interview. moreover, the context would determine his choice of topic. choosing appropriately motivating topics was vital with young learners in a tesep context, he argued, as “you really want to try to engage them.” asked if languages were best learnt through communication, andrew replied “i think this depends on learners and learning styles . . . some students are naturally better at getting more out of a communicative situation.” he also reported that in a monolingual environment, such as thailand, he “wouldn’t be adverse to using translation, if necessary.” while this principle suggests no conflict with tblt (willis [1996, p. 49] accepts mother tongue use that is “systematic, supportive and relevant”), it does indicate flexibility and willingness to put learners’ needs first. in short, andrew favoured methodological principles which lean towards strong clt: the use of tasks to build context and underpin learning with any explicit focus on form coming afterwards. he acknowledged, though, that the specific needs of students and the type of context (bana/tesep) influenced how he enacted his methodological principles. 4.2. bethany bethany’s class consisted of 9 intermediate level young adults (5 europeans, 3 asians and 1 arab) in a standard classroom environment containing chairs and tables in a horseshoe shape. in the lesson observed here, grammar teaching was the central theme. the session observed consisted of three cycles, each beginning with an explanation of a grammar rule (cycle 1: i wish, cycle 2: i wish i had contextual factors, methodological principles and teacher cognition 705 and cycle 3 for other aspects of i wish) and ending with controlled or free practice in using this rule (giving the general impression of a weaker form of clt). contextualisation occurred within bethany’s explanations through elicited situations and picture prompts, one example being during the teaching of i wish, which involved two people playing basketball, one short and one tall, with the shorter person wishing he was taller. although much of the lesson involved teacher-led explanations, student interaction was maintained throughout. this was achieved through elicitation before presentations of grammar and through both work in mixed-nationality pairs and open class discussions on the topic of students’ own wishes, which thus encouraged personalisation. corrections were elicited, apart from pronunciation errors which the teacher corrected directly. student participation was greatly encouraged through the informal mood of the session, with students frequently interjecting and bethany participating in digressions off topic. when speaking with bethany afterwards, it was quickly apparent that planning the stages of a lesson was considered very important, a belief born out of training to be a children’s teacher, she reported. her ideal lesson would involve cycles described as “express, correct and repeat”: i think providing opportunities to express themselves . . . and then correcting what they produce i suppose. and then repeating . . . a lot of repetition, in different ways, you know, recycling language in a different way but making sure it’s repeated and repeated and repeated. as well as stressing the need for repetition, she emphasised the importance of testing prior knowledge in the first cycle so that new knowledge could be built upon a learner’s existing knowledge. when presenting language, bethany was open to guided learning or teacher-led explanations, the latter more likely within grammatical explanations. then, in discussing activities in her observed lesson that required students to apply language to their own lives (for example, their own wishes), she commented on the importance of contextualising language learning through personalisation to aid memory, rather than relying on workbook exercises: i keep telling them that if i don’t make anything personal, they’re never going to remember it, so i did the first activity where it was all my own ideas and i think, they would need a chance to come up with their own experiences, and the textbook, there’s . . ., we were at the right place in the textbook but a lot of it was with superpowers, being able to see in the dark, being able to see in the future, you know, not really very realistic, and we did it as a revision exercise but i think if they can give a real example of a real situation that’s personal to them, they’re more likely to remember it . . . rupert walsh, mark wyatt 706 on the participation of students, bethany values an interactive approach and so fosters an informal atmosphere. however, this interactivity is more likely to succeed, she claimed, when controlled by the teacher, as an uncontrolled classroom merely results in confusion, “with people just sitting there, doing nothing.” earlier in her career, bethany had taught “really big groups” in the czech republic (a tesep context), and felt it had not been “really different. the lesson would be pretty much the same.” this suggests she was applying techniques developed with larger groups (children in a uk mainstream school and european students) to the small group teaching in her current context. however, as with andrew, bethany stressed that her teaching approach varies according to the students. interestingly, i did a similar lesson with another class and they didn’t know anything whereas there was a girl in that class who seemed to know the grammar quite well. so a lot of the first bit was just testing to see how much they already knew. furthermore, bethany reported eliciting continually in the observed class due to its vocal nature, but for less vocal classes she would elicit less, accordingly. she also reported sensitivity to individual needs: “every learner’s different . . . while some do just want general communication skills for the outside world, others actually want to learn a language, all the rules and grammatical structures.” so bethany’s preferred methods resembled weak clt to some degree, with a focus on form being mixed-in with personalisation, interaction and other forms of contextualisation. as with andrew, she believed that learner characteristics and needs impacted the way she enacted her methodological principles. 4.3. caroline for caroline’s lesson, 9 intermediate level young adults (3 asians, 2 arabs and 4 europeans) were present, sitting in a standard classroom with tables and chairs in a horseshoe shape. as in bethany’s lesson, there was an emphasis on the mastering of grammatical structures, though the approach seemed different in some ways. after beginning with a teacher-led activity revising collocations learnt the previous day, students completed a task in which they invented questions to ask royal family members, hardly very realistic! questions had to begin with who, what or where, a requirement which could have stifled spontaneity but was strictly enforced. caroline then used or adapted students’ utterances to teach the difference between object questions (“where are you going on holiday?”) and subject questions (“who loves mary?”). the session ended with two contextual factors, methodological principles and teacher cognition 707 activities providing practice in using subject and object questions, the first involving the rearrangement of jumbled words and the second requiring students to write subject or object questions in response to teacher prompts. the lesson contained some features which would not typically be considered clt; for instance, contextualisation was limited largely to the invention of questions early in the lesson, before subsequent explanations and exercises focused mainly on the structure being taught. students participated through inventing questions in pairs and responding to teacher prompts. however, as was the case in andrew’s and bethany’s classes, students were placed in mixed-nationality pairs and consequently used english to communicate. on the whole, though, less student participation was observed than in andrew’s and bethany’s classes; much lesson time involved caroline explaining, instructing and providing corrections, although some instances of self-correction were encouraged. overall, the atmosphere was quite formal, with students often quiet, not contributing more than necessary. the subsequent interview with caroline revealed cognitions which indicated responding to “student factors” was more important to her than following any methodology. in her interview, caroline did outline a preference for methods comparable with ppp. this was evident firstly from frequent uses of the word build to describe how activities should follow one upon another: we always kind of build up to an activity where they are hopefully going to be able to express their own opinions or putting in their own language, giving their own ideas in their own way based on what the input has been . . . caroline emphasized the importance of “building up their confidence” through encouraging speaking in pairs and small groups, in which they “feel secure”: a lot of them do enjoy just answering questions and just discussing things you’ve led up to . . . i think you just have to give them the opportunity to feel confident and to try to express themselves, as and when they want. furthermore, it was evident caroline valued ppp; she claims that she usually begins with explanations of grammar, which lead in to activities providing contextualised practice and allowing self-expression. however, this reported practice was in contrast to the largely non-clt methodology observed. caroline also said the self-discovery of grammar would normally permeate her lessons; again, this was not observed. during stimulated recall, caroline claimed she limited self-discovery, student participation and contextualisation in the observed lesson deliberately to address the needs and wants of students. meeting these was more important to her than rupert walsh, mark wyatt 708 following an approach; for example, although caroline reported valuing communicative tasks, she was conscious of her students’ preference for accuracy-focused activities, a preference she consequently needed to respect. student-stated preference had also played a part in her decision to favour teacher-led correction: you also get students who say ‘it’s all very well doing these communicative activities and speaking in pairs and groups but, you know, we really want you to correct us, both grammatically and pronunciation wise,’ and i think they’re quite right really . . . caroline acknowledged that “what everyone wants to do (is) to be able to speak” and confessed she was “perhaps a bit of a stickler for accuracy.” nevertheless, the learners observed were retaking a level previously failed; caroline prioritised accuracy and emphasised correct forms to help them avoid failing again: i do think that structures at this level, at intermediate level are actually important because if they’re not going to learn the grammar at this stage there are going to be fossilised errors and they’re going to struggle throughout the next level and so on . . . to summarise, although clt methods were apparently appealing to caroline, when she was reminded of what actually happened in her lesson, situated cognitions came to the fore. one interpretation might be that her own methodological preferences were of less importance to her than were student-led contextual factors she felt she needed to respond to, such as those outlined above. however, an additional possible interpretation is that, when confronted with contextual realities, “politically correct” espousals of clt methodology that she may have been exposed to throughout her career and drawn upon, given the very pervasiveness of this political correctness (waters, 2013), fell away, and methodological principles, important to her but nevertheless suppressed initially in interview, which relate more closely to non-clt practices, for example, prioritizing decontextualized grammatical accuracy practice activities, emerged. 5. discussion we now consider these cases together and in relation to research questions and the literature. firstly, the study uncovered two clear examples (in andrew and bethany) of harmony between methodological principles, situated cognitions and teaching context. both teachers combined a concern with learners’ needs, which, as we have said, relate primarily to general education (mangubhai et al., 2004), with methodological principles that relate clearly to clt. however, while bethany’s observed lesson and interview afterwards revealed a preference for a weaker version of clt, in andrew’s case, preference for a stronger version was contextual factors, methodological principles and teacher cognition 709 evident. so, in his lesson, tasks preceded focus on form, which was heavily contextualised; students were communicatively involved throughout. then, in interview, andrew’s comments indicated a compatible preference for collaborative skills-based activities which provide contextualisation and opportunities for the noticing of linguistic features. like bethany, who varied levels of elicitation and explicit instruction according to the learners’ needs, andrew felt he was flexible in adjusting his methodology according to the students, though these adjustments still seemed compatible with his principles. therefore, there was no need to compromise methodological principles, as ur (2013) argues might be necessary, in order to accommodate contextual concerns. perhaps such harmony is not surprising. andrew’s lesson, after all, was centred on a “task” (ellis, 2003), and, as hunter (2013, p. 477) suggests, these can attract teachers due to “the creative and humanistic possibilities they offer; [they] are adaptable for use with topics that interest learners: they absorb students in meaning and involve them in intense social activity.” teachers who believe “in the essentially humanistic and communicative nature of language” may be drawn to clt methodology (harmer, 2003, p. 291) they can enact more easily if promoted on their teacher education programmes and supported by their contexts. unlike teachers in richards and pennington (1998), andrew and bethany benefited from a bana context characterized by a multilingual environment, small class sizes, and continuing in-service professional development that emphasized appropriate response to learners’ needs allied to a clt approach. this approach was realized in relatively relaxed general efl summer school courses. furthermore, while andrew had no more experience than the celta-qualified “novice” in farrell and bennis’ (2013) study, this was clearly varied and he was already continuing his education through the delta, which, as borg (2011) explains, is an advanced course. this continuing education might partially explain the relative congruence between andrew’s cognitions and practices. such harmony was not apparent in the work of the third teacher, caroline, who, despite espousing support for a weak version of clt, did not teach in a way congruous with her stated beliefs; non-clt practices were more in evidence. nonetheless, in interview she offered a clear contextual reason why. indeed, caroline underlined that the needs and wants of the students were her primary consideration in all her teaching choices, regardless of her personally held preference for a ppp delivery style. her students had failed end of level achievement tests of their grammar and vocabulary and had also specifically requested direct teacher instruction to support linguistic accuracy. caroline was sympathetic to this, and there are different possible interpretations. one is that caroline had suppressed non-clt methodological principles early in the interview, as these may not have seemed politically correct to her. alternatively, rupert walsh, mark wyatt 710 though, if we take her stated beliefs at face value (remembering that, rather than being elicited directly, these beliefs were inferred from her choice of lexis and descriptions of how activities ideally related to one another, a methodological procedure we followed with a view to accessing more deeply-held principles), caroline was adopting her own “situated methodology,” driven by her interpretation of learners’ needs, an approach which ur (2013, p. 470) argues is likely to result in “a substantial improvement in learning for students.” a more critical perspective, though, might be that caroline was positioning herself as a “client-satisfier” (harmer, 2003, p. 288), in so doing abandoning methodological principles that many researchers (e.g., ellis, 2003) believe may lead to deeper learning. the extent to which this was a risk, though, is difficult to assess. only one lesson was observed and, while the learners did not appear to be engaged to any great extent, such engagement in itself is of course only one possible indicator of learning. these learners were not interviewed subsequently and nor was their progress monitored as part of our research. caution in interpretation is thus essential here, particularly since caroline may have been channelling her observations and reflections into her teaching. nevertheless, caroline did employ non-clt practices. while she explained clearly that she had other priorities, hunter (2013, p. 479) warns that worrying excessively about “difficult” contextual factors, such as learners’ tests, can lead to teachers abandoning creativity in favour of “unhelpful conservatism.” this may possibly have been the case here, although without substantially more observational data any such conclusion would be far too premature. this suggestion does allow the insight, though, that even in such a bana teaching context, where the concern on efl summer courses was generally primarily perhaps with “immersing learners in anglo saxon society” (hiep, 2007, p. 195), “difficult” contextual factors, for example, test pressures, could still seem to exert “undue” influence. even though the college appeared to be encouraging clt, were its end of level achievement tests in fact inducing negative washback, for example, by “focusing heavily on surface features of grammar” (hunter, 2013, p. 479)? while a detailed study of these tests was outside the scope of our investigation, that they were achievement rather than proficiency tests (hughes, 1989), assessing discrete grammatical and lexical items introduced in the course book rather than communication skills more holistically, is telling. caroline’s situated cognitions and practices suggest her interpretation of these tests may have been that accuracy was more important than other features of communication. in caroline’s bana environment, there was an emphasis on supporting learners’ needs, partly driven by ofsted, and, as ur (2013) recommends, her practices seemed governed by her situated cognitions. however, when considering contextual factors, an important distinction can be made. on one hand, contextual factors, methodological principles and teacher cognition 711 there are learner needs, in terms of characteristics and learning styles, for example, confidence of the learner in a communicative situation, which the “postmethod” teacher would probably be only too willing to draw upon in fine-tuning their teaching in a principled way, while on the other, there are “difficult” contextual factors. this second set of factors, for example, the high stakes exams, particularly found in tesep contexts, that might encourage various forms of undesirable student behaviour such as surface approaches to learning (chan, spratt, & humphreys, 2002), may make it harder for a teacher to teach in a way consistent with their methodological principles. ur’s (2013) discussion of “situated methodologies” does not make this distinction clearly enough. while andrew and bethany were drawing on methodological principles in meeting the individual styles of their learners, as holliday (1994) in fact suggests can happen in bana contexts, caroline was also swayed by apparently “difficult” contextual factors, namely the learners’ end of level achievement tests. ur (2013) acknowledges that such tests are invariably “paper and pencil” since “the testing of oral proficiency is relatively expensive and time consuming” (p. 471) and that this will impact teaching, as will marking that “involves substantial subtraction of points for grammatical and spelling mistakes” (p. 472). she nevertheless argues that such contextual factors should still drive teachers’ practices. hunter (2013), however, disputes this, pointing out that “many teachers, thankfully, refuse to accept the notion that classroom teaching and learning should be directed solely towards assessment” (p. 479). the extent to which caroline and her colleagues had a choice in the way they set and marked these achievements tests on their summer school courses is unclear. however, caroline’s apparent acceptance of a perhaps difficult contextual factor, of the type that hunter (2013) argues needs to be guarded against, may partially explain the relative lack of harmony identified between her declared methodological principles and situated cognitions. much greater harmony was observed, as we have noted, in andrew and bethany. there are various implications arising from this study. first, to help all concerned, this particular college could re-evaluate the communicativeness of its tests. in such a typical bana context, characterized by small classes on summer courses that have been set up to aim primarily at improving oral communication skills (though of course caroline’s learners may have been more interested in accuracy even if they had not failed a level and been asked to repeat), it would seem that other means of testing would be possible. for example, carefully constructed role plays, assessed according to criteria that relate to communicative competence (bachman & palmer, 1996), could be incorporated to supplement teachers’ book tests. the inclusion of such role-plays would better match the college’s stated goals rupert walsh, mark wyatt 712 to develop oral communication skills, but of course such an innovation would need careful management and monitoring. second, though we would not wish to generalize from such a small-scale study, caroline’s case does illustrate the concern voiced by hunter (2013) that if contextual factors, including those open to challenge since they might seem to have a negative impact on learning, such as assessment that is ill-matched to the aims of a course, are placed ahead of methodology, as ur (2013) recommends, this may not necessarily result in the positive outcomes she anticipates, for example, “more professional satisfaction for the teacher” (p. 470). indeed, if there is a lack of harmony between methodological principles and situated cognitions, such a positive outcome intuitively seems to us less likely. though our own study could ideally have probed this particular issue more deeply through follow-up interviews and observations, this insight does suggest that any advice given to teachers on meeting needs and handling context should be informed more fully by teacher cognition research. furthermore, caroline’s case, taken together with the findings of farrell and bennis (2013) in canada, demonstrates that even in contexts characterized by small, multilingual groups of students studying in well-resourced school environments in english-speaking countries that are apparently favourable to convergence between methodological principles and practices (holliday, 1994), divergence may nevertheless occur. concerns about assessment, pressures of time, and, perhaps in the case of the novice in farrell and bennis (2013), undeveloped belief systems due to inexperience, can all lead to methodological principles, which in these cases seemed to relate to a weaker form of clt, not being put into practice. for example, while caroline and the two teachers in farrell and bennis (2013) affirmed in interviews that language should be contextualized, in their practice this contextualization was largely absent. this finding then, admittedly emerging from two small scale bana studies, should help to put into perspective criticisms of clt “failing” in monolingual tesep contexts characterized by large classes and limited resources. as holliday (2006) has implied, there is too often an “othering” in public criticisms of teachers’ “misconceptions” of and “inability” to apply clt in tesep contexts, which seems unjustified. teachers in bana contexts, too, might not find perfect congruence between their methodological principles and practices, as we have demonstrated. a modest implication of this study then is that robinson crusoe nativespeakerist types looking to enlighten the rest of the world with their superior methodological practices (holliday, 2006) should look first to home and the complexities evident in their classrooms there. on a more positive note, the findings here relating to andrew and bethany demonstrate that, in a bana context, it is indeed possible, perhaps with a “postmethod” stance (kumaravadivelu, 2001), to consider learner characteristics contextual factors, methodological principles and teacher cognition 713 pragmatically while teaching according to methodological principles, including those relating to different forms of clt. indeed, our findings suggest that creating a facilitative environment, characterized by small classes, sensitivity to the learners, and ongoing professional support, can help teachers such as these achieve this balance. 6. conclusions in this study, we set out to explore the congruence between methodological principles and practices of three teachers in a uk adult education college. in two cases, the teachers’ personally held methodological principles, regarding clt and education more generally, were highly evident in their practices. various features of the bana context in which the study took place appear to have been helpful in allowing them to teach harmoniously in accordance with both principles and learners’ needs. the case of the third teacher, though, reminds us of how contextual factors, such as a preoccupation with tests, can lead a teacher away from classroom practices that match declared beliefs. even though it did not appear to affect the other two, the assessment strategy employed at the college appears to have influenced this third teacher, contributing to an observed lack of fit between stated principles and practices, and a gap between the intended curriculum and how it was enacted. however, this gap could have been reduced through the adoption and careful monitoring by the college of assessment methodology that encourages communicative competence. in this bana context, then, it seems there may have been a need for clearer leadership in this regard, with the assessment strategy in place subjected to careful review and subsequent revision. this insight, in itself, demonstrates a value of teacher cognition research such as this, which, through being small scale and local, can address local issues. furthermore, if research of this nature is shared more widely, it can support the questioning of broader assumptions often made all too readily, for example, regarding the presence of ideal conditions in all bana contexts. such studies can only be produced, though, through the willing participation of teachers, and if the results are to be meaningful it is important that their contributions are unfiltered as much as possible by affective concerns. notwithstanding its limitations, a notable strength of the current study was that the observer, while being an outsider, was able to build a degree of trust. to retain this trust, so that teachers feel they can continue to contribute to the development of context-sensitive knowledge of classrooms in under-researched parts of the world, it is vital that teacher cognition studies such as this are underpinned by research methodology that is rigorously ethical. rupert walsh, mark wyatt 714 references andon, n., & leung, c. 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(2004). how to teach grammar. harlow: pearson rupert walsh, mark wyatt 716 ucles (2014). celta – cambridge english. retrieved from: http://www.cambridgeenglish.org/exams-and-qualifications/celta/. ur, p. (2013). language-teaching method revisited. elt journal, 67, 468-474. waters, a. (2013, april). “orwellian” professional discourse in elt: a threat to diversity. paper presented at the 47th iatefl conference, liverpool, uk. wedell, m. (2008). developing a capacity to make "english for everyone" worthwhile: reconsidering outcomes and how to start achieving them. international journal of educational development, 28, 628-39. willis, j. (1996). a framework for task-based learning. harlow: longman. wyatt, m. (2009). practical knowledge growth in communicative language teaching. tesl-ej, 13(2), 1-23. wyatt, m., & borg, s. (2011). development in the practical knowledge of language teachers: a comparative study of three teachers designing and using communicative tasks on an in-service ba tesol programme in the middle east. innovation in language learning and teaching, 5, 233-252. contextual factors, methodological principles and teacher cognition 717 appendix a field notes template used to record observed data (andrew) time (hh:mm) interaction (t, s or both?) teacher activity student(s) activity methods / materials rupert walsh, mark wyatt 718 appendix b interview questions: guide 1. restate study aims, ethical considerations and ask for permission to record 2. general background & “rapport building” questions how long worked at college? professional training? 3. teaching methods (general q to allow participants to expand in their own words) most important things about teaching? approach to teaching grammar / vocabulary / pronunciation / skills / error correction? (pick up on prompts re: clt / communicative approach) (explore answers for further reasoning) 4. reminder of observed lesson “outline” (prompt for recall) + investigate relationship with cognitions. read lesson outline (1-2 minute summary) is this how you normally teach? what are the reasons why … (error correction techniques, staging, interaction patterns)? would you teach this lesson differently, for example, in a different country, with different age groups, class sizes…? (explore answers for further reasoning) 5.anything to add? 269 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (2). 2018. 269-291 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.2.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt investigating the use of speaking strategies in the performance of two communicative tasks: the importance of communicative goal mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl abstract although the ability to speak is usually seen as a key manifestation of learners’ ability in the target language they are attempting to master, research has not given ample attention to strategies that can be employed to enhance this skill. in fact, the bulk of such empirical investigations has mainly focused on communication strategies that are reactive devices, predominantly used to overcome difficulties in successful conveyance of meanings and messages, and even this line of inquiry has been neglected in recent years. the study reported in this paper aims to partially bridge this gap by examining the speaking strategies that advanced learners of english used in the performance of two communicative tasks, differing in the extent to which the participants were required to make a contribution to their successful completion. the data collected by means of open-ended questionnaires that were administered immediately after the completion of the two tasks yielded crucial insights into the nature of the speaking strategies and the ways in which the communicative goals inherent in task type influenced the choice of speaking strategies. keywords: communication strategies; speaking strategies; communicative task; immediate report mirosław pawlak 270 1. introduction even though there are many indices that could be used to describe the mastery of a second or foreign language (l2), most people are likely to associate it with the ability to communicate in a variety of everyday situations, which inevitably entails reliance on the skill of speaking. at the same time, successful development of speaking skills poses a major challenge, particularly in situations in which learners have scant access to the target language (tl) outside the classroom (majer, 2003; ortega, 2007; pawlak, 2004, 2006, 2014), which, despite all the technological advances, is still the case in most foreign language contexts. the difficulty involved in developing speaking skills in the tl has been stressed by many specialists in the area of second language acquisition. tarone (2005), for example, states that the ability to produce oral language “is the most complex and difficult to master” (p. 485), whereas burns and seidelhofer (2010) comment that “learning speaking, whether in a first or other language, involves developing subtle and detailed knowledge about why, how, when to communicate, and complex skills for producing and managing interaction, such as asking a question or obtaining a turn” (p. 197). these concerns are echoed by kawai (2008), who points out: when the learner is not in the target language environment, it is likely that learning to speak that language will be especially difficult, since learners have minimum exposure to the target language and culture, which is crucial to understanding sociolinguistic traits (such as genre and speech styles), paralinguistic traits (such as pitch, stress, and intonation), nonlinguistic traits (such as gesture and body language), and cultural assumptions in verbal interaction. (shumin, 2002, pp. 218-219) these challenges of developing the ability to engage in oral language production should hardly come as a surprise when we consider that in order to be able to do so learners are not only required to accumulate different types of tl knowledge (e.g., grammar, vocabulary, multiword units, phonology, pragmatics, genre types and purposes of the act of speaking, characteristics of spoken language), but they also have to deploy these resources in real time under considerable time pressure to attain their communicative goals. these are two interrelated facets which are referred to in the literature in terms of the distinction between language as a system and language in contexts of use (bygate, 2002), form and meaning (tarone, 2005), oral repertoires and oral processes (bygate, 2008), but can also be conceived of in terms of explicit and implicit (highly automatized) knowledge or declarative and procedural knowledge (dekeyser, 2010, 2017; ellis, 2009). the degree to which learners can succeed in employing the linguistic resources they have at their disposal in actual communication impinges on their fluency or “the degree to which speech flows, and to what extent investigating the use of speaking strategies in the performance of two communicative tasks: the. . . 271 the flow is interrupted by pauses, hesitations, false starts, and so on” (derwing, 2017, p. 246). the obvious hurdles learners have to surmount in producing oral language become even more acutely visible when we consider the dominant models of speech production, both the one initially put forward by levelt (1989) for speaking in the first language (l1) and its subsequent adaptations to the production of speech in an l2, by, among others, bygate (2002), de bot (1992), izumi (2003), and kormos (2006). all of them posit that the process of speaking comprises the distinct stages of message conceptualization, where requisite semantic concepts are activated and the choice of language takes place, formulation, where semantic, syntactic and phonological encoding occurs, and a phonological plan is created, and articulation, where the phonetic plan is executed, with the process of monitoring affecting all of the stages as well. clearly, l2 learners, who, unsurprisingly, often lack the necessary linguistic and pragmatic resources and have yet to automatize those resources that they do possess, are not in a position to devote their limited attentional capacities to all aspects of the process. this difficulty is further exacerbated by the fact that real-time interaction also imposes a number of other demands, such as listening to interlocutors, drawing on appropriate content knowledge, or simply focusing on the attainment of the intended communicative goal (cf. derwing, 2017; kormos, 2006; muranoi, 2007; pawlak, 2011; pickering, 2012). this means that l2 learners are bound to encounter a number of problems when trying to speak, problems that can at least partially be overcome by adept reliance on speaking strategies (sss), which can be defined as actions and thoughts that learners more or less consciously employ to develop speaking skills and use those skills in real-time communication. viewed in this way, sss comprise both largely proactive and mainly reactive strategic devices, or such that are intended to aid the process of gaining greater proficiency in speech production and such that are mainly compensatory in nature, deployed when a communication problem arises (i.e., communication strategies or css). however, not only has the bulk of the available research focused predominantly on the latter but, for some reason, the interest in speaking strategies in general has abated in recent years, one manifestation of which was the difficulty in finding a contribution on sss for this special issue. for example, cohen and macaro (2007) elected to include in their landmark edited volume on language learning strategies a chapter on css rather than sss. additionally, to the best knowledge of the present author, the last major publication on css was the one co-edited by kasper and kellerman (1997a). the present paper is aimed to partly fill this gap by reporting the results of a study which investigated the use of sss in the performance of two communicative tasks by polish university students majoring in english. the first part will provide a succinct overview of the available studies on speaking strategies, mirosław pawlak 272 while the second will focus on the aims and design of the study, its findings and the discussion of these findings. the paper will close with a consideration of future research directions into sss as well as some pedagogic suggestions regarding the teaching of speaking and the role of strategies in this process. 2. overview of previous research on speaking strategies as pawlak (2011) notes, “for the vast majority of learners, it is the ability to engage in successful oral communication, whether this success is defined as achieving nativelike mastery or merely getting messages across, that drives their motivation to learn a particular foreign language” (p. 19). in light of this situation and the formidable challenges that learners are bound to encounter in accomplishing this goal, it is reasonable to assume that skillful use of strategies can on the one hand help learners improve their speaking skills and, on the other, aid them in successfully tackling the difficulties that may emerge in the process of communication. for example, taking as a point of reference the classifications of strategies proposed by oxford (1990, 2011, 2017), the use of the metacognitive strategy of planning a speech and the cognitive strategy of practicing that speech several times may lead to better performance in the language classroom, but also outside of the school context, in real-life situations (e.g., a job interview in the tl). the performance can further be enhanced by controlling emotions with the help of metaaffective and affective strategies, ensuring the attention and assistance from the teacher, fellow learners or other interlocutors by means of metasocial or social strategies, or effectively resolving communication problems through reliance on compensatory strategies. thus, it is both surprising and disconcerting that, as hinted at above, empirical investigations of speaking strategies have somewhat fallen out of favor with specialists, with most of the existing studies zooming in on the compensatory mechanisms that learners resort to when confronted with problems in conveying their messages or successfully participating in interactions. the present section offers a brief overview of such research, first with respect to communication strategies and, second, with regard to more general speaking strategies going beyond the need to deal with immediate exigencies resulting from gaps in different aspects of tl communicative competence. given the focus of this paper, only the main trends in research on css will be highlighted while the studies that have informed the present empirical investigation and those that have examined more broadly conceptualized speaking strategies will be described in somewhat more detail. following the definition offered by faucette (2001), communication strategies can be seen as “the ways in which an individual speaker manages to cominvestigating the use of speaking strategies in the performance of two communicative tasks: the. . . 273 pensate for this gap between what she wishes to communicate and her immediately available linguistic resources” (p. 1). it can thus be assumed that they play a predominantly reactive role by helping learners to deal with problems with getting their messages across in the course of communication. however, nakatani and goh (2007), who, incidentally, equate communication strategies with speaking strategies, point out that “there is . . . little agreement about what css really are, their transferability from l1 to l2, and whether they can be learnt in the classroom” (p. 207). although dörnyei and scott (1997) identified as many as seven possible ways in which css can be conceptualized, it is possible to condense them into two major approaches, that is the interactionist perspective, also known as sociolinguistic, and the cognitive perspective, also referred to as psycholinguistic (see e.g., ellis, 1994; kasper & kellerman, 1997b; nakatani & goh, 2007). the former views as css as external devices learners fall back on in interactions not only to resolve communication breakdowns but also to make communication more effective through the use of negotiation of meaning, selfrepair and time-gaining strategies, which results in the construction of detailed classifications but also underlies the conviction that css are teachable. the latter lays emphasis on the mental processes that learners engage in when they experience a language deficit, with the effect that the focus is primarily on compensatory devices, the classifications are thus much more parsimonious and the value of instruction in css is denied in line with the belief that such strategies can be transferred from the l1. these two approaches have triggered a spate of research projects, mainly in the 1980s and 1990s, that have aimed, among other things, to identify and describe the css used in different situations (e.g., nakahama, tyler, & van lier, 2001), to gauge factors mediating their employment, such as proficiency, task type, cognitive style or willingness to communicate (e.g., hsieh, 2014; littlemore, 2001; mesgarshahr & abdollahzadeh, 2014; pawlak, 2009), and to look into the effects of instruction targeting css (e.g., benson, fischer, geluso, & joo, 2013; nakatani, 2005; pawlak, 2005; teng, 2012). it is fitting to devote a little more space at this juncture to the studies that provided an inspiration or a point of departure for the present investigation, even though it is broader in scope in addressing sss in general rather than just focusing on css, that is, those carried out by nakatani (2006, 2010) and pawlak (2015). nakatani (2006) used responses to an open-ended questionnaire administered to 80 japanese students to first pilot and then develop the final version of the oral communication strategies inventory (ocsi) that was used with 400 participants to identify factors underlying css use. the instrument is comprised of strategies employed to tackle problems in conversation, both in speaking (i.e., socio-affective, fluency-oriented, negotiation for meaning, accuracy-oriented, nonverbal, message reduction and alteration, message abandonment, and attempts mirosław pawlak 274 to think in english strategies) and in listening (i.e., negotiation for meaning, fluency-maintaining, scanning, getting the gist, non-verbal, less active listener and word-oriented css). the tool was correlated with oxford’s (1990) strategy inventory for language learning and was subsequently filled out by higherand lower-proficiency students on completion of a conversation task. the former reported more frequent use of some categories of strategies, particularly of the achievement type (i.e., involving the use of an alternative plan to attain the communicative goal). the instrument was then applied, alongside transcripts of recordings and retrospective protocols, to determine the effects of training 62 japanese learners in the use of css on their performance in a conversation task (nakatani, 2010). it was found that negotiation for meaning and discourse maintaining strategies contributed to the participants’ communicative ability but also that there were few instances of modified output (i.e., changes in the initial utterance in response to a signal on the part of the interlocutor). the ocsi was also applied by pawlak (2015) in his investigation of the use of css by 64 english majors in poland as they were working on two types of communication tasks, which differed with respect to the requirement to exchange information. he found, among other things, that the css for speaking and listening were used with comparable frequency and that the participants mainly opted for strategies based on tl and those helping them get messages across, and that greater attainment translated into more frequent reliance on accuracy-oriented and getting the gist strategies. however, the analysis of the data led pawlak (2015) to identify a number of flaws of the instrument such as its unsuitability to examining css use by more advanced learners, excessive focus on detail that may be difficult to understand for respondents, and lack of sufficient emphasis on strategies included in most classifications of css, such as circumlocution, approximation or appeal for assistance. the study reported in the present paper is an extension of this investigation, but it relies on qualitative data and places store by the effect on task type on the use of css. perhaps because researchers have been primarily concerned with different aspects of css, relatively little attention has been given to investigating more broadly conceptualized strategies that can be applied to develop speaking skills and enhance speaking performance. in effect, the available empirical evidence is scant, unfocused, fragmented, and therefore exceedingly difficult to synthesize, with major overviews of language learning strategies treating the terms speaking strategies and communication strategies as synonymous (e.g., cohen, 2012, 2014; oxford, 2011) or making references to studies in other areas, such as pragmatics. one relevant study, undertaken by huang and van naerssen (1987), examined the link between performance on an oral task and the use of language learning strategies by 40 english majors in an institution of tertiary education in investigating the use of speaking strategies in the performance of two communicative tasks: the. . . 275 china. interviews conducted with 10 highand 9 low-achievers revealed that the former were more likely to engage in functional practice, as exemplified by such strategies as actually using the tl for communication, thinking in that language, talking to oneself, or reading in order to obtain the models for speaking. in another study, whose focus, however, was primarily on pragmatics, cohen and olshtain (1993) examined the performance of the speech acts of apologies, complains and requests in role-play activities by 15 advanced learners of english as a foreign language. the analysis of the data obtained by means of think-aloud protocols resulted in the identification of four major strategies (i.e., planning, thinking in two or three languages, searching for tl forms in various ways, and paying scant attention to grammar and pronunciation), allowing categorization of the participants into metacognizers, avoiders and pragmatists. carson and longhini (2002), in turn, reported a study in which the first researcher kept a diary for eight weeks including in it comments on the process of learning spanish in argentina. the analysis of the 32 entries that carson made with the help of oxford’s (1990) classification demonstrated that she mainly relied on indirect strategies that were in synch with her learning styles, with metacognitive strategies being prevalent. kawai (2008) describes an informal study in which two proficient adult learners of english were asked to identify in an open-ended questionnaire the strategies that they used for in-class discussions. both of them pointed to the role of adequate planning and preparation, practicing speaking on a daily basis, starting discussions with their peers and relying on stop-gap strategies when communication breakdowns occurred. worth mentioning as well is the study by pietrzykowska (2014), who correlated the data obtained by means of the sill with the results of the oral component of the end-of-the-year examination taken by 80 english majors. the results were mixed but suggested a positive contribution of cognitive and compensation strategies to the development of speaking skills. there are also studies that have looked into the effects of strategies-based instruction on the speaking ability in the tl. one of the first, undertaken by o’malley and chamot (1990), showed beneficial results of training high school learners of english in the use of metacognitive, cognitive and socio-affective strategies on their speaking performance, as measured by preand posttests. varela (1999), in turn, conducted a study which investigated the impact of strategy training on the development of oral presentation skills of 41 learners of english as a second language in the usa. the intervention focusing on the strategies of grouping, selective attention, cooperation, self-talk, note-taking and self-assessment led to improvement of oral performance and increased reliance on strategies. moreover, a positive correlation was revealed between the use of strategies and attainment in the experimental group. in yet another empirical investigation involving three intact classes of spanish, naughton (2006) examined the mirosław pawlak 276 effects of instruction in cooperative strategies on the patterns of interaction in the performance of a small group discussion task. the video-recordings of the interactions of triads that were selected in experimental and control groups before and after the intervention demonstrated that the program resulted in the participants engaging more often in the kinds of interaction that aid successful language acquisition (e.g., asking follow-up questions, requesting classifications and providing them, asking for and offering assistance). also of relevance here is the action-research project reported by kawai (2008) in which 50 students of engineering in japan attending a course in english were provided with taskbased strategy instruction aimed to assist their participation in face-to-face and online discussions. the analysis of questionnaire responses prior to and after the intervention resulted in more active involvement in interactions in both environments, but the effect was more pronounced in chat discussions. as can be seen from the above overview, most of the research on speaking strategies to date has focused on css which have been investigated in a systematic manner, although they have evidently fallen out of favor with researchers in recent years. as regards research on more broadly conceptualized ss that are also more proactive in nature, the empirical evidence is quite limited, pertinent studies represent a rather mixed bag, and the main focus has been on the contribution of strategies in general rather than their role in effective use of the tl in specific tasks. the study reported below is intended to partially fill this gap by exploring the use of speaking strategies in the performance of two types of communication-based activities. 3. the study 3.1. research questions the present study constituted an extension on the research project conducted by pawlak (2015), and, using very similar methodology, aimed to investigate speaking strategies that were employed by advanced learners of english in the preparation for, execution and on completion of two tasks which differed in regard to the existence of an information gap. in effect, the following research questions were addressed: 1. what speaking strategies do advanced learners of english use before, during and after the performance of two communication-based tasks? 2. are there differences in this respect between the tasks with their diverse communicative goals? investigating the use of speaking strategies in the performance of two communicative tasks: the. . . 277 3.2. participants the participants were 20 students, 11 females and 9 males majoring in english, enrolled in the first year of a two-year ma program in a regional polish university which built upon a ba program in english philology that most of the students had completed in the same institution. at the time of the study, they had been learning english for an average of 12.8 years, with the minimum of 8 and the maximum of 15.5 years. the participants’ proficiency could be described as falling somewhere in between b2 and c1 according to the common european framework of reference for languages, although there was considerable individual variation. the students self-rated their overall mastery of english as 4.25 on a 6-point scale (1 – lowest and 6 – highest), being more confident about their listening rather than speaking skills, as evident in the mean self-evaluations of 4.44 and 3.96, respectively, on the same scale. the mean end-of-semester grade in the conversation class they were attending was somewhat comparable as it equaled 3.41 on a 5-point scale (2 – lowest and 5 – highest), which is typically used for the purposes of assessment in polish universities. at the same time, perhaps being aware of their lacking abilities in this respect, the participants seemed to be fully aware of the importance of speaking skills in the overall mastery of the tl because they evaluated it as 5.15 on a 6-point scale (1 – lowest and 6 – highest). although the main aim of the program the students attended was to lead them to an ma degree in english philology in the areas of foreign language teaching and translation, in addition to seminars and supplementary seminars, they had the benefit of an intensive course in the tl including separate classes in grammar, academic writing, conversation or translation. they also had to attend a number of content classes in literature, linguistics and culture, as well as several electives, and complete a course in german as an additional (third) language. the students varied tremendously with respect to their everyday contact with english outside of the program offered by the university. some of them travelled to english-speaking countries, regularly communicated with their friends from abroad in english or had jobs that required its use, whereas in the case of others, access to the tl was scant, it was confined to television or electronic media, and rarely did it involve face-to-face interactions. 3.3. procedures, data collection and analysis in order to collect the requisite data that would go beyond the information that can be obtained by means of questionnaire items divorced from concrete instances of cs use, the students were requested to perform two communicative tasks in pairs. task one was a discussion activity in which the participants were mirosław pawlak 278 asked to express their views on such issues as the advantages and disadvantages of living in the country, the pluses and minuses of being brought up in a big family, and the advantages and disadvantages of possessing a mobile phone. since the students had access to the same questions and not all of them had to participate equally (or at all) to accomplish the communicative goal, the task could be described as optional information-exchange in nature. in task two, the same dyads were instructed to identify twenty differences between two pictures presenting a scene in a park. since the students were not allowed to look at each other’s pictures and there had to be a high degree of interaction between them for the communicative aim to be attained, the activity represented a required information-exchange task. the participants were given about 15 minutes for the completion of the tasks, which was sufficient for the first task but turned out to be inadequate for the second since most of the pairs failed to pinpoint all the differences during that time. immediately on completion of each task, the students were given the same questionnaire which was intended to obtain data on the use of sss drawn on in the completion of each activity and can be regarded as a form of immediate report. it included six open-ended items in which they were asked to report on the following issues: (1) strategies used to prepare for the task, (2) strategies applied during the task, (3) strategies used after the task, (4) what they paid attention to when performing the task, (5) the processes engaged in when listening to the interlocutor, and (6) the things that were the most helpful during the interaction. in order to ward off any potential misunderstandings and ensure that the students would write what they really thought rather what they merely could express owing to their limited tl resources, the questions were formulated in their l1, and they could also respond in polish or english, as they saw fit. the participants were also asked to fill out the ocsi (nakatani, 2006, see above), and the interactions of all dyads were audio-recorded by means of dictaphones and later transcribed. such data, however, will not be taken into consideration in the present study as they mainly provide insights into css functioning as reactive measures deployed to deal with communication breakdowns. the decision to focus exclusively on responses to the open-ended items also determined the type of analysis, which was entirely qualitative. it consisted in going over the responses many times in order to identify predominant types of sss used, adopting as a point of reference oxford’s (1990) classification, as well as pinpointing specific instances of strategic devices employed in the different phases of the two tasks. the detected strategies were also compared as a function of the two tasks. when doubts arose concerning the categorization of a specific strategy, the researcher consulted these cases with a colleague who had considerable experience in investigating the use of language learning strategies. investigating the use of speaking strategies in the performance of two communicative tasks: the. . . 279 on the whole, while the study can be viewed as a follow-up on the investigation undertaken by pawlak (2015) and mirrors its overall design, there were differences with respect to the tasks used (i.e., a different set of questions, a picture description task instead of a jigsaw task), the conditions under which the activities were performed (i.e., pairs instead of small groups), and the focus of the analysis (i.e., open-ended items instead of the ocsi). 3.4. findings the results are presented here in the order in which the queries appeared in the questionnaire, first in general and then separately for the two tasks, with all the themes touched on being brought together in the discussion section in order to address the research questions posed. when it comes to the preparation for the two tasks, somewhat unsurprisingly, one can see the predominance of different types of metacognitive strategies, which, however, were often not related to language learning or use but, rather, to the content of the messages that needed to be communicated. it is also worth noting that, in both cases, the participants sometimes mentioned strategies that did not seem relevant and were listed only because the students might have been familiarized with them in their methodology classes (e.g., metacognitive, association, immediate recall, semantic mapping). as to the differences between the two tasks, the optional information exchange activity involved much more focus on content-related issues, such as seeking arguments to be garnered in support of one’s stance. as for specific strategies, the participants pointed to brainstorming ideas with their peers, which can be at the same time regarded as the social strategy of cooperation, the metacognitive strategies of planning, paying attention, or overviewing and linking with already known material, and even the cognitive strategies of creating structure for input and output (i.e., summarizing), note-taking or practicing on condition that the interactions were conducted in the tl. as regards the required information-exchange task, there was visibly much more focus on individual work, analysis of the details in the pictures and language-related issues, as exemplified by the search for appropriate vocabulary. in doing so, the students fell back on the metacognitive strategies of organizing, identifying the purpose of the task, and planning for it, the cognitive strategy of practicing, when they repeated the requisite lexical items that might come in handy in the performance of the task, but also the social strategy of cooperating with peers when deciding how to approach the activity. the excerpts below illustrate some of these points (s stands for student and t for task in all cases):1 1 all the examples were translated into english by the present author. mirosław pawlak 280 i considered the questions, focused on the content, and tried to find relevant arguments. the strategies were reading the instructions carefully, mapping, brainstorming. (s6, t1) i tried to recall the vocabulary needed to describe this particular picture. (s6, t2) brainstorming, mapping; depending on the difficulty of particular things, writing them down on a piece of paper or practicing them in the head. (s11, t1) i carefully analyzed all the details of the picture and tried to organize my thoughts in such a way that the description would be the most accurate. (s16, t2) when the task was actually being performed, irrespective of its type, the students constantly engaged in monitoring and were mainly concerned with getting their messages across in the face of sometimes lacking tl resources. this led to the use of compensatory strategies, which were reactive in character and in fact represented different types of css, such as circumlocution or approximation (i.e., findings synonyms that were more or less suitable). in some cases, the strategies even took the form of gesticulation and, much more rarely, reliance on the l1. the main difference between the activities, though, lay not only in the fact that the picture-description task called for the employment of considerably more specific language but it also required considerably greater cooperation between interlocutors. in other words, while the students could focus on their own points of view and arguments in task one, paying rather scant attention to what their interlocutors were saying, the situation was dramatically different in task two, where lack of collaboration and attention to the interlocutor’s description could have resulted in a failure to find the differences. as was the case with the preparation stage, there were also answers which were totally unrelated to the questions in hand and only provided evidence for the participants trying to display their knowledge of methodology rather than reflecting on the task being performed. some illustrative examples are provided below: i asked questions about the details of the picture, which was very helpful in finding the differences. (s16, t2) i used circumlocution . . . sometimes i used polish when i did not know the words i wanted to use. (s15, t1) i brainstormed all the time. i also used synonyms when i could not find the right words. (s14, t1) i focused on logical construction of arguments. i used circumlocution and explanation when i wanted to use a specific word or phrase. (s13, t1) choosing the right vocabulary, directing the interlocutor to a specific part of the picture that i wanted to describe. (s13, t2) investigating the use of speaking strategies in the performance of two communicative tasks: the. . . 281 when i did not know a particular word, i tried to explain its meaning. i tried to be systematic in the description of the picture. i asked my partner to describe the place in his picture that i have just described. (s6, t2) i used mental maps and brainstorming. (s3, t1) the question regarding the strategies that the participants used after the completion of the tasks proved to be exceedingly difficult, with the students leaving empty spaces or stating that they did not use any strategies at all. there were also many responses which are very difficult to understand given the focus of the tasks because some students mentioned the need to remember the arguments used or the differences listed, even though no such need was signaled in the instructions for both tasks. although the metacognitive strategy of selfevaluation was present in both activities, it was much more pronounced in the find-the-difference activity (task two), with the participants comparing their pictures, identifying the differences, as well as gauging the level of understanding, and assessing the lexis they had used to convey their messages. in addition, in this case, there was evidence for much more reliance on social strategies in the form of cooperation or asking for clarification and verification, with some of those constituting an inherent part of the process of self-evaluation. it would thus appear that a tangible effect of task performance was one of the key factors that turned students into active users of speaking strategies. the following excerpts illustrate some of these points: i tried to write down and remember the arguments used by my interlocutor and the way in which he or she was speaking (metacognitive). (s3, t1) consulting accuracy with the partner. (s5, t1) comparing the pictures and differences. (s5, t2) i self-evaluated my performance and compared my score with others from the group. (s6, t2) checking if the responses are congruent and correct. (s7, t1) comparing the two pictures, taking about the task, summing up differences. (s8, t2) we compared each other’s pictures and tried to decide if we had understood each other. (s15, t2) on competing the task i did not use any strategy. (s 19, t1 t2) when asked what they were paying attention to when performing the tasks, most of the students pointed to tl accuracy with respect to lexis, grammar and pronunciation, and speaking in such a way so as to be understood by their partners. thus, they could be said to have primarily drawn upon the speaking mirosław pawlak 282 strategy of language monitoring. the conveyance of messages was also emphasized but it was somewhat relegated to the back seat in the case of most of the participants. generally speaking, it was task two, which was clearly more cognitively demanding, that triggered greater focus on content, and this was to some extent necessitated by the need to precisely pin down the differences between the two pictures. some of these themes are evident in the excerpts provided below: when performing the task, i tried to produce sentences that were grammatically correct. i was also trying to choose the right vocabulary and to make sure that my interlocutor can understand me. (s2, t1) i mainly tried to speak in an understandable way, choose correct vocabulary, and employ grammatically correct language. (s2, t2) i paid attention to what i was saying and the way in which i was speaking so that my interlocutor could understand me. (s3, t1) i paid attention to precisely formulating sentences and questions. (s3, t2) i concentrated on phonetic accuracy, and careful and meticulous description to catch all the details. i tried to be grammatically correct and to use appropriate vocabulary. (s6, t2) i paid attention to appropriate vocabulary, directing the interlocutor to the right section of the picture, and remembering the differences. (s8, t2) my main focus were pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, the contents of my talk and preparing the arguments. (s10, t1) i mainly concentered on the details of the picture to which my interlocutor was paying attention. (s12 t2). i paid attention to the phrases describing the location of the objects in the picture so as not to mislead the interlocutor and to describe the objects precisely. (s15, t2) in response to the query about what they were doing when listening to their interlocutors, most of the students pointed to comprehending the messages being conveyed, regardless of the task being performed. this involved reliance on the metacognitive strategy of monitoring, which was often adroitly combined with the social strategy of seeking clarification. in other words, the focus was mainly on content rather than accuracy of what the interlocutor was saying, with negotiation of meaning evidently taking precedence over negotiation of form (suzuki, 2018). what should be noted though is that participants paid much more attention to what their interlocutors were saying in task two rather than task one, since this was indispensable for the identification of differences between the pictures. such tendencies are exemplified by the following excerpts: investigating the use of speaking strategies in the performance of two communicative tasks: the. . . 283 i was trying to understand and to respond in an appropriate way as well as to justify my responses. (s5, t1) i was trying to remember the advantages and disadvantages mentioned by the interlocutor, so i could respond to them. (s6, t1) i was examining my picture in search of the differences and i was trying to locate the parts of it that my partner mentioned. (s6, t2) i tried to interrupt and asked for the same thing to seek confirmation. (s9, t2) i was trying to locate the objects the interlocutor was talking about. (s18, t2) finally, when asked what helped them the most when performing the tasks, the students most frequently indicated the qualities of their interlocutors, followed by their own attributes and abilities. as to the former, the participants most often pointed to their partner’s gregariousness, the fact that they knew him or her pretty well and were therefore less afraid to make mistakes, his or her tl proficiency or conversation skills (e.g., the capacity to refrain from interruptions or to ask appropriate questions). when it comes to the latter, the most crucial was the mastery of english, familiarity with requisite vocabulary, ample knowledge of the topic that may have been covered in class, creativity, or skills in managing the interaction. it was also the only time when the students mentioned affective issues such anxiety accompanying the act of speaking. in a word, it was in the main social strategies that played the most important role but some weight was also given to affective strategies. importantly, little difference was revealed between the discussion triggered by the preset questions and the picture description task. tendencies of this kind can be discerned in the following responses: a talkative partner helped me a lot. (s1, t1) i was able to do the task thanks to my extensive knowledge of vocabulary. (s1, t2) what helped me the most was skillful asking of questions (e.g., asking for details), which enabled me to find out what i needed. (s3, t2) what helped me was knowing the interlocutor well as well as having planning time to think about my views and the topics which were familiar as they had been discussed in class before. (s6, t1) what mattered was the ease with which the interlocutor was describing the picture but also my own knowledge of the needed vocabulary. (s9, t2) creativity helped me the most as well as the fact that i am not afraid to speak. i have no inhibitions in this respect. (s14, t1). adequate knowledge of grammar and vocabulary was key to performing the task. (s 16, t1) mirosław pawlak 284 4. discussion at this point, an attempt will be made to address the research questions posed earlier in the paper which concerned the speaking strategies used to perform the communicative tasks and the impact of task type and communicative goal on the choice of these sss. with respect to the first research question, the analysis provided evidence for the predominance of metacognitive strategies in all the stages of task performance under investigation, that is preparation, execution and follow-up. to be more specific, the participants most frequently engaged in planning their contribution, both in terms of content (e.g., searching out the relevant arguments of examining the particulars of the pictures being compared) and language (e.g., the selection of appropriate vocabulary), monitoring their performance as the task was being executed, in particular with respect to accurate use of tl subsystems (i.e., grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation), and paying attention to what their partner was saying, as well as self-evaluating their success on the completion of the tasks. there was also clear evidence for frequent deployment of social strategies at all stages of task performance (e.g., cooperation, asking for clarification or verification) as well as compensatory strategies, or simply css (e.g., circumlocution, approximation, gesticulation, reliance on the mother tongue), as the task was being performed. other types of strategic devices were used very rarely, and while this may not be surprising in the case of memory or cognitive strategies that may not have suited the nature of the two tasks, marginal reliance on affective strategies was somewhat unexpected. after all, speaking tasks are by nature anxiety-provoking (gregersen & macintyre, 2015) and it would have been natural for the students to draw on strategies that would have allowed them to combat such apprehension. it should also be noted that, as indicated by oxford (2017) and empirically verified by cohen and wang (2018) in the case of vocabulary tasks, the strategies the students employed served several functions at the same time, a good case in point being brainstorming which can be viewed as an example of a metacognitive, social or cognitive strategy. another important point is that, on the whole, the metacognitive strategy of monitoring was considerably more focused on language-related issues (i.e., grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation) than the messages conveyed when a particular student was speaking, but the reverse was the case when he or she was listening to a partner. what is also striking is the evident lack of focus on pragmatic considerations, which figured prominently in the research project undertaken by cohen and olshtain (1993) referred to above, a situation that can perhaps in part be attributed to different types of tasks used in both studies (i.e., role-plays designed to elicit concrete speech acts vs. more general communication tasks). finally, particularly disconcerting is the investigating the use of speaking strategies in the performance of two communicative tasks: the. . . 285 fact that the participants often left blank spaces, in most cases provided rather general responses failing to give details of sss use, or offered answers that were entirely irrelevant. this testifies to the limited knowledge of the english majors in this respect despite the training in l2 teaching methodology they might have received and thus to the need to raise their awareness of language learning strategies in general and speaking strategies in particular. when it comes to the second research question, the analysis demonstrated that the use of speaking strategies was at least to some extent conditioned by the type of task being performed and the communicative goals the participants were expected to achieve. the differences between the optional and required information-exchange tasks can be summarized as follows: (1) more focus on content, cooperation and content-related issues in the preparation for task one than task two, (2) focus on more specific language (e.g., lexical items) in task two as well as considerably more attention to what the interlocutors were saying, as manifested in intent listening but also more instances of collaboration which was necessary to establish the differences between the pictures, (3) considerably more emphasis in task two on self-evaluation, both with respect to content and language, and cooperation, on completion of the activity, and (4) greater emphasis on content in task two, which can be viewed as more demanding in terms of the use of the available cognitive resources. the existence of these divergences may indicate that the different communicative goals inherent in different communication tasks can be beneficially harnessed in the process of teaching speaking as well as conducting strategies-based instruction in this area, a point that will be taken up in the concluding section. an undeniable strength of the present study is that it investigated the application of sss in regard to the performance of specific communication tasks, something that has been rarely done by researchers, thereby providing valuable insights in this respect. however, the research project is also afflicted by some weaknesses. first, the investigation relied on a single data collection tool, that is immediate report, which severely limits insights that can be gleaned from the analysis. even though this was to some extent warranted by the aims of the study, which focused on speaking strategies rather than solely communication strategies, thus making the use of transcripts or the ocsi superfluous, there can be little doubt that the inclusion of post-task interviews or the administration of a tool specifically designed to tap the use of sss could have considerably enriched the findings. second, the number of participants was relatively small, which severely constrains the generalizability of the results, although it should be kept in mind that large number of subjects in qualitative studies may often blur the picture and prevent researchers from detecting clear-cut patterns (cf. pawlak, 2018). third, the use of sss could have been impacted by a host of individual mirosław pawlak 286 difference variables, such as gender, proficiency, working memory, motivation, learning style, or willingness to communicate, to name but a few. fourth, it is conceivable that at least some of the participants were not familiar with the concept of speaking strategy, which would account for their indexical responses or even lack thereof in some cases. such issues should surely be taken heed of in future empirical investigations dealing with task-based application of speaking strategies. 5. conclusions, directions for future research and pedagogical implications the present study undoubtedly constitutes a valuable addition to research on speaking strategies, a field that has been dominated by a focus on largely reactive communication strategies and has given little attention to more broadly conceptualized, proactive strategies which can be drawn on to enhance the process of developing speaking skills and actual engagement in oral interactions. what is more, in contrast to most available studies, an attempt was made to link the use of sss to the performance of a specific tasks which differed with respect to the communicative goals that the participants were expected to accomplish (i.e., exchanging opinions and views vs. reaching a consensus regarding specific differences). despite all the shortcomings that the study may suffer from, it did provide interesting insights into the sss that advanced learners employ when preparing for, conducting and reflecting on a communicative task. additionally, it provided evidence that the employment of sss is bound to be conditioned by the type of activity, the demands it places on interlocutors, and the communicative goals it sets. this having been said, there is clearly a need for further research into the use of strategies in the performance of a variety of language learning tasks that are more or less communicative in nature. such research should employ multiple data collection instruments, factor in the influence of individual difference variables and look into the influence of other task-related variables, such as the amount of planning. what is of particular importance, given the close link between speaking and listening, studies of this kind should most profitably address the sss with respect to both skills, thereby following nakatani (2006), who developed the ocsi, but simultaneously moving beyond problem-oriented, largely reactive css to include more proactive speaking strategies. the findings also offer an important lesson for l2 instruction. it is clear, for example, that different types of communicative tasks can be employed to hone different types of skills and abilities, necessitating diverse foci on meaning versus form, accuracy versus fluency, cooperation versus individual work, and the like. some of the students’ inability to name the strategies they fell back upon when executing the two tasks or the general nature of their comments also speak to the necessity of instruction in this domain, with different types of tasks catering to the use of various kinds investigating the use of speaking strategies in the performance of two communicative tasks: the. . . 287 of sss. one way or another, it is clear that if the aim of foreign or second language instruction is the development of speaking skills, students have to be requested to complete well-designed communication tasks on a regular basis. this condition, however, is seldom met even in language courses designed for english majors who are expected to become highly proficient in their use of tl in different contexts. mirosław pawlak 288 references benson, s., fischer, d., geluso, j., von joo, l. 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(1999). using learning strategy instruction to improve english language learners’ oral presentation skills in content-based esl instruction. in r. l. oxford (ed.), strategy research compendium: language learning strategies in the context of autonomy (pp. 76-77). new york: columbia university. 111 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (1). 2020. 111-131 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.1.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt expanding the theoretical base for the dynamics of willingness to communicate peter macintyre cape breton university, sydney, canada https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1085-6692 peter_macintyre@cbu.ca abstract the dynamics underlying willingness to communicate in a second or third language (l2 for short), operating in real time, are affected by a number of intraand interpersonal processes. l2 communication is a remarkably fluid process, especially considering the wide range of skill levels observed among l2 learners and speakers. learners often find themselves in a position that requires the use of uncertain l2 skills, be it inside or outside the classroom context. beyond issues of competencies, which are themselves complex, using an l2 also evokes cultural, political, social, identity, motivational, emotional, pedagogical, and other issues that learners must navigate on-the-fly. the focus of this article will be on the remarkably rapid integration of factors, such as the ones just named whenever a language learner chooses to be a language speaker, that is, when the moment for authentic communication arrives. communicative events are especially important in understanding the psychology of the l2 learner. our research group has developed the idiodynamic method to allow examination of an individual’s experience of events on a timescale of a few minutes. results are describing complex interactions and rapid changes in the psychological conditions that accompany both approaching and avoiding l2 communication. the research takes a new approach to familiar concepts such as motivation, language competence, learning strategies, and so on. by examining willingness to communicate as a dynamic process, new types of research questions and answers are emerging, generating new theory, research methods, and pedagogical approaches applicable both within language classrooms and beyond. keywords: communicative events; idiodynamic method; willingness to communicate; communication traits; dynamic turn peter macintyre 112 1. introduction in secondor foreign-language situations, choosing to communicate or not may be one of the most important decisions a person can make. language learning and communication are intimately interconnected; it is generally accepted that one must talk in order to learn (skehan, 1989). a learner’s willingness to communicate (wtc) can be defined as the probability that she or he would choose to initiate communication given the opportunity (mccroskey & richmond, 1991). wtc was originally conceptualized in the communication literature as a trait, reflecting a stable pattern over time. in essence, the concept reflects the common observation that some people talk a lot while others talk very little. interest in wtc has grown steadily since it was introduced to the second-language (l2) literature by macintyre, clément, dörnyei, and noels (1998). as lead author of the 1998 paper, i can admit that, at the time we wrote it, we were not fully aware of the implications of the model we proposed, nor that it would lead us to embrace complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) some twenty years later. this chapter offers a discussion of how thinking about wtc has changed over the years, with an eye to clarifying the appropriateness of the trait approach and also expanding the theoretical base for the dynamic approach. in this paper, i address two areas where much of the existing research literature diverges from the theory presented in the pyramid model. first, the need to identify cdstappropriate methods and, second, enlisting a theoretical explanation for how various processes, operating on different timescales, influence wtc in real time. the present paper is written in a style that is intended to be both personal and accessible for readers without much prior experience in the literature, especially for a reader new to the use of complex dynamic systems theory (cdst). 2. origins of wtc research wtc was originally conceptualized as a stable individual difference variable in native-language (l1) communication (burgoon, 1976). based on the wholly uncontroversial idea that some people talk more than others, burgoon’s (1976) early research described the need to conceptualize an unwillingness to communicate (unwtc) as a stable personality disposition. burgoon proposed a scale to measure unwtc based on a previously unpublished scale that examined “restrained communication.” the scale items for both restrained communication and unwtc included a variety of items referring to anxiety, distrust, and avoidance including items such as: “i feel nervous when i have to speak with others,” “i don’t think my friends are honest in their communication with me,” or “talking to other people is just a waste of time.” factor analysis revealed that the expanding the theoretical base for the dynamics of willingness to communicate 113 scale’s underlying structure was not clearly defined (burgoon, 1976; mccroskey & baer, 1985) and the scale was not widely used. perhaps the most enduring contribution of the unwtc scale was to inspire development of an alternative way to measure the disposition to communicate. mccroskey and baer (1985) created a more widely applicable scale to measure the disposition or willingness to communicate. they argued that burgoon’s (1976) unwtc scale was too closely linked with established concepts such as communication apprehension and therefore created a measure of wtc from a different starting point. the new wtc scale was based on 12 generic situations that combine three types of receivers (friends, acquaintances, and strangers) with four group settings (dyads, small group, large meetings, and public speaking). an example of an item is “speak to a small group of strangers.” additional eight filler items were added (e.g., “talk with a secretary”). significantly, rather than the familiar likertstyle scoring, where responses ranged from strongly agree to strongly disagree, the wtc scale asked for a direct estimate of the probability of initiating communication. in the probability response format, each respondent provides an estimate of the percentage of time (from 0% to 100%) in which he/she would be willing to talk in each situation named in each item. for example, the item “talk with a friend while standing in line” is usually rated near 100% wtc, indicating respondents are almost always willing to talk in that situation. the use of a probability estimate is a measurement strategy highly consistent with the conceptual definition of wtc, and the scale’s psychometric properties are very good (mccroskey & baer, 1985; mccroskey & richmond, 1991). the wtc scale measures a trait-like concept, so it is important to clarify what the authors meant by trait in this context. they suggest that a general tendency in one context is correlated with tendencies in other contexts. wtc has never been defined as “monolithic” or invariant. the central point, made forcefully by mccroskey and baer (1985, pp. 5-6), deserves to be quoted directly to avoid misunderstandings: underlying the construct of willingness to communicate is the assumption that this is a personality-based, trait-like predisposition which is relatively consistent across a variety of communication contexts and types of receivers. for us to argue the predisposition is trait-like, then, it is necessary that the level of a person’s willingness to communicate in one communication context (like small group interaction) is correlated with the person’s willingness in other communication contexts (such as public speaking, talking in meetings, and talking in dyads). further, it is necessary that the level of a person’s willingness to communicate with one type of receiver (like acquaintances) is correlated with the person’s willingness to communicate with other types of receivers (such as friends and strangers). this assumption does not mandate that a person be equally willing to communicate in all contexts or with all receivers, only that the level of willingness in various contexts peter macintyre 114 and with various receivers be correlated. thus, if person a is much more willing to communicate in small groups than in a public speaking context, the underlying assumption is not necessarily violated. however, if person a is more willing to communicate than person b in one context, it is assumed that person a will be more willing to communicate than person b in other contexts as well. if no such regularity exists when data are aggregated for a large number of people, willingness to communicate in one context will not be predictive of willingness to communicate in another context and willingness to communicate with one type of receiver will not be predictive of willingness to communicate with another type of receiver. in this event, the data would invalidate the assumption of a trait-like predisposition and necessitate we redirect attention to predispositions that are context-based and/or receiverbased or forgo the predispositional approach in favor of a purely situational explanation of willingness to communicate. (pp. 5-6) mccroskey and baer (1985) found correlations to support the cross-situational consistency they sought, and subsequent research into wtc in the l1 provided growing support for the concept. much of the initial research was correlational in nature, showing that wtc is associated with low communication apprehension, high extraversion, low anomie, and low cultural alienation, and that it is also associated with positive self-esteem and self-perceived communication competence (summarized by mccroskey & richmond, 1991). macintyre and charos (1996) proposed a path model in which basic personality traits lead to the development of patterns of communication, reflected both in perceptions of competence and anxiety which, once developed, are the two most direct influences on l1 wtc (see also mccroskey & richmond, 1991). in addition, it is important to note that wtc was also found to correlate with measures of actual communication-related behavior. chan and mccroskey (1987) reported that high-wtc students initiated communication in their classrooms more often than those with low wtc. later, zakahi and mccroskey (1989) reported that people higher in wtc were more likely to volunteer for a communication study and were more likely to turn up to participate later in that study. finally, macintyre, babin, and clément (1999) reported that wtc predicted communication during specific tasks in an oral-interview format. if l1 wtc is related to a variety of personality-based and situational factors, it seems reasonable to think wtc will also be relevant to l2 learning as well, the major caveat being that changing the language of discourse might have dramatic effects on the communication process and the learner/speaker psychology behind it. indeed, there is an even wider range of potentially relevant factors in learning additional languages, making wtc even more interesting to study from a l2 learner’s psychological perspective. in the 1998 pyramid paper, macintyre, clément, dörnyei, and noels (1998, p. 546) commented: expanding the theoretical base for the dynamics of willingness to communicate 115 it is highly unlikely that wtc in the second language (l2) is a simple manifestation of wtc in the l1. in fact, a recent study of beginning language students has found a negative correlation between wtc in l1 and l2 (charos, 1994) . . . the differences between l1 and l2 wtc may be due to the uncertainty inherent in l2 use that interacts in a more complex manner with those variables that influence l1 wtc. for example, among most adults, a much greater range in communicative competence would be found in the l2, as compared to the l1. by definition, l1 speakers have achieved a great deal of competence with that language. however, l2 competence level can range from almost no l2 competence (0%) to full l2 competence (100%). in addition, l2 use carries a number of intergroup issues, with social and political implications, that are usually irrelevant to l1 use. to address issues such as the ones just noted, we created the heuristic pyramid model of wtc (macintyre et al., 1998). the six layers of the model are organized by time and breadth-of-concept. at the bottom of the figure are longterm, stable, enduring influences of intergroup climate and personality that change very slowly, if at all, and are ubiquitous across communication contexts. the intergroup climate is something a person is born into; friendly relations or tensions between language groups tend to span generations. with respect to an individual’s personality traits, because they have a strong heritability component, we might say that personality is partially established even before the person exists. the base of the pyramid reflects the influence of long-term, stable processes. as one moves upward the pyramid, shorter-term, more situationspecific or time-limited processes begin to become relevant. eventually, the pyramid converges on a specific moment in time, an opportunity to communicate. at such a moment, a specific behavioral intention emerges from the interaction of many influences that lead to two key underlying features of the situation: (a) a person has something to say to somebody, and (b) they have the self-confidence at that moment to do so. such a state of confidence is heavily influenced by the level of communication competence previously attained in the target language, but also implies that, in the moment, negative emotions such as anxiety are not interfering too much with communication (see gregersen, macintyre, & meza, 2014). combining the notion of having something to say with the selfconfidence to say it creates the behavioral intention to communicate at a particular time, which by definition is wtc. research into l2 wtc initially used trait-like wtc from the l1 communication literature and made substantial progress. in the canadian context, studies found that l2 immersion students were more willing to talk in the l2 than traditional french as a l2 students (macintyre, baker, clément, & donovan, 2002). having friends who are willing to communicate was associated with a learner who was more willing to communicate (macintyre, baker, clément, & conrod, 2001). a social context that provides a choice to communicate or not was found peter macintyre 116 to increase wtc (clément, baker, & macintyre, 2003). in the japanese context, yashima, zenuk-nishide, and shimizu (2004) found that japanese students coming to the united states who were more willing to communicate benefited more from the trip abroad when they returned home. wtc has been shown to predict the initiation of communication in both l1 and l2 and is correlated with personality and other factors (macintyre, clément, & noels, 2007). the literature on l2 trait wtc has matured well and its research base continues to build (for a recent overview of the literature, see mystkowska-wiertelak & pawlak, 2017). there now are several measures of trait-like wtc available (see ayersglassey & macintyre, 2019). the original l1 wtc scale (mccroskey & richmond, 1991) was adapted to l2 wtc simply by changing the language referenced in the instructions. in addition, a scale assessing l2 wtc inside and outside the language classroom was developed in the canadian context (macintyre et al., 2001). beyond that, in the japanese context, weaver (2007) developed a scale to measure a combination of speaking and writing wtc. mystkowska-wiertelak and pawlak (2016) also developed a new scale with a focus on classroom wtc in the polish context. most recently, a group in iran has also reported a wtc scale that has a more complex structure (khatib & nourzadeh, 2015). the traitlike measures of wtc allow research to proceed in various contexts, where the choice of measure should be guided by the research questions under consideration. the trait approach to wtc is perfectly reasonable if one is asking about its correlations with longer-term processes. in addition to the trait-like approach, the wtc literature is progressing in other directions as well, meaning we must take account of recent developments that have given new life to studies of wtc by adopting a complex, dynamic approach that co-exists along-side the trait approach. it is important not to consider these research approaches as competing or mutually exclusive; they are different ways of approaching the topic, each with the potential to yield different insights about wtc (see macintyre, noels, & moore, 2010). 3. changes in l2 wtc research: a dynamic turn the discussion of the dynamics of l2 wtc research began by noting that there are several ways in which wtc theory and research proved to be difficult to align with the pyramid conceptualization. it might be worth mentioning that the pyramid was published in 1998, ten years before larsen-freeman and cameron’s (2008) highly influential book on complex dynamic systems theory (cdst). in 1998, we did not have the cdst framework within which to situate our idea about how wtc operates; had cdst concepts been used in conceptualizing and describing the pyramid model of wtc, the meta-theoretical implications might have been made clearer at that time. expanding the theoretical base for the dynamics of willingness to communicate 117 as an illustration of the need for a dynamic approach, a quote from a young learner can exemplify the complexity of the processes. as part of a largescale qualitative study, a sample of canadian french immersion students in grades seven to nine responded to structured diaries given to them by the researchers, including myself, for six weeks (macintyre, burns, & jessome, 2011). in the diaries, learners were asked to describe a situation they encountered during the week that made them most willing to communicate and another situation in which they were least willing to communicate. approximately 300 diary entries were analyzed for the study. initially, it was thought that the study would generate a list of situations that reflected unwtc and a list of situations that reflected wtc, with clear differences between the situations on each list. however, we found few clear differences and a great deal of overlap between the lists. recently, in preparing a conference presentation (macintyre, 2018), i found a previously unpublished extract from the collection of diaries (macintyre et al., 2011). one respondent provided a brief but meaningful description of how wtc and unwtc can be affected by a specific situation. the student, a 12-year-old english-speaking girl taking french immersion at school, said: i was most unwilling to speak french when i was at a craft show with my mom and she met someone who spoke french. mom introduced me to her friend, and vice versa. i felt like saying hello in french, willing, but i felt i would make a mistake. i don’t feel comfortable talking with strangers, unwilling. and i would though if i had another opportunity. (macintyre, 2018) the question we researchers faced was how to code this entry: does it reflect a willing or unwilling student? she wrote it on a page asking for unwtc, but she expresses wtc at the very end (if another opportunity arises). clearly, the learner felt conflicted; she wanted to use the l2 but was herself holding back. this young girl had the choice to talk or not, and she decided not to do so at the craft show. but she wants another opportunity, a second chance. the moment of deciding whether or not to engage reflected in the brief narrative is fascinating in the complexity of the psychological processes involved, as forces moving this learner toward using her l2 are competing with forces leading to avoidance (see macintyre, 2007 for a discussion of ambivalence in l2 communication). as the young learner suggested, if those same interacting forces pulling in different directions came together during another opportunity, a very different communicative result very well might occur. this conflicted state between approach and avoidance is not unique to communication. in a study of parachute jumpers, epstein and fenz (1965) studied the moments in time before a skydiver jumps out of a perfectly good aircraft. the researchers presented the interaction between approach and avoidance peter macintyre 118 motivations as two separate dimensions at various moments in time relative to the jump: the night before, when the skydiver arrives at the airport, when boarding the aircraft, when the signal comes on that the pilot is ready to let the jumpers open the door, when the jump begins, and then when the person lands. epstein and fenz (1965) also reported that the approach and avoidance motivations change significantly with experience, as new opportunities arise. the maximum avoidance for new skydivers is at the moment the signal to jump comes on, just as the aircraft door is about to open. after repeated jumps, the maximum avoidance actually comes the night before the jump, as life’s tasks interfere with going skydiving. clearly approach and avoidance patterns change over time as experience grows. the moment of decision of whether or not to communicate can be likened to “crossing the rubicon” in which a learner essentially says “yes, i’m willing to jump into conversation” (dörnyei, 2005; macintyre, 2007). the idea of the rubicon suggests uncertainty, irrevocability, and engaging with a potentially dangerous situation (for clarity, this is a situation risky to one’s positive view of self and relationships with others, not necessarily a physical danger). in some ways, this idea is similar to the conflicted state of mind that a skydiver has when preparing for a jump for the first time. instead of staying within the safety of the aircraft, which almost always lands without incident, the jumper thinks: “no, i’d rather have a large, thin piece of cloth i packed into a sack on my back to get me safely to the ground.” some l2 speakers face a similar dilemma, especially early on, as they are both trying to learn language and learning to communicate with language at the same time. they might think to themselves things such as: “do i start a conversation,” “i don’t know where it’s going,” “i don’t know how it’s going to end,” “i don’t know what the demands are going to be,” “i might really embarrass myself,” and so on. perhaps these are the sorts of questions that arose when the choice to use the l2 arose for the girl at the craft show in the diary entry quoted above. being willing to jump across the communication rubicon, indicative of wtc at a moment in time, and is very interesting psychologically because it integrates approach and avoidance processes, each of which has multiple interacting and coordinated influences (macintyre & serroul, 2015). what a learner does when such a moment arrives may be critically important to his or her success with the language, especially when the time comes to use the language for communication. macintyre et al. (1998, p. 547) comment: authentic communication in a l2 can be seen as the result of a complex system of interrelated variables. we treat communication behavior in a broad sense, which includes such activities as speaking up in class, reading l2 newspapers, watching l2 television, or utilizing a l2 on the job. often, language teachers do not have the capacity to create this array of opportunities for l2 communication. we would argue that the ultimate goal of the learning process should be to engender in language students the expanding the theoretical base for the dynamics of willingness to communicate 119 willingness to seek out communication opportunities and the willingness actually to communicate in them. that is, a proper objective for l2 education is to create wtc. a program that fails to produce students who are willing to use the language is simply a failed program. the experience at the moment of decision can be quite ambivalent or conflicted, as if a person is jumping into something (metaphorically in the case of communication, literally in the case of skydiving) and one does not know with certainty how it is going to go. some take the leap, others do not. the situations that produce high wtc may not be very different from the situations that produce low wtc, as noted above (macintyre et al., 2011). subtle changes in the interacting elements of a situation can flip a switch from hesitation to communication or vice versa. what does this mean for the conceptualization of wtc, and what role can the pyramid model play in helping to understand what is happening at the moment of decision? 4. revisiting the pyramid over the years of conducting research on wtc, two significant ways in which the wtc research and the wtc pyramid model were not necessarily in harmony have come into focus. the first issue is timescales. burgoon, mccroskey, and others conceptualized wtc over a long timescale, as a trait-like predisposition that is carried across situations; the pyramid model took a different approach, conceptualizing wtc as emerging from the interaction among multi-layered enduring and situational influences that can change rapidly, moment-to-moment. this distinction has important implications for how wtc is studied, specifically for how it can be measured as part of a research project focusing on a brief timescale. the pyramid model did not address the measurement of state wtc and was silent on how it fluctuates over time. the trait-level measures of wtc cited above, developed with reference to l1 and l2, have worked well for their intended research purpose. however, trait-level measures are not designed to measure fluctuations in wtc from moment to moment because they gloss over the intra-personal variability that is central to the focus on dynamics. the original measure of l1 wtc asked respondents to estimate the percentage of time they would be willing to communicate, which implies estimating a single number that covers a fairly large number of opportunities. however, that measurement approach will not generate the kind of data or the large number of data points required per person for measuring moment-by-moment changes in wtc where the respondent’s estimate of wtc changes as the situation unfolds over time. acknowledging this issue meant a new research method was needed. a second inconsistency between the wtc research literature and the pyramid model our research team has dealt with lies in the interactions among different peter macintyre 120 timescales among the multi-layered processes. it was recognized that some of the factors identified in the pyramid model can change rapidly and others change very slowly, but the means by which these processes interact at any moment in time was not described. for example, it was not specified how culturerelated or personality processes interact with the immediate influences in the situation. given that they change on different timescales, there is a need to consider how the multitude of influences on wtc combine in a meaningful way. both the issue of studying wtc on a per-second timescale and the interactions among underlying processes are addressed below. 4.1. new timescales need new research methods given the points of departure between the pyramid model and wtc research, the research focus in the wtc literature has been evolving, in particular to address the need to more directly engage with the issue of “time” in creating appropriate research methods. dörnyei (2003) noted the need to be explicitly aware of the issue of time. although he wrote this with respect to motivation, the thought applies equally well to wtc. dörnyei (2003, p. 18) said: i have now come to believe that many of the controversies and disagreements in l2 motivation research go back to an insufficient temporal awareness . . . that different or even contradictory theories do not exclude one another but may simply be related to different phases of the motivated behavioral process. language learning is not something that begins or ends at a specific time, for example the way a lecture does. it can be almost impossible to pinpoint a moment at which a learner started to learn a l2, and even more difficult to specify when learning ends (de bot, 2012); maybe it is not even worth the attempt. rather than pinpointing a start and a finish time, it seems preferable to think about how learners continuously arrive at new moments in time, such as an opportunity to jump into a conversation, by transitioning out of old moments. as people communicate with each other, interpreting verbal and nonverbal cues, wtc can potentially change at any moment. for example, if one person said something offensive or insulting to the others, there would be immediate changes; wtc at that moment in time would change rapidly and significantly from just the moment before. however, immediately thereafter the communication would arrive at a new moment in time perhaps following a successful repair, explanation, elaboration, or apology that puts the conversation back on track. then, following the communication event of making an apology, there would be another event, and then another, and then another, each moment a transition from the previous moment, in a continuous chain. therefore, if people are expanding the theoretical base for the dynamics of willingness to communicate 121 constantly arriving at a new point in time – as reflected at the top of the wtc pyramid where there is an opportunity to communicate or not – the clear and pressing need is for a conception of time focused on the now. the need for a greater emphasis in research on a wider range of potentially relevant situational and individual factors affecting wtc generated calls for increased use of qualitative methods (e.g., cao, 2014; kang, 2005; peng, 2007). qualitative methods have significant advantages over quantitative approaches in terms of providing rich descriptions of the processes involved in creating wtc, but they are not necessarily adept at describing interactions and complex dynamics unless they have been designed for that purpose (macintyre, mercer, & gregersen, in press). documenting the process by which various factors interact and the timescales on which different processes operate is the heart of cdst. it is important to note that the choice of timescale will have an impact on the types of conclusions that can be drawn from any study; stability on a longer timescale (e.g., over a semester of a language course) can mask considerable variability and fluctuation on a brief timescale, such as in a conversation (de bot, 2012). in the present case, as contrasted with the long-term focus on trait wtc, the pyramid model required a focus on a timescale reflecting changes momentto-moment in a given situation, measured in seconds. as our research team conducted studies of hypotheses derived from the pyramid model, it became obvious that the trait approach was working on a timescale that did not allow us to study fluctuations in wtc as communication unfolds. we needed to develop a new method to focus on communication over a short period of time (a few minutes) during which a substantial number of wtc ratings could be collected. given the need to focus on the occurrence of unpredictable moments of change during communication, it was necessary to focus on data for individuals rather than groups. we called this the idiodynamic method, where idio implies a focus on the individual and dynamic on fluctuations (macintyre, 2012). the method captures communication events during which wtc likely fluctuates. given that it is not possible to both communicate in a meaningful way and to simultaneously rate one’s wtc, the idiodynamic method is necessarily retrospective. it begins with a recorded speech sample, either from one person (macintyre & legatto, 2011) or from a dyad during a brief interaction (macintyre, 2019). as soon as possible after the communication event, the research participants watch their own video and rate their wtc using software created to play the video and to collect ratings on a per-second basis. in addition to wtc, other individual difference variables such as anxiety (gregersen et al., 2014), motivation (macintyre & serroul, 2015), speech fluency (wood, 2016), and other factors have been variables of interest. the idiodynamic software produces a continuous graph of changes in wtc or another variable over time, approximately peter macintyre 122 five minutes or less in most of our studies. after collecting the ratings, participants are shown the video again, along with a printed graph of their wtc ratings. in an interview with the researcher, participants explain reasons for changes in the graph, using their video as a cue. both the original communication event and the interview are then transcribed for analysis. the first idiodynamic study was published by macintyre and legatto in 2011 using an eight-item oral interview to generate l2 use. both relatively easy and relatively difficult prompts were used, such as “describe what you’re wearing” (easy) and “what’s the role of parliament in the canadian system of government?” (difficult). other prompts included “discuss the education system of your home province in some detail,” “interpret a painting,” “count to 100 by 10s,” “order a simple meal,” and “give directions for local shopping mall.” over the course of those eight tasks, fluctuations in wtc took place. we found that each of the prompts, even the relatively easy ones, proved to create unexpected difficulties for specific individuals. one unusual instance was preceded by a respondent’s (mabel) relatively flat wtc ratings, until she encountered a significant problem. mabel was trying to figure out how to say the number 80 in french. she could not remember it; she knew it was a compound word construction, but she could not retrieve the vocabulary item. the research assistant running the experiment asked if she wanted to be told the troublesome number, but mabel declined. she went on for a relatively long time struggling to try to remember “80.” eventually she gave up and said to the research assistant, “you’re going to tell me this after the experiment’s over.” she struggled in a way that no other student did in that particular study, and in a way probably few students would have endured. what was unusual about mabel? was she exceptionally stubborn, highly determined, frustrated, or embarrassed? what was going on at that moment during which she would not give up? metacognitively she was aware that she knew the correct word, but the vocabulary retrieval process was disrupted. in her interview, she said she knows her numbers, but after 70 she couldn’t think about 80 or 90, and her wtc dropped. the moment described here is an example of the power of the idiodynamic method to detect interactions in real time. the quantitative ratings of wtc tracked over time allow a comparison of the systems that create the sense of being willing to communicate. by quantifying the change in wtc, researchers are able to identify moments of change in wtc and look for explanation in underlying systems. the addition of the qualitative and observational data helps to focus attention on the interactions occurring at the exact time wtc changes. it is clear that the lynchpin of mabel’s particular struggle with the number 80 was a sudden loss of vocabulary coupled with her awareness that the problem was one of retrieval. she had knowledge of the sought-after number – it was in the shadows of memory – but the information would not come into the light. expanding the theoretical base for the dynamics of willingness to communicate 123 immediately this glitch in the cognitive system initiated an emotional response, probably best described as frustration. in this case, this state seemed to last an unusually long time in part because mabel refused to give up or accept assistance. there is no data available to address that specific issue in mabel’s case, but we might speculate that some combination of the test-like approach to the oral interview coupled with the social situation of being tested by a near peer (research assistant) activated a stubbornness that might be at least partially personality-based. given that complex dynamic systems such as human communication are open to unanticipated influences, it can be difficult to predict in advance all factors that might be relevant to a specific event. for example, we do not know what role experience with prior testing situations might have played, but it does not stretch the imagination to think that mabel might have refused to give up in comparable prior testing situations. the ways in which long-term processes, such as personality or prior experience with the language, combine with short-term processes, such as emotional arousal or cognitive difficulties, implicates a process by which several influences can be combined in real time. 4.2. combining multiple influences on different timescales the dynamics of a communication situation such as mabel’s draw together interactions among cognition, emotion, social processes, personality, prior experience, and more that are assembled into a meaningful, emergent state. we might identify her state as a stubborn refusal to give up in the face of vocabulary retrieval difficulty. this state is a psychological situation to which many people can relate. after remaining in the state for a period of time, mabel did move on to the next task, the frustrated state dissolved, and she was on to a new moment in time that marshalled many of the same subsystems to address a new communicative task. in cdst, reactions at the next moment in time are in part dependent on the moment just completed, which sets the new task’s initial conditions (verspoor, 2015). to the extent that the next task draws on different resources, however, other factors relevant to that situation might assemble to create a meaningful, emergent state that can be similar to or different from the state just experienced. that is, different traits might be more or less relevant to a specific situation. in mabel’s example, it is possible that the lingering effect of feeling frustration might have activated a trait such as conscientiousness, making it more relevant than it was moments before; conscientiousness might have led her to persist in trying to retrieve the vocabulary item in spite of frustration. once the offending task was over, the relevance of conscientiousness might be replaced by a factor more relevant to the next task, such as language competence. mabel reported a fairly neutral reaction to the next task, giving directions, which she completed without difficulty. peter macintyre 124 the larger theoretical issue raised by documenting rapid fluctuations in wtc ratings concerns the way in which various influences combine at a given moment in time to create wtc. the pyramid model took note of over 30 variables that can affect wtc in one way or another, with the possibility that more influences would be identified. it would be virtually impossible to measure and map the interactions among 30 or more variables fluctuating on different timescales that influence wtc at a given moment. however, human beings have the capacity to deal quickly and efficiently with enormous amounts of information. the pyramid model did not describe how information is processed and integrated into the per-second wtc ratings. modern dual processing theories (frankish, 2010), on the other hand, have considerable explanatory power in elucidating the types of processes that underlie wtc and link the trait and dynamic conceptualizations. the central idea behind dual processing theories is that human beings have developed two types of processing systems to deal with ongoing interactions within their environments (frankish, 2010). in one of the best known modern dual processing theories, kahneman (2011) proposes that people use two types of systems to process information and make decisions on how to act, blandly called system 1 and system 2 to avoid evoking extraneous connotations. according to kahneman, system 1 is a rapid, intuitive, emotional, and errorprone system of information processing allowing quick judgements based on heuristic thinking. system 2 is slower, logical, deliberative, more effortful, and conscious than system 1. kahneman (2011) notes that people rely on the rapid, intuitive thinking style of system 1 a great deal as they navigate their daily lives because it is a relatively easy way to do so, but also that system 2 is running and available to exert an influence on information processing and decision making if one chooses to be more deliberate in their thinking. according to kaufman (2016), the roots of kahneman’s thinking can be traced to cognitive-experiential self theory (cest; epstein, 1991, 1994), which also proposed two systems with similar characteristics to system 1 and system 2, called “experiential” and “rational,” respectively. compared to the rational system, epstein and erskine (1983, p. 134) describe the experiential system as more affective, less abstract, more action-oriented, less contemplative, and concerned with immediate personal welfare. furthermore, the experiential system is more loosely integrated, characterized by categorical (yes/no) rather than nuanced dimensional judgments, contains affective conceptual subsystems that become dominant when an emotion is experienced, and is experienced passively as if events and emotions directly imposed themselves on the individual rather than being mediated by the individual’s interpretive processes. the experiential system operates automatically and pre-consciously and is self-evidently valid because emotions and associated beliefs that arise are based on one’s own experience. expanding the theoretical base for the dynamics of willingness to communicate 125 rapid judgements of wtc, such as those made as situations unfold, would be based in the experiential system. the wtc experiences reported in the idiodynamic studies, and some of the qualitative accounts of wtc as well, have the hallmarks of experiential thinking: the judgements are made rapidly with emotional overtones. rapid wtc judgements are action-oriented, adaptive, and influence feelings of personal welfare. furthermore, wtc can be justified simply on the basis of present experience, that is, in given circumstances saying that one feels willing or unwilling can be taken as sufficient justification for approaching or avoiding communication. if requested, however, judgments of wtc can be made more slowly and deliberatively. a learner likely would be able to sit down with a piece of paper and write out a list of pros and cons for communicating in a given situation. the thoughtful application of one’s assessment of their language skills, their prior experience, their personality tendencies, situational constraints and so on can be contemplated. this bears a resemblance to what respondents do when completing trait-level measures of wtc. it takes from 30 seconds to a minute or two to complete any of the trait wtc scales described at the beginning of this article. for example, by the time a person has completed the 20-item wtc scale (mccroskey & richmond, 1991), a fairly reliable assessment is available which covers multiple types of interlocutors and situations. this more deliberative assessment of wtc implicates the rational processes of system 2 more than the rapid judgements discussed above; the person completing the trait scale has time to think about the various communication situations. it is critically important to note that the experiential and rational processes are running at all times and that they interact to influence each other both simultaneously and sequentially (epstein, 1994, 2003). the trajectory of emotional arousal can be modified by deliberate thought, but thought can also be modified by emotional experiences. often the two systems are synchronized, but at times they oppose each other to produce ambivalent or conflicted experiences (macintyre, 2007). ambivalence was evident as the young french immersion student experienced unwtc at the craft show or as mabel described when vocabulary retrieval failed. one of the most relevant cest concepts to dynamic wtc is the idea of vibes or “. . . subtle feelings of which people are often unaware” (epstein, 1994, p. 716). when a person encounters an emotionally salient event, such as being asked to speak in an l2 to their mom’s friend at a craft show, epstein (2003, pp. 161-162) proposes that the experiential system automatically searches its memory banks for related events, including their emotional accompaniments. the recalled feelings influence the course of further processing and reactions, which in subhuman animals are actions and in humans are conscious and unconscious thoughts as well as actions. if the activated feelings are pleasant, they motivate actions and thoughts anticipated to reproduce the peter macintyre 126 feelings. if the feelings are unpleasant, they motivate actions and thoughts anticipated to avoid the feelings. as this sequence of events occurs instantaneously and automatically, people are normally unaware of its operation. seeking to understand their behavior, they usually succeed in finding an acceptable explanation. insofar as they can manage it without too seriously violating reality considerations, they will also find the most emotionally satisfying explanation possible. (pp. 161-162) in this sense, the young learner at the craft show can be seen to be rapidly influenced by the experiential system in the immediate context; in the moment she refused to talk. in cest terms, when her mother asked her to say something in french, a negative vibe arose based on integrating the present situation with similar past experiences and she avoided communicating. later, the rational system kicked in as she told the story to the researchers. in that brief narrative, she seemed to regret her previous hesitation as a lost opportunity to communicate in her l2, possibly because french immersion students are taught that (logically) one must talk in order to learn (macintyre et al., 2001). her narrative indicated a wtc if another opportunity were to arise. examining the pyramid model of wtc in terms of cest allows an understanding of how proximal and distal influences converge rapidly in real time and why the ratings of wtc can fluctuate considerably (or not at all) as a situation unfolds. when respondents in an idiodynamic study are making wtc ratings on a per-second basis, they are more or less reporting the vibes emerging from the coordinated action of their experiential and rational systems, vibes that are heavily influenced by the emotional tenor that summarizes past experience or within the present situation. in the craft show example, and also in idiodynamic wtc ratings, the feelings of wtc are made conscious by the requirement of the study to report on wtc. in naturalistic situations, communication may be initiated or avoided without generating fully conscious awareness of changes in wtc. through the coordinated operation of the experiential and rational systems, learners navigate their way through experiences that change quickly. applying epstein’s idea of rationalization, fluctuations in wtc that reflect reasons for approaching or avoiding communication opportunities must be emotionally satisfying to the individual, not necessarily logical to an external observer. for example, if asked for a more detailed explanation for her unwtc, the young learner might have come up with reasonable and emotionally satisfying explanations for her low wtc based on any layer of the pyramid. she might explain unwtc based on enduring influences, such as “i am shy” (personality), or more proximal influences such as “my french is not great, i am still learning” (communicative competence), through to situational influences like “i don’t know my mom’s friend very well” or “i don’t really have anything to say to her today” (desire to speak with a specific person). expanding the theoretical base for the dynamics of willingness to communicate 127 wtc theory requires combining multiple influences on different timescales. the rational system, which seems to be most implicated in assessments of trait wtc, combines influences in a way that differs from the experiential system, which seems to be strongly implicated in dynamic wtc ratings. both systems draw on the same personality traits, past experiences, linguistic knowledge but may combine those influences to produce different levels of wtc, especially when situational factors are highly salient. therefore, we can expect differences from time to time between typical patterns and communication behavior in specific situations because of how factors interact to affect wtc. 5. conclusion the dynamic turn in wtc research has presented a treasure trove of issues relevant to understanding l2 communication. the trait-level conceptualizations of wtc in both l1 and l2 emphasize stability, and over the long-term the processes can be seen to show consistency within situations and wtc shows high correlations across different types of situations. however, as de bot (2012) points out, the nature of dynamic systems suggests that stability observed at one timescale may mask variability on a shorter time scale. the theoretical orientation of the pyramid model (macintyre et al., 1998) requires consideration of the here-andnow experience of wtc, even though much of the early wtc research approached it at the trait level. the divergence between the timescales used by the research instruments as opposed to the pyramid model generated two significant discrepancies between the pyramid model and wtc research that are being actively addressed in the literature. first, the idiodynamic method was developed to measure wtc on a per-second timescale, with a goal of explaining the fluctuations in willingness from one moment to the next as communication demands change, leading to the idiodynamic method and other approaches to capturing changes in wtc (mystkowska-wiertelak & pawlak, 2017). second, the research method necessitates a theoretical rationale for combining wtc-related factors across multiple timescales. although they have not been extensively applied to wtc, dual processing theories such as kahneman’s (2011) system 1 versus system 2 or epstein’s (2003) cest seem to provide 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(1989). willingness to communicate: a potential confounding variable in communication research. communication reports, 2, 96-104. 559 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (4). 2016. 559-560 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.4.1 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial the last 2016 issue of studies in second language learning and teaching includes six papers, five of which are reports of original research projects and one is a conceptual piece. the initial two contributions are concerned with different aspects of pragmatics, both with respect to the teaching of this subsystem and the process of its acquisition. in the first of these, andrew d. cohen addresses the crucial issue of how native and non-native teachers of second and foreign languages deal with sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic features in their classes. he reports the findings of an online survey of 113 teachers of different additional languages from across the world, which demonstrated that while there exist many similarities between the native and non-native instructors, the former are often at an advantage, although they by no means confine themselves to reliance on their intuition. in the second, qiong li undertakes a synthesis of 26 original longitudinal research studies on naturalistic pragmatic development in adult learners with the purpose of identifying patterns of variation in the acquisition of pragmatic features and providing potential explanations for the occurrence of such variation. the analysis showed that there are differences in the rate of development of various aspects of pragmatics (e.g., speech acts vs. lexical features), which can be accounted for in terms of factors related to the target language (e.g., the frequency of the feature in the input), the situation (e.g., social status) and the learner (e.g., initial knowledge about the target feature). the following two papers shift the emphasis to the role of individual factors in the process of second language acquisition, more specifically the contributions of motivation and willingness to communicate (wtc). ali al-hoorie reports the results of a survey study conducted among 311 young arabic adult learners of english as a foreign language, providing evidence, somewhat in contrast to much previous research, that achievement in second language learning is a function of implicit attitudes to l2 speakers and l2 learning experience rather than the ought-to self or attachment to the l1 group, with such constructs as the ideal l2 560 self or intended effort being unrelated to success. the study by mystkowskawiertelak investigated fluctuations in wtc of advanced learners of english during seven conversation classes which she taught over the period of one semester. quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data gathered by means of self-assessment girds, interviews, questionnaires and detailed lesson plans indicated that wtc was indeed in a state of flux, both within single lessons and over time, with such changes being attributed to an intricate interplay of contextual and individual factors. the last two contributions focus on the role of critical thinking in foreign language learning. jelena bobkina and svetlana stefanova present a model of teaching critical thinking skills with the help of literature, arguing that such skills can be fostered through encouraging critical reader response to fictional work embedded in social phenomena as well as illustrating how this model can be applied to classroom practice. in the last paper, paweł sobkowiak underscores the interdependence of critical thinking and the development of intercultural competence, discussing the findings of a study of 20 coursebooks used in the polish contexts and concluding that activities used in these coursebooks fall short of achieving either goal. as always, i am confident that all of the papers included in the present issue will provide food for thought to the readers and serve as a springboard for future empirical investigations that will help us better understand the exceedingly complex processes of second language learning and teaching. as the year 2016 is drawing to a close, it is fitting to take stock of the status of the journal over the last twelve months. to put it briefly, it has been a good year for ssllt, which has seen the publication of 25 excellent articles, most of which were reports of original research studies, 9 reviews of recently published books, as well as a special issue on the latest developments in instructed second language acquisition. my sincere thanks go to all contributors, both successful authors as well as those whose submissions could not in the end be published, all the reviewers, whose constructive, detailed comments helped the authors considerably enhance the quality of their work and, in particular, hossein nassaji, the guest editor of the special issue, who managed to get together such an impressive group of specialists in the field. the new year is shaping up to be an equally successful one for the journal and i am positive that we will be able to bring to the community a number of high quality papers, some of which will be part of the projected state-of-the-art special issues on individual differences, acquisition of grammar and language learning strategies. mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl 73 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (1). 2018. 73-101 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.1.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt love and enjoyment in context: four case studies of adolescent efl learners liana maria pavelescu guildford college, uk lpavelescu@guildford.ac.uk bojana petrić birkbeck, university of london b.petric@bbk.ac.uk abstract this study explores the foreign language learning emotions of four efl adolescent students in romania and the ways in which their emotions emerge in their sociocultural context. multiple qualitative methods were employed over a school semester, including a written task, semi-structured interviews with the learners and their teachers, lesson observations and english-related events outside the classroom. it was found that, while all four participants reported experiencing positive emotions in language learning, a distinction was identified in the intensity and stability of their emotions. two participants expressed a strong and stable emotion of love towards english, while the other two participants experienced enjoyment in their english language learning without an intense emotional attachment to english. unlike enjoyment, love was found to be the driving force in the learning process, creating effective coping mechanisms when there was a lack of enjoyment in certain classroom situations and motivating learners to invest greater effort into language learning in and out of the classroom. the findings thus revealed that, unlike enjoyment, love broadened cognition and maintained engagement in learning. the study emphasizes the role of strong, enduring positive emotions in teenage students’ language learning process. keywords: adolescent learners; efl, enjoyment; love; positive emotions liana maria pavelescu, bojana petrić 74 1. introduction emotions, defined as “socially constituted syndromes (transitory social roles) which include an individual’s appraisal of the situation and which are interpreted as passions rather than as actions” (averill, 1982, p. 6), play a crucial role in language learning (e.g., dewaele, 2011; dewaele, 2015; garrett & young, 2009; murphy & dörnyei, 2010; swain, 2013; imai, 2010). garrett and young (2009), for instance, showed how emotional responses to a language course “were the most salient feature of [garrett’s] learning endeavor” (p. 221), while swain (2013), in an analysis of language learner narratives and collaborative dialogue, found that language learning was not only a cognitive, but also an emotional process. while there is an established body of research on negative emotions such as language learning anxiety (e.g., gkonou, daubney, & dewaele, 2017; gregersen, 2005; gregersen & macintyre, 2014; horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986; marcos-llinás & juan garau, 2009; oxford, 1999; tóth, 2011), it is only recently that sla research, inspired by positive psychology, has shifted its focus to positive emotions, shown to facilitate and enhance the language learning process (e.g., dewaele & macintyre, 2014; gregersen & macintyre, 2014; macintyre & gregersen, 2012a; macintyre & mercer, 2014; murphey, 2014; oxford, 2014). however, positive emotions are still under-researched. as oxford (2016) pointed out, studies focusing on positive emotions in language learning tended to lack contextualization. the contextual dimension is important since “the self cannot be conceptualized as being abstracted and separated from contexts” (mercer & williams, 2014, p. 179); rather, it shapes and is shaped by broader social realities (pitkänen-huhta & nikula, 2013). recent research in psychology (e.g., boiger & mesquita, 2012; mesquita, 2010) similarly stressed the social, contextualized nature of emotion, and pavlenko (2005) argued that emotions were not only inner states but also relational processes. thus, this study addresses the gap in research on positive emotions in language learning by investigating them as they emerge in individual learners’ experiences taking into account the complex interplay between the individual and the social. more specifically, given the power of school to create the context for various emotional experiences which can influence learning (schutz & decuir, 2002), the aim of the present study is to gain insights into adolescent students’ english language learning emotions and into the ways in which positive emotions arise in the learners’ sociocultural context. the research questions are the following: 1. do high school students experience positive emotions in their english language learning? if so, which emotions are the most salient? 2. how do these emotions emerge in relation to the learners’ sociocultural context? love and enjoyment in context: four case studies of adolescent efl learners 75 2. literature review the study draws on sociocultural theory, which views emotions as being socially mediated, and on previous research which has shown the relational nature of emotions (e.g., imai, 2010; mahn & john-steiner, 2002; swain, 2013). for instance, swain’s (2013) study of l2 learners’ collaborative dialogue shows that emotions are not an individual’s inner, private reactions but rather interpersonal events, whose meanings are socially and culturally derived, internalized from interactions with others. similarly focusing on emotions in a collaborative task, imai’s (2010) study on the ways in which japanese university efl learners construct and share emotions during such a task reveals that the meaning and value of emotions are “locally situated” (p. 288): it is through their social construction that emotions can mediate development and learning. while studies such as imai’s (2010) and swain’s (2013) provide valuable insights into how emotions emerge in collaborative learning, and several positive emotions are identified, such as empathy (imai), or excitement and joy (swain), they do not specifically focus on positive emotions and their role in the students’ language learning experiences. of particular relevance to this study is macintyre and gregersen’s work on positive and negative emotions in sla (macintyre & gregersen, 2012a; gregersen & macintyre, 2014), which describes positive emotions as broadening an individual’s perspective or focus, drawing on fredrickson’s (2001, p. 219) broaden-andbuild theory, according to which “certain discrete positive emotions . . . all share the ability to broaden people’s momentary thought-action repertoires and build their enduring personal resources, ranging from physical and intellectual resources to social and psychological resources.” dewaele and macintyre (2014, 2016) highlighted the role of the positive emotion of enjoyment by showing that anxiety can be experienced together with enjoyment in the foreign language classroom. some classroom activities mentioned by the biand multilingual learners in dewaele and macintyre (2014) were enjoyable to some, yet anxiety-provoking to others. in some cases, enjoyment emerged from a potentially negative, anxiety-arousing situation. dewaele and macintyre (2016) identified two dimensions of foreign language enjoyment: a social dimension, linked to a good classroom atmosphere and encouraging and supportive peers and teachers, leading to positive feelings and satisfaction; and a private dimension, linked to the cognition that accompanies enjoyment and to a sense of accomplishment. with regard to the social dimension of emotions, in a pseudo-longitudinal investigation of the dynamic interactions between enjoyment and anxiety in the foreign language classroom in 12 to 18 year-old learners, dewaele and dewaele (2017) found that, over time, the teacher’s effect became a strong predictor of the positive emotion of enjoyment, but not of the negative emotion of anxiety. liana maria pavelescu, bojana petrić 76 the presence of other positive emotions in language learning, such as love, passion and empathy, has recently also been acknowledged in the literature. for instance, oxford’s (2016) emphatics framework of dimensions contributing to language learners’ well-being and progress includes emotion, together with empathy, as the first dimension of the system. she includes love as part of the virtues and character strengths of language learners with high levels of well-being. as she noted, such language learners sometimes experience love towards their teachers and other people involved in their learning process. oxford’s account of love in language learning is in line with fredrickson’s (2013) definition of love as interpersonal connection: first, a sharing of one or more positive emotions between you and another; second, a synchrony between your and the other person’s biochemistry and behaviors; and third, a reflected motive to invest in each other’s well-being that brings mutual care. (p. 17) thus, unlike enjoyment, which includes both social and private dimensions (dewaele & macintyre, 2016), love is defined as primarily social and relational. this complex, multidimensional nature of emotions as subjective feelings and social phenomena has also been highlighted in psychology by reeve (2009). drawing on definitions of love in education and the social sciences, barcelos and coelho (2016) argued that love represents one of the most important emotions that can be cultivated and nurtured in the language classroom: “love unfolds and reveals itself in the space between teachers and learners in the language classroom. it resides within connections and relationships that are (or should be) at the basis of all the interaction that occurs in language learning environments, especially in the language classroom” (p. 137). a loving classroom environment is described as a space where students learn to trust themselves and their classmates and discover their potential for growth. focusing on the perspective of the teacher, barcelos and coelho (2016) pointed out that love involves noticing each learner, with their interests and anxieties, and seeing the potential in all students. they further argued that love, being a fundamental part of language learning and teaching (e.g., aiazzi, 2007, cited in barcelos & coelho, 2016; moskowitz, 1978, cited in barcelos & coelho, 2016), should be a more commonly researched emotion in applied linguistics. focusing on positive emotions as experienced by the learner, lake (2016) discussed “passion” for l2 learning, defined it as “a strong inclination toward activities that are liked or loved” (p. 241), and argued that it was one of the three elements of the positive l2 self, together with interest and mastery goals. however, while barcelos and coelho (2016), and lake (2016) addressed the importance of love and passion in the l2 classroom, empirical studies of positive emotions in foreign language learning are scarce. love and enjoyment in context: four case studies of adolescent efl learners 77 as this brief review shows, positive emotions in language learning represent an emerging research theme, raising numerous questions for further research. are positive emotions experienced by all or only some language learners? in what particular situations and in relation to what factors do they arise? the need for research in this area is particularly acute with regard to adolescents, who go through a life stage characterized by emotional intensity and turmoil. the present study will start filling this gap in the literature through an indepth exploration of four romanian adolescents’ emotions in their english language learning over a school semester. 3. methodology 3.1. participants the study focused on four adolescent learners attending a state high school in a town in the south of romania, which offers bilingual instruction in four languages, including english, in addition to regular classes in romanian. the participants’ background information is shown in table 1. as can be seen, kim was in an english bilingual classroom, attending subject classes in romanian and english, with additional five english language classes per week, while ann, andrea and addison attended the philology strand, where all subject classes were in romanian, with three english classes a week. two were high-achieving efl learners: kim had the highest mark in class tests (10) and ann had marks of 9 and 10; they were described by their teachers as the best in class (kim) and one of the best (ann). the other two participants, andrea and addison, were described by their teacher as being average learners. table 1 participants’ background information participant pseudonym age foreign languages known grade/type of class 1 kim 17 english, french, korean eleventh/english bilingual 2 ann 16 english, french tenth/philology 3 andrea 16 english, french tenth/philology 4 addison 16 english, french tenth/philology the students’ english teachers, mrs. mitchell and mrs. vaughn (pseudonyms), also participated in the study. both were experienced efl teachers with 28 and 24 years teaching experience respectively. 3.2. data collection the overall methodological approach used is a multiple case study, which has been defined as several cases that “may be studied jointly in order to investigate liana maria pavelescu, bojana petrić 78 a phenomenon, population, or general condition” (stake, 2005, p. 445). the study used multiple qualitative methods to elicit data on the participants’ emotional experiences of learning english over a period of one school semester, that is, written tasks in the form of language learning histories, repeated semi-structured interviews with students and teachers, field notes based on informal conversations with students and teachers, lesson observations, and observations of english-related events outside the classroom. in terms of participant recruitment, the teachers were approached first. with their help, the participating learners were recruited by going to these teachers’ classrooms and talking to their students. the learners who had agreed to participate in the study gave their e-mail addresses to the first author, and they received the written task as an e-mail attachment. once completed, the tasks were sent back to the first author by e-mail. at the end of the written task, the students were invited to participate in interviews which would explore the issue of english learning emotions and motivation in more depth. with the participants’ verbal permission, the interviews were audio-recorded. 3.3. the written language learning history task language learning histories were included in the study since “writing language learning histories gives learners the opportunity to describe their own language learning experiences and express their feelings about those experiences” (oxford, 1995, p. 581). the first author wrote her own language learning history as an efl learner in romania, from which several guiding questions emerged. these questions were used in task instructions as general prompts to give the participants a sense of direction (murray, 2009), although they were encouraged to write freely and in as much detail as possible (see task instructions in appendix a). by having the students tell their language learning stories, it was believed that valuable insights would be gained into the participants’ english learning trajectories, including “past emotions and memories of these emotions” (swain, kinnear, & steinman, 2011, p. 82) from past to present. the written language learning histories were elicited in english. 3.4. interviews to obtain an insight into the participants’ own, that is, emic perspective on their english language learning experiences, the interview was chosen as a method offering an opportunity for “a conversation that has . . . a purpose” (kvale, 2007, p. 7). three semi-structured interviews with each participant were conducted throughout the school semester. the main areas covered in the first interview were: an exploration of the language learning history, feelings towards learning english, autonomy and love and enjoyment in context: four case studies of adolescent efl learners 79 contextual factors, and motivation (see appendix b for the interview guide). the second and third interviews were mainly focused on the lesson observations, being conducted in order to gain a deeper understanding of the participants’ classroom behavior and richer insights into their english learning experiences. the topics discussed in the second interview were therefore related to what had been observed in the classroom and to english-related activities observed outside the classroom. the third interview additionally explored issues related to future plans for learning english. all the interviews with the students were conducted in english, but the interviewees were made aware that they could resort to their first language whenever they felt like doing so. the decision to have the student interviews in english was motivated by both ethical and pragmatic concerns, that is, the belief that the interviewees should benefit from the research not only by becoming more selfaware as language learners but also by having an additional opportunity for speaking practice in communicative interaction outside the classroom in a context where such speaking opportunities are rather limited. moreover, the participating students’ levels of proficiency in english were high enough for the learners to be able to express themselves in english. specifically, the teachers described the participating learners as being at the intermediate and advanced levels. the participating students’ english teachers were also interviewed to gather more data on the learners by adding the teachers’ viewpoints and to obtain data on these adolescent learners from a different perspective. the interviews were guided by three key questions, focusing on a description of the participants as english learners, what they liked in the english class and what motivated them in learning english. interviews with the teachers were conducted in romanian to avoid any judgment of their english and hence any threat to their professional image. 3.5. lesson observations lesson observations were used since “for the majority of foreign language learners, the classroom is the primary site for learning” (lamb, 2013, p. 38), and “researchers may be able to gain an understanding of some behaviors only through observation: . . . participants themselves may not be aware of some of their behaviors” (richards & morse, 2007, pp. 115-116). the focus of the lesson observations was on the participating students’ classroom behavior: the ways in which they participated in the lessons and how they interacted with their teachers and peers. 3.6. data coding coding was guided by the research questions and informed by sociocultural theory in that attention was paid to the ways in which emotion was mediated by liana maria pavelescu, bojana petrić 80 artifacts and social relationships in the learners’ context. at the same time, given the exploratory nature of the study, coding was data-driven. although the focus was on positive emotions, it was not decided a priori which specific emotions to investigate in depth. rather, emotions were identified based on their salience in the participants’ reports on their learning experiences. the initial major code “core positive emotions” was subsequently divided into three codes: love, liking and enjoyment (see pavelescu, 2017, for the full code list). as described in the literature review, love is a multifaceted, complex emotion. in the context of this study, love is understood more narrowly as a strong positive feeling about the language being studied, in this case english. the specific criteria used to distinguish between love, liking and enjoyment are the following (see also table 2): the relative intensity of the emotion expressed (differentiating between the strong emotion of love and the less intense, pleasant feeling of enjoyment), its relative duration and stability (with love and liking being stable in contrast to more transient enjoyment), and the presence of specific contextual factors (i.e., artefacts and individuals) mediating the positive emotion towards english (with liking being linked to contextual factors, in contrast to the overall positive emotion of love about english). table 2 coding positive emotions positive emotion reported intensity of emotion duration/stability of emotion contextual factors mediating the emotion love high high no specific factors; overall positive emotion about english /learning english liking medium-high high emotion tied to specific contextual factors constituting and supporting the prevalent emotion of love enjoyment low-medium low overall pleasant feeling about english; emotion tied to specific contextual factors it is important to note that since much of the data comes from the participants’ self-reports, care was taken not to code verbal expressions of emotion mechanically based on the language the participant used (e.g., the use of the verbs love or like), but rather by taking into consideration the criteria above as well as the co-text and other data segments pertaining to the same participant. thus, the use of the verb like in the statement “i like english more than romanian” (kim) was coded as the expression of love since liking a foreign language more than one’s mother tongue means the person conveys a strong emotion. in contrast, the following segment, also containing the verb like was coded as ‘liking’ since the emotion is less intense, though relatively stable, and the positive emotion about english is mediated via positive emotions about british and american musicians: “. . . i have a lot of favorite singers including a british band, love and enjoyment in context: four case studies of adolescent efl learners 81 muse, it’s called, muse, and i like lana del rey, she’s an american singer, and leona lewis and lorde.” liking thus refers to contextual connotations of the overall love of english, supporting it by contributing to its stability and depth. finally, the following segment, where the participant described an english language learning activity from the previous school year that she remembered as a positive experience, was coded as enjoyment given the lower intensity and duration of the emotion: “last year we learned about shakespeare, about hamlet, about romeo and juliet, and i like that” (addison). to identify the contextual factors mediating the positive emotions towards english language learning, the codes were further subdivided; for instance, the “liking” segment above was coded as “liking – pastime activities.” coding was done in nvivo. a portion of the dataset was independently coded by two coders. an inter-rater reliability test showed that the level of agreement between the coders was acceptable (k = .78, p < .0005). 4. findings the following sections report on the core positive emotion identified in each learner’s language learning experience. “core emotion” is used with the meaning of the emotion that is at the center of the students’ english learning selves, which powerfully stands out as being the most salient emotion in the participating students’ accounts of their language learning experiences. focusing on the core emotion does not imply that other positive emotions were not present in these adolescent learners’ english language learning experiences. rather, while all positive emotions identified in each case were reported, it was felt that, by exploring the participants’ core emotion in depth, rich insight would be gained into the emotional dynamics of their language learning process. core emotions towards english essentially emerged in the learners’ interactions with family members, teachers and classmates. their accounts thus uncovered the highly important role of interactions and social relationships in constructing and shaping emotions and the ways in which such interactions mediated learning. love arose as the prevalent emotion experienced by two of the learners in their english language learning, kim and ann, while enjoyment was found to be the core emotion in andrea’s and addison’s language learning experiences. 4.1. ann’s core emotion: love love was the emotion that prevailed in ann’s english learning. ann began to learn english when she started school, and one of her first english-related memories with positive emotional connotations was her textbook: liana maria pavelescu, bojana petrić 82 when i was little, the english book had some adorable, funny comics with a dog, a puppy and a cat. i think this is the first thing i remember about learning english; i loved it. as she stated in her written language history, her love of english increased over the years: “. . . during these 10 years i fell in love with it more and more.” when asked what had made her fall in love with english, ann firstly reported her belief that english was important. such awareness seemed to have initially emerged in ann’s interactions with her uncle, who lived in the netherlands and had travelled widely. ann’s uncle had been the first person who had encouraged her to learn english when she was only five years old. as she reported, he always encouraged her to keep practicing english. ann’s awareness of the importance of english was also linked to her parents, who had been telling her ever since she was a child that english was an important language to learn. when asked what she loved the most about english, ann mentioned the opportunities english offered: i guess the opportunities it gaves (sic), it gives you, like you can go anywhere in the world and talk to anyone and basically you can do everything you want. in addition to family members who shaped her love of english while she was very young, ann’s love of the language appears to have been strongly shaped in interactions with a teacher she had in the seventh grade, who had only taught her english for two months. ann vividly remembered that time in her life. she described the teacher as “awesome in every possible way,” a person who always encouraged her to pursue her dreams. she placed emphasis mainly on the emotional support provided by that teacher rather than on the ways in which the teacher taught english. ann felt that she had learnt most english during that year. as she reported, it had been such a special learning experience that it had changed her life. it was after this teacher had left that ann made the decision to learn english by herself. this teacher’s interest in and concern for her students mediated ann’s love for the language, which in turn mediated ann’s learning since she became an autonomous learner. her love of english was also linked to her emotions towards her high school teacher. when asked about the role her teacher played in her english learning, ann reported: she is such a sweet person. i love her. she is very nice and . . . i love the way she teaches. ann’s love of english was also supported by her liking of the various english-related classroom and out-of-class activities she engaged in. in particular, reading novels in english strongly mediated her love of the language during the semester when the study took place. as she described it: “right now, i am so in love and enjoyment in context: four case studies of adolescent efl learners 83 love with them.” her response to the question about whether she would change anything in her textbook further emphasized her liking of reading. she reported that she and her classmates needed literature, expressing her belief that, first and foremost, they needed to read in the english classroom. moreover, when asked what she would like her classroom activities to focus on, she mentioned reading among such activities. she also implied that she sometimes felt rather bored by the texts in her textbook. when faced with boring texts or features of classroom life she disliked, such as noisy classmates, it was love of english that helped her to focus on language learning: i love english, so . . . easier for me to pay attention to the class rather than listening to the others making noise. in another interview, she described a similar situation when her peers were noisy, once again stating that focusing on language learning was easy and natural for her because of her love of english. that love was the prevalent emotion in her learning was also evident from an episode in her language learning history, which described her efforts to learn “over 100 irregular verbs” during the summer holiday before the 4th grade. despite this being a “challenge,” learning the verbs gave her a pleasant sense of achievement: “it made me feel good,” further reinforcing her positive emotions about learning english. this strong emotional connection to english was apparent throughout the interviews with ann. to her, everything sounded better in english. she reported thinking in english. even when doing her homework for her french class, she sometimes thought in english. ann’s positive emotions towards english were also acknowledged by her teacher, who reported that “she puts her heart and soul into everything she does [in the english class],” describing ann’s connection to english as deeply emotional: she does it [learning english] because she needs it but also because she likes it very much and she does it with passion and love and that can be seen. ann’s love for the language also appeared to be linked to her fascination with london. throughout her account, she expressed a strong attraction towards the uk. she mentioned a lesson about london that she particularly enjoyed during high school, in the ninth grade: it was about london, and i already had an obsession with it, and it was very interesting. in her written language learning history, ann stated that she had gone on a trip to london with her english teacher during the summer holiday, at the end of the liana maria pavelescu, bojana petrić 84 ninth grade. she referred to the trip as “a great experience,” and her use of adjectives such as “breathtaking,” “stunning” and “amazing” in her written and oral accounts attests to the positive emotions experienced. ann also reported her excitement and the intensity of her emotions at seeing london: a.: the first thing i did as i got, got off the autocar [coach] it was crying because i was so excited. i.: crying? a.: yes. i was so excited and i, i saw, i saw the thames and . . . the tower bridge. i.: yes. a.: and i was so in love with it. her strong desire to visit london is evident in another episode. before going on the trip to the uk, ann had painted a landscape of london on canvas, revealing her eagerness and excitement. interestingly, the same episode was told by ann’s teacher when she mentioned how talented ann was at painting: t.: last year, she went on a trip to england with me and i.: yes. t.: before going on the trip she was so excited and she found a picture of houses of parliament at dusk. (. . .) (…) t.: (…) she made a painting in oil of the houses of parliament (. . .) liking of, and interest in, other cultures also shaped ann’s love towards english. one of her pastime activities was writing a blog in english about bands, which offered her the opportunity to make friends with people from all over the world and communicate with them regularly. thus, her love of the language was also linked to blog writing in english and the ability to communicate with others. in sum, ann’s love for the language was strongly shaped by positive experiences outside the classroom, such as reading english language novels or travelling to london, but also by interactions in and out of the classroom, such as a close relationship with teachers and enjoyable computer-mediated communication with other english language users. 4.2. kim’s core emotion: love kim’s love of english was initially revealed in her written language learning history, where she described that “by 5th grade i was already in love with this beautiful language.” the intensity of her emotions was reflected by the statement that she loved english more than she loved her mother tongue. kim mentioned that she liked english so much that, to her, it sounded more beautiful than her native love and enjoyment in context: four case studies of adolescent efl learners 85 language. she also loved the english culture. when asked if there was a specific part of the english culture that she particularly liked, she stated: i like the fact they are a bit, um, superior. they feel superior um towards, um, other… countries. and . . . there’s a royal feeling about england, great britain that i like. when reflecting on her emotions towards english and the reasons why she loved it, kim mentioned her aunt, who lived in the uk, as the essential influence: k.: maybe because my aunt was very passionate about english as well when she was a teenager. now she is in um england. she is a doctor there. i.: oh, so she lives in england now. k.: yes, yes, with her family, family. and . . . um, since i spent a lot of time with her when i was really young, i think some . . . something of her passion for english has brushed off on me. [laughs] her aunt had translated the cartoons kim was watching from english into romanian when kim was three or four years old. kim’s mother, who was an english teacher at the time, also translated the cartoons. thus, it is reasonable to assume that her mother had also played a significant role in shaping her emotions towards english although the fact that her aunt lived in england seems to have made a particularly strong impression on kim. kim’s strong positive emotion towards english also appeared to have been shaped by her internet-based communication with other english speakers, whom she had “met” online by playing computer games. she stated: k.: i . . . back when i used to play a lot of video games, even online games, i used to have a lot of foreign friends, like, um . . . and i even talk to them now, but not that often anymore. i.: so, you still keep in touch with some of them. k.: yeah, i still keep in touch with some of them. for example, a couple from portugal and a guy from the netherlands. i.: yes. (…) k.: whenever they would log on, log in the game, we would chat for hours on end and . . . i felt that my english was in a very good state. [laughs] i.: yes. was the conversation restricted to the game that you were playing or not necessarily? k.: no, we would talk about other things and about life and what we would do daily and stuff like that. the emotion of love also appeared to be linked to the caring support offered to kim by her teacher. in kim’s own words: liana maria pavelescu, bojana petrić 86 i am extremely grateful to my . . . english teacher who always supported me and helped me exceed my limits she definitely played the most important role in my english learning process. however, the interviews revealed that kim experienced a lack of interest in the english class that semester. in her own words: k.: yes, i was more enthusiastic about learning english the past years, but ahm this semester i didn’t feel anything . . . . i.: why do you think that that was the case? k.: i wasn’t really interested in the writing tasks, except for a few . . . . love was revealed as being lasting and was thus still experienced despite this reported lack of interest in and liking of the majority of her classroom writing tasks that semester, such as essays and, particularly, reports, which provoked a feeling of constraint, of being bound by rules and a certain type of language. the stability of kim’s love of english was highlighted by the following comment: i.: i remember that, in the language learning history, you mentioned among other things that you loved english more than romanian. k.: yeah. i.: and i was just wondering if you feel the same way now. k.: of course i feel the same way. her account implied that it was the emotion of love that kept her engaged in the language learning process even when the lessons focused on tasks which she disliked. therefore, a discrepancy existed between kim’s core emotion towards english – love – and her emotions towards learning english in the classroom that semester – lack of enjoyment of the majority of the writing tasks. kim contrasted this to her liking of narrative and descriptive essays in the tenth grade: k.: . . . in the past years we had you know narrative essay and descriptive essay and i was really good at writing them and i, they really tested my creativity. i.: mhm. k.: that’s why i liked them more and i, i feel like i’ve learned so many things in the tenth grade when i, we learnt the descriptive essay, so many words. and i enriched my vocabulary in that year so much. and i, i used to think that i couldn’t write any better than in ninth grade, but i proved myself that in the tenth grade that i could learn even more and write even better ah essays but only narrative and descriptive essays because the other essays i don’t, i don’t really like them. kim’s reported liking of writing tasks such as book and film reviews of the learners’ choice, assigned towards the end of the semester, seems to point to an increase love and enjoyment in context: four case studies of adolescent efl learners 87 in her liking of english learning in the classroom towards the end of the school year. the opportunity to use her creativity and express herself without any constraints was linked to kim’s liking of review writing, which she listed among her favorite writing tasks that semester. this learner’s emotion of love thus appeared to be shaped by interactions with significant others such as aunt, mother and teacher, by classroomrelated experiences such as narrative/descriptive essay writing and book/film review writing, and by a positive mental image of british culture/society. 4.3. andrea’s core emotion: enjoyment enjoyment in relation to english was the core emotion reflected in andrea’s account. a reference to english as a “beautiful language” in her written language learning history, as well as her interview reports that her main reason for learning english was that english was “pretty,” reveal enjoyment and aesthetic appreciation. in her written language learning history, andrea vividly remembered her first day of learning english at nursery school. she described her teacher as a beautiful, young lady whose voice and accent made her want to learn english. furthermore, she remembered the lesson when she learnt the word hello and how nice it sounded, pointing to her enjoyment of the sounds of the language. the significant role andrea’s kindergarten teacher had played in her life was emphasized in her account during the first interview, when andrea mentioned that it was that teacher who had made her like english and that she wanted to become a person like her. this strong emotional connection to that teacher was confirmed once again in andrea’s interview account that she had once gone to her former nursery school to look for her: “i really want to see her and, i don’t know, talk to her.” her positive feelings about english1 were also linked to her high school english teacher. when asked what she liked about learning english in the classroom, andrea mentioned her teacher: a.: well, she is not like the others, like the other teachers, and she’s different. she’s so charismatic and she’s nice and she, her way to make us to know eng… to, yeah, to learn english is different. i don’t know. she makes us write stories and stuff i.: yes. a.: and in this way, you know, you prove your words and your imagination 1 the positive emotions were not always possible to completely delineate due to their somewhat fuzzy boundaries and their fluid nature. however, if enjoyment arose as the prevalent emotion in a particular student’s reported learning experiences, the other instances revealing positive feelings were treated as constitutive elements of that emotion. liana maria pavelescu, bojana petrić 88 as we can see, andrea liked her teacher not only because she was “charismatic” but also because she engaged students in creative writing tasks, which stimulated students’ imagination in the english class, activities andrea enjoyed. thus, positive emotions about the teacher and the enjoyable activities in the classroom were closely intertwined. however, a discrepancy was found between andrea’s self-reported enjoyment and her classroom behavior. when observed in class, andrea usually seemed preoccupied by something other than the english lesson. for instance, she was seen talking to her classmates or not knowing the page number in the textbook when the teacher called on her. during the majority of the classes observed, andrea seemed absent-minded, somewhat disconnected from the lesson and the classroom activities. this behavior was also revealed in her teacher’s account, which stressed andrea’s lack of attention to the class: . . . her mind is always elsewhere. . . . so, if she has a preoccupation at that time, that is her universe, everything revolves around that. andrea’s case highlights the contrast between a self-reported positive emotion – enjoyment of english, linked to interactions with her nursery school teacher and to a perception of the language as being beautiful – and the lack of this emotion manifested in her classroom behavior, mainly through her lack of attention to the lessons. 4.4. addison’s core emotion: enjoyment positive emotions in english language learning were also revealed by addison, whose written language learning history highlighted how her enjoyment of english was constructed in interactions with her teacher and classmates before high school. addison began learning english in kindergarten and mentioned her excitement at seeing an english book for the first time. however, it was not until the sixth grade that she became truly interested in english and started to like the language. she mentioned a classroom episode in the sixth grade, when her english teacher involved addison and her classmates in a play based on alice in wonderland. this episode seemed to have been the most memorable in her written language learning narrative. the teacher assigned a role to every pupil, and their task was to read the part, identify the character, put their parts together, imagine a name for the play and learn their assigned roles. addison played the part of the malefic queen and remembered that her lines were full of arrogance. she reported: love and enjoyment in context: four case studies of adolescent efl learners 89 the game made us curious, interested in discovering english language meanings, new words, where we are on the learning curve, beside this was a exciting situation, we had a lot of fun, it made us actors and made us more familiar with english. when asked about this episode during the first interview, addison stated that she liked theatre and drama, and that she enjoyed acting, especially the role of the villain. addison’s positive emotion towards english appeared to have been essentially mediated by her playful interaction with her classmates when acting in the role-play and by her interaction with her teacher, who had designed an entertaining classroom activity. further interviews with addison confirmed her enjoyment of plays, particularly by shakespeare, whose hamlet and romeo and juliet she enjoyed studying in the ninth grade, and of role-plays in the english classroom, which she described as an essential element of her ideal english classroom. in addison’s case, then, the positive emotion of enjoyment in the english language classroom seemed to have been essentially shaped by her interactions with her peers during role-play activities and by classroom-related artifacts such as plays by shakespeare. 4.5. a cross-case analysis as can be seen from these accounts, the learners’ core positive emotions towards english arose in, and were shaped by, their relationships in their sociocultural context, but also by their interactions with different artifacts, such as classroom and leisure activities (see table 3). although all four students experienced positive emotions in their language learning, the core emotion differed in that ann and kim felt a deep emotional connection to english, while andrea and addison’s emotions were less intense. the intensity of ann and kim’s emotion of love of english was revealed in these learners’ comments that they loved english more than romanian (kim) and that, over the years, they loved english more and more (ann). furthermore, love emerged as being enduring over time and as having the power to help the learners overcome barriers in their learning process, such as a lack of interest in certain classroom tasks (kim) and a noisy, disruptive classroom atmosphere (ann). in contrast, andrea and addison, who experienced the dominant positive emotion of enjoyment, did not express or imply a high intensity of their prevalent emotion towards english. moreover, their accounts did not point to stability of the emotion over time, nor was the positive emotion strong enough to help maintain interest in and focus on language learning (andrea). in terms of the contextual factors contributing to the positive emotions the participants experienced, it was shown that factors both within and outside of the classroom played a role. there were various types of activities and tasks liana maria pavelescu, bojana petrić 90 that mediated the emotions of love and enjoyment within the classroom, such as literature-based lessons, writing reviews and narrative/descriptive essays and writing stories. activities and situations outside of the classroom, such as reading english language novels, travelling to the uk and blog writing in english also seemed to enhance the prevalent emotions experienced towards english. the findings also show that some of the contextual factors were present in all four learners’ accounts, while others were learner-specific (see table 3). both love and enjoyment were linked to an emotional attachment to english teachers, who seemed to have played an important role in shaping these four students’ positive emotions towards english. learner-specific factors included preferred classroom and pastime activities, which varied across the four learners, as well as specific perceptions and beliefs about the english language and english-speaking society and culture, which mediated their positive emotions towards the language. for instance, ann held the belief that english was important and that it offered countless opportunities in life, which mediated her love for english. as for kim, she believed that british people felt superior, and she liked this imagined aspect of british culture and society. with regard to andrea, she perceived english to be a beautiful language, and this perception mediated her enjoyment of english. table 3 contextual factors mediating positive emotions towards english language learning english teachers classroom activities and artefacts family members out of school activities/experiences perceptions and beliefs of english kim high school teacher writing reviews of books and films of students’ own choice aunt living in the uk, english teacher, and her mother (watching cartoons in english) internet-based communication with other english users english “is superior,” “there’s a royal feeling about england” ann teacher in the 7th grade (‘changed her life’) high school teacher textbook reading about london uncle living abroad reading books in english, trip to london, blog writing about music, thinking in english, and painting a landscape of london with english “you can do everything you want” andrea nursery school teacher and high school teacher writing stories in english english is “pretty,” a “beautiful language” addison teacher before high school role-plays and plays by shakespeare love and enjoyment in context: four case studies of adolescent efl learners 91 5. discussion 5.1. positive emotions in english language learning this exploratory study investigated four romanian high school students’ emotions in their english language learning experiences over a school semester. in response to the first research question, which focused on whether the students experienced positive emotions towards english in their language learning process, this study has found ample evidence of positive emotions, with the most salient ones being love and enjoyment. while all four participants reported experiencing positive emotions in language learning, a distinction was identified in the intensity and stability of their emotions. two participants expressed a strong and stable emotion of love towards english, while the other two participants experienced enjoyment in their english language learning without an intense emotional attachment to english. unlike the prevalent emotion of enjoyment, the core emotion of love was found to be the driving force in the learning process of the students who experienced it through its intensity and stability, creating effective coping mechanisms when there was a lack of enjoyment in certain classroom situations as well as motivating learners to invest greater effort in language learning. the difference between love and enjoyment is evident in the ways in which ann and addison reported engaging in their favorite english-related activities, reading english novels and participating in role-plays, respectively. while ann was mobilized by her emotion of love to read books in english outside the classroom, falling in love with such books and being an active agent in engaging with learning english outside school, addison enjoyed a literature-based activity that her teacher asked her to engage in. such findings about love and enjoyment foreground the importance of strong, enduring positive emotions towards the foreign language. however, studying emotions in isolation has its limitations, the main one being that they do not emerge in a vacuum but are context-dependent. in response to the second research question, which focused on emotions in relation to the participants’ sociocultural context, the findings have shown that positive emotions arose in relation to various contextual factors, both individuals, such as family members and the teacher, and artefacts, such as classroom and outof-class activities. the learners’ accounts revealed the existence of an emotional bond between them and their teachers, which converges with mahn and johnsteiner’s (2002) and macintyre and gregersen’s (2012b) arguments on the importance of community-building and close interpersonal relationships in students’ emotional experience in the classroom. all the participating students expressed positive emotions towards their high school teachers, which shows that liana maria pavelescu, bojana petrić 92 their core positive emotions towards english were also linked to their close relationship with their teachers. these findings are in line with dewaele and macintyre’s (2016) social dimension of foreign language enjoyment, which was also linked to encouraging and supportive teachers, and with dewaele and dewaele’s (2017) results concerning the effect of the teacher on learners’ positive emotions in the foreign language classroom. in addition to teachers, it is interesting to note the important role of family members living abroad in shaping a positive orientation to english and to english language learning in the cases of ann and kim. both students were exposed to english and encouraged to learn it from an early age in their families, and both later developed a strong emotional attachment to english. in sum, then, the findings have revealed the social construction of positive emotions in language learning, confirming previous research such as imai’s (2010), which has emphasized that “emotions . . . are socially constructed through people’s intersubjective encounters” (p. 283). the findings also provide evidence of the private dimension of positive emotions, linked to cognition and a sense of accomplishment, which dewaele and macintyre (2016) identified in the case of enjoyment. kim’s enjoyment of narrative and descriptive essays, which stimulated her creativity and were memorable learning experiences, and ann’s ability to think in english and her pleasant sense of challenge experienced while learning irregular verbs are instances of the private dimension of positive emotion. cognition and a sense of achievement seem to be enhancers of ann and kim’s prevalent emotion of love of english, contributing to the development of inner resources that sustained their engagement in learning. in contrast, despite the fact that addison enjoyed acting in role-plays, the emotion of enjoyment was closely related to interacting with peers; similarly, andrea’s enjoyment of the beauty of english seemed to be part of her enjoyment of her teacher’s pronunciation of english sounds. thus, in both students’ cases, the social dimension was essential to the experience of the positive emotion of enjoyment. although the private dimension of the emotional experience of english learning may have existed, it was not made salient by these two students’ accounts. the study further provides an empirical description, through the cases of ann and kim, of how love of english may have a “positive-broadening” effect (macintyre & gregersen, 2012a; gregersen & macintyre, 2014). although both students reported experiencing obstacles in their learning, such as unappealing texts in the textbook and classmates making noise in the case of ann and demotivating classroom activities causing lack of enjoyment in the case of kim, it was love of english that broadened the students’ perspective and sustained their engagement in learning. the positive emotion of love thus appeared to have been the driving force in this process (see dewaele, 2011). these findings highlight love and enjoyment in context: four case studies of adolescent efl learners 93 the importance of love in the foreign language classroom and its link to cognition. love has thus emerged from these students’ accounts as a strong emotion which is enduring over time and broadens cognition, empowering learners to overcome obstacles in their learning context and maintaining learners’ engagement in language learning in the long term. the different contextual factors linked to the emotion of love did not emerge as short-term passions but rather as crucial elements which constituted and supported this positive emotion during the language learning process over time. although the findings about the role of love in l2 learning are in line with reschly, huebner, appleton, and antaramian (2008), who found a link between positive emotions and engagement in the learning process, in the cases of andrea and addison, who experienced positive emotions of a more fleeting and less intensive kind, such link between emotions and engagement was not identified. this points to the need for further research on the role of different types of positive emotions in foreign language learning. one of the intriguing findings is the fact that ann and kim developed a strong emotional bond to english while andrea and addison did not, leading to the question of how this difference can be accounted for. the comparison of the “love” and “enjoyment” cases in this exploratory study provides some possible answers, such as the encouragement to learn english provided by family members and student-initiated engagement in out-of-class english-related activities, both of which were present in the “love” cases but absent in the “enjoyment” ones; however, why some students form strong and lasting emotions towards the language they study remains to be explored in future research. 6. limitations and suggestions for further research one of the limitations of this study results from the self-selection effect, that is, that only students who have positive emotions towards learning english are likely to participate in a study about their learning experiences. nevertheless, the findings provide insights into how such emotions arise and how they interact with contextual factors and thus provide a useful point of comparison for future studies on this topic, particularly studies involving students who experience mostly negative emotions. it is also important to acknowledge that there were only female participants in this study. the views presented should thus be understood as “teenage girl” perspectives, which may differ from teenage boys’ views. studies such as dewaele and macintyre’s (2014) and dewaele, boudreau, and dewaele’s (2016) have shown that there are gender differences regarding emotions in the foreign language classroom: the foreign language was more emotionally loaded for female participants, something worth investigating in further research. liana maria pavelescu, bojana petrić 94 finally, while this study took into account the factors in the learners’ immediate context (e.g., family members, the classroom), a discussion of the equally relevant factors in the wider social context was beyond the scope of this paper. however, their presence was clear in the data. for instance, the participants’ love of english was encouraged by family members who had emigrated from romania to work abroad. the intersection of social, economic and political realities with teenagers’ language learning experiences is a worthy topic for future research. 7. implications for practice the findings of the study point to the need for teachers to view their adolescent learners as complex social beings, whose worlds are not confined to the classroom, or the school, walls. this study has foregrounded the view of learners as sentient beings, whose emotions towards the target language need to be engaged in the process of learning. the findings have emphasized the “positivebroadening” (see macintyre & gregersen, 2012a; gregersen & macintyre, 2014) power of love in teenagers’ language learning process, namely its power to facilitate learning when there was a perceived lack of enjoyment of certain classroom tasks or to broaden cognitive resources in a noisy classroom. they suggest that close attention must be paid to the process of creating positive emotions in language learners (macintyre & gregersen, 2012b) and of nurturing such emotions during the learning process. as oxford (2016) pointed out, we could depict positive emotions as skills that can be developed. given that teenagers’ attitudes towards their english learning are linked to their interests, teachers should find effective ways to bridge the gap between students’ in-school and out-of-school learning (see pitkänen-huhta & nikula, 2013) to enhance learners’ positive emotions and what oxford (2014) calls “meaningful engagement” in the learning process. for instance, some of the english-related activities the participating students particularly liked, which were linked to their lives outside the classroom, were book/film review writing and reading books in english. teachers should therefore turn the classroom into a space which allows for a link between out-of-school contact with english and in-class activities (see legutke, 2012). this implies that they should teach “the whole student, bringing together mind and heart in the classroom” (goleman, 1996, p. xiv; emphasis added). there is thus an interplay between cognition and emotion which needs to be acknowledged and addressed by teachers in the foreign language classroom for students’ learning experience to be enhanced. love and enjoyment in context: four case studies of adolescent efl learners 95 8. conclusion the present study explored romanian high school students’ positive emotions in their english language learning experiences and how such emotions emerged in their surrounding environment. although there were several emotions identified, two core emotions powerfully emerged in the data, namely love and enjoyment. these two emotions were mediated by the participants’ interactions with family members, teachers and english speakers and by artifacts, such as classroom activities and tasks, trips abroad, and books. a particularly interesting finding is that the emotion of love acted as the driving force in the learning process, maintaining engagement in learning even when there were obstacles in the classroom, such as a lack of enjoyment of certain tasks or noisy peers, while such capability to sustain learning efforts was not identified in the case of students who experienced a less intense and less durable positive emotion. the study has emphasized language learners’ complexity and uniqueness, pointing to the importance of viewing students as sociocultural beings who shape and are shaped by their surrounding environment in intricate, idiosyncratic and perhaps even unpredictable ways. the study has shown that learners are holistic individuals whose emotional universes are highly rich and complex, raising awareness that “what we see are fragments and only a partial description of the bigger picture” (mercer, 2011, p. 74). the findings of the present study suggest that the language learning self is like a jigsaw puzzle and that understanding the self involves understanding how 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(2011). foreign language anxiety and advanced efl learners: an interview study. wopalp, 5, 39-57. liana maria pavelescu, bojana petrić 100 appendix a instruction sheet for the language learning history task language learning history write your own story about your english learning experiences from the moment you began learning english until now. focus on what you consider to be more important and try to give as many details as possible. when reflecting upon your experiences, make sure you include answers to the following questions: when and where did you start learning english? how have you learned english? what is your most vivid memory regarding your english learning experiences? what opportunities have you had to use english until now? who played a particularly important role in your english learning process? in what way(s)? keep in mind that your language learning history should look like a story (the story of your english learning experiences) rather than like answers to a questionnaire. love and enjoyment in context: four case studies of adolescent efl learners 101 appendix b interview guide – first interview explore the language learning history in your language learning history, you said that … . can you tell me more about that? feelings towards learning english: the metaphor you used was: “learning english is …”. why is learning english … for you? what do you like about learning english in the classroom? can you tell me about a specific lesson that you enjoyed very much? what do you dislike about learning english in the classroom? if you could have more of something in the english classroom, what would it be? if you could have less of something in the english classroom, what would it be? what makes you feel nervous in the english class? autonomy and contextual factors how would you describe yourself as a learner of english? how do your parents support you in learning english? what role do films, music and the internet play in your english learning outside the classroom? what opportunities do you have to use english outside the classroom? motivation overall motivation what are your reasons for learning english? what obstacles are there in your way when it comes to learning english? how do you overcome them? vision for the future how important is it for your future to be a successful learner of english? why? where do you see yourself in three years (university)? why? where do you see yourself in ten years (work)? why? 377 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (3). 2016. 377-393 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.3.2 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl classroom-oriented research from a complex systems perspective1 diane larsen-freeman university of michigan, michigan, usa dianelf@umich.edu abstract bringing a complex systems perspective to bear on classroom-oriented research challenges researchers to think differently, seeing the classroom ecology as one dynamic system nested in a hierarchy of such systems at different levels of scale, all of which are spatially and temporally situated. this article begins with an introduction to complex dynamic systems theory, in which challenges to traditional ways of conducting classroom research are interwoven. it concludes with suggestions for research methods that are more consistent with the theory. research does not become easier when approached from a complex systems perspective, but it has the virtue of reflecting the way the world works. keywords: complex systems; emergence; intra-variability; inter-variability; research methods 1 this article is based on a revised and updated paper delivered at the classroom-oriented research: towards effective learning and teaching conference, konin, poland, october 12-14, 2015. i am grateful to mark clarke and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this article and to mirek pawlak for his invitation to present a paper at the conference. diane larsen-freeman 378 1. introduction classroom-oriented research is important—especially when it is explicitly directed towards understanding effective learning and teaching—which is the theme of the conference in which the paper that this article was based on was presented. however, it is my contention that classroom-oriented research has not contributed towards this effectiveness to the extent that it might because our construction of the classroom has been too limited. i submit that complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) has the potential to broaden our perspective appropriately. i therefore begin by discussing characteristics of complex systems and the implications of these characteristics for research. as part of this discussion, i maintain that conducting educational research from the viewpoint of complex systems calls for a departure from standard epistemological assumptions. for instance, cdst questions the value of randomized control experiments for classroom-oriented research, even though such experiments have often been considered “the gold standard.” it also challenges the idea that the results of a given study can be replicated. i will conclude the article with a discussion of certain methods for conducting classroom-oriented research that do make more sense from a cdst perspective. in so doing, i am not assuming that findings from classroom-oriented research should be directly applicable to teaching, a point i shall return to at the end of this article. 2. characteristics of complex systems probably the most distinctive, and certainly the most intriguing characteristic of complex systems is their emergence. emergence is the arising of something new, often unanticipated, from the interaction of components which comprise it. emergent behavior can be observed in everything from bird flocks to traffic gridlocks. in the case of the classroom ecology, the components are not only the agents, that is, the teacher and the students (and all of their accompanying thoughts, embodied actions, emotions, behaviors, dispositions, identities, social capital, etc.), but they also include properties of the physical and temporal environment as well. for instance, the configuration of the desks, the size of the room, its orientation, its temperature, the time of the day/week/year at which the lesson is conducted, and so on, all potentially influence teaching and learning. in a complex system, the physical environment is not considered a backdrop but is rather integral to what emerges from agents interacting with it. it is not difficult to imagine, for instance, how the pattern dynamics would be altered in a classroom with desks affixed to the floor so that interaction among students is impeded, or in my case, in teaching english in malaysia, how heavy rains on classroom-oriented research from a complex systems perspective 379 the corrugated tin roofs of our open air classrooms kept our voices from being audible, and thus, during the rainy season, frequently disrupted spoken interaction of any kind. in other words, we cannot make assertions about effective teaching and learning without considering the environment in which it is embedded. but more than the physical presence of these factors in the environment, what is key is how the agents relate to them. cdst is a relational theory. this is why i wrote that the environmental factors were “potentially” influential. what is important for teaching and learning is not simply the presence of environmental influences; it is how the agents perceive them as offering the basis for action (larsen-freeman, 2016; mercer, 2016; van lier, 2004). both teacher and learner agency “emerges from the interaction between resources and contexts and the learners’ [and teachers’] perceptions and use of them” (mercer, 2012, p. 43). at the same time, it is important to recognize that the class itself is one of many systems nested within other systems. my class in malaysia existed within a government secondary school, which was part of a school district with other schools. the district, in turn, was a subsystem of the state of sabah’s ministry of education in kota kinabalu, and then it, too, was under the umbrella of the national ministry of education, situated in kuala lumpur. the systems are not only nested one within another; each also influences what transpires above and below any given level. thus, a complex dynamic systems perspective asks us to consider interaction across interconnected levels of organization, with each level itself a system of interacting components and with the levels forming a hierarchy—in the case of classroom-oriented research, a hierarchy from individual minds up to the sociopolitical context of language learning and teaching. as goldstone (2006) notes, the way a component behaves is shaped by the larger system of which it is a part. furthermore, at all levels, dynamic behavior is taking place at the same time. speaking of time, it is significant that a complex system is temporally situated as well. emergence is not only affected by what is taking place at one point in time, but it is also the product of dynamism over time. a complex system is made up of interconnected timescales, from the moment-by-moment scale of classroom activity to teaching and learning lifetimes (cameron & larsen-freeman, 2007, p. 236). because of the dynamic quality of classrooms as complex systems, circumstances change. for instance, as students show that they are learning, teachers alter the tasks they assign, perhaps increasing their authenticity; they lessen scaffolding; they adjust any expectations they have, the opportunities they provide, and so forth (van geert, 2011). if all this seems complicated (although i caution that complicated and complexity are not equivalent terms within cdst), well, it is. “with the . . . emergence of complexity as an overarching explanation of reality, our fundamental assumptions about the way the world works, including comfortable understandings about teaching and learning, require serious scrutiny” (clarke & quinnwilliams, 2015, p. 4). diane larsen-freeman 380 contrast this appraisal of emergent complexity in the classroom with bolster’s (1983) depiction of traditional classroom research: . . . much social science research on teaching assumes that causation in classrooms operates unilaterally from the teacher to the students . . . teaching is viewed exclusively in terms of the influence instructors have on pupils; the reciprocal effects of students on teachers or of students on students and then on teachers are thought to be either nonexistent or not of central consequence. (p. 302) while bolster’s assessment is somewhat dated, i believe that a unilateral linear view of teaching and learning still prevails. in contrast, in complex systems, it is understood that it is highly unlikely that a single cause will give rise (in a linear fashion) to a complex event. rather, there are likely multiple and interconnected causes underlying any shift or outcome. “we may rank their relative significance, but we’d think it irresponsible to seek to isolate – or ‘tease out’ – single causes for complex events” (gaddis, 2002, p. 65). this is an important point because the world as envisioned by cdst does not rest on assumptions of linear causality. “simple point-to-point causal explanations are of limited value; that is, you can’t prescribe simple solutions for the problems that matter” (clark & quinnwilliams, 2015, p. 2). as i mentioned earlier, complex systems are situated not only in space, but also in time. for instance, the current state of a complex system is shaped by all of the events of its history and by the events of the moment, and by our perspective on all of this. complex systems are, in gould’s (as cited in rosenberg, 1990) words, “the result of a series of highly contingent events that would not happen again if we could rewind the tape” (p. 1). one consequence of the temporal embeddedness of a complex system is that “. . . conclusions about the eventual attainment are strongly dependent on the coincidental time of the measurement” (lowie & verspoor, 2015, p. 66). therefore, “[one type of] research on teaching requires direct systematic continuous observation (preferably recording) supplemented with interviews in order to capture, as far as possible, the ways individual students experience their classroom activities and the curriculum content embedded in them” (nuthall, 2004, p. 296). nuthall goes on to observe that teaching effects are not stable over time and context, and both teaching and learning are continuous, cumulative processes. recordings and observations need to be focused on individual students. occasional observations or sampled observations do not provide the data needed to connect teaching to the learning process. classroom-oriented research from a complex systems perspective 381 of course, second language classroom-oriented researchers do have access to other means of studying classroom interaction. for example, microdevelopment (thelen & corbatta, 2002), which has been recently applied to language teaching by pawlak and mystkowska-wiertelak (2015), can be very helpful in this regard. then, too, macintyre’s (2012) idiodynamic approach is an innovative method that addresses the need to make continuous observations within an instructional period. both of these methods represent important developments in conducting research consonant with cdst; i return to a discussion of other research methods below. another important point, related to this need to consider a complex system's full history, is the misguided practice of wholly relying on randomized controlled trial experiments. we can no more “repeat” an experiment on a complex system than we can ask a class of fifth graders at the end of the school year to go back to the way they were at the beginning of the school year. however, the assumption in randomized controlled trial experiments is that the precise histories of systems are unimportant. (ricca, 2012, p. 33) indeed, there was a great deal of consternation expressed recently (even in the media) about a study (open science collaboration, 2015) that examined 100 replications in psychology. the study determined that a large portion of research studies that were replications found weaker evidence than the original findings. what distressed people was the assumption that if the research was valid, the results should replicate. when they found they did not, the questions then arose: should the incongruence be blamed on the original research or on the replication, or is it the case that the findings are true only under certain conditions (barrett, 2015)? nevertheless, from a cdst perspective, discovering that findings from one study of human subjects do not obtain in a subsequent study is not surprising at all, given the situated nature of what is being studied. a related question along these same lines is whether it is reasonable and valid to assume that the treatments or interventions in controlled experiments are replicable in and of themselves. after all, treatments “are not implemented so much as enacted” (clarke & quinnwilliams, in press), and when it comes to classroom research, attempts to control all aspects in the enactment of an experimental intervention make the circumstances of the treatment artificial and ecologically suspect. this is especially so because a complex system is sensitive to its initial conditions. a different starting point will yield different results. this does not mean that we should avoid the kind of partial or reconceived or extended replication that gass and valmori (2015) call for. indeed, lowie (2015) opines that replication is very important. however, it does mean that we should diane larsen-freeman 382 not expect that a replication will resolve a question once and for all. research results should always be seen as provisional. an additional problem attributable to the nonlinear behavior of complex systems is that it may be spurious on the basis of a simple experiment to claim that a particular experimental treatment works or does not work based on the difference between participants’ scores on a pre-test and post-test. for one thing, it is certainly possible that the effect of an intervention does not occur within the timeframe of the design (koopmans, 2014). yet the assumptions underlying the use of [common] parametric gaussian statistics – that the relationships under investigation are linear relations – is fundamentally challenged by recent studies that have used a dynamic perspective and which show the relationships between subsystems of a developing language system are nonlinear (de bot, lowie, & verspoor, 2007; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). (lowie & verspoor, 2015, p. 69) on a related note, the assumption underlying a simple experiment is that any intervention is the cause of an outcome if it is statistically significant. this, too, is a problematic assumption. as i have argued, what is meaningful is not an intervention itself, but rather how individuals relate to it. “of course, the real, observed effect is a combination of the intrinsic effect of the intervention and the effects of a number of uncontrolled variables that apply to a particular individual (van geert & steenbeek, 2014, p. 36). a further problem lies in the recognition that the many components of a complex system are interconnected. controlling all but one, which is what is done in a typical experimental study of a classroom intervention, ignores the fact that the one component has an effect on another component, often in unanticipated ways. all these are serious problems when it comes to classroom research using experimental designs. on top of these, there is the matter of the teacher’s “emotional resistance to the new activities prescribed by the intervention” (van geert & steenbeek, 2014, p. 31). if teachers do not fully endorse the intervention, they are not likely to implement it as prescribed by the experimenter. while this has caused exasperation on the part of some researchers, it is the teacher’s right, and some might say duty, to resist what is seen to be an inappropriate intervention. returning to nuthall’s point about focusing our research on individual students brings to mind a problem with sample-based research, which is that it allows generalizations at the level of the group, but it does not tell us much about the behavior of the individuals who comprise the group. van geert (2011) warns: . . . models based on aggregated data from individuals have no logical bearing on models of individual processes. molenaar (2008) calls this the ergodicity principle. classroom-oriented research from a complex systems perspective 383 he and his collaborators have shown that the implicit step, so common in the behavioral sciences, from sample-based research to individual process statements is often demonstrably incorrect. (p. 275) nuthall (2004) advises that aggregation of data across students and across different learning outcomes must be carefully justified before it can be used. individual students can have quite different experiences within the same classroom, begin with quite different background knowledge, and achieve significantly different outcomes (nuthall, 1999a). aggregation by summing test totals or class averages introduces unnecessary ambiguity and error. (p. 297) this observation by nuthall was certainly borne out in my study (larsenfreeman, 2006) of five chinese learners enrolled in an english course over a 6month period. when their performances were averaged, the learners appeared to make fairly uniform progress over the period. all the initial measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency of their spoken and written english showed improvement by the end of the course, and most recorded steady improvement on the performance samples at regular intervals in between. however, by looking at the individual level of performance, it was clear that not all learners progressed evenly. in fact, some learners scored lower on certain measures at the end of the course than when they had started. the level of granularity at which the data were inspected made all the difference in whether or not progress was detected and the instruction deemed successful. furthermore, as van geert and steenbeek put it (2014), the reason why intraand inter-individual variability are in fact very different is that intra-individual variability results from the working of complex dynamic systems – such as an individual person in interaction with a particular educational environment – whereas inter-individual variability typically results from statistically constructed, simple additive systems. (p. 34) having up to this point been critical about classroom experiments that seek to establish a causal relationship between a particular practice and outcome, i should acknowledge that for certain constituencies, such as policy makers, a larger view may be warranted. for policy makers, “what matters is whether on the level of populations, the odds are in favor or not of a particular educational intervention, which is a matter of differences in averages” (van geert & steenbeek, 2014, p. 34). so i do not deny that there is a place for educational research beyond the walls of the classroom. indeed, “if we want to make statements about general trends of factors affecting products of development, then group generalizations diane larsen-freeman 384 are useful, especially when applying bayesian statistics and provided the focus is on power and effect sizes rather than on nhst [null hypothesis statistical testing]” (lowie, 2015), the outcome of which is highly manipulable. for instance, it is well known that one can obtain statistically significant findings “because any size difference between groups (or correlation) will reach statistical significance given a large enough sample” (plonsky, 2014, p. 464). however, i do not want to lose sight of the point that “the one thing that is known for certain is that the average is not good enough if the goal is to understand individuals: we must explain patterns of individual variability” (rose, rouhani, & fischer, 2013, p. 152). recall, too, that complex systems are nested, which means that they are interconnected with other systems both at higher and lower levels than themselves. thus, at this point in the article, readers may be forgiven for wondering just how researchers can truly meet all the expectations cdst asks of them. after all, if everything is connected with everything else, how can we adopt a perspective that does justice to the complex system that is the classroom in all its multiple embeddedness (larsen-freeman, in press)? one answer is to adopt one level as the focal level, which for present purposes may well be the classroom, but to interrogate the other nested levels of scale (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). indeed, whatever level of organization or subsystem is the focus of our research, we can always ask a series of key questions motivated by the perspective of complex systems. here are a few suggested by lemke and sabelli (2008, p. 122): • what next higher level of organization determines constraints on the dynamics at the focal level? • how do all subsystems subject to those constraints interact to constitute the dynamics of the higher level? • what degrees of freedom remain at the focal level after the constraints are allowed for? • what units of analysis at the next level below interact to constitute units (or processes or patterns) at the focal level? • what characteristics of those lower level units determine the range of dynamical possibilities at the focal level? another consideration is the reciprocal influence of each system or component of a system on the other (kaneko, 2006), influences which provoke changes in both directions. we illustrated this reciprocity in our book (larsenfreeman & cameron, 2008) from some research conducted by cameron in an english language classroom in norway. after recording all the interactions in a lesson, cameron went on to calculate an “interaction differential.” the interactional differential was a subjective measure of the difference between the lexicogrammatical and cognitive demands expected and the actual utterances. in classroom-oriented research from a complex systems perspective 385 other words, the graph in figure 1 taken from larsen-freeman and cameron (2008, p. 210), in which the interactional differential is plotted, represents neither the teacher’s nor the student’s language. rather, it is a collective variable which represents values pertaining to the difference between what the teacher’s elicitations appear to expect and the learner’s actual response. it is calculated by comparing the actual language used by the learner with the expected language as set up by the teacher’s utterances. figure 1 trajectory of teacher interaction with learner a on the task, described in terms of the interaction differential (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008, p. 210) as can be seen in figure 1, there was a wide interactional difference to start with. the teacher’s initial elicitation was an open request for information, but the student offered nothing in return. as the lesson preceded over time, teacher elicitations narrowed and were followed by limited responses from the student. the rise at the end of the exchange was due to concluding information given by the teacher. this concluding information increased in complexity and length. thus, figure 1 represents the overall trajectory of the interaction. this type of interaction has been termed co-adaptation by larsen-freeman and cameron. co-adaptation appears to be a particularly relevant type of change in the dynamic systems of the language classroom. co-adaptation is change in connected systems, where change in one system or component of a system produces change in the other. larsen-freeman and cameron (2008) further note that “language classrooms are full of people co-adapting – teacher with students, students with each other, teacher or students with learning contexts. stabilized patterns of action, including language action, emerge from co-adaptation on various timescales” (p. 199). importantly, cdst is a systems theory. to help us understand a bit more what this means, here is my selective summary of an example from mary catherine diane larsen-freeman 386 bateson in her role supervising a counselor offered by seltzer-kelly et al. (as cited by ricca, 2012). mary catherine bateson reflects upon a videotaped family counseling session that she has watched repeatedly as part of her professional supervision of the counselor . . . the designated client is the child; however, over repeated viewings of the session, bateson found that her perspective as to the actual source of the problem has shifted several times . . . finally, she explains, she came to view the family dynamic in terms of gregory bateson's thought: to see the pathology as a product of the interaction of systems, rather than as residing in any individual. (p. 36) a systems perspective is the reason why “to remove part of a complex system and isolate it for, say, ‘closer study,’ is to remove the ‘pattern that connects’ (bateson, 1988)” (ricca, 2012, p. 35). indeed, conventional experiments can only, at best, lead to claims about proximate, linear causes, while not allowing for multiple or reciprocally interacting and nonlinear variables, which change over time and lead to emergent phenomena. “likewise, a child taken from a classroom environment for assessment does not behave the same way as s/he does in a classroom and the attempt to understand the child's classroom behavior through such efforts is thwarted” (ricca, 2012, p. 36). while i would not wish to discount experimental claims, i think that we do need to consider them carefully. as horn (2008) remarks: in order to understand schools and classrooms as the complex environments that they are capable of becoming, we must first allow them to be so. this will require new methodologies . . . methodologies that do not reduce the phenomena studied to fit within the prevailing research repertoire . . . (p. 136) 3. research methods for studying complex systems so what classroom-oriented research methods are compatible with cdst? i have already mentioned microdevelopment and idiodynamic approaches. other appropriate methods can be found in dörnyei, macintyre and henry’s (2015) recent book on motivational dynamics and in hiver and al-hoorie’s (in press) call for a “dynamic ensemble.” social network analysis (gallagher & robins, 2015; mercer, 2015) also shows promise. gallagher and robins (2015) explain, social scientists have generally operationalized groups in a way that is static and monolithic, such as through social categories, distinctions between types of language instruction, or in terms of experimentally designed groups. consequently, in an attempt to move toward a view of language as a complex adaptive system, we should consider how to reapproach seminal, macrosocial concepts with new methods that elaborate on our understanding of group systems, as well as the interactions, situations, and encounters from which systems are constituted. (p. 931) classroom-oriented research from a complex systems perspective 387 the newer approach involves statistical network modeling, which seeks to bridge the gap between individuals and the groups they are members of by constructing a network structure of the interaction. to get the view of changes over time, longitudinal designs are essential (e.g., ortega & iberri-shea, 2005; pawlak, 2012). then, of course, a richly contextual ethnography is especially useful in studying complex systems, where it is assumed that the observer is part of the system being observed. as ricca (2012) remarks, “reflexivity in complex systems requires a different approach to study than the usual separation of observer and observed” (p. 37). clarke and quinnwilliams (in press) concur and add that “if we hope for our work as action researchers to have an impact on classroom practice, we must understand that we are part of the complex dynamic systems of school and classroom, not agents acting upon schools and classrooms.” to this call for reflexive practice on the part of the researcher, harvey (2015) adds this twist: “. . . i feel that if as a researcher i am to genuinely acknowledge the people i am working with as responsible agents of their own lives, i have a responsibility to give them the opportunity to theorize their own experience” (p. 24). for this reason, harvey gave her analysis of the data to the participants in her study for them to comment upon. beyond “member checking” to authenticate her interpretation, this step gave harvey an important insight: “i became aware that her [one of her participants] story, and every participant’s story, can never be finalized, and is always being reconstructed in a dialogic tension between the past and the present. the co-construction, therefore, continues” (p. 34). another limitation of conventional experiments occurs when researchers attempt to control context and situation, rather than investigating adaptation to the unique particularities of a context. a crucial characteristic of a complex system is its adaptability. a different type of experiment, described by jacob (as cited in reinking & watkins, 2000) and called a formative experiment, focuses on the dynamics of implementation and might thus be capable of overcoming the limitations of a conventional experiment. according to newman (as cited in reinking & watkins, 2000, p. 388), in a formative experiment, the researcher sets a pedagogical goal and finds out what it takes in terms of materials, organization, or changes in the intervention in order to reach the goal. in other words, once the goal is reached, the researcher can trace the adaptations that were made to get there. design-based research offers another alternative. a design-based researcher responds to the emergent features in the situation. a particular research angle is not adopted once and for all. after all, not all variables that turn out to be of interest are known in advance. rather than creating research designs that isolate a single variable, design-based researchers examine multiple diane larsen-freeman 388 dependent variables in order to develop a qualitative account that links different instructional conditions with different effects on learning, all the while acknowledging the complex social context of the classroom. researchers adopt a retrodictive view, looking for the influence of prior activity on current activity (larsen-freeman, 2009). as confrey (2006) writes, “such studies support views of the classroom not as deterministic, but as complex and conditional. in these settings, instructional guidance is based on affecting the likelihood of certain events and outcomes by adjusting the conditions of instruction” (p. 139). action research is concerned with possibility rather than prediction (wadsworth, 1998). in keeping with the nature of complex systems, action research considers change and facilitates an examination of the emergent nature of change. as ahmadian and tavakoli (2011, p. 123) propose, in order for us to solve second language classroom problems, we need research traditions that are responsive to the unpredictability and dynamism of the behavior under investigation. the action of action research is what a teacher does to disrupt the equilibrium of the teaching and learning situation. teachers are encouraged to challenge their assumptions by acting differently from their customary way of being in the classroom. in other words, teachers who practice action research are encouraged to introduce a perturbation into the system, to actively promote non-equilibrium. then, after introducing noise, they watch what happens in order to inform their next move. finally, burns and knox (2011) write of their attempt at relational model building. while i suppose it would be incorrect to call model building a research method, it can nevertheless provide a platform for one. their model conceptualizes the classroom not as a machine where inputs are processed and outputs generated, not as a space where activity takes place, . . . but as a convergence of different elements which stretch beyond the temporal and spatial location of a given classroom, and which combine in dynamic relationships. (p. 2) in order to depict such dynamism, they built a relational model to be able to map interrelatedness, fluidity and unpredictability, rather than construct distinct, separate and fixed categories. (p. 5) . . . this model builds on, and extends existing classroom-based research in applied linguistics, and affords a relational view of the classroom in which there is no a priori start or end point; classrooms are convergences that reach backwards and forwards temporally, discursively, socially, cognitively, and culturally. (p. 19) although some might find these methods disappointing because of their inability to produce generalizable results, they should find reassurance in van geert’s classroom-oriented research from a complex systems perspective 389 (2011) observation that case studies have significant theoretical import: “for students of language development, single case studies have a direct bearing on the underlying theory, and only an indirect one on the population of language learners . . .” (p. 276; see larsen-freeman, in press, for further discussion of the generalizability issue). 4. conclusion kennedy (1999) concluded from her studies of teachers’ thinking about research on teaching: the relationship between teaching and learning is the most central issue in teaching, and it is also the most perplexing and least understood. teachers often feel that learning outcomes are unpredictable, mysterious and uncontrollable. it is not surprising to learn that teachers find studies most valuable when the studies give them a deeper understanding of this fundamental relationship. (p. 528) i believe that cdst can contribute to this deeper understanding, an understanding informed by how the real world of the classroom operates, especially when our research agendas are informed by teachers’ questions, when our research has ecological validity, which takes into account the complex reality of the classroom, and when findings are communicated in a straightforward and respectful manner, with the expectation of reciprocity (larsen-freeman, 2015). nonetheless, seeing research findings as “applicable” to pedagogy might not be the way to think of them. in my opinion, perhaps the most important contribution of cdst-inspired research to effective teaching and learning is to challenge both researchers and teachers to think differently (larsen-freeman & tedick, 2016) and to cultivate new ways of talking about what transpires in the classroom (borg, 2010; pedrazzini & nava, 2012). i think that cdst offers a very useful way to conceptualize effective teaching and learning, to research it, and to stimulate conversations about enacting it. diane larsen-freeman 390 references ahmadian, j. v., & tavakoli, m. 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(1998). what is participatory action research? action research international, paper 2. retrieved from http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/ari/ p-ywadsworth98.html 61 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (1). 2017. 61-88 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.1.4 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl positive and negative emotions underlie motivation for l2 learning1 peter d. macintyre cape breton university, sydney, nova scotia, canada peter_macintyre@cbu.ca laszlo vincze university of helsinki, finland laszlo.vincze@helsinki.fi abstract the role of basic emotions in sla has been underestimated in both research and pedagogy. the present article examines 10 positive emotions (joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love) and 9 negative emotions (anger, contempt, disgust, embarrassment, guilt, hate, sadness, feeling scared, and being stressed). the emotions are correlated with core variables chosen from three well-known models of l2 motivation: gardner’s integrative motive, clément’s social-contextual model, and dörnyei’s l2 self system. respondents came from italian secondary schools, and most participants were from monolingual italian speaking homes. they described their motivation and emotion with respect to learning german in a region of italy (south tyrol) that features high levels of contact between italians and germans. results show that positive emotions are consistently and strongly correlated with motivation-related variables. correlations involving negative emotions are weaker and less consistently implicated in motivation. the positivity ratio, that is, the relative prevalence of positive over negative emotion, showed strong correlations with all of the motivation constructs. regression 1 this research was supported in part by a grant to the first author from the social science and humanities research council of canada and grants to the second author from the ella and georg ehrnrooth foundation, helsinki and the finnish cultural foundation, helsinki. peter d. macintyre, laszlo vincze 62 analysis supports the conclusion that a variety of emotions, not just one or two key ones, are implicated in l2 motivation processes in this high-contact context. keywords: integrative motive; l2 self system; social-contextual model; broaden and build theory; positivity ratio 1. introduction basic emotions can play a significant role in second language acquisition (sla) and communication processes, an impact that has been underestimated in both the research and pedagogical literature (dewaele, 2012; macintyre, 2002). in sla, the literature on individual differences and learner factors has featured a considerable emphasis on cognitive and ability factors such as working memory, strategies, intelligence, aptitude factors, and others, but in sla they have been discussed as relatively cold cognition, as if emotion played no part in these processes (pintrich, marx, & boyle, 1993). in contrast, a hot cognition approach examines learning “. . . in which multiple levels of cognition are sparked by motivation and emotions in lively sociocultural contexts” (oxford, 2016, p. 25). the relative lack of emphasis on emotion and the roles it plays in both learning and communication experiences has been something of a historical accident, a holdover from a time when a serious treatment of emotions was considered irrelevant by behaviourists, and later when emotions were ignored by cognitively-focussed scholars (fredrickson, 2013a). however, there is rapidly emerging interest in emotion in sla, partially inspired by applying and expanding on the developments being made in positive psychology (gabryś-barker & gałajda, 2016; macintyre, gregersen, & mercer, 2016). in sla, the most notable area in which emotion has been implicated, albeit indirectly, has been in the literature on motivation. three of the major l2 motivation research traditions, gardner’s (1985, 2010) integrative motive, clement’s (1986) social-contextual model, and to a lesser extent dörnyei’s (2005) l2 self-system, feature emotions that influence motivational processes. however, even within the sla motivation literature, the emphasis has not been on basic emotions. recent research has been addressing the imbalance and working to fit emotions into the theoretical framework of sla. the present article will examine the correlations of basic positive and negative emotions, as identified by differential emotions theory (izard, 2007), with established learner characteristics emphasizing motivation-related variables drawn primarily from the well-established models of gardner, clément and dörnyei. positive and negative emotions underlie motivation for l2 learning 63 1.1. emotion is a primary motive there are good reasons to be concerned with emotion as a core process that impacts almost everything we do. in the book descartes’ error, neuroscientist antonio damasio (1994) built the case that human beings are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think. the primacy of emotion emerges in the earliest moments of life as an infant reacts emotionally to every significant stimulus, a process of reacting to events that continues throughout the entire lifespan. all later experiences, including language development, are built on an emotional foundation and are fully integrated with it. at their core, emotional reactions are adaptive and drive efforts at coping with life’s changing situations. active emotions, especially negative ones such as fear or anger, simply take over conscious experience—they cannot easily be ignored (reeve, 2015). languages are difficult to learn and the learning process can arouse intense emotions. as teachers, we might ask students to “stop and think” when emotions run high, but have you ever asked a student to “stop and feel something”? 1.2. defining emotion in psychology, when considered at all, emotion has proven remarkably difficult to define. the definition we will use in the present article was developed by reeve (2015): emotions are “. . . short-lived, feeling-purposive-expressive-bodily responses that help us adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events” (p. 340). under this definition, emotions have both physical and psychological dimensions, they are reactions to the outside world, they express what is going on inside the body to the outside world, and they exist for a reason—each emotion has a purpose. reeve’s definition is representative of the field because it allows for emotions to be more than the sum of their parts, reflecting the complexity of emotional experience. we hasten to note that the adaptations provoked by a given emotional experience may be relatively beneficial on one timescale but harmful when considered over a different period of time.2 although we have chosen reeve’s (2015) definition to guide our work, the difficulty with defining emotions must be emphasized. a leading scholar in the field, caroll izard (2010) surveyed leading emotion researchers but failed to converge on a single definition that captures the subject they study. he did, however, generate the following description of emotion. 2 for example, opting for short term comfort can lead to long term problems, as when a panicky student leaves an important examination before finishing the test. it is the interaction of emotion with other processes that determines the quality of the adaptation for any particular purpose, considered over a particular timescale. peter d. macintyre, laszlo vincze 64 emotion consists of neural circuits (that are at least partially dedicated), response systems, and a feeling state/process that motivates and organizes cognition and action. emotion also provides information to the person experiencing it, and may include antecedent cognitive appraisals and ongoing cognition including an interpretation of its feeling state, expressions or social-communicative signals, and may motivate approach or avoidant behavior, exercise control/regulation of responses, and be social or relational in nature. (p. 367) izard’s (2010) study revealed that theorists working with conceptualizing emotion show moderate to high agreement on the structures and functions of emotion, and they all agree that “there are rapid, automatic, and unconscious connections among emotion, cognition, and action” (p. 366). historically, biologically-oriented theories have proposed a small number (2-8) of basic, universal emotions. cognitively-oriented theories have taken a different track, emphasizing the wide diversity of felt emotion, distinctions between similar emotions (e.g., love for your spouse versus love for your parents) and the many words for emotions in a language such as english (reeve, 2015). at the most basic level, solomon (1980) recognizes only two types of emotions, positive (pleasant) and negative (aversive), each of which triggers the other. the opponent emotional processes can be considered both complex and inherently conflicted or ambivalent (see macintyre, 2007). izard (2007) offered a broader theoretical approach, differential emotions theory (det), which features a combination of basic emotions and higher-order thought processes. according to izard (2007), there are only six basic emotions: interest, joy/happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, and fear, which are generated by patterns of physical responding which are more-or-less automatic and hard wired, and may or may not be registered consciously. the exact number of basic emotions has been widely debated and different theorists use different types of evidence (e.g., patterns of neural firing, facial expressions, neuro-chemical reactions inside the body) to support their viewpoints. although the number of basic emotions has been a long-standing concern for emotion theorists (reeve, 2105), it is the roles that emotions play in situations where languages are learned and used that is likely to be of more concern for the sla field. izard (2007) noted that as people mature, the basic emotions are more and more rarely felt because the complexity of the appraisal of the social situation, experiential memory, and self-related cognition are continuously modifying basic emotions. considering the ways in which adults experience day-to-day emotions, izard goes on to describe ways in which emotion schemas combine low-level physiological (basic emotional) responding with ongoing appraisals of the situation and other cognition in a dynamic process, creating the emotional milieu familiar to most adults. positive and negative emotions underlie motivation for l2 learning 65 in cognitive psychology, a schema is a mental structure to organize information and interpret events. with respect to emotions, a schema combines the various internal physiological signals (e.g., a fast heart beat) with an interpretation of the social context (e.g., giving my first speech in the l2), urge to act (e.g., i want to quit this speech) and other specific cognitions (e.g., the audience looks confused) to produce an emotional interpretation (e.g., an episode of language anxiety arousal). emotion schemas allow for the specificity and differentiation of specific emotional reactions, such as a difference in anxiety between communicating in the l1 versus l2 (see dewaele, 2012; macintyre & gardner, 1989), as well as allowing combinations of emotions into larger complexes. the specific ways in which schemas are formed over time helps to explain individual differences in emotional reactions, providing a powerful source of motivation. “after the period of early development, emotion schemas (not basic emotion per se) constitute by far the most prominent source of human motivation” (izard, 2007, p. 265). even though basic emotions have been found to be ubiquitous across cultures (ekman, 1972), the repertoire of emotion schemas can vary from person to person based on experiences and the ways in which a person learns to differentiate one emotion from another. in this way, emotions provide a basis for both common/shared experiences as well as unique/individual configurations of emotions/motivations. perhaps the single most powerful way to separate emotion schemas is to categorize them as positive or negative felt emotions (solomon, 1980). as a note of caution, the terms positive and negative reflect the vernacular usage of the terms, that is, whether the emotion is pleasant or unpleasant, welcome or unwelcome. however, it is worth noting that all emotions are adaptive and have the potential to contribute to growth and well-being. even emotions that are unpleasant or unwelcome can lead to positive outcomes, as when anger generates a concerted effort to overcome obstacles, or an emotion like disgust leads to rejection of foods that are unhealthy or poisonous (lazarus, 2003). yet a person will experience positive and negative emotions quite differently because they generate qualitatively different types of feelings, and because they serve different functions. 1.3. positive and negative emotions although emotion has been studied for a long time, the emergence of positive psychology as a recognized field has facilitated interest in positive emotion. seligman and csikszentmihalyi (2000) initially proposed three pillars on which positive psychology is founded: positive character traits, enabling institutions, and positive emotion. one of the most significant contributions of positive psychology to date has been to highlight the differences between positive and negative peter d. macintyre, laszlo vincze 66 emotions. fredrickson’s (2001, 2008, 2013a) broaden-and-build theory proposes that negative emotions tend to be focussed and associated with specific thought-action trajectories (anger à destroy obstacle) and positive emotions tend to lead to expansive thinking that broadens a person’s awareness. for example, people in a positive emotional state will notice more items in their visual field, engage more social connections, and will tend to have urges to act in a greater variety of ways, relative to those with negative emotions. the increased attention and elaborated information processing associated with positive emotion has the additional benefit of building personal and social resources for the future (gregersen, macintyre, & meza, 2016). there is some empirical evidence that, over time, positive emotional experiences produce greater resiliency, resourcefulness, social connections, and optimal functioning through broadminded coping efforts (cohn, fredrickson, brown, mikels, & conway, 2009; fredrickson, 2013a). this leads to an interactive, upward spiral connecting positive emotionality to positive outcomes, a process that has the potential to contribute directly to second language development and communication. for a recent review of theory development and evidence supporting the broaden-andbuild theory, see fredrickson (2013a). unfortunately, the role of positive emotions in sla has not received much research attention (dewaele & macintyre, 2014; macintyre & gregersen, 2012). however, there has been some discussion of positive and/or negative emotion in larger, multi-dimensional models of learner factors, in particular the motivation models by gardner (1985, 2010), clément (1980, 1986), and dörnyei (2005). space does not permit a full review of each author’s approach, and readers are encouraged to consult the original works. · gardner’s (1985, 2010) integrative motive: although attitudes are described as the drivers of motivation in gardner’s model, there is a place for both positive emotions (including desire to learn the target language and interest in foreign languages) and negative emotions (target language classroom anxiety and language use anxiety). integrative motivation is defined by a desire to meet and communicate with members of target language community, and there is a variety of emotion schemas that come to be associated with intergroup interaction. gardner’s model also features the concept of instrumental orientation toward learning for pragmatic reasons, such as getting a job using the target language. · clément’s (1980, 1986) socio-contextual model: this model has key features in common with the integrative motive but is focussed on describing acculturation, using a core emotion-related process labelled “fear of assimilation.” in the case of a minority group learning the language of a majority group, the desire to move toward the new language (integrativeness) positive and negative emotions underlie motivation for l2 learning 67 is in a state of tension with the fear of losing one’s heritage language and culture. clément’s model also features a secondary motivational process, self-confidence, which facilitates language acquisition via the interactive effects of low anxiety and high perceptions of communicative competence. the combination of low anxiety and perceived competence features prominently in the model of willingness to communicate that was developed later by macintyre, clément, dörnyei and noels (1998). · dörnyei’s (2005) l2 self-system: dörnyei’s model is centred around three interrelated components: an ideal self that describes what a language learner wants to become in the future, an ought-to self that captures obligations placed on the learner by other people, and a role for prior language experience. although dörnyei emphasizes discrepancies in cognition about the present and the future, there is a role to be played by emotional reactions that emerge from perceived discrepancies and the prior experience of positive and negative emotions associated with language learning contexts. the above language motivation models implicate emotion schemas even if the theoretical attention is directed most explicitly toward attitudes, evaluations, patterns of intergroup contact, willingness to communicate, and self-related imagery. there is a gap in theorizing of motivation in sla when it comes to the role of emotion and its connection to key processes, including motivation. among studies in sla that focus attention directly on emotion, language anxiety has most frequently been studied (see dewaele, 2012; horwitz, 2010; macintyre, in press). language anxiety has long been conceptualized as a drain on motivation for language learning and a source of disruption in the learning process (gardner, 1985; gregersen & macintyre, 2014; horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986). consistent with the idea of an emotion schema described above, research has defined language anxiety as a situation-specific anxiety that develops out of negative experiences with language that lead to the anticipation of further difficulties (macintyre & gardner, 1989). the consequences of anxiety arousal include difficulties in processing linguistic material (macintyre & gardner, 1994), lower academic success (aida, 1994; horwitz et al., 1986), and disruption of social-communicative processes that lead to language development (dewaele, 2002, 2007, 2010), including lower willingness to communicate in the target language (macintyre, baker, clément, & donovan, 2003). whereas language anxiety and its associated cognitive and emotional processes exert a generally negative impact on learning and communicating, there is theoretical work that has begun to describe the role of specific positive emotions in language acquisition and communication (macintyre & mercer, 2014). arnold and brown (1999) argue for bringing research into better balance, “much peter d. macintyre, laszlo vincze 68 more attention is given to the question of negative emotions . . . [one] should not lose sight of the importance of developing the positive” (p. 2). in doing so, dewaele and macintyre (2014, 2016) examined language anxiety and foreign language enjoyment as the “two faces of janus” or “the left and right feet of the learner,” asking whether anxiety and enjoyment are simply opposite ends of one continuum or two different types of experience. dewaele and macintyre (2014) report data from a survey of over 1700 learners that showed anxiety and enjoyment correlated modestly (r = -.36) but that the distribution of scores was very different between the two emotions. further, anxiety and enjoyment showed different patterns of relationships to a number of demographic factors. the authors conclude that anxiety and enjoyment are best seen as two interrelated dimensions, each of which with its own trajectory of development over time. “conceptualized as two separate dimensions, the question becomes one of describing a constructive balance between enjoyment and anxiety, rather than implicitly taking them as opposite ends of the same dimension” (p. 262). indeed, given that learners inevitably experience both communicative difficulties and successes over time, the ratio of positive to negative emotions might be especially important in fl contexts. fredrickson has labelled this the positivity ratio.3 one of the advantages of calculating a ratio of positive to negative emotions is that it allows researchers to control for individual differences in base rates of affect intensity; some people report experiencing more intense emotions more often than others, who are relatively emotionally quiet and stable (larsen & diener, 1987). by examining how positive and negative emotions correlate with motivation using both raw scores and relative positivity, we gain a more complete perspective on the connections between emotion and motivation. one of the drawbacks of calculating a positivity ratio, however, is losing the nuances of the contributions of specific positive or negative emotions that predict specific motivational variables. for this reason, we will include both raw correlations between emotions and motivation-related variables as well as a set of stepwise multiple regression equations predicting the motivational variables based on the scores for the specific emotions. 3 positivity ratio is also the title of fredrickson’s book for a general audience in which she argues for an artificially precise 2.9:1 ratio of positive to negative emotions for optimal functioning, based on work published by fredrickson and losada (2005). in a recent publication (fredrickson, 2014) she has abandoned the specificity of this numerical ratio but retained the more general argument that greater positivity ratios promote healthy functioning and that the idea is worth studying in future research. positive and negative emotions underlie motivation for l2 learning 69 1.4. the present study the present study was designed to investigate the relationships between a set of positive and negative emotions and motivational factors in a second language context. the emotions are defined and measured by the modified differential emotions scale (frederickson, 2013a). the scale measures 10 representative positive emotions (joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love) and 10 representative negative emotions (anger, shame, contempt, disgust, embarrassment, guilt, hate, sadness, feeling scared, and being stressed). to help respondents focus on the specific emotion schema being assessed, each emotion is defined not by a single word, but rather a cluster of three closely related words (e.g., joy is defined by the triad joyful, glad, and happy). given the close connection between motivation and emotion, it is important to know how these emotions link to key motivational constructs that have been established in the sla literature. specifically we sample from work related to the socio-educational model (gardner, 2010), the l2 self-system (dörnyei, 2005), and the socio-contextual model (clément, 1980, 1986) in an effort to connect basic emotions to well-established concepts of language learner motivation factors. for the most part, the gap in theorizing emotion in sla means that these specific emotions have not been studied directly, so specific predictions involving correlations of each emotion with motivation will not be offered. rather, we are taking a first step in empirically testing correlations among emotions and well-established sla motivation-related variables. the specific motivation concepts included in the present study include integrative orientation (gardner, 2010) that reflects reasons for language learning to develop relationships with target language speakers. based on taguchi, magid, and papi (2009), we will also measure both promotional and preventative instrumentality reflecting reasons for learning a language to gain something of value (e.g., a good job) or avoid losing something valuable. from dörnyei’s l2 (2005) self system, we sampled (a) the l2 ideal self (dörnyei & chan, 2013), which describes a vision for future language learning success, (b) the l2 oughtto self, which describes obligations to learn, such as to satisfy parental demands, and (c) l2 learning efforts reflecting the time and energy spent on learning. inspired by clément (1986), we sampled concepts related to l2 self-confidence, which reflects the perception of skills in the l2 and low levels of language anxiety. given that prior research has used measures of anxiety and perceived competence, both separately and combined together, we will employ measures of both concepts (language anxiety and perceived competence), plus the aggregated variable (self-confidence). clément’s (1986) model places a great deal of emphasis on contact between the language groups that we measured with the peter d. macintyre, laszlo vincze 70 perceived quantity and quality of contact with target language speakers. finally, we used a measure developed by tropp, erkut, coll, alarcon, and garcia (1999) to examine psychological acculturation, or identification with the native and target language groups. research into l2 motivation is becoming more concerned with the learning context. ushioda (2009) emphasizes the connections between theorizing about motivation and the specific contexts in which the research is conducted. the local context for language use is also likely to be relevant to the patterns of emotion experienced by learners over time. this study was conducted in a location where language groups interact with each other on a regular basis: south-tyrol, italy. given the role that intergroup contact and communication play in the various motivational processes being sampled, we expect that emotions will be correlated with motivation in a context featuring frequent contact between language groups. 1.4.1. the region although german speakers constitute merely 0.5% of the population of italy, in the province of south-tyrol they make up two thirds of the local population with about 300,000 speakers. south-tyrol is an autonomous province, where both italian and german are official languages (e.g., bonell & winkler, 2006; oberrauch, 2006). according to the autonomy statute, filling any position in public administration requires skills in both official languages. consequently, applicants must pass the so-called bilingualism exam, which has four levels, depending on the qualifications of the applicant, and the type of the position applied for. the two language groups have their own school systems. while in italian language schools the language of instruction is italian, german is taught as a mandatory second language from the second grade of the elementary school; in a similar way, in german language schools, the language of instruction is german, but italian is taught as a mandatory second language (meraner, 2004). however, empirical studies demonstrate that italian speakers usually have considerably poorer skills in german than german speakers have in italian (e.g., paladino, poddesu, rauzi, vaes, cadinu, & forer, 2009). in addition, relations between the language groups can be characterized by a certain level of social distance due to the historical conflicts (e.g., eichinger, 2002; schweigkofler, 2000), most importantly, the italianization policy led by mussolini after south-tyrol became a part of italy in 1919, which banned the use of german at all levels of society (e.g., schools) and aimed to make the region monolingually italian (see e.g., steininger, 2003). in this region, issues of integration between language groups are features of everyday life. the ethnolinguistic vitality of both languages is fairly high (e.g., vincze & harwood, 2014), that is, they possess a relatively high status, strong demographic capital and broad institutional support (giles, bourhis, & taylor, positive and negative emotions underlie motivation for l2 learning 71 1977). also, there is the opportunity for frequent contact between the language groups in everyday life. although dörnyei’s l2 self system has wide applicability across regions of the world, using south-tyrol as a research setting makes the social-psychological models of gardner and clément especially relevant as we examine how emotions relate with various established motivational constructs. 1.4.2. research questions in developing expectations for patterns of correlation, we can note that both motivation and emotion can be broadly categorized as positive/facilitative/approachoriented versus being negative/inhibitive/avoidance-oriented (macintyre & serroul, 2015). the nature of most of the motivation constructs sampled here is facilitative and approach-oriented, including positive attitudes toward integrativeness and the instrumental value of language learning, pleasant contact and positive acculturation experiences, exerting more effort, feeling competent and confident. we expect that some or all of the approach-oriented motivation variables will correlate positively with positive emotions and negatively with negative emotions. however, the size of the correlations cannot be predicted based on prior research. the one clearly avoidance-oriented motivational construct is language anxiety, and we expect that it will show the reverse pattern, that is correlate negatively with positive emotions and positively with negative emotions. perhaps the most uncertain of the constructs is the ought-to self, which features a sense of obligation that might be welcome or unwelcome for learners, and so the pattern of correlations between the ought-to self and various emotions will be tested without making any specific predictions. the research questions can be summarized as follows: 1. how are the different emotions associated with motivational variables? what are the correlations between emotions and l2 motivation variables? 2. what emotions predict best the motivational variables? using multiple regression, which positive and negative emotions best predict the l2 motivational variables? 2. method 2.1. participants the participants (n = 182) were sampled from italian language secondary schools, and most participants were from monolingual italian speaking homes (n = 161). approximately 66% of the respondents were females, 34% males, and all participants were between the ages of 15 and 18. peter d. macintyre, laszlo vincze 72 2.2. instruments the following instruments were used in the study to measure the following constructs: 1. integrative orientation. integrative orientation was measured with three items (e.g., “learning german is important because it will allow me to be at more ease with german speakers”) using a 5-point likert-scale for responses, as described in gardner (2010) and clément and baker (2001). the reliability of the scale was good (α = .82). 2. instrumental orientation. four items measured promotional instrumentality and four measured preventive instrumentality borrowed from taguchi, magid, and papi (2009). items used a 5-point likert-scale response format. however, because of the low overall reliability of both the promotional instrumentality (α = .63) and the preventive instrumentality scales (α = .58), we collapsed the eight instrumentality items into one compound scale, which had a good reliability (α = .75). 3. l2 learning emotions. the participants were asked to indicate how often they have experienced each of 19 specific positive and negative emotions during german learning/studies. the measure was based on fredrickson’s differential emotions scale (fredrickson, 2013a). each emotion item was described with three adjectives to help respondents focus on the intended meaning of the item. for example, the trio of “amused, fun-loving, or silly” made one item that we refer to as “amused”; the combination of “angry, irritated, or annoyed” was another item that we refer to as “angry.” each emotion trio generated a single rating on a 5-point likert scale. treated as composite measures, reliability of both positive emotions (α = .88) and negative emotions (α = .85) was good. however, attention in the present study will be directed toward 19 specific emotions. there are 19 emotions, not 20 as in fredrickson (2013a), because two of the negative emotions converged on the same terms when translated into italian, resulting in 9 negative and 10 positive emotions in the present study. 4. l2 ideal self. five items were used to assess l2 ideal self as described, for example, in dörnyei and chan (2013). we used a 5-point likert response scale for items such as “i can imagine myself being a very competent speaker of german” and “when i think of the future, i can imagine myself using german in a variety of ways.” the scale had a good reliability (α = .73). 5. l2 ought-to self. five 5-point items assessed l2 ought-to self based on taguchi et al. (2009). the scale included items such as “i have to learn german because if i don’t learn it, my parents will be disappointed with positive and negative emotions underlie motivation for l2 learning 73 me,” and “people around me believe that i must learn german to be an educated person.” the scale had an acceptable reliability (α = .68). 6. l2 learning efforts. l2 learning efforts were measured with five 5-point items adapted from taguchi et al. (2009). the scale included sample items such as “i am working hard at learning german” and “i would like to spend lots of time learning german.” the scale had a good reliability (α = .78). 7. l2 anxiety. l2 use anxiety was measure with eight 5-point items as described by clément (1986; see also clément & baker 2001). the scale included items such as “i feel uneasy whenever i speak german” and “when i make a telephone call, i get mixed up if i have to speak german”. the reliability of the scale was good (α = .76). 8. l2 competence. l2 competence was measured with four 5-point items. participants were asked how well they evaluate their skills in reading, speaking, writing and understanding german (1 = very poor, 5 = very good). the reliability of the scale was good (α = .75). 9. l2 confidence. l2 confidence combined the competence and the l2 anxiety scales. l2 anxiety items were reversed so that higher values indicate greater confidence with the l2. the reliability of the scale was good (α = .90). 10. acculturation. acculturation was measured with ten 5-point items by means of the psychological acculturation scale (tropp et al., 1999). respondents were asked which language group they feel they share most of their values with; they feel the most comfortable with; they know the most about the history, traditions, and customs of; and so forth. the scale had a good reliability (α = .90). 11. quality of contact. the quality of contact was measured with six 5-point items (e.g., “my contact with german speakers is usually enriching,” and “my interaction with german speakers is often distant and hostile”) adapted from clément and baker (2001). the scale had a good reliability (α = .82) 12. quantity of contact. the quantity of contact was measured with three 5point items based on islam and hewstone (1993). respondents were asked how much contact they had with german speakers within their family and friends, how often they were engaged in informal conversations with german speakers, and how often they visited the home of german speakers. the reliability of the scale was good (α = .73). higher values indicate more frequent contact and better quality of contact. 2.3. procedure a letter of invitation was sent to two italian language secondary schools in bolzano/bozen. after they agreed to participate in the study, self-report questionnaire peter d. macintyre, laszlo vincze 74 data was collected by a research assistant in december 2014 and january 2015. participants received instructions about the research orally and in writing. participants were also reminded that participation in the research is voluntary and anonymous. 3. results 3.1. correlations among the measures the first research question examines the pattern of correlation between positive emotions, negative emotions, and l2 motivation variables. table 1 shows the correlations between the positive emotions and the motivation variables. using a conventional alpha level of p < .05, all but four correlations are significant. the consistency of correlations among positive emotions and motivation-related constructs is noteworthy. as expected, the correlations between positive emotions and motivation are positive, with the exception of language anxiety which consistently generates negative correlations. both the composite measure of positive emotion and the positivity ratio are significantly correlated with all of the motivation-related variables and the correlations tend to be strong, with a median among the 11 correlations of r = .431, p < .001 for positive emotions and r = .531, p < .001 for the positivity ratio. this data suggests that there is a strong and consistent tendency for higher scores on motivation-related variables to be associated with higher levels of positive emotions and a larger ratio of positive to negative emotions. overall, it is clear that all of the positive emotions are related to the l2 motivational concepts included in the present study. table 1 correlations of positive emotions and the positivity ratio with other learner factors l2 anx. confidence acculturation integrative instrumental ideal self ought-to self l2 effort competence contact quant’y contact quality amused -.367** .416** .282** .306** .214** .448** .234** .414** .394** .291** .468** awe -.069 .141 .225** .293** .168* .284** .277** .346** .267** .263** .223** grateful -.252** .344** .190* .226** .188* .328** .211** .358** .445** .109 .360** hopeful -.161* .245** .199** .276** .200** .350** .311** .449** .366** .219** .326** inspired -.286** .353** .156* .350** .255** .411** .261** .434** .390** .232** .327** interest -.182* .235** .280** .442** .291** .275** .287** .422** .291** .178* .432** joyful -.260** .324** .300** .387** .263** .400** .229** .421** .366** .288** .351** love -.259** .321** .378** .326** .251** .411** .209** .370** .352** .224** .262** proud -.289** .361** .141 .233** .260** .362** .236** .438** .409** .221** .275** serene -.335** .399** .209** .241** .200** .394** .224** .314** .417** .247** .312** positive emotions -.365** .463** .361** .431** .348** .563** .358** .565** .536** .320** .478** positivity ratio -.528** .607** .346** .336** .189* .531** .222** .528** .585** .340** .581** positive and negative emotions underlie motivation for l2 learning 75 the negative emotions produced a less consistent pattern of correlations with motivation-related constructs. as expected, the correlations between negative emotions and motivation variables tend to be negative, except for language anxiety, which correlates positively with these emotions. considering the columns of table 2, five of the motivation variables show significant correlations with all of the specific negative emotions. in particular, the measures of confidence, competence, quality of contact and the ideal self each correlated as expected with all of the negative emotions. however two scales, the ought-to self and instrumental orientations, showed non-significant correlations with the composite score for negative emotions. considering the specific negative emotions individually, ought-to self correlated with only two emotions (anger and hate). instrumental orientation also correlated weakly with all of the negative emotions, showing small correlations with hate, anger and contempt. if attention is focussed on the emotions, as shown in the rows of table 2, on the one hand a consistent pattern was observed for both anger and hate, which correlated significantly with all of the motivation-related constructs. on the other hand, feelings of guilt and embarrassment were not especially well correlated with motivation variables, correlating with four and five variables respectively. for ease of comparison, the final lines in tables 1 and 2 provide the same information, that is, correlations involving the ratio of positive to negative emotions (the positivity ratio). table 2 correlations of negative emotions with other learner factors l2 anx. confidence acculturation integrative instrumental ideal self ought-to self l2 effort competence contact quant’y contact quality angry .316** -.376** -.163* -.258** -.162* -.384** -.226** -.395** -.392** -.221** -.425** contempt .197** -.217** -.150* -.295** -.151* -.189* -.086 -.325** -.213** -.051 -.386** disgust .361** -.389** -.251** -.354** -.129 -.263** -.093 -.294** -.335** -.154* -.504** embar. .299** -.311** -.037 -.030 -.005 -.211** -.014 -.137 -.246** -.132 -.226** guilty .203** -.207** .056 -.079 .040 -.159* -.073 -.125 -.142 -.015 -.198** hate .348** -.386** -.285** -.354** -.205** -.371** -.209** -.344** -.360** -.172* -.473** sad .418** -.418** -.182* -.201** -.009 -.268** -.022 -.210** -.291** -.139 -.394** scared .345** -.380** -.202** -.116 .023 -.249** .042 -.138 -.322** -.159* -.290** stress .399** -.423** -.193** -.087 -.037 -.305** -.069 -.091 -.337** -.118 -.282** negative emotions .479** -.420** -.265** -.261** -.089 -.391** -.093 -.323** -.420** -.184* -.509** positivity ratio -.528** .607** .346** .336** .189* .531** .222** .528** .585** .340** .581** 3.2. regression analyses the second research question examines emotions that best predict the motivation variables. to address the question, and to limit the overlap among emotion predictors, the 19 positive and negative emotions were entered into stepwise peter d. macintyre, laszlo vincze 76 regression equations. each of the 11 motivation variables served in turn as the criterion. only predictors that enter the regression equation at the p < .05 level, and which are not subsequently eliminated (p < .10), will be reported in the final regression results. each of the motivation-related constructs generated a significant prediction equation. overall, tables 3 and 4 show that 15 different emotions appear as predictors, with amused (6 times), angry (5 times), and peaceful (3 times) being the only ones to appear more than twice. table 3 also shows that 60% of the significant predictors (21 out of 35) are positive emotions. each motivation-related construct shows between 2 and 5 emotions as significant predictors. finally, it can be noted that in every case, the positivity ratio shown in table 1 provides slightly less predictive power than the stepwise multiple regression equation, although in many cases the level of prediction provided by each is quite similar. table 3 results of stepwise regressions predicting motivation-related constructs criterion r predictor 1 predictor 2 predictor 3 predictor 4 predictor 5 competence .63 grateful .30 angry -.23 scared -.20 peaceful .22 confidence .63 amused .22 embarrassed -.16 angry -.19 sad -.20 peaceful .19 quality .63 disgust -.26 amused .31 angry -.22 effort .62 amused .25 proud .26 angry -.28 awe .18 stressed .18 ideal .59 amused .31 love .26 angry -.23 anxiety .56 sad .26 amused -.23 embarrassed .18 peaceful -.15 integrative .51 interest .24 joy .23 disgust -.18 acculturation .45 love .39 scared -.22 quantity .38 amused .24 joyful .20 ought .36 hope .28 awe .20 instrumental .32 inspired .19 proud .18 note. all rs are significant at p < .001; all beta coefficients are significant at p < .05. table 4 frequency of the differential emotions as predictors in the regression equations amused (6) angry (5) peaceful (3) proud (2) joy (2) love (2) awe (2) scared (2) embarrassed (2) sad (2) disgust (2) grateful (1) stressed (1) hope (1) inspired (1) positive and negative emotions underlie motivation for l2 learning 77 4. discussion the present data provide evidence that both positive and negative emotions are correlated with sla motivation processes in the context of south tyrol. further, the data suggest a substantial role for positive emotion, a topic not widely studied in sla but which might provide several productive lines of enquiry for future research (macintyre & mercer, 2014). these results contribute to the developing interest in applications of positive psychology in sla (gabryś-barker & gałajda, 2016; macintyre et al., 2016), and in particular theory related to positive emotion (arnold & brown, 1999; dewaele & macintyre, 2014, 2016). 4.1. a role for emotions overall, the present data show that motivation-related constructs are more consistently and strongly correlated with positive emotions than with negative emotions. only four correlations involving positive emotions (3%) failed to reach the standard p < .05 level of significance compared to 31 non-significant correlations involving negative emotions (26%). but it is the magnitude of the correlations that provides strong support for the potentially motivational force of positive emotion. izard (2007, p. 265) suggested that emotions were “by far the most prominent source of human motivation.” in the sla literature, the role of attitudes and cognition has been emphasized, especially in the theories of gardner and dörnyei respectively. however, the present data show that emotion, and in particular positive emotion, is strongly associated with motivational processes. it is worth noting that positive emotions correlated more strongly with gardner’s integrative orientation than with instrumental orientation, clément’s quality of contact better than frequency of contact, and dörnyei’s ideal self better than ought-to self. considering the literature as a whole, integrativeness, the ideal self, and positive contact between language groups all have been regarded as key to sustained motivation for language learning. the present data suggest that there may be a significant connection between emotion and those variables, which is worth further exploration. perhaps it can be considered “good news” that negative emotions tend to be less consistently correlated with motivation. among the negative emotions, the only two that correlate with all of the motivation-related variables are anger and hate; the regressions showed that anger was the single most frequent predictor among the negative emotions. it is difficult to imagine emotions with stronger motivational force than anger and hate; their intensity is undeniable. “anger is not only the most passionate emotion, it is also the most dangerous, because its purpose is to destroy barriers in the environment” (reeve, 2015, p. peter d. macintyre, laszlo vincze 78 408). the intensity of anger can be highly disruptive to ongoing thought and behaviour; anger makes it difficult to think clearly and can lead to verbal and/or physical aggression (tafrate, kassinove, & dundin, 2002). dewaele (2012) devotes a full chapter to understanding the ways in which multilinguals express anger, a process that is both inherently difficult and socially important. in his analysis of the pragmatics of anger expression, dewaele notes that “. . . anger, cursing and swearing involve a certain amount of loss of control over one’s emotions, and may very well include a similar lack of control over linguistic resources, which makes it all the more challenging in the foreign language” (p. 109). several studies have shown that less proficient learners have considerable difficulty with pragmatic expression of emotion in the target language (dewaele & pavlenko, 2002; graham, hamblin, & feldstein, 2001; rintell, 1984). one of the limitations of the present study is that we do not have data concerning the triggers of the various emotions; we do not know, for example, whether negative emotions such as anger and hate are triggered by intrapersonal factors, linguistic factors, social factors, power relations or political differences, or by other sources. but the present results do suggest that those who experience anger more often also tend to have higher anxiety and lower scores on perceived competence, effort at learning, confidence, ideal l2 selves, with the strongest correlate being lower quality of intergroup contact. it is ironic that the experience of intense, negative emotions such as anger may be partially responsible for inhibiting learners from acquiring the vocabulary with which they can express and deal with those same emotions. at their core, emotions provide information about the individual’s reaction to ongoing events. defined as short-lived experiences, emotions function to facilitate situational adaptation. in the second language context, emotions may both contribute to and impair learning and communication processes, operating in complex ways. it is not a simple matter of negative emotions being “bad” and positive emotions being “good” for learning, because all emotions are fundamentally adaptive—the issue is the quality of that adaptation over a given period of time. the present study examined emotions on a timescale that asked respondents to report on typical patterns of emotional arousal. the regression analyses show that positive and negative emotions combine to predict most of the motivational constructs studied here, with the exception of the ought-to self and instrumental orientation (which do not correlate with the negative emotions) and quantity of contact (showing a weak but significant correlation with the composite measure of negative emotion). it is an open question whether the pattern of correlations observed on this timescale would also apply to the dynamics of emotions as they wax and wane during the time span of a specific situation, such as a conversation or classroom lesson. to address emotions as they are experienced positive and negative emotions underlie motivation for l2 learning 79 moment-to-moment requires a different methodology than the one used in the present study, especially, if researchers are interested in describing the coordination of positive and negative emotional experiences during communication. the adaptive value of both positive and negative emotion is best considered a conjoint, intertwined process (dewaele & macintyre, 2014, 2016). for example, even though language anxiety has been consistently associated with negative outcomes (horwitz, 2010; macintyre, 1999, in press), emotion theory would suggest that it is necessary to consider how anxiety might in some way aide adaptation. the present regression analysis shows that language anxiety is predicted by two positive and two negative emotions. it is not especially surprising that embarrassment or sadness would predict anxiety, but it is instructive to think about how language anxiety might be related to feeling amused and peaceful. if anxiety arises as a result of a threat to one’s positive sense of self (cohen & norst, 1989), then part of its function might be to motivate a learner to take steps to restore one’s positive self-image. this can be done on short timescales by avoiding communication to minimize the chance of making mistakes or on longer timescales by avoiding target language speaking contexts. however, the regression analysis predicting language anxiety appears to be suggesting that anxiety might be ameliorated by arousal of an opposing positive emotion such as amusement (perhaps the ability to laugh at one’s self) or a sense of being comfortable, secure and at peace with the present situation. in essence, it is possible that competing positive emotions can ward off a negative reaction such as anxiety arousal before it really gets going. as suggested by fredrickson’s (2013b) work with the positivity ratio, the combined, interacting effects of positive and negative emotions might be especially interesting as a resource helping to sustain motivation. 4.2. interactions among emotions the interaction among emotions, and the motivational correlates of those interactions, is evident in the present data. examining the regression results, in the context of south-tyrol the two emotions most often predictive of second language motivation-related constructs were amused and angry. the function of anger to destroy obstacles has been described above; amusement can work in opposition to anger. fredrickson (2013a, p. 6) suggests: amusement occurs when people appraise their current circumstances as involving some sort on nonserious social incongruity. it can erupt, for instance, in the wake of a harmless speech error or physical blunder. amusement creates urges to share a laugh and find creative ways to continue the joviality. as people follow these urges, they build and solidify enduring social bonds. peter d. macintyre, laszlo vincze 80 in the present data, amusement correlated with all of the motivation-related variables and was significantly predictive of six variables in the regressions: confidence, frequency and quality of contact, effort, ideal l2 self, and language anxiety (negatively correlated). the enduring social bonds that fredrickson describes likely emerge from intergroup contact wherein mistakes and gaffes can be taken as matters to be ignored, accommodated, or perhaps laughed off. reducing the seriousness of the emotional reaction to communication errors has been recommended for learners who experience language anxiety as a way to minimize self-critical thoughts and deal with perfectionistic tendencies (gregersen & horwitz, 2002; gregersen & macintyre, 2014). the correlation between amusement and effort further suggests that a setting that allows for amusement might facilitate sustained engagement with the other language group. perhaps then it is not surprising that amusement is also predictive of both quality of contact and confidence with the language. among the 19 emotions, the single strongest correlate of the ideal l2 self is amusement. this unexpected result might suggest that amusement facilitates intergroup contact and language learning in this particular context in ways that have not yet been described in the sla literature. if ability to find humour in mistakes and to enjoy minor social incongruities becomes a valued part of the linguistic landscape, facilitating frequent and enjoyable contact, then it makes sense for learners in this context to integrate amusement into their sense of future self and who they want to become. anger also appears frequently in the regression equations. the core function of anger is to remove obstacles or barriers (reeve, 2015). the negative regression coefficients suggest that lower levels of anger facilitate more frequent and pleasant social contact, attendant feelings of confidence and competence, and development of the ideal self. with the exception of dewaele’s (2012) work, the role of anger itself has not been widely studied in the sla literature, but the present results suggest that higher levels of anger are related to both intergroup contact and the sense of self. further examination of the regression results reveals that feeling peaceful (serene and content) correlated with all of the motivation-related concepts and appeared as a significant predictor in three of the regression equations, specifically predicting competence, confidence and low anxiety. there have been efforts recently to link peace and language learning, notably, oxford’s (2013) book the language of peace: communicating to create harmony. fredrickson (2013a, p. 4) suggests that the cluster of emotions involving peacefulness, . . . emerges when people interpret their current circumstances as utterly cherished, right, or satisfying. people feel serenity, for instance, when they feel comfortable, at ease in, or at one with their situation. serenity creates the urge to savor those current circumstances and integrate them into new priorities or values. the durable resources positive and negative emotions underlie motivation for l2 learning 81 created through savoring and integrating include a more refined and complex sense of oneself and of one’s priorities. the combination of amusement and peace, evident in two of the regressions, provides a potentially powerful social and emotional context that can help develop competence and confidence when people feel at ease in the social context, further emphasizing the contributions to language learning from interacting emotions. the highly consistent pattern of correlations observed for the positivity ratio suggest that positive emotions make a significant contribution to a variety of motivational processes. the five strongest correlates of the positivity ratio were (in descending order): confidence, competence, quality of contact, effort, and a lack of anxiety. the results are remarkably consistent with clément’s (1980, 1986) socio-contextual model, which emphasizes the psychological effects of contact between language communities. according to research done by clément’s group, . . . contact with or confidence in an l2 leads individuals to identify with the l2 community. this process, in turn, guides individuals to more positive representations of the l2 culture. in day-to-day life, this research suggests that learning an l2 might positively influence intergroup relations. in the context of learning an l2, we see greater identification with that community, which, in turn, leads us to feel more positively about the community . . . it is also conceivable that having positive cultural representations of a language community will motivate individuals to learn that l2. (rubenfeld, clément, lussier, lebrun, & auger, 2006, p. 627) the present data provide evidence that both positive and negative emotions support the intergroup processes at play. the positivity ratio captures the notion that the stronger positive emotions are relative to negative emotions, the more favourable the intergroup, interpersonal and intrapersonal outcomes are likely to be. the present study has several limitations that should be taken into consideration. data were gathered using a convenience sample of young persons in a cross-sectional research design. the data do not allow for an understanding of the developmental patterns of emotions and the potential for their relationships to motivation to change over time. the data also reflect a longer term time scale than the ones on which emotions are felt in situ. respondents reported on long term tendencies to experience specific emotions rather than the specific emotions that they were feeling at a given time. whether older adults show a similar pattern of emotional reactions and correlates with language learning motivation, whether shorter and longer timescales might show different patterns, and whether those patterns change as the present cohort ages, is an empirical question for future research. further, the social context provides for intergroup contact that might serve to magnify the role of emotions compared to peter d. macintyre, laszlo vincze 82 contexts with infrequent contact between groups, although that is an empirical question awaiting future research. although group-level analysis can describe general patterns, the research approach used here does not speak to patterns of emotions experienced by specific individuals. it is not known to what extent emotions experienced by individuals, or their changes over time, mirror the group-level patterns reported here (see molenaar & campbell, 2009). it also is an open question whether positive emotion would show the same patterns in foreign language contexts, such as learning english in japan or china (jin, de bot, & keijzer, 2015). finally, the translation of the differential emotions measure into the italian language raises an issue that has been identified in the literature on emotions, that is, to what extent emotions are universal and cross-cultural versus shaped by learning within a social context. the difficulty in translating one of the negative emotion items (“ashamed, humiliated, or disgraced” converged on the same terms in italian as “embarrassed, self-conscious, or blushing”) suggests that emotion schemas are influenced by language and culture. although a small number of basic emotions might be powerful and universal, it is emotion schemas that account for the majority of felt emotions (izard, 2007; reeve, 2015) and they are contextualized within languages. in spite of its limitations, the present study provides new evidence for the relevance and importance of emotion in the motivation for language learning. the particular role of specific positive and negative emotions in language learning warrants further investigation, but it is the interaction of positive and negative emotion that has strongest potential to inform future research and theory development. the positivity ratio described in the present study emphasizes a concern for the interactions among emotions. understanding the accumulated effect of emotional arousal over time can inform motivation theory and research. however, the dynamic interaction of positive and negative emotion during language learning and communication processes, that is, their coordinated effects in real time at the individual level, would also be an especially interesting avenue of research. 5. conclusions the study of emotion in sla in general, and positive emotion in particular, is a potentially rich and powerful avenue for future investigations. we have found that there are a large number of emotions that are correlated with well-established motivational variables in sla, including gardner’s (2010) integrative and instrumental orientations, dörnyei’s (2005) l2 self-system, and clément’s (1986) socio-contextual variables including quantity and quality of intergroup contact. the positivity ratio (frederickson, 2013b) provides one way to capture succinctly the notion that positive and negative emotions interact and, to the positive and negative emotions underlie motivation for l2 learning 83 extent that persons tend to experience positive emotions more often than negative ones, correlate well with language learning motivation. acknowledgements the authors would like to express their sincere appreciation to the staff and students of the schools that participated in the research. they would also like to thank esther able for her assistance in preparing the manuscript. peter d. macintyre, laszlo vincze 84 references aida, y. 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(2014). objective local vitality and linguistic networks as predictors of perceived vitality. journal of multilingual and multicultural development, 35(3), 209-215. 293 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (2). 2016. 293-318 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.2.6 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl efl teacher motivation in-situ: co-adaptive processes, openness and relational motivation over interacting timescales richard j. sampson gunma university, japan sampson@gunma-u.ac.jp abstract this paper presents an exploratory case study of the classroom motivational dynamics of an english as a foreign language (efl) teacher at a japanese technology college. the article examines how motivation evolved in-context over various timescales through interactions with affect and identity. an introspective research journal generated rich, qualitative data concerning fluctuations in teacher motivation over one academic year. the analysis also drew on student journal data to provide a different perspective on teacher reflections. the study applied a thematic analysis, with “theoretical comparison” (corbin & strauss, 2008) to understand teacher motivation from a “person-in-context relational view” (ushioda, 2009). the article utilises the properties of complex systems to render insight to the evolution of teacher motivation as open to influences “external” to the classroom, yet fundamentally tied to adaptive experiences with a particular class group. a variety of diagrammatic tools are also employed to illuminate the relational development of teacher motivation, affect and identity constantly occurring over interacting timescales. keywords: teacher motivation; complex systems theory; person-in-context relational view; english as a foreign language; case study richard j. sampson 294 1. introduction study into learner motivation is without doubt one of the most prolific areas of second language acquisition (sla) research. this rich history has involved a move from social psychological constructs, to cognitively-informed situated theorizing, process-oriented perspectives, and more recently to socio-dynamic approaches to conceptualising and exploring the motivation of second language learners (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). puzzlingly, however, while a good deal of additional language learning worldwide occurs in instructed, classroom settings, theorizing and investigation of the motivation of teachers in these learning spaces is still relatively scarce. what is it that drives second language teachers in their day-to-day enterprise in the classroom? a small but slowly growing body of research into teacher motivation goes some way to providing insight: there appear to be a variety of contextual factors that impact negatively on teacher motivation in both general education (pelletier, seguin-levesque, & legault, 2002) and language teaching (doyle & kim, 1999; menyhart, 2008; pennington, 1995); examples include the influence of the school climate, class sizes, resources, relations with coworkers, school leadership structures and attitudes, workload, salary, student characteristics, and acceptance by the school community of teacher autonomy. additionally, teacher motivation has been associated in a more positive fashion with intrinsic facets of the teaching process. this motivation stems from teachers’ desire to shape future society through working with young people and contributing to individual student growth (doyle & kim, 1999; erkaya, 2013; kassabgy, boraie, & schmidt, 2001; martin, 2006; pelletier et al., 2002; pennington, 1995). despite some promising qualitative research in the sla field (see, e.g. menyhart, 2008), empirical work to date has however seen a preponderance of large-scale survey studies. such instruments render one-off, averaged snapshots, removed from distinct classrooms. moreover, while they provide insights into factors impacting on teacher motivation, they do little to illuminate the fluctuating interplay of these elements as teacher motivation develops over time and in-context. as kaplan (2014) summarises, “most motivational research has been either correlational research that employed self-report surveys or experimental research conducted under artificial conditions, both of which are quite different from teachers’ experiences of the complex and dynamic environments of classrooms” (p. 64). the current article takes a situated approach to understanding language teacher motivation. the paper describes research in which an efl teacher (the author) was conceptualised as a particular “teacher case.” through re-exploring data obtained in a wider study of classroom language learner motivation efl teacher motivation in-situ: co-adaptive processes, openness and relational motivation over. . . 295 (sampson, 2016) from a different angle through case study, the paper describes the contextualised ebb and flow of teacher motivation in the language classroom. while the article provides insights into the motivational dynamics of only one teacher, as richardson, watt and karabenick (2014) note, “teachers’ motivations matter in both the short and the longer term, not only for their own well-being and career satisfaction, but also for how they relate to and interact with students” (p. xv). by bringing to light dynamic issues relevant in one context of teaching practice, the article therefore draws on complex systems theory (cst) to encourage future research to take a situated approach in exploring the relational evolution of teacher motivation in the language classroom. 2. literature review 2.1. complex systems theory and relational motivation cst is a theoretical and philosophical position that has been gaining increasing attention in the field of applied linguistics (see, e.g. the seminal work of larsenfreeman & cameron, 2008). mitchell (2009) defines a complex system as one in which “large networks of components with no central control and simple rules of operation give rise to complex collective behaviour, sophisticated information processing, and adaptation via learning or evolution” (p. 13). the metaphoric tools and understandings of cst are argued to be facilitative to social science research through encouraging the exploration of possibilities in interpretive forms of describing “rather than prescribing [emphasis added] relationships and processes” (kuhn, 2007, p. 299). indeed, offering intriguing possibilities for understanding teacher motivation, a review of the literature turns up the following commonly discussed properties of complex systems: · made up of multiple agents with considerable diversity and redundancy; · distributed control; · open (both offer and receive energy in interaction with other systems); · nonlinear interactions (introduced change may have varying effects); · co-adaptive interactions that alter both agent(s) and context; · constant dynamic change across different timescales; · phase shifts (sharp whole-system change); · self-organisation and emergence (gradual whole-system change) (cilliers, 1998; davis & sumara, 2006; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). while the recent years have seen an incremental growth in the number of studies utilising cst to conceptualise language learner motivation (see, e.g., chapters in dörnyei, macintyre, & henry, 2015), research into language teacher motivation from a cst perspective is still extremely scarce. one exception is kimura’s (2014) richard j. sampson 296 investigation of the motivation of two middle-school teachers in china. kimura conducted video-taped observation of lessons and semistructured interviews with the teachers and seven of their students on two occasions spaced around three years apart. he used cst to organise understandings of how the teachers’ motivation changed over micro (observed lessons) and macro (the three year interval) timescales. kimura’s (2014, pp. 323-324) study reveals a number of key influences on these teachers’ motivation that differed by context and stage of professional career. unfortunately however, because of the rather wide gaps between data-collection points and interviews, the study does not allow a detailed understanding of the ways in which these influences interact and motivation develops in-situ. the work of hiver (2015; hiver & dörnyei, 2015) takes a more contextualised approach. hiver (2015) investigated what he classified as “teacher immunity,” that is, how teachers cope with stress to remain motivated. he conducted a number of one-to-one interviews with four language teachers in south korea. hiver came to a realisation that the cst concept of self-organisation offered a useful metaphor for understanding insights from the data. it was found that motivation-sustaining teacher immunity developed through a four-stage process: (a) an initial perturbation that triggers a response; (b) a coupling process whereby an adaptive response is implemented; (c) a reformation of higher-order patterns in the system based on these adaptations, and; (d) consolidation of the new pattern of stability (pp. 220-225). hiver (2015) concluded that motivation and teacher immunity emerge as teachers come to terms with adapting to the situated accumulation of “events, concerns or realities . . . in their daily practice” (p. 220) and “accept and solidify this residue of experience as a new aspect of their identity” (p. 224). hiver’s (2015) work draws attention to a fundamental process in complex systems, that of co-adaptation. such processes involve a “kind of mutual causality, in which change in one system leads to change in another system connected to it, and this mutual influencing continues over time” (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008, p. 233). co-adaptation involves positive and negative feedback. when an agent acts in an environment and perceives negative feedback indicating that that this behaviour is inappropriate for the circumstances, the likelihood of the adoption of a similar behaviour in the future is reduced. on the other hand, positive feedback occurs when an agent acts and perceives that this behaviour is appropriate in the environment. the behaviour is reinforced, and this may lead to an increased likelihood of its adoption in the future. crucially, proponents of cst understand that any form of behaviour alters the environment at the same time as it alters the agent (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). that is, complex systems are open in the sense that they interact with other systems to both receive and offer energy in interaction with their context. this said, it is efl teacher motivation in-situ: co-adaptive processes, openness and relational motivation over. . . 297 important to remember that the “boundaries” of these systems are merely conceptually defined and are more akin to permeable and shifting interfaces determined by the observer (cilliers, 1998). the previous discussion may perhaps give an unintentionally straightforward, linear impression of the development of teacher motivation. proponents of cst (and indeed hiver) however argue that change is nonlinear. rather than an effect being directly attributable to a specific cause, or development occurring in regimented stages, the present state of a system (such as motivation) is more the accumulation of change in various interrelated elements up to that point in time (cilliers, 1998). a key property of complex systems is that some change may occur suddenly over a relatively shorter span of time, while other change takes place at a slower rate involving interactions over longer spans of time (de bot, 2015). as de bot (2015) notes, a cst approach holds that “development on one scale is influenced by what happens on smaller and larger scales” (p. 32). as figure 1 depicts, classroom activity may involve a timescale of change in terms of minutes, whereas a lesson or homeroom period entails a timescale of hours. these timescales interact with each other in such a way that perceptions of teacher motivation at the timescale of a semester or academic year are an emergent outcome of experiences across different timescales. minutes------------hours---------------days / weeks------years-----------------timescales of change figure 1 some of the interacting timescales relevant to teacher motivational development with particular class groups (adapted from davis & sumara, 2006) lesson series lesson・homeroom semester / academic year activity richard j. sampson 298 one motivation theory that seems to mesh well with cst understandings is ushioda’s (2009) “person-in-context relational view of motivation.” this conceptualisation holds that motivation emerges through the processes by which people make meaning in their social context. in terms of classroom motivation, ushioda (2011) asserts that “it is through social participation in opportunities, negotiations and activities that people’s motivations and identities develop and emerge as dynamically co-constructed processes [emphasis added]” (pp. 21-22). psychological systems, such as motivation, affect and identity are in dynamic interaction with each other as well as the evolving contextual system. rather than treating the context as a background variable, individual sense-making and action is constrained and made possible by context, while also acting to change the context. in contrast to linear cause-effect understandings, such an approach necessitates a relational view of multiple interacting elements whereby motivation is “an organic process that emerges through the complex system of interrelations” (ushioda, 2009, p. 220). taken together, the cst literature in general, hiver’s (2015) focus on teacher adaptations, and ushioda’s (2009) relational conceptualisation of motivation suggest that research examining the situated, dynamic evolution of teacher motivation through experiences and adaptations in interaction with particular class groups could make an additional contribution to the existing body of research. in order to investigate how my own contextualised teacher motivation evolved in a relational fashion, i developed the following two research questions: 1. what understandings about the emergent educational context appear to affect the development of the motivation of an efl teacher with one class group? (rq1) 2. in what ways does this motivation evolve over time? (rq2) details of the particular setting from which the data for this study were drawn are provided in the following section. 3. method 3.1. setting and participants the current article concerns the author’s experiences whilst working at a kosen, a 5-year college of technology in japan. these colleges endeavour to foster the creativity and practical skills of future technology workers through a mix of vocational engineering education with general learning. kosen are a combination of the usual three years of senior high school in japan with the first two years of undergraduate efl teacher motivation in-situ: co-adaptive processes, openness and relational motivation over. . . 299 study. students range from around 15 to 20 years of age. further to educational responsibilities, teachers at these colleges are expected to be research active. in this context, i had two educational roles, as a classroom teacher and homeroom advisor, with one first-grade class of 40 students aged 15-16 years, referred to herein as class e. these students were of equivalent age to senior high school first-grade students in the regular japanese educational system. the college context defined that this group and my roles within it would naturally occur for only one academic year (in 2011-2012), before participants (myself included) were split into different classes. the paper examines my teacher motivation with class e over this year of 32 lesson-weeks. the analysis concerns primarily my role as a classroom teacher for one of the three weekly 90-minute english lessons for these students. in addition to these lessons, the paper will occasionally refer to experiences in “homeroom periods,” which were regular, 45-minute sessions with class e once every week involving general administrative tasks and life and career guidance. as this paper centres on my teacher motivation, it is necessary to provide some brief information about my background. at the time of the study i was 35 years old, a caucasian australian national. i studied education as an undergraduate in australia and shifted to japan for employment purposes following graduation. i had lived in japan for over 10 years at the time of data collection, and i operate comfortably in english and japanese. in my time in japan, i have worked in a range of education settings and continued my own education through postgraduate studies. i had only been employed at the kosen for one year prior to the study, and the year of data-collection coincided with my first experience as a homeroom teacher. 3.2. research approach and data collection in the study on which this paper is based (sampson, 2016), i had used action research to introduce activities that would assist students to reflect on their motivation to study english. however, after the study was completed, i became intrigued to investigate how my own motivation had evolved over the year with class e. as such, i employ an autoethnographic case study approach here to focus on “the particularity and complexity of a single case” through which we might come “to understand its activity within important circumstances” (stake, 1995, p. xi). case studies typically propose a theoretical boundedness to the case, endeavouring to provide an in-depth, contextualised interpretation of the phenomenon of interest (duff, 2008). an autoethnographic case study approach meshed well with my intention to embark on an exploratory investigation that might suggest directions and questions for future research and theorising about teacher motivation. richard j. sampson 300 in the initial study, prior to the commencement of data collection, a participant information session was held. informed consent was received from student participants and their caregivers. data were collected about both regular curriculum activities and change-action activities through introspective journals (see appendix a for instructions to students). journals were chosen in order to afford insights into participants’ experience of the learning environments yet also allow an efficient way of gathering regular data without obstructing curriculum content. students wrote in japanese, which was translated into english before analysis. along with learners, i had also kept a research journal. although there were additional data-collection tools (see appendix b), the extracts presented in this article are drawn in the main from these journals. i made every effort to write in the research journal immediately after lessons or homeroom periods. i also occasionally wrote observations when i could find time during sessions. the length of my entries varied as certain incidents or reflections led to deeper understandings, resulting in 64 a4 pages totalling around 27,000 words. 3.3. analysis i was all too aware of criticisms of autoethnographic approaches as being the realm of “self-absorbed narcissists who do not fulfil scholarly obligations of hypothesising, analysing and theorising” (ellis, adams, & bochner, 2010, para. 37). in conducting a re-analysis, i wanted to start afresh and build a detailed picture of teacher motivation based on a sound understanding of the data. in order to remain analytically open-minded as i read through the research journal, i applied a basic definition of motivation as “a cumulative arousal, or want [emphasis added], that we are aware of” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 209). initial analysis attempted to uncover instances of such “want” towards teaching practice. i used nvivo for mac to look for repetitions and regularities in the text as i emphasised ideas that held significance for myself over the course of the teaching year (ryan & bernard, 2003). this first pass through the data engendered an expanded exploration as interactions between what i conceptualised as systems—motivation, affect, identity (often in the form of beliefs), and contextual and temporal elements—took on increasing importance. these categories were then microcoded to uncover vital qualities apparent from the data. table 1 presents a selection of codes developed for each category. efl teacher motivation in-situ: co-adaptive processes, openness and relational motivation over. . . 301 table 1 category and code examples category example codes motivation source, valence, intensity, behaviour affect source, feeling, valence, intensity, behaviour, physical reaction identity self-beliefs, role-beliefs, group membership, group expectations context focus (individual person/group; in-class/outside-class) time past/present/future focus, granularity (activity/lesson/lesson series) theoretical comparison (corbin & strauss, 2008) of the ongoing analysis with concepts from the existing literature moreover suggested that a “person-incontext relational” perspective on motivation (ushioda, 2009) and certain properties of complex systems offered a useful way of structuring the dynamic interactions between themes. theoretical comparison is a tool with which “properties and dimensions that are derived from the ‘outside’ . . . give us ideas of what to look for in the data, making us sensitive to things we might have overlooked before” (corbin & strauss, 2008, p. 76). through this process i became aware of interactions between the categories that seemed to “sit together” in a conceptual sense. i used the boolean query feature of nvivo to examine the interrelations (or lack thereof) between categories and particular instances in the data and grouped related items into sets. the data items collected together into these sets were then compared with similarly grouped items a number of times, progressive iterations refining understandings at both “higher” and “lower” hierarchical levels. proponents of case study also urge the use of multiple data sources to gain different perspectives on the phenomenon of interest (duff, 2008). the developing conceptual framework based on cst and realisations about particular events pushed me to revisit student data to examine it for ways that the interactions i was finding were illuminated. due to the large amount of student data, a number of methods were employed to hone in on pertinent extracts. for instance, i used a simple text search for keywords such as teacher in the bank of student data. the analysis of the research journal had also suggested certain events as particularly influential on my motivation at points across the year. by examining corresponding student texts, i searched for ways in which the existing analysis could be enlightened and refined to further support or question my understandings. 4. results and interpretations in order to give a sense of the relational dynamics of teacher motivation/affect/identity, the following discussion presents a connected series of extracts. these extracts are representative of the macrothemes from analysis and allow a flavour of the uncovered “lower-level” themes adding qualitative details to those “higher-level” themes, whilst also providing a taste of the lived, narrative richard j. sampson 302 experience of teacher motivation in the classroom. considering the research questions for this study, the first two sections below illuminate the contextualised nature of my teacher motivation (rq1) through drawing on the cst properties of co-adaptation and openness. this said, nonlinear fluctuations in my motivation/affect/identity over different timescales are moreover evident throughout these first two sections (rq2). the third section then more specifically addresses rq2, drawing the discussion together by offering a number of different representations of the contextually-based yet relational development of motivation/affect/identity through nested timescales. in what follows, i mark extracts by week, type of session (english lesson or homeroom session), and source. research journal is abbreviated to rj, student learning journals to lj. all student names are pseudonyms. 4.1. the contextualised nature of teacher motivation: co-adaptive processes a group of understandings about the emergent educational context was that continual processes of co-adaptation were evident in the development of my teacher motivation with class e, as illustrated by the following series of extracts. in a homeroom session in week 1 of the academic year, i introduced an activity for students to share ideas about their futures. this was my first opportunity to stand back and watch students interacting: most students, from appearances, seemed to enjoy the chance to interact with others, and, even though they must hardly know each other, try to imagine about the future of other students. there were, of course, some students who hesitated to find a partner to talk to . . . but i was also pleasantly able to notice that in most cases other students came and tried to include these students. (week 1, homeroom, rj) at the timescale of this activity (a matter of minutes), my writing clearly evinces my own positive affect as i observed students engaging each other. this affect is also interacting at a longer timescale with my teacher identity in the form of expectations: over the course of many “first lessons” with new groups of students, i appear to have built up certain expectations about hesitancy from japanese students. this belief meets with negative feedback in my perceptions of student behaviour in class e, interacting positively with affect. in turn, these impressions about the newlyformed class group interacted with my motivation, prompting me to adapt an activity in the english lesson the following week: “after how they took to the homeroom activity, i decided to make this into an activity where they mingled . . . students looked really interested comparing experiences. . . . there was quite a lot of animated conversation” (week 2, english lesson, rj). efl teacher motivation in-situ: co-adaptive processes, openness and relational motivation over. . . 303 these two extracts reveal processes of positive feedback connected with student responses to my planned activities. whilst it may be tempting to conceive that there is a causal chain between affect and motivation in the moment, i again believe that issues of identity are at play: my preference as a language teacher for communicative activities that encourage students to share their ideas in interaction has built up over a still longer timescale through my postgraduate studies. lemke’s (2000) use of the concept of heterochrony in cst is facilitative here, whereby “a long timescale process produces an effect in a much shorter timescale activity” (p. 280). an extract focusing on a more negative experience the very next lesson also uncovers the way in which the co-adaptation of my teacher motivation continued to emerge across a lesson series: who knows how things will turn out now? my class were just on another planet today. in the end i had to stop them, and have a ‘stern word’ or two. so now, of course, i feel terrible . . . who knows what dynamics came together to create that, what, mess? looking around as they were making their business cards, only about half of them seemed to actually be getting into the spirit of things . . . then there was a mingling activity, using these business cards to meet ‘co-workers.’ once again, it seemed as if precious few students were really getting into things. . . (week 3, english lesson, rj) this event appears to have a critical impact on my motivation. i begin the entry by focusing not on the activity of students, but on the outcome of having “to stop them, and have a ‘stern word’ or two.” the action of chastising the students for their behaviour seems to run against my identity as a teacher, making me “feel terrible.” at the timescale of the lesson, i define the whole session as a “mess.” the experience has a crushing effect on my ideas of future lessons with class e, leading me to worry about “how things will turn out now.” my concern appears to come from the perception that the kind of communicative activity that had worked so well up to this point was met by “precious few students . . . getting into things.” in cst terms, the positive feedback i had been receiving up to this point in my interactions with the student group (over a timescale of weeks) was abruptly replaced by negative feedback that something about this activity on this day with class e did not foster the kind of learning environment i had been anticipating. in fact, despite the negative affect i attached to these experiences at the time, examining student reflections about the same event allowed a different perspective on my action of “scolding” the students: today everyone wasn’t concentrating on studying seriously, so we made the teacher angry. i’d been talking about some completely unrelated topic with a friend, so i need to think about my attitude as well. . . . i want to concentrate more seriously in lessons from now on. (hide, week 3, english lesson, lj) richard j. sampson 304 hide’s writing reveals his understanding that perhaps a behavioural line had been crossed by a good number of students: “everyone wasn’t concentrating on studying seriously.” of the 40 students, 17 made reference in some form to this event and my reactions as a teacher in their journal writing. as evident in hide’s reflection, many students clearly recognized my affect in being “angry,” with some students alternately interpreting that i “looked sad” when i felt it necessary to interrupt the lesson. however, far from the worries that i expressed for future lessons with class e, student writing suggests my response to have had a critical dampening function. it allowed students a chance to reflect on their actions and retrain their own motivation towards future lessons. another prominent theme related to students’ drive to coform a more positive classroom environment: “i want to work together to make the class atmosphere a good one”; “i want to create a classroom environment where if one of us thinks, ‘hey, that’s playing around a bit too much,’ then we can tell each other.” taking the student perspective gives key insight into the ongoing processes of co-adaptation in class groups: the classroom i would walk into the following week would be a different space. an entry in the research journal provides evidence of my recognition of this change. well, that was great. i don’t know whether it was the students that changed, or me (probably both), but this week’s lesson was so incredibly better than last week’s. . . . the activities (for example, an info-gap to find out and imagine about a product; and getting put into new teams new seating and introducing themselves to other team members) seemed to go well, and many more students were trying to use english this week . . . i’m also getting a feel for the types of activities that might go well, and the need to repeat phrases over and over, and review things they’ve learnt, so that it sticks. i’ll get to work on revising some upcoming lessons, where i’ve realised some things i had planned probably wouldn’t go well. (week 4, english lesson, rj) my reflection in some ways provides a conclusion to the motivational stanza that continued over this timescale of a lesson series. as discussed in the review of literature, hiver’s (2015) study revealed that the way in which teachers adapt to experiences in their daily practice and accept these adaptations as part of their identity influences their accumulated levels of negative affect and stress. as i came to terms with the (english) ability level of students in class e, i adapted my teaching approach to “repeat phrases over and over, and review things they’ve learnt, so that it sticks.” in alignment with research finding an intrinsic nature to teacher motivation (see, e.g. erkaya, 2013; pelletier et al., 2002), my reflections give the impression that my confidence as a teacher was renewed through my perception that “the activities . . . seemed to go well, and many more students were trying to use english this week.” in fact, research by martin (2006) efl teacher motivation in-situ: co-adaptive processes, openness and relational motivation over. . . 305 into teacher affect revealed a strong connection between teacher enjoyment and teachers’ perceptions of students proactively working to improve their ability and knowledge. my writing similarly suggests the crucial importance of my perceptions of students putting in effort to improve their english ability. on a still longer timescale, i understand the extract as also suggesting processes through which my identity as a competent teacher has likely built up through repetition of numerous similar classroom experiences. i link my teaching adaptations to the outcome that the lesson was “so incredibly better than last week’s.” however, rather than presuming this to be a linear result of my own adjustments, an implicit recognition of relational co-adaptation is also revealed in my puzzlement as to “whether it was the students that changed, or me (probably both).” 4.2. the contextualised nature of teacher motivation: openness already evident in the discussion of co-adaptation, the open and blended nature of my teacher motivation/affect/identity interacting with context emerged as a strongly recurrent theme throughout the research journal. while focusing on my experiences in the classroom with class e, my motivation/affect/identity was also revealed to be open to interactions with contextual and temporal elements “external” to the present classroom system. in an entry a couple of weeks later, i begin by introducing my experiences in the lesson not by writing about class e, but another class: actually, i taught the same lesson the day before, and it was just terrible probably a combination of it being the very first day back after golden week, and it not being a very good lesson plan (as it turned out). even i came away from the lesson feeling that students probably hadn’t gotten much from it, which made me really sorry for them (and i wonder what they will think of me as a teacher after that experience!). anyway, i spent a restless night. in the end it got pretty thoroughly revised. (week 6, english lesson, rj) this extract suggests that my motivational system is open in a number of ways: firstly, i ascribe the teaching failure in part to the effects of a break due to the extended golden week holiday period in japan.1 in fact, such temporally-based negative influences on my motivation, for example from the timing of other subject lessons or breaks imposed because of national holidays or college events, were a recurring theme in the analysis. i perceived that such perturbations impeded student progress and ability to concentrate on material and lesson activities, which in turn affected my motivation as a teacher. analysis of student data 1 golden week is a series of four national holidays spread over eight days. depending on the timing, this means that students may not have a lesson for two weeks. richard j. sampson 306 also frequently turned up comments about the negative effects of similar occurrences, suggesting my fears to be well-founded. secondly, as in this example, i often referred to experiences in other classes. in the extract above, i attribute a further reason for the poor lesson with the other class as due to the lesson plan. a study by menyhart (2008) into the motivation of efl teachers at the university level in hungary revealed high levels of stress associated with what these teachers perceived as unsuccessful lessons. my writing clearly reveals strongly negative affect as the “terrible lesson” which made me “sorry for [those students]” resulted in the physical response of a “restless night.” these experiences and the resultant affect however also motivated me to create a “thoroughly revised” plan for the lesson with class e. another area of interest is my concern as to “what [the students] will think of me after that experience!” this statement again reveals my identity as a teacher, built up over years, to also be highly dependent on my perceptions of momentary experiences with students and affective understandings of lessons. it further implies that one motivation to work to make what i hoped would be a more successful lesson with class e was an effort to move away from this image of failure towards a more ideal teacher-self (dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014). in the end, one of the changes that i made was to increase the opportunities for students to interact and discuss during activities. as i continued in my entry about the lesson with class e: most students were using japanese to discuss their opinions, and writing in english. however, kazu tried everything in english! . . . furthermore, for a while, the feeling spread to some of his other teammates. initially they were speaking japanese, and looking a bit oddly at him, but then some tried also in english. i wish this could happen in other classes! . . . anyway, it all worked a lot better than had the previous day’s lesson! (week 6, english lesson, rj) i understand hints of the cst property of nonlinearity in this extract. while i begin by focusing on “most students,” i then remark on the actions of one particular student. my writing reveals a clear picture of affect interacting with motivation as this student and some other students took advantage of the more interactive nature of the revised lesson, allowing me to feel a sense of contentment that “it all worked a lot better than had the previous day’s lesson!” the quantitatively small influence of this one student had a qualitatively critical effect on my impression of the lesson. also evident is the way in which i make a connection this time between my experiences in class e with a desire for similar outcomes in other classes that i was teaching: “i wish this could happen in other classes!” all in all, these extracts give a sense that my teacher identity and motivation, negatively influenced by experiences in another class, recover through the positive feedback i receive from class e about the adaptations to teaching that i implemented. efl teacher motivation in-situ: co-adaptive processes, openness and relational motivation over. . . 307 in conjunction to these regular curriculum activities, i was moreover conducting action research to assist students to reflect on their english language learning. particularly near the start of the year, i felt frustration in trying to introduce change-action: as things are going, there is just so much time taken with boring surveys or menial information i have to pass on to students . . . and so this makes me frustrated for my research, and for the possibilities of doing something worthwhile with these students i kind of feel like chances are slipping away . . . (week 7, general reflection, rj) this extract starkly evinces the way in which i held strongly negative affect towards contextual responsibilities that i had not accepted as part of my professional identity. there was a clash between interacting and merged teacher and researcher identity systems. this disdain also however illuminates my motivation to conduct research beneficial to students to be a developing yet essential aspect of my professional identity as i refer to “chances . . . slipping away” for “doing something worthwhile [emphasis added] with these students.” frustration arises through the impediments i perceive to working towards this ideal professional identity to such an extent that i belittle what were in fact vital administrative duties in my role as a homeroom teacher. nevertheless, while these concerns peaked on occasion, i gradually became more capable in making time to incorporate change-action. i made use of my identity as a fellow additional language learner a couple of weeks later. i showed students a series of entries from a japanese diary i had kept: i’d been doubtful that they would be interested, but i think the entries i showed them expressed my frustrations with studying japanese, yet also showed a clear progression (and had a running theme of me hating boring meetings, which many laughed about), so overall there seemed to be a really good atmosphere after i’d shown this like they had gotten a bit closer to the teacher. . . . (i’m really looking forward to reading the comments in the ljs about this activity. are things like this useful to them?). (week 11, english lesson, rj) ushioda (2011) argues convincingly for the motivational benefits of interacting with students “as ‘people’ rather than as simply ‘language learners’” (p. 17). while i initially express trepidation about how students would greet this activity, my writing suggests that my positive perceptions of learner engagement with this aspect of my identity foster motivation towards creating similar activities. student reflections on this activity uncover the fact that my impressions were not far off the mark: the teacher’s story was deeply interesting. i thought, even something that you don’t understand or can’t do at all, if you repeat and keep trying little by little, you’ll be able richard j. sampson 308 to do it in the end. i thought i want to study english not just during lessons, but outside of class too. (kosuke, week 11, english lesson, lj) these extracts show my motivational system to be open through the way in which genuine interactions with students utilising dimensions of my identity from “outside” of the classroom—in this case as a fellow additional language learner—met with positive responses from students. such instances of me drawing in my “transportable identities” (zimmerman, 1998) to interact with students held somewhat of a risk, by exposing aspects of my self that were in many ways private and not a regular part of my teacher identity. additional instances also suggest the way in which teacher motivation is both situationallygrounded yet also relationally dynamic over longer timescales: my impressions are of student responses to my transportable identities during an activity; these perceptions gain (positive) feedback a couple of weeks later through student journal writing. yet, the dimensions of my identity upon which i drew for these activities (such as my identity as a second language learner or past dreams i held for my future) had evolved over my time in japan or even longer timescales. 4.3. motivational development: relational motivation over interacting timescales analysis found motivation/affect/identity to be continuously reforming in the space between context and the individual. it is relational: i was not merely acting and reacting but acting and reacting in co-adaptive interrelation with others in the class group. the evolving interrelations altered ideas of what was possible for me as a teacher in the social context of the particular class group, as well as my ongoing “identity project” (lemke, 2000) as teacher and as a person in general. as evident in the previous sections, these interactions occurred over different timescales. how might a cst approach facilitate understandings of the dynamic, relational nature of my motivation/affect/identity apparent in the analysis? one promising method is revealed in yashima and arano (2015). these researchers took a sociocultural approach to interpreting the motivation of language learners. they represented coded experiences from student interviews over three sociocultural domains: contingent experiences, personal meaning, and deeply internalised values or thought patterns. adapting their representative tool, in figure 2 i display a selection of coded references to teacher motivation/affect/identity emergent over the year of data collection. rather than the sociocultural “levels” employed by yashima and arano (2015), through analysis i understood my reflections as referring to different interacting timescales. the analysis further allowed me to discern valence and intensity from motivation/affect references (see appendix c for examples of valenced references). on a 5-point scale, figure 2 shows these fluctuations of motivation/affect in interaction with the different timescales of experience. efl teacher motivation in-situ: co-adaptive processes, openness and relational motivation over. . . 309 figure 2 longitudinal fluctuations in valence and intensity of motivation/affect in interaction with different timescales evident from analysis (* the college summer vacation period continued from late july to early september; ** the college winter vacation period continued from late december to early january.) timescale month/years § ef l te ac he ri de nt ity : be lie fi n im po rt an ce of in te ra ct iv e, co m m un ic at iv e ac tiv iti es § d ev el op in g re se ar ch er id en tit y: an xi et y ab ou t no tp ro gr es si ng w ith ac tio n re se ar ch § ef l te ac he ri de nt ity : ex pe ct at io ns of st ud en ts § d ev el op in g re se ar ch er id en tit y: in te rf er en ce by ot he rr ol e re sp on si bi lit ie s § pe rs on al ity (s en se of hu m or ) § te ac he ri de nt ity :w an t to he lp st ud en ts (“ w hy am ib ot he ri ng ?” ) § 2n d la ng ua ge le ar ne r id en tit y: po si tiv e re sp on se to sh ow in g ow n ef fo rt s § te ac he r/ re se ar ch er id en tit y: “j us tt ea ch in g, no te xc iti ng re se ar ch ” § ef l te ac he ri de nt ity : “l et tin g go ” & al lo w in g st ud en ta ut on om y § te ac he ri de nt ity :e xp ec ta ti on s fr om co lle ag ue s, te ac he rr ol e be lie fs § d ev el op in g re se ar ch er id en tit y: po si tiv e st ud en t re sp on se to ch an ge -a ct io n fo st er sp os iti ve m ot iv at io n § ef l te ac he ri de nt ity : be lie fi n us ag e fo r la ng ua ge de ve lo pm en t § pa re nt id en tit y: tir ed fr om lo ok in g af te rs ic k so n § pe rs on al ity (s en se of hu m or ) § g en er al id en tit y: pa st dr ea m s fo rt he fu tu re § pe rs on al ity (s en se of hu m or ) § ef l te ac he r id en tit y: “l et tin g go ” & al lo w in g st ud en t au to no m y § te ac he r id en tit y: te ac he rr ol e be lie fs week/lessonseries § m ot iv at io n to re vi se ac tiv ity to in cl ud e m or e in te ra ct io n § an xi et y ab ou tc la ss di re ct io n § m ot iv at io n to pr ov id e sc af fo ld in g to st ud en ts an d he lp im ag in e la ng ua ge us e si tu at io ns § m ot iv at io n to re vi se le ss on s ba se d on ex pe ri en ce w ith ot he r cl as s/ cl as s e § n eg at iv e im pr es si on s of ef fe ct on st ud en t en ga ge m en ta ft er br ea k in le ss on s § h ig hl y pu bl ic ac to f de fia nc e by on e st ud en t; ot he rs tu de nt s aw ar e of in ci de nt § n eg at iv e im pr es si on s of ef fe ct on st ud en t en ga ge m en td ue to un se as on ab le he at § “t ea ch er an d st ud en ts ju st w in di ng do w n to su m m er va ca tio n” § m ot iv at io n to in tr od uc e su m m er va ca tio n en gl is h sk ill bu ild in g pr oj ec t § in ci de nt be tw ee n fo ur st ud en ts cr ea te s co lle ge -w id e ru m or s, re qu ir es co un se lin g st ud en ts § m ot iv at io n to gi ve a lo gi ca l st ru ct ur e to le ss on s § n eg at iv e im pr es si on of st ud en tte ac he rr el at io ns hi p af te rs um m er va ca tio n br ea k § n eg at iv e im pr es si on s of ef fe ct on st ud en t en ga ge m en ta ft er br ea k in le ss on s § po si tiv e co m pa ri so n w ith ef fo rt of ot he r cl as s gr ou p § st ud en ts “o n ed ge ” be ca us e of m id te rm gr ad es § po si tiv e im pr es si on of st ud en ts ’e ng ag em en t w ith pr oj ec t § po si tiv e im pr es si on s of st ud en ts pu tt in g in ex tr a tim e to co m pl et e pr oj ec t § o ut si de -c ol le ge in ci de nt w ith on e st ud en t lesson § h ad to st op le ss on du e to of fta sk be ha vi or (le ss on be ca m e a “m es s” ) § “g re at ” le ss on § le ss on “w or ke d a lo t be tt er ” th an w ith ot he r cl as s § “l ow ke y” le ss on bu t “n ot m aj or dr am a” § d is ap po in te d th at st ud en te ng lis h us e de cl in ed ov er le ss on § st ud en ts af fe ct ed by ot he rs ub je ct (p hy si ca l ed uc at io n) ; di sa pp oi nt ed w ith in iti al ef fo rt ,b ut st ud en ts be ca m e “m or e liv el y” as le ss on pr og re ss ed § d is ap po in tm en tt ha ti n gr ou pw or k “s om e st ud en ts w or k ha rd , ot he rs no t” § d is ap po in tm en tw it h fe w ch an ce s fo r en gl is h us e w hi le pr ep ar in g fo r pr es en ta tio n § “f la t” le ss on at m os ph er e: ac tiv iti es “j um pe d ar ou nd ” to o m uc h an d le ft st ud en ts co nf us ed § h ad to st op le ss on du e to of fta sk be ha vi or ,r em in de d st ud en ts of pu rp os e of le ss on s § te ac he ri ni tia lly ha d lo w en er gy ,b ec am e m ot iv at ed in le ss on as st ud en ts en th us ia st ic § fe lt a “c on ne ct io n” w ith st ud en ts du e to at te nt iv en es s § st ud en ts un se tt le d du e to ch an ge to ne w gr ou ps § po si tiv e at m os ph er e cr ea te d by in tr od uc in g pa st dr ea m s § “a m az ed at ho w al iv e st ud en ts lo ok ” du ri ng pr oj ec tp re pa ra tio n § “v er y pl ea sa nt at m os ph er e” fo rp re pa ra tio n le ss on § “f an ta st ic at m os ph er e” fo rf in al pr oj ec t le ss on activity § po si tiv e im pr es si on s of st ud en ti nt er ac tio n § h al fo fs tu de nt s no t pu tt in g in ef fo rt § po si tiv e im pr es si on s of so m e st ud en ts sp ea ki ng en gl is h w ith te ac he r § o ne st ud en tt ry in g to us e en gl is h; sp re ad to ot he rs § po si tiv e st ud en t re sp on se (la ug ht er )t o in tr od uc ed ac tiv ity § po si tiv e im pr es si on s of so m e st ud en ts sp ea ki ng en gl is h w it h te ac he r § tw o st ud en ts ta lk in g ne ga tiv el y ab ou tt he co lle ge § d is ap po in te d th at st ud en ts di d no tt ry ne w fo rm s st ud ie d § th re e st ud en ts sp ok e en gl is h w ith te ac he r ou ts id e le ss on § in te ra ct io n w ith in di vi du al st ud en ts : po si tiv e im pr es si on of ef fo rt § po si tiv e im pr es si on of so m e st ud en ts st ay in g ba ck to ge ts tu dy ad vi ce (w an tt o im pr ov e ab ili ty ) § po si tiv e im pr es si on of so m e st ud en ts tr yi ng to m ak e en gl is h at m os ph er e in ne w gr ou p § po si tiv e im pr es si on s of st ud en ts th in ki ng de ep ly ab ou tp ol ite ne ss st ru ct ur es § so m e st ud en ts sp ok e en gl is h w ith te ac he r § so m e st ud en ts of fta sk § po si tiv e im pr es si on of st ud en ts en th us ia st ic al ly pr ac tic in g pr io rt o su rv ey ac tiv ity § po si tiv e st ud en t re sp on se (la ug ht er )t o te ac he rv id eo § in te ra ct io n w ith in di vi du al st ud en ts : po si tiv e im pr es si on of ef fo rt to im pr ov e ab ili ty § po si tiv e st ud en t re sp on se (la ug ht er )t o ch ild ho od ph ot og ra ph s § po si tiv e im pr es si on of st ud en ts ne go tia tin g fo rm of fin al pr es en ta tio n § st ud en ts lo ok ed “s o in te re st ed ” in pr es en ta tio ns valence/intensityofmotivation/affect +2 +1 -1 -2 w ee k 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 m on th ap ril m ay ju ne ju ly * se pt . o ct ob er n ov em be r d ec em be r* * ja nu ar y fe b. richard j. sampson 310 looking vertically at figure 2 fosters a recognition that motivation/affect/identity, for example at the timescale of a classroom activity, interacts with contextual events and is further interrelated with longer timescales such as impressions of a lesson in general or motivation to adapt over a lesson series. although perhaps difficult to take in at a glance, the horizontal axis also allows a glimpse of some varying dynamics of my motivation/affect/identity over the time window of the study. for instance, in strong alignment with the past findings of martin (2006), my motivation/affect/identity was in constant interaction with perceptions of student attempts to improve ability, their proactive planning and persistence in learning. similarly, occasional incidents involving my role as a homeroom teacher when there was some kind of disciplinary trouble remained a constant source of strongly negative affect (evidenced by the negatively-valenced spikes on the intensity graph) as i struggled to incorporate these responsibilities into my image of professional identity. conversely, it is also possible to observe (through absence) the way in which frustrations with the research process decreased. i became more capable of making adaptations to teaching that allowed the introduction of change-action, but furthermore, the context simply allowed more freedom as time passed. what is apparent from the previous discussion and figure 2 is that the analysis suggested my motivation/affect/identity to be highly contingent on perceptions of student action at both an individual level and as a whole class group. in this respect, the cst literature also suggests a useful tool for visualising the evolving, relational form of my teacher motivation/affect/identity: multiple threading (davis & sumara, 2006). multiple threading is a way of representing the “many strands” involved in a single group narrative, whilst recognising that “some may be only brief phrases or single images that punctuate the text, and strands may overlap or interlink at times” (davis & sumara, 2006, p. 162). by searching my research journal for mentions of the human focus of the development of my motivation/affect/identity, i was able to build a picture of its spread across perceptions of experiences with the members of class e, which is shown in figure 3. efl teacher motivation in-situ: co-adaptive processes, openness and relational motivation over. . . 311 figure 3 multiple threading (davis & sumara, 2006) representation of interactions between perceptions of student actions and teacher motivation/affect/identity across a year of study richard j. sampson 312 as discernable in figure 3, there is positive and negative valence connected to individual students and the class group as a whole (“they” in the bottom row) across the timescale of the academic year. in terms of individual students, only 32 of the 40 students in class e were mentioned explicitly in my research journal. as far as can be discerned from the data, some of these students appear only briefly to impact on my motivation/affect/identity, whilst others provide a more sustained contribution to the narrative over a longer timescale. similarly, my perceptions of some students appear to have a relatively consistently valenced pattern (e.g., positive: kazu, yusuke; negative: tomoe, kanata) or more fluctuating relationship (e.g., koji, haruki) with my motivation/affect/identity. it can also be seen that at the level of the class group at the timescale of the year of study my motivation/affect/identity settles into an increasingly positive pattern, even while at times i have negative motivation/affect/identity connected with individual students. such multiple threading is one useful tool to begin to understand the way in which teacher motivation is intricately intertwined with experiences in particular class groups, and how perceptions in interaction with students build up relationally over nested timescales. 5. conclusion this exploratory study focused on the situated motivation of myself as a teacher in the specific context of one language learning class group. as such, it is certainly limited in its focus on only one teacher and its self-reflective nature. there was no use of peer checking by other researchers to re-analyse data. the themes are restricted to being the subjective understandings and interpretations of one researcher. moreover, the initial research from which data were drawn was not set up to study teacher motivation. however, by employing a case study approach to examine in depth the experiences and perceptions of myself as a teacher and triangulating where possible with student data, i was able to build a picture of efl teacher motivation arguably more detailed and dynamic than previous studies. the study also suggests profitable directions for future research: a more refined design could specifically focus teachers on writing reflectively about their motivation/affect/identity while students are also encouraged to write perceptions of the teacher each lesson. video recording of lessons would contribute an additional perspective on these introspective accounts. the study does however indicate that cst concepts might provide a much more satisfying range of possibilities to explore and understand the “messiness” of a person-in-context relational view of motivation. by focusing on a particular context and examining data longitudinally, the analysis revealed the very situated efl teacher motivation in-situ: co-adaptive processes, openness and relational motivation over. . . 313 and dynamic nature of teacher motivation. it suggests that while teacher motivational trajectories develop their own character in interaction with members and experiences in classrooms, motivation, affect and identity also interact with elements conceptualised “outside” of any particular class group. perceptions of these interactions build up to form a consolidated motivational/affective/identity trajectory that is contextually bound to a class group. my study intimates that further intriguing insights into the motivation of teachers could be forthcoming from similar inquiries that examine the lived experience of teaching over time. the contextually-based yet open nature of teacher motivation also hints at the fascinating possibilities of investigating the development of motivation/affect of the same teacher with different class groups. finally, building on hiver’s (2015) research into teacher immunity, the study suggests the usefulness of encouraging teachers to reflect on and become conscious of the ways in which teacher motivation/affect/identity adapts and evolves in-situ over still longer timescales. richard j. sampson 314 references cilliers, p. (1998). complexity and postmodernism: understanding complex systems. abingdon: routledge. corbin, j., & strauss, a. (2008). basics of qualitative research (3rd ed.). thousand oaks: sage. davis, b., & sumara, d. (2006). complexity and education: inquiries into learning, teaching, and research. mahwah: lawrence erlbaum. de bot, k. (2015). rates of change: timescales in second language development. in z. dörnyei, p. d. macintyre, & a. henry (eds.), motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 29-37). bristol: multilingual matters. dörnyei, z. (2009). the psychology of second language acquisition. oxford: oxford university press. dörnyei, z., & kubanyiova, m. (2014). motivating learners, motivating teachers: building vision in the language classroom. cambridge: cambridge university press. dörnyei, z., macintyre, p. d., & henry, a. (eds.). (2015). motivational dynamics in language learning. bristol: multilingual matters. dörnyei, z., & ushioda, e. (2011). teaching and researching motivation (2nd ed.). harlow: pearson education. doyle, t., & kim, y. m. (1999). teacher motivation and satisfaction in the united states and korea. mextesol journal, 23(2), 35-48. duff, p. (2008). case study research in applied linguistics. new york: routledge. ellis, c., adams, t. e., & bochner, a. p. (2010). autoethnography: an overview. forum: qualitative social research, 12(1), art. 10. retrieved from http:// nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fgs1101108 erkaya, o. r. (2013). factors that motivate turkish efl teachers. international journal of research studies in language learning, 2(2), 49-61. hiver, p. (2015). once burned, twice shy: the dynamic development of system immunity in teachers. in z. dörnyei, p. d. macintyre, & a. henry (eds.), motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 214-237). bristol: multilingual matters. hiver, p., & dörnyei, z. (2015). language teacher immunity: a double-edged sword. applied linguistics. advance online publication. doi:10.1093/applin/amv034 kaplan, a. (2014). theory and research on teachers’ motivation: mapping an emerging conceptual terrain. in p. w. richardson, s. a. karabenick, & h. m. g. watt (eds.), teacher motivation: theory and practice (pp. 52-66). new york: routledge. kassabgy, o., boraie, d., & schmidt, r. (2001). values, rewards, and job satisfaction in esl/efl. in z. dörnyei & r. schmidt (eds.), motivation and second language acquisition (pp. 213-237). honolulu: university of hawai’i, second language teaching and curriculum center. efl teacher motivation in-situ: co-adaptive processes, openness and relational motivation over. . . 315 kimura, y. (2014). elt motivation from a complex dynamic systems theory perspective: a longitudinal case study of l2 teacher motivation in beijing. in k. csizer & m. magid (eds.), the impact of self-concept on language learning (pp. 310-329). bristol: multilingual matters. kuhn, l. (2007). denouement. world futures, 63, 298-299. larsen-freeman, d., & cameron, l. (2008). complex systems and applied linguistics. oxford: oxford university press. lemke, j. l. (2000). across the scales of time: artifacts, activities, and meanings in ecosocial systems. mind, culture, and activity, 7(4), 273-290. martin, a. j. (2006). the relationship between teachers’ perceptions of student motivation and engagement and teachers’ enjoyment of and confidence in teaching. asia-pacific journal of teacher education, 34(1), 73-93. menyhart, a. (2008). teachers or lecturers? the motivational profile of university teachers of english. wopalp, 2, 119-137. mitchell, m. (2009). complexity – a guided tour. oxford: oxford university press. pelletier, l. g., séguin-lévesque, c., & legault, l. (2002). pressure from above and pressure from below as determinants of teachers’ motivation and teaching behaviors. journal of educational psychology, 94(1), 186-196. pennington, m. c. (1995). work satisfaction, motivation and commitment in teaching english as a second language. retrieved from eric database. (ed 404850) richardson, p. w., watt, h. m. g., & karabenick, s. a. (2014). teacher motivation matters: an introduction. in p. w. richardson, s. a. karabenick, & h. m. g. watt (eds.), teacher motivation: theory and practice (pp. xiii-xxii). new york: routledge. ryan, g. w., & bernard, h. r. (2003). techniques to identify themes. field methods, 15(1), 85-109. sampson, r. j. (2016). complexity in classroom foreign language learning motivation: a practitioner perspective from japan. bristol: multilingual matters. stake, r. e. (1995). the art of case study research. thousand oaks, ca: sage. ushioda, e. (2009). a person-in-context relational view of emergent motivation, self and identity. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 215-228). bristol: multilingual matters. ushioda, e. (2011). motivating learners to speak as themselves. in g. murray, x. gao, & t. lamb (eds.), identity, motivation and autonomy in language learning (pp. 11-24). bristol: multilingual matters. yashima, t., & arano, k. (2015). understanding efl learners’ motivational dynamics: a three-level model from a dynamic systems and sociocultural perspective. in z. dörnyei, p. d. macintyre, & a. henry (eds.), motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 285-314). bristol: multilingual matters. zimmerman, d. h. (1998). discoursal identities and social identities. in c. antaki & s. widdicombe (eds.), identities in talk (pp. 87-106). london: sage. richard j. sampson 316 appendix a student learning journal instructions learning journal n during your studies this year please keep a learning journal – a kind of diary about your english lessons and some homeroom periods. n i’d like you to reflect about what we did in class – think back, and write a very short entry about (for example): something you learned / something you enjoyed / something that made you think about yourself / something that was motivating / something you want to try next lesson… n sometimes i might ask you to write about a specific topic or activity from class, but otherwise it’s your choice what you write about. n it should be short – 1 paragraph at most. you will have 5 minutes at the end of each lesson to write in japanese. n please bring this journal to class every week. n example 12/12/2012 in today’s class we did an activity about dreams for the future. we had to write about our own dream. next, we asked other students about their dreams. it was really interesting to know about other students’ dreams and hopes – they had so many different ideas! because i heard other students’ ideas, i could think more about my own dream… efl teacher motivation in-situ: co-adaptive processes, openness and relational motivation over. . . 317 appendix b complete list of data sources in sampson (in press) data collection tool volume research journal 64 pages best possible english self (bpes) activity worksheet 41 pages past experience of english lessons (peel) activity worksheet 41 pages student learning journals (total of 4 collection points) 241.5 pages semester 1 questionnaire (checking of themes) 80 pages summer holidays english skill building activity worksheet 40 pages semester 1 learning journal self-reflection activity worksheet 20 pages english expression lesson goal-review and action-planning worksheet 40 pages possible-self tree activity worksheet 40 pages expectations activity worksheet 40 pages semester 2 questionnaire (checking of themes) 80 pages semester 2 reflection activity worksheet 40 pages richard j. sampson 318 appendix c examples of motivational/affective valenced references positively-valenced references negatively-valenced references get to work revising impressed pleasantly surprised how can i help [student name]? interested laughed amazed at how alive… it makes me feel like helping… it all came together worthwhile disappointed embarrassed depressing just winding down why am i bothering? on edge is there any point to going to such effort? terrible bit flat 169 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (1). 2017. 169-173 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.1.9 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book review motivational currents in language learning: frameworks for focused interventions authors: zoltán dörnyei, alastair henry, christine muir publisher: routledge, 2016 isbn: 978-1-138-77732-3 pages: 204 the book motivational currents in language learning: frameworks for focused interventions is without doubt a valuable contribution to the study of motivation to learn second or foreign languages, despite the fact that, as the authors themselves admit in the preface, there exists a vast literature on the impact of this individual difference variable. this is because it focuses on the concept of a directed motivational current or a dmc, which is defined as “. . . an intense motivational drive—or surge—which is capable of stimulating and supporting longterm behavior (such as the learning of the l2)” (p. 18). while reminiscent of the notion of flow that was introduced into psychology by csikszenttnihalyi (1975, 1990), dmcs represent a crucial extension on it by adopting a longer-term perspective on total absorption in a particular activity and recognizing that the process of pursuing an envisaged, highly valued goal involves a series of tasks, some of which may be enjoyable and others rather mundane. the construct offers fresh insights into the study of second language motivation, and it is of paramount 170 importance on both theoretical and practical grounds because, on the one hand, it integrates for the first time the initial motive for undertaking a specific course of action and subsequent motivated behavior, and, on the other, it provides an impetus for designing and implementing potentially successful motivational interventions in the classroom. it is for this reason alone that the monograph will be an inspiring and thought-provoking read for anyone interested in the role of motivation in learning additional languages. the book opens with a preface where zoltán dörnyei, alastair henry and christine muir define dmcs, explain how the concept is related to language learning motivation and how it can inform classroom practices, as well as illustrating in very personal terms that “the ultimate confirmation that dmcs are real came from the experience of writing this manuscript” (p. xv). this is followed by nine chapters in which the characteristics of dmcs are described and then an attempt is made to demonstrate how the principles which underlie the concept at the individual level can be applied to the group level to make it relevant to everyday language instruction in the classroom. more specifically, chapter one, which at the same time constitutes an introduction, contrasts dmcs with the concept of flow and presents stories of three learners that are illustrative of the occurrence of these motivational surges and serve as key points of reference for the discussion in the remainder of the book. in chapter two, the authors explain that dmcs represent and extension of the theory of l2 motivational self-system (dörnyei, 2010) and the concept of vision (dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014), attribute belated emergence of the notion to the traditional separation of motivation and behavior in psychology as well as its reluctance to consider the temporal dimension of motivation, and argue that dmcs can aid our understanding of sustained motivation and provide a blueprint for engendering this type of motivation in learners. chapter three focuses on the directedness of motivational drives, emphasizing the role of vision, sensory elements, self-concordant, or highly personalized, goals as well as proximal subgoals, stressing that for this to happen two things are indispensable, that is a favorable alignment of some initial conditions (i.e., clear goals, sense of ownership and control, perceived balance of challenges and skills, openness to the dmc experience and the existence of certain motivational preconditions in the classroom) and the occurrence of the right trigger (e.g., an arising opportunity or a reaction to a challenge to the self-image). in chapter five, emphasis is shifted to the unique structure of dmcs which ensures that motivation is kept alive over time, a phenomenon that is attributed to the gradual emergence of certain behavioral routines, a sole focus on the goal to be achieved, identification of subgoals that constitute critical progress checks as well as the provision of affirmative feedback, both of which give learners a sense of satisfaction and fuel further effort 171 along the dmc pathway. in chapter six, the point is made that positive emotions are an inherent characteristics of a dmc and that this sense of well-being is the result of eudaimonia, or “a constellation of subjective experiences including feelings of rightness and centeredness in one’s actions, identity, strength of purpose, and competence” (waterman, 2008, p. 236), and authenticity of what one is doing, which comes from congruence with ideal self-images. chapter seven focuses on the final stage of dmcs, where motivation gradually begins to decrease, the performance of tasks or activities starts to require more and more effort and fatigue may set in, which may be accompanied by both positive feelings, reflective of the satisfaction with the achievement of a highly desired goal, and negative feelings, related to the sacrifices made or a sense of loss. the authors argue that what is of critical importance at this stage is support on the part of the teacher which can take the form of raising learners’ awareness of which behavioral routines falling within the scope of a dmc can be beneficially maintained and helping them pursue their goals within the confines of formal instruction. the last two chapters aim to demonstrate how the key principles of dmcs can be successfully capitalized upon in the language classroom where teachers have to deal with groups rather than single individuals. first, in chapter eight, the characteristics of dmcs at the individual level are extrapolated to the realities of the language classroom, an argument is made that such group-level dmcs are best manifested in intensive group projects, and key features of successful projects of this kind are outlined. second, in chapter nine, the final part of the book, concrete guidelines are provided for how such intensive projects should be successfully implemented, with a focus on the need to develop a project-based mindset and to ensure the requisite classroom conditions with respect to appropriate classroom dynamics, based on dörnyei and murphy (2003), the provision of adequate support structures and facilities (e.g., various resources), the selection of clear and engaging goals, and the formulation of tangible outcomes. the authors also discuss seven frameworks for focused interventions which emphasize different aspects of dmcs, that is all eyes on the final product, step by step, the big picture, that’s me!, detective work, story sequels, and study abroad. it should be mentioned that some of the chapters are accompanied by boxes with guidelines for motivational classroom practices, regarding, for instance, promoting long-term motivation or fostering the flow experience. zoltán dörnyei, alastair henry and christine muir should without doubt be commended for putting together this inspiring monograph and the way in which they have gone about this task for several reasons. first, the book makes a major and indisputably novel contribution to theorizing about the concept of motivation, building and expanding upon the most dominant theories, thus delineating new directions in research on second language learning motivation in general and 172 motivational dynamics in particular. second, the authors have done an outstanding job of integrating theory, research and practice, a feat that is truly laudable in light of the fact that few publications of this kind strive and ultimately manage to include concrete pedagogical implications. this is achieved through the provision of multiple real-life examples, many of which are set in the classroom, constant references to three cases of learners introduced at the beginning of the book, the lists of specific guidelines with respect to how dmcs can be initiated and sustained, or how intensive projects can be successfully organized in the classroom. third, the value of the monograph lies in the fact that it is interdisciplinary, combining insights from the domains of second language acquisition, and cognitive and social psychology, a feature that is clearly worth emulating in other areas as this ensures obtaining greater insights into the issues under investigation. fourth, and no less importantly, the book is simply highly readable thanks to the comprehensible language used, numerous examples and excerpts taken from the stories of learners from different contexts. as regards the areas in which the book could be improved upon, the only thought that crossed my mind when i got to the end of the last chapter was that something should have been included on the methodology of research into dmcs, both at the individual and group level, since not all readers may be familiar with these issues. while they can refer to the publications cited throughout the volume, it could be argued that an inclusion of a separate chapter dedicated to such considerations would have become a further strength of the book. this shortcoming, though, is a relatively minor one compared to all the undeniable contributions that the book makes to our understanding of the role of motivation in second language learning. thus, i am confident that the monograph will be of relevance not only to researchers conducting studies on motivation in learning a second or foreign language, somewhat irrespective of the theoretical perspective they embrace, undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students working on their research projects, but also teachers wishing to trigger dmcs in individual students or groups of students they work with. i can only wish that there would be more publications of this kind as our field would surely benefit from such successful attempts to translate theoretical considerations into classroom practice. reviewed by mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl 173 references csikszenttnihalyi, m. (1975). beyond boredom and anxiety. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. csikszenttnihalyi, m. (1990). flow: the psychology of optimal experience. new york: harper & row. dörnyei, z. (2010). researching motivation: from integrativeness to the ideal l2 self. in s. hunston & d. oakey (eds.), introducing applied linguistics: concepts and skills (pp. 74-86). london: routledge. dörnyei, z., & kubanyiova, m. (2014). motivating learners, motivating teachers. building vision in the language classroom. cambridge: cambridge university press. dörnyei, z., & murphy, t. (2003). group dynamics in the language classroom. cambridge: cambridge university press. waterman, a. s. (2008). reconsidering happiness. an eudaimonist’s perspective. journal of happiness studies, 9, 41-79. 455 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (3). 2016. 455-486 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.3.5 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl higher education teachers’ attitudes towards english medium instruction: a three-country comparison julie dearden university of oxford, uk julie.dearden@education.ox.ac.uk ernesto macaro university of oxford, uk ernesto.macaro@education.ox.ac.uk abstract we report on a small scale study carried out in austria, italy and poland which investigated the attitudes of university teachers engaged in teaching their academic subject through the medium of english. the data consisted of 25 teacher interviews. we focused on the topics of internationalisation of universities, on policy and resourcing, and on the levels of english proficiency (theirs and those of their students) needed for effective english medium instruction (emi). we also observed whether there were differences among the respondents from the three countries and attempted to relate any differences to the linguistic, educational and political context of each. our findings suggest that whilst very similar concerns are in the minds of the teachers regardless of the country they were teaching in, some interesting variability in attitudes, relating to language and to history, could be detected. to our knowledge, this is the first study on emi that compares teacher attitudes in three countries, hence its exploratory nature. our findings would suggest that further research of such comparative kind might provide insights into how the phenomenon of emi is being introduced and accepted across the world. keywords: english medium instruction; university; teacher attitudes julie dearden, ernesto macaro 456 1. introduction this paper reports on a small scale exploratory comparison of lecturers and tutors in three universities situated in poland, austria and italy and describes their attitudes towards the growing phenomenon of english medium instruction (emi) in higher education in their respective countries. the emi phenomenon has been described as displaying a momentum unlikely to be reversed for the foreseeable future (dearden, 2015) but one where the benefits are neither established by solid research evidence nor clearly understood by educational stakeholders. for this paper we adopt the following definition of emi: “the use of the english language to teach academic subjects (other than english itself) in countries or jurisdictions where the first language (l1) of the majority of the population is not english” (dearden, 2015). we should note the contrast here with the definition of content and language integrated learning (clil) given by coyle, hood, and marsh (2010): clil is “a dual-focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language” (p. 1). the issue of terminology (e.g., emi, clil) and what it represents is a complex one. emi is arguably an umbrella term for academic subjects taught through english, one making no direct reference to the aim of improving students’ english. it is a term used across the world and usually in higher education (he). clil is a term which originated in and is almost entirely specific to europe, although some research in non-european contexts has used it. clil has behind it a teaching method which has been described in some detail (see ball, kelly, & clegg, 2015; dalton-puffer & smit’s 2007 edited book for a series of classroom studies), whereas emi makes no claim to a method nor is it, to our knowledge, described anywhere as a method. we should note that clil, unlike emi, does not specify english as the language being used. nonetheless, despite the plurilingualism being advocated by, inter alia, the bologna declaration (european ministers of education, 1999) english has for some time been by far the l2 most adopted in clil contexts (coleman, 2006). the extent to which emi might adopt the concept of integrating language learning into content learning is an important theoretical perspective to adopt. we use the broad term teachers to describe lecturers and tutors who teach academic subjects in the he sector. before considering previous literature on teacher beliefs and attitudes we present a broad picture of some of the issues that have arisen to date in relation to emi. 1.1. the growth of emi and its challenges there is now conclusive evidence (dafouz & guerrini, 2009; doiz, lasagabaster, & sierra 2013b; graddol, 2006; wächter & maiworm, 2014) that across the higher education teachers’ attitudes towards english medium instruction: a three-country comparison 457 world we are experiencing a rapid increase in emi. the expansion of emi is taking place primarily in he, but secondary and even primary education are also undergoing a rapid change in this direction (murphy, 2014). an online survey of postgraduate courses in europe (brenn-white & faethe, 2013) estimated that those taught through emi have increased by at least 42% to a figure around 6,407 with the trend showing an increase from a similar survey only a year earlier (brennwhite & van rest, 2012). o’dowd’s (2015) survey of 70 european universities found that only 7% stated that they were offering no courses at all through emi. globally, a recent 55 country survey (dearden, 2015) found that in both the he and secondary phases of education the trend was for an increase in emi courses, with the private education sector leading the way and the public sector being forced to “play catch up” (macaro, 2015). examples of where this private versus public battle is taking place are in japan (chapple, 2015) and in bangladesh, where hamid, jahan, and islam (2013) provide evidence of private sector student identities perpetuating a social divide. in dearden’s (2015) global survey it was additionally concluded that (a) although public opinion is not wholeheartedly in support of emi, especially in the secondary phase, the attitudes can be described as “equivocal” or as “the object of some concern” rather than being “against” its introduction and continued use; and (b) where there are concerns, these relate to the potentially socially divisive nature of emi because instruction through english may limit access from lower socio-economic groups and/or a fear that the first language or national identity will be undermined. it appears that in europe and across the world more generally similar questions are being asked and challenges are being faced by those involved in the implementation of emi, although each country will have its own perspectives on those questions and challenges. among those involved in the switch from l1 medium of instruction to emi, some of the key stakeholders are the teachers themselves and their attitudes towards emi are the focus of this study. the rapid growth is being increasingly attributed to a desire for universities to “internationalise,” a definition yet to be consensual (but see knight, 2013 for an interpretation), and one which appears to be linked to attracting students from outside the country where the institution is situated in order to increase revenue (o’dowd, 2015), attracting foreign faculty in order to present a competitive profile of “expert teachers” (güruz, 2008), catering for an increasing expat community (belhiah & elhami, 2015) and a desire to rise in the international university rankings (lehikoinen, 2004; rauhvargers, 2013). however, a causal link between the introduction of emi and successful “internationalisation” has not yet been established, and in denmark hultgren’s (2014) study suggests that there is no clear correlation between the introduction of emi and higher-ranked universities. julie dearden, ernesto macaro 458 a number of commentators have expressed serious concern about “englishisation” (hultgren, 2014, p. 390) of he with phillipson (2009), following on from his seminal notion of linguistic imperialism (1992), describing it as a potential pandemic and kirkpatrick (2011) arguing that we may be hurtling disastrously towards “a global society based on anglo-saxon values” (p. 11). in france similar concerns have been expressed by faculty and the media alike (macaro, 2015; and see section 1.3 below). one of the major concerns of emi is the effect that it might have on the home language (l1), and that concern is not limited to countries with a postcolonial history. however, the evidence for this concern is not conclusive as yet. ramanthan (2014), arguing in the sociolinguistic context (gujarat, india) of english as a post-colonial language, proposes that if not carefully managed the vernacular language can be devalued by the economic forces shaping a divided education system, prolonging colonizing policies that “still hold sway” (p. 308), but that it does not have to be that way. this is a view also held broadly by lehikoinen (2004) in the finnish context: no firm evidence exists as yet of a deleterious effect on the l1 but, he argues, we should be vigilant. hultgren (2012), investigating “domain loss” (borrowing english words for scientific terminology) found that, at the university of copenhagen, although computer science was “borrowing” heavily, physics and chemistry, surprisingly, were not. yet policymakers and governments express concern about the threat to the country's home language as reported with regard to the united arab emirates by belhiah and elhami (2015). clearly much more research is needed to monitor the effects on the l1 of the rapid expansion of emi where, in the case of the domain loss, it may lead to a situation where no academic textbooks are published in the home language with the linguistic and social consequences that this might entail. a question which the literature to date does not seem to have answered sufficiently is what level of english is expected of students on emi courses, both at entry and at exit. doiz, lasagabaster, and sierra (2013a) found that, in the basque/spanish context, a high percentage of the local students (42%) claimed to have a very low level of english proficiency, whereas the number of international students reporting a low level of english was around 12%, suggesting some measure of selection (either selfor imposed) in the latter. interestingly, in a different publication, doiz et al. (2013b) also report that administrative staff in the university had serious concerns about students’ english proficiency. in terms of the teachers’ english proficiency there is contradictory evidence. lam and wächter (2014, p. 22) report that in their study the overwhelming majority of emi programme directors considered the proficiency of the emi teachers as good or very good. dearden (2015), on the other hand, reported some concern expressed by the informed participants, perhaps reflecting that the former study was europe-based, whereas the latter attempted a more global picture. higher education teachers’ attitudes towards english medium instruction: a three-country comparison 459 not unexpectedly, one of the main questions being asked by commentators on the emi he phenomenon is whether the teaching of academic subjects through english actually improves the students’ english? here, the evidence is not conclusive. lei and hu’s (2014) study of undergraduate students in china studying in emi programmes found no evidence of a benefit on english proficiency when compared to students on chinese medium programmes. rogier (2012), on the other hand, investigated ielts score gains after four years of emi study at universities in the united arab emirates and found these gains to be statistically significant. however, given that there does not appear to have been a comparison group of some kind, these findings merely tell us that in four years of exposure to english students improved their language proficiency, not that learning through emi is better than, say, a programme of l1 content instruction plus english as a foreign language (efl) support. the corollary of the “does emi improve english?” question is whether the academic subject suffers as a result of it being taught through a second language. joe and lee’s (2013) study of medical students in korea, using a 10-minute understanding of content test, found that emi had little or no detrimental effect on students’ comprehension of the lecture. yet, in surprising contradiction, the students wanted l1 summaries as support materials in emi lectures (suggesting they were experiencing difficulties) and more than half reported that the emi course was less satisfying than learning through l1. dafouz, camacho, and urquia’s (2014) study of first year students (finance, accounting and history) at madrid’s complutense university found no difference in academic subject outcomes between emi students and students taught through spanish. we have found very little other research, in the he context, of deficit/benefit to an academic subject. a recent review of clil in spain (dooly & masats, 2015) does not report on any studies (either in the secondary or tertiary context) which focused specifically on the impact on academic subjects of teaching content through a second language. we can therefore conclude in summary that previous literature on emi has identified a number of issues central to its development. these are: 1. whether the introduction of emi is sufficiently bringing about the desired internationalisation of he to make it worth the challenges it entails. 2. a possible negative impact that emi may have on the home language. 3. the extent to which english proficiency is improved via emi (compared with through l1 medium of instruction plus efl programmes). 4. whether academic subjects are being learnt at least as well as through the home language. 5. the extent to which the learning of english is being integrated in emi he classes. julie dearden, ernesto macaro 460 we hypothesised that these issues might be of concern to various education stakeholders (teachers, students, managers, policy makers). it is to university teachers as key stakeholders in the emi process that we now turn. 1.2. faculty perceptions of emi the research literature on teachers’ perceptions of emi has recently become quite abundant. however, there is little comparison among countries, or geographical areas, which would provide insights into commonalities and differences leading to the development of theory. pre-service science teachers in malaysia (othaman & saat, 2009) expressed major concerns about their students’ poor levels of english and envisaged having to change their pedagogy as a result because “explaining concepts in english” (p. 311) was considered to be their greatest challenge. using an online survey, belhiah and elhami (2015) asked 100 teachers across a range of institutions in the united arab emirates to estimate the impact they felt emi was having on students' english proficiency, with results suggesting favourable outcomes (67% thought that emi improved students' english proficiency). similar positive views were also expressed in a korean study (byun et al., 2011), but concerns were articulated regarding whether students had the necessary english proficiency levels to cope at the beginning of the course, and whether sufficient support systems were available for emi teachers. kiliçkaya (2000) investigated the attitudes of turkish university teachers and found equivocal attitudes expressed: on the one hand they believed turkish as the medium of instruction would have a more positive impact on their students’ learning than emi because of (inter alia) the resulting low student participation; on the other hand, teaching through english overcame the limited academic resources available in turkish. at the european level, in werther, denver, jensen, and mees ’s (2014) small scale study of lecturers in a danish (business) university, emi was seen more as an inevitable consequence of wishing to attract international students than a clearly planned language policy, and some respondents indicated that “teaching through english is more of a problem than most people dare to openly admit” (p. 453). some felt that they had been “saddled with emi in a relatively haphazard way” (p. 452) and asked to take on emi courses at very short notice often without any acknowledgement of the additional workload that managing content through an l2 entails. a small scale qualitative study of teachers in spain (cots, 2013, p. 116) reported teachers being forced to adopt emi by institutional and professional considerations rather than through personal choice with references to “survival” and “no other option.” lecturer respondents in doiz et al. (2013a), whilst acknowledging the importance of introducing emi as the global higher education teachers’ attitudes towards english medium instruction: a three-country comparison 461 language of academia, also commented on the additional workload that this represented. in airey’s (2011) study of swedish university teachers, the respondents felt that their lectures were less precise and less in-depth than if they had been in l1. the linguistic challenges of emi have been responded to in a number of different ways according to jurisdictions. university teachers in the ukraine (tarnopolsky & goodman, 2014) reported that both themselves and their students were having to codeswitch to l1 for a number of pedagogic functions (especially for checking understanding of content), with some teachers feeling this was an unfortunate consequence of low student proficiency. others pointed to the artificiality of attempting english-only instruction with homogenous l1 emi classes of students. the austrian teachers in tatzl’s (2011) study, however, showed much less concern with the linguistic challenges they faced implementing emi, perhaps because (apparently) as many as half the teachers in the sample were native speakers of english. teachers’ english proficiency levels may affect attitudes to emi. for example jensen and thøgersen (2011) found that younger teachers in a danish university were more favourable to the spread of emi than older teachers, and they attribute this attitude to feeling more comfortable using english-only or english extensively. this then leads to the question of whether staff should be selected to teach through emi based on proficiency tests and whether this selection might disadvantage certain academic groups (klaassen & räsänen, 2006). 1.3. emi in italy, austria and poland: a brief overview before moving on to our current study we provide a brief overview of he in the three countries using data gleaned from a variety of sources. we should point out that the choice of these three countries was entirely dictated by our opportunity to conduct the research in those countries (see section 2) and the financial resources available. nevertheless, having a southern european country (italy), a central european german-speaking country (austria) and a country which has for historical reasons only recently adopted english as its first foreign language (poland), provided us with three differing and potentially interesting european contexts. a survey conducted by the european commission (2012) of self-reported competence in an l2 placed italy second from last among 27 eu nations. only 38% of italians claimed to be able to speak at least one foreign language1 well enough to be able to have a conversation, compared to the eu average of 54%. in 2010 (published 2013), costa and coleman carried out a comprehensive survey 1 throughout this survey english was classified as being by far the most widely spoken foreign or second language among non-anglophones in europe. julie dearden, ernesto macaro 462 of emi in he in italy. they demonstrated that italy has been “slow to internationalise” (p. 5) despite an italian law of 2010 calling for greater mobility of faculty and students, more co-operation among universities, and an increase in programmes taught through a second language. according to online data from universitaly reported in guarda and helm (2016), there are 55 universities offering 245 “english taught programmes” (etps, another term for emi), 226 of which are at master’s level and 19 at bachelor’s level. this represents a 72% rise in just one year. nevertheless, helm and guarda (2015) consider english as “far from being the language of higher education in italy.” wächter and maiworm (2014) estimate moreover that only 0.5% of italian students are enrolled in etps and rank italy 21st in the eu in terms of etp provision. in italy the introduction of emi has provoked a heated debate in recent years. lack of internationalisation has contributed to what costa and coleman (2013) argue is a situation where no italian university figures in the top 200 of the world university rankings. because of this low ranking, at the politecnico di milano, the rector tried to introduce, relatively quickly, emi in all courses but met with fierce resistance from students and faculty alike. the media (e.g., corriere della sera in 2014) presented the debate by, on the one hand, enlisting the views of nationally famous linguists who predicted a linguistic, cultural and even cognitive decline resulting from introducing emi, and, on the other hand, giving ample space to the then minister for he who had been seen to be repeatedly lending his full support to this introduction. in terms of preparation for emi in he, clil is permitted in the last year of italian secondary education through legislation passed in 2010 (grandinetti, langelotti, & ting, 2013). however, teacher training for either clil secondary or emi tertiary education is virtually non-existent, and, with regard to teacher professional development, francomacaro (2011) reports that emi lecturers in her study apparently were not aware that language plays an important role in content delivery. in contrast to italy, the european commission (2012) placed austria 11th among eu nations in self-reported second language proficiency, with 78% of austrians claiming to speak at least one foreign language well enough to have a conversation. austria in fact showed the most marked improvement since the previous survey among european nations in 2005. austria has 23 public and 11 private universities (studying in austria, 2016). only one university (university of vienna) is ranked (170th) in the world university rankings 2014-15 top 200. wächter and maiworm (2014) estimate that 1.8% austrian students are enrolled in etps and rank austria 10th in terms of etp provision. unterberger’s (2012) study of austrian business faculties claims that this academic field has been particularly active in the rapid increase in emi provision in he, and more than 65% courses taught through english were introduced in the single year 2009-2010. higher education teachers’ attitudes towards english medium instruction: a three-country comparison 463 she found that students’ english proficiency was not being evaluated prior to programme entry in nearly a third of programmes surveyed, relying instead on school-leaving certificates. unlike italy above, austrian faculty (at least in this somewhat more restricted area of business studies) reported that some focus was being placed on developing students’ language skills in emi classes. however, there is little provision for teacher preparation to teach through english. in austria, clil is much better established in secondary schools than in either italy or poland. dalton-puffer (as cited in yoxsimer paulsrud, 2014) estimates that approximately 75% of secondary schools have some clil provision, almost always in english. one would expect this to be a reasonable foundation for emi in he. nonetheless, unterberger and wilhelmer (2011), in their overview of the forms of implementation of emi in austria, conclude that there is a “significant risk of rushed decision making” (p. 105) and that the conversion from l1 medium of instruction to emi needs to be informed by research evidence. in terms of our third country, the european commission survey of selfreported competence in a second language placed poland 18th among eu nations, with 50% of poles believing that they could hold a conversation in at least one foreign language. however, this figure represents a decrease since the previous survey in 2005. we should note that the recent political history of poland has impacted on the country’s attitudes and policy regarding second language learning, more so than in the other two countries. thus the drive to offer academic subjects through a second language started in he in poland after the systemic changes of 1989. according to wächter and maiworm (2014), between 2007 and 2014 the number of etps increased five-fold attracting three times more students. in the year 2013-2014, of the 8,300 programmes of study offered by polish he institutions 409 were taught in english, which constituted nearly 5% of the total number, attracting 0.7% of the total student body. the authors rank poland 17th in terms of etp provision. poland has 132 public universities and other he institutions (piotrowski, 2012). none of these are in the world university rankings 2014–15 top 200. there are also over 302 private he institutions (ministerstwo nauki i szkolnictwa wyższego, 2013). individual he institutions’ international strategies preceded the official national internationalisation strategy issued in 2015 by the ministry of science and higher education, which refers to the need to attract more foreign students to polish institutions of he. teachers involved in emi are not formally required to enhance their language or teaching methodology skills and, like in the other two countries, there is little impetus to create a teacher preparation structure for emi teachers. in summary, for these three countries one would expect to see some divergence of university teacher attitudes with respect to and dependent on how well established emi (or clil) is at both the secondary and tertiary level, julie dearden, ernesto macaro 464 whether there are national debates on-going regarding a threat to the national language, and whether there are personal beliefs about levels of teacher english language proficiency as well as that of the students. one might expect convergence on the question of the impact that emi might have on the internationalisation of their institutions. 2. methodology the above general background to emi and the brief descriptions of emi in the three countries concerned led us to the following research questions: 1. what are he teachers’ beliefs and attitudes with regard to the introduction of emi in their universities? 2. how do levels of english proficiency influence teachers’ perceived success of emi programmes? 3. are there any emerging differences among the “teacher voices” in austria, italy and poland? table 1 list of participating teachers from the three countries and their emi subject teacher country subject 1 austria creative media technologies 2 austria physical therapy, basic physiology, anatomy, orthopaedics 3 austria maths 4 austria computer science, business informatics 5 austria english and administrator 6 austria social work, internationalisation, family dynamics, mental health care 7 italy english, academic writing 8 italy maths, applied maths 9 italy internet security, it 10 italy micro-biogenetics, molecular biology and genetics 11 italy italian law, constitutional law 12 italy maths 13 italy industrial engineering 14 italy international law 15 poland chemistry, general chemistry, chemistry for biologists 16 poland chemistry technology, physical chemistry 17 poland marine geology, catastrophe geology 18 poland english + responsible for bologna process and language provision 19 poland astronomy 20 poland chemistry 21 austria tourism 22 austria media , broadcasting, radio 23 austria computer science 24 austria social work 25 austria physiology higher education teachers’ attitudes towards english medium instruction: a three-country comparison 465 this was a small-scale qualitative study of university teachers, in one institution in each of the three countries. individual semi-structured interviews were carried out with 25 teachers (see the appendix for the interview schedule). table 1 provides information about the teachers whilst ensuring that their anonymity (as well as that of their institutions) is maintained. in order to further protect anonymity with such a small qualitative sample we have not, except in very rare cases, identified the teachers’ fields of specialization (academic disciplines). ours was an opportunity sample because the teachers had embarked on a week-long programme which explored general issues relating to emi. both authors of this paper contributed to that programme, and we clearly acknowledge that this workshop contribution might be seen as a limitation of the research and the findings below may not be typical of teachers in those countries. in accordance with our own university’s ethics protocol, the teachers interviewed were informed as to what the research entailed and how it might be used, the security measures undertaken regarding the storage of data, maintenance of anonymity of participants and institutions. they were also given participant consent forms with the option of withdrawing from the research at any time. the workshop did not carry with it any form of certification; thus, there was no apparent need to “please the interviewer.” interviews were conducted in english in quiet locations. we were given no impression that conducting the interviews in the participants’ l2 caused them problems. they also gave the impression of being very relaxed and able to speak freely perhaps because they had got to know the interviewer over the course of the week. interviews lasted approximately 20 minutes and were audio-recorded. the recordings were transcribed. analysis of the transcriptions was carried out by first examining the responses to the introductory questions and then identifying themes emerging from the respondents' answers, whether these diverged or not, using the approach advocated by strauss and corbin (1998). 10% of the transcriptions were checked for reliability of coding by the other researcher and any disagreements about what themes were emerging were resolved through discussion. the findings are structured according to the research questions, and then within these according to the themes that emerged from the respondents. we first present the findings in general, then provide a comparative account among the three countries. 3. findings 3.1. what are he teachers’ beliefs and attitudes with regard to the introduction of emi in their universities? as can be seen from the interview schedule (see the appendix), we approached the topic of their beliefs and attitudes by asking, at the beginning of the interview, julie dearden, ernesto macaro 466 a broad open-ended first question, deliberately not specifying whether those beliefs and attitudes reflected those of the institution as a whole or were those of the teachers themselves. we expected the term emi itself to be a challenge as no universally accepted definition exists and the teachers were purposively not given a working definition of emi. however, in general, they understood emi as describing the practice of teaching their academic subject through english when english was not the teacher's first language or that of either the students in their lecture room or the majority of the population in their country. there were virtually no references to integrating content and language as in clil (see section 1). 3.1.1. internationalisation internationalisation and globalisation emerged repeatedly as two “buzz words,” and it was clear, as one teacher said, that “globalisation has arrived” and both were inextricably linked, in teachers' minds, with emi: “internationalisation is one of the big words here. english as world language, as the key to success, omnipresent.” internationalisation was closely linked with teachers' aspirations for their home students, wanting them to be able to function in a globalised world. it became clear that the terms internationalisation and globalisation were used almost interchangeably. teachers believed that emi was “a passport to a global world,” a “key to success,” giving opportunities to their home students to work and study abroad. by increasing the level of their students' english, teachers were providing their students with opportunities to broaden their horizons. emi was a way “to open doors and opportunities.” teachers believed that emi could be “useful for young people who might have to look for a job abroad” and that their students had to be flexible in work life and education, be able to move abroad for work and not find it “a big problem to move to another country or do studies in another country because they already know how it is to have english language.” teachers wanted to give their home students a more international outlook by teaching through english, often relating this to their personal experiences of having studied abroad. those who taught through emi tended to be those who had studied abroad themselves and who wished to impart some of the excitement and benefits. as one interviewee said: due to my own experience and how much more i can do using english, looking at the research going on, and having the opportunity to use all this information is really helpful. [i want to] give the same opportunity to my students as i had. there was a common belief in the three countries that teaching through emi at university would improve the students' english. most interviewees were higher education teachers’ attitudes towards english medium instruction: a three-country comparison 467 convinced that students would improve their english simply by being exposed to it as “they will be exposed to more input, relevant input” and “because they are forced to communicate with me in english and forced to think in english.” one teacher thought that students would “improve because they have to express themselves and collect the vocabulary to express and for their writing,” whilst another thought that emi would be good “probably not [for] the level of spoken english but to give them more confidence, understand more when reading.” 3.1.2. english as the language of the academy another reason for teachers to teach through emi was that english was the international language of their subject and very often that of the text books, articles, and teaching materials they were using. thus some found it simpler to teach through english; for example, a science teacher told us: “the text books are in english and also i give them my experience from scientific papers but they are in english so it’s easier to talk in english than in polish.” perhaps unsurprisingly, as academics, they held the desire for students to be able to understand research publications, academic literature, to be able to hold their own at international conferences and publish in world-class research journals. one university had research projects with american and other international universities, and all were optimistic that emi would enable them to produce high quality research papers in english with international impact, helping the university to move up in the international rankings and therefore gain prestige. 3.1.3. international students in addition to opening up opportunities for home students, across the three countries, emi was also considered a way of attracting international students. however, these attempts were not always successful, and this was considered to be due to insufficient emi available at their institutions: “so far we have not been very successful in attracting other students to come here and one main reason is that we do not offer enough emi.” some teachers accepted the need to attract international students somewhat reluctantly but acknowledged: “for my university it is necessary to open the doors, globalisation has arrived.” there was an acceptance that the emphasis for international students had shifted from studying abroad to learn a language to studying to learn content. this shift was not considered problematic even though students were deciding to study in austria, for example, without speaking any german: “when i went to france i had to certificate somehow my knowledge of french – they wouldn't have accepted me coming without french but it's possible now coming and studying without the julie dearden, ernesto macaro 468 language of the country. it's possible now.” there were varying attitudes to the quality and motivation of international students. some students worked hard: “from kazakhstan last year we had 2 persons, they were really very good students . . . also well-prepared from the chemistry point of view.” others chose a country because they wanted to travel, for example, some spanish students who “came for a holiday” did not attend lectures but “travelled a lot so finally they didn't pass exams.” in some cases the international students were not being integrated into regular undergraduate or graduate programmes and were not taught by the same teachers. a few teachers reported that “they end up being taught individually as the main course is taught in l1” or in “a special course for foreigners.” there was concern that international students were being taught by less experienced tutors: “the course was supposed to be held by a full professor of the university who did not feel confident, then they came to me and asked me because they knew i was from a similar field and solved the problem.” 3.1.4. a generation gap? hesitation to embrace emi perhaps signalled a generation gap. younger teachers who had studied abroad were keen to try out teaching in english and were optimistic: “i think [emi] is a good opportunity for a professor.” younger teachers were eager to experiment in their own lecture rooms, and enthusiastic about attracting “intelligent people to my university and share our own knowledge more widely.” one younger teacher nevertheless offered: “i wanted to prove myself but it’s been quite tiring.” younger teachers wanted to move beyond the narrow national confines. however, one more experienced teacher also said: [despite my age,] i want to have a wider audience in my lectures, some erasmus students; i want to switch in english.” understandably, some older teachers felt less confident about teaching through a second language. they had nevertheless been put under pressure to teach through emi, to the point where one experienced professor spoke of bringing in an outside researcher to do his teaching as the researcher was younger and spoke english. in another case the interviewee told us that two phd students from india had taken his seminars: “we give them the literature and the papers and they teach the students.” older teachers were also keener to protect their home language. although english was seen as the academic lingua franca and, more than once, teachers referred to emi as the new latin, emi was nevertheless viewed with more scepticism by older teachers. 3.1.5. teachers and university managers the teachers also made a distinction between their own attitudes to emi and those of policy-makers and university management. the teachers’ reasons for higher education teachers’ attitudes towards english medium instruction: a three-country comparison 469 teaching through emi were more idealistic than those which they attributed to the administrators of their own universities. as we have seen, teachers expressed a desire to give their students opportunities and give them the keys to success whereas they spoke of the “central universities,” “administration” or “rectors” introducing emi for financial reasons, in order to survive and compete with other universities on an international stage. university managers wanted to “do it in english because of economical reasons and to enlarge our students base.” this was because “universities [have been] made financially independent and need higher number of students to survive.” both of them were italian teachers, and it is interesting that both mentioned finance as a motive for the introduction of emi in their institution. 3.1.6. emi policy and resources if policy makers and university managers insist on introducing emi for reasons of economic growth, prestige and internationalisation, do they give sufficient consideration to the administrative and teaching resources needed to support its effective implementation? when asked if their university had an emi policy, the majority of the teachers interviewed suspected that there was a strategy in their university but it was not explicit: “you mean that we need a . . .? . . . we have a masters starting in fall . . . here isn’t a document at least that i know.” one interviewee knew that in their university “there is a strategy paper, internationalisation is a big goal and emi is part of that,” and others thought that a policy might come later: “not policy now, it could be in the future,” or that emi in their institution was “a general trend not set in stone.” some associated emi with the erasmus scheme in their institution, seeing it as a kind of continuation: “each year the numbers of the lectures which are offered in english increase.” according to interviewees, emi seemed to be growing organically rather than in a planned way; this was reflected not only in the lack of a clear policy in universities, but also in the lack of administrative support, the random choice of subjects taught through emi, and the criteria used for choosing teachers to teach content subjects in english. some teachers felt they were carrying all the responsibility for the implementation of emi. one declared: “my institution is discharging the responsibilities on the professors and i'm not sure they are doing their best at hierarchical level to support us.” another teacher was hopeful that “the offices will get an awareness that it needs to be managed, not just [rely on] the goodwill of lecturers.” in all three universities there was no clear policy on which subjects should be taught through emi. teachers tended to volunteer to teach through emi when they felt capable of doing so. the point was made that even within subjects such as law, parts of a subject may be suitable for teaching through english julie dearden, ernesto macaro 470 but others would not be. case law, for example, could be taught in english but it would not make sense to teach constitutional law through the medium of english. medicine was another example where a teacher explained that studying medicine through emi made sense in terms of a medical student reading international research but made no sense at all when the student became a practitioner and met their local patients. 3.1.7. teacher preparation for emi although the teachers we interviewed were taking part in a short emi teacher professional development course, some teachers, nevertheless, thought their universities were not supporting them sufficiently in emi pedagogy. however, this may not be simply an emi problem, but a more general one in european he. as one teacher told us, “for professors it's necessary to have good publications. the didactics is not so important at our university.” across the three institutions, teachers reported limited self-experience or no previous understanding of the implications of teaching through emi. few teachers said they had considered the idea that emi was not simply a matter of translating course material and presentation slides from l1 to l2 and/or that it might require a more interactive pedagogy to ensure comprehension. referring to a master’s degree course, one teacher explained that half my lectures are in polish but then i give the summary in english and this is on slides. i ask someone to read this and i give some questions in english and they should answer [in english] but they can choose to answer in polish or in english. 3.2. how do levels of english proficiency influence teachers’ perceived success of emi programmes? if universities decide to teach through emi then a basic first requirement would presumably be that their faculty members speak english—but what level of english? teachers were asked what level of english they believed was necessary for a teacher to have to teach through emi and how the teacher could reach that level. they were also asked what level the students needed to have before coming to study with them and how students could reach that level. 3.2.1. teachers’ level of english all our respondents found it difficult to answer the question about the level of english a teacher should have before teaching through emi and how teachers higher education teachers’ attitudes towards english medium instruction: a three-country comparison 471 should reach an appropriate level of english. they expressed consternation: “phew, wow, i’m not sure what level the teacher needs, erm, it’s not necessary that the teacher needs a higher level than the students, but it should be on a good level”; “pof . . . good question. i don’t know actually . . . at least you have to be able to understand the questions of the students. you should be able to talk, formulate and reformulate – that's probably the hardest thing.” currently there does not seem to be a standardised english proficiency benchmark test for subject teachers teaching through emi. the teachers we interviewed were unaware of a language level, test or qualification for emi teachers in their respective countries. this meant that there was no standard way of deciding who might be competent to teach through the medium of english. teachers had been nominated to teach through emi because they had been abroad, were thought to speak english well or, typically, had volunteered. one teacher thought a test would deter teachers, so in their faculty they had “intentionally left out a standard as requirement as it's difficult enough to encourage faculty to take part and to teach in english.” however, it was also clear that many of the teachers would welcome a benchmark level of english proficiency for emi to reassure themselves that they were capable of teaching through english. indeed many of the respondents that we, as researchers, considered confident and proficient english speakers were unsure whether they had a sufficient level of english to teach through emi. having a phd from an english-speaking country was considered one way of measuring a teacher's english skills. however, teaching through emi would appear to necessitate both english and pedagogical skills, so a phd was not always enough. one of the interviewees commented: “other days it [the lecture] doesn’t work and i don’t know why . . . if they are astonished or if they are involved or if they are bored.” another teacher with a phd expressed their limitations in the following way: the things i'm teaching i learned them in english during my phd. when i first came back i had to translate the words into italian so i feel more confident to teach them the subject. but it might be limiting when i have to make the examples, you feel a limitation, you would like to make things clear and then your dictionary is limited. some teachers were aware that they needed a sufficiently high level of english to deal with teaching complex constructs: “because i have to explain notions and i know these notions in my language but my task is to use another language and things can change.” at the same time there was a belief that teaching science and maths was easy and required little language: “i think for technical disciplines we don’t need very deep knowledge of the language. the vocabulary is 400 or 500 words.” a maths teacher told us: “in maths you are saved by the formulae, and the formulae are true or false in any language,” and a science julie dearden, ernesto macaro 472 teacher offered: “in science it’s probably easier because the number of words you have to use in english is lower.” most importantly, teachers rarely referred directly to the language challenges faced by their students perhaps because they were concentrating on their own challenge of preparing and giving their lectures in english. 3.2.2. students’ level of english our interviewees appeared to have only a vague idea of what level of english their students needed in order to follow a course in emi at university, and expressing this varied from “quite good” to referring to the common european framework of reference (cefr)—generally, but not always—b2. one maths teacher commented: “i think they have to be able to listen, to follow me to understand my words and my thoughts. they don’t have to be very good in written english for following my course.” when asked how the students could reach the necessary level of english to study in their classes, a few teachers were themselves willing to give support: “intermediate just to communicate, they don’t need to use special terms, i can teach them.” other teachers thought that it was secondary schools' responsibility to prepare students: “9 years english at school and if you have good teachers it should be sufficient.” or the university might help by “giving them grammar classes in the first semester to prepare them for the official course in the second semester.” in general though, the idea was prevalent that it was the student's own responsibility to make sure that their english was of a high enough standard to study through emi. one teacher believed that “the university can support. i know there are english courses for the students but i think it’s up to them.” this is an interesting belief especially when combined with most interviewees’ attitude that they were not there to support the students in improving their english. subject teachers did not see themselves as language teachers: “errr i don’t think so, i’m not going to improve [their] english. i’m going to transfer basic knowledge, try to communicate in a correct way but i’m not going to correct or teach them english!” it is not clear if or to what extent a content teacher needs to take some responsibility for the students' language development, and this makes setting and marking exams a challenge. should the teacher be assessing the english or the content? one teacher told us: “i do mark the big mistakes but this is not my duty. i shouldn’t be judging them on their english.” another question that needs to be addressed is: what language should the exams be in to enable students to demonstrate their knowledge and their potential? many teachers were struggling with this dilemma and one explained: higher education teachers’ attitudes towards english medium instruction: a three-country comparison 473 so i even called the rector of the didactic section to ask him if i could eventually use italian to assess their preparation, because i’m not interested in their english, i’m interested in their comprehension of micro-biogenetics but they said no, no, no it’s forbidden!. they didn’t even understand the point. but for me it’s a serious point. clearly many teachers felt teaching english was not their job. teachers seemed to be oblivious to the effect that a student's poor level of english and little support in improving that level might have on motivation in an emi context. they complained that the students’ poor levels of english inhibited their learning, made them embarrassed, and worse, not able to understand the teaching. one teacher said s/he tried to encourage them: they [the students] are always complaining that they don’t understand, they can’t talk, they can’t read but it’s practice . . . i kept saying don’t worry, nobody’s laughing at you, ask your question in english. very few dared to and the others were laughing. however, we found virtually no evidence of teachers feeling any sense of responsibility for improving their students’ english. when asked whether or not emi affected the subject content, teachers spoke of the difficulty of expressing themselves clearly in a second language. one teacher spoke for many: “i’m afraid so . . . i’m not able to tell them every single detail as i run out of words; it takes us longer to teach to understand.” in one case not helping students improve their english was even thought to be an advantage, a good way of getting rid of students in a university which, forced to accept a huge number of students in the first year (so many that they did not even fit into the lecture rooms), used this as a way to reject students after the first year exams: “partly professors say we should not support every student only the intelligent students. the intelligent will pass the exams and the others can go.” 3.3. are there any emerging differences among the “teacher voices” in austria, italy and poland? although as researchers we did not specifically go looking for differences between the three countries and by and large there was a great deal of convergence of beliefs, some differences did arise. these emerged from what the teachers chose to focus on (the topics they steered towards) in the interviews rather than in direct answers to our questions. put differently, it was not the case that teachers from one country did not share the concerns of others; rather, it was what, through their “voices,” they seemed to be prioritising as the key issues. for example, in response to the general question about why emi might be introduced, austrian teachers steered their answers much more towards their julie dearden, ernesto macaro 474 own and their students’ mobility across countries. italians steered the conversation much more towards the needs of their own institution to internationalise and towards the (very often repeated) problem of italian being a relatively minor world language. polish teachers chose to focus quite substantially on the kinds of international students they were getting. the following give a flavour of these subtle, but we believe telling, differences: i [feel positive about emi] due to my own experience and how much more i can do using english. (austria) [students need to] feel more comfortable with english in their studies, [so that it’s] not a big problem to move to another country or do studies in another country. (austria) in the beginning it was for erasmus students, the students which came to warsaw from spain, portugal, turkey, recently also kazakhstan, united states but most of them are from turkey. i think our country is interesting for them. (poland) from kazakhstan last year we had 2 persons, they were really very good students . . . we called them guest students and they paid so they were well motivated. (poland) i suppose that we are using emi for internationalisation problems because we have a language which is not spoken around the world. (italy) we’re linguistically speaking an isolated country. (italy) this difference in prioritising certain aspects of the emi discussion partly reflected the difference in english language provision prior to coming to the university and the overall national competence in english cited in our introduction to the three countries. when asked about how well secondary schools prepared students for emi in he, again some subtle differences emerged: officially when they graduate from high school they should be at b2, a lot of them aren’t . . . a lot of them are at b1.2 (austria). they probably should attend special courses which can make their english level at the right level. (poland) they could do better but the way for teaching english or any foreign language is very old fashioned in italy. rarely you have native lecturers and they don’t use videos or tape recorders, they hear about grammar but then when you go to great britain grammar doesn’t help very much. (italy) a recurring theme among the italian teachers was that national pride was at stake: “when they go abroad to conferences . . . i see some italians that make me embarrassed so i would not like this to happen in the future any more.” this theme did not arise in either the austrian or polish respondents. on the topic of whether their institutions had a clear emi policy and support systems, again respondents seemed to steer towards differences which underpinned 2 b1 and b2 are levels on the common european framework of reference. higher education teachers’ attitudes towards english medium instruction: a three-country comparison 475 their main attitudes, despite the clear evidence that none had stated an emi policy and/or strategy documents. teachers in two of the three universities felt that the infrastructure of their universities was not yet sufficiently supportive of emi. in austria, the university had an efficient, english-speaking administrative team in place, but this did not seem to be the case in either poland or italy. however, despite the better preparation in austria from an administrative perspective, it was not necessarily the top administrators who were driving the change. in the following, we should note who the “agents of change” might be: i and my colleague are the driving force here in the university, trying to implement, trying to convince the rector, the principal to offer more courses in english, we have to pull the wagon. (austria) no they ask the director of each department to indicate the professor who could provide courses in english. they ask only the english speaking professor to join the programme but they don’t really structure the course before, so as soon as they found the people willing to do emi, they start. (italy) yes step by step we try to introduce courses for people from saudi arabia. (poland) if the above reflect the broader picture in the three countries, then it would suggest that in austria the emi drivers are the teachers themselves, whereas in italy and to a lesser extent in poland, internationalization is being imposed more from above. there was also some indication that of the three institutions at least one was recognising the additional workload posed by emi as in poland an emi lecture was counted as one and a half times the teaching stint of a lecture in l1, recognising the fact that it takes time to prepare a lecture in l2. we were not made aware of any recognition of additional workload that emi brings about in either italian or austrian institutions, nor of any financial enticements to take on the additional burdens of emi. we asked the teachers where they thought emi would have got to in 10 years’ time in their country. here there was variation within country as well as among countries: in italy? i doubt it will be much more diffused [meaning ‘widespread’]. there are still so many of my peers who do not speak english. they will never allow it to spread much more than this. (italy) i think there will be more, the university will adopt clear cut policies about this. it won’t be just grass-root experiences or anybody decides what to do, the way they want to do it. it will be somehow managed in a more conscious and organised way. (italy) it will be popular, at this moment this is new. poland is a country which came into the european union 20 years ago, so it is not a long time, so we try to improve in different areas. (poland) i think this programme is good for us for english but also for teaching this is the time to stop and think. i just talked about seminars, last year was the first year we were obliged to have seminars in english for the masters students. (poland) julie dearden, ernesto macaro 476 i think almost every university, i hope so. (austria) i assume that in 10 years perhaps 50% of the faculties will also have english programmes. it will always be the case that in some disciplines people will say english is not necessary. (austria) we propose to finish the findings section with this very thought-provoking statement which will act as an interesting research issue in the years to come: “i assume [emi] will keep on making good progress for a while and it’ll come to a point where its limits become more apparent and . . . it will be clear it has reached its limits in becoming a productive tool” (austria). 4. discussion this small scale study sought to investigate university teachers’ attitudes to emi in an institution of he in each of three european countries. our findings by and large concur with previous literature on the implementation of emi in europe and indeed across the world in that the purposes for its introduction are multifarious (lehikoinen, 2004; o’dowd, 2015), the purposes are rarely clearly articulated by policy makers and university managers, and that differences exist both within country and across countries in how it is being introduced and accepted. if this within-country and cross-country diversity is replicated world-wide, then there is an urgent need for research to establish whether this diversity is a positive reflection of different cultural needs, or whether it is simply an overall lack of understanding of emi’s implications and of poor investment in programme preparation. clearly, according to the interviewees in the three countries investigated, emi is on the increase and this concurs with global research previously cited (brenn-white & faethe, 2013; wächter & maiworm, 2014). the major driver in the implementation of emi is the internationalisation of the he sector aimed at attracting more foreign students. this finding supports findings from previous studies (e.g., başıbek et al., 2014 in turkey; choi, 2013 in korea) which have investigated reasons for its growth. internationalisation and globalisation were believed to be beneficial for both students and universities. however, it became clear that much more work needs to be done on differentiating these terms. for some universities, international may contain a notion of students studying an international, outward-looking curriculum. for others it means setting up partnerships, sending students abroad and attracting students from overseas, but there is no unifying definition of what “going international” actually means. what was interesting about the data from these three countries was the virtual absence of a concern to keep up with the private sector (e.g., chapple, 2015; dearden, 2015; hamid et al., 2013). of course a factor at play here is that the private sector does not have a strong foothold in italy, but we were surprised higher education teachers’ attitudes towards english medium instruction: a three-country comparison 477 at the lack of mention of the private factor in our austrian and polish respondents’ comments (there are more private universities there although the respondents’ institutions were both public ones). it could be argued that state universities are now more financially independent in all three countries and that, in europe at least, this makes the private versus state distinction less important. however, we would propose that compared to the freedom that the private sector has to offer as many of its programmes through english as it wants and, therefore, generate much greater income through international students, state universities are still relatively restricted. future research may give greater clarity to some of these issues. we were also surprised that the issue of university rankings (hultgren, 2014; unterberger, 2014) did not emerge more powerfully in relation to emi and internationalisation in view of the virtual absence of all three countries from the top 200 rankings. in other words, the teachers themselves did not appear to consider rising in the rankings an important issue, even if their managers perhaps did. it was referred to specifically by only one respondent (an austrian), although there was more indirect reference among others when talking about producing high quality research papers in english. no doubt, the issue was lurking in the background, but rising in the rankings did not seem to have been a strategy explicitly articulated by the university managers. a challenge posed by emi is the infrastructure of the universities themselves. if our findings are replicated more generally in europe, then universities need to adapt their organisation and culture if they are to accept and successfully integrate international students. if a university decides to teach through emi, there will be a need not only for emi teaching but for english medium administration. international students, once they have applied and been accepted, will need to be enrolled, welcomed and integrated into courses of study; administrative staff will need to be able to speak and write in english. if a university has visiting academics, then administrative systems such as employment and student reports may need to be in english. as a whole our respondents were more in favour than against the introduction and increase in emi. this is in line with previous findings of teacher beliefs (e.g., jensen & thøgersen, 2011) where there is a recognition of the importance of internationalisation through the implementation of emi despite its challenges, and our findings also correspond to dearden’s (2015) global survey which showed few educationalists to be fundamentally against its introduction (not including commentators such as phillipson, 2009 and kirkpatrick, 2011). there were concerns and challenges to be faced but, in general, there was recognition of benefits both for home students and for the academy more generally. probably the best way to sum up our respondents’ attitudes is that emi is here to stay and set to increase, and therefore they have to make the best of it. julie dearden, ernesto macaro 478 perhaps the greatest concern with the dangers of emi was implicit in the italians’ commentaries, no doubt echoing the national debate in the media that had been taking place. it is interesting that italians should on the one hand feel their language threatened by emi and, at the same time, frequently acknowledge the low levels of national english competence. italian is spoken by approximately 60 million people as native speakers, polish by 40 million, and german by 90 million. compared to native speakers of much larger “world languages” (mandarin, spanish, english), these figures are relatively similar. future research may try to dig deeper into why the italians should particularly feel threatened by the introduction of emi; none of the polish or austrian respondents referred to a possible domain loss of their languages. nevertheless, the issue of domain loss would appear to be an important one. if a language is no longer used in academia, will it risk being relegated to the status of a spoken language used only as a social vernacular rather than existing in all fields (dearden, 2015)? a question then arises as to whether english really is a tool for a multicultural and multilingual education. does an international student gain a merely superficial insight into the host culture if they are not expected to have some competence in the host language? could emi simply encourage “educational tourism” (carr, 2003)? it became evident from the teachers' comments that in many cases the students were not always completely integrated. in the rush to internationalise there seems to be variability in the quality of experience for an international student. it would be worth investigating if, more generally, they are in fact receiving the same content as home students. one of the challenges expressed in our study was the english proficiency levels required of both students and teachers in order not just to survive emi but to actually thrive on it. echoing the previous literature (doiz et al., 2013a; lam & wächter, 2014), our respondents reported no clear threshold for either student or their own english proficiency. the issue did not appear to have been sufficiently debated in their respective institutions and future research is urgently needed to establish these thresholds. in terms of whose responsibility it was to develop the english competence of students in emi classes, the majority did not feel it was the emi teacher’s. this again raises the issue (e.g., by airey, 2012) of whether secondary schools and preparatory programmes should be responsible for the language levels of the students, whether emi teachers should be language teachers as well as content teachers, and therefore whether they should be specifically trained as such? furthermore, given some of the respondents’ comments about science and mathematics requiring relatively small vocabularies, there is not only an urgent need for research into subject-specific language requirements but clearly a need for teacher professional development given that research in these subjects (othman & saat, 2009; probyn, 2006), albeit in different contexts, has already higher education teachers’ attitudes towards english medium instruction: a three-country comparison 479 begun to show that complex language and indeed carefully scaffolded interactive learning plays a critical role in understanding content thoroughly. unlike the views expressed by at least one science teacher, science requires a great deal of language in order to put across concept definition and explanation (rollnick, 2000; yassin, tek, alimon, baharom, & ying, 2010), and it has its own specific genre which is second nature to the teacher but which has to be learnt by the student in order for them to become part of this community of practice (wingate, 2015). we detected a distinct lack of awareness of a need to change pedagogy in order to help students (whether home or international) cope with content delivered through a second language. in this connection, we have to keep in mind that these were emi teachers embarking on a short professional development course, so they were possibly relatively open to the need for a revised pedagogy. there was little mention of the skills they believed might be required of an efl teacher and how these skills might need to be adopted or developed by them as emi teachers. at the very least, we would argue, emi teachers need to know how to modify their input, assure comprehension via student-initiated interactional modifications and create an atmosphere where students operating in an l2 or l3 are not afraid to speak, whilst taking into account the many cultural differences present in the room and the potentially different language levels of individuals. a monologic approach sits uneasily alongside the belief that emi is a tool for opening doors to a global world, a multilingual and multicultural tool for developing intercultural communication. 5. conclusion this was a small scale study of only three institutions in three countries; clearly, this limitation does not allow us to generalise our findings to other contexts, let alone to europe. moreover, we acknowledge that the fact that the interviewees had volunteered to be on a teacher development programme which the researchers contributed to may be seen as a limitation. however, from the frankness of their responses we are confident that they were not modifying their beliefs in order to please the interviewer. we found recurring themes, common to all three countries, which have been the concern of previous empirical studies and commentaries, and our data has added to the layers of evidence of what the critical issues are in the implementation of emi. there is considerable variance in the beliefs and attitudes of emi teachers with regard to emi being introduced in their countries. the within-country variation goes from almost unqualified enthusiasm to considerable concern about the speed, lack of agency, low linguistic proficiency and general support for emi programmes. this variation may be partly explained by the age and/or english proficiency level of the teachers. julie dearden, ernesto macaro 480 some between-country differences have been highlighted and these appear to relate to the concerns that teachers have about the status of the home language once emi becomes the norm, as current trends indicate that it will. more research, and particularly quantitative research of comparative nature, is clearly needed in order to gain greater insights into how the educational and political setting influences teacher beliefs. in terms of whose responsibility it was to develop the english competence of students in emi classes, the vast majority of teachers did not feel it was that of the emi teacher. clearly, in the context of he, emi is quite some way from the principles of integrating content and language learning (clil). however, we should not be surprised that this is the case in he where teachers have spent years developing as subject specialists. a shift towards greater integration of language into the content of their classes is unlikely to occur without support and structure from their institutions, and the evidence from our study was that the support was lacking in all three. acknowledgements we would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers of this paper for their very helpful suggestions. we are indebted to colleagues in austria, italy and poland for some of the information contained in section 1.3. any fault in the interpretation of that information is of course our own. higher education teachers’ attitudes towards english medium instruction: a three-country comparison 481 references airey, j. 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(2014). english-medium degree programmes in austrian tertiary business studies: policies and programme design (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of vienna, austria. retrieved from http://j.mp/u nterbergeremi unterberger, b., & wilhelmer, n. (2011). english-medium education in economics and business studies: capturing the status quo at austrian universities. international journal of applied linguistics, 161, 90-110. wächter, b., & maiworm, f. (eds.). (2014). english-taught programmes in european higher education, the state of play in 2014. bonn: lemmens. werther, c., denver, c., jensen, c., & mees, i. g. (2014). using english as a medium of instruction at university level in denmark: the lecturer’s perspective. journal of multilingual and multicultural development, 35(5), 443-462. wingate, u. (2015). academic literacy and student diversity: the case for inclusive practice. bristol: multilingual matters. yassin, s., tek, o., alimon, h., baharom, s., & ying, l. (2010). teaching science through english: engaging pupils cognitively. international clil research journal, 1(3), 46-59. yoxsimer paulsrud, b. (2014). english-medium instruction in sweden. perspectives and practices in two upper secondary schools. stockholm: stockholm university, department of language education. julie dearden, ernesto macaro 486 appendix schedule of interviews with university teachers in poland, austria and italy interviews lasted between 15-20 minutes. questions were asked in the following order, but the interview was allowed to “flow” according to the teacher’s responses. 1. what is your name? 2. what do you teach? 3. do you already teach in english? 4. why do we have emi in the first place? what are you trying to achieve by teaching in english? 5. is teaching through english language the policy in your university/ the place where you work? 6. do you think it’s going to be beneficial to the students? 7. do you think they will improve their english? 8. do you think the other academic subject content will be affected? 9. what level of english does the teacher need to teach in emi? 10. how do you think a teacher gets to the level of being good enough to teach in emi? 11. what level of english do you/ the students need before they come to study with you/ study in emi at university? 12. and how do the students get to the level of english before they come to your university/ get to university? 13. do you assess your students in english? please can you explain? which subjects? how? who assesses? 14. and if you think ahead, to 10 years time, where do you think emi will be? 15. and what do you think the research questions are in emi? what would you like answers to? 715 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (4). 2017. 715-720 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.4.8 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review assessment in the language classroom: teachers supporting student learning authors: liying cheng, janna fox publisher: palgrave, 2017 isbn: 978-1137464835 pages: 246 language assessment has achieved a great amount of attention of both researchers and practitioners, which is evidenced, among others, by a number of wellknown monographs (brown & abeywickrama, 2010; coombe, davidson, o’sullivan, & stoynoff, 2012; gordon & rajagopalan, 2016; gottlieb, 2006; komorowska, 2002; tsagari & banerjee, 2016; to name just a few) as well as a proliferation of journals oriented towards language testing and assessment (e.g., language testing, assessing writing, language assessment quarterly, international journal of language testing and assessment, and educational assessment). the question might arise, then, whether there is a need for a new publication dealing with the complex nature of language assessment, and if yes, what kind of addressee to aim at, how to bridge the gap between what is available and what might be desired, and how to structure it to respond to the currently changing educational reality. it is in this context that the current review attempts to evaluate the newly published book by liying cheng (queen’s university, canada) and janna fox 716 (carleton university, canada) assessment in the language classroom: teachers supporting student learning (applied linguistics for the language classroom series, series editor: andy curtis). in particular, the promises made by the subtitle of the book trying to make assessment more usable by practicing teachers to motivate learners and shape the learning process are to be put to a test below. the book is subdivided into seven chapters, contains a list of figures and tables, the series editor’s introduction, acknowledgements, introduction, appendix, glossary, references and index of major concepts. the major part of the book shows an almost perfect division into chapters, each spanning around 30 pages. the question however arises whether the book would not benefit from a concluding section, paralleling the currently existing introduction, in which the authors would indicate the point to which they actually took the readers. the first glance at the table of contents indicates a new approach to the way language assessment is conceptualized. rather than deal traditionally with areas for testing and devoting chapters to testing specific language subsystems and language skills, cheng and fox decided to structure the book in a different way. each chapter’s title is a question that refers to a particular stage of the assessment process: 1. why do we assess? 2. what do we assess? 3. how do we assess? 4. how do we develop a high-quality classroom test? 5. who are we assessing? placement, needs analysis and diagnostics 6. who are we assessing? feedback and motivation 7. when we assess, how can we use assessment to move forward? this is an interesting way of approaching language assessment holistically, adopting a bird’s eye view of the language classroom, regardless of the particular testing purposes that might be needed during a lesson. however, a holistic view like that might make those teachers who seek a range of practical testing solutions for each skill and subsystem unsatisfied. at the same time, it enabled the authors to devote ample attention to the effect of assessment on future learning and to the motivating and instructional value of assessment instruments, or, in other words, to how testing shapes teaching. this seems to be an important asset of the book, well-addressed throughout the whole publication. each chapter opens with a series of questions in the “activate your learning” box, where the questions announce the concepts that are going to be covered in the chapter. each finishes with a section entitled “looking back at chapter x,” summing up the discussion in one-two paragraphs, as well as “suggested readings” with an annotated bibliography of books and articles relevant to the 717 theme of the chapter. each chapter is subdivided into a number of sections (numbered subchapters and subsubchapters as well as unnumbered thematic sections), with headings clearly indicating where the book’s addressees actually are at the moment. one minor shortcoming might be the fact that the internal structure of chapters is not reflected in the table of contents, which contains only chapter titles. while it might be understandable that the authors wanted to use the question format for chapter titles and did not want to list subchapters in order to more powerfully express the philosophy of the book also through the table of contents, its readers might benefit from a full table of contents, which would allow them to appreciate the completeness of the approach to language assessment represented in the publication. as regards the structure, the practical orientation of the book is accomplished through in-text activities, examples, teachers’ quotations, classroom problems, sample tasks, and evaluation criteria. activities are clearly distinguished from the text proper, and each has a brief introduction indicating the assessment concept(s) that it addresses and the practical task to be executed. given the fact that each chapter features a few such well-developed activities, the book is a perfect combination of theory and practice, suitable for use in graduate teacher training modules. the instructional impact of the book is also achieved through the glossary of the most important concepts used in assessment. the terms are defined in relatively simple language, without excessive use of technical or scientific terms. assessment in the language classroom concludes with an eight-page appendix listing the most popular classroom assessment tools and test formats, each with a brief explanation and example. such a section is immensely useful as a practical inventory of testing techniques to be directly used by teachers without necessarily resorting to the text proper. however, one could think about making the list more extensive (the authors themselves claim that it is not exhaustive and there are other alternatives as well) and labeling its items with the skills/subsystems they are useful for. chapter one starts with definitions and purposes of assessment. here, assessing learners is defined, together with features of high-quality assessment. an interesting part of this chapter is the discussion of the concept of alignment, or “the degree of agreement between standards, curriculum, tests and classroom instruction” (“introduction,” p. xiv). out of the features of high-quality assessment (pp. 11-12), alignment takes the first place, indicating the importance of the concept that has not been viewed as fundamental before. also the feature of fairness is emphasized, alongside such well-known concepts as validity, reliability or practicality. the chapter skillfully leads the reader to reflecting upon and eventually formulating their own philosophy of assessment. 718 in chapter two, cheng and fox address the questions of what is worth teaching and what is worth assessing. to answer these, examples of specific curriculum expectations in relation to particular language modalities are given. the concept of alignment introduced in chapter one is put into use here, and the authors help teachers align their classroom activities and assessments with the learning goals and outcomes. the chapter stresses the importance of contextual understanding, which is, for instance, demonstrated by the provision of a very helpful template for planning a course. most of the chapter is devoted to the issues of formulating learning outcomes, course planning and design. within the holistic philosophy adopted by cheng and fox, it is inevitable to have a well-grounded awareness of what to teach and why before one starts to think about what to assess and why. chapter three starts by comparing and contrasting large-scale testing with classroom testing. details of a wide range of assessment tools are given, including alternative assessment methods, such as portfolio, again, with detailed examples. the continuation of the comprehensive approach adopted in the previous chapters finds its reflection here in a separate subchapter devoted to creating a classroom assessment plan, which would bring together different assessment measures such as reflective diaries, in-class tests, portfolios, group posters and presentations into a holistic estimate of learners’ proficiency. a great merit of this chapter is an extensive discussion of portfolio as an assessment tool. what is missing, on the other hand, is a more traditional summary of kinds of tests/assessment instruments, such as placement, diagnostic, achievement, proficiency or aptitude tests. this would add to the diversity of purposes that assessment actually serves and would give teachers complete knowledge of how to design and conduct different forms of testing to satisfy diverse assessment purposes. chapter four helps teachers build the knowledge and skills of test design, analysis and evaluation. a detailed overview of the test development process is also presented herein, with test specifications emphasized as a basis for proper test design. it is interesting how cheng and fox introduce in this chapter some basics of quantitative analysis of tests, showing the calculations for task facility and item discrimination in a user-friendly way, without introducing statistical terminology or equations. effective as this may be, the discussion of task facility calculation could be accompanied by a table showing bands for different levels of facility so that teachers find it easy to interpret the facility score. also, some emphasis on how to score tests to ensure inter-rater and intra-rater reliability would be useful for a complete picture. chapter five looks at who we are assessing, in relation to placement, needs analysis and diagnostics. the importance of classroom context is shown in this chapter with a comparison of diagnostic assessment in a conversation class versus diagnostic assessment in an english-for-academic-purposes class. a closer look is taken at specific assessment tools that teachers use to better understand 719 their students’ needs and capabilities, such as placement testing, needs analysis and diagnostic assessment, showing how different data sources might lead to better understanding of learners’ proficiency and needs. the approach adopted in the chapter is interesting, also in that few books on assessment actually deal with needs analysis. however, a more systematic coverage of the recommended structure and design of a placement test would be useful, given the serious consequences an incorrectly designed placement test may have. the penultimate chapter focuses on the test-taker in relation to feedback and motivation. the importance of teacher-student connection and the value of on-going feedback in determining the quality of teaching and learning are discussed, as well as the use of assessment practices to motivate students to learn. quite interestingly, the chapter evokes some key concepts and distinctions of motivation in order to show how assessment for learning can actually help sustain motivation. the chapter addresses the essential concept of assessment motivation strategies to show how the washback effect can be maximized to support learning. the last chapter aims at answering the essential question: “when we assess, how can we use assessment to move forward?,” thus stressing the formative value of assessment. the chapter serves as a kind of conclusion, showing how complex grading tests can actually be and indicating test preparation (testwiseness) as an essential area of learner training. to sum up, the book by liying cheng and janna fox draws on the practical experiences of the authors to give a coherent picture of how language assessment can support students in foreign language learning. since, according to the contemporary methodology influenced by learner autonomy, students learn rather than are taught languages, assessment of learners’ progress and proficiency should shape learning, support students and motivate them to work, rather than merely provide an objective picture of language ability and use. in quite an innovative way, the book attempts to guide its readers to formulating their own philosophy of assessment, proceeding from types and features of assessment, through building the theoretical basis of learning, to practical techniques used in the classroom. perhaps the approach of encouraging teachers to filter assessment through their own experiences will lead to improved assessment skills through increased awareness and understanding. if that is actually the case, the value of the book will be immense, as this kind of “methodology ownership” approach would be transferable to other spheres of teaching as well. reviewed by jarosław krajka maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin, poland jarek.krajka@wp.pl 720 references brown, h. d., & abeywickrama, p. (2010). language assessment: principles and classroom practice (2nd ed.). new york: pearson education. coombe, c., davidson, p., o’sullivan, b. & stoynoff, s. (2012). (eds.). the cambridge guide to second language assessment. new york: cambridge university press. gordon, e. w., & rajagopalan, k. (2016). the testing and learning revolution: the future of assessment in education. new york: palgrave macmillan. gottlieb, m. (2006). assessing english language learners: bridges from language proficiency to academic achievement. thousand oaks, ca: corwin. komorowska, h. (2002). sprawdzanie umiejętności w nauce języka obcego. kontrola – ocena – testowanie. warszawa: fraszka edukacyjna. tsagari, d., & banerjee, j. (2016). (eds.). handbook of second language assessment. boston: de gruyter mouton. 183 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (1). 2016. 183-188 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.1.9 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book review introduction to instructed second language acquisition editor: shawn loewen publisher: routledge, 2015 isbn: 97804155295549 pages: 210 the volume an introduction to instructed second language acquisition is intended as an overview of key issues related to the process in which learning of additional languages can be shaped with a view to enhancing its effectiveness, one that would be not only representative of the latest developments in the field but also comprehensive, succinct and reader-friendly. taking as a point of departure the definitions available in the literature, such as those proposed by ellis (2005), housen and pierrard (2005), or loewen (2013), the author defines instructed second language acquisition (isla) as “. . . a theoretically and empirically based field of academic inquiry that aims to understand how the systematic manipulation of the mechanisms of learning and/or the conditions under which they occur enable or facilitate the development or acquisition of a language other than one’s first” (p. 2). he then goes on to explain the components of this definition, stating that the term second refers to any additional language or languages, that the word language is meant to denote not only grammar but also lexis, pronunciation and pragmatics, that the term acquisition is inclusive of 184 both conscious and subconscious processes and products, and that isla can occur in different contexts. in fact, it is precisely this wide scope and the multifaceted approach to isla adopted in the book that makes it such a needed, timely and valuable addition to the existing literature on the effects of instructional intervention on second language development. this is because, while there are influential book-length publications providing state-of-the-art overviews of various aspects of form-focused instruction, particularly corrective feedback, such as those authored by ellis (2005), nassaji and fotos (2011), mackey (2012), pawlak (2014) or nassaji (2015), they are limited in the subsystems they target or the techniques they focus upon, with none of them managing to bring together so many issues of relevance to the process and outcome of instruction. the volume comprises eleven chapters, most of which have an identical structure, with a clear progression from a brief consideration of key theoretical issues, through presentation of relevant empirical evidence and consideration of pedagogical solutions, to practical activities intended to encourage reflection on the topics covered. the book opens with an introductory chapter, which, apart from providing a definition of isla in terms of the degree of pedagogic manipulation and attempted acquisition by the learner, sheds lights on theoretical perspectives, methodological choices, empirical investigations and instructional options that are and are not relevant to the area of isla, as well as considering various contexts of pedagogic intervention. in the second chapter, which, in my view, is of pivotal importance for framing the discussion in the remainder of the book, the focus is placed on the nature, acquisition and measurement of second language knowledge, with a crucial distinction being made between explicit and implicit knowledge (ellis, 2009). chapters three and four are respectively concerned with the role of interaction and negotiation of meaning in promoting acquisition, and the effects of the more implicit types of instructional intervention, as embodied in the focus on form approach (long, 1991), such as input flood, input enhancement or the provision of corrective feedback. chapters five, six, seven and eight, in turn, shift the focus of attention to more explicit instructional techniques which are discussed in relation to the acquisition of four main subsystems of the target language, namely grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and pragmatics, highlighting the specificity of each of these areas. subsequently, chapter nine considers the role of context in shaping the contribution of isla, both with respect to learning in the classroom (i.e., foreign vs. second language settings, immersion education and content-based instruction) and outside (i.e., study abroad and application of computer-assisted language learning), while chapter ten zooms in on the role of individual learner differences, the ways in which they impact isla and the extent to which they themselves can be subject to manipulation. the final chapter is intended as a 185 summary of the issues touched upon in different parts of the book, it ties up all the loose ends and closes with the assertion that “the goal of isla is . . . to enable learners to achieve the highest levels of success possible in their endeavor to learn a second language through classroom instruction” (p. 182), and it also includes a list of general principles of successful instructed language learning, as proposed by ellis (2005). without doubt, the greatest value of the book lies in the fact that it strives to offer a unified account of isla, extending many of the claims thus far made mainly for grammar, as the most extensively researched area, to vocabulary, pronunciation and pragmatics, a task that poses a formidable challenge in view of the paucity of empirical evidence in some cases. particularly commendable is, to my mind, the attempt to discuss the acquisition of all the language subsystems with respect to both explicit and implicit knowledge, something that has so far primarily been done in research on the effects of different types of instruction on the acquisition of grammar structures. although there are doubts as to which aspects of lexis, phonology, sociopragmatics or pragmalinguistics are learned as explicit and implicit knowledge or the extent to which it is possible to develop a tacit representation of consciously held aspects thereof, it is obvious that, due to limited attentional resources, interaction in real time requires that knowledge of this kind be employed largely automatically so that communication can proceed smoothly. for example, even if a learner has sufficiently automatized the passive voice and can access it relatively effortlessly under time pressure, difficulty in accessing appropriate lexical items, drawing on requisite pragmatic conventions or using the required stress patterns may hamper effective attainment of the envisaged communicative goals. it is self-evident then that placing greater emphasis on the need to help learners gain greater control of such features as well as devising and researching instructional options that could achieve this goal is of vital importance. the book has undeniably succeeded in bringing our attention to this key issue, which is of equal relevance to researchers and practitioners, even if some of the assumptions can only be tentative due to the scarcity of relevant empirical studies. another merit of the book is the fact that it takes account of the different contexts in which isla can occur, not only those traditionally associated with the classroom, considered in terms of foreign and second language settings, but also content-based instruction, study abroad as well as inand out-of-class learning, enabled by modern technologies. while there exists some research on the effectiveness of instruction in these areas, these efforts should certainly be intensified in light of the weight currently given to integrating content and language in the classroom, the increasing numbers of individuals taking advantage of 186 study abroad programs, such as erasmus plus, or the ubiquitous impact of information and computer technology on our lives. what certainly adds to the value of the book is the inclusion of hands-on activities and the varied nature of such tasks, in which readers are requested, among others, to assess measures of implicit and explicit knowledge (chapter two), identify specific types of corrective feedback and speculate on its potential effects (chapter four), or suggest ways in which teachers could integrate content and language in a literature course (chapter nine). this considerably extends the range of uses to which the book can be put, constituting not only an approachable source of information about different aspects of isla but also representing a resource that can be applied in class in order to enhance students’ critical skills, reflection and engagement. last but not least, the book is written in a way that is easily accessible to classroom teachers, thereby making an important contribution to bridging the gap between theory, research and classroom practice, a feat that, whatever the academic domain, few specialists are able to accomplish. for me, as a long-time senior high school teacher, this is an invaluable asset. in fact, this alone would be ample reason for me to read the book from cover to cover even if i were not fully cognizant of its strengths which i can pinpoint as someone actively involved in research on different aspects of isla. having said that, it is fitting at this juncture to mention the few things that did not quite live up to my expectations and left me somewhat disappointed when i got to the end of the book. what particularly whetted my appetite when i examined the table of contents was the chapter devoted to the coverage of individual difference (id) factors as i expected a discussion that would address the mitigating impact of such variables on the effectiveness of isla. this would have been fully warranted because ellis (2008) makes it plain in his overview of the study of second language acquisition that although such variables mediate the contribution of different instructional options, “. . . it may be premature to draw any conclusions” (p. 903). what i found instead was an overview of selected issues in id research which did take into account the latest theoretical and empirical developments but focused mainly on ways in which factors of this kind can be manipulated rather than interact with different types of instructional intervention, notable exceptions being the subsections dealing with anxiety and language learning aptitude. moreover, it is not entirely clear to me why the chapter on id factors does not include a section on beliefs which can be hypothesized to impinge on teachers’ instructional practices, learners’ responsiveness to such practices and, as such, albeit primarily indirectly, exert an influence on learning outcomes (cf. ellis, 2008). finally, the concept of english as an international language (jenkins, 2002), brought up in the discussion of the goals of pronunciation teaching in chapter seven, could be said to apply in equal 187 measure to formal instruction in pragmatics, a possibility that is for some reason overlooked. after all, it could reasonably be argued that the knowledge of sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic features in the target language is relevant only when learners are expected to interact with native speakers, which may on many occasions simply not be the case, not to mention the fact that nonnative teachers’ competence in this domain is often blatantly lacking, which casts doubt on their ability to provide effective instruction. these reservations, however, are reflective of my own concerns, experiences, interests and preferences as a researcher as much as a practitioner, and do not in the least detract from the undeniable value of the publication which offers a refreshing look at a wide array of issues related to isla. the admittedly successful attempt to view isla through the lens of all the target language subsystems, the consideration of their mastery in terms of the development of explicit and implicit knowledge, the comprehensive perspective on various contexts in which additional languages can be studied, and the discussion of the role of id variables in that process all dictate that the publication will constitute an important point of reference as well as a major source of inspiration for students, researchers and practitioners. i am confident that in offering this fresh outlook on isla and highlighting some fundamental issues that might have thus far eluded and been neglected the specialists, shawn loewen’s book will, on the one hand, pave the way for numerous empirical investigations into how instruction can be most beneficially manipulated to augment learning outcomes, and, on the other, provide food for thought for teachers wishing to boost the effectiveness of their instructional practices with respect to different components of the languages they teach. reviewed by mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references ellis, r. (2005). instructed second language acquisition: a literature review. wellington: ministry of education: new zealand. ellis, r. (2008). the study of second language acquisition (2nd ed.). oxford: oxford university press. 188 ellis, r. (2009). implicit and explicit knowledge, learning and instruction. in r. ellis, s. loewen, c. elder, r. erlam, j. philp, & r. reinders (eds.), implicit and explicit knowledge in second language learning, texting and teaching (pp. 3-25). bristol: multilingual matters. housen, a., & pierrard, m. (2005). investigations in instructed second language acquisition. berlin: mouton de gruyter. jenkins, j. (2002). a sociolinguistically based, empirically researched pronunciation syllabus for english as an international language. applied linguistics, 23, 83-103. loewen, s. (2013). instructed second language acquisition. in c. chapelle (ed.), the encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 2716-2718). malden, ma: blackwell. long, m. h. (1991). focus on form: a design feature in language teaching methodology. in k. de bot, r. ginsberg, & c. kramsch (eds.), foreign language research in cross-cultural perspective (pp. 39-52). amsterdam: john benjamins. mackey, a. (2012). input, interaction and corrective feedback in l2 learning. oxford: oxford university press. nassaji, h. (2015). the interactional feedback dimension in instructed second language learning: linking theory, research, and practice. london: bloomsbury. nassaji, h., & fotos, s. (2011). teaching grammar in second language classrooms: integrating form-focused instruction in communicative contexts. new york: routledge. pawlak, m. (2014). error correction in the foreign language classroom: reconsidering the issues. heidelberg: springer. 717 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (4). 2016. 717-723 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.4.8 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book review written corrective feedback for l2 development authors: john bitchener, neomy storch publisher: multilingual matters, 2016 isbn: 9781783095032 pages: 156 the book written corrective feedback for l2 development represents a stateof-the-art overview of critical issues involved in the provision of corrective feedback (cf) on linguistic errors that learners of additional languages (i.e., foreign, second or otherwise) commit in their efforts to compose texts in the target language. these issues are tackled from both a psycholinguistic and sociocultural perspective in recognition of the fact that it is the two theoretical stances that have provided the main impetus for empirical investigations in this important domain. as the authors point out in the concluding chapter, . . . our main aim in writing this book was to provide an overview of the theories of l2 learning within the cognitive and sociocultural perspectives and consider to what extent they explain a role for written cf in l2 learning process, as well as the possible explanations for why written cf may or may not lead to successful l2 development. (p. 120) it should be made clear from the outset that such a goal is without doubt worth pursuing for the reason that, first, there has long been a demand for a book718 length publication that would bring together and critically examine the available research on written cf with a view to setting an agenda for future empirical endeavors, and, second, as is emphasized on numerous occasions throughout the volume, there has also been a pressing need to situate the accumulating empirical evidence within a specific theoretical framework in order to accommodate the well-known processes of second language acquisition. this is clearly a worthwhile undertaking that aims to accomplish for written error correction what has already been attained for oral cf (e.g., mackey, 2014; nassaji, 2015; pawlak, 2014), that is, offering a theoretically-sound account of its role in gaining mastery over an additional language by demonstrating how it can impact upon different stages of l2 development and shedding light on factors influencing its effectiveness or lack thereof. it should be emphasized here that john bitchener and neomy storch have not only succeeded in attaining these key aims but have in fact also done a superb job of synthesizing, analyzing and criticizing the existing studies, tying up many of the loose ends and outlining the directions for the research endeavors to come. the book has been neatly divided into six chapters, leading the reader form the discussion of preliminary issues connected with written cf, through the presentation of the two theoretical stances and the critical analysis of the empirical evidence that the research they have inspired has yielded, to the consideration of issues that empirical investigations of written cf should tackle and the methodological challenges they are bound to face. more specifically, chapter one, intended as an introduction, is devoted to a precise explanation of key terms included in the title, that is written cf and l2 development, the presentation of the case for the beneficial role of written error correction and the description of the structure of the book. the next two chapters represent a cognitive perspective on the contribution of written cf to the development of an additional language. chapter two demonstrates how written cf can spur l2 development by discussing the crucial distinction between explicit and implicit l2 knowledge, illustrating the ways in which the former can convert into the latter, as postulated by skill-learning theories (anderson, 1993; dekeyser, 2007; mclaughlin, 1990), and, most importantly, considering the potential contribution of different written cf options to different stages of cognitive processing of input hypothesized by gass (1997) (i.e., attention, noticing, comprehended input, intake and integration). chapter three, in turn, offers a synthesis of the empirical studies that have been informed by the psycholinguistic approach, with the sections included being devoted to the role of cf in facilitating l2 development (i.e., both with respect to revisions and producing new texts), the efficacy of different types of written cf (e.g., direct correction vs. less explicit types of written cf), the benefits of written feedback as a function of error type (e.g., 719 rule-based vs. item-based forms), the value of focused and unfocused written cf (i.e., such that is limited to certain categories of errors vs. such that is comprehensive), as well as the moderating effects of individual and contextual variables (e.g., various dimensions of language aptitude, working memory, attitudes, setting). the foci of chapters four and five are similar, the key difference lying in the fact that they view the role of written cf from a sociocultural stance. the former outlines the tenets of sociocultural theory (lantolf & thorne, 2006; vygotsky, 1978), and its extension in the form of activity theory (leontiev, 1978; engeström, 2001), demonstrating how their constitutive constructs, such as the zone of proximal development, scaffolding, mediation, subjects, actions or community can be applied to teasing out the contribution of written cf to l2 development. the latter offers an overview or research falling within this theoretical stance or can at least be interpreted with its assistance, focusing on the effects of feedback as a form of scaffolding, the use of symbolic (e.g., language) and material (e.g., the computer) tools by means of which written cf mediates l2 development, and the role of feedback as an activity, understood in terms of learners’ response to written cf supplied by teachers, teachers’ practices regarding the provision of cf, and the occurrence of peer feedback as well as the response to such feedback. finally, chapter six, serving as a conclusion, briefly summarizes all the themes taken up in the book and singles out the lines of inquiry that empirical studies drawing on both the cognitive and sociocultural perspective might pursue in the near future. apart from what has been said above about the pressing need for a volume of this kind and for an attempt to situate the use of written cf within a theoretical framework, both of which tasks the authors have not only achieved but clearly have done so with flying colors, there are other things for which they should be commended. first, the publication draws our attention to the benefits of written cf that may often be overlooked by specialists and practitioners alike, such as its permanence, which enables learners to consult and revisit the corrections at the time of their choosing, diminished demands on limited attention resources, which facilitates cognitive comparisons, as well as the fact that such feedback can therefore be more effective than oral cf, at least when it comes to the development of explicit knowledge. second, the book imposes the so-muchneeded order on the somewhat fragmented research on written correction, highlighting the areas that have thus far been addressed and issues in urgent need of empirical investigation, in particular those shedding light on why written cf is or is not effective in different contexts and for different individuals. third, truly commendable is the attention given to the contribution of various mediating variables, both individual, linguistic and contextual in nature, which can not only in many cases trump the effects of specific types of written cf, but can in 720 fact enter into intricate, unpredictable interactions with these feedback moves as well as with each other, a reality that has often been overlooked in research on instructed second language acquisition in its entirety. fourth, the synthesis of the existing studies is not only comprehensive, including also lower-key known publications, but also critical, providing a convincing rationale for why some studies offer more compelling empirical evidence than others. finally, it is laudable that the authors have chosen to ground research into written feedback in two, seemingly disparate, theoretical stances and that they are cognizant of the fact that these perspectives are not mutually exclusive but can in fact inform each other, although this realization was not present from the start. as they candidly state, “we began . . ., by presenting the two major theoretical paradigms, cognitive and sociocultural . . . however, in the process of writing the book, we realized that the two paradigms may, in fact, provide complementary insights on written cf . . .” (p. 135). while, as will be elaborated upon below, integration of this kind could be taken a step further, the admission that the two perspectives are two sides of the same coin can hardly be underestimated. even though the book constitutes an excellent and much-needed account of the role of written cf in l2 development, there are usually some issues in any publication that might make one wish for more, and the volume is no exception to this rule. for one thing, the discussion of the distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge in section 2.1. is somewhat simplistic as it does not recognize the fact that the development of fully implicit knowledge may be an unachievable goal for most adult learners in foreign language contexts and that it is therefore better to talk about highly automatized explicit knowledge which can effortlessly be employed in spontaneous communication (dekeyser, 2010; pawlak, 2013). i do understand that a focus on such minute distinctions might have been beyond the scope of the book, but had this caveat been recognized, the discussion of the problems involved in the measurement of implicit knowledge in section 6.2.1.2. might have become superfluous as the issue would boil down to designing tasks in which the targeted form has to be deployed in real time, regardless of whether this is possible thanks to implicit or highly automatized explicit knowledge. secondly, many specialists would in all likelihood take issue with the statement that “it is generally agreed that (1) the goal of l2 learning is the acquisition of native or near-native competence in both understanding and producing/using the target language . . .” (p. 11), pointing, for example, to the growing role of english as an international language in which native-speaker proficiency may or even should not be seen as a priority (cf. mckay, 2011). while i am personally against total abandonment of native-speaker norms as a point of reference for a number of reasons, it is clear that the goal of l2 learning hinges on the agendas of a particular learner or a given group of learners and this goal 721 may in many situations not be native-like proficiency, a fact that should at the very least have been acknowledged. third, what i found missing in the discussion of the mediating role of individual and contextual factors was the consideration of the potential impact of variables that have not so far been investigated with respect to written cf, such as learning styles, learning strategies, more specific conceptualizations of motivation (e.g., the ideal language self) or even willingness to communicate. i am fully aware that no research of this kind exists, but considering the ways in which new territories could be staked out in this respect would be extremely useful. fifth, i wish that in their discussion of learner attitudes, beliefs, motivations or agency in regard to response to written cf, the authors had made a reference to the concept of engagement with corrective feedback, in particular of the cognitive and affective type, that ellis (2010) discusses with respect to both oral and written correction, as this concept surely helps us better understand the varying effects of diverse corrective moves in different situations. finally, although i heaped much praise on the authors for their recognition of the complementarity of the psycholinguistic and sociocultural stances, i think that it is warranted to emphasize that the findings of the studies conducted within the two approaches should not only reinforce each other, as if from a distance, but that the two paradigms can also be combined within a single study. this could happen, for example, when a pretest-posttest design including experimental and control groups as well as exploring the mediating effects of individual factors were augmented with data derived from other sources (e.g., interviews, think-aloud protocols, stimulated recall), thus helping us more fully understand the value of different corrective moves and their contribution at different stages of cognitive input processing. what should be clearly stressed at this juncture is that the points raised above should not be viewed as criticisms, but, rather, as indications of the ways in which the authors could have delved a little more into certain issues, offered important caveats or considered additional ways in which the role of written cf in l2 development could be examined. as such, these comments do not in the least diminish the immense contribution of the volume to the field, a contribution that is truly difficult to overestimate. as signaled on several occasions throughout the review, john bitchener and neomy storch have done an outstanding job of situating written feedback within two dominant theoretical frameworks, demonstrating that the cognitive and sociocultural approaches are complementary rather than competing with each other, offering a thorough but at the same time critical synthesis of exiting studies and, most importantly perhaps, charting the course for future research on written cf, emphasizing the necessity of illuminating how and why it promotes l2 development or fails to do so under certain circumstances. for these reasons, i am confident that the book 722 will offer food for thought to researchers interested in written error correction, spawn many further empirical investigations in this pedagogically important area and provide in effect valuable insights into the mechanisms determining the efficacy of written cf, the variables moderating these mechanisms and the diverse interactions between them. reviewed by mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references anderson, j. (1993). rules of the mind. hillsdale, nj: lawrence erlbaum. dekeyser, r. m. (2007). introduction: situating the concept of practice. in r. m. dekeyser (ed.), practice in a second language (pp. 1-18). cambridge: cambridge university press. dekeyser, r. m. (2010). cognitive-psychological processes in second language learning. in m. h. long & c. j. doughty (eds.), the handbook of language teaching (pp. 119-138). oxford: wiley-blackwell. ellis, r. (2010). epilogue: a framework for investigating oral and written corrective feedback. studies in second language acquisition, 32, 335-349. engeström, y. (2001). expansive learning at work: toward and activity theoretical reconceptualization. journal of education and work, 14, 133-156. gass, s. m. (1997). input, interaction, and the second language learner. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. lantolf, j. p., & thorne, s. l. (2006). sociocultural theory and the genesis of l2 development. oxford: oxford university press. leontjev, a. n. (1978). activity, consciousness, and personality. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. mackey, a. (2012). input, interaction and corrective feedback in l2 learning. oxford: oxford university press. mckay, s. l. (2011). english as an international lingua franca pedagogy. in e. hinkel (ed.). handbook of research into second language teaching and learning. volume ii. (pp. 122-139). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. 723 mclaughlin, b. (1990). restructuring. applied linguistics, 11, 113-128. nassaji, h. (2015). the interactional feedback dimension in instructed second language learning: linking theory, research, and practice. london: bloomsbury. pawlak, m. (2013). principles of instructed language learning revisited: guidelines for effective grammar teaching in the foreign language classroom. in k. droździał-szelest & m. pawlak (eds.), psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives on second language learning and teaching. studies in honor of waldemar marton (pp. 199-220). heidelberg: springer. pawlak, m. (2014). error correction in the foreign language classroom: reconsidering the issues. heidelberg: springer. vygotsky, l. (1978). mind in society. the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. 193 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (2). 2018. 193-218 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.2.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt a self-regulated learning approach to extensive listening and its impact on listening achievement and metacognitive awareness yajun zeng yangtze university, p. r. china zyajun@gmail.com christine c. m. goh national institute of education, nanyang technological university, singapore christine.goh@nie.edu.sg abstract the role of self-regulation in general learning has been investigated for some time now. its significance and contribution to second language (l2) listening, however, has yet to be discussed extensively with empirical support. this article reports a case study involving four college efl students in china over a six-month period of self-regulated learning (srl) in developing their listening in independent settings. the study examined how the achievement and metacognitive awareness of four high-achieving and low-achieving listeners may have been affected by strategies they used for self-regulating extensive listening activities. it also examined the learners’ engagement during four phases of self-regulated listening, namely, task definition, goal setting and planning, strategy enactment, and metacognitive adaptation. findings revealed substantial differences in the two groups’ metacognitive engagement in three srl phases. the article argues that the achievements of the respective learners in listening development were affected by these differences. pedagogical implications of a self-regulated learning approach in extensive listening for l2 listening development are discussed. keywords: self-regulated learning strategies; listening; metacognition yajun zeng, christine c. m. goh 194 1. introduction listening is a critical dimension in language learning and plays an important role in second language (l2) pedagogy. the importance of listening in communication has also been well documented (feyten, 1991; wolvin, 2010; wolvin & coakley, 2000). nevertheless, many scholars agree that listening is still being overlooked in l2 learning, as greater prominence is accorded to the development of more “visible” skills such as speaking and writing, as well as reading, which is seen to be an important gateway to knowledge in academic contexts (nation & newton, 2008; nunan, 1997; vandergrift 1997). listening remains a much neglected skill and listening strategies are seen as the “cinderella” of strategies (vandergrift, 1997), receiving little research attention as compared to reading, writing or speaking. even when the curriculum recognizes the importance of listening, such as the current curriculum of college english in mainland china, more is needed to facilitate a principled approach to helping language learners develop their abilities. in china, listening comprehension is a compulsory module for all non-english major undergraduates. in the important college english test band 4 (cet4) the assessment of listening comprises 35% of the total weighting of the test (goh & zeng, 2014). beyond language learning and assessment, listening is also valued as an important language communication skill in the current economic landscape. in spite of this, listening is the weakest skill for chinese tertiary-level efl learners (jiang, 1994). chinese students who are studying in other englishspeaking countries also consider listening to be their greatest challenge (liu, 2005). given the limited classroom instruction time (an average of 2 hours per week of listening instruction for 30-32 weeks in an academic year) and an approach that mainly emphasizes exam preparation, there is a need to find other ways of helping college english learners improve their listening through independent learning outside class. chinese efl students have for decades practiced extensive listening on their own, but what is needed is teacher support that promotes self-regulated learning (srl) to ensure that listening development through extensive listening practice is directed and not left to circumstances. drawing on experiences from educational psychology and second language learning in general (oxford, 2011; pintrich, 2004), such a teacher-supported srl approach to independent listening development would include principles for planning and implementing learner-oriented srl activities in independent settings. it underscores the critical role of metacognition in the learning process and provides learners with essential metacognitive tools for self-regulated learning beyond the listening classroom (vandergrift & goh, 2012). a self-regulated learning approach to extensive listening and its impact on listening achievement. . . 195 to understand the effectiveness of an srl approach, we conducted a comparative case study of two high-proficiency listeners and two low-proficiency listeners who experienced a six-month independent listening program after class by engaging in srl activities and materials prepared specially to support their independent learning. 2. learner strategies in l2 listening learner strategies refer to deliberate procedures used by learners to enhance comprehension, learning and retention of the target language (chamot, 1995; cohen, 1998). in l2 listening, learners use appropriate strategies to achieve comprehension goals, particularly when they have limited ability to understand the oral texts (gu, hu, & zhang, 2009; vandergrift, 2008). strategies help learners improve comprehension, retention, and recall of information; and, at the same time, they assist them in planning for overall listening development as part of their language learning effort (vandergrift & goh, 2012). recent research shows that successful l2 listening involves careful orchestration or clustering of both metacognitive and cognitive strategies (graham & macaro, 2008; vandergrift, 2003b). in addition, vandergrift and goh (2012) contend that listeners with heightened metacognitive awareness are able to orchestrate the enactment of various strategies according to task and learner variables. general listening strategies can also be examined in terms of tactics or individual techniques through which each strategy is operationalized (goh, 2002), and this can offer greater clarity about hierarchic relationships among strategies (oxford & cohen, 1992). despite early debates about whether strategy instruction is useful for listening (field, 2000; ridgway, 2000), possible resistance from learners (huang, 2006) and other challenges, researchers have argued that learners can benefit from learning to use listening strategies to compensate for incomplete understanding, missed linguistic or schematic input, misidentified clues and other listening limitations (flowerdew & miller, 2005; rubin, 1994; vandergrift, 2003a). the consistent use of metacognitive strategies, in particular, is a feature of high achieving l2 listeners (goh, 1998) and can contribute to improving learners’ l2 listening comprehension (vandergrift, 2004). one form of l2 listening pedagogy integrates listening tasks with teacher-directed strategy use by learners (vandergrift & goh, 2012). vandergrift (vandergrift, 2004; vandergrift & tafaghodtari, 2010) proposed a metacognitive cycle to help learners integrate the use of strategies while listening and guide listeners in the acquisition of implicit knowledge about listening processes. besides developing metacognitive awareness about l2 listening, this cycle also develops l2 perception skills and word recognition skills, yajun zeng, christine c. m. goh 196 as recommended by graham (2006). vandergrift (2007) argues that this metacognitive listening cycle has strong theoretical support as it closely parallels the research demonstrating implicit learning through task performance. further empirical support is found in a number of studies applying this metacognitive cycle in listening classes (cross, 2011; liu & goh, 2006; vandergrift & tafaghodtari, 2010). while the metacognitive listening cycle develops strategic processes during listening comprehension, it is essentially a classroom pedagogy. learners also need to have support in using strategies to strengthen activities for developing listening beyond the classroom, in particular, in raising their metacognitive awareness of how to self-direct and manage their efforts (goh, 2008). this calls for an approach to supporting l2 learners’ extensive listening endeavors which enable them to self-regulate their learning process with the help and guidance of the teacher, thereby taking greater ownership of their listening development in an informed manner. 3. self-regulated learning self-regulated learning (srl) is a complex process by which learners personally activate and sustain cognition, affect and behavior that are systematically oriented toward the attainment of learning goals (efklides, 2009; schunk, 2008). our study adopts the definition of srl by pintrich (2000) as “an active, constructive process whereby learners set goals for their learning and then attempt to monitor, regulate, and control their cognition, motivation, and behavior, guided and constrained by their goals and the contextual features in the environment” (p. 453). the concept of self-regulated l2 learning strategies was first put forward by oxford (2011, 2017) in her s2r model. this framework examines closely the theoretical underpinnings of self-regulation in l2 learning and applies selfregulation for understanding development in each of the l2 skill areas, including listening. participants in our study were responsible for taking charge of their overall listening development and initiating extensive listening tasks in independent settings. we follow winne and hadwin (1998) in characterizing selfregulated learners as learners who are actively and efficiently managing their own learning through monitoring and strategy use. their mode of srl model emphasizes the importance of metacognition, which is an important construct for the process of learning to listen in an l2 (goh, 2008; vandergrift & goh, 2012; vandergrift & tafaghodtari, 2010). metacognition is defined as cognition about cognition and involves monitoring and control functions (dinsmore, alexander, & loughlin, 2008; flavell, 1979; schunk, 2008). research has shown that metacognition interacts with motivation and affect, and these interactions have important implications for srl (efklides, 2009). a self-regulated learning approach to extensive listening and its impact on listening achievement. . . 197 winne and hadwin’s (1998) srl model presents srl as a more global and inclusive construct which subsumes metacognitive knowledge and strategy use (pintrich, 2000; winne & hadwin, 2008). it describes the specific cognitive processes that entail a learner’s self-regulation through four basic phases that are considered to be recursive in nature: task definition, goal setting and planning, strategy enactment, and metacognitive adaptation (greene & azevedo, 2007). this model enables the forging of linkages between learners’ metacognitive knowledge system and their self-regulatory behaviors in efl listening development. to our knowledge, this l2 study, which adopts a self-regulatory learning theoretical framework in order to understand the efficacy of learning strategies, is the first of its kind for extensive listening. 4. chinese efl listening listening is often perceived to be the weakest language skill among chinese tertiary-level efl learners at the lower or intermediate proficiency levels (wang, 2002; wu, liu, & jeffrey, 1993). in spite of this, many chinese learners receive a limited amount of in-class listening instruction per week, with lessons focusing heavily on checking the answers to pre-set comprehension questions. in similar kinds of listening classes, the process of helping students learn to listen was often overlooked (mendelsohn & rubin, 1995; vandergrift, 2004). a great number of students passively relied on classroom listening instruction and may not have realized that they themselves should take charge of their listening development (goh & taib, 2006; vandergrift, 2003b; wang, 2002). it was also not unusual for some students to give up on their listening because they felt they had caught very little of what was said (goh, 2000). with the availability of technology-enabled resources, it is important that teachers consider ways of supporting learners in their extensive listening efforts so that they can learn how to manage their learning and benefit from the authentic resources made available through their mobile devices. to this end, an srl approach merits consideration, as self-regulated listening activities not only increase learners’ exposure to authentic oral texts but also enhance their metacognitive knowledge and self-regulatory abilities for listening success (berne, 2004; mendelsohn, 2006). an srl approach that emphasizes the role of metacognition and learning strategies is adopted in this study to help chinese efl learners plan and carry out extensive listening activities beyond their classrooms. the study aimed to understand how such an srl approach to extensive listening practice could benefit language learners and whether the gains that learners derive from an srl program might be affected by their level of engagement during the program. this study is also an example of a study that heeds hu’s (2016) call to strategy yajun zeng, christine c. m. goh 198 researchers to conduct strategy research that is emancipatory where learners’ participation can assist them in acquiring new knowledge and developing greater awareness of themselves so that their learning endeavors can be guided by these new understandings. 5. research questions this study was undertaken to answer the following research questions: 1. do learners engaged in a srl approach to extensive listening benefit differently in terms of listening development and metacognitive awareness of the listening process? 2. what are the self-regulatory behaviors of highand low-achieving listeners at the four self-regulated learning phases of task definition, goal setting and planning, strategy enactment and metacognitive adaptation? what similarities and differences are there between the two groups of learners? 3. to what extent can the self-regulatory behaviors of the two groups of learners account for the differences in the benefits they derived from the srl program? 6. method 6.1. participants four participants (three females and one male) with an average age of 19 were selected from one intact class. they had been learning english for an average of seven years, beginning from secondary school education. of these an average of six years included practicing l2 listening. results from listening tests and participants’ self-reports confirmed that their listening ability remained the weakest of the four language skills. for the purpose of comparison, the four participants were placed into two groups according to their achievements in two tests: the national entrance examination (english paper) and a mid-term listening test (table 1). two top performers in both tests in the class (n = 30; 90th percentile) were designated as high achieving (ha1 and ha2) while two participants in the 20th percentile were designated as the low achieving group (la1 and la2). these groupings served to provide some comparison among the learners according to their listening performance. a self-regulated learning approach to extensive listening and its impact on listening achievement. . . 199 table 1 selection criteria of four participants for the case study sex national entrance examination score* mid-term listening test score** high achieving ha1 f 123.0 57.0 ha2 f 121.0 55.5 low achieving la1 f 101.0 49.5 la2 m 99.0 49.0 class mean 109.0 53.5 note. * the score is on a 150-mark system; ** the score is on a 100-mark system 6.2. instruments 6.2.1. metacognitive awareness listening questionnaire (malq) this study adopted the metacognitive awareness listening questionnaire (malq; vandergrift, goh, mareschal, & tafaghodtari, 2006) as an instrument to assess the learners’ metacognitive awareness and perceived use of strategies while listening to oral texts. the malq is a 21-item questionnaire comprising items from five factors related to l2 listening comprehension processes: problem-solving, planning and evaluation, mental translation, directed attention and person knowledge. it was used without any adaptions or translations in the present study because the items were written in simple english that the chinese college efl learners could understand. 6.2.2. self-regulated learning portfolio (srlp) the self-regulated learning portfolio (srlp) consisted of a set of templates for the participants to record their listening activities and track their progress in both metacognition and listening performance. part i consisted of a weekly listening plan for the learners to record their plans for listening tasks as well as their monitoring and evaluation of the completion of these tasks. it also recorded time spent on each task and how many times learners listened to each text. part ii was a self-directing listening guide which helped learners to plan how to approach the task, monitor their comprehension during the task and evaluate their efforts after it. part iii was a form for a weekly listening diary where the learners wrote their reflections on their weekly listening activities in and outside the classroom and their description of strategy use. a listening strategy inventory comprising various metacognitive and cognitive strategies was also included for their reference. it functioned as a learning tool, familiarizing yajun zeng, christine c. m. goh 200 students with listening strategies and helping them to expand their strategy repertoire and promote more effective strategy use (macaro, graham, & vanderplank, 2007; vandergrift, 2003a, 2003b). 6.2.3. value reflection form at the end of the srl program, the participants completed a reflection form which was aimed to evaluate what they had gained from the srl program and the challenges they had faced. this was done in chinese to facilitate the learners’ expression of any complex thoughts that they might have difficulty expressing in english. 6.2.4. interviews individual and group interviews were conducted in chinese to obtain detailed information on the participants’ evolving metacognitive awareness, strategy use, and self-regulatory skills in listening. individual interviews were conducted before the learners began the srl program when they had completed the malq questionnaire. a group interview was also conducted in chinese with the four participants at the end of the srl program. the purpose of this interview was to supplement data from the students’ value reflection forms and to allow the researchers to explore specific issues that arose during the conversation and which might not have been included in the written reflections. 6.2.5. listening tests scores scores of two large-scale listening tests (a university-based mid-term listening test and a national cet4 listening test) were used to assess the participants’ progress in listening performance after the srl program. a comparison of the participants’ results in these two tests (overall score and listening score) was used as an indicator of the participants’ improvement in listening performance. 6.3. data collection and analysis data collection was completed in the following ways: 1. collection of participants’ test results for the two listening tests (midterm and cet4), responses to the malq and individual and group interviews were conducted at different points of the study. the interviews in chinese were recorded, transcribed and translated. a self-regulated learning approach to extensive listening and its impact on listening achievement. . . 201 2. completed srlp documents were submitted via email to one of the authors, who provided answers and feedback to the questions and comments in the srlp through online text chatting and email. at the end of the srl program, the participants took part in a specially arranged session, in which they wrote individual value reflections and completed a second response to the malq. after that they participated in a group interview led by one of the researchers. 3. comments from the participants’ listening teacher were obtained to provide qualitative evaluation on the performance of the four participants. data obtained from malq responses, listening test scores, and strategy use frequencies, were processed using spss to address research question 1. the quantitative data all went through tests of normality before further analysis to examine participants’ pretest-posttest changes in listening performance, metacognitive knowledge and strategy use. to address the second and third research questions, data were collected mainly through verbal reports and interviews. retrospective verbal reports written in chinese were translated independently and cross-checked against the translation of another translator for consistency. coding was done in two stages. in stage one, one of the authors and a colleague coded a set of transcripts from one participant independently according to a preliminary coding scheme that was based on previous studies on educational objectives (anderson et al., 2001; krathwohl, 2002) and listening strategies (i.e., goh, 2002; gu, hu, & zhang, 2009; o’malley, chamot, & kupper, 1989; vandergrift, 2003b). informal calibration discussions were held to resolve inconsistencies and disagreements before the coding scheme was finalized. in stage two, the data was divided into two sets and coded independently according to the coding scheme. the transcripts were then double-coded by the two coders with inter-coder reliability improving from .69 to over .84 after the two stages. 7. results and discussion 7.1. how learners have benefitted from the srl program table 2 shows the four participants’ listening performance on the preand posttest. while has improved by almost 20 marks on a 100-mark test paper, las improved by only 9 marks. furthermore, scores of has improved from 2-7% (pretest) to 14-16% (posttest) above the class mean score in the cet4 listening test, showing that they achieved greater progress in their listening performance. scores of las on the other hand dropped from 7-8% to 10-12% below the class mean score after six months of participation in the srl program. yajun zeng, christine c. m. goh 202 table 2 listening performance of the highand low-achieving listeners on the pretest and the posttest mid-term listening test score as pretest** cet4 listening test score as posttest** ha1 57.0 76.0 ha2 54.5 74.5 la1 49.5 59.0 la2 49.0 58.0 class mean 53.5 65.5 note. ** the score is on a 100-mark system with respect to the changing level of metacognitive knowledge in listening, although all four participants benefitted from the srl approach, has’ response scores showed an overall 80% increase compared with the las in the five metacognitive factors in the malq framework, as indicated in table 3. table 3 comparison of highand low-achieving listeners’ preand post-test malq scores high-achieving low-achieving ha1 ha2 mean la1 la2 mean directed attention pretest 5.25 5.25 5.25 4.75 4.25 4.50 posttest 5.50 5.33 5.42 4.50 4.00 4.25 problem solving pretest 5.50 5.17 5.34 4.33 4.25 4.29 posttest 5.33 5.25 5.29 4.50 4.25 4.38 planning/evaluation pretest 4.67 4.60 4.64 4.00 3.75 3.88 posttest 5.25 5.33 5.29 4.17 3.33 3.75 person knowledge pretest 2.33 2.67 2.50 3.33 4.00 3.67 posttest 2.00 2.33 2.17 4.00 4.00 4.00 mental translation pretest 2.00 2.33 2.17 4.50 4.67 4.59 posttest 2.00 2.33 2.17 4.50 4.50 4.50 note. the score is based on a 6-point likert scale as used in the malq the results showed that has manifested greater progress than las in terms of listening performance. although it is not possible to establish a clear causal effect of the srl program, the data from the srlp, reflections, evaluations and interviews strongly suggest that has were more engaged in their listening practice and development through self-regulated extensive listening. this would have contributed to their listening development compared with las, who were less engaged (see sections to follow on three other phases of srl). this result is different from classroom-based studies where metacognitive instruction utilizing a pedagogical cycle was found to benefit less-skilled listeners more in their listening development (cross, 2011; vandergrift & tafaghodtari, 2010). this could be argued to be due to learners’ self-regulated learning contexts where a self-regulated learning approach to extensive listening and its impact on listening achievement. . . 203 there was limited teacher input during the listening tasks, unlike previous classroom-based studies (see e.g., vandergrift & tafaghodtari, 2010). results also revealed much higher overall improvement in five metacognitive factors for has, lending further support to previous studies demonstrating the positive outcomes of different kinds of metacognitive interventions for l2 listening development (goh & taib, 2006; goh & zeng, 2014; graham & macaro, 2008; mareschal, 2007; vandergrift & tafaghodtari, 2010; zeng, 2007). moreover, has showed much stronger metacognitive awareness than las in factors such as planning/evaluation, directed attention and problem-solving. the increase in reported use of these three strategies reflect has’ stronger self-regulatory skills in listening: planning, evaluating, managing attention for better comprehension and applying strategies to infer and to monitor these inferences (kintsch, 1998; vandergrift, 2003a). as skilled and effective listeners are generally found to frequently employ these strategies while listening, it could be argued that good control of planning/evaluation, attention-managing and problem-solving strategies signals a great step for learners to becoming self-regulated and autonomous listeners. as indicated by their responses on personal knowledge, has were also more confident and less anxious compared to las in english listening after the self-regulated learning program. similarly, their lower mean scores for mental translation indicate that they were refraining from using mental translation strategies. 7.2. how learners compared in self-regulatory behaviors the four srl phases for listening development in independent settings are task definition, goal setting and planning, strategy and tactic enactment and metacognitive adaptation. results of the has-las comparisons in these four phases are first presented in table 4, and these will then be discussed and further illustrated with excerpts from the learners’ reflections. these behaviors are analyzed and presented in terms of the learners’ understanding of their general listening development and the specific listening tasks that they engaged in during their weekly listening. 7.2.1. task definition task definition refers to an understanding of what a task is. all four participants largely shared a common understanding of what the general task of developing listening and specific listening tasks entail. they regarded listening in english as a real challenge and felt that listening was more difficult than other three macro-skills of english. this is indicative of learners’ lack of confidence and levels of anxiety, both of which can result in an inability to apply metacognitive knowledge while listening yajun zeng, christine c. m. goh 204 in particular (vandergrift et al., 2006). has, nevertheless, reported that they did not feel nervous when listening to english, which might have resulted from their increased exposure to english listening materials through the srl program. table 4 differing self-regulatory behaviors in listening for has and las high-achieving low-achieving task definition general listening development it is a challenge and more difficult than the other three language skills. specific listening task generally determined by understanding of the nature and purpose of listening and the task type. goal setting & planning general listening development mastery orientated. performance orientated. specific listening task set more demanding cognitive and metacognitive goals. mainly behaviorally and cognitively oriented. strategy enactment general listening development frequent use of all essential metacognitive listening strategies. metacognitive tactics not reported: selective attention 1. check current interpretation with context of the message. 2. notice how information is structured. 3. listen to specific parts of the input. comprehension monitoring 4. pay attention to visuals and body language. general listening development orchestrated a broader spectrum of cognitive listening tactics to infer, predict, contextualize, visualize, elaborate, or to reconstruct meaning of the oral text. cognitive tactics not reported: prediction 1. anticipate details while listening/local. inferencing 2. apply knowledge about the target language. 3. use visual clues. metacognitive adaptation general listening development varied and more sophisticated metacognitive adaptation. simple and limited forms of metacognitive adaptations. specific listening task results indicated that definition of specific listening tasks was generally determined by a learner’s understanding of the nature of listening and the task type concerning selected listening materials. an example of such perceptions was the belief that “the dictation task is far more difficult than a mcq task” (la1). this reflected the participants’ understanding of task demands or the difficulty level of different task types. a self-regulated learning approach to extensive listening and its impact on listening achievement. . . 205 7.2.2. goal setting and planning the has and las differed considerably in goal setting and planning in their overall listening development or when approaching specific listening tasks (table 5 and table 6). table 5 implementation of weekly srl listening plans average times of repeated listening time spent on listening (minutes) high-achieving 3.77 123 low-achieving 2.1 34 table 6 learners’ multi-dimensional listening purposes ha1 ha2 la1 la2 submissions 18 14 10 10 listening purpose behavioural finish assignment 0 0 7 6 entertain 0 1 2 3 form habit 2 2 0 0 cognitive remember/know 5 10 4 8 understand 5 2 1 3 apply 2 2 1 0 metacognitive manage attention 2 1 0 0 develop ability 15 9 1 0 las expressed explicitly the strong desire to get appropriate grades to pass the national cet4 test. in contrast, although passing cet4 was also mentioned by the has, they were more focused on deep understanding of tasks, mastering skills, and selfimprovement. in line with their distinct goal-orientations, the learners planned their listening development in quite different manners, and the implementation of listening plans also varied considerably. as shown in table 5, while las spent only 34 minutes per week on learning to listen, has invested almost four times more in this effort (123 minutes). likewise, for each listening task, has tended to listen to it about four times. ha1 even reported that for a difficult listening task the text was repeated seven times. in contrast, las listened to it only two times, regardless of the difficulty level of the tasks. such a considerable difference in planning for and implementation of listening plans between the highand low-achievers was consistent with their differing goal-orientations. has benefitted more from the srl approach as they were prepared to invest more and they also adhered more faithfully to their learning plans. group interview data also revealed that las’ much poorer investment in listening could have been caused by their relatively lower level of confidence, as they were weaker in their listening to start with (goh & zeng, 2014). as in the excerpt below, la1 had clearly prioritized the learning of other skills as a result of this. yajun zeng, christine c. m. goh 206 excerpt 1 my listening is poor. i don’t think i can improve very much in half a year’s time so i spent more time on preparing the reading section and writing section of the cet4 test. (la2) such significantly different degrees of investment in listening either in overall time spent (frequency) or in repeated listening (repetition) would have contributed to has’ higher scores (30%) on the cet4 listening test (vandergrift & goh, 2012). has and las also differed considerably in implementing action plans while carrying out specific listening tasks. listening is a goal-directed strategic behavior and a purposeful process, in which the listening purpose drives the comprehension process (goh, 2002; goh & zeng, 2014; rost, 2005). different listening purposes would therefore affect the comprehension process, as the analysis of the srlp protocols concerning the multidimensionality of listeners’ purposes for specific recordings revealed. following pintrich (2001), these dimensions are behavioral, cognitive, and metacognitive. as can be seen in table 6, the two low achievers tended to set more behavioral and cognitive goals for specific listening tasks, while the two high achievers clearly perceived more demanding cognitive purposes and metacognitive purposes of listening. for las with a performance-oriented approach, finishing the assignments seemed to be their top priority, either because they were required to do so or they did not want to be considered inferior in the class. they also listened to english songs or movie clips for relaxation and entertainment, indicating their preference for less demanding listening tasks. in contrast, the two high achievers explicitly pointed out they were trying to cultivate a good learning habit through regular listening training. although they also listened to english songs and watched english movies in their spare time, they reported to have chosen more demanding listening materials for intensive listening from their textbooks and original cet4 listening test papers, demonstrating their mastery-orientation. it is possible that these two stronger listeners felt they had the ability to manage these more demanding listening tasks and were setting up challenges for themselves while the less able listeners preferred to choose easier ways of practicing their listening. while this seems like a logical thing to do, it is also possible that the two las had missed out on opportunities to develop their listening further. this factor combined with a lower frequency of practice and fewer repetitions of listening would have contributed to their slower progress. in addition, las’ cognitive learning purposes were limited to knowing and understanding, with knowing or remembering taking up the highest percentage of occurrence. in contrast, has not only set goals for more exposure to aural input and deeper understanding and comprehension of gist and details, but they a self-regulated learning approach to extensive listening and its impact on listening achievement. . . 207 also tried to apply their linguistic knowledge and what they got from the oral texts to improve their dictation skills. dictation takes up a little less than 30% of the cet4 listening test and is also the weakest listening skill for chinese efl listeners (jin, 2005). has’ resolution to overcome this listening difficulty and more self-initiated investment in dictation exercises were evidence of their much higher cognitive goals in listening. 7.2.3. strategy enactment the strategy enactment pattern of high achievers showed considerable differences from that of low achievers either in the frequency of strategy use or in the way specific cognitive or metacognitive tactics operationalize strategies used (table 4). it should be noted that the reported use of listening tactics and strategies based on participants’ retrospection for each listening task was not necessary in tandem with the actual use in listening learning and the 44 listening tactics included in our checklists were illustrative and not exhaustive. furthermore, due to the limited sample size (n = 4), no statistical measures were adopted here to determine the significance level of strategy deployment. instead, the occurrences of cognitive and metacognitive strategy use for each participant were counted and ranked accordingly. research in both learner strategy for language learning and l2 listening highlighted the significance of strategy development for listening success and l2 acquisition (goh & zeng, 2014; vandergrift, 2003b; wenden, 2002). the fact that six cognitive tactics and eight metacognitive tactics were jointly used by all participants was strong evidence of the similarity and convergence of chinese efl listeners’ strategy use preference in approaching listening tasks or developing listening proficiency. in line with what has been reported by goh (2002), the four participants reported an average 64% of use of inferencing strategy, using contextual clues and familiar content words or drawing on knowledge of the world to help them bridge gaps in their understanding, which stressed the key role that prior knowledge played in learner comprehension. as such, these listening tactics can be prioritized and highlighted in strategy instruction in listening classes to promote learners’ higher level of awareness and future use. furthermore, all participants reported they had never used the strategy of noticing how information is structured, for example, the presence of discourse markers. this finding has strong implications for listening pedagogy in china. specifically, familiarizing chinese efl learners with various genre types and corresponding meta-discourse markers and rhetorical devices assumed greater importance in teaching listening. thus, genre-based teaching intended to promote listening discourse comprehension should thereby be prioritized in listening classes. yajun zeng, christine c. m. goh 208 however, we found a marked difference in cognitive strategy enactment as reflected by the frequency/occurrence of participants’ perceived strategy use. first, has used four cognitive strategies, up to one third more often than las. this might help explain has’ higher level of strategy awareness and stronger ability in deep level processing and tackling listening comprehension problems. second, has reported relying heavily on the visualization strategy of mentally displaying the shape or spelling of key words while listening, which was only occasionally used by las. chinese efl learners frequently mentioned the importance of the size of their vocabulary in relation to their learning, as observed by zhang (2010). hence, the considerable difference identified here might have been caused by learners’ varied vocabulary size in general and word recognition or spelling abilities in particular. third, the finding that the strategy occurrence of mental translation for has was almost 30% lower than that of las might indicate has’ much improved awareness of the detrimental effect of this strategy and fruitful efforts in restricting its use while listening. or it might have resulted from their greater level of automaticity in processing lexical chunks. the finding is consistent with l2 listening literature (e.g., vandergrift et al., 2006). finally, the highand low-achievers differed in operationalizing the fixation strategy, which involves focusing attention on understanding a small part of a text. compared to las, who frequently tried to memorize/repeat the sounds of unfamiliar words, has were more engaged with memorizing words or phrases for later processing, indicating their stronger ability in matching the sound of words with their forms as well as engagement in deep level processing to construct meaning during listening (field, 2008). similarly, there were also more differences between has and las in how the metacognitive tactics were enacted. first, the frequency disparity of metacognitive strategy use between has and las was even greater compared to that of their cognitive strategy use. the much higher frequency of metacognitive strategy use for has was in line with l2 listening literature claiming that skilled listeners revealed using about twice as many metacognitive strategies as their less-skilled counterparts, primarily in comprehension monitoring (goh, 2002; vandergrift & goh, 2012). it also helped explain has’ stronger ability to self-regulate their listening learning as well as their greater degree of progress in listening performance in the srl case study. second, has reported 42% more use of pre-listening preparation strategies such as previewing contents, which underscored the key role that preparation strategies played in listening success (goh, 2002; rost, 2005). the three preplanning preparation tactics not only covered learners’ mental and emotional preparation to reduce anxiety and enhance confidence but also included actions a self-regulated learning approach to extensive listening and its impact on listening achievement. . . 209 to pre-process the content semantically and phonologically. in this sense, has were far better prepared mentally and emotionally for achieving success in listening tasks as compared to las. third, the much higher level of strategy use in directed attention and selective attention suggests that has tended to monitor attention and avoid distractions by concentrating hard and continuing to listen in spite of difficulty. moreover, has managed to pay particular attention to familiar content words and listen for gist to secure satisfactory comprehension. such strategy use disparity between has and las in both attention strategies is consistent with l2 listening research (goh, 2002; rost, 2002; vandergrift et al., 2006) claiming that attention strategies are mainly adopted by higher ability listeners and are believed to be essential for second language listening success. fourth, while has frequently tried to notice intonation features to help them in comprehension, las seldom did so. specifically, has were found to have paid particular attention to pronunciation and intonation for better oral english through reading-aloud in the mornings and active participation in after-class english activities. lastly, while has tended to use another two types of selective attention strategies, which were to listen to specific parts of the input and to pay attention to visuals and body language for video texts, las reported never using these tactics. listening has been proven highly demanding and very much memory consuming for chinese efl listeners (wang, 2002). thus, it is especially important that las learn to focus on specific parts of input and discard irrelevant or less important information to achieve satisfactory understanding. in the same vein, it is also important that they are able to capitalize on visuals and body language to compensate for their limited knowledge of the target language for better comprehension of video texts or in face-to-face communications with native speakers. 7.2.4. metacognitive adaptation high-achieving listeners engaged in varied and more sophisticated metacognitive adaptation, either for immediate change or for long-term listening development, compared to las, who appeared to have restricted themselves to simple and limited forms of immediate and long-term metacognitive adaptations, as indicated in table 7. l2 listening research has well attested to the benefits and significance of evaluation after listening (goh & zeng, 2014; rost, 2002; vandergrift et al., 2006). as reported, the four participants showed marked difference in making long-term metacognitive adaptation for listening development. although both highand lowachievers tended to make metacognitive changes to reduce anxiety, regulate attention, and take down more notes to compensate for the limited working yajun zeng, christine c. m. goh 210 memory, has also reported having engaged in other essential metacognitive adaptations for long-term listening development, which were not reported by las. table 7 has and las’ metacognitive adaptation in listening based on the listening guide protocols high-achievers low-achievers adaptation immediate metacognitive adaptation for specific listening task · need to consult the dictionary to get to know some words and expressions involved in such games (ha1). n.a. vocabulary · take down those unclear parts and then consult the dictionary afterwards to make clear their pronunciations (ha1). n.a. pronunciation · could listen according to scripts and try to find some patterns (ha2). · scripts are helpful for repeated listening (la2). listening scripts long-term metacognitive adaptation for listening development · often neglect to use these strategies while listening and i should learn to use these strategies more (ha1). n.a. strategy use awareness · calm down and do not be anxious if i can’t catch the listening (ha1). · try to reduce listening anxiety (ha2). · try to relax while listening (la2). · should prepare well before listening (la1). reduce anxiety · very important to focus attention while listening (ha1). · understand more when i stay focused (ha2). · should focus more as i often get distracted (la1). · just can’t concentrate on the task (la2). attention · very important to predict the content based on the title (ha1). · guess according to common sense knowledge (ha1). · quite important to predict before listening (ha2). · sometimes the content could be predicted through test item choices (ha1). · predict using the test items (ha1). · try to train ability to preview the test items quickly (ha1). n.a. prediction and previewing test items · impossible to catch every sentence so key points are important (ha1). · impossible to understand every part even if i want to (ha2). · should focus on key points (ha1). · try to catch sensitive and key details while listening (ha2). n.a. theme and key points a self-regulated learning approach to extensive listening and its impact on listening achievement. . . 211 · for the inferential test items, i need to grasp the main theme and key sentences (ha1). · pay attention to some questions related to the theme and pay attention to several sentences in the beginning of the text (ha1). · learn to catch the main theme of the text (ha1). · learn to catch key sentences to improve accuracy (ha2). · should take down more notes in case i forget what i’ve heard (ha1). · taking down more notes as it is helpful (la2). note-taking · train my dictation ability consciously after class (ha1). n.a. dictation · should learn to link what i hear to related questions while listening (ha2). n.a. association note. n.a. = means not available from the data results showed that has possessed stronger strategic awareness in listening and they decided to learn and use more strategies in listening tasks. this is supported in one of has’ srlp protocol, as indicated in excerpt 2. excerpt 2 i often neglect to use these strategies while listening and i should learn to use these strategies more. (ha1) in addition, has were more aware of the value of prediction for listening success and tended to preview test items to get themselves better prepared before listening. given the limited working memory and weak word recognition skills of chinese efl listeners (zheng & li, 2002), effective prediction and previewing test items or questions before listening, which is what has did in our study, seemed to have contributed the lion’s share of learners’ listening success. furthermore, has stressed the importance of the theme and key points of the oral texts. unlike las, has would “pay attention to some questions related to the theme and pay attention to several sentences in the beginning of the text,” as one high achiever put it. therefore, the ability to grasp the theme and key points to guarantee overall comprehension and to solve inferential questions or test items appeared to well distinguish has from las. finally, has reported having made another two metacognitive adaptations for listening development, which were not found in las’ listening protocols. one was to train the dictation ability and the other was to develop association skills. first, improving dictation ability directly addressed the urgent need to pass cet4 listening test, where dictation takes up almost 30% of the total yajun zeng, christine c. m. goh 212 listening score. second, active association across the comprehension process to link what has been heard to questions demonstrated has’ dynamic assessment of their level of comprehension. it appears that las have much to learn from has in applying these two metacognitive adaptations to enhance their listening ability. 8. conclusion this study adopted a self-regulated learning (srl) approach for developing l2 listening in independent settings. it helped to extend the current classroombased, process-oriented discussions of l2 listening instruction into one that focuses on learner-oriented, self-regulated learning activities. it also provides evidence for the validity of transferring the theoretical construct of self-regulated learning to the area of second language acquisition, as first proposed by oxford (1999) and explicated in oxford (2011, 2017). this concept was further emphasized by dörnyei and associates (dörnyei & skehan, 2003; hornstra, van der veen, peetsma, & volman, 2013; tseng, dörnyei, & schmitt, 2006). at the same time, by adopting a metacognition-inclusive srl framework, we were able to examine the use of strategies and how they can benefit language learners in self-directed listening activities. as argued by vandergrift and goh (2012), strategy instruction during class time and listening practice after class need not be mutually exclusive. we demonstrated that listening teachers in china could use carefully designed metacognitive tools to help learners plan and prepare well for listening tasks, check and monitor comprehension, and evaluate strategic efforts in listening process in independent settings. finally, our study took the research on skilled listeners further by identifying distinct and differing developmental paths of self-regulatory skills in l2 listening for learners with different achievement levels. this research evidence was especially helpful for less skilled listeners to reflect on their poor performance in specific self-regulated learning phases. listening teachers can also capitalize on the limited listening class time to offer individualized instruction for low achievers. as such, it was expected that low achievers’ self-regulatory skills in listening could be greatly enhanced along the way for them to become skilled listeners. our study was limited in its scope as the proposed srl approach focused primarily on examining listening as an individual cognitive entity and the developmental paths of learners with different achievement levels. future research on self-regulation in srl in l2 listening should include an examination of the affective and social aspects of the skill. in addition, research is needed in which both the constructive nature of learning and the important role that l2 learners play in the social process of learning to listen could be equally emphasized. how a self-regulated learning approach to extensive listening and its impact on listening achievement. . . 213 teacher scaffolding or support can be integrated into the srl approach, as well as how their on-going interaction with learners in an srl program can help learners achieve more progress in listening also merits further research. furthermore, research that would contribute to fuller understanding of metacognition and self-regulated learning in l2 listening both within and beyond the classroom is warranted. whether different listening task types exert a differential influence on learner’s growth in metacognition and listening performance also appears to be an area requiring further research. additional research is also needed to combine others’ ratings (such as teachers’ and peers’) and self-ratings to produce comprehensive assessment of listeners’ metacognition and self-regulated learning. lastly, it should also be cautioned that the interpretation and discussion are based on feedback from two cases (two high achievers vs. two low achievers) only. therefore, the generalizability of the findings is very much limited to the context where the case study was carried out. in spite of this, the study can offer some practical insights for consideration. firstly, l2 listening development outside class can benefit from a teachersupported self-regulated learning approach. instead of asking students to just “listen more,” teachers can provide tools to support their learning endeavors. these tools, such as the srlp, can help learners articulate their plans and chart their progress. more able listeners may be more motivated to adopt such an approach, and the weaker ones who want to master their listening would also be likely to invest more time and effort in it. although this study showed that it was the higher-achieving students who benefitted more and were more engaged, teachers should not exclude weaker listeners from a teacher-supported self-regulated approach. they could use the two cases in this study to illustrate the importance of taking charge of one’s listening development by engaging in and being committed to self-regulated learning beyond the classroom. learners who are mainly motivated to pass examinations, however, may not fully appreciate the rationale for such an approach, as they may see it as taking away time from other language learning activities. teachers would therefore need to decide for themselves whether or not it is necessary to complement their classroom instruction with such extensive listening activities. more importantly, they would need to be convinced themselves that their learners can benefit from such an approach, as this study has shown, and motivate their learners to invest time and effort in this form of extensive listening that can bring about longer term benefits in listening development. yajun zeng, christine c. m. goh 214 references anderson, l. w., krathwohl, d. r., airasian, p. w., cruikshank, k. a., mayer, r. e., pintrich, p. r., . . . wittrock, m. c. 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(2002). listening comprehension and short-term retention. foreign language world, 89(3), 32-35. 719 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (4). 2014. 719-723 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.4.7 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book reviews key topics in second language acquisition editors: vivian cook and david singleton publisher: multilingual matters, 2014 isbn: 978-1-78309-179-9 pages: 150 good textbooks dealing with issues involved in second language acquisition (sla) are always in high demand among undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students as well as their teachers, and yet, even though numerous titles are available on the market, publications of this kind are exceedingly difficult to come by. the most conspicuous shortcomings are typically related, among others things, to the abstruse level of discussion of the topics chosen, much too often grounded in theoretical positions to which the authors seem to have sworn allegiance, the use of technical language that may be hard to access for many less experienced readers, the desire to cover too much territory, the frequent failure to reconcile theory and practice, and even when such reconciliation is undertaken, the blatant inapplicability of the pedagogical proposals offered to many instructional contexts. the book authored by vivian cook and david singleton without doubt avoids all of these pitfalls, thus constituting a prime example of a well-written introduction to the undoubtedly highly complex, interdisciplinary and multifaceted domain of second language acquisition 720 research, being at the same time accessible, readable and simply engaging. as the two scholars explain at the very outset, “the book is not . . . a comprehensive introduction to sla research, of which there are many around, but a glimpse into how sla researchers have tried to answer eight common questions about second language acquisition” (p. xi). the eight topics they zoom in upon include the connections between various languages in the mind of the learner, the age factor in second language learning, the acquisition of vocabulary, the contribution of grammar to learning and using a second language, issues involved in the development of writing skills in a second language, the role of attitudes and motivation in learning second and foreign languages, the usefulness of the findings of sla research for language pedagogy, and, finally, the goals of language instruction. the authors admit that the selection of these eight themes is to a certain extent arbitrary in the sense that it was dictated by the questions they have frequently been asked, their own research interests and experience, and the desire to address issues that would be of importance irrespective of a particular context. thus, in their own words, “the final choice was a combination of popularity, expertise and relevance” (p. xi). the eight topics are explored in separate chapters, each written by one of the authors but then commented upon and edited by the other, with the effect that, on the one hand, they allow the manifestation of personal beliefs and preferences as well as showing differences in terms of style, and, on the other, they draw upon the considerable expertise, experience and wisdom of both of the eminent scholars. all the chapters have a similar structure, they are divided into subsections devoted to different facets of the key theme in question, and they are meant to be used in any sequence, independently of each other. the issues under discussion are in most cases illustrated by means of easy-to-understand examples, taken from everyday life as well as the huge experience of the authors, and, importantly, basing upon a wide array of languages. the main points are usually conveniently highlighted in boxes or figures (e.g., different views on access to universal grammar in late learners on p. 27 in chapter two, on the age factor and distinctive features of foreigner talk on p. 43 in chapter three, dealing with the acquisition of words, or the sequences of second language acquisition on p. 64 in chapter four, devoted to learning grammar). each section is accompanied by useful summaries of the key points discussed, many chapters end with concluding remarks which are intended to reiterate some of the main ideas and shed light on the possible directions for future research, and those interested are always provided with suggestions for further reading which can help them gain more in-depth grasp of a particular theme. in addition, the chapters are meant to be interactive since readers are requested to reflect upon their own experiences or perform simple tasks that enhance their understanding of the concepts being introduced (e.g., 721 determining motivational orientation on p. 96 in chapter six, concerned with the role of attitudes and motivation, or deciding on reasons for language learning on p. 126 in chapter eight, on the goals of foreign language instruction). attached at the end of the book is a glossary of the key topics featuring in the successive chapters. as i already made clear at the very outset, the book is a valuable addition to the existing literature as far as introductory texts on second language acquisition are concerned and in fact it has a number of features which make it special. in the first place, vivian cook and david singleton should be commended for the selection of topics to be covered, as they indeed represent hotly debated and sometimes blatantly misunderstood issues of great relevance to sla. equally commendable is the decision to opt for selectivity rather than comprehensiveness, because, thanks to this, the book can be successfully used in programs that are not entirely focused on sla and with students who are only beginning to get acquainted with this domain and might be overwhelmed by detailed treatment of a multitude of diverse issues. in addition, the authors do not hesitate to dispel a number of deeply-seated, yet at times totally unfounded, beliefs about sla, such that have persevered for decades and may have even discouraged many an individual from attempting to learn a foreign language. by way of example, they argue that neither the maximal (i.e., passing for a native speaker) nor the minimal (i.e., just being able to get messages across effectively in an additional language) view of bilingualism is tenable, opting instead for a more convenient and sensible term second language user (chapter one). they take the stance that when it comes to second language instruction, “an early start . . . does not seem to necessarily advantage the recipients. . . . given motivation and perseverance, good results in second language learning can in fact be achieved in any age” (p. 33; chapter two). they also make it plain that the acquisition of words benefits from adept combination of intentional and incidental approaches (chapter three), emphasize that grammar plays an important role in learning and using an additional language (chapter four), and point to the need to recognize the vital role of writing skills in view of the fast growth of online communication, highlighting the common difficulties in this respect (chapter five). equally importantly, they acknowledge the limitations of research on motivation, pinning their hopes on the new directions it has taken, in particular the focus on its dynamic nature (ushioda & dörnyei, 2012) and the role of possible selves (dörnyei, 2009) (chapter six). they call for greater contributions of research to language teaching, cautioning at the same time that, for this to happen, such research would need to take greater heed of the realities of real classrooms, and that its results cannot provide a direct basis for a recipe for successful instruction (chapter seven). finally, they go a long way to 722 convince the reader that the goal of learning should not be envisaged as attaining native-like proficiency in the target language as such a view is bound to lead to learners viewing themselves as failures. besides, as they comment, “. . . the monolingual is just as defective. monolinguals can’t switch between languages; their awareness of language is poorer; their perceptions of the world are less complex; their command of their first language is worse” (p. 137; chapter eight). on a more general level, cook and singleton express the view that sla research should be brought closer to the everyday concerns of practitioners, and that researchers’ agendas should be shaped to a greater extent by what transpires in the classroom, with the important caveat that under no circumstances can straightforward solutions and clear-cut pedagogic proposals be expected. given that all of these pronouncements come from two of the most prominent scholars in the field and the entire text bespeaks their experience, sagacity and thoughtfulness, there is a clear need for such opinions to weigh heavily on how second languages are learnt and taught, and on how these two processes should be investigated. there are also many other, more down-to-earth, reasons why the book can be considered as one of the best introductory texts to research on sla, the most important of which are related to the ease with which it can be processed, the presence of hundreds of enlightening and thought-provoking examples, as well as numerous attempts to get the reader engaged and to encourage reflection on his or her own experiences. obviously, it is always possible to find some fault with any publication and key topics in second language acquisition is certainly no exception. one potential area of criticism could be the choice of topics, which may not be to the liking of scholars whose interests lie primarily with other aspects of sla. i could lament, for example, the absence of a separate chapter devoted to language learning strategies, classroom interaction or corrective feedback; others could object to the inclusion of a chapter on writing even though nothing is said about reading, speaking and listening; and others yet could make the point that at least some space should be reserved for aptitude, working memory or intelligence. another line of attack could be the theoretical stances adopted in the discussion of the eight topics or the conclusions reached, because it is obvious, for instance, that the views on the exact nature of bilingualism are bound to differ, some scholars are more convinced of the decisive role of the age factor than others, and the goals of language instruction are open to debate, depending on national policies, cultural milieus or simply perceptions of individual teachers and learners. a point could also be made that some of the tasks, particularly those involving the use of many different languages, may not be suitable for some readers who will be forced to offer answers based on hunches rather than real knowledge. the simple truth is, however, that the selection of 723 themes to be discussed is bound to be controversial and driven by a number of factors; as the authors candidly admit in the introduction, the specific approach has to be reflective of one’s preferences, experiences and interpretations, and some hands-on activities are always more or less suitable, depending on the specific national and institutional context, the nature of a given program or simply a particular learner group. while such issues must surely be taken into account, they do not in the least affect the overall quality of cook and singleton’s, book which seems to be a perfect choice for students who are just about to start exploring the fascinating but exceedingly complex world of sla. in the epilogue, in fact in the closing sentence in the volume, the authors write: “sla research, if it does nothing else, asks the right questions; and our little book, if it does nothing else, may give some useful guidance as to what some of those questions are” (p. 144). i am confident, though, that it does much more than that because even though the answers to the questions posed cannot possibly be definitive, they are carefully considered and grounded in the immense expertise of the two scholars. in effect, the volume may turn out to be a genuine eye-opener not only for learners, teachers, undergraduate or graduate students as well as methodology instructors, but also for researchers themselves who may wish to give a second thought to what issues should be given priority on their agendas, how these issues should most profitably be investigated, how the outcomes of their efforts can be made more accessible to practitioners, and how they can contribute to more effective teaching and learning. reviewed by mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references dörnyei, z. (2009). the l2 motivational self-system. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 9-42). bristol: multilingual matters. ushioda, e., & dörnyei, z. (2012). motivation. in s. gass & a. mackey (eds.), the routledge handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 396-409). new york: routledge. 587 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (4). 2016. 587-617 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.4.3 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features1 qiong li carnegie mellon university, pennsylvania, usa qiongl@andrew.cmu.edu abstract drawing on the findings of longitudinal studies in uninstructed contexts over the last two decades, this synthesis explores variations in developmental patterns across second language (l2) pragmatic features. two synthesis questions were addressed: (a) what are the variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features?, and (b) what are the potential explanations for the variations? in response to the first question, previous studies showed that l2 pragmatic development is a non-linear, dynamic process, with developmental paces varying across pragmatic features (ortactepe, 2013; taguchi, 2010, 2011, 2012; warga & scholmberger, 2007). these studies revealed that some aspects of pragmatic features (e.g., semantic strategies of speech acts) develop faster than others (e.g., lexical features such as mitigators). in response to the second question, three potential explanations were identified to account for the developmental variations: (a) language-related, (b) situation-dependent, and (c) learner-related explanations, with three subcategories for the language-related explanation: (a) the functions of pragmatic features, (b) the frequency of availability of target features, and (c) the similarity and difference between languages with respect to the target feature. keywords: l2 pragmatic development; variations; longitudinal perspective; non-linearity 1 i am grateful to dr. naoko taguchi for her guidance for this synthesis. i also appreciate the comments from three anonymous reviewers on an earlier draft of this article. qiong li 588 1. introduction pragmatic competence in a second language (l2) involves mastering pragmalingistic and sociopragmatic knowledge (thomas, 1983), as well as developing efficient control of both knowledge bases when encoding and decoding language functions in a sociocultural context (taguchi, 2010, 2011). pragmalinguistics refers to the linguistic resources available to perform language functions, while sociopragmatics refers to a language user’s assessment of the context in which those linguistic resources are implemented (leech, 1983; thomas, 1983). research on l2 pragmatics encompasses two primary areas: the study of l2 use and the study of l2 learning (kasper & rose, 2002). the former investigates how non-native speakers comprehend and produce speech actions in the target language. the latter examines how l2 learners develop the ability to understand and perform those actions in the target language. additionally, both l2 use and learning are constrained by social conventions and contexts in which learners decide between different pragmatic meanings (kasper & rose, 2002). therefore, l2 pragmatic development involves acquisition of a complex interplay among language, language users, and social contexts (taguchi, 2012). two methods have been adopted to study pragmatic development in uninstructed contexts: cross-sectional and longitudinal. cross-sectional studies compare pragmatic performance among different groups based on different proficiency levels or length of stay. the group differences of pragmatic performance are perceived as changes that learners exhibit at different learning stages and thus indirectly demonstrate development. in contrast, longitudinal studies trace the trajectory of l2 pragmatic development over a period of time with the same learner(s). the changes captured over time provide insights into the developmental patterns and the factors affecting pragmatic development. this longitudinal perspective directly addresses the developmental process of pragmatic competence, which contrasts with cross-sectional studies’ indirect ways of demonstrating development. compared with cross-sectional studies, longitudinal investigations are still under-explored in the area of l2 pragmatics, as acknowledged by many researchers (e.g., bardovi-harlig, 1999, 2000; kasper & rose, 2002; kasper & schmidt, 1996; taguchi, 2010, 2011, 2012). it is only within the past two decades when the number of longitudinal studies started to increase. this body of studies have examined various pragmatic features: address terms (e.g., hassall, 2013), implicatures (e.g., bouton, 1992), formulaic expressions (taguchi, li, & xiao, 2013), discourse markers (e.g., polat, 2011), and speech acts such as apologies (e.g., warga & scholmberger, 2007), compliments (e.g., félix-brasdefer & hasler-barker, 2014), disagreement (e.g., bardovi-harlig & salsbury, 2004), indirect variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features 589 opinions (e.g., taguchi, 2012), offers-refusals (barron, 2003), refusals (e.g., ren, 2012), requests (e.g., li, 2014), and suggestions (e.g., matsumura, 2001). these studies showed that the developmental paces varied across pragmatic features or aspects. for example, taguchi’s (2007, 2008) studies revealed that learners’ comprehension developed faster and more accurately for indirect refusals than for indirect opinions. several studies on speech acts (e.g., schauer, 2009) uncovered that semantic strategies used to structure a speech act progressed faster than lexical and syntactic forms. these findings suggest that pragmatic development is a non-linear, dynamic process with uneven developmental paces in developmental patterns (e.g., ortactepe, 2013; taguchi, 2012; warga & scholmberger, 2007). despite this generalization, with the notable exception of taguchi’s (2010) synthesis, very few studies have systematically addressed the uneven developmental paces or explored the potential explanations for variations in these longitudinal studies. to fill these gaps, this synthesis seeks to describe and explain the variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features in uninstructed contexts. two questions guide this investigation: 1. what are the variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features? 2. what are the potential explanations for the variations? before addressing these two questions, the following section will first briefly introduce the background guiding this synthesis. 2. background in interlanguage pragmatics, research has revealed that pragmatic development shows uneven developmental paces across pragmatic aspects and features. this pathway aligns with the non-linear perspective in complex dynamic systems theory (cdst), which claims that language development is a non-linear, complex process in which changes emerge at uneven paces. some changes emerge gradually over time, but others occur suddenly and radically (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). in language development, different aspects of language abilities have different rates of changes and changes in one aspect do not necessarily cause changes in others. as part of language ability, pragmatic competence also shows uneven paces in the developmental process, which is called developmental variations in this synthesis. several studies of speech acts have revealed that, within the same period of time, the developmental pace with semantic strategies was faster than that with pragmalinguistic expressions (e.g., felix-brasdefer & hasler-barker, 2014; li, 2014; schauer, 2004, 2009). the characteristic of nonqiong li 590 linearity in pragmatic development and the empirical evidence provide justification for the exploration of variations in l2 pragmatic development. in addition to non-linearity, the temporal dimension is another key feature in tracing and observing language development in general, and l2 pragmatic development in particular. the critical role of “time” is emphasized by ortega and iberri-shea (2005): “many, if not all, fundamental problems about l2 learning that second language acquisition (sla) researchers investigate are in part problems about ‘time’” (p. 26). similarly, cdst also stresses this time scale in language development (de bot, lowie, thorne, & verspoor, 2013; ortega & bynes, 2008). the observation of developmental processes is not limited to static phases themselves, but also involves the transitions between phases within a period of time (de bot et al., 2007). this time-based view underlines the importance of the longitudinal perspective on language development. to capture the developmental variations in pragmatic patterns, the present synthesis focuses on longitudinal investigations of l2 learners’ pragmatic competence. to date, research does not only describe the developmental process but also explains pragmatic development from diverse perspectives. two categories of theories have been applied to explain pragmatic development: theories with an individual-psychological focus (e.g., cognitive-processing models) and theories with a social practice focus (e.g., sociocultural theory and language socialization; kasper & rose, 2002, p. 61). both approaches are valuable in explaining pragmatic development since the development of pragmatic competence is characterized by the interactions between “cognitive, social, and environmental factors” (taguchi, 2012, p. 66). the diversity of explanations for pragmatic development provide insights into developmental variations across pragmatic features, which can be explored from various perspectives. the non-linear and time-based traits of language development guide this synthesis to address the developmental variations (uneven paces) across pragmatic features investigated in longitudinal studies, as well as to explore the potential explanations for these variations. below, the methodology section will define longitudinal studies, which is followed by the literature search procedures used to locate the primary studies. it will also present the inclusion/exclusion criteria used to screen the studies and the coding process of categorizing the studies. after this, operationalization of key terms (e.g., developmental patterns, variations, pragmatic features) will be explained. then, in the findings section, the answers to the two synthesis questions will be presented. finally, the conclusion section will summarize the synthesis findings and provide implications for future research directions. variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features 591 3. methodology the present synthesis adopts the criteria proposed by ortega and iberri-shea (2005) and later revised by taguchi (2010) to define longitudinal research. according to ortega and iberri-shea, longitudinal research is the observation of the same participant(s) over an extended period of time. they presented four definitional features of a longitudinal study: (a) the specific time length, (b) the presence of multi-wave data collections, (c) the conceptualization of capturing changes over time, and (d) the focus on establishing contextualized antecedent and consequent relations by tracing the phenomenon in its context, instead of with experimental controls. drawing on these characteristics, a literature search was conducted using four electronic databases: llba, eric, google scholar, and the carnegie mellon university (cmu) library database (a university database). key words including interlanguage pragmatics, pragmatic development, second language learning/acquisition, and longitudinal study were used to carry out the bibliographic search. this search, conducted in 2014, yielded 17 hits in llba, 286 in eric, 453 in google scholar, and 308 in the cmu library database. after cross-examining the studies, a total of 765 articles were identified as unique studies. then, the following inclusion and exclusion criteria2 were used to screen the studies: 1. the study was empirical and was published in a journal or book.3 2. the study focused on adult participants. 3. the study traced the changes of specific pragmatic features4 over a period of time (it was a longitudinal study). 4. the data in the study were collected systematically over time (e.g., preand post-results). 5. the study included pragmalinguistic analysis.5 6. the study focused on naturalistic development: it did not involve instructional intervention or other types of training.6 2 these criteria are based on those in taguchi’s (2010) synthesis of longitudinal studies. 3 doctoral dissertations (e.g., dufon, 1999) were not included because they were not published in journals or books. 4 some longitudinal studies (e.g., dings, 2014; shively, 2013) did not meet this criterion because they did not focus on specific pragmatic features. 5 some ethnographic studies (e.g., siegal, 1995) did not meet this criterion because they did not code the data for pragmalinguistic analysis. neither did this study present the changes of certain pragmatic features over the 18 months 6 some longitudinal studies such as cohen and shively (2007) and shively (2011) did not meet this criterion because their design involved instruction or training. for example, qiong li 592 7. the study showed different paces of development of particular pragmatic features, meaning that within the same period of time and within the same group of learner(s), some pragmatic features/aspects developed faster while others did not develop or developed more slowly. after applying these inclusion and exclusion criteria, 26 primary studies remained for the synthesis. 3.1. coding for substantive and methodological features each study was first coded for substantive and methodological features (norris & ortega, 2006). the substantive features involve target pragmatic features and learning contexts (second or foreign language context). the methodological features consist of six aspects: (a) length of study, (b) frequency of data collection, (c) measures used to capture development, (d) sample size, (e) participants’ l1(s) and the target language, and (f) participants’ proficiency. the appendix displays all 26 studies coded for these features. as shown in the appendix, the pragmatic features examined include address terms, formulaic expressions, discourse markers, the sentence final particle ne, conversational implicatures and speech acts. these studies fall into three broad categories of examination: pragmatic comprehension, awareness/perception, and production, with 17 studies concentrating on pragmatic production. only seven studies investigated pragmatic comprehension and three studies pragmatic awareness/perception.7 additionally, most studies were conducted in the second language (sl) context. seven involved the foreign language (fl) context, but only two were conducted exclusively in the fl context; the other five were carried out in both sl and fl contexts, comparing the learning outcomes between the two contexts. finally, 16 of 26 studies had english as the target language. other target languages included spanish, indonesian, chinese, japanese, french, and german. regarding the length of study, there is little consensus about the optimal length of observation for a longitudinal study (ortega & iberri-shea, 2005). the 26 studies confirm this claim, exhibiting a wide range of the study length (from four weeks to over four years). most studies used convenience scaling based on institutional time (e.g., one academic year). the frequency of data collection points ranges between two and eight times, with a majority of studies involving shively’s (2011) study involved an hour-long orientation to pragmatics and approximately 30 minutes of instruction on pragmatics before participants started doing their tasks. 7 taguchi’s (2012) study was coded twice because it included two separate analyses of pragmatic comprehension and production. variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features 593 two or three points. the data were written or oral production elicited by instruments such as the discourse completion task (dct) and questionnaires. a few studies collected authentic data by recording naturalistic conversations (e.g., bardovi-harlig & hartford, 1993; bardovi-harlig & salsbury, 2004; polat, 2011) or administering role-plays (e.g., bataller, 2010). 3.2. coding for developmental variations and explanations in this step, each study was further coded for the aspects that directly answer the research questions: (a) pragmatic features that developed and did not develop/developed slowly, namely, developmental variations, (b) evidence (e.g., test scores, frequency) for faster and non-/slower development, and (c) potential explanations for the developmental variations. the key terminology used in this coding process was defined. first, pragmatic features were defined as the operationalization of pragmatic competence in each study. specifically, they refer to the units of analysis (e.g., address terms) researchers used to examine pragmatic competence. second, the measurement of development and non-development was adopted from previous studies that regarded target language speakers’ performance as the normative use of a certain pragmatic feature. within the same observation period, the changes that approximate the target-like norms indicate faster development, while the divergence from the target-like norms or no change represents slower or non-development.8 third, developmental patterns were defined as paces or rates of changes of pragmatic features. these changes were traced in the performance of the same leaner(s) within the same period of time. finally, variations were operationalized as the uneven developmental paces or rates across pragmatic features, which means that variations involved two aspects: faster and non/slower development of the pragmatic feature.9 when coding for the potential explanations for the variations, i did not simply copy the authors’ explanations reported in their studies. instead, i reanalyzed the study features and the findings/results reported in each study. this 8 the distinction between faster and non-/slow development was based on the evidence (e.g., test scores, frequency) presented in the original studies. for example, the accuracy scores in taguchi’s (2012) study showed significant differences of low-imposition speech acts between the first and the second data collection points, as well as between the second and the third data collection points. however, high-imposition speech acts showed significant differences only between the second and the third data collection points. thus, lowimposition speech acts developed faster than high-imposition speech acts. 9 since variations cover these two aspects, the corresponding explanations should also address the two aspects at the same time. qiong li 594 re-analysis process relied on the information provided by the author(s) in the original studies and resulted in three potential explanations: (a) language-related, (b) situation-dependent, and (c) learner-related explanations. each single explanation was identified to account for both faster and non-/slower development simultaneously because developmental variations involve these two aspects of development. based on the language properties (e.g., frequency) in the studies, three subcategories in the language-related explanation were further identified: (a) the functions of the target feature, (b) the frequency of availability of the target feature, and (c) the similarity and difference between l1 and l2 for the target features. the situation-dependent explanation concerns the characteristics of the task items used in the study, specifically, the social variables involved in the task situations, that is, degree of imposition, social distance, and social status (brown & levinson, 1983). finally, the learner-related explanation refers to the learners’ initial conditions (e.g., initial-level pragmatic knowledge) at the start of the study. when each study was categorized into a specific explanation, the explanation has to account for both faster and non-/slower development at the same time. of the 26 studies, 20 studies were categorized into the language-related explanation, six studies into the category of the situation-dependent explanation, and two studies into the category of learner-related explanation. to improve the reliability of this categorization, three pragmatics phd students recategorized six different studies (about 20% of the 26 studies). each of them selected two studies s/he had read from the 26 studies. none of them selected the same article. after this, they received the variation description found by the researcher in each study. the co-coders were required to come up with their own explanations for the variations they received. they were informed that the explanation that they came up with had to account for both faster and non/slower development. none of the co-coders knew any of the explanations the researcher identified. the agreement rate between the researcher’s and the cocoders’ explanations was 83.3%, with one disagreement on a study. agreement was achieved after the discussion of the variations in that study. 4. synthesis findings this section synthesizes the findings of the 26 studies to answer the two questions: (a) what are the variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features and (b) what are the potential explanations for the variations? since the variations found in these studies are associated with explanations, the findings for these two questions are presented together according to the three explanations: (a) language-related, (b) situation-dependent, and (c) learner-related. variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features 595 4.1. the language-related explanation for developmental variations the first category of studies concerns the developmental variations caused by the language-related factors. among the 26 primary studies, 20 studies fall into this category: one study of pragmatic awareness/perception, seven studies of pragmatic comprehension, and 12 studies of pragmatic production. as shown in table 1, three specific types of language-related explanations were further identified: (a) the functions of pragmatic features, (b) the frequency of availability of the target feature, and (c) the similarity and difference of the target features between l1 and l2. table 1 studies in the category of the language-related explanation studies target pragmatic features features/aspects that developed or developed relatively quickly features/aspects that did not develop or developed slowly studies in the function subcategory (2 studies) polat (2011) discourse markers the use of you know and like the use of well sawyer (1992) sentence final particle ne the formulaic use of the particle ne as in soo desu ne ‘that’s right’ the use of the affective particle ne studies in the frequency subcategory (2 studies) khorshidi (2013) requests direct strategies and conventionally indirect strategies hints ortactepe (2013)** formulaic expressions expressions such as i didn’t catch your name and get out of here expressions such as come again studies in the l1-l2-similarities-and-differences subcategory (15 studies) bardovi-harlig & hartford (1993) suggestions and rejections frequency and the success rate of initiated suggestions and refusals the use of mitigators and aggravators bardovi-harlig & salsbury (2004) disagreements indirect disagreement strategies (i.e., the agreement-before-disagreement strategy, postponing disagreement across turns) lexical devices (i.e., overgeneralized use of but in disagreement) barron (2003) requests, offers, and refusals to offers discourse structure in offers-refusals10 linguistic behaviors (i.e., linguistic forms and internal modification in requests and offers) bouton (1992, 1994)** conversational implictatures relevance-based implicatures pope questions, sequence implicatures, indirect criticism, and irony félix-brasdefer & hasler-barker (2014) compliments the range of compliment strategies (e.g., an increase in the number of strategy types from four to seven) the use of adjectives in compliments hassall (2013)* address terms address terms in the vocative slot address terms in the pronoun slot and the use of pronouns anda and kamu (both meaning ‘you’) li (2014) requests external modifiers alerters and internal modifiers (e.g., mitigators) ren (2012) refusals types of refusal strategies use of adjuncts to strategies schauer (2004, 2009) requests external modifiers and request strategies (fewer direct strategies and more conventionally indirect strategies) lexical and syntactic downgraders (e.g., a bit, would you mind) taguchi (2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2012)** conventional implicatures conventional implicatures (i.e., indirect refusals) non-conventional implicatures (i.e., indirect opinions) and language-specific conventional implicatures (i.e., routines) warga & scholmerge (2007) apologies apology strategies (e.g., justifications, offers of repair) linguistic forms (e.g., tres ‘very,’ vrainment ‘really’) note. * studies of pragmatic awareness/perception; ** studies of pragmatic comprehension (other studies focused on pragmatic production). 10 this study only focused on offers-refusals in the discourse structure. qiong li 596 4.1.1. functions of pragmatic features pragmatic functions vary across features, with some serving simple functions and others affording complex functions. it is easier for learners to register the simple form-function mapping such as the one-to-one mapping of a pragmatic feature. learning and using these features do not require much processing and retrieving workload. in contrast, the complexity of functions conveyed by the pragmatic features may slow down learners’ pragmatic development because learners have to establish the multiple form-function relationships and use the specific function based on their assessment of the context. one example illustrating the function effect on developmental paces is the japanese sentence final particle ne investigated by sawyer (1992). the study examined 11 japanese learners’ use of ne in four semi-structured interviews over one year. the findings showed that learners developed a sufficient command of the formulaic use of ne as in soo desu ne ‘that’s right/i see,’ but their progress was slow with the use of ne as an affective particle. the faster development of the formulaic ne is likely due to the function it serves in the conversation. as sawyer (1992) claimed, soo desu ne serves an allpurpose function. interlocutors can use this expression to keep the conversation going without other responses. for l2 learners who have limited interactional competence, such a common, all-purpose expression is useful, which probably facilitates learners’ development of the formulaic use of ne. in contrast, the affective ne is difficult because it has complex interpersonal functions: to make a conversation flow smoothly by showing consideration of the hearer or involving the hearer in the conversation (sawyer, 1992). thus, the use of the affective ne seems to be more demanding because l2 learners have to monitor the flow of conversation and identify the right timing to use the particle for interpersonal purposes. this function explanation is supported by polat’s (2011) study, which traced the development of three discourse markers (dms), that is, you know, well, and like,11 by an untutored turkish adult over one year. the analysis of 24 recordings of informal conversations between the researcher and the learner revealed different paces of changes across the three dms. the use of you know and like showed an approximation toward the target-like pattern. the frequency of you know declined by 50% over the year (from 4,122 to 2,019 occurrences per 100,000 words), even though this frequency was still higher than that in native speakers’ (nss) utterances (580 occurrences per 100,000 words). the use of 11 in the study, the analysis of a corpus, santa barbara corpus of spoken american english (sbcsae), showed that the three dms have similar frequency in the native speakers’ utterances (see details in polat, 2011). variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features 597 like increased dramatically from zero to 1010 occurrences per 100,000 words, approximating the nss’ frequency (1800 occurrences per 100,000 words). however, the dm well rarely appeared in the learner’s speech over the year. these different developmental rates can be attributed to the different functions these markers serve. the marker you know is primarily used to guide the listener in the interpretation of the message (e.g., understanding the implication of the speaker’s utterances; erman, 2001). the dm like serves the functions of approximating, exemplifying, and hedging (jucker & smith, 1998). it also occurs when people search for a word (müller, 2005). these functions are diverse, but they are relatively simple and straightforward and, thus, easy to understand. in comparison, well has more diverse and nuanced functions. it can be used to signal a reaction to information provided by another speaker or to modify the speakers’ own utterances (e.g., preface a disagreement). when speakers use well with these two functions, face management and mitigation are involved. moreover, well also affords functions of changing topics, repairing utterances, initiating conversation, and delaying the response (müller, 2005). these interpersonal functions require learners to pay attention to the direction of the conversation. compared to the straightforward functions of you know and like, these functions are relatively opaque and complex. furthermore, different from like and you know, which can occur at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of utterances, the position of well is restricted. it usually occurs turninitially and only in certain contexts, such as in indirect responses (polat, 2011). because of this functional complexity, learners may fail to differentiate between the multiple and opaque functions of well and use it as an interpersonal device. the two studies revealed developmental variations in two pragmatic features: the sentence final particle ne and dms. the explanation for the variations seems to come from the functions of the target features. features with simple, straightforward or one-size-fit-all functions show a faster developmental pace, whereas features with complex or nuanced functions show slower development. 4.1.2. the frequency of availability of the target pragmatic feature another language-related explanation, the frequency of availability of the target pragmatic feature, was identified in ortactepe’s (2013) and khorshidi’s (2013) studies. ortactepe (2013) investigated learners’ comprehension of formulaic expressions. over one year in the usa, seven advanced turkish learners of english completed a dct twice, in which they responded to 20 formulaic expressions (e.g., what’s up?) based on their understanding. twenty native speakers rated the participants’ responses. the rating scores, ranging from one to three, represented participants’ comprehension of the formulaic expressions. the findings qiong li 598 revealed faster improvement with the expressions i didn’t catch your name and get out of here. learners’ scores increased by about two points, nearing the perfect score of three. however, the development of other expressions such as come again was much slower. learners either interpreted these forms literally or failed to demonstrate their understanding of the expressions. in another study, khorshidi (2013) investigated three types of requestmaking strategies by 72 iranian learners of english: direct strategies (e.g., the imperative form as in please let me through), conventionally indirect strategies (e.g., would you please . . .?), and hints (e.g., excuse me, guys when asking the hearer to step aside). participants responded to 16 situations in a dct three times over a 6-month period. results showed that the development of direct and conventionally indirect strategies was faster than that of hints. learners approximated the normative pattern by decreasing the use of direct strategies and increasing the use of conventionally indirect strategies. however, the frequency of hints in the learners’ data remained much lower over time (from 0.8% to 4%), compared with that of nss’ use of hints (11%). in these two studies, the different rates of changes in formulaic expressions and request strategies can probably be explained by the frequency of availability of these expressions. as ortactepe (2013) pointed out, formulaic expressions such as get out of here frequently occur in informal daily conversations, while expressions such as come again occur in more restricted speech contexts such as a bank situation. similarly, compared to hints, direct and indirect request strategies are widely used and easier for learners to notice in the target community. learners may have frequent access to expressions with higher frequency, which makes learners familiar with the form-function-context mapping of these expressions. this process will further facilitate learners’ acquisition and use of the target expressions. however, expressions with lower frequency are more difficult and slower to develop because the limited availability of the expressions hinders learners from registering the form-function-context mapping in their linguistic repertoire. 4.1.3. the similarity and difference between l1 and l2 the third language-related explanation relates to the similarity and difference between l1 and l2 with respect to the target pragmatic feature. the analysis of the available findings from the 16 studies (see table 1) revealed that pragmatic features/aspects shared between l1 and l2 seem to facilitate the development, whereas the language-specific features/aspects tend to slow down the development. hassall (2013) observed 12 australian learners’ perception of indonesian address terms during their 7-week residence in indonesia. two categories of address variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features 599 terms were investigated. one was the four kin terms in the vocative slot: bapak ‘father’/ibu ‘mother’ and mas ‘brother’/mbak ‘sister.’ the other included the same four kin terms in the pronoun slot and two additional pronouns, anda and kamu (both meaning ‘you’). in this study, none of the 12 learners had heard of mas/mbak before their arrival in indonesia, but they learned the use of vocative mas/mbak after four weeks of stay and maintained the use until the end of the program. in contrast, only slight improvement was observed with the use of the four kin terms in the pronoun slot and the two additional pronouns (anda and kamu). learners underused kamu and overused anda in situations where mas/mbak and bapak/ibu (in the pronoun slot) were appropriate. hence, developmental variations were found in learners’ faster development of the address terms in the vocative slot, in contrast to their slower development of anda, kamu and the kin terms in the pronoun slot. the l1-l2 similarity and difference may account for these variations. indonesian address terms in the vocative slot are similar to the address terms in australian english such as bro and sis, whereas the address terms in the pronoun slot are different from those in english. in english, the single, all-purpose pronoun you (not address terms) is used in the pronoun slot (hassall, 2013). these l1-l2 similarities and differences probably lead to the developmental variations in these address terms. turning to the studies dealing with comprehension of conversational implicatures, bouton (1992, 1994) examined l2 english learners’ comprehension of different types of implicatures. he (1992) found a profound development with relevance-based implicatures over four years; however, language-specific implicatures (e.g., pope question implicatures) remained difficult for learners to comprehend. a similar developmental variation was found in bouton’s second study (1994), in which comprehension of relevance-based implicatures was fastdeveloping, while four types of implicatures were slow-developing: pope questions (e.g., responding to a question did you finish your homework? with is the pope catholic?), indirect criticism, sequence implicatures, and irony. taguchi’s (2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2012) studies added to bouton’s findings. her studies investigated learners’ comprehension of indirect refusals, situational routines, and indirect opinions among japanese learners of l2 english. of the three target features, indirect refusals and situational routines12 (e.g., that’s so sweet of you in thanking someone) are conventional, while indirect opinions are non-conventional. in these studies, regardless of the target comprehension items (accuracy and response time) or learning contexts (esl vs. efl), the findings were similar: indirect refusals were easier and faster for japanese learners to comprehend than routines and indirect opinions. 12 these situational routines are those used in daily communication such as thanking someone and greeting customers in a shop. qiong li 600 the explanation for the variations found in bouton’s and taguchi’s studies also relates to the l1-l2 similarity and difference. the relevance-based implicatures and indirect refusal strategies are easier to comprehend because they are conventional, and their conventionality is shared between l1 and l2.13 for example, the shared discourse pattern in indirect refusals (i.e., giving a reason for refusal) between japanese and english may facilitate learners’ comprehension because it is possible for them to transfer their l1 pragmatic skills to l2 (taguchi, 2012). while pope questions and routines are also conventional, their conventionality is language-specific, not shared between learners’ l1s and english. for instance, the direct translation of routines, such as how can i help you from a shop assistant, does not work in japanese (l1). other features such as sequence implicatures and indirect opinions are less or non-conventional. these language-specific characteristics may slow down the development of pragmatic comprehension because these features are not associated with specific linguistic expressions or language use patterns. learners have to make inferences from contextual cues to interpret language-specific and non-/less conventional implicatures (taguchi, 2012). therefore, conventionality facilitates implicature comprehension, as long as it is shared between languages (e.g., indirect refusals). language-specific conventionality (e.g., routines) or lack of conventionality (e.g., indirect opinions) slows down the development of pragmatic comprehension. shifting from comprehension studies, l1-l2 similarity and difference also account for the developmental variations in the production of speech acts. nine studies in this category (see table 1) shared a common developmental trend: the acquisition of semantic strategies used to construct a speech act is relatively faster than that of exact pragmalinguistic forms used in a speech act. it is likely because semantic strategies are often shared between cultures (l1-l2 similarity), while the linguistic forms used to convey these strategies vary across languages (l1-l2 difference). for example, when making an apology, a common strategy is to express regret (e.g., i’m sorry). this strategy is shared between many languages (olshtain, 1989; olshtain & cohen, 1983). however, upgraders (e.g., really in i’m really sorry) used to intensify the impact of a particular utterance on the addressee are usually language-specific (warga & sholmrger, 2007). all the nine studies showed the variations of semantic strategies and linguistic forms in the production of speech acts, regardless of the types of speech act examined or the instruments used for data collection (e.g., dct, multimedia elicitation task or met, recordings of naturalistic conversations). 13 for the refusal strategies, l1 and l2 are limited to the language pair of japanese and english, but not all language pairs. for details, see taguchi (2012). variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features 601 bardovi-harlig and hartford’s (1993) study investigated the production of suggestions and rejections in advising sessions by recording conversations (twice) between students and their advisors in a u.s. university over a semester. the findings showed that students increased the frequency of suggestion and rejection strategies, as well as the success rate of both strategies. however, students continued to overuse aggravators and ignore the use of mitigators, which was in contrast to the frequent use of mitigators by nss. in another study, bardovi-harlig and salsbury (2004) examined ten esl learners’ development in the speech act of disagreement in naturalistic conversations recorded biweekly in a 1-year period. the findings revealed the approximation to native speakers in learners’ use of disagreement strategies: learners shifted from the direct disagreement strategy to the agreement-before-disagreement strategy or postponing disagreement within or across turns. however, learners did not expand on the use of lexical devices: they overused but to preface disagreement. therefore, learners’ use of semantic strategies (shared across languages) developed over time, whereas their competence in producing the lexical devices (specific linguistic forms) in these speech acts, that is, suggestions, rejections, and disagreement, did not develop as quickly. similar findings were also found in other studies of different speech acts, including apologies (warga & scholmberger, 2007), compliments (félix-brasdefer & hasler-barker, 2014), offers-refusals and requests (barron, 2003), refusals (ren, 2012), and requests (li, 2014; schauer, 2004, 2009). particularly notable is ren’s (2012) study that compared developmental patterns between efl and esl learners over one year. regardless of the learning context, these two groups showed similar developmental variations in refusals: a faster pace with semantic strategies and a slower pace with pragmalinguistic forms. although both groups expanded the repertoire of refusal strategies and refusal adjuncts (linguistic forms),14 the developmental paces were different. from the first to the second data collection point, 80% of the esl and 85% of the efl learners produced new refusal strategies, but the percentage was only 40% (esl) and 60% (efl) for the refusal adjuncts. thus, the development of linguistic forms in refusal seems to fall behind that of refusal strategies. these nine studies revealed developmental variations between semantic strategies and pragmalinguistic forms in speech acts: within the same period of observation time, the same group of learners showed a faster developmental pace with semantic strategies and a slower pace with precise syntax and lexis. these variations seem to come from the l1-l2 similarity and difference. compared to 14 refusal adjuncts are modifications prefacing or following the refusal response utilized to modify the refusal; however, they do not in themselves carry refusing force. qiong li 602 pragmalinguistic forms, the strategy for a pragmatic event, for example, softening requests with small talk, is universal across languages. the universality makes it easier for learners to apply their l1 pragmatic knowledge and skills to l2. however, the syntactic and lexical devices used to encode pragmatic intention are often language-specific. the mastery of these pragmalinguistic forms is a slow-developing progress (taguchi, 2010, 2012), especially when the corresponding translation does not exist in another language (e.g., l1). it is difficult for learners to directly apply their l1 pragmalinguistic knowledge to l2, which may slow down their development in syntactic and lexical ability. in summary, the l1-l2 similarities and differences can illustrate the developmental variations found in the 16 studies discussed in this section. the shared norms in address terms, the shared conventionality encoded in implicatures, and the similar semantic strategies in speech acts between l1 and l2 facilitate the development of these target pragmatic features. in contrast, the languagespecific aspects in address terms (e.g., address terms in the pronoun slot in indonesian), language-specific conventionality (e.g., routines), non-conventional utterances (e.g., indirect opinions), and culture-specific pragmalinguistic forms (e.g., mitigators) seem to slow down the development of the features. as already mentioned, the shared aspects in pragmatic features provide learners with opportunities to transfer their l1 pragmatic knowledge and skills to l2 situations, while the differences between l1 and l2 require learners to register the new form-function-context mapping for language use. this process may lead to the uneven developmental paces in speech acts. 4.2. the situation-dependent explanation for developmental variations this section discusses developmental variations associated with the situationdependent explanation, which refers to the characteristics of the situations investigated in the study. specifically, they are social variables involved in the task situations, that is, degree of imposition, social distance, and social status. as shown in table 2, six studies were identified. two of them (hassall, 2013 and kinginger & farrell, 2004) focused on pragmatic awareness/perception and the other four focused on pragmatic production. hassall’s (2013) study of address terms discussed in the language-related section revealed another explanation for variations from the situation characteristic perspective. this study examined l2 indonesian learners’ choices of address terms in three types of situations: superior situations, non-superior and non-intimate situations, and non-superior and intimate situations. the findings showed that learners did not show much improvement in their knowledge of address terms for superiors, but they developed knowledge of address terms variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features 603 for non-superiors. this phenomenon is probably caused by the situation characteristics in the study. the superior situation items are more difficult for learners to complete because the sociopragmatic norms involved in these situations are relatively complex and the consequences of using inappropriate address terms are more severe, as opposed to those in situations with equalor lowerstatus individuals. table 2 studies in the category of situation-related explanations studies target pragmatic features features/aspects that developed or developed relatively quickly features/aspects that did not develop or developed slowly barron (2000) a polite marker (bitte ‘please’) and downgraders in requests bitte and downgraders in situations involving lowor equal-status individuals (e.g., friends) bitte and downgraders in situations involving high-status individuals (e.g., lecturers) barron (2006) address terms address terms in situations with acquaintances (e.g., relatives, friends) address terms in situations with high-status individuals (e.g., professors) bataller (2010) request strategies request strategies in the low-imposition situation (ordering a drink) request strategies in the high-imposition situation (exchanging shoes without a receipt) hassall (2013)* address terms address terms in “non-superior” situations address terms in “superior” situations kinginger & farrell (2004)* address terms address terms in babysitting situations, age-peer situations, and a bakery situation with a mother address terms in the bakery situation with an age-peer taguchi (2012) requests, opinions requests and opinions in lowimposition situations (e.g., borrowing a pen from friends) requests and opinions in high-imposition situations (e.g., asking a professor for an extension) note. * studies of pragmatic awareness/perception (other studies focused on pragmatic production). this situation-dependent explanation can also account for the developmental variations found in barron’s (2000, 2006) studies. barron (2000) examined learners’ development in the use of the politeness marker, bitte ‘please’ and the downtoners (e.g., etwas ‘a little’) in request-making strategies. among the five situations in the dct, three situations involved equalor lower-status individuals (e.g., friends). the other two involved higher-status individuals (e.g., lecturers). the nss’ data showed that they preferred downtoners to the politeness marker in all the five situations. in situations involving equalor lower-status individuals, learners increased the target-like use of downtoners and decreased the non-target-like use of the politeness marker bitte over the ten months. however, in the situations involving higher-status individuals, learners showed a slower and unsteady developmental pace with the use of downtoners and the politeness marker. they underused downtoners and overused the politeness marker. qiong li 604 similar variations were observed in barron’s (2006) other study which investigated the use of address forms in six situations over a 10-month period. in situations involving relatives and friends, learners displayed target-like use of sie and du (both meaning ‘you’) and the target-like switching between the two forms. but no such target-like pattern was found in situations involving higherrank people (e.g., a professor). in another study, kinginger and farrell (2004) found that l2 french learners showed a faster improvement in the perception of address terms (tu/vous ‘you’) in situations where the social variables such as status, age, and familiarity were easier to identify. three types of scenarios (two situations each) were involved in the study: babysitting situations with a mother or a child, bakery situations with a mother or a daughter (sales persons), and age-peer situations with an acquaintance or a stranger. in the language awareness interviews, the learners were asked to choose an address form in each of these situations and to explain the rationale underlying the choice. the comparison between the preand post-interviews uncovered that learners remained uncertain about their choice in the bakery situation with a daughter, which involved addressing an age-peer girl in a bakery. however, all learners moved toward the target-like choice of address terms in other situations involving peers. different from the status explanation for the variations in hassall’s and barron’s studies, the developmental variations in kinginger and farrell’s study are associated with ambiguity and complexity of the situation. when interacting with the age-peer interlocutor in a bakery situation, learners can choose either tu to project “closeness” based on the same age or vous to project “distance” in this business transaction. these concerns associated with social variables result in the complexity of this situation and can lead to learners’ uncertainty in selecting the appropriate address term. in such situations, it seems to be difficult for learners to determine what social variables should be considered to choose the appropriate address term. therefore, when the social variables are not clear-cut and thus ambiguous, learners may make little improvement. in addition to social status and social distance between interlocutors, the degree of imposition in tasks also affects learners’ performance. here, the degree of imposition refers to the relative ease/difficulty in performing the target pragmatic features. for example, the degree of imposition in a request is greater when asking for a big favor (e.g., asking a professor for an extension) in comparison to a small favor such as asking a close friend for a pen. two studies lend support to this explanation: bataller (2010) and taguchi (2012). bataller’s (2010) study investigated l2 spanish learners’ requests in two service encounter scenarios in a role play task: a low-imposition scenario (requesting something to drink from a girl working behind the counter) and a high variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features 605 imposition scenario (asking a shop assistant to exchange shoes without a receipt). the findings showed that more target-like strategies (e.g., need statements, elliptic expressions) were observed in the low-imposition scenario than in the high-imposition scenario over the period of four months. this pattern is in tandem with that found in taguchi’s (2012) study, which investigated the speech acts of requests and opinions in lowand high-imposition situations among l2 english learners over eight months. the low-imposition speech acts included requests such as asking a friend for a pen and opinions such as expressing negative comments on the color of a close friend’s jacket when buying clothes. the high-imposition speech acts involved requests such as asking a professor for an extension of an assignment and opinions such as giving negative feedback about a professor’s class. the analysis of learners’ pragmatic speaking tests (three data collection points) revealed that low-imposition requests and opinions displayed a larger gain in terms of appropriateness scores and speech rate, but no such development occurred in the high-imposition counterparts. taken together, both bataller’s and taguchi’s studies demonstrated developmental variations associated with the situation characteristics of imposition. learners tend to make greater advancement with low-imposition speech acts than with high-imposition speech acts. this is probably because, compared with the low-imposition situations, high-imposition situations often require longer utterances and more complex linguistic forms (e.g., mitigated expressions) to encode the speaker’s intentions. the elaboration of these intentions often requires a large processing capacity to retrieve and produce the complex illocution (taguchi, 2012). however, l2 learners’ limited processing capacity may hinder them from performing the complex high-imposition speech acts. thus, learners’ incompetency, combined with the linguistic complexity, slows down their developmental rate in high-imposition situations. in summary, the above six studies illustrate how the situation characteristics can influence developmental patterns across pragmatic features (address terms and speech acts). learners can make faster progress or demonstrate a recognizable change with situations where equalor lower-status individuals are involved, as well as with situations where social variables are easier to identify, or with situations where the degree of imposition is lower. in these situations, it is easier for learners to recognize the normative sociocultural knowledge, which may enable learners to convey their intentions. for example, in the lowimposition situation of ordering a drink, the customer-waiter/waitress relationship is easy to identify. a simple, elliptical form such as two beers can realize the speech act. however, in the high-imposition situation such as exchanging a pair of shoes without a receipt, direct expressions such as exchange shoes are less desirable because they may offend the shop clerk. instead, more indirect and qiong li 606 syntactically complex forms such as would it be possible . . . are expected in these situations. additionally, the consequence of using inappropriate expressions in high-imposition situations are more severe than that in low-imposition situations. this difference may give learners additional “workload” when they express their intentions in high-imposition situations. 4.3. the learner-related explanation for developmental variations as defined in the methodology section, the learner-related explanation in this synthesis refers to learners’ initial conditions when they participated in the studies. it primarily concerns learners’ initial-level pragmatic knowledge, either sociopragmatic or pragmalinguistic knowledge. as shown in table 3. two studies fall into this category: matsumura (2001) and taguchi, li, and xiao (2013). matsumura investigated pragmatic awareness/perception, while taguchi et al. examined pragmatic production of formulaic expressions. table 3 studies in the category of learner-related explanations studies target pragmatic features features/aspects that developed or developed relatively quickly features/aspects that did not develop or developed slowly matsumura (2001)* advice-giving expressions giving advice to equaland lowerstatus individuals (e.g., friends) giving advice to higher-status individuals (e.g., professors) taguchi, li, & xiao (2013) formulaic expressions expressions in situations involving ordering food and asking about the price expressions in situations involving trying on a hat and saying goodbye note. * studies of pragmatic awareness/perception (the other study focused on pragmatic production). matsumura (2001) investigated changes in learners’ perception of advicegiving expressions. the participants were 102 japanese learners of english who completed a multiple-choice survey four times during 1-year study abroad in canada. the survey questions asked them to select the most appropriate advicegiving form out of four options: direct advice, hedged advice, indirect comments with no advice, and opting out. the findings showed that, at the very early stage of the stay, the learners shifted their preferences from direct to indirect advicegiving strategies with individuals of equalor lower-status (e.g., friends), which moved toward the nss’ preferences. in contrast, no change was found in the advice given to higher-status individuals (e.g., professors). learners showed a stable preference for hedged and indirect advice in this situation, which was congruent with that of the nss.15 these different rates of changes seem to come 15 while variations were found in lower-status and higher-status situations, matsumura’s (2001) study does not fit into the situation-dependent explanation because when the study variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features 607 from learners’ initial-level pragmatic knowledge about social norms of giving advice. the sociopragmatic norms for situations involving higher-status individuals are similar between japanese and canadian cultures. in both cultures, indirect expressions are preferred with individuals of higher status in advice-giving situations. learners did not show any change with their advice-giving strategies because they already had the knowledge of l2 social norms in these situations before they started the study abroad program. however, learners did not have such knowledge for giving advice in english to equalor lower-status individuals before they came to canada. when learners were in japan, they preferred direct strategies, which diverged from the nss’ choice of indirect strategies. their knowledge gradually changed as their choice shifted from direct to indirect advice-giving strategies in situations involving equalor lower-status individuals after exposure to the target community (canada). with a focus on formulaic expressions, taguchi et al. (2013) examined 31 american learners’ development of chinese formulaic expressions over 14 weeks. the findings revealed a larger pre-post gain with certain expressions such as yào gè yúxiāngròusī ‘want one yúxiāng ròusī’16 and píngguǒ duōshǎo qián? ‘how much is the apple?.’ the progress occurred greatly probably because, at pre-test, most learners were able to produce part of the expressions, yào yúxiāngròusī ‘want yúxiāng ròusī’ for yào gè yúxiāng ròusī and yīgè/zhègè píngguǒ duōshǎo qián? ‘how much is the/this apple?’ for píngguǒ duōshǎo qián? having these similar (but not exact) forms in their linguistic repertoire, the learners were able to acquire correct formulaic expressions quickly through elaboration and/or simplification process after exposure to the target forms. in contrast, the developmental pace with other expressions was slower. for example, learners showed a tendency to stick to the same (zàijiàn ‘goodbye’) across different leave-taking situations, while nss varied their expressions according to situations. this slower developmental pace is probably explained by the fact that learners’ knowledge of the form zàijiàn had already been firmly established as a one-to-one mapping, which makes it difficult to incorporate new expressions into their linguistic repertoire (taguchi et al, 2013). in other started, learners’ initial-level pragmatic knowledge of these two types of situations was different. learners had already acquired the target-like advice in higher-status situations, but their knowledge of lower-status situations was divergent from the native norms. the nonchange in higher-status situations was irrelevant to the social variables. however, learners in the studies in the situation-dependent explanation did not have the target-like knowledge of either higher-status or lower-status situations at the beginning of studies. their uneven paces in these two types of situations were caused by the social variables associated with the situations, but not learners’ initial-level pragmatic knowledge. 16 yúxiāng ròusī is the name of a chinese dish. qiong li 608 words, the learners’ pre-existing knowledge of zàijiàn had been fossilized. as a result, the same expression (e.g., zàijiàn) might have come to the learner’s mind whenever they were dealing with similar situations (e.g., a leave-taking situation). this fixed one-to-one mapping between formulaic expressions and situations in learners’ knowledge seems to hinder learners from varying their expressions in similar situations. to summarize, these two studies revealed developmental variations across pragmatic features (advice-giving expressions and formulaic expressions) due to learners’ initial-level pragmatic knowledge. both studies showed that learners’ prior knowledge about the target features influenced their progress. little room is left for development if learners’ pre-existing knowledge is already target-like (e.g., matsumura, 2001) or if the knowledge is already fixed at the level that does not allow entry of new knowledge (e.g., taguchi et al, 2013). on the other hand, a certain level of learners’ pre-existing knowledge can also facilitate development, as indicated in taguchi et al.’s study where learners made improvement when they had knowledge about a part of the expressions. 5. conclusion and implications with the non-linear and time-based perspectives on language development, the present synthesis reviewed 26 longitudinal studies in uninstructed contexts, with the purpose of exploring the variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features and the potential explanations. the findings indicate that pragmatic development shows variations across pragmatic features within the same learner(s) in the same observational period. these findings not only confirm the developmental variations of pragmatic development revealed in previous studies (e.g., ortactepe, 2013; taguchi, 2012; warga & scholmberger, 2007) but also aligns with the view of csdt that language development is a non-linear, complex process with uneven developmental paces for different language abilities and aspects (de bot et al., 2007; de bot et al., 2013; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). to explain the uneven paces of the observed changes, three potential explanations were identified: (a) language-related, (b) situation-dependent, and (c) learner-related explanations. specifically, the language-related explanation consists of three subcategories: (a) the functions of pragmatic features, (b) the frequency of availability of the target feature, and (c) the similarity and difference between l1 and l2 with regard to the target feature. the situation-dependent explanation addresses the social variables involved in the task situations, that is, social status, social distance, and the degree of imposition. the learnerrelated explanation primarily concerns the learners’ initial-level sociopragmatic or pragmalinguistic knowledge about the target feature. variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features 609 in concluding this paper, i would also like to point out some limitations of the current synthesis, as well as implications for future research on developmental variations in l2 pragmatics. the first limitation relates to the potential explanations for developmental variations. language development goes beyond the simple cause-and-effect relationship. it also involves the interaction of different factors and resources such as the learning environment and learners’ cognitive capacities. the three identified explanations provide insights into developmental variations in l2 pragmatic competence, but the analysis did not address the effects of interaction of these explanations on pragmatic developmental variations. for future research in this direction, some studies such as hassall (2013) and taguchi (2012) may inform researchers of how different variables influence the uneven developmental paces. for instance, two explanations were identified to account for the developmental variations in hassall’s (2013) study: language-related and situation-dependent explanations. on the one hand, the similarity between l1 (english) and l2 (indonesian) address term systems facilitated the development of the address forms in the vocative slot, while the l1-l2 differences (i.e., address terms not functioning as pronouns in english) slowed down the development of the two pronouns (anda and kamu) and the address terms in the pronoun slot. on the other hand, the developmental variations were also associated with the situation-dependent explanation. the smaller improvement in the use of terms for addressing higher-status individuals could be attributed to the more complex social variables involved in such situations. these multiple explanations for developmental variations make it necessary for future research to explore the issue of how different forces or resources available to learners shape pragmatic development. second, the findings on developmental variations in this synthesis showed an imbalance in the three areas of l2 pragmatics longitudinal studies: comprehension, awareness/perception, and production. among the 26 studies, only three studies are in the area of pragmatic awareness/perception, seven studies in pragmatic comprehension, and 16 studies in pragmatic production.17 the area of production accumulates most findings. however, the variations in pragmatic developmental patterns are not limited to the ability to produce pragmatic features. the variations in pragmatic comprehension and awareness also contribute to the understanding of pragmatic competence. limited findings in the areas of pragmatic comprehension and awareness/perception call for future examination. additionally, similar to the exploration of the interaction between different explanations, it is also essential to investigate whether the developmental 17 taguchi’s (2012) book was counted twice because it focused on both comprehension and production. qiong li 610 variations in one pragmatic area (e.g., awareness) are associated with the variations in other areas. in pragmatic competence, comprehension, awareness, and production are three primary components. thus, the interaction among these components may influence the development of pragmatic competence as a whole. the third issue relates to the developmental variations found in speech acts: the developmental paces for semantic strategies are faster than those for pragmalinguistic forms. however, a question remains as to why pragmalinguistic forms take a longer time to develop. according to de bot et al. (2007), different systems usually require unequal amount of resources for growth. thus, for the uneven rates of changes between pragmalinguistic forms and semantic strategies, it is important to understand what additional resources are needed for the slower development of pragmalinguistic knowledge. another question associated with this issue is the relationship between grammar and pragmatics. this is not about whether grammar or pragmatics develops first. rather, it is about explaining how one system supports another (bardovi-harlig, 2013; kasper & rose, 2002). as two subsystems of language ability, grammatical ability and pragmatic ability are interconnected. while grammatical knowledge may not guarantee the appropriate use of pragmalinguistic forms across contexts, sufficient grammatical knowledge seems to facilitate the development of pragmatic competence (bardovi-harlig, 1999, 2000). when learners are exposed to available resources (e.g., the language used in the environment), linguistic forms in their repertoire may be triggered, which might eventually establish the formmeaning-function mapping of the pragmatic feature. meanwhile, the growth of pragmatic competence can also facilitate the development of grammatical ability (bardovi-harlig, 2012). as learners’ sociopragmatic knowledge increases, they become more sensitive to social variables. as a result, they realize the need to use a greater variety of lexical devices to mitigate their pragmatic performance in some situations. the need for adopting new lexical and syntactic forms, then, probably leads to increased grammatical ability. finally, research that revealed developmental variations, particularly the studies of speech acts, was primarily conducted under the traditional framework of speech act theory. one of the weaknesses of speech act theory is that it assumes a one-to-one correspondence between utterance and force (taguchi, 2012). nevertheless, a speech function is usually co-constructed by the speaker and hearer through interactions and negotiations over a number of sequences and turns. while an increasing number of studies have investigated l2 pragmatics in constructed interaction, only a few studies have revealed developmental variations from an interactive perspective. in this synthesis, only four studies collected interactive data by conducting role-plays (bataller, 2010) or recording naturalistic conversations (bardovi-harlig & hartford, 1993; bardovi-harlig & variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features 611 salsbury, 2004; polat, 2011). other studies have used either dct or questionnaires for data elicitation, both of which neglect sequential or discourse-level analysis of speech acts. one possible method to unveil the interactive features in speech acts is to adopt the conversation analysis (ca) perspective. several studies have started to apply ca to investigate l2 development (e.g., hauser, 2013; lee & hellermann 2015). hauser (2013) collected naturalistic conversation data between an immigrant (nori) and the researcher and analyzed the production of negation forms. the findings showed that the negation form i don’t know developed fast. this change was attributed to the occurrence of i don’t know in the interaction. nori used this negation form each time the researcher produced the same formula, which implies that nori’s ability to produce negation forms was co-constructed in the interaction. following this line of work, future l2 pragmatics research may apply the ca perspective to investigate pragmatic developmental variations through interactions. the trends found in this synthesis suggest the usefulness of some perspectives for future l2 pragmatics research to explore the variations in developmental patterns. it is not only a matter of what the variations are but also a matter of how and why the variations emerge. the explanations for language development in various theories (e.g., cdst) provide researchers with some implications for examining the role of different resources available to learners and the interactions of resources on language development in general, and pragmatic development in particular. the potential interactions between different pragmatic areas may present a holistic picture of l2 pragmatic competence. the application of ca to the analysis of developmental variations can reveal how the co-constructed interaction affect the emergence of developmental variations in pragmatic comprehension, awareness/perception, and production. qiong li 612 references (* indicates the synthesized studies) bardovi-harlig, k. 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(1995). individual differences and study abroad: women learning japanese in japan. in b. f. freed (ed.), second language acquisition in a study abroad context (pp. 225-244). philadelphia, pa: john benjamins. variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features 615 taguchi, n. (2007). development of speed and accuracy in pragmatic comprehension in english as a foreign language. tesol quarterly, 42, 313-338. taguchi, n. (2008a). the role of learning environment in the development of pragmatic comprehension: a comparison of gains between efl and esl learners. studies in second language acquisition, 30, 423-452. taguchi, n. (2008b). cognition, language contact, and development of pragmatic comprehension in a study-abroad context. language learning, 58, 33-71. taguchi, n. (2010). longitudinal studies in interlanguage pragmatics. in a. trosborg (ed.), handbook of pragmatics vol.7: pragmatics across languages and cultures (pp.333-361). berlin: mouton de gruyter. taguchi, n. (2011). pragmatic development as a complex, dynamic process: general patterns and case histories. modern language journal, 95, 605-623. *taguchi, n. (2012). context, individual differences and pragmatic competence. england: multilingual matters. *taguchi, n., li, s., & xiao f. (2013). production of formulaic expressions in l2 chinese: a developmental investigation in a study abroad context. chinese as a second language research journal, 2, 23-58. thomas, j. (1983). cross-cultural pragmatic failure. applied linguistics, 4, 91-109. warga, m., & scholmberger, u. (2007). the acquisition of french apologetic behavior in study abroad context. intercultural pragmatics, 4, 221-261. qiong li 616 appendix substantive and methodological features of the synthesized studies study target pragmatics participants (sample size and l1s) context target language proficiency measures (# of data collection) length of study studies under the language-related explanation (20 studies) bardovi-harlig & hartford (1993) suggestion & rejection 10 graduate students with mixed l1s sl english advanced recordings of advising sessions (2) 7-14 weeks bardovi-harlig & salsbury (2004) disagreement 10 learners with mixed l1s sl english beginning recordings of conversations (every two weeks) 1 year barron (2003) requests & offers-refusals 33 irish learners of german sl german advanced dct & free dct (3) 10 months bouton (1992) conversational implicatures 30 learners with mixed l1s sl english in-house proficiency test written multiplechoice test (2) 4 years and a half bouton (1994) conversational implicatures 34 learners (17-month group) and 35 learners (33-month group) with mixed l1s sl english not given written multiplechoice test (2) 17 months and 33 months félix-brasdefer & hasler-barker (2014) compliment 26 american learners in mexico and 12 in america sl & fl spanish advanced oral dct (3) 8 weeks khorshidi (2013) request strategy 72 iranian learners sl english intermediate dct (3) 6 months hassall (2013) address terms 12 learners of mixed l1s sl indonesian elementary to upper-intermediate written multiplechoice (2) 4-7 weeks li (2014) request 31 american learners sl chinese intermediate and advanced computerized oral dct (2) 15 weeks ortactepe (2013) formulaic expressions 7 turkish learners sl english advanced dct (2) 1 year polat (2011) discourse markers 1 turkish learner sl english advanced recordings of informal conversations every two weeks 1 year ren (2012) refusal 20 chinese learners in britain and 20 in china fl & sl english advanced multimedia elicitation task (3) 1 year sawyer (1992) sentence final particle ne 11 learners with mixed l1s sl japanese beginning semi-structured interviews (4) 1 year schauer (2004) request 12 german learners sl english not given multimedia elicitation task (3) 9 months schauer (2009) (production) request 49 germen learners sl & fl english not given multimedia elicitation task (3) 9 months taguchi (2007) indirect refusal and indirect opinion 92 japanese learners fl english average toefl 20 listening test with yes-no questions (2) 7 weeks taguchi (2008a) indirect refusal and indirect opinion 44 japanese learners sl english average toefl 400 listening test with yes-no questions (3) 4 months taguchi (2008b) indirect refusal and indirect opinion 57 japanese learners in the us and 60 in japan sl & fl english beginning listening test with yes-no questions (2) efl group: 7 weeks; esf group: 5 weeks taguchi (2012; comprehension) refusal and routine 48 japanese learners fl english beginning: toefl 413497 the end: toefl 467563 computerized pragmatic listening test (3) 8 months variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features 617 warga & scholmberger (2007) apology 7 austrian learners sl french not given dct (5) 10 months studies under the task situation-dependent explanation (6 studies) barron (2000) request 33 irish learners sl german advanced dct (3) 10 months barron (2006) address terms 33 irish learners sl german advanced dct (3) 10 months bataller (2010) request strategy 31 english-speaking learners sl spanish not given role-play (2) 4 months hassall (2013) address terms 12 learners of mixed l1s sl indonesian elementary to upper-intermediate written multiplechoice (2) 4-7 weeks kinginger & farrell (2004) address terms 8 american learners sl french elementary to basic language awareness interview (2) 3 months taguchi (2012; production) indirect requests and opinions 48 japanese learners fl english beginning: toefl 413497 the end: toefl 467563 computerized pragmatic speaking test (3) 8 months studies under the learner-related explanation (2 studies) matsumura (2001) advice giving expressions 94 japanese learners in canada and 102 in japan sl english toefl 480600 multiple-choice survey (4) 1 year taguchi, li, & xiao (2013) formulaic expressions 31 american learners sl chinese intermediate codct (2) 14 weeks note. fl = foreign language, sl = second language. 721 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (4). 2018. 721-754 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.4.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the l2 motivational self system: a meta-analysis ali h. al-hoorie jubail industrial college, saudi arabia hoorie_a@jic.edu.sa abstract this article reports the first meta-analysis of the l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2005, 2009). a total of 32 research reports, involving 39 unique samples and 32,078 language learners, were meta-analyzed. the results showed that the three components of the l2 motivational self system (the ideal l2 self, the oughtto l2 self, and the l2 learning experience) were significant predictors of subjective intended effort (rs = .61, .38, and .41, respectively), though weaker predictors of objective measures of achievement (rs = .20, -.05, and .17). substantial heterogeneity was also observed in most of these correlations. the results also suggest that the strong correlation between the l2 learning experience and intended effort reported in the literature is, due to substantial wording overlap, partly an artifact of lack of discriminant validity between these two scales. implications of these results and directions for future research are discussed. keywords: ideal l2 self; ought-to l2 self; l2 learning experience; l2 motivational self system; self-guides 1. introduction in 2005, dörnyei introduced the l2 motivational self system (l2mss) as an attempt to explain individual differences in language learning motivation. the l2mss is influenced by a number of theories, most notably possible selves theory (markus & nurius, 1986), self-discrepancy theory (higgins, 1987), and the socio-educational ali h. al-hoorie 722 model (gardner, 1979, 1985, 2010). a fundamental assumption in the l2mss is that when the learner perceives a discrepancy between their current state and their future self-guide (i.e., ideal or ought), this discrepancy may function as a motivator to bridge the perceived gap and reach the desired end-state. in 2009, the first anthology testing this model appeared (dörnyei & ushioda, 2009b) reporting a number of empirical investigations that, according to dörnyei (2009), “found solid confirmation for the proposed self system” (p. 31). subsequently, interest in this model increased exponentially in the language motivation field. within just one decade, the l2mss generated “an exceptional wave of interest with literally hundreds of studies appearing worldwide” (dörnyei & ryan, 2015, p. 91). in fact, in their comprehensive survey of over 400 recent publications, boo, dörnyei, and ryan (2015) report that the l2mss is currently the dominant theoretical framework in the field. boo et al. (2015) attribute this dominance to the versatility of the model and its ability to accommodate a wide range of perspectives from different theoretical orientations. the l2mss consists of three main components (dörnyei, 2005, 2009): the ideal l2 self, the ought-to l2 self, and the l2 learning experience. the ideal l2 self refers to the state one would ideally like to reach, thus representing one’s own hopes and wishes. the ought-to l2 self, on the other hand, refers to the state that others would want one to reach, thus representing the expectations projected by significant others. on a different level, the l2 learning experience concerns one’s experience in the immediate learning environment, involving aspects such as the teacher, the curriculum, and peers. the next section reviews the evidence each of these three components has generated. 2. components of the l2mss 2.1. the ideal l2 self the ideal l2 self has received a significant amount of attention in recent literature. however, the results seem to have led to a range of conclusions in the field, some of which seem polarized. on the one hand, the predictive validity of the ideal l2 self has been described as “straightforward” (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, p. 87), and as providing “solid confirmation” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 31) in that “the emerging picture consistently supports [its] validity” (dörnyei, 2014, p. 521). similarly, dörnyei and ryan (2015) argue that “virtually all the validation studies reported in the literature found the l2 motivation self system providing a good fit for the data” (p. 91). ghanizadeh and rostami (2015) further state that the “results conclusively verified the model in virtually every context.” these comments generally refer to the ideal l2 self specifically (see also ghanizadeh, eishabadi, & the l2 motivational self system: a meta-analysis 723 rostami, 2016, p. 15; henry & cliffordson, 2015, p. 20; islam, lamb, & chambers, 2013, p. 238; teimouri, 2017, p. 683). on the other hand, some other researchers expressed some reservation. for example, in their investigation of korean secondary school students, kim and kim (2011) report that the ideal l2 self could not predict school grades. the researchers note that “being motivated by developing a vivid ideal l2 self through a dominant visual preference seems to be irrelevant to the level of academic achievement” (p. 36). similarly, lamb (2012) administered a c-test to indonesian learners and found, again, that the ideal self could not predict proficiency. he therefore argued that although his participants “would like to see themselves as future users of english (ideal l2 self), what makes them more likely to invest effort in learning is whether they feel positive about the process of learning” (p. 1014). in the canadian context, macintyre and serroul (2015) examined the relationship between the ideal l2 self and actual l2 performance in their idiodynamic paradigm, which measures individual motivational variability on a persecond timescale. the researchers found “no evidence” (p. 126) that the ideal l2 self is dynamic or adapting to the changing task demands. in the iranian context, papi and abdollahzadeh (2012) also found that the ideal l2 self does not predict actual classroom behavior. the researchers explain that: the learners’ ideal image of their future self does not have much impact on their motivated behavior in english language classrooms or vice versa; that is, regardless of how well-developed the students’ ideal l2 self is, their actual motivated behavior in classroom activities will remain unaffected, and regardless of how motivated the students are in class, their ideal l2 selves will remain unchanged. (papi & abdollahzadeh, 2012, p. 588) in the saudi context, moskovsky, assulaimani, racheva, and harkins (2016) found the ideal l2 self to be a negative predictor of language proficiency. the researchers argue that, overall, the results “at best indicate a tenuous link between the self guides and achievement” (p. 650). thus, the emerging literature points to a rather complex picture. this could plausibly due to certain factors, such as applicability of the model to different contexts or participants, or the use of different outcome measures. as explained in more detail below, a meta-analysis can help shed more light on such conflicting results. 2.2. the ought-to l2 self in contrast to the controversy surrounding the ideal l2 self, there seems to be more agreement that the ought-to l2 self could benefit from some improvement. for example, dörnyei and chan (2013) acknowledge that “while [ought-to ali h. al-hoorie 724 selves] do play a role in shaping the learners’ motivational mindset, in many language contexts they lack the energising force to make a difference in actual motivated learner behaviours by themselves” (p. 454). they then go on to explain that “while the participants perceived the external pressures on them as being valid and did intend to adjust their behavior accordingly, this intended effort was not manifested in their actual grades” (p. 454, original emphasis). in recognition of the wanting nature of the ought-to l2 self construct, a number of developments have been proposed. most of these developments argue for the need to incorporate the distinction between own and other standpoints in both the ideal and ought-to l2 selves. from this perspective, the ideal l2 self should be separated into two constructs, one representing one’s own hopes and one significant others’ hopes. similarly, the ought-to l2 self should be bifurcated into obligations one would like to perform and obligations others expect one to perform (see papi, bondarenko, mansouri, feng, & jiang, in press; taylor, 2013). for example, thompson and vásquez (2015) conducted a narrative study on three language teachers and argued that their data indicate a distinction between an ought-to l2 self and an anti-ought-to l2 self, the latter referring to one’s own desires that are at odds with what the others expect from the individual. lanvers (2016) conducted another qualitative study on language learners and argued that the ought–other standpoint should feature more prominently in educational contexts, as parents and teachers typically exert a lot of influence on students. in one of the few quantitative studies testing the relevance of own–other standpoints to the language learning context, teimouri (2017) developed questionnaire scales to measure each of the four proposed constructs: the ideal–own, ideal– other, ought–own, and ought–other. interestingly, teimouri found support for the distinction between own and other in the case of the ought-to l2 self, but not the ideal l2 self. teimouri argued that ideals are highly internalized, and consequently they may not be separable into those that relate to one’s own versus others’ ideals. however, in order to be able to evaluate the contribution of these developments and the extent to which they have advanced the original construct, it is important to have a frame of reference. that is, without quantifying the predictive validity of the original ought-to l2 self, it may not be immediately apparent how much of an improvement an alternative variation of this construct is. a meta-analysis can offer a baseline against which the effectiveness of reformation attempts can be evaluated. 2.3. the l2 learning experience this construct has been variously labeled as ‘the l2 learning experience’ and as ‘attitudes toward language learning.’ all these terms refer to the same construct the l2 motivational self system: a meta-analysis 725 because of the considerable overlap in the scales used to measure them (cf. you, dörnyei, & csizér, 2016, pp. 96-97). the l2 learning experience operates on a different level from either the ideal l2 self or the ought-to l2 self. unlike them, the l2 learning experience is concerned with attitudes and evaluations of the present learning environment rather than a future-oriented self-guide. however, due to the increasing interest in self-guides in recent years (cf. boo et al., 2015), very little attention has been paid to this construct. for example, dörnyei describes the l2 learning experience as the situated, executive motive (dörnyei, 2009, p. 29) and as the causal dimension (dörnyei, 2005, p. 106) of the model. beyond that, very little work has been done to clarify the role of such executive motives or the mechanisms that underlie their causal effect, making it the least theorized construct in the l2mss (ushioda, 2011, p. 201). despite that, the l2 learning experience has been described as the strongest predictor in the l2mss (e.g., lamb, 2012; teimouri, 2017). interestingly, the vast majority of studies testing this construct in our field has been observational. the standard design involves administering a questionnaire scale to learners and then examining the relationship (e.g., using correlation, regression, or structural equation modeling) between scores from this scale and from other criterion measures. however, this approach is prone to confounds, thus risking obtaining spurious results that do not underlie a genuine causal relationship. beleche and colleagues point out the need for caution in interpreting observational studies: the positive association between grades and course evaluations may also reflect initial student ability and preferences, instructor grading leniency, or even a favorable meeting time, all of which may translate into higher grades and greater student satisfaction with the course, but not necessarily to greater learning. (beleche, fairris, & marks, 2012, p. 709) other potential factors shown to confound course evaluations include the teacher’s age, ethnicity, gender, and even clothes and attractiveness (for reviews, see ottoboni, boring, & stark, 2016; stark & freishtat, 2014). in fact, results by ambady and rosenthal (1993) show that students, simply after watching a very brief silent video (less than 30 seconds), form impressions about their teachers and that these first impressions then predict end-of-course evaluations. the presence of all of these biases has led some researchers to cast serious doubt on the value of course evaluation, with some considering any attempt to statistically adjust for the many biases involved to be practically “impossible” (ottoboni et al., 2016, p. 10). when it comes to experimental research, a number of educational studies conducted in different parts of the world – including italy (braga, paccagnella, & pellizzari, 2014), france (boring, 2015), and the united states (arbuckle & williams, 2003; carrell & west, 2010; macnell, driscoll, & hunt, 2015) – have demonstrated ali h. al-hoorie 726 that student satisfaction with the course is biased (based on objective measures). the results of these studies also cast doubt on any clear (positive) causal relationship between satisfaction with the course and achievement. in fact, some of them found a negative relationship between satisfaction and success in subsequent, more advanced courses. for example, results by braga et al. (2014) show that “teachers who are more effective in promoting future performance receive worse evaluations from their students” (p. 81). in the present study, an attempt is made to meta-analyze the relationship between the l2 learning experience and language learning outcomes. the results are then used as a springboard to discuss the implications of results from observational studies and compare them to those from experimental studies. 3. need for meta-analysis a rigorous evaluation of a theory requires a systematic review of its accumulating literature. when sufficient quantitative reports become available, their results may be synthesized in a meta-analysis. a meta-analysis typically aims to estimate the magnitude (and confidence intervals) of the reported effect sizes, while moving away from a dichotomous significant versus non-significant outcome. a meta-analysis can also be helpful in shedding light on conflicting results. that is, it is plausible that conflicting results might to some extent be explainable by certain characteristics of different studies, such as type of participants, research design, or instruments used. for example, the literature on the ideal l2 self has drawn from different measures to date. some researchers used subjective self-reports (i.e., intended effort), while others used more objective criteria (e.g., school grades and other achievement tests). it is plausible that different measures lead to different results. when used to test such hypotheses, a metaanalysis can potentially contribute to resolving debates in the literature. 4. the present study despite the growing number of studies drawing from the l2mss, no systematic meta-analysis has been conducted on this literature to date. instead, previous researchers have so far engaged in head-counting, such as tallying the number of published studies (e.g., boo et al., 2015); or in vote-counting, such as describing the results of these studies as either supporting the theory or as ‘mixed’ (e.g., dörnyei & chan, 2013). describing findings as mixed does not inform the reader about their average estimate, the width of its confidence interval, and whether any heterogeneity (i.e., variability of the estimate) found can or cannot be explained by moderators. because a meta-analysis can address these questions, the the l2 motivational self system: a meta-analysis 727 present study aimed to meta-analyze studies drawing from the l2mss. more specifically, the primary research question guiding this meta-analysis is as follows: rq. what is the correlation between each of the three components of the l2mss (the ideal l2 self, the ought-to l2 self, and the l2 learning experience) and educational outcomes (subjective and objective measures)? this research question indicates a total of six correlations to be investigated: three correlations with subjective measures and three with objective measures. categorizing outcome measures into subjective and objective was a rather pragmatic decision due to, as is explained in more detail below, the scarcity of studies utilizing objective measures in the field. the vast majority of studies in recent literature have used intended effort as their primary criterion variable. however, objective measures of actual language learning and achievement (e.g., grades and other standardized tests) represent an indispensable part of the overall picture. for example, roth et al. (2015) argue that “school grades are crucial for accessing further scholastic and occupational qualification, and therefore, have an enormous influence on an individual’s life” (p. 118). similarly, moskovsky et al. (2016) claim that “therein lies the real test for the theory – in the capacity of the self guides to predict l2 achievement” (p. 643; see also dörnyei & chan, 2013, p. 454; dörnyei & ryan, 2015, p. 101). indeed, language proficiency and achievement are an essential consideration for many stakeholders such as parents, teachers, and future employers. still, arguing that objective measures are ‘the real test’ of a theory might imply downplaying subjective measures, when in fact subjective measures might plausibly capture a dimension not captured by objective criteria. for completeness, therefore, the correlation between the two outcome measures was investigated to find out the degree of correspondence between them. 5. method 5.1. inclusion criteria in order to be eligible for inclusion in this meta-analysis, the report must satisfy the following criteria: 1. it must involve a quantitative component. qualitative and conceptual articles were excluded. 2. it must be about language learners. reports about language teachers were excluded. 3. it must include at least one of the three components of the l2mss. ali h. al-hoorie 728 4. it must include at least one outcome variable, such as school grades, objective tests, or subjective intended effort. 5. it must report the zero-order correlation between at least one component of the l2mss and one outcome measure, or provide sufficient information to calculate it. studies with only regression coefficients were excluded. 6. it must be published in english. 7. it must have been available by the start of june 2017. 5.2. literature search the literature search commenced with the article pool compiled by boo et al. (2015), spanning the period from 2005 to 2014 (k = 283, excluding book chapters). to complement this list and to find more recent reports, a search was conducted in databases relevant to our field: eric, llba, mla, proquest, and psychinfo using the following keywords: ideal l2 self, ought-to l2 self, l2 learning experience, and l2 motivational self system. this resulted in a number of additional journal articles and unpublished theses (k = 51). the list was then complemented by a google scholar search and by an ancestry search to ensure saturation (k = 21). furthermore, 19 edited volumes published since 2005 were inspected (k = 309 chapters). finally, a call for papers was announced at various relevant mailing lists, including baalmail, linguist list, mytesol lounge, korea tesol, and iatefl research sig, as well as social media – resulting in further reports (k = 14). this search procedure has therefore resulted in a pool of 678 journal articles, book chapters, and unpublished manuscripts, ranging from conceptual to empirical, quantitative and qualitative, as well as duplicates (e.g., theses that were later turned to one, or more, publications). this pool of reports was subsequently examined against the inclusion criteria listed above. eventually, 32 reports involving 39 unique samples and 32,078 language learners met all inclusion criteria. the lists of the included studies and of their characteristics are available in appendices a and b. 5.3. data analysis software. comprehensive meta analysis 3.3 (borenstein, hedges, higgins, & rothstein, 2014) was used for all analyses. a random-effects model was implemented, since there was no reason to assume that all studies share one common effect size. heterogeneity was examined using the i2-statistic and its associated significance value. the presence of significant heterogeneity implies that the effect is highly variable and could potentially be explained by certain characteristics of different studies. the l2 motivational self system: a meta-analysis 729 publication bias. publication bias refers to the situation where the outcome of a study has an effect on whether that study is eventually published. studies reporting statistically significant results tend to be perceived as more interesting than those reporting non-significant results, and therefore the latter may not successfully complete the long and laborious publication process. the authors themselves can also become discouraged or lose interest, and consequently decide not to undergo the publication process. in some cases, the authors may believe that there must have been a mistake, especially when their results are not in line with mainstream views. this can lead to what is known as the file drawer problem (rosenthal, 1979). publication bias may be inferred when small-scale studies, with statistically lower precision, report extreme values relative to larger-scale studies. due to their lower power, some small studies are expected to find non-significant results simply by chance. however, when such small studies report significant results consistently, the likelihood that the literature is significant-biased increases. in the present meta-analysis, publication bias was examined using the trim and fill method (duval & tweedie, 2000a, 2000b). the trim and fill method is currently the most popular corrective technique to adjust for publication bias in contemporary meta-analytic literature (simonsohn, nelson, & simmons, 2014). inclusion criteria. initially, a second coder analyzed 10% of the reports independently against the inclusion criteria described above (cohen’s ᴋ = .76, p < .001). subsequently, discrepancies were resolved by discussion until 100% agreement was reached. very few studies reported longitudinal investigations (k = 1). in this case, the first time point was included. also very few studies reported two measures for the l2 learning experience (k = 1) or intended effort (k = 1). in these cases, the two measures were averaged before inclusion in the analysis. most studies adopted the standard research design of administering questionnaire scales adopted with minor variations from taguchi, magid, and papi (2009), typically translated to the participants’ l1. some reports were excluded for not reporting the results for pearson correlation, such as instead reporting regression coefficients (k = 13), the path coefficients in structural equation models (k = 11), or other procedures (k = 2). however, over 90% of these reports used intended effort as their criterion measure. due to the relatively large number of reports drawing from intended effort that are already eligible for inclusion in the present meta-analysis, the excluded reports would have probably had a minor impact had they been included. this issue is discussed further in the limitations section below (see appendix c for a list of studies excluded for incomplete reporting). published versus unpublished reports. unpublished reports are typically included in meta-analyses (norris & ortega, 2006). although unpublished studies raise quality concerns, they may also represent studies with null results or with ali h. al-hoorie 730 results going against mainstream views – making them harder to publish. other reports may have been completed as part of a degree program (e.g., ma or phd) and publication was not subsequently pursued. in the present meta-analysis, there were a number of unpublished reports (k = 6). as a quality control procedure, moderation analysis was conducted to compare the results obtained from published and unpublished reports. the results showed that all comparisons were non-significant at the .05 level, thus providing no evidence that this small sample of unpublished reports have biased the results. study quality. study quality is a perennial problem in meta-analysis, since low quality studies could potentially bias the results. while some researchers advocate excluding low quality studies altogether, others recommend including them and then conducting sensitivity analysis (e.g., norris & ortega, 2006). this is partly because study quality is not a straightforward concept, and different researchers may evaluate quality differently. sensitivity analysis, however, can show whether the overall results are robust or highly influenced by the presence of studies with debatable quality. in the present meta-analysis, the target statistic was pearson correlation. because this is a relatively straightforward procedure, it was expected that most reports would exhibit satisfactory quality. following guidelines outlined by dörnyei (2010), particular attention was also paid to psychometrics, such as using multi-item scales, providing suitable response options, and reporting reliability. all reports satisfying the inclusion criteria were analyzed by two coders independently (cohen’s ᴋ = .87, p < .001). discussion of the minor discrepancies obtained led to the conclusion that a small number of reports (k = 2) might potentially bias the results as the reliability of individual scales was missing. sensitivity analysis was therefore conducted to examine the effect of excluding these two reports (see results below). subjective versus objective outcomes. in the present sample, a large number of studies used intended effort as their criterion variable. in fact, even subjective self-ratings of proficiency can hardly be found in the literature. a smaller number of studies used more objective measures, including school grades and proficiency tests. moderation analysis was conducted to compare the results obtained from school grades and from other objective measures. all tests were non-significant, thus justifying combining grades and objective measures into one category (called “achievement” henceforth).1 further moderators. unfortunately, it was not possible to test the moderating effect of some important learner characteristics, including age, gender, 1 it has to be clarified that the term “subjective” does not mean less valid or less reliable. it simply means that it relies on the learner’s own perspective rather than on the results of a formal language test. objective and subjective measures, therefore, serve different purposes. the l2 motivational self system: a meta-analysis 731 and context. in terms of age, not a single study involving pre-secondary learners qualified for the final analysis, supporting boo et al.’s (2015) observation that there is a “virtual absence” (p. 156) of research on younger learners in recent years. a few studies reported results for secondary and university learners separately, but the literature does not seem mature enough to meta-analyze the role of this variable since it was not always clear whether the target language was learned as part of a major or elective course or as an l2 or l3. in terms of gender, most studies reported the results combined for males and females, thus precluding any comparisons between the two genders. in terms of context, most investigations were conducted in a foreign language context, and only a small minority were in a second language context (k = 5, 3 of which were unpublished dissertations). finally, a very small number of studies investigated a language other than english (k = 3), supporting dörnyei and al-hoorie’s (2017) argument that the language motivation field is currently english-biased. implications of these trends are discussed later. 6. results table 1 reports the correlations between each of the three components of the l2mss and the two outcome measures, as well as those between the two outcome measures themselves. in all cases, a sizable number of learners were included, with the smallest total being over 1,300. it is further evident from table 1 that considerably fewer studies included a measure of actual achievement, while most used intended effort as their primary outcome variable. table 1 correlations between the three l2mss components and the two outcome variables intended effort achievement k n r 95% ci i2 k n r 95% ci i2 lower upper lower upper ideal l2 self 32 30,572 .611 .562 .655 97.21% 13 3,551 .202 .084 .315 90.76% sensitivity — — — — .170 .046 .289 91.15% corrected .611 .562 .655 97.21% .103ns -.013 .218 93.70% ought-to l2 self 19 18,542 .379 .315 .440 94.21% 10 2,452 -.048ns -.107 .011 41.29%ns sensitivity — — — — -.040ns -.107 .027 51.88% corrected .379 .315 .440 94.21% -.048ns -.107 .011 41.29%ns — — — — l2 learning exp 18 19,586 .656 .590 .712 97.71% 7 1,369 .174 .026 .315 85.95% sensitivity — — — — .137ns -.040 .306 89.35% corrected .656 .590 .712 97.71% .111ns -.029 .247 89.07% achievement 7 2,016 .116ns -.121 .341 96.02% sensitivity — — — — corrected .116ns -.121 .341 96.02% note. exp = experience, ns = non-significant. sensitivity analysis excluded two reports (n = 171 total). ali h. al-hoorie 732 the three components of the l2mss had positive correlations with intended effort, but dropped with achievement. there was also no overlap in the confidence intervals of each component’s correlations with intended effort and with achievement, indicating that the coefficients are significantly different from each other. these findings might be used to explain some conflicting results in the literature: researchers who used subjective measures found stronger support for the l2mss than those who used objective measures. furthermore, the correlation between intended effort and achievement was weak and non-significant, indicating that these two outcome measures cannot be used interchangeably. a stark illustration of this is found in the ought-to l2 self, where its correlation with intended effort was positive and moderate in magnitude (.38), but reversed its sign with achievement (-.05). these findings point to the need to diversify outcome measures in the l2 motivation field to obtain a more comprehensive picture, rather than relying exclusively on intended effort. the i2 values in table 1 indicated that there was a wide and significant heterogeneity in most correlations. that is, with the exception of the one between the ought-to l2 self and achievement (which is non-significant), all other correlations exhibited heterogeneity in excess of 85% and higher. some confidence intervals were also somewhat large, especially for the correlations between achievement and each of the ideal l2 self and the l2 learning experience. such heterogeneity is to be expected since these studies were conducted in different parts of the world by different researchers working independently rather than adhering strictly to certain research protocols. potential moderators might help explain this heterogeneity in future meta-analytic research when a sufficient pool of studies becomes available. when it comes to sensitivity analysis, the two reports that were excluded for not reporting scale reliability happened to involve correlations with achievement only. the results after excluding these two reports are found in the ‘sensitivity’ rows in table 1. the three correlations with achievement exhibited a minor drop, with that of the l2 learning experience becoming no longer significant. when it comes to publication bias, adjusted values are reported in the ‘corrected’ rows in the table. two correlations dropped to non-significance due to publication bias correction: the correlation between achievement and each of the ideal l2 self and the l2 learning experience. these two cases had relatively low sample sizes, suggesting a larger sample of studies utilizing objective measures is needed to obtain a more robust finding. it may also potentially suggest that there are further reports that show non-significant results but that could not be uncovered by the literature search of this study, despite the relatively generous inclusion criteria adopted (by including unpublished reports and book chapters) and a call for papers circulated widely in the field. figure 1 presents a visual illustration of publication bias in the case of the ideal l2 self. the l2 motivational self system: a meta-analysis 733 one surprising finding in table 1 is the unusually high correlations of intended effort with the l2 learning experience. according to dörnyei (2007), “if two tests correlate with each other in the order of 0.6, we can say that they measure more or less the same thing” (p. 223). while this may not be a hard-and-fast rule, the high correlations in table 1 do raise discriminant validity concerns. this part of the analysis was therefore rerun to compare studies that examined the factorial structure of their scales (whether using classical test theory or item response theory) with those that did not. the results in table 2 indeed provide evidence that the high correlation between the l2 learning experience and intended effort may be a methodological artifact of not applying a factor-analytic procedure. the correlation between these two variables showed a significant drop from .68 to .41. a cursory look at the items used in studies that did not examine the factorial structure of their scales also showed considerable overlap. for example, one report used these two items: “learning english is one of the most important aspects in my life” and “it is extremely important for me to learn english.” despite the close similarity of these two items, the former was used to measure attitudes toward learning english while the former intended effort. it is highly unlikely that these two items belong to two different latent variables. unsurprisingly, that study reported a correlation of .91 between them for university majors, indicating that it may not be meaningful to distinguish between these two scales. table 2 correlations between the three l2mss components and intended effort for studies that applied a factor-analytic procedure and studies that did not intended effort k n r 95% ci q p lower upper ideal l2 self with factor analysis 10 10,053 .548 .447 .636 2.695 .101 without factor analysis 22 18,640 .637 .579 .689 ought-to l2 self with factor analysis 3 2,369 .378 .205 .528 < 0.001 .997 without factor analysis 16 14,294 .378 .302 .449 l2 learning exp with factor analysis 2 671 .408 .135 .624 6.051 .014 without factor analysis 16 17,394 .680 .619 .733 note. a few studies reported ambiguous analyses (k = 2) and were therefore excluded. exp = experience, ns = non-significant ali h. al-hoorie 734 figure 1 funnel plot showing the relationship between the ideal l2 self and achievement 7. discussion the present meta-analysis has revealed a number of trends. one is that, perhaps for convenience, there is an abundance of research using intended effort as the primary criterion variable in recent language motivation research. on the other hand, there is a shortage of other outcome variables, resulting in an incomplete picture in the literature – especially since there was hardly any relationship between intended effort and other objective measures (r = .12). future research should attempt to draw from more diverse criterion measures in the hope of shedding more light on the multifaceted nature of motivation. another trend in recent literature is the lack of sufficient attention to important learner characteristics. more specifically, the present meta-analysis could not examine the effect of age, gender, or context. as for age, although older learners tend to be more accessible to researchers, it is possible that the dynamics of motivation is different at different ages (kormos & csizér, 2008). what motivates a 7-year-old might not motivate a 17-year-old (nikolov, 1999). as for gender, it is often taken for granted that females exhibit higher motivation than males (you et al., 2016). however, systematic research to test this assumption is lacking, let alone attempting to explain it. as for context, the vast majority of recent motivation research has been conducted in foreign language contexts. this is in stark contrast to the social-psychological era, during which research in second language contexts was dominant (al-hoorie, 2017b). hence, little is currently known -2.0 -1.5 -1.0 -0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 0 10 20 30 p re ci si on (1 /s td e rr ) fisher's z funnel plot of precision by fisher's z the l2 motivational self system: a meta-analysis 735 about the applicability of self-guides to second language contexts (see also dörnyei & ushioda, 2009a, pp. 352-353, for a similar argument). a further trend is the dominance of english as the target language in recent research. english is indeed the global language and the most commonly taught nowadays. however, its global status may make the motivation to learn it distinct from the motivation to learn other languages (dörnyei & al-hoorie, 2017). for example, a decision to learn a language like danish or german typically needs to be accompanied by strong or personal reasons, especially when the aim is to achieve high proficiency. learning english, in contrast, hardly needs a justification. this suggests a qualitative difference in the motivation to learn english versus the motivation to learn other languages. if this is the case, then the emphasis on english in recent literature risks deriving an incomplete theory of language learning motivation. this is an especially challenging task since the study of non-english languages is a rather complex subject. non-english languages fall on different varieties such as minority, heritage, indigenous, and endangered languages, each with its unique set of contextual factors and conditions (duff, 2017). the following sections discuss the results of the present meta-analysis in relation to self-guides, the l2 learning experience, and intended effort. limitations of this study are then highlighted. 7.1. self-guides in terms of the ideal l2 self, the results of the present meta-analysis showed that it correlated at .61 with intended effort and at .20 with achievement. in other words, the ideal l2 self accounts for around 37.2% of the variance in intended effort, but only about 4.1% in achievement. these results may help explain the conflicting findings in the literature: studies relying on intended effort found strong support for the predictive validity of the ideal l2 self, while those drawing from other objective measures were less supportive. recently, plonsky and oswald (2014) have offered recommendations for field-specific benchmarks for interpreting the size of correlation coefficients: .25 small, .40 medium, and .60 large. if we follow these recommendations, the ideal l2 self is a strong predictor of intended effort, but approaching the small threshold in achievement. the relationship between the ideal l2 self and achievement is also smaller than the expected correlation between attitudes and behavior in social psychology (r = .38, kraus, 1995). it is also smaller than the magnitude that aptitude (r = .49, li, 2016) and intelligence (r = .54, roth et al., 2015) explain in academic achievement, two established individual difference variables. given this modest magnitude, readers may wonder about the extent to which motivation contributes to language learning relative to the two classical ali h. al-hoorie 736 individual difference variables, intelligence and aptitude. nevertheless, there seem to be a number of means to improve the predictive validity of the ideal l2 self when it comes to actual language achievement. first of all, the original conceptualization of the l2mss comes with a set of conditions that, if not satisfied, self-guides are not expected to exhibit full power (dörnyei, 2009). these conditions include the availability of the different self-guides, their vividness, plausibility, harmony, and activation, as well as having procedural strategies and being offset by a feared self. although these conditions were proposed together with the inception of the theory itself, they have remained largely untested and hardly any attempts have been made to incorporate them into how self-guides are currently measured (hessel, 2015). another potential direction is the incorporation of discrepancy. by definition, self-guides are not absolute constructs but relational to a future state. the hypothesized effect of the ideal l2 self, for example, resides in the discrepancy between a current state and a desired future state, not the future state per se. unfortunately, this discrepancy is not currently featured in how self-guides are measured (thorsen, henry, & cliffordson, 2017). the standard scale items used to measure the ideal l2 self are in the form of ‘i can imagine myself…’, which is admittedly ambiguous. as an illustration, if a learner cannot imagine herself mastering english someday, this could additionally mean that she does not believe she can do that (self-efficacy), that she does not want to do that (value of the activity), that she experiences a complete absence of motivation (amotivation), that she does not need to do that (e.g., she has already mastered english), or any other interpretations different learners might conjure up. due to this ambiguity, it might be appropriate to relabel the standard ideal l2 self scale to the imagined self, and reserve the ideal l2 self label to an improved measure that can accommodate a current–future discrepancy that the l2mss requires by definition. a measure that can accommodate a current–future discrepancy does not have to be a close-ended questionnaire scale. in fact, self-discrepancy is not conceptualized as a conscious construct that the individual can readily self-report (higgins, 1987). for this reason, higgins (1987) criticized a study by hoge and mccarthy (1983) for using experimenter-selected attributes and asking their participants about their discrepancies directly, describing this type of measure as nonideographic. an ideographic measure, in contrast, requires that the participant is the one who supplies attributes related to, say, their actual self and their ideal self separately. it is then the researcher’s job to code these attributes in order to determine ‘matches’ and ‘mismatches’ between actual and ideal selves. the results may show that one participant has a large number of matches (i.e., little discrepancy), another with mostly mismatches (much discrepancy), and yet another with neither matches or mismatches (no relevance of discrepancy). the l2 motivational self system: a meta-analysis 737 this approach has not been utilized in the language motivation field to date. another approach that does not rely on close-ended questionnaires draws from reaction-time measures (e.g., higgins, shah, & friedman, 1997; shah & higgins, 2001). the premise behind this approach is that higher accessibility leads to more efficient approach and avoidance tendencies unconsciously. our field is yet to exploit the full potential of reaction-time measures to study unconscious aspects of motivation (al-hoorie, 2016a, 2016b, in press). in terms of the ought-to l2 self, its predictive validity was markedly lower than that of the ideal l2 self in relation to both intended effort and achievement. as explained above, the wanting nature of the ought-to l2 self has already been pointed out by a number of scholars who recommended improvements. however, instead of leaving this construct behind in favor of newer constructs, it would be useful to attempt to understand why its theoretically anticipated effect has not been borne out. one possible explanation is that the ought-to l2 self is – by definition (see dörnyei, 2009, p. 29) – concerned only with the less internalized forms of motives. it pertains to someone else’s expectations, rather than one’s own ideals, and primarily functions in a preventive fashion. that is, since ought self-guides represent “minimal goals” (higgins, 1998, p. 5) that are “imposed” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 32) by one’s peers, parents and authoritative figures, then learners may simply aim to achieve the minimum required to satisfy another person’s desires, rather than fulfilling them more thoroughly as one might do with one’s own ideals. such minimal goals are less likely to sustain engagement in learning and enthusiasm about it in the long run. a similar picture emerges from possible selves theory. markus and nurius (1986) actually downplay the role of others in the formation of one’s own possible selves. in their words, “others’ perceptions of an individual are unlikely to reflect or to take into account possible selves” (p. 964). markus and nurius then point out that, “when we perceive another person, or another perceives us, this aspect of perception, under most conditions, is simply not evident and typically there is little concern with it” (p. 964). a similar picture emerges, again, from self-determination theory (deci & ryan, 2002), in which the less internalized forms of extrinsic motivation seem to be associated negatively with l2 achievement, but the more internalized forms are associated positively with it (e.g., wang, 2008). indeed, mackay (2014, p. 394) reports that some of her interviewees construed external pressures to learn the language as a demotivating factor. all of this points to the need to reconsider the original conceptualization of the ought-to l2 self construct as a motivational factor, an assumption held in the field for more than a decade. it might be more appropriately conceived of, at least in some contexts, as a demotivating variable instead. another possible explanation is that current measurement practice does not distinguish between own-other standpoints in self-guides (lanvers, 2016; ali h. al-hoorie 738 teimouri, 2017; thompson & vásquez, 2015). however, before treading this path, a number of conceptual issues need to be addressed. first, introducing standpoints may make the different self-guides less clear-cut. that is, where do we draw the line between an ideal-own and ought-own, and between ideal-other and ought-other (see dörnyei, 2009, pp. 13-14, for a similar argument). second, as dörnyei and ushioda (2009a, p. 352) point out, degrees of internalization are inherent to self-determination theory. when degrees of internalization are used to justify the different self-guides (e.g., ideal-own versus ideal-other), theorists need to consider in what respects this new formulation is more than self-determination theory cast in self terminology. this is a crucial consideration since it is desirable to avoid a situation where different researchers within one field deal with more or less the same phenomena but independently due to different terminology (dörnyei & ryan, 2015). a further consideration pertains to the proliferation of ‘selves’ witnessed in the field today. some scholars (macintyre & mackinnon, 2007; macintyre, mackinnon, & clément, 2009) argue that these selves are hardly more than mere metaphors, risking unnecessary redundancy and conceptual clutter. for example, macintyre and mackinnon (2007) list over 60 self-related constructs in psychology, leading them to argue that “the multitude of overlapping concepts in the literature on the self is more confusing than integrativeness ever could be” (macintyre et al., 2009, p. 54). just like psychology, the language motivation field is witnessing more and more selves being introduced, including anti-oughtto, rebellious, imposed, bilingual, multilingual, private, public, possible, and probable selves, but without sufficient attention to their construct validity or their overlap. in fact, it has become fashionable to introduce a new construct and suffix it with a ‘self’ even when existing constructs seem to exist (e.g., antiought-to self versus reactance, and feared l2 self versus fear of failure). adding a new dimension to an existing construct (e.g., l2 reactance) may be more appropriate than introducing yet another ‘self’. as albert bandura cautions, a theory cast in terms of multiple selves plunges one into deep philosophical waters. it requires a regress of selves to a presiding superordinate self that selects and manages the collection of possible selves to suit given purposes. actually, there is only one self that can visualize different desired and undesired futures and select courses of action designed to attain cherished futures and escape feared ones. (bandura, 1997, p. 26) 7.2. the l2 learning experience as reviewed above, the l2 learning experience has been described as the strongest predictor of intended effort. however, the results of the present meta-analysis suggest that the high correlation between the l2 learning experience and the l2 motivational self system: a meta-analysis 739 intended effort may partly be an artifact of not implementing a factor-analytic procedure. a cursory look at the literature suggests that the importance of examining the factorial structure of scales is not appreciated. researchers, reviewers, and editors seem satisfied with a quick cronbach analysis showing a reliability of around .70. however, reliability assumes that the scale is already unidimensional, and when it is not, reliability can be artificially inflated (see al-hoorie & vitta, in press; green, lissitz, & mulaik, 1977; sijtsma, 2009). based on the present results, it is recommended that researchers routinely present the results of a factor analytic procedure (whether from classical test theory or item response theory) to establish convergent and discriminant validity among their scales, along with their reliabilities. in contrast to its correlation with intended effort, the l2 learning experience had a modest correlation with achievement (r = .17). this suggests that, to date, the small number of studies that have examined the correlation between this variable and achievement do not support a strong association. furthermore, little theoretical analysis is available to explain why this association should be causal in the first place (ushioda, 2011), especially since virtually all studies included in the present meta-analysis were observational. neither is this modest association totally inconsistent with experimental studies (on non-l2 learning) that do not support a causal relationship between student evaluation of the course and educational outcomes (arbuckle & williams, 2003; boring, 2015; braga et al., 2014; carrell & west, 2010; macnell et al., 2015). having a positive attitude toward the course and its teacher may not necessarily imply better learning, even if the learner believes so. indeed, it is not an unusual experience for a learner to get the ‘impression’ that they have mastered the subject, but to subsequently realize from a test that there were significant gaps in their knowledge. this misleading impression of mastery may be attributed to different reasons, including a teacher with a charismatic personality or simply an entertaining approach (see al-hoorie, 2017a, for a more detailed review). evidence of this misleading impression has been demonstrated graphically in a classic experiment titled ‘the doctor fox lecture: a paradigm of educational seduction’ (naftulin, ware, & donnelly, 1973). these researchers recruited a professional actor to give a lecture about game theory (a subject he knew nothing about). the actor was given a fake name, dr. myron l. fox, and was introduced to the unsuspecting audience as an expert in the application of mathematics to human behavior. drawing from his acting skills, the actor peppered his lecture with some humor as well as meaningless, conflicting, and irrelevant information. at the same time, he sounded authoritative and exhibited a charismatic personality. despite the empty content of the lecture, the audience reported having enjoyed the lecture and even learned from it (in fact, one ali h. al-hoorie 740 person even reported that s/he had read some of the speaker’s publications!). we can confidently argue that, despite this favorable impression, no learning or any knowledge transmission about game theory occurred during that lecture. ‘dr. fox’ simply did not know the material. the feeling of having learned from the lecture is little more than a misattribution. the audience simply enjoyed the charismatic and authoritative personality of lecturer, but then misattributed this enjoyment to the informativeness of the lecture. naftulin et al. (1973) conclude that “student satisfaction with learning may represent little more than the illusion of having learned” (p. 630). this is now known as the dr. fox effect.2 these results point to the urgent need for experimental studies in the language motivation field for testing causal assumptions. one reason for the paucity of experiments has to do with the numerous practical and logistic considerations involved (see, e.g., csizér & magid, 2014, part 4). still, language motivation researchers could take their cues from other sla areas where experiments are very common. when it comes to instructional effects, for example, plonsky (2013) reports that experimental studies are about twice more common in classroom research than are observational studies. experimental studies are also needed to examine pedagogical implications derived from observational studies (e.g., dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014; hadfield & dörnyei, 2013). it is not unimaginable that some of these recommendations might turn out premature. if some implications do turn out to be premature, this could ultimately undermine the field’s credibility. 7.3. intended effort in the l2mss tradition, self-reported intended effort has been frequently called the criterion measure (sometimes with capital c and m). although any outcome can be described as a criterion measure (since it simply refers to the dependent variable), the convention of calling intended effort as the criterion measure is nowadays seen everywhere in research reports – from scale descriptions, through results tables, to structural equation models. another euphemism is ‘motivated behavior’. in reality, however, this scale typically refers to intended effort rather than observation of actual behavior. still, a subjective measure is not necessarily less valid. the use of a subjective measure could provide unique insights that more objective measures might not capture. nevertheless, there are at least two important considerations to take into account with regard to this scale. first, the items in this scale 2 in the original experiment, naftulin et al. videotaped the lecture by dr. fox. some of its footage is now available on youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcxw6nrwwtc (accessed 28 september 2017). the l2 motivational self system: a meta-analysis 741 tend to be generic, while generic intentions are less likely to translate into behavior (fishbein & ajzen, 2010). this is especially because conscious thought suffers from substantial blind spots when it comes to predicting how one will actually behave (see al-hoorie, 2015, 2016a, 2016b, 2017b, for a more detailed discussion). following wolters and taylor (2012), intended effort could be made more specific by recognizing the different ‘dimensions’ of motivated behavior. in one dimension, some activities reflect behavioral engagement while others reflect academic engagement. behavioral engagement includes class participation and other overt behavioral effort. academic engagement, on the other hand, refers to time spent on learning tasks and amount of assignments completed. although both constitute ‘effort’, the latter reflects more quality engagement. a second dimension of effort is whether it is universal and optional. universal engagement refers to the activities that all students are expected to engage in, such as attending class and doing homework. in contrast, optional engagement refers to going beyond the expected of the typical student, by showing initiative and volunteering for relevant extracurricular activities. a third dimension is the need to consider engagement in adaptive versus maladaptive forms of behavior. a learner may engage in adaptive learning behaviors, but might at the same time also engage in other maladaptive behaviors (e.g., procrastination, defensive pessimism, and other forms of self-handicapping). focusing on adaptive behaviors only might miss important pieces from the overall picture. a final dimension is the need to consider agentic versus non-agentic behavior. effort expended by the learner that is planful and purposeful should count as more than the effort that merely reflects norm following. “students coerced to finish worksheets using specific tactics rigidly dictated by a teacher may appear cognitively and behaviorally engaged” (wolters & taylor, 2012, p. 645) but not necessarily actually motivated. adopting such level of specificity would likely enrich our perspective on learning motivation and open up interesting directions for future research. second, the use of intended effort leads a conceptual difficulty. theoretical clarity requires observing “the motivation → behavior → outcome chain” (dörnyei, 2005, p. 73) because “if we want to draw more meaningful inferences about the impact of various motives, it is more appropriate to use some sort of a behavioural measure as the criterion/dependent variable” (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, p. 200, original emphasis). intended effort does not seem to qualify as representative of the ‘behavior’ piece of the chain – until it is actually performed. this is why, in his review of the l2mss, gardner (2010) maintains that “they relate one measure based on verbal report to another measure based on verbal report” (p. 73). a theoretical justification for the use of intended effort as an outcome measure is needed to clarify what we can learn from this construct and in which contexts. ali h. al-hoorie 742 8. limitations and conclusion because this is the first meta-analysis of the l2mss, the present study inevitably has a number of limitations. the number of studies using a criterion measure other than intended effort is relatively small. this small number resulted in relatively wide confidence intervals, and further showed evidence of publication bias. this small sample also led to a pragmatic decision to combine all objective measures into one group. however, it is not implausible that different outcome measures would exhibit different results (e.g., end-of-year grades versus researcher-administered tests). therefore, the present meta-analysis must be considered a meta-analysisin-progress and be updated once a sufficient number of studies using different outcome measures become available. although a number of studies were excluded for not reporting correlation results, most of these studies followed the general trend of relying on intended effort rather than other outcome measures. the same applies to potential moderators, including age, gender, context, and target language (see also ellis, 2006). the results also draw attention to the urgent need for experimental studies in the language motivation field. for historical reasons, our field has relied heavily on observational questionnaire-based research designs. at the same time, many arguments in the field have causal implications, and even pedagogical recommendations for classroom teachers. in fact, making a list of pedagogical implications has become a default expectation from researchers (and graduate students), even when their research is observational. without experimental research to support such pedagogical recommendations, this practice may be at best misleading, and at worst damaging to the field. however, overcoming the various logistics involved in conducting experimental research – whether inside or outside the classroom – would eventually lead to a science that is more instructive to classroom practice and to language learning in general. acknowledgements i would like to thank robert gardner, zoltán dörnyei, richard clement, peter macintyre, diane larsen-freeman, kim noels, sarah mercer, martin lamb, alastair henry, saadat saeed, neil mcclelland, luke plonsky, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft. i would also like to thank phil hiver and joe vitta for their assistance in data coding. the l2 motivational self system: a meta-analysis 743 references al-hoorie, a. h. 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(2016). l2 motivational self system among arab efl learners: saudi prespective. international journal of applied linguistics and english literature, 5, 145-152. al-shehri, a. s. (2009). motivation and vision: the relation between the ideal l2 self, imagination and visual style. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 164-171). bristol, uk: multilingual matters. asker, a. (2011). future self-guides and language learning engagement of english-major secondary school students in libya: understanding the interplay between possible selves and the l2 learning situation. unpublished doctoral dissertation, university of birmingham, uk. busse, v. (2013). an exploration of motivation and self-beliefs of first year students of german. system, 41(2), 379-398. calvo, e. t. (2015). language learning motivation: the l2 motivational self system and its relationship with learning achievement. unpublished ma dissertation, university of barcelona, spain. dörnyei, z., & chan, l. (2013). motivation and vision: an analysis of future l2 self images, sensory styles, and imagery capacity across two target languages. language learning, 63, 437-462. eid, j. (2008). determining the relationship between visual style, imagination, the l2 motivational self system and the motivation to learn english, french and italian. unpublished ma dissertation, university of nottingham, uk. ghanizadeh, a., eishabadi, n., & rostami, s. (2016). motivational dimension of willingness to communicate in l2: the impacts of criterion measure, ideal l2 self, family influence, and attitudes to l2 culture. international journal of research studies in education, 5, 13-24. ghanizadeh, a., & rostami, s. (2015). a dörnyei-inspired study on second language motivation: a cross-comparison analysis in public and private contexts. psychological studies, 60, 292-301. huang, h-t., & chen, i-l. (2016). l2 selves in motivation to learn english as a foreign language: the case of taiwanese adolescents. in m. t. apple, d. da silva & t. fellner (eds.), l2 selves and motivations in asian contexts (pp. 51-69). bristol, uk: multilingual matters. islam, m., lamb, m., & chambers, g. (2013). the l2 motivational self system and national interest: a pakistani perspective. system, 41, 231-244. iwaniec, j. (2014). motivation to learn english of polish gymnasium pupils. unpublished doctoral dissertation, university of lancaster, uk. jiang, y. (2013). gender differences and the development of l2 english learners’ l2 motivational self system and international posture in china. unpublished doctoral dissertation, birkbeck, university of london, uk. the l2 motivational self system: a meta-analysis 751 khany, r., & amiri, m. (2016). action control, l2 motivational self system, and motivated learning behavior in a foreign language learning context. european journal of psychology of education, 1-17. kim, y.-k., & kim, t.-y. (2011). the effect of korean secondary school students’ perceptual learning styles and ideal l2 self on motivated l2 behavior and english proficiency. korean journal of english language and linguistics, 11, 21-42. kim, t.-y., & kim, y.-k. (2014). a structural model for perceptual learning styles, the ideal l2 self, motivated behavior, and english proficiency. system, 46, 14-27. lake, j. (2013). positive l2 self: linking positive psychology with l2 motivation. in m. t. apple, d. da silva & t. fellner (eds.), language learning motivation in japan (pp. 225244). bristol, uk: multilingual matters. lamb, m. (2012). a self system perspective on young adolescents’ motivation to learn english in urban and rural settings. language learning, 62, 997-1023. lasagabaster, d. (2016). the relationship between motivation, gender, l1 and possible selves in english-medium instruction. international journal of multilingualism, 13, 315-332. moskovsky, c., assulaimani, t., racheva, s., & harkins, j. (2016). the l2 motivational self system and l2 achievement: a study of saudi efl learners. modern language journal, 100, 641-654. papi, m. (2010). the l2 motivational self system, l2 anxiety, and motivated behavior: a structural equation modeling approach. system, 38(3), 467-479. papi, m., & abdollahzadeh, e. (2012). teacher motivational practice, student motivation, and possible l2 selves: an examination in the iranian efl context. language learning, 62, 571-594. polat, n. (2014). the interaction of the l2 motivational self system with socialisation and identification patterns and l2 accent attainment. in k. csizér & m. magid (eds.), the impact of self-concept on language learning (pp. 268-285). bristol, uk: multilingual matters. ryan, s. (2009). self and identity in l2 motivation in japan: the ideal l2 self and japanese learners of english. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 120-143). bristol, uk: multilingual matters. shahbaz m., & liu, y. (2012). complexity of l2 motivation in an asian esl setting. porta linguarum, 18, 115-131. taguchi, t., magid, m., & papi, m. (2009). the l2 motivational self system among japanese, chinese and iranian learners of english: a comparative study. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 66-97). bristol, uk: multilingual matters. tan, t. g., lim, t. h., & hoe, f. t. (2017). analyzing the relationship between l2 motivational self system and achievement in mandarin. international academic research journal of social science, 3(1), 104-108. yun, s., hiver, p., & al-hoorie, a. h. (in press). academic buoyancy: construct validation and a test of structural relations. studies in second language acquisition. ali h. al-hoorie 752 appendix b characteristics of studies included in the meta-analysis study sample size target language learner level learner gender context criterion measure al qahtani (2015) 257 english university mixed m. east intended effort al-hoorie (2016) 311 english university male m. east mixed alshahrani (2016) 397 english university male m. east intended effort al-shehri (2009) 200 english mixed mixed m. east intended effort asker (2011) 126 english secondary mixed m. east intended effort busse (2013) 94 german university mixed europe intended effort calvo (2015) 29 english secondary mixed europe grades dörnyei & chan (2013) 172 mixed secondary mixed asia mixed eid (2011) 93 mixed secondary mixed europe mixed ghanizadeh et al. (2016) 160 english university mixed m. east intended effort ghanizadeh & rostami (2015) 905 english mixed mixed m. east intended effort huang & chen (2016) 1,698 english secondary mixed asia intended effort islam et al. (2013) 975 english university mixed m. east intended effort iwaniec (2014) 236 english secondary mixed europe intended effort jiang (2013) 240 english university mixed asia intended effort khani & amiri (2016) 510 english secondary mixed m. east intended effort kim & kim (2011) 495 english secondary mixed asia intended effort kim & kim (2014) 2,239 english secondary mixed asia intended effort lake (2013) 224 english university female asia mixed lamb (2012) 527 english secondary mixed asia mixed lasagabster (2016) 189 english university mixed europe intended effort moskovsky et al. (2016) 360 english university mixed m. east mixed papi (2010) 1,011 english secondary mixed m. east mixed papi & abdollahzadeh (2012) 460 english secondary male m. east behavior polat (2014) 88 english secondary mixed m. east pronunciation ryan (2009) 2,397 english mixed mixed asia intended effort shahbaz & liu (2012) 547 english university mixed m. east intended effort shahbaz & yongbing (2015) 547 english university mixed m. east intended effort taguchi et al. (2009) 4,891 english mixed mixed mixed intended effort tan et al. (2017) 142 english university mixed asia grades you & dornyei (2016) 10,413 english mixed mixed asia intended effort yun et al. (in press) 787 english university mixed asia grades the l2 motivational self system: a meta-analysis 753 appendix c list of studies excluded for incomplete reporting of pearson correlation results studies reporting regression coefficients: csizér, k., & lukács, g. (2010). the comparative analysis of motivation, attitudes and selves: the case of english and german in hungary. system, 38(1), 1-13. khan, m. r. (2015). analyzing the relationship between l2 motivational selves and l2 achievement: a saudi perspective. international journal of english language teaching, 2(1), 68-75. kim, t.-y., & kim, y.-k. (2014). efl students’ l2 motivational self system and self-regulation: focusing on elementary and junior high school students in korea. in k. csizér & m. magid (eds.), the impact of self-concept on language learning (pp. 87-107). bristol, uk: multilingual matters. kormos, j., & csizér, k. (2008). age-related differences in the motivation of learning english as a foreign language: attitudes, selves, and motivated learning behavior. language learning, 58(2), 327-355. kormos, j., & csizér, k. (2010). a comparison of the foreign language learning motivation of hungarian dyslexic and non-dyslexic students. international journal of applied linguistics, 20(2), 232-250. li, q. (2014). differences in the motivation of chinese learners of english in a foreign and second language context. system, 42, 451-461. mezei, g. (2014). the effect of motivational strategies on self-related aspects of student motivation and second language learning. in k. csizér & m. magid (eds.), the impact of selfconcept on language learning (pp. 289-309). bristol, uk: multilingual matters. nagle, c. (2014). a longitudinal study on the role of lexical stress and motivation in the perception and production of l2 spanish stop consonants. unpublished doctoral dissertation, georgetown university, usa. papi, m., & teimouri, y. (2013). dynamics of selves and motivation: a cross-sectional study in the efl context of iran. international journal of applied linguistics, 22(3), 287-309. polat, n., & schallert, d. l. (2013). kurdish adolescents acquiring turkish: their self-determined motivation and identification with l1 and l2 communities as predictors of l2 accent attainment. the modern language journal, 97(3), 745-763. sugita mceown, m., noels, k. a., & chaffee, k. e. (2014). at the interface of the socio-educational model, self-determination theory and the l2 motivational self system models. in k. csizér & m. magid (eds.), the impact of self-concept on language learning (pp. 19-50). bristol, uk: multilingual matters. teimouri, y. (2017). l2 selves, emotions, and motivated behaviors. studies in second language acquisition, 39(4), 681-709. xie, y. (2014). l2 self of beginning-level heritage and nonheritage postsecondary learners of chinese. foreign language annals, 47(1), 189-203. studies reporting sem path coefficients: aubrey, s. (2014). development of the l2 motivational self system: english at a university in japan. jalt journal, 36(2), 153-174. ali h. al-hoorie 754 aubrey, s., & nowlan, g. p. (2013). effect of intercultural contact on l2 motivation: a comparative study. in m. t. apple, d. da silva & t. fellner (eds.), l2 selves and motivations in asian contexts (pp. 129-151). bristol, uk: multilingual matters. csizér, k., & kormos, j. (2009). learning experiences, selves and motivated learning behaviour: a comparative analysis of structural models for hungarian secondary and university learners of english. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 98-119). bristol, uk: multilingual matters. gu, m., & cheung, d. s. (2016). ideal l2 self, acculturation, and chinese language learning among south asian students in hong kong: a structural equation modelling analysis. system, 57, 14-24. kormos, j., & csizér, k. (2014). the interaction of motivation, self-regulatory strategies, and autonomous learning behavior in different learner groups. tesol quarterly, 48, 275-299. kormos, j., kiddle, t., & csizér, k. (2011). goals, attitudes and self-related beliefs in second language learning motivation: an interactive model of language learning motivation. applied linguistics, 32(5), 495-516. magid, m. (2011). a validation and application of the l2 motivational self system among chinese learners of english. unpublished doctoral dissertation, university of nottingham, uk. munezane, y. (2016). motivation, ideal self and willingness to communicate as the predictors of observed l2 use in the classroom. eurosla yearbook, 16, 85-115. taguchi, t. (2013). motivation, attitudes and selves in the japanese context: a mixed methods approach. in m. t. apple, d. da silva & t. fellner (eds.), l2 selves and motivations in asian contexts (pp. 169-188). bristol, uk: multilingual matters. ueki, m., & takeuchi, o. (2013). forming a clearer image of the ideal l2 self: the l2 motivational self system and learner autonomy in a japanese efl context. innovation in language learning and teaching, 7(3), 238-252. visgatis, b. l. (2014) english-related out-of-class time use by japanese university students. unpublished doctoral dissertation, temple university, usa. studies reporting chi-square and kendall’s tau, respectively: georgiadou, e. s. (2016). the role of proficiency, speaking habits and error-tolerance in the selfrepair behaviour of emirati efl learners. the asian efl journal quarterly, 18(4), 104-126. kim, t.-y. (2009). korean elementary school students’ perceptual learning style, ideal l2 self, and motivated behavior. korean journal of english language and linguistics, 9(3), 461-486. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: edyta olejarczuk (poznań university of technology) language editor: melanie ellis (pedagogical university of cracow) vol. 6 no. 3 september 2016 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, university of new south wales, sydney) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo) kata csizér (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) robert dekeyser (university of maryland) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) carol griffiths (fatih university, istanbul) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) sarah mercer (university of graz) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) bonny norton (university of british columbia) terrence odlin (ohio state university) rebecca oxford (university of maryland) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (university of pannonia, trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto) elaine tarone (university of minnesota) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) stuart webb (university of western ontario) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2016 editor: mirosław pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak anna mystkowska-wiertelak edyta olejarczuk articles are licensed under the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · directory of open access journals (doaj) · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · infobaseindex · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the thomson reuters master journal list. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 6, number 3, september 2016 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors ....................................................................371 editorial .........................................................................................375 articles: diane larsen-freeman – classroom-oriented research from a complex systems perspective ......................................................................... 377 adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak – the interface between research on individual difference variables and teaching practice: the case of cognitive factors and personality .................................................... 395 ali h. al-hoorie – unconscious motivation. part i: implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers ........................................................................................................ 423 julie dearden, ernesto macaro – higher education teachers’ attitudes towards english medium instruction: a three-country comparison .....455 paola vettorel, sara corrizzato – fostering awareness of the pedagogical implications of world englishes and elf in teacher education in italy ...487 hien hoang, frank boers – re-telling a story in a second language: how well do adult learners mine an input text for multiword expressions? ...513 book reviews: adriana biedroń – review of zhisheng (edward) wen’s working memory and second language learning. towards an integrated approach ...... 537 danuta gabryś-barker – review of peter d. macintyre, tammy gregersen, sarah mercer’s positive psychology in second language acquisition ..... 541 notes to contributors .....................................................................547 371 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors ali h. al-hoorie is a lecturer at the english language institute, jubail industrial college, saudi arabia. his research interests include motivation theory, research methodology, and complexity. he is currently a doctoral candidate at nottingham university working under the supervision of professors zoltán dörnyei and norbert schmitt. he also holds an ma in social science data analysis from essex university. contact data: p.o. box 10099, the english language institute, jubail industrial college, jubail industrial city 31961, kingdom of saudi arabia (hoorie_a@jic.edu.sa) adriana biedroń received her doctoral and postdoctoral degrees in applied linguistics from adam mickiewicz university in poznań, poland in 2003 and 2013, respectively. she is professor at the english philology department at the pomeranian university in słupsk, poland and koszalin university of technology, poland. her fields of interest include applied psycholinguistics and second language acquisition theory. her research focuses on individual differences in sla, in particular foreign language aptitude and cognitive and personality factors in gifted l2 learners. her most recent publications are: “neurology of foreign language aptitude” (2015, studies in second language learning and teaching) and “new conceptualizations of linguistic giftedness” (co-authored with m. pawlak, 2016, language teaching). contact data: english philology department, pomeranian university in słupsk, arciszewskiego 22a, 76-200, poland (adriana.biedron@apsl.edu.pl) frank boers is associate professor of applied linguistics at victoria university of wellington, new zealand. most of his recent research concerns second language vocabulary acquisition, including applications of tenets of cognitive linguistics to the teaching of multiword expressions. he is currently co-editor of the journal language teaching research. contact data: victoria university of wellington, school of linguistics and applied language studies, po box 600, wellington 6140, new zealand (frank.boers@vuw.ac.nz) 372 sara corrizzato received a phd in english linguistics from the university of verona, italy in 2012. her research interests include elf and teacher education. among her publications there are spike lee’s bamboozled: a contrastive analysis of compliments and insults from english to italian (2015, cambridge scholars publishing) and “world englishes and elf in elt textbooks: how is plurality represented?” (co-authored with p. vettorel, 2012, in: r. facchinetti (ed.), a cultural journey through the english lexicon, cambridge scholars). she has been awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship at the department of foreign languages and literatures (university of verona) to investigate fl trainee teachers’ perception of we and elf and their implications for teaching practices. contact data: university of verona, department of foreign languages and literatures, via lungadige di porta vittoria 41, 37129 verona, italy (sara.corrizzato@univr.it) julie dearden is a member of the applied linguistics research group and teaches the english language teaching module on the msc course in applied linguistics and second language acquisition (alsla). as senior research and development fellow in english medium instruction (emi), julie manages emi oxford, a centre for research and development in english medium instruction which was established in march 2014. julie has a particular interest in the global shift from english being learnt and taught as a “foreign” language to english being used as a medium of instruction for other academic subjects such as business, geography, science and maths. julie conducts research into emi and develops and teaches professional development courses for emi teachers and lecturers as well as for english language teachers. contact data: department of education, 15 norham gardens, university of oxford, oxford, england (julie.dearden@education.ox.ac.uk) danuta gabryś-barker is professor of english at the university of silesia, katowice, poland, where she lectures and supervises ma and phd theses in applied linguistics, psycholinguistics and especially in second language acquisition and multilingualism. she has published approximately 150 articles and the books aspects of multilingual storage, processing and retrieval (2005, university of silesia press) and reflectivity in pre-service teacher education (2012, university of silesia press). she has also edited 11 volumes, among others for multilingual matters, springer and the university of silesia press. professor gabryś-barker has been the editor-in-chief of the international journal of multilingualism (taylor & francis/routledge) since 2010 (with professor eva vetter) and the co-founder and the editor-in-chief of the journal theory and practice of second language acquisition (university of silesia press) since 2015 (with professor adam wojtaszek). contact data: uniwersytet śląski, instytut języka angielskiego, ul. gen. grotaroweckiego 5, 41-205 sosnowiec, poland (danuta.gabrys@gmail.com) 373 hien hoang is a lecturer of english at quy nhon university, vietnam. her primary areas of interest are instructed l2 acquisition, with a special focus on intervention studies on phraseology and language assessment. she holds an ma degree in applied linguistics from victoria university of wellington, new zealand. contact data: quy nhon university, 170 an duong vuong street, quy nhon city, binh dinh province, 820000, vietnam (hoangthithuhien@qnu.edu.vn) diane larsen-freeman, phd in linguistics from the university of michigan, is professor emerita at the university of michigan, ann arbor, where she was a faculty member and director of the english language institute. she is also professor emerita at the sit graduate institute, where she was on the faculty from 1978 to 2002. she has been a visiting senior fellow at the university of pennsylvania for the past five years and will return for a sixth this coming year. contact data: university of michigan, 610 e. university avenue, ann arbor, michigan, 48109, usa (dianelf@umich.edu) ernesto macaro is professor of applied linguistics at the university of oxford where he is director of the centre for research and development in english medium instruction (emi oxford). he teaches on the masters in applied linguistics and on the teacher education program. his research focuses on second language learning strategies and on the interaction between teachers and learners in second language classrooms or in classrooms where english is the medium of instruction. contact data: department of education, 15 norham gardens, university of oxford, oxford, england (ernesto.macaro@education.ox.ac.uk) mirosław pawlak, professor of english at the faculty of philology, state university of applied sciences, konin, poland; and the department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts in kalisz, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland. he received his doctoral and post-doctoral degrees as well as his full professorship from adam mickiewicz university in poznań. his main areas of interest are sla theory and research, form-focused instruction, corrective feedback, classroom discourse, learner autonomy, learning strategies, grammar learning strategies, motivation, willingness to communicate and pronunciation teaching. his recent publications include the place of form-focused instruction in the foreign language classroom (2006, adam mickiewicz university press), production-oriented and comprehension-based grammar teaching in the foreign language classroom (co-authored with anna mystkowska-wiertelak, 2012, springer), error correction in the foreign language classroom: reconsidering the issues (2014, springer), applying cognitive grammar in the foreign 374 language classroom: teaching english tense and aspect (co-authored with jakub bielak, 2013, springer), as well as several edited collections on learner autonomy, form-focused instruction, speaking and individual learner differences. mirosław pawlak is the editor-in-chief of the journals studies in second language learning and teaching (www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl), konin language studies (http://www.ksj.pwsz.konin.edu.pl/?lang=en), and the book series second language learning and teaching (http://www.springer.com/series/10129). he has been a supervisor and reviewer of doctoral and postdoctoral dissertations. contact data: department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, nowy świat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (pawlakmi@ amu.edu.pl) paola vettorel is assistant professor in the department of foreign languages and literatures, university of verona, italy. her main research interests include elf and its implications for elt. her recent publications include: elf in wider networking: blogging practices (2014, mouton de gruyter); new frontiers in teaching and learning english (ed., 2015, cambridge scholars); “promoting awareness of englishes and elf in the english language classroom” (co-authored with l. lopriore, 2015, in: h. bowles & a. cogo (eds.), international perspectives on english as a lingua franca: pedagogical insights, palgrave/macmillan); and “weand elf-informed classroom practices: proposals from a pre-service teacher education programme in italy” (2016, journal of english as a lingua franca). contact data: university of verona, department of foreign languages and literatures, via lungadige di porta vittoria 41, 37129 verona, italy (paola.vettorel@univr.it)) 151 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (1). 2023. 151-178 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.23166 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt musical hearing and the acquisition of foreign-language intonation mateusz jekiel adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3906-7793 mjekiel@amu.edu.pl kamil malarski adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7826-7213 kamil.malarski@amu.edu.pl abstract the present study seeks to determine whether superior musical hearing is correlated with successful production of second language (l2) intonation patterns. fifty polish speakers of english at the university level were recorded before and after an extensive two-semester accent training course in english. participants were asked to read aloud a series of short dialogues containing different intonation patterns, complete two musical hearing tests measuring tone deafness and melody discrimination, and a survey regarding musical experience. we visually analyzed and assessed participants’ intonation by comparing their f0 contours with the model provided by their accent training teachers following tobi (tones and break indices) guidelines and compared the results with the musical hearing test scores and the survey responses. the results suggest that more accurate pitch perception can be related to more correct production of l2 intonation patterns as participants with superior musical ear produced more native-like speech contours after training, similar to those of their teachers. after dividing participants into four categories based on their musical hearing test scores and musical experience, we also observed that some students with better musical hearing test scores were able to produce more correct l2 intonation patterns. however, students with poor musical hearing test scores and no musical background also improved, suggesting mateusz jekiel, kamil malarski 152 that the acquisition of l2 intonation in a formal classroom setting can be successful regardless of one’s musical hearing skills. keywords: language and music; intonation; pitch perception; pronunciation learning 1. introduction the link between the abilities to produce and perceive speech and music, both unique to humans and universal across cultures, has been extensively studied over the years (see ott & jäncke, 2013; patel, 2008). superficially, spoken language and instrumental music appear to share a range of characteristic features: both have tone, melody and rhythm, both are organized temporally in syntactically-structured sequences of sounds, and both have a limited number of elements that can be used to form an unlimited number of hierarchically-structured signals (fenk-oczlon & fenk, 2009). the prevalent explanation for these similarities is that the processing of speech and music share common neural networks (schön et al., 2010). these developments have led to a series of studies attempting to assess possible transfers between these two domains, primarily focused on the relationship between musical skills and language skills. moreover, various research findings imply that musical hearing and musical experience can improve speech processing, including prosody, segments and syntax (jentschke & koelsch, 2009; schön et al., 2004). studies on musical skills and second language (l2) learning also suggest that the perception and production of foreign language sounds can be improved by musical ability (slevc & miyake, 2006) as well as musical expertise (chobert & besson, 2013). overall, these studies suggest that musical skills and language skills are strongly related and can potentially be employed in the process of second language learning and teaching. what some of the previous studies lack, however, is that learners’ musicality was not evaluated empirically, but rather self-reported through questionnaires. another major limitation has been testing the level of accent proficiency through imitation and shadowing tasks, which too often are not a reliable tool for eliciting the actual second-language accent output. in order to address such limitations, the present study explores the relationship between musical hearing and the acquisition of l2 intonation by polish advanced learners of english in a longitudinal context. the research aim is to determine whether superior musical hearing skills and musical experience are correlated with more successful production of l2 intonation patterns. musical hearing and the acquisition of foreign-language intonation 153 2. literature review 2.1. prosody in music and language while various associations between language and music have been researched through the years, prosody in speech and melody in music are arguably the two most similar aspects, as they both rely on the same acoustic parameters, such as fundamental frequency, amplitude, duration, and spectral characteristics (schön et al., 2004). one particular part of prosody to be investigated in this study is intonation, that is, the melody of speech resulting from pitch variation used to convey linguistic and pragmatic meaning (wells, 2014). a widely-discussed process suggesting the existence of shared mechanisms between speech and music is pitch perception. zatorre and baum (2012) argue that there are two different pitch processing systems functioning in the brain. the first type is “finegrained” and it is responsible for the accurate encoding of musical intervals, while the second one is “coarse-grained,” and allows for discriminating between different contours in both speech and music. contour information is also more perceptually salient and can be detected at an early stage by infants, suggesting that it is a more basic and innate process (chen et al., 2017). therefore, it is possible to assume that pitch perception in speech and music is related and can have an influence on the language learning process. superior perception of contours in music can affect the encoding of contours in speech as a result of common brain functions responsible for processing both of these auditory phenomena (bidelman & krishnan, 2009; wong et al., 2007). ott and jäncke (2013) showed that musically trained individuals outperform non-musicians in reaction time for auditory processing of different tonal signals. behroozmand et al. (2014) found that musicians with absolute pitch (i.e., the ability to label the pitch of a single musical note without the help of a reference sound) develop specialized left-hemisphere mechanisms for pitch processing, unlike musicians with relative pitch (i.e., the ability to discriminate the pitch of a sound after hearing a reference sound) or non-musicians. a series of studies on formal musical practice and tonal language speakers have revealed that musicians learning l2 mandarin are better at discriminating tone contours in l2 speech than non-musicians (marie et al., 2010; wong et al., 2007). this can be related to the fact that first language (l1) mandarin speakers develop absolute pitch recognition skills in the course of their early language acquisition more often than speakers of non-tone languages (deutsch, 2002). zatorre and baum (2012) argue that not only can musicians be better at encoding tones in speech, but also that tone-language speakers are more accurate in identifying musical tones, suggesting the existence of overlapping cognitive and neural mechanisms. mateusz jekiel, kamil malarski 154 2.2. musical hearing and second language intonation although a number of articles in popular science discuss the idea of a “musical ear” as an asset in l2 learning, there is no single concept that would encompass an individual’s musicality as a whole. indeed, there are a number of aspects of music that can be related to language learning. first, musical aptitude can be regarded as a talent based on innate motoric and cognitive predispositions and is strongly linked to musical hearing skills, including melodic memory and pitch perception, combined with skills in performing instrumental music or singing (schön et al., 2004). secondly, musical experience is related to the perception and production of music through musical training and practice and is independent of musical aptitude (pastuszek-lipińska, 2008). in other words, one might have exceptional musical aptitude without performing music, or be a practicing musician in spite of their lack of talent. in this light, musical ability can be regarded as a combination of musical aptitude and musical experience and is expressed in how well an individual can perform music due to their aptitude and/or experience. musical expertise, in turn, is a broad concept that can be used to characterize an expert in music performance and/or music theory. both concepts may prove to be an asset for learners acquiring l2 english intonation; therefore, both will be taken into account in the present study. there are a number of studies confirming the relationship between the processing of pitch in language and music, and its potential impact on listening skills in language learning. schön et al. (2004) showed that adult professional musicians are more accurate in processing small changes in f0 in both music and language than non-musicians, with shorter onset latency of the brain waves associated with f0 manipulations. based on these results, they argued that extensive musical training can affect the perception of pitch contour in both domains. follow-up studies by magne et al. (2006), and moreno and besson (2006) corroborated these results, revealing that young musicians outperform non-musicians in detecting pitch violations in speech. for adult listeners, dankovicová et al. (2007) also found a relationship between musical hearing skills and intonation discrimination among university students of english. finally, a related study by patel et al. (2005) confirmed that tone-deaf listeners (i.e., not being able to label the difference between two tones in terms of pitch) have difficulties in discriminating intonation contours in speech. the above-mentioned studies prove that finer musical pitch perception can relate to more accurate identification of intonation patterns in speech. if pitch perception in music is indeed related to the perception of speech in one’s l1, a similar relationship should be found for the perception of l2 speech. wong et al. (2007) set out to determine this link and observed that musical experience musical hearing and the acquisition of foreign-language intonation 155 can shape human brainstem encoding of pitch patterns in speech. this was confirmed in a subsequent study by wong and perrachione (2007), revealing the relationship between former musical experience and adult learners’ identification of non-native pitch patterns. a similar study by alexander et al. (2005) investigated the discrimination of lexical tones in mandarin chinese by adult english-speaking musicians and non-musicians, providing more evidence for greater accuracy in l2 pitch perception and musical experience. on the other hand, kurt et al. (2014) investigated the effects of explicit instruction and musical experience on the perception of l2 english intonation patterns among international students of english with different l1s (mandarin, japanese, spanish, and arabic). while the effect of explicit training was found, there was no apparent effect of musical familiarity on the correct identification of l2 intonation patterns. finally, intartaglia et al. (2017) compared the listening skills of adult native speakers of english with non-native musicians and non-musicians by recording their subcortical electrophysiological responses. the results of native speakers and non-native musicians were comparable, while non-native non-musicians scored lower, suggesting that musical experience can lead to enhanced neural encoding of acoustic information and compensate for the lack of language experience. although these studies show that musicians can have an advantage when performing analytic listening tasks in l2, they do not explain whether musical experience can help in the acquisition of l2 pronunciation. while most former studies have focused on the relationship between pitch perception in music and l2 listening skills, there is still a scarcity of research examining the function of pitch perception in l2 speech production. slevc and miyake (2006) found that musical hearing skills are correlated with l2 production skills among japanese adult learners of english. in milovanov et al. (2010), finnish adult students of english with higher scores in seashore measures of musical talents (seashore et al., 1960) produced fewer errors in a speech shadowing task pronouncing challenging english phonemes (e.g., /ʒ/, /ɜː/, /ð/). pastuszeklipińska (2008) reported that polish learners of english with formal music education produced fewer errors than non-musicians in a speech shadowing task, although both groups performed at a similar level in terms of intonation. in a related study by zybert and stępień (2009), polish adult learners of english who scored better in edwin gordon’s intermediate measure of music audiation test also received higher scores from a native speaker in a speech shadowing task focused on intonation, word stress, and overall pronunciation. one limitation of the above studies stems from the use of speech shadowing tasks, in which participants listen to and repeat isolated words or phrases and, consequently, are restricted to speech imitation and may not necessarily represent learners’ actual pronunciation skills (dufour & nguyen, 2013; mitterer mateusz jekiel, kamil malarski 156 & müsseler, 2013). another limitation is related to pronunciation assessment. instead of using speech analysis software to conduct a more objective assessment, most empirical investigations rely on impressionistic judgements of speech. finally, as most previous studies have compared pronunciation skills of professional musicians to non-musicians, language learners without formal music education but with good musical hearing are potentially overlooked in such studies (zarate et al., 2012). 2.3. intonation in the english as a foreign language (efl) classroom mastering discourse intonation (i.e., the segmenting and topic-structuring function of pitch) in the efl classroom is one of the most difficult linguistic skills to teach and learn effectively (roach, 2000) and efl learners have been frequently reported to produce errors in the realization of various intonation patterns (willems, 1982). however, it is now agreed that intonation is both teachable and learnable, and that it plays an important role in communication, especially in international settings (aronsson, 2014). it is well known (e.g., pijper, 1983; willems, 1982) that general british (gb) uses considerably large pitch movements (octave up or down), and most gb intonation patterns start at the mid-level (nooteboom, 1997), rather than at the bottom level, posing considerable difficulties for non-native speakers whose l1 does not incorporate pitch movements to such an extent. moreover, learners’ intonation is frequently influenced by prosodic patterns in their l1 (mennen, 2004). studies have shown that l2 learners have problems with selecting appropriate intonation contours (he et al., 2012), often relying on their native tones instead (gut, 2009). grabe and karpinski (2003) was the first study to provide a prosodically annotated and phonetically descriptive corpus of polish and english speech data. the analysis confirmed the existence of language-specific properties in intonation as english and polish speakers produced different nuclear accent types and distributed them differently. despite many languages sharing a lot of commonalities in their use of intonation, or prosodic universals, the target classroom l2 pronunciation competences, especially at the proficient level, go beyond these universals. those language-specific modes of intonation are usually perceived as difficult to teach and learn and, consequently, are often avoided by teachers in the efl classroom (demirezen, 2009). while researchers agree that prosody should be formally taught in the efl classroom (chapman, 2007), teachers find many aspects of intonation difficult, due to a lack of appropriate materials (derwing, 2008). nevertheless, practicing intonation and other suprasegmental features can have a significant effect on spoken proficiency and comprehensibility (kang, 2013). in our study, we investigate the acquisition of english l2 intonation in a longitudinal musical hearing and the acquisition of foreign-language intonation 157 context, with a specific focus on how musical hearing and musical experience may influence this process. 3. the present study while the majority of similar studies have focused on imitation tasks in testing pronunciation and treated self-reports as a measure of the level of musical abilities to determine the link between pitch perception in music and speech, the primary goal of this study is to investigate the relationship between music perception and the production of intonation patterns by polish advanced learners of english before and after an accent training course. in our study, we try to assess whether musical hearing, as measured by three different tests, translates into better production of l2 intonation patterns after training. indirectly, we also attempt to measure the extent to which intonation is learnable and teachable by comparing the recorded patterns before and after accent training. our research questions are as follows: 1) are participants able to produce more correct intonation patterns after training? 2) do participants who scored better on the musical hearing tests also produce more correct intonation patterns after training? 3) do participants with musical experience produce more correct intonation patterns after training, regardless of their musical hearing test results? 4. method 4.1. participants our participants were 50 polish university students (42 females, 8 males)1 of english between the ages of 19 and 21 (m = 20.14, sd = .40) who spoke with standard polish intonation in their l1. they were learning english at the advanced level of proficiency, between b2 and c1 within the common european framework of reference (council of europe, 2001), and had overall good results in their secondary school exit exams in english (m = 87.75, sd = 6.56). in order to confirm their language proficiency, we conducted the lexical test for advanced learners of english (lextale) by lemhöfer and broersma (2012), which aims to assess general l2 english proficiency. the test results also confirmed their efl proficiency between b2 and c1 (m = 74.48%, sd = 8.93). none of the 1 language majors in poland are commonly more popular among female than male applicants. mateusz jekiel, kamil malarski 158 participants had reported having formal accent training in their english classes at previous stages of their education, nor did any of them have medically documented speech or hearing impairments. 4.2. english accent training course and english phonetics and phonology course as part of their curriculum, all participants took an obligatory english accent training course, which comprised segmental phonetics (i.e., vowels and consonants of english) and suprasegmental phonetics (i.e., intonation, rhythm, syllable stress and sentence stress). all students attended the course twice a week during the first two semesters (90 hours of class work). the primary objective of the accent training course is to teach the students to speak english with an accent that is as native-like as possible. all participants aimed for a general british pronunciation, that is, the accent spoken in the south of england and the english pronunciation model which is most commonly used in the polish primary and secondary education system (weckwerth et al., 2006).2 the course focused on the pronunciation of gb vowels and consonants, word stress, weak forms, connected speech processes, and intonation. for the purpose of the study, the participants were divided into four different groups and were taught by four different accent training teachers; that is, academic instructors specializing in teaching english pronunciation to polish learners of english. all teachers were female polish speakers of english with near-native gb accent and over 20 years of experience in accent training and l2 research. the primary reason for relying on polish instructors instead of native speakers of english is that the former have the necessary first-hand experience and insight allowing them to identify the differences between polish and english pronunciation, which in turn can be used to help the learners avoid potential errors. phonetic instruction during both academic semesters was holistic; the focal areas were taught not in isolation, but within the framework of connected speech phenomena of coarticulation, connected speech processes, stress and intonation. teaching methods included in-class drills and repetitions. student assessment was performed via weekly in-class drama performance or news-reading and monthly recordings based on authentic materials. during the accent training course, all participants were familiarized with english intonation patterns and practiced their usage in different contexts, usually through dialogue reading and drama performance. all participants also attended a two-semester practical course in english phonetics and phonology, which supplemented the accent training course by raising 2 students are offered a choice between the general american and the general british accent training course. musical hearing and the acquisition of foreign-language intonation 159 phonological awareness and making students aware of how english speech sounds are produced and transcribed. all students attended the course once a week during their first two semesters (45 hours of class work). course topics included articulatory and acoustic phonetics, phonetic transcription, english phonemes and allophones, word stress, connected speech processes, and intonation. assessment relied on regular weekly quizzes, as well as two mid-semester and two end-semester tests. 4.3. data collection 4.3.1. speech production all participants took part in two recording sessions. the first one took place in the first week of their studies, before they received formal instruction in english phonetics and phonology and accent training, both of which were included in their course of study. the second recording session took place at the end of the second semester, allowing insight into participants’ progress. both recording sessions consisted of a spontaneous conversation in english, followed by reading aloud a set of four short dialogues. the dialogues were adapted from wells (2014) and were meant to elicit as many different intonation contours as possible (see appendix for more details). the english part of the interview was preceded by a short spontaneous conversation in polish to verify any possible speech impediments or dialectal variation in their l1, as polish intonation can differ in certain regions and could influence the results of our study (gussmann, 2007). table 1 summarizes the sentences from the adapted dialogues included in the analyses. it also presents the target intonation contours associated with the sentences, written down in the tobi convention for transcribing intonation; then it provides the target intonation contour in the nucleus; and in the last column, it includes the function of that intonational phrase (statement, command, tag question etc.). the intonation patterns were verified on the basis of recordings of the four accent training teachers who had taught the participants, as well as a recording of a native speaker representing the target accent. all teachers were consistent in their production. if two out of four teachers produced a different intonation pattern, we considered it as an acceptable alternative answer (hence two options for yes/no questions). a total of 1600 tokens were collected (800 before training and 800 after training). dialogues were displayed in large black font against white background on a computer screen, one dialogue at a time. a short instruction explaining the task preceded the actual dialogues. the participants were asked to read each dialogue silently and then read each one aloud, trying to sound as natural as possible for the given context. the recordings were obtained in a sound-treated mateusz jekiel, kamil malarski 160 booth using a studio microphone and speechrecorder software (draxler & jänsch, 2019). the tokens were recorded in mono 44.1 khz and 16-bit resolution. table 1 sentences used in data analysis sentence tobi nucleus function you will have to check that. h*l-l% high fall statement i’m going for a jog in the park. let me have some. h*l-l% high fall command hands off my drink! you’re broke again, aren’t you? h*l-l% high fall tag question (certainty)so the match is on sunday, isn’t it? what are you drinking? h*l-l% high fall wh-question how did you like the football match yesterday? shall i pay for the cleaning? l*h-h% h*h-h% low rise high rise yes/no questiondid you finish the essay? actually, i don’t really like football. h*l-h% fall-rise attitude word actually, let’s talk about your homework. i only want to taste it... h*l-h% fall-rise non-finality i’ve finished the introduction... neat! l+h*l-l% rise-fall strong approval you’d better! 4.3.2. musical hearing and musical experience at the end of the first recording session, participants were asked to complete two online musical hearing tests (mandell, 2009) focusing on tone deafness and melody discrimination. the tests measure important indicators of musical hearing skills and rely on similar rules to other musical hearing tests (see wallentin et al., 2010). both tests were conducted in a separate room, using a laptop connected to a pair of closed-back headphones akg k240 mkii with audio frequency bandwidth 15-25000 hz. each participant completed the tests in isolation. the first test was the adaptive pitch test, measuring tone deafness and pitch perception, in which participants listened to a series of two tones (300 ms each, with a 100 ms silence between the first and the second tone) and were asked to determine whether the second tone in each pair was higher or lower than the first one by pressing the up or down arrow on the keyboard, respectively. participants could use the spacebar to replay the tones. the next pair was played immediately after providing the answer for the previous pair. the test duration was circa one minute. the test was adaptive, so the number of played tokens varied and relied on the correct answers. the pitch difference between the first two sounds was 96 hz. after providing three correct responses in a row, the pitch difference was halved from the previous trial to 48 hz, progressing to the next, more difficult level. after providing an incorrect response, the pitch difference would regress to the previous, easier level. the tones in musical hearing and the acquisition of foreign-language intonation 161 the test oscillated within the range of 50-500 hz. the test results, expressed in hertz (hz), indicate the accuracy of differentiating between two tones. the data from 11.761 subjects available on the test’s website show the normal distribution of data, with the mean result of 3.98 hz. table 2 provides the interpretation of the test scores. table 2 interpretation of the adaptive pitch test results result performance < .75 hz < 1.5 hz < 6 hz < 12 hz > 16 hz exceptional very good normal low-normal below normal the second test was the tonedeaf test, measuring melody discrimination and melodic memory. its utility in investigating pitch discrimination and musical ability has been verified by palomar-garcía et al. (2020) and ning (2020). each participant listened to 36 pairs of short (2-8 seconds each, with a 2-second interstimulus interval) instrumental melodies representing various musical styles and had to decide whether the melodies were the same or different by clicking on the corresponding button on the screen. no repetition was possible in this test. each pair of melodies used different sonorities (e.g., piano, keyboard, string instruments, wind instruments) in order to reduce potential bias due to specific instrument training. each pair also varied from one another in terms of natural or synthesized sounds, duration, intensity, timbre, and number of tones. 18 pairs were identical, while the other 18 pairs differed in the pitch of one note, which occurred in one of the last ten tones of the melody and was modified by up to 11 semitones. out of the 18 pairs that were different, half had the different note within the scale of the melody, while the other half had the different note outside of the scale of the melody. the test was designed to assess melodic memory and locate neuroanatomical correlates of tone-deafness (congenital amusia). the test takes five minutes to complete and the results are expressed in percentages, indicating the percent of correctly identified pairs. the data from 61.036 subjects available on the test’s website follow a normal distribution, with the mean result of 73.8% (sd = 9.99). table 3 provides the interpretation of the test scores. table 3 interpretation of the tonedeaf test results result performance > 90% > 80% > 70% > 60% < 55% exceptional very good normal low-normal below normal mateusz jekiel, kamil malarski 162 after the musical hearing tests, we also asked our participants to complete a survey (in polish) to assess their musical experience. the questionnaire comprised the following questions: did you go to music school? if yes, when and for how long? can you play a musical instrument? if yes, what kind of instrument(s) can you play and how long have you been playing? can you sing? if yes, how often do you sing? 4.4. data analysis intonational phrases (ips) summarized in table 1 were extracted from the recordings and analyzed by both authors who are trained phoneticians and active accent training teachers. ips were transcribed, labeled and analyzed acoustically in praat (boersma & weenink, 2022). we labeled the pitch accents and boundary tones using the tobi convention (beckman & elam, 1997; brugos et al., 2006); pitch measurements were inspected in praat using the program’s algorithm for fundamental frequency (f0) tracking with pitch floor set to 75 hz and pitch ceiling set at 600 hz. manual corrections were performed for signal failures, such as octave jumps or pitch halvings. to determine the correct intonation contour, we observed the difference in f0 between the pitch accent and the boundary tone. following the established model answers by the teachers and the native speaker, we marked h*l-l% (high fall) as correct patterns for statements, commands, tag questions, and wh-questions; l*h-h% (low rise) or h*h-h% (high rise) for yes/no questions; h*l-h% (fall rise) for attitude words and expressions of non-finality; l+h*l-l% (rise-fall) for strong approval. each participant could score a point for each correct intonation pattern (two points per function), up to a total of 16 points from one recording session. figure 1 presents a model ip produced by the teacher, an incorrect ip produced by one participant before training, and a correct ip produced by the same participant after training. figure 1 example wh-question produced by the three speakers: model pattern produced by the teacher (left); incorrect pattern produced by one student before training (mid); correct pattern produced by the same student after training (right) a one-tailed t-test for two dependent means was conducted to investigate participants’ progress in acquiring intonation scores before and after training, followed by a linear multiple regression to predict the percentage of correct intonation musical hearing and the acquisition of foreign-language intonation 163 patterns produced by the participants before and after training, with gender, lextale result, adaptive pitch test score, tonedeaf test score, and musical experience as independent variables. finally, a two-way anova was conducted to examine the effect of musical hearing test scores and musical experience on the production of correct intonation scores before and after training. 5. results this section begins with the presentation of intonation scores before and after training, followed by musical hearing test results and participants’ musical experience survey responses. next, we present the effects of phonetic training, musical hearing, and musical experience on intonation scores. 5.1. intonation scores before and after training figure 2 shows an observable improvement in intonation scores for 50 participants after the two-semester accent training course. a one-tailed t-test for two dependent means showed a statistically significant difference, t(49) = 10.02, p < .001 with 95% ci [-inf, .15]. the mean result was 49.0% before training (sd = .13) and 66.8% after training (sd = .15). figure 2 intonation scores before and after training figure 3 shows the overall scores for h*l-l% (high fall) in commands, statements, tag questions, and wh-questions. while statements and commands were both relatively easy to produce for the participants both before (94% and 87%, respectively) and after the training (99% and 95%, respectively), the gains mateusz jekiel, kamil malarski 164 were more pronounced across tag questions (41% before and 66% after) and wh-questions (55% before and 76% after). the most frequent incorrect pattern for these two functions was l*h-h% (low rise) or h*h-h% (high rise). figure 3 intonation scores before and after training for h*l-l% (high fall) in commands (cm), statements (st), tag questions (tq), and wh-questions (wh) figure 4 intonation scores before and after training for the h*l-h% (fall-rise) in attitude words (aw) and non-finality (nf), l+h*l-l% (rise-fall) in strong approval (sa), and l*h-h% (low rise) or h*h-h% (high rise) in yes/no questions (yn) figure 4 shows the overall scores for h*l-h% (fall rise) in attitude words and expressions of non-finality; l+h*l-l% (rise-fall) for strong approval; and l*h-h% (low rise) or h*h-h% (high rise) in yes/no questions. the most difficult pattern for participants before training was h*l-h% in non-finality and attitude words (6% and 19%, respectively), although they managed to make a noticeable progress musical hearing and the acquisition of foreign-language intonation 165 across both functions (23% and 52%, respectively). the second most difficult pattern was l+h*l-l% for strong approval (23% before and 42% after). out of the following patterns, the use of l*h-h% or h*h-h% for yes/no questions was the least difficult for students, even less difficult than the use of h*l-l% for tag questions or wh-questions (67% before and 81% after). the most frequent incorrect pattern for these functions was h*l-l% (high fall) or l*l-l% (low fall). 5.2. musical hearing tests figure 5 shows the adaptive pitch test results, which reveal how precisely participants could differentiate two tones in hertz values. the mean result was 16.05 hz (se = 2.24). participants with musical experience had an average score of 11.08 hz, while participants without any musical experience had an average score of 18.84 hz. the two highest results were scored by participants with formal music education and 12 years of musical experience (1 hz), while the two weakest results were scored by participants without any musical experience (60 hz). figure 5 adaptive pitch test results figure 6 displays the tonedeaf test results, which express the percentage of correctly identified melodic tokens. the mean result was 68% (se = 1.35). the mean score is similar to the mean score found on the test’s website (73.9%) and is comparable to the mean scores found in ning (2020) for beginner and advanced l2 speakers of mandarin (63.88% and 74.21%, respectively). participants with musical experience had an average score of 72%, while participants without any musical experience had an average score of 65.7%. the highest result was scored by a participant with formal music education and 12 years of musical experience (83%), while the weakest result was scored by a participant without any musical experience (44%). mateusz jekiel, kamil malarski 166 figure 6 tonedeaf test results 5.3. musical experience table 4 summarizes the musical experience of our participants that we included as a fixed effect in the linear multiple regression analysis. according to the musical experience survey completed by the participants, 18 out of 50 had some musical experience. four participants had graduated from music school (first degree); two of them had played a musical instrument for six years, the other two for twelve years. three participants had played a musical instrument for seven to nine years without any formal music education. six participants had practiced singing for ten to twelve years without any formal music training. finally, three participants had played a musical instrument and had practiced singing for four to six years, and two participants had done the same for ten to twelve years. participants who admitted that they had played a musical instrument or had sung only for a brief episode in their former years (i.e., less than a year) were treated in the analysis as participants with no musical experience. table 4 number of participants with formal music education and musical experience years music education playing a musical instrument (no music education) singing (no music education) playing a musical instrument and singing (no music education) 10-12 2 6 2 7-9 – 3 4-6 2 3 5.4. fixed effects on intonation scores before and after training a linear multiple regression was performed to predict the percentage of correct intonation patterns produced by the participants before the training, based on musical hearing and the acquisition of foreign-language intonation 167 the following independent variables: gender, lextale result, adaptive pitch test score, tonedeaf test score, and musical experience. the regression equation was significant (f(5,44) = 2.765, p < .029) with an r2 of .15). the results for individual independent variables are summarized in table 5 and show that the only significant estimate was found across lextale results (p = .035), suggesting that a general l2 proficiency might be an indicator in the production of correct intonation patterns. we found no significant results for musical hearing or musical experience at this stage. no multicollinearity between the independent variables in the vif-scores was uncovered. table 5 summary of fixed effects on intonation scores before training estimate se z p vif intercept .317 .191 -1.656 .105 – gender (m) .098 .051 1.923 .061 1.218 lextale .004 .002 2.172 .035 1.018 adaptive pitch test -.002 .001 -1.317 .195 1.318 tonedeaf test -.002 .002 -.878 .385 1.234 musical experience -.003 .000 -.805 .425 1.337 note. n = 50, f(5,44) = 2.765, p < .029, r2 = .15, se = standard error, vif = variance inflation factor table 6 summary of fixed effects on intonation scores after training estimate se z p vif intercept .655 .235 2.793 .008 – gender (m) .099 .062 1.587 .119 1.219 lextale .002 .002 1.149 .256 1.018 adaptive pitch test -.003 .001 -1.827 .074 1.318 tonedeaf test -.002 .002 -.999 .323 1.234 musical experience .000 .005 .166 .869 1.337 note. n = 50, f(5,44) = 1.794, p = .134, r2 = .07, se = standard error, vif = variance inflation factor another linear multiple regression statistics was run to predict the increase in correct intonation patterns produced by the participants after the training, based on the same independent variables as in the previous analysis. the results for individual independent variables are summarized in table 6 and show adaptive pitch test results (p = .074) as significant predictors of intonation score after training. it is important to note that in the case of the adaptive pitch test scores, the estimate is negative as higher scores on the test indicate weaker discrimination of pitch in music. therefore, participants who could discriminate between two tones which were more similar to each other in their pitch in the test also produced more correct intonation contours, similar to their teachers. there were no significant results for other factors, suggesting that learners’ gender, lexical proficiency or musical experience are not related to the acquisition of l2 intonation in an mateusz jekiel, kamil malarski 168 advanced efl classroom setting. we also reported no multicollinearity between the independent variables in the vif-scores. since a traditional multiple linear regression model may not have uncovered all the underlying relations between the acquisition of near-native l2 english intonation and musical hearing or musical experience, we investigated systematically for chances of naturally good musical hearing skills or musical experience to contribute to the production of l2 intonation. based on the results of the musical hearing tests and the musical experience survey, we categorized our participants into four types of l2 learners in a two-by-two matrix: 1) participants with good musical hearing test scores (i.e., having a result below 6 hz in the adaptive pitch test and/or above 70% in the tonedeaf test) and musical experience (i.e., singing and/or playing a musical instrument); 2) participants with good musical hearing test scores without musical experience; 3) participants with poor musical hearing test scores but with musical experience; and 4) participants with poor musical hearing test scores and without musical experience. the number of participants and their average results before and after training are provided in table 7. table 7 division of participants into musicians and non-musicians with good or poor musical hearing test scores (average intonation scores before (bt) and after training (at) provided in brackets) musical experience total musicians non-musicians musical hearing test scores good 12 (.43 bt, .66 at) 13 (.53 bt, .71 at) 25 (.48 bt, .68 at) poor 6 (.48 bt, .65 at) 19 (.50 bt, .64 at) 25 (.49 bt, .64 at) total 18 (.44 bt, .66 at) 32 (.51 bt, .67 at) 50 (.49 bt, .66 at) a two-way anova was run on the sample of 50 participants to examine the effect of musical hearing test scores and musical experience on the production of correct intonation scores before training. residuals followed a normal distribution (α = .05, p = .07) without outliers (k = 1.5). although we found no significant interaction between the effects (f(1, 46) = .33, p = .74), we observed that participants without musical experience were able to achieve higher results than active musicians before training (f(1, 46) = 3.04, p = .08). there was no significant difference between the 25 participants who scored higher and lower on the musical hearing tests (f(1, 46) = .10, p = .74). when observing the distribution of the results in figure 7, we can see that non-musicians with good musical hearing test scores were able to achieve the highest scores before training. interestingly, some participants with musical experience and good musical hearing test results scored lower than participants with poor musical hearing test scores or no musical experience. musical hearing and the acquisition of foreign-language intonation 169 figure 7 intonation scores before training by learner type we conducted a similar analysis on the same sample of 50 participants to examine the effect of musical hearing test scores and musical experience on the production of correct intonation scores after the training. residuals followed a normal distribution (α = .05, p = .02) without outliers (k = 1.5). we found no significant interaction between the effects (f(1, 46) = .62, p = .43) and there was no significant difference in the intonation scores between participants with good and poor musical hearing test scores (f(1, 46) = .06, p = .79) or between participants with and without musical experience (f(1, 46) = .86, p = .35). by observing the distribution of the results in figure 8, we were able to determine that some non-musicians with good musical hearing test results were able to achieve higher intonation scores after training. by comparing these results with the intonation scores before training by learner type, we can see that the mean results for all learner types improved, but most of the participants with good musical hearing test scores produced more correct intonation patterns after training. these results suggest that participants with a good musical ear but no musical experience could have been positively stimulated during the accent training course and used their natural talent to their advantage in the acquisition of l2 intonation patterns. figure 8 intonation scores after training by learner type mateusz jekiel, kamil malarski 170 6. discussion the results of the study are threefold. our first research question asked whether polish advanced learners of english were able to produce more native-like intonation patterns after training. we found a noticeable improvement in the production of correct gb intonational phrases after two academic semesters of an accent training course, combined with an english phonetics and phonology course. the courses provided the participants with practical pronunciation skills and phonetic awareness in order to acquire the specific features of the gb accent, and, consequently, produce similar intonational phrases to those of their accent training teachers. this finding shows that l2 intonation is both learnable (participants significantly improved their scores over time) and teachable (participants replicated their teachers’ pronunciation) to a high level of proficiency in a formal learning environment. interestingly, we also observed that not all intonational phrases were acquired with the same rate of success. the most difficult intonation patterns were the fall-rise, expressing non-finality, and the rise-fall, used for strong approvals. as these intonation patterns are relatively complex for l2 learners of english and not typically found in polish speech, they are rarely used by polish learners of english without formal accent training. at the same time, participants made a noticeable progress in wh-questions and tag questions. these results show that a change from a rising tone, used commonly in polish questions (mikoś, 1976), to the more typical falling pattern found in gb can be achieved by advanced learners of english after two semesters of formal accent training. our second research question considered participants who scored better in the musical hearing tests and whether they produced more correct intonation patterns after training. we found that participants who scored better in the adaptive pitch test also produced more correct intonation patterns after training. that said, we found no significant relationship between participants’ intonation scores and the tonedeaf test results. it should be noted that the results of both tests may differ from other musical hearing tests conducted on a wider population (see e.g., barbaroux et al., 2020 for french non-musicians) as they usually differ across cultures and sample sizes. the tests used in this study were also recently used in other studies (ning, 2020; palomar-garcía et al., 2020), where vietnamese learners of mandarin scored comparably to the polish speakers comprising our sample. both of these studies have confirmed the validity of the tests and their relevance for studying the relationship between musical hearing and l2 language processing. the tests were used because their design aligned with the aims of this study, that is, researching the perception of tones and contrasting these cognitive skills with the ability of producing prosodic features in a second language. while the results of this study show that it is still musical hearing and the acquisition of foreign-language intonation 171 possible for a learner with poor musical hearing test scores to produce nativelike intonation contours after training, participants who scored higher in the adaptive pitch test were able to correctly produce more of them. this finding reveals that being a good listener can be an asset in the production of more native-like l2 intonation patterns. alternatively, it is possible to interpret these results as an indication that recognizing pitch change in the adaptive pitch test is important for students practicing english intonation in the classroom, where rises and falls will be frequently used terms (see zybert & stępień, 2009). our final research question inquired whether participants with musical experience produced more correct intonation patterns after training, regardless of their musical hearing test results. we did not find any significant relationship between participants’ musical experience and more accurate production of l2 intonation. unlike former studies suggesting a strong link between musical practice and language skills (e.g., chobert & besson, 2013; pastuszek-lipińska, 2008), this result implies that musical background might not play a key role during a formal accent training course. alternatively, it might suggest that the accent training course combined with a practical phonetics and phonology course could help all learners acquire l2 intonation and compensate for the lack of former musical practice. however, this does not negate the fact that superior pitch perception, even without formal music education, can be related to more accurate production of l2 intonation patterns. in regard to long-term language acquisition – especially nowadays, when students are exposed to a great deal of audio and video material in native-spoken english – it is difficult to discern a single, overriding factor responsible for facilitating the acquisition of certain phonetic skills in learners. the results of our study suggest that formal phonetic instruction and practice, combined with finer pitch perception, can raise the success rate for learning foreign language intonation contours. in this study, we mentioned only the contours (i.e., falling tones, rising tones, etc.), but we realize that the acoustic signal in suprasegmental phonology involves not just f0, but also pitch register, pitch span, rhythm, etc. thus, it would be interesting to examine these parameters in future research. this study provides tentative evidence for how musical hearing can correlate to the acquisition of l2 intonation, using similar methodology to previous works by the authors investigating l2 vowel production (jekiel & malarski, 2021) and l2 rhythm (jekiel, 2022). the current results refer to a rather narrow context of learning intonation in l2 english by polish learners – whether they are applicable to other language pairs requires further research. despite the efforts put into designing a careful methodology and its longitudinal nature, there were several factors this study did not control for. first, the participants learning the gb accent were instructed by four different teachers. mateusz jekiel, kamil malarski 172 although the curriculum was the same for all groups, the impact of the individual differences in teaching styles the teachers may have presented could have been relatively strong. another limitation of our study is the lack of control for motivation and other related variables, such as grit or general talent for language learning, apart from the musical context. these variables are widely discussed in the field of second language learning and teaching, and their role may have proven very interesting in discussing the results. finally, the results are based on the data obtained from two recording sessions. an additional recording session after another academic year could have determined whether the gains were retained over time and point to the right direction showing whether the best-performing participants would have still been high-scoring in the delayed post-test. 7. conclusions the present study has demonstrated that superior musical hearing is correlated with more accurate production of l2 intonation patterns. fifty polish advanced learners of english were recorded reading a series of dialogues focusing on different intonational phrases before and after a two-semester accent training course, supplemented with an english phonetics and phonology course. the participants also completed two musical hearing tests assessing pitch perception and melody discrimination, and a musical experience survey. after comparing the participants’ intonation patterns with the model provided by their accent training teachers, we compared their intonation scores with the musical hearing test results and survey responses. we found that superior pitch perception can be related to more native-like l2 intonation as participants with higher scores in the adaptive pitch test also produced more accurate intonation contours, similar to those of their teachers. although we observed that students with higher musical hearing test scores produced more correct l2 intonation patterns, students with poor musical hearing test scores and no musical experience also improved, suggesting that accent training in a formal classroom setting can lead to successful acquisition of l2 intonation regardless of students’ musical hearing skills. acknowledgements this research was supported by the national science center in poland, grant 2014/ 15/n/hs2/03865. principal investigator: mateusz jekiel. recipient: adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland. musical hearing and the acquisition of foreign-language intonation 173 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(2009). musical intelligence and foreign language learning. research in language, 7, 99-111. https://doi.org/10.2478/v10015-0 09-0007-4 mateusz jekiel, kamil malarski 178 appendix dialogues presented to participants (based on wells, 2014) dialogue 1 a: what are your plans? are you going to the concert tonight? b: well, not really. i’m going for a jog in the park. a: really? it’ll rain in a minute! b: i don’t think so. look, there’s still some sun out there. but i’d better take my coat. a: you’d better. dialogue 2 a: what are you drinking? b: coffee. a: neat! let me have some. b: hands off my drink! a: i only want to taste it… b: you’re broke again, aren’t you? a: don’t worry, i’ll have some money soon. b: in that case, here you go. dialogue 3 a: hello, sir. how can i help you? would you like another beer? b: thanks. the match is on saturday, isn’t it? (the customer isn’t sure) a: no, i think it was pushed a day ahead. b: oh no, so the match is on sunday, isn’t it? (the customer is now sure) a: you will have to check that. b: how did you like the football match yesterday? a: actually, i don’t really watch football. dialogue 4 a: john! this is your frog, isn’t it? b: it’s not a frog. it’s a toad. a: you know where i found it, don’t you? b: oh no, was it in the pocket of your jacket again? is the jacket all right? a: i’ve checked it and it’s okay. it’s a run-of-the-mill jacket anyway. b: shall i pay for the cleaning? a: actually, let’s talk about your homework. did you finish the essay? b: i’ve finished the introduction… 189 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (2). 189-208 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl cognate facilitation effects in trilingual word recognition weronika szubko-sitarek university of ód , poland weronikaszubko@uni.lodz.pl abstract research on bilingual word recognition suggests that lexical access is nonselective with respect to language, i.e., that word representations of both languages become active during recognition. one piece of evidence supporting nonselective access is that bilinguals recognize cognates (words that are identical or similar in form and meaning in two or more languages) faster than noncognates. in fact, any difference between how cognates and ‘monolingual’ words are processed by multilinguals would indicate that the other, currently irrelevant language must have played a role as well, at least as long as the two groups of words are comparable with respect to all dimensions other than language membership. the aim of the present paper is to report on two visual perceptual experiments conducted within the lexical decision task paradigm whose aim was to test the assumptions concerning the special position of cognates (the cognate facilitation effect, cf. dijkstra, 2005) within a trilingual mind and to answer the question whether trilinguals rely upon their second language lexical knowledge when recognizing l3 words. the results of the experiments attest to simultaneous activation and parallel processing as well as interaction among all the three languages. at the same time, they point to the fact that cross-linguistic lexical access and the source and strength of transfer may be constrained by variables such task demands. keywords: multilingual mental lexicon, nonselective lexical access, cognates processing weronika szubko-sitarek 190 nonselective lexical access and the cognate effect the majority of empirical evidence gathered in psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies seem to support the contention that during bilingual lexical access, even if the two languages are indeed represented differently, both are activated, although perhaps to different degrees (cf. de bot, lowie, & verspoor, 2007; dijkstra, 2007). according to the bia+ model (dijkstra & van heuven, 2002a), the visual presentation of a word to a bilingual person leads to parallel activation of orthographic input representations both in the native language (l1) and in the second language (l2). these representations then activate associated semantic and phonological representations, leading to a complex interaction (or resonance process; dijkstra & van heuven, 2002a, p. 183) between codes from which the lexical candidate corresponding to the input word emerges and is recognized. in recent years, more and more studies (cf. de bot et al., 2007; lemhöfer et al., 2008) have reported evidence in support of language nonselective access with respect to form (orthographic and phonological) as well as semantic representations. many studies conducted to prove the nonselective access perspective used orthographic neighbours as stimulus materials. an orthographic neighbour is “any word differing by a single letter from the target word with respect to length and letter position” (dijkstra, 2005, p. 187). it has been confirmed that in monolingual word recognition many possible words initially become active on the presentation of a letter string, and the reader is usually not aware of them; only the word that is eventually recognized becomes available to awareness. similarly, empirical studies show that neighbours from both the same and the other language are activated during the presentation of a target word. this provides evidence that, with respect to orthographic codes, the lexicon of bilinguals is integrated and nonselective in nature. notably, jared and kroll (2001) in their word naming study showed that the same conclusions hold for the phonological part of the bilingual lexicon. perhaps the strongest results in favour of nonselective access concern experiments that report reaction time (rt) differences for interlingual homographs and cognates under different experimental conditions. in fact, cognates have been very useful as tools to investigate the multilingual mental lexicon and language (non)specificity of lexical access in both bilinguals and multilinguals (cf. friel & kennison, 2001). a multitude of previous studies carried out in different languages suggests that the distinction between cognate (words that are similar in form and meaning) and noncognate (words only similar in meaning) translations is consequential to the processing of this type of words (cf. the cognate facilitation effect, dijkstra, 2005) and can be relevant cognate facilitation effects in trilingual word recognition 191 in determining how words are represented in the multilingual lexicon. the general finding is that cognates are produced, recognized, and translated faster than noncognates (cf. costa, santesteban, & caño, 2005; de groot & nas, 1991; dijkstra, grainger, & van heuven, 1999; lemhöfer et al., 2008; voga & grainger, 2007). the faster production, recognition, and translation of cognates are usually attributed to a common set of form-based representations (e.g., orthographic, phonological, morphological) that are used to process them in both (or more) languages. if access is language selective, the fact that words are cognates or have many neighbours in another language should have no effect on rts. if access is nonselective, candidates from both languages will present themselves and this competition will lead to longer rts. a large number of studies have been done on this and the overwhelming evidence in favour of the nonselective access hypothesis cannot go unnoticed. one source of information in favour of the nonselective access are experiments conducted within the lexical decision paradigm. by way of example, in their rt study lemhöfer and dijkstra (2004) found that cognates were recognized faster than the matched english and dutch controls. because at the same time the homographs (having an identical orthographic form across languages) did not show any effects (relative to dutch controls), the effect for cognates appears to depend at least on their overlap in meaning across languages. in other words, there must have been co-activation of the semantics of the cognates in both languages. in fact, it may be that cognates are represented in a special way, with a strong link between orthographic and semantic representations. another source of information supporting the nonselective hypothesis is data from eye-tracking studies and brain-imaging studies (cf. marian & spivey, 2003; midgley, holcomb, & grainger, 2011; wartenburger, heekeren, abutalebi, cappa, & villringer, 2003). the data are interpreted as evidence for simultaneous activation of both languages in the early phonetic stages of perception. also, the data coming from cross-linguistic priming and repetition effect tasks (cf. altarriba & basnight-brown, 2009; basnight-brown & altarriba, 2007) clearly support the nonselective access view. it has to be noted that all the above mentioned experiments concern out-of-context word recognition performance. the empirical data reviewed in the previous paragraphs indicate that language nonselectivity is a compelling feature of this type of recognition. this means that word candidates from different languages initially become active on the presentation of a letter string. this nonselectivity seems to hold for all representations that characterize words (e.g., orthographic, phonological, and semantic codes). further, bilingual word recognition also seems to be automatic in the sense that the process takes place relatively unaffected by nonlinguistic contextual factors. this weronika szubko-sitarek 192 applies not just to words from the l1, but also to words from the l2 or l3. at the same time, some research is still needed to verify whether language nonselectivity is maintained or eliminated in context since the empirical data gathered thus far show that when words are processed in sentence context, their processing seems to be sensitive to the semantic and syntactic aspects of the sentence (cf. hartsuiker & pickering, 2008). consequently, some researchers point to the possibility that even if access to the identification system is basically nonselective in nature, particular circumstances might allow it to operate in a language selective way. in fact, there is a clear evidence in the literature that task demands can affect multilingual performance to a considerable extent. by way of example, in the experiments carried out by dijkstra and van heuven (2002a) the informants appeared to be extremely sensitive to small variations in task demands and the composition of the word lists. many researchers even claim that it may be inappropriate to talk about multilingual word recognition in general without specifying the precise task and experimental circumstances under which it takes place because performance is both task and context dependent (cf. dijkstra, 2007; lemhöfer & radach, 2009). the present study the aim of the present study was to verify the language-specific or language-integrated nature of multilingual lexical processing by examining the issues connected with the lexical organization of cognates. in particular, the two experiments were conducted to investigate how cross-linguistic overlap in orthography and semantics affects trilingual word recognition in different variants of the lexical decision task. it needs to be noted that since the research stimuli used in the experiments comprised only cognate nouns, all the results and their implications for connections between languages in the trilingual mental lexicon refer to this particular group of words. as regards methodology, an experimental setup was chosen for which the most reliable and frequently replicated bilingual cognate effects have so far been obtained, namely a lexical decision task. the logic behind using this type of task is that it requires individuals to search their lexicons for a lexical representation that matches the letter string presented. the representation of a lexical item contains information regarding the word’s orthography, phonology, and semantics, and these aspects of the word are retrieved during the task. in the polish context, research on the multilingual mental lexicon and the role cognates play in its organization and processing is still rather limited. hence the desire of the present author to verify the applicability and generalisability of the findings of multilingual research to the polish setting. cognate facilitation effects in trilingual word recognition 193 according to statistical data published by the central statistical office of poland (gus in polish), english is the first and german the second foreign language in polish schools (cf. dmochowska, 2010). taking this language constellation as the basis for empirical research guaranteed a wide number of reliable respondents. the other reason for choosing to use this pair of foreign languages throughout the experiments is related directly to the ready availability both of natural cognates and noncognates between german and english. experiment 1 – cognate effects in trilingual word recognition to investigate whether the nonselective access hypothesis holds also for trilinguals and three languages, polish-english-german trilinguals carried out a lexical decision task in their third (weakest) language – german (cf. dijkstra et al., 1999; lemhöfer & radach, 2009). in the present experiment, the word materials included purely german control words, ‘double’ cognates that overlapped in polish and german, but not in english, and ‘triple’ cognates with the same form and meaning in polish, german, and english (cf. lemhöfer, dijkstra, & michel, 2004). first, it was expected that the participants would react faster and more accurately to german-polish cognates than to german control words. such a finding would replicate the standard cognate effect (cf. djikstra & van heuven, 2002a, 2002b) for a new language combination and provide additional evidence in support of language nonselective access. second, an even stronger view of language nonselective access would be supported if three languages at a time can influence word recognition. in that case, the cognate status of the stimuli with respect to english should have an additional effect on top of the standard cognate effect. in other words, the recognition performance for german-polish-english cognates should be even faster and more accurate than that for german-polish cognates. if that turned out to be true, the experiment would replicate the lemhöfer et al. (2004) study conducted for a different combination of languages and add further evidence to the discussion of the nonselective visual word recognition in the multilingual mental lexicon. participants. the experiment involved 27 trilinguals with polish as their l1, and english and german as l2 and l3. all the participants were ‘unbalanced’ trilinguals; that is, they were not as proficient in their second and third languages, english and german, as in their mother tongue, polish. all of the testees were students (secondand third-year) in the institute of english studies at the university of ód . all of them had learned english and german as a foreign language at school. the participants’ l2 competence was not tested weronika szubko-sitarek 194 before the study. it was assumed that their status of students of english philology ensured advanced l2 proficiency. before the experiment, however, a language background questionnaire was administered, in which 31 prospective participants were asked to report on their competencies in all of their foreign languages. 4 students had to be excluded from the experiment due to their relatively advanced knowledge of spanish that could affect the results. additionally, a few respondents declared some competence in french, italian or russian, but those selected for the experiment described their competence as very low. to ensure that the testees constituted a homogenous sample as far as their l3 (german) competence was concerned, only those students were selected who described their l3 level as pre-intermediate (a2) or intermediate (b1), as specified by the common european framework for languages (cefr) descriptors. the data from 3 participants had to be excluded due to their faulty performance, which sets the mortality rate of the experiment at 11 percent. the remaining 24 participants were between 20 and 24 years old with the mean of 21.66. 17 were female, 7 were male. all the participants were right-handed. they were not paid for their participation, nor given any course credits. procedure and materials. during the experimental session, which took about 30 minutes, the participants carried out a german lexical decision task involving triple polish-english-german cognates (hereafter referred to as pge cognates), double polish-german cognates (pg cognates) and german control words. these critical groups of l3 words were compared with respect to the latencies and accuracy of their recognition: one quarter of the l3 words were cognates with their translations in polish (e.g., dach, meaning ‘roof’ in both polish and german), one quarter of the l3 words were cognates with their translations in both polish and (l2) english (e.g., plan), and the remaining words were noncognates – german control words that were different from both their polish and english translations (e.g., kopf, meaning ‘head’, owa in polish). in addition to the test stimuli, two german words as well as two pge cognates, two pg cognates and two nonwords, all different from any of the test stimuli, were selected as practice items. in the word materials only nouns were used because they are the only content words that possess the same lemma form in all three languages. verbs and many adjectives are morphologically marked by suffixes in both german and polish (e.g., german sing-en or polish piew-a , meaning ‘to sing’), while they are not marked in english, which usually results in different lemma forms of these words in the three languages. pge cognates were selected from celex database (cf. baayen, pipenbrock, & gulikers, 1995). they possessed the same spelling and meaning in all three languages, as exemplified by the word plan. all of them were singucognate facilitation effects in trilingual word recognition 195 lar forms of nouns with a length of between 4 and 6 letters and no more than two syllables. it was attempted to choose only cognates with both english and polish frequencies high enough to potentially affect the responses. while in german and polish the chosen items are used as nouns only, it was inevitable that in english some of these nouns are also used as verbs. however, in all cases the verb meaning was closely related to the noun meaning (e.g., plan, echo), so that semantic competition could be largely ruled out. for the group of pg cognates, nouns with orthographic and semantic overlap in polish and german (e.g., dach, pech ‘bad luck’) were selected that matched the pge cognates with respect to length, number of syllables and frequency. matching took place on an item-by-item basis with support of the spss (13.0) software. all cognate translations had a nonidentical phonology, whereas 41% of the pg cognates had a nonidentical orthography. additionally, only such cognates were selected that in cefr lists are assigned to no higher than b1 level. a number of nonwords that was equal to the number of words (48) was generated by changing one or more letters in an existing german noun of 4-6 letters. all nonwords were orthographically legal in german and did not exist as words in any of the three languages. they were all created with the help of wordgen (cf. duyck, desmet, verbeke, & brysbaert, 2004), an online program that uses the celex and lexique lexical databases for word selection and nonword generation in dutch, english, german, and french. fourteen items were adopted from the studies by lemhöfer and dijkstra (2004) and lemhöfer et al. (2004). the nonwords were matched to the word items in terms of their mean length and number of syllables – the mean number of letters was 4.68 and the mean number of syllables was 1.54. testing took place individually on a pc; a modified program based on the reaction time instrument builder was used. the subjects were seated at the 17-inch computer screen, where stimuli were presented in black 14-point uppercase times new roman on a white background. one button on the side of the dominant hand of the participants was assigned to the yes response, the other button to the no reaction. at the beginning of each trial, a fixation point appeared in the middle of the screen for 1 s, then a blank interval of 500 ms followed. next, the test word appeared. the item stayed in view until a response had been provided or until a time-out of 5 s had passed. the next trial was started 500 ms after the response was given. all items were presented in uppercase letters, because in german the case of the first letter can be a cue for the syntactic class of a word (nouns are written with a capital). the experiment consisted of two blocks of 48 items each. the first two items of each block were warm-up items (a nonword and a german filler word) which were not included in the analyses. the participants took a short break (5 min) beweronika szubko-sitarek 196 tween the blocks. the order of items within the lists was pseudo-randomised with no more than four words or nonwords in a row. results and discussion. for the rt analysis, only correct responses were considered. the overall error rate (er) amounted to 9.4%, including 8.1% on test words. furthermore, rts exceeding two times the standard deviation from the item mean counted as outliers and were excluded from the set of valid responses. outliers accounted for 1.7% of all the responses and they were approximately equally distributed across conditions. erroneous responses on test words (8.1%) were excluded from the analysis, so that 9.8% of the data were discarded in total. the data on the erroneous response matched item partners were not excluded since such a procedure could have led to too high a percentage of the excluded data points. moreover, in many studies employing similar methodology (e.g., lemhöfer et al., 2004; van hell & de groot, 2008) results obtained with and without the exclusion of the data on the outliers and erroneous response matched item partners yielded comparable results. similarly to lemhöfer et al.’s (2008) study, ers and rts were analyzed over participants only, because the selected cognates and controls were matched item-by-item and can be seen as an almost exhaustive set of items with the given restrictions. the data gathered in the experiment were entered into the spss (13.0) program for statistical analysis. the relevant data are summarized in table 1. table 1 the mean rts and ers for participants in experiment 1 rt sd er sd pge cognates 743.17 25.74 5.2 3.7 pg cognates 765.92 32.74 7.8 4.1 german controls 819.58 66.48 11.4 6.2 german fillers 823.17 63.15 15.0 8.1 nonwords 897.73 91.16 7.7 4.9 the analysis of the obtained rts indicates that all three languages became activated and influenced the subject’s responses to the following targets. as can be seen from the data in table 1, the participants responded much faster (743.17) to pge cognates than to pg cognates (765.92) and to control words (819.58). these data indicate that both english and polish were activated in the course of the experiment and that the word status influenced lexical access. to investigate the influence of item type on rt, paired samples t test was conducted whose results are presented in table 2. in brief, the obtained data point to the statistically significant activation of pge and pg cognates. cognate facilitation effects in trilingual word recognition 197 planned comparison showed that pge cognates were recognized 76.42 ms faster than monolingual german control words. this difference turned out to be statistically significant (t(11) = 3.94, p < .005). similarly, pg cognates were recognized 53.67 ms faster than control words. this difference also reached statistical significance (t(11) = 2.92, p < .05). finally, cognate effect obtained for pge cognates was bigger (22.75 ms) than that obtained for pg cognates, which was significant at t(11) = 2.36, p < .05. table 2 paired samples t test for the three types of stimuli words in a german lexical decision task paired samples mean sd sme t df sig. (2-tailed) pge vs. control 76.42 67.26 19.42 -3.94 11 .002 pg vs. control 53.67 63.67 18.38 -2.92 11 .014 pge vs. pg -22.75 33.45 9.65 -2.36 11 .038 also the analysis of rts with anova yielded similar results. there was a significant main effect of item type, f(2,33) = 9.004, p < .01. moreover, planned comparison showed that pge cognates were recognized faster than pg cognates, f(1,46) = 7.162, p < .01. finally, pg cognates were responded to significantly faster than control words, f(1,46) = 12.584, p < .01. similarly, the analysis of ers revealed a comparable pattern. item type significantly influenced ers, f(2,33) = 5.062, p < .05. also planned comparisons indicated that there were significantly more errors on pg cognates than on pge cognates, and more on german controls than on pg cognates. both differences turned out to be significant: f(1,46) = 17.697, p < .001 and f(1,46) = 5.319, p < .05, respectively. statistically significant cognate effects obtained for pge and pg cognates confirmed by rts and ers analyses conducted both with paired samples t test as well as one-way anovas point to language nonspecific selection which extends to three languages. first, the ‘standard’ cognate effect in lexical decision for a new language combination (polish and german) was replicated. pg cognates were responded to faster than exclusively german control words. second, an additional cognate effect on top of the standard cognate effect could be demonstrated for the trilingual population: words that had the same form and meaning in all three languages were recognized even faster and more accurately than the matched pg cognates with a dissimilar english translation. this indicates that during the recognition of words in a given foreign language, not only the mother tongue, but even another non-native language (english) exerts influence on recognition performance. admittedly, the obtained effects cannot be explained without the involvement of all three lanweronika szubko-sitarek 198 guages: if the participants had selectively activated their german lexicon, there should have been no cognate effect whatsoever; if they had only activated the relevant lexicon (german) and their native language (polish), there would not have been any rt difference between pg and pge cognates. clearly, the presented interpretation of the obtained results could be challenged. firstly, it could be claimed that the difference between pge and pg group might have been caused by the fact that not all words in the pg group were identical cognates. it needs to be noted that non-identical cognates are reported to be recognized more slowly (cf. dijkstra, 2007; lemhöfer & dijsktra, 2004). however, an additional analysis conducted exclusively on the pairs of identical cognates repeated the results as confirmed by one-way anova, f(1,12) = 4.986, p < .05. secondly, it could be argued that the triple cognate effect might have been obtained due to the higher level of proficiency in l2 – english. similarly, the lower level of l3 might have led to stronger l1-l3 connections triggering faster rts for pg cognates. doubtless, a similar experiment with participants declaring comparable, advanced levels of l2 and l3 proficiency would additionally help to verify the hypotheses. finally, although the results do show that it is possible to have activation of three languages simultaneously, the present data alone leave the possibility that they may not all be activated in less favourable circumstances, for instance if the task language is l1 or if the participants’ proficiency in their foreign languages changes. the influence of the former factor is to be verified in the subsequent experiment. experiment 2 – the role of task demands in the trilingual processing of cognates if the mental lexicon of a trilingual is organized on the basis of item characteristics as the outcomes of experiment 1 seem to indicate, words from all the known languages might be activated in response to incoming information. interestingly enough, a number of previous studies, all of whose results were interpreted in terms of the language-nonselective view, differed in the languages that were relevant for task performance and/or the languages of the stimuli with which multilinguals (or, in fact, mainly bilinguals) were presented. in some studies, bilinguals were shown stimuli in both languages, and they had to respond to items from both languages (e.g., dijkstra et al., 1999; lemhöfer & dijkstra, 2004) or only to items from one language (e.g., dijkstra, 2003; van heuven & dijkstra, 2010). other, and perhaps stronger, evidence for the notion that knowledge of one language influences performance in the other language is provided by studies in which the stimulus list and the task demands involved words from one target language only. by far, the majority of these studies focused on performance in the first foreign language (l2; de groot, delmaar, & cognate facilitation effects in trilingual word recognition 199 lupker, 2000; dijkstra et al., 2010), which is less dominant than the native language being, at the same time relatively advanced. what is, however, worth noting is that some pioneering experiments using the second, typically weaker, foreign language as the target have also been reported of late (l3; lemhöfer et al., 2004; lemhöfer & radach, 2009; experiment 1 above). according to van hell and de groot (2008), the most critical way to study whether knowledge of one language affects performance in the other language is to create an experimental context in which multilinguals perform a lexical decision task exclusively in their dominant language (l1), and in which they are presented with l1 words. admittedly, taking the nonselective access view to an extreme would imply that “words from both languages are activated even when the bilinguals are performing in their native and dominant language and in a purely native language context” (van hell & dijkstra, 2002, p. 782). it needs to be emphasized, however, that for lexical decision tasks performed in l1, the findings are far from clear. caramazza and brones (1979) failed to find a cognate effect in the dominant-language task, as did gerard and scarborough (1989). other authors, on the other hand, reported some effects of l2 knowledge on l1 word performance under similar circumstances (cf. de groot et al., 2000; de groot & van hell, 2005; lemhöfer et al., 2008; van hell & dijkstra, 2002). more importantly, van hell and dijkstra (2002) documented an rt advantage for lexical decisions on native language words that were cognates with respect to a second language and even for decisions on words that were cognates with respect to a third language. to be sure, the usually stronger cognate effects from l1 on l2 than from l2 on l1 indicate that l2 representations are generally activated less strongly or less rapidly than l1 representations, implying that they have less chance to affect the response when l1 is the target. in other words, when cognates are processed in a second or third language context, the first-language reading not only becomes active but it facilitates recognition as well (cf. dijkstra, 2007; lemhöfer et. al, 2008; experiment 1 above). consequently, it seems reasonable to claim that, in the previous experiment, before the l3 (german) target reading of a cognate became active, the l1 (polish) reading had already affected target processing. in contrast, in the polish language-specific lexical decision task, multilinguals can be assumed to respond to the first reading of the cognate they identify, which will often be their l1 reading. thus, the crosslinguistic effect measured relative to polish controls is expected to be considerably smaller. in fact, the question arises whether cognate effects are still present in the recognition of l3 cognates in a first-language context and if that were the case, will the cumulative influence of the stronger and the weaker weronika szubko-sitarek 200 foreign language (l2 and l3) lead to even faster l1 recognition, thus adding evidence to the nonselective access extending to three languages. taken together, the issue under investigation is whether the cognate effects found for pge and pg cognates in the german task relative to german (l3) control words (cf. experiment 1) can also be demonstrated in comparison with polish (l1) control words in a purely polish task. if so, semantic and orthographic overlap of cognates should cause facilitatory effects on word recognition. alternatively, overlap effects might be task dependent and nonsignificant relative to the polish control words. this would indicate that, whereas the simultaneous activation of an l1 code affects the recognition of words in l2 and/or l3, the reverse is not the case. participants. nineteen right-handed participants (14 women and 5 men), drawn from the group from experiment 1, took part in the present study. five students from the previous experiment did not participate in the present experiment. the two sessions were conducted within the interval of 6 weeks. procedure and materials. the apparatus and procedure of the lexical decision task in the present experiment were similar to those used in experiment 1. the stimulus materials consisted of triple and double cognates from experiment 1. however, since the language of the task was l1, german control words were replaced with polish controls. additionally, orthographically nonidentical pg cognates were transformed into their polish equivalents. as in experiment 1, the three groups of words (i.e., cognates with english and german, cognates with german, and control words) were matched item-by-item (spss 13.0) for polish frequency, length and number of syllables. a group of polish fillers (12) and a group of nonwords (48) were also included. again, in the word materials only nouns were used. for the present polish language-specific lexical decision experiment, only polish control words that were purely polish nouns were included. they were noncognates, and resembled neither their english, nor their german translation in either orthography or phonology; examples are polish noga (bein in german, leg in english) or pies (hund in german, dog in english). in order to keep the proportion of cognates in the experiment at no more than 50% of the words, 12 additional pure polish fillers were included with characteristics similar to those of the polish control words. a number of nonwords that was equal to the number of words (48) originated by changing one or more letters in an existing polish noun of 4-6 letters. all nonwords were orthographically legal in polish. they did not exist as words in any of the three languages. the nonwords were matched to the word items in terms of their cognate facilitation effects in trilingual word recognition 201 mean length and number of syllables – the mean number of letters was 4.53 and the mean number of syllables amounted to 1.47. results and discussion. for the analysis of rts, only correct reactions were considered. the overall er was 7.4%. furthermore, rts that lay more than two standard deviations away from the item mean were considered outliers. the percentage of outliers among the correct trials was 2.3%. errors on test words accounted for 5.9%. in total, 8.2% of the data were excluded. the mean rts, standard deviations, and ers are listed in table 3. table 3 the mean rts and ers for the participants in experiment 2 rt sd er sd pge cognates 728.58 21.53 4.2 3.1 pg cognates 746.33 43.22 5.3 5.3 polish controls 757.17 36.24 8.4 6.2 polish fillers 760.03 39.33 9.1 7.7 nonwords 792.15 47.15 10.2 11.1 the participants responded faster (728 ms) to pge cognates than to pg cognates (746 ms) and control words (757 ms). to investigate the influence of item type on rt, paired samples t test was conducted whose results are presented in table 4. planned comparison showed that pge cognates were recognized 29 ms faster than monolingual polish control words. this difference turned out to be statistically significant (t(11) = 4.11, p < .005; f(1,36) = 8.740, p < .005). pg cognates were recognized only 11 ms faster than control words. this difference failed to reach statistical significance (t(11) = .79, p = .44). similarly, the difference between pge cognates and pg cognates turned out not to be statistically significant (t(11)= 1.77, p = .10). more importantly, the analysis of ers revealed the same pattern. the fewest errors were made on pge cognates, more errors were made on pg cognates, and the most errors were made on polish control words. nevertheless, only pairwise comparisons for pge cognates and polish control words gave statistically significant results (f(1,22) = 4.405, p < .05). table 4 paired samples t test for the three types of stimuli words in a polish lexical decision task paired samples mean sd sme t df sig. (2-tailed) pge vs. control 28.58 24.03 6.94 4.11 11 .001 pg vs. control 10.83 47.36 13.67 .79 11 .44 pge vs. pg 17.75 34.62 9.99 1.77 11 .10 weronika szubko-sitarek 202 interestingly enough, only the group of pge cognates compared with their matched controls yielded statistically significant results both in rts and ers analysis. since the difference in processing pg cognates and controls did not reach the significance level, nor did the difference between pge and pg cognates, it may be argued that the weaker foreign language does not affect visual word recognition in the exclusively native language context. no significant influence of the weaker foreign language on the dominant language processing has been found. nor was any data found that could support the contention that nonselective access in an exclusively native language context extends to three languages. to be sure, statistically significant results for pge cognates in comparison to their matched controls are likely to be obtained due to the presence of the stronger foreign language – english (l2), not the cumulative effect of two foreign languages. thus, it can be argued that the nonselective access hypothesis tested in the native language context has been found to be valid only as far as the stronger foreign language is concerned. notably, another possible reason for the lack of l3 influence might be the fact that the trilingulas’ l3 proficiency, relative to their target language proficiency, may have been too low to induce any noticeable effects on target language processing. to analyze task dependency, the rt results, achieved for pge cognates and for pg cognates under two different task conditions, have been correlated (cf. table 5). by using the same stimulus materials as well as the same group of polish-german-english trilinguals, in both a german language-specific and a polish language-specific lexical decision task, the effects of cross-linguistic overlap were compared for exclusively german and exclusively polish lexical decision variants. the paired difference for both pge and pg cognates in comparison to their matched controls in a german lexical decision task turned out to be bigger than in the case of the polish version of this task. planned comparisons showed that both the difference in processing pge cognates as well as pg cognates in comparison to their matched controls in two different language settings reached the significance level as confirmed by one-way anovas: f(1,41) = 8.695, p < .005 and f(1,41) = 5.972, p < .05, respectively. table 5 paired differences in rts achieved for pge and pg cognates in comparison to their matched controls in german and polish lexical decision tasks (experiments 1 and 2) german controls polish controls mean rt sd mean rt sd pge cognates vs. controls 76.42 67.26 28.58 24.03 pg cognates vs. controls 53.67 63.67 10.83 47.36 cognate facilitation effects in trilingual word recognition 203 the obtained data can be interpreted with the support of the bia+ model, according to which the activation of various lexical representations is constantly monitored by a task/decision system that subserves task execution and decision making (cf. lemhöfer et al., 2004). the bia+ model predicts that even for the same stimulus materials, different tasks will lead to systematically different response patterns, because responding can occur at different moments in time and can be based on different information sources. conclusions consistent with previous findings in the literature, the experiments reported in this paper proved that trilinguals processed cognates more quickly and more accurately than they processed noncognate control words. obviously, the overlap of form and meaning across languages facilitated lexical access. the obtained results reveal that the cognate effect can accumulate over languages: while cognate status in one language caused shorter word recognition latencies, the additional cognate status in one additional language speeded up responses even more. thus, it can be claimed that the notion of nonselective lexical access that has recently received growing support within the bilingual domain seems to generalise to trilinguals and three languages. as mentioned before, experiment 1 proved that processing the weakest language (l3) words entails automatic, parallel activation of candidate words in the dominant, stronger languages; not only l1 but also l2. it was concluded that in accordance with the nonselective access hypothesis the presentation of a word in one language automatically activates words from both the target and the nontarget languages in parallel. it logically follows from this that crosslinguistic effects may arise in both directions, manifesting themselves not only in a nondominant but also in a dominant target language. this assumption gave rise to the hypotheses set in the second experiment, whose aim was twofold. first, the influence of foreign language knowledge on native language performance in an exclusively native language context was studied. the objective was to verify the assumption in the light of which weaker language knowledge may influence performance in the dominant language. needless to say, such a finding would additionally support nonselective access in multilingual lexicon. second, using the same group of pg cognates in experiments 1 and 2 allowed to verify the influence of task demands on the recognition of words and the hypothesis that cognate effects might be task dependent. the finding that foreign language knowledge (in this case l2) affects l1 target word processing in an exclusively native language context provided additional support for the theoretical position that the language processing sysweronika szubko-sitarek 204 tem of multilinguals is profoundly nonselective with respect to language. on the other hand, the nonnative language influence on the mother tongue was clear only for l2 since only pge cognates were recognized faster than their matched controls; l1-l3 cognates did not generate statistically significant results. admittedly, it was l2 that supported the recognition. the comparison of the results for pg cognates from experiment 2 with those from experiment 1 showed that the same list of stimulus words, recognized by the same group of subjects generated different rts. clearly, language nonselective access in the case of three languages seems to be task-dependent. and although more research is needed to find out the exact nature of the demands posed by various tasks, experiment 2 proved that the different results they produce may be informative with respect to the underlying representation of cognates. summing up, processing words in the strongest language can be influenced by weaker language knowledge – in this case, l2 knowledge. the study has certain limitations and implications for future research. it has to be admitted that it was difficult to fully control many individual as well as extraneous variables. consequently, there are some shortcomings that need to be acknowledged and addressed. one of the extraneous variables that might have affected the validity of the experiments relates to population characteristics. the fact that the participants of the experiments were students at the philological department definitely limits the generalisability of the findings. another participant-related variable influencing the results is connected with the number of respondents. due to considerable difficulties in finding subjects with advanced levels of both english and german, the research groups were not very large (about 20 people). luckily, the participant mortality rate was not statistically significant and, as the dropout was random, it did not affect the group homogeneity. yet another limitation concerns the type of methodology itself. since the lexical decision task entails single word recognition, it seems reasonable to believe that some research is still needed to verify whether the outcomes of the discussed experiments are maintained or eliminated in sentence context. all the more so, as there is a growing amount of empirical data showing that when words are processed in sentence context, their processing seems to be sensitive to the semantic and syntactic aspects of the sentence (cf. hartsuiker & pickering, 2008). all in all, it seems legitimate to predict that context effects could influence the findings to a large extent. future studies should be conducted looking more closely at the level of proficiency. a question which remains to be tackled relates to the type of relationship that non-native languages establish with one another at a single point in time and over time, especially in view of the rapid changes in proficiency level non-native languages are subject to. cognate facilitation effects in trilingual word recognition 205 the underlying aim of the presented experiments was to verify the hotly disputed conceptualization of a multilingual learner. on the one hand, there are scholars who assume that there is no meaningful difference between bilinguals’ and multilinguals’ processes and accordingly classify all learners of one or more non-native languages as l2 learners, especially when proficiency in the previously learned non-native languages is low. on the other hand, there are researchers who argue that this position is not acceptable, as meaningful differences between these learners’ processes exist and must be accounted for. one common argument in favour of the view that a difference between the two types of users exists is the contention that multilingual learners are influenced both by their l1 and the non-native languages they know. in a multilingual system, crosslinguistic influence takes place not only between the l1 and the l2 but also between the l2 and the l3, and the l1 and the l3, as well as in the reverse direction. the findings of the study confirmed this contention. consequently, it seems legitimate to say that the native language does not always have a privileged status and must be looked at together with other possible sources of transfer. since multilinguals have knowledge of more than two languages by definition, the possible sources of lexical transfer automatically increase with the number of languages the individual is familiar with – a phenomenon referred to as combined cross-linguistic influence (cf. de angelis, 2007; 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(2007). crosslinguistic similarity in foreign language learning. clevedon: multilingual matters. van hell, j. g., & de groot, a. m. b. (2008). sentence context modulates visual word recognition and translation in bilinguals. acta psychologica, 128, 431-451. van hell, j. g., & dijkstra, t. (2002). foreign language knowledge can influence native language performance in exclusively native contexts. psychonomic bulletin and review, 9, 780-789. van heuven, w. j. b., & dijkstra, a. (2010). language processing in the bilingual brain: fmri and erp support for the bia+ model. brain research reviews, 64, 104-122. voga, m., & grainger, j. (2007). cognate status and cross-script translation priming. memory & cognition, 35, 938-952. wartenburger, i., heekeren, h. r., abutalebi, j., cappa, s. f., & villringer, a. (2003). early setting of grammatical processing in the bilingual brain. neuron, 37, 159-170. 725 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (4). 725-726 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.4.8 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl reviewers for volume 4/2014 the editors would like to express their gratitude to the following scholars who have kindly consented to review one or more submissions to volume 4/2014 of studies in second language learning and teaching. their insightful and thorough comments and suggestions have without doubt greatly enhanced the quality of the journal: molly babel university of british columbia, canada dario luis banegas university of warwick, uk helen basturkmen university of auckland, new zealand adriana biedroń pomeranian university, słupsk, poland frank boers victoria university of wellington, new zealand simon borg university of leeds, uk kees de bot university of groningen, the netherlands mary grantham o’brien university of calgary, canada anna broszkiewicz adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland anne burns aston university, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia you-show cheng national taiwan normal university katherine chaffe university of alberta, canada kata csizér eötvös university, budapest, hungary jean-marc daweale birbeck college, university of london, uk tracey derwing university of alberta, canada joseph falout nihon university, japan alan fortune king’s college, london, uk danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia, poland muriel gallego ohio university, usa christina gkonou university of essex, uk daryl m. gordon adelphi university, usa tammy gregersen university of northern iowa, usa carol griffiths fatih university, istanbul, turkey elaine horwitz university of texas at austin, usa ulrike jessner university of innsbruck, austria j. lake fukuoka women’s university sharon lapkin ontario institute for studies in education, toronto, canada stefan lenhard ludwig-maximilians-university, munich, germany christina lindquist university of uppsala, sweden 726 meihua liu tsinghua university, china thomas lockley nihon university, tokyo, japan shawn loewen michigan state university, usa peter macintyre cape breton university, canada ataollah maleki zanjan university of medical sciences, zanjan, iran maya sugita mceown university of alberta, canada jelena mihaljević djigunović zagreb university, zagreb, croatia paul meara swansea university, wales, uk sarah mercer university of graz, austria alene moyer university of maryland, usa tim murphey kanda university of international studies, japan hossein nassaji university of victoria, canada judit navracsics university of pannonia, hungary kimberly noels university of alberta, canada bonny norton university of british columbia, canada terrence odlin ohio state university, usa rebecca oxford university of maryland, usa jian-e peng college of liberal arts, shantou university, china simone pfenninger university of zurich, switzerland françois pichette university of quebec, canada katalin piniel eötvös university, budapest, hungary andrzej porzuczek university of silesia, poland arkadiusz rojczyk university of silesia, poland jesús romero trillo autonomous university of madrid, spain stephen ryan senshu university, japan paweł scheffler adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland linda shockey university of reading, uk anna-brita stenström bergen university, norway gretchen sunderman ohio state university, usa merrill swain ontario institute for studies in education, toronto, canada elaine tarone university of minnesota, usa feng-fu tsao national tsing hua university, taiwan ema ushioda university of warwick, uk ewa waniek-klimczak university of łódź, poland 721 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (4). 2017. 721-725 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.4.9 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review demotivation in second language acquisition: insights from japan authors: keita kikuchi publisher: multilingual matters, 2015 isbn: 9781138783093946 pages: 162 as csizér (2017, p. 426) so aptly points out in her state-of-the-art overview of motivation research in second language acquisition (sla), a “. . . potentially pivotal issue in isla [instructed second language acquisition] concerns the empirical investigation of students’ demotivation, that is students losing their motivation during the learning process.” when discussing future directions of motivational research, she makes the point that demotivation should be one of the key areas that specialists should investigate, and, following the suggestions of dörnyei and ushioda (2011), she argues that such research should focus on the relationship of demotivation to more general motivational dispositions as well as personality traits, the situated nature of the construct, and the impact of demotivation on the validity of instruments used to tap motivation. obviously, empirical investigations into demotivation have immense practical value as well since, irrespective of the specific context in which they teach, practitioners have to deal with learners’ demotivation on a regular basis, often being at a loss as to how to motivate students who gradually lose interest 722 in learning a foreign language, a phenomenon that has been well attested to in research (see e.g., dörnyei, 2005; pawlak & mystkowska-wiertelak, 2018, for overviews). thus, empirical studies of demotivation can be an important source of pedagogical implications, both with respect to the factors that are responsible for a decrease in learners’ motivation and the ways in which such a trend can be counteracted with the help of judiciously applied motivational strategies. in the light of this, the book demotivation in second language acquisition: insights from japan makes a valuable contribution to the field of sla by, on the one hand, advancing research on demotivation and, on the other, by forging so-much needed links between the outcomes of such research and classroom practice. the volume is divided into ten chapters, but it is in fact composed of three distinct parts, that is the literature review reflecting theoretical perspectives on motivation and summarizing the findings of relevant studies, the description of the research projects that the author has carried out, sometimes in collaboration with colleagues, and the recapitulation of the main findings, accompanied by a discussion of pedagogical proposals and a consideration of directions for future research. the first part comprises chapters 1-3, which respectively focus on such key issues as the definition of demotivation as opposed to amotivation, the main foci of previous research which are divided into attempting to identify demotivators, trace the process of demotivation and pin down strategies employed to ward off or reverse this negative state, leading to remotivation, and the role of demotivation in sla in terms of both individual and contextual factors. chapters 4-7 report the findings of research projects that have relied on quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods paradigms and have all been conducted in japan. more specifically, chapter 4 describes the process of using rasch analysis and qualitative analysis in the construction of a questionnaire tapping demotivation as well as two models of the construct proposed on the basis of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses: a six-factor (i.e., teacher behavior, characteristics of classes, class environment, class materials, experience of failure, and loss of interest) and a four-factor solution (i.e., teacher behavior, class environment, experiences of difficulty, and loss of interest). chapter 5 reports another quantitative study which investigated learners’ and teachers’ perceptions of demotivators with the help of standard multiple linear regression analysis and found the lack of statistically significant correlations between the ratings of the two groups. chapter 6 provides a description of a largely qualitative study, following “a retrospective panel design” (de vaus, 2002), in which secondary school learners were asked to reflect on demotivators that they experienced in three years of junior high school and three years of senior high school, focusing as well on the motivational evolution of two clearly demotivated students. finally, chapter 7 reports the results of a mixedmethods study which applied “a person-in-context relational view” (ushioda, 2009), in which the data were collected by means of questionnaires, group interviews and 723 reflective journal entries. in contrast to the previous studies, it explored out-of-class motivation of four students majoring in nursing, focusing in particular on the intersections between motivational states and context, as well as the temporal dimension of motivation. in the last part of the book, kukuchi synthesizes the results of the four research projects, also outlining their limitations (chapter 8), illustrates how dörnyei’s (2001) framework of motivational strategies can be employed to deal with demotivation (chapter 9), and discusses the directions in which the research on demotivation can most profitably be taken. in particular, he emphasizes the need to address different levels of demotivation (i.e., global, contextual and situational), to adhere to rigid methodological guidelines in empirical studies and to connect demotivation with the constructs of ambivalence (macintyre, mackinnon, & clément, 2009) and disengagement (skinner, kindermann, connell, & wellborn, 2009). as mentioned above, the obvious strength of the book is that it touches on a crucial issue that has so far been underresearched and is therefore in need of empirical investigation, one that can yield important insights for the teaching and learning of second and foreign languages. in addition, however, there are several other merits for which the author should be commended. first, kikuchi makes a successful attempt to disentangle the admittedly overlapping and somewhat confusing concepts of demotivation, amotivation and remotivation, and also manages to impose some structure on the existing research in the field. second, the meticulous descriptions of the research procedures that were involved in the quantitative and qualitative analyses offer a point of reference for scholars wishing to develop and validate their own context-sensitive instruments tapping into different aspects of demotivation, to further explore the underlying structure of the construct, to correlate it with other variables, or to better understand changes in the motivational process over time. third, particularly valuable for researchers are the honest discussion of the limitations of the four reported studies, the link to related concepts in the field (i.e., ambivalence and disengagement), the delineation of future research directions and the presentation of sound methodological guidelines for conducting such endeavors. fourth, of great relevance to teachers are concrete suggestions as to how motivational strategies can be used to hinder demotivation at the level of creating basic motivational conditions, generating initial motivation, maintaining and protecting motivation, and encouraging positive retrospective self-evaluation (cf. dörnyei, 2001). this said, there are some aspects of kikuchi’s book that might make readers wish for more and are likely to leave them somewhat disappointed. for one thing, one can hardly escape the impression that the volume would have gained a lot if the literature review had been extended. for example, the discussion of the construct of motivation in chapter 3 is limited, confined to just two pages, which is surprising in light of the fact that a good grasp of what constitutes motivation in learning additional languages is indispensable for better understanding of demotivation 724 as such. particularly conspicuous is the absence from this section of even a cursory discussion of the theory of l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2009), all the more so that it provides the theoretical framework for the study described in chapter 4. apart from language anxiety, kikuchi fails to relate demotivation to other individual difference variables such as willingness to communicate, beliefs, learning styles or learning strategies, although it stands to reason that such factors may determine whether or not what transpires in the classroom is seen as motivating or demotivating. one would also expect the theoretical part to include a more thorough overview of studies of motivational change which are clearly pertinent to demotivation and the results of which would have helped the interpretation of students’ reflections on the ups and down in their motivation in chapter 6. the studies reported in the empirical part suffer from a number of methodological limitations, related, among other things, to the ways in which motivation is measured or doubts concerning whether learners are capable of providing a valid retrospective representation of demotivators in different school grades. what should be emphasized, however, is that the author openly admits that the research projects are not free from flaws and discusses ways in which such shortcomings could be avoided in the future. despite such gaps, limitations or maybe just the musings of one reader whose appetite has been whetted but not fully satisfied, there can be little doubt that the book demotivation in second language acquisition: insights from japan represents an urgently needed addition to the literature on the role of motivation in learning additional languages. in the conclusion kikuchi writes that “it is hoped that this book will serve as a partial foundation for a better understanding of the causes of demotivation in japanese english teaching context” (p. 130). in my view, though, kikuchi has not only succeeded in accomplishing this goal but has also achieved much more by enhancing our awareness of the concept of demotivation, its causes and manifestations, thus laying the requisite groundwork for research projects extending far beyond the japanese context. i am convinced that, thanks to sound categorization of available studies, exemplary description of research procedures and concrete suggestions for future empirical investigations, the book will constitute a must-read for anyone intending to further examine the role of demotivation in learning second and foreign languages. reviewed by mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl 725 references csizér, k. (1993). motivation in the l2 classroom. in s. loewen & m. sato (eds.), the routledge handbook of instructed second language acquisition (pp. 418-432). new york: routledge. de vaus, d. a. (2001). research design in social research. london: sage. dörnyei, z. (2001). motivational strategies in the language classroom. cambridge: cambridge university press. dörnyei, z. (2005). the psychology of the language learner: individual differences in second language acquisition. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. dörnyei, z. (2009). the l2 motivational self system. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the self (pp. 9-42). bristol: multilingual matters. dörnyei, z., & ushioda, e. (2011). teaching and researching motivation (2nd ed.). harlow: longman. macintyre, p. d., mackinnon, s. p., & clément, r. (2009). embracing affective ambivalence: a research agenda for understanding the interdependent processes of language anxiety and motivation. in p. cheng & j. x. jan (eds.), cultural identity and language anxiety (pp. 3-34). guilin: guangxi normal university press. pawlak, m., & mystkowska-wiertelak, a. (2018). tracing the motivational trajectories in learning english as a foreign language. the case of two english majors. in m. pawlak & a. mystkowska-wiertelak (eds.), challenges of second and foreign language education in a globalized world. studies in honor of krystyna droździał-szelest (pp. 185-208). cham: springer nature. skinner, e. a., kindermann, t. a., connell, j. p., & wellborn, j. g. (2009). engagement as an organizational construct in the dynamics of motivational development. in k. wentzel & a. wigfield (eds.), handbook of motivation in school (pp. 223-245). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. ushioda, e. (2009). a person-in-context relational view of emergent motivation, self and identity. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the self (pp. 215-228). bristol: multilingual matters. 193 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (2). 2017. 193-210 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.2.2 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl “did we learn english or what?”: a study abroad student in the uk carrying and crossing boundaries in out-of-class communication khawla m. badwan manchester metropolitan university, uk k.badwan@mmu.ac.uk abstract language educators in many parts of the world are torn between preparing language learners to pass language proficiency tests and trying to let their classrooms reflect the messiness of out-of-class communication. because testing is “an activity which perhaps more than any other dictates what is taught” (hall, 2014, p. 379), helping students to pass language proficiency tests seems to be a current top priority. since globalisation “has destabilised the codes, norms, and conventions that fl [foreign language] educators relied upon to help learners be successful users of the language once they had left their classrooms” (kramsch, 2014, p.296), the gap between what is taught in classrooms or measured in examination halls and what is used in real life situations has become much bigger. testimonies from study abroad students feed into this discussion. this article addresses the gap between being a language learner and a language user and the implications of this on learners’ perceptions of their language abilities, as illustrated by the story of mahmoud, a study abroad student in the uk. it also features learner’s voice, exploring mahmoud’s views of his previous formal language education and concludes with pedagogical implications for language educators. keywords: out-of-class communication; language testing; learners’ voice; study abroad; formal language education khawla m. badwan 194 1. introduction globalisation “has destabilised the codes, norms, and conventions that fl [foreign language] educators relied upon to help learners be successful users of the language once they had left their classrooms,” says kramsch (2014, p. 296). this is because the superdiversity that characterises many parts of the world today (vertovec, 2006) has opened the door for endless possibilities and encounters. that is to say, it has grown difficult to prepare language learners for the diverse situations and the circumstances thereof, and therefore, the gap between what is taught in classrooms or measured in examination halls and what is used in real life situations has become much bigger. still, language teaching and testing practices do not seem to cope with these changing demands. one of the main factors that perpetuates the divide between how language is viewed in the classroom and how it is used outside the classroom springs from what osberg (2008) calls the “logic of determinism” defined as “a fundamentally ‘object-based’ logic which understands causality and process in terms of a series of individual stages or states that are all logically derivable from each other” (p. 144). kramsch (2011) comments on this by explaining that the underlying logic of textbooks aims to guide learners through stages in their language acquisition and therefore syllabi and tests obey the logic of determinism in the name of fairness in order to “predict performance and rewards” (p.18). bearing the logic of determinism in mind, language is viewed as a fixed system and teaching is seen as a practice that aims at “conforming to uniformity” (larsenfreeman & cameron, 2008). in other words, learners are seen as individuals climbing the same ladder at their own paces. out of class communication, on the other hand, goes far beyond the logic of determinism and falls under what osberg (2008) calls “the logic of emergence” in which processes are not determined. this goes in line with attempts at viewing language as a complex, adaptive system (larsen-freeman, 1997; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008; ellis, 2011; larsen-freeman, 2012). with this view in mind, language users take various, unexpected routes of communication and therefore language teaching cannot and should not claim to mirror life outside the classroom. this underlying difference between how language is presented inside the classroom and how it is actually used outside the classroom results in creating a gap between being a language learner and being a language user. this gap cannot be easily bridged as long as language teaching and testing practice continue to embrace the logic of determinism which misleadingly makes language learners assume that what they learn inside the classroom is what they will need to use outside the classroom. “did we learn english or what?”: a study abroad student in the uk carrying and crossing boundaries. . . 195 here the first section discusses common practices featured in the english language teaching and testing industry and addresses the problematic implications of such practices on how learners cross classroom boundaries to be thrown into unpredictable instances, leading learners to lose their voice and willingness to communicate. the second section presents some contemporary attempts at offering a more pedagogically honest language education. the third section moves to address the methodological aspects of this empirical study. after that, mahmoud’s story will be narrated, discussing his views of his previous formal english language education and how it impacted on his sociolinguistic trajectories in the uk. the paper, then, outlines major pedagogical implications for language educators before it concludes with a theoretical and conceptual discussion about the need to embrace conscious learning in the language classroom in order to allow learners to develop their own voice inside and outside the language classroom. 2. language in the classroom and examination halls an important discussion about the relationship between the “language classroom” and “real life” comes from pennycook (2000) in which he argues that “classrooms are socio-political spaces that exist in a complex relationship to the real world” (p.90). while this view is valid with reference to local contexts surrounding classrooms, it is not necessarily relevant when it comes to the relationship between the foreign language classroom and wider socio-political contexts in other countries where the foreign language is used as the “native language.” this is a very common situation for study abroad students who spend years learning a foreign language prior to arriving in a country where they can finally test their “investment” in language learning (norton peirce, 1995 p.18). in this case, what is required is a closer look at the language ideologies produced and reproduced through language textbooks and language proficiency tests and how they impact on learners’ expectations of out-of-class communication. since the current study examines the narratives of a study abroad student in the uk, the discussion will focus on the teaching and testing of english. it is important to notice that the “monolithic” views of languages, which believe that language can be pinned down to a single “valued,” “correct,” or “standard” variety, predominate in linguistics, applied linguistics, and in everyday discourse (hall, 2012). moreover, mainstream enterprise attests to the power of “standard english,” leading to the reproduction of monolithic language ideologies, through mechanisms of institutional hegemony (holborow, 2015), thereby contributing to perpetuating the commodification of “standard english” as the variety that should be taught, and tested. reinforcing and promoting this conceptualisation khawla m. badwan 196 justifies the ontological existence of english language testing services (e.g., ielts, toefl, toeic, etc. and their associate assessment standards), elt textbooks, and international corporate organisations for elt. together, this ideological machinery equates a particular way of “englishing” (hall, 2014; pennycook, 2007) with the language itself and eventually builds the industry of english language education on a premise which is not expansive enough to represent the dynamic, ever-changing linguistic landscapes beyond the spaces of language classrooms and examination halls. monolithic conceptualisations of english are dangerous because they misleadingly make learners assume that what they learn inside the classroom is what they will use and be exposed to outside the classroom. while studying english as a second or foreign language, learners use textbooks with glossy designs whose content is deterritorialised and is often designed with sets of guidelines with regard to inclusivity, that is, a non-sexist approach to how men and women are represented, and inappropriacy, that is, topics that may offend potential consumers (gray, 2002). as a result of what gray (2002) calls “the global coursebooks,” language learners in many parts of the world study a narrow range of “bland” topics which are mainly aspirational, apolitical, and carefree. this discourse was described by kramsch (2015) as “tourism discourse,” featuring “playful, fleeting encounters without any desire to negotiate, let alone resolve, differences in meaning” (p. 409). commenting on this, gray (2012, p. 108) quotes one of his participants explaining that some themes in his elt textbook represent a “dishonest portrayal of life in the uk’ since they ‘create false dreams and aspirations in the minds of language learners.” using the “global courebooks” can be significantly misleading because language education inside the classroom is based on making learners interact with “imagined communities” (kanno & norton, 2003) that usually present willing and cooperative interlocutors whose interactions do not usually require efforts of negotiation and resistance. if real encounters in the outside world are fundamentally different, this can easily make learners lose voice in real life interactions. an example of this comes from pellegrino aveni (2007) who tells the story of an energetic young woman, leila, who on arrival in a study abroad context, lost her voice figuratively and allowed others to speak for her. ‘the person she believed herself to be in her everyday life was not the person she could present to others in her new language and new culture’, observes pellegrino aveni (2007, p.99). although this example comes from second language identities literature to comment on the divide between learners’ “ideal selves” and “real selves,” it can be argued that the effects of learners’ previous formal language education and hitherto conceptualisations of the second/foreign language are part and parcel of learner’s imagined world and desired identity. in other words, “did we learn english or what?”: a study abroad student in the uk carrying and crossing boundaries. . . 197 the monolithic, rather simplistic representations of what english is and how it is used in everyday interactions, as featured in elt textbooks, can play a major role in silencing and intimidating language learners who want to go beyond the imagined community to face the real heterogeneous, and messy real world in study abroad contexts. studies on migrant education have similarly indicated the divide between what language learners are taught and what they encounter in the real world (simpson, 2015; roberts, baynham, cooke, & simpson, 2007). as discussed above, not only do elt textbooks contribute to perpetuating what hall (2012) and pennycook (2007) call the “monolithic myth,” but language proficiency tests are key players in this task as well. testing is “an activity which perhaps more than any other dictates what is taught” (hall, 2014, p. 379). what assigns more power to english language testing regimes is their powerful gatekeeping role. when language learners are told that they have to obtain a particular score in order to be offered a place at university and a visa to another country, these individuals would ultimately believe that once the required score is attained, all doors are open. nonetheless, language proficiency tests measure one type of “englishing” as the implicit objective (hall, 2014) and englishing should not be equated with the entire, amorphous sociolinguistic system called ‘english’. furthermore, using language tests as powerful gatekeepers poses several questions as to who has the right to decide on which language test to take and what the cut-score is. who decides on which abilities to assess and how to do so? who sets the “correct” answer and against whose standards are these answers evaluated? in response to these questions, bachman and purpura (2008) explain that: ultimately, the issue of who decides is, in our view, one that involves societal, cultural, and community values that are beyond the control of the language test developer. nevertheless, these values need to be carefully considered as we design, develop, and use language assessments. (2008, p. 466) language tests have gradually and discursively developed an authority for assessment and started to impose their own standards and ideologies on the societal values that are not to be thought of as static, stable, and never changing. with the rise of globalisation, the fabrics of societies are in continual changes. these changes are not met by changes in language tests. language tests are still designed according to group a (monolingual speakers) standards even though it has become apparent that learners of english will never belong to this group (cook, 2009). societies do not have a pure fabric of either group a, group b (speakers using an l2 within a larger l2 community) or group c (speakers of l2 for international communication) (cook, 2009) and it seems evident that decisions related to language tests need to change. this change cannot occur khawla m. badwan 198 overnight because existing language tests have shaped societal perceptions of what “correct english” is, leading to a chicken-and-egg situation. it is also worth mentioning that maintaining the status quo serves the political, economic and national interests of the dominant group. commenting on this heller and duchêne (2010) maintain that: if you have [learned the language of the nation], you still need to constantly prove yourself against the measures developed by the dominant group, who use the agencies of the state (schools, bureaucracies, language academies, the media) to describe what counts as linguistic competence and the means to identify it. (2010, p.5) this system, they assert, constitutes and perpetuates “mechanisms of social selection” legitimised by dominant hegemonic discourses in language testing. nonetheless, the alternative approach, which accepts the ontological existence of multiple englishes, has been present in the literature of applied linguistics for a decade or so. still, it has not been granted sufficient legitimacy in language teaching and testing practices despite numerous calls for changing such practices. some of those came from pennycook (2007, p. 112) who asserts that language teachers need to reassess how they teach english in light of the plurilithic nature of english. in addition, jenkins (2006) indicates that testing regimes in the elt industry need to change to capture the new realities brought by globalisation and phenomena such as english as a lingua franca (elf). in light of this approach, “english resembles a galaxy of millions of discrete objects . . . bound together by the gravitational pull of effective communication” (hall, 2014, p. 379). despite the beauty of this metaphor, it is necessary to be reminded that the “gravitational pull of effective communication” is usually defined according to predefined norms, centres, and expectations. in other words, the boundaries between what is effective communication and what is not are blurred, amorphous, relational, and will always depend on a set of contextual factors. 3. calls for a more pedagogically honest way of crossing boundaries in the previous section i argued that the way english is introduced to language learners through elt textbooks and language tests places language learners in a bubble of a shiny, desired, and homogenous imagined community. once the bubble goes out of the classroom, it explodes as it touches the harsh realities of life outside the classroom. addressing this concern, some researchers introduced different paradigms for teaching foreign languages. these include focusing on the ability to “operate between languages” (mla report 2007, p. 35), learning a variety of linguistic repertoires (cenoz & gorter, 2011), or developing “disposable linguistic “did we learn english or what?”: a study abroad student in the uk carrying and crossing boundaries. . . 199 resources” activated according to momentary needs (kramsch, 2015, p. 408). since this repertoire-focused pedagogy might involve the risk of producing ‘truncated repertoires’ (blommaert, 2010, p.23), canagarajah renounces this agenda by asking: how many varieties of english should one master in order to deal with the diverse people one meets in one’s interactions, not to mention the genres of texts, video, or music in diverse englishes? beyond english, one has to also know the diverse languages that could be mixed in all these interactions. such an agenda for learning and knowing languages is unsustainable. (2014, p. 771) canagarajah’s (2014) alternative approach, or what he calls a “new paradigm for teaching english as an international language,” encompasses three components: language awareness (how grammars work in languages), rhetorical sensitivity (awareness of communication genres), and negotiation strategies (practices for intelligibility). i will revisit this approach in the discussion presented in the last section of this article. another attempt comes from santipolo (2015) who introduces the notion of bespoke language teaching (blt) which is based on two principles borrowed from computer science: utility and usability. blt is based on identifying learners’ needs and meeting them i.e. sociolinguistic usability. it aims at teaching what is useful before what is not useful; teaching what is more widespread e.g., “gonna” instead of “going to”; and attending to learners motivation, by reminding them that english varieties exist for certain purposes, for instance. in a similar quest, holmes and riddiford (2011) propose “conscious learning” as a way of developing sociopragmatic skills in the context of negotiating workplace requests. they define sociopragmatic competence as the “ability to accurately interpret and appropriately express social meaning in interaction” (p. 377). they investigate negotiating requests because refusals can be unexpected and because there is a mismatch between how native speakers and non-native speakers perceive refusals. the conscious learning approach is based on the premise that instead of teaching a range of appropriate utterances to be used in different social contexts, teaching should “empower the students to undertake the analysis of relevant social dimensions for themselves” (baynham, cooke, & simpson, 2011, p. 382). however, their approach was restricted to analysing speech acts related to requests in the workplace context in new zealand. thus far, it has become evident that despite numerous attempts at bridging the gap between learning and using the language, this problem continues to exist. evidently, individuals who move across time and space are more vulnerable to the consequences of shifting between being learners of english in their countries and users of english in another country, as will be demonstrated in the subsequent sections. khawla m. badwan 200 4. methodology: design and participants the data presented in this article comes from an empirical investigation of the sociolinguistic trajectories of study abroad students in the uk (badwan, 2015). the participant featured here, mohamoud from uae, is one of eight participants who were all recruited during the welcome week at a university in northern uk. mahmoud is 18 years old and was admitted to a foundation year leading to a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. i met mahmoud and the rest of the participants, aged 18-28 years, on campus and explained the purpose of the study and what being a participant entails. the participants came from 5 different countries in the middle east and they are all arabic speakers who learned english as a foreign language. all participants were repeatedly interviewed over a period of eight months (from october 2013 to june 2014). the participants were first interviewed in pairs within one month of their arrival in the uk. after that, they were individually interviewed in four rounds, with each round lasting for an average of half an hour, making a total of 44 interviews and around 27 hours of recorded data. the reason for conducting the study longitudinally was to trace the participants’ sociolinguistic trajectories in the uk and how their views of their english, previous education and themselves changed, if at all, during this time. the study sprang from a willingness to attend to language learners’ voice to conceptually, theoretically and methodologically investigate the impact of mobility on how foreign language learners conceptualise language and the implications of this on their views of themselves and of their previous investment in learning a foreign language, english. 4.1. “i got ielts 5.5 and reached my goal”: mahmoud’s language learning history before coming to study in the uk, mahmoud lived in united arab emirates and learned english from grade 1 at a state model school for uae citizens only. however, he complained that his primary school education did not help him learn english and therefore he moved to a private high school: m: from grade one to grade nine, i did not speak any english except for yes and no. then i joined a private high school. they have intensive courses (15 hours/w). i started learning grammar and spelling to prepare for ielts exams. k: um . . . what happened in your early years of schooling? why didn’t you learn any english from grade one to nine? m: i attended a model school which is only for uae citizens. i am from a city which has a high emirati population unlike dubai or abu dhabi. we don’t use english at all and all what i learned from grade one to nine was in arabic even english was taught in arabic. “did we learn english or what?”: a study abroad student in the uk carrying and crossing boundaries. . . 201 the decision to attend a private high school reflects mahmoud’s and his family’s desire to access better english language education since private education is usually associated with better english education (ramanathan, 2005). however, there was another reason for this decision: in my family i am the only speaker of english. some family members did not complete their university degrees because of english and ielts. my concern was to get 5.5 in ielts. i got ielts 5.5, and reached my goal. i studied hard in high school and my family wanted us to learn english because it is required for careers in the future. mahmoud was under familial pressure to learn english in order to be admitted to university. the education he received in his private high school was tailored to enable students to pass ielts with a minimum of 5.5. he explained that the intensive english classes were to teach him grammar and ielts skills and because of the powerful gate-keeping role of ielts mahmoud associated having an ielts 5.5 with success. that score allowed him to be admitted to a foundation year course leading to a bachelor’s degree in engineering in a uk higher education institution. it is worth noting that in his high school mahmoud was taught by a british native speaker. still, the focus of instruction was not on communication but on passing exams: my grade 12 teacher was british. he did not speak british english. he spoke normal english. he was used to teaching foreign students. he used to write synonyms for us and trained us to get ielts 5.5. mahmoud’s conceptualisation of “normal” english goes in line with the understanding of english as a language with one standard, normal variety. yet, mahmoud drew a distinction between british english and normal english which could suggest that he perceived local varieties of english as british english, whereas the standard variety he was taught was regarded as the normal accent he expected people to use. mahmoud’s emphasis on the fact that he was taught by a british teacher who also did not introduce other varieties of english to him suggests that focusing on standard english is a crucial ideological underpinning of language education in his country and this can be extended to many different parts of the world as well. at the same time, mahmoud’ notion of “normal” english reflected his frustration and confusion: i have a problem: here my tutors always ask us to speak in academic words so what i was learning in my school? is that normal english or what? i have a question: did we learn english or not? here they say, no, english must be used with different words unlike the normal words. this frustrates me. khawla m. badwan 202 mahmoud continues to use ‘normal english’, ‘normal words’ to refer to the standard english he was taught before arriving in the uk. this suggests that when mahmoud was taught english he was not made aware of the different repertoires and accents of english. his words underlie an assumption that he used to believe that english is one monolithic variety that would enable him to function in all contexts. consequently, he was frustrated when he was told that the english he wrote was not academic. academic english for him is a new repertoire to which he was not exposed before. he expressed his frustration by using many rhetorical questions and at the end he admitted that he was indeed frustrated. gradually, his ielts 5.5 was no longer a big achievement to accomplish. 4.2. “i still have a very long way to go”: mahmoud’s confrontations with english in out-of-class communication mahmoud expected that coming to the uk was an opportunity to learn english “from scratch.” later, he realised that the english input he received in the uk was rather limited and that he needed to make use of that limited input to improve his english and to get his degree. he referred to his english as a “building” whose bases were established in uae and whose decorations are added in the uk: i expected that when i come to the uk, i will learn english. but this is not true, i am here to complete my university education. this is the first point. second, i learned that i cannot learn english from scratch here because i already have a building and i need to improve it and decorate it. i have the bases and i need to complete this building. this is what i learned from the uk. when i go back to uae, i want to go home with a complete building. i imagined that i will learn english from scratch and will speak perfect english. i didn’t imagine that i will have problems with the british people. they do not understand me. i thought i would learn everything here. there are social and psychological reasons behind mahmoud’s exposure to limited input in the uk. while his geographical mobility entails boundary crossing, his struggles with english had meant that he was also carrying boundaries at the same time. mahmoud explained that speaking english with english native speakers in his country was different from speaking to them in the uk: in uae, i am in my country and when i speak english with them [british people], it shows that i have learned this language to talk to them. they appreciate that. but here they do not appreciate the fact that i spent years trying to learn english. they take this for granted. mahmoud’s relationship with english changed in the uk. whereas it was a source of pride for him in uae, allowing him to talk to interlocutors who appreciated his “did we learn english or what?”: a study abroad student in the uk carrying and crossing boundaries. . . 203 efforts to speak english, his english in the uk was a cause of concern. he noticed that he had to deal with higher expectations and different demands and thus he complained that his interlocutors were not always willing to accommodate their language. he further asserted that linguistic awareness makes people communicate more effectively and he explained how this awareness enabled him to interact with other non-arabic speaking interlocutors in his country: you see when someone comes to our country and he speaks little arabic, i try to speak in broken arabic so they can understand me. they should consider us as guests in the uk and speak with an easier accent. if they speak with a strong accent no one will benefit from that because there will be no mutual understanding. mahmoud’s word shed light on how language learners can become more sensitive to language-related issues and more aware of what affects interaction and intercultural communication. this awareness, however, did not help them communicate these concerns to his interlocutors: look, when i see that i have to speak to a british speaker i know beforehand that the communication will not be easy and i am now convinced that they have to pay some effort in order to understand me. later, he realised that he could not stay silent, waiting for the other party to understand his linguistic struggles. he decided to use a new technique at the beginning of every interaction. he reported saying the following sentence all the time ‘i don’t speak english very well but i’ll do my best. please do your best’. when asked about how effective this technique was, he mentioned that even though it made many people use simpler and slower english, he was not happy to say that his english was ‘bad’. mahmoud felt ashamed that he had to foreground his linguistic disadvantage to make others understand his struggles. in his last interview, i asked mahmoud to comment on his expectations of his language ability and whether he was prepared for life in the uk. to this, he replied saying: i have to say that i did not expect this and it made me feel that the english i learned in uae is the english taught in kindergarten here. i feel deceived. i thought the english i was taught is the english that i can use everywhere but it turned out to be nothing and that i still have a very long way to go. mahmoud’s study abroad experience opened his eyes to new conceptualisations and ontologies of language. his previous education which focused on passing language proficiency tests made him conceptualise english in a monolithic and simplistic way. being a language user in the uk, however, helped him khawla m. badwan 204 realise that the linguistic system called “english” cannot be pinned down to one variety, what he used to call “normal english.” such a discovery made him feel that his previous language education deceived him and did not prepare him for using language beyond classrooms and examination halls. 5. pedagogical implications for language educators the process of engaging study abroad students with reflecting on their previous english language education in light of their new sociolinguistic demands in the uk has put forward various implications for language educators and has also raised more challenging tasks facing english language education, especially in efl contexts. the following points summarise some of the key issues that have emerged from the current discussion: · participants’ monolithic conceptualisations of english were challenged by encountering different varieties and repertoires of english in the uk context. · participants’ familiarity with formal spoken registers and oral performance meant that they were uncomfortable dealing with other informal or written registers. · in an increasingly unpredictable world, the gap between learning english inside classrooms and using english outside classrooms is getting bigger. therefore, more is required to prepare language learners/users for the “messy” life beyond classroom-space and cyberspace. · the understandably exaggerated role that the ielts has as a powerful gatekeeping tool has proven to be troublesome, especially for study abroad students who assumed that english education is all about ielts. · language learners have the right to be “sensitised” to variation in speech and contextually realistic practice materials. they also have the right to be exposed to different dialects (gomes de matos, 2002, p.314). 5.1. english language education as preparation for the unpredictable mahmoud’s previous conceptualisations of english sprung from the perception that english is one coherent system, a view reinforced in the elt provision and testing practices in many parts of the world. besides these problematic views, the changes brought by globalisation add to the complexity of foreign language teaching. in an increasingly globalised world, language educators are faced with increasingly diversified needs. added to that, kramsch (2015) posits that communication in a global age is not restricted to transmitting facts as it also entails developing a voice, and making oneself heard (harvey, 2014; ushioda, 2011). how“did we learn english or what?”: a study abroad student in the uk carrying and crossing boundaries. . . 205 ever, it seems apparent that the focus of mahmoud’s previous language education was on transmitting facts (through learning formal registers and ielts skills), or what byram (2008b) calls “propositional knowledge,” rather than nurturing participation through cultivating the “procedural knowledge” of the “how” (byram, 2008b) and developing “socio-pragmatic competence” (brown, benson, barkhuizen, & bodycott, 2013; holmes & riddiford, 2011). mahmoud’s trajectory featured moments of losing one’s voice (pellegrino aveni, 2005) because of unfamiliarity with other english repertoires which rendered him unable to communicate in less comfortable situations (e.g., informal chats, small talks, social events). subsequently, it can be argued that mahmoud’s previous language education did not help him develop his own voice when speaking english as a second language. foreign language classrooms, through scripted conversations and roleplays, depict a rather simplistic representation of human social interaction. that is to say, learners are taught that when interlocutor (a) asks a question (x), interlocutor (b) will respond by saying (x) or (y). interlocutor (b), who is usually part of learners’ ‘imagined communities’ (following kanno and norton, 2003), is almost always introduced as a participant who is willing to respond and interact. therefore, language learners are not prepared to deal with the other multiple possibilities of interlocutor (b): someone who is not willing to respond, someone who may discriminate against the language learner, or someone who may give a negative response, etc. in social spaces beyond classrooms and test rooms, interlocutor (b) can be anyone and therefore predicting his/her responses is an unattainable task. as a result, instead of foregrounding a “tourism discourse” (kramsch, 2015), language learners need to be socio-culturally and socio-linguistically aware to realise that what goes inside the language classroom is usually a simplistic archetype of the speech acts which might occur outside the classroom. we have seen how mahmoud eventually had to foreground his poor english skills to make his interlocutors use slower and simpler english. the dialogues that mahmoud role played with his fellow classmates inside the language classroom were far from the reality of using english in the uk. section 3 above presented some attempts to bridge the gap between what is taught inside the foreign language classroom and what is used or encountered in the outside world. with reference to canagarajah’s (2014) ‘new paradigm for teaching english as an international language’, it can be argued that his proposal for nurturing procedural knowledge sounds too ambitious as it requires intensive teacher training practices and might make teachers feel that focusing on how different grammars work distracts them from focusing on their primary task. therefore, instead of focusing on how grammars in different languages work, the focus needs to be directed towards two main issues: khawla m. badwan 206 1. cultivating “conscious learning” (holmes & riddiford, 2011) through raising ideological, sociolinguistic, and socio-pragmatic awareness and, 2. embracing plurilithic conceptualisations of english in order to offer flexibility in the outcomes of language teaching (hall, 2013), as well as a more realistic representation of the dynamic linguistic scenes beyond classroom spaces and english proficiency examination halls. promoting conscious learning and more realistic representations of how language works in discursive practices is a way of producing a more pedagogically honest way of preparing language learners instead of “leaving them with the false hope that they will succeed in the communicative challenges out there if they master the forms and texts we drill into them” (canagarajah, 2014, p. 784). mahmoud’s more mature reflections made him realise that the english he was taught is a kind of “englishing” (following pennycook, 2007). therefore, he was able to name different kinds of english repertoires and registers such as: ielts english, general english, academic english, and normal english, etc. and his experience of moving across time and space was a major factor that opened his eyes to see beyond the standard english repertoire he was taught before. although it can be argued that this awareness is beneficial, it left him bewildered and voicedeprived. a detailed account of the implications of his devalued language ability on his identity and self-perception falls outside the scope of this article. what is required in an age of increasing globalisation, uncertainty, and unpredictability, is empowering language learners through undertaking rigorous conscious learning that trains them how to be conscious of and sensitive to the socio-pragmatic conditions of their interactions, and how different occasions call for different english repertoires. this knowledge should not only be preserved in scholarly publications because language learners have the right to understand how the language they have learnt interacts with the situations, interlocutors, and discourses they will encounter in order to give them the opportunity to decide on what sociolinguistic support they need, depending on where they want to go next. by doing this, english language education can go beyond the current reductionist approaches to social interactions (which prevail in elt textbooks), and achieve its moral responsibility of preparing language learners to be active, conscious agents amid the unpredictable encounters in the hybrid, heteroglossic reality of life outside the classroom. only when learners are aware of the sociolinguistic realities outside the classroom can they develop a voice of their own that enables them to negotiate meaning and positioning in discursive practices. although kramsch (2015) indicates that the task of language education becomes complicated when different conceptualisations of english are embraced, she insists that language educators are responsible for making their “did we learn english or what?”: a study abroad student in the uk carrying and crossing boundaries. . . 207 classrooms representative of real life and this denotes resisting powerful ideologies of monolithic english and the machineries that (re)produce them. in a similar vein, canagarajah (2014, p. 768) maintains that “changes in pedagogy don’t always mean that teaching practice is made difficult. teaching can actually become more creative, interesting, and fulfilling, if we only had the patience and tolerance for change.” this article is a call for a change towards conscious learning that embraces the complexity and emergence of language in social interactions, allowing learners to develop their own voice inside and outside the classroom. acknowledgements thanks are due to mahmoud, dr james simpson and prof mike baynham for their contributions to the research here reported. 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(2006). the emergence of super-diversity in britain. working paper no. 25. oxford: centre on migration, policy and society, university of oxford. retrieved from https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/media/wp-2006-025vertovec_super-diversity_britain.pdf 599 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (3). 2018. 599-620 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.3.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt l2 spanish apologies development during short-term study abroad todd a. hernández marquette university, milwaukee, usa todd.hernandez@marquette.edu abstract the present study examined the apologies of 18 study abroad (sa) students during a short-term sa experience in madrid, spain. apologies were assessed with a discourse completion task (dct) consisting of five vignettes that varied across three variables: relative social status of the interlocutor, relative social distance, and seriousness of the offense. based on performance ratings assigned to them by two native spanish speakers, the students made significant gains in pragmatic appropriateness from pretest to posttest, on two out of the five individual vignettes, and on the five combined vignettes. examination of the students’ apologies before and after sa further revealed that they increased several strategies during their time abroad. despite these gains, other aspects of the sa group’s performance remained the same or, in some cases, moved in the opposite direction of the target norm. moreover, the students also demonstrated continued overreliance on routine, formulaic expressions on the posttest dct while underusing some important target-like mitigation strategies. given the study’s findings, the researcher offers recommendations for teaching pragmatics before and during the sa experience. keywords: apologies; pragmatics; spanish; speech acts; study abroad todd a. hernández 600 1. introduction second language (l2) pragmatic development has received increasing attention in study abroad (sa) research (e.g., bataller, 2010; henery, 2015; hernández, 2016; shively, 2010, 2016; shively & cohen, 2008). a large body of this research suggests that l2 learners tend to become more target-like after a semester or more abroad (e.g., churchill & dufon, 2006; dufon, 2010; kasper & rose, 2002; shively, 2010, 2016; shively & cohen, 2008). one important feature of pragmatic competence is the knowledge of how to apologize in the target language. l2 learners must have sufficient pragmalinguistic knowledge (i.e., knowledge of the specific linguistic resources for apologizing) and sociopragmatic knowledge (i.e., knowledge of the contextual and social variables that determine the appropriateness of a pragmalinguistic choice) in order to placate their interlocutor without being perceived as rude or impolite (thomas, 1983). with the exception of a few studies (kondo, 1997; shively & cohen, 2008; warga & scholmberger, 2007), little research exists, however, that examines how sa participants acquire apologies during their time abroad. in addition, no previous studies have reported on the development of l2 apologies in spanish during short-term sa. because of the continued increase in enrollment in short-term sa (institute of international education, 2016), it is particularly important for the foreign language profession to investigate the l2 pragmatic development of students in these programs. the present study reports on the l2 apology development of 18 students during a short-term (four weeks) sa program in spain. native speaker ratings of students’ apology performance on a discourse completion task (dct) were compared before and after sa. in addition, the participants’ apology strategies on the dct were examined in comparison to a group of native spanish speakers who completed the same dct. the remainder of this article is organized as follows. first, a brief introduction to the speech act of apologies is provided, followed by a review of the literature on l1 spanish apologies and the development of l2 apologies. the methods are described, including the sa participants, the sa program, as well as the instrument and procedures for data collection and data analysis. the results of the study are then presented, followed by a discussion of the results, directions for future research, and implications for sa programs. 2. review of literature this review of the literature begins with a definition of apologies, followed by an overview of previous studies on l1 spanish apologies. we then transition to a discussion of the acquisition of l2 apologies and conclude with research concerning the development of l2 apologies in sa contexts. l2 spanish apologies development during short-term study abroad 601 2.1. definition of apologies an apology is a “compensatory action to an offense in the doing of which s (the speaker) was causally involved and which is costly to h (the hearer)” (bergman & kasper, 1993, p. 82). in brown and levinson’s (1987) politeness theory, an apology is a face-saving speech act for the hearer because it provides support for the hearer’s negative face which has been damaged by a violation. contrastively, an apology represents a face-threatening speech act to the speaker because it damages that person’s positive face. brown and levinson (1987) predict that social distance, power, and seriousness of offense determine the nature and amount of redress. the assessments of these three factors varies across cultures. in turn, this influences the strategies that a speaker may choose to employ to perform the speech act. moreover, language learners often transfer strategies from their l1 to their l2 (kondo, 2010). the act of apologizing can therefore be problematic for the l2 learner because he or she must know what represents an offense, understand the seriousness of the offense, and then know which strategies to employ in addressing the interlocutor (bergman & kasper, 1993; kondo, 2010). previous research (blum-kulka, house, & kasper, 1989; cohen & olshtain, 1981; olshtain & cohen, 1983, 1989) has identified six strategies involved in making an apology: an explicit expression of apology (illocutionary force indicating device, ifid), acknowledgement of responsibility, explanation, offer of repair and promise of non-recurrence. an apology may also include a strategy to signal intensification (e.g., i’m very sorry), which serves to emphasize the speaker’s regret (sabaté i dalmau & curell i gotor, 2007). the speaker uses at least one of these strategies to mitigate the impact of an offense and to reestablish social harmony with the interlocutor. an example of each of these strategies is given below in spanish with its english translation: · expression of apology (ifid): the speaker makes the apology explicit by using formulaic, routinized expressions. lo siento (‘i’m sorry’). · acknowledgement of responsibility: the speaker expresses responsibility for the committed offense in order to placate the offended person. fue mi culpa (‘it was my fault’). · explanation: the speaker provides an explanation or account of the situation and reason for the violation. lo siento, es que dejé mi mochila en el autobús (‘sorry, i left my backpack on the bus’). · offer of repair: the speaker offers to do something about or pay for the damage caused by the offense. te voy a comprar otro libro (‘i am going to buy you a new book’). todd a. hernández 602 · promise of non-recurrence: the speaker promises that the offense will not occur again. te prometo que no va a volver a pasar (‘i promise that it won’t happen again’). · intensification: the speaker deems that it is important that the ifid be intensified. lo siento mucho (‘i’m very sorry‘). having established the various categories utilized by western european language speakers to differentiate between forms of apologies, we now turn to the role of apology use by native spanish speakers. 2.2. l1 spanish apologies several studies have outlined the strategies that native spanish speakers employ in their apologies (e.g., gómez, 2008; márquez reiter, 2000; rojo, 2005). using role-plays, rojo (2005) found that the most frequently used strategies in peninsular spanish were acknowledgement of responsibility and offer of repair. expressions of apology was the least preferred strategy. similar to rojo (2005), gómez (2008) used four role-plays to examine the apology strategy use of colombian spanish speakers. gómez reported that the colombians employed acknowledgement of responsibility 100% of the time in all four role-play scenarios, noting that they often use acknowledgement of responsibility with the impersonal se, in expressions such as se me olvidó nuestra cita (literally, ‘our appointment was forgotten by me’) and se me cayó la gaseosa (literally, ‘the soft drink fell from me’), thus minimizing their responsibility for the committed offense. similar patterns of acknowledgement of responsibility usage with the impersonal se were observed in márquez reiter’s (2000) study of uruguayan spanish speakers. shively and cohen’s (2008) study of the l2 pragmatic development of 67 sa students is also helpful in establishing norms for l1 apologies in spanish. evidence from their baseline comparison group of 12 native spanish speakers (from argentina, colombia, costa rica, ecuador, honduras, mexico, peru, and spain) suggests that native spanish speakers employ a variety of expressions of apology (e.g., lo siento [‘i’m sorry’], perdón [‘sorry’], perdóneme [‘forgive me’], discúlpeme [‘i’m sorry’], and qué pena [‘that’s too bad’]) and intensifiers (e.g., lo siento de verdad [‘i’m really sorry’], lo siento de veras [‘i’m truly sorry’], and mil disculpas [‘i’m very sorry’]). shively and cohen also discovered that the native spanish speakers frequently used the acknowledgement of responsibility strategy with the impersonal se (e.g., se me cayó, literally, ‘it fell from me’) as a way of distancing themselves from the responsibility for the offense while also indicating that it was out of their control. studies on native spanish speaker apologies have thus demonstrated the central role of acknowledgement of responsibility with the impersonal se as a tool for mitigation. we now shift to the l2 spanish apologies development during short-term study abroad 603 matter of what previous research has found regarding the developmental path that l2 learners take in their acquisition of apologies. 2.3. development of l2 apologies studies on the acquisition of apologies have identified four major developmental patterns for l2 learners as they become more proficient in the target language. first, less proficient learners often demonstrate an overreliance on routine expressions, such as i’m sorry and excuse me, because of their ease of use (rose, 2000; sabaté i dalmau & curell i gotor, 2007; shively & cohen, 2008; trosborg, 2003). second, l2 learners decrease their l1 transfer as proficiency increases (maeshiba, yoshinaga, kasper, & ross, 1996; sabaté i dalmau & curell i gotor, 2007). a third observation is that more proficient l2 learners use a wider range of apology strategies than less proficient learners (rose, 2000; sabaté i dalmau & curell i gotor, 2007). for example, sabaté i dalmau and curell i gotor (2007) compared the apologies of 78 catalan learners of english at three different proficiency levels (proficiency having been determined by scores on the university’s placement exam). their findings suggest that the more proficient l2 learners employed a greater number of different strategies and used fewer nontarget-like expressions than the less proficient learners. even the more advanced students had not acquired sufficient sociolinguistic competence, however, to know which specific strategies were most appropriate for a given context. meanwhile, the lower proficiency learners overused or even repeated what the authors described as transparent ifids or pre-patterned chunks such as i’m sorry and excuse me to avoid employing more complex strategies while still ensuring that they performed the apology. the fourth and final developmental pattern is that some advanced l2 learners acquire the ability to intensify their apologies (e.g., i’m very sorry). researchers suggest, however, that target-like intensification strategies are one of the most difficult apology features to acquire (márquez reiter, 2001; mir, 1992; sabaté i dalmau & curell i gotor, 2007; shively & cohen, 2008; trosborg, 1995). while trosborg (1995) found that three groups of danish learners of english did not use as many intensifiers as the native english speakers did, she did find that there was a relationship between higher language proficiency and more target-like intensification. similarly, although sabaté i dalmau and curell i gotor’s (2007) most advanced students employed intensification more frequently than the other students, they did not attain native-like command of intensifiers. rather, the students overused a very finite set of expressions. now that we are aware of the developmental patterns that l2 learners take in their acquisition of apologies, we now consider the development of this speech act in sa contexts. todd a. hernández 604 2.4. development of l2 apologies during study abroad previous research suggests that sa has a positive effect on the development of apologies for students who spend at least a semester or more abroad (kondo, 1997; shively & cohen, 2008; warga & scholmberger, 2007). kondo (1997) administered a dct to japanese high school students both before and after their academic year in the united states. the findings indicated that the students became more target-like after sa, shifting from overreliance on expressions of apology (e.g., sorry) to more frequent use of explanations (e.g., i was late because there was an accident). shively and cohen (2008) reported on the acquisition of apologies for 67 sa participants who spent a semester in a spanish-speaking country. posttest performance ratings on a dct consisting of five vignettes were higher than pretest performance ratings. the authors attributed the group’s improvement to their increased use of several strategies on the posttest. in addition, whereas the students overused the routine formula lo siento (‘i’m sorry’) on the pretest, most expanded their selection of target-like formulae, employing such ifids as perdón (‘pardon’), perdóneme (‘forgive me’), and discúlpeme (‘i’m sorry’) on the posttests. in their use of acknowledgement of responsibility, some students also began to produce the impersonal se or agentless construction (e.g., se me perdió, literally, ‘it was lost from me’) on the posttest to indicate that the infraction was not their fault (gómez, 2008). evidence from sa research indicates that l2 pragmatic development does not always occur in a linear fashion, as warga and scholmberger’s (2007) study of seven austrian learners of french who studied for ten months in quebec demonstrated. their learners completed a four-item dct six times at two-month intervals. the authors identified three major developmental patterns. first, the students became more target-like over time by decreasing their use of excuses with malheureusement (‘unfortunately’) and justifications. the second development was a shift away from the quebecois target norm (e.g., increase in the use of two upgraders in one ifid, increase in the use of très [‘very’] and a corresponding decrease in the use of vraiment [‘really’]). third, some aspects of the students’ performance remained unchanged (e.g., frequency of use of ifids). regarding the participants’ overuse of malheureusement before sa, warga and scholmberger suggest that they had transferred this strategy from their l1. at data collection times 2 and 3, the students decreased their use of malheureusement and replaced it with target language chunks. by time 4, participants had begun to replace these target-like chunks with a more controlled and creative pragmatic performance. at this stage, the students had combined target-like strategies with elements from their l1 to form a pragmatic interlanguage. the authors concluded that at the final stage of acquisition, the l2 learners would have target-like control of this feature. l2 spanish apologies development during short-term study abroad 605 in sum, this review of literature has described the relative importance of the speech act of apologizing. we explored what scholars have noted regarding native spanish speakers, as well as l2 learners, and the conclusions reached on the matter of the acquisition and use of apologies during sa. we can now consider the effect of short-term sa on the development of l2 apologies in spanish. 3. research questions previous studies suggest that sa has a positive effect on the development of apologies for students who spend a semester or more abroad. no studies exist, however, that have investigated the development of students’ l2 spanish apologies during short-term sa. the present study thus aims to address an important gap in the sa literature. our research questions are: 1. how do native spanish speakers rate the apologies of spanish l2 learners before and after short-term sa? 2. how do spanish l2 learners’ apologies develop during short-term sa? 4. methodology 4.1. the study abroad participants eighteen (18) undergraduate students (14 females, 4 males) participated in a fourweek sa program in madrid, spain, during the summer of 2011. all were adult l2 learners of spanish, between the ages of 19 and 22 years old. english was their l1 and there were no heritage speakers of spanish. participants had completed between four to six semesters (or equivalent) of college spanish prior to the program. the students’ oral proficiency levels1 ranged from novice high to advanced low on the actfl proficiency scale (actfl, 1999). none of them had previous sa experience (see appendix for further participant information). 4.2. the study abroad program at the on-site orientation in madrid, the students were assigned to intermediate or advanced courses based on the host institution’s placement examination. students attended two classes (taught in spanish) for 20 hours of coursework 1 to measure oral proficiency gains made during sa, a simulated oral proficiency interview (sopi; stansfield, 1996) was given to participants prior to their departure for spain, and again during the final week of the program. sopi scores are provided to help the reader contextualize the study’s findings. todd a. hernández 606 per week. the intermediate students chose two three-credit courses: grammar, conversation, or spanish culture. l2 spanish learners from several us and foreign institutions were also enrolled in the intermediate sections. students in the advanced track chose two three-credit courses: literature, advanced conversation, or spanish culture. advanced students attended classes with both native spanish speakers (literature) and other l2 spanish learners (advanced conversation and spanish culture). coursework was combined with a series of academiccultural excursions conducted in spanish. all participants lived with host families. 4.3. data collection and assessment the present study had a pretest-posttest design. the students completed the same written dct (adapted from shively & cohen, 2008) three weeks prior to their departure for sa and again at the conclusion of the four-week program. the dct consisted of five vignettes designed to represent social and situational variation across three variables: social status, social distance, and seriousness of offense. for each vignette, the students completed a dialogue that included several responses from an interlocutor. the five vignettes appear in table 1 (see shively & cohen, 2008 for further information). table 1 description of the vignettes on the dct (shively & cohen, 2008) vignette relative social distance social status of hearer seriousness of offense spill wine equal/high high low friend’s book equal mid high babysitting spill low mid high meeting friend equal low low meeting professor high mid high fifteen (n = 15) native spanish speakers from madrid also completed the dct in order to provide a baseline comparison with the sa students’ data. all 15 spanish speakers, whose ages ranged from 22 to 35 years old, were living in madrid at the time of the data collection. two native spanish speakers rated the students’ responses on the dct. both raters (one male; one female) were 22-year-old exchange students from madrid. both had been living in the united states for three months at the time of their participation in the rating sessions. prior to rating, the researcher described to them the goals of the research project, the research instrument, and the evaluation criteria. examples of native spanish speaker and l2 learner responses were given to the raters in order for them to become familiar with the l2 spanish apologies development during short-term study abroad 607 dct. the researcher and the two raters then scored a practice test together. ratings were compared and discussed. the pragmatic appropriateness of the apologies on the dcts was evaluated as an “overall success” score. this score was based on the native speaker’s intuitions about how he or she would react to the student’s responses in each vignette (see shively & cohen, 2008 for further information). overall success ratings were scored on a 5-point likert scale: 5 = i would feel quite satisfied with this response. 4 = i would feel satisfied with this response. 3 = i would feel somewhat satisfied with this response. 2 = i would feel unsatisfied with this response. 1 = unacceptable response. the students’ written responses were entered into an excel spreadsheet and randomized so that the raters would not know whether a given response was from the preor posttest. students’ responses were also assigned a unique code number that was unknown to the raters. both raters scored each vignette for each student. when there was disagreement between the two raters of more than one point on the same vignette, they discussed their scores with the researcher and then assigned new ratings. in addition to assigning numerical ratings, the raters were also asked to explain their rationale for each rating. an inter-rater reliability analysis was performed on the raters’ scores. cronbach’s alpha coefficients were found to be high for the pretest (.89) and for the posttest (.92). finally, in order to create one final score for each vignette for each student’s pretest and posttest, the two raters’ scores were averaged. each student also received a composite score on the pretest and posttest which represented his or her combined performance on all five of the vignettes. in addition to the performance ratings, the researcher and a research assistant coded the use of apology strategies in the sa group and native spanish speaker baseline data using the cross cultural speech act realization project coding manual (blum-kulka et al., 1989). apologies were coded for six categories. to ensure inter-coder reliability, the data were coded independently by the researcher and the research assistant. the agreement was high (90%). the remaining 10% of the cases were discussed and coding was agreed upon. examples of responses from the sa students are provided in table 2. todd a. hernández 608 table 2 examples of responses on dct from sa students apology strategy example expression of apology (ifid) lo siento, pero he perdido el libro en el autobús ayer. (‘i’m sorry, but i lost your book yesterday on the bus.’) (student 1 posttest: friend’s book) acknowledgement of responsibility se me olvidó completamente nuestra cita. lo siento. (‘i completely forgot about our meeting. i’m sorry.’) (student 18 posttest: meeting professor) explanation lo siento, sofía. estaba en una cita para hablar con mi profe sobre el examen. (‘i’m sorry, sofía. i had an appointment with my professor to talk about the exam.’) (student 9 posttest: meeting friend) offer of repair lo siento, marta. te puedo comprar otro libro. (‘i’m sorry, marta. i can buy you another book.’) (student 15 posttest: friend’s book) promise of non-recurrence no se me olvidará en el futuro. (‘i won’t forget about it again.’) (student 11 posttest: meeting professor) intensification lo siento mucho. (‘i’m very sorry.’) (student 10 pretest: spilled wine) 5. results 5.1 research question 1 how do native spanish speakers rate the apologies of spanish l2 learners before and after short-term sa? the first research question examined the question whether native spanish speakers rated the students’ apologies as more appropriate after the sa experience. table 3 provides the students’ preand posttest scores on the five individual vignettes and on the five combined vignettes (composite). table 3 paired samples t tests for pretest and posttest performance ratings on the dct m sd t df sig. spill wine pretest 3.44 0.54 -1.528 17 .145 posttest 3.72 0.65 friend’s book pretest 3.28 0.62 -3.335 17 .004 posttest 3.89 0.87 l2 spanish apologies development during short-term study abroad 609 babysitting spill pretest 3.56 0.87 -0.809 17 .430 posttest 3.67 0.75 meeting friend pretest 3.39 0.95 -1.713 17 .105 posttest 3.78 0.75 meeting professor pretest 3.17 0.66 -2.766 17 .013 posttest 3.67 0.82 composite score (five vignettes combined) pretest 16.83 2.77 -4.154 17 .001 posttest 18.72 2.59 posttest mean scores were higher than pretest mean scores on all five vignettes and on the composite. paired samples t tests using the holm-bonferonni method to adjust for inflated alphas were performed to measure differences in pre-posttest performance ratings. significant differences were observed on two out of the five vignettes (friend’s book and meeting professor) and also on the composite. significant differences were not observed on spill wine, babysitting spill, and meeting friend. in turning to the two vignettes that were found to be significant, the students’ mean scores increased from 3.28 on the pretest to 3.89 on the posttest (p = .004) in friend’s book, and from 3.17 to 3.67 in meeting professor (p = .013). composite mean scores increased from 16.83 on the pretest to 18.72 on the posttest (p = .001). effect size measures using cohen’s d (1988; d = .20 as a small effect, d = .50 as a medium effect, and d = .80 as a large effect) suggested that there was a large effect size for friend’s book (d = .79) and a medium effect for meeting professor (d = .65). a very large effect was found for the composite score (d = .98). these results indicate that the native spanish speakers rated the students’ apologies as more appropriate after sa than before. 5.2. research question 2 how do spanish l2 learners’ apologies develop during short-term sa? to answer this second research question, the researcher examined the students’ apology strategies on the preand posttest dct. the sa group’s strategies were then compared to those of the 15 native spanish speakers who completed the same dct. table 4 provides the strategies used by the students prior to and after sa as well as those used by the native speakers. todd a. hernández 610 table 4 comparison of apologies strategy between sa students and native spanish speakers study abroad students native spanish speakers pretest posttest n (%) n (%) n (%) spill wine expression of apology 16 (89%) 18 (100%) 8 (53%) acknowledgement of responsibility 7 (39%) 10 (56%) 9 (60%) explanation 0 (0%) 1 (6%) 0 (0%) offer of repair 18 (100%) 18 (100%) 15 (100%) promise of non-recurrence 0 (0%) 1 (6%) 0 (0%) intensification 7 (39%) 3 (17%) 14 (93%) friends’ book expression of apology 16 (89%) 14 (78%) 9 (60%) acknowledgement of responsibility 13 (72%) 16 (89%) 14 (93%) explanation 7 (33%) 9 (50%) 7 (47%) offer of repair 15 (83%) 16 (89%) 15 (100%) promise of non-recurrence 1 (6%) 2 (11%) 0 (0%) intensification 6 (33%) 8 (44%) 11 (73%) babysitting spill expression of apology 18 (100%) 14 (78%) 8 (53%) acknowledgement of responsibility 12 (67%) 15 (83%) 13 (87%) explanation 1 (6%) 2 (11%) 4 (27%) offer of repair 15 (83%) 17 (94%) 15 (100%) promise of non-recurrence 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) intensification 8 (44%) 4 (22%) 9 (60%) meeting friend expression of apology 17 (94%) 17 (94%) 14 (93%) acknowledgement of responsibility 6 (33%) 8 (44%) 12 (80%) explanation 13 (72%) 15 (83%) 13 (87%) offer of repair 15 (83%) 12 (67%) 12 (80%) promise of non-recurrence 1 (6%) 5 (28%) 4 (27%) intensification 3 (17%) 2 (11%) 6 (40%) meeting professor expression of apology 15 (83%) 12 (67%) 9 (60%) acknowledgement of responsibility 13 (72%) 17 (94%) 13 (87%) explanation 8 (44%) 15 (83%) 13 (87%) offer of repair 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) promise of non-recurrence 13 (72%) 16 (89%) 15 (100%) intensification 5 (28%) 10 (56%) 12 (80%) descriptive statistics were employed to investigate the differences from pretest to posttest, and also between the sa group and the native spanish speakers. in order to determine whether a given difference was notable, a cutoff score of 15% was used for differences in preand posttest scores as well as for differences between the sa group and the native spanish speakers (nsss). l2 spanish apologies development during short-term study abroad 611 several notable trends were observed in the two vignettes that had significant pretest to posttest performance ratings. each trend represented a shift toward the target norm. in friend’s book, the students increased their use of two strategies: acknowledgement of responsibility (pretest = 72%; posttest = 89%; nsss = 93%) and explanation (pretest = 33%; posttest = 50%; nsss = 47%). in meeting professor, the students increased their use of four strategies: acknowledgement of responsibility (pretest = 72%; posttest = 94%; nsss = 87%), explanation (pretest = 44%; posttest = 83%; nsss = 87%), promise of non-recurrence (pretest = 72%; posttest = 89%; nsss = 100%), and intensification (pretest = 28%; posttest = 56%; nsss = 80%). finally, the sa group also decreased their use of expression of apology (pretest = 83%; posttest = 67%; nsss = 60%) in this vignette as well. regarding the remaining vignettes, three notable shifts toward more target-like pragmatic performance were also observed. first, in spill wine, the students increased their use of acknowledgement of responsibility from 39% on the pretest to 56% on the posttest (nsss = 60%). second, in meeting friend, a greater percentage of students used promise of non-recurrence on the posttest (28%) than on the pretest (6%) (nsss = 27%). finally, in babysitting spill, the students decreased their use of expression of apology from 100% to 78% on the posttest (nsss = 53%). the sa group’s performance also included several changes that were indicative of movement in the opposite direction of the target norm. the students reduced their use of intensification in spill wine (pretest = 39%; posttest = 17%; nsss = 93%) and babysitting spill (pretest = 44%; posttest = 22%; nsss = 60%). similarly, the participants’ less frequent use of offer of repair from pretest (83%) to posttest (67%) in the meeting friend vignette was also suggestive of a shift away from the target norm (nsss = 80%). in addition, two more general differences were also observed between the students’ preand posttest strategies and those of the nsss. the students’ use of expression of apology was much more frequent on the preand posttest than that of the native speakers in three vignettes (spill wine, babysitting spill, and friend’s book). the second notable difference was the students’ underuse of intensification across all five vignettes. in spill wine, the sa group’s infrequent use of intensification (pretest = 39%; posttest = 17%) stood in stark contrast to the native spanish speakers, who used intensifiers 93% of the time. examination of the content of the students’ strategies further generated four noteworthy findings. first, participants demonstrated a strong preference for the routine expression lo siento (‘i’m sorry’) as an expression of apology both before and after sa. it was only the more advanced l2 learners who by the time of the posttest began to incorporate more target-like lexical expressions into their ifid repertoire, such as perdón (‘forgive me’), perdóname (‘forgive me’), disculpa todd a. hernández 612 (‘sorry’), and discúlpame (‘i’m sorry’). second, evidence from three vignettes (friend’s book, meeting friend, and meeting professor) revealed that the students gained better control of appropriate address terms (tú versus ud.) on the posttests. third, although the students increased their use of acknowledgement of responsibility from pretest to posttest, they did not use the impersonal se (e.g., se me pasó la hora, ‘i lost track of time’), a structure that the native spanish speakers used very frequently. finally, the students used a reduced number of intensifiers (e.g., lo siento mucho, ‘i’m very sorry’) compared to the native speakers, who employed a variety of expressions to intensify their apologies, such as lo siento de verdad (‘i’m very sorry’) and lo siento de veras (‘i’m so sorry’). 5.3. summary of results in conclusion, the students improved their performance ratings during their time abroad on two vignettes as well as on the five combined vignettes. in some cases, as in friend’s book and meeting professor, the students became more target-like in their apologies through more frequent use of several strategies (e.g., acknowledgement of responsibility, explanation, and promise of non-recurrence). at the same time, however, there were also instances in which the sa group’s performance shifted away from the target norm. we see this in the students’ less frequent use of intensification from preto posttest in both spill wine and babysitting spill. similarly, in meeting friend, fewer students used offer of repair on the posttest than the pretest. finally, the group’s overuse of expressions of apology with a concurrent underuse of intensification were also important findings. 6. discussion the present study examined the development of students’ apologies during a four-week sa experience. results suggest that the students improved some aspects of their pragmatic performance over the course of their time abroad, even as other features remained unchanged. this section discusses the findings from the students’ performance ratings on the dct (research question 1) and then transitions to an examination of the strategies students used before and after sa (research question 2). paired samples t tests indicated that for the five combined vignettes, the students increased their performance ratings from pretest to posttest. in addition, the students made significant gains on two (friend’s book and meeting professor) out of the five individual vignettes. these findings are similar to shively and cohen (2008), whose students also made significant improvements in pragmatic appropriateness on the same five combined vignettes after a semester l2 spanish apologies development during short-term study abroad 613 abroad. meanwhile, their students’ significant gains on the individual vignettes were also limited to two vignettes (friend’s book and babysitting spill). we now consider the students’ use of strategies on the preand posttest to better understand what specific features of their apologies did or did not develop during their time abroad. our examination of students’ strategies on the dct suggests that at least two aspects were responsible for the higher performance ratings on the posttests. the first area that may have contributed to the higher ratings was the students’ increased use of several strategies on the posttests. in four out of the five vignettes (spill wine, friend’s book, babysitting spill, and meeting professor), more students used acknowledgement of responsibility on the posttest than the pretest. the sa group also employed explanation more frequently on the posttest in both friend’s book and meeting professor. in addition, the students increased their use of promise of non-recurrence in meeting friend and meeting professor; and intensification in meeting professor. the second area that may have produced higher performance ratings after sa was the participants’ better control of address forms (tú versus ud.) on the posttests. previous research in interlanguage pragmatics has determined that l2 learners are often insensitive to situational variation, suggesting that less proficient learners sometimes adopt a single address term in the target language and overuse it, even when it is inappropriate for a given social context (churchill & dufon, 2006; dufon, 2010; hassall, 2013). the present study’s participants demonstrated more control of address forms on the posttests in three vignettes (friend’s book, meeting friend, and meeting professor). in meeting professor, for example, several students addressed the professor with the tú form on the pretest when ud. was more appropriate. in examining the raters’ comments, both agreed that ud. was the correct address form because of the seriousness of the offense, and more so because the students were speaking to a higher status interlocutor. in the dcts, the nsss were indeed unanimous in their adoption of the ud. address form in this vignette. by the time of the posttest, most of our students also began to address the professor using ud. a similar pattern occurred in friend’s book and meeting friend. in these vignettes, a number of the participants addressed their interlocutors with the formal ud. form at the time of the pretest. both raters noted that it would have been more appropriate for them to have used the informal tú, because these vignettes involved equal status interlocutors (two friends). by the time of the posttests, the students did indeed speak to their interlocutors with the most appropriate address form for the given context. while the sa group became more target-like through their more frequent use of several strategies and demonstrated better control of address forms on the posttest, their use of expression of apology was non-target-like before and todd a. hernández 614 after sa when compared to the nsss – both in terms of their frequency of use of ifids and their lexical choices. this finding affirms those of previous researchers (e.g., sabaté i dalmau & currell i gotor, 2007; shively & cohen, 2008), who have determined that lower proficiency learners often overuse formulaic, pre-patterned expressions such as lo siento (‘i’m sorry’) as an expression of apology. despite the numerous options available in spanish, the present study’s participants demonstrated their preference for this same particular transparent chunk. indeed, both raters commented that several students also used lo siento several times within the same vignette – a phenomenon that was more evident on the pretests than on the posttests. trosborg (2003) suggests that l2 learners often rely on those expressions which are easiest to retrieve and are frequently employed during classroom instruction. as learners become more proficient, their repertoire of strategies expands and becomes more native-like. indeed, in this study, the researcher found that only the most proficient l2 learners used other forms of an expression of apology. participant 6, an intermediate high speaker at the time of the pretest and advanced low speaker after the posttest, used disculpa (‘sorry’) and discúlpeme (‘i’m sorry’) in several vignettes on the pretest and posttest. participants 15 and 16, intermediate high speakers at both the preand posttest, used perdón (‘forgive me’) and perdóname (‘forgive me’) several times on the posttest. participant 18, an advanced low speaker before and after sa, employed perdón (‘forgive me’), as well as the informal discúlpame (‘i’m sorry’) and the formal discúlpeme (‘i’m sorry’) in several vignettes both before and after sa. these results are similar to what shively and cohen (2008) found. by the end of a semester of sa, most of their students also had begun to expand their repertoire of expressions of apology. evidence from previous studies (e.g., gómez, 2005; márquez reiter, 2000; rojo, 2005; shively & cohen, 2008) suggests that the impersonal se, in expressions such as se me olvidó nuestra cita (literally, ‘the appointment was forgotten by me’) and se me cayó el vaso (literally, ‘the glass fell from me’) is one distinguishing strategy that native spanish speakers use to mitigate their apologies. this construction allows the speaker to distance himself or herself from responsibility for the committed offense, thus defending his or her self-image in front of the offended person (gómez, 2008). while the present study’s students generally increased their use of acknowledgment of responsibility from pretest to posttest, participant 18 (advanced low speaker on pretest and posttest) was the only student who incorporated the impersonal se into her use of this strategy. in contrast, the native spanish speakers used this mitigating device often, thereby indicating that the infraction was out of their control. in comparison, shively and cohen’s (2008) sa students began to use the impersonal se in their apologies only after a semester of sa. it might be the case that the students in the present study did not have sufficient control of the target language in order l2 spanish apologies development during short-term study abroad 615 to employ this agentless construction. another possible explanation is that the students were not aware that the impersonal se is frequently used in spanish to minimize responsibility for an offense. intensification represents another feature of apologies that is difficult for l2 learners to acquire (e.g., sabaté i dalmau & curell i gotor, 2007; shively & cohen, 2008; trosborg, 1995). a similar developmental pattern was observed with the present study’s participants. they overwhelmingly underused intensification both before and after sa compared to the nsss, who used this strategy consistently. furthermore, the students’ use of intensifiers was limited to lo siento mucho (‘i’m very sorry’). nowhere on either the preor posttests did a student employ one of the several other intensifiers available in spanish. on the other hand, the native spanish speakers used a wider variety of intensifiers in their apologies, such as lo siento muchísimo (‘i’m very sorry’), lo siento de verdad (‘i’m truly sorry’), and le pido mil disculpas (‘i’m very sorry’). shively and cohen (2008) found somewhat parallel results. after a semester abroad, their participants expanded their use of intensification, so much that it often surpassed the target norm. however, similar to the present study’s findings, their group’s use of intensification also was primarily limited to lo siento mucho. the present study had several limitations that we must consider when interpreting our findings. first, there was no control group. researchers might therefore compare the pragmatic development of short-term sa students with a group of at-home classroom learners in a summer session at the home institution. the second limitation was the use of a dct to measure the students’ apologies. we must acknowledge that dcts measure what students know rather than how they use their knowledge to interact with an interlocutor (félixbrasdefer, 2010; shively & cohen, 2008). given the advantages of role-plays (bataller & shively, 2011), future researchers might consider employing both dcts and role-plays to examine the development of students’ apologies and other speech acts during sa. finally, because the students improved some features of their apologies while others remained unchanged or, in some cases, shifted away from the target norm, researchers should measure the impact of pragmatic intervention on the development of sa participant’s apologies compared to a sa group that is not exposed to intervention. 7. conclusion the aim of the current study was to investigate the development of students’ apologies during a short-term sa experience in spain. seven major findings were observed. first, based on performance ratings assigned to them by two nsss, the students made significant gains in pragmatic appropriateness in two out of todd a. hernández 616 the five vignettes and on the five combined vignettes (composite). the second finding was that the students became more target-like by increasing their use of three strategies (acknowledgement of responsibility, explanation, and promise of non-recurrence) in several of the vignettes. the students also increased their use of intensification in meeting professor. third, the sa group reduced their use of expression of apology in babysitting spill and meeting professor. fourth, in some cases the students became less target-like from pretest to posttest (e.g., less frequent use of offer of repair in meeting friend), which suggests that they had not acquired sufficient sociocultural knowledge to understand which strategies to use in this particular context. the fifth finding was that despite gains, there remained at times significant differences between the students’ strategies and those of the nsss. while the sa group increased their use of acknowledgement of responsibility on the posttest, for example, they did not employ the impersonal se (e.g., se me olvidó nuestra cita, ‘i forgot about our appointment’), an important mitigating device used frequently by nsss. in addition, the students overused routine expressions, such as lo siento (‘i’m sorry’), whereas the native speakers used a wide range of ifids. the seventh and final finding was that the students underused intensification (e.g., lo siento mucho, ‘i’m very sorry’) when compared to the nsss, who used this strategy very frequently while obviously possessing a more extensive set of lexical intensifiers (e.g., cuánto lo siento, ‘i’m so sorry’). taken together, our findings indicate that exposure to target language input during sa may well be insufficient for l2 learners who have the expectation of acquiring the pragmatic features of the host community. if pragmatic competence is one of the goals of the sa experience, the students should be made aware of the pragmatic norms of the host culture before and during the course of their time abroad. sa programs should develop this knowledge through explicit instruction, awareness-raising activities, communicative output practice, targeted feedback, and guided reflection (e.g., hernández, 2018; hernández & boero, 2018; kondo, 2010; martínez-flor & usó-juan, 2006; shively, 2010). the model i envision is based on second language acquisition constructs (e.g., noticing, pushed output) that are thought to facilitate language development. the noticing hypothesis (schmidt, 2001) states that there must be conscious attention or noticing of a given feature in the input for acquisition to occur. output (swain, 1995) and guided metapragmatic reflection, for their part, further draw learners’ attention to target forms and their use. building on the pragmatic knowledge that students will have acquired in pre-departure orientation, participants could then be given tasks during sa designed to provide them opportunities to listen and observe native speakers making apologies and performing other speech acts, practice them, and receive targeted feedback about their l2 pragmatic development (hernández, 2018; hernández & boero, 2018). l2 spanish apologies development during short-term study abroad 617 references actfl. 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(2008). development of spanish requests and apologies during study abroad. íkala, revista de lenguaje y cultura, 13(20), 53-118. stansfield, c. (1996). test development handbook: simulated oral proficiency interview (sopi). washington, dc: center for applied linguistics. swain, m. (1995). three functions of output in second language learning. in g. cook & b. seidlhofer (eds.), principles and practice in the study of language: studies in honour of h. g. widdowson (pp. 125-144). oxford: oxford university press. thomas, j. (1983). cross-cultural pragmatic failure. applied linguistics, 4, 91-112. trosborg, a. (1995). interlanguage pragmatics: requests, complaints, apologies. berlin: mouton de gruyter. trosborg, a. (2003). the teaching of business pragmatics. in a. martínez-flor & e. usó-juan (eds.), pragmatic competence and foreign language teaching (pp. 247-281). castelló de la plana: publicaciones de la universitat jaume i. warga, m., & scholmberger, u. (2007). the acquisition of french apologetic behavior in a study abroad context. intercultural pragmatics, 4(2), 221-252. todd a. hernández 620 appendix participant information student track courses in spain pretest dct posttest dct pretest sopi score posttest sopi score 1 intermediate grammar culture 13.50 16.50 il ih 2 intermediate grammar culture 16.50 18.00 il ih 3 intermediate grammar culture 17.50 19.00 il ih 4 intermediate grammar culture 16.50 18.50 il ih 5 intermediate conversation culture 11.50 18.00 im ih 6 advanced literature culture 18.00 20.00 ih al 7 intermediate grammar culture 18.50 20.00 im im 8 intermediate conversation culture 15.50 16.50 il im 9 intermediate conversation culture 15.00 19.50 im ih 10 advanced literature culture 20.00 23.50 im ih 11 intermediate grammar culture 16.00 18.00 il ih 12 intermediate grammar conversation 13.50 12.00 nh il 13 intermediate grammar conversation 13.50 16.00 nh il 14 intermediate grammar conversation 17.50 17.00 il im 15 advanced literature culture 18.00 21.50 ih ih 16 advanced literature culture 19.50 20.00 ih ih 17 advanced literature culture 21.00 21.00 il ih 18 advanced literature culture 21.50 21.50 al al 467 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (4). 467-482 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl does euro-english have native speakers? making sense of conflicting views romuald gozdawa-go biowski university of warsaw, poland r.gozdawa@uw.edu.pl abstract this paper examines the status of european english (ee) in current linguistic theory, in particular the hotly debated issue of whether or not it is possible to treat ee as an endonormative linguistic variety in its own right. alternatively, ee may remain a form of english as a foreign language (efl), and the decision has far-reaching socio-political consequences. some relevant data from polish english is discussed in this context. it is argued that there is no reason to reanalyse the observed deviations from english native standards as simplifications or innovations characteristic of a new language. the debate is shown to relate to the opposition between utilitarian and epistemic goals in foreign language teaching methodology, as exemplified by the dichotomy between competence and performance or between training for interaction and training of the faculties of the mind. keywords: european english, native standards, nativespeakerhood, wellformedness let us begin by considering a brief quote from widdowson (1998): “how english develops in the world is no business whatever of native speakers in england, the united states or anywhere else. . . . it is not a possession which they lease out to others, while still retaining the freehold. other people actually own it” (pp. 244-245). romuald gozdawa-go biowski 468 i find this quote puzzling. undeniably, it is politically correct, and it does foretell the downfall of native speakers (nss) as ultimate authorities on wellformedness and acceptability issues, since it eliminates the concept of stable norms deriving from native usage. however, it sends confusing signals with respect to the question of ownership. english is not a commodity that nss can decide to keep or pass on, as the decision is not theirs to make in the first place. if one claims that nss do not own their language, what should we make of the observation that “other people actually own it”? a language is not something to be owned. it is to be learned/acquired and to be used. this goes beyond a mere play on words. as with any learning, experience predicts that there will be better and worse users, more competent and less competent learners. nature sees to it that the majority of competent users are found in the category of nss. there is no need for nss in the united states, or elsewhere in the world to apologize for the fact that they know english and that others are trying to learn it but consistently get parts of it wrong. nativespeakerhood is neither a curse nor a blessing and in traditional methodology second/foreign language learners (l2ers) will be assessed based on the match between their production and the native standards observed by the target communities. nowadays there is growing pressure to accept deviations (innovations, simplifications) from native standards as norms in nonnative englishes (cf. for example seidlhofer’s [2006, p. 47] transdialectal enrichment, tolerance for diversity in jenkins [2002] or the pluricentric approach advocated in jenkins [2006, p. 35]). this tendency amounts to bestowing learners of english with norm-providing powers, or at least normdeveloping powers, in the role of “secondary” or “second-order” nss. in counter distinction to primary nss, they are unlikely to serve as language models outside of their “cultural comfort zone” (e.g., their country of origin or speech community). native users have a right to change their native language, to adopt it to their sociocultural needs or linguistic preferences, so that with time the changes become normative for a particular variety. needless to say, prescriptive grammarians would vehemently disagree at this point. it also goes without saying that nonnative speakers (nnss), while not equipped with a similar prerogative, adjust the language they use to the immediate contextual demands, negotiating the shortest effective route between their limited resources and the desired outcomes. therefore, the question arises of what to do with persistent errors in the speech of an l2 community. i intend to address this issue in some detail below, with specific reference to polish learners of english: is the english spoken by polish people in and from poland a foreign language to them or do they use a regional variety of english, which may be referred to as polish english? does euro-english have native speakers? making sense of conflicting views 469 the status of euro-english for the discussion to make sense it is necessary to adopt a working definition of european english (henceforth also euro-english or ee). to avoid certain methodological difficulties, i propose to specify first what euro-english is not, through comparison to related concepts and then zoom in on the criterial features for its identification. european english stands in opposition to and should not be confused with any of the following: native/inner circle english (ice), international english (ie), english as a foreign language (efl), or english as a lingua franca (elf). let us try to make sense of these concepts in terms of their relatedness to native english lexico-grammar and native standards of socio-pragmatic appropriateness. for the purposes of this paper let us distinguish two broad categories of language users, depending on processing preferences. category a includes users who do not need to consciously reflect on the formal aspects of how their language operates for successful communication to take place. instead, they follow standards they have proceduralised and automatised during the acquisition process, unless they are determined (for various geopolitical and socio-cultural reasons, including status, prestige and the like) to oppose the intuitively available patterns and consciously apply prescriptive alternatives. the speech of these users may serve as a model for category b users, both native and foreign. in this sense, category a is endonormative or normproviding, this feature being clearly a prerogative of native communities, while category b is exonormative (here: norm-dependent or norm-developing), a commonly recognised trait of nonnative communities (cf. kachru, 1985). the distinction can be usefully applied to uniquely characterize the aforementioned five varieties of english and english-like systems (ice, ee, ie, efl, elf), with an important proviso that the terms exonormative and endonormative are not mutually exclusive, in the sense of not constituting a binary either-or option. this is because the recognition of an exonormative or endonormative role of a linguistic system in a given population depends on the willingness of target users to acknowledge the hegemony of nss and, independently, on their willingness to obey ns norms. native english, or more appropriately, inner circle englishes constitute(s) a birthright. native linguistic competence is restricted to nss. this claim does not call into question the efforts of those l2ers who strive on a daily basis to attain native-like fluency and native-like levels of accuracy. as noted by bley-vroman as early as 1982, nearnative competence in l2 learners, if at all possible, is rarely achievable via overt tuition, whereas the processes driving forward l1 acquisition remain beyond the grasp of average l2 learners. native intuitions are the hallmark of romuald gozdawa-go biowski 470 an endonormative and nonexonormative variety. the morpho-syntactic, semantic and phonological rudiments of our vernacular systems are acquired early and resist conscious inspection. international english (ie) is inner circle english used for international communication, real-life english stripped of some of its features, including pragmatic features (cf. holliday, 2005, pp. 8-9). the existence of ie depends on the recognition of native norms by a group of nonnative users and their willingness to employ these rules in speech production/comprehension in socially acceptable contexts. consequently, ie is [-endonormative] and [+ exonormative]. the variety referred to as efl belongs to the same category. the differences, most visible at the level of learner needs and learning outcomes, do not affect the exonormative and nonendonormative character of this linguistic variety. as frequently pointed out, for example, in kecskesc (2008, p. 204), nns/nns communication abounds in transparent (nonidiosyncratic and easily processable) linguistic elements, without relying on socio-cultural background knowledge which varies from speaker to speaker. unsurprisingly, however, this will be also true – albeit at a different level – of any kind of communication, including nns/ns or even ns/ns. getting your meaning across, manipulating others, and promoting the self (cf. wray 2002, pp. 93-102) are the overriding goals of communication and every speaker will adjust the linguistic means at his disposal to the current situational demands. the englishes of the outer circle (cf. kachru, 1982 for the inner circle/outer circle/expanding circle distinction in the analysis of the spread of english in the world) used to belong to the [-endonormative] and [-exonormative] category: norm-providing users are recognized as having the right to act as models of correctness, whereas that right may be denied to outer circle (normdeveloping) users. that linguistic status is changing rapidly, since english has been allowed to grow undisturbed in the outer circle, that is, the normproviding privileges of these users have been recognised (cf. european commission, 2011, p. 27; seidlhofer & jenkins, 2003, p. 141). a term that has become fashionable recently is elf. it is gradually replacing the concept of efl. traditionally, a lingua franca was an auxiliary language adopted as a contact language if the parties involved did not have an alternative means of communication (european commission 2011, p. 5). this concept is compatible with elf as a medium of communication in the world of academia and for clil purposes (cf. ute smith, 2010 for elf in higher education, also hoffman, 2000, p. 10). this perception of elf is clearly in conflict with the newly emerged concept of lingua franca english as a new creolized standard of international communication. to appreciate the change, it is enough to consider the recent observation by does euro-english have native speakers? making sense of conflicting views 471 the council of europe that the concept of elf “dethrones” the ns and defines the goal of english learning as the ability to communicate successfully with other nnss (cf. european commission, 2011, p. 28; jenkins, 2000; walker, 2010). walker’s book, in particular, is a major source which explores the idea of core phonetic features ensuring mutual intelligibility in international contexts (cf. also jenkins, 2000 for the concept of a lingua franca core). the new elf is built around the mutilated native core, it is deprived of what holliday (2005) calls ice’s parochial features, as well as its lexical, grammatical and cultural idiosyncrasies. a lingua franca has no culture, no nss, hence every user randomly enriches it with elements of their own culture and linguistic system (cf. the concept of hybrid cultures of elf speakers in kumaravadivelu, 2008, p. 12). having no native monitoring system, elf is neither endonormative nor exonormative: the standard rules that served as elf’s input will be ignored or replaced with ad hoc configurations, frequently with a strong lexical (idiosyncratic) flavour, to suit the communicative needs of all parties involved. there is tension between external norms on the one hand and patterns of attested linguistic behaviour on the other. formal grammatical coherence (or adherence to ice norms) is not our concern at the moment. given the instability of elf, it is only natural to expect that elf does not become a linguistic variety in its own right. rather, as the research by mollin (e.g., 2006) reveals, elf is a functional extension of efl, serving some of the less sophisticated communicative needs of its users. this new polycentric perspective of the european union (cf. european commission, 2011, p. 28) affects the status of euro-english as well. successful use determines new boundaries of acceptability and, in the long run, of grammaticality. euro-english turns endonormative, as the properties of the interlanguages of the learners (or, more adequately in this context, the properties of english evident in the target community) become the defining features of specific national varieties. at the same time it remains norm-dependent by acknowledging the existence of a common core that it shares with (and assumes from) english. it will have more and less advanced users, culminating in functional nativism (in the sense of kachru, 2005), a politically correct concept which effectively puts an end to the tyranny of inner circle nss, who no longer “know better.” euro-english is not a specific geopolitical instantiation of elf. the latter flouts norms, or rather creates ad hoc patterns for immediate communicative purposes to adjust to the needs of conversational partners from various linguistic backgrounds. english as a lingua franca is the art of talking to anyone anywhere, with the sole goal of task completion. euro-englishes have a growing group of users, whose speech patterns overlap to a considerable degree. are we, then, looking at one language (ee) with dialectal/regional variety or a romuald gozdawa-go biowski 472 number of languages? mollin’s (2006) research argues against the concept of a single transnational phenomenon known as ee. the alternative, clearly open to investigation, is the existence of numerous national englishes in europe, instead of a single ee (for some inspiring discussion of pros and cons of the two options, cf. prodromou, 2006). what matters for my immediate purposes is that on both the strong interpretation (single transnational variety) and the weak interpretation (regional varieties) the linguistic and socio-cultural habits of european users constitute a coherent, rule-based communicative system in its own right. it is this assumption that requires attention, since some serious methodological issues seem to be involved. jenkins (2006, p. 35) argued passionately that certain deviations from native norms in elf users should be reinterpreted as signs of creativity, aimed at appropriating english by these users. bamgbose (as cited in jenkins, 2006, p. 33) points out that unless such innovations are acknowledged “a non-native variety can never achieve any recognition.” this is echoed by alptekin’s (2002) warnings against imposing native models in international contexts and appeals for developing teaching models based on local appropriation. sarolta (2003, p. 59) predicted that english would become the primary language of the citizens of europe, differing from ice in structure and vocabulary due to the two legitimate processes of europeanization and discoursal nativization. in seidlhofer (1999, p. 239) the reader finds “an exhortation to efl teachers to assert nonnative norms and local values.” it is important to realize what is at stake before we can commit ourselves to endorsing the norm-providing powers of ee users. this is not an issue that can be solved by appealing to research results, unless the research takes the form of an interview, where european users of english are asked, more or less directly, whether or not they would like to be decreed to be nss of a new variety of english, admittedly not a very brilliant idea in terms of research methodologies. the problem is not obtaining empirical data (samples of speech and written production from a sufficiently representative group of respondents). that is the easy part, even if technically challenging. european english has long been recognised as full of idiosyncrasies. the real difficulty lies in the interpretation of the data: at which point does an efl sample qualify as an ee sample? running the risk of getting “stuck in empty preaching and ideologizing” (seidlhofer, 2006, p. 43), i still insist that statistical records do not decide whether an observed regularity is to be grudgingly accepted as an error or enthusiastically welcomed as an innovation. after all, interlanguage patterns have long been a focus of interest for efl practitioners. ever since the advent of the contrastive analysis hypothesis (cah) the interference (negative transfer) from an l1 to an l2 has been recognized as the main factor responsible for observed difficulties in foreign language learning. even does euro-english have native speakers? making sense of conflicting views 473 today, with the behaviourist foundations of the cah discredited, analyses of linguistic corpora provide more and more data to illustrate the intuitively appealing claim that there are systematic differences as well as systematic correspondences between, say, polish english and german english. however, this does not bring us any closer to the solution of the basic dilemma: is ee endonormative or exonormative? how do we treat the deviations from ice norms observed in the corpus data? do we want the deviations to legitimize a new variety of english? let us take a look at an example. a polish learner of english produces the sentence informations depend from the money which are involved (all deviant forms listed in swan and smith, 2001, pp. 166-175, as typical mistakes). the lexical and morphosyntactic imperfections observed in that sentence are commonly associated with polish learners of english as a foreign language. do we encourage our learners to use informations as part of their active vocabulary? perhaps we should go even further than that. if informations is part of a new polish english standard, then maybe the “dethroned” information should be banned from this variety altogether? poles are known to say things like i’d like to please you in the sense of i’d like to ask a favour of you. what will happen if the new sense of the verb please is attested in statistically significant numbers? what if the new use surpasses the traditional use? obviously, common sense dictates that we should allow innovations only up to recoverability. for the two examples just quoted, this would mean that informations can be presented as a regular plural (as it would be unproblematic in seidlhofer’s sense of the word), while please must be discouraged, since it is highly confusing to most non-polish users of english, just as much as it is confusing to polish learners who proceduralised the “correct” usage. on the other hand, if polish users of polish english have been allowed a modicum of lexico-grammatical independence, why would one want to worry about bits and pieces of the new variety becoming opaque to non-polish users? if polish english is a language in its own right, then it is only natural to expect that speakers of other languages will find it difficult to understand. after all, languages are known to be mutually incomprehensible. a jocular polish english expression pay from the mountain is perfectly transparent to polish users and opaque to just about everybody else, because it is a literal translation of a polish formula, functionally equivalent to making an advance payment. all that it takes now is to demonstrate that this expression is used, or at least understood, by polish speakers in statistically significant numbers. the creation of new languages based on shared lexico-grammatical preferences is a significant step towards a new tower of babel. it should also be borne in mind that defining recoverability with reference to international, or at least native-english standards, so that polish eng romuald gozdawa-go biowski 474 lish is free to go its own way and introduce new norms as long as the resulting strings can be processed with the intended meaning by non-polish users (or perhaps native english users), is hardly a revolutionary move. in fact, it is a commonly recognized procedure in communicative language teaching in which one is to teach some form of simplified ice variety but allow considerable leeway in students’ own production. the real question is therefore the following: is there any linguistic evidence that the english of polish l2ers is evolving towards a creolised normdeveloping variety and gradually losing the status of a “mere” foreign language? it is easy to think of properties defining native languages ranging from hockett’s design features to chomsky’s definition of i-language: systematicity, stable intuitions, complete proceduralisation, little awareness of the underlying grammatical regularities, natural focus on the content with unconstrained access to the relevant system resources, ample exposure and opportunity for use against the shared socio-cultural/pragmatic background. none of them apply to the english learned and practised in poland by adult users. therefore, let us assume the following: for a linguistic variety x to achieve the endonormative status in a linguistic community y there have to be users of x selecting it for the purposes of natural language communication, including, but not limited to, cases of x being a language of choice for communication among native users of y. the endonormative status of polish english would presuppose, therefore, that nss of polish switch to (some version of) english in spontaneous exchanges while communicating with other nss of polish. to the best of my knowledge, this does not happen. the discussion inevitably takes a sharp turn at this point, and leads us all the way back to 1989 when bley-vroman published his ground-breaking paper on the fundamental differences between an l1 and an l2. the validity of that distinction can be (and has been) questioned on the grounds of its being insufficiently attuned to the communicative value of human languages, whether naturally acquired or learned in artificial contexts. communicative language teaching (a philosophy rather than a particular, coherent approach) elevates communicative success to the status of an overriding criterion of linguistic efficiency but that efficiency is achieved with learners having access to imperfect system resources. that is so, because the communicative tradition focuses on the performative aspect of language use and the learner’s satisfaction springs from the realisation of how much s/he can accomplish, with or without being formally accurate: a story of success despite limitations. the ee philosophy removes the limitations. surprisingly enough, a rationale for dispensing with a view of a foreign language as an imperfect rendition of some unattainable native standards may be sought in a specific but justidoes euro-english have native speakers? making sense of conflicting views 475 fiable use of the term error. an error is a deviation from a norm, that is to say, a violation of a guideline about what is typical enough to be used systematically. interlanguages, at any point in their development, are rule-based and systematic, even though the rules do not necessarily reflect target language patterns and regularities. if this applies to interlanguages as much as to full-fledged regional varieties, then the birthright privilege of nss no longer makes sense. and so, a form of language starts off as a faulty rendition of a foreign language but some of the faults gain recognition as defining features of a new standard. justifying the methodological conundrum let us see how this could work in practice. it has always been recognized that l1 influence is a major factor shaping interlanguage patterns. a reliable reference book (swan & smith, 2001) has a chapter on interference errors commonly observed in the production of polish adult learners of english. should these errors, perhaps, be treated as evidence of a systematic growth of a new linguistic variety? to see what is at stake, please observe short extracts from a few texts produced as midterm requirements of course work at a polish university (a b2+ reading course for polish students at an early stage of a 3-year training programme to become teachers of english). the fragments selected contain the errors listed in swan and smith (2001) as characteristic of polish users of english. the texts were verified and graded by native teachers of english with a working knowledge of polish and in none of the cases was the clarity of the message called into question. (1) russia contained other nations, like ukraine, poland, and so on. while another mentioned countries were smaller because they were independent. (2) he couldn’t understand this political problems, so he didn’t formed full questions. (3) this legacy caused prejudice west habitants. people from the east of vistula are different. (4) they lived in poor villages but they have been still a heroes. what are the features of the sample sentences above that make them distinct from standard english patterns? clearly, the morphosyntax of a noun phrase deserves closer attention, since singular determiners a/this/another romuald gozdawa-go biowski 476 may select plural heads, tense marking in negated constructions may optionally be marked both on the auxiliary and on the main verb (couldn’t understand vs. didn’t formed), and relexification is allowed (prejudice west habitants). these patterns (with the possible exception of relexification) are not a specifically polish phenomenon; in all likelihood the nonstandard use of inflection (tenses, agreement within noun phrases) relates to the primacy of lexis (cf. gozdawago biowski, 2003; vanpatten, 2004) and little impact of functional markers on the interpretation of the message. in a nutshell, he didn’t formed another questions and he didn’t ask other questions have the same cognitive meaning (cf. the concept of interpretable and uninterpretable features in the sense of chomsky, 1995). they do not reflect a specifically polish grammar quirk that gets transferred into another language. they reflect a general cognitive trait at a certain level of learning: we attend to meaning before we are able to turn attentional resources to form. so, the fact that numerous europeans, along with numerous non-europeans, drop the third person -s in present tense verb forms shows a transitory stage in learning and as such it must be expected (as inevitable and natural) but should not be encouraged or accepted as correct (but cf. seidlhofer, 2006, p. 47 for the opposite view). it is not a feature of a language; it is a sign of learning in progress. let me make it absolutely clear at this point that i do not advocate that teachers should focus on inflectional paradigms. when english is taught as a foreign language, the priority of task completion and communicative success is indisputable and logic dictates that -s is a minor detail of execution. the learner reaches his or her goal, although grammar shortcomings are evident. but with ee and elf the lack of -s gets redefined as a regular feature of a linguistic system. this seems antipedagogical, as it prevents a complete learning cycle from taking place. given these linguistic reservations, of which the proponents of ee/elf models are certainly aware, there remains the question of why the development of new linguistic varieties is still an attractive alternative to treating the emerging englishes as nonnative varieties. a careful look at the available literature (holliday, 2005; jenkins, 2007; mollin 2006; rubdy & saraceni, 2006, to mention just a few) indicates that the growth of new englishes is encouraged and supported for a number of vital, if mostly extralinguistic, reasons. some of the frequently mentioned considerations include (in no particular order): socio-political identity, cultural authenticity, learners’ aspirations, ns tyranny, socio-psychological appropriateness, linguistic imperialism, autonomy of the learner, moral development, democracy, and teacher’s prestige. clearly, it is not within my competence to speak on all these issues with authority. but before i accept these reasons as sufficiently valid, i would like to see some empirical research carried out to indicate that europeans does euro-english have native speakers? making sense of conflicting views 477 are better off being recognised as speakers of a regional variety of english, rather than continuing in their capacity as users of efl. the recognition of quasinative national varieties is supposed to be rewarding for non-english speakers both sociolinguistically, “through the development of a local standard” (jenkins, 2006, p. 35), and socio-psychologically, “through the capacity to express their users’ local identity” (jenkins, 2006, p. 35). but do nnss really need rewarding? alleviating the alleged pain of being non-english by the unspeakable joy of becoming “differently english” seems like a cruel sociolinguistic prank. to take a specific example mentioned by jenkins (2006, pp. 33-34), it would be psychologically appropriate to tell a german learner of english, pronouncing /w/ as /v/ in initial syllables that this is a valid course of action to take and that this is perfectly within his or her rights to follow his phonetic intuitions here. i think i can understand the frustration that accompanies language learning. but perhaps we should rather take a leaf out of byram’s book and help learners see the strength and autonomy that l2ers have by being native users of one language and culture in addition to being users (no matter how limited) of another language and culture. as pointedly argued in byram (1997), native competence implies native convictions, cultural bias, patterns of behaviour and perception of the world. there is no reason why we should reasonably expect our learners to give up on aspects of their national and individual traits to become part of another languaculture (cf. risager, 2006, pp. 110113, where she attributes the term to michael agar). a speaker and a half is always better than a monolingual user. this is the area where we should praise our learners the most, for achieving a task in a socially acceptable manner, not by pretending to be part of that community but by demonstrating social skills required to adapt themselves to the new conditions, by being ready to reconcile otherness with their views, beliefs and preferences. a ns of polish with working knowledge of english is a more powerful communicator than a monolingual ns of english. there is no need for a polish speaker of english to feel inferior or superior because his or her english has foreign (polish) traits. as a matter of fact, to acknowledge the right of certain countries from the expanding circle to set up norms of usage is the first step to eliminating efl from the linguistic scene altogether, though it is difficult to imagine justification for doing that. euro-english and the epistemic versus utilitarian opposition i would like to suggest that the varying attitudes towards genetically nonnative regional englishes (from downright rejection to enthusiastic ac romuald gozdawa-go biowski 478 ceptance) reflect a more basic underlying dichotomy that cuts across the field of language acquisition studies: the epistemic versus utilitarian tradition (cf. byram, 2010). the views of the proponents of ee and its adversaries can be comprehended better when they are related to the epistemic/utilitarian opposition. the epistemic tradition is about knowing and about training of the faculties of the mind: it favours the product view of grammar as a stable rulegoverned system, effortlessly acquired and intuitively used (in this context cf. batstone, 1994). the epistemic tradition is also nomothetic, as the authority of nss springs from their knowing the system. the utilitarian approach is a mirror image of whatever the epistemic tradition stands for. it stresses the importance of doing, rather than knowing, of performance (social use of language) instead of competence: it adopts a dynamic view of grammar as process and communicative, goal-oriented behaviour in the classroom. focus on form should be avoided, as irrelevant or detrimental for communicative purposes. the endocentric (norm-providing) character of nonnative varieties is not so much about providing new norms for other nonnative users of english to follow. that would be tantamount to claiming that polish english is a competing variety. instead, the claim is more modest: forms which are systematically produced are assumed to be grammatical. this is, paradoxically, an epistemic perception of acquisition. if an error is understood as a deviation from some norm, and (descriptive) norms are assumed to reflect stable usage, the inevitable conclusions suggests itself at this point: interlanguage users, like nss, are immune to errors, save slips of the tongue, lapses, and so on. this is not to say that interlanguages are comparable, grammar-wise, to native languages. do you be happy, frequently heard in polish classrooms, remains ungrammatical in standard ice and an l2er who internalised that form deviates from ic norms. however, do you be happy is grammatical with respect to the l2er’s interlanguage norms and only with respect to these norms. this is the epistemic rationalisation of the move towards functional nativism. language teaching methods draw upon the insights from one or the other of these two traditions, and language use can be accounted for by referring to the utilitarian/epistemic dichotomy (e.g., the interplay between the lexico-grammatical and sociocultural aspects of formulaic competence). and now i would like to argue that the interpretation of linguistic behaviours yields the same polarity effects. the focus of attention in the debate over ee is a functional ns, a person who is able to successfully accomplish a range of tasks that can be reasonably expected of her/him in the target language. this presupposes some epistemic foundations (knowledge of the system) and performance skills (a major utilitarian factor). the latter constitute the social dimension of language: conversadoes euro-english have native speakers? making sense of conflicting views 479 tional skills, going way beyond the richness of vocabulary resources or system clues at the disposal of the learner, and social skills, strategies and techniques that turn language users into actors. in fact, this reflects a major idea by byram (2010): discourse participants as acteurs sociaux, with skills to apply the knowledge to socially advantageous performance. to my mind this is the only way to justify any nomothetic claims that “foreignnational” englishes may have. functional nativism is understood as the ability to handle natural discourse of reasonable complexity with a view to achieving the desired outcomes. the endocentric (norm-providing) character of nonnative varieties is not about providing new norms for other nonnative users of english to follow. in short, functional nativism is a set of linguistic and sociocultural tools and procedures to prepare the user for the role of an acteur social in any language other than his/her native language. in this definition the word language is used twice, yet in two different senses. for the supporters of ee, language, in the best utilitarian fashion, is a framework for social interaction. the opponents of ee perceive language nomothetically as a formal system. that difference in perspective is crucial. polish learners of english have little chance of becoming fluent, idiomatic speakers of ice because that presupposes nativelike control of the linguistic system. given the epistemic point of view, this objective cannot be achieved. hence, the opposition to the concept of new regional varieties of english can be said to have epistemic roots, as pragmatic efficiency is seen as a consequence of having a language and not a defining feature of it. on the other hand, the utilitarian preoccupation with social skills allows us to define a linguistic variety in terms of interaction, communicative effectiveness and cultural awareness. under this interpretation the question of (genetic) nativespeakerhood does not even begin to arise because the overriding criterion remains that of functional competence. conclusion can the utilitarian and epistemic approaches ever be reconciled? there is every reason to believe that they will. the simplest middle-of-the-road solution is to set utilitarian goals with an epistemic mindset. the teaching of languages, at least in the foreseeable future, should be geared to meet the communicative needs of language users, helping them accomplish tasks and cope with linguistic, sociolinguistic and cultural challenges of natural discourse. the required social skills and growing lexico-grammatical resources should be the result of overt pedagogical intervention, as much as accidental learning resulting from primary linguistic data (i.e., exposure to language). to succeed, teachers should carefully distinguish between goal-oriented communicative tasks and awareness-raising romuald gozdawa-go biowski 480 focus-on-form activities and introduce both to suit the needs of their learners. since today’s international discourse is predominantly of the nns/nns type, we need to expose learners to all varieties of english, teach tolerance and respect for socio-cultural and linguistic otherness. we should be very careful, however, about proposing such regional innovations for inclusion in the learners’ active vocabulary or lexico-grammatical resources. perhaps that way we can ensure the required balance between the sociological, psychological and linguistic considerations, without sacrificing the twin concepts of a natural language and of a ns. does euro-english 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(2004). processing instruction: theory, research and commentary. mahwah, nj: erlbaum. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: edyta olejarczuk (poznań university of technology) language editor: melanie ellis (pedagogical university of cracow) vol. 6 no. 2 june 2016 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, university of new south wales, sydney) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo) kata csizér (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) robert dekeyser (university of maryland) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) carol griffiths (fatih university, istanbul) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) sarah mercer (university of graz) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) bonny norton (university of british columbia) terrence odlin (ohio state university) rebecca oxford (university of maryland) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (university of pannonia, trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto) elaine tarone (university of minnesota) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2016 editor: mirosław pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak anna mystkowska-wiertelak edyta olejarczuk articles are licensed under the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · infobaseindex · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the thomson reuters master journal list. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 6, number 2, june 2016 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors ....................................................................197 editorial .........................................................................................201 articles: justyna leśniewska – the use of articles in l2 english: a phraseological perspective ...................................................................................... 203 dmitri leontjev – l2 english derivational knowledge: which affixes are learners more likely to recognise? ................................................... 225 maria pia gomez-laich – second language learners’ divergence from target language pragmatic norms .............................................................. 249 jenni alisaari, leena maria heikkola – increasing fluency in l2 writing with singing ....................................................................................................... 271 richard j. sampson – efl teacher motivation in-situ: co-adaptive processes, openness and relational motivation over interacting timescales ... 293 jill surmont, esli struys, maurits van den noort, piet van de craen – the effects of clil on mathematical content learning: a longitudinal study....319 book reviews: anna parr-modrzejewska – review of jelena mihaljević djigunović, marta medved krajnović’s early learning and teaching of english: new dynamics of primary english ............................................................. 339 ewa waniek-klimczak – review of tracey m. derwing, murray j. munro’s pronunciation fundamentals: evidence-based perspectives for l2 teaching and research .................................................................................... 345 zuzanna kiermasz – review of lyn wright fogle’s second language socialization and learner agency: adoptive family talk ................... 349 dorota werbińska – review of paula kalaja, ana maria f. barcelos, mari aro, maria ruohotie-lyhty’s beliefs, agency and identity in language learning and teaching ....................................................................... 355 correction note .............................................................................. 359 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 363 197 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors jenni alisaari received her master’s degree in education from the university of turku, finland in 2002. she is a university teacher and a doctoral student at the department of education at the university of turku. her major research interests include second language learning, particularly second language writing, and the effects of singing on second language acquisition. contact data: department of teacher education, university of turku, opettajankoulutuslaitos, 20014 turun yliopisto, finland (jenni.alisaari@utu.fi) maría pia gomez-laich is a phd candidate in second language acquisition at carnegie mellon university, pittsburgh, pa, usa. her research interests include pragmatics, language and identity, task-based language teaching, and second language writing. contact data: carnegie mellon university, modern languages department, baker hall 160, pittsburgh, pa 15213, usa (mgomezla@andrew.cmu.edu) leena maria heikkola received her master’s degree in finnish language and literature from åbo akademi, finland in 2005. she is a university teacher, and a doctoral student at the finnish department at åbo akademi university. her research interests include speech and language disorders, second language learning with special focus on singing, and sociolinguistics, especially code switching and language identity. contact data: finnish language, åbo akademi university, tehtaankatu 2, 20500 turku, finland (lheikkol@abo.fi) zuzanna kiermasz, ma, is a phd student at the faculty of philology of the univesity of łódź, poland where she teaches foreign language pedagogy. she is also an english teacher in a junior high school. her research interests include psycholinguistics, bilingualism and various aspects of foreign language teaching, especially language learning strategies. contact data: instytut anglistyki, wydział filologiczny uniwersytetu łódzkiego, ul. pomorska 171/173, 90-236 łódź (zuzannakiermasz@gmail.com) 198 dmitri leontjev is a postdoctoral researcher at the centre for applied language studies of the university of jyväskylä. his research interests include dynamic and diagnostic (and dynamic diagnostic) assessment of english as a second or a foreign language, which positions his research at the crossroads of language acquisition, teaching, and assessment. contact data: university of jyväskylä, centre for applied language studies, p.o. box 35 fi-40014, finland (dmitri.leontjev@jyu.fi) justyna leśniewska, phd, works at the institute of english studies of the jagiellonian university in kraków, poland. her research interests are related to the phraseological aspects of second language acquisition, the collocational competence of efl learners, the role of cross-linguistic influence in second language acquisition and use, as well as second language acquisition in children. she is the author and co-author of a number of journal publications and has co-edited several collections of scholarly articles. she has supervised over twenty ma theses in applied linguistics. contact data: instytut filologii angielskiej, al. mickiewicza 9a, 31-120 kraków, poland (justyna.lesniewska@uj.edu.pl) anna parr-modrzejewska obtained her phd in linguistics from the institute of english studies, university of łódź, poland. she teaches at the department of english language and applied linguistics specialising in teacher training. she also holds ba diplomas in early years pedagogy and polish philology. her research interests include bilingualism, clil and early efl education. apart from her academic publications, she also co-authors course books for young learners. contact data: institute of english, university of łódź, ul. pomorska 171/173, 90236, poland (anna.parr@uni.lodz.pl) richard sampson has been working in the japanese educational context for over 15 years. he holds a phd from griffith university, australia. his research interests concern situated exploration of the contextualized nature of the learning and teaching of foreign languages. his research into the interrelations between language-learner self ideas, past, present and future learning experiences, and motivation engages with japanese adolescents, working to foster the advancement of student and teacher voice about the actual experience of foreign language learning class groups. he draws on complex systems theory to inform philosophical understandings about research processes and the interactions involved in dynamic motivation of class groups, notably represented in his 199 research monograph, complexity in classroom foreign language learning motivation: a practitioner perspective from japan (2016, multilingual matters). contact data: university education centre, gunma university, aramaki-machi 42, maebashi-shi, gunma-ken, japan 371-8510 (sampson@gunma-u.ac.jp) esli struys, is assistant professor of linguistics at the vrije universiteit brussel in belgium. his research interests are second language learning, cognitive control, education, and neurolinguistics. contact data: centre for linguistics and neuroscience (clin), vrije universiteit brussel, pleinlaan 2, b-1050 brussels, belgium (estruys@vub.ac.be) jill surmont, is postdoc at the vrije universiteit brussel, belgium. she investigates the learning process and how it can be influenced by languages usage. in an iwt-project called validiv run by the university of ghent, vrije universiteit brussel, and katholieke universiteit leuven, jill supports schools in brussels to validate the linguistic diversity in classrooms. contact data: centre for linguistics and neuroscience (clin), vrije universiteit brussel, pleinlaan 2, b-1050 brussels, belgium. tel: ++32 26292649; fax: ++32 26293684 (jisurmon@vub.ac.be) piet van de craen is full professor of linguistics at the vrije universiteit brussel in belgium. his research interests are second language learning, neurolinguistics, education, and content and language integrated learning. contact data: centre for linguistics and neuroscience (clin), vrije universiteit brussel, pleinlaan 2, b-1050 brussels, belgium (pvdcraen@vub.ac.be) maurits van den noort is regular professor at kyung hee university in seoul, republic of korea, where his research group of pain and neuroscience conducts mainly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri) research on healthy participants and psychiatric patients. in addition, he works as a visiting professor at the brussels institute for applied linguistics of the vrije universiteit brussel in belgium. his research interests are foreign language learning, multilingualism, working memory, education, neurolinguistics, and neuroimaging. contact data: brussels institute for applied linguistics (bial), vrije universiteit brussel, pleinlaan 2, b-1050 brussels, belgium & research group of pain and neuroscience, kyung hee university, 1 hoegi-dong, dongdaemun-gu, seoul 130701, republic of korea (info@mauritsvandennoort.com) 200 ewa waniek-klimczak is professor of english linguistics and the head of the department of english language and applied linguistics in the institute of english at university of łódź, poland. she teaches courses in phonetics, phonology, native and nonnative accents of english and sociolinguistics. her main research interests are the acquisition and usage of the second language sound system, crosslinguistic phonetics and phonology, and pronunciation teaching. she has published in the area of applied phonetics and phonology, with her recent publications including co-edited volumes on teaching and researching english accents in non-native speakers (with linda shockey, 2013, springer ), and teaching and researching the pronunciation of english (with mirosław pawlak, 2015, springer). she is the editor-in-chief of research in language and an organiser of accents conferences held every december in łódź. contact data: institute of english, university of łódź, ul. pomorska 171/173, 90236, poland (ewaklim@uni.lodz.pl) dorota werbińska, phd, works in the modern languages department at pomeranian university, słupsk, poland. her main academic interests are within the field of language teacher education, both pre-service and in-service, in particular language teacher professional development, teacher beliefs and identity, and the development of teacher reflexivity. she is the author of 3 books on language teacher cognition, a co-editor of 2 collections and almost 60 articles, book chapters and reviews published nationally and internationally. contact data: pomeranian university, ul. słowiańska 8, 76-200 słupsk, poland (dorota.werbinska@apsl.edu.pl) 421 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (3). 421-445 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl i think (that) something’s missing: complementizer deletion in nonnative e-mails mercedes durham university of aberdeen mercedes.durham@abdn.ac.uk abstract sociolinguistic competence is not often examined in nonnative english acquisition. this is particularly true for features where the variants are neither stylistically nor socially constrained, but rather are acceptable in all circumstances. learning to use a language fully, however, implies being able to deal with this type of ‘difficulty,’ and understanding what type of variable features nonnative speakers acquire with ease and which ones they do not may help us better understand more general processes of second language acquisition. by comparing the rates of complementizer deletion of nonnative to native speakers and examining their distributions across various internal and external factors, this paper addresses these issues and offers an example of acquisition of what is, in some ways, an invisible variant. furthermore, by focusing on a swiss student association, the paper is also able to compare the patterns of french, german and italian native speakers, to examine to what extent they differ in english. keywords: sociolinguistic competence, complementation, complementizer deletion, zero complementizer learning how to appropriately use the syntax of a new language is never an easy task, but it can further be complicated in cases where the target language demonstrates variation within a single construction – be this variation linked to social, stylistic or linguistically internal factors (see bayley, 1995; bayley & regan, 2004; mougeon, nadasdi, & rehner, 2010; mougeon & rehner, 2001; mercedes durham 422 mougeon, rehner, & nadasdi, 2000; regan, 1995; regan, howard, & lemée, 2009; rehner, mougeon, & nadasdi, 2003 for examples of this). how do nonnative speakers cope with learning aspects of grammar that not only are variable, but where one of the variants is actually not there? in the case of complementizers in english, speakers, native and nonnative, have the option to use that or simply to use a zero form (examples (1)-(2)) in most cases. (1) i hope ø you enjoyed the day and liked the city. (b, italian, e-mail)1 (2) i hope that in the future in all switzerland we’ll have some common projects at national level. (f, french, e-mail) native speakers, as we shall see, ‘decide’ whether to use the overt (that) or covert (ø) complementation form according to a number of factors, internal and external, but what of nonnative speakers? are they able not only to use both variants, but crucially use them in the same way as native speakers and at equivalent rates? will it depend on whether the structure is similarly optional in their source language? or do nonnative speakers simply avoid the covert variant, given that the use of that is grammatically, though not pragmatically, correct in all circumstances? complementizer variation can offer valuable insight into nonnative language acquisition processes in a number of ways; first of all, because it has been extensively studied in native varieties of english and as such will make it easier for us to establish whether nonnative speakers have acquired the same patterns; secondly, because the variation is restricted to two variants both of which are possible in all situations; and finally, because it is a feature that is not generally taught or even pointed out in teaching, we will be able to see whether nonnative speakers acquire aspects of the target language which, in some ways, are ‘not there.’ in addition, this analysis will focus on the speech of swiss natives, which will provide additional insight into strategies of acquisition, as it will enable us to compare french, german and italian native speakers. the section below will introduce studies which have examined the nonnative acquisition of aspects of sociolinguistic competence – that is to say what is variable in native speech – and summarize what is already known in terms of nonnative speakers’ ability to acquire the nuances of native language use. it will be followed by a discussion of complementizers in english and then a presentation of the corpus analyzed and, because the speakers in the corpus are from 1 the codes for the examples from the data are as follows: the one letter code given to the speaker in the corpus, their native language and the medium the example was delivered in. i think (that) something’s missing: complementizer deletion in nonnative e-mails 423 switzerland, a brief portrait of the situation of english in the country. the results and a discussion will come before a general conclusion. acquisition of sociolinguistic competence the examination of variable features of the target language in nonnative speech is a relatively new strand of second language acquisition research, and has, in many ways, chosen to distinguish itself from “the bulk of previous research in second language acquisition (sla) [which] focused on aspects of the target language where native speakers display invariant language usage (i.e., use only one linguistic element to convey a given notion)” (mougeon & rehner, 2001, p. 398). indeed this “new strand of research” is quite different from traditional research into second language acquisition in that it “includes not only factors that have been examined by mainstream sla research, but also those that have been found to be correlated with l1 variation in sociolinguistic research” (mougeon & rehner, 2001, pp. 398-399). this type of research looks for proof that l2 learners can show “the same kind of sociolinguistic ability in using the variants as do l1 speakers (i.e., ability to observe the linguistic and extralinguistic constraints that have an impact on variant choice)” (mougeon & rehner, 2001, p. 399). basically, if nonnative speakers are to be considered to have fully mastered the target language, they must show they have acquired the syntactic and phonological aspects of it. the nonnative speakers will also have to display that they have acquired the variable rules of native speakers, both for features where the variation is stylistically motivated and those where the variation is internally constrained. these variable rules belong to native speakers’ communicative competence (hymes, 1972, p. 281) and are an intrinsic part of the mastery of one’s own language. a number of studies concerned with this aspect of acquisition have shown that sociolinguistic competence is not always fully acquired (see for example dewaele, 2004; dewaele & regan, 2002; regan, 1995; rehner, mougeon, & nadadsi, 2003). it has been found, for example, “that immersion students learn an academic register of the l2 but not its vernacular” (lyster, 1996, p. 167). this is because “whereas there exist numerous dictionaries and reference grammars to support the teaching of lexis and syntax, there are no such reference books to support the teaching of sociolinguistic variation” (lyster, 1996, p. 167). it is not surprising that reference books do not tend to present sociolinguistic variation, as, for the most part, even native speakers are not aware of the variable rules they use everyday. the fact that the application of these variable rules is almost completely subconscious for native speakers means that they may be mercedes durham 424 more difficult for nonnative speakers to notice and acquire. the difficulties experienced by the students in these studies are not restricted to external constraints but to internal factors as well (as demonstrated in regan, 1995). rehner, mougeon and nadasdi (2003) and mougeon, nadasdi and rehner (2010) examined nonnative french speakers in immersion classrooms in canada, while nagy, blondeau and auger (2003) and sankoff, nagy, blondeau, fonollosa and gagnon (1997) studied other speakers of nonnative french in canada. aspects of nonnative french acquisition have also been studied in europe (dewaele & regan, 2002; regan, 1995; regan, howard & lemée, 2009). bayley has conducted a considerable amount of research on the variation patterns of chinese speakers, either learning chinese as a heritage language in the united states, or learning other languages abroad (bayley, 1995; langman & bayley, 2001). relatively little has been done on the nonnative acquisition of english in terms of sociolinguistic competence (see durham, 2007 for a further discussion of this), so this paper provides a first examination of this topic. this discussion should not be taken to imply that other types of second language research have not considered related aspects as well. indeed, a number of papers from recent years have focused on examining why there is “a disjunction between success in acquiring the syntax of the target language (tl), on the one hand, and persistent difficulties at the interfaces of syntax with other grammatical modules, e.g. discourse-pragmatics, on the other” (hopp, 2007, p. 147; see also sorace & filiaci, 2006). of course, interface structures have not always been found to pose a difficulty for nonnative speakers and a comparison of various studies examining interface issues has lead white (2010) to underline that “interfaces are not monolithic: it is not the case that all interfaces lead to difficulties, it is not the case that all phenomena at a particular interface are necessarily problematic, it is not the case that acquisition failure is inevitable” (p. 11). complementizers syntactic structures, of the sort introduced with verbs such as think, say, and mean can either have a that complementizer between the verb and the following clause or zero (as in examples (1) and (2) above). far from being free variation, the use of the two variants is constrained by a range of factors. two very general findings related to this were reported in previous studies. first of all, the use of the zero form has grown through the history of english. although the zero form was rarely used in old and middle english, by the twentieth century it had achieved a near categorical use for some specific i think (that) something’s missing: complementizer deletion in nonnative e-mails 425 verbs (tagliamonte & smith, 2005, p. 301; thomson & mulac, 1991, p. 244; torres cacoullos & walker, 2009, p. 2). secondly, elsness (1984, p. 521) found that in formal writing zero complementizers are used far less than in informal writing, so it would be said that, in present day english, style exerts a considerable effect on the selection of zero complementizer forms. looking at informal oral data, thomson and mulac (1991, p. 242) found that overall the zero complementizer was used at a rate of 86%, tagliamonte and smith (2005, p. 300) found a rate of 84%,2 torres cacoullos and walker (2009, p. 16) found 79% and kolbe (2008, p. 112) found 90%.3 elsness (1984, p. 521), examining a subsection of written data from the brown corpus, found rates between 52% and 58% in his two informal text categories (press releases and fiction: adventure & western) and far lower rates (between 1.3% and 15%) in his two formal text categories (belles lettres & biography and learned & scientific writing) (see kucera & francis, 1967 and ellegard, 1978 for further information about the brown corpus and the syntax data corpus which is a subset of it). nonnative speakers from a variety of linguistic backgrounds use both variants, as can be seen in examples (3)-(8) below. french speakers (3) i think that there’s a virus in the past document i send to you. (f, french, e-mail) (4) i will take some copies [. . .] because i think ø there is a virus. (f, french, e-mail) italian speakers (5) i guess that there will not be very many new people. (b, italian, e-mail) (6) i guess ø you’re back in switzerland! (b, italian, e-mail) german speakers (7) so i also think that we need to think carefully about the division of expenses. (h, german, e-mail) (8) i think ø it is very important to have such a useful booklet. (h, german, e-mail) 2 tokens such as i think, you know and i mean, which categorically selected the zero complementizer, were excluded in tagliamonte and smith’s results. 3 note, however, that what was included in the analysis did vary from study to study. kolbe chose to examine solely the verbs think, say, know and see, which goes some way in explaining why her rates were higher than in the other studies. mercedes durham 426 a survey of several grammar books used in switzerland to teach english reveals that the existence of two variants is never explicitly made clear. the two forms are used, however, both in the grammar books (e.g., soars & soars, 1987; spencer, 1999) and other teaching materials4 the swiss students use and in the speech of their teachers. if swiss speakers have the same patterns as native speakers, we can hypothesize that they acquired these patterns subconsciously then and not through overt and conscious teaching. what of complementizer forms in the native languages? french and italian do not have a zero complementizer variant. complementizer forms in these two languages are somewhat similar to relative pronouns (for a further discussion, see durham, 2007, p. 146-148), in that the complementizer particle is also the more frequent of the possible relative pronouns (que for french, and che for italian; examples (9)-(10)). german and swiss german, however, have both overt and zero complementizer forms (examples (11)-(12)). moreover, similarly to english, the dass form is seen to be more formal than the zero form. the variable patterns of complementizers have not been studied in german, however, so we cannot know if some of the other factors found to be significant in english complementizer use operate in german as well. (9) je pense que tu as presque fini. (10) penso che hai quasi finito. (11) a. ich glaube, dass du schon fertig bist. b. ich glaube ø du bist schon fertig. (12) d ruth glaubt, dass/ø d susann het s gmacht (penner and bader, 1995, p. 103). native english studies studies which have focused on contemporary varieties of english (elsness, 1984; kolbe, 2008; tagliamonte & smith, 2005; thompson & mulac, 1991; torres cacoullos & walker, 2009) can help us establish how close the nonnative speakers are to native norms. tagliamonte and smith (2005) provided an in-depth presentation and summary of earlier studies and attempt to establish which of the factors mentioned in these studies are relevant to their own data. their analysis focused on the patterns of zero complementizer use of the oldest generation of speakers in several relatively isolated northern british communities (in cumbria, 4 much of the literature read by students of english would have contained instances of both that and zero complementizer. i think (that) something’s missing: complementizer deletion in nonnative e-mails 427 lowland scotland and northern ireland). they found very high percentages of the zero complementizer (around 90%) and established that the zero form had become nearly categorical in contexts such as i think and i mean (tagliamonte & smith, 2005, p. 299). in the variable contexts of use, they also uncovered a number of internal factors which conditioned the use of the variants: first and second person subjects versus other subjects, present tense versus past tense, the presence of additional elements in the verb phrase and finally the use of adverbials between the verb phrase and complementizer (tagliamonte & smith, 2005, p. 301). these factors will be examined in this study and presented in more detail in the section on extraction and coding. moreover, as mentioned above, formality also exerts a considerable influence on the use of complementizer variants. all the studies mentioned here which examined oral data found high rates of deletion. on the other hand, elsness (1984, p. 521), who examined written data, found low rates of the zero form in the more formal texts. he found higher rates of the zero form in the less formal texts but these rates were still rather lower than the oral data in other studies. this is particularly relevant, because this study examines e-mail data, as will be discussed more fully directly below. the place of e-mail on the continuum between oral and written data is debatable (cf. herring, 2001), so we cannot know a priori if the rates for the zero complementizer in e-mail data will be high, as in spoken english, or low, as in formal written english. a native e-mail control corpus will be examined as well, and will play a crucial role here as it is directly comparable to the nonnative data. if the native e-mail data shows high levels of zero complementizer, then we would expect high levels from the nonnatives as well, if we are to prove that the non-native speakers pattern like native speakers. on the other hand, if the native data shows low levels of deletion, then we would expect the same from the nonnatives. data in many respects, switzerland is a perfect place to examine nonnative english acquisition; not only does the mix of french, german and italian speakers mean that it is possible to examine effects of various source languages at once, but, furthermore, switzerland is on the cusp of transitioning from an english as a foreign language country (or expanding circle country in kachru’s terminology; 1982, p. 38) to an english as a second language country (outer circle) by virtue of the fact that english is used as an intranational lingua franca in a number of domains (see durham, 2007 and dürmüller, 2001, 2002 for a further discussion of this). this means that many of the users of english in switzerland have a high competency in the language. mercedes durham 428 this is the case of the swiss speakers in the present study; the corpus of data is composed of a collection of 653 e-mails (circa 90000 words) sent over a period of 4 years by medical students who were all members of the international federation of medical students’ associations – switzerland (ifmsa-ch) (see durham, 2003 for a full discussion of the mailing list and the linguistic background of its members). the association is composed of students who are studying at the various medical schools in switzerland at the universities of lausanne, geneva, berne, zurich and basel (ifmsa, 2003; ifmsa-ch, 2003) and whose linguistic backgrounds are french, german or italian.5 as described by one of the members of ifmsa-ch, the purpose of the association “is to enable international cooperation in professional training and the achievement of humanitarian ideals” (b, italian, e-mail). the association’s main use of english is in e-mails and, at the time of data collection, some members e-mailed on a daily basis, so it is the natural place to examine their english use. because the main part of the swiss medical student data was composed of emails, a comparable corpus of e-mails sent by native english-speaking british students was collected as well and will be the main point of comparison for the swiss data (again, see durham, 2007 for further discussion of this control data set). extraction and coding every instance where either that or zero could have been used was extracted from the data and was coded for a number of factors.6 the factors which were coded in this analysis and which will be studied in detail are very similar to those examined in tagliamonte and smith (2005) and torres cacoullos and walker (2009). as well as speaker and speaker’s native language, which are the external factors in this analysis, i will focus on subject of the main clause, the tense of the verb, whether there are any additional elements to the main clause, whether the verb phrase and the complementizer are separated by adverbs or adverbials and finally the lexical verb which the complementizer follows. 5 although some students were slightly more proficient in english than others, they had all had a similar amount of schooling in english. furthermore, only one speaker on the mailing list was an english-speaking bilingual and was excluded from the analysis. note furthermore that most of the students had also studied at least one of the other swiss languages, which possibly makes them rather different linguistically from german, french and italian speakers of english in germany, france and italy respectively. 6 rather differently from tagliamonte and smith (2005), there were no cases of parentheticals which were in a position where the that form was not a possible option (e.g., she’s very nice, i think). i think (that) something’s missing: complementizer deletion in nonnative e-mails 429 previous research on complementizers found first and second person subjects have a higher proportion of zero complementizers than third person subjects. the tokens have been coded for whether they are first person singular (13) or plural (14), second person singular or plural (15), third person pronouns he, she, it and they (16)-(18) or third person noun phrases, singular and plural (19). (13) i guess that i still the nore7 for this year. (l, french, e-mail) (14) we knew that x didn’t speak german. (o, german, e-mail) (15) do you also think that we should buy a firewall program? (c, italian, e-mail) (16) but he told us, that he can speak german! (r, german, e-mail) (17) it’s about time that things get clear in this meeting story (&, french, e-mail) (18) they told me that they can give us some sample materials (b, italian, e-mail) (19) young teenagers (girls), think ø their physical appearance is very important. (f, french, e-mail) the tense of the main verb was coded with a three way distinction: verbs in the present tense (20), verbs in the past tense (21), and sentences with no verb preceding the complementizer (22). tagliamonte and smith (2005, p. 304) had found that verbs in the present tense favoured the zero complementizer more than past tense verbs. there are relatively few tokens of sentences with no verb, so these will not be considered further for the factor of tense. (20) i think also that x is in geneva, isn’t it? (w, french, e-mail) (21) in the meantime i found that he wrote his notes for fundraising on the ifmsa web page. (c, italian, e-mail) (22) the fact that the computer is not always on minimizes greatly the possibilities for anyone to access it. (j, french, e-mail) in terms of additional elements in the verb phrase, the tokens were coded for whether there were no additional elements (23), whether the additional element was a modal verb (24) or whether the additional element was a negation form (25). the tokens which had both a modal and a negation form were given a separate code (26). tagliamonte and smith (2005, p. 304) found that ‘simpler constructions’ (i.e., those without additional elements in the verb phrase) favoured the zero complementizer and torres cacoullos and walker (2009, p. 21) found the same. 7 nore = national officer for research exchanges mercedes durham 430 (23) i think ø you’ll understand why. (c, italian, e-mail) (24) to sum it up it can be said that scome-ch has to build a solid structure for concrete projects. (f, french, e-mail) (25) i don’t think ø it would be necessary to buy a multi-user license. (j, french, e-mail) (26) i cannot promise that i can attend. (*, french, e-mail) somewhat similarly to the previous factor, the tokens in the factor considering other modifiers in the verb phrase were coded for absence (27) or presence (28) of additional elements. again, tagliamonte and smith (2005, p. 304) found that tokens without additional elements favoured the zero complementizer. (27) if you ø thought that you had already won the portwine bottle (p, german, e-mail) (28) i really hope that everyone arrived in kopaonik as per travel-timetable! (a, italian, e-mail) a number of specific lexical verbs were analyzed to determine how they affected the variability; any verb occurring frequently enough to allow it to be analyzed on its own was considered (think, hope, tell, say and know). the cut-off point for this was at least 24 tokens in the whole of the ifmsa data set. this is a far lower cut-off point than that used by torres cacoullos and walker (2009, p. 16) in their analysis of spoken canadian english. there, verbs with more than 200 occurrences were frequent and those between 10 and 49 occurrences were deemed to be very infrequent. except for hope, which was not examined on its own by tagliamonte and smith (2005), the other specific lexical verbs are the same as the ones considered in tagliamonte and smith (2005) and similar to those found most frequently in torres cacoullos and walker (2009). results overall distribution the nonnative speaker e-mail corpus yielded 576 tokens, and the native corpus 328. the breakdown of the tokens by native language and by that or zero complementizer is provided in table 1. i think (that) something’s missing: complementizer deletion in nonnative e-mails 431 table 1 overall distribution of the use of the zero complementizers (e-mails) % of zero % of that n ifmsa overall 33 67 576 french 26 74 197 german 46 54 87 italian 34 66 292 natives 38 62 328 the occurrence of the zero complementizer form is far lower in all four groups than what was found in studies of native english speech. this is not entirely surprising, however, as it had been noted that speech has higher rates of the zero form than written data. the rates found in the present analysis are at a mid-point between the informal and formal texts that elsness (1984) had considered. this further underlines how e-mails are a separate medium from both oral and written data and why it is crucial to use a native english control group of e-mailers to compare to the swiss data. although it was initially hypothesized that some nonnative speakers would have much higher rates of that given their mother tongues do not have forms comparable to the english zero form, this does not seem to be the case exactly. the native group is not substantially different from the three nonnative groups in terms of percentage of zero complementizer forms, being at a mid-point between the german speakers and the french and italian speakers, as can be seen from figure 1. figure 1 percentage of zero complementizer (ns above bars) 197 293 328 87 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 french italian english german % of zero mercedes durham 432 a chi square test considering all four linguistic groups reveals that the differences between them are significant,8 so, at this stage, we cannot state that the four groups are identical in their complementizer use. the three nonnative groups clearly make use of both variants. note that the german speakers use more of the zero complementizer than the native group; this may be due to interactions with the lexical verb. if the german speakers have a higher proportion of think than the other groups, for example, then this could explain the difference in zero complementizer use. we turn to this now. lexical verb most studies found considerable differences in rates depending on the lexical verb (kolbe’s research only examined the most frequent lexical verbs in fact). this difference in rates was explained in two ways; first of all, some verbs, such as think, were more likely to have an epistemic meaning and more likely to use the zero form (tagliamonte & smith, 2005, p. 293), and secondly, the higher frequency verbs were also more likely to show high rates of zero complementizer (torres cacoullos & walker, 2009, p. 15). the present analysis examines think, hope, tell, say and know in detail, as these were the verbs which occurred most frequently in the nonnative data. the other verbs which were found to be more likely to use the zero complementizer did not occur frequently enough to warrant being considered individually. think. think represents more than 20% of the overall tokens considered in this analysis, that is, 200 tokens across both corpora, making it the most frequently occurring verb, as was the case in previous studies. the percentages of think with a zero complementizer are lower for all four groups than what was found previously (table 2). nonetheless, the native speaker group is far closer to this near categorical average (with 90% zero) than the three nonnative groups (with ranges between 50 and 70%). note that think has far higher rates of zero complementizer than the overall distribution in all four groups. although the nonnative groups have lower rates than the natives, they share the direction of effect.9 despite the difference with the native group, the three nonnative groups show very similar rates; there is no significant difference between them.10 8 (df = 3, 2 = 12.18, p < .01.) 9 a chi square calculation of the four groups confirms this is a significant result: 2 = 18.03, p < .001. 10 a chi square calculation of the three non-native groups is found to be not significant: 2 = 1.92, p < 1. i think (that) something’s missing: complementizer deletion in nonnative e-mails 433 table 2 distribution of complementizer forms for think % of zero % of that ns ifmsa 52 48 161 french 51 49 51 german 68 32 22 italian 54 46 80 natives 90 10 39 the lower rates found in the nonnative speakers might also show that their e-mails are generally more formal than natives’; recall that for the relative pronouns, only the nonnative speakers had tokens of the highly formal variant whom. i will return to this point in the discussion. hope. hope occurred frequently enough in the e-mail data for it to be considered individually, as there were nearly 100 tokens for the nonnative speakers and 25 in the native e-mails. although most studies did not consider it separately from other verbs, torres cacoullos and walker (2009, p. 16) found that the complementizer was deleted at a rate of 89%. as in the case of think, hope demonstrates a high proportion of the zero complementizer in all four groups, with the german speakers being closest to the native percentages and the french speakers furthest away (table 3). table 3 distribution of complementizer forms for hope % of zero % of that n ifmsa 62 38 95 french 56 44 27 german 81 19 16 italian 60 40 52 natives 88 12 25 here again, although all the groups vary and show percentages of zero complementizer forms above 50%, there are differences between the groups. in this instance, the german speakers are very close to the native speakers, while the other two groups delete the complementizer about 20% less. the differences between the four groups are significant but, as for think, when only the three nonnative groups are considered, the difference is found not to be significant.11 tell. the next high frequency lexeme is tell. tagliamonte and smith (2005. p. 301) had found rates of 64% percent of the zero form with tell in 11 all four groups: 2 = 9.39, p < .025. three nonnative groups: 2 = 3.12, p < 1. mercedes durham 434 their data, while torres cacoullos and walker (2009, p. 16) had found 54%, both of which were considerably lower than the other verbs they examined and lower than the overall distribution (which was about 80%). note that directly reported speech has to be separated from indirectly reported speech with tell, because in direct speech there is no complementizer (examples (29)-(31)). (29) he told me ‘i’m happy.’ – direct speech (30) he told me that/ø i was happy. – indirect speech (31) he told me that/ø he was happy. – indirect speech while the number of tokens for tell is rather lower than for think and hope, the distributions of the various linguistic groups can still be analyzed, and once again there are considerable differences between the natives and the german speakers on one hand and the french and italian speakers on the other (table 4).12 table 4 distribution of complementizer forms for tell % of zero % of that n ifmsa 23 77 31 french 11 89 9 german 44 56 9 italian 15 85 13 natives 45 55 11 say. tagliamonte and smith (2005, p. 301) found that the zero complementizer occurred at a rate of 85% with say in their data, while torres cacoullos and walker (2009, p. 16) found a rate of 73%. there are slightly over 40 tokens of it in the two e-mail corpora. the distribution of the tokens is not ideal as the french and native english speakers provide the majority of the tokens, so the results of the german and italian speakers (with totals of three and four tokens respectively) cannot be considered to be truly indicative of the situation (table 5), but they give us at least an idea of what is happening. 12 the low number of tokens per cell means that it is not possible to establish whether these figures are statistically significant. i think (that) something’s missing: complementizer deletion in nonnative e-mails 435 table 5 distribution of complementizer forms for say % of zero % of that n ifmsa 21 79 24 french 18 82 17 german 33 67 3 italian 25 75 4 natives 37 63 19 as was the case for hope and tell, say occurs at a higher rate with the zero complementizer for the german and native english speakers. the french rate (18%) is considerably lower than the native group (37%). the native email rate (37%) is much lower than what was found in speech. know. similarly to say, tagliamonte and smith (2005, p. 301) found that know occurred with the zero complementizer at a rate of 85%, while torres cacoullos and walker (2009, p. 16) find 66% deletion. there are around 50 tokens of know in the e-mail corpora, and in this case, it is the french and the german speakers that have a far lower number of tokens than the other two groups (table 6). insofar as it is possible to establish, the german and italian speakers are similar to the native speaker rates. table 6 distribution of complementizer forms for know % of zero % of that n ifmsa 43 57 28 french 25 75 4 german 40 60 5 italian 47 53 19 natives 42 58 24 table 7 presents a summary view of the percentages of zero complementizer for all the verbs studied individually, while figure 2 presents these results in graph form. the rates of the different verbs alongside each other must be considered as this will allow us to establish whether the groups share the same patterns despite having different overall distributions. figure 2 also plots the results from tagliamonte and smith (2005, p. 301) and torres cacoullos and walker (2009, p. 16) to allow us to see how the oral data compares to the e-mail data. mercedes durham 436 table 7 percentage of zero complementizer by verb overall think hope tell know say english 38 90 92 45 42 37 french 29 51 56 11 25 18 german 49 68 81 44 40 33 italian 32 54 60 15 47 25 what is most striking when examining figure 2 is that the four e-mail groups show remarkably similar patterns; despite differences in percentages, the four e-mail groups have the highest rates for the same verbs. the hierarchy they all show is hope > think as the verbs with the highest rates of zero complementizer, with tell, know and say showing lower rates. the french and italian groups have patterns that are marginally more similar to each other than to the other two groups and the same holds for the english and german groups; nevertheless the overall picture is that the three nonnative groups have similar patterns to the native control group. figure 2 percentage of zero by verb because tagliamonte and smith (2005) did not provide the rate of zero complementizer use with hope in their results, there is a gap in figure 2. although the rates of zero complementizer found by them and by torres cacoullos and walker (2009) are considerably higher than for any of the e-mail groups, there are several points of similarity. tell is the lexical verb with the lowest rate of zero complementizer in all six groups and think has one of the 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 overall think hope tell know say english french german italian tagliamonte and smith torres cacoullos and walker i think (that) something’s missing: complementizer deletion in nonnative e-mails 437 highest rates. similarly to the french and italian groups, the results of studies examining speech show that know is used considerably more with the zero complementizer than with tell. overall, in terms of specific verbs, these results provide us with two major findings. first of all, the native e-mails show a distribution similar to the findings in previous studies in terms of specific verbs. the rates of zero complementizer are slightly lower than what was found in spoken data, but the near categoricity of the zero form with think is replicated here. the e-mail medium did not affect the variable rules underlying the distribution of the zero complementizer. secondly, although the three nonnative groups have lower percentages than the native speaker control group, figure 2 demonstrated that their patterning is very similar to the native speakers. their percentages fall between those of the formal and informal text categories that elsness (1984, p. 521) had examined, again underlying how difficult it can be to place e-mail in terms of written or oral registers. subject of main clause previous studies found that the subject of the main clause influenced complementizer choice in that first and second person subjects were more likely to occur with a zero form than third person forms. the data in the present study will be considered in terms of a four-way distinction with singular and plural subjects considered together; first person subjects, second person subjects, third person pronoun subjects and third person noun phrases. this follows the findings of previous studies. the results of previous studies are matched by the nonnative e-mailers and the native e-mailers, as is demonstrated in figure 3. first person subjects have the highest rates of the zero complementizer in all four groups and, except for the german speakers, these are followed by second person subjects.13 13 although tagliamonte and smith (2005) had found a considerable amount of interaction in terms of first person subjects and think, this analysis did not uncover the same categorical distribution of i think with the zero form for any of the linguistic groups. mercedes durham 438 figure 3 percentage of zero by subject (ns above bars) there are a number of differences in terms of hierarchy for the third person categories; however, the english and the french speakers have higher percentages of zero with noun phrases than with third person pronouns, while it is the opposite for the german and italian speakers. overall, despite some differences in terms of third person subjects, the four groups are quite similar. the nonnative groups share the hierarchies of the native speakers and are varying their use of the zero complementizer according to the subject of the main clause in a very similar way to the native e-mailers. tense previous studies (tagliamonte & smith, 2005; thompson & mulac, 1991) found that verbs in the present tense are more likely to be used with the zero complementizer form than past tense verbs. the results for the present study are shown in figure 4.14 figure 4 demonstrates that, unlike the factors of lexical verb and the subject of the main clause, the groups are very different in terms of verb tense. rather unexpectedly, the english group shows a higher proportion of zero deletion with past verbs than with present ones, which is at odds with 14 recall that instances with no verb are not considered here. this explains any discrepancies in total ns. 119 60 192 143 7 9 22 75 49 8 44 5622 10 34 54 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 french german italian english first person second person third person pronoun noun phrase i think (that) something’s missing: complementizer deletion in nonnative e-mails 439 both the non-native e-mailers and with the findings for native speakers in previous studies. the difference between present and past complementizer use is not statistically significant for the english speakers however, so it is possible that it is not a true pattern and could merely be tied to the relatively low proportion of past tense forms opposed to the present tense tokens. it may also be because this analysis includes tokens of i thought, while tagliamonte and smith’s (2005) study did not. figure 4 percentage of zero by verb tense (ns above bars) additional elements in verb phrase previous studies found that the presence of modal and negation forms lowered the likelihood of the zero complementizer being used. the results presented in figure 5 consider this in terms of the e-mail corpora. due to low figures, the presence of modal verbs and negation forms are combined. figure 5 percentage of zero deletion by elements in the verb phrase (ns above bar) 162 65 262 269 34 19 24 43 0 20 40 60 80 100 french german italian english present past 14 5 26 45 183 82 266 283 0 20 40 60 80 100 french german italian english any element no element mercedes durham 440 although the hierarchy is very similar for the german, italian and english groups, in that they all, as predicted, have higher rates of zero complementizer in clauses without additional elements, the overall low rate of tokens containing additional elements means that it is dangerous to attribute too much importance to these findings. the low number of tokens with any element in the verb phrase means that we cannot test whether the difference found in the french speakers is statistically significant. additional elements in main clause tagliamonte and smith (2005) and torres cacoullos and walker (2009) found that additional elements in the main clause, such as adverbials, decreased the likelihood of a zero complementizer being used. figure 6 analyzes the distribution in the e-mail data. figure 6 percentage of zero complementizer with additional elements in the matrix clause (ns above bars) all four e-mail groups show the predicted distribution; additional elements in the main clause lower the use of the zero complementizer form.15 15 the data from each of the language groups was run individually in a multivariate analysis to fully establish which factors were likely to have a favourable effect on the zero complementizer, but as, by and large, they merely confirmed the patterns found in the overall distributions discussed here, i have decided not to include them (see durham, 2007 for a full analysis). 23 10 24 48 147 77 268 280 0 20 40 60 80 100 french german italian english something nothing i think (that) something’s missing: complementizer deletion in nonnative e-mails 441 discussion the various analyses have revealed similarities and differences among the natives and nonnatives, but also within the nonnative groups themselves. the points below summarize the main findings for each factor, before we turn to a full discussion of the results. overall rates: the main difference in zero complementizer use is between the e-mail and the oral data. whereas previous studies examining oral data had rates between 70-90% of zero, the e-mail groups, native and nonnative, are all around 35%. this is nonetheless higher than what elseness (1984) had found for formal texts, but lower than the informal texts (1-15% and 52-58% respectively) underlining that the register of emails is more formal than oral data and informal written data. this affects native and nonnative speakers alike. the french and italian groups are significantly lower than the english and german groups, however. overall, the nonnative groups reach a close approximation of the native rates and clearly do use both variants. lexical verb: despite some differences in overall distribution of the zero form, the four e-mail groups have very similar patterns for the different verbs; hope and think are considerably higher than the other verbs. this matches the findings in tagliamonte and smith (2005) and torres cacoullos and walker (2009). the nonnative groups have completely acquired this aspect of the variation. subject of main clause: the four e-mail groups have the pattern found for oral data in tagliamonte and smith (2005); first person subjects have the highest rate of the zero variant followed by second person subjects and then other subjects. this factor constraining the variation in complementizers has been fully acquired by the nonnative speakers. tense: the three nonnative groups show the expected favouring of the zero complementizer in present tense contexts. for the native speakers, on the other hand, there is no statistically significant difference between the two contexts, mostly likely due to low ns. additional elements in the verb phrase: here the order predicted was an increase of the zero complementizer in cases where there was no additional element in the verb phrase; all but the french speakers showed the expected order. this factor has been acquired by the german and italian groups. additional elements in the main clause: as for the previous factor group, the absence of additional elements was found to favour the mercedes durham 442 zero complementizer. this was found to be the case for all four e-mail groups, so they have acquired this aspect of variability. examining the whole range of factors influencing the use of complementizers, the overwhelming conclusion one can draw is that the nonnative groups are very similar to the native e-mailers. although their overall rates are generally lower than in native data, the native constraints and patterns are there. the nonnatives, for the most part, match native speaker patterns (either those of the e-mail control group or those considered in previous studies). think, tell, know and say have higher rates of zero complementizer than other verbs, first person subjects are more likely to be used with a zero complementizer than other subjects, and elements, either in the verb phrase or the main clause, inhibit the use of zero. this demonstrates that the nonnative speakers have acquired many of the constraints which operate in english complementizer patterns. the (swiss) german speakers have a zero form used in a similar way to the english zero complementizer form in their native language and they are the nonnative group with the highest rates of zero complementizer. they are not the only group to show variability in the feature, however, as both the italian and french groups also use the zero complementizer form. while the similarity between german and english might have benefited the german speakers in some ways, the fact that they and the other two nonnative groups share native speakers’ hierarchies of constraints and ranges is due to more than surface similarity. although we do not know what constraints operate on german complementizers, it is unlikely that they are the same constraints as in english. the german speakers (as well as the french and italian speakers) are applying english variable rules for their use of the zero complementizer form. conclusion this article has shown that despite the that and the zero complementizer forms not being explicitly taught to nonnative swiss speakers of english, these speakers have nevertheless acquired the variable rules of native speakers. not only do the patterns match the native e-mail corpus, but also what had been uncovered in previous analyses of english zero complementizers (tagliamonte and smith, 2005; 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(2010). second language acquisition at the interfaces. lingua, 124(4), 577-590. 419 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (3). 2014. 419-441 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.3.3 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl l2 learner age from a contextualised perspective jelena mihaljevi djigunovi university of zagreb, croatia jdjigunovic@gmail.com abstract in this qualitative study the author focuses on age effects on young learners’ l2 development by comparing the l2 learning processes of six young learners in an instructed setting: three who had started learning english as l2 at age 6/7 and three who had started at age 9/10. both earlier and later young beginners were followed for three years (during their second, third and fourth year of learning english). the participants’ l2 development was measured through their oral output elicited by a two-part speaking task administered each year. results of the analyses are interpreted taking into account each learners’ individual characteristics (learning ability, attitudes and motivation, self-concept) and the characteristics of the context in which they were learning their l2 (attitudes of school staff and parents to early l2 learning, home support, in-class and out-of-class exposure to l2, socio-economic status). the findings show that earlier and later young beginners follow different trajectories in their l2 learning, which reflects different interactions which age enters into with the other variables. keywords: age effects, young beginners, english as l2, individual differences, contaxtual factors 1. introduction although it has been one of the most interesting issues in sla and l2 teaching research for a long time, the age factor is still the main focus of many researchers’ jelena mihaljevi djigunovi 420 interest. most studies to date have discussed the age factor with reference to the critical period hypothesis (lenneberg, 1967; penfield & roberts, 1959). the findings of these studies are not unanimous. some (e.g., dekeyser, 2003; dekeyser & larson-hall, 2005; hyltenstam & abrahamsson, 2001, 2003) conclude that there is a critical period beyond which it is difficult or even impossible to master l2, others (e.g., bialystok, 2001; birdsong, 2005; marinova-todd, marshall, & snow, 2000, 2001; macwhinney, 2005; moyer, 2004) claim that the critical period does not really exist, while still others maintain a more balanced position (e.g., muñoz, 2006; scovel, 1988, 2000; singleton, 1989, 2001; singleton & ryan, 2004). in recent overview chapters of the age factor (e.g., dekeyser, 2012; muñoz & singleton, 2011; nikolov & mihaljevi djigunovi , 2006, 2011) it is possible to discern some new trends in viewing the age factor. they reflect, on the one hand, a move away from the idea of biological maturation implied by the critical period hypothesis as the explanation of differences in sla between younger and older learners and, on the other, a realization that age is difficult to disentangle from other variables and its impact on sla can be better understood if we take into account its interactions with other factors. thus, the term age effects is nowadays used increasingly more often than critical period in discussions of the age factor in sla. in this paper i will move away from the prevalent approaches to age effects. more specifically, i will not aim at finding out which age is the best to start foreign language learning in terms of the rate of acquisition or the ultimate attainment, as most studies currently do. since early l2 programmes have mushroomed in pactically all corners of the world (nikolov & mihaljevi djigunovi , 2011), the start age has become something of a given because education policy makers decide on the introduction of l2 at a particular age irrespective of what research findings suggest and, often, only because of strong parental pressure to start early. thus, the urgent problem that research on age effects can help solve concerns the understanding by all parties involved of the l2 learning by young learners at different early ages. findings of such research can contribute to broadening our theoretical insights about early l2 learning and, at the same time, raise the awareness of l2 teachers and other stakeholders about the relevance of different factors which impact early instructed l2 learning and teaching. a number of relevant variables confounding the age factor have emerged in recent literature. thus, muñoz and singleton (2011) mention young learners’ attitudes and motivation; amount and quality of input; amount, intensity and diversity of l2 contact; frequency of out-of-school use of l2 and the like; stressing that natural and instructed settings imply differences in relevance of these variables. moyer (2004), for example, draws attention to the potential importance of the quality of l2 experience as well as to the level of interactivity required during exposure to l2. l2 learner age from a contextualised perspective 421 mihaljevi djigunovi and lopriore (2011) suggest that learner self-concept plays a role in early l2 learning, as well as home support. the socio-economic status has also been pointed out as a relevant variable in early l2 learning (muñoz & lindgren, 2011). in instructed learning settings l2 learners’ classroom behaviour has also been found as a valuable source of information on the l2 learning process (mihaljevi djigunovi , 2009). dekeyser (2012) adds increasing role of l1 and decreasing role of schooling. the above mentioned variables do not present a full list of factors which interact with age and potentially determine age effects on the processes and products of early l2 learning. it is very likely that the list will increase with the increase in our understanding of the complex role of age in sla. as has often been pointed out (e.g., enever & lopriore, 2014; nikolov, 2009), deeper insights into early l2 learning require a longitudinal approach to research. in spite of the fact that quite a few studies have been carried out in the field, there have not been many which followed this research paradigm. some recent notable exceptions are longitudinal projects carried out in spain (garcía mayo & garcía lecumberri, 2003; muñoz, 2006), ireland (harris & conway, 2002), scotland (low, duffield, brown, & johnstone, 1993) and croatia (vilke & vrhovac, 1993, 1995; vrhovac, 2001), as well as the transnational early language learning in europe (ellie) (enever, 2011) study which involved seven european country contexts. 2. a comparative study of earlier and later young efl beginners 2.1. context of the study the study was carried out in the croatian socio-educational context. it is characterised by a long tradition in l2 learning. for decades, the starting age used to be grade 4 of primary school (age: 9/10 years), and in 2003 it was lowered to the very beginning of education: grade 1 of primary school, when learners are at the age of 6/7 years. all pupils follow the same national curriculum, which lays emphasis on developing positive attitudes to learning second languages, motivation for language learning and oral skills. explicit teaching of grammar is discouraged. two types of teachers are considered qualified to teach english: specialist english teachers who have a university degree in english language and literature and have been trained to teach english to any age and type of learners, and class teachers with a minor in english who have specialized in teaching english to young learners. 2.2. aims this study aimed at getting an insight into age effects on young learners’ development in l2 english by contextualising age at the learner and learning context jelena mihaljevi djigunovi 422 levels. following the earlier and later young beginners’ language development over three years i wished to paint as comprehensive a picture of age effects as possible by taking into account their attitudes and motivation, l2 self-concept and classroom language learning behaviour, as well as their l2 exposure in class and out of class, home support and socio-economic status. 2.3. methodology the sample in this qualitative study included 6 croatian young learners of english as l2. three of them started learning english in grade 1 (earlier beginners) and 3 started in grade 4 (later beginners). they were followed during their second, third and fourth years of learning. in terms of age this means that the ealier beginners were followed from the age of 7/8 years till 9/10, while later beginners were aged 10/11 when the study started and were 12/13 years old by the end of the study. the participants’ l2 development was measured by means of speaking tasks involving a picture description and a personalised interview related to the picture. in their second year of l2 learning the young learners were presented with a picture of a family house and could see its different rooms and family members doing different things. they were first asked to describe the picture and then to talk about the place where they lived and about their family. the third year speaking task involved decribing a picture of a living room and a dining room in which family members were watching tv, or eating, or studying. this was also followed by discussing the related aspects of the participants’ family life. in the final year of the study (fourth year of l2 learning) the participants were shown a four-part picture depicting the hall, the living room, the bathroom and the bedroom of a house. they were asked to first describe everything they could see and were then interviewed about what they thought about the house, whether they would like to live in it, and about their favourite room at home. during piloting, these pictures were found to be good elicitation tools: they provided enough stimulus for the participants in both age groups to produce orally at their current level. the personalized interview part was included to see if there were differences in oral production based on a visually guided and more structured stimulus and a more authentic-like and free use of l2. information about the young learners’ attitudes and motivation for learning english and their l2 self-concept was gathered through interviews with the learners and through the parents’ questionnaire. these instruments were taken over from the ellie project (for details see enever, 2011). the participants were asked each year what their favourite school subject was (and if they liked english in cases when they did not list it among the favourite subjects) and what they liked and/or disliked about their english classes. data on the participants’ l2 learner age from a contextualised perspective 423 language learning behaviour during english classes and on the exposure to english through classroom teaching was collected using the observation schedules also developed by the ellie team. the already mentioned parents’ questionnaire supplied information about the participants’ out-of-school exposure and their socio-economic status, which helped to triangulate the data obtained from the young learners themselves. the participants were observed in their classrooms nine times during the three years of the study. the speaking tasks and the interviews were administered at the end of each grade. the parents filled in the questionnaire in the second and in the final year of the study. before the start of the study the participants’ teachers were asked to describe each learner in terms of their language learning ability (high-ability, average-ability, low-ability). two independent raters assessed the participants’ oral production. they used a 5-point scale on which they assessed the participants’ task achievement, vocabulary, accuracy and fluency in relation to the respective curricular aims for a particular year of study. their inter-rater reliability was .94. 2.4. results in this section i will first describe our participants’ l2 development as evidenced by their oral production over three years. then i will try to build up a profile of each participant based on their individual learner characteristics and on the key features of the context they learned english in. this will be followed by looking into the interaction of the l2 development and the individual and contextual factors investigated. the earlier beginners will be referred to as eb1, eb2 and eb3. the three later beginners will be named lb1, lb2 and lb3. 2.4.1. eb1 this was a female learner who displayed average performance in the second year of learning and then performed well above average in years 3 and 4, as shown in figure 1. jelena mihaljevi djigunovi 424 figure 1 overall oral performance of eb1 during three years a closer look at her performance on individual subtasks over the three years depicted in figure 2 shows that the observed trend in her oral performance did not take place in all aspects of oral production. in the picture description part of the oral task the command of vocabulary peaked in the third year and then dropped, while fluency was highest in the fourth year. in the personalized interview each of the investigated aspects of her oral performance developed in the same way: they were lowest in year 2 and then rose in year 3, remaining at the same increased level in year 4. if scores on the two subtasks are compared, it can be seen that task achievement and accuracy followed the same pattern (rising, then stabilizing) in both subtasks, while fluency showed a rising trend already from year 2 in personalized interview and only in year 3 in picture description; vocabulary showed greater variability in picture description compared to personalized interview, where no drop was observed. figure 2 oral performance of eb1 broken down by criteria and by subtask l2 learner age from a contextualised perspective 425 eb1 attended a small town school which had a long tradition in early foreign language learning, was well equipped and in which both the school principal and teaching staff considered early beginning of a foreign language important. the school library boasted a nice collection of english books, picture books and dictionaries as well as dvd players, computers and an iwb, all of which were available to be used during english classes. this participant was taught by a generalist teacher with a minor in english, who was very enthusiatic about teaching young learners. her teaching approach was communicative, and she used english close to 90 per cent of class time. the number of students in the class was 20. in the home, the participant had no english books or dictionaries but was exposed to the language through foreign tv series and music. her father had secondary education, while her mother had finished only primary school. only her mother spoke a little english, and it was her who often helped her with the homework. both parents supported her learning of english; they reported she enjoyed speaking it and each year became more confident about her knowledge. once, during summer, she met some foreign tourists at the seaside and managed to talk to them in english. this was a very pleasant experience for her. at the start, eb1 was assessed by her english teacher as an average-ability learner. throughout the three years this participant listed english as her favourite (years 2 and 3) or one of the favourite school subjects (year 4). she also reported enjoying everything about her english classes, and pointed out games, songs and learning new words as the most enjoyable activities in years 2 and 3, and stories and listening in year 4. her self-concept developed in the positive direction: in year 2 she explained she was just as good as others in class, while in years 3 and 4 she claimed she was better than her classmates because she could understand everything in class and could remember new things faster than her friends. during english classed she showed high interst and was very attentive and engaged. 2.4.2. eb2 this male participant’s overall oral performance, which is shown in figure 3, was on the constant increase. it was not too high in year 2 but rose to average in year 3 and reached the above average level in year 4. jelena mihaljevi djigunovi 426 figure 3 overall oral performance of eb2 during three years figure 4 oral performance of eb2 broken down by criteria and by subtask when considering the different aspects of oral performance in both subtasks together, it can be seen that this participant’s performance increased over the three years in all the aspects included except fluency. in picture description the most obvious rising trend could be observed in task achievement, while vocabulary and accuracy increased in the final year only. accuracy was the weakest point in this learner’s performance in this subtask. similar trends could be observed in his performance in personalized interview, with somewhat lower scores overall. interestingly, in years 2 and 3 this participant displayed higher accuracy in the interview than in the picture description subtask. eb2 attended a village school. his class included 22 students. the attitudes towards early learning of foreign languages were generally positive among the school staff as well as parents. the teacher was a generalist teacher with a minor l2 learner age from a contextualised perspective 427 in english. she was very enthusiastic about teaching young learners and had high rapport with them. her teaching methodology was age-appropriate. she used english approximately 60 per cent of class time. what characterised her use of l2 and l1 was that her code-switching was strategic: she would use l1 in order to make a particular l2 word or structure more salient. she often paid attention to the english her learners encountered out-of-school and did her best to integrate it into her classroom teaching. at the beginning of the study the participant was assessed by the teacher as a low ability learner. both of the participant’s parents had primary education and neither could speak english. it was his older brother that the participant turned to for help when necessary. the parents supported the participant’s learning of english and were very happy when he got good grades. they reported that their son was very proud about his english but at the beginning was too shy to use it in the presence of his family. he became more confident from year to year. eb2 did not have access to books in english at home or to the internet. most of his exposure to l2 was through english speaking tv programmes and music. eb2 did not mention english as a favourite subject in year 2. in year 3 he listed it as one of his favourite subjects, while in year 4 it featured as the favourite school subject. he enjoyed all the classroom activities but from year 3 on he singled out learning new english words and doing listening tasks as the best. at the end of year 2, eb2 perceived himself as less good than his classmates, in year 3 he claimed he could learn as fast as everyone else, while in year 4 he said he was better than most of his classmates and offered his high grades as evidence. during english classes he regularly displayed high interest in all the tasks and was generally very attentive and engaged. 2.4.3. eb3 this participant was a boy whose oral performance, showed in figure 5, although well above average, showed the most variability. the performance in year 3 displayed a drop compared to year 2, and rose again in year 4. jelena mihaljevi djigunovi 428 figure 5 overall oral performance of eb3 during three years if the production is analyzed according to the four criteria and separately for the two subtasks, shown in figure 6, again different trends can be seen. as far as the picture description subtask is concerned, a drop in the scores on the vocabulary and accuracy scales could be observed in year 3, while fluency increased in the same year. in personalized interview, the same variability was observed for accuracy, while fluency remained at the same level; vocabulary showed a rising trend after year 3. task achievement was high in all three years and in both subtasks. figure 6 oral performance of eb3 broken down by criteria and by subtask eb3 attended a big city school with a tradition in early foreign language learning. his class was quite large and comprised 29 learners. most staff in the school entertained positive attitudes to early foreign language learning. the school was averagely equipped: there was a collection of children’s books in l2 learner age from a contextualised perspective 429 english in the school library, the teacher had access to a dvd player, a computer and a data projector. several dictionaries were also stocked in the library. the teacher was a specialist english teacher who was not specifically trained to teach young learners. she liked teaching children and attended in-service workshops in order to upgrade her competences. her teaching generally reflected the communicative approach to foreign language learning, but she insisted on accuracy more than the other teachers in this study. since the class was rather large, there were sometimes discipline issues she had to cope with; she also had to accommodate her teaching to two pupils with special needs in the class. the teacher used english between 50 and 70 per cent of class time. in the home the participant’s parents generally supported his learning of english. however, there were no books or dictionaries the young learner could use and, up untill year 4, he did not have access to the internet. the father had secondary education and the mother had finished primary school. both parents had learned english in school but reported poor knowledge of the language. all of their other three children learned english and helped one another when necessary. eb3 was assessed by his teacher as a high ability learner. both his motivation and self-concept showed variability over the three years of the study. english was one of his favourite subjects in year 2, was not mentioned at all in year 3, and turned into the one and only favourite subject in year 4. his self-concept followed similar changes: in years 2 and 4 the participant claimed he was better at english than his classmates, while in year 3 he said we was neither better nor worse than others. as far as classroom activities are concerned, his constant favourites were listening to stories, games, learning new words and role plays. in year 3 he seemed less enthusiastic about his english classes than in other years but still reported liking practically everything. observation of his classroom language behaviour reflected his affective dispositions: in contrast to years 2 and 4, in year 3 eb3 displayed average interest but less attention and engagement. that year he also seemed distracted by his unruly classmates whose behaviour often caused the teacher to stop the class and deal with the discipline issues at hand. 2.4.4. lb1 this was a female learner. her oral production showed variability from year to year as well as from one aspect to another within the same year. she perforned best in year 3. figure 7 presents the observed overall variability. jelena mihaljevi djigunovi 430 figure 7 overall oral performance of lb1 during three years as can be seen in figure 8, in the picture description subtask lb1 performed best in year 3, after starting rather poorly in year 2. except for task achievement, her performance displayed an inverted u-shape development. in the interview subtask, the same trend could be observed in all aspects except vocabulary. it is interesting to note that, overall, this participant performed better in personalized interview than in picture description. figure 8 oral performance of lb1 broken down by criteria and by subtask lb1 attended a town school that can be described as a typical primary school for the croatian socio-educational context: it was equipped with basic teaching aids (specialized foreign language classroom with cd and dvd players, no iwb, and a number of english books and dictionaries in the school library) with the staff entertaining positive attitudes to early foreign language learning. she was taught by a specialist english teacher who applied age appropriate methodology and mostly l2 learner age from a contextualised perspective 431 used english in class. although the teacher believed early foreign language learning was highly beneficial, she said she preferred teaching more mature learners. at home lb1 had dvds in english and a dictionary. she got access to the internet during year 3 and made use of her knowledge of english while surfing. although her mother could speak english, she would mostly ask her sister for help when doing homework or preparing for a test. there was a major difference in her parents’ educational level: her mother had a university degree, while her father completed only primary education. lb1 took pride in her knowledge of english, liked to speak the language and was not shy to use it. by year 3 she had already experienced communicating in english with a foreigner and reported feeling happy about being able to use her english. she did not list english as a favourite subject till year 3. at first she claimed she liked everything in her english classes, but in year 3 she liked role-playing the most and said she disliked having to wait for everyone to finish the tasks they were still doing after she had finished hers. her classroom language behaviour suggested slightly negative trends in terms of all the aspects observed from year 3 on. lb1 could not decide in year 2 whether she was just as good at english as her classmates or better than them, but by year 3 she was sure she was better than others in class. her self-concept remained positive in year 4 as well, when she claimed she could understand new things faster than her classmates. still, she perceived english as getting more difficult each year. 2.4.5. lb2 the second later beginner was a boy whose oral performance excelled in all three years and according to all the investigated criteria, as can be seen from figure 9. figure 9 overall oral performance of lb2 during three years jelena mihaljevi djigunovi 432 lb2 attended a city school which offered primary education in english besides the regular national curricula in croatian. thus it attracted foreign pupils such as children of foreign diplomats or businessmen, which gave the local children ample opportunity to use english during the breaks. lb2 was exposed to english quite extensively in the home too through watching tv programmes in english, listening to music in english and using the internet. he also had contacts with english speaking people who visited his parents or whom he met at the seaside during summer vacations. his experience in communicating in english was highly positive. according to his parents, he felt confident using english with foreigners. the parents had university level education and used english at work. they rarely helped their son with homework or studying because he needed no help. lb2 was taught english by a qualified teacher who used english 50 per cent of class time on average. the participant did not think highly about his teacher’s english and claimed that her pronunciation was not too good but that her grammar was excellent. his self-concept was very positive during all the three years: he perceived himself as the best pupil in class. although english was never among his favourite subjects because it was too easy and not challenging enough, lb2 enjoyed himself when they read stories or worked with comic strips. still, he was often bored during his english classes and wondered how his classmates could find english difficult. his teacher assessed his language learning ability as high. 2.4.6. lb3 this participant was a boy whose performance was generally not high and also varied over time, as shown in figure 10. it was assessed as below average in year 2, then rose to above average in year 3 to drop slightly again, but remaining above average. figure 10 overall oral performance of lb3 during three years l2 learner age from a contextualised perspective 433 if this participant’s performance is comapred along the four criteria in the two subtasks with the help of figure 11, it can seen that his performance varied over the three years in both cases. in picture description, task achievement remained at the same level throughout the three years, while vocabulary, accuracy and fluency increased in year 3, and remained at that level in year 4. in the personalized interview subtask the observed trends were somewhat different: while task achievement and vocabulary scores increased in year 3 and then stabilized, accuracy was highest in year 3 and then dropped to the year 2 level; fluency first increased in year 3 and then dropped in year 4 to the lowest point. figure 11 oral performance of lb3 broken down by criteria and by subtask lb3 attended the same town school as lb1 but had a different english teacher. it was a specialist teacher who had not been trained to teach young learners. the teacher assessed him as an average-ability learner. his exposure to english in class was average (the teacher used english about 60 per cent of class time), as was the out-of-class exposire: he would sometimes watch films in english on tv, listen to music and, in year 4, he gained access to the internet and used english when using facebook or playing games. lb3 got a chance to communicate in english with a foreigner only in year 4, and reported feeling highly anxious while trying to show the way to a german tourist visiting his town. his parents had secondary level education and could speak some english. when he needed help, he would turn to his older brother. the parents were happy about his learning english and would praise him whenever he would get a good grade. they claimed their son liked learning english but was not very confident when using it and found it rather hard to learn and use. jelena mihaljevi djigunovi 434 lb3 never listed english among his favourite subjects but, when prompted, he reported that he liked english too, stressing that he liked other subjects better. he generally preferred structed learning activities and enjoyed listening to english texts in class, but disliked writing and doing tests. during his english classes he generally showed high interest, but it was not always accompanied by engagement. lb3’s self-concept changed over the three years. in year 2 it was negative, and he believed he was worse at english than his classmates; in years 3 and 4 he claimed he was just as good as others. 2.5. discussion eb1 displayed increase in her l2 development at the start, which then stabilized at the above average level. interestingly, it was fluency that showed the most consistent rise over the three years. i connect this with the high l2 use by her teacher during english classes combined with the opportunity the participant had to use english in the home because her mother spoke english and encouraged her to use it. it is also interesting that vocabulary showed a downward development after year 3. i believe it reflected her new interest in other school subjects in year 4, when she said english was not anymore the favourite subject but one of the subjects she liked best; this perhaps made her devote less time to mastering vocabulary in the final year. eb2 seems like a success story of a young learner. as a low-ability learner his oral performance seemed to be constantly on the rise in most aspects. this was reflected in the development of his self-concept, which turned increasingly more positive from year to year. the same trend was observed in his motivation, which also steadily grew over the years. this is consistent with the claim that self-concept is the best predictor of motivation (mercer, 2011). although he had strong family support for his learning of english, if it is taken into consideration that his socio-economic status was not high, it seems most likely that the key explanation of his success is connected to the high quality classroom teaching which he was exposed to. age-appropriate methodology coupled with integration of out-of-school exposure to english into english classes was probably the trigger for this participant’s l2 development. although in a descriptive study like this we cannot be sure about the cause-effect relationships, i believe that it was this development that led to positive trends in both the young learner’s self-concept and motivation. this reflects moyer’s (2004) claim that quality of l2 experience is a very important factor in language learning. l2 development of eb3, a high-ability and a relatively successful young learner, painted an interesting picture: while his task achievement was excellent during all the three years, he displayed the most variability of the three earlier beginners in the l2 learner age from a contextualised perspective 435 vocabulary, accuracy and fluency aspects. it seems that year 3 was a crisis year for him. this can be connected with a simultaneous drop in his motivation as well as his self-concept that same year. a look at what went on in the eb3’s classroom that year suggests some possible explanations. discipline problems in his large class, causing the teacher to frequently interrupt her teaching, may have made learning too demanding for eb3. another possible explanation is that his specialist teacher, with no training in teaching young learners, made learning too demanding by insisting on accuracy. teachers without an appropriate training in working with young learners may not be aware of the fact that younger children learn more slowly than older ones, and that linguistic accuracy is not the main aim in the early years of foreign language learning. his teacher’s prevalent experience with older learners might have misled her to expect the same progress with younger children in all language learning aspects which she had witnessed in her older learners. thanks to his constant interest in listening and learning new words, combined with interest in role plays and games which enabled him to apply his knowledge in the classroom setting, eb3 resumed the upward trend in his l2 development after year 3. the key role of the teacher and ageappropriacy of teaching methodology has been stressed in previous research (e.g., nikolov, 1999; vilke, 1995). enever and watts (2009) have also drawn attention to the importance of aligning classroom activities with learners’ interests. lb1 displayed just the opposite trend in her l2 development from the one observed in eb3. her performance was, overall, best in year 3. what most likely contributed to that is the out-of-school exposure to english and home support. it was in year 3 that she could for the first time apply her knowledge of english while surfing on the internet as well in real life communication with foreigners. this coincided with a rise in both her self-concept and motivation, which remained high till the end of the study. the classroom context did not seem to be too stimulating for her, especially after year 2. her high interest, attention and engagement during english classes slightly decreased in intensity from year to year although they were never low. relying on previous research (e.g., harris & conway, 2002), it seems to me that it was the opportunities to use l2 in real life situations that had the largest impact on this participant’s l2 development. lb2’s english development suggests a strong interaction with some contextual variables and individual learner characteristics. the broader school context in which he learned english was excellent, but the classroom context was not too positive: the teacher’s language competence was far from perfect, just as her classroom management skills. this seemed to be off-putting for lb2. however, his socio-educational context which supplied him with substantial amounts of exposure to english was very stimulating and, combined with his high language learning ability and genuine interest in languages as such, rejelena mihaljevi djigunovi 436 sulted in top oral performance. this is consistent with murphy’s (2014) conclusions on the impact of the out-of-school context based on her review of a number of studies on instructed l2 learning at the primary school level. lb3’s overall performance seems to have followed the same trend as that of lb1, only the results were lower. what stands out about this young learner is his lack of confidence, which seems to have had an important impact on his l2 development. the contextual background in which this young learner learned english was not unsupportive, but he obviously needed more support and encouragement both from his teacher and family to progress faster. the opportunity to use english while using the internet probably helped him to maintain his above average level of performance in year 4. his lack of confidence, which was only reinforced by high anxiety during his first real life communication in english with a foreigner, probably had a crucial role in his l2 development, overriding the high ability and the generally positive sides of contextual factors. mihaljevi djigunovi (2006) has shown that l2 anxiety impacts oral language production and processing. csizér and dörnyei (2005) have also observed that experiences of language anxiety in early l2 learning can lead to young learners’ lack of trust in their own abilities. the present findings show that both groups of young beginners shared the generally positive attitudes of school staff and parents to early learning of foreign languages. also, no matter what type and level of education their parents had, all young beginners enjoyed strong support for their learning of english. murphy (2014) has highlighted the role of the parents by referring to their insistence on an early start as parentocracy. another thing in common was a considerable exposure to english outside school, mostly through the media. however, the town and city settings, in contrast to the village setting, offered more l2 exposure in terms of names of shops, street advertisements and the like. what the present analyses of earlier and later young beginners’ profiles show is, first of all, that their l2 developed following different trajectories. inter and intra-learner differences could be observed at different points of the language learning process as well as in different aspects of language mastery. i would like to suggest that this was so because learner age interacted with other individual learner characteristics and with contextual factors in different ways. in both earlier and later young beginners in this study, l2 development seemed to enter into complex interactions with other variables, but the dynamics of these interactions was different for earlier and later young beginners. as tragant (2006) has found in the case of young learners’ motivation, biological age plays a more important role than, for example, hours of instruction. according to our findings, in the case of the earlier young beginners, the role of the immediate learning environment seemed to override the other variables to l2 learner age from a contextualised perspective 437 a large extent. similar conclusions were reached by nikolov (2002) in her longitudinal study of hungarian young learners of english as l2, which offered evidence that early beginners were more motivated by classroom practice than by motivational orientations connected with integrative or instrumental reasons. l2 development was associated more strongly with what was happening in the young learner classroom than with out-of-class factors. a good case in point is eb2, who was not as much exposed to l2 outside school as the other young learners living in nonrural contexts, whose socio-economic status was the lowest of the six participants and who, at the beginning of our study, had a negative self-concept as a language learner. the high quality l2 teaching he was exposed to must have significantly contributed to his increasing motivation and l2 self-concept, as well as l2 development throughout the three years of the study. his teacher’s skillful and meaningful use of code-switching and integration of the english that her learners came in contact with outside the classroom was probably more beneficial for her learners’ l2 development than much larger amounts of out-of-class exposure never made use of in class. the smaller size of the groups in which the earlier beginners were learning english was probably also a contributing factor to l2 development. this was confirmed in earlier research on croatian young learners of english (mihaljevi djigunovi , 2009; vilke, 1995). the later beginners analysed in this study, on the other hand, presented a different picture. their l2 development seemed to be more associated with individual characteristics and the out-of-school factors. lb2, for example, was put off by what was going on in his l2 classes but excelled in l2 oral performance anyway thanks to the high quality out-of-class l2 exposure (both in school through contact with foreign children and outside school) and the high socio-economic status of his family. as nikolov (1999) observed, classroom teaching is associated with intrinsic motivation in young learners, but it becomes a less important source of motivation in a few years’ time. other motives emerge and, besides, negative attitudes to school in general tend to appear. also, as lb1 illustrates, the number of out-of-class experiences in authentic use of l2 increases with age, and this slowly develops a more significant impact on young learners’ motivation, self-concept and l2 development. unfortunately, classroom teaching often does not take into consideration the language competences in english which young learners nowadays obtain out of school. another distinguishing factor between earlier and later young beginners is the role of individual learner characteristics. the older the learner the stronger the impact of such characteristics as shyness and language anxiety. a case in point is paricipant lb3, whose oral performance reflected more his lack of self-confidence as an l2 learner than the relatively positive outlook of all the other variables i looked into. jelena mihaljevi djigunovi 438 3. conclusions the findings of this study suggest that age effects on l2 development do exist and are probably mediated by individual learner characteristics and contextual factors. i found that earlier and later young beginners of english as l2 may follow different trajectories in their l2 development. generally, earlier beginners are more dependent in their l2 development on what goes on in the l2 classroom in the sense that their attitudes, motivation and self-concepts are based on the quality of the teacher and the teaching they are exposed to to a larger extent than is the case with later beginners. in contrast, later young beginners seem generally to be influenced less by classroom teaching than by out-of-class factors, especially l2 exposure and authentic experiences in using it, which emerge as mediating factors between age and their l2 development. our study provides evidence that in early l2 learning a couple of years may make a difference. starting at age 6/7 as compared to 9/10 years results in a different impact of factors which drive l2 development. this may have important implications for the choice of predictors in future quantitative studies. l2 learner age from a contextualised perspective 439 references bialystok, e. 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(2001). children and foreign languages iii. zagreb: university of zagreb. 295 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (2). 2017. 295-315 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.2.7 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl realities of and perspectives for languages in the globalised world: can language teaching survive the inadequacies of policies implemented today at leeds beckett university? saadia gamir leeds beckett university, uk s.gamir@leedsbeckett.ac.uk abstract various newspaper articles report that british ministers, university representatives, exam chiefs and business bodies agree that foreign languages skills in primary, secondary and tertiary uk education are in crisis. lower funding and policy changes have caused language skills deficiencies felt gravely in the business sectors. funding and support initiatives pledged by policy makers appear to be election-driven, barely outliving newly elected governments. others blame secondary school language curriculum for failing to inspire students to take up a language when they reach 13 or 14. others still argue that severe a-level examinations marking deters students from taking up a foreign language at 6th form level, producing fewer prospective language learners for university departments. community languages are also undervalued as small-entry languages could soon be axed from gcse and a-level examinations. in a world increasingly interconnected, it is essential the importance of language learning be reinstated in all our educational institutions. this paper reviews two decades of the conditions of language provision in the uk in general, with an emphasis on leeds beckett university. it also attempts to answer two questions emerging form the author’s personal teaching experience and reflections: what are the realities and challenges language teaching faces at leeds beckett university? and, how may we support language learners in fulfilling their saadia gamir 296 ambition to acquire the required skills to communicate effectively in this globalised world? keywords: language learning; policies; funding; challenges; possibilities; leeds beckett university 1. introduction uk linguistic skills base has been impoverished by successive government reforms, policies and funding cuts at a time when the relevance of languages in the ever more diverse and interconnected global world we live in is increasing, according to the british academy. the lack of relevant language skills is losing the country £48 billion a year in international sales, highlights j. foreman-peck from cardiff business school; national jobs are remaining unfilled because applicants, 22% of them according to the uk commission for employment and skills (ukces) 2013 statistics, have no relevant language skills. to redress such alarming shortage, the british chamber of commerce is calling for “the next generation of business owners’ to be ‘born global’ with language skills” (as cited in the manifesto for languages . . ., n.d.). language provision at leeds beckett university (lbu) is deeply entrenched into a global perspective. it services global linguists with an array of languages ranging from the traditional french, german, italian and spanish to a number of lesser taught languages. despite this thriving demand and wide-ranging offer, lbu has suffered, like the rest of uk educational institutions, from the deadly triangle of continuously changing government policies, exam board reforms and funding cuts that are squeezing language provision out of the uk. as a consequence, the number of languages offered by lbu has gone from 22 (traditionally offered until 2010), down to 19 (in 2011-13), then 15 in 2014 and finally 10 currently. this article offers a language tutor’s reflection on the challenges facing language provision in the uk in general and at lbu in particular. using a variety of sources, ranging from government documents, charitable organisations’ reports and newspaper articles to statements from university representatives, ministers and industry bodies, this article highlights the causes of language skills crisis as seen by representatives of the three uk education sectors. it also reflects on implementation policies adopted in schools at different key stages, as well as the impact of government cuts on university language provision. furthermore, this reflection focuses on how the crisis has been dealt with in the languages department of lbu since the higher education funding council for english’s (hefce) cuts in 2014. the paper ends with some proposals for improving realities of and perspectives for languages in the globalised world: can language teaching survive. . . 297 the reforms introduced recently, not only to face the present challenges but also to make the provision more durable and sustainable at our institution, if approved by the university leadership. with this reflection the author hopes to take part in the ongoing discussion reviewed in this paper of the challenges of language teaching by sharing personal views on reforms that, if beneficial to this university, could be emulated by other institutions in the country that are facing the same challenges. 2. causes of foreign language skills crisis in uk schools 2.1. primary education prior to the introduction of the new national curriculum which was to make primary language teaching at key stage 2 statutory starting from september 2014, teachers from hundreds of state and independent schools across the country responded to the 12th language trends 2013/14 survey (board & tinsley, 2014).1 they welcomed the new policy but expressed many concerns arising from their current teaching conditions and resources. these are discussed in the following two subsections. 2.1.1. need for further training of primary school teachers most responding primary schools felt they needed training to boost lack of language confidence and competence prevalent among their staff, especially for years 5 and 6. in fact, 24% of these primary schools reported that the highest level the members of staff who could be competent to teach a language is gcse, a level they believed would not meet the challenging task of teaching the three main requirements of the new national curriculum, that is, reading, writing and grammar. moreover, “33 per cent of responding schools (the same proportion as in the 2012 survey) [did] not have systems in place to monitor or assess pupil progress in the foreign language” (board & tinsley, 2014, p. 5). such a low degree or lack of confidence felt by schools with regards to language teaching at primary level suggests that although this new primary languages strategy may be well-intended because it reinstates the statutory position of language teaching in uk schools, its designers, it appears, have aspired to introduce it without providing a strong foundation for it to stand on. such a cart-before-the-bull approach seems too ambitious and unrealistic. adding to this, the reins that are needed to lead this cart have recently been cut as the financial support previously available through local authorities or secondary school partnerships is no 1 the language trends survey is an annual survey jointly conducted by the centre for british teachers (cfbt) and the british council to research the state of language teaching and learning in uk schools. saadia gamir 298 longer available to promote and implement this primary language strategy. 50% of the responding schools felt under pressure not only because of lack of financial and language resources but also because they felt they did not have sufficient curriculum time to integrate languages properly and therefore meet the new national curriculum requirements (board & tinsley, 2014). 2.1.2. lack of cohesion at the transition from key stage 2 to key stage 3 the survey reported a patchy picture of collaboration or progression between state secondary schools and their feeder primary schools as 46% of primary schools had “no contact . . . with language specialists in their local secondary schools,” (board & tinsley, 2014, p. 6) and only 18% of state secondary schools reported having contact with all their primary schools, “due to teachers’ workloads, financial constraints and geographical distance” (board & tinsley, 2014, p. 6) which itself cannot be overcome without the availability of adequate financial resources. moreover, when there is evidence of language experience being developed or started in the primary school (99% of primary schools responding to the 2014/15 13th language trend survey teach languages, with 38% of them having increased their teaching resources), there is no guarantee their burgeoning language skill will continue developing in the high school. such efforts are usually regarded of very low standard by the high schools and of an insufficient quality to build on, as less than one third of state secondary schools see the pupils coming to them as able to “continue with the same language they learned in primary school” (board & tinsley, 2014, p. 6). moreover, the latest report shows that take-up remains very low at gcse and post-16. with such apparent lack of systematic and consistent collaboration between schools resulting from many conspiring challenges, it appears very unlikely that the newly introduced statutory status of primary language learning will bring any positive changes to the state of language teaching and learning in uk schools in the near future. 2.2. secondary education 2.2.1. growing exclusion of pupils from language study at key stage 3 both the 2013-14 and 2014-15 cfbt-british council reports (board & tinsley, 2014, 2015) highlight the fact that although language learning is a statutory right for all students at key stage 3, a process of disapplication is practised whereby low-achieving pupils are excluded from language classes in order to free them for additional tuition in literacy or numeracy, or maths and science are prioritised to avoid performance measure pressures. the 2013-14 survey has also revealed that realities of and perspectives for languages in the globalised world: can language teaching survive. . . 299 a growing number of just above 7% of schools have no foreign language provision “to all pupils throughout key stage 3.” these language teaching practices which “are rarely seen in the independent sector” (board & tinsley, 2014, p. 6), render language learning an elitist activity when it is in reality statutory for all key stage 3 pupils. while schoolsnet (www.schoolsnet.com), the number one uk independent high schools guide for parents and teachers, counts 1,373 independent private high schools spread across 178 uk regions, the department for education statistics published in 2014 almost treble that number (3,268) for state-funded mainstream secondary schools in england. one can only imagine the staggering number of pupils who may be deprived of their statutory right to language learning because of the disapplication practice in schools, and the loss of potential linguistic skills the country desperately needs to develop but appears to be thwarting by the counterproductive practice of disapplication. 2.2.2. lack of resources for continuous professional development like their primary school colleagues, high school teachers’ access to continuous professional development (cpd) has been affected by lack of time and financial resources. the 2013/14 survey (board & tinsley, 2014) also points at the fact that the most common form of cpd training is the one provided by exam boards at a cost and during twilight sessions and/or during the school timetable. this means that schools wanting their staff to complete their cpd will have to find the financial resources to cover the cost for training them and the human resources to cover for them while they are completing their cpd, putting extra burden on the whole school’s cost effectiveness and productivity. to counter such constraints, teachers resort “to online webinars and social media to access professional development” (p. 6). however, these online webinars do not come without their technological disadvantages and complications, such as possible two-way collaborative features unavailability and software incompatibility, to name only two. all in all, such constraints, added to the ones mentioned above, are likely to dampen teachers’ enthusiasm for cdp, especially for language teaching, which according to the survey data, is at the bottom of the schools’ priorities, most probably due to their lack of confidence in the success of such language learning policy. according to the survey report, 83% of state schools and 86% of independent schools believe “that implementing the new national curriculum will be challenging,” because they “are not confident that the changes being introduced by the government will have a positive impact on the teaching of languages in their school” (p. 6). such fears have been confirmed by the 2014-15 survey, as only 17% of the 99% of the primary schools teaching languages have invested in extra teacher training and only 6% have recruited new staff to teach languages. saadia gamir 300 2.2.3. reform and language provision decline at key stage 4 one reform introduced by the coalition government in 2010 as a performance measure for both schools and pupils which secured for languages a firm place among the core academic subjects at key stage 4 was the english baccalaureate (ebacc);2 it was rapidly adopted as an alternative to the previous gcse examination. david willetts, minister of state for universities and science (2010-2014), echoed by bernadette holmes, speak to the future campaign director and former president of the association for language learning, notes that the ebacc had very encouraging gcse results for languages in 2013 despite initial resistance from school leaders. “today’s figures show 44% of the cohort has taken a modern language in 2013, a rise of 3% on 2012” (holmes, 2013). where the ebacc had been adopted between 2010 and 2013, an increase of 50% in students’ languages take-up at key stage 4 had been witnessed, and for 31% of these schools the ebacc had been used to encourage students with english as a second/foreign language to take a qualification in their mother tongues. however, this success did not seem to transfer to a-levels. the 2013/4 survey (board & tinsley, 2014) showed “no evidence yet of any widespread positive impact of the ebacc on take-up for languages post-16” (p. 6). this could most probably be because from 2013 the prospects of such continuation appear to have been weakened as only 16% (down from 22%) of state schools and 66% (down from 77%) of independent schools make the study of languages at key stage 4 compulsory. the survey report gives the figure of 30% of state schools which do not provide language for all key stage 4 pupils, even though they are required to make language entitlement available to the pupils who wish to take them. the authors of the language trends 2014/15 report give further underlining explanation for such a decline in language provision at this level saying that “the 2010–2015 coalition government also withdrew targeted funding for specialist colleges, which formerly played a leading role in developing language teaching nationally and in their local areas” (board & tinsley, 2015, p. 11). 2.2.4. deep crisis of language study post-16 and its impact on university language institutions many factors appear to have contributed to the alarming decline of language study at the a-level, the results of the british council survey 2013/14 (board & tinsley, 2014) reveal. 43% of independent schools, which have been traditionally providing universities with a steady stream of student linguists, reported a 2 ebacc subjects are english, mathematics, history or geography, the sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, computer science) and a language. realities of and perspectives for languages in the globalised world: can language teaching survive. . . 301 decline in this vital resource to university language faculties. this, the report suggests, appears to be a reaction to the perceived harshness and unpredictability of grading by exam boards, so students hoping to achieve highest grades to secure university places have to make strategic decisions not to jeopardise their chances. in addition, the state schools responding to the survey expressed their inability to support those few students who may wish to study a language at the a-level on the grounds of lack of financial viability. adding to this, the survey reveals another example of lack of gradual progression in linguistic complexity between gcse and advanced subsidiary (as) level, which the respondents believe adds to “the difficulty of predicting grades at a2” (board & tinsley, 2014, p. 7); as a result, these schools do not believe the reforms introduced to the a-level through the move to a terminal exam at a2 will improve language take-up at the a-level after gcse. another explanation for this decline in language take-up may be found in the fact that the majority of a-level students take three to four a-level subjects. some of them take four subjects in their as year, and very few take up to five as subjects, as most university courses only require three a-levels to gain a place. this admission policy may contribute to the limited choice students have when they select the a-level subjects that are seen to be more likely to secure their future employment or university entry. thus, if they have to choose between science, technology or maths (stem) subjects they wish to continue doing at post16 and university level, and the languages they so enjoyed learning and excelled at in high school, they do not seem to have a lot of scope for choice. my own son, with his high grade of a* (a star) in both french and spanish gcse is a case in point. he had to drop both languages to be able to take the only other four subjects he was allowed to take and in which he excelled, too: maths, physics, ict and sports science. how many similar students have been discouraged to carry with them their languages because of this university admission policy? lesley davies, director of quality and standards at the pearson exam board, sums up this situation in the following statement: “we mustn’t forget the environment we’re in – resources are tightening, and whereas before students might have done four or five a-levels, now those extra classes are being dropped” (ratcliffe, 2013). the a-level examination results released in the summer of 2013 alarmed the three main exam boards (aqa, ocr and pearson exam board) who expressed, through their executives, the need for an inquiry into the reasons behind the sharpest fall in a decade in traditional modern foreign languages take-up at a-level. with the exception of the 4.08% increase in spanish uptake, german entries fell by 11.13% compared to the previous year, while french fell by 9.9%. moreover, only 6.9% of those sitting the three languages achieved a* (ratcliffe, 2013), while 5% sat physics, 7.3% sat chemistry, 8.8% sat biology and 19.2% sat saadia gamir 302 mathematics (department for education & truss, 2013). clearly, the august 2013 general sense of crisis felt and expressed by ministers, university representatives and exam chiefs shows the desperate state of school language provision in the uk that has a direct impact on the survival of university language provision. faced with the alarming modern foreign languages (fml) a-level results, andrew hall, chief executive of aqa, called, in a statement quoted in a guardian issue of august 2013 (ratcliffe, 2013), for an evidence-based research into both the unpopularity of languages and low percentage of top grades among those sitting them. he said: when we saw that languages were down again, we . . . said we need to move this away from anecdote to evidence to find out what’s happening here . . . is there something in the design of the qualification? we don’t believe so [emphasis added], but researching and challenging ourselves is important. (ratcliffe, 2013) what is interesting in his statement, however, is the apparent lack of willingness to dig deeper into the investigation, for he seems to take a partial position about what causes such deficiencies by exempting one area from investigating: the design of the qualification. although he asked whether this might be due to the design of the qualification, he immediately disregarded such a possibility, but recognised none the less that challenging these disappointing results through research was important. if any research is to be scientifically conducted and any findings are to be collected and then challenged without bias, every aspect of language teaching is to be challenged, from the way the content is selected and taught to the students to the way they are assessed, not forgetting the manner in which the conception of the qualification has been rationalised. there is a sense of apportioning blame in the exam body chief executive’s statement, but away from this body, which seems to ignore the observation, highlighted by the british council 2013-4 report, that the harsh marking of a-level language exams is making the language option a daunting prospect for potential a-level language candidates. on a slightly more optimistic note and in the same august issue of the guardian (ratcliffe, 2013), professor michael kelly, head of languages at southampton university and director of the routes into languages programme, attributed the decline of traditional mfl a-level entries “to a growing interest in a broader range of subjects including spanish, russian and arabic”. the fact that maybe too many languages are offered and competing for the same candidates may explain the decreasing numbers of candidates for the traditional languages, but can the availability and variety of the lesser taught languages be blamed for this decline? the latter may be attributed to the way students are encouraged to take them. at the moment, a language is pre-selected for the key stage 3 realities of and perspectives for languages in the globalised world: can language teaching survive. . . 303 entrants by the schools (including those with a language college status) they go to, and only in key stage 4 can these students choose a second language if it is provided. by the time they reach post-16, even if they had been judged very successful linguists, other factors (mentioned above) contribute to their abandoning languages at a-level. in an ideal world, uk schools’ human resources and financial capabilities need to be supported consistently and continuously, as is the practice in continental europe, in order to introduce students from the primary level to more than one language. the new national curriculum aspires to achieve this, but there is no clear strategy indicating that language learning should be a statutory requirement throughout a uk child’s school life from the primary through to high school and a-level, nor does it provide a clear budget or strategy of continuation between stages that would lead to a smooth progression to university. in his january 2015 blog discussing the closing of language departments and the decline of language skills, dominic cummings, adviser to former education secretary michael gove, quoted the results of research conducted for the guardian with a foi (freedom of information act) request, saying: the number of universities offering degrees in the worst affected subject, german, has halved over the past 15 years. there are 40% fewer institutions where it is possible to study french on its own or with another language, while italian is down 23% and spanish is down 22%. (cummings, 2015) this appears, in a big part, to be the result of the dwindling number of students taking gcses mainly, in the 3 european languages by 39% over 12 years “(in spite of the slight increase in 2013 and 2014)” (cummings, 2015). gcse language results (2013) a-level school leavers with languages (2003-2012) a-level & university stem subject entries (1996-2012) a-level candidates for languages (1996-2012) french 15.5% 10% drop by 26% over a decade physics 3.1% french 45% 22% german 9.4% 11% drop by 28% maths & further maths 6.8% german spanish 25.8% 33% (only rise over the decade) chemistry 5.1% spanish total 50.7% 54% 15% 67% figure 1 drop in the number of a-level language candidates (1996-2012) figure 1 shows how the decline in language take-up at a-level has affected language sustainability at university level in less than two decades. so, while over the past decade a-level and university stem subject entries witnessed a 15% increase, the same decade witnessed an average 45% drop in a-level leavers saadia gamir 304 with french and german. and despite the 33% increase in spanish speaking alevel leavers in the same period, and the exceptional 2013 50.7% rise in gcse entries for the three combined languages, there has been a dramatic drop of 67% in the number of a-level candidates for the three languages, or an alarming 90% drop accumulated over 16 years, if we add the 23% drop in italian. the 90% drop mentioned above represents the 90% loss of potential language candidates for university faculties. this state of affairs is only going to worsen with the decrease of opportunities for young people to continue taking languages at gcse and alevel, as highlighted by jocelyn wyburd (2015), chair of ucml in her letter to the minister of state schools, nick gibb mp in 2015. such further decrease may be worsened (see board & tinsley, 2015) by the recent language provision policies. 2.2.5. government policies and assessment implications the department for education (2014) conducted a consultation in july 2014, which led in the following year to a progressive introduction of the new government reforms (accredited by the exams regulator, ofqual) of gcse and a-level specifications. these were to become effective for french, german and spanish from 2016 and for other lesser-taught languages from 2017. as a consequence, the three uk exam boards announced their decisions not to include a broad range of small-entry languages in the new reformed gcse and a-level qualifications. this decision could seriously jeopardise uk’s “future trade, diplomatic and cultural relationships with many future economic success stories” (de bois, 2015). the future of these “small-entry,” or lesser-taught languages, many of which are “community languages,” looks as follows: · aqa has decided to discontinue its a-level provision of bengali, modern hebrew, punjabi and polish, and is considering discontinuation of other small-entry languages at gcse. · ocr will discontinue it’s a-level provision of dutch, gujarati, persian, portuguese and turkish, and gcse dutch, gujarati, persian, portuguese and turkish. · edexcel will not redevelop its arabic, modern greek, japanese and urdu programmes, and, like aqa, it is reconsidering its provision of other small-entry languages. according to aqa officials, the decision is due to two reasons. the new government changes to the exam system and qualifications require that not only the reading and writing, but also speaking and listening skills must be assessed. d. bassett (2015), director of public policy at aqa claimed in april 2015 that “it will become increasingly difficult to recruit sufficient experienced senior examiners with realities of and perspectives for languages in the globalised world: can language teaching survive. . . 305 assessment expertise to set and mark” these skills. however, this statement appears to contradict and challenge the statement made a month earlier by mp fiona mctaggart (2015): “i have spoken to a senior examiner in polish and she assures me there is no difficulty in finding suitably qualified examiners in that subject, yet aqa is determined to abandon it.” one may add that past and current students who entered these qualifications have followed language programmes developed by language experts who taught and assessed all the four language skills. aqa officials say that the number of candidates for qualifications in these languages is very low, citing as an example the number of 179 students who entered for a-level punjabi in 2014. it is again not clear how aqa can justify using the small number of entries for these languages as a valid argument when these languages represent minority ethnic groups, and how it can ignore the official records that in 2014 the number of entries exceeded 4,000 in a-level gujarati, greek and bengali, a 50% increase since 2004, while the same official records for the same year highlighted a drop of a third in french and german entries. similarly, ocr officials have made their decision on the grounds that only 1,700 gcse and 600 a-level students entered for turkish in 2014, ignoring the fact that the number of a to e grades achieved in this language was higher than those achieved in german and spanish in the same year. it is very interesting to see that the financial grounds seem to weigh heavily on the decisions of these awarding bodies, all non-profit organisations, and contradict their own officials’ claims: “these are not purely economic decisions . . . however, as an education charity, we have to look where best we can do educational good and . . . use our limited resources” (bassett, 2015). one wonders, if this is not directly for financial reasons, why these awarding bodies appear reluctant to share the financial information that is driving their decision with the government, as nick de bois (2015), the minister of state at the department of education points out. 2.3. uk universities according to the guardian issue of 17 august 2013 (boffey, 2013), the number of universities offering modern language degrees dropped dramatically from 105 in 2000 to 62 at the beginning of the 2013 academic year. this meant the likelihood of closures of 40% of university language departments, with further 20 departments forecast to close within the next decade. to make matters worse, the pace of attrition in language provision was feared to increase, according to mike kelly.3 3 mike kelly, professor of french at southampton university, former adviser on the department for education’s steering group on languages, now head of the government-funded routes into languages programme. saadia gamir 306 with reference to another aspect of this language crisis, ministers voiced their concerns about the danger of focusing on encouraging students to choose science, technology, engineering and maths (stem) subjects over humanities subjects. in this respect, david willetts4 (2013) said: “we need to keep a close eye on numbers studying modern languages in particular – one area in which ucas applications were down.” it would be interesting today to find out if there is anymore any justification for his optimistic and hopeful statement that the increase in language learning at gcse noticed then would “filter through to universities”, and whether hefce is still, as he claimed, “working with institutions on safeguarding modern language provision across the country.” this i believe is less likely, particularly now that a considerable number of small entry languages representing key economic players in the global market have been officially earmarked for withdrawal at a-level in the next couple of years. david willetts’ claim hides the fact that hefce’s teaching grant has witnessed nearly a triple drop going from £4.9 billion in 2010-11 to £1.6 billion announced in hecfe grant letters for the period of 2015-2016, according to a statement published by julian gravatt5 (2014) on wonkhe6 blog page. it is obvious that these successive government funding cuts have affected teaching budgets of almost all uk universities since 2011, when a mammoth £940-million cut affected the teaching budget for that year only. since then, universities’ teaching areas in general and language teaching departments in particular have been forced to bear the biggest brunt of the cuts by adopting various strategies ranging from more positive initiatives, such as creating local commercial activities, building international business links and hosting conferences, to more aggressive ones like increasing students’ fees up to the maximum £9,000 allowed by government from 2012 and seeking and sometimes even forcing redundancies by “cutting back on less successful courses” (vasagar & carrell, 2011). only those few universities known for their established world-leading research programmes seem to have been only minimally affected by lower government cuts in research funds, according to sir alan langlands7 (vasagar & carrell, 2011). what is worrying is the fact that a reflection by gareth thomas, labour’s higher education spokesman, (quoted in vasagar & carrell, 2011) still resonates in 2015: “at a time when all our major rivals are investing heavily in universities to 4 david willetts, minister of state for universities and science (2010-2014). 5 julian gravatt is assistant chief executive at the association of colleges (aoc). he works in funding, finance, pensions and regulation issues on behalf of fe and sixth form colleges in england. 6 wonkhe was founded in 2011 by higher education professionals and others engaged in higher education policy and politics. according to their website, they are “not aligned to any particular policies, politics or interests” (http://www.wonkhe.com/about-us/) 7 sir alan langlands was hefce chief executive from april 2009 to october 2013, then leeds university vicechancellor from 1 october 2013. realities of and perspectives for languages in the globalised world: can language teaching survive. . . 307 drive economic growth, cutting by so much the engine room of innovation in our economy seems even more illogical.” 3. the case of leeds beckett university in march 2013 the then leeds metropolitan university started consulting its parttime and community language programme staff about plans to reduce its language provision by terminating certain lesser-taught languages such as finnish, farsi, turkish and hungarian that had become less cost effective because of their dwindling numbers of recruits. this move was made in response to a funding shortage from the hefce, vital resources which for years had enabled the university to charge reduced course costs to language students. this funding was first reduced by half in 2013 and then stopped entirely in 2014. the german undergraduate course was one of the early victims of such cuts and was followed by similar disappearance of the spanish and french undergraduate courses in the next two years. the university faced this funding crisis with determination, and as a commitment to maintaining the european and lesser taught part-time language provision, the languages for all (l4all) programme was launched in 2013 allowing over 700 of our full-time students to join a free one-year beginner class in one of 19 languages of their choice (see table 1), widening as a result participation in the language learning experience among all users of the university. table 1 data from the languages 4 all programme 2012-2013 report (lbu) languages in l4all programme l4all places on the part-time language programme arabic farsi chinese finnish french hungarian german norwegian italian polish japanese swedish portuguese turkish russian urdu spanish semester 1 & semester 2 = 630 students semester 1 = 260 students, semester 2 = 80 students total number of l4all students in both semesters: 710 two years on, 1003 l4all spaces were offered to both students (undergraduate ad postgraduate) and staff of lbu through this thriving language learning initiative, confirming the words of professor paul smith (deputy vice-chancellor for strategic development at the then leeds metropolitan university): “we are . . . confident that our language provision will continue to be sustainable and successful in the future” (leeds metropolitan university plans . . ., 2013). saadia gamir 308 the success of the languages 4all initiative is not without its challenges and shortcomings, however, and its sustainability can only be guaranteed by the continuing demand for our language courses. unfortunately, we have been facing what appears to be an insurmountable challenge: by christmas, the early euphoria of the september enrolment tends to be followed by the disengagement of many students. as a consequence, numbers shrink leading on many occasions to class closures sometimes within the first 3 weeks of the autumn term. there seems to be a combination of factors leading to this disengagement phenomenon. a few i have identified below, but there may be more to be teased out by further investigation: · cost: the l4all beginner classes are offered for free. therefore, students appear not to give their language classes the same priority they would grant their main subjects as quitting the language class does not incur any financial loss, nor does it affect their achievement rate in their main subjects. although this may be seen as legitimate prioritising, it reflects the general attitude towards languages, for even though students recognise that acquiring or consolidating their language skills makes them more attractive candidates especially for jobs abroad, they find missing their language class easy to do to focus on their other learning or work commitments. their attitude may be also encouraged by the fact that the language classes are scheduled outside their main study timetables. · time: these classes start in the evening (from 6:00 pm onwards), which may be convenient for evening class part-time language students, but it is not always practical for most l4all students, who have spent all day at university attending their graduate classes in their main subjects, preparing and sitting for their main exams, meeting essay submissions deadlines or completing work placements. moreover, as full-time undergraduates or post-graduates, they have a different semester and holiday timetable from the one for their language classes, so on many occasions while they are on holiday from their main courses, their language class is still running; consequently, they miss many weeks, especially in winter, either intentionally or inadvertently. · access to course and learning materials: the l4all students, the majority of whom are undergraduates, are issued a student id number that attaches them to their language class and the materials on the languages vle (mybeckett), which is different from their main course id number. this causes them a lot of confusion, and very often they have forgotten to ask the student hub8 to give them the appropriate password to access their language learning materials online. 8 the student hub are leeds beckett university’s student help services. realities of and perspectives for languages in the globalised world: can language teaching survive. . . 309 · assessment burden: until the 2014/2015 academic year language students had to sit for exams in the four language skills. this requirement has now been waived allowing those students who were reluctant to prepare and sit for exam to complete their course without any pressure or anxiety from fear of failing assessments. however, some students still enrol on the award-bearing route, but because of study or work commitment pressures, they have occasionally not completed their language assessment. this is another illustration of the priority perception they have about their language course. it is perceived as an offer of an elective subject, particularly by the undergraduate and post-graduate students. under the present financial constraints, the success of a language course seems to be equated not so much with the enthusiasm and motivation of those who have enrolled in it but with the number of students attending it. the latest languages for work (l4w) initiative was introduced in french, spanish, arabic and chinese at the beginning of the 2014 academic year as a response to a real need from students. however, it seems to have had one main purpose: that of boosting language student numbers: it lasted only two weeks when it appeared that the number of students who wanted to learn a language for work purposes did not reach the required number of over 15 per language group. the decision was then made to merge all beginner groups, including the l4w students who were encouraged to join the general language classes, since both groups were at beginner level. except for a tiny minority, most of those l4w students stayed another two weeks after this forced reconversion before quitting the course. there was a real miscalculation here as such a merger did not rectify the number problem but instead made it worse. attrition does not affect the l4all and the ephemeral l4w programme only. it permeates all levels of the part-time language courses in the same manner, making it difficult to sustain large groups at the advanced levels where different levels are forced to coexist in the same groups, a measure taken so these levels may survive closure. this arrangement is not without its own challenges for both students and tutors, for the former have to cope with the difference in level within their group, and the latter have the arduous task of differentiating work for their mixed ability groups. unfortunately, but understandably, while coexistence is tolerated or endured generally, there are times when it is rejected by the students who prefer or feel forced to quit. when they do quit, they claim back their registration fees, putting more financial burden on the institution. these challenges threaten the sustainability of our language provision because at the moment we have a counterproductive one-size jacket to fit all shapes and forms of our students’ needs, and the reforms that we have introduced do not seem to have been implemented adequately. so, what perspectives can we explore saadia gamir 310 to make sure our language provision not only survives the financial challenges and language learning policies reviewed above but achieves a guaranteed sustainability? before answering this question, it is worth stressing here that sustainability is measured by the number of recruits, and not their motivation to enrol. 4. suggestions for the survival of language provision at leeds beckett university after the loss of hefce’s language funds, the sustainability of language programmes with the limited resources of the university has become more vital than ever before. achieving the survival of language provision at lbu is not likely to happen, however, if the problem of attrition is not resolved. this requires a complete overhaul of the part-time language programme timetable, so the question arises: what shape might this take? at present, the academic year lasts 26 weeks, during which the 4 language skills are taught (and assessed for those students who have enrolled in the award-bearing route). however, not all beginner or elementary recruits stay on the course after christmas. many factors contribute to this disengagement. first, undergraduates usually find it very difficult to commit to a 26-week long course, especially when they have to interrupt their attendance to complete work placements, undergraduate assignments, or to take up evening parttime jobs to fund their courses. usually, this happens after christmas. second, not all beginners need to start from the same learning point, and the way they tend to be grouped at the start contributes to the problem of attrition as those who are more able feel held back by the real beginners or slow learners and quit because they do not feel challenged and stimulated enough. sometimes, it is the others who quit because they feel threatened by the more able ones. third, while the majority of the beginners need to focus for a whole term on learning and consolidating their knowledge of the language basics, such as the script and the sound system, especially of the non-european languages, namely arabic, chinese, farsi, greek, japanese, russian, and turkish, others only want to develop their speaking skills in the language as they are already capable of reading and writing the script. in the same way that the non-award bearing route has been introduced and embraced by some of the students, a more sympathetic learner grouping should be implemented. this may mean smaller group sizes: they are more likely to guarantee the survival of the level than the inflated mixed-ability groups. this also could reduce the likelihood of mixed-ability groups and therefore the burden of differentiation at the higher levels, if the discrepancy in levels has been addressed efficiently at the beginner and elementary levels. another thing that may help eradicate this phenomenon is allowing the students to re-enrol at the same level, realities of and perspectives for languages in the globalised world: can language teaching survive. . . 311 even if they have completed it successfully if they do not feel confident enough to progress onto the next level. in addition to the 26 weeks, another five or six weeks could be added in the summer to answer the student demand for extra speaking classes, at all levels. this opportunity has been given to european languages but needs to be extended to other lesser-taught languages. finally, our institution could reduce its losses in the event of students withdrawing from the course and still apply a fair treatment to them by refunding their money only if they withdraw in the third week of enrolment. some international institutions apply a non-refund policy, which does not seem to affect the number of recruits and in fact eliminates possibilities of withdrawal, as suggested by one participant9 at the second languages in the globalised world conference, organised by leeds beckett university. table 3 shows what the timetabling of the part-time language course would look like if the suggested changes are implemented, and provided it coincides with the undergraduate timetable. table 3 partially reformed timetable and course structure for the part-time language programme at lbu enrolment completed and paid per term term 1 (13 weeks) term 2 (13 weeks) summer conversation weeks (5-6 weeks) beginner (a1) reading & writing, the script & the sound system listening & speaking – free to l4all students only – fees refundable if withdrawal after 1st or 2nd week only developing pronunciation & oral comprehension skills elementary (a2) reading & writing listening & speaking – free to l4all students only – fees refundable if withdrawal after 1st or 2nd week only developing communication skills levels from intermediate to proficiency 26 weeks’ course unchanged consolidating communication skills the present author recognises that some empirical research to validate the above proposals is needed. for this to happen, recommendations such as the restructuring of the academic year from 26 weeks to three 10-week block sections, for instance, need an opportunity for trial to assess their effectiveness and feasibility before final implementation. at the moment, they only reflect the author’s own reflections based on her individual teaching experience within the 9 professor ivo vasiljev, prague linguistic circle, czech republic (27 may 2015). saadia gamir 312 languages department of lbu. this requires a lot of courage from management as it means a departure of our institution from a very familiar, tried and tested academic year structure to an innovative one that nonetheless would better reflect the needs of our language students and their availability for learning. 5. conclusion this article has discussed the thorny issue of language skills crisis in the uk’s various education sectors and how such challenges play out in the context of lbu. what seems to emerge from the discussion is how unclear the position of various governmental organisations is about the importance of languages in the uk. on the one hand, through various declarations and policies government officials highlight the crucial role languages play in the promotion of england’s economy globally, and, on the other hand, policies that have been implemented since the 1990 under the auspices of successive governments have been sending conflicting messages that have thwarted the implementation of an efficient, strong and durable language strategy on the ground. rather than recognising it as an indispensable part of national and human interaction that is, like stem subjects, essential for successful global transaction, the integration of languages in the educational system has been unsystematic and heavily dependent on student numbers and how much money language entries can potentially generate. because of the various reasons mentioned above, language teaching has not been able to compete on an equal footing with other subjects, consolidating further the view that languages may not be essential to producing well-rounded graduates ready to compete in the global job market. as a consequence, whenever cost effectiveness has been the sole yardstick to measure the success and the survival of language provision, limited interest in languages has been ignored, and their provision swiftly terminated because it was judged uneconomical. it is a fact, not to be ignored, that language, which is part of the humanities subjects, is an essential tool in honing skills that are essential in science. we need it to form a logical argument and defend it when put under scrutiny, and we cannot solve problems or think and communicate clearly and effectively without it with the rest of humanity, which happens to use a variety of “modern” and “community languages,” all essential for our social, academic and professional functions, be they national or global. it is high time a strong message was sent to everyone concerned that if britain wants to create a sound and cohesive social structure that has an effective presence on the world scientific, economic and geopolitical arenas, languages must be every child’s and every young person’s prerogative, not simply the preserve of the 7% in private education and the fortunate affluent élite. realities of and perspectives for languages in the globalised world: can language teaching survive. . . 313 the repercussions of the recent reforms discussed above are far-reaching as they affect all aspects of uk education, which include supplementary schools run by local communities, state and independent schools as well as adult and further education. the disappearance of small-entry languages in the next two years will have hugely damaging implications not only for individuals wishing to learn languages to enhance their prospects in life, but also for schools wishing to develop these languages as well as community users of these languages, who may become marginalised at a time when the government is striving to improve intercultural communication both within and outside the country. more importantly, young people will not be able to compete in the global market because of lack of language skills. as a consequence, the country will not be able to exercise effectively its trading role across the world, nor will it have a strong international reputation that would give it a global influence. bernadette holmes (2015), campaign director of speak to the future, summarises the urgency to maintain languages in these poignant terms: these decisions make no sense. languages matter more than ever to community development, to social mobility and to our economy. our rich and diverse language capital makes the uk the most attractive place for inward investment. we need to recognise and value the multilingual capabilities of so many of our young people and build our future upon them. at a time when business is increasingly hyper connected across the globe, it is the very languages which face the axe that would be significant assets to our success and to the prosperity of those who speak them. to say nothing of the intrinsic linguistic and cultural value of these languages which will no longer be taught and assessed in our schools. what uk language teaching and learning needs is stability and continuity, for which there seemed to be a glimpse of hope as in may 201510 the conservatives joined the labour party in a commitment to save the gcse and a-level exams in languages from withdrawal. was this a real turning point for languages after the strong mobilisation and campaign led by speak to the future and the all-party parliamentary group on modern languages which launched its manifesto for languages (n.d.) in 2014 or a mere after-effect of the euphoria of the elections? the faith in languages in the uk may not survive yet another empty pledge. 10 see recent updates on the speak to the future campaign (http://www.speaktothefuture.org). saadia gamir 314 references bassett, d. (2015, april 2). response of dale bassett of aqa education, director of public policy, to ucml letter: withdrawal of gcse and a level exams in smallentry languages. retrieved from the website of the university council for modern languages: http://www.ucml.ac.uk/sites/default/files/response%2 0from%20aqa%20re%20withdrawal%20of%20language%20qualifications.pdf board, k., & tinsley, t. (2014). language trends 2013/14: the state of language learning in primary and secondary schools in england. cfbt & british council. retrieved from http://cdn.cfbt.com/~/media/cfbtcorporate/files/research/ 2015/r-language-trends-summary-2015.pdf board, k., & tinsley, t. (2015). language trends 2014/15: the state of language learning in primary and secondary schools in england. cfbt & british council. retrieved from http://www.ucml.ac.uk/sites/default/files/cfbt%201_ language%20trends_v5.pdf boffey, d. (2013, august 17). language teaching crisis as 40% of university departments face closure. the guardian. retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/ education/2013/aug/17/language-teaching-crisis-universities-closure de bois, n. (2015, march). lesser taught languages. in the house of commons daily hansard debate. retrieved from the website of the uk parliament. retrieved from http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmhansrd/cm1 50324/debtext/150324-0004.htm department for education. (2014, september 24). reformed gcse and a level subject content consultation [government consultation issue]. retrieved from the website of the uk government: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/ uploads/attachment_data/file/358590/gcse_and_a_level_consultation_docu ment_final.pdf department for education, & truss, e. (2013, august 15). elizabeth truss comments on the rise in the number of students taking a levels in subjects like maths and the sciences [press release]. retrieved from the website of uk government: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/a-level-results-show -more-doing-maths-and-sciences-than-ever-before cummings, d. (2015, january 27). standards in english schools. part i: the introduction of the national curriculum and gcses [blog message]. retrieved from dominic cummings’s blog: https://dominiccummings.wordpress.com/2015/01/ gravatt, j. (2014). understanding the unthinkable post-2015 cuts. retrieved from the whonke website: http://www.wonkhe.com/blogs/understanding-the -unthinkable-post-2015-cuts/ holmes, b. (2013). ebacc to the future? languages results rise at gcse but is the crisis really over? retrieved from the speak to the future campaign for realities of and perspectives for languages in the globalised world: can language teaching survive. . . 315 languages website: http://www.speaktothefuture.org/ebacc-to-the-future -languages-results-rise-at-gcse-but-is-the-crisis-really-over/ holmes, b. (2015). withdrawal of gcse and a level exams in small-entry languages – call to action. retrieved from the speak to the future campaign for languages website: http://www.speaktothefuture.org/withdrawal-of -gcse-and-a-level-exams-in-small-entry-languages/ leeds metropolitan university plans to cut foreign languages. (2013, may 18). the yorkshire evening post. retrieved from http://www.yorkshireeveningpost .co.uk/news/education/leeds-metropolitan-university-plans-to-cut-foreign -languages-1-5687192 manifesto for languages from the all-party parliamentary group on modern languages. (n.d.). retrieved from https://uk2.live.solas.britishcouncil.net/sites/ britishcouncil.uk2/files/manifesto_for_languages.pdf mctaggart, f. (2015). withdrawal of gcse and a level exams in small-entry languages – call to action. retrieved from the speak to the future campaign for languages website: http://www.speaktothefuture.org/withdrawal-of -gcse-and-a-level-exams-in-small-entry-languages/ ratcliffe, r. (2013, august 15). drop in number of a-level students studying foreign languages. the guardian. retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/ education/2013/aug/15/a-level-results-foreign-languages vasagar, j., & carrell, s. (2011, march 17). england’s newer universities face biggest cuts as teaching budgets slashed. the guardian. retrieved from https://www .theguardian.com/education/2011/mar/17/newer-universities-cuts-teac hing-budgets willetts, d. (2013, august 18). in the race for scientific prowess we mustn’t leave the arts behind. the guardian. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2013/aug/18/willetts-universities-arts-and-humanties-subjects wyburd, j. (2015, june 26). ucml open letter to nick gibb. retrieved from the website of the university council for modern languages: http://www.ucml.ac.uk/news/272 505 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (4). 505-525 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl working with corpora in the translation classroom ralph krüger cologne university of applied sciences, germany university of salford, uk ralph.krueger@fh-koeln.de abstract this article sets out to illustrate possible applications of electronic corpora in the translation classroom. starting with a survey of corpus use within corpus-based translation studies, the didactic value of corpora in the translation classroom and their epistemic value in translation teaching and practice will be elaborated. a typology of translation practice-oriented corpora will be presented, and the use of corpora in translation will be positioned within two general models of translation competence. special consideration will then be given to the design and application of so-called do-it-yourself (diy) corpora, which are compiled ad hoc with the aim of completing a specific translation task. in this context, possible sources for retrieving corpus texts will be presented and evaluated and it will be argued that, owing to time and availability constraints in real-life translation, the internet should be used as a major source of corpus data. after a brief discussion of possible internet research techniques for targeted and quality-focused corpus compilation, the possible use of the internet itself as a macro-corpus will be elaborated. the article concludes with a brief presentation of corpus use in translation teaching in the ma in specialised translation programme offered at cologne university of applied sciences, germany. keywords: corpora, translation classroom, do-it-yourself (diy) corpora, web as macro-corpus ralph krüger 506 the origins of corpus use in translation: corpus-based translation studies the start of the systematic use of corpora in translation theory can be dated back to the early 1990s. it was especially propagated by mona baker (e.g., 1993, 1995) who, working at that time with john sinclair at birmingham university in the context of applied linguistics (beeby, rodríguez inés, & sánchez-gijón, 2009, p. 1), laid the groundwork for a research paradigm termed “corpus-based translation studies.“ within this field of research, a corpus is generally understood as “a collection of texts held in machine-readable form and capable of being analysed automatically or semi-automatically in a variety of ways” (baker, 1995, p. 225). in holmes’ (1972) map of translation studies as visualised by toury (1995; see figure 1), corpus-based translation studies is subsumed under the descriptive branch of “pure” translation studies and is therefore closely linked to toury’s research paradigm of descriptive translation studies (laviosa, 2002, p. 5). figure 1 the holmes-toury map of translation studies (toury, 1995, p. 10) the primary aim of this new field of research was thus to describe characteristics of the translation product and the translation process or the function of a translation in its socio-cultural context and to feed this data to the theoretical branch of “pure” translation studies for testing explanatory hypotheses. the relation between the theoretical, the descriptive and the applied branch is, of course, a dialectical one (see laviosa, 2002, p. 10). one of the main advantages of corpus-based translation studies is that it allows for an extension of the traditional and widely practiced comparison between source texts (st) and target texts (tt). since corpus-based studies usually involve a rigorous methodology with a set of fine-grained design criteria (see e.g., kreinkühle, 2003), they allow for a better contextualisation and control of the texts to working with corpora in the translation classroom 507 be investigated and provide a higher representativeness, generalisability and replicability of the findings. however, the dominant research focus of corpus-based translation studies is not on large-scale, methodologically sound st-tt comparisons, but rather on the investigation of “the nature of translated text as a mediated communicative event” (baker, 1993, p. 243). speaking of the nature of translated text betrays the assumption that translation is somehow “different” from autonomous text production, that it is a “third code,” which exhibits “its own standards and structural presuppositions and entailments” (frawley, 1984, p. 169). corpus-based translation studies thus set out to uncover the distinctive features of this third code, not by comparing translations to their source texts, but rather to autonomous texts in the target language. the focus here lies on the identification and investigation of so-called “universals of translation,” which were defined as “linguistic features which typically occur in translated texts and are thought to be the almost inevitable by-products of the process of mediating between two languages” (laviosa, 2002, p. 43). two prominent examples of potential universals of translation would be explicitation and normalization (olohan, 2004, p. 37), that is, translations are hypothesised to be informationally more explicit and stylistically more conventional than nontranslated texts. corpus typology in corpus-based translation studies the canonical corpus typology of corpus-based translation studies was developed by laviosa (2002, p. 34 ff.) and, due to its complexity, cannot be presented here in full. however, two distinct corpus types can be identified that have traditionally dominated corpus-based translation research along the two research dimensions described above (i.e., st-tt comparisons and comparisons between translations and nontranslated texts in the target language). a translation corpus (also called parallel corpus) consists of one or more texts in the source language and their translation(s) into the target language (baker, 1995, p. 230). the designation parallel corpus is widely established in corpus-based translation studies, but it has sometimes been criticised for its possible terminological confusion (e.g., johansson, 1998; krein-kühle, 2003). as krein-kühle (2003, p. 45) points out, the adjective parallel is traditionally used in the term parallel texts, which refers to original target language texts with a subject matter and communicative function comparable to that of a specific text to be translated (göpferich, 1998, p. 184). since the concept of parallel texts will have a prominent role in the discussion of corpora in translation teaching, the designation translation corpus will be used in this paper. translation corpora basically represent an extension of the long-practised st-tt comparison. as ralph krüger 508 mentioned above, they are usually associated with a more rigorous methodology and provide a better empirical basis than isolated case studies. a comparable corpus, on the other hand, may consist of translations and comparable nontranslated texts in the same language, or it may consist of original (as opposed to translated) texts in one or more languages (olohan, 2004, p. 35). the first type of a comparable corpus features prominently in translation research, since comparing translations with nontranslated texts in the same language specifically allows for the investigation of translational universals that allegedly constitute the distinctive features of translation. in line with the primary aim of corpus-based translation studies, it is this corpus type which has been investigated most extensively and which has generated the most widely recognised research results (e.g., olohan & baker, 2000). the second type is probably more relevant to translation teaching, since students faced with a translation task are normally not interested in distinctive features of translated language. in fact, given that in real life it is generally required that a translation should read like a text originally produced in the target language, these features are indeed what students are normally encouraged to avoid in their translations. instead, students could use a comparable corpus of original target-language texts to study the idiomatic usage of terms and their collocates or the natural target-language style of specific text types or genres (bowker & pearson, 2002, p. 203 ff.) and try to reflect this usage or style in their translations. it is often claimed that studies of translation corpora prioritise the translation process, since a st-tt comparison allows, at least to some extent, the retracing of the translational decision-making process, while studies of comparable corpora focus on the translation product (stewart, 2000, p. 210). what can certainly be observed is that the epistemic aims associated with corpora in translation studies are slightly different from those in translation teaching. therefore, moving from the general role and position of corpora in translation studies, some specific corpus types and their potential applicability in translation teaching will be presented in the following paragraphs. corpora in translation teaching the systematic use of corpora in translation teaching1 started more recently than the theoretical reflection on and the investigation of corpora in translation 1 in the following discussion, it is generally assumed that the students translate out of a foreign language into their native language, since this is what will usually be required of them in their later professional career. where corpora can be exploited for a translation into a foreign language, this will be specifically mentioned in the text. working with corpora in the translation classroom 509 studies. trying to establish a link between the theoretical work of corpus-based translation studies and the use of corpora as learning aids in the translation classroom, bernardini, stewart and zanettin (2003, p. 1) term this latter enterprise “applied corpus-based translation studies.” with reference to the holmes-toury map of translation studies, corpora can therefore be used as resources to be employed in translator training and they can be used as translation aids in their own right, having direct relevance to translation practice. one of the main advantages of translation teaching with corpora over traditional translation teaching is generally considered to be the fact that the presence of corpora reduces the role of the teacher’s intuition in the translation classroom and at the same time assigns more importance to the students and their documentation skills (rodríguez inés, 2009, p. 131). by providing alternative sources of authority as well as a set of authentic data, corpora can also shift the role of the teacher from that of the principal information provider to that of an information facilitator (rodríguez inés, 2009, p. 130, p. 133), who develops the procedural knowledge of the students to enable them to gain declarative knowledge in a more autonomous way. approaches to the use of corpora in translation teaching there are two complementary approaches to the use of corpora in the translation classroom: corpus use for learning to translate and learning corpus use to translate (beeby et al., 2009, p. 1). in the first approach, the compilation and control of the corpus material falls within the responsibility of the translation teacher, who then presents the students with preselected data (which is usually tailored to a specific translation task) and guides the students’ analysis of this data. from the students’ perspective, this microscopic approach focuses on the immediate relevance of the corpus as a “performance-enhancing tool” (varantola, 2003, p. 59), which can be queried in order to solve specific translation problems. the second approach represents a more macroscopic perspective in that students themselves have to compile the corpora before they can apply them to solve any translation problems. this approach does not primarily focus on the immediate corpus-use related aspects but instead on the various translation-related issues of corpus compilation, for example, corpus design, search strategies, assessment of potential corpus sources, assessment of the adequacy and relevancy of corpus texts, general software literacy, and so on (cf. varantola, 2003, p. 69). it should be obvious that these two approaches are highly complementary and should ideally be combined in the translation classroom to provide students with a complete set of corpus skills. ralph krüger 510 corpus typology in translation teaching in translation didactics, there is a general distinction between three major corpus types with different epistemic values (see bernardini et al., 2003, p. 6): monolingual corpora, comparable bilingual corpora and bilingual translation corpora. this typology overlaps to a considerable extent with the typology established in corpus-based translation studies, but there are still several differences. monolingual corpora, usually containing texts originally produced in the target language, can, for example, provide students with information about the idiomatic use of terms and their collocates, syntactic constructions or genre and domain conventions in the target-language environment. if the corpora are designed as specialised corpora containing texts of a specific subject matter such as engineering or economics, they can also provide students with explanatory contexts for the various concepts of the specialised field (bowker & pearson, 2002, p. 207-208). in this context, sánchez-gijón (2009, p. 120) claims that factual information is generally obtained from a corpus containing source-language texts, “since that is the language in which cognitive problems will occur.” this may be true; however, since the translator produces a target text that is usually geared towards a target-language readership, it is usually the concepts and the field-specific conceptual structuring of the target language and culture that will ultimately be of relevance. also, it may be less difficult for students who are new to a specialised field to acquire the domain knowledge required for high-quality translation via their native language (which is usually not the source but the target language), because the cognitive load in this language will probably be lower. armed with a basic knowledge of the field-specific concepts in their native language, it will then be much easier for the students to analyse the sourcelanguage concepts. since these monolingual corpora basically serve the same function as the well-established concept of parallel texts, they will be termed parallel-text corpora2 for the purpose of this paper. offering empirical information on idiomaticity and natural language use, parallel-text corpora can also be a useful resource for students faced with a translation into a foreign language (bernardini et al., 2003, p. 6), especially considering that their text production competence in the foreign language will usually be much lower than in their native language. therefore, when translating into a foreign language, students are all the more dependent on authentic examples of natural language use that can be offered by parallel-text corpora. comparable bilingual corpora contain original source and targetlanguage texts and allow for a comparative analysis of the same parameters 2 which is not to be confused with the discarded designation parallel corpora (see above). working with corpora in the translation classroom 511 that can be studied in a monolingual environment in parallel-text corpora. working with these corpora, students gain a better understanding not only of original target-language texts but also of original source-language texts and their natural make-up (bernardini et al., 2003, p. 6). in this case, it would make sense to include the source text to be translated in the comparable corpus and to expand it with texts of a similar subject matter, communicative function, and the like. it is this corpus type that can be used for the conceptual analysis of source-language texts proposed by sánchez-gijón (see above). finally, bilingual translation corpora, containing source texts and their translations, offer insights into the strategies employed by professional translators when dealing with specific translation problems on various levels. for example, students could query a bilingual translation corpus for terminological equivalents and perform a contrastive analysis of the underlying source and target-language terms. they could also analyse how certain stylistic features of the source text (e.g., post-modification or inanimate nouns + action verbs in english) were rendered in the translation. the idiomaticity of the various translation solutions identified could then be checked against a corresponding parallel-text corpus. this leads to another important aspect of corpus use, both in translation theory and in translation practice, namely the quality of the corpus texts (cf. krein-kühle, 2003, 2011). when compiling a bilingual translation corpus, it is particularly important to devise a set of quality criteria to ensure that the translations to be included in the corpus do not exhibit any strong signs of “translationese,” that is, unnatural target language patterns or elements or unusual frequencies of specific patterns or elements that can be traced back to source-language interference (see olohan, 2004, p. 90).3 as described above, the inclusion of low-quality translations in the corpus could be avoided by comparing the potential corpus texts with similar original target-language texts from a parallel-text corpus to see whether any significant structural or other deviations can be found. in this case, the parallel-text corpus would serve as a “reference corpus” (see krein-kühle, 2003, p. 50). an alternative, which may be more feasible if real-life translation constraints (especially time constraints) were to be taken into account, is to implement quality control measures at the corpus design stage and restrict the potential corpus texts to publications by specific authors, companies, organisations, and so on. the issue of corpus quality will be revisited in the discussion of the internet as a source of corpus texts. 3 of course, the question of quality is not restricted to translated texts, but applies just as well to autonomous texts. however, since the issue of “translationese” or poor general translation quality is indeed a central aspect in translation practice (see krein-kühle, 2003, p. 3), the discussion will be restricted to translation quality here. the quality criteria proposed later in this paper can certainly be applied to nontranslated texts as well. ralph krüger 512 corpus use as a translational sub-competence it has now been generally recognised in translation didactics that corpus use should not be regarded as a mere additional qualification to be acquired independently of “pure” translation competence, but that it rather forms part of wider translation competence itself (rodríguez inés, 2009). in the field of translation process research, considerable work has gone into developing models of translation competence, the best-known of which is perhaps the model devised by the pacte4 group based at the universitat autònoma de barcelona (e.g., pacte 2003). figure 2 translation competence model of the pacte group (pacte, 2003, p. 60) as can be seen in figure 2, this model divides translation competence into four individual sub-competences (bilingual, extra-linguistic, instrumental and knowledge about translation), which are controlled by a strategic sub-competence. in this model, corpus use would form part of the instrumental sub-competence, which involves “procedural knowledge related to the use of documentation sources and information and communication technology applied to translation” (pacte, 2003, p. 59). it should be pointed out that this description of the instrumental subcompetence only covers the technical side of corpus use, that is, the compilation of corpora and the application of specific corpus analysis software. the actual linguistic 4 process in the acquisition of translation competence and evaluation working with corpora in the translation classroom 513 or conceptual analysis of a corpus and the interpretation of the analysis results fall outside the description of this sub-competence. within the instrumental subcompetence of the pacte model, rodríguez inés (2009, p. 136) proposes a further sub-competence which refers to “the ability to use electronic corpora adequately to solve translation problems in an adequate manner.” this specific sub-competence consists of four elements, namely the assimilation of basic principles involved in working with corpora, the building of corpora, the handling of corpus-related software and the use of corpora to solve translation problems (rodríguez inés, 2009, p. 136). the last element of this sub-competence covers the actual corpus analysis with regard to specific translation problems and thus fills the gap identified in the general description of pacte’s instrumental sub-competence. another prominent translation competence model that recognises corpus use as an integral part of overall translation competence is the model developed within the european master’s in translation (emt) network of the european union. the emt network is a partnership project between the european commission and higher-education institutions in the member states and was established in order to provide a quality label for translation programmes at university level that meet specific educational standards. the reference framework for translation competences shown in figure 3 is specifically geared towards such university programmes and is intended to serve as a basis for developing the content of individual training modules (emt expert group, 2009, p. 3). figure 3 emt reference framework for professional translation competence (emt expert group, 2009, p. 4) in this reference framework, corpus use is included as a component of the information mining competence and refers to the procedural competence of “knowing how to use tools and search engines effectively (e.g. terminology software, elecralph krüger 514 tronic corpora, electronic dictionaries)” (emt expert group, 2009, p. 6). as with the pacte model, this description only covers the technical side of corpus use, the linguistic side in this case being covered mainly by the language competence. the inclusion of corpus use in these two major translation competence models is certainly evidence of the fact that the multiple advantages of these resources for translation teaching and practice have by now been widely recognised. ideally then, a corpus approach should be adopted in the translation classroom that tries to reconcile the requirements of both translation teaching and practice, to familiarise students with the various aspects of corpus compilation and analysis while taking the constraints of translation practice into account. do-it-yourself corpora in the following, a corpus type will be introduced that may prove especially useful to in vivo translation courses that try to model, at least to some extent, the professional working environment and the working conditions of future translators. such a course would include, for example, access to it software (especially text processing, translation memory and terminology management software) and the internet and the translation of texts with high professional relevance but also the assessment of the various tools and techniques with regard to their applicability in professional contexts, which are often characterised by time and financial constraints. in this regard, aston (2009, p. ix-x) points out the discrepancy between the increasing use of corpora in translation teaching and the rather low acceptance of these resources among professional translators. the reason, according to aston, is that the construction and consultation of corpora is very time-consuming, making corpus-use “anti-economic in the short term” (p. ix-x). if we want to bridge this gap between corpus use in translation teaching and in translation practice, a corpus type is required that retains the epistemic advantages of corpora in general yet is tailored to the specific constraints and requirements of translation practice. such corpora are known as do-it-yourself (diy) corpora, which are compiled “for the sole purpose of providing information – either factual, linguistic or field-specific – for the purposes of completing a translation task” (sánchezgijón, 2009, p. 115). other designations for this corpus type are ad hoc corpora, disposable corpora, or virtual or ephemeral corpora (see corpas pastor & seghiri, 2009, p. 78). the designations disposable or ephemeral imply, however, that these corpora may not become part of a more permanent corpus or may not be retained by the translator as reference materials for future translations, which is probably not the case. especially when establishing permanent relationships with clients requesting similar translations on an ongoing basis, working with corpora in the translation classroom 515 texts which were initially intended as ad hoc resources for a specific translation task are often consulted again for subsequent translations and thus acquire a more permanent status as proven reference materials, which could over time lead to the compilation of a more comprehensive and stable corpus. seen in this light, the designations diy corpora or ad hoc corpora seem more suitable. according to zanettin (2012, p. 64), one of the main advantages of diy corpora is precisely being able to create them ad hoc in response to specific translation problems or information needs. therefore, these corpora tend to be very precise and can be expanded anytime as required. the design criteria of these corpora are primarily determined by the source text, which basically guides the material to be included in the diy corpus (see varantola, 2003, p. 56). depending on the epistemic requirements, diy corpora can be constructed as monolingual parallel-text corpora, comparable bilingual corpora or bilingual translation corpora (as detailed above). in the corpus-compilation stage, sánchez-gijón (2009, p. 115 ff.) identified three possible sources for retrieving potential corpus texts: the client, specialist centres and the internet. in the translation classroom, the teacher can obviously act as client and provide the students with pre-selected texts for their diy corpora. this option is characterised by a strong bias towards the corpus-use-forlearning-to-translate approach and does not develop the corpus compilation skills that students need to become fully autonomous corpus users. providing students with access to specialist documentation sources (e.g., databases, academic journals, specialised libraries, etc.) would ensure a high quality of the corpus texts, but as sánchez-gijón (2009, p. 116) points out, these sources are not always readily available for the different subject matters of the texts to translate in the classroom or in later translation practice. moreover, consulting these sources would again be quite time-consuming and run counter to the efforts of making corpora a feasible resource for translation teaching and practice. the internet as a source of corpus texts the internet, in contrast, does not suffer from any of these constraints. it can be used as a source for autonomous corpus compilation by students, it is highly accessible and it provides a vast, albeit unstructured, body of information. the internet therefore seems to be the most viable source for compiling diy corpora (cf. sánchez-gijón, 2009, p. 116). however, the undisputed advantages of the internet as a source of corpora are accompanied by several drawbacks, the most prominent being the lack of structure of the content provided and its varying quality. therefore, if a targeted and high-quality diy web corpus is to be compiled from the internet, this lack of structure as well as potenralph krüger 516 tial quality concerns have to be compensated by a rigorous corpus compilation approach, which can be roughly divided into the following three phases (for the first two phases, cf. sánchez-gijón, 2009, p. 116-117): 1. determining the characteristics of the resource that will provide the corpus texts. 2. devising specific search strategies to carry out more precise searches. 3. establishing and applying quality criteria. these three phases will now be discussed in detail. determining the characteristics of the resource that will provide the corpus texts. normally, students will access the internet using a conventional search engine like google, yahoo! or bing. before they start compiling a diy web corpus, students should be made aware of the characteristics and functioning principles of these search engines in order to make more informed searches. the most fundamental principle to be pointed out in this context is the difference between the surface web, that is, that part of the internet which can be accessed via conventional search engines, and the much bigger deep web, which is inaccessible by these engines (e.g., password-protected websites or sites that are dynamically generated using local database content; cf. griesbaum, bekavac, & rittberger, 2009). therefore, students should be aware that the information they obtain using conventional search engines is by no means all the information that exists on a particular subject, but that more differentiated searches may be necessary. students should also be introduced to the difference between universal search engines (google et al.) and vertical search engines that focus on a specific field or discipline (sánchez-gijón, 2009, p. 117). if, for example, students are tasked with a scientific or technical translation, they could use the vertical search engine scirus.com to obtain more targeted search results. other relevant characteristics of search engines that can be made transparent to students are the ranking criteria which determine the sorting order of the search results (e.g., google’s pagerank algorithm, which assigns a numerical weight to different web pages according to the number of hyperlinks to these pages and the pagerank of the pages hosting these hyperlinks; see dopichaj, 2009) and the distinction between natural listings (those results that are listed according to objective ranking algorithms) and paid listings (those results that the search engine provider is paid for to present regardless of objective ranking criteria) (see also lewandowski & höchstötter, 2009). understanding these principles of result presentation by conventional search engines may prompt students to look harder for the information required instead of relying on the first two or three results that are presented at the top of the page. working with corpora in the translation classroom 517 devising specific search strategies to carry out more precise searches. after reviewing these basic characteristics of common search engines, the next step would be to introduce students to specific search strategies to narrow down the searches to yield only results with direct relevance to the diy corpus being compiled (cf. sánchez-gijón, 2009, p. 117). a common search operator5 offered by sites such as google or yahoo! is the operator site:, which restricts the search to a specific website or domain. for example, the search string site www.deutsche-bank.de would only yield results from the website of deutsche bank, whereas the search string site:.edu would restrict the search to websites with the top-level domain .edu, that is, to sites of educational institutions. these search strategies may be useful if the students are interested in the terminology or the style employed by a specific client (e.g., the corporate language or terminology of deutsche bank) or if they are looking for high-quality explanatory texts on a specific subject matter (which can reasonably be expected to be provided by educational institutions). another helpful search operator is filetype:, which restricts the search to documents with a specific file format. the search string filetype: pdf, for example, would only yield pdf files, which are usually claimed to have a more stable content compared to files in other text formats (zanettin, 2012, p. 58). a last strategy to be presented here is excluding a word or a complete website from the search by placing a dash (-) before the corresponding site or word. if, for example, students are looking for texts about computer mice and they want to exclude any search results referring to the identically named animals (cf. zanettin, 2012, p. 57), they could use the search string mouse -animal or mouse -rodent. likewise, if the students know that a specific site does not offer texts that meet their quality requirements, they can exclude that site from their search by using the search string -name of the site to exclude. there are many more options available for specifying web searches (e.g., setting the language and region of the website, setting a date range, etc.), and most search engines provide a support page with corresponding information.6 it is important to mention at this point that these search strategies are primarily geared towards the compilation of monolingual corpora (see zanettin, 2012, p. 62). the compilation of a translation corpus via the internet is more complicated (if only because there may not be a translation of a particular text in the first place) and generally requires additional search strategies. for example, the websites of major international companies or organisations are often available 5 for a list of common search operators offered by google see http://support.google. com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=136861 (last accessed: 18/01/2013) 6 the corresponding google support page can be found under support.google.com/websearch/ (last accessed: 21/01/2012). ralph krüger 518 in a variety of languages, and these languages are usually shown at the top of the page. if the required language is available on the website, the sitemap of the original version of the website can be used to identify the category structure of the website and to locate the source text in this structure (e.g., a report in the “reporting and events“ subcategory of the category “investor relations” of the website of a financial institution). if the target-language version of the website has the same category structure (this is not always the case), it should be fairly easy to locate the corresponding target text. if the link to the source text in the url bar of the browser contains an iso language code (e.g., /en/), it may also be possible to substitute this code with the iso code of the target language (e.g., /de/) to locate the translation. however, as already mentioned, a translation may not be available in the first place, and even if one is available, creative solutions beyond the strategies just described may be necessary to locate it. nonetheless, using the aforementioned as well as further search strategies can provide a structured approach to corpus compilation from an inherently unstructured source of information. it is, however, important to incorporate a qualitative dimension in such an approach. establishing and applying quality criteria. while the internet offers a vast amount of potential corpus texts, these texts will be characterised by a very uneven quality (zanettin, 2012, p. 56). if students want to avoid carrying over erroneous or inappropriate solutions into their translations, they must be aware of the potential quality issues involved in corpus compilation. it is certainly advisable for students to carry out a rough quality assessment of the potential corpus texts. with this procedure, seriously flawed texts like machine translations without any post-editing will almost certainly be spotted and excluded. however, less obvious quality defects such as source-language interferences in translations may not be as easy to detect by students, since their textual competence will usually not be fully developed yet. this will probably be the case with their native language, and almost certainly with their foreign language(s). it may thus be advisable to develop a list of extra-textual criteria (like authorship or publishing organisation) and to reflect these criteria in the search strategies previously described to identify the corpus texts. the operator site:, for example, could be used to restrict the search a priori to specific websites or top-level domains which are likely to fulfil the established quality criteria, or a dash (-) could be used to exclude websites or top-level domains that may not meet the quality requirements. using the internet as a macro-corpus as well as being used as a source for corpus compilation, the internet can itself be used as a macro-corpus (zanettin, 2012, p. 56) to be queried diworking with corpora in the translation classroom 519 rectly for linguistic or conceptual information related to a specific translation task. since this is again a primarily monolingual approach, this macro-corpus will probably be used as a parallel-text corpus. using conventional search engines. in order to query the internet as a macro-corpus, students could principally resort to conventional search engines again, using some of the above mentioned strategies in combination with several more linguistically-oriented search functions. for example, most conventional search engines allow for the use of wildcard characters (zanettin, 2012, p. 57). if students were faced with a source-text element like “to issue shares” and they know the german equivalent of shares (which would be aktien in this case) but are unsure about the proper german collocate, they could devise a search string that contains a wildcard for the unknown verb (e.g., die von dem unternehmen * aktien) and check the results for a verb that might fit. in this case, a potential candidate would be ausgeben, and the word group aktien ausgeben could be further verified using one of the general search strategies explained above (e.g., by using the operator site: it could be established whether the phrase aktien ausgeben is used on the websites of major publicly traded german companies, which would be strong evidence that ausgeben is indeed the required collocate). the internet may also be queried directly for explanatory contexts for specific concepts. conventional search engines like google offer the search operator define:, which yields a list of definitions of the search term along with hyperlinks to the corresponding web pages. a more sophisticated strategy would be to formulate a search string in the form of the classical aristotelian definition, leaving the definiens unspecified (cf. bowker & pearson, 2002, p. 206 ff.). if, for example, students were looking for a definition of the term frequency converter, they could query the internet using the search string a frequency converter is. the linking element can also be varied to yield hypernymic information (e.g., a frequency converter is a kind of), meronymic information (e.g., a frequency converter consists of/contains/is a part of) or functional information (e.g., a frequency converter is used to). using special web concordancers. while these strategies may provide a viable approach to using the internet itself as a macro-corpus, conventional search engines generally do not present the results in a format that invites straightforward linguistic analysis. the selection and ordering of results does not follow any linguistic criteria (but is rather determined by ranking algorithms and commercial aspects, as detailed above) and the results as presented by a search engine are static and do not allow for any manipulation such as sorting the concordance lines, generating collocations, and the like (see zanettin, 2012, ralph krüger 520 p. 58 ff.). considering these shortcomings, special applications for using the internet as a macro-corpus have been developed which offer specific functions tailored to the linguistic analysis of the results. one of the best-known of these web concordancers is the programme webcorp live (2013), which was developed by the research development unit for english studies in the school of english at birmingham city university (see also zanettin, 2012, p. 59). this concordancer involves a search phase and a postprocessing phase. in the search phase, options such as the search engine to use (e.g., google or bing), the language of the web pages to search and the number of concordance lines per web page can be specified. several options which are provided by conventional search engines are also available in webcorp live, for example the specification of a certain site or domain to search (this is the equivalent of google’s search operator site), the use of word filters (e.g., words that must or must not appear on the same page as the search term) and the use of wildcards in the search string. the search strategy previously described to retrieve explanatory contexts for individual concepts can also be applied in webcorp live. in the post-processing phase, the number of words or characters to display to the left and right of the search term can be specified, and the concordances can be sorted by date or alphabetically (e.g., sort by the words to the left or right of the search term). also, a table with the most frequent collocates can be generated and stopwords to exclude from the list (e.g., high-frequency words like a and the) can be specified. webcorp live also caches the search results for seven days. the results can be saved on a local computer (zanettin, 2012, p. 60) and the hyperlink to the cached results can be shared with other researchers, students or translators. other tools with a range of functions similar to that of webcorp live are for example webascorpus (2013) and kwicfinder (2013) (zanettin, 2012, p. 59). these tools offer some powerful functions to conduct a linguistically-oriented analysis using the internet as a macrocorpus. these functions should ideally be combined with the various research strategies described previously in order to obtain high-quality results with direct relevance to the translation task at hand. corpus use in translation teaching at cologne university of applied sciences in order to exemplify some of the issues discussed above, i will briefly illustrate how corpora are used in the 2-year ma programme in specialised translation7 offered by the institute of translation and multilingual communication at cologne university of applied sciences. the focus will be on the course called translation 7 for more information on the programme see http://www.international-office.fhkoeln.de/english/faculties/overview/f03/courses/u/01550.php (last accessed: 17/01/2013). working with corpora in the translation classroom 521 project using translation tools, which tries to project into the translation classroom as closely as possible the professional environment that students will encounter in their later careers as translators. in this in vivo translation course, the students are introduced to key aspects of real-life translation projects (client communication, document management, handling client instructions, research strategies for the internet, etc.) as well as to relevant computer software (e.g., translation memory software, terminology software, quality assurance software, web concordance software). after this introductory phase, the students are asked to work on various small translation projects (usually involving specialised texts of medium difficulty in the fields of economics or engineering) in which these competences are brought together and developed further. the course thus has a strong, although by no means exclusive, focus on the instrumental sub-competence in the pacte competence model or the information mining competence and the technical competence in the emt reference framework. corpora are introduced in the course within the context of linguistic and conceptual research for the translation projects, and the necessary competences are taught in two different teaching units, which roughly correspond to the two didactic approaches introduced previously, that is, corpus use for learning to translate and learning corpus use to translate. in the first unit, “internet research strategies for translators,“ the students are introduced to the basic characteristics of conventional search engines and to the various techniques for compiling diy corpora using the internet. in this unit, the students are also familiarised with the tools and strategies for querying the internet itself as a macro-corpus. this unit thus focuses on the corpus compilation skills of the students. the second unit, “text analysis in translation,” is loosely based on the translation-oriented text analysis model developed by nord (2009) and introduces the students to various linguistic concepts that are relevant to a well-founded corpus analysis (e.g., genre conventions, register, textual microand macro-structure, lexical and syntactic analysis, etc.). this unit, therefore, is more concerned with the competences required for the actual corpus analysis with regard to specific translation problems. in one exercise, the students were asked to translate various excerpts of the annual report of an international bank from english into german (e.g., the letter from the chairman of the management board). using the research competences acquired during the course, the students built a parallel-text corpus consisting of german annual reports of various german banks as well as a translation corpus containing original english annual reports of various international banks and their translations into german. the students were then asked to investigate the genre conventions, register and lexis of the parallel-text corpus and to reflect the results of their analysis in the translation. the parallel-text corpus was also used to provide explanatory contexts for specialised concepts. the translation corpus was mainly used to identify terminological equivalents or to see how specific source-text patralph krüger 522 terns were rendered in the translation. the students were also encouraged to use webcorp live to query the internet as a macro-corpus. the analysis of the parallel text and translation corpora was conducted manually, without resorting to special concordance software for monolingual corpora (e.g., wordsmith) or bilingual corpora (e.g., paraconc), since the preprocessing of the texts was found to be too timeconsuming to be reconcilable with professional constraints. this was especially the case for copy-protected pdf files and for bilingual files, which had to be prealigned for their use in a bilingual concordancer or to be preprocessed for the automatic alignment function offered by these programmes. thus, the only true concordance functions available to the students were those offered by webcorp live. the students’ feedback on the use of corpora was largely positive. they particularly appreciated the availability of a high-quality translation corpus which provided immediate solutions to various translation problems. the parallel-text corpus was, for the most part, not used as an independent resource. the students mainly used it as a “back-up” corpus to check whether the terminology and structural patterns found in the target texts of the translation corpus were also present in original target-language texts. they also made extensive use of the internet as a macro-corpus, especially when the parallel-text and translation corpora did not yield any ready-made solutions to their translation problems. at first, the students were reluctant to work with webcorp live and mostly used google for their searches, but once they became more familiar with webcorp, they used the programme more readily. in this context, the function for generating a list of frequent collocates was seen as particularly helpful. altogether, corpus use made the students feel more confident with their own translation solutions, especially if these were justified by “independent” sources of natural language data such as parallel-text corpora. concluding remarks this paper has hopefully made a strong case for the use of corpora in the translation classroom by highlighting the multiple advantages of these resources as teaching aids but also by demonstrating how the application of corpora can be reconciled with the constraints of translation practice. the competent use of corpora requires various competences, both linguistic and technological, and therefore working with corpora in the translation classroom provides an ideal test case for bringing these diverse competences together. the technological dimension of corpus use also ties in perfectly with the general call for computer literacy in today’s professional world, and the research and documentation skills the students acquire by compiling corpora (especially from the internet) will certainly be valuable beyond the immediate field of translation practice. working with corpora in the translation classroom 523 references aston, g. 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(2012). translation-driven corpora: corpus resources for descriptive and applied translation studies. manchester: st. jerome. 397 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (2). 2019. 397-419 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.2.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt metalinguistic knowledge about the native language and language transfer in gender assignment jan vanhove university of fribourg, switzerland https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4607-4836 jan.vanhove@unifr.ch abstract whereas standard dutch only distinguishes between two adnominal grammatical genders, substandard varieties of belgian dutch distinguish between three such genders. german, too, distinguishes between three genders. nevertheless, when assigning gender to german nouns with dutch cognates, speakers of belgian dutch are strongly influenced by standard dutch gender but to a much lesser degree (if at all) by substandard gender. on the hypothesis that a lack of metalinguistic knowledge about l1 substandard gender decreases its use as a source for transfer, i experimentally manipulated the metalinguistic knowledge about l1 substandard gender of 45 speakers of substandard belgian dutch varieties. i then assessed how strongly this manipulation affected the participants’ reliance on substandard gender distinctions when they assigned gender to l2 german nouns with dutch cognates. results confirm the strong influence of standard dutch, hint at a weak influence of substandard dutch, and show no appreciable effect of the experimental manipulation. keywords: crosslinguistic influence; dutch; german; grammatical gender; metalinguistic knowledge; substandard variety 1. introduction the influence of the first language (l1) on the learning and use of an additional language (l2) is a classic topic in bilingualism and language acquisition. by and large, such jan vanhove 398 crosslinguistic influence or language transfer is more pronounced in areas in which the l1 and l2 are similar to one another (e.g., ringbom, 2007). at the same time, it is widely recognized that “not everything that looks transferable [from the linguist’s perspective] is transferable [from the learner’s]” (kellerman, 1983, p. 113, his emphasis), and research has sought to identify factors that promote or hamper transfer (for overviews, see jarvis & pavlenko, 2008, chapter 6; odlin, 1989). here i ask to what extent the metalinguistic knowledge the learner has about the l1 is one such factor. 2. background 2.1. grammatical gender in german and dutch the present study’s point of departure is vanhove’s (2017) findings regarding standard and substandard influences from the l1, dutch, on gender assignment in a closely related l2, german. german distinguishes between three adnominal grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). among other things, this is reflected in the singular nominative definite article (der, die, das). dutch is closely related to german, but in its standard and northern (netherlandic) varieties, masculine and feminine gender have merged to form a common-gender category adnominally. this common gender contrasts with neuter gender, a difference that is particularly obvious in the choice of the definite article (de vs. het). dutch pronouns can still be masculine or feminine, but this is largely a semantic matter (e.g., feminine pronouns for women and occasionally for female animals; audring, 2009). despite this difference in gender systems, german-speaking learners of dutch clearly see a link between the gender systems of german and dutch. they tend to assume that the gender of dutch nouns is compatible with that of their german translation equivalents, particularly if these are cognates: if a dutch word has a neuter german translation equivalent, they tend to assign neuter gender to it; if it has a masculine or feminine translation equivalent, they tend to assign common gender to it (lemhöfer, schriefers, & hanique, 2010; lemhöfer, spalek, & schriefers, 2008; also see sabourin, stowe, & de haan, 2006). this assumption is sometimes incorrect (for examples, see the stimuli used in the present study), but to my knowledge, no data are available as to how often it is. in the other direction, dutch-speaking learners of german similarly assume that neuter dutch words tend to have neuter german translation equivalents (vanhove, 2017), but they cannot rely on their l1 to distinguish between l2 masculine and feminine gender. in many substandard varieties of belgian dutch, however, the masculine/feminine distinction is still largely maintained adnominally. here it is most reliably marked on the indefinite article (ne(n) vs. een). table 1 shows how singular noun phrases are marked for gender in german, standard dutch, and substandard metalinguistic knowledge about the native language and language transfer in gender assignment 399 belgian dutch (the latter based on de vogelaer and de sutter’s [2011] description of east-flemish). vanhove (2017) hypothesized that speakers of belgian dutch who are familiar with a three-gender substandard variety would make use of this additional masculine/feminine distinction when assigning gender to german nouns: compared to speakers of netherlandic dutch, belgian speakers of dutch were expected to more often assign feminine gender to german words whose cognates are feminine in substandard belgian dutch and masculine gender to words with masculine cognates in substandard belgian dutch. but while both the dutch and belgian participants’ german gender assignments revealed a substantial influence from the common/neuter distinction in standard dutch (i.e., they generally assigned neuter gender to german nouns with neuter dutch cognates and masculine or feminine gender to german nouns with common dutch cognates), at best a weak trace of the additional substandard masculine/feminine distinction was found in the belgian data (depending on the specific analysis; see vanhove, 2017, p. 454). table 1 adnominal gender marking in german (nominative), standard dutch, and substandard belgian dutch. the masculine/feminine distinction is not upheld in standard dutch, but it is in substandard belgian dutch. gender german standard dutch substandard belgian dutch translation masculine ein grosser hund, der grosse hund een grote hond, de grote hond ne groten hond, de groten hond a big dog, the big dog feminine eine grosse katze, die grosse katze een grote kat, de grote kat een grote kat, de grote kat a big cat, the big cat neuter ein grosses pferd, das grosse pferd een groot paard, het grote paard e(en) groot paard, het groot paard a big horse, the big horse 2.2. sociolinguistic markedness and psychotypology as explanations for non-transfer a couple of reasons can be invoked to account for a lack of influence from the l1 substandard. first, james (1983) suggested that sociolinguistic markedness may cause learners to assume that substandard l1 characteristics are less suitable for transfer than standard elements. this may tie in with the observation that nonlinguists often consider standard varieties, more so than substandard ones, to be logical and well-structured (berthele, 2010; niedzielski & preston, 1999, chapter 1). second, non-transfer of what would seem to be transferable features is often explained in terms of the learners’ “psychotypology,” that is, their sense of how languages are related to each other (kellerman, 1983; see also pająk, fine, kleinschmidt, & jaeger, 2016, and rothman, 2015, for similar recent proposals): perhaps speakers of belgian dutch do not rely on their substandard gender system jan vanhove 400 because they do not perceive their substandard variety to be close enough to german to be of any use. while these are plausible explanations, they are difficult to verify. psychotypology in particular is often cited as a factor in language transfer, but only in a few studies did researchers attempt to measure it (e.g., hall et al., 2009; lindqvist, 2015; neuser, 2017; sánchez & bardel, 2016). the authors of these four studies tried to measure their participants’ psychotypology by means of questionnaires, and the results are difficult to interpret. lindqvist (2015), for instance, did not observe a relationship between the participants’ responses and their transfer tendencies, whereas neuser (2017) noted a mix of expected and counter-intuitive findings with respect to whether greater psychotypological proximity increased or decreased (negative) lexical transfer from three potential source languages. but are we to conclude that psychotypology does not predictably affect learners’ transfer tendencies or rather that the questionnaires may not have provided a good enough approximation of the respondents’ actual psychotypology? it is not clear to me how any measure of psychotypology could be validated without already assuming that interindividual differences in psychotypology predict transfer tendencies. incidentally, rothman (2015) rejects the idea that his conceptualization of (subconscious) psychotypology can meaningfully be measured using questionnaires. i do not know of any study that measured individual perceptions of sociolinguistic markedness and correlated these to the respondents’ transfer tendencies. 2.3. lack of metalinguistic knowledge as a possible explanation for non-transfer apart from sociolinguistic markedness and psychotypology, a third possible reason for the lack of transfer from the l1 substandard in vanhove’s (2017) study may be the participants’ lack of metalinguistic knowledge about the substandard’s gender system. if speakers of substandard belgian dutch do not know that their dialect distinguishes between masculine and feminine gender, or if they are not aware of which words are feminine and which are masculine, then this may make it more difficult for them to make the “necessary crosslingual tie-ups” (kellerman, 1983, p. 114) or “interlingual identification” between the genders of a l1 noun and its l2 cognate (weinreich, 1953, p. 7). this, in turn, would lessen the likelihood that gender transfer takes place. the suggestion here is not that metalinguistic knowledge is an absolute precondition for transfer to take place, but rather that metalinguistic knowledge about grammatical gender may affect – and in this case facilitate – transfer. this does not deny that transfer in general may take place unconsciously, though it does assume that it can also occur as a deliberate strategy (cf. jarvis & pavlenko, 2008, p. 24). metalinguistic knowledge about the native language and language transfer in gender assignment 401 in this particular case, sociolinguistic and linguistic factors may conspire to render the masculine/feminine distinction opaque to speakers of belgian dutch dialects. on the sociolinguistic level, the language of schooling in dutch-speaking belgium (flanders) is standard dutch, not substandard dutch. while pupils at flemish schools may be taught explicitly about standard dutch features, they are unlikely to learn about substandard features. on the linguistic level, the masculine/feminine distinction is not consistently maintained in pronominal reference, that is, adnominally masculine noun phrases can be referred to pronominally using masculine, neuter, or even feminine pronouns (and vice versa), depending on semantic factors (see de vogelaer, 2009; de vogelaer & de sutter, 2011). as a result, flemings cannot reliably infer a noun’s adnominal gender by reflecting on how they would refer to it pronominally. moreover, the masculine/feminine distinction is often ambiguous adnominally, especially in definite contexts. for instance, den is the masculine definite article used before vowels and a handful of consonants. before other consonants, de is used both as the masculine and feminine definite article such that the masculine/feminine distinction is only marked in some phonological contexts (for data, see vanhove, 2017, on-line materials). most research on metalinguistic knowledge in l2 learning concerns metalinguistic knowledge about the target language (e.g., alderson, clapham, & steel, 1997; ellis et al., 2009; roehr, 2008). research on metalinguistic knowledge about source languages (typically the l1) and more specifically its relation to language transfer is scarce. while metalinguistic knowledge concerning the source language(s) is occasionally invoked as an explanation for the presence or absence of transfer (e.g., cenoz, 2001; gallardo del puerto, garcía lecumberri, & cenoz, 2006; odlin, 1990; vanhove, 2017; see also ringbom’s [2007] prediction about the utility of l2 finnish in learning swahili), this explanation is rarely put to the test. to my knowledge, the only exception is a study by falk, lindqvist, and bardel (2015), who investigated the relationship between l1 swedish explicit metalinguistic knowledge and l3 dutch adjective placement and found that better performance on the l1 metalinguistic test was associated with more accurate l3 adjective placement. since adjectives precede nouns in both l1 swedish and l3 dutch, this relationship can be taken to suggest that higher l1 metalinguistic knowledge correlates with the participants’ tendency to transfer a l1 structure to the l3. however, falk et al.’s (2015) metalinguistic test also contained questions not related to l1 adjective placement so that it is difficult to assess if metalinguistic knowledge about a specific l1 structure or feature affects transfer tendencies with respect to this feature. in conclusion, research that directly tackles the question, how does metalinguistic knowledge about a potential source language (l1) feature affect learners’ transfer tendencies?, is lacking. the present study aimed to fill this research gap. jan vanhove 402 3. method falk et al. (2015) used a correlational design to address a question similar to mine, but i anticipated to find little variation among informants on a metalinguistic test of substandard gender knowledge. i therefore decided to induce such variation in an experiment. the premise was that if a lack of metalinguistic knowledge about substandard gender categories and gender marking hampers substandard-to-german transfer of adnominal gender (hypothetically by decreasing the odds of the relevant interlingual identification being made), then explicit instruction about l1 substandard gender should increase learners’ propensity to transfer substandard gender to german. importantly, the hypothesis is that instruction about l1 substandard gender will increase the number of crosslingually congruent l2 gender assignments, not that it will improve the accuracy of these gender assignments. for instance, assigning masculine gender to german steak would be crosslingually congruent but incorrect, since steak is neuter. in an online between-subjects experiment, speakers of belgian dutch were assigned to one of three conditions that differed with respect to how much gender-relevant metalinguistic instruction was provided. after receiving this instruction and answering a handful of questions testing their comprehension of it, the participants were asked to assign gender-marked articles to german nouns with dutch cognates and to indicate for a number of gender-marked dutch noun phrases whether they would use these themselves, in a design similar to vanhove’s (2017). this made it possible to determine whether the participants’ german gender assignments reflected gender differences in their l1 substandard. 3.1. participants the envisaged participants were middle-aged to elderly speakers from around the flemish–brabantian dialect border in the province of east flanders, specifically from the ‘denderstreek,’ which spans from dendermonde to geraardsbergen. speakers in this age range tend to have more affinity with substandard varieties than the mostly 20 to 30-year-olds in vanhove’s (2017) study. the denderstreek was chosen because it is one of the regions whose dialects are characterized by elaborate three-way adnominal gender marking (de vogelaer & de sutter, 2011). potential participants were contacted mainly through local history societies. in the end, 48 speakers of belgian dutch (12 women; median age: 61 years) completed the entire task. (an attempt to recruit an additional control group of middle-aged to elderly dialect speakers of northern dutch had to be abandoned altogether due to even greater difficulties in recruiting them.) the data from three participants were excluded from the analyses for fear that metalinguistic knowledge about the native language and language transfer in gender assignment 403 they were not paying sufficient attention (see results section). two of the remaining participants grew up elsewhere in east flanders; the results reported below do not hinge on their inor exclusion. according to a questionnaire, all participants considered dutch to be their sole native language, and all claimed to at least know a local dialect or sometimes use a supraregional substandard variety of belgian dutch in which threeway gender marking is also commonly found (tussentaal, literally ‘in-between language’; taeldeman, 2008). figure 1 contains additional information about the participants. the data in the fifth plot (‘l2 german gender knowledge’) stem from the l2 gender assignment task introduced further below and show that the participants’ actual knowledge of l2 gender was modest. figure 1 description of the participant sample. the participants’ age, dialect and tussentaal use, and their self-assessed conversational german skills were collected a questionnaire; for the assessment of their german gender knowledge, see the tasks section jan vanhove 404 3.2. tasks metalinguistic instruction and training. the participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. these differed with respect to how much information the participants received about grammatical gender distinctions in their dialect. the rationale behind having three conditions is more easily explained after having introduced them. ‘strategy’ condition. in this condition, participants were told that standard dutch distinguishes between neuter and common gender, which can be told apart on the basis of the definite singular article (het vs. de). they were also told that their substandard variety, like german but unlike standard dutch, distinguished between three grammatical genders. it was explained to them how they could tell the substandard gender of dutch words on the basis of the determiners that these words can and cannot take. specifically, they were told that if a dutch word (e.g., dak ‘roof’) could be combined with the determiners het ‘the’ or da(t) ‘that’ in their dialect, then this word was neuter in their dialect. if a word (e.g., computer) could be combined with the determiners ne(n) ‘a’ or diene(n) ‘that,’ then this word was masculine in their dialect. if a word (e.g., pen ‘pen’) could be combined with de ‘the’ but not with ne(n) or diene(n), then the word was feminine in their dialect. it was also pointed out to them that the biological and grammatical genders of a word need not coincide (using neuter kind ‘child’ as an example). after receiving this information, the participants practiced the strategy for identifying the substandard grammatical gender of dutch nouns. they were shown ten words (one at a time) and were asked questions about which determiners these can take in their dialect. they were then asked to name the grammatical gender of each word in their dialect, after which they received feedback on whether their latter response was consistent with their answers concerning the determiners that these words could take. figure 2 shows how the questions asked and the feedback given were conditional on the participants’ earlier answers. this strategy was practiced for ten words: regering ‘government,’ paard ‘horse,’ meisje ‘girl,’ velo ‘bicycle,’ auto ‘car,’ stok ‘stick,’ concert ‘concert,’ slachtoffer ‘victim,’ kerk ‘church,’ and gazet ‘newspaper.’ four of these are neuter nouns (paard, meisje, concert, slachtoffer); the others were non-neuter (three masculine and three feminine in the author’s own dialect). metalinguistic knowledge about the native language and language transfer in gender assignment 405 figure 2 participants in the ‘strategy’ condition were asked one or two questions about which determiners they thought ten dutch words could take in their dialect (white boxes). they then identified the grammatical gender of these words. the feedback (grey boxes) highlighted whether their latter response was consistent with their answers to the question(s) about the determiners that the word could take. the questions and feedback were in dutch. this flowchart was not shown to the participants ‘no information’ condition. in this condition, the participants were not told about gender distinctions. instead, they were provided with correct but task-irrelevant information about a syntactic phenomenon common in many substandard belgian dutch dialects, viz., double subject marking (de vogelaer & devos, 2008). three examples of subject doubling were shown to the participants, among which the example in (1); the glosses and english translations were not provided. (1) ze werkt zij in duitsland. she.weak works she.strong in germany. ‘she works in germany.’ the participants were told truthfully that different dialects permit pronominal subject doubling in different contexts and that it is interesting to linguists to find out which types occur where. after receiving this information, they were asked to judge for twelve sentences with doubly marked subjects whether these could occur in their local dialect. these items only served to draw the participants’ attention to their own dialect but are irrelevant as far as grammatical gender is concerned, so the responses to them were not analyzed. jan vanhove 406 ‘information’ condition. in this condition, participants were told that standard dutch distinguishes between neuter and common gender, which can be told apart on the basis of the definite singular article (het vs. de). they were also told that their substandard variety, like german but unlike standard dutch, distinguishes between three grammatical genders. unlike the participants in the ‘strategy’ condition, the participants in the ‘information’ condition were not told that they could tell which nouns were masculine and which were feminine by looking at the determiners that these could take. that is, their attention was drawn to the grammatical gender system of their dialect, but they were not taught a metalinguistic strategy for finding out which words are neuter, masculine or feminine. it was also pointed out to them that the biological and grammatical genders of a noun need not coincide, using neuter kind ‘child’ as an example. afterwards, the participants in this condition were asked how many grammatical genders their dialect has: none, two (common, neuter), three (masculine, feminine, neuter) or “i don’t know.” they were also asked to identify the grammatical gender of the same ten nouns that served as training items in the ‘strategy’ condition. the response options were masculine, feminine, neuter, common and “i don’t know;” no guiding questions were asked. rationale. by comparing the gender assignments of the ‘strategy’ participants to those of the ‘no information’ participants, one can gauge the influence of explicit metalinguistic instruction on the participants’ transfer tendencies. specifically, if the proportion of l1–l2 congruent responses is larger in the ‘strategy’ group than in the ‘no information’ group, then this would suggest that the explicit metalinguistic instruction that the first group received affects the participants’ transfer tendencies. however, if an effect of explicit metalinguistic instruction on the participants’ transfer tendencies were to be found, it would not be clear whether this was specifically the result of teaching them a strategy for telling masculine and feminine words apart: perhaps merely pointing out to the participants (or reminding them) that their own dialect also has a three-way gender system already affects their l2 gender assignments. if an effect of explicit metalinguistic instruction on the participants’ transfer tendencies were to be observed, a natural follow-up question would be to what extent this effect is related to the focusing of the participants’ attention on the substandard variety’s gender system or to the strategy that the instruction imparted. for this reason, some participants were told about their substandard variety’s gender system but not about the gender identification strategy. by comparing the ‘attention’ group’s transfer tendencies to those of the other two groups, it should be possible to tease apart the effects of merely drawing the participants’ attention to a possible transfer base on the one hand and full-fledged metalinguistic instruction on the other, if indeed any such effects exist. metalinguistic knowledge about the native language and language transfer in gender assignment 407 l2 german gender assignments. the participants were asked to pick a german gender-marked singular nominative definite article (masculine der, feminine die, neuter das) for 44 german nouns. the participants were told that der is used for masculine, die for feminine, and das for neuter nouns. the same nouns as in vanhove’s study (2017) were used; they are listed in the results section below (figure 3). all had dutch cognates, and both the german nouns and their dutch cognates were monosyllabic and monomorphemic and referred to inanimates. the nouns were presented individually and in a new random order for each participant. unlike in vanhove’s study (2017), the standard dutch translations were shown underneath the german words. this was done in order to ensure that all participants associated the german nouns with the same dutch cognates. dialectal translations were not provided, since there is no commonly used orthography for the relevant dialects and since the pronunciation of some words varies between dialects. for the words used in this task, the standard dutch lexemes also occur in denderstreek dialects and tussentaal, though sometimes side-by-side with a synonym (e.g., sossis for worst ‘sausage’). twenty-nine stimuli had common-gender cognates in standard dutch. in substandard varieties of belgian dutch, these are usually either feminine or masculine, though varieties may differ with respect to which are which. by comparing the participants’ l2 gender assignments to these words with their responses on the following task (‘own use of gender-marked l1 noun phrases’), it could be determined to what extent their l2 gender assignments are congruent with the gender of these nouns’ cognates in the participants’ substandard varieties. the fifteen other stimuli were not directly relevant to the research question. these were masculine (6), feminine (4), and neuter (5) nouns whose cognates were all neuter in both standard dutch and most substandard belgian dutch varieties. these stimuli were included to compare the participants’ tendency to transfer the grammatical gender from substandard vs. standard dutch to l2 german: to the extent that the participants’ gender assignments are congruent with the standard dutch neuter vs. common distinction but not with the substandard dutch masculine vs. feminine distinction, this can be attributed to their transferring standard but not substandard dutch gender. on the basis of vanhove’s (2017) results, a strong preference for neuter assignments can be expected for these 15 stimuli. moreover, the fifteen stimuli with neuter cognates allowed me to assess the participants’ actual knowledge of l2 gender: participants with no knowledge of german gender would pick the correct gender in only about 5 out of 15 cases, be it through random guessing or systematic transfer. the number of correct responses to these 15 stimuli can therefore serve as a measure of the participants’ knowledge of l2 gender. as shown in figure 1, the participants’ actual knowledge of german gender was limited, with most of them performing at chance on this task. jan vanhove 408 own use of gender-marked l1 noun phrases. the substandard gender of some dutch nouns varies within flanders (de schutter, van den berg, goeman, & de jong, 2005; pauwels, 1938; vanhove, 2017). for instance, knie ‘knee’ is masculine in some varieties but feminine in others. depending on the variety, then, the congruent l2 gender assignment can be masculine (der) or feminine (die). to account for such differences, the participants were shown gender-marked masculine substandard dutch noun phrases with the cognates of all 29 german words that had common-gender standard dutch cognates and that were encountered in the previous task. two examples of such noun phrases are ne knie ‘a (m.) knee’ (corresponding to the german stimulus knie) and ne stad ‘a (m.) city’ (corresponding to stadt). (vanhove [2017] only included 8 of these words.) they were asked to indicate whether they themselves could use this combination of words. when participants indicated that they could use the masculinemarked article with the noun, it could be deduced that the noun is masculine for these participants. when they indicated that they could not use the masculine-marked article with the noun, it could be inferred that the noun is not masculine but feminine or possibly neuter. additionally, this task included 20 noun phrases with standard dutch determiners (the same as in vanhove [2017]). half of these were acceptable in standard dutch (e.g., het veld ‘the field,’ de trein ‘the train’), and half were unacceptable (e.g., *het maand instead of de maand ‘the month’). these were included in order to identify participants who had limited knowledge of standard dutch gender or were not sufficiently focused on the task. another six noun phrases featured substandard dutch determiners combined with nouns whose cognates did not appear in the previous task (the same as in vanhove [2017]). these will not be further analyzed here. 4. results in the ‘own use’ task, 45 out of 48 participants provided responses consistent with standard dutch for at least 18 out of 20 noun phrases with standard dutch articles. the three other participants were excluded from the analyses reported below. this left 16 participants in the ‘strategy’ condition, 15 in the ‘information’ condition, and 14 in the ‘no information’ condition. i first established whether the metalinguistic instruction that the participants in the ‘strategy’ and ‘information’ conditions received succeeded in imparting factual and strategic knowledge about l1 substandard gender to these participants. then i investigated to what extent the l1 standard neuter vs. common distinction was reflected in the l2 gender assignments. lastly, i assessed how strongly metalinguistic instruction affected the participants’ tendency to rely on l1 substandard metalinguistic knowledge about the native language and language transfer in gender assignment 409 gender distinctions when assigning gender to l2 nouns. the data and computer code used for the analysis are available from https://osf.io/d7cu2/. 4.1. metalinguistic instruction and knowledge about l1 substandard gender when training the strategy for determining the substandard gender of dutch nouns, 13 out of 16 participants in the ‘strategy’ condition labeled the nouns’ gender consistently with their responses to the guiding questions in at least 9 out of 10 cases. these 13 participants’ l1 substandard gender assignments were not only internally consistent, they were also largely consistent with each other: at least 12 of them agreed on the grammatical gender of each word. the three other participants applied the strategy consistently for only 4 or 5 items, with no sign of becoming more consistent towards the end of the task. this suggests that the metalinguistic instruction and feedback were not sufficiently clear for them. the results reported below do not change appreciably if the responses from these participants are disregarded, but in the graph with the main results further below (figure 4), their data points are labeled separately. the participants in the ‘information’ condition were told that their dialect distinguishes between three genders. nevertheless, 7 out of 15 participants in this condition responded afterwards that it only distinguished between two genders (neuter and common). in the graph with the main results, their data points are labeled separately. moreover, 5 out of the 7 participants who claimed that their dialect only distinguished between neuter and common labeled the gender of some of these words as feminine or masculine. similarly, 1 out of the 8 participants who claimed that their dialect distinguished between feminine and masculine distinguished between neuter and common gender exclusively. while these inconsistencies underscore the difficulty of the metalinguistic task, there was some degree of agreement between participants on the substandard grammatical gender of the ten nouns. for the six non-neuter nouns, 7 to 10 out of 15 participants agreed on whether these were masculine or feminine; each non-neuter word was assigned to the common-gender category by four participants. for the four neuter words, 11 to 15 participants agreed that they were neuter. in sum, the metalinguistic instruction seems to have been difficult to process for several participants, particularly in the ‘information’ condition, in which no examples were provided. in the ‘strategy’ condition, most participants were able to consistently apply the gender identification strategy if they were provided with guiding questions. jan vanhove 410 figure 3 the proportion of neuter l2 german article choices (das) for each german noun. the nouns are split up by their l2 german gender and that of their l1 standard dutch cognate metalinguistic knowledge about the native language and language transfer in gender assignment 411 4.2. influence of the dutch neuter vs. common distinction in l2 german gender assignments before investigating the influence of the l1 substandard masculine/feminine distinction on l2 gender assignments, let us take a look at the influence of the neuter/non-neuter distinction. vanhove (2017) observed that both dutch and belgian speakers of dutch were substantially more likely to assign neuter gender to a german noun if it had a neuter cognate in dutch than when it had common dutch cognate. the present study replicates this finding: when the german noun had a neuter cognate in standard dutch, the participants picked the neuter article das in 86% of cases; when it had a common-gender cognate, das was picked in only 8% of cases. these numbers do not vary substantially between the three conditions. figure 3 shows the proportion of neuter article choices for each german noun and reveals a near-categorical distinction between nouns with neuter cognates and those with common cognates. as in vanhove’s (2017) study, the sole exception to this rule is boot, to which most participants correctly assigned the neuter article, perhaps owing to the 1981 film das boot. for the inferential analysis, the responses (neuter das vs. other) were fitted in a generalized (logistic) linear mixed-effects model with by-participant and by-item random intercepts, and the cognates’ standard dutch gender (neuter vs. common; coded as 0.5 and -0.5) as a fixed effect and a by-participant random slope. the estimated effect size for the fixed effect of standard dutch gender was 5.9 ± 0.57 (estimated β ± standard error, in log-odds). this is appreciably larger than the congruency effect in vanhove (2017; 3.2 ± 0.3 log-odds), which may be due to differences in actual l2 gender knowledge as well as the fact that the participants in the present study were shown the stimuli’s dutch cognates. 4.3. influence of metalinguistic instruction on l2 german gender assignments the expectation was that participants who were taught about the grammatical gender system of their substandard variety and how they could identify the substandard grammatical gender of dutch nouns would rely to a greater extent on this distinction than other participants. to test this hypothesis, the participants’ article choices for the 29 german nouns with common gender were coded as either congruent or incongruent with the gender of the corresponding dutch cognates in the participants’ substandard variety. if a participant claimed to use a substandard masculine article with the dutch cognate (e.g., ne knie ‘a knee’), then the choice for the masculine article der for german knie was considered crosslingually congruent and feminine die and neuter das incongruent; if the participant claimed not to use ne knie, then the choice for feminine die for german jan vanhove 412 knie was considered crosslingually congruent and masculine der and neuter das incongruent. (in principle, if participants claim not to use ne(n) with one of these dutch nouns, it may be neuter rather than feminine for them. specifically, bijl ‘axe’ is known to be neuter in some denderstreek dialects. when neuter das responses are disregarded, the overall congruency numbers are higher, but the comparisons between conditions are not affected.) overall, when the participants claimed to use a substandard masculine article with a dutch noun, they chose masculine der as the article for its german cognate in 50% of cases (371 of 746), feminine die in 42% (311/746), and neuter das in 9% (64/746). when the participants claimed not to use a substandard masculine article with a dutch noun, they chose masculine der as the article for its german cognate in 26% of cases (144 of 559), feminine die in 66% (370/559), and neuter das in 8% (45/559). in total, 57% of the german article choices were crosslingually congruent (741 out of 1305). the fact that there are more congruent than incongruent article choices overall may suggest some influence from substandard belgian dutch. vanhove (2017), in a post-hoc analysis in which a third of the participants were disregarded, found such a congruency effect between the belgian participants’ l1 use of masculine-marked noun phrases and their l2 gender assignments for the 8 cognate pairs for which l1 own use data were available (estimated β ± se: 0.9 ± 0.4 log-odds). the present study has own use data for all 29 stimuli, and a similar analysis ran on them (using the data from all three conditions) finds a comparable congruency effect (1.1 ± 0.35 log-odds; 0.74 ± 0.35 log-odds if only the same 8 stimuli are considered). this degree of l1 substandard–l2 congruency is markedly lower than that of l1 standard–l2 congruency, and while it may constitute some evidence for cross-linguistic influence, it is difficult to know without a (northern dutch) control group: in vanhove’s (2017) study, german gender assignments by dutch and belgian participants were correlated, even though the dutch participants were not familiar with substandard belgian dutch gender (his figure 7). this suggests that this fairly modest degree of crosslingual congruency in gender assignments need not necessarily be caused by transfer from the substandard (see jarvis, 2010, on the utility of comparing groups with different linguistic backgrounds in transfer research). more importantly for the present research question, 63% of the german article choices in the ‘strategy’ condition were crosslingually congruent (291 out of 464), compared to 52% in the ‘information’ condition (225 out of 435) and 55% in the ‘no information’ condition (225 out of 406). figure 4 shows the proportion of congruent gender assignments per participant and does not reveal a systematic difference between the three conditions. figure 5 shows the same data per item, similarly not revealing any systematic differences. this is also borne out by the inferential analysis, for which the data were fitted in a generalized metalinguistic knowledge about the native language and language transfer in gender assignment 413 (logistic) linear mixed-effects model with crosslingual congruity as the outcome, the metalinguistic instruction condition as a fixed effect, and by-participant and by-item random intercepts. according to this analysis, the estimated effect sizes (estimated β ± standard error) for the ‘information’ and ‘strategy’ condition relative to the ‘no information’ condition were -0.17 ± 0.36 and 0.43 ± 0.36 (in logodds), respectively. these effect sizes suggest a small, possibly negligible, effect of metalinguistic instruction on substandard influence in l2 gender assignments. figure 4 the proportion of l2 german article choices that were crosslingually congruent with the gender of the dutch cognate of the german noun in the participants’ substandard varieties per participant. data points from participants in the ‘information’ and ‘strategy’ whose responses during training were inconsistent with the metalinguistic instruction are shown as crosses 5. discussion i asked how metalinguistic knowledge about an l1 feature affects crosslinguistic influence with respect to this feature. the feature in question was the three-way adnominal gender system of substandard belgian dutch varieties, which is arguably similar to the three-gender system of german but which takes a back seat to standard dutch’s two-gender system in l2 german gender assignments by belgian speakers of dutch. to investigate the role of l1 metalinguistic knowledge in crosslinguistic influence, i experimentally induced variation between participants in terms of their knowledge of l1 substandard gender and found that this influenced substandard–l2 congruency in gender assignment weakly if at all. jan vanhove 414 figure 5 the proportion of l2 german article choices that were crosslingually congruent with the gender of the dutch cognate of the german noun in the participants’ substandard varieties, split up by the condition to which the participants were assigned. each panel contains the percentage of participants that claimed to use the l1 substandard masculine article ne(n) in conjunction with its cognate. for instance, only 9% claimed to use ne with zaal ‘hall,’ but 96% claimed to use ne with paal ‘pole’ in addition to the obvious conclusion that metalinguistic knowledge about l1 substandard gender is not a major factor in flemings’ l2 german gender assignments, an alternative explanation is that the metalinguistic instruction provided to the participants was not clear enough or that it was not practiced sufficiently. indeed, three out of 16 participants did not seem to have fully understood the instructions. however, even participants who had demonstrably understood the strategy for identifying the substandard gender of dutch nouns showed a considerably weaker reliance on substandard than on standard distinctions (see figure 4). this is all the more noteworthy in view of the great potential for expectancy effects in the data collection: directly after receiving metalinguistic instruction and training about their dialect, the participants were asked to assign gender to german nouns without being put under time pressure. metalinguistic knowledge about the native language and language transfer in gender assignment 415 had a stronger substandard–l2 congruency effect or metalinguistic knowledge effect been found, it would have been reasonable to counter that this reflected nothing but task demands and might not be observed in more natural contexts. despite a research context that arguably encouraged stronger effects, these were not observed. perhaps an experiment in which the metalinguistic strategy is practiced more extensively would show more favorable results, but for now, i submit that the obvious conclusion – that metalinguistic knowledge about l1 substandard gender is not a major factor in flemings’ l2 german gender assignments – is apt. but if metalinguistic knowledge is not a major factor, what is? one recent suggestion is that predominantly spoken varieties are dispreferred as source languages in crosslinguistic influence in the written mode (neuser, 2017). this suggestion is relevant inasmuch as substandard dutch is mostly (though not exclusively) confined to the spoken mode, whereas the gender assignments were tested in the written mode. on the hypothesis that substandard dutch is dispreferred as a source variety in the written mode, the prediction would be that it may exert a stronger influence in the spoken mode (e.g., in spoken word recognition). in addition to neuser’s suggestion, the two explanations discussed in the introduction, namely sociolinguistic markedness and psychotypology, still seem plausible. the problem with the latter explanation in particular lies in testing it. for the most part, researchers working on crosslinguistic influence, while cognizant of the importance of learners’ perceptions, can generate falsifiable predictions by equating psychotypology with actual language genealogy and typology in practical terms (ringbom, 2007, p. 8; similarly, see odlin, 2014, or research on rothman’s [2015] typological primacy model). when the potential source languages are closely related both to each other and to the target language, making such predictions becomes more difficult. descriptive work involving potential source languages that are highly similar overall but that differ with respect to their similarity to the target language in a specific feature may be useful in underscoring the role of factors in language transfer other than genealogy and typology proper. 6. conclusion this study did not find evidence that flemings’ metalinguistic knowledge about l1 substandard gender distinctions affects the likelihood with which they transfer these distinctions to a closely related l2, viz., german. future studies in a similar vein may wish to intensify the metalinguistic instruction and test the learners in the spoken modality (cf. neuser’s [2017] suggestion). taking a broader perspective, however, the question at hand is not so much why flemings do not rely strongly on their substandard gender distinctions when assigning gender to l2 german nouns. rather, it is to what degree popular explanations for the (near-)absence jan vanhove 416 of crosslinguistic influence can be put to the test. psychotypology in particular is a commonly cited factor in transfer research, but since it is nearly always equated with actual relatedness or typology in practice, it loses its predictive power when the languages in contact are very closely related. further descriptive studies on language transfer with closely related source languages as well as conceptual and methodological reflections on how psychotypology can best be operationalized seem in order. acknowledgements i thank raphael berthele, gunther de vogelaer, and marc meert for their help in the design, execution, and write-up of this study, as well as the ssllt reviewers for their comments. metalinguistic knowledge about the native language and language transfer in gender assignment 417 references alderson, j. c., clapham, c., & steel, d. 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(1953). languages in contact. new york, ny: linguistic circle of new york. 725 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (4). 2016. 725-731 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.4.9 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book review english as a lingua franca: perspectives and prospects. contributions in honour of barbara seidlhofer editors: marie-luise pitzl, ruth osimk-teasdale publisher: mouton de gruyter, 2016 isbn: 9781501511226 pages: 294 this extensive collection of essays provides a comprehensive overview from a broad range of perspectives of the developments that research into english as a lingua franca (elf) has seen over the last 15 years. the contributors to the volume are all renown scholars working in different areas in linguistics, who have gathered to honour one of the “founding mothers” of elf, barbara seidlhofer, to whom the volume is dedicated. both the leading and pioneering role that seidlhofer has played in researching elf, contributing to making it an acknowledged and increasingly rich field of study in (applied) linguistics, and her personal and professional charisma clearly transpire throughout the book, whose aim is to “explore the question how elf relates to other linguistic fields” (p. 1) from a variety of perspectives in linguistics, in a number of domains. the first section of the volume, “perspectives on the study of elf,” opens with the contributions of two other leading elf scholars, jennifer jenkins and anna mauranen. in “barbara seidlhofer: another ‘mother’s’ reflection” jenkins 726 traces the development of the field through four main cornerstones in seidlhofer’s work: the voice corpus, the connections between elf and its applications, its reconceptualization in the late 2000s and the creation of the journal of english as a lingua franca. mauranen’s “elf corpora: design, difficulties and triumphs” focuses on the development of voice and elfa (and new directions in digital communication), with concurrent reconceptualization of issues such as language communities/users and implications for language usage (and variability), both in elf and in english as a native language (enl). mauranen also discusses the issue of how different corpus methodological approaches have been applied to elf research, providing examples from findings. in “elf, adaptive variability and virtual language” henry widdowson highlights how elf studies have contributed to questioning the “myth” of standard english as the reference point in defining varieties. elf cannot any longer be taken as an absolute benchmark since, like other varieties, “it is the exemplification of certain encoding principles, one set of realizations that have become conventionally established within a particular community” (p. 33). different encodings of the virtual language, widdowson argues, are at work at all language levels, in elf in particular, depending on their pragmatic communicative value. alessia cogo’s “visibility and absence: ideologies of ‘diversity’ in belf” examines the complexity of elf communication in two business environments, a multinational banking corporation and a small it company. while in official, “front-stage” communication languages “need to be kept controlled, separated and employed as a one-language-at-a-time” (p. 46), back-stage everyday communication is characterised by diversity in translanguaging practices, which, together with professional expertise, contribute to effective communication. the chapter by maria grazia guido, “elf in responsible tourism: power relationships in unequal migration encounters,” provides a thought-provoking view on how, when used in unequal encounters in immigration contexts, elf is characterised by transfer processes that are not only typological and pragmatic, but also concern “native socio-cultural schemata” (p. 49), often leading to serious misunderstandings. conversation analysis applied to interactions between tourists playing the “‘robinson crusoe’” role of intercultural mediators for immigrants clearly shows that in such elf contexts cross-cultural misunderstandings are largely due to the imposition of “western” cultural and experiential schemata. beyza björkman looks at the development of “english-medium instruction and english as the lingua franca in higher education in central and northern europe,“ examining also its perceived impact on local languages. elf research shows that english in its lingua franca role constitutes an additional, rather than a “killer” language; future research ought to “acknowledge the significance of 727 sociolinguistic challenges brought on by a globalized higher education and consider the local setting at a finer level” (p. 64). in “language education policies and practice in (mediterranean) europe: an elf perspective” lucilla lopriore outlines the developments of european multilingual language education policies in the last two decades, setting them against the changes that have occurred in people’s linguistic and cultural profiles in europe due to migration flows. the author then argues that an elf-aware perspective in language planning is starting to appear in some european countries’ local educational documents, school curricula, textbooks, and in teacher education in particular. kumiko murata’s “elf research: its impact on language education in japan and east asia” illustrates education language policies for english in east asia at different educational levels, particularly in higher education with the promotion of internationalization programmes. despite a general (and political) awareness of english largely acting as a lingua franca, the reference point still remains “the ns-norm-based one” (p. 79), even in the adoption of an adapted version of the common european framework of reference (cefr); elf research could provide a great contribution to english medium instruction “to make students more globally-minded and operative as elf users” (p. 82). in “from elf communication to lingua franca pedagogy” kurt kohn, after outlining how elf can substantially contribute to developing a communicative orientation in elt, stresses the importance of elf-aware teacher education to foster a change in perspective, one that takes account of elf research findings and promotes a “capability for languaging” within a “social constructivist understanding of language learning” and “reconceptualization of standard english” (p. 90). telecollaboration projects can provide excellent opportunities for the development of communicative capability and, together with elf research, “for opening the windows of the foreign language classroom to the breeze of real life communication” (p. 94). andy kirkpatrick’s “standards and lingua francas: a personal account” is an engaging narrative of experiences in which the author found himself “torn” between multilingual repertoires and settings, and monolingual/cultural native standard benchmarks against which “competence” was judged. elf research and b. seidlhofer’s work have greatly contributed to showing how (multilingual) elf speakers communicate successfully in cross-cultural contexts, offering “a rigorously developed framework and way forward to push for a more equitable world” (p. 102). part ii, “the study of elf in a wider context,” comprises two sections. the first, “sociolinguistics, variation and elf,” opens with edgar w. schneider’s “world englishes and english as a lingua franca: relationships and interfaces,” where the historical and conceptual commonalities and differences between the two research areas—and between elf and efl/esl—are discussed. recent developments in 728 both we and elf, such as a communities—of—practice framework, a “processual, communicative perspective” and the “‘poststructuralist,’ ‘transnational attraction’ or ‘sociolinguistic of globalization’” approaches that “emphasise the creative availability of elements of english as a resource” (p. 110), make overlaps between the two areas significant; from this perspective, elf could be viewed as “a possible precursor to emerging wes and esl” (p. 111). in “elf and new-dialect formation” peter trudgill reflects on lingua franca phenomena and their linguistic consequences, from latin and greek to english spoken in the bonin islands, then focusing on multicultural london english, a “multiethnolect” emerging from “contact between african, caribbean, and south asian english, as well as cockney and jamaican creole,” second-language englishes and other languages (p. 119). herbert schendl’s “historical linguistics and elf” explores language contact in triglossic medieval england from a sociolinguistic perspective, drawing parallels with elf on the grounds of “creative freedom and independence” (p. 123). after reflecting on similar linguistic processes characterising latin (and english) as a lingua franca in multilingual contact situations, schendl points to historical linguistics and elf’s common interests in “questions of variability, change and in the endeavour of users of language to fully exploit the potentials of language, before, beyond, and outside the norms of standardisation” (p. 126). in “what’s in a word? reflections on labels such as ‘elf’ or ‘english’” nikolaus ritt points out how elf research has provided “fresh sets of data” (p. 131) for issues and fundamental concerns in linguistics as to concepts, theories and methods. the author discusses the problematicity of widely used labels (e.g., a language, a dialect, a variety) and discusses searle’s (1995) distinction between “brute facts” and “institutional facts” (attitudes and beliefs) with reference to languages and elf. in “complexity theory and elf: a matter of nonteleology” diane larsenfreeman examines taylor’s (2012) distinction between “creativity” and “innovation,” where the former “remains strictly within the bounds of the language system,” while the latter flouts it (p. 141); pitzl’s (2012) definitions of norm-following (synchronic variation) and norm-developing (diachronic perspective of change) creativity in elf are also set forward. language use, larsen-freeman argues, is an open system, and “comes from continuing dynamic adaptation to a specific present and ever-changing context”; thus, “l1 english speakers, english learners, and elf users can all contribute towards expanding the semiotic potential of english” (p. 143). evelien keizer’s “(morpho)syntactic transparency and elf” looks at the notion of transparency—“a one-to-one relation between meaning and form” (p. 148)—from a functional discourse grammar (fdg) perspective; fdg can be a useful tool for elf analysis as shown in the exemplifications from different language areas (third person singular present tense, phrasal agreement, sequence of tenses and raising). 729 in “conversation analysis and elf” jagdish kaur focuses on conversation analysis as an appropriate tool in the study of elf, since it “affords the researcher the means to uncover the sense making procedures that participants in elf encounters rely on to communicate” (p. 163). the focus on intersubjectivity, the fine-grained analysis tools and the “view of talk as a practical social accomplishment” (p. 163) make conversation analysis a valuable tool to reveal the strategies used by elf speakers in cooperative interaction, as shown in elf literature. section b, “multilingual/-cultural perspectives and elf”, opens with hua zhu’s “intercultural communication and elf,” where commonalities and points of convergence with elf research are examined: elf “delinking the native speaker norm and language use is not only liberating but also conducive in understanding problems in intercultural communication” (p. 173); the study of mutual understanding, rather than non-understanding, in elf encounters, the complexity of the notions of culture in intercultural elf communication, and the central role of negotiation constitute areas of mutual concern for the two fields. in “multilingual identity and elf” claire kramsch highlights how being multilingual with elf today is connected to projections into the “wide world”: in her words, “the attraction of wide open spaces – geographical spaces, cyberspaces, the desire to conquer them and to negotiate ways of populating them” (p. 181). referring to french as a lingua franca, kramsch shows how “common ways of conceptualizing issues” (p. 184) should be negotiated in order to ensure understanding through a lingua franca in multilingual/cultural settings. juliane house’s “elf and translation” discusses the growing importance of translation in the global economy for business, legislation, the international press, tourism and advertising, as well as internet-based communication. despite translations into english being increasingly carried out by elf users, the widespread assumption is that “translators should adhere to the expectations of native-english readers, rather than those of readers using elf” (pp. 191-192). further research, as well as pedagogic actions in the field, could help legitimize elf translation practices. in “multi, pluri, trans. . . and elf: lingualisms, languaging and the current lingua franca concept” cornelia hülmbauer explores how elf, allowing communication at an international level, and the increasing presence of different languages in superdiversity, are not in contradiction with each other. as elf research has shown, “what links elf to multilingualism is not only shared communicative contexts, but also structural patterns and strategic processes that find parallels in both phenomena” (p. 197), whereby speakers draw on their multilingual repertories in (trans)languaging processes. 730 section c, “ policy, pedagogy and elf” opens with guy cook’s “cosmopolitan combat: politics, teaching and interpreting.” starting with reflections on current reactionary positions on diversity and “otherness” across europe, cook draws a thought-provoking parallel with the monolingual orientation characterising elt, despite the fact that “the presence of more than one language is inherent in the language classroom” (p. 210). cook argues that translation practices and bilingual activities should find a place in language teaching, in line with the reality of elf as “a moral and political as well as an academic concept” (p. 214). in “learner language in elf and sla” elaine tarone sets the focus on communicative competence, forcibly arguing that the priority given to accuracy in language pedagogy “has been damaging to second-language learners’ development of communicative competence in general and strategic competence in particular” (p. 218). through the analysis of oral tasks by two esl language learners tarone calls for a reconsideration of accuracy as “the sole criterion for success” in pedagogic practices and materials. in “language testing and elf: making the connection” tim mcnamara and elana shohamy critically examine the challenges that elf—and “real” language use—raise for assessment and testing, highlighting several questions that need to be addressed, such as elf and translanguaging/biand multi-lingual/multi-modal communication, competences, elf and the overt use of communication strategies, as well as the impact these issues and elf can have on testing practices. in “content and language integrated learning and elf” christiane daltonpuffer and ute smit explore the implementation of clil-based programmes over the last two decades, focusing particularly on content and english integrated learning (ceil) in austria. four concerns are then discussed: conceptual relations between elf, efl and esp, functions of english in ceil from an etic perspective, relevance of english for students from an emic perspective and consequences for educational language policies. the authors conclude that the dominance of english in clil/ceil reflects its role as a lingua franca, also in out-of-school contexts, and should thus be treated in its unicity, differently from other foreign languages. the chapter “closing the gender gap: the role of english” by janina bruttgriffler and sumi kim discusses how english, in its “macroacquisition” dimension (brutt-griffler, 2002), can create spaces “to break away from gender conventions and shape different subjectivity and new symbolic possibilities” (p. 245) for asian female students. their findings show that learning english can create new and more egalitarian perspectives, particularly for female students, as to their societal roles in family, work and education. joseph lo bianco in “the seidlhofer effect: gaining traction for elf in language planning and educational change” discusses the implications that elf research, and seidlhofer’s pioneering work, can have for language policy. elf studies 731 have largely shown that, rather than a deficient realization by non-native language learners, elf constitutes a “meaning-making resource for polyglot individuals in multilingual settings which bolsters communication” (p. 266), “an additive resource used by multilinguals to expand their communication possibilities” (p. 269). it would be essential to push the “seidlhofer effect” even further, so that key ideas and challenges that elf poses for conceptualizations of language(s) can impact on public policy formulation. in the “afterword: expanding frontiers: prospects on the creativity of elf” marie-luise pitzl key-points the many issues explored in the volume, such as creativity in elf, language variation, multilingualism, and implications for language pedagogy. most importantly, following seidlhofer’s outstanding work in the field, this volume shows how “elf research has expanded (and continues to expand) conceptual frontiers in that it prompts us to go beyond ‘normal’ and established categories in linguistics” (p. 276). the bibliography of barbara seidlhofer’s works that closes the volume further testifies to her dedication to the exploration of elf over almost two decades, which has paved the way for research all over the world. the volume, with the variety of views it provides, thus represents a valuable tool both in the comprehensive overview of the significant developments of elf research, and in the new perspectives it offers for researchers and students wishing to approach this vibrant research area. reviewed by paola vettorel university of verona, italy paola.vettorel@univr.it references brutt-griffler, j. (2002). world english: a study of its developments. clevedon: multilingual matters. pitzl, m.-l. (2012). creativity meets convention: idiom variation and re-metaphorization in elf. journal of english as a lingua franca, 1(1), 27-55. searle, j. r. (1995). the construction of social reality. new york: free press. taylor, j. r. (2012). the mental corpus: how language is represented in the mind. oxford: oxford university press. 45 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (1). 2020. 45-65 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.1.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt are foreign language learners’ enjoyment and anxiety specific to the teacher? an investigation into the dynamics of learners’ classroom emotions jean-marc dewaele birkbeck, university of london, uk https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8480-0977 j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk livia dewaele university of chicago, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6795-5299 liviadewaele@aol.com abstract previous research has considered fluctuations in students’ foreign language enjoyment (fle) and foreign language classroom anxiety (flca) over months or years (dewaele & macintyre, 2014, 2016). however, there has been no investigation of the effect of the teacher on these emotions at a single point in time. in this study, we investigate the question whether fl learners experience similar levels of fle and flca in the same language if they have two different teachers. participants were 40 london-based secondary school students studying modern languages with one main teacher and one second teacher. statistical analysis revealed that while flca was constant with both teachers, fle was significantly higher with the main teacher. predictors of fle such as attitudes towards the teacher, the teacher’s frequency of use of the target language in class and unpredictability were also significantly more positive for the main teacher. item-level analysis revealed that the teacher creating a positive emotional atmosphere in class contributed to the higher fle score. items that reflected more stable personal and group characteristics varied less jean-marc dewaele, livia dewaele 46 between the two teachers. the findings suggest that fle is more teacher-dependent than flca, which is more stable across teachers. keywords: foreign language enjoyment; foreign language classroom anxiety; teachers 1. introduction in their introductions to special issues on emotions in second language acquisition (sla), dewaele and li (2018, 2020) celebrated the advent of a more holistic approach of learner emotions, triggered by positive psychology, the empirical study of how people thrive and flourish (macintyre, gregersen, & mercer, 2016, 2019). positive psychology rejects the palliative approach in general psychology, with its focus on abnormalities, disorders, mental illness, and the development of ways to reduce pain and learn to cope with negative experiences, in favor of the development of tools to build positive emotions, foster greater engagement, and boost the appreciation of meaning in life and its activities (macintyre & gregersen, 2012; macintyre, gregersen, & mercer, 2016; macintyre & mercer, 2014). macintyre et al. (2019) point out that the emergence of positive psychology in applied linguistics fits in with “the zeitgeist of general education which now sees the promotion of well-being as both desirable and necessary” (p. 9). the emergence of positive psychology in sla has caused a move away from an exclusive focus on negative emotions, such as foreign language classroom anxiety (flca), in favor of a broader range of learner emotions, including positive emotions, such as foreign language enjoyment (fle) (dewaele, chen, padilla, & lake, 2019). the first study to juxtapose flca and fle in the same research design was the study by dewaele and macintyre (2014). it was based on quantitative and qualitative data from 1746 fl learners of all ages and from all over the world. it showed that levels of fle and flca that participants reported experiencing in their foreign language (fl) classes were linked to a range of learner-internal and learner-external variables. qualitative data indicated that while fle and flca were relatively stable over time, they could occasionally peak, or drop, depending on the task at hand or comments from the teacher and peers. speaking in front of peers was frequently mentioned as both highly anxiety-provoking and enjoyable. further research focused on the exact effect that learner-internal and learner-external variables had on fle and flca (dewaele & macintyre, 2019; dewaele, witney, saito, & dewaele, 2018). fle in particular seems to be linked more strongly to the teacher, while flca seems to be less context-dependent. the research design of the current study, which draws on a are foreign language learners’ enjoyment and anxiety specific to the teacher? an investigation into. . . 47 subsample of the participants in dewaele et al. (2018), will allow us to find out to what extent fle and flca are linked to individual teachers among learners who had two teachers for the same fl. it will also allow us to determine just how teacher-specific fle and flca are in the specific context of two british schools. 2. literature review 2.1. foreign language classroom anxiety (flca): from 1986 to today horwitz, horwitz, and cope’s (1986) study heralded a new era in research on flca, the so-called specialized approach (macintyre, 2017). horwitz et al. (1986) used feedback from foreign language (fl) learners about triggers in their fl classes that made them anxious, which included the fear of not doing well on tests, of speaking up in public, and the possible negative reactions by peers and teachers. all these sources of fl anxiety coalesce into a “conceptually distinct variable in fl learning” (p. 125), namely flca, which was defined as “a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors related to classroom learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process” (horwitz et al., 1986, p. 128). horwitz later insisted that flca is “multi-faceted” (2010, p. 145). indeed, anxious learners have the tendency to become anxious in specific situations: “when individuals experience language anxiety, they have the trait of feeling state anxiety when participating in language learning and/or use” (italics in original, horwitz, 2017, p. 33). horwitz adds that anxiety may simply emerge from thinking about fl situations. many applied linguists have explored language anxiety since 1986, seeking to identify its relatively stable sources as well as its relationship to student performance and achievement (see dewaele, 2017; horwitz, 2010). researchers who focused on instructed learning contexts have investigated learners’ flca within classrooms but there has also been research on anxiety experienced outside the classroom where the social stakes are higher (dewaele, petrides, & furnham, 2008; ross & rivers, 2018). sevinç and dewaele (2018), for example, found that turkish immigrants in the netherlands suffer from heritage language anxiety in interactions with members of the turkish community and from majority language anxiety in interactions with dutch speakers, fearing in both cases that disfluencies or errors would mark them as outsiders. recently researchers have become increasingly interested in the dynamic nature of anxiety over different time frames, ranging from months or years, to seconds in the idiodynamic approach (boudreau, macintyre, & dewaele, 2018; gregersen, macintyre, & meza, 2014). gregersen et al. (2014) investigated variation in heart rate and ratings of state language anxiety over a three-minute period using an idiodynamic approach. participants were three highand three jean-marc dewaele, livia dewaele 48 low-anxiety american students who were enrolled in a spanish class and had to give a short oral presentation in front of their peers. an analysis of the values showed that all participants spent some time in the high anxiety zone and that most also had moments in the low anxiety zone. high anxiety participants reported in subsequent interviews that word searches caused spikes in anxiety while low anxiety participants used strategies to mitigate word retrieval problems. even during tasks that the learner appreciates, anxiety can be triggered by some innocuous obstacle, which sets off a chain reaction, the so-called self-exacerbating syndrome (jussim & eccles, 1995). the learner may feel a sudden pang of anxiety and begin to worry that peers or teacher will notice it, leading to even more anxiety. in other words, learners may be more or less prone to experiencing anxiety, but all will experience it momentarily and it will dissipate at different rates. dewaele (2002) argued that flca is not a stable psychological dimension, as it varies across the fls at the same point in time. his 100 flemish students were found to report significantly more flca in their second language (l2) french than in their third language (l3) english, and that flca in french (but not in english) was linked to students’ social class and the political tensions between language communities in belgium. an individual’s anxiety is thus linked to triggers that arise in the micro-context (i.e., a specific sentence or task), in the meso-context (i.e., anxiety about reactions of teachers or peers in the classroom or in some group) and in the macro-context (i.e., political and historical context). one could therefore argue that anxiety is at the confluence of both learner-internal variables and learner-external variables (dewaele, 2017). while the number of learner-internal variables having an effect on anxiety could be described as being more or less finite, the number of external variables is much larger and possible interactions between micro-, mesoand macro-levels push potential causes towards infinity. of course, by controlling a number of crucial learner-external variables, such as age and educational context, it might be easier to judge the effect of a number of external variables such as the teacher, and teacher practices, combined with learnerinternal variables (cf. dewaele et al., 2018; dewaele, magdalena franco & saito, 2019; saito, dewaele, abe & in’nami, 2018). 2.2. positive psychology and the broadening of the emotional spectrum in fl research macintyre and gregersen (2012) pointed to the crucial role of all emotions in the fl classroom, not just the negative ones. referring to positive psychology, they argued that effects of positive emotions go beyond pleasant feelings since they enhance learners’ ability to notice things in a classroom environment and strengthen their awareness of language input. students in a positive emotional state are better able to absorb the fl. positive emotions also help counteract are foreign language learners’ enjoyment and anxiety specific to the teacher? an investigation into. . . 49 the damage caused by negative emotions. macintyre and gregersen (2012) explained that students who are consumed by negative emotions are more likely to have a narrow focus, which restricts the intake of language input, an idea at the basis of krashen’s (1981) affective filter hypothesis. positive emotions contribute to students’ longer-term resiliency and hardiness. a final benefit of positive emotion in the classroom, according to macintyre and gregersen (2012), is that it allows learners to feel safe as they explore the fl and play with it, boosting social cohesion with their peers as they do so. dewaele and macintyre (2014) developed a study design that allowed them to consider variation in flca and fle simultaneously. they devised a fle scale, developing and adapting the interest/enjoyment subscale from ryan, connell, and plant (1990) to a fl context. the new fle scale consisted of 21 items with likert-scale ratings about the emotions towards the fl learning, the peers and the teacher. it was complemented with a flca scale of 8 items extracted from horwitz et al. (1986). fle was defined as “a complex emotion, capturing interacting dimensions of challenge and perceived ability” (dewaele & macintyre, 2016, p. 216). a total of 1746 fl learners from around the world participated. fle was found to be moderately negatively correlated with flca (r = -.36). statistical analyses allowed the identification of learner-internal and externalvariables that had a significant relationship with levels of fle and flca: participants who already mastered several languages, who had reached a higher level in the fl, who felt more proficient than their peers, who had reached a higher level of education and who were older reported significantly more fle and significantly lower levels of flca. in addition, those studying more fls also scored significantly higher on fle, where flca was not associated with studying more fls. (dewaele & macintyre, 2016. p. 262) an analysis of qualitative feedback from 1076 participants about enjoyable episodes in the fl class showed that certain classroom activities boosted learners’ levels of fle. these were typically unusual activities that gave students a degree of autonomy. additionally, teachers were typically central in the stories because their attitude, humor, organization, respect, and praise for outstanding performance were frequently mentioned. based on these findings, dewaele (2015) argued that teachers need to have an emotional thermostat, allowing them to keep their students in an optimally positive emotional mood. 2.3. the effect of the teacher on fle and flca shifting the focus to the effect of teacher-centered variables, dewaele et al. (2018) collected data from 189 secondary school fl learners in london, uk. a moderate jean-marc dewaele, livia dewaele 50 negative correlation emerged between fle and flca (r = -.194). predictors of fle and flca turned out to be very different: higher levels of fle were linked to more positive attitudes toward the fl (eta2 = .29), the fl teacher (eta2 = .27), frequent use of the fl by the teacher (eta2 = .12), the amount of time students spent speaking the fl (eta2 = .08), and teacher unpredictability (eta2 = .06). levels of flca were linked to being more advanced in the fl (eta2 = .17), higher relative standing among peers in the fl (eta2 = .08), and positive attitudes toward the fl (eta2 = .07). pursuing this avenue of research, dewaele et al. (2019) collected data from 210 former and current spanish efl learners. some teacher characteristics (i.e., teacher’s friendliness and foreign accent) predicted close to 20% of variance in fle but others (i.e., strictness, fl use in class and teacher age) explained only 8% of variance in flca. in a mixed-methods study on the nature of fle and flca and the role of classroom-specific and psychological predictors, dewaele and macintyre (2019) collected feedback from 750 fl learners from around the world. statistical analyses showed that fle was mostly predicted by attitudes towards the teacher (24% of variance) as well as the personality trait of cultural empathy (8% of variance) while flca was mostly predicted by the personality trait of emotional stability (30% of variance), followed by relative standing (9% of variance) and by social initiative (2.4% of variance). analysis of participants’ own attribution of their fle and flca confirmed the statistical findings as fle was most often attributed to the teacher while flca experiences were most frequently linked to the self. the strong effect of the teacher on fle also emerged in the chinese efl context (e.g., li et al., 2018; li et al., 2019; jiang & dewaele, 2019; jin & zhang, 2018) and in the kazakh context with turkish as a target language (dewaele et al., 2019) 2.4. time scales for variation in fle and flca boudreau, macintyre, and dewaele (2018) used the idiodynamic approach to examine the highly unstable relationship between fle and flca in fl speech, on a very short timescale. ten anglo-canadian students completed oral tasks in their french l2 after which they viewed a video recording of their performance and provided per second measurements of their fle and flca. they were then interviewed about the reasons for fluctuations in their fle and flca. correlation analyses of fle and flca values of the same participant revealed highly dynamic patterns veering from positive to negative and then to zero. in other words, sometimes high fle corresponded with low flca, but a few seconds later the relationship could shift completely and unpredictably. feedback from participants suggested that a variety of causes were linked to the fluctuations, ranging from difficulties in vocabulary searches, to using strategies to control flca, to enjoyment in discussing a particular topic. are foreign language learners’ enjoyment and anxiety specific to the teacher? an investigation into. . . 51 given the difficulty of following a cohort of fl learners through their whole secondary education, dewaele and dewaele (2017) adopted a pseudo-longitudinal design1 to look at variation in fle and flca over time. participants were the same 189 london-based fl learners that were used in dewaele et al. (2018). mean levels of fle, flca and their relationships with independent variables were calculated for three age groups of students within the same two london schools. a comparison of the 12-13 year olds (age group 1), 14-15 year olds (age group 2) and 16-18 year olds (age group 3) showed that flca did not change over time, and that fle was the highest for age group 3, with a dip for age group 2. multiple regression analyses revealed that different independent variables predicted fle and flca in the three age groups. in age group 1, fle was linked to relative standing in the group of peers (28% of variance) and flca to the amount of fl knowledge already acquired (25% of variance), with the effect sizes being moderate. in age group 2, attitude towards the fl was the strongest predictor of fle (30% of variance), followed by attitude towards the teacher, teacher predictability (a negative predictor) and the number of languages in the learner’s repertoire, explaining all together a total of 44.5% of variance (large effect sizes). relative standing in the group of peers and fl knowledge predicted less than half the amount of variance in flca (17% and 3% respectively, which are medium effect sizes). in age group 3, attitude towards the teacher was the only predictor of fle (explaining 44.5%, a large effect size), while relative standing in the group (a negative predictor) and teacher predictability were the stronger predictors of flca (explaining 21% and 8% of variance respectively, a medium effect size) (dewaele & dewaele, 2017, p. 18). the authors thus concluded that despite relatively modest changes in mean levels of fle and the lack of change in flca, “various psychological and sociobiographical variables were in a tug of war over pupils’ emotions” (p. 20). in other words, the causes of fle and flca are highly dynamic and change over time. adopting a dynamic systems theory approach, dewaele and pavelescu (2019) collected qualitative data from two romanian fl learners during one school semester to investigate how variation in the learners’ fle and flca affected their willingness to communicate (wtc) in english. material included lesson observations, a written task and semi-structured interviews that probed into the learners’ fle and flca when they started learning the language. the learners’ levels of fle and flca were found to fluctuate sharply in the short term and more slowly over the longer term, affecting their wtc. the fluctuations in fle and flca could be attributed to the learners’ previous experience with the fl, 1 in pseudo-longitudinal research “samples of learner language are collected from groups of learners of different proficiency levels at a single point in time. a longitudinal picture can then be constructed by comparing the devices used by the different groups according to their proficiency” (ellis & barkhuizen, 2005, p. 97). jean-marc dewaele, livia dewaele 52 their use of the fl outside of the classroom, their personality, but also to classroom-specific factors, such as the lack of interest in a film or conversation topic, a dislike for a replacement teacher or the seating arrangement in the classroom. what emerges from the literature review is that a well-established interest in the sources of flca has expanded to include positive emotions such as fle. fle and flca have been shown to be independent dimensions linked to different learnerinternal and learner-external variables. teachers have a much stronger effect on their students’ fle than on their flca. no study so far has, to our knowledge, investigated whether learners who have two different teachers for the same fl might experience similar levels of fle and flca with both. this is the aim of the present study, namely an investigation into the teacher-specificity of fle and flca. 3. the study 3.1. research questions 1. are learners’ fle and flca similar in the classes of two different teachers teaching the same fl to the same class? 2. are there differences in the teacher-related predictor variables for fle identified in dewaele et al. (2018) between the two teachers (i.e., attitude toward the teacher, frequency of use of the fl by the teacher, amount of time students spent speaking the fl and teacher unpredictability)? 3. what does an item-level analysis of the fle scale reveal about reasons behind significant differences? 3.2. participants and demographics the present sample is a subsample of 40 high school students (17 females, 23 males) extracted from the full sample of 189 participants in dewaele et al. (2018). they were selected because they reported having two fl teachers for the same fl, compared to the other 149 who had just one teacher for the fl. participants’ age ranged from 13 to 18 (m = 16.6, sd = 1.3). they came from two schools in greater london: 17 students were from dame alice owen’s, a selective state school in potters bar, and 23 students were from westminster school, a private school in central london, which is selective and fee-paying. both schools are amongst the top performing schools in the uk.2 most participants 2 dame alice owen’s school reported that 81% of all grades were awarded a* b at a-level in 2015 (http://www.damealiceowens.herts.sch.uk/sixth_form/results.html). westminster school reported that 97% of all grades were awarded a* b at a-level in 2015. are foreign language learners’ enjoyment and anxiety specific to the teacher? an investigation into. . . 53 were studying french as a fl (n = 24), while the others were studying spanish (n = 8), german (n = 8), with smaller numbers studying hindi, italian, japanese, mandarin, polish, portuguese, and russian. a large majority of participants were british (n = 30) and had english as an l1 (n = 38). other l1s (often acquired simultaneously from birth) included bulgarian, cantonese, dutch, farsi, french, hungarian, punjabi and russian. the sample consisted of one self-reported bilingual (2.5%), 10 trilinguals (25%), 10 quadrilinguals (25%), 12 pentalinguals (30%), and 5 sextalinguals (12.5%). the two remaining participants reported knowledge of 7 and 8 languages respectively. a fifth of participants (n = 8 or 20%) reported growing up with more than one language from birth. students were asked to rate themselves compared to their fl learning peers, ranging from far below average, below average, average, above average and far above average. only 3 students rated themselves as below average (7.5%), with higher numbers choosing average (n = 10, 25%), above average (n = 20, 50%) and far above average (n = 7, 17.5%). these ratings were non-significantly positively correlated with self-reported results on their last major fl test (r (39) = .31, p = .053). these test scores ranged from 69% to 100%, with the mean of 89.5% (sd = 7.5). in other words, these were very good fl students. they reported very positive attitudes toward their fl (m = 4.6, sd = .78) on a 5-point likert-scale. they were also asked to describe themselves as fl learners: low intermediate (n = 3, 7.5%), intermediate (n = 11, 27.5%), high intermediate (n = 17, 42.5%), advanced (n = 9, 22.5%). 3.3. instrument the questionnaire started with a demographics section from which the above information was retrieved. following this, participants were asked whether they had just one or two fl teachers for their first foreign language. these teachers did not have the same status, as the more senior teacher typically had more contact time with the students. although no reference was made in the questionnaire to the status of the teacher, participants automatically labelled the teacher with whom they spent most time as main teacher and the other teacher as second teacher. no information was collected about how many people were included in both groups. one item enquired about the frequency of use of the fl in class by the main teacher and the second teacher (ranging from “hardly ever” – 1, “not very often” – 2, “sometimes” – 3, “usually” – 4, and “all the time” – 5). the next four questions inquired about the average proportion of time spent on writing, reading, listening and speaking by the main teacher and the second teacher: the options ranged from 0-10% (1) to 90-100% of the time (10). the following question asked how predictable the classes were with the main teacher and the second teacher (“very predictable” – 1, “predictable” – 2, “variable” – 3, “not predictable” jean-marc dewaele, livia dewaele 54 – 4, “very unpredictable” – 5). attitudes towards the main teacher and the second teacher were collected using a 5-point likert scale (ranging from “very unfavorable” – 1, “unfavorable” – 2, “neutral” – 3, “favorable” – 4, to “very favorable” – 5). students then completed 10 items, which were extracted from the fle questionnaire (see table 2), and reflected on the original structure of the fle scale (dewaele & macintyre, 2014), about how much enjoyment they experienced overall in the classes of the main teacher and the second teacher. they were based on standard 5-point likert scales with the anchors “absolutely disagree” = 1, “disagree” = 2, “neither agree nor disagree” = 3, “agree” = 4, and “strongly agree” = 5. all the items were positively phrased. the analysis revealed high internal consistency reliability for the main teacher (cronbach’s alpha = .91) and the second teacher (cronbach’s alpha = .92). another 8 items were extracted from the flcas and reflected physical symptoms of anxiety, nervousness and lack of confidence (horwitz et al., 1986) and were used in macintyre (1992). they also captured the reliability of the original scale (dewaele & macintyre, 2014). two flca items were phrased to indicate low anxiety and six were phrased to indicate high anxiety. the low anxiety items were reversecoded so that high scores reflected high anxiety for all items on this measure. scale analysis revealed high internal consistency for the main teacher (cronbach’s alpha = .90) and the second teacher (cronbach’s alpha = .92) (see the list of items in the appendix). botes, dewaele and greiff (2020) used exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis of the fle and the flca items and found good fit statistics. a one-sample kolmorogov-smirnov test revealed that the normality of distribution of the items was narrowly rejected for three out of the four dependent variables (fle main teacher: ks = .18, p < .002; fle second teacher: ks = .12, p = .18; flca main teacher: ks = .14, p < .034; flca second teacher: ks = .15, p < .026). a look at the distribution shows a skew towards higher values for fle and lower values for flca. we ran both non-parametric and parametric statistics and found very similar results (available from the corresponding author). we opted for the more powerful parametric statistics, taking into account that t-tests tolerate moderate violations to their normality assumption (rosenkrantz, 2008, p. 478). the online questionnaire was completely anonymous since no names of participants nor their teachers were collected. students filled out the questionnaire once and were asked to reflect on their fl classes since the start of the academic year (approximately 6 months). the research design and questionnaire obtained approval from the ethics committee of the first author’s institution, the headmasters of westminster school and dame alice owen’s school, as well as the fl teachers at both institutions. consent was obtained in two stages. parents of about 600 students were informed that their children would be contacted to participate in a survey on affective variables in the foreign language are foreign language learners’ enjoyment and anxiety specific to the teacher? an investigation into. . . 55 classroom. they were invited to contact the researcher to obtain extra information. some parents did so and none opted out of the survey. next, students were invited by their school to participate in the study, and their individual consent was obtained at the start of the survey. the questionnaire was posted online using googledocs and remained accessible for a month. 3.4. results a first series of paired t-tests showed that fle was significantly higher with the main teacher than with the second teacher (t(39) = 3.01, p < .005), with cohen’s d = .360, which approaches a small effect size (see plonsky & oswald, 2014). no differences emerged in flca in the classes of the main teacher and the second teacher (t(39) = .61, p = .55, cohen’s d = .04) (see figure 1). figure 1 mean scores (and sd) for fle and flca with the main teacher and the second teacher a second series of paired t-tests revealed that the main teacher scored significantly higher than the second teacher on three out of the four predictor variables for fle identified in dewaele et al. (2018) (see table 1 and figure 2). the effect size is situated between small and medium. table 1 fle predictor variables ordered following the size of the difference between the main teacher and the second teacher variable t p cohen’s d teacher’s frequency of fl use in class 3.21 .003 .575 attitude towards teacher 3.37 .003 .568 teacher’s predictability -2.21 .033 .464 learner proportion of time speaking 1.01 .323 .208 1 1,5 2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 fle flca main teacher second teacher jean-marc dewaele, livia dewaele 56 figure 2 mean scores (and sd) of the dependent variables where the difference between the main teacher and the second teacher was significant in order to answer the final research question, paired t-tests were run for the 10 items of the fle scale in order to identify the ones where the difference between the main teacher and the second teacher were strongest (see table 2). differences were significant for five items (see figure 3), with small effect sizes (plonsky & oswald, 2014). table 2 fle items ordered following the size of the difference between the main teacher and the second teacher item t p cohen’s d i’m not bored 3.00 .005 .516 i enjoy it 2.90 .006 .492 it’s fun 2.52 .016 .430 it’s a positive environment 2.43 .020 .313 we laugh a lot 2.08 .044 .293 i’m proud of my accomplishments 1.60 .118 .211 it’s cool to know fl 1.36 .183 .105 i’m a worthy member of group 0.96 .342 .131 there is a good atmosphere 0.72 .474 .080 peers are nice 0.00 1.000 0 1 2 3 4 5 teacher's frequency of fl use attitude towards teacher teacher's predictability main teacher second teacher are foreign language learners’ enjoyment and anxiety specific to the teacher? an investigation into. . . 57 figure 3 mean scores (and sd) of fle items where the difference between the main teacher and the second teacher was significant five items were responsible for the higher fle score with the main teacher (see table 2). not surprisingly, they related to the positive emotional atmosphere that the teacher could create where students were excited, enjoyed the class, had fun and shared humor. participants felt that their second teacher did not create an equally positive emotional atmosphere. the five items that did not show significant differences were more independent of the classroom interactions and reflected more stable characteristics such as pride in accomplishments in the fl, seeing the mastery of a fl as something cool, enjoying group membership and good relations with nice peers. 4. discussion the answer to the first question was unexpected, as levels of fle were significantly higher with the main teacher than with the second teacher, while levels of flca remained similar with both teachers. this confirms previous research showing that variation in fle is strongly related to the teacher (dewaele et al., 2018, 2019; jiang & dewaele, 2020; li et al., 2018, 2019), whereas flca is more strongly predicted by learner-internal variables (dewaele & macintyre, 2019). thus, flca is slightly more trait-like whereas fle is more state-like. this finding has important pedagogical implications because it means that teachers have to work hard to create the optimal emotional climate in their classrooms to allow learners to enjoy the class, and not all teachers manage to do that (li et al., 2018, 2019). the fact that no difference in learners’ flca emerged between the two teachers confirms previous findings that teacher characteristics are weak predictors of flca (dewaele et al., 2019; dewaele & macintyre, 2019). considering the finding that 1 1,5 2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 5 not bored enjoy it fun positive environment laugh a lot teacher 1 teacher 2 jean-marc dewaele, livia dewaele 58 levels of fle were higher with the main teacher than with the second teacher, it is hardly surprising that our participants’ attitudes towards their main teacher were significantly more positive than towards the second teacher. given that the main teacher is typically the more experienced teacher, he or she may be better equipped to create enjoyable lessons than his or her less experienced colleagues. the second research question focused on differences in students’ ratings of teacher-related predictor variables for fle for their two teachers (i.e., attitude toward the teacher, frequency of use of the fl by the teacher, and the amount of time students spent speaking the fl and teacher predictability). significant differences emerged for three out of the four predictor variables for fle. students had significantly more positive attitudes towards their main teacher. they also reported that the main teacher used the fl more frequently in class and was less predictable than the second teacher. this finding strengthens the suggestion made previously about the main teacher eliciting more fle among learners because they had more teaching experience. frequent use of the fl in class suggests a high level of expertise in the fl and confidence in using it in class. lower predictability suggests that the teacher dares to deviate from the rigid guidelines on what and how to teach, and strives to be more creative (see dewaele, gkonou, & mercer, 2018). it is likely that the self-selected participants in the survey were good fl learners, in two elite schools, who particularly enjoyed the challenge of communicating in the fl and who appreciated not being exposed to the same routines in every class. it can be assumed that these two factors contributed to a favorable attitude towards the teacher, which in turn fed into the learners’ fle. the third research question focused on the analysis of 10 individual items in the fle scale in order to gain a better understanding about the specific reasons behind the significant differences in fle between the main teacher and the second teacher. the values of half of the items were significantly higher with the main teacher than with the second teacher (see table 2). what these items had in common was that they directly reflected how students felt in a specific classroom (e.g., excitement, enjoyment, fun, shared humor and a positive sense of community). this sits well with the observation in dewaele and macintyre (2014) that specific classroom activities, expertly led by the teacher, figured most frequently in participants’ descriptions of a highly enjoyable episode in their fl classroom. similar findings emerged in the chinese efl context (e.g., li et al., 2018, 2019). the fle items that varied less between the main teacher and the second teacher were less linked to what happened in the classroom as they reflected longer-term, more stable characteristics of learners and the group. pride, attitudes toward fl learning, toward the group membership and the peers are less likely to vary much with a different teacher. the current study is not without limitations. participant self-selection means that participants were more likely to be enthusiastic fl students, a common are foreign language learners’ enjoyment and anxiety specific to the teacher? an investigation into. . . 59 problem in applied linguistics research (dewaele, 2018). another limitation is linked to the delicate nature of assessing teacher “quality.” approval of our ethics application, and obtaining the agreement of the two schools, depended on full and total anonymity of participants and their teachers. this meant that we were incapable of collecting the names of the teachers, which would have allowed more precise analyses rather than the rather generic categories of “main teacher” and “second teacher”. we could have established whether the same students experienced more or less fle and flca with the main teacher than with the second teacher. this limitation might also be a strength, as having had teacher names might have led to too much fragmentation within an already small sample and would have complicated statistical analyses. qualitative data would also have offered the possibility of getting a better insight into the causes of fle and flca with various teachers. however, this would have led to a violation of the conditions for ethics approval by the research institution and by the schools, as teacher names would have likely cropped up during interviews or open questions. 5. conclusion the originality of the present study lies in the analysis of data on classroom emotions from the same cohort of learners studying the same set of foreign languages with two different teachers. any variation in fle and flca could hence be attributed to the teacher. the finding that flca remained similar with both teachers but that fle was higher with the main teacher confirmed previous work on the nature of these two emotions. flca is more strongly linked to learner-internal variables, including personality traits such as emotional stability and social initiative, while fle is more dependent on learner-external variables such as the teacher and the peers (dewaele & macintyre, 2019). what happens in the classroom is thus more likely to cause ups and downs in fle. one possible cause is that teachers differ in their ability to regulate the emotional temperature in their classroom and, by extension, the fle and the longer-term motivation of their students. this ability has been linked not just to experience but to trait emotional intelligence and happiness (dewaele, 2015; dewaele, gkonou & mercer, 2018; moskowitz & dewaele, 2019). the fact that learners reported most fle with the more experienced main teacher should therefore not discourage novice teachers. as arnold (2020) points out in the preface to the emotional rollercoaster of language teaching: “teachers who are highly motivated will work to find the best ways to teach the language and to relate to their students. when teachers show interest in their students, have empathy with them, reduce their anxiety, and contribute to their feeling of confidence, they will have more positive results with their teaching” (p. xx). jean-marc 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(2018). heritage language anxiety and majority language anxiety among turkish immigrants in the netherlands. international journal of bilingualism, 22(2), 159-179. are foreign language learners’ enjoyment and anxiety specific to the teacher? an investigation into. . . 65 appendix the flca scale 1. even if i am well prepared for fl class, i feel anxious about it 2. i always feel that the other students speak the fl better than i do 3. i can feel my heart pounding when i’m going to be called on in fl class 4. i don’t worry about making mistakes in fl class (reverse-coded) 5. i feel confident when i speak in fl class (reverse-coded) 6. i get nervous and confused when i am speaking in my fl class 7. i start to panic when i have to speak without preparation in fl class 8. it embarrasses me to volunteer answers in my fl class 335 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (3). 335-363 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the effect of focused communication tasks on instructed acquisition of english past counterfactual conditionals anna broszkiewicz teacher training college amu pozna aabroszki@gmail.com abstract one important controversy connected with the effectiveness of grammar teaching seems to have been resolved as there is ample empirical evidence testifying to the positive effect of form-focused instruction on second language acquisition (nassaji & fotos, 2004; norris & ortega, 2000; spada, 1997, 2010). nevertheless, there are still a number of problems open to debate and awaiting concrete solutions, such as how to establish connections between form and meaning and find the best way to teach grammar for implicit knowledge, which, in the opinion of most sla researchers (ellis, 2006a, p. 95) and according to numerous theoretical positions, is a key driver of linguistic competence. one of the options available to language educators is to employ focused communication tasks, which “are designed to elicit production of a specific target feature in the context of performing a communicative task” (ellis, 2001, p. 21). the aim of the study reported in this article was to explore the effect of focused communication tasks on the instructed acquisition of english past counterfactual conditionals when compared with contextualized practice activities. the results of two types of intervention were measured employing a number of data collection instruments with a view to tapping both the explicit and implicit knowledge of the participants of the study. both types of instructional treatment were equally effective in helping learners develop the explicit knowledge of past unreal conditionals, but when it comes to the implicit knowledge of the aforementioned structure, the group instructed by means of focused communication tasks outperformed the other experimental group and the control group, as evianna broszkiewicz 336 denced by the results obtained from the individually elicited imitation test and the focused communication task performed in pairs. keywords: focused communication tasks, form-focused instruction, explicit and implicit knowledge the central role of grammar in the language curriculum was relatively unquestionable for many years and it would have been unthinkable to imagine language instruction without grammar until the late twentieth century when new theories and approaches started to emerge. they were concerned with the roles of explicit and implicit learning and tried to establish whether learning occurs through conscious manipulation or unconscious processes taking place during exposure to input (e.g., n. ellis, 1994). with the advent of krashen’s (e.g., 1981) input hypothesis, form-focused instruction was no longer considered necessary for language acquisition. classroom procedures were to resemble naturalistic contexts on the basis of the assumption that language can be acquired from exposure to comprehensible input only. the communicative approach advocated the exclusive use of meaning-focused activities in a foreign language classroom (e.g., prabhu, 1987). with time, however, it turned out that the rejection of formal instruction was premature. the complete abandonment of grammar teaching proved unsuccessful as learners were unable to achieve high levels of grammatical accuracy even though they had plentiful opportunities for meaningful practice (e.g., dekeyser, 1998; doughty, 1991; lightbown, 1998; lightbown & spada, 1990; norris & ortega, 2000; robinson, 1996; spada & lightbown, 1993; swain, 1985). the role of grammar has had to be reconsidered and there are at least four important reasons which support instruction in the formal aspects of the language (nassaji & fotos, 2004). first of all, the idea that noticing and attention are necessary for second language acquisition was argued by the proponents of the noticing hypothesis (schmidt, 1990, 2001) and has been supported by numerous researchers (dekeyser, 1998; doughty, 2001; ellis, 2001). it has been proved that noticing is necessary for learners to attend to form in the input; otherwise input is processed for meaning only and the structure may be ignored. secondly, the research has provided evidence for the existence of developmental sequences which learners have to undergo, which resulted in the teachability hypothesis (pienemann, 1984) suggesting that while certain developmental sequences are fixed and cannot be altered by grammar teaching, other structures can benefit from instruction any time they are taught. instruction is therefore believed to be able to influence sequences of development if learners are ready to move to the next developmental stage the effect of focused communication tasks on instructed acquisition of english . . . 337 of linguistic proficiency (lightbown, 2000). thirdly, there is a large body of research pointing to the inadequacies of teaching approaches where the focus is primarily on meaning-focused communication, and grammar is not addressed. early immersion programmes in canada proved unsuccessful in terms of grammar accuracy, and instruction in the formal aspects of the language was necessary to develop high levels of accuracy in the target language. finally, there is plenty of evidence for positive effects of grammar instruction from classroom research. the meta-analysis by norris and ortega (2000) has found that explicit instruction (presenting the structure, describing and exemplifying it, and giving rules for its use) results in substantial and long-term gains in the learning of target structures in comparison to implicit instruction which usually entails communicative exposure to the target form only. new perspectives on grammar instruction in foreign language classrooms, based on emerging theories of language learning and teaching, introduced new dimensions of form-focused instruction and generated a number of novel teaching options. as burgess and etherington (2002, p. 433) stated: “grammar is being rehabilitated . . . and recognised for what it has always been . . .: an essential, inescapable component of language use and language learning.” focused communication tasks among a plethora of controversial issues connected with form-focused instruction there is the question about instructional options which can foster the process of learning grammatical structures so that students develop high levels of accuracy in the target language. there is broad consensus that learners need to have opportunities to encounter, process, and use the new forms in their form-meaning relationships so that they can become part of their interlanguage (ellis, 2002; larsen-freeman, 2003; nassaji, 2000; nassaji & fotos, 2010; pawlak, 2005; spada, 2010). one of the principles that ellis proposes states that “learners need the opportunity to participate in communicative activities to develop implicit knowledge. thus, communicative tasks need to play a central role in instruction directed at implicit knowledge” (2005b, p. 13). it cannot be denied that recent years have seen a growing interest in the use of tasks in the process of foreign language teaching (see e.g., ellis, 2003; nunan, 1991, 2004; skehan, 1996, 2003). various tasks are believed to contribute to the acquisition of language forms and promote successful language production. nevertheless, as nassaji (2000) observes, many second language acquisition researchers argue that activities focusing solely on message conveyance can be inadequate to foster the development of accurate language use and that some focus on form is necessary in communicative classroom anna broszkiewicz 338 contexts (e.g., dekeyser, 1998; doughty, 1991; lightbown, 1998; lightbown & spada, 1990; norris & ortega, 2001; pawlak, 2006; robinson, 1996; spada & lightbown, 1993; swain, 1985). in order to be able to explore the effectiveness of focused communication tasks in instructed second language acquisition of grammatical structures, a precise definition of a task is indispensable. a number of different proposals have been suggested (e.g., ellis 2003; long, 1983; prabhu, 1987; skehan, 1998) and the most general distinction was offered by nunan (2004), who distinguished between real world target tasks and pedagogical tasks, where the main difference is whether the task is used beyond or in the classroom. as far as a pedagogical task is concerned, various definitions have been constructed as well (e.g., bygate, skehan, & swain, 2001; ellis, 2003; skehan, 1998). nunan’s (2004, p. 4) definition, which describes a pedagogical task as “a piece of classroom work which involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language while their attention is principally focused on mobilizing their grammatical knowledge in order to express meaning, and in which the intention is to convey meaning rather than to manipulate form,” is in line with ellis’s (2003) definition in the sense that both of them acknowledge the interrelatedness of form and meaning and their importance for the effective expression of various communicative functions. there are two main arguments for the implementation of communication tasks in classroom teaching. according to griggs (2005, p. 407), they provide a favourable learning situation, because “they place learners in the centre of the learning process by creating an interactional framework in which they solve language problems in order to fulfill communicative needs.” having been exposed to the task which contains a gap between different sources of information, students usually work in groups or in pairs to partake in communicative interaction. second of all, communication tasks help bridge the gap between language learning in an educational context and actual language use in the real world (nunan, 1991), and therefore they are believed to contribute incidentally to learners’ linguistic development, with regard to both fluency and accuracy (ellis, 1997). communication tasks can be divided into two types: unfocused and focused (ellis, 1997, 2003; nunan, 2004). in the case of unfocused communication tasks, the designer of the task does not offer prominence to any particular linguistic feature. during the performance of the task learners are not obliged or encouraged to employ particular language structures; the situation should resemble ‘natural’ communication in which the language used is broadly determined by the content of the task. focused communication tasks, on the other hand, are examples of functional production practice (ellis, 2005c, p. the effect of focused communication tasks on instructed acquisition of english . . . 339 718), that is, they are designed to employ a particular linguistic feature, although not in a way that makes the learner pay more attention to form than to meaning. therefore, they are also referred to as structure-based communication tasks (loschky & bley-vroman, 1993) or implicit structure-based tasks (fotos, 2002). while there are some objections and doubts about classroom activities that are planned with specific linguistic features in mind, suggesting that focus on specific grammar forms may not cause any restructuring of the learner’s interlanguge (e.g., long & robinson, 1998), lightbown (1998) refutes such arguments claiming that: classroom activities that tend to elicit specific linguistic features need not be awkward and unnatural. they can incorporate the principles of communicative language teaching and task-based instruction, while, at the same time, maximizing the likelihood that learners will have adequate opportunity to be exposed to, use and receive feedback on a wider range of linguistic features. teachers are not traitors to the cause of communicative language teaching if they plan activities in which they know that learners will almost inevitably need to use specific language features. (p. 195) communication tasks can become focused either through design or through methodology, and, in their influential paper, loschky and bleyvroman (1993, p. 132) argue that “it is possible to construct tasks which involve grammatical knowledge in various ways, and to varying degrees.” as far as the design is concerned, there are three major features focused communication tasks can possess: task-naturalness, task-utility and task-essentialness. loschky and bley-vroman (1993) define the three criteria in the following way: in task-naturalness, a grammatical construction may arise naturally during the performance of a particular task, but the task can often be performed perfectly well, even quite easily, without it. in the case of task-utility, it is possible to complete a task without the structure, but with the structure the task become easier. the most extreme demand a task can place on a structure is essentialness: the task cannot be successfully performed unless the structure is used. (p. 132) when the design procedures fail to elicit the targeted language feature, a solution could be found in the methodological choices made by the language teacher. this is because through the teacher’s use of brief explicit instructions and corrective feedback, particularly in the form of requests for clarification, the learner may be indirectly encouraged to employ the target language feature. although the communicative nature of the task is threatened by the focus on form initiated by the teacher, the task will probably remain communicative for the learner who perceives the clarification request as a need to improve the quality of the message. anna broszkiewicz 340 tasks designed and conducted according to these suggestions may constitute a valuable instructional option for teaching grammar (samuda, 2001). focused communication tasks can be “a powerful instruction tool in any language classroom where the emphasis is laid not only on acquainting learners with relevant rules but also ensuring that they will be put in the service of successful communication” (pawlak, 2006, p. 264). ellis (2003) proposes tasksupported language teaching and claims that focused communication tasks are a useful option in supporting formal instruction with the communicative dimension. focused communication tasks provide learners with a considerable opportunity to actually use the structures they are taught and convey real messages, which is what most of them may hardly ever do outside of a regular educational context. by means of focused communication tasks learners’ implicit knowledge is automatized and, moreover, the transformation of their explicit knowledge into implicit knowledge may be facilitated. facing the problems of contemporary language teaching, which suffers from lack of time and expects quick results, focused communication tasks may also serve as an indispensable option for review work or remedial teaching (fotos, 2002; pawlak, 2004, 2006). issues in learning and teaching past unreal conditionals in their standard form, past conditional sentences are usually constructed with two clauses: the if-clause containing a past perfect verb, accompanied by a perfect modal verb in the main clause, both of which refer to the past. it is possible to reverse the clause order, which does not cause much change in meaning or emphasis. in order to achieve emphasis, one can use inversion techniques in the if-clause. in addition to inversion, the conjunction if can be substituted with other conjunctions or phrases having a similar meaning (parrot, 2000, p. 237). as far as its meaning is concerned, the third conditional is the past counterfactual conditional describing a situation which is assumed not to have happened. this meaning provokes the contexts in which it is used: excuses, regrets, or expressing relief. another typical use is presenting alternatives to something that had already happened, often with a tone of blame (yule, 1998, p. 129-130). it is important to note that the meanings of conditional sentences are also dependant on the kinds of modal verbs used in them. though it is often assumed that the inclusion of some modal verbs in both the if-clause and the main clauses is incorrect, they are often found in both clauses simultaneously and are part of informal spoken english (azar, 2002, p. 418). since past conditional sentences can express a wide range of functions and their form may indeed result in clauses that are long and difficult for learners to process and remember (parrot, 2000; thornbury, 2001), “the so-called the effect of focused communication tasks on instructed acquisition of english . . . 341 third conditional is typically taught at a relatively advanced stage, both because of its syntactic complexity and because it expresses a concept that is itself fairly opaque, that is, hypothetical past time” (thornbury, 2000, p. 97). due to the problems inherent in the teaching and learning of conditionals, even advanced students either tend to avoid complex conditional forms, having developed strategies allowing them to communicate effectively without conditional sentences, or they seem to confuse conditional forms which refer to the present and to the past. one way of solving such problems is to apply grammar interpretation tasks (ellis, 1995) to draw students’ attention toward how the form and meaning interact. when it comes to tasks promoting production, problems with meaning and use can also be addressed by providing learners with a clear context or situation typical of the past unreal conditional (azar, 2002). fotos (1995, 2002) presented explicit structure-based interactive tasks, designed to raise students’ consciousness of the correct usage of present and future conditional forms using if. on the basis of positive research results obtained from year-one university students, she suggested that those tasks were a useful communicative activity to improve proficiency and interaction. a study dealing precisely with english past unreal conditionals was conducted by pawlak (2007). the third conditional was taught by means of two approaches to grammar teaching: planned focus on form and focus on forms. the participants of the quasiexperiment were 102 senior high school students, divided into two experimental groups and a cg. the findings of the study obtained from paper-andpencil tests and dictogloss tasks proved the durable effectiveness of grammar instruction for past unreal conditionals, without a significant predominance of one of the studied approaches over the other. the author concluded that focus on form and focus on forms should be combined in classroom practice rather than viewed as mutually exclusive (pawlak, 2007, p. 186), pointing particularly to the polish educational setting, but the claims seem to be valid for the general educational context as well (e.g., fotos, 2005). design of the study the main aim of the quasi-experimental study presented in this article was to explore the shortand long-term effects of focused communication tasks on the acquisition of past counterfactual conditionals. the distinction between the two experimental groups was the specific instructional option that was given primary attention for the purpose of the study bearing in mind that isolating the different instructional options is a recommended way of assessing their contribution to learning and drawing conclusions about their anna broszkiewicz 342 pedagogical effectiveness (ellis, 2005c; norris & ortega, 2000). more specifically, the study sought to address the following research questions: 1. does form-focused instruction facilitate the development of explicit and implicit knowledge of past unreal conditionals? 2. what is the effect of employing focused communication tasks on explicit and implicit knowledge of unreal past conditionals in comparison to text-manipulation and text-creation activities? 3. are the effects of the instructional treatment durable? participants the subjects were 45 year-one full time ba programme students of english at the teacher training college, adam mickiewicz university, pozna . their level of english could be ranked as b2+ according to the common european framework of reference for languages. the students were divided into three random groups (see table 1), two of which were experimental and one control. all of them completed the written tests and took part in the recordings: both individually and in pairs. prior to the testing and treatment procedure, the participants were asked to complete a background questionnaire. its aim was to obtain information about the students’ personal histories and educational backgrounds as far as english was concerned, with a particular focus on english grammar. table 1 the design of the study. group 1 group 2 group 3 experimental focused communication tasks (fct) experimental contextualized practice activities (cpa) control group (cg) procedure the instructional treatment took place during regular grammar lessons taught to year-one students on the same days in both experimental groups. the instruction took two weeks, that is, four grammar classes, each of which was 90 min long. at the same time the students in the cg covered other grammar topics and their grammar teacher confirmed that conditionals were not taught. the instructional treatment included the same procedures in the two experimental groups during the first three lessons. for both the fct group and the cpa group, the treatment started with input-based instruction by exposing the students to a written text containing a number of examples of the third conditional, which was the effect of focused communication tasks on instructed acquisition of english . . . 343 a kind of input enhancement (doughty & williams, 1998). all the instances of the target structure were visually enhanced by means of different font type, italics and bolding. next, the students answered comprehension questions connected with the text (i.e., true/false statements, gap fill, open questions). this part of the lesson aimed at helping the learners make proper form-meaning connections while processing the input by familiarizing them with the context and ensuring their understanding of the meaning of the targeted structures. at this point, the students were not asked to produce the targeted structure. what followed was the analysis of the examples of the feature from the text when the teacher elicited the rule by, for example, concept questions which check meaning and understanding of the structure and guide the learner toward clarifying the rule. the next step was drawing general conclusions concerning the form, meaning and use of the focused grammar area. there was also time allotted to discussing all the subtleties connected with the form under study. most of these were exemplified in the text provided at the beginning of the lesson. metalinguistic explanations were supplied as responses to the students’ actual queries, connected with the text they read and the exercises they did. the various examples and contexts that the students were provided with encouraged the shift of attention to the form, but it was integrated with meaningful practice in the majority of cases. the next three classes were entirely devoted to practice, both input and output-oriented. comprehension practice, which came first, included such tasks as two-answer alternatives, multiple choice and grammaticality judgement, whereas production practice was organized by means of the following types of tasks: completing with the correct form, transformations and translation. ellis (1998) recognizes output-based grammar activities of two types: text-manipulation activities, which are highly-controlled, such as paraphrasing or sentence completion, and text-creation activities, in which learners are guided into producing their own sentences using the target structure, for example into creating a story, a dialogue or writing a composition. ellis recommends text-manipulation followed with text-creation activities, as this order helps learners move from controlled to automatic use of the target structure. such a procedure was followed in this study. it needs to be mentioned here that during the instructional treatment both explicit and implicit feedback was provided to the students. the fourth treatment session was designed to apply two distinct types of practice in the two experimental groups. one group of subjects spent the whole lesson performing various focused communication tasks, which aimed at eliciting real-life-like communication; the students exchanged information, opinions and experiences on different topics. the tasks were designed in such a way that the use of the targeted structures was highly desirable and advisable to express a particular meaning and reach the comanna broszkiewicz 344 municative goal. at no time, however, were the students encouraged or advised to employ the structure under study. the students performed the tasks in pairs or small groups and there was also a mingling activity when they worked with various people. the process of constructing and finding the tasks for the lessons was itself very strenuous and demanding, as it was crucial to meet the three requirements of a focused communication task: task-naturalness, task-utility and task-essentials, proposed by loschky and bley-vroman (1993). as pawlak (2006) concluded, focused communication tasks promote incidental learning, in contrast to feature-focused activities, which cater for intentional learning with a clear focus on the rule in question. and it was the latter type to which the other experimental group devoted their time during the fourth class. the members of the cpa group continued with various text-manipulation and textcreation activities in which the students were required to use the targeted features. even a cursory look at contemporary teaching materials and course books indicates that this type of practice is still an integral component of grammar instruction popular among a great number of teachers at different levels. some activities prepared for the lesson in fact bore resemblance to focused communication tasks, but the main difference was the fact that the subjects were instructed which structure to employ in a given activity. instruments of data collection and data analysis in accordance with the recommendations of leading sla researchers (e.g., ellis, 2002, 2006a; nassaji & fotos, 2004; norris & ortega, 2000), an attempt was made to establish the levels of the participants’ implicit and explicit knowledge at different points of the study in order to provide information about the durability of the instructional gains. given that “particular outcome measure categories could account for differences observed in the effectiveness of different treatment” (norris & ortega, 2000, p. 471), a battery of tests to measure different types of knowledge was designed. the tests constructed for this particular study included: written tests to measure explicit knowledge, and elicited imitation tasks and focused communication tasks to access implicit knowledge. each of these research instruments was used three times: as a pretest, posttest and delayed posttest. in order to avoid the risk of the practice effect, three versions of every test had been prepared by the researcher. there has been a considerable amount of controversy over the instruments of measuring explicit and implicit knowledge. the research tools employed to estimate the two types of knowledge in this study were chosen, verified and constructed in accordance with ellis’s (2005a) key characteristics of explicit and implicit knowledge. both the written and the oral tests the effect of focused communication tasks on instructed acquisition of english . . . 345 were analysed employing the following procedures. having been checked and transcribed, the answers were grouped according to three categories: correct, interlanguage, incorrect. correct answers, accorded 1 point, were the responses which were appropriate in form, meaning and use for the context provided. interlanguage forms, given half a point, were such answers which, although appropriate for the context, lacked a fully correct form. finally, the form was granted 0 points and labelled incorrect if the form, meaning and the use were inappropriate for the context or situation. apart from accuracy percentages, means and standard deviations were also computed. the data obtained were normally distributed and standard deviations were comparable; therefore analysis of variance (anova) was employed to compare the differences between the three groups on the same test. to assess the significance of the differences in the students’ performance on different tests, repeated measures anovas were run. the effect size, aiming to indicate the standardised difference between two means, was established with the help of cohen’s d. each of the three versions of the written test consisted of the following six components with instructions supplied in polish. the first two comprised comprehension tasks, which aimed at tapping the receptive knowledge of the two structures. an untimed grammaticality judgement task included ten sentences, six of which were erroneous. ellis (2004) argues that given unlimited time, learners have the opportunity to reflect on the sentence, and thus draw on their explicit knowledge. the next task included five sentences of a multiple choice type. the students were asked to choose the correct option out of four provided to complete every sentence. the next four tasks included output-based tasks aimed to tap the students’ productive knowledge. the first one was completing ten sentences with the correct form of the third conditional. it was hoped to draw the participants’ attention to the required form and thus ensure that they would apply the appropriate rules to complete the sentences. two types of transformations with five sentences each comprised tasks four and five. as far as task four is concerned, the transformation was quite controlled, as the students were asked to create a new sentence starting with a phrase given on the basis of the context provided. task five could be done more freely, as there were no restrictions on how to construct a new sentence. the final text-creation task was story completion. given either some clues or a short story, the students were asked to continue with at least five sentences. while the written tests were supposed to access the participants’ explicit knowledge of unreal past conditionals, it was the implicit knowledge of the two aforementioned structures that was of major interest to the researcher. for the purpose of the study, two different measures of implicit procedural knowledge were employed: elicited imitation tasks and focused comanna broszkiewicz 346 munication tasks. elicited imitation tasks have been employed by a number of researchers to measure second language competence. one of the reasons for their popularity in language testing is their reconstructive nature (munnich, flynn, & martohardjono, 1994). it means that, when students hear a sentence, their attention is drawn to meaning and form, and they process the sentence according to the rules which are internalized in their memory. consequently, learners spontaneously correct the ungrammatical utterances, which allows analysis of their linguistic knowledge. in order to tap the students’ implicit knowledge, one needs to meet certain criteria while constructing an elicited imitation task (ellis, 2006b; erlam, 2006; gass & mackey, 2007; mackey & gass, 2005). first and foremost, the reconstructive nature of the elicited imitation task must be ensured by focusing the participants’ attention on meaning (erlam, 2006). the results of erlam’s (2006) study designed and conducted employing such procedures clearly indicate that an elicited imitation task requires the participants to process, rather than repeat, language stimuli. apart from the relatively easy and straightforward administration and scoring characterizing this test, another asset needs to be mentioned. unlike many other instruments measuring implicit knowledge, the test allows the targeting of a specific language structure, which undoubtedly adds to its value as far as tapping into students’ implicit knowledge is concerned. according to ellis (2002), implicit knowledge requires automatic processing, or, in other words, it involves little or no language monitoring. free language production would then be considered as the most reliable instrument of accessing implicit knowledge. as far as classroom research is concerned, such a quality could be reached by asking students to perform communicative tasks, which ought to resemble real-life situations. for the purpose of the study, three versions of focused communication tasks were constructed both for the third conditional and modals in the past. the same task was administered to all three groups in one test in order not to risk different performance results caused by subtle differences in the tasks. results written tests measuring explicit knowledge. as evidenced in figures 1 and 2, and also in table 2, which depict the mean percentage scores, standard deviations, levels of statistical significance and effect sizes, the instructional treatments turned out to have a similar effect on the students’ explicit knowledge of past unreal conditionals in the two experimental groups. the controlled activities employed in the written tests were performed by all three groups on the pretest and the results did not reveal any statistically significant the effect of focused communication tasks on instructed acquisition of english . . . 347 differences between the participants of the study (figure 1). however, having been subjected to the instructional treatment, the two experimental groups outperformed the cg on the immediate posttest significantly (fct = 87.81%, cpa = 84.69%, cg = 74.58%) with the effect sizes deemed large (d = .97, d = .79), and also reached statistically significant gains over the cg on the delayed posttest (fct = 92.81%, cpa = 92.84%, cg = 78.56%, p < .001 in both cases ), which supports the durability of instruction and the carryover of gains for as long as ten weeks. the two groups which had been subjected to two different types of intervention did not reveal any statistically significant differences between the scores they obtained on any test. figure 1 the mean percentage scores for the use of third conditional for the three groups on the written tests table 2 the effect of instructional treatment on the use of third conditional on the written tests group pretest posttest delayed posttest significance repeated measures anova a) pre-post b) post-del post c) pre-del post m (%) sd (%) m (%) sd (%) m (%) sd (%) control 70.50 16.4 74.58 14.6 78.56 12.0 a) f = 1.67, p = .21 b) f = 5.77, p = .02 c) f = 5.37, p = .03 experimental: fct 74.48 15.9 87.81 11.5 92.81 6.8 a) f = 16.22, p = .001 b) f = 2.42, p = .14 c) f = 22.90, p < .001 experimental: cpa 77.02 16.3 84.69 16 92.84 7.8 a) f = 17.96, p = .001 b) f = 4.99, p = .04 c) f = 20.99, p < .001 anna broszkiewicz 348 significance anova multiple comparisons (lsd) a) control-fct f = .45 p = .50 f = 6.52 p = .01 d = .97 f = 14.97 p < .001 b) fct-cpa f = .15 p = .69 f = .04 p = .84 f = .22 p = .64 c) control-cpa f = 1.27 p = .26 f = 5.70 p = .02 d = .79 f = 20.56 p < .001 looking at the groups and their results separately (figure 1), the increase in accuracy observed in the two instructed groups was significant from the pretest to the immediate posttest; it amounted to more than 13% in the fct group (fct = 87.81%, f = 16.22, p = .001) and more than 7% in the cpa group (cpa = 84.69%, f = 17.96, p = .001). what is particularly interesting, however, is the fact that the groups increased their average scores on the delayed posttest as well (fct by 5%, cpa by 8%), compared with the immediate posttest results. the group in which the pedagogical intervention included focused communication tasks did not achieve a statistically significant gain, but the delayed posttest score of the other group, instructed by means of textmanipulation and text-creation activities, was significantly higher in comparison with its immediate posttest result. the cg also revealed some improvement on the immediate posttest (cg = 74.58%) in comparison with the pretest (cg = 70.50%); nevertheless the differences became statistically significant as late as on the delayed posttest (cg = 78.56%) compared with the pretest. the findings obtained from the written tests demonstrate that formal instruction did facilitate the development and proceduralisation of explicit knowledge; yet it appears that, for this type of knowledge, the differences in the instructional treatments did not matter significantly. while the general findings encourage grammar intervention and testify to its effects, which is in accordance with a number of previous studies, some details need further consideration and analysis. although it is the group instructed by means of focused communication tasks that achieved the best results on the posttest, gaining more than 13% in comparison with the pretest, it is evident from the delayed posttest scores that the group subjected to textmanipulation and text-creation activities did in fact compensate for its poorer gain on the immediate posttest (7%), achieving the same score as the other experimental group. another fact worth noticing is the change in the sd levels in the three groups. on the pretest, the sd values were quite high, revealing the existence of huge discrepancies in the performance of particular group the effect of focused communication tasks on instructed acquisition of english . . . 349 members. form-focused instruction appeared to have a diminishing effect on the degree of individual variation in both experimental groups, as sd values decreased remarkably by more than a half on the delayed posttest, whereas the sd level in the cg diminished by 25% only. the changes in the sd values could also be attributed to the overall process of language education at the college, which undoubtedly increased the students’ knowledge, developed their language awareness and helped them improve their level of english, which is visible in the sd decrease in the cg. nevertheless, the sd levels of the two experimental groups seem to be indicative of the beneficial effect of form-focused instruction because the high test scores and the low levels of standard deviations testify to the increase in homogeneity among the participants of the study on the measures of explicit knowledge after both types of pedagogical intervention. elicited imitation tasks measuring implicit knowledge. as visible from the graphical representation in figure 2 and the detailed description in table 3, the pretest procedure revealed that the three groups participating in the research project did not differ significantly from each other with reference to the ability to perform the elicited imitation test (cg = 49.25%, fct = 54.79%, cpa = 50.77%). as indicated by the scores obtained on the immediate posttest (cg = 52.38%, fct = 83.13%, cpa = 66.67%), the instructional treatment caused significant changes in the two experimental groups; yet it did not generate significant differences between them. in comparison with the cg, the results achieved by the group instructed by means of focused communication tasks was highly significant (p = .003) and the effect size was large (d = 1.11). the group which received instruction containing text-manipulation and textcreation activities approached a statistically significant difference when compared with the cg (p = .06) and the effect size value was much above medium (d = 0.66). a corresponding situation occurred on the delayed posttest, where the two groups differed from the cg considerably, with the fct group reaching 81.82% and the cpa group 76.82%. the differences were statistically significant both in the case of the fct (p = .001) and cpa (p = .02) group. anna broszkiewicz 350 figure 2 the mean percentage scores for the use of third conditional for the three groups on the elicited imitation test table 3 the effect of instructional treatment on the use of third conditional on the elicited imitation test group pretest posttest delayed posttest significance repeated measures anova a) pre-post b) post-del post c) pre-del post m (%) sd (%) m (%) sd (%) m (%) sd (%) control 49.25 21.9 52.38 23.2 65.26 16.3 a) f = .94, p = .34 b) f = 12.09, p = .002 c) f = 18.91, p < .001 experimental: fct 54.79 27.0 83.13 18.3 81.82 10.9 a) f = 14.89, p = .002 b) f = 1.46, p = .25 c) f = 15.16, p = .002 experimental: cpa 50.77 23.0 66.67 18.6 76.82 11.4 a) f = 5.57, p = .03 b) f = 3.66, p = .08 c) f = 25.35, p < .001 significance anova multiple comparisons (lsd) a) control-fct f = .41 p = .52 f = 10.38 p = .003 d = 1.11 f = 11.52 p = .001 b) fct-cpa f = .18 p = .67 f = 1.36 p = .25 f = .90 p = .35 c) control-cpa f = 0 .03 p = .85 f = 3.79 p = .06 d = .66 f = 5.57 p = .02 the effect of focused communication tasks on instructed acquisition of english . . . 351 the comparison of the results for the particular groups, illustrated in figure 2, indicates a significant advantage for the instruction involving focused communication tasks. this group made an improvement of more than 28% from the pretest (54.79%) to the immediate posttest (83.13%), with the difference reaching high statistical significance (f = 14.89, p = .002), and the score was only marginally lower on the delayed posttest (81.82%). the growth in the other experimental group was 16% from the pretest (50.77%) to the immediate posttest (66.67%) and another 10% on the delayed posttest (76.82%), with the effect that the difference between the pretest and the delayed posttest was a result that was highly statistically significant, at f = 25.35, p < .001. the cg, the members of which did not receive any instruction in past unreal conditionals, made significant improvement but as late as on the delayed posttest. however, even in this case, as might be expected, the scores were much worse than in the two experimental groups. when it comes to sd values, one can observe a relationship between the results achieved by the experimental groups and their level of variability. there was a comparable decrease in heterogeneity on every subsequent test in the two groups, with the caveat that they started at slightly different levels. the instructional treatment including focused communication tasks affected the students’ level of heterogeneity to the greatest extent (a decrease of 9%), when compared with the decrease in sd in the cpa group (a decrease of 4.5%). a finding like this may be reflective of the nature of focused communication tasks which are designed with a view to developing learners’ implicit knowledge. the students in the fct group not only significantly improved their score on the immediate posttest, but they were also definitely more homogeneous in their answers, which seems to be closely related to the employed instructional option. the members of the group instructed by means of various text-manipulation and text-creation activities, which are certainly more controlled in their nature, manifested a much smaller drop of variation on the immediate posttest, which may have been caused by the type of intervention to which they had been subjected. contrary to the test measuring their explicit knowledge, which they had no problems with, the elicited imitation task seems to have caused them some difficulty, as the immediate posttest score was 66.67% and the answers were more varied than in the fct group. the cg, having increased their level of variation on the posttest, finally reduced their sd on the delayed posttest, but not to such a great extent as the two experimental groups. although their elicited imitation test scores were higher on the subsequent tests, it may be connected with their self-study or the practice effect, because the delayed posttest was in fact the third test of this kind that they took. anna broszkiewicz 352 focused communication tasks measuring implicit knowledge. the analysis of the data obtained from pair recordings in which the students performed a focused communication task commenced with calculating the number of obligatory contexts for the use of the third conditional for every student. as evidenced by the graphical illustration in figure 3 and the data exhibited in table 4, the three groups participating in the quasi-experiment did not differ significantly in their ability to use the third conditional on the pretest (cg = 68.89%, fct = 67.05%, cpa = 55%). the comparison of the scores obtained on the immediate posttest following the instructional treatment clearly indicates a significant advantage for grammar intervention (cg = 37.04%, fct = 89.06%, cpa = 78%). in comparison with the cg which in fact manifested a loss of over 30% (f = 13.70, p = .001), the two experimental groups made some improvement, and the differences between the two groups and the cg were statistically significant (cgfct: f = 25.71, p < .001; cg-cpa: f = 9.26, p = .004). the effect size also reached very high values, but the reasons for it may be the poor results of the cg rather than the gains of the experimental students. it may also be of interest that the difference between the performance of the two experimental groups on the immediate posttest approached significance with f = 3.16 and p = .08. the fct group scored 89.06%, whereas the result achieved by the cpa group was 78%. the delayed posttest results confirmed the variable effects of the treatment between the cpa and the fct groups as the mean percentage scores differed significantly (fct = 84.78%, cpa = 61.76%, f = 5.70, p = .02). on the delayed posttest no statistical difference between the cg and the group instructed by means of text-manipulation and text-creation activities was observed (f = 0.08, p = .77). such findings indicate a significant advantage for focused communication tasks: the score of the fct group on the delayed posttest was significantly higher (84.78%) than that of the cg (cg = 53.45%, p = .002). although both experimental groups did worse on the delayed posttest, one may conclude that the treatment that included a number of focused communication tasks was more beneficial to the development of implicit knowledge. to sum up, the fct group outperformed not only the control but also the cpa group during the test comprising a communication task. the effect of focused communication tasks on instructed acquisition of english . . . 353 figure 3 the mean percentage scores for the use of third conditional for the three groups on the focused communication task table 4 the effect of instructional treatment on the use of third conditional on the focused communication task group pretest posttest delayed posttest significance repeated measures anova a) pre-post b) post-del post c) pre-del post m (%) sd (%) m (%) sd (%) m (%) sd (%) control 68.89 36.0 37.04 38.0 53.45 42.5 a) f = 13.70, p = .001 b) f = 3.38, p = .08 c) f = 1.68, p = .21 experimental: fct 67.05 31.7 89.06 9.5 84.78 30.6 a) f = 5.30, p = .04 b) f = 1.19, p = .29 c) f = 0.81, p = .38 experimental: cpa 55.00 47.6 78.00 40.5 61.76 41.5 a) f = 1.52, p = .24 b) f = 2.40, p = .14 c) f = 0.60, p = .45 significance anova multiple comparisons (lsd) a) control-fct f = .17 p = .68 f = 25.71 p < .001 d = 2.15 f = 5.24 p = .002 b) fct-cpa b) f = 1.48 p = .23 f = 3.16 p = .08 f = 5.70 p = .002 c) control-cpa c) f = .87 p = .35 f = 9.26 p = .004 d = .92 f = 0.08 p = .77 anna broszkiewicz 354 when it comes to the analysis of the progress made by the three groups individually (figure 3 and table 4), the picture is more complex than in the case of the previous tests. as far as the cg is concerned, the only statistically significant difference in the use of the third conditional was observed on the immediate posttest, on which the students obtained 37.04%, a result that was lower by more than 30% when compared with the pretest (68.89%). one reason for such a poor score may be that the students had noticed that they were tested on something they had not been instructed in, but what seems more likely is that they became tired and bored with the tests and recordings. the potential contribution of the fatigue effect must be taken into account, as the students underwent repetitive, monotonous and time-consuming tests, which might have discouraged them from engagement in the task. on the delayed posttest, the cg was the only one to improve its results from the immediate posttest with a score of 53.45%, but still it failed to reach the pretest score. the comparison of the data for the two experimental groups indicates that the instructional treatment caused positive changes on the immediate posttest, particularly for the group instructed with the help of focused communication tasks, the score for which, in comparison with the pretest, was 22% higher and the gain statistically significant (f = 5.30, p = .04). taking into consideration the results obtained by the other experimental group (cpa), one could observe that it had the lowest score on the pretest in relation to the other groups (55%), then made a considerable improvement on the immediate posttest (78%), and, what is particularly worrying, experienced a drop of almost 17% on the delayed posttest (61.76%). none of these changes reached statistical significance, and therefore drawing definitive conclusions might be premature. although the findings obtained from tasks administered to pairs attest to the beneficial effect of grammar instruction, with the advantage of the treatment containing focused communication tasks, it is necessary to point to some weaknesses which might have influenced the outcomes of the study. one issue might be the choice of the tasks designed to tap students’ implicit knowledge of the third conditional in pairs. this test was the first kind of test performed in pairs. although the students knew their partners and worked with them throughout the study, their results might, to a certain extent, have been affected by the interlocutor. moreover, despite the researcher’s efforts to design three similar tasks for the three tests, they might have generated different output, not only with regard to the content, but also the number of forms provided. all this needs to be taken into account during the analysis of the data coming from this particular measure. this might have been one of the reasons for the disparities in sd values and might also have affected the results of the tests, which were surprising at times. on no previous test were the the effect of focused communication tasks on instructed acquisition of english . . . 355 sd values so diverse. in the cg the disparities did not diminish; on the contrary, sd values rose on the subsequent tests. it may testify to the different levels of the students’ knowledge, but also to differences in understanding of the task. when looking at the experimental group instructed by means of textmanipulation and text-creation activities, a similar situation may be observed, with the caveat that the result was slightly lower on the immediate posttest. on a somewhat more optimistic note, the sd values in the second experimental group, in which focused communication tasks were employed, dropped remarkably from the pretest (31.7%) to the immediate posttest (9.5%). unfortunately, they rose on the delayed posttest (30.6%) to approach the pretest value. this may be indicative of similar levels of knowledge among the students on the immediate posttest, but may also be connected with how they understood the task on the pretest and the delayed posttest. this is particularly important when we consider the fact that the third conditional is often confused with the second conditional, which could cause serious consequences. although no effort was spared to make the tasks comparable, differences in their levels of difficulty and in their potential for generating samples of language cannot be excluded. these and other important issues concerning the students’ explicit and implicit knowledge of past unreal conditionals will be revisited in the discussion which follows. discussion throughout the study, the researcher’s attention was directed mainly to the role of focused communication tasks in the acquisition of past unreal conditionals by advanced learners of english. the instructional treatment including focused communication tasks was compared with another type of form-focused instruction which contained a number of contextualized practice activities, such as text-manipulation and text-creation activities. as indicated by the data accrued in the course of the study, form-focused instruction overall appears to have had a beneficial effect on the development of explicit and implicit knowledge. as far as the explicit knowledge of past unreal conditionals is concerned, no advantages of one type of instructional treatment over the other were observed, as both produced significant improvements in the results obtained by the two experimental groups in comparison with the cg. the students’ ability to deal with comprehension and production tasks tapping explicit knowledge was also measured, and, on the basis of the results of the tests, neither type of instruction can be viewed as privileged, as both experimental groups made similar gains and differed significantly from the cg. when it comes to sd values, which are reflective of the level of the students’ variability, the role of the anna broszkiewicz 356 instructional treatment cannot be neglected. undoubtedly, form-focused instruction caused changes in the learners’ explicit knowledge, which is particularly visible on tests measuring the production dimension of this knowledge. the members of the two experimental groups appear to have systematized their explicit knowledge of the two targeted grammatical forms as they produced them accurately in a consistent manner. as far as the behaviour of the members of the cg is concerned, it has to be admitted that the students improved their results in the course of the study despite no formal instruction in the targeted features. this improvement may be attributed to numerous factors, such as the practice effect, exposure-only effect, or maturation, which may have contributed to changes in the results of the groups (norris & ortega, 2000, p. 468). this demonstrates that even without the crutch of the instructional treatment, the members of the cg must have become sensitized to the structure after taking numerous tests, which may in fact have encouraged them to study the third conditional on their own. besides, they must have encountered the feature under study in some meaningful communication contexts, either inside or outside the educational environment. when it comes to the implicit dimension of the learners’ knowledge estimated on the basis of the two tests, one may acknowledge that the two instructional options affected the students’ performance in a different way. as the findings undeniably suggest, it was the group instructed by means of focused communication tasks that made the greatest gain in terms of the ability to use past unreal conditionals in their oral performance. it allows a tentative conclusion that the free production component present during the instructional treatment of the third conditional was pertinent to developing the students’ implicit knowledge of the target structure. when it comes to the level of individual variation, the impact of the instructional treatment was again considerable; yet it must be noted that during the focused communication task performed in pairs the levels of the students’ heterogeneity were quite high and only slightly affected by the intervention. such a situation could have resulted from the task itself. despite the researcher’s efforts to create tasks which were as similar as possible for the three tests, the students might have understood them differently and might have perceived them as easier or more complex, which could have led to greater variation in their language use than in the case of the written tests measuring explicit knowledge. another reason for high sd values might have been the context for the activity, that is, a fairly informal conversation with a peer. moreover, past unreal conditionals themselves are an intricate grammatical feature and are used in specific situations. the students who were concentrating on message conveyance might not have paid their attention to whether they were using the second or the third condithe effect of focused communication tasks on instructed acquisition of english . . . 357 tional, which might have resulted in higher sd values. it may also testify to the fact that their implicit knowledge regarding this structure was not fully automatized yet. the performance of the cg on the tests measuring implicit knowledge should also be taken into account. while the members of the group increased their results on the elicited imitation test, they performed quite poorly on the focused communication task performed in pairs. when compared with the improvement on the measures of explicit knowledge, it appears that implicit knowledge is not as likely to be developed without any instruction and assistance. the noticing hypothesis (schmidt, 1990) and the role of conscious attention seem to be very important for the facilitation of linguistic knowledge. noticing is believed to be of vital importance for the initial registering of new linguistic representations. if the cg was deprived of instruction in past unreal conditionals, then its members might have had problems with the development of implicit knowledge, even though they managed to improve with regard to explicit knowledge of this targeted structure. the comparison of the results achieved by the cg and the high levels of variation they revealed on the tests allows us to conclude that there must have been students who studied past unreal conditionals via self-study, which altogether contributed to improving the scores of the group. conclusions and implications on the basis of the investigation of the impact of focused communication tasks on the development of explicit and implicit knowledge of past unreal conditionals, it may be concluded that such instruction proved capable of yielding both shortand long-term learning gains. the analysis of the data demonstrated that focused communication tasks were particularly effective for the development of the students’ implicit knowledge, as was evidenced in the outcomes of the three measures employed. these tasks developed the learners’ awareness of the two forms and helped them increase control over them (robinson, 2001). moreover, they seemed to have a profound influence on the learners’ cognitive and affective characteristics by fostering their autonomy, self-esteem, self-efficacy, self-confidence and motivation. therefore, it can be concluded that focused communication tasks are an effective instructional option when it comes to promoting the acquisition of complex grammar structures. it cannot be forgotten, however, that the pedagogical intervention including various text-manipulation and text-creation activities also brought positive results in comparison with the scores achieved by the cg; however, the magnitude of beneficial effects seems to have been smaller here. the differential effects observed in all the three groups may also have been influanna broszkiewicz 358 enced by the contribution of other factors, among which individual differences, analysed on the basis of the two questionnaires, seem to have played an important role, which is in accordance with housen and pierrard’s (2005, p. 9) suggestion that “the learner factor” is one of the crucial aspects to be taken into account when it comes to the effectiveness of instruction for sla. it appears reasonable to conclude then that focused communication tasks are an effective, and perhaps even necessary, instructional option. irrespective of the fact that such tasks are difficult to construct for the teacher and may pose a great deal of problems when it comes to design, they seem to create numerous advantages for learners. they contribute to greater automatization and raise the students’ awareness of the target grammar structure. apart from that, focused communication tasks place the learner in the centre of the learning process and they contribute to fostering learners’ autonomy, developing their motivation, and raising self-esteem. it is the learners that are expected to decide what they are going to say or write, and how they are going to do it. learners can test their hypotheses about the language and, thanks to the communicative goal, they can understand the real value and importance of the quality of their language as a means of communication. all these factors seem to be of vital importance, because, as robinson and n. ellis (2008, p. 490) believe, “language is learned from participatory experience of processing input and producing language during interaction in social contexts where individually desired non-linguistic outcomes are goals to be achieved by communicating intentions, concepts and meaning with others.” the effect of focused communication tasks on instructed acquisition of english . . . 359 references azar, b. 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(1998). explaining english grammar. oxford: oxford university press. 89 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (1). 2017. 89-103 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.1.5 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl language aptitude: desirable trait or acquirable attribute? david singleton university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary state university of applied sciences, konin, poland dsnglton@tcd.ie abstract the traditional definition of language aptitude sees it as “an individual’s initial state of readiness and capacity for learning a foreign language, and probable facility in doing so given the presence of motivation and opportunity” (carroll, 1981, p. 86). this conception portrays language aptitude as a trait, in the sense of exhibiting stability over long periods of time and being immune to training. the trait view of language aptitude tends towards the notion that it is innate, and indeed language aptitude has often been associated with the popular notion of a “gift for languages” (cf. rosenthal, 1996, p. 59). the view of language aptitude as an innate trait has, however, long been questioned (see e.g., neufeld, 1978). recently, this questioning has intensified (see singleton, 2014), especially since the development of a widespread consensus that working memory needs to be recognized as an important component of language aptitude (see wen, 2016). working memory was also once thought of as a trait, but is now recognized as susceptible to the influence of experience and instruction (see e.g., williams, 2012). the present paper will track the trajectory of the above theoretical discussion and will explore the implications of the stage it has now reached. keywords: aptitude; working memory; experience; language aptitude tests; instruction david singleton 90 1. introduction the most widespread traditional definition of language aptitude sees it as “an individual’s initial state of readiness and capacity for learning a foreign language, and probable facility in doing so given the presence of motivation and opportunity” (carroll, 1981, p. 86). this conception portrays language aptitude as a trait, in the sense of exhibiting stability over long periods of time and being immune or very resistant to training. the trait view of language aptitude tends towards the notion that it is innate. indeed, language aptitude has often been associated with the popular notion of a “gift for languages” (cf. rosenthal, 1996, p. 59). such a view may be at the very least over-simplistic. there are indications that language aptitude is in a number of its dimensions and to some degree a consequence of language experience and awareness (see singleton, 2014). this paper will suggest that our approach to language aptitude needs to make room for acceptance of the proposition that language aptitude is not as “given” as we may have once thought, and that what happens to us post-natally may influence it very considerably. in regard to aptitudes in other areas too, it is acknowledged that, whatever may be innate, experience and practice are indispensable to bring this to manifestation (see e.g., vinkhuysen, van der sluis, posthum, & boomsma, 2009). 2. language aptitude: definition in terms of its measurement language aptitude has for decades been widely defined de facto in terms of the instruments deployed in researching it. in much recent aptitude research (see e.g., muñoz, 2014) these instruments have tended simply to make use of (often just parts of) carroll’s modern language aptitude tests (mlat)—which date back more than half a century (e.g. carroll, 1973; carroll & sapon, 1959). the four components of language aptitude that are probed by the mlat approach, and which in this connection and for these purposes define language aptitude, are summarized below: . . . phonemic coding ability, the capacity to code sounds so that they can be retained for more than a few seconds; grammatical sensitivity, the capacity to identify the functions that words fulfil in sentences; inductive language learning ability, the capacity to take a corpus of material in a target language and make extrapolations (i.e., generalisations) from that material; and associative memory, a capacity to form links between native and foreign language words. (skehan, 2001, para. 2) an increasingly popular alternative to utilizing the mlat instrument is to deploy meara’s quite recently developed llama suite of tests (meara, 2005; see also granena, 2013). the llama tests build “on pioneering work by john language aptitude: desirable trait or acquirable attribute? 91 carroll (e.g., carroll & sapon, 1959) but over years . . . the design of the tests has significantly diverged from the originals on which they were based” (meara, 2005, p. 2). one is entitled to pose the question, however, whether this really constitutes an alternative, given that the llama set of tests is, as meara himself reports, largely modelled on the mlat tests, and their design differences largely amount merely to “a more snazzy presentation style” (lognostics, 2016). moreover, the tests in question, says meara, “have not been extensively standardised, and should not be considered a replacement for mlat in high-stakes situations” (lognostics, 2016). in fact, the llama tests have been deployed frequently in quite a cavalier way, and the manner in which they are being used, contrary to meara’s advice, in a great deal of current frontline research is apparently causing their creator considerable heartache, not to say sleepless nights (vivienne rogers, personal communication, 2016). for example, they have been used in important age-related research investigating whether language aptitude acts as a prophylactic against the effects of the so-called “sensitive” or “critical” period (see e.g., abrahamsson & hyltenstam, 2008; granena & long, 2013). the modern language aptitude tests (and their llama derivatives) have thus been widely used for decades, and essentially are still being used; some would no doubt argue that this demonstrates the proof of their worth. it is worth pointing out, however, that they fall within the ambit of stansfield’s swingeing critique of standard language aptitude tests which he made in 1989 (stansfield, 1989, pp. 3-4; cf. parry & stansfield, 1990; skehan, 2002), and which, in many people’s view, has never been satisfactorily answered. there are, of course, other language aptitude tests in use, for example, the pimsleur language aptitude battery, the high level language aptitude battery (hi-lab), and the cognitive ability for novelty in acquisition of language – foreign test (canal-f), for which the researchers below are respectively responsible. these overlap, however, with the mlat tests (e.g., pimsleur, 1966), their validation is still in progress (doughty et al., 2010) and/or their track record is no better than that of the mlat tests (e.g., grigorenko, sternberg, & ehrman, 2000), which is no doubt why researchers keep going back to the latter. we now turn our attention more broadly to the nature and scope of language aptitude. 3. the mutability of language aptitude as was stated in the introductory section, contrary to the traditional view of language aptitude, there are increasingly indications and claims that such aptitude is not an unalterable endowment present from birth—or not just something which is innate and unalterable—and that, at least to an extent, the awareness that derives from experience and training impacts on it (cf. robinson, 2002). in wen’s (2012) words, david singleton 92 the concept of fla has developed considerably over the last 15 years, from being seen as a stable and unitary fixed trait to being considered as more dynamic and multiple sets of malleable abilities that interact with other internal “learner attributes and attitudes” (larsen-freeman, 2001). (p. 234) of course, the trait conception of language aptitude did not arise from nowhere. some early studies (e.g., skehan, 1986; cf. sparks, 2012) showed a correlation between early l1 development performance in children and their later l2 aptitude scores and l2 proficiency, which was taken as a demonstration of aptitude constancy from early childhood. the current line of thinking, however, is that stability of aptitude based on some kind of bio-endowment is far from the whole story. this is not a new view. neufeld (1978) had something similar to say on the matter nearly 40 years ago. he suggested that the ability to shine in a second language is not dependent on what one is equipped with innately, but rather upon one’s previous learning experiences. larsen-freeman and long (1991, p. 169) also interpreted doing well in language aptitude tests as having its source in what emerges from the pattern of classroom experience rather than “some innate linguistic ability.” van lier (1996), for his part, consistently saw the development of language awareness, which is usually seen as distinct from language aptitude, as closely linked to it, as making a crucial contribution to the ability to learn language. his perspective on the matter was that “to learn something new one must first notice it . . . pointing one’s perceptional powers in the right direction and making ‘mental energy’ available for processing” (p. 12). schmidt (2012), like van lier, talks about the importance of “noticing.” since noticing involves awareness, and since schmidt regards noticing as playing a very important part in learning, he also makes the connection by implication between coming to awareness and the development of aptitude to learn. attention and noticing are crucial concepts for understanding second and foreign language learning. as baars (1997) puts it, “paying attention – becoming conscious of some material – seems to be the sovereign remedy for learning anything . . .” (p. 44). jessner (2006, 2014) has approached the awareness-aptitude nexus in the context of a discussion of the benefits claimed for multilingualism (cf. de bot, 2015; de bruin, treccani, & della sala, 2014). she reports from her findings a metalinguistic awareness in her subjects that she claims to be one of the fruits of the experience of multilinguality. she goes on to say that this metalinguistic awareness appears to be very much associated with the development of certain cognitive advantages, in other words with the development of particular kinds of aptitude. as she herself puts it, “the cognitive advantages which have been seen to develop in multilinguals have been related to an enhanced level of metalinguistic awareness” (jessner, 2006, p. 65). language aptitude: desirable trait or acquirable attribute? 93 kormos (2013) sums up the way in which thinking on this matter is moving with admirable succinctness: although language-learning aptitude might seem to be a relatively stable individual characteristic when compared with other factors, such as motivational orientation and action control mechanisms, there seems to be some converging evidence that certain components of aptitude . . . might improve in the course of language learning. (pp. 145-146) she cites in this connection a number of studies: eisenstein (1980), who showed that bilinguals and students with foreign language training evinced higher levels of language aptitude than individuals without such experience; sparks et al. (1995), who reported that instruction in latin resulted in increased language aptitude scores in high-school students; sáfár & kormos (2008), who compared two groups (at the beginning and end of the academic year) undergoing different amounts of efl instruction; the change in language aptitude scores was significantly higher among those receiving intense instruction; nijakowska (2010), who found indications that phonological sensitivity can be developed with the aid of specialized teaching. (p. 145) 4. the working memory dimension a particular instance of the notion that language aptitude develops with experience relates to the case of working memory (cf. chan, skehan & gong, 2011; wen, biedroń, & skehan, 2017). there are some differences between current models of working memory, but they have commonalities in regard to the conceptualization of this construct and to the account given of its processes. these models share a view of working memory as “mechanisms and processes that are involved in the control, regulation, and active maintenance of task-relevant information in the service of complex cognition” (miyake & shah, 1999, p. 450). they also share a conception of working memory as a limited capacity construct, whose efficiency may vary widely from individual to individual. working memory is generally assumed to comprise multiple components, each of which is seen as accounting for certain domain-specific effects. for example, a component that has been identified as especially relevant in the context of second language lexical learning is phonological short-term memory (also referred to as the phonological loop), which is believed to be responsible for the manipulation and retention of verbal material. within the most widely researched working memory model, the so-called multi-component working memory model (baddeley, 2000, 2007; baddeley & hitch, 1974), phonological short-term memory is conceived as a subsidiary system alongside two other subsidiary systems (the visuospatial sketchpad and the david singleton 94 later incorporated episodic buffer), and one supervisory attentional system (the central executive) (skrzypek & singleton, 2013). working memory capacity has been shown to have an impressive impact on second language learning (and, let it be said, on first language learning). there is no suggestion, of course, that working memory capacity explains everything (cf. baddeley, 2003), but wen (2016) cites a large number of empirical studies which indicate a close and positive relationship between the phonological aspects of working memory and attainment in second language lexical acquisition (e.g., cheung, 1996; ellis & sinclair, 1996; french, 2006; service, 1992), as well as the acquisition of l2 formulaic sequences and collocations (e.g., bolibaugh & foster, 2013; foster, bolibaugh & kotula, 2014; skrzypek, 2009) and grammar acquisition and development (e.g., french & o’brien, 2008; martin & ellis, 2012; o’brien, segalowitz, collentine, & freed, 2006, 2007; verhagen & leseman, 2016; williams & lovatt, 2003). accordingly, a strong connection has been established between phonological working memory capacity and the degree of proficiency achieved in relation to lexis, formulaic sequences and morpho-syntactic constructions (ellis, 1996, 2012, 2013; martin & ellis, 2012). the scope of working memory certainly extends far beyond the language learning area. nevertheless, it is clear that a high working memory capacity needs to be brought into the picture when consideration is being given to elements which may contribute to an aptitude for learning languages (r. ellis & shintani, 2013; wen & skehan, 2011; wen, biedroń & skehan, 2017), even if the question of the unidirectionality or bidirectionality of the influence requires further research and consideration. as mitchell, myles and marsden (2013, p. 155) point out, working memory, in common with language aptitude, “has traditionally been thought of as a ‘trait’ – a relatively fixed capacity that increases in a predictable, maturationally constrained way as children grow.” given the robust evidence that higher working memory capacity is associated with higher language learning performance, this “trait” view of working memory seems to point to the integration of higher capacity in this area with the trait understanding of language aptitude. in recent years, however, the view has been formed that working memory is, in fact, amenable to modification through relevant experience and training (eysenck, 2012; holmes, gathercole, & dunning, 2009; klingberg, 2010). also relevant may be the claim that bi-/multilingualism induces a higher degree of cognitive flexibility. for example, adi-japha, berberich-artzi, and libnawi (2010) report findings on the drawings of bilingual children, which they say provides support for the suggestion that “flexibility in the linguistic domain may facilitate flexibility in other nonlinguistic domains demonstrating the effects of experience (and in particular bilingualism) on children’s development” (p. 1364). since drawing is a complex skill involving fine-motor, perceptual, cognitive, and language aptitude: desirable trait or acquirable attribute? 95 other developmental competencies, working memory would seem to be inevitably involved in the mix. this change of view has very much impinged on the way working memory is now perceived within second language acquisition research (see e.g., williams, 2012). morales, calvo and bialystok (2013) found that children with experience of bilingualism performed better than monolingual children on working memory tasks. in their investigation two studies were carried out involving monolingual and bilingual children, the first manipulating working memory demands with reference to conflict resolution, the second based on a visuospatial span task manipulating other executive function component. the bilinguals outperformed the monolinguals in both kinds of tasks. indeed, the more complex the tasks the larger the difference between bilinguals and monolinguals. the authors interpret these results as demonstrating a working memory advantage for bilinguals (see also blom et al., 2014). it has to be said that these findings are somewhat in contrast to those of engel de abreu (2011), who found that dealing with a multiplicity of language systems in the mind had little impact on working memory. another study (gass & lee, 2011) reveals that two different second language groups at different stages in their university second language study (first and third year respectively) evinced significantly different second language working memory scores, which, again, points to a shaping, changing role for experience in relation to working memory capacity. in an earlier l2 study macdonald and christiansen (2002) illustrated a clear correlation between working memory capacity, practice and experience. what might be the implications of the above in educational terms? it is notable that there has been a considerable amount of work done by gathercole and her colleagues in assessing working memory and in attempting to train its capacity among children whose general academic performance has been adversely affected by their poor working memory. what emerges from such work is a claim that working memory can be improved by a process of training in such a way that it contributes to helping the children’s learning (dehn, 2008; dehn, kaufman, & kaufman, 2015; gathercole & alloway, 2008; klingberg, 2010). it has been mooted whether it might be possible to modify second language classroom instruction so that it fits second language learners’ working memory profiles (skehan, 2012; cf. dekeyser 2012), but, in addition, in the light of the above findings, more radically, it has been suggested that it may be possible to come up with pedagogical measures which may improve second language learners’ working memory capacity. tsai, au, and jaeggi (2016) have reviewed a set of studies reporting working memory training in relation to second language learning, which appear to have had a successful impact in respect of raising the level of capacity of executive components of working memory. working memory training research (see david singleton 96 also au et al., 2015) is controversial (cf. melby-lervåg & hulme, 2013), but accounts of its positive effects are vigorously defended (see au et al., in press), and such accounts are in line with the general evidence of the malleability of working memory capacity (see gathercole’s work and the studies referred to in the last paragraph). it is worth noting in this connection that in older adult learners substantial memory improvements (in which, of course, working memory plays a part) have been effected by memory strategy training (grotek, 2002). undoubtedly, more research is needed to evaluate how far the malleability of working memory should be taken into consideration by second language didactics and to what extent research findings in this area can inform second language pedagogy (cf. doughty et al., 2010). citing bunting and engle (2015) and williams (2015), wen (2016, p. 153) points out that the investigation of working memory in relation to second language learning is in general “still in its infancy” and that the interaction postulated between working memory and particular second language domains and processes is “only speculative” and requires “further scrutiny.” specific areas recommended by wen (2016, pp. 153154) for future research in this context are the relative importance of working memory vis-à-vis “statistical” mechanisms (cf. miysak, christiansen, & tomblin, 2010), the impact on the working memory construct of complex, dynamic conceptions of language (cf. de bot, 2008) and the connection between working memory and socio-affective factors (cf. dörnyei, 2010). what this section has attempted to show is that there has been a similar evolution in the conception of working memory to the evolution of the notion of language aptitude. we saw earlier that language aptitude has developed from being seen as a more or less unalterable bio-endowment, a “gift for languages,” that is present or not from the cradle onwards, to being recognized as a phenomenon which is changeable by experience. in like fashion, in the present section we have noted that working memory capacity has gone from being regarded as a fixed, lifelong given to being viewed of as improvable with increasing interaction with language(s) and possibly formal training. the interesting aspect of these developments is that they have more or less coincided with a process whereby working memory has been progressively acknowledged as a vital dimension of language aptitude. 5. concluding remarks all in all, the language aptitude discussion clearly requires a great deal more research and reflection at a definitional and theoretical level, and also in respect of its practical implications. fortunately, it is clear that such research and reflection are now coming its way. the fact that the bibliography to the present article contains numerous recent and forthcoming works dealing with language aptitude language aptitude: desirable trait or acquirable attribute? 97 is proof positive that there is renewed interest in this area, which not so long ago was something of a neglected backwater of applied linguistics. what is more, this interest is patently focused on the kinds of issues that most urgently require research attention. that is to say, the emphasis is not only on producing more reliable tests, although endeavours to this end are certainly ongoing. also under way is a thorough examination of the validity of language aptitude testing via an exploration of the entire construct of language aptitude, including its extent, its components, and its status as trait or attribute. perhaps the most significant indication of this root-and-branch re-appraisal of the nature of the construct of language aptitude has been the recent proposal to include working memory capacity as, among many other things (!), an important part of what we consider language aptitude to be. the particular issue that has been raised here regarding the extent to which language aptitude is innate and stable and to what degree influenceable by experience, seems increasingly, in the light of a range of language aptitude research, and in the light of recent research on working memory, to be receiving an answer which favours the notion of at least its post-natal improvability. the question also arises as to whether language aptitude and language experience/awareness are actually separable as constructs or whether they co-subsist on the same continuum (see singleton, 2014). evidence i have cited in this connection has its origins in classroom research, language awareness research and multilingualism research. on the basis of the above-mentioned proposed inclusion of working memory capacity within the language aptitude construct, such cited evidence also draws on recent research concerned with working memory. in particular, in regard to the second language learning situation, it refers to a range of indications that increased second language experience is associated with increased working memory capacity and a forthcoming study which seems to show that working memory training in the context of second language learning was successful in raising working memory capacity. if this latter finding is replicated, it may point the way to the development of some pedagogical ways of operating which might have a tangible impact on improvement of language aptitude via the improvement of working memory capacity. david singleton 98 references abrahamsson, n., & hyltenstam, k. 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(eds.), working memory in second language acquisition and processing (pp. 301-307). bristol: multilingual matters. 263 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (2). 2019. 263-285 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.2.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt a drama of selves: investigating teacher identity development from dialogical and complexity perspectives alastair henry university west, trollhättan, sweden https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7789-9032 alastair.henry@hv.se abstract identity is of increasing interest in teacher education. crucial for resilience, the development of a coherent professional identity has been characterized as emerging from tensions between multiple and sometimes conflicting conceptions of what it means to be someone who teaches (akkerman & meijer, 2011). while light is being shed on these often antagonistic relations, less is known about the dynamics of identity formation and transformation. providing a contribution to work on language teacher identity, in this single case study hermans’ (2008) concept of the dialogical self is combined with complexity principles in an investigation of changes in the emerging professional identity of a pre-service english teacher during a practicum. drawing on intraand inter-personal data, experiences of learning to become a person who teaches english are conceptualized as a drama that is played out between different and sometimes unaligned selves. analyses show how this inner drama maps onto the landscape of an emerging teacher identity, how tensions can be understood systemically, and how a teacher identity system can have a signature dynamic. keywords: language teacher identity; complex dynamic systems; dialogical self; practicum learning alastair henry 264 1. introduction in learning to teach, identity construction takes place in the midst of complex systems of different relationships. it is a process characterized by tension and struggle (alsup, 2006; beauchamp & thomas, 2009; beijaard, meijer, & verloop, 2004). the development of a professional identity begins in the earliest stages of preservice education (geijsel & meijers, 2005; walkington, 2005). through educational experiences in formal studies and practicum learning, students “develop a more sophisticated understanding of their work as teachers” (sutherland, howard, & markauskaite, 2010, p. 456). often, the practicum is the most influential of all aspects of a preservice teacher’s education. it can also be the most difficult, demanding and frustrating (ferrier-kerr, 2009; trent, 2013). nowhere in a teacher’s preservice education is the negotiation of shifting relationships as emotionally demanding as in early periods of classroom-based learning: moving from a university community of student teachers to the community of a school as a new teacher implies multiple tensions as adaptations and adjustments to identity are necessitated or provoked. we understand this period as an intense identity experience, a time when the new school context causes a beginning teacher to question and perhaps reframe her developing identity. (beauchamp & thomas, 2011, p. 6) in the practicum, multiple systems of relations exist in overlapping and often conflictive constellations. it is through the negotiation of relationships with university faculty, classroom mentors, pupils and preservice teaching colleagues that preservice teachers learn the work of teaching and begin to develop professional identities (smagorinsky, cook, moore, jackson, & fry, 2004). these multiple and complexly intersecting relations create tensions that can make identity formation a highly challenging process. it is against this backdrop that the current investigation of the process of the formation of a professional identity during a practicum is carried out. conceptualizing teacher identity as a dialogical accomplishment where development occurs as a consequence of shifts between different identity positions that map onto the topography of a teacher identity system, the study seeks to show how identity tensions can be understood systemically. it shows how a coherent language teacher identity can be understood as emerging from conflicting perceptions of what it means to be a teacher, and how a teacher identity system can have a particular signature dynamic. 2. a dialogical perspective the development of a coherent professional identity can be understood as a process of struggle, and a constant “search for meaning” (britzman, 2006, p. ix). a drama of selves: investigating teacher identity development from dialogical and complexity. . . 265 teacher identities are multi-faceted and dynamic (beijaard, meijer, & verloop, 2004). under continual construction and reconstruction, development takes place during interactions with others. identity development is thus both an individual and a social process (akkerman & meijer, 2011; rodgers & scott, 2008). while the struggles that take place between competing and sometimes irreconcilable identities are well-recognised, most studies on teacher identity development rely on retrospective self-report data and investigate identity dynamics over longer timescales (often semesters or entire programs). far fewer focus on development across shorter timescales or are structured around data collection points that are closely-spaced. even fewer investigate teacher identity development using dialogical data or attempt to map “the dynamics of a teachers’ identity by describing in more detail the self-dialogue that is pursued by a teacher in striving to maintain a coherent and consistent sense of self” (akkerman & meijer, 2011, p. 316). grounded in the recognition that teaching identities are constructed within relationships, and that development involves tensions between identities that can be conflictive, a dialogical approach offers a useful way of conceptualizing teacher identity development (akkerman & meijer, 2011). in research that frames teacher identities as dialogical accomplishments, the theory of the dialogical self (hermans, 1996, 2001, 2003) provides a valuable framework for mapping development. this is because it offers a systemic approach to the conceptualization of what it means to be someone who teaches (akkerman & meijer, 2011). like other theories with a focus on self-concept development, dialogical self theory emphasizes the complexity and multifacetedness of the self. drawing on james’ (1890) conceptualization of the self as comprising both the knower and the known, and bakhtin’s (1981) notion of the polyphonic novel where multiple voices offer sometimes complementary and sometimes conflicting narratives, hermans (2008) conceptualizes the inner world of the individual as a cast of characters who interact within a mesh of dialogical relations. each of these characters has a “voice,” which is also related to the voices of other characters. as in a play, where exchanges take place between the people on stage, in the dialogical self interactions occur between “voiced positions” (hermans, 2008). emerging from these interactions is a complex and narratively structured self. as situations change, the drama of the self unfolds in ways where shifts take place in the relative dominance of the voices that speak. thus, at any particular moment, some voices/positions will be dominant, while others are subdued (hermans, 2008). it is in this way, and through the facility of imagination, that a person can act agentically as if they were another person, or as if they found themselves in another setting (hermans, kempen, & van loon, 1992). with its emphasis on space and the framing of identity as a landscape where different aspects of the self are related to one another like points on a alastair henry 266 map, hermans’ (2008) theory of the dialogical self provides a way of dividing the self into functional sub-parts. each of these parts – “i-positions” in hermans’ theorizing – represents a particular aspect of identity. systemically, the self can be understood as an ever-shifting conglomeration of potentially autonomous ipositions which, at any point in time, can re-locate to a different part of the system’s space-time field (valsiner, 2004). following this conceptualization, the process of developing a teacher identity can be understood as one that involves interactions between i-positions within the dialogical landscape of “being someone who teaches” (akkerman & meijer, 2011, p. 315). often, this space is a contested one, identities emerging through the constant need to make sense of diverging conceptions of what it means to be a teacher. identity development is thus a product of negotiation. it is a product of attempts to interrelate i-positions in ways that can lead to a sense of self that is more or less coherent, and which can be sustained in the everyday work that takes place in classrooms. 3. a complexity perspective the development of a teacher identity is a dynamic process (henry, 2016; kaplan & garner, 2018). it involves “the formation and restructuring of relations” within and between identities and takes place “through intraand interpersonal processes” (kaplan & garner, 2017, p. 2036). the investigation of developmental processes involves pursuing the questions of why, when and how identities emerge. because complexity principles are focused on the mechanisms of development, they offer a means through which these central questions can be addressed. by focusing on the conditions under which identities evolve, a complexity approach can provide a framework for conceptualizing the integrative nature of teacher identity (kaplan & garner, 2017, 2018). from a complexity perspective, the dialogical self can be understood as a bounded yet open system where, in the ongoing drama of self-definition, interactions between i-positions are situationally influenced. to investigate and make sense of these conflictive relations, and to understand the dynamics of identity development, complexity theories offer a range of conceptual tools (bell & das, 2011). although traditionally connected with the natural sciences, complexity theories are now firmly established in the social sciences (byrne & callaghan, 2014). complexity theories have made particular inroads in research into second language development and, more recently, second language education (larsen-freeman, 2017; ortega & han, 2017). they provide conceptualizations of change that enable phenomena relating to language development to be viewed dynamically, and principles that can be applied in the study of these processes (hiver & al-hoorie, 2016; kostoulas, stelma, mercer, cameron, & dawson, 2017; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). a drama of selves: investigating teacher identity development from dialogical and complexity. . . 267 the dynamics of a complex system can be understood in terms of the system’s movement across its state space. the system’s state space comprises the total number of possible states that a system can occupy. regions representing enduring periods of stability are conceptualized as attractor states. regions representing (temporary) instabilities are repeller states. transitions between attractor states can arise as a result of perturbations (very specific, and often very sudden changes in the context). they can also be triggered through changes in the system’s control parameters (dimensions that constitute the state space and which have a “controlling” function). transitions to a new area of the state space involve a phase shift. new system behaviors are understood as emergent properties. these are aspects of functioning not existing previously which originate in a spontaneous manner from the system’s own internal interactions and self-organization (byrne & callaghan, 2014; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). using these dynamical conceptualizations, research conducted from a complexity perspective has the aim of representing particular systems at particular scales of description, identifying dynamical patterns of change and their emergent outcomes, and modelling the mechanisms that give rise to change (hiver & alhoorie, 2016). because the aim of complexity-informed research is to develop understanding of the parameters that influence a system, and in so doing to identify opportunities for effecting positive changes, a complex system is often described in terms of distinct dynamical characteristics. these are the system’s signature dynamics (byrne & callaghan, 2014; dörnyei, 2014; van geert & lichtwarckaschoff, 2005). identifying a system’s signature dynamics involves mapping the system’s state space, identifying the attractor (and repeller) states, and plotting the movement between these states. it involves developing an understanding of the types of movement that take place, the events that prefigure such changes, and, at the system level, the nature and the effects of changed behaviors. 4. study and purpose in a previous study in which a dialogical model of identity was combined with a complexity perspective, henry (2016) examined the identity dynamics of a preservice english teacher undertaking her first extended practicum. drawing on data from the same project, a similar approach is taken in the current study. in this previous study, the participant found herself consistently questioning the practices of her mentor and the other teachers at the school and, as a consequence, also her own motives for wanting to be a teacher. for this student, the struggles she experienced in developing a coherent teacher identity were characterized by ambivalence. with tensions between two competing i-positions in alastair henry 268 her teacher identity system remaining unresolved, at the end of the practicum she was uncertain about whether she wanted to continue her education. while struggles that take place during the practicum can lead to doubt and career reorientations (bloomfield, 2010), they can also be productive and lead to emerging identities that are oriented to future practice (trent, 2011). in contrast to the participant in this previous study, the participant in the current study found herself in an environment that supported her professional development. here, in mapping a different set of identity dynamics, and focusing on the ways in which a coherent language teacher identity can emerge within the “inside world” of a student teacher’s imagination (hermans, 2001, p. 249), the study seeks to show how identity tensions can be understood systemically and how a teacher identity system can have a particular signature dynamic. 5. method 5.1. design studies in which complexity principles are used to investigate identity development need to focus on (i) an identity system, (ii) the contexts in which it is embedded, and (iii) changes that take place over time (kaplan & garner, 2017). case studies of identity systems will therefore often involve the triangulation of data that is derived from multiple sources. following the design described by klimstra et al. (2010), analyses with a focus on identity dynamics occurring across shorter timescales (specific events in the classroom) were combined with analyses designed to reveal evolutionary patterns over longer timescales (across the practicum as a whole). 5.2 the participant the participant was a preservice english teacher undertaking a 4-week practicum at a school in the western part of sweden. she was the study partner of the participant in a previous single case study on teacher identity dynamics (henry, 2016). the participant and her colleague were selected to take part in the research on the basis of three considerations. first, when carrying out teaching practice, concerns relating to self-disclosure and the handling of sensitive topics and events can have constraining effects on a student’s engagement in “in-public” activities, such as posting contributions on online forums (chu, kwan, & warning, 2012; deng & yuen, 2013). these two students had established a trusting relationship. this meant that they were comfortable sharing experiences on an externally monitored forum. second, in a drama of selves: investigating teacher identity development from dialogical and complexity. . . 269 studies using complexity methodologies, data rich in detail needs to be collected across points in time that are closely spaced (kaplan & garner, 2017). for this reason it was necessary to select students who viewed the practicum as an important space for developing a professional identity and who were willing to discuss their day-to-day experiences. both students had demonstrated ambition and conscientiousness during their education and were selected for this reason. finally, given the purpose of investigating the dynamics of identity development, it was important to select participants who, to some extent, displayed uncertainty about the embarked-upon career. both students viewed the practicum as a testing ground for their career choice and hoped to gain an early indication that teaching was right for them. 5.3. the data intraand inter-personal data (jasper, moore, whittaker, & gillespie, 2012) were generated. the intra-personal data comes from two semi-structured interviews conducted by the author immediately before, and immediately after the practicum period. the inter-personal data comes from two sources: (i) postings made by the participant on an online forum (n = 22), where she and the other student maintained a conversation during the practicum, and (ii) a 40-minute, video-recorded, stimulated recall discussion between these two students immediately subsequent to a lesson that the participant had carried out. this combination of intraand inter-personal data offers a window into the participant’s processes of sensemaking, and her authoring of a dialogical self. while the intra-personal data can provide insights into beliefs and cognitions, the inter-personal data can cast light on the internal dialogue between voiced positions in the dialogical landscape of becoming someone who teaches. all of the data generated was in english. 5.4. analytical procedures a discourse analytical approach was used (coyle, 2006; potter & wetherell, 1995). this included a strategy specially developed for investigating inner dynamics within the dialogical self (bell & das, 2011; duarte & gonçalves, 2007). in a first stage, i carefully read the forum postings and the interview transcripts. this provided me with opportunities to experience these texts as a reader. it enabled me to develop an understanding of what the text was doing, and how this was accomplished. in the second stage i coded the text. doing this, my aim was to identify instances where an identity (i-position) was articulated. on each occasion when an identity was voiced, i shaded the text segment, and copied the extract into an adjacent comment box (using the “comment” function alastair henry 270 in word). doing this, my aim was to be as inclusive as possible. thus, even borderline examples of identity articulations were included. in a third stage, i examined these extracts in more detail. my aim here was to identify the function of an utterance. reading the text in a situated manner, i attempted to relate articulations of identity to discourses associated with teacher education, practice learning, and to teaching secondary level english in the swedish context. this involved focusing on the linguistic construction of the text. using the comment boxes, i made notes about the rhetorical function of discourse features. here, i paid particular attention to features in the discourse that might reveal an identity position that was currently foregrounded, and to variability within the discourse that could indicate whether a shift in identity position might have taken place. in a final stage, and for each identified i-position, i considered whether this was the same i-position as that narrated immediately previously, and if not, whether it constituted either an entirely new i-position or an i-position previously identified in the data and which was foregrounded again. these shifts were similarly noted in the comment boxes. working in this way, i was able to plot the movement between i-positions across each of the three types of data. 5.5. ethical considerations information about the research was provided to the participant and her student colleague. assurances of confidentiality were given, together with information that participation was voluntary and that withdrawal was possible at any time. written consent was obtained from both students. 6. results and discussion prior to starting teacher education, the participant, sara, had spent 15 years in a service sector job. although changes at her workplace provided the impetus to embark on a teaching career, in the initial interview she made clear that the idea of teaching english had “always been there since leaving school.” it was not, she said, “something i’ve come up with like a whim . . . it’s always been there. i wasn’t even applying for anything else when i applied. i knew what i wanted to apply for.” 6.1. i-positions at the start of the practicum in the interview before the start of the 4-week practicum, sara had the opportunity to talk about her feelings. she spoke of how she was looking forward to an extended period in the workplace, how she valued the opportunity to experience the work of teaching english, and how she saw it as “my chance to get a drama of selves: investigating teacher identity development from dialogical and complexity. . . 271 proper experience of the job.” she talked about hoping to feel confident in the classroom and was adamant that she wanted to contribute to the work taking place, and of not “feeling that i am being in the way” or of being “a burden to my luv.”1 asked how she viewed herself at this stage in her education and how she hoped to develop over the coming weeks, she talked of wanting to experience confirmation of her ability to teach, and said that the work of teaching would feel right for her: “that the more time it gets, the more confident i will become. that i will feel that i have chosen the right thing. and that it will be that it is not just something i think i can do, but will come up as a thing that i can do.” she talked also of being “curious about the students” and said that a commitment to young people’s development was another reason “why i want to do the job. for the students.” for sara the story she tells is both about who she is as a person aspiring to be a teacher and, through the exercise of imagination, who she hopes to become as a person who teaches. narratives of the self not only provide opportunities for reflection on who one has been in the past and who one is in the present; they also enable the telling of who one will be in the future (henry, 2019). in projecting forward and describing how she hopes the practicum will be, sara expresses a desire for validation (“that it will be that it is not just something i think i can do”) and articulates the hope that she will be perceived as a resource (“i don’t want to be a burden to my luv”). in this way, she positions herself as an emerging practitioner. even though the practicum is the first extended period she will spend in a school, the role she imagines for herself is not that of a bystander; rather it is of someone who is engaged in the practice of teaching english. in imagining the nature of this work, sara describes herself as someone who can teach english, and someone who will be actively involved in facilitating students’ learning. 6.2. initial conditions and system resilience in hermans’ (1996) theory of the dialogical self, identities are accomplishments traceable to interactions between i-positions. as in a story, in the internal dialogue of the self the responses of the characters (the i-positions) relate to both current and previously occurring events. in this ongoing story of the self, immediately preceding events can be understood as “initial conditions.” in a dynamic system, initial conditions represent the state of the system at the point in time that an observation sequence begins. initial conditions have a determining influence on the trajectory that the system takes across its state space (larsenfreeman & cameron, 2008). consequently, at the time that observations begin, 1 mentor alastair henry 272 it is important to ascertain whether the system is in a more generally stable or a more generally instable state (verspoor, 2015). a system that is in a more generally stable state is likely to display high resilience to perturbations. in the state space topography, this would be represented by an attractor state with a broad basin and deep-sided valley walls (nowak, vallacher, & zochowski, 2005). if perturbed, the return of the system to an attractor state of this type would be rapid. however, if the system is in a less stable state (i.e., the basin of attraction is shallower), it can be more easily perturbed. phase shifts – the movements of the system to a new area of the state space – would be more likely to occur. at the beginning of the practicum, sara’s teacher identity system is in a generally stable state. it can be understood as lodged within an attractor state that represents the emerging practitioner i-position. this, for example, is revealed in her opening contribution to the forum dialogue at the end of the practicum’s first day: excerpt 1 (forum post, day 1) my luv made a real effort to make sure i got introduced to all of her colleagues, in the “program team” she is a part of, and they all made me feel very welcome. we have had some really good conversations about some of the approaches she uses to teach and why. and she has started to give me copies of material she works with and makes herself. she tries to mix the textbook and own-made material, so i got to help her out with that. “she put me to work”, made me feel useful which i really appreciated. even in classroom she through me straight in to help the students with their tasks that they were working with, and i have to admit it was a confidant boost. that i actually could help, but also that she believed in/trusted me to do so. in articulating the experience of how her mentor “put me to work,” sara voices the experience of being the person she imagined herself to be before the start of the practicum, someone who is a resource in classroom practice. this is similarly the case when she tells how “we have had some really good conversations about some of the approaches she uses to teach and why.” even though sara is an early-program student, and she and her mentor have not previously met, as a discourse marker the pronoun ‘we’ functions to indicate that her knowledge and interests are recognized by an experienced teacher who finds herself having to explain and justify her pedagogical strategies. that such conversations have been identified as valuable to mentors has been noted by akkerman and meijer (2011), who point out that student teachers are increasingly perceived as ‘brokers’ “who open up possibilities for experienced teachers and schools to learn, for example, by asking critical questions” (p. 315). voice is also given to the sense of being someone who can facilitate students’ learning and who is able to teach english. this is also part of the emerging a drama of selves: investigating teacher identity development from dialogical and complexity. . . 273 practitioner identity. for example, sara writes that “even in classroom she through me straight in to help the students with their tasks that they were working with, and i have to admit it was a confidant boost. that i actually could help.” the foregrounding of this i-position at the beginning of the practicum is further confirmed when, in the second interview (at the end of the practicum), sara reflects on these early days. she says that her mentor “was good at showing me and appreciating me,” that her presence in the classroom was valued, that “she was not just having me for me, she’s having me for her as well,” and that this was something her mentor “continuously showed me.” however, even when the basin of attraction of a governing attractor state is deep-sided and broadly-stretched, the system is never entirely stable. a dynamic system is always prone to perturbations (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). micro-level events that have a perturbing effect on the system and which temporarily dislodge it from the attractor state representing the emerging practitioner i-position form the subject of posts written on the two subsequent days: excerpt 2 (forum post, day 2) in a split second! something came up today and my luv had to leave the classroom for a few minutes to give some instructions. we were having a class in her second subject and i was asked to get the lesson started, to read aloud to the class, and for a split of a second i felt like i was 9-10 again and forced to do something that i’d been repeatedly told i was bad at. it is strange how a thing like that can kind of throws one off guard even if it just for a short while. anyhow, i’m there to learn, and couldn’t really say no now could i, so i started to read. you know what, about 16 boys sat totally quiet and just listened, no talking or laughing just sat there quiet and listening. good feeling maybe about time after what, 20 some years or so, to start realizing i’m not that 10 year old girl anymore when it comes to reading, and that i actually can read aloud as good as anyone else. i got asked again of my luv if it felt ok to read and if i could do it again, so i did with a lot more confident the second time. excerpt 3 (forum post, day 3) it was my luv’s second subject again. i got to go through a thing on whiteboard today, something that she kind of just asked if i could do when we were in class and not before. it kind of threw me off guard a bit making me nervous, not that i didn’t know anything about the subject just that i was so totally unprepared and had to improvise. i have never really gone through something like that before, not even written on the whiteboard for that matter. of course i told her i was ok, and that she had to fill in if she felt i had missed something, not wanting her to think i was nervous about it. hmmm. i did mention it after class though, that i’d never done anything like that before. maybe she’ll give me more notice next time. mind you a strange feeling i have now looking back at it is that maybe i shouldn’t get to much time to prepare, not have time make a big thing about it, and learn to trust myself, trust my instincts, and believe that i can do this. not having time to get nervous about it i mean. not saying that i don’t need to plan alastair henry 274 ahead for bigger assignments, but little once like today and yesterday. got to read for class aloud today again, and guess what it wasn’t even close to be as “frightening” to do it today as i felt yesterday. third time is a charm in the first of these excerpts, sara describes a situation where, unexpectedly asked to read aloud to the class, she experiences anxiety. instantly, she recalls previous unpleasant experiences of having to read for others, and she describes how she momentarily loses her self-confidence. in the second situation an equally unexpected request generates a similar response. asked to explain something on the whiteboard, sara describes how this request “kind of threw me off guard a bit making me nervous.” in both cases the system is rapidly dislodged from its attractor state and transitions into a repeller state. repeller states are non-enduring periods of instability which, in the state space topography, form the ridges between the valleys of attractor states, as shown in figure 1. when a cognitive/affective system enters a repeller state, negative emotions are generated. consequently, the system rarely remains there for any extended period of time (macintryre & serroul, 2015). following a shift to a repeller state, a system is likely to return to its previous attractor state. however, this passage may not always be direct. evidenced in both of these forum entries, movement back to the attractor state representing the emerging practitioner i-position takes place via a newly emergent i-position, that of a student-apprentice. this is someone who is expected to follow the instructions of a superior and to carry out allocated tasks. while sara says that she had “never really gone through something like that before,” she also recognizes that she has little choice but to carry out the instructions: “i’m there to learn, and couldn’t really say no.” although, as an attractor state, the newly emergent student-apprentice i-position is not one in which the system remains for any length of time, it is here that the system gravitates whenever sara loses confidence, when she is reminded of knowledge or experiences that she does not yet possess, or when she becomes frustrated by aspects of her mentor’s classroom practice. however, as seen in excerpt 2, the positive experience of successfully accomplishing a challenging task – “16 boys sat totally quiet and just listened” – functions to quickly shift the system back to the emerging practitioner attractor state. on the subsequent occasions when she reads to the class, sara’s confidence in her abilities grows. on the third occasion she describes this as “a charm .” this leads to the reflection that in the future she should maybe not be given too much time to prepare for tasks like this. reflections of this sort also represent newly emergent system behavior. recognition of being a valued resource in classroom practice, and having the ability to facilitate students’ learning, function to strengthen her sense of self as an emerging practitioner. as the basin of attraction of the system’s governing attractor becomes deeper and broader, the a drama of selves: investigating teacher identity development from dialogical and complexity. . . 275 system becomes more securely anchored. this has the consequence that, in the face of potential perturbations, it will demonstrate greater resilience. when a new position within an identity system has been narratively created, it also becomes more readily accessible in the future (lewis & ferrari, 2000). moving further into the practicum, the i-position of the student-apprentice is an attractor state to which the system gravitates with greater frequency. in the final week, sara’s posts on the online forum reflect a deeper frustration in working alongside her mentor. in the post-practicum interview, she explains how she began to experience being restricted by her mentor’s approach and her methods: excerpt 4 (post-practicum interview) i did feel after the third week that i wanted to do my own thing. not because i had had enough of the school, because i loved it. the days went so fast. but i started to realize that i wanted to do it my way. and when you are in a vfu2 you just you are trapped into following everybody else’s footsteps. 6.3. signature dynamics dynamic systems can be described in terms of their signature dynamics (dörnyei, 2014). signature dynamics are “the robust causal mechanisms within a system” (hiver, 2017, p. 672). viewed over the practicum period, the signature dynamics of sara’s teacher identity system reveal a shifting back and forwards between these two attractor states and reflect a pattern where the two i-positions (the emerging practitioner and the student-apprentice) are variously foregrounded and backgrounded. as revealed in excerpts 3 and 4, on occasion shifts between these attractor states could take place via a repeller state where, momentarily, the system lacks anchoring. periodic shifts between these two attractor states reflect a period of “multi-stability,” a pattern of instability that is generally predictable (vallacher, van geert, & nowak, 2015). 6.4. the emergence of a new i-position being asked to read aloud (excerpt 2), and to use the whiteboard (excerpt 3), are perturbations that affect the system across shorter timescales (each a matter of seconds). dynamic systems also demonstrate fluctuations over longer timescales (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). following the initial period of adjusting to the conditions of learning to teach in her mentor’s classroom, and around the third week of the practicum, a new i-position in sara’s teacher identity system appears to emerge. the self-narratives that create i-positions have a powerful imaginative 2 practicum alastair henry 276 dimension, meaning that the dialogical self is always oriented to the future. indeed, in the process of the self’s becoming, the present exists merely as an unstable moment (hermans, 2008). as bento, cunha, and salgado (2012) explain, it is imagination that enables the individual “to construct what is not yet present and project something into the future” (p. 428). self-narratives about the future are constructed in the contexts of stories told about the present, and it is through ongoing processes of interrelations between i-positions that relate to the past, the present and the future that a coherent and consistent sense of the self can emerge (akkerman & meijer, 2011). figure 1 the state space topography of the participant’s teacher identity system. the two deeper indentations (top-left and bottom-right) represent the system’s governing attractor states and correspond to the emerging practitioner and student-apprentice i-positions. the ridge between these indentations represents a repeller state, a moment in time when the system temporarily lacks anchoring. sara’s growing self-confidence in the classroom means that the emerging practitioner i-position is more frequently foregrounded. however, in the following excerpts, we see how the emergence of a new i-position disrupts this development. in a dynamic system, a phase shift represents a sudden change where the system selforganizes into a new pattern of behavior. downstream from a phase shift, behavior is qualitatively different from that previously pertaining. it possesses a distinct and recognizable wholeness (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). similarly to the emerging practitioner i-position, this new i-position is constructed from narratives that encompass imaginal elements and which involve projections into the future: a drama of selves: investigating teacher identity development from dialogical and complexity. . . 277 excerpt 5 (stimulated recall, day 12) here because i’ve not gone through what i’ve planned i’m actually just trying to speed things up. so i’ve cut so much out so i kind of realise i need to do this [motions with hands at the screen] to get to the next part. urm. [pause] and i’m thinking how i’m gonna connect to the next. this is how i’m thinking there. i need to get from here to the next part. though i’m thinking they kind of need to [pause] so that’s going through my mind when i’m, i’m doing this. erm. well i’m actually thinking about it the whole time when i’m [motions with hands towards the screen] i’m going to have to do the next thing and connect it to it. . . . i, i think that it’s something i’m going to come across quite a lot and i think that, i think that, i don’t know, obviously i need to practice on it and maybe it gets better, erm, but i do think that sometimes you never know what’s going to happen in a classroom and i think that i’m going to come across it a lot, but i just need to work the time better, and hopefully that’s something that comes with, comes with experience. excerpt 6 (forum post, day 18) sad thing and a little depressing in all this though is that it here shows that my luv doesn’t have sufficient the time to spend with each and every student in the classroom that is needed to give the individual student the time they need. take for example student 2, that now will get a grade in this subject, and most likely a c, and most probably wouldn’t gotten a grade at all if it hadn’t been for the fact that we now for 4 weeks have been two people in the classroom instead of 1. not that my luv isn’t trying to “see” all the students but if you have a student that you over and over again tell that you need them to work and hand things in, and the student doesn’t what is there to do? . . . i know this is the back side of this profession; that time and money sadly limits the teacher to do all that they want to do for their students and that i one day also will be faced with these problems. however, the feeling, the satisfaction i feel after today still over powers that. how good it feels to see how proud the students become of themselves when they have achieved a goal/task, and how good it feels to have been a part of their achievement. in both of these excerpts, sara demonstrates an awareness of the constraints and challenges faced in the context of carrying out teaching in her mentor’s classroom. as bloomfield (2010) observes, during the practicum pre-service teachers embark on journeys of learning. these journeys involve conflict and struggle; learning to teach requires continual compromise, and preservice teachers can become embroiled in constant processes of accommodation. while in the first of these excerpts sara recognizes how she needs to cut back on the content of her lesson in order to complete it within the stipulated timeframe, in the second she reflects on the needs-resources equation and how the teacher’s limited time impacts negatively on students’ opportunities for growth. however, it is important to be aware that these challenges are perceived not only in the context of the current practice in which sara is involved. in sharing alastair henry 278 her experiences with her preservice teacher colleague in the stimulated recall discussion (excerpt 5) and in the discussion forum (excerpt 6), she projects into an imaginary future, framing the problems as challenges to be addressed in the imaginal spaces of future practice. while in excerpt 5 the challenge she envisages involves structuring activities in ways that can enable students to create meaning (“i think that it’s something i’m going to come across quite a lot”), in excerpt 6 a future working life is envisaged in the recognition that resource constraints can prevent students from fully developing their potential (“i know . . . that i one day also will be faced with these problems”). unlike the emerging practitioner and student-apprentice i-positions, which more generally involve orientations to conditions currently prevailing, the i-position that emerges here involves an undetermined language teaching future. in dialogical self theory, the self is not only “here,” but also “there” (hermans, 2008). it is through the power of imagination that the person can act “as if he or she were the other and the other were himor herself” (hermans, 2001, p. 250). this newly emergent i-position – a challenged practitioner – constitutes a new attractor state in the system’s state space. however, it is not just the sense in which sara frames her present experiences in terms of imagined future challenges that is characteristic of this new i-position. the challenged practitioner also differs from the emerging practitioner in the manner in which it is narratively constructed. in voicing concerns about the challenges she expects to face in the future, sara narrates a selfidentity as a member of a community of practice of other teaching professionals: “. . . if it hadn’t been for the fact that we [emphases added] now for 4 weeks have been two people in the classroom instead of 1,” “but i do think that sometimes you never know what’s going to happen in a classroom” (excerpt 5), and “not that my luv isn’t trying to ‘see’ all the students but if you have a student that you over and over again tell that you need them to work and hand things in, and the student doesn’t what is there to do?” (excerpt 6). pre-service teachers look to the future, often foreseeing different self-identities, such as for example being an inspiring teacher. providing a source for identity formation, imagined future practice enables the pre-service teacher to transcend immediate situations and to create visual representations of themselves in broader contexts of professional work (trent, 2011). it is through acts of imagination of this sort, and from the voices that are articulated in these representations, that professional identities develop. 7. conclusion comprised of i-positions oriented towards the past, the present and the future, the dialogical self is temporally configured. mapping the processes of this participant’s teacher identity development, three i-positions were identified. while a drama of selves: investigating teacher identity development from dialogical and complexity. . . 279 the student-apprentice i-position is oriented to presently pertaining conditions in learning the work of teaching, the emerging practitioner and the challenged practitioner involve narrative interpretations of current events from a vantage point in an imagined future. in common with possible selves (markus & nurius, 1986) and mcadams’ (1985) notion of the imago, i-positions have a function in guiding current behavior (henry, 2019). the dialogical self is both “here” (in the present) and “there” (in the future). as hermans (2001) explains, it is through the power of imagination that a “person can act as if he or she were the other and the other were himor herself” (p. 250). as revealed in the exploration of identity dynamics in this study, experience and imagination combine in the development of an identity of being someone who teaches english. the practicum is a place of struggle, and the process of developing a teacher identity is rarely linear (beauchamp & thomas, 2009). in this study, tensions are in evidence in momentary periods where the system enters a repeller state, and when shifts take place between attractor states that represent i-positions which are contradictory in nature. while together the forum posts offer evidence of identity development over time – specifically the emergence of the i-position of the challenged practitioner which is more frequently foregrounded in the posts towards the end of the period – examinations across shorter timescales (i.e., within a particular post) reveal how changes in the immediate context of learning to teach can trigger changes in the identity system. in this study, investigation of the identity narratives of the pre-service teacher participant has shed light on the dynamical processes through which a professional identity develops. focusing on the complexity principles of self-organization and emergence, analyses show how a language teacher identity is dialogically constructed, how i-positions are foregrounded and backgrounded, and how new i-positions come into being. as evidenced in the inter-personal data used in the study, it is through the dynamical positioning and repositioning of voiced identities within the dialogical self of being someone who teaches that innovation takes place. in everyday interactions in language classrooms, teachers are constantly involved in identity work; everything that a teacher does and knows is in some way implicated in the continual process of identity formation (miller, 2009). together with a complexity-framing, the conceptualization of language teacher identity as a collection of narratively constructed i-positions makes it possible to shed light on identity development as it takes place. because it provides a means of understanding the in-situ mechanics of identify shifts, the complexity approach adopted in the study has enabled identity development to be investigated as a process in motion that is operative across varying timescales. furthermore, in taking a perspective in which i-positions are understood as attractor states in a complex dynamic system, it is possible to understand how the foregrounding alastair henry 280 of a particular i-position can have effects not only at the system level but also on other interpenetrating systems. as seen here, and in a previous study (henry, 2016), a contextual change will often coincide with a shift in a mood. in sara’s teacher identity system, the attractor state representing the emerging practitioner i-position has a wide basin of attraction for positive emotions; she feels good when things go well, and when students respond in anticipated ways. equally, the attractor state representing the student-apprentice i-position has a wide basin of attraction for negative emotions. having to work in ways contrary to her beliefs about effective teaching, she experiences negative emotion. importantly, when an emotional experience is sufficiently incongruent with the system’s currently governing attractor – for example experiencing a positive response from a student when the system is in the student-apprentice attractor state – movement to a different part of the state space can be triggered. revealing how shifts in the teacher identity system have consequences for other systems is also an insight of importance that emerges from this study. in periods of learning such as the practicum where processes of identity development can be particularly intense, the conceptualization of teacher identity as dialogical and dynamic can provide a valuable pedagogical tool in the education of pre-service teachers. in the same way that johnston (1997) highlights the theoretical value of bakhtinian notions of identity in “detecting and unraveling the multiple, competing discourses present in the teachers’ speech” and in conceptualizing “teachers’ lives in efl/esl in a way that captures the complexities and contradictions of those lives without a general descent into incoherence” (p. 707), from a practice perspective i-positions can be similarly used to identify, explore and untangle developing professional identities and their effects. for pre-service teachers, the process of learning to work can be supported through the development of insights into the complexities of identity work (henry & tynkkinen, 2017). models that enable students to conceptualize identity as multivoiced, and which fame identity tensions as struggles between antagonists in a play who have competing opinions, can provide a practical means of investigating the dramas of the self that play out when learning to teach. working with identity work in this way can play an important role in studentmentoring (henry, 2019). of course, it is impossible to predict the exact nature of the struggles and the types of tension that teachers have to confront in developing a professional identity (pillen, den brok, & beijaard, 2013). however, by enabling pre-service teachers to recognize that the development of a professional identity necessarily involves conflicts between competing conceptualizations of what it means to be a teacher, and by providing them with models through which identities can be mapped and a drama of selves: investigating teacher identity development from dialogical and complexity. . . 281 developmental processes can be unraveled, dialogical conceptualizations of the self can play an important role in the mentoring process. acknowledgements i received insightful and important advice from the anonymous reviewers of this article, and from the reviewers of a previous article in journal of teacher education. i would also like to thank bo svensson, my colleague at university west, and tammy gregersen, who got me started with this work. most of all, i would like to thank “sara” and her preservice colleague “lina” for agreeing to take part in the study and for sharing their experiences with me. 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(2005). becoming a teacher: encouraging development of teacher identity through reflective practice. asia-pacific journal of teacher education, 33(1), 53-64. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (silesian university of technology, gliwice, poland) vol. 10 no. 2 june 2020 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) maria dakowska (university of warsaw, poland) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2020 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: jakub bielak mariusz kruk aleksandra wach © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: jakub bielak, melanie ellis, mariusz kruk, aleksandra wach cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · scopus · web of science emerging sources citation index (esci) · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the clarivate analytics (formerly thomson reuters) master journal list. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 10, number 2, june 2020 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ....................................................................229 editorial .........................................................................................235 articles: sharona moskowitz, jean-marc dewaele – through the looking glass of student perception: how foreign language students see teacher trait emotional intelligence and why it matters ...................................... 239 maria nilsson – beliefs and experiences in the english classroom: perspectives of swedish primary school learners ................................................. 257 dario luis banegas, paige michael poole, kathleen a. corrales – content and language integrated learning in latin america 2008-2018: ten years of research and practice .................................................................. 283 kristof baten, silke van hiel, ludovic de cuypere – vocabulary development in a clil context: a comparison between french and english l2 .... 307 a young park – a comparison of the impact of extensive and intensive reading approaches on the reading attitudes of secondary efl learners ..........337 sholeh moradi, shima ghahari, mohammad abbas nejad – learnervs. expert-constructed outlines: testing the associations with l2 text comprehension and multiple intelligences ...................................... 359 book reviews: danuta gabryś-barker – review of non-natives writing for anglo-american journals: challenges and urgent needs by katarzyna hryniuk ........ 385 mirosław pawlak – review of research methods for complexity theory in applied linguistics by phil hiver and ali h. al-hoorie .................. 391 notes to contributors .....................................................................397 229 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors dario luis banegas is a lecturer in tesol at the university of strathclyde, uk, and an associate fellow with the university of warwick, uk. in argentina, he supports continuing professional development initiatives usually through action research. he is also a visiting lecturer at different latin american universities. his main teaching and research interests are clil, initial english language teacher education, and action research. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0225-0866 contact details: school of education, university of strathclyde, lord hope building, 141 st james road, g4 0lt, glasgow, united kingdom (dario.banegas@strath.ac.uk) kristof baten is coordinator of foreign language education at the university language centre of ghent university, belgium. he obtained a phd in linguistics from ghent university in 2011. his research interests include morpho-syntactic development, the bilingual mental lexicon and bilingual language education. he has also conducted research on the effectiveness of explicit instruction and on the role of individual learner differences in a study abroad context. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2125-8011 contact details: uct, sint-pietersnieuwstraat 136, 9000 gent, belgium (kristof.ba ten@ugent.be) kathleen a. corrales is a professor, researcher, and academic coordinator of the instituto de idiomas at the universidad del norte, colombia. she is an interdisciplinary scholar whose interests lie in the intersection of language teaching and learning, content and language integrated learning (clil), development of international and intercultural competences, and business communication. as a member of the colombian colciencias-ranked research group, language and education, she has participated in research projects and has published articles and chapters on these areas. 230 orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6778-3925 contact details: foreign languages department, universidad del norte, km 5 vía puerto colombia, barranquilla, colombia (kwade@uninorte.edu.co) ludovic de cuypere is a lecturer in english linguistics at vrije universiteit brussel, belgium and a research consultant at the linguistics department of ghent university, belgium. he obtained a phd in linguistics and literature from ghent university in 2007. his research focusses on alternating morpho-syntactic constructions (e.g., english dative alternation), which he studies from multiple perspectives (different languages, synchrony and diachrony, foreign language learning). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0050-1097 contact details: ugent, lw06, blandijnberg 2, 9000 gent, belgium (ludovic.decu ypere@ugent.be) jean-marc dewaele is professor of applied linguistics and multilingualism at birkbeck, university of london. he has published widely on individual differences in psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, pragmatic, psychological and emotional variables in second language acquisition and multilingualism. he is former president of the international association of multilingualism and the european second language association. he is general editor of the journal of multilingual and multicultural development. he won the equality and diversity research award from the british association for counselling and psychotherapy (2013) and the robert gardner award for excellence in second language and bilingualism research (2016) from the international association of language and social psychology. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8480-0977 contact details: department of applied linguistics and communication, birkbeck, university of london, 26 russell square, wc1b 5dt london, uk (j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk) danuta gabryś-barker is professor of applied linguistics and psycholinguistics at the university of silesia, katowice, poland, where she lectures in applied linguistics, second language acquisition and multilingualism. she has published several books, edited twenty volumes and authored approximately two hundred articles nationally as well as internationally. professor gabryś-barker has been co-editor-in-chief of international journal of multilingualism (taylor & francis/routledge) since 2010 and the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the journal theory and practice of second language acquisition (university of silesia press) since 2015. she has been an active member of several scholarly associations, among them the international association of multilingualism since its foundation and the member of the board from 2010 to 2018. she has also been 231 the co-organizer of the international conference on foreign/second language acquisition in szczyrk, poland (university of silesia) for well over twenty years. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 contact details: university of silesia, institute of linguistics, ul. gen. grota-roweckiego 5, 41-205 sosnowiec, poland (danuta.gabrys-barker@us.edu.pl) shima ghahari is associate professor of applied linguistics at shahid bahonar university of kerman, iran, teaching and supervising postgraduate students. her recent papers have been published in system, assessing writing, journal of psycholinguistic research, studies in educational evaluation, culture and psychology, relc, reading psychology, psychological studies, pedagogies: an international journal, interpreter and translator trainer, poznan studies in contemporary linguistics, and other journals. she is also a reviewer and/or editor for many scholarly journals including learning and individual differences, tesol journal, reading and writing quarterly, and asia-pacific education researcher. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7182-8460 contact details: shahid bahonar university of kerman, department of foreign languages, 7616914111, kerman, iran (ghahary@uk.ac.ir; ghaharii@gmail.com) silke van hiel is a research consultant at ipsos, belgium, a global company in market research. she received an ma in linguistics and literature (english – french) from ghent university in 2016. her master’s thesis examined clil in belgium, with a focus on clil learners’ attitudes and motivations as well as productive and receptive vocabulary outcomes. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6616-3959 contact details: ugent, lw06, blandijnberg 2, 9000 gent, belgium (silkevanhiel @gmail.com) sholeh moradi holds an ma degree in tefl (teaching english as foreign language) from shahid bahonar university of kerman, iran and teaches english at several schools and colleges. her major areas of interest are cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2964-4101 contact details: shahid bahonar university of kerman, department of foreign languages, 7616914111, kerman, iran (sholeh.flam@gmail.com) sharona moskowitz is a phd candidate in applied linguistics at birkbeck college, university of london, uk. her research focuses on the role of student perception of 232 teacher emotion in the foreign language learning process. she is interested in various aspects of psycholinguistics related to foreign language acquisition, as well as the complex emotional dynamics of the student-teacher relationship in the language classroom. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5456-2186 contact details: department of applied linguistics and communication, birkbeck, university of london, 26 russell square, wc1b 5dt london, uk (smosko02 @mail.bbk.ac.uk) mohammad abbas nejad is assistant professor of applied linguistics at shahid bahonar university of kerman, iran, teaching and supervising postgraduate students. his major areas of interest are psycholinguistics, morphology, and english for specific purposes. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5287-0970 contact details: shahid bahonar university of kerman, department of foreign languages, 7616914111, kerman, iran (mabbasnejad2000@yahoo.com) maria nilsson is a phd student in language education at the department of language education at stockholm university, sweden. she has taught various courses within teacher education for primary school teachers. her research focuses on the perspectives of young language learners in relation to foreign language anxiety, learner beliefs and agency. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4201-0867 contact details: department of language education, stockholm university, 106 91 stockholm, sweden (maria.nilsson@isd.su.se) a young park is currently a teacher of changwon jungang girls’ high school in korea. she has been an english teacher, curriculum developer, and teacher educator for 15 years. her academic interests include using technology in l2 teaching and learning, l2 literacy development and practice. she is also interested in l2 assessment and assessment development. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7006-4809 contact details: changwon jungang girls’ high school, south korea 121, danjeong-ro, seongsan-gu, changwon-si, gyeongsangnam-do, 51499, south korea (sonnik@hanmail.net) mirosław pawlak is professor of english in the english department, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland, and department 233 of research on language and communication, faculty of humanities and social sciences, state university of applied sciences, konin, poland. his main areas of interest are form-focused instruction, corrective feedback, pronunciation teaching, classroom interaction, learner autonomy, learning strategies, motivation, willingness to communicate, boredom and study abroad. his most recent publications include error correction in the foreign language classroom: reconsidering the issues (2015, springer), willingness to communicate in instructed second language acquisition: combining a macroand micro-perspective (with anna mystkowska-wiertelak, 2017, multilingual matters), and boredom in the foreign language classroom: a micro-perspective (with joanna zawodniak and mariusz kruk, 2020, springer). he is editor of the journals studies in second language learning and teaching and konin language studies, as well as the book series second language learning and teaching, published by springer. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7448-355x contact details: adam mickiewicz university, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, ul. nowy świat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl) paige michael poole is foreign language professor at the universidad del norte in barranquilla, colombia, where she currently coordinates and teaches in the english programs with a cultural emphasis. she holds an ma in tesol studies from the university of leeds and has published on clil, materials design, global simulation, teacher development, and project-based learning. she is also interested in research related to intercultural and international competence development and international virtual exchanges. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0137-8801 contact details: foreign languages department, universidad del norte, km 5 vía puerto colombia, barranquilla, colombia (ppoole@uninorte.edu.co) 19 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (1). 2017. 19-46 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.1.2 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl not so individual after all: an ecological approach to age as an individual difference variable in a classroom simone e. pfenninger university of salzburg, switzerland simone.pfenninger@sbg.ac.at abstract the main goal of this paper is to analyze how the age factor behaves as an alleged individual difference (id) variable in sla by focusing on the influence that the learning context exerts on the dynamics of age of onset (ao). the results of several long-term classroom studies on age effects will be presented, in which i have empirically analyzed whether ao works similarly across settings and learners or whether it is influenced by characteristics of the setting and the learner—and if so, whether there are contextual variables that can help us understand why those outcomes are different. results of multilevel analyses indicate that macro-contextual factors (i.e., the wider school context) turn out to have a mediating effect on the relation between ao and l2 proficiency increase, exerting both positive and negative influences and thus suggesting that ao effects are malleable, which is what one would expect if we are dealing with an id variable. in contrast, no such phenomenon can be observed in relation to lower contextual levels; learners within classes do not vary with regard to how sensitive they are to ao. since the broader social environment in which learning takes place seems to be more influential than the cognitive state assumed to be a characteristic of the individual, i suggest that an id model that assumes that age is a “fixed factor” (ellis, 1994, p. 35) is not entirely satisfactory. keywords: age factor; context; environmental variables; young learners; individual differences simone e. pfenninger 20 1. introduction age is often discussed as if it were a simple, single factor that is “beyond external control” (ellis, 1994, p. 35). this is despite the fact that for many years it has been authoritatively pointed out that ignoring context when it comes to understanding individual differences (ids) between learners leads to a spurious, or, at least incomplete understanding; as larsen-freeman (2015, p. 16) poignantly puts it, “with the coupling of the learner and the learning environment, neither the learner nor the environment is seen as independent, and the environment is not seen as background to the main developmental drama.” although it is statistically possible to separate the learner from context, it is untenable to do so because this would carry the implication that the two are independent (van geert & steenbeek, 2008). in this paper, i focus on school contexts that can exert a facilitative, neutral, or inhibitory influence on age of onset (ao). the results of longitudinal and cross-sectional studies on effects of ao are presented, in which i have analyzed whether different schools, classes and participants vary with regard to how sensitive they are to the manipulation at hand (i.e., ao). in a first step, it is essential to test whether ao works similarly across broader school contexts, or whether it is influenced by characteristics of the context—and if so, whether there are macro-contextual variables that can help us understand why those outcomes are different. in a further step, i analyze whether effects of age are different for subjects in different classes and thus subject to micro-contextual variables. as we will see, the characteristics of the groups under investigation have implications not only for theoretical discussions of the age factor but also for methodology in age-related research. a multilevel modeling approach was deployed to shed light on the way in which ao interacts with macro-contextual variables such as school effects or treatment variables (e.g., type of instruction) and micro-contextual variables such as classroom and clustering effects. i will argue that the use of multilevel models enables us to integrate individual-level and contextual-level data in order to assess the impact of context-varying factors in relation to id variables. the data suggest that, owing to its complex status as a “macro-variable” co-varying with environmental factors (montrul, 2008, p. 1), the question of age as an id variable warrants an entirely separate treatment from most other ids (but see de bot & fang, this issue). 2. age as an individual difference variable the usual line is to place age alongside id variables like gender, aptitude, motivation, learning styles, learning strategies and personality (see e.g., dekeyser, not so individual after all: an ecological approach to age as an individual difference variable in. . . 21 2012; paradis, 2011; robinson, 2002; zafar & meenakshi, 2012). in his seminal overview of individual learner differences, dörnyei (2005, p. 4) defines ids broadly as “enduring personal characteristics that are assumed to apply to everybody and on which people differ by degree.” according to ellis (2006), the study of ids in sla research seeks answers to four basic questions: 1. in what ways do language learners differ? chronological/biological age and initial age of learning (or age of onset; ao) both have an impact on the affective and linguistic development of learners. while it has been argued that both may impact on l2 achievement by confounding with cognitive factors, education, and other background variables (bialystok & hakuta, 1999), several scholars (e.g., muñoz, 2008) have made the case for the claim that a confound between chronological age and ao may partly explain the negative effect on the performance of the youngest learners in comparison with older learners in school settings, and may thus contribute to the positive relationship between l2 proficiency and older age of learning (see also question 3 below). referring to stevens (2006), muñoz (2008) points out that chronological age is not just an indicator of biological processes associated with senescence; it is also an excellent indicator of life-cycle stage, strongly associated with motivations and opportunities to speak and to maintain or improve proficiency in an l2. 2. what effects do these differences have on learning outcomes? depending on the setting, an earlier ao might lead to better outcomes; for instance, in naturalistic settings age is widely recognized as a robust predictor of long-term success in second language acquisition (cf. hyltenstam, 1992; johnson & newport, 1989; krashen, long, & scarcella, 1979; patkowski, 1980; snow & hoefnagel-höhle, 1978). however, it is not the case that everyone who begins learning an l2 in childhood in an informal setting ends up with a perfect command of the language in question; nor is it the case that those naturalistic learners who begin the l2 later in life inevitably fail to attain the levels reached by younger beginners (see e.g., kinsella & singleton, 2014). related to this, attempts to define the temporal boundaries of a so-called critical or sensitive period for sla and fl learning have failed, that is, led to inconclusive results as it has not been possible to confidently establish the existence of a discontinuity in the age of arrival/ultimate attainment function (see e.g., vanhove, 2013). furthermore, generalizing age-related outcomes found in naturalistic settings to other contexts, notably the very different context of the classroom, has not been upheld by classroom research. numerous classroom studies throughout simone e. pfenninger 22 the world (see e.g., al-thubaiti, 2010 for saudi arabia; muñoz, 2006, 2011 for catalonia/spain; larson-hall, 2008 for japan; myles & mitchell, 2012 for great britain; pfenninger, 2013, 2014a, 2014b for switzerland; unsworth, de bot, persson, & prins, 2012 for the netherlands) have presented consistent results that there are very few linguistic and extra-linguistic advantages to beginning the study of a fl earlier in a minimal-input situation. finally, there seem to be different windows for different language domains. in many naturalistic studies (e.g., clahsen & felser, 2006; dekeyser, alfishabtay, & ravid, 2010; granena & long, 2013; mcdonald, 2006, 2008), it is pointed out that l2 morpho-syntax seems to be more vulnerable to processing difficulties than l2 lexico-semantics and more susceptible to age. such difficulties have been linked to resource limitations that might lead to the inability (a) to access and retrieve stored l2 knowledge (semantically-related difficulties) and/or (b) to detect phonological discriminations in the input (phonologicallyrelated difficulties), similar to the difficulties of native speakers under specific types of stress manipulation (mcdonald & roussel, 2010; pfenninger, 2011). 3. how do learner differences affect the process of l2 acquisition? although the prognosis for the level of “ultimate l2 attainment” (if there ever is such a state) generally deteriorates with increasing ao in a naturalistic setting, older children and adults often proceed faster through early stages in the acquisition of l2 morphology and syntax, that is, they profit from a rate advantage (e.g., garcía lecumberri & gallardo, 2003; muñoz, 2006; singleton & ryan, 2004). not only is there no evidence that an early start in foreign language learning leads to higher proficiency levels after the same amount of instructional time, but the “jump start” that older learners experience often enables them to catch up relatively quickly with the performance of earlier starters (see e.g., pfenninger, 2011; pfenninger & singleton, 2017) so that younger starters with more instructional time have often failed to show a particularly substantial advantage in terms of long-term proficiency benefits. 4. how do individual learner factors interact with instruction in determining learning outcomes? dekeyser (2012) discusses age-by-treatment interaction research in the narrow sense, suggesting that different learning processes are at work at different ages, which may imply the need for different treatment (implicit instruction for younger students vs. traditional teaching methodology for older students). sze (1994) mentions that since classroom-based l2 learning is generally more cognitively not so individual after all: an ecological approach to age as an individual difference variable in. . . 23 oriented than naturalistic acquisition, there is more reason to believe that the older instructed learner, whose cognitive ability is more developed, will outperform the younger learner in the l2 classroom. lightbown (2003, p. 8) points out that, “in instructional settings where the total amount of time is limited, instruction may be more effective when learners have reached an age at which they can make use of a variety of learning strategies, including their l1 literacy skills, to make the most of that time.” it is important to note that the “older-is-better” trend has also been found in partial and full immersion programs (see e.g., genesee, 1987; harley, 1986). for instance, in some of my earlier studies (pfenninger, 2014a, 2016), learners who experienced intensive exposure to efl in late immersion presented similar levels of proficiency in the fl to children who had experienced more exposure to the fl in early immersion programs. despite our increasing knowledge of the age factor in sla, there are still many points that are not understood very well. for instance, there is less agreement about the reasons for age effects and the mediating effect of cognitive, affective and environmental factors on age effects (granena & long, 2013). are children at an advantage for neurological or neuro-cognitive reasons (effects of aging on l2 learning) or because of age-related circumstances and contextual factors (e.g., positive attitudes, open-mindedness, greater commitment of time and/or energy, support system, school environment, etc.)? furthermore, owing to the complexity of the age factor, the question has arisen in recent years if this variable should really be regarded as an id variable. ellis (1994) belongs among the few scholars who exclude age from the inventory of ids. he takes the view that age transcends these categories and potentially impacts on all four, thus contributing to, rather than representing, ids in l2 learning. on the other hand, he considers age to be an example of a “fixed factor” or “general factor,” in the sense that “it is beyond external control” (p. 35). by contrast, motivation is for him an example of a factor that is variable and malleable as the strength of an individual learner’s motivation can change over time and is influenced by external factors. ao can also be causative (i.e., have an effect on learning as well as on other ids such as motivation), yet, of course, it cannot be resultative (i.e., be influenced by learning). while it is certainly true that no treatment could alter someone’s ao, and the impact of an early or late ao does not change with time, age effects are sensitive to, and thus mediated by, contexts and situations, as i will illustrate in this paper. 3. quo vadis: taking a person-in-context relational view of age in general, research on ids has primarily focused on examining individual learners’ cognitive and affective states in relation to goals, intentions, and self-images simone e. pfenninger 24 and how these factors differ across individuals (dörnyei, 2005; kozaki & ross, 2011). however, we know that id variables often interact with external variables, thus creating a joint impact on the outcome variable. hence, in order to complete the “individual differences” model of age outlined above, which assumes that ao is a fixed factor and the individual learner is the epicenter of cognitive processes that drive successful language learning, external factors need to be addressed as environmental influences (e.g., the impact of the learning context or compositional effects within the sample) that impact on and possibly mediate age effects in that age effects disappear as soon as external factors are taken into account—hence an “ecological” or, to use ushioda’s (2008) words, “person-in-context-relational” view of age. 3.1. macro-contextual variation: school effects one of the central goals of applied linguistics has been to place questions of language in their social context, as learners are influenced by context and they in turn help shape the context itself as time progresses (de bot, lowie, & verspoor, 2007; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). in motivation research, “macro-contextual variation,” that is, variation in motivation that is driven by broader outside effects such as societal and cultural influences, has been well-documented. dörnyei (2005, p. 67) holds that, unlike other school subjects, learning a foreign language can be heavily affected by socio-cultural factors “such as language attitudes, cultural stereotypes, and even geopolitical considerations.” in the same way, ao does not work similarly across settings, that is, it is influenced by characteristics of the setting. as mentioned above, there is good supportive evidence that under certain optimal learning circumstances (that is, high quality, quantity and intensity of input in a naturalistic setting, ample opportunities for interaction with a variety of native speakers, high motivation, etc.), an early ao can indeed explain why some learners succeed more than others. similarly, in a school context, school effects indicate the relationship between school characteristics and learning outcomes. school characteristics comprise context variables (e.g., school location, resources, school socioeconomic composition, teacher education and experience), which are beyond the direct control of parents, teachers and administrators, and climate variables (e.g., administrative policies, instructional organization, school operation, values, and expectations of students, parents and teachers) (ma, ma, & bradley, 2008). school-effects research has consistently shown that school policies and practices not only vary in their schooling outcomes, but that they can also improve the levels of schooling outcomes and reduce inequalities between different groups (e.g., lowering high status and/or lifting low status groups). thus, while not so individual after all: an ecological approach to age as an individual difference variable in. . . 25 students bring into their schools different individual and family characteristics (see e.g., haenni hoti & heinzmann, 2012) as well as different cognitive and affective conditions, schools are seen to channel or process, through school context and school climate, students with different backgrounds. 3.2. micro-contextual variation: the complexity of the classroom context let us now zoom in on the micro-context, that is, micro-contextual variation due to classroom effects. language learning in the classroom context has long been recognized as a complex dynamic system in that “individuals are intrinsically joined to their environment and context does not therefore represent a static external variable but is in reality part of the individual” (king, 2015, p. 1). under classroom effects we understand a complex interplay between effects of individual characteristics including self-confidence, personality, emotion, motivation, degrees of learners’ control over their learning, perceived opportunity to communicate and willingness to communicate, and classroom environmental conditions such as topic, task, interlocutor, receptivity to the teacher and pedagogical approach, and classroom dynamics (see e.g., borg, 2006; cao, 2011; wen & clément, 2003). it is chaudron’s (2001) view that classroom processes are heavily influenced by the structure of classroom organization, in which different patterns of teacher-student interaction, group work, degrees of learners’ control over their learning, and variations in tasks and their sequencing, play a significant role in the quantity and quality of learners’ production and interaction with the target language. another important component of the classroom atmosphere is group size. cao (2011, p. 472) suggests that “generally students prefer small group or pair work to whole-class activity in both esl and efl settings.” smaller classes may also facilitate more peer communication and mutual understanding, as dewaele and macintyre (2014, p. 264) point out: “smaller groups are more conducive to closer social bonds, a positive informal atmosphere, and to more frequent use of the fl.” additional factors include teacher characteristics, which are likely to also raise or lower the outcome for a given classroom (e.g., borg, 2006). it is unavoidable that the teacher plays an influential role in affecting students’ engagement (see also cao 2011; wen & clément, 2003). as a consequence of classroom effects, learners can exert a normalizing influence in fl classrooms that can augment or undermine individual learners’ own motivations to learn the fl (see pfenninger & singleton, 2016). as early as 1988, van lier described the importance of taking such classroom effects into consideration in classroom research: simone e. pfenninger 26 at some point all these factors must be taken into account, for all are relevant, many are related, and as yet we know little about their potential contribution to l2 language development . . . it is clear that, unless we are to oversimplify dangerously what goes on in classrooms, we must look at it from different angles, describe accurately and painstakingly, relate without generalizing too soon, and above all not lose track of the global view, the multifaceted nature of classroom work. (p. 8) i will argue in this paper that it is not enough for researchers to merely draw connections between language and context, but context needs to be granted appropriate weight in the analyses. although cohort effects have been observed in age research, too (see e.g., moyer, 2014; muñoz, 2014; nikolov, 2009, p. 93), more often than not, observations of such effects are neglected in the methodological analyses. indeed, many applied linguists (see e.g., pennycook, 2005, p. 796) caution that one of the shortcomings of work in applied linguistics generally has been a tendency to operate within “decontextualized contexts.” 4. the study 4.1. research questions the following research questions are addressed in this paper: rq1. to what extent is ao mediated by classroom effects? rq2. can we find some external (e.g., class-level) variables that explain betweengroup differences more accurately than age effects? rq3. is the effect of ao different for different schools, classes, tasks and subjects? studying interactions between age and external, educational or contextual variables is important as it allows for more fine-tuned (and hence more generalizable) predictions that help with adaptation of teaching methodologies to students or matching students with treatments (understood here as any kind of educational intervention at any level of generality, such as curriculum design, teaching method, content presentation, or practice activity; see dekeyser, 2012, p. 190). 4.2. participants one part of the study has a longitudinal design comprising a random sample of two groups following two different educational models of fl learning in the canton of zurich (n = 200). 100 of them were so-called “early classroom learners” (henceforth ecls); they were schooled according to the new model and learned standard german from the first grade onwards, english from the third grade onwards and french from the fifth grade onwards, while 100 were “late classroom learners” not so individual after all: an ecological approach to age as an individual difference variable in. . . 27 (lcls), schooled according to the old system without english instruction at primary level (ao 13, year 7), learning only standard german from the first grade and french from the fifth grade onwards. the average self-reported age of the students was 13.6 years at the first data collection time (at the beginning of secondary school) and 18.8 years at the second measurement briefly before graduation. for the qualitative analysis, i selected a focus group of 20 early learners and 20 late learners from those 200 who had participated in the quantitative phase. early and late learners were selected according to scores on a range of l2 proficiency tests administered at times 1 and 2. following muñoz (2014), the criterion for inclusion in the high achievement groups was a score in the 75th percentile on all tasks, and for inclusion in the low achievement groups a score in the 25th percentile on all tests. furthermore, the high-achievers all had grades at or above 5 (6 being the highest grade). following these grouping criteria, i ended up with four groups of 10 participants: 10 early learners, high achievement (elh); 10 early learners, low achievement (ell); 10 late learners, high achievement (llh); and 10 late learners, low achievement (lll). this focus group was chosen so as to get a better, more detailed impression of students’ language learning experiences and beliefs (see below). finally, a third group of participants was recruited in the canton of schaffhausen, where the early english program is conducted during four years of primary school, that is, the ecls’ ao is around 9 years, whereas the lcls from the previous curriculum started their english instruction at the age of 13. during a phase of transition, some of the ecls and lcls were integrated in the same classes when they entered the academically oriented high school (at around age 15), which provided me with a sample of five mixed classes (n = 98; 51 ecls, 47 lcls) to investigate class-specific slopes (the effect of ao for different tasks and subjects). the participants were in grade 9 (mean age: 15.1, range 14-17). 4.3. procedure language data were collected by means of a test battery that included a standardized listening comprehension task, two written compositions (an argumentative and a narrative essay), a grammaticality judgment task,1 a vocabulary size test (academic sections in schmitt, schmitt, and clapham’s [2001] versions a and b of nation’s vocabulary levels test), laufer and nation’s (1999) productive vocabulary size test, and two oral tasks (the re-telling of a silent movie and a spot-the-difference task) (for a description of these, see pfenninger & singleton, 2017). in order to give a better account of the interaction of ao and other (often 1 the reliability coefficient (kr-20) obtained was .90 for grammatical items and .95 for ungrammatical items. simone e. pfenninger 28 hidden) variables such as motivation, attitudes and beliefs, the participants were given 45 minutes to write language experience essays, which i hoped would elicit (a) the participants’ reflections on their experience of early or late fl learning at the beginning and at the end of secondary school, (b) the participants’ affect in respect of foreign languages, and english in particular, and (c) participants’ beliefs about the age factor. loose guidelines were provided for the writing. no specific length was set; students wrote between 203 and 475 words (see pfenninger & singleton, 2016). 4.4. method the main question is how to operationalize an ecological perspective of the age factor in different settings as described above, for example, the interrelationship between starting age and macro-contextual variables such as school effects or treatment variables (e.g., type of instruction), as well as micro-contextual variables such as classroom and clustering effects. the most frequently used statistics in sla—general linear models (glms) that compare means as a default, as well as correlation-type statistics (e.g., plonsky, 2013, 2014; plonsky & gass, 2011)— are not suitable for a nuanced account of exactly what goes on in the classroom as they run on the averaged data and thus cannot directly provide information about individual change or capture the complexity of contextual effects on individual learning. besides the problem of the loss of information in glm, these models are often used in violation of at least some of the assumptions of the procedure, such as the inclusion of correlated errors in linear models. performance as well as affective factors correlate between the members of one cluster, resulting in the loss of independence among observations, a serious violation of a key assumption underlying a large majority of parametric statistics procedures (e.g., goldstein, 1995; raudenbush & bryk, 2002). multilevel modeling (mlm), a subgroup of linear mixed-effects regression modeling, has for some time finally been finding its way into certain sla subfields (see pfenninger & singleton, 2017). the use of multilevel models enables us to integrate individual-level and contextual-level data in order to assess the impact of context-varying factors in relation to id variables. mlm can also take account of the fact that performance correlates between students within the same class (and school) in a way that is not observed between different classes (and schools), and takes the hierarchy of the data into consideration: measurements within and between students that are nested within classes that are nested within schools. i specified a multilevel model that included all the oral and written measures (listening comprehension, receptive vocabulary, lexical richness [guiraud index], fluency, complexity, accuracy, grammaticality judgments). fixed effects included main effects of ao and time as well as the interaction between ao and time. i not so individual after all: an ecological approach to age as an individual difference variable in. . . 29 later added fixed effects for class size. visual inspection of residual plots did not reveal any obvious deviations from homoscedasticity or normality. random intercepts for classes and schools were included, as were random slopes for time varying by both classes and schools, and school-specific, class-specific and taskspecific slopes, using a maximal random effects structure. the qualitative analysis of the language experience essays was conducted in two stages. the first stage involved separately reading through the essays for each student of the focus group several times, getting a general understanding of issues covered and taking note of interesting features. from the second reading on, the essays were analyzed independently by two researchers for emerging categories that were significant relative to target language development and age-related differences. 15 categories emerged as significant relative to target language development and age-related differences. finally, after the saturation of categories, some were merged with others, resulting in eight final categories: 1. future l2 self-states 2. present l2 self-states 3. fl learning anxiety 4. linguistic self-confidence 5. attitudes towards fls in general 6. attitudes towards the learning situation 7. cultural interest and media usage 8. parental encouragement the advantage of the conventional approach to content analysis is gaining direct information from study participants without imposing preconceived categories or theoretical perspectives. to prepare for reporting the findings, exemplars for each code and category were identified from the data. finally, an extensive biodata questionnaire was administered at both measurement times in order to collect biographical data and quantifiable information concerning participants’ l1 and fl learning history. at the first data collection time, when the participants were under 18 years old, parents’ consent was obtained to authorize the children’s involvement in the research. 5. results and analysis 5.1. research question 1 as table 1 in the appendix shows, although the ecls who took part in the longitudinal study showed stronger performance in the receptive vocabulary task as simone e. pfenninger 30 well as with respect to oral and written lexical richness, they did not significantly outperform the lcls in the long run with respect to receptive and productive vocabulary, and to oral and written production (content, organization, fluency, complexity, accuracy, lexical richness). the results also showed that for receptive vocabulary, grammaticality judgments, oral and written productive vocabulary (guiraud index), and oral and written accuracy, the time × ao interactions were significant in favor of lcls, that is, the lcls displayed faster learning rates in these areas. not only did the lcls make more progress within a shorter period of time in certain areas, but they were also able to catch up very quickly (i.e., within six months in secondary school) with the performance of the early starters in other areas. thus, there was an age effect, but in favor of the late starters. figure 1 variation across classes for receptive vocabulary at time 1 (variance = 15.63, sd = 3.60, p < .001) in addition to the fixed effects discussed above, there were also significant random class effects with estimated intra-class correlation coefficients (icc) between 0.11 and 0.32. class effects, therefore, explained 11%-32% of the variability in english listening comprehension, grammaticality judgments, receptive and productive vocabulary, written content, organization accuracy, fluency, complexity. figure 1 shows the between-class differences for receptive vocabulary at time 1. how well a student performed in these tests was, consequently, also dependent on which class they were in—more than on the age at which they started learning english. the use of glms (e.g., anovas, t tests) with this dataset would thus very quickly lead to incorrect estimates of treatment and other fixed effects (e.g., age effects) in the presence of the correlated errors that arise from a data hierarchy. in other words, if we fail to take the above-mentioned 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 10 20 30 40 number of students r ec ep tiv e vo ca bu la ry sc or es t 1 not so individual after all: an ecological approach to age as an individual difference variable in. . . 31 variance and covariance into account statistically, this will maximize or minimize age effects, which could lead to misinformed educational policies (goldstein, 1995; raudenbush & bryk, 2002). the importance of immediate context has also been observed in naturalistic studies: dekeyser (2013), for instance, cautions that a bias in convenience samples (e.g., a bias toward the more educated or toward learners who are in contact with other speakers of the same l1) can minimize age effects in immigrant settings. thus, to answer rq1, classroom effects can not only impact on students’ motivated behavior and, by extension, affect their fl achievements, but they also mediate age-related differences. 5.2. research question 2 in order to clarify what exactly led to the class differences described above, i consulted the language experience essays written by the 200 subjects at both data collection times. a content analysis revealed the following factors that the students deemed conducive to fl learning at time 1 and time 2: 1. group size (time 1: ecl 65%, lcl 59%; time 2: ecl 71%, lcl 75%): “our class is much too big, which doesn’t honestly motivate me to contribute much to the english lesson.” (12_llh15_m_ger) 2. group composition (time 1: ecl 65%, lcl 59%; time 2: ecl 71%, lcl 75%): “i think it’s good that we only have girls in the class. we learn faster and better than other classes. my classmates spur me on.” (07_elh21_f_ger) 3. peer influence (time 1: ecl 55%, lcl 50%; time 2: ecl 33%, lcl 35%): “a lot of my classmates thought that they [foreign languages] were sometimes boring [in primary school], so then i didn’t find it fun either.” (07_elh5_m_ger) 4. teacher skills/personality (time 1: ecl 79%, lcl 82%; time 2: ecl 59%, lcl 62%): “english was honestly not great for me from the beginning, because i didn’t like our teacher so much.” (07_elh6_f_ger) 5. teaching method (time 1: ecl 46%, lcl 55%; time 2: ecl 59%, lcl 65%): “our english teaching was very good at primary school. we did a lot of creative stuff. and when the teaching is fun (with a lot of games too) you learn better also (i think).” (07_elh9_f_ger) 6. teaching materials (time 1: ecl 23%, lcl 25%; time 2: ecl 12%, lcl 17%): “if there are new modern learning methods available, they should be used! i very seldom enjoyed the french teaching . . . besides that i find the course book ‘envol’ boring and dry.” (07_llh1_m_ger) while factors 2-6 could not be directly measured in this study, it was possible to include class size as a fixed effect in the multilevel models. indeed, for simone e. pfenninger 32 all the measures, class size was a strong predictor of fl outcomes and thus partly explains why the intercepts are higher in some classes and lower in others. figure 2 illustrates the impact of class size on receptive vocabulary at time 2. figure 2 effects of class size on receptive vocabulary at time 2 (b = -0.84, se = 0.23, t = -3.66, p = .0006) possibly one of the main reasons for this is the large impact of class size on motivation (see e.g., future l2 selves in figure 3), which is known to mediate fl achievement (see pfenninger & singleton, 2016a). figure 3 effects of class size on future l2 selves at time 2 (b = -0.08, se = 0.02, t = -3.25, p = .003) 10 12 14 15 16 17 18 19 21 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 number of students r ec ep tiv e vo ca bu la ry sc or es t2 10 12 14 15 16 17 18 19 21 1. 5 2. 0 2. 5 3. 0 3. 5 4. 0 4. 5 5. 0 number of students m ot iv at io n sc or es t 2 not so individual after all: an ecological approach to age as an individual difference variable in. . . 33 5.3. research question 3 multilevel analysis can also play an important role in evaluating school outcomes because it can help disentangle school effects from the effects of student characteristics (or ids). analyzing how much difference there was between/within schools, that is, whether there was variability in the effect of the fixed variables (ao, among others) on learners’ l2 achievement, i found that there was significant variability in age effects across the five schools at time 1 but not time 2. although, overall, the five schools did not vary with regard to how sensitive they were to ao across the written tasks at time 1 (see figure 4), the effect of ao was different for the different schools with respect to the oral measures (figure 5) as well as various other measures (e.g., receptive vocabulary and grammaticality judgments in figure 6 and figure 7, respectively). figures 4-7 thus show that some schools had weaker slopes than others for certain measures (e.g., receptive vocabulary)—meaning that age-related differences varied across schools—while for other measures (e.g., oral measures and grammaticality judgments), some schools showed age effects “in the opposite direction.” figure 4 random ao slopes for five schools (written efl achievement at time 1) in pfenninger and singleton (2016), we argue that the reasons why school districts can mediate age-related differences could be the impact of schools and classes on students’ motivated behavior. furthermore, the participants came from different primary and secondary school districts and neighborhoods and hence slightly different educational backgrounds that emphasized different skills and values: early late 0 10 20 30 40 ao w rit te n e fl ac hi ev em en tt 1 schools simone e. pfenninger 34 resources available and used in fl education are dependent on schools, which might then influence learners’ intrinsic interest indirectly (see e.g., kormos & kiddle, 2013), with the mediation of classroom factors (muñoz, 2008). students who are highly motivated might thus be able to make up for a later start. by the same logic, early starters who were in primary schools with less than optimal learning conditions might not be able to profit from the extended learning period, as they might have, for instance, significantly less favorable future l2 self-state. (pfenninger & singleton, 2016, p. 25) figure 5 random ao slopes for five schools (oral efl achievement at time 1) figure 6 random ao slopes for five schools (receptive vocabulary at time 1) early late 0 20 40 60 80 ao o ra le fl ac hi ev em en tt 1 schools early late 10 20 30 40 ao groups r ec ep tiv e vo ca bu la ry sc or es t1 schools not so individual after all: an ecological approach to age as an individual difference variable in. . . 35 figure 7 random ao slopes for five schools (grammaticality judgment tasks at time 1) thus, the results demonstrate how schools (in this case primary schools) can vary in their schooling outcomes, as described in the literature review above. furthermore, the fact that school-specific slopes were no longer necessary at time 2 shows that schools (in this case secondary schools) can also reduce inequalities between different groups over a longer period of time. by contrast, different classes seem to be equally susceptible to age effects. figures 8 and 9 show that some classes had a higher intercept than others, as mentioned above. figure 8 illustrates that the earlier the students’ ao is, the more the prediction for better receptive vocabulary will increase. on the other hand, late starters consistently outperformed early starters with respect to grammaticality judgments (figure 9), arguably, because the early starters may not have developed an especially acute sense of grammatical accuracy, perhaps because of the lack of attention to this dimension in the fl instruction in primary school (see pfenninger & singleton, 2016). with respect to the slopes, no such significant differences can be observed. although the slopes are not exactly parallel, the difference is relatively small, that is, learners within classes did not vary with regard to how sensitive they were to ao. this points to relatively strong age effects that are able to prevail despite classroom and clustering effects. however, this was a relatively small sample of five classes, and these classes had just been formed six months prior to testing, which might have had a negative impact on group cohesion (see pfenninger & lendl, in press). on the other hand, the findings can also be explained in terms of the strong task effects that i found, which i will discuss in the following. early late 30 35 40 45 ao groups g js co re s t 1 simone e. pfenninger 36 figure 8 random ao slopes for five mixed classes (receptive vocabulary) figure 9 random ao slopes for five mixed classes (grammaticality judgments) in order to empirically measure and analyze whether different tasks vary with regard to how sensitive they are to the manipulation at hand (i.e., ao), i included task-specific random slopes for the fixed effect of ao so as to find out whether the effect of ao might be different for different tasks. it turned out that the effect of ao was different for different tasks at time 1 but not at time 2 (oral: variance = 1.43, sd = 1.19, p < .001; written: variance = 21.27, sd = 3.5, p < .001). while spoken and written fluency, complexity and accuracy as well as grammaticality judgments remain relatively unaffected by ao, receptive vocabulary (see figure 10) and oral productive vocabulary are highly sensitive to ao. this early late 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 ao r ec ep tiv e vo ca bu la ry sc or es early late 20 25 30 35 40 45 ao g ra m m at ic al ity ju dg m en ts co re s not so individual after all: an ecological approach to age as an individual difference variable in. . . 37 might reflect the greater reliance on implicit learning in children (and accordingly the implicit teaching approach in primary school) and explicit learning in older children (dekeyser, 2012). figure 10 random ao slopes for six written tasks (productive and receptive vocabulary, fluency, complexity, accuracy, and grammaticality judgments) at time 1 finally, since it is not possible to include subject-specific slopes for the fixed effect ao—which means we cannot allow the effects of ao on l2 achievement to vary across individuals in the model—i needed to employ a qualitative approach in order to find out if, for example, some ecls profit more from an early start than others. analyzing the language experience essays written by the focus group, that is, the 10 early high-achieving starters, the 10 early low-achieving starters, the 10 late high-achieving starters, and the 10 late low-achieving starters, revealed an interesting pattern. although, of course, many different views and opinions emerged concerning how the students felt about the age at which they had started being exposed to english at school, there was something of a trend in that the late starters (high and low achievers alike), who had french in primary and english in secondary school, came out fairly uniformly at both data collection times (time 1: 81%, time 2: 91%) with critical sentiments like the following: (1) i personally don’t think it’s good when you begin learning too early, etc. but of course i think you shouldn’t start too late; i think starting english at 12 or 13 is exactly right. (07_llh7_m_ger) (2) i think one foreign language at primary school (french) is good enough [in primary school], because we learn english anyway. i could already early late 0 10 20 30 40 ao w rit te n e f l ac hi ev em en tt 1 tasks gui recvoc w/tu c/tu acc/tu gjt simone e. pfenninger 38 sing english songs at primary school, because i wrote them down (the words) and as a curious child i then wanted to know what it was all about. (07_llh4_m_ger) (3) the motto “the earlier the better” is not quite true. children who don’t have german as a mother tongue have to learn three languages because of this and then comes the overload. we should begin very slowly. i would leave things as they were; if i had to change something i’d put french later, from 6th class. (07_lll6_f_ger) the lcls at time 2 on the whole remained as satisfied as they had been at time 1 with the late english regime they had experienced, and as skeptical as they had been with regard to the wisdom of the introduction of english at primary level (see also pfenninger, 2016). the early low achievers expressed similarly critical views at both times (time 1: 79%, time 2: 86%); they mainly took issue with the slow pace in primary and the repetitions in secondary school (see examples 4 and 5), as well as the choice of language of instruction at primary school (example 6): (4) with the help of simple games and songs in a foreign language a small vocabulary can be built up. but i remember how in early years the learning was unconcentrated and slow. at secondary level it progressed really fast. (12_elh9_m_ger) (5) early acquired knowledge has anyway got to be reviewed again in subsequent schooling. after five years of learning english and two years of learning french, i had to start again. (12_elh9_m_ger) (6) at primary school our teacher even still spoke german, but here at xxx the teacher only speaks english. (07_elb91_f_ger) the exception at time 1 to the expression of dissatisfaction with what had been experienced were the early high achievers, who supported the pattern of starting english at an earlier age (time 1: 79%). (7) “the earlier the better.” we should learn foreign languages early because our brain learns a foreign language faster when we’re children. (07_elh3_m_ger) (8) i think it’s good that i had english as early as 2nd class because actually i didn’t feel it as a burden. it was very easy too that we only learned things like “hello, how are you” and general standard things. we learned colors, numbers and animals until finally we were able to make sentences. there were basic rules of a kind that i didn’t find tremendously easy but with time you find it easier. i had a good teacher for this too. (07_elh9_m_ger) not so individual after all: an ecological approach to age as an individual difference variable in. . . 39 at time 2 some more nuanced, more skeptical views appeared in this group (24%), but, overall, the tenor was still in favor of an earlier start: (9) even if in individual cases early english doesn’t achieve the desired success, it was still worth a try. it’s of course hardly the case that children who have english instruction from second class in primary school, can speak the language fluently after four years. in my opinion, however, it’s not primarily a matter of making as much progress as possible, but much more a matter of getting a feel for the language. so, for example, in relation to pronunciation and intonation. (12_elh6_f_ger) thus, the discrepancies between the groups can be ascribed to proficiency rather than ao. this hypothesis was confirmed by a majority of the participants (time 1: ecl 52%, lcl 66%; time 2: ecl 61%, lcl 88%) who were aware of the gap between high achievers and low achievers: (10) according to my experiences, it’s heavily dependent too on the person whether they benefit from the early learning of foreign languages. you have to be aware that at primary school the iq range is very wide. so for one child french or english instruction may be a trifling thing, for another a hugely excessive demand. (12_elh7_f_ger) (11) so actually the teaching should be suited to each child, and one group should already get foreign language teaching early and another group not yet at that time. (12_elh3_f_ger) 6. conclusions and implications it is very important to understand the true nature of age effects, not least because the age debate raises important concerns about all aspects of curriculum development and its adaptation to different ages (see dekeyser, 2013). in this study, i have empirically measured whether ao works similarly across settings and learners or whether it is influenced by characteristics of the setting and the learner—and if so, whether there are contextual variables that can help us understand why those outcomes are different. one of the main findings was that school/class context and climate interact with student-level variables such as ao: students under conditions of different school context and school climate demonstrate different educational attainment irrespective of ao, which has direct policy implications for policy makers, administrators, teachers, and parents. furthermore, results of multilevel analyses indicated that macro-contextual factors (i.e., the wider school context) turn out to have a mediating effect on the simone e. pfenninger 40 relation between ao and l2 proficiency (growth), exerting both positive and negative influences and thus suggesting malleability of ao, which is typical of id variables. it is thus particularly important in institutional environments that age effects are considered in light of macrocultural and microcultural phenomena that can have a bearing on interpersonal relations that influence, shape, increase, or decrease variables such as motivation that interact with age. in contrast, no such effect could be observed with lower-level data, as learners within classes did not vary with regard to how sensitive they are to ao, in contradistinction to other ids such as motivation. i suggest that the origin of the significant school slopes can be found in the strong age × context/treatment interaction documented in the literature, as well as different educational backgrounds, school curricula, materials and resources of the participants. the lack of class slopes, on the other hand, can be explained in terms of leveling effects that result from the integration of early and late starters in the same classes. the present study also showed that not only do different structures show different sensitivity to age of acquisition (see, e.g., dekeyser, 2012) but also different tasks/skills. arguably the focus on vocabulary in primary school is primarily responsible for this interaction effect. in the long run, however, none of the tested skills turned out to be problematic as a function of ao. i would thus argue that the broader social environment in which learning takes place seems to be more influential than the cognitive state assumed to be a characteristic of the individual. therefore, a simple id model, which assumes that age is a fixed factor, is not entirely satisfactory. ao not only interacts with environmental contingencies to create a synergistic effect, but it is also influenced, mediated and mitigated by environmental influences (e.g., the impact of the learning context or compositional effects within the sample). multilevel models are ideal for such investigations as they encourage us to shift from a myopic focus on a single factor such as the age factor to examining multiple relationships among a number of variables, including contextual variables, or, in brown’s (2011) words: “you are more likely to consider all parts of the picture at the same time, and might therefore see relationships between and among variables (all at once) that you might otherwise have missed or failed to understand” (pp. 11-12). in this view, then, such methods can be seen as an attempt to remake the connections between language learning and the social learning contexts in which these occur. not so individual after all: an ecological approach to age as an individual difference variable in. . . 41 references al-thubaiti, k. 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(2012). individual learner differences and second language acquisition: a review. journal of language teaching and research, 3(4), 639-646. simone e. pfenninger 46 appendix table 1 evaluation of written production and response time 1 time 2 ecl1 lcl1 b t p ecl2 lcl2 b t p listening n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. 12.61 (3.17) 12.08 (3.49) -0.45 ±0.47 -0.95 .332 productive vocabulary n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. 25.30 (7.35) 26.18 (7.88) 0.94 ±2.83 0.33 .716 receptive vocabulary 26.36 (8.59) 17.47 (8.05) -8.90 ±1.73 -5.13 < .001* 50.08 (7.14) 49.40 (7.54) -0.60 ±3.28 -0.18 .841 written content 19.14 (2.61) 19.05 (2.19) -0.10 ±0.34 -0.29 .791 27.27 (1.91) 27.10 (2.01) -0.20 ±0.37 -0.54 .567 written organization 10.61 (2.16) 10.42 (2.05) -0.10 ±0.30 -0.35 .709 16.67 (2.96) 16.90 (2.45) 0.28 ±0.49 0.58 .560 guiraud index (oral) 4.05 (1.90) 3.21 (1.29) -0.97 ±0.96 -2.01 .002* 5.55 (1.43) 5.63 (1.27) -0.00 ±0.83 -0.00 .997 guiraud index (written) 4.92 (1.30) 4.17 (0.78) -0.76 ±0.19 -4.09 < .001* 7.57 (0.80) 7.73 (0.77) 0.16 ±0.15 1.04 .268 fluency (oral) 60.95 (16.55) 58.00 (8.28) -5.03 ±7.08 -0.63 .494 124.80 (12.78) 122.63 (12.92) -2.23 ±7.41 -0.30 .742 fluency (written) 10.87 (3.64) 10.78 (3.22) -0.09 ±0.49 -0.19 .846 14.91 (2.97) 14.21 (4.17) -0.74 ±0.57 -1.31 0.18 complexity (oral) 1.32 (0.62) 1.34 (0.41) -0.05 ±0.31 -0.17 .862 1.57 (0.50) 1.61 (0.50) 0.00 ±0.28 0.00 .996 complexity (written) 1.43 (0.39) 1.45 (0.31) -0.00 ±0.05 -0.03 .996 1.69 (0.61) 1.71 (0.44) -0.01 ±0.09 -0.14 .900 accuracy (oral) 3.46 (1.67) 2.79 (1.72) -0.67 ±0.24 -2.78 .008* 1.20 (1.25) 1.30 (1.40) 0.04 ±0.19 0.25 .763 accuracy (written) 2.07 (0.63) 1.77 (0.58) -0.33 ±0.08 -4.03 < .001* 0.60 (0.44) 0.62 (0.56) 0.02 ±0.08 0.30 .745 grammaticality judgments 24.20 (3.78) 23.45 (3.41) -0.79 ±0.66 -1.19 .203 41.93 (3.31) 42.97 (2.75) 0.96 ±0.76 1.27 .180 note. *statistically significant at α < .05; bold type = significantly higher scores. 391 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (2). 2020. 391-395 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.2.9 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review research methods for complexity theory in applied linguistics authors: phil hiver, ali h. al-hoorie publisher: multilingual matters, 2020 isbn: 978-1-78892-573-0 pages: 286 when i found out about the upcoming publication of a book devoted in its entirety to research methods that can be used to investigate issues in applied linguistics (al) within the framework of complex dynamic systems theory (cdst), i immediately decided to include it in my reading list and, time permitting, review it for ssllt. on the one hand, research into learning and teaching second and foreign languages is one of the most vibrant lines of inquiry in al and therefore it is only fitting that the appearance of such a ground-breaking volume should be recognized by the journal. after all, it is an indisputable fact that cdst has made major inroads into the domain of second language acquisition (sla) and it is beginning to change or, should i say, revolutionize the ways in which different aspects of sla are examined. this is perhaps most evident in the case of studies of individual difference (id) factors (e.g., dörnyei, macintyre, & henry, 2014; hiver, 2017; oxford, 2017) and has also found its reflection in the special issue of ssllt (1/2020), titled investigating the dynamic nature of individual differences in l2 learning, guest-edited by laura gurzynski-weiss. in addition, one cannot help but notice that this theoretical stance has started to be seen as 392 a new creed for many specialists, to the point that there is perhaps a danger of its being perceived as the only “correct” approach to shedding light on various facets of sla. as diane larsen-freeman writes in her excellent foreword to the book, “this new way of thinking has called into question the conventional ideas about language and its learning/development” (p. vii). on the other hand, i cannot call myself an ardent enthusiast of cdst, not because i cannot see its many merits or do not acknowledge its enormous potential for expanding our understanding of how languages are learnt or taught, but because i believe that only a diversity of approaches can help us better grasp the intricacies of these processes. still, i was certainly thrilled to finally see a publication that, instead of merely trying to convince us that sla research should be grounded in cdst, in fact makes an earnest attempt to illustrate how this can be done in practice. the book is divided into four parts. part one, “introduction to complexity theory,” is composed of three chapters (chapter 1 is an introductory one), and, as the title suggests, aims to introduce readers to the main tenets of cdst (chapter 2) as well as delving into philosophical and methodological issues involved in carrying out research within this theoretical framework (chapter 3). drawing upon their previous work (hiver & al-hoorie, 2016), the authors present here what they refer to as the dynamic ensemble, or guidelines that should be heeded when planning and designing empirical studies informed by cdst. these are considered with respect to operational, contextual, macro-system and micro-system decisions. in the following two parts of the book, emphasis is placed on specific methods that have originated with different disciplines and can be potentially harnessed for cdst-driven research in al. accordingly, part two is devoted to the discussion of qualitative methods which are as follows: qualitative comparative analysis (chapter 4), process tracing (chapter 5), concept mapping (chapter 6), agent-based modeling (chapter 7), retrodictive qualitative modeling (chapter 8), social network analysis (chapter 9), and designbased research methods (chapter 10). part three, in turn, is dedicated to quantitative methods, that is, panel designs (chapter 11), latent growth curve modeling (chapter 12), multilevel modeling (chapter 13), time series analysis (chapter 14), experience sampling method (chapter 15), single case designs (chapter 16), and idiodynamic method (chapter 17). for reasons of space, it is not feasible to even very briefly characterize all of these research methods here and, thus, suffice it to say that while some have already been quite successfully applied in sla research (e.g., retrodictive qualitative modeling, idiodynamic method, experience sampling), others are newcomers to the field and it remains to be seen whether they will be adopted and in fact catch on at some point. it should also be noted that chapters dealing with specific methods follow the same structure, whereby each method is briefly introduced, possible research 393 questions are specified, technical features are considered, and an example study is presented. finally, part four illuminates how different methods used in cdst research can be beneficially integrated (chapter 18), as well as providing a useful glossary of terminology related to cdst and a list of resources that interested readers can reach for in order to further explore this theoretical perspective. not being a great fan of cdst myself, i strongly applaud the publication of hiver and al-hoorie’s book for several reasons. first, it is reassuring that researchers at long last have at their disposal a manual which can guide their efforts to apply complexity theory to different areas of al in general and sla in particular. therefore, i could not agree more with another comment made by larsen-freeman in the foreword: “the potential to deliver robust findings, consistently and convincingly, through powerful analytical tools is a most welcome next step in the evolution of cdst in service to furthering our understanding of second language development” (p. ix). second, the volume has the potential to become a valuable resource also for scholars who may be reluctant to embrace the principles of cdst since they adhere to other theoretical positions or simply wish to keep an open mind about the utility of different theories. this is because they can fall back upon some of the methods introduced in part two and part three to pursue their own research agendas. fore example, experience sampling has been successfully employed to explore changes in levels of motivation, willingness to communicate or boredom, even though the relevant studies have not drawn upon cdst (e.g., pawlak, mystkowska-wiertelak, & bielak, 2016; pawlak, kruk, & zawodniak, 2020). third, the authors should be commended for making it clear that adept integration of various methods may be indispensable but also for admitting that not all research has to be anchored in complexity theory and use its theoretical apparatus. this is how i understand the comment, for instance, that “good applications of cdst research will be transparent about the reasons for choosing to adopt a complexity framework and specifying why situating the study within this perspective is a sound theoretical and empirical choice” (p. 55). fourth, one simply cannot help being impressed by the authors’ extensive knowledge of cdst as well as methods of investigating it, their erudition, or the rigor and logic with which the volume is structured. it is evident how much effort must have gone into studying this theoretical position and putting the book together but, looking at the final product, this was surely time well spent. this review would be incomplete without mentioning what i see as limitations of the volume. for example, the overview of the principles of cdst in chapter 2 does not make for easy reading and it is doubtful whether those with limited understanding of this theory will be able to process all the information included, but this is a problem that the authors themselves openly recognize. in addition, while there are differences in this respect between chapters, the book 394 would probably better serve its purpose as a guide for applied linguists if the discussion of the research methods were more firmly grounded in al or sla. i do understand that many of the methods were imported, so to speak, from other disciplines and no relevant example studies were available, but i would argue that the research questions listed or the procedures outlined could include more references to issues specific to our field. the danger is that if such links are not highlighted, some readers may simply fail to see their immediate relevance to their own research endeavors. although i appreciate the inclusion of a framework for integrating different methods for the sake of cdst-driven investigations, i am not entirely convinced that the somewhat lengthy elaboration on how mixing methods is distinct from integrating them amounts to much more than splitting hairs. at the end of the day, any study should include some kind of justification for why different instruments were used or how different data sources contribute to the interpretation of the findings. finally, what seems to be missing is a concluding chapter that would offer even a very sketchy research agenda concerning the areas of al that the cdstbased methods could help us illuminate. i do realize that this would have been a somewhat daunting task, but such an effort could get some skeptics to actually test the potential of complexity theory in their own studies. despite these critical comments, which are obviously very subjective and which other readers may disagree with, i would like to emphasize that hiver and al-hoorie’s book is a landmark publication and an invaluable contribution to our field. of course, it remains to be seen whether and to what extent the specific methods will find successful applications, but it is quite clear to me that researchers have been equipped with requisite tools of the trade that they can put to the test in their specific contexts to advance their own research agendas. whatever sentiments about cdst one may have, it is undeniable that with the publication of the book, this theoretical perspective stands a much greater change of helping us understand different aspects of al and in particular sla than before. i hope that phil hiver and ali al-hoorie will continue their efforts to show the utility of cdst and perhaps one day they will also write a book about how adopting complexity theory can actually translate into more effective instruction in the language classroom. reviewed by mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl 395 references dörnyei, z., macintyre, p. d., & henry, a. (eds.). (2015). motivational dynamics in language learning. bristol: multilingual matters. hiver, p. (2017). tracing the signature dynamics of language teacher immunity: a retrodictive qualitative modeling study. modern language journal, 101, 669-699. hiver, p., & al-hoorie, a. h. (2016). a dynamic ensemble for second language research: putting complexity theory into practice. modern language journal, 100, 741-756. oxford, r. l. (2017). teaching and research language learning strategies: selfregulation in context. new york: routledge. pawlak, m., kruk, m., & zawodniak, j. (2020). investigating individual trajectories in experiencing boredom in the language classroom: the case of 11 polish students of english. language teaching research. http://doi.org/10.1177/ 1362168820914004 pawlak, m., mystkowska-wiertelak, a., & bielak, j. (2016). investigating the nature of classroom wtc: a micro-perspective. language teaching research, 20, 654-671. 465 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (4). 465-466 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial new communication and information technologies are probably the main feature associated with the phenomenon of globalisation. such technologies allow people to be in contact with almost anyone anywhere, raising debates about both their benefits and negative consequences. it is often argued that they contribute to increasing the domination of a few major languages chosen to mediate communication, at the expense of more minor languages in terms of the number of speakers and social status. on the contrary, it is also argued that they allow speakers of minority languages to be in contact with one another and create social networks that may promote the survival, birth, or spread of such languages. the facilitated use of languages over large areas of the world may trigger language differentiation, eventually contributing to the rise of different dialects, or even languages. among the benefits associated with new technologies, we realise that they give us access to immense language corpora that often reflect language differentiation. the papers presented in this special issue concern various aspects of languages in the globalised world, and they stem from reflections on the interpretation of multilingual literacy and cross-cultural encounters. in the first paper, romuald gozdawa-go biowski reflects on the status of european english and its deviations from english native standards. it is followed by an analysis by robert michael bianchi of the characteristics of 3arabizi, an emerging language blending english and vernacular arabic. those two studies of major languages from a social and linguistic viewpoint are followed by three papers which adopt a classroom perspective. first, ralph krüger makes a case for the use of internet-based corpora in translation classrooms. following this, two papers ponder cultural issues in teaching: pawe sobkowiak examines how intercultural competence can be developed despite the homogeneity of the language classroom in poland, and luz maría muñoz de cote and sylvia van dijk investigate how to enhance students’ competence in academic english in their 466 specific fields of interest. finally, théophile munyangeyo provides an original reflection informed by sociological reading of fictional narratives, highlighting the way writing can reflect social events through symbolism. he also reflects on challenges related to reading and using factual content in language learning from fictional narratives. théophile munyangeyo leeds metropolitan university, united kingdom t.munyangeyo@leedsmet.ac.uk françois pichette téluq/université du québec, canada francois.pichette@lli.ulaval.ca 225 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (2). 2016. 225-248 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.2.3 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl l2 english derivational knowledge: which affixes are learners more likely to recognise?1 dmitri leontjev university of jyväskylä, finland dmitri.leontjev@jyu.fi abstract knowledge of derivational morphology is considered an important aspect of vocabulary knowledge both in l1 (mother tongue) and l2 (second or foreign language) english language learning. however, it is still not clear whether different derivational affixes vary in their (learning) difficulty. the present study examines whether bauer and nation’s (1993) teaching order of l2 english affixes can account for the difficulty learners have with recognising the affixes. the participants in the study were l1 estonian and russian learners of english at uppersecondary schools in estonia (n = 62). their performance was measured on a word segmentation task. there were significant differences in the number of affixes the learners were able to successfully recognise at different levels, as classified by bauer and nation (1993). by and large, with the exception of no significant difference between level 5 and level 6 affixes, the higher the affix level was, the less likely the learners were to recognise the affixes at this level. i argue that these results can support the order proposed by bauer and nation. the implications of the finding for teaching and further research are also discussed. keywords: derivational morphology; affix difficulty; l2 english teaching 1 the present article was used as a part of leontjev (2016), the author's compilation dissertation. dmitri leontjev 226 1. introduction a number of studies have revealed that l2 (second or foreign language) inflectional morphology poses problems for learners (e.g., clahsen, felser, neubauer, sato, & silva, 2010; felser & clahsen, 2009; jiang, 2004; lardiere, 1998). at the same time, while l2 learners (and native speakers alike) face even greater problems with derivational morphology (friedline, 2011; schmitt & meara, 1997; schmitt & zimmermann, 2002; silva & clahsen, 2008), not many studies on learners’ word derivation knowledge and its acquisition have been conducted. friedline (2011, p. 60) suggests that the reason for the small number of studies on word derivation has been, until recently, the predominance of theories that argue for a clear dichotomy in morphology, such as split morphology hypothesis (perlmutter, 1988), which states that whereas inflection is rulebased, derivation only occurs in the lexicon. nevertheless, more recent advances in morphology research, especially in the field of psycholinguistics (e.g., alegre & gordon, 1999; clahsen & neubauer, 2010), suggest that at least some derived words can be processed within the same rule-based system as (some) inflected words. therefore, more research into word derivation and its acquisition is necessary, the more so as many questions, including how exactly learners acquire l2 word derivation knowledge, remain unanswered. as regards l2 inflection, some relatively early morphological studies (e.g., bailey, madden, & krashen, 1974), but also later studies (e.g., pienemann, 1998), sought an answer to the question of whether there is a universal order of acquisition of l2 inflectional morphemes. with a similar objective in mind, using the research findings on the english affixes available at that time, bauer and nation (1993) classified l2 english affixes (both derivational and inflectional) into seven levels. the levels ranged from considering each form a different word (level 1), to classical roots and affixes (level 7). later, nation (2001) refined the classification, adding a number of affixes to the levels and limiting the list to derivational affixes only. bauer and nation (1993) suggested that the levels could be used as a framework for teaching/learning affixes for reading in english. they further proposed that the levels could reflect what should be included in word families at different levels of learners’ morphological awareness and be used as a reference point in empirical research on the development of word derivation knowledge. nevertheless, up until the present time, this order has not been unambiguously confirmed or rejected empirically both as a difficulty order and the order in which learners do indeed acquire derivational affixes, or at least some of their aspects. the present study endeavours to find evidence for bauer and nation’s (1993) proposal, aiming at confirming that the levels they defined reflect the increasing l2 english derivational knowledge: which affixes are learners more likely to recognise? 227 difficulty learners have with recognising the affixes. therefore, the research question the study aims to answer is: · does the difficulty learners have with recognising derivational affixes differ significantly across the affix levels as classified by bauer and nation (1993), increasing as the level grows? i will discuss bauer and nation’s (1993) study in some detail and other research relevant for the present study in the following section. i will then present the study and the analyses, report on the findings, and suggest some research to follow which could reinforce the findings. 2. background in the present section, i will provide further details on bauer and nation’s (1993) and nation’s (2001) teaching order of l2 english affixes as well as discuss the studies that used their classification or tried to challenge it. i will also discuss some (further) factors that can offer an explanation for the difficulty learners have with word derivation. hereinafter in the paper, the levels will be referred to as bauer and nation’s levels. 2.1. bauer and nation’s affix levels bauer and nation (1993) based their classification of affixes on the following criteria: · frequency, · productivity, · predictability of the meaning of the affix, · regularity of the written/spoken form of the base, · regularity of the spelling/phonological form of the affix, · regularity of function. table 1 difficulty order of l2 english affixes (bauer & nation, 1993; nation, 2001) level no. description level 1 a different form is a different word. level 2 regularly inflected words are part of the same family, e.g., -ed, -ing, -s, etc. level 3 the most frequent and regular derivational affixes: -able, -er, -ish, -less, -ly, -ness, -th (fourth), -y, non, un(unusual)* level 4 frequent and regular affixes, e.g., -al (coastal), -ation, -ful, -ism, -ist, -ity, -ise (-ize), -ment, -ous, in-* level 5 infrequent but regular affixes, e.g., -age, -al (arrival), -ance, -ant, -ship, en-, mis-, un(untie), etc. level 6 frequent but irregular affixes, e.g., -ee, -ic, -ify, -ion, -ition, pre-, re-, etc. level 7 classical roots and affixes, e.g., -ate, -ure, etc. note. *all with restricted uses; see appendix 1 in bauer and nation (1993) for details. it is evident, and the authors themselves acknowledged it, that the criteria are not unique to bauer and nation’s (1993) study. similar criteria were found dmitri leontjev 228 to explain the acquisitional order of inflectional affixes (e.g., goldschneider & dekeyser, 2001) but were also used much earlier, for example, by thorndike (1942). as the levels were defined with recognition/understanding during reading in mind, the priority was given to the written forms. the levels as identified by bauer and nation (1993) are presented in table 1. both bauer and nation (1993) and nation (2001) stressed that there was no empirical evidence for the order. on the other hand, the authors encouraged researchers to use the levels as a reference for affix difficulty in their studies. i will discuss the studies that utilised bauer and nation’s levels in the following subsection. 2.2. studies using bauer and nation’s levels bauer and nation’s levels have been used to operationalise l2 english affix difficulty in several studies. schmitt and meara (1997), for example, used the levels when creating their instruments in a longitudinal study of 95 learners of english. being the first to test the interplay between different aspects of vocabulary knowledge empirically, the authors used word derivation knowledge as one of these aspects. there was a significant, albeit small, increase in the participants’ suffix knowledge over the course of the academic year (5% in the productive measure and 4% in the receptive one). the authors, however, did not find any noticeable differences between the suffixes in terms of their difficulty, which could have resulted from the fact that they used only two or three different suffixes at each level and only one level-7 suffix. similarly, schmitt and zimmermann (2002) used the levels to control for the difficulty of the word forms across the word classes in their instrument. however, the aim of their study was to find out which parts of speech learners were the most likely to produce. thus, the authors neither presented any data that could allow for making assumptions regarding the difficulty their participants had with affixes at bauer and nation’s different levels nor discussed their data in terms of a potential implicational order of derivational affixes. the authors also considered possible reasons for the difficulty that word derivation poses to l2 learners. they drew on the work of jiang (2000), according to whom syntactic and especially morphological specifications are integrated into the lexical entry during the last stage of learning a word. drawing on the morpheme acquisition studies (e.g., larsen-freeman, 1976), natural language acquisition studies (e.g., lardiere, 1998), and psycholinguistic research (e.g., gollan, foster, & frost, 1997), jiang (2000) also claimed that by the time this latter stage is reached, many words have become fossilised. this was an important point raised. as a matter of fact, there is psycholinguistic research demonstrating that, at least in oral-aural processing, l2 learners l2 english derivational knowledge: which affixes are learners more likely to recognise? 229 often process meaning before they process form and often rely on lexical and semantic cues rather than morphological and syntactic cues during lexical processing (e.g., vanpatten, 1996). jiang’s lexical development model can serve as an explanation for that finding. on the other hand, there is also research (e.g., clahsen & neubauer, 2010) showing that l2 learners rely on frequency when processing derived words, that is, they process more frequent words as wholes, which can explain the usual superiority of processing meaning over processing form discussed by vanpatten (1996) and expands on jiang’s (2000) model. specifically, more frequent l2 words may be stored and processed as wholes (perhaps due to fossilisation, according to jiang), whereas attempts are made to analyse less frequent words, which also presents a difficulty for learners in the light of jiang’s discussion. clahsen and neubauer’s (2010) finding is also in line with the declarative-procedural model (e.g., ullman, 2004), according to which there are two systems involved in processing: procedural, which is rule-based and includes the processing of both inflection and derivation, and declarative for storing/retrieving frequent lexical entries as wholes. these studies present a rather strong case for controlling for frequency in word derivation research, suggesting that the more frequent morphologically complex l2 words are, the less likely they are to be analysed by learners. another study that used bauer and nation’s levels was conducted by hayashi and murphy (2010). their study aimed at comparing the ability to derive words of l1 (mother tongue) japanese learners of english (n = 22) and adult native speakers of english (n = 20). the study also aimed at finding a relation between learners’ size of vocabulary and their morphological awareness. the authors used affixes from bauer and nation’s different levels as a way to establish the frequency and productivity of the affixes they used in the instruments: a word segmentation task as a measure of receptive morphological awareness and an affix elicitation task as a productive measure of it. the authors did not elaborate on their decision to use a word segmentation task as a measure of receptive morphological awareness. however, friedline (2011), for example, used a similar format in one of his instruments, asking the participants to write the base forms of the given derived words. he drew, above all, on the findings of carlisle (2000) and carlisle and fleming (2003), which confirmed the prediction made in schreuder and baayen’s (1995) model of morphological processing that children are able to define novel morphologically complex words in their mother tongue when they have access to corresponding bases and bound morphemes. despite the lack of research confirming whether the same is true for l2 english, word segmentation/decomposition task types seem to be useful for establishing whether l2 learners have access to / can recognise affixes and bases in english morphologically complex words. dmitri leontjev 230 hayashi and murphy (2010) also considered semantic transparency of the items, that is, the degree to which the meaning of a whole morphologically complex word can be understood from the meaning of its parts, as one of the factors. they checked whether semantic transparency influenced their participants’ morphological awareness, as previous research (e.g., marslen-wilson, 2007) has demonstrated that semantic transparency, among other factors, influences the processing of morphologically complex words. having completed the qualitative evaluation of the participants’ performance, hayashi and murphy (2010) discovered that semantic transparency influenced the way the learners performed on the word segmentation task. specifically, they found that all of their participants were able to correctly separate affixes in the items disorder (level 7), enable (level 5), rewrite (level 6) and childhood (level 5), which were formed with the help of affixes at bauer and nation’s different levels but which, arguably, were all semantically transparent. judging by this finding, but also by the previous studies, semantic transparency should be taken into consideration in word derivation research, especially if it aims at establishing an implicational order of derivational affixes. to my knowledge, there are two studies that attempted to find a difficulty order (or an order of acquisition) of l2 english derivational affixes. one of them was the study of 403 japanese learners of english conducted by mochizuki and aizawa (2000). the authors evaluated the learners’ knowledge of suffixes and prefixes on two nonword tasks, operationalising suffix knowledge as the ability to identify the part of speech formed with the help of the suffixes and prefix knowledge as the receptive knowledge of the meaning of the prefix. they also had an interesting way of defining affix acquisition, suggesting that affixes known by more learners are acquired earlier whereas those known by fewer learners, later. the affix order they established had several discrepancies with bauer and nation’s levels, for example, suffix -er (level 3) being more difficult that suffix -ation (level 4). one of the issues that mochizuki and aizawa’s (2000) study had was the authors’ operationalisation of suffix knowledge. it is logical to assume that syntactic function of affixes should be a part of learners’ word derivation knowledge. however, limiting word derivation knowledge to syntactic function only seems to be an overgeneralisation. moreover, the way the authors defined affix acquisition should rather be considered the order of difficulty the learners had with the affixes. finally, as the authors mentioned, the order they established could have been affected by english loan words in japanese. the second study that aimed at finding a difficulty order of derivational suffixes (among other research questions) was chuenjundaeng’s (2006) master’s thesis. for this purpose, the researcher used an instrument consisting of l2 english derivational knowledge: which affixes are learners more likely to recognise? 231 two translation tasks including 16 base and 16 derived forms (eight base and eight derived forms per task), the base form in one task being the derived form in the other and vice versa. the second task was set a week after the first one. the suffixes that the author selected for the instrument were -er, -tion, -ment, and -ity. the thai learners of english (n = 167) were asked to provide a definition/translation of the words in the tasks in their mother tongue. their responses to each item were classified into four categories: 1 when they provided definitions for both the base and the derived form, 2 when they provided definition for only the base form, 3 when it was only the derived form, and 4 when they failed to define both the base and the derived form. the responses in category 1 were awarded the score of 2, that is, 1 point for both the base and the derived form each. the responses in categories 2 and 3 were awarded the score of 1, that is, 1 point for either the base or the derived form. the score of 0 was given for the items in the last category. the author used the composite score on categories 1 and 3 as an indication of the learners’ knowledge of the derived words formed with the four affixes she studied. based on the results, the author identified the following increasing difficulty order of the suffixes: -tion (the total score on categories 1 and 3 being 216), -er (the total score of 206), -ity (the total score of 154), and -ment (the total score of 143). there are discrepancies between the order found by chuenjundaeng (2006) and that found by mochizuki and aizawa (2000). on the other hand, it is hard to say whether the difficulty order found by chuenjundaeng (2006) agrees with bauer and nation’s (1993) levels or not, as all the suffixes that the author selected except for -er were at level 4 of bauer and nation’s classification. moreover, the difference between the scores on -er and -tion was small, and the author treated -ation, -ion, and -ition as allomorphs of the same suffix at level 4 of bauer and nation’s classification. the latter is not entirely incorrect. indeed, bauer and nation themselves discussed the issue of the suffix -ation and its allomorphy and admitted the problem of determining whether -ation, -ion, and ition should be considered the allomorphs of the same suffix or not. they, however, decided that only -ation should be included at level 4. given the lack of evidence for (or against) the order proposed by bauer and nation (1993), the present study sets to determine whether bauer and nation’s levels reflect the increasing difficulty learners have with l2 english derivational affixes. however, unlike the two studies discussed above, instead of studying learners’ performance on separate affixes, i will consider the affixes at each level as a group. dmitri leontjev 232 3. methodology 3.1 materials to answer the research question, i analysed the learners’ performance on a word segmentation task, a task type also used by hayashi and murphy (2010) and somewhat similar to friedline’s (2011) decomposition task. the purpose of the task was to find out how likely learners were to recognise affixes at bauer and nation’s different levels. however, instead of trying to challenge bauer and nation’s classification by studying separate affixes, as the previous studies did, i looked at the affixes at each of bauer and nation’s level collectively, studying affixes at each of the levels as a group. another difference from the previous studies, specifically friedline (2011) and hayashi and murphy (2010), concerned the items used in the instrument and the learners’ selection procedure. what neither study did was control for the possibility that the items might have been known by their participants and thus exhibited the frequency effect. moreover, friedline (2011) did not control for the potential effect of the semantic transparency. hayashi and murphy (2010) did account for that. however, they did not establish whether the words they selected as the items in their instruments were semantically transparent to their participants and instead rated the items themselves. as with any judgmental phenomenon, not only could dissimilar ratings have been produced by other raters, but it was also not known whether the learners were actually able to discern the meanings of the words that the authors rated as semantically transparent from the meanings of the bases and the affixes these words were composed from. that is to say, it is not known whether these words were semantically transparent to the participants in their study. i addressed the issue differently, and instead of producing figures for the frequency and the semantic transparency of the items and controlling for these while analysing the learners’ performance, i made sure that the learners did not know the words selected for the task before i started the analyses. for the item selection, i used affix levels @ frequency tester instrument from compleat lexical tutor website (http://www.lextutor.ca/cgi-bin/morpho/ fam_affix/index.pl). this instrument classifies words, or, rather, base words and word families in the british national corpus into frequency bands by thousand most frequent words/word families. the instrument contains the first twenty thousand most frequent word families, breaking them into 20 frequency bands. it then separately lists derived words formed with affixes at bauer and nation’s different levels at each of the frequency bands. that is to say, it allows for singling l2 english derivational knowledge: which affixes are learners more likely to recognise? 233 out words of a certain frequency (or, rather, frequency of their bases) formed with affixes at bauer and nation’s particular levels. for the word segmentation task, i decided to select words formed with affixes at bauer and nation’s level 3 to level 6. a total of 12 words per affix level were randomly selected such that there were three words formed with affixes at each of bauer and nation’s levels selected at each of 5,000, 6,000, 7,000, and 8,000 most frequent base words/word families. there were, however, several constraints to the otherwise random selection. first of all, there were not more than three words formed with the same affix, and before the selection started, words that might have been known to the participants were removed. thus, for example, words denoting languages, such as croatian, were excluded. secondly, words containing two suffixes, such as momentousness, were excluded as well. at the same time, the instrument included four words formed with both a prefix and a suffix. a further six words not including any derivational affixes were selected to serve as distractors. all in all, the instrument included a total of 50 items, of which 44 were formed with the help of a total of 48 affixes, of 10 of them being prefixes. with the exception of level 5, there were two prefixes per bauer and nation’s level. since there are considerably more prefixes at level 5 than at the rest of bauer and nation’s levels, having four items formed with prefixes at level 5 reflected this overall tendency. after the selection, the order of the items was randomised. the items in the present version of the instrument are presented in table 2. to make sure that the learners did not know any of the words in the task, and thus to account for a possible frequency effect, the participants were asked to supply translations or definitions for the items. arguably, this also allowed for the control of whether the items were semantically transparent for the learners, on the assumption that they would supply a definition or translation for any item the meaning of which they could deduce from the meaning of the bases and the affixes. identifying bases could have compromised the results as this could have allowed the learners to separate affixes without actually having to recognise them. therefore, a decision was made to exclude the performance of those learners whose translations or definitions indicated that they identified any of the bases. asking the participants to find prefixes and suffixes invariably meant that they had to refer to their metalinguistic knowledge to complete the task, and metalinguistic knowledge has been found to present a problem even to native speakers (e.g., alderson, clapham, & steel, 1997). on the other hand, the advantages of the format, above all, the possibility to control for the influence of the participants’ vocabulary knowledge, and the suitability of the task type for answering the research question, that is, finding out how well learners are able to recognise derivational affixes at bauer and nation’s different levels, outweighed this limitation in my opinion. dmitri leontjev 234 table 2 items in the word segmentation task level frequency bands 5,000 6,000 7,000 8,000 9,000/10,000 level 3 indiscreetly unambiguous* voidable blandness crofter obscenely briskness decipherable lushness brimless stoutly unshackle level 4 boastful indiscreetly unambiguous* enshrinement inapt reaffirmation arsonist frugality solemnise discernment pailful slanderous level 5 discipleship interlace moisten enshrinement errant misapprehend deference enmesh repentant bestowal deflationary ternary level 6** exemption heraldic obstructive digression prohibitive reaffirmation eviction mortify recoup detainee regressive cherubic distractors abolish, bulletin, comprise, magnitude, mediocre, scrutiny notes. *unambiguous (with a bound base morpheme) replaced an item that was found unacceptable during the piloting; **two items from the 9,000 and 10,000 most frequent word families and the item mortify (with a bound base morpheme) were added to replace three items that were found unacceptable during the piloting. the instrument was piloted among five learners of english whose proficiency on the common european framework of reference (cefr; council of europe, 2001) was at about b1 level, as they studied at grades 9 to 11 of estonian schools (see põhikooli riiklik õppekava õigusakt, 2010). the reason for selecting learners at this particular level of proficiency for the piloting (and also for the present study) was nation’s (2001) suggestion that the best time for starting teaching l2 affixes to learners would be when they are at the lower-intermediate level of their l2 proficiency, that is, at about level b1 on the cefr scale. a major aim of the piloting was to establish whether learners would be able to recognise the affixes without being able to define the words or their bases. based on the results of the piloting, several items were replaced as one or several learners provided translations or definitions for these words. among the items that had to be replaced were three words at level 6. the problem i faced at this stage was that at the base frequency bands selected for creating the instrument, there were no alternatives to the selected words as the rest either contained the suffix -ion, which three other items in the instrument already contained, or were easy to define (e.g., atomic or combative). thus i decided to select two items at frequency bands 9 and 10 instead (i.e., among the 9,000 and 10,000 most frequent word families) and selected mortify as a new item at frequency band 7, which is not listed in the affix levels @ frequency tester instrument but nevertheless belongs to this frequency band (the affix levels @ frequency tester instrument does not include words containing bound base morphemes). l2 english derivational knowledge: which affixes are learners more likely to recognise? 235 for a similar reason, unambiguous replaced the item unconstitutional. the items used in the present version of the word segmentation task are presented in table 2 and the appendix. 3.2 participants the participants in the study were 76 l1 estonian and l1 russian learners of english studying at grade 10 in estonian schools. however, 14 of them supplied more or less accurate translations or definitions to one or several items or their bases (e.g., wetness for the item moisten), so their results were not included in the analysis. the final sample included a total of 62 learners from six different groups taught by five different teachers. although the proficiency level of most participants was expected to be at about level b1 on the cefr scale, this assumption was corroborated by asking the learners to self-assess their writing and reading proficiency using the cefr descriptors from the self-assessment scale (available at http://www.keelemapp.ee/ keelemapp/keelemapi-osad/). furthermore, the teachers were also asked to assess their learners’ reading and writing proficiency using the same scale. then, the median across the four ratings was calculated and used as the measure of the learners’ proficiency in the study. while such judgmental figures should not be considered very reliable since it was just a background variable, it was found sufficient for the purposes of the present study. moreover, the agreement between the ratings of the learners and the teachers as calculated by kendall’s tau b was substantial: rk = .603, p < .001 for reading and rk = .492, p < .001 for writing, which added to the reliability of the figures. further details of the participants are presented in table 3. table 3 description of the participants l1 n cefr level* median cefr level a2 b1 b2 c1 estonian 27 3 17 6 1 b1 russian 35 12 14 9 b1 note. *the proficiency estimate was calculated as the median across the learners’ self-assessment of their reading and writing proficiency on the cefr self-assessment scale and the assessment of their reading and writing proficiency on the same scale completed by their teachers. 3.3. procedure before the start of the study, the learners were informed that the study aimed at finding out how well they could recognise suffixes and prefixes in english. they were then given a written description of the study, which also detailed that they dmitri leontjev 236 were expected to assess their abilities with the help of a self-assessment scale and complete one exercise. the learners were also informed that in the study, group results rather than those of individual learners would be analysed. then they gave their permission to use their performance for calculating the group statistics. in order for the learners not to get discouraged by failing to define all (or, at least, most) of the words in the task, they were instructed that they should not be worried if they did not know any of the words in the task, as the task was rather difficult. the same was restated in the written instructions (see the appendix). it was also stressed that the learners were expected to work individually and that there was no purpose in cheating. in addition, the teachers were asked to help monitor the learners’ performance. the task was not speeded, and, as the piloting had also established, it took the learners about 20 minutes to complete. 4. results in the present section, the results of the study will be presented. first, i will present the overall results, including the reliability estimate for the task. following that, i will present the results that allowed me to find the answer to the research question posed in the study. as has been mentioned earlier, the performance of 62 learners was analysed. the learners’ performance was scored such that each correctly recognised affix was awarded 1 point. cronbach’s alpha for the 48 items was .89, which suggested that the internal consistency of the instrument was rather high. moreover, none of the learners scored 0, and there was no item in the task in which none of the learners was able to recognise the affix. this showed that there was no floor effect observed in the task. the mean number of affixes recognised by the learners was 21, sd = 8.2, with the weighted average of 34.85 in the 95th percentile, which means that those who scored the highest on the task were able to recognise affixes in about 73% of the items, that is, there was no ceiling effect either. the l2 english proficiency of the two l1 groups of learners was roughly the same (see section 3.2). moreover, the l1 estonian learners (n = 27) did not perform significantly differently from the l1 russian learners (n = 35) on the segmentation task either, as demonstrated by an independent-samples t test, t(60) = 0.61, p = .55. thus, in the following, for the most part, the performance of the two groups will be considered together. i will, however, corroborate the main analysis by comparing the two l1 groups, too. to discover whether the learners were able to recognise affixes at bauer and nation’s different levels to a different degree, a composite score was calculated separately for the affixes at each of bauer and nation’s levels, the maximum l2 english derivational knowledge: which affixes are learners more likely to recognise? 237 possible score being 12 at each level. the descriptive statistics are presented in table 4. for the sake of comparison, i also supplied the means and the medians separately for each of the l1 groups. table 4 affixes correctly recognised at bauer and nation's (1993) different levels (n = 62; k = 12 at each of the levels) level no. mean 95 % ci of the mean sd median lower upper level 3 estonian (n = 27) 9.48 8.08 9.76 3.29 11 russian (n = 35) 8.49 9 both l1s 8.92 10 level 4 estonian (n = 27) 6.04 5.03 6.23 2.37 7 russian (n = 35) 5.31 5 both l1s 5.63 5 level 5 estonian (n = 27) 3.41 2.68 3.77 2.16 3 russian (n = 35) 3.09 3 both l1s 3.23 3 level 6 estonian (n = 27) 2.78 2.54 3.88 2.66 2 russian (n = 35) 3.54 2 both l1s 3.21 2 from the descriptive statistics, it can be deduced that with the exception of almost no difference between level 5 and level 6 affixes, the numbers of affixes recognised at bauer and nation’s different levels were rather different, and the higher the level was, the fewer affixes were recognised. specifically, on average, the learners recognised about 75% of all the affixes at level 3, about a half at level 4, and about a quarter at levels 5 and 6. however, from the descriptive statistics, it was not clear whether the differences between the levels were statistically significant. thus, a repeated measures anova was conducted with the number of affixes recognised at bauer and nation’s different levels forming the within-subjects factor. the anova, with the greenhouse-geisser correction of the degrees of freedom applied as the sphericity assumption was violated, confirmed that there was a significant difference in the learners’ ability to recognise derivational affixes at bauer and nation’s different levels, f(2.44, 149.08) = 117.66, p < .001, ௣ଶ = .66.2ߟ 2 the shapes of the distributions of level 3, level 5, and level 6 affixes recognised by the learners were not symmetric. thus, i supplemented the repeated measures anova analysis with a friedman’s test, which does not assume normality. the results of the friedman’s test corroborated the results of the anova confirming that it was robust to the deviations from normality present in the variables, x2(3, n = 62) = 114.08, p < .001. the pairwise comparisons also confirmed the results, demonstrating that there were significant differences between all the affix levels except for no difference between levels 5 and 6. dmitri leontjev 238 the effect size value indicated that the affix levels accounted for 66% of all the variance in the learners’ performance, which is a very strong effect. the learners’ performance is graphically presented in figure 1. i then compared the means at the affix levels pairwise, in essence conducting a series of posthoc tests using the bonferroni correction to account for the family-wise error, the results of which are presented in table 5. figure 1 mean number of affixes recognised at bauer and nation’s (1993) different levels table 5 pairwise comparisons levels mean difference significance* level 3 and 4 3.29 < .001 level 3 and 5 5.69 < .001 level 3 and 6 5.71 < .001 level 4 and 5 2.4 < .001 level 4 and 6 2.42 < .001 level 5 and 6 0.02 ns notes. *the p values were adjusted using the bonferroni correction; ns = nonsignificant. l2 english derivational knowledge: which affixes are learners more likely to recognise? 239 the pairwise comparisons, thus, demonstrated that with the exceptions of no significant difference between levels 5 and 6, all the differences were significant. in fact, the trend was the same if the groups were compared separately, as can be seen in figure 2. figure 2 mean number of affixes recognised at bauer and nation’s (1993) different levels by l1 estonian and l1 russian learners moreover, the repeated measures anovas and the pairwise comparisons conducted separately for each of the l1 groups yielded the same results as the analysis conducted for the whole sample. what is more, while, with the exception of the performance on level 6 affixes, the l1 estonian group slightly outperformed the l1 russian group (see table 4 and figure 2), there was no significant difference in the ability of either of the two groups to recognise affixes at any of bauer and nation’s levels, as demonstrated by a series of the independent-samples t tests. for example, the greatest mean difference of 0.99 between the performance of the two groups was in the ability to recognise level 3 affixes, and the t test demonstrated that this difference was not statistically significant, t(60) = 1.18, p = .241. this being said, the results do not imply that the learners found all the affixes at level 3 easier to recognise than affixes at level 4, or all the affixes at level dmitri leontjev 240 6 harder to recognise than level 4 affixes. for example, many learners recognised the prefix rein recoup (45 learners, i.e., 73%) and reaffirmation (30 learners, i.e., 48%), which were much higher numbers than those who recognised the rest of the affixes at level 6 (ranging from 3 to 17 learners). this suggests that the prefix was rather easy to recognise. in fact, these numbers are comparable to those who recognised many of the level 4 affixes in the task (e.g., the prefix inin inapt recognised by 30 learners). similarly, the numbers of learners who recognised the suffix -ful in pailful (55 learners, i.e., 89%) and in boastful (54 learners, i.e., 87%) were higher than the number of learners who recognised, for example, -ly in stoutly (51 learners, i.e., 82%), the latter being a level 3 affix. what is more, the results do not reveal why substantially different numbers of learners recognised the same affix in different items, such as the prefix re-, as illustrated in the previous paragraph. other examples include the suffix -ly, which was recognised in stoutly by 51 learners but only by 42 (68%) in indiscreetly, or the suffix -ary (level 5), which was recognised by 15 learners (24%) in deflationary but only by 2 (3%) in ternary. 5. discussion the present study aimed at finding empirical evidence for (or against) the order of l2 english affixes proposed by bauer and nation (1993). differently from the previous research, i did not challenge bauer and nation’s levels by looking at separate affixes but instead considered affixes at different levels as groups. the potential influence of the frequency effect (e.g., clahsen & neubauer, 2010) was countered by making sure that the learners did not know the words in which they were asked to find the affixes. arguably, this allowed for the control of the influence of semantic transparency as well. the results demonstrated that with the exception of no difference between the learners’ ability to recognise level 5 and level 6 affixes, the higher bauer and nation’s level was, the fewer affixes on average the learners recognised at this level. that is to say, their ability to recognise the affixes, for the most part, followed the affix order proposed by bauer and nation (1993). what is more, the difficulty order of the affixes accounted for 66% of all the variance in the learners’ performance, which is a large effect and should thus be considered a rather strong evidence for the order proposed by bauer and nation. the difference between level 5 and level 6 affixes was not statistically significant. the reason for that can, in part, be attributed to the fact that many learners recognised the prefix re-. as a matter of fact, mochizuki and aizawa (2000) found that the meaning of this prefix (i.e., its most common meaning of again) was recognised by the largest number of learners as compared to other l2 english derivational knowledge: which affixes are learners more likely to recognise? 241 prefixes, which can explain the ease of recognition of the prefix in the present study. what is more, bauer and nation (1993) accounted for the undoubted productivity of the prefix, which means that there is a possibility that the learners in the present study met this prefix quite often. on the other hand, bauer and nation (1993) rightfully noted that because of the number of meanings rehas in addition to again and anew and a number of tokens with rethat have become lexicalised, learners can end up misanalysing words containing reif they learn the semantics of this prefix. i would, however, suggest that this assumption might be reconsidered in future. reis present in many languages and its meanings, at least in some of them, are similar to those it has in english. specifically, it is the case with estonian and russian. in estonian, one can find it, for example, in representatiivne (‘representative’), where it has an intensifying meaning, and in russian in репродукция [reproduktsiya] (‘reproduction’), where it has the meaning of again. thus, there could have been the influence of the mother tongue that influenced the learners’ performance on the prefix reas well. further studies, for example, teaching experiments, can shed more light on whether it indeed makes sense to classify the prefix at an earlier stage. connected to the previous discussion, it should not be assumed that the learners found all the affixes at level 3 easier to recognise than level 4 affixes and all the affixes at level 4 easier to recognise than those at levels 5 and 6. one illustration of the opposite is the learners’ recognition of rein the task. another example could be the learners’ performance on the items with -ful. as regards the latter suffix, it has been found by mochizuki and aizawa (2000) that more learners were able to indicate the syntactic role of -ful than of suffixes at level 3, such as ly and -er, which can serve an explanation for the finding of the present study. what is more, the meaning of -ful also seems easy to remember as it is the same as that of the word full, a very frequent word. presumably, these could be the reasons for the number of learners recognising the suffix in the study. however, i would refrain from making any claims regarding the potential reclassification of these affixes. the results of the present study do not allow for establishing reasons for the learners’ performance on affixes such as reor -ful. moreover, it is hard to say whether comparable numbers of learners recognising the same affixes will be found in future studies. judging by the previous studies that examined separate affixes and produced dissimilar orders of difficulty, this might not be the case. what is more, while the participants in the present study did not know the meanings of the words in the task, which reduced, if not excluded, the possibility of the effects of frequency and semantic transparency, it is not clear why different numbers of learners recognised the same affixes in different items. i would suggest that before trying to find answers to these questions more research into l2 english word derivation is required, which should dmitri leontjev 242 increase our understanding of what is included in l2 english word derivation knowledge and how it develops. thus, it is best to interpret the results of the present study in the most straightforward way. that is to say, the results indicate that learners are able to recognise significantly fewer affixes at bauer and nation’s higher levels than at lower levels; or, perhaps, that learners are more likely to recognise affixes at bauer and nation’s lower levels than at higher levels. it should also not be forgotten that i only measured the learners’ ability to recognise the affixes. thus, the results could have been different should i have studied their ability to recognise/recall the meanings of the same affixes, for example. 6. conclusion the present study aimed at establishing whether the classification of the english affixes proposed by bauer and nation (1993) can indeed account for the difficulty l2 english learners have with recognising derivational affixes. the results demonstrate that with the exception of the lack of the difference between level 5 and level 6 affixes, the learners were more likely to recognise affixes at lower levels than at higher levels of difficulty as defined by bauer and nation, thus providing evidence for the validity of the levels. the findings have several implications, both theoretical and practical. the empirical confirmation of the difficulty order reinforces bauer and nation’s (1993) proposal to use the levels as a reference for affix difficulty in morphological research. moreover, bauer and nation’s levels could be used as a starting point for establishing an/the order of acquisition of l2 english derivational affixes, if any. as far as pedagogical implications are concerned, teachers of english could take the levels into consideration when instructing their learners to refer to morphological knowledge when inferring the meanings of unknown words in texts. that is to say, the levels should help l2 english teachers to find which affix properties as defined by bauer and nation (1993) make it more likely that their learners will recognise the affixes. these implications are not new. in fact, bauer and nation (1993) discussed these as possible applications of their classification. i, however, argue that the findings reported in the paper present a stronger case for doing so. having said that, i feel that several limitations of the study should be listed, so that further studies could account for them. one of the limitations of the study has already been mentioned in section 3.1. to complete the task, the learners were also required to demonstrate their metalinguistic knowledge, which learners often have problems with (alderson, clapham, & steel, 1997). on the other hand, the word segmentation task is, arguably, the best for determining how well the learners recognise derivational l2 english derivational knowledge: which affixes are learners more likely to recognise? 243 affixes. i could have rephrased the instructions, and, similarly to hayashi and murphy (2010), instead of mentioning prefixes and suffixes in the instructions, asked the learners to break the words into meaningful units. this, however, would have meant that the learners would also have to identify the bases, and i wanted to minimise this possibility. what is more, if the instructions had been phrased without mentioning prefixes and suffixes, the learners might have misinterpreted what they were asked to do (cf. hayashi & murphy, 2010). another limitation concerns the inability to say whether the results would be exactly the same if other affixes had been used. using other, perhaps more easily recognisable affixes at level 5, such as -hood, post-, or neo-, could result in learners recognising more affixes at level 5. finally, the way i controlled for semantic transparency might have been insufficient. further studies, using other affixes, and, perhaps, a larger number of affixes as well as a better control for semantic transparency could confirm or disprove the findings of the present study. furthermore, future studies could also determine whether learners find it easier to recognise or recall meanings and/or syntactic roles of affixes at bauer and nation’s different levels taken as a group. this would strengthen the case for bauer and nation’s levels or present evidence against them. in any case, i hope that the present study stimulates the research on l2 english word derivation knowledge. dmitri leontjev 244 references alderson, j. c., clapham, c., & steel, d. 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(1996). input processing and grammar instruction in second language acquisition. norwood, nj: ablex. l2 english derivational knowledge: which affixes are learners more likely to recognise? 247 appendix the word segmentation task (originally, the instructions were in the participants’ mother tongues; the correct responses are highlighted) some of the words you see below are formed with help of prefixes or suffixes or both prefixes and suffixes. circle the prefixes and suffixes in these words. in some words there are both a prefix and a suffix. in some words, there are only prefixes. in some, there are only suffixes. in some of the words, there is neither a prefix nor a suffix. if you know the meanings the words, write what they mean (a translation or a definition). but even if you don’t know the meaning of any of the words, don’t worry. these are very difficult words. even if you know the meanings of one or two, you have got a rather good vocabulary. the first two words are examples. farmer _____talunik______ deashed _________________ unshackle _________________ mediocre _________________ pailful _________________ slanderous _________________ recoup _________________ briskness _________________ unambiguous _________________ indiscreetly _________________ voidable _________________ comprise _________________ heraldic _________________ lushness _________________ regressive _________________ repentant _________________ decipherable _________________ eviction _________________ blandness _________________ stoutly _________________ frugality _________________ crofter _________________ prohibitive _________________ deflationary _________________ inapt _________________ brimless _________________ enshrinement _________________ abolish _________________ boastful _________________ discernment _________________ obstructive _________________ bulletin _________________ dmitri leontjev 248 interlace _________________ solemnise _________________ errant _________________ mortify _________________ cherubic _________________ moisten _________________ obscenely _________________ digression _________________ magnitude _________________ scrutiny _________________ discipleship _________________ deference _________________ detainee _________________ ternary _________________ reaffirmation _________________ enmesh _________________ arsonist _________________ bestowal _________________ exemption _________________ misapprehend _________________ 319 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (2). 2016. 319-337 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.2.7 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the effects of clil on mathematical content learning: a longitudinal study jill surmont vrije universiteit brussel, belgium jisurmon@vub.ac.be esli struys vrije universiteit brussel, belgium estruys@vub.ac.be maurits van den noort vrije universiteit brussel, belgium info@mauritsvandennoort.com piet van de craen vrije universiteit brussel, belgium pvdcraen@vub.ac.be abstract previous research has shown that content and language integrated learning (clil), an educational approach that offers content courses through more than one educational language, increases metalinguistic awareness. this improved insight into language structures is supposed to extend beyond the linguistic domain. in the present study, the question whether pupils who learn in a clil environment outperform their traditionally schooled peers in mathematics is investigated. in total, 107 pupils entered the study. all participants were in the first year of secondary education at a school in ostend, in flanders, the dutch-speaking part of belgium. thirty-five pupils followed clil education in a foreign language (french) and 72 followed traditional education that was given in the native language (dutch). all participants were tested using a mathematical test at the beginning of the year, after three months, and jill surmont, esli struys, maurits van den noort, piet van de craen 320 after ten months. the first measurement of the mathematical scores showed that the two groups did not differ. in accordance with our hypothesis, the clil group scored higher than the non-clil group after ten months. surprisingly, an effect was also found after three months. to conclude, clil appears to have a positive impact on the mathematical performance of pupils even after a short period of time. keywords: content and language integrated learning; second language; teaching; math performance; longitudinal study 1. introduction content and language integrated learning (clil) refers to a teaching approach where subjects, or parts of subjects, are taught in a foreign language with dualfocused aims, namely the learning of content and the simultaneous learning of a foreign language (marsh, 1994). clil combines a number of pedagogies that have proven to work well and, as a result, it has become a well-established part of education systems across europe (e.g., banegas, 2012; bonnet, 2012; nikula, dalton-puffer, & garcía, 2013; pérez-cañado, 2012). there are several reasons why clil is different from traditional language learning approaches. 1.1. differences between clil and traditional language education first of all, clil is dual-focused and has both content and language goals, which creates a continuum with both goals at one end, without any specification of importance of one over the other (coyle, 2006). the target language is used as a vehicle for communication and is therefore not the ultimate goal. in other words, clil is a task-based language learning approach by which language is learned through usage of the language while discussing content matter. this creates a meaningful learning environment in which pupils have an immediate need to use the target language. feedback is given through scaffolding, ensuring the pupils are constantly in what vygotsky (1978) called “the zone of proximal development.” this means that the pupil is able to fulfill tasks because the teacher is helping, whereas alone the pupil would not be able to do so. a second difference from traditional language learning approaches is the way clil is pupil-centered rather than teacher-centered (gonzález & barbero, 2013). in many western societies, the dominant teaching model is based on what freire (1972) calls the “banking model.” this means that the teacher has the role of the expert and deposits information and skills into the memory bank the effects of clil on mathematical content learning: a longitudinal study 321 of the pupil. this banking model creates a teacher-controlled and teacher-led learning process. clil, on the other hand, has a more social-constructivist approach, meaning that the emphasis is on the student experience and on the encouragement of active student learning (cummins, 2005; marsh, 2012). the focus of clil is therefore on interactive, mediated, and student-led learning, which requires social interaction between teachers and students. the third difference focuses on the resemblance of the language learning process in clil to the natural cognitive skill acquisition. there are two types of processes that interact during a learning process, namely implicit learning and explicit learning (sun, mathews, & lane, 2007). surmont, van de craen, struys, and somers (2014) compared this interaction with the way a child learns how to tie his/her laces: he/she needs to practise on his/her own, but when a parent or sibling provides explicit information on what to do with the laces, the child will figure out much faster how it is done. research by bialystok and barac (2012) showed that when second languages are learned implicitly, the brain responds the same way as it does when using the mother tongue. this does not imply that it is better, but it proves that the learning context has a major influence on how something is processed. this can, for instance, explain previous neurolinguistic results in which bilingual brains were found to be more efficient than monolingual brains (mondt, struys, balériaux, & van de craen, 2008). in traditional education, there are various reasons why implicit (language) learning is not used often enough. sun, mathews, and lane (2007) described it as follows: “most educational settings focus on teaching conceptual (explicit) knowledge rather than setting up an opportunity for gaining substantial experiential (mostly implicit) knowledge” (p. 1). in traditional language education, the emphasis is all too often on grammatical correctness and often teachers are unable to give their students sufficient time to use and to practise using the target language due to time constraints. in clil education, on the other hand, students learn the language in a much more implicit way, as they have to use it to understand and communicate about the content of the course. they basically learn the language “along the way” (surmont et al., 2014). due to a much higher implicit learning aspect in clil classes, children benefit more from the interaction between implicit and explicit education. it is of course impossible to solely offer implicit or explicit learning. rather, learning should be seen as a continuum in which both sides can never be fully tuned out (sun et al., 2007), thus implying that traditional language courses are not obsolete in clil programs, because they provide the necessary, more explicit focus on language. francis (2004) even suggests that it is not bilingualism per se that creates increased metalinguistic awareness (see further) but that the learning context in which the pupils are situated has the largest influence. the combination of a clil class and a traditional jill surmont, esli struys, maurits van den noort, piet van de craen 322 language class creates a learning environment in which the brain thrives, an environment where explicit and implicit learning can take place (ellis, 2008). a final difference between clil and traditional foreign language classes is the possible increased development of metalinguistic awareness. metalinguistic awareness can be described as the ability to “reflect on and manipulate the structural features of languages” (nagy & anderson, 1998, p. 155). it permits reasoning and application of logic with language (ter kuile, veldhuis, van veen, & wicherts, 2011). usage of metalinguistic awareness usually requires a momentary shift of attention from content to form (edwards & kirkpatrick, 1999). in normal language use, metalinguistic awareness is hardly relevant as conveying the message is normally considered as more important than the linguistic structures used to convey it (nagy & anderson, 1995). speakers do rely on it when they have to access deeper linguistic knowledge when, for example, correcting certain slips of the tongue (fromkin, 1980) or deciphering an atypical form of speech or dialect (kemper & vernooy, 1993), when making puns or word jokes (horgan, 1981), when linguistic ambiguities have to be resolved, when grammaticality or appropriateness has to be judged, or when decisions have to be made on deeper meanings or intentions based on word choices or paralinguistic cues (edwards & kirkpatrick, 1999). 1.2. increased metalinguistic awareness it is clear that the ability to reflect on language structures requires a higher level of abstract thinking and understanding. research reports that metalinguistic skills (bialystok, peets, & moreno, 2014; hermanto, moreno, & bialystok, 2012) are an important factor that distinguishes bilingual from monolingual language users and learners (bialystok, 2001; jessner, 2006). it has been found that bilingual children have an increased metalinguistic awareness compared to monolingual children (ransdell, barbier, & niit, 2006; whitehurst & lonigan, 1998). the influence of an increased metalinguistic awareness may extend the linguistic domain. for instance, studies have shown that bilingual pupils have an advantage in mathematics when they are highly competent in both languages, compared to their monolingual peers (clarkson, 1992, 2007; dawe, 1983). a possible explanation for this is the increased metalinguistic awareness of high ability bilingual students (clarkson, 2007). those bilinguals can compare the language structures of the languages they speak and come to a higher understanding of how each language structure functions on its own, whereas monolinguals do not (or rarely) question the way their language system is built up. these metalinguistic abilities seem to be important factors in mathematical performance (e.g., the better metalinguistic skills of bilingual students allow them, for instance, the effects of clil on mathematical content learning: a longitudinal study 323 to self-correct when solving problems; moreover, bilingual students are more confident in their approach to solving difficult problems compared to monolingual students) (clarkson, 2007). it can be argued that mathematics is a “language” (arianrhod, 2005; goldhaber, 2006), because it has its own set of rules, and with a finite number of symbols an infinite number of utterances can be created. moreover, as in other languages, students need to master this language in order to read, understand, write down, and discuss (mathematical) ideas (thompson & rubenstein, 2000). orr (1987) even claimed that most difficulties that students have with mathematics are rooted in language. orr noticed that the structure of the so called black english, that is, english spoken by many black students, causes their problems in mathematics. in her work, she illustrates the concepts which these students do not understand and which underlie mathematics, namely prepositions, conjunctions, and relative pronouns. if we accept that mathematics is a language (usiskin, 1996), then it might be possible that bilinguals may acquire the language of mathematics faster than their monolingual peers and may have a better insight into it. when it comes to clil, it is likely that pupils will benefit from an increased metalinguistic awareness, as the extra language provided in a meaningful context will create a deeper insight into language structures. ter kuile and colleagues (2011) have shown that pupils in clil programs have a better insight into language structures, even with respect to an unknown language. when looking at the maths performance of clil pupils compared to their traditionally schooled peers, research indicates that clil pupils have an advantage (e.g., murray, 2010; valladoloid, 1991; van de craen, ceuleers, & mondt, 2007). this not only confirms that clil has a positive influence on content knowledge but also that it stimulates cognitive development. the influence it seems to have on maths performance could be an indication that clil stimulates metalinguistic skills in such a way that the understanding of the language of maths (and/or science, as seen in jäppinen, 2005) increases. 1.3. research question and hypotheses the question in the present study is if monolingual pupils whose mathematics is delivered via clil outperform their traditionally schooled peers whose mathematics is taught in their mother tongue. the first hypothesis of this study is that pupils who learn in a clil environment are likely to outperform their traditionally schooled peers on mathematical tests, because clil is assumed to create an increased metalinguistic awareness (mehisto & morsh, 2011, p. 36) and, as a result, their understanding of the “language of math” (e.g., arianrhod, 2005; goldhaber, 2006) increases (jäppinen, 2005). however, as the learning jill surmont, esli struys, maurits van den noort, piet van de craen 324 process cannot be rushed, and a small change in the learning environment is unlikely to show its effect on a cognitive level immediately (goswami, 2008), the second hypothesis is that differences between the clil group and the non-clil group will not be apparent after only a short period of time but will require a longer period of study, after which they will become visible. 2. method 2.1. participants the participants of this study were 107 pupils from the first year of secondary education in a school in ostend, in flanders, the dutch-speaking part of belgium. thirty-five pupils had chosen to follow the clil course, while 72 had preferred the traditional curriculum. for ethical and legal reasons, it was not possible to randomly divide the 107 pupils in a clil group and a non-clil group; however, this selection procedure might have resulted in the so-called “creaming effect” (bredenbröker, 2002, p. 146; rumlich, 2013, p. 185) because it cannot be excluded that the two groups are different with respect to factors such as motivation, parental support, and so forth (for a detailed discussion, see jäkel, 2015). the clil course lasted one hour per week and the pupils of the clil group followed the clil course throughout the whole school year (i.e., 10 months). the pupils were taught in french with dual-focused aims, namely the learning of the subject (mathematics; content) and the simultaneous learning of the language (french; foreign language). the clil teaching was pupil-centered and interactive, there was a significant role for implicit learning, and the teacher helped the pupils in order to succeed. aside from the fact that the clil group received their maths instruction through french, there were no significant differences in the teaching strategies or the curriculum content between the two groups, and all other instruction was delivered in their native dutch. furthermore, there were no significant differences in the teaching strategies used for all other subjects of the curriculum between the clil and the non-clil pupils. all participants were being raised in dutch only, and, although they all had had two years of introduction to french in primary education, their french proficiency level was so low that the secondary french teachers informed the researchers that they had to start from the very beginning. for this reason, the pupils in this research are considered to be at a very early stage of second language acquisition. participants from both groups did not differ (p > .05) in age in years (the clil group: m = 12.23, sd = .39; the non-clil group: m = 12.36, sd = .45). gender distributions were equal for both groups (pearson chi square = .47): in the clil group, there were 19 females and 16 males; in the non-clil group there were 34 females and 38 the effects of clil on mathematical content learning: a longitudinal study 325 males. lastly, pupils in both groups had the same socio-economic status (ses) as measured by the educational attainment of both parents (pearson chi square for mother = .31; pearson chi square for father = .13). 2.2. materials three versions of a new mathematical test called the mathematical assessment test-help (math) have been developed by the researchers. at the time, there were no official standardized tests in flanders (belgium) to test mathematical knowledge in secondary education. each of the three versions of the math consisted of the same kind of mathematical exercises and were presented in the native language of the pupils (dutch). the test consisted of four different parts: i. mental calculation, ii. numeracy, iii. mathematical applications and insight, iv. geometry, measurement and arithmetic calculation; and it included both theoretical as well as practical exercises covering arithmetic and geometry (for the three versions of the mathematical test, see the appendices of the online supporting information at http://ssllt.amu.edu.pl/download/docs/ssllt%206(2)%20surmont, %20struys,%20van%20den%20noort,%20van%20de%20craen%20appendices.pdf). the correction of all tests was conducted by one corrector who was not familiar with the aims of the study, and the maximum score on the math was 100. 2.3. procedure at the beginning of the school year, all pupils completed the first of the mathematical tests based on the official standards that have to be met in order to start secondary education. at that point, no clil education had been introduced to the pupils (hereafter we refer to this time point as t = 0 throughout the paper). after three months, all pupils completed a second mathematical test (t = 1), and after 10 months all pupils completed a final mathematical test (t = 2). the study was approved and conducted according to the ethical guidelines of the vrije universiteit brussel, belgium and the declaration of helsinki (world medical organization, 1996). 2.4. statistics spss 22.0 (ibm corp., 2013) was used for all statistical analyses. a one-way repeated measures analysis of variance (anova) was conducted in order to analyse the scores of the clil group versus the non-clil group on the mathematical test over the three different time points. a greenhouse-geisser correction and a huynh-feldt correction were used in order to elicit a more accurate and conservative significance value (abdi, 2010). in addition, anovas were conducted to analyse jill surmont, esli struys, maurits van den noort, piet van de craen 326 the between-group results of the three different time points (t0, t1, and t2) separately and paired samples t tests were conducted in order to analyse the withingroup results separately (t0 compared to t1 and t0 compared to t2 respectively). finally, anovas were conducted to analyse the between-group difference scores (t1-t0 and t2-t0) separately and paired samples t tests were conducted in order to analyse the within-group difference scores (t1-t0 compared to t2-t0) for the clil group and the non-clil group separately. 3. results 3.1. between-group and within-group results table 1 shows the mean scores and standard deviations of the clil group versus the non-clil group on the mathematical test at the beginning of the study (t0), after three months (t1), and after ten months (t2). at the beginning of the education year (t0), the anova revealed that there was no significant difference between the clil group and the non-clil group on the mathematical test (f(2,105) = .28, p = .60, partial η2 = .003), meaning that the pupils of the clil group and the non-clil group performed equally well on the mathematical test at the beginning of the study. as can be seen in table 1 and figure 1, the oneway repeated measures anova results showed that after three months the clil group scored significantly better than the non-clil group (f(2,105) = 3.00, p ≤ .05, partial η2 = .055). this difference remained significant from the mean score at the beginning (t0) on the delayed posttest (t3) (f(2,105) = 3.42, p < .05, partial η2 = .032), meaning that the pupils of the clil group performed better than the pupils of the non-clil group after ten months of clil education in comparison with the traditional education (see figure 1). table 1 mean scores (standard deviations) on the mathematical test (maximum score = 100) at the beginning of the study (t0), after three months (t1), and after ten months (t2) group t0 t1 t2 clil group 57.24 (14.03) 67.23ab (13.73) 65.77ac (12.31) non-clil group 58.68 (12.96) 63.05b (15.50) 63.62c (14.89) notes. a mean score of the clil group is significantly different (p < .05) from the mean score of the non-clil group; b mean score after three months (t1) is significantly different (p < .05) from the mean score at the beginning (t0); c mean score after ten months (t2) is significantly different (p < .05) from the mean score at the beginning (t0). the effects of clil on mathematical content learning: a longitudinal study 327 figure 1 mean scores of the clil group (n = 35) versus the non-clil group (n = 72) on the mathematical test at the beginning of the study (t0), after three months (t1), and after ten months (t2) examining the within-group results more closely, both groups showed a significant improvement of the mathematical test scores after three months (t1) in comparison with the scores at the beginning of the study (t0) (the clil group: t = 5.09, p < .001; the non-clil group: t = 3.17, p < .01). moreover, both groups showed a significant improvement of the mathematical test scores after ten months (t2) in comparison with the scores at the beginning of the study (t0) (the clil group: t = 4.34, p < .001; the non-clil group: t = 3.42, p < .01). overall, the within-group results showed that both groups scored higher on the mathematical test after following ten months of clil or non-clil education. 3.2. between-group and within-group difference scores as can be seen in table 2, the analysis of the between-group difference scores gives a better insight into the learning curves. between t0 and t1 (after three months) a significant difference in progression between the clil group and the non-clil group was found (f(2,105) = 5.48, p < .05, partial η2 = .050), with more progression visible for the clil group within the first three months after starting clil education in comparison with the non-clil group. in contrast, between t1 and t2 (between three and ten months) there was no significant difference in progression between the clil group and the non-clil group (f(2,105) = 1.81, p jill surmont, esli struys, maurits van den noort, piet van de craen 328 = .18, partial η2 = .017): both groups showed the same learning curves and remained relatively stable (the clil group: t = -1.18, p = .24; the non-clil group: t = .66, p = .51). finally, overall, clil pupils’ progress was significantly better over the ten months when compared to their traditionally schooled peers (f(2,105) = 3.42, p < .05, partial η2 = .003). table 2 mean difference scores (standard deviations) of the clil group (n = 35) versus the non-clil group (n = 72) on the mathematical test: (t1)-(t0) and (t2)-(t0) group (t1-t0) (t2-t0) clil group +9.99 (11.62)a +8.53 (11.61) non-clil group +4.37 (11.67) +4.94 (12.26) note. a mean difference score of the clil group is significantly different (p < .05) from the mean difference score of the non-clil group. 4. discussion in this research, a longitudinal study was performed to find out what the influence of clil would be on math performance. there is a growing body of research that suggests that clil influences cognitive development, which results in better outcomes in science and/or mathematics (jäppinen, 2005; murray, 2010; van de craen et al., 2007). the first hypothesis of this study was that pupils who learn in a clil environment are likely to outperform their traditionally schooled peers on mathematical tests, because clil creates an increased metalinguistic awareness. the second hypothesis was that it was unlikely that clil students would outperform their traditionally schooled peers after a short period of time (three months), as the researchers expected that the influence of clil would only be noticeable on cognitive tasks after a longer period of time (at least ten months). here, it is important to note that before the commencement of any clil education (at t = 0), a pretest showed that the clil group and the non-clil group were at the same level. after three months (t = 1) and after ten months (t = 2), second and third tests were undertaken to see how the students’ abilities had evolved. repeated measures analysis showed that the clil group improved significantly better than the non-clil group over time. on the third test both groups remained at the approximately the same level they had reached on the second test. our between-group data is clear proof for the first hypothesis of our study. pupils who learn in a clil environment indeed outperform their traditionally schooled peers on a mathematics test. however, the within-group results reveal that both groups showed an improvement in mathematical performance. the second hypothesis, that the clil influence on cognitive level would only be noticed after a longer period of time, was proven incorrect because, in contrast to the effects of clil on mathematical content learning: a longitudinal study 329 our expectations, even after three months the positive effect of clil teaching was clearly noticeable. it was argued that if bilinguals had an increased metalinguistic awareness, which gave them a better understanding and insight into (language) structures (ter kuile et al., 2011), the same could be said about pupils who are at a very early stage of second language acquisition and are learning a second language through clil. this would not only give them an advantage in understanding the language structures of the “new” language and their mother tongue (lorenzo et al., 2010; ter kuile et al., 2011), but it would also help them to understand the language of mathematics (arianrhod, 2005; goldhaber, 2006). this claim is backed up with previous research into the influence of clil on mathematics (e.g., murray, 2010; van de craen et al., 2007). 5. implications the present results confirm the above-mentioned studies on clil and mathematics and indicate a number of things. first of all, these results add to the research body that indicates that clil not only positively affects language learning but also content acquisition. clil stimulates pupils in such a way that more than one aspect of the learning process is influenced (surmont et al., 2014). secondly, it is very surprising to find these positive results already after only three months of clil education. it was hypothesized that more time should be given to pupils, at least 10 months upwards, before effects would be found. it would appear that the combination of mathematics and clil is so effective that the cognitive stimulation is enormous; however, caution is needed because other possible explaining factors, such as increased motivation, higher self-confidence, and more parental support in the clil group were not taken into account (for a detailed discussion of these factors, see jäkel, 2015). it is recommended that future research look into the impact of these factors on student outcomes. thirdly, these data indicate that clil possibly influences pupils’ cognitive development, and more specifically, their metalinguistic awareness. this increased metalinguistic awareness could lead to a better understanding of and insight into the abstract language of math. research by bialystok and barac (2012) indicates that even in moderate bilinguals an increased metalinguistic awareness can be found, meaning that pupils do not have to be highly proficient in both languages to profit from an increased metalinguistic awareness. in this study pupils were still at a very low level of french proficiency and the results seem to indicate that they indeed already profit from an increased metalinguistic awareness. however, this conclusion has to be approached with caution as an increased metalinguistic awareness has not been directly proven here. future jill surmont, esli struys, maurits van den noort, piet van de craen 330 research should therefore look into the impact of clil on metalinguistic awareness and the question to what extent the advantage (if any) impacts other competences such as math achievement. a longitudinal setup in which language proficiency, math achievement and metalinguistic awareness are measured and where variables such as motivation are taken into account should give a clearer insight into this matter. it would also be very interesting to see how different age groups respond (e.g., jäppinen, 2005) and how much the unique linguistic environment of a specific school (i.e., the native and foreign language background of the teachers, of the other pupils, the location of the school, etc.) affects the (possible) effect clil has on the cognitive development of the pupils. a final consequence of the present results, and of other results found in the literature (e.g., adanur, yagiz, & işik, 2004; jäppinen, 2005), is the fact that policy makers should be aware of the link between languages and mathematics. if the european union intends to improve math performance, it should create bridges between language learning and mathematics (and science for that matter). the present results indicate that a combination of language and content has a positive effect on cognitive development. this indicates that teachers should cooperate with each other and that the schism between language teachers and math/science teachers should be overcome. cooperative learning, both by pupils and teachers, is the way forward. knowledge is built on previous learning (oecd, 2007), and enabling peer groups to synthesize ideas can create learners with options for accessing learning (gardner, 1983; marsh, 2012). this coincides with vygotsky’s (1978) zone of proximal development, where pupils are provided with the necessary help and support for tasks they cannot yet perform on their own. governments, both local and (trans)national, should increase help for schools which want to introduce clil, be it on legislative level or through the provision of enough support and guidance for schools who introduce clil. a european framework for clil implementation and follow-up could be a possible solution, although in order to succeed, it is important to stop using the current rigid national education systems. finally, it is important to come to a european agreement on the exact definition of clil so that clil teachers are able to benefit from the experiences and knowledge acquired in various educational settings across europe (cenoz, genesee, & gorter, 2013). 6. limitation of the study naturally, the present study has several limitations. one limitation is that there were no standardized math tests for secondary education available at the time of this study. therefore, three versions of a new mathematical test called the mathematical assessment test-help had to be developed by the researchers. the effects of clil on mathematical content learning: a longitudinal study 331 although the stimulus material was prepared as carefully as possible, in close collaboration with experts in the field of mathematical education, it would have been better if validated math tests could have been used. a second limitation of the study is the time frame. the students in both the clil and non-clil group were observed and tested throughout only one academic year, or ten calendar months. a more interesting test would be to observe the groups over a longer time in order to ascertain whether or not the two groups continued to develop. a more detailed, longer study to compare the clil group’s advantages in mathematics over the non-clil group and to measure any continued expansion would be hugely beneficial. thirdly, a specific test of metalinguistic awareness would have been able to test the increased metalinguistic awareness hypothesis. a test such as the indonesian language test (ter kuile et al., 2011) or the wug task (berko, 1958; bialystok & barac, 2012) could have been implemented in order to strengthen the assertion that clil education develops such an awareness. this increased metalinguistic awareness, along with increased motivation, higher self-confidence, and more parental support (e.g., jäkel, 2015) seem to be the factors explaining the results. a specific test of metalinguistic awareness could have proven this more conclusively and could have shed light on the degree to which it is a factor. moreover, in order to be able to draw firm conclusions, in future research moderator variables (including metalinguistic awareness) should be factored in and controlled for, and multivariate analyses (such as factor or discriminant analyses) should be performed in order to determine which variables (the independent variable, clil, or other moderator variables, such as increased metalinguistic awareness) are truly responsible for the better mathematical results of the clil group compared to the non-clil group. 7. conclusions the latest results of the programme for international student assessment (pisa) by the organisation for economic cooperation and development (oecd) have shown that the need to increase mathematic abilities of pupils in europe is high (european commission, 2013). the 2020 goal to have a maximum of 15% being low achievers is far off, and the decline in the rate of low achievers is too slow. in this paper, a suggestion was made to take a different route towards better math achievement, namely the clil route. the present results confirmed previous research results (e.g., dawe, 1983; clarkson, 1992, 2007) showing that clil pupils outperformed their traditionally schooled peers in mathematics. the clil group’s progress over ten months (one secondary education year) was significantly better than the progress of the traditionally schooled pupils and was already visible jill surmont, esli struys, maurits van den noort, piet van de craen 332 after a very short period of time (three months). to conclude, these remarkable results shed new light on the math issue and should be taken into account when new math policy is written; however, more research needs to be done in the future, especially over longer periods of time, but also in different contexts and with different age groups. the effects of clil on mathematical content learning: a longitudinal study 333 references abdi, h. 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(1996). declaration of helsinki. british medical journal, 313(7070), 1448-1449. the effects of clil on mathematical content learning: a longitudinal study 337 supporting information additional supporting information may be found in the online version of this article at the journal’s website: http://ssllt.amu.edu.pl/download/docs/ssllt%206(2) %20surmont,%20struys,%20van%20den%20noort,%20van%20de%20craen%20 appendices.pdf. 727 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (4). 727-729 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.4.10 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl reviewers for volume 7/2017 the editors would like to express their gratitude to the following scholars who have kindly consented to review one or more submissions to volume 7/2017 of studies in second language learning and teaching. their insightful and thorough comments and suggestions have without doubt greatly enhanced the quality of the papers included in the 2017 volume: ali al-hoorie university of nottingham, uk heather willis allen university of miami, usa tanja angelovska university of salzburg, austria larissa aronin oranim college of education, israel dario luis banegas university of warwick, uk helen basturkmen university of auckland, new zealand szilvia bátyi university of pannonia, hungary alessandro benati university of portsmouth, uk adriana biedroń pomeranian university, słupsk, poland marie-josee bisson de montfort university, leicester, uk cylcia bolinbaugh university of york, uk simon borg university of leeds, uk kees de bot university of pannonia, hungary kelly a. bridges new york university, usa petra burmeister university of education, weingarten, germany melisa misha cahnmann-taylor university of georgia, usa christine pearson casanave temple university, japan huiping chan university of groningen, the netherlands letty chan hong kong institute of education, china anna cieślicka a&m international university, texas, usa kata csizér eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary anna czura university of wrocław, poland jean-marc dewaele birkbeck college, university of london, uk dina el-dakhs prince sultan university, riyadh, saudi arabia m. ángeles escobar-álvarez national distance education university, madrid, spain susanne even indiana university at bloomington, usa doreen e. ewert university of san francisco, usa thomas farrell brock university, canada 728 fan (gabriel) fang shantou university, china fang fang university of pannonia, hungary anne frenzel university of munich, germany mara fuertes-gutiérrez open university, uk danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia, poland joseph gafaranga university of edinburgh, uk sue garton aston university, uk monika geist university of munich, germany shannon giroir university of texas at austin, usa christina gkonou university of essex, uk jagoda granić university of split, croatia junkal gutierrez university of the basque country (spain) todd hernandez marquette university, milwaukee, usa phil hiver florida state university, usa maria adelina ianos university of lleida, spain teppo jakonen university of jyväskylä, finland yinxing jin university of groningen, the netherlands mari haneda pennsylvania state university, usa angela hahn university of munich, germany naeema hann leeds beckett university, uk nigel harwood university of sheffield, uk elaine horwitz university of texas at austin, usa katarzyna hryniuk university of warsaw, poland jan hulstijn university of amsterdam, the netherlands paula kalaja university of jyväskylä, finland dimitra karoulla-vrikki european university of cyprus, cyprus merel keijzer university of groningen, the netherlands achilleas kostoulas university of graz, austria benjamin kremmell university of nottingham, uk hadrian lankiewicz university of gdańsk, poland tove larsson uppsala university, sweden batia laufer university of haifa, israel shaopeng li shanghai international studies university, china meihua liu tsinghua university, china hanneke loerts university of groningen, the netherlands mariza g. méndez lópez university of quintana roo, mexico wander lowie university of groningen, the netherlands peter d. macintyre cape breton university, canada gabriela meier university of exeter, uk sarah mercer university of graz, austria jelena mihaljević djigunović university of zagreb, croatia théophile munyangeyo leeds beckett university, uk andre nava university of milan, italy colleen neary-sundquist perdue university, usa marianne nikolov university of pécs, hungary gabriela olivares university of north iowa, usa rhonda oliver curtin university, perth, australia zarina othman national university of malesia, malesia simon phipps anatolia language institute, anatolia, turkey françois pichette téluq university of quebec, canada simone e. pfenninger university of salzburg, austria 729 jennefer philp lancaster university, uk ewa piechurska-kuciel opole university, poland katalin piniel eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary simona popa university of lleida, spain nairán ramírez-esparza university of connecticut, usa john read university of auckland, new zealand cecilio lapresta rey university of lleida, spain michael p. h. rodgers carleton university, ottawa, canada joanna rokita-jaśkow pedagogical university of cracow, poland piotr romanowski university of warsaw, poland stephen ryan waseda university, japan matteo santipolo university of padua, italy david singleton university of pannonia, hungary natalia skorczewska leeds beckett university, uk john smeds university of turku, finland ute smit university of vienna, austria anja k. steinlen university of erlangen-nuremberg, germany kaitlyn tagarelli dalhousie university, halifax, canada amy s. thomson university of south florida, usa ivor timmis leeds beckett university, uk tan bee tin university of auckland, new zealand diana tremayne leeds beckett university, uk marijn van dijk university of groningen, the netherlands antonella valeo york university, ontario, canada marjolijn verspoor university of groningen, the netherlands laszlo vincze university of helsinki, finland aleksandra wach adam mickiewicz university, poland thomas wagner university college of education, linz, austria ewa waniek-klimczak university of łódź, poland stewart webb university of western ontario, canada zhisheng (edward) wen macao polytechnic institute, china johanna wolf university of salzburg, austria robert yennah university of ghanna, ghanna shulin yu university of macau, macau xian zhang pennsylvania state university, usa 103 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (1). 2018. 103-126 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.1.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt emotional experiences beyond the classroom: interactions with the social world andrew s. ross southern cross university, gold coast, australia andrew.ross@scu.edu.au damian j. rivers future university hakodate, hokkaido, japan rivers@fun.ac.jp abstract research into the emotional experiences of language learners and their impact upon the language-learning process remains relatively undernourished within second language education. the research available focuses primarily on emotions experienced within the classroom, rather than in the daily lives of learners within various social contexts. this article contends that the focus placed upon emotions within the relatively structured environment of the formal classroom is problematic, particularly within an esl environment, as the target language is more frequently experienced beyond the classroom. drawing on data collected within australia, the study explored the emotional experiences of a small cohort of eight university-level esl learners experienced within their various social interactions beyond the classroom with a specific focus on the emotions of hope, enjoyment and frustration. semi-structured interviews revealed that their emotional experiences beyond the classroom were particularly intense in comparison to emotional experiences within the formal language-learning classroom. keywords: emotions; enjoyment; hope; frustration; esl andrew s. ross, damian j. rivers 104 1. introduction emotions have long featured in research interests across a variety of domains and scholars have targeted their fundamental role in the human experience (see plutchik, 1962). within applied linguistics and second language education the scholarly interest in the role and function of human emotions is more recent and comes as part of a shift toward considering the influence of a plethora of sociocognitive variables and antecedents in the development of target language proficiency. however, in comparison to many sociocognitive considerations in second language education, such as the various antecedents of motivated behavior, which have dominated the research agenda over the past decade, emotions have received scant attention (dewaele, 2015). commenting upon the state of affairs within second language education, swain (2013, p. 205) contended that “emotions are the elephants in the room – poorly studied, poorly understood, seen as inferior to rational thought.” while it is important to acknowledge that emotions have been insufficiently studied, they have not been altogether ignored. emotions have tended to be investigated under the header of “affective factors” as a part of other processes such as motivation or individual differences. pavlenko (2013) draws attention to the fact that when emotions have been discussed in terms of language learning, the singular emotion of anxiety has been the primary focus, thus neglecting many others. indeed, numerous contemporary studies have centralized the role of anxiety in language learning (see dewaele & macintyre, 2014; gregersen, macintyre, & meza, 2014; mercer, 2006). in order to better understand the complexities of the emotional experiences of language learners, it is necessary to more fully engage with the lived experiences of language learners beyond the classroom. shifting the contextual focus away from the formal classroom environment toward the dynamic complexity of life outside the classroom demands that researchers engage with a greater range of emotions in situations which have significance for individual language learners. to explore emotions in this manner is to look beyond the narrow implications created for the development of second language proficiency and, instead, to entertain the human experience as one which includes second language learning, but is not strictly limited to it. 2. literature review the term emotion has proven notoriously difficult to define. it was this difficulty that prompted pavlenko (2005) to consider emotion from a range of different perspectives including states, representations, processes and/or relationships. the current study conceptualizes emotion in accordance with the definition proposed emotional experiences beyond the classroom: interactions with the social world 105 by reeve (2005, p. 294), who states that “emotions are short-lived, feeling-arousalpurposive-expressive phenomena that help us adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events.” this definition explicitly mentions four different dimensions. often emotions are described as an individual’s own subjective experience of an event, and this is what the “feeling” aspect of the definition refers to. “arousal” takes human physiological reactions that often occur simultaneously with specific emotions into account. the “purposive” element can be linked to the manner in which emotions are directed towards individual goals. the final element of “expressiveness” concerns how the emotion is communicated in context. it should be noted here, however, that macintyre and gregersen (2012) warn that in order to trigger an emotion, these elements need to work together, and not in isolation. 2.1. emotions in second language education when emotions have featured in the language education research literature, the focus has primarily been on the negative emotion of anxiety and its affective role in willingness to communicate within the classroom context, particularly since the work of horwitz, horwitz and cope (1986) resulted in the development of the foreign language classroom anxiety scale. subsequent research has tended to push other emotions, including enjoyment, hope and frustration to the periphery (imai, 2010). however, there has been a series of studies conducted reflecting a growing interest in emotions in second language education. in an example of early work linking emotions to second language learning, schumann (1997) investigated the role of emotion through neurological and psychological exposure to stimulus material and the subsequent impact on second language acquisition. further, in an edited volume, arnold (1999) considered emotion (or affect) in light of issues such as memory, anxiety, self-esteem, reflective learning and learner autonomy, primarily within the classroom context. another trend facilitating a greater interest in the study and role of emotions is the ongoing interest in learner identity, with which emotions are closely linked. this movement was led largely by the work of norton (2000), and has since been followed by numerous other studies interested in the role of language in identity construction. notable studies include those of both norton (2000) and menard-warwick (2009) with their focus on immigrant language learners as well as that of miller (2011) whose work on the social construction of identity in qualitative interviews bears relevance to the methodological choices made in the current study. in the study of language learner identity, emotion plays a significant role in that the act of learning another language in andrew s. ross, damian j. rivers 106 itself can trigger strong emotional experiences due to the connection between language, culture and identity (noels, pon, & clément, 1996). importantly, acting as a recent counter to the previous focus on the negative emotion of anxiety is a growing focus on discrete positive emotions, drawing on the positive psychology movement within mainstream psychology. this sees a move away from a focus on merely “affective factors.” within positive psychology, the work of fredrickson (1998, 2001, 2003) has led the way, stating that emotions such as joy and happiness best represent the idea of positive emotions in that they carry with them a pleasant subjective feeling. in addition, fredrickson (2001) stated that positive emotions are valuable as they represent not merely the absence of negativity, but have the power to promote health and well-being and the development of personal resources, a belief reflected in her “broaden-and-build” theory of positive emotions in which positive emotions are referred to as having the ability to broaden one’s outlook and help one to cope with negative experiences. the positive psychology movement has recently infiltrated second language education research. dewaele and macintyre (2014) continued the interest in foreign language anxiety but coupled this with the positive emotion of enjoyment, one of the discrete emotions targeted in the current study. they found that learners experienced more enjoyment than anxiety and that enjoyment was more important and meaningful to them. this finding is supported by campbell and storch (2011), who found that for learners language-related enjoyment is critical to sustaining language study. more recently, ross and stracke (2016) investigated the emotion of pride and how it featured in the experiences of second language learners in the australian context. they found that pride is integral in the experiences of language learners, but cannot only be understood as a positive emotion. these studies too, however, were focused on the classroom context. another study by gregersen, macintyre, finegan, talbot, and claman (2014) investigated how emotional intelligence can be used to harness positive emotions in order to progress and succeed in language learning. the interest in positive psychology in second language acquisition continues and is exemplified by a recent edited volume by macintyre, gregersen and mercer (2016) dedicated to the topic. the emotion of hope is relevant in second language learning and can be found in motivational theories such as dörnyei’s (2005, 2009a) l2 motivational self system, which relies heavily on the vision of a hoped-for, or desired, future self. the notion of “desire” (for the language and an identity associated with it), recently given attention in language education by motha and lin (2014), is also important here as it can be seen as very closely connected to “hope” in meaning and character. this is made clearer by ahmed (2010, p. 31) who defined desire as “both what promises something, what gives us energy, and also what is lacking,” which could be seen as synonymous with hope. emotional experiences beyond the classroom: interactions with the social world 107 frustration, the third target emotion in the current study, also has strong implications for language learners. this particular emotion has been broached in the literature to a small extent, in particular in relation to language use and the frustration that results from an inability to ask for teacher help (dewaele, 2010), and the role of learning strategies and learning training in drawing attention to potential language frustrations encountered in the classroom (stern, 1992). furthermore, the role that frustration, among other emotions including anxiety, plays in language learners exhibiting silence in the classroom has been considered in the work of granger (2004) from a psychoanalytical perspective, and this is certainly an area that warrants extrapolation to the environment beyond the classroom. 2.2. emotions outside the classroom emotions outside the classroom have also been studied to some extent, but this focus is much more recent. one area of inquiry where powerful emotional experiences are likely to be regularly encountered is that of the study abroad context, although the focus within research on language and study abroad has been on identity negotiation rather than on specific emotions. identity negotiation in study abroad situations involves many elements, but an important one is that of the linguistic self-concept. ellis (2004, p. 543) defines this concept as the manner in which “learners perceive their ability as language learners and their progress in relation to the particular context in which they are learning.” the emotions of language learners in foreign contexts are relevant here, as emotions are intertwined with self-concept and individual experience, and thus with the learners’ sense of who they are as a person (benson, barkhuizen, bodycott, & brown, 2012). this was made clear in an example presented by kinginger (2004, p. 219) of an american learner of french in france, who overcame “significant personal, social and material obstacles” in an endeavor to learn french, and these obstacles had a significant emotive element to them. more specifically, pavlenko (2005) embarked on a detailed analysis of the role of emotions in the lives of bilinguals on vocal, semantic, discursive, and neuropsychological levels. the analysis highlighted how emotions are expressed and conveyed through language use, paying attention to how different emotions feature in bilinguals’ lives. in another study, dewaele (2010, p. 1) highlighted the idea that “sharing emotions, whether in face-to-face interactions or through written communications, is a crucial social activity” and in particular emphasized the difficulties inherent in communicating emotions, as well as the variety of ways in which they can actually be expressed. this emphasis on emotions beyond the classroom needs to become broader to encompass not only the communication of emotions, but also an awareness of the subjective emotional experiences of language andrew s. ross, damian j. rivers 108 learners that lie beneath their language study, their communicative ability, and their lives in the target language context. finally, emotion research lends itself to a narrative approach, and this approach has provided other insights into emotions of language learners beyond the classroom. block (2007) identifies l2 learner stories as an important element of identity research, and pavlenko (2007) also states the key advantages of autobiographical narratives of having significant aesthetic and textual value and being an accessible and transformative means of collecting data. this approach can also be extremely valuable in terms of giving insight into the emotions that learners experience beyond the classroom, but pavlenko (2007) also warns of the inherent challenges associated with analysis. examples of the rich stories that emerge from autobiographical narratives can be seen in the stories of immigrants presented by norton (2000), or in those of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers presented by baynham and de fina (2005). such stories help us understand the lived experiences of language learners in a new cultural context, which have inevitably incorporated emotive elements, a notion that swain (2013) further supports by stating that it is in narratives that learner stories and experiences reside, and in which the central role of emotion becomes evident. 3. methodology 3.1. participants the participants in the current study were eight university-level students studying on a pre-degree language program at an australian institution. the sample was comprised of seven female students and one male student (mean age = 24.6). the eight participants were recruited through a general call for participants disseminated among the larger student cohort. as the participants were required to respond to english language interview questions, and would be required to talk in some detail reflectively about their own emotional experiences within australia, interested participants were required to write an english email of application. students were asked to write briefly about themselves and why they wanted to take part in an english language interview study concerning their language-learning experiences. from the 21 replies received, the most proficient and informative emails were selected, thus creating a final sample population of eight students. demographic details of the eight students are shown in table 1. emotional experiences beyond the classroom: interactions with the social world 109 table 1 demographic information of eight study participants name age gender nationality first language alfredo 21 male brazilian portuguese anna 30 female chinese mandarin carla 27 female chilean spanish cassie 21 female chinese mandarin ellie 21 female chinese mandarin emma 32 female japanese japanese michelle 22 female chinese mandarin ramira 23 female spanish spanish note: all names shown are pseudonyms. 3.2. instrument and procedure the study utilized semi-structured interviews as the data collection method. given our interest in exploring the subjective emotional experiences of the participants, this method of data collection offered the most practical opportunity to explore “the lived world from the perspective of the participants involved” (richards, 2009, p. 187). the discursive exchanges within the interviews were conceptualized as “interactional narrative procedures of knowledge production” (holstein & gubrium, 2003, p. 68), establishing the research interview as a form of social practice (talmy, 2010, 2011). in other words, the discursive exchanges were not limited to casual conversation and categorization, but were also focused on participants remembering, projecting and collaboratively producing recollections of subjective emotional experiences for and with the researcher (prior, 2015). the interviews targeted a specific range of emotions including enjoyment, hope, frustration, happiness, embarrassment, pride, and boredom. of course, the possible range of emotions to target is challengingly broad, so these emotions were selected from a list suggested by dörnyei (2009b) of relevance to language learners, helping to limit the focus. the semi-structured interviews were then designed around these emotions in a bottom-up approach as well as providing an opportunity for others to be discussed when and if they arose. each participant took part in three individual interviews making a cumulative total of 24 interviews conducted across a period of 6 months (one interview per 2 months). the interviews were conducted by one of the researchers at a pre-arranged time on campus. all interviews were audio-visually recorded. the selection of three separate interviews was designed not only to cover a broad range of emotional experiences, but also to facilitate a positive relationship between the researchers and the participants. an overview of the three interviews and their focus is listed below. andrew s. ross, damian j. rivers 110 · interview 1: 30-40 minutes in duration. this interview was designed to clarify the aims and focus of the project, the kind of data we were interested in and the expectations we had of the participants, as well as to establish rapport. the data to be collected in this interview were related more to the language learning backgrounds and histories of the participants than to individual emotions. participants were also invited to ask questions in this interview. · interview 2: 50-90 minutes in duration. this interview was more informal than the first meeting. the researchers utilized an interview guide which included a number of focused questions pertaining to the emotional experiences that the participant had encountered over the previous three month period (see sample questions from interview 2 in appendix). the guide was generally adhered to, but the interviews also followed the direction the respective participant responses took them. · interview 3: 20-30 minutes in duration. the third interview was designed as a follow-up to previous experiences discussed and for the possible documentation of new experiences encountered. on our understanding that emotional experiences encourage reflection, throughout the process all participants were provided with an emotional experience notebook in which they were encouraged to document emotional experiences shortly after they had happened. participants were requested to be descriptive and open in documenting how a particular experience made them feel. the researchers did not have access to the participants’ notebooks, but encouraged their use and suggested that participants bring them along to the interviews to help them recall details of any experiences. these notebooks were referred back to during the interview process through prompt questions such as “did you have any experiences you wrote about in your emotion notebook in the last few weeks?,” and “why did you feel this experience was an interesting one to write about in there?” in this way, the notebooks were useful in focusing the discussion and the personal recollections of each participant, although not all participants chose to use them to the same degree. in a previous study, mercer (2006) adopted learner journals to record emotional experiences; however, her study focused on recording the emotional experiences of a group of advanced tertiary learners within the classroom. finally, the interviews in the study were conducted in accordance with some guiding research questions, and these are listed below: · what experiences do the participants encounter with the targeted emotions in their english-using lives outside of the classroom? · how do the participants describe these experiences? · how do these experiences contribute to our understanding of language learning in esl contexts? emotional experiences beyond the classroom: interactions with the social world 111 3.3. analysis the data analysis began with interview transcription. the conversion of the interview data into more accessible units was carried out in accordance with kvale’s (1996) meaning interpretation approach. the first step necessitated the coding of the data, in which segments of transcribed text containing or presenting an idea or an emotion were assigned labels (cohen, manion, & morrison, 2011). an example of an interview excerpt and how it was coded can be seen in table 2 which shows resultant themes. following this, in table 3, is a complete list of the codes created during the coding process. the example given is of one of the emotions forming the focus of the current paper, just to illustrate the coding process. table 2 sample interview excerpt and coding transcribed excerpt from interview code in melbourne i had a beer with a friend and i bought two beers and i don’t know what was the conversation but he gave me four beer so why? i required two but they gave me four so why maybe my accent was not good and was so frustrating. frustration communication breakdown table 3 complete list of the codes used in the data analysis codes of negative emotions frustration embarrassment disappointment sadness fear guilt hopelessness boredom codes of positive emotions enjoyment hope happiness excitement pride confidence other codes to emerge attitude to mistakes motivation demotivation opportunities for l2 use communication communication breakdown l2 learning experience effort progress goals andrew s. ross, damian j. rivers 112 the data were analyzed in relation to the most dominant emotions identified by each participant (in table 2 example the dominant emotion was “frustration”) as well as other potentially relevant aspects, such as “communication breakdown” in table 2. each researcher coded the data and then compared their final coding results to establish inter-coder reliability. any discrepancies were discussed further and excluded when agreement could not be reached. across each of the eight participants and the targeted emotions, the most frequently referenced positive emotional experiences situated around hope and enjoyment, while the most frequently referenced negative emotional experience situated around the emotion of frustration. once the coding process was complete and the comments relating to each emotion had been collated, the meaning interpretation approach was adopted. the purpose of this approach is to “develop the meanings of the interviews, bringing the subjects’ own understanding into the light as well as providing new perspectives from the researcher on the phenomena” (kvale, 1996, p. 190). in order to achieve this, the researchers selected comments from the participants in relation to enjoyment, hope and frustration that were particularly salient and that provided the greatest insight into the participants’ own lived emotional experiences beyond the classroom. following this, we applied another layer of analysis through our own subjective interpretation, which was itself influenced and informed by the relationships and understanding we had developed with participants across the six month period involving three interviews. to return to talmy’s (2011) notion of the research interview as social practice, the interview data were treated in accordance with this approach as the interviews themselves were not seen merely as locations from which to excavate data, but as a site to engage in meaningful social interaction around the topic. in addition, the data were co-constructed and had a specific focus on the what as well as the how from an analytical perspective. perhaps most importantly, the data are presented as “accounts [original italics] of truths, facts attitudes, beliefs, mental states . . . coconstructed between interviewer and interviewee” (talmy, 2011, p. 27). 5. results the interviews focused on a range of individual emotions and their place in participants’ l2 lives beyond the classroom. as mentioned above, the data to be presented in the following subsections relates to the emotions of hope, enjoyment and frustration and establishes the clearest image of the out-of-class emotional experiences of the learners in the australian esl setting. emotional experiences beyond the classroom: interactions with the social world 113 5.1. hope after speaking with the participants, it became clear that the emotion of hope is a special case in that although it is felt in the present, and can be felt both in the classroom context and the world beyond it, the actual future circumstance or outcome that is hoped for is most often rooted firmly in the world the learners inhabit beyond the classroom, not the formal learning context. cassie made this apparent when she remarked, it is my hope that i can speak very well and i can communicate with foreigners no problem. (interview 2) a similar sentiment was expressed by alfredo when stating, i am hopeful. i’m looking for the day i can speak english no problems. (interview 3) for both of these students, the hope they experienced in relation to their english language use in the future is intertwined with a desire to be able to use the language proficiently. of course, this would be at least partly the result of language study, but the feeling of hope is not connected to the situated learning environment in any way, but to their potential future ability to be able to engage confidently and successfully in authentic communicative contexts “with foreigners.” ramira also expressed her feelings in relation to hope. her experience of hope was similar to alfredo and cassie in that it was directly linked with her own image of her future self: interviewer (i): so, we talked a bit about feeling lost and a bit hopeless, and of course the opposite of that is ‘hope’. what are your feelings about that in your studies? ramira (r): [laughter] i: i mean how . . . (cut off) r: i hope to improve my speaking and i hope to, i hope that i make the right decision to move to england [she was to move to england within the two months following our interviews] and hope to improve my level of english and trying to express myself not only in a social environment but i need to speak in a professional environment. for me this language is not only for travel. (interview 2) again, here there is no reference to the situated learning context at all, but there is strong reference to her future and the role that english will play. these comments display a strong connection with the notion of motivation. however, there is a subtle difference in that hope suggests a less concrete vision than presented by actual goals. for example, in hoping she has not made a poor decision andrew s. ross, damian j. rivers 114 to move to england, ramira is not expressing a goal and motivation cannot be inferred; rather, she hopes to avoid a future negative emotional experience, such as regret. in addition, ramira highlights here the extent to which emotions are connected with every aspect of our lives. in the same short comment, she spoke of her hope for her english proficiency in varying contexts, and she also spoke of her hope that she had not made a bad personal decision to move to another place. emotions are complex, and they are occurring at different levels in individuals such as ramira at any given time. 5.2. enjoyment the emotion of enjoyment was another positive emotion talked about during the interviews. in contrast to other emotions, the essence of the emotion the participants were alluding to was often somewhat open to interpretation. thus, as opposed to some other emotions where the emotion was referred to frequently by name, it was the researchers who, in many cases, interpreted the comments as being related to enjoyment. ellie talked about an experience that was of importance to her. her comment exemplified those where the actual word enjoyment was not used, but the researchers aligned it with this emotion through their own interpretation building on their relationship with and understanding of the participant, and with the aid of facial clues and gestures indicating an enjoyable experience. ellie’s comment was a direct response to a question regarding her best language-learning experience: in my sophomore year i went to america to join a summer club and we spent two weeks in la and it was also a college. it was more relaxed than here [university level in australia], and the teacher was nice. but the best thing was my mind opened that i can use english in a different culture like that, and i was amazed. (interview 2) while “enjoyment” itself is not mentioned here explicitly, the comment does represent the emotion of enjoyment, and this was confirmed in subsequent comments on the same topic. of added interest is that the comment refers to elements of both the situated learning environment (teacher/summer club/college) and the environment beyond the classroom in her reference to using english in a different culture. it is notable that her emphasis was placed on her mind “opening” when using english in a different culture, and this was with regard to the external environment, beyond the classroom. thus, the power that this experience of using the language in a non-learning context can have over second language learners becomes visible. alfredo also referred to enjoyment when relating a positive l2-using experience during his time in sydney: emotional experiences beyond the classroom: interactions with the social world 115 so for me the best experience i have ever had was once when i was in the street and asking information you know and then i found an old guy and i asked him how to go to the museum and he went with me and we talked in english and he could understand everything i said and it was cool you know to see that my english was good enough to get the information and talk and have a fluent conversation. it was a great memory for me. (interview 2) alfredo represents a particularly interesting case, as when the topic of the conversation was the classroom learning environment, he often appeared disengaged and bored, but when afforded the opportunity to talk about his l2 use outside of his class environment, he became animated and enthusiastic, and his determination to become a proficient user of the language was more obvious. importantly, what alfredo helps to make clear is that the l2 learner that exists in the classroom is not necessarily the same l2 learner that exists outside of it. the lives of language learners occur in these two domains in an esl context and each domain can have significantly different effects. this was reinforced in the remarks made by anna. anna is a mother, and although she was engaged in a university pathway eap program, her enjoyment in l2 use came from her experiences outside of her learning context as well: i: . . . when you’re using english what do you enjoy the most? when do you feel best? is it inside the class? outside? talking to strangers? talking to neighbors? what is it that makes you feel the best using english? anna (a): i always enjoy when i have a chat, i mean in the mothers group when i can join them i can share the same topic with mothers about the kids and the kids’ food and habits. yes, that’s the time i most enjoy. if i can’t do that, i can’t enjoy at all. (interview 3) like alfredo, this shows that the use of the l2 in her life in australia carried much more weight for her in her lived experiences outside of the classroom. in addition, her own linguistic self-concept was highest when she was able to participate in this social context, and this in turn triggered positive emotions. she also mentions that her enjoyment would be absent if she was unable to engage in this activity, thus weakening her linguistic self-concept. finally, when responding to a question asking about what she enjoyed most in her language learning and use, carla did not use the term enjoy, but referred instead to happiness. this illustrates that there is some interchangeability with perceptions of these two discrete emotions. her comments can be seen in the following exchange: i: think about your english language study and learning, and try to tell me what you enjoy the most about your english use and your english study? carla (c): when i travel and use it of course. so i travel and i’m learning to speak in english because i have to communicate. i need to communicate with other people on my trip so this is, i feel really happy when i am travelling in english. (interview 2) andrew s. ross, damian j. rivers 116 carla’s response here came with almost no hesitation, which highlights again that in the domain of lived experience beyond the classroom, emotions carry significant weight for language learners and users. at times during the interviews, carla’s comments were interpreted as meaning that the emotions she felt inside the class were not as strongly felt due to students in the class all being “the same” in that they were all language students of about the same proficiency with the same goals in terms of successfully completing the course, which provided a safety net of sorts. once that safety net is removed; that is, once she left the classroom, the depth of her emotional experiences increased as they became far less predictable. with comments such as these in relation to enjoyment, the separation between emotions inside and outside of the classroom becomes clearer. the comments reveal that successful language use outside the classroom appears to correlate more strongly with the emotion of enjoyment than inside. success does of course occur in both contexts, and likely results in increased learner motivation, but the enjoyment (and stronger motivation) comes from meeting a need outside of their formal language learning and more specifically related to its use in everyday social situations. 5.3. frustration the negative emotion of frustration was often experienced by the participants and most frequently beyond the classroom. emma, a japanese participant, explained that her feelings of frustration are far greater outside of class: emma (e): yes almost every time [laughter] i feel frustration. i can’t express my feelings and my thoughts exactly in english so i feel frustrated. i: and when this happens do you feel it more outside of the class or inside of the class? when do you feel more frustrated? e: i feel frustrated out of class more than in class because when i talk to some friends i have more things i want to say than in class so i feel frustrated out of class much more. (interview 3) when pressed on what she meant by “more things i want to say,” emma explained that within the class environment she was restricted in what she could talk about by the activities, and the content of the lessons, in which she was often not that interested beyond the english skills she could practice. outside class, however, she felt unable to successfully participate in daily social interactions and her frustration stemmed from this perceived inability. anna also spoke of her frustration in a perceived inability to successfully engage in l2 interaction in her everyday life, and provided the specific example of her neighbors: emotional experiences beyond the classroom: interactions with the social world 117 i mean sometimes i feel i should learn more because i want to communicate with my neighbors but sometimes it really made me not happy and frustrated and you know sometimes i say “why did i even pay so much money to learn it but i am still not good enough?” (interview 2) it is clear that anna has difficulty in attempting to engage in, or engaging in communicative interactions with her neighbors. these types of social scenarios in her daily life (as with the mother’s group she mentioned earlier) were extremely important to her, and her own perceived success or failure in them were in turn the cause of the emotions she encountered along with the intensity with which they appeared. a final comment worthy of reporting came from ramira. as with the previous two examples, ramira’s frustration was rooted in a perceived lack of skill or proficiency combined with her belief that her english ability was not improving rapidly enough: r: i feel so frustrated in social life because in class everybody’s the same level as you so you try and you ask for help from the teacher and you know you are learning and you are in a safe environment but when you are in a social environment with people who are speaking english all the time like here with my aussie friends it’s complicated. although they can help you and they are very good, you feel like a child you know. i: right. so you find this very frustrating? r: yes! i feel frustration a lot because it is hard to try and express something in english when your brain is always in spanish, no? but you keep trying all the time and sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad but then i think “oh my god i’ve spent a lot of time and money to improve my english but i can’t,” so every day i am trying but i can’t so i feel very upset about that and sometimes very angry. i think “it’s worth it? all this effort?” (interview 3) although the sentiment expressed here correlates strongly with the comments of emma and anna, ramira’s description is perhaps even more powerful, and even invokes some additional emotions such as anger. during the interviews, ramira spoke of her boredom in class and a resulting lack of motivation. however, there is also an important distinction stemming from the social context that exists beyond the classroom for the participants. for example, ramira spoke of a sense of boredom and lack of motivation in class as it did not reflect the social reality in which she wished to utilize english the most and as a direct result of this she did not feel particularly frustrated. on the other hand, outside of class, her frustration intensified significantly as it was in this domain that her motivation was greatest. although she found her language use in the social context outside the classroom the most frustrating, her overall motivation did not appear to diminish. frustration remains highest where motivation is also highest. andrew s. ross, damian j. rivers 118 6. discussion in relation to the research questions underpinning the study, the data have highlighted the range of emotional experiences of hope, enjoyment and frustration the participants have encountered. the manner in which they described them was varied, and ranged from comparing their out-of-class experiences to the way they felt in class, to discussing their experiences in connection with what is most important to them as individuals. for example, the emotions anna described were strongest when related to attending a mothers’ group, while for alfredo it was when he was able to communicate freely with local people. ramira, on the other hand, described her emotional experiences in terms of the barriers to successful communication she felt in english, which was incredibly frustrating for her. the emotional experiences the participants recollected and described make a valuable contribution to our understanding of language learning in esl contexts as the language-use environment differs significantly inside and outside the classroom for learners. therefore, it is necessary for educators to become more aware of the fact that particularly in esl contexts the learner they interact with in the classroom is only one aspect of that learner, and that once outside the confines of the classroom the experience of interacting in and learning the language is significantly different. the interview data help to understand these two different elements of students’ lives in esl contexts and raise several implications for language teaching and learning. the participants’ insights and comments demonstrate that in an international esl setting such as australia, language learners have plentiful encounters and experiences with different individual emotions, particularly in relation to l2-based encounters outside of the classroom as they conduct their daily lives. the study builds on previous work in relation to language learner emotions in authentic l2 use beyond the classroom. firstly, as the interviews were quite extensive and detailed, they were able to take the shape of the autobiographical narratives that pavlenko (2007) and swain (2013) outlined as aiding in understanding the affective side of the learner. further, although the focus of the current study was not on switching between languages as such, some of the comments of the participants did indicate that emotions can be heightened when thinking in one language and desiring to express oneself in another, which serves to support the work of dewaele (2010) and pavlenko (2005). the comments of ramira demonstrate this when she spoke of her frustration and anger at not being able to convert her spanish thinking to english communication. the feelings of difference that dewaele (2016) describes in biand multilinguals are also evident in the results. for example, alfredo just felt like a regular emotional experiences beyond the classroom: interactions with the social world 119 student in the classroom among his language student peers, but when outside of the classroom, he was a different l2 user – one who was engaged, excited and determined to use the language for effective intercultural communicative encounters. however, this sense of “difference” is not entirely in line with that of dewaele (2016) and dewaele and nakano (2013), who focused on the individual feeling like a different person when using the l1 compared to the l2. instead, what emerged here is that language learners can feel like a different l2-using person in different contexts such as those inside and outside the classroom. the data also highlighted the importance of the notion of linguistic selfconcept as described by ellis (2004). the learners’ emotional experiences often appeared to work in harmony with their linguistic self-concept. in other words, when their linguistic self-concept was developed and the learners were able to perceive their ability and progress within their context of australia in a favorable light, the subsequent emotions experienced were positive, and vice-versa. this is very much in keeping with the view of benson et al. (2012) in the sense that the experiences of learners were inextricably linked to the participants’ sense of themselves, that is their identities, and their lives in australia. another aspect highlighted by the study was the manner in which the emotional experiences of learners affected their investment in the language learning enterprise. for example, ramira’s motivation to improve as an english user remained high, but over the six months of the study her investment in the process waned and she eventually returned to her home country. thus, her frustration shifted her investment in her language learning. this was also evident in alfredo, whose investment in his in-class language learning decreased, while his investment in improving his english use outside of class increased during his time in australia. these are not isolated examples, but they are important as they point to the ways in which learner emotions can actually cause a change in investment in the language learning process. 7. implications there are several important implications to emerge from this study in relation to what can be done inside the classroom to, potentially, help language learners outside of it. the first aspect relates to authentic l2 interactions beyond the classroom. in many cases, while the language study of the participants in the classroom was of course important and necessary for them, it was not from that context that they reported the most intense emotional experiences, but rather from outside of the classroom in everyday daily encounters. from these positive or negative out-of-class experiences, it would seem that more types of class-based or learning-based practice or simulation of authentic andrew s. ross, damian j. rivers 120 interactions need to occur to assist students in further development of the communicative competence and confidence they need to gain the most from their daily lives in a foreign country. these types of activities could include projects such as engaging with the community in class research tasks where l2 use is essential, possibly in the form of an interview-based data collection task which could result in an in-class outcome of a presentation of findings. a second aspect that warrants consideration is the hope, or desire, of learners such as ramira to be able to communicate effectively in differing out-of-class contexts, such as social and professional ones. again, there are possibilities here for application within the classroom. workplace-based simulations are not new to language classrooms, but these could be strengthened by having learners participate in e-mail exchanges or on work-focused discussion forums. while these do not provide face-to-face interactions, they could serve to develop the confidence and tools necessary to manage such interactions when they occur. a final perspective that was raised was travel, which represents another type of authentic communication for international students travelling around their new educational location, in this case australia. carla spoke of her feelings of happiness while she was travelling and using english. this could be incorporated into the classroom learning environment through projects requiring students to report back on specific interactive exchanges or communicative experiences they had on holiday experiences, and discussing how they could engage in these more effectively in the future. while the implications outlined above are focused on what might be done in the class to enhance the emotional experiences of learners in their daily lives beyond the classroom, there are clear connections that can be drawn with potential future research studies. for example, if these tasks or activities were to be implemented, reflections of learners could be documented to understand the benefit of the tasks and how they might be improved. studies in this area would make it possible to see more clearly the link between what is done in the class and how that impacts on the lived experiences of the l2 user outside of the class in esl settings such as australia. a clear recommendation emerging from our study is the need for studies to be designed that, first, help us to better understand what language learners experience outside of the classroom and, second, that establish a link between classroom-based learning and pedagogy and life beyond the classroom. 8. conclusion although research into emotions continues to gather momentum within second language education, it remains primarily focused on the situated classroom context. emotional experiences beyond the classroom: interactions with the social world 121 this is understandable in an efl context, but in an esl context such as australia, the world that the learners inhabit beyond the classroom is a much bigger part of their l2 lives in that it is there every time they leave the class. the emotional experiences of language learners in their l2 learning experience invariably have a significant impact on their relationship with the language and the culture they are residing within. there is now a growing recognition of the impact of emotional well-being on students’ academic success and an opportunity exists for language educators to now take up the challenge of tailoring their teaching and learning programs to consider the emotional experiences of learners beyond the situated classroom environment to make them more proficient users of the language and to aid them in experiencing more positive emotions than they do negative ones along the way. andrew s. ross, damian j. rivers 122 references ahmed, s. 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(2011). the interview as collaborative achievement: interaction, identity, and ideology in a speech event. applied linguistics, 32(1), 25-42. doi: 10.1093/applin/amq027. andrew s. ross, damian j. rivers 126 appendix sample guiding interview questions for the emotion of ‘enjoyment’ 1. what have you enjoyed about your english use here in australia? can you tell me an example? 2. what social activities have you taken part in? can you tell me about them? were they enjoyable? what made these events enjoyable? 3. how do you feel about your life here in australia? can you tell me about your experiences? 4. when you enjoy something, what effect does it have on you? can you give an example? 5. do you enjoy studying at home and in other places to continue improving your english ability? if so, what do you do? note: these are sample questions only. while targeting the same emotions, the interviews all followed different paths and the majority of follow-up questions and deeper discussion formed organically as the interview was constructed together with the participant. 201 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (2). 2016. 201-202 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.2.1 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial the second 2016 issue of ssllt brings together six contributions, most of which are reports of original research projects. in the first paper, justyna leśniewska addresses the question as to whether the correct use of articles in english is determined solely by grammar rules or, rather, it is also mediated by the formulaic nature of the target language, demonstrating, on the basis of data obtained from 90 polish students majoring in english, that the latter may in fact be the case. in the next contribution, dmitri leontjev reports the results of a study which sought to find out whether derivational affixes differ in their difficulty, thus putting to the test the order of teaching of english affixes proposed by bauer and nation (1993). the analysis of the data gleaned from 62 estonian and russian upper-secondary school students by means of a word-segmentation task showed that the proposed classification indeed is able to account for the difficulty in recognizing such affixes, with the effect that it can provide a point of reference for future empirical investigations. subsequently, maria pia gomez-laich shifts our attention to the domain of pragmatics by synthesizing the empirical studies concerning why learners may consciously choose to ignore the pragmatic norms of the target language, concluding that this phenomenon is likely to stem from divergence of l1 and l2 pragmatic norms, a clash with self-identity or the way learners see themselves with respect to the target language community. the next paper by jenni alisaari and leena maria heikkola focuses upon the impact of different pedagogical techniques on written fluency and shows through an intervention study carried out among 67 learners of finnish that singing may have a beneficial effect in this respect. the study undertaken by richard j. sampson, in turn, is devoted to investigating the changes in the motivation of a teacher of english as a foreign language working in a technical college in japan, who was the author himself, with the assistance of an introspective journal, adopting ushioda’s (2009) person-in-context perspective and taking into account the tenets of complex dynamic systems theories (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). it turned out 202 that motivation is the outcome of an intricate interplay of affect and identity, with major differences being observed between roles played by different students. finally, jill surmont, esli struys, maurits van den noort and piet van de craen attempt to explore the effect of content and language integrated learning (clil) on the performance in mathematics by dutch-speaking secondary school learners educated in french, finding both a shortand long-term advantage for the clil group. i am confident that all of the papers included in this issue will provide food for thought and a source of inspiration for researchers wishing to pursue similar lines of inquiry, thereby enriching our knowledge of second language learning and teaching, no matter whether the emphasis is laid on grammar, lexis, pragmatics, the impact of individual learner differences or the application of different forms of content-based instruction. mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references bauer, l., & nation, i. s. p. (1993). word families. international journal of lexicography, 6(4), 253-279. larsen-freeman, d., & cameron, l. (2008). complex systems and applied linguistics. oxford: oxford university press. ushioda, e. (2009). a person-in-context relational view of emergent motivation, self and identity. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 215-228). bristol: multilingual matters. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: miros aw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: marek derenowski (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) language editor: melanie ellis (language teacher training college, zabrze) vol. 4 no. 3 october 2014 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham/university of new south wales, sydney) piotr cap (university of ód ) anna cie licka (texas a&m international university, adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) kata csizer (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) krystyna dro dzia -szelest (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabry -barker (university of silesia) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of ód ) jan majer (university of ód ) paul meara (swansea university) anna micho ska-stadnik (university of wroc aw) anna ni egorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) terrence odlin (ohio state university) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) pawe scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) david singleton (trinity college, dublin) odzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) merrill swain (university of toronto) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of ód ) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – pozna 2014 editor: miros aw pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak marek derenowski anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydzia pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam pozna proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, pozna contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy wiat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. wierzawska 1, 60-321 pozna print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: index copernicus central and eastern european online library (ceeol) the mla international bibliography the mla directory of periodicals linguistic abstracts ebsco efforts are being made to include studies in second language learning and teaching in the index of journals published by the polish ministry of science and higher education, and to have it listed by the european reference index for the humanities (erih) and the thomson reuters master journal list. special issue: age and more guest editor: david singleton studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 4, number 3, october 2014 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors .................................................................... 403 editorial ......................................................................................... 407 articles: kees de bot – the effectiveness of early foreign language learning in the netherlands ............................................................................... 409 jelena mihaljevi djigunovi – l2 learner age from a contextualised perspective ...................................................................................... 419 alene moyer – what’s age got to do with it? accounting for individual factors in second language accent .................................................. 443 carmen muñoz – starting age and other influential factors: insights from learner interviews ................................................................... 465 judit navracsics – input or intimacy ................................................ 485 mark patkowski – looking for structure: is the two-word stage of language development in apes and human children the same or different? ........ 507 simone e. pfenninger – the misunderstood variable: age effects as a function of type of instruction ......................................................... 529 david singleton – apt to change: the problematic of language awareness and language aptitude in age-related research ................................. 557 book reviews ................................................................................. 573 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 579 403 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors editor david singleton took his ba at trinity college dublin and his phd at the university of cambridge. he is a fellow emeritus of trinity college dublin, where he was until 2013 professor of applied linguistics. he now has the title of full professor at the university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary and at the state university of applied sciences in konin, poland. he has published in a wide range of areas, but his principal current areas of interest are cross-linguistic influence, the lexicon, multilingualism and the age factor in language acquisition. contact data: university of pannonia, institute of applied linguistics, 8200 veszprém, egyetem utca 10, hungary (dsnglton@tcd.ie) contributors kees de bot is professor of applied linguistics at the university of groningen, the netherlands and the university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary. he has published on various topics in international journals and books. his current research interests are multilingual processing, code switching, the application of dynamics systems to language development, language attrition and the history of applied linguistics. his work is characterized by a certain lack of focus and he intends to keep it that way in the years to come. contact data: department of applied linguistics, faculteit der letteren, rijksuniversiteit groningen oude kijk in ‘t jatstraat 26, 9712 ek groningen (c.l.j.de.bot@rug.nl) jacqueline haimov was born, raised and educated (ba, ma and phd) in bulgaria. for the last 24 years she has lived and worked in haifa, israel. she has taught english as a foreign language for haifa university, open university and oranim college of education, kiryat tivon, israel. she has also taught english to students 404 of biology. since 2008 she has been teaching academic reading, applied linguistics, vocabulary acquisition and pedagogical grammar in the english department of oranim college of education. she has prepared course materials which are being used by all her colleagues teaching the same level of language proficiency. contact data: oranim academic college of education, tivon post 36006, israel (jhsl1990@gmail.com) jelena mihaljevi djigunovi worked as a professor of sla and tefl at zagreb university, croatia before she retired in october 2014. her main research interests centre around teaching modern languages to young learners, the age factor, affect in language learning and teaching, and l2 teacher education. she has been involved in a number of large scale research projects, the latest one being early language learning in europe (ellie). she has published extensively in national and international journals. her publications include two research books on affective learner factors and over 100 papers. she has co-edited several research volumes, and has published a number of efl teaching materials. contact data: pijavisce 21 e, 10090 zagreb, croatia (jdjigunovic@gmail.com) professor alene moyer received her phd from the university of texas at austin, usa in germanic languages and applied linguistics. she taught at georgetown university before coming to the university of maryland in 1999. her research focuses on long-term learning outcomes in both classroom-focused and naturalistic language acquisition, with a special emphasis on l2 phonology. she is author of foreign accent: the phenomenon of non-native speech (2013, cambridge university press), age, accent and experience in second language acquisition (2004, multilingual matters), and is co-editor of social dynamics in second language accent with john levis of iowa state university (2014, degruyter mouton). professor moyer’s work is published in several books, edited volumes and in journals such as studies in second language acquisition, applied linguistics, canadian modern language review, journal of multicultural and multilingual development, issues in applied linguistics, and foreign language annals. contact data: school of languages, literatures and cultures, 1102 francis scott key hall, university of maryland, college park, md 20742-7311, usa (moyera@umd.edu) carmen muñoz is a professor of applied english linguistics at the university of barcelona, spain. her research interests include the effects of age and context on second language acquisition, young learners in instructed settings, individual differences, and bilingual/multilingual education. she has edited age and the rate of for 405 eign language learning (2006, multilingual matters), intensive exposure experiences in second language learning (2012, multilingual matters), and the special issue complexities and interactions of age effects in l2 learning: broadening the research agenda (in applied linguistics, 2014). her recent work has appeared in journals such as language learning, the modern language journal, the international journal of applied linguistics, language awareness, and applied linguistics. contact data: icrea academia, departament de filologia anglesa i alemanya universitat de barcelona gran via 585, 08007 barcelona, spain (munoz@ub.edu) judit navracsics took her ma degrees in russian and english linguistics and literature and her phd degree in applied linguistics. she is professor of linguistics and head of institute for hungarian and applied linguistics at the university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary. she is the chair of pannon language examination centre and the chair of the organizing committee of the summer school of psycholinguistics held annually in balatonalmádi, hungary. she does research into biand multilingualism. she is the author and editor of books and articles on early multilingual development, early second language acquisition, the bilingual mental lexicon and bilingual word recognition and sentence comprehension. contact data: university of pannonia, institute of applied linguistics, 8200 veszprém, egyetem utca 10, hungary (navju@yahoo.co.uk) mark patkowski is professor and director of the linguistics program at brooklyn college, city university of new york, usa. he has a long-standing interest in the critical period hypothesis and has published papers on ultimate attainment of phonological and syntactic proficiency in a second language, as well as on right-hemisphere activation during speech production in a late-acquired second language, and on parametersetting during late first language acquisition. some of his other activities have included directing the english language program at hofstra university, hemptstead, ny, usa, holding a fulbright lecturing award in applied linguistics at the university of rwanda, and directing the graduate english programs at brooklyn college. contact data: linguistics program/department of english, 2900 bedford ave., brooklyn college, cuny, brooklyn, ny 11210, usa (mpatkowski@brooklyn.cuny.edu) simone e. pfenninger, phd, is a senior research and teaching associate at the english department of the university of zurich, switzerland. her principal research areas are multilingualism and psycholinguistics. she is currently conducting research into early versus late learning of multiple foreign languages and the cognitive and psycholinguistic mechanisms that drive language change. she has been involved in efl in switzerland for eight years at different levels: secondary 406 school, adult education, higher education, assessment of processes and outcomes in language education, and language policy. contact data: university of zurich, english department, plattenstrasse 47, 8032 zurich, switzerland; phone: 0041 44 634 35 (simone.pfenninger@es.uzh.ch) 733 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (4). 733-735 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.4.10 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl reviewers for volume 6/2016 the editors would like to express their gratitude to the following scholars who have kindly consented to review one or more submissions to volume 6/2016 of studies in second language learning and teaching. their insightful and thorough comments and suggestions have without doubt greatly enhanced the quality of the journal: is’haaq akbarian university of qom, iran jenni alisaari university of turku, finland grace eunhye-lee amuzie calvin college, grand rapids, usa tanja angelovska university of salzburg, austria larissa aronin oranim college of education, israel dario luis banegas university of warwick, uk helen basturkmen university of auckland, new zealand jasemin bayyurt boğaziçi, university, istanbul, turkey alessandro benati university of greenwich, uk sarah benesch city university of new york, usa adriana biedroń pomeranian university, słupsk, poland marie-josee bisson de montfort university, leicester, uk frank boers victoria university of wellington, new zealand kees de bot university of pannonia, hungary ron carter university of nottingham, uk anna uhl chamot george washington university, washington, dc, usa letty chan hong kong institute of education, china gwen (guangyan) chen texas christian university, usa anna cieślicka a&m international university, texas, usa andrew cohen university of minnesota, usa kata csizér eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary christiane dalton-puffer university of vienna, austria jean-marc daweale birkbeck college, university of london, uk darla k. deardorff duke university, durham, usa gatis dilāns ventspils university college, latvia paulina foster saint mary’s university twickenham, london, uk tingfeng fu paragon testing enterprises, canada danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia, poland xuesong gao university of hong kong, china 734 christine c. m. goh national institute of education, singapore tammy gregersen university of northern iowa, usa carol griffiths fatih university, turkey laura hawkes british columbia ministry of education, canada alastair henry university west, trollhättan, sweden wenhua hsu i-shou university, taiwan anna kristina hultgren oxford university, uk yasuhiro imai sophia university, tokyo, japan solène inceoglu rochester institute of technology, rochester, usa eun hee jeon university of north carolina at pembroke, usa john e. joseph university of edinburgh, scotland soomin jwa boston university, usa paula kalaja university of jyväskylä, finland sue garton aston university, uk miya komori-glatz vienna university of economics and business, austria dale a. koike university of texas at austin, usa edit h. kontra eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary achilleas kostoulas university of graz, austria iwona kowal jagiellonian university, kraków, poland jarosław krajka maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin, poland terry lamb university of westminster, london, uk batia laufer university of haifa, israel justyna leśniewska jagiellonian university, kraków, poland robert lew adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland shuai li georgia state university, usa meihua liu tsinghua university, china shawn loewen michigan state university, east lansing, usa karen m. ludke edge hill university, ormskirk, uk ernesto macaro oxford university, uk paul meara swansea university, wales, uk sarah mercer university of graz, austria christine muir university of nottingham, uk hossein nassaji university of victoria, canada rhonda oliver curtin university, bentley, australia rebecca oxford university of maryland, usa kate paesani university of minnesota, usa lynn ellen pearson bowling green state university, ohio, usa luciana pedrazzini university of milan, italy maría luisa pérez cañado university of jaén, spain simone pfenninger university of zurich, switzerland liliana piasecka opole university, poland françois pichette university of quebec, canada ewa piechurska-kuciel opole university, poland katalin piniel eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary john read university of auckland, new zealand jeffrey m. ringer university of tennessee, knoxville, usa stephen ryan waseda university, japan mashatoshi sato andrés bello national university, chile rachel shively illinois state university, usa daphnée simard university of quebec, montreal, canada peter skehan saint mary’s university twickenham, london, uk 735 ute smit university of vienna, austria naoko taguchi carnegie mellon university, pittsburg, usa amy s. thomson university of south florida, usa jesus romero trillo autonomous university of madrid, spain ema ushioda university of warwick, uk ineke vedder university of amsterdam, the netherlands freerkien waninge university of nottingham, uk ye wang columbia university, usa ewa waniek-klimczak university of łódź, poland dorota werbińska pomeranian university, słupsk, poland stewart webb university of western ontario, canada zhisheng (edward) wen macao polytechnic institute, china david wood carleton university, ottawa, canada jane woodin university of sheffield, uk feng xiao pomona college in claremont, california, usa shahreen young curtin university, bentley, australia xian zhang pennsylvania state university, usa michael zuniga university of quebec, montreal, canada eve c. zyzik university of california at santa cruz, usa 447 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (3). 447-451 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl commentary in ‘other’ words: some thoughts on the transferability of collocations terence odlin ohio state university todlin23@gmail.com in discussions of cross-linguistic influence (also known as language transfer), the focus is usually on the influence of a particular structure in a particular instance of language contact, for instance, the negative transfer of serial verbs by vietnamese learners of english: she has managed to rise the kite fly over the tallest building (helms-park, 2003). even so, as helms-park acknowledges, serial verb constructions can and do surface in contact situations besides the one she studied in canada, and they can involve speakers of different languages. while serial verb constructions have unique syntactic traits, the same point about the transferability of multiword constructions in different contact settings is applicable in other instances and with collocations that can be viewed as unique in their lexical as well as syntactic characteristics. the following article considers such a case, based in part on my own teaching experience but also on transfer research from other settings as well. after a discussion of a collocation that i call the repeated other pattern found in different settings, i briefly consider other cases of transfer having lexical and syntactic peculiarities and appearing in more than one contact situation. there will also be some discussion of factors that transfer researchers and language teachers would do well to consider. some years ago i was teaching a course on academic and professional writing for nonnative speakers of english with students from a variety of lanterence odlin 448 guage backgrounds. one student was a native speaker of greek whose final paper on bilingualism included the following paragraph: in recent studies it is mutually consent that motivation shifts students’ behaviors towards the language selection and learning, attitudes towards language lessons and cognitive development. nevertheless, researchers adopt various models in order to perceive these behaviors. many researchers were influenced by an early study . . . [bibliographical reference; henceforth br] which suggested that there are numerous different attitudes that influence motivation. these attitudes are categorized in two specific constructs of motivation: integrative motivation and instrumental motivation. however, over the years there has been much discussion over the validity of the distinction between an integrative and an instrumental orientation to second language learning. researchers argue that these set orientations eschewed several important variables such as social and identity issues. therefore some studies attempted to define the characteristics of effective language learners [br], while others have focused on social situations that help create motivated learners (characteristics of effective language learners versus social situations that motivate). i have edited the text a little bit (e.g., omitting the bibliographical references used by the student writer), but the paragraph is quite close to the final version handed in by the student, whose actual name will not be given here and who will be called irene. the paragraph had undergone a number of revisions, some of which resulted from discussions that irene and i had about her work. the final sentence in the passage is of particular interest because of the repeated other pattern which had occurred in an earlier version of irene’s work: “therefore other [emphasis added] studies attempted to define the characteristics of effective language learners [br], other [emphasis added] have focused on social situations that help create motivated learners [br].” on my advice, irene made the change of the first other to some and the second other to others (the conjunction while was likewise not used, but its absence is not germane). it should be noted that this sentence summarizes – both in the revised version and in the version with the repeated other pattern – a conclusion that irene had come to regarding the different research perspectives on motivations for learning a language. the rhetorical function of this sentence will be considered in more detail further on in this article. in our discussion of the sentence, i learned that greek has a coordinating construction which can explain irene’s repeated uses of other. the greek form (transliterated) allos occurs twice in many constructions where a suitable english translation would render the first as some and the second as other or others, depending on whether the form occurs as a pronoun (hence to be marked with plural -s) or as a determiner (with no plural marker). although a repetition of the same form does violate the english convention, the some . . . other construction is comin ‘other’ words: some thoughts on the transferability of collocations 449 mon and forms part of a larger class of ‘correlative’ constructions that include other syntactic classes such as the correlative conjunction construction either . . . or. the error that irene produced seems clearly the result of cross-linguistic influence (also known as language transfer) from greek. the changes needed were relatively small ones but the fact that they were needed shows that english and greek differ somewhat in their collocational patterns (in the latter, the word allos ‘other’ can be used as irene did, thus, allos . . . allos). although her error was unique in that writing class (and indeed in my thirty-something years of teaching experience), similar transfer patterns have been noted in other contact settings. among native speakers of finnish there are cases such as weather moves quickly from the other kind to the other kind (=’weather changes from one kind to another quickly,’ with the collocation modeled on finnish toinen . . . toinen ‘other . . . other’) (ringbom 1987, p. 125). ringbom’s book often compares native speakers of finnish and of swedish in terms of characteristic errors, and he deems the other construction an error characteristic of native speakers of finnish and not of speakers of swedish. a quite similar example is seen in a discussion by mesthrie (2004, p. 969) of black south african english: others are for the proposal, others are against it (=‘some are for the proposal, others are against it’). while mesthrie does not discuss any particular african language, buthelezi (1995, p. 248) deems zulu as a likely source, since it has a correlative construction omunye . . . nomunye, and offers both a literal gloss (‘one . . . and one’) and a more idiomatic translation (‘the other and the other’). the repeated other pattern appears fairly rare if thought of in terms all the possible settings where english is in contact with another language. even so, some speakers of zulu, finnish, and greek seem to consider repeated other acceptable. accordingly, it is most implausible to try to explain the pattern as a ‘developmental’ error, one to be expected in the attempts of any second language learner. some errors do seem amenable to a developmental explanation, as with the widespread problems related to english do support evident in inaccurate verb phrases such as didn’t went and does thinks, which are problems that teachers might encounter among speakers of many different language backgrounds (and as parents find among children acquiring english as their native language). although the repeated other pattern occurs among speakers of more than one language background, its occurrence in the cases cited above can be linked to a very similar pattern in the native language of individuals using english as a second language. accordingly, cross-linguistic influence seems the best explanation for its appearance even in very different language contact situations. the repeated other pattern is not unique among transfer errors. a somewhat similar case is the use of what instead of that in certain relative clause constructions, for example but same lady what he [chaplin] meet come to policecar terence odlin 450 too (odlin & jarvis, 2004, p. 136), which was written by a native speaker of finnish describing part of a charlie chaplin movie. such errors are also found among native speakers of polish; moreover, such uses of what as a relative pronoun occur in some nonstandard varieties of native speaker english such as cockney. despite the apparent interpretive problem (i.e., whether or not to ascribe the use of relative what to transfer from finnish and polish), there are good reasons to favor a transfer explanation, as considered in a recent analysis (odlin, 2009). for example, the relative what pattern occurs only among some groups, as likewise seen in the repeated other pattern. among speakers of swedish, such uses of what are rare or nonexistent. accordingly, it does not seem plausible to assign examples such as the lady what he meet to the category of developmental errors, as was done with many patterns a generation ago (e.g., dulay, burt, & krashen, 1982). moreover, the existence of structures in finnish and polish parallel with an english one supports an analysis of relative what as a result of transfer. the occurrence of the repeated other pattern is a little different from the relative what pattern in that it is a correlative construction, but just as significant as its formal pattern is its functional profile. that is, the repeated other pattern seems to have a special rhetorical use to compare individuals or points of view. thus in irene’s paper, a contrast of perspective is foregrounded in the research topics compared (language learners versus social situations that motivate learners). without the appropriate discourse context, irene would probably not have tried to use the repeated other pattern. in the sense that her rhetorical aim was essentially the same as that of anyone who would use some . . . other in the same context, irene experienced positive transfer from greek: only in the lexical difference of the actual collocation is there any negative transfer. the examples from finland and south africa likewise seem to involve contrasts (states of weather in the finnish example, and people for or against a proposal in the south african). the examples of the repeated other pattern and the relative what pattern strongly suggest that any case of lexical or grammatical transfer should be analyzed as a result of communicative needs in which particular kinds of meanings have priority. formal details such as the nature of a correlative structure do matter, but such structures are at the service of meaning. the main pedagogical implication of this conclusion is that teachers of writing or speaking should do their best to ascertain just what a student believes a particular structure communicates and to encourage a revision which remains faithful to the communicative intention even while adjusting certain details of word choice. such a pedagogical approach is nothing new: experienced teachers will often have a good intuitive sense of the priority. even so, it can help to be aware that some communicative intentions seem to be very similar even in geographically and culturally different areas such as those considered in this analysis. in ‘other’ words: some thoughts on the transferability of collocations 451 references buthelezi, q. (1995). south african black english: lexical and syntactic characteristics. in r. mesthrie (ed.), language and social history: studies in south african sociolinguistics (pp. 242-250). cape town: david philip. dulay, h., burt, m., & krashen, s. (1982). language two. new york: oxford university press. helms-park, r. (2003). transfer in sla and creoles: the implications of causative serial verbs in the interlanguage of vietnamese esl learners. studies in second language acquisition, 25, 211-244. mesthrie, r. (2004). black south african english: morphology and syntax. in b. kortmann, e. schneider, k. burridge, r. mesthrie, & c. upton (eds.), handbook of varieties of english (pp. 974-992). berlin: mouton de gruyter. odlin, t. (2009). when different sources lead to the same outcome: some reflections on contact vernaculars. in e. penttilä & h. paulasto (eds.), language contacts meet english dialects: studies in honour of markku filppula (pp. 47-164). newcastle: cambridge scholars press. odlin, t., & jarvis, s. (2004). same source, different outcomes: a study of swedish influence on the acquisition of english in finland. the international journal of multilingualism, 1, 123-140. ringbom, h. (1987). the role of the first language in foreign language learning. clevedon: multilingual matters. 579 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (4). 579-580 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl reviewers for volume 2/2012 the editors of studies in second language learning and teaching would like to thank the following people for reviewing one or more manuscripts submitted to be published in the 2012 volume: esteban t. montoro del arco university of granada, spain larissa aronin trinity college, dublin, ireland; haifa university, israel charlotte baker lancaster university, uk adriana biedro pomeranian university, s upsk, poland piotr cap university of ód , poland silvia-maria chireac “alexandru ioan cuza” university of iasi, romania anna cie licka a&m international university, texas, usa; adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland jean-marc daweale birbeck college, university of london, uk jelena mihaljevi djigunovi zagreb university, zagreb, croatia krystyna dro dzia -szelest adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland mercedes durham university of aberdeen, scotland, uk xuesong gao university of hong kong danuta gabry -barker university of silesia, poland joseph gafaranga university of edinburgh, uk tammy gregersen university of northern iowa, usa carol griffiths fatih university, istanbul, turkey mara fuertes-gutierrez leeds metropolitan university, uk naeema hann leeds metropolitan university, uk angel huguet-canalis universitat de lleida, spain richard kiely university of bristol, uk jaros aw krajka maria curie-sk odowska university, lublin, poland robert lew adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland david little trinity college, dublin, ireland jan majer university of ód , poland paul meara swansea university, wales, uk gabriela meier university of exeter, uk sarah mercer university of graz, austria theophile munyangeyo leeds metropolitan university, uk anna ni egorodcew jagiellonian university, kraków, poland agnieszka otwinowska-kasztelaniec university of warsaw, poland 580 françois pichette university of quebec, montreal, canada ewa piechurska-kuciel university of opole, poland simone pfenninger university of zurich, switzerland david singleton trinity college, dublin, ireland piotr stalmaszczyk university of ód , poland ivor timmis leeds metropolitan university, uk ema ushioda university of warwick, uk ewa waniek-klimczak university of ód , poland tony young newcastle university, uk 561 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (4). 2016. 561-585 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.4.2 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the teaching of pragmatics by native and nonnative language teachers: what they know and what they report doing andrew d. cohen professor emeritus, university of minnesota, usa adcohen@umn.edu abstract the paper focuses on how nonnative teachers of a target language (nnts) deal with pragmatics in their classes. it starts with a discussion of what pragmatics entails. next, issues relating to the teaching of pragmatics are identified, such as the language background of the teacher, comparisons between second(l2) and foreign-language (fl) instruction, and the potential role of digital media and other means in providing models for pragmatic behavior. then, an international survey is presented which probed into the experiences of nnts of various languages while teaching the pragmatics of their language of instruction. a total of 113 teachers were asked to indicate what they taught with regard to pragmatics, 30 native-language teachers (nts) and 83 nnts. they were also asked to report on their experience as teachers of l2 and fl pragmatics (e.g., if they encountered classroom moments when they did not feel like an authority on some aspect of pragmatics, what they did about it). since pragmatics is a meeting of language and culture, the teacher respondents were asked to assess their knowledge regarding pragmalinguistics (i.e., the language forms) and sociopragmatics (sociocultural knowledge). in addition, they were asked to give their opinion regarding similarities and differences between the teaching of fl as opposed to l2 pragmatics, as this traditional dichotomy gives way to a more hybrid reality in an increasingly globalized world. similarly, they were asked about their methods for teaching pragmatics (e.g., their use of digital media and their handling of dialect differences). finally, they were asked to suggest areas in which andrew d. cohen 562 they would like to see research conducted that would inform the teaching of pragmatics. the paper reports the findings from the study, including statistical differences in reported teaching of criticism, sarcasm, and cursing, as well as in the use of digital media and in having students gather data on pragmatics. keywords: native teachers (nts) and nonnative teachers (nnts); l2 vs. fl pragmatics; pragmalinguistics; sociopragmatics 1. introduction at the present time increasing attention is being given to the teaching of the pragmatics of the target language (tl). taguchi (2015), for example, reviewed 58 studies over the last 30 years focusing on the teaching of pragmatics in tl instruction. one finding from this exhaustive study was that the explicit teaching of pragmatics can make a difference for tl learners. consequently, the role of teachers cannot be underestimated since pragmatics can be challenging for learners to acquire on their own. the focus of this paper is one that is not necessarily investigated, namely, how nonnative teachers (nnts) of an l2 or an fl deal with pragmatics in their classes worldwide, as compared with native teachers (nts). especially given the rise of the world englishes literature where local varieties of the tl may be preferred, it would appear that for learners to approximate some tl norm would be unnecessary and perhaps even inappropriate. if this is the case, then, nnts need not worry about teaching to some tl standard. the case of english is usually given to support this argument. for years, the model for pragmatics was unquestionably the same model as for english as a foreign language (efl), namely, a model based on idealized norms of u.s. or british english. the world englishes movement would suggest that the usa and the uk are an inappropriate standard for pragmatics (galloway & rose, 2015). rather, the pragmatics need to be those of the local players. there is also the english as a lingua franca (elf) movement which likewise sees nonnative englishes as different rather than deficient (jenkins, cogo, & dewey, 2011). whereas efl has its theoretical roots in theories of l1 interference and fossilization, elf prefers theories of language contact and evolution. as a result, while in efl code-switching is regarded as evidence of a gap in nonnative speakers’ (nnss) english knowledge, in elf it is viewed as a bilingual pragmatic resource. users of elf are seen as skilled communicators who make use of their multilingual resources in ways not available to monolingual native speakers (nss), and who prioritize successful communication over notions about using english “correctly” (jenkins et al., 2011). the teaching of pragmatics by native and nonnative language teachers: what they know and. . . 563 of course, it is important to bear in mind that not all efl teachers necessarily embrace the tenets of elf. there are those who continue to teach toward the native english speaker norm, even if they pay lip service to elf. a study by asmari (2014) of english teaching practices of over 200 predominantly nns efl teachers in saudi arabia found that while the majority of nns teachers favored the use of elf, which would mean exposing their students to nns varieties of english and possibly overtly teaching these varieties, in their actual language instruction the teachers apparently adhered to a ns norm, whether british, american, canadian, or australian, especially in written work. among other things, they reportedly strove for a native-like pronunciation. the current article reports a study comparing nts and nnts with regard to their handling of pragmatics, starting with a brief description of what pragmatics is and the challenge of comparing nts with nnts in terms of how they teach it in the tl classroom. then the results of an international survey intended to probe into the experiences of nts and nnts of various l2s and fls are reported. the survey looked at what the nts and nnts reported teaching with regard to pragmatics, their experience as teachers of tl pragmatics, their selfassessment of sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic knowledge, their opinion concerning the l2-fl distinction as applied to pragmatics, their methods for teaching tl pragmatics, and their suggestions regarding information/research to inform the teaching of pragmatics. 2. the role of pragmatics in the language that students learn and use if learners wish to say something to someone, they need to determine the situationally-appropriate utterances: what can be said, to whom, where, when, and how. there is a powerful influence working against the appropriate use of the tl—namely, how we do it in our native or dominant language. it is not enough just to know the vocabulary and the grammar (e.g., the verb forms). pragmatic ability is the ability to deal with meaning as communicated by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader) and to interpret people’s intended meanings, their assumptions, their purposes or goals, and the kinds of actions (e.g., making a request) that they are performing when they speak or write (yule, 1996, pp. 3-4). pragmatics includes politeness/impoliteness, speech acts (greetings, thanks, requests, compliments, apologies, complaints, etc.), conversational style, humor, sarcasm, teasing, cursing, discourse markers, conversational implicature, and deixis (see cohen, 2017). andrew d. cohen 564 3. the challenges of learning pragmatics a study investigating the development of l2 chinese formulaic competence among intermediate-level college students from the usa in a semester of study abroad in beijing underscored the challenges of learning pragmatics (taguchi, li, & xiao, 2013). this rigorous study found that the learners showed only modest gains in both appropriateness and fluency in chinese pragmatics. the finding was attributed to these intermediate-level students’ lack of lexical and syntactic knowledge, and their lack of both sociopragmatic (sociocultural) and pragmalinguistic (language-focused) knowledge. these students had reached the intermediate level and were still found to be lacking in their ability to produce pragmatically formulaic phrases such as when hiring a cab, withdrawing money at a bank, bargaining, ordering in a restaurant, asking for the washroom, and ending a phone call. the author of this article has studied 12 languages beyond his native english over the course of his lifetime. while he has achieved relative pragmatic control in, say, four of these, he has found that even with these languages he is capable of pragmatic failure (see cohen 1997, 2001). it is more his pragmatic failures than his pragmatic successes that have made him acutely aware that pragmatic performance benefits from explicit instruction—that learners trend not to acquire rules for pragmatic appropriateness through osmosis. here is just one example from only one of the languages he has dealt with: when studying japanese he learned that he could fill his pauses with eeto or ano, and so he did his best to fill as many pauses as he could that way. then, eventually a native-speakin interlocutor expressed annoyance at his overuse of these pauses. he explained to the author that he was filling his pauses too much—that natives prefer to use silence or nonverbal cues more. something else he did not realize until it was pointed out to him was that he should use eeto when filling pauses in communication with people of equal or lower status, and ano with people of higher status. put differently, ano is more formal and eeto is more informal. he was blithely using them interchangeably, totally unaware of this pragmatic distinction. this anecdote is included in this paper to emphasize the crucial role that teachers can play in explicitly teaching those pragmatic aspects of a tl which can be of real benefit to learners as they move forward in their use of a language. one of the interesting findings in the review of pragmatics instruction cited above (taguchi, 2015) was that implicit teaching of pragmatics was found to be as effective as explicit teaching if it involved noticing and processing activities. in other words, having learners first derive the target form-function-context mappings from input and then reinforce the mappings by processing them consciously had an impact, and it was also found that engaging learners in this process clearly called for an informed teacher. simple exposure to input, even the teaching of pragmatics by native and nonnative language teachers: what they know and. . . 565 typologically enhanced, was seen to have a shortfall in producing learning with regard to pragmatics. so the question of concern for this study was to look at possible advantages or disadvantages of nts and nnts when it came to providing this explicit or guided implicit instruction. 4. nt and nnt advantages and disadvantages regarding tl pragmatics some twenty years ago, rose (1997) noted that the literature on nnts’ handling of pragmatics in their instruction was sparse. not much has been added to the literature since then. if anything, there has been an effort to downplay the role that being an nnt may play in the handling of tl pragmatics. akikawa (2010), for example, expressed the view that whether the language instructor is an nt or an nnt is a lesser issue in effective pragmatic instruction than are demonstrable linguistic and pragmatic competence, along with appropriate professional development. the position that she takes is that the key to a teacher’s success is having critical awareness and acceptance of pragmatic diversity. this allows teachers, whether nts or nnts, to help their students develop cultural sensitivity and tolerance so that they can observe and analyze pragmatic norms different from their own and make their own pragmatic choices (akikawa, 2010; see also ishihara, 2008, 2010). there are clearly language educators and classroom teachers who view the nt-nnt distinction as a relatively minor issue, especially with regard to the pragmatics of english. in addition, there is a literature which supports the view that it is a myth to consider nts as superior to nnts (mahboob, 2010). see, for example, recent volumes which describe and promote the status of world englishes (matsuda, 2012; marlina & giri, 2014). the case is eloquently made in various chapters in these publications that there is a need to recognize regional varieties of english in their own right (e.g., japanese english), without applying u.s. and british standards for what is considered acceptable. for example, if japanese and korean business associates are conversing among themselves in english in seoul, it is reasonable to assume that they may rely to some extent on their own firstlanguage (l1) pragmatics. yet there do not appear to be guidelines for how to actually teach the pragmatic features of a world english, such as teaching the local japanese variety of english pragmatics to japanese speakers. putting aside the issue of which variety of the tl is to be taught, there still is the issue of whether there are advantages and disadvantages for nts and nnts when it comes to the teaching of tl pragmatics. a cleverly designed study looked at the handling of pragmatics by the same person who was concurrently teaching french as an nt and german as an nnt (aslan, 2015). a qualitative analysis of interviews and classroom observations over six weeks revealed that andrew d. cohen 566 the participant teacher’s french nt and german nnt identities influenced her teacher cognition. the observations, corroborated by the interviews, indicated that she had different knowledge bases for her native language french and nonnative language german, the former being implicit and the latter explicit. in her nnt teaching of german she drew from her high level of proficiency in german grammar in responding successfully to student questions, which gained her respect from the students. in fact, in german class she presented students with morphological analyses of words and verb conjugations and tried to elicit grammatical information, and her teacher talk mostly consisted of metalinguistic terms and concepts, such as predicates, prepositional phrases, and subject/object pronouns. in the french class, on the other hand, her use of grammatical terminology was observed to be considerably less frequent. in fact, in one of the classes observed, she explicitly stated that she did not want to be asked why a particular grammatical form or feature was an exception to a rule. she had difficulty explaining the grammaticality and appropriateness of some of the utterances students generated. the teacher reported that her nt intuitions and knowledge of french did not help her much in explaining grammatical phenomena (aslan, 2015, p. 257). it is possible that especially in an fl instructional context, the teaching of tl pragmatics is a challenge for both an nt and an nnt. if the teacher encourages the fl learners to have extensive interactions with nss (whether live or over the internet), perhaps these interactions could lead to the kind of noticing that results in pragmatic awareness to offset the disadvantage of not being in an l2 context. while study abroad programs are viewed as means for getting learners to be more comfortable with tl pragmatics, a recent study by félix-brasdefer and haslerbarker (2015) produced only mixed results for u.s. study abroaders to mexico. they found that even if the students are in a highly supportive study abroad program directed by an nt from their home institution, where there is access to a tl conversation club, field trips, participation in conferences in the tl, volunteer activities (e.g., in orphanages, medical centers, and other places), outings to cinemas and theaters, and guided visits to various public offices, the outcomes may still be mixed, with some gains but not impressively so. so, there are clearly challenges associated with the learning of tl pragmatics that involves both the specific context for learning and the teacher’s knowledge about and experience in teaching the pragmatics of the tl (see ishihara, 2014). certainly, the individual learner factor can play a role. some fl learners can beat the odds through their own determination to learn the language. it may be that a given teacher, whether an nt or nnt, is particularly well versed at instilling in learners a strong motivation to learn the tl, which offsets the challenge of being in an fl context, removed from easy contact with the tl. the teaching of pragmatics by native and nonnative language teachers: what they know and. . . 567 5. a study to explore the handling of pragmatics by nts and nnts the interest in exploring the possible role of nativeness of the teacher in tl pragmatics instruction, then, prompted the carrying out of an international survey.1 the concern was to see whether along with high competence and functioning ability in the tl language, knowledge of tl pragmatics, and teaching experience, the teacher’s nativeness in the tl might have its own role to play. the main research question for the study was: what are the reported similarities and differences between native and nonnative teachers in their handling of tl pragmatics in the language classroom? 5.1. instrumentation an online survey instrument was constructed for nts and nnts, consisting of 20 questions. there were minor differences between the nnt and the nt versions. survey monkey was used to assist in this effort. the survey instrument was piloted with a mixed group of 15 nts and nnts in july of 2015, and subsequently some changes were made in the questions. the survey questionnaire explored the following: 1. how do nts and nnts handle pragmatics in the tl classroom? 2. what areas in tl pragmatics are taught? 3. to what extent does the teacher provide explicit instruction regarding pragmatics, use digital media, and teach about dialect differences in pragmatics? 4. how comfortable do teachers feel being a resource for tl pragmatics? 5. what do teachers do if they do not feel like an authority on some aspects of tl pragmatics? 6. how knowledgeable do teachers feel they are about sociopragmatic (sociocultural) and pragmalinguistic (language-form) issues relating to the specific tl? 7. how relevant do teachers think the l2-fl distinction is in dealing with tl pragmatics? 8. how might teaching activities differ according to whether it is an l2 or an fl context? 9. how do teachers motivate learners to learn tl pragmatics? 10. in what areas in pragmatics might teachers want to obtain more information/see the results of research? 1 one of the early researchers in the pragmatics field, meryl siegal (from laney college, oakland, ca) provided useful feedback in the early stages of the study design and the construction of the survey instruments. andrew d. cohen 568 5.2. sampling and data collection procedures an invitation to respond to the survey was sent to over 100 university professors and graduate students via email. the invitation was also posted on the author’s website, on linkedin, and on facebook. the first invitation went out on july 25 and responses to the survey were accepted until september 20. there were 113 responses altogether, 83 of whom were from respondents to the nnt survey. these respondents were native speakers of some 23 languages (english: 29, mandarin: 10, vietnamese and persian: 6 each, indonesian: 4, japanese and arabic: 3 each, and 14 other l1s). they reported being nnt of some nine tls at the university level: english (53), spanish (13), german (11), and 6 others. respondents had been teaching language for an average of 10.6 years. they represented beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels about evenly, with most teaching at the intermediate level (66%) and slightly fewer teaching at the advanced level (60%). there were 30 respondents to the nt survey. they were nss of seven languages: english: 5, japanese: 5, french: 1, spanish: 2, catalan: 1, chinese: 1, and danish: 1, and were native-language teachers of five tls at the university level: english: 21,2 japanese: 4, spanish: 3, danish: 1, and french: 1. respondents had been teaching language for an average of 17.2 years, an average 6.6 years longer than the nnts. they reported teaching all three levels robustly, with 75% teaching advanced level courses. with regard to the language teaching context, 32 of the nnts taught their tl as an fl and 51 taught it as an l2. as for the nts, 22 taught their tl as an fl and 8 taught it as an l2. some teachers reported teaching pragmatics in other kinds of courses as well. such courses included teacher preparation courses, heritage language courses, linguistic courses, language for academic purposes courses, and courses focusing on culture writ large, sociolinguistics, and special topics within pragmatics such as politeness. 5.3. data analysis procedures survey monkey provided basic statistical analysis (means and percentages) for closed items. chi-square analyses were performed using social science statistics (www.socscistatistics.com/tests/chisquare/) to compare nnts’ and nts’ reported handling of pragmatics in the classroom, and pearson correlations using minitab 17 (www.minitab.com/) to see whether years of teaching and teaching level were related to reported coverage of pragmatics and comfort teaching pragmatics. the open-ended responses by the nts and nnts were content analyzed. 2 one was a native speaker of cantonese in hong kong but dominant in english, which he reported teaching. the teaching of pragmatics by native and nonnative language teachers: what they know and. . . 569 5.4. results with respect to the areas of pragmatics that they reported covering and the results for which are presented in tables 1 and 2, the nts reported significantly more teaching of criticism3 (χ2 = 8.28, p < .05) and sarcasm (χ2 = 9.39, p < .05). whereas neither group of teachers reported very much attention to cursing in their instruction, still nnts reported more coverage of cursing (χ2 = 9.47, p < .05). in other categories, the teachers were relatively similar in what they reported. so the finding here was that the nativeness of the teacher had some impact on the reported handling of a few of the more subtle speech acts, like expressing sarcasm and criticizing. in addition, nnts in this sample reportedly taught students how to interpret and deliver curses more than nts did. table 1 nnts’ reported coverage of tl pragmatics, n = 83 extensive coverage fair amount of coverage some coverage little coverage no coverage total respondents politeness/impoliteness 26% 20 41% 32 31% 24 3% 2 0% 0 78 how to make requests 21% 17 48% 39 26% 21 6% 5 0% 0 82 how to apologize 13% 10 33% 26 35% 27 18% 14 1% 1 78 how to compliment and respond to compliments 6% 5 28% 22 35% 28 29% 23 4% 3 80 how to complain 5% 4 29% 23 24% 19 35% 28 6% 5 79 how to criticize 5% 4 18% 14 32% 25 35% 27 13% 10 78 greetings and leave-taking 31% 25 38% 30 19% 15 10% 8 3% 2 80 thanking 28% 22 43% 34 21% 17 8% 6 3% 2 80 conversational style (e.g., turn-taking, appropriate listener responses) 14% 11 35% 28 19% 15 22% 17 10% 8 79 humor 6% 5 16% 13 26% 21 33% 26 19% 15 80 sarcasm 3% 2 6% 5 20% 16 30% 24 41% 32 79 teasing 4% 3 5% 4 13% 10 38% 30 41% 33 80 cursing 3% 2 3% 2 18% 14 32% 25 45% 35 78 the temporal, discursive, affective, and indexical roles of discourse markers like “well,” “you know,” “so,” “i think,” “on the other hand,” “frankly,” and “as a matter of fact” 16% 13 19% 15 47% 37 11% 9 6% 5 79 conversational implicature (i.e., the implied meaning as interpreted by listeners based on content and knowledge of how conversations work) 10% 8 26% 21 28% 22 30% 24 6% 5 80 3 the speech act of criticizing is meant here rather than literary criticism. andrew d. cohen 570 table 2 nts’ reported coverage of tl pragmatics , n = 30 extensive coverage fair amount of coverage some coverage little coverage no coverage total respondents politeness/impoliteness 17% 5 37% 11 43% 13 3% 1 0% 0 30 how to make requests 17% 5 43% 13 37% 11 3% 1 0% 0 30 how to apologize 7% 2 27% 8 47% 14 17% 5 3% 1 30 how to compliment and respond to compliments 7% 2 27% 8 27% 8 33% 10 7% 2 30 how to complain 7% 2 27% 8 27% 8 33% 10 7% 2 30 how to criticize 13% 4 27% 8 23% 7 27% 8 10% 3 30 greetings and leave-taking 30% 9 33% 10 27% 8 7% 2 3% 1 30 thanking 20% 6 40% 12 33% 10 7% 2 3% 1 30 conversational style (e.g., turn-taking, appropriate listener responses) 20% 6 40% 12 27% 8 10% 3 3% 1 30 humor 3% 1 13% 4 37% 11 40% 12 7% 2 30 sarcasm 0% 0 17% 5 23% 7 43% 13 17% 5 30 teasing 0% 0 10% 3 13% 4 60% 18 17% 5 30 cursing 0% 0 0% 0 10% 3 50% 15 40% 12 30 the temporal, discursive, affective, and indexical roles of discourse markers like “well,” “you know,” “so,” “i think,” “on the other hand,” “frankly,” and “as a matter of fact” 20% 6 30% 9 27% 8 10% 3 13% 4 30 conversational implicature (i.e., the implied meaning as interpreted by listeners based on content and knowledge of how conversations work) 10% 3 33% 10 33% 10 10% 3 13% 4 30 for the nnts there were no significant correlations between years of teaching and reported coverage of pragmatics. in contrast to the findings for the nnts, for the nts, there were four significant correlations between number of years teaching and the extensiveness of reported pragmatics coverage: apologies (r = .39, p < .05), complaints (r = .40, p < .05), conversational style (r = .47, p < .01), and sarcasm (r = .38, p < .05). while the extent of reported comfort at teaching pragmatics correlated significantly with reported extent of coverage of politeness (r = .37, p < .001) and of requests (r = .32, p < .01) for the nnts, there were no significant correlations for the nts. as for the level teaching, those nnts teaching higher levels reported more coverage of implicature (r = .33, p < .01) and those teaching lower levels reported more coverage of greetings and leave takings (r = .32, p < .01). as for the nts, those teaching higher levels reported significantly more teaching of criticism (r = .38, p < .05). we should note that although significant, for the most part the correlations were generally low. the teaching of pragmatics by native and nonnative language teachers: what they know and. . . 571 regarding their reported methods for teaching pragmatics, as presented in tables 3 and 4 nts reported significantly more use of digital media than did the nnts (χ2 = 12.85, p < .01). there was no statistical difference between the two teacher groups in terms of reported explicitness used in their teaching of pragmatics, nor in the extent to which they reported teaching about regional and dialect differences. table 3 nnt methods for teaching pragmatics all of the time most of the time sometimes rarely never total weighted average to what extent do you teach the pragmatics of the target language explicitly? 9% 7 39% 31 43% 34 10% 8 0% 0 80 2.54 to what extent o you have your students access digital media (e.g., movies, youtube, etc.)? 11% 9 34% 27 33% 26 18% 14 4% 3 79 2.88 to what extent do you teach regional and dialect differences in pragmatics (e.g., the ways pragmatics differs in the hispanic world)? 11% 9 13% 10 32% 25 32% 25 13% 10 79 3.22 table 4 nt methods for teaching pragmatics all of the time most of the time sometimes rarely never total weighted average to what extent do you teach the pragmatics of the target language explicitly? 13% 4 43% 13 37% 11 7% 2 0% 0 30 2.37 to what extent o you have your students access digital media (e.g., movies, youtube, etc.)? 27% 8 17% 5 37% 11 20% 6 0% 0 30 2.50 to what extent do you teach regional and dialect differences in pragmatics (e.g., the ways pragmatics differs in the hispanic world)? 7% 2 20% 6 37% 11 30% 9 7% 2 79 3.22 with regard to their comfort level about serving as a resource for information about the specifics of pragmatics in the tl, which is graphically shown in figures 1 and 2, 53% of the nts reported being very comfortable teaching tl pragmatics versus 37% of the nnts, with the chi-square close to significance at the .05 level (χ2 = 5.28, p = .07). another 55% of the nnts reported being somewhat comfortable in comparison to 40% of the nts. andrew d. cohen 572 figure 1 nnts’ comfort level at teaching tl pragmatics (n = 83) figure 2 nts’ comfort level at teaching tl pragmatics (n = 30) the teacher respondents were asked the following regarding their expertise in pragmatics: if you encounter classroom moments when you don’t feel like an authority on some aspect of pragmatics, what do you do about it? indicate the extent to which you do the following: (extensively, sometimes, seldom, never) __i acknowledge my lack of knowledge to my students. __i have my students serve as data gatherers. __i teach what i know and hope it is adequate. (for nnts) __i use as a point of departure the pragmatics of my first language or of some other language. 37% 55% 7% 1% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% very comfortable somewhat comfortable somewhat uncomfortable very uncomfortable 53% 40% 7% 0% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% very comfortable somewhat comfortable somewhat uncomfortable very uncomfortable the teaching of pragmatics by native and nonnative language teachers: what they know and. . . 573 as to what the nnts and nts reported doing if they encountered classroom moments when they did not feel like an authority on some aspect of pragmatics, both nts and nnts reported at least sometimes acknowledging to their students their lack of knowledge about some pragmatics issue, as presented in tables 5 and 6. the nts reported a significantly higher likelihood of getting their students to serve as data gatherers (χ2 = 8.25, p < .01). significantly more nnts reported teaching what they knew and hoping it was adequate4 (χ2 = 13.44, p < .01). a fair number of nnts (62%) reported sometimes or extensively using as a point of departure the pragmatics of their l1 or some other language when teaching the tl. table 5 when nnts do not feel like an authority extensively sometimes seldom never total weighted average i acknowledge my lack of knowledge to my students 43% 35 51% 42 5% 4 1% 1 82 3.35 i have my students serve as data gatherers by checking with native speakers and then reporting back to the class. 14% 12 36% 30 25% 21 24% 20 83 2.41 i teach what i know and hope it is adequate. 31% 25 35% 28 23% 19 11% 9 81 2.85 i use as a point of departure the pragmatics of my first language or of some other language. 21% 17 41% 34 21% 17 17% 14 82 2.66 table 6 when nts do not feel like an authority extensively sometimes seldom never total weighted average i acknowledge my lack of knowledge to my students 40% 12 57% 17 0% 0 3% 1 30 3.33 i have my students serve as data gatherers by checking with native speakers and then reporting back to the class. 23% 7 47% 14 17% 5 13% 4 30 2.80 i teach what i know and hope it is adequate. 10% 3 48% 14 24% 7 17% 5 29 2.52 commenting on those moments when they did not feel like an authority with respect to pragmatics, most nnts said they would check with nss, with the internet, and with other sources and get back to their students right away. the nnts’ comments reflected a high level of knowledge about the issues and an impressive array of strategies for dealing with them, perhaps indicating that it was the more knowledgeable teachers who were willing to respond to this 20tem survey. here are some representative comments: 4 one nnt took offense at the wording since she felt that explore or double check should have been used instead of hope, since she did not teach something unless she was sure of it. unfortunately, this wording problem was not flagged in the piloting of the instrument. andrew d. cohen 574 · i base what i tell students on research and, when research isn’t available, i use my own anecdotal observation – but if my only evidence is anecdotal, i tell students that fact so they don’t overgeneralize. if i don’t know about some pragmatic feature, i say so and tell students i will try to find out. then i ask native speaker friends about the feature, if there is no published research available to consult. · i may explain to students that any aspect of pragmatics can be perceived and practiced differently by different groups of people, or even by different individuals. thus, that aspect should be seen in specific situations. · i talk to my colleagues whom i think is expert in pragmatics. i also consult to books, recent updates on pragmatics as written in journals. · i check on the internet to find more information, and i check with some teachers in the u.s. · i use research-based information about the pragmatics of the language i teach. · i confer with native speakers to hear what they have to say about the issue in question. · i check with native speakers from a range of varieties of the language and then report back to the students. · if i don’t know, i let them know that i am unsure, check with a native speaker, and get back to them the next day. · given the diversity within the spanish-speaking world, i stress to students that they need to be mini-ethnographers and observe the pragmatic norms of the place that they are visiting or where they are studying. i give as an example carmen garcía’s miscommunications as a peruvian in venezuela – she has an interesting article on how she was not successful in ordering coffee in a cafe. we also discuss maria placencia’s work comparing pragmatic norms in quito, ecuador and madrid, spain. · people say i have native-like fluency, and international test results confirm that i am “an expert user” of english; however, when it comes to areas such as humor, or certain disciplines such as philosophy, or religion, i seem to lag behind. sometimes, i am quite useless. these comments would suggest that the nnts who responded to this survey were aware both of research and of strategies for data gathering. as we see from the comments, one issue that emerged was the handling of dialect issues in pragmatics, such as for an english-speaking nnt teaching spanish. another issue was that voiced by a highly competent nnt of still not feeling competent enough with the pragmatics of the language to deal satisfactorily with humor. the overriding position was that of “when in doubt, ask a native speaker.” as for comments by nts, a fair number commented on their using the moments where they did not feel authoritative as an opportunity to gather data, or, in other words, as teachable moments. in the first comment below, the nt underscored differences in norms for pragmatic behavior according to dialect, in this case for english: · i teach in different english speaking countries (e.g. i am from the united states but currently teaching in new zealand), so reliability and fact-checking of pragmatics is the teaching of pragmatics by native and nonnative language teachers: what they know and. . . 575 a point shared between my non-native-english-speaking students and myself, a native english speaker but still a “foreigner.” · having spent 3 years in austria and 1 year in germany and some time in hungary, and having a constantly teaching father who repeatedly reminded us and others (friends who were inappropriate) about the cultural ramifications of verbal, attitudinal, and bodily expressions, underscored my awareness and ability to articulate issues in various sociocultural contexts and interlocutors. part of that though, is to admit i don’t know everything, and that i may be mistaken in many assumptions, and not to generalize my understandings that are rooted in specific situations. · i would consider myself very knowledgeable about a certain kind of japanese language, but more current, informal, or highly dialectical speech i would readily acknowledge i am always in the process of learning about. · i told my students that what i taught them only applied to dealings with foreigners, and even then, that they should follow the norm of what others did towards foreign visitors in the given context. · i feel that pragmatic practices are constantly changing and are so communityand context-specific that full mastery of both the target language and sociocultural contexts seems like a mission impossible to me. even in my home country, which i have been away from for two years now (although i do come back at least three times a year), i feel that i no longer have sound grasp of my l1 pragmatics. · due to being formally instructed on esl pragmatics, having attended pragmatics conferences, having read numerous publications on pragmatics, and having conducted pragmatics-related research myself, i consider myself rather knowledgeable about sociocultural contexts and respective language variations. · [if not sure about some issue in pragmatics] i take it as a research moment for all of us – “you guys research and i’ll research and we’ll come back tomorrow and discuss/compare results.” · i do my best to speak to my english-speaking colleagues or go to the relevant literature and then get back to my students as much as possible. · usually the confusion is over ambiguities or differences in context, etc. i discuss with the students these differences, then we gather data (i will survey my colleagues, and sometimes also outside my school) and report back. these are “teachable moments.” · i have students check coca or micase5 to look at usage. or i have students ask friends. a standard assignment in my class is to have students bring in puzzling bits of conversation that they overheard. some students love this assignment and ask pointed questions like, "how do you respond to ‘you know what i mean?’” or they ask about idioms like "let’s not get bogged down" that are highly frequent in teaching (but which i had never noticed!). these comments by the nts reveal the similarities between their approaches and those of the nnts as to strategies for getting accurate information about 5 coca is the corpus of contemporary american english (www.corpus.byu.edu/coca/), and micase is the michigan corpus of american spoken english (www.quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/c/corpus /corpus?page=home;c=micase;cc=micase). andrew d. cohen 576 pragmatics in response to students’ queries, such as through data gathering, rather than relying on their intuition. in addition, the comments reflect the challenges an nt may face either in teaching in a country where a dialect of the tl different from their own is spoken, or in teaching in an fl context where they are losing contact with their l1. the teachers were also asked a question to get at their knowledge of tl sociopragmatics and pragmalinguistics:6 pragmatics focuses on how the language is interpreted in a given sociocultural context within the target language community. how would you assess your knowledge of the target language and of the sociocultural contexts in which the language is likely to be used? (mark all that apply.) as shown in tables 7 and 8, there were differences in how knowledgeable the nnts and nts reported feeling when called upon to provide tl instruction about sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic issues. while only 37% of the nnts felt very knowledgeable about both kinds of issues, twice as many nts reported feeling very knowledgeable (73%; χ2 = 34.77, p < .001). more than half the nnts reported feeling more knowledgeable about language than sociocultural issues in contrast to the 20% of nts who reported this feeling. table 7 how knowledgeable nnts feel about the language (pragmalinguistics) and the sociocultural (sociopragmatic) context answer choices responses very knowledgeable about both the language and the sociocultural contexts 37% 31 more knowledgeable about the language than the sociocultural contexts 52% 43 more knowledgeable about the sociocultural contexts than about the language 6% 5 still a learner in both the language and the sociocultural contexts within the target community 23% 19 total respondents: 83 table 8 how knowledgeable nts feel about the language (pragmalinguistics) and the sociocultural (sociopragmatic) context answer choices responses very knowledgeable about both the language and the sociocultural contexts 73% 22 more knowledgeable about the language than the sociocultural contexts 20% 6 more knowledgeable about the sociocultural contexts than about the language 0% 0 still learning about my language and norms for its use in different sociocultural contexts 17% 5 total respondents: 30 6 pragmalinguistics deals with how language forms are used in pragmatics; sociopragmatics deals with the sociocultural knowledge needed to determine the appropriateness of pragmatic behavior. the teaching of pragmatics by native and nonnative language teachers: what they know and. . . 577 the nnts who commented about their knowledge of language and of sociocultural contexts indicated their wariness at making generalizations in class based just on their experiences, since the norms for appropriate pragmatic behavior could vary according to the sociocultural context, both within and across dialects. some nnts added the caveat that what they taught about tl pragmatics related only to interactions by nss with foreigners. there were also the occasional pragmatics specialists who indicated acquiring their knowledge from research studies that they and others had conducted and from conferences. here are some of their comments: · italy is a very diverse linguistic and geographic territory. although my knowledge is substantial, i can only offer an honest assessment of its extent while reiterating that possibilities of sociocultural contexts are endless. · i would consider myself very knowledgeable about a certain kind of japanese language, but more current, informal, or highly dialectical speech i would readily acknowledge i am always in the process of learning about. · i told my students that what i taught them only applied to dealings with foreigners, and even then, that they should follow the norm of what others did towards foreign visitors in the given context. the nts who commented about their knowledge of language and of sociocultural contexts indicated that they were constantly learning about pragmatics, especially given how it was always in flux: · although i feel very comfortable teaching about the pragmatics of my native language, i acknowledge that great variety exists among the different varieties of spanish, and i am constantly learning about other sociocultural contexts. · i’m a native speaker of the language i teach and am very analytical about the pragmatics of my own language due to having been a second language learner in another language. being able to relate to the difficulties my students encounter – particularly when they are unable to explicitly frame the problem beyond the understanding that something is wrong – is probably my most valuable asset. · of course i’m still learning and always will be! but having lived almost half my life outside my home state, and almost a decade outside the united states, i have become aware (through self-reflection, reading, and conversation) of the different sociocultural contexts for english, and i try to pass on these nuances to my students who may have only spent a month in an native english-language environment. · as i was brought up in japan and lived for 26 years with some working experience in japan, i’m fairly confident about what i learned from my experience. however, as it has been a few decades since i left japan and have got accustomed to the life in australia, i sometimes feel that my knowledge might not be up to date any more. society and people’s norm seem to have changed to some degree in japan for the past few decades, i need to be always mindful to updating my knowledge through various media. andrew d. cohen 578 these comments by nts about their sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic knowledge base simply underscore the previous comments about handling classroom moments of uncertainty regarding pragmatics. again the issues of teaching in an fl context removed from contact with their l1 and also contending with dialect differences were raised as challenges that many nts face. these comments also remind us that especially in fl contexts nts are dealing with matters of multilingualism. the teachers were asked the following question with regard to the fl-l2 distinction: it is said that teaching the pragmatics of a foreign language is more challenging than teaching the pragmatics of a second language since in foreign-language learning the learners are presumably not living in the target-language context. in your own experience as a language teacher, does this distinction still work for you? (yes, somewhat, no. explain) the contrast between nnt and nts views on the relevance of this distinction did not yield a χ2 with a significant p value. as shown in figures 3 and 4, while 61% of the nnts deemed the distinction fully relevant and 30% somewhat relevant, 50% of the nts found it fully relevant and 40% somewhat relevant. figure 3 nnts’ view regarding the relevance of the l2-fl distinction (n = 80) figure 4 nts’ view regarding the relevance of the l2-fl distinction (n = 30) 61% 30% 9% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% yes somewhat no 50% 40% 10% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% yes somewhat no the teaching of pragmatics by native and nonnative language teachers: what they know and. . . 579 the following were principal activities considered helpful in teaching tl pragmatics in an fl situation: · viewing segments from films, videos (from youtube and elsewhere) and analyzing them (perhaps with a transcript). · collecting data from tl speakers (in service encounters, in dorms, in cafeterias/restaurants, and the like). · role-plays, with the suggestion that they be based on models from film segments and videos. · small-group discussion of tl pragmatics. the activities reportedly used in the l2 context for teaching tl pragmatics were much the same as those reportedly used in the fl context. there was, however, one activity only reported for the l2 context, namely analyzing samples of pragmatics in use by tl speakers: i send my esl students out as ethnographers, to observe specific types of interactions: greetings and leave taking among young men in contrast to young women of their own age group (i.e., hands, voices, feet, proximity, verbal or grunting/shrieking expressions), gift-giving actions and verbal expressions, phone calls, requests for directions around campus, expressions of disappointment, asking for and declining favors. these can be written up, but if possible, videotaped and analyzed. there were numerous strategies reportedly used by nnts and nts alike to motivate their students to learn norms for tl pragmatics: · by saying: if you want to make sense, sound natural, and – more importantly – be polite, you need to learn tl pragmatics. · i find that with my intermediate and advanced spanish learners i don’t need to work hard to motivate them to be interested in spanish pragmatics. they generally find social norms to be fascinating! in part it may be that in other classes instructors don’t talk about pragmatics, so it is novel for them. in addition, there is a clear practical component to learning about pragmatics that i think they recognize. · through engaging materials, especially russian-language music and movies. if they find something they really love, they are motivated to understand it. also i emphasize how native speakers will react when they behave in pragmatically inappropriate ways, which i hope motivates them to at least be conscious of that dimension of language. · i tell them that being a competent speaker requires not only being accurate but also appropriate. · i make sure my german fl students have the opportunity to observe real (if possible, filmed) interactions among people who speak the target language; this way, they see that there are people just like them who observe the social and linguistic norms that they have been learning about. · i tell my efl students here in italy about my own interactional experiences with native speakers (storytelling grabs their attention, and i trust they trust i am telling andrew d. cohen 580 them the truth). if there are international/erasmus students in class, i always ask them to tell the class about how “their way of doing things” differs from ours and what problems, if any, this may have caused. · i normally peak the curiosity of my spanish fl learners in italy by using humor or misunderstandings, and start from there. · i try to get my iranian efl students to watch english comedies because it seems interesting to most of them, or to register in different social networks and be in touch with americans. · i just demonstrate pragmatics to my beginning spanish and german fl students (in california). i act like someone from that culture would act. i also try to get them excited about the culture. i show them things that they can connect with. i always interview all of my students at the beginning of the quarter to find out why they are taking the language and what their hobbies/activities are. then i try to match my curriculum to that. · i use inter-cultural and cross-cultural examples. for example, i use service encounter interactions in u.s. english and in comparable settings in spain and latin america. my spanish fl students love the pragmatics of service encounters because they find it quite useful when they travel abroad. it is encouraging to see from these comments that both nnts and nts are reportedly engaged in motivating their students to become better versed in the pragmatics of the tl that they are learning. especially given the often formulaic nature of pragmatics in areas such service encounters, there are advantages if learners are not only grammatically accurate but also pragmatically appropriate as noted in the above comment. they may get a better price on some item at the market or just have a more enjoyable interaction. the use of humor or misunderstandings as a way for teachers to keep students motivated resonates since learners not only enjoy being entertained but can also learn and perhaps better retain what they have learned when the classroom moments are amusing. both nnts and nts alike expressed a desire to have greater access to pragmatics information and research findings in the following areas: · humor, sarcasm, teasing, and cursing: these are things that are normally left out of the curriculum but are a huge part of living in a culture. they are often speech acts that motivate students to learn. · the expression of sympathy and compassion. · table manners. · interacting with different generations of speakers at, say, a family gathering (meeting their spanish-speaking significant other’s siblings, parents, and grandparents, for example). · euphemisms for things like age, sex, and dying. · how to pose questions during class, at conferences, and in the workplace. · the pragmatics of online discussions engaging several participants using the same language, as in an academic setting such as conferences. the teaching of pragmatics by native and nonnative language teachers: what they know and. . . 581 · the pragmatics of diplomatic communication. · things people are more likely to discuss in the tl and things they are less likely to discuss. · small talk. · invisible culture: behavioral patterns in the tl community that learners do not realize are part of the shared culture, rather than individual idiosyncrasies. · elf pragmatics, and especially pragmatics for business purposes. · more about the differences in pragmatic behavior that may exist among the varieties of spanish around the world. · the connection between grammar and pragmatics: the relevance of the resources of a language system to speakers’ uses of a language. · distinguishing pragmatic deviations due to lack of tl knowledge from pragmatic deviations by l1 speakers (such as due to boorish or gauche behavior). · prioritizing: what areas of pragmatics should be taught first? what can be skipped if there is limited time? this final collection of comments demonstrates how savvy the nnts and nts were about just what pragmatics can entail in areas such as table manners, small talk, euphemisms, extending condolences, and interacting with people across the age spectrum. other comments played up areas that can be most instructive for practicing teachers, such as knowing which topics are and are not sociopragmatically appropriate to bring up in the given context (e.g., how much a new house or car cost, how much the monthly salary is, and so forth), and also distinguishing normative behavior for the tl community from idiosyncratic (boorish) behavior. 6. discussion and conclusions this paper has presented an issue that has perhaps not received much attention in the research literature, namely, the ways in which nts and nnts are similar and different with regard to the handling of tl pragmatics in their instruction. while nts and nnts share many of the same challenges in teaching tl pragmatics, there is nonetheless an nnt factor with regard to the handling of certain aspects of pragmatics. while the survey of 83 nnts and 30 nts showed many similarities in reported handling of tl pragmatics, it also indicated certain areas of difference, where nnts felt less knowledgeable about the teaching of tl pragmatics and also trended towards feeling less comfortable at is as well. the findings would suggest that nts’ intuitions about pragmatics may assist them in teaching learners how to be effectively critical and sarcastic, as well as how to respond appropriately to criticism and sarcasm. the caveat here is that relying on ns intuition may be misleading, which is why both nnts and nts in this survey indicated that they gathered data from other sources if they were in doubt about some area of tl pragmatics. andrew d. cohen 582 the nts also indicated greater use of digital media, whether because being a ns made them more facile at findings and utilizing tl media, due to their many years of teaching experience, or for some other reason. the nts also indicated a willingness to use their students as data gatherers in cases where they were unsure of some issue in pragmatics to a somewhat greater extent than the nnts, though both groups reported this strategy. what is encouraging about this finding is that it would indicate that at least with regard to this self-selected sample, the nts were not just relying on their intuition. the nnts reported more coverage of cursing than the nts, which can be an important area for learners to have some control over. a case in point would be that of female study abroad students who find themselves in a culture where properly understanding off-colored catcalls may be important for their safety. the nnts also reported relying on their l1 when they were not certain of the tl pragmatics, which could possibly be a source of misinformation regarding the tl if there were negative transfer in the process (see ishihara & cohen, 2014). in addition, the survey provided a helpful listing of activities that can be used in teaching tl activities both in fl and l2 situations. in addition, it gave helpful suggestions for how to motivate learners to want to study tl pragmatics, as well as an indication as to pragmatics areas for which teachers would like more information based on both research and practice. this study is clearly a preliminary effort. while international in scope, the sample was still relatively modest and with the nts having over six more years of teaching experience than the nnts. by virtue of it being a matter of self-selection into the sample, it most likely represented a more knowledgeable group of teachers with regard to the teaching of tl pragmatics. it is likely that teachers less knowledgeable about tl pragmatics declined to respond. in addition, the questions were in some cases only a first effort at probing the issues. also, the fluctuation in responses would serve as an indication that it is difficult to arrive at consensus in such a survey effort. both nts and nnts spoke with differing voices, especially in their open-ended explanations of responses. they represented not only different l1s and tls, but also many different regions of the world. another limitation is that the tl proficiency of the nnts was not measured, a task that would have called for instruments in a variety of languages and a willingness on the part of the nnts to have their knowledge assessed. undoubtedly, having knowledge of just how proficient or even “expert” they were in their respective tls would have helped interpret the data in order to distinguish nt-nnt issues from other kinds of issues. finally, it must be remembered that report of coverage of certain tl pragmatics issues does not speak to how reliable the reports of coverage of pragmatics actually were, nor does it speak to how effectively they were covered. despite the limitations of the study, it stands as a useful exercise in an effort to better deal with the area of pragmatics instruction in the classroom. at the teaching of pragmatics by native and nonnative language teachers: what they know and. . . 583 a time when there is increasing interest in teaching pragmatics, there needs to be a commensurate concern with supporting nts and nnts alike to do the best possible job of this (see cohen, in press). a comment is in order with regard to the finding that years of teaching were reported to have a positive correlation with certain speech acts for the nts. why years of teaching experience correlated positively with reported teaching of certain speech acts for nts and not for nnts is a matter of speculation. perhaps the longer this sample of nts taught, the more they saw the benefits of introducing information about pragmatics. as for the nnts, perhaps it was their relative lack of awareness of pragmatics or their intent to simply follow textbook lessons over the years which explained the lack of correlation between years teaching and report of inclusion of pragmatics. on the other hand, perhaps this finding is suggestive of a slight deficit that nnts have in their ability to teach tl pragmatics, whether as an l2 or as an fl. with regard to further research, there is undoubtedly a need to broaden the data base through more systematic sampling of teacher respondents from all areas of the world, as well as to refine the questions that are posed to teachers. on a pedagogical level, more can be done to develop classroom activities which help in the instruction of tl pragmatics in the less covered and more challenging areas—activities that serve nts and ntts alike, both in fl and teaching contexts. the findings from the survey reported on in this paper would appear to support the view that there are nt-nnt differences that might show up in tl instruction in the classroom, which warrants a discussion about measures that might be taken to deal with this issue. in all fairness, the conversation needs to start by acknowledging nnts for the fine work they do in teaching the tl, and for their often admirable abilities in both performing and teaching tl pragmatics. the concern is in dealing with those areas of pragmatics which are currently outside their comfort zone (perhaps dealing with teasing, sarcasm, humor, cursing, and other such areas). being a nnt may make teachers even more mindful of pragmatics and motivated to educate themselves in this area. rather than simply denying it is an issue, language educators might wish to make more resources available to nnts and to nts as well, so 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(1996). pragmatics. oxford: oxford university press 235 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (2). 2020. 235-237 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.2.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial it is with great pleasure that i am sharing with you this new issue of studies in second language learning and teaching. since the first issue in 2020 was a special issue guest-edited by laura gurzynski-weiss, i did not have the chance to emphasize the fact that the journal has entered its tenth year of existence. these ten years have passed very quickly and the journey we have travelled is truly exceptional. when we were putting together the first issues, it was so hard to find good papers and we had to continually struggle trying to convince our colleagues that ssllt had much potential and was the right choice for publishing their work. at present, we are receiving several hundred submissions per year and the rejection rate by far exceeds 80%. at the same time, an increasing number of submissions represent outstanding scholarship, with the effect that the papers that ultimately get accepted and published are also getting better and better. i would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to all those who have supported ssllt from the get-go – the co-editors, the members of the editorial board, the reviewers, the guest-editors of special issues and all the contributors. i will have much more to say about this special anniversary in the december edition where i will also be announcing the way in which we are planning to celebrate it. the present issue brings together six contributions dealing with various aspects of second and foreign language learning and teaching, five of which are reports of empirical studies and one offers a critical literature review. the first paper by sharona moskowitz and jean-marc dewaele focuses on affective issues by presenting the findings of a study that investigated the relationship between teachers’ perceived trait emotional intelligence (tei) and learners’ attitudes and motivation in the case of 129 students representing 28 nationalities. the analysis of the data collected by means of the teique 360° short form (petrides & furnham, 2006) and the attitude/motivation test battery (gardner, 1985) showed that such aspects of tei as sociability, emotionality, and self-control are important predictors of learners’ positive feelings and attitudes towards teachers. the 236 researchers argue that such insights can enhance teacher self-awareness, potentially leading to improved instructional practices. in the next contribution, maria nilsson deals with yet another individual difference variable, beliefs about english instruction held by 26 primary school learners in sweden. the beliefs were tapped in the course of group discussions among learners which were audio-recorded, transcribed and then subjected to qualitative content analysis. it was found that the students were in favor of extensive use of the target language and saw the importance of oral interaction, which mirrored the beliefs of the teacher, but mismatches between learner beliefs and experiences were identified as well in the case of participants manifesting high levels of anxiety. in the following two papers, the focus is shifted to a very popular way of implementing bilingual education, that is, content and language integrated learning (clil). first, dario luis banegas, paige michael poole and kathleen a. corrales offer a critical review of clil in latin america in the years 2008-2018 on the basis of the analysis 41 empirical studies, 19 practice/reflective accounts as well as four reviews. the overview of the publications with respect to five themes (i.e., clil pedagogy, clil perceptions and beliefs, teacher education, global citizenship, and language development) provides a basis for specific suggestions about how clil research and practice can be enhanced in the context in question. second, kristof baten, silke van hiel and ludovic de cuypere report the findings of a study which examined the development of productive and receptive vocabulary in english and french, languages that were simultaneously taught through clil to 104 secondary school learners in flanders. with the help of productive and receptive vocabulary tests used for pretests and posttests, the researchers found that although vocabulary knowledge in english was greater, progress was comparable for both languages despite their different status or opportunities for exposure. in the following paper, a young park presents the results of an investigation which compared the impact of intensive and extensive reading approaches on attitudes towards reading in the case of 73 high school students in korea. using a questionnaire drawing on van schooten and de glopper’s (2002) three-dimensional framework (i.e., affective, cognitive, and conative reactions) administered before and after a 12-week-long treatment, she demonstrated that extensive reading exerted a more positive impact on attitudes, particularly in the affective domain, irrespective of proficiency level. in the last paper, sholeh moradi, shima ghahari and mohammad abbas nejad report a quasi-experimental study which examined the effectiveness of two types of cognitive organizers, that is, outlines constructed by learners and experts, also looking into the moderating role of multiple intelligences. the analysis of the data collected from 111 undergraduate students in iran indicated that both types of outlines were 237 equally effective, with different intelligences coming to the fore in different instructional conditions. this issue also includes two book reviews by danuta gabryś-barker and mirosław pawlak, which focus on recent volumes on publishing in anglo-american journals and methods of doing research within the framework of complex dynamic systems, respectively. as always, i am confident that all these contributions will generate discussion about the topics covered and provide an impulse for further empirical investigations in these areas. mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references gardner, r. c. (1985). social psychology and second language learning: the role of attitudes and motivation. london: edward arnold. petrides, k. v., & furnham, a. (2006). the role of trait emotional intelligence in a gender-specific model of organizational variables. journal of applied social psychology, 36, 552-569. van schooten, e., & de glopper, k. (2002). the relation between attitude toward reading adolescent literature and literary reading behavior. poetics, 30(3), 169-194. 487 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (3). 2016. 487-511 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.3.6 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl fostering awareness of the pedagogical implications of world englishes and elf in teacher education in italy paola vettorel university of verona, italy paola.vettorel@univr.it sara corrizzato university of verona, italy sara.corrizzato@univr.it abstract teacher education represents an essential step to raise awareness of the sociolinguistic changes brought about by the current pluralization of english and by its lingua franca role. within the pre-service teacher education programs run at the department of foreign languages and literatures, university of verona, italy, part of the english language course focused on issues related to world englishes (we) and english as a lingua franca (elf), aiming at fostering awareness of and active reflection upon their pedagogical implications. after taking into consideration recent developments in weand elf-aware teacher education, we will report on findings from a research study involving trainee teachers attending the aforementioned courses for english in academic years 2012-13 to 2014-15. the main aim of the study has been to investigate whether, how and to what extent trainee teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and reasoning about a we and elf-informed perspective in teaching practices may undergo a change after attending these courses. drawing upon different sets of data (questionnaires, reflections in e-learning discussion forums, interviews and final reports), the trainees’ increased awareness of and readiness to include a weand elf-informed didactic approach after attending the paola vettorel, sara corrizzato 488 course will be discussed, together with implications for foreign language teacher education. keywords: world englishes; english as a lingua franca; teacher education; elt materials and practices 1. introduction the plurality into which english has developed has been extensively documented by studies in world englishes (we) and, more recently, english as a lingua franca (elf). elf research has shown how english is used as the world’s lingua franca, with bilingual speakers of english largely outnumbering speakers for whom english is a native language. research related to the implications this can have in english language teaching has been carried out both with reference to classroom practices and teacher education: teachers’ awareness and beliefs concerning the pluralistic perspective of we and the variability of elf are of primary relevance for any potential shifts in elt practices to take place. fostering awareness among experienced and, above all, trainee teachers of the modified contexts where english is employed today should include reflection on its increased plurality (we) and variability (elf), on how pedagogic practices can cater for l2 users’ communicative needs in “real” contexts of language use, as well as on the “relationship between language models (which are necessarily abstractions) and the variable nature of language in interaction” (jenkins, cogo, & dewey, 2011, p. 17). indeed, the deep modifications in the use of language(s) in our globalized world, together with the spread and diversification of english, have contributed to the problematization of several topical issues, including the primacy of (idealised) standard models and norms, and the conceptualization of the “native speaker” (ns). as graddol (2006, p. 114) remarks, from a perspective where english is employed as an international language of communication “native speakers may increasingly be identified as part of the problem rather than the source of a solution” on several grounds. besides the “cultural baggage” they bring with them, “native speaker accents may seem too remote from the people that learners expect to communicate with; and as teachers, native speakers may not possess some of the skills required by bilingual speakers, such as those of translation and interpreting.” furthermore, “as the english-speaking world becomes less formal, and more democratic, the myth of a standard language becomes more difficult to maintain” (graddol, p. 115). traditional elt perspectives, based on standard english as a native language (enl) varieties—generally british or american english—are becoming fostering awareness of the pedagogical implications of world englishes and elf in teacher. . . 489 socio-linguistically unrealistic: in our “superdiverse” world, basing the teaching of english solely upon standard native varieties is “incomplete and may result in a limited and skewed understanding of who speaks english and for what purposes” (matsuda, 2012, p. 171). furthermore, such a monocentric approach can contribute to reinforcing a utopian notion of an “omniscient” ns’s competence (alptekin, 2002, p. 60; rajagopalan, 2004, p. 114), conveying a narrow and unfaithful portrait of the multifaceted reality of english, as well as of its uses and users, both for we and elf. even more importantly, it “may lead to confusion or resistance when students are confronted with different types of english users (e.g., form the outer circle). students may be shocked by varieties and uses of english that differ from inner-circle english, view them as deficient rather than different, or be disrespectful of such varieties and uses” (matsuda, 2012, p. 171; cf. also bockhorst-heng, 2012, p. 218; mckay & bockhorst-heng, 2008). in order for a shift in perspective to take place, making english language teachers aware of these issues appears, thus, essential, first of all because it can familiarize them with the current sociolinguistic reality of the language they are teaching, and secondly since it can foster critical reflection on implications for pedagogical approaches (e.g., dewey, 2012, 2014, 2015a; i̇nal & özdemir, 2015; seidlhofer, 2011; widdowson, 2015). furthermore, it can provide opportunities to critically engage in the evaluation of existing materials, and to devise activities and task that are weand elf-aware, adapting and suiting them to each specific learning and teaching context. as sifakis (2009, pp. 234-235) remarks, efl teachers are “language and teaching specialists” who attend university courses to enter the profession; they should thus be informed about the most relevant key aspects both regarding the language and the methodological approaches to teaching english today. this would entail taking into consideration current studies in sociolinguistics (bayyurt, 2013) of we and elf discourse (sifakis, 2007, 2014), both at a theoretical level and, even more importantly, through reflective practices (seidlhofer, 2011, chapter 8), allowing teachers to “become more aware of the variety/ies of english they actually master and teach” (pedrazzini & nava, 2010, p. 280), and to actively reflect on what a weand elf-informed pedagogy would mean in practice. according to matsuda (2009), if trainee teachers are equipped with the analytical and reflective skills to interpret their encounter with these new concepts, they will not only gain a knowledge base but also be able to use the exposure to these concepts to (re)shape their perception of english and english speakers. (p. 186) this would enable teachers to “decide whether/to what extent elf is relevant to their learners in their context” (jenkins, 2012, p. 492), also taking into account paola vettorel, sara corrizzato 490 “real” opportunities for contact with—and use of—english outside class (giorgis, 2013; ranta, 2010; vettorel, 2014) from a socio-constructivist perspective (kohn, 2015). it could also possibly encourage more flexible attitudes, not least towards a critical appraisal of prevalently norm-focused methodological approaches; this could in turn lead towards pedagogic choices that can be locally tailored and attuned to the students’ (present and future) needs and contexts of use for english, valuing and sustaining a view oriented at what can be “done” with language (seidlhofer, 2011; widdowson, 2003, 2012, 2015) from a communicative “outside-the-class” oriented perspective, rather than seeing it “only” as a school subject, both in language and in (inter)cultural terms. 1.1. issues in elf and teacher education seidlhofer (2011, p. 205) has suggested that a teacher education curriculum should foster “understanding in teachers of how the language they are studying and will be teaching figures in a more general framework of communication.” besides raising awareness of the modified reality of english and of its plurality, one of the related objectives would be to promote reflection upon the challenges for “established ways of thinking” in elt (widdowson, 2012, 2015). this would entail problematizing broader (pedagogical) issues, allowing “teachers to become more aware of the ‘cultural’ nature of existing principles and re-examine these in a critical light” through active reflection on how, and where, theory and practice meet, and “develop their individual pedagogies in response to what they encounter through exposure to theory and research” (dewey, 2015a, p. 132). such opportunities for reflection could work towards the realization that norms “are continually shifting and changing” (seidlhofer, 2008, p. 4), particularly for elf, challenging and “counteract[ing] the ‘code-fixation’ of much current language pedagogy that tends to be focused on developing proficiency in language forms rather than an awareness of the nature of the language itself and its creative potential” (seidlhofer, 2011, p. 205). however, a plurilithic approach to we, and even more to elf and its pedagogic implications, has been met with resistance on several fronts (e.g., kuo, 2006; maley, 2010; sewell, 2013; swan, 2012; see also seidlhofer, 2011), mainly on the ground that a standard (single) variety of english is needed in teaching and learning terms. such resistance is well summarised in the pests acronym, standing for “‘practicality’ (not practical to teach different types of english), ‘efficiency’ (just a waste of time), ‘standards’ (need to learn standard native english), and ‘simplicity’ (don’t like to be confused, keep things simple)” (marlina, 2014, p. 9). sceptical views towards a plurilithic approach come also from teachers; as sifakis (2009, p. 235) highlights, one of the dimensions in the elt profession is fostering awareness of the pedagogical implications of world englishes and elf in teacher. . . 491 that teachers are “perceived by themselves, and their learners, peers and broader community” as “language [and culture] custodians/guardians.” this aspect, alongside and in line with the traditionally held norm-oriented view of language(s) and language teaching/learning, is likely to account for the dichotomous stances emerging from literature investigating teachers’ views and beliefs towards englishes and elf, with standard varieties and normativity on the one hand, and an acknowledgement of the current plurality in english and of elforiented perspectives on the other (e.g., blair, 2015; dewey, 2012, 2014, 2015b; vettorel, 2015). as dewey (2012, p. 163) points out, grammatical and normabiding accuracy are fundamental tenets in elt, and standard varieties are thus “seen as the only valid models for the classroom.” this viewpoint is also evident in other recent studies, where teachers’ perceptions of their role as “custodians of english for their learners” (bayyurt & sifakis, 2015b, p. 125) and their “duty to correct” (vettorel, 2015) is related both to the place standard english retains, and should continue to retain, in pedagogic practices, and to the extent to which a “flexible” approach can be realized as far as error correction is concerned (bayyurt & sifakis, 2015b, p. 129). it has also been pointed out that even teachers who have the opportunity to discuss we, elf and the inclusion of elf-aware practices in elt as part of their training path seem to show resistance in actually taking on a more inclusive approach to englishes and elf in their pedagogic practices. research into teacher awareness of elf concepts has thus far tended to show that there is a growing awareness among some teachers of terms such as ‘world englishes’, but there is generally limited meaningful integration of these terms and the concepts they represent in existing practices. (dewey, 2015b, p. 180) similarly, bayyurt and sifakis (2015b, p. 119) summarize how a “contrasting picture” emerges from studies related to teachers’ perceptions and beliefs: on the one hand, there is a willingness to find out more about elf and non-native speakers’ successful interaction strategies; on the other hand, there is confusion about what needs to be done to integrate the teaching of such strategies into established, efl-bound practices” (cf. blair, 2015; also sifakis & bayyurt, 2015). 1.2. we, elf and teacher education programmes in recent years several teacher education projects have been implemented with the specific objective to familiarize prospective and/or experienced teachers with the above issues and to foster reflection upon their implications for teaching practices, frequently including moments for experimentation with materials, paola vettorel, sara corrizzato 492 too (e.g., bayyurt & sifakis, 2015a, 2015b; hall, wikaksono, qian, & xu, 2013; matsuda, 2009 for japan; sifakis & bayyurt, 2015; wicaksono & schender black, 2012). as importantly, concepts related to we, global englishes and english as a lingua franca have to some extent been taken on board since 2008 in teacher training programmes like the cambridge esol delta1 (dewey, 2012, 2014, 2015b; dewey & leung, 2010). it is also worth of notice that the italian ministry of education recent teacher entry papers (2013, 2014; miur, dm 95 – allegato a – prove e programmi d’esame, retrievable at http://www.istruzione.it/concorso_docenti/documenti.shtml (last accessed 10 august 2016)) for secondary school teacher qualifications refer to these areas, and that weand elf-related topics are increasingly included in pre-service teacher education courses in the italian context, too (bozzo, 2015; lopriore, 2010; mansfield & poppi, 2012; pedrazzini, 2015; vettorel & lopriore, in press). generally, the overall aim of these programmes is to provide a theoretical framework for reflection on issues related to the spread of english and its implications for teaching of english as a foreign language. azuaga and cavalheiro (2015, p. 118), for example, identify the following aims for a module on elf as part of english studies courses: “to become aware of the implications of elf in communication and pedagogy, as well as to confront and change their opinions by providing them with hands-on information” in order to critically reflect upon their suppositions and explore new possible paths of action. in addition, the course aimed at developing “a critical awareness towards issues like intercultural competence, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, world englishes, among other topics” (p. 118) from which different options in the language classroom could be explored. gimenez, calvo, and el kadri (2015, pp. 227-228) highlight similar objectives for a teacher education course in brazil, where contents included key issues such as “the spread of english in the world, englishes and their implications for teaching and learning, grammar issues arising from interactions among non-native speakers and the ownership of english” to be dealt with in a reflective way within an elf-oriented pedagogic perspective, also through devising elf-aware teaching activities as part of the course. the programme successfully managed to provide trainees with perspectives on elf and english varieties, and on how to include them in teaching, as well as on intelligibility as “more important than achieving a standard native-speaker variety” (p. 234). objectives similar to the ones outlined above were part of the tfa and pas pre-service teacher education courses run at the university of verona, as will be illustrated in the following sections. 1 diploma in english language teaching to adults. fostering awareness of the pedagogical implications of world englishes and elf in teacher. . . 493 2. the study: fostering awareness of we and elf in tfa and pas teacher education courses in italy, since 2012 would-be teachers are requested to attend university-run courses, namely tirocinio formativo attivo (tfa) and percorso abilitante speciale (pas), which include both a general part on didactics and a more specific one in close connection with the trainees’ disciplinary area. unless participants have at least 3 years’ teaching experience to attend pas courses, a consistent practicum (19 ects) is to be carried out as an integral part of the tfa programme. 2.1. context and participants since the academic year 2012-2013 the department of foreign languages and literatures at the university of verona has been involved in both tfa and pas teacher education: tfa programmes for prospective language teachers of english, spanish, german and french were offered in 2012-13 (lower secondary school) and 2014-15 (lower and upper secondary school). pas courses were activated in 2013-14 and 2014-15 and have been offered in 2015-16 for english and spanish. one of the two modules in the english anguage course (6 ects/36 hours for pas and 3 ects/18 hours for tfa) focused on we, elf and their pedagogical implications. the module was placed at the beginning of the course so that it would represent a reference framework also for the following lessons dealing respectively with lesson planning, material evaluation and the development of language skills. the following aspects were dealt with in the module: · the historical and socio-cultural factors responsible for the spread of english and its current pluralization (we), including exemplifications of language variation; · elf: characteristics, speakers and contexts of use; · reflection on the pedagogical implications of we and elf, including a critical evaluation of elt coursebooks, and the creation of weand elfaware lesson plans and classroom activities. after a theoretical introductory phase, pair and group reflective activities were carried out and then shared in class and in the course e-learning forums. since 2012, a total of 58 teachers have attended the tfa english courses and 81 the pas ones. as table 1 shows, the majority of participants were women for both pas and tfa courses, and generally tfa trainee teachers were younger than those attending pas courses. paola vettorel, sara corrizzato 494 table 1 tfa/pas participants’ gender and teaching experience academic year and course2 2012/13 tfa 1 2014/15 tfa 2 2013/14 pas 1 2014/15 pas 2 male 14% 14% 9% 3% female 86% 86% 91% 97% teaching experience less than 5 years 79% 76% 61% 69% 5-10 years 0% 14% 35% 26% 10-15 years 14% 3% 4% 0% more than 15 years 7% 7% 0% 5% although having at least 3 years’ teaching experience was mandatory to attend pas courses, as can be seen in table 1, all participants had at least some years of experience as foreign language teachers, gained after they completed their degree in foreign languages. most trainees attending pas1 had worked at school for less than 5 years, and many of them between 5 and 10 years. the great majority had less than five years’ teaching experience at different school levels, more frequently in primary and lower secondary schools. 2.2. research design the main aim of the present case study has been to investigate whether, how and to what extent trainee teachers’ beliefs and “pedagogic knowledge” (borg, 2006, p. 49) about the inclusion of a weand elf-informed perspective in their teaching practices would undergo a change after attending the aforementioned module 1 on we and elf, part of the teacher education course they attended. the data were collected by means of both primary and secondary sources. primary factual, behavioural and attitudinal data (dörnyei, 2010) were gathered through a questionnaire. in the initial phase of the study, that is, for tfa1 and pas1 courses, one single questionnaire was administered, to be compiled partly at the beginning and partly at the end of module 1. the questionnaire was divided into five main sections: (a) personal background, (b) personal and professional relations with the english language, (c) students and english outside school, (d) english, englishes and elt, and (e) elf. the 24 questions included closed-ended items (likert scale and multiple-choice) as well as open, clarification and short-answer questions. 2 questionnaire responses have been coded specifying the courses for each academic year, assigning them a progressive number; the initials of participants and the contexts of data are also indicated: forum discussions (f), final reports (fr), interviews (int). data in the tables refer to the questionnaires that were returned. fostering awareness of the pedagogical implications of world englishes and elf in teacher. . . 495 in the second phase of the study (tfa2, pas2), in order to further expand the investigation related to how teachers would take into consideration a weand elf-informed approach in their classroom practices after attending module 1, the questionnaire was subdivided into two parts, handed out at the beginning and at the end of module 1 respectively; the initial questionnaire was a slightly modified version of the previous one, and a part investigating the respondents’ educational background was added, for a total of 26 questions. both the single and the initial/final questionnaires were piloted before the courses. it was made clear that participation in the questionnaire survey was voluntary and anonymous; the questionnaires were completed individually, partly during the lessons. consent for all data included in the study was granted by participants. table 2 shows the ratio between the number of attendees for each course and the number of questionnaires that were returned. table 2 total number of questionnaires/trainees academic year and course no. of questionnaires/ trainees no. of initial questionnaires/ trainees no. of final questionnaires/ trainees 2012/13 tfa1 7/7 2013/14 pas1 22/42 2014/15 tfa2 43/51 27/51 2014/15 pas2 29/39 24/39 quantitative analysis was conducted for answers to close-ended and open questions. since the final questionnaire was specifically aimed at investigating more in depth a possible change in the trainee teachers’ “pedagogical knowledge” (borg, 2006, p. 49) after attending module 1, seven out of the eight total questions were open; participants were also asked to provide actual examples of how they would include a weand elf-aware approach in their teaching practices. our qualitative dataset comprises answers to the closed and open questionnaire questions, the participants’ comments in the e-learning dedicated forums, the lesson plans and activities devised by the trainee teachers, as well as follow-up semi-structured interviews. a 3-stage qualitative content analysis (mayring, 2014) was undertaken for the open-ended questionnaire responses. the first stage consisted in organizing the participants’ open answers in order to get a first general sense of the data; in a second step the main topics and ideas emerging from the data were organized in key-words and key-concepts; the last step involved the classification of data through a coding framework. paola vettorel, sara corrizzato 496 3. research aims and results: impact of module 1 on trainee teachers’ awareness of we and elf the case study illustrated here is part of a larger research project aimed at investigating trainee teachers’ opinions towards the introduction of a weand elf-aware approach in their teaching practices after attending tfa and pas courses. the main research questions in the larger study aimed to explore whether the course would bring about a change in: · familiarity with the concepts and characteristics of we and elf, · awareness of the current plurality of english in terms of language variation and contexts of use, · awareness of the implications this pluralization can have in elt, and · openness to adapt/modify their teaching practices and/or materials within a weand elf-informed approach. within the scope of these broader aims, in this paper findings emerging from the areas related to the following questions, which were part of the questionnaire, will be taken into account: 1. what key aspects has the module helped to clarify? 2. what aspects related to we and elf do you think are important in teacher training? why are these aspects important? 3. in which way has the module influenced your approach to teaching english? the aim of these questions was to investigate whether, how and to what extent module 1 contributed to partially modifying, or even transforming, the trainees’ knowledge about (a) the current plurality of english and its lingua franca role, (b) aspects related to we and elf that should be included in teacher education following the participants’ experience in the course, and (c) the impact the module could have on their (prospective) teaching practices. findings deriving from the questionnaire data will be interrelated and triangulated with the aforementioned data sources, that is, comments additional to the open-ended questions and in the e-learning forums, interviews3 and final reports; exemplary quotes from data will also be provided in order to illustrate the trainees’ reflections on the issues under consideration.4 we will first give an overview of the responses in the questionnaire section investigating the trainees’ familiarity with we and elf before attending the course. we will then take into consideration their answers regarding the aspects 3 follow-up interviews have so far been carried out with tfa1 and pas1 participants. 4 see note 2. fostering awareness of the pedagogical implications of world englishes and elf in teacher. . . 497 module 1 had helped clarify and those that were deemed relevant in teacher education. thirdly, we will focus on the aspects the participants indicated as influential for their teaching practices. 3.1. impact of module 1 on trainee teachers’ perception of we, elf and their pedagogic implications an open question investigating the participants’ familiarity with we, elf and their implications in elt prior to attending the course was included in the questionnaire to gain background information. as summarized in table 3, findings show a general unfamiliarity with these issues; even the respondents who provided a positive answer specified that their knowledge was generic or came from academic courses they had attended dealing with these topics. the great majority of pas1 trainee teachers (72.7%, 38.7% for pas2) said that they were unfamiliar with we, while tfa participants stated they were more familiar with we (28.6% tfa1; 18.2% tfa2). similarly, 81.8% pas1 and 54.6% pas2 participants answered they were not familiar with elf, against 28.6% tfa1 and 34.6% tfa2 attendees. table 3 familiarity with we and elf before attending module 1 yes, i was familiar with we no, i was not familiar with we yes, i was familiar with elf no, i was not familiar with elf tfa1 55.1% 28.6% 57.1% 28.6% tfa2 22.7% 72.7% 13.6% 81.8% pas1 45.5% 18.2% 34.6% 34.6% pas2 38.7% 38.7% 19.4% 54.6% as to the aspects examined in module 1, a significant number of participants highlighted the fact that the lessons contributed to familiarizing them with several concepts and with the historical developments and linguistic variation in we (14.3% tfa1, 20% pas1, 24,5% tfa1, 64.3% pas2), and with the function and characteristics of elf. other elements that were mentioned are the role of intelligibility and the “legitimacy” of language variation (14.1% tfa1, 9.4% tfa2). participants also said that module 1 contributed to clarifying the concept of varieties of english, the first and the second diasporas and kachru’s model, as well as “the world english situation, the historical aspects, the ‘dignity’ of we and elf [contributing to creating] a deeper knowledge of how they are important” (pas2-14), and “the differences among all the varieties of englishes existing, their origin, their status, their evolution” (pas1-3). comments from several data sources confirm the importance of dealing with we and elf in the course: “the first lesson was really enlightening for me because i have never been extensively educated about world englishes” (eo-tfa2-f); module 1 “gave me strong basis paola vettorel, sara corrizzato 498 and more confidence in using we in my classes and make my students have an up-to-date view of english today” (bt-pas1-int). dealing with we and elf fostered reflection on the trainees’ habitual teaching practices, too: it was pointed out that teachers should focus on “the different englishes spoken in countries in which english has an official status” (tfa1-2) and reflect on “the validity of variation” that leads to a gradual detachment from teaching “english only [as] spoken in the inner circle” (tfa2-8). as to elf, lessons were defined as useful to “deepen the concept of english as a lingua franca and to focus on the fact that it is a ‘contact language’ that does not depend on english or american lexical and grammar rules” (pas2-1), and to foster the realization that “many english speakers use it as a lingua franca for cross-cultural communication” (pas1-20); during the post-course interview a teacher commented that “it was interesting to see what elf is . . . and to understand how we use it, and why, and how to explain this to students as well” (lvz-tfa1-int). familiarization with conceptualizations of elf was also seen as relevant to raise awareness of the importance of taking into account intelligibility and communicative effectiveness, as indicated by 14% pas1, 9.6% pas2, and 7.1% tfa2 participants respectively. reflective comments included the following: “i have to focus my attention more on the communicative aspects rather than correcting only grammar mistakes” (pas2-5); “communication ability is more important than formal correctness” (pas2-21); teachers should encourage students to “communicate avoiding the fear of making mistakes also thanks to communicative strategies” (tfa2-43), aiming at “intelligibility and effective communication” (tfa213). a reference to the “ownership of the language” was also made, since it can deeply influence the “interpretation of errors” (tfa2-12). reflection on the implications of we and elf for elt, which was indicated as significant by 57.1% tfa1, 15.1% pas2, and 9.5% tfa2 respondents, helped foreground several key points, such as the importance of setting “goals that are compatible with the status of english nowadays,” where “it is important to focus on the message to get across rather than to aim at a language ‘standard’” (tfa11) and to open “our students’ minds to new perspectives about the varieties of english used in interactions all over the world” (pas2-1). in several comments it was also mentioned that module 1 helped trainees realize that both we and elf can be frequently experienced, and that taking them into account in elt can represent “a honest proposal for our students” (ic-pas1-f): “we and elf are not so far away from our everyday life and are [therefore] key aspects of language teaching” (pas2-26); “english is a language which, by now, must be accepted in all its varieties. these aspects cannot be ignored any longer because in our globalized world it permits a real communication and a real contact” (pas2-2); “the use of fostering awareness of the pedagogical implications of world englishes and elf in teacher. . . 499 english is more and more spread outside classroom so we [teachers] have to take into account that our students have many stimulus from outside” (pas2-29). these reflections showcase that module 1 helped trainees raise their awareness about conceptual issues for both we and elf, developing sensitivity to the lingua-cultural diversity of english through reflection on the importance of including a weand elf-informed approach in didactic practices. 3.2. we and elf in teacher education key issues related to the second research question, that is, aspects connected to we and elf that ought to be included in teacher education, are summarized in table 4. according to many tfa1 participants, raising awareness of we is one of the most relevant aspects to be taken into consideration in teacher education: several respondents highlighted the importance of focusing on different varieties of english, indicating historical and linguistic development of we as a major element to be included. moreover, many participants commented that being familiar with elf and its characteristics is significant because of the implications in teaching practices; once informed, teachers can help students understand the role that english has as a contact language and the international settings in which it is used. including we and elf in teacher education can thus allow teachers to prepare students for facing international and intercultural communicative contexts in which they will use english in its lingua franca function as active participants. table 4 we and elf aspects that should be included in teacher education important aspects to be taken into consideration in teacher education to foster: tfa1 pas1 tfa2 pas2 teachers’ awareness of we historical development and linguistic traits 37.5% 22.7% 48.6% 38.7% acknowledgement of the role that english plays around the world, focusing on elf and its features 37.5% 13.6% 6.6% 6.5% acknowledgement of the role intelligibility plays in cross-cultural communication, focusing on communication strategies 12.5% 13.6% 33.3% 64.2% sensitivity to different cultural backgrounds 2.7% 12.9% intelligibility and processes related to pragmatics and communication strategies were indicated as key points, too, particularly since they are very rarely present in elt materials. besides, international school projects were often identified as useful opportunities to experience the language in “real” communicative elf contexts. in one of the interviews, a teacher who had attended tfa1 referred to her students’ international exchange with a german group of peers as such an example, commenting that the experience was eye-opening for students paola vettorel, sara corrizzato 500 because they realized that english is not only spoken to interact with mother tongue speakers (lvz-tfa1-int). the different cultural backgrounds of speakers, and the importance of fostering intercultural awareness by reflecting on the students’ and on other lingua-cultures5 were also mentioned: learning about we was seen as fundamental to “talk[ing] about world englishes even in classroom,” giving students “a different perspective” on language and culture (pas2-9), and having “a broader view and learn[ing] to be respectful of differences” (pas2-21). regarding elf, it was pointed out that since it “responds to the need of communication of our global society” (mda-pas2-f), it “can no longer be ignored in educational contexts and . . . it is not right to identify one variety as superior” since “it is the use that ‘makes’ the language” (tfa1-4); “[teachers] shouldn’t consider elf as a deviation from standard english nor a language full of errors” (aa-pas2-f). hence, elf should be dealt with “because students often think that english is useful just to speak with native english speakers” (tfa2-14). intelligibility and communication strategies were identified as key aspects in this case, too: “communicative skills and abilities are [as] important as grammar” (pas2-17), and dealing with intelligibility can allow students to understand “different variations/pronunciation and to make them aware of these different aspects of englishes in the world” (pas1-11). communication strategies ought to be dealt with to make students aware of “how to solve problems with the language through interaction strategies” (tfa2-28) and “to put into practice any strategy in order to achieve effective communication . . . to avoid misunderstanding” (tfa2-9), both in linguistic and cultural terms. communicative effectiveness and using “the language to communicate” (pas1-20) were also seen as a major point: “communication and the ability to communicate are more important than accuracy and grammar” (tfa220); “fluency and understandability are key aims to be achieved” (tfa2-21). one further element that was stressed in a reflective critical way is the lack of elt materials aimed at developing pragmatic competence, an important aspect in elf interactions. both during classroom discussions and in the e-learning forums, comments related to the textbooks that were analysed during the module highlighted that: “no effort has been made to make the students perceive what english has become in our globalized society: a language rich in varieties and used/accepted by nonnative speakers,” stressing that “no contexts have been created and no tips/prompts have been given to permit elf communication to be experienced by learners” (ptpas2-f). at the same time, several participants also mentioned that 5 some tfa2 participants also mentioned that having knowledge of linguistic variation and being open to different cultural backgrounds can help teachers deal with students of non-italian origin, also in encouraging them to share their lingua-cultural “heritage” with the rest of the class. fostering awareness of the pedagogical implications of world englishes and elf in teacher. . . 501 even if in our english textbooks there are no examples of elf . . . some lessons explaining the most important features of elf would be very interesting for students, in order to understand . . . the reality that they will have to face when engaging a conversation with people from various backgrounds. (pt-pas2-f) the challenge of considering a new perspective was also referred to; as one teacher comments, the most challenging aspects of our course were exactly that of finding ways to take elf into our classes . . . making our students understand how this language has developed recently. all the simplified grammar and vocabulary and the fact that there is not only one standard english are not always easy to be understood and accepted even by the students. (ar-tfa1-int) to sum up, understanding the plurality of english today, both in terms of variation in we and in its lingua franca role, were seen as key-elements for teacher education by all participants. tfa1 and pas1 trainees highlighted the importance of dealing with the plurality of englishes, of the relevance of intelligibility and communication strategies, and of authentic communicative contexts. tfa2 and pas2 participants stressed the importance of being informed about the multifaceted reality of english both in terms of linguistic variation and cultural sensitivity. 3.3. weand elf-aware didactic perspectives: a new pedagogical reasoning? as we have seen, besides an increased “knowledge about the language,” module 1 contributed to challenging the trainees’ “pedagogical knowledge” and “pedagogical reasoning” (borg, 2006, p. 48) by fostering critical reflection on a weand elf-informed approach in classroom practices. in this section we will focus on the third research question,6 aimed at investigating what kind of pedagogical practices were envisaged by the participants for actual inclusion in a weand elf-aware classroom approach. as to we, trainees agreed on the importance of encouraging a pluricentric approach in their didactic practices, fostering a broader view both linguistically and culturally; pas2 participants in particular acknowledged the need to focus not only on british and american english, and several tfa2 trainees mentioned that using authentic materials, such as written texts, audioclips or videoclips, charts and also literary texts could encourage a more dynamic approach to presenting differences in accents and lexical items. 6 the question was specifically included in the questionnaire for tfa2 and pas2 courses and in the interviews. paola vettorel, sara corrizzato 502 besides reflecting on the issues examined during module 1, trainee teachers shared in the e-learning forums the weand elf-related teaching ideas they had prepared during the course, for which some examples will be provided. one lesson plan that well exemplifies the rationale with which trainees worked in devising weaware activities is “multicultural london: is bombay really two hours away? workshop @ the web lab.” the series of activities in the teaching unit7 that were tried out in class aimed at familiarizing students with the multiethnic environment of london, where different varieties of english and different cultures coexist, focusing then on indian english. as the trainee teacher explains in the e-learning forum: students were posed some questions meant to reflect on possible links between india and britain. then a picture of southall market from london's little india was shown. everybody guessed that is was a street market in india. when they were shown the second photo (borough market) they could hardly believe that both pictures were taken in london. (gc-pas2-f) similarly, referring to an activity related to we that was realized in class after attending the course, during the interview a teacher commented that there were first of all cultural and social aims: introduce them [students] to socio-linguistic and socio-pragmatic competence; underline the plurilinguistic and intercultural aspects in order to enhance cultural sensitivity and the ability to identify and use strategies to be part of a multicultural community; make students understand what world englishes are and expose them to another variation [variety], and to language borrowings too. (bt-pas1-int) as to the inclusion of an elf-informed approach in teaching practices, trainees focused primarily on the importance of making students aware of the role that english plays as the international language of communication. intelligibility and communication strategies were once again seen as key elements: “clarity of the communicative exchange” (pas2-20) and all those aspects that “are necessary to mutual understanding” (pas2-21) should be overtly included in teaching practices. several comments pointed out that the english class should be more communicatively oriented, with a focus “on the message rather than on the form” (pas2-17) also in testing (the need to re-think assessment parameters in terms of language use and language fluency was mentioned, too), as the following comment in the forum exemplifies: 7 the unit includes six sections: (a) brainstorming, (b) picture analysis, (c) picture unfolding, (d) web activity and itc tools, (e) video and discussion, and (f) language reflection. fostering awareness of the pedagogical implications of world englishes and elf in teacher. . . 503 freedom [in communicating with people] can be easily used in class and [teachers can] turn it into a powerful tool to make our students express them[selves] during speaking activities in a foreign language rather than in their mother tongue – thus knocking down the linguistic fear to say something which is never correct – of course, as we have widely discussed in our past classes, there are rules and so on, but i truly feel that elf can be an effective instrument to let our students speak freely. (gc-pas2-f) it was also highlighted that classroom practices should prepare students for authentic international/intercultural communication, helping them become aware of elf and realize that british english can no longer be the only reference model in “real” communication. as explained in a number of questionnaires answers, students could be guided to compare aspects related to intercultural pragmatics, such as “different way[s] of greetings, for example italian greetings are different from chinese and indian greetings” (pas2-20); exemplifications of english as “spoken around the world” could make “students aware of the different accents, pronunciations and vocabularies” (pas2-6), for example through “examples of listening passages from italian politicians speeches in international contexts” (tfa2-4). tfa2 and pas2 participants stressed the importance of interaction among non-native speakers, and indicated participation in international school projects (for example via etwinning: https://www.etwinning.net/en/pub/index.htm) as a good opportunity to experience language use in elf contexts, pointing out that teachers should encourage students to take part in “experiences of student-exchange in other countries where english is not [the] l1” (tfa2-9); interaction with students of non-italian origin present in the school was also mentioned (pas2-6). among the lesson ideas that were devised in this area, an interesting example is the activity in which students are first introduced to issues connected to accent variation in elf through a video (british council, 2014) and are then guided to work on describing some elf phonological and morphological characteristics through different types of exercises. as suggested in the comment, even if students at this [elementary] level cannot afford comparison between ‘standard’ english and the samples of elf we would be analyzing, i’m sure . . . their ears can detect that they are listening another english, and this would be suitable for my purpose; watching a video showing the shift of accent among “english” and elf users would be useful. (sz-pas2-f) several pas final reports included activities, or whole lesson plans, that were devised within an elf-aware approach, aimed at fostering students’ awareness of language variation and language use in elf contexts. for example, one of the pas1 trainee’s final works consisted in eight lessons aimed at introducing students to the plurality of english and to the role it plays in students’ every-day life (tm-pas1-fr). first, students were asked to work on a textbook paola vettorel, sara corrizzato 504 passage (“the role of english”; banzato & dalziel, 2009) presenting the concept of elf, and then guided to discover its role in international communication. in other cases, reading passages from coursebooks, or authentic materials from the web, were used with this objective in mind, and some final reports included both virtual and face-to-face meetings with students of different l1s as a way to experience communication in elf contexts. to sum up, findings show that a positive attitude towards the inclusion of both a weand elf-informed approach in teaching practices was developed by these trainee teachers. comments in the questionnaires and in the e-learning discussion forums, as well as reflections during the post-course interviews and in the final reports, show that the topics covered in module 1 contributed to developing awareness of the current plurality of we and elf, positively influencing their “personal pedagogical systems” (borg, 2006, p. 48). furthermore, the didactic activities devised during the course, as well as the ones included in the final reports, point towards a weand elf-aware teaching perspective that will hopefully continue to inform these trainee teachers in their future professional lives. 4. conclusions the trainee teachers who attended the tfa and pas courses described in this paper considered the topics covered in module 1 as a positive opportunity to develop knowledge and awareness of the current plurality of english and of its lingua franca role. the module contributed to familiarizing them with issues related to we and elf, clarifying several key notions in both areas. participants highlighted the importance of discussing aspects and issues connected to the plurality of english in teacher education, saying that the module helped them develop awareness of linguistic variation and cultural differences, as well as recognize the relevance that intelligibility and communication strategies have for effective communication. this awareness also translated into a critical evaluation of elt materials and led to the development of weand elf-informed approach didactic activities. the case study discussed in this paper can thus suggest important insights for pre-service teacher education. on the whole, our findings show that including we, elf and their pedagogical implications in pre-service teacher education can certainly contribute to modifying trainee teachers’ views of the current reality of english, and above all encourage them to move towards a broader perspective in didactic terms. as for the participants in the teacher education project developed by bayyurt and sifakis (2015b, p. 131), dealing with we and elf issues represented for the participants in our study “an opportunity to receive new information about fascinating issues concerning the english language and a springboard for growing fostering awareness of the pedagogical implications of world englishes and elf in teacher. . . 505 professionally as reflective teachers.” in line with other research studies in different contexts (bayyurt & sifakis, 2015a, 2015b; matsuda, 2009; sifakis & bayyurt, 2015; vettorel, 2015), our findings show that, once informed, teachers do acknowledge the importance of dealing with topics related to the current developments of english and their pedagogic implications. this, as we have seen, can allow them to make informed pedagogical choices, actively reflecting on the need to promote an “ability to adapt, negotiate, and mediate communication in dynamic and context-sensitive ways” (jenkins, cogo, & dewey, 2011, p. 17), and reflect on the need to move away from a predominantly norm-focused instruction towards a more communication-oriented and inclusive approach. fostering awareness of the current diversification of english in teacher education can thus set the basis for acknowledging that we and elf can no longer be ignored in class: rather than one single) variety (standard british english) or ns reference model, students should be presented with exemplifications of different accents, lingua-cultural varieties and contexts of use, going beyond static and monolithic representations of the language, as is still largely the case in elt. our findings show that providing opportunities for a critical evaluation of existing elt textbooks and “global or local us/nes-based materials” (yu, 2015, p. 49) represents a fundamental step towards we and elf-awareness “in practice,” and towards the exploration of “possible ways to adapt materials from elf-relevant perspective” (p. 49). in kramsch’s (2014) words, the purpose is not to abandon all standards pedagogic norms of language use as the goals of instruction. it is, rather, to strive to make our students into multilingual individuals, sensitive to linguistic, cultural and, above all, semiotic diversity, and willing to engage with difference, that is, to grapple with differences in social, cultural, political and religious worldviews. (p. 305) rather than abandoning “nes/us-based materials entirely” (yu, 2015, p. 50), teacher education should foster awareness of how existing materials can be implemented within a less monolithic and more weand elf-informed perspective, broadening opportunities and adding “to teachers’ and teachers educators’ repertoires of teaching examples” (p. 50). in this respect, the activities and lesson plans that were developed as part of these tfa and pas courses and exemplified above show that, when the opportunity is provided, teachers can become “agents of change” in using materials as “resources for adaptation” (seidlhofer, 1999, p. 236; cf. also lopriore & vettorel, 2015; vettorel, 2016). they can thus play an active role in promoting awareness of englishes and elf, not only selecting the most appropriate materials but also using them in a context-appropriate way (cf. also seidlhofer, 2011, pp. 199, 201; mckay, 2012a, 2012b). and, as we have seen, both during the lessons and in the e-learning discussion paola vettorel, sara corrizzato 506 forums, the knowledge and reflection stimuli in module 1 led tfa and pas trainee teachers to interrogate themselves in a critical and reflective way about the ways in which a shift in perspective can actually be put into practice, devising possible ways for a weand elf-aware approach, and largely recognizing the importance of including we and elf as integral part of teacher education for such a shift to take place. certainly, further moments of cooperation between researchers, teacher trainers and teachers are of crucial relevance so that the latter can be supported in finding “their own ways” of introducing we and elf-informed perspectives in their own teaching and learning contexts. initial teacher education can thus be seen as a first step in this direction: awareness of the issues involved, as well as opportunities to reflect on how these challenges can be taken into account in teaching practices can lead to a change in perspective, one that can hopefully have a long-lasting impact on classroom practices. acknowledgements the study described in this paper has been carried out within a pas post-doctoral research grant, supported by the university of verona. the authors would also like to thank all the trainee teachers who took part in the research project, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. fostering awareness of the pedagogical implications of world englishes and elf in teacher. . . 507 references alptektin, c. 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(2003). defining issues in language teaching. oxford: oxford university press. 133 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (1). 2020. 133-157 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.1.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt further exploring the dynamicity, situatedness, and emergence of the self: the key role of context ellen j. serafini george mason university, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8048-9533 eserafi2@gmu.edu abstract drawing on theoretical insights from a complex dynamic systems framework, this work explores the ways that learner selves, as they relate to learning and using languages, manifest across different contexts and timescales and emerge in interaction with various factors. first, a broad overview of dynamically-oriented l2 motivation research is provided before critically considering the need for research that aligns with conceptual advances made under the dynamic turn in sla. in particular, this critical overview highlights a crucial need for more research employing dynamic methods capable of revealing how learner perceptions of self emerge in relation to their interlocutors and in interaction with external factors, including language ideologies that may uniquely characterize sociocultural contexts where target languages other than english are learned. the chapter concludes by discussing ways to implement dynamically oriented methodology that can provide much needed insights into the inherent dynamic, emergent, and contextually and socially embedded nature of learner selves. keywords: complex dynamic systems; l2 motivation; l2 self; learning context 1. introduction the idea that the motivation to learn and maintain the ability to communicate in another language is influenced by context and changes over time is not new. ellen j. serafini 134 parallel to the social turn in the field of second language acquisition (sla) (block, 2003; firth & wagner, 1997), ushioda (1996, 2009) first argued that motivation is best conceived as a process that is dynamic, contextually grounded, and socially mediated in nature and that language learners should be viewed as people, or “persons,” who are located in particular social, cultural and historical contexts. the latter idea developed into the “person-in-context,” relational view of second language (l2) motivation as an organic, nonlinear phenomenon that emerges from relationships between people, which ushioda (2009) summarizes as the following: i mean a focus on real persons, rather than on learners as theoretical abstractions; a focus on the agency of the individual person as a thinking, feeling human being, with an identity, a personality, a unique history and background, a person with goals, motives, and intentions; a focus on the interaction between this self-reflective intentional agent, and the fluid and complex system of social relations, activities, experiences and multiple microand macro-contexts in which the person is embedded, moves, and is inherently part of. (p. 220) this thinking influentially challenged the traditional separation of learner and context and the view of motivation as a static, internal phenomenon residing primarily within the learner with context acting as an isolated background variable that exerts a one-way influence on the learner and language development. in essence, a person-in-context view emphasizes the co-adaptive and mutually influential nature of the relationship between learners and the learning context, in which „learners shape and are shaped by context” (ushioda, 2015, p. 48). within the broad field of learner individual differences (ids), the study of language motivation, in particular its dominant operationalization as the l2 self (dörnyei, 2005, 2009a), has significantly evolved in line with the person-in-context view and dynamically oriented approaches to l2 learning, most notably complex dynamic systems theory (cdst, larsen-freeman, 1997, 2017; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008a). the current article aims to draw on key conceptual insights and methodological tools afforded by this ecological perspective in order to elucidate the complex ways that language learner selves emerge over time through dynamic, reciprocal interactions with context, conceived on both microand macrolevels (king, 2016; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008a; mercer, 2016; ushioda, 2011, 2015). first the article lays the conceptual groundwork of cdst, with a focus on how these principles have transformed our understanding of context and the construct of learner possible selves (dörnyei, 2009a, 2009b, 2010). next, i provide a critical review of previous research investigating the multi-dimensionality and contextual and temporal dynamics of learner selves. the paper concludes by identifying outstanding questions in dynamically oriented research on the self and consider eclectic and innovative methodological approaches capable of providing insights into these questions. further exploring the dynamicity, situatedness, and emergence of the self: the key role of context 135 2. language, learning, and learners as complex dynamic systems simply put, a complex dynamic system (cds) is a system that changes with time (larsen-freeman, 1997). it is emergent, in that its interrelated components not only mutually and continually affect one another (van geert, 1994), but such interactions yield complex, ordered behavior, which is not totally random nor wholly predictable either (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008a). rather, the centrality of variation and nonlinearity in understanding the system is key (larsenfreeman, 2015b). cdss are also sensitive to or dependent on initial conditions such that their trajectories and outcomes will vary depending on where they started. likewise, a complex system is sensitive to feedback and adapts, or “. . . changes in response to feedback from its changing environment” (larsen-freeman, 2015a, p. 16). all complex systems embody these core characteristics, whether they occur in the natural world (e.g., bird migration patterns or a wetland ecosystem), in the business world (e.g., the stock market), or what most concerns applied linguists, during the course of language development. larsen-freeman (1997) first related the principles of complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) to the study of second language acquisition and argued for the need to view l2 development as a dynamic, holistic, relational system, rather than a static set of independent, isolated variables. she argued that this “larger lens” would potentially overcome the traditional divide between the social and the individual cognitive dimensions of sla (larsen-freeman, 2002), an idea that has significantly evolved through transdisciplinary efforts (e.g., beckner et al., 2009; de bot, lowie, & verspoor, 2007; douglas fir group, 2016; larsen-freeman, 2012, 2015b, 2017; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008a; verspoor, de bot, & lowie, 2011). since then, the dynamic turn in sla (de bot, 2015) has not only afforded new ways of “seeing” but also “doing” research (benson, 2019; larsen-freeman, 2018). two interrelated areas of research significantly impacted by this holistic, ecological way of seeing and doing are the study of learner ids and language learning context. the impetus of the id strand of research has traditionally aimed to answer the ‘differential success’ question (larsen-freeman, 2015a), or understanding why individual learners vary in the rate and outcomes of sla. mainstream notions of learner differences portray them as deviations from a norm (dörnyei, 2005, 2010) that are stable and independent from context and other ids. further, the relationship between learners and the contexts in which language learning takes place is seen as one-directional, rather than reciprocal, where the external (i.e., contexts) influences the internal (i.e., learner characteristics) (mercer, 2016; ushioda, 2009, 2015). under the dynamic shift, not only has the theoretical conceptualization of learner ids changed, but so has the differential success question itself. that is, ellen j. serafini 136 learner id constructs are predominantly viewed as constellations of cognitive, motivational, and emotional components that are multidimensional, contextually-embedded, and temporally dynamic (dörnyei, 2009b, 2010) and variability in learning “. . . stems from the ongoing self-organization of systems of activity” (larsen-freeman, 2012, p. 211). that is, developing individuals and their language system “. . . develop owing to the interaction with their environment and principles of self-organization” (verspoor, lowie, & van dijk, 2008, p. 214) and will never be completely stable during a specific period of time. therefore, the relationship among individual learners and their environments is proposed to be continuously changing and mutually influential, rather than static and onedirectional. this not only alters the construct of context itself but also motivates different questions about how the external and internal dimensions of language learning interact over time. one way to illustrate this mutual influencing is in terms of the ‘back and forth’ that occurs in language classrooms between teachers and learners or amongst learners themselves. for example, the ways that learners orient and respond to the input they receive (whether from teachers or other learners) „will affect the content, quantity and quality of further input in the developing context of the interaction” (ushioda, 2015, p. 47). from a cdst perspective, this interaction between interlocutors is understood as “co-adaptation,” or a kind of „mutual influencing” in which change in one system perpetuates change in another connected system (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008b, p. 203). importantly, co-adaptation is thought to not only shape the nature of the linguistic interaction but to also impact each interlocutor’s cognitive and affective resources as well (larsen-freeman, 2020; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008a). however, dynamically-oriented research is only beginning to understand the mechanisms through which co-adaptation takes place, such as mediation through learner perceptions of their interlocutors (serafini, 2020). the following section elaborates on the nature of the learner-context ecosystem under a cdst view with a focus on exemplifying different macro and micro-levels of context. then, i consider how the study of l2 motivation and notions of self have been transformed under cdst. 3. the learner-context ecosystem the term context is not monolithic but refers to „multiple levels of contexts stretching from micro-level interactional contexts to macro-level cultures” (mercer, 2016, p. 13). that is, the context of any communicative event is not a singular entity but rather exists at multiple levels including spatial, temporal, cultural, etc. (king, 2016). according to larsen-freeman and cameron (2008b), contextual further exploring the dynamicity, situatedness, and emergence of the self: the key role of context 137 factors characterizing a language learning or language using activity might include elements of the physical environment such as the seating arrangement of learners in the room, whereas the teaching approach and tasks or materials that are used form part of the pedagogical context. the cultural context can encompass the cultural norms or expectations of teachers and students in a formal learning environment, while social aspects of a communicative context refer to relationships among interlocutors, both inside and outside the classroom. the sociopolitical dimension of context might reflect the societal ideologies about language and bi/multilingualism in general, and the language under study in particular, as well as its perceived social status or prestige. context also refers to cognitive factors that reflect the intrinsic dynamics of the learner, like working memory capacity. king (2016) considers a similar contextual continuum, locating intrapersonal narratives and interpersonal interactions as well as the physical, social and pedagogical dynamics of individual classrooms at the micro-level, to broader macro-level sociocultural and national contexts. importantly, this work also addresses the key concept of temporal context, highlighting the need to study “language learner characteristics and behavior across various timescales of activity” (p. 2). given the hallmark “ebb and flow” of language motivation, the time-frame one adopts is particularly important to consider as motivation can appear to be more or less stable or fluctuating depending on the time-frame analyzed (e.g., over a semester vs. over a week of instruction vs. over the course of a lesson) (larsen-freeman, 2015a). therefore, to avoid spurious results, de bot (2015) recommends collecting developmental data over different levels of granularity to “get the full picture” (p. 36). these multiple, interconnected levels of context are “not separable from the system” (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008b, p. 204) and can be conceptualized in terms of the learner being ‘coupled’ with their environment. in addition to actively participating in shaping the nature of the linguistic exchange, as illustrated in the previous example of input during classroom interaction, “. . . the learner also constitutes part of the dynamic physical, historical, social, and cultural context within which the interaction is taking place” (ushioda, 2015, p. 48). as ushioda argues, this inseparability raises conceptual and empirical questions in terms of conceptualizing and researching the learner-context ecosystem because one must be able to somehow ‘delimit’ context in relation to the learner and decide which external, internal and temporal boundaries of ‘context’ may be relevant to the phenomena under study. to overcome these issues, ushioda recommends “. . . we endeavor to think big and small at the same time” (2015, p. 53) and to think in terms of nested, interconnected external and internal levels of context, while remaining necessarily pragmatic in the selection of focal contextual elements within a single ecosystem. in sum, language learners, the learning process and language itself are fundamentally changed under a cdst view. fundamental to this conceptual transformation ellen j. serafini 138 is the role of context. rather than an isolated, separate entity that exerts effects ‘on’ learner characteristics and language development, context is thought to form an integral part of the whole system. the learner and his/her environment are in an ongoing, mutually influential dynamic in which “contextual factors play a prominent role in pushing or pulling a system toward or away from a certain state” (waninge, dörnyei, & de bot, 2014, p. 706), which in turn leads to systemic variability (verspoor et al., 2008). this implies certain challenges that researchers must be aware of in order to make sound conceptual and methodological decisions about the scope of their research and to meaningfully, yet practically, set contextual and temporal boundaries (see hiver & al-hoorie, 2016, for step-by-step guidelines). the following section offers a broad overview of dynamically-oriented work on l2 motivation with a focus on studies exploring the multi-dimensional, contextual and temporal dynamics of learner possible selves as they have been theorized and explored within the sociodynamic framework of l2 motivation, referred to here as the l2 motivational self-system (l2mss) (dörnyei, 2005, 2009a; dörnyei & ushioda, 2009). 4. dynamic conceptualizations of l2 motivation and the l2 self conceptions of language motivation have evolved from a dominant focus on integrativeness (gardner, 1985, 2001), or the extent to which an l2 learner identifies (psychologically) with and wants to be associated with the target-language community. more recent notions reflect how a learner envisions herself or himself in relation to learning/using language and the attributes she or he would ideally like to possess in the future, encapsulated in the construct of learner possible selves, or “future self-guides” (markus & nurius, 1986) which originates in self-discrepancy theory (higgins, 1987). learner possible selves represent the ways individuals conceptualize and imagine their current and future self-identities and dörnyei was the first to formally adapt these concepts to the domain of second/foreign language learning. he proposed in his l2mss that l2 motivation is driven by the degree to which achieving target language proficiency is integral to one’s imagined identity as a speaker/user of the target language. thus, one’s level of motivation to reduce the perceived gap between current and future self states will lead to action (or not) and thus, positively or negatively impact l2 development. since this influential reconceptualization of l2 motivation, our understanding of the l2 self has further evolved in terms of the ways it functions as a system that is inherently complex, multidimensional in nature, and dynamic across contexts and time. to theoretically account for these dimensions, several researchers have suggested that the self be viewed in terms of a holistic, nested system that not only operates “within ecologies of other motivational systems, but also within other psychological, psycholinguistic, and social systems” (henry, 2017, p. 561). further exploring the dynamicity, situatedness, and emergence of the self: the key role of context 139 4.1. multidimensionality of the self in terms of the multidimensional nature of the self, research tends to focus either on the interconnectedness of cognitive, affective, and emotional subcomponents of ids more generally (e.g., dörnyei, 2009b, 2010, 2017; dörnyei & ryan, 2015; segalowitz & trofimovich, 2012), or the ways language-specific selves are represented, interact, and manifest in multilingual speakers (e.g., henry, 2011, 2017; henry & cliffordson, 2013; lasagabaster, 2016; thompson & erdil-moody, 2014; see thompson, this issue; ushioda, 2017). as previously mentioned, the former area of inquiry has had a broad theoretical impact in challenging problematic conceptual divides, such as the longstanding cognitive/affective id dichotomy in sla (larsen-freeman, 2018), and in questioning the traditional view of ids as stable, modular, and isolated traits. current dominant views portray ids as dynamic systems variables (e.g., henry, davydenko, & dörnyei, 2015; waninge et al., 2014) that act as multicomponential resources, or higher-order integrated wholes, that may potentially function as “powerful attractors” or “stabilizing forces” (dörnyei, 2010, p. 261) in the language learning process. under this view, the ideal l2 self in particular is thought to function as a relatively stable, higher-level constellation of cognition, motivation, and affect (p. 262). within complexity theory, ids are referred to as growers (van geert, 1995), which are limited by nature and posited to interact with one another. that is, learner resources such as memory capacity, input, time, and motivation likely amplify and/or compete with one another’s effects (de bot, 2008), and these interactions are hypothesized to manifest as supportive, competitive, conditional or compensatory relationships (de bot, 2008; verspoor et al., 2011). however, while patterns of interaction among growers are “likely to be different for individual learners” (de bot, 2008, p. 174), little dynamically-oriented research to date has actually explored the interrelationships between the self and other learner ids or resources in l2 development. one key exception is serafini (2017), who explored the variable interactions among cognitive capacity and l2 motivation, conceived under both gardner’s and dörnyei’s models, in instructed l2 learners of spanish at three levels of proficiency over a semester of instruction. cognitive and motivational constructs were found to be differentially involved according to learner proficiency, and relationships among cognitive and motivational growers exhibited both stability and fluctuation over time and by stage of development. specifically, relationships among growers at higher levels of proficiency were more stable, potentially indicating the existence of emergent attractor states, or stable states in system behavior (larsen-freeman, 2012), while the nature of relationships between ids found for beginning learners ellen j. serafini 140 was more variable, likely indicating system reorganization that is typical during transitional phases (de bot et al., 2007; verspoor et al., 2008). in a different strand of research, researchers have drawn on dynamic notions of multilingualism, such as the dynamic model of multilingualism (dmm; herdina & jessner, 2002; jessner, 2008), to theorize about the degree of uniqueness, overlap, and interaction among self-concepts in multilingual speakers (i.e., l1 self, l2 self, l3 self, etc.). for example, recent conceptual work by henry (2017) examines the emergence of multilingual self-guides and the potential effects they may have on l2 motivation. this study was motivated by critiques of the inherent monolingual bias in the core constructs of integrativeness and ideal l2 self in both the socio-educational and socio-dynamic theoretical models of l2 motivation whose assumed reference point is the monolingual native speaker of the target language. henry argues that this ignores the reality of the globalized, multilingual world as well as the other languages the individual may desire to learn, already speak or be in the process of learning (ushioda, 2017). to address this theoretical gap, henry draws on complexity theory and insights afforded within the multilingual (may, 2014) and dynamic (de bot, 2015) turns in sla to contemplate whether students learning two or more foreign languages – and who are in the process of being/becoming multilinguals – might also develop a “multilingual identity” (henry, 2017 p. 558), as well as how that identity might be mentally construed. similar to other nested models of the self, described in the literature (e.g., mercer, 2014, 2015b), henry (2017) proposes that “the motivational systems of the learner’s different languages need to be conceptualized as interrelated systems that are simultaneously constituents within a higher-level multilingual motivational system” (p. 549). specifically, the multilingual motivational self system is proposed to be a subsystem nested within the multilingual identity system. under this model, henry argues that the ideal multilingual self emerges from harmonious, or “mutually complementary” interactions between ideal lx and ideal ly selves, while a contentedly bilingual self may result from competitive or conflicting interactions among a speaker’s selves. importantly, henry argues that multilingual self-guides can generate positive effects on motivation in that “for people who develop an ideal multilingual self, motivation to learn the ly can be greatly enhanced in that developing tl competence becomes part of a larger identity project” (2017, p. 557). other work in multilingual contexts has investigated the nature and outcomes of interactions between learners’ selves in relation to the different languages they know or are learning. for example, henry (2011) conducted focus groups with secondary students in sweden learning two or more languages other than english (lotes) in addition to english. the study revealed how, in l3 learning situations, learners’ l2 english self-concept was frequently active in cognition, further exploring the dynamicity, situatedness, and emergence of the self: the key role of context 141 and how interactions between l2 and l3 self-concepts took place, which, in conjunction with attitudes and beliefs about multilingualism, generated multilingual self-guides. he also reported that students tended to emphasize the sensory and perceptual aspects of being/becoming multilingual and used figurative, metaphorical language to depict openness, empathy, and discovery. in two large-scale quantitative studies using self-report measures, henry and cliffordson (2013) and lasagabaster (2016) investigated the role of learner characteristics (i.e., gender and language-related differences) in the perception and construal of learner possible selves within a multilingual setting, sweden and spain, respectively. specifically, henry and cliffordson investigated genderrelated differences in the ideal l2 self (english) and third language (l3) selves (spanish, german, or french) of 269 secondary adolescent learners studying l2 english and their l3s as compulsory subjects in sweden. participants completed three 5-point likert-scale, self-report questionnaires administered in the l1. significant gender differences were found for the ideal l3 self, but not the ideal l2 self and confirmatory factor analyses revealed that such gender-related differences in the ideal l3 self were mediated by learners’ interdependent self-construal (isc), or how females and males relate to target language speakers and the elaborateness with which they imagine these interactions. similarly, lasagabaster (2016) asked whether the relationship between english-medium instruction (emi), motivation, and possible selves in l3 english is mediated by gender and students’ first language (l1) (basque, spanish, or both) in university students who were voluntarily enrolled in emi in spain. 189 intermediate l3 english learners completed a 6-point likert-scale, self-report questionnaire (67 items). a lack of, or weak, effect sizes led lasagabaster to conclude that gender differences in motivation are neutralized in emi contexts and that one’s native language does not influence the imagined ideal l3 self of emi students. in an english as a foreign language (efl) turkish context, thompson and erdil-moody (2014) investigated the relationship between motivation (conceived as ideal and ought-to l2 selves) and multilingualism, operationalized either as any experience with an l3 or perceived positive language interaction (ppli; thompson & aslan, 2015; see also thompson, this issue). ppli refers to whether multilingual learners perceive positive or negative interactions among the languages they know or are learning as well as how the ideal multilingual self connects to language-specific ideal selves. 159 efl learners completed self-report measures and significant group effects were found for multilingual status for both l3 experience and ppli in relation to the ideal l2 self but no significant group differences emerged for the ought-to l2 self. in a similar large-scale study conducted in the united states, thompson (2017) measured relationships among motivation, language choice, and multilingualism in ellen j. serafini 142 195 university students learning lotes. learners completed a background questionnaire and motivation questionnaires (31 items) that assessed learners’ ideal, ought-to, and anti-ought-to selves in relation to the foreign languages they knew or were learning (34 different languages reported). thompson found that higherlevel multilingual students (those with at least a basic beginning level of proficiency in an l3) had significantly stronger ideal selves than their bilingual peers who only had experience with one fl and also the lower-level multilingual students who had below a basic level in an l3. moreover, within the higher-level multilingual group, the ppli learners who perceived positive language interaction between previously studied fls had a stronger ideal self compared to those who did not, providing empirical support for henry’s model (2017). that is, in contrast to a contentedly bilingual self that is hypothesized to result from competitive or conflicting interactions among a speaker’s selves, the enhanced ideal l3 self perceived by multilingual learners in thompson’s study underscores the role of ppli in generating stronger ideal multilingual self-guides, which henry claims emerge from positive reciprocal interactions between ideal lx and ideal ly selves. the studies reviewed above have revealed key insights into the multidimensional nature of motivational and self-related phenomena in learners who speak and learn multiple languages. however, the majority of studies employed quantitative self-report measures administered at one point in time with large samples of learners, which can be valuable for replicating and generalizing results to different contexts, but arguably limits our understanding of the inherent emergent and situated nature of the self as well as its dynamicity and susceptibility to change (henry, 2015; serafini, 2019). second, although the above studies were carried out in contexts where multiple languages are spoken/learned, most research on learner selves to date has been exclusively carried out in instructed esl/efl contexts (for reviews, see al-hoorie, 2017; boo, dörnyei, & ryan, 2015; sugita mceown, noels, & chaffee, 2014; ushioda, 2017). this gap underscores the need for qualitative research to explore how learner selves evolve in relation to learning lotes and in diverse sociocultural contexts where bi/multilingualism may not be the societal norm and where the symbolic value of and support for linguistic and cultural diversity varies. 4.2. contextual dynamics of the self theoretical discussion and qualitative work by mercer (e.g., 2011a, 2011b, 2014, 2015b, 2016) has been particularly valuable in conceptualizing the situated nature of the self. integrating insights from ushioda’s “person-in-context” view of l2 motivation and theoretical principles in cdst, mercer proposes a network, or relational view, of the self and underscores its emergence in interaction with further exploring the dynamicity, situatedness, and emergence of the self: the key role of context 143 context, which, similar to the broader notion of self-concept, “both influences and is affected by a person’s social contexts and interactions” (mercer, 2011a, pp. 1314). mercer also argues that the self is best construed as “a network of relationships which inherently integrates contexts-both temporal and spatial” (2016, p. 12). thus, the self is constructed in relation to these multiple contextual levels, which encompass the past, present and future and stretch “from micro-level interactional contexts to macro-level cultures” (mercer, 2016, p. 13), for example, from the immediate family context to larger societal attitudes and beliefs. conceived in this way, mercer (2014) has noted the need for multiple theoretical perspectives to motivate research investigating the self, but recommends qualitative methods in order to tap into the subjective meaning that past, present and future contextual factors hold for the individual. in particular, she emphasizes that a learner’s sense of self cannot be understood without employing methods that explore “the learners’ own subjective interpretation of the relevance and meaning of respective contextual factors” (mercer, 2016, p. 17). for example, in previous exploratory work, mercer (2014) used multimedia narratives with four adult efl learners at the university level. learners were asked to portray their sense of self (related to the domain of foreign language learning via a collage, which provided the basis for an in-depth interview or series of interviews). based on a content analysis of the data, mercer used sociogram software to visualize learners’ sense of self as a network of relationships “to things, places, people, events and concepts – past, present, and future” (mercer, 2016, p. 22). she argues that such an approach portrays a broad, holistic view of the self in which contexts inherently form part of the system of relationships. network data can also be generated through questionnaires, interviews and/or observations, but a key consideration and challenge is defining the focus and level of analysis (mercer, 2015a). for example, within an educational setting, “different levels of networks could include, for example, a school class of learners as a network, an individual learner’s language use network, a teacher’s network of professional contacts” (mercer, 2015a, p. 77), among others. thompson and vásquez (2015) also take a narrative approach to explore the motivational profiles (based on the l2mss) and language learning experiences of 3 l1 english non-native speaking teachers of chinese, italian and german. in addition to further fleshing out dörnyei’s model to account for the possibility of psychological reactance, or “the urge to perform an action specifically because someone gave advice to the contrary” (brehm, 1966; brehm & brehm, 1981, as cited in thompson & vásquez, 2015, p. 161), the authors inductively analyzed audio-recorded narrative interviews in which participants narrated their personal foreign language learning journeys. findings illustrate the variation in motivational profiles and how each “was shaped by components of his/her ellen j. serafini 144 immediate social context” (p. 163), leading them to emphasize the need to consider interactions between the self and contextual variables in a variety of settings, particularly non-efl environments. in sum, a contextually grounded, dynamic view of the self aims to maintain the integrity and complexity of the system without reducing the whole to the sum of its parts. methods that are qualitative in nature such as learner biography, narrative, and social network analysis provide particularly effective means for gaining access to learners’ subjective interpretations of the meaning and relevance of context and to portray a relational view of the self as a network. however, while there has been rich conceptual discussion and empirical advances regarding the contextual dynamics of the self, less is known about its temporal dimension. in mercer’s exploratory work, the learner’s sense of self was represented “on a broad level as experienced at the particular moment in time” given that “the dynamics of the self across time were not the focus” (2016, p. 21). while thompson and vásquez (2015) rightfully argue that narratives have a temporal dimension and “provide the opportunity for language learners to reflect back upon their lifelong language learning processes” (p. 161), the focal timescale in a narrative is inherently broad with less potential for revealing temporal dynamism and change at different levels, as well as interaction among them. one key exception is mercer (2015b), detailed in the following section, who examines different facets of the self across broad and narrow timescales. 4.3. temporal dynamics of the self several studies conducted in instructed settings have investigated micro-level change (e.g., over seconds or minutes) and variability in learner ids like willingness to communicate (wtc) and anxiety. for example, a productive line of research led by macintyre and colleagues has aimed to capture the moment-to-moment fluctuations of wtc through innovative methods using idiodynamic software (e.g., macintyre & legatto, 2011). this method requires learners to frequently self-record responses while completing l2 communicative tasks and has also been used in case studies of anxiety (e.g., gregersen, macintyre, & meza, 2014). other classroom studies have investigated factors affecting changes in wtc using both in-class selfratings over the course of a conversation class as well as immediate post-questionnaire reports (pawlak, mystkowska-wiertelak, & bielak, 2016). a growing number of studies have also studied fluctuation in short-term motivation in the classroom (e.g., pawlak, 2012; waninge et al., 2014). for example, waninge et al. analyzed micro-level classroom motivational dynamics in four language learners during six language classes over a period of two weeks. they used an adapted version of the motometer, which learners completed at further exploring the dynamicity, situatedness, and emergence of the self: the key role of context 145 five-minute intervals, as well as classroom observations and a motivation and attitudes questionnaire completed at the end of the study. together these instruments illustrated both fluctuation and stability in individual learners’ motivational development and also demonstrated that motivational phenomena are inseparable from the learner’s individual learning context. importantly, the authors recommend that motivational development be studied over different interacting timescales as “what happens on the minutes scale has an impact on what happens on higher time scales and the other way around” (waninge et al., 2014, p. 707). in contrast to classroom-based studies of wtc and l2 motivation, there has been noticeably less empirical work aimed at revealing change in learner selves in either instructed or naturalistic learning environments. one key exception is a small-scale exploratory study by mercer (2015b), who takes a nested systems approach to the self, which “can be thought of as comprising multiple layers of the self that differ in scope, evolve over different timescales and are interconnected with different types or levels of contexts” (p. 141). this study elicited data over four different macro and micro-level timescales via four different methods from two advanced instructed adult efl learners in a university context. specifically, efl learners’ sense of self/academic self was assessed via open-ended interviews and multimodal narratives on a monthly basis (three total) and weekly journal entries (15-17 total) over a 15-week semester. learners’ working efl self was tapped in the form of likert-scale questionnaires completed every five minutes during three class sessions. at the most micro-level, mercer used idiodynamic software to analyze change in learners’ efl self-confidence on a second-by-second basis while engaging in two speaking tasks together. despite several learner similarities such as age, gender, educational background, and level of proficiency, findings highlighted the inherent individuality in each learner’s self system, particularly in terms of its underlying structure and conceptualization, the identified drivers of change, and patterns of dynamism. for instance, at the macro-level, learners differed in their focus and approach to describing their sense of self (more holistic versus more domain-specific) as well as the way they portrayed their self-beliefs (positivity vs. certainty). factors affecting change were also unique although both learners’ sense of self was strongly affected by interpersonal factors, particularly their interlocutors. for example, degree of familiarity with the interlocutor and a focus on their reactions during the communicative task were what most affected both learners at the idiodynamic level. the interpersonal focus was also prevalent on a more macro-level for one learner, who emphasized affective responses to her experiences with others in the journals and interviews. mercer’s rich qualitative and quantitative methodological approach exploring change on multiple time scales illustrates the connection between social ellen j. serafini 146 and interactional relationships and inherent fluctuation in a learner’s sense of self, which underscores that individuals construct “their identity in relation to a specific [sociocultural, educational, or personal] context, real or imagined” (mercer, 2011a, p. 19). interlocutors are obviously a key part of such contexts, but are often taken for granted and omitted in both the research phases of conceiving of the role an interlocutor’s characteristics may play (beyond being a ‘native speaker’) as well as incorporating them into the phase of methodological design and analysis (gurzynski-weiss, 2017). however, two key studies provide initial insights in this realm within a broader (pellegrino, 2005) and narrower timeframe (serafini, 2020). 5. interlocutors and learner selves: a potential role for co-adaptation and alignment in a longitudinal study conducted in an immersion setting, pellegrino (2005) explored the impact of the interaction between learner-internal factors (e.g., attitudes toward the l2) and external factors (e.g., interlocutors’ personal characteristics) on the self-construction of six native english-speaking l2 learners of russian studying abroad in russia for varying periods (4-10 months). study abroad interlocutors included language instructors, resident directors, host-family members, roommates, or friends and their characteristics encompassed their behaviors, perceived attitudes, and personal characteristics such as gender, age, and physical appearance. a grounded theoretical analysis of learner narrative journal entries and interviews revealed several insights into the evolution of learners’ sense of self in relation to their interlocutors abroad. for example, complimentary comments and behavior exerted a positive influence and served as validation of the self, while attitudes and behaviors perceived as critical negatively impacted learners’ self-esteem and confidence and caused conflict between learners’ real and ideal selves. an interlocutor’s age also played a key role, with many participants reportedly feeling more confident in interactions with older adults and children, whereas interlocutors who were closer in age (i.e., peers or teens) were perceived to be more threatening to one’s status or self-presentation. pellegrino also reported that learners’ sense of self and self-construction gradually relied less on their perceptions of interlocutors over time, elucidating the temporally dynamic relationship between interlocutor characteristics and learner affective outcomes abroad. in a similar study conducted over a two-week experience abroad in ecuador, serafini (2020) took a mixed methods approach to explore the extent to which interlocutor ids mediate learners’ perception and construction of their possible selves, conceived within the l2mss framework (dörnyei, 2009a). to assess daily, weekly, and monthly changes in self-constructs, four learners (three l2; one heritage learner, hl) completed a series of likert-scale, self-report questionnaires on a daily basis, and before, during, and at the conclusion of the program as well as one month further exploring the dynamicity, situatedness, and emergence of the self: the key role of context 147 later. learners also completed a social interaction log to reveal the range, frequency and content of their daily interactions with study abroad interlocutors. to elucidate factors influencing changes in learners’ perceptions of self (as measured quantitatively), learners also completed guided daily journal reflections, which instructed them to reflect on their perceptions of experiences and social interactions with host interlocutors in the target language within the local community, the at-home setting, and the classroom. interlocutors included host family members, spanish teachers, ecuadorian university students, program coordinators, a group excursion tour guide, a faculty program director (i.e., the researcher), and several “miscellaneous” interlocutors (e.g., bus driver, waiter). interlocutors completed a closedand open-ended questionnaire tapping six ids (e.g., language-related training and background, experience working with l2/hl learners, attitudes toward l2/hl learners). inspection of the quantitative data via line graphs and moving max-min graph plots revealed varying degrees of fluctuation and change in learner perceptions of self over time. these different patterns of intra-individual variability were linked to internal factors (e.g., previous experiences learning or using spanish) and interactions and relationships developed with their interlocutors as well as learner perceptions of interlocutor differences. however, the independent measure of interlocutor ids did not always align with learner perceptions of these characteristics as described in the journal reflections. for example, while learners frequently mentioned being inspired by their interlocutors’ high level of bilingualism in spanish and english, which positively reinforced their ideal l2 self, interlocutors themselves did not assess their bilingual skills as highly as learners did. also positive (and negative) interactions with host mothers, teachers, and the excursion tour guide played a key role in how learners perceived and constructed different facets of self, which underscores that the interlocutor not only provides language input and feedback for learners, but is a crucial source of information about themselves, causing conceptions of self to continually be in flux (henry, 2015; pellegrino, 2005). the studies detailed above contribute valuable insights to our understanding of the dynamic, situated nature of learner selves and move us toward a holistic view of learners and their interlocutors as contextually-embedded, dynamic elements of a larger “coupled system” (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008a). however, both studies stop short of revealing the emergent nature of the self through the mutually influential and reciprocal processes of co-adaptation and alignment (larsen-freeman, 2020). that is, while emphasizing the key mechanism of learner perceptions of their interlocutors, neither study demonstrates how learner selves emerge through mutually reciprocal processes nor do they illustrate how both parties emerge changed from their interactions. this ellen j. serafini 148 gap not only limits our understanding of the notion of dynamicity and emergence but also situatedness given that the self is proposed to be sensitive to feedback and to continuously modify through social interaction and the implicated processes of “self-perception, social comparison and self-appraisal” (henry 2015, p. 89). 6. moving toward a dynamic, situated, and emergent understanding of the self to render insights into the true complexity and dynamicity of self-related phenomena, this work concludes by summarizing gaps and considering ways to move forward. 6.1. contextual breadth first, we need a broader representation of sociocultural contexts in order to better understand how learner selves develop in interaction with unique cultural, historical, pedagogical, political, and social factors that are relevant to learning target languages other than english. though an increasing number of studies have investigated the l2 and/or l3 self in a broad range of social and educational settings including, but not limited to, russia (pellegrino, 2005), canada (kim, 2009), sweden (e.g., henry, 2011; henry & cliffordson, 2013), japan (e.g., sampson, 2012), indonesia (e.g., lamb, 2012), turkey (thompson & erdil-moody, 2014), spain (e.g., lasagabaster, 2016, 2017), korea (kim, 2019), and ecuador (serafini, 2020), the overwhelming majority of these studies remain limited to instructed esl/efl contexts, with few exceptions (thompson, 2017). this gap prevents us from understanding how factors operating within cultural, social or sociopolitical dimensions of context (e.g., circulating language ideologies or perceived value and social status associated with different languages and varieties) intersect with learners’ relationship to the target language and culture(s), and thus their perceptions of self. for example, further research is needed within the us context with a focus on the growing number of students who identify as heritage speakers of a minority language like spanish. such speakers often speak socially stigmatized, or “nonstandard,” varieties of spanish and have likely been exposed to harmful ideologies about standard language, whether at home, in the community, in the classroom, or elsewhere (leeman, 2015, 2018). research should explore the degree to which their conceptions of self reflect internalization of or active resistance to such ideologies, or both, and analyze the ways in which these mutually influence one another. in addition to investigating lotes in different sociocultural settings, more selves research is also needed in varying formal and informal learning environments such as instructed heritage language contexts, mixed classes with both l2 learners and heritage speakers, language for specific purposes, service learning or community-based learning, and study abroad or work/volunteer experiences further exploring the dynamicity, situatedness, and emergence of the self: the key role of context 149 abroad (e.g., peace corps). expanding our focus to these contexts would clarify how learner selves are contextually and socially embedded and “coupled” with their environment, leading to a more complex, rather than reductive, understanding of the learner-context ecosystem (ushioda, 2009, 2011, 2015). 6.2. interaction across timescales complex systems such as the self not only operate at different levels of context, they also fluctuate over a range of timescales and these timescales interact. this means that an ideal cdst design requires the study of dynamic systems at different levels of granularity as they evolve over minutes, days, weeks, months, years, etc. (de bot, 2015; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008b). however, as the current review has shown, very few previous studies explore the evolution of the self over both microand macro-levels of granularity with few exceptions (mercer, 2015b). on one hand, large-scale studies tend to be cross-sectional in nature, presenting a static snapshot or “photographic stills rather than moving pictures” (henry, 2015, p. 93). on the other hand, longitudinal small-scale case studies either exclusively focus on motivational phenomena at the micro-level (e.g., seconds or minutes) using idiodynamic methods or a broader timeframe (e.g., the lifespan) via language learning biographies or narratives. moving forward, studies need to measure phenomena over a minimum of one narrow and one broader timescale to compare fluctuations over moments, days, weeks, months and years, and analyze how these different rates of change influence one another and lead to divergent trajectories in the phenomenon under focus. related to the key components of context and time, it is important to note that researchers must differentiate between what is ideal and what is practical in a cdst design. that is, what is conceptually or theoretically desirable is not always feasible. deciding the scope of one’s research and meaningfully, yet practically, setting contextual and temporal boundaries is a recurring challenge in the study of dynamicity, and one that has received considerable attention (e.g., hiver & al-hoorie, 2016; larsen-freeman, 2012; mercer, 2015a). 6.3. longitudinal mixed methods designs related to levels of granularity, one key methodological decision in exploring complex, dynamic systems is the number of time points of data collection. given that variability “is an intrinsic property of a self-organizing system” (verspoor et al., 2008, p. 219), it is necessary to take a longitudinal approach that includes repeated measurements and a high density of observations relative to the rate of change in order to reveal the degree and patterns of variability. this variability ellen j. serafini 150 not only enables us to compare intra-individual complexity to group-level patterns (hiver & al-hoorie, 2016), but also reveals more about the developmental process in that high variability may indicate phases of transition and system reorganization whereas low variability may reveal more stability (verspoor et al., 2008). further, particularly appropriate to the longitudinal study of complex systems is the use of “combinations or blends of methodologies” (larsen-freeman, 2015b, p. 233), which should elicit and examine data through both quantitative and qualitative means (verspoor et al., 2011). for example, self-report questionnaires or surveys should be completed at multiple points over longer timescales and idiodynamic measures or other innovative instruments like the motometer (waninge et al., 2014) should be administered over shorter timescales. to elucidate and explain data obtained via quantitative measures, it is essential to also employ qualitative methods such as longitudinal autobiographies, language learning narratives, journal reflections, interviews, and focus groups, among others. these methods allow essential access to first-person insights into the personal significance of contextual factors (mercer, 2016). sociograms are a useful tool to analyze “the social network structures that underlie linguistic interaction” (beckner et al., 2009, p. 17) and ethnographic methods that include participant and/or nonparticipant observations of learner interactions in the classroom, community, and beyond1 can provide rich insight into the myriad contexts in which the learner functions. analyzing repeated observations of learner interactions with others is particularly important for revealing the emergent nature of learner selves, which is a key gap in previous research, as argued throughout this article. in particular, researchers should focus on the degree of alignment between interlocutors and the reciprocal, reflexive nature of co-adaptation “in which change in one system leads to change in another system connected to it, and this mutual influencing continues over time” (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008b, p. 203). focusing on this type of mutual causality and what unfolds between interlocutors within a particular context can overcome the traditional one-sided focus on the learner and reveal how all parties emerge changed or affected by the enactment (larsen-freeman, 2020). 6.4. large-scale replication and small-scale case studies finally, both large-scale replication and small-scale exploratory studies are necessary in order to address the broader question of the extent to which the self is situated versus being a more global construct (e.g., mercer 2011a, 2011b, 2014, 1 regardless of the area of inquiry, researchers should critically reflect on ethical considerations in longitudinal researcher-participant relationships and how participants benefit or are affected by the outcomes (see consoli & aoyama, 2019). further exploring the dynamicity, situatedness, and emergence of the self: the key role of context 151 2015a, 2016). while cdst warrants change from a traditional focus on hypothesis testing and generalizability of results, a means analysis of large-scale data to confirm or reject hypotheses and make generalizations regarding populations of learners can still inform dynamically oriented research (verspoor et al., 2008). for instance, serafini (2019) argues that conceptual replication may serve as a first step to address the degree to which learner possible selves are generalizable across diverse social and educational contexts and in relation to learning lotes, but must be complemented by longitudinal, mixed methods case studies that are more in line with the dynamic conceptualization of the self as a multidimensional construct that is contextually situated across time and space. 7. conclusions overall, the dynamic turn in sla has led to a more holistic conceptualization of ids in language learning more generally, and the self in particular, which has fundamentally transformed the questions we ask and the ways we try to answer them (benson, 2019). however, there is a need to reconcile theory and research practice as the ways we investigate these constructs have not kept up with the pace of conceptual advances in the field. as benson (2019) argues, the field is entering an era of ‘person-centeredness’ in which individual learners are conceived as socially and contextually embedded beings. to keep moving forward, it is hoped that the critical review and methodological recommendations discussed here will spur dynamically oriented research toward further 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(2011). a dynamic system approach to willingness to communicate: developing an idiodynamic method to capture rapidly changing affect. applied linguistics, 32, 149-171. may, s. (ed.). (2014). the multilingual turn: implications for sla, tesol, and bilingual education. new york, ny: routledge. markus, h. r., & nurius, p. (1986). possible selves. american psychologist, 41, 954-969. mercer, s. (2011a). towards an understanding of language learner self-concept. dordrecht: springer. mercer, s. (2011b). language learner self-concept: complexity, continuity and change. system, 39, 335-346. mercer, s. (2014). the self from a complexity perspective. in s. mercer & m. williams (eds.), multiple perspectives on the self in sla (pp. 160-176). bristol, uk: multilingual matters. mercer, s. (2015a). social network analysis and complex dynamic systems. in z. dörnyei, p. d. macintyre, & a. henry (eds.), motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 73-82). buffalo, ny: multilingual matters. mercer, s. 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(2015). context and complex dynamic systems theory. in z. dörnyei, p. d. macintyre, & a. henry (eds.), motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 47-54). bristol: multilingual matters. ushioda, e. (2017). the impact of global english on motivation to learn other languages: towards an ideal multilingual self. modern language journal, 101, 469-482. van geert, p. l. c. (1994). dynamic systems of development: change between complexity and chaos. new york: harvester wheatsheaf. van geert, p. l. c. (1995). growth dynamics in development. in r. f. port & t. van gelder (eds.), mind as motion: explorations in the dynamics of cognition (pp. 313-338). cambridge, ma: bradford books/the mit press. verspoor m. h., de bot k., & lowie w. (eds.). (2011). a dynamic approach to second language development: methods and techniques. amsterdam: john benjamins. verspoor, m. h., lowie, w., & van dijk, m. 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(2014). motivational dynamics in language learning: change, stability, and context. modern language journal, 98, 704-723. 339 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (2). 2016. 339-343 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.2.8 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book review early learning and teaching of english: new dynamics of primary english editors: jelena mihaljević djigunović, marta medved krajnović publisher: multilingual matters, 2015 isbn: 9781783093380 pages: 240 although the changing dynamics of language instruction and acquisition is constantly attracting attention, the diverse angles adopted by the researchers are far from exhausted. while some studies focus on modern trends across different age levels (e.g., hinkel & fotos, 2008), others offer a more theoretical overview (e.g., frankenberg-garcia, flowerdew, & aston, 2011). this leaves researchers specializing in early efl instruction like myself with a feeling that this dynamically developing area is somewhat neglected. even though a number of publications deal with the topic of young learners, they mostly offer single glimpses into the nature of teaching and learning english (e.g., gonzaĺez davies, & taronna, 2012) or are set in a second, rather than foreign language environment (e.g., howard, sugarman, & christian, 2003). therefore, the recently published volume early learning and teaching of english. new dynamics of primary teaching has been a long awaited title for anyone scientifically or practically involved in teaching english to young learners. the book comprises a selection of longitudinal research projects into how english is learnt and taught in croatian primary schools. the studies were conducted 340 within the framework of a croatian national five-year long research project learning english from an early age: analysis of learner language. the remarkably wide scope of these studies offers valuable insight into language learning and teaching across a long period of time. changes reported in the book have not been observed overnight, nor are they a result of chance but rather testify to a dynamics in language acquisition that has been meticulously studied by the researchers over a span of a few years in the reality of a primary classroom. the volume consists of nine chapters, all of which (with one exception only) were written by scholars from the university of zagreb, croatia. although it may seem rather hermetic, it is fully justified by the fact that all the presented research has been part of a national project. limiting the scope of the research to one socio-cultural setting might seem to unnecessarily narrow down the perspective. however, the issues raised in the studies and the areas of language acquisition addressed are, in my opinion, largely universal and the findings are applicable to other european contexts. each article situates the study within the research tradition of the respective linguistic area discussed, provides relevant empirical evidence and identifies pedagogical implications for practical classroom application. the opening chapter offers an overview of the context in which the study was carried out. it describes briefly the educational policy of croatia and defines the broad aims of the national project the following studies pertain to. chapter two explores the issue of individual differences, focusing on the affective factors and, more specifically, on motivation, attitudes and self-concept. the author investigates the connections between affective factors, age and language proficiency. as a result of a three-year long study, separate trajectories have been determined and correlations between some of the researched factors have proved to be significant. in chapter three, emphasis is laid on identifying the importance of pronunciation in contemporary english-as-a-foreign-language primary classroom. this chapter, in my opinion, merits special attention as it offers a fresh, if at times controversial, perspective on how english is perceived by primary school learners, many of whom are defined by the author as “users,” that is, “participants whose proficiency is generally higher than that of their peers, but who do not believe much in formal classes within the education system” (p. 43). dynamic changes in the availability of exposure to english outside school have influenced students’ perception of what is and what is not useful to them. these beliefs, in turn, affect their willingness to acquire pronunciation models that are nativelike but less comprehensible in international communication than their corrupted forms. the author provokes a very interesting discussion of the question whether this tendency of shifting from english as a foreign language (efl) to english as a lingua franca (elf) should be promoted (especially in the case of 341 noncore features) in a language classroom or discouraged in favour of the model native pronunciation. the subject of the study presented in chapter four is acquisition of definiteness and indefiniteness markers assessed on the basis of written production. chapters five and six take up the issue of acquiring temporal meanings of grammar structures. the former concentrates on the stages of mastering the ways to express the present through analyses of oral samples from a cognitive (conceptualization, grammaticalization and emergentism) and sla (crosslinguistic influence and language transfer) perspectives. the latter explores the processes of identifying temporal meanings of present and past verbs in narrative discourse. the focus here is on young learners’ acquisition of the meaning of verb forms in context throughout five years of efl instruction. chapter seven investigates conceptual preferences in forming meaning relations. the author examines the process of lexical and structural formation of networks in young learners’ mental lexicons. chapter nine discusses correlations between an increase in receptive skills proficiency, and individual and contextual factors. in the closing chapter, the author assumes the dynamic systems perspective in order to explore the process of increasing linguistic complexity in oral production. undoubtedly, the greatest value of this book lies in its longitudinal approach to the research. the context of primary school education allowed a prolonged study period of the same participants, which enabled the researchers to record individual and group progress across a few years of formal efl instruction. such a design offers much better insights into the linguistic processes which were investigated than a short, one-off intervention. the persistence of the researchers is also admirable as they worked on their projects for years rather than months. the overall impression this volume leaves me with is one of a professional analysis paired with genuine care for the young learners’ linguistic development. apart from detailed statistical analyses, some chapters (e.g., chapter two and chapter seven) also offer much more insightful, in my opinion, qualitative analyses. the authors have been able to observe changes in the role of the classroom teaching caused by out-of-school exposure to the target language and digitalisation of life. above all, however, they manifest a very openminded attitude to formal efl education in primary school context. their comments reflect strong beliefs in young learners’ abilities to process the language more naturally than many teachers expect, a stand that i strongly support. as geld points out, for instance, “we can easily imagine a young learner of english acquiring a new form and effortlessly attaching it to conceptual content she had acquired in her l1” (p. 151). this is an argument that has been maintained for years, and yet not very widespread especially in lower primary efl education. similarly, chapters focusing on grammar, beside scientific data analyses, present explanations of young learners’ perceptions of efl that may for some (especially 342 teachers) be surprising and inspiring. narančić kovač and milkowić explain why teachers avoid using more complex structures or what the authors call the “difficult past tense” in primary school context identifying this fear as “the widespread, and sometimes unconscious, misconception that children need to understand the formal grammatical features of certain structures to be able to use them properly” (p. 144). as a result, instead of the natural forms teachers use corrupted or nonnative variation, depriving their students of the challenging opportunity to infer the meaning from the context and to implicitly acquire target language structure. all the positive qualities of the book described above considerably outweigh its weaknesses. it seems, however, that there are many more other areas worth exploring in the research area of early learning and teaching of efl. what i missed was a chapter on content and language integrated learning (clil), a mode of teaching english very dynamically spreading across primary (and preprimary) education. other issues, i feel, could have been explored further. for example, the issue of the interference of elf with native-like model pronunciation teaching could have been broadened to encompass also lexical and structural simplifications. finally, with the exception of chapter one, all other studies focused mainly on the linguistic aspects of efl, neglecting the equally interesting socioand psycholinguistic issues that no doubt played a part in students’ development. the approach to researching early learning and teaching of english from a classroom perspective, as illustrated in this book, is an important step forward from current trends of desktop analyses of data sets gathered through questionnaires in less controlled settings. most of the research findings discussed in this volume have clear pedagogical implications and can inform formal instruction, offering an incentive for a real change in an efl classroom. this volume offers valuable insight into the nature and dynamics of efl acquisition and formal instruction from a first-hand experience of a language classroom. it is my sincere hope that this book, a very interesting publication not only for primary efl researchers but also for in-service and prospective teachers, will be both a refreshing and thought-provoking read. reviewed by anna parr-modrzejewska university of łódź, poland anna.parr@uni.lodz.pl 343 references hinkel, e., & fotos, s. (eds.). (2008). new perspectives in grammar teaching in second language classrooms. hillsdale: lawrence erlbaum. frankenberg-garcia, a., flowerdew, l., & aston, g. (2011). new trends in corpora and language learning. london: continuum. gonzaĺez davies, m., & taronna, a. (eds.). (2012). new trends in early foreign language learning: the age factor, clil and languages in contact. bridging research and good practices. newcastle: cambridge scholars. howard, e. r., sugarman, j., & christian, d. (2003). trends in two-way immersion education: a review of the research. washington, dc: center for applied linguistics. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: achilleas kostoulas (university of graz, austria) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (pedagogical university of kraków, poland) vol. 8 no. 2 june 2018 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, university of new south wales, sydney) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo) kata csizér (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) robert dekeyser (university of maryland) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (curtin university, perth) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) carol griffiths (fatih university, istanbul) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) sarah mercer (university of graz) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) bonny norton (university of british columbia) terrence odlin (ohio state university) rebecca l. oxford (university of maryland) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (university of pannonia, trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto) elaine tarone (university of minnesota) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) stuart webb (university of western ontario) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2018 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: jakub bielak achilleas kostoulas mariusz kruk aleksandra wach © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: jakub bielak, melanie ellis, achilleas kostoulas, mariusz kruk, aleksandra wach cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 100 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · scopus · web of science emerging sources citation index (esci) · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the clarivate analytics (formerly thomson reuters) master journal list. special issue: language learning strategies: linking with the past, shaping the future editors: rebecca l. oxford mirosław pawlak studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 8, number 2, june 2018 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ....................................................................181 editorial .........................................................................................187 articles: yajun zeng, christine c. m. goh – a self-regulated learning approach to extensive listening and its impact on listening achievement and metacognitive awareness ......................................................................193 kouider mokhtari, dimiter m. dimitrov, carla a. reichard – revising the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi) and testing for factorial invariance ....................................................................219 rosa m. manchón – past and future research agendas on writing strategies: conceptualizations, inquiry methods, and research findings.............247 mirosław pawlak – investigating the use of speaking strategies in the performance of two communicative tasks: the importance of communicative goal .................................................................................................. 269 mirosław pawlak, magdalena szyszka – researching pronunciation learning strategies: an overview and a critical look ....................... 293 peter yongqi gu – validation of an online questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies for esl learners ......................................................325 mirosław pawlak – grammar learning strategy inventory: another look ......................................................................................................................351 julie m. sykes, andrew d. cohen – strategies and interlanguage pragmatics: explicit and comprehensive .......................................................................... 381 rebecca l. oxford, christina gkonou – interwoven: culture, language, and learning strategies .................................................................... 403 mirosław pawlak, zuzanna kiermasz – the use of language learning strategies in a second and third language: the case of foreign language majors .............................................................................................. 427 melissa williamson hawkins – self-directed learning as related to learning strategies, self-regulation, and autonomy in an english language program: a local application with global implications ........................................445 yalun zhou, michael wei – strategies in technology-enhanced language learning ............................................................................................................... 471 carmen m. amerstorfer – past its expiry date? the sill in modern mixed-methods strategy research .............................................................. 497 mirosław pawlak, rebecca l. oxford – conclusion: the future of research into language learning strategies ............................................................... 525 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 537 181 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors carmen m. amerstorfer is senior scientist at the department of english at alpen-adria-universität klagenfurt (aau), austria. she has a long-standing and intense curiosity about strategic foreign and second language learning, nurtured by her experience as an l2 learner and teacher in austria, the uk, the netherlands, and china. she currently teaches methodology courses in the english teacher education program at aau and develops problem-oriented teaching materials to encourage students’ self-regulation and teamwork. in 2015, she organized the first international conference on language learning strategies entitled “situating strategy use: language learning strategies and individual learner characteristics” (ssu1), which is continued biennially. contact details: alpen-adria-universität klagenfurt; department of english; universitätsstraße 65-67, 9020 klagenfurt, austria (carmen.amerstorfer@aau.at) andrew d. cohen is professor emeritus from the university of minnesota. he co-edited language learning strategies with ernesto macaro (2007, oxford university press), co-authored teaching and learning pragmatics with noriko ishihara (2014, routledge), and authored strategies in learning and using a second language (2011, routledge) and the learning of pragmatics from native and nonnative language teachers (2018, multilingual matters). in addition, he published two articles in system on language learner strategies in march and may of 2018, respectively. contact details: 1555 lakeside drive #182, oakland, ca 94612, usa (adcohen@umn.edu) dimiter m. dimitrov, phd, is a senior psychometrician at the national center for assessment in riyadh, saudi arabia, and professor emeritus at george mason university, usa. his current research relates to validation of assessment scales, test scoring and equating, and latent variable modeling. contact details: the national center for assessment, 3329 al ghazalah, an nasiriyah, riyadh 12732 8490, saudi arabia (ddimitro@gmu.edu) 182 christina gkonou, phd, is assistant professor and ma tesol program leader in the department of language and linguistics at the university of essex, uk. she is also deputy director of education in the same department. she convenes postgraduate modules on teacher education and development, and on psychological aspects surrounding foreign language learning and teaching experience. she is the co-editor of new directions in language learning psychology (2016, springer) and new insights into language anxiety: theory, research and educational implications (2017, multilingual matters), and co-author of mye: managing your emotions questionnaire. contact details: university of essex, department of language and linguistics, colchester co4 3wa, uk (cgkono@essex.ac.uk) christine goh is professor of linguistics and language education at the national institute of education, nanyang technological university, singapore. she teaches graduate courses, provides professional development for english language teachers and supervises doctoral research in her areas of interest: second language listening and speaking, learner metacognition and teacher cognition. she publishes extensively in these areas and her work has been widely cited. contact details: national institute of education, 1 nanyang walk, singapore 637616 (christine.goh@nie.edu.sg) peter yongqi gu is associate professor at the school of linguistics and applied language studies, victoria university of wellington, new zealand. his main research interests include language learning strategies, vocabulary acquisition, and language testing and assessment. contact details: school of linguistics and applied language studies, victoria university of wellington, po box 600, wellington, 6140, new zealand (peter.gu@vuw.ac.nz) melissa hawkins is manager of accreditation and teacher development for the into uab english language programs at the university of alabama at birmingham (uab), usa. she is pursuing a doctorate in educational studies of diverse populations at uab. her experience includes university teaching in belgium, japan, and the united states, directing a language program start-up, and managing an intensive english program. her research interests include language learning strategies, language learner identities, and the impact of university internationalization on teaching practices. contact details: into uab english language programs, 917 13th street s., 2nd fl., birmingham, al 35203, usa (melissaw@uab.edu) 183 zuzanna kiermasz is a phd student at the department of english language and applied linguistics in the institute of english of university of łódź, poland, where she teaches teacher training courses. she is also an english language teacher in the language centre at łódź university of technology. her research interests include language learning strategies, bilingualism and multilingualism. contact details: institute of english, łódź university, ul. pomorska 171/173, łódź, poland (zuzannakiermasz@gmail.com) rosa m. manchón is professor of applied linguistics at the university of murcia, spain, where she teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in instructed second language acquisition and research methodology. she has published extensively on l2 writing processes and strategies in the form of journal articles (which have appeared in prestigious journals), contributions to collective works, and edited and co-edited books of her own. she is currently the head researcher of two comprehensive programs of research on the cognitive dimension of second language writing, with a special focus on the manner in which writing itself and the processing of written feedback can lead to language learning. contact details: departamento de filología inglesa, facultad de letras, campus la merced, plaza de la universidad s/n, 30071 murcia, spain (manchon@um.es) kouider mokhtari, interdisciplinary phd, serves as the anderson-vukelja-wright endowed professor of literacy at the university of texas at tyler, usa. his research focuses on metacognition and reading comprehension by first and second language readers. he has published extensively in these areas and his work has been widely cited. contact details: college of education & psychology, the university of texas at tyler, 3900 university blvd., tyler, texas 75709, usa (kmokhtari@uttyler.edu) rebecca l. oxford, phd, is professor emerita and distinguished scholar-teacher, university of maryland, usa. her lifetime achievement award states, “oxford’s research on learning strategies changed the way the world teaches languages.” she now teaches graduate courses at the university of alabama at birmingham. oxford has published five learning-strategy books, including such as teaching and researching language learning strategies: self-regulation in context (2017, routledge) and language learning strategies and individual learner characteristics (with carmen m. amerstorfer, 2018, bloomsbury) and books on teaching methods, culture, and motivation (1990, 1995, 1996). her books on peace (the language of peace: communicating to create harmony, 2013; understanding peace cultures, 2014; peacebuilding in language education: innovations in theory 184 and practice, with matilde olivero and tammy gregersen, forthcoming), spirituality, and transformative education reflect oxford’s lifelong passions. she currently co-edits two book series: transforming education for the future (information age) and spirituality, research, and education (springer) and earlier coedited the tapestry program, a 69-volume efl/esl textbook series. she has edited and co-edited earlier special issues on learning strategies and is delighted to work with dr. mirosław pawlak on this special issue. contact details: 7608 saxon dr. sw, huntsville, al 35802, usa (rebeccaoxford@gmail.com) mirosław pawlak is professor of english in the english department, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts of adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland, and department of research on language learning and teaching, faculty of philology, state university of applied sciences, konin, poland. his main areas of interest are formfocused instruction, corrective feedback, pronunciation teaching, classroom interaction, learner autonomy, learning strategies, motivation and willingness to communicate. his most recent publications include error correction in the foreign language classroom. reconsidering the issues (2015, springer), willingness to communicate in instructed second language acquisition: combining a macroand micro-perspective (with anna mystkowska-wiertelak, 2017, multilingual matters), and several edited collections on learner autonomy, form-focused instruction, speaking in a foreign language, classroom-oriented research and individual learner differences. he is editor of the journals studies in second language learning and teaching and konin language studies, as well as the book series second language learning and teaching, published by springer. contact details: department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, ul. nowy świat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl) carla reichard, phd, is assistant director of sponsored research at the university of texas at tyler, usa. her research interests include metacognition, measurement, and student retention. contact details: college of education & psychology, the university of texas at tyler, 3900 university blvd., tyler, texas 75709, usa (creichard@uttyler.edu) julie sykes the director of casls and associate professor in the department of linguistics. her research focuses on applied linguistics and second language acquisition with an emphasis on technological and pedagogical innovation for interlanguage pragmatic development and intercultural competence. she has published a variety of articles on call-related topics, including synchronous computer185 mediated communication and pragmatic development, gaming and call, and lexical acquisition in digitally mediated environments. she was awarded the 2018 university of oregon research award for impact and innovation. contact details: casls, university of oregon, 1600 millrace suite 201, eugene, or, usa (jsykes@uoregon.edu) magdalena szyszka is assistant professor at the department of applied linguistics in the institute of english of opole university, poland. she teaches, among others, phonetics and teacher training courses. her research interests comprise pronunciation learning strategies, language anxiety in foreign language acquisition and pronunciation teaching. she is an author of the book pronunciation learning strategies and language anxiety: in search of an interplay (2017, springer). contact details: institute of english, opole university, pl. kopernika 11a, opole, poland (mszyszka@uni.opole.pl) michael wei, phd, is associate professor and tesol program director in the division of teacher education and curriculum studies at university of missourikansas city, usa. he teaches graduate courses in linguistics, english grammar, second language acquisition and research methods. his research interests include second language acquisition, phonetics, reading/writing english as a second language, and learning environments. contact details: 319 education building, school of education, university of missouri, kansas city, mo 64110, usa (weiyou@umkc.edu) yajun zeng, phd, graduated from the national institute of education, nanyang technological university, singapore. he is associate professor of applied linguistics in the school of foreign studies and director of international office (dean of international college) at yangtze university, p. r. china. his research interests span linguistic, cognitive, sociocultural and motivational factors in l2 listening development, critical thinking ability development for efl learners at university settings, and teacher identity, metacognition and self-regulated learning (srl) in language teacher development at tertiary institutions in china. he has published two books and more than 30 journal articles in china and abroad. he is principal investigator of a provincial government-funded research project and co-pi of another corporate-funded project. contact details: international office, yangtze university, nanhu road 1, jingzhou city, hubei province, p. r. china (zyajun@yangtzeu.edu.cn) 186 yalun zhou, phd, is an assistant professor in the department of communication and media at rensselaer polytechnic institute, troy, usa. she teaches courses in english for academic communication and chinese language and culture. she publishes research in the areas of early childhood l2 literacy, l2 academic writing, and instructed second language acquisition with technology. she also works on pedagogical design in immersive language learning environments with emerging technologies. contact details: rensselaer polytechnic institute, 110 8th street, troy, ny 12180, usa (zhouy12@rpi.edu) 395 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (3). 2016. 395-422 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.3.3 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the interface between research on individual difference variables and teaching practice: the case of cognitive factors and personality adriana biedroń pomeranian university, słupsk, poland adrianabiedron@wp.pl mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl abstract while a substantial body of empirical evidence has been accrued about the role of individual differences in second language acquisition, relatively little is still known about how factors of this kind can mediate the effects of instructional practices as well as how empirically-derived insights can inform foreign language pedagogy, both with respect to shaping certain variables and adjusting instruction to individual learner profiles. the present paper is an attempt to shed light on the interface between research on individual difference factors and teaching practice, focusing upon variables which do not easily lend themselves to external manipulation, namely intelligence, foreign language aptitude, working memory and personality, with the role of the last of these in language learning being admittedly the least obvious. in each case, the main research findings will briefly be outlined, their potential for informing instruction will be considered, and, in the final part, the caveats concerning practical applications of research on the variables in question will be spelled out. keywords: individual differences; intelligence; foreign language aptitude; working memory; personality adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak 396 1. introduction there have recently been several attempts to relate the findings of research into individual difference (id) variables in the field of second language acquisition (sla) to everyday foreign language instruction,1 as superbly demonstrated, for example, in the book-length overviews by gregersen and macintyre (2014), or williams, mercer, and ryan (2015), and pedagogical implications also tend to be included in volumes devoted to specific id factors (e.g., dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014; oxford, 2011). nevertheless, there is a clear need to take stock of what has thus far been accomplished in this respect, bring together some of the loose threads, and address the question whether, to what extent and in what ways such research could inform classroom practices. with this in mind, the present paper, intended as the first in a sequence of two dedicated to the consideration of practical applications of empirical investigations into selected id variables, focuses on factors which are believed to be relatively stable, or, at best, malleable only to a minute degree in response to external manipulation, that is, intelligence, foreign language (fl) aptitude, working memory (wm) and personality. the conviction that these variables are by and large immune to pedagogical intervention originates in classical cognitive psychology, which views cognitive id factors as latent traits, determined by genetic and environmental influences, with the contribution of the former having been much more thoroughly scrutinized and much more firmly confirmed (jensen, 1997; plomin, 1997; plomin & deary, 2015). research into these factors, which are crucial in the process of l2 learning, has a long tradition in sla (see dörnyei, 2005, 2009; dörnyei & ryan, 2015; ellis, 2008; pawlak, 2012). by the same token, personality is also seen as a relatively stable and universal trait, determined by both genes and the environment (see mccrae & costa, 2003), although its role in learning an fl is less obvious than, for example, that of aptitude. in what follows, first, general perspectives on the status of cognitive id variables and personality in language learning will be considered and the ways in which the interface between research and everyday teaching practice can be approached will be highlighted. this will be followed by a more detailed discussion of this interface in the case of the id variables in question, and the paper will close with an evaluation of the extent to which research on ids has succeeded in informing language pedagogy as well as the consideration of the limitations of empirically-derived insights for successfully influencing language instruction in the classroom. 1 the terms second and foreign are used interchangeably in the present paper to refer to any language that an individual might be learning in addition to his or her mother tongue. the same caveat applies to the terms acquisition and learning, which are meant here to refer to the general process of gaining mastery of an additional language. the interface between research on individual difference variables and teaching practice: the case. . . 397 2. the role of cognitive factors and personality in sla although ids are considered to be influential variables affecting both the process of second language learning and the outcomes of this process, their status, understood in terms of their contribution to the outcomes of fl learning, is varied, and so is the amount of research devoted to them. generally speaking, it is possible to identify in sla theory and research several key hypotheses concerning cognitive ids and personality traits. they could be summarized as follows: 1. most ids are heterogeneous constructs, composed of several factors, entering into intricate interactions, both with each other and with the environment (dörnyei & skehan, 2003; robinson, 2002). the corollary of this characterization is that it would be unreasonable to assume that all the diverse id factors, also such that are hypothesized to be constitutive components of a given variable (e.g., phonemic coding ability in the case of fl aptitude), can be put on a par with respect to their stability and trainability. 2. different factors are relevant to different learning stages, skills and subsystems (cf. robinson, 2002; skehan, 2002), which means that learners can benefit from them to varying degrees under different instructional conditions, in various learning situations and while performing specific tasks in the classroom, also such that they are confronted with in the real world. 3. all the factors are in a constant flux, and they influence each other dynamically, with the effect that, in line with the tenets of dynamic systems theory, they should be seen as constellations of variables rather that single entities (see dörnyei, 2005, 2009, 2010; dörnyei & ryan, 2015; gregersen & macintyre, 2015; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). what logically follows is that, for example, fl aptitude cannot be considered in separation from, say, motivation, since they are bound to remain in constant, dynamic interaction. in fact, empirical evidence for the existence of such interdependencies has been provided by neuroscience. for example, the neurotransmitter dopamine has been found to affect such attributes and processes as wm, language learning motivation and learning reinforcement, defossilisation, and the effectiveness of learning grammar (see e.g., schumann, 2004; wong, morgan-short, ettlinger, & zheng, 2012). empathy, on the other hand, can be more relevant for pronunciation attainment at advanced stages of learning than wm (hu et al., 2013). 4. most people can succeed in fl learning, with success being interpreted in terms of the attainment of adequate levels of communicative ability, given that they manifest high motivation and have access to a conducive environment (e.g., copious opportunities for interaction in the target adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak 398 language). over the last several years, for example, evidence has accumulated that adept reliance on language learning strategies as well as self-motivation strategies can boost the effectiveness of the language learning process, even after the closure of critical or sensitive periods,2 regardless of whether such strategies have been recommended by specialists, suggested by the teacher or developed by the learner himself or herself (gregersen & macintyre, 2014; moyer, 2013). broadly speaking, two tendencies can be recognized with respect to the theory-practice nexus in research on id factors: (a) a qualitative/quantitative change due to training, and (b) aptitude-treatment interaction (ati). the former pertains in the main to wm, which is considered to be the most trainable of cognitive ids (söderqvist & nutley, 2015). the latter embraces the application of compensatory or matching approaches, aimed at, respectively, compensating for learners’ weaknesses or adjusting instructional practices to their strengths, and it can be extended to other ids, such as motivation, learning styles or learning strategies (gregersen & macintyre, 2014). in other words, even if some factors appear to be stable and their modification is hardly feasible, teachers have at their disposal an array of other possible pedagogic interventions, which might involve matching learners’ cognitive-affective profiles to instructional techniques, creating varied assessment criteria for learners depending on the level of their fl aptitude, raising students’ awareness with reference to their strengths and weaknesses, or attempting to alter counter-productive, outcome-related attributions or beliefs (e.g., by changing causal ascription from lack of ability to lack of effort). these issues will be considered in more detail in the following sections in which the selected cognitive ids and personality are dealt with separately. 3. intelligence the factor that has been most thoroughly examined in cognitive and genetic psychology and at the same time is the least amenable to pedagogic intervention is intelligence. it should also be noted at the outset that the contribution of this variable to the processes and outcomes of l2 learning has largely remained on the sidelines of sla research. following sasaki's (1996) and skehan's (1998) suggestions, intelligence is believed to affect only analytical abilities and be of little relevance for success in language learning. evidently, this reasoning is based on limited and outdated evidence from 20 years ago, when a two-factor 2 even though the concept of the critical or sensitive period is debatable in the field of sla (e.g., singleton, 2014), many researchers (e.g., abrahamsson & hyltenstam, 2008; long, 2013) provide a substantial body of empirical evidence to confirm its significance. the interface between research on individual difference variables and teaching practice: the case. . . 399 approach to intelligence (i.e., verbal vs. nonverbal) prevailed. moreover, in western education, which has been dominated by socialization theories (cf. scarr, 1997), intelligence is a factor too often shamefully but at the same time conveniently swept under the carpet. this is undeniably a major oversight as this is a powerful variable encompassing a multitude of other cognitive ids, which themselves correlate with one another. a contemporary definition of intelligence, offered by plomin and deary (2015), is as follows: although there are many types of cognitive ability tests of individual differences, they almost all correlate substantially and positively; people with higher ability on one cognitive task tend to have higher ability on all of the others. intelligence (more precisely, general cognitive ability or g, as discovered and defined by spearman in 1904) indexes this covariance, which accounts for about 40 per cent of the total variance when a battery of diverse cognitive tests is administered to a sample with a good range of cognitive ability . . . intelligence is at the pinnacle of the hierarchical model of cognitive abilities that includes a middle level of group factors, such as the cognitive domains of verbal and spatial abilities and memory, and a third level of specific tests and their associated narrow cognitive skills. (p. 99) in view of such a characterization, an assumption that intelligence exerts no effect on adult fl learning outcomes becomes clearly untenable. even though evidence has been mounting as to the heritability of this factor (cf. plomin & deary, 2015), there is still an ongoing debate in education between behavior-genetic theorists and socialization theorists (scarr, 1997) concerning the persistent nature or nurture problem. intelligence is undoubtedly not only the most often discussed id (sternberg & grigorenko, 1997) but also such that arouses the most emotions. this is because, on the one hand, this factor is known to impinge on basically all aspects of life, including success in education and work, income, health, marriage and even a sense of happiness in life, but, on the other, it is also undemocratically distributed on account of the fact that it is for the most part genetically derived. the most radical genetic determinists, such as jensen (1997), plomin (1997), and loehlin, horn and willerman (1997, the texas adoption project) provide hard scientific data for the heritability of cognitive abilities. they claim that the heritability of the intelligence quotient (iq) is approximately 70%, whereas other factors, such as socio-economic status, cultural background, parents’ education and occupation or the number of books in the home, factors which are emphasized by socialization theory, account for no more than 10% of variation in intelligence (jensen, 1997). contrary to common assumptions, genetic effects increase rather than decrease with age, a phenomenon which is corroborated by a large body of evidence from twin, adoption and family studies. according to plomin and deary (2015), the heritability of adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak 400 intelligence increases from about 20% in infancy to approximately 80% in later life. although the family environment does have a significant effect, this applies only to children and the impact gradually lessens at an older age, to finally become of minor importance in adulthood. these results derive mainly from twin studies and have now been confirmed by the first new quantitative genetic technique, known as genome-wide complex trait analysis (gcta), which is used to estimate genetic influence with the help of genome-wide genotypes in large samples of unrelated individuals (plomin & deary, 2015). what makes the situation even less optimistic is the fact that the available evidence suggests that fluid iq cannot be trained and improved (jensen, 1997; plomin & deary, 2015). in accordance with the definition presented above, iq is a general term which subsumes all other cognitive abilities, including those required for learning fls, especially in instructional settings, and, therefore, all such abilities can be naturally expected to share the same characteristics as general iq. from this perspective, teachers, educators and learners have two possibilities: they can either ignore factors which are uncontrollable anyway or try to find evidence for their pliability. socialization theorists have adopted a mixed approach (ceci, 1996; sternberg, 2002; sternberg & grigorenko, 2000). drawing on vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural theory and his concept of the zone of proximal development, they claim that cognitive factors are highly flexible, with social conditions playing a major role in the process of cognitive development. the first psychologist who applied this theory to instructed sla was sternberg (1997, 2002) in his triarchic theory of human intelligence, which posits a dynamic, interactive nature of cognitive abilities. in his view, expertise is far more important than natural ability and cognitive factors tend to be overestimated in education. a similar stance is embraced by dweck (2006) and mercer (2012), who emphasize the contribution of the social and cultural context to sla over that of congenital cognitive factors. yet another convincing argument advanced by socialization theorists is that only part of human potential can be subjected to measurement (ceci, 1996). this is because we have no access to the whole possible potential of a person, which makes it impossible to offer an ultimate prediction of what that person would be able to do if he or she were provided with conducive environmental conditions. according to ceci (1996), heritability coefficients may be overestimated as they refer solely to the fulfilled genetic potential. on these grounds, constructivists (cf. williams & burden, 1997) argue that the impact of the environment on cognitive development surpasses the impact of genetic variation. this approach can surely be considered as more optimistic than the behaviorist-genetic one, since it allows the possibility of effective pedagogic intervention aimed at modification of intelligence-related factors. consequently, it should perhaps come as no surprise that it is preferred by many researchers and practitioners in the field of sla (e.g., gregersen & macintyre, 2014). the interface between research on individual difference variables and teaching practice: the case. . . 401 in the field of education, gardner’s (1983) model of multiple intelligences has become extremely widespread and influential. gardner suggests that traditional models of intelligence, assuming the existence of a general cognitive ability, should be abandoned and replaced with a set of independent multiple intelligences. his theory aims at identifying individual profiles of natural abilities which can be further developed while the weaker areas can be improved upon. although severely criticized by cognitive psychologists for lacking scientific validity, this theory has gained immense popularity, particularly among educators and fl teachers. nevertheless, it must be emphasized that nowadays most researchers representing various approaches and schools of thought accept the fact that some id factors are highly heritable but, at the same time, extreme, allor-nothing positions are typically avoided. rather than emphasizing arguments against the existence of cognitive differences between people, the discussion has been revolving around the issue of efficacious pedagogic intervention with an eye to compensating for weaknesses in cognitive functioning, as well as raising awareness in this respect among both teachers and learners. 4. foreign language aptitude a cognitive factor that has attracted considerable attention from sla researchers but has also generated a good deal of controversy is fl aptitude. this id is a powerful variable, covering a number of cognitively-based learner differences, which explains the largest proportion of variation in the outcomes of fl learning among all ids. fl aptitude is the strongest predictor of the rate of progress as well as high levels of achievement in learning an additional language after the closure of critical or sensitive periods (doughty et al., 2010; linck et al., 2013; long, 2013). it is a complex, multi-faceted factor, which means that there is no single fl aptitude, but, rather, there exists a whole range of fl aptitudes which are included in the domain of cognitive ids (see abrahamson & hyltenstam, 2008; granena & long, 2013; robinson, 2002) and operate differently under various learning conditions. thanks to major advances in the fields of sla, cognitive psychology, genetics and neurolinguistics, the construct has been considerably updated and reconceptualized over the last two decades. the contemporary concept of fl aptitude is based on the classical definition proposed by carroll (1959, 1981). in carroll’s model, fl aptitude is described as a latent, innate, relatively stable trait, which is distinct from motivation and interest, and manifests itself only indirectly in the process of fl learning as well as in language performance. the construct includes four, fairly independent, subcomponents, that is: phonetic coding ability, grammatical sensitivity, inductive language learning ability, and associative memory. while carroll (1981) adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak 402 considered fl aptitude to be relatively fixed, he did not exclude the possibility of its development and modifiability. he suggested that aptitude measures in part reflect some kind of achievement because they depend to some extent on past learning. carroll’s view of the construct was restricted to the prediction of the rate of learning and did not pertain to the ultimate achievement in learning a fl. the four-component model of aptitude and the test constructed on its basis, the modern language aptitude test (mlat; carroll & sapon, 1959), were points of reference for subsequent research endeavors in this area (doughty, 2013; doughty et al., 2010; grigorenko, sternberg, & ehrman, 2000; meara, 2005; pimsleur, 1966; robinson, 2002; skehan, 1998; tare et al., 2014). recently, fl aptitude has been operationalized as a set of cognitive abilities, which can be approached from the perspective of psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology. within this approach, two influential conceptualizations of fl aptitude can be recognized, those proposed by skehan (1998, 2002) and robinson (2002, 2007). in skehan’s (1998) model, aptitude components are related to consecutive stages of information processing in sla. he decided to merge carroll’s (1959) grammatical sensitivity and inductive language learning ability into language analytic ability, which is related to central processing. as regards phonetic coding ability and memory abilities, he saw them as corresponding to input processing, and output and fluency, respectively. an updated version of the model (skehan, 2002) distinguishes four stages of sla processing, namely noticing, patterning, controlling and lexicalizing. robinson's (2002, 2007) model of fl aptitude consists of four aptitude complexes, including primary and secondary abilities that are differentially related to fl learning under different conditions. the aptitude complex hypothesis (robinson, 2007) posits that some fl learners might possess strengths in abilities that are facilitative under specific learning conditions but prove to be ineffective in others. the ultimate aim of his approach is to “make predictions about how to optimally match learners to instructional options” (robinson, 2007, p. 274), thus creating the most advantageous environments for specific learner abilities. robinson opts for the application of various focus-on-form techniques as a means of pedagogic intervention in the performance of communication tasks (see e.g., loewen, 2011, 2015, for a discussion of focus on form). thus, for example, communicative practice of target language features is optimized according to learners’ aptitude profiles when those more implicitly-oriented are exposed to recasts (i.e., corrective reformulations of erroneous utterances that retain their intended meaning; robinson, 2002) in order to facilitate incidental learning, while those more analytically-oriented are provided with rule explanations with a view to catering to their preferred ways of processing. a comment seems to be in order at this juncture on the contributions of the two proposals. the major the interface between research on individual difference variables and teaching practice: the case. . . 403 strength of skehan’s (2002) model lies in the fact that it relates stages of sla to fl aptitude components in a way which firmly situates the construct within mainstream sla research. robinson’s (2002, 2007) model is consistent with the tenets of ati (cf. vatz, tare, jackson, & doughty, 2013), and its main value concerns relating cognitive profiles of fl learners to different types of instruction. both models give weight to wm, which reconceptualizes the original model of fl aptitude proposed by carroll (1959) by adding extra abilities, such as noticing language forms in the input (see section 5). with regard to practical application of the theory of fl aptitude, as signaled in section 2 above, two different approaches can be adopted, namely: (a) fl aptitude training intended to facilitate its development, and (b) ati. the former has its roots in socialization theory. from this perspective, fl aptitude is considered to be dynamic, that is, it undergoes evolutionary development in interaction with the environment (cf. sternberg & grigorenko, 2000), and it is thus potentially modifiable rather than predetermined. consequently, it is believed that this attribute can be shaped in the process of education (sternberg, 2002). this idea is reflected, for example, in a method of testing proposed by sternberg (2002), known as dynamic testing, during which learners are given ongoing feedback in order to improve their scores. basing on this assumption, grigorenko et al. (2000) developed an fl aptitude test, labeled the cognitive ability for novelty in acquisition of language (canal-ft). all of this clearly demonstrates that sternberg’s model extends the research agenda by enriching the concept of fl aptitude with a dynamic, developmental dimension. in fact, in recent years, the questioning of aptitude as a fixed trait has intensified (see singleton, 2014), especially since the development of a claim that wm, which is believed to be susceptible to the influence of experience and instruction (gathercole, 2014), should be recognized as an important component of fl aptitude (wen, 2016). a question also arises as to whether language aptitude and language experience or awareness are actually separable or whether they can be perceived as operating on the same continuum. as singleton (2014) suggests, the instruments used to measure fl aptitude and language awareness seem to capture at least partly overlapping constructs. the latter perspective, ati, assumes that fl aptitudes should be matched to appropriate teaching methods. this approach is clearly represented by robinson’s (2002) model that has been described above. researchers in the areas of sla and fl pedagogy have been attempting to translate these theoretical proposals into classroom practice by, for example, identifying learners’ cognitive profiles in order to uncover the best teaching method that would recognize their strengths and weaknesses. by matching learners to different types of instruction, researchers are able to determine whether or not a specific teaching technique is adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak 404 beneficial and whether students with different profiles perform differently under varied learning conditions. one of the first attempts of this kind was wesche's (1981) study in which learners representing different aptitude profiles, that is, analytically-oriented or memory-oriented, were matched with different instructional options. she indeed found that matching students’ learning profiles to corresponding learning conditions contributes to better quality of learning (see vatz et al., 2013, for a review of ati research). ranta (2008), in turn, suggests that students should first be explicitly taught a specific rule and only then participate in consciousness-raising tasks to become able to extract information about a structure from the communicative input. in the case of learners with weak phonological skills, ranta proposes a multisensory structured learning approach, in which learners are given opportunities to simultaneously attend to sound-spelling relationships, morphology and syntax, using all their senses and different modalities. admittedly, all of these ideas have mainly remained in the sphere of theory and have never been empirically verified to the extent that would allow offering a set of reliable and at the same time feasible pedagogical proposals (cf. ranta, 2008). a rare example of a practical illustration of how different ids can be shaped or at least taken advantage of is the volume by gregersen and macintyre (2014), who offer a wide array of hands-on activities related to all major id variables, including fl aptitude. more specifically, drawing upon skehan's (1998) theory, the authors present activities that can be deployed to improve learners’ skills required for the four stages of noticing, patterning, controlling and lexicalizing. in more general terms, gregersen and macintyre (2014) stress the importance of individualization of instruction through task-based learning in groups. following cook’s (2001) and ranta’s (2008) reasoning, they recognize two principles that have been identified in the literature, namely matching versus compensatory. the matching principle is in line with robinson’s ati approach as it suggests that teaching should accommodate the strengths of the learner to increase his or her chances for success, while the compensatory principle, reflecting skehan’s (2002) position, holds that instructional practices should have as their aim compensating for learners’ weaknesses. for instance, explicit grammar instruction could be used either to capitalize upon learners’ strong analytical skills, which would indicate reliance on the matching principle, but it could also be employed as a means of remediation with a group of learners with lower analytic skills, in which case the compensatory principle would come to the fore. gregersen and macintyre (2014) also recommend awarenessraising activities aimed at identifying learners’ individual aptitudinal profiles by “matching some tasks to their strengths and compensating for limitations in others” (p. 86) according to vygotsky's (1978) zone of proximal development. the interface between research on individual difference variables and teaching practice: the case. . . 405 clearly, it is ultimately the teacher’s decision which principle he or she chooses to follow, the matching or compensatory one. in accordance with ati principles, some efforts have recently been made to investigate the relationship between different types of input or interaction and specific aptitude profiles, which can be seen, for example, in the realm of grammar instruction. li (2015a) reports 16 interactional studies that have examined the interface between aptitude and the effectiveness of various instructional treatments. the results of the studies are often contradictory as to the effectiveness of implicit versus explicit type of feedback (sheen, 2007; trofimovich, ammar, & gatbonton, 2007) and the role of the learners’ proficiency level as a variable mediating the benefits accruing from different types of feedback (li, 2009). li (2015b) presents the results of his study examining the relationship between the effectiveness of recasts, as moderated by ids in analytical ability and wm in learners at different stages of l2 development. although learners representing both low and high proficiency levels appeared to benefit equally from recasts, it turned out that the less proficient students relied more on analytical ability, whereas advanced ones were more likely to draw upon wm. li (2015b) concluded that wm and analytical ability are sensitive to l2 learners’ proficiency and feedback type, thereby offering new insights into the role of the ati approach, as is evident in the following comment: “the results afford further evidence against an eclectic approach to language teaching/learning . . . and underscore the importance of tailoring instruction to cater to learners at different stages of l2 development” (li, 2015b, p. 156). similarly to ranta (2008) and gregersen and macintyre (2014), li suggests that explicit instruction coupled with metalinguistic explanation is more appropriate for beginners, especially those with poor analytic ability, whereas more advanced learners, who are likely to depend more on wm capacity, may benefit from memory strategies which can aid them in processing and retrieving new information as well as reconceptualizing old information. some work on ati has been done as well in the case of pronunciation, a good example being the research project by perrachione, lee, ha, and wong (2011), who explored the interaction between learners’ perceptual ability and training of non-native phonological contrasts in an input-variation study. the general conclusion was that different kinds of input, that is such characterized by high as opposed to low variability, can have a differential effect on learners manifesting different levels of phonological aptitude. tare et al. (2014) and doughty, clark, cook and tare (2013) elaborate on cognitive ids, the knowledge of which can be useful in creating learners’ profiles, thus further informing fl pedagogy in general and possibilities for suitable training in particular. they emphasize both the need to recognize learners’ cognitive profiles and the necessity of ensuring on that basis optimal instruction conditions. adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak 406 doughty and her team developed a battery of tests, known as high-level language aptitude battery (hi-lab; doughty et al., 2010), which can be used to predict the ultimate success of adult language learners in reaching high levels of proficiency in an fl. from this perspective, fl aptitude is defined as “a student’s ceiling on language ability, or the highest level that an individual is likely to achieve” (tare et al., 2014, p. 6). the test taps into the following constructs: executive functioning (i.e., wm, inhibitory control, task-switching), rote memory, perceptual acuity, processing speed, primability, and implicit and explicit induction, with the researchers offering pedagogical recommendations related to all these (tare et al., 2014). for example, since learners with low scores for rote memory have difficulty in learning words and phrases out of context, they may not be able to learn long lists of items. such learners may benefit from focusing on discovering word meaning, building associations for new vocabulary via tasks in the target language, or being exposed to visually enhanced input. by contrast, in the case of students who score high on this construct and are thus able to learn decontextualized words, recommended techniques include the use of flashcards, translations or activities involving learning chunks of language. when it comes to learners who exhibit an aptitude for explicit learning, they are likely to benefit from direct, explicit grammar instruction, learning by induction and metalinguistic explanation. on the other hand, for those less explicitly-oriented, who are not good at extrapolating rules, a more traditional, deductive approach is advised, in which structures are first explained and only then applied. as regards learners endowed with high implicit learning ability, they tend to exhibit a preference for coping with complex or unfamiliar language in rich context rather than be taught explicitly. for this group, the best solution is to avoid explicit presentation of rules and to ensure instead a variety of language examples in context. thus, implicitly-oriented learners can benefit from exposure to input, which can take the form of extensive listening and reading, meaning-based tasks as well as the provision of recasts in the course of message communication. 5. working memory working memory is now probably the most often studied id factor in various fields, including cognitive and developmental psychology, neuroscience and sla. a contemporary definition of wm is offered by bunting and engle (2015): “a convenient analogy for working memory is to think of it as the mental workspace of the mind: the small amount of memory that holds information and the capacity for attention control to manipulate that information for ongoing use” (p. xvii). as far as the relationship between wm and sla is concerned, the studies conducted to date have addressed all target language skills and subsystems, the interface between research on individual difference variables and teaching practice: the case. . . 407 different levels of proficiency and ultimate attainment, as well as different aspects of bilingualism, with wm having been found to act as an influential factor across all these areas (e.g., biedroń & szczepaniak, 2012; dekeyser & koeth, 2011; doughty et al., 2010; juffs & harrington, 2011; kormos & sáfár, 2008; linck et al., 2013; linck, osthus, koeth, & bunting, 2014; miyake & friedman, 1998; robinson, 2003; sawyer & ranta, 2001; skehan, 2015; wen, 2015, 2016; wen & skehan, 2011). wm as a construct composed of four subsystems, that is phonological loop, central executive, visuospatial sketchpad and episodic buffer, was first conceptualized by cognitive psychologists baddeley and hitch (1974) and baddeley (2000). subsequently, the concept gradually began to enter the field of applied linguistics to finally become an integral part of the dominant models of fl aptitude (robinson, 2002; skehan, 2002), and it is now proposed as a new fl aptitude (wen, 2015, 2016; wen, biedroń, & skehan, in press; wen & skehan, 2011). the discussion of wm usually revolves around its limited capacity, which is bound to constrain cognitive performance. to be more precise, individuals with greater wm capacity perform better on a variety of cognitive tasks, including, among others, complex learning, reading and listening comprehension, grammar and vocabulary learning, than those with smaller wm capacity. therefore, in the words of skehan (2015), the problem is “how these limitations can be minimized or circumvented” (p. 200), and finding a solution to this challenge constitutes one of the main objectives of fl teaching practice. unfortunately, we still do not know which components of wm affect what aspects of language learning, which severely curtails the potential for pedagogical intervention. two components of wm, namely the phonological loop and the central executive, are considered to be the most vital for this process. the first is a temporary verbal-acoustic storage system, whereas the other is a system responsible for attentional control of wm. drawing upon the available empirical evidence, wen (2015) makes an attempt to relate the phonological loop and the executive components of wm to specific aspects of language subsystems as well as sla processes. thus, he suggests that the phonological loop underlies language learning in the domains of lexis, formulaic sequences and morphosyntactic constructions, while the executive component plays a role in monitoring and attentionrelated processes, such as comprehension, interaction and production. in fact, the latter seems to be of particular importance to sla, and, given its high correlation with verbal intelligence (engle, laughlin, tuholski, & conway, 1999) and learning outcomes in general, it seems to be implicated in more processes than researchers have been able to establish so far (baddeley, 2015). still, as has already been mentioned, there are numerous controversies surrounding wm and contradictory research findings abound, often due to the application of inconsistent research methodologies (wright, 2015). on the whole, although it is evident that adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak 408 learners with more capacious wm exceed in language learning, and that enhancement of wm translates into better learning outcomes, there are still many doubts concerning the nature of this relationship. one such controversial area is the contribution of wm to grammar learning. while many studies (e.g., fortkamp, 2003; juffs, 2015; linck et al., 2014; martin & n. ellis, 2012; williams & lovatt, 2003) provide evidence for a complex relationship between wm capacity and learning grammar structures, the executive component is definitely more strongly implicated in grammar development than the phonological loop (see linck et al., 2014). there is copious evidence that the efficacy of various types of instruction, including the provision of corrective feedback, is moderated by wm. such instructional options as explicit explanation, input flooding, input enhancement, negotiation for meaning or recasting may be more or less efficient for specific learners, depending, among others, on the capacity of wm. for example, recasting, which is a popular technique in the focus-on-form approach (see ellis, basturkmen, & loewen, 2002; loewen, 2011, 2015), depends on noticing ability, and, thus, its utility may be limited in the case of learners endowed with low wm capacity (e.g., goo, 2012; mackey, philip, egi, fujii, & tatsumi,2002). noticing the gap is one of fl aptitude factors, defined as aptitude for learning from recasting, in which the learner is supposed to learn from becoming aware of the difference between the recast and his prior, erroneous utterance, thus being able to make the requisite internal comparisons (robinson, 2007, p. 274). as tare et al. (2014) suggest, implicit feedback in the form of recasts is suitable for learners with high wm abilities because “they are able to notice various language aspects while performing a language task, while those with low working memory may need more explicit feedback prior to, during, or after the task” (p. 14). other types of instruction appropriate for learners with high wm ability include online tasks performed in real time (e.g., interpretation, listening comprehension), discussions of cognitively complex topics, tasks with no planning time, interactive tasks, or learning words from context. all these activities are unsuitable for low wm capacity learners who benefit from more scaffolding and tasks which are less cognitively demanding. this is because such learners need more time for planning, the inclusion of pretask activities as well as more repetitions. analogically to fl aptitude, there are two approaches to wm in language instruction (williams, 2012), namely: (a) manipulation aimed at increasing l2 learners’ wm capacity (söderqvist & nutley, 2015), and (b) modification of instruction to suit l2 learners’ cognitive wm profile (skehan, 2012). it should also be borne in mind that the two components of wm discussed above require adequate pedagogical intervention. this means that educators have to start with identification of learners with poor wm, decide which components are problematic, the interface between research on individual difference variables and teaching practice: the case. . . 409 and apply proper, individualized training. there is a large body of empirical evidence showing that deficits in both the phonological store and attentional system severely impair language learning (gathercole, lamont, & alloway, 2006), and that these deficits can be leveled out to some extent thanks to adept pedagogic intervention (gathercole 2014; gathercole & alloway, 2008; holmes & gathercole, 2014; söderqvist & nutley, 2015). gathercole and colleagues have provided evidence that skillful training in the case of young children whose general academic performance is severely affected by poor wm produces considerable and sustained results. this means that wm is a cognitive id variable that is the most susceptible to improvement (dehn, 2008; gathercole, 2014; gathercole & alloway, 2008; klingberg, 2010; söderqvist & nutley, 2015). because individualization of the learning process may be an unrealistic prospect for many teachers due to different limitations (e.g., scant classroom time, difficulty in identifying learner profiles, challenges of preparing different sets of materials), it seems advisable for them to encourage parents and learners to train wm with the use of special computer programs, all the more so that numerous websites exist which help students develop their wm skills. neuroscientific data from studies conducted at karolinska institute in sweden indicate plasticity of the areas of the brain responsible for wm capacity. an impressive number of 55 original research studies published in peer-reviewed journals demonstrate that wm could be trained to enable more and higher quality information processing (see söderqvist & nutley, 2015 for an overview). overall, the research findings testify to sustained improvement in wm capacity from childhood to adulthood, durable gains in attention, enhanced functioning of low-performing learners in math and reading, as well as better functioning of individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (adhd). moreover, improvement in wm capacity has been shown to be mirrored by changes in brain functioning. the improvement of wm resulting from the application of a popular commercial wm training program is supported by 25 controlled studies and has been validated by independent meta-analyses (cortese et al., 2015; melby-lervåg & hulme, 2013; spencer-smith & klingberg, 2015). the reported increase in wm capacity is truly impressive: an average 26% in visuo-spatial wm and 23% in verbal wm, as compared to the control groups (söderqvist & nutley, 2015). it is perhaps not surprising that these results have triggered doubts concerning their reliability. to quote from the report: the fact that wm is proven to be malleable with practice is a groundbreaking finding, which has caused some resistance and controversy in the academic world of psychological theory in which wm capacity had traditionally been viewed as a fixed trait. (söderqvist & nutley, 2015, p. 6) adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak 410 a number practical tips as to how wm can be exercised and enhanced as well as tasks that can be applied for this purpose can be found in gregersen and macintyre (2014, pp. 72-73). firstly, students with poor wm capacity should be identified, with the warning signs including, among others, inadequate recall, persistent inability to follow instructions, difficulty in keeping pace and failure to complete the set tasks. these problems are likely to stem from wm capacity overload, which can be minimized by limiting the amount of learning material, increasing the meaningfulness of the language input, and reorganizing complex tasks. the authors propose different means of pedagogic intervention, which could entail activation of relevant schemata, an increased number of repetitions of key information, as well as reliance on memory aids, such as, for example, realia, wall charts or audio-recordings. they also suggest falling back on multimodal support, with the use of visualizations (hummel & french, 2010), and various technical aids, such as multi-media or computer-assisted language learning. finally, gregersen and macintyre (2014) emphasize the role of strategies-based instruction that would aim at the development of individualized repertoires of strategies aiding the transfer of the relevant information from wm to long-term memory and the other way around, as well as subsequent retrieval (e.g., note-talking, requesting assistance or organizing the learning process). 6. personality as far as personality factors are concerned, there are several firmly established taxonomies in psychology, which view the main traits, that is agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion/introversion and neuroticism as separate, universal and replicable factors that can be found in all societies and cultures of the world (mccrae & costa, 2003). although their impact on human behavior, including the outcomes of education, is well-established in the field of psychology, there is no convincing evidence that they correlate, whether positively or negatively, with success in learning fls (see dörnyei, 2005; robinson & ellis, 2008). one possible reason for this may be their general and universal nature. as is the case with intelligence, analyses of twin, adoption and family studies provide robust and consistent evidence for both genetic and environmental contributions to personality, with the latter being far more difficult to detect and measure (bouchard & mcgue, 2002). most likely, personality factors interact with cognitive variables and with success in learning fls in a non-linear way, constituting interactions and relationships that are complex, dynamic and thus difficult to capture in research studies (dörnyei, 2005). this is not to say, however, that such a link has not been demonstrated in sla. for example, empirical evidence for the impact of personality has emerged from research on multilingualism (dewaele, the interface between research on individual difference variables and teaching practice: the case. . . 411 2009, 2011; ożańska-ponikwia, 2011; ramirez-esparza, gosling, benet-martínez, potter, & pennebaker, 2006) as well as studies of high levels of attainment (biedroń, 2011; forsberg lundell & sandgren, 2013; hu & reiterer, 2009). an increasingly important role is ascribed to empathy, which has been found to affect success in learning pronunciation (hu et al., 2013; rota & reiterer, 2009) and to highly correlate with fl aptitude (forsberg lundell & sandgren, 2013). what is interesting, the boundary between affect and cognition is blurred in contemporary psychology. in fact, there is copious evidence for intelligence-personality associations in this domain (e.g., asendorpf, 2014; von stumm, 2014), which might suggest that future sla research should focus to a much greater extent on the interface between cognition and affect, somewhat in line with dörnyei’s (2005) pronouncement that “examining the combined effect or interrelationships of personality traits and other id variables may also yield meaningful insights” (p. 30). what is more, teachers intuitively know that much of their students’ learning and their response to particular instructional tasks are underpinned by personality factors. shy and introverted students, for example, may be less willing to communicate than extrovert and risk-taking ones, while analytical and conscientious learners are likely to do well in a traditional classroom. it is one thing, however, to be intuitively aware of the contribution of personality traits or even to prove empirically that they mediate the effects of specific instructional activities or determine the choice of language learning strategies, and quite another to employ pedagogical intervention in this area. for one thing, it is difficult to decide what the overall aim of such an intervention should be because it is clear that, even if this were possible, language teachers should not strive to change the personalities of their learners, however desirable such changes might seem in some situations. it would thus seem that the practical application of the results of research on personality are restricted and could perhaps take the form of individualization, awareness-raising, application of varied activities that would cater for different personality traits, and encouraging learners to perform tasks that may not be fully compatible with their personality profiles. with respect to individualization, although such an approach is feasible in one-on-one tutoring or in very small groups of learners, it poses a major challenge in a class of 20 or 30 students for the reasons already mentioned above, and therefore it is highly unlikely to assume the status of a regular instructional practice. much easier to implement is awareness-raising, which, as gregersen and macintyre (2014) note with regard to learning styles, applies in equal measure to learners and teachers. this could be achieved, for example, by having students fill out simple surveys on personality available on the internet but also by means of tools intended to tap into learning style preferences, such as the learning style survey (cohen, oxford, & ci, 2001), as they also incorporate personality adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak 412 dimensions. armed with requisite knowledge about themselves and their learners, teachers will find it easier to ensure variety in the sense that the learning tasks employed will take into consideration the various personality traits represented by students in a particular class. on the one hand, this will ensure a certain degree of matching instructional options to the profiles of specific learners, but, on the other, it will also encourage what could be referred to as personality stretching, as some activities are bound to force learners to engage in the kind of learning that goes against predominant personality traits (gregersen & macintyre, 2014; oxford, 1999, 2003). this having been said, it should be emphasized that being too adamant about getting learners to leave their personalityrelated “comfort zones” (ehrman, 1996) may backfire, because not only is it unlikely to be effective, but it could also alienate some students, producing negative consequences for motivation, willingness to communicate or anxiety levels. 7. conclusion the aim of the present paper has been to consider the extent to which the findings of research into cognitive variables in sla, such as intelligence, fl aptitude and wm, as well as personality traits, all of which can be regarded as difficult to manipulate through pedagogic intervention, can be applicable to classroom practice. on the face of it, as demonstrated with respect to all the factors in question, the available empirical evidence offers important insight into the contribution of these id variables, sometimes providing a basis for suggesting concrete solutions that teachers could fall back upon to assist their learners. after all, there are certainly ways in which practitioners could employ the matching or compensatory options by trying to emphasize their learners’ strengths and resorting to remediation to offset the negative effects of their weaknesses, try to build upon the dominant intelligences or hone those that are somewhat lacking, get learners to use the available software to expand their wm capacity, ensure that students are cognizant of their id profiles or implement a modicum of variety which would at the same time involve a certain degree of matching, compensation and stretching. this is certainly the position adopted by gregersen and macintyre (2014), who comment with reference to cognitive abilities: “although they may be somewhat stable features (perhaps in specific domains), we believe that cognitive abilities and attentional variables can be changed or manipulated through instruction and experience” (p. 79). while the activities included in their book indeed demonstrate that teachers can do a lot to manipulate the id factors discussed in this paper, there are grounds to temper our optimism in this respect for several reasons. first, as was made clear in the current discussion, the research findings are still patchy and at times contradictory, with the interface between research on individual difference variables and teaching practice: the case. . . 413 the effect that the exact role of, say, different components of fl aptitude or wm, is far from clear. second, there is still a paucity of research that would shed light on the way in which the factors in question mediate the effects of specific instructional techniques or such that would examine the effects of training, and empirical evidence of this kind is certainly needed if reliable pedagogical proposals are to be offered. third, irrespective of what the research findings reveal, a question arises as to the extent to which teachers can capitalize on such insights with respect to intelligence, fl aptitude, wm or personality, for the simple reason that they lack the necessary expertise and tools to tap these ids, their judgments are bound to be intuitive and thus often inaccurate, and these constructs as such may seem far removed from the realities of the classroom. fourth, there are many practical reasons which may cause teachers to shy away from implementing pedagogic intervention, such as the lack of time, the need to achieve curricular goals, focus on exam requirements, the additional burden of preparing extra materials that would cater to individual learner profiles, the unfeasibility of individualization in large classes, or simply resistance and lack of interest on the part of students. all of this should not be taken to mean that practitioners had better do nothing to respond to various cognitive and personality profiles, but, rather, that consistent research findings are indispensable as a basis for clear-cut and feasible pedagogical implications that could guide teachers in their efforts to effectively develop some abilities or adjust their instructional practices in such a way that individual learner variation with respect to intelligence, fl aptitude, wm and personality becomes an asset rather than a liability. acknowledgements the present article represents a contribution to the project no. 2015/17/b/hs2/01704 (2016-2019) funded by the national science centre, poland. adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak 414 references abrahamsson, n., & hyltenstam, k. 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happens in the italian school system today from child care to university as far as english teaching is concerned. the second part of the contribution focuses on the increasing variability of english as a world language, both within and outside the native speakers’ domain. the second part also deals with the issues that the complex nature of variation in english has raised when teaching it, and underlines how such issues have recently, although only partially, been acknowledged by the italian ministry of education. the final section, illustrates a proposal for implementing the teaching of english variation in italian schools, based on the concepts of utility and usability which have given birth to a student-tailored approach called bespoke language teaching. keywords: english teaching in italy; english as a world language; sociolinguistics matteo santipolo 234 i have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. john steinbeck, america and americans and selected nonfiction (2003), p. 142 (first contained in like captured fireflies (1955) the best language textbook is the one written in the learner’s mind at the end of a course. balboni & santipolo 2003, p. 101 1. introduction the long-established role of english as an international language and as a lingua franca used in all kinds of social and geographical contexts and situations around the world and with the most heterogeneous purposes and its consequent increased internal variation, both within and outside the native speakers’ domains, has progressively raised the question of what variety should be taken as a model when teaching it to speakers of other languages, regardless of the context in which they happen to find themselves (cf. howatt, 1984; jenkins, 2006, 2009; kirkpatrick, 2007; mckay, 2002; santipolo, 2009). as a result of all this, more and more teachers of english have realised that facing and coping with a constantly fast-changing world and its needs and pressing demands which have radically shifted over the last few decades can no longer be disregarded. we could say that the role of the english teacher of the mid-20th century was totally different from the role of the english teacher today (cf. mccarthy 2016, chapter 5). even though we focused only on what used to happen in an english class during the 1970s in most european countries and if we compared it with what happens (or should happen) today, we would be considerably surprised in many respects. changes, in particular have affected at least four fundamental aspects: 1) objectives; 2) methodology; 3) consideration of the student’s role in the learning process; 4) teaching tools. with regard to the objectives, a copernican revolution occurred when language teaching adopted and adapted the principles of sociolinguistics, thus opening the way to a new conception of what it means “to know” a language. in this way the role of grammar in the use of language took on a secondary role. this lay the foundations for the communicative approach which introduced new teaching bespoke language teaching (blt): a proposal for a theoretical framework. the case of efl/elf. . . 235 methods and methodologies to the english classroom, further strengthened by studies on neuroand psycholinguistics (cf. balboni, 2009; howatt, 1984; howatt & smith, 2014). a student-centred approach was also the consequence of such a contribution which led to the development of a new awareness of and a novel attitude towards what to expect from learners and their active participation in the class (cf. santipolo, 2015). last but undoubtedly not least, the development and adoption of modern technologies (from computers to smart boards and all sorts of other electronic and interactive devices and software which have given birth to a methodology of its own, the so-called byod “bring your own device”), in the english class have demanded that both teachers and learners acquire competences that were simply not even imaginable less than 15 years ago. after all, little do we know what might lie ahead of us in the years to come. surprisingly, despite all of these significant and substantial innovations in teaching approaches, methodology and technology, much less specific attention, and only recently, has been devoted, at least in italy, to the object of what is being taught, that is, the constant evolution of the english language. as pointed out by seidlehofer (2011, p. 189): although lip service is paid to the idea that learners should be encouraged to put the language to communicative use, they are generally only allowed to do so on the teacher’s terms and not their own, and as a means to an end, namely the eventual conformity with ns [native speakers] norms that counts as competence. therefore, albeit not everywhere, in many cases, the language taken as a teaching model has mainly been somewhat “crystalized,” with few openings and exceptions towards variation and variability. these, when present, have concentrated on the two most popular so-called international reference varieties, namely british and american english, mainly as a result of the huge amount of teaching materials available in these two “dialects.” nonetheless, even when these two have been taken into account, it’s often been more of lip service than a serious and systematic comparative illustration of the main differences and features existing between them, limiting analysis to some vocabulary and more rarely to basic grammatical structures. the principle drawback of such a narrow-minded choice and practice has, fallen on the learners’ actual and usable competencies which have often revealed themselves inadequate or, not sufficient for the necessities of the real world (cf. santipolo 2012, pp. 13-32). of course, what i have described so far cannot be considered exhaustive of what happens in all countries and neither is it applicable to all possible contexts in which english is taught worldwide. it is only meant to provide a broad (and perhaps even blurred) picture of the state of the art. what i know for sure, however, is that it definitely depicts what has happened in a considerable number of italian schools. matteo santipolo 236 2. foreign language teaching in the italian educational system today: an outline before focusing on english, i would like to explain in a nutshell the status of foreign language teaching in general in italian schools. the italian educational system is organised in different age cycles, whereby the study of a foreign language becomes compulsory only at the age of six, although it is recommended even in earlier years. with very few exceptions (which mainly regard “bilingual” regions such as valle d’aosta – along the border with france – and alto adige, or südtirol – along the border with austria, where french and german are respectively the foreign languages taught), english is by and large the predominant foreign language taught. here is an outline of what happens in the different cycles in relation to foreign language teaching in general: • nido (literally “nest,”child care: from 0 to 3 years): english is not taught, but there is a reasonable and increasing number of sporadic experimental projects whose success depends mainly on the presence and preparation of (semi-qualified) teachers in the school staff. • scuola dell’infanzia (nursery school/kindergarten: from 3 to 6 years): english is currently taught in some nursery schools, although it is not compulsory. its teaching depends on the availability of (semi-)qualified teachers in the school staff. • scuola primaria (primary school: from 6 to 11 years): english is compulsory (on average from 2 to 4 hours a week); chinese is currently being introduced in some areas. • scuola secondaria di primo grado traditionally known as “scuola media” (“middle” school: from 11 to 14 years): english is compulsory (3 to 5 hours a week). a second language (french, spanish or german) is also taught (2 hours a week). • scuola secondaria di secondo grado, traditionally known as “scuola superiore”: (secondary/high school: from 14 to 19 years): this level of school is not uniform and there are several different types of specializations and orientations offered, from classical to scientific, from technological to artistic, etc. english, however, is compulsory in all of these different secondary schools. the number of hours taught per week changes according to the focus of the school. a second and/or a third foreign language (mainly spanish, german and french, and more recently, chinese and arabic) may be taught. at the end of the 5 years of school, students must have acquired a b1 level (cef) in the language(s) studied. • university: students of all faculties must pass a b1 test (from a couple of years officially, but not in practice everywhere, raised to b2) in a foreign language, which, in 90% of cases is english, but may also be french, spanish bespoke language teaching (blt): a proposal for a theoretical framework. the case of efl/elf. . . 237 or german. in some ba degree courses a b1 test is required for admission, whereas the expected and assessed exit knowledge required is at a b2 level. 3. english teaching in the italian school system today: an outline in the previous paragraph i provided an overview of foreign language teaching in the italian educational system from which it emerged that, although other languages are taught, english, as expected, takes the lion’s share. in this paragraph, however, i would like to focus the attention on english only, describing in detail its status in all the different cycles of schools. please be aware that, in some cases, in order to make the contents more accessible to those who are not familiar with the complexities of the sometimes chaotic and ever changing italian educational system, some simplifications will be necessary. in general it must also be pointed out that, wherever and whenever present (i.e., from the age of six) textbooks are almost exclusively based on a communicative approach. that said, i will concentrate on five aspects: 1. mandatory teaching. 2. average teaching hours per week. 3. teachers’ qualification and proficiency required. 4. pupils’ expected final proficiency. 5. main methodologies and approach employed. child care (not free of charge, from 0 to 3) english language teaching average teaching hours per week teachers’ qualification and proficiency pupils’ expected final proficiency main methodologies/ approaches employed optional (depending on teachers’ availability and presence) ? ? none only sporadic experimental projects/ ludic (edutainment) for some of these aspects (e.g., numbers from 3. to 5.) it will also be necessary to further distinguish between what the “official” requirements, when and if existing, like from primary school onwards, are and what actually occurs in the classroom. we shall see that, unfortunately, on many occasions, the two conditions do not coincide. this problem is even worsened by a very patchy situation across the country, where, traditionally, northern regions tend to meet the desirable standards more than the southern ones. besides, for completion’s sake, we will also include in this outline child care and kindergarten, which are currently not compulsory in the italian educational system, although increasingly popular and requested by parents around the country. matteo santipolo 238 at child care english is not compulsory and not even provided for. as a result, no hours per week, nor teachers’ qualification are expected. nevertheless, in spite of the parents’ fear of confusion that may grow in the infant’s mind in having to cope with learning two languages at the same time at such an early age, a certain awareness of the importance of early bilingualism is progressively catching on. in order to meet such an increasing demand, more and more child cares are starting to develop projects to work on early language awareness and to expose infants right from their very first months of life to both italian and english. the main difficulty here is represented by the lack of preparation of the educators, since the university degree (laurea in scienze dell’educazione e della formazione) to teach infants at such an early age in italy does not provide a specific formation either in english or in english teaching. statistics emerging from analysis of english exam results at the degree course at the university of padua in the last five years (2011-2015) show that no more than 32% of candidates pass at every session and that on average in order to pass the exam more than 50% of them have to sit it at least three times. moreover, around 30% of students leave the exam as one of the last in their university career, considering it only marginal and most of the times a real “nuisance” or even a hindrance to their educational path rather than an opportunity to improve their knowledge of the language. all this, most of the times, leads to poor preparation, definitely not enough to teach the language or even to work on raising its awareness in very young children. as a consequence, even where such pilot projects are implemented the results are mostly unsatisfactory because of the teachers’ inadequate linguistic and methodological competence. kindergarten (from 3 to 6) english language teaching average teaching hours per week teachers’ qualification and proficiency pupils’ expected final proficiency main methodologies/ approaches employed optional (depending on teachers’ availability and presence) ? ? none ludic (edutainment) the situation at kindergarten is probably a little better than the one described at child cares. several studies (cf. balboni, 1999; balboni, coonan, & ricci garotti, 2001; ricci garotti & stoppini, 2010) have been devoted in italy to teaching and learning a foreign language between the age of 3 and 6, which have led to a relative spread of good practices across the country. in an official report by the italian ministry of education on foreign language (fl) “teaching” or “awareness” experiences, as well as on their implementation and effects as carried out in italian pre-primary schools1 we read: (miur, 2014, pp. 10-11): 1 “[. . .] a questionnaire, aimed at collecting information and investigating the main features of currently existing early fl learning experiences in both state and non-state italian pre-primary bespoke language teaching (blt): a proposal for a theoretical framework. the case of efl/elf. . . 239 [. . .] 2.1 the teacher in charge as for fl experiences, non-subject specific [author’s note: my correction of the original text which used the ambiguous word “generalist”] teachers in the school are in most cases in charge of the fl lessons (49.4%), however different types of teachers (external specialist 31.4 %, external mother-tongue 14.2%, external voluntary mother-tongue 3.5% for a total of 49.1%) are also used in fl lessons. as for fl awareness experiences nonsubject specific teachers in the school are in most cases responsible (56.3 %), however different types of teachers (external specialist 25.5%, external mother-tongue 12.7 %, external voluntary mother-tongue 5.5 % for a total of 43.7%) offer awareness activities. 2.1.1 teachers’ qualifications the majority of teachers involved in the fl experiences are primary school teachers with either a university degree in primary education sciences and/or a university degree in foreign languages and/or a primary school diploma with a special qualification in teaching fl. most teachers have attended in-service courses on fl methodology or have a fl teaching international certified qualification. the fl competence of the majority of teachers is between b1 and b2 level, in some cases also c1 and c2. 2.2 “fl teaching and awareness” experiences. in a large number of schools (48.7%) both types of experiences have been implemented: 84.8% of the schools state that they implement fl “teaching” experiences, 53.4% of the schools offer fl “awareness” experiences. 2.3 models of implementation most schools introduce fl teaching when children are aged five, fewer experiences occur for children aged either 3 or 4. the average length of the fl exposure is thirty minutes once a week. 2.4 activity types most teachers define the type of activities implemented in their fl classes as gamebased. the most cited ones are: role-play, bingo, language games, nursery rhymes, musical games, dances, drama, hands-on-activities, narratives, fairy tales, use of flashcards, use of puppets, use of finger friends, use of toys, iconic mediators, posters, etc. a large number of teachers use multimedia resources and the interactive white board. among the teaching approaches used in this age range, teachers mention: total physical response and the narrative format, such as the one offered in the adventures of hocus and lotus. 2.5 use of the fl in the classroom over 60% of the teachers declare that they use the fl in the classroom always or almost always, while over 30% say that they sometimes use the fl. this last piece of information is worrying and it is worth further research. [. . .] schools, was administered online. valid responses to the questionnaire were 1740 – 1425 from state schools and 315 from non-state schools. their responses are being analysed in this report. the total number of state “scuole dell’infanzia” is 5145, whereas the total number of non-state schools is 9781. the 1740 schools represent a total of 257.713 children, 29.150 of them non-native italians, mostly children from migrant families.” (miur 2014, p. 10) matteo santipolo 240 the situation that emerges from this outline seems to be, even if not ideal, definitely promising in terms of future developments, and these are also the conclusions the authors of the document seem to suggest. nevertheless, our experience on the field has pushed us to be less optimistic or, at least, more careful, in so far as present and short-term expectations are concerned. indeed, although, apparently, a high percentage of the schools surveyed in the report deem exposure to foreign languages a valuable experience for children, several weaknesses persist. to explain this statement, we need to consider the situation described above concerning the passing of english exam at degree courses to become educators at child care. as a result of this it is important to analyse what happened at a national selection carried out by a private institution in 2015 for posts as teachers and educators at both child care and kindergarten. there were two main requirements for the candidates: 1. to have a degree either in scienze dell’educazione e della formazione (cf. paragraph on child care), primary education sciences or psychology; 2. to have an internationally recognised b2 certificate in english2 obtained not more than two years previously. only about 120 applications were presented, from all over italy. of these 50% were not even admitted to the oral interview: the main reason for this being the lack of an adequate certification of their proficiency in english. the interview consisted of two parts: the first one was a conversation in english on every-day, general topics or on the candidate’s life and professional experiences; the second one (which was held in italian) regarded pedagogical aspects. of the remaining 50% who were interviewed about 80% did not give proof of sufficient knowledge and mastery of spoken english. taking all of this into account, it is hard to believe that the results illustrated in the report by the ministry correspond to the real state of the art. without wishing to question the professionality and the good faith of the authors of the document, a possible explanation of the discrepancy between statistics and experience on the field may lie in the informants’ tendency to overestimate their preparation. nonetheless, it must be underlined how some successful projects in english teaching or language awareness at kindergarten level have actually been carried out around the country at least since the 1990s3. 2 by “internationally recognised b2 certificate” it was meant a certificate issued by such institutions as cambridge, trinity, toefel, etc. and not by local or even british or american but not recognised schools. some of the candidates presented certificates of attendance of summer schools or of recreational clubs or the likes of them. 3 to quote but a few of them: 1. progetto lesi (lingue europee nella scuola dell’infanzia), carried out in the province of trento between 1998 and 2001. 2. progetto “6 irrsae” educational research on the pedagogical and teaching orientations for the introduction of a foreign language at kindergarten,in the regions of lombardy, piedmont, marche, liguria, friuli venezia giulia, sardinia between 1999 and 2001. 3. progetto “apple” (apprendimento precoce lingue straniere) carried out in 10 regions (emilia romagna, friuli venezia giulia, lazio, liguria, lombardy, marche, piedmont, sardinia, sicily, veneto, from 2001 (“european year of languages”) to 2005). 4. progetto liremar (lingua bespoke language teaching (blt): a proposal for a theoretical framework. the case of efl/elf. . . 241 primary school (from 6 to 11) english language teaching average teaching hours per week teachers’ qualification and proficiency pupils’ expected final proficiency main methodologies/ approaches employed compulsory 2/3 degree in education with b1(former)/b2 (now) english language teaching education (formerly)/none (now) officially: a1 actual: a1officially: • ludic • clil • communicative acutal (common): • basic grammar • some vocabulary • some basic expressions at primary school, after several years of semi-improvisation, the state of english teaching is much better than at the younger levels of education (cf. balboni & daloiso, 2011). here, its teaching is compulsory and teachers, although not specialists in english, are required to have at least a b1 certification, which from 2015 was raised to b2. in this case, however, problems mainly regard the methodology used to teach the language: when teachers do not feel confident enough to speak english, despite their supposed qualification, they often resort to teaching some basic grammar (personal pronouns, to be, to have, interrogatives, negatives, and little more), some mostly little contextualised vocabulary (mainly colours, numbers, names of some animals, of everyday objects and of the commonest sports, about the family and the school contexts) and some very down-toearth expressions (what’s your name?, what time is it) how old are you? etc.). this is because in the past future primary schools teachers while at university had to pass an exam on how to teach english as a foreign language, called “didattica della lingua inglese”. today, on the contrary, with the reform of the degree course introduced in 2010 which stipulates the exit proficiency in english from b1 to b2, such an exam was removed from their curriculum (cf. santipolo, 2011, 2012). secondary school 1st level (from 11 to 14) english language teaching average teaching hours per week teachers’ qualification and proficiency pupils’ expected final proficiency main methodologies/ approaches employed compulsory 3 degree in foreign languages or similar b2/c1/c2 officially: a2 actual: a1 officially: • communicative • clil actual (always rarer and rarer): • grammar inglese in rete nelle marche) developed in the region of marche in collaboration with the university of urbino between 1999 and 2005 and which involved 27 schools (miur, 2014, p. 17). matteo santipolo 242 secondary school 2nd level (from 14 to 19) (changes considerably according to school typology) english language teaching average teaching hours per week teachers’ qualification and proficiency pupils’ expected final proficiency main methodologies/ approaches employed mainly compulsory 2 to 5 degree in foreign languages b2/c1/c2 + native speakers (lettori) officially: b1 to b2 actual: a2 to b2 officially: • communicative • clil • microlanguages actual (always rarer and rarer): • grammar • translation secondary school (both 1st and 2nd level) are definitely the level of schools in which english teaching is at its best in italy, although, once again, the situation is not uniform across the country and, especially at the 2nd level, it varies a lot according to the orientation and typology of school. in any case, all teachers must have an ma degree in english and their average proficiency ranges from b2 to c1. not all of them, however, have received an adequate pedagogical preparation while at university and this may affect what they actually teach during their classes. native speakers “lettori” (lecturers) are also employed, especially in schools with a linguistic orientation, but they often have a limited array of action, with only limited time available and always under the supervision of the “standard” teacher. there might still be exceptions to good practices, with grammar and translation still being the main objectives, but these are, fortunately enough, becoming always rarer and rarer. at the 2nd level there may be great differences in terms of contents taught: in “classical” schools english literature prevails, whereas in technical schools english for special purposes is predominant. university (except foreign languages and similar) english language teaching average teaching hours per week teachers’ qualification and proficiency pupils’ expected final proficiency main methodologies/ approaches employed compulsory (mainly “idoneità”: a qualifying examination which gives no mark but that only states “pass” or “fail”) extremely variable mainly native speakers with a degree in english (lettori) officially: b1 (former)/ b2 (mainly reading and writing) actual: b1communicative some universities are introducing english medium, especially scientific degree, ma and phd courses which will probably have some impact on students’ language proficiency but which may, in the long run, impoverish and diminish the use of italian as a scientific language. bespoke language teaching (blt): a proposal for a theoretical framework. the case of efl/elf. . . 243 4. what english? some preliminary observations the complexity and variability both in terms of english language teachers’ preparation (and their attitudes towards what it means to know and thus to teach a foreign language) and of school contexts that i described in the preceding paragraphs in italy go hand in hand with the by now universally-recognised complexity and variability of the english-speaking world today which i hinted at the very beginning of this paper. as pointed out, among others, by graddol (1997, p. 2), [. . .] in many parts of the world, where english is taken into the fabric of social life, it acquires a momentum and vitality of its own, developing in ways which reflect local culture and languages, while diverging increasingly from the kind of english spoken in britain or north america. one may question whether this should still be considered english or rather globish (global + english), (cf. mccrum, 2010; nerrière, 2004), or even worse, with a strong pejorative and conservative judgement glubbish (globish + rubbish), but that is not the point, since what matters in the end is keeping communication going effectively. literally thousands of works and studies have been devoted, from many different perspectives, to the analysis of the features, problems and consequences of this unprecedented state of things, and it would be too ambitious and beyond me just even to sum them up here. suffice it to say, however, that among the most relevant aspects that have raised scholars’ attention is the question of how to take into account such a complexity and variability when teaching the language, but without making it a mountain too tall and too challenging for students to climb. the debate has revolved around english as a lingua franca (elf), english as a foreign language (efl), english as second language (esl), english as an international language (eil), english for speakers of other languages (esol) and english for specific purposes (esp) (cf., among many possible others, grazzi, 2013; kirkpatrick, 2007; mackenzie, 2014; santipolo, 2012; sharifian, 2009). the main problematic issues touching all of these categories have been related to the concepts of correctness, acceptability, intelligibility and the role of the native speaker as opposed to or along with the role of the non-native speaker. to cut a long story short, the big challenges english language teachers have to face today may be summed up as follows: 1) english as a global phenomenon (like all other language, but probably even more than any other) changes today faster than ever before (cf. the role the internet plays on such changes); 2) globalisation of english: english teaching as a whole should involve teaching learners to grow variety-aware, to be ready for huge difference and variability; matteo santipolo 244 3) teachers themselves (especially, but not exclusively, if non-native speakers) must keep up with points 1 and 2 above and should adopt strategies to work on them in the classroom. so, eventually, what english should be taught? no straightforward or ultimate answer is possible to such a challenging question, but i think that some guidelines can be singled out starting from the observation of some matters of fact about the english language today which have some kind of impact on its teaching (cf. santipolo 2016): · english as a native language, despite its huge internal variation, at least in its internationally and universally accepted version, is relatively stable and thus easier to describe and teach. this has made it possible to produce a huge wealth of teaching materials. · new englishes are now moving towards some degree of stability, but there are hardly no teaching materials for them; · efl and elf are extremely unstable (mackenzie, 2014, p. vii) and no systematic teaching materials exist for them, although something has started to come along4. of all this, the decision-makers at the italian ministry of education, university and research (miur) finally seem to have become aware. so much so that in an official announcement of selection5 recently released (25th february 2016) by the ministry, candidates to posts as teachers of english in secondary schools were required to: have a command of the subject language under examination (i.e., english) at least at a c1 level of the common european framework of reference for languages; know the culture of the countries where people speak the language under examination, with particular reference to the historical, social, literary, artistic and economic 4 the most significant example of this kind is probably the so-called voice project or viennaoxford international corpus of english whose homepage reads (https://www.univie.ac.at/voice/): in the early 21st century, english in the world finds itself in an “unstable equilibrium”: on the one hand, the majority of the world’s english users are not native speakers of the language, but use it as an additional language, as a convenient means for communicative interactions that cannot be conducted in their mother tongues. on the other hand, linguistic descriptions have as yet predominantly been focusing on english as it is spoken and written by its native speakers. voice seeks to redress the balance by providing a sizeable, computer-readable corpus of english as it is spoken by this non-native speaking majority of users in different contexts. these speakers use english successfully on a daily basis all over the world, in their personal, professional or academic lives. we therefore see them primarily not as language learners but as language users in their own right.” 5 article 97 of the italian constitution prescribes that in order to obtain a post in a state institution of whatever kind (school, university, public transportation, health care, and so forth) candidates must sit what is known as a concorso pubblico, a “competitive state exam” or a “public competition” consisting in a written and oral exam used to recruit workers/people. bespoke language teaching (blt): a proposal for a theoretical framework. the case of efl/elf. . . 245 areas, as well as the linguistic varieties of english, from world englishes, to english as a language franca; know how to read, analyze and interpret literary texts with reference to the various literary genres related to authors of literary tradition of the countries where the language under examination is spoken; know how to read, analyze and interpret technical and scientific texts with reference to several specific languages for technical and professional sectors6. similar requirements, but of course language-specific, which for the first time in italy, reveal a considerable degree of sociolinguistic awareness, are also present in the announcements of selection of posts as teachers of french, german, and, though only in a less detailed form, spanish – the main foreign languages taught today in italian schools – and portuguese. what remains to be clarified is if the ministry expects teachers to introduce such competences related to variability in the english classroom, and if yes, how they are expected to do it. 4.1. introducing utility and usability in order to achieve such an ambitious objective i suggest that two concepts may be borrowed and adapted from computer sciences: utility and usability. if the concept of utility is intuitively understandable, usability probably needs some explanation. nielsen (2003) defines usability as a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. the word “usability” also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process. usability is defined by 5 quality components: 1. learnability: how easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design? 2. efficiency: once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks? 3. memorability: when users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency? 4. errors: how many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors? 6 this is the original text in italian: […] avere una padronanza della lingua oggetto d’esame almeno a livello c1 del quadro comune europeo di riferimento per le lingue; conoscere la cultura dei paesi in cui si parla la lingua oggetto d’esame, con particolare riferimento agli ambiti storico, sociale, letterario, artistico ed economico, nonché alle varietà linguistiche dell’inglese, dai world englishes, all’english as a lingua franca; saper leggere, analizzare e interpretare testi letterari con riferimento ai vari generi letterari relativi ad autori della tradizione letteraria dei paesi in cui si parla la lingua oggetto d’esame; saper leggere, analizzare e interpretare testi tecnicoscientifici con riferimento ai vari linguaggi specifici relativi ai settori tecnici e professionali; […] matteo santipolo 246 5. satisfaction: how pleasant is it to use the design? all of these components of usability can easily be read and re-interpreted having language teaching in mind: 1. learnability is connected to how easy it is to turn the linguistic input into intake and, at last, into output. 2. efficiency is defined by the relation between the effort (which includes time as a variable) necessary to learn something and the targets actually reached in terms of communicative competence acquired, especially from a pragmatic viewpoint. 3. memorability: the more meaningful what is learnt is for the student, the more he/she will remember it. 4. errors and mistakes are an essential part of the language learning process (cf. corder, 1981, p. 11). 5. satisfaction lies at the basis of any learning process and language learning is no exception. therefore, it goes without saying, that the more a student is satisfied with what he/she has learnt, the more he/she will be willing to carry on learning, little affected by how demanding that might be. from all this we can derive the definition of sociolinguistic usability as the degree of correspondence that there is between the learner’s current or future actual needs, features and interests and the answers to them that the language course he/she is attending can and does provide. if we apply these principles to the specific complexity and variability of the english-speaking world, what emerges is the need to shift from a singlenorm model to a multi-layered adapting/suiting model, which, taken as a whole, may be called teaching variety. far from being a simplified form of the language similar to what is traditionally known as teacher talk, the teaching variety i’m introducing here implies a considerable enlargement of the number of varieties of english students should be exposed to in the class, practically changing the model from the language to its linguistic repertoire. this, quite clearly, doesn’t mean that learners should be exposed to, or even worse, taught all varieties of english, an unfeasible and meaningless challenge, but rather that the varieties of english they are to be presented with will be selected on the basis of what is useful and usable to them. the added value of such a strategy will be not only to provide learners with what they may feel to be more relevant to them, but also to help them grow more variety-aware. 4.2. criteria to build the teaching variety in practice, the teaching variety as defined here above, will be built by having recourse to the following criteria: bespoke language teaching (blt): a proposal for a theoretical framework. the case of efl/elf. . . 247 1. teaching what is useful before what is not useful. utility will be determined by analysing the learners’ present and/or future needs, motivations and aspirations (not just in relation to language learning) and may consequently change a lot from one student/group of students to another; 2. teaching what is more widespread (both in terms of grammar and vocabulary and of actual sociolinguistic use) before what is less so or not even used (anymore) at all. this is again extremely variable, depending on the type of language to be taught and the specific purpose and context of the course; 3. from this, it entices that it will not always be possible to teach what is easier before what is more complicated, but the advantages deriving from learning something that is perceived as useful and usable will be rewarding thus triggering off new motivation to carry on working and learning. 4.3. bespoke language teaching (blt) exposing students to as many english varieties as possible, regardless of whether native or non native, right from the lowest levels of proficiency but selecting them on the basis of what might be more useful and usable, or, as it were, more “tantalizing” to them, corresponds to building student-tailored courses and will eventually turn language teaching into bespoke language teaching (blt). provided teachers are adequately prepared and perhaps even more importantly, that they themselves are open-minded towards language variation, i firmly believe that a model of this kind could be adapted to and implemented in all the different levels and types of schools illustrated in the first part of this paper and may, in the long run, help improve the quality of “real” english teaching in italy. this promises to be effective, even if, absurdly, english should ever turn into newspeak “[. . .] reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispenses with was allowed to survive. newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. newspeak was founded on the english language as we now know it, though many newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an englishspeaker of our own day.” george orwell, “the principles of newspeak.” an appendix to 1984 (1948) acknowledgments many thanks go to dr. federica bellusci of the university of kwa-zulu natal, durban (south africa) for revising the text. matteo santipolo 248 references balboni, p. e. 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(2009). english as an international language. perspectives and pedagogical issues. bristol, buffalo, toronto: multilingual matters. 453 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (3). 453-456 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book review teaching grammar in second language classrooms: integrating form-focused instruction in communicative context (esl & applied linguistics professional series) author: hossein nassaji and sandra fotos publisher: new york and london: routlege isbn: 978-0-415-80205-5 pages: 167 hossein nassaji and sandra fotos hardly need an introduction: both are renowned scholars with a long track of publications in journals, edited collections and books on a wide range of topics within the domain of second language acquisition. their latest publication, teaching grammar in second language classrooms: integrating form-focused instruction in communicative context, tackles the subject of the effects of formal instruction on the acquisition of grammar. not infrequent are objections voiced by specialists concerning practitioners’ persistent traditionalism and reluctance to implement novel ideas in their classroom practices, and those of teachers who complain about the abstract nature of linguistic theories and their disparity with classroom reality. in the light of the above, the present book makes a rare attempt to bridge the gap between advances in sla theory and the second/foreign language classroom. 454 the authors’ objective is to bring the most recent developments in communicative focus on form to language teachers in an accessible way. the nine chapters of the book have been divided into three parts: part i focusing on input-based options in focus on grammar, part ii, where interactionand output-based solutions are discussed, and, finally, part iii, where the role of context is considered. most of the chapters follow an identical format: the presentation of the theoretical underpinnings of a particular option is followed by an account of empirical studies in its support and a selection of activities and techniques that integrate focus on grammar with opportunities for communication and could be readily applied in the classroom or serve as inspiration for developing one’s own tasks. the opening chapter, “the changing view of grammar instruction,” briefly outlines traditional and more recent approaches to grammar teaching and offers an overview of current advances in communicative focus on form. chapter 2, “focus on grammar through processing instruction” starts with a discussion of input processing, a theoretical model concentrating on ways in which learners derive richer intake from input. the presentation of empirical data in support of the claims of the theory is followed by guidelines for developing affective and referential structured input activities coupled with examples of such techniques. textual enhancement, a technique that brings into focus important formal features that otherwise might not be attended to in the input, is the point of interest of chapter 3, “focus on grammar through textual enhancement.” physical manipulation of the text, such as bolding, highlighting, underlining, and so forth – is aimed at increasing the perceptual salience of specific features, which, when consciously registered, become candidates for acquisition. chapter 4, entitled “focus on grammar through discourse,” concentrates on the need to expose learners to target language discourse loaded with instances of a particular form, if that form is to be acquired. discourse-based approaches to teaching grammar aided by corpus linguistics provide learners with the opportunity to explore the relationship between grammatical forms and their functions. moreover, the grammar of spoken language has come to the fore allowing comparisons between corpora comprising data accumulated by both modalities. sample activities reveal the potential of using discourse-level input and output for teaching grammar in the classroom. chapter 5, “focus on grammar through interactional feedback,” is the first in the second part of the book where the premium is placed not on the reception of grammatical forms but their production. the interactional strategies and activities described here function as a means of drawing learners’ attention to grammatical features that are to be acquired. the following chapter, “focus on grammar through structured grammar-focused tasks,” presenting 455 the background and rationale for task-based instruction, discusses a whole array of implicit and explicit grammar-focused tasks, including consciousness-raising, information exchange, problem-solving, and interpretation tasks. in chapter 7, “focus on grammar through collaborative output tasks,” various techniques requiring collaborative production of language are presented. the recognition of the contribution of the output hypothesis as well as that of sociocultural theory to the understanding of the processes leading to the mastery of a foreign language provides grounds for developing groupor pair-work activities that require learners to produce a certain grammatical structure. chapter 8, “the role of context in focus on grammar,” being, apart from the conclusion, the only chapter in part iii, considers the importance of the pedagogical context in classroom teaching. the impact of such contextual factors as learners’ age and proficiency level, having a native or a nonnative teacher, or living in the second or foreign language context on the outcomes of the learning process are examined to the conclusion that task developers need to account for the goals of each context to maximize the effects of instruction. the conclusion chapter of the book explicates the authors’ recognition for the dominant role of perceptions, beliefs and experience of teachers in every classroom context. language teachers, being active participants in the process, will not apply novel ideas automatically. instead, the authors have no doubt, the decisions teachers make are guided by teachers’ personal views on teaching and learning confronted with particularities of the conditions in which they dwell. the authors emphasize the intricate relationship between theory, research and practice stating that the options offered by researchers and theorists are not ready-made solutions but rather proposals whose effectiveness will be tested by language teachers in their everyday practice. nevertheless, a question rises whether language teachers will reach for the volume that is part of a wellrecognized but more academia-oriented series tackling issues of theoretical nature and discussing research perspectives rather than practical solutions. the audience of the book has been identified as language teachers and language students, who, even if lacking background in sla, wish to explore the connection between theory and the classroom. by the same token, researchers and graduate students should find the book useful as it combines an account of the latest advances in sla theory and research with a practical guide offering advice on their implementation in the classroom. moreover, each of the chapters includes a questions for reflection section which provides an opportunity to reconsider the concepts tackled in the chapter, which could be done individually or in class with teacher trainees. equally practical appear the useful resources parts at the end of each chapter containing a list of leading publications on the 456 ideas presented in a particular part of the book. all titles without exception are followed by a brief presentation of their contents and merits. all this testifies to the exceptional usefulness of the book that can be recommended to a wide audience as a tool that may be used in training programmes or serve as an inspiration for developing new activities or techniques, or for exploring, further on, the concepts elaborated in the publication. reviewed by anna mystkowska-wiertelak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland mystkows@amu.edu.pl 293 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (2). 2018. 293-323 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.2.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt researching pronunciation learning strategies: an overview and a critical look mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl magdalena szyszka opole university, poland mszyszka@uni.opole.pl abstract disparate goals that learners might have in learning second or foreign language pronunciation and the scant classroom time that can be dedicated to teaching this target language subsystem dictate that learner autonomy is of vital importance in this case and adept use of pronunciation learning strategies (pls) can be viewed as key to the development of this attribute. surprisingly, research on these strategies is scarce, mainly focusing on the identification and classification of pls, diverse instruments are used for data collection and the findings are inconclusive. the paper provides an overview of the available research on pls with respect to their identification, learners’ preferences concerning their use, factors mediating the application of pls, and the effects of strategies-based instruction in this area. an attempt is also made to assess research of this kind and to suggest how it could be taken forward to provide insights that would be of value to practitioners. keywords: pronunciation learning; pronunciation learning strategies; strategies-based instruction mirosław pawlak, magdalena szyszka 294 1. introduction as noted by pawlak (2006a, 2006b, 2010a), learning pronunciation in a second or foreign language (l2) is a task that requires a certain degree of autonomy, defined as “the ability to take charge of one’s own learning” (holec, 1981, p. 3) or “a capacity for detachment, critical reflection, decision making and independent action” (little, 2000, p. 69). this is primarily because, whether the goal of pronunciation instruction is to enable near-native like proficiency in a target language (tl), as is the case with students majoring in a foreign language, or learners are merely expected to achieve what has been described as comfortable intelligibility (kenworthy, 1987), the limited classroom time makes it difficult, if not impossible, to systematically focus on this tl subsystem. consequently, students who wish to improve their pronunciation, whatever their individual goals might be, usually have to do this in their own time, which clearly calls for the ability to set realistic goals, choose appropriate ways of learning, engage in constant monitoring and conduct valid self-evaluation. since adept use of language learning strategies (lls) is seen by many specialists as a vital, or perhaps even indispensable condition for the development of autonomy in l2 learning (e.g., griffiths, 2013; oxford, 1990, 2011, 2017; wenden, 1991), it can reasonably be argued that the same applies to learning tl pronunciation. in view of this, it is quite surprising that research into pronunciation learning strategies (pls) has been visibly lagging behind the advances in other domains of empirical investigations of lls and only in the last decade or so has this area begun to inspire more systematic research endeavors. the aim of this paper is to remedy this situation by providing an exhaustive overview of the existing studies of pls, making an attempt to critically evaluate such research in terms of its focus and methodology, and suggesting ways in which this line of inquiry can be beneficially moved forward. with this in mind, at the outset, the definition and role of pls will be considered, which will be followed by the discussion of key methodological issues and a narrative synthesis of the existing empirical evidence, separately for the identification of pls, learners’ preferences regarding their application, factors influencing pls use and attempts to conduct strategies-based instruction in this area. the paper will close with an assessment of what studies of pls have been able to accomplish thus far and a consideration of future research directions in this area. 2. definition and utility of pls before embarking on an overview of research that has focused on different aspects of strategies for learning l2 pronunciation, it is crucial to define the construct and consider the ways in which such strategic devices can potentially contribute to researching pronunciation learning strategies: an overview and a critical look 295 improved mastery of this subsystem. in what perhaps constitutes the first definition of pls, coined for the sake of the first empirical study that specifically targeted this area, peterson (2000) characterized such strategies as “steps taken by students to enhance their own pronunciation learning” (p. 7). this description clearly corresponds to the classic definition of lls proposed by oxford (1990), which emphasizes the involvement in the learning process of not only cognitive, but also physical, social and affective resources of learners. more recently, pawlak (2010a) characterized pls as “deliberate actions and thoughts that are consciously employed, often in a logical sequence, for learning and gaining greater control over the use of various aspects of pronunciation” (p. 191). this definition emphasizes some key aspects of the concept, namely: (1) the purposefulness of the use of pls, (2) a certain level of awareness of this use, (3) the fact that pls can be both observable (e.g., numerous repetitions of words that are difficult to pronounce) and unobservable (e.g., a mental plan of how to get around a persistent pronunciation problem), (4) the importance of combining pls into clusters or chains for the benefit of achieving learning goals, and (5) the fact that pls can be employed with the purpose of better understanding and remembering tl pronunciation patterns but also with a view to successfully employing various segmental and suprasegmental features in communication, or what could be related respectively to the development of explicit and implicit knowledge (cf. ellis, 2009). while it is the second definition that serves as a point of reference in the present overview, it is also warranted to extrapolate a definition of pls from recent definitions of lls proposed by two leading specialists in the field. first, adopting oxford’s (2017, p. 48) conceptualization, pls can be characterized as teachable, dynamic thoughts and behaviors that learners consciously select and employ in specific contexts to improve their self-regulated, autonomous l2 pronunciation development for effective task performance and long-term proficiency (see also the definitions of strategies for learning grammar and vocabulary on p. 244). oxford (2017) also makes a distinction between strategies for learning l2 phonology and strategies for learning l2 pronunciation, but the focus on both learning and use included in pawlak’s (2010a) definition somewhat obviates the need for such a differentiation and allows the use of pls as an allinclusive concept. second, taking into account griffith’s (2018) latest definition of lls, pls can be described as actions, chosen by learners, for the purpose of learning tl pronunciation (but apparently not for using it effortlessly in communication). although there are some clear differences between these two definitions and the one proposed by pawlak (2010a), related, for example, to the element of choice, dependence on context, dynamism, teachablity, reference to specific tasks or the issue of performance, there are also obvious similarities. therefore, it can reasonably be argued that the selected definition, which is somewhat mirosław pawlak, magdalena szyszka 296 more general and inclusive, is sufficient for an overview of a field that is still in its infancy. this does not mean obviously that other characterizations cannot provide important insights into directions for future research, which will be touched upon in the concluding section. although moyer (2014) identified the use of carefully-selected self-regulated strategies as well as constant reflection on the effectiveness of these strategies as one of the key factors which contribute to the achievement of near native-like l2 pronunciation, it must be emphasized that this takes place only when learners recognize the need for improvement in this domain, which of course is not always the case. assuming that learners are indeed concerned with greater mastery of tl pronunciation, be it on account of aspiring to become indistinguishable from native speakers or merely being able to articulate words in an intelligible manner, skillful pls use can undoubtedly facilitate the accomplishment of this goal. following dörnyei’s (2005) assumption that “the actual student response only becomes strategic if it matches the if condition in the pursuit of a goal, that is, if it is appropriate for the particular purpose” (p. 165), it is fully warranted to assume that if a learner consciously and intentionally falls back upon strategic devices promoting improvement in pronunciation, the learning, storage, retrieval or use of different aspects of this tl subsystem is enhanced. to put it differently, appropriate application of pls can potentially foster the awareness and learning of pronunciation features but also assist the application of these features in different types of learning tasks, both more controlled and more communicative. thus it can contribute to the development of both explicit, declarative (e.g., being cognizant of the position of a specific vowel in a vowel chart) and implicit, procedural knowledge (e.g., actually producing that vowel in the right way in different linguistic contexts in spontaneous communication). a separate issue concerns the extent to which different types of pls can in fact contribute to enhanced mastery of pronunciation and even if such an approach runs counter the current recommendations to avoid squeezing lls into fixed categories (e.g., oxford, 2017), it is still very much the reality of strategy research and there appears to be a pressing need to impose order on a field that is still largely an uncharted territory. it stands to reason that metacognitive strategies, or, more broadly, different types of metastrategies (see oxford, 2011, 2017) are bound to play an important role but they are not likely to be specific to learning pronunciation. on the other hand, cognitive, memory and compensation strategies can surely be geared to the distinctive challenges posed by l2 phonetics, although logic as well as the findings of previous research (see section 4 below) dictate that the first group may be the most relevant as it includes different types of practice or analyses. memory strategies, such as representing sounds in memory or remembering their visual representations, may be useful researching pronunciation learning strategies: an overview and a critical look 297 mainly at initial stages, while the role of compensation pls, such as the use of proximal articulations may be even more limited, not least because they are difficult to fall back on in more communicative tasks where limited attentional resources have to be directed at other aspects of speech production. affective and social strategies could potentially be extremely useful, since the former can help reduce anxiety and the latter can facilitate obtaining assistance from peers or the teacher, but reliance on them may hinge upon individual differences, particularly with respect to personality and learning styles, which could account for scant evidence for their use in available research findings (cf. pawlak, 2006b, 2008, 2010a). 3. methodological issues whatever the specific aims of studies of pls, be it merely identification of strategic devices that l2 learners report using in general or in the performance of a particular task, determining the link between reported frequency of pls use and attainment in pronunciation learning or an individual difference (id) variable, or assessing the efficacy of strategies-based instruction (sbi) focused on pls, there is always a need to collect data on strategy use. as is the case with lls more generally, this can be done by means of different instruments and procedures, which can include, among others, questionnaires containing likert-scale items, such as the strategy inventory for language learning (sill, oxford, 1990; see the paper by amerstorfer in this special issue), surveys including open-ended queries, retrospective interviews, immediate reports, observations, diaries, logs and journals, including e-journals, as well as introspective methods, such as think-aloud protocols (see cohen, 2011; griffiths, 2018; oxford, 2011; white, schramm, & chamot, 2007). obviously, the different tools are afflicted by their own share of problems, they may be more or less suitable depending on the objectives of the study, and, in many cases, perhaps the best solution is using methodological triangulation by integrating data coming from several sources. for example, a carefully validated questionnaire may not be the best way to gather information on the use of strategies employed in a specific learning activity that students have just completed, immediate reports will yield little data on generalized strategy use, and changes in the application of lls over time may best be captured by a combination of questionnaires, interviews and diaries completed at longer-time intervals. although, as will be shown in the following section, research into pls has to some extent taken advantage of most of the data collection tools mentioned above, empirical investigations of this kind come with their own specificities, exigencies and requirements, with the effect that some instruments are more useful than others. first, perhaps one of the greatest limitations of such research mirosław pawlak, magdalena szyszka 298 is that learners, particularly those who have little concern for pronunciation, may be less likely to fall back on strategies, in which case the use of questionnaires with items representing different strategic devices may produce highly unreliable data. while it could be argued that this problem applies in equal measure to all lls research, it is particularly acute in the case of pls since the learning goals in this case are remarkably diverse. second, probably equally importantly, even when learners attach much importance to pronunciation, as the case may be with l2 majors, their awareness of the use of pls may be diminished, particularly in more communicative tasks in which the need to convey the intended meanings will naturally direct the limited attentional resources to grammar, lexis or the ways in which obstacles to getting the intended meanings across can be overcome (i.e., communication strategies). while this problem is surely somewhat alleviated in more controlled activities dealing with pronunciation features, interviews or immediate reports may fail to produce data that would be sufficiently rich for detailed analysis. third, reliance upon introspective procedures is severely limited to the preparation stages of communication tasks or to the performance of highly controlled exercises focusing on explicit knowledge (e.g., identifying similar sounds in a set of words or providing a phonetic transcription), because participants clearly cannot speak and talk about their mental processes at the same time. fourth, similarly to research on other less researched tl subsystems (e.g., grammar, see the paper by pawlak in this issue), the lack of classifications and questionnaires specifically designed to explore strategy use in particular areas results in the temptation to adopt existing categorizations and only slightly modify popular tools, most likely the sill, which are intended to tap general use of lls. even though there is no denying that some valuable data can be obtained in this way, modified questionnaires are often too crude to give justice to the specificity of learning pronunciation, and interpretation of the data with reference to general frameworks may lead to major omissions and oversights. this clearly indicates that there is an urgent need to develop comprehensive classifications of pls and construct new instruments, more suited to the study of strategies that can be employed to learn and use pronunciation features. all of this goes to show the importance of using mixed-methods designs and reliance on a combination of instruments in research into pls, a point that will be elaborated upon at the end of the paper. 4. overview of existing research the present section offers a synthesis of the available studies on pronunciation learning strategies in four areas, that is, identification and classification of pls, investigation of learners’ preferences for strategy use, examination of the link researching pronunciation learning strategies: an overview and a critical look 299 between pls use and achievement as well as id factors, and investigation of the effectiveness of strategies-based instruction focused on pls. while such a division is surely not without its shortcomings, one being that the discussion of some domains is evidently more extensive than others, it is related to the paucity of research in this domain, the somewhat natural focus on the description of pls at such initial stages, or the fact that there is not enough research to justify the inclusion of separate categories (e.g., devoted to studies seeking to validate pls inventories). at the same time, in the view of the authors, organizing the synthesis around the main foci makes more sense than doing so in terms of methodological paradigms (e.g., quantitative, qualitative or mixed-methods), as this will better reflect the main research directions and highlight the lines of inquiry that are in need of more attention. what should also be stressed is that although strategies for learning pronunciation were identified in the investigations of good language learners as well as research aiming to identify general lls used by different groups of studnets (e.g., droździał-szelest, 1997; o’malley, chamot, stewner-manzanares, russo, & küpper, 1985; rubin, 1975), the overview only focuses on studies that have dealt specifically with pls. 4.1. identification and classification of pls studies devoted to identification, description and classification of pls drew at the outset mainly on qualitative approaches which allowed the researchers to detect some initial patterns in the use of strategies in pronunciation learning and only later did quantitative studies begin to appear (see table 1, for a summary). in a pioneering empirical investigation dealing with pls, peterson (2000) used self-reports in the form of diaries and interviews to collect data from 11 adult learners of spanish in the us, representing beginner, intermediate and advanced levels of proficiency. taking as a point of reference oxford’s (1990) classification, the researcher identified 22 tactics (apparently understood as specific manifestations of lls) already identified in earlier studies as well as new 21 ones that had not been previously documented. the 43 tactics were grouped into the following twelve pls: representing sounds in memory, practicing naturalistically, formally practicing with sounds, analyzing the sound system, using proximal articulations, finding out about tl pronunciation, setting goals and objectives, planning for a language task, self-evaluating, using humor to lower anxiety, asking for help, and cooperating with peers. in another study seeking to identify strategies for learning pronunciation, osburne (2003) collected data from 50 learners of english as a second language with the help of oral reports. the procedure involved conducting monitored interviews during which participants were requested to provide 10-minute long learning biographies, then replaying the interviews to them so that they mirosław pawlak, magdalena szyszka 300 could repeat a line or two paying attention to their pronunciation, and, in the last stage, asking them to offer an account of the strategies that were supportive in helping them improve this tl subsystem. eight strategies were detected during qualitative analysis, that is: global articulatory gesture, local articulatory gesture or single sound, individual syllables, clusters below syllable level, prosodic structure, individual words, paralanguage, and memory or imitation. however, there were differences in the frequency with which the pls were applied, the most popular including mimicking the speakers and focusing on paralanguage (speed, volume and clarity), and the least common being those related to clusters below the syllable level and to syllable structure. table 1 research on identification and classification of pls author instrument(s) main results peterson (2000) self-reports in the form of diaries and interviews collected 43 pronunciation learning tactics grouped into twelve pls osburne (2003) monitored interviews, followed by replaying the interviews, repetition of a selected fragment and providing an account of pls collected eight pls: global articulatory gesture, local articulatory gesture or single sound, individual syllables, clusters below syllable level, prosodic structure, individual words, paralanguage, and memory or imitation pawlak (2006b) a questionnaire with seven closed and one open-ended items preference for the cognitive strategies of repeating words and sentences as well as learning and applying pronunciation rules; most frequent pls: self-evaluation and listening to one’s own speech, and practicing in front of a mirror; higher awareness of pls among university students pawlak (2008) a questionnaire with closed and open-ended items in-class most frequently reported pls: repeating after the teacher or tape, listening to the model, and using transcription; out-of-class most frequently reported pls: repetition after a model, seeking exposure, checking pronunciation in dictionaries, reading aloud, using transcription, self-recording; strategic learning conditioned by classroom experience pawlak (2010b) the pronunciation learning strategy survey (plss); 60 likertscale statements, divided into metacognitive, cognitive, affective and social pls, supplemented with open-ended items the reliability of the instrument (measured with cronbach alpha): .74 for metacognitive pls, .64 for the cognitive pls, .70 for the affective pls, and .67 for the social pls; overall reliability of .69; a positive and statistically significant correlation between the plss and the sill (r =.45; p < .05) całka (2011) a survey with an open-ended question followed by likert-scale items prevalent use of cognitive strategies, such as practicing pronunciation by repeating, reading aloud, using media or speaking with foreigners and metacognitive strategies, such as paying attention to pronunciation when listening to others; reported frequency order of pls: memory, cognitive, compensation, metacognitive strategies, affective, and social fang and lin (2012) pls use in two distinct contexts: computer-assisted pronunciano statistically significant difference between groups; the students who benefitted from both types of training outperformed those in the capt condition; frequent use researching pronunciation learning strategies: an overview and a critical look 301 tion training (capt) and classroom-based pronunciation training (cbpt); questionnaire based on osburne (2003) of memory and imitation strategies, focusing more on prosodic features than segmental aspects of pronunciation akyol (2013) a questionnaire containing 5point likert-scale items, adopted from berkil (2008) social, memory and affective strategies used most frequently, while the compensation, metacognitive and cognitive pls employed less often; pronunciation training participants report a more frequent use of: making up songs or rhymes in order to remember the pronunciation of words, making associations between english and turkish pronunciation, recording their own voices, and reading reference materials about pronunciation szyszka (2014) semi-structured interviews, diaries identified 36 orchestrated pls chains; a prevalent pattern of strategy chains: a cognitive pls followed by a memory pls erbay, kayaoglu and önay (2016) problem-oriented vignettes for eliciting pls 18 most frequently reported tactics, classified into the six categories of lls (oxford, 1990); high use of cognitive pls and little reliance on affective, compensation and social pls pawlak (2018) open-ended questionnaires filled out immediately on completing activities, and the learning style survey (cohen, oxford, & chi 2001) participants use a narrow range of pls; similar across different phases of the activities as well as entire tasks; disparate nature of the activities necessitates different foci of attention: controlled task enables more focus on pronunciation another two research projects designed with the purpose of identifying pls used by learners of different foreign languages were undertaken by pawlak (2006b, 2008) in the polish context. the first of them (pawlak, 2006b) involved 176 young adults, 87 from senior high schools and 89 attending different programs at the university, who were participating in the first piloting of one of the polish versions of the european language portfolio (elp), developed for senior high school students and language learners in institutions of higher education (bartczak, lis, marciniak, & pawlak, 2005). the data were collected by means of a list comprising seven metacognitive and cognitive strategies that was included in one section of the elp (e.g., “i learn pronunciation rules consciously,” or “i pay attention to word and sentence stress as well as intonation”) as well as one open-ended item inviting the participants to report their own ways of learning tl pronunciation. a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis yielded a total of 572 pls, with an average of 3.25 per respondent. participants exhibited a marked preference for such cognitive strategies as repeating words and sentences as well as learning and applying pronunciation rules, whereas they were the least likely to draw upon the metacognitive strategy of self-evaluation, involving audio-recording and listening to one’s own speech, and the cognitive strategy of practicing in front of a mirror. additionally, it was found that awareness of pls was higher among university students, with english majors reporting mirosław pawlak, magdalena szyszka 302 the most frequent use of strategies which were also the most varied, a finding that is hardly surprising. inspired by such results, the second study carried out by pawlak (2008) involved 106 first-year philology students, based on the assumption that, in view of their more ambitious goals in pronunciation learning, they would report numerous instances of pls use. the data were collected through a questionnaire which included closed and open-ended items that tapped the participants’ opinions about pronunciation learning as well as the strategies that they employed inside and outside the classroom. as far as in-class pls are concerned, the most frequently reported ones were repeating after the teacher or a recording, listening to the model provided and using phonetic transcription. when it comes to pronunciation learning at home, the respondents indicated most frequent reliance on repetition after a recorded model, seeking exposure to english, looking up pronunciation in dictionaries, reading aloud, using transcription, and recording one’s own pronunciation in order to pinpoint areas in need of improvement. on the whole, somewhat disappointingly, these english majors depended heavily on just a few cognitive pls, with their strategic learning being to a large extent conditioned by their classroom experience. in yet another attempt to identify and classify the pls reported by 74 fulltime and part-time teacher training college students of english, całka (2011) integrated qualitative and quantitative methodologies. in order to collect the requisite data, she applied a survey which included an open-ended question (“how did you learn english pronunciation before entering the college?”) which was followed by likert-scale items developed on the basis of oxford’s (1990) sill, intended to tap the frequency of pls use. the analysis of the responses to the open-ended item revealed prevalent use of cognitive strategies (e.g., practicing pronunciation by repeating, reading aloud, using media or speaking with foreigners) and metacognitive strategies (e.g., paying attention to pronunciation when listening to people using english). with respect to the quantitative part of the investigation, the pls were ordered in the following way in terms of their reported frequency: memory strategies (e.g., repeating a word several times, associating the pronunciation of a word or sound with a situation in which it was heard), cognitive strategies (e.g., repeating after native speakers, using resources, reading aloud), compensation strategies (e.g., using proximal articulation, guessing the pronunciation of new words), metacognitive strategies (e.g., paying attention to pronunciation, planning for a task, self-monitoring and organizing learning), affective strategies (e.g., having a sense of humor about one’s mispronunciations), and social strategies (e.g., asking for help). more recently, szyszka (2014) carried out a study which went beyond mere identification of pls by attempting to detect orchestrated sequences of these strategic devices, or strategy chains deployed for specific tasks in pronunciation researching pronunciation learning strategies: an overview and a critical look 303 learning. the participants were 31 trainee teachers of english as a foreign language, 20 of whom were recorded during semi-structured interviews and 28, including 17 of those previously interviewed, were requested to keep diaries. szyszka (2014) found pls chains consisting of two or more strategies which the participants reported applying for such activities as preparing a presentation, learning the pronunciation of a new word, improving pronunciation through watching films on television, listening and reading. she also concluded that the prevalent pattern of strategy chains consisted of a cognitive pls followed by a memory pls. in another study, erbay, kayaoglu and önay (2016) set out to identify the pls employed by 56 english majors in turkey. also adopting a qualitative approach, the researchers used 11 problem-oriented vignettes in which hypothetical situations requiring the students’ reactions were described with a view to eliciting pls. the following problem areas were included: natural pronunciation, difficult and long words, self-confidence, misunderstanding, sounds that do not exist in turkish, tone, sounds existing in turkish and the tl, the knowledge of the international phonetic alphabet, and intonation. the analysis of the data yielded a list of 18 most frequently reported tactics that were classified into the six categories of lls identified by oxford (1990). the participants reported high frequency of use of cognitive strategies and low frequency of reliance on affective, compensation and social strategies. it was also found that cognitive and metacognitive strategies were likely to be often drawn on in the face of hypothetical problems in pronunciation. moving on to empirical investigations that were entirely quantitative in nature, the studies undertaken by fang and lin (2012), and akyol (2013) need to be mentioned. the first one sought to compare the application of pls in two distinct contexts, that is computer-assisted pronunciation training (capt) and classroom-based pronunciation training (cbpt). participants were 120 college students attending pronunciation courses assigned to four different conditions, with 30 students in each: only capt, only cbpt, and two groups having the benefit of both types of instruction, but the responses concerning just one of the two conditions. instruction in pronunciation lasted two semesters and involved two hours a week. the students receiving capt worked individually in a computer lab using my english tutor, software featuring automatic speech recognition and speech analysis units, the cbpt students attended regular classes, and the remaining students had access to both types of training. the data were collected by means of a questionnaire that contained likert-scale items based on the pls identified by osburne (2003) in the study described above. while no statistically significant difference was found in pls use between the capt and cbpt groups, the students who benefitted from both types of training outperformed those in the capt condition, which indicates that the inclusion of different contexts provides more opportunities to engage in strategy use. irrespective mirosław pawlak, magdalena szyszka 304 of the learning condition, the students reported frequent use of memory and imitation strategies, focusing more on prosodic features than segmental aspects of pronunciation (e.g., local articulatory or single sound). akyol (2013) explored the frequency of pls use reported by 82 prospective teachers, paying particular attention to the differences in this respect between 46 students who attended a pronunciation training course and 36 who did not. a questionnaire containing 5-point likert-scale items was used to collect the data, which was based on oxford’s (1990) classification of lls, adopted from the study conducted by berkil (2008) (see below) and characterized by a high level of internal consistency reliability (.73). the participants reported the most frequent application of social, memory and affective strategies, whereas the compensation, metacognitive and cognitive pls were employed much less often. additionally, statistically significant differences were observed between the two groups. more specifically, the students provided with formal training reported more frequent reliance on making up songs and rhymes, creating associations between english and turkish pronunciation, recording themselves in order to hear their pronunciation, and reading reference materials, whereas those without instruction opted most often for the strategies of recalling the teacher’s pronunciation or paying more attention to pronunciation if it was appreciated by others. a rare attempt to construct a data collection tool specifically intended to tap the frequency of pls use was made by pawlak (2010b), who designed the pronunciation learning strategy survey (plss). the instrument includes 60 likert-scale statements, divided into four groups referring to metacognitive, cognitive, affective and social pls, and this quantitative part is supplemented with open-ended items inviting respondents to share their opinions on favorite approaches to studying segmental and suprasegmental features in the tl as well as problems they are confronted with. the plss was validated in a study involving 80 polish university students majoring in english, enrolled in the second and third year of a three-year ba program. the reliability of the instrument was measured with cronbach alpha coefficients which reached .74 for metacognitive pls, .64 for the cognitive pls, .70 for the affective pls, and .67 for the social pls, with the value for the entire instrument equaling .69. moreover, a positive and statistically significant moderate correlation was found between the mean scores on the plss and the sill (r =.45; p < .05). despite such promising results, it has to be stressed that the instrument still represents work in progress, it needs to be validated in other contexts and, perhaps most importantly, it was constructed with english philology students in mind, which considerably reduces the range of situations in which it can be employed. pawlak (2018) has also spearheaded another important line of inquiry with respect to pls by investigating their deployment in the completion of specific researching pronunciation learning strategies: an overview and a critical look 305 learning activities, a form-focused and a meaning-focused one. the aim of the study, which involved 54 english majors in the last year of a three-year ba program was threefold: (1) to identify the pls employed when preparing for, performing and after completing the two tasks, (2) to gauge the effect of task type on the pls use, and (3) to shed light on the mediating effect of gender, proficiency and learning style on strategy use (the findings for the last one are discussed in section 4.3). participants were requested to perform two activities based on the same text containing words, the pronunciation of which posed a major learning challenge for english majors in poland. in both activities the students were provided with preparation time but while the first involved simply reading the text aloud, the second involved retelling the text in pairs, thereby calling for more spontaneous use of the tl. it was hoped that such a design would allow identification of pls supporting the development of explicit and implicit knowledge of tl pronunciation (see section 2 above). the data were collected by means of open-ended questionnaires that participants filled out immediately on completing each of the two activities, as well as the learning style survey (lss, cohen, oxford, & chi, 2001), which was administered towards end of data collection. pawlak (2018) found that the participants drew on a narrow range of strategies that were similar across the different phases of the activities as well as entire tasks. at the stage of preparation, students attended to words which were difficult to pronounce, practiced pronunciation, fell back on resources, especially online ones, requested assistance and, much less frequently, tried to control their emotions. when performing the tasks, they attended to pronunciation features, made comparisons with their own production, and counted on the help of their peers. after performing the activities, the students, yet again, tried to compare their performance with that of other students, repeated difficult words or looked up their pronunciation. it was also revealed that the disparate nature of the activities necessitated different foci of attention, with the controlled task enabling more focus on pronunciation but the meaning-focused one still giving opportunities for a dual focus on meaning and pronunciation. in a somewhat similar vein, jiang and cohen (2018) conducted a study in which they compared the perceived difficulties in the pronunciation of sounds in mandarin chinese and the lls used to deal with them with the problems and the pls actually employed in oral performance. the data were collected from 92 native speakers of english taking chinese classes in a large university in the us with the help of a specifically designed survey, a read-aloud task and a stimulated-recall interview that took place immediately after the performance of the task. quantitative and qualitative analysis showed that the difficulties and coping strategies the students reported in the survey did not always match the errors they made in reading and the pls they drew upon, thereby emphasizing the need for contextualized strategy research. mirosław pawlak, magdalena szyszka 306 table 2 research on learners’ preferences concerning pls author instrument(s) main results samalieva (2000) semi-structured interviews reported problems: length of words and familiarity with them, sound production, stress and rhythm, speed, familiarity with interlocutors, the relationship between pronunciation and spelling, perceptions of native pronunciation and l1 interference; better students are more cognizant of problems and use more metacognitive pls; less proficient ones prefer teacher or peer correction vitanova and miller (2002) answers to open-ended questions most students favor consciousness-raising pronunciation instruction at both segmental and suprasegmental levels; perceived positive contribution of metacognitive pls; participants emphasize the importance of affective factors, such as self-confidence, in communication wrembel (2008) a questionnaire comprising a quantitative and a qualitative part, measuring usefulness of pls and the extent to which they are enjoyable most useful pls: phonemic transcription, dialogue reading and performing; most enjoyable pls: drama performance, relaxation and breathing exercises, dialogue reading and performing, eight pls reported in open-ended part: listening to english radio/tv, using a pronunciation dictionary, talking with friends, talking to oneself, audiotaping, imitating/pretending to be native speakers, singing english songs, transforming american accent into rp, and reading aloud pawlak (2011a) a diary with participants responding to five prompts most learners focused on issues discussed during pronunciation classes, did not have long-term plans in pronunciation learning, and concentrated on immediate problems and solutions; most frequently used pls were cognitive: repetition, transcription and consulting a dictionary 4.2. learners’ preferences concerning pls another line of inquiry concerns studies that are mostly qualitative in nature and adopt a learner-centered perspective by placing students’ opinions in the spotlight and exploring strategies they employ to overcome the difficulties encountered in learning tl pronunciation (see table 2, for a summary). in one such research project, samalieva (2000) used semi-structured interviews to examine problems that 21 university students experienced with learning english pronunciation and the pls they deployed to deal with them. participants reported difficulties pertaining to the length of words and familiarity with them, sound production, stress and rhythm, speed, familiarity with interlocutors, inconsistency of the relationship between pronunciation and spelling, perceptions of native pronunciation and l1 interference. the analysis yielded 29 types of strategies that were classified into cognitive, metacognitive and social, with the most frequently used pls representing the first group and being related to increasing the amount of exposure through listening to records and watching television in the tl, and relying on repetition. it was also uncovered that the better students were researching pronunciation learning strategies: an overview and a critical look 307 more cognizant of their pronunciation problems and used more metacognitive pls, such as monitoring and self-correction, whereas the less proficient participants preferred teacher or peer correction. learners’ concerns and opinions related to pronunciation learning experience were also addressed in the study undertaken by vitanova and miller (2002), who obtained the data from an unspecified number of graduate students attending a pronunciation course, requested to reflect on their learning experience by answering questions such as: “why do you wish to improve your pronunciation? what do you find most helpful in improving pronunciation?”. the findings demonstrated that most of the students favored consciousness-raising pronunciation instruction at both segmental and suprasegmental levels and saw the positive contribution of metacognitive pls, such as active listening or mirroring, which could be used autonomously in various contexts. the participants also emphasized the importance of affective factors in learning pronunciation, such as the role of self-confidence in communication. another two research projects being the focus of this section were carried out in the polish context by wrembel (2008) and pawlak (2011a). wrembel’s (2008) investigation aimed to tap the opinions of 32 first-year english philology students concerning the usefulness of pls used during a pronunciation course and the extent to which the participants enjoyed applying them, and to collect data on the application of strategies outside the classroom. the data collection tool was a questionnaire comprising a quantitative as well as a qualitative part. the first consisted of a list of 16 pls which the students had to evaluate on a 5point likert scale both in terms of their perceived utility and the degree to which their employment was enjoyable, while the second asked the participants to enumerate pls that they fell back upon in out-of-class learning. the analysis showed that the most useful pls included phonemic transcription as well as dialogue reading and performing while the least useful was provision of kinesthetic feedback, believed to appeal to learners’ senses and modalities. the most enjoyable pls included drama performance, relaxation and breathing exercises, as well as dialogue reading and performing whereas the least enjoyable were recordings made at home and dialog memorization. with respect to learning pronunciation in their own time, the students reported reliance on eight strategies, that is: listening to english radio/tv, referring to a pronunciation dictionary, talking to friends in english, talking to oneself in the tl, audiotaping, imitating/pretending to be native speakers, singing english songs, changing american accent into rp, and reading aloud. based on the findings, wrembel (2008) proposed a classification of pls adopting as a point of reference o’malley and chamot’s (1990) more general division of lls into metacognitive, cognitive and socioaffective. pawlak (2011a) conducted a study aimed to provide insights into the ways in which advanced l2 learners approach pronunciation learning, identify problems mirosław pawlak, magdalena szyszka 308 they face while mastering phonetic aspects of l2 speech, and uncover ways in which such problems were surmounted. also in this case the participants were first-year english majors, a total of 60 students, who were requested to keep diaries over the period of three months. in order to make their task easier, the students were given five prompts regarding their efforts to master english pronunciation, such as “what do you do to master various pronunciation features?” or “how do you evaluate your progress?”. qualitative analysis showed that most of the participants focused on issues covered during pronunciation classes, were preoccupied with the problems they faced and the solutions they had to find, and only a handful had far-reaching plans related to learning this tl subsystem. the students most frequently opted for rather traditional, cognitive pls, such as, for example, repetition, transcription and reliance on dictionaries, and only a few reported a more varied repertoire of pls, also emphasizing the need for more naturalistic practice. some students as well pointed to the importance of metacognitive strategies, such as self-monitoring or self-evaluation, and offered evidence for the employment of strategy chains, but such participants were clearly in the minority. 4.3. the link between pls use, achievement and id factors very few studies, typically quantitative in nature, have sought to investigate the extent to which the application of pls can in fact translate into greater mastery of pronunciation features, and only a handful have attempted to determine the role of id factors as mediators of strategy use in this domain (see table 3, for a summary). conducting such research usually involves designing inventories measuring reported frequency of pls use or using existing ones, perhaps after some modifications, and, then, using statistical procedures (e.g., correlational analysis) to determine the connection with other variables (e.g., pronunciation performance or an id factor). one research project falling into this category was carried out by berkil (2008), who examined the relationship between the employment of pls and pronunciation attainment in the case of 40 turkish university students representing different levels of proficiency. the frequency of pls use was determined by means of the strategy inventory for learning pronunciation (silp), constituting a modified version of oxford’s (1990) sill, whereas pronunciation ability was operationalized as reading a passage and performing a free response task, in which the participants expressed their opinions on one of five topics. berkil (2008) failed to find a correlation between overall pls use and attainment but revealed that three of the strategies included in the silp were used statistically significantly differently between participants at different proficiency levels. more specifically, the students in the moderate pronunciation ability group reported more frequent reliance on purposeful listening to sounds researching pronunciation learning strategies: an overview and a critical look 309 and listening to tapes, television, movies or music, but at the same time were the least likely to use the strategy of using phonetic symbols or personal codes in order to remember how to pronounce words. table 3 research on the relationship among pls use, achievement and id factors author instrument(s) main results berkil (2008) strategy inventory for learning pronunciation (silp), passage reading and free-response task no significant correlation between overall pls use and attainment; three pls used differently between participants at different proficiency levels: purposeful listening, watching/listening to tapes, television, movies or music and using phonetic symbols or own codes eckstein (2007) strategic pronunciation learning scale (spls) and a standardized speaking level achievement test (lat) significant positive correlation between attainment and three pls: noticing pronunciation mistakes, adjusting facial muscles while speaking and asking for help with pronunciation; significant negative correlation between attainment and two pls: silent repetition of the english pronunciation model and modulation of speech volume campos (2015) strategic pronunciation learning scale (spls, eckstein, 2007) and pronunciation performance in semi-spontaneous speech positive relationship between pls use and the duration of this use; no major correlations between the frequency and duration of pls use and pronunciation performance; positive relationship for pronunciation intelligibility hişmanoğlu (2012) instrument comprising 42 5-point likert scale items and pronunciation scores on final examination more proficient students rely more often on metacognitive pls and the affective strategy of using humor to reduce anxiety levels rokoszewska (2012) całka’s (2011) instrument; perception: listening tasks; production: vowels and diphthongs, reading minimal pairs and a text weak but statistically significant positive correlation between pls use and production of english vowels and diphthongs; no significant correlation between pls use and perception pawlak (2018) open-ended questionnaires filled out immediately on completing activities, and the learning style survey (cohen, oxford, & chi, 2001) no evidence for the influence of proficiency level; females use more pls than males in both tasks, manifesting more concern with accuracy; field-independent and analytic learners are more likely to pay attention to form and engage in practice szyszka (2017) pronunciation learning strategies inventory (plsi), adapted from berkil (2008), foreign language classroom anxiety scale (horwitz et al., 1986), input-processing-output anxiety scale (macintyre & gardner, 1994), oral presentations, semi-structured interviews and diary writing compensation and memory pls used more frequently by anxious trainee teachers; higher input anxiety levels connected with less frequent use of social pls; higher processing anxiety levels correlated with more frequent use of memory and compensation pls; higher output anxiety linked with more frequent use of compensation pls and less frequent use of affective strategies; anxious and non-anxious learners differ significantly in their use of a number of pls yetkin (2017) eckstein’s (2007) spls a statistically significant difference in strategy use by males and females eckstein (2007) conducted a study among 183 international students at lowintermediate, intermediate and high-intermediate levels of proficiency with the purpose of correlating the use of pls and spontaneous language performance. he mirosław pawlak, magdalena szyszka 310 designed the strategic pronunciation learning scale (spls), which drew on kolb’s (1984) construct of learning cycle and included 28 pls related to: concrete experience – input/practice, reflection on observation – noticing/feedback, abstract conceptualization – hypothesis forming, and action based on new conceptualization – hypothesis testing. achievement was measured with a standardized speaking level achievement test (lat), aimed to elicit spontaneous speech in response to a set of prompts. the analysis revealed meaningful relationships for five pls, with attainment being positively correlated with noticing pronunciation mistakes, adjusting facial muscles while speaking and asking for help with the pronunciation of new english words, and negatively correlated with silent repetition of the english pronunciation model and modulation of speech volume. the spls was also applied by campos (2015) in order to look into the relationship between the frequency of pls use and pronunciation performance in semi-spontaneous speech in the case of 40 students of teacher education at a university in chile. however, the instrument was modified, comprising 36 statements representing strategic devices and a 5-point likert-scale was applied to tap into both the frequency and duration of pls use. the mastery of pronunciation in semi-spontaneous speech was assessed by means of a test designed by the researcher, with performance being evaluated both holistically and analytically by two raters. one interesting finding of the study was that there was a positive connection between the frequency of use of pls and the duration of this use, with cognitive strategies scoring highest on both criteria. however, no major correlations were found between the frequency and duration of the employment of pls and pronunciation performance, but at the same time a positive relationship was disclosed in the case of the levels of pronunciation intelligibility. also worth mentioning in this section are the research projects conducted by hişmanoğlu (2012), rokoszewska (2012) and, yet again, pawlak (2018). in a study involving 38 english majors, hişmanoğlu (2012) set out to compare the use of pls of successful and unsuccessful students. the instrument employed to tap pls comprised 42 5-point likert scale items divided into six groups in accordance with oxford’s (1990) classification, with the items having been developed drawing on previous research (e.g., eckstein, 2007; peterson, 2000). the division of participants into those that were successful and unsuccessful was made based on their pronunciation scores on the final examination. the main finding of the study was that the more proficient students tended to more often rely on metacognitive pls, especially those involving self-evaluation, as well as the affective strategy of using humor to reduce anxiety levels. rokoszewska (2012) investigated the relationship between pls use, and the perception and production of tl vowels by 63 polish university students majoring in english. the data concerning pls were gathered by means of the tool constructed by całka (2011) researching pronunciation learning strategies: an overview and a critical look 311 in the study described in section 4.1., perception ability was assessed with the help of three listening tasks taken from baker (2006), while production was evaluated through tasks requiring articulation of pure vowels and diphthongs, as well as reading both minimal pairs and a continuous text. the analysis demonstrated a weak but significant correlation between pls and attainment in the case of production but not perception. finally, in the study reported earlier, pawlak (2018) found no evidence for the influence of proficiency pls use in formfocused and meaning-focused tasks. as mentioned at the beginning of this section, research targeting the relationship between pls use and id factors is extremely scant and, for that reason, only three studies can be mentioned here. perhaps the most extensive empirical investigation in this area was undertaken by szyszka (2017), who conducted a mixed-methods study among 94 trainee teachers of english as a foreign language at a polish university to examine the interplay between the use of pls and different levels of language anxiety. qualitative data were collected by means of pre-prepared oral presentations, semi-structured interviews and diary writing, whereas quantitative data were gathered through the pronunciation learning strategies inventory (plsi), adapted from berkil (2008), aimed to tap frequency of pls use, as well as the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas), developed by horwitz, horwitz and cope (1986) and the input-processing-output anxiety scale, created by macintyre and gardner (1994), both of which were deployed to obtain data on anxiety levels. the findings can be summarized as follows: (1) compensation and memory pls were employed more frequently by anxious trainee teachers, (2) higher input anxiety levels were connected with less frequent use of social pls, (3) higher processing anxiety levels correlated with more frequent use of memory and compensation strategies, (4) higher output anxiety levels were accompanied by more frequent use of compensation pls and less frequent affective strategies, and (5) anxious and non-anxious pronunciation learners differed significantly in their use of a number of pronunciation learning tactics. in another, much more limited, study, yetkin (2017) investigated, among other things, the effect of gender on pls among 27 english majors (21 females and 6 males) enrolled in a teacher education program in turkey. the analysis of the data collected by means of eckstein’s (2007) spls yielded a statistically significant difference in strategy use by males and females, but the results have to be taken with circumspection, given the evident lack of balance in the size of the two groups. the impact of id factors on task performance was also tackled by pawlak (2018) in the study referred to above. in line with findings of previous research (see e.g., pawlak, 2011b; takeuchi, griffiths, & coyle, 2007), women were found to employ more pls than men both in the form-focused and meaningfocused task, manifesting as well more concern with accuracy and avoidance of mirosław pawlak, magdalena szyszka 312 errors. using the lls (cohen et al., 2001), he also found some evidence for the impact of learning styles on pls use, since field-independent and analytic learners were more likely to pay attention to form and engage in practice. by his own admission, however, “such evidence is tenuous, other id variables, such as goals or beliefs, could have played a part, and the impact of id factors was intricately intertwined with the nature of the task” (pawlak, 2018, p. 202). this comment only goes to show how badly more research is needed in this domain. 4.4. instruction in the use of pls there is also a gradually growing body of research on strategies-based instruction in the area of pls (see table 4, for a summary), although it should be emphasized at the very outset that some of the studies suffer from design flaws, which casts doubt on the reliability of their findings. the weaknesses mirror to some extent those leveled at research on sbi with respect to lls in general (cf. plonsky, 2011) and are related, for example, to the determination of differences in strategy use before and after the intervention. however, what should be stressed at this juncture is that it is one thing to show an increase in pls use and quite another to demonstrate that such increased frequency accounts for progress in learning pronunciation. this is surely a critical issue since, both with respect to pls and strategies applied for learning other tl skills and subsystems, there should be evidence for tangible benefits of sbi lest it should begin to be regarded as art for art’s sake. on the other hand, measuring pronunciation gains without simultaneously tapping changes in pls use is also problematic since it is difficult to determine whether progress should be attributed to the intervention or some other variables. two relatively early research projects that aimed to gauge the effects of pls training were carried out by bukowski (2004) and vasarin (2007). in the first one, which took place in the polish context, a group of first-year english philology students received training in the use of indirect strategies of the metacognitive and socioaffective type in their regular pronunciation course for the period of three months, with diaries being used to elicit information on pronunciation learning processes. bukowski (2004) reported visible changes in the students’ approach to learning pronunciation, in particular with respect to enhanced autonomy, greater use of metalanguage related to phonetics, higher frequency of use of the targeted pls and more positive attitudes toward tl pronunciation. one stage of an action research project conducted by vasarin (2007) involved 20 thai learners of english, children aged 8-10, and investigated the extent to which sbi focusing on pls impacted participants’ pronunciation performance as well as their speaking confidence. the intervention targeted metacognitive, cognitive, affective and social strategies, and data were obtained from observations, group discussions, field notes, reflective reports and tape recordings. the researching pronunciation learning strategies: an overview and a critical look 313 analysis of the collected empirical evidence indicated that the training resulted in improved intelligibility of pronunciation as well as greater speaking confidence. table 4 research on strategies-based instruction in pls author instrument(s) main results bukowski (2004) intervention metacognitive and socioaffective pls (three months); diaries on pronunciation learning processes changes in the approach to learning pronunciation, in particular with respect to enhanced autonomy, greater use of metalanguage related to phonetics, higher frequency of use of targeted pls and more positive attitudes toward tl pronunciation vasarin (2007) intervention targeting metacognitive, cognitive, affective and social strategies; observations, group discussions, field notes, reflective reports and tape recordings improved intelligibility of pronunciation, greater speaking confidence haslam (2010) training in pls use for 10 weeks; plab (pimsleur, 1966[2003]), spls (eckstein, 2007), a test measuring global foreign accent, comprehensibility and accuracy, and fluency no interplay between aptitude and context, and gains in l2 pronunciation; positive, statistically significant relationship between pls use and improvement in comprehensibility and accuracy of segmental features; no correlation between frequency of pls use, global foreign accent and fluency ingels (2011) intervention in self-monitoring for 16 weeks; a pretest-posttest design; tests measuring suprasegmental accuracy, primary phase stress, intonation, vowel reduction in content and function words, linking, word stress, and multiword construction stress self-monitoring led to improved suprasegmental accuracy; participants most successful at improving accuracy in identifying message unit boundaries, linking and vowel reduction in function words, and less successful in primary phrase stress and intonation sardegna (2009) intervention in pls for learning english stress placement for one semester; preand posttest consisting of five dialogs and 22 english words; self-report on pls use positive gains in the students’ ability to read english primary phase stress, construction and word stress (the gains retained over time) sardegna (2011) intervention in pls for improving linking sounds within and across words for one semester; preand posttest consisting of read-aloud tests, self-report on pls use significant short-term (immediately following the instruction) gains and noticeable long-term (a few months afterwards) improvement in linking sardegna (2012) intervention in pls for improving linking and english stress; preand posttest consisting of read-aloud tests; selfreport significant gains with respect to the targeted features, both immediately and over time; positive self-efficacy beliefs play a beneficial role sardegna and macgregor (2013) intervention in pls for 15 weeks; a preand a posttest, based on reading aloud, participants’ self-assessments, reflections, descriptions of problems and reports of activities completed outside the classroom students supplied with pronunciation instruction (based on psl empowerment and their needs) significantly improved their read-aloud accuracy, both on the whole and with respect to vowel reduction, linking, primary stress and intonation; intervention impacted participants’ choice of activities for their outof-class self-regulatory pronunciation practice mirosław pawlak, magdalena szyszka 314 somewhat more recently, haslam (2010) investigated the link between pls instruction and pronunciation gains, also taking into account language aptitude and learning context (i.e., english as a foreign language – efl, and english as a second language – esl – in intensive programs). the participants, who were 86 esl learners in the us and 100 efl learners in china benefitted from 10 weeks of intervention in using pls. the data were collected by means of the pimsleur language aptitude battery (plab) (pimsleur, 1966[2003]), the spls (eckstein, 2007, see above), as well as a pronunciation proficiency test measuring global foreign accent, fluency, comprehensibility and accuracy, all of which were administered before and after the intervention. while there was no interplay between aptitude and context, and gains in l2 pronunciation, a positive, statistically significant relationship was detected between pls use and improvement in comprehensibility and accuracy of segmental features. on the other hand, frequency of pls use did not correlate with global foreign accent and fluency. ingels (2011), in turn, explored the effects of instruction in the use of self-monitoring, entailing the pls of critical listening, transcribing, marking corrections and rehearsing, on the pronunciation of selected suprasegmental features in english. fifteen esl learners, future international teaching assistants, participated in instruction focusing on self-monitoring for the period of 16 weeks, with a pretestposttest design being used. both tests had the same format and measured suprasegmental accuracy, operationalized in terms of message unit boundaries, primary phase stress, intonation, vowel reduction in content and function words, linking, word stress, and multiword construction stress. the employment of self-monitoring led to improved suprasegmental accuracy, with different types of pls having differential effects. the gains, though, were differentiated depending on the specific aspect being measured, with the participants being most successful at improving accuracy in identifying message unit boundaries, linking and vowel reduction in function words, and less successful in primary phrase stress and intonation. one of the contributions of these studies to sbi research in the domain of pls is the inclusion of nuanced measures of tl proficiency, an important lesson for future empirical investigations. of particular interest is a series of empirical investigations conducted by sardegna and her collaborators, who were interested in the effectiveness of pls training adopting as a point of reference the covert rehearsal model (crm) proposed by dickerson (1994). the model specifies six stages for covert rehearsal that lead learners towards a self-directed modification of their pronunciation, which are as follows: (1) finding privacy to practice, (2) practicing aloud, (3) monitoring production for target features, (4) comparing production with models, (5) adjusting production to match the models, and (6) practicing the adjustment out loud until accurate and fluent. in the first research project, sardegna (2009) researching pronunciation learning strategies: an overview and a critical look 315 explored the effects of one-semester sbi on pronunciation improvement of 39 esl students from different academic branches taking an english pronunciation course at an american university, both with respect to its overall contribution and the contribution of specific pls. in this longitudinal investigation, adopting a pretest-posttest design, participants took part in pronunciation course for one semester, in which they were taught how to apply pls to learning english stress placement. their progress was evaluated on three posttests, which consisted of five dialogs and 22 english words, and information on pls use was collected by means of a self-report survey including 5-point likert scale items completed together with the last two posttests. it was found that intensive instruction augmented with pls training positively affected the students’ ability to read english primary phase stress, construction and word stress, with the gains being retained over time. a similar design was adopted in the following study, in which sardegna (2011) investigated the long-term effects of equipping 38 international graduate-level students with pls aimed to improve their ability to link sounds within as well as across words. the analysis of the data elicited through read-aloud tests and questionnaire revealed that the training had generated the desired effects, since the participants made significant short-term (immediately following the instruction) gains and exhibited noticeable long-term (a few months afterwards) improvement in linking. in yet another extension of the initial research project, again applying the same design, sardegna (2012) looked at the efficacy of sbi focused on pls in terms of the mastery of linking and english stress, and the mediating role of self-efficacy beliefs. using some of the tools employed in previous studies, she managed to show that the intervention indeed led to gains with respect to the targeted pronunciation features, both immediately and over time, with positive self-efficacy beliefs playing a beneficial role. finally, sardegna and macgregor (2013) examined the effects of scaffolded pronunciation teaching with embedded pls on self-regulated efforts in pronunciation practice. fifteen international esl students from 10 different majors took part in an intervention that spanned 15 weeks and comprised carefully planned activities targeting such features as vowel reduction, linking, primary stress and intonation. the data included the scores on a pretest and a posttest, based on reading aloud a text as well as the participants’ self-assessments, reflections, descriptions of problems and reports of activities completed outside the classroom to improve pronunciation. it was concluded that the students who had been supplied with pronunciation instruction based on psl empowerment and their needs significantly improved their read-aloud accuracy, both on the whole and with respect to vowel reduction, linking, primary stress and intonation. it also turned out that the intervention impacted the participants’ choice of activities for their out-of-class self-regulatory pronunciation practice. mirosław pawlak, magdalena szyszka 316 5. conclusions, reflections and directions for future research looking at the overview of research into pronunciation learning strategies provided in this paper, it immediately becomes clear that although some valuable insights are beginning to emerge, the findings are by and large contradictory and inconclusive, and some areas could be referred to as grey spots on the map of strategy research. when it comes to some emerging patterns, they could be summarized as follows: 1. most studies have revealed that learners often have a penchant for relying on traditional cognitive and memory pls in quest of improving their tl pronunciation at the expense of those involving different types of naturalistic practice; importantly, this also holds true for situations when strategy chains are applied; however, there is some evidence for frequent use of other groups of strategies, such as metacognitive, affective or social. 2. on the whole, learners have favorable opinions about the utility of pls, but what is useful is not always considered enjoyable and there are evident differences when it comes to the application of specific pls. 3. attainment in pronunciation seems to be related to the application of specific pls rather than high overall frequency of their employment, which may testify to the importance of the mediating effects of individual learner profiles; different outcomes can occur when it comes to different aspects of pronunciation competence (e.g., production vs. reception); there are evident differences in the pls used by learners at different proficiency levels. 4. the use of pls is related in intricate ways to anxiety levels; gender and learning styles may also play a part, but the available evidence is extremely tenuous. 5. generally, instruction targeting pls is effective but it can be assumed that much depends on the target of the pedagogic intervention, its duration, the ways in which strategy use is tapped and the tasks used to evaluate pronunciation gains; what the empirical evidence appears to demonstrate is that longer treatments are more efficacious and that measures of pronunciation gains should be more multifaceted and nuanced. this said, it has to be emphasized that the above patterns are far from consistent, which is the corollary of the weaknesses that empirical investigations of pls suffer from. first, different measures of pls use are employed in different studies, some of which are not geared to capturing the specificity of learning this tl subsystem. this is a critical issue because when the employment of pls is tapped in disparate ways, not only is it predictable that different studies will researching pronunciation learning strategies: an overview and a critical look 317 generate different outcomes, but it also clearly has a bearing on the comparability of the results of research projects that focus on the relationship between pls and other variables or aim to appraise the effectiveness of sbi in this respect. second, there are differences as well in how pronunciation ability is measured, both in terms of the level of fine-tuning of the tests, the focus on production and reception, and the requirement for spontaneous production of tl speech, which, again, makes the comparisons between studies difficult, if not impossible. third, correlational analysis, typically employed in studies of the link between pls and other variables, cannot be used as a basis for making claims about cause-and-effect relationships, which, however, is a problem that pertains to the field of lls research in its entirety. fourth, a crucial issue in intervention studies is their design so that increased use of pls can be related to pronunciation gains and vice versa, which clearly necessitates the use of pretest-posttest designs and the need to tap the variable in question at the same point. fifth, in the case of the mediating effect of id variables on pls use, the empirical evidence is confined to just a few studies, which surely precludes making generalizations in this respect, and the same could be said about the employment of pls in different types of learning activities. sixth, the available research is limited both in terms of the tl, with almost an exclusive focus on english, as well as the contexts in which it is undertaken, with the predominance of polish and turkish learners. this is yet another reason to be circumspect about the generalizability of the available research on pls. these limitations provide an excellent point of departure for the considerations of future research directions in research on strategies for learning pronunciation. perhaps the crucial task for researchers is to develop a comprehensive classification of pls, which could serve as a basis for constructing an inventory that could be deployed in different studies, such as the still imperfect ones proposed by pawlak (2010b). while oxford’s (2017) concerns about squeezing strategies into predetermined categories are salutary, some order is clearly indispensable in the case of an area in which research is still in its infancy. another important challenge is further investigating the link between pls and the mastery of different aspects of tl pronunciation, with the latter being tapped by tests that are adequately fine-tuned. given the paucity of empirical evidence in this area, even more urgent is research addressing the relationship between pls and a wide array of id variables, such as motivation, anxiety, willing to communicate, aptitude, working memory, or learning styles. crucially, in line with the tenets of dynamic systems theories (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008), such research needs to look not only into the role of isolated factors but also the contribution of different conglomerates of id variables. more well-designed empirical investigations are needed as well when it comes to appraising the effects mirosław pawlak, magdalena szyszka 318 of instruction in pls, not least because such efforts bring the entire research endeavor closer to the needs of practitioners. of paramount importance is also exploring the use of pls with respect to specific tasks, as illustrated in the study by pawlak (2018), because general insights into the employment of strategies surely do not translate into the gamut of tasks that learners have to face. following the tendencies observed in other domains of research on id factors, it would also be advisable to investigate the dynamics of pls use, both over longer periods of time and in specific pronunciation classes and tasks (cf. oxford, 2017). finally, if insights emanating from the empirical investigations of pls are ever to be generalized, researchers have to look more often at languages other than english, involve learners form a variety of national backgrounds and explore the role of context, be it foreign or second, or traditional or digital, as this may determine the quantity and quality of exposure to the tl. what should also be highlighted is the need for combining various methodological paradigms in the study of pls as only adept combination of the macroand micro-perspective (cf. mystkowska-wiertelak & pawlak, 2017) can be expected to illuminate the ways in which pls are deployed, factors impacting their use, the link to proficiency and the benefits of sbi. although pronunciation may be seen by many specialists and practitioners as much less of a concern nowadays when english is regarded as a lingua franca (mckay, 2011) and native-like achievement in this area has been relegated to the sidelines of l2 pedagogy, it will likely remain a crucial goal for students majoring in a foreign language, not to mention the fact that intelligibility is inevitably a priority for all 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(2017). research into pronunciation learning strategies of pre-service english teachers. eurasian journal of applied linguistics, 3(2), 287-295. 527 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (4). 527-541 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl cross-cultural perspective of fl teaching and learning in the polish context pawe sobkowiak adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland pawelsob@amu.edu.pl abstract this study examines whether learners’ capacity to use a foreign language (fl) successfully in the global world is developed in the fl classroom in polish high schools. the article reports results of the quantitative research which aimed at assessing whether and to what extent homogeneous fl classes in poland are conducive to developing learners’ intercultural (ic) sensitivity and competence. the results obtained from the two study samples, namely learners and teachers, are contradictory: in the students’ opinion, ic teaching/learning plays a marginal role, whereas the teacher respondents claim they practice ic teaching moderately. thus, to be able to get a broader picture of ic teaching/learning in poland the current research should be complemented by a separate qualitative study, that is, lesson observations and interviews with teachers and students. only then could more valid conclusions be drawn. keywords: intercultural teaching and learning, developing intercultural competence in times of globalization and considerable increase in international contacts in all spheres of life, language teaching can no longer focus on the target language (tl), target countries and cultures as territorially defined phenomena. if foreign language (fl) teachers want their learners to become effective, crosscultural communicators, they have to break with the traditional national paradigm and place language teaching in a global, transnational context (risager, 2007). thus, the development at school of intercultural (ic) competence, that is, pawe sobkowiak 528 the ability to change one’s knowledge, attitudes and behaviors so as to become open and flexible to other cultures, seems to be unquestionable (alred & byram, 2002). equally important is the work on students’ capability to develop relationships with people from different cultures, negotiate each other’s cultural identity, and manage conflicts that cultural differences might cause. only if students get such ic training, will they be able to execute communication behaviors appropriately and effectively in a variety of cultural contexts (taylor, 1994). however, because of complex, multidimensional and changing nature of culture, as well as its relation with language, what the cultural dimension can entail on a concrete level and how it can be implemented in the fl classroom, is far from self-evident, particularly considering different contexts where english is spoken nowadays (kramsch, 1998; kramsch, 2001; mckay, 2002). we need to reconsider long-established goals of fl teaching accordingly and adopt a more open-ended, intercultural, process-oriented approach. the fl syllabus should aim at helping learners to develop adaptive capacity by incorporating such elements as raising learners’ awareness of difference and diversity between representatives of various cultures and engaging them in the process of de-centering, altering their own perspective, teaching desirable personal attitudes to otherness, like empathy and flexibility, developing their ability to mediate, promoting tolerance and benefiting rather than suffering from ic experience (byram, 1997). this article will report on the results of the quantitative research carried out among polish high school students and teachers in the year 2011. the study aimed at assessing whether and to what degree a monolingual, thus homogeneous fl classroom in poland is conducive to developing learners’ ic sensitivity/competence. the results of the study have been presented separately in two previous articles (sobkowiak, in press-a, in press-b). in this paper the findings received from the two research groups will be confronted and discussed. this will give the reader a broader picture of ic teaching/learning in the polish context. intercultural learning/teaching in a polish fl classroom: research study the rationale and aims the impulse for the study came from the author’s interest in the ic dimension of fl teaching, perceived as an indispensible fifth skill to be acquired by learners in order to be able to function effectively as citizens of the global world. individuals who have gone through a largely mono-cultural socialization, which is the case of the majority of students in poland, have access only to their own cultural worldview, so they are unable to form and experience the difference between their own perception and that of people who are culturally different. cross-cultural perspective of fl teaching and learning in the polish context 529 that is what makes ic teaching/learning so important. it is in the fl class that learners should attain the ability to put together (and thus experience) cultural differences by structured, planned action, namely by using appropriate textbooks, other sources and fieldwork.1 however, as a reviewer for the ministry of education of textbooks used in polish schools, the present author noticed that the ic component still plays a marginal role there. this raised interest in whether ic was developed in fl classrooms in the polish context, especially since the majority of classes are taught by polish graduates of fl departments, which makes ic input for students more difficult to get in the classroom. the author wanted to examine empirically if and to what degree assumptions of ic teaching were being practiced in a fl class in poland. the research was meant to answer the following questions: 1. do fl lessons help learners develop ic competence by being a source of ic experience? 2. do teachers focus learners’ attention on the relation between language and culture, and the importance of socio-cultural knowledge in international communication? 3. to what extent do fl classes help learners become aware of cultural differences? do students learn appropriate strategies which will help them cope with ic encounters? 4. are “soft skills,” namely the open and accepting attitude to otherness, which help in managing cross-cultural interaction, developed in the classroom? 5. are learners made aware that they themselves are products of enculturation? are they referred to polish culture in the classroom or do they practice analyzing foreigners from the polish culture perspective while looking at themselves through foreigners’ eyes? 6. do textbooks the learners and their teachers use contribute to the development of learners’ ic competence? to what extent? 1 byram (1997, pp. 64-65) claims ic communication can be acquired in the classroom by pedagogically structured experience outside the classroom (fieldwork) and by independent experience. experience of fieldwork, particularly over a longer term where learners are separated from other learners and teachers, and from their family and friends, provides them with the opportunity to develop attitudes which include an ability to cope with different stages of adaptation, engagement with unfamiliar conventions of behavior and interaction, and an interest in other cultures which is not that of the tourist or business person (byram 1997, p. 69). for this reason the respondents were asked about foreign exchange programs in their schools. pawe sobkowiak 530 the participants the first part of the research was conducted on 338 high school students in pozna , in the spring of 2011 (questionnaires were handed out to 353 students). stratified, multiple stage sampling was used: 3 high schools were drawn, then 4 classes in each school. finally, groups (strata) were established. of the 338 respondents, 48% were men (n = 162) and 52% were women (n = 176). the second part of the study was carried out among high school teachers in various cities in poland (warsaw, pozna , wroc aw, leszno, koszalin, lublin) from september 2011 to january 2012. stratified, multiple stage sampling was also used: a group of high school teachers were drawn at various conferences, seminars and meetings. finally, groups (strata) were established. questionnaires were administered to a sample of 489 subjects, who agreed to participate in the study. data from the final sample of 317 who completed and returned the questionnaires were analyzed, using a standard set of psychometric procedures. within the sample, 83.91% of respondents were women (n = 266) and 16.09% (n = 51) men. the sample size used in both parts of the research fulfilled the sample requirement of a threshold of a minimum 300 respondents for scale testing recommended by nunnally (1994). the procedures of multiple stage sampling used in the sample selection resulted in the sample being truly representative, thus the findings could be generalized beyond the study group. procedures: the method and measurement instrument a paper and pencil questionnaire in polish developed by the author was used in the study. the 24-item questionnaire, asking the respondents for their opinions, assessed the fl classroom from an ic perspective. this questionnaire was constructed after a detailed analysis of comprehensive literature on ic teaching/learning; it contained the most important elements of ic teaching (see appendix a). scale construction guidelines were followed (devellis, 1991). students were asked to mark to what extent they agreed with the opinions concerning elements of ic teaching/learning in their classroom. a 5-point likert scale was used and the following response options were incorporated: 1 – strongly disagree, 2 – disagree, 3 – neutral, 4 – agree, 5 – strongly agree. the participants were not supposed to consult each other while completing the questionnaires. a pilot test was administered to a sample of 12 students to check clarity of instructions, item clarity, overall time taken to complete the questionnaire and balanced keying (to see if the respondents avoid using extreme response cross-cultural perspective of fl teaching and learning in the polish context 531 categories). a relatively equal number of extremely positive (5) and negative (1) sentences in the sample proved that the scale had been chosen correctly. construct and content validity of the questionnaire was performed. two experts were asked to participate in the study and review the item pool for clarity, sentence structure and ambiguous meanings. this aided in establishing relevancy of the items to ic teaching/learning, providing also the initial reliability and validity estimates (devellis, 1991). the two experts, phd holders, were selected based on their demonstrated expertise within the ic field. they were asked to decide independently whether they felt a particular item was important for ic competence development in the fl classroom. the criterion for selecting items into the final version of the questionnaire was that each had to be accepted as important for ic teaching/learning by both experts, who also provided comments on the item’s clarity and conciseness. in the process, six items were eliminated from the pool. in order to analyze the results and perform a reliability analysis, excel was used to compute descriptive statistics. internal consistency reliability of the questionnaire was measured for both samples; the scale had cronbach alpha coefficient of .84 for the learner sample and .91 for the teacher sample, and thus both met the requirement of internal consistency reliability (crocker & algina, 1986). results and discussion the results obtained from both groups of respondents will be presented simultaneously. this will allow the reader to compare the opinions of both teachers and learners, and consequently will give him/her a more reliable picture of ic teaching in poland. teachers’ versus learners’ opinions on icc teaching/learning, as has already been mentioned, the instrument used to assess ic teaching/learning was a 24-item questionnaire. the respondents were asked to grade the questionnaire items from 1 to 5. the findings are presented in table 1 and table 2 below. the .05 level of significance was set for all the results, thus the confidence level was 95% (p = .95). table 1 descriptive statistics for all the 24 items of the questionnaire parameter teachers’ results learners’ results mean 3.87 2.78 standard deviation 0.98 1.28 coefficient of variation (%) 25.41 46.04 mode 4.00 3.0 median 4.00 3.0 pawe sobkowiak 532 table 2 ic teaching/learning in poland – the breakdown of teachers’ and learners’ results for each questionnaire item and u-statistics item teachers learners u-statistics m sd cv mode mdn m sd cv mode mdn 1 3.66 0.99 27.20 4 4 2.99 1.21 40.46 3 3 7.7035 2 4.02 0.88 22.00 4 4 3.13 1.22 39.09 4 3 10.6600 3 4.12 0.76 18.39 4 4 3.23 1.11 34.42 4 3 12.0620 4 3.50 1.05 30.00 5 4 2.62 1.11 42.56 3 3 10.4082 5 3.91 0.94 24.04 4 4 2.99 1.22 40.86 3 3 10.9174 6 3.85 0.96 24.78 4 4 2.86 1.16 40.59 3 3 12.0788 7 3.55 0.99 27.86 4 4 2.48 1.09 43.84 3 2 13.2660 8 3.62 1.03 28.57 4 4 2.71 1.28 47.12 3 3 10.0711 9 3.85 1.00 26.00 4 4 2.55 1.20 46.85 3 3 15.0972 10 4.12 0.80 19.52 4 4 2.95 1.19 40.24 3 3 14.7666 11 3.82 1.03 26.95 4 4 2.05 1.12 54.62 1 2 20.9944 12 3.88 1.08 27.77 4 4 2.04 1.04 51.09 1 2 22.2951 13 3.66 1.06 29.05 4 4 2.51 1.17 46.77 3 3 13.0912 14 3.85 1.01 26.25 4 4 3.52 1.16 33.03 4 4 3.9307 15 3.97 0.92 23.21 4 4 2.58 1.16 44.90 3 3 17.0460 16 4.18 0.82 19.51 4 4 3.86 1.18 30.67 5 4 4.0743 17 3.94 0.99 25.15 4 4 3.03 1.22 40.29 3 3 10.4760 18 3.82 0.96 25.16 4 4 2.19 1.11 50.63 1 2 20.1004 19 3.87 0.97 25.00 4 4 2.16 1.08 49.85 1 2 21.4346 20 4.51 0.73 16.09 4 5 2.46 1.31 53.16 1 2 24.9644 21 4.15 0.82 19.88 5 4 2.52 1.27 50.44 1 2.5 19.5200 22 3.33 1.03 30.81 4 3 2.61 1.16 44.47 3 3 8.4368 23 3.50 0.94 26.76 4 3 2.69 1.23 45.76 3 3 9.5131 24 4.21 0.85 20.16 3 4 4.05 1.19 29.49 5 4 1.9598 total 3.87 0.98 25.41 2.78 1.28 46.04 13.1120 n 317 338 the results reveal that the teacher respondents’ assessment of ic teaching/learning in poland is much higher than the learner informants’ (m = 3.87 for all the 24 questionnaire items versus m = 2.78; research question 1). what is more, the results of the teacher sample for each separate questionnaire item are higher than the results of the learner sample. all the differences are statistically significant. the teacher informants’ grades for separate questionnaire items range from 3.33 (item 22) to 4.51 (item 20), whereas the learner subjects’ grades are much lower and range from 2.04 (item 12) to 4.05 (item 24). standard deviations for the majority of questionnaire items for teachers are relatively low and dispersion, which is measured by the coefficient of variation, in all the cross-cultural perspective of fl teaching and learning in the polish context 533 cases but one is below 30%. this indicates that the results are very close to the mean and that the majority of the teachers surveyed were relatively unanimous in their assessment; they agreed that their fl lessons help learners develop ic competence.2 furthermore, the mode in the sample is 4 for as many as 21 questionnaire items. two items score 5 at the rating scale, and only one scores 3. by contrast, learners’ sample results are spread and show a considerable diversity of respondents’ opinions. standard deviations for the majority of questions are high, which means there is a small concentration of the results around the mean value; dispersion in all the cases is higher than 30% and amounts mostly to over 40% (14 items), or even 50% (5 items). there is also a wide scattering of the mode in the learners’ sample; as many as six questionnaire items score 1 at the rating scale and only one item scores 5. the score which dominates in the majority of items is 3 (13 items). this might mean that ic teaching/learning differs between schools and teachers, and that in the classroom the vast majority of learners are introduced only to some aspects of interculturality. both samples graded question 24 high; a considerable number of subjects from both research groups admitted that traveling abroad and foreign school exchanges had a strong influence on students’ attitudes and behaviors towards representatives of foreign cultures (m = 4.21 and m = 4.05 respectively). moreover, a great number of learner informants attached the highest value at the rating scale (5) to this item. coefficient of variation is below 30%, which indicates a large concentration of the results around the mean; most learner respondents graded this item high. in contrast, the teacher sample is not as unanimous in high assessment of this questionnaire item; the dominant value at the rating scale for this item is 3, which means that quite a large number of the respondents do not think that school visits abroad have such a strong influence on developing students’ ic competence. similarly, both groups of informants also agreed that fl classes do not contribute to strengthening stereotypes and prejudices among students towards foreign cultures (item 16, m = 4.18 and m = 3.86 respectively). what is more, the highest value at the rating scale (5) dominates in the students’ responses and the mean (3.86) is 1.08 higher than the average for all the questionnaire items (2.78). a large number of teacher respondents agreed that fl education contributes to reducing learners’ ethnocentrism (item 20). the mean for this item (m = 4.51) is 0.64 higher than the average mean for all the 24 questionnaire items (3.87). furthermore, half of the informants surveyed attached the highest value at the rating scale to this item; the median is 5, which means that 2 high values of sd would mean that the results are dispersed considerably, which would make it more difficult to draw conclusions concerning the research questions. pawe sobkowiak 534 half of the sample agreed with it strongly. contrary to the teachers’ assessment, the learner subjects graded this element of ic teaching/learning relatively low (m = 2.46). there is a huge disagreement in the results obtained from both groups; in learners’ results the lowest value at the rating scale (1) is dominant, whereas in teachers’ results the value of 4 prevails. a vast majority of the teacher respondents were positive about the second research question (items 1-5, the mean from 3.50 to 4.12) concerning the attention they pay in the classroom to the relation between language and culture. in their opinions fl class in poland helps learners to realize cultural connotations of language and make them aware that the lack of knowledge of a foreign culture impedes the ability to communicate. similarly, fl classes contribute to the learner’s knowledge of the target and foreign culture/s. however, the results obtained from the learner sample do not confirm this and show that learners were neutral in this respect; their results ranged from 2.62 to 3.23. there is also a considerable discrepancy between both research samples concerning the answer to question 3 (items 6-9). the teacher informants agreed that fl classes raised their students’ awareness of cultural differences. the scores for this part of the questionnaire range from 3.55 (item 7) to 3.85 (items 6 and 9) and the dominant value at the rating scale is 4 for all the four questionnaire items. the teacher respondents claimed that they tried to equip students to a moderate degree with appropriate strategies which should help them cope with ic encounters (item 8, m = 3.62). contrary to this, the scores for this part of the questionnaire for the learners’ sample range from 2.48 (item 7) to 2.86 (item 6). a large number of the respondents claimed that in fl class they neither developed the skills that would help them communicate effectively with representatives of the foreign cultures (item 8), nor did they practice establishing and maintaining contacts with foreigners (item 9). both study samples differ significantly in their assessment of how high schools in poland prepare learners to manage cross-cultural interactions (research question 4, items 10-15). the study results obtained for the teacher population revealed that teachers developed in class learners’ „soft skills”. the scores of this part of the questionnaire ranged from 3.66 (item 13) to 4.12 (item 10). the teachers who were surveyed agreed that they developed in their students openness and tolerance towards foreign nations and cultures, promoted positive attitudes towards them and taught them to perceive the world from different perspectives (item 10, m = 4.12). they also taught students to disagree with the opinions or attitudes of other people in the way that did not provoke conflicts or excluded cooperation with them (item 15, m = 3.97). moreover, the subjects declared that they taught how to avoid assessing a situation or a phenomenon emotionally-driven (item 12, m = 3.88) or cross-cultural perspective of fl teaching and learning in the polish context 535 how to keep negative emotions under control (item 11, m = 3.82). however, the learner sample did not assess these questionnaire items positively; in their opinion developing learners’ “soft skills” was completely ignored. the scores for this part of the questionnaire were the lowest and very diversified. they ranged from 2.04 to 3.52. a vast majority of the subjects declared that they were not taught how to avoid assessing a situation or a phenomenon emotionally-driven (item 12, m = 2.04) or how to keep negative emotions under control (item 11, m = 2.05). in addition to this, both items had the lowest mode at the rating scale (1) and a low value of the median (2). the majority of the teacher informants were also positive about research question 5 concerning building learners’ awareness of being a product of enculturation (items 16-21). the scores in this part of the questionnaire ranged from 3.82 (item 18) to 4.51 (item 20), and were the highest of all the questionnaire item results. in contrast, most of the student informants were either neutral or negative about research question 5. there was a considerable difference in what the teachers said and the results obtained from the learners in this part of the questionnaire; the scores ranged from 2.16 (item 19) to 3.86 (item 16). the mode value for four of the items was the lowest (1), which means that the majority of the respondents expressed strong disagreement. surprisingly, the respondents thought that the fl class did not help them understand their own culture and identity better (item 19, m = 2.16 and the lowest mode at the scale (1) and a low median (2)). the majority of the learner subjects were also neutral when asked if they compared in class a spectrum of various foreign cultures with their own (item 17, m = 3.03). both textbooks used in the classroom (item 22) and fl teachers (item 23) were assessed moderately well in the ic perspective by teacher respondents (research question 6); the mean values were 3.33 and 3.50 respectively. however, coefficient of variation for item 22 is high (over 30%), which indicates a considerable diversity of the responses. both items got a relatively low value of the median (3), which means that half of the obtained responses were lower than 3 at the rating scale. this might mean that some textbooks used in polish high schools are better than others at teaching student interculturality. similarly, some teachers teach more interculturally than others. contrary to this, student respondents assessed both textbooks used in the classroom and fl teachers relatively low in the ic perspective; the mean values were 2.61 and 2.69 respectively. however, coefficient of variation for both items is high (over 40%), which indicates a considerable diversity of the student responses, which might mean that there are schools where ic teaching is implemented by teachers with the textbooks. furthermore, some teachers might teach fls interculturally. pawe sobkowiak 536 factors fostering icc teaching/learning. to get a broader picture of ic teaching in the polish fl classroom, the next step in the study was to determine what factors, if any, determine the respondents’ assessment. the following seven factors were considered to find out whether teacher respondents differentiated the questionnaire results: gender, the years in service, fl taught, the number of fls known, travelling/not travelling abroad, having experience of living abroad and employment in a school with an/no exchange program. in the case of the learner sample gender, the length of fl education, the number of fls learned, language proficiency, intensity of fl instruction, participation in a school exchange program and experience of living abroad were analyzed. u-tests were run on the seven determined subpopulations for both research groups.3 significant differences were found only in the teacher sample on three measures: the language taught,4 the number of fl known by the respondents, and travelling/not travelling abroad. the study results revealed that teachers of german focused more on developing learners’ ic competence in the classroom than their counterparts teaching english. moreover, the more fls a teacher knew, the more s/he got involved in ic teaching. similarly, the teachers who traveled abroad frequently were also more aware of the need to introduce elements of ic teaching in the classroom (see appendix b). the teacher’s experience of living abroad and being employed in a school which has a student foreign exchange program are other important factors which facilitate the development of students’ ic competence; although the difference for those two subpopulations was not significant, a range of separate items in those categories differed significantly (items 12 and 9 respectively). similarly, more significant differences were found on a few separate items for subpopulations determined by gender and years in service. for example, female informants developed students abilities to cope with intercultural encounters more (items 8 and 9). more experienced respondents gained higher means in three questionnaire items: they taught not only about history, geography, literature or art of the target language culture/s, but also everyday habits of the inhabitants (item 5). furthermore, they assessed textbooks they use from the ic perspective higher (item 22) and they saw higher correlation between students’ visits abroad and their positive attitudes towards foreign countries, cultures and foreigners (item 24). quite surprisingly, however, inexperienced subjects fo 3 the critical values are 1.64 and -1.64 respectively, a significance level is .05. 4 since the majority of the sample constituted teachers of english and german, the difference between only those two subpopulations was checked. cross-cultural perspective of fl teaching and learning in the polish context 537 cused more than their experienced colleagues on developing skills which help students communicate effectively with foreigners (item 8). no significant differences were found in the learner sample on all the seven measures. however, there were significant differences in a few separate items in the subpopulations determined by gender (3 items), the length of fl education (1 item), intensity of fl instruction (12 items) and participation in a school exchange program (2 items) (see appendix c). implications for future research some limitations of the present study should be addressed because they provide agenda for future research. firstly, the quantitative investigation has its limitations, namely subjectivity of the questionnaire as the tool to check respondents’ assessment. secondly, to help validate the obtained data, and thereby, eventually, to increase the credibility of their interpretations, the present study should be complemented by a separate, qualitative one, that is, lesson observations, interviews with teachers and learners or different kinds of diaries, journals and logs. only triangulation by methods and sources will help us further pursue the matter and investigate it thoroughly, and eventually, will give us a reliable answer to the research questions, thus a broader picture of ic teaching/learning in poland. conclusions the findings of the research are conflicting. teacher respondents’ results demonstrate that fl teachers in poland feel prepared to foster their students ic competence, but they practice ic teaching in the classroom moderately. contrary to this, the results obtained from the analysis of learners’ data reveal that ic teaching/learning in the polish educational context plays a minor role and much needs to be done to implement multi-dimensional ic teaching/learning there. it is too soon to generalize the assessment of ic teaching/ learning in poland on the basis of the data presented in this article; this research should be complemented by research employing other methods and sources. acknowledgements i would like to acknowledge and express my gratitude to gra yna korytowska, phd and anna melerowicz, phd from adam mickiewicz university for their invaluable help as expert raters. pawe sobkowiak 538 references alred, g., & byram, m. (2002). becoming an intercultural mediator: a longitudinal study of residence abroad. journal of multilingual and multicultural education, 23, 339-352. byram, m. (1997). teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence. clevedon: multilingual matters. crocker, l., & algina, j. (1986). introduction to classical and modern test theory. orlando, fl: harcourt, brace and janovich. devellis, r. (1991). scale development: theory and applications. thousand oaks, ca: sage. kramsch, c. (1998). language and culture. oxford: oxford university press. kramsh, c. (2001). intercultural communication. in r. carter & d. nunan (eds.), the cambridge guide to teaching english to speakers of other languages (pp. 235-261). cambridge: cambridge university press. mckay, s. l. (2002). teaching english as an international language: rethinking goals and approaches. oxford: oxford university press. nunnally, j. (1994). psychometric theory. new york: mcgraw-hill. risager, k. (2007). language and culture pedagogy: from a national to a transnational paradigm. clevedon: multilingual matters. sobkowiak, p. (in press-a). intercultural dimension of fl teaching in the polish context. in e. willim & m. kleban (eds.), pase papers. linguistics. kraków: jagiellonian university press. sobkowiak, p. (in press-b). intercultural teaching in the polish context. in m. pawlak (ed.), classroom-oriented research: achievements and challenges. heidelberg: springer. taylor, e. (1994). intercultural competency: a transformative learning process. adult education quarterly, 44, 154-174. cross-cultural perspective of fl teaching and learning in the polish context 539 appendix a intercultural education in a fl classroom in poland – questionnaire a number of statements which are used to describe fl classroom from the ic perspective are given below. read each statement and indicate by circling the right number how this particular comment refers to your fl classes. use the following rating scale: 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neutral, 4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree. 1. thanks to fl classes i (my students) know that both language and body language have cultural connotations, e.g. people in different parts of the world differ in their perception of time, the distance kept by interlocutors during a conversation or the use of gestures. 2. fl education has made me (my students) aware that lack of knowledge of cultures impedes our abilities to communicate with their representatives and can lead to a wide range of communicative misunderstandings. 3. fl classes contribute to my (students’) better understanding of the tl culture/s. 4. fl classes broaden my (students’) knowledge of various cultures, characteristic of the people living all over the world, not only in the tl culture. 5. fl classes provide me (my students) with the information not only about history, geography, literature or art of the tl culture/s, but also about everyday habits of the inhabitants. 6. thanks to fl education i (my students) know that different societies differ from each other in the systems of values or attitudes that prevail there. 7. fl education is conducive to my (students’) reflections on cultural differences and development of observational and analytical skills. 8. in fl classroom we (my students) develop skills which help us (them) communicate effectively with speakers who originate from various cultures. for example, we (they) do exercises or tasks which require adopting linguistic and paralinguistic behavior appropriately to the situation. 9. fl teaching is integrated with establishing and maintaining contacts with foreigners. 10. fl classes develop our (in my students) openness and tolerance towards different nations and cultures, promote positive attitudes towards them and teach us (them) perceive the world from different perspectives. 11. fl classes have taught me (my students) to keep under control my (their) negative reactions, such as anger or fury towards representatives of the cultures distant from mine. 12. in fl classroom i (my students) have learned to avoid assessing a situation or a phenomenon impulsively or emotionally-driven. 13. fl education has helped me (my students) develop empathy towards people who live in different countries or originate from different cultural regions. 14. when i (my students) compare foreign cultures or behavior of foreigners with my (their) own i (they) try not to assess them. 15. fl classes have taught me (my students) to disagree with the opinions or attitudes of the other people in such a way that does not provoke conflicts or excludes cooperation with them. pawe sobkowiak 540 16. fl classroom does not contribute to strengthening stereotypes and prejudices among students towards foreigner cultures, e.g. scots are mean. 17. in fl classroom we (my students) often compare foreign cultures with the polish one. 18. fl classes help us (my students) reflect on our (their) own values and beliefs. 19. fl classes help us (my students) understand better our (their) own identity and native culture. 20. fl education contributes to reducing our (my students’) ethnocentrism. 21. contacts with other cultures in foreign language classroom help us (my students) improve our (their) self-assessment as poles – we (they) do not have an inferiority complex toward representatives of other cultures because we (they) realize that poles have their own valuable contribution to the world’s cultural heritage. 22. fl textbooks which we have used in the classroom so far have prepared us well to function in a multi-cultural world. among others, they had a separate module devoted to developing icc. 23. my flteachers are/ were (i am) very effective ic mediator/s – they (i) make/ have made us (my students) aware that we (they) live in a multi-cultural world and have prepared us (them) well to interact with foreigners. 24. visits abroad (school exchange programs included) have a positive influence on my (students’) attitude and behavior towards foreign cultures and their representatives. appendix b table u-statistics for the differences between mean results in the teachers’ subpopulations determined by seven factors (asterisks indicate significant differences) item gender years in service the number of fls known traveling/not traveling abroad having experience of living abroad employment in schools with exchange program fl taught 1 0.2126* 0.3862* 2.9811* 1.4095* 2.3666* 0.7921* 0.0815* 2 0.2090* 0.3095* 2.3656* 1.9482* 1.1211* 0.3126* 1.4824* 3 0.3463* 0.3223* 1.5882* 1.7167* 1.9560* 2.1909* 2.4843* 4 0.8644* 0.9082* 1.6001* 1.9901* 3.1057* 2.1502* 0.5200* 5 0.8301* 1.9425* 0.8781* 1.7748* 2.9303* 0.0933* 0.6945* 6 0.7265* 0.5922* 5.2091* 2.8689* 3.2341* 0.6937* 2.2823* 7 0.3541* 0.7345* 4.1974* 1.9890* 2.5984* 2.8545* 1.7132* 8 2.1489* 2.1116* 1.5019* 1.4771* 2.0861* 0.2946* 3.5128* 9 1.8983* 0.1501* 1.1217* 1.5452* 1.8590* 0.4671* 3.2784* 10 1.0274* 0.3310* 3.2964* 1.2878* 0.3731* 0.5708* 2.4655* 11 1.2883* 0.3079* 0.1592* 1.2435* 1.7308* 0.6907* 1.2309* 12 1.1407* 0.1805* 0.2530* 0.5765* 1.1567* 1.8593* 3.1043* 13 0.0667* 0.2206* 2.9339* 0.5431* 0.9219* 1.2641* 2.1201* 14 1.2759* 0.0009* 0.6508* 1.8719* 0.0927* 2.1139* 2.8974* 15 1.3667* 0.8320* 1.5097* 1.4560* 0.3544* 1.9260* 2.6599* 16 1.3443* 0.8630* 1.4329* 0.6309* 0.4890* 0.9704* 3.8803* 17 0.1880* 0.0614* 3.4819* 2.7991* 0.9947* 0.6884* 1.3144* 18 0.2910* 0.8877* 3.6289* 2.3349* 2.0685* 1.3481* 3.3103* 19 0.5939* 0.0239* 2.2265* 1.7160* 1.4814* 1.4944* 1.9179* 20 1.3101* 0.3634* 0.9874* 1.4677* 0.0611* 1.2303* 1.9611* cross-cultural perspective of fl teaching and learning in the polish context 541 21 0.4821* 0.3328* 1.8328* 0.5771* 0.1380* 2.2673* 1.1619* 22 1.3312* 1.7534* 1.0336* 1.0961* 0.3690* 2.2662* 0.7442* 23 0.6961* 1.0775* 4.1004* 2.5695* 2.5428* 1.3674* 2.0839* 24 0.0688* 1.8034* 2.1068* 3.2539* 2.5947* 4.0220* 2.7106* total 0.3932* 0.2410* 2.0741* 1.6665* 1.4053* 1.3611* 1.9471* appendix c table u-statistics and t test for the differences between the mean results in the learners’ subpopulations determined by seven factors5 (asterisks indicate significant differences) item gender the length of fl education the number of fls learned language proficiency intensity of fl instruction participating in a foreign exchange program having experience of living abroad 1 -0.3795* -0.9433* -1.1153 -0.7398 -2.7771* 0.6391* 0.2169 2 0.2249* 0.7012* -1.2124 -0.7941 -2.1978* 0.2118* 0.0765 3 -1.5733* -0.1708* -1.2229 -0.8189 -2.4645* -1.7695* -0.6172 4 -1.1525* 0.4012* 0.1396 0.0920 -0.4395* 0.2088* 0.0692 5 -1.6638* -0.5521* -0.0266 -0.0176 -2.7139* -0.6744* -0.2267 6 -0.6360* 0.5224* 0.3994 0.2621 -2.2484* 1.0363* 0.3435 7 -1.5198* -0.4283* -0.7347 -0.4873 -1.8748* -0.1492* -0.0484 8 -1.1624* 1.0998* 0.1720 0.1133 -1.4144* 1.0650* 0.3430 9 -1.7973* 0.1563* -0.3124 -0.2044 -0.4171* -0.8565* -0.2775 10 -1.4107* 0.3618* 1.0684 0.7081 -1.2027* 0.5238* 0.1874 11 0.3125* 1.2140* -0.7841 -0.5189 -1.9975* 0.1165* 0.0390 12 0.8697* -1.2613* -0.9278 -0.6154 -0.2085* -0.8379* -0.2935 13 -0.9526* 0.8695* -0.7956 -0.5297 -1.7727* 0.1545* 0.0494 14 0.6949* 0.3615* 1.1769 0.7749 1.1645* -0.8278* -0.2917 15 -0.3767* 1.3582* 0.2092 0.1403 -1.7833* -1.3933* -0.4535 16 -0.2483* 1.5526* 0.7389 0.5029 -0.9162* 0.4503* 0.1470 17 0.0855* -0.2950* 0.4434 0.2998 -1.6589* 0.0440* 0.0135 18 -0.7694* 2.3394* 0.4859 0.3230 0.5105* 1.4181* 0.4595 19 -2.0228* -0.0266* -0.0216 -0.0144 0.6612* 0.1328* 0.0404 20 -1.0089* 1.0740* -0.3426 -0.2259 -0.0586* -0.4272* -0.1382 21 -0.2296* -0.1384* -0.1580 -0.1042 -1.8408* -0.9659* -0.3213 22 -1.5121* -0.2367* -1.0464 -0.6795 -1.8884* -1.6546* -0.5387 23 -1.1943* -0.8844* 1.0351 0.7035 -0.1966* 0.4255* 0.1449 total -0.5481* 0.2895* -0.2441 -0.1621 -1.2188* 0.0498* 0.0164 5 for the first six factors determined u-statistics was used, for the last one t test because of the small number of the subpopulation of the students who have experience of living abroad (n = 7). 219 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (2). 2018. 219-246 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.2.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt revising the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi) and testing for factorial invariance kouider mokhtari the university of texas at tyler, usa kmokhtari@uttyler.edu dimiter m. dimitrov national center for assessment in riyadh, saudi arabia george mason university, usa ddimitro@gmu.edu carla a. reichard the university of texas at tyler, usa creichard@uttyler.edu abstract in this study, we revised the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi), a self-report instrument designed to assess students’ awareness of reading strategies when reading school-related materials. we collected evidence of structural, generalizability, and external aspects of validity for the revised inventory (marsi-r). we first conducted a confirmatory factor analysis of the marsi instrument, which resulted in the reduction of the number of strategy statements from 30 to 15. we then tested marsi-r for factorial invariance across gender and ethnic groups and found that there is a uniformity in student interpretation of the reading strategy statements across these groups, thus allowing for their comparison on levels of metacognitive processing skills. we found evidence of the external validity aspect of marsi-r data through correlations of such data with a measure of the students’ perceived reading ability. given that this journal is oriented to second kouider mokhtari, dimiter m. dimitrov, carla a. reichard 220 language learning and teaching, our article also includes comments on the survey of reading strategies (sors), which was based on the original marsi and was designed to assess adolescents’ and adults’ metacognitive awareness and perceived use of esl reading strategies. we provide a copy of the marsir instrument and discuss the implications of the study’s findings in light of new and emerging insights relative to assessing students’ metacognitive awareness and perceived use of reading strategies. keywords: metacognition; reading comprehension; metacognitive awareness; reading strategies 1. introduction during the past two decades, reading researchers and practitioners have eagerly welcomed the re-emergence of scholarly interest in the role of metacognitive processing in students’ reading comprehension performance. this renewed interest can be seen in the writing of several edited volumes devoted exclusively to the topic of metacognition (e.g., garner, 1987; hacker, dunlosky, & graesser, 1998; hartman, 2001; israel, block, bauserman, & kinnucan-welsch; 2005; snow, 2002), the publication of a large number of articles addressing various aspects of metacognition and reading in scholarly journals, and the inclusion in several recently published books of instructional frameworks to guide the teaching of metacognitive reading strategies (e.g., gersten, fuchs, williams, & baker, 2001; pearson & gallagher, 1983; pressley, 2000). interest in the role of metacognition and reading is apparent in the publication of a special issue of the international electronic journal of elementary education (desoete & özso, 2009), and the launching of the metacognition and learning journal in 2006, with a special issue in 2011 (schellings & van hout wolters, 2011) devoted exclusively to assessment and instructional issues pertaining to metacognition and reading. this article focuses on the following topics: (1) issues and primary purpose of the marsi (mokhtari & reichard, 2003), (2) the validity of the marsi, (3) a validity study using the marsi-r, (4) discussion, and (5) comments on assessing metacognitive awareness and perceived reading strategy use of esl students. 2. issues and primary purpose of the marsi despite the serious interest in metacognition and reading, an intricately connected web of issues and questions remains to be addressed prior to achieving a full understanding of the nature of the metacognitive processing skills and revising the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi) and testing for. . . 221 strategies as they relate to reading and text understanding. this understanding should help in the design and development of adequate assessment measures of metacognitive reading strategies, as well as effective instructional and curriculum frameworks for advancing students’ awareness and use of reading strategies when they read. several contributors to the special issue of metacognition and learning published in 2011 (schellings & van hout wolters, 2011) commented on the challenges and complexities related to metacognition and reading, in particular challenges related to the assessment of metacognitive processing strategies. in the following excerpt, macnamara (2011) provides an excellent description of some of the potential challenges involved in “developing a pure (separable) measure of strategy use that is also reliable, valid, and contextualized” (p. 159): there is a heightened understanding that metacognition and strategy use are crucial to deep, long-lasting comprehension and learning, but their assessment is challenging. first, students’ judgments of what their abilities and habits are, and measurements of their performance often do not match. second, students tend to learn and comprehend differently depending on the subject matter, contexts, goals, and tasks. as a consequence, a student may appear to use deep, reflective strategies in one situation, and fail to do so in other circumstances. third, it is generally assumed that strategy use (metacognition, metacomprehension) are separable constructs from the underlying skills germane to the target task. (macnamara, 2011, p. 159) macnamara’s appraisal of the status of the field reminds us that, as a research community, we have a great deal more to do to develop adequate measures for assessing the cognitive and metacognitive processes involved in reading and text understanding. we faced a number of theoretical, methodological, and practical challenges when we developed the original version of the marsi (mokhtari & reichard, 2002), which took a significant amount of time (nearly three years) and a great deal of effort on the part of several individuals. we were highly cognizant of the fact that it would be idealistic, and perhaps impractical, to try to develop a clean and discrete measure of strategy use that is also reliable, valid, and contextualized. as a result, we developed a reading strategy measure that was, by design, limited in terms of intended purpose, target audience, context or scope, and interpretation. at the request of teachers and researchers, we also developed the survey of reading strategies (sors; mokhtari & sheorey, 2002), an adapted version of the marsi instrument for use with learners of english as a second language (esl). the marsi and sors have been translated into several languages, specifically arabic, chinese, czech, farsi, french, german, greek, indonesian, japanese, korean, polish, slovenian, and spanish. both marsi and sors have been widely used for teaching and research purposes, and published kouider mokhtari, dimiter m. dimitrov, carla a. reichard 222 in dozens of dissertations and other published research studies since their original publication in 2002. the primary purpose of the marsi and sors is to assess students’ metacognitive awareness or perceived use of reading strategies when reading texts for academic purposes. when using self-report measures such as the marsi, it is important to consider the following two characteristics, which limit the interpretability of the results obtained from these measures. first, we designed the instrument to tap students’ perceptions of reading strategy use (i.e., what strategies they think they use in general when reading), not actual strategy use (i.e., what specific strategies they actually used when reading). second, we designed the instrument to tap students’ strategy use in generalized reading contexts. in other words, when students complete the marsi, they are asked to think about a broad range of reading texts, tasks, or purposes, and, as a result, they report their perceived strategy use in a generalized rather than in a specified or contextualized sense. we constructed the marsi so that we are able to uncover students’ generalized use of reading strategies within the context of academic or school-related reading. in the instructions, we specifically ask students to select the strategies they believe they generally use when reading academic or school-related materials, as opposed to other types of reading materials (e.g., reading for pleasure). given this context, it is also important to keep in mind that students’ perceptions of strategy use are a reflection of a moment in time rather than a reflection of their reported strategies across different times, texts, or tasks. finally, we designed the marsi for a specific target audience, namely students with reading abilities that are roughly equivalent to those of a good reader in a typical upper elementary or middle grade classroom. thus, we wanted to develop a measure that would enable us to identify student levels of metacognitive awareness or perceived use of reading strategies by reading ability rather than by grade level designation. there exists within any classroom or grade a range of readers and a range of reading ability levels. for example, in a fifthgrade classroom, there will be some readers who are as many as three grade levels ahead of the typical reader and some readers who are as many as three or more grade levels behind that benchmark. 3. validity of the marsi we used the unified construct-based model of validity (american educational research association, american psychological association, & national council on measurement in education, 2014; messick, 1989, 1995) to measure the validity of marsi. under this model, there are six aspects of validity: (1) content aspect of validity, which includes evidence of content relevance, representativeness, and revising the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi) and testing for. . . 223 technical quality; (2) substantive aspect of validity, which refers to theoretical rationales for the observed consistencies in item responses; (3) structural aspect of validity, which appraises the fidelity of the scoring structure to the structure of the construct domain at issue; (4) generalizability aspect of validity, which examines the extent to which score properties and interpretations generalize across population groups, settings, and tasks; (5) external aspect of validity, which includes convergent and discriminant evidence as well as evidence from measures of other traits; and (6) consequential aspect of validity, which relates to implications of score interpretations as a basis for action, as well as the actual consequences of test use, especially in regard to invalidity related to bias, fairness, and distributive justice (messick, 1995; see also dimitrov, 2012, pp. 41-51). we obtained information about the validity of the original marsi instrument in stages. in the original study, we documented validity data, particularly on the content and substantive aspects of the instrument design and external evidence of correlation with reading ability. subsequent studies have examined various aspects of the marsi, with many studies providing support for its validity, and a few raising issues pertaining to its appropriateness for college and adult readers and its association with reading ability (e.g., guan, roehrig, mason, & meng, 2010; macnamara, 2007). some issues are more difficult to address than others. as cromley and azevedo (2006), macnamara (2011), as well as veenman and colleagues (veenman, 2011; veenman, van hout-wolters, & afflerbach, 2006) have noted, self-report data have inherent limitations. there are methods of data collection (e.g., think-aloud protocols, reaction times, error detection, and other methods) that are less vulnerable to those limitations, but are also considerably more time-consuming and difficult to implement. there are also issues with the generalized nature of the marsi directions: students use strategies to a different extent in different contexts, even in academic reading, and context-free measures do not accurately reflect strategy use for all of those contexts (e.g., bråten & strømsø, 2011; hadwin, winne, stockley, nesbit, & woszczyna, 2001; pressley, 2000; veenman, 2011). however, contextualizing the instrument to focus on specific readings would necessarily limit its generalizability. an important aspect of validity that has not been thoroughly tested concerns the generalizability aspect of the marsi instrument. characteristically, this question is addressed through testing for factorial invariance of the targeted construct across student populations, tasks, and contexts. 4. validity study using the marsi-r in light of the issues discussed above, we made a few changes to the marsi over the past several years, taking into account suggestions and recommendations kouider mokhtari, dimiter m. dimitrov, carla a. reichard 224 made by various researchers and practitioners who have used the instrument. these changes, which resulted in the marsi-r, pertain specifically to: (a) enhancements in the readability or comprehensibility of the strategy statements so that the instrument can be completed by students as early as fourth grade as long as they are able to read and understand the strategy statements; for example, a problem-solving strategy of “getting back on track when losing concentration” was revised as “getting back on track when sidetracked or distracted;” and (b) enhancements to the scale format and type of response expected to determine levels of strategy awareness or use, with the goal of improving the interpretation of the responses. the new 5-point scale taps students’ degree of knowledge and awareness of reading strategies ranging from “i have never heard of this strategy before” to “i know this strategy quite well, and i often use it when i read” (see appendix for the marsi-r). while we do not expect these changes to significantly impact the overall factorial structure or reliability of the instrument, we believe this study is the first large-scale test of these changes. the purpose of this study is to examine the factorial structure of the marsi in light of some changes in item wording and scale instructions and to collect evidence concerning the structural, generalizability, and external aspects of validity for the revised instrument (marsi-r). the tasks involved in addressing this goal relate to conducting confirmatory factor analysis of marsi-r data, testing for factorial invariance across gender and ethnic groups, and correlating marsi-r data with a relevant external criterion. the testing of factorial invariance underlying students’ metacognitive awareness of reading strategies is of considerable practical importance for practitioners who wish to assess their students’ levels of metacognitive awareness of reading strategies and use the assessment data obtained to inform reading instruction. the generalizability of the instrument’s factor structures is also of considerable significance theoretically for researchers who are interested in studying differences in awareness or perceived use of reading strategies across different student populations and/or instructional interventions. invariant or consistent factor structures would indicate that a level of uniformity in student interpretation of the reading strategy statements exists. in turn, this invariance makes it possible for us to compare student performance on metacognitive awareness measures, to develop a theoretical framework for guiding reading strategy instruction, and to determine the validity of assessment instruments when evaluating the quality of instruction. revising the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi) and testing for. . . 225 4.1. method 4.1.1. participants the participants in this study included 1,164 students in grades 6 through the first year of college. students in grades 6-12 were enrolled in three large school districts and one community college located in a large metropolitan city in the midwestern united states. the students ranged in age from 11 to 18 years old and the mean age of the group was 13.38 years (sd = 1.99). the sample included males (51%) and females (49 %), representing a fairly diverse group with caucasian (n = 628 or 54.0%), hispanic (n = 205 or 17.6%), african-american (n = 131 or 11.2%), and other (n = 200 or 17.2%) student groups. school demographics indicated that students were quite diverse with respect to linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds. for instance, hispanic students had varied english language proficiency levels ranging from intermediate to advanced, as indicated by enrollment in either esl and/or developmental reading classes. there were also discrepancies in socio-economic levels between minority student groups (i.e., hispanics and african-american) and caucasian students. 4.1.2. instrument all participants completed a modified version of a 30-item instrument – the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi), which measures students’ metacognitive awareness and use of reading strategies while reading academic materials. the modifications are described below. the marsi measures three broad categories of strategies including: (1) global reading strategies (grs), which can be thought of as generalized, or global reading strategies aimed at setting the stage for the reading act (e.g., setting purpose for reading, previewing text content, predicting what the text is about, etc.); (2) problem-solving strategies (pss), which are localized, focused problem-solving or repair strategies used when problems arise in understanding textual information (e.g., checking one’s understanding upon encountering conflicting information, re-reading for better understanding, etc.); and (3) support reading strategies (srs), which provide the support mechanisms or tools aimed at sustaining responsiveness to reading (e.g., the use of reference materials such as dictionaries and other support systems). these three classes of strategies interact with and support each other when used in the process of constructing meaning from text. we validated the original marsi instrument using large subject populations representing students with equivalent reading abilities ranging from middle school to college. cronbach’s coefficient alpha for internal consistency reliability of the three kouider mokhtari, dimiter m. dimitrov, carla a. reichard 226 documented subscales (global, problem-solving, and support reading strategies) ranged from .89 to .93, and score reliability for the total sample was .93, indicating reliable measures of metacognitive awareness of reading strategies. a complete description of the marsi, including its psychometric properties as well as its theoretical and research foundations, can be found in mokhtari and reichard (2002). 4.1.3. data collection procedures we collected the data during a three-week period of time during the spring semester of the school year. we administered the marsi-r in the english language to the subjects at the beginning of each class period, with the help of the classroom instructor, who was familiar with the tool and aware of the purpose of the study. after a brief overview of the objective of the study, a description of the instrument, and an explanation of the steps involved in completing it, the students were instructed to read each statement in the inventory and circle the number that best describes their responses to the statements. we advised students to work at their own pace, and reminded them to keep in mind reading academic or school-related materials while responding to the strategy statements. finally, we let them know that there were no right or wrong responses to the statements, and that they could take as much time as they needed to complete the inventory. on average, the students completed the instrument in about 15-20 minutes. 4.1.4. data analysis procedures given that there is prior theoretical and empirical work on establishing the underlying structure of the marsi (see mokhtari & reichard, 2002), we used a confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) to test the structural aspect of validity for marsir. we performed the cfa using the computer program for statistical analysis of latent variables mplus (muthén & muthén, 1998-2012). following the cfa, we tested the revised instrument (marsi-r) for factorial invariance across gender and ethnicity. after a preliminary analysis of the frequencies of responses across the five categories of the original ranking scale of marsi-r (see appendix), the lowest two categories were collapsed, thus forming a 4-point ranking scale. this was done to stabilize the data in line with guidelines in the literature related to quality of rating scales (e.g., dimitrov, 2012; linacre, 2002). the evaluation of data fit under the cfa in this study is based on a commonly used chi-square test statistic in combination with several other goodnessof-fit indices. an important clarification in this regard is that the cfa was conducted by using the computer program mplus, which provides a dependable framework for analysis of categorically ordered data. the estimation of cfa parameters was revising the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi) and testing for. . . 227 obtained through the use of a robust estimator for categorical data in mplus, referred to as weighted least square parameter estimates with standard errors and mean and variance adjusted (wlsmv). evidence of data fit is provided when the chi-square value is not statistically significant (p > .05). however, given that the chi-square value rises with the increase of the sample size, which results in an artificial tendency to reject model fit, the evaluation of data fit is based on a joint examination of other goodnessof-fit indexes such as the comparative fit index (cfi), the tucker-lewis index (tli), the weighted root mean square residual (wrmr), and the root mean square error of approximation (rmsea) with its 90% confidence interval (ci). it should be clarified that the widely used standardized root mean square residual (srmr) is appropriate for data on continuous variables and, therefore, not reported with mplus analyses of categorical data; instead the wrmr index is provided. hu and bentler (1999) suggested that a reasonably good fit is supported when the following fit criteria are met: cfi ≥ .95, tli ≥ .95, and rmsea ≤ .06 (see also bentler, 2004). less stringent criteria of a reasonable data fit (cfi ≥ .90, tli ≥ .90, and rmsea ≤ .08,) can also be useful in some practical applications (e.g., marsh, hau, & wen, 2004). the wrmr statistic is still viewed as an “experimental” fit index, with a value close to 1.0 indicating a good data fit at this stage of its use in cfa assessment of data fit (e.g., cheung & rensvold, 2002; muthén & muthén, 1998-2012.) under the original assignment of 30 items to three latent factors that were expected to underlie the responses on the marsi (global reading strategies, problem-solving strategies, and support reading strategies), we conducted cfa using mplus with the wlsmv estimator for categorical variables. 5. results 5.1. the model the examination of the values for the goodness-of-fit indexes used in this study and the modification indices (mis) reported in mplus suggested the need for modification of the original factorial model for the marsi. for clarification, the mi value for a parameter gives the expected drop in the model chi-square value if this parameter is freely estimated (jöreskog & sörbom, 1979). typically, mi greater than 10 (reported by default in mplus) implies indication of misspecification for the respective parameter. in our case, although the estimates of the factor loading parameters for all items were statistically significant (p < .001), the mis indicated numerous crossloadings for items and correlated errors between items (not reported here for space considerations). based on the examination of these misspecifications and related kouider mokhtari, dimiter m. dimitrov, carla a. reichard 228 substantive considerations, we modified the original marsi to the revised version, marsi-r, with five items per latent factor, for a total of 15 items. table 1 description of the items associated with three latent factors under marsi-r factor/item description global reading strategies (grs) grs 1: having a purpose in mind when reading grs 2: previewing text to see what it is about before reading grs 3: checking to see if the content of the text fits my purpose for reading grs 4: using typographical aids like bold face and italics to pick out key information grs 5: critically analyzing and evaluating the information read problem-solving strategies (pss) pss 1: getting back on track when getting sidetracked or distracted pss 2: adjusting my reading pace or speed based on what i’m reading pss 3: stopping from time to time to think about what i’m reading pss 4: re-reading to help ensure i understand what i’m reading pss 5: guessing the meaning of unknown words or phrases support reading strategies (srs) srs 1: taking notes while reading srs 2: reading aloud to help me understand what i’m reading srs 3: discussing what i read with others to check my understanding srs 4: underlining or circling important information in text srs 5: using reference materials such as dictionaries to support my reading note: grs = global reading strategies, pss = problem-solving strategies, srs = support reading strategies figure 1 baseline cfa model for marsi-r revising the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi) and testing for. . . 229 the marsi-r model is described in table 1 and graphically depicted in figure 1. the means and standard deviations on the total marsi-r score by gender, ethnicity, and the total sample of 1,164 students are provided in table 2. the goodness-of-fit indexes indicated an adequate data fit for this model. specifically, although the chi-square value was statistically significant, χ2(87) = 303.33, p < .001, the other goodness-of-fit indexes suggested a good data fit, cfi = .972, tli = .966, wrmr = 1.188, and rmsea = .046, with 90%ci [.016 .027]. table 2 means and standard deviations of marsi-r scores by gender, ethnicity, and total sample group n m sd gender males 594 39.72 8.84 females 570 42.36 8.46 ethnicity african american 131 41.96 8.13 hispanic latino 205 39.99 8.90 caucasian 628 41.35 8.74 other 200 40.41 8.94 total 1,164 41.01 8.75 note. n = sample size, m = mean, sd = standard deviation table 3 standardized estimates of factor loadings for the baseline cfa model factor/items factor loading estimate (fle) standard error (se) significance p-value global reading strategies grs 1 0.549 0.027 < .001 grs 2 0.584 0.026 < .001 grs 3 0.647 0.025 < .001 grs 4 0.632 0.026 < .001 grs 5 0.670 0.024 < .001 problem-solving strategies pss 1 0.606 0.025 < .001 pss 2 0.666 0.022 < .001 pss 3 0.667 0.021 < .001 pss 4 0.594 0.025 < .001 pss 5 0.520 0.026 0.000 support reading strategies srs 1 0.560 0.025 < .001 srs 2 0.532 0.025 < .001 srs 3 0.678 0.021 < .001 srs 4 0.692 0.020 < .001 srs 5 0.725 0.021 < .001 furthermore, as shown in table 3, the estimates of the standardized factor loadings for all items are sizable (> .40) and statistically significant (p < .001). kouider mokhtari, dimiter m. dimitrov, carla a. reichard 230 the correlations among the factors under marsi-r were found to be: (1) r = .814 between global reading and problem-solving strategies, (2) r = .618 between global reading and support reading strategies, and (3) r = .840 between problem-solving strategies and support reading strategies. 5.2. reliability cronbach’s alpha coefficient for internal consistency reliability of the 15-item scale marsi-r was equal to .850. by subscales, the alpha values for global reading strategies, problem-solving strategies, and support reading strategies were .703, .693, and .743, respectively. these relatively low estimates of internal consistency reliability of the three subscales are partly due to the smaller number of subscale items (five items per subscale). 5.3. convergence with external measures as a part of collecting evidence related to the external aspect of validity, we correlated the subscale scores and the total scores on the marsi-r with the scores on the variable reader. the variable reader, which asks students to estimate their level of reading ability, comes from the general information section of the marsi-r and represents respondents’ answer to the item: “i consider myself: (1) an excellent reader, (2) a good reader, (3) an average reader, or (4) a poor reader.” we found the correlation coefficients, all statistically significant (p < .001), to be (1) r = .316 between reader and global reading strategies, (2) r = .346 between reader and problem-solving strategies, (3) r = .163 between reader and support reading strategies, and (4) r = .330 between reader and the total scale score on the marsi-r. regarding the relationship between the student grade level and scale scores on the marsi-r, the only statistically significant, yet low, correlation was between the grade level of the students and their score on the subscale global reading strategies (r = .08, p = .009). an overall implication of this finding is that the grade level of the students is unrelated to their relative performance on the marsi-r. 5.4. results of testing for factorial invariance of the marsi-r across gender and ethnicity testing for factorial invariance of a cfa model across gender and ethnicity is conducted to examine the extent to which the three-factor structure of the marsi-r and the score interpretations generalize across gender and ethnic groups. that is, the question is whether the marsi-r’s underlying construct has revising the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi) and testing for. . . 231 the same meaning across the gender and ethnic groups in this study. to clarify some basic terms, configural invariance refers to invariance of the model configuration across the respective groups (e.g., males and females). measurement invariance refers to: (1) metric invariance – equal factor loadings across groups, (2) scalar invariance – equal item intercepts across groups, and (3) invariance of item uniquenesses – equal item residual variances/covariances across groups. structural invariance refers to invariance of factor variances and covariance (e.g., byrne, 1988; byrne, shavelson, & muthén, 1989; dimitrov, 2012). we performed the testing for factorial invariance using the step-up constraints method. under this approach, the analysis begins with the least constrained solution (total lack of invariance) and subsequent restrictions for equality of specific parameters across groups are imposed, thus producing nested models that are tested against each other using the chi-square difference test. it should be emphasized, however, that by using the wlsmv estimator in cfa with categorical variables, the conventional approach of taking the difference between the chi-square values and the difference in the degrees of freedom is not appropriate because the chi-square difference is not distributed as chisquare. therefore, the difftest option in mplus was used here to conduct chisquare difference tests in the comparison of nested cfa models under wlsmv estimation with categorical variables (muthén & muthén, 1998-2012, p. 625). table 4 configural invariance of the cfa baseline model of across gender and ethnicity 90% ci for rmsea group ߯ଶ df p cfi tli wrmr rmsea ll ul gender male 184.88 87 .000 0.974 0.969 0.932 0.044 0.035 0.052 female 213.05 87 .000 0.966 0.959 1.014 0.050 0.042 0.059 ethnicity caucasian 258.26 87 .000 0.963 0.955 1.095 0.056 0.048 0.064 other 175.93 87 .000 0.972 0.966 0.923 0.044 0.034 0.053 total 303.33 87 .000 0.972 0.966 1.188 0.046 0.041 0.052 note. ci = confidence interval; ll = lower limit; lu = upper limit 5.4.1. factorial invariance across gender to test for configural invariance across gender, we first tested the marsi-r model in figure 1 for data fit separately for males and females. the results in table 4 indicate there is a good data fit across males and females, as well as for the total sample of respondents, thus supporting the configural invariance of the marsi-r model referred to hereafter also as a baseline model. the correlations among the latent factors global reading strategies, problem-solving strategies, kouider mokhtari, dimiter m. dimitrov, carla a. reichard 232 and support reading strategies, obtained with the baseline model for the total sample (n = 1,164) were quite strong, namely (1) .814 between grs and pss, (2) .618 between grs and srs, and (3) .840 between pss and srs. table 5 testing for factorial invariance of the marsi-r model across gender model ߯ଶ df comparison diff߯ଶ δdf p-value model 0 398.210 174 ― ― ― model 1 389.252 186 m1-m0 22.288 12 .034 model 1p 373.423 185 m1p-m0 13.150 11 .284 model 2 446.064 212 m2-m1p 53.209 27 .002 model 2p 432.259 210 m2p-m1p 34.891 25 .090 model 3 441.655 225 m3-m2p 26.791 15 .030 model 3p 437.756 224 m3p-m2p 21.902 14 .081 model 4 415.628 227 m4-m3p 1.234 3 .745 model 5 379.257 230 m5-m4 2.058 3 .560 note. m0 = model 0: baseline model (no invariance); m1 = model 1: invariance of factor loadings; m1p = model 1p: partially invariant factor loadings; m2 = model 2: model 1p + invariant thresholds; m2p = model 2p: model 1p + partially invariant thresholds; m3 = model 3: model 2p + invariant item residual variances; m3p = model 3p: model 2p + partially invariant item residual variances; m4 = model 4: model m3 + invariant factor variances; m5 = model 5: model 4 + invariant factor covariances; with model comparisons, the respective hypothesis of invariant parameters across gender is retained when the diff߯ଶ value is not statistically significant (p > .05) the results from testing for measurement and structural invariance of the baseline model are summarized in table 5, where subsequent pairs of nested models are tested against each other using the difftest option in mplus for chisquare difference tests with categorical variables. model 1 is obtained from the baseline model (model 0) by imposing the constraint of invariant factor loadings (model 1 is nested within model 0). as the diff߯ଶ is statistically significant (p = .034), not all factor loadings are invariant across males and females. the examination of the modification indices (mis) showed that the factor loading of one item (pss5) associated with the factor problem-solving strategies is not invariant across gender. after relaxing the constraint for invariant loading for this item, which resulted in a model denoted model 1p, the comparison of model 0 versus model 1p produced a nonsignificant diff߯ଶ value (p = .284). this indicated the presence of a partial invariance for factor loadings across gender – except for item pss5, the factor loadings are invariant across males and females. next, model 2 is obtained from model 1p by imposing invariance of the item thresholds (latent cutting values between adjacent response categories on marsi-r items) across gender. thus, model 2 is nested within model 1p. as the diff߯ଶfor the comparison of model 2 versus model 1p is statistically significant (p = .002), not all item thresholds are invariant across males and females. after revising the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi) and testing for. . . 233 examining the modification indices (mis) and successive free estimation of thresholds, a nonsignificant diff߯ଶ value was obtained with model 2p in which two thresholds were freely estimated (i.e., noninvariant across gender), that is, the thresholds between the first two response categories for items grs1 and grs5 (see table 1 for description). thus, we have established that there is a partial invariance of item thresholds across gender, with two (out of 45 thresholds in total) being different across males and females. as a next step, model 3 was developed from model 2p by imposing invariance of the item residual variances across gender. the diff߯ଶ for the comparison of model 3 as nested within model 2p was statistically significant (p = .030), thus indicating that there is no full invariance of item residual variances across gender. after examining the modification indices (mis) and freely estimating the residual variance for one item (grs2), the diff߯ଶ for the comparison of the resulting model 3p versus model 2p was no longer statistically significant (p = .081). thus, there is a partial invariance of item residual variances, with the residual variance of one item (out of 15) being noninvariant across gender. model 4 was obtained from model 3p by imposing of invariance of the factor variances across gender. the diff߯ଶ for the comparison of model 4 as nested within model 3p was not statistically significant (p = .745), thus indicating the variances of the three latent factors were the same for males and females. finally, model 5 was obtained from model 4 by imposing invariance of the covariances among the latent factors. the diff߯ଶ test comparing model 5 as nested within model 4 was not statistically significant (p = .560), thus indicating the covariances among the three latent factors do not change across males and females. 5.4.2. factorial invariance across ethnic groups as 54% of the total sample were caucasian students (see table 2), the testing for factorial invariance across ethnic groups was conducted by comparing caucasian versus non-caucasian groups of students. the results are summarized in table 6. following the procedure of sequential comparisons of nested models, described in detail with the testing for factorial invariance across gender, it was found that: (1) all factor loadings were invariant, (2) the item thresholds were invariant, with the exception of the second threshold of two items (grs4, grs5) and the third threshold of two items (grs4 and srs2), (3) the item residual variances were invariant, with the exception of five items (grs5, pss1, pss2, srs1, and srs4), (4) the variances of the latent factors, problem solving strategies and support reading strategies were invariant, but not the variance of the global reading strategies, and (5) the covariances among the three latent factors were invariant across the ethnic groups. kouider mokhtari, dimiter m. dimitrov, carla a. reichard 234 to summarize the results in this section, noninvariance across gender was signaled for the factor loading of one item (pss5), the thresholds between the first two response categories for two items (grs1 and grs5), and the residual variance for one item (grs2). given that up to 20% noninvariant parameters are tolerable for an acceptable partial invariance (e.g., dimitrov, 2012), the conclusion is the there is a satisfactory level of partial measurement invariance across gender for the marsi-r. at the same time, the variances of all three latent factors and the covariances among them were found invariant, thus indicating full structural invariance of marsi-r across gender. regarding the two ethnic groups used in this study (caucasian and non-caucasian), it was found that all factor loadings were invariant, whereas nonivariance was signaled for: (1) the second threshold of two items (grs4, grs5) and the third threshold of two items (grs4 and srs2), and (2) the variance of one latent factor (grs). the covariances among all three latent factors were invariant across the two ethnic groups. the conclusion is that there is an acceptable level of partial measurement and structural invariance of the marsi-r across the two ethnic groups. 5.5. testing for gender and ethnic differences on marsi-r factors given the presence of an adequate factorial invariance across gender and ethnicity for the marsi-r data, testing for gender and ethnic differences on the latent factors of marsi-r (global reading strategies, problem-solving strategies, and support reading strategies) is appropriate. such testing was conducted by regressing each of these three factors on gender and ethnicity in the baseline cfa model for marsir (see figure 1). for gender, the regression coefficients on the three latent factors are denoted here as γ1, γ2, and γ3, respectively, whereas the regression coefficients for ethnicity on the latent factors are denoted β1, β2, and β3, respectively. regarding gender, the estimates of all regression coefficients were statistically significant, with their magnitudes, p-values, and effect size, d, being (a) γ1 = .120, p = .008, d = .185, (b) γ2 =.240, p < .001, d = .320, and (c) γ3 = .205, p < .001, d = .312. the effect size estimate, d, indicates how many latent standard deviations separate the means of males and females on the factor of interest (hancock, 2004). under cohen’s (1988) interpretation for the magnitude of effect size, there is a small effect size for the gender difference in favor of females on each of the three latent factors, with the relatively largest effect size being on problem-solving strategies, followed by the effect size for support reading strategies and global reading strategies. revising the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi) and testing for. . . 235 table 6 configural invariance of the cfa baseline model of the marsi-r across ethnic groups (caucasian, non-caucasian) model ߯ଶ df comparison diff߯ଶ δdf p-value model 0 431.174 174 ― ― ― model 1 403.598 186 m1-m0 16.931 12 .152 model 2 499.183 213 m2-m1 74.155 27 .000 model 2p 458.214 209 m2p-m1 27.436 23 .239 model 3 486.372 224 m3-m2p 42.178 15 .000 model 3p 459.681 219 m3p-m2p 16.380 10 .089 model 4 459.781 222 m4-m3p 8.241 3 .041 model 4p 458.281 221 m4p-m3p 5.401 2 .067 model 5 416.884 224 m5-m4p 1.462 3 .691 note. m0 = model 0: baseline model (no invariance); m1 = model 1: invariant factor loadings; m1p = model 1p: partially invariant factor loadings; m2 = model 2: model 1p + invariant thresholds; m2p = model 2p: model 1p + partially invariant thresholds; m3 = model 3: model 2p + invariant item residual variances; m3p = model 3p: model 2p + partially invariant item residual variances; m4 = model 4: model m3 + invariant factor variances; m4p = model 4p: model 3 + partially invariant factor variances; m5 = model 5: model 4p + invariant factor covariances; with model comparisons, the respective hypothesis of invariant parameters across gender is retained when the diff߯ଶ value is not statistically significant (p > .05) regarding ethnicity, the estimate of the regression coefficient for global reading strategies was statistically significant (β1 = -.125, p = .006, d = .192), thus indicating a small effect size of the ethnic difference on global reading strategies in favor of the caucasian students (the data coding for ethnicity is 0 = caucasian, 1 = non-caucasian). there was no statistical significance for the estimates of regression coefficients on the other two latent factors, thus indicating a lack of ethnic differences on problem-solving strategies (β2 = -0.022, p = .683) and support reading strategies (β3 = 0.038, p = .397). 5.6. correlations between marsi-r latent factors and students’ perceived reading ability in search of evidence related to the external aspect of validity, we incorporated the variable reader in the marsi-r model depicted in figure 1 to examine its correlational relationships to the three latent factors. the estimates of correlations between the students’ scores on reader and their latent (true-score) performance on strategies of global reading, problem-solving, and support reading, all statistically significant (p < .0001), are reported in table 7. as can be seen, these correlation estimates are higher than the their counterparts, reported earlier in this paper, when the raw scores on the three factors are used: (1) .373 versus .316, (2) .419 versus .346, and (3) .190 versus .163 for global reading, problem-solving, and support reading, respectively. this is due to attenuation of the correlations when raw scores (instead of true scores) are used. kouider mokhtari, dimiter m. dimitrov, carla a. reichard 236 table 7 correlations among latent scores on the marsi-r subscales, grade level of the students, and their perceived level of reading ability variable grs pss srs grade reader grs .815*** .619*** .082* .373*** pss .840*** .061 .419*** srs .048 .190*** grade .042 note. grs = global reading strategies, pss = problem-solving strategies, srs = support reading strategies, grade = grade level, reader = students’ self-perception of their reading ability (an external measure in marsi-r); * p < .05. ** p < .01. *** p < .001 table 7 also provides correlations between the grade level of the students and their latent (true-score) performance on strategies of global reading, problem-solving, and support reading. these estimates were obtained by incorporating correlations between the grade level variable and the three latent factors in the cfa model depicted in figure 1. statistically significant, yet very small, is only the correlation between grade level and global reading (r = .082, p < .05). these results are consistent with the correlations between grade level and the raw scores on global reading, problem-solving, and support reading reported earlier in this paper. an overall implication of this finding is that the grade level of the students is unrelated to their relative performance on the marsi-r. 6. discussion in this study, we revised the original marsi and collected evidence of structural, generalizability, and external aspects of validity for the revised inventory (marsi-r). we first conducted a confirmatory factor analysis of the revised marsi, which resulted in the reduction of the number of strategy statements from 30 to 15. this result occurred because some strategy statements appeared to tap similar reading strategy constructs (see appendix). we subsequently tested the marsi-r for factorial invariance across gender and ethnic groups and found that there is a uniformity in student interpretation of the reading strategy statements across these groups, thus allowing for their comparison on levels of metacognitive processing skills. finally, we found evidence of the external validity aspect of marsi-r data through correlations of such data with a measure of the students’ perceived reading ability. the results from the confirmatory analysis of marsi-r data supported the original factorial structure of three latent factors – global reading strategies (grs), problem-solving strategies (prs), and support reading strategies (srs) – with five reading strategy statements serving as indicators for each latent factor. revising the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi) and testing for. . . 237 the internal consistency reliability of the student scores on the indicators by latent factors was reasonably high. furthermore, we found the factorial structure of the marsi-r to be invariant across gender and ethnic groups, namely caucasian versus other ethnic groups taken together for sample consideration (hispanic, african-american, and other). this finding indicates that, regardless of gender and ethnicity, the students assign the same meanings to the reading strategy statements in the inventory. therefore, it is appropriate to compare gender and ethnic groups on their performance on the marsi-r. it also found that the relative performance of the students on the marsi-r does not depend on their grade level. these findings are helpful when exploring differences in metacognitive awareness or perceived use of reading strategies across student populations, for developing instructional frameworks and curriculum materials aimed at enhancing students’ levels of metacognitive processing strategies, and for determining the validity of metacognitive assessment instruments when evaluating the quality of instruction. in relation to the validity of the marsi-r, the results in this study provide evidence about: (1) the structural aspect of validity, with a three-factor structure (grs, pss, and srs), (2) the generalizability aspect of validity, with factorial invariance across gender and ethnic groups, and (3) the external aspect of validity, with correlations between the students’ scores on each of the three marsi-r subscales (grs, pss, srs) and their scores on the reader scale as an external measure of perceived reading ability. the factorial invariance of marsi-r data across gender and ethnicity has both theoretical and practical implications. theoretically, the generalizability of the marsi-r’s latent factor structure indicates that there is uniformity in student interpretation of the reading strategy statements. this makes it possible for researchers to design studies aimed at exploring student awareness of reading strategies across student populations, to develop theoretical frameworks for understanding student metacognitive awareness of reading strategies in relation to reading comprehension performance, to design instructional interventions aimed at enhancing student metacognitive awareness and use of reading strategies when reading, and to determine the validity of measures such as the marsi-r when evaluating the quality of instruction. the generalizability of the marsi-r’s factor structure is also of considerable practical importance to classroom teachers, reading specialists, and other education professionals who are interested in identifying measures for reliable and valid assessment of students’ metacognitive awareness of reading strategies. a useful practical implication of the consistent factor structure of the marsi-r is that student ratings of their perceived awareness or use of reading kouider mokhtari, dimiter m. dimitrov, carla a. reichard 238 strategies are not affected by bias arising from differences in interpretation of the same scales in the inventory across different student populations. however, it is important to note that the generalizability of the factor structure of the marsi-r has limits that need to be addressed through further research and exploration of students’ judgments of their perceived metacognitive awareness or use of reading strategies when reading. while we found that the understanding of the students about the levels of their metacognitive awareness is consistent across gender and ethnic groups within a set of school districts in one metropolitan area, we are not certain that a similar level of invariance would be found across more disparate groups of students in more or less linguistically and culturally diverse school settings. a note on correlations of the marsi-r with reading ability is also warranted. specifically, one of the persistent issues with the marsi has been the relatively low correlations between reported scores of strategy use on the marsi with external measures of reading ability. if strategy usage is important to reading comprehension, we would expect to see higher correlations. undoubtedly, the issues discussed here with regard to self-report instruments, generalized (vs. contextualized) usage, and so forth, play a role in this correlation problem. we want to mention yet another, previously unpublished, issue which came up in the testing of the original marsi instrument. specifically, in the initial pilot testing of the marsi, we began with 60 items, which were then winnowed down to 30. in the initial analysis of 60 items, there was one item (“when reading difficult materials, i give up”) which, when grouped with some of the items later included in the support reading strategies factor, had a significant negative correlation with self-reported reading ability. we omitted this item from the published original version of the marsi because it did not lend itself to any specific instructional strategy or specific theoretical finding. however, because of its strong (negative) correlation with reading ability, we note it here for any researchers who may be interested in pursuing it. we recognize that in many cases, struggling readers may be unable to adequately diagnose their own deficiencies in detail, though they do know that they feel like just giving up. analysis of the results of this study leaves us in a good position to consider important questions and issues that might be addressed in future studies. first, we want to reiterate our cautions related to the uses and interpretation of the results obtained from this shorter, revised version of the marsi. we ask that marsi-r users keep in mind the fact that this instrument asks students to rate their strategy use in a generalized rather than a specific, contextualized sense. second, we encourage researchers and practitioners to use the marsi-r in their work to determine the extent to which it provides useful information for deter revising the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi) and testing for. . . 239 mining students’ levels of metacognitive processing. third, we hope that researchers would consider carrying out cross-text, cross-task, and cross-language comparisons of instruction in metacognitive awareness, as such studies would help us to better understand whether and to what extent students’ metacognitive awareness and use of reading strategies are text-specific, task-specific, or language-specific. findings of such studies may also help us to determine why there are so few significant effects of metacognitive awareness on measures of reading comprehension. 7. final comments on assessing metacognitive awareness and perceived reading strategy use of esl students given that this journal is oriented toward second language learning and teaching, it is important to comment here on assessing the metacognitive awareness and perceived reading strategy use of esl students as well. as indicated in the first section of this manuscript, we developed an adapted version of the original marsi instrument for use with esl students and we called it the survey of reading strategies (mokhtari & sheorey, 2002) to distinguish it from the marsi, although the marsi and sors are similar in terms of design and implementation features. like the marsi, the sors is a self-report instrument aimed at assessing students’ metacognitive awareness and use of reading strategies when reading academic or school-related materials. in this adapted version, we made slight revisions to a few of the strategy statements with the goal of improving their comprehensibility for esl students. for instance, we revised the instructions for administration as well as interpretation of the results for clarity and readability purposes. in addition, we integrated certain esl reading strategies (e.g., use of cognates, code-mixing or code-switching, and translation across two or more languages) that are characteristically used by bi-literate or multi-literate readers when reading academic texts in english. it is worth noting that both the marsi and sors are valid measures for assessing students’ metacognitive awareness and perceived use of reading strategies. information about the development of the marsi and sors instruments, their psychometric properties, as well as their limitations can be found in mokhtari and reichard (2002), and mokhtari and sheorey (2002). although the sors is a valid instrument, we intend to revise and revalidate it to follow the practice of the marsi as well. the decision as to which measure to use depends to a large extent on the students’ levels of english proficiency. for students with advanced levels of english proficiency, either measure is fine to use. however, there is practical value in using the sors when assessing students with lower levels of english proficiency. kouider mokhtari, dimiter m. dimitrov, carla a. reichard 240 the marsi and the sors have been translated into several languages with translations used for students representing different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. translated versions of marsi and sors are available in arabic, chinese, czech, farsi, french, german, greek, indonesian, japanese, korean, polish, slovenian, and spanish. both marsi and sors have been widely used around the globe by classroom teachers and researchers with students varying in levels of language proficiency. a number of studies using either the marsi or the sors have been published as master’s or doctoral dissertations and in refereed journals. revising the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi) and testing for. . . 241 references american educational research association, american psychological association, national council on measurement in education, joint committee on standards for educational and psychological testing (u.s.). 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(2006). metacognition and learning: conceptual and methodological considerations. metacognition and learning, 1, 3-14. kouider mokhtari, dimiter m. dimitrov, carla a. reichard 244 appendix metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory-revised (marsi-r, 2013) general information name: ___________________________ age: ______ grade: _______ gender: ______male ______ female ethnicity: ______ african american/black ______ caucasian/white ______ american indian ______ asian american ______ hispanic/latino ______ other i consider myself (check one): 1. ______ an excellent reader 2. ______ a good reader 3. ______ an average reader 4. ______ a poor reader instructions for completing the inventory the statements listed on this inventory describes 15 strategies or actions readers use when reading academic or school-related materials such as book chapters, journal articles, stories, etc. directions: step 1: read each statement to indicate whether you are aware of and/or use these strategies when you read. step 2: use the following scale to show your strategy awareness and/or use: 1. i have never heard of this strategy before. 2. i have heard of this strategy, but i don’t know what it means. 3. i have heard of this strategy, and i think i know what it means. 4. i know this strategy, and i can explain how and when to use it. 5. i know this strategy quite well, and i often use it when i read. step 3: after reading each strategy statement, place the numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, or 5) in the spaces preceding each statement to show your level of awareness and/or use of each strategy. example: ______ sounding words out when reading place the number 1 in the blank space next to the strategy if you’ve never heard of it before; place the number 2 next to the strategy if you’ve heard of it, but don’t know what it means; and so on. revising the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi) and testing for. . . 245 there are no right or wrong answers to the statements in this inventory. it takes about 7-10 minutes to complete the inventory. metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory-revised (marsi-r, 2013) strategy scale: 1. i have never heard of this strategy before. 2. i have heard of this strategy, but i don’t know what it means. 3. i have heard of this strategy, and i think i know what it means. 4. i know this strategy, and i can explain how and when to use it. 5. i know this strategy quite well, and i often use it when i read. after reading each strategy statement, place the numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, or 5) in the spaces preceding each statement to show your level of awareness and/or use of each strategy. strategies 1-15 ______ 01. having a purpose in mind when i read. ______ 02. taking notes while reading. ______ 03. previewing the text to see what it is about before reading it. ______ 04. reading aloud to help me understand what i’m reading. ______ 05. checking to see if the content of the text fits my purpose for reading. ______ 06. discussing what i read with others to check my understanding. ______ 07. getting back on track when getting sidetracked or distracted. ______ 08. underlining or circling important information in the text. ______ 09. adjusting my reading pace or speed based on what i’m reading. ______ 10. using reference materials such as dictionaries to support my reading. ______ 11. stopping from time to time to think about what i’m reading. ______ 12. using typographical aids like bold face and italics to pick out key information. ______ 13. critically analyzing and evaluating the information read. ______ 14. re-reading to make sure i understand what i’m reading. ______ 15. guessing the meaning of unknown words or phrases. metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi-r) scoring & interpretation scoring: the 15 strategies on the marsi-r inventory are scored on a 1 to 5 scale. the scores obtained provide three types information, including: 1. an individual score for each reading strategy. review to get a cursory view of strategies you are aware of and use, and strategies you may not be aware of or use. kouider mokhtari, dimiter m. dimitrov, carla a. reichard 246 2. a scale score, which can be obtained by summing the items in the three reading strategy scales or categories (i.e., global reading strategies [items 1,3,5,12, & 13], problem-solving strategies [items 7,9,11,14, &15], and support reading strategies [items 2,4,6,8, &10]). to obtain scale scores, simply add up the appropriate items for each scale. review to determine your level of awareness and use with respect to clusters or groups of reading strategies. 3. a composite score, which can be obtained by summing the scores of all strategy items in the inventory. review to determine your level of awareness and use with respect to all reading strategies in the inventory. use the table below to record individual, subscales, and total inventory scores: global reading strategies problem-solving strategies support reading strategies total reading strategies 01______ 03______ 05______ 12______ 13______ 07______ 09______ 11______ 14______ 15______ 02______ 04______ 06______ 08______ 10______ grs mean: _____ pss mean: _____ srs mean: _____ grs mean: ______ ÷ 5 = _______ pss mean: _______ ÷ 5 = _______ srs mean: ______ ÷ 5 = _____ total mean: ______ ÷ 15 = _____ interpretation: use the following guide to interpret your scores on the marsi-r instrument. 1. high level of awareness (3.5 or higher). 2. medium level of awareness (2.5-3.4). 3. low level of awareness (2.4 or lower). in general, higher scores on individual, subscale, or overall reading strategies indicate higher levels of awareness and perceived use of reading strategies when reading academic or school-related materials. we recommend: 1. using the total scores and subscale scores to derive profiles for individual students or groups of students. these profiles are useful in understanding students’ levels of awareness and use of reading strategies, and in designing instruction aimed at enhancing students’ awareness and use of reading strategies, which are critical for reading comprehension. for instance, lower scores on certain strategies or type of strategies may indicate a need for targeted strategy instruction based on student profile characteristics. 2. examining the scores obtained for differences in strategy awareness and use by groups, including, but not limited to, differences between male and female students and differences between effective and struggling readers. 3. administering the marsi instrument two or three times per school year to monitor growth and patterns of change in student awareness and use of reading strategies in relation to overall reading performance. 643 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (3). 2018. 643-672 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.3.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt a higher-education teaching module for integrating industry content and language through online recruitment advertisements dietmar tatzl fh joanneum university of applied sciences, graz, austria dietmar.tatzl@fh-joanneum.at abstract empirical evaluations of practical teaching units integrating content and language in higher education are rare and deserve more attention. the current article aims to narrow this gap by providing an empirical study of an integrating content and language in higher education (iclhe, smit & dafouz, 2012) teaching module. it investigates the effectiveness of a content-based english for specific purposes module in tertiary aeronautical engineering education, which incorporates recruitment advertisements as online resources. the study adopted a mixed-methods approach and surveyed three aeronautical engineering student groups (n = 141) over three consecutive years on their perceptions of the module’s learning outcomes. this longitudinal survey was complemented by a teacher-assessed writing task and a qualitative content analysis of online recruitment advertisements (n = 80) in a self-built corpus. all three year groups rated the 10 questionnaire statements on a 5-point likert scale rather equally, thus suggesting a similar perception of academic achievement stemming from the module’s completion. this student view was supported by the results of the writing assignment. in short, the module’s effectiveness was corroborated both quantitatively and qualitatively, which identifies this teaching concept as a feasible way forward. keywords: english language teaching; content-based instruction; specialised corpus; online recruitment advertisement; aeronautical engineering dietmar tatzl 644 1. introduction integrating content and language (icl) has become a goal for many degree programmes in higher education (he, smit, & dafouz, 2012). the form and scope of such integration, however, varies from institution to institution, ranging from the ideal of full integration in all courses of a programme to lesser degrees of integration in single courses, modules and units. at the tertiary level, full integration may remain difficult to achieve and even not be desirable, as it involves many issues, pitfalls and intricacies (see abello-contesse, 2013, pp. 12-13; baetens beardsmore, 2009; doiz, lasagabaster, & sierra, 2013; cf. bruton, 2011; paran, 2013, for controversial aspects of content and language integrated learning [clil] at secondary level). a central issue is that of deskilling content and language teachers (paran, 2010) when both content and language goals should be pursued in all courses because most university lecturers are experts in their academic fields but not in languages, whereas most tertiary language professionals have no deep knowledge of students’ disciplines and their respective subfields (abellocontesse, 2013, p. 13, p. 17; räisänen & fortanet-gómez, 2008, p. 48; snow, met, & genesee, 1989, p. 214; studer, pelli-ehrensperger, & kelly, 2009, p. 13; tatzl, 2011a, p. 261). even native-speaking content teachers usually have not been educated in linguistics or the target language of instruction in foreign-medium degree programmes. as a consequence, it may be reasonable not to aim at full but partial integration of content and language objectives and find integration niches in single course units or modules. this article evaluates the effectiveness and validity of such a content and language integrated module for familiarizing aeronautical engineering students with industry requirements and professional tasks, processes and contexts. 2. literature review it has been emphasised across industries and businesses that excellent communication skills are indispensable for employment (cbi higher education task force, 2009, p. 6; engineering council, 2004/2010, p. 12; lamb et al., 2010, pp. 11-12). today, this mainly means communication in english, the global lingua franca (cf. jenkins, 2007; kachru, 1988, as cited in crystal, 2003, pp. 60-61; prodromou, 2008; seidlhofer, 2001), which is why tertiary english for specific or academic purposes (esp/eap) language teaching and learning needs to form a constituent component of content degree programmes. as it remains doubtful whether content experts should be expected to teach language or are capable thereof, full integration across all courses in a programme may remain an unattainable myth for many institutions. in higher education, full integration is rather a higher-education teaching module for integrating industry content and language through online. . . 645 an ideal constructed by proponents of clil that is rarely questioned as a programme development goal (llinares, morton, & whittaker, 2012, p. 215; cf. marsh, pavón-vázquez, & frigols martín, 2013). furthermore, it is by no means certain that increasing the time of exposure to a target language through full immersion will necessarily lead to linguistic gains for students, as ament and pérez-vidal’s (2015) comparison of a semi-immersion and immersion group suggests. their semi-immersion group showed a “significant gain in grammar skills” (p. 63), which was not visible in the full immersion group. in any event, there are degrees of integration on a continuum from full integration to no integration. for instance, met (1999) has classified contentbased language teaching (cblt) on a continuum from content-driven to language-driven poles. for her, total immersion is at the extreme content end, whereas “language classes with frequent use of content for language practice” (p. 7) lie at the opposite end (cf. paran, 2013, p. 321). the centre of her scale consists of subject courses taught in a second language, subject courses with language instruction and language classes based on themes, which largely corresponds to brinton, snow, and wesche’s (1989/2003) sheltered classes, adjunct model and theme-based courses. this continuum has been recently expanded by tedick and cammarata (2012, p. s31), who have added the dimensions of high and low time-intensive to further categorize and define integration. another classification of english-taught university courses was provided by unterberger and wilhelmer (2011), who have identified five types with differing aims, target groups, teaching staff, pedagogical approaches, teaching formats, roles of language and expected learning outcomes: esp, esp/eap, english-medium instruction (emi), adjunct-iclhe and iclhe (pp. 95-97; see also greere & räsänen, 2008, p. 7). this classification views the medium of instruction as the lowest common denominator across language (esp) as well as subject courses (emi). despite such categorisations, content programmes taught through a foreign or second language often lack linguistic learning objectives. there is, however, the necessity for an explicit focus on forms and functions in academic registers and genres, varying with the level of immersion in the target language (llinares et al., 2012, pp. 214-215; cf. costa, 2012). it follows that a need exists for “language activities . . . specific to the content taught” (ament & pérez-vidal, 2015, p. 51), although such a need is not limited to iclhe settings but extends to esp/eap courses as well. similarly, the integration of content and language is not confined to content programmes taught through a foreign or second language but is also characteristic of esp/eap courses. it is not the formal classification of a programme or course that identifies its level of integration but rather the individual realization of content and language objectives in each course, module, unit or activity that matters. concrete dietmar tatzl 646 successful examples of integrating content and language in higher education within esp/eap and cblt frameworks have been reported on project work (tatzl, 2015b; tatzl, hassler, messnarz, & flühr, 2012) and case meetings (tatzl, 2015a). among the multifarious levels of integration in tertiary contexts, a feasible way forward consists in solutions that leave linguistic instruction to the expertise of language teachers. the literature on single content and language integrated teaching units or modules in higher education, however, is still scarce, even more so when empirical evidence is a key criterion for the search. empirical investigations tended to concentrate on full programmes or approaches (see, e.g., snow & brinton, 1988). promising activities for iclhe teaching units were described by foran-storer (2007, pp. 313-315). furthermore, carrió pastor and gimeno sanz (2007, p. 109) produced a collection of online activities drawing on content websites in industrial engineering. the current article intends to narrow this gap by contributing an empirical study of an iclhe teaching module in aeronautics. 3. institutional background and module design the fh joanneum university of applied sciences, graz, austria, hosts a divergent range of graduate and postgraduate degree programmes. the seminar accommodating the module described here is located in the first semester of a three-year bachelor’s programme in aviation, which leads to a science in engineering degree. the programme, therefore, mainly draws on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) disciplines but also contains mandatory english language courses from the first to the fifth semester of study, each bearing two european credit transfer and accumulation system (ects) credits. these credits translate into two teaching hours per week over 15 weeks. the content curriculum is delivered through the students’ first language, german. the seminar in question may be classified as an adjunct theme-based esp/eap course in brinton et al.’s (1989/2003) terms. it is entitled aviation industry english and incorporates various themes that play a role in this particular sector. it is also adjunct in the sense that it accompanies the first semester of study with linguistic support, even though the content courses are not taught through english. thus, it does not exactly correspond to brinton et al.’s (1989/2003) definition of an adjunct language course as being paired with a single subject course, yet it is closely connected with certain curricular contents of the first semester. one of the curricular goals in the first semester is to introduce students to the aeronautics industry, which also formed the rationale for the iclhe module in this adjunct theme-based esp/eap course. the module design was guided by the principle of “giving students the power to conduct their own domain-specific analyses” (wilkinson, 2003, p. 179) a higher-education teaching module for integrating industry content and language through online. . . 647 using authentic online resources (cf. duensing & batstone, 2004; fürstenberg & kletzenbauer, 2012; kasper, 2000b; luzón marco & gonzález pueyo, 2006). a detailed description of the module was published in a conference paper (tatzl, 2011b), which is why it will only be briefly summarised here. the module comprises five teaching hours within two weeks and exploits online recruitment advertisements from the aerospace sector. students use these advertisements as resources for identifying employment profiles, qualifications, skills and personal strengths required of aeronautical engineers. an in-class analysis of the aeronautics industry through the lens of such online vacancies ends in short group presentations of various engineering positions, so that learners gain an overview of the sector in content terms and acquire technical vocabulary, expressions and chunks of words in language terms. the in-class activities of this module lead to a writing assignment which may be characterised in littlejohn and hicks’s (1987) words as a “writing simulation” (p. 76). for this purpose, students need to choose an online aerospace vacancy and prepare application documents for the position advertised. in this way, the new language input from the in-class activities is processed and reinforced through a writing task. 4. the study 4.1. rationale and research questions this article supports the rationale that engineering students can be familiarized with their future career fields and the related linguistic requirements through a course module based on online recruitment advertisements. engineering bodies have called for such close links to ensure “that course content reflects the real requirements of industry” (the royal academy of engineering, 2007, p. 6). students of scientific and engineering disciplines tend to be motivated to follow foreign language courses for instrumental reasons of career orientation rather than out of deep integrative interest (coleman, 2012, p. 18). this is why the module under investigation was deemed suitable for teaching esp to aeronautical engineering students from an industry-related perspective. as online recruitment advertisements blend descriptions of content domains and workplaces with specialist language, this text type promised to be an effectual instructional resource for a communicative content-based esp approach. this study evaluates the iclhe module’s effectiveness and validity in empirical terms to contribute to the research on content and language integrated teaching techniques in esp/eap. six research questions were formulated from multiple angles, using both quantitative and qualitative methods of data analysis. each of the six questions dietmar tatzl 648 pursued complementary objectives that should lead to a sound empirical estimation of the module’s effectiveness for esp contexts. the first three questions aimed at identifying the iclhe module’s usefulness quantitatively, as perceived by different student groups. a qualitative analysis of students’ free verbal feedback attempted to compare this with descriptive teacher assessment of the module’s writing task. the fifth question juxtaposed the results of the second question with the writing grades, and the sixth question was answered through a qualitative content analysis of selected recruitment advertisements in a self-built corpus. 1. are there differences in the ratings of content and language items by students? 2. are there differences in the perceived academic achievement of the three year groups surveyed? 3. are there significant correlations between content and language items on the questionnaire? 4. does the free verbal student feedback confirm the results of the teacher-assessed module assignment? 5. is the perceived academic achievement of student groups mirrored by the teacher-assessed module assignment? 6. do online recruitment advertisements serve as appropriate input for raising students’ awareness of industry requirements and subject-specific language in aeronautical engineering? 4.2. methods this evaluation of a content-based language teaching module on industrial and linguistic requirements imposed on engineering students adopted a mixedmethods approach with the triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data. in this way, the internal validity of the research was strengthened, and the different data sources enabled multiple perspectives on the module’s feasibility and effectiveness for integrating content and language in esp. the methods employed in this research were a questionnaire survey, teacher assessment of student texts and a content analysis of authentic online resources. 4.2.1. survey the main quantitative part of this research represented a cross-sectional between-subject analysis of questionnaire variables with three different subsamples surveyed in three consecutive years. these three student year groups combined constituted one convenience sample within the homogeneous partial population of aeronautical engineering students at the author’s institution. a higher-education teaching module for integrating industry content and language through online. . . 649 4.2.1.1. participants and sampling the participants in the survey were first-year bachelor’s students in the author’s course aviation industry english. they had all taken the iclhe module at the beginning of the course, which was taught without variation to three different student cohorts in three consecutive years from 2012 to 2014. sampling was non-random and included the full student year group in each case. ethical standards were met, as student participation in the survey was voluntary, and participants were assured of the anonymous and confidential treatment of the data for research purposes (british educational research association, 2011). a statement to this end was included on the survey sheet, and students gave their consent to the use of their data by completing and returning a questionnaire form. the intended sample size for this research was 105 participants, estimated from the number of 35 regular study places per year in this degree programme. as more students were allowed into the programme in each year of the investigation, the actual sample size could be extended (n = 141). 4.2.1.2. survey research design the survey form used for this research was an ad hoc instrument designed to gather data on engineering students’ evaluation of an iclhe teaching module. the survey consisted of five questions on personal data, five questions on content learning and five questions on language learning. the questionnaire’s main part on perceived content and language learning outcomes applied a 5-point likert scale (0 = not at all; 1 = slightly; 2 = noticeably; 3 = greatly; 4 = very much) for each item. the 10 items were: content 1. the module has introduced me to the discipline of aeronautical engineering and the field of aviation. 2. the module has provided me with orientation concerning the aerospace industry’s demands on engineers. 3. the module has provided me with industry insights in an authentic learning environment. 4. the module has raised my awareness of my own educational needs. 5. through its focus on employment prospects after graduation, the module has strengthened my motivation to study aviation. language 6. the module has improved my technical vocabulary knowledge of aviation and recruitment. 7. the module has improved my aviation-related spoken interaction skills. dietmar tatzl 650 8. the module has improved my aviation-related reading skills. 9. the module has prepared me for writing a letter of application and a cv to an aerospace company. 10. through its use of authentic online industry materials, the module has strengthened my motivation to learn english. survey data were gathered face-to-face. the questionnaire was distributed in paper form to each year group at the end of the teaching module but before students received the teacher-assessed results of their writing assignments. in this way, student bias caused by positive or negative grades could be ruled out. all completed questionnaires were collected again on the same day. spss® statistics (version 22, 1989/2013) was used for data analysis. participants’ personal data were analyzed by means of descriptive statistics. the first research question on differences in the ratings of content and language items by students was answered with a friedman test statistic (f) and comparison of mean ranks. the second research question on group differences in perceived academic achievement was examined using the kruskal-wallis test. for detecting significant correlations between content and language items on the questionnaire, spearman’s rho was calculated to answer the third research question, exploring potential relationships among the module’s outcomes. 4.2.2. teacher-assessed module assignment the teacher-assessed module assignment comprised all participants in the sample (n = 141). the teacher graded students’ application documents (cover letter and curriculum vitae) according to the austrian national scheme, where 1 corresponds to an excellent mark and 5 to a fail. the medians and frequencies of the grades were compared across groups descriptively to answer the fifth research question whether the perceived academic achievement of student groups mirrored the results from the teacher-assessed module assignment. concerning the fourth research question, the free verbal student feedback from the survey was processed qualitatively to investigate whether it supported the results of the teacher-assessed module assignment. 4.2.3. qualitative content analysis of online recruitment advertisements online resource materials have increasingly attracted the attention of researchers in the tertiary education sector (see brezina, 2012; kasper, 2000a), and methods are being developed to extract technical vocabulary from source texts and corpora for shaping esp learning materials (see kwary, 2011). furthermore, the value a higher-education teaching module for integrating industry content and language through online. . . 651 of small, specialized and self-built corpora has been recognized by researchers (see charles, 2012). for these reasons, the esp teacher-researcher generated a small corpus of online recruitment advertisements (n = 80) for a qualitative content analysis to answer the sixth and final research question whether this text type served as appropriate input for raising students’ awareness of industry requirements and subject-specific language in aeronautical engineering. the analysis was conducted with maxqdaplus® (version 11, 1989/2012). the sampling of texts for the corpus was semi-random using seven online aerospace employment search engines. the search criteria were based on the most frequently student-selected vacancy titles (appendix, table 1) and additional advertisements to cover various industry subsectors. the corpus was built in january 2015 and contains a cross section of vacancies advertized at that time. a frequency count with maxdictio, an extension of maxqdaplus®, revealed that the corpus consists of 30,216 words, with a minimum number of three characters defining a single word. 4.3. results the results of this study are reported with respect to the methods applied. the quantitative student survey and assessment results are followed by the outcomes of the qualitative content analysis of online employment advertisements in the self-built corpus. 4.3.1. student survey results the student survey data were analysed by way of spss® statistics (version 22, 1989/2013). a one-sample kolmogorov-smirnov test for all variables in the whole data set revealed that the observed distribution differed significantly (at the ***p ≤ .001 level, 2-tailed) from the normal distribution. as a consequence, the data set was analysed by means of descriptive and non-parametric statistics. the internal validity of the questionnaire was tested and resulted in cronbach’s alpha of .766. 4.3.1.1. participants the sample surveyed consisted of first-year aeronautical engineering students (n = 141) enrolled at the institute of aviation from three different year groups in consecutive years. table 1 shows the demographic variables for the full sample. on average, the groups were of comparable age (m = 20.5) and had received the same number of years in previous formal english language training (m = 9.0). most students were male austrian german native speakers, followed by the second-largest dietmar tatzl 652 group of students from germany. in other words, it was a very homogeneous sample that afforded no interesting comparisons of male to female, austrian to nonaustrian or german native-speaking to non-german native-speaking learners. table 1 descriptive statistics for biographical variables variable year group m mdn sd min max agea (in years) group 1 20.2 20.0 1.3 18 24 group 2 21.0 20.0 2.8 18 32 group 3 20.3 20.0 1.5 18 24 combined 20.5 20.0 2.0 18 32 formal english language training (in years) group 1 8.9 9.0 1.7 4 14 group 2 9.0 9.0 1.7 5 15 group 3 9.0 9.0 1.6 3 14 combined 9.0 9.0 1.7 3 15 variable level sample frequencies group 1 group 2 group 3 combined gender male 45 45 44 134 female 3 1 3 7 nationalityb austrian 44 38 40 122 german 3 5 5 13 hungarian 0 1 0 1 italian 1 1 0 2 slovenian 0 1 0 1 first languagec german 47 43 45 135 german & hungarian 0 0 1 1 hungarian 0 1 0 1 ladin (romance language) 1 0 0 1 slovenian 0 1 0 1 turkish 0 0 1 1 notes. n = 141; group 1 n = 48; group 2 n = 46; group 3 n = 47; m = arithmetic average; mdn = median; sd = standard deviation; min = minimum in sample; max = maximum in sample a missing values because of nonresponse: n = 1; b missing values: n = 2; c missing values: n = 1 4.3.1.2. content and language integrated learning items the first research question on differences in the ratings of content and language items by students was answered by means of non-parametric statistics. a friedman test with all likert-scale variables and the total sample (n = 141) revealed that the mean ranks differed significantly for the content statements (at the **p ≤ .01 level) as well as language statements (at the ***p ≤ .001 level), which led to the rejection of the null hypothesis that the medians were equal across all items (tables 2 and 3). in fact, six statements lay above the mean rank of the h0 assumption or above 3.0. a separate comparison of the content and language a higher-education teaching module for integrating industry content and language through online. . . 653 items revealed that the medians for each statement also differed within each year group (group 1 to group 3), but that these differences were not that far from the median (tables 4 and 5). in other words, the mean rank of only one content statement was clearly below the median, and that was industry insights in authentic learning environment with a mean rank of 2.63. concerning language, the items improved aviation-related spoken interaction skills (2.30) and improved aviation-related reading skills (2.39) clearly ranked below the median. the item preparation for writing application and cv in aerospace (4.04) achieved the highest mean rank of all statements, thus lying far above the median. it is important to note that the groups analysed with the friedman test were not the year groups but the groups of five content and five language statements on the questionnaire respectively. in other words, the friedman test aimed at detecting differences between two sets of items. table 2 friedman test results across groups for content items test statistics year group sample group 1 group 2a group 3b combinedc f/chi2 10.182 8.175 2.213 15.259 df 4 4 4 4 asymp. sig. .037* .085 .697 .004** decision reject h0 retain h0 retain h0 reject h0 notes. n = 141; group 1 n = 48; group 2 n = 46; group 3 n = 47; f = friedman statistic; df = degrees of freedom a missing values because of nonresponse: n = 1; b missing values: n = 1; c missing values: n = 2 significance levels: ***p ≤ .001; **p ≤ .01; *p ≤ .05 table 3 friedman test results across groups for language items test statistics year group sample group 1 group 2a group 3b combinedc f/chi2 52.781 47.653 48.133 143.799 df 4 4 4 4 asymp. sig. .000*** .000*** .000*** .000*** decision reject h0 reject h0 reject h0 reject h0 notes. n = 141; group 1 n = 48; group 2 n = 46; group 3 n = 47; f = friedman statistic; df = degrees of freedom a missing values because of nonresponse: n = 1; b missing values: n = 1; c missing values: n = 2 significance levels: ***p ≤ .001; **p ≤ .01; *p ≤ .05 a comparison across the three student groups by means of a kruskal-wallis test with the year groups as grouping variables answered the second research question on differences in the perceived academic achievement of the three student samples. this comparison resulted in little differences for the ratings of each statement by each group. in fact, all three year groups judged the statements rather equally, thus demonstrating a similar perception of academic achievement, dietmar tatzl 654 with the single exception of the item industry insights in authentic learning environment (p = .043*), which yielded the lowest mean rank for group 1 students (59.73) and the highest one for group 3 students (78.05), so that the h0 of equal medians for group achievements was retained for the other nine items. table 4 friedman comparison of mean ranks for content items on the questionnaire per group content items mean ranks group 1 group 2 group 3 combined introduction to aeronautical engineering and aviation 3.02 3.02 2.92 2.99 orientation concerning aerospace industry’s demandsa 3.06 2.96 3.15 3.06 industry insights in authentic learning environmentb 2.48 2.57 2.84 2.63 raised awareness of own educational needsc 3.31 3.13 3.17 3.21 strengthened motivation to study aviation 3.13 3.32 2.91 3.12 notes. n = 141; group 1 n = 48; group 2 n = 46; group 3 n = 47 a missing values because of nonresponse: n = 1; b missing values: n = 1; c missing values: n = 1 table 5 friedman comparison of mean ranks for language items on the questionnaire per group language items mean ranks group 1 group 2 group 3 combined improved vocabulary knowledge of aviation and recruitment 3.32 2.84 3.27 3.15 improved aviation-related spoken interaction skillsa 2.27 2.41 2.22 2.30 improved aviation-related reading skillsb 2.35 2.42 2.39 2.39 preparation for writing application and cv in aerospace 4.02 4.16 3.93 4.04 strengthened motivation to learn english 3.03 3.17 3.18 3.13 notes. n = 141; group 1 n = 48; group 2 n = 46; group 3 n = 47 a missing values because of nonresponse: n = 1; b missing values: n = 1 the third research question on significant correlations between content and language items on the questionnaire yielded results that were analysed by means of spearman’s rho, as the data were not normally distributed. spearman’s rho showed significant correlations at the p ≤ .01 level (2-tailed) between many variables. table 6 displays the results of this analysis. 4.3.1.3. free verbal student feedback from the questionnaire the free verbal student feedback gathered from the survey was divided into nine approving categories and two categories of criticism and suggestions for improvement. the majority of comments expressed gains from the module and its effectiveness in the areas of employment preparation, technical english, materials, task integration, group work, reflection on own skills, practical orientation a higher-education teaching module for integrating industry content and language through online. . . 655 and raised motivation. a brief selection of exemplary statements included “good idea. innovative,” “just benefits for the students,” “very interesting content” or “this module provided a lot of useful information.” the more critical voices addressed aspects such as time constraints and the effort spent on searching for employment advertisements and writing a set of application documents. table 6 spearman’s rho correlations table of content and language questionnaire items variables 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 introduction to aeronautical engineering and aviation .460** .434** .203* [n.s.] .264** .326** .326** .267** .206** 2 orientation concerning aerospace industry’s demandsa .313** [n.s.] [n.s.] .242** .399** .242** .188** .185** 3 industry insights in authentic learning environmentb [n.s.] .191* .347** .291** .232** [n.s.] .191** 4 raised awareness of own educational needsc [n.s.] [n.s.] [n.s.] [n.s.] .296** .351** 5 strengthened motivation to study aviation [n.s.] [n.s.] .264** .225** .400** 6 improved vocabulary knowledge of aviation and recruitment .483** .405** [n.s.] [n.s.] 7 improved aviation-related spoken interaction skillsd .484** [n.s.] .196** 8 improved aviation-related reading skillse .287** .412** 9 preparation for writing application and cv in aerospace .311** 10 strengthened motivation to learn english notes. n = 141; a missing values because of nonresponse: n = 1; b missing values: n = 1; c missing values: n = 1; d missing values: n = 1; e missing values: n = 1 ** correlation significant at the p ≤ .01 level (2-tailed); * significant at the p ≤ .05 level (2-tailed) table 7 medians and frequencies of grades on the module assignment per group mdn group 1 group 2 group 3 combined 2.00 2.00 2.00 2.00 grade levelsa frequency excellent (1) 7 6 6 19 good (2) 26 19 23 68 satisfactory (3) 12 16 14 42 passed (4) 3 5 4 12 failed (5) 0 0 0 0 notes. n = 141; group 1 n = 48; group 2 n = 46; group 3 n = 47; mdn = median a austrian national grading scheme from 1 = excellent to 5 = failed 4.3.2. teacher-assessed module assignment the fifth research question of whether the perceived academic achievement of student groups mirrored the teacher-assessed module assignment was answered by means of descriptive statistics. table 7 shows a median comparison and frequencies of grades awarded to students across all year groups. the median for all groups is the second-best grade in the austrian national grading scheme (2.00), and none of the students failed the assignment, which equals good overall academic achievement. dietmar tatzl 656 4.3.3. online recruitment advertisements students in the sample (n = 141) had predominantly selected vacancies offered by european and north american companies, with exceptional cases from other regions. table 1 in the appendix lists all employment advertisements that the three student year groups exploited for the module assignment (see appendix). in group 2, the missing values for the employment advertisements were rather high, as 13 students had not appended a printed copy to their set of application documents. table 10 the 20 most frequent words in the corpus of online recruitment advertisements rank worda characters frequency % 1 job 3 1,046 3.46 2 engineer 8 556 1.84 3 jobs 4 465 1.54 4 design 6 306 1.01 5 engineering 11 293 0.97 6 experience 10 275 0.91 7 systems 7 271 0.90 8 aerospace 9 225 0.75 9 apply 5 180 0.60 10 quality 7 177 0.59 11 test 4 175 0.58 12 email 5 162 0.54 13 search 6 162 0.54 14 work 4 154 0.51 15 will 4 152 0.50 16 technical 9 144 0.48 17 avionics 8 143 0.47 18 support 7 141 0.47 19 company 7 139 0.46 20 requirements 12 134 0.44 notes. n = 80 documents; 30,216 words in total; 3,815 words in results list a stop list in maxdictio applied: personal pronouns, prepositions, articles, numbers, names of persons, acronyms, non-words, faulty words without spacing and combinations of symbols excluded from analysis; minimum number of characters for single word: 3 the qualitative content analysis of online employment advertisements (n = 80) resulted in 21 codes and 3,209 coded segments. table 2 in the appendix presents the code system and frequency counts in each code category. the three main code categories were employment details (with six sub-codes), industry requirements (with six sub-codes) and specialist content (with six sub-codes). the code system and the coded segments revealed insights into industry demands on aeronautical engineers as well as linguistic needs of engineering students. furthermore, a higher-education teaching module for integrating industry content and language through online. . . 657 the word frequencies in the corpus were determined with maxdictio, an extension of maxqdaplus® (version 11, 1989/2012). the outcome of this examination was a ranked word list with the 20 most frequent items depicted in table 10. these analyses answered the sixth research question by confirming that online employment advertisements serve as appropriate input for raising students’ awareness of subject-specific content and specialist language in aeronautical engineering. 4.4. discussion the triangulation of methods increased the objectivity of this research. the quantitative student survey, the teacher-assessed module assignment and the qualitative content analysis of online recruitment advertisements yielded rich data on the module’s effectiveness from different angles. another factor strengthening the study’s objectivity is the clear design of the questionnaire instrument and its description in section 4.2.1.2., which permits the replicability of the survey by other researchers. the results obtained from this study are reliable because the same survey instrument produced comparable data through repeated gathering in three consecutive years. the survey’s internal validity can be considered solid, with a good cronbach alpha value of .766, which means that the instrument measures what it is supposed to measure. a potential threat to the internal validity may have been the inherent bias from a teacher-student relationship, as the researcher was also the teacher of the participants, yet the survey data had been acquired before students received their grades on the written module assignment to rule out a reverse grading effect. the external validity is also strong, even though the findings cannot be generalised in the manner of an inferential statistics design. nevertheless, the sample investigated allows conclusions about both the partial population of aeronautics students in the author’s institution and the global target population of aeronautical engineering students. 4.4.1. differences in the ratings of content and language items the non-parametric friedman test of all likert-scale variables and the total sample (n = 141) yielded significantly different mean ranks, so that the null hypothesis of equal medians across all items was rejected (tables 2 and 3). the mean rank comparison of the content items in table 4 showed that raised awareness of own educational needs had been ranked highest (3.21), followed by strengthened motivation to study aviation (3.12) and orientation concerning aerospace industry’s demands (3.06). these results suggest that the module under scrutiny alerted students to their educational needs and the aerospace industry’s workplace dietmar tatzl 658 realities. such an anchoring of language tuition in industry content also seems to produce motivational benefits for students. the fact that the mean rank of industry insights in authentic learning environment (2.63) lay clearly below the median may be attributed to students’ perception of a classroom setting as nonauthentic compared to an industry setting. the mean rank comparison of language items in table 5 showed that preparation for writing application and cv in aerospace ranked highest (4.04), which indicates that the module under scrutiny was very effective in this respect. the second-highest language ranking of improved vocabulary knowledge of aviation and recruitment (3.15) further supports the module’s design and rationale to expand students’ specialist lexical repertoire through online recruitment advertisements. obviously, the module does not only boost motivation to study aeronautical engineering but also to learn english (3.13). in sum, there are differences in the ratings of content and language items by students, which answers the first research question. 4.4.2. differences in the perceived academic achievement the kruskal-wallis test performed on the three student samples showed different ratings only for the item industry insights in authentic learning environment (p = .043*), with the lowest mean rank for group 1 (59.73) and the highest one for group 3 (78.05). this shows that all three student samples judged their academic achievement equally and that the module did not alter students’ impressions of its pedagogic value from one sample to the other over the three years under scrutiny. this constant learner recognition of content and language improvements supports conclusions about the module’s didactic accomplishments. interestingly, the item with the greatest variation of ratings as determined by the kruskal-wallis test also received the overall lowest mean rank in the friedman comparison of content items, thus identifying it as the most controversial one among students in this category. as intimated above, this may be due to students’ diverging understandings of the term authentic, which for some may be no acceptable designation of a language classroom. the second research question, therefore, yielded no significant differences in the perceived academic achievement across the three student samples. 4.4.3. correlations between content and language items the spearman’s rho correlations between content and language items on the questionnaire suggest that industry-related variables correlate significantly with others (table 6). the first variable, introduction to aeronautical engineering and aviation, for instance, correlated significantly at the p ≤ .01 level (2-tailed) with a higher-education teaching module for integrating industry content and language through online. . . 659 all other variables on learning gain about the aeronautical industry and on all language skills variables. this may hint at a reciprocal influence of content and language learning when subject-matter input and specific context are linked with tasks and activities for linguistic improvement. the second variable, orientation concerning aerospace industry’s demands, and the third variable, industry insights in authentic learning environment, correlated in a comparable pattern as the first variable to the other content variables, with the exception that there was a weaker or no correlation with the variables raised awareness of own educational needs and strengthened motivation to study aviation. the second and third variables displayed similar results in the language field, where they correlated significantly at the p ≤ .01 level (2-tailed) with variables 6 to 8, but only at the p ≤ .05 level (2-tailed) or not at all with the variable preparation for writing application and cv in aerospace and the variable strengthened motivation to learn english. these results allow for the interpretation that industryoriented items influence each other as well as certain aspects of language improvement, such as vocabulary learning (variable 6), spoken interaction skills (variable 7) and reading skills (variable 8). the fact that industry insights in an authentic learning environment (variable 3) yielded no significant correlation with writing preparation (variable 9) may indicate that writing preparation requires specific linguistic support instead of a focus on authenticity. this is particularly surprising for the writing assignment in this module, as for producing a letter of application and a curriculum vitae, a stronger relationship between industry demands and the writing task had been expected. it needs to be remembered that these variables reflect the perceived ratings of students and no measured metrical data, which may also reveal a certain reservation of engineering students towards writing tasks. furthermore, the genre of online employment advertisements as a lens for gaining industry insights in an authentic learning environment may have correlated with aviation-related reading improvement because this type of input materials fostered visual intake. the fourth variable, raised awareness of own educational needs, on the other hand, only displayed a strong correlation at the p ≤ .01 level (2-tailed) with variables 9 and 10. this may point to an interrelationship between awareness-raising task components, personalised writing tasks and motivation, which would support the module design of moving from online vacancies as resources to the production of application documents by students. the fifth variable, strengthened motivation to study aviation, was strongly related at the p ≤ .01 level (2-tailed) to variables 8 to 10 only, which may indicate that the motivation to study subject matter is linked with the motivation to study language. furthermore, it may suggest that the motivation to study aviation is connected with reading as well as writing improvement in an aeronautical context. dietmar tatzl 660 in the field of language, the sixth variable, improved vocabulary knowledge of aviation and recruitment, correlated significantly at the p ≤ .01 level (2-tailed) with variables 7 and 8, thus indicating a mutual influence between vocabulary learning on the one hand and spoken interaction as well as reading skills on the other. surprisingly, no such correlation was found for the variable preparation for writing application and cv in aerospace, even though the online recruitment advertisements contained a rich selection of subject-specific terms and phrases. students may have felt that this writing task required more personalised than aviation-related or recruitment vocabulary. the seventh variable, improved aviation-related spoken interaction skills, displayed a strong correlation at the p ≤ .01 level (2-tailed) with variable 8, improved aviation-related reading skills, which may stem from the succession of speaking and reading periods in the module’s group exploration phase of online recruitment advertisements. the eighth variable further correlated strongly with variable 9, preparation for writing application and cv in aerospace, and with variable 10, strengthened motivation to learn english. in other words, there seems to be a reciprocal influence of improved reading skills and the preparation of the module assignment, which points to an important role of the right input materials in esp and iclhe. furthermore, improved reading skills may strengthen the motivation to learn english, and a strong motivation may contribute to the development of reading skills. variable 9 also correlated significantly at the p ≤ .01 level (2-tailed) with variable 10, which means that the preparation of the module assignment was strongly linked with the motivation to learn english. 4.4.4. free verbal student feedback from the questionnaire the free verbal student feedback from the questionnaire contained several areas that supported the results from the teacher-assessed module assignment. students, for instance, found that the module had prepared them for seeking future employment, as it “was good to see which types of engineers the aeronautic industry is looking for.” several learners emphasised that the module had expanded their “technical english,” “aeronautical vocabulary” and “business vocabulary.” for participants it was also “interesting to use real material and advertisements from the internet.” concerning task integration, there were comments such as “good exercise” or “appreciate all related tasks,” and learners “enjoyed solving the task in a group.” moreover, students had been encouraged to reflect on “personal skills . . . and compare them with the needs of different jobs.” one student also mentioned the module’s “good mix of theoretical and practical education,” and several pointed to their increased “motivation to learn english, so [they] can also work abroad.” highly relevant practice has been identified as part a higher-education teaching module for integrating industry content and language through online. . . 661 of an effective pedagogy in bilingual education (garcía & baetens beardsmore, 2009, p. 327). in short, learners in all three samples overwhelmingly addressed the module’s suitability and validity for esp, personal learning gains they had derived from its completion and a general appreciation of combining practical or industry aspects with language instruction in classroom settings. 4.4.5. teacher-assessed module assignment the results from the teacher-assessed module assignment were corroborated by the free verbal student feedback from the questionnaire, which pointed to a recognition of the module’s contribution to language learning progress. the grades from the module assignment (table 7) also mirrored the longitudinally stable outcome concerning the perceived academic achievement of the different student groups over the three years under investigation which had been estimated by means of a kruskal-wallis test, thus answering the fifth research question. the fact that the median for all groups was the second-best grade in the austrian national grading scheme (2.00) substantiated learners’ ratings of the 10 survey items concerning their perceived academic progress (tables 4 and 5). in other words, teacher assessment and student perceptions agreed in their detection of content and language learning success owing to the completion of the module. 4.4.6. online recruitment advertisements the qualitative content analysis of online employment advertisements (n = 80) with maxqdaplus® (version 11, 1989/2012) confirmed that this text type provides appropriate input for promoting students’ understanding of industry requirements and subject-specific language in aeronautical engineering. the code system and the coded segments (appendix, table 2) allowed insights into workplace demands on aeronautical engineers in many respects. selected retrievals from the corpus of recruitment advertisements characterise this text type’s content and language focus and thus demonstrate its suitability for esp didactics. the texts analysed covered employment details including travel arrangements, working hours, benefits, salary ranges and restrictions. one advertisement, for instance, required the “mobility to relocate to south east asia” from potential candidates, and another stipulated that future employees had to “work overtime, shift work (nights) or extended shifts, weekends and holidays as needed.” the benefits mentioned were not limited to remuneration aspects but referred to immaterial advantages as well, as in the case of “a rare aviation industry chance to work a type design project that offers career and technical growth.” restrictions often confined the circle of candidates in terms of citizenship, work dietmar tatzl 662 permits or security clearances but also addressed particular necessities, such as a willingness and ability “to work in a clean room environment, full clean room suit with full face mask.” the code category industry requirements included sub-codes and details on personality, experience, communication skills, management skills, stem skills as well as education and training. communication skills mentioned were “technical writing, including reports and work instructions,” “documenting validation and qualification testing of new designs,” “writing design briefs,” “preparing bid proposals” or “mentoring small groups.” in short, the requirement of “excellent oral and written communication skills” featured prominently in the corpus. management skills were also expected and comprised the ability to “drive schedule execution for a project, including recovery and work around plans” or “strength in planning, time management, and organization.” retrieved stem skills addressed the “generation of 3d cad models and 2d manufacturing drawings,” an “aptitude for math and complex equations (incl. probability and statistics)” or an “understanding of device physics and failure modes.” specialist content in the corpus focused on processes, products, tasks, sectors, software and hardware common in the aeronautics industry. the crucial role that machines, instrumentation and test procedures play for engineers has been noted before (winsor, 1998, p. 353). however, content is expressed through language, which implies a strong natural link between these cognitive concepts (stohler, 2006). these selected retrievals indeed identify the text type of online employment advertisements as a rich source of technical, workplaceoriented and recruitment language. 5. conclusions the effectiveness of the teaching module under scrutiny was confirmed by results from triangulated quantitative and qualitative research methods. the findings related to the module pointed to a strong recognition as well as good academic achievement among students. even though quick (2012) called job-application materials and cover letters a “culminating genre, not an introductory one” (p. 248), the results of this research support the decision to introduce this teaching module at the beginning of an esp stream for engineering students. apart from linguistic gains, an early introduction of learners to their future career fields may yield benefits such as a motivation “to work toward longer-term goals,” guidance on “informed choices about their own careers” and preparation for the engineering workplace (chalifoux & vinet, 1988, p. 308). weaknesses of this study are its limited generalisability in strictly inferential statistical terms and its author’s double role of teacher-researcher. nevertheless, a higher-education teaching module for integrating industry content and language through online. . . 663 the aerospace sector is a truly global industry, which imposes similar and thus comparable demands on engineers, as the qualitative content analysis of online recruitment advertisements has indicated. in this context, it is legitimate to assume that the module’s effectiveness as perceived by participants in the current study would be rated similarly by aeronautical engineering students in other institutions. furthermore, it is true that the teacher-researcher role prevented randomised participant sampling, yet it enabled the analysis of content and language integrated esp instruction from a practitioner perspective. such practitioner research may add valuable insights into the field, as it reveals immediate classroom concerns. in short, integrating content and language through online employment advertisements represents a feasible and effective basis for teaching esp. acknowledgements i would like to thank all student cohorts for their informed participation in this study and the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript version for their valuable comments and suggestions for improvement. i am also indebted to the journal editor for his guidance during the review and publication phases. dietmar tatzl 664 references abello-contesse, c. 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(1998). rhetorical practices in technical work. journal of business and technical communication, 12(3), 343-370. a higher-education teaching module for integrating industry content and language through online. . . 669 appendix qualitative results from the analysis of online employment advertisements table 1 employment advertisements chosen by students for module assignment from 2012 to 2014 group 1a companyd frequency · aerodynamics engineer (stability & control) level 1 boeing, usa 1 · aerospace design engineer intech recruitment ltd, uk 2 · aircraft technician – wheels & brakes emirates group, dubai 1 · design engineer bishop gmbh, germany 3 facc ag, austria s.com aviation, uk · electronic maintainability and diagnostic engineer bishop gmbh, germany 2 · electronics engineer – avionics schiebel gmbh, austria 1 · engineering internship job ge aviation, usa 1 · engineering landing gear systems internship eads, n.v., the netherlands 1 · engineers and technicians eads, n.v., the netherlands 1 · fuel system & engine installation development engineer eads, n.v., the netherlands 1 · galley development engineer – structures engineer – design engineer employment agency 1 · ife maintenance service representatives – australia and hong kong jet professionals llc, usa 1 · internship avl list gmbh, austria 4 dassault aviation s.a., france eads, n.v., the netherlands lufthansa group, germany · internship / thermal optimisation of pylon eads, n.v., the netherlands 1 · internship / tool development / flight control computers a350 eads, n.v., the netherlands 1 · internship within engineering: planning & performance management eads, n.v., the netherlands 1 · intern, ground operations iata, canada 1 · intern – student engineer boeing, usa 1 · mechanical/structural design engineer protec technical ltd, uk 1 · new product introduction (npi) engineer vector aerospace corporation, canada 1 · performance engineer morson group, uk 1 · production planner omega resource group ltd, uk 1 · programme intern – engineering – stress/mechanical rolls-royce plc, uk 1 · safety response specialist etihad airways, uae 1 · software engineer matchtech® group plc, uk 1 · stress engineer bishop gmbh, germany 2 matchtech® group plc, uk · structures engineer morson group, uk 1 · summer internship – industrial engineering bell helicopter textron inc., usa 1 · system engineer for advanced air system architectures eads, n.v., the netherlands 1 · systems analyst / flight physics / performance engineer experis™, usa 1 · systems engineer (aerospace/avionics) experis™, usa 1 · systems engineer – avionics employment agency 1 · technical engineer employment agency 2 · weights engineer capital group, uk 1 dietmar tatzl 670 group 2b companyd frequency · aero design engineer ge aviation, usa 1 · aeronautics mechanical engineer leidos inc., usa 1 · applications & design engineer rexnord® corporation, usa 1 · avionic design engineer aeropeople ltd, uk 1 · avionics design engineer zenon recruitment ltd, uk 2 · avionics engineer – bombardier/gulfstream employment agency 1 · avionics lead software engineer – flight management systems ge aviation, usa 1 · cad & documentation engineer (electrical systems) matchtech® group plc, uk 1 · composite manufacturing design engineer aeropeople ltd, uk 2 · design engineer bishop gmbh, germany 5 ferchau engineering gmbh, germany · design engineer (electrical/avionic) aeropeople ltd, uk 1 · design engineer – turbomachinery ge aviation, usa 1 · detailed design engineer bishop gmbh, germany 1 · electrical test engineer exelis inc., usa 1 · fuselage aerodynamics specialist morson group, uk 1 · ground operations manager zenon recruitment ltd, uk 1 · internship at iata iata, canada 1 · internship campaign eads, n.v., the netherlands 1 · internship within test set-up preparation on the secondary hc structure eads, n.v., the netherlands 1 · maintenance planner zenon recruitment ltd, uk 1 · mechanical engineer honeywell international inc., usa 1 · mechanical engineer – life support cobham plc, uk 1 · private aviation sales leader zenon recruitment ltd, uk 1 · propulsion engineer level 1 boeing, usa 1 · senior avionic design engineer cobham plc, uk 1 · systems engineer jam recruitment ltd, uk 1 · uas/uav assistant professor middle georgia state college, usa 1 group 3c companyd frequency · aerospace business development manager diab group, sweden 1 · aerospace structures design engineer cobham plc, uk 1 · associate principal systems engineer exelis inc., usa 1 · aviation services manager zenon recruitment ltd, uk 1 · avionics designer intec ltd, uk 2 · avionics engineer excel technical consulting ltd, uk 1 · cadet pilot cathay pacific airways ltd, hong kong 1 · cargo route research and business intelligence manager emirates group, dubai 1 · chief designer aeropeople ltd, uk 1 · composite design engineer excel technical consulting ltd, uk 2 · composite operator morson group, uk 1 · composite stress engineer employment agency, uk 1 · customer service representative textron inc., usa 1 · customer support engineer panasonic avionics corporation, usa 1 · development engineer elevation recruitment, uk 1 · director-flight technical ryan aviation recruitment, ireland 1 · electrical test engineer exelis inc., usa 1 a higher-education teaching module for integrating industry content and language through online. . . 671 · f-15 analysis / electrophysics engineer 1/2 boeing, usa 1 · facilities engineer aeropeople ltd, uk 1 · flight data monitoring & investigation officer airtanker ltd, uk 1 · flight physics engineer airbus s.a.s, france 1 · flight test engineer bombardier inc., canada 1 · graduate mechanical analysis engineer airbus s.a.s, france 1 · graduate mechanical, thermal & propulsion engineer airbus s.a.s, france 1 · internship within engineering: virtual helicopter based on 3d catia® data airbus s.a.s, france 1 · maintenance engineer ryanair ltd, ireland 1 · program planning & control intern boeing, usa 1 · project engineer ge aviation, usa 2 hays plc, uk · project engineer – cabin interior emirates group, dubai 1 · project manager carbon60 ltd, uk 2 facc operations gmbh, austria · propulsion engineer 1\2 boeing, usa 1 · quality manager oaklands global ltd, uk 1 · senior lead manufacturing engineer aurora flight sciences, usa 1 · stress engineer bishop gmbh, germany 5 strongfield aviation plc, uk · structural design engineer aeropeople ltd, uk 1 · test engineer exelis inc., usa 1 · trainee composite production assistant employment agency, uk 1 notes. n = 141; group 1 n = 48; group 2 n = 46; group 3 n = 47 a missing copies of employment advertisements: n = 5; b missing copies: n = 13; c missing copies: n = 2 d location of headquarters; several of these companies are employment agencies and professional recruiters table 2 results from the qualitative content analysis concerning online recruitment advertisements in maxqdaplus® (version 11, 1989/2012) code system code definition examplea frequencyb employment details specific information on position advertised that is not part of any sub-code all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or protected veteran status. [b/e aerospace, inc., doc. no. 57] 173 position title title of position advertised manufacturing composite engineer [cpi radant technologies division, doc. no. 01] 274 travel mobility demands of the position willing to travel, up to 50% of time, with extended stays nationally and/or internationally as needed [exelis inc., doc. no. 05] 23 working hours hours of work per day or week, including contract type flexibility to adjust work hours and schedule [masterworks, inc., doc. no. 14] 133 benefits pension schemes, holidays or other details except salary 25 days holiday + 8 bank holiday [fircroft group, doc. no. 16] 43 salary exact figures or qualitative notes salary £25,000 £40,000 depending on experience [lamonby recruitment, doc. no. 28] 76 restrictions limitations for candidates u.s. citizen or permanent resident [cpi radant technologies division, doc. no. 01] 69 dietmar tatzl 672 industry requirements specific information on industry demands that is not part of any sub-code no colour blindness [carbon60 ltd, doc. no. 49] 7 personality personal character and traits high level of personal integrity [strongfield aviation plc, doc. no. 63] 78 experience number of years and practical experience of performing a certain task five to ten years of industry experience [boeing, doc. no. 02] 177 communication skills explicitly and implicitly named communication skills excellent oral and written communication skills of technical issues both internally and externally [exelis inc., doc. no. 04] 183 management skills any skills related to organisation, management, leadership and project delivery manages technical operation flow of a large project/program [exelis inc., doc. no. 04] 118 stem skills knowledge and skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics uses the application of systems engineering standards, principles, theories, concepts and techniques. [exelis inc., doc. no. 06] 336 education & training specified qualification of candidates with level bachelor of science degree in engineering or related technical discipline [exelis inc., doc. no. 04] 120 specialist content specific technical terms that are not part of any sub-code fabricated and machined parts [sigma recruitment, doc. no. 30] 22 processes principal global processes and work descriptions provides engineering and engineering support services to a variety of technical problems of moderate scope and complexity [exelis inc., doc. no. 05] 183 products technical products or services related to the position turbine components [fircroft group, doc. no. 16] 161 tasks specific tasks involved in the workplace description creates/manages electronic test data [exelis inc., doc. no. 05] 382 sector scientific field or market segment composite aerostructures [exelis inc., doc. no. 06] 501 software computer-aided design and analysis tools and programming languages coding in c and c++ [get computer systems analyst jobs, doc. no. 56] 96 hardware machines, equipment and tools in the workplace flight simulators [get marine engineering jobs, doc. no. 51] 54 notes. n = 80 documents as advertised in january 2015 in the corpus; n = 21 codes (employment details: n = 7; industry requirements: n = 7; specialist content: n = 7); n = 3,209 coded segments a original wording, spelling and capitalisation; names of companies or employment agencies advertising the positions and the corresponding document numbers from the corpus are given in square brackets b relates to number of coded segments in each code category 415 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (3). 2020. 415-422 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.3.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial: introduction to the special issue on english language learning in primary schools the early introduction of foreign languages, mainly english, in pre-primary and primary education in different parts of the world is an undisputable fact in today’s world, as clearly illustrated in enever (2018). one of the reasons for this educational change is the belief in “the earlier the better” notion, which has already been shown not to hold true when linguistic outcomes are assessed in foreign language settings (see garcía mayo & garcía lecumberri, 2003; huang, 2015). age is just one variable among many others that need to be taken into account when assessing child language learning in educational contexts (see butler, 2019), and that is the reason why more research on identifying those other variables is necessary. as oliver and azkarai (2017, p. 62) have argued, “. . . child second language acquisition (sla) differs significantly from adult sla, having its own questions and issues” and, therefore, deserves to be studied in its own right. more recently, in a special issue of aila review on policy and practice in early language learning, enever and driscoll (2019) aim “. . . to position early language learning as a distinctive field of enquiry within the discipline of applied linguistics and education [emphasis added]” (p. 1). more and more interest in the topic is reflected in the publication of monographs (murphy, 2014; pinter, 2011), edited volumes (garcía mayo, 2017; murphy & evangelou, 2016; philp, oliver, & mackey, 2008), specialized journals (language teaching for young learners), and in the organization of thematic conferences and sessions worldwide. there is even a book series (early language learning in school contexts) launched by a prestigious publisher (multilingual matters) and an aila research network in early language learning (www.ell-ren.org) established in 2015 by janet enever “with the aim of raising the profile of research in early language learning (3-12 years).” 416 within this backdrop, the goal of this special issue is to advance the research agenda on child foreign language learning by sharing with the reader nine contributions that explore issues related to the impact of variables such as proficiency pairing, pair dynamics, task modality, task repetition and previously known languages on children’s oral interaction. the papers also consider how young learners explore meaning in context, how word frequency and idiomacity have an impact on second language reading and how an individual variable, motivation, changes when a task is carried out individually or in collaboration. the final contribution also explores how teachers reportedly use their first and second languages in the primary school classroom. it is worth mentioning that the first four papers examine the oral interaction and the written production of english as a foreign language (efl) children participating in content and language integrated learning (clil) programs, which attests to the importance of this methodological approach in primary school settings in spain. although, as pointed out by ellis (2014), the term young learners covers a range of age groups in the literature, in this issue it refers to children from 6 to 12 years old, all of them in primary school settings in denmark, the uk, the usa and spain. in the first paper, “language-related episodes and pair dynamics in primary school clil learners: a comparison between proficiency-matched and student-selected pairs,” basterrechea and gallardo-del-puerto explore the effects of pair formation method, that is, whether children are paired based on their proficiency level in the foreign language or whether they self-select their partner, on both the production of language-related episodes (lres; swain & lapkin, 1998) and their pair dynamics (storch, 2002). twenty-seven pairs of 1012-year old basque-spanish efl learners, enrolled in a clil program, completed two collaborative tasks and their interactions were audioand video-taped. the findings showed that the children produced more lres that focused on meaning than on form regardless of the pair formation method, supporting previous research with efl children (garcía mayo & imaz agirre, 2019). those lres were resolved accurately much more frequently by proficiency-matched dyads, who were also more collaborative in their pair dynamics than self-selected pairs, as was the case in previous research with efl children (garcía mayo & imaz agirre, 2019) and efl adults (mozaffari, 2017). in their contribution, entitled “efl child peer interaction: measuring the effect of time, proficiency pairing and language of interaction,” pladevall-ballester and vraciu consider the amount of negotiation of meaning, repetition and feedback produced by 40 spanish-catalan efl learners, also in a clil program, and the mediating effect of the variables of time, proficiency pairing and the choice of the language of interaction. regarding time, the data were collected when the children were 9-10 and two years later when they were 11-12. as for 417 pairing, the children were paired up in matched proficiency dyads (n = 10) and in mixed proficiency dyads (n = 19), and the language used could be their first language (l1) or their foreign language (l2). the authors reported little effect of time but both pairing and language played a role. thus, mixed dyads, formed by high-low pairs, negotiated more irrespective of the language they used, and l2 meaning negotiation was significantly more frequent than l1 meaning negotiation. the authors explain the higher negotiation of the high-low proficiency dyads as a result of the need to readjust the output and input of each member of the dyad in order to understand each other to successfully accomplish the task. martínez-adrián and arratibel-irazusta study the interface between task modality (speaking tasks vs. speaking + writing tasks) and the use of previously known languages (pkl) in their article “the interface between task-modality and the use of previously known languages in young clil english learners.” fifty basque-spanish efl learners (10-11 years old) in a clil program completed two tasks, a speaking task and a speaking + writing task in dyads. previous research on task modality with efl children (garcía mayo & imaz agirre, 2019) had shown task modality effects on lres, but martínez-adrían and arratibelirazusta show that task modality also impacts the use of pkls, as a higher number of pkl turns was obtained in the speaking + writing task, although it had a limited effect on the functions those pkls serve. in their paper “task repetition and collaborative writing by efl children: beyond caf measures,” hidalgo and lázaro-ibarrola consider the importance of task repetition, a pedagogical choice that has been claimed to offer interesting learning opportunities (bygate, 2018) in the written mode. specifically, the researchers analyzed the written production of 20 12-year-old spanish efl learners who attended a clil program. the children wrote a text in pairs in response to a visual prompt three times over a 3-week period, and the researchers analyzed not only the lres the children generated while writing but also their written output in terms of analytic and holistic measures. the analysis showed that most of the lres focused on formal aspects of the language, a finding that mirrors previous research with adults completing writing tasks (garcía mayo & azkarai, 2016), most of the lres were successfully resolved, and their number decreased with each task repetition. regarding the analysis of the children’s written output, the findings showed that their compositions improved when measured holistically, but analytic measures (i.e., complexity, accuracy and fluency) failed to echo that improvement. eskildsen and cadierno report data from semi-structured oral tasks given to young learners of english in denmark. in their paper “oral english performance in danish primary school children: an interactional usage-based ap418 proach,” they combine analytic tools from usage-based linguistics and conversation analysis (eskildsen, 2018) to assess the oral performance of two danish primary school children. one of the children, nicoline, the less proficient child, was 9 years old and had started learning english at 7, and the other, bo, the more proficient child, was 11 and had started taking english at 9. the children performed two consecutive oral tasks within one single session, with the first one being a semi-guided interview with a native speaker and the second a pictureelicited narrative. the findings showed that the children’s differences in their interactional competence had a fundamental impact on the interactional trajectories of the interviews. this pilot study allowed the researchers to identify both linguistic patterns and interactional practices in the two children, which will guide them in the analysis of the data from the whole cohort and in the development of an interactional usage-based approach to the analysis of oral l2 performance. yuko goto butler deals with an underexplored topic in her contribution “the ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context.” although vocabulary plays a key role in reading comprehension, butler rightly points out that there is a scarcity of research that considers children’s depth of vocabulary, their ability to infer meaning from context, and how those lexical abilities impact their reading comprehension. in her contribution, she investigated those topics with a group of 61 children (9-10) in the united states, 24 monolingual englishspeaking children and 32 l2 learners of english from spanish or vietnamese backgrounds. the findings of her study point to quantitative differences between strong and emergent readers and between native speakers and l2 learners regarding their ability to infer word meanings of unknown words in context, and how they use metacognitive knowledge to arrive at those meanings, although some of those differences disappear after controlling for the size of the children’s receptive vocabulary. butler provides practical implications of her study that teachers could take into account, such as the provision of texts with explicit contexts to provide instruction on strategies for inferring word meaning. in their paper “effects of frequency and idiomaticity on second language reading comprehension in children with english as an additional language,” kan and murphy also deal with the importance of vocabulary in the learning of an additional language. more specifically, they consider the importance of doing research on knowledge of multi-word expressions, whose high frequency can cause vocabulary difficulties for children. they recruited 25 monolingual english children and 22 children with english as an additional language (eal) from 7-8 to 10-11 years old, who completed two reading comprehension tests, one nonformulaic (few multi-word units) and one formulaic (more multi-word units). the findings showed that both groups over-estimated their comprehension of the texts and had lower comprehension scores on the formulaic texts, that is, 419 the presence of multi-word expressions had an impact on both actual and reported understanding of the text. from a pedagogical perspective, the authors argue for the inclusion of multi-word units when working with vocabulary, as they clearly have an impact on literacy measures. kopinska and azkarai focus on one very important individual difference, motivation, in their paper “exploring young efl learners’ motivation: individual vs. pair work on dictogloss tasks.” specifically, in their contribution the researchers consider how the choice of task and how that task is carried out, individually or in collaboration with another partner, might have an impact on general and task-related motivation. sixty four spanish efl learners aged 11-12 participated in the study. they worked on several dictogloss tasks (wajnryb, 1990) six times throughout the academic year, both individually and in collaboration. the findings showed that the children exhibited high motivation towards efl and the dictogloss right from the pre-test, a motivation that consolidated significantly after they finished the tasks. they also had a positive predisposition towards the task and, especially, towards collaborative work, which kopinska and azkarai believe should be fostered by children’s efl teachers. the final paper of this special issue deals precisely with teachers. in their contribution, “teachers’ self-reported l1 and l2 use and self-assessed l2 proficiency in primary efl education,” wilden and porsh analyze the data gathered from a survey administered to 844 german primary school teachers regarding their l1 (german) and l2 (english) use in the classroom and whether or not there was a correlation between their self-reported use of the l2 and their professional qualifications. the findings showed that german efl teachers reported both l1 and l2 use in the classroom, the former for management situations and the latter when they focused on foreign language learning. moreover, the authors found a correlation between the teachers’ self-assessed l2 proficiency and their l2 reported use in the classroom: the higher their self-assessed proficiency, the more the l2 was reportedly used. the findings are highly relevant against the backdrop of the need for highly qualified professionals to teach foreign languages at the primary school level (butler, 2019). to conclude, this special issue offers a view of some of the factors that play a role in the process of learning english in primary school from different standpoints, all of which provide the reader with a rich perspective of the intricacies involved in foreign language learning at a young age and which fully justify the call for establishing a distinctive field of enquiry which focuses on the particularities of early language learning. pedagogically speaking, the contributions offer valuable takeaways for teachers. after reading the different contributions, teachers will have knowledge about the effects that different factors have on young foreign language learning, which will allow them to make informed decisions that 420 may directly impact the process. pairing up children according to their proficiency, rather than allowing them to self-select their partners, may lead to a higher number of resolved lres. forming mixed-proficiency pairs will probably lead to more negotiation, which may take place more frequently in the l2 than when forming same-proficiency pairs. when children are asked to complete a speaking + writing task, they are more likely to resort to their l1s than when completing an oral only task. children also benefit from task repetition as their written output tends to improve when measured holistically, albeit not when assessed using more analytical measures. when evaluating children’s l2 proficiency, we may have to pay attention not only to the children’s linguistic repertoire but also to what interactional resources they are able to deploy when asked to accomplish a given task. children’s ability to infer word meanings increases when the new word is presented in an explicit context, which helps infer the meaning of the word, but the presence of multi-word expressions hinders the understanding of texts. there is an increase in motivation when children are asked to work collaboratively. finally, after reading the last contribution, teachers will learn that there is a tendency for them to resort to the l1 when they have to manage the class but prefer to use the l2 when they focus on the learning of the l2. in addition, the higher the perceived proficiency of the teacher, the more frequently they use the l2. we are very grateful to the journal’s editor in chief, mirosław pawlak, for having invited us to guest-edit this special issue, and to all the contributors, who showed their interest in the project from the start. we also want to warmly thank the following colleagues for their valuable help in reviewing the papers in this special issue: rebecca adams, maría del pilar agustín llach, ion patrick francis dew, janet enever, martin l. hawkes, youjin kim, michael lesser, stephanie mcmillen, marije michel, inmaculada miralpeix, kimi nakatsukasa (†), marianne nikolov, rhonda oliver, caroline payant, elisabet pladevall, glen poupore, nathalie schümchen, juliana shak and natalie smith. the financial support of the spanish ministry of economy and competitiveness (mineco) under grant ffi2016-74950-p (aei/feder/ue) and by the basque government under grant it904-16 are hereby gratefully acknowledged. maría del pilar garcía mayo universidad del país vasco/euskal herriko unibertsitatea (upv/ehu), vitoria-gasteiz, spain mariapilar.garciamayo@ehu.eus m. juncal gutierrez-mangado universidad del país vasco/euskal herriko unibertsitatea (upv/ehu), vitoria-gasteiz, spain junkal.gutierrez@ehu.eus 421 references butler, y. b. (2019). common challenges in diverse contexts. aila review, 32, 178-186. bygate, m. (ed.). (2018). learning languages through task repetition. amsterdam: john benjamins. ellis, g. (2014). “young learners:” clarifying our terms. elt journal, 68, 75-78. enever, j. (2018). policy and politics in global primary english. oxford: oxford university press. enever, j., & driscoll, p. (2019). introduction to policy and practice in early language learning. aila review, 32, 1-9. eskildsen, s. w. (2018). building a semiotic repertoire for social action. interactional competence as biographical discovery. classroom discourse, 9, 68-76. garcía mayo, m. p. (ed.). (2017). learning foreign languages in primary school: research insights. bristol: multilingual matters. garcía mayo, m. p., & azkarai, a. (2016). efl task-based interaction: does task modality impact on language-related episodes? in m. sato & s. ballinger (eds.), peer interaction and second language learning: pedagogical potential and research agenda (pp. 241-266). amsterdam: john benjamins garcía mayo, m. p., & garcía lecumberri, m. l. (eds.). (2003). age and the acquisition of english as a foreign language. clevedon: multilingual matters. garcía mayo, m. p., & imaz agirre, a. (2019). task modality and pair formation method: their impact on patterns of interaction and lres among efl primary school children. system, 80, 165-175. huang, b. h. (2015). a synthesis of empirical research on the linguistic outcomes of early foreign language instruction. international journal of multilingualism, 13, 257-273. mozaffari, s. h. (2017). comparing student-selected and teacher-assigned pairs on collaborative writing. language teaching research, 21, 496-516. murphy, v. (2014). second language learning in the early school years: trends and contexts. oxford: oxford university press. murphy, v., & evangelou, m. (eds.). (2016). early childhood education in english for speakers of other languages. london: british council. oliver, r., & azkarai, a. (2017). review of child second language acquisition (sla): examining theories and research. annual review of applied linguistics, 37, 62-76. philp, j., oliver, r., & mackey, a. (eds.). (2008). second language acquisition and the younger learner: child’s play? amsterdam: john benjamins. pinter, a. (2011). children learning second languages. london: palgrave macmillan. storch, n. (2002). patterns of interaction in esl pair work. language learning, 52, 119-158. 422 swain, m., & lapkin, s. (1998). task-based second language learning: two adolescent french immersion students working together. modern language journal, 82, 320-337. wajnryb, r. (1990). grammar dictation. oxford: oxford university press. 209 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (2). 209-225 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl using tracking software for writing instruction sane m. yagi university of jordan, amman, jordan saneyagi@yahoo.com saleh al-salman arab open university (hq), kuwait salehalsalman@hotmail.com abstract writing is a complex skill that is hard to teach. although the written product is what is often evaluated in the context of language teaching, the process of giving thought to linguistic form is fascinating. for almost forty years, language teachers have found it more effective to help learners in the writing process than in the written product; it is there that they could find sources of writing problems. despite all controversy evoked by post-process approaches with respect to process writing, information technology has lately offered tools that can shed new light on how writing takes place. software that can record keyboard, mouse, and screen activities is capable of unraveling mysteries of the writing process. technology has given teachers and learners the option of examining the writing process as it unfolds, enabling them to diagnose strategy as well as wording problems, thus empowering teachers to guide learners individually in how to think about each of their trouble spots in the context of a specific product of writing. with these advances in information technology, metacognitive awareness and strategy training begin to acquire new dimensions of meaning. technology lays open aspects of the writing process, offering unprecedented insight into creative text production as well. this paper attempts to explain how tracking software can influence writing instruction. it briefly examines the process and post-process approaches to assess their viability, explains the concept sane m. yagi, saleh al-salman 210 of tracking software, proposes methodology needed for the adoption of this technology, and then discusses the pedagogical implications of these issues. keywords: tracking software, metacognition, writing, pedagogy, tefl, call writing is an extremely complex skill that is hard to teach. although the written product is what is often analyzed and evaluated in the context of language teaching, the process of giving thought to putting together linguistic form in order to create a text is truly fascinating. for almost forty years, many language teachers have considered it more effective to help learners in the very writing process than in the written product; it is there that they could find sources of writing problems. despite all the recent controversy that the post-process approaches might have evoked about process writing, technology has lately provided tools that offer new insights into how written language originates. one example of such technology is the eye-tracker which uses cameras and infrared illuminators to record eye position, cornea reflections, and pupil size. eye tracking traces eye movements and measures gaze locations, time length of fixations, and pupil dilation. eye tracking has been used to research reading (e.g., rayner, 1998) and writing (e.g., andersson et al., 2006; hacker, keener, & kircher, 2009). it does so in order to index human behavior and reflect how it is affected by acquired information, where attention is focused, what emotional state the beholder is in, and what brain activity he or she is involved in during the process of reading and writing. another example that is of concern here is the software that can record keyboard and mouse activity, and capture all that takes place on the computer screen. this information technology (it) is capable of unraveling some of the mysteries of the writing process. it has given the teacher and the learner the opportunity to examine the writing process as it unfolds, enabling them to diagnose strategies used as well as articulate problems and, thus, empowering the teacher to guide the learner individually in how to think about each of their trouble spots in the context of a specific product of writing. with these advances in it, such concepts as metacognitive awareness, individualized instruction, learner independence, collaborative learning, teacher and peer feedback, and strategy training have acquired new dimensions of meaning. it lays open aspects of the enigma of the writing process, offering unprecedented insight into creative text production such as the making of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, translation, and so forth. this paper attempts to explain how tracking software can influence writing instruction as well as to offer pedagogical implications. to this end, it will briefly using tracking software for writing instruction 211 examine the process and post-process writing approaches to assess their viability, explain the concept of tracking software, propose a pedagogy which adopts this technology, and then discuss the practical implications of its adoption. process and post-process writing approaches the enigma of writing has perplexed people for hundreds of years so much that george orwell likens it to an exhausting struggle, to “a long bout of some painful illness” and views the writer as being driven by some demon who can neither be resisted nor understood (orwell, 1946, p. 316). although it would hardly be true that orwell had to face such a struggle because of lack of good ideas or lack of good writing strategies, it is most likely the case that all writers struggle when they want to verbalize ideas that are fuzzy; after all, writing is a tool for idea crystallization. process writing is a teaching approach that shifts focus from the product to the process of writing, shifts from a belletristic focus on literary style and linear rhetorical organization to nonlinear recursive exploration and selfexpression, and shifts from a model-based approach to a process of repetitive planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. it is a writing-centered paradigm which, in addition to the consideration of the purpose, audience, and context of writing, fosters strategies for discovery and invention through recursiveness in the writing process. it further distinguishes between aims and modes of discourse (hairston, 1982). emig (1971) pioneered the process approach to teaching writing when she asked her students to compose their essays aloud verbalizing everything that came to mind as they wrote. the approach has also been supported and promulgated by other scholars such as perl (1979), sommers (1980) as well as flower and hayes (1981). in spite of the widely recognized value of the process-writing approach, the major drawbacks are that writing behavior is not universal or strictly codegoverned, and that different contexts require different writing processes (atkinson, 2003). hence, the post-process view negates that it is possible at all to talk about writing as a ‘process’ which can be codified adequately or taught properly. this claim is based on the premise that human communication cannot be modeled (olson, 1999). post-process, however, should not be viewed as a total rejection of the process paradigm but rather as an extension to it (mccomiskey, 2000). in fact, atkinson (2003) argues that “the usefulness and power of process writing has been revealed time and again” (p. 10). at last, it has offered theorists and practitioners alike tools that enable them to peep into the writing process as it takes shape. tracking software makes it possible for the teacher and the theoretician to witness the making of sane m. yagi, saleh al-salman 212 a written product as it unfolds second by second, thereby enabling them to infer the cognitive activity associated with the visible behavior of the writer. it must be cautioned, however, that the use of such software is hinged on the assumption that what takes place on the computer provides to a greater or lesser extent a valid reflection of the writer’s cognitive processes. in reality, however, some writers do not act on an impulse and they are more reflective; therefore, they would have longer contemplative pauses without any computer activity correlatives. tracking and capturing software tracking all interactions with the computer is technically possible and consequently useful. whether a command is clicked on in a graphical user interface or a key on the keyboard is pressed, whether text is typed in or picture, video, or sound files are edited, a code is always produced. a log can be made of all the sequences of codes projected on the screen or produced by the click of a mouse or the press of a key. it is the log of such sequences of codes that the tracking software uses to depict the actions of the computer user. there are multiple tracking software programs that can be used to teach writing. to name but a few, the more recent ones include sciptlog (holmqvist, johansson, stromqvist, & wengelin 2002), inputlog (leijten & van waes, 2006), translog (jakobsen, 2006), camtasia and snagit (techsmith, 2011), and winwhatwhere investigator, whereas examples of older tracking software include comptrace, writing environment, keytrap, screenrecorder, and scriptkeel. tracking software as a research tool the use of tracking software as a research tool is well-recognized in the literature (cf. sullivan & lindgren, 2006). it has been used as a tool for the observation of writer behavior, for reflection on the cognitive processes associated with writing, and for the analysis of a writer’s consideration of genre, audience, topic development and linguistic form. some studies have used it to assess written narratives (cf. asker-amason, wengelin, & sahlen, 2009), to explore the human translation behavior (carl, 2010), to support persons with cognitive disabilities (carmien & fischer, 2008), to investigate the interplay between aphasia and text production (behrns, ahlsen, & wengelin, 2010), to study journalistic discourse production (van hout, 2007), to describe the adaptation of process texts produced by a speech recognition system (leijten & waes, 2005), to bridge the gap between students’ technology skills and the using tracking software for writing instruction 213 demands of developing an electronic portfolio (gladhart, 2007), and to foster collaborative story-writing (chung & walsh, 2006). tracking software for writing instruction regardless of the teaching approach that is adopted, tracking software can be used in a product-focused approach, a process writing approach, or a post-process approach. within the product orientation, the prose model aspect lends itself well to tracking. learners can be asked to have tracking on as they answer questions on a model essay that they consider prior to the task of essay writing. tracking is not only useful at the stage of students’ emulation but also valuable for teacher stimulation of analysis and reflection on the model essay. within the process approach to writing, tracking software may be used at each writing stage beginning from planning to drafting and revising. for instance, with the help of such technology, the teacher can offer exercises that would get learners to use such brainstorming software as filmfiler, idea cruncher, winflow, storyright, and so forth. the revision stage is where tracking is most useful. some students may rush through the revision stage; hence, it would be wise to require that tracking be utilized during revision. finally, within the post-process approach, tracking software is equally useful. although the post-process approach calls into question the possibility that the “writing process can be described in some way” (olson, 1999, p. 7), teachers can use tracking to enhance learner consciousness of writing as a social activity that involves a reader and the consciousness of it as an activity situated within a specific context. keeping track of students’ writing behavior facilitates teacher feedback and makes it all the more pertinent. teachers could in fact encourage learners to think not only about the background of a potential reader, shared knowledge, and so forth, but also to develop metacognitive awareness of the writing activity itself. the uses of tracking software tracking software is useful in giving feedback to learners. the traditional underlining, annotating, commenting, and occasional rephrasing have for a long time been regarded as having little value because more often than not learners ignore all of this information and stop at the letter grade assigned to their essays (cf. truscott, 1996). in lieu of post-dated written feedback, replaying a student tracking video would facilitate offering live feedback in a private conference or in a group discussion. the replay of composition activities reminds the learner of the mindset that he or she had when they took one decisane m. yagi, saleh al-salman 214 sion after another as they constructed their sentences and arguments. therefore, the live feedback given during this process of idea rebirth might become most relevant and make a lasting impact. tracking software is ideal for the individualization of instruction, which is increasingly becoming more difficult, given the new tendency to have large class sizes. individualization is a learner-centered approach to teaching in which the curriculum design makes allowances for individual learner differences and where the teaching goals are based on individual learner needs. a lowperforming student who is lagging behind his or her class could be given an assignment to work on individually while the teacher attends to the rest of the class. if the tracking is on, the teacher would be able to comment on the specific set of problems that such students suffer from and could guide them to the right process that they would need to follow. by the same token, good students who are ahead of their class could also be given an assignment to work on individually with tracking enabled. also in this case, the teacher could individualize his or her guidance and tailor-make their teaching by using the tracking feature. as language learners are supposed to assume maximum responsibility for their own learning and are encouraged to become autonomous, collaborative learning becomes all the more valuable. however, teachers need to keep tabs on student in-class activities to ascertain that learning is taking place. before a collaboration session starts, the teacher may instruct students to turn tracking on to facilitate subsequent teacher guidance and advice (berzsenyi, 2001). education aims to produce life-long learners who are capable of acquiring knowledge independently; hence training them in the procedures and strategies used in learning, critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication is a form of indispensible empowerment. strategy training is facilitated by turning tracking on while teachers verbalize their own thinking processes as they compose an essay or while directly explaining the value and purpose of each strategy that they want the student to learn and practice. they can focus on the metacognitive strategies of planning, self-monitoring, and selfevaluation. thus, tracking is instrumental in teaching embedded strategies and in explicit strategy training. the added advantage is that students can take home the teacher’s tracking video and replay it as often as they need to appreciate the concepts further. tracking software and metacognitive awareness perhaps the most appropriate use for tracking is indeed in a situation where students are the center of the learning process and where there is emphasis on how learning is achieved, that is, in the context of metacognitive using tracking software for writing instruction 215 awareness. metacognitive knowledge is awareness of the mental processes associated with learning. there are two types of metacognitive skills: selfassessment, where the learner evaluates their own cognition; and selfmanagement, where they direct their own cognitive development (cf. wenden, 1998). it involves thinking about the mental processes required in a specific instance of learning, monitoring learning as it takes place, and assessing a learner’s own learning at the conclusion of the process. metacognitive knowledge is widely thought to influence learning (e.g., abraham & vann, 1987; horwitz, 1988; macaro & erler, 2008; schoonen, hulstijn, & bossers, 1998; vandergrift, 2005). in particular, metacognitive awareness substantially enhances learning. dickinson (1995) reviewed the literature on cognitive motivation and concluded that learning success and enhanced motivation are contingent upon learners’ perception that “their learning successes or failures are to be attributed to their own efforts and strategies rather than to factors outside their control” (p. 174). in a study of the effect of beliefs about the nature of knowledge on comprehension, schommer (1990) provided empirical evidence that correlated the type of cognitive awareness with the degree of text comprehension. schoonen et al. (1998) studied the relative contribution of dutch students’ metacognitive and language-specific knowledge to the comprehension of their native dutch versus english as a foreign language. they learned that metacognitive knowledge had no significant relationship with language-specific knowledge; yet, metacognition appeared to play a significant role in both native and foreign language reading comprehension. goh (1997) called for more in-class discussion to increase learners’ metacognitive awareness after her student diary study had revealed that second language learners had clear ideas about their own role and performance in the learning process. research on the value of metacognitive knowledge has been accelerated in the last decade or two with numerous researchers confirming the contribution such knowledge makes to language learning. chang and shen (2010) compared the beliefs about language learning among 250 junior high taiwanese students and their language learning strategies, finding out that there was a significant relationship between them. macaro and erler (2008) reported that reading strategy instruction that they had provided to 62 pre-teen british children had succeeded in enhancing comprehension of both simple and elaborate french texts, bringing about changes in strategy use, and improving attitudes toward reading in general. nakatani (2005) examined the effect of awareness-raising training on oral communication strategy use and found that the participants significantly improved their oral proficiency test scores and that general awareness of oral communication strategies was partly responsisane m. yagi, saleh al-salman 216 ble for their success. vandergrift (2005) examined the relationships among motivation, metacognition, and proficiency in listening comprehension among 57 adolescent learners of french and provided empirical support for the links between self-determination, self-regulated learning, learner autonomy, and metacognition. since metacognitive knowledge is beneficial to language learning, tracking software could be used to build such awareness or enhance it. although metacognitive awareness can be developed by means of the classical procedure of student-teacher conferencing, such metacognitive instruction can benefit more from it tracking technology. if tracking is enabled during the composition of an essay on the computer and the think-aloud protocol is utilized, not only does metacognitive instruction become easier but so does cognitive strategy training because tracking enables the teacher to witness essay creation as it develops. student-teacher conferencing, on the other hand, relies on only what the student remembers of the writing decisions that he or she made when they were composing the essay days before. the major advantage of student-teacher conferences being independence of equipment is outweighed by the pedagogical value of bringing to life the act of essay writing. one approach to teaching metacognitive awareness could involve fostering it right at the very beginning of a writing lesson. before teachers explain the first stage of essay writing, for example, they may need to bring into focus the very purpose of the essay to be accomplished and the type of audience whom it addresses. then, they may need to demonstrate how the purpose and audience interact and affect every decision that the writer takes at discourse, paragraph, and sentence levels. they may also show how the goal of communication determines the strategy for achieving it. it might also be necessary to illustrate how composition planning is influenced by the conscious knowledge of purpose and audience and how these affect the process of gathering information and preparing for the composition. to explicitly promote writer reflection, teachers may avail themselves of the use of it by composing an essay on the computer, outside the class, with tracking turned on. as they consider what to do before the composition process has started, they can verbalize their thoughts in a think-aloud protocol, asking such questions as the following: why am i writing this essay? is it to inform, persuade, dissuade, entertain, answer a question, make a request, promote someone or something, and so forth? what is the purpose i want to achieve? what do i want to say? who would care to read what i will write? would they be young or old, males or females, educated, specialists, laity, superiors, subordinates, etc? what would they be interested in? would they have heard about my topic? would they know much about it? what would they know? using tracking software for writing instruction 217 as the teacher answers each of these questions, he or she verbalizes the implications in terms of content and style of delivery. for instance, if the target audience were non-specialists, the issues to be discussed would need to be of a general nature with focus on the global rather than the detailed picture. the language would need to be non-technical and ought to focus on what this kind of audience would be interested to know about. if the audience were experts, however, then the focus would need to be on the details, and the language may have to be technical and precise. teachers will need to clearly state who the target audience is, their expectation of them as writers, and what style of delivery will be adopted. when drafting the essay, they must verbalize how this definition of the target audience affects whether they include a certain idea or exclude it, use jargon or not, keep complex structures or simplify them, and so forth. then they can move on to the stage of idea generation, namely brainstorming, free writing, list-making, asking questions, clustering, and so forth. the teacher may make the decision about the style of idea generation, say listmaking, and then link the essay purpose to the ideas that he or she will list. suppose that they were writing a proposal, they could verbalize, “since i am writing a proposal, my reader would need to know the pros and cons of it. ok, so let me think of the pros. . . . let me think now of the cons.” if they were writing an informative essay, they could verbalize, “the reader does not know x, so i must tell them the what, the who, the when, the where, the how, and the why.” if they were writing a compare and contrast essay, they could verbalize, “for the reader to decide which is better, they need to know the advantages and disadvantages, the strengths and weaknesses. let me first list the strengths of x. . . . now its weaknesses are . . . let me move on to y, its strengths are . . ., its weaknesses are . . .” throughout the idea generation process, the teacher must use the think-aloud protocol to demonstrate how knowledge of purpose and audience dictates the elements that will go in the outline, that is, the ideas to be included or excluded. at the drafting stage, the think-aloud protocol, when captured with the tracking software, must portray the cognitive strategies that accompany the writing process. the teacher should endeavor to integrate previously learned concepts and previously used processes to enable students to develop their own unfailing schema for learning. depending on the language level of the learner, the teacher needs to focus on different aspects of writing, one at a time. the verbalization may run across the entire piece of discourse, but the focus and the details ought to be on the teaching point that the teacher is demonstrating. thus, the learner would watch how decisions are made and executed at the level of words, sentences, paragraphs, and discourse, but his or her attention is primarily drawn to the teacher’s concentration on the tarsane m. yagi, saleh al-salman 218 get concept. the teacher should encourage students to take the tracking video home and must give them assignments on it that would motivate them to view it more carefully outside the classroom. at the revision stage, the teacher needs to go through his or her written piece with tracking turned on. they would have to read it, stop occasionally, and delete, insert, rearrange, or fix whatever is needed. throughout the revision, however, they must verbalize their thoughts, explain what their concern is, why it is problematic, and how best it can be fixed. they must be cognizant of their audience and their purpose, verbalizing the estimated impact of their decisions on the audience, and demonstrating how this impact can be altered with the replacement of a word, the modification of a sentence structure, or the rearrangement of sentences and paragraphs. once the teacher is satisfied that the learners have understood the target concept, he or she needs to require of them that they produce a piece of writing, be it a set of sentences, paragraphs, or an entire composition, and must demand that: (a) the composing process be on the computer, (b) that tracking be enabled, and (c) that students verbalize their thought processes the same way that the teacher demonstrated. this is essential for feedback purposes. the next stage of writing instruction is feedback, which is as critical as the stage of teacher demonstration. feedback is the response that teachers and peers give to a learner about his or her work and their progress. not only does it provide an appraisal of the learner’s performance but also reinforcement. the teacher needs to invite a student to volunteer to share his or her tracking video with the class in a workshop atmosphere. if deemed appropriate and if there is a specific lesson to be learned from one student’s performance, the teacher may encourage that specific student to share his or her tracking video. the idea here is to offer feedback to a writer, to reinforce the target lesson, and to foster collaborative learning at the same time. before the class starts to view a student’s tracking video, the teacher may be advised to reiterate the target concept that the video is meant to have implemented. the suggested procedure for viewing the video will now be presented. the video is played on a computer and is projected on a data-show in an itenabled traditional classroom or on the individual screens in a computer laboratory. then, the teacher stops the video at junctures of interest to invite comments on what the student writer produced or comments on strategy use. afterwards, the student writer is given the chance first to correct a mistake that he or she might have made or to comment on a strategy that they followed. other students are then invited to comment. they may correct a mistake, offer alternative wording, or suggest a better strategy to follow. if the class were unable to identify a problem or to recognize a good strategy, the teacher may using tracking software for writing instruction 219 weigh in and give a hint or lead the class to what he or she has in mind. if not apparent in the video, the student writer may be invited to explain why he or she followed a certain strategy or why they opted for a specific phrase. the teacher’s role at this stage is to offer positive and negative reinforcement, encouraging the right thinking process and discouraging the wrong one. focus must be more on how the student went about a task than on their product. throughout a feedback session, the teacher will give examples of useful strategies, elicit additional examples of good strategies, and encourage students to experiment with structures, wordings, organization, and so forth. he or she should enable students to experience the advantages of applying a good learning strategy and must foster all good learning tactics. furthermore, they must train students to become more responsible for their own learning. the benefit to the student writer subject of class discussion is unparalleled, for critical reflection is an essential component of the learning experience. it is through questioning and commenting on their and others’ work that they derive meaning from their writing experience and get motivation to strengthen the fruitful cognitive strategies (such as the self-monitoring substrategy, where they check their drafts for capitalization, overall appearance, punctuation, and spelling) and alter the wrong ones (where they fail to practice self-monitoring altogether or fail to take one or more aspects of writing into account). it is through feedback sessions that students can develop their metacognitive awareness and learn how to learn writing. their replayed tracked writing session enables them to relive the writing experience and to recall in vivid detail what they did and how they thought and felt about it. it gives them the opportunity to attend to their emotional responses that accompanied the decisions made during the process of writing and it invites them to re-evaluate these decisions, associating some with wrong outcomes and integrating others into their stock of learned concepts. in their next writing experience, they would validate the latter and avoid the former strategies. the class as a whole stands to benefit from this interaction. it will strengthen what they already know and what they do well and will help them identify what they do not know and what they do wrongly. they will learn from each other. the teacher will not only facilitate such interaction, but must also have an agenda to teach students how to learn writing from their own experiences and from those of their teacher and peers. primary teacher goals should include guiding students to acquire permanent learning skills, to self-assess, to be independent, and to be responsible for their own learning. the teacher’s aim should be to make students believe that they are in control of their own learning, to make them conscious of their ability to monitor their own learning, and to make them aware of what they know and what they do not know. sane m. yagi, saleh al-salman 220 pedagogical implications in view of the previous arguments and the authors’ practical experience with tracking software, the following may be established as core teaching methodology standards for writing: a. writing teachers should aim to ultimately develop cognitive and metacognitive awareness. b. students should be clearly informed of the learning goals of each writing lesson. c. teachers must explain the subcomponents of the composing process and work to develop learners’ abilities related to the different components. d. as they instruct students on the process of writing, teachers must share with the class a model piece of writing that would resemble that which students have to produce. they must get students to answer questions that would create awareness of the essay features of discourse genre, thesis, organization, paragraph development, grammatical structures, and diction. e. teachers need to model the composing process by producing on the computer their own piece of text. f. they are advised to use a piece of tracking software and utilize thinkaloud protocols to model each of the subcomponents of the composing process. the tracking software would videotape their every move and document their procedures, thus producing a learning resource that student could refer to at a time of need. g. as part of their instruction, teachers should demonstrate the target writing procedure with the tracking video of their own writing experience, commenting upon and directing student attention to subtleties that are essential to proper skill mastery. h. while using the think-aloud protocol, teachers should verbalize the thoughts that cross their minds as they consider the use of specific strategies. they will have to verbalize how they narrow down their topic, define their audience, decide their communication goals, phrase their thesis statement, adopt a personal voice, translate outline points into topic sentences, elaborate on these sentences by explaining them, illustrating them with examples, supporting them with evidence, and so forth. i. once convinced that students have appreciated the craft of constructing the model, the teacher can ask them to emulate it by producing a similarly constructed piece of text on a different theme, perhaps a theme of their own. using tracking software for writing instruction 221 j. teachers must require of their students that they use computers to prepare their assignments and that they have a piece of tracking software installed. k. all assignments must be written with tracking enabled and the tracking video must be saved for teacher feedback. l. teachers should provide learners with feedback by viewing their tracking video and commenting on their writing strategies as reflected in the video, commenting on their planning, revising, proofreading, and referring to information sources. they may in particular advise them on whether they have re-evaluated their opening and closing paragraphs, re-assessed their topic sentences and thesis statements, considered giving adequate details and examples, checked their sequence of points and paragraph transitions, and fixed their mistakes in spelling, grammar, vocabulary, and so forth. they may also advise on language problems. m. teachers should work on the development of sensitivity to language forms and communication strategies. by reviewing with the studentwriter the composing process as it unfolds, the teacher could ask questions that would get the student to think of their social responsibility to readers, how readers would interpret a statement or a paragraph that the student wrote, how they would react to it, and which specific linguistic segment could have caused such a reaction. n. peer evaluation should also be encouraged, especially for validating reader response, attainment of purpose, and writer personal voice. conclusion in this paper, the usefulness of using tracking software to foster metacognition in writing instruction was presented. throughout the process of writing, the teacher demonstrates the thinking that goes with writing, and the tracking software records their keyboard and mouse activities, their screen contents, and their verbalization. in this way they will create metacognitive awareness of the acts of composition. students learn not only how the concepts that they were taught in class have been translated into the model essay that the teacher has composed, but also what the teacher was thinking as he or she was producing it. to ensure that students learn the metacognitive activity associated with the learning of writing, the teacher should clearly state the learning goals and explain what needs to be accomplished and how. whenever they decide on a certain strategy, they should explain why that strategy rather than another one was used in a particular context and must demonstrate how it is used. they must continusane m. yagi, saleh al-salman 222 ously monitor what they do and ask themselves whether or not they are using the strategy correctly and whether the strategy is achieving its goal. they need to make it clear that more than one strategy is available in a particular context and that the writer needs to monitor their own strategy use. when one strategy stops delivering, they should switch to an alternative strategy. throughout the process of writing, they monitor, self-assess, and self-manage; they evaluate their own cognition and direct their own cognitive development. it is evident that writer reflection permeates the entire process of composition. tracking together with the think-aloud protocol are capable of capturing such reflection and consequently rendering direct metacognitive instruction demonstrable and more effective. with metacognitive training and its empowerment, life-long learners can be created. training students in the area of the thinking processes that accompany the writing process, the cognitive strategies used in learning how to write, critical thinking and problemsolving, and analysis and synthesis is 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(1998). metacognitive knowledge and language learning. applied linguistics, 19(4), 515-537. 317 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (2). 2017. 317-334 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.2.8 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl an ever closer union . . . of linguistic diversity daniel tomozeiu university of westminster, uk d.tomozeiu@westminster.ac.uk abstract the analysis carried out between october 2014 and february 2015 by a team of researchers from the university of westminster with support from colleagues from across the eu identified the linguistic communities across the 28 eu member states as recognized (or not) by the country’s legislation and the linguistic rights of these communities in education, judiciary and public services. the findings present a complex picture of different linguistic traditions, as well as different levels of minority language use. education and media appear as the two areas where these minority languages are most used. the diversity of national policies across the eu towards minority languages is highlighted. at the same time, a number of factors that influence the use of minority languages in one context and not in another are identified. finally, a policy approach that would enhance education in minority languages, strengthen community cohesion and diversity in a globalizing world is put forward. keywords: linguistic diversity; less-dominant languages; education policy; european union 1. introduction linguistic diversity is an acknowledged reality in the european union (eu). across the 28 member-states “over 60 indigenous regional or minority languages, spoken by some 40 million people” (eu multilingualism, 2016) are being used in every day communication. european union linguistic diversity was acknowledged by the daniel tomozeiu 318 treaties of rome in 1957; this acknowledgement was further reinforced by subsequent treaties, most recently in the treaty on european union: “it shall respect its rich cultural and linguistic diversity, and shall ensure that europe’s cultural heritage is safeguarded and enhanced” (european union, 2007, art. 3). the same concept was put forward from a human rights perspective in the european charter of human rights: “the union respects cultural, religious and linguistic diversity” (european union, 2000, art. 22). as can be noticed, the two treaties make no distinction between national, regional or minority languages; they provide “blanket recognition” of cultural and linguistic diversity. this passive eu approach was recalibrated with a more active one, under which linguistic diversity was to be maintained across the eu through education, in order to “increase individual multilingualism until every citizen has practical skills in at least two languages in addition to his or her mother tongue” (european commission, 2005). in this new framework strategy for multilingualism published by the european commission in 2005 there was little explanation as to which languages the framework strategy refers to and to what extent it addresses the challenges faced by minority languages. the new framework was adopted by the promoters of multilingualism mainly in order to encourage the learning of eu official languages in schools, and little evidence was found of its use to support or promote minority languages. as the new framework strategy for multilingualism makes it clear, “responsibility for making further progress (in promoting multilingualism) mainly rests with member states” (european commission, 2005). this top down approach has been criticized as being unsuitable: “current approach of nation states, defining both national and regional/minority languages from the top down, is increasingly at odds with the idea of cross-border migration and communications” (hornsby & agarin, 2012, p. 88). the current horizon-scanning research set out to identify what is the situation of minority languages across the 28 eu-member states now, ten years after the launch of the new framework strategy for multilingualism in the eu. the research investigated the status and treatment of minority languages across the eu-member states. given that “regional or minority languages are spoken in all european countries, except for iceland” (minority languages . . ., 2012), it follows that all eu member states have minority languages. the legal status of these languages, whether they are acknowledged as official or not, and their daily use in the public sphere were the two main research foci. obviously the analysis of the use in the public sphere should be correlated with the use of minority languages in the private sphere, for example in the context of family life; however, that was considered to be outside the scope of the current research. this is a limitation of the research approach and methodology; all the data collected and presented in the current paper refers only to activity in minority languages undertaken in the public sphere, in the eu member states. an ever closer union . . . of linguistic diversity 319 regarding the legal status of minority languages, the aim of the research was not to pass judgement on any legal set-up or linguistic rights that different groups might enjoy in a particular member state. the research was designed (see section 2) as a horizon-scanning exercise in which the national approach to minority languages, their use and the linguistic rights of their users are presented and discussed. for the purposes of this research, no particular minority-majority language legal model is considered superior to the others, and wherever possible the names of the countries adopting a particular approach have been left out. the author acknowledges that the status of minority languages and their use is very much linked to national and regional history, as discussed further in the article. the current status enjoyed by a minority language has developed over a long period of time, and it is outside the scope of the current article to pass judgement on this development. the study looks only at the current status of minority languages, drawing parallels between the approaches of different eu member states in the area of minority language recognition and use. a word on terminology: the term minority language is used here as an over-encompassing term that includes lesser-used languages (luls) and one that does not usually include official eu member state languages. less widely used languages (lwuls) is a term that usually includes luls and the small eu member state languages, or regional or minority languages (rmls). also, by not naming specific minority languages, the article attempts to stay away from the language versus dialect debate (for more on this see, for example, auer, hinskens, & kerswil, 2005). given the focus and remit of the current study, this over-encompassing approach was found to be satisfactory. 2. the research approach the current research was carried out between october 2014 and march 2015 by a group of researchers1 from the university of westminster, and it involved desktop research, interviews, triangulations and fact-checking exercises across the different eu member states. in order to address the research question as detailed above, the research looked first at the official legal status of the different languages. for this part of the study the primary source of information on the status of languages in each member state was either the state constitution or a legislative act detailing the position and usage of the different languages in the territory of the state. this provided a sense of how, from a legal perspective, the state defines its linguistic landscape. 1 the researchers that collected the data for the current study are: ilenia chindamo, tara golkar, kristina kand, valeria mezzanu, mayahuel petillo (research students in ma international liaison and communication), under the supervision of dr daniel tomozeiu. daniel tomozeiu 320 in order to identify the use of minority languages in the public sphere, the second part of the research involved selecting three different areas (education, judiciary and public services) and researching the use of minority languages in each eu member state in each of these three areas. the three areas were chosen as significant and representative for the public life of an individual. other areas of public engagement were considered, such as healthcare and the languages used in patient-doctor relations. however, due to the different and sometimes overlapping medical systems which operate across the 28 eu member states and the different approaches to this relation (see, for example, pena, 2005 or verrept, 1997), this proved unfeasible. based on its research set-up, the research encountered three major challenges. the first relates to defining what constitutes a minority language. there are academic definitions of minority languages as discussed for example by grin (1992, p. 69); however, the definitions adopted by the eu member states appear to vary from one state to another. therefore, when analysing the national legislative framework, the research had to use national definitions of minorities and minority languages. also, acknowledging the migration that is taking place form outside the eu, which brings with it new languages which then tend to become minority languages in the territory of the eu member state, as well as the historical minority groups with their own languages, the research had to identify a way to manage this complexity. given that most constitutions and linguistic laws are written in relation to historical minority languages and because the situation of the new migrant languages is rather fluid, a research design decision was made to focus only on the historical minority languages. the findings regarding the state approach to minority languages applies, in some cases, also to newer minority languages; however, the data was collected in respect of historical minority languages. the second challenge encountered in the research phase had to do with access to documents in various languages. while the research team could, between its members, master over a half of the national eu languages, it still had to rely on translations of legislative acts at times. while the position of minority languages was always well understood and checked through a triangulation process and every effort has been made to reflect it appropriately, some of the nuances of the minority language status might have been affected by this process. the third challenge had to do again with language accessibility. despite all attempts to be fair when representing the usage of each minority language on the ground, the research team sometimes had access to less-than-objective sources. discrepancies were found for example between the number of speakers quoted by national sources and those of the cultural and linguistic associations. best efforts were made to reach an objective conclusion in each case. an ever closer union . . . of linguistic diversity 321 3. the research protocol the research protocol used for the current study was designed with the above-mentioned challenges in mind. while they could not all be addressed or accommodated in the research-design phase, efforts were made to create a research protocol that mitigated at least some of these challenges. the research protocol is presented in the appendix. in the protocol, the collected data are split into three categories. the first part of the protocol looks at the official languages across the national territory, as defined by the state constitution and other representative legislation. for this section, four different scenarios were prepared and presented: one language, more languages across whole territory, one language and regional languages, and different languages in different regions. these four scenarios proved to be appropriate for the data collection and provided interesting results, which are presented and analysed in sections 5 and 6. the second part of the protocol aimed at engaging in detail with the usage of minority languages in the three areas mentioned above: education, judiciary and public services. at the same time, this second part contains an “other” category, allowing the researcher to note other areas where minority languages are being used. this approach was designed in order to avoid the challenge of being too restrictive with the areas of public engagement, as explained section 2. the aim was to have an objective evaluation of the usage of minority languages in different areas of public life. the level of objectivity a researcher can have while analysing this area came under question several times during the study, for example due to the (sometimes significantly) different numbers of speakers and language usage provided by different sources. during the triangulation process every effort was made to maintain objectivity; this at times proved difficult given how some of the sources were quoting each other rather than relying on primary research. the third part of the protocol was designed to be more subjective, based on the experience of the researcher in evaluating the approach of the government towards minority languages. the individual views of the researcher were then discussed and moderated within the research team. in order to facilitate the task of the researcher doing the evaluation, three different categories were established regarding the attitude of the government towards minority languages: support/promote, protect and ignore. the divergent data collected for this part made this type of analysis highly problematic. the challenges of this approach are further discussed in section 5. daniel tomozeiu 322 4. the legal framework besides the eu treaties and the european charter of human rights, the document that protects and promotes historical and minority languages in europe is the european charter for regional or minority languages (council of europe, 1992a), signed under the auspices of the council of europe in the early 1990s. the fact that as of march 2015, 11 eu member states had not yet ratified this charter provides an insight into the different national approaches the member states take towards minority languages. interestingly, as of march 2015 the charter did have 25 signatories in total, which demonstrates that some of the non-eu members of the council of europe acknowledged the principles of the charter. while the reasons for not ratifying the charter vary from state to state, they do provide a first indication of the diversity of legislative approaches that exist. the ratification of the charter requires states to acknowledge their minority languages and to either protect them (part ii languages) or promote and allow their use in public (part iii languages; council of europe, 1992b). this differentiation between protection and promotion already allows for significant differentiation in the approach signatories have towards the minority languages. this differentiation was built into the european charter for regional or minority languages in order to provide flexibility of approach and to allow the different countries to find the best formula to accommodate their minority languages (nic craith, 2003). judging from the numbers that have ratified the charter in the first 25 years of its existence, it could be argued that the flexibility that was incorporated in its approach was not deemed sufficient by almost a half of the eu member states. given that the study was not longitudinal, in the current article the trend over time adopted by individual countries when it comes to addressing their minority languages is not analysed. what the article does provide is a snapshot of the current situation, 10 years after the eu launched its new framework strategy for multilingualism. it could be argued that the charter, together with the other social and legislative developments, have helped bring the approaches to minority languages of the 17 eu member states that ratified it closer together. it could well be the case that the charter also influenced the approaches of the remaining 11 eu member states that have not ratified it, to a certain extent. however, the research for the study focused on the situation as it currently stands rather than any shifts in approach over time. the research does not pass judgement on the effectiveness of specific legislative tools, such as the charter, but analyses the current situation as the result of the impact and influence of those eu and national social and legislative developments. one could wonder why the protection of minority languages is addressed by the council of europe rather than the eu. the eu did touch upon the topic in an ever closer union . . . of linguistic diversity 323 the european charter of human rights and continues to be engaged at research level, for example though the euromosaic study (euromosaic, 1996) which identified communities using minority languages, as well as other specific projects. despite these practical efforts, the eu is not the legal framework provider in this area. the high number of non-eu members states that have signed the charter could be an indication of the interest that exists outside the eu to provide a legal framework for the actions taken (or not) in this policy area. at the same time, the high number of eu member states that have not ratified the charter could indicate that the positions of the eu member states on this issue are significantly apart and therefore consensus building on approaches towards minority languages in the eu remains difficult. 5. findings in the view of the author, any discussion of the treatment of minority language should start with an analysis of the official language(s) in the given territory. the view and treatment of minority languages will be influenced by the legal context as well as national and regional discourses regarding majority/minority and official languages. therefore, the first part of the research protocol analysed the situation of the national language(s) as defined by the legislation of the state. the findings for the 28 eu member states are presented below in table 1. this first part of the research already provides an indication of the different linguistic contexts and approaches that exist across the eu member states. different potential reasons for these approaches as well as their implication for the status of minority languages will be analysed in detail in the discussion section. table 1 official languages in the 28 eu member states official language category number of eu member states a. one language 11 b. more languages across whole territory 7 c. one language and regional languages 9 d. different languages in different regions 1 if the first part of the research protocol produced clear-cut results, for the second part the findings were much more nuanced. in order to address the subjectivity of the documents that were consulted and the interviews that were carried out, the author decided to focus on the trends that were clear and obvious in the dataset, rather than the ones that were open to discussion. two conclusions stood out when this approach was taken. first, education is the area where minority languages seem to be more present than in judiciary or public daniel tomozeiu 324 services. this was obvious across virtually all the eu member states. all states had a form of minority language instruction. in some cases, the provision was limited to certain minority languages. in others, it was limited to certain levels, either primary or university, for example. also, in other cases, minority language education took place in parallel with the official education system, as will be discussed in detail below. if some form of minority language education was identified in all eu member states, 17 of the 28 counties appeared to offer some form of public service in a minority language. oftentimes, this happened at regional or local level, and only 11 countries allowed the use of minority languages in the judiciary. (for a more qualitative analysis of the use of minority languages in the judiciary see, e.g., cardi, 2007). moreover, the research identified another domain which appeared to have significant minority language representation: the media. the reasons behind these two areas appearing to be more sensitive to minority language use will be discussed in the discussion section. the third and final part of the protocol was meant to provide a set of researcher-subjective appraisals of the attitude of the government of each eu member state towards minority languages. the subjectivity of the individual researcher was to be mitigated through moderation inside the research team. during the data collection phase, due to the identified data divergence, it quickly became clear that an in-depth evaluation of the government’s attitude towards minority languages would be highly subjective. the one conclusion that could be drawn was that there appeared to be a high level of correlation between the government approach as identified by the project researchers and the list of signatories and non-signatories of the european charter for regional or minority languages produced by the council of europe. virtually all signatories appeared to allow the use of minority languages in the judiciary, public services or both. only a couple of non-signatories had any provisions in this direction. this would indicate that the adoption of the charter had a positive impact on the promotion and protection of minority languages. this conclusion is supported by o’reilly’s (2001) finding that the developments triggered by the ratification of the charter “have been largely positive” (p. 11). suggestions on how this particular line of research could be carried forward are made in the further research section. 6. discussion the diversity of approaches regarding official languages and language recognition across the 28 eu member states could be explained through different historical and cultural processes. the research team was interested in some of the potential historical reasons that have led to such a diverse approach to designating official languages. the team was not interested in passing judgement on an ever closer union . . . of linguistic diversity 325 the appropriateness of a particular approach, but rather in understanding the reasons why a particular approach was taken and a specific policy implemented, which has led to such a diversity of approaches. during the research a number of factors became apparent. the first of these factors has to do with historical influences. as haugen (1966) argues, the creation of the nation states has had a significant impact on the recognition of particular languages (or dialects) as the official language of the nation, and this had to do with the “the development of a vernacular, popularly called a dialect, into a language, [which] is intimately related to the development of writing and the growth of nationalism” (p. 922). given the complex nation-building history of most eu member states, the process of establishing a national language is not particularly linear or straightforward. just as complex to fully identify is the impact that the establishment of one or more official languages had on the development and recognition of minority languages. the tumultuous nation-building process experienced by most eu member states goes some way towards explaining the difference in approaches. alongside nation-building, nation-branding also appears to play a pivotal role in the development and selection of official languages. the national discourse explaining the genesis of the nation and its main values and characteristics appears often to be another important factor in determining the official language approach. how unitary the whole nation is seen and presented, how linguistic diversity is understood and taught in schools, as well as various representations of minority language communities appear to play an important role in identifying and defining official languages. the research indicated that the first two factors are strongest when it comes to the a (one language), b (more languages across whole territory) and d (different languages in different regions) categories in the first part of the research protocol. the third and final factor that was identified during the research is a much more contemporary one. it has to do with the european charter for regional or minority languages understood as a human rights document. its ratification (or not) does seem to have had an impact on the policies adopted by some countries. this appears to be a more significant factor for states that fall under the c category (one language and regional languages). the recognition of these regional and minority languages and the status they enjoy as official languages (or not) appears to be particularly influenced by this third factor. the use of minority languages in the three areas of public engagement (education, judiciary and public services) that were initially considered proved to be a relatively good indicator of the status of minority languages in the respective eu member state. education (alongside media) will be discussed in the following section, and therefore the focus here is on judiciary and public services. in the case of the judiciary, for the states that allowed minority language daniel tomozeiu 326 usage, two distinct approaches were identified. one of them relied on the use of courtroom interpreters, while the second on the use of the minority language directly in court proceedings. while a number of states opted for the second approach, this appeared to be unsustainable as the case moved to higher courts. if for local and sometimes regional courts the two approaches exist, when the case moves to higher courts, sometimes outside the area where the minority language is used, the former approach (using interpreters) appears predominant. the term public services was sometimes used during the research. the initial designation referred to the interaction of the citizens with the authorities in terms of tax collection, provision of services and local management. it soon became clear that given the complex mix of nationally and regionally provided services, the use of minority languages in public service contexts was hard to identify and quantify. a good indicator for this provision seemed to be the requirement that existed in some states that local state employees should be fluent in or have a good knowledge of the respective minority language. however, given the limited scope of the current study, it was not possible to establish a clear correlation between the indicator and the use of minority languages in a public service environment. this idea is discussed in detail in the further research section. 6.1. education and media education and the media were by far the two areas where the use of minority languages appeared to be most extensive. virtually all eu member states have some provisions for education in minority languages. although this provision appears to exist across the board, it varies significantly across five different dimensions which were identified during the research. the first dimension has to do with state versus private education. while in some states minority language education is provided by the state, in others the state merely approves the creation of private minority language educational units. this state-private education dichotomy appears to be strongly linked to a free versus fee paying differentiation. given that eu member states have such different historical approaches to private education (james, 1991), it is hard to draw any conclusions as to the impact of the different approaches. however, the diversity of approaches along this first dimension appears significant. the second dimension that was identified during the education-relation analysis was official versus unofficial educational systems. official education system in this context is to be understood as state recognized and sanctioned. the term official education system is preferred as any reference to a state would raise questions over, for example, recognition by the national or regional authorities. the use to the term here is similar to that employed by izumi and an ever closer union . . . of linguistic diversity 327 baker (2010). while in some eu member states education in minority languages is official and parallel to majority language education, the level of the two being measured through standardised national tests in different languages for example, in others minority language education exists only as an unofficial system. this unofficial system takes many different shapes and forms, some more integrated with and others more removed from the majority language education system. the lack of standardisation of the various forms of minority language education appears to be significant. the third dimension has to do with the level at which minority language education is made available. the level that appeared most frequently during the research is primary education. the minority language primary education then seems to feed into the majority language education system at secondary and tertiary level. again, significant variation exists as to the level of official testing and evaluation of the minority language provision. the impact of this fragmented linguistic education on the learner falls outside the scope of the current article. another interesting, although limited, trend in this dimension has to do with the provision of university education in minority languages. this appears to be mostly based on the initiative of universities located in areas with large minority language speaking populations. the support these initiatives received from national authorities has not been investigated for the current study. the fourth dimension has to do with on-demand versus “as-standard” approaches. some eu member states have defined in legislation an on-demand approach for the provision of education in minority languages. where this type of education does not materialize, it remains unclear if this is due to lack of demand or other reasons. in the states where certain criteria, mostly related to the number or percentage of speakers of minority languages, trigger an automatic provision of education in minority languages, this appears to be more established. without passing judgement on the level of flexibility that needs to be built into such a system and the sustainability of on-demand systems, the study simply highlights the diversity of approaches. the fifth and final dimension that was identified in the minority language education provision has to do with the status of the minority language. while in some cases all or some of the regular classroom subjects are being taught in the minority language, there are also instances where the minority language is taught as a second language. the phrase second language here does not refer to the pedagogical approach employed by teachers in the classroom, but it simply refers to its classification in the education system curricula. without discussing the advantages and disadvantages of such an approach for the state or the minority language speaking community, the present study identified this as a distinctive approach that was implemented by a number of eu member states. daniel tomozeiu 328 besides the three different areas initially identified in the research protocol, a fourth area titled “other” was included in order to allow the researchers to name other social interaction contexts in which minority languages were used. these instances varied significantly with a number of minority languages being associated with specific religious or cultural events and rites, for example. however, there was a particular area that stood out as having significant minority language representation across the majority of eu member states: the media. media here are understood mostly, but not exclusively, as traditional media, newspapers and radio stations in particular, but also television channels in several cases. of course, the research identified several examples of new media outlets that were using minority languages: websites, blogs, online newsletters, and the like. however, given the difficulty in establishing where exactly the producer of the new media is located, it was difficult to identify if they indeed represented a minority language community. focusing exclusively on traditional media helped the research team get a much better picture of the rather dynamic landscape of minority language media. the frequency with which they appear or broadcast will depend on the interest of the community in keeping the minority language alive and on the resources, human and financial, they can employ for this task. indexing the number of titles for particular minority languages was outside the scope of the current study. besides, the number of titles would then have to be correlated with issue frequency or circulation of the specific paper in order to provide a realistic picture. what quickly became obvious during the research is that media, alongside education, is the area where minority languages appear to be most used in the 28 eu member states. when looking at the three established categories: education, judiciary, public services, and adding the fourth one, media, the research team tried to understand why with the first and last the use of minority languages seemed to be more widespread. through the analysis three different factors were identified. the first has to do with the legal restrictions and state involvement. in most eu member states the production of media as well as the establishment of private education is regulated but allowed. unlike in the case of, say, judicial systems, where the establishment of parallel, even linguistically parallel, systems is not encouraged, in the case of media and education the judicial framework appears to be more permissive in many cases. in the case of legislative and public services, state involvement is definitely extensive in all the 28 eu member states. media appears to have the looser regulatory framework, while in the case of education the approaches vary significantly from state to state. the second factor, which is in a sense the flip-side of the above, has to do with citizen initiative. in the area of media and education, citizen initiative, either organized through ngos and associations, or less organized, plays a major role. based on their initiatives, the communities can establish and run their own an ever closer union . . . of linguistic diversity 329 media outlets as well as education establishments. the official role of these establishments as well as the curricula and type of subjects they can teach is being regulated differently in different eu member states; however, their establishment relies very much upon community initiative. the same cannot be argued for the judiciary system or other public services, which are very much dependent on state input. the final factor that appears to be driving the use of minority languages in these two areas has to do with costs. due to the latest technological developments, it has become relatively inexpensive to set up a local newspaper or even radio station, or to provide educational services in a minority language. the costs still exist, but they are not exorbitant, making this type of activities accessible to minority language communities. 6.2. eu minority languages and language education although 7.9% of the eu population or 40 million people (eu multilingualism, 2016) speak minority languages, there seems to be little coordinated policy on the role these languages can have in society. these decisions appear to have been left completely with the member states, and the member states have very different, even diverging, approaches to this topic. as discussed above, the reasons for these different approaches are multiple. through its new framework strategy for multilingualism as well as though specific projects such as euromosaic, the european union has helped with identifying the minority language communities across the eu member states. this recognition appears to have helped several of these communities to raise their profile and enhance their activities. the strategy of the council of europe and of the one of the eu, which acknowledges the efforts of the council of europe in this area (european commission, 2005), could benefit from further coordination particularly since the ratification process seems to have slowed down; the last country to ratify the european charter for regional or minority languages did so in 2010. further coordination between the two organizations, given that their interests, even if not necessarily their membership, overlap significantly, could enhance the status of minority languages. as demonstrated by this research, the european charter for regional or minority languages appears to have had an impact. given the divergent approaches of the member states to this issue, as demonstrated above, a focussed approach in one particular area could prove most effective. based on the analysis carried out for this study, that area could be education. there appears to be an interest on the part of the communities to have minority language education available, and several eu member states already provide it in one form or another. a more coordinated approach from the eu could encourage its member states to standardise their provisions. given daniel tomozeiu 330 the diversity of the educational systems that exist in the eu member states any policy interference is bound to encounter challenges. however, the bologna process and the creation of the european higher education area (european union, 1999) offer a blueprint in this direction which could be adapted to different levels and could address the issue of minority language education directly. this policy area would also benefit from an eu clarification on whether minority languages are included in the new framework strategy for multilingualism. the author believes that if the answer is yes, minority language education will benefit from a boost in recognition and allocation of resources, both human and financial. a move in this direction would also help educational establishments across the eu to comply with the “native plus two” approach a lot faster. the existence of educational establishments teaching minority languages or teaching in minority languages demonstrates the interest of the population. the fact that educational establishments using minority languages have been set up and are currently running demonstrates that the human resource is available. what appears to be lacking is a unified policy approach that would link the available resources to the required demand. of course, such an approach might create tensions with some of the nation-building and nation-branding approaches employed by the eu member states. however, most eu citizens are accustomed or are becoming accustomed to having multiple identities. the people belonging to minority language speaking communities already have these different identities. a coherent second and third language education policy would only allow them to develop their linguistic abilities and to put these multiple identities to good use. this way the “native plus two” policy could offer eu citizens linguistic knowledge and fluency to engage with their own community, their nation state and the world. 7. further research a horizon-scanning study like this one is bound create and to lead to several other research directions. the scope and the resources of the study were limited, and the collected data opens the door to future, much more specific directions of investigation. two particular research suggestions are being made here. the literature seems somewhat split on the impact the european charter for regional or minority languages had on the provisions in the council of europe member states. a longitudinal study that tracks these provisions in a particular member state before and after the ratification of the charter could provide evidence of its impact. this would further indicate whether the proposed coordinated approach regarding education, detailed in the section above, could be successful or whether other mechanisms are needed. an ever closer union . . . of linguistic diversity 331 a second direction of research is a much more in-depth study into the current situation of minority languages in a particular public service area across several eu member states. the current research has identified a series of dimensions of education, judiciary, public services and media which vary from country to country. these dimensions were developed based on an inductive approach starting with the collected data. a deductive approach using these dimensions would now help categorize more accurately the approach of the different eu member states in regards to minority languages in, say, education, and would therefore better inform any future policy proposals. 8. conclusion despite the fact that a sizable portion of the eu population speaks a minority language, there seems to be little in terms of legislative coordination between the member states towards these languages. historical and national narrative appears to influence and shape the very diverse approaches towards minority languages taken by the eu member states. the work undertaken by the council of europe in providing a common legal framework through the european charter for regional or minority languages seems to have produced some results in this direction, although 11 of the eu member states (and other non-eu members of the council of europe) are still to ratify the charter. after 25 years since it was put forward, the charter seems to be “running out of steam.” the new framework strategy for multilingualism proposed by the eu, although launched ten years ago, appears to have head limited impact when it comes to minority languages and education in minority languages, in particular. further cooperation between the council of europe and the eu could enhance the coherence of the national approaches to minority languages. education, as a public area with high use of minority languages, stands out as an important area where the eu can make a difference by providing support to grassroots initiatives and facilitating the creation of a more unified legislative framework towards minority languages. if the eu is serious about its new framework strategy for multilingualism and its native language plus two principle, then minority languages offer an opportunity to engage constructively with european cultural and linguistic diversity, ensuring a coherent legislative framework across the 28 eu member states. this in turn would enhance community cohesion and at the same time ensure that, through education, the eu citizens are prepared for the challenges and opportunities brought by globalization. daniel tomozeiu 332 references auer p., hinskens, f., & kerswill, p. 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(2012). retrieved on 16 may 2016 from the website of mercator, european research centre on multilingualism and language learning: http://www.mercator-research.eu/minority-languages/facts-figures/ nic craith, m. (2003). facilitating or generating linguistic diversity: the european charter for regional or minority languages. in g. hogan-brun & s.wolff (eds.), minority languages in europe (pp. 56-72). basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. verrept, h., & louckx, f. (1997). health advocates in belgian health care. in a. ugalde & g. cardenas (eds.), health and social services among international labor migrants: a comparative perspective (pp. 67-86). austin, tx: cmas-books. daniel tomozeiu 334 appendix research protocol country author references official languages a. one language b. more languages across whole territory c. one language and regional languages d. different languages in different regions spoken languages language 1 no of speakers usage/status in a. education b. judiciary c. public services d. other (explain) language 2 no of speakers usage/status in a. education b. judiciary c. public services d. other (explain) language 3 government attitude towards minority languages delete all that does not apply: a. support/promote b. protect c. ignore 351 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (2). 2019. 351-377 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.2.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt arabic language-learning strategy preferences among undergraduate students hezi y. brosh united states naval academy, annapolis, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4881-425x brosh@usna.edu abstract this study elicited arabic students’ perceptions regarding their languagelearning strategy preferences (llsps). a sample of 120 undergraduate arabic students participated. data were collected through a questionnaire and interviews. the findings reveal that students tend to adopt a holistic view of the learning task and relate it to real-life, personal experience. participants selected interaction with the teacher, speaking, and flashcards as their most preferred application-directed learning strategies. these selections demonstrate that arabic students desire to be proactive in order to make the language more concrete for them, to enhance their performance, and to develop language skills that will last a lifetime. whereas advanced level participants preferred interaction with the teacher, speaking, flashcards, and working individually, beginner level participants preferred learning grammar and group work. the empirical evidence from this study could have implications regarding theoretical models of effective arabic language instruction, arabic teacher education programs, and curriculum development. keywords: arabic language-learning strategies; language-learning strategy preferences; language-teaching strategy preferences; arabic learning as a foreign language; effective arabic language learning and teaching; undergraduate students hezi y. brosh 352 1. introduction since the mid-1970s, a substantial amount of research in second language acquisition (sla) attempts to explain how best to teach and learn a foreign language, what factors make learners successful at learning a foreign language, and why some learners are more successful than others. one aspect that has been widely investigated is learners’ learning strategy preferences (lsps). the present study is confined to preferred learning strategies used by language learners and, more specifically, by arabic language learners. students in the language classroom have diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds and varied beliefs. they also utilize particular and distinct learning strategies as their preferred means of receiving, processing, and integrating information (cohen, 1998; o’malley & chamot, 1990; o’malley, chamot, stewnermanzanares, russo, & küpper, 1985; oxford, 1990; scarcella & oxford, 1992). since students differ from one another and every teaching-learning situation is unique, there are teaching or learning strategies that are considered effective in one setting but that are less effective in another. to accommodate individual students, language instructors have started to develop interactive and communicative teaching approaches and methods. student-centered instruction has given learners more autonomy and responsibility for their learning and has reduced their dependency on instructors (cohen, 1984; oxford, 1990, 2003; pashler, mcdaniel, rohrer, & bjork, 2008). this change in teaching philosophy has increased the need to investigate the learning strategies that language students apply both inside and outside the classroom. scholars believe that languagelearning strategies have a significant role in increasing motivation and profoundly influence how learners approach learning tasks (dörnyei, 2005). identifying, describing, and classifying these strategies and the ways learners apply them can help explain and predict students’ behavior when learning an l2 and the level of success they reach (kamińska, 2014; oxford, 1990, 2003). despite the considerable amount of studies done on this topic, investigations into language-learning strategy preferences (llsps) and the ways language learners choose and use their learning strategies are relatively uncommon. further, investigations arabic language-learning strategies, in particular, are rare if at all exist. studying arabic llsps is especially significant given the complex task of learning arabic due to its diglossic nature (see the literature review). to this end, and in order to provide research-based insights into the current learning/teaching process of arabic thus maximizing its efficiency, this study identifies llsps among undergraduate students who study arabic as a foreign language. it also examines differences in llsps based on learning experience – that is, between students who have been studying arabic for two years or less (group 1) and those who have been arabic language-learning strategy preferences among undergraduate students 353 studying the language for three years or more (group 2). the results of this study could heighten awareness among arabic language instructors regarding llsps and guide them to formulate a customized, effective teaching plan for their target students in order to facilitate learning and ultimately influence students’ academic growth. with regard to possible interactions between strategies used by instructors and students in the classroom, the results could also assist them to modify their respective teaching and learning strategies for better learning outcomes. 2. literature review 2.1. the case of arabic a wide variety of motivations can play an important role in a student’s decision to learn arabic (for more about students’ motivations, see brosh, 2013). yet, learning arabic can at times be a daunting, even intimidating endeavor. by and large, arabic learners expect to become proficient in reading, writing, speaking, and listening in the new language. achieving that goal requires hours of intense study and comprehensive practice. the learner needs to control a new set of vocabularies and syntactic, morphological, and phonological rules and to decode and match them to a new writing system. the learner has to acquire a new alphabet with its different representations in print and script. he or she has to figure out the direction of writing, the shape of the characters based on their location in the word, and the precise relationship between letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes); on top of that, the learner must be able to manipulate these elements in order to read or say words (stanovich, 1986). what makes the learning of arabic even more challenging and time-consuming is the duality of the language (diglossia) – that is, the strong distinction between the standard variety (fuṣḥa) or modern standard arabic (msa), on the one hand, and the spoken one (ʿammiyya, or darija), on the other hand. differences between these two varieties are widely exhibited in syntax, morphology, phonetics, and semantics (bassiouney, 2009; bateson, 2003). fuṣḥa and ʿammiyya are used in different socio-cultural contexts. they function, throughout the contemporary arab world, in a complementary way: fuṣḥa is used in writing and orally for formal functions, including religious, educational, and other cultural events. in its written form, it is used almost exclusively in any printed publication all over the world. in its oral form, it is used in formal situations, ranging from radio news broadcasts to university lectures to political speeches to mosque or church sermons or such other formal addresses as those at national or international conferences (bassiouney, 2009). hezi y. brosh 354 ʿammiyya does not have a script and is not officially written. it is used in casual speech for usual day-to-day activities in such informal settings as home, work, social gatherings, and conversations on the street as well as in all other contexts that do not demand the use of fuṣḥa (for an in-depth discussion of diglossia, see bassiouney, 2009; brosh & lubna, 2009; ryding, 1991). additionally, the structural differences between the two varieties, along with diglossic spontaneous switching between them, resulted at some point in the creation and development of intermediate and mixed varieties known as middle arabic – also known variously as “formal spoken arabic,” “modern inter-arabic language,” “colloquial arabic of the intellectuals,” “intercommon spoken arabic,” or “substandard arabic” (amara, 1995; mitchell, 1986; ryding, 1991). middle arabic accommodates the dialects by dispensing with fuṣḥa’s complexity of cases and inflectional endings and by borrowing some of the lexical, morphological, and syntactic structures of the regional dialects (bateson, 2003). in summary, learning arabic is by no means an easy task. the foreign language learner of arabic needs to learn at least two different varieties, the standard and the spoken. ryding (1991, p. 216) goes even further: to achieve “functionally native proficiency,” a learner of arabic as a foreign language must ultimately master at least the three arabic language variants used by educated arabs: msa, fsa (formal spoken arabic) and a regional vernacular. the following is a brief discussion of language-learning strategies, a meaningful way to approach the complex task of learning arabic. 2.2. language-learning strategies there are numerous ways of characterizing and defining language-learning strategies. oxford (2017) listed 33 definitions and analyzed them, so before addressing learning strategies deployed by arabic students, a definition of learning strategy is needed. for the utility of the present study, i selected oxford’s (2017) definition that a language-learning strategy consists of specific actions or behaviors consciously selected by the learner and employed in specific contexts to make language learning successful, easier, faster, enjoyable and self-directed. this definition emphasizes the active aspect of language learning strategies and assumes flexibility by the learner to intentionally manipulate them in order to plan for effective learning (for an in-depth review, see cohen, 1996; kamińska, 2014; o’malley & chamot, 1990; o’malley et al., 1985; oxford, 2017). cohen (2011) differentiates among three main types of strategies: (a) language-learning and -use strategies; (b) skill-area strategies pertaining to the four arabic language-learning strategy preferences among undergraduate students 355 basic language skills; and (c) strategies that are classified according to their function – that is, metacognitive, cognitive, affective, and social (see also chamot, 1987; oxford, 1990). both metacognitive and cognitive strategies incorporate the student’s preferred mode of perceiving, reflecting, and retaining information (chamot, 1987; cohen, 2012; ehrman, leaver, & oxford, 2003; ehrman & oxford, 1990; grenfell & harris, 2017). a metacognitive learning strategy relates to a student’s own thinking, planning, and judgment regarding his or her cognitive activities (learning). it includes activities to monitor and assume the responsibility for his or her learning, to reflect, and to evaluate (cohen, 2011; grenfell & harris, 2017; o’malley & chamot, 1990; vermunt, 1996). the ability of a student to reflect and manage effectively his or her own learning is a worthwhile skill to acquire, and it prevents the illusion of knowing something while, in reality, such knowledge does not exist (pashler, mcdaniel, rohrer, & bjork, 2008). furthermore, students with a high level of metalinguistic awareness are more likely to apply the appropriate language-learning strategies that match their learning styles (cohen, 1998; oxford, 2003; scarcella & oxford, 1992). a cognitive learning strategy refers to learning processes and behaviors that relate to specific learning activities employed by a student in order to perceive, organize, retain, and use information (cohen, 2011; grenfell & harris, 2017; vermunt, 1996). such activities include repetition, reciting, memorizing, summarizing, note taking, substitution, and translation (grenfell & harris, 2017; o’malley & chamot, 1990; oxford, 1990, 2003). since students process information differently, they may favor different cognitive solutions for acquiring and analyzing new data. some may prefer writing down words or sentences, some may find that they recall new words better when they are associated with images or sounds, and others may desire grammatical explanations. using strategies in creative ways helps students develop their own individualized approach to learning (weaver & cohen, 1994). hagino (2002), in her study of 208 japanese college students, argued that there is no individual student who uses only a single learning strategy. different learning tasks require the deployment of different learning strategies; thus, a learner uses a group of strategies (strategy chains) to personalize and self-direct his or her own learning experiences (oxford, 2017). furthermore, a learner’s flexibility to shift strategies when needed in order to match the learning settings, the instructor methodology and the program requirements is advantageous (weaver & cohen, 1994). using a combination of strategies depends on how an individual learner chooses, combines and sequences strategies (oxford, 1990). such strategy chains affect the learner’s motivation to learn the language and the way he or she acquires, organizes, and integrates new information (felder & spurlin, 2005; kamińska, 2014; oxford, 2017; vermunt, 1996). hezi y. brosh 356 other studies have found differences in strategy choice between beginners and intermediate-advanced students. o’malley et al. (1985), who investigated the range and frequency of learning strategy uses among beginning and intermediate level english as a second language (esl) students, found that while both groups used cognitive strategies more often than metacognitive ones, the intermediate group showed a tendency to prefer metacognitive strategies. they found that repetition was the strategy used most frequently by esl students. sheorey and mokhtari (2001) found that while beginner level students focused on strategies revolving around repetition, advanced students focused on strategies that showed a deeper understanding of the systematic nature of the target language. note that there is no consensus among scholars as to whether or not matching teaching strategies to students’ learning preferences can lead to more effective learning and the enhancement of students’ motivation to learn the language. some have argued that such matching can lead to effective impact on learning and academic success, whereas others have questioned that argument due to a lack of sufficient empirical validation; in fact, they have highlighted possible advantages of a mismatch between teaching and learning strategies as they expand the learner’s awareness to learning opportunities (bialystok, 1985; cohen, 2012; dörnyei, 2009; oxford, 2011; pashler et al., 2008). though strategies have been extensively studied and discussed, these two conflicting views are still in contention, without clear data that can support one over the other (kamińska, 2014). 3. research questions choosing and using language learning strategies depends on the learner’s purpose in learning the language, among other factors. since no single set of l2 learning strategies can satisfy all needs of students, it is crucial to identify, assess, and understand students’ preferences and how they perceive and interact with both the target language and the learning environment. the aforementioned benefits of learners’ individualized usage styles of lls for more effective language learning have motivated the research undertaken in this study into arabic learners in the american undergraduate university demographic. this study seeks to explore the following: 1. what are the llsps among american undergraduate students who study arabic? 2. are there differences in llsps between students who have been learning arabic for two years or less and students who have been learning arabic for three or four years? arabic language-learning strategy preferences among undergraduate students 357 4. method 4.1. participants i randomly selected a total of 120 undergraduate students between the ages of 18 and 23 to participate in the study. the sample was selected using the lottery method, that is, choosing eight out of a total of 15 classes studying arabic. the participants were l1 english speakers, 66% males, and 34% females in a majority male institution, and for three hours a week they learned msa as a foreign language. for the sake of this study and for clarity of comparison between novice and advanced participants, i divided the participants into two groups: group 1 (n = 91), participants who had finished two or fewer years of study, and group 2 (n = 29), participants who had finished three to four years of study. in line with the guidelines for ethical research, participants received general information about the study, its aim, its methods, its means of data storage and handling, and the fact that participation was voluntary and could be terminated at any time. after receiving this information, the participants signed a consent form. 4.2. data collection i collected the data toward the end of the spring semester in a 2-semester system by means of a questionnaire and follow-up semi-structured interviews. 4.2.1. the questionnaire the questionnaire listed 24 learning strategies and the respondents were asked to choose their three most frequently used lls and to rank-order them as 1, 2, and 3. in this preliminary study, a decision was made to have a relatively short list of strategies not exceeding 25. i believe that this number of strategies captures the most commonly used ones and can shed light on trends regarding participants’ llsps while paving the way for future studies involving additional strategies to explore the distinctive aspects of language. the list featured direct and indirect strategies which were influenced by a variety of factors, such as the learning task, motivation, learning style, culture, personality traits, teacher expectations and more. some strategies were knowledge-based (such as learning vocabulary and grammar), and others were control-based aimed at practice to develop language fluency (such as speaking and interaction with the teacher). both kinds of strategies are central to the development of language proficiency (bialystok, 1985). these strategies were selected from a larger list of strategies which were drawn from research literature – the strategy inventory of language learning hezi y. brosh 358 (sill; oxford, 1990) – and from a preliminary poll that asked arabic language students to rank their three most frequently used lls (the students who were polled did not participate in the study). the list, therefore, represents a balance between research literature and strategies used by students in the actual process of learning arabic. the selection of strategies considered the following: 1. learning arabic as a foreign language by english speakers requires more of the learner compared to learning other languages such as french or spanish. learners have to deal with learning a new alphabet, a new direction of writing (from right to left), new sounds that do not exist in the english sound repertoire, and the root system (construction of words around roots). 2. strategies should cover the four basic language skills and other areas such as learning pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. 3. strategies should be meaningful and effective as students implied by choosing them in the preliminary poll. i administered the questionnaire to respondents during class time, and it was answered anonymously. respondents were not asked to provide any information that could identify them or their educational institution. furthermore, using paper and pencil ensured confidentiality, which in turn allowed respondents to feel secure and give honest answers. choosing this method aimed to force respondents to focus and identify their most frequently used strategies that they apply to learn arabic as a foreign language and to rank them. other advantages of this method were the simplicity, the limited time it required from respondents, and the ease in analyzing and categorizing the data, that is, strategies that were ranked first, second, and third, as well the total number of votes each strategy received regardless of rank. also, answering the questionnaire is assumed to be beneficial for respondents, who were directed to focus on a variety of lls and to figure out their significance and value for their own learning process. it is important to note that the overall arabic learning experience of respondents constituted the framework for them to rank-order their three llsps. 4.2.2. semi-structured interviews i conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 participants representing group 1 and group 2 differentiating “newer” and “more experienced” arabic learners (14 males and 11 females), randomly selected from among the 120 participants to supplement the quantitative data gathered through the questionnaire and to shed light on how arabic learners express their preferences for lls. to randomly arabic language-learning strategy preferences among undergraduate students 359 select interviewees, i assigned participants from each group consecutive numbers from 1 to n followed by the word male or female; then i selected numbers from the two lists of participants. the information gathered during these interviews provided insight into the reasons why respondents preferred some strategies over others and revealed further particular themes derived from the findings. an interview guide, which included a predetermined set of open-ended questions, was prepared to prompt discussion that enabled participants to freely express their views and ideas in their own terms and to provide reliable, comparable, and qualitative data. by interviewing group 1 and group 2 participants, it was possible to compare perceptions and preferences between the two groups. the interview questions were phrased so as not to affect the interviewees’ answers or to lead to specific ones, and they also enabled the interviewer to flexibly probe for details or to discuss issues. here are a few examples: · can you speak about your three most frequently used language-learning strategies? · why do you prefer to use these strategies? · the majority of respondents preferred the interaction with the teacher, speaking, and flashcards. what is your reaction to that? · why do you think some respondents select reading aloud among their three preferred strategies? · the results of the study showed that group 1 differed from group 2 by showing preference to interaction with the teacher. what can you make of this? the interviews lasted about 15 minutes and were conducted in an informal, friendly atmosphere that facilitated a “natural” flow of ideas and opinions. after greeting the interviewee, the interviewer explained the context and purpose of the interview and asked the interviewee for his or her consent to taperecord the interview. to gain the trust of the interviewees, the interviewer made it clear to them at the beginning that their responses would be kept confidential and anonymous. the interviews started with warm-up questions that were followed by more focused questions taken from the interview guide. the interviews were recorded, transcribed, coded, and organized into themes and categories matching the research questions. 5. results our understanding of cognitive processes and learning is relatively limited due to little research performed; consequently, the empirical evidence provided by this study can indicate only goal-oriented behavior regarding arabic llsps. hezi y. brosh 360 5.1. llsps comparing the percentages of the respondents’ ranking of llsps allowed the identification of some trends regarding respondents’ standard strategy use divorced from a specific learning task or setting. table 1 percentages of student choices of lls in arabic (n = 120) 1st choice 2nd choice 3rd choice total votes 1. interaction with the teacher 14.65 12.20 8.15 35.00 2. speaking 13.80 11.40 8.15 33.35 3. flashcards 11.40 5.70 7.30 24.40 4. pronunciation drills 5.70 8.95 7.30 21.95 5. checking homework in class 4.05 6.50 8.15 18.70 6. tests and quizzes 5.70 6.50 5.70 17.90 7. reading aloud 8.15 3.25 4.90 16.30 8. translation from english into arabic 4.90 3.25 4.85 13.00 9. frontal teaching 4.05 4.05 4.05 12.15 10. group work 1.60 0.80 8.95 11.35 11. field trips 2.45 3.25 4.90 10.60 12. working individually 2.45 6.50 3.25 12.20 13. correcting sentences on the board 4.05 2.45 2.45 8.95 14. working with computers 4.05 3.25 1.60 8.90 15. watching movies and video clips 0.80 7.30 1.60 9.70 16. learning grammar 1.60 0.00 4.05 5.65 17. learning vocabulary through pictures 2.45 6.50 0.80 9.75 18. translation from arabic into english 4.05 1.60 0.80 6.45 19. using the arabic-english dictionary 0.00 0.80 4.90 5.70 20. singing songs 1.60 1.60 2.40 5.60 note. the following llsps, where the total votes were under 5%, are not included in the table: spelling practice 4.05%, playing games 3.25%, listening practice (tv, radio, etc.) 3.20%, and chorus 1.60% table 1 displays the strategies and the percentage each strategy received being first, second, or third choice. the fourth column presents the total votes each strategy received regardless of rank. the data clearly shows that the majority of participants perceived interaction with the teacher (one on one) and speaking to be the two most significant llsps for them in the arabic classroom (strategies 1 and 2). participants also attributed importance to the use of flashcards for learning the meanings of new words as well as to pronunciation drills (strategies 3 and 4). interestingly, participants also recognized the importance of reading aloud, translation from english into arabic, and learning grammar, especially when combined with correcting sentences on the board, a strategy that focuses on grammar and vocabulary. the combined total is 14.6%. strategies that do not contribute directly to the development of communicative skills were less popular. arabic language-learning strategy preferences among undergraduate students 361 5.2. interviews all interviewees indicated that interaction with the teacher, speaking, and flashcards are among their favored strategies for learning arabic. they denoted that each one of them contributes to and is geared toward the development of their communicative skills. they explained that they felt secure and comfortable under the teacher’s leadership. the teacher made the language and the culture real for them and helped them understand how to use arabic effectively and correctly outside the classroom. for them, the more they spoke, the more they could “create the language.” eighteen interviewees out of 22 claim that learning vocabulary was a key component to become an effective communicator in arabic in both speaking and writing. they stated that flashcards were an effective and fast strategy to accomplish that goal. interviewees also indicated the importance of other strategies such as pronunciation practice, reading aloud, learning grammar, and checking homework in class. each of the aforementioned strategies is addressed in more detail in the discussion section using respondents’ quotes. whereas these quotes could be perceived as part of the results, in this specific study, i found it to be more beneficial for the reader to include them in the discussion section in order to illustrate the arguments made and memorably summarize them. in general, the interviews showed that respondents tended to view strategies as effective when they perceived them as significantly contributing to the development of language proficiency. 5.3. differences between the two groups in order to compare the llsps of group 1 and 2, i computed the frequencies of the various strategies and presented them in percentages. to identify statistically significant differences between the two groups, i used a two-sample t test. this statistical procedure compares the mean of one continuous variable between two groups, indicating whether or not there exists a significant probability (p ≤ .05) of that difference not being the result of chance. to perform this procedure, i graded each strategy on a scale ranging from 0 to 3. the first-choice strategy scored the highest grade, 3; the second-choice strategy scored grade 2; the third-choice strategy scored grade 1; and any strategy not selected scored the lowest grade, 0. hezi y. brosh 362 table 2 differences in total choices of llsps between group 1 and group 2 in percentages group 1 (n = 91) group 2 (n = 29) 1. checking homework in class 20.90 10.35 2. frontal teaching 13.20 10.35 3. chorus 1.10 .00 4. reading aloud 22.00 .00 5. listening practice (tv, radio, etc.) 2.20 6.90 6. singing songs 6.60 3.45 7. watching movies and video clips 11.00 6.90 8. working individually 9.90 17.25 9. translation from english into arabic 12.10 17.25 10. translation from arabic into english 3.30 17.25 11. using the arabic -english dictionary 4.40 10.35 12. working with computers 8.80 3.45 13. field trips 4.40 17.25 14. spelling practice 9.90 3.45 15. correcting sentences on the board 9.70 6.90 16. speaking 29.70 41.40 17. playing games 3.30 3.45 18. interaction with the teacher 33.00 48.30 19. tests and quizzes 17.60 10.35 20. learning vocabulary through pictures 13.20 .00 21. learning grammar 6.60 .00 22. group work 16.50 3.45 23. pronunciation drills 24.20 20.70 24. flashcards 20.90 37.90 table 3 t test: significant results comparing group 1 and group 2 participants on llsps strategy group 1 (n = 91) group 2 (n = 29) t t-crit df p working individually m 1.80 1.00 1.80 2.10 18 .04** sd .91 1.05 speaking m 1.96 2.50 2.26 2.03 33 .00** sd 1.20 1.15 interaction with the teacher m 2.07 2.42 -1.87 1.69 33 .03** sd .67 .51 learning grammar m 1.77 .00 5.48 2.30 8 .00** sd .97 .00 group work m 1.07 .00 2.95 2.16 13 .00** sd 1.18 .27 flashcards m 2.21 1.05 3.38 2.03 34 .00** sd .91 1.17 note. m = mean, sd = standard deviation * p < .05 (confidence intervals: 95%) ** p < .00 (confidence intervals: 99%) arabic language-learning strategy preferences among undergraduate students 363 a brief glance at tables 2 and 3 reveals that elementary level respondents (group 1) and advanced level respondents (group 2) varied significantly with regard to six lls. group 2 differed from group 1 by preferring interaction with the teacher: t(33) = -1.87, p = .03; speaking: t(33) = 2.26, p = .00; flashcards: t(34) = 3.38, p = .00; and working individually: t(18) = 1.80, p = .04. group 1 differed from group 2 by preferring learning grammar: t(8) = 5.48, p = .00; and group work: t(13) = 2.95, p = .00. additionally, the findings suggest other interesting trends between the two groups and a shift in llsps based on the learning experience of respondents. whereas elementary level respondents put more emphasis on checking homework in class, reading aloud, and spelling practice, advanced level respondents put more emphasis on translation from english to arabic and vice versa, using the arabic-english dictionary, and listening practice (tv, radio, etc.). in general, understanding the nature of classroom instruction could help us better understand the results. in the educational institution from which the data was elicited, language instruction could be characterized as having a strong emphasis on effective oral and written communication with stress on multicultural awareness and regional expertise. this is in line with the institution’s mission and students’ goals and expectations. the specific classroom instruction, however, was not investigated. 6. discussion the three preferred arabic learning strategies selected by respondents go hand in hand and reinforce each other. these strategies reflect respondents’ desire to use the language as a communicative tool with native speakers rather than learning the language as a body of knowledge to be memorized. it is worth mentioning that participants interpreted and understood the 24 strategies on the list in their own way. the following is a discussion of these strategies and others. 6.1. interaction with the teacher in the context of learning arabic as a foreign language and given the students’ goal to be able to communicate with native speakers, participants clearly valued interaction with the teacher (as well as speaking, addressed specifically in the next subsection), that is, using the language for oral communication. they believed that the teacher was the most proficient speaker that they could have contact with and thus interaction with him or her was viewed as probably the best chance they had to get exposure to the language in a way that was comfortable for them: hezi y. brosh 364 talking with the professor and getting feedback is huge for me. in this way, i am forced to create the language and produce sentences that i did not hear before. (male, fourth year) the instructor is very helpful. he explains complex things, repeats words and phrases, and gives examples when needed. (female, second year) participants realized that they could not have such interaction anywhere but in the classroom: no one can give me feedback like i receive from my professor in the classroom. it is of the essence for my progress in the language and for being able to speak it with confidence. (male, third year) additionally, participants believed that the teacher was a safe person to practice with, especially when he or she created a supportive learning environment in which making mistakes was tolerable: my professor told us that he welcomes mistakes but that we have to learn from them. this encourages me to participate more in the classroom. (male, third year) 6.2. speaking participants believed that speaking practice increased their ability to “create” language: for me speaking in the classroom is an uncomfortable thing to do, but it makes me active in the whole process. i have to think about what i want to say, what words to choose, in which order to put them, and how to pronounce them. (male, third year) participants made it clear that speaking gave them self-confidence and a sense of achievement: i want to speak out loud, because i feel that i can form sentences on my own and deliver my message. people can understand me even if i pronounce words a little bit weird or if i make some mistakes with grammar. this gives me satisfaction and confidence. (female, fourth year) choosing speaking (as well as interaction with the teacher) as the most effective learning strategies indicates that participants preferred to be actively involved in the learning process in order to develop their language skills and to maximize their efficiency in using the language for communication. they were aware, though, that this process included taking some risks and hard work: arabic language-learning strategy preferences among undergraduate students 365 learning a language is learning a new skill. it is like swimming. if i want to be a better swimmer, i have to swim every day. if i want to be better at speaking the language, i need to practice speaking it every day. it is not easy, but it’s worth it. (female, fourth year) 6.3. flashcards choosing learning vocabulary through flashcards feeds into the first two strategies that aim at communication. because vocabulary is an important component of this process, participants specified that using flashcards was a fast and a convenient way to learn new vocabulary: for me, flashcards are a simple way to learn words and letters. i emphasize things like verbs or nouns with colors, because i am a visual learner. the cards are always with me, so i can practice any time and everywhere. (female, first year) since practice is key to learning the language, flashcards are on target. they aid repetition of words in random order; build connections between spelling, pronunciation, and meaning; and give instant feedback to the learner: learning vocabulary is the most difficult thing for me, because words are arbitrary, like names. flashcards help me memorize the meaning of words, their spellings, and also how to pronounce them. (male, second year) flashcards constitute a flexible tool that could be manipulated by learners to answer their specific needs. participants indicated that flashcards also helped them pick up grammatical structures as they wrote phrases and sentences wherein the words appeared to be in the context of their usage: i find that writing a phrase or a whole sentence rather than just the word in isolation is very helpful for me in learning the word. it is stuck in my memory better. i also learn about grammar and how to use the word. (female, second year) 6.4. other strategies in addition to selecting the foregoing three strategies as the preferred ones, participants were also aware of the value of other strategies in learning arabic (cf. hagino, 2002; weaver & cohen, 1994). pronunciation practice: five interviewees highlighted pronunciation practice as a critical component in the development of language proficiency: hezi y. brosh 366 some of the sounds in arabic do not exist in english. therefore, you need the practice to train your mouth to make those sounds. pronunciation is important for effective communication, because if i say a word and they don’t understand it, what is the point? sometimes mispronunciation can also create confusion. (male, fourth year) one interviewee mentioned that being aware of the consequences of not properly pronouncing a word in her mother tongue, english, made her recognize the importance of proper pronunciation when learning arabic: it happened to me several times that i did not understand foreigners because they mispronounced words. pronunciation is an important skill to have when learning a new language. (female, third year) checking homework in class: six interviewees emphasized the significance of checking homework in class as a way to receive immediate feedback and to force students to look at the corrections in real time, listen to the teacher’s explanations, and understand the meaning behind the corrections: when the professor corrects my homework on a piece of paper, this is not enough. i need explanations to understand the meaning behind the corrections. (male, third year) it is more effective to check homework in class, because it allows students to ask followup questions and to listen again to the professor’s explanations. (female, second year) furthermore, participants noted that students do not always look at the corrections after class in order to learn from them and avoid similar mistakes in the future: when you check homework in the classroom, you look at the corrections in real time right then and there. when students just get the homework back with all the corrections, they may not look at them later on in the day, because they need the time to prepare the homework for the next day. (female, second year) another interviewee underscored that if homework assignments were checked only in class without its having been submitted to the teacher, then no one would take the homework very seriously, because there would be no consequences for not doing it. on the other hand, he noted, submitting homework and receiving feedback after several days would also not be effective. reading aloud: an additional surprising yet interesting finding was the selection of reading aloud (16.30% of participants) as an effective strategy for learning arabic. although this learning strategy is hardly mentioned in the literature, eight interviewees found it practical for practicing and for activation of arabic language-learning strategy preferences among undergraduate students 367 orthographic knowledge, sound correspondences, the pronunciation of words and phrases, and intonation: reading aloud forces me to read quickly, to put everything together at once – the letters, the sounds, the vowels – and also to pronounce words correctly. (male, third year) another interviewee reported that reading aloud increased students’ confidence in their ability to correctly pronounce words, thus making them more willing to take the risk of speaking: reading aloud is like a pronunciation drill. when i hear myself reading, it gives me satisfaction and confidence that i can say words correctly. this makes me more motivated to speak in the classroom. (female, second year) yet, three advanced interviewees expressed contradictory views: when you read aloud, you mainly focus on the sounds of words, which does not contribute anything to your understanding of the text or to constructing a sentence. (female, fourth year) the professor should not force us to read out loud. when am i going to use this skill outside the classroom? (female, fourth year) these interviewees also made it clear that in a classroom setting reading aloud might be ineffective for most students, since it targets only one student at a time. the foregoing views may point to participants’ perception that reading aloud is mostly effective as a drill to improve their pronunciation and intonation and thus enhance the speaking skill. 6.5. differences between group 1 and group 2 interaction with the teacher and speaking: advanced students attributed more value to interaction with the teacher and speaking than beginners. advanced students find the teacher as the most proficient speaker they could interact with: only in the classroom could i interact with a person, the professor, who masters the language and who is ready to help me improve my speaking skill. (male, fourth year) advanced students already knew the basics of the language, and their main barrier was using the language for communication. they understood that this was their weakest area, and that is where they wanted to improve and learn: hezi y. brosh 368 i try to take advantage of any opportunity to practice speaking. such opportunities are very limited, though. (female, third year) when advanced students compared interaction with classmates versus interaction with the teacher, they clearly favored interaction with the teacher: when you interact with your classmates, you know what they know. you might also hear and make mistakes. but when you interact with the professor, you might be corrected and exposed to new words and phrases. (female, third year) another explanation could be that the complexity level of the materials at the beginning phases was not that difficult, and therefore reliance on the teacher was less critical. at the advanced level, however, the complexity of the materials had grown and a higher level of accuracy and fluency was required; therefore, advanced participants felt the need to interact with the teacher: the grammatical structures and the verbs are getting more complex every day, and in order to speak and write with fewer mistakes, i really need the help of the instructor. (male, fourth year) along the same lines, the ability to conduct a meaningful conversation at the advanced level was more realistic than it had been at the beginning level: i don’t think that conversations are the most helpful thing for me, because i don’t know enough vocabulary to really have a good conversation. when the professor conducts a conversation, i feel that i am trying more to just think of words that i know to throw into a sentence than actually trying to communicate something in arabic. (male, second year) i sort of get discouraged when i try to say a sentence in arabic and realize that i don’t know most of the words, so i never enjoy having a conversation. (male, first year) two interviewees, however, expressed a different opinion. according to them, interaction with the teacher was a key segment and a vital strategy for beginners to learn the language; according to them, beginners do not have enough tools to study the language on their own. advanced learners, on the other hand, should not enormously rely on the professor, as the beginners do. in my opinion, advanced students are independent enough and have the tools needed to work on their own and improve. (male, fourth year) learning grammar: beginners attributed more significance to learning grammar than the advanced learners. perhaps beginners realized that without basic grammatical arabic language-learning strategy preferences among undergraduate students 369 knowledge, it would be difficult to construct a sentence or understand one; thus, they felt less confident in speaking: i don’t want to speak out loud, because i don’t know if i can form sentences correctly. i don’t want to sound stupid. (female, second year) advanced students, on the other hand, believed that delivering the message was more important than being grammatically correct. they felt that they could form a bunch of sentences with the block of grammar knowledge they already had, and that is why they needed more vocabulary. it was more practical for them toward achieving their goal, communication: if i am stuck in an arabic-speaking country, then the grammar is not the most important thing for me. i can deliver the message even with some grammar mistakes. what i need at this point is vocabulary. (male, fourth year) grammar comes with practice, and the more i practice, the more i learn how to structure a complex sentence. (female, fourth year) another study, however, found that advanced students were interested in learning grammar because in the advanced phase, they needed to sound more eloquent and accurate (see also brosh, 2017). flashcards: advanced learners attributed more weight to flashcards than beginners, perhaps because beginners tend to be overwhelmed with new characters, new sounds, new vocabulary and how to construct sentences. additionally, beginners’ need for vocabulary was restricted to such basic topics as introducing themselves and their families. however, all the advanced learners needed was more vocabulary, which they could use for communication. they wanted to speak and opine about a variety of topics, such as economics, politics, the news, and their careers. thus, expanding their actual vocabulary base brought advanced learners satisfaction: i enjoy studying vocabulary, because knowing how to say a lot of words in arabic is more enjoyable, more rewarding. when i learn vocabulary, i feel that i have actually been learning some stuff. (male, third year) since the amount of new vocabulary at the advanced level grows significantly, the flashcard strategy seemed to be the most effective for advanced participants: hezi y. brosh 370 in the advanced level, the number of new words is huge, and it takes hours and hours to memorize them, so using flashcards to target a few words at a time seems to be a fast and efficient strategy. (female, fourth year) group work versus working individually: beginners favored group work, whereas advanced learners preferred working individually. this difference can simply be explained by comparing the level of knowledge and confidence each group has. moreover, the motivation of beginners to work in groups was due to their perception that the task at hand could be accomplished more easily and effectively when all of them worked together and pooled their knowledge. beginners generally had the same skill level in understanding the language, so in a group setting they all could, most likely, contribute about the same amount of knowledge and work to the task. in contrast, advanced learners, who had been studying the language for three or four years, differed significantly from one another in their ability, based on how much they had been passionately devoted to learning the language and how much effort and time they had put into it. so, when advanced participants come together to work in a group, there is going to be a very clear leader, who is going to do most of the work, while others will contribute only a little. (male, fourth year) that made group work less effective for many members of the group. furthermore, advanced learners were aware of their weaknesses and wanted to work on them individually, without being distracted or embarrassed by others: if i work with someone who knows tons of words but is weak in grammar, whereas my grammar is strong but i don’t know all the words, when we get together to do an assignment, he still does not know the grammar, because i did it all, and i still don’t know the words, because he did them all. (female, fourth year) 7. implications the findings from this study could have implications regarding theoretical models of effective language instruction, language teacher education programs, and language curriculum development. the findings indicate that learning arabic with the goal of being able to use it for communication, in and out of the classroom, involves the use of a combination of strategies: when i learn arabic, i combine and use different strategies. for example, i will learn a thing much faster if i see it, listen to it, write it, and think about it than if i utilize only one of these strategies. (female, first year) arabic language-learning strategy preferences among undergraduate students 371 students are by nature linguistically and culturally diverse – and thus different – in their perceptual learning strategies, how quickly they can adjust to new strategies, and the amount of practice they need. they are aware that there is no single learning-strategy recipe for learning arabic. moreover, they are also aware that learning strategies differ within the student himor herself. whereas learning a certain aspect of a language, such as vocabulary or grammar, may come easy for an individual student, learning other aspects of the language may be much harder. recognizing these individual patterns and variability can lead arabic instructors to develop and design complementary instructional interventions to address individual students’ learning needs, thereby using classroom time more effectively. these results could also guide instructors to develop a comprehensive teaching model that can match to a reasonable extent a variety of students’ learning strategies (oxford, 2003), enhance student achievement rates, and provide a foundation for students’ lifelong learning. on the other hand, though it is extremely helpful to have a knowledgeable and capable instructor, if students are not motivated to identify and utilize their learning strategies, or if they oppose the teaching strategies applied by the instructor, rightly or wrongly, because, for example, they are convinced that such strategies focus on knowledge rather than on practice or vice versa, or for any other reason, then learning will produce only limited outcomes. the principal result from this study indicated that undergraduate arabic students who study the language in order to be able to use it for communication with native speakers, concentrated on strategies that help them become autonomous learners (oxford, 2017) and move them toward the end goal of their learning: speaking for communication. they perceived speaking as a practical application of the language, and they wanted to develop their ability to the level where they could deliver their messages even without an adequate mastery of grammar. since students may learn in unanticipated modes (pashler et al., 2008), an instructor who keeps teaching only in ways that are comfortable for himor herself might leave many students behind, to struggle with learning the material on their own. thus, responding to students’ strengths and weaknesses, and understanding how an individual student would be most receptive to arabic instruction, will help instructors design a well-rounded teaching methodology pertinent to their students’ expectations for interpersonal communication. research suggests that a teaching strategy that matches or addresses a student’s learning strategy to a reasonable degree can result in higher learning quality, motivation to learn the language, feelings of independence, and confidence in one’s abilities to succeed (oxford, 2003). participants’ strong preference toward speaking made it apparent that teaching strategies should provide students with ample opportunities to use the language and to be proactive. when instruction hezi y. brosh 372 offers a variety of venues to use the language orally, and is aligned with students’ learning strategies, students can assign a suitable priority to the material being taught, can have a clear idea of where the instructor is heading, and can know what to expect from the lesson. such instruction could create an effective and engaging learning environment, increase each student’s motivation, and thus generate the student’s personal commitment and confidence in his or her abilities to succeed in learning the language (o’malley & chamot, 1990): i had a professor whose teaching strategies aligned closely with how i wanted to learn, and i paid close attention to that class and got good grades. but the next semester i had a class where i didn’t like how the professor presented the materials, and that’s when i started not paying attention, and my grades started to decline as well. (female, second year) alignment between teaching strategies and learning strategies is desirable; however, it is not always realistic. in a typical arabic classroom, students vary greatly in a wide range of learning strategies as well as in the level of confidence with which they process and apply them, so it is extremely difficult and challenging for an instructor to teach according to each student’s preferred method. in any event, an instructor should not be reluctant to train and expose students to useful learning strategies that do not necessarily accommodate their arabic llsps but are nonetheless essential to the development of their language skills. indeed, such exposure revitalizes students’ attention, forces the students to familiarize themselves with and acclimate themselves to teaching strategies that might be beneficial to them even though out of their comfort zone. choosing interaction with the teacher as the most preferred learning strategy emphasizes the essential role of instructors as facilitators who need to assist their students in becoming more autonomous and proficient in learning the language (oxford, 1990; weaver & cohen, 1994). that choice also implies the extent of the instructor’s influence over the students’ learning process is perhaps even greater than the instructor realizes. such influence should be utilized to empower and motivate students to study arabic on their own beyond the classroom in order to move forward in their language learning (weaver & cohen, 1994). 8. limitations this study has three limitations that should be acknowledged. the first one has to do with the questionnaire. it did not provide information about how a strategy preference was influenced by specific l2 learning tasks that participants faced, and thus, perhaps, decreased the significance of the results. unfortunately, it was almost impossible to ask participants to explain their llsps across arabic language-learning strategy preferences among undergraduate students 373 the manifold possibilities of language-learning tasks. the questionnaire also did not provide information about the reasons participants preferred one strategy over another. to compensate for these limitations, i conducted a relatively high number of semi-structured interviews with participants. the second limitation has to do with a difference concerning the population of the two groups. group1 (first and second year) was a mixture of students: those who planned to continue their arabic studies beyond the second year, on the one hand, and those who were studying arabic just to fulfill the two-year language requirement for their majors, on the other hand. in contrast, students in group 2 (third and fourth year) had chosen to continue their arabic studies beyond the second year, based on their personal drive; as a result, they could be more passionate about learning the language and thus ready to make the extra step in order to accomplish their language goals. nonetheless, i found other differences between beginners and advanced students with regard to llsps significant. the third limitation, which does not affect the results of the study and stems from the limited scope of this article, is the lack of an in-depth examination of oral feedback when discussing the strategy called interaction with the teacher. the issue of feedback is a vast and significant one in l2 teaching and learning. the reader can find more details on feedback in loewen (2012). 9. future research to better understand how arabic students, discover, choose, and apply learning strategies, further research on arabic llsps is required. more specifically, empirical data are needed to answer such questions as the following: what principles and phenomena underlie arabic students’ llsps?, are students actually using the strategies they self-report as their preferences, and to what extent?, how are lls used in specific language tasks? and how does using a given lls enhance a student’s learning experiences and ultimately lead to the development of his or her language proficiency? additionally, arabic instructors’ language-teaching strategy preferences should be examined in terms of range, type, and usage frequency to obtain an accurate profile of such strategies and to reveal the extent to which they correspond with students’ llsps. 10. conclusion in the context of learning arabic as a foreign language and within the constraints of a conventional classroom, the empirical evidence from this study shows that undergraduate arabic students tend to adopt a holistic view of the learning task and relate it to real-life, personal experience. by selecting interaction with the hezi y. brosh 374 teacher and speaking as their two most preferred application-directed learning strategies, arabic students clearly demonstrate their desire to be proactive in order to make the language more concrete for them, to enhance their performance, and to develop language skills that will last a lifetime. students are aware that learning arabic requires application of a wide variety of learning strategies to accomplish different learning tasks (written or oral production) and to manage and organize their learning. to expand students’ awareness of how arabic as a foreign language is efficiently learned, instructors should provide guidance regarding the suitability of strategies to learning tasks and topics being studied and how to incorporate these strategies into students’ daily learning routines inside and outside the classroom. in this way, while maximizing students’ level of comfort in learning the language, instructors could also challenge them academically and ultimately stimulate their language skills. in addition, arabic instructors should adopt a multifaceted view of instruction that is responsive to students’ learning strategies, needs, and interests so as to allow them the flexibility to navigate through the language. the application of diversified channels through which information streams into the arabic language classroom could help students review their progress, achievements, and future learning directions. arabic language-learning strategy preferences among undergraduate students 375 references amara, m. 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(1994). making learning strategy instruction a reality in the foreign language classroom. in c. klee (ed.), faces in a arowd: the individual learner in multisection courses (pp. 285-323). boston: heinle & heinle. 47 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (1). 2017. 47-60 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.1.3 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl circadian rhythms and second language performance kees de bot university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary c.l.j.de.bot@rug.nl fang fang university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary ff19881129xx@outlook.com abstract human behavior is not constant over the hours of the day, and there are considerable individual differences. some people raise early and go to bed early and have their peek performance early in the day (“larks”) while others tend to go to bed late and get up late and have their best performance later in the day (“owls”). in this contribution we report on three projects on the role of chronotype (ct) in language processing and learning. the first study (de bot, 2013) reports on the impact of ct on language learning aptitude and word learning. the second project was reported in fang (2015) and looks at ct and executive functions, in particular inhibition as measured by variants of the stroop test. the third project aimed at assessing lexical access in l1 and l2 at preferred and non-preferred times of the day. the data suggest that there are effects of ct on language learning and processing. there is a small effect of ct on language aptitude and a stronger effect of ct on lexical access in the first and second language. the lack of significance for other tasks is mainly caused by the large interindividual and intraindividual variation. keywords: circadian rhythm; chronotype; aptitude; vocabulary kees de bot, fang fang 48 1. introduction in the study of second language development (sld) differences between learners have been studied intensively. there is a general agreement that individual differences (ids) in second language learning should be taken into account in the study of sld. ids include foreign language aptitude, attitudes, motivation, and personality traits (dörnyei & skehan, 2003). in addition, anxiety, age, and language learning styles are all considered to be factors that contribute to ids in sla (ellis, 1994). dörnyei (2009) linked aspects of ids with dynamic systems theory: he argued that ids are dynamic factors that mutually affect each other over time. a factor that has not yet received much attention in the study of ids is the circadian rhythm (cr). this refers to the fact that people have individual and unique chronotypes (cts), which could be a factor that has an impact on sld. schmidt, collette, cajochen, and peigneux (2007) indicated that both time-of-day modulations and cts affect performance on a series of cognitive tasks, reflecting “interindividual differences in circadian preference” (p. 755). optimal performance is assumed to be achieved when an individual is tested at his or her optimal time. the present study attempts to show ct effects on second language performance as measured by a verbal fluency task and one executive function, inhibition, measured through various types of the stroop test. 2. individual differences in the study of sld there is a growing awareness of the importance of ids. dörnyei (2009) defines them as follows: “individual differences (ids) are characteristics or traits in respect of which individuals may be shown to differ from each other” (p. 1). while most l1 learners will reach a fairly high level of proficiency in the mother tongue, there is substantial variation between learners of a second language. compared to l1 acquisition, ids in learning an l2 are more noticeable, which can be seen not only in the learning speed, but also the completely different learning outcomes, ranging from zero achievement to native-level attainment (dörnyei, 2009; ellis, 2004). ids are now seen as “consistent predictors of l2 learning success” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 2), rather than distractors that prevent deeper insight into the unique development process of l2. general factors such as motivation, personality, and learning aptitude are typically included in the list of ids because of their important role in l2 acquisition (ellis, 1994). ellis (2004) lists four big categories of factors that contribute to ids in second language acquisition (sla):1 ability, propensities, learners’ cognition about 1 from a dynamic systems theory perspective the term sld (second language development) should be used rather than second language acquisition since the same factors play a role circadian rhythms and second language performance 49 l2 learning, and learner actions. different from ellis (1994), ellis (2004) excluded “age” because he held that age “potentially affects learners’ abilities, propensities, cognitions, and actions” and probably “affects the actual psycholinguistic processes involved in learning, with younger learners able to access a ‘language acquisition device’ and older learners reliant on general cognitive learning strategies – the fundamental difference hypothesis” (p. 529). dörnyei (2009) classified factors of ids into core and optional ones. similarly to ellis (2004), he excluded age for the same reason. gender was also removed from the list of core ids because it influences all aspects of the process of sla, “including virtually all the other id variables” (p. 8). different from all the categories mentioned above, dörnyei (2009) resorted to the new concept of “group dynamics” (p. 89), an interdisciplinary field of social sciences, which focuses on institutional teaching and learning. proposing new “dynamic conceptualizations”, he believed that “id factors enter into some interaction with situational parameters rather than cutting across tasks and environments” (p. 218). although dörnyei (2009) proposed a dynamic perspective to re-evaluate ids, he neglected a potentially important characteristic of human beings—the different daily rhythms of individuals—the cr and ct. de bot (2013) has argued that ct should also be included in the list of ids. he indicated that factors such as motivation and attitude are much more easily affected by external factors, and some seemingly stable factors are not as stable as previously assumed (e.g., language aptitude, working memory, etc.). he also pointed out some stable factors, such as personality style, anxiety and learning style. along those lines he believed that ct, a relatively stable factor, should be added to the list of ids, although there is only limited research on how ct affects language development and change. 3. circadian rhythms and chronotype all creatures on earth, including humans, are influenced by crs. physical behaviors, such as eating when hungry, sleeping when tired, drinking when thirsty, are all defined by the internal biological clock. emotions and mood fluctuations are also subject to the daily rhythm. the rhythms that are generated within us are based on biological clocks. the times of activities and other diurnal and nocturnal propensity are all synchronized by our biological clock, which leads to optimal performance of activities when we have access to food, sunlight and other resources (kreitzman & foster, 2011). these environmental changes during the day are controlled by solar clocks. in language acquisition and in language attrition. development is used as an overarching term for both acquisition and attrition. kees de bot, fang fang 50 solar clocks, together with social clock and biological clock, work together and influence our activities during the day (roenneberg, wirz-justice & merrow, 2003). if our daily life was shunned from both the solar and social clocks for a longer period of time, our biological clock would run out of control. however, in normal life, the biological clock is entrained by the solar clock of the 24-hour time (roenneberg et al., 2003) and constrained by the social clock, which is formed by working hours, study schedules, appointments and other constraints. in general, the three clocks work together yet asynchronously. the biological clock is influenced by the interaction between homeostatic and circadian factors, which can have an effect on a large set of neurobehavioral events. the nonlinear interaction between these two factors will cause temporal fluctuation, leading to the time-of-day variation and to peaks and troughs in cognitive performance in daily life. additionally, since the circadian process is not precisely 24 hours in the light-dark cycle, it is entrained by what in chronobiology has been labelled zeitgebers ‘providers of time’. these are sources of information about time, such as day and night (schmidt et al., 2007). the most important zeitgeber is daylight. for most plants and animals daylight defines their cr. it is based on “the interaction of multiple external and internal oscillators” (dijk & von schantz, 2005, p. 279). the oscillations have been shown in “both biological (e.g. body temperature and levels of hormone secretion) and psychological variables (e.g. mood and performance)” (díaz-morales, 2007, p. 770). 4. chronotypes chronotypes can be defined as “human preferences in the timing of sleep and wake” (roenneberg et al., 2003, p. 81). human behaviors are largely affected by the unique individual circadian timing system. the particular individual ct can be seen in different “favorite periods of diurnal activities, like working hours, and in specific sleep habits” (roenneberg et al., 2003, p. 758). generally, people can be classified on a continuum between two types, the morning type, “larks,” and the evening type, “owls”. larks are those people who wake up early in the morning and prefer to finish their work in the daytime, while owls are those who prefer to do their work late at night and wake up with difficulty in the early morning (giampietro & cavallera, 2007). the difference between extremely early larks and extremely late owls can be such that “extreme ‘larks’ wake up when extreme ‘owls’ fall asleep” (roenneberg et al., 2003, p. 80). moreover, the aging process plays a significant role in the circadian and sleep rhythms (schmidt et al., 2007). the shift of the crs occurs during the time when children become adolescents, when their cts change from morning-preferred types to eveningpreferred ones (hahn et al., 2012). another shift of rhythmicity towards larks circadian rhythms and second language performance 51 appears around 50 years of age (giampietro & cavallera, 2007). the majority of elderly people are larks and most young adults are owls (schmidt et al., 2007). fluctuations of circadian arousal can affect individual performance in various ways. performance on a certain task can be influenced by one’s “peak circadian arousal period” (hahn et al., 2012, p. 123) and the time of testing of the study. the optimal performance of a certain task is assumed to be achieved at the matching time of these two variables, which has been labelled the synchrony effect (hogan et al., 2009; may & hasher, 1998). 4.1. the establishment of chronotype there are various instruments to assess ct. in the studies reported on here, ct types are assessed with the munich chrono type questionnaire (mctq). the midsleep time is taken as the referent point for ct. for example, a 3.00 a.m. mid-sleep time would be with the sleep onset at 11.00 p.m. and 7.00 a.m. wake-up. it should be noticed that a person who falls asleep at 12.00 p.m. and wakes up at 6.00 a.m. has the same mid-sleep time, 3.00 a.m. mid-sleep is thus used as the indicator of ct but does not tell us much about the amount of sleep a person gets. 4.2. chronotype and cognitive activities blatter and cajochen (2007) provide a general overview of early studies in the 19th and 20th century which provided evidence for the time-of-day effects for a range of activities. nathainel kleitman is “the pioneer in circadian and sleep research” (p. 196) as he systematically combined information from cognitive performance, chronobiology and sleep research. he found a time-of-day fluctuation in cognitive performance: performance was found to be optimal in the afternoon and worst in the early morning and late night. similarly, the time-of-day fluctuations of brain activities and cognitive performance have been also mentioned by ebbinghaus (1885/1964). he reported that the performance in learning nonsense syllables is better in the morning than in the afternoon (schmidt et al., 2007). farrell, sood, dewsnap, and schmitt (2013) made the first attempt to examine the question if the morning-evening (me) type has an effect on the performance of university students in the uk. they found a clear effect of ct on cognitive performance. so far, no research has been done on ct and second language development. in the present contribution a number of recent studies on this issue are presented. kees de bot, fang fang 52 5. study 1: de bot (2013)2 de bot (2013) made the first attempt to test the ct impact on aspects of sld, with a focus on language aptitude and word learning and retention. based on the assumption that “different cts will lead to time-of-day effects: larks generally doing better in the morning and owls performing better in the early evening” (p. 6), the study looked at ct, word learning and aptitude. the instruments used were the munich chronotype questionnaire (mctq) and meara’s llama language aptitude tests. a total of 24 informants, mainly university students, were tested on language learning aptitude and word learning. the group of informants was divided into an early group (larks) and a late group (owls) on the basis of the median. the range of cts was fairly limited, and therefore there was little variation in mid-sleep time. the participants were tested with the llama aptitude test, they had to learn a number of pseudo words, and they were tested later at the preferred and nonpreferred time of the day. a significant time-of-day effect was only found in the aptitude tests (the sound-symbol correspondence test and the grammatical inferencing subtest), in which the participants showed synchrony: they performed better at their preferred time. no effect of ct on word learning was found. 6. study 2: fang (2015) in this experiment the focus was on lexical access and inhibitory control. lexical access is a crucial factor in language production. it can be assessed in different ways. here a verbal fluency task was used. this task has been used extensively in psycholinguistic studies on bilingualism (portocarrero, burright, & donovick, 2007). for the assessment of inhibitory control a number of versions of the stroop test were used. the research hypothesis addressed was the following: larks have better performance than owls in the morning, and owls perform better than larks in the evening on lexical access and inhibitory control. the 94 participants in this study were individuals with different l1 backgrounds whose second/foreign language was english. the age range was from 19 to 34. all participants had learned english since primary school, and only nine of them had never been abroad. the english proficiency levels of the 85 participants who had been abroad were measured by ielts scores, the range of which was from 6.5 to 7.5. for those who had never been abroad, their english proficiency levels were measured by the test for english majors (tem-8).3 therefore, all the participants were assumed to have similar english competency. 2 this study is summarized here. details can be found in de bot (2013). 3 tem-8 is one of the most difficult english tests in china for english major students. circadian rhythms and second language performance 53 40 participants were selected to join the second part of the study on the basis of their cts. they were divided randomly into two groups, group 1 and group 2, as shown in table 1. both groups included 10 larks and 10 owls. group 1 was tested in the evening, which is assumed to be the time owls prefer but is non-preferred by larks, while group 2 was tested in the morning, the time that larks prefer and is non-preferred by owls. table 1 the division of the 40 selected participants and their time of testing ct types number of participants test time group 1 larks 10 evening owls 10 group 2 larks 10 morning owls 10 6.1. procedure in a first step, the mctq was administered online, and all participants were asked to fill in the questionnaire so that they could be divided into specific groups according to their cts. in a second step, verbal fluency tasks (phonological and semantic) were used, which required the participants to name as many words as possible from specific categories in 60 seconds: · phonological verbal fluency task: the participants were asked to list as many english words as possible in 60 seconds which begin with the letter s. in research on verbal fluency in english, the letter s is often used because it is a “large” letter compared to other letters (monsch et al., 1992). · semantic verbal fluency task: the participants were asked to name as many english words as possible in 60 seconds that belong to the category of fruits and vegetables. again, this is one of the most widely used categories for verbal fluency in english. the number of correct words that the participants named in both tasks was used as the dependent variable in the analysis. third, stroop tests were used to assess inhibitory control. the tests were conducted through a website (https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/words.html#seffect), which can record the time spent by the participants automatically: · stroop tests: a number of variants of the stroop test were used in this study, the traditional color-word stroop test (see rosselli, ardila, & santisi, 2002 for an overview of research on the stroop task with bilinguals) and three new variants, the interactive positional stroop, interactive number stroop, and interactive animal stroop, as described below. kees de bot, fang fang 54 after determining the cts by the mctq according to the group division, the 40 participants completed the verbal fluency tests and the stroop tests. the tests were conducted one week after the mctq. in the color-word stroop test, the participants were asked to name the colors of the words while not reading the words themselves. for example, if the word “green” was printed in blue, the participants were supposed to say “blue.” this test consists of two sub-tests, a congruent and an incongruent one. the participants were asked to name all the words as quickly as possible. if a participant was wrong for the first time, he or she was allowed to correct the error until the answer was right. the time for finishing each of the two sub-tests was recorded. in the interactive positional stroop test, the participants were asked to name the positions of the words rather than the words themselves. for example, where the word “left” is positioned in the up location, the participants should say “up.” when the word “left” is located on the right, “right” is the correct answer. this test included two sub-tests, a congruent one and an incongruent one. the participants needed to produce the words as quickly as possible. if a participant was wrong for the first time, he or she was allowed to correct the error until the answer was right. the time of finishing each of the two subtests was recorded. in the interactive number stroop test, the participants were asked to name the numbers of the words while not reading the words themselves. for example, if there were two words “dog” in the box, the answer should be “two”; if the word “one” appears three times, then the participant is required to answer “three.” this test consisted again of two sub-tests, a congruent one and an incongruent one. the difference in reading time between the two versions, that is, the stroop effect, was used as the dependent variable in the analysis. the participants were asked to read aloud all the words as fast as possible. if a participant was wrong for the first time, he or she was allowed to correct the error until the answer was right. finally, in the interactive animal stroop, the participants were asked to name the animals in the picture while not naming the pictures of words themselves. for example, the participant was supposed to say “cow” when the picture itself showed a cow (congruent condition), but the participant was supposed to say “cat” when the picture showed a cat but the printed word said “spider.” 6.2. analysis in the analysis the characteristics of the participants were first considered, which are shown in table 2. circadian rhythms and second language performance 55 table 2 the average mid-sleep time during workdays of the participants in group 1 and group 2 ct types number of participants average mid-sleep time standard deviation test time group 1 larks 10 3:06 a.m. 0:25 evening owls 10 4:48 a.m. 0:31 group 2 larks 10 3:23 a.m. 0:24 morning owls 10 4:26 a.m. 0:22 the data on the verbal fluency task are presented in table 3. on both phonological and semantic verbal fluency tests, no significant differences of the performances of the larks and the owls were found in either group 1 or group 2. table 3 the results of the verbal fluency tasks verbal fluency tasks result type group 1 (evening tests) group 2 (morning tests) larks owls larks owls phonological verbal fluency task with the letter “s” words m 16.30 15.20 17.10 17.20 sd 6.36 5.39 5.13 2.86 levene’s test f = 0.012, p > .05 f = 72.205, p > .05 t test/significance t(18) = 0.417, p > .05 t(18) = -0.054, p > .05 semantic verbal fluency task with fruit & vegetable words m 13.20 15.20 17.0 13.60 sd 4.98 6.49 6.06 4.53 levene’s test f = 1.057, p > .05 f = 0.229, p > .05 t test/significance t(18) = -0.773, p > .05 t(18) = 1.422, p > .05 the results of the original color-word stroop test and its three variations are shown in table 4. no significant differences between the performances of the larks and the owls were found on any of the stroop tests. the correlations between the variants of the stroop test were fairly high (r = .60 -.70). table 4 the results of the stroop tests (unit: second) stroop tests result type group 1 (evening tests) group 2 (morning tests) larks owls larks owls color-word-1 m 20.59 17.44 20.75 19.73 sd 6.27 2.84 4.10 5.43 t test/significance t(18) = 1.447, p > .05 t(18) = 0.475, p > .05 color-word-2 m 29.46 27.99 28.57 29.03 sd 7.83 6.96 6.46 5.05 t test/significance t(18) = 0.445, p > .05 t(18) = -0.177, p > .05 directional-1 m 12.30 11.53 11.92 11.78 sd 2.82 2.49 2.56 2.77 t test/significance t(18) = 0.648, p > .05 t(18) = 0.124, p > .05 kees de bot, fang fang 56 directional-2 m 16.85 16.80 16.15 16.73 sd 4.84 3.99 3.78 5.55 t test/significance t(18) = 0.026, p > .05 t(18) = -0.270, p > .05 number-1 m 14.81 13.17 14.93 14.59 sd 3.00 1.76 2.67 1.79 t test/significance t(18) = 1.488, p > .05 t(18) = 0.338, p > .05 number-2 m 16.80 14.84 sd 3.23 1.88 t test/significance t(18) = 1.654, p > .05 t(18) = -0.758, p > .05 animal-1 m 18.58 18.24 14.77 16.70 sd 4.20 5.44 2.99 1.88 t test/significance t(18) = 0.155, p > .05 t(18) = -1.728, p > .05 animal-2 m 23.99 23.44 20.07 21.43 sd 8.46 8.89 3.48 3.47 t test/significance t(18) = 0.142, p > .05 t(18) = -0.465, p > .05 correlational analyses showed that there was neither a significant effect of the mid-sleep time on the individuals’ performances nor a significant interaction between the mid-sleep time and test time in any tests. a significant effect of the test time on performance was only found in the animal stroop test. 6.3. main results study 2 for this current study, verbal fluency tests and three variants of the stroop test were used to find out whether there is synchrony between the peak circadian time and the test time on second language performance. the results of all the tests showed that no significant difference was found between the performances of the larks and the owls in any group. no significant effect of the midsleep time on the performance was found in any tests. a significant effect of the test time on performance was only found in the animal stroop test. there was no significant interaction between the test time and the mid-sleep time in any tests either. the findings of the study did not confirm the assumption that optimal performance will be achieved at individuals’ preferred time. 7. study 3: the kőszeg study in this study, which was carried out with financial support form the ises centre in kőszeg, we looked at the relationship between cr, executive functions and lexical access. with the help of students and student assistants, 28 informants were tested. they showed a range of ages, and they were all native speakers of hungarian and had some knowledge of english. again the mctq was used to assess ct. to measure lexical access, verbal fluency tests were used. the categories used are presented in table 5. because the size of categories, in particular the circadian rhythms and second language performance 57 semantic ones, is hard to estimate, it was decided to switch the categories for half of the informants: half of them got the “f” letter test at the preferred time and half of them at the non-preferred time. this should balance out the effect of differences in set size. table 5 categories for phonological and semantic verbal fluency tests taken at the preferred and non-preferred times tests preferred time non-preferred time l1 phonological “f” “m” l1 semantic names fruits l2 phonological “r” “t” l2 semantic animals grocery goods the findings of this study are summarized in table 6 with the mean scores for l1/l2, phonological/semantic and preferred/non-preferred time of the day. table 6 verbal fluency mean scores (standard deviations) for phonological/semantic, l1/l2 and preferred/non-preferred time language test preferred time non-preferred time p l1 phonological 22.3 (6.3) 17.1 (4.2) t(27) = 4.9, p < .001 semantic 19.9 (6.7) 17.0 (4.3) t(27) = 2.1, p < .050 l2 phonological 14.2 (3.9) 10.6 (4.7) t(27) = 3.7, p < .001 semantic 15.6 (5.8) 10.1 (3.8) t(27) = 6.3, p < .001 the data in table 6 reveal significant effects of time of testing for all categories. l1 typically shows higher scores than l2, and phonological fluency is better than semantic fluency. 8. discussion on the basis of the literature on cr and cognitive functioning, it was expected that ct (chronotype) would be a factor in language learning and (multilingual) processing. in the first study aspects of language aptitude were considered and a significant effect of ct on some components, but not all, was found. in the word learning experiment, no advantage for preferred over non-preferred time of the day was found. in the second study different types of stroop tests were used, and the relation between verbal fluency data and inhibitory control was assessed at different times of the day, depending on the ct of individual informants. no effect of ct was found, which may have partly been caused by the large variation within and between participants. kees de bot, fang fang 58 in the third study we looked at the effect of preferred time of the day versus non-preferred time on phonological and semantic verbal fluency in l1 and l2. here a strong effect of time of testing was found with significant effects of ct on lexical processing both in l1 and 2 and for phonological and semantic fluency. the verbal fluency task is a typical example of a combination of action and control. the participant has to generate words from a specific phonological or semantic category, but the generation of a word leads to activation of all the words in the network that word is part of. that can be synonyms, associations or collocations. only a small set of the words activated are actually part of the category searched for. so the other words have to be filtered out and inhibited. it may be that different parts of the activation-control process differ in the way they are influenced by cr. the data from the second study discussed earlier show that the inhibitory control mechanism as measured by the stroop test is not sensitive to cr effects. that means that the cr effect found in the third study mainly impacts the activation process. why this component is affected and not the inhibitory control mechanism is still unclear. one of the useful findings in the third study is that the choice of the testing moment, four and eight hours after getting up, seems to work to select preferred and non-preferred testing times. apparently four hours is early enough for larks to perform effectively, while eight hours works well for owls. 9. general conclusions the first finding of the studies reported on are time of day and ct which both appear to play a role in lexical processing. we report data from three studies on the role of ct in language processing and learning. the first study (based on de bot 2013) reports on the impact of ct on language learning aptitude and word learning. the second project is based on fang (2015) and looks at ct and executive functions, in particular inhibition as measured by variants of the stroop test. the third project aimed at assessing lexical access in l1 and l2 at preferred and non-preferred times of the day. the data suggest that there are effects of ct on language learning and processing. there is a small effect of ct on language aptitude and a stronger effect of ct on lexical access in the first and second language. the lack of significance for other tasks is mainly caused by the large interindividual and intraindividual variation. the main conclusion from the studies reported on is that there are indications of cr effects in monolingual and bilingual processing, but also that the main positive finding is based on just one experimental task. more ecologically valid measures are needed to substantiate the cr effect. therefore it is too early to claim that cr should be included as one of the main ids that play a role in bilingual processing and language learning. circadian rhythms and second language performance 59 references blatter, k., & cajochen, c. (2007). circadian rhythms in cognitive performance: methodological constraints, protocols, theoretical underpinnings. physiology & behavior, 90, 196-208. de bot, k. (2013). circadian rhythms and second language development. international journal of bilingualism, 19(2), 142-155. doi: 10.1177/1367006913489201. dörnyei, z. (2009). the psychology of second language acquisition. oxford: oxford university press. dörnyei, z., & skehan, p. (2003). individual differences in second language learning. in c. j. doughty & m. h. long (eds.), the handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 589-630). oxford: blackwell. díaz-morales, j. f. (2007). morning and evening-types: exploring their personality styles. personality and individual differences, 43(4), 769-778. dijk, d. j., & von schantz, m. (2005). timing and consolidation of human sleep, wakefulness, and performance by a symphony of oscillators. journal of biological rhythms, 20(4), 279-290. ebbinghaus, h. (1964). memory: a contribution to experimental psychology (h. a. rugen & c. e. business, trans.). new york: dover. (original work published 1885) ellis, r. (1994). the study of second language acquisition. oxford: oxford university press. ellis, r. (2004). individual differences in second language learning. in a. davies & c. elder (eds.), the handbook of applied linguistics (pp. 525-551). malden, ma: blackwell. fang, f. (2015). circadian rhythm and second language acquisition (unpublished ma thesis). university of groningen, the netherlands. farrell, a., sood, a., dewsnap, b., & schmitt, j. (2013). student morningnesseveningness type and performance: does class timing matter? in s. sezgin, e. karaosmanoglu, & a. b. elmadag bas (eds.), emac 2013 : 42nd annual emac conference: lost in translation. giampietro, m., & cavallera, g. m. (2007). morning and evening types and creative thinking. personality and individual differences, 42(3), 453-463. hahn, c., cowell, j. m., wiprzycka, u. j., goldstein, d., ralph, m., hasher, l., & zelazo, p. d. (2012). circadian rhythms in executive function during the transition to adolescence: the effect of synchrony between chronotype and time of day. developmental science, 15(3), 408-416. hogan, m. j., kelly, c. a., verrier, d., newell, j., hasher, l., & robertson, i. h. (2009). optimal time-of-day and consolidation of learning in younger and older adults. experimental aging research, 35(1), 107-128. kees de bot, fang fang 60 kreitzman, l., & foster, r. (2011). the rhythms of life: the biological clocks that control the daily lives of every living thing. london: profile books. may, c. p., & hasher, l. (1998). synchrony effects in inhibitory control over thought and action. journal of experimental psychology: human perception and performance, 24(2), 363-379. monsch, a. u., bondi, m. w., butters, n., salmon, d. p., katzman, r., & thal, l. j. (1992). comparisons of verbal fluency tasks in the detection of dementia of the alzheimer type. archives of neurology, 49(12), 1253-1258. portocarrero, j. s., burright, r. g., & donovick, p. j. (2007).vocabulary and verbal fluency of bilingual and monolingual college students. archives of clinical neuropsychology, 22(3), 415-422. roenneberg, t., wirz-justice, a., & merrow, m. (2003). life between clocks: daily temporal patterns of human chronotypes. journal of biological rhythms, 18(1), 80-90. rosselli, m., ardila, a., & santisi, m. (2002). stroop effects in spanish/english bilinguals. journal of the international neuropsychological society, 8(6), 819-827. schmidt, c., collette, f., cajochen, c., & peigneux, p. (2007). a time to think: circadian rhythms in human cognition. cognitive neuropsychology, 24(7), 755-789. 807 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (4). 2020. 807-811 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.4.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review directed motivational currents and language education: exploring implications for pedagogy author: christine muir publisher: multilingual matters, 2020 isbn: 978-1-78892-884-7 pages: 252 the construct of a directed motivational current (dmc), or “. . . a surge of motivational energy that seemingly picks an individual up and carries them sometimes unimaginable distances” (p. xvi) was introduced into research on motivation in second and foreign language (l2) learning less than a decade ago (e.g., dörnyei, ibrahim, & muir, 2015; muir & dörnyei, 2013). despite being a relative newcomer to the field, the concept has provided an impulse for empirical investigations which have primarily focused on validating its core assumptions and proposed dimensions using largely qualitative methodology (e.g., safdari & maftoon, 2007; zarrinabadi & tavakoli, 2017). the book directed motivational currents in language education: implications for pedagogy by christine muir is another valuable addition to this line of inquiry and it can be seen in a way as a follow-up to and extension of the monograph motivational currents in language learning: frameworks for focused interventions that she co-authored with zoltán dörnyei and alastair henry in 2016. since i had the opportunity to write a review of this volume for studies in second language learning and 808 teaching (pawlak, 2017), i was all the more curious to see how research on dmcs has progressed and what promise it currently holds for l2 pedagogy. therefore, the moment the publisher contacted me with the suggestion that ssllt might be a good venue for a review, i immediately jumped on the offer and simply felt compelled to take on this task myself. i have to say from the get-go that the book has lived up to my expectations and, although i might be somewhat skeptical about some of the implications for classroom practice, i have to admit that christine muir’s work represents a so-much-needed step forward in the study of dmcs. this certainly cannot too often be said about all the apparently innovative ideas introduced into the domain of second language acquisition research. following the “preface,” which sets the scene for the discussion of dmcs and provides an overview of the contents, the book is comprised of four parts, each subdivided into chapters and ending with a succinct summary that also serves the purpose of signaling what is to come next. part i, “introducing dmcs and intensive group projects,” consists of three chapters which focus on the developments in l2 motivational research that have contributed to the rise of dmcs, such as complex dynamic systems theory, possible selves, emotions or vision (chapter 1), the definition and distinctive attributes of the construct (chapter 2), as well as dmcs in the classroom which involve entire learner groups and can be generated by means of intensive projects (chapter 3). part ii and part iii shift the focus to empirical investigations which aimed to rectify the limitations of previous research, which, as pointed out above, has mainly been qualitative in nature and has not really moved beyond validating the initial theoretical framework. each of the two parts consists of three chapters (chapters 4-6 and chapters 7-9, respectively), which present the methodology of the study, the results and, in part iii, some considerations on how the implemented project could be improved upon, and, yet again, reader-friendly summaries. part i reports a questionnaire study drawing on online data from all over the world, showing that a dmc is a recognizable and universal phenomenon, identifying novel triggers responsible for its occurrence, as well as providing specialists with a new research tool, that is the dmc diagnostic scale. part iii, in turn, describes the findings of an interventionist study which aimed to purposefully facilitate a group dmc in a class of students of diverse nationalities at a language school attached to an australian university. this was done with the help of what is referred to as an intensive group project with dmc potential, of the type dörnyei at al. (2017) label all eyes and the final product. the analyses of the data collected by student and teacher diaries as well as interviews demonstrated that a dmc was indeed successfully engineered and participation in the project led to l2 development. finally, part iv, “the future of dcm research,” reflects on the seven frameworks for focused interventions introduced by dörnyei et al. (2017), 809 stressing in particular the potential of study abroad experiences, and considers the directions of future research on dmcs, including action research. the book closes with the “afterword,” in which readers can find further advice on implementing projects with dmc potential alongside a list of useful resources. the publication of christine muir’s book without doubt has the potential to usher in a new era both with regards to research into dmcs in l2 learning as well as how the outcomes of such research are translated into everyday classroom practice. first and foremost, i warmly welcome the admission that, while theorizing about and investigating the construct may still be in its infancy, the time is ripe to move beyond conceptual papers, manuals on how dmcs should be generated or studies that do little more than showing that the framework might be applicable to specific groups of learners in highly selective contexts. i am impressed even more by the two studies reported in the book. to my mind, the contribution of the first lies not only in the fact that it corroborated the universality of dmcs for various settings and learner groups, but also, or even more importantly, that it provided us with a tool (i.e., dmc diagnostic scale) that will allow enriching qualitative data collected so far and seeking relationships among dmcs and a wide range of individual difference variables that may impact their occurrence (e.g., personality, learning styles, learning strategies, boredom proneness, curiosity or willingness to communicate). the undisputable value of the second investigation is that it has successfully demonstrated that facilitating dmcs is feasible in an instructional setting, even if the conditions in this case were exceptionally propitious. it is clear that such empirical evidence might at the end of the day be more convincing for teachers than just proving that dmcs exist and that perhaps some learners experience them. the likelihood that at least some teachers may take the idea of dmcs on board is additionally enhanced by numerous, quite concrete, if not always practicable, guidelines that can be found throughout the book as well as a healthy dose of realism as to whether proposals of this kind can at all times be effectively applied. when commenting on the positive findings of the interventionist study, muir openly admits that “. . . it is still to be demonstrated whether such periods of intense motivation might be as successfully facilitated in different contexts, with different student groups – and groupings – and in contexts where, for example, there are fewer contact hours per week of lower levels of external support feasible” (p. 173). i was also intrigued by the idea of formative experiments undertaken to verify “. . . theory and empirical research in the real world of practice” (reinking & bradley, 2004, p. 155), mainly because of their potential to pave the way for practitioner research, something that is evidently indispensable to broaden our understanding of the true contribution of dmcs. last but not least, the book is written in an approachable way, with summaries at the end of each part as well 810 as interim summaries helping the readers to get their bearings without the need to revisit previous chapters or sections. the reservations i have are not so much related to the book as such, which i believe does make a vitally important contribution to l2 motivation research, but, rather, to the true relevance of the construct of dmc to everyday teaching. yes, christine muir did succeed in showing that such intense motivational surges can be generated at a group level when learners are energized by the need to achieve a goal that is greatly relevant to them. this was, however, a unique context where students were motivated to excel in the first place and the teachers were not only highly skilled and dedicated but also “. . . became swept up in the group dmc . . .,” (p. 175). however, the realities of most state-run schools around the world are quite different – learners for whom the additional language is not a top priority among school subjects or university courses, students who are striving to meet predetermined requirements, overworked and unrewarded teachers, severe time limitations, or the need to follow national curricula and prepare learners for final examinations. hoping that the current situation is transitory, i am not even elaborating on the burdens and challenges of entirely online education for all the parties involved. in other words, in most cases, teachers do not have the luxury of devoting sufficient time to implementing an intensive project, their hands are tied when it comes to curricular changes, and they certainly have little if any influence on final assessments which are externally regulated. another problem has to do with the myriad of conditions that simultaneously have to be in place for an intensive project to stand a chance of facilitating a group dmc, such as maturity, positive emotionality, common goals, appropriate classroom dynamics or adequate support structures, to name but a few. in most classes in the world, learners tend to follow their own agendas, there are bound to be tensions among them, maturity cannot always be assumed, not to mention the fact that it is unpredictable constellations of individual difference factors that may ultimately account for the occurrence of a group dmc and its success. in fact, one can wonder if it might not perhaps be more feasible for teachers to try to trigger dmcs in the case of individual learners, since it could simply be easier to ensure that all pieces fall into place at the right time in this case. obviously, the experience would then be reserved only for those who are ready to embrace it, but this goal can be seen as more pragmatic than creating a situation in which a diverse group suddenly, as if with a wave of a magic wand, gets carried away by the need to attain a common goal. all of these doubts come from someone who used to work for well over a decade in a regular, state-run school and is aware of the everyday challenges that teachers and learners face. i am by no means suggesting, though, that facilitating dmcs in some groups is impossible and should not by attempted. i am merely highlighting the inherent problems this is bound to involve and the need 811 to convince teachers that embarking on this path is a viable proposition, something that will aid the achievement of curricular goals. on a positive note, the book by christine muir is without doubt a step in the right direction if the idea of dmcs is to ever be more widely embraced by practitioners. the two studies she reports and the practical advice she offers will surely be an inspiration for researchers wishing to further explore the concept but also for teachers willing to experiment with it in their one classrooms. the volume is an excellent, thought-provoking read and i recommend it to anyone interested in making l2 instruction more effective, whether they are researchers, teacher trainers, materials writes, or pre-service and in-service teachers. reviewed by mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references dörnyei, z., henry, a., & muir, c. (2016). motivational currents in language teaching: frameworks for focused interventions. new york: routledge. dörnyei, z., ibrahim, z., & muir, c. (2015). ‘directed motivational currents’: regulating complex dynamic systems through motivational surges. in z. dörnyei, p. d. macintyre, & a. henry (eds.). motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 95-105). bristol: multilingual matters. muir, c., & dörnyei, z. (2013). directed motivational currents: using vision to create effective motivational pathways. studies in second language learning and teaching, 3, 357-375. pawlak, m. (2017). review of motivational currents in language teaching: frameworks for focused interventions by zoltán dörnyei, alastair henry, christine muir. studies in second language learning and teaching, 7, 169-173. reinking, d., & bradley, b. a. (2004). connecting research and practice using formative and design experiments. in n. k. duke & m. h. mallette (eds.), literacy research methodology (pp. 114-148). new york: guilford press. safdari, s., & maftoon, p. (2017). the rise an fall of directed motivational currents: a case study. journal of language teaching and learning, 7, 43-54. zarrinabadi, n., & tavakoli, m. (2017). exploring motivational surges among iranian efl teacher trainers: directed motivational currents in focus. tesol quarterly, 51, 155-166. 345 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (2). 2016. 345-348 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.2.9 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book review pronunciation fundamentals: evidence-based perspectives for l2 teaching and research authors: tracey m. derwing and murray j. munro publisher: john benjamins, 2015 isbn: 9789027213273 pages: 208 after a period of relative neglect, pronunciation seems to have finally come back to the foreground of sla theory and practice. a growing interest in the field is evidenced by a growing number of publications (e.g., mompean & fouzgonzález, 2015; szpyra-kozlowska, 2015; waniek-klimczak & pawlak, 2015), regular conferences (e.g., accents, pronunciation in second language learning and teaching or the bi-annual english pronunciation: theory and practice) and the emergence of a new journal (journal of second language pronunciation). within this richness, pronunciation fundamentals: evidence-based perspectives for l2 teaching and research stands out as a comprehensive and thought-provoking compendium of issues relevant for teaching and researching pronunciation in l2. in a way, this book rounds up all pronunciation-related events of 2015, reporting on major aspects of pronunciation research conducted so far and opening up new paths for the development of theory and practice. coming from two leading researchers in the field, the book offers a personalized view 346 on what pronunciation research and teaching is all about, with evidence-based perspectives promised in the title fully explicated and illustrated in the text. the book opens up with the chapter entitled “key concepts,” which the authors recommend as a starting point for all readers, regardless of their specific interests in other chapters, which can be read independently. introducing key concepts, the authors begin by stressing the importance of pronunciation, proclaiming that “oral communication is such a fundamental part of everyday life that if pronunciation patterns get in the way, action is essential” (p. 2). with this statement, pretty much a motto for the whole book, the authors move on to introduce essential terminology, with concepts such as accent, intelligibility, comprehensibility and fluency receiving most attention. further on, nativeness versus intelligibility principles are introduced, followed by a short account of research agendas and research misinterpretations related to these and other concepts (e.g., the effectiveness of segmental vs. suprasegmental instruction). all in all, what the introductory chapter does goes beyond key concepts as such; in fact, it previews the approach used throughout the book with a critical overview of the research and its interpretation, which are crucial for the discussion of individual aspects of l2 pronunciation. what needs to be mentioned at this point is a clear l2 focus of the book. as mentioned by the authors in the foreword, it is their experience with teaching and researching the pronunciation of english as the second language in north america that forms the basis for the book. while this can be seen as a limitation in the applicability of research insights discussed in the volume, this clearly stated perspective makes the discussion of such key concepts as intelligibility or accentedness precise due to a clear point of reference. consequently, the book offers insights which are not only relevant but also crucial for instructed learning in the case of english as an additional or a foreign language. this can be clearly seen in the following chapters, beginning with a historical overview of pronunciation (chapter 2), through pedagogical perspectives on l2 phonetic acquisition (chapter 3), to pronunciation errors and error gravity (chapter 4), all of which rely on the native speaker as a potential interlocutor whose ease or difficulty in understanding and\or whose assessment is crucial for deciding about relative success in learner’s pronunciation. when talking about research into pronunciation instruction (chapter 5), however, the authors do acknowledge the fact that it is not only native speakers of english who might be involved in the teaching process. discussing pronunciation instruction research, the authors move to the classroom, and it is from this perspective that they discuss not only the availability of teaching materials but also teacher training in other than l2 contexts. one of the interesting issues that emerge is the question whether nonnative speakers should teach l2 pronunciation, a problem 347 well-known to many nonnative speaker teachers around the world and throughout europe. other problems discussed include the effectiveness of pronunciation instruction, curriculum issues, and decisions concerning when and who to teach. the following chapters continue with practical issues of interest to all teachers, such as the assessment of l2 pronunciation (chapter 6) and technology in pronunciation instruction (chapter 7). having discussed the instructional setting, the authors go back to real life, considering numerous issues related to the use of accented english, its social role, prejudice related to it, and, finally, the ethics of accent reduction. chapter 8 and 9 begin with a more specific focus on the l2 setting for accents, and, using the canadian perspective, illustrate problems related to accentedness versus intelligibility. moving on to the attitudes towards accented speech or the stigma of a foreign accent, the authors discuss numerous studies concerning the call centre setting and other types of employment. further issues, including the problem of accent and identity as well as the relevance of the context, bring the authors to world englishes and english as a lingua franca (elf), with the role of the interlocutor viewed as crucial for setting pronunciation priorities. interestingly, while the authors do not make any strong claims as to the usefulness of elf for pedagogy, they do stress the need for further studies into the needs of the students, including studies within the willingness to communicate paradigm. finally, accent reduction—not infrequently treated as the ultimate aim of pronunciation instruction—is critically evaluated from the perspective of business as well as medical help providers. this is an extremely interesting and not at all obvious word of warning as to a wide range of meanings and services associated with pronunciation. from other than l2 perspectives, this angle may seem irrelevant; however, its reality needs to be noticed and acknowledged by educators not only in l2 but also in other contexts, such as english as a foreign, other or additional language. chapter 10 closes the book with future directions being laid out and discussed for pronunciation research, teaching, assessment and technological innovations. last but not least, intelligibility and comprehensibility are put into a broader perspective, with the role of interlocutors stressed in the process of reaching mutual understanding. the book, written “to serve as a resource for anyone who is interested in second language pronunciation” (p. xi), stems from the long teaching and research experience of the authors, who provide a well-balanced account of research and pedagogical suggestions in connection with major challenges related to pronunciation. the structure of the book makes it possible for individual readers to choose aspects of interest rather than follow the order of issues raised by the authors; however, treated as a whole, the book makes a perfect text for the study of pronunciation in its full complexity. raising important problems 348 and issues related to pronunciation as seen from a student and teacher perspective, discussing strengths and weaknesses of relevant research and providing a variety of insights into the development of research as well as pedagogy, the book manages to achieve what verges on the impossible: it is comprehensive and yet concise. discussing sound research, it opens up new paths for further studies; referring to the authors’ experience, it provides food for thought and stimulates new ideas. most importantly, perhaps, the book bridges the gap between pronunciation research and teaching, showing how the former informs the latter. as it is only by better understanding of complex conditionings of pronunciation challenges faced by students that we can provide relevant instruction, the book offers an invaluable resource to all of us interested in pronunciation. and to make us enjoy researching and teaching pronunciation even more, the book reads so well, being both engaging and engaged in the pronunciation instruction cause. reviewed by ewa waniek-klimczak university of lodz, łódź, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland ewaklim@uni.lodz.pl references mompean, j. a., & fouz-gonzález, j. (eds.). (2015). investigating english pronunciation: trends and directions. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. szpyra-kozłowska, j. (2015). pronunciation in efl instruction. a research-based approach. bristol: multilingual matters. waniek-klimczak, e., & pawlak, m. (eds.). (2015). teaching and researching the pronunciation of english. heidelberg: springer. 755 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (4). 2018. 755-774 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.4.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt automaticity of lexical access and executive control in croatian-german bilinguals and second language learners kristina vujnović malivuk university of zagreb, croatia krisvujnovic@yahoo.com marijan palmović university of zagreb, croatia marijan.palmovic@erf.hr lovorka zergollern-miletić university of zagreb, croatia l.zergollern-miletic@ufzg.hr abstract the aim of this study was to explore automaticity of lexical access and executive functions of language learners and bilinguals while considering their language automaticity. three groups of youths aged 14 to 18 were tested: croatian-german early bilinguals, croatian high school students who participated in a german immersion programme at school and croatian high school students of german as a foreign language. the participants were tested on a modified version of the stroop test (i.e., a stroop-like test). it presented pictures of an animal or an object with names of an animal or an object written over the picture. the names were written in croatian or german and were either congruent or incongruent. lexical access was slower for the bilinguals in both croatian and german, which suggests that they used more of their cognitive resources because both of their languages were highly active, and more executive control was required to complete the task. keywords: automaticity; lexical access; executive control; bilingualism; second language learning kristina vujnović malivuk, marijan palmović, lovorka zergollern-miletić 756 1. introduction lexical access is the process in which we access the mental lexicon in order to retrieve information about words (dijkstra, 2005), and word identification is based on lexical access through phonological and written inputs. over the last few decades, a large body of empirical research has been devoted to the study of bilingual word identification. the models that were developed were mostly based on monolingual word identification models, with, however, the necessity of adding features which are present in bilingual language processing. in addition, the advantages of bilingualism are widely discussed in terms of academic achievements or cognitive flexibility (bialystok, craik, & luk, 2008; costa, hernandez, costa-faidella, & sebastian-galles, 2009; for a review, see bialystok, craik, green, & gollan, 2009). however, bilingualism seems to produce subtle difficulties in accessing each language and even proficient bilingual speakers actually perform worse than monolingual speakers in language production tasks and lexical access tasks in l1 and l2. even bilinguals who are highly proficient in both languages and who acquired both languages at an early age perform worse in picture naming tasks in their l2, and more surprisingly in their l1, when compared with monolingual speakers (ivanova & costa, 2008). when bilingual speakers need to produce examples of words that belong to a certain semantic category (e.g., fruit) they are slower in retrieving words and they produce fewer examples than monolingual speakers (roselli et al., 2002; see bialystok et al., 2009 for a review). additionally, bilingual speakers report more tip-of-the-tongue states (gollan & silverberg, 2001), even when they are tested only in their l1. however, when they are required to put picture names into categories such as human-made or natural objects, they are equally successful as monolingual speakers (gollan, montoya, fennema-notestine, & morris, 2005), which suggests that differences do not occur at the semantic level. the cause of these difficulties is debated: while some claim that they are caused by the constant need for monitoring (cognitive control), others view the divided exposure (weaker links) as the main factor that explains the difficulties. therefore, in order to differentiate between these two accounts of bilingual processing, we examine the results from a croatian-german stroop-like task, carried out by three groups of croatian-german speakers assumed to differ in automaticity of lexical access (skilled bilinguals, immersion students and students of german as foreign language). automaticity in lexical access is studied with the stroop task in which a word in croatian or german is written over the picture in two experimental conditions (word congruent with the picture or not). the prolonged reaction times are measured in the incongruent conditions due to the students’ need to inhibit the automatic retrieval of the word represented by automaticity of lexical access and executive control in croatian-german bilinguals and second. . . 757 the picture. the pattern of the results in two languages and three student groups will be interpreted in relation to the two approaches. given this rationale for the study, the article will start with the literature review, which elaborates on the bilingual disadvantage found in language production tasks and automaticity in language processing, two topics that we try to integrate in our research in order to answer the questions of how much proficiency and exposure is enough for bilinguals to achieve automaticity of lexical access and whether the participants who achieved automaticity in both languages experience difficulties in bilingual language mode due to this dual automatic language processing. while examining automaticity we wanted to determine whether partial immersion in school could provide sufficient exposure for language students to achieve automaticity of lexical access. we expect these answers to our questions to be able to give us a new perspective in our attempts to differentiate between the two approaches (cognitive control and weaker links) in the context of bilingual disadvantages. this review and the statement of our aims are followed by the section on participants, a more detailed task description in the materials and procedure sections, and finally the results and discussion sections containing statistical analysis of the results and their interpretation. we end the article with the conclusion and propositions for further research. 2. literature review models of bilingual word recognition refer to the questions of whether the word form is stored in a shared lexicon or in two different lexicons. empirical research evidence implicates that the former proposition is probably valid (francis, 2005). furthermore, it has been proposed that task demands influence whether lexical access is language selective or non-selective. generally, two viewpoints are usually contrasted in theoretical approaches: language selective access in independent lexicons and language non-selective access in a shared lexicon (dijkstra & van heuven, 2002). another important question in bilingual word recognition is whether skilled bilinguals are able to attenuate the influence of one of their languages, to what degree they can do that and which factors influence this process. though we are far from a complete model of bilingual word recognition, progress has been made in the form of computational models. the following computational models are the current models of bilingual word recognition: bilingual interactive activation model (bia; dijkstra & van heuven, 1998), inhibitory control model (green, 1986, 1998), language mode framework (grosjean, 1997, 2001) and bia+ model (dijkstra & van heuven, 2002). all of these current models support the viewpoint of language non-selective access in an integrated kristina vujnović malivuk, marijan palmović, lovorka zergollern-miletić 758 lexicon. however, costa and caramazza (1999) challenged the assumption of nonselective access and proposed the hypothesis of language-specific selection (costa, colomé, & caramazza, 2000; costa, miozzo, & caramazza, 1999; finkbeiner, gollan, & caramazza, 2006). in this study we will make reference to two of these models: inhibitory control model and language mode framework via the executive control approach to bilingual disadvantages, and to the previously mentioned hypothesis via the weaker links approach. 2.1. bilingual disadvantage in language production tasks according to costa, sadat, and martin (2013), bilingual disadvantages in lexical access and word production can be explained in two ways: they can be seen as the consequence of the fact that bilingual speakers need to constantly control the two languages, that is, the consequence of higher demands placed on executive control in bilingual speakers (green, 1998). the other explanation is the weaker links hypothesis, also known as the frequency-lag hypothesis (gollan, slattery, van assche, duyck, & rayner, 2011), which is based on frequency effect (gollan, montoya, cera, & sandoval, 2008). the name of the weaker links hypothesis comes from assumed weaker links between semantic and phonological representations of words. according to the weaker links hypothesis, bilingual speakers use each of their languages less frequently compared to monolingual speakers using their language, and this means that the frequency of use of lexical representations in both languages is lower in bilingual speakers. when a word is used less frequently, the response latencies in retrieving the word are longer (jescheniak & levelt, 1994), so bilingual speakers are consequently slower in lexical access than monolingual speakers. according to the executive control approach, language production of bilingual speakers is under the influence of language control mechanisms activated during language production (green, 1998). as opposed to monolinguals, who activate only one language, bilinguals show different levels of activation of both of their languages. as grosjean (2008, p. 38) points out, “the state of activation of the bilinguals’ languages and language processing mechanisms, at a given point in time, has been called the language mode.” bilinguals can be in the monolingual language mode when they deactivate one language (but never completely) and in the bilingual language mode when both languages are active. furthermore, there can be various levels of activation for both languages, ranging from slightly to fully active. in order to avoid interference between languages, especially when both languages are highly active, bilingual speakers need to use some kind of language control, and this additional processing influences lexical access, which becomes slower in bilingual speakers. automaticity of lexical access and executive control in croatian-german bilinguals and second. . . 759 along with cross-language interference and a need for language control in bilingual language production suggested by the executive control approach, numerous studies and review articles (bialystok et al., 2009; bialystok et al., 2008; bialystok, craik, & luk, 2012; costa et al., 2009; costa & sebastián-gallés, 2014; kroll & bialystok, 2013) suggested a bilingual advantage in non-verbal executive control tasks. the idea is that due to constant need for language control, bilinguals actually exercise their executive control. for example, costa et al. (2009) reported faster bilingual overall response times in the flanker task.1 they conducted two experiments in which bilingual and monolingual participants performed the task in two different versions of the experiment. in the first experiment, which was a low-monitoring version, the participants responded to mainly congruent or mainly incongruent trials, and in the second experiment congruent and incongruent conditions were randomly distributed in a mixed condition, which was a high-monitoring task. the bilingual advantage was only present in the high-monitoring experiment. according to the authors, this may be an effect of a better monitoring system which is highly active in high-monitoring demands of the task. better performance may be the result of the bilingual need to monitor and control the appropriate language in everyday communication, which serves as a practice for the monitoring system. however, an opposed view proposed by paap and greenberg (2013) suggests that the bilingual advantage is actually a result of a publication bias which favours positive results over negative and null results (de bruin, treccani, & della sala, 2015). paap, johnson, and sawi (2015) refer to other possible causes for the bilingual advantage, such as type 1 error and confounds in demographic factors, and they reinforce their view by stating that many authors have not been able to replicate the findings from the seminal studies. 2.2. automaticity in language processing research in automaticity in lexical access has shown differences between the first and the second language. lexical access in the first language is fast, the language is processed with little or no conscious control, and once it is initiated it cannot be stopped (segalowitz, 2013). on the other hand, lexical access in the second language is usually not automatic, especially in the early phases of language learning, whereas later phases include a higher degree of automaticity defined as ballistic, fast and effortless processing (segalowitz & hulstijn, 2005). when we are acquiring a new skill, automaticity is the result of long and continuous practice (schneider, dumais, & schiffrin, 1984) and it is important in fluency 1 eriksen flanker task is a non-verbal executive control task which is based on the suppression of unwanted responses (eriksen & eriksen, 1974). kristina vujnović malivuk, marijan palmović, lovorka zergollern-miletić 760 development in the second language (segalowitz, 2010). tzelgov, henik, sneg, and baruch (1996) examined automaticity in dominant bilinguals of hebrew and english. the participants performed a modified stroop test2 which contained words in hebrew and english and the incongruent condition had the orthography of the other language. the participants demonstrated a strong interference effect for incongruent l1 words written in l2 orthography and l1 phonology, but not for l2 words written in l1 orthography and l2 phonology. the results suggest that once the phonology in l1 is activated, linguistic processing cannot be stopped, which is not the case with l2. favreau and segalowitz (1983) conducted a study with two groups of bilingual speakers, both fluent in english and french with equally high language proficiency. the groups differed in the relative speed of firstversus second-language reading. bilingual speakers with equal reading rate demonstrated ballistic language processing in both of their languages, and those with slower optimal reading rates in the second language showed ballistic language processing only in their first language. these results suggest that the automaticity of language processing is related not only to high proficiency and fluency, but that there are also differences in automaticity in various groups of fluent language speakers. there is a need to further explore which level of proficiency in the second language is sufficient in order to achieve automaticity in the weaker language and whether different approaches to language learning, such as bilingual immersion programs and traditional methods of language learning provide enough language input and interaction in order to achieve automaticity in lexical access in the weaker language. 3. the present study the first aim of this study is to explore the differences in automaticity in the weaker language among three groups of participants. our hypothesis (table 1 includes a summary of the study hypotheses, dependent variables, expected group differences and the relation of the hypotheses to the two approaches) is that all the groups should demonstrate language automaticity in their first language, that is, there should be a significant stroop effect, which is observed as the difference between congruent and incongruent stimuli in all three groups of participants in the croatian language. furthermore, we propose that in a language which is not our native tongue, the lack of inhibition of the incongruent stimuli is actually a sign of the lack of second language automaticity. therefore, in the german language the difference in reaction times between the congruent and incongruent conditions 2 stroop task is a verbal executive control task which is based on interference in the reaction time, e.g., it requires the participant to name the colour of the word while ignoring the word itself (stroop, 1935). automaticity of lexical access and executive control in croatian-german bilinguals and second. . . 761 should be large only for the bilingual participants who acquired both languages early and use them regularly in everyday communication, that is, who are equally proficient and fluent in both languages. in other words, in this group language behaviour in german should resemble language behaviour in croatian. table 1 hypotheses, dependent variables, expected group differences and the relation of the hypotheses to the executive functions approach and weaker links approach hypothesis dependent variable group differences in accordance with the approach all the groups should demonstrate automaticity in lexical access in their first language rt difference between congruent and incongruent stimuli in croatian significant rt difference between congruent and incongruent stimuli in croatian in all three groups both approaches only bilinguals should demonstrate automaticity in lexical access in their second language rt difference between congruent and incongruent stimuli in german significant rt difference between congruent and incongruent stimuli in german only in bilingual group both approaches only in bilinguals strong activation of both languages requires high monitoring and control total rt total rt slower in bilinguals, faster in immersion students and the fastest in german language students executive functions approach bilingual speakers have weaker connections than native speakers even in their first language rt for croatian stimuli rt for croatian stimuli should be slower for bilinguals than the other two groups weaker links approach native speakers who are not bilinguals do not differ in automaticity of lexical access rt for croatian stimuli rt for croatian stimuli should not differ significantly between immersion students and german language students weaker links approach bilingual speakers show more automaticity in lexical access in their second language than non-native language learners rt for german congruent stimuli rt for german congruent stimuli should be faster for bilinguals than for the other two groups weaker links approach note. rt = reaction time. the second aim is to see whether the differences in language processing among the three groups could help choose between the executive functions approach and the weaker links hypothesis, that is, to see whether the pattern of the results fits one approach better than the other. in accordance with the executive control model (green, 1998) and different levels of activation that could be achieved in bilingual speakers (grosjean, 2008), our hypothesis is that there will be a difference in overall reaction time in the croatian language and german language among the three groups. we propose that for bilinguals, whose both languages are very strong, the mere presence of both languages in the task is enough to put kristina vujnović malivuk, marijan palmović, lovorka zergollern-miletić 762 them into a state where high monitoring and control is required, and that for less proficient bilinguals, less monitoring and control is required since the second language is not as strongly activated. the bilingual speakers, who are highly proficient in croatian and german and have the highest level of the german language activation among our participants along with a strong activation of the croatian language, are faced with higher demands on their control and monitoring processes. for them the performance of the task requires more cognitive resources in order to successfully monitor and avoid the interference of the unwanted language. therefore, the reaction time in both languages should be slower in bilingual speakers, faster in immersion students and the fastest in german language students. on the other hand, the weaker links hypothesis proposes that bilingual speakers have weaker connections in both languages due to reduced language use of each language. according to this approach, that is, if we exclude the possibility that bilingual participants need to use more executive control because of cross-language interference, the pattern of results should indicate that bilinguals are slower in lexical access in croatian, but immersion students should be equally fast in lexical access in their first language (croatian) as german language students since both groups are native speakers of croatian. in addition, bilinguals should be faster in the congruent condition in the german language than the other two groups of participants since the other two groups are not native speakers of german. 3.1. participants the participants were high school students aged 14 to 18 from zagreb and velika gorica, croatia. the students were divided into three groups: croatian german bilingual group (n = 29), croatian native speakers who were enrolled in a german immersion programme at school (n = 34) and croatian native speakers who learned german as a foreign language at school (n = 31). all the participants gave their informed consent to participate in the study and their rights were protected according to the university of zagreb ethics code and the ethics code for research with children. the most significant differences between bilingual students and the other two groups were the age of acquisition (aoa), the context in which they acquired/learned german, the amount of time they lived or were educated in german speaking countries and the amount of german language use in everyday situations. bilingual speakers acquired both their languages in everyday communication with their parents, relatives and friends and spent a long period of time in a german speaking area. at the time when the study was conducted, all three groups were attending german language classes as part of their education in croatia. all the bilingual participants were exposed to the german language before adolescence (the average age of exposure to german m = 1.47, sd = 1.98; croatian m = automaticity of lexical access and executive control in croatian-german bilinguals and second. . . 763 1.02, sd = 2.87). bilingual participants continually used both croatian and german at school and at home. at home they spoke both croatian and german with their parents, siblings and/or relatives. their estimated proficiency was c1/c2 according to the common european framework of reference for languages (cefr). other participants did not use german at home and their exposure to the language was limited to language lessons at school and television programmes in german. immersion students attended a partial immersion program in high school. they had been attending the immersion program for 2-4 years. they attended on average 12 lessons in german per week where they were taught in german and interacted in german during the lesson. this part of the program was taught by native speakers and german language teachers. subjects taught in german were: german language lessons, history, physics, chemistry, sociology, ethics, logic and philosophy. the students estimated proficiency was b2 according to cefr. prior to attending the immersion programme in high school, these students started their formal german language education in elementary school in the fourth grade (aged 10), while being first exposed to german at an earlier age (age of first exposure to german on television and/or in kindergarten m = 4.63, sd = 3.06). foreign language learners who learned german almost exclusively during language lessons began their german language learning in elementary school in the fourth grade and continued in high school (three german language lessons per week on average). the age of first exposure to german was m = 6.62, sd = 3.01. the students’ estimated proficiency was b1 according to cefr. the results of the self-evaluation questionnaire with language use data and demographic characteristics are shown in tables 2 and 3. table 2 means and standard deviations of the participants’ language characteristics bilinguals immersion students language students test p n = 29 (18 females) n = 34 (19 females) n = 31 (19 females) percentage of croatian use currently 65.28 (14.74) 64.06 (13.32) 69.03 (14.48) f (2,91) = 1.069 >.05 percentage of german use currently 24.41ᵃ (10.85) 19.15ᵃ (8.52) 8.58ᵇ (5.87) f (2,91) = 26.661 .000 age of first exposure to croatian (yrs) 1.02ᵃ (2.87) .10 b(.00) .10 b(.00) f (2,91) = 3.347 .04 age of first exposure to german (yrs) 1.47ᵃ (1.98) 4.63ᵇ (3.06) 6.62ᶜ (3.01) f (2,91) = 26.471 .000 years of education in croatia 6.59ᵃ (3.55) 10.41ᵇ (1.48) 10.77ᵇ (.99) f (2,91) = 32.295 .000 years of education in a german speaking country 6.59ᵃ (3.64) 0 b(0) 0 b(0) f (2,91) = 106.672 .000 croatian language use with family since early childhood since early childhood since early childhood german language use with family (in yrs) 12.48 (5.30) no no years of watching tv in croatian 9.17ᵃ (6.37) 14.38ᵇ (2.71) 13.52ᵇ (4.07) f (2,91) = 11.499 .000 years of watching tv in german 12.79ᵃ (3.94) 9.00ᵇ (5.25) 6.77ᵇ (5.76) f (2,91) = 10.742 .000 years living in croatia 7.3ᵃ (4.41) 16.18ᵇ (.94) 16.19ᵇ (2.55) f (2,91) = 93.564 .000 years living in a german speaking country 9.07ᵃ (3.71) .03 b(.17) .16 b(.64) f (2,91) = 184.289 .000 self rated croatian proficiency (1-7) 6.38ᵃ (.78) 7 b(0) 7 b(0) f (2,91) = 20.889 .000 self rated german proficiency (1-7) cefr croatian cefr german 6.62ᵃ (.62) c1/c2 c1/c2 5.09ᵇ (1.16) c2 b2 4.84ᵇ (1.00) c2 b1 f (2,91) = 29.553 .000 note. the means in the same row with the same letters do not differ significantly and with different letters differ significantly from each other. standard deviations are shown in brackets. cefr is the abbreviation for the common european framework of reference for languages. kristina vujnović malivuk, marijan palmović, lovorka zergollern-miletić 764 table 3 means and standard deviations of the bilingual participants’ language characteristics croatian german t test p m (sd) m (sd) percentage of language use currently 65.28 (14.74) 24.41 (10.85) 8.960 .000 age of first exposure (yrs) 1.02 (2.87) 1.47 (1.98) -.632 >.05 years of education in croatia/german speaking country 6.59 (3.55) 6.59 (3.64) .00 >.05 language use with family (in yrs) 14.86 (3.82) 12.48 (5.30) 1.80 >.05 years of watching tv in croatian/german 9.17 (6.37) 12.79 (3.94) -3.711 .001 years living in croatia/german speaking country 7.3 (4.41) 9.07 (3.71) -1.190 >.05 self rated croatian/german proficiency (1-7) 6.38 (.78) 6.62 (.62) -1.367 >.05 the main differences between the three groups of participants are the context of language acquisition/learning and the frequency of language use. psycholinguistic research suggests that there are differences in the memory systems and depth of language processing between speakers who acquire a language in a natural setting and those who learn it as a foreign language (paradis, 2009). as foreign language learners we mostly use our explicit memory, for example, for memorization, which is slower than implicit memory, which requires no conscious awareness. in a real-life context every situation is personalized and it requires a fast response with deeper processing involved, which leads to stronger and more automatic recall. in contrast, language learning in the formal language class setting involves shallow processing and more metalinguistic awareness (paradis, 2009). recently a number of researchers (ferré, sánchez-casas, & guasch, 2006; kroll, van hell, tokowicz, & green, 2010) have pointed out that there is a limit to direct access to l2 semantics even for highly proficient bilinguals and it is connected to the type of exposure to l2, that is, whether they were exposed to l2 in daily life and whether they acquired it early in life or as an adult. as opposed to early bilinguals who acquire both of their languages simultaneously, late bilinguals acquire their l2 with reduced neuroplasticity and their l1 had already become entrenched by the time they started learning their l2. consequently l2 competes with l1 or parasitically relates to l1 (hernandez, li, & macwhinney, 2005). according to the competition and entrenchment model of hernandez et al. (2005), late bilinguals differ in several aspects which influence their proficiency and, in our opinion, also their automaticity in second language: how deeply their l1 was entrenched when they started acquiring their l2, how much brain plasticity was available and how much dedication they put into acquiring metacognitive strategies like rehearsal, imagery and recoding. factors that could influence whether someone becomes a more and less proficient late bilingual would be the use of metacognitive strategies and l2 exposure. this increased exposure and strategy use would increase the ability of a proficient late english-spanish bilingual to think of manzana independently of the word apple, thus enhancing automaticity. automaticity of lexical access and executive control in croatian-german bilinguals and second. . . 765 having this in mind, we included three groups of participants: bilinguals who acquired both languages early in a naturalistic setting, still use the languages outside the classroom and differ in the age of first exposure to l2 and in the quantity of exposure to l2 from the other two groups (early exposure, high proficiency); immersion students who were exposed to classical teaching methods and also to a more naturalistic setting of immersion experience at school and who also used more metacognitive strategies than foreign language learners and were more proficient (late exposure, high proficiency); and foreign language students who learned their second language almost exclusively in their language lessons (late exposure, lower proficiency). thus, examining these three groups we can compare them with regard to proficiency and exposure. 3.2. materials and procedures the participants performed a modified stroop task on a laptop. the task was displayed on a 15-inch laptop screen using e-prime 2 stimulus presentation program (schneider, eschman, & zuccolotto, 2002). the modified stroop task was based on a picture word interference paradigm described in roelofs and lamers (2007). however, this task required the participants to name the word, while in our task the participants gave their answers by pressing a button. the participants were shown black and white pictures of an animal or an object with the name of the same animal or object written over the picture in capital letters (congruent condition) or a name of an object written over a picture of an animal and a name of an animal written over a picture of an object (incongruent condition). the stimuli (20 animals and 20 objects) were chosen among a larger set of stimuli based on familiarity of the words in german at b1 level of language knowledge, which is the level of the least proficient group (see appendix for a full list of the stimuli). the instructions were to press x on the keyboard if they see a picture of an animal on the screen and to press m if they see a picture of an object, regardless of the text written over the picture. before every picture there was a fixation cross on the screen for 250 ms to orient the participant’s gaze and after that a blank screen for 100 ms. the stimuli (picture-word combinations) were shown in the middle of the screen for 300 ms. the participants were given 1800 ms to press the correct button before a new stimulus was shown. the reaction times were measured from the onset of the stimuli, as usual in this sort of research. the stimuli consisted of 20 different animal and 20 different object pictures with congruent or incongruent names in croatian or german (altogether 160 different stimuli). every participant was randomly shown 100 stimuli. half of the stimuli were congruent and another half incongruent; also, a half were in croatian and the other half in german. the names of animals and objects were matched in frequency and syllable length in croatian and german. kristina vujnović malivuk, marijan palmović, lovorka zergollern-miletić 766 before performing the task, the participants were given a short trial task that was not included in the analysis and its purpose was to familiarize them with the demands of the task. example task stimuli are offered in figure 1. figure 1 example of the task stimuli (congruent and incongruent stimuli in croatian and german) 4. results and discussion the descriptive statistics for all the reaction times (rts) are included in table 4. mixed model anova with language group as between-subjects factor, congruency (congruent, incongruent) and language of the stimulus (german, croatian) as within-subjects factors was used for the statistical analysis of the data. only the correct responses were included in the reaction time analysis and all the reactions that were shorter than 150 ms or longer than 1500 ms were excluded from further analysis. the analysis has shown a significant main effect of congruency (f(1, 91) = 37.447, p = .000): the participants responded faster to congruent stimuli than to incongruent ones. the main effect of language was not significant (f < 1), which means that there was no difference in reaction times in croatian and german. furthermore, the interactions between language and language group and between congruency and language group were not significant (both f < 1), which means that the groups’ overall rts in each language did not differ with regard to language and the groups did not differ in rts with respect to the congruency of the picture and the word written over it. the interaction between language and congruency was significant (f(1, 91) = 4.566, p = .035). the participants showed the stroop effect in croatian, but not in german. the interaction between language, congruency and language group was not significant (f(2, 91) = 1.246, p > .05). however, the main effect of language group was significant (f(2, 91) = 3.432, p = .037). based on bonferroni post hoc analysis, there was a significant difference between bilingual speakers and foreign language learners in overall rts. bilingual speakers responded significantly slower than foreign language learners (p = .033). immersion programme students did not differ significantly either from automaticity of lexical access and executive control in croatian-german bilinguals and second. . . 767 bilingual speakers (p > .05) or foreign language learners (p > .05). the results for croatian stimuli are shown in figure 2 while the results for german stimuli are shown in figure 3 for all three groups of participants. there were no significant differences between the groups with regard to accuracy analysis. table 4 mean reaction times (in milliseconds) and standard deviations (in parentheses) by language group in the stroop task language group croatian german congruent incongruent congruent incongruent bilingual students 495.89 (48.22) 507.13 (54.61) 497.03 (50.57) 508.21 (56.43) immersion students 477.11 (43.38) 489.95 (45.72) 483.05 (44.29) 483.55 (43.66) foreign language students 465.93 (40.55) 481.14 (42.40) 468.60 (37.39) 475.63 (40.63) figure 2 results of the stroop-like task for croatian stimuli figure 3 results of the stroop-like task for german stimuli kristina vujnović malivuk, marijan palmović, lovorka zergollern-miletić 768 our study revealed some interesting results regarding automaticity and language processing in bilinguals and language learners. first, the participants showed a stroop (or stroop-like) effect only in croatian, and not in the german language. the inhibition required for the stroop-like task (to inhibit the linguistic information and response to the picture) is taken as a measure of the automaticity of language: the more inhibition is required, the more automated the language is. the word representations in an automatized language are automatically activated once we see the words and we cannot suppress them. in other words, we take inhibition, an executive function, as a measure of automaticity, our construct. obviously, it is easier to suppress a word in a language which is not our mother tongue, just as it is more difficult for us and takes more time to read in a language which is not our native language, especially if we are not fluent in it. this absence of automaticity was expected in german language learners and, to some extent, german immersion students, given that the participants in these two groups were native speakers of croatian and that they might not have been sufficiently exposed to german. literature (tzelgov et al., 1996; segalowitz, 2013) suggests that automaticity in dominant bilinguals should be expected only in the first language. however, we expected to find the stroop effect in both languages in the bilingual group since some research (favreau & segalowitz, 1983; segalowitz, 2013; segalowitz & hulstijn, 2005) has shown that once ballistic language processing is started in balanced bilinguals it cannot be stopped. even though we can see the stroop effect in bilinguals also in german (figure 3), it was not significant in the statistical analysis. the bilingual speakers estimated their proficiency in croatian and german as high (croatian m = 6.38, sd = .78, german m = 6.62, sd = .62, t = -1.367, p > .05) and they speak german on a daily basis at home and at school; however, they have lived in croatia on average for the last six and a half years and they speak croatian significantly more than german (m = 65.28, sd = 14.74; m = 24.41, sd = 10.85, t = 8.960, p = .000). it might be possible that the attrition processes in the german language had already begun, which could be the reason why we found automaticity only in the stronger language, that is, croatian, and why processing in the weaker language was less automatic. these results are consistent with the findings by favreau and segalowitz (1983), who reported that fluent bilinguals with high second language proficiency who have slower optimal reading rates in the second language demonstrate less automatic lexical access in the second language. it seems that achieving automaticity in a language which is less used is very difficult regardless of the various contexts of the second language usage, early exposure in l2, fluency and high proficiency in l2. subsequently, our results suggest that a partial bilingual immersion environment does not provide enough language input and interaction in order to achieve automaticity in the weaker language. automaticity of lexical access and executive control in croatian-german bilinguals and second. . . 769 secondly, bilingual speakers tended to be overall slower than language learners. this effect is consistent with the findings by gollan et al. (2005) and ivanova and costa (2008), who found slower bilingual performance in language production tasks, even in their first language. this is consistent with the executive control approach (green, 1998) since it predicts slower performance on language-related tasks due to the constant need of bilingual speakers to monitor and control the activation of both languages. faster performance for german language learners was significant for both languages and it reflects the processing speed in the given circumstances where both languages are highly active, but executive control and monitoring is highly needed only for one language which is automated. the overall rts of immersion students of german follow this trend, since their performance is slower than the performance of language students and faster than the one of bilingual students. even though their performance was not significantly different from either group in the post hoc analysis, it consistently follows this trend in both languages. we believe that these results are not consistent with the weaker links hypothesis, which gollan et al. (2005) used in the interpretation of the slower performance of bilinguals compared to monolinguals in a picture naming task. this hypothesis would yield different expectations based only on word frequencies, that is, according to it there should be no difference in performance between immersion students and foreign language students in their native tongue due to the fact that the word frequencies are controlled for in the experiment and that the exposure to german differs only in the exposure to german at school, while both groups have little exposure to german in everyday life. furthermore, the weaker links hypothesis would yield a prediction that the bilinguals should be faster than immersion students and language learners in the congruent condition in german, since this condition should be facilitated by their more frequent usage of german words. however, this was not corroborated by our data. 5. conclusion in this study, a modified stroop task was used to investigate automatic processes related to word retrieval in croatian-german bilinguals, immersion students, and classical german language learners. the results follow the pattern that was consistent with the executive control approach to bilingual processing. it seems that the bilingual group that has the strongest second language among our three groups experiences the most difficulties in lexical access because of this strong dual language activation. however, the group effect was somewhat diminished by the fact that the bilingual students had already spent more than six years on average in croatia and the attrition processes in this group had started. we suggest kristina vujnović malivuk, marijan palmović, lovorka zergollern-miletić 770 this was the reason we have not found automaticity in the second language in the bilingual group. therefore, future work will have to put more focus on bilingual speakers in a bilingual environment. as for language learning, the program of partial immersion (i.e., attending some courses in the second language) does not provide enough language input to achieve automaticity in l2, although it has obvious educational value. we propose that it would be useful to explore programs with full immersion in the weaker language. acknowledgements we would like to thank kees de bot and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this article. automaticity of lexical access and executive control in croatian-german bilinguals and second. . . 771 references bialystok, e., craik, f., green, d. w., & gollan, t. h. 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(1996). unintentional word reading via the phonological route: the stroop effect with cross-script homophones. journal of experimental psychology: learning, memory and cognition, 22, 336-349. kristina vujnović malivuk, marijan palmović, lovorka zergollern-miletić 774 appendix stimuli for the modified stroop task stimuli (category of everyday objects) for the stroop task in croatian and german with their english translations german word croatian word english translation tisch stol table tasche torba handbag kissen jastuk pillow stiefel čizma boot mütze kapa cap mantel kaput coat hose hlače trousers schal šal scarf geldtasche novčanik wallet gardine zavjesa curtain uhr sat clock fenster prozor window haus kuća house fahrrad bicikl bicycle teller tanjur plate regenschirm kišobran umbrella löffel žlica spoon jacke jakna jacket kühlschrank frižider fridge flasche boca bottle stimuli (category of animals) for the stroop task in croatian and german with their english translations german word croatian word english translation hund pas dog katze mačka cat pferd konj horse maus miš mouse ratte štakor rat vogel ptica bird biene pčela bee wolf vuk wolf schaf ovca sheep schlange zmija snake kamel deva camel fisch riba fish löwe lav lion tiger tigar tiger schwein svinja pig frosch žaba frog spinne pauk spider giraffe žirafa giraffe fliege muha fly tintenfisch hobotnica octopus 11 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (1). 2021. 11-13 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.1.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial it is my immense pleasure to share with you the first 2021 issue of studies in second language learning and teaching. it brings together five papers reporting the findings of empirical studies as well as two reviews of very recent publications. the issue opens with the contribution by mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, and joanna zawodniak, who investigate changes in the levels of boredom experienced by 13 polish university students majoring in english during four efl classes as well as factors responsible for such fluctuations. multiple sources of data were applied which included boredom-grids, where participants indicated the intensity of this negative emotion on a 7-point likert scale at 5-minute intervals, class evaluation forms, narratives, semi-structured interviews with four students after each class, and lesson plans. a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrated that boredom was indeed subject to betweenand within-class variation, which resulted from various constellations of variables, with repetitiveness, monotony and predictability playing a key role. in the second paper, xiaowan yang and mark wyatt report a qualitative case study which examined teachers’ beliefs about learners’ motivation and their own motivational practices, and the actions they actually took in this respect in the classroom in the context of teaching english for specific purposes (esp) in china. the analysis of the data collected from three university-level teachers of business english by means of pre-observation interviews, in-class observations and stimulated recall interviews yielded evidence for tensions between participants’ cognitions and practices they engaged in, showing that such mismatches negatively affect their self-determination. the existence of this cognitive disharmony is attributed to scarce opportunities for professional development, outdated knowledge about motivation and cultural influences. the theme of esp also features in the following paper by cailing lu, frank boers and averil coxhead, who explored understanding of technical terms included in a list of technical words related to traditional chinese medicine (tcm) with the aim of determining which of these terms should be emphasized during 12 instruction. the requisite data were collected by means of a word association task, drawing on read’s (1998) word association test, as well as retrospective interviews from 21 ba students in china and new zealand. the analysis showed that although the students manifested good understanding of the targeted items, especially high-frequency ones, some chinese participants experienced difficulty understanding midand low-frequency words. by contrast, the western learners mainly struggled with chinese loan words, but their comprehension was not impacted by cultural differences. in the fourth paper, bryła-cruz reports the findings of a study which looked into the role of gender in the perception of english segments by polish learners of english as a foreign language. the data were collected from 40 male and 40 female secondary school students who were asked to indicate the sound they heard in 20 sentences containing minimal pairs. the differences between males and females failed to reach statistical significance for most targeted segments and while the hierarchy of perceptual difficulty was not identical for both groups, it was similar, which suggests that differences between the sound systems of the first and second language might trump the mediating role of gender. in the final paper, jesús izquierdo, silvia patricia aquino zúñiga, and verónica garcía martínez shift the focus to the context of foreign language education in rural schools in southeast mexico, zooming in on the challenges faced by generalist teachers, or non-language specialists, tasked with the job of teaching english. the data were collected by means of questionnaires administered to 155 such teachers in 17 schools and semi-structured interviews with those who manifested the greatest involvement in professional development. using frequency analysis and categorical aggregation, the researchers show that generalist teachers are confronted with a wide array of problems related to their professional preparation, instructional techniques used as well as the sociocultural realities of l2 instruction in rural communities. in addition, only a few teachers are prepared to develop professionally, relying instead on limited strategies that help them combat the challenges they encounter. the issue also includes two book reviews by jarosław krajka and mirosław pawlak. the first book deals with the assessment of english proficiency among young learners while the second is devoted to research into learning and teacher psychology from the perspective of complex dynamic systems theory (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2007). i am hopeful that all the contributions will provide food for thought to our readers and inspire them to further disentangle the intricacies of second language learning and teaching. mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl 13 references larsen-freeman, d., & cameron, l. (2007). complex systems and applied linguistics. oxford university press. read, j. (1998). validating a test to measure depth of vocabulary knowledge. in a. kunnan (ed.), validation in languge assessment (pp. 41-60). lawrence erlbaum. 619 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (4). 2016. 619-649 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.4.4 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl unconscious motivation. part ii: implicit attitudes and l2 achievement ali h. al-hoorie school of english, the university of nottingham, uk the english language institute, jubail industrial college, saudi arabia hoorie_a@jic.edu.sa abstract this paper investigates the attitudinal/motivational predictors of second language (l2) academic achievement. young adult learners of english as a foreign language (n = 311) completed several self-report measures and the singletarget implicit association test. examination of the motivational profiles of high and low achievers revealed that attachment to the l1 community and the ought-to l2 self were negatively associated with achievement, while explicit attitudes toward the l2 course and implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers were positively associated with it. the relationship between implicit attitudes and achievement could not be explained either by social desirability or by other cognitive confounds, and remained significant after controlling for explicit self-report measures. explicit–implicit congruence also revealed a similar pattern, in that congruent learners were more open to the l2 community and obtained higher achievement. the results also showed that neither the ideal l2 self nor intended effort had any association with actual l2 achievement, and that intended effort was particularly prone to social desirability biases. implications of these findings are discussed. keywords: motivation; implicit attitudes; implicit association test; social desirability; explicit–implicit correspondence ali h. al-hoorie 620 1. introduction although second language (l2) motivation research has made impressive advances since gardner and lambert’s (1959) seminal study, one notable trend has been by and large constant: motivation is conceptualized as a conscious factor, one that learners are aware of and can therefore exert considerable control on (e.g., al-hoorie, 2016a; dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). this is certainly in line with a more general trend in motivational psychology since the cognitive revolution. recently, however, more and more significance has been attached to the unconscious side of motivation in mainstream motivational psychology (e.g., alhoorie, 2015; r. m. ryan, 2012). the aim of this paper is to examine whether the l2 motivation field would also benefit from attention to unconscious approaches to human motivation. a second notable trend in much of the recent l2 motivation literature has been the tendency to avoid using l2 achievement as a criterion measure (e.g., moskovsky, assulaimani, racheva, & harkins, 2016). this trend may be traced back to csizér and dörnyei’s (2005) call for “increased theoretical clarity” since “motivation is a concept that explains why people behave as they do rather than how successful their behavior will be” (p. 20; see also dörnyei, 2001). dörnyei and ushioda (2011) have more explicitly advocated this motivation-behaviorachievement theoretical clarity, stating that achievement may be “the wrong criterion measure” (p. 200) for motivation studies. more recently, an alternative point of view is to emphasize that, after all, the “ultimate aim of motivation research is always to explain student learning” (dörnyei & ryan, 2015, p. 101) and “ultimately, sla is about achievement” (moskovsky et al., 2016, p. 643). indeed, while it is true that motivation is more strongly associated with behavior rather than achievement, it is also useful to examine the different attitudinal/motivational factors in order to distinguish the ones whose explanatory power is limited to (self-reported) motivated behavior from those whose explanatory power extends to actual learning and achievement. this will appraise the strength of each motivational variable. this is an issue that ellis (2009) has raised, describing it as “really needed” (p. 108) now. this is especially important since certain motivational constructs have already been shown to predict academic achievement successfully, such as integrative motivation (r = .33-.39, masgoret & gardner, 2003, table 4) and self-efficacy (r = .38, multon, brown, & lent, 1991, p. 34). this study therefore included a measure of achievement in the spirit of the proof of the pudding. this study also utilized the l2 motivational self system (l2 mss; dörnyei, 2005, 2009) as a theoretical framework because it is currently the most influential theory of l2 motivation (boo, dörnyei, & ryan, 2015). the l2 mss postulates unconscious motivation. part ii: implicit attitudes and l2 achievement 621 three factors: the ideal l2 self, the ought-to l2 self, and the l2 learning experience. according to this theory, the ideal l2 self is “a central component” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 67) and “the key concept” (dörnyei & ryan, 2015, p. 87). the ideal l2 self should therefore be the prime candidate to have a robust effect extending to achievement. 1.1. achievement in l2 motivation research contrary to claims in the literature (e.g., thompson & vásquez, 2015, pp. 159-160), the l2 mss has not been tested extensively in the context of actual l2 achievement, and so its educational relevance is not yet established. probably following the above call for theoretical clarity—and probably due to its convenience—there has been a paucity of research utilizing measures of actual l2 achievement in the l2 mss literature. indeed, the original argument in favor of the ideal l2 self equates self-reported “intended effort” with the “criterion measure”: “the ideal l2 self was consistently found to correlate highly with the criterion measure (intended effort), explaining 42% of the variance” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 31). in the few exceptions that did include a form of l2 achievement (e.g., dörnyei & chan, 2013; eid, 2008; kim & kim, 2011; lamb, 2012; macintyre & serroul, 2015; moskovsky et al., 2016), the results are not optimistic. in the two languages they examined, dörnyei and chan (2013) reported a relatively strong correlation between the mandarin ideal l2 self and grades in mandarin (r = .42), but a weaker correlation between the english ideal l2 self and school grades in english (r = .24), a correlation that is barely higher than the correlation between the english ideal l2 self and mandarin grades (r = .17). eid’s (2008) results paint a similarly mixed picture, in that the three languages she examined varied in how strongly they correlated with their respective grades (r = .17-.46). crosslanguage overlap was also obtained by eid (2008), as she found significant correlations between the french ideal self and italian grades (r = .35) and between the italian ideal self and french grades (r = .31), despite “the growing consensus in the field of l2 motivation that coexisting ideal l2 self images constitute fairly distinct l2-specific visions” (dörnyei & chan, 2013, p. 455). following the motivation-behavior-achievement theoretical clarity, it is possible that observed correlations between the ideal l2 self and achievement would decrease once we control for potential mediators, such as motivated behavior and the l2 learning experience (cf. papi, 2010; taguchi, magid, & papi, 2009). in a direct demonstration of this, kim and kim (2011) initially had a significant correlation between the ideal l2 self and achievement, but this association disappeared after controlling for motivated behavior. kim and kim (2011) note that “being motivated by developing a vivid ideal l2 self through a dominant ali h. al-hoorie 622 visual preference seems to be irrelevant to the level of academic achievement” (p. 36). interestingly, the auditory—rather than the visual—learning style remained a significant (though weak) predictor of achievement. kim and kim (2011) explain the unexpected superiority of the auditory preference by drawing from kim’s (2009) provocative argument that, because l2 is an essentially verbal ability, auditory preference might lead to more sensitivity in noticing l2 proficiency gaps. a second finding in kim and kim’s (2011) study is that intended effort also turned out to be a weak predictor of achievement, accounting for “merely 5.7%” (p. 37) of the variance. kim and kim (2011) concluded by expressing their disappointment that “the effect was not prominent enough to [support] its educational relevance . . . demotivated students may have an equal chance to earn a high english test score” (p. 38). consistent with kim and kim’s (2011) results, lamb (2012) used a c-test as a measure of l2 proficiency and found that the ideal l2 self could not predict achievement in any of his groups. when it comes to motivated behavior, the ideal l2 self also failed to predict it in two of three groups. in the group where the ideal l2 self did predict motivated behavior, the magnitude of the prediction was modest. in lamb’s (2012) words, the ideal l2 self explained “only 25% of the variance, compared to the more than 40% which dörnyei and ushioda (2011) argue is ‘typically’ found in other recent studies” (p. 1014). macintyre and serroul (2015) also tested the effect of the ideal l2 self on actual l2 performance in their idiodynamic paradigm, which examines individual motivational variability on a per-second timescale. in line with the above findings, macintyre and serroul (2015) found “no evidence” (p. 126) that the ideal l2 self is associated with idiodynamic ratings. in at least one study (moskovsky et al., 2016), the ideal l2 self was a negative predictor of language achievement. moskovsky et al. expressed their surprise that their results “suggest the unusual conclusion that learners with low ideal selves, low [positive l2 learning experience], and low [intended learning effort] are likely to achieve higher scores on l2 proficiency tasks” (p. 649; for further critiques of the ideal l2 self, see gardner, 2010; henry & cliffordson, 2015; hessel, 2015; lanvers, 2016; motha & lin, 2014; taylor, 2013, pp. 31-33). it is also worth noting that the ought-to l2 self has similarly been inconsistent, sometimes showing a negative association with l2 achievement (e.g., eid, 2008). although a systematic meta-analysis of the contribution of the l2 mss is yet to be conducted, the emerging picture points to the idea that “self-reported motivation does not always have behavioral consequences” (moskovsky et al., 2016, p. 641). one explanation for this unsatisfactory predictive validity is the role played by hidden moderators (e.g., low aptitude, inappropriate strategies, poor instruction) that can undermine motivated behavior (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). unconscious motivation. part ii: implicit attitudes and l2 achievement 623 another explanation has to do with the role played by the unconscious dimension of behavioral intent. in stressing the influence of such unconscious factors, some researchers have questioned the very validity of conscious self-reports— or at least their prestigious status. for example, a meta-analysis by connelly and ones (2010) shows the unexpected finding that ratings by others yield “substantially greater” (p. 1092) predictive validity of academic achievement than do self-reports. this suggests that researchers are sometimes better off asking other people about an individual’s motivation (e.g., classmates and teachers) than directly asking the individual about his/her own motivation! this finding might be attributable to at least two factors: implicit attitudes and social desirability. these two factors are discussed next. 2. implicit attitudes implicit (i.e., unconscious) attitudes are “introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects” (greenwald & banaji, 1995, p. 8). neuroscientific evidence lends support to the claim that implicit and explicit attitudes are indeed two distinct constructs. according to cunningham et al. (2004), implicit attitudes correlate with activation in the amygdala, the brain region concerned with emotions, while explicit processing is associated with activation in the frontal cortex, the area responsible for control and regulation (see also cunningham, johnson, gatenby, gore, & banaji, 2003; phelps et al., 2000). this explicit–implicit dissociation is explained by dual-process theories of cognitive functioning, which posit two simultaneous—but qualitatively different—kinds of mental processes (e.g., j. w. sherman, gawronski, & trope, 2014). associative processes form the basis of implicit attitudes through affective reactions that are automatically and efficiently activated once a relevant stimulus is encountered; propositional processes form the basis of explicit attitudes deriving rational judgments based on conscious, logical reasoning. this dissociation implies some independence between explicit and implicit attitudes, in that each might be associated with different types of outcome. indeed, while explicit attitudes might be better predictors of outcomes requiring intentional decisionmaking, implicit attitudes tend to exert their influence in more spontaneous situations (fazio, 2001; strack & deutsch, 2004). at an extreme, this dissociation may be seen as “a split in consciousness, such as mutually unaware person systems occupying the same brain” (greenwald & nosek, 2009, p. 65). when it comes to learning the language of another ethnic/racial community, there might similarly be implicit, not just explicit, processes in operation. ali h. al-hoorie 624 2.1. development of implicit attitudes attitudes in general form very early, even before birth, through genetic factors (bouchard et al., 2003) and through sounds heard while still in the womb (decasper & spence, 1986). after birth, attitudes are influenced by various factors (for a review, see banaji & heiphetz, 2010). one influential account of these influences is social learning theory (bandura, 1977), according to which children learn from observing others. research shows an association between children’s and parents’ attitudes (for a meta-analysis, see tenenbaum & leaper, 2002). the same principles seem to apply to implicit attitudes (sinclair, dunn, & lowery, 2005), but relatively little research has investigated this topic. this study therefore included a measure of parental support of l2 learning in order to examine its relation to l2 implicit attiudes. 2.2. implicit attitudes in l2 motivation in a first attempt to extend research on implicit attitudes to the l2 field, alhoorie (2016a) used the implicit association test (iat; greenwald, mcghee, & schwartz, 1998) as a measure of attitudes toward l2 speakers. al-hoorie found that, after holding constant explicit attitudes toward l2 speakers, l2 learners who had stronger implicit preference for l2 speakers (i.e., explicit–implicit congruence) also expressed stronger affiliation with the l2 group as well as less fear of assimilation and ethnocentric concerns. these results demonstrate that implicit attitudes are related to other attitudinal/motivational factors. one purpose of the present study is to extend this line of research to examine the relevance of implicit attitudes to l2 achievement. because al-hoorie’s (2016a) results were more salient for male rather than female learners, this study recruited an all-male sample in order to examine this effect more closely. finally, this study also used the single-target implicit association test (st-iat; wigboldus, holland, & van knippenberg, 2005), which is a variation of the original iat that does not require a contrasting category. 3. social desirability while research on implicit attitudes suggests that individuals may possess negative implicit attitudes toward specific social objects, social desirability proposes that some individuals have a more general tendency to present themselves favorably, and so they tend to exaggerate their views of themselves, for example, in their questionnaire responses. in presenting their impression management theory, tedeschi, schlenker, and bonoma (1971, p. 690) explain that “we are unconscious motivation. part ii: implicit attitudes and l2 achievement 625 postulating that it is not the actor’s own perceptions that matter so much as the actor’s beliefs about the impression that an observer gains.” in other words, individuals might tend to inflate their self-reports in order to obtain more favorable impressions from others. this is what investigators found when they examined self-reports that could be verified independently, such as one’s weight and height. for example, obese and overweight adolescents tend to misreport their weight, and this misreporting is consistently in the direction of underestimating their weight, so that they look skinnier (elgar, roberts, tudor-smith, & moore, 2005). women of reproductive age also underestimate their weight, and this happens regardless of their age, education, race, or marital status (brunner huber, 2007). the misreporting is more frequently found in the responses of overweight individuals, who usually have a stronger desire to present themselves more positively. when height is reported, as might be expected, it is misreported in the opposite direction; people overestimate their height to look taller (e.g., rowland, 1990). although the magnitude of misreporting varies (e.g., see spencer, appleby, davey, & key, 2002), it is clear that the distortion is consistently self-enhancing. more crucially, impression management theory developed from cognitive dissonance theory (festinger, 1957), and so individuals may not be consciously “fabricating” their responses in order to deliberately enhance their self-image. instead, they are probably engaged in an automatic process to resolve a dissonance that they are experiencing, without even being aware of it (e.g., “i think i am goodlooking, so i must be skinny”). thus, this process is probably operating unconsciously. that these participants were unaware of this process may be supported by the fact that they were usually aware that their weight and height were going to be checked afterward and their self-reports verified, which should have functioned as an incentive to provide as accurate responses as possible. based on this, it is not unreasonable to expect people to also provide impression-managementbiased responses when it comes to more sensitive issues, such as their own motivation and diligence or their attitudes toward another ethnic or racial group. the present study therefore included a measure of social desirability. 3.1. the crowne-marlowe scale crowne and marlowe (1960) devised a social desirability scale consisting of 33 true–false statements related to behaviors that are socially undesirable but that people nonetheless typically engage in routinely. examples included “i like to gossip at times” and “i am sometimes irritated by people who ask favors of me.” individuals who score highly on this scale may have a general tendency to exaggerate their questionnaire responses. ali h. al-hoorie 626 despite some controversy (e.g., johnson, fendrich, & mackesy-amiti, 2012), a growing literature is showing that social desirability is associated with various meaningful outcomes. for example, barger (2002) reviewed research showing that the social desirability scale predicts hypertension, cortisol levels, cholesterol, autonomic nervous system reactivity, lifetime psychiatric morbidity, and mortality following a cardiac event. because of the length of this scale (i.e., 33 items), some researchers have tried to subdivide it into three shorter versions. however, in a large-scale study, barger (2002) questioned these shorter versions. this study therefore used the full version. 3.2. social desirability in l2 motivation if a scale is sensitive to social desirability, that could be a reason for concern. in recognition of this, some early studies of l2 motivation did examine social desirability. for example, while gardner, lalonde, and moorcroft (1985) argued that there was “virtually no evidence” (p. 219) of an association between the attitude/motivation test battery and social desirability, gardner and gliksman (1982) reported that it had a correlation of .40 with motivational intensity, a magnitude the authors described as “substantial” (p. 197). to the extent that the “intended effort” scale is concerned with motivated behavior, it is conceptually similar to gardner’s “motivational intensity.” therefore, it is possible that intended effort would similarly be prone to social desirability. in a subsequent study, gardner and macintyre (1991) utilized a measure of social desirability but it resulted in a very low internal consistency coefficient (α = .23), which the authors attributed to the use of likert items instead of the original true-false format. because of this, this study used the original dichotomous response format. 4. research foci the present study aimed to achieve two main goals. the first goal was to compare the motivational profiles of l2 learners with different academic achievement levels. the aim was to find out which motivational variables would be able to successfully discriminate between high versus low achievers. the second goal was to replicate al-hoorie’s (2016a) study in order to find out whether the results would hold with a different sample, with a different instrument, and when controlling for social desirability. more specifically, congruent learners (i.e., those with positive attitudes toward l2 speakers both explicitly and implicitly) were expected to show more affiliation with the l2 group than would incongruent learners (i.e., those with positive explicit, but negative implicit attitudes). this study also attempted to find out whether this pattern would extend to l2 achievement. unconscious motivation. part ii: implicit attitudes and l2 achievement 627 in addition, there is some controversy surrounding what iat-type tests are actually measuring (e.g., greenwald, banaji, & nosek, 2015; oswald, mitchell, blanton, jaccard, & tetlock, 2013; rudman, 2008). for example, do individuals who perform faster really possess more positive implicit attitudes, or is this simply because of their better task-switching skills or working memory capacity? or is it that learners who score higher are the “good” students who take the implicit test seriously, while the low scores of others merely reflects careless performance? it could also be that those who perform better simply want to appear favorably, such as to please teachers and experimenters. to address such potential confounds, social desirability was included as an explicit control, and an additional implicit test was used as an implicit control. the additional implicit test targeted attitudes toward the l2 course. if the implicit scores are a result of the above confounds and artifacts (e.g., having better cognitive ability or taking the test more seriously), this should apply equally to the two tests and therefore conclusions derived from them should be very similar. in order for the implicit tests to show discriminant validity, it was expected that implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers would be related to l2 group affiliation, but implicit attitudes toward the l2 course (which reflect the here and now) would not. finally, a measure of parental support was included in order to explore its relationship with explicit and implicit attitudes. 5. method 5.1. participants a total of 311 participants qualified for the final analysis after excluding those who did not complete all study tasks or who responded randomly to the implicit test (see the data analysis section for details). the qualifying participants (18-24 years old, m = 19.8, sd = 0.95) were arabic l1 males studying english as a foundation-year requirement at an all-male higher education institution in saudi arabia. the majority (over 85%) had never visited an english speaking country. less than 10% had lived in an english speaking country for a maximum of three months, while less than 5% had stayed there for a longer duration. all participants took part in the present study on a voluntary basis. 5.2. materials 5.2.1. implicit measures the st-iat was adapted to measure attitudes toward l2 speakers and toward the l2 course separately. performing the st-iat requires pressing a left or right ali h. al-hoorie 628 button on the keyboard in order to rapidly categorize a series of stimuli appearing in the center of a computer screen. table 1 gives an overview of the l2 speakers st-iat. in the first block, the participants practiced categorizing words as pleasant or unpleasant 20 times. then the actual test started. in the first condition, blocks 2 and 3, pleasant was paired with l2 speakers, as shown in figure 1. in the other condition, blocks 4 and 5, l2 speakers moved to the other side to pair up with unpleasant. before each block, the participants read instructions and were reminded to perform as fast as possible. the l2 course st-iat followed the same format but used l2 course in place of l2 speakers (see the appendix for the stimuli used). each st-iat took less than 10 minutes to complete. table 1 overview of the l2 speakers single-target implicit association test block trials function response key assignment left button (e) right button (i) 1 20 practice pleasant unpleasant 2 40 test 1a pleasant or l2 speakers unpleasant 3 80 test 1b pleasant or l2 speakers unpleasant 4 40 test 2a pleasant unpleasant or l2 speakers 5 80 test 2b pleasant unpleasant or l2 speakers figure 1 a trial of the l2 speakers st-iat. the correct answer here would be the left button (e) because the stimulus honest belongs to pleasant. the stimuli were randomly drawn without replacement from pleasant, unpleasant, and l2 speakers or l2 course where appropriate. a red x appeared when an incorrect response was given, and the participant had to correct the error before proceeding. split-half analyses based on even-versus-odd trials showed that both the l2 speakers st-iat (spearman-brown’s ρ = .73) and the l2 course st-iat (ρ = .72) had good reliabilities. the st-iat scores were coded so that a higher score reflected a more positive attitude. the software used was inquisit 4 (2014). unconscious motivation. part ii: implicit attitudes and l2 achievement 629 5.2.2. explicit measures the participants also completed 10 self-reported attitudinal and motivational scales relevant to explicit and implicit dispositions: 1. the ideal l2 self (4 items, cronbach’s α = .80). example: “i can imagine myself mastering english one day.” 2. the ought-to l2 self (4 items, α = .65). example: “i must study english because it will earn me respect in the society.” 3. intended effort (5 items, α = .67). example: “i am prepared to expend a lot of effort in learning english.” 4. family support (4 items, α = .57). example: “my parents encourage me to study english.” a higher score in each of the above four scales indicated stronger endorsement. three other scales were concerned with the degree of affiliation with the l1 group: 5. fear of assimilation (5 items, α = .72), adapted from s. ryan (2009). example: “i think that the interest in the west has a negative influence on the arab culture.” 6. ethnocentrism (2 items, α = .59), adapted from neuliep and mccroskey (1997). example: “i find it difficult to work together with people who have different customs.” 7. religious attitudes (6 items, α = .78), adapted from al-hoorie (2016a). example: “when i see a non-muslim, the idea of sharing my islamic faith with them comes to my mind immediately.” a higher score in each of these three scales reflected stronger l1 affiliation. the above seven scales all involved 7-point likert scales. 8. social desirability (28 true–false items, α = .66), adapted from crowne and marlowe (1960). example: “my table manners at home are as good as when i eat out in a restaurant.” a higher score in this scale reflected higher social desirability. finally, the participants also responded to two semantic differential scales: 9. attitudes toward l2 speakers (10 bipolar adjective scales, α = .82), concerned with individuals whose l1 is english. 10. l2 learning experience (8 bipolar adjective scales, α = .87), concerned with attitudes toward the l2 course. ali h. al-hoorie 630 the adjectives used in these two scales were based on the stimuli of implicit tests (see the appendix). the above scales were also submitted to mokken scale analysis using msp5 (molenaar & sijtsma, 2000) to ascertain their discriminant validity and unidimensionality, and all of them satisfied these two criteria. social desirability was three-dimensional as expected but was left intact in order to use the full version as explained above. all materials in the explicit and implicit measures were translated into arabic to avoid language interference. 5.3. procedure the participants completed the study tasks in small groups in a laboratory. the participants were informed at the beginning that the current study was part of a research project at a british university, which incidentally might have activated their social desirability. each participant first responded to items randomly drawn in a fixed order from the seven likert scales, and then to the l2 speakers and to l2 learning experience semantic differential scales. afterwards, they completed the two implicit measures with the social desirability scale in between. the order of the two implicit tests was counterbalanced, but this did not have an effect on responses either to the l2 speakers st-iat (d = 0.02) or to the l2 course st-iat (d = 0.05). the participants’ final achievement in the l2 course (on a 9-point scale ranging from a+ to f) was obtained. one particular difficulty in using real-life course grades is that the researcher is rarely in full control of the process. on the other hand, as explained above, examining real-life academic achievement is also important because it is a meaningful outcome in educational settings. as an additional step to make the achievement variable more interpretable, learners were considered high achievers if they obtained a or b, and low achievers if they obtained d or f. this procedure excluded learners in the middle, gray area. still, because it might seem artificial, this dichotomization procedure was used only when the aim was to compare high versus low achievers. the full 9-point achievement measure was used for the rest of the analysis. as detailed below, both approaches led to positive results supporting the relevance of implicit attitudes. 5.4. data analysis the analysis of the implicit tests closely followed the improved scoring algorithm, called the d measure, recommended by greenwald, nosek, and banaji (2003). the four test blocks were included in the analysis, and the latency of each incorrect response was replaced with the block mean plus 600 ms error unconscious motivation. part ii: implicit attitudes and l2 achievement 631 penalty. participants with more than 10% latencies faster than 300 ms—an indication of random responding—were excluded, while responses longer than 5,000 ms were removed. the responses from the social desirability scale were summed to obtain a score with a maximum of 24. all other measures, explicit and implicit, were rescaled so that they centered on zero and ranged from +3 to -3. 6. results 6.1. descriptive statistics the first two columns in table 2 present the descriptive statistics of the variables in this study. each of the core variables in the l2 mss—the ideal l2 self, the ought-to l2 self, the l2 learning experience, and intended effort—was highly endorsed by the participants and showed relatively high inter-correlations. intended effort also had the strongest correlation with social desirability. as expect, fear of assimilation, ethnocentrism, and religious attitudes also correlated with each other. table 2 means, standard deviations, and pearson product-moment correlations among the variables in the study (n = 311) m sd 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1. ideal l2 self 2.18 0.82 — 2. ought-to l2 self 2.07 0.88 .14** — 3. family support 1.96 0.90 .25*** .21*** — 4. fear of assimilation 0.51 1.26 –-.05 –.08 .08 — 5. ethnocentrism –0.44 1.41 –.09 .05 .09 .21*** — 6. religious attitudes 1.22 1.10 .19*** .09 .28*** .50*** .25*** — 7. attitudes to l2 speakers 1.10 0.83 .13 .22*** .06 –.15** –.08 –.09 — 8. l2 speakers st-iat 0.27 0.36 .01 .08 .13* –.08 –.03 .01 –.03 — 9. l2 learning experience 1.18 1.09 .33*** .20*** .15** –.09 .00 .06 .26*** .01 — 10. l2 course st-iat 0.56 0.34 .00 .00 –.06 .01 .03 .01 .06 .26*** .02 — 11. social desirability 13.25 3.71 .12 .04 .10 .07 –.10 .16** .08 –.01 .12* –.01 — 12. intended effort 1.76 0.89 .38*** .44*** .21*** –.14** –.13* .10† .25*** .12* .33*** .06 .21*** — 13. grades 4.22 2.48 .09 –.09 –.12* –.12* –.14* –.22** .06 .13* .17* –.03 –.03 .00 note. ***p ≤ .001, **p ≤ .01, *p < .05, †p < .10. grades are used here in the full 9-point format ranging from a+ to f. ali h. al-hoorie 632 6.2. high vs. low achievement the first goal of this study was to investigate the participants’ motivational profiles in order to determine which variables are associated with high versus low achievement. a one-way mancova was conducted to determine the effects1 of achievement (high versus low) on the dependent variables with social desirability as a covariate. a few outlying values (z > ±3.3) were detected and removed in order to satisfy univariate normality; no multivariate outliers were found based on mahalanobis distance scores, χ²(12) = 32.91, p = .001. the homogeneity of variance-covariance matrices was assumed, box’s m = 72.89, f = 1.10, p = .27. using pillai’s trace, there was a significant main effect of achievement, v = .186, f(11, 252) = 5.25, p < .001, h2p = .186. there was also a significant main effect of social desirability, v = .091, f = 2.29, p = .011, h2p = .091. the lower panel of table 3 presents the results. low achievers significantly outperformed high achievers in the first four variables listed in the table: the ought-to l2 self, family support, religious attitudes, and ethnocentrism. on the other hand, high achievers scored significantly higher in the next two variables: the l2 speakers st-iat (i.e., implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers) and the l2 learning experience (i.e., attitudes toward the l2 course). the remaining variables failed to discriminate between the two groups. the upper panel of table 3 lists the variables that exhibited proneness to social desirability. it is clear that intended effort is the most extreme case, while some others were mildly prone to it. the results in table 3 suggest that positive implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers are associated with higher achievement. the underlying assumption of implicit attitudes is that they influence behavior without conscious awareness, and therefore their influence is non-self-reportable (al-hoorie, 2016b). if this is the case, implicit attitudes should still be able to predict achievement after controlling for the other explicit measures. hierarchical linear regression was conducted as it would allow investigating the unique variance accounted for by implicit attitudes. this analysis was conducted on the full 9-point achievement measure. the results showed that implicit attitudes towards l2 speakers did predict achievement over and above all the other variables in this study, β = .19, se = 0.39, t = 3.33, p = .001. 1 the use of terms like effect and predict throughout this paper is intended to be in the statistical sense only. the direction of causality cannot be determined by the design of this study and would require future experimental investigation. this point is discussed further later in the paper. unconscious motivation. part ii: implicit attitudes and l2 achievement 633 table 3 upper panel: variables exhibiting proneness to social desirability as a covariate. lower panel: mancova results for low and high achievers variable group emm se f p h2p social desirability ideal l2 self 2.93 .088 .011 family support 3.48 .063 .013 ethnocentrism 3.73 .054 .014 religious attitudes 5.91 .016 .022 intended effort 12.62 < .001 .046 achievement ought-to l2 self low 2.20 0.072 7.35 .007 .027 high 1.93 0.070 family support low 2.16 0.073 8.23 .004 .030 high 1.87 0.071 religious attitudes low 1.49 0.088 12.37 .001 .045 high 1.06 0.085 ethnocentrism low –0.22 0.122 6.46 .012 .024 high –0.65 0.118 l2 speakers st-iat low 0.20 0.032 5.88 .016 .022 high 0.31 0.031 l2 learning experience low 0.95 0.089 9.97 .002 .037 high 1.34 0.086 ideal l2 self low 2.14 0.070 0.74 .389 .003 high 2.22 0.068 intended effort low 1.80 0.074 0.40 .528 .002 high 1.73 0.071 attitudes to l2 speakers low 1.03 0.072 1.37 .243 .005 high 1.14 0.069 fear of assimilation low 0.62 0.108 1.08 .299 .004 high 0.46 0.105 course st-iat low 0.06 0.030 < 0.001 .975 < .001 high 0.06 0.071 note. the same pattern emerges when the covariate is excluded. emm = estimated marginal mean, se = standard error. finally, the correlational patterns of family support with the other motivational variables were explored. the results are shown in table 4. the first two columns present the correlations with family support for low and high achievers, respectively. the last column tests whether the magnitude of the difference ali h. al-hoorie 634 between these two correlation coefficients is statistically significant. these results show that low achievers tended to associate family support with their ideal l2 selves and their l2 learning experience more strongly than did high achievers, suggesting that low achievers are more susceptible to external influences. this pattern reverses, however, for implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers. high achievers’ implicit attitudes were associated more strongly with family support than it was the case for their low-achieving counterparts. table 4 correlation of motivational scales with family support for low achievers (n = 134) and high achievers (n = 140) scale rlow rhigh z ideal l2 self .434*** .144† 2.62** l2 learning experience .311*** .107 1.75† intended effort .236** .148† 0.75 ought-to l2 self .203* .150† 0.45 attitudes to l2 speakers .099 .050 0.40 l2 speakers st-iat .051 .278*** 1.92† note. all hypotheses are two-tailed. ***p ≤ .001, **p ≤ .01, *p < .05, †p < .10. 6.3. congruence vs. incongruence the purpose of this part of the analysis was to replicate al-hoorie’s (2016a) results, showing that congruent learners are more open to the l2 community, and to extend these results to l2 achievement. based on al-hoorie’s approach, a twostep procedure was applied (see table 5). first, learners who obtained a score higher than the neutral zero in attitudes toward l2 speakers were selected for the analysis. this step satisfied the first column in table 5 (i.e., positive explicit attitudes). second, these learners were then divided based on a median-split of their l2 speakers st-iat scores. this two-step procedure generated learners with positive–positive scores (i.e., congruent) and learners with positive–negative scores (i.e., incongruent). the same procedure was followed to obtain congruent and incongruent learners in terms of implicit attitudes toward the course. table 5 illustration of (in)congruence between explicit and implicit attitudes explicit attitudes implicit attitudes type positive positive congruent positive negative incongruent unconscious motivation. part ii: implicit attitudes and l2 achievement 635 a two-way mancova was conducted to determine the effects of l2 speakers attitudes (congruent vs. incongruent) and l2 course attitudes (congruent vs. incongruent) on the dependent variables with social desirability as a covariate. as above, outlying values were removed, and no participant violated multivariate normality. the homogeneity of variance-covariance matrices was also assumed, box’s m = 33.39, f = 1.04, p = .40. using pillai’s trace, there was a significant main effect of l2 speakers attitudes, v = .048, f(4, 231) = 2.91, p = .022, h2p = .048. as expected, there was neither an effect of l2 course attitudes, v = .014, f = 0.80, p = .53, h2p = .014; nor a significant interaction, v = .017, f = 0.98, p = .422, h2p = .017. there was also a significant main effect of social desirability, v = .052, f = 3.19, p = .014, h2p = .052. only religious attitudes showed significant susceptibility to social desirability, f = 8.39, p = .004, h2p = .035. the results are shown in table 6. as expected, the congruent learners scored less in all of fear of assimilation, ethnocentrism, and religious attitudes, indicating more openness to the l2 group. some results are slightly over the conventional .05 threshold, but it has been argued that it is not critical for replication research to satisfy an arbitrary threshold as long as the direction of the effect is maintained (e.g., anderson & maxwell, 2016; nassaji, 2012). a more systematic approach is to metaanalytically synthesize the results from the two studies. the meta-analytic bayes factors were computed using the bayesfactor r package (morey & rouder, 2015) using a 0.30 prior. the results, presented in the last column of table 6, show support for the hypothesis that congruent learners are more open to the l2 group. table 6 mancova results for l2 speakers attitudes for congruent (n = 112) and incongruent learners (n = 125) group emm se f p h2p b fear of assimilation cong 0.09 0.166 5.31 .022 .022 182.63 incong 0.56 0.116 ethnocentrism cong –0.80 0.203 3.51 .062 0.15 12.85 incong –0.33 0.141 religious attitudes cong 0.97 0.149 3.19 .075 .013 31.68 incong 1.29 0.103 grades cong 5.04 0.345 5.46 .020 .023 2.75 incong 4.06 0.239 note. repeating this analysis without the covariate leads to the same results, with the exception that religious attitudes drops to non-significance (f = 2.15, p = .144, h2p = .009). this indicates that the covariate has increased the estimation efficiency. b = bayes factor, cong = congruent, emm = estimated marginal mean, incong = incongruent, se = standard error. note also that grades are used here as the full 9-point measure. ali h. al-hoorie 636 still, because there is an element of subjectivity in choosing the prior, sensitivity analysis was conducted using both a lower (0.10) and a higher (0.50) prior. changing the prior had a negligible effect on the results, indicating that they are stable. table 6 also shows that congruent learners obtained significantly higher achievement, with the bayes factor showing support for this hypothesis. rather than being a meta-analysis, this bayes factor tests the hypothesis against the null since al-hoorie’s (2016a) study did not involve a measure of achievement. again, sensitivity analysis showed that this result is stable. finally, because the selection procedure used in the above analyses (i.e., table 5) might seem artificial, a two-step log-likelihood cluster analysis based on these four variables was conducted on the whole sample. the results readily yielded two clusters with a ratio of 1.03. a t test showed that the cluster showing more explicit openness to the l2 group also scored significantly higher in the l2 speakers st-iat, t(270) = 2.34, p = .02, d = 0.28. the meta-analytic bayes factor, drawing from the male subsample in al-hoorie (2016), also showed substantial support for the hypothesis, b = 234.60. again, sensitivity analysis showed that this result is stable. the two clusters had equivalent scores on the l2 course st-iat (d = 0.001). 7. discussion this paper has reported the first study in the l2 field investigating achievement in the context of implicit attitudes, and the results show that implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers successfully and uniquely predict l2 achievement. this study also replicated al-hoorie’s (2016a) results, showing that explicit–implicit congruence is associated with more openness to the l2 community. the fact that this effect was present only for implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers, rather than toward the l2 course, indicates that these results were not mere artifacts of the learner’s cognitive skill or interest in the test, thus lending support to the implicit attitudes construct. several implications of these results are discussed next. 7.1. attachment to the l1 community conventional wisdom (e.g., gardner, 1985) states that l2 learning is different from other school subjects in that it is social in nature. therefore, openness to the l2 community (according to the integrative motive) or to l2 speakers in general (the ideal l2 self) is important for successful learning. the results of this study suggest that it may not be enough to focus on openness to the l2 community without also considering the other side of the coin, namely attachment to the l1 community. strong attachment to the l1 community might be motivated by a sense of threat to one’s l1 identity. in this case, learners may need a unconscious motivation. part ii: implicit attitudes and l2 achievement 637 sense of security through believing that the l2 does not subtract one’s l1 identity (cf. lambert, 1973; see also garcía, 2014, for a more dynamic conceptualization). 7.2. the ought-to l2 self the ought-to l2 self turned out to be a negative predictor of l2 achievement (for similar results, see eid, 2008). in fact, even in the easier task of predicting intended effort, the ought-to l2 self has not consistently lived up to theoretical expectations in empirical research (for similar critiques, see lamb, 2012, p. 1014; macintyre & serroul, 2015, p. 110). so why is that? since the ought-to l2 self is concerned with meeting the expectations of others, this makes “ought self-guides function more like minimal goals” (higgins, 1998, p. 5). in line with the suggestion that it concerns minimal goals, the ought-to l2 self has been shown to be associated with the less internalized, preventive forms of motivation (see dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, p. 86; taguchi et al., 2009), which are less likely to sustain engagement in learning and enthusiasm about it. unlike other theories, such as self-determination theory (deci & ryan, 2002), the l2 mss does not propose different levels of ought-to l2 selves based on degree of internalization (at least in the case of global english, cf. dörnyei & al-hoorie, in press), or how to empirically operationalize each level. instead ought-to l2 selves are considered “someone else’s vision” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 14) to perform “the duties and obligations imposed [emphasis added] by friends, parents and other authoritative figures” (p. 32). thus, from this perspective, the ought-to l2 self is distinct from the more internalized forms of extrinsic motivation. indeed, research shows that the more internalized forms of extrinsic motivation are associated positively with l2 achievement, while the less internalized forms are associated negatively with it (e.g., wang, 2008). the lack of internalization might help explain why the ought-to l2 self turned out to be detrimental to l2 learning. if this interpretation is correct, a reconsideration of the view that the ought-to l2 self is a positive motivational factor would be in order. 7.3. the ideal l2 self the ideal l2 self could not predict l2 achievement in this study. although the empirical research supporting the ideal l2 self has been “straightforward” (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, p. 87) and provided “solid confirmation” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 31) and that “the emerging picture consistently supports [its] validity” (dörnyei, 2014, p. 521), this research has relied almost exclusively on one criterion measure, namely (self-reported) intended effort; “thus,” as robert gardner concluded in his critique of the l2 mss, “they relate one measure based on verbal ali h. al-hoorie 638 report to another measure based on verbal report” (gardner, 2010, p. 73). research testing the ideal l2 self in the context of actual l2 achievement has been less conclusive. still, unlike in the case of the ought-to l2 self, these results should not be seen as detracting from the potential of ideal selves. instead, it is more likely that the conventional method of elicitation (i.e., “i can imagine myself . . .”) does not do justice to the perceived desirability, accessibility, plausibility, and present–future discrepancy that the theory stipulates as conditions (cf. henry & cliffordson, 2015; hessel, 2015). expecting “i can imagine myself” to subsume all these complex facets is too optimistic. 7.4. intended effort this scale and its variations (e.g., motivated behavior) have been the primary source of validation for the ideal l2 self. however, little attention has been paid to the validity of this scale in the first place. in this study, as in others reviewed earlier, intended effort has emerged as a poor predictor of actual achievement. one possible reason for this is that self-report rating, by nature, is a crude estimate that is incapable of eliciting precise responses. this explanation is reminiscent of an early study by mcclelland and atkinson (1948), who compared the self-reported hunger of participants who had abstained from eating for one hour, four hours, or 16 hours. although the last condition would certainly lead to the most hunger, the researchers found that self-reported hunger could not distinguish it from the four-hour condition (though their implicit test did), and thus self-ratings provided “a less sensitive index” (mcclelland, 1987, p. 188). it seems that standard self-report measures are unable to capture subtleties beyond a certain threshold (e.g., learners with high vs. very high intended effort). more recently, zogmaister, perugini, and richetin (2015) obtained similar results for both hunger and thirst using the iat, with implicit scores showing more sensitivity to motivational states, while other studies showed a similar effect in relation to smoking (sherman, rose, koch, presson, & chassin, 2003) and unfinished goal pursuit (ferguson & bargh, 2004). in reviewing research that has compared self-reports with objective measures of actual behavior, back and vazire (2012) report low to moderate correlations and conclude that “there are substantial blind spots in personality self-views when it comes to predicting actual behavior” (pp. 138-139). another possible reason for the poor predictive validity of intended effort is simpler. common sense suggests that intended effort should not function as a consistent and reliable predictor of achievement. some learners might express lower levels of intended effort because they believe they would obtain higher grades (e.g., confidence in one’s ability to pass the test of a particular course). on the other hand, some low achievers might express higher intended effort unconscious motivation. part ii: implicit attitudes and l2 achievement 639 because they realize they are in danger of failing, thus trying to do too much too late. the dynamics of academic achievement thus seem very different from the dynamics of general l2 proficiency, and in some circumstances it seems naïve to expect a straightforward link between intended effort and academic achievement (see gardner, 2007; moskovsky et al., 2016, for similar views). in the present study, intended effort had virtually no correlation with grades (r = .00; see table 2). finally, intended effort also showed a high level of susceptibility to social desirability. self-report measures vary in the extent to which they are susceptible to social desirability (d. chan, 2009), and intended effort turned out to be the worst of the bunch, just as gardner and gliksman (1982) reported earlier. adding a control like social desirability to the statistical model serves to increase the efficiency of the estimate (rutherford, 2000, p. 105) by reducing standard errors without a substantial change in effect size. while this procedure was effective in the case of religious attitudes (table 6), it did not help intended effort. this adds to its problematic nature. it is therefore recommended that researchers exercise extreme caution in using intended effort as a criterion measure. 7.5. l2 learning experience although attitudes toward the learning situation are a robust predictor of l2 achievement as well as being one of the most dynamic constructs in l2 motivation (e.g., lamb, 2012; macintyre & serroul, 2015), it is unfortunate that this is probably the least theorized aspect in l2 motivation theory. this study also operationalized this construct using a semantic differential scale in order to make it parallel to implicit test. the merits of using likert versus semantic differential scales have not received serious attention in the field. that the effect of the l2 learning experience was not mediated by intended effort leads to the speculation that more “unintended” mediators might be playing a role, such as increased cognitive attention during enjoyable learning lessons. such unintended motivated behavior triggered by particular situational cues may be too subtle to be detectable and self-reportable (bargh, gollwitzer, & oettingen, 2010, p. 288). from this perspective, a variety of antecedents of successful learning can be investigated in future l2 research, such as the mere presence of motivationally-charged stimuli in the environment that are not even “noticed” by learners. for example, radel, sarrazin, jehu, and pelletier (2013) exposed their participants to a “barely audible” conversation (i.e., just above the auditory threshold) to which the participants could not have attended because they were engaged in a cognitively demanding task. when this conversation was about an intrinsically motivating activity reflecting enjoyment and satisfaction, the participants’ motivation was automatically activated so ali h. al-hoorie 640 that they consistently outperformed their control counterparts both in solvable tasks and in perseverance in unsolvable ones. the authors argue that studies successfully eliciting unconscious motivation through situational cues have yielded “indisputable evidence” (radel et al., 2013, p. 763). it might also be a fruitful future direction to examine the malleability of implicit attitudes through the l2 learning experience (e.g., dasgupta & greenwald, 2001; gregg, seibt, & banaji, 2006) and its effect on explicit motivation and successful learning. for example, blair, ma, and lenton (2001) have demonstrated that engaging in mental imagery can counteract the effect of negative implicit attitudes. 7.6. family support this study showed that family support was a negative predictor of l2 achievement (for similar results, see lamb, 2012, table 9). this counterintuitive pattern is most likely because some parents recognize their children’s low achievement and then offer them extra support. thus, this explanation reverses the direction of causality. further interesting insights emerged from the correlational patterns of family support with the other variables. first, low achievers had stronger correlations between family support and each of the ideal l2 self and the l2 learning experience. that high achievers did not exhibit this pattern suggests that they had dissociated these two factors from parental influence. they for example enjoyed learning regardless of whether their parents proactively encouraged them to learn or not. second, high achievers had a stronger correlation between family support and implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers. this pattern may support the distinction between the active and passive roles of parents, as “it is the parents’ passive role that may be the more effective one in the language learning context” (gardner, 1985, p. 119). investigating family support is not standard in current l2 motivation research, and therefore further research is required to shed more light on these exploratory results. a limitation of the design of this study is that the direction of causality cannot be determined unequivocally. the use of effect and predict throughout this paper has been intended in the statistical sense only. it is possible, for example, that l2 success actually promotes favorable implicit attitudes. it is also possible that there is a reciprocal relationship between these two variables. it is hoped that this paper would inspire further research into these possibilities. 8. conclusion this study has shown that implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers and the l2 learning experience are positive predictors of l2 achievement, though neither of unconscious motivation. part ii: implicit attitudes and l2 achievement 641 them has received sufficient theoretical attention. this study has also shown that the ought-to l2 self and attachment to l1 group are negative predictors of l2 achievement. the ideal l2 self and intended effort showed no association with it. while the “self” has served as a useful metaphor in l2 motivation for around a decade and has advanced the field beyond integrativeness, “the multitude of overlapping concepts in the literature on the self is more confusing than integrativeness ever could be” (macintyre, mackinnon, & clément, 2009, p. 54). this may not be undesirable. the complexity of the self may open up countless possibilities for future research on a multitude of aspects, conscious and unconscious. acknowledgements i would like to thank zoltán dörnyei, phil hiver, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft. ali h. al-hoorie 642 references al-hoorie, a. h. 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(2015). motivation modulates the effect of approach on implicit preferences. cognition and emotion. advance online publication. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2015.1032892 unconscious motivation. part ii: implicit attitudes and l2 achievement 649 appendix implicit test stimuli l2 speakers st-iat stimuli: pleasant: kind, beautiful, honest, optimistic, fair, knowledgeable, hardworking, polite, cheerful, cleana. unpleasant: mean, ugly, dishonest, pessimistic, unfair, ignorant, lazy, impolite, cheerless, dirtya. l2 speakers: george, elizabeth, new york, britain, newton, robin hood, shakespeare, oxford university, dollar, bbc. l2 course st-iat stimuli: pleasant: interesting, clear, valuable, important, varieda, satisfying, gooda, appealing, encouraging, cleana. unpleasant: boring, complicated, time-wasting, trivial, monotonousa, dissatisfying, bada, repellent, discouraging, dirtya. l2 course: grammar, vocabulary, listening, reading, speaking, writing, learning, studying, lecture, teacher. a not included in the semantic differential scale. 665 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (3). 2014. 665-692 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.4.5 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl assessing instructional effects of proficiency-level efl pronunciation teaching under a connected speech-based approach1 sasha s. euler university of trier, germany eulers@hotmail.co.uk abstract this article discusses the assessment of pronunciation instruction under a new approach to pronunciation teaching centered on the role of connected speech in the prosodic system of english. it also offers a detailed discussion of various empirical problems in teaching-oriented l2 pronunciation research and suggests ways of addressing them in intervention studies. a new explanatory sequential mixed-methods design was developed for this study, which was used to assess 10 advanced efl learners in germany before and after 13 weeks of instruction. the results revealed co-occurring developments in learners’ use of prosody and connected speech in line with the rationale of the approach. the findings lead to various implications for language teaching and assessment. for future research, ways are suggested to increase the validity and predictiveness of l2 pronunciation research from both empirical and pedagogical perspectives. keywords: english language teaching, efl, pronunciation teaching, prosody 1 special thanks go to j. d. brown for his invaluable help with the mixed-methods research design and for his encouragement to go new ways in both pronunciation teaching and research. any errors that remain are the sole responsibility of the author. sasha s. euler 666 1. introduction pronunciation can still be considered an “orphan” (gilbert, 2010) in english language teaching (elt).2 the problem is that owing to the long neglect of this area of elt, pronunciation pedagogy lags significantly behind the advances made in other domains of elt. addressing this issue, gilbert (2010, p. 3) notes that “there need to be major changes in teacher training, materials available, appropriate supporting research, and changes in curricula,” and in brown and kondobrown (2006a) calls are repeatedly made for a systematic approach and the development of practical materials (e.g., pp. 25, 94). in order to accomplish this, a first step is to develop a view of language, that is, a view of the underlying logic of how language is structured and how its constituent parts interlock to form a meaningful whole (a good example being lewis’ [1993, 1997] lexical approach). from there, priorities can be set and curricula and materials developed so that a workable pedagogical system may be established. this has been done in the creation of a connected speech-based approach to pronunciation teaching (conspa; see euler, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c), which is the basis for the instruction conducted for the present study. with the communicative turn in elt, pronunciation (then understood as the drilling of isolated sounds) was initially deemed to be of little relevance, before pronunciation teaching gradually shifted to a focus on prosody owing to its inherent meaning and context-generating quality (chun, 2002). the conspa (outlined in appendix a) is a recent development of this tendency in that it centers on english rhythm and the reduction, deletion and linking processes resulting from the need to maintain stress timing. the way rhythm and connected speech create prosodic words and chunk the stream of speech into meaningful units significantly impacts students’ intelligibility, comprehensibility and accentedness if not employed adequately, and causes enormous difficulty in listening comprehension because of the mismatch between students’ representation of the language and authentic l1 speech (see euler, 2014c for a discussion). while intuitively plausible, empirical evaluations are essential in order to justify the alleged prioritizing of prosody-oriented teaching over segment-oriented teaching (or no pronunciation focus at all). however, such studies are very difficult to conduct because entire teaching programs need to be evaluated, which poses considerable empirical as well as logistical challenges. as a consequence, only few studies can be identified that go beyond impressionistic 2 this situation has improved in sla research. however, as will be argued in this paper, sla scholars tend to follow very different paradigms so that the benefit for elt is not clear, where pronunciation is still a much neglected area (grant, 2014). assessing instructional effects of proficiency-level efl pronunciation teaching. . . 667 teacher judgments (e.g., couper, 2003; ricard, 1986) or artificial laboratory experimentation (e.g., watkins, rauber, & baptista, 2009) and provide both empirically sophisticated and practically applicable results. three of these studies will be briefly discussed. in an earlier study, anderson-hsieh, johnson, and koehler (1992) investigated speak test raters’ pronunciation judgments of readings of a text passage in relation to errors in segmentals, prosody, and syllable structure. the authors obtained general accent ratings from three experienced raters (efl teachers who had worked as speak test raters) and statistically correlated them with a general value based on counts of individual errors marked on transcriptions for sounds, syllable structure and prosody. while sounds and syllable structure correlated significantly with the accent ratings (-.67 and -.76, respectively), prosody showed the strongest relationship (-.90) (all at p < .0001). however, the authors conclude that in addition to such statistical correlation data, “research is needed that further investigates the specific ways in which prosody affects pronunciation judgments” (p. 549). this need is addressed in the following studies and in the present one. derwing, munro, and wiebe (1998) conducted an instructional intervention study under the premise that more studies with longer interventions under natural conditions were needed in which the exact type of instruction is specified. to address such needs, the authors organized three different groups who received 12 weeks of instruction for segmental accuracy (1), general speaking habits and prosodic factors (2), and general english with no specific pronunciation focus (3; a placebo group). instruction was assessed based on diagnostic sentences and extemporaneous speech data, both rated for comprehensibility and accentedness. for the sentence data a two-way anova with time (pretest-posttest) and focus (segmental, prosodic, placebo) as factors revealed significant improvements for both pronunciation groups for comprehensibility, while accentedness improved with all three groups. the second, more naturalistic test elicited data with a picture story. here six experienced raters rated 45-second recordings of 48 students. in this test, the accent scores proved nonsignificant, while in the comprehensibility test only the prosodic group showed significant improvements. these findings suggest that the unit of measurement (read sentences vs. extemporaneous samples) as well as the focus of instruction have an impact on pronunciation ratings. the authors argue convincingly that the high ratings for the segmental group in the sentence-reading test was a result of their undivided attention being focused on perfect production, while in the free speech test students’ attention was divided and their segmental knowledge was, apparently, not transferrable, while prosodic skills were (p. 406). the transferability of prosodic skills to free speech clearly supports prosody-oriented approaches to pronunciation teaching. sasha s. euler 668 still, as anova analyses are very general and can blur individual case facts, in derwing and rossiter (2003) the authors took the same data and conducted a more qualitative analysis to determine which forms to best focus on in teaching practice (p. 3). in this study, six professional judges rerated the recordings by marking transcriptions and commenting on prosody. comprehensibility was classified as either problematic to comprehend, irritating, or salient (clearly noticeable) but not problematic. the authors counted all errors as either segmental/syllable structure, morphological, syntactic, semantic, filled pauses, repetition or prosodic. the authors found that “over conditions, times, and judges, errors problematic for comprehensibility [24.1% of identified errors] tended to be mostly phonological, bothersome errors [32%] were mostly due to filled pauses, and salient errors [43.7%] were predominantly morphological” (p. 10). a repeated measures anova for prosody showed a significant 16% discrepancy between the global and segmental group in the posttest, confirming that prosodic instruction promotes automaticity (p. 13). the authors suggest that future research include “the description of developmental patterns in pronunciation, the effectiveness of specific activities in pronunciation instruction, and the ongoing investigation of factors that affect comprehensibility” (p. 14). the present study follows these suggestions and looks specifically at prosody and resulting connected speech phenomena. 2. agenda of the present study in order to assess instructional effects of the conspa, the following research questions were devised: 1. can pronunciation instruction using a top-down conspa lead to measurably improved pronunciation proficiency?3 2. which linguistic and experimental factors seem to shape or influence accent ratings? while the first question, addressed through global accent ratings, more generally looks at the effectiveness of intervention, the second question is needed to show if the conspa could fulfill its purpose of making highly intricate aspects of english phonology like rhythm, elision and linking teachable (see appendix a). 3 since this paper assesses highly advanced learners, intelligibility and comprehensibility are already given. the course underlying the experiment was advertised as a pronunciation and oral fluency course for advanced learners only. since in the assessment standard language tests are used (as in the certificate of proficiency in english), pronunciation here de facto refers to the dimension of accentedness as at such advanced levels relative correspondence with a target norm is assessed. assessing instructional effects of proficiency-level efl pronunciation teaching. . . 669 for this purpose, a new mixed-methods design was employed to address research questions 1 and 2 through its different parts and to research naturalistic language in order to maximize pedagogical applicability. along these lines this paper also has a specific research methodological agenda. as will be shown, much of the existing l2 pronunciation research has been criticized for its lacking applicability to pedagogical contexts, so that the third questions was: 3. which research methodology factors should be considered in teachingoriented l2 pronunciation studies? the rationale behind this question, starting with an extensive discussion in the following section, is to raise awareness for future research. this will be accomplished by calling on various voices from the field (see below), which may be interpreted as indicating that among scholars interested in language pedagogy, a kuhnian state of crisis, possibly eventually leading to a paradigm shift, may be commencing (see kuhn, 1970, 1977). possible solutions to such empirical factors will be further discussed in the last section of this paper, which will, in addition to a discussion of the results of the experiment, also include implications for language teaching and assessment. as a consequence, this paper will be of relevance for three applied linguistic fields: instructed l2 pronunciation acquisition, esl/efl pronunciation teaching, and language testing. language testing reported in this paper, as will be shown, was characterized by the fact that some language examiners were able to look beyond prosodic distortions due to nervousness and/or test/experiment conditions, while others took this as part of student performance and assessed it as such. the qualitative analysis also further validates derwing and rossiter’s (2003) findings cited above on the effects of filled pauses, which is of further consequence for language examination purposes. 3. research methodology factors 3.1. empirical issues in l2 pronunciation research much of the published research on l2 pronunciation acquisition deals with speech perception and production. from a tefl perspective, the problem with this research is that it is inaccessible to those without specialized knowledge of phonetics. moreover, some of the research may not be perceived as practical because it has been carried out under strict laboratory conditions, so that it is not immediately clear how the findings apply to the classroom. (derwing & munro, 2005, p. 382) sasha s. euler 670 zampini (2008) further illustrates this issue by arguing that one of the primary drawbacks to laboratory-elicited speech is that it is rarely naturalistic. indeed, some studies elicit the production of isolated syllables, words, or short phrases out of context, and the results of such studies may not be generalizable to speech in a natural setting. some even question whether or not conversations conducted in a laboratory setting can be considered truly spontaneous or naturalistic. (p. 239) the statement in the last sentence will be addressed in detail below and in the discussion section since facilitating the ability to use language spontaneously and in naturalistic settings should, arguably, be the aim of any l2 teaching effort. in addition, and especially as regards instructional intervention studies, there are several design features relating to what is assessed that need to be addressed systematically. these features can be summarized under the following bullet points: · competence/acquisition versus performance · extemporaneous/spontaneous production versus controlled/self-monitored production · implicit or automatized versus explicit knowledge · large versus small scope and duration · communicative/interactive instruction versus teacher-centered or computer-based instruction · applied linguistics versus linguistics applied while in experimental phonetics/phonology or in more general linguisticsoriented sla studies naturalistic language may not always be of relevance, in l2 phonological studies designed to inform language teaching (such as instructional intervention projects), the analysis of natural (or authentic/spontaneous/extemporaneous/conversational/free) speech seems necessary since, as has been said, producing such language is the explicit aim of any l2 instruction. this also has a strong psycholinguistic rationale. in the context of speech perception, strange and shafer (2008, p. 166) argue that “real spoken word recognition requires rapid identification or categorization of phonetic segments by reference to internalized representations of those categories.” in experiments that are highly controlled, students are very likely to show what they are intellectually capable of, rather than what they have internalized, that is, what they would be capable of when the cognitive load is on communication (as has been indicated in the above derwing et al. studies). in the context of intonation, chun (2002, pp. 89-90, 94) addresses this problem from a useful perspective. she argues that a “distinction has to be made between acquisition phenomena and performance phenomena” since, especially in the context of research supporting elt, “simply being able to assessing instructional effects of proficiency-level efl pronunciation teaching. . . 671 demonstrate aspects of intonation physically and perceptually does not necessarily render the process useful from a teaching point of view.” internalized knowledge is not demonstrated adequately through “mere” performance, so that empirical research should be adapted accordingly. likewise, ellis (2013) argues from an instructed sla perspective that while free constructed responses (communicative tasks) often empirically show little effect, they “arguably . . . constitute the best measure of learners’ l2 proficiency” (p. 41). such arguments clearly relate to the type of knowledge demonstrated in elicited data. in looking back at meta-studies on the effectiveness of explicit instruction, spada (2011) remarks that the alleged advantage of explicit instruction may be due to the fact that the majority of tests to measure learners’ progress in instructed sla research are tests of explicit knowledge. in fact, 90% of the outcome measures in the primary studies included in the norris & ortega [2000] meta-analysis used highly constrained, discrete-focus linguistic tasks, whereas only 10% required extended communicative use of the l2. (p. 228) while building explicit or declarative knowledge can speed up the acquisition process, and while automatized procedural knowledge can become “functionally equivalent” to implicit knowledge (dekeyser, 2003, pp. 329-330), the inert knowledge problem (the nontransferability of grammar knowledge to free speech) must not be ignored (larsen-freeman, 2003). this is, in fact, a general problem in instructed sla research. in the context of the implicit-explicit learning issue, for example, dekeyser (2003, p. 336) argues that l2 research tends to be quite limited because studies are too small in scope and duration, they are conducted in laboratory settings rather than classrooms and criterion measures tend to be very constrained (grammatical judgment or fill-in-the-blank tests vs. freely constructed discourse). these factors hold equally true for l2 pronunciation research. there are many studies in which students receive some kind of computer training in the perception or production of minimal pairs, or a few brief frontal (teacher-centered/lecture-type) instruction sessions on articulatory settings and are then asked to read out or repeat wordlists in a laboratory, which is supposed to demonstrate their acquisition of english pronunciation (see e.g., some of the studies in watkins et al., 2009). however, as has been argued by chun (2002), such studies most likely demonstrate perceptual or productive performance, rather than actual acquisition. owing to all such aspects, this kind of methodology renders such studies nearly completely irrelevant from a teaching perspective. in elt it is well known and needs no further elaboration that language acquisition is best facilitated through meaningful interaction within a larger language program, and that language cannot be “taught” as in sasha s. euler 672 transferred from teacher to student (e.g., h. d. brown, 2007; nunan, 2004). therefore, the type of instruction in an experiment should also reflect the nature of classroom second language learning. along similar lines, piske, flege, mackay, and meador (2011) were able to confirm the hypothesis that errors observed in studies on sounds may well be only artifacts of the elicitation technique employed. the authors argue that while “most researchers would acknowledge that conversational speech should represent the most important criterion for success in acquiring l2 vowels . . . surprisingly few studies have been undertaken,” which is most likely due to “the inherent difficulty in analyzing conversational speech under controlled conditions” (p. 2). this question concerns the balance between the ecological validity of a study (how similar the experiment is to natural communication or settings) and experimental control to achieve token richness and comparability (post & nolan, 2011; see also dekeyser, 2003). the derwing et al. studies reviewed above and the new mixed-methods design presented here explicitly try to strike such a balance. however, they still “simply” follow customary methods in l2 studies. in the discussion section, ways of adapting methods from other traditions for l2 research will be suggested. as has been indicated, the fact that such discrepancies are discussed in review articles and handbook chapters such as the ones cited may be of significance from the perspectives of applied linguistic theory (e.g., davies, 2007; widdowson, 2000) and, especially, kuhnian philosophy of science (kuhn, 1970, 1977), indicating possible commencing paradigm shifts. many years ago henry widdowson attempted to set a course for applied linguistic research with his contrast between a theoretical notion of “linguistics applied” and actual “applied linguistics”: with linguistics applied the theory of language and the models of description deriving from it must be those of linguistics. as an activity, therefore, it is essentially conformist. . . . for applied linguistics, the central question is: how can relevant models of language description be devised, and what are the factors which will determine their effectiveness. (widdowson, 1984, p. 22) much of the work criticized above is essentially conformist in that the focus is on the linguistic tools available and how they can be used, rather than on realworld needs which can be identified and addressed (cf. dörnyei, 2007, p. 17). in other words, while applied linguistics (such as elt/tesol) would start with classroom needs, linguistics applied (or simply general linguistics) aims at identifying established research paradigms and starts with scientific needs as reflected in these paradigms. the consequence of this is that in purely phonetic/phonological or general linguistic sla studies the features criticized above may simply be considered the way “normal science” (to use kuhn’s terminology assessing instructional effects of proficiency-level efl pronunciation teaching. . . 673 again) is practiced under established paradigms. in teaching-oriented studies, however, it is necessary to start with real-world needs such as the nature of classroom language acquisition and teaching. this will, then, often create a different view of which issues still need to be solved, so that methodology has to be adapted to these needs (davies, 2007, p. 29). while more general linguistics/phonetics-oriented studies would often go for the second options listed in the above bullet points, the present study (even though it was quite restricted by institutional conditions) attempts to realize the first options as they are considered most conducive to pedagogical applicability. 3.2. the mixed-methods research (mmr) paradigm since the mixed-methods paradigm is still rarely found in l2 pronunciation research, it seems important to highlight some theoretical underpinnings of this paradigm and the particular variant of it employed here, before design and results of the experiment are elaborated on. one of the distinctive purposes of mixed-methods research is that it can aid in achieving a fuller understanding of a target phenomenon and in verifying one set of findings against another. this is achieved by “trying to make 1 + 1 = 3 by carefully combining qualitative and quantitative data and analyses” (brown, in press b, chapter 6). while there are several different types of mmr designs, the present study uses an “explanatory sequential” design (cresswell & plano clark, 2011). in this design, the data collection procedures involve first collecting quantitative data, then analyzing the data, and using the results to inform the follow-up qualitative data collection (cresswell & plano clark, 2011, p. 185). this procedure is useful because researchers can interpret how the qualitative results help to explain the initial quantitative results. in practice, this is accomplished by selecting interesting, illustrative or odd cases from the whole population studied in the quantitative part for the qualitative follow-up analysis (cresswell & plano clark, 2011, p. 181), which is thus not to be confused with “cherry picking” (compare dörnyei, 2007). especially as regards classroom sla and pretest/posttest intervention studies, this is particularly useful because various secondary and developmental factors may play a role at a given moment. possible issues of external validity aside, one consequence of this design can be that not all students may actually demonstrate their regular performance during data elicitation (e.g., nunan, 2004, p. 30). the selection of cases for the qualitative follow-up analysis in this kind of mmr is a useful way of counteracting this problem. sasha s. euler 674 4. evaluation of the conspa 4.1. design the explanatory sequential design is realized in the present study as follows: 1. phase i, quantitative data collection: five professional cambridge english language assessment speaking examiners from britain and the usa were employed to assign global accent ratings, classified in a numerical system on a continuous nominal judgment scale. however, in order to avoid ceiling effects, as only advanced/proficiency learners were assessed, the cambridge benchmark system realizing the common european framework (cefr) for the levels b2, c1 and c2 (high intermediate, advanced, proficiency) was employed, resulting in a 9-point scale. appendix b presents a variation of the cambridge realization of the cefr levels as it was given to the judges (further discussed in 4.3.1). 2. phase ii, qualitative data collection: a number of coding schemes (inspired by brown & kondo-brown, 2006b) and semantic scales were devised in order to obtain a view of prosodic, segmental and connected speech deviations or realizations and of formal mistakes (compare derwing & rossiter, 2003). the data (recordings of oral production) were analyzed combining auditory analyses by the author and another trained linguist with elt experience, and the use of phonetic speech analysis software. 4.2. procedure 4.2.1. instruction and participants the instruction was conducted at a private language institute and at a university in germany (13 90-min sessions over 15 weeks) as a pronunciation and oral fluency course under a conspa framework following a north american english model. the underlying idea of the conspa is that connected speech becomes processable and therefore teachable by establishing it as a logical consequence of the workings of the prosodic system, resulting in a teaching sequence as illustrated in appendix a. methodologically, this course followed the celce-murcia model of communicative pronunciation teaching (celce-murcia, brinton, & goodwin, 2011, pp. 44-48), but also included task-based units (see euler, 2014c). 10 students in two groups (7 german, 2 italian, 1 polish, all between their 20s and early 40s) attended regularly and agreed that their recordings be used for research purposes. students reported that they were not receiving any other instruction and that they did not have the time assessing instructional effects of proficiency-level efl pronunciation teaching. . . 675 for any additional practice at home. in addition, there was a control group of 4 native speakers from the usa and canada whose recordings were assessed alongside students’ recordings. as raters were not aware of the fact that some recordings came from native speakers, these ratings were used to confirm that the highest levels were, indeed, assigned appropriately. 4.2.2. collection of listening stimuli in preand posttests, conducted on the first and last day of the course, diagnostic passages and a picture elicitation task (adapted from a past c1 cambridge esol examination) were employed. however, the oral reading data could not be used since reading with authentic prosody and connected speech is extremely challenging even for native speakers, resulting in unnatural and distorted speech (see also the discussion section). the rationale behind the free speech task was to increase the cognitive load as appropriate for advanced learners so that no or only very little monitoring should be possible. the picture elicitation task (in which students were asked to discuss how realistic they consider certain dreams, which were illustrated, to become reality) was timed and took approximately 90 seconds, though the exact number of words differed slightly due to speech rate and hesitation. in both tests students spoke into a logitech h555 microphone. the speech samples were digitally recorded with 16-bit. for the accent ratings all 69 resulting recordings (oral reading and free speech tasks including the control group) were randomized and raters were instructed to assign a value between 1 and 9 as elaborated on an accompanying sheet with cefr benchmark descriptors for the numerical values (see appendix b). the raters were also given three warm-up items, one from a native speaker and two from students, to familiarize themselves with the type of advanced english they were going to assess. 4.3. quantitative data 4.3.1. analysis instead of using the typical continuous rating scales going from, for example, very strong accent to no accent (see e.g., derwing & munro, 2005; flege, munro, & mackay, 1995), for this study a cefr-based scale was developed since this should make it easier for trained teachers or language examiners to produce objective and reliable ratings. it also provides a detailed system for assessing specifically advanced english. creating such a detailed assessment system was a high priority because, as previous research has shown (bongaerts, vam summeren, planken, & schills, 1997), assessing pronunciation in advanced and proficiency sasha s. euler 676 english has been found to be a very difficult task (as the raters in the present study also reported). consequently, a type of indicator triangulation was used here that combines the general continuation of the scale (1 through to 9) with the familiar cefr levels (b2, c1, c2) and specific level descriptors for each level based on the cambridge english language assessment benchmark descriptors (see appendix b). however, since cambridge does not have separate descriptors for levels c1 and c2, their benchmark descriptors were modified to account for differences on those levels. the raters were instructed to assess the pronunciation dimension of the recordings just as they would in any regular cambridge exam (including the recordings of the native speaker control group, of which they were unaware), but were instructed to consider the sheet given in appendix b as it modified the level descriptors somewhat. the native speaker control group was included to demonstrate that full proficiency can, indeed, be identified. likewise, in the free speech test all native speakers received level 9 ratings. inter-rater reliability was calculated via spss using a two-way mixed intraclass correlation coefficient (icc) in order to calculate reliability across multiple raters and multiple informants. inter-rater reliability for the free speech task was r = .72 (calculated for ultimate agreement), which reflects moderate reliability as often found in such studies. the fact that even experienced expert raters could not achieve a higher level, again, is explained through the fact that only advanced english was assessed in a highly detailed system (while typically rating scales cover the whole spectrum). 4.3.2. results table 1 contains mean values showing developments from pretest to posttest. in order to interpret these ratings, a number of secondary factors relating to language assessment need to be considered. table 1 accent ratings in the pretest and posttest student free speech task ms pretest posttest 1 5.6 6.3 2 3.0 3.8 3 4.8 5.2 4 5.2 6.0 5 6.8 7.6 6 7.2 7.3 7 5.0 6.4 8 6.2 7.2 9 2.4 1.8 10 3.0 3.6 assessing instructional effects of proficiency-level efl pronunciation teaching. . . 677 a very strong influencing factor is the psychological stress (as all students openly reported and as was quite obvious from their behavior) of being in a kind of exam situation and being recorded for error analysis (even though verbal attempts were made to ease the stress). it should be said in this context that this was a voluntary class and not subject to high-stakes examination, so the reported test was entirely for the purpose of the experiment (and students’ desire to know if they improved). in the preand posttests some students were doing notably worse than in classroom interaction, where student 6, for example, regularly showed native-like production. the linguistic factors resulting from this kind of stress (unnatural duration, pitch and loudness, hesitation phenomena distorting rhythm and intonation contours) will almost necessarily have an impact on accent ratings. in connection to this, it is rather obvious that in such experimental situations some connected speech phenomena are unlikely to be employed as they would in conversational speech (warner, 2011), so ratings have to be treated with care. further, low ratings could be a consequence either of lacking acquisition (student 9, whose starting level was so low that the instruction was beyond his zone of proximal development and thus not processable [e.g., pritchard & woollard, 2010]), or of random fluctuations in performance (student 6, whose performance was generally quite native-like but who would occasionally lag behind her regular level, thus showing that her interlanguage system had not fully stabilized). while this study used standard procedures in order to explore and confirm expected limitations in l2 pronunciation research (the reading passages will be discussed below), in the last part of this paper some possibilities (quite unusual for l2 studies) will be elaborated on that may serve to improve this situation. an additional very strong factor is rater subjectivity (cf. munro, 2008). this factor is two-fold: first, it concerns what “bothers” or “impresses” individual raters more or less, and, second, what raters happen to pay attention to at a particular moment in time. such aspects explain how even experienced expert raters were only able to achieve moderate reliability and has clear implications for language teaching and testing. 4.4. qualitative data 4.4.1. analysis as has been elaborated above, the accent ratings serve as the basis for both case selection and further cross-verification in the explanatory-sequential mmr design. while accent ratings provide a global score of native speakers’ reactions, sasha s. euler 678 it will need the detailed qualitative analysis to determine which exact features might have shaped those ratings. in this part, 4 students were selected for detailed analysis because they posed particularly interesting cases in different ways. specifically, from the teacher’s perspective, student 4 did not seem to have developed significantly throughout the course, which is surprising. student 5 improved from close to level 7 to close to level 8 (receiving several level 8 ratings in the posttest), resulting in clearly native-like performance. student 7 did develop somewhat throughout the course, but the increase by 1.4 bands is surprising since many deviations still seemed to be present. to explain such cases, a thick qualitative description interpreted on a case to case basis will allow making assumptions as to whether certain (combinations of) features seem to have a positive or negative bearing on accent perceptions. still, such assumptions, however informed, are always just that, and would need to be replicated with different students and different raters in different scenarios. for such a qualitative data analysis to be possible in a sufficiently controlled and replicable manner, detailed coding schemes need to be developed (j. d. brown, personal communication, november 2012), here showing precisely how many realizations out of how many possible realizations could be found in the pretest and posttest recordings. the prosody scale classified certain phonological features on a 3-point semantic scale. this system, in the form of category goodness, is widely used for sounds in l2 phonological studies and was also employed here for prosody. as regards data analysis procedures, printed transcriptions (in normal spelling) of all the extemporaneous speech samples (pretest and posttest) were produced, with phonetic transcriptions by the author of possible vowel reduction, assimilation and deletion, as well as linking processes and allophonic variation (cf. brown & kondo-brown, 2006b). these transcriptions illustrate the amount of possible realizations in each recording, leading to the number after the slash in the following tables, and were thus done only with the text, that is, without listening to the recordings. further markings were used for pitch raises or drops and for very likely tone unit boundaries. the latter was important since in this way certain words or phrases could be marked as cases where connected speech processes were unlikely owing to prosodic factors (first word of a tone unit without notable anacrusis, relative sentence stress). with assimilation, virtually no realizations could be observed because being asked to speak into a microphone in order to be recorded for language assessment is not the most natural situation for using a lot of such connected speech reductions (warner, 2011), although other processes such as vowel reduction to schwa and non-assimilation types of linking are largely a fixed part of (l1) english. assessing instructional effects of proficiency-level efl pronunciation teaching. . . 679 4.4.2. results table 2 shows results productive for connected speech (several additional types of assimilation, elision and linking were counted but did not yield a sufficient number of tokens). examples include h or th deletion in pronouns or deletion of d in and, vowel reduction to /ə/ (schwa) in unstressed function words (of, from, them, that, can, you, some, etc.), and linking with [j] and [w] (bluweyes, seejit). it should be said here, however, that the exact number of connected speech reductions used is always, to some extent, an idiosyncratic decision. table 2 connected speech realizations (the number of realizations/the number of possible realizations) student deletion in function words vowel reduction glide insertion (vowel + vowel linking) pretest posttest pretest posttest pretest posttest 1 3/8* 9/14* 5/12 10/15* 1/5 8/11* 4 5/10 2/6* 7/23 5/13* 4/10 5/6* 5 5/12 7/9* 4/15 14/24* 4/6 7/9 7 3/11 7/10* 2/19 10/21* 5/7 5/8 note. *improvement over the pretest. for prosody a 3-point system emulating category goodness in sound studies was used with a high, intermediate and low value (for advanced learners) for problematic aspects that are reliably measurable combining auditory judgments and instrumental analysis. rhythm was rated on a 3-category semantic scale as natural (3), sometimes distorted (2) or often distorted (1) (in l2 speech also due to lacking fluency or semantic gaps). such a rather subjective assessment is needed because “speech rhythm is very much a perceptive category. we perceive speech as rhythmic even if the physical placement of articulatory events does not occur at precisely regular time intervals” (szczepek-reed, 2011, pp. 140-141). this is further supported by the fact that rhythm is often broken due to hesitations or the dynamics of conversational interaction, so that regular speech rhythm typically only occurs over stretches of two or three intonation phrases at most (p. 146). vowel duration and pitch in intonation units were assessed as the main markers of sentence stress. vowel duration can not only be easily measured instrumentally but is essential in marking (primary) sentence stress and can be missing as a stress marker even if pitch and loudness are employed naturally (chela-flores, 1997). pitch is rated in its main domain, the intonation unit. an intonation unit has an overall intonation contour, at least one pitch accent (elements receiving sentence stress) and typically one primary/nuclear pitch accent sasha s. euler 680 (with a higher pitch level). such features can, again, be measured quite reliably combining auditory and instrumental analyses (as portrayed in szczepek-reed, 2011). while discussed on a case-to-case basis in section 4.1, level 1 ratings were used with significant distortion across the band. level 2 signifies that many correct tokens could be observed but that distortions are still present, while level 3 shows native-like correctness/consistency. in the special case of student 7, no clear value could be determined, as discussed in detail below. next, filled pauses and repairs (sentences that are aborted in the middle and restarted) are measured as occurring in high amounts (1), occasionally (2), or in low amounts (3). as it has been shown (e.g., derwing & rossiter, 2003) that filled pauses can cause annoyance in listeners (as the raters in the quantitative part agreed when asked afterwards), this aspect was also measured impressionistically to approximate real-world listeners’ perceptions. table 3 category goodness in prosody student rhythmic timing vowel duration in sentence stress pitch in tone units filled pauses/ repairs pretest posttest pretest posttest pretest posttest pretest posttest 1 3 3* 2 3* 2 2* 1 2* 4 2 3* 3 3* 2 2* 1 3* 5 3 3* 3 3* 2 3* 2 2* 7 2 2-3* 2 2-3* 2 2-3 1 1* note. *improvement over the pretest. finally, sounds (certain vowels and consonants and some allophonic variation) and formal errors were also counted. since sounds were not an essential part of the instruction (only small portions of the whole program were devoted to segmentals out of prosodic contexts, following the rationale of the studies cited in the introduction and current trends in elt) not many distinctive improvements occurred. as regards formal errors, only grammar was consistently productive, showing between two and four mistakes in each recording. 5. discussion 5.1. discussion of the results instructed language acquisition goes along at least three phases of measureable performance manifestations. a first phase centers on noticing and beginning integration. a second phase comprises restructuring and fine-tuning of the interlanguage (il) system, while in the final stage the il system is stabilized through deeper processing and automatization so that new features can be used both accurately assessing instructional effects of proficiency-level efl pronunciation teaching. . . 681 and fluently (de graaf & housen, 2009, p. 731). immediately post-instruction, students are likely to be in a stage in which their il is destabilized and integration and refinement were initiated, but it is unlikely that full integration has already been achieved. this poses an empirical problem in that results of immediate posttests are likely to be rather moderate. still, even moderate improvements, especially when demonstrated through in-depth analyses, such as those used in the present study, can point toward the effectiveness of instruction by showing that acquisition was initiated and is in progress (long & robinson, 1998, pp. 40-41). keeping such general reservations in mind, it could be shown that both the quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed clear developments. in addition, while delayed posttests were not institutionally possible, email contact with students hints at further developments based on self-assessment and current instructors’ comments on their pronunciation. as regards explaining the accent ratings through the qualitative findings, obviously only educated assumptions can be made and further cross-validation would be needed. student 1 made minor improvements across the board, but especially his pitch was still clearly non target-like, though, quite notably, he was now able to consistently use duration (vowel length) to realize primary sentence stress. student 4’s ratings were surprising (thus his selection) because he appeared quite resistant to instruction during the intervention. this student improved significantly in his use of rhythm and filled pauses, the latter being naturally related to the former. this further validates derwing, munro, and wiebe’s (1998) method of approaching prosodic instruction as “global” focus on prosody and speech habits, and it underlines the recent pedagogical prioritization of rhythm in pronunciation teaching (brown, 2013; brown & kondo-brown, 2006a; cauldwell, 2013; euler, 2014b, 2014c). even though student 5 was already very advanced from the beginning, she achieved a largely native-like level, which is a significant achievement in its own right. she significantly improved in all categories, very notably so in vowel reduction and pitch, so probably only minor accent traces and very few grammatical errors and hesitation phenomena gave her away as an l2 speaker. student 7 was selected because she showed a very high amount of hesitation in both tests and seemed to have clearly not mastered many phonological features. despite that, her accent ratings showed higher improvements than those of any other student, although they also showed more inter-rater variation than anyone else’s. the in-depth analysis revealed that some prosodic features improved but were still not entirely targetlike, and that clear developments in connected speech realizations were made. while still very much in progress, the improvements in prosody and connected speech seemed to have made a better and significantly more native-like impression on several raters, while others were probably disturbed by the still high sasha s. euler 682 amount of hesitation (even though more prosodically aligned) and/or individual negative tokens. the qualitative analysis of the posttest data did not reveal a distinctive score (either level 2 or 3) as it was very difficult to distinguish between hesitation-induced prosodic deviations and lacking competence. in the same way, inter-rater reliability for student 7 in the accent ratings was very low, with individual ratings in the posttest varying between values 4 and 8 (they are further interpreted in section 4.3). 5.2. discussion of empirical issues it was part of the agenda of this paper to illustrate and discuss empirical issues in teaching-oriented l2 pronunciation research. one of the primary concerns here was if read-out language can validly be used for such research. while the studies in the introduction already established that the unit of measurement has a strong impact on language data, this study confirmed possible reservations against readout language owing to the distortedness of the reading passage data. this was intentionally taken to extremes with a connected speech dialogue (taken from brown & kondo-brown, 2006b), where (experienced expert) raters differed by up to 7 points on the same recording. student 6, for example, received the following five ratings in the preand posttest, respectively: 4, 4, 6, 3, 4 versus 8, 1, 3, 2, 8, which was the most extreme case as some raters considered it completely substandard while others considered it to be native-like. this suggests that prosody and connected speech cannot be usefully studied this way (compare also the section on assessment below). while in general sla research it has been argued that ecological validity (here, experiments being conducted just as regular classroom teaching) should not be the “sacred cow” (compare dekeyser, 2003, p. 339), for teaching-oriented pronunciation research it should, indeed, be of primary concern (possible techniques are discussed presently). in a similar manner, more generally the question was posed “whether or not conversations conducted in a laboratory setting can be considered truly spontaneous or naturalistic” (zampini, 2008, p. 239) at all. indeed, it could be observed that some students’ test performance tended to significantly lag behind classroom performance, again especially so in the domains of prosody and connected speech. a possible solution that would be worth exploring (and that could also be used to empirically show the difference between prosodic test and classroom performance) may be to obtain data from classroom interaction without students’ knowledge (with their general consent, of course) while engaged in task work. the resulting interactive data could then, for example, be analyzed with the assessing instructional effects of proficiency-level efl pronunciation teaching. . . 683 system developed for the study of pronunciation in interactional linguistics and conversation analysis (e.g., couper-kuhlen, 2007; szczepek-reed, 2011).4 the other criteria introduced above (testing acquisition/competence and implicit/automatized knowledge, running large-scope long-term interventions, and using communicative and interactive instruction) were also specifically addressed in this study. the first two issues were tackled through the use of c1 oral exam tasks creating a level-appropriate cognitive load that would only allow for minimal monitoring and would test transferable and internalized knowledge (see the references above). warner (2011), speaking from a laboratory phonology perspective, however, lists this as only one out of at least seven workable methods for eliciting natural language rich in connected speech, in the discussion of which he also explicitly cautions against the effects of physically being in a laboratory setting and having to wear or speak into a microphone since this can make language less natural (and therefore also less rich in reduction processes), as observed in this study. the author illustrates several factors of immediate relevance here that can help to make speech more natural and rich in reduction: engaging in a dialogue with a moderator or an interlocutor, the presence of familiar interlocutors (family, friends), or being recorded without immediate awareness of it. in l2 teaching contexts, these criteria could be realized with classmates as conversation partners or the teacher as a moderator, though the unaware classroom interaction recordings, as already suggested, may represent the most natural condition by far. with this technique some control would naturally be achieved by having students engage in the same kind of task work. if these tasks have a specific pronunciation focus (e.g., identifying instances of sentence stress patterns in a text in order to work with them further (see nunan, 2004), even more control would be exerted quite organically (though this should be combined with entirely meaning-focused tasks as monitoring will always be present even in meaningful and interactive structure-oriented tasks). in either case, it would be very much worth exploring such techniques in future l2 pronunciation research.5 6. implications for language teaching and assessment as regards teaching, it has been said in the introduction that the conspa is a development of the prosody-centered state of the art in pronunciation teaching 4 note that cambridge english language assessment also uses student interaction as one of their primary elicitation techniques in language tests. 5 as a further aspect, large-scale intervention studies and pretest-posttest designs have been criticized on more general grounds by sla scholars (as mentioned above). since this paper has a more practical and specifically pronunciation-oriented focus, this discussion will not be reviewed here. sasha s. euler 684 (e.g., chun, 2002; gilbert, 2010, 2012) with the specific aim to help learners achieve authentic production and comprehension. however, a major problem with aspects like rhythm and connected speech is their intangible and elusive nature, so these aspects of the english phonological system are extremely difficult to make processable for students and to teach in a communicative, interactive and motivating manner (cf. euler, 2014a, 2014b). the present study has shown that developments in all domains were observed while none of the criteria of good pedagogy needed to be neglected. in euler (2014c) it has, in addition, been shown how the way rhythm and connected speech structure the stream of speech into meaningful chunks provides a very fruitful gateway into task-based pronunciation teaching. as a consequence, the study of task-based pronunciation teaching under the premises discussed in this paper seems a fruitful direction for future research. on a more general level, the empirical problems with the reading passage, especially in the context of the results from the derwing et al. studies cited above, also have distinctive pedagogical implications. derwing and her colleagues have shown that while students were able to show clear developments in the reading passage in the sound domain, only prosodic skills were transferrable to free speech. pedagogically, reading out as a pronunciation teaching technique, indeed, only leads to reading without internalization (celce-murcia et al., 2011, p. 11). in fact, it is quite possible to get even beginning learners to read out a sentence with nearly perfect pronunciation, but this has no impact whatsoever on their spontaneous language use, that is, on their il system. such findings suggest that reading out is a cognitive skill very different from pronunciation. the flip-side of this issue, as this study has shown, is that reading out for authentic prosody and connected speech is extremely difficult even for native speakers (who often only achieved level 7 or 8 ratings too in their readings of the diagnostic passages). this is not only highly significant for empirical research but shows again that reading passages are neither a useful tool for pronunciation teaching nor for assessment. as regards assessment specifically, recently one of my colleagues reported what was to her a rather illuminating event when i gave her some native speaker readings of a diagnostic passage that she had used to assess her students’ pronunciation performance. she was dissatisfied with her students’ acquisition of prosody and thought her teaching to have been ineffective. she was rather surprised when she found that native speakers also made several “mistakes,” which finally convinced her that reading out is not a valid tool for pronunciation assessment. another important implication for language testing is the influence of hesitation phenomena. phonologically, hesitation can break rhythm, which will automatically also impact the marking of primary sentence assessing instructional effects of proficiency-level efl pronunciation teaching. . . 685 stress and the use of connected speech. in short, hesitation phenomena can completely disrupt prosody in english; can is used here because native speakers often align hesitation phenomena rhythmically (szczepek-reed, 2011, p. 151) or use appropriate repair strategies. with the latter point, however, language analysis moves from pronunciation to discourse management, and these two domains are assessed separately in official language examinations. it has been argued that while some judges in the present study were able to look beyond prosodic distortions due to nervousness (as students reported) and/or test/experiment conditions, others took this as part of student performance and assessed it as such. this was hinted at in derwing et al.’s studies, and it showed specifically in the assessment of student 7’s results as discussed. it can be hypothesized that while some raters took hesitation as a discourse phenomenon and therefore “accepted” prosodic distortions, others took them as phonological deviations, with some raters probably doing both to varying degrees, thus arriving at more intermediate ratings. this is clearly something language examiners should be made aware of. 7. conclusion derwing, munro and wiebe (1998, p. 408) noted in the conclusion to their study that “given the growing emphasis on pronunciation as of late, we look forward to a clearer empirical identification of useful and effective approaches.” this was attempted through the conspa, working under the rationale that utilizing the organic interplay between certain prosodic features and connected speech processes makes these areas of phonology processable and teachable in a motivating, communicative and interactive fashion. while the quantitative analysis of this study showed that students, generally, made progress, the qualitative analysis was able to reveal that students did in fact develop in the intangible domains addressed through the conspa, and that positive effects on native listeners can be observed. still, caution is needed since—also owing to obvious logistic factors—this study was somewhat exploratory in nature and aimed at analyzing only a limited number of students in detail. further replication would be needed, which would especially benefit from long-term delayed posttests if this is logistically feasible. the present study, further, identified a number of empirical problems often inherent in applied linguistic pronunciation studies, especially as tests of the effectiveness of l2 instruction—the practical realization of “approaches”—is concerned. the purpose of this was to build awareness of these issues and to offer possibilities of addressing them systematically. several additional research directions are suggested by this study. on a research methodology level, it would be beneficial to further explore the use of sasha s. euler 686 mixed-methods research in teaching-oriented l2 pronunciation research. this may be especially useful since mmr lends itself to the study of naturally occurring language as relevant in tests of learner proficiency while still maintaining an appropriate level of empirical control and predictiveness. on a more practical level, teaching-oriented l2 pronunciation research still needs to further explore areas such as developmental patterns in instructed pronunciation acquisition, the interplay between various linguistic features in pronunciation teaching and learning, and their effect on native listeners. as regards the conspa system, obviously further tests in different settings would be beneficial in order to potentially further validate its effectiveness and implementability in different contexts. assessing instructional effects of proficiency-level efl pronunciation teaching. . . 687 references anderson-hsieh, j., johnson, r., & koehler, k. 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(2000). on the limitations of linguistics applied. applied linguistics, 21(1), 3-25. zampini, m. l. (2008). l2 speech production research: findings, issues, and advances. in j. g. hansen edwards & m. l. zampini (eds.), phonology and second language acquisition (pp. 219-251). philadelphia: john benjamins. sasha s. euler 690 appendix a outline of the conspa the idea for the connected speech-based approach (conspa) initially arose when i noticed in advanced/proficiency efl classes i taught at the time that even such highly advanced learners were not able to comprehend authentic l1 english. i came to realize that there is a significant mismatch between students’ use of rhythm and resulting connected speech phenomena, and respective use of such phonological features by l1 speakers. interestingly, j. d. brown (brown & kondo-brown, 2006a; brown, in press a) started his inquiry into teaching connected speech in a very similar way when a chinese student once asked him: “why is it that i can understand you in class, but cannot understand you when you talk to other american teachers?” connected speech is a phonological aspect that is virtually never taught in esl/efl classes because there are so many apparently random rules that, in isolation, bear no real meaning on their own, thus making connected speech phenomena practically impossible to teach by standards of current methodology. further, rhythm and connected speech are rather intangible phonological aspects with very low perceptual saliency, which makes even noticing extremely difficult. the question, therefore, is how to make such phonological aspects processable and therefore teachable in a meaningful manner? the solution proposed by the conspa is to present connected speech as consequence of the workings of english prosody. prosody stands at the center of contemporary pronunciation pedagogy because of its meaning and context-generating quality and therefore offers a possibility to introduce connected speech in a meaningful context. as i have argued elsewhere (euler, 2014a, p. 105-106), “connected speech becomes teachable and processable by helping students develop a solid understanding of prosodic areas like rhythm, thought grouping and primary stress allocation. in doing so the issue of individual rules, in turn, also becomes less of a problem because they will now appear as somewhat of a logical consequence.” this results in the following kind of syllabus (see euler, 2014a, 2014b for a detailed presentation), usable either in intensive courses or as a subsyllabus in regular esl/efl programs (euler, 2014b): rhythm -> intonation units -> pitch & intonation contours -> coalescent assimilation, deletion & reduction -> linking & regressive assimilation <-> sounds & positional variation after students have explored rhythm and other prosodic aspects, they will see that something has to happen in sequences of unstressed function words in order to maintain stresstiming (see euler, 2014c). by the time the prosody components are completed, they will have come across connected speech phenomena (with the teacher initiating some awareness-raising in such situations) so many times that they are, indeed, highly motivated to study this area systematically. the problem of individual rules can further be treated by “creating larger categories – coalescent assimilation, deletion and linking – and treating individual rules as possible instances that students can discover under the same framework (such as deletion)” (euler, 2014a, p. 106). assessing instructional effects of proficiency-level efl pronunciation teaching. . . 691 methodologically, in the course reported in this paper the celce-murcia model of communicative pronunciation teaching (celce-murcia et al., 2011) was predominantly used, which follows the following sequence: analysis -> listening discrimination -> controlled practice -> guided practice -> free practice however, some task-based lessons were also included in which students start with processing input, during which they realize a need for language form which is then addressed at the end (e.g., willis & willis, 2007). in the conspa this is achieved through students not being able to understand l1 english and wanting to be able to decode the stream of speech (cf. cauldwell, 2013). this is a cognitive window of opportunity for language practice. once students realize that this is no “magic,” that listening comprehension difficulties stem from not being able to recognize and process a distinctive set of phonological features, they will be very motivated to work on these features (see euler, 2014c for a detailed discussion of task-based pronunciation teaching under a conspa framework). in addition, research has repeatedly shown that many learners do, in fact, strive for a native-like accent (e.g., derwing, 2003) (as the students in the present study reported too), so these two aspects (comprehension and production) can easily be addressed complementing each other. this possibility is highly useful as it is very much in accordance with the focus on form system underlying much of structure teaching in task-based methodology (doughty & williams, 1998; long & robinson, 1998). references brown, j. d. (in press a). shaping students’ pronunciation: teaching the connected speech of north american english. honolulu, hi: university of hawaii at manoa. derwing, t. m. (2003). what do esl students say about their accents? canadian modern language review, 59, 545-564. doughty, c. j., & williams, j. (1998). pedagogical choices in focus on form. in c. j. doughty & j. williams (eds.), focus on form in classroom second language acquisition (pp. 197-261). cambridge: cambridge university press. willis, d., & willis, j. (2007). doing task-based teaching. oxford: oxford university press. sasha s. euler 692 appendix b rating system6 measure cambridge esol cefr bands description 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 b1 band 3 & b2 band 1 b1 band 4 & b2 band 2 b1 band 5 & b2 band 3 b2 band 4 & c1 band 2 b2 band 5 & c1 band 3 c1 band 4 & c2 band 2 c1 band 5 & c2 band 3 c2 band 4 c2 band 5 mostly intelligible. some control of phonological features at word and utterance level. (between 1 and 3) is intelligible. intonation, stress, rhythm, & sounds are often accurate, but still some clear deviations. (between 3 and 5) intonation, stress, rhythm, & sounds are mostly accurate; some deviations of little bearing. (between 5 and 7) intonation, stress, rhythm, & sounds are accurate; very few minor deviations. almost native-like, but something does not seem to add up. (between 7 and 9) pronunciation is native-like measure: continuation from 1 (not entirely intelligible) to 9 (native-like). cambridge/cefr band: how the measure value relates to the cefr assessment bands. description: descriptions are designed as broad landmarks. they are based on cambridge’s respective band descriptors but are modified as cambridge english does not clearly differentiate between levels c1 and c2. the definitions are to be understood together with the continuation of the scale and the general cefr level standards. compare cambridge english’s “assessing speaking performance” sheets under: https://www.teachers.cambridgeesol.org/ts/teachingresources/resourcedetails?resid=9016 6 each cefr level is assessed in 5 bands, with bands 1, 3 and 5 having a level description (the others being in-between values). all levels overlap in that, for example, band 5 b2 equals band 3 c1. likewise, band 1 b2 equals band 3 b1. band 3, therefore, represents its respective level and equals either the lowest band of the next higher level or the highest band of the next lower level. 67 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (1). 2020. 67-87 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.1.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt dynamic properties of language anxiety tammy gregersen american university of sharjah, united arab emirates https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0744-9655 tgregersen@aus.edu abstract this article begins by examining previous empirical studies to demonstrate that language anxiety, or the negative emotional reaction learners experience when using a second language (macintyre & gardner, 1999), is a dynamic individual difference learner variable. i show that it forms part of an interconnected, constantly-in-flux system that changes unpredictably over multiple time scales. while at certain times this system might settle into an attractor state that accommodates contradictory conditions, perturbations that arise may lead to development and change with the curious possibility that minor disruptions generate large effects while major alterations go unnoticed. in essence, language anxiety (la) is part of a continuous complex system in which each state evolves from a previous one. after i establish la as a dynamic variable using the aforementioned criteria, i outline the implications and challenges for researching la using a dynamic paradigm, which include focusing on individuals, transforming la research questions, designing interventions and re-thinking data gathering methodologies. i conclude with implications for language teaching that emphasize: 1) raising awareness of the importance of decoding nonverbal behavior to identify moment-by-moment shifts in learner emotion; 2) remaining vigilant concerning variables that are interacting with la that make this factor part of a cyclical process; 3) understanding that anxiety co-exists with positive emotions to varying degrees and that language tasks are not unanimously enjoyed or universally anxiety-provoking; and 4) incorporating positive psychology activities that proactively encourage buoyancy and resilience for moment-by-moment daily perturbations as well as debilitating disruptions that result in long-lasting influences. keywords: language anxiety; dynamic; timescales; complexity; interconnected tammy gregersen 68 1. introduction language anxiety (la) is considered dynamic for a host of different reasons. for instance, it exists on different time scales; that is to say, we can talk about it as a trait, a state, as situation-specific, and as fluctuating on a moment-to-moment basis. secondly, it is part of a system of interconnected variables that are in constant change. second language (l2) researchers propose that la influences and is influenced by other individual difference (id) variables such as motivation, willingness to communicate, and self-concept, among others; linguistic variables such as proficiency; and cognitive variables like a learner’s aptitude. thirdly, contradictory conditions can co-exist. for example, learners experiencing la can simultaneously feel a sense of enjoyment. lastly, perturbations in the system, whether they are negative and lead to setbacks, or positive and result in forward progress, catalyze development and change. to this point, it is also possible that minor perturbations can cause later catastrophic tidal-wave-like change or that a major disturbance does not trigger the slightest ripple. the purpose of this article is two-fold. first, it aims to take each of these four defining features of dynamic systems and demonstrate through previous investigations that la is indeed a dynamic id variable and that it can be measured in a variety of different ways. second, it is intended to examine the research and teaching implications of what such a metamorphosis in thinking about la carries with it. 2. language anxiety as a dynamic id 2.1. different timescales de bot comments: “language development takes place at different, interacting timescales ranging from the decades of the life span to the milliseconds of brain activity. because these timescales interact, looking at phenomena at only one timescale may lead to spurious results” (2015, p. 29). examining a phenomenon using multiple timescales – whether measuring across decades, or milliseconds, or the countless scales in between – offers a more comprehensive idea of the innumerable influences on the system in a contextualized way (macintyre, 2012). for example, in language classrooms, we would have vastly different results if we measure the la of an intermediate learner during a public presentation, a week after he or she has had time to decompress, or after several years when his or her language development is well beyond intermediate proficiency. thus, the timescale one selects will impact data collection and interpretation (de bot, 2015). the timescales used to research la are mainly chosen using la’s various conceptualizations as a trait, a state, specific to a situation, or fluctuating momentarily. dynamic properties of language anxiety 69 la can be relatively stable across time, be specific to one domain only (with some learners potentially crossing back and forth over these somewhat arbitrary lines as they respond to a variety of triggers or exercise differentially effective resiliency strategies), and/or shifting in response to immediate stimuli in the context. trait anxiety, the most stable of the perspectives, is regarded as a distinct personality attribute that remains steady through time and varying circumstances. individuals who experience anxiety as a trait are more susceptible to la than others are; that is to say, more situations cause anxiety reactions and/or they respond with more intense emotion when it arises (spielberger, 1983). according to spielberger (1983), such trait-like anxiety indicates the inclination to react with state anxiety in anticipation of threatening conditions. state anxiety, as opposed to trait anxiety, is triggered in response to a specific circumstance, like speaking in public or visiting the dentist. upon cognitively appraising a potential threat and finding it legitimate, an individual with state-induced anxiety experiences a disagreeable emotional reaction (lazarus, 1991). the longer-term timescales used to study trait and state anxiety are grounded in summative analyses of experience and the results of these investigations tend to demonstrate stability in their outcomes. such timescales allow generalizations such as “la is negatively correlated with motivation, perceptions of competence and willingness to communicate, but positively correlated with perfectionism and neuroticism,” and have a tendency to round out the momentary fluctuations in anxiety as it is experienced in real time (macintyre & serroul, 2015). continuing the countdown from most to least stable forms of anxiety, subsequent to trait and state comes language anxiety that is conceived as situation-specific (dewaele, 2002; horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986; macintyre & gardner, 1989). this means that anxiety is aroused within a particular context, such as the language classroom where learners could potentially fear negative evaluation, experience apprehension surrounding their communication and where their limited linguistic knowledge and performance may get tested (horwitz et al., 1986). hence, although some language learners may not experience anxiety as a stable personality feature, this does not preclude the possibility that la may arise in the specific context of learning and using a foreign language. that is to say, language anxious students may feel secure and worry-free in other contexts, but the special circumstances evidenced in the language classroom evoke the arousal of negative emotion. the most erratic of la types is the dynamic variety that rises and falls on a moment-by-moment timescale. such here-and-now emotion appears as we observe “real-time language processing, developmental change in learner language and evolutionary change in language” (larsen-freeman, 2007, p. 783). analyses carried out on per-second timescales show the processes that unfold as participants consciously experience events. although high anxious language tammy gregersen 70 learners tend to experience state anxiety in l2 contexts more often than learners with low la (maclntyre & gardner, 1989), this does not necessarily portend that even the calmest of learners will not feel temporary bouts of nervousness or unease. likewise, when viewing la through a dynamic lens, it is probable that even the most highly anxious language learner will feel fleeting flashes of respite and pleasure. although la is dynamic in the sense that it can be observed on a momentby-moment timescale, such dynamism is magnified by the fact that all the varieties, including state, trait, and situation-specific also interact. the interaction of la timescales was well-articulated by macintyre and gardner (1989, 1991), who proposed that when learners first begin their language journey, the anxiety they might feel is not necessarily linked to the specific classroom situation. subsequent to recurrent exposure with their negative emotions in the context of the language class, they start associating their anxiousness with the class. “thus, the nature of language anxiety is not merely a question of either/or, but rather a combination of both trait/stable and situation-specific/dynamic dichotomies of language anxiety that are likely to be realized in language classrooms” (gkonou, 2017, p. 138). the notions of time and timescales are integral to how we perceive la. given that language learning itself continually transpires on numerous concurrent timescales with certain processes linked to particular timescales, any inferences we draw about la are necessarily tied to the timescale on which they happen. that is to say, as we focus on the constant and continuous dips and surges of la on a moment-by-moment scale, or on its emergent phases or recurring patterns over the course of a semester, we are examining and attempting to explain la using different points of departure and over numerous timescales (macintyre, dörnyei, & henry, 2015). 2.2. interconnected and constantly in motion a second argument that supports the dynamic nature of la is that it is linked with a host of other continually fluctuating variables, whether in cognitive, affective/personal, linguistic or other domains. during their interaction, la shapes and is shaped by such variables. divorcing a variable from its system and examining it in isolation is insufficient on many different levels. a learner factor such as la is not only mutable on its own, but it also overlaps and interacts interdependently, playing a larger role at certain times and not at others. it is easy to envisage, for example, a learner’s heightened la during the early stages of language development wherein his or her low level of proficiency interacts with his or her inferior sense of self-competence to create great unease in speaking in front of others. however, as language development proceeds and learners experience daily successes with their communicative abilities, their own sense of self-efficacy dynamic properties of language anxiety 71 rises and eases the unpleasant feelings of tension and worry that they had associated with their language use earlier. hence, the reciprocal interactions that continually occur demonstrate that we cannot accurately measure the influence of a factor if we isolate it from the others and examine it on its own. in continuation is an overview of a sample of studies that demonstrate the multi-directional effects of la on and by cognition, personal variability and language use. macintyre and gardner (1994) demonstrated that the dynamic cognitive effects of la can be evidenced across the three stages of processing (input, processing/interpreting and output) in their research that assessed both anxiety and performance at each phase. they found that la pervasively, yet sometimes subtly, influenced cognitive processing at all three levels and that observing only the performance that occurs during output, the most common stage to assess learners’ la, may blind us to the impact of la at preceding stages along with a disregard of the interactions among the stages. additionally, the presence of anxiety can bias cognitive processing by negatively prejudicing learners’ perceptions of their own competence; that is, anxious language learners are more inclined to underrate their l2 proficiency while relaxed students tend to overrate it (dewaele, petrides, & furnham, 2008; macintyre, noels, & clement, 1997). other research demonstrates that la interacts with personal and/or affective learner variables in mutually transformative ways. for example, dewaele (2002) investigated the relationships among la in two foreign languages, and the personality traits of extraversion, psychoticism and neuroticism among flemish learners. he found that the correlation between la and the personality variables was different for each foreign language and that the effect of social class of learners was only significant for the foreign language (french) that was a socially prestigious l2 in the first part of the 20th century. later, dewaele et al. (2008) added emotional intelligence (ei) to the personality/la mix and found a robust propensity for low-ei language learners to experience higher la across all of the languages they used including their l1. furthermore, researchers have also shown the influencing interconnectedness between la and perfectionism in that a tendency exists for perfectionistic language learners to experience higher anxiety than their less perfectionistic counterparts do (dewaele, 2017; gregersen & horwitz, 2002). lastly, boudreau, macintyre, and dewaele (2018) also highlighted the fleeting nature of emotions when they implemented an idiodynamic technique to observe the moment-to-moment adaptations of the connection between enjoyment and anxiety in second language communication. they discovered that the enjoyment-anxiety relationship is extremely dynamic, which brings about fluctuating correlational patterns. mutually influencing, inextricable interconnections also exist among la and linguistic variables. for example, more contact with foreign languages, higher tammy gregersen 72 feelings of linguistic self-competence, and l2 acquisition that transpires early in life are generally associated with lower la. such variables are enhanced even further when learners authentically and regularly use their foreign language with a large network of other speakers (dewaele, 2013). additionally, tls that belong to a linguistic family in close approximation to the learner’s l1 will most likely generate less la than those languages that are typologically distant (dewaele, 2010). this sample body of research demonstrates that la is multi-determined, so that no solitary component, language input, or force commands it or causes it to change. instead, la processes and outcomes, rather than being hardwired and static, are in a state of soft assembly wherein components of the system interact in various ways depending on the milieu, interlocutors, task and so on. 2.3. contradictory conditions can co-exist among the features of dynamism is the state of co-existence that seemingly contradictory elements can maintain. macintyre and gregersen (2012) referred to fredrickson’s (2004) broad-and-build theory in their discussion of the different thought-action repertoires that negative and positive emotions invoke in the language classroom. while adverse emotion can trigger a negative-narrowing focus and hamper the processing of language input, positive emotion broadens learners’ scope so that they notice and become aware of language input and are better able to absorb it. however, although positive and negative emotions may instigate different action, it does not mean they exist to the mutual exclusion of the other. in fact, although the emotional dimension of a learner’s flow of activities may often be in harmony with the immediate circumstances (anxiety and skipping class, feeling motivated and contributing to a discussion), other occasions arise when emotions oppose what the learner is doing (anxiety and taking an exam, discomfiture and speaking to a native speaker). according to macintyre and gregersen (2012, p. 199): when emotions are in conflict with ongoing actions, when we have to overcome an emotional reaction in order to take action, we are in a state of ambivalence. the perception of a conflicted emotional state reflects a complex, underlying motivational process. when emotions motivate action, conflicted or ambivalent emotions produce instability that might be best understood as a coordination of approach and avoidance tendencies. rather than looking at emotion as approach versus avoidance, we can discuss interesting moments of approach and avoidance, to capture in theory the tensions experienced by learners so that pedagogy can actively deal with the issues raised by affective reactions, and better understand the breadth of facilitative and debilitating emotional processes. dewaele and macintyre (2014) were among the first to address this somewhat dubious relationship when they juxtaposed la with foreign language enjoyment dynamic properties of language anxiety 73 (fle) and discovered, via the web-based responses of 1,746 multilinguals to their foreign language classroom enjoyment scale (flce), that low anxious learners do not inevitably enjoy the language and/or language class, nor are learners who enjoy the language and language class free from the clutches of anxiety; rather, the dynamic interplay of enjoyment and anxiety is apt to engender adaptive learning. even the learners who had high levels of enjoyment in the dewaele and macintyre (2014) study experienced anxious moments, so while the enjoyment produced the desire to play and explore, the anxiety spurred them on to take specific action to avoid or eliminate their anxiety and/or its triggers. statistically speaking, the moderate negative correlation between la and flce that was found suggested that the two emotions are partially inter-related but fundamentally distinct dimensions. for the purposes of this article, what is important to note is that they can and do co-exist. in a follow-up study, dewaele, macintyre, boudreau, and dewaele (2016) added the variable of gender to the language anxiety/enjoyment mix and found the same co-existent condition. although the females in their study had significantly more fun in class, believed more strongly that what they learned was interesting, and took greater pride in their fl accomplishments than did their male counterparts, they also were more concerned about their mistakes and were less confident when using the fl. hence, ordinary emotion schemas elicited in language learning contexts can indeed contain both negative emotions like la along with positive emotions like enjoyment and self-confidence. emotions like la and language enjoyment can co-exist in contradictory conditions. 2.4. perturbations in the system catalyze development and change in a dynamic system, a seemingly insignificant alteration in its conditions can have immense implications for future behavior. such alterations or “perturbations” are events that unsettle the stability in a system’s development. at any juncture in a system’s evolving trajectory, even a minor tickle can steer the system down a different path. likewise, a major blow may have very little impact. in terms of perturbations that influence la, they can originate externally, such as the introduction of a new test format (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008) or the presence of a video camera in a speaking class (macintyre & gardner, 1994; gregersen, macintyre, & meza, 2014). they can also occur internally (howe & lewis, 2005), for example, because of a dip in a learner’s perceived self-competence. important to keep in mind is that a prior state influences a subsequent one, and not always in a way that is anticipated or intended. this is especially the case with la. in general, within the multidimensional composition of a system, particular conditions (i.e., “attractor states”) exist that pull the system towards it. as the tammy gregersen 74 system gravitates toward a strong attractor state, it behaves in a comparatively stable way. however, weak attractor states offer little resistance and thus changes are much more likely to occur. this being the case, we can assess the strength of an attractor state and the system’s general stability in terms of the resilience it preserves when confronted with perturbations (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). perturbations that alter the system and result in la are abundant. those residing internally but influenced by external relationships include students’ negative self-comparisons with other learners, learners’ perceptions concerning their relationship with their teachers, and their desire for teachers’ approval (bailey, 1983). young (1991) also cited the collision of learner beliefs with those of the teacher as a possible disruption of learners’ language development resulting in la, while macintyre (2017) proposed that unrealistic beliefs are problematic. internally-driven perturbations can also be found in negative, self-degrading thoughts, excessive self-evaluation worries over potential failure and concern over what others think (macintyre & gardner, 1991). macintyre (2017, p. 21) also suggested that perturbations originating within learners themselves are found in worrying over the forfeiture of one’s identity, subjectively self-assessing proficiency, being timid and/or introverted, and having low self-confidence. perhaps one of the most oft-cited external perturbations is miscalculated error correction, especially that coming from the language classroom teacher. gregersen (2003) contends that the relationship of errors and la is cyclical: that learners make errors and become more anxious, and the more errors they make, the less willing they are to interact in the language as they attempt to shield their public persona. without participation, anxious learners reinforce the recurring gridlock of negative-narrowing emotion and diminished performance. anxious learners are inclined to concentrate on the negative, thinking that their language is infused with more errors than they really make. concurring, macintyre (2017, p. 21) described “instructors who intimidate their students with harsh and/or embarrassing error correction in front of other students” as an external “academic” perturbation. external perturbations can also be found in instructional practices, classroom procedures and language testing (macintyre, 2017; young, 1991). among other social disruptions are “fear of being laughed at, being embarrassed and making a fool of oneself, a poor quality accent, misunderstanding communication or using incorrect words, cultural gaffes, competitiveness, and frequency and quality of contact with native speakers” (macintyre, 2017, p. 21). to sum up, larsen-freeman (2012, p. 205) stated that complex systems are “open and dynamic” and “operate under conditions that are not in equilibrium.” the countless number of variables makes it nearly impossible to identify a comprehensive inventory of pertinent influences on a system. furthermore, they are interconnected and change over time. if one feature is altered, the other dynamic properties of language anxiety 75 system components are affected, too (de bot, 2007). as variables change through interaction with the environment and internal self-reorganization, their continual interrelatedness nevertheless maintains meaning and order. however, even though there is no master plan, script or prescriptive solution for the behavior of the variables in a system, they are not fully random and disconnected. from the time sla researchers began examining anxiety in the context of language learning, they have mainly conceptualized it as being somewhat static, using methods that incorporated surveys, language learning tasks, case studies, interviews, participant observation, and diary studies, among a host of others, to collect data. to analyze their data, researchers used correlation, multiple regression, structural equations, anova, grounded theory, etc. (macintyre, 2014). what few have done, however, is wade into the messy, chaotic data that a dynamic systems approach generates. in the next section, i attempt to paint a picture of what that might look like, for both researchers and teachers. 3. implications for research and pedagogy we are left now with questions about the impact on research and pedagogy of the paradigm shift in sla toward dynamics and complexity. what happens to research and teaching when we move away from a traditional perception of la (as a trait, a state, or specific wherein the summary accounts that are generated overlook intra-individual variation) to its conceptualization as part of a dynamic, constantly fluctuating, interconnected system (that transcends timescales, maintains contradictory conditions and changes and adapts to the intrusion of perturbations)? we might draw the analogy of comparing a photograph with a video recording of the same event (macintyre, 2014). while a static photo and moving images both communicate visual information to the viewer, the form and quality of the communication is very different. it is not necessarily that one is better than the other. rather, each provides a different kind of experience. for both researchers and teachers, such a fundamental transformation of the way we characterize la necessitates changes in research and classroom practices. 3.1. implications for research one of the most significant changes for la researchers who integrate a dynamic perspective in their investigations will be in their formulation of research questions and the methodological designs and data collection measures that will necessarily follow in order to pursue the new lines of inquiry. to exemplify what this might look like, i googled the phrase research questions for language anxiety. from the first four studies that appeared, i pinpointed the research questions. tammy gregersen 76 in the left column of table 1, there is a list of the first research question (of sometimes two or three) that each of the author(s) had utilized to guide their studies. the second column contains suggested wording to transform the original question so as to re-formulate the study into a dynamic one. table 1 non-dynamic vs. dynamic research question formulations “non-dynamic” research questions transformed into dynamic studies does the motivational level of students differ according to gender? (öztürk & gürbüz, 2013) how do motivational levels in females change over the course of an hour-long language task? how does this compare with those of males? are us college-level chinese as a foreign language learners anxious when speaking chinese? (luo, 2014) what happens to the fluency of us college-level chinese as a foreign language learners as anxiety rises and falls in a five-minute presentation? how can we identify whether students experience speaking anxiety in the foreign language classroom? (suleimenova, 2013) as students are speaking in the foreign language classroom, what behavioral indicators accompany their rising and falling anxiety? what are l2 teachers’ and students’ perceptions of the extent to which l2 students’ attitudes and beliefs about learning english contribute to l2 students’ feelings of anxiety? (lababidi, 2016) how do the perceptions of l2 teachers and students about students’ attitudes and beliefs about learning english and the ways the latter contributes to language anxiety change over the period of one semester? with questions focusing on dynamic processes, the traditional methods by which researchers used to gather and analyze data are no longer appropriate. non-dynamic methods seek to isolate and manipulate an independent variable, such as la, with the purpose of controlling as many factors and conditions as possible in order to generalize findings to other contexts. such procedures create at least two problems that dynamic systems researchers try to avoid: 1) because variables are interconnected (and thus mutually influencing and being influenced), any measure would provide only a snapshot of what was occurring at the very time the variable was being measured; and 2) because in an ideal nondynamic world groups are selected at random to allow wider generalization to a larger population, little is known about what happens at the individual level. this is particularly troubling when applied to studies of la due to the extremely personal and individualized response of l2 learners. beyond the framing of suitable research questions that focus on process rather than product, what else does dynamic systems research involve? according to macintyre, dörnyei, and henry (2015), researchers must first define the system and the level of said system that is under scrutiny. this can range from an individual, to a dyad, to a classroom, and extend all the way to a culture, but it can also, as is often the case in la research, be defined as a system that is internal to a learner – such as the interplay of variables in a learner’s emotional system as anxiety ebbs and flows. this leads us to the second requirement of dynamic research: because systems are in motion and interacting, they cannot dynamic properties of language anxiety 77 be isolated, which necessitates: 1) a process of mapping wherein between-systems interactions can be examined; and 2) an appropriate methodology to gather and interpret data. such a methodology, most likely mixed methods, requires a process in which data is collected often over a defined period of time (timescale) and focuses on individuals rather than group averages. 3.2. implications for teaching researchers are not the only language experts whose practices are transformed when attention is shifted from static measures of la to a dynamic systems perspective. language teachers’ practices also need an overhaul. 3.2.1. teachers and timescales let us consider the issue of timescales and look at an example of what happens when teachers widen their focus from the traditional way of perceiving la as a trait, state, or specific to a situation to also considering it as constantly fluctuating from moment to moment. la, as we know through decades of previous research, can be exacerbated by pre-existing conditions like particular personality variables or be aggravated by features specific to the language learning classroom; however, research into the dynamics of la also demonstrates moment-to-moment variations that become evident even in those learners who generally do not exhibit trait, state, or even situationspecific varieties. for example, one specific learner in gregersen, macintyre, and meza’s (2014) study had tested as very low anxiety on the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas), a situation-specific anxiety measure, but when she participated in an idiodynamic process in which she self-ranked her moment-by-moment la, her anxiety was higher than that of some of the participants who were more prone to situation-specific la. when asked about it in a posterior interview, she mentioned several arousal factors (“perturbations”) such as being videotaped, wearing a heart monitor, and speaking in front of a group in a language that was not her own while being evaluated by the professor. her specific case is testimony to the potential vacillation of la in learners with little to no known history of la. just when language teachers thought their jobs were taxing their sensitivities to the brink by accommodating learners whose la is a well-established debilitating phenomenon, teachers now must ask themselves what recourse they have to identify learners whose la rises suddenly with little previous history? one possible recommendation to consider comes from the nonverbal research that has been carried out in language classrooms. although we sometimes break down communication into different channels such as verbal (the words we use), nonverbal (the “body language” that tammy gregersen 78 accompanies the verbal message, such as gesture, posture, facial expression, and eye behavior), and paraverbal (the variations in vocal cues that express meaning, such as intonation, speech rate, pitch and other prosodic features), in reality, they all work together to create one whole communication event. however, that said, each channel tends to perform a specialized purpose. while the verbal channel primarily has a cognitive orientation via the transmission of content information, the nonverbal and paraverbal channels in tandem express the emotional message, at least in the sense of guiding the listener’s interpretation of it. nonverbal and paraverbal channels are primarily responsible for communicating emotions and attitudes, even if not intentional (gregersen & macintyre, 2017). furthermore, previous investigations examining the nonverbal behavior of low and high language-anxious learners in an anxiety-inducing situation (graded oral exam) suggest that there are particular body and vocal cues that indicate the presence of la. gregersen’s (2005) observation study revealed variances in high and low language anxious learners’ facial expressiveness, eye behavior, posture and body movements. for example, the facial movement (including eye behavior and smiling) of learners with high la was more limited than that of learners with low la, including brow behavior and smiling. their eye contact with the teacher tended toward minimal, their posture rigid and closed. they were also inclined to use their hands to self-touch and manipulate objects rather than to use them to improve their communication through speech-enhancing gestures. this is in contrast to the low-anxious participants whose purpose in gesturing tended to illustrate the content of their verbal message and regulate interaction. in a related study, gregersen (2007) explored whether explicit training for pre-service language teachers resulted in increased accuracy when interpreting the anxiety states of learners with variable la. she found that, indeed, teachers did improve their nonverbal decoding skill with awareness-building and explicit preparation, especially when the participants observed language learners whose la was on the extreme high and low ends of the continuum. because pre-service teachers increased their interpretive precision upon being presented with explicit anxiety-indicating cues, gregersen (2007) recommended nonverbal awareness preparation as a means of identifying those learners who struggle with la. although these two nonverbal decoding studies (gregersen, 2005, 2007) contained elements of dynamism, gregersen, macintyre, and olson (2017) purposefully took an overt dynamic turn when they examined the expression of nonverbal emotion as part of a system identified as being composed of interacting variables in constant flux. using the video-recorded data of a previous idiodynamic study (gregersen, macintyre, & meza, 2014) wherein participants selfrated their levels of la in real time while watching their pre-recorded performance in an oral classroom presentation, this study added two different external observers, dynamic properties of language anxiety 79 one an experienced language teacher and the other a peer reviewer, to assess convergence and/or divergence with learners’ self-ratings after watching the same videos. results led to the pedagogical implication that teachers’ attention should be drawn to those cues research suggests are indicative of la and that they should be encouraged to be on the lookout for these specific nonverbal manifestations of anxiety. so, to conclude this section on teachers’ options in dealing with the moment-by-moment timescales that dynamic systems introduce, the following captures the gist well: teachers who can read these [emotional] cues accurately are better able to react to the changing emotional tenor in the classroom that can disrupt even the most carefully prepared lesson. being sensitive to nonverbal emotion cues can . . . [avoid] some of the harmful consequences of emotional arousal that tend to narrow students’ focus to dealing with the source of anxiety. (gregersen, macintyre, & olson, 2017, p. 114) 3.2.2. teachers and interacting variables a language teacher’s classroom practices will also be altered if he or she perceives la as interacting with other variables rather than a factor that is isolated from the rest and treated as such. one of the long-standing debates in sla concerning la is whether anxiety is a cause or an effect of language learning difficulties. this question is at the heart of the dynamic principle of interacting variables. a teacher who recognizes that la networks with other learning variables, whether they are emotional, cognitive and/or linguistic, immediately knows la is both a cause and an effect. it is both an emotional reaction and impediment to ongoing cognition and behavior, thus making it part of a continuous cycle of sometimes influencing other variables and sometimes being influenced (gregersen & macintyre, 2016). so where does such ambiguity leave the classroom language teacher? does it matter that a learner’s la is a symptom of another phenomenon he or she is experiencing, or that la is the source of the disturbance? it might or it might not. a medical doctor who gives a pain reliever to a patient for a sore throat but does not treat the bacterial infection causing the strep throat treats the symptom but not the cause. likewise, a language teacher who focuses on a learner’s la without understanding its roots in the learner’s abysmal self-ratings of linguistic competence might be confounding the source of the problem. however, because of the cyclical nature of the interconnected systems, targeting one factor might mitigate some of the negative effects of the ones with which it interacts. dynamically-minded teachers, when confronted with learners struggling with la, do not focus exclusively on the la but also look for interacting variables that surround it and work with the conglomerate of emotions that make up the learner’s affective profile. mentioned earlier were an assortment of variables among which were low levels of tammy gregersen 80 self-competence and motivation, perfectionism, neuroticism, and the like. such a comprehensive approach will minimize the conundrum as to whether la is a cause or an effect, as that distinction may be difficult to ascertain in the moment. 3.2.3. teachers and contradictory conditions language teachers who understand that contradictory conditions can co-exist will come to a fuller understanding of learners’ conflicted (or as macintyre suggests, “ambivalent”) states, including developing sensitivities to the possibility that even the least anxious students might suffer bouts of la. this translates into teachers needing to remain vigilant concerning practices that might trigger negative-narrowing learner responses. at times teachers may let their guard down with learners that they intuit are emotionally and psychologically “in a good place.” we might be more relaxed with how we correct their errors or assign tasks necessitating more risk-taking when we think that their self-confidence can handle it. although such decision-making on the part of the teacher may not always lead to negative results, the fact that all learners are susceptible to la should give us pause to think first and insert risk later. on a hopeful note, the opposite is also true in the co-existence of contradictory conditions, as high anxious learners surely enjoy moments of pleasure. language teachers can optimize such moments by noting what the features were that incited the enjoyment and attempting to lengthen them and repeat them to preserve the allure. in the dewaele and macintyre (2014) study that examined the co-existence of enjoyment and la, the participants found a variety of activities enjoyable and particular aspects of the classroom environment stimulating, including teacherand peer-related behaviors. among the activities were those that: 1) were novel (e.g., making short videos and preparing group presentations); 2) provided space for learner choice (e.g., choosing debate and/or discussion topics); and 3) respected learner autonomy and imagination (e.g., group projects). furthermore, in terms of teacher behavior and the classroom environment that he or she fostered, dewaele and macintyre (2014, p. 264) reported: teachers who were positive, humorous, happy, well organized, respectful of students, and praised them for good performance were appreciated by their students. respondents forgave teachers for gentle teasing and for laughing together when they made mistakes. laughter that occurs when things do not go as planned can have a healthy effect on learners, taking the negative emotional tension out of the room. in terms of the role of peers in the enjoyment experienced in language class, they found that size matters: small groups facilitated social connections, a relaxed environment, and increased target language use. dynamic properties of language anxiety 81 the important take-away for teachers concerning the dynamic trends in the co-existence of contradictory conditions is not to assume that classroom activities or affective environments are unanimously enjoyed or universally induce anxiety. instead, to promote enjoyment, a person-in-context approach advocates a fit between learners’ skill level and the degree of challenge found in the activity. overgeneralizing enjoyment triggers and prematurely fitting them into universal contexts would create “laws” of effective teaching and learning that simply do not exist. because every learner is unique and is inserted into a distinctive context, what the individual finds enjoyable or anxiety-provoking will be in the eyes of the beholder (dewaele & macintyre, 2014). 3.2.4. teachers and perturbations to the system in terms of perturbations in the dynamics of la, as mentioned earlier, they can originate from a variety of sources and the influence of the resultant condition can last from a matter of milliseconds to a lifetime. anxiety-producing perturbations can minimize learners’ progress if they cannot remain impervious to both ordinary and extraordinary impediments and challenges and surmount the stresses that arise from moment-to-moment and/or during the lifetime of learning another language (ushioda, 2008). for teachers, understanding learners’ triggers and attempting to avoid them is the first place to start, particularly if the perturbation is within the teachers’ control. for example, if error correction is a major perturbation, consider alternative ways of providing feedback. if speaking in front of the entire class disrupts learners’ well-being, divide learners into small groups with cooperative tasks to provide practice opportunities; this might also alleviate the common social trigger of competitiveness among learners. nonetheless, perturbations will continue to occur, no matter the attention paid or the energy exerted on the part of language teachers. it may be that disruptions to the system fall outside the direct attributions of the classroom teacher, but no matter the origin, learners will still need to overcome the setbacks, challenges, and pressures that are part of the ordinary course of language learning. to this end, i would like to turn our attention to the notions of resiliency and buoyancy, two related ideas but qualitatively different from each other. for the purposes of our discussion on the dynamics of la, their distinction may lie in the gravity and duration of the perturbation in question. resilience is necessary in response to perturbations of intense difficulty and menacing threats to growth while buoyancy is pertinent to overcoming routine stressors and anxieties that disrupt learner engagement by posing a threat to self-confidence and determination (yun, hiver, & al-hoorie, 2018). for both, the underlying question is how we can help learners turn adversity into advantage by engineering the tammy gregersen 82 circumstances for resilience and buoyancy to thrive. for instance, such positivity might be achieved by expanding the relative balance of protective factors over risk factors (luthar, chiccetti, & becker, 2000) and by building individual strengths by emphasizing a proactive rather than reactive approach to setbacks and challenges (martin & marsh, 2008). one of our teacher goals in response to the disruptions caused by perturbations in the form of la should be enabling learners to successfully resolve or adapt to risks and threats in the language classroom. yun et al. (2018) also recommended a proactive rather than reactionary approach to perturbations. in their study examining the relevance of the buoyancy construct in l2 learning, they discovered that l2 learners with a sufficient amount of self-efficacy, self-regulation, and motivation can develop buoyancy despite a certain degree of anxiety. citing oxford (2016), they suggested the following (yun et al., 2018, p. 822): instead of focusing on avoiding or reducing the negative dimensions such as tension, apprehension and nervousness that accompany l2 learning, strengthening positive indicators in the face of external threat may more successfully reinforce learners’ buoyancy in the l2 learning process, helping them develop the ability to deal with and overcome day-to-day stresses and setbacks. this may also make buoyance directly amenable to intervention through its focus on positive and adaptive coping with hassles. such advice is also in keeping with recent research in language learning that has begun to integrate insights from positive psychology which seeks to incorporate positive qualities and endeavors to complement steps that teachers are already taking and to help learners flourish and thrive (macintyre, gregersen, & mercer, 2016). insights from this line of thinking contribute to individual development and well-being by nurturing learners’ strengths and personal resources (gregersen, 2016). a positive perspective on l2 learners and the learning process will expand our understanding of how l2 learners can proactively recover and move beyond the inevitable challenges of both their shortterm struggles and long-term language learning challenges (macintyre, 2016). 4. conclusion this article provided four convincing reasons why la is a dynamic individual difference, namely, its measurability on different timescales, the interconnectedness of its moving parts, the co-existence of contradictory conditions, and the change that transpires when perturbations are present. as such, these dynamic elements require both researchers and teachers to adapt the way they approach their tasks. for researchers, their challenge will be in the formulation of research questions that consider the dynamic properties of la and the changes in design dynamic properties of language anxiety 83 and data collection that such modifications imply. for teachers, they will want to consider innovative ways of identifying language anxious learners through nonverbal means and once identified, to look for interacting reasons for the causes and effects and to understand that all learners can feel both positive and negative emotions, and sometimes even at the same time. proactively engineering circumstances that incite resiliency and buoyancy may even stave off problems before they even begin. tammy gregersen 84 references bailey, k. m. 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(2018). academic buoyancy: exploring learners’ everyday resilience in the language classroom. studies in second language acquisition, 40, 805-830. 105 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (1). 2017. 105-125 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.1.6 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl affective and situational correlates of foreign language proficiency: a study of chinese university learners of english and japanese1 yinxing jin hainan normal university, p.r.china university of groningen, the netherlands busicontact@yahoo.com kees de bot university of groningen, the netherlands c.l.j.de.bot@rug.nl merel keijzer university of groningen, the netherlands m.c.j.keijzer@rug.nl abstract the study explores the effects of teacher support and student cohesiveness on foreign language (fl) learning outcomes and compares their effect with that of fl anxiety. one hundred and forty-six first-year chinese undergraduates of japanese, who were also learning english, participated in two surveys that were administered over a 2-month interval. data were collected using the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986), the teacher support scale (trickett & moos, 2002), the affiliation scale (trickett & moos, 2002), the english proficiency scale, and the japanese proficiency scale. it was found that (a) student cohesiveness was a positive predictor of fl proficiency, (b) teacher support, which was positively related to student cohesiveness and negatively to fl anxiety, did not show a direct relationship with fl proficiency, and (c) fl anxiety, 1 this paper is based on the first author’s phd project. yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 106 which was negatively associated with fl proficiency, showed a better predictive power than student cohesiveness and teacher support. keywords: teacher support; student affiliation; foreign language anxiety; foreign language proficiency 1. introduction understanding the factors affecting foreign language (fl) learning has been a crucial task in the field of sla. many studies have shown that the success and failure of fl learning are related to a myriad of internal and external learner variables as well as their interactions (e.g., dewaele, 2007; ellis, 2008). one such external factor is classroom environment, which itself is a multi-faceted concept (trickett & moos, 2002). teacher support and student cohesiveness, as two key dimensions of classroom environment, have been directly shown to be essential for a fruitful fl learning experience, but only a fairly small number of studies currently exist. furthermore, their effects have not been related to fl anxiety, one well-recognized negative correlate of fl learning. thus, in this study involving two tests over a 2-month interval, we investigated quantitatively the impact of these two classroom dimensions on fl proficiency as well as comparing their effect with that of fl anxiety in the english and japanese learning contexts of chinese university students. with this study, we hope to further clarify the roles of the two classroom variables of teacher support and student cohesiveness in fl learning as well as that of fl anxiety. it should be noted that to do a study in two fl learning contexts offers the possibility of making a comparison between the two languages, but this is not the study’s main objective. rather, we aimed to assess the roles of fl anxiety, teacher support, and student cohesiveness as general constructs, by collecting data over two contexts and time points. 2. theoretical background gardner and macintyre (1992) argue that there are three categories of individual characteristics that affect l2 achievement: (a) cognitive variables (e.g., intelligence and language aptitude), (b) affective variables (e.g., motivation, language anxiety, and personality attributes), and (c) a miscellaneous category (e.g., age and socio-cultural experiences). the three categories of variables have been collectively treated as individual difference factors by dörnyei (2005). in addition to the personal properties that can determine the different paths of the fl learning process and the interpersonal disparities in outcomes, the social affective and situational correlates of foreign language proficiency: a study of chinese university. . . 107 context, particularly the classroom environment, should also be taken into account, at least to some extent. in what follows, we focus on those studies that probe the effect of fl anxiety, itself an important negative factor in fl learning, and two crucial variables of social support in the classroom, namely student cohesiveness and teacher support, on fl learning. 2.1. fl anxiety and fl learning in their seminal work, horwitz, horwitz, and cope (1986) introduced the concept of fl anxiety and defined it as “a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors related to classroom language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process" (p. 128). from then on, there has been a gradual change in our understanding of the construct of fl anxiety. for instance, fl anxiety has been gradually recognized to include not only general fl anxiety as assessed by the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas; horwitz et al., 1986), but also skill-based anxieties, that is, listening, speaking, reading, and writing anxiety (e.g., elkhafaifi, 2005; gkonou, 2011; saito, horwitz, & garza, 1999). fl anxiety can be quite pervasive among learners. horwitz (2000) notes that around one third of american college students experience moderate to severe levels of fl anxiety. in liu and jackson’s (2008) study, more than one third of the 547 chinese students felt anxious in the english classroom. furthermore, even language teachers suffer from anxiety. horwitz (1996) maintains that fl teachers who lack confidence about their own target language proficiency, who pursue an idealized level of proficiency, or who encountered a good deal of anxiety in their own language learning, are likely to experience anxiety. owing to the pervasiveness of fl anxiety, research looking into its impact on fl learning is crucial. crosssectional research across different language classrooms in different countries has documented a negative link between general fl anxiety and fl achievement/proficiency (e.g., aida, 1994; cheng, horwitz, & schallert, 1999; elkhafaifi, 2005). recently, jin, de bot, and keijzer (2015) found that the diachronic changes in anxiety in japanese/english assessed by the flcas were negatively associated with the development of self-reported overall japanese/english proficiency as well as japanese/english proficiency in relation to the four subskills (e.g., listening and speaking). in addition, a negative link also extends to writing/listening/reading anxiety and writing/listening/reading achievement or proficiency (cheng et al., 1999; zhang, 2013; zhao, guo, & dynia, 2013). correlation is not causation, and the findings highlight the possible reciprocal effects between fl anxiety and fl achievement/proficiency, rather than indicating a direct causal relationship. researchers also probed the effect of fl anxiety on the more subtle aspects of fl learning (macintyre & gardner, 1994). gregersen (2003) looked at yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 108 differences between anxious and non-anxious students in regard to the number of errors in oral expression as well as in their ability to monitor and perceive errors. the students themselves were all l1 spanish-speaking university students of english. the highly anxious students (n = 4) scored between 111 and 121 out of a maximum of 165 on the flcas and the less anxious students (again n = 4) obtained scores ranging from 51 to 76. anxious students were found to make more errors, to self-repair more often, and to recognize errors less often when reflecting on their output with the researcher. in addition, the anxious students used the l1 more often as part of a communicative compensation strategy and overestimated the number of errors they had made. these findings suggest that anxious students may experience more task-irrelevant cognitive inference, pay more attention to the correctness of linguistic forms than to the content of the messages out of concern for others’ evaluations, face more difficulties in retrieving the learnt materials, and tend to have a self-derogatory bias (gregersen, 2003). rassaei (2015) was interested in finding out the effect of fl anxiety on learners’ perceptions of recasts and metalinguistic feedback, two types of oral corrective feedback. results showed that low-anxiety students perceived significantly more corrective feedback of either of the two types than high-anxiety ones. the reason may be that, owing to cognitive distraction arising from anxiety, highly anxious students largely failed to focus on the task of identifying the corrective feedback provided by the interlocutors. in sum, previous findings have supported the view that fl anxiety interferes with fl learning and should be controlled as much as possible (e.g., dörnyei, 2005; horwitz, 2001; macintyre & garnder, 1991). there are, however, also other views on this. sparks, ganschow and their colleagues (sparks & ganschow, 1991, 1993a, 1993b, 1995; sparks, ganschow, & javorsky, 2000; sparks, ganschow, & pohlman, 1989) have contended that fl anxiety is primarily a consequence of fl learning difficulties, rather than a causal factor for fl underachieving. this claim has met with strong opposition from macintyre (1995) and horwitz (2000). as a matter of fact, “the potential of anxiety to interfere with learning and performance is one of the most accepted phenomena in psychology and education” (horwitz, 2000, p. 256). therefore, the influences of fl anxiety on fl learning should not be ignored, but it should be kept in mind that a constellation of additional factors such as motivation, language aptitude, learning styles, personality traits, and situational variables also play a role. 2.2. classroom climate and fl learning goodenow (1993) refers to classroom climate as “the ‘objective’ perception of the social and emotional features of a class, the average or shared perception affective and situational correlates of foreign language proficiency: a study of chinese university. . . 109 of class members” (p. 29). within that frame, there has traditionally been abundant research into social support in general and supportive classrooms in particular (goodenow, 1993). a focus on perception is also meaningful, because as house (1981) puts it, “no matter how much your spouse or supervisor feels or acts supportive toward you, there will be little effect on you unless you, in fact, perceive them as supportive” (p. 27). indeed, it is possible that a gap exists between the quality and quantity of support given by instructors/peers and the quality and quantity of support ultimately perceived by students. cultural norms, learners’ personality, temperament, mood, and/or language-learning growing experiences may block or distort the support given by teachers/peers. as such, teacher support is an essential classroom dimension, defined as “the help and friendship the teacher shows toward students; how much the teacher talks openly with students, trusts them, and is interested in their ideas” (trickett & moos, 2002, p. 1). overall, it “involves characteristics such as caring, friendliness, understanding, dedication, and dependability” (ryan & patrick, 2001, p. 440), though some researchers emphasize academic support (e.g., chen, 2008). teacher support has been considered pivotal for learners’ academic outcomes. piechurska-kuciel (2011) has mentioned that “[without teacher support and guidance], successful learning may be very difficult, if not impossible” (p. 84). empirical studies have directly examined the relationship between perceived teacher support and fl academic outcomes, but not while focusing on adult learners. chen (2005) found that perceived academic support was directly and indirectly (through perceived engagement) linked with end-of-semester grades in the subjects of english, mathematics and chinese for secondary school adolescents in hong kong. piechurska-kuciel (2011) targeted polish secondary school pupils of english. she found that final grades and self-assessment of listening, speaking, reading, and writing were significantly higher in students with high levels of teacher support than those of students who perceived a low level of teacher support. a second factor contributing to classroom environment is student cohesiveness, which has been conceived of as “the friendship students feel for each other, as expressed by getting to know each other, helping each other work with homework, and enjoying working together” (trickett & moos, 2002, p. 1). student cohesiveness belongs to a broader construct of group cohesion: the integrity, solidity, social integration, unity, and “groupness” of a group (forsyth, 2014, p. 10). dörnyei (1997) maintains that “[group] characteristics and group processes significantly contribute to success or failure in the classroom and directly [affect] the quality and quantity of learning within the group” (p. 485). hence, it is reasonable to hypothesize that learners with a positive perception of interpeer relatedness in the fl classroom should be able to develop a higher level of proficiency. gascoigne’s (2012) study sheds light on such a hypothesis. adopting yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 110 the 18-item connected classroom climate inventory (dwyer et al., 2004), gascoigne (2012) probed the relationship between student-to-student connections and french course grades in a study involving three groups of students respectively attending beginning, intermediate, or advanced courses at the university of nebraska. data analysis revealed a significant positive link between the classroom climate and grades for each learner group. to sum up, many studies have supported the view that fl anxiety interferes with fl learning. in contrast, there is little research—to our knowledge— that directly supports the view that teacher support and student cohesiveness affect fl outcomes. therefore, a focus on these two dimensions of classroom environment in fl learning is very much needed. as for fl anxiety, studies comparing its effect on fl learning with that of other factors are worth undertaking in order to establish the relative importance of this affective factor in fl learning. thus, in this study, we sought to directly examine the impact of teacher support and student cohesiveness on language outcomes in fl learning contexts and to compare their effect with that of fl anxiety. specifically, this study aimed to answer the following research questions: rq1: do student cohesiveness and teacher support have an effect on fl proficiency levels? rq2: does fl anxiety affect fl proficiency levels more than teacher support and/or student cohesiveness? 3. methodology 3.1. design of the study we situated our study within the context of chinese university students’ learning english and japanese as fls. within that context, a design with two measurements over time was adopted: data relating to teacher support and student cohesiveness in english/japanese classes, to anxiety in english/ japanese, and to english/japanese proficiency were collected twice with a 2-month interval. in short, we examined the effects of fl anxiety, teacher support, and student cohesiveness on fl proficiency in english and japanese learning contexts, at two moments in time. 3.2. participants participants were 146 chinese students, all majoring in japanese and simultaneously studying english. they were recruited from six japanese classes at two universities located in the henan province in the central part of china and one university in the shandong province in east china. all the students were taking affective and situational correlates of foreign language proficiency: a study of chinese university. . . 111 more than one japanese course, but only one compulsory english course. of the 146 students, 21 were male and 125 female, with ages ranging from 17 to 23 (m = 19.57, sd = 1.00). moreover, the students mainly came from less developed areas (m = 1.9, sd = 1.21; home location options: 1 = village, 2 = township, 3 = county, 4 = prefecture city or above) and their parents overall had not received much education (parental education options: 1 = primary school, 2 = junior school, 3 = senior school, 4 = college): m = 2.4, sd = .87 for fathers and m = 2.2, sd = .91 for mothers. at the time of the first test, all participants had been studying english for quite a long time (m = 9.05 years, sd = 1.88), with individuals’ learning experience ranging from 4.5 to 13.5 years. however, all participants, except one, started learning japanese only after university enrollment (m = .52 years, sd = .29 up to time 1 test). 3.3. instruments apart from the demographic information index (diq) used to elicit the participants’ background information: name, age, gender, home location, parental education, and duration of english and japanese learning (part of the demographic information was reported above), five other scales constituted the basic measures for this study, including the teacher support scale (tss; trickett & moos, 2002), the affiliation scale (as; trickett & moos, 2002), the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas; horwitz et al., 1986), the english proficiency scale (eps), and the japanese proficiency scale (jps). the diq, the eps, and the jps were constructed in chinese by the current researchers. the remaining three, which were originally developed in english, were translated into chinese with the procedures as follows: one chinese-english bilingual holding an ma applied linguistics degree or the chinese researcher in this study translated the scales into chinese (the flcas was translated into chinese by referring to abaohuier, 2011 and guo and wu, 2008; for the tss and the as, the existing chinese versions that were provided by mind garden, inc., the copyright holder of the two scales, were referred to). the chinese researcher in this study discussed the translated versions with a fourth year university student who was enrolled in a chinese program and had a good command of english until the minor discrepancies between them were resolved. in addition, the translated measures were piloted before administering them to the 146 participants (see the procedures section). the details of the five basic measures are presented in table 1. yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 112 table 1 description of scales scales (# of items) description response format score range sample items e/jcas (33) flcas adapted by changing foreign language into english (ecas) or japanese (jcas) to measure anxiety in the english or japanese classroom. higher scores indicate more intense anxiety. 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree 33165 “in english class, i can get so nervous i forget things i know.” “it embarrasses me to volunteer answers in my japanese class.” e/j-tss1 (10) tss adapted by clearly indicating english (e-tss) or japanese classes (j-tss) for some items to elicit the participants’ general perceptions about teacher support in classes for the two fls under investigation. higher scores indicate stronger support. 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = agree, 4 = strongly agree 10-40 “english teacher is more like a friend than an authority.” “japanese teacher takes a personal interest in students.” e/j-as1 (10) as adapted by clearly indicating english (e-as) or japanese classes for some items to elicit the participants’ general perceptions about student connections in classes for the two fls. higher scores show a closer affiliation among students 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = agree, 4 = strongly agree 10-40 “a lot of friendships have been made in (j-as) english classes.” “students in japanese classes aren’t very interested in getting to know other students.” eps (20) a measure of intermediate level of english, developed by the current researchers on the basis of the curriculum standard for senior high school english (experimental) (moe, 2003). it has four subscales (5 items in each) pertaining to proficiency in four subskills, respectively, i.e., listening, speaking, reading, and writing. higher scores indicate higher levels of proficiency. the effectiveness of the eps in measuring english proficiency was validated against teacher ratings of students’ proficiency in the four subskills (1 = poor, 2 = fair, 3 = good, 4 = very good, 5 = excellent for each skill; teacher ratings range from 4 to 20). the validation process is introduced in section 3.4 and the validation result is reported in section 4.1. 1 = almost impossible, 2 = difficult, 3 = a bit difficult, 4 = easy 20-80 “in daily interpersonal communication, i can effectively express opinions, blames, and complaints.” jps (20) a measure of elementary level of japanese, developed by the current researchers on the basis of the curriculum standard for japanese majors at elementary level in higher education (moe, 2001) (two items were adapted from xu, 2010). it has four subscales (5 items in each) pertaining to proficiency in four subskills, respectively, i.e., listening, speaking, reading, and writing. higher scores suggest higher levels of proficiency. the effectiveness of the jps in measuring japanese proficiency was validated against teacher ratings of students’ proficiency in the four subskills (1 = poor, 2 = fair, 3 = good, 4 = very good, 5 = excellent for each skill; teacher ratings range from 4 to 20), as introduced 1 = almost impossible, 2 = difficult, 3 = a bit difficult, 4 = easy 20-80 “i can understand daily conversations on the topic of school life.” affective and situational correlates of foreign language proficiency: a study of chinese university. . . 113 section 3.4. the validation result is reported in section 4.1. note. 1 the tss and the as were originally formulated using a true-false format. in this study, a 4-point likert format was adopted to increase the sensitivity of the two scales. 3.4. procedures data were collected in three steps. step 1 was a pilot study that itself consisted of two parts. in part 1, 41 first-year japanese majors recruited from two intact classes at a university in west china’s shaan’xi province were tested during regular class hours. all measures were first pilot tested in class 1 (21 students). after that, a few chinese words in the measures, with the exception of the diq, were adjusted with the help of a chinese teacher who was teaching english at the pilot study university, following the results of internal reliability computations, and the resulting measures were retested in class 2 (20 students). importantly, the 20 students in class 2 did not report any difficulties in understanding the items in the scales. as the jcas and the ecas were identical except for the respective medium of english or japanese, only the jcas was tested as part of the pilot. likewise, the tss and the as were only tested for japanese classes. in short, the pilot results (internal reliability) for the jcas, the j-tss, the j-as, the eps, and the jps as reported in section 4.1 were based on class 2. part 2 of the pilot design aimed to find out whether the eps and the jps could effectively measure language proficiency. to that end, the two scales that had already shown adequate reliability levels in the class 2 samples were administered to 27 freshmen of japanese at another university in east china’s shandong province. this is because this shandong university more closely resembles, in terms of level, the three universities from which the 146 participants were sampled. obtaining valid results in this context would thus be a better indication of the effective use of the scales in the full surveys. teacher ratings (two teachers for japanese and english, respectively) of the 27 students’ english and japanese listening, speaking, reading, and writing proficiency were also collected. there were 26 valid student self-reports for each scale. thus, the eps and the jps were validated by correlating the 26 self-reports and the associated teacher ratings. two tests administered over a 2-month interval formed step 2 of the design. they were administered to the 146 participants in an out-of-class session. at both testing points, participants attending the same university completed a test battery in a classroom with no teacher present. the questionnaires that were administered were arranged in the following order: the diq (excluded at time 2), the j-as, the j-tss, the jps, the eps, the jcas, the e-as, the e-tss, and the ecas. prior to the distribution of questionnaires at time 1, the research purposes were only partly revealed. the students were also informed that their participation was yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 114 voluntary and would not influence their course grades in any way. they were expected to respond honestly and independently. at time 2, the instructions were shortened. questionnaires were checked immediately after being collected for missing answers. as soon as unanswered items were detected, those subjects were traced and asked to supply the missing responses. step 3 of the design involved data registration, during which the negatively-worded items in the scales were reverse-coded. 4. results 4.1. reliability levels table 2 reports the psychometric properties of the five basic measures, including internal and test-retest reliability. as can be seen, the scales overall showed satisfactory reliability levels, in particular regarding internal reliability. the internal reliability of the flcas in chinese was as high as other language versions used in previous studies that looked at university students, such as .94 in aida (1994) and .95 in zhao et al. (2013). these consistent findings attest to the universality of fl anxiety phenomena across cultural and instructional contexts. the test-retest reliability of the jcas was almost the same as what horwitz (1986) reported (.83) and was higher than that of the ecas. table 2 reliability levels of the scales (n = 146) internal reliability (α) measure pilot study time 1 time 2 test-retest reliability (r) ecas n/a .92 .92 .72*** jcas .95 .93 .94 .81*** e-tss n/a .86 .90 .71** j-tss .78 .79 .81 .70** e-as n/a .73 .80 .63** j-as .77 .68 .71 .50** eps .95 .92 .92 .68** jps .91 .92 .92 .68** note. n/a = not available; test-retest reliability coefficients were calculated on the basis of times 1 and 2; ***p < .001; **p < .01. generally speaking, the internal reliability of the tss and the as were similar to what trickett and moos (2002) reported in their 465 normative high school samples: .84 for the tss and .74 for the as. the relatively low internal reliability of the as in both trickett and moos (2002) and our study reflects the design of the classroom environment scale (ces) to which the as belongs as one affective and situational correlates of foreign language proficiency: a study of chinese university. . . 115 of the subscales: the nine ces subscales aim to assess relatively independent and broad constructs, so items diverse in content were selected at the cost of higher inter-item relatedness in each subscale. in addition, the e-tss/as achieved better internal reliability than the j-tss/as. this is probably because profiling the degree of support of several japanese teachers and the social bond among students in more than one japanese course led to less homogenous responses to the items of the j-tss/as. as for the test-retest reliability of the tss and the as, the current findings were notably lower than what trickett and moos (2002) reported on the basis of their 52 normative samples over a 6-week interval: .89 for the tss and .73 for the as. the factors contributing to the discrepancy may include the fact that different categories of participants were used (university students vs. high school pupils) and the difference in the test-retest interval (8 vs. 6 weeks). as noted in section 3.4, the eps and the jps were validated by correlating students’ self-reports on the two scales with teacher ratings. the results showed that the internal and external ratings were highly associated: .63 for english proficiency and .71 for japanese proficiency, underscoring the validity of the eps and the jps in measuring language proficiency. moreover, the two scales revealed high levels of internal reliability at either time point as well as adequate test-retest reliability. 4.2. descriptive analysis table 3 presents the mean scores and standard deviations for anxiety and proficiency in english and japanese of the 146 chinese students. as can be seen, the participants reported a high level of fl proficiency at the two testing points. anxiety in the two fls was moderate at either time. to take a closer look at teacher support and student cohesiveness in the learning contexts of the two fls, the descriptive statistics for the e/j-tss and the e/j-as scores are reported based on individual classes (i.e., six japanese classes), as presented in table 4. table 3 means (with standard deviations) of fl anxiety and fl proficiency at both testing times (n = 146) measurements time 1 time 2 english proficiency 66.5 (8.96) 66.9 (8.28) japanese proficiency 61.1 (9.94) 63.2 (9.33) anxiety in english 91.5 (17.54) 91.6 (16.26) anxiety in japanese 94.2 (18.41) 91.6 (18.34) as shown, the students in each class perceived a moderate level of teacher support and student cohesiveness when learning english at time 1 and time 2. it should be noted that the e-tss mean for class 1 was strikingly lower than that for the other classes at each time. student cohesiveness in the japanese yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 116 learning context was still moderate at either time for each class, but the degree of teacher support tended to be high. in addition, the j-tss/as mean was higher than the mean e-tss/as scores for each class (with the exception of student cohesiveness for class 5 at time 2). student cohesiveness showed a tendency to become stronger with time, whereas teacher support did not. table 4 means (with standard deviations) of the tss and the as scores in two learning contexts and at two time points (n = 146) class size time 1 time 2 e-tss j-tss e-tss j-tss 1 25 22.8 (5.12) 32.0 (3.35) 23.4 (5.60) 32.1 (3.44) 2 22 27.2 (3.55) 32.3 (3.34) 27.7 (4.17) 31.8 (3.10) 3 28 28.4 (4.02) 31.4 (3.28) 26.4 (5.53) 31.9 (2.83) 4 26 28.0 (2.89) 32.1 (3.76) 29.7 (2.94) 32.0 (4.06) 5 24 28.8 (2.59) 29.5 (3.12) 29.0 (1.70) 29.3 (2.33) 6 21 29.1 (2.56) 31.5 (3.48) 29.2 (2.81) 30.9 (3.12) class size time 1 time 2 e-as j-as e-as j-as 1 25 23.4 (3.84) 26.2 (3.63) 25.0 (4.41) 28.3 (3.46) 2 22 24.7 (2.97) 26.5 (3.10) 25.8 (3.68) 26.7 (2.49) 3 28 23.4 (3.08) 25.3 (3.03) 24.3 (3.81) 26.2 (3.09) 4 26 25.7 (2.70) 26.4 (2.84) 26.5 (2.35) 27.0 (2.25) 5 24 25.2 (2.46) 25.6 (2.10) 26.0 (2.40) 25.6 (2.94) 6 21 26.4 (2.96) 27.5 (2.87) 27.0 (3.03) 28.7 (3.06) 4.3. simple correlation analysis table 5 presents the results of simple correlation analyses between fl anxiety, teacher support, student cohesiveness, and fl proficiency. prior to any computation, the relationship between the variables to be correlated was observed via scatterplots. no curvilinear patterns were found, warranting the use of simple correlations. teacher support and student cohesiveness were found to be positively related, with the correlation being stronger in the english learning context. the two classroom variables showed a negative link with language anxiety in english and japanese learning contexts at both time 1 and time 2. in addition, student cohesiveness was significantly and positively associated with fl proficiency in the two learning contexts, but there was no significant correlation between teacher support and fl proficiency. hence, teacher support was excluded from the ensuing regression analysis. moreover, anxiety in english/japanese was negatively correlated with proficiency in english/japanese at either time, showing a stronger relationship than that between student cohesiveness in the english/japanese classroom and english/japanese proficiency. figure 1 was drafted to map the correlational findings of this study. affective and situational correlates of foreign language proficiency: a study of chinese university. . . 117 table 5 correlations between the e/j-tss, the e/j-as, the e/jcas and the e/jps scores at two times (n = 146) variable time 1 time 2 ts-e sc-e ae ep ts-e sc-e ae ep ts-e 1.00 1.00 sc-e .46*** 1.00 .68*** 1.00 ae -.20* -.23* 1.00 -.21* -.22* 1.00 ep .13 .36*** -.57*** 1.00 .11 .20* -.55*** 1.00 time 1 time 2 ts-j sc-j aj jp ts-j sc-j aj jp ts-j 1.00 1.00 sc-j .32*** 1.00 .40*** 1.00 aj -.18* -.32*** 1.00 -.27** -.20* 1.00 jp .09 .42*** -.57*** 1.00 .12 .35*** -.50*** 1.00 note. ts-e/j = teacher support in english/japanese classroom; sc-e/j = student cohesiveness in english/japanese classroom; ae/j = anxiety in english/japanese; e/jp = english/japanese proficiency; ***p < .001; **p < .005; *p < .05. figure 1 the relationships between student cohesiveness, teacher support, fl anxiety, and fl proficiency (+ = positive correlation; = negative correlation) 4.4. regression analysis for english proficiency in table 6, the findings of regressing student cohesiveness and anxiety on english proficiency in a standard procedure at the two times are presented. following the regression analyses, standardized residual values were checked, which ranged from -2.96 to 2.16 for time 1 and from -3.11 to 1.93 for time 2. pallant (2010) warns researchers that standardized residuals falling out the range of -3 to 3 suggest outliers in the data. a further inspection revealed the standardized residual of one case at time 2 was -3.11. yet, we did not remove this case, as cook’s distance (maximum .24) showed that this case would pose no major problems regarding the overall model’s predictive ability. in addition, the assumptions of normality, linearity, homoscedasticity, and independence of residuals were not found to be violated. for the computations at times 1 and 2, a weak correlation of student cohesiveness with anxiety in english indicated no multicollinearity between the predictor variables, and this was confirmed by the vif value of 1.05 (twice). student cohesiveness + + -teacher support fl anxiety fl proficiency yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 118 table 6 regression results for english proficiency at two times (n = 146) times variables b se b β 1 anxiety in english -.26 .04 -.51*** student cohesiveness .69 .19 .24*** 2 anxiety in english -.27 .04 -.53*** student cohesiveness .19 .17 .08 note. time 1: r2 = .376; adjusted r2 = .367; f(2, 143) = 43.07, p < .001; ***p < .001. time 2: r2 = .306; adjusted r2 = .296; f(2, 143) = 31.55, p < .001; ***p < .001. at time 1, the regression of anxiety in english and student cohesiveness was highly significant. anxiety in english and student cohesiveness were found to be negative and positive predictors of english proficiency, respectively. anxiety was a better predictor than student cohesiveness. however, at time 2, only anxiety in english significantly and negatively predicted english proficiency. 4.5. regression analysis for japanese proficiency standard multiple regression analyses were performed to investigate and compare the effects of student cohesiveness and anxiety in japanese on japanese proficiency, the results of which are reported in table 7. as for english, the range of standardized residual values was checked after each computation. at time 1, residual values fell in the range of -2.46 to 2.31, suggesting no outliers for the regression analysis, which therefore did not result in any data cleansing. at time 2, the minimum residual score was -3.90 and the maximum was 2.34. a closer inspection revealed the standardized residuals of two cases to be either -3.03 or -3.90. yet, we kept these two cases as cook’s distance (maximum .12) showed that they would pose no major problems regarding the whole model’s predictive ability. moreover, there was no violation of normality, linearity, homoscedasticity, and independence of residuals at either time. multicollinearity was also not found (vif = 1.12 at time 1 and 1.04 at time 2). table 7 regression results for japanese proficiency at two times (n = 146) times variables b se b β 1 anxiety in japanese -.26 .04 -.49*** student cohesiveness 87 .23 .26*** 2 anxiety in japanese -.23 .04 -.44*** student cohesiveness .80 .22 .26*** note. time 1: r2 = .386; adjusted r2 = .377; f(2, 143) = 44.96, p < .001; ***p < .001. time 2: r2 = .311; adjusted r2 = .301; f(2, 143) = 32.28, p < .001; ***p < .001. affective and situational correlates of foreign language proficiency: a study of chinese university. . . 119 as shown in table 7, the regression of anxiety in japanese and student cohesiveness at both time slots reached significance levels. anxiety significantly negatively predicted japanese proficiency, more than student cohesiveness predicted it positively. the affective and situational factors negatively and positively predicted japanese proficiency, respectively. 5. discussion this study investigated the effects of teacher support and student cohesiveness on fl learning and compared their effect with that of fl anxiety. descriptive analyses revealed a higher level of perceived teacher support and student cohesiveness in the japanese classroom than in the english classroom (the e-as mean was slightly higher than the j-as mean only in class 5 at time 2). we discussed the reasons for stronger japanese teacher support in jin, de bot, and keijzer (2016): one reason may be the much smaller size of japanese classes, which may also explain the discrepancy in students’ social affiliation between the two fl learning contexts. that is, the much smaller number of students in japanese classes may have facilitated more peer communication and mutual understanding. as dewaele and macintyre (2014) remark: “smaller groups are more conducive to closer social bonds, a positive informal atmosphere, and to more frequent use of the fl” (p. 264). another explanation for the higher degree of student cohesiveness in the japanese classes may be related to a large difference in japanese and english class hours. the participants spent much more time in japanese classes, increasing peer-to-peer contact. moreover, two schools from which classes 2 to 6 were recruited offered japanese conversation courses. no such courses were available for english at the two universities, and that possibly restrained the enhancement of friendly relations among students in english classes achieved through interactive activities. returning to the research questions, rq 1 was formulated to determine whether student cohesiveness and teacher support have an effect on fl proficiency levels. regression analysis revealed student cohesiveness to be a positive predictor of fl proficiency in both the english and japanese learning contexts and at both testing times. teacher support did not significantly predict fl proficiency, however, which was an unexpected finding. yet, our study is not the only one to find a non-significant relationship between perceived teacher support and academic outcomes: chen (2008) found that perceived academic support from teachers was related to academic outcomes for form 3 students (mean age = 14.5 years), but not for forms 4 and 5 (mean age = 15.5 and 16.7 years). reflecting on these findings, chen (2008) noted that “increased cognitive abilities may prompt older adolescents to seek independence from adults” (p. 192). this may be equally applicable to the current study’s finding obtained on the yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 120 basis of adult participants. in addition, it should be noted that the participants in this study had more than one japanese teacher. the tss was used to elicit the participants’ holistic perceptions of these teachers’ support. we hypothesize that a significant relationship between the support variable and fl learning outcomes might have been obtained if the tss had targeted one particular teacher and only grades of the course taught by that teacher had been used. indeed, a significant positive link between teacher support and peer cohesiveness was found, suggesting that the two relationship dimensions in the classroom may well influence each other. in addition, teacher support was negatively correlated with fl anxiety. the findings suggest that perceived teacher support is more likely to determine how well university learners, or more specifically collegelevel beginners, learn a fl—by influencing students’ perceptions of inter-peer connection and/or learners’ anxiety levels. in brief, this study revealed an indirect relationship between teacher support and fl learning outcomes. rq 2 asked whether fl anxiety affects learners’ fl proficiency levels more than teacher support and/or student cohesiveness. data analysis showed that anxiety in english/ japanese negatively predicted english/japanese proficiency at either time. moreover, anxiety appeared to be a stronger predictive factor than student cohesiveness and teacher support. all the findings again point to the necessity to control learners’ fl anxiety levels. in addition, this study attested to a negative correlation of fl anxiety with student cohesiveness, mirroring palacios’ (1998) finding and suggesting a possible reciprocal influence between the affiliation and anxiety variables: a lack of social cohesion among learners in the classroom may evoke fl anxiety and fl anxiety may in turn affect the learners’ cognitive evaluation of their learning environment. in addition, the finding that fl anxiety is a negative predictor of fl proficiency levels identified across both learning contexts and both testing times does not mean that students with relatively high fl anxiety levels cannot be successful in learning that fl. in fact, the effect of anxiety on fl learning is related to a myriad of variables, such as learners’ intelligence and personality. williams (1991) proposed that studies should look at learners’ different responses to anxiety. some students who feel anxious about their fl classes may try to find ways of reducing their anxiety, for instance by doing more extracurricular work to better master the fl, doing more pre-class preparation, or thinking positively about anxiety (kao & craigie, 2013). in contrast, others may mentally and behaviorally do little or nothing to become less anxious. thus, students at the same level of anxiety may differ greatly in their final fl proficiency. similarly, fl anxiety can create stronger determination in learners and help students to be aware of their weaknesses (tran, moni, & baldauf, 2013). yet, it does not suggest that fl anxiety is healthy in essence. as for its facilitating effect, this is better understood affective and situational correlates of foreign language proficiency: a study of chinese university. . . 121 from the perspective of creating more motivation in learners (e. k. horwitz, personal communication, july 06, 2014). 6. conclusion and implications to conclude, this study has established an association of fl learning outcomes with teacher support as well as student cohesiveness in the classroom, particularly with the latter. learners’ anxiety should ideally be reduced to a minimum, for increased anxiety can bring about more serious consequences to fl learning, as witnessed by a stronger predictive effect of anxiety than of the two classroom variables. the findings lend support to what gregersen, macintyre, and meza (2014) have noted: “language learning is an emotionally and psychologically dynamic process that is influenced by a myriad of ever-changing variables and emotional ‘vibes’ that produce moment-bymoment fluctuations in learners’ adaptation” (p. 574). moreover, this study revealed the interconnections between student cohesiveness, teacher support, and fl anxiety, further suggesting the dynamics of factors influencing fl learning. the findings of this study have pedagogical implications. first, it remains important that teachers be supportive and sympathetic in respect to students, which has been emphasized by many researchers (e.g., gregersen, 2003; horwitz et al., 1986). second, measures should be taken to build a classroom characterized by closer student-to-student connections. for example, students could be instructed in how to manage conflicts with their peer learners because, as johnson and johnson (1995) reflected, “we are not born instinctively knowing how to interact effectively with others. interpersonal and group skills do not magically appear when they are needed” (p. 122). third, actions are needed to reduce the interference of fl anxiety with fl learning to a minimum level. for instance, students’ enjoyment of fl learning should be established by encouraging students to savour the joyful episodes in the fl classes (cf. dewaele & macintyre, 2014). positive emotions are beneficial to “dissipate the lingering effects of negative emotional arousal, helping to promote personal resiliency in the face of difficulties” (dewaele & macintyre, 2014, p. 241). acknowledgements we thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the earlier version of this manuscript. we are grateful for the graduate school for the humanities, university of groningen and china scholarship council for their financial support when we were collecting the data and preparing the manuscript. we are also appreciative of the chinese students and teachers who provided great collaboration during data collection and those who assisted us with materials translation. 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(2013). foreign language reading anxiety: chinese as a foreign language in the united states. the modern language journal, 97, 764-778 443 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (3). 2014. 443-464 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.3.4 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl what’s age got to do with it? accounting for individual factors in second language accent alene moyer university of maryland, college park, usa moyera@umd.edu abstract empirical research conducted over the past few decades suggests that the age at which an individual is first exposed to a second language affects long-term outcomes, in particular for phonology. the question that has occupied scholars of various bents is what, exactly, underlies the robust age effects observed. does age imply immutable changes in one’s ability to ever sound native-like? are these changes neurological, cognitive, or socio-psychological in nature? what role do l2 use and contact play? do age-related influences apply to all individuals, or can language learners actually chart their own course when it comes to accent? this paper will outline basic assumptions of the critical period for phonology while suggesting a different approach to the age question that highlights the individual’s role in both process and outcome. constructs such as l2 experience, motivation, self-concept, learning approach, and willingness to communicate are discussed in depth in order to show the fundamental connection between cognition and affect so critical for late phonological learning. a re-orientation of the age research is suggested as a result, to prioritize contextual understandings of language use and learner agency. keywords: critical period hypothesis, individual differences, second language acquisition, phonology acquisition, motivation alene moyer 444 1. introduction by now it is rarely questioned that younger learners have the advantage in second language (l2) learning as compared to their older peers, particularly regarding the acquisition of a new sound system. l2 learners beyond the age of about 9 or 10 years can exhibit native-like behavior in certain subdomains of language, for certain tasks, and under certain conditions (hyltenstam & abrahamsson, 2001), but it is particularly unusual to reach a level of pronunciation ability that qualifies as consistently “native” or “near native.” in broad strokes, the possible reasons include: (a) real neurological and/or cognitive changes that reduce the capacity for, or adeptness of, phonological processing, or (b) shifts in attitude and motivation that essentially discourage individuals from acquiring an altogether “new sound,” particularly if doing so would compromise an already wellestablished sense of self. as munoz and singleton (2011) point out, researchers are not in agreement concerning the precise nature of possible maturational constraints, and “insufficient attention has been paid to a range of potentially important factors, such as amount and quality of input, learners’ orientations and attitudes, and the specific conditions under which the l2 is encountered” (p. 2). what is clear is that age is a potentially multi-faceted influence, intricately connected with social and psychological factors that shape the learner’s overall approach to, and experience with, the target language. findings from small and larger-scale studies suggest that a host of factors shape phonological learning and attainment, many age-related (see moyer, 2013). with this complexity in mind, this paper will first outline basic assumptions and critiques found in the age effects research, and then highlight several emerging issues that emphasize the late learner’s role in both process and outcome. given the inherent connections between cognition and affect evident in the factors discussed here, i suggest a reorientation of the age question in l2 phonology to account for a multiplicity of age-related factors in empirical work, incorporating neuro-cognitive, social-psychological, and experiential influences on l2 accent. 2. assumptions (and weaknesses) of the critical period hypothesis the idea of a critical period for language learning has a long history, brought to the fore in sla research through seminal work by lenneberg (1967). the basic premise is that after a certain age, roughly coinciding with puberty, language learning is less complete, less successful, and noticeably “non-native-like” due to some neurological or neuro-cognitive decline affecting the mechanisms essential for language acquisition. for phonological acquisition, the nature of this decline could correspond to auditory mechanisms responsible for the accurate what’s age got to do with it? accounting for individual factors in second language accent 445 perception of new sounds, or it could correspond to some decline in memory or processing capacity, although these would generally be a concern well into adulthood, not before. according to a strict interpretation of the critical period hypothesis (cph), all individuals experience a loss of neural “plasticity,” that is, the capacity to engage various neural regions and connections to support the learning of new patterns. in the case of phonology, this could apply to both “higher order” analytical processes and “lower order” muscle control at the level of speech articulation. in other words, it is not simply auditory processing, perceptual acuity, knowledge reorganization, and the like, that affect phonological acquisition; control of the articulatory organs must also be flexible enough to produce new sounds and sound combinations and sequences. there are several areas of ongoing debate in the cph/age effects literature. one centers on the question of the nature of age effects, that is, whether they are really linear—continuing in a consistent relationship from early in life through adulthood—or whether they peak with maturation (at about 15 years of age), after which individual variation predominates (e.g., johnson & newport, 1989; cf. birdsong & molis, 2001; flege, 1999; see discussion in birdsong, 2006). (a further point is that age effects linked to puberty may be confounded with the learner’s chronological age at testing, which brings into the equation education and other background variables, as well as individual cognitive differences; muñoz, 2008, p. 587ff.) singleton and le niewska (2012) critique a strict endorsement of the cph since “any decline in l2-learning capacity that occurs at the end of childhood varies from individual to individual . . . it also appears that any decline in l2-learning capacity with age is continuous and linear, which is not in keeping with the usual understanding of the notion of critical period” (p. 102). further complicating matters, there is debate over a definitive “offset point” for phonology, since even those with early childhood exposure to a second language may retain a foreign-sounding accent (flege, mackay, & piske, 2002; see bongaerts, 2005; munro & mann, 2005; singleton & ryan, 2004). this suggests that there is more to it than age-bound processing potential; the existence of another language could be responsible for nonnative like features in l2 (muñoz & singleton, 2011, p. 4; see also flege, 1999). a strictly cognitive view of age effects in sla posits that analytical mechanisms dominate language processing by the age of puberty (some argue that this obscures the pathways by which infants process and acquire language; see singleton & le niewska, 2012 for discussion). the emphasis is therefore on agerelated difference rather than deficit. the articulatory corollary is that early flexibility in auditory processing, as evidenced by babbling across a seemingly infinite range of possible speech sounds, starts to wane as the sound patterns in the infant’s immediate environment become salient and solidified, even within alene moyer 446 the first year of life (kuhl, 2007). as a result, sounds that are not part of the native language inventory become ever more difficult to perceive and to produce. by adulthood, this may be an insurmountable barrier for some; however, explicit training can mitigate the difficulties (e.g., sereno & wang, 2007). at this time many questions remain about the mechanisms involved and how they might change. unclear also is the nature of the perception-production interface, and whether certain processing abilities are necessary to overcome the challenges of late phonological learning. if young children have any specific advantage, its nature and neural location have yet to be identified (see singleton & ryan, 2004). meanwhile, there is both short and long-term evidence that adults can and do acquire efficiently and expertly in this realm (bongaerts, planken, & schils, 1995; ioup, boustagi, el tigi, & moselle, 1994; moyer, 1999; muñoz & singleton, 2007). all of this has led some to express skepticism about the inevitability of age as a negative influence (e.g., moyer, 2013; muñoz & singleton, 2011; scovel, 2000; singleton, 2005). some points that support this skepticism include: competence versus processing: rather than addressing possible declines in linguistic knowledge or competence, scholars have focused on age-related declines in processing (e.g., speed, memory, etc.) (mulder & hulstijn, 2011). yet little is known about “the exact functions of brain areas involved in language production and perception, or about . . . the relationship between the localization of neural substrates and language learning outcomes” (muñoz & singleton, 2011, p. 20). furthermore, there is no clear indication that underlying mechanisms relevant to phonology are associated with age-related neural or cognitive decline before adulthood. meanwhile, recent evidence reveals two interesting phenomena: (a) processing declines in language apply to native speakers just as they do to nonnative speakers, and certain factors seem to ameliorate them, for example education level (mulder & hulstijn, 2011); (b) neural functions seem to remain plastic, or flexible, well into adulthood (dick, pizzamiglio, saygin, small, & wilson, 2005; herschensohn, 2007), casting real doubt on the plasticity argument that is the basis for the cph. capacity to learn: contrary to infants, adult learners are no longer a linguistic “blank slate,” ready to absorb any and all primary data or input. nevertheless, they can learn to distinguish new categories as a result of noticing certain features (hancin-bhatt, 2008), which may in itself forge new neurological pathways (see sereno & wang, 2007). such pathways can even be sustained even after months of discontinued exposure to the language, regardless of whether they are forged under explicit training conditions or immersion-style implicit learning conditions (morganshort, finger, greyand, & ullman, 2012). what’s age got to do with it? accounting for individual factors in second language accent 447 instruction matters: persistent problems at the level of either perception or production could be a straightforward matter of insufficient practice or input. here, the quality of practice is key; werker and tees (2005) assert that input and feedback which are consistent, interactive, and repetitive can successfully bridge any gap between a child’s and an adult’s language learning abilities. second, the type of instruction matters. we have evidence that speech rate, pause, and intonation as well as rhythm, are statistically significant for overall accent ratings (kang, rubin, & pickering, 2014; nardo & reiterer, 2009), and that those who have received some kind of suprasegmental training obtain closer-tonative accent ratings compared to those without such training (derwing & rossiter, 2003; moyer, 1999). difference versus deficit: the cph is firmly rooted in a deficit view of late language learning, but late learning appears to be different, not necessarily less than. let us consider l1 transfer or interference. as reliance on l1 grows over time (i.e., with age, for a monolingual), the stronger a foundation it becomes for subsequent language learning. inevitably, comparisons are drawn between l1 and l2, some erroneously. new sounds and sound sequences are a common source of trouble for l2 learners (see major, 2001). examples include consonant clusters that are unfamiliar or that occur at unfamiliar positions in the words, syllable structures and stress patterns that defy l1 rules, and so on (hayes-harb, 2014). these inaccuracies may be a natural by-product of the learning process given a preexisting knowledge base; they are not necessarily indicative of neuro-cognitive, age-related decline. the experience issue: age of onset has a significant relationship to experience, but the nature of that relationship has yet to be clarified. an older learner typically has fewer opportunities to engage with the language in meaningful ways (see below), while at the same time, an extended length of residence may allow the learner to fully utilize opportunities for language learning and use. at the level of phonological learning, it may be that certain aspects of sound are processed differentially, over time, in an immersion context, so that length of residence is more significant than age of onset for specific aspects of sound production (jia, strange, wu, collado, & guan, 2006; saito & brajot, 2013). the traditional age effects/cph literature has been overwhelmingly concerned with universals, not with individual variation. nor has it given real attention to the social dimensions of language learning. in the following sections, i suggest that language input and use interact with both cognitive processes and affective inclinations, and that these are interwoven concerns for late learners. following on alene moyer 448 the above list of cph counterarguments, it will hopefully become clear that early exposure implies a host of opportunities to learn and use the target language, and to become well-integrated into a community of its speakers. 3. age-related factors in l2 phonology: new issues in the research even in the best of circumstances, every learner brings to bear a unique set of learning styles, abilities, and personality traits that affect the process and end state of language learning. these a priori factors interact dynamically with the learning context. in other words, factors of a social and psychological nature are prominent for late learners, not least of which is the willingness to take on a new language identity. gains in l2 fluency surely affect an individual’s sense of self in the language, and a bidirectional relationship may underlie attainment and one’s effort toward, and interest in, sounding native-like (see moyer, 2004, 2013). on a very basic level, access to the target-language speaking community is all-important, and this undoubtedly covaries with age of onset, as noted in the following section. 3.1. experiential discrepancies between younger and older learners experience in the second language can be conceived of as: (a) length of residence, or time spent in the target language country; (b) years spent studying the foreign language in a classroom; (c) daily or weekly hours spent using l2, or; (d) the extent to which l2 is relied upon to perform certain functions (e.g., personal and social expression, as opposed to work-related and perfunctory language use). studies of (a) and (b) as factors in accent have produced mixed results (see discussion in moyer, 2013). the second group of variables, (c) and (d), represent a new way of looking at experience which underscores the significance of context-based language use, and the relative dominance of l1 versus l2 as a factor in phonological attainment (flege, yeni-komshian, & liu, 1999; jia et al., 2006; moyer, 2011). in an immersion environment, learners are simultaneously processing unfiltered linguistic input, restructuring knowledge, and recalibrating how to use the language in communicatively and socially effective ways. at the same time, they necessarily grapple with what the language signifies on a personal level. let us consider how age factors fit into this complex process. children who immigrate to the target language environment are more likely to attend school with l2 as the language of instruction (and as the actual subject of instruction). they also enjoy ongoing opportunities to make friends and to use l2 in various contexts, representing both instrumental and interpersonal functions. consequently, they stand a far greater chance of developing native-like fluency. not only will most become functional bilinguals, they may become l2 dominant in the span of just a what’s age got to do with it? accounting for individual factors in second language accent 449 few years, taking on a different language identity than their parents. jia and aaronson (2003) present a comparison of younger and older arrivals to the united states, for example, that illustrates how younger children and adolescents negotiate this differently, and the linguistic consequences thereof. by contrast, adult immigrants have greater difficulty establishing l2-based social networks, and may have no access to instruction in the target language. the result is that they may never achieve the kind of communicative fluency that would sustain such a network, and thus never establish a firm sense of self in the target language. (of course, this may not be a goal for all late learners.) muñoz (2008) reminds us that age of onset in l2 is not an indicator of when significant, meaningful l2 input begins. thus, focusing on age of onset without accounting for context has, more often than not, led to erroneous conclusions about age as a singular influence on l2 attainment (p. 585). experience is one factor that illustrates this long-standing disconnect. as noted, adults and children are distinctive in terms of l2 access and use, which for those living incountry affects not just their linguistic lives, but their social ones as well (see levelle & levis, 2014). recent l2 phonology studies support this view, bringing to light two predictors of accent in an immersion context: interaction with native speaker friends, that is, using the language within one’s own inner circle (moyer, 2004, 2011); and primary use of l2 relative to l1 (flege, mackay & piske, 2002; moyer, 2011). both interaction with native speakers and l2 use relative to l1 point us toward a new research agenda, one that explores the unique path by which language fluency evolves into possible l2 dominance, and the effect this has on accent at all levels: segmental, suprasegmental, and discursive. qualitative analyses offer a view into how this process is mediated through active decision-making (see moyer, 2004, 2014). those considered exceptional, that is, those who sound native-like despite a late start in the second language, tend to be l2 dominant in the home, which surely intensifies their desire and efforts toward native-like fluency. as noted, once one develops a strong reliance on, or even preference for, l2 over the mother tongue, l2 “performs not just instrumental, but emotional and social functions essential to a sense of self” (moyer, 2013, p.78). this is an intriguing issue as it illustrates the connection between accent and identity, as well as agency. what role do learners play in this transition toward greater reliance on l2, and what are the implications for the authenticity of their accent? specifically, do they concentrate more acutely on suprasegmental features once they reach a certain level of fluency? more investigation about how language shift is negotiated should be a priority in introspective phonology research. as far as classroom language learning goes, the odds of attaining a nativelike sound as an adult are certainly low, but not necessarily for any intrinsic alene moyer 450 (neuro-cognitive) reasons. input is reduced, and the learner finds himself in a far less “authentic” environment than do immersion learners, with fewer l2 models with whom to practice. taking a long-term view, without ongoing opportunities to use the language in real-life contexts, any fluency gained is likely to fade away once the classroom experience comes to an end. on top of inherent input and practice limits, the effectiveness of the classroom experience also depends on individual receptivity to teacher and approach, as well as individual learning styles and strategies, motivation, attitudes, and the rest. the experience issue underscores the fundamental connection between affective factors and cognitive ones, which is so essential for understanding age effects. together, these intersecting factors may be described as learner orientation (moyer, 2004), incorporating goals and goal-setting, desires, learning strategies, and one’s sense of the likelihood of success for the endeavor at hand (aka self-efficacy). their significance for accent is gaining greater prominence in the research. the following sections prioritize these and a few other learner-driven constructs. 3.2. motivation, attitudes and self-concept by all accounts, motivation in language learning is complex and difficult to capture, but two dimensions of it have been defined in the research: (a) integrativeness, or the positive inclination and openness toward the l2 community and culture; and (b) instrumentality, or the expected extrinsic benefits that will follow from learning the language well. some scholars have sought to verify their differential impact on sla, but for phonology, both seem to have significance (bongaerts et al., 1995; moyer, 1999, 2004). the distinction itself is somewhat arbitrary. for example, the desire to know more about target language culture really involves either/both, as pointed out by clément and kruidenier (1983). what matters most seems to be the depth of one’s investment in the language, and the consistency of that investment over time (e.g., see moyer, 2007). another way to look at motivation is proposed by dörnyei (2005), who emphasizes an “ideal l2 self,” an individualized concept driven by personal or professional goals. csizér (2012) suggests that “without a pronounced (and perhaps idealized) self-image, the level of l2 motivation will be less strong and goals will be more immediate” (p. 242). moreover, if the distance between the idealized and the actual self is too great “motivation . . . will not be sufficient to achieve long-term success” (p. 242). tangential to motivation, attitudes such as desire to sound native, concern with pronunciation accuracy, comfort with linguistic and cultural assimilation, and self-ratings of accent have long had a place in l2 phonology studies, with statistical tests of their significance generally supported by qualitative and what’s age got to do with it? accounting for individual factors in second language accent 451 introspective data (see piske, mackay & flege, 2001). like motivation, attitudes can be both a priori and dynamic. preconceived ideas about the language and its speakers can affect the willingness to take on a new cultural and linguistic identity, and thus affect one’s approach to language learning, but at the same time, new experiences can lead to changes in attitude and approach. it is essential to ask l2 learners about their intended goals and approaches toward accent in order to put their actual attainment in context. exceptional learners often cite a deep commitment to, if not “love” for, the target language (moyer, 2014), and perhaps seeing their “ideal l2 self” as attainable actually focuses their efforts in specific ways (see muñoz & singleton, 2007). the converse also has some supporting evidence: baranucarz’s (2012) low-achieving learners cited a strong desire to sound native-like in english, but only as a function of instrumental motivation, for example, the desire for a better job, as opposed to a sense of “fascination” with the language (see also moyer, 2004). l2 learners judged to sound most native-like have a few good (meta)cognitive habits in common in addition to an optimal orientation: they reflect on their progress, update their goals and approaches accordingly, take advantage of possibilities to use the language with native speakers, and practice and utilize feedback conscientiously (ibid.). in other words, their investment in the language is deep and well-defined. as shown in moyer’s (2014) analysis of exceptional learner case studies, those who reliably sound native-like actively “self-regulate” and approach fluency as an ongoing process. whether their learning style precedes their deep sense of connection to the language, or is developed in response to it, is another interesting question for future work. self-concept and self-efficacy seem to have special prominence for learners with exceptionally good accents in a second language. those who believe they are capable of improving their accent, and focus on aligning it with native-speaker norms, do come significantly closer to that goal (moyer, 2007). there may be a moderately “self-critical” element at play as well. when reflecting upon gains made in accent, those who have attained to near-native or native-like levels rate themselves lower than actual listener ratings indicate, as shown in muñoz and singleton’s (2007) study of native-like late learners, and in baranucarz’s (2012) study of 65 teacher training students of english. far less successful learners, by contrast, tend to overestimate their pronunciation skill, and to attribute difficulties to limited time available for practice. of greatest interest perhaps is the belief cited by those with “excellent” pronunciation that relevant factors were within their control, with the opposite obtaining for those considered “poor” or “very poor” (baranucarz, 2012). in sum, preliminary work on attribution style and selfefficacy reveals that false self-concepts and beliefs about pronunciation learning alene moyer 452 characterize those with lower levels of attainment, while those with closer-tonative accents have a strong sense of agency and self-efficacy. conscious reflection and continual reassessment of one’s progress and approach appear to be key to acquiring an accent that sounds authentic across various kinds of speaking tasks (not just word or sentence-level recitation). introspective data has shown that in order to sound native-like in a second language, any pre-existing “linguistic ego” or self-concept must make room for a new “voice,” even if that involves a painful trade-off. late learners who do achieve this have something in common; they are willing to pursue their goals at some social and psychological cost, for example through loss of connection to friends and family, or to an l1 community in the target language environment (e.g., muñoz & singleton, 2007). they persevere in the face of challenges and setbacks, including self-consciousness about accent, and the lack of a strong social network (as in moyer, 2004). clearly, their self-concept is malleable in certain respects, and continual goal-setting, reflection, and self-assessment guide its development (see mercer, 2012). 3.3. willingness to communicate (wtc) as levelle and levis (2014) point out, “social involvement may be an important strategy for those who want to improve their pronunciation” (p. 103). identifying with a target culture goes along with the willingness to engage with others, and to “gaining access to real speakers . . . [which] opens up opportunities to notice how people talk, how they interact, the ways in which they package their words and gestures, and the sociolinguistically marked variants that evoke comfort in interactions” (lavelle & levis, 2014; see also gluszek & dovidio, 2010, cited in levelle & levis, 2014). this is the essence of the willingness to communicate construct, defined by macintyre, dörnyei, clément and noels (1998) as “a readiness to enter into discourse at a particular time with a specific person or persons, using a l2” (p. 547). as with other affective factors, willingness to communicate (wtc) is a “trait” or tendency, tied to one’s prior experiences and personality, yet it is also reflects immediate communicative concerns depending on interlocutor, topic, function, and so on. wtc is perhaps most immediately influenced by perceptions about one’s own language competence (derwing & munro, 2014; subtirelu, 2014). on a broader, societal level, wtc references perceptions of how nonnative speakers are valued and evaluated as members of the community. this is an important consideration because “[w]e are social beings,” write levelle and levis (2014), “and communication and pronunciation live and develop within social contexts” (p. 103). cultural beliefs or ideologies may guide its diwhat’s age got to do with it? accounting for individual factors in second language accent 453 rection, so for example, if nonnative speakers are expected to carry the “communicative burden” and to adhere to accent standards (lippi-green, 1997), this can feed their insecurities and lead them to communicate in circumscribed ways (subtirelu, 2014). the effect on long-term phonological attainment is predictably negative, as shown by hansen (1995). alongside fear or embarrassment, factors such as political and ethnic affiliation can affect wtc within a given context. for example, one may have little interest in sounding native-like if one’s ethnic identity differs from that of the dominant language (see gatbonton, trofimovich, & segalowitz, 2011). these ethnolinguistic identity factors obtain in classroom settings also, as do considerations like receptivity to the teacher and pedagogical approach, group size and dynamics, and the opportunities to communicate that a given task provides (cao, 2011, p. 468). age of the learner is relevant to the wtc construct. younger learners have been shown to be more willing to engage with native speakers socially, and to adopt (inter)active practice opportunities, while older learners tend toward more passive and solitary forms of practice (victori & tragant, 2003), possibly due to greater self-consciousness and reduced tolerance for risk-taking. this has an impact on long-term attainment since close personal contact with native speakers is crucial to developing a more native-like accent (moyer, 2004, 2011). so, wtc is an obvious corollary to the age issue, and has real potential to affect ultimate attainment, but has rarely been mentioned in the l2 phonology research. wtc has been examined primarily as a factor affecting immediate interactive situations, that is those where communication with others is a necessity. seen from a long-term perspective, however, wtc is ultimately a strategic aspect of the learner’s orientation; it shapes cognitive, metacognitive, and social strategies aimed at improving all aspects of language fluency. wtc is also a twoway street; it does not apply solely to the l2 user. derwing and munro (2014) discuss why it is so important to encourage native speakers to listen to accented nonnative speakers as a way to equitably share the communicative burden. 3.4. self-monitoring and learning styles given the individual variability seen for both short and long-term attainment in sla as a whole, and given that some l2 learners seem to have an advantage when it comes to phonological learning, we inevitably return to a decades-old question: what constitutes a “good language learner”? this familiar quandary can be updated to suit a more modern, dynamic, learner-centered view. to what extent does the learner herself guide the process and eventually arrive intentionally at an ultimate outcome (be that “successful” or not)? one way into alene moyer 454 this quandary is to explore learning styles and strategies consciously directed at phonology, an area that has rarely been explored. there is evidence that learners who undertake a range of practice and self-monitoring techniques end up sounding more native-like according to a range of tasks. moyer’s (2004) study analyzed the types and number of strategies reported by immigrants to berlin, and found that those who engage in multiple strategies aimed at accent, including regularly imitating native speakers, enjoy significant advantage in ratings assigned by native speaker listeners. in terms of learning style, it is a characteristic of these participants that they seek out feedback beyond the confines of a classroom, that is, they are proactive, reflective, highly motivated, and have a metalinguistic approach to feedback. learners seem to understand that pronunciation is key to communicative fluency and the negotiation of meaning (derwing & rossiter, 2002), but this alone is no guarantee of progress. cognitive, metacognitive, and even social strategies are significantly correlated with closer-to-native accent ratings (moyer, 2004, 2014). specific examples include focusing on tempo, volume, and clarity in real time (e.g., osburne, 2003), reflecting and seeking out feedback and practice on specific problem features (e.g., moyer, 2004), and initiating greater contact with native speakers with the explicit intention to practice and improve (moyer, 2004, 2007). few l2 phonology researchers have directly addressed learning style, strategies and self-monitoring, so several questions could guide future work: explicit versus implicit focus: what is the relative significance of an overt focus on suprasegmental features like tempo, pitch range, intonation, and the like as opposed to segmentand word-level practice for long-term phonological attainment? there is some indication that suprasegmentals are especially relevant to listener judgments of nativeness (see andersonhsieh, johnson, & koehler, 1992; derwing & rossiter, 2003; moyer, 1999), but this may not receive the greatest attention by either the learner or her instructor. furthermore, derwing and rossiter (2002) provide evidence that learners connect comprehensibility to segmental precision, yet the repairs they make while speaking have to do instead with volume, tempo, and repetition (among other discourse-level features). “stage” in context: do learners at different proficiency levels self-monitor in different ways, for example, focusing on segmental accuracy in the early stages and gradually incorporating more awareness and practice on discourse-level features? would their selected attention differ according to learning context? for example, immersion environments may encourage a heightened awareness of suprasegmentals, whereas what’s age got to do with it? accounting for individual factors in second language accent 455 the classroom may invite more overt focus on segmentals if speaking tasks are more circumscribed and/or controlled. matching ability: how effectively do l2 learners use targeted feedback? how well do they gauge their own performance against the model provided? students should be guided by their instructors to notice the various levels involved in accent: segmental and suprasegmental; and word-, sentence-, and discourse-level features that affect comprehensibility. in this way, self-monitoring could be enhanced and practiced to greater effect (see smith & beckmann, 2010 for examples). self-critique as impetus: do those who are not quite satisfied with their accent end up reaching greater levels of fluency (see discussion in the previous section)? is the exceptional learner’s tendency toward slight discontent with accent key to his perseverance? these questions beg further questions about memory, selective attention, perceptual acuity, risk-taking tolerance, motivation, and desire to sound native. a well-rounded instrument design is needed to put these factors into perspective, and to test their respective strength for an age effects model. pawlak (2011) maintains that older learners use “a greater number of more sophisticated strategies in a more general manner,” and those who are more motivated employ “a wider range of strategies more frequently than less motivated ones” (p. 23) (see also moyer, 2004, 2007). of course, the strategies chosen by any individual depend on the nature of the learning goals. we should also remember that the ability to adapt to (sometimes challenging) circumstances is a factor underlined by analyses of exceptional learner accent studies. all of this suggests the need for longitudinal approaches to the relationship between accent, self-regulation and learning approach. 4. directions for future research: bringing cognition and affect together all the issues discussed above, namely experience, motivation, attitudes, wtc, self-concept and self-monitoring, and so on, point to the complex connections between cognition and affect, an area just coming of age in sla research. many relevant issues could not be accommodated in this short paper, including aptitude, identity, and the like. here, i have selected a few possible priorities for future l2 phonology research in order to contextualize the age factor, and to operationalize a deeper understanding of individual differences. phonology is an especially exciting area for this agenda given its inherent complexity, processingwise, and its essential connections to self-concept and self-efficacy. i highlight below two thought-provoking studies that speak to the cognition-affect interface emphasized throughout this paper, approached from very different angles: alene moyer 456 empathy was first brought to light decades ago as an influence on accent (zuengler, 1988); however, researchers are beginning to look at it in new ways. rota and reiterer’s (2009) study sheds light on how empathy may connect to various cognitive abilities relevant to accent, particularly at the more advanced stages of fluency. the authors used a range of psychometric aptitude batteries, psychological and nonverbal intelligence assessments, reaction-time tasks, memory span tests, and questionnaires on subjects they separated into “highly talented,” “average,” and “antitalented” groups for pronunciation fluency (and for some of these tests, as “high,” “average” and “low” talent for overall l2 proficiency). within their advanced group, empathy correlated to phonetic coding ability, imitation ability, perception of suprasegmental features, and the degree to which one enjoys imitating novel accents. this raises intriguing questions about how empathy connects to: (a) memory (e.g., through the phonological loop, perhaps); (b) selective attention to tone, pitch range, and so on; (c) the willingness to articulate new sounds and patterns. it makes sense intuitively that those who strive to sound as authentic as possible have a greater tolerance for risk-taking, and a greater predilection to selfmonitor and gauge their accuracy against a native speaker model. they also appear to enjoy experimenting with new accents and voices. a new picture of “optimal orientation” could emerge from a combination of neural imaging data, various test batteries as mentioned, and survey instruments that are introspective in nature (see also hu & reiterer’s 2009 discussion of neuro-imaging perspectives on personality and extraversion as related to sla and pronunciation talent). it is blommaert’s (2013) view that language and identity is “iterative work . . . a repetitive routine or ritual in which we engage in creative constructions of ourselves and our partners . . .” (p. 620). thus far, few l2 phonology studies explore this new territory. an exception is the study by magnusson and stroud (2012), who present a longitudinal analysis of 20 multilinguals, born and raised in sweden, of assyrian-syrian background. all come from multilingual families, and all have a repertoire of different oral and written languages for home, school, work, and so on. style-shifting and code-switching are part of their everyday linguistic performance, in other words. the authors propose a new view of focus on form as a self-aware, situationally-adaptive strategy that evolves out of these participants’ “struggles with ethnic and linguistic discrimination and censorship, factors that . . . impact how they focus on form across their linguistic lifespan” (p. 327). the authors present introspective data to show how these young adults, all customer service what’s age got to do with it? accounting for individual factors in second language accent 457 representatives, modify style, accent, and register to position themselves as native, non-native, or near-native speakers of swedish during customer service calls, depending on the caller’s perceived identity. in the course of interaction, they choose whether or not to adhere to “expected” levels of correctness, authenticity, and allegiance. it may be a function of their youth, not just their multilingual backgrounds, that leads to these playful permutations on accent, also attested by other studies on “passing” among adult l2 learners (marx, 2002; moyer, 2004; piller, 2002). these kinds of studies underscore the fluidity of accent as a conscious practice, less as a potential “deficit” and more as a resource. along these lines, cutler (2014) has both reviewed and undertaken research on “racialized” identities adopted by immigrant youth in the united states. their remarkable proficiency requires being able to (a) perceive how the racialized dialect (e.g., of african american english) varies from the standard, and (b) reproduce those differences convincingly as part of their stylistic repertoire (p. 158). l2 learners make choices at the phonological level in order to highlight aspects of their identities in interaction, signal degrees of alignment with other groups, and shape how others see them. most importantly, new evidence shows that speakers possess a greater degree of agency over their phonology than was previously imagined, allowing for the expression of a greater range of identities and alignments through language (p. 149). an obvious question is why, what are the motivations for doing so? (p. 158). given these new insights, the cognition-affect conundrum would best be approached via a full appreciation for context and agency. based on the above discussion and the studies cited therein, those whose abilities defy expectations for late phonological learning seem to share two aspects of orientation, one quite personal, or intrinsic, and one outwardly directed. first, their self-concept is inextricably tied to advancement in the target language. second, they pursue new avenues to connect socially with native speakers. they also tend to describe themselves as outgoing and socially motivated, which could indicate extraversion, possibly related to greater wtc, lower anxiety, and superior short-term memory, according to dewaele and furnham (1999; see also van daele, housen, pierrard, & debruyn, 2006). at some point, a pivot toward l2 dominance occurs for some, with consequences for fluency and processing abilities in both languages. up to now, the relationship of l1 to l2 has been seen simplistically (as hours of weekly use, for example), rather than as a reflection of language choice, meaning, in accordance with the individual’s intended expressive ability within defined contexts. turning our perspective in alene moyer 458 favor of learner agency and context would more clearly reveal conscious intentions vis-à-vis l2 use, and thus, long-term attainment. 5. conclusion age effects research has traditionally failed to capture the complexity and dynamism of the experience of language learning, and the myriad factors that influence its course of development. it has also ignored context, by and large. what drives some to pursue a native-like sound, while others do not engage in the same ways? what are the ultimate consequences of sounding foreign? even many current studies of bilingualism are notably devoid of context, focused instead on neurological responses to language processing without accounting for language experience that is socially grounded. this can provide insights on l1-l2 processing differences, no doubt, but tells us nothing of the active, reasoned choices made by l2 users. furthermore, harrison (2012) points out that bilingual speakers are rarely equally competent in both languages because they “use their languages for different purposes and social contexts” (p. 3). this kind of orientation would put a new spin on brain imaging studies, to be sure. prioritizing context could underscore the real consequences when “linguistic competencies are defined and evaluated in relation to monolingual standards” (p. 3). in harrison’s study, for example, bosses espoused tolerance for their employees’ different accents, but in reality those with the strongest foreign accents sensed that they were not perceived as “legitimate” (p. 7), and that their professional qualifications were, in some cases, overridden by judgments of their english proficiency (p. 10). attaining functional fluency may not be enough, in other words; knowledge of how to use l2 in socially desirable ways, in accordance with “standard” norms for accent, can constitute a gateway to fair treatment and equal access (harrison, 2012). with this in mind, the research needs to open up to the relative “messiness” of introspective methods if we are to understand the social implications of accent. such a focus would move us from the what of age effects, to the (all but unspoken) why-does-this-matter question, and place the factors that are within the learner’s control above those that are not. what’s age got to do with it? accounting for individual factors in second language accent 459 references anderson-hsieh, j., johnson, r., & koehler, k. 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(1988). identity markers and l2 pronunciation. studies in second language acquisition, 10, 33-49. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s027226310000694x 249 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (2). 2016. 249-269 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.2.4 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl second language learners’ divergence from target language pragmatic norms maria pia gomez-laich carnegie mellon university, pittsburgh, usa mgomezla@andrew.cmu.edu abstract pragmatic competence is an indispensable aspect of language ability in order for second and foreign language (l2/fl) learners to understand and be understood in their interactions with both native and nonnative speakers of the target language. without a proper understanding of the pragmatic rules in the target language, learners may run the risk of coming across as insensitive and rude. several researchers (bardovi-harlig, 2001; kasper & rose, 2002) suggest that l2 pragmatics not only can be taught in the l2/fl classroom, but, more importantly, that explicit approaches that involve direct explanation of target pragmatic features are beneficial for learning pragmatics. just as native speakers of a language acquire a “set of dispositions to act in certain ways, which generates cognitive and bodily practices in the individual” (watts, 2003, p. 149), instructors can help learners to become aware of the pragmatic features that characterize the target language. although the importance of explicit teaching of pragmatics is well recognized in the literature, learning norms and rules of pragmatics largely depends on learners’ subjectivity. learners’ convergence or divergence from the l2 pragmatic norms, both consciously and out of awareness, sometimes depends on whether these norms fit their image of self and their l1 cultural identity. since identity-related conflict can have significant consequences for the acquisition of second language pragmatics, failing to consider the centrality of learners’ identities will produce an inadequate understanding of sla. this paper synthesizes studies that document the reasons why learners opt to remain foreign by resisting certain l2 practices. the following synthesis maria pia gomez-laich 250 question was proposed: why do language learners resist the pragmatic norms of the target language? keywords: pragmatic competence; language learning; identity 1. introduction pragmatic competence, namely, the knowledge that influences and constrains speakers’ choices regarding the use of language in socially appropriate ways, is an indispensable aspect of language ability for second and foreign language (l2/fl) learners to understand and be understood in their interactions with both native speakers (nss) and nonnative speakers (nnss) of the target language. pragmatic competence entails the acquisition of both pragmalinguistic knowledge, that is, the knowledge and ability to use linguistic resources to achieve a specific purpose, and sociopragmatic knowledge, that is, knowledge of language use appropriate to social situations (thomas, 1983). more specifically, sociopragmatics has been defined as “the sociological interface of pragmatics” (leech, 1983, p. 10), referring to the “social perceptions underlying participants’ interpretation and performance of communicative action” (kasper & rose, 2001, p. 2). to be pragmatically competent users of the target language, learners need to acquire both of these knowledge bases and the ability to efficiently control each of them in spontaneous communication (taguchi, 2012). several researchers suggest that l2 pragmatics not only can be taught in the l2/fl classroom but, more importantly, that explicit approaches that involve direct metapragmatic information on target pragmatic features must be implemented in classrooms (bardovi-harlig, 2001; félix-brasdefer, 2008; kasper, 1997, 2001; kasper & rose, 2002). supporting this, taguchi (2011) states that “early studies produced in the 1990s showed that most aspects of pragmatics are indeed amenable to instruction, meaning that instruction is better than noninstruction for pragmatic development” (p. 291). bardovi-harlig (2001) also makes a strong claim for the necessity of instruction, stating that the pragmatic production and comprehension in the target language of those learners who are not exposed to instruction in pragmatics usually differs significantly from that of nss. according to kasper and rose (2002), the results of several studies (billmyer, 1990; bouton, 1994; wishnoff, 2000; yoshimi, 2001) strongly suggest that “most aspects of l2 pragmatics are indeed teachable, that instructional intervention is more beneficial than no instruction specifically targeted on pragmatics, and that for the most part, explicit instruction combined with ample practice opportunities results in the greatest gains” (p. 273). second language learners’ divergence from target language pragmatic norms 251 however, research in interlanguage pragmatics has shown that, even if learners receive explicit instruction targeted on pragmatics, even fairly advanced learners’ pragmatic performance sometimes deviates from target language sociocultural norms (lafford, 1995; regan, 1995). a range of factors have been attributed to this deviation, including transfer from the native language, insufficient knowledge of the target language and its communicative practices, lack of opportunities to interact with nss of the target language, negative attitudes towards the l2, and insufficient length of stay in the target language community (bardovi-harlig, 2001; barron, 2002; blum-kulka, 1991; kinginger & farrell, 2004; locastro, 2012). there is, however, a complementary line of explanation: learners sometimes consciously choose not to conform to the target language pragmatic norms. second language users’ convergence on or divergence from the l2 pragmatic norms depends on whether these norms fit their image of self (locastro, 2001, 2012). learners’ attempts to acquire and use l2 pragmatic norms may therefore not indicate inadequate knowledge, imperfect interlanguage, or fossilization of l2 development. on the contrary, learners may diverge from l2 norms to accentuate their linguistic differences in order to maintain their sense of self and their l1 cultural identity (davis, 2007). second language learning is an arena in which new identities are sought and constructed, and individuals will ultimately make linguistic choices that match with their desired identity in a given situation (pavlenko & blackledge, 2003). norton (1997), for example, stresses that language learners are constantly engaged in identity construction and negotiation when they use an l2, and she claims that l2 instructors should take the relationship between language and identity seriously. block (2007) states that, since the 1990s, a wealth of research that explores the relationship between identity and l2 learning has been produced, which attests to the fact that issues of identity have been recognized as central to sla. in documenting the rise of identity as a construct relevant to l2 acquisition, block emphasizes the potential negotiation of difference that takes place when an l2 is learned. block situates his argument in reference to poststructuralist accounts of identity which, in his words, has become the “approach of choice among those who seek to explore links between identity and l2 learning” (p. 864). the poststructuralist approach to identity emerged in part as a response to a line of thought known as biological determinism, which claims that all human behavior is innate, determined by genes, brain size, skin color, biological sex, facial features or other biological givens. poststructuralism in current social science literature is “about moving beyond the search, associated with structuralism, for unchanging, universal laws of human behavior and social phenomena to more nuanced, multileveled, and, ultimately, complicated framings of the world around us” (block, 2007, p. 864). as block (2007) states, learning an l2 implies exposure to unfamiliar practices which, in turn, can upset taken-for-granted worldviews and can destabilize maria pia gomez-laich 252 an individual’s sense of identity. in crosscultural encounters, for example, an individual’s personal history may come into conflict with the history of another society’s institutions or other social structures, and this conflict may (or may not) prompt destabilization of the habitus, and thus, of identity. the result of this disturbance of points of reference is what has come to be known as third space identities (bhabha, 1994). in this third space, there is a negotiation of difference (papastergiadis, 2000) during which the past and the present encounter and transform each other in the “presence of fissures, gaps and contradictions” (p. 170). this process of negotiating new subject positions is not harmonious, and individuals often have feelings of ambivalence, defined as “the uncertainty of feeling a part and feeling apart” (block, 2007, p. 21). this identity-related conflict can have significant consequences both for the overall quality of language learning experiences and for the development of a specific domain of communicative competence, namely pragmatics. students’ acquisition and use of pragmatic competence partly depends on the kinds of identities they want to project and the responses they receive to them from their interlocutors. in addition, in terms of learning l2 pragmatics, learners’ identities and their sense of themselves need to be recognized since they may affect the amount of effort an l2 learner is willing to make to learn and adapt to ns pragmatic norms. several studies of learners’ language use report instances of divergence from l2 pragmatic norms caused by learners’ self-identity (davis, 2007; locastro, 2001; siegal, 1996). although identity has generally been found to play a role in the development of l2 pragmatic competence, to provide better pedagogical implications to l2 practitioners and directions for future research, it is important to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the reasons why learners opt to resist certain l2 norms even when they are aware of those norms and are capable of producing them linguistically. to answer this question, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive research synthesis. adopting the poststructuralist approach to identity, this synthesis paper follows block’s (2007) definition of linguistic identity: linguistic identity refers to “the assumed and/or attributed relationship between one’s sense of self and a means of communication” (2007, p. 40). 2. methodology for the research synthesis this review of studies followed the methodologies of a qualitative synthesis of qualitative and quantitative research in language learning and teaching (suri & clarke, 2009). it adopted specific strategies to find, select, and evaluate studies, and to present collective findings (cooper, 1998). in order to identify a pool of studies published in refereed journals that contributed relevant information for the purposes of gaining a more comprehensive understanding of the reasons second language learners’ divergence from target language pragmatic norms 253 why learners opt to resist certain l2 norms, a literature search based on electronic databases (eric, linguistics and language behavior abstracts [llba] and academic one file) was conducted. these databases are strong in languages, literature and linguistics. the following search words were used to locate potentially relevant studies: pragmatics, identity ans language learning. this search yielded 52 hits in llba, 10 hits in academic one file, and 30 hits in eric. in addition, edited books and book chapters related to pragmatics and identity as well as their reference sections were scanned to identify potential studies. the entire search process yielded 97 results. subsequently, i applied the following exclusion/inclusion criteria to screen studies: (a) the study had to focus on learners’ pragmatic competence, (b) the study was a data-driven, empirical study, (c) the data was collected using a systematic strategy, that is, primary data was collected using a recognized qualitative or quantitative technique (miles & huberman, 1994; this can include group or case studies, and crosssectional or longitudinal studies), (d) the study had to contain data in the form of quotations or descriptions from the primary data set, (e) the study had to focus on a learning context (i.e., second or foreign language learning or study abroad), and (f) the study had to be published in english. doctoral dissertations were not included. the screening process yielded 11 studies for the synthesis (they are marked with asterisks in the reference section). a coding scheme, which is included in the appendix, was then developed for profiling each study. the key features for analysis were: aim of the study, identity-related outcomes, sample size, subjects’ age, subjects’ l1, target language, subjects’ level of proficiency in target language, target pragmatic feature(s) (i.e., honorifics, speech acts of various types, politeness markers), academic context, length of the study, accommodation (specifically, if the study was carried out in a study abroad setting, i recorded whether the participants lived in dormitories with conationals, or whether they lived alone or stayed with host families), data collection procedures, data sources, data analysis procedures, and results. these data were recorded in tabular format using word processing software. the tabulated summary allowed for easier comparison of studies to determine recurring themes and commonalities. 3. findings the findings presented in this section emerged in attempting to answer the question: why do language learners resist the pragmatic norms of the target language? below, the studies are discussed according to three themes: (a) learners’ perception of l2 pragmatic practices as inconsistent with their l1 cultural values, (b) learners’ perception of l2 pragmatic practices as inconsistent with their self-identity, and (c) learners’ perception of their position as “foreigners” maria pia gomez-laich 254 in the target language community. i selected a narrative logic as the organizational structure to present the findings (cooper, 1998). a structured summary of each study’s characteristics, context, and findings is provided. similarities and differences are across studies are presented. 3.1. learners’ perception of l2 pragmatic practices as inconsistent with their l1 cultural values the first group of studies concerned learners’ unwillingness to adopt l2 pragmatic norms that are inconsistent with their l1 cultural values. in this group, there were five studies. three of them specifically discuss learners’ discomfort with using honorifics: siegal (1996), ishihara and tarone (2009), and iwasaki (2011). another study analyzes the pragmatic development in service encounters of seven u.s. learners of spanish studying abroad for one semester and shows that learners consciously make pragmatic choices that diverge from l2 pragmatic norms (shively, 2011). the last study in this group examines the development of identity-related pragmatic abilities by jordanian efl learners in the enactment of the speech act of refusals (al-issa, 2003). of the five studies included in this section, four were carried out in a study abroad context, and one was carried out in a fl context. in siegal’s (1996), ishihara and tarone’s (2009), and iwasaki’s (2011) studies, l2 japanese learners studying and/or working in japan were found to consciously make pragmatic choices that diverge from l2 pragmatic norms. siegal (1996), for example, examined how learner subjectivity, defined as “the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself, and her ways of understanding her relation to the world” (weedon, 1987, p. 32), influenced the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence in japanese. the researcher focused on a case study of a white professional new zealander woman in her mid forties in japan. the data she examined, a conversation between the participant and her japanese professor, are part of a larger ethnography of the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence by white women studying japanese in japan. in this study, the participant’s perception of japanese politeness markers (i.e., honorifics) and female speech negatively affected her feelings toward the l2. because the participant’s l1 culture valued less gendered societal structures and more egalitarian language use, she resisted using humbling, honorific forms of japanese. siegal’s observations of this participant revealed that gender-specific speaking positions available in an l2 are sometimes oppressive and require a negotiated and modified l2 pragmatic interlanguage style. just as siegal’s study revealed a conflict with pragmatic choice in a professional woman, ishihara and tarone (2009) and iwasaki (2011) also found that second language learners’ divergence from target language pragmatic norms 255 learners of l2 japanese made pragmatic choices that diverge from l2 pragmatic norms. using a multiple-rejoinder oral discourse completion task (dct) and a role play, ishihara and tarone investigated the reasons for pragmatic choices among seven japanese learners in a u.s. university. retrospective interviews and follow-up email correspondences examined the learners’ use of keigo honorifics and their deliberate pragmatic decisions while requesting, refusing, and responding to compliments in the l2. it was found that learners sometimes intentionally accommodated to or resisted l2 pragmatic norms. the areas of resistance centered on both sociopragmatic norms (e.g., cultural ideologies of honorifics) and their pragmalinguisitc realizations (e.g., exalted/humble honorific forms). for example, three learners rejected keigo and gendered language which, in their perception, delineated unfair hierarchical relationships and an unequal power distribution. these participants’ pragmatic resistance was largely associated with l1 cultural values (e.g., equality beyond social status/gender). similarly, iwasaki (2011) explored four american male l2 learners’ acquisition of politeness in japanese during study abroad. more specifically, through retrospective interviews conducted 1 year and 6 months after students completed their poststudy abroad opis, the researcher analyzed the learners’ perceptions of politeness, the desu/masu form (polite form) versus the plain form, and the experiences that shaped their views while studying abroad. the data revealed that some of the learners rejected the desu/masu form in situations where it was necessary because the sense of social distance that the desu/masu form conveys was incompatible with their l1 cultural values. in these three studies, we see that what seemed to be blatantly inappropriate by native japanese standards could be understood as the participants’ solution to conflicting pragmatic demands. the participants were confronted with a pragmatic dilemma: speaking competently in japanese by adhering to pragmatic norms that would humble them or maintaining their l1 cultural identity. the participants ultimately decided to maintain l1-influenced practices and rejected certain japanese pragmatic norms that they perceived as inconsistent with their l1 cultural values. another study in which learners were found to consciously make pragmatic choices that diverged from l2 pragmatic norms is shively’s (2011). shively analyzed the pragmatic development in service encounters of seven american learners of spanish studying abroad in spain for one semester. shively’s participants audio recorded their interactions with service providers in an array of settings, such as shops, restaurants, and cafes. literature on service encounters involving expert or native speakers of peninsular spanish shows that how-are-you inquiries between parties are socially inappropriate and that there is a predominance of hearer-oriented verbs ( e.g., can you give me x?) rather than speakermaria pia gomez-laich 256 oriented verbs (e.g. can i have x?). in addition, requests are almost always realized with imperatives or elliptical forms. however, the norms for u.s. service encounters are quite different because they involve greetings and how-are-you inquiries, politeness markers such as please, and speaker-orientated requests (e.g., i need/would like a cup of coffee). shively’s findings show that some students applied these u.s. norms to their service encounter interactions in spain. one female participant, for example, never used imperatives in her service encounters. she did notice that requests are realized almost exclusively with imperatives in spanish; however, she did not perceive this behavior as polite. she interpreted the imperative in requests from the perspective of her l1 culture; that is, her interpretation of the social meaning of imperatives as exhibiting an “authoritarian” attitude remained influenced by her l1 cultural values. her l2 behavior was strongly influenced by the way she was socialized in her l1 and culture. similarly, al-issa (2003) also examined the influence of learners’ identity in the development of pragmatic abilities in a foreign language learning context. the researcher investigated l1 sociocultural transfer among jordanian efl in the speech act of refusals. the learners’ refusal data were collected using a dct followed by semistructured interviews. the data showed that the refusal strategies used by jordanians differed from those used by american speakers of english. interestingly, during the interviews, some efl learners explained that, when using english, they felt more comfortable not trying to adhere to the sociopragmatic norms of american english. the efl learners in this study held a negative perception of the english language as well as of its native speakers, and they felt that speaking english the way it is spoken by its people is a type of imitation, something that is regarded negatively by speakers of arabic. this study provides clear evidence of how nnss sometimes consciously refuse to appropriate the pragmatic norms of the target language community due to cultural values associated with their l1. here, the data show that arabs may find it difficult to justify the effort needed to speak english appropriately since imitation is not viewed positively by many arabs. taken together, the five studies summarized above show that when students meet with practices that differ from their “more or less permanent ways of being and behaving” (kramsch, 2009, p. 112), they may make for themselves “an environment in which one feels at home” (bourdieu, 1997, p. 150). again, learners’ lack of adherence to the target language pragmatic norms does not necessarily mean that they are not proficient enough to use the language in a socioculturally appropriate manner. learners’ divergence from pragmatic norms is indeed an indication of how l2 learners exercise agency in the process of their own development and how, when faced with a new set of pragmatic norms, they may adopt or resist those norms to index an identity that fits their l1 cultural values. second language learners’ divergence from target language pragmatic norms 257 3.2. learners’ perception of l2 pragmatic practices as inconsistent with their self-identity the second group of studies concerns learners’ unwillingness to adopt l2 pragmatic norms that are inconsistent with their sense of self. there are five studies in this section: siegal (1996), locastro (2001), davis (2007), liao (2009), and masuda (2011). of these studies, four were carried out in a study abroad context, and one was conducted in a foreign language context. two studies that provided evidence that learners sometimes resist adhering to l2 pragmatic norms that are inconsistent with their sense of self are lo castro’s (2001) and masuda´s (2011). locastro (2001) conducted a study on the interactions among learner subjectivity, attitudes and motivation, and pragmatic development of 33 japanese learners of english as a foreign language. the participants were first and second year students at a university in tokyo. at the time of data collection, all of them were enrolled in an intensive english program aimed at developing learners’ awareness of appropriate language use. data collected from group discussions, essays and reaction papers, language awareness worksheets, and questionnaires suggest that learners’ willingness to adopt ns standards for linguistic action was constrained by their inability to be themselves in a l2 (english, in this case). one student, for example, stated that her japanese personality was characterized by a “sharp” (locastro, 2001, p. 82) way of speaking, a mode of self-representation that she felt was not available to her when speaking english. another participant wrote: “it’s not necessary to speak like a native speaker” (p. 82); still another wrote: “for one, the target language is only one tool for one’s business” (p. 82). many of the participants in this study retained their own identities as japanese since they felt it was inappropriate to accommodate to the l2 pragmatic norms. masuda (2011) also provided evidence of learners’ unwillingness to adopt l2 pragmatic norms. this study examined the development of interactional competence of english-speaking learners of l2 japanese who participated in a 6-week summer study abroad program in japan. the researcher focused on the learners’ progress as indexed by their use of the interactional particle ne, a “particle that has important pragmatic functions for interpersonal acts within a social context” (masuda, 2011, p. 521). the participants in this study were six intermediate-level l2 japanese learners, and six japanese-speaking undergraduate students from the host university. the data consisted of recorded informal conversations between a learner and his/her japanese peer. the data showed that, on the whole, the learners improved their interactional competence by using more ne alignments in pragmatically appropriate ways. what is interesting to note, however, is that a gender-related conflict emerged in one of the male maria pia gomez-laich 258 subjects. this participant intentionally avoided using ne because he perceived it as a particle used by women, an impression that he derived from japanese comics and pop music. he stated that “ne sounds feminine” and that “plain forms without any interactional particles sound more masculine” (masuda, 2011, p. 533). here we see how this participant actually resisted the use of this interactional particle because he perceived it as gendered and how he was doing a conscious enactment of gender in language use by refusing to use the particle ne. this masculine subject position that he adopted consequently impacted on the development of his pragmatic competence. two other studies revealed how l2 speakers’ perceptions of themselves influence their l2 pragmatic competence in the target language: siegal’s (1996) and liao’s (2009). these studies showed that the participants’ desire to construct a professional persona influenced their language choices. in siegal’s study, which i discussed in the previous section, the participant’s lack of use of honorific language and successful use of topic control in her encounters with her japanese professor appeared to result from “her desire not to be perceived as a mere student, but as a knowledgeable researcher and scholar on a semiequal basis with the professor” (siegal, 1995, p. 233). similarly, liao (2009) investigated the use of english discourse markers (dms) by three male and three female l1 chinese graduate teaching assistants (tas) in a u.s. university. more specifically, liao (2009) used quantitative methods to examine the use of dms in two settings (ta-led discussions and informal interviews) and a qualitative analysis to examine the relationship between the participants’ social identities and the frequency of dm use. the data showed that one female participant used far fewer dms than the other two female tas since the informality that is usually associated with dms such as you know, like and well was incompatible with the professional identity as a teacher that she wanted to create. this participant expressed no intention to use dms; she was concerned about constructing her professional persona in english and her identity as the authority in class and preferred a more formal teacher talk. the data provided in these two studies clearly demonstrate that in order to understand individual differences in sociolinguistic competence, it is of paramount importance to consider the (unconscious) desires of the individual learner to maintain his/her image. the last study in this group was conducted by davis (2007). davis examined how korean esl learners’ preferences for north american english over australian english routines influenced their willingness to adopt australian english pragmalinguistic behaviors while studying abroad in australia. in this study, routines were defined as “recurrent phrases or words employed in particular contexts for the social purposes of thanking, apologizing, requesting, offering, greeting, insulting, and complementing” (davis, 2007, p. 613). this study is different from the ones i second language learners’ divergence from target language pragmatic norms 259 discussed above in that students performed identity not by reverting to l1 modes of pragmatic expression, but by expressing their preference for another form of national english (i.e., american english as opposed to australian english). participants were 20 korean esl students studying at private institutes and universities in melbourne. data were collected with two instruments: (a) a multiple choice ranking task, and (b) an attitude questionnaire that aimed at assessing whether students preferred north-american-based pragmatic routines to australian pragmatic routines. the results show that the students resisted australian routines, and that they expressed preference for north american over australian english. some students mentioned that their preferences for north american routines derived from their efl educational background (i.e., north american english is the established efl norm in south korea). in addition, students expressed their resistance to australian pragmatic behaviors by claiming that they felt “unnatural” and “uncomfortable” using australian routines (davis, 2007, p. 629). for example, one of the respondents said that “unlike american english it’s uncomfortable to use australian english” (davis, 2007, p. 629). the data show how esl learners resist undesirable l2 pragmatic norms that are inconsistent with their sense of self. different from the studies i discussed above, the students in this study performed identity not by reverting to l1 modes of pragmatic expression, but by showing their preference for american over australian english. they exercised choice based on their affective stance toward australian english and consciously resisted and excluded australian routines from their l2 pragmatic repertoire. in summary, the studies discussed above clearly show that learners sometimes resist adhering to l2 pragmatic norms that are inconsistent with their sense of self. they also show how learners decide not to abide by local customs in order to retain a sense of personal integrity (kramsch, 2009). in other words, learners’ desire to maintain their sense of self can make them reluctant to converge towards l2 targets. 3.3. learners’ perception of their position as “foreigners” in the target language community the last group of studies to be discussed concerns how being a foreigner and being treated as a foreigner in the l2 culture setting sometimes leads learners to flout l2 pragmatic norms. there are two studies in this group: brown (2013) and hasall (2013), both of which were carried out in a study abroad context. brown (2013) analyzed quantitative (discourse completion tests) and qualitative (recordings of natural conversations and retrospective interviews) data to chart four male l2 learners’ acquisition of korean honorifics during a 1maria pia gomez-laich 260 year study abroad program in korea. the findings revealed a gap between the students’ knowledge of the prescriptive ns norms of how honorifics should be used to express social meanings and the way they actually used them. this gap emerged because the participants encountered situations in which native-like patterns of interaction were not available to them; their position as exchange students and foreigners resulted in the belief on the part of some korean interlocutors that the norms of honorifics did not apply in interactions with them. for example, one of the participant’s instructors used panmal (i.e., honorific forms) when addressing korean students individually. however, she always used contaymal (i.e., nonhonorific forms) when addressing him. the participants reported that their identity as foreigners in the l2 community and the resulting lack of opportunities to acquire native-like patterns caused them discomfort and annoyance. for example, patrick reacted negatively to “any attempts by korean interlocutors to treat him differently because of his non-korean identity” (brown, 2013, p. 292). these identities of an “exchange student” and “foreigner” assigned to the participants positioned them in the “peripheries of korean society” (p. 290) and thus resulted in patterns of honorific use that flouted native speaker norms. similarly, hasall’s study (2013) showed how a highly salient identity as a foreigner in the l2 culture setting can constrain study abroad participants from adopting l2 pragmatic norms. the researcher examined the acquisition of indonesian address terms by australian l2 speakers of indonesian during a 7-week stay in indonesia. the data, which were collected using written preand posttests and through elicitation of oral comments on written test responses, regular interviews and regular diary-keeping tasks, revealed that the participants felt positioned only as partial members of the target language community. these learners were insistently positioned within the l2 setting as bule, an indonesian term used to refer to western foreigners which bears a disparaging tone. this identity of “outsiders” that was assigned to them led students to believe that the appropriate use of the address term system was not something they needed to participate in. taken together, these two studies show how language learners participating in study abroad programs are sometimes not seen as potential members of the host communities and might thus be assigned an outsider status. in other words, these studies show how being a foreigner and being treated as a foreigner influences the types of interactions l2 learners participate in and may lead students to believe that the pragmatic norms of the target language are not something they have to adhere to. 4. discussion the studies i have synthesized in this paper show that there are three main reasons why learners resist the pragmatic norms of the target language: (a) their second language learners’ divergence from target language pragmatic norms 261 perception of l2 pragmatic practices as inconsistent with their l1 cultural values, (b) their perception of l2 pragmatic practices as inconsistent with their selfidentity, and (c) their perception of their position as “foreigners” in the target language community. both learners whose learning has been limited to the formal language classroom in their home country and those who have learned the target language in an immersion setting (whether it is totally untutored or combines formal study with immersion in the target culture) do not blindly copy the target language’s pragmatic conventions. on the contrary, they develop pragmalects (thomas, 1983) that reflect their individual personalities. learners adopt an intercultural style that is different from both the l1 and the l2 and that serves as an identity marker (barron, 2002). the studies i have synthesized clearly show how learners opt to remain foreign by resisting certain l2 pragmatic practices and how learners are constantly engaged in identity construction and negotiation when they use a target language. even if there is pedagogical intervention, no matter whether it is in a foreign language learning environment or a study abroad context, the fact that learners’ pragmatic norms deviate from ns practices does not necessarily imply that they lack competence in the target language. learners’ preference for l1 styles as a marker of cultural and self-identity and the identities they are assigned by the members of the target language community are also factors that influence learners’ pragmatic choices and will undoubtedly have a determining influence on their language use. thus, l2 learners may be reluctant to behave according to l2 sociocultural norms because they do not desire to converge toward ns targets; learners exercise agency and may opt for pragmatic distinctiveness as a way of asserting their identity (benson, barkhuizen, bodycott, & brown, 2012). the studies also show that identity is fragmented and contested in nature, fluid and negotiated through social practices, as opposed to something fixed for life. in other words, identity is relational and contextually situated, and emerges in interactions within a particular discourse (block, 2007). once again, whether the focus is on foreign language contexts (where the classroom is the setting where the new subject positions and learners’ sense of self emerge) or on study abroad contexts, “failing to consider the centrality of learners identities will produce an inadequate understanding of sla” (norton & mckinney, 2011, p. 86). the pragmatic choices students make are related to their own preferences for the performance of identity. learners do not blindly copy native speaker norms. on the contrary, they create both their own interlanguage and an accompanying identity in the process of learning the target language (shardakova, 2005). clearly, any study which fails to take on board the role of identity and which fails to acknowledge this dimension of student’s agency in the acquisition of l2 pragmatics is necessarily flawed. maria pia gomez-laich 262 certain methodological limitations, however, should be taken into consideration when interpreting the data presented in the studies. one of the shortcomings of some studies is that most of the data were elicited from participants by means of a dct (e.g., al-issa, 2003; brown, 2013; hasall, 2013; ishihara & tarone, 2009), a multiple choice ranking task (e.g., davis, 2007), or self-reports on subjective reactions to l2 pragmatic norms (e.g., locastro, 2001). the main disadvantage these methods of data collection is that they do not offer a direct measure of authentic interaction or discourse because the elicited data may diverge in important ways from the language participants might have produced in natural settings. the written dct and multiple choice ranking task, for example, might have elicited artificial learner responses that fail to represent the language they would have produced in a more naturalistic context. similarly, although self-reports on subjective reactions to l2 pragmatic norms are useful in providing information about informants’ preferred language use, they are not sufficient to gain insights about how individuals construct themselves through language in a real-life setting. another disadvantage of these data collection methods is that they lack consequentiality. because “learners’ agency can be constrained by the affordances that the context provides” (ishihara & tarone, 2009, p. 109), these methods of data collection may not accurately reflect the language choices learners would make in authentic situations. in other words, if the learners had had to use the target language in authentic situations, they might have made pragmatic choices that accommodated to l2 pragmatic norms. despite these methodological limitations, these studies still show that the choices students make are related to their own preferences for the performance of identity, and how learners are constantly engaged in identity construction and negotiation when they use a language. 5. implications for teaching pragmatic competence, namely knowledge of the appropriate use of the target language’s linguistic resources within the overall social and cultural context of communication, is essential for l2 learners (barron, 2003). the consequences of lacking this competence are not to be disregarded since speakers who do not use pragmatically appropriate language run the risk of appearing uncooperative, rude or insulting. since communicative functions are realized differently in different languages, it is important that learners become aware of these differences. inadequacies in learners’ pragmatic competence may lead to pragmatic failure, which occurs when “. . . h [hearer] perceives the force of the s´s [speaker’s] utterance as other than the s [speaker] intended s/he would perceive it” (thomas, 1983, second language learners’ divergence from target language pragmatic norms 263 p. 94). bardovi-harlig (2001) states that the main differences between learner and ns performance lie in the actual speech acts realized, the semantic formulas chosen to realize a particular speech act, the content of these semantic formulas and, finally, in the form that these realizations take. for example, many researchers have showed that learners exhibit behaviors that differ from those of nss of the target language when performing different types of speech acts, such as apologies (olshtain, 1983, 1989), requests (blum-kulka & house, 1989), greetings and leave-takings (hoffman-hicks, 1999), and request and apology productions (kim, 2000).1 the question that still remains unanswered is how instructors can help students become socialized into the pragmatic norms and practices of the l2. kasper and rose (2002) suggest that instructional practices that comprise explicit instruction in the form of meta-pragmatic information regarding the target features can help learners integrate target elements into their discourse. brock and nagasaka (2005) propose that some objectives for classroom instruction could be to help learners identify differing norms of behavior across cultures with regard to different speech acts; to help learners assess appropriateness, sincerity, and spontaneity when performing specific speech acts, considering the relative social status of the conversation partners, their familiarity with each other, and suitability of the topic; and to help learners to express their intentions by producing different speech acts. in other words, when students in the language classroom share the same l1, they propose engaging in crosscultural comparisons of “how an interaction might unfold in two different language communities or subcommunities, and the interactions that might take place among people from these respective communities and cultures” (cohen, 2012, p. 273). the instructor can describe how a certain interaction is likely to take place in the target language community and then compare it to a similar interaction in the first language community, and can draw students’ attention to “possible variation in the interactions depending on the age of the participants, their status, and their roles in the interaction, among other things” (cohen, 2012, p. 273).2 pragmatics, however, should always be taught taking learners’ subjectivity into consideration. l2 learners, as it has been showed, may diverge from l2 norms to accentuate their linguistic differences in order to maintain their sense of self and their l1 cultural identity. 1 as one of the reviewers pointed out, the question is whether to try to change what nnss do so that they do not exhibit behaviors that differ from those of nss of the target language. it really comes down to an issue of consequences. if disregarding accepted pragmatic norms becomes a source of contention and perhaps of genuine pragmatic failure, then instruction is necessary. 2 as one of the reviewers pointed out, it is not always the case that the instructor is familiar with the practices, values and beliefs of the speakers of both the target and native language of the students. maria pia gomez-laich 264 acknowledgements i would like to thank dr. naoko taguchi, my advisor, for providing valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. my thanks also go to the three anonymous reviewers and the editor of studies in second language learning and teaching for their helpful suggestions. all mistakes are, of course, my own. second language learners’ divergence from target language pragmatic norms 265 references *al-issa, a. 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(2003). politeness. cambridge: cambridge university press. weedon, c. (1987). feminist practice and poststructuralist theory. london: blackwell. wishnoff, j. (2000). hedging your bets: l2 learners’ acquisition of pragmatic devices in academic writing and computer-mediated discourse. second language studies: working papers of the department of second language studies, university of hawai`i, 19, 119-157. yoshimi, d. r. (2001). explicit instruction and jfl learners’ use of interactional discourse markers. in k. r. rose & g. kasper (eds.), pragmatics in language teaching (pp. 223-244). new york: cambridge university press. second language learners’ divergence from target language pragmatic norms 269 appendix study coding scheme title: author: publication date: source: aim of the study: sample size: subjects’ age: subjects’ l1: target language: level of proficiency in target language: target pragmatic feature(s): academic context: length of study: accommodation (if applicable): data collection procedures: data sources: data analysis procedures: results: identity-related outcomes: 635 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (4). 2021. 635-639 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.4.8 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review learning words from reading: a cognitive model of word-meaning inference author: megumi hamada publisher: bloomsbury academic, 2021 isbn: 978-1-3501-5368-4 pages: 168 acquiring words is an essential, yet daunting, part of learning any language. in english, current estimates indicate that learners need to be able to understand around 8,000-9,000 word families, that is, headwords with their inflections and derivations (bauer & nation, 1993), to attain satisfactory levels of reading comprehension (nation, 2006). to put this into perspective, 8,000 word families could amount to over 34,000 individual words (schmitt, 2010). academic texts appear to be even more demanding, typically requiring knowledge of around 14,000 families (webb & paribakht, 2015). second language (l2) learners cannot achieve such knowledge only by intentionally attempting to commit each word to memory. instead, most words must be acquired incidentally, that is, as a byproduct of meaning-focused tasks such as reading. the problem is that incidental learning through reading is slow and necessitates vast amounts of comprehensible input. thus, seeking to improve incidental vocabulary learning and teaching, the book learning words from reading: a cognitive model of wordmeaning inference by megumi hamada proposes an eponymous model of reading 636 that draws on second language acquisition (sla) and psycholinguistic research to illustrate “how the meanings of words encountered during reading are learned” (p. viii). the model is hence the brainchild of a timely collaboration between two related and yet distinct research traditions. and it is perhaps this much-needed interdisciplinary dialogue that confers the most value on the book. the book is divided into two parts. the first part, with three chapters, summarizes research on lexical learning and reading, especially from the fields of applied linguistics and sla. chapter 1 provides a historical and theoretical overview of incidental learning through reading. chapter 2 explains what it means to know a word, foregrounds research on the mechanisms underpinning lexical learning through reading, and outlines findings on input processing. then, the chapter discusses the effectiveness of incidental learning through reading and compares it to learning yielded by meaning-given (intentional-learning) methods (e.g., provision of l1 translations or l2 definitions). the author concludes that “learning from reading may not be as effective as expected in the long term” (p. 25) and that meaning-given methods are “more effective than incidental learning” (p. 26). the third and last chapter in part 1 delves more deeply into some linguistic and contextual factors that affect incidental vocabulary learning; then, it underscores the importance of strategy use in successful text comprehension and word-inferencing; finally, it reviews studies that investigate intentional-learning tasks conducted concurrently with or following reading tasks. chapter 3 yields at least two important conclusions: (1) reading-strategy instruction improves text comprehension but may not have “any reliable effects on the success of wordmeaning inference during reading” (p. 34); and (2), echoing a conclusion from chapter 2, reading provides opportunities for lexical learning, intentional-learning tasks, especially output-production tasks performed during or after reading, significantly enhance vocabulary learning. the second part of the book, chapters 4 to 7, draws on studies from psycholinguistic research on reading. chapter 4 outlines several theories and models from l1 and l2 research. it explores the cognitive processes that learners go through when inferring the meaning of a word in a text and introduces the cognitive model of word-meaning inference. essentially, the model incorporates the reading models discussed in the chapter to summarize the higherand lower-level processes that readers go through to obtain the word-form and contextual information necessary for successful word inferencing (and thus lexical learning). the following two chapters then detail how such wordform (chapter 5) and contextual information (chapter 6) is utilized by readers. finally, chapter 7 focuses on practical ways to improve l2 reading comprehension and vocabulary learning. the chapter suggests tasks that may improve word-recognition, sentence-processing, and reading-comprehension skills, all 637 of which may facilitate text comprehension and, as the author claims, also word inferencing and learning. hamada’s book is clearly written, and each chapter is introduced with a short overview and concluded with a concise but highly useful, informative summary. the book is indubitably a welcome addition to the sla and psycholinguistic literature and may be an important asset for anyone seeking to better understand the reading process and its potential to foster incidental lexical learning. the conciseness and overall clarity of the text make it accessible to specialists and graduate students, but also to more adventurous teachers and undergraduate students. additionally, in her quest to develop the cognitive model of wordmeaning inference, the author covers vast theoretical ground. this provides the reader, especially the uninitiated one, with extensive knowledge of the topics covered, even though these topics are seldom discussed in depth. it is also this remarkable display of breadth of knowledge that lays the foundations for the cognitive model proposed in the book. to me, the model and its theoretical underpinnings are the most praiseworthy aspect of hamada’s work. it is refreshing, even reassuring, to understand the need to intertwine two similar research traditions that rarely talk to each other in one, rather simple, model. yet, such simplicity may constitute the most significant omission of the book, as the extensive theoretical background covered does not appear to come together nicely in the proposed model. i feel that the topics discussed may be too broad while lacking depth. this seems true especially in the case of the first part, which highlights research on vocabulary and reading in sla. for instance, hamada spends considerable time reviewing intentional-learning tasks, such as meaning-given output-production tasks, and concludes that these task types yield more lexical learning than reading alone (see above). nevertheless, and with no clear rationale, the author neither accounts for these tasks in the model, nor does she discuss how these tasks may supplement word-learning through inferencing. this begs the question as to why studies investigating such tasks were reviewed in the first place. the second part, focused on the psycholinguistics of reading, is significantly more relevant to the model. however, i believe that also in this case too many models and theories are introduced only to be glossed over, and it remains far from clear how they all contribute to the model. in short, i often felt that there was too much information being provided too quickly, and i looked forward to a section (maybe a chapter) that would eventually build a coherent whole, which, however, never materialized. in the end, the book appears to cover too much superficial ground, which may be taxing and often misleading, especially to less experienced readers. i am also not convinced that the main premise of the model can withstand scrutiny. its main assumption seems to be that by focusing on the development of 638 word-recognition, sentence-processing, and contextual-processing skills, teachers may help learners comprehend texts better, which facilitates word inferencing and thus enhances lexical learning. although intuitive, this assumption is not supported by the research findings reported in the book. on the contrary, on page 34 the author reviews a study by kern (1989) which shows that strategy instruction enhances reading comprehension but not lexical learning (see also above). a final point of contention concerns hamada’s recommendations regarding proficiency levels and inferencing. as the author mentions, readers need to understand around 96-98% of the words in a text for unassisted comprehension and successful word inferencing to occur (e.g., hu & nation, 2000). thus, hamada asserts that “word-meaning inference is not recommended for beginning-level students” (p. 123) and claims that learners may need to know 3,000 word families before inferencing skills can be taught. put differently, the author appears to imply that learners who know fewer than 3,000 word families are beginners who cannot benefit from word inferencing. first, these are not beginners, but rather learners of intermediate (b1/b2) proficiency in english (milton & alexiou, 2009; see also below). second, the author seems to ignore the existence of simplified texts, which occur in at least two forms. there are the short, simplified texts that are pervasive in textbooks across proficiency levels; and there are graded readers (simplified versions of unabridged books), typically used in extensive reading programs, which are discussed by the author. for instance, the penguin readers series (www.penguinreaders.co.uk) contains seven levels. level 1 books (a1 level, as per the website) utilize the most common 500 word families; level 7 books (b2 level) make use of about 2,500 families. in other words, comprehensible input (i.e., where 96-98% of the words are known to readers) is available at almost any level. thus, it is unclear why the author makes such recommendations. the book also does not clarify why teaching reading skills to facilitate comprehension and lexical learning (i.e., the main premise of the model) may be more beneficial to vocabulary acquisition than, for example, the reading of simplified texts supplemented by intentional-learning tasks. despite these critical comments, megumi hamada’s book is a valuable contribution to the literature. for one thing, the book provides an extensive overview of two main fields, that is, sla and psycholinguistics, thus creating a dialogue between two complementary, yet distinct, research traditions. this dialogue allows graduate students and researchers to broaden the scope of their knowledge and is useful to teachers, who may be willing to better understand the intricacies underpinning their day-to-day practice. secondly, and being perhaps hamada’s most novel addition to the literature, the book highlights the need to consider word-recognition, sentence-processing, and textual-comprehension skills when seeking to investigate lexical learning through reading. such 639 discussion may alert researchers to unexplored confound variables and may, hopefully, help improve the reliability of future research findings. reviewed by breno silva university of warsaw, poland brenotesol@gmail.com references bauer, l., & nation, p. (1993). word families. international journal of lexicography, 6, 253-279. hu, m., & nation, i. s. p. (2000). vocabulary density and reading comprehension. reading in a foreign language, 23(1), 403-430. milton, j., & alexiou, t. (2009). vocabulary size and the common european framework of reference for languages. in b. richards et al. (eds.), vocabulary studies in first and second language acquisition (pp. 194-211). palgrave. nation, i. s. p. (2006). how large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? the canadian modern language review, 63, 59-81. schmitt, n. (2010). researching vocabulary: a vocabulary research manual. palgrave macmillan. webb, s., & paribakht, t. s. (2015). what is the relationship between the lexical profile of test items and performance on a standardized english proficiency test. english for specific purposes, 38, 34-43. 239 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (2). 2020. 239-256 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.2.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt through the looking glass of student perception: how foreign language students see teacher trait emotional intelligence and why it matters sharona moskowitz birkbeck, university of london, uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5456-2186 smosko02@mail.bbk.ac.uk jean-marc dewaele birkbeck, university of london, uk https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8480-0977 j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk abstract the aim of this study is to examine how students perceive teacher trait emotional intelligence (tei) and how those perceptions relate to students’ own self-reported attitudes and motivation. adult students of esl/efl were given an online questionnaire consisting of two parts: one to provide observer-reported data on their teacher’s trait emotional intelligence and the second to measure students’ own attitudes and motivation. in total, 129 participants of 28 nationalities took part. the results showed that the perceived teacher tei domains of teacher sociability and teacher self-control were significant predictors of student positive feelings and attitudes towards the teacher. with this paper, we make the case that observer reports of teacher tei by students could be a valuable tool in l2 instruction by offering teachers unique insight into their own classroom behavior, thereby increasing teacher self-awareness which could lead to improved classroom practices. keywords: trait emotional intelligence; attitudes; motivation; teacher sociability; teacher self-control sharona moskowitz, jean-marc dewaele 240 1. introduction there is an increasing acceptance and understanding of teaching as an “emotion-laden process, yet there is still much that we do not fully understand about how teacher emotions function in classrooms, how they influence the practice of teaching and how they shape teacher professional identities” (gkonou, dewaele, & king, 2020, p. 1). what also remains somewhat hazy is how students’ impressions of their teachers’ emotions relate to their own learning process in the l2 classroom. aside from the customary course evaluation forms routinely administered to students at the end of a term, language learners are rarely asked directly what they think about their teachers in a formal manner, and even less so with regard to their teachers’ emotional aspects. with this current study, we attempt to “break the ice” by asking adult foreign language students to quantify their teachers’ trait emotional intelligence (tei) using an adapted version of the teique 360° short form test (petrides & furnham, 2006). given that most student/teacher relationships call for at least some degree of social and personal distance, we argue that exploring students’ personal and often unexpressed impressions of their teachers’ emotions could benefit both students and teachers by effectively holding up a mirror to language teachers, offering a distinct perspective in revealing teachers’ own blind spots in their practice and classroom behavior. 2. literature review 2.1. emotion and the language classroom the language classroom is an emotionally charged environment for both students and teachers (dewaele, gkonou, & mercer, 2018; dewaele & macintyre, 2014; gkonou, dewaele, & king, 2020). teachers with high tei help themselves and their students deal with emotions in the classroom (dewaele, gkonou, & mercer, 2018; dewaele & mercer, 2018). dewaele (2020) found that teachers with high tei were more intrinsically motivated to be good teachers. they also had stronger identified regulation and were less amotivated. more granular analysis of the four facets of tei revealed that teachers with higher levels of wellbeing and sociability were most likely to be strongly intrinsically motivated while teachers with low levels of wellbeing and emotionality were most likely to be amotivated. teachers are often cautious about their emotional reactions in the classroom and selective about which emotions to show, carefully keeping certain emotions glossed over or cordoned off from student view completely. nonetheless, despite engaging in so-called “emotional labor” to edit out truly through the looking glass of student perception: how foreign language students see teacher trait. . . 241 felt emotions in order to only show the desired ones (hochschild, 1983), students are generally aware of and responsive to a teacher’s reactions, including automatic involuntary facial change in response to an emotion. for example, a teacher’s spontaneous nod of approval or disparaging glance is often noticed and taken to heart, regardless of the teacher’s intention (acheson & nelson, 2020; benesch, 2012, 2017; dimberg, thunberg, & elmehed, 2000; sime, 2006). king (2016) found that teachers in japan went to great lengths to stifle displays of negative emotion, reasoning that such displays would demotivate students. curiously in stark contrast, a later qualitative study by humphries (2020) of a teacher at an engineering college, also in japan, profiled a teacher who felt so emotionally drained and fed up with his unmotivated students, that he effectively granted himself carte blanche to openly express his dissatisfaction and frustration in the classroom. even though some people are more adept at controlling their emotions (e.g., by natural predisposition, disciplined practice, or some combination thereof), observers are still often able to pick up on very subtle emotional cues. as barsade and gibson (2007) assert, teachers may often not be aware that they are showing emotion through facial expression or body language. emotions we do not even realize we are feeling can influence our thoughts and behaviors. further complicating matters is the ongoing debate over whether or not emotional intelligence (ei) can be changed, and if so, to what extent. on the positive side, there is some evidence that teachers in general can learn to control and regulate their own emotions, thereby increasing the effectiveness of their practice (sutton, 2004), and this is true for language teachers as well, particularly those with less experience (gkonou & mercer, 2017). in fact, teachers often already do consciously self-modify their own emotional displays in the classroom. sutton, mudrey-camino, and knight (2009) found that in a study of 400 junior high school teachers, 97% believed that their teaching practices would be improved by increasing positive emotions in themselves, actively using strategies such as self-talk, deep breathing and visualization to control their own facial reactions in the classroom. student perceptions of how teachers behave have a significant relation to student outcomes (clark et al., 1979; spilt, koomen, & thijs, 2011) and there is little doubt that students are acutely aware of teachers’ emotions, both negative and positive (sutton & wheatley, 2003), including nonverbal behavior. in a qualitative study of adult language learners’ perceptions of teacher nonverbal behaviors, sime (2006) analyzed five separate efl classes, interviewing participants after each class, finding that learners characterized teacher gestures into three general categories with three distinct functions: for the learner’s benefit, to serve an organizational function, such as classroom management, and for emotional engagement. the researcher also found that learners preferred teachers sharona moskowitz, jean-marc dewaele 242 who conveyed enthusiasm through their gestures and that those gestures promoted a relaxed atmosphere. unsurprisingly, the researcher noted that no matter how subtle teachers’ gestures were, learners noticed and interpreted them, positing that “the fact that teachers may often be unaware of the emotional effects that their nonverbal actions may have on individuals does not mean that learners are oblivious to them” (2006, p. 222). in other words, teacher behavior significantly affects student outcomes and “student perceptions of teacher behavior can have an important influence on causal relationships in the classroom” (clark et al., 1979, p. 30). teacher ei may also have a positive effect on student achievement by strengthening the students’ own self-perception of aptitude and ability (curci, lanciano, & soleti, 2014). 2.2. observer-reported ei noticing and making judgements about others’ emotions is a constant process, whether we are aware of it or not. as kahneman (2015) notes, the tendency to make judgements about others’ emotions is so basic and atavistic that people as early as infanthood tend to assign emotional personality traits even to nonhuman objects. he comments: “the perception of intention and emotion is irresistible . . . your mind is ready and even eager to identify agents, assign them personality traits and specific intentions, and view their actions as expressing individual propensities” (2015, p. 76). furthermore, these perceptions have salient effects on behavior and personal relationships. as elfenbein, barsade and eisenkraft point out, “. . . social perception of emotional abilities [is] an epiphenomenal construct – that is, judgments of ei are theoretically important in their own right because they exist in our minds, not necessarily because they are accurate or valid for use as a measurement device. people continually make these judgments, and these judgments subsequently have meaningful interpersonal consequences” (2015, p. 19). while it is true that impressions of others’ emotions can be faulty and bias-prone (kahneman, 2015), a strong argument can be made that self-impressions are even more unreliable, at least in certain respects. cooper and petrides (2010) have been critical of self-reported measures of ability ei as have other researchers, noting a strong general proclivity towards overestimating one’s own positive traits and abilities (chance, norton, gino, & ariely, 2011). in contrast to the pitfalls of self-reported ei tests, a good deal of solid research supports the validity and accuracy of observer-reported testing across various contexts (see furnham, 2008). in one particular study in the field of organizational psychology, co-workers rated personality traits of their colleagues in the work environment and it was found that such observer ratings of personality traits through the looking glass of student perception: how foreign language students see teacher trait. . . 243 were indeed better predictors of overall performance than self-reported ratings (oh, wang, & mount, 2011). assessing oneself impartially may be difficult due to the all too human flaw of self-delusion, which has led researchers to argue that people are sometimes better judges of the ei of others than of their own (furnham, race, & rosen, 2014). grant (2018) concurs: “as a social scientist, if i want to get a read on your personality, i could ask you to fill out a survey on how stable, dependable, friendly, outgoing, and curious you are. but i would be much better off asking your coworkers to rate you on those same traits: they’re often more than twice as accurate.” trait emotional intelligence is defined as “a constellation of emotion-related self-perceptions and dispositions located at the lower levels of personality hierarchies” (petrides, pérez-gonzalez, & furnham, 2007, p. 26). tei deals with how people perceive their own emotional competences and their own inner landscapes, using four domains as follows: wellbeing; self-control; emotionality; sociability. in a paper on tei of ballet dancers and musicians (petrides, niven, & mouskounti, 2006), the researchers compared observer versus self-reported ratings and investigated the validity of teique tests in relatively small sample sizes (34 ballet students, 5 ballet teachers). first they compared self-ratings to observer ratings of ballet students and teachers, and then explored the relationship between tei scores and ballet dancing. the researchers found a high rate of self-other convergence, meaning that: ballet teacher ratings on the teique 360° – sf showed high inter-rater reliabilities, which suggests that not only do lay people understand the nature of the trait ei facets, but they also agree when they rate others on them. furthermore, teacher trait ei ratings converged with student trait ei scores, which supports the accuracy of emotion-related selfperceptions. in other words, it is clear that there is at least some convergence between selfand other-perceptions of emotion-related abilities as well as between self-perceptions and objective performance on affect-laden tasks. (petrides et al., 2006, p. 104) the authors provide evidence that “in relation to the operationalization of trait ei . . . the teique provides complete and valid measurement of the construct. in stark contrast to ability ei tests, the teique shows robust psychometric properties, even in small sample research” (petrides et al., 2006, p. 106). we argue in the present paper that the same principles that undergird the value of observer ei reports in the workplace and other contexts could be transferable to the language classroom. language learners have a unique vantage point, both physically due to the layout of many traditional classrooms, and psychologically, because of the inherent power structure of the relationship between students and teachers. as a result, learners have a special awareness of teachers that teachers themselves may not even have. moreover, while research sharona moskowitz, jean-marc dewaele 244 on observer reported ei has been flourishing in the corporate world, there is a remarkable gap of such research in educational settings, particularly in the foreign language (l2) classroom, which is ironic considering that teacher and student emotions are elaborately interconnected and thus will necessarily influence each other (hargreaves, 2000; mercer & kostoulas, 2018; moskowitz & dewaele, 2019; sutton & wheatley, 2003). in terms of traditional self-reported tests of performance and intelligence, a significant male bias towards self-enhancement and a significant female bias towards self-diminishment has emerged (e.g., beyer, 1998; furnham & rawles, 1995). schutte et al. (1998) revealed a significant gender difference in self-reported measures of tei, but petrides and furnham (2000) found that there were generally no significant differences between males and females in total measured tei, with the exception of the domain of “social skills,” with females self-reporting higher scores than males. in a study of the effect of perceptions of teacher characteristics on enjoyment and anxiety of spanish students of english, the researchers found that teacher gender was unrelated to student level of foreign language enjoyment (fle) and foreign language classroom anxiety (flca) (dewaele, franco magdalena, & saito, 2019); however, the effect of student gender was not tested. previous research did show a small gender effect on learners’ classroom emotions, with female l2 learners reporting both more anxiety and enjoyment (dewaele, macintyre, boudreau, & dewaele, 2016). the “emotional sensitivity hypothesis” posits that women are more likely than men to notice subtle or ambiguous emotional displays of others. however, a study of 5,000 participants (fischer, kret, & broekens, 2018) found contradictory evidence and little solid support for this hypothesis. testing both selfreported ei and perceived emotion of others, the authors found that: men did score lower on self-perceived ei, which suggests that they think of themselves as less confident in perceiving, understanding and regulating emotions than did women. however, this did not affect the intensity ratings of target emotions. in other words, men and women’s self-perceived emotional intelligence is not a reliable predictor of rating the intensity of the intended emotion displays on the face. (fischer et al., 2018, p. 14) although research on emotion in sla and particularly positive emotion is steadily gaining momentum (dewaele, chen, padilla, & lake 2019; dewaele & li, 2020), given the emotional and social nature of the classroom and of the student-teacher relationship, such empirical investigations remain paltry (dewaele & dewaele, 2017; dörnyei & ryan, 2015; mercer & kostoulas, 2018). furthermore, despite some recent notable exceptions (e.g., dewaele et al., 2019), the topic of student emotion perception of teachers is practically uncharted territory in sla research. there is some evidence that how students render the classroom in emotional terms matters in measurable, observable outcomes. in a study of through the looking glass of student perception: how foreign language students see teacher trait. . . 245 2,000 language arts students at the 5th and 6th grade levels from a diverse urban school district in the united states, researchers found a positive correlation between student reported emotional climate of the classroom and observerreported student conduct (brackett, reyes, rivers, elbertson, & salovey, 2011). the researchers posited that “in emotionally supportive classrooms, students liked and respected their teachers more and in turn, behaved better. these findings align with a growing body of research evidencing the influence of emotional aspects of the classroom in student motivation, engagement, performance, and conduct in school” (brackett et al., 2011, p. 32). interest in teacher psychology is growing fast, and in particular, an “area with little research at present but with considerable implications for classroom life and teacher well-being concerns teacher emotions, their emotional intelligence and ability to self-regulate . . . this suggests there remains a whole rich under explored area for future research” (mercer, oberdorfer, & saleem, 2016, p. 220). in the context of the foreign language classroom, we propose that the tei of teachers as reported by student observers could unearth valuable insights with not only theoretical implications but potential uses applicable in the classroom as well. we realize that teachers might have their misgivings; after all, students may not always regard their teachers in a favorable light. however, such feedback from students could add meaningful contributions to the study of teacher psychology by helping teachers learn about their own strengths and weaknesses. 3. the study 3.1. research questions the study reported in this part of the paper was conducted with the purpose of addressing the following two research questions: 1. what is the relationship between student perceptions of teacher tei and students’ own self-reported positive feelings? if a significant relationship does exist, which domain of trait ei correlates most strongly with a favorable impression of a teacher? 2. how does perceived teacher ei affect student attitude towards the teacher? we hypothesize that student perceptions of teacher tei will predict at least some aspects of student attitude and motivation in the classroom. since past research has shown that fle is highly correlated with teacher friendliness, we predict that the domain of perceived teacher sociability will be a predictor of student positive feelings. sharona moskowitz, jean-marc dewaele 246 3.2. methodology 3.2.1. participants this study draws on data collected from a larger research project. participants from all over the world were asked to fill out an anonymous online questionnaire. the respondents were all adults enrolled in an english as a foreign or second language classes at the time of the study (total n = 129, male n = 40, female n = 87, unspecified gender n = 2). ages ranged from 18 to 60 years old (m = 23 years, sd = 6). participants reported 28 different nationalities, with 6 participants providing dual nationalities. the largest nationality group represented was austrian (n = 40), followed by french (n = 16), japanese (n = 14), uae (n= 9), syrian (n = 7), and belgian (n = 7). the highest first language group was german (n = 43), followed by arabic (n = 26), french (n = 23), and japanese (n = 13). participants were asked how many languages they knew in addition to their mother tongue and english, “proficient enough for at least a basic conversation.” all respondents were automatically considered to be bilingual since they were required to represent at least lower-intermediate level english proficiency to participate in the study. therefore, additional languages known are in addition to their l1 and english: 32 respondents knew no additional languages, 57 knew one additional language, and 41 knew two or more additional languages. when asked to describe their own english performance in comparison to their peers on a 5-point likert scale, the mean was 3.70 and the standard deviation amounted to .82, which indicates that most participants considered themselves slightly more proficient than their peers. in describing their own level of english (also on a 5-point likert scale), the mean was 4.11, with a standard deviation of .80, indicating that most participants indeed rated their own levels of english as rather advanced. 3.2.2. instrument the first section of the questionnaire included a basic collection of demographic and personal items concerning the number of years spent learning english, the amount of time spent using english outside the classroom and self-reported rating of english ability, both independently and compared to their classmates. the dependent variable of student attitude and motivation was measured using a construct adapted from the attitude/motivation test battery (amtb, gardner, 1985). the section included 22 total items, with responses measured on a 5-point likert scale (m = 3.83, sd = .58, α = .869). negatively worded items were reverse coded. the subsections were modified from the original amtb to better suit the relationship through the looking glass of student perception: how foreign language students see teacher trait. . . 247 between teachers and adult learners. items that dealt with homework and parental guidance were omitted. questions dealing with anxiety were also omitted. the two subcategories were as follows: (1) positive feelings (m = 3.91, sd = .65, α = .794) and (2) attitude towards english teacher (m = 3.76, sd = .63, α =.790). the independent variable of perceived teacher emotional intelligence was measured using a 22 item construct adapted from the teique 360° short form (petrides & furnham, 2006), meant to assess tei from the perspective of an observer. responses were measured on a 7-point likert scale (m = 5.21, sd =. 95, α = .914). the subsections were consistent with the domains of the original test: (1) teacher wellbeing (m = 5.51, sd = 1.18, α = .669), (2) teacher self-control (m = 5.20, sd = 1.23, α = .758), (3) teacher emotionality (m = 5.06, sd = 1.14, α = .796), and (4) teacher sociability (m = 5.18, sd = .83, α = .641) q-q plots of the dependent variables showed nearly normal distributions (figures 1-2), so the more powerful parametric statistics were chosen. figure 1 normal qq plot of positive feelings sharona moskowitz, jean-marc dewaele 248 figure 2 normal qq plot of attitude towards teacher to answer the research questions, first pearson’s correlation analyses were conducted (see table 1), and the significant independent variables were tested for unique variance using a multiple stepwise regression. all durbin-watson values fall between the accepted range of 1 and 3, and the tolerance values are all above .20, which suggests that there is no multicollinearity. table 1 pearson’s correlation analyses for dependent variables pearson’s correlation positive feelings attitude towards teacher t sociability .397* .654* t wellbeing .289* .538* t emotionality .314* .536* t self-control .314* .625* notes. * p < 0.05 3.3. findings 3.3.1. positive feelings pearson’s correlation analyses showed that student positive feelings correlate with all four domains of perceived teacher tei, with teacher sociability showing the strongest correlation (r = .397). a multiple regression analysis was used to through the looking glass of student perception: how foreign language students see teacher trait. . . 249 determine the unique effect of predictor variables while controlling for the effect of others (see table 2). it revealed a significant regression equation for teacher sociability (f(1, 127) = 23.787, p < .000) with the r² value equaling .158, which indicates that teacher sociability predicts 15.8% of the variance of students’ positive feelings, a medium effect size (cf. plonsky & ghanbar, 2018). table 2 multiple regression for student positive feelings predictor r² f p β durbin-watson collinearity diagnostics tolerance t sociability .158 23.79 .000 .397 1.41 1.000 notes. dependent variable: student positive feelings predictor: perceived teacher sociability 3.3.2. attitude towards the teacher pearson’s correlational analysis showed that all four domains of teacher tei correlate with attitude towards teacher, with teacher sociability showing the highest correlation (r = .320). a stepwise multiple regression analysis showed that the durbinwatson value (1.97) and the vif value (1.00) indicated no concern for autocorrelation nor multicollinearity, the normality and residual plots indicated linearity and homoscedasticity. a significant regression equation was found, with two variables – teacher sociability and teacher self-control – predicting 46% of the variance: adjusted r² square = .455, (f(1, 127) = 94.92, p < .0001), which is a large effect size (cf. plonsky & ghanbar, 2018). the strongest predictor was teacher sociability (β = .424, p < .0001), explaining 42.8% of variance, followed by teacher self-control (β = .298, p < .0001), explaining an additional 3.6% of variance. 4. discussion the first research question asked about the relationship between student selfreported positive feelings and perceptions of teacher tei. the results show that all four domains of perceived teacher tei correlate with positive feelings, underscoring the importance of the teacher-student relationship and student perceptions of teacher emotional aspects. the tei domain of teacher sociability correlated most strongly with student positive feelings and also predicted unique variance in positive feelings, indicating that friendlier, more sociable teachers make students feel more positive in the classroom. this finding is consistent with a study by dewaele et al. (2018), which found that teacher characteristics predicted 20% of the variance in foreign language enjoyment, with teacher friendliness being the strongest positive predictor. sharona moskowitz, jean-marc dewaele 250 in terms of student attitude towards the teacher, all four the domains of perceived teacher tei showed a positive correlation. the domains of teacher sociability and teacher self-control predicted a large amount of variance, providing strong evidence that students prefer language teachers they perceive as sociable and friendly, and that students have better attitudes towards teachers who they think effectively control their own emotions in the classroom. based on this, it can be presumed that teachers who are better able to control their own emotions will more effectively put students at ease and create a more positive environment with less anxiety (see dewaele & macintyre, 2014). furthermore, the student preference for teachers who they perceive can effectively control their own emotions accords with earlier research showing that “socially and emotionally competent teachers set the tone of the classroom by developing supporting and encouraging relationships with their students . . . and acting as a role model for respectful and appropriate communications and exhibitions of prosocial behavior” (jennings & greenberg, 2009, p. 492). both consciously and unconsciously, teachers craft a classroom persona, carefully selecting which of their personal traits to reveal, exaggerate, or, conversely, play down or conceal completely (king, 2016). in doing so, teachers can become almost like caricatures of themselves and often report feeling typically associated with performers rather than educators (beadle, 2009; lamb, 2017). regardless of the “authenticity” of teacher emotional displays, students are constantly observing and judging their teachers’ tei from their own vantage point and, as our results indicate, those assessments have predictive effects on students’ positive feelings and attitudes towards the teacher. these results combined with established research on the validity and uses of observer reported ei testing in various settings suggest that it might be worthwhile to survey adult students about how they perceive their teacher’s tei since those perceptions are related to their own attitudes and motivation. furthermore, due to their point of view as observers, students have a unique awareness of their teacher’s tei and might hold a key to a deeper understanding of teacher psychology. this study has potential pedagogical implications. student reported assessment of teacher tei can be extremely valuable in improving teachers’ selfawareness and might help illuminate teachers’ own blind spots. because of their unique vantage point, adult students have special insight into their teacher’s tei. in other words, students may know their teachers in ways that their teachers simply do not know themselves (at least in the less private aspects of emotion). because the student-teacher relationship is reciprocal by nature, such assessments might benefit students as well. in proposing that students assess their teachers’ tei, we realize that teachers might have their misgivings; after all, students may not always regard their teachers in a favorable light. however, such through the looking glass of student perception: how foreign language students see teacher trait. . . 251 feedback from students could add meaningful contributions to the study of teacher psychology and also help teachers at the individual level to learn about their own strengths and weaknesses. although some teachers might feel resistant to hearing their students’ observations, we suspect that many might also be unexpectedly enlightened and encouraged by what their students report. one result that seems to emerge repeatedly is that students prefer more sociable teachers and that teachers perceived as more emotionally intelligent tend to fare better in the classroom. while some teachers may be more naturally predisposed to sociability and self-control, gregersen, macintyre and macmillan (2020) propose a cognitive reappraisal strategy called “finding silver linings” in order for teachers to deal with stressful situations, particularly those that may arise while studying abroad. similarly, falout and murphey (2018) make the case for teachers to actively construct meaning and purpose in teaching, even if they do not feel that they were “meant to be” teachers. in order for teachers to function optimally, they need support and encouragement, which must include recognition and respect for the job’s emotional challenges. one limitation of the present study is the unavoidable self-selection bias; students who were willing to take the survey probably had more positive attitudes about their teachers and the learning process to begin with. another limitation involves the absence of data about the teachers themselves and the particulars of the teaching contexts, including the students’ motivation for taking the class and how long they had known the teacher. since emotions are highly context dependent and even teacher-specific (dewaele & dewaele, 2017), further research is needed to delve more deeply into this topic. it might be worthwhile in the future to collect teachers’ self-reported tei and compare the results against the observer-reported scores by their students to look for similarities and disparities. as the present study was cross-sectional, it was also impossible to look at students’ perceptual changes of teacher tei over time in relation to student attitudes, which could be done with a longitudinal design. 5. conclusion this study illustrates the relationship between perceived teacher tei, and student attitudes and motivation. the results show that the domains of perceived teacher sociability, teacher emotionality, and teacher self-control can predict student positive feelings, student attitudes towards teachers, and student foreign language anxiety levels. we propose that there could be inherent value in student observer reports of teacher tei and asking students to report those perceptions in an ethical, nonthreatening manner could help teachers improve their own self-awareness and teaching practice. we do not contend that student opinions of teachers sharona moskowitz, jean-marc dewaele 252 should be taken at face value. however, given the proven utility of observer-reported ei testing, we argue that such inquiry in the setting of the foreign language classroom could be beneficial. there is ample room for discovery in the multifaceted and richly complex area of the psychology of language learning and teaching, and we feel that this study is a starting point for further research. acknowledgements we would like to thank the participants for having taken the time to fill out our questionnaire, and the reviewers and the editor for their excellent feedback. through the looking glass of student perception: how foreign language students see teacher trait. . . 253 references acheson, k., & nelson, r. b. 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(2003). teachers’ emotions and teaching: a review of the literature and directions for future research. educational psychology review, 15(4), 327-358. 669 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (4). 2020. 669-672 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.4.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial i have to honestly admit that writing this editorial feels very different from writing the one for the december of 2011 when studies in second language learning and teaching had just completed its first year of existence. at that time, i was feeling a lot of uncertainty and trepidation about the future of the journal, wondering whether it would survive beyond the first year or two as well as whether it would stand a chance of becoming internationally recognizable. today the situation is very different. even though this has been an unprecedented year because of the covid pandemic with all the havoc it has been wreaking all over the world, 2020 has proved to be exceptionally gracious to ssllt. for one thing, not only has the journal survived and it is now turning 10 years of age, but it has also managed to secure its place among the most influential journals in the field, as can be seen, for example, from its ever-increasing indices in scopus. even more importantly, ssllt has at last been included in some of the databases in web of science, most notably social sciences citation index (ssci) and journal citation reports social sciences (jcrss). needless to say, we have been waiting for this momentous turn of events for quite a few years and now we cannot wait again to find out the impact factor for the journal, which should be announced some time in 2021. once again, i cannot stress enough that the huge success of the journal is the outcome of the contribution of numerous individuals, in particular the consecutive associate editors, authors, reviewers, as well as editors of special issues. all of this certainly calls for a celebration and it is our intention to do so by organizing a conference that would bring together all those who have been involved in ssllt and supported it from its inception, in whatever capacity this might have happened. we are sincerely hoping to be able to hold this event in october 2021 and will be sending out a call for papers some time in december. we do realize that the pandemic can foil any plan now, but we are determined to celebrate the success of the journal. should autumn 2021 turn out to be unfeasible, we will be aiming for spring 2022 and we are 670 very confident that sooner rather than later we will be able to finally meet faceto-face to discuss key issues involved in the process of second language learning and teaching. while there is surely nothing wrong with online conferences, i am convinced that we would all rather have a chance to talk in person at along last and we will do our best to make this happen. one thing is for sure, whatever the timing, the faculty of pedagogy and fine arts in kalisz, adam mickiewicz university, poland, will be the venue for this event. after all, this is where the idea for ssllt was conceived well over 10 years ago and where the journal has been published from the get-go. the current issue of ssllt brings together five original empirical studies and two reviews. first, chika takahashi and seongah im report the findings of an investigation which aimed to compare two influential theories of motivation in the learning of second or foreign languages (l2), that is self-determination theory (sdt; ryan & deci, 2017) and second language motivational self system (l2mss; dörnyei, 2009). using correlational analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling drawing on data obtained from 545 firstyear japanese university students, researchers demonstrated that the key constructs in both theories correlated with each other. at the same time, while internalized types of motivation did predict intended learning effort and in turn predicted proficiency, as stipulated by sdt, l2 learning experience proved to be of more importance than the ideal l2 self, contrary to the claims of l2mss. in the following paper, d. reid evans applies complex dynamic systems theory (cdst; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008) to the exploration of complex syntax in the case of a french-speaking, untutored learner of english working at a university in the united states. using fractal analysis with data collected over 30 weeks during informal 20-minute conversations with the participant, he managed to show self-similar dynamic patterns of variability of syntax over three different timescales, thus providing evidence for the fractal nature of language. the contribution by kriss lange and joshua matthews empirically examines the relationship between l2 vocabulary knowledge, lexical segmentation and listening comprehension ability with a group of 130 japanese learners of english at the tertiary level. correlational and regression analyses of the data collected by means of listening vocabulary levels test (mclean, kramer, & beglar, 2015), a paused perception test as well as two measures of l2 listening demonstrated that the knowledge of aural vocabulary at the first 1,000 level was a key predictor of listening comprehension scores in addition to lexical segmentation ability. on the basis of these findings, the authors stress the importance of teaching high-frequency vocabulary, particularly in contexts where out-of-class access to the target language is scarce. subsequently, anna krulatz and tülay dixon report the findings of the study which compared the use of refusal strategies in english 671 by 81 korean and 62 norwegian university students. the data were collected through a discourse completion task containing two scenarios and the point of reference were the taxonomies of refusals developed by salazar campillo, safont-jordà, and codina espurz (2009) as well as beebe, takahashi, and ulissweltz (1990). independent-samples t-test showed that while the use of refusals strategies is to some extent dependent on cultural norms, this influence may be trumped by the specificity of multilingual pragmatic competence. in the final empirical study, joanna nijakowska, dina tsagari and george spanoudis describe the process of validation of a 24-item tepid scale intended to tap into teachers’ beliefs about their preparedness to include dyslexic learners in mainstream foreign language classes. principal component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis involving data obtained from 546 pre-service and in-service teachers from cyprus, greece and poland yielded a two-factor solution that was robust for all the groups. the identified factors were: (1) knowledge and selfefficacy, and (2) stance towards inclusion. the present issue closes with the book reviews written by mirosław pawlak and haydab almukhaild, the former dealing with a monograph on directed motivational currents and the latter with a volume on engagement in the l2 classroom. i am confident that the contributions to the current issue will provide an impulse for further empirical investigations in the areas on which they focus. mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references beebe, l. m., takahashi, t., & uliss-weltz, r. (1990). pragmatic transfer in refusals. in r. c. scarcella, e. andersen, & s. d. krashen (eds.), developing communicative competence in a second language (pp. 55-73). new york: newbury. dörnyei, z. (2009). the l2 motivational self system. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 9-42). clevedon: multilingual matters. larsen-freeman, d., & cameron, l. (2008). complex systems and applied linguistics. oxford: oxford university press. mclean, s., kramer, b., & beglar, d. (2015). the creation and validation of a listening vocabulary levels test. language teaching research, 19(9), 741-760. 672 ryan, r. m., & deci, e. l. (2017). self-determination theory: basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. new york: the guilford press. salazar campillo, p., safont-jordà, p. m., & codina espurz, v. (2009). refusal strategies: a proposal from a sociopragmatic approach. revista electrónica de lingüística aplicada, 8, 139-150. 297 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (2). 2021. 297-303 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.2.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review situating language learning strategy use: present issues and future trends editors: zoe gavriilidou, lydia mitits publisher: multilingual matters, 2021 isbn: 9781788926713 pages: 376 despite recently going through a sort of a crisis brought about by critical remarks made by eminent scholars (e.g., dörnyei, 2005) about the raison d’être of the whole research area, the field of language learning/learner strategies (llss) is still very much alive and kicking. this is manifested by constant publication of meta-analyses (e.g., plonsky, 2011), numerous journal articles, including stateof-the-art pieces (e.g., pawlak, 2019), special issues of journals (e.g., pawlak & oxford, 2018) and books (e.g., oxford, 2017), and the organization of a conference series (situating strategy use [ssu]), all devoted exclusively to llss. the book under review here, situating language learning strategy use: present issues and future trends, edited by zoe gavriilidou and lydia mitits, includes chapters originating in the talks delivered at the second international conference on ssu (komotini, greece, september 2017). as is the case with post-conference publications, the authors of the chapters are an international “motley crew” of more experienced scholars who are easily recognizable for their contribution to lls research, and less experienced 298 researchers. however, branding them all humorously as a motley crew (greek dominated, though, which reflects the affiliations of the editors and the venue of the conference), an expression usually used to refer to bands of pirates, is not meant in a negative way; quite to the contrary, it highlights the fact that they represent diverse research contexts, in particular various places in europe, north america and asia, which is undoubtedly a strength of the book. the book opens with a foreword by peter gu, in which he sketches a research agenda for the contemporary lls field and expresses the conviction that many of the chapters in the book contribute to it. what follows is a preface by one of the editors, zoe gavriilidou, in which she presents the book’s focus and goals. these are further explained in an introduction authored by both editors, where they also comment on the structure of the volume. the overarching aim of the publication is gathering the most recent research and ideas concerning llss, locating research gaps, and staking out new research territories. the book thus aims to provide research directions by suggesting useful theoretical and methodological solutions, and also to show how research can inform strategy instruction (si) and learner autonomy. let me say right at this point that in my opinion the book is largely successful in meeting these general objectives, which i will try to highlight in some of the comments on particular chapters, with some caveats included later on. the book is divided into four parts and 15 chapters. part 1, entitled “language learning strategies: where do we go from here?” includes two chapters by eminent lls scholars which are more theoretical and conceptual. part 2, “new pathways to language learning strategy research,” includes five chapters related to strategy use and assessment in relation to speaking (chapter 3) and vocabulary (chapters 4-7). part 3, “language learning strategies in context,” comprises four chapters concerning strategy use in different country(chapter 8), task(chapter 9), target language(chapter 10) and educational institutionspecific (chapter 11) contexts. part 4, entitled “aspects of language learning strategy instruction,” includes four chapters dealing with si in connection with a wide range of linguistic and pedagogic matters, that is, the peculiarities of modern greek morphology (chapter 12), the promotion of learner autonomy (chapter 13), and the use of new technologies (chapters 14-15). in chapter 1, “language learner strategies: a call for fine-tuned strategy categorization,” andrew cohen uses a somewhat personal account of his own grappling with learning strategies when learning chinese to highlight the need to frequently update strategy characterizations necessitated by the ongoing changes in how students learn and use languages. cohen also stresses the caution and precision required in strategy definition and characterization by showing that what seems to be a single strategy may flexibly realize a number of completely different strategic functions at different points in time. 299 rebecca oxford’s contribution is chapter 2, entitled “consciously keeping watch: self-regulation and learning strategies.” it is yet another effort to reconcile llss with self-regulation. thus, it seems to be an outgrowth of the harsh criticism by dörnyei (2005) and some other authors of lls research. although strategy researchers seem now to have survived and recovered from the “crisis” following the criticism, and the lls field is perhaps even stronger now because of its lively and constructive reaction to it, “responses” to the crisis are still common. it is in this vein that oxford shows the compatibility between and mutual complementation of llss on the one hand, and the theory of consciousness and several theories of self-regulation on the other: vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory, feuerstein’s instrumental enrichment program, and self-regulation as researched in educational psychology and social cognition. the exploration of the links between the research areas is a theoretical innovation that the book promises. following the extended discussion of the two initial chapters, in order to examine the value of the whole book, it is useful to consider gu’s research agenda outlined in the foreword, which echoes earlier suggestions concerning what is ideally required of up-to-date lls research (pawlak, 2019; pawlak & oxford, 2018). it seems that such research should (a) go beyond mere establishment of strategy taxonomies and surface level exploratory research (explanatory and intervention research is required, including strategy and strategy-based instruction), (b) focus on learners’ motivation for strategy use and its social construction, rather than treating strategy employment as just a skill, (c) contextualize strategy use in terms of specific tasks, and also skills and language subsystems, especially those which have received less research attention (e.g., grammar and speaking), (d) examine the contextual pressures and affordances mediating successful strategy application, also with respect to learning diverse languages, (e) develop strategy assessment, also for purposes other than research, (f) focus on the links between llss and other individual differences, especially learner autonomy, and (g) investigate the dynamics of strategic learning over different timescales. in what follows, i briefly introduce different chapters by assigning them to the above research agenda points. this way, i will reveal the actual realization of the research guidelines by the contributions to the volume, which is tantamount to meeting the purposes announced in the introduction. (a) in chapter 13, “promoting learner autonomy through learning strategy instruction with college efl students,” nae-dong yang describes a project in which she offered differentiated metacognitive si to taiwanese college students, which influenced their autonomy and was reflected in learner beliefs. in chapter 14, “promoting learners’ critical thinking and developing reading strategies 300 through critical video-gaming,” vasiliki-agathi theodoridou and anna-maria hatzitheodorou test teaching reading strategies aimed at fostering critical reading with the help of commercial video games in a case study of a 13-year-old greek learner of english. in chapter 15, “using digital supportive feedback for the strategic training of young efl learners,” anna-theodora veliki and angeliki psaltou-joycey report an important quasi-experimental study in which they found that vocabulary learning si among young english learners employing digital supportive material may be effective in terms of better strategy use and improved vocabulary performance. (b) in chapter 1, andrew cohen calls for fine-grained strategy characterizations, also in terms of their elusive and dynamically changing functions, which will by necessity involve focusing on specific reasons for strategy use. (c) in chapter 3, “speaking strategies and speaking ability in esp classrooms in a higher education setting,” milevica bojović focuses on the less frequently investigated speaking strategies and finds out that they are used more often by learners whose communicative ability is high. in chapter 7, “strategic construal of particle verbs (pvs) in croatian secondary school learners of english,” ana petanjak dedić and renata geld investigate specific strategies used by highschool learners of english when interpreting the meanings of phrasal verbs. several types of “strategic construal of particle verbs” are distinguished, in the spirit of cognitive linguistics. in chapter 9, “task-specific strategy use in video-mediated integrated writing: the greek eap context,” iris papadopoulou, ifigeneia machili and zoe kantaridou investigate strategy use in writing tasks integrated with videos. they found that tertiary learners use test-wiseness, output-composing and input-organizing strategies, with the last two predicting their academic english language proficiency. (d) in chapter 8, “situating language learning strategy use and instruction: the greek context,” angeliki psaltou-joycey offers a comprehensive review of lls research in greece over several recent decades. although this chapter could be linked to some other items on the research agenda (e.g., llss and individual differences, and si), it connects the most closely with strategy use and strategy teaching contextualization. in chapter 10, “understanding language learning strategies in context: the case of russian students learning greek as a foreign language,” zoe gavriilidou, irina tresorukova and antonios mylonopoulos focus 301 on the use of llss in learning greek by russian students majoring in greek studies in russia. this study could also be linked to (f) as the authors not only explain their results obtained by an adapted version of oxford’s sill with reference to the specific context of the study but also correlated them with several individual differences. in chapter 11, “efl learning strategies and motivational orientations of multilingual learners in mainstream and dual-immersion schools,” lydia mitits, zoe gavriilidou and athina vrettou investigate the differences between llss used by multilingual learners in mainstream and dual-immersion greek schools. (e) in chapter 4, “vocabulary learning strategy surveys in second language acquisition: design, context and content,” richard labontee compares three vocabulary strategy assessment instruments, examines the processes of their development (including validation and reliability), and uses the insights thus garnered to revise the swedish vocabulary learning strategy survey. in chapter 5, “exploring efl learners’ paths through vocabulary learning using narrative frames,” višnja pavičić takač and sanja marinov examine school-age learners of english’s vocabulary learning strategies by means of narrative frames and show their utility for the purpose. the authors also contribute to the debate concerning the place of lls research vis a vis self-regulation. (f) even though i do not list any chapters here, several contributions do make reference to the relationship between llss and individual differences, even though it is not their main advantage because they do not investigate these differences in an innovative way. (g) no chapters fit this guideline. in addition to numerous chapters being compatible with a state-of-theart research agenda, the book has other strengths, too. first, many chapters include sound pedagogical implications grounded in the research reported, which may somehow with time trickle down to the teaching profession (e.g., the suggestion in chapter 5 that vocabulary teaching and si should address the whole learner-person, including their affect). second, the research is varied in terms of its themes and contexts. next, innovative teaching solutions concerning strategic learning are provided in some chapters (e.g., reading si using video games). also, the book offers some methodological diversity and even sophistication, a good example being the methodology of narrative frames (chapter 5). finally, 302 and on a more personal note, it is good that a bulk of the talks presented at a conference get published in one volume because conference participants can return to some presentation themes and also less formal exchanges which they have failed to remember or consider in detail. there are also some weaker points concerning the book, which do not however significantly diminish its overall merit. one is the fact that some chapters do not make any significant contribution to the research agenda referred to earlier and bear only a weak relation to the theme of llss. in particular, in chapter 6, “the language of the home in learning l2 vocabulary,” thomaϊ alexiou, lydia mitits and james milton investigate the knowledge of the l1 and l2 vocabularies of minority l1-turkish children in greek schools, and they make reference to llss only as an afterthought in considering the possible ways of improving the children’s vocabulary knowledge. this also applies to chapter 12, “morphological segmentation in strategy-based instruction: towards a graded morphological syllabus of modern greek,” where maria mitsiaki and anna anastassiadis-symeonidis describe the procedure for syllabus creation with respect to the morphological intricacies of modern greek and only loosely refer to the possibility of applying aspects of the syllabus in si. in the preface, zoe gavriilidou states that another purpose of the book is helping teachers appreciate llss so that they encourage learners to use strategies and be more engaged. in addition, the volume aspires to offer ideas on how learners can autonomously approach learning situations. yet teachers and, especially, learners are not specifically listed as the intended readership of the book, so these aims may be realized only indirectly via the conduit of researchers. this is a book primarily for the academic audience: researchers and university students, especially graduate ones. the editors also suggest that it might serve as a textbook. i take issue with this because edited volumes such as this one are rarely suited for this purpose because of their multiple, often not highly compatible perspectives; a student and a university instructor expect a more unified and by necessity simplified view of a research or practice area. some other limitations of the book concern publication and research standards, as well as topic coverage. first, the methodological and academic rigor in some of the contributions is slightly lesser than in articles published in top-tier journals, which is, however, understandable given a different peer review model used in the preparation of such publications. for example, there are cases where the methodologies are not meticulously described and the results are not thoroughly discussed with ample reference to previous research. second, although the book’s coverage is relatively wide, there are no references to some of the newest lls research trends such as investigations informed by complex dynamic systems theory or other-regulated strategy use. 303 all in all, despite the limitations, taking into account the strengths of the book, that is its breadth of coverage of both theoretical and empirical aspects of the contemporary lls research agenda, its engagement with some of the topical issues such as innovative si, and its reference to a wide range of contexts, the book is a valuable addition to the lls literature. the editors and authors should be lauded for their largely successful effort to offer a state-of-the-art volume which will be of use mostly to the research community and also students, especially graduate ones, interested in llss and their role in language learning and teaching. reviewed by jakub bielak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland kubabogu@amu.edu.pl references dörnyei, z. (2005). the psychology of the language learner: individual differences in second language acquisition. lawrence erlbaum. oxford, r. l. (2017). teaching and researching language learning strategies: self-regulation in context. routledge. pawlak, m. (2019). investigating language learning strategies: prospects, pitfalls and challenges. language teaching research. https://doi.org/10.1177/13 62168819876156 pawlak, m., & oxford, r. l. (eds.). (2018). language learning strategies: linking with the past, shaping the future [special issue]. studies in second language learning and teaching, 8(2). plonsky, l. (2011). the effectiveness of second language strategy instruction: a meta-analysis. language learning, 61(4), 993-1038. 127 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (1). 2018. 127-147 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.1.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt advanced learners’ foreign language-related emotions across the four skills katalin piniel eötvös university, budapest brozik-piniel.katalin@btk.elte.hu ágnes albert eötvös university, budapest albert.agnes@btk.elte.hu abstract individual differences researchers have recently begun to investigate the concept of emotions and their role in language learning (macintyre, gregersen, & mercer, 2016). our aim is to report on a project exploring english majors’ feelings related to their use of foreign languages. using a qualitative research design, participants were asked to write a paragraph in their mother tongue (hungarian) describing their emotional experiences in connection with foreign languages and one of the four language skills. our database comprised altogether 166 paragraphs from 31 male and 135 female students, with 43 texts on listening, 35 on speaking, 47 on reading, and 41 on writing. with the help of content analytical techniques, the texts were divided into thematic units and coded by the two authors. a framework of academically-relevant emotions (pekrun, 2014) was used to guide our initial coding and the categories were modified where it was felt necessary. results indicate that the two emotions most frequently experienced by english majors are predominantly related to enjoyment and language anxiety, and these emotions vary not only according to the skill involved but also depending on the context of language use (in class or outside class). keywords: emotions; language learning; foreign language classroom katalin piniel, ágnes albert 128 1. introduction in individual differences research, the notion of affect was mostly used to refer to phenomena (e.g., attitudes) judged as relevant in connection with motivation (gardner & macintyre, 1993). also, since early motivational research acknowledged the negative effects of anxiety (gardner, 1985), language learning anxiety emerged as the most prominent affective variable in studies of second language acquisition (horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1991). in recent years a more explicit focus on different emotions present in the classroom has emerged, particularly since the turn of the millennium (dewaele, 2005, 2010; macintyre, 2002). around that time, an important change also started in the discipline of psychology: in an influential paper, seligman and csíkszentmihályi (2000) argued for introducing the framework of positive psychology. they suggested that, instead of the focus on pathology that characterized psychology for quite a long time, there was a need to concentrate on positive experiences in people’s lives. this new approach has also found its way into our field (macintyre & mercer, 2014), which is well reflected by the fact that two books were published on the topic quite recently (i.e., gabryś-barker & gałajda, 2016; macintyre, gregersen, & mercer, 2016). since positive emotions are one of the focal points of positive psychology (seligman & csíkszentmihályi, 2000), this trend also helped to broaden the scope of affective studies to include positive emotions experienced in the classroom. in the educational literature, there is an increasing interest in emotions experienced in connection with academic success and in different academic subjects (pekrun & linnenbrink-garcia, 2014; schutz & pekrun, 2007), while in the field of applied linguistics, language learning related enjoyment has gained attention recently (dewaele & macintyre, 2014, 2016). however, there seems to be limited research to date that aims to provide a comprehensive picture of the range of emotions students experience in connection with foreign language learning and use in different language learning contexts (for an exception, see macintyre & vincze, 2017). in our exploratory study, our aim is to explore english majors’ feelings related to their use of foreign languages in and out of the classroom. 2. what are emotions? emotions, similarly to many other concepts of psychology, are notoriously difficult to grasp scientifically. if we asked people around us whether they knew what emotions were, we could safely guess that most of them would answer with a definite “yes,” and they would even offer us examples. however, it is much less likely that they could provide a reasonably comprehensive definition or that their definitions would overlap. if we turn to the discipline of psychology, advanced learners’ foreign language-related emotions across the four skills 129 where the study of emotions has quite a long research tradition, we still find some controversy over the definition of emotions. arriving at a generally accepted scientific definition of emotions has not been an easy feat. izard (2010), a renowned researcher of basic emotions, even devoted a small-scale study to the topic. he asked 34 distinguished scientists to define the term emotion, and although he found some agreement on the structures and functions of emotions, he was unable to provide a complete synthesis of the definitions he received. nevertheless, all the definitions acknowledged the multi-componential nature of emotions, and many of them “gave a definition of emotion that recognized (a) neural circuits and neurobiological processes, (b) phenomenal experience or feeling, and (c) perceptual-cognitive processes as aspects of emotion” (p. 368). the definition adopted in our study also acknowledges the multiple aspects that are present in emotions besides drawing attention to the evolutionary role of emotions in adapting to our environment in accordance with our personal goals. therefore, emotions in our study are defined as “multifaceted responses to events that we see as challenges or opportunities in our inner or outer world, events that are important to our goals” (keltner, oatley, & jenkins, 2014, p. 27). having arrived at a working definition, it might also prove useful to differentiate the term emotion from other related terms like affects, moods, and dispositions. keltner et al. (2014) used the dimension of time to differentiate these concepts. in their interpretation, self-reported emotions typically last between a few minutes and a few hours, whereas moods last at least for a few hours or even longer, for days or even weeks. frijda (1993) pointed out another difference between emotions and moods, stating that the former are typically directed at specific people or events, that is, an object, while moods are freefloating and objectless in this sense. the words dispositions, sentiments and traits describe the emotional aspects of someone’s personality, which can last a lifetime; in this sense, their temporal range is even longer (keltner et al., 2014). the terms affective or affect tend to refer to the whole range of phenomena that have been described above (oatley, 2004). besides definitional problems, emotions also pose problems of classification. the words used to describe emotions in different cultures and in different languages tend to vary considerably, and their interpretation might even differ from one person to the other. one way out of the classification problem might be reducing distinct emotions to affective dimensions and viewing them as varying on two dimensions: arousal/activation and valence/pleasantness (larsen & fredrickson, 1999). however, considering emotions as dimensions tends to mask the fact that “discrete emotion variables have different predictors and contribute to different behavioral outcomes” (izard, 2007, p. 267), and these katalin piniel, ágnes albert 130 approaches also dismiss evidence of the functionality of discrete emotions outlined by izard (2007). moreover, people tend to label their emotions as distinct categories, which seems to underline their psychological reality (field, 2003). therefore, another solution to the problem of classification would be to focus on categories of distinct emotions and come up with lists of primary emotions based on biological considerations, as has been attempted by a number of researchers (reeve, 2009). one such list of primary, basic or first-order emotions is provided by izard (2010); in his view, (a) interest, (b) enjoyment/happiness/contentment, (c) sadness, (d) anger, (e) disgust, and (f) fear belong to this group. although this list is not very extended, the problem is that after early childhood, people do not really experience these first-order emotions in their pure forms. as we grow up, cognition starts to play a decisive role in our emotions; consequently, what we usually refer to as emotions should be more precisely described as emotion schemas. emotion schemas are defined “in terms of the dynamic interaction of emotion and cognition” (izard, 2007, p. 265); therefore, besides feelings derived from primary emotions, they also have influential cognitive aspects. variation in the cognitive aspects can be held accountable for the differences in cognitive schemas, posing potential problems for research. however, since after early childhood emotional schemas can be considered as the most powerful source of human motivation (izard, 2007), the importance of cognition in forming emotion cannot be disregarded. the relationship between feelings and cognition is reciprocal. on the one hand, our emotions arise as a result of the process whereby all events are evaluated in line with the individual’s concerns, and this evaluation is called appraisal (lazarus, 1991). the first evaluation process, called primary appraisal, is automatic and reflex-like. it is during the process of secondary appraisal that the person’s cognitions have a major role. these cognitions can be labeled attributions (keltner et al., 2014) or schemas (izard, 2007), and they will determine the quality of the emotion experienced by the person and eventually the label attached to it. on the other hand, feelings are also known to influence people’s cognitions. for example, individuals are more attuned to perceiving emotioncongruent objects and events. emotions help people prioritize their attentional resources and assist in concentrating on those events and objects that are relevant to whatever they are doing at the moment. when recalling the past, events infused with intense emotions prove to be easier to recall and these events are also recalled more often (keltner et al., 2014). another important question concerns the functions of emotions. emotion and cognition are intimately connected, and seem to influence each other extensively, but their relationship can be seen in a different light. although there was a time when emotions were primarily considered as nuisances, disrupting advanced learners’ foreign language-related emotions across the four skills 131 the rational working of the mind (hebb, 1949; mandler, 1984), going back even further in time, we find that darwin (as cited in reeve, 2009) argued as early as 1872 that emotions help animals adopt to their environment. today, we also attribute an important role to emotions in coping with fundamental life tasks, such as protection, destruction, reproduction, reunion, affiliation, rejection, exploration, and orientation (plutchik, 1980). emotions also serve a social function in the sense that they communicate our feelings to others, they influence how we are interacted with, they invite and facilitate social interaction, and they have a role in establishing, maintaining and dissolving relationships (manstead, 1991). consequently, emotions indeed seem to assist adaptation to our physical and social environment and ensure our survival. therefore, oxford (2015) seems to be right when arguing that “all learning is a powerful combination of cognition and emotion” (p. 371). given their fundamental role and their intimate relationship with cognition, it is quite surprising that emotions have largely been ignored in educational contexts until recently. the exception to the rule is anxiety, whose effects on testtaking (cassady & johnson, 2002; spielberger & vagg, 1995; zeidner, 1998) and foreign language learning (gkonou, daubney, & dewaele, 2017; horwitz et al., 1991) have been explored extensively. the recent shift in focus, to other emotions and positive emotions in particular, can be attributed to the emergence of positive psychology (seligman & csíkszentmihályi, 2000) and its focus on positive emotions, for example. fredrickson’s (2003, 2008) theory hypothesizing the crucial role of positive emotions found its way into research on second and foreign language acquisition (dewaele & macintyre, 2014; macintyre & gregersen, 2012; macintyre & mercer, 2014; macintyre & vincze, 2017, oxford, 2015). more specifically, fredrickson’s (2003, 2008) broaden-and-build theory postulates that negative emotions tend to lead to characteristic thoughts and actions; thus, they result in focusing and narrowing. in contrast, positive emotions “all share the ability to broaden people’s momentary thought-action repertoires and build their enduring personal resources, ranging from physical and intellectual resources to social and psychological resources” (fredrickson, 2003, p. 219). in this sense, positive emotions are broadening rather than narrowing, and they assist building different resources; as such, they are considered quite beneficial in educational contexts. 3. emotions in the educational setting besides research inspired by the role of positive emotions in general, the effects of distinct emotions have also been investigated within the educational context. pekrun (2014) argued that emotions, especially those relevant in a school setting, can be grouped into four categories. achievement emotions relate to feelings connected to success and failure in school; examples include enjoyment of learning, katalin piniel, ágnes albert 132 hope and pride related to success, and anxiety and shame related to failure. another group of emotions relate to cognitive problems encountered while learning; these are labeled epistemic emotions, such as surprise, curiosity, confusion and frustration. the third group of emotions relate to the specific topics that students deal with in the lessons, that is, the content of learning. topic emotions include instances when students feel empathy towards characters they read about, or when they are disgusted or anxious or feel enjoyment or interest about certain topics. the last group of emotions described are social emotions relating to teachers and peers in the classroom. examples of such emotions are love, sympathy, compassion, admiration, contempt, envy, anger or social anxiety. of these four groups of emotions, the one that has been studied extensively is that of achievement emotions. in their control-value theory of achievement emotions, pekrun, frenzel, goetz and perry (2007) use a three-dimensional taxonomy of achievement emotions. the first dimension refers to valence (positive/pleasant vs. negative/unpleasant quality), the second to activation (activating vs. deactivating tendency), while the third describes whether the focus of achievement is the activity itself (intrinsic emotion) or the outcome (extrinsic emotion) (pekrun, götz, titz, & perry, 2002a). in this framework, enjoyment is a positive, activating and activity focused emotion with relaxation as its deactivating counterpart. anger and frustration are negative and activating emotions, and they are also activity focused, while boredom is their deactivating counterpart. outcome-focused emotions are more numerous: joy, hope, pride and gratitude are positive and activating, while contentment and relief are positive but deactivating. on the negative side we find anxiety, shame and anger as activating, whereas sadness, disappointment and hopelessness are deactivating emotions. outcome-focused emotions can be further divided into prospective anticipatory emotions (i.e., hope for success, anxiety over failure) and retrospective emotions (i.e., pride or shame experienced after receiving evaluation) (pekrun, 2006). in order to measure these achievement emotions in the classroom, pekrun, goetz and perry (2005) developed the academic emotions questionnaire (aeq), and this instrument has been used in several quantitative studies (e.g., frenzel, thrash, pekrun, & goetz, 2007; pekrun, elliot, & maier, 2009; pekrun, goetz, frenzel, barchfeld, & perry, 2011). the control-value theory of achievement emotions “stipulates that individuals experience specific achievement emotions when they feel in control of, or out of control of, achievement activities and outcomes that are subjectively important to them, implying that control appraisals and value appraisals are the proximal determinants of these emotions” (pekrun et al., 2007, p. 16). this means that, on the one hand, achievement emotions experienced by individuals are going to depend on the value, positive (success) or negative (failure), that they attribute to the activity. values can be intrinsic if they are related to the advanced learners’ foreign language-related emotions across the four skills 133 activity itself, or extrinsic if they are connected to the instrumental utility of the activities to produce the desired outcomes. on the other hand, achievement feelings also depend on the extent to which learners feel in control of the learning situation and their achievements, and the extent to which they are able to attribute success or failure to their own efforts or abilities. in studies linking academic achievement to achievement emotions, fairly consistent findings have emerged. positive activating emotions such as activityrelated enjoyment and outcome-related hope and pride have been found to be related positively to students’ academic achievement, while negative deactivating emotions such as hopelessness and boredom are linked to negative achievements (pekrun, götz, titz, & perry, 2002b). the effects of deactivating positive emotions, such as relaxation, and of negative activating emotions, such as anger, anxiety and shame are hypothesized to be more complex. for example, although pekrun et al. (2002b) found that anger, anxiety and shame are negatively correlated with achievement, in a diary study investigating individual students’ achievement emotions before and after their final exams, pekrun and hoffmann (as cited in pekrun et al., 2007) found both negative and positive correlations. recently, in the field of second and foreign language learning, there have also been some studies which attempted to offer a more comprehensive view of emotions and move away from anxiety as their exclusive focus. in a largescale questionnaire study involving 1746 participants, dewaele and macintyre (2014) found that while learning languages, learners experienced foreign language enjoyment more often than foreign language anxiety and argued that these two emotions should be treated not as endpoints of a single continuum but as two different dimensions. this means that enjoyment is more than simply the lack of anxiety and that these two emotions can even be experienced together. ross and stracke (2016) analyzed learners’ perceptions of pride in an interview study and found that, even within this single emotion, different dimensions can be identified which can also be related to the different learning contexts. instead of concentrating on just one or two emotions, macintyre and vincze (2017) attempted to link 10 positive and 9 negative distinct emotions to models of motivation (which included language anxiety as a motivational construct) on a sample of italian language learners studying german in a high-contact context. they found that the correlations between positive emotions and motivation-related variables are positive and strong, except for the correlations with anxiety (which not surprisingly are negative in sign). at the same time, correlations involving negative emotions are weaker and show a less consistent pattern, although they are mostly negatively correlated with motivation-related variables, with the exception of anxiety where the correlations are positive. their regression analyses, which attempted to predict motivation with the help of emotions, showed that motivation-related katalin piniel, ágnes albert 134 variables can be best predicted by a combination of positive and negative emotions, thereby drawing attention to the dynamic interplay of the two. they found that fredrickson’s (2013) positivity ratio, which instead of looking at positive or negative emotions alone examines if positive emotions are prevalent in language learners’ experiences, is a measure that correlates well with language learning motivation. another questionnaire study conducted by pishghadam, zabetipour and aminzadeh (2016) attempted to link the achievement emotions explored by the aeq to the four skills in an iranian context. although it is quite interesting that different language skills tend to be linked to different groups of emotions (e.g., listening is linked to all of the examined negative emotions while speaking seems to trigger mostly positive emotions), the closed format of the questionnaire raises the question whether these are indeed the only or even the most relevant emotions that students experience in connection with the four skills. since studies exploring the range of possible emotions that could be experienced in connection with language learning and language use are clearly missing, we attempted to fill this research gap with our study. pekrun (2014) acknowledged that there are other potentially important emotions influencing learning besides the achievement emotions he explored, so we felt the need to have an extended scope for our research and to investigate additional categories of academically-relevant emotions (pekrun, 2014). language learning is different in nature from learning other academic subjects, since classes do not necessarily have a set content as language is primarily the medium of communication (coyle, hood, & marsh, 2010; stryker & leaver, 1997) and language learning also involves aspects of culture and personal identity (dewaele, 2016; dörnyei, 2005; gardner & lambert, 1959) in ways other school subjects do not; therefore, there is a possibility to adjust the content of classes to learners’ interests. also, social factors play a more dominant role in language learning and language use than in other subjects (gardner & lambert, 1959), as the primary aim of language instruction is to enable students to communicate in the foreign language and interact in social situations. therefore, we set out to explore the full spectrum of emotions experienced by learners in and outside the classroom by asking them to describe their feelings in various language-related learning contexts. 4. the study 4.1. context of our study the context of our study was a prominent university in budapest, hungary, where one of the most populous majors is english studies. in the 2015/16 academic year, 348 students commenced their studies in the english ba program. during their advanced learners’ foreign language-related emotions across the four skills 135 three years of study, students are obliged to take language development classes, courses specifically aimed at developing their academic reading and writing skills, courses involving extensive listening to lectures, and extensive reading in preparation for content classes in literature, culture, and history. generally, we can say that the complete spectrum of english language skills is practiced at some point in the curriculum, with different skills being emphasized in different courses. since academic emotions tend to be examined in domain-specific contexts (goetz, frenzel, hall, & pekrun, 2008), it is quite possible that different language emotions will emerge in association with different skills. the students enrolled in english studies tend to have a foreign language proficiency level of around b2 level according to the common european framework of reference (council of europe, 2001). they generally also have had experience of learning a second foreign language in high school, as it is compulsory according to the hungarian national core curriculum (national curriculum, 2012). having gone through the system and having experienced both compulsory learning of languages as well as optional opportunities (choosing a language major) led us to believe that exploring the emotions related to language learning of this target group would help us gain insight into the role affect plays in the course of language learning. 4.2. research questions based on the above, the research questions guiding our study were the following: a. what kind of emotions do english majors experience in connection with their use of a foreign language and the four language skills? b. are there any differences in the types of emotions language learners tend to experience with regard to the four skills? c. are there any differences in the types of emotions language learners tend to experience with regard to their year of study at university? d. are there any differences in the types of emotions language learners tend to experience inand outside the foreign language classroom contexts? 4.3. method in order to investigate the research questions formulated above, we took a primarily qualitative approach in our study. we hoped that this type of design would yield rich, descriptive and insightful results. through purposive and convenience sampling, 166 english majors from a large hungarian university (31 male and 135 female students; 93 first-year, 17 second-year, and 53 third-year students – data for three participants was missing) were selected to take part in our study. the mean age of the participants was katalin piniel, ágnes albert 136 20.9. these students were purposefully selected because they were guaranteed to have ample foreign language learning experience in order to provide us with information concerning their emotions while learning languages. the sample was also conveniently chosen as they comprised learner groups where the teachers offered to assist us in our project. data was collected during different university seminars, where participants were asked to write a paragraph in their mother tongue (hungarian) describing their emotional experiences in connection with foreign languages and one of the four language skills. the instructions read as follows: “in a paragraph, please describe how you feel when speaking/writing/listening/reading in a foreign language in and outside the classroom.” altogether our final pool of data consisted of 43 texts on listening, 35 on speaking, 47 on reading, and 41 on writing. in order to analyze the narratives, we used the atlas.ti v. 7.5.17 software. we adopted a deductive qualitative content analysis approach (elo, kääriäinen, kanste, pölkki, utriainen, & kyngäs, 2014) with pekrun’s (2014) theoretical framework in mind. in our analysis we also opted for strauss and corbin’s (1990) approach to qualitative data analysis with three phases of analysis: open coding, axial coding and selective coding. first, through open coding (strauss & corbin, 1990), we compiled a coding scheme that consisted of 75 codes. these codes were emotion words (in english) adapted from pekrun’s (2014) list as well as english translations of emotion words appearing in the hungarian texts as participants used them. thus, some of the codes emerged from the texts themselves (see strauss & crobid, 1990). after analyzing the hungarian texts and reaching a point of saturation, we ended up with 1352 coded segments. the intercoder reliability coefficient of cohen’s kappa = .91 provided an indication of the conformability (elo et al., 2014) and trustworthiness of our data analysis. next, through axial coding (strauss & corbin, 1990), we looked at the context of the 75 codes related to emotions and tried to find links between them and group them into larger categories accordingly. finally, through selective coding, we looked at the main categories of emotions that seemed to account for most of the variation in our dataset (see strauss & corbin, 1990). specifically, we counted the frequencies with which the main types of emotions were mentioned across the four skills, across university years, and linked to inand outside classroom contexts. finally, we investigated these differences using non-parametric techniques with the help of the statistical package for the social sciences (spss) 16.0 for windows software. 4.4. results and discussion in presenting our findings, we will focus on the results of the axial and selective coding processes, namely, we will discuss the most salient categories of emotions advanced learners’ foreign language-related emotions across the four skills 137 and try to establish their link to contextual factors on an abstract level. for the sake of anonymity, the letters and numbers in brackets after the quotations depict the participants’ identification numbers. with regard to pekrun’s (2014) framework, a clear dividing line appeared between the positive and negative type of achievement, epistemic, topic and social emotions. participants mentioned positive achievement emotions concerning foreign language learning, such as pride, contentment, comfort, relaxation (cf. pekrun et al., 2007), generally positive feelings related to success, feeling the lack of anxiety, and the feeling of enjoyment linked to academic accomplishments. an example of such emotions is the following: “when i communicate with native speakers in writing, i feel proud that i am able to use this language” (p83). although not a primary emotion (see izard, 2007), based on our data, it made sense to include the feeling of freedom in all four groups of positive academic emotions (achievement, epistemic, topic, and social emotions), respectively, since participants mentioned it relatively frequently (11 times in total) in connection with a variety of language use situations. based on the above theorizations, the feeling of freedom can be viewed as an emotion schema (izard, 2007), which is developed through time by way of a dynamic interplay between emotion and cognition. it suggests a high level of control appraisal, meaning that individuals have a high sense of control over the activity they are engaged in, which in turn leads to the positive emotional experience of freedom. the following quotation from the data illustrates the feeling of freedom as a positive achievement emotion: “outside class, i like to listen to people speaking in a foreign language, or even to join in a conversation. i feel free, i’m not worried, if i don’t understand something, i just ask them to repeat what they said, or ask them to simplify it” (p166). alongside positive feelings, negative achievement emotions also emerged from the data. these included expressions of anger, disappointment, impatience, anxiety, and remorse. participants recounted such feelings as the following: “i might be a bit more impatient and nervous when reading in hungarian because i cannot proceed as quickly and smoothly” (p12). the second main category comprised epistemic emotions primarily linked to the cognitive aspects of foreign language learning. such positive emotions included feelings that showed that learning a language poses a cognitive challenge and instigates enjoyment; feelings related to self-efficacy, the belief of possessing the cognitive ability to complete language related tasks; feelings of excitement; happiness; freedom; and curiosity. excerpts such as the following were grouped under these categories: “a foreign language text always presents challenges” (p4). the negative counterparts of these emotions included general negative feelings, being frustrated, confused, tired, bored, depressed, and not self-efficacious with regard to the cognitive demands of learning a language. katalin piniel, ágnes albert 138 participants described this type of feeling as follows: “i feel uncertain even when i write very simple texts” (p50). the next large category of emotions is related to topic in the academic context. here we identified feelings of interest, freedom, liking, enjoyment and feeling energetic in connection with particular issues that language learners discuss, write about, listen to, or read about: “if i find the text interesting, i enjoy it” (p29), “i also like reading novels in foreign languages for pleasure” (p31). negative topic emotions included anxiety, feelings of dislike and disinterest related to the object of language use. feeling unenthusiastic about a topic also emerged as an issue categorized as a negative topic emotion: “i am usually less enthusiastic in class, but it also depends on the task we are given” (p99). the last group of academically relevant emotions in pekrun’s (2014) framework are social emotions. here again, based on our data, we distinguished between positive and negative emotions related to the social aspects of language learning. expressions of liking, enjoyment, freedom, the lack of anxiety, being brave in connection with socializing in the foreign language and having positive attitudes towards others were grouped under the umbrella term positive social emotions (e.g., “i communicate in english with my foreign friends, and it feels really good that we are able to understand each other even though neither of us is a native speaker” (p72)). in contrast, feeling scared, anxious, stressful, not brave, and expressing dislike along with possessing negative attitudes towards others with respect to the social aspect of language learning were identified as negative social emotions. examples here included the following: “in class, i am much more critical towards others, i pay more attention to their grammar mistakes” (p151); “i feel under stress to understand everything the teacher says, and i try to avoid embarrassment because of the level of my knowledge” (p160). upon first looking at the data from our sample, pekrun’s (2014) framework of academic emotions seems to provide an adequate theoretical background of emotions experienced in a university context. the most prominent emotions in all categories seem to be those related to enjoyment and liking along with anxiety (cf. dewaele & macintyre, 2014, 2016). this also means that enjoyment, anxiety, and liking appeared in more than one emotion category. this is in line with the multi-dimensionality described by dewaele and macintyre (2014), specifically with regard to these emotions. the authors explain that these emotions can be linked to both the private or the social context of an individual. in the present study, this is underpinned by the fact that participants mentioned these three emotions in all categories, including social academic emotions (using a foreign language in a social context or to communicate with a specific person); the more private topic emotions (liking a specific topic or not) and achievement emotions (notions related to their own successes and failures); advanced learners’ foreign language-related emotions across the four skills 139 and epistemic emotions (linked to the emotions evoked by the cognitive aspects of language learning). although pekrun’s (2014) framework proved to be fruitful for our analysis, accounts of certain emotions emerging from our data did not fit into its boundaries such as not feeling anything or feeling special. the lack of feeling was listed eight times (e.g., “when i read in english, it feels totally neutral, it does not feel special in any way” (p34)), which should be interpreted with caution, as it might simply be an artefact caused by the phrasing of the questions which explicitly enquired about students’ feeling and emotions. alternatively, it may be attributed to the disembodied nature of the second language, a common theme in emotion and multilingualism (cf. pavlenko, 2012). at the same time, in five instances, participants included in their accounts feeling special in connection with foreign language learning, which signals a difficulty in the precise labelling of their emotions although the value attached to the feeling clearly appears positive. an example from a language learner reads as follows: “i feel privileged that i have access to such a great universe” (p4). these feelings do not seem to appear in pekrun’s academic emotions framework, and their interpretation and possible inclusion requires further research. after categorizing the type of emotions language learners recounted in connection with foreign language learning, we looked at overarching categories and tried to establish abstract links between them and contextual characteristics. with the results of these analyses we sought answers to research questions b, c, d, as listed above. in other words, we examined the overall distribution of the main categories of emotions, their distribution across the four skill areas (see table 1), across years (see table 2), and in different contexts (in and outside the classroom) (see table 3). for our participants, overall the most frequently mentioned feelings were positive topic emotions (n = 94), followed very closely by positive achievement emotions (n = 93). more precisely, they appeared in connection with reading (n = 42) and listening (n = 33) in a foreign language (see table 1), respectively. generally speaking, among the receptive skills, reading is the one that can be practiced with the least amount of time pressure and where students have the largest space to choose topics they are interested in. while listening to foreign speech is still less time-bound than speaking and misunderstandings are also less obvious, being able to understand what the other person is saying seems to bring about positive emotions linked to success. the frequency of positive topic and achievement emotions linked to the receptive skills can be explained by the fact that our sample consisted of university students majoring in english, who tend to read a considerable amount of fiction and non-fiction in the foreign language and attend lectures held in english. however, it must be katalin piniel, ágnes albert 140 noted that our analysis was not restricted to english, but any foreign language the english major students chose to share their feelings about. thus, positive emotions linked to the receptive skills also point beyond the foreign language major and perhaps indicate that, generally, our participants have positive emotional experiences tied to the topics they have a chance to read about in a foreign language and linked to successfully understanding others’ speech in a foreign language. this finding contradicts the one in pishghadam et al. (2016), where listening was primarily associated with negative emotions. differences in the findings can be explained by differences in the sample, in the educational context, and also in the research methodology used. perhaps taking a processbased approach in future studies will also be helpful in clarifying the situation. to see whether differences in the frequency of the four emotions can be found across the skills, a kruskal-wallis non-parametric test was performed. we found a statistically significant difference in terms of social (χ2 = 41.003, p < .001) and topic emotions (χ2 = 15.039, p < .002) related to the four skills; more specifically, participants mentioned social emotions most often in the context of speaking skills and topic emotions in the context of reading skills. such differences echo the findings of studies on one particular emotion, language anxiety, which have shown that learners tend to experience different levels of anxiety tied to distinct foreign language skills (pae, 2013; xiao & wong, 2014). our results are straightforward in that they reflect the nature of these skills: speaking involves oral communication, which by definition is a social activity; hence the importance of social emotions. particularly, dewaele, witney, saito, and dewaele (2017) found enjoyment to be linked to the proportion of class-time spent on speaking. on the other hand, as our learners tended to focus more on the theme or topic of texts, topic emotions played a crucial role. table 1 the frequency of the different emotions across the four skills positive achievement emotions negative achievement emotions positive epistemic emotions negative epistemic emotions positive social emotions negative social emotions positive topic emotions negative topic emotions listening 33 (35.5%) 15 (30.5%) 23 (26%) 21 (32.5%) 14 (27.5%) 12 (34.5%) 25 (26.5%) 4 (20%) reading 20 (21.5%) 9 (18.5%) 26 (30%) 20 (30.5%) 0 (0%) 2 (5.5%) 42 (44.5%) 7 (35%) speaking 19 (20.5%) 10 (20.5%) 20 (22.5%) 10 (15.5%) 27 (53%) 16 (45.5%) 12 (13%) 5 (25%) writing 21 (22.5%) 15 (30.5%) 19 (21.5%) 14 (21.5%) 10 (19.5%) 5 (14.5%) 15 (16%) 4 (20%) total 93 (100%) 49 (100%) 88 (100%) 65 (100%) 51 (100%) 35 (100%) 94 (100%) 20 (100%) furthermore, given that emotions might change as skill and achievement progress, we compared the distribution of emotions across the years in the ba english studies program (see table 2). we decided to group together secondand the third-year students for these analyses because the distribution across advanced learners’ foreign language-related emotions across the four skills 141 the three years was not equal, and it made sense to separate freshmen from the students who were more advanced in their studies. using the mann-whitney test, which is non-parametric test, we investigated the differences between the two groups. overall, first-year students reported significantly more emotions (u = 2771, z = -1.99, p = .046) than secondand third-year students in connection with foreign language learning. the differences were found to be significant in terms of negative emotions (u = 2756.50, z = -2.137, p = .033), particularly in the case of negative achievement emotions (u = 2789.50, z = -2.60, p = .009). interestingly, upper-year students reported more feelings tied to failure or unsuccessful experiences, although overall they tended to report experiencing fewer emotions related to foreign language learning. these results can be explained by the notion that probably the main source of language learning experience stems from the university context for our sample. in the first year, students are eager to learn about the subject they have chosen to pursue a career in; they have entered a new level of education, a new institution where there is still plenty to explore; hence the frequent mention of positive achievement, epistemic, and topic emotions. however, in later years, students tend to focus on obtaining good grades for their courses and on getting their degrees; so, their emotions are mainly linked to achievement in connection with both success and failure. table 2 the frequency of the different emotions across the years of study year positive achievement emotions negative achievement emotions positive epistemic emotions negative epistemic emotions positive social emotions negative social emotions positive topic emotions negative topic emotions 1st 44 17 50 31 29 21 56 11 2nd-3rd 49 32 38 34 22 14 38 9 another issue we investigated concerned emotions experienced inside and outside the language classroom (see table 3). according to our data, the educational context seems to evoke relatively more negative emotions (especially in the form of anxiety), whereas outside the classroom, enjoyment, general liking of language-related activities, and freedom in using the language were most frequently mentioned. while there is abundant literature on foreign language anxiety in the language classroom (gkonou et al., 2017), relatively few studies have been published on the experiences of other emotions, albeit this situation is rapidly changing (e.g., galmiche, 2017; macintyre et al., 2016). based on our data, we can assume that outside the classroom, students have more control over the foreign language-related activities they are engaged in, their social aspects, the topic, and the challenge that some tasks present. as katalin piniel, ágnes albert 142 argued earlier, such positive emotional experiences can stem from such control appraisals (pekrun et al., 2007). this line of reasoning also parallels studies on self-regulation and autonomy where it has been shown that a greater sense of control leads to higher levels of language learning motivation (ushioda, 2011). likewise, positive emotions such as freedom also appear in the pyramid model of willingness to communicate (macintyre, clément, dörnyei, & noels,1998), where they play a role in interpersonal motivation and the language learners’ desire to communicate with a particular person. table 3 the distribution of emotions in and outside the foreign language classroom in class outside class anxiety 27 7 enjoyment 4 11 lack of anxiety 4 9 like 9 21 not like 7 0 self-efficacy 4 7 freedom 0 10 relaxed 2 5 comfort 1 4 5. conclusion in the present study, we set out to explore the type of emotions english majors experienced in connection with their use of a foreign language and the four language skills. we chose a primarily qualitative approach to explore the variety and frequency of learners’ feelings. in our data analysis, we embraced a deductive approach and interpreted the data within pekrun’s (2014) framework of academic emotions. according to the findings, language learners experience both positive and negative feelings linked to achievement, epistemic, topic and social emotions. overall, in line with previous studies that have focused on language learners’ affective states, the two most frequent emotions were enjoyment and language anxiety. emotions were linked to particular language skills, and we found that participants recounted significant differences in experiences of topic and social emotions. reading skills were mainly associated with topic emotions, whereas speaking skills were primarily related to social emotions. language learners’ feelings varied not only according to the skills involved but also depending on their year of study, with freshmen mentioning emotional accounts more frequently, while upper-year learners providing evidence of a higher frequency of negative achievement emotions. finally, our data suggest that the context of advanced learners’ foreign language-related emotions across the four skills 143 language use (i.e., inside or outside class) can also be characterized by particular emotional experiences. language learners tended to list more positive feelings in connection with outside classroom language learning situations. our findings also have pedagogical relevance in shedding light on emotions in academic contexts. it seems that emotions are not negligible when it comes to language learning. students experience a wide array of emotional states and teachers need to be aware of these. to maximize language learning experiences, it would be crucial for teachers to reduce negative emotions and encourage positive emotions in the classroom. also, teachers should recognize that the use of particular language skills will invoke different emotions even in the same learner. by promoting enjoyment, especially with topics learners like and feel positive about in the classroom, language learning experiences in the instructional setting could also be enhanced. our study also has limitations. although it was english language majors we investigated, they could recount emotional experiences concerning any foreign language they had learnt. it may have been worth making a distinction between such accounts of english as a foreign language and other languages. also, as the data comprised retrospective narratives, they may have differed from how the learners felt on the spot at the time these events they were recalling actually took place. last but not least, it must be noted that the data were collected in hungarian (l1 of the participants), while the language of data analysis and interpretation was english. thus, translation issues may have allowed room for misinterpretation in spite of the fact that two researchers coded the data instead of just one. in terms of further research, it may be worth investigating the roles of the type of languages being studied, the proficiency level and the language teaching methods that are used when investigating emotional experiences in the process of language learning. it may also be important to look at emotions as language learning events as they unfold to gain deeper insights into what language learners feel in such situations (see boudreau, macintyre, & dewaele, this special issue). katalin piniel, ágnes albert 144 references cassady, j. c., & johnson, r. e. 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(1998). test anxiety: the state of the art. new york, ny: springer science & business media. 697 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (3). 2018. 697-700 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.3.8 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review uncovering english-medium instruction: glocal issues in higher education authors: branka drljača margić, irena vodopija-krstanović publisher: peter lang, 2017 isbn: 9781787070578 pages: 142 though globalization has by now affected practically all aspects of life in the 21st century, it will take some time before we can fully understand its true nature. hence, any book looking into its effects is highly welcome. the book uncovering english-medium instruction: glocal issues in higher education by branka drljača margić and irena vodopija-krstanović, published in 2017 by peter lang, makes a valuable contribution to understanding some aspects of globalization processes as reflected through the role of english in higher education (he). the book focuses on the fast spreading phenomenon of english-medium instruction (emi) permeating he as one of the consequences of globalization. emi refers to using english to teach academic subjects in non-anglophone contexts (dearden, 2014). the nine chapters of the book are based on both theoretical insights and empirical data from previous studies and the research that the authors themselves carried out. the book aims, as stated by the authors, at a holistic as well as critical picture of emi. 698 chapter one discusses the aims of the book, offers an overview of emi worldwide, points to the connection of internationalization of he and emi, and introduces the chapters that follow. a special point is made regarding the term emi, which is used in the book only because it is highly widespread; the authors stress that languages of learning and teaching (lolt) would be more appropriate, as rightly pointed out by van der walt (2013). in chapter two the reasons for introducing emi as a way of internationalization of he are looked into. the reasons are considered from the perspectives of global trends and of more local contexts. overall, educational, economic as well as cultural gains are pinpointed. enhanced competitiveness, visibility and modernization are pointed out as key reasons among universities for introducing emi. interestingly, these are relevant not only at the international level but also local levels as he institutions are increasingly ranked by the same criteria in local and international contexts. international student mobility is turning he institutions into multicultural academic environments adding an important intercultural dimension as a special asset. this enables even those students who are not part of mobility schemes to experience “internationalization at home,” as mccambridge and saarinen (2015) are quoted in the book to say (p. 12). in this chapter, emi is considered from the point of view of sla as well. the concept of emi implies acquiring both the english language and content: extensive language input, increased interaction in english and ample opportunities to acquire the language incidentally in what can be considered authentic communication situations are all considered conducive to acquisition of english. the authors go on to describe possible benefits for emi teachers (e.g., professional development, international visibility, networking). as suggested in the remainder of the chapter, emi involves quite a few challenges too! one challenge is the equity issue which emerges because emi is still prevalent in the private sector. some fear that it may result in he becoming a commodity. an equal threat is that in many contexts emi has been implemented without enough preparation or sufficient concern for quality of education. a frequently mentioned problem is students’ competence in english which, if too limited, can interfere with academic attainment, prevent students from fully participating in classes and cause anxiety and low self-concept, which in turn may result in resistance to emi. challenges exist with teachers, too. as the authors stress at different points in the book, teachers’ competence in english, if not high enough, can interfere with the way of teaching (e.g., avoidance of learner-centered and collaborative approaches, less illustration of content, too much simplification), and can damage their professional self-concept and status. hiring problems for teachers who do not speak english emerge as well, turning english into the gatekeeper to academia. the status of other languages in academia is, consequently, perceived by some as seriously affected by emi and as becoming marginalized. the following six chapters shift to the local perspective of the global issue of emi. they discuss how internationalization of he through emi is implemented in 699 croatia, a context very similar to many contexts world over. the authors offer insights into the croatian context (chapter three), present the aims and methodology used in their investigations (chapter four), report on findings regarding the perception of the value and feasibility of emi in the croatian context based on reports of teachers and students who have not been involved in emi (chapter five) and those who have (chapter six), discuss all their findings with relevance to the local context (chapter seven) and in comparison to results from studies in other contexts (chapter eight). in the concluding chapter (chapter nine), implications of emi are reconsidered and recommendations for further research and actions are made. a particularly valuable feature of the study described in the book is its very interesting research design. using a mixed-methods approach, the authors collected quantitative data via questionnaires and combined them with qualitative data gathered by means of interviews and classroom observation. using classroom observation to obtain insights into what happens in real classrooms is a particularly notable characteristic of the study! also, information was gathered from emi students and teachers, from non-emi participants, from teachers and students of croatian-medium instruction as well as institution management. this allowed the authors to present and discuss the emi phenomenon from a very broad as well as multi-layered perspective. based on the findings, the authors conclude that success of emi depends on good communication between all stakeholders (institution management, english language teachers, content teachers, teacher trainers and students), and that both top-down and bottom-up policies need to be implemented. this is a strong conclusion about emi globally based on local findings, which makes this book truly glocal! although an interested reader, i could not help wishing reports on quantitative results were made more reader-friendly. their numerical and graphical representation could have made those parts of the text more dynamic. i would recommend the book to all applied linguists interested in new developments in language learning and teaching, to experienced and novice researchers interested in innovative research approaches in the field as well as to teachers (and not necessarily only those at the he level!) who want to understand and be in touch with new practices in their profession emerging as part of globalization processes. it is my hope that what they learn from this book they would then successfully relay to all emi stakeholders for the benefit of emi students. i am sure nothing would make the authors happier. reviewed by jelena mihaljević djigunović university of zagreb jdjigunovic@gmail.com 700 references dearden, j. (2014). english as a medium of instruction: a growing global phenomenon. london: british council. retrieved from https://www.britishco uncil.org/sites/default/files/e484_emi_-_cover_option_3_final_web.pdf mccambridge, l., & saarinen, t. (2015). “i know that the natives must suffer every now and then”: native/non-native indexing language ideologies in finnish higher education. in s. dimova, a. k. hultgren, & ch. jensen (eds.), english-medium instruction in european higher education (pp. 291-316). berlin, ma: walter de gruyter. van der walt, ch. (2013). multilingual higher education: beyond english-medium orientations. bristol: multilingual matters. 501 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (3). 2020. 501-522 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.3.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt task repetition and collaborative writing by efl children: beyond caf measures maría ángeles hidalgo universidad pública de navarra, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7131-1880 mangeles.hidalgo@unavarra.es amparo lázaro-ibarrola universidad pública de navarra, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3016-5901 amparo.lazaro@unavarra.es abstract research into the potential of collaborative writing is relatively new. similarly, task repetition (tr), which has been claimed to be a valuable tool for language learning, has been rarely explored in the context of writing. therefore, little is known about the potential of combining tr and collaborative writing, and even less if we focus on young learners (yls), who constitute a generally under-researched population. with these research gaps in mind, the present study examines the compositions of 10 pairs of learners of english as a foreign language (efl) (aged 12) who write the same text in response to the same picture prompt three times over a three-week period. our analysis includes the languagerelated episodes (lres) that learners generate while writing collaboratively and, also, a thorough analysis of the three drafts that students produce, including quantitative (complexity, accuracy and fluency (caf)) and holistic measures. results show that learners’ compositions improve with repetition when measured by holistic ratings although caf measures fail to grasp this improvement. as for the lres, a great amount was found, most of the episodes were focused on form, most were successfully resolved and their amount declined with tr. in light of these results we argue in favor of the inclusion of holistic measures when analyzing students’ productions and discuss the positive effects of collaborative writing in the context of tr with yls. keywords: young learners; task repetition; collaborative writing; holistic measures; caf maría ángeles hidalgo, amparo lázaro-ibarrola 502 1. introduction the use of pair and group work in language classrooms is anchored in firm pedagogical and theoretical bases (storch, 2011) and has been frequently investigated in the context of oral language (mackey & gass, 2006), whereas the study of collaborative writing is still relatively new (abrams & byrd, 2017; storch, 2011). likewise, task repetition (tr), which has been claimed to offer students great learning opportunities by allowing them to shift their focus from content to form (bygate & samuda, 2005), has been rarely explored in the context of writing (amiryousefi, 2016), where findings from research on oral data can hardly be applicable due to the important differences between the oral and written mode (gilabert, manchón, & vasylets, 2016; manchón, 2014; tavakoli, 2014). as tr and pair work have been explored independently, little is known about the potential of combining them, and even less about their potential in the case of writing tasks. finally, most of the existing literature has focused on adult learners, disregarding a population that is increasing all over the world: young language learners (collins & muñoz, 2016; copland, garton, & burns, 2014; enever, 2018; pinter, 2017). in order to shed some light into this research gap, this study examines the compositions of 10 pairs of 12 year-old learners of english who had to write the same narrative in response to a picture prompt three times over a three week period in a classroom context. our analysis includes the widely used measurement of the main components of linguistic performance (complexity, accuracy and fluency (caf)) (housen & kuiken, 2009; housen, kuiken, & vedder, 2012; michel, 2017), a holistic assessment of their writings (storch, 2005), and the analysis of the students’ deliberations during the writing process operationalized as language related episodes (lres) (swain & lapkin, 1998). our findings will help to better understand the potential of task repetition in the context of writing with young learners (yls). 2. literature review 2.1. collaborative writing collaborative writing has been defined as “the production of a text by two or more writers” (storch, 2016, p. 387). while writing together, the authors are expected to interact, combine their ideas, and co-author and co-own the text, as well as their responsibilities as writers (ede & lunsford, 1990; storch, 2013, 2018). ideally, in a text written collaboratively, the parts created by each of its authors cannot be identified. collaborative writing combines the benefits of oral interaction and writing tasks. during interaction, learners engage in meaningful task repetition and collaborative writing by efl children: beyond caf measures 503 use of the target language (tl), have opportunities to negotiate for meaning, and produce modified output. in addition, they receive peer support as well as immediate feedback, and are able to co-construct new meaning (loewen & sato, 2018; long, 1983; storch, 2013; swain, 2005). the benefits of writing are many. one of the advantages is the extra time learners have to pay attention to meaning and form, which is not as available during oral-only tasks (manchón, 2014; storch, 2016). given the lack of spontaneity and immediacy of writing, as well as the access writers have to their production, anxiety might also be lower than in oral communication (tavakoli, 2014). moreover, writing has been claimed to encourage the use of language structures that are not normally employed orally (williams, 2012). finally, the written modality demands higher levels of accuracy, as errors tend to be less tolerated (schoonen, snellings, stevenson, & van gelderen, 2009). studies that have compared writing tasks carried out in pairs with tasks completed individually have reported gains in accuracy regarding target words and structures when learners collaborate (nassaji & tian, 2010; storch, 2007; teng, 2020). in addition, learners writing collaboratively have been reported to produce shorter but better texts in terms of grammatical accuracy, complexity and task fulfilment (storch, 2005). learners writing collaboratively have also been found to initiate and solve more lres than they do when performing oralonly tasks (adams & ross-feldman, 2008; garcía mayo & azkarai, 2016). also, when asked, learners have expressed positive views towards writing in collaboration with their peers (storch, 2005). however, to date, these findings are based on research into adult collaborative writing. little is known about children writing collaboratively and whether the claims summarized above hold for this specific learner group (coyle & roca de larios, 2014). 2.2. task repetition the repetition of communicative situations occurs in everyday life. we often need to perform the same tasks and chores more than once in our life. we have to go to the shops, to the bank, or just interact with our neighbors in the lift. tr constitutes, therefore, a common human activity. bygate (2018) recently defined the construct of tr as “the repetition of a given configuration of purposes, and a set of content information” (p. 2). this definition underlines the idea that nothing can be exactly repeated and that, consequently, changes may happen from one performance to the next. these constitute, in fact, the key elements of tr: how learners’ performances vary from one iteration to another, and how these changes relate to language acquisition (bygate, 2018). maría ángeles hidalgo, amparo lázaro-ibarrola 504 tr influences the way learners perform a task, and the language they use to deal with it. tr has been found to help learners to produce improved output (bygate, 1996, 2001; lambert, kormos, & minn, 2017; sample & michel, 2014). by repeating a task, learners’ attention is diverted from conceptualizing the meaning they want to convey during the first iteration, to the formulation of their message in subsequent encounters with the task (bui, ahmadian, & hunter, 2018; bygate, 1996). most research has addressed the effect of tr on adult learners’ oral performance, and scarce attention has been paid to the potential of tr for yls (pinter, 2006, 2007, 2011). in any case, research to date both on adult and child populations concurs that gains have always been found with tr although there are differences regarding the aspects that show greater improvements. in general, fluency gains have been reported, whereas the evidence regarding complexity and accuracy is more variable (ahmadian & tavakoli, 2011; bagheri, rahimi, & riasati, 2012; bret blasco, 2014; bygate, 2001; bygate & samuda, 2005; garcía mayo, imaz agirre, & azkarai, 2017; hidalgo, 2018; hu, 2018; lynch & maclean, 2000; pinter, 2006, 2007, 2011; sample & michel, 2014). the fact that findings regarding some aspects are inconclusive (bui et al., 2018; bygate, 2018) may be partly due to the great diversity of variables analyzed (context, age, level, tasks, and time span between repetitions) (lázaro-ibarrola & hidalgo, 2017). it is also important to make a distinction between same tr, the most widely explored type, in which learners repeat the exact same task, and task-type repetition (procedural repetition), in which students repeat the same task type but with different content (kim, 2013; kim & tracy-ventura, 2013; payant & reagan, 2018). with oral data from junior high school korean students, kim (2013), and kim and tracy-ventura (2013) compared these two types of repetition and found that learners’ interest and focus on form (measured by their use of lres) decreased when repeating the same task in comparison to learners who repeated different versions of the same task type. however, they do not recommend any method over the other, since no significant differences were found between the groups. payant and reagan’s (2018) study also showed that lres decreased with exact tr and that learners focused mainly on the meaning of the message they want to convey, producing more meaning-focused lres. on the other hand, these authors suggest that exact tr had greater benefits as regards the production of lres. finally, they reported that most lres were correctly solved. despite the body of work addressing tr in relation to different aspects of language performance, only a few studies have analyzed the effect of tr on writing (amiryousefi, 2016; manchón, 2014; nitta & baba, 2014). one of the few studies addressing tr and written performance is amiryousefi’s (2016). this author analyzed the effects of exact tr and procedural tr on low-proficiency efl task repetition and collaborative writing by efl children: beyond caf measures 505 learners’ (mean age 23.56) computer-mediated individual written production. his results provided positive evidence of the benefits of both tr types for writing, although some differences were found. the compositions by the exact tr group improved significantly in terms of fluency (measured as numbers of words, clauses and t-units) and in one of his accuracy measures (the percentage of error-free clauses), whereas the procedural tr group only improved in two of the fluency measures (namely number of words and clauses per text). nitta and baba (2014) explored the effect of these two types of tr on writing over time. in their longitudinal study, they found that procedural tr had a marked effect on lexical and grammatical aspects, whereas the influence of exact tr was limited. nevertheless, they suggest that the benefits of tr may be more noticeable in the long term. in a very similar context to that of our study, hidalgo and garcía mayo (2019) examined the effect of tr on the production of lres by yls while performing a collaborative writing task. contrary to most research to date, their participants initiated more form-focused than meaning-focused lres. on the other hand, they also reported that most lres were correctly solved and that lres decreased significantly with exact tr. 3. the study 3.1. research questions the present study analyzes the effects of exact tr on the collaborative writing of 10 pairs of efl learners. our first aim is to find out if learners are able to generate better texts (measured quantitatively and holistically) with tr. also, we want to understand how tr affects the lres that learners generate while writing, that is, whether it affects the amount, the type or their ability to successfully resolve them. therefore, our research questions are the following: 1. how do learners’ drafts change (quantitatively and qualitatively) with tr? 2. how does tr affect the number, nature and resolution of learners’ lres? on the basis of the literature review, our learners’ drafts will be expected to improve with repetition, however, it is not clear what specific components might improve more. on the other hand, lres will be expected to decrease with the repetitions, and will probably be mainly form-focused and correctly solved (hidalgo & garcía mayo, 2019). maría ángeles hidalgo, amparo lázaro-ibarrola 506 3.2. participants and setting the participants in the present study were 20 efl learners (mean age 11.39) who attended a content and language integrated learning (clil) program at a state school in the north of spain. at the moment of data collection their command of the tl was described as an a2 level of the common european framework of references for languages (cefr), as attested by the cambridge key english test (ket) and by school-internal tests. in the school, the learners followed a clil program and their exposure to the tl was approximately 14 hours per week. english language as such was allotted five sessions per week, and the rest of hours of exposure included other subject matters taught through english, such as math, science, art and physical education. this clil program was mandatory for all pupils. this eliminates the risk that only the most motivated learners, or those with a higher-than-average command of the tl, would participate in the study. 3.3. procedure the participants had to work in pairs to write a narrative in response to a picture prompt three times over a three-week period in a classroom context. the pairs were established by the researchers and learners’ own teacher, taking into account their personal relationship (to avoid conflict) and, at the same time, trying to make pairs of very similar levels of proficiency. the prompt consisted of a sixpicture comic strip (cambridge english, 2014, p. 3). the dyads sat together and were given two minutes to look at the pictures and speak about them. after the two minutes, they were asked to collaborate to compose the story in writing, with a pen, on a piece of paper. each dyad had to produce a single composition at each data collection time. the time limit set for students to perform the task was fifteen minutes. the dyads remained the same throughout the experiment. the participants’ deliberations were video and audio recorded and their oral production (30 transcripts, 8 hours approximately) was transcribed into the chat (codes for the human analysis of transcripts) format. their attention to form, operationalized as lres (swain & lapkin, 1998), was coded using the clan (computerized language analysis) tools (macwhinney, 2000). 3.4. coding and analysis our analysis of the learners’ written compositions consisted of both quantitative and holistic measures. in both cases we compared the production at time 1 (henceforth t1) versus the production at time 2 (t2) and the production at t1 and t2 vs. the production at time 3 (t3). task repetition and collaborative writing by efl children: beyond caf measures 507 l2 performance has been defined as multicomponential in nature and its principal components have been successfully captured in the notions of complexity, fluency and accuracy (caf) (housen & kuiken, 2009; housen et al., 2012; michel, 2017). although there is some controversy regarding how these constructs are operationalized (particularly with fluency and complexity), the three components still are the most reliable tool to measure proficiency (housen et al., 2012). our choice of the specific caf measures was based on the main measurements used in some previous studies that seemed to be applicable to our data. thus, complexity was measured in terms of the proportion of dependent clauses and clauses to t-units (foster, tonkyn, & wigglesworth, 2000). t-units are defined as “one main clause plus whatever subordinate clauses happen to be attached to or embedded within it” (hunt, 1966, p. 735). also, our measurement of complexity included lexical diversity, which was measured in terms of the type/token ratio (ttr), that is, the number of different words in a text divided by the total number of words (malvern, richards, chipere, & durán, 2004). for the analysis of accuracy, the least controversial of the three constructs, the percentage of the error-free clauses over the total number of clauses and the number of errors per total number of words were considered (storch, 2005; storch & wigglesworth, 2007; wigglesworth & storch, 2009). finally, fluency was measured in terms of the number of words, clauses and t-units per text (wolfe-quintero, inagaki, & kim, 1998). in addition to this, we also took into account the functional dimension of our students’ production by carrying out a holistic assessment of their writings (de jong, steinel, florijn, schoonen, & hulstijn, 2012; kuiken, vedder, & gilabert, 2010; pallotti, 2009). while there is no agreement to date as to how functional adequacy is to be defined or assessed (iwashita, brown, mcnamara, & o’hagan, 2008), its inclusion is vital in order to obtain a more comprehensive assessment of students’ production. in this paper, functional adequacy is measured using storch’s (2005) 5-scale global evaluation scheme, which we adapted to the content of the task we employed. this evaluation considered the content and structure of the text, as well as the degree of task fulfillment (the appendix). finally, our study also analyzed the lres generated in the students’ oral interactions during the process of writing their texts. following previous research in efl settings (garcía mayo & azkarai, 2016; hidalgo & garcía mayo, 2019; lópez-serrano, roca de larios, & manchón, 2019), the lres were classified according to their linguistic focus, whether they were meaning-focused or form-focused (deliberation over morpho-syntactic aspects, spelling and pronunciation), and to their outcome (resolved or not resolved). finally, resolved lres were further classified as target-like, or non-target-like. the codification of lres is illustrated with examples (examples 1, 2, 3 and 4) from our own dataset. maría ángeles hidalgo, amparo lázaro-ibarrola 508 (1) form-focused and target-like resolution. student 1: i am going to tell you what i do this afternoon. student 2: but we can change instead of saying i am going to tell you what i do… student 1: i think that is good no? student 2: . . . what i did. student 1: what i did this afternoon sorry. in example 1, the learners focus on the tense of the verb they want to use. student 1 starts narrating the story and student 2 interrupts her to suggest that they should use a different tense, namely, the past tense. student 1 agrees with her partner and they settle on the past tense. thus, this lre has been coded as form-focused with a target-like resolution. (2) meaning-focused, form-focused, and target-like resolution. student 1: they saw the tv very content. student 2: very student 1: very content. student 2: no . . . he, he, very happy with two . . . with double p. in example 2, student 2 is not satisfied with the term employed by student 1 and proposes a more target-like word (happy). additionally, she focuses on the spelling of the word (with double p). the lres in this example have been coded as one meaning-focused and one form-focused lre, both target-like resolved. (3) form-focused and non-target-like resolution. student 1: the girl . . . put. student 2: the flower. student 1: puted no? en pasado [past tense]. student 2: ok. student 1: because once upon a time there was a boy and a girl. student 2: yes in past. in past. student 1: puted. the girl puted. example 3 represents an instance in which the learners were not able to successfully solve a form-focused lre. student 2 seems to think the verb to put has a regular past form, so he adds the -ed ending. he provides evidence for his decision by going back to the beginning of their composition and emphasizing the past tenses they had used. his partner agrees, and they use a wrong form (puted*) in their text. this lre has been coded as form-focused with a non-target-like resolution. task repetition and collaborative writing by efl children: beyond caf measures 509 (4) form-focused and not resolved. student 1: my sister at . . . student 2: at his painting and also in his . . . student 1: . . . at the painting. student 2: pero cómo se dice sin querer? [but how do you say “unintentionally”?] student 1: but . . . but she . . . put . . . pero podemos decir de otra forma [but we can say it some other way] . . . but she put. example 4 represents an occasion in which the participants do not solve a meaning-focused lre. apparently, none of the learners is able to provide the term they want to use (unintentionally), and they decide to write something different. 3.5. inter-rater reliability the participants’ written production was coded by one of the authors of this paper. an independent research assistant also analyzed the production of 5 pairs at the three testing times (50% of the data). both raters held several meetings prior to data coding to agree on their understanding of the measures of analysis and also after their coding in order to solve the few discrepancies on a case-bycase basis. inter-rater reliability was checked for all measures and the differences between the two raters were very small. total agreement was reached by the two researchers for the codification of the lres. regarding caf, total agreement was found for complexity and fluency while the greatest number of discrepancies was found in the case of accuracy (93.5% agreement). the holistic ratings for the three compositions reached a global agreement of 92%. 3.6. statistical analysis as for the statistical analysis, dependent samples t-tests were used for data that presented a normal distribution and wilcoxon signed-rank tests were used for the data that were not normally distributed. the significance level was set at α = .05. 4. results the results obtained from the analyses of caf reveal that tr does not seem to have a great influence on any of these three dimensions in the compositions written by the young participants in the present study. table 1 shows the results for our complexity measures. maría ángeles hidalgo, amparo lázaro-ibarrola 510 table 1 complexity measures t1 t2 t3 t1 vs. t2 t2 vs. t3 t1 vs. t3 t df p t df p t df p clauses to t-units 3.08 2.58 2.62 -1.96 9 .08 .18 9 .85 1.36 9 .2 dependent clauses 64.07 60.25 60.05 -1 9 .33 -.06 9 .946 .91 9 .384 lexical diversity 51.96 54.18 52.78 .95 9 .364 -.53 9 .603 -.32 9 .756 as illustrated in table 1, both the proportion of clauses to t-units and the percentage of dependent clauses appear to follow a decreasing tendency. lexical diversity, on the other hand, seems to increase in the second repetition and decrease again in the third one. nevertheless, the differences across tasks did not reach statistical significance for any of the different complexity measures. table 2 features the results from the analysis of the accuracy measures. table 2 accuracy measures t1 t2 t3 t1 vs. t2 t2 vs. t3 t1 vs. t3 t df p t df p t df p error-free clauses over total number of clauses .39 .44 .40 1.11 9 .293 -.68 9 .511 .16 9 .876 errors per total number of words .12 .11 .12 -.75 9 .469 1.37 9 .201 .17 9 .865 as table 2 shows, there seems to be a slight increase in the percentage of error-free clauses from the first to the second and third compositions, which might hint at an improvement in terms of accuracy. however, as in the case of complexity, there are no statistically significant changes. table 3 fluency measures t1 t2 t3 t1 vs. t2 t2 vs. t3 t1 vs. t3 t df p t df p t df p number of words per text 113.4 112.4 115.5 -.14 9 .886 .48 9 .638 -.33 9 .744 clauses per text 16.1 16.9 16.3 .84 9 .423 -.55 9 .591 -.14 9 .890 t-units per text 5.4 6.8 6.6 3.28 9 .010* -.3 9 .770 -1.65 9 .133 as for fluency, table 3 shows the results. the mean number of words, clauses and t-units per composition show a trend to increase with tr. nevertheless, only the difference in the proportion of t-units between t1 and t2 is significantly different. all the other aspects did not show statistically significant differences. the holistic analysis, on the other hand, revealed more encouraging results, as can be seen in table 4. as can be seen, the mean rate obtained in the three drafts improves with tr. the scores of all participants ranged from 2 to task repetition and collaborative writing by efl children: beyond caf measures 511 4.5 and all dyads’ last composition was the best rated. a statistical analysis shows that the improvement from task to task of the global evaluation of the texts was statistically significant (t1 vs. t2: z = -2.56, p = .010; t2 vs. t3: z = 2.07, p = .038; t1 vs. t3: z = -2.97, p = .003). table 4 holistic ratings holistic rating composition t1 t2 t3 average rating 3 3.65 4 sd .62 .7 .57 finally, the analysis of the lres identified in the pair dialogues shows that interaction related to language was recurrent in all dyads’ oral production while writing their texts. table 5 shows the amount of lres produced by the ten pairs in each composition. we can see that the discussions of language aspects, operationalized as lres, seems to decrease with each tr. in fact, a statistical analysis shows that this difference is statistically significant when comparing the first composition to the last one (t1 vs. t3: z = -2.60, p = .009). table 5 lres produced by the ten pairs next, lres were classified as either meaningor form-focused. table 6 summarizes the distribution of the lres in terms of the total turns for each lre type. table 6 lre types table 6 clearly shows that form-focused lres made up the greatest proportion of the total lres at the three data collection times although there was also a large number of meaning-focused lres. the difference between the frequency of these two types was statistically significant in the three tasks (t1: z = 2.20, p = .028; t2: z = -2.24, p = .025; t3: z = -2.49, p = .012). as for the effect of tr on the nature of the lres, the frequency of the percentage of use of meaningfocused lres decreases significantly from the first task performance to the last lres t1 t2 t3 total 125 95 75 mean 12.5 9.5 7.5 sd 4.03 4.99 5.17 t1 t2 t3 focus meaning form meaning form meaning form total 41 84 25 70 15 60 percentage 32.8 67.2 26.32 73.68 20 80 maría ángeles hidalgo, amparo lázaro-ibarrola 512 (t1 vs. t3: z = -2.40, p = .016). on the other hand, the increase in the amount of the percentage of form-focused lres at t3 is not statistically significant (t1 vs. t3: z = -1.68, p = .091). table 7 resolution of lres t1 t2 t3 resolved not resolved resolved not resolved resolved not resolved target non-target 6 target non-target 10 target non-target 6total 97 21 67 17 51 18 percentage 77.6% 16.8% 4.8% 70.5% 17.9% 10.5% 68% 24% 7.9% finally, we addressed the impact of tr on the outcome of the lres. the results are presented in table 7. the most relevant finding is that most lres were target-like resolved. on the other hand, the percentage of the correctly solved lres appears to follow a decreasing trend, however, this decrease did not reach statistical significance (t1 vs. t2: z = -1.12, p = .26; t2 vs. t3: z = -0.35, p = .72; t1 vs. t3: z = -1.36, p = .17). 5. discussion the present study has examined the effect of tr on the collaboratively written texts of ten pairs of young efl learners. more specifically, the two students in each pair worked together while writing the exact same composition three times over a three-week period. our analysis included the quantitative and holistic analysis of these three compositions as well as the analysis of the quantity, type and resolution of the lres generated by the learners while writing. our first research question addressed the effect of tr on these yls’ written compositions in terms of caf and holistic ratings. regarding caf measures, our results reveal mainly non-significant differences, with only an increase in lexical diversity and in the proportion of t-units at t2. however, the raw numbers seem to suggest a tendency towards a greater number of error-free units, greater lexical diversity and greater fluency in either the second or the third composition. as storch (2005) suggests, the lack of statistical significance may have to do with the small sample size analyzed in the present study (10 dyads, 20 learners), and the relatively short texts these yls wrote (113.4 words on average). on the other hand, the holistic ratings help us to complete these results. each time the learners performed the task the mean score improved significantly. this positive finding is in line with the trends hinted at in the analyses of the caf measures, which, even though when examined separately did not reach statistical significance, seem to be strong enough to give a better global impression. task repetition and collaborative writing by efl children: beyond caf measures 513 thus, our findings support previous research from the oral domain addressing yls that report better overall performance across tr (pinter, 2007; sample & michel, 2014) and also suggest that caf measures are not always able to fully grasp the improvements that students make in their writings. our second research question focused on the impact of tr on the quantity, nature and outcome of the lres yls initiate while composing a text collaboratively. in our students’ production, the overall number of lres has decreased significantly over time. these learners have worked three times with the exact same content and task procedure, and by the last task performance they are so familiar with both that they may not need to resort to metalinguistic discussions so much. also, by the third tr, yls may have already solved most of their doubts and language problems from the first iterations, are able to carry this knowledge to the next performance (hidalgo & garcía mayo, 2019; payant & reagan, 2018) and, in line with sample and michel’s (2014) study with oral data, might also be more able to focus their attention on all three caf dimensions simultaneously and, therefore, to improve their drafts. in addition to the above, most of the lres identified in our data were correctly solved at the three data collection times, also mirroring previous findings (garcía mayo & azkarai, 2016; hidalgo & garcía mayo, 2019; payant & reagan, 2018). this evidence underlines the benefits of collaborative writing tasks, which offer learners the opportunity to pool their knowledge together and solve language problems correctly. however, as opposed to most previous research, yet concurring with hidalgo and garcía mayo (2019), the majority of the lres produced by the yls in the present study were categorized as form-focused. this seemingly contradictory finding may be related to different factors. first, most previous research studies have addressed adult learners whereas, like hidalgo and garcía mayo (2019), we have worked with primary school learners. besides, most studies employed oral tasks, whereas we have examined learners’ oral interactions while producing a written text. finally, different categorizations have been employed, which, for instance, consider pronunciationand spelling-related lres as lexical-based (payant & reagan, 2018). in the current study, on the other hand, we have followed garcía mayo and azkarai (2016), who include the discussion of these aspects in the formfocused category. our findings regarding the nature of the lres are more in line with the evidence reported by these authors, who also found that their participants initiated significantly more form-focused lres when carrying out a written task. 6. conclusion this study has provided some evidence in favor of the use of collaborative writing and tr with yls. the repetition of the same composition three times has maría ángeles hidalgo, amparo lázaro-ibarrola 514 helped learners to generate better compositions and to discuss and successfully resolve a great number of lres, mainly regarding formal aspects, but also with an important number of episodes focused on meaning. our results also highlight the importance of including functional adequacy among the analytic measures of caf (housen et al., 2012). as we reported, caf measures seemed to show trends of improvement but these did not reach statistical significance. on the contrary, the global assessment revealed that the compositions did, in fact, statistically improve in terms of content, structure and task fulfilment. therefore, we advocate for the combination of quantitative and holistic measures to obtain a more thorough analysis of students’ productions. from a pedagogical perspective, our study can also offer important implications for teachers of young language learners. even though the value of pair and group work is well recognized in second language acquisition research, and widespread in education (storch, 2011), its use in writing lessons is still quite limited (storch, 2005). with our study we have shed more light on the benefits of peer collaboration during the writing process. thanks to the lres the participants initiate, and correctly solve, they are able to successfully complete the tasks. as for the value of tr, our results illustrate how subsequent task performances of the same task lead to improved versions of the original manuscripts. certainly, there are some limitations to our research that need to be acknowledged and that in turn open up lines for further research. studies with a larger sample size and that require the production of longer compositions would be necessary. in addition, research that includes more detailed analysis of the pair dialogues examining other processes learners engage in while carrying out the tasks would also help us to better understand the nature of peer-peer collaboration (lópez-serrano et al., 2019). following wigglesworth and storch (2009), these processes would include planning, composition, and revision, as well as the focus of these processes (e.g., task management, generation of ideas, text structure). another interesting line of research would be the comparison of collaboratively written texts and oral narratives also produced collaboratively. despite the limitations to this study, we can conclude that collaborative writing and same tr seem to be beneficial for yls. writing together has provided them with opportunities to use the tl in a meaningful context and to share their knowledge on language use and this, combined with the repetition of the same draft, has enabled learners to produce a better final text. finally, we would like to highlight once more the importance of the inclusion of holistic analyses of students’ productions since, as we have seen, they reveal information that otherwise might remain unnoticed. task repetition and collaborative writing by efl children: beyond caf measures 515 acknowledgements this work was supported by grants ffi2016-74950-p (spanish ministry of economy and competitiveness, national research agency and european regional development fundaei/feder/eu) and it904-16 (basque government). we would also like to thank the schools, the teachers and children for their willingness and generosity to participate in this project. maría ángeles hidalgo, amparo 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(1998). second language development in writing: measures of fluency accuracy and complexity. honolulu, hi: university of hawaii at manoa. maría ángeles hidalgo, amparo lázaro-ibarrola 522 appendix holistic rating scale guidelines to global evaluation of writing adapted from storch (2005). the writing is assessed on a score out of 5. this score evaluates the writing mainly in terms of structure and task fulfilment. in order to fulfil the task, the writing needs to include the description of the main elements that appear on the pictures and the narration of what happens should also be clear. 5. this is a very well written text. it is well structured. it contains a clear and complete description of the pictures and the narration of the story is logical. ideas are clearly organized and good use is made of linking words/phrases. 4. this is a good text. the text has a clear overall structure. all pictures are described and the narration of the story is easy to follow most of the time. ideas are generally well organized and linking words/phrases are generally used appropriately. 3. this is a satisfactory text. it has an overall structure, but the description of some pictures may be incomplete and the narration of the story hard to follow. linking words/phrases may be missing or used inappropriately. 2. this is an adequate text. the text is difficult to follow because the description is very incomplete and the narration is not well organized. there is a general lack of linking words/phrases. there might be repetitions. 1. this is a poorly written text. it is poorly organized and difficult to follow. description and narration are poor or absent. 11 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (1). 11-12 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial the first 2013 issue of studies in second language learning and teaching brings together six contributions from scholars from different parts the world, five of which constitute reports of original research studies. as many as four of the papers are devoted to the role of affective factors in the process of learning and using second and foreign languages, which speaks to the considerable emphasis that is currently placed on the mediating effect of the affective domain. first, annie morris, marc lafontaine, françois pichette, and linda de serres investigate the relationship between attitudes, motivation, amotivation, parental involvement, and parental disinterest and korean students’ competence in l2 english, offering evidence that parents’ roles have only a limited impact on children’s language learning, even though links with some affective variables can be detected. in the next contribution, jean-marc dewaele and tsui shan ip present the findings of a study which is among the first to provide insights into the relationship between foreign language classroom anxiety, second language tolerance of ambiguity, and self-rated proficiency, the participants being learners of english in hong kong, and report that the three factors are closely related, accounting for half of the variance in each other. reza barzegar and sajjad aref sadr examine the impact of instruction aimed at the development of iranian learners’ emotional intelligence on motivation and although the findings do not demonstrate a positive effect of awareness-raising of this kind overall, it is beneficial in the case of the instrumentality prevention aspect of l2 motivation. in the last paper dealing with affective variables, zainab abolfazli khonbi and karim sadeghi report the results of a study which taps iranian learners’ attitudes towards self-, peerand teacher-assessment with which they are provided for the duration of one semester, showing that all these assessment types met with the approval of the participants, with the attitudes towards peer-assessment being the most positive. the final two contributions deal with the analysis of learner language and 12 the evaluation of instructional practices employed in the foreign language classroom. accordingly, colleen a. neary-sundquist examines the use of cohesive devices in a corpus of transcribed oral data of learners representing different levels and finds that while the use of conjunctions increases steadily together with growing proficiency, an increase in the application of pragmatic markers becomes observable only at the highest levels. in the only paper that is not empirical in nature, elisabetta pavan makes a strong case for the use of translation as a tool that contributes to the growth of competence in a foreign language and a mother tongue as well as prodding the development of intercultural awareness, taking as an example a course that she taught to italian undergraduate students. i am confident that, thanks to the topics covered, methodological rigor and sound implications for classroom instruction, all of these papers will provide food for thought for researchers looking for new lines of inquiry as well as teachers willing to enhance their everyday practices. miros aw pawlak adam mickiewicz university, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl 491 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (4). 2021. 491-515 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.4.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt second language listening comprehension: the role of anxiety and enjoyment in listening metacognitive awareness lanxi wang saint mary’s university, halifax, canada https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6951-6177 lanxi.wang@smu.ca peter d. macintyre cape breton university, sydney, canada https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1085-6692 peter_macintyre@cbu.ca abstract emotion in second language acquisition (sla) has recently received greater attention because it is largely implicated in daily conversations, which may affect second or foreign language (l2) use including listening comprehension. most research into emotion and l2 listening comprehension is focused exclusively on anxiety, with an attempt to reduce its negative effects on individuals’ listening performance. with the arrival of positive psychology in sla, researchers began to take a holistic view of a wider range of emotions including enjoyment that language learners experience during their l2 communication. the current study explored the relationships among listening anxiety, enjoyment, listening comprehension performance, and listening metacognitive awareness among a group of 410 international students in a canadian university. correlational analyses showed that listening anxiety was negatively correlated with enjoyment. however, these two variables shared only 18% of their variance, indicating that listening anxiety and enjoyment are related but independent emotions. this study suggests that anxiety and enjoyment in l2 listening are not the opposite ends of the same emotional continuum, but lanxi wang, peter d. macintyre 492 each serves a different purpose. l2 learners should work to find intriguing and enjoyable experiences in language learning, rather than focusing merely on reducing anxiety. keywords: second language listening comprehension; listening anxiety; listening enjoyment; listening metacognitive awareness 1. introduction listening is a skill crucial for second or foreign language (l2) learning and communication. oral communication is a two-way process which integrates speaking and listening; however, many researchers agree that l2 listening has been neglected relative to speaking which is more visible to an outside observer (oxford, 2019; vandergrift, 2003; zeng & goh, 2018). indeed, l2 listening comprehension is an elusive and complex process to research due to the dynamic interplay of various factors such as emotion, metacognitive awareness, and language proficiency (long, 1990; oxford, 2019). greater metacognitive awareness of listening, that is, the awareness of the factors involved in one’s own listening, has been found to boost listening performance and to have positive influences on language learners’ listening development (bozorgian, 2014; goh & hu, 2014; yang, 2009). in recent years, emotion has been emerging as a relevant influence on many facets of l2 learning and communication, but its potential impact has long been under-valued, and its effect on various language-related processes has been under-appreciated (prior, 2019). adding subtlety and complexity to the role of emotion, positive psychology differentiates the roles of positive and negative emotions in the language learning process (macintyre & gregersen, 2012), roles that can change over time (boudreau et al., 2018). although there have been some studies of anxiety as a skill-specific negative emotion that affects listening comprehension (elkhafaifi, 2005; zhang, 2013), no study to date has looked at the potential effect of positive emotions such as enjoyment on l2 listening. the present study will explore the relationships of two important emotions, anxiety and enjoyment, with metacognitive awareness in listening comprehension. 2. literature review 2.1. metacognitive awareness in listening comprehension metacognitive awareness of listening refers to learners’ understanding and attentiveness to the processes involved in l2 listening (vandergrift et al., 2006). it second language listening comprehension: the role of anxiety and enjoyment in listening. . . 493 is defined as individuals’ knowledge and control of their own cognitive processes, encompassing the dimensions of knowing and doing (goh & hu, 2014). it has been suggested that students’ difficulties in l2 learning and listening may be partly compensated for by increasing metacognitive awareness because reflecting on one’s information processing allows listeners to listen in a more effective way (goh & hu, 2014; rubin, 1994). qualitative data showed that less skilled listeners were likely to fixate on words that they had predicted before a listening activity (graham et al., 2008), spending a lot of energy on decoding and translating without giving much time to monitor or evaluate their understanding (gu et al., 2009). in contrast, more skilled listeners were able to draw inferences from context to interpret meaning, form a conceptual framework, and monitor their comprehension against this framework (graham et al., 2008; gu et al., 2009). successful l2 listening relies on the coordination of varied strategies chosen by listeners to regulate listening processes and achieve comprehension, using both bottom-up and top-down processing (gu et al., 2009; oxford, 2019; vandergrift, 2003). flavell (1979) originally proposed that metacognitive knowledge reflects learners’ understanding of the interactions among person, task, and strategy use. vandergrift et al. (2006) extended the concept into the area of l2 listening, developing the metacognitive awareness listening questionnaire (malq) to assess learners’ self-reported uses of listening strategies and perception of themselves as l2 listeners. the malq has five factors: (1) problem-solving, reflecting strategies used by listeners to make inferences and to monitor these inferences, (2) planning and evaluation, defined by strategies listeners use to prepare for listening and to evaluate their performance after listening, (3) (no) mental translation, referring to strategies that allow listeners to translate what they hear word-by-word into their native language (more experienced and skilled listeners learn to avoid these strategies), (4) directed attention, referring to strategies that listeners use to focus attention and to stay on task, and (5) person knowledge, which represents learners’ perception of themselves as l2 listeners, focusing on their level of confidence and anxiety experienced in l2 listening. the addition of person knowledge as a factor in metacognitive listening awareness draws emotions into play. the other four factors represent strategies used in l2 listening: problem-solving, planning/evaluation, and directed attention are relatively effective strategies, whereas mental translation represents lower-level, less effective processing. students who use mental translation and engage in surface analysis tend to be those who experience more difficulties in l2 listening (vandergrift, 2003; vandergrift et al., 2006). vandergrift et al. (2006) reported significant relationships between malq scores and measures of l2 listening comprehension success: about 13% of the variance in listening performance could be explained by metacognition. since the development of the malq, a number of studies have provided evidence for the relationship between metacognitive awareness in l2 listening lanxi wang, peter d. macintyre 494 and learners’ listening performance (baleghizadeh & rahimi, 2011; bozorgian, 2014; goh & hu, 2014; zeng & goh, 2018). results suggest that l2 learners possess varying degrees of metacognitive knowledge about the listening process and themselves as l2 listeners, and that this knowledge is linked to their listening abilities (goh & hu, 2014; tavakoli et al., 2012). the substantive conclusion from available studies is that skilled listeners are generally more aware of strategies that may facilitate l2 listening comprehension and how factors such as attention and concentration, background knowledge, task demands and difficulties might affect their listening (goh & hu, 2014; zeng & goh, 2018). there have been a few psychometric issues raised with the malq. rahimi and katal (2012) reported a principal components analysis with five factors. generally, the factors showed solid measurement properties, with only one item (from the problem-solving subscale) showing a loading coefficient lower than expected (see ehrich & henderson, 2019). aryadoust (2015) performed a rasch analysis that also generally supported the validity of malq, but flagged two subscales as having potentially problematic reliability, planning/evaluation and problemsolving. finally, ehrich and henderson (2019) conducted a rasch analysis of the malq and concluded that although the items generally fit well with the five-factor model, a potential problem exists with the person knowledge subscale and recommended it be re-examined. taken together, the available psychometric evidence indicates that the malq should be used with some caution. given the concerns expressed in the literature, it is advisable to test its measurement properties in each new sample. thus, the first goal of the present study is to evaluate the psychometric properties of the malq and to explore the factor solutions of the scale before examining the correlations between its subscales and emotion. 2.2. emotion in second language comprehension in sla research, emotion has been likened to an “elephant in the room – poorly studied, poorly understood, seen as inferior to rational thought” (swain, 2013, p. 205). however, there is evidence of a recent affective turn in sla (prior, 2019). emotion theory suggests that there are different roles played by positive and negative emotions in language learning (fredrickson, 2001, 2013). negative emotions tend to narrow a learner’s focus and positive emotions tend to broaden learners’ attention and perception (macintyre & gregersen, 2012). the most widely studied negative emotion in sla has been language anxiety (dewaele & macintyre, 2016). anxiety is a negative experience, defined by negative feelings of apprehension, worry, or fear, which can interfere with language learning and inhibit l2 achievement in both obvious and subtle ways (horwitz, 2010; horwitz et al., 1986). macintyre (2017) summarized the academic, social, and cognitive effects of second language listening comprehension: the role of anxiety and enjoyment in listening. . . 495 language anxiety. anxious language learners tend to have lower levels of achievement, reduced linguistic self-confidence, and lower willingness to communicate. in the cognitive domain, anxiety can distract attention and consume cognitive resources that otherwise could be used at the input, processing, and output stages (macintyre & gardner, 1994). in one of the first studies to look at anxiety in listening comprehension, aneiro (1989) found that communication among two or more people created the largest amount of receiver apprehension, followed by receiving information, communication in a group, and watching tv. higher receiver apprehension was significantly related to lowered listening and language proficiency in the l2, while higher levels of prior exposure to the target language seemed to reduce the apprehension. elkhafaifi (2005) suggested that the unfamiliar phonological systems and the foreign cultural context of a l2 might engender listening anxiety in students. in comparison with other receptive skills such as reading, l2 listening can be anxiety-provoking because listeners have more difficulty controlling the speed of l2 input delivery. further, using a structural equation model to investigate the direction of the effect of anxiety, zhang (2013) found that foreign language (fl) listening anxiety appeared to have a significant influence on listening performance but that fl performance did not systematically affect fl listening anxiety. one implication is that downstream effects of anxiety arousal on listening comprehension can occur whether anxiety is aroused by language difficulties (sparks & ganschow, 1995), elements of the situation such as being tested or evaluated (gregersen et al., 2014), or by the meaning/content of communication (boudreau et al., 2018). in contrast to anxiety, less is known about the potential effects of positive emotional arousal on listening comprehension. generally, the role of positive emotions in language learning has received little attention until recently. studies of language enjoyment, defined by positive feelings of creativity, desired relationships, and having fun in language learning/use situations, have caused a reconsideration of the importance of both positive and negative emotions in learners’ experience (dewaele et al., 2019; dewaele & macintyre, 2014). according to the broaden-and-build theory, positive emotion is not simply the lack of negative emotion but serves its own distinct purposes to broaden one’s thoughts and actions that come to mind and build resources for the future (fredrickson, 2001, 2013). to provide a more holistic view on the range of emotions that language learners experience, dewaele and macintyre (2014) studied both foreign language enjoyment (fle) and foreign language classroom anxiety (flca) in the l2 classroom. results supported partial independence of positive and negative emotions in l2 learning. in a follow-up study, dewaele and alfawzan (2018) found that both fle and flca affected l2 performance, and that the positive effect of enjoyment on performance was stronger than the negative effect of anxiety. in practice, during l2 learning and communication, positive and negative emotions co-exist – they may oppose each other or work together (boudreau, lanxi wang, peter d. macintyre 496 et al., 2018; dewaele & macintyre, 2016). as continuously occurring, contextualized experiences (kong, 2019), positive and negative emotions can be triggered in the process of using any language skill. dewaele and macintyre (2014) suggested that over time, the cooperating processes of positive and negative emotions can facilitate success in the fl classroom; enjoyment encourages playful exploration while anxiety can generate focus on specific activities. negative emotions tend to narrow learner’s attention and promote avoidance behaviors, whereas positive emotions such as enjoyment can encourage engagement with the language and exploration in unfamiliar settings. applied to l2 listening, anxiety can narrow focus to specific words and sentences and urge the use of specific listening strategies, such as word translation. in contrast, enjoyment may help offset the negative feelings generated by anxiety, aid listeners in better noticing of linguistic input while listening, free their cognitive resources to engage in higherlever processing, and allow them to actively engage in complex strategies such as inferencing and elaboration. positive emotions such as enjoyment can be theorized to broaden learners’ perspective, free their cognitive resources, and facilitate engagement with the language (boudreau et al., 2018; fredrickson, 2013). it can thus be hypothesized that enjoyment may boost self-confidence in l2 listening and encourage flexible and adaptive use of metacognitive strategies. emotion has been found to interact with metacognitive awareness and information processing in l2 listening. previous studies indicate that students with lower levels of listening anxiety used metacognitive strategies more often and performed better on listening comprehension tests than more anxious students (golchi, 2012; golzadeh & moiinvaziri, 2017). further, macintyre et al. (1997) found that language anxiety has a negative effect on l2 learners’ self-efficacy, such that anxious students tend to underestimate their level of ability and proficiency. several studies found that listening metacognitive awareness mediated the relationship between listening anxiety and listening test scores (xu, 2017; xu & huang, 2018). additionally, findings from research on metacognitive instruction in listening suggest that training students in metacognitive strategies can be helpful in reducing listening anxiety, improving their confidence, motivation, metacognitive awareness and listening performance (fathi et al., 2020; goh, 2008; movahed, 2014). the negative correlation between listening anxiety and metacognitive awareness has been well established; however, no study to date has examined the role of positive emotions in listening self-efficacy and use of metacognitive strategies. studying the relationship between enjoyment and metacognitive awareness may help learners and teachers identify ways to overcome negative effects of anxiety, choose appropriate listening strategies, and reflect on their successes. taken together, research findings concerning the broadening and building effects of positive emotions such as enjoyment can be applied to listening comprehension and second language listening comprehension: the role of anxiety and enjoyment in listening. . . 497 considered in conjunction with the negative effects of anxiety arousal. l2 learners may experience anxiety and/or enjoyment at any time during l2 learning and communication; however, research has not yet looked at positive emotions specifically in l2 listening. it is well worth asking how listening performance and the components of listening metacognitive awareness relate to emotions such as listening anxiety and enjoyment. 3. the present study building on prior research, the present study looks at the relationships among listening anxiety, listening enjoyment, listening proficiency test scores, and metacognitive awareness of listening. more specifically, we will investigate the following research questions: 1. what is the factor structure of the malq? 2. what are the interrelationships among students’ listening anxiety, listening enjoyment, and malq sub-components? 3. what are the relationships between emotion, malq sub-components, and previous achievement in english? 4. method 4.1. participants participants included 410 international students at cape breton university, canada, who speak english as an l2. the sample included 237 females, 164 males, and nine whose gender was unspecified, ranging in age from 18 to 50, with a mean age of 25.14 (sd = 4.42). nearly half (44.1%) of the sample was from india, 39.8% from china, and 11% from vietnam. the rest of the participants were from philippines (n = 4), bangladesh (n = 2), egypt (n = 1), uzbekistan (n = 1), south korea (n = 1), and japan (n = 1), with 11 participants not specifying their home country. participants reported varying degrees of self-perceived english proficiency (on a scale of 1 to 5; m = 3.42, sd = 0.73) and different levels of experience learning english (ranging in years from 0.5 to 40, m = 13.84; sd = 7.18). 4.2. measures the data for the study were collected by means of the following instruments employed in previous empirical investigations: lanxi wang, peter d. macintyre 498 · foreign language listening anxiety scale (fllas, elkhafaifi, 2005). the fllas is a 20-item scale measuring listening anxiety. responses are made on a five-point likert (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree). an example item is: “when listening to english i get nervous and confused when i don’t understand every word.” elkhafaifi (2005) reported strong internal consistency reliability (cronbach’s α = .96, n = 233). the reliability of the fllas in the current study was acceptable, with a cronbach’s alpha of .86. · foreign language listening enjoyment (flle) questionnaire (adapted from dewaele & macintyre, 2014; see appendix). the original fle questionnaire has 21 items reflecting social and private dimensions of enjoyment. given the intrapersonal quality of listening, the present study focused only on private enjoyment, adapting six items to reflect enjoyment related to l2 listening comprehension. an example item is: “it’s fun learning to understand spoken english.” the reliability of the flle scale was acceptable (cronbach’ α = .80). · metacognitive awareness listening questionnaire (malq; vandergrift et al., 2006). the 21-item malq assesses metacognitive awareness concerning use of strategies while listening to oral text, and their sense of themselves as l2 listeners. responses to the malq were made using a six-point likert response (1 = strongly disagree, 6 = strongly agree). the overall reliability of the malq in the current study was low (α = .60). the malq is divided into five subscales, four of which showed adequate reliability coefficients that are comparable to prior studies (see goh & hu, 2014; xu, 2017): planning and evaluation (five items, α = .71), person knowledge (three items, α = .69), mental translation (three items, α = .74), and problem solving (six items, α = .69). however, in the present sample, the directed attention subscale (four items, α = .33) showed poor reliability.1 · previous listening performance. when applying to the university at which the study was conducted, students whose first language is not english must furnish evidence of the english proficiency, most commonly by providing the international english language testing service (ielts) score. thus, the listening component of the ielts test served as the measure of the test1 the low reliability may have resulted from low inter-item correlations due to ceiling and floor effects which can be tied to the context in which the respondents live. the four “directed attention” items refer to recovering attention when difficulties arise. item da1 and da3 received very high endorsement (in this sample, 57% and 67%, respectively scored 5 or 6 out of 6 on these items). da4 is a reverse coded item indicating that one gives up when facing listening difficulties and most people disagreed with this, 58% of the sample scored either 1 or 2 on this item. esl students living in an overwhelmingly english speaking community do not seem to feel they have the option to give up when attention difficulties arise. second language listening comprehension: the role of anxiety and enjoyment in listening. . . 499 takers’ previous english listening proficiency in the present study. ielts listening is scored on a nine-band scale; half scores such as 6.5 are possible. zhang (2013) noted that the ielts listening score has a good predictive power over participants’ listening proficiency in terms of listening to lectures or instructions. a total of 306 participants in the current study (74.6%) self-reported their latest ielts listening score, ranging from 4.5 to 9. 4.3. procedure participants in the current study were students recruited within university classes, with the instructors’ permission. after providing informed consent, students participated in a testing session during which the fllas (anxiety), flle (enjoyment), malq, and demographic information sheet were distributed. participants were encouraged to answer items honestly and were reminded that all answers would remain anonymous. 4.4. data coding for 17 of the 20 fllas items, responses were coded as the likert-scale points chosen by the participants. the remaining three items (#12, #13, and #18) were reversed coded (elkhafaifi, 2005). all six items in the adapted listening enjoyment scale flle were positively worded. three items for the malq scale (#3 and #8 for person knowledge, and #16 for directed attention) were negatively worded, thus the responses were reverse coded. because mental translation represents strategies contribute negatively to overall metacognitive awareness, the mental translation subscale was reversed and coded as (no) mental translation following vandergrift et al. (2006). however, even with recoding mental translation scores, the internal consistency of the malq scale was poor (cronbach’ α = .54), suggesting that a psychometric issue might exist when this scale is used as a composite measure. 4.5. data analysis preliminary analysis assessed the factor structure of the malq to evaluate evidence supporting the use of its five subscales in the present sample. due to the poor internal consistency of the malq and its subscales (e.g., directed attention, cronbach’s α = .33), the current study will propose an alternative two-factor solution to explore a novel combination of subscales. following that, the two proposed sub-components and five original subscales of the malq were correlated with listening anxiety, listening enjoyment, and prior listening achievement. pearson correlation analyses was conducted among all these variables. lanxi wang, peter d. macintyre 500 for interpretation of the magnitude of the correlations (r), we use benchmarks provided by plonsky and oswald (2014) who “. . . suggest that rs close to .25 be considered small, .40 medium, and .60 large (plonsky & oswald, 2014, p. 889) 5. results 5.1. malq factor solution and subscales the first step in data analysis was a principal components analysis of the malq (see table 1). both the measure of sampling adequacy (kmo = .83) and bartlett’s test (chisquare (280) = 2060.5, p < .001) indicated the correlation matrix was suitable for factoring. following vandergrift et al. (2006), we extracted five factors with a promax rotation. results of the five-factor solution emerged similar to the original vandergrift factors but with elevated cross-loadings (i.e., variables loading on two or more factors). factor i (planning) received high loadings (> .50) from all five of the planning and evaluation items and one of the problem-solving items. factor ii (difficulty) received high loadings from all three of the person knowledge items, focusing on difficulty, challenge, and nervousness, plus one directed attention item that reflected giving up when difficulties arise. factor iii (concentration) received loadings from two of three directed attention scale items (the third loaded at .49), plus a problem-solving item. factor iv (translation) had high loadings from all the mental translation items. factor v (problem-solving) showed high loadings from four of the six problem solving items. in addition, there were three correlations among the factors that were greater than .30. although the malq scales did not replicate the clear factor structure reported by vandergrift et al. (2006), the factor analysis results were substantially similar and approached simple structure (defined by loadings > .50). to address the low reliability of the malq in general and the da subscale in particular, and to avoid redundancy by simplifying the malq structure, we created a novel combination of subscales. on the one hand, the three subscales of the malq which represent relatively effective strategies l2 listeners use to facilitate information processing and understanding, that is, planning and evaluation, directed attention, and problem-solving, were combined to form a scale labelled listening strategies. on the other hand, the mental translation subscale, representing lower-level, less effective strategies used by listeners struggling with higher-level processing, was combined with a reverse-scored person knowledge subscale, which was scored to represent l2 learners discomfort with listening to english. the combination of measures was renamed as comprehension difficulties. cronbach’s reliability for the seven-item comprehension difficulties scale was acceptable (α = .73). the fourteen-item listening strategies scale also showed acceptable internal consistency (α = .78). second language listening comprehension: the role of anxiety and enjoyment in listening. . . 501 for comparison to the five factors originally proposed to underlie the malq, we conducted a second principal components analysis extracting two factors with a promax rotation (see table 2). results showed patterns that generally supported the newly combined subscales, except for a few items. factor i (strategies) received high loadings (>.50) from planning and evaluation, directed attention, and problem-solving subscales. factor ii (difficulties) had high loadings (> .50) from perceived difficulty and mental translation items, plus an unexpected directed attention item. additionally, these two factors showed a positive correlation of .34. these results suggest potential use of the malq as a two-factor solution. table 1 factor loadings and communalities based on a principal components analysis with promax rotation for malq items (five-factor) items factor loadings factor 1 factor 2 factor 3 factor 4 factor 5 communality planning/evaluation #5 .75* -.03* .26* .34* .02* .61 planning/evaluation #3 .61* -.10* .46* .11* .18* .48 planning/evaluation #4 .61* .05* .39* .36* .18* .52 planning/evaluation #2 .60* -.42* .05* .37* .32* .47 problem-solving #6 .59* -.09* .22* .10* .46* planning/evaluation #1 .59* -.28* .14* .30* .19* .39 person knowledge #2 -.15* .82* .03* -.28* -.16* .67 person knowledge #1 -.15* .75* -.09* -.27* -.13* .58 person knowledge #3 -.03* .67* .23* -.15* -.07* .49 directed attention #4 -.16* .52* .05* -.27* .28* .43 directed attention #2 .26* .08* .70* .25* .10* directed attention #3 .19* .00* .64* .12* .31* problem-solving #4 .46* .03* .63* .01* .22* .58 directed attention #1 .16* -.37* .49* .19* .40* .58 mental translation #1 .22* -.28* .14* .83* .23* .72 mental translation #2 .39* -.24* .25* .77* .27* .65 mental translation #3 .35* -.32* .13* .74* -.13* .62 problem-solving #5 .38* -.06* .15* .00* .70* .52 problem-solving #1 .20* -.39* .20* .33* .68* .43 problem-solving #2 .12* -.02* .45* .24* .65* .51 problem-solving #3 .18* .12* .55* .05* .58* .53 eigenvalues 4.82 2.59 1.62 1.20 1.04 % of total variance 22.95 12.34 7.70 5.70 4.95 total variance 53.63 note. * = factor loadings over .30 factor correlations factor 1 factor 2 factor 3 factor 4 factor 5 factor 1 1.00 factor 2 -.17 1.00 factor 3 .31 .06 1.00 factor 4 .32 -.34 .19 1.00 factor 5 .21 -.14 .29 .11 1.00 lanxi wang, peter d. macintyre 502 table 2 factor loadings and communalities based on a principal components analysis with promax rotation for malq items (two-factor) items factor loadings factor i factor ii communalities problem-solving #3 .70* -.27* .43 problem-solving #4 .61* -.14* .34 problem-solving #2 .60* -.08* .33 directed attention #2 .57* -.11* .30 directed attention #3 .58* -.15* .30 planning/evaluation #4 .56* .09* .35 problem-solving #5 .56* -.05* .29 problem-solving #6 .55* .06* .32 planning/evaluation #3 .54* .08* .32 planning/evaluation #5 .40* .22* .27 directed attention #1 .39* .22* .26 problem-solving #1 .36* .35* .34 planning/evaluation #1 .30* .37* .31 perceived difficulty #2 -.18* .76* .52 perceived difficulty #1 -.11* .69* .44 perceived difficulty #3 -.35* .62* .36 directed attention #4 .29* -.61* .33 mental translation #3 .04* .60* .38 mental translation #1 .18* .55* .42 planning/evaluation #2 .28* .48* .40 mental translation #2 .33* .48* .45 eigenvalues 4.90 2.55 % of total variance 23.3 12.2 total variance 35.5 note. * = factor loadings over .30 factor correlations factor 1 factor 2 factor 1 1.00 factor 2 .34 1.00 5.2. correlations of listening anxiety and enjoyment with malq subscales the two measures of emotion, listening anxiety and listening enjoyment, were significantly, negatively correlated (r = -.43), but only to a medium or moderate degree. correlations were also computed between listening anxiety and listening enjoyment with comprehension difficulties and listening strategies, the two new composite scales described in section 4.1 (see table 3). on the one hand, comprehension difficulties correlated strongly (positively) with listening anxiety and moderately-tostrongly (negatively) with listening enjoyment. on the other hand, listening strategies showed a slightly different pattern of correlation. both anxiety and enjoyment correlated positively with greater use of listening strategies. in other words, students who used more listening strategies experienced both higher anxiety and higher enjoyment while listening to english, though these correlations tended to be small. second language listening comprehension: the role of anxiety and enjoyment in listening. . . 503 table 3 listening anxiety, listening enjoyment, comprehension difficulties, listening strategies, and ielts listening scores: correlations and descriptive statistics (n = 410) variables 1 2 3 4 1. listening anxiety 2. listening enjoyment -.43*** 3. comprehension difficulties .67*** -.32*** 4. listening strategies .19*** .23*** .35*** m 54.68 23.99 19.37 64.20 sd 12.17 4.34 6.03 9.76 range 24-85 9-30 5-35 32-90 for comparison we also include the correlations of listening anxiety and listening enjoyment with the original five factors of the malq (i.e., directed attention, problem-solving, planning and evaluation, mental translation, and person knowledge). results suggest that emotions play a potentially complex role in metacognition about listening comprehension (see table 4). person knowledge had the strongest correlations with emotion, a strong negative correlation with listening anxiety and a strong positive correlation with listening enjoyment. mental translation showed a medium-sized correlation with listening anxiety, but was not significantly correlated with listening enjoyment. in a reverse pattern, directed attention showed a significant, small-to-medium-sized correlation with listening enjoyment but was not correlated significantly with anxiety. finally, both the problem-solving and planning/evaluation subscales showed significant and positive correlations (but weak) with both listening anxiety and enjoyment. table 4 listening anxiety, listening enjoyment, malq subscales, and ielts listening scores: correlations and descriptive statistics (n = 410) variables l. anxty l. enjoy pe da pk ps mt 1. l. anxty 2. l. enjoy -.43*** 3. pe .27*** .12*** 4. da -.06*** .31*** .26*** 5. pk -.68*** .45*** -.20*** .10*** 6. ps .15*** .18*** .48*** .50*** -.11*** 7. mt .42*** -.09*** .47*** .12*** -.32*** .30*** m 54.68 23.99 19.77 17.61 12.13 26.82 10.62 sd 12.17 4.34 4.87 2.99 3.52 4.55 3.83 range 24-85 9-30 5-30 8-24 3-18 10-36 3-18 note. * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001; l. anxty = listening anxiety, l. enjoy = listening enjoyment, pe = planning and evaluation, da = directed attention, pk = person knowledge, ps = problem-solving, mt = mental translation lanxi wang, peter d. macintyre 504 5.3. correlations of listening anxiety and enjoyment and metacognitive awareness with prior achievement for the final analysis, we correlated the self-reported measure of prior achievement, ielts listening score, with the other variables in the study. ielts scores were significantly (p < .001) negatively correlated with listening anxiety (r = -.52, a medium-to-large sized correlation) and positively correlated with enjoyment (r = .31), in the small-to-medium size range. further, ielts showed a negative, medium-sized correlation with the aggregate measure of comprehension difficulties (r = -.48, p < .001) but was not significantly correlated with the aggregate measure of listening strategies (r = -.09, ns). for completeness, ielts also correlated significantly, positively with person knowledge (r = .42, p < .001, medium size) and negatively with the use of mental translation (r = -.32, p < .001, small size). self-reported ielts scores showed weaker correlations with the other malq subscales (pe r = -.14, p = .012; ps r = -.10, p = .084, da r = .09, p = .102). 6. discussion although listening is a crucial skill for language learning, it has been the focus of less research attention than other l2 skills. one reason for this situation may be that there are fewer measures of listening comprehension, which may limit the understanding of factors related to this crucial skill. the first research question of this study deals with the underlying structure of one of the few available measures focused on l2 listening, the malq. the factor analytic results here suggest that the malq seems to have a more complex factor structure than originally reported (vandergrift et al., 2006). the original scale showed a clear and simple factor structure in both exploratory and confirmatory modelling. however, since the original scale was published, research has hinted at psychometric anomalies (aryadoust, 2015; ehrich & henderson, 2019; rahimi & katal, 2012). extraction criteria for the data in the present study suggested either a fivefactor solution (according to eigenvalues-greater-than-one rule) or a three-factor solution (from a parallel analysis). however, even the five-factor solution showed slight discrepancies from the originally reported factor structure. the directed attention subscale in particular showed low internal consistency reliability. as an alternative approach, based on interpretability and simple structure, we also attempted a two-factor, exploratory solution. the two aggregate subscales were called listening strategies and comprehension difficulties. the new subscales showed improved and acceptable reliability, as well as interpretable correlations with listening anxiety, enjoyment, and prior achievement. future research involving the malq should routinely test its factor structure and report second language listening comprehension: the role of anxiety and enjoyment in listening. . . 505 complete loading matrices, building a body of evidence that would support the continued and informed use of this measure. the second research question considers the relationships among listening anxiety, enjoyment, and malq sub-components. consistent with previous studies (dewaele & macintyre, 2014; dewaele et al., 2018), the present results revealed a significant negative correlation between listening anxiety and enjoyment. however, these two variables correlated moderately, with only 18% shared variance, indicating that listening anxiety and enjoyment are related but independent emotions. the results are in line with dewaele and macintyre (2014), who showed that anxiety and enjoyment in the l2 classroom shared only 12.9% of their variance. anxiety and enjoyment are not opposite ends of the same emotional continuum, but each serves a different purpose. enjoyment and anxiety may even cooperate from time to time in l2 listening; enjoyment serves to broaden listeners’ thoughts and encourage them to approach interesting listening materials, whereas anxiety serves to narrow their focus to specific information (fredrickson, 2001, 2013). the two emotions included in the present data, anxiety and enjoyment, correlated with the first newly constructed malq subscale, comprehension difficulties. the correlation was large and positive with listening anxiety but somewhat weaker and negative with listening enjoyment. l2 listening is a cognitively demanding receptive skill, compared to l2 reading for example. listening requires attending to additional factors such as stress, pause, and rhythmic patterns that can complicate the comprehension process. listening takes place in real time and is ephemeral; listeners often cannot review what has been heard and have little control over the speed of the input (vandergrift & baker, 2015). l2 listeners who repeatedly encounter comprehension difficulties are likely to form a strong association between listening activities and the feelings of being worried and develop anticipatory fear (kimura, 2008; zhang, 2013). in addition, the present results suggest that those with higher levels of comprehension difficulties also experience less enjoyment in l2 listening, though the correlation is not as strong as it is with anxiety. this may be part of a vicious cycle wherein high anxiety and low enjoyment might consume cognitive resources, and narrow the material available for cognitive processing, leading to greater comprehension difficulties and poorer performance. in contrast, positive experiences of successfully applying tools to crack the code of l2 speech potentially boost listeners’ self-efficacy (graham, 2011). these experiences might reinforce listeners’ sense of control over the process of listening and generate greater feelings of enjoyment. consistent with the broaden-and-build emotion theory (fredrickson, 2013), enjoyment may facilitate exploration of new listening material and deeper analysis of the information, which further enhances enjoyment in listening activities in a “virtuous cycle.” lanxi wang, peter d. macintyre 506 the second aggregate malq subscale emerging from the present study, listening strategies, represents relatively effective strategies used by l2 listeners to facilitate comprehension. results indicated a small but significant positive correlation between listening strategies and listening enjoyment but also a small, positive correlation with listening anxiety, which seems to contradict some previous research suggesting that those who use more strategies tend to be more effective listeners (o’malley et al., 1989) and experience less anxiety (golchi, 2012; golzadeh & moiinvaziri, 2017). this incongruence might be explained by the positive relationship between listening strategies and comprehension difficulties found in this study. in the social context where learners are frequently using the l2 for authentic communication, learners who use more listening strategies might be those who are encountering more difficulties in listening comprehension. as a result of becoming anxious, they may actively use strategies to help cope with difficulties and distractions. bang and hiver (2016) found that it was only through the mediation of l2 linguistic knowledge that l2 listening strategy use was linked to low l2 listening anxiety, meaning that listening strategies might alleviate anxiety only if l2 knowledge has reached a certain threshold or level. intentionally using strategies can be a source of distraction from the meaning of what is being said, so over-reliance on strategies might lead to cognitive overload associated with greater anxiety. skilled listeners rely on the orchestration of varied strategies instead of serial deployment of such strategies (vandergrift, 2003). therefore, more skilled, less anxious listeners in the current study might have reported less use of strategies because they do not intentionally employ such strategies but use them in a natural way. the pattern of correlations suggests that, as the learning process moves along leading to more experience and higher levels of proficiency, greater emotional arousal is likely to occur (both positive and negative, see also dewaele & macintyre, 2016). learners who use planning and problem-solving types of strategies may be experiencing both positive and negative emotional experiences. the third research question examined the relationship between participants’ previous listening achievement, emotions, and metacognitive awareness subscales. in the present study, participants’ latest ielts listening scores were found to be moderately positively correlated with listening enjoyment and moderately-to-strongly negatively correlated with listening anxiety. these results were largely consistent with previous studies (dewaele & alfawzan, 2018; elkhafaifi, 2005; kim, 2000; li, 2019; zhang, 2013); l2 learners who had better listening performance tended to experience more enjoyment and less anxiety when listening to english, compared to those who had poorer performance. this pattern of correlations suggests that individuals who scored higher on previous listening tests experience more enjoyment, which in turn helps to broaden their second language listening comprehension: the role of anxiety and enjoyment in listening. . . 507 perspective, absorb more linguistic input in l2 from listening, and experience less worry and distracting self-doubt. additionally, results indicate a mediumsized negative relationship between previous listening achievement and comprehension difficulties. students who had poorer listening achievement tended to be those who experience more difficulties in l2 listening. however, prior achievement scores (ielts) did not correlate significantly with the use of listening strategies, and showed weak correlations with the original malq subscales (planning and evaluation, problem solving, and directed attention). although non-significant correlations are inherently ambiguous and difficult to interpret because they show a lack of a relationship between variables, previous research suggests a positive association between metacognitive strategy use and listening performance (golchi, 2012; golzadeh & moiinvaziri, 2017). future studies could further examine metacognitive strategy use and listening performance to provide a clearer understanding of this relationship. 7. pedagogical implications understanding the role(s) played by emotion in l2 listening and its relationship with metacognitive awareness allows for a better understanding of how listeners’ self-perceptions, and how they perceive the listening tasks affects their use of listening strategies. li (2019) found that students who were more cognizant of their emotions may be better able to manage their anxiety, and generate more enjoyment during l2 learning, which can lead to higher self-confidence and better actual performance. understanding their own emotions can help learners prepare for listening tasks, monitor their mental processes during listening, and evaluate their listening performance to develop future goals. on the other hand, l2 teachers can help learners to know more about their feelings and reinforce positive emotions. results of the present study suggest that positive and negative emotions are not opposite ends of the same spectrum, but work in different ways in l2 listening. language teachers and learners should focus not only on reducing anxiety but also working out intriguing and enjoyable experiences in language learning (see dewaele et al., 2018). the current study highlighted the importance of positive emotions in promoting l2 learners’ psychological resilience and raising self-confidence, in the form of person knowledge. listening can be an anxiety provoking activity; positive emotions may even serve a protective function against negative emotions associated with comprehension difficulties. furthermore, the current study emphasized the importance of teaching strategy use in l2 listening. however, it should be noted that listening proficiency is not determined solely by strategy use. although several studies have found that metacognitive strategy instruction produced positive outcomes in students’ listening lanxi wang, peter d. macintyre 508 performance (fathi et al., 2020; goh, 2008; movahed, 2014), field (1998) suggested that teaching strategies may promote the use of strategies, but may not necessarily lead to listening ability improvement. the present study found that use of strategies is positively correlated with listening anxiety; being preoccupied with strategy use may take up limited cognitive resources and distract listeners from the actual linguistic input itself. furthermore, some strategies (e.g., mental translation) serve as a crutch that can get listeners over a difficult moment, but generally should not become routinized because they can distract from the meaningful input (vandergrift, 2003). strategy use might be considered as a double-edged sword, which could help with comprehension and generate enjoyment, but also serve as a source of distraction and at times create anxiety. 8. limitations and future research directions before concluding, two key limitations of the study should be noted. first, the use of self-report always raises questions about the veracity of responses. specifically, the ielts listening scores collected in this study were self-reported and thus might not accurately represent participants’ current listening performance. approximately one-in-four participants in the present study did not take the ielts test or might have refused or neglected to report their score (104 of 410 participants were missing ielts scores). future research could employ alternative measures to assess l2 learners’ listening achievement, such as administering a listening test as part of data collection. nevertheless, the reliability of scales and pattern of results, including the ielts scores, seems to suggest that the data are credible. a second consideration is the social context in which the present study took place. the sample of international students living in an english-speaking community and taking all of their university classes in english provides a context in which listening is critically important. this study extended beyond the classroom context to investigate l2 listeners’ experience of anxiety and enjoyment in their daily lives. however, the nature of the context also might have affected scores, including generating more occasions for intense emotional arousal (both positive and negative), but also making some scores problematic due to restricted range, especially the directed attention subscale (see footnote 1). additionally, the social context of the current study suggests that the findings might not be applicable to other populations or languages. participants in this research were international students who study and live in an english-speaking country, thus their self-reported levels of listening anxiety and enjoyment likely targeted emotions both inside and outside the classroom. considering that high exposure to the target culture might alleviate language anxiety and increase enjoyment (aneiro; 1989; resnik & schallmoser, 2019), students who study the l2 second language listening comprehension: the role of anxiety and enjoyment in listening. . . 509 in their home country may use the l2 only in classrooms. thus, they may have different emotional experiences and different patterns of strategy use. future studies should be conducted with participants with different l2 learning background to further investigate the relationship between emotion and metacognitive awareness in l2 listening. 9. conclusion this study was among the first attempts to investigate the relationship between metacognitive awareness and both positive and negative emotions in listening comprehension. results indicated that anxiety and enjoyment are related but independent emotions and may serve different functions in l2 listening. this finding is further supported by listening anxiety and enjoyment showing different patterns of correlation with aspects of metacognitive awareness. moreover, this study found that use of listening strategies was positively related with both listening anxiety and enjoyment, which calls for a more detailed consideration in how to teach and use listening strategies as it could potentially create anxiety for listeners. being aware of the emotional experiences, the use of strategies, and comprehension difficulties in l2 listening can have implications in improving learners’ listening performance and enhancing their general listening ability. lanxi wang, peter d. macintyre 510 references aneiro, s. 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(2013). foreign language listening anxiety and listening performance: conceptualizations and causal relationships. system, 41(1), 164-177. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2013.01.004 second language listening comprehension: the role of anxiety and enjoyment in listening. . . 515 appendix foreign language listening enjoyment (flle) questionnaire statement (1) through (5) described how enjoyable you find listening to english. please read each statement, give your first reaction to each statement, and mark an answer for every statement. please indicate whether you 1 – strongly disagree, 2 – disagree, 3 – undecided, 4 – agree, 5 – strongly agree 1. i don’t get bored listening to english. 1 2 3 4 5 2. i enjoy listening to someone speaking english 1 2 3 4 5 3. i’ve learnt interesting things when listening to english 1 2 3 4 5 4. i feel proud of my ability to understand spoken english 1 2 3 4 5 5. it’s fun learning to understand spoken english 1 2 3 4 5 6. listening to english makes me feel happy 1 2 3 4 5 365 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (3). 365-400 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl teaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study jakub bielak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz kubabogu@amu.edu.pl miros aw pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl abstract form-focused instruction is usually based on traditional practical/pedagogical grammar descriptions of grammatical features. the comparison of such traditional accounts with cognitive grammar (cg) descriptions seems to favor cg as a basis of pedagogical rules. this is due to the insistence of cg on the meaningfulness of grammar and its detailed analyses of the meanings of particular grammatical features. the differences between traditional and cg rules/descriptions are exemplified by juxtaposing the two kinds of principles concerning the use of the present simple and present progressive to refer to situations happening or existing at speech time. the descriptions provided the bases for the instructional treatment in a quasi-experimental study exploring the effectiveness of using cg descriptions of the two tenses, and of their interplay with stative (imperfective) and dynamic (perfective) verbs, and comparing this effectiveness with the value of grammar teaching relying on traditional accounts found in standard pedagogical grammars. the study involved 50 participants divided into three groups, with one of them constituting the control group and the other two being experimental ones. one of the latter received treatment based on cg descriptions and the other on traditional accounts. cg-based instruction was found to be at least moderately effective in terms of fostering mostly explicit grammatical jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak 366 knowledge and its effectiveness turned out be comparable to that of teaching based on traditional descriptions. keywords: cognitive grammar, pedagogical grammar, traditional descriptions, tense, aspect the teaching of second/foreign language grammar1 cannot do without descriptions of grammatical elements, which may only be produced with any degree of systematicity with the help of some theoretical assumptions, if not within the confines of some linguistic theory(ies). although it is rarely openly stated, when viewed from this perspective, most grammatical descriptions employed by language teachers may be said to be traditional in nature. they are usually taken from textbooks, which normally extract information from pedagogical and practical grammars, or from these grammars themselves. as argued by bielak and pawlak (in press), pedagogical/practical grammars are normally based on major descriptive/reference grammars such as the ones by quirk, greenbaum, leech, and svartvik (1985) and huddleston and pullum (2002), whose theoretical orientation is referred to by bielak and pawlak (in press) as structuralist-traditional. this label is used because, generally speaking, the descriptive/reference grammars employ mostly traditional grammatical terminology and organization of the material, concentrate mostly on language facts rather than their explanations, and provide numerous taxonomies (bielak & pawlak, in press). because grammatical descriptions used in pedagogy are, through the mediation of textbooks and pedagogical/practical grammars, based on the descriptive/reference grammars, their labeling as traditional seems to be warranted, and the label itself should be viewed as reflecting their structuralist-traditional foundations. however, as evidenced by some pedagogical grammars which state that contemporary linguistics enhances the descriptions they provide (e.g., celce-murcia & larsen-freeman, 1999), modern linguistic theory may have a lot to offer to language teachers and, through their mediation, to learners. one such innovation is cognitive linguistics, which includes cognitive grammar (langacker, 1987, 1991) as one of its leading theories. the potential relevance of cognitive linguistics and cognitive grammar (cg) to language teaching has been premised mainly on their insistence on the meaningfulness of most areas of language, including grammar, and on the comprehensiveness of their semantic analyses. while there are numerous theoretically-oriented proposals concerning the harnessing of cg in the service of grammatical in 1 in this paper, no important distinction is made between teaching and learning second and foreign languages. teaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study 367 struction (e.g., achard, 2008; niemeier & rief, 2008; turewicz, 2000; tyler, 2008; tyler & evans, 2001), empirical research testing the effectiveness of such applications is only beginning to appear (e.g., huong, 2005; królmarkefka, 2010; tyler, mueller, & ho, 2010). the present article, reporting on one study which is part of a larger research project,2 is intended as a contribution to the emerging body of empirical evidence concerned with pedagogical applications of cg. specifically, its purpose is determining the effectiveness of using cg descriptions of the socalled present simple and present continuous, and of their interplay with stative and dynamic verbs when reference is made to situations unfolding at the time of speaking, and comparing this effectiveness with that of grammar teaching relying on traditional descriptions found in standard pedagogical grammars. instructional effectiveness is considered in terms of fostering mostly explicit grammatical knowledge.3 descriptions of selected facets of the english tense/aspect system the present study focuses on teaching the choice between the english progressive and nonprogressive present tense when reference is made to single situations4 existing or happening at the time of speaking, which often depends on whether the situation is expressed by a stative or a dynamic verb. for this reason, the present section offers the traditional and cg descriptions of the relevant aspects of the grammatical phenomena involved which were exploited in the treatments of the study, namely the present tense, the progressive aspect and the distinction between the so-called stative and dynamic verbs. this is done to the exclusion of all the other facets and uses of these grammatical elements. traditional descriptions the traditional descriptions offered here and used as a basis of instruction in the quasi-experiment described below are taken from two standard practical/pedagogical grammars, namely eastwood (1999) and ma czakwohlfeld, ni egorodcew, and willim (2007). with respect to the use of the 2 a more comprehensive description of this project is to be published in two volumes, the first of which is bielak and pawlak (in press). 3 for the exploration of the implicit knowledge dimension see bielak and pawlak (in press). 4 the use of situation as an umbrella term referring to verb-symbolized phenomena, that is, to states, activities, events, actions and processes existing and unfolding in time, follows quirk et al. (1985, p. 177). jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak 368 present tense either with or without the progressive when talking about something which exists or is happening now, at the moment of speaking, and in particular when the choice of one of them is at issue, the two sources jointly give the following rules: 1. stative verbs are not usually used with the progressive (“a state means that something is staying the same” [eastwood, 1999, p. 14]); dynamic verbs may be used in progressive tenses (“an action means something happening” [eastwood, 1999, p. 14]); for example, the farmer owns the land, the farmer is buying the land (eastwood, 1999, p. 14). 2. the present progressive is used to “say that we are in the middle of an action” (ma czak-wohlfeld et al., 2007, p. 154), for example, i’m getting the lunch ready (eastwood, 1999, p. 8). in other words, it is used “to refer to an activity in progress at the very moment of speaking or about the moment of speaking,” for example, i am trying to fall asleep (ma czak-wohlfeld et al., 2007, p. 154). 3. the nonprogressive present tense is normally used to refer to thoughts, feelings, states and permanent facts, for example, i think it’s a good programme, kitty likes her job (eastwood, 1999, pp. 10-12). ma czakwohlfeld et al. (2007, p. 155) explain why it is so; the meanings of stative verbs of the following types are incompatible with the progressive: a. “verbs referring to passive mental states, that is, verbs of inert cognition” (think, believe, etc.), for example, i think it is all right, “as opposed to mental activities,” for example, i am thinking about it; b. “verbs referring to more or less permanent emotions,” for example, love, like, and hate; c. “verbs referring to passive activities of the senses, that is, verbs of inert perception,” for example, hear, see, as opposed to listen to, look. 4. the nonprogressive present tense is used with such verbs as promise, agree, and refuse; for example, i promise i’ll write to you; it’s all right, i forgive you (eastwood, 1999, pp. 10-12). 5. sometimes a given verb may be used either for a state or an action and may therefore be used both without and with the progressive, for example, i think you are right versus i am thinking about the problem (eastwood, 1999, p. 14). ma czak-wohlfeld et al. (2007, pp. 156-157) explain what kinds of stative verbs may be used in the progressive and why: a. they may have a different meaning which is compatible with the progressive; the use of the progressive involves either an activity teaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study 369 with human agency or a temporary activity, or sometimes both,5 for example, i am thinking about it (a temporary, voluntary activity). b. some sensation verbs, when used transitively, may be used in the progressive, for example, i am tasting the soup, she is smelling the roses. c. the progressive may be used with state verbs to imply a gradual change in a state, for example, she is resembling her mother more and more. 6. sometimes a state verb may be used in the progressive “to talk about a short period of time,” for example, i like school versus i’m liking school much better now (eastwood, 1999, p. 14). cg descriptions in cg, it is assumed that verbs designate processes, that is, relations between two entities with positive temporal profiles (langacker, 1987, p. 244), which means that these processes receive a certain amount of focal prominence (they are profiled) and are construed as unfolding through conceived time (they have positive temporal profiles). the conceptualization of such relations requires the employment of a mode of cognitive processing called sequential scanning, which results in the conception of a series of relations transformed sequentially one into another. this characterization of the semantics of verbs makes crucial reference to construal, that is, to (different ways of) viewing semantic content (cf. langacker, 2008, pp. 55-91), and to cognitive processing, rather than to the contents of conception. cg assumes the division of all verbs into perfective and imperfective ones, with the attendant distinction between perfective and imperfective processes (langacker, 2002, p. 87). generally, perfective verbs refer to situations which involve some change and are bounded, while imperfective verbs denote situations which are stable and unbounded. because a process is a series of relations scanned sequentially through conceived time, words with processual meanings are devices ideally suited to describing change (langacker, 1987, p. 254). and indeed, perfective verbs, which constitute the majority of the verb class, refer to a change of some sort (langacker, 1987, p. 254). individual relations that these verbs profile are usually not all the same, and the differences between them constitute the change in 5 this rule is worded ambiguously in the grammar by ma czak-wohlfeld et al. (2007). the rules given here are partially based on the authors’ interpretation of the examples illustrating the rule. jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak 370 question. another important characteristic of perfective verbs is that their processes are bounded within the temporal scope of predication (langacker, 1987, pp. 258-262), that is, within the semantic base needed for the characterization of the process. the essentials of the semantics of perfective verbs are depicted in figure 1. the component states of a perfective process are represented by the bold line, which is wavy to stress the change that is typically involved. the line, whose every point corresponds to a single relationship, extends along the time arrow, which signals the evolution of the process through conceived time. vertical bars at the endpoints of the line bound the process and mark its beginning and end, which are both included in the scope of predication. figure 1 semantics of perfective verbs (1) (langacker, 2002, p. 88) in contrast to perfective ones, imperfective verbs designate processes all the component relations of which are construed as effectively identical, which results in the conception of a stable situation persisting through conceived time (langacker, 1987, p. 256). also, because imperfective processes are construed in cg as homogeneous, they are thought to be characterized by inherent expansibility/contractibility, and they are therefore not inherently bounded in their temporal scope (langacker, 1987, pp. 258-262). figure 2 highlights the relevant details. the heavy line representing a series of relationships characteristic of processes is straight, which indicates that the relations are construed as the same and that no change is involved. the line is not delimited by vertical bars, which reflects the absence of inherent bounding typical of imperfectives. instead, the ellipses (…) indicate the indefinite temporal extension of the process, one portion of which, limited by the scope of predication, is profiled. this is expressed by the heavy-line part of the entire line. scope t teaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study 371 figure 2 semantics of imperfective verbs (langacker, 2002, p. 88) it should be noted that in cg verbs of either type are regarded as generally flexible in the sense that they often have different variants or senses belonging to two different lexical-aspectual classes: perfective and imperfective. a good example is the verb like as occurring in the sentence i’m liking school much better now offered by eastwood (1999, p. 14). according to this author, like is a stative verb here and it is used with the progressive to talk about a situation of short duration (eastwood, 1999, p. 14). in contrast, cg claims that like in such sentences has an extended, perfective sense, because “a period of stability is regarded as a bounded episode rather than something expected to continue indefinitely” (langacker, 1991, p. 208). according to traditional accounts (rule 1 above), only dynamic/perfective verbs are compatible with the english progressive, while stative/imperfective ones are not. another widespread view of the progressive is that it takes an internal perspective on a situation (rule 2), while the nonprogressive views a process from an external perspective, in its entirety (cf. langacker, 1991, p. 208). both views are essentially accepted (langacker, 1991, p. 208) and insightfully explained by cg, which in addition claims that the english progressive is used with perfective verbs to make them imperfective (langacker, 1991, p. 209). this transformation from a perfective into an imperfective will now be explained and illustrated by a sequence of figures. first, figure 3 introduces yet another pictorial cg convention used to represent perfective processes. the circle and the square stand for two processual entities, while the line which links them represents their relation. the sequence of several relations of this sort, including the initial and the terminal ones, stands for a longer sequence constituting the whole process. the processual nature of this configuration is highlighted by the heavy line portion of the time arrow, which symscope t jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak 372 bolizes sequential scanning. figure 4 depicts the semantic value of the present participle (-ing), an essential component of the english progressive. in cg, -ing is said to designate a complex nonprocessual relationship which is an internal subpart of a longer process and whose component relations are viewed as effectively identical (langacker, 1991, p. 209). as can be seen in figure 4, -ing imposes a restricted immediate scope on a process, which ‘pushes’ certain of its component relations outside the profile, including the initial and terminal ones (langacker, 2008, p. 120). all these excluded relations, being outside the immediate scope and thus unprofiled, lose their bold-line marking in figure 4. another thing -ing does is to “abstract away from any differences among the focused states, thus viewing them as effectively equivalent” (langacker, 2008, p. 121). thus, the highlighted relations are viewed a homogeneous mass, as indicated by the ellipses (…). this is possible because the relations are seen as representative of the whole perfective process (langacker, 1991, p. 209). the last semantic feature of -ing is that it nullifies sequential scanning characteristic of all verbs, and thus turns a process into a complex atemporal relation (langacker, 1991, p. 209), that is, a relation which is not scanned sequentially, and is instead viewed holistically. this is signaled in figure 4 by the disappearance from the time arrow of heavy-lining, in comparison with figure 3. all of these semantic features of the present participle are also expressed, albeit differently, in figure 5, which follows the conventions of figures 1 and 2, and is offered here for the purposes of comparison with them. it abbreviates the semantic value of -ing even more than figure 4; the heavy straight line within the immediate scope, similar to that in figure 2, stresses the effective homogeneity of the focused part of an essentially perfective process. figure 6 shows the effect of combining -ing (together with a verb it attaches to) with the second element of the progressive construction, the verb be. the function of be is to supply sequential scanning, symbolized by the highlighted portion of the time arrow included within the immediate scope. be thus restores the processual character of the main verb, suspended earlier by -ing (langacker, 1991, pp. 210-211).6 6 obviously, the composition of a progressive structure, let alone a whole clause containing it, is much more complex than what has been mentioned here. for instance, it is executed in a number of steps and simultaneously at several levels. all this is simplified and taken for granted here, there being no need in the present context to dwell on the particulars of the whole complex process. for the detailed cg exposition of composition see langacker (1987, 1991). teaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study 373 figure 3 semantics of perfective verbs (2) (adapted from langacker, 2008, p. 119) figure 4 semantics of -ing (1) (langacker, 2008, p. 121) this cg analysis of the semantics of the progressive accounts for a number of its characteristics. first, it explains why the progressive is compatible only with perfective verbs, to the exclusion of imperfectives. for one thing, the redundancy of applying the imperfectivizing progressive to imperfective verbs is conventionally rejected in english (langacker, 1991, p. 208). using the imperfectivizing impact of the progressive with perfectives, on the other hand, makes perfect sense since it is not redundant. second, cg explains the achievement of the internal perspective on a situation associated with the progressive. it is reached through the narrowing down of focus so that the endpoints of a process are no longer in it, which is due to the contribution of -ing. this morpheme is also responsible for the third feature of the progressive, namely its imperfectivizing force itself. this results from -ing’s homogenization of the component relations of a process, and from its t is t jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak 374 elimination of bounding, which stems from the exclusion of the endpoints of a perfective process from the immediate scope. figure 5 semantics of -ing (2) (langacker, 2002, p. 92) for reasons of economy, a detailed cg analysis of the english present tense cannot be offered here (see langacker, 1991). what will suffice for the present purposes is the prototypical value cg ascribes to what are usually treated as present tense morphemes (zero and -s), which is to indicate “the occurrence of a full instantiation of the profiled process that precisely coincides with the time of speaking” (langacker, 1991, p. 250). this prototypical meaning basically conforms to a commonsense understanding of the present tense, which is probably also accepted by traditional accounts, although rather tacitly. at this point, it is clear how cg explains the fact that the progressive may only be used with perfective verbs, and not with imperfectives. what remains to be clarified in cg terms is the use of both verb types with the english present tense and the progressive aspect to refer to situations, or processes, happening or existing at speech time. this may be done by answering three questions concerning the use of these elements. the first two answers essentially report the analysis of langacker (1991, pp. 250-252). the first question is why the nonprogressive present tense, when referring to something unfolding at the moment of speaking, may be freely used with imperfectives, but not with the majority of perfectives. it follows from the cg definition of the present tense that the immediate scope of a present tense clause, which delimits its profile, is coextensive with the time of the immediate scope scope t teaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study 375 speech event. this means that its duration is quite short. however, it is possible to use a present tense imperfective verb such as know in he knows it no matter how long the process is in objective reality. in cg this is seen as resulting from the inherent contractibility, brought about by the lack of bounding, and from the effective homogeneity of imperfective processes, whose component relations coincident with the (usually short) time of speaking count as a full instantiation of the process. the incompatibility of the present tense with the majority of perfectives follows from the fact that most of them profile, just as imperfectives, processes longer than speech time. contrary to imperfectives, however, this conflict between the present tense and perfective processes cannot be resolved, because the latter do not have the features of contractibility and effective homogeneity. for this reason, the portion of the process coextensive with the speech event, which as a whole is longer than this event, does not count as a full instantiation of the process. for this to happen, the whole bounded perfective process, including its endpoints, would have to be viewed as simultaneous with the time of speaking, which is sometimes possible, as explained in the following paragraph. the second question is why it is possible to use the english nonprogressive present tense with certain perfective verbs. according to cg, the so-called performative verbs such as promise and order, profiling the speech event itself, for example the act of promising in i promise to be home on time, satisfy the requirement that the designated process, including its endpoints, be simultaneous with the speech event. clearly, the speech act of promising is exactly as long as the time required to utter it. the third question is why exactly most perfective verbs require the progressive when used in the present tense. the answer should be quite obvious by now. it has been shown that, in contrast to perfectives, imperfectives may be freely used with the simple present. it has also been shown that the progressive imperfectivizes an otherwise perfective process. the conclusion that offers itself is that perfectives, when combined with the progressive whereby they become imperfective, are compatible with the present tense. rationale for employing cg descriptions in grammar teaching this section presents the reasons for which cg might be a desirable source of grammatical descriptions to be used in instruction. table 1 features a comparison of cg and traditional descriptions, with the criteria of comparison selected so as to reveal certain potential advantages of cg over traditional accounts. the table includes pedagogically important features of cg and their exemplification as well as corresponding information on traditional practijakub bielak, miros aw pawlak 376 cal/pedagogical grammars. whenever possible, the exemplification is based on the descriptions offered earlier in the paper. table 1 comparison of cg and traditional grammars as sources of pedagogical rules cg as a basis of pedagogical rules cg examples traditional pedagogical rules traditional grammar examples meaningfulness of all grammatical elements and highly detailed analyses of their meanings of is meaningful; the analysis of the semantic contributions of the components of the english progressive: be, -ing, and of the english present tense not all grammatical elements are meaningful and analyses of their meanings not as detailed as in cg no meaning ascribed to of; no semantic analysis of the components of the english progressive and no precise semantic value of the english present tense grammatical meaning is conceptualization, existence of different construals different conceptualizations and construals of perfective and imperfective verbs, even in the case of seemingly stative verbs such as like no conceptual value of grammatical items specified no conceptual values and construals of perfective and imperfective verbs, no specification of different construals associated with the stative and dynamic (imperfective and perfective) uses of like discourse and other pragmatic factors often included in the meaning of grammatical features the specification of the discourse functions of the -s and of possessives discourse and other pragmatic factors not/rarely included in the meaning of grammatical features discourse functions of the -s and of possessives not specified grammar is motivated the use of the nonprogressive present tense with performatives clearly explained by the semantics of these elements grammar is often arbitrary the use of the nonprogressive present tense with performatives not explained little/no vagueness and imprecision of description significant vagueness and imprecision of description no explanation of the sense in which think refers to a state in i think it is all right and to an action in i am thinking about it no contradictions between different rules/subrules contradictions between different rules/subrules the contradiction between the rule according to which the nonprogressive present is used with such verbs teaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study 377 as promise and refuse, which denote apparently dynamic situations, and the rule stating that the nonprogressive present is used to refer to thoughts, feelings, states and permanent facts frequent use of pictorial illustrations of meaning figures accompanying the description of perfective and imperfective verbs and the progressive in english infrequent use of pictorial illustrations of meaning as can be seen from the table, the first difference between the traditional and cg approaches to grammatical description is the insistence of the latter on the meaningfulness of grammar and its provision of detailed analyses of grammatical meanings, neither of which is shared by the former. one example is the elucidation by cg of the meaning of the english preposition of, which is considered as semantically empty in traditional accounts (for details see bielak, 2007). another example is the meticulous breakdown of the meaning of the english progressive (see above), which is traditionally analyzed in much cruder semantic grain. conceptualization and pragmatic factors, which are discussed next, are two special facets of the meaningfulness of grammar. another difference between the two modes of description is that traditional treatments do not elucidate the conceptual import of grammatical phenomena, while it is the essence of cg descriptions that they do. the consequence of the absence from traditional accounts of the focus on conceptualization is their employment of often lengthy lists of ‘functions,’ ‘meanings’ or ‘uses’ of grammatical features, which are in turn characterized by a high degree of arbitrariness, an issue to be presently discussed. an example of such a list is the one already presented, which includes the ‘exceptional’ use of verbs such as like when combined with the progressive to refer to a situation of short duration. in cg, however, where the description of the conceptual content of grammatical items including the way it is construed is the norm, such lists of unrelated meanings or uses are not encountered. to explain the behavior of verbs such as like, cg simply evokes two ways of construing the same conceptual content, which are the construals associated with imperfective and perfective verbs. the next difference between traditional and cg accounts of grammatical meanings is that the former are generally devoid of references to discourse jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak 378 functions, while the latter often include such references. as this difference cannot be demonstrated in relation to the descriptions offered earlier in the paper and it is not relevant to the pedagogic interventions used in the present study, it will not be further discussed.7 yet another difference is that traditional rules seem to be arbitrary (cf. chalker, 1994, p. 31) in the sense that no general principles uniting the apparently unrelated rules or uses concerning a grammatical item are given (cf. e.g., littlemore, 2009, p. 61; tyler & evans, 2004, p. 257), while cg analyses offer such overarching principles (cf. e.g., tyler and evans 2004, p. 258). for example, the traditional rule that the nonprogressive present is used with verbs such as promise and refuse seems to be arbitrary as there is nothing in the traditional account that relates it to the overall rule that this tense/aspect pairing is used with stative verbs. by contrast, the cg description of the same language facts follows clearly from the cg definition of the (nonprogressive) present tense, which admits both imperfectives (stative verbs) as well as these perfectives which profile actions coextensive with the time of speaking. a further difference is that traditional descriptions are often highly vague and imprecise, while cg ones are not (cf. turewicz, 2000, pp. 27-32). an example of vagueness is found in the set of traditional rules included above, where in rule 3a. no explanation is offered as to why the example verb think refers to an action in one sentence and to a state in another. in contrast to traditional accounts, among the cg descriptions offered above no such descriptive vagueness nor imprecision is to be found. the next difference can also be stated in terms of a feature characterizing traditional descriptions, but not cg ones. this is the fact that when the rules concerning a particular grammatical area are considered in total, some contradictions among them become apparent. for instance, according to rule 4, the nonprogressive present is used with such verbs as promise and refuse, and, given the fact that the actions they denote may be considered dynamic, it contradicts rule 3, which states that the nonprogressive present tense refers to states. the cg description of the same grammatical area is devoid of such contradictions. the last difference is the fact that cg makes extensive use of pictorial and diagrammatic representations of the semantics of grammatical features, while traditional accounts do not. this is demonstrated by the preceding section, where the subsection with cg descriptions abounds in figures illustrating grammatical meanings, while the traditional description section does not contain any such illustrations. 7 for details of the examples cited in this part of table 1 see bielak (2007). teaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study 379 at this point, let us enumerate the possible learner benefits that the above features of cg descriptions may bring about, in contrast to, or to an extent greater than, traditional ones. all of these benefits but the first one are suggested by boers and lindstromberg (2006). first, the lack of arbitrariness and the lower number of rules to be assimilated it entails may result in the rules constituting a lesser burden on learners’ memory. second, the detailed analyses of grammatical meaning are supposed to result in deep processing and understanding of grammar and heightened language awareness. third, the meaningfulness of grammar and the use of pictorial representations may boost retention. finally, the lack or low degree of arbitrariness, vagueness and contradictoriness are expected to result in positive affect. it should be remembered that it is also possible to list some features of cg descriptions which may be potential drawbacks when cg is applied in pedagogy. among them is the weak motivation behind certain meanings/uses (boers & lindstromberg, 2006, pp. 320-321), the novel terminology of the theory and the high degree of abstractness of some of its concepts. the study as already mentioned, the study set out to explore the effectiveness of form-focused instruction based on cg and compare its effects with those of teaching based on traditional pedagogical descriptions. specifically, it sought to address the following research questions: is grammar teaching based on cg descriptions of grammatical elements effective? is there a difference between the effects of cg-inspired form-focused instruction and the same kind of instruction based on traditional pedagogical descriptions in both the short and the long run? the study reported here took the form of a quasi-experiment with a pretest-posttest design. the assessment procedure consisted of a pretest, given one week prior to the treatment, an immediate posttest (posttest 1), given one week after the treatment, and a delayed posttest (posttest 2), administered three weeks after the treatment, as specified in table 2. the data collected were subjected to quantitative analysis. it should also be mentioned that the study had been piloted, including its tests and instructional treatments. the study involved exposing two experimental groups to two different instructional treatments aimed at improving their control and use of the target forms. the treatment, which employed instructional materials devised by the present authors and lasted approximately 80 min, was based on traditional pedagogical grammars in one experimental group, and on cg descriptions in the jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak 380 other. hence, the two kinds of treatment were called traditional and cognitive, respectively. besides, a control group was included in the design of the study. table 2 research schedule week procedure 1 pretest 2 treatment (70-85 min) 3 posttest 1 4 posttest 2 participants the participants of the study were 50 polish grade one and two senior high school students, including 15 males and 35 females. on average, they had had 5.18 years of instruction in english, with considerable intra-group variation in this respect, and also with respect to the number of hours of instruction they had received, which makes the participants a typical mixed-level group. the participants were much more uniform when it comes to such factors as extracurricular instruction and out-of-school exposure, which were generally insignificant, and also as far as their motivation is concerned, which was instrumental in an overwhelming number of cases. the participants belonged to four intact classes, which constituted three groups for the purposes of the study. the first was labeled the traditional group (trad, n = 15), as it later received the traditional treatment; the second one was dubbed the cognitive group (cog, n = 21), as its treatment was cognitive; and the third one was designated as the control group (ctrl, n = 14). target forms the decision to focus on the meanings and use of the english present tense and progressive aspect, as well as stative (imperfective) and dynamic (perfective) verbs, was motivated by a host of practical, pedagogic and theoretical factors. first, for reasons of practical nature related to the institutional setting of the quasi-experiment, the target forms had to be relatively simple and amenable to instruction in one and a half hours. therefore, the decision to teach the progressive and nonprogressive present tense was made, as these grammatical elements are relatively simple, at least when compared with other elements of the english tense/aspect system. the choice of the target features was further restricted by focusing on the present tense with or without the progressive to refer to situations existing or happening at speech time. teaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study 381 additionally, certain verb types had to be ignored as well.8 although such decisions prevented the presentation of the grammatical material in greater complexity, they enabled the design of time-compact instructional treatments. in addition, pedagogical and theoretical considerations also influenced the choice of the target forms, which were supposed to constitute a challenge to the participants in terms of both explicit and implicit knowledge. they are too numerous to be discussed here in detail (for a more extensive discussion see bielak & pawlak, in press); it will suffice to say that they are related to such issues as the polish and english contrastive analysis, developmental sequences, the lack of transparent form-meaning-function relationships in some of the target features, their low salience in perception, and their semantic redundancy. it should be added that the semantic aspects of the target structures were at the centre of attention in the study, with form focused upon only incidentally in the feedback provided. instructional treatment the two experimental groups received their treatment during regularly scheduled school classes. the instructor delivering the treatment was one of the present authors. although the two kinds of treatment were different in essence, they employed exactly the same language data and were otherwise as similar as possible. all the metalinguistic comments and other instructions were in polish, which was necessitated by the low level of advancement of numerous participants. the duration of the treatment was originally intended to be the same in trad and cog. however, the pilot study revealed that the cognitive treatment, which required a more detailed discussion of the semantics of the target forms, had to be approximately 15 min longer than the 70 8 for instance, verbs which are best categorized as intermediate between stative and dynamic, such as the so-called stance verbs (e.g., sit, live) (cf. quirk et al. 1985, pp. 205ff), verbs of bodily sensation (e.g., hurt, tickle) (cf. quirk et al. 1985, p. 203) and the verb look were not covered by the instructional treatment as the exposition of some of their idiosyncratic features would have unduly stretched the treatment. in addition, even the kinds of dynamic verbs focused on were restricted in certain ways. for an influential taxonomy of dynamic verbs (and of lexical aspect) used in this footnote see vendler (1957). the treatment and tests excluded activities (atelic verbs), and they only included achievements and accomplishments (telic verbs), both of which have a more clearly defined beginning and end in comparison with activities. this was done because achievements and accomplishments are easier to account for with the use of the boundedness/unboundedness distinction used in the cognitive treatment. had the instruction and the tests also included activities, the treatment, and especially its cognitive version, would have had to be extended to accommodate these less prototypical dynamic/perfective verbs. jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak 382 min traditional treatment. instruction in both groups was aided by the use of two different handouts and power point presentations. because of its novelty, the following presentation of the cognitive treatment is much more detailed than that of the traditional treatment. a combination of learner performance and feedback instructional options (cf. ellis, 1997) was used in the two versions of the treatment. first, feature-focused, mostly inductive techniques were employed whose primary target was the participants’ explicit knowledge. in the case of trad, its purpose was teaching the participants certain of the traditional rules presented above. they may be summarized as follows: when we talk about a situation happening or existing at the time of speaking, we use the present simple with stative verbs, which refer to states (e.g., thoughts and feelings, nothing is changing in a state); and we use the present continuous with dynamic verbs, which refer to actions (something is happening, something is changing in actions) (see rules 1, 2 and 3 above). some verbs have different meanings in the sense that a given verb form sometimes refers to a state, and sometimes to an action. such verbs may be called stative-dynamic verbs. when they refer to a state, the present simple is used when we talk about a situation existing at speech time, and if they refer to an action, the present continuous is used (see rule 5). when we talk about a situation taking place at speech time and we use a verb referring to an action consisting in speaking, the present simple is used (see rule 4). the first part of the treatment offered to cog intended to teach the participants the major cg principles concerning the target features. what is offered here is a concise summary of this treatment (for a full account see bielak & pawlak, in press). the representations in figures 7 and 8 were used to teach the participants the cg view of the present tense, according to which it is used to mark a given situation as coextensive with the time of speaking. in the figures, the short time it takes to utter the polish example sentence (pol. zdanie) siedz na krze le ‘i am sitting on a chair,’ approximately 1-2 s, exemplifies the time reference of the present tense. figure 8 demonstrates that this time is so short that it may be likened to a keyhole.9 9 the keyhole idea was inspired by a technique proposed by niemeier (2005). teaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study 383 (zdanie) siedz na krze le 1-2 s t present tense (czas tera niejszy) figure 7 cognitive treatment: the present tense (zdanie) siedz na krze le 1-2 s t present tense (czas tera niejszy) figure 8 cognitive treatment: the present tense as a keyhole the next part of the treatment intended to confer to the participants, in a pedagogy-friendly manner, the cg view of imperfective processes as homogeneous and inherently contractible/expansible. towards this aim, a series of pictures similar to and including the ones in figures 9, 10 and 11 were used, in which the meaning of the verb trust in the sentence jerry trusted his girlfriend is portrayed. figure 9 shows that, if it is assumed that the trusting started on 1 january and terminated on 31 december, the sentence may be used to refer to a series of relations between these points in time consisting in jerry holding certain favorable beliefs about his jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak 384 girlfriend’s worth, goodness or reliability.10 however, the other two figures show that the same sentence, and generally verbs such as trust, may be used to refer not only to the whole length of the situation, but also to any subpart, which, due to its restricted extension, may be likened to what may be perceived through a keyhole. jerry trusted his girlfriend. 01.01 31.12 trust figure 9 cognitive treatment: the verb trust (1) jerry trusted his girlfriend. ok 01.01 31.12 15.03 30.04 trust figure 10 cognitive treatment: the verb trust (2) 10 in the figure, this general belief in the girlfriend’s overall integrity is pictorially represented as a belief in her piousness, which is just an example which might be easily replaced with many others, but was selected since it was quite easy to represent in pictorial form. teaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study 385 jerry trusted his girlfriend. 01.01 31.12 15.03 30 .04 trust figure 11 cognitive treatment: the verb trust and the keyhole next, the participants were made aware of the view that imperfective (stative) processes are inherently unbounded in their temporal scope, which makes them compatible with the nonprogressive present tense. the representation in figure 12 was used to highlight the fact that the endpoints of the process designated by trust are not important in the sense that there is no major change between the beginning of the situation and its end. this explains why dotting, rather than vertical lines, marks the endpoints of the timeline representing the process. at this point the participants were offered the following pedagogical rule: stative verbs may be used in the simple present because their endpoints are not important/relevant (the verbs do not describe change), so we can view their situations through the (small/short) keyhole of the present tense. jerry trusts his girlfriend. trust – present simple 1-2 s figure 12 cognitive treatment: the verb trust in the present simple jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak 386 subsequently, the participants focused on the cg view of perfective processes as heterogeneous and not inherently contractible/expansible. to achieve this, a series of pictures was used, including the ones in figures 13, 14 and 15, which render the meaning of the verb build in the sentence jerry built a castle, with the assumption that the action took place between 8:00 and 12:00. figures 14 and 15 demonstrate that it is not possible to refer to any subpart of the whole process of building the castle expressed by this sentence by using the sentence itself. figure 15 conveys this conclusion with the additional conceptualization of the shorter time span as a keyhole. jerry built a castle. 8:00 12:00 build figure 13 cognitive treatment: the verb build (1) jerry built a castle. 8:00 12:00 9:30 10:25 build figure 14 cognitive treatment: the verb build (2) teaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study 387 8:00 12:00 9:30 10:25 jerry built a castle. build figure 15 cognitive treatment: the verb build and the keyhole next, the treatment focused on the fact that perfective (dynamic) processes are inherently bounded in their temporal scopes, which makes them incompatible with the nonprogressive present. the representation in figure 16 underlined the cg assumption that the endpoints of the process symbolized by build and by other perfectives are important in the sense that there is some significant change between the beginning and the end of the situation; at the beginning the castle did not exist, and at the end of the process a complete castle was in existence. this is why the timeline for this verb in figure 16 begins and ends with vertical lines highlighting the importance of the endpoints between which there is a qualitative difference. at this point the participants were offered the following rule: dynamic verbs cannot be used in the simple present, because their endpoints are important/relevant (these verbs describe a change between these endpoints), so we cannot view their situations through the keyhole of the present tense since the endpoints are outside of it. jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak 388 8:00 12:00 jerry builds a castle. build – present simple 1-2 s figure 16 cognitive treatment: the incompatibility of the verb build with the present simple next, the imperfectivizing function of the progressive aspect and its interaction with the present tense and lexical aspect were focused on. this was done with the help of the representations in figures 17 and 18, which show that when the present progressive is used rather than the present simple with verbs such as build, the endpoints of the process cease to be important, and we are not interested in the change that occurs between them. at this point the participants were offered the following pedagogic formulation: dynamic verbs may be used in the present continuous, because in this tense their endpoints are not important/relevant, so we may view their situations through the keyhole (of the present tense). build build – present continuous figure 17 cognitive treatment: the verb build with the nonprogressive and progressive aspect teaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study 389 jerry is building a castle. build – present continuous 1-2 s figure 18 cognitive treatment: the verb build in the present progressive finally, the participants were exposed to the cg description of the compatibility of the performative verbs with the nonprogressive present tense with the help of the illustration in figure 19. they were then offered the following principle: when reference is made to the time of speaking, verbs referring to actions which consist in speaking are used in the present simple because these actions are as long as the time it takes to utter one sentence, so they are exactly as small (short) as the keyhole of the present tense. (zdanie) i promise i will ... 1-2 s t promise – present simple figure 19 cognitive treatment: the verb promise in the present simple jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak 390 the second part of instructional treatment in both experimental groups was in the form of three text manipulation tasks, which had the same form as the three tasks in the test, which is in turn described in more detail in the subsequent section. it will suffice to note here that their function was creating an opportunity for the participants to practice the target grammar. the activities were monitored by the instructor, who offered some overt feedback in the form of metalinguistic remarks, repetition, corrective recasts and focus on errors. obviously, the feedback in the two kinds of treatment was different, as it reflected the two sorts of descriptions used. data collection and analysis the testing instruments which provided the data in the whole project evaluated both controlled and spontaneous use of the target forms. the present paper concentrates only on the measure of mostly explicit knowledge, which took the form of a written discrete-item grammar test consisting of three parts. the first was a receptive knowledge selected response test in which the participants had to choose between a present simple and a present continuous verb phrase as part of a sentence or a longer exchange. the other two parts were productive knowledge constrained constructed response tasks. the first of these required the provision of the correct form of the base form of the verb given in brackets, again as part of a sentence or a longer exchange. in the next part, the participants read a sentence or a longer exchange written in polish and then completed its english translation, which contained a gap. a verb phrase was always required to complete it, and, to ensure the use of the types of verbs which were targeted by the treatment, the base forms were also provided. the test included an english-polish glossary and was administered within the time limit of 20 min by one of the present authors. because the split-block procedure was employed to ensure the same levels of difficulty of the pretest and the two posttests for each group, three versions of the test were designed (tests a, b and c). each group was divided into three subgroups which can be referred to as cog 1, cog 2, cog 3, trad 1, trad 2, and so forth. for the pretest, cog 1, trad 1 and ctrl 1 took test a; cog 2, trad 2 and ctrl 2 took test b; while cog 3, trad 3 and ctrl 3 took test c. on each subsequent test the versions a, b and c were shuffled so that everybody took a test he or she had not taken before. the maximum score was 72 points, as each of the three components included 12 items, each of which was worth maximally 2 points. in the binarychoice part, 2 points were awarded for the right response, and no points otherwise. for the remaining components, partial-credit scoring was used. specificalteaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study 391 ly, 2 points were awarded if the supplied verb phrase was both formally correct and appropriate, even if some minor spelling mistakes were present. one point was given if the form of the verb phrase was inaccurate in some way (e.g., if there was a problem with the auxiliary, as in she don’t weigh), but it was still clear which tense/aspect pairing the test taker had meant and if that was the right choice. no point was given if tense or aspect had been wrongly chosen, or if the form of the verb phrase was entirely incorrect, making it impossible to tell which tense/aspect pairing had been intended. obviously, if no answer was provided, no points were awarded, either. quantitative analysis involved computing the means and standard deviations for each of the three groups on the three tests as well as conducting one-way and repeated measures analyses of variance (anovas) together with the requisite post host tests (bonferroni, or games-howell if variances were not equal). the tests were conducted using the statistical package for the social sciences, version 19 for windows. results and discussion a one-way anova yielded no main effect for group (f(2, 47) = 1.01, p = .37) on the pretest (see table 3), and it was therefore concluded that any inter-group differences in subsequent analyses were not due to prior differences among the groups. the results of this test also supported the assumption that that original between-group differences were insignificant and therefore not responsible for differential performance the groups might display on subsequent tests. table 3 shows the means and standard deviations for the three groups on the tests, which measured accuracy and appropriateness in the use of the relevant tense/aspect pairings over three testing sessions. the means for these tests of mostly explicit knowledge are also plotted in figure 20 for easier inter-group comparisons. these data reveal that all the groups improved from the pretest to posttest 1, although the scores of the two experimental groups rose much more sharply than those of ctrl; cog improved by 7.26 points, trad by 11.14 points, while ctrl by mere 3 points. while the improvement of the experimental groups did not come as a surprise, ctrl’s progress was unexpected and should be probably attributed to the practice effect. ctrl’s performance on posttest 2 was very similar to that of trad in the sense that both deteriorated minimally, trad by 0.47 of a point and ctrl by 0.07 of a point, from posttest 1. this means that the earlier moderate gain of ctrl and the more pronounced gain of trad were basically maintained on posttest 2. this is different from the gains of cog, which were not just maintained but kept increasing from posttest 1 to posttest 2 to yield an improvement of 4.6 points. in the long run, between the first and the last test, ctrl improved just by 2.93 jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak 392 points, while the gains of trad and cog were much greater and quite similar to each other, 10.67 and 11.86 points respectively. table 3 means and standard deviations for all groups groups cog (n = 21) trad (n = 15) ctrl (n = 14) test m sd m sd m sd pretest 30.80 11.36 26.86 4.01 28.57 5.69 posttest 1 38.06 15.81 38.00 13.65 31.57 9.71 posttest 2 42.66 15.10 37.53 13.29 31.50 7.30 figure 20 means for all groups a repeated-measures anova with one between-subjects variable (treatment group) and one within-subjects variable (time of test) was performed on the raw scores of the three groups using a general linear model, and its results are presented in table 4. this test yielded the interaction of treatment group with time of test of statistical significance, with f(4, 94) = 2.51, p < .05, p 2 = .09, as well as significant main effects for time of test, with f(2, 94) = 20.30, p < .001, p 2 = .30, and no significant main effects for treatment, with f(2, 47) = 1.73, p = .18, p 2 = .06. these data mean that different treatment conditions resulted in significantly different scores at different times. it should be noted that the statistically significant results just reported 30.80 38.06 42.66 26.86 38.00 37.53 28.57 31.57 31.5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 pretest posttest 1 posttest 2 cog trad ctrl teaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study 393 are characterized by effect sizes which have to be regarded as either small (interaction of treatment group with time, p 2 = .09) or large (time, p 2 = .30) (cf. cohen, 1988). the first of these is close to but below the conventionally established medium value, which means that the results have to be treated with caution; their overall significance, however, was taken to be nonnegligible. given the fact that the pedagogic interventions took only up to 85 min, the significant result characterized by the effect size indicating that the interaction of time and treatment accounted for 9% of total variability in scores might still reveal a certain potential of the interventions. in the case of the second effect size, it meant that the time factor predicted 30% of the variance in test scores. table 4 repeated measures anova of the test scores across the two treatment and one control condition and the three testing sessions source df f p p 2 between subjects group (cog, trad, ctrl) 2 1.73 .18 .06 error 47 within subjects time 2 20.30 < .001 .30 time x group 4 2.51 < .05 .09 error 94 to further explore the effects of the two kinds of treatment on the scores, a series of one-way anovas and anovas with repeated measures for different groups were run. a one-way anova yielded a statistically significant result on posttest 2: f(2, 47) = 3.19, p = .05, p 2 = .11. since the test of homogeneity of variances was statistically significant, a games-howell post hoc test was used, which revealed a significant between-group contrast involving cog and ctrl (p < .05). it must have resulted from the fact that the steep pretestposttest 1 progress registered by both trad and cog was continued from posttest 1 to posttest 2 only by cog (improvement by 4.6 points), while both ctrl and trad generally stayed at their posttest 1 levels. furthermore, anovas with repeated measures found statistically significant discrepancies between different test scores of cog, with f(2, 40) = 17.47, p < .001, p 2 = .46, and of trad, with greenhouse-geisser correction f(1.40, 19.61) = 8.01, p < .01, p 2 = .36. these results indicate that the time factor accounted for at least 36% of the total variance in scores, which is a definitely large effect size. a summary of these significant and near-significant results, as revealed by repeated-measures anovas’ pairwise comparisons, as well as of the sole statisjakub bielak, miros aw pawlak 394 tically significant between-group difference, are provided in table 5. it should also be added that there were no statistically significant differences over time in the scores of ctrl. what appears from these analyses is that both kinds of treatment had a pronounced effect on test scores, inducing their significant improvement from the pretest to posttest 1. this rising trend was maintained on the delayed posttest, as the differences between the pretest and posttest 2 were also significant in the case of both experimental groups. table 5 summary of statistically significant and near-significant betweenand within-group differences between-group within-group pretest posttest 1 posttest 2 cog > ctrl cog pretest < posttest 1* posttest 1 < posttest 2 (p = .056, near-significant difference) pretest < posttest 2*** trad pretest < posttest 1** pretest < posttest 2** ctrl * p < .05 ** p < .01 *** p < .001 the results suggest that form-focused instruction based on cg may be at least moderately effective with respect to explicit grammatical knowledge. this follows from cog’s significant improvement from the pretest to posttest 1, from the pretest to posttest 2, as well as from its nearly significant improvement from posttest 1 to posttest 2. the same conclusion is supported by the statistically significant difference between the scores of cog and trad on posttest 2. the effectiveness cg-based instruction is pronounced cautiously, because there were no statistically significant differences between cog and ctrl on the immediate posttest. it should be remembered, however, that the treatment received by cog was rather short for such a complex and inherently difficult area of english grammar as tense and aspect. it may also be concluded that the effects of cg-inspired teaching were durable, as not only were cog’s immediate gains maintained, but they were actually improved from posttest 1 to posttest 2. when the effectiveness of teaching based on cg and that based on traditional descriptions are compared, the results provide no evidence of any major differences, as both kinds of treatment resulted in comparable teaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study 395 gains in terms of the use of the target structures in controlled reception and production. it should be borne in mind, however, that similar gains were brought about by treatments of slightly different duration, with cog’ treatment approximately 15 min longer. even though definitive answers may not be found, it is worth attempting to explain these results. the effectiveness of form-focused instruction based on cg and its durability may easily be explained by the general case for this kind of instruction presented earlier in the paper, as the cg descriptions drawn on in the cognitive treatment bore most of the pedagogically advantageous features discussed in that section. the favorable effects of instruction based on traditional descriptions and their durability are not particularly consonant with the potential disadvantages of this kind of teaching transpiring from the comparison with cg offered above. what may have outweighed the drawbacks of traditional descriptions is their relative simplicity, which may have been especially advantageous given the fact that the treatment was quite short. the finding that the two instructional options may produce comparable effects may be somewhat surprising as the pedagogy-oriented comparison of the cg and traditional descriptions seemed to favor the cg ones. one possible explanation is that the cognitive treatment, which was quite complex and therefore probably more challenging to the participants, was not highly relevant to this particular group of learners, in contrast to the traditional treatment. the term relevant is used here in swan’s (1994) sense, for whom a rule is relevant to the extent to which it respond to the needs of particular learners. given the fact that the participants were not a high-level group, the cognitive treatment may have been simply too complex and challenging to them, despite the fact that it relied on pedagogy-friendly, simplified renditions of the relevant cg descriptions. by contrast, the traditional treatment, which was relatively simple and with certain elements of which the participants may have been already familiar from earlier instruction, may not have posed a comparable challenge and might thus have been more relevant to their needs, especially in the case of those at lower levels of advancement. yet another explanation of basically the same effect of the two treatments has to do with the forms targeted. while the cognitive treatment made use of nuanced semantic analyses, in this particular case, due to the highly restricted focus of the treatment resulting from the practical considerations discussed earlier, there was no need to refer in it to pragmatic considerations. it is possible, however, that this is the area where cg has the most to contribute to form-focused instruction. if so, it is perhaps the case that grammatical features the description of which would be greatly facilitated by the inclusion jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak 396 of pragmatic information benefit most when subject to cg-inspired teaching, because such information rarely figures in traditional descriptions. another possible explanation of the comparable effects of the two kinds of treatment resembles the one proposed by tyler et al. (2010, p. 46) to account for the moderate effects of teaching english modals with the help of cg that they reported. no advantage of cg-based teaching over traditional instruction may have been due to the fact that the treatment in cog was relatively short and restricted to selected aspects of a handful of grammatical features. it might be argued that had the treatment been longer, and had it covered a wider range of grammatical features, or even the same features, but in finer detail, its effects, assuming a parallel extension of the traditional treatment, might have been better than those of that treatment. this is supported by the fact that cg offers a highly comprehensive and unified view of language, where basically the same constructs are used to characterize multiple, often seemingly remote grammatical phenomena. it therefore seems plausible that cg teaching may achieve its full potential only if it is implemented over more extended periods and covers a wider range of features and their uses. for instance, the notions of boundedness and unboundedness, which cg evokes to account for the difference between perfectives and imperfectives and the meaning of the progressive, are also at the foundation of the mass/count noun distinction in cg. moreover, because of their association with the -ing form, these notions are also evoked in cg to describe all of its other uses, including for instance the choice between the present participle and the base form after verbs of perception or the use of the progressive with the past tense and modals. considering the multitude of grammatical constructions in the teaching of which the notions of boundedness and unboundedness may be used suggests that if all of them were to be taught with the help of cg, this process might be greatly facilitated, as learners who once grasp the nature of the boundedness/unboundedness distinction may subsequently enjoy its benefits by simply applying it to a number of different areas of grammar. traditional instruction, by contrast, would probably place heavier demands on learners by necessitating their assimilation of new, unrelated (arbitrary) analyses or rules pertaining to each of these different grammatical features and their uses. conclusion the results of research reported in the paper endorse neither unqualified enthusiasm with respect to the employment of cg descriptions in grammar teaching nor their rejection as a possible alternative to traditional descriptions. it was concluded that cg-inspired instruction may be at least moderateteaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study 397 ly effective in terms of fostering the use of the target forms on the basis of mostly explicit knowledge, and its effects were found to be comparable to these achieved by employing traditional descriptions. it seems that these results should not discourage researchers from embarking on further exploration of the effectiveness of cg-based instruction. quite to the contrary, since they offer some evidence that this kind of instruction may be effective, further research seems to be required to achieve a more comprehensive picture of the strengths and liabilities of this kind of teaching. before some directions for future research are outlined, the limitations of the present study should be considered. a major limitation dictated by important practical considerations was the relative shortness of the treatment, and it was responsible for some other limitations. first, the practice part of the treatment lacked a truly communicative component, which may be essential to maximize the effectiveness of explicit instruction. second, the target forms and their uses were heavily restricted, which precluded any reference to pragmatic considerations. another important limitation also related to time is that the cognitive treatment, due to its greater complexity, had to be somewhat longer than the traditional treatment, which should be borne in mind when considering the finding that both kinds of instruction resulted in comparable gains. it is after all possible that if the treatment in trad had been of exactly the same duration as that in cog, trad’s results would have been much better than those of cog on posttest 1, and equally good on posttest 2. all of these limitations should be eliminated in subsequent research to achieve a better picture of the effectiveness of the two kinds of teaching. while considering the limitations of the study, let us also mention that given the fact that the participants had partially acquired the targeted features prior to the study, one cannot exclude the possibility that the latent knowledge they had in this area might have influenced their performance in subtle ways. this, however, is a woe that all researchers investigating the effects of formfocused instructions often have to face, and little can be done to eliminate it. some of the possible determinants of the results of the study might be manipulated in subsequent research. the first one is the considerable complexity of the cognitive treatment. although it may seem that cg descriptions tend to be inherently complex, it also seems that there is some room for finetuning the pedagogical renditions of these descriptions which occurred in the cognitive treatment. after all, this treatment has to be considered as a pioneering attempt to translate cg descriptions of elements of english tense/aspect into pedagogically exploitable formulations. also, the introduction of cg-based teaching earlier on in the educational process might be considered, which might also entail covering not just one or two points of gramjakub bielak, miros aw pawlak 398 mar, but a whole range of them, which seems to be particularly fitting if the conceptual unity and comprehensiveness of cg are taken into account. this might in fact result in cg-based teaching being of the same duration as that of traditional instruction, because familiarizing learners with cg concepts in a gradual manner might not require as elaborate explanations as the ones used in the cognitive treatment used in the present study. acknowledgements the authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their insightful comments as well as encouragement, which they found extremely useful and motivating when preparing the final draft and which are bound to enhance their future research and its reporting. teaching english tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study 399 references achard, m. 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(1957). verbs and times, the philosophical review, 66, 143-160. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: miros aw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: mariusz kruk (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) vol. 2 no. 1 march 2012 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (trinity college, dublin) simon borg (university of leeds) piotr cap (university of ód ) anna cie licka (texas a&m international university, adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) kata csizer (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) krystyna dro dzia -szelest (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabry -barker (university of silesia) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of ód ) jan majer (university of ód ) anna micho ska-stadnik (university of wroc aw) anna ni egorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) terrence odlin (ohio state university) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) pawe scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) david singleton (trinity college, dublin) odzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) merrill swain (university of toronto) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of ód ) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – pozna 2012 editor: miros aw pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak mariusz kruk anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydzia pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam pozna proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print and online, with the print edition being the original version. published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, pozna contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy wiat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. wierzawska 1, 60-321 pozna studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 2, number 1, march 2012 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors ....................................................................... 5 editorial ............................................................................................ 7 articles: xiaoli jiang, andrew d. cohen – a critical review of research on strategies in learning chinese as both a second and foreign language..................... 9 ma gorzata baranucarz – ego boundaries and attainments in fl pronunciation ..................................................................................... 45 déogratias nizonkiza – quantifying controlled productive knowledge of collocations across proficiency and word frequency levels .......... 67 hadi farjami – efl learners’ metaphors and images about foreign language learning ............................................................................... 93 darío luis banegas – integrating content and language in english language teaching in secondary education: models, benefits, and challenges ............................................................................................... 111 book reviews ................................................................................. 137 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 143 5 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors darío luis banegas is a teacher of english, holds an ma in elt, and is a phd student at warwick university. he works as a secondary school teacher, advisor, and curriculum designer at ministerio de educación del chubut, argentina. he is also involved in teacher education programmes, international projects with the british council, and research projects. his main interests are materials development, clil, and action research for teacher development. contact details: (e-mail: d.l.banegas@warwick.ac.uk) ma gorzata baranucarz received her phd degree in applied linguistics in 2004 with a dissertation entitled field independence as a predictor of success in foreign language pronunciation acquisition and learning. she is an assistant professor at the university of wroc aw and since 1998 has been a teacher at the teacher training college in wroc aw. her main areas of interest are methodology of fl teaching, sla (particularly with regard to individual learner differences and fl pronunciation acquisition), psycholinguistics, phonetics and pronunciation pedagogy. contact details: (e-mail: mbaran-lucarz@ifa.uni.wroc.pl) andrew d. cohen, a professor in phased retirement from the program in second language studies at the university of minnesota, has researched language learner strategies since the early 1970s. he has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on language learning, language assessment, and research methods. among his recent books are language learner strategies with macaro (oxford, 2007), teaching and learning pragmatics: where language and culture meet with ishihara (pearson, 2010), and most recently strategies in learning and using a second language (2nd ed., pearson). he is currently learning his 12th language, mandarin, and studying the strategies he is using. contact details: (e-mail: adcohen@umn.edu) 6 hadi farjami is an assistant professor at the department of english language and literature, semnan university, iran. he has taught efl, eap and teacher training courses for 15 years. he has published articles in international and national journals and authored and coauthored efl textbooks. contact details: (e-mail: zzmhadi@yahoo.com) xiaoli jiang is an associate professor at the school of foreign languages, renmin university of china. she obtained her ba in english language and literature from the beijing normal university, her ma in english language teaching from warwick university, england, and her phd in english education and applied linguistics from the same institution. she has published articles in system, studies in higher education, and the asian eflj, as well as several book chapters in international publications. she recently received a distinguished teaching award in china, and was awarded a fulbright in the united states to do research on strategies in learning chinese for the 2011-2012 academic year. contact details: (e-mail: xiaoli.jiang@gmail.com) déogratias nizonkiza is a phd student at the university of antwerp, investigating the relationship between lexical competence and l2 proficiency. his research interests include the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and l2 proficiency; collocation growth, testing, and teaching; and the role of collocations in academic texts. nizonkiza is also an assistant lecturer at the department of english language and literature, university of burundi. contact details: (e-mail: deogratias.nizonkiza@student.ua.ac.be) agnieszka szefer received her ma in polish in 1996, and a ba in applied linguistics (english and german) in 2009. she has been an english teacher for 20 years, working with students at various school levels, and with different educational needs. she is also a phd student at the school of english of adam mickiewicz university, pozna . her main areas of interest are english phonetics, teaching esl, ict in call, and virtual learning environments. her research focuses on education in second life. contact details: (e-mail: agnieszka-szefer@wp.pl) 159 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (1). 2020. 159-176 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.1.8 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt my many selves are still me: motivation and multilingualism1 amy s. thompson west virginia university, morgantown, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4505-1755 amy.thompson@mail.wvu.edu abstract two concepts of multilingualism that relate to the selves aspect of dörnyei’s (2009) l2 motivational self system (l2mss) are highlighted in this article: thompson’s concept of perceived positive language interaction (ppli) and henry’s notion of the ideal multilingual self. with the dynamic model of multilingualism informing both concepts (herdina & jessner, 2002; jessner, 2006, 2008), the intangible advantage that multilingual speakers have over monolingual speakers is clearly articulated in the discussion of this topic. the interconnectivity of language systems is an inherent aspect of the dmm; as such, both thompson with ppli and henry with the ideal multilingual self incorporate the dmm as a framework to indicate the fluid nature of these constructs as additional language learning experiences are added to the system over time. this article further explores the dynamicity of multilingual learners’ language systems and the influences that induce change. specifically, data from thompson’s (2017b) study on lote learners are reexamined to explore this question. additionally, excerpts from natasha lvovich’s (1997) the multilingual self, an autobiography of an l1 russian speaker, are analyzed to present different possible models of incorporating the multilingual self and ppli. the article ends with a discussion of an inherently multilingual context, as well as thoughts regarding the possibility of different types of future selves. keywords: perceived positive language interaction (ppli); ideal multilingual self; l2 motivational self system; multilingualism; motivation 1 i dedicate this publication to kimi nakatsukasa, my dear multilingual friend, who lived a life that was full, yet far too short. amy s. thompson 160 1. introduction to “selves” qui suis-je? ¿quién soy? ben kimim? who am i? this is a question that resonates with all of us, no matter in which language the question is formulated. as mercer (2014) states, reflecting briefly on the question of ‘who you are’ leaves you with a multitude of selfdescriptions, incorporating a range of self-related cognitions, beliefs, emotions, motives, roles, relationships, memories, dreams and goals, as well as expressions of who you feel you are not. the self is the hub at the centre of all our lived experiences. (p. 160) the languages we use, and the way that we are exposed to them, are at the epicenter of our conceptualization of self. multilinguals, operationalized in this article as those who have experience with more than one second/foreign language, have the advantages of multiple world views with every turn of phrase. for an l1 english speaker, pondering “who am i?” in multiple languages illustrates not only the metaphorical complexities of the question, but also foregrounds the linguistic implications. in french, why is this one of the only instances of first-person singular subject-verb inversion for question formulation? why does spanish require a question mark in both opening and closing? where is the copula represented in the turkish sentence? certainly, the conceptualization of self is much more complex than a learner expressing first person singular differently in a variety of languages. mercer and williams (2014) dedicated an edited volume to the variety of ways that the self can be conceptualized in sla. mercer and williams (2014) indicate that “there are many different ways to conceptualize, define and thus measure the self” (p. 177). in the same volume, ushioda (2014) elaborates on the many internal and external self-related cognitions that are related to language learning motivation: factors internal to the self include the various self-related cognitions briefly mentioned earlier (i.e., cognitions by the self and cognitions about the self), as well as attitudinal and affective factors (e.g., enjoyment, anxiety) and individual characteristics (e.g., gender, developmental age, personality). on the other hand, factors external to the self comprise the broad complex of social, cultural and contextual factors that may influence individual motivation, such as interactions with significant others (e.g., teachers, parents, peers), specific features of the learning environment (e.g., classroom tasks and materials) or less visible aspects of the wider sociocultural context (e.g., educational values and cultural beliefs). (pp. 130-131) this bourgeoning interest in including people’s multi-faceted and contextualized language learning experiences has also been especially evidenced in motivation research, as can be seen in the fall 2017 special issue of the modern language journal, as well as in other recent publications. in particular, may (2014) calls my many selves are still me: motivation and multilingualism 161 attention to what ortega (2014) refers to as the monolingual bias, or when language scholars take monolingualism as the default norm in studying language acquisition. individuals with more than one language learning experience do not experience learning subsequent languages in the same way as those who are starting with the native language as the only linguistic system to which they have access. 2. objectives and framework it is the concept of the internally formulated and externally influenced selves that is the current focus of this piece. specifically, this article examines two concepts of multilingualism that relate to the selves aspect of dörnyei’s (2009) l2 motivational self system (l2mss): thompson’s concept of perceived positive language interaction (ppli, 2016) and henry’s (2017) notion of the ideal multilingual self. at the core, the conceptualization of self and motivation in language learning was popularized by dörnyei’s (2009) l2mss. in brief, the l2mss draws on markus and nurius’ (1986) concept of possible selves, and higgins’ (1987) selfdiscrepancy theory (sdt). thompson (2017b) describes the l2mss as a two-part theory: the conceptualization of selves (ideal and ought-to) and the contextualized learning experience. the ideal self is the self that the learner would like to become in terms of language use (promotion focus) and the ought-to self is the self that the learner feels he or she should become in terms of language use (prevention focus). the process by which the learners acquire the target language and the context in which they find themselves, both of which influence the formation of the selves, comprise the second part of the l2mss – the learning experience. particularly relevant to this article is sdt and the conceptualization of the different selves involved. higgins discusses an actual self (the current state of the learner) juxtaposed with the ideal and ought selves; the latter two are both what markus and nurius would label as future selves (i.e., the imagined future selves of the learner). higgins also disentangled four main types of self-discrepancies: actual/own with ideal/own; actual/own with ideal/other; actual/own with ought/own; and actual/own with ought/other. as thompson and vásquez (2015) indicate: the l2mss does not strongly articulate the ‘i’ versus ‘other’ dimensions of self-discrepancy theory. thus, the question arises whether there can be an ‘other’ dimension in the ideal l2 self (the construct with a focus on ‘i’), and an ‘i’ dimension in the ought-to l2 self (the construct with a focus on ‘other’), which would be more congruent with higgins’s self-discrepancy theory. (p. 170) as mercer and williams (2014) note, there are many other selves in the language learning literature; for example, thompson and vásquez’s (2015) antiought-to self, which is a self that forms with the desire to reject expectations or amy s. thompson 162 that thrives in challenging situations (also see thompson, 2017a, for elaboration), comes directly from a re-interpretation of the “i”/other” dimension of sdt. other selves, such as those connected to a specific profession or activity, such as an ideal teacher self, have also been proposed in the literature (i.e., gao & xu, 2014), as has a bildungs-selbst ‘educational self’ (busse, 2017), which is another type of future self. the following sections will examine the role of context and experiences on multilingualism and self formation. of particular focus are the internally situated constructs of ppli and the ideal multilingual self. throughout the article, theoretical underpinnings and implications of the person-in-context perspective of these two constructs will be portrayed, and the dynamicity of perceptions of multilingualism and self formation will be illuminated. both quantitative and qualitative analyses are presented in this article, as both types of analyses can illustrate the dynamicity of perceived positive interactions between languages studied and the types of selves developed. for example, as is explained below, a content analysis of short answer questions is used to group participants with those who perceive positive interactions between languages studied and those who do not (the ppli construct). the participant answers are then used to support and explain the quantitative findings of the group differences. thus far, the ideal multilingual self has been primarily supported by qualitative data. however, henry and thorsen (2017) provided the results of the ideal multilingual self measured quantitatively. further quantitative measurements of selves have been illustrated by dörnyei and chan (2013) and thompson (2017b); both of these studies use exploratory factor analyses to support the concept of distinct selves in different languages. as such, considering the context and added language learning experiences through time are both necessary when conceptualizing the dynamicity of learning multiple languages, as are the use of both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. 3. the internally situated constructs of ppli and the ideal multilingual self as mercer (2014) writes, “it is perhaps stating the obvious to say that the self is complex” (p. 160). the dynamic interchange between more than one second language increases the complexity even more, as it is related to the formation of the self or selves and language learning motivation. two recent frameworks used in motivation and multilingualism research to illustrate the cognitive representations of learners’ language systems are thompson’s theory of perceived positive language interaction (ppli, 2016) and henry’s (2017) concept of the ideal multilingual self. both of these constructs incorporate the dynamic model of multilingualism (dmm; herdina & jessner, 2002; jessner, 2006, 2008) in their overarching theoretical development. the dmm addresses how linguistic systems my many selves are still me: motivation and multilingualism 163 of multilingual speakers are interrelated; the so-named m-factor (or a special characteristic that only multilingual individuals have) in this theory is representative of the intangible advantage multilingual speakers have in “language learning, language management, and language maintenance” (herdina & jessner, 2002, p. 131). the interconnectivity and dynamicity of a learner’s language systems is a fundamental aspect of the dmm, a characteristic that both ppli and the ideal multilingual self share. ppli (e.g., thompson, 2016) is a learner variable that has been used to explore a variety of individual differences, including motivation (e.g., thompson, 2017b; thompson & erdil-moody, 2016). as mentioned previously, dmm was one of the frameworks used in the formation of ppli; several other theories, such as kellerman’s (1979) concept of perceived language distance and odlin’s (1989, updated in 2008) theory of interlingual identification, were also used when first conceptualizing ppli. both perceived language distance and interlingual identification emphasize the importance of the learner’s perception of relatedness in terms of language transfer. in other words, the importance of the perception of language relatedness outweighs the actual typological similarities between the languages in question. ppli also draws from de angelis’ (2007) concept of the relatively small amount of language exposure needed to affect subsequent acquisition. in terms of data analysis in the ppli framework, participants answer the question: “if you have studied other languages in the past, do you think that this has helped or hindered your ability to learn subsequent languages? please provide specific examples where appropriate.” the answers are oftentimes used as examples of specific themes, but for a quantitative analysis, learners are placed into ppli and nppli (no perceived positive language interaction) groups based on the answers to these questions. an example of an answer that would place a learner into the ppli group is as follows: i think learning spanish before japanese has helped me with being able to translate from a foreign language to english and the other way around. i think spanish also really helped me understand pronunciation and phonetic sounds. an example of an answer that would place a learner in the nppli group is as follows: i believe learning spanish hindered my ability to learn other languages. thompson (2016, p. 97) provides additional useful tips and examples for coding open-ended comments via the ppli framework. for example, six coding tips are included: amy s. thompson 164 1. verify that the participants in question are multilingual (i.e., that they have studied at least two languages beyond the l1). the information should be independently collected in a separate part of the background questionnaire. bilingual participants (those with only one language beyond the l1) cannot be classified as ppli. 2. read the response and identify if a perceived positive language interaction has been stated. 3. eliminate responses that indicate positive interactions involving the l1 and an l2 (these are interesting, but are outside the scope of the ppli framework). 4. remember that responses such as “i’m not sure” or “neither positive nor negative” do not qualify for ppli. 5. if a participant states both positive and negative interactions, the ppli coding can be used if the participant’s overall feeling is that the interactions are positive. a nppli coding will be used if the participant’s overall feeling is that the interactions were negative. 6. ppli coding is by default subjective. it is always a good idea to have a second or third rater coding the answers for interrater reliability. as an example of coding tip #5 (indicating both positive and negative interactions with a final ppli coding), the following quotation was given: of course, there was an interaction. thanks to english, i learned other languages more easily because the grammar rules were almost the same. however, i had trouble at first with german. for instance, i would write ‘and’ instead of ‘und.’ except for these it affected positively. (thompson, 2016, p. 97) having previously written about motivation and multilingualism in the l2mss framework, henry (2017) introduces the ideal multilingual self. influenced by the dmm and aronin’s (2016) concept of multilinguality, the essence of the multilingual self is that a learner’s motivational systems are interrelated to form a multilingual motivational self system. this multilingual motivational self system has various multilingual self guides, two of which are the ideal multilingual self and the contentedly bilingual self: “while the contentedly bilingual self can have the effect of further weakening the power of the ideal ly self, the ideal multilingual self can have the opposite effect, enhancing the strength of the ideal ly self” (henry, 2017, p. 554). the ideal multilingual self and ppli are both internally-situated constructs, and they both explore the mental representations of the interconnectivity of a learner’s language systems. as herdina and jessner’s dmm is central to both ppli and the ideal multilingual self, both constructs highlight the dynamicity of the language learning process when multiple languages are involved. my many selves are still me: motivation and multilingualism 165 4. contextualized selves and ppli: implications of the person-in-context perspective specific languages studied in particular contexts affect the development of various motivational selves (e.g., ushioda, 2009). huang, hsu, and chen (2015) in the taiwanese context, for example, examine learners with english as an l2 and either french, german, japanese, or korean as an l3. using multiple regression analyses with ideal and ought-to selves, learning experience, cultural interest, career opportunity, and role obligation, intended learning effort were predicted for the five languages in question. the ideal self and cultural interest were the strongest predictors for the french sample and the weakest predictors in the english sample. identification with social role obligations was the strongest predictor for english and the weakest for japanese. the ought-to self was only a significant predictor of english, japanese, and german (and not for french and korean). the predictive strengths of specific languages on the different types of selves is related to the social constructs around the languages in question. in the us context, re-examining the data from thompson (2017b) for language specificity, it can be observed that the lowest percentage of ppli learners can be found with those who study spanish (see table 2 and figure 2); it is also the case that with the spanish students, there were fewer who had studied an additional language (see table 1 and figure 1). both of these trends are undoubtedly related to the us context and the role of spanish therein. spanish is currently the most-taught language in both secondary and post-secondary levels in the us context. if a language other than english is required or preferred for a job in this context, the preference is oftentimes spanish. thus, students who study spanish are likely influenced positively regarding the marketability of the language, while at the same time being negatively influenced by the oftentimes negative discourse in the media about spanish and spanish-speaking populations (e.g., garcía & mason, 2009). the complex relationship with spanish in the us context undoubtedly influences students’ language learning motivation, and also influences the dynamic interactions of multiple languages that take place in such a complex socio-political setting. table 1 bilingual and multilingual participants: spanish versus other lotes spanish (n = 78) all other languages (n = 148) multilingual 45 121 bilingual 33 27 amy s. thompson 166 figure1 percentages of bilinguals and multilinguals in spanish and other lotes table 2 ppli and nppli participants: spanish versus all other languages spanish (n = 78) all other languages (n = 144) ppli 31 89 nppli 47 55 the highest number of ppli participants (n = 89) are those learners who have a language other than spanish as the first foreign language studied. for the total number of languages other than english (lotes) other than spanish, 89/144 (61.8%) of the participants have internalized the positive interactions between languages studied into their linguistic systems. an opposite trend is found with the spanish learners; the lowest number of participants fall into the ppli spanish group (n = 31), or 31/78 (39.7%) of the spanish learners. within the spanish group, there are fewer learners in the ppli group (n = 31) than in the nppli group (n = 47). the opposite is true for the group composed of those who studied lotes other than spanish. there are more learners in the ppli group (n = 89) than in the nppli group (n = 55). figure 2 pictorial representation of ppli/nppli learners with spanish versus other lotes 15% 12% 20% 53% bilingual spanish bilingual other languages multilingual spanish multilingual other languages 0 20 40 60 80 100 ppli spanish nppli spanish ppli other languages nppli other languages my many selves are still me: motivation and multilingualism 167 what can this data tell us? even though spanish is the most common language studied in the us context, it does not possess the same utilitarian value as english as a global language. thus, students may feel obliged to study spanish because of the relative abundance of spanish speakers in the us but it is possible that not as many internalize it as those who study languages other than spanish. this is not the case for all learners of spanish, however, as 33 out of the 78 spanish students did perceive positive interactions between languages studied. perceiving positive language interactions allow learners to formulate a mental representation of the learning experience that is beyond the separate language systems studied. this perceived positive interaction is akin to henry’s idea of the ideal multilingual self, a self that is conceived beyond the selves that are formed for the separate languages in question. without at least two foreign language experiences, people are not able to have the m-factor, that is, conceptualize positive interactions between languages. it is possible that in primarily l1 english contexts, another dominant language, such as spanish in the us, might result in learners having a “contentedly bilingual self” as suggested with henry’s (2017) swedish learners of english. the situations are not directly comparable, however. the use of english in sweden is so prevalent, that some have even argued that it should be considered a second, as opposed to a foreign, language, and most swedes have a high competency in the language (sylvén & thompson, 2015). in the us context, it is sometimes the case that the language studied is oftentimes not used frequently outside of the classroom context. 5. ppli and the ideal multilingual self in a language learning narrative whereas the previous section utilized quantitative data to explore the dynamicity of ppli, particularly in terms of students of spanish, this section explores the use of autobiographical narratives to examine ppli and the ideal multilingual self. the use of language learning narratives as data has been considered a recognized practice only recently. as pavlenko (2007) indicates, such narratives provide a unique insider perspective to the language learning process, or “people’s private worlds” (p. 164). the learner who is interviewed, or as in this case, who writes the autobiography, chooses the specific topics and situations to emphasize. the resulting narratives turned data are the learner’s perspective of the truth. if multiple languages are involved, the learner provides evidence for the interactions and dynamicity of multiple language learning processes. as such, natasha lvovich’s (1997) the multilingual self is an example of another perspective of how to integrate ppli and the ideal multilingual self, while at the same time theorizing how a multilingual learner conceptualizes her selves in different languages. the text was read multiple times for several rounds of coding. amy s. thompson 168 structural coding was first employed to find all excerpts of development of selves and perceived interactions between languages studied in the autobiographical narrative. for the second round of coding, focused coding (an adaptation of selective and axial coding) was used to organize the data into salient themes (saldaña, 2016), and the excerpts presented are examples of the salient themes found. evident through the text is the consistently shifting concept of self and interactions between languages that lvovich expresses as she expands her language learning experiences. throughout the book, lvovich primarily expresses language-specific selves (e.g., dörnyei & chan, 2013; thompson, 2017b), primarily with a focus on her french self. desperate to have an escape from her situation in the soviet union, lvovich created a french self with the encouragement of role models, such as yulia, her grandmother, who was “a recipient and simultaneously a facilitator of all my french life, information, impressions, and emotions” (p. 8). natasha was determined to become french, so to speak, visualizing the variety of situations needed to make this possible: i had to learn to do everything a french person does: speak with a parisian accent, joke about domestic politics, sing children’s songs, read and enjoy grotesque detective stories in argot as well as the most sophisticated literature, write in french in any style, curse, gesticulate, give speeches, count mentally, and dip the imagined croissant into coffee. i had to know how the french make their beds, talk on the phone, write business letters, and cook meals from different provinces. (p. 2) this french self was created as an escape or sort of safety net because “a french personality, after all, was much less confusing and safer than being a jew in soviet russia. it was a beautiful me, the me that i liked” (p. 8-9). as ideal selves inevitably do, natasha’s french self shifted, based on the context. after eventually immigrating to the us, she no longer needed the safety net of being french: “and then it started to make sense to me. i did not have to continue being french in america” (p. 72). the shift in her perception of self in french did not mean she no longer had an affinity to the language; it just meant that she no longer needed her french self to survive. lvovich’s english self was a less confident one than her french self, especially at first. indeed, she had aspects of a feared self in english, something that was not present in her french self: “what will i do when my english is not their english?” (p. 56). readers can sense the difference in her feelings towards english versus her feelings towards french; natasha also compares learning the two languages: something is missing in my way of functioning in english. something substantial, important, which does not let me enjoy my linguistic performance. it is like i am floating on the surface of the ocean, giving curious glances into its depth. it’s like i am fishing for a deeper essence, and sometimes i get some fish, but they are separate fishes, my many selves are still me: motivation and multilingualism 169 not the overall picture, with everything lying there, on the bottom. frustrating. sometimes i felt that way in french, too, but i always ended up sensing the whole structure of everything, in meanings and words, inward and outward, at any level, in any dimension . . . i don’t like america. i hate new york. i hate my life. (p. 61) from the excerpt, it is clear that lvovich’s feeling towards english is affected by her feeling towards her living situation (i.e., new york). she reflects on learning english via her experience of learning french and sees the positive effects that french has on her language learning experience (despite the fact that she preferred the process of learning french). in other words, she exhibits the characteristics of other ppli learners illustrated in previous research: could i have become more proficient in english as fast as that, without being fluent in french? could i embrace and feel the depth of the culture? would i meet so many wonderful people if i had not loved my french friends? would i have been able to continue to be a linguist, a writer, a scholar, a researcher – a creator, without my french life? (p. 72) before arriving in the us, she and her family also had a brief stay in italy. interestingly, she did not discuss language interactions between italian and french; however, there is a brief mention of how latin helped her with italian: “yes, latin made me admire the language form – maybe that was my first exposure to structuralism?” (pp. 46-47). it is perhaps the case that no real attachment was formed with italian because of the feeling of non-permanence. they were “stuck in italy, lost between two worlds and overwhelmingly confused . . . meanwhile, i am learning italian” (p. 44). the italian learning was something to pass the time, but it did not seem to be integrated into her developing self system as much as french was at first and how english became later. lvovich, similar to anecdotes of other language learners found in previous research, seemed to conceptualize different selves in different languages: “with each language and each identity, there will be more life, more love, and more growing. multiplicity is the adjustment” (p. 73). at the same time, however, there is an instance in which she exhibits a sort of ideal multilingual self in the form of being “a linguist:” i am a linguist. what difference does it make for a linguist, which language to learn, which language to teach? i can enjoy the process of constructing the language, mentally building rules and systems, taking notes of irregularities, and admiring – yes, admiring the beauty of linguistic logic. i know i am learning. i am learning very fast, all by myself, like an experienced linguist should do, like i always did. i am learning from people around me, form shopping, form office signs, and from my own teaching. i am learning from trying to become once again what i have always been: a linguist. (pp. 59-60) amy s. thompson 170 using these excerpts from lvovich’s book, we can see the interplay between her french, english, and italian selves. we can also see evidence of ppli between french and english, as well as a separate ideal multilingual self. using the evidence at hand, we can start to conceptualize the interaction of ppli and the ideal multilingual self, as well as the integration of the ideal multilingual self into the language system. more empirical data from a diverse population of language learners would lead to further development of the hypothesized models. figure 3 was created to show one possibility in which the ideal multilingual self is the background context with the french, english, and italian selves situated within it, according to lvovich’s narrative. ppli is evident for the french and english selves, but not for the italian self. figure 3 the ideal multilingual self as the background self figure 4 was created to illustrate the same system, conceptualized slightly differently. in figure 4, the ideal multilingual self is connected to the three language selves and is still a factor in the ppli conceptualization. as noted above, further research with more empirical data can be used to develop these models further. figure 4 the ideal multilingual self directly connected to the language-specific ideal selves my many selves are still me: motivation and multilingualism 171 how would learners, such as lvovich, develop their ideal multilingual self? how would this development be related to the ppli construct? as dörnyei and al-hoorie (2017) state, “from the perspective of the current version of the l2 motivational self system, such a ‘multilingual self’ does not lend itself easily to actual visualization, because the visionary aspect of the theory has mostly been operationalized as imagining oneself using one l2 in a concrete situation” (p. 459). however, henry (2017) argues that the abstract images conjured for an ideal multilingual self are that of the “essence of the experience” (p. 557, italics in original), and that it focuses the attention “inwards towards the individual’s central, intrinsic, and more generally idealistic concerns” (p. 558, italics in original). nevertheless, the question remains of what those who conceptualize an ideal multilingual self use for visualization; perhaps what is visualized are the language interactions as conceptualized in the ppli construct, but more research is needed on this matter. one thing is certain – both ppli and the multilingual self are dynamic, changing with each language learning experience. for example, thompson and vásquez (2015) investigated the developing selves of several advanced language learners turned language teachers of german, chinese, and italian. the participant who studied and later taught italian, vera, started her journey with an abstract image of wanting to be bilingual: “i had this goal in life – i wanted to be bilingual. i always knew that. i don’t know why but i did” (p. 163). vera’s ideal self was originally non-language specific, but as she ended up in italy, her ideal italian self overshadowed her more general ideal self. was the generic ideal self able to be overshadowed because of vera’s status of an l1 english speaker? perhaps, but in other research, relatively few of the total number of participants seemed capable of conceptualizing a more general multilingual self (e.g., busse, 2017). busse suggested that these students might have “an overarching plurilingual ideal bildungs-selbst [educational self]” (p. 578), and lasagabaster (2017) warns that language learners need to be in harmony with individual selves (ideal and ought-to), as well as the multilingual self (p. 592). as several researchers have suggested the existence of a sort of overarching ideal self for learners of multiple languages, the existence and representation of this phenomenon is ripe for future exploration. 6. multiple language learning selves in inherently multilingual contexts one of the few authors who studies inherently multilingual context is coetzee-van rooy (2014), who proposed a multilingual language learning self. unlike the multilingual self that other researches (e.g., henry & ushioda) have proposed, coetzeevan rooy bases this multilingual self primarily on the ought-to self dimension – individuals in these contexts feel that they need to be communicative in a variety of different languages depending on the context in order to fit in to society as a whole. amy s. thompson 172 in her 2014 study, her multilingual southern sotho and zulu participants know many languages, using some more than others on a regular basis, and hers is the first mention of a type of multilingual self in the applied linguistics literature: i want to argue that, linked to the ‘sociolinguistic language mode’ of an environment, the language learning self can be conceptualised as a multilingual language learning self. in the minds of people living in these types of environments there is an expectation that members learn many languages as part of their ordinary behaviour as integrated citizens that belong to the society . . . the ‘ought to language self’ in a multilingual language mode society directs people to believe that if they are not multilingual in this society, they do not ‘fit in’, because well-integrated citizens in this society are multilingual. this idea finds support from bamgbose (1994, p. 34), who argues that a person who speaks several languages is to be regarded as a better integrated citizen than one who is only proficient in one language in african contexts. (coetzee-van rooy, 2014, p. 124) similarly, thompson (in press) describes the experiences of a multilingual senegalese english teacher, ablaye (pseudonym). his schooling was primarily in french when he was growing up, but he started to seriously study english at the university. during the interview, he compares learning english to learning french, and insists that “english is easier than french.” interestingly, ablaye did not discuss his native languages, wolof and serer, until he was explicitly asked about them. in his answer, he spoke about his daily use of these languages: ablaye: in the street when i talk to people and children. yeah, but i learned serer in my family. everybody speaks serer, and i learned serer from them. i learned wolof in the street meeting people. what this means is that i learned both languages at the same time. it means in my house, in my family, we speak serer. whenever you go out, everybody can’t speak serer, so it is wolof. and i learned both languages at the same time, but i consider serer to be my first language. in this case, ablaye displays what coetzee-van rooy describes as the multilingual language learning self. ablaye has developed a strong ideal english teaching self, indicated in his interview as a sense of pride in statements such as: “yes, [i’m] most interested in english. and whenever i see somebody speaking english, i don’t speak french. i speak to him in english. in our country it is what we are doing. we english teachers, we speak english.” however, it is clear that he also uses french, serer, and wolof as needed in daily interactions. student q in coetzee-van rooy describes a similar situation with regard to language use: “and sotho i learned at home with my grandparents, cos i stay with my grandparents . . . and then zulu i learned as i visited my mother and my father in soweto. cos they stay in soweto . . . and xhosa. cos my mother’s family, my mother’s side of the family is xhosa, my father’s side is zulu. so when i visited them [mother and my many selves are still me: motivation and multilingualism 173 father’s family], that’s how i learned those different languages [xhosa and zulu]” (p. 133). thompson’s senegalese participant, ablaye, and coetzee-van rooy’s southern sotho and zulu participants all have multiple languages that they use daily, which is a distinct situation than those language learners who learn multiple languages primarily by formalized mechanisms, such as in a classroom. 7. concluding thoughts ppli and the self concepts have primarily been situated in contexts in which multilingualism is a learned phenomenon (i.e., in formal settings, such as a classroom). of course, there are large parts of the world, which are largely understudied in terms of multilingual and applied linguistics research, where multilingualism is a normal part of everyone’s daily life. additionally, both ppli and the self concepts have primarily been investigated in contexts where learning a language is a choice, or at least part of the required schooling (i.e., additive bilingualism). the choice of learning a language is quite different than situations where the language being learned was a matter of survival, such as in cases of immigrants (forced or by choice) or refugees. how the different languages interact in the minds of individuals in these contexts, and how their different selves are formed, is an area that needs to be further explored. additionally, it has been shown that not all multilingual language learners perceive positive interactions between languages learned; some of these multilingual participants envision each language learned as a separate language system. similarly, not all multilinguals will have a multilingual self identity. some of these learners might have separate ideal selves (or indeed ought-to, anti-ought-to, and/or feared selves) that are not linked together with any sort of ideal multilingual self. as language learning is inherently dynamic, formation of selves and perceiving positive language interactions are ever-changing and are highly dependent on the context. qui suis-je? ¿quién soy? ben kimim? who am i? this is a question that language learners might pose when learning one or more languages. the answer to this question at least partially depends on the context and what language is being spoken at the time of the inquiry. how and when positive language interactions are seen, whether an ideal self is conceptualized for each language or if there is a more salient ideal multilingual self, if a language is learned just to prove to others that it can be done or merely out of a sense of obligation – all of these eventualities contribute to the formation of language learning selves, including the ability to see positive interactions between languages. the one certainty is that the answer to “who am i?” will be ever-evolving. amy s. thompson 174 references aronin, l. 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(2014). motivational perspectives on the self in sla: a developmental view. in s. mercer & m. williams (eds.), multiple perspectives on the self in sla (pp. 127-138). bristol: multilingual matters. 607 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (3). 2020. 607-630 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.3.10 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt exploring young efl learners’ motivation: individual versus pair work on dictogloss tasks marta kopinska universidad del país vasco/euskal herriko unibertsitatea (upv/ehu), spain https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3382-384x marta.kopinska@ehu.eus agurtzane azkarai universidad del país vasco/euskal herriko unibertsitatea (upv/ehu), spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3011-344x agurtzane.azcaray@ehu.eus abstract motivation has been widely considered one of the most influential variables in the field of second language learning. motivation may vary throughout the years, even within the duration of a single language class, and this might occur due to different factors, such as the choice of tasks or the activity type (i.e., collaborative or individual). these two factors have not been investigated in depth with young learners in foreign language settings, and from a task-based perspective. thus, this paper addresses this gap, and explores the potential changes in motivation of 64 spanish young learners of english as a foreign language who worked on a number of dictogloss tasks in pairs and individually over the span of a school year. data was collected several times by means of different tools that measured students’ general and more specific task motivation, as well as their attitudes towards individual/pair work. the findings revealed that, overall, these children’s motivation was high and consolidated with time, while their level of anxiety decreased. their attitudes towards the dictogloss were positive from the beginning to the end of the school year, and more so when they carried out the task in pairs. these findings support the benefits of collaborative work, and the marta kopinska, agurtzane azkarai 608 dictogloss, as an appropriate task that engages children in their learning of a foreign language. keywords: l2 motivation; task motivation; young efl learners; dictogloss; individual vs. pair work 1. introduction motivation is considered one of the most influential variables in second language (l2) learning (doiz, lasagabaster, & sierra, 2014a; dörnyei, 2009; gardner, 1985), as without this key learner factor, “nothing much happens” (cohen & dörnyei, 2002, p. 172), and it helps to make the “long [and] often tedious” process of learning of a foreign language (fl) more pleasant (dörnyei & ryan 2015, p. 72). gardner (1985) defined motivation as the desire to achieve the goal of mastering a language and to expend effort to do so combined with favorable attitudes towards it. moreover, he referred to attitudes as “evaluative (positive or negative) reactions” of a learner towards a fl, which may result in behavioral implications in the fl learning process (gardner, 1985, p. 9). while motivation has long been considered a stable trait, recent developments in the field have highlighted its complex, changeable character (dörnyei & ryan, 2015), and have focused on the socio-dynamic perspective on motivational variation through the lens of the complex dynamic systems (cds) theory (larsen-freeman, 2015; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). following this theory, motivation should be viewed as a system of interrelated components, experiencing constant changes (dörnyei, macintyre, & henry, 2015; larsen-freeman, 2015). in formal and pedagogical contexts such changes may also occur as an effect of carrying out specific tasks (dörnyei, 2019; kormos & dörnyei, 2004). thus it is important to assess how different tasks might affect motivation in order to enable researchers and teachers to better understand their role in the process of language learning (dörnyei, 2019). this is precisely the main aim of this study, to analyze the motivation, and task-specific motivation of a group of young learners who worked on several dictogloss tasks (wajnryb, 1990) individually and in pairs. 2. background 2.1. motivation and young learners (yls) as mentioned above, according to cds theory, motivation is in constant flux (dörnyei et al., 2015; larsen-freeman, 2015; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). such exploring young efl learners’ motivation: individual versus pair work on dictogloss tasks 609 conceptualization makes the study of motivational change central, highlighting the interaction of the different components of motivation, its nonlinearity, and context-dependency. it is therefore important to consider that these changes can also happen in school education, when children spend multiple years sometimes struggling with their fl learning. not necessarily all children commence their learning adventure with a favorable disposition towards the fl (mihaljević djigunović, 2012). even if during their early years of fl learning yls’ motivation soars, as years go by, they often get bored and tired of their fl learning process (henry, 2009), and their motivation and attitudes towards fl learning often decrease over time (dörnyei, csizér, & németh, 2006; henry, 2009; williams, burden, & lanvers, 2002). this may be due to a general “disenchantment with school” at this age (henry, 2009, p. 184), and the classroom-based fl learning becoming rather a frustrating experience (dörnyei et al., 2006). however, this decreasing enthusiasm towards the fl is also accompanied at the same time by students’ stable commitment towards learning english, a popular and demanding basic skill in education in the 21st century (see csizér & kormos, 2009; dörnyei et al., 2006). in spain, the setting of our current study, some authors have attributed a decrease in yls’ motivation to a change in methodology. as stated by cenoz (2009) and lasagabaster (2000), in the first years, yls start learning english as a fl (i.e., efl) usually through a communicative approach based on storytelling and projects, which in later grades converts to much more grammar-based and textbook-centered approaches. such a change in the learning experience, if too abrupt, may affect pupils’ initial favorable mindset towards efl learning, as it is not that enjoyable anymore (cenoz, 2009). more recently, in a spanish efl setting, muñoz (2017) traced 14 spanish efl yls (aged 6) over 10 years. she administered a questionnaire to them and the students had to mark one of the different smiley faces next to each item. muñoz found that the development of motivation of these yls did not generally decrease, but their intrinsic motivation – which engages individuals doing something for their own personal enjoyment – was higher at the beginning of the data collection, and was gradually surpassed by more instrumental motives to learn english, such as learning english to gain a particular future reward concerning work status, or economic advantage. muñoz highlighted the complex and multifaceted character of the yls’ motivation and the disjuncture between pupils’ positive attitudes towards the english language itself, and their (less enthusiastic) attitudes towards english as a school subject (see also fenyvesi, 2018; mihaljević djigunović & lopriore, 2011). her findings are in line with nikolov (1999), as this author pointed out that instrumental motives to learn a fl emerge around the age of 11-12. nikolov also underscored that when dealing with yls, the most important motivating factors are classroom-related, such as enjoyable and satisfying activities and tasks. marta kopinska, agurtzane azkarai 610 2.2. task motivation some studies have therefore closely looked at the relationship between tasks and motivation. dörnyei and kormos (2000) investigated the role of motivation of 46 hungarian efl adolescents (aged 16-17) when they performed an oral argumentative task. the researchers found that situation-specific motives, that is, learners’ motivation towards the task, were particularly influential on these learners’ task engagement. julkunen (2001) stated that l2 task motivation was a combination of trait and state motivation, that is, a blend of a learner’s general disposition towards learning the fl and their more task-specific motivational state. he explored the task-specific motivation of 593 finnish efl learners (12-14 years old) who worked cooperatively (in pairs or groups of three) and individually on two different vocabulary tasks (i.e., open-outcome, closed-outcome). these learners’ task motivation was measured by means of a preand post-task questionnaire, and the results showed that collaborative work was the most motivating factor for these efl learners, more than individualistic or competitive setting, regardless of their efl competence (high vs. low achievers) or the task type (open vs. closed). poupore (2013) investigated the task motivation of 38 korean adult efl learners who performed 15 tasks (e.g., information gap, problem solving, opinion exchange, etc.) in groups of three or four over the period of a semester. preand post-task questionnaires were used to measure task attraction, perceived relevance and difficulty, learners’ emotional state, intended effort, and success expectation. structured interviews with a selection of participants were also carried out, which allowed greater understanding of the interplay of different motivational factors. in a more detailed analysis of two of the tasks, conducted within a cds approach, poupore found that different combinations of motivational, socio-affective variables and variables related to task conditions, such as cognitive complexity or topic choice (demanding, or controversial subject), resulted in a decreasing motivational pattern. al khalil (2016) used a motivational thermometer to measure learners’ task motivation. participants were 44 adult learners of fl arabic in the united states, and completed six oral interactive tasks with a native speaker of arabic. their task motivation was measured upon each task completion, by indicating on a scale how they felt after having finished the interaction, bearing in mind the effort they expended to complete the task, how much they wanted to learn from it, and how much they enjoyed it. the researcher found that task motivation constantly changed, and that it did not always correlate with participants’ previous beliefs about a task. research with primary school students has also explored learners’ attitudes towards the dictogloss task (wajnryb, 1990), which is the one used in the exploring young efl learners’ motivation: individual versus pair work on dictogloss tasks 611 present study. shak and gardner (2008) analyzed the attitudes of 78 efl primary school students (aged from 9 to 12) in brunei towards different focus on form tasks, including a dictogloss or consciousness-raising tasks, among others. the data they considered included 2-day lessons and the participants in their study had to rate the tasks they carried out for enjoyment, ease, performance and motivation. data were collected by means of an attitude questionnaire and group interviews. the authors also explored what task features influenced the learners’ preferences. the results indicated that that participants showed generally positive attitudes towards all four tasks and highlighted children’s preference of pair work to individual work. the findings of the study indicate that familiarity with the task led to an increase in positive perceptions (shak & gardner, 2008, p. 398). more recently, calzada and garcía mayo (2020) explored the attitudes towards collaborative work and collaborative writing in general, and the dictogloss task in particular, in a group of 32 spanish efl learners (11-12 years old). in their study, children worked in dyads and triads on a dictogloss task twice, first individually and next collaboratively, and were asked to complete an attitude questionnaire the following week. the authors found that these children showed positive attitudes towards pair and group work, and the dictogloss task, although only two items in their questionnaire referred specifically to this task. according to dörnyei (2019, p. 60), the “‘learning-through-doing’ tenet has been a key principle of communicative language learning in general and task-based language learning in particular,” and therefore learners’ active involvement in classroom tasks is crucial for their success in the learning process. adequate tasks may therefore play a decisive role in fostering students’ motivation. however, research on the topic, from a task-based perspective (ellis, 2003), and in particular with yls, is still scarce (muñoz, 2017). moreover, the above-mentioned studies conducted with adolescents (dörnyei & kormos, 2000; julkunen, 2001) and adults (al khalil, 2016; poupore, 2013) have reported different findings with regard to the impact of tasks on learners’ motivation. what is more, with the exception of the studies by shak and gardner (2008) and calzada and garcía mayo (2020), there is still little evidence about the role of the dictogloss task in the attitudes of primary school children. this study aims at shedding more light on the topic by exploring task motivation of efl yls from a task-based perspective. 2.3. pair vs. individual work another important factor to bear in mind when focusing on motivation is the extent to which the type of activity, individual or collaborative, plays a role in learners’ motivation. as mentioned above, julkunen’s (2001) study shed more light on the topic, but research with yls from a task-based perspective is still marta kopinska, agurtzane azkarai 612 lacking. several studies conducted within a task-based framework have focused on potential differences between individual and pair work, and have reported that pair work leads to more accuracy in students’ written production (see díaz vega, 2016; fernández dobao, 2012; nassaji & tian, 2010; storch, 1999; storch & wigglesworth, 2007; wigglesworth & storch, 2009) and higher vocabulary gains (kim, 2008) than individual work. moreover, pair work also results in shorter texts (storch, 1999) and more time necessary to finish a task at hand (fernández dobao, 2012), but this is because learners also employ more time in discussing linguistic issues, which leads them to reflect on grammar and receive feedback on their production (fernández dobao, 2012). in sum, there is some empirical evidence to suggest that pair work results in more successful practice than individual work with regard to improving complexity, accuracy and fluency in learners’ performance; however, it is still unclear whether it also leads to higher motivation. baleghizadeh and farhesh (2014) explored this issue with a group of efl iranian adult learners. they analyzed the motivation of two groups of students: one group worked in pairs on several collaborative activities, such as role play or information-gap tasks, while the other group engaged individually in different unspecified tasks. baleghizadeh and farhesh examined the motivation of these participants by means of a questionnaire, and the results pointed to higher motivation in the case of the students who worked in pairs (similar to julkunen, 2001). thus, baleghizadeh and farhesh (2014) provided more insight into the impact of individual/pair work on motivation, but their sample carried out tasks either in pairs or individually, not both, and the study was conducted with adult learners. to the best of our knowledge, similar research with yls is non-existent. similar to adult learners, yls may also show higher motivation towards pair work, but they also tend to pay attention to their own needs rather than assisting their peers (see oliver, 1998), and as a consequence, their motivation might decrease when working in pairs if they feel their needs are not fully covered. in order to assess the motivation of yls in pair and individual work, this study will also explore this issue. 3. the present study considering the lack of research carried out on efl yls’ motivation, including task motivation, and collaborative versus pair work, the present study focuses on the motivational changes of a group of efl yls over the course of one school year, and it specifically explores their general and task-related fl motivation by means of a dictogloss task in pair work vs. individual work. we address the following research questions: exploring young efl learners’ motivation: individual versus pair work on dictogloss tasks 613 1. what is the general and more specific task motivation of efl yls when they work on a dictogloss task? do they vary over the span of a year? 2. are there differences in the children’s motivation depending on whether they perform the task individually or in pairs? 3.1. participants a group of 64 spanish efl yls in 6th grade of primary education (aged 11-12) participated in this study. there were 33 girls and 31 boys. their english level, as assessed by means of the cambridge flyers, which consisted of an oral comprehension test and a written comprehension and production test (ucles, 2017), was a2.1 (beginner), according to the common european framework of reference for languages (cefr) (council of europe, 2001). the whole group obtained the mean score of 78.2 out of 100 on the oral comprehension test and a mean score of 72.1 out of 100 on the written comprehension and production test. 3.2. data collection instruments and procedure before the data collection, we asked for the permissions to carry out research with the children in the school. then, the school teachers gave the students a consent form which they had to take home and bring back signed by their parents/guardians granting permission to participate in the study. only students whose parents had granted written permission to participate in this study did so. 3.2.1. dictogloss tasks the pupils worked on different dictogloss tasks six times, and the data were collected over the span of a common spanish school year (september-june), which consists of three terms. the first three tasks were carried out in november-december, during the first term and over a period of three weeks, and the last three in may, in the third term, again over three weeks. in both cases, the students first carried out the dictogloss task individually in the first and third week, and in pairs in the second week. the dictogloss task for both activity types, individual and pair work, followed the standard procedure (wajnryb, 1990): listening to a recording twice, taking some notes the second time the yls listened to it, and then reconstructing the story. dyads pooled their ideas to write the text collaboratively, whereas during individual performance learners relied on their own notes alone. the researchers created the dictogloss tasks and were informed by the teachers as to their appropriateness on the basis of the participants’ linguistic ability and the marta kopinska, agurtzane azkarai 614 different topics they were covering in the classroom, such as school routines, cooking and halloween (first term) and family and personal relationships (third term). thus, all six dictogloss texts were short narrations of a similar number of words and lexical diversity, following guiraud’s (1960) index. texts were recorded at a normal pace by the same speaker (a sample of these texts can be found in appendix a). in order to avoid a task bias effect, the order of the tasks in each term was counterbalanced. we categorized three different groups of pupils, and each group was assigned a random order of tasks to be carried out either individually or in pairs. individual dictogloss tasks were conducted in standard classrooms, whereas “pair” dictogloss tasks were performed in different rooms where yls’ performances were video-recorded. the cameras were arranged before the pairs entered the room, and they knew from the start of the data collection that they were going to be recorded. as for the individual performances, no recording was made, and only the yl’s final written output was taken into account for further analysis. our present study belongs to a larger project, and the analysis of the recordings and learners’ written texts are beyond the scope of this paper. 3.2.2. background and motivation questionnaires the pupils filled in a background questionnaire with some basic personal information (e.g., name, age, years studying english) before beginning with the data collection. then, for our analysis, we asked them to complete a motivation questionnaire in spanish (see section 1 in appendix b for its english version), based on doiz et al. (2014a) before the first time they performed the first dictogloss (pre-test), and then after the last dictogloss task (post-test). this general motivation questionnaire consisted of 16 items followed by a traditional likert scale which ranged from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. its aim was to analyze possible changes in the general motivation of these efl yls over the span of one school year, and was divided into four scales that measured students’ intrinsic motivation (items 1, 7, 8 and 11), which referred to their inherent enjoyment related to learning english; instrumental motivation (items 3, 6, 10, 12, 13 and 15), which encompassed more practical motives to learn english (e.g., to find a better job in the future); anxiety (items 2, 4 and 5), which referred to the feeling of apprehension and unease experienced while using english; and motivational strength (9, 14 and 16), which focused on the yls’ readiness to expend effort to learn english. around the middle of the data collection process, right after the first three dictogloss tasks were completed at the end of the first term, these yls were asked to respond in any language from their repertoire: spanish, basque or english to a combination of open-ended questions (see section 2 in appendix b), exploring young efl learners’ motivation: individual versus pair work on dictogloss tasks 615 and likert-type questions (see section 3 in appendix b), following doiz, lasagabaster and sierra (2014b) (mid-test). these extra questions aimed at gathering more information on the participants’ thoughts on the task (i.e., dictogloss) or the type of activity (i.e., collaborative or individual). they replied to the same questions at the end of the data collection (post-test), together with the motivational questionnaire, as mentioned above. the questionnaire was first piloted with a group of learners of the same age before beginning with the study in order to confirm that it was adequate and understandable for yls. table 1 summarizes when the different questionnaires were administered. table 1 timing of the different sections of the motivation questionnaires n of items pre-test mid-test post-test section 1 16 x x section 2 6 x x section 3 3 x x following doiz et al. (2014a), cronbach’s alpha tests were performed to check the reliability of the four scales under scrutiny in this paper (i.e., intrinsic motivation, instrumental orientation, anxiety, and motivational strength). as shown in table 2, all the scales reached satisfactory values, above .70 (dörnyei, 2007), with the caveat that the anxiety scale was slightly lower, although still acceptable. table 2 main variables and reliability coefficients in the motivation questionnaire cronbach’s alpha values variables nº of items pre-test post-test sample item intrinsic motivation 4 .87 .76 i really enjoy learning english. instrumental orientation 6 .79 .85 studying english is important for me because i’ll need it for my future studies. anxiety 3 .69 .64 i feel more tense and nervous in my english class than in my other classes. motivational strength 3 .71 .77 i put my best effort into learning english in my english language class. 3.2.3. task motivation thermometers apart from the motivation questionnaire, the participants completed an alternative motivation assessment measure tool before (see figure 1) and after (see figure 2) completing each dictogloss task. this tool was a thermometer, based on al khalil (2016), which contained a scale from 0 (lowest grade) to 10 (highest grade) and different statements. the children had to indicate how they felt at that specific moment. although we acknowledge that learners’ emotional state marta kopinska, agurtzane azkarai 616 does not necessarily equal their motivational disposition, even if these two affective factors are related, we decided not to change al khalil’s (2016) thermometer, and keep it in its original form. in addition, the children had to provide at least one reason for their answer from the ones supplied together with the thermometer, although they were allowed to write a different answer. this instrument enabled us to gather more data about learners’ motivation towards the task, and it allowed task motivation to be measured dynamically both within the task and repeatedly across time in terms of task repetition. how do you feel before doing the task? please, indicate on this thermometer: why have you chosen this level? please, indicate: because i think the task is going to be easy. because i want to work with my partner. because i want to do the task. because i want to do an activity in english. because i think i’m going to have fun doing the task. because i think the task is going to be difficult. because i don’t want to work with my partner. because i don’t want to do the task. because i don’t want to do the activity in english. because i think i’m going to get bored doing the task. figure 1 example of a task motivation thermometer carried out pre-task before the pair work1 how do you feel after doing the task? please, indicate on this thermometer: why have you chosen this level? please, indicate: because the task was easy. because i liked working with my partner. because i liked the task. because i liked doing an activity in english. because i had fun doing the task. because i the task was difficult. because i didn’t like working with my partner. because i didn’t like the task. because i don’t like doing activities in english. because i got bored doing the task. figure 2 example of a task motivation thermometer carried out post-task after the pair work 1for the individual dictoglosses, reasons referring to working with a partner (phrases 2 and 7) were not included, as they could distract the students. exploring young efl learners’ motivation: individual versus pair work on dictogloss tasks 617 3.3. data analysis the data obtained from the questionnaires were analyzed both quantitatively (section 1 and 3 in appendix b) and qualitatively (section 2 in appendix b, and thermometers). a wilcoxon signed rank test was carried out in order to compare the results from the preand post-thermometers after the performance of each dictogloss task and the pre-test and post-test questionnaire data (section 1 in appendix b), and mid-test and post-test likert-type questions (section 3 in appendix b). the magnitude of the results was measured by means of eta squared calculations and we followed cohen’s (1988) classification of effect sizes as small = .01, medium = .06, and large = .14. the main findings of these analyses are explained in the next section. qualitative data obtained in the questionnaires (section 2) were transcribed, codified and examined following the three-step procedure put forward by garrett and gallego (2014). firstly, the discrete ideas in the yls’ answers were identified; secondly, they were classified under the general themes of positive and negative aspects of the three issues under scrutiny (i.e., the dictogloss task, individual and pair work); and, finally, the ideas were clustered into broader categories of what these efl yls liked the most/least. categorization of the themes mentioned by yls in their responses was done in english, although learners could reply in spanish, english or basque. 4. results and discussion the research questions referred to the dynamics of the changes in motivation, both general and task-specific, of the efl yls observed when they worked on several dictogloss tasks over the span of a year. this study also explored differences in their motivation depending on whether they carried out the task individually or in pairs. the results and discussion of these two research questions are presented below. 4.1. general and task-specific motivational changes over time overall, the findings showed that these learners exhibited high motivation and positive attitudes towards efl and the task from the start of the school year (pre-test) that consolidated significantly after they finished the tasks (post-test). this is shown specifically in the data corresponding to the increase of their instrumental motivation (p = .025, ŋ² = .04) and motivational strength (p = .032, ŋ² = .04), which, together with intrinsic motivation, reflected their general favorable disposition to learn english. moreover, their initial medium-level anxiety decreased marta kopinska, agurtzane azkarai 618 significantly (p = .045, ŋ² = .06), which shows that their uneasiness towards using english diminished with time. the magnitude of these results was medium. as for their intrinsic motivation, similar to their instrumental motivation and motivational strength, it was high at the beginning and increased at the end of the data collection, but in this case this improvement was not statistically significant (see table 3 for more details). table 3 comparison of general motivational variables in preversus post-test pre-test post-test variables mean median sd mean median sd z p ŋ² intrinsic motivation 4.0 4.0 .81 4.2 4.4 .77 -1.854 .064 .03 instrumental motivation 4.4 4.6 .60 4.5 4.8 .60 2.243 .025* .04 anxiety 2.9 3.0 1.02 2.7 2.7 .89 2.047 .045* .06 motivational strength 3.8 3.7 .74 3.9 4.0 .77 -2.139 .032* .04 note. * significant at p < .05 level our findings are in line with nikolov (1999) and muñoz (2017), as for these efl yls, favorable disposition towards learning english for some utilitarian reasons (i.e., instrumental motives) carried more weight, carried more weight than intrinsic ones (i.e., favorable disposition towards efl learning as it is regarded as naturally satisfying and enjoyable), even if both motivational factors were strengthened during the study. as referred to above, nikolov (1999) reported in her study that instrumental reasons arose around the age of 11-12, which is the age of our current sample. at this age, learners might start to be aware of the importance of english for their future, as to find a better job, travel abroad or simply watch any of the numerous streaming platforms with multiple english shows. although their intrinsic motives to learn english were strong, their being superseded by the more instrumental ones could have been due to these aforementioned reasons. overall, these learners’ relatively strong instrumental and intrinsic motives for learning the fl are also supported by the responses to the items corresponding to the motivational strength scale, which referred to students’ effort invested in learning efl as a school subject, and which showed learners’ high commitment that was further intensified in the post-test. however, this goes against previous research carried out in the field (fenyvesi, 2018; mihaljević djigunović & lopriore, 2011; muñoz, 2017), which reported a lower motivation for efl yls towards english as a school subject. however, only three items helped us tap into this attribute and thus, these findings should be considered with caution. the extra open-ended questions (section 2 in appendix b) and the likertscale questions (section 3 in appendix b) that focused specifically on the dictogloss showed that these efl yls had a positive attitude towards it before and after they worked on the task, in line with findings reported by calzada and garcía exploring young efl learners’ motivation: individual versus pair work on dictogloss tasks 619 mayo (2020), and shak and gardner (2008). in the case of the open-ended question about what they liked/disliked most about the dictogloss task (section 2 in appendix b), the learners were asked to indicate at least three ideas, although the majority of them included only two. overall, most learners indicated that they liked the opportunity it gave them to work with someone else, and this was the most popular answer in the mid-test and the post-test. this corroborates the preferences for collaborative work found among young learners in other investigations (calzada & garcía mayo, 2020; shak & gardner, 2008). the most unpopular opinions about the task were having to (re)write the text they listened to, to take notes while listening to it, and to repeat the task again. very few responses indicated a negative answer towards the task. these findings are detailed in table 4. table 4 what the yls liked most (+) and least (-) of the dictogloss: top 3 answers at midversus post-test mid-test n post-test n po si tiv e + pair work 23 + pair work 21 + stories, audio recordings 10 + stories, audio recordings 12 + thermometers 7 + (re)writing & note-taking 7 + doing activities in english 7 n eg at iv e (re)writing & note-taking 13 repetition 12 repetition 11 (re)writing & note-taking 10 task (dictogloss) 5 audio recordings 6 figure 3 students’ responses to the likert-scale question about dictogloss on the mid-test and post-test (values represent the percentage of students replying to each item) i didn't like it at all i didn't like it i neither liked it nor disliked it i liked it i liked it very much 0 10 20 30 40 50 middle test post-test marta kopinska, agurtzane azkarai 620 however, when comparing these learners’ responses to the dictoglossoriented likert-scale question (section 3 in appendix b), no significant changes (z = -.010, p = .992, ŋ² < .001) in the mean scores were found in their answers from the mid-test (m = 3.1, sd = 1.2) to the post-test (m = 3.1, sd = 1.2). according to these data, in the mid-test the majority of the students reported a neutral attitude towards this task (i.e., neither liked it nor disliked it), while in the post-test most of them said they liked it. this is illustrated in figure 3. these efl yls enjoyed working on the dictogloss, and this finding was further supported by the thermometers presented above (figures 1 and 2), which included mainly task-oriented reasons the students had to mark (e.g., because the task was easy, because i liked the task). furthermore, there was a significant increase in motivation, with a large effect size, when comparing the thermometer indications before and after completing the dictogloss tasks, regardless of whether participants carried out the task individually or in pairs, except for the first time they did the task. detailed results are included in table 5 below and depicted in figure 4. in dörnyei’s (2019, p. 60) words, learners’ general motivation is crucial for “preparing the deal,” but their task motivation is of utmost importance for “sealing the deal,” that is, for their actual active engagement in the task at hand. thus, at least for these efl yls, the dictogloss task actively engaged them and fostered their motivation, which supports its utility as an engaging and motivating l2 learning task in efl primary education. table 5 preversus post-task motivation (individual and collaborative dictogloss) mean sd median z p ŋ² individual 1 pre-task 6.65 1.89 7 post-task 7.21 3.16 8 -1.734 .083 .03 collaborative 1 pre-task 7.20 2.01 8 post-task 8.28 1.73 9 -3.913 <.001* .14 individual 2 pre-task 6.30 2.46 7 post-task 7.44 2.55 8 -3.861 <.001* .14 individual 3 pre-task 5.17 2.56 5 post-task 6.85 2.20 7 -4.209 <.001* .16 collaborative 2 pre-task 7.45 1.72 8 post-task 8.00 1.81 9 -2.912 .004* .08 individual 4 pre-task 5.73 2.39 6.25 post-task 7.44 1.96 8 -4.867 <.001* .22 note. * significant at p < .05 level exploring young efl learners’ motivation: individual versus pair work on dictogloss tasks 621 figure 4 preversus post-task motivation: comparison of thermometer means after each dictogloss performance 4.2. motivational differences in individual and collaborative performance the results of the comparison between individual and collaborative work in our study also showed a greater variation in the case of individual work over the school year than in the case of collaborative work. the latter remained stable throughout the school year and with high levels (7 and 8 points out of 10), as shown in figure 4. moreover, the findings for individual work were characterized by a greater fluctuation, especially on the third performance. in this particular case, the motivation levels, based on the pre-task data, were at their lowest level (m = 5.17) in comparison with the rest of the performances, but after the posttask they increased significantly (m = 6.85). the students performed this task right after a long bank holiday, and close to the end of the school year. the fact they had to go back to school after the holiday season, and so close to the summer vacation, could have affected their overall motivation towards school, and also towards performing a task they were already familiar with (i.e., dictogloss) once more. in fact, as displayed above in table 4, one of the aspects some of the students liked the least from the dictogloss was precisely the repetition of the task. however, when a closer look is taken at the open-ended questions regarding pair work and individual work (section 2 in appendix b), the findings reveal (see table 6) that these children liked working individually because it allowed them to develop their own ideas and make their own decisions, although they missed the assistance that pair work provided them with. as mentioned above, 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 individual 1 collaborative 1 individual 2 individual 3 collaborative 2 individual 4 pre-task motivation post-task motivation marta kopinska, agurtzane azkarai 622 oliver (1998) reported that sometimes yls feel their needs might not be fully covered while interacting with a peer, and for some students this could have been the case. by contrast, when working in pairs, the majority of these students appreciated collaboration with a partner as they received more help from their peers, although sometimes this type of work might lead to arguments and lack of agreement, which were some of the items on their “least popular” list. in both cases, no negative answers were recorded this time against the dictogloss task, which suggests that whether individually or in pairs, the dictogloss proved to successfully engage these students in the learning process. table 6 what the yls liked most (+) and least (-) of the individual and pair work: top 3 answers at midversus post-test mid-test nº post-test nº individual work + own work 17 + own work 18 + concentration 8 + concentration 9 + thermometers 7 + thermometers 5 no help 15 no help 18 repetition 10 (re)writing & note taking 8 (re)writing & note-taking 8 repetition 6 pair work + pairs 16 + pairs 24 + more help 14 + more help 14 + enjoyment 9 + opportunity to speak in english 8 no agreement 9 no agreement 8 being recorded 8 being recorded 7 problems with the partner 7 problems with the partner 5 figure 5 students’ responses to the likert-scale question about pair work in the midtest and post-test (values represent the percentage of students replying to each item) i didn't like it at all i didn't like it i neither liked it nor disliked it i liked it i liked it very much 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 middle test post-test exploring young efl learners’ motivation: individual versus pair work on dictogloss tasks 623 in the case of the additional likert-scale question in section 3 (see appendix b), the findings seemed not to be totally in line with the thermometer findings, or the yls’ answers to the open-ended questions. in the case of individual work, there was no significant difference (z = 1.256, p = .209, ŋ² = .01) in the mean scores from the mid-test (m = 2.9, sd = 1.1) to the post-test (m = 3.1, sd = 1.2), and these yls’ disposition towards individual work was found to be rather neutral. however, the analysis revealed a significant reduction (z = -2.869, p = .004, ŋ² = .07) of yls’ initial enthusiasm (m = 4.3, sd = 1.0) towards working on the dictogloss in pairs at the end of the school year (m = 3.9, sd = 1.3). these findings are depicted in figure 5. this last finding suggests that these efl yl’s attitudes towards individual work was neutral, while they were more positive in the case of collaborative work. on the whole, pair work registered higher levels of motivation across the school year than individual work, that is, this arrangement fostered these yls’ motivation, which is in line with baleghizadeh and farhesh (2014), and julkunen (2001). however, the mixed findings, including those of pair work showed that, for some students, repeating the task could result in some level of tediousness, and for this reason there was a change in their responses (section 3 appendix b) in the posttest. moreover, this last data collection took place at the end of the school year, with the summer holidays around the corner, and after carrying out all the tasks and filling in the questionnaires, the students could have felt a bit overwhelmed. 5. conclusion, pedagogical implications and lines for further research this study explored the general and task motivation of efl yls as well as whether performing different dictogloss tasks several times individually and in pairs played a role in their level of motivation. the findings pointed to a positive disposition towards the task and, especially, towards collaborative work. moreover, the general motivation of these learners seemed to consolidate with time. these findings support the benefits of collaborative work, which efl teachers should keep in mind, as well as the usefulness of dictogloss as a motivating classroom task. moreover, although pair work seemed to be more popular than individual work, these efl yls also appreciated the fact that they could concentrate more on the task if they did it alone; thus, individual performance should not be completely disregarded in the efl classroom, but combined with pair work. this study has shed more light on the impact of individual and collaborative work in the efl primary classroom, but it also has some limitations that should be kept in mind and that could serve as lines for further research. more qualitative data, such as individual or group interviews with the yls, might enable greater insights into the motivational dynamics occurring in the classroom, marta kopinska, agurtzane azkarai 624 and allow the researchers to understand the motives behind learners’ mindset regarding certain tasks. furthermore, it seems vital to gather pupils’ beliefs and opinions on what they (dis)like most of the tasks they perform in their efl classes in order to better understand the motivational processes involved in the l2 classroom. this study has only explored the motivation of these efl yls in one task (i.e., dictogloss), and task modality differences (i.e., oral vs. written tasks) could shed more light on the task motivation of efl yls. finally, more studies with a wider array of qualitative measures of l2 motivation are needed to capture the flux in learners’ task-related motivation and to further refine our understanding of the motivational processes that yls experience. acknowledgements the authors would like to express their gratitude to the school that allowed access to the students, the teachers and the students who participated in the study. this work was supported by the spanish ministry of economy and competitiveness (grant number ffi2016-74950-p; aei/feder/ue) and the basque government (grant 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(2002). ‘french is the language of love and stuff’: student perceptions of issues related to motivation in learning a foreign language. british educational research journal, 28, 503-528. marta kopinska, agurtzane azkarai 628 appendix a sample dictogloss texts halloween night every year, lucy waits for halloween night. she puts on her witch mask and asks her neighbors for sweets. she knocks on their door and says: “trick or treat?”. she usually gets many sweets of different flavors. she eats them all the same night, and she shares some with her younger sister anna. if the neighbors don’t give her any sweets, she plays a trick on them and they get very scared. but this year, when she bites her first sweet, one of her teeth hurts a lot! so her mum takes her to the dentist. the dentist looks at her teeth and tells lucy that she shouldn’t eat so many sweets. so this time lucy only scares the neighbors with her mask! a day in the garden the smiths are spending a day together in the garden. tom is playing football with his uncle. he calls his grandmother to join them, but she is busy playing cards and she is winning all the time! now it is lunchtime. they are all sitting at the table in the garden. maría, the oldest granddaughter, asks her mum to take some pictures. her dad pulls funny faces and they laugh. in the afternoon, it’s very hot. tom sees that his grandfather is preparing ice cream in the kitchen. he calls his sister and they go quickly to try it. it’s delicious! maria gives a big hug to her grandfather. then, she takes a portion for her aunt, who is in the swimming pool. what a wonderful day! exploring young efl learners’ motivation: individual versus pair work on dictogloss tasks 629 appendix b motivational questionnaire section 1 how much do you agree or disagree with the following statements? please indicate by putting a cross or circling your answer on the scale: totally disagree disagree neither disagree nor agree agree totally agree 1 2 3 4 5 here you have an example: if you like skiing, and you don’t like swimming, indicate it like this: i like skiing. 1 2 3 4 5 i don’t like swimming. 1 2 3 4 5 1 i really enjoy learning english. 1 2 3 4 5 2 i feel nervous when i have to speak in english in my english class. 1 2 3 4 5 3 studying foreign languages is an important part of my education. 1 2 3 4 5 4 i always feel that the other students speak english better than i do. 1 2 3 4 5 5 i feel more tense and nervous in my english class than in my other classes. 1 2 3 4 5 6 studying english is important for me because it will be useful in getting a job. 1 2 3 4 5 7 i enjoy my english class. 1 2 3 4 5 8 i enjoy using english in the class. 1 2 3 4 5 9 i work hard in my english class even when i don’t like what we are doing. 1 2 3 4 5 10 studying english is important for me because i can meet and talk with more people. 1 2 3 4 5 11 i don’t like learning english. (reverse coded) 1 2 3 4 5 12 i enjoy meeting and talking with people from other countries and other cultures. 1 2 3 4 5 13 studying english is important for me because i’ll need it for my future studies. 1 2 3 4 5 14 i often feel bored when i study for my english class. (reverse coded) 1 2 3 4 5 15 studying english is important for me because it will be useful to be able to travel abroad. 1 2 3 4 5 16 i put my best effort into learning english in my english language class. 1 2 3 4 5 marta kopinska, agurtzane azkarai 630 section 2 1. what is that you liked most and least of the dictogloss task in english? please, write the first three words that come to your mind: what you liked most of the dictogloss task: what you liked least of the dictogloss task: 1. __________________________________ 1. __________________________________ 2. __________________________________ 2. __________________________________ 3. __________________________________ 3. __________________________________ 2. what is that you liked most and least while working individually on the dictogloss task in english? please, write the first three words that come to your mind: what you liked most of the individual work: what you liked least of the individual work: 1. __________________________________ 1. __________________________________ 2. __________________________________ 2. __________________________________ 3. __________________________________ 3. __________________________________ 3. what is that you liked most and least while working in pairs on the dictogloss task in english? please, write the first three words that come to your mind: what you liked most of the pair work: what you liked least of the pair work: 1. __________________________________ 1. __________________________________ 2. __________________________________ 2. __________________________________ 3. __________________________________ 3. __________________________________ section 3 how much did you like or dislike the following things? please indicate by putting a cross or circling your answer on the scale: i didn’t like it at all i didn’t like it i neither liked nor disliked it i liked it i liked it a lot 1 2 3 4 5 1 the dictogloss task 1 2 3 4 5 2 working on it individually 1 2 3 4 5 3 working on it in pairs 1 2 3 4 5 thank you for completing this questionnaireষ 183 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (2). 2021. 183-184 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.2.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial the second 2021 issue of studies in second language learning and teaching includes four empirical papers and three book reviews. in the first contribution, carmen muñoz and teresa cadierno report the results of a study which investigated the effects of differences in inand out-of-class exposure on the acquisition of english as a foreign language (l2) in denmark and spain, geographical contexts which differ both in terms of access to the target language (tl) and the extent of linguistic distance to it. participants were two groups of 14-15-yearold teenagers, 56 in denmark and 80 in spain. quantitative analysis of the data collected by means of questionnaires, a listening comprehension test, a metalinguistic knowledge test (mkt), and a grammaticality judgment test demonstrated that the danish participants, who had more exposure to the tl and spoke a first language with a shorter linguistic distance to english, outperformed their spanish counterparts on all measures of tl proficiency, with the exception of the mkt, although associations between these measures differed in both contexts. the next two papers shift the focus to the role of individual differences in l2 learning. first, hyang-il kim examines factors underlying foreign language reading anxiety as well as their relationships to the use of reading strategies and orientation to reading. the data were collected from 256 korean university students in english-related courses through the foreign language reading anxiety scale (saito et al., 1999), the survey of reading strategies (mokhtari & sheorey, 2002), subjective judgments of reading orientation, and toeic reading scores. exploratory factor analysis identified three factors that underpin l2 reading anxiety: anxiety experienced during reading english, confidence in reading, as well as anxiety when reading english characters. regression analysis showed that anxiety was a negative predictor of reading performance, whereas the positive impact of confidence in reading proved to be more important for strategy use than the negative impact of anxiety. second, xuan van ha, jill c. murray and a. mehdi riazi employed an explanatory sequential mixed methods design to investigate 184 beliefs about oral corrective feedback (cf), held by 250 high school learners of english as a foreign language in vietnam as well as the mediating role of gender, motivation and extraversion in this respect. exploratory factor analysis allowed identification of six factors underlying such beliefs: output-prompting cf and eliciting recasts, desire for cf, non-verbal cues, important errors, input-providing cf, and less important errors. the analysis of interview data demonstrated that participants were positively disposed towards the provision of cf, especially such that was explicit or metalinguistic in nature. in addition, females turned out to favor cf more than males, with higher extraversion amplifying this trend, while students motivated by the need to pass exams were more positive about error correction than those focusing on communication. in the final contribution, xiaozhou (emily) zhou and steve mann report the findings of an action research study which explored translanguaging practices in the context of a content and language integrated learning reading class that was taught to 25 university-level students in china. the analysis of the data gathered over the period of two terms by means of recordings of 60 classes, questionnaires and reflective notes provided by the teacher indicated that the teacher fell back upon a diversity of linguistic resources to attain the pedagogical goals set for a given class and that the students, intent on both improving their tl skills and learning predetermined content, welcomed this approach. the issue closes with reviews of three book publications, focusing on formulaic language, language learning strategies, and teacher development in content-based instruction, which were contributed by ella alhudithi, jakub bielak and katarzyna papaja, respectively. as always, i am confident that all the contributions included in this issue will serve as catalysts for further, ground-breaking research into various aspects of learning and teaching of additional languages, and that the results of such research will be of value to practitioners. mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references mokhtari, k., & sheorey, r. (2002). measuring esl students’ awareness of reading strategies. journal of development education, 25(3), 2-10. saito, y., thomas j. g., & horwitz, e. k. (1999). foreign language reading anxiety. modern language journal, 83(2), 202-218. 543 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (4). 543-560 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl intercultural challenge to language learning luz maría muñoz de cote sylvia van dijk university of guanajuato, mexico luzmaria@ugto.mx abstract this paper presents the findings of a qualitative research project set to investigate the piloting process of an innovative language program for university students. it challenges traditional english language teaching courses celebrating a view centered on learning; classes become spaces for students to understand the language they are learning through the development of small projects. the approach moves from a teaching transmission paradigm to one where the most important agent is each student who has to engage with a topic of his or her interest. students are seen as individuals whose knowledge and understanding of the world is valued and not as people whose lack of language skills prevents them from engaging in discussions of complex topics. the objective of this innovation is to enhance students’ understanding and use of academic english in their field of interest. in this project, we argue that knowledge and understanding of the mother tongue and culture play key roles in the development of a second language. a number of studies suggest that students who had strong first language literacy skills achieved higher proficiency levels in their second language. based on this argument and vygotsky’s sociocultural learning theory, we designed disciplinary content language learning workshops for first-degree students. the main tenet is that students can develop academic english given that they know about their discipline. findings so far reveal the difficulty of students to take distance from their previous learning experiences. they also show that students’ ideas expressed in english are far more complex than what would be expected of them given their second language skills. the complexity is not only related to the luz maría muñoz de cote, sylvia van dijk 544 content, but to the way they construct their paragraphs and the understanding of how the register of their field may be used. keywords: heteroglossia, second language learning, previous experience, intercultural intercultural challenge to language learning second language learning is a topic of interest around the world. institutions are challenged to help students reach proficiency levels to deal with academic content in english. however, the success of language learning programs is still a problem area in many educational settings (byun, chu, kim, park, kim, & jung, 2011; chen & goh, 2011; robinson, rivers, & brecht, 2006). the situation in many mexican universities, public and private, is not different from findings in reports of other countries (davies, 2008, 2009). tertiary mexican institutions have taken up the challenge, offering students general english language courses: classroom-based instruction designed to help students master the second language. the results of the strategies implemented in the institution where we work coincide with davies’ results; most students do not reach a level of proficiency that allows them to learn sophisticated academic content in english. this situation also reduces their access to job opportunities or postgraduate programs that require an advanced level of english. based on the evidence presented by davies and the experience at the university of guanajuato, where we have worked for a number of years, as language teachers, teacher educators and researchers, we designed a series of workshops as an alternative approach to language learning. the objective of this paper is to present findings of the research carried out during the pilot process of the proposed workshops. we begin the discussion by clarifying the differences we find between traditional language learning approaches and the innovation presented. and then we proceed to present some of the learning outcomes. one of the tenets that support traditional english language learning environments is a need to first acquire enough knowledge about the language to access the possibility of transferring academic abilities developed in the first language; a process i refer to as cross-linguistic transferability of academic abilities. this approach to language learning assumes that students’ lack of knowledge about the language needs to be tackled first for students to be able to use background knowledge. a metaphor that comes to mind is that of the student as an empty vessel that needs to be filled to become a literate language user. students are positioned as deficitarian individuals rather than as people with a wealth of intercultural challenge to language learning 545 knowledge. such knowledge could be used as a platform to develop further cognitive and social understanding, and abilities. in this second perspective one of the objectives of learning processes would be to establish the basis for a confident student self with capacities to discuss, analyse, and develop personal views and express them in the second language they are learning. in traditional settings it is the teacher who defines what aspects of language students need to learn before they can engage in more complex tasks. from our perspective, the students come to realise where they need better language skills to understand their texts and to express their views. when only teachers are considered as owners of knowledge while students become subordinates, this vertical relationship celebrates the perpetuation of hegemonic views by those in power; in the classroom the teacher represents this position. furthermore, students’ capacities to use their previous knowledge to support the learning process of the second language is not necessarily compromised; often, they do not require engaging with the language to levels that go beyond superficial use of linguistic forms and limited understanding of vocabulary. that is, learning the second language often remains at the level of coding and decoding; actions that are linked to views of literacy as the ability to read and write, but which do not necessarily involve deep understandings of social meanings. moreover, it seems to suggest that all students have the same needs and learn at the same pace; all of which are established by objectives dictated and determined by programs and followed by teachers. pang and kamil (2004) suggest that literate second language students may not understand or know about second language cultural and literacy practices; but they have probably developed complex literacy skills in their first language. geva and verhoeven (2000) and koda (2005), among other scholars, have investigated this cross-linguistic transferability and they conclude that children apparently transfer l1 skills to their l2 abilities when they are given constant opportunities to raise their awareness of the differences between the two languages; however, as children become older, and maybe as part of the pedagogy used at school, they seem to lose awareness of those differences. the ideas of these authors are based on cummins (1979, 1984), who maintains that there is an interdependence between the development of the first language and that of the second one establishing a complex relationship between both languages. cummins (1979) contends that exposure to the l2 and motivation are necessary for language skills to transfer from l1 to l2. cummins based his contentions on studies of children learning a second language. verhoeven (1994) studied immigrant children in the netherlands finding similar correlations. other researchers (sparks, 1995; sparks & ganschow, 1991, 1993, 1995) have also found different levels of interdependence between l1 and l2 and proposed the linguistic coding difference hypothesis proposing that “both l1 and l2 learning luz maría muñoz de cote, sylvia van dijk 546 depend on basic language learning mechanisms that are similar to both languages . . . on observations of college students who had demonstrated histories of difficulty with l2 learning (e.g., students classified as learning disabled) . . . early findings indicated that weak l1 learners appeared to have particular difficulties in specific aspects of their l1” (sparks, ganschow, & humbach, 2009, p. 205). the interdependence of l1 and l2 has been found at different linguistic skill levels, in a variety of contexts as well as from varied research approaches (dufva & voeten, 1999; durgunoglu, nagy, & hancin-bhatt, 1993; holm & dodd, 1996; meschyan & hernandez, 2002; olshtain, shohamy, kemp, & chatow, 2005, 2006; proctor, august, carlo, & snow, 2006 to mention but a few) strengthening initial arguments. cummins’ interdependence hypothesis can be analyzed from bakhtin’s (1981) point of view on the dialogic heteroglossic nature of language. according to bakhtin (1981), heteroglossia involves “a struggle among socio-linguistic points of view, not an intra-language struggle between individual wills or logical contradictions” (p. 4). this view decenters knowledge about the language, and centers on sociocultural and discursive processes that are constantly challenging learning processes as previous experiences shape our understanding of the present. this position contests the view of unitary language needs in a classroom defined by programs and teaching objectives, and enacted through teachers’ pedagogical views. in line with this view, vygotskyan ideas of the social development of cognition (wertsch, 1985), where interpersonal and intrapersonal dialogues are key factors, would support the interdependence hypothesis posed by cummins. vygotsky wrote “. . . cultural development appears on the stage twice, on two planes, first on the social plane and then on the psychological, first among people as an intermental category and then within the child as an intramental category” (as cited in greenfield, 1984, p. 117). based on this, the interdependence of both languages may be said to involve first social interaction with others where the heteroglossic nature of the individual discursive life is enacted and then the intramental process that leads towards the construction of our understanding and appropriation of reality triggering the development of higher mental functions. one of the implications of supporting a learning approach on these views is that the meaning of literacy goes beyond coding and decoding. street (1997) discusses literacy in terms of “social practices associated with reading and writing rather than psycholinguistic conflicts . . .” (p. 45). he further explains . . . the term “new literacy studies” (nls) (gee, 1991; street, 1996) represents a new tradition in considering the nature of literacy, focusing not so much on acquisition of skills, as in dominant approaches, but rather on what it means to intercultural challenge to language learning 547 think of literacy as a social practice (street, 1985). this entails the recognition of multiple literacies, varying according to time and space, but also contested in relations of power. nls, then takes nothing for granted with respect to literacy and the social practices with which it becomes associated, problematizing what counts as literacy at any time and place and asking “whose literacies” are dominant and whose are marginalized or resistant. (p. 77) ideologically, street’s conceptualization of literacy opens the door for a context-based and sensitive approach to the construction of literacies. furthermore, it allows us to think of alternatives where power can be exercised horizontally rather than vertically following a learning centered approach where students may lead the processes involved. under this view, teachers and students share the learning responsibility. learning establishes opportunities for dialogical understanding and recognizes the heteroglossic nature of our discursive experiences. it further aknowledges the inter and intramental processes that the development of higher mental functions defined by vygotsky involves. the workshops based on the ideas discussed above and vygotsky’s sociocultural learning theory, we designed disciplinary content language learning workshops for firstdegree university students. knowledge and understanding of the mother tongue and culture play key roles in the development of a second language; these are important arguments for the proposed english workshops presented in this article. the main tenet is that students can develop academic english given that they know about their discipline; by the time students enrol in the workshops, they have read extensively in their first language to develop some level of understanding about their discipline. such experience has probably served as scaffolding for complex literacy skills in their l1. considering that the content of the workshops is based on the students’ disciplinary area, their motivation may trigger a positive attitude towards learning a l2. the approach of the innovation involves moving from a teaching transmission paradigm to one where the most important aspect is for each student to engage with a topic of his or her interest. additionally, students are seen as individuals whose knowledge and understanding of the world is valued and not as people whose lack of language knowledge prevents them from engaging in the discussion of complex topics. the objective of this innovation was not only to learn about a second language, but also to enhance students’ understanding and use of academic english in their field that would lead them to acquire a second language to a level that would open doors for future studies and professional careers. luz maría muñoz de cote, sylvia van dijk 548 this paper presents the findings of the qualitative research project set to investigate the piloting of this initiative, an innovative language program for university students that challenges traditional english language teaching (elt) courses. it celebrates a view centred on learning; classes become spaces for students to understand the language they are learning through the development of small projects related to their disciplinary area. methodology the purpose of this study was to understand the challenges involved when teachers and students confront a learning space that challenges previous learning and teaching experiences. following a contention that reality is socially constructed, the research stance taken to understand the piloting process of the english workshops is qualitative. this approach has enabled the researcher to give voice to participants; this position allows for the emergence of themes that otherwise would be hidden from the naked eye, supported by the assumption that reality is complex and dynamic. as such, and as holliday (2007) explains, it is necessary to look at the research within a specific context and draw boundaries of its social setting. there is recognition of the researcher’s subjectivity throughout the development of the research project where a detailed narrative of the process is necessary to ensure its rigor. the specific research questions that led this study were: 1. how do students experience a program that challenges a transmission model of education? 2. how do teachers experience a program that is based on learning rather than on teaching? the focus of this paper is on the first question. given the research approach used for this investigation, and the fact that it is an unfinished research project, we have not analyzed data to provide quantitative information. this does not mean that we do not consider such data important; it is a pending objective. at this stage, the stance we have taken has enabled us to unravel the complexity involved when individuals encounter learning situations that challenge previous experiences. research participants. five teachers (1 man and 4 women) and 16 students (10 women and 6 men) from five first-degree programs within the university served as participants in this study. four programs fall within the social science and humanities division, while the fifth one belongs to the hard sciences area. of the 5 teacher-participants, 2 are teachers and teacher trainers with over 20 years of experience while the other 3 are english teachers whose range of intercultural challenge to language learning 549 teaching experience is between 6 and 10 years. all of them are highly qualified in language teaching and accepted the challenge of becoming part of the project. one of the teachers, however, dropped out of the project after the first semester. the 16 student-participants were all enrolled in the workshops to cover the language requirement to finish their ba/bsc program. none of the participants can be considered true beginners as they had taken english classes in secondary and high school. they were all given the quick oxford placement test (qpt) and their levels ranged from high beginning to low intermediate. the qpt is a grammar based test that proved to be a useful discriminatory instrument. for ethical reasons, teachers’ and students’ names have been changed or concealed. data collection and analysis procedures. all teachers working as workshop facilitators were invited to participate in this study; to date, they are the only ones that have piloted them. each teacher, after accepting the invitation participated in semistructured, in-depth interviews conducted by the researcher over a period of two years. in addition to the interviews, a number of nonparticipant classroom observations were made in three of the six schools to gain greater understanding of the piloting process. two of the teachers also kept a journal of their daily experiences within their classroom. data were also gathered through two focus groups with 2 teacher-participants. student-participants were also invited to participate and after accepting the invitation they were interviewed by the researcher and also by their teachers. we also observed classes and students’ presentations. students’ reports, journal entries and glossaries have also been used as data. data analysis involved a constant comparative framework (miles & huberman, 1994). we began building a set of categories that represented the teachers’ and the students’ experiences. from there, we constructed two main themes that comprise the categories found in the initial analysis. the researcher discussed the categories with three teacher-participants to corroborate her interpretation. the themes that emerged from the data analysis problematize previous teaching and learning experiences as well as teachers’ pedagogical identities; students’ and teachers’ resistance towards an innovation that involves breaking away from their comfort zone in the classroom seems to threaten individuals. the second theme relates to the linguistic complexity of students’ work. findings: data analysis and discussion in this section we first present findings concerning students’ resistance towards the workshops. then we present evidence of the complexity of their luz maría muñoz de cote, sylvia van dijk 550 written work and their use of different voices. the piloting process began in august 2010. two teachers, the researcher and one of the teachers, started working with science undergraduate students. after this initial group, the workshops have been piloted in three different venues by three teachers. for teachers and students, it was the first time facing an approach that challenged previous teaching and learning experiences. one of the first issues students highlighted was the use of a textbook. they constantly expressed a need to follow a book. a second aspect they questioned was how they were to develop projects linked to their discipline if they did not know enough about the language. students never complained about their knowledge or understanding of their discipline, though. in our opinion, students’ knowledge about their discipline is considered by students a given capital. students’ resistance towards the workshops varied as it happens in any classroom. however, how resistance was enacted showed not only differences, but the complexity of students’ realities and beliefs, as evidenced by the following november 2011 excerpt from the researcher’s journal: while waiting for the teacher to arrive, a group of students asks me who i am and what i am doing there. i explain that their teacher had invited me to observe their project presentations. a few seconds were enough to hear comments about their experiences, agreeing or disagreeing with the workshops. one of the students said that he disliked them; he said that it was impossible to learn anything because he first needed to learn vocabulary and grammar to function in a second language. another student was all excited and enthusiastic, but nervous, as her team would be the first to explain and present their project to the group. she said that even though developing a project was difficult and time consuming, she liked it because it was the first time she could discuss topics that were interesting and linked to education, her field of study, in english. while this excerpt shows different positions towards the courses, it also portrays two different views about language. one where knowledge about language seems to be the key to liking the workshops; a second view suggest a challenge but also some sort of reward. even though the second student does not explain the difficulties she found, once we were in the classroom, some of those challenges became visible. when she presented her project, she struggled with pronunciation; she managed to explain (not read), in broken english, a series of piagetian ideas that were the basis of her project. while this was happening, the student that apparently disliked the course was distracted and kept distracting other students. the teacher encouraged the group to ask questions, a few students did and got answers from the students presenting their project to the group. the following excerpt seems to indicate that the student positions himself as subordinate and the teacher as the one in power with capacities intercultural challenge to language learning 551 that apparently define the student’s actions; a vertical enactment of power between teacher and student. in an informal conversation in june 2011, the student that was not paying attention said: “i don’t like the workshops, the teacher doesn’t teach. i have to do things that should be done by the teacher and i don’t know how i’m going to pass [the course].” it may be the case that the student’s lack of interest is a way to resist the challenge posed by the innovation as it questions previous experiences. furthermore, it suggests that for this student teaching involves depositing knowledge (freire, 2004) as a static commodity. the student’s resisting attitude towards an innovation calls for responsibilities that have probably not been part of his educational experiences. from a bakhtinian point of view and thinking of discursive positions where language defines or produces spaces (doecke, kostogriz, & charles, 2004, p. 32), the student’s struggle may be conceived as heteroglossic, a constant struggle between centripetal and centrifugal discourses: the centripetal forces of the life of language, embodied in a “unitary language” operate in the midst of heteroglossia. at any given moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word . . . but also, and for us this is the essential point, into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, “professional” and “generic” languages, languages of generations and so forth . . . alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward. (bakhtin, 1981, pp. 271-272) centripetal discursive forces are represented by monoglossic learning experiences where language is standardized and has fixed meanings that teachers deposit. these problematize centrifugal forces that resist unified views of language, which would mean engaging with the language beyond structural levels. this creates a space of struggle where on the one hand there is a celebration of the differences and complexity of language learning processes influenced by previous experiences, individual differences, interests, motivation, and so on. in other words, centripetal and centrifugal discursive forces are the sites of the struggles created by students’ traditional language classes and their experiences within the workshops. an example of this struggle seems to be represented by the topic chosen by a group of students. these students developed a project on verb morphology in english. during their presentation they explained that before they could start using the language, they needed to understand its morphology. when questioned about the reasons why such knowledge was necessary to use the language, one of the participants said that if a student does not understand how luz maría muñoz de cote, sylvia van dijk 552 the language works and where it comes from, meaning etymologies, a learner cannot use the language appropriately. the group explained that in junior high school they had begun learning the rules and now they were trying to go deeper into their understanding of the linguistic system. another student wrote in his journal: “today in my english class i felt bad because the new form of work is confused for me [sic]” (luis’ journal, may 2011). during an interview, a third student said: “i want classes, normal grammar classes. maybe two hours of grammar and one for the workshops” (interview, june 2012). the evidence shows the struggle that changing the educational paradigm involves; student’s experience involves states of confusion and desire to go back to grammar based learning environments that are apparently seen as the normal way of learning a language; a conflicting heteroglossic position where monoglossic grammatical discourses and heteroglossic linguistic experiences compete. a space where “meaning-making lies on the inter-discursive and inter-textual borderline and appropriating these social discourses and text is a complicated struggle and ideological activity” (doecke et al., 2004, p. 34). even though students’ perceptions at one point in time differed, in the large body of data we identified patterns that suggest that students’ views tend to change. while many of them strongly resist the innovation the first time, during their second semester, they seem to take a different stance, their views seem to change: “throughout this project, i was involved more in the team work and of course, on the topic at hand [sic]” (lola’s journal, september 2011). “the activities in group benefic my learn [sic] in english because we worked in different activities [sic]” (ramiro’s journal, october 2011). “i have learned more than just english. now i know how to make reference to the sources i use for my papers” (interview, june 2012). these excerpts suggest how students acknowledge having learned a number of things. while there are grammatical inaccuracies, the evidence apparently portrays a dynamic meaning-making process. working collectively seems to be of value to these students; for example, the focus of their learning appears to go beyond linguistic gains. such meaning-making process involves modifying attitudes and learning more than language: “in this class i felt a change in my attitude, i noticed that if i try to say things in english is very easy for me [sic]. my classmates and i like [it]” (students’ comment after class october 2011). “i think that this form of the class is very interesting because i will can learn bests but i will can more responsibility [sic]” (luis, november 2011). these data excerpts may be interpreted as a constant interplay of discursive forces that generate conflict between them as different voices and contrasting perspectives mingle. students move from positions where the emphasis is on learning about the language and teachers transmitting knowledge as part of their previous experiences, to spaces that invite them to think about what they know and what they want to say. intercultural challenge to language learning 553 the struggle also seems to place learning more than a second language in the center of their experience,; they appear to learn about becoming responsible for their learning process, learning academic skills, and valuing group work. in other words, the experience “stretches their repertoires as language users” (doecke et al., 2004, p. 35). they combine experiences from the past with those of the present; experiences and knowledge from the classroom and experiences and knowledge beyond the classroom. from a bakhtinian position, their conflicting views are the evidence of the dialogical nature of their polyphonic discourses. the possibility of stretching repertoires as language users may represent the transferability of linguistic abilities described by cummins (1979, 1984), geva and verhoeven (2000) or koda (2005); a dialogical process of making sense of the difference between different literacies. this suggests the development of complex literacy skills that go beyond linguistic coding and decoding, that is the development of nontraditional definitions of literacies that involve a more complex view of language and literacy. students’ experiences take place within spaces where tensions apparently involve a reconceptualization of what learning and teaching mean as they participate in dynamic social systems (lemke, 1993). it is within dynamic social spaces, which are part of social systems, where struggles to come to terms with a different type of classroom that challenges beliefs, previous experiences as first language users and as language learners, take place. coming to terms involves understanding different cultural linguistic practices, not only in the students’ first language, but also in the second language they are learning. the experience, as mentioned above, also involves learning to value group work. working with peers apparently represents a learning opportunity. group work has probably enabled students to engage in discussions where interpersonal dialogues created opportunities to develop higher thinking abilities through intrapersonal dialogues. even though students’ previous experiences as language learners involved learning about the language, the workshops led them to see learning spaces differently. it was not a place to fulfill only the objectives set by a program or a teacher, but a space that opened up opportunities to learn about themselves and how others may be part of their individual learning processes. the evidence suggests that the proposed approach enables students to enter a process of critical thinking that first resists moving away from comfort zones, to then value opportunities to learn about themselves, integrate knowledge about their discipline to the learning process of language use that is not isolated from relevant aspects involved in academic discourses, such as the use of reference conventions, different written genres as will be presented below. the evidence presented and this discussion lead us to think that the luz maría muñoz de cote, sylvia van dijk 554 level of engagement with the language and the learning process that the workshops seem to promote enable students to develop an understanding of a second language at discourse level rather than sentence level. this challenges many of the discourses promoted by elt where the emphasis is on learning about the language at structural and functional levels. in other words, the celebration of monoglossic views of language where learning is apparently conceived as a process of homogeneous understanding. initial analysis of students’ writings. as this research project is in progress, in this section we present our initial understanding of students’ written discourse. it may sound odd to include something in an article that is in the early stages of analysis. however, the evidence we have found, even at this early stage of analysis, is of relevance to the discussion on how students experience the workshops. while the above discussion shows how problematic the process appears to be for some students, there is also evidence of the value of collaborative work and its impact on students’ learning at levels that go beyond linguistic knowledge, and their written discourse shows awareness of different genres and their use. figure 1 sample of a handout designed by a group of students whose project was to create a flyer even though we are still in the process of analyzing students’ writings, findings so far show that, while most of them think that they do not know enough english, they can express ideas in english. so far we can say that ideas, in most of the written intercultural challenge to language learning 555 documents we are analysing, are complex, as in the example in figure 1. when these documents are compared with the compositions students have to write in a traditional english course, students appear to focus on content rather than form. there are grammatical mistakes that, at times, hamper understanding; however, most of the times, it is possible to understand what they are trying to convey. evidence shows that students’ understanding involves differentiating between genres, journal writing and academic essays. a student from the first semester workshop wrote the following two excerpts: “the independent work is good because it lets you take control of your academic activities. the development of an academic activity, independent work allow students to practice it, work as they wish and at their own pace” (introductory paragraph from first essay, 2011). “this is the first day of the english course 4, still do not know, how it will conduct the class in this subject . . .” (journal entry at the beginning of his first semester in the workshops, 2011). these excerpts are written in broken english, but it is possible to understand what the student wants to say. the first example is part of the introductory paragraph of the student’s first essay. the second example is an excerpt from the student’s journal. the examples represent two different genres. the second one is a clear portrait of the student’s feeling of uncertainty towards the language class. the first excerpt, on the other hand, explains the student’s understanding of independent work. the discourse is impersonal and the student manages to detach himself from the subject. these students seem to understand that a different genre involves different ways of using the language, something rather sophisticated when one thinks about a second language learner within a traditional language classroom. it may be premature to say it, but there is an apparent transfer of l1 academic linguistic abilities to the l2. students seem to use their l1 resources and understanding to organize their ideas for at least two genres. linguistic choices are context dependent and the evidence suggests that while writing their journals, they are talking to themselves. on the other hand, the discourse of their essays suggests that they take distance and use not only their voice, but also that of the authors they refer to. students’ understanding of l1 discourses could be the basis for the transference of those abilities as they also seem to know that: in every community there co-exist different regional and social group dialects, different historical usages, different modes of speaking associated with interest groups, agegroups, genders, ideological points-of-view, etc. social semiotics identifies, with bakhtin, both the ideational and the value-orientational relations among these different social voices (lemke 1988a, 1989 1990b, in press; thibault 1989). each sub-community constructs a different reality by the views it formulates in language on any matter, and it constructs its views always and only from a particular social position of interests and values vis-a-vis other possible or actual views. (lemke, 1993, p. 4) luz maría muñoz de cote, sylvia van dijk 556 understanding that different genres imply using the language differently suggests a basic comprehension of how linguistic differences within a text represent not only different voices, but different communities where certain discursive practices are accepted while others are not (for example, formal vs. informal language). this suggests that meaning making involves writing as a socially meaningful activity; that is, the context where certain piece of writing delves must be thought as part of a context. it is not a matter of only practising linguistic structures. rather, it seems to be a matter of understanding social practices within different communities. such communities, from a sociocultural standpoint, are context and culture bound. moreover, looking at this phenomenon from a vygotskyan developmental perspective, the value of collaborative work may be as a mediation tool to develop such understanding (lantolf & thorne, 2007). in terms of halliday’s views, people use language to create meanings within their social and cultural context . . . l2 learners must learn the new contexts they are likely to encounter in using the l2 as well as the new types of content that are expected in these new contexts. (dixon et al., 2012, p. 34) in other words, evidence suggests that the value of interaction which students explain as collaboration changes not only the role of the teacher, but also the objectives of the learning process. the learning process involves much more than knowledge about linguistic systems; there seems to be a need to bring into the learning setting opportunities for each individual to find effective ways of communicating in different contexts and for different purposes. conclusion in this article, we have tried to explain our understanding of how students experience learning english through a series of workshops where content about their disciplinary area is at the core of the activities they need to develop. the stance taken involved looking at language learning from the perspective of vygotskyan views of cognitive development where interactions with peers are key to those processes. we have also explained that the focus of the workshops is on learning rather than on teaching. students’ previous experiences are problematized. the problematic nature of students’ experiences was explained through bakhtin’s ideas of the heteroglossic nature of language. students’ struggle apparently involves a process of adjustment that involves resisting the change of power positions when they realize that they have to be in charge of their learning process. despite the mistakes or errors found in stu intercultural challenge to language learning 557 dents’ work, data suggest that students’ understanding of english goes beyond the correct use of the language at sentence level. there is evidence of a process that involves using at least two different written genres, essays and journals. we need to continue our investigation to better understand the processes triggered when students and teachers engage in learning-teaching processes that challenge previous learning and teaching experiences. in light of the current findings, there are a number of implications for the language classroom and for teacher formation processes. one of them would be the problematization of a number of current views about language within elt discourses. are we mainly fostering superficial and mechanical language learning? is the classroom conceived as a space where ideas are more important than language correctness? if this were the case, then it would be necessary to deeply analyse teacher formation processes and how these may be reifying superficial and mechanical language learning, where students are not given opportunities to engage with the language at deeper discursive and meaningful levels. another question arises: do teachers understand the difference between a stance that focuses on teaching and one that focuses on students learning? there are pending issues related to this research project. one of them has to do with statistical data analyses. this would provide relevant information regarding the group that would strengthen the findings presented so far. luz maría muñoz de cote, sylvia van dijk 558 references bakhtin, m. 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(1985) vygotsky and the social formation of the mind. london: harvard university press. 307 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (2). 2020. 307-336 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.2.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt vocabulary development in a clil context: a comparison between french and english l2 kristof baten ghent university, belgium https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2125-8011 kristof.baten@ugent.be silke van hiel ghent university, belgium https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6616-3959 silkevanhiel@gmail.com ludovic de cuypere ghent university, belgium free university of brussels, belgium https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0050-1097 ludovic.decuypere@ugent.be abstract content and language integrated learning (clil) has expanded in europe, favored by the large body of research, often showing positive effects of clil on l2 development. however, critical voices have recently questioned whether these positive findings apply to any language, given that most research focuses on english. taking into account this concern, the present study investigated the (productive and receptive) vocabulary development in l2 english and l2 french of the same group of learners within a clil context. the aim was not to evaluate the benefits of clil over non-clil, but, instead, to examine whether vocabulary gains in clil learning are language-dependent. more specifically, this study included 75 flemish eight-grade pupils who had clil lessons in both english and french. the results show that although the pupils have a larger english vocabulary, the level of improvement (from pretest to kristof baten, silke van hiel, ludovic de cuypere 308 posttest) is not different across the languages. the findings indicate that within clil vocabulary knowledge also develops in languages other than english. keywords: clil; vocabulary; l2 english; l2 french; productive and receptive levels tests 1. introduction content and language integrated learning (clil), that is, the teaching of subjects, such as history or economy, in a foreign language, has gained increasing popularity in the european educational landscape over the past 20 years (eacea, 2012) and in many other geographical contexts, such as asia (e.g., lin, 2016) or south america (e.g., banegas, 2011). undoubtedly, this growth in popularity is partly driven by the substantial body of research on the effects of clil, including largescale studies on learning outcomes (e.g., admiraal, westhoff, & de bot, 2006 for the netherlands; lasagabaster, 2008 for spain; zydatiß, 2007 for germany) as well as specific studies dealing with individual aspects of language, such as vocabulary, pronunciation and morphosyntax, or the four language skills. the image that emerges from these studies is that clil learners generally attain higher proficiency levels than non-clil learners, especially in listening skills (aguilar & muñoz, 2014) and vocabulary (jexenflicker & dalton-puffer, 2010). furthermore, clil learners are found to display greater fluency and creativity in speaking (mewald, 2007) and to reach higher levels on cefr-based diagnostic tests in reading, listening, writing and speaking (lorenzo, casal, & moore, 2010).1 despite the positive picture that is commonly associated with clil, a number of critical voices have recently raised concerns about the role of english within clil. for example, cenoz, genesee, and gorter (2014, p. 257) point out that “much, if not most, research on clil has been conducted by esl/efl scholars.” consequently, most of the (positive) research findings are based on the acquisition of english as a second or foreign language. in this respect, daltonpuffer, nikula, and smit (2010, p. 286) refer, somewhat provocatively, to content and english integrated learning instead of content and language integrated learning. similarly, pérez, lorenzo, and pavón (2016, p. 485) speak of an “empirical vacuum” of how clil functions in languages other than english, as it is not implausible that the positive findings for clil in english are, at least partly, connected to english itself. cenoz et al. (2014) call for more inner-clil research, a 1 in areas such as morphosyntax, writing performance and pronunciation clil seems to have little effect (aguilar & muñoz, 2014; dalton-puffer, 2008; dalton-puffer et al., 2010; ruiz de zarobe, 2011). vocabulary development in a clil context: a comparison between french and english l2 309 need which was also underlined by breidbach and viebock (2012) in their review of recent research on clil in germany. seeing that there is indeed no one unified clil approach (coyle, 2007; lasagabaster, 2008; wolff, 2002), it is worthwhile to get into the black box and examine clil also in relation to its variation. clil approaches vary according to curriculum variables such as intensity, duration, age of onset, starting linguistic level, the subjects and languages involved (coyle, 2007), but also according to pedagogic variables such as types of input, types of output practice, and use of strategies (de graaff, koopman, anikina, & westhoff, 2007). the present study will single out the variable of language, which within clil is most commonly a combination of english with another national, regional, border or minority language (pérez-cañado, 2012). therefore, in an attempt to answer this call for more inner-clil research, the present study compares the (receptive and productive) vocabulary development in both l2 english and l2 french within the same group of clil learners. we focus on vocabulary because positive effects of clil have especially been observed in this area (dalton-puffer, 2008). moreover, vocabulary knowledge is generally taken to be one of the most salient components of linguistic ability (hulstijn, 2010). it should be emphasized, however, that this study does not include a nonclil group and thus refrains from evaluating the effectiveness of clil compared to non-clil. instead, the present study examines to what extent vocabulary development within a specific clil context varies according to the target language. with this comparison of english clil versus french clil, the present investigation seeks to fill a gap in the existing clil research, which has largely focused on the lingua franca english (pérez et al., 2016). the goal is to examine how clil works for languages that do not have the status of a global language. to this aim, the present study zooms in on belgium’s dutch-speaking region (i.e., flanders), where, since recently, clil is organized in english and french (and german as a matter of fact). before the findings are presented, some brief background is given on clil in general as well as on the specific context of clil in flanders. 2. literature review 2.1. content and language integrated learning clil has become a popular and widespread practice (and term) in europe (coyle, hood, & marsh, 2010). it refers to an alternative didactic method in which school subjects are taught in a second or foreign language (l2). crucial to the method is the dual focus on language and content, which implies that the language is not the main (or only) goal, but rather serves as the means of communication in authentic situations. the method is believed to be more effective than kristof baten, silke van hiel, ludovic de cuypere 310 traditional language education on linguistic, subject content, cognitive and affective-attitudinal grounds. as such, it would replicate the positive effects found in the wealth of previous research on content/language integration in canadian immersion, us bilingual education and european international schools. however, pérez-cañado (2012) rightly pointed out that, while positive effects have been attested in these specific north american and european contexts, the possibility of similar effects arising from clil still remains largely assumed instead of empirically backed-up. indeed, even though clil represents an emerging field, strong empirical evidence in this area is still scarce (gierlinger, 2017). also, the context-specificity of each type of bilingual education shows that extrapolation of findings from one situation to another should be treated with caution. in addition, it should also be taken into account that clil approaches vary considerably, which again limits the generalizability of research findings (coyle, 2007; lasagabaster, 2008; wolff, 2002). nevertheless, a recurring finding in clil research seems to be the positive effect on vocabulary knowledge. for example, in a large-scale study with 180 pupils in berlin, zydatiß (2007) observed that the clil learners outperformed the other learners on lexical competence on an english proficiency test (and also on grammatical and communicative competences, for that matter). in writing, ackerl (2007) and jexenflicker and dalton-puffer (2010) found that austrian clil learners have a larger vocabulary size, use more complex and less frequent words, and show more word variation. similarly, catalonian clil learners obtained significantly higher levels on lexical complexity in their writing performance than their non-clil counterparts (navés, 2011). in a study with finnish learners, using the receptive and productive vocabulary levels test (see below), merikivi and pietilä (2014) analogously found larger vocabulary sizes in the clil-group compared to the non-clil group. receptive scores were higher than productive scores, and both were correlated, meaning that clil learners with high receptive vocabulary size also scored high for productive vocabulary size. furthermore, studies have shown that clil pupils rely less on their mother language and increase their level of lexical inventions, which indicates a higher proficiency level (jiménez catalàn, ruiz de zarobe, & cenoz, 2006; ruiz de zarobe, 2010). the observed lexical advantage of clil learners is attributed to the interaction of explicit and implicit learning conditions (merikivi & pietilä, 2014). because of the more frequent exposure to versatile and meaningful input, students unconsciously learn the form of the words. in sla this type of learning is termed “incidental language learning” (hulstijn, 2003). however, “contextual language learning” (elgort, brysbaert, stevens, & van assche, 2018) may be a better term, because unlike what is suggested by incidental, the learning is not accidental but, rather, the result of particular activities in meaningful contexts. vocabulary development in a clil context: a comparison between french and english l2 311 indeed, in clil, the students get more opportunities to use the target language in meaningful communicative situations, which leads to conscious learning of the meaning of these words. this is closely related to the “involvement load hypothesis” (laufer & hulstijn, 2001), which suggests that the higher the degree of involvement on the part of the learner, the better it is for acquisition. the hypothesis consists of three components (i.e., need, search and evaluation), which refer to the knowledge (e.g., of a word) that is required to complete a task, the attempt to acquire this knowledge (e.g., the meaning of an unknown word), and the evaluation of one’s own performance (e.g., appropriate use of a word). more so than in traditional l2 classes, clil incorporates a greater involvement load, which may positively affect vocabulary learning. furthermore, the non-threatening atmosphere in the clil classroom (nikula, 2010), for example in terms of error correction, most likely adds to the uptake of new words. in this regard, macintyre and gregersen (2012) argue that positive associations and emotions act as facilitators in the language learning process. because language learning is not the main and only goal in clil, the fear of using the target language and making mistakes eases off. indeed, nikula (2010) has shown that there is more student-teacher interaction in the clil class compared to regular l2 classes. this increased interaction may explain the lexical advantage of clil as it fits well with general theories of learning, suggesting that frequency of encounters is one of the most powerful predictors of learning (ellis, 2002). however, it should be noted that an increase of student-teacher interaction is not necessarily a given in clil classrooms. lo and macaro (2015), for example, observed little interaction in classrooms in honk kong that had just started to experience the clil approach. some researchers claim that other factors, such as reading or extracurricular contact, also affect vocabulary development. sylvén (2004), for instance, found that clil students had significantly more contact with english outside of school than their non-clil counterparts. interestingly, the clil students in this study already scored higher on the first receptive vocabulary test, which was administered before clil instruction had started. this led the author to state that it is not possible to conclude that clil per se led to larger vocabulary gains. in addition, it should also be noted that not every study reported higher levels of vocabulary knowledge. for example, in a large-scale longitudinal study on the effects of clil education in the netherlands, admiraal et al. (2006) found no differences in receptive vocabulary knowledge between clil and non-clil learners. what is striking about the studies overviewed above is that the lexical advantage has been observed for english, which may not be a coincidence, given that it is the uncontested global language, in the case of which the out-of-class exposure is significant. this raises questions on how clil functions in languages kristof baten, silke van hiel, ludovic de cuypere 312 other than english. in this regard, pérez et al. (2016) examined the linguistic and sociolinguistic competences as well as the socio-educational outcomes of a french clil program in andalusia. the findings of this study suggest that clil also works for french, especially with regard to linguistic competence, but at the same time the study warns of possible detrimental effects when not taking into account important social issues. furthermore, also in the uk and switzerland a few studies have included other languages than english. wiesemes (2009), for example, found that uk pupils in a french clil program reported increased levels of motivation and enjoyment. in switzerland, gassner and maillat (2006) found positive effects of clil on productive skills in french. on the other hand, serra (2007) did not observe differences between clil and non-clil on language skills in italian and romansch. closer to the specific clil context of the present study, de smet, mettewie, galand, hiligsmann, and van mensel (2018) examined the levels of anxiety and enjoyment of french-speaking belgians in dutch clil and non-clil contexts. interestingly, the study also included english clil and non-clil contexts, which makes it possible to examine how clil interacts with different target languages. in this regard, the results reveal that, in addition to significant differences between clil and non-clil in general, the levels of anxiety and enjoyment diverge even more in english than in dutch. this finding suggests an important role of the target language within clil. therefore, de smet et al. (2018) call for further empirical investigations in this area. 2.2. clil in flanders the clil context in the present study is situated in a secondary school in flanders, the dutch-speaking part of belgium. although belgium is officially trilingual on state-level (dutch, french, german), the educational system of the communities (i.e., the flemish, francophone and german-speaking communities) is organized unilingually. this means that the language of the community is the medium of instruction for all subjects (i.e., dutch in flanders), except for l2 classes, where it is common practice to use the foreign language as the language of instruction as soon as possible. this educational separation on community-level is the result of a long process of linguistic legislation since the birth of belgium (see bollen & baten, 2010; buyl & housen, 2014). with the independence of belgium in 1830, french was declared the only official language and it became the dominant language in government and administration. french was also the dominant language used by the catholic clergy, the nobility, the industrials and the bourgeoisie. however, the 19th century witnessed the emergence of the socalled flemish movement, which aimed for the dutchification of education, the judiciary, the army and official administration. in 1963 the tug-of-war between the vocabulary development in a clil context: a comparison between french and english l2 313 dutch-speaking and french-speaking parts of belgium culminated in the instalment of the dutch-french language border (willemyns, 2002). the struggle for linguistic rights – often considered a struggle for social rights – has had many consequences, including the educational separation on community-level, and, as a result, different language policies in flanders and wallonia emerged (bollen & baten, 2010; buyl & housen, 2014; van de craen, surmont, mondt, & ceuleers, 2011). this particularly applies to the communities’ organization of bilingual education: whereas the francophone community already began with clil in 1998 (chopey-paquet, 2007), flanders only started the program 16 years later, that is, in the school year 2014/2015. currently, five years after its implementation, clil programs are offered in more than 100 flemish schools. in order to obtain the permission to implement clil, these schools had to submit a bulky application, stating, among other things, the aims of the clil program, the characteristics of the clil curriculum (e.g., the language(s) and subject(s) involved, teaching material, etc.), the staff policy, the quality assurance policy, and so on. in this application the schools also have to comply with a number of restrictions imposed by the flemish government (de vlaamse regering, 2004). first, clil can only be organized on the level of secondary education. second, the number of courses taught in a foreign language, other than traditional l2 courses, is limited to 20% of the total curriculum. third, it is obligatory to offer a parallel dutch-speaking program, enabling pupils who opt out to take the same courses in dutch. and fourth, the only languages in which clil is allowed are english, french and german. although actually all languages (i.e., national languages, migrant languages, minority languages, and border languages) are eligible as medium of instruction in clil – at least, this was the spirit of the european language planners (pérez et al., 2016) – the reality in flanders shows otherwise, in that the policy does not allow for teaching in minority languages (e.g., spanish or italian) or migrant languages (e.g., turkish). in fact, financial government support of minority-language teaching projects (dutch: onderwijs in eigen taal en cultuur, oetc) was discontinued in 2011 (bollen & baten, 2010). for example, the foyer project in brussels, which was launched in 1981 and which provided part of the education in spanish, italian and turkish, no longer receives public funding. however, on a voluntary basis, the project still runs on a smaller scale. closer inspection of the presently available clil programs in flanders reveals that history and geography are the most popular courses, and english is the most popular language (offered in 64 schools). clil in french ranks second (offered in 45 schools), while clil in german is only offered in four schools.2 clearly, also flanders favors english as medium of instruction in clil. the fact 2 http://onderwijs.vlaanderen.be/nl/clil-content-and-language-integrated-learning kristof baten, silke van hiel, ludovic de cuypere 314 that english is the most popular clil-language and that history and geography are the most popular clil-subjects is most likely related to the competence requirements set by the flemish government. clil teachers are obliged to attest competences in both the clil subject (by a bachelor or master degree) and the clil language (again by a bachelor or master degree, or by an official language proficiency certification). the required language proficiency level is the c1 level of the cefr in all skills. the school and the teachers experience this requirement as too high, and it is a perception that the c1 level is more easily achieved for english than for french. therefore, as a side effect, the schools and teachers seem more inclined to choose english.3 the frequent choice for history and geography is the result of the flemish bachelor program for secondary teacher training, which involves a combination of the two subjects. it is mostly the teachers that have a foreign language in this combination of two who will (be asked to) become clil-teachers. apparently, among the available teachers, the combination with history/geography was a popular one. in a recent survey of the flemish schools inspectorate regarding the present-day clil practice in flanders, the schools and the teachers indicate that these competence requirements as well as the abovementioned restrictions hinder the rollout of clil.4 so, while clil is now successfully launched in flanders, the rigid rules and regulations may need some adjustments. given that clil has only recently been introduced in flanders, research into the linguistic as well as extra-linguistic effects of clil remains rather scarce. the limited published findings so far relate to the research activities that took place in clil pilot projects: before 2014-2015, a small number of schools were granted permission by the minister of education to embark on experimental clil projects. for example, in the so-called stimob-project (stimulerend meertalig onderwijs in brussel), van de craen, ceuleers, lochtman, allain, and mondt (2006) found that clil learners in primary education in brussels had equal and sometimes better knowledge of both the l1 (dutch) and the l2 (french) compared to the non-clil children. in another experimental clil project, strobbe, sercu, strobbe, and welcomme (2013) investigated the outcomes of clil in nine flemish secondary schools. quantitatively, no significant positive effect on the target language (either french or english) was found. although the clil learners were capable of communicating fluently, their fluency was restricted to the content provided in the clil classroom and their language was often ungrammatical and unidiomatic. qualitatively, however, the researchers observed higher self-confidence among clil learners when they had to express 3 according to an inquiry of the flemish schools inspectorate: www.onderwijsinspectie.be/ sites/default/files/atoms/files/clil-rapport%20zonder%20bijlagen%20-%2020170112.pdf 4 see fn. 4 vocabulary development in a clil context: a comparison between french and english l2 315 themselves in the target language as well as increased motivation and enthusiasm with regard to the course-specific content. in addition, and more importantly for the present study, learners reported having noticed considerable improvement in relation to course-specific vocabulary development. in addition to these pilot project studies, a recent study examined the effects of clil (in french) on mathematical content learning in a flemish secondary school (surmont, struys, van den noort, & van de craen, 2016). the results showed that the 35 clil-learners in seventh grade outperformed the 72 nonclil counterparts on a mathematical test. the researchers ascribe the difference to the clil approach. however, their conclusion that the data provide “clear proof” (p. 328) might be overstated. as pointed out by the authors, the groups were self-selected, which means that the pupils were able to choose whether or not to participate in the clil program (this was also the case in the pilot project studies above). this means that other lurking factors, such as motivational levels, parental support, and the like, could have had an impact. for instance, it is possible that clil is chosen by higher achieving and well-supported pupils in the first place. a number of studies in the spanish context indeed showed that the parents of the children in the clil stream often have a university degree, indicating higher socio-economic status (ses; e.g., alonso, grisaleña, & campo, 2008; bruton, 2011; pérez et al., 2016). pérez et al. (2016) even observed that the effect of ses is reinforced when the clil program incorporates languages other than english, thus making non-english clil a program for the select few. nevertheless, in light of the tendency of the existing literature to focus on clil in english, it is interesting to point out that the above studies on clil in flanders have examined clil with french as the medium of instruction. the moderately positive findings of the (pilot project) studies in clil french indicate that previous findings for l2 english in clil may be transferable to l2 french, especially with regard to the acquisition of vocabulary, in which domain most positive effects of clil have been observed so far, at least for l2 english (daltonpuffer, 2008). it is the present study’s aim to explore this. 2.3. research questions the present study was conducted in flanders, a region where both english and french are considered an asset. however, attitudes and exposure to these languages are different. attitudes towards french, for instance, are rather negative, compared to the positive attitudes towards english (lochtman, lutjeharms, & kermarrec, 2005). mettewie (2015) suggests that this negative attitude may hinder the acquisition of l2 french. indeed, dewaele (2005) found a relationship between negative attitudes and poor achievement among flemish students. kristof baten, silke van hiel, ludovic de cuypere 316 in addition to these different attitudes, english and french differ in the extent to which learners are exposed to them outside the classroom: whereas english is pervasive in the daily lives of children in flanders (de wilde, brysbaert, & eyckmans, 2019), exposure to french, despite it being an official language, is limited. the difference in exposure undoubtedly has consequences for l2 acquisition. in a study focusing on the success in learning french and english in regular foreign language classes in flanders, housen et al. (2001) found that pupils had better receptive and productive skills in english than in french. with regard to vocabulary, students were not only able to recognize english words easier than french words, but they also commanded richer and more varied english vocabulary compared to french. according to housen, janssens, and pierrard (2001), this difference is not only due to greater typological affiliation between english and dutch, but is also the result of more extracurricular contact with english than with french. on the other hand, the pupils demonstrated better knowledge of formal language use in french than in english. this finding is not surprising because the extracurricular contact with english generally takes place in informal settings, whereas exposure to french is limited to the formal language use in class. informal encounters with french, for example through television, occur, but to a considerably lesser extent than could be expected in a bilingual dutch-french country. given the different findings with regard to vocabulary knowledge in french and english of flemish pupils in regular foreign language classes and given the newly emerged educational context of clil in flanders, the present study sought to assess the vocabulary knowledge in french and english of flemish pupils in a clil context. it is important to note explicitly that the study does not evaluate the benefits of clil over non-clil, but aims to establish the initial level of vocabulary and to address the possibly differential vocabulary development in a french and english clil context. two research questions guided the study: 1. what is the level of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge in french and english of beginning flemish clil learners? (rq1) 2. how do english and french clil students differ in receptive and productive gains? (rq2) with respect to rq1, we expected a clear difference between english and french, with higher scores for english. such a finding would be in line with housen et al. (2001) and reflect the differences that exist in terms of attitudes and exposure. with respect to rq2, we formulated two alternative hypotheses, the first assuming a larger gain for french than for english, and the second predicting the opposite. the reasoning behind the first hypothesis was that learners are expected to have more vocabulary development in a clil context: a comparison between french and english l2 317 room for improvement in their french vocabulary and less in their english vocabulary, because they already had considerable english vocabulary knowledge before they started the clil program. the rationale for the second hypothesis was that more knowledge leads to more gains, that is, “the rich get richer.” 3. methodology 3.1. participants we collected data from 104 pupils in a large secondary school in the province of antwerp (flanders). however, participants with either english or french as home language (n = 21) and participants that only partially completed the tests were excluded from the study (n = 8). therefore, the data reported here comes from 75 pupils (28 females, 47 males). all participants were l1 speakers of dutch and aged 12 to 14 at the time of testing (m = 12.9, sd = 0.3). data from a language background questionnaire further revealed that, in terms of previous experience with l2 learning, all the pupils had received formal instruction in french for three years prior to the time of study (in grades 5-7). in contrast, none of the pupils had received formal language instruction in english before. however, due to heavy media exposure, flemish children acquire english from an early age onwards and before any formal education gets under way (goethals, 1997; simon, lima jr, & de cuypere, 2016). in this regard, the participants reported different engagement with french and english media. on a 5-point likert-scale from never to daily, the pupils’ average media-engagement with english (3.19) was significantly higher than their media-engagement with french (1.95; wilcoxon signed-rank test: z = -6.54, p < .001, r = -0.53). the school started the clil program in 2015 and runs the program in both l2 english and l2 french in grades 7 and 8. the program involves such subjects as economics, history, computer science, music education, and religion. table 1 distribution of hours per week of clil and regular language classes clil language class english 1 2 french 2 4 or 5 for this study, we examined pupils who were in grade 8, taking both history in french and music in english. more specifically, the pupils received two hours of history in french and one hour of music in english per week. they additionally took four or five hours of french and two hours of english per week. the difference for the number of hours of french was related to program of study: pupils taking the modern languages program received one extra hour of kristof baten, silke van hiel, ludovic de cuypere 318 french (n = 15). table 1 summarizes the distribution of language and clil education in hours per week. it can be noticed that the exposure to french was double the exposure to english. in other schools in flanders other choices are made, which indicates that clil comes in different shapes and colors, not only in flanders but also across europe (coyle, 2007; lasagabaster, 2008; wolff, 2002). although this variation in clil implementations obviously means that findings in clil research are context-specific, they are revealing for clil in general. 3.2. research instruments the participants took for each language two vocabulary levels tests (vlt): a reception test and a production test. in the receptive vlt, participants matched decontextualized words with definitions, while in the productive vlt, they completed words that appeared in short sentences. for english, we used the second receptive vocabulary levels test, developed by schmitt, schmitt, and clapham (2001) and the productive vocabulary levels test, constructed by laufer and nation (1999). both tests contain five levels of word frequency: the 2000-word level, the 3000-word level, the 5000-word level, the 10 000-word level and the university/academic word level. the first two levels (2000-level and 3000-level) contain high-frequency words. research has established that knowledge of these word families is required for basic daily conversation (adolphs & schmitt, 2003), movie viewing (webb & rodgers, 2009) and reading texts (schmitt & schmitt, 2014). as a mid-frequency level, the 5000word level represents the boundary towards low-frequency items. this level is seen as the threshold for dealing with authentic texts/discourse fluently (schmitt & schmitt, 2014). the 10000-word level contains low-frequency items. having reached this level, l2 users are able to read practically any texts without major difficulty (nation, 2006). finally, the university/academic word level is not based on frequency but contains words that occur widely in academic discourse and textbooks. contrary to the common belief that university/academic words represent infrequent and specialized words inaccessible from general language, masrai and milton (2018) demonstrated that the majority of these words actually fall within the 3000 most frequent words. because we did not expect beginning secondary school pupils to know low-frequency words, we only included the first three levels in the receptive vocabulary test and the first two levels in the productive vocabulary test. indeed, as kremmel and schmitt (2018) point out, administering the levels representing low-frequency words to beginner learners would be time poorly spent. in the receptive test, each level consists of thirty definitions and sixty words organized in groups of three definitions and six words. participants are asked to match vocabulary development in a clil context: a comparison between french and english l2 319 the meanings of the right-hand column with a word from the left-hand column. the words in both columns are representative of the words at that frequency level. the following is an exerpt from the test: receptive vocabulary levels test 1. business 2. clock 3. horse ___ part of a house 4. pencil ___ animal with four legs 5. shoe ___ something used for writing 6. wall the productive test contains 18 words per level. the participants are presented with sentences including a missing word. they are asked to fill in the blanks with appropriate target words. the first few letters of the target words are provided, as well as an indication of the total number of letters, in order to prevent the participants from filling in other words which, although semantically suitable, would come from non-targeted frequency levels. the following is an example test item: productive vocabulary levels test there are a doz__ __ eggs in the basket. equivalent tests were used to measure the vocabulary size for french: the receptive vocabulary test as developed by batista (2014) and the productive vocabulary test as developed by peters, velghe, and van rompaey (2015). analogous to our decision regarding the english tests, we only included the first three levels of the receptive test and the first two of the productive test. likewise, the receptive test aimed to elicit 30 word-definition matches per level, while the productive test aimed to elicit 18 word completions per level. different from the english test, we sometimes explained or translated difficult words in the french sentences. the following are two excerpts from the tests: receptive vocabulary levels test 1. ambassadeur 2. enfance 3. portrait ___ conflit 4. rayon ___ première partie de la vie 5. trouble ___ représentant du gouvernement 6. vœu kristof baten, silke van hiel, ludovic de cuypere 320 productive vocabulary levels test après une guerre de plus de quatre ans, les deux pays voisins (=buurlanden) ont signé la p__ __ __ . the vocabulary levels tests estimate the total number of words a learner knows. the estimates can be used to compare groups of learners, measuring vocabulary growth within a language. because the tests for english and french were developed and designed according to the same principles, we assumed that the estimates could be useful for comparing vocabulary knowledge and growth across the particular language. 3.3. procedure and scoring the participants completed the four tests twice over a 3-month-interval. the pretest took place at the beginning of the clil program (october 2015), and the posttest was performed after three months (january 2016). after a briefing session with one of the researchers, the tests were administered by the teachers themselves in one of their clil classes: first the productive levels test and then the receptive levels test. the order of testing for french and english was random and dependent on practical matters (e.g., different week calendars, other assignments, etc.). the participants had approximately 30 minutes to complete the productive test and 20 minutes to complete the reception test. at the beginning of each session, the participants were given instructions regarding the content of the tests and the manner in which they should be solved. moreover, they received explanation about the goal of these tests, that is, that their vocabulary knowledge was examined solely for research purposes and that the results would not have an impact on course grades. furthermore, in order to avoid guessing, the participants were asked to only provide answers of which they were certain. taking the same testing instruments twice may entail the possibility of a practice effect from the first to the second time. considering that parallel test versions of the vlt exist, in principle, these parallel versions could have been administered to the group of clil learners in the present study, which would have ruled out any memory effect confounding the results. however, kremmel and schmitt (2018, p. 4) state that parallel tests are “not found to be equivalent enough to be used to measure the learning gains of any individual learner, and for this purpose, the same version should be used twice.” they point out, though, that a substantial amount of time should elapse between the administrations; ideally, more than a month. with regard to the scoring of the tests, we marked test items as either correct (1 point) or incorrect (0 points). mistakes in grammatical form or in spelling vocabulary development in a clil context: a comparison between french and english l2 321 were not penalized in the productive vocabulary levels tests. answers were marked as correct as long as the meaning of the word could be derived from a phonologically recognizable form. the maximum score that could be obtained for each level in the receptive vocabulary test was 30, whereas the maximum score for each level in the productive vocabulary test was 18, resulting in the maximum test score of 90 for the receptive vocabulary test and 36 for the productive vocabulary test. for our analysis, we used the pupils’ individual test scores. this accuracy approach is different from the reached levels approach. for example, according to schmitt, schmitt, and clapham (2001), learners have to obtain a score of 26/30 on a particular level in order to conclude that the level is mastered. however, the accuracy approach enabled us to make extrapolations on vocabulary size (see below). table 2 lists the vlts that were used in the present study together with their maximum scores. table 2 overview of vocabulary levels tests per type of knowledge and language 3.4. data analysis our response variable of interest was the gain score achieved by each participant on the french and english tests (with gain score = posttest score pretest score). we analyzed the data for the production and reception tests separately as the difference between both types of knowledge was in itself not a matter of interest. it should be noted that all participants followed the clil program in both english and french clil simultaneously. this setting allowed us to compare the two clil languages in a paired study design. for both the productive and the receptive results, we first compared the results for the pretests and posttests separately by means of a mann-whitneywilcoxon test (i.e., pretest: english vs. french and posttest: english vs. french). a non-parametric test was chosen because of a clear violation of the equal variances assumption. then we examined whether there was a significant improvement in the gain scores for both languages separately, using a paired-samples ttest (two-tailed; i.e., english: pretest vs. posttest and french: pretest vs. posttest). finally, we evaluated the differences between the mean gain scores of both languages, again by means of a paired-samples t-test (two-tailed; i.e., gain: english vs. french). in total, 10 significance tests were performed. we controlled l2 type of knowledge adapted from levels maximum score english receptive schmitt, schmitt, & clapham (2001) 2000, 3000, 5000 /90 productive laufer & nation (1999) 2000, 3000 /36 french receptive batista (2014) 2000, 3000, 5000 /90 productive peters et al. (2015) 2000, 3000 /36 kristof baten, silke van hiel, ludovic de cuypere 322 for the family-wise error rate by means of bonferroni correction, which consists of dividing the alpha level by the number of tests, and accordingly adjusted our significance level to .005 (= .05/10).5 4. results 4.1. productive levels tests table 3 presents an overview of the main statistics for the results of the production tests per language. the paired individual scores for the preand posttest per language are visualized in figure 1. cronbach’s alpha estimates were .91 (95% ci = 0.86 to 0.95) and .58 (95% ci = 0.40 to 0.76) for the english and french test, respectively.6 table 3 statistics for the production tests: minimum, 1st quartile, median, mean, 3rd quartile, maximum english min q1 med m q3 max pre 1 7 12 12.0 15.0 27 post 6 13 16 16.8 21.5 30 gain -4 3 5 4.9 7.0 11 french min q1 med m q3 max pre 0 4.0 5 5.3 7.0 12 post 0 6.5 9 8.7 10.5 16 gain -8 2.0 3 3.5 6.0 10 5 we did not perform ancova, which is often the preferred model in a pretest-posttest study design, for three reasons. first, gain score analysis is better suited to answer rq2 than ancova. gain score analysis answers the question how groups differ, on average, in gains, whereas ancova evaluates whether post test means differ between independent groups, adjusted for pretest scores (fitzmaurice, laird, & ware, 2004). second, the groups in our data, that is, english vs. french, are not independent (as in ancova). this allowed us to compare the paired gains in both languages, which in turn simplified the statistical analysis to a paired-samples t-test. third, there was a substantial difference in range between the results for french and english. as there were no observations for french for the higher scores for english, we would have to extrapolate the results for french, which would arguably hamper the reliability of the regression analysis. 6 the low cronbach’s alpha for the french production tasks is partially related to two participants who performed much worse on the posttest than on the pretest (both scored 3 and 12 on the pretest but 0 and 4 on the posttest, respectively). eliminating the two participants from the dataset would have improved the value to 0.67 (95% ci = 0.53 to 0.81). we do not know why the gain scores for these two participants are negative. we decided to retain the two participants in the dataset, so as not to artificially inflate cronbach’s alpha. vocabulary development in a clil context: a comparison between french and english l2 323 figure 1 individual scores for the production tests per language (grey lines indicate changes in scores. the black line connects the mean results for each test) the first general observation is the large difference in the range of scores for both languages, with much higher scores on the english test than on the french one, both on the pretest and the posttest. tellingly, more than half of the participants (n = 41; 54%) achieved a score on the english pretest that was equal to or higher than the maximum score of 12 on the french pretest, which indicates that the initial level of vocabulary was generally higher in english than in french. comparing the preand posttest scores for both languages, we find that participants tended to attain a higher score for english, both on the pretest and the posttest (p < .001, for both pretest: english vs. french and posttest: english vs. french). an extrapolation of the mean correct responses on these vlts (36 items) to knowledge of the 3,000 most frequent words yielded productive vocabularies at the time of the pretest of 1000 (12/36*3000) words for english and only 442 (5.3/36*3000) words for french, while at the time of the posttest the extrapolation revealed productive vocabularies of 1400 and 725 words, respectively. the second finding was that productive vocabulary knowledge improved in the case of both languages. for english, there was an average gain of 4.9 (sd = 3.4) for english (t = 12, df = 74, p < .0001, 95% ci = 4 to 5.6). for french, there was an average gain of 3.5 (sd = 2.9, t = 10.4, df = 74, p < .0001, 95% ci = 2.8 to 4.2).7 7 the normality assumption was violated in the case of french (shapiro-wilk test: p = .009). we therefore performed an additional non-parametric sign test, which also appeared highly significant (p < .0001; only three out of 75 pupils achieved a lower score on the posttest than on their pretest). kristof baten, silke van hiel, ludovic de cuypere 324 figure 2 individual gain scores per individual participant for the english and french production tests (gain score = posttest score pretest score; the black line connects the mean gains for each language) the comparison of the gain scores between the two languages (i.e., english posttest – pretest vs. french posttest – pretest) is visualized in figure 2. the difference in paired means equals 1.3 (95% ci = 0.6 to 2.0), which is statistically significant based on a paired-samples t-test (t = 3.7, df = 149, p < .001, r = 0.29), but nevertheless rather low given that the maximum score equaled 36. the estimated effect size was also rather low, as is indicated by the r value (rosnow & rosenthal, 2005, p. 328) and the maximum difference of 2.0 points (out of 36) on a 95% ci. in terms of vocabulary size, these numbers represent an average gain of 408 english words (with a 95% ci between 333 and 467 words) and an average gain of 292 french words (with a 95% ci between 233 and 350 words). 4.2. receptive levels tests table 4 presents an overview of the main statistics for the results of the reception tests per language. the paired individual scores for the preand posttest for english and french are depicted in figure 3. cronbach’s alpha was .83 (95% ci = 0.76 to 0.91) for both the english and french test, a value that can be considered satisfactory. overall, we can see again that pupils tended to achieve higher scores in this case for english than for french, both on the pretest and the posttest (p < 0.001 for both the pretest: english vs. french and the posttest: english vs. french). it should be emphasized again that 24 participants (32%) achieved an english pretest score that was higher than or equal to the maximum pretest score for french (53). an extrapolation of the mean correct responses on the receptive vlt (90 items) to knowledge of the 5,000 most frequent words yielded receptive vocabularies at the time of the pretest of 2,500 (45/90*5000) words vocabulary development in a clil context: a comparison between french and english l2 325 for english and 1,694 (30.5/90*5000) words for french while at the time of the posttest the extrapolation reveaed receptive vocabularies of 2,850 and 2,100 words, respectively. table 4 summary for the reception tests: minimum, 1st quartile, median, mean, 3rd quartile, maximum english min q1 med m q2 max pre 13 34 44 45.0 55.5 84 post 19 40 51 51.3 65.5 85 gain -34 0 5 6.2 13.0 34 french min q1 med m q3 max pre 9 23.5 29 30.5 37.0 53 post 14 29.5 37 37.8 45.0 63 gain -10 2.0 7 7.3 13.5 22 figure 3 individual scores for the reception tests per language (grey lines indicate individual changes in score. the black line connects the mean results for each test) there was also significant improvement on the receptive tests for both languages. on average, there was an approximate gain of 6.2 (sd = 12.2) for english (t = 4.4, df = 74, p < .0001, 95% ci = 3.4 to 9) and of 7.2 (sd = 7.7) for french (t = 8.2, df = 74, p < .0001, 95% ci = 5.5 to 9), which corresponds to a receptive vocabulary size gain of 344 english words (with a 95% ci between 189 and 500 words) and 400 french words (with a 95% ci between 306 and 500 words). if we compare the gain scores on both languages, illustrated in figure 4, we can see that the mean gain was in this case slightly higher for french than for english. however, the difference in paired means was negligible, amounting to only 1 point out of the total of 90. the difference is also not significant (t = 1, df = 149, p = .28). kristof baten, silke van hiel, ludovic de cuypere 326 figure 4 individual gain scores per individual for the english and french reception tests (the black line connects the mean gains for each language) 5. discussion in response to the dearth of comparative empirical work on the role of target languages in clil, the present study examined the level of vocabulary knowledge in english and french of first-time clil learners in flemish education (rq1) and whether the vocabulary improvement in this clil context is target language-dependent (rq2). with respect to rq1, the present study found that the scores on the receptive and productive vocabulary levels tests were significantly higher for english than for french, both on the pretests and the posttests. this result is in line with the findings reported by housen et al. (2001), who examined the foreign language acquisition of french and english in regular foreign language classes in flanders. the results for the pretests may seem remarkable, given that the pupils received no previous formal instruction in english in contrast to three years of formal instruction in french. housen et al. (2001) referred to the typological affiliation between english and dutch as part of the explanation for the difference between english and french vocabulary knowledge. in fact, the positive impact of typological resemblance particularly applies to the most frequent words, although negative influences through the so-called “false friends” are also to be reckoned with. another, and arguably more plausible explanation for why flemish pupils have such a high starting proficiency level of english in comparison to french, is the high amount of exposure to english (see de wilde et al., 2019; simon, lima jr, & de cuypere, 2016; sundqvist & sylvén, 2016). whereas contact with french is mostly limited to the classroom (even with french being the second official language of belgium), english is omnipresent in the daily lives of flemish pupils. indeed, also the participants of the present study reported significantly higher media-engagement with english compared to french. in addition, the fact that the attitudes of flemish students towards french and vocabulary development in a clil context: a comparison between french and english l2 327 english are different (lochtman et al., 2005) may have influenced the results in the sense that negative attitudes towards french may decelerate the acquisition process (dewaele, 2005; mettewie, 2015). naturally, not every pupil is exposed to english to the same extent. substantial differences in this regard may explain why the scores for english ranged widely. for example, an extrapolation of the lowest and the highest scores on the english pretests revealed a vocabulary size, ranging from 83 to 2,250 words for productive knowledge and from 722 to 4,667 words for receptive knowledge. by comparison, the scores for french were closer to each other, suggesting that the exposure to this language was largely similar across the participants (i.e., limited to the classroom). interestingly, our results for english are reminiscent of sylvén’s (2004) study, which investigated the vocabulary development in english of swedish clil and non-clil learners. she observed that the learners with the most exposure to english outside the classroom scored best on vocabulary tests. remarkably, this observation applied to both the clil and the non-clil group. in other words, extramural exposure can be more important for vocabulary acquisition than clil itself. the wide range of the scores on the english tests that was obtained in the present study may suggest the same thing. unfortunately, because we only procured minimal data on extramural language engagement (and there was no non-clil group), the link between the amount of exposure and general vocabulary acquisition could not be further pursued. moving on to rq2, the present study found that, despite the clear differences between english and french, the productive and receptive vocabulary knowledge of the participants improved significantly in both languages. in the case of productive knowledge, improvement constitutes an average of 408 english and 292 french words, while for receptive knowledge it amounted to 344 english and 400 french words. this improvement was not as self-evident as it may seem, considering that it happened in the relatively short timeframe of three months, meaning that the learning rate was between 3.2 and 4.5 new words per day. by comparison, estimates of vocabulary knowledge by adult native speakers indicate that they learn about seven new words per day (brysbaert, stevens, mandera, & keuleers, 2016). in other words, the learning rate in the present study was considerable. in addition, it should be emphasized that the improvement relates to general vocabulary knowledge in english and in french, and not to course-specific vocabulary (in this study history and music). this finding is different from previous research on clil, which provided evidence for vocabulary gains particularly in technical and semi-technical terms (dalton-puffer, 2008, 2009; ruiz de zarobe, 2011). it should be emphasized that also the flemish learners in strobbe et al. (2013) only reported course-specific vocabulary gains. kristof baten, silke van hiel, ludovic de cuypere 328 interestingly, in addition to the finding that general vocabulary knowledge improves in both english and french, the present study shows that the level of improvement is comparable across the languages. this goes against the hypotheses formulated above. instead of seeing a larger effect for english than for french, or the other way around, the present study’s findings suggest that vocabulary development in french keeps pace with that in english, even though the respective gains occur at different levels. considering this, the fact that the vocabulary development seems to run parallel in english and in french puts the effect of extramural exposure into perspective. while it is true that the higher media-engagement with english leads to higher initial levels for english (both in production and reception), as well as results in a wider range in the scores for english compared to french (reflecting in all probability various levels of engagement with english among participants), it does not automatically bring about significantly greater gains for english compared to french. actually, given that the progress is similar in both languages, it shows that intramural language exposure plays an equally important role in lexical development. indeed, it should be recalled that the inschool exposure to french, both in clil and foreign language classes, is twice as high as in the case of english. in order words, despite the rather difficult initial state for clil in french in flanders (i.e., negative attitudes towards french and minimal exposure outside of school), the increased in-school exposure yields hopeful results for l2 french, at least in terms of vocabulary knowledge.8 the implication of this finding seems to be that clil can safely include other languages than english, thus complying with the original multilingual aspirations of this approach. however, in order to avoid drawing false conclusions from the present study, it is important to note that the purpose of the investigation was not to compare the effectiveness of clil in the case of two different languages (and, as a matter of fact, nor was the purpose to assess its general effectiveness over non-clil). to examine this question, other variables such as out-of-school exposure and classroom input should be kept constant, which is obviously impossible in this kind of classroom-oriented research. instead, the present study was intended to determine the vocabulary knowledge in english and french and to evaluate whether the degree of the development depends on the target language involved. with this aim in mind, the pairwise comparison in the present study suggests that learners in a clil class are capable of developing the vocabulary knowledge of a language to which they are less exposed 8 the results can be regarded as promising in light of the clock-like regularity with which flemish media report that knowledge of french among flemish pupils is on the decline. these reports are usually not based on empirical academic studies but on fragmentary results of entry or placement tests, or finals. vocabulary development in a clil context: a comparison between french and english l2 329 outside of the school and of which the initial knowledge is rather limited. however, an important provision seems to be that there is sufficient parallel exposure in l2 classes. obviously, this finding only applies to french in the dutchspeaking part of belgium. it remains to be seen if the same results would be obtained for the other national/border language in belgium (german) or for languages of a different nature (migrant or non-neighboring languages). also, we do not think that it makes sense to extrapolate our findings to other educational settings in different countries or regions involving different languages (e.g., clil in english and dutch in the french-speaking part of belgium).9 in other words, the findings of the present investigation cannot be taken as a basis for a recommendation to implement clil for languages other than english all over. in light of the above, even though the present results seem to provide general support for clil, also for languages other than english, caution in terms of implementation is advised for a number of reasons. first of all, one limitation of the present study is that only one clil-school was included. this shortcoming restricts the generalizability of the findings to other clil schools in dutch-speaking belgium, because as coyle et al. (2008, p. 101) pointed out, “there is a lack of cohesion around clil pedagogies. there is neither one clil approach nor one theory of clil.” in other words, more research is needed, not only with respect to different foreign languages involved, but also with respect to inner-clil differences. it is crucial in future clil research to examine the diversity within clil (e.g., in terms of amount and type of input, amount of interaction and output, different types of clil teaching; see de graaff et al., 2007), and how this diversity impacts learners’ language attainment. in this regard, it should be recalled that the present study involved two different content subjects, that is, history and music. naturally, teaching differs according to the subject and such differences (e.g., history is likely to be more text-based than music) may have an impact on “picking up” new words. further investigation is required to investigate the effect of the subject matter on clil learners’ l2 development. the second limitation of the present study is that we did not examine the influence of other factors, such as motivation, socioeconomic status, parental support, and the like. in this respect, bruton (2011) argued that (self-selected) clil learners are usually different from the outset, and, as a result, it remains unclear whether the positive results obtained in many clil studies are attributable to clil or to other factors. it should be clarified that his critique was directed at control group studies, comparing the results of clil versus non-clil 9 at present a large-scale project is being conducted in french-speaking belgium, correlating linguistic performance with cognitive, educational and socio-affective variables in dutch and english clil (bulon, hendrikx, meunier, & van goethem, 2017). kristof baten, silke van hiel, ludovic de cuypere 330 learners. such control-group comparisons are a common research design to investigate the effectiveness of pedagogical programs. however, cenoz et al. (2014) criticize the use of control-group comparisons (see also berthele & vanhove, 2020). the main reason is that the participants in these studies are rarely randomly assigned to treatment and control groups, and that, in effect, a range of factors remain uncontrolled for. the absence of random group assignment clearly constitutes a major drawback and precludes drawing conclusions for the beneficial effect of clil. therefore, claims in support of clil should be taken with circumspection (e.g., cenoz, genesee, & gorter, 2014, p. 257).10 however, the present study was not intended to evaluate the effectiveness of clil over non-clil, and, for this reason, it did not include a non-clil group. nevertheless, even if the current investigation had included a non-clil group showing less improvement or non-significant changes, it would be premature to associate the differences in language gains (or content gains, for that matter) with clil. actually, that is not even the point. the aspiration of building multilingual and multicultural societies may be reason enough to foster clil in flanders (for french and other languages). 6. conclusion the present study examined the vocabulary development of flemish pupils in a clilcontext. in terms of language development, research on clil has so far mainly focused on the lingua franca english, leaving much unknown about the development of other languages taught in this manner (cenoz et al., 2014; pérez et al., 2016). this study, therefore, measured the initial level of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge in both english and french (i.e., at the start of the clil program), as well as the gains after three months. the results show that although vocabulary knowledge was generally better for english than for french, the level of improvement in productive and receptive vocabulary knowledge was the same across these languages. in line with the widespread explanation in clil-related discourses, the significant gains in productive and receptive vocabulary knowledge can be related to increased exposure, which functions as a trigger for acquisition processes (dalton-puffer, 2008). most importantly, however, the present study has shown that despite the numerous differences that exist regarding particular target languages (in this study english and french) in terms of status, extramural and in-school exposure, attitudes, and so on, progress can be made in both languages, even though the respective gains in english and french vocabulary knowledge occur at different levels. 10 however, for a recent good practice including a randomized controlled field experiment on the effects of clil employing a repeated-measures design (i.e., pre-test, posttest, followup), see piesche, jonkmann, fiege, and keßler (2016). vocabulary development in a clil context: a comparison between french and english l2 331 references ackerl, c. 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(2007). bilingualer fachunterricht in deutschland: eine bilanz. fremdsprachen lehren und lernen, 36, 8-25. 185 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (2). 2021. 185-212 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.2.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt how do differences in exposure affect english language learning? a comparison of teenagers in two learning environments carmen muñoz university of barcelona, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7001-4155 munoz@ub.edu teresa cadierno university of southern denmark, odense, denmark https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8305-1027 cadierno@sdu.dk abstract this study investigates whether potential differences in the weight of out-ofschool and in-school learning environments affect the acquisition of l2 english by teenagers in two geographical contexts, more and less english-rich, and with less and more linguistic distance to english, respectively. participants were two groups of 14-15-year-olds, from denmark and spain. language measures included a listening comprehension test, a metalinguistic knowledge test, and a grammaticality judgment test. data about out-of-classroom exposure was elicited via a questionnaire. the study showed that (a) the danish group attained a significantly higher level in all language tests except for the metalinguistic knowledge test; (b) the danish group engaged longer in out-of-school activities although the preference for some activities over others was similar in the two groups; and (c) the types of associations between out-of-school activities and language measures were different between the two groups. these results suggest that the potential influence of out-of-school activities on different language aspects is related to the particular context in which the l2 is learned and to the language proficiency of the learner. keywords: out-of-school input; in-school input; linguistic distance; adolescents; subtitles carmen muñoz, teresa cadierno 186 1. introduction in the last decade, second language acquisition (sla) research has turned its attention to the role of out-of-school exposure in the acquisition of foreign languages (fls). the increased exposure to fls via internet, audiovisual and social media allows for the possibility of learning languages, and especially english, outside the classroom context. given its status as a lingua franca and the widespread lowering of the starting age in primary education across europe and around the world, more people are learning english from a younger age and are in daily contact with this language (e.g., muñoz, 2014; sun et al., 2016; unsworth et al., 2015). despite this common trend, there are notable differences in english proficiency levels across geographical contexts. these differences are related to a number of factors, such as the linguistic distance between the learners’ first language (l1) and second language (l2), the amount of english instruction that learners are exposed to in school and the degree of contact with the fl outside school. some learning environments are more english-rich than others – for example, those in which english tv programs are subtitled rather than dubbed. given the large presence of english in the media and in the linguistic landscape, the status of english has been argued to be changing from a foreign to a second language in some european countries like holland or the nordic countries (de bot, 2014), that is, in contexts where the linguistic distance from english is also relatively short. the important role of out-of-school exposure in l2 learning can be explained by usage-based approaches, which assume language learning to be input-dependent and experientially-based (ellis & cadierno, 2009; tomasello, 2003). a key aspect of usage is frequency, as language users are sensitive to the input frequency of specific language patterns at all levels of language representation (e.g., ellis, 2002). both token frequency (the number of times a given item appears in the input) and type frequency (the frequency with which different lexical items can be applied to a specific pattern or construction) play an important role in language learning (bybee, 1995). token frequency promotes the entrenchment of given linguistic expressions as a whole (e.g., i dunno), whereas type frequency determines the abstractness or schematicity of the resulting construction (tomasello, 2003). the present study is based on the assumption that usage-based differences in the amount of contact with english inside and outside school have implications for l2 english learning. as usage-based models emphasize the notion that language use in specific usage events is the basis for language learning (langacker, 1987; tomasello, 2003), it may be expected, for example, that learners in input-rich environments with more frequent exposure to l2 input outside the classroom will reach higher levels of english proficiency in language skills such as listening comprehension how do differences in exposure affect english language learning? a comparison of teenagers in . . . 187 when compared to learners in input poorer environments. therefore, the study investigates whether these differences, together with the dissimilarity in linguistic distance, lead to differences in the acquisition of different l2 english dimensions by teenagers from two geographical contexts: denmark and spain. 2. literature review this section first presents research that has been conducted on school language learning. then the second part addresses studies on language learning from out-ofschool exposure. in the majority of studies, english was the target language (tl). 2.1. school language learning learners in fl contexts have traditionally had very limited access to the target language with classroom instruction being the main, and sometimes the only, source of input. in addition to age-related factors, input limitations in both quality and quantity have been seen as determinants of the slow learning rate observed in typical classroom settings (muñoz, 2006). these limitations may also explain that the resulting knowledge is predominantly explicit (i.e., conscious) rather than implicit (e.g., dekeyser, 2012) and declarative (e.g., language rules). additionally, when the use of language in the classroom is not contextualized, instruction may mainly lead to metalinguistic knowledge about language (doughty, 2003). a few studies have examined the effects of extensive fl instruction in order to identify the language dimensions that are more enhanced in young adults’ classrooms. for instance, two studies with spanish-catalan college students found that years of formal instruction were more significantly associated with their receptive knowledge of vocabulary and global proficiency (as measured by the oxford placement test) in english than with measures of phonetic identification and oral performance, with the exception of measures of syntactic complexity (muñoz, 2011, 2014). on the other hand, the pronunciation abilities of japanese l1 students were observed to be enhanced with greater amounts of extra fl activities inside and outside school (saito & hanzawa, 2018). the students’ pronunciation was examined in spontaneous speech as measured by means of a timed picture description task. the effect of the amount of instruction has also been investigated in research with children and adolescents. in a study where very young chinese efl learners (aged 3-8) were followed for one and a half years, sun et al. (2016) found that the total amount of school input significantly predicted english l2 outcomes in relation to productive and receptive vocabulary and receptive grammar skills, especially in the latter. similarly, in a study with young learners carmen muñoz, teresa cadierno 188 in the netherlands starting english lessons at age 4, unsworth et al. (2015) found that after two years of instruction, amount of classroom exposure (more than 60 minutes of weekly classroom exposure versus 60 minutes or less) was a significant predictor of children’s outcomes in receptive vocabulary and grammar skills. however, in a study with danish children (ages 7-8 and 9-10) who attended schools that differed in hours of instruction, ranging from 68.25 to 141, cadierno et al. (2020) found that the total number of lessons was not a significant predictor of english proficiency in relation to receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar and phonetic discrimination skills. in fact, the relatively limited role of years of instruction in english fl proficiency has been evidenced in studies conducted in other geographical contexts. for example, de wilde et al. (2021) found that even though the amount of english instruction significantly impacted overall proficiency, speaking skills, and receptive vocabulary in a group of dutch-speaking children in flanders (aged 10-12 at the first time of measurement), this effect disappeared when the effect of the english knowledge acquired outside school before classroom instruction was introduced into the analysis. further support for the superior role of out-of-school activities vis-à-vis classroom instruction was found by peters et al. (2019) in a study with flemish secondary school learners. this study demonstrated that although years of instruction were positively related to vocabulary size in french and english, the effects of out-of-school activities in the latter was the most determinant factor of learners’ vocabulary knowledge in english, which was consistently larger than in french in spite of fewer years of english instruction. similarly, in a study with a group of 11th graders (ages 16-17) in taiwan, huang et al. (2020) found that even though the amount of formal english instruction in kindergarten was significantly associated to listening comprehension and measures of fluency and accuracy from an oral narrative (but not measures of complexity), the strongest influence on their language outcomes was a measure of current contact with english outside school. finally, in a recent study of a representative sample of adolescents in 14 eu member states, azzolini et al. (2020) found that although school factors were positively associated with the development of various english skills, especially in countries with native languages that are more distant from english, factors related to out-of-school exposure played an even more important role in the development of english skills in countries with both high and low linguistic distances from english. this finding underlies the strong influence that the informal language learning opportunities available to adolescents through different types of media have on their language proficiency (european commission, 2012). 2.2. language learning from out-of-school exposure in the last two decades, research has increasingly focused on the characteristics of learners’ out-of-school exposure and its influence on language learning (see sundqvist how do differences in exposure affect english language learning? a comparison of teenagers in . . . 189 & sylvén, 2016). some studies have been concerned with the types of english-related activities that learners of different age and gender most frequently engage with (e.g., hannibal jensen, 2017; muñoz, 2020). for example, in a study that examined contact with english outside of school by means of a questionnaire and a one-week language diary, sundqvist and sylvén (2014) found that swedish children (aged 1011) engaged extensively in english activities, with boys spending significantly more time than girls in digital gaming and watching films, and girls spending more time on pastime language-related activities such as facebook. furthermore, in a series of studies conducted with french university students, sockett and colleagues (e.g., sockett & toffoli, 2012) showed that the majority of students watched films and television series in english, while a minority also corresponded regularly with other english users on social networking tools like facebook, twitter and myspace. other studies have focused on the association between amount and types of exposure and objective measures of language proficiency, mostly in school learners. two studies including adolescents and children from different european countries (azzolini et al., 2020; lindgren & muñoz, 2013) found that linguistic distance and out-of-school exposure were among the strongest predictors of learners’ english proficiency. likewise, studies conducted in single geographical contexts (e.g., hannibal jensen, 2017 in denmark; johannsdóttir, 2018 in iceland; sun et al., 2016 in china; verspoor et al., 2011 in the netherlands) have supported the important role of out-of-school activities in school learners’ english proficiency. the positive effect of engaging in english activities has also been documented in studies conducted in flanders with learners before the start of formal instruction. to illustrate, de wilde et al. (2020b) observed that young dutchspeaking learners in flanders made very large gains in overall language proficiency (measured by tests of receptive vocabulary, listening comprehension, reading comprehension and writing, and speaking) by means of their contact with english mainly through gaming, using social media and speaking english. also, in flanders, puimège and peters (2019) investigated a very large group of 10-, 11and 12-year-olds and found age differences both in the amount of exposure to english and in vocabulary knowledge. their results also highlight the positive effects of gaming and video streaming, among the english activities, and of cognateness, among the word-related variables studied. the joint positive effects of context exposure and linguistic distance have also been evidenced in a comparative study by muñoz et al. (2018) who investigated two groups of danish learners (7and 9-year-old, respectively) at the start of english instruction and two groups of spanish/catalan learners after several years of instruction (3 and 5, respectively). the l1-danish children, with more frequent exposure to english media and an advantage at cognate recognition, showed a level of receptive knowledge of vocabulary very similar to the level shown by the l1-spanish/catalan children. the carmen muñoz, teresa cadierno 190 higher amount of instruction of the spanish learners only had a noticeable influence on the performance in the grammar recognition test of the 7-year-olds. finally, a fruitful recent line of research is concerned with the positive effects on l2 learning of audiovisual input, where on-screen text can be added to audio and imagery. the learning potential of such multimodal input is explained by several cognitive theories. according to paivio’s dual coding theory (1986), the verbal and visual memory paths are activated simultaneously, facilitating input retention and information storage in long-term memory. partly based on this, mayer’s cognitive theory of multimedia learning (2014) assumes that the presentation of words with pictures allows learners to make connections between them. it also assumes that processing is more efficient when input is received through several channels because this enhances individuals’ limited attentional capacity. from the perspective of sla, long (2020) has argued that bi-modal and tri-modal input may improve enhanced incidental learning, an internal process in the mind of the learner that increases unconscious detection, without necessarily raising learning to the level of conscious awareness at all. indeed, research on learning from audiovisual input has consistently shown that watching audiovisual material, especially with captions (subtitles in the l2), is beneficial for comprehension (e.g., gass et al., 2019), vocabulary items and formulaic sequences (e.g., peters & webb, 2018; pujadas & muñoz, 2019), grammar learning (e.g., lee & révész, 2020; pattemore & muñoz, 2020), and pronunciation (wisnieska & mora, 2020). on the other hand, watching non-captioned video has been shown to especially benefit aural recognition of word forms (sydorenko, 2010). in sum, recent research has provided a great deal of evidence regarding the positive effects of out-of-school exposure on l2 learning, supporting usage-based claims that language learning emerges from human experience with language (e.g., cadierno & eskildsen, 2015; muñoz et al., 2018). the token and type frequency with which constructions are encountered by l2 learners in informal exposure to english outside the classroom can be expected to facilitate the statistical associative learning of form-function relations involved in all aspects of language (ellis, 2002). the present study contributes to this line of research by jointly addressing the role of inschool and out-of-school factors in the development of different english language dimensions in environments that differ in terms of the degree of social penetration of english. moreover, this study focuses on two learner populations with first languages that vary with respect to their linguistic distance from this language, an issue that has so far received scant attention (but see azzolini et al., 2020). thus, the present study fills these gaps by exploring whether divergences in the weight of inschool and out-of-school factors in these two learner populations are related to language dimensions that are more likely to be developed via classroom instruction, via exposure to english outside school, or through both. how do differences in exposure affect english language learning? a comparison of teenagers in . . . 191 3. the present study 3.1. comparing two learning environments: linguistic and societal circumstances the two learning environments investigated in the current study, denmark and spain, are representative of a group of european countries with germanic and romance languages respectively. danish belongs to the group of north germanic languages and is thus genetically closer to english than spanish and catalan (the two languages of catalonia) which belong to the group of romance languages (greenberg, 2001). the shared germanic origin also explains the similarity between danish and english phonotactics (grønnum, 2001). in terms of cognate linguistic distance, a measure of linguistic distance that relies on the lexical similarity between words in different languages, danish and english share 59.3 per cent of cognates, whereas spanish and english share 24.0 per cent and catalan and english 23.6 per cent (dyen et al., 1992). additionally, the shared germanic cognates between danish and english are mostly words with higher frequency and more phonological transparency than the romance cognates. the two learning environments also differ in relation to the social penetration of english. for example, in denmark, english television programs and films are seen in the original language with l1 subtitles, whereas in spain, english audiovisuals are dubbed into the country’s home languages. moreover, the joint influence of exposure to media and linguistic distance can be observed in that 85% of the words in tv programs are in the first frequency band (webb & rodgers, 2009), and among them many words are cognates with germanic languages. as in previous studies in flanders (e.g., de wilde et al., 2020b) or in sweden (e.g., sundqvist & wikström, 2015), a joint effect of amount of exposure and linguistic distance may be observed: denmark is an english-richer environment than spain, and the linguistic distance between english and danish is smaller than that between english and spanish or catalan. 3.2. aim and research questions the aim of the study was to explore whether potential differences in the weight of inschool and out-of-school learning environments together with a dissimilarity in linguistic distance led to differences in the acquisition of l2 english by teenagers from the two learning contexts. specifically, the study addressed the following research questions: 1. are there differences in the levels of english proficiency attained in different language measures (i.e., listening comprehension, grammaticality judgment, metalinguistic knowledge) by same-age teenagers in the two carmen muñoz, teresa cadierno 192 learning environments (more and less english-rich and less and more linguistically distant, respectively)? 2. are there differences in the frequency with which same-age teenagers engage with the different types of out-of-school activities in the two learning environments? 3. which types of out-of-classroom activities (i.e., viewing videos, listening to songs, writing, reading, speaking, gaming) have the strongest associations with each english language measure in the two learning environments? in relation to the first research question, it was predicted that the danish participants would show advantages in listening comprehension skills, because their environment is english-richer and the similarities between danish and english offer a useful crutch for comprehension (de wilde & eyckmans, 2017; muñoz et al., 2018). it was also predicted that the spanish participants would show advantages in metalinguistic explanations, because of their longer period of english instruction, that will have facilitated the acquisition of declarative knowledge. in relation to the third research question, a higher association was predicted between listening scores and leisure activities (e.g., viewing, gaming), and between metalinguistic knowledge scores and literacy-oriented activities (reading, writing). 4. method 4.1. participants the participants comprised two groups of 14-15-year-olds, one from a school in denmark and one from a school in spain. the danish group consisted of 56 learners (31 female and 25 male) who were finishing the 8th grade of their primary school studies. the spanish group consisted of 80 learners at the end of 9th grade1 (39 female and 41 male); they were bilingual catalan-spanish. both schools were semi-private and were similar in terms of socio-economic background, so as to control as much as possible for the financial circumstances that allow access to english outside of school. informed consent was obtained from the parents through the school. the danish students had started english instruction at the average age of 9-10 and had had six years of formal english instruction (360 hours); none had participated in extracurricular classes in english. the english proficiency level expected by danish students at the end of compulsory education (i.e., in 9th grade) is equivalent to b1 (cefr). the spanish students had started learning english at age 4-5 on average and had had 10 years of english instruction (on average 1 children in denmark start primary school one year later than in spain: denmark at age 78; spain at 6-7. how do differences in exposure affect english language learning? a comparison of teenagers in . . . 193 over 750 hours), and 77.5% of them had had extracurricular classes in english. the expected english proficiency level by the spanish students at the end of compulsory education (i.e., in 10th grade) is equivalent to a2. in both schools, english was typically used as the vehicle of instruction in class and teachers had the required national degree in education and possessed a high level of english proficiency. although both schools applied a communicative approach to teaching english, including a focus on form, there were some differences between them. in the danish school, the textbook used a topicbased syllabus that presented topics through a variety of texts. the themes were typically discussed in class orally and summarized in writing; grammar was practiced mainly through web exercises at home and later discussed in class. in the spanish school, the textbook used followed a structural syllabus. target structures were practiced in writing through focus on form exercises, essay writing and oral communicative activities. 4.2. instruments and procedure 4.2.1. questionnaires the participants completed a background questionnaire including questions about their history of english learning (e.g., extracurricular tuition, number of weekly classes, age of onset) and an out-of-school exposure questionnaire in their l1, danish or catalan. the latter was built on the basis of a questionnaire that had been used in previous research (e.g., muñoz, 2020) and had undergone a two-part validation process. first, colleagues’ suggestions and critiques helped ensure that its questions were appropriate. then, a group of students in a master’s program in applied linguistics completed the questionnaire in order to give feedback and identify potential areas of confusion. after making the suggested changes, the questionnaire was piloted with learners in the sameage range and changes were implemented in order to improve its clarity and suitability. the questionnaire consisted of nine main questions asking about the weekly frequency of common activities in english on a scale of 1-7 (see appendix a). (1 = never; 2 = less than one hour; 3 = between two and three hours; 4 = between three and four hours; 5 = between four and five hours; 6 = between five and six hours; 7 = more than six hours); an open-ended question followed asking learners to specify how many hours (if more than six). the nine activities were: watching audiovisual material with l1 subtitles, with english subtitles, without subtitles; listening to songs; reading for leisure online or on paper; speaking online or faceto-face; writing; single-player gaming; and multiplayer gaming. carmen muñoz, teresa cadierno 194 4.2.2. language tests three tests were selected on the assumption that they would yield measures of the language knowledge that was more likely to be developed through incidental exposure outside school, through classroom instruction, or through both. a listening comprehension test was used as a measure of a skill that can be enhanced through incidental exposure to english media; a metalinguistic knowledge test was used as a measure of explicit and declarative knowledge that is most frequently developed in a classroom, and a grammaticality judgment test was chosen on the grounds that the grammatical and ungrammatical sentences may yield measures of different types of knowledge developed through either incidental or classroom experience.2 to measure the participants’ listening comprehension in english, the listening section of the oxford placement test (opt) was used (listt). the grammaticality judgement test (gjt) was adapted from previous studies (see ellis et al., 2009). the grammatical constructions were balanced to include syntactic and morphological rules of early, intermediate and late acquisition (ellis, 2009). after piloting with a small group of same-age learners, the original set of grammatical constructions was shortened slightly to make it less tiring for this age group. each grammatical structure was represented by two grammatical and two ungrammatical sentences, with a total of 52 sentences (see appendix b). the metalinguistic knowledge test (mkt) contained a selection of 10 ungrammatical sentences from the gjt (see appendix c). the participants were informed that the sentences were ungrammatical and that the ungrammaticality was italicized in each sentence, but that they did not have to correct the error; instead, they had to explain why each sentence was ungrammatical using their own words in their l1 (see gutiérrez, 2012). the reliability of the two language tests adapted for this study was calculated using cronbach’s alpha. the gjt and the mkt had acceptable values of reliability: gjt (cronbach alpha = .946 in the danish sample and .796 in the spanish sample) and mkt (cronbach alpha = .779 in the danish sample and .721 in the spanish sample). 2 researchers have long discussed the nature of the knowledge measured by gjts. it has been claimed that timed gjts measure implicit knowledge and untimed gjts measure explicit knowledge (ellis, 2005). on the other hand, it has also been claimed that grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in gjts measure two different types of knowledge representations, i.e., implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge respectively, in both timed and untimed conditions (e.g., gutiérrez, 2012). recently, however, it has been argued that the alleged implicit knowledge accessed by gjts in some studies may actually have been automatized explicit knowledge (see the discussion in maie & dekeyser, 2020). the present study using untimed gjts was not designed to address such fundamental issue, though some intriguing differences in the results of the grammatical and ungrammatical sets are observed and discussed. how do differences in exposure affect english language learning? a comparison of teenagers in . . . 195 the listt was scored following the opt test instructions. for the gjt, the learners’ accuracy scores were calculated for all the test items (out of a possible 52 points), as well as separately for the grammatical (g-gjt) and ungrammatical (u-gjt) sentences (26 points each). answers in the mkt were scored as correct and incorrect (1/0 points). the criteria were agreed after several cycles of discussion of all the answers obtained for each sentence by two raters. correct answers consisted of age-adequate explanations of the errors that showed recognition of the relevant grammatical rule. incorrect answers consisted of corrections without explanations, or wrong or irrelevant explanations (see example below). example: prompt: did martin lived in africa? correct: es live porque ya has puesto did transl.: it’s “live” because you already put “did” incorrect: tendría que haber el past perfect transl.: there should be the past perfect data collection took place in two separate sessions one week apart. each session lasted about 40 minutes. in the first session, the participants completed the background questionnaire, the listt and the out-of-school exposure questionnaire. in the second session, they took the gjt and the mkt. 4.2.3. data analysis to address the comparison in the first research question between the two participant groups, independent-sample t-tests were performed. additionally, the association between the different language measures was explored by means of spearman-rank correlations. to address the comparison in the second research question between percentage frequency of engagement in different english-related activities by the two participant groups, mann-whitney u tests were calculated. finally, to address the third research question and explore the strength of the association between the different out-of-classroom activities and the different language measures of the two participant groups, spearman-rank correlations were performed. 5. results 5.1. language measures to answer the first research question inquiring about differences in the levels attained in a set of tests, descriptive statistics were calculated first (see table 1). the average score of the danish group in the listt corresponds to a level of c1 carmen muñoz, teresa cadierno 196 in the common european framework of reference for languages (cefr) and the score of the spanish group to a level of b2.3 table 1 descriptive statistics for the language tests danish sample spanish sample mean % (sd) max. % min.% mean % (sd) max.% min.% listt 80.73 (5.98) 94 62 70.03 (7.42) 86 45 mkt 25.50 (2.39) 80 0 56.90 (2.09) 100 20 gjt 80.94 (4.74) 96.15 51.92 71.42 (6.38) 92.31 34.61 g-gjt 86.96 (2.60) 100 57.69 82.07 (3.63) 100 30.77 u-gjt 74.92 (2.95) 96.15 46.15 60.77 (3.90) 88.46 23.07 note. list = listening comprehension test; mkt = metalinguistic knowledge test; gjt = grammaticality judgment test; g-gjt = grammatical sentences in gjt; u-gjt = ungrammatical sentences in gjt figure 1 boxplots depicting test scores of the danish (d) and the spanish (s) samples (list = listening comprehension test; mkt = metalinguistic knowledge test; gjt = grammaticality judgment test; g-gjt = grammatical sentences in gjt; u-gjt = ungrammatical sentences in gjt) 3 the opt reports scores aligned to the cefr for the whole test: the grammar and the listening comprehension sections (max.: 100 points each); only a rough equivalence can be estimated for one of the sections. how do differences in exposure affect english language learning? a comparison of teenagers in . . . 197 the boxplots in figure 1 show a few acceptable outliers, and a negatively skewed distribution in the spanish group’s gjt and u-gjt scores. to determine whether these differences were significant, independent-sample t-tests were computed to compare the scores in each test; as the levene test showed that variances of the gjt and the u-gjt were unequal, the t-values for unequal variances were used. the results showed that all the scores were significantly different (bonferroni adjusted alpha level: .01) except for the difference between scores in the g-gjt: listt: t = 8.952, p < .001, d = 1.54; mkt: t = 8.098; p < .001, d = 1.40; gjt: t = 5.188, p < .001, d = .77; u-gjt: t = 6.261, p < .001, d = .94. thus, the spanish group outperformed the danish group on the mkt, the danish group outperformed the spanish group on the listt, the (total) gjt, the u-gjt, and the g-gjt, but in this last case the difference was not significant after bonferroni correction (t = 2.244; p = .026, d = .35). the effect sizes are large, except for the comparison of the gjt (medium), and of the g-gjt (small). non-parametric tests (mann-whitney u) were also run on these data and the results confirmed significant differences in all comparisons (p < .001), except for g-gjt (p = .052). table 2 correlations for scores on the language tests listt mkt list d s mkt d .307* s .222* gjt d .608** .415** s .337** .646** g-gjt d .511** .122 s .246* .604** u-gjt d .441** .538** s .286* .537** note. ** p ≤ .01, * p ≤ .05. d = danish sample; s = spanish sample. list = listening comprehension test; mkt = metalinguistic knowledge test; gjt = grammaticality judgement test; g-gjt = grammatical sentences in gjt; u-gjt = ungrammatical sentences in gjt spearman rank correlations were computed to examine the relationship between the various measures for the two samples. as shown in table 2, most correlations were medium in size. the correlations of list with the other measures were stronger for the danish sample than for the spanish sample. 5.2. frequency of exposure to english the second research question addressed the frequency with which the two groups engaged in different types of out-of-school exposure. as shown in table 3, the danish group generally reported a higher frequency of exposure than the carmen muñoz, teresa cadierno 198 spanish group. a series of mann-whitney u tests showed that differences were small in terms of the frequency with which the two groups listened to songs, engaged in single player gaming and viewed audiovisual input with english subtitles. significant differences were found in relation to viewing with l1 subtitles (u = 2836.50, p = .008), viewing without subtitles (u = 3368.50, p = .000), speaking in english (u = 2936.50, p = .001), writing in english (u = 2997, p = .000), and multiplayer gaming (u = 2658, p = .023). after bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons (adjusted alpha value .0055), significant differences were still found for viewing without subtitles, speaking and writing. table 3 percentage frequency for weekly exposure to english never < 1h 1h-2h 2h-3h 3h-4h 4h-5h 5h-6h > 6 hours viewing l1 subtitles d 17.9 12.5 10.7 14.3 8.9 8.9 8.9 17.9 s 27.5 15 23.8 7.5 10 7.5 3.8 5.1 viewing english subtitles d 26.8 26.8 26.8 7.1 5.4 3.6 1.8 1.8 s 36.3 28.8 23.8 6.3 2.5 -2.5 -viewing no subtitles d 5.4 19.6 19.6 8.9 8.9 12.5 12.5 12.5 s 38.8 21.3 22.5 5 2.5 2.5 -6.4 listening to songs d -7.1 19.6 17.9 7.1 14.3 14.3 19.7 s 1.3 8.8 21.3 8.8 12.5 11.3 18.8 16.3 reading d 10.7 42.9 26.8 16.1 -1.8 -1.8 s 27.5 33.8 20 10 1.3 2.5 1.3 1.3 speaking d 14.3 33.9 23.2 8.9 7.1 1.8 1.8 9.0 s 41.3 26.3 16.3 3.8 8.8 2.5 -1.3 writing d 10.7 39.3 25.0 14.3 1.8 5.4 1.8 1.8 s 27.5 50 13.8 2.5 3.8 1.3 --single-player gaming d 48.2 14.3 12.5 7.1 5.4 -5.4 7.1 s 55 20 7.5 3.8 1.3 1.3 5 5.1 multiplayer gaming d 51.8 14.3 3.6 1.8 5.4 7.1 8.9 7.2 s 66.3 15 6.3 3.8 2.5 1.3 -3.8 note. d = danish sample; s = spanish sample 5.3. influence on language dimensions to address the third research question that inquired about the association between the frequency of the different types of out-of-school exposure and the level attained in the different tests, spearman rank correlations were computed (see table 4). the first noticeable difference between the two samples concerned the significant correlations with viewing with l2 subtitles and without subtitles: numerous and positive for the spanish sample, whereas the only significant one for the danish sample, with gjt, was negative. another interesting difference concerns the significant correlations with reading only for the spanish group, and with speaking only for the danish group. with regard to the similarities, the negative direction of almost all correlations with viewing with l1 subtitles in both groups how do differences in exposure affect english language learning? a comparison of teenagers in . . . 199 and the absence of significant correlations with listening to songs and writing in both groups are interesting findings. also noticeable are the significant negative correlations with gaming, especially for the spanish group. table 4 summary of correlations of language test scores and exposure frequencies listt mkt gjt g-gjt u-gjt viewing l1 subtitles d -.161 .121 -.084 -.073 -.070 s -.039 -.198 -.101 -.064 -.147 viewing english subtitles d -.169 -.120 -.289* -.179 -.259 s .320** .250* .250* .244* .160 viewing no subtitles d .237 -.041 .232 .210 .190 s .176 .057 .337** .282* .299** listening to songs d -.060 -.048 .027 .175 -.112 s .184 .019 .070 .142 -.015 writing d .039 -.205 .156 .183 .089 s -.046 -.096 -.014 -.051 .021 reading d -.013 -.184 .192 .173 .165 s .158 .231* .231* 172 219 speaking d .137 -.159 .289* .318* .220 s -.011 .027 .089 .108 .042 single-player gaming d .047 -.273* -.023 .021 -.029 s .033 -.190 -.171 -.222* -.116 multiplayer gaming d .235 -.188 .128 .213 .043 s -.048 -.350** -.340** -.317** -.328** note. ** p ≤ .01, * p ≤ .05. d = danish sample; s = spanish sample 6. discussion this study investigated the performance on different language measures of two groups of learners in environments that differ in the amount of context exposure and linguistic distance from english. it compared the frequency of their out-ofschool exposure by means of different activities and related these frequencies to language test scores. the first research question compared the levels of attainment of the two learner groups in three different tests. the comparison showed that the danish group, in an english-richer environment and with a shorter linguistic distance from english, attained significantly higher levels on all the tests except for the mkt. this result generally concurs with the results by azzolini et al. (2020), showing that the shorter the distance between english and the national language, the higher the average english competence. in line with the usage-based assumption of language learning being rooted in concrete usage events, the danish learners’ superior listening comprehension was predicted because of their exposure to spoken english through a variety of media, as found in studies in similar environments such as flanders (de wilde & eyckmans, 2017) and because of the language proximity carmen muñoz, teresa cadierno 200 and shared cognates, as also shown in studies with dutch (de wilde et al., 2020a; puimège & peters, 2019) and danish children (muñoz et al., 2018). similarly, the spanish learners’ superior performance in the metalinguistic task was predicted given their longer period of english instruction, and thus, a longer exposure to usage events that are more form-focused and conducive to the development of declarative knowledge on the part of the learner. no prediction was made concerning the gjt, on which the danish group also showed an advantage. the correlations of the gjt with the other measures differed in the two groups in an interesting way. in the danish group, the correlation between the gjt and the listt was large, and larger than that with the mkt. moreover, the correlation between the g-gjt and the mkt was not significant, while that between the u-gjt and the mkt was medium to high. this finding echoes previous research using a principal factor analysis which found that grammatical and ungrammatical sentences loaded in different components deemed to represent implicit and explicit knowledge respectively (ellis, 2009; gutiérrez, 2012), or automatized explicit and explicit knowledge (see note 2). conversely, in the spanish group these correlations with the mkt were all medium to high, suggesting that the learners may have mainly resorted to explicit knowledge. a tentative explanation for these findings is that the danish learners may have learned the target constructions mostly incidentally through their cumulative higher exposure to the correct versions of those constructions in out-of-school english-related activities (though learners may have been made aware of underlying rules through classroom instruction). in fact, the danish learners may have resorted to both implicit and explicit knowledge in their performance (ellis, 2005). in contrast, the most important source of knowledge of the spanish learners when performing both the mkt and gjt may have been classroom instruction. the different association patterns between the danish and spanish performance in the mkt and the gjt seem to provide support for the role of token and type frequency in usage-based accounts of l2 learning. repeated exposure to english language samples over the years has presumably provided danish learners (and less so their spanish counterparts) with many opportunities to experience high token frequencies of particular linguistic items and high type frequencies of various linguistic material in given constructions, and thus facilitated the emergence of more abstract linguistic schemata (see muñoz et al., 2018 for a similar argument). this finding, though still preliminary given the correlational nature of the data in the current study, suggests that, in line with usage-based approaches to l2 learning, implicit and/or incidental l2 learning is possible when learners have the chance to interact with large amounts of language samples in informal contexts (see sockett & toffoli, 2012). in response to the second research question, the out-of-school questionnaires revealed that the contact with english outside school was higher for the how do differences in exposure affect english language learning? a comparison of teenagers in . . . 201 danish group, as expected, particularly so in activities such as viewing audiovisual material without subtitles, with l1 subtitles, and speaking, writing and multiplayer gaming. these results are in line with previous studies conducted in flanders with adolescents (peters, 2018) and slightly younger participants (de wilde et al., 2020b) as well as in a study with 10-year-olds from seven different european countries (lindgren & muñoz, 2013). the most frequent types of exposure in these studies included listening to songs, watching films or tv and gaming. this coincidence suggests a general age-related pattern for the young in this geographical region (see also muñoz, 2020). the third research question addressed the association of the english-related activities with the language measures in the two learning environments. the correlations found were small and small-to-medium and so, even though they suggest interesting tendencies, these findings should be considered preliminary. first, in relation to the list scores, it was predicted that they would be associated especially with leisure activities. the results did not support the prediction since there was only a significant positive correlation with viewing with english subtitles in the spanish group. interestingly, though the correlations with audiovisual input for the danish group were not significant, they were negative for viewing with english and danish subtitles. the direction of the relationship, surprising at first sight, may be related to danish teenagers’ practice of watching tv in english with danish subtitles from a very early age (muñoz et al., 2018). as they grow older and their comprehension improves, they may become used to accessing the easily available digital contents without subtitles, and only those with lower proficiency level may choose danish or english subtitles. this tentative explanation may also apply to the negative relationship, not significant but consistent in the spanish group, between the list scores and viewing l1-subtitled audiovisual material. as for the correlations of list scores with viewing audiovisual input without captions, they were positive for both groups and approaching significance for the danish learners, who watch audiovisual input without on-screen text much more often. the possibility that this frequent practice benefited their listening skills is supported by research indicating that viewing non-captioned video is especially beneficial for the aural recognition of word forms (sydorenko, 2010). second, regarding mkt scores, it was predicted that they would be particularly associated with reading and writing, the most literacy-related activities. the results only confirmed a positive significant correlation with reading in the spanish group, which is in line with the findings by muñoz (2020), showing that reading had the strongest link with class grades in a large sample of spanish learners. with regard to gjt scores, no prediction was made but two interesting significant correlations of g-gjt (the sub-set allegedly associated with implicit or automatized explicit learning) were found: with viewing with english subtitles carmen muñoz, teresa cadierno 202 for the spanish group and with speaking for the danish group, two activities associated with out-of-school learning. finally, focusing on the out-of-school activities, it is interesting that viewing english-spoken videos was more strongly associated with linguistic measures for the spanish learners, probably because of the lack of variability in the danish group. as seen above, and though we can only talk of a tendency because the correlations are not significant, the direction of the relationship was negative for viewing videos with english subtitles for the danish group and for viewing with l1 subtitles for both groups except for mkt scores in the danish group. de wilde et al. (2021) found a significant negative association between viewing with l1 subtitles and measures of receptive vocabulary, speaking skills, and overall language proficiency in a study with dutch-speaking flemish school learners. according to these authors, this result may indicate that lower proficiency learners prefer input supported by l1 subtitles, whereas more proficient learners prefer ‘english-only’ input. however, this does not rule out the possibility that language learning takes place for less proficient learners while watching television with l1 subtitles, as observed for listening and reading skills by lindgren and muñoz (2013) and for class grades by muñoz (2020). the associations of gaming with language scores are also worthy of consideration because of the predominantly negative relationship, especially in the spanish group. spanish learners presented significant negative associations with the mkt and the gjt, and their scores seemed to be more dependent on school instruction for this group. studies in flanders (e.g., de wilde & eyckmans, 2017; de wilde et al., 2020b; puimège & peters, 2019), denmark (hannibal jensen, 2017) and sweden (e.g., sundqvist & wikström, 2015; sylvén & sundqvist, 2012) have found the amount of gaming in english to be positively related to different language measures, including receptive vocabulary size, speaking, reading, and writing skills. however, no significant association was found in other studies with similar learner samples (muñoz et al., 2018 for denmark; peters, 2018 for flanders), while a significant negative association for spanish learners was observed in one large survey (muñoz, 2020). muñoz (2020) reflected that participants with lower grades (possibly less academically oriented) may have engaged in gaming more often. additionally, perhaps gaming takes away time from other activities that are more effective and adequate for lower-level learners. all in all, these mixed results may reflect differences in the types of games that are chosen in the different contexts (kuppens, 2010; sylvén & sundqvist, 2012), their lexical profiles (rodgers & heidt, 2021), learners’ proficiency level and even what learners do when playing games (hannibal jensen, 2017). how do differences in exposure affect english language learning? a comparison of teenagers in . . . 203 7. conclusion the present study has shed some new light on the unexplored issue of differences in english learning arising from divergences in the weight of in-school and out-ofschool learning and in the degree of social penetration of english and linguistic distance from this language. despite the exploratory nature of the study, its findings make several relevant contributions. it has shed light on the ways in which english language learning may be affected by different combinations of classroom instruction and out-of-the classroom exposure and, hereby, it has provided support for the experientialist view of language acquisition in usage-based accounts of l2 learning, that is, the fact that language knowledge is viewed as emerging ontogenetically from participation in particular usage events (tomasello, 2003). the study has also provided a comparison of the amount and types of out-ofschool exposure in which same-age teenagers in a more or less english-rich environment engage. by contrasting the association between these different types of input with learners’ performance on the different tests, the study has indicated that this association may show different directions and be dependent on learners’ cultural habits (i.e., dubbed or undubbed tv) and, probably, on their proficiency. the results have several pedagogical implications for teachers. first of all, teachers need to recognize the singularities of present-day english learners as learners of a global language that is increasingly present in their daily lives. it is important that they are aware of the types of activities in which learners engage with english in their free time and the effect that this contact with english may have on their proficiency level. likewise, it is important that teachers train students to exploit the advantages of informal input and that they recommend proficiency-appropriate activities. last, by recognizing the characteristics of the english knowledge that is acquired beyond the classroom (i.e., vocabulary pertaining to topics not addressed in the classroom, colloquial expressions), teachers can integrate it into the classroom setting (e.g., in the development of learning tasks and the content of language tests). several limitations in this study should be addressed in future research. first, the tests used here addressed only certain dimensions of language proficiency and did not include measures of production and interaction. in addition, the reliability of the mkt was acceptable but low, probably due to the small number of items. another limitation is the fact that the teaching approaches in the two environments may have differed over the years for different students, which is something that could not be controlled. this study used cross-sectional correlational data, which do not warrant the directionality of causality, and future studies could investigate the relative effect of different activities on learning gains in relation to specific populations. additionally, further research with other language carmen muñoz, teresa cadierno 204 pairs could disentangle the relative impact of the amount of out-of-classroom exposure and linguistic distance. for now, the present study has contributed to highlighting this joint effect that characterizes most previous studies in this line of research, suggesting that the influence of different activities on different language outcomes is context-dependent. this finding, which is also highlighted by azzolini et al. (2020), provides a more nuanced perspective than previous work conducted in single geographical contexts, and especially in those with a joint effect of high amount of exposure and short linguistic distance. acknowledgements this work was supported by grant pid2019-110594 from the spanish ministry of science and innovation and grant sgr 560 from the catalan agency for management of university and research grants. we are most grateful to the students, parents and teachers of the schools. we also thank anastasia pattemore, elsa tragant and mikkel hansen for their kind help as well as the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. how do differences in exposure affect english language learning? a comparison of teenagers in . . . 205 references azzolini, d., campregher, s., & madia, j. e. 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(2020). can captioned video benefit second language pronunciation? studies in second language acquisition, 42(3), 599624. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0272263120000029 carmen muñoz, teresa cadierno 210 appendix a background questionnaire please tell us with which frequency you do the following activities in a regular week. ex. 1. per week, with which frequency do you see films, series, videos, videoclips, vblogs, etc. in english with english subtitles? i don’t do this less than 1 h 1 h 2 h 2 h 3 h 3 h 4 h 4 h 5 h 5 h 6 h more than 6 h if more than 6 hours, please specify how many: ex. 2. . … read in english online (webpages, blogs, etc.) or in paper (books, magazines, comics, etc.)? how do differences in exposure affect english language learning? a comparison of teenagers in . . . 211 appendix b grammatical structures in the gjt and examples of learner error ex. 1. verb complementation louis says he wants buying a new car. ex. 2. regular past tense 2. martin completed his assignment yesterday. carmen muñoz, teresa cadierno 212 appendix c metalinguistic knowledge test instructions: the words that are italicized make these sentences ungrammatical. say why using your own words. you don’t need to correct them. here is an example: he likes going to partyes some words that finish in “y,” like “party,” make the plural adding “ies.” ex. 1. victoria live with her friend helen. ex. 2. this building is more smaller than your house. 513 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (3). 2016. 513-535 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.3.7 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl re-telling a story in a second language: how well do adult learners mine an input text for multiword expressions? hien hoang quy nhon university, vietnam hoangthithuhien@qnu.edu.vn frank boers victoria university of wellington, new zealand frank.boers@vuw.ac.nz abstract adult second language (l2) learners have often been found to produce discourse that manifests limited and non-native-like use of multiword expressions. one explanation for this is that adult l2 learners are relatively unsuccessful (in the absence of pedagogic intervention) at transferring multiword expressions from input texts to their own output resources. the present article reports an exploratory study where esl learners were asked to re-tell a short story which they had read and listened to twice. the learners’ re-tells were subsequently examined for the extent to which they recycled multiword expressions from the original story. to gauge the influence of the input text on these learners’ renderings of the story, a control group was asked to tell the story based exclusively on a series of pictures. the results of the experiment suggest that multiword expressions were recycled from the input text to some extent, but this stayed very marginal in real terms, especially in comparison with the recycling of single words. moreover, when learners did borrow expressions from the input text, their reproductions were often non-target-like. keywords: vocabulary; phraseology; formulaic sequences; input; story re-telling hien hoang, frank boers 514 1. introduction multiword expressions have attracted a considerable amount of interest in applied linguistics circles in recent years, as evidenced, for example, by the steady stream of monographs and edited volumes devoted to the topic (e.g., boers & lindstromberg, 2009; barfield & gyllstad, 2009; lewis, 1997, 2000; meunier & granger, 2008; nattinger & decarrico, 1992; polio, 2012; schmitt, 2004; wood, 2010a, 2010b, 2015; wray, 2002). it is now generally recognized that a large proportion of natural discourse consists of (semi-)fixed word strings and combinations that are predictable by virtue of the frequent co-occurrence of their constituent words (erman & warren, 2000; howarth, 1998; sinclair, 1991), and that mastery of these sequences is one of the hallmarks of native-speaker competence (pawley & syder, 1983). multiword expressions come in many shapes and perform a multitude of functions. they include conversational routine formulas (e.g., how are you doing?), discourse organisers (e.g., having said that), idioms (e.g., at the end of the day), proverbs (e.g., when the cat’s away), standardized similes (blind as a bat) and binomials (rough and tumble), phrasal verbs (e.g., sleep in), prepositional phrases (e.g., by car), compounds (e.g., baby boom), and collocations (e.g., bright sunshine; make an effort). some are uninterrupted strings, while others provide sentence frames with slots to be completed (e.g., not only . . ., but . . .; i was wondering if . . .). perhaps due to the great diversity of multiword items, both in form and function, many different labels have been used in the literature to refer to multiword lexis in general and to certain categories of expressions in particular (e.g., lexical phrases, phrasal expressions, multiword units, prefabricated chunks). at the time of writing her influential book on the topic, wray (2002) had found over 50 terms to describe instances of multiword lexis. her own, now much adopted term, was formulaic sequence, which she defined as “a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other elements, which is, or appears to be, prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved whole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar” (p. 9). while this is a comprehensive definition of the kinds of patterns we wish to consider in the present article, the definitional criterion of “holistic” retrieval makes it more suitable when one is dealing with native speakers than for studies such as ours, where l2 learners’ use of multiword lexis is examined. after all, l2 learners’ command of target expressions may not yet be sufficiently proceduralized to warrant the kind of hesitant-free production that suggests the expressions are retrieved from the mental lexicon holistically, as prefabricated units. to avoid this implication, we have therefore opted to use the term multiword expression (henceforth mwe) rather than formulaic sequence in the present article. re-telling a story in a second language: how well do adult learners mine an input text for multiword. . . 515 a growing body of experimental research shows that native speakers’ knowledge of mwes facilitates their fluent language processing and that this is a processing advantage many l2 learners do not enjoy (see siyanova-chanturia & martinez, 2015, for a recent review; sonbul, 2015, for a recent example). there is also evidence that l2 learners who display mastery of mwes tend to be (perceived as) more proficient or advanced than those whose output exhibits little evidence of such phraseological competence (bestgen & granger, 2014; boers, eyckmans, kappel, stengers, & demecheleer, 2006; crossley, salsbury, & mcnamara, 2015; dai & ding, 2010; stengers, boers, housen, & eyckmans, 2011). unfortunately, many studies have also shown that even advanced learners’ l2 output will typically lack the phraseological richness manifested in native speaker discourse and will usually exhibit phraseological oddities (e.g., altenberg & granger, 2001; laufer & waldman, 2011; levitzky-aviad & laufer, 2013; li & schmitt, 2010; serrano, stengers, & housen, 2015; siyanova & schmitt, 2008). and yet, these attested shortcomings often concern relatively common mwes. part of the problem, then, seems to lie in learners’ failure to pick up the mwes they encounter and add these to their own repertoire. several explanations have been proposed that may jointly account for this lack of transfer of mwes from input to output. one is that (literate) adult learners are relatively inattentive to phraseological patterns in l2 text, because—unlike children acquiring their mother tongue through aural input—they have become used to treating the word (rather than larger chunks) as the basic unit of meaning (wray, 2002). most applied linguists now concur that attention is crucial for intake of information (schmidt, 2001). it is also well recognized that language users are naturally inclined to process messages first and foremost for their content, not the linguistic packaging of that content (e.g., sharwood-smith, 1993; van patten, 2002). if, for adult learners, it is single words that provide the key to text content, then it follows that words rather than larger syntagmatic units will be attended to, reducing the likelihood that the latter will leave a durable imprint in memory. what is more, even when mwes do receive attention, learners may fail to reproduce them accurately or simply shy away from trying to reproduce them, because mwes are often longer than single words and thus more challenging to recall (ellis, 1996; skrzypek & singleton, 2013). often single-word substitutes are available (e.g., they were furious vs. they were up in arms; we’ll have to accept it vs. we’ll have to put up with it; don’t lie vs. don’t tell lies) and the learner may consider these easier (and “safer”) to use. this may be an especially appealing avoidance strategy in case one is uncertain about the meaning of particular mwes (e.g., idioms; laufer, 2000) and in case a given category of l2 mwes (e.g., phrasal verbs) is absent from the learners’ l1 (dagut & laufer, 1985; siyanova & hien hoang, frank boers 516 schmitt, 2007). but interference from the learners’ l1 also occurs when members of a shared category of mwes (e.g., collocations) are not congruent (nesselhauf, 2003; yamashita & jiang, 2010; wolter & gyllstad, 2011). given these hindrances to learners’ autonomous recycling of mwes from textual input, one might argue that, instead of relying on incidental uptake, time needs to be invested in the explicit teaching and deliberate study of mwes (for example by using materials such as lindstromberg & boers, 2008; davis & kryszewska, 2012; and mccarthy & o’dell, 2005). on the other hand, there is some evidence that learners do spontaneously recycle lexis from instructions and exemplars they are given as prompts for output activities, and that some of that recycling does concern lexical items larger than single words (boston, 2008). in light of that evidence, the above pessimism about learners’ spontaneous uptake of mwes from input texts is perhaps not entirely justified. perhaps learners do pick up a fair number of mwes from input texts that they incorporate in their subsequent output, provided the conditions for this to happen are favourable. it is this possibility that is explored in the present article. 2. “mining” input for multiword expressions to fuel an output task a number of studies have compared l2 learners’ rate of acquisition of mwes under various reading conditions (pellicer-sánchez, 2015; webb, newton, & chang, 2013), including reading where target mwes are typographically enhanced (boers, demecheleer, he, deconinck, stengers, & eyckmans, 2016; sonbul & schmitt, 2013; szudarski & carter, 2014) and/or glossed (bishop, 2004; peters, 2009, 2012). separate to this strand of research into reading-based mwe acquisition, some studies have examined factors that influence the effectiveness of deliberate mwefocused instruction and learning (e.g., alali & schmitt, 2012; boers, eyckmans, & stengers, 2007; boers, demecheleer, coxhead, & webb, 2014; boers, dang, & strong, 2016; eyckmans, boers, & lindstromberg, 2016; laufer, 2010; laufer & girsai, 2008; peters, 2016; szudarski & conklin, 2014; webb & kagimoto, 2011). what all of these aforementioned studies have in common is that they assess the effects of interventions by means of controlled, discrete-item knowledge tests. to date, much less research has been conducted that addresses the question of how well learners incorporate the mwes they have been exposed to or have studied in their own meaning-focused communicative output, and what steps can be taken to promote this transfer from input to output. like boston (2008, 2010), we borrow the term mining of input from samuda (2001), who used it to refer to learners’ use of language elements borrowed from prompts, even though the learners were not explicitly instructed to do so. focusing specifically on vocabulary, boston (2008) describes how his japanese re-telling a story in a second language: how well do adult learners mine an input text for multiword. . . 517 efl learners spontaneously recycled items from instructions and examples for output activities. if learners are inclined to mine input materials for language that they feel will help them perform the output task, he argues, then it may be possible to harness this inclination by designing the input materials in ways that promote successful mining. successful mining is likely to depend on many factors, however, including the kind of language features concerned (e.g., content words are likely to be recycled more than function words and grammar features), the relevance of the input language for the output task (i.e., whether particular elements are task-essential or not), and the way the input language is presented (e.g., written or aural; with or without features that make particular elements perceptually salient). several of the studies that address the question of whether adult l2 learners successfully incorporate mwes from input materials into their own communicative output have been conducted in the context of writing courses. jones and haywood (2004) report a study where learners in an eap course were regularly engaged in activities with a focus on mwes. while the authors found clear evidence that these students’ awareness of mwes increased, their actual use of mwes in their end-of-course essays did not differ markedly from that of a comparison group that had not received the mwe-focused treatment. in a partial replication of jones and haywood (2004), peters and pauwels (2015) also examined the effect of integrating various mwe-focused activities in an eap course. they found evidence of an effect, but this evidence emerged more clearly in a discrete-item recognition test than in the learners’ spontaneous use of the mwes in their writing assignments. this illustrates that, despite increasing familiarity with mwes at a receptive level, learners may not adequately deploy this knowledge in communicative output tasks. the effects of mwe-focused interventions on learners’ oral output have been investigated by wood (2009, 2010b), boers et al. (2006) and stengers, boers, housen and eyckmans (2010). wood’s investigations focus on the advantages afforded by formulaic sequences specifically for speech fluency. he describes courses where esl learners took part in intensive fluency workshops involving focused instruction on and sustained practice of formulaic sequences. mwes were extracted by the instructor from listening input and the learners practised reproducing these sequences in a series of output activities. detailed analyses of the learners’ subsequent oral narratives showed that their speech fluency benefited from using the formulaic sequences they had practised. the intervention tried in boers et al. (2006) and stengers et al. (2010) was much less intensive. students in an efl course were regularly encouraged to identify mwes in the authentic reading materials they worked with in class, an awareness-raising activity recommended by lewis (1997). at the end of the course, hien hoang, frank boers 518 their performance on speaking tasks was compared with that of a comparison group whose attention had not been directed explicitly to the presence of mwes in the texts. no compelling evidence emerged that the former group made more use specifically of the mwes they had encountered in the course materials. on the positive side, however, if the speaking activity was prompted by a text which they had at their disposal during the speaking activity, these students did appear more inclined than the comparison group to replicate mwes used in that text. it is worth noting that these studies present no evidence that mwe learning does not occur in the absence of mwe-focused instruction. after all, where comparison groups were included, these were usually also found to make progress, sometimes enough progress to render the differences between mwe-instructed and comparison groups non-significant, thereby casting doubt on the impact that focused mwe instruction has over and above learners’ spontaneous mining of input texts. it is also worth noting that, in the aforementioned intervention studies, the learner-participants rarely engaged in communicative output activities making use of the content of (and thus potentially also the wordings used in) the textual input very shortly after having processed that textual input. a study by lindstromberg, eyckmans and connabeer (2016) investigates the potential of text reconstruction activities such as dictogloss for mwe uptake, but the extent to which learners will mine input texts for mwes spontaneously to help them fulfil a subsequent communicative output task is still insufficiently documented. in the exploratory study we report below, we gauge the extent to which adult esl learners spontaneously recycle mwes from a short story they are asked to retell. 3. method 3.1. participants participants in the study were 34 volunteers who were all international students (aged 19 to 38) in an english proficiency program at a university in new zealand. they were informed they would be participating in a study on the benefits of story-retelling activities. they came from eight different countries: china (14), vietnam (6), japan (4), thailand (3), indonesia (2), east timor (2), brazil (2), and germany (1). their (self-reported) scores for speaking skills on their most recent ielts test were 5 or above. they all took an in-house placement test at the beginning of their english courses, three weeks prior to the experiment. this placement test consisted of a dictation, c-tests, and a vocabulary test. taking account of their scores on this placement test, the participants were quasi-randomly assigned re-telling a story in a second language: how well do adult learners mine an input text for multiword. . . 519 to one of two conditions. in one condition (henceforth the experimental condition) the learners read and listened to a short story twice (see section 3.2 for details) and then re-told the story. in the other condition (henceforth the control condition) the participants were presented with the story exclusively in pictorial form before being asked to tell the story. the latter condition served to generate “baseline” data, that is, information about the lexis that same-proficiency learners would resort to for the narrative task without being influenced by the input text. the data of three participants were discarded (for reasons explained further below), which left us with usable data for 17 participants in the experimental condition and for 14 in the control condition. according to their performance on the placement test, the two groups were similar in proficiency, with means of 173.35 (sd = 27.75) and 168.07 (sd = 32.34), respectively (maximum score = 282). an independent-samples t-test yielded t(29) = 0.49; p = .63. 3.2. materials and procedure an adaptation of one of aesop’s fables, the donkey and his masters, rich in mwes, served as the input text for the re-tell task (see the appendix). the text consists of 466 words, and the story has six narrative turns: (a) the donkey working for the first master (a herb seller), (b) the donkey asking the god jupiter for another master, (c) the donkey working for the second master (a brick-maker), (d) the donkey asking jupiter again for another master, (e) the donkey working for the third master (a tanner), and (f) the donkey recalling jupiter’s words of caution and learning a lesson. a powerpoint presentation was created with 20 slides that told the story in a time span of 4 minutes. for the experimental group the story was presented concurrently in three modes: (a) an audio recording of the story read aloud (relatively slowly, at 117 words per minute) by a female native speaker of english; (b) full captions of the audio recording, i.e., the written text for the participants to read while listening; and (c) pictures (one picture per slide) illustrating the content of the passage being read. for the control group, the same 20 slides with pictures were used, but without the audio recording and without the captions. this was preceded in both conditions by a slide with instructions (see below) and a slide with the title of the story, i.e., the donkey and his masters. according to the vocabprofile tool at tom cobb’s http://www.lextutor.ca, only three words (barring the name jupiter) in the story are beyond the 3,000 most frequent word families of english (in the combined corpus of contemporary american english [coca] and british national corpus [bnc]) and would be considered as mid-frequency rather than high-frequency vocabulary according to the criteria proposed by schmitt and schmitt (2015). these are herbs, donkey, hien hoang, frank boers 520 and tanner. the meaning of donkey was illustrated pictorially in the slides and the meaning of tanner was explained verbally in the text itself. we found no indications in the participants’ renderings of the story that the input text posed any challenges for comprehension. the text was analyzed for the presence of mwes independently by two experienced english teachers. in cases of disagreement, we resorted to statistical information from coca to make a decision. for collocations of two content words (e.g., learn + lesson), we used mutual information (mi) scores and set the threshold at > 4. for other word strings (e.g., no longer), we used corpus frequency and set the threshold at > 100 occurrences. the combination of these procedures led to the identification of 35 mwes in the text (see the appendix), henceforth referred to as target mwes. they represent a range of phraseological patterns, including polywords (e.g., let alone), complex verbs (e.g., look forward to . . .), verb-noun collocations (e.g., make + request), and sentence frames with open slots to be completed (e.g., be too . . . to . . .). as already mentioned, the two groups of students were exposed to the same story but in two different conditions: (a) a listening text accompanied by captions and pictures and (b) pictures only. both groups were given the following instructions: you are going to watch the story twice. the first time, just enjoy the story. the second time, feel free to take notes. afterwards, you will be given eight of the pictures to help you remember the story line and three minutes to prepare an oral narrative. your re-telling of the story should be about three minutes long. you will tell the story twice, for different listeners who have not watched the story themselves. we believe the task conditions we created for the recall task to be relatively favourable for input mining to occur, for at least the following four reasons. first, reading-while-listening has been found to be more conducive to l2 vocabulary uptake than reading only (webb & chang, 2012). moreover, the availability of the aural input may not only assist learners with the pronunciation of words they might otherwise shy away from using, but the prosodic cues may also assist learners with the chunking of speech into units larger than single words (e.g., lin, 2012). at the same time, preserving the written mode alongside the aural mode may be helpful for note-taking, and, according to boston (2008), facilitates mining more than aural input alone. second, reading and listening to the story twice gives learners the opportunity to first become familiar with its content so that attentional resources can be freed up for taking in the language proper as they process the text a second time. third, we asked the participants to perform the narrative task twice because that would give them the opportunity to try and modify language forms they may have felt dissatisfied with the first time they performed the task (e.g., bygate, 2001; wang, 2014). evidence of re-telling a story in a second language: how well do adult learners mine an input text for multiword. . . 521 (accurate) uptake of a language item from the input text might therefore emerge in a second re-tell while it was absent in the learner’s first attempt. finally, presenting the text explicitly as the prompt for a re-tell activity is likely to stimulate engagement with language items in the text that learners anticipate using in the output activity. moreover, the time given to prepare the narrative allows for a fair amount of (mental) text re-construction prior to the actual oral delivery. 3.3. analysis the participants’ oral narratives were audio-recorded and transcribed. the transcriptions of raw speech were trimmed by removing false starts, repairs, repetitions and filled pauses. these trimmed transcripts were used for the below analyses. prior to any between-group comparisons we needed to ascertain whether the experimental and the control group produced narratives of comparable length and structure (i.e., containing six narrative turns, as described above). recall that participants were instructed to aim at a narrative of about 3 minutes. one (japanese) participant in the experimental group produced a narrative of only 1.29 minutes. another (japanese) participant in the experimental group did deliver narratives of close to 3 minutes but his speech rate was so slow that he produced far fewer words than his peers. this was also the only participant who failed to include six narrative turns in his rendering of the story. one (brazilian) participant in the control group, by contrast, produced a much longer (and embellished) story than all other participants. we decided to remove these three outliers from the data so as to increase the comparability of the two samples. after removing the data of these three participants, the word counts of the two groups’ narratives are very similar: combining the word counts of the first and the second re-tells yields means of 498.59 (sd = 81.98) for the experimental group and 496.79 (sd = 80.48) for the control group. in terms of the amount of language produced, then, the two samples are very well matched: t(29) = 0.06; p = .95. before turning to an evaluation of the learners’ inclination and ability to recycle the phraseological dimension of the input text (operationalized here as the 35 target mwes), it is worth establishing whether the input text influenced the participants’ language at all. more particularly, the extent to which they recycled single words from the input text may help to put the amount of mwe mining into perspective. we resorted to the text lex compare function on tom cobb’s http://www.lextutor.ca to calculate the proportion of word families shared between the re-tells and the original story, and compare this with the narratives produced by the control group. we complemented this with a count of shared word families from beyond the 2,000 most frequent word families (in the combined coca and bnc corpus). the proportion of these beyond-k2 words hien hoang, frank boers 522 is a measure of lexical sophistication, that is, of the extent to which learners have advanced beyond a “basic” vocabulary (laufer, 1995). we then proceeded by counting and assessing the target mwes in the participants’ narratives. we also asked the same two teachers who identified mwes in the input story to identify any other mwes in the participants’ narratives. in cases of disagreement, we applied the same corpus-informed criteria as above (mi score > 4; corpus frequency > 100) to determine whether to consider word strings as mwes. the analyses reported below concern each participant’s two renderings of the story combined as one document. this was not the original plan, but it follows from the findings that the first and second re-tells were consistently very similar. only very seldom did participants in the experimental group recycle a word from the input text in one but not the other rendering of the story. as a result, the number of recycled words in the repeated narratives was almost identical (paired-samples t(16) = -0.2; p = .84). similarly, only very seldom did participants in the experimental group use mwes from the input text in the second but not the first of their re-tells. in fact, the number of recycled mwes tended to be lower in participants’ second re-tells, but this trend is not significant (t(16) = 0.4; p = .69). 4. results and discussion 4.1. recycling of words the counts of word families shared between the participants’ narratives and the original story indicate that the availability of an input text exerts a strong influence on learners’ choice of words as they deliver their version of the story, as shown in table 1. of the word families that make up the narratives of the experimental group, on average 68.77% were shared with the input text. this compares to only 49.47% in the control condition. the effect of having versus not having processed the input text on the participants’ choice of words in their renderings of the story is clearly significant: independent-samples t-test: t(29) = 9.36; p < .0001; ci95% exp. [65.59, 71.95]; ci95% ctrl [47.16, 51.78]. table 1 descriptive statistics for single words group n % shared with input text number of beyond-k2 word families total per 100 words m sd m sd m sd experimental group 17 68.77 6.69 5.18 1.98 1.03 0.32 control group 14 49.47 4.41 5.21 2.89 1.06 0.56 re-telling a story in a second language: how well do adult learners mine an input text for multiword. . . 523 complementary evidence that learners in the experimental group recycled words from the input text emerges when we focus specifically on the beyond-k2 words from the input text. for example, 13 of the 17 participants in the experimental group reproduced tanner, herbs, and request, three words which none of the participants in the control group used in their renderings of the story. the word regret was used by 11 participants in the experimental group but by only three in the control group. most participants in the control group opted for other means to express the same notions, such as ask for instead of request and feel sorry or be unhappy about instead of regret. the fact that the experimental group was strongly influenced in their choice of lexis by the text they had just read and listened to did not necessarily lead them to produce narratives that were lexically more sophisticated than those of their control peers, however. the two groups’ narratives actually displayed similar mean numbers of beyond-k2 word families: 5.18 in the experimental condition and 5.21 in the control condition (see table 1). given that the total number of words produced by participants varied somewhat, it is perhaps more accurate to compute means per 100 words produced. also according to this calculation the two groups’ narratives contained almost equal proportions of beyond-k2 words: 1.03 and 1.06. it may seem surprising that the opportunity to mine a text for language did not benefit the overall degree of lexical sophistication of the learners’ output. after all, many did use a low-frequency word such as tanner, which they would not have used had they not encountered it (and its explanation) in the input text. however, by adhering to the words used in the original story, the learners in the experimental group also recycled many “basic” means of expression (e.g., tired and unhappy) where their peers in the control group used more “sophisticated” ones, such as exhausted, miserable and even disillusioned. adherence to the words contained in the input text may thus have led the more advanced participants in the experimental group to produce output exhibiting a lexical profile that masked their real lexical competence. this possibility is lent credibility by the virtual absence of a correlation (r = .033) between the experimental participants’ scores on their placement test and the number of beyond-k2 words in their narratives. in the control group, however, the correlation between placement test scores and the number of beyond-k2 words used in the narratives is much stronger (r = .491), reflecting the expected association between proficiency and lexical richness. 4.2. recycling of multiword expressions having established that mining for language definitely occurred, we can now turn to the data which will help us answer the question we set out to address, hien hoang, frank boers 524 that is, how well l2 learners mine an input text for its phraseological dimension, operationalized here as the quantity and quality of mwes recycled from the text. as summarized in table 2, of the 35 target mwes, the participants in the experimental group reproduced on average only 2.41 (median = 2) (type counts) accurately in their re-tells. the average number of accurate target mwes per stretch of 100 words in the experimental group was just 0.48 (median = 0.49). the overall likelihood of any given mwe from the input text reappearing in the experimental group’s re-tells was only 6.89%. this is obviously very limited use of mwes from the input text, especially in comparison with the amount of recycling of single words we discussed above. the data nevertheless furnish evidence that learners mine an input text for mwes to some degree, because the same set of 35 mwes was virtually absent from the narratives of the control group: participants in the control group produced on average 0.57 (median = 0.5) of the mwes that occurred in the input text, or an average of 0.12 (median = 0.09) per 100 words. while this is a significantly smaller proportion than that found in the experimental group (z(29) = 2.52; p = .01, for per-participant counts, and z(29) = 2.68; p = .007, for per-100-word counts), the fact that some of the mwes also occurred in the control group’s narratives does suggest that not all target mwes were necessarily produced by participants in the experimental condition under the influence of the input text. this makes the mean use of 2.41 out of 35 target mwes by the experimental group even less impressive: some of these mwes may already have been quite familiar and participants might also have used them in their re-tells without exposure to the textual version of the story. it is perhaps worth mentioning that the amount of successful mining of mwes from the input text was positively associated with the learners’ general proficiency, as gauged by the placement test. this association, however, was rather weak, and statistically non-significant: r = .171 for participants’ total number of recycled mwes, and r = .209 for their mean number of recycled mwes per 100 words. it therefore looks as though proficiency level does not have a profound impact on learners’ inclination to pick up and reproduce mwes from text. table 2 descriptive statistics for multiword expressions group n mwes shared with input text mwes overall total per 100 words total per 100 words m sd m sd m sd m sd experimental group 17 2.41 2.03 0.48 0.39 3.88 2.18 0.78 0.44 control group 14 0.57 0.65 0.12 0.14 6.07 2.76 1.26 0.70 note. mwe = multiword expressions. one may of course argue that a number of the mwes included in the original story (e.g., it’s now or never) expressed idea units which were not crucial re-telling a story in a second language: how well do adult learners mine an input text for multiword. . . 525 for the story line. as their use was not task-essential, perhaps participants did not see any reason for recycling these particular bits of text. the same could also be said about some of the single words, though. for example, the information given in the text that the god jupiter is “the god of the sky and rain” does not appear vital to the story line either, and yet nine of the participants in the experimental group did include this in their re-tells. another reason why some mwes, such as collocations, may not have stood a good chance of being recycled is that a whole collocation could be substituted by a single-word constituent, as in the case of make + request, which three participants substituted for by the verb to request. this does suggest, though, that it is content words and not their phraseological patterning that tend to be successfully mined from input text. it needs to be clarified that the above mwe counts concern participants’ accurate production of the target mwes. in fact, more traces of the target mwes were present in the re-tells of the experimental group, but many of these were not target-like. many were incomplete (e.g., living by instead of earning a living by, not notice instead of take no notice of, look forward to the new master instead of look forward to meeting the new master, make the best situation instead of make the best of the situation, than instead of rather than) and others manifested erroneous substitutions of constituents (e.g., earning the living, beg a request, have a lesson, not enough food for eating, look forward about). the participants in the experimental group produced on average 3.41 (sd = 2.45) inaccurate versions of mwes they had encountered in the original story. (these means concern type counts; participants tended to produce the same malformed mwes in both of their re-tells.) this actually exceeds their mean number of mwes recycled accurately, although the difference falls short of significance (t(16) = 1.75; p = .099). the ratio of inaccurate versus accurate versions of mwes produced by the learners appeared not to be a reflection of their proficiency, since we found no correlation between this ratio and the participants’ scores on the placement test (r = .024). besides the target mwes (i.e., the mwes that matched those in the input text), the narratives of the experimental group contained a small number of additional mwes (e.g., in addition, make a mistake, feel sorry for . . ., adjust to . . .), such that the total mean number of per-participant mwes in the experimental group was 3.88. the average per 100 words was 0.78. the fact that the control group used hardly any of the target mwes does not at all mean that their narratives were void of mwes. instead, they used different mwes to help them tell the story (e.g., first of all, do business, run away from . . ., once again, at a loss, as a result, solve the problem, make an effort, take care of . . .). the control group’s narratives were in fact found to contain a higher number of mwes overall than the experimental group’s: on average 6.07 per participant and 1.26 per hien hoang, frank boers 526 100 words (see table 2). this is a significant between-group difference: t(29) = 2.47; p = .02; ci95% exp. [2.84, 4.92]; ci95% ctrl. [4.62, 7.52], for the per-participant count, and t(29) = 2.31; p = .03; ci95% exp. [0.57, 0.99]; ci95% ctrl. [0.89, 1.63], for the per-100-words count. in sum, despite the availability of an input text that was rich in mwes, the experimental group’s narratives manifested a lower degree of native-like phraseology than the control group’s narratives, at least as gauged by counting accurate mwes. notice, though, that the confidence intervals for the two groups’ means show some overlap, suggesting that the betweengroup difference is far from absolute and should be interpreted with caution. in both conditions, the more advanced learners (according to the scores on the placement test) tended to display better command of mwes, and this was especially striking in the control condition. correlation coefficients between the participants’ placement test scores and the number of accurate mwes they used were r = .448 in the experimental group and r = .685 in the control group. computing the correlation for all 31 participants together yields r = .484 (p = .006). computing the correlation for the mean number of accurate mwes used per minute yields parallel results: r = .493 in the experimental group, r = .789 in the control group, and r = .577 (p = .0007) for both groups together. these strong correlations demonstrate that a growing command of multiword lexis is an integral part of becoming a proficient language user. the fact that the correlation is somewhat weaker in the case of the experimental condition probably reflects the aforementioned presence of many inaccurate renderings of mwes from the input text in these learners’ narratives. 5. conclusion, implications for pedagogy, and avenues the above findings suggest that, while an input text will exert an influence on learners’ choice of words when they are given the task to reiterate its content, transfer from input to output at the level of phraseology cannot at all be taken for granted. not only were there relatively few attempts by our participants at recycling mwes from the input text, but also a considerable number of those attempts resulted in incomplete or otherwise malformed versions of the mwes. the question of whether this is due to a lack of attention paid to phraseology during input processing or rather to the challenge of recalling encountered mwes is probably answerable only through collecting online processing data, such as tracking learners’ eye-movements during reading, to determine what elements in the text attract learners’ attention. interestingly, we found only a weak and non-significant association between the learners’ recycling of mwes from the input text and their scores on a general proficiency placement test, re-telling a story in a second language: how well do adult learners mine an input text for multiword. . . 527 which suggests that proficiency is not a major factor when it comes to adult learners’ inclination to mine texts for multiword lexis or phraseology. the control group in our experiment was required to generate speech based on a picture story rather than being given the opportunity to recycle language from an input text. this nevertheless resulted in output displaying a similar lexical sophistication level and at least the same quantity of mwes as that of the experimental group. since the mwes produced by the control group were not copied from the input text, they must have been retrieved from a repertoire these learners had already developed through prior l2 learning experience. the experimental group, by comparison, relied heavily on words borrowed from the input text, but then often failed to string these words together in native-like ways. as a result, the mean number of accurately produced mwes was lower than in the control condition. irrespective of condition, however, the learners’ use of mwes in their narratives and their scores on a general proficiency test were found to be strongly correlated. this is consistent with earlier research that found significant parallels between learners’ mwe use and measures of proficiency, and it lends support to earlier assertions about the importance of mastering multiword lexis as an integral part of proficiency development. given the rather poor incidental uptake of multiword lexis from input, at least as attested here, the data also lend support to arguments that pedagogic interventions are needed to help learners add mwes to their l2 repertoires. that mwes from the story were successfully recycled by the participants in our study to such a limited extent is particularly surprising in light of the fact that, as argued in the method section, the conditions for mining language were quite favourable. if so little successful mining was attested even under these conditions, then this result may indeed be interpreted as support for more explicit, deliberate mwe-focused instruction and productive practice, where teachers (or materials designers) direct learners’ attention to particular mwes and set up communicative or game-like activities where learners are explicitly encouraged to reproduce them. these teacher-led interventions should of course be considered as complements rather than substitutes of approaches that aim to foster autonomous mwe learning (for reviews of work undertaken to facilitate learners’ independent study of mwes, including the development and use of corpus-informed resources, see, e.g., boers & lindstromberg, 2012; and meunier, 2012). we also need to acknowledge that it would be premature to draw anything but tentative conclusions about the rate of incidental uptake of mwes during text-based communicative tasks from the outcome of this exploratory study alone. this was a small-scale study, after all. besides, the conditions created here were perhaps not yet favourable enough for mwe mining to occur, and so hien hoang, frank boers 528 additional steps for stimulating mwe uptake during input-driven communicative tasks should be tried in future studies. it may be helpful, for example, to incorporate multiple instances of the same mwe in the input text, although it may take a fair amount of creativity on the part of the teacher/materials writer to adapt texts in that way. typographic enhancement (e.g., underlining) of mwes in the input text is another possibility, and easy to implement. apart from manipulating the input so as to make preselected mwes more salient, one may also raise learners’ awareness of the usefulness of multiword phrases more generally (e.g., lewis, 1997) and explicitly encourage learners to engage in input mining. some learners may have been told all too often by teachers that they should sum up the content of a text “in their own words,” and they may consequently have become reluctant to repeat wording from an input text verbatim, thus missing an opportunity for practicing idiomatic language, expressing content the way a native speaker would. more specifically in the context of task repetition, such as the repeated narrative task used in our study, it is probably helpful to insert a feedback stage between the 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(2010). l1 influence on the acquisition of l2 collocations: japanese esl users and efl learners acquiring english collocations. tesol quarterly, 44, 647-668. doi: 10.5054/tq.2010.235998. re-telling a story in a second language: how well do adult learners mine an input text for multiword. . . 535 appendix the input text at the time of writing this article, the original text and the picture story were available at http://www.e-yep.com/storyen/060s_donkeyandmaster.swf. the underlining below indicates the target mwes. the text presented to the participants did not have this underlining. the donkey and his masters a donkey lived with his master. his master earned his living by selling herbs in the market. despite the fact that the donkey always did his best and worked all day, his master wanted the donkey to work harder. so he worked on and on. every day the donkey wished he had a different master. the master never gave him enough food to eat. little by little, the donkey lost hope that things would change. he came to a decision that he had had enough. he couldn’t help but think that one way or another, he had to leave. he no longer wanted to work for his master. he thought: “it’s now or never”. there was only one person who could help the donkey. the donkey searched for jupiter, the god of the sky and rain. “could you do me a favor, jupiter?” begged the donkey, “please give me a new master.” the donkey explained why he wanted a new master. jupiter did not turn down the donkey’s request. “i will give you a new master,” jupiter said finally. “but,” jupiter said firmly, “you will regret making this request”. the donkey was too happy to care. he was really looking forward to meeting his new master. the donkey’s new master was a brick-maker by trade. the donkey had to pull heavy carts of brick every day. the donkey’s master wanted him to work harder. he did not give the donkey any water, let alone any food. the donkey was also unhappy with his new master. in desperation, he got in touch with jupiter again. “please give me a new master,” begged the donkey. “i’ll give you a new master,” jupiter said finally. “but,” jupiter said firmly, “this is the last time i will help you. it will be no use coming back again. this will be your last and only master.” the donkey was too happy to care. again he took no notice of jupiter’s words. the donkey’s new master was a tanner. he caught animals and killed them. then he skinned them and sold their hide. now, worst of all, the donkey wasn’t just tired. he was also frightened of this new master. he recalled jupiter’s words: “you will regret wishing for a new master.” the donkey’s eyes were full of tears. “on second thoughts, it would have been better if i had stayed with the other masters,” the donkey cried. “i may have been hungry, or i may have been tired from too much work, but they would not have skinned me like those animals. he will make use of me even after i die.” in the end, the donkey learned a lesson. it is better to make the best of your situation rather than try to change it. . studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: chengchen li (huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan, china) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) editor: joanna zawodniak (university of zielona góra, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (silesian university of technology, gliwice, poland) vol. 11 no. 3 september 2021 editorial board: ali al-hoorie (royal commission for jubail and yanbu, jubail, saudi arabia) larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) maria dakowska (university of warsaw, poland) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) tammy gregersen (american university of sharjah, united arab emirates) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2021 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: jakub bielak mariusz kruk chengchen li aleksandra wach joanna zawodniak © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: jakub bielak, melanie ellis, mariusz kruk, chengchen li, aleksandra wach, joanna zawodniak cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 61 829 64 20 fax +48 61 829 64 21 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · social sciences citation index (wos core collection) · journal citation reports social sciences (wos) · scopus · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) · current contents – social and behavioral sciences (wos) · essential science indicators (wos) special issue: teaching english reading and writing to young learners guest editors: barry lee reynolds mark feng teng studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 11, number 3, september 2021 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ....................................................................321 editorial: introduction to the special issue on teaching english reading and writing to young learners ...........................................................325 articles: sihui (echo) ke, dongbo zhang – morphological instruction and reading development in young l2 readers: a scoping review of causal relationships .................................................................................... 331 gavin brooks, jon clenton, simon fraser – exploring the importance of vocabulary for english as an additional language learners’ reading comprehension ................................................................................ 351 gavin bui, xueya luo – topic familiarity and story continuation in young english as a foreign language learners’ writing tasks ..................... 377 darío luis banegas, robert j. lowe – creative writing for publication: an action research study of motivation, engagement, and language development in argentinian secondary schools .................................................... 401 barry lee reynolds, mark feng teng – innovating teacher feedback with writing activities aimed at raising secondary school students’ awareness of collocation errors......................................................................... 423 maggie ma, gavin bui – chinese secondary school teachers’ conceptions of l2 assessment: a mixed-methods study ...................................... 445 notes to contributors ......................................................................473 321 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors darío luis banegas, phd, is lecturer in tesol at the school of education, university of strathclyde, uk and associate fellow with the university of warwick, uk. in argentina, he is an online teacher educator for ifdc lenguas vivas bariloche. dr. banegas is an active member of teacher associations in the uk and latin america. his research focuses on content and language integrated learning, initial english language teacher education, curriculum development, and educational action research. he has recently co-edited two volumes for the international perspectives on elt series published by palgrave, and a special issue for elt journal (75/2). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0225-0866 contact details: school of education, university of strathclyde, 141 st james road glasgow, g4 0lt, uk (dario.banegas@strath.ac.uk) gavin bui, phd, is associate professor of applied linguistics at the hang seng university of hong kong. his research interests include task-based language teaching and third language learning motivation. his recent publications appeared in language teaching research (2018), international review of applied linguistics in language teaching (2019), system (2019), and applied linguistics review (2020). he is co-editor of asian journal of english language teaching. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1567-9074 contact details: department of english, the hang seng university of hong kong, siu lek yuen, shatin, new territories, m422a, hong kong (gavinbui@hsu.edu.hk) gavin brooks is associate lecturer of english at the school of policy studies at kwansei gakuin university in japan. his research interests include english as an additional language (eal), vocabulary development, vocabulary assessment, and corpus linguistics. he has presented on the findings of his research at a number of international conferences, including aaal, eurosla, and the tesol annual convention, and has had his work published in several academic journals and as a chapter in an edited book. 322 orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9839-1593 contact details: school of policy studies, kwansei gakuin university, 2-1 gakuen, sanda city, hyogo prefecture, japan, 669-1337 (gavinbrooks@gmail.com) jon clenton, phd, is associate professor of applied linguistics at hiroshima university, japan. his main research interests include the assessment of vocabulary knowledge, second language (l2) productive vocabulary development, productive vocabulary knowledge and fluency, second language acquisition, word-association studies, lexical processing, and l2 measurement tools. he has examined several vocabulary measurement tools, with a focus on attempts to isolate the construct of productive vocabulary knowledge. the findings of this area of research have resulted in several international journal article publications. he is also the co-editor of two recent book publications (routledge): vocabulary and the four skills, and first language influences on multilingual lexicons. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3048-8807 contact details: the graduate school of humanities, hiroshima university, 1-71 kagamiyama, higashi-hiroshima city, hiroshima, 739-8521 japan (jclenton@ hiroshima-u.ac.jp) simon fraser, phd, is professor at the institute for foreign language research and education at hiroshima university, japan. his research interests include english for specific purposes (esp), corpus linguistics, and l2 vocabulary development. his lexical analyses of medical english corpora have led to the development of medical english materials and wordlists, and he has published widely in this area. his interest in vocabulary extends to textbook writing, and he is currently working on a lexically-based course book for medical students. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8151-4625 contact details: institute for foreign language research and education, hiroshima university, 1-7-1 kagamiyama, higashi-hiroshima city, hiroshima, 739-8521 japan (fraser@hiroshima-u.ac.jp) sihui (echo) ke, phd, is assistant professor of second language acquisition at the university of kentucky, lexington, usa. her primary research interest is in second language reading and biliteracy development. her research incorporates quantitative, psycholinguistic and mixed methods. her work has appeared in applied linguistics, language learning, modern language journal and reading research quarterly. her research projects have received external support from language learning early career research grant (2019-2020) and the american council on the teaching of foreign languages 2018 research priorities initiative. 323 orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2665-0637 contact details: 1055 patterson office tower, university of kentucky, lexington ky 40506, usa (sihui.ke@uky.edu) robert j. lowe, phd, is associate professor in the department of english communication, tokyo kasei university. his research focuses on critical issues in english language teaching and critical qualitative research methods. he is co-author of teaching english as a lingua franca (2018, delta publishing), co-editor of duoethnography in english language teaching (2020, multilingual matters), and author of the monograph uncovering ideology in english language teaching (2020, springer). he has published papers in numerous journals, including language teaching, applied linguistics review, and elt journal. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2411-0330 contact details: department of english communication, tokyo kasei university, 1-18-1 kaga, itabashi, tokyo, 173-8602, japan (robert-l@tokyo-kasei.ac.jp) xueya luo holds an ma in translation and interpreting studies from the polytechnic university of hong kong. she is a teacher of english as a foreign language at the shenzhen nanshan foreign language school group gaoxin junior high school, guangdong, china. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9263-9335 contact details: shenzhen nanshan foreign language school group gaoxin junior high school, 5 gaoxin ring road south, nanshan district, shenzhen, guangdong, p. r. china (67445021@qq.com) maggie ma, phd, is assistant professor at the english department of the hang seng university of hong kong. her research interests include formative assessment and second language writing. her work has focused on metacognitive knowledge development of second language student writers, student perceptions of assessment practices in writing classrooms, and student feedback literacy. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9805-5100 contact details: department of english, the hang seng university of hong kong, siu lek yuen, shatin, new territories, m423b, hong kong (maggiema@hsu.edu.hk) barry lee reynolds, phd, is assistant professor of english education in the faculty of education at the university of macau, macau sar, china. he has taught the english language and trained english language teachers at thirteen institutions in the usa, taiwan, and macau. his research interests are in the areas of vocabulary 324 acquisition, second language literacy education, and computer assisted language learning. his most recent co-edited volumes include innovative approaches in teaching english writing to chinese speakers (2021, de gruyter mouton) and english literacy instruction for chinese speakers (2019, palgrave). he also serves as an editorial board member for several journals and is section editor for open linguistics (de gruyter mouton). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3984-2059 contact details: faculty of education, university of macau, room 1017, e33, avenida da universidade, taipa, macau sar (barryreynolds@um.edu.mo) mark feng teng, phd, is a language teacher educator in mainland china and a research fellow at university of macau. his research interests mainly focus on l2 vocabulary acquisition and metacognition in l2 writing. his work has appeared in journals such as applied linguistics, language awareness, language teaching research, applied linguistics review, and system, among many others. he has recently co-edited two volumes published by palgrave and de gruyter. his recent monographs appeared in springer, routledge, and bloomsbury. he is co-editor of on the internet section, tesl-ej. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5134-8504 contact details: faculty of education, university of macau, e33, avenida da universidade, taipa, macau sar (markteng@um.edu.mo) dongbo zhang, phd, is professor of language education (tesol) in the graduate school of education, university of exeter, uk. he previously held appointments in the united states, singapore, and china. he is primarily interested in vocabulary knowledge and reading development in second language (l2) or bilingual learners, and is well published on this topic. his work has appeared in journals such as applied linguistics, applied psycholinguistics, language learning, modern language journal and reading research quarterly, among many others. he is an editor of chinese as a second language assessment (springer; with chin-hsi lin) and reading in chinese as a second language (under contract with routledge; with liu li). he is currently on the editorial board of language and education and tesol quarterly, among others. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4175-2052 contact details: baring court, university of exeter st luke’s campus, heavitree road, exeter, ex1 2lu, uk (d.zhang4@exeter.ac.uk) 117 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (1). 2022. 117-141 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.1.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt investigating academic achievement of english medium instruction courses in turkey mehmet altay kocaeli university, turkey https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7227-5685 mehmet.altay@kocaeli.edu.tr samantha curle university of bath, united kingdom https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3790-8656 samanthamcurle@gmail.com dogan yuksel kocaeli university, turkey https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9131-3907 doganyuksel@gmail.com adem soruç university of bath, uk https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4165-6260 a.soruc@bath.ac.uk abstract this article reports a quantitative study that investigated academic achievement in english medium instruction (emi) courses at a public university in turkey. student test score data on emi and turkish medium instruction (tmi) courses as well as general english proficiency scores were collected in two academic divisions: the mathematical, physical, and life sciences (mpls, n = 357); and the social sciences (n = 359). analysis conducted at the macro (academic division), meso (academic department), and micro levels (academic program) showed subtle differences at each level. overall, results were consistent: english mehmet altay, samantha curle, dogan yuksel, adem soruç 118 language proficiency was a strong predictor of academic achievement of social science participants, whereas success in tmi courses predicted emi success of mpls participants. these results reinforce the notion that more language support should be given to social science students, whereas learning some content through tmi should be prioritized for mpls students. implications for language professionals and emi practitioners are discussed, and suggestions are made for further research. keywords: english medium instruction; academic success; turkish medium instruction; general english proficiency; higher education 1. introduction when the bologna declaration was adopted in europe in 1999, the aim was to “cultivate and develop multilingualism” (doiz et al., 2013, p. 345) and “motivate and produce a highly-skilled plurilingual, pluricultural workforce” (coyle 2008, p. 99). despite this focus on multiand plurilingualism, english has become the dominant foreign language used as the medium of instruction (moi) at universities in the european higher education area (ehea, doiz et al., 2013). this trend has spread globally in higher education (he; see macaro et al., 2018). commonly known as english medium instruction (emi), this global phenomenon is defined here as “the use of the english language to teach academic subjects other than english itself in countries or jurisdictions where the first language of the majority of the population is not english” (macaro, 2018, p. 19). the context of this study, turkey, falls within this description. while there is a growing research interest in student learning outcomes of emi programs (li, 2018; rose et al., 2020; terraschke & wahid, 2011; xie & curle, 2022), no studies have examined emi success at three levels: division level (macro: mathematical, physical and life sciences (mpls) and social sciences), department level (meso: engineering and economics, and administrative sciences), and program level (micro: four programs per department; see the appendix). this study, therefore, makes an original contribution to the field by investigating the influence of general english proficiency, success in turkish medium instruction (tmi), and academic subject on emi academic achievement. 2. literature review 2.1. the role of the first language in academic success in english medium instruction the effect of students’ first language (l1) on their academic attainment in emi courses has not been explored until recently (see curle et al., 2020). from a linguistic theoretical perspective, in his interdependence hypothesis, cummins (2017) investigating academic achievement of english medium instruction courses in turkey 119 proposes two language-independent transfer types, namely: (a) conceptual elements and (b) strategic knowledge transfer from the first language (l1) to the second language (l2). he postulates that these two transfer types might facilitate success in learning a second language (cummins, 2017). the transfer of conceptual elements (a) is known as the transfer of knowledge. this is the transfer of declarative knowledge from the l1 to the l2. declarative knowledge can be made overt or explicit, “teachable” knowledge that is statically stored in memory (ullman, 2005). this is conceptual or descriptive knowledge, as opposed to “implicit” knowledge, or knowledge of performance or operation (watson et al., 2021). it is therefore hypothesized that bilingual learners transfer knowledge from their l1 to perform academically in the l2 (olivares, 2002). one example could be transferring the understanding of the concept of photosynthesis from the l1 to the l2. the transfer of strategic knowledge (b) occurs when learners become aware of their learning process and apply that process to a new learning circumstance. for example, if a student has learned to use graphic organizers or mnemonic devices to learn new vocabulary in their l1, the same strategy could be applied and used to learn vocabulary in the l2 (wolfsberger, 2012). the main argument behind transfer of knowledge theory is that learning strategies can be used irrespective of the language/content being learned. empirical research has been conducted and provides evidence for the transfer of knowledge. lemberger and vinogradova (2002) examined a group of bilingual students’ transfer of science literacy skills from their l1 (russian) to their l2 (english) and concluded that bilingual instruction helped them maintain and build on prior science learning together with well-developed reading and writing skills. in the korean emi setting, kang and park’s (2005) study revealed that students required some form of preparation course in their l1 (korean) before commencing their emi academic programs to ensure their studies were successful. similarly, turkish students in curle et al. (2020) noted that their l1 courses helped them understand basic background knowledge in their academic discipline, thus mediating learning and facilitating comprehension of abstract concepts in their emi courses. the current study takes the theory of transfer of knowledge further by taking academic achievement in l1 courses into account. more specifically, it explores whether knowledge acquired in tmi courses influences emi success and whether this differs according to academic discipline. 2.2. the role of english language proficiency in academic success in english medium instruction recently, there has been an increased interest in emi academic achievement. a handful of studies have explored significant predictors of emi academic achievement (i.e., mehmet altay, samantha curle, dogan yuksel, adem soruç 120 emi success: curle et al., 2020; li, 2018; rose et al., 2020; terraschke & wahid, 2011). rose et al.’s (2020) study with 139 second-year students in japan found that scores of english language proficiency and english for academic purposes (eap) were significant predictors of emi success in an international business course (a social science subject). these findings were echoed in thompson et al.’s (2019) study in japan with a similar group of students (i.e., 139 second-year students): english language ability and eap scores predicted emi international business administration success. xie and curle (2022) developed this line of research in china and found that business english proficiency predicted emi academic achievement of 106 second-year students studying business management administration. only two studies on emi success have been conducted in turkey, and the results were contrary to previous study findings. curle et al.’s (2020) study found that instead of english proficiency, success in tmi courses predicted the emi academic success of 159 fourthyear economics students (a social science subject). the investigation of social science subjects has so far dominated the emi success literature, and analysis has focused solely on the micro level (academic program). the current study builds on this emi academic success literature by comparing two academic divisions (macro level): social science and mpls. such a comparison might be critical because previous research that has examined the differences between the micro and macro levels has identified significant gaps between these two levels (aizawa & rose, 2019; hu et al., 2014). 2.3. discipline-specific language differences: differences according to academic division emi is used to teach and learn a range of academic disciplines in higher education, from physical and life sciences to the humanities and social sciences. previous studies have categorized and named these disciplines (at a macro level) differently; from numeric-based subjects to arts and humanities (dearden & macaro, 2016), hard versus soft sciences (dafouz et al., 2014; neumann, 2001), natural sciences versus social sciences and humanities (kuteeva & airey, 2014) to stem versus sumanities (roothooft, 2019). in this study, we categorize and compare academic disciplines at three levels: division level (macro: mpls and social sciences), department level (meso: engineering and economics, and administrative sciences), and program level (micro: four programs per department). when the nuances of language used in different academic disciplines have been investigated, both in the emi and the english for specific purposes (esp) literature, many research studies have adopted a descriptive approach, specifically examining lecturers’ perceptions (e.g., dearden & macaro, 2016; kuteeva & airey, 2014; roothooft, 2019) and learners’ perceptions (e.g., kuteeva & airey, investigating academic achievement of english medium instruction courses in turkey 121 2014; may & casazza, 2012) of linguistic complexity in various academic disciplines. for example, kuteeva and airey (2014) found that learners in social sciences depend greatly on their english proficiency because their emi courses demand that students use language flexibly and creatively. similarly, in dearden and macaro’s (2016) study, social science emi lecturers reported that they deal with numerous language-related issues. mpls lecturers, on the other hand, stated that they rely more on formulae; they also considered general english proficiency less important than content knowledge (dearden & macaro, 2016). support for this argument also comes from two studies conducted by ward (1999, 2009). moreover, ward (1999) examined five foundation-level engineering textbooks to determine the number of words students need to know to be able to read efficiently. he found that 2000 word families covered up to 95% of the texts. in another study, ward (2009) identified 299 word types that provided good coverage of the vocabulary used across five engineering subjects. these results demonstrate that a limited number of words (or word groups) are commonly used in mpls discipline coursebooks. in their book on the nature of language in science and science education, wellington and osbourne (2001) argue that the intensity of language used in technical disciplines is low. this is due to learners primarily relying on “a combination and interaction of words, pictures, diagrams, images, animations, graphs, equations, tables and charts” in the pure and applied sciences (wellington & osbourne, 2001, p. 6). in their longitudinal study, yuksel et al., (2021) investigated whether language improvement over a four-year period of studying through english impacts academic achievement by comparing the scores of the students in a business administration program (a social science subject, n = 81) with those in a mechatronics engineering (a mathematics, physical and life sciences subject, n = 84). their results revealed that language proficiency statistically significantly predicted emi academic achievement in business administration courses but not in mechatronics engineering courses. the current study expands this line of research by exploring whether general english proficiency plays a role in emi academic achievement and whether this differs according to macro (academic division), meso (academic department), and micro (academic program) levels. 2.4. english medium instruction in turkey although turkey does not have a colonial past, it has adopted english as the medium of instruction (moi) in higher education. emi in turkey has been exponentially growing in recent years. according to dearden et al. (2016), 110 out of 178 higher education institutions in turkey use english to teach academic subjects. furthermore, turkey has seen an incremental expansion of the multilingual model mehmet altay, samantha curle, dogan yuksel, adem soruç 122 of emi (a hybrid rather than an “english only” use of language; macaro, 2018). as of 2019, out of 10,396 undergraduate programs offered by 193 universities in turkey, 2542 programs provide students with full emi education, while 378 provide partial emi. 28% of all emi programs are, therefore, partial emi programs (osym manual, 2019). similar to the exponential growth in the number of the emi programs (osym manual, 2019), numerous studies have been conducted on various aspects of the use of english to teach academic subjects in turkey. when these studies are reviewed, we can find some empirical investigations which have examined students’ motivations for choosing emi programs (kırkgöz, 2005; turhan & kırkgöz, 2018) or studies that have undertaken policy-level analysis of the emi programs (karakas, 2016). there are some other studies that have investigated the challenges faced by turkish emi students and strategies used to overcome those challenges (soruç & griffiths, 2018; soruç et al., 2018). however, few quantitative studies have been conducted. one example is the study by macaro and akıncıoğlu (2018), which explored turkish emi students’ perceptions using year group, gender, and university type as variables. to our best knowledge, no prior study has explored the influence of general english language proficiency, tmi academic achievement, and academic subject on emi success, at three different levels. this innovative study aims to fill this gap in the literature. motivated by these gaps in the literature, the current study seeks to address the following research questions: 1. to what extent do general english proficiency, tmi academic success, and academic division predict emi academic achievement? 2. to what extent do general english proficiency and tmi academic success predict emi academic achievement in engineering and economics, and administrative sciences? 3. to what extent do general english proficiency and tmi academic success predict emi academic achievement in the following academic subjects: civil engineering, electronics and communication engineering, mechatronics engineering, environmental engineering, business administration, international relations, labor economics, and political science and public administration? 3. methodology this study adopted a quantitative research approach. first, details about the context and participants of this study are given. next, the procedural details of data collection and analysis are explained. investigating academic achievement of english medium instruction courses in turkey 123 3.1. context emi programs at higher education institutions in turkey are classified into two types: partial emi and full emi. the current study investigates partial emi programs, also known as the implementation of a “multilingual model” of emi (macaro, 2018). this means that not the entire program is taught through english; rather, students are required to take a minimum of two emi courses per semester. in these programs, courses such as introduction to political science, basic concepts in law, history of turkish politics (in international relations program) and linear algebra and engineering applications, and electric circuit theory and differential equations (in electronics and communications engineering program) are offered in turkish and account for a minimum of 70% of all the courses, whereas the rest (e.g., research methods in international relations, sociology and business english in the international relations program, and introduction to electronics and telecommunications engineering, linear algebra and engineering applications and computer programming, in the electronics and communication engineering program) are offered in english. newly admitted students are required to take a general english language proficiency exemption test, that is, cambridge preliminary english test (pet) at the b1 level of difficulty (cambridge esol, 2014). if this test is failed, students then need to complete a one-year intensive general english as a foreign language course alongside their emi studies. 3.2. participants data were collected at a major public university in turkey that offers 13 emi programs in three departments. departments included in this sample were: engineering (from the mpls division), and economics and administrative sciences (from the social science division). the remainder of the sample (i.e., of the total data collected) could not be included in this study due to a lack of a sufficient sample size from each program (two in the humanities, a further two in mpls, and one in social science). the department of engineering offers six emi programs, while the department of economics and administrative sciences offers five. consent forms were sent out to a total of 1,343 students in 13 academic programs. 908 students gave consent for their scores to be used in this study. a final sample of 716 were included: 357 students from four emi programs in the engineering department, and 359 students from four emi programs in the economics and administrative sciences department. all participants were turkish and had similar learning experiences of english as a foreign language. they were exposed to english only during their emi classes, and most of them did not get much opportunity to improve their english out of class. mehmet altay, samantha curle, dogan yuksel, adem soruç 124 using a purposive sampling technique (see rose & mckinley, 2020), participants were included in the sample if they met the following criteria: the participant had completed three and a half years of their degree program, the participant had completed a minimum of 18 emi courses and 35 tmi courses, the participant had completed the one-year intensive general english program. background information of participants according to their academic division, department and program is provided in table 1. table 1 demographic information of participants according to academic division, department and program division: mathematical, physical and life sciences (mpls) department: engineering (n = 357) programs civil engineering electronics and communication engineering mechatronics engineering environmental engineering gender (%) m: 68 (73) f: 25 (27) m: 64 (75) f: 21 (25) m: 72 (79) f: 19 (21) m: 59 (67) f: 29 (33) total students 93 85 91 88 age range (m) 22-27 (24.6) 21-29 (23.9) 22-28 (25.1) 21-28 (24.7) division: social science department: economics and administrative sciences: (n = 359) programs business administration international relations labor economics political science and public administration gender (%) m: 38 (46) f: 45 (54) m: 37 (42) f: 52 (58) m: 54 (59) f: 38 (41) m: 45 (47) f: 50 (53) total students 83 89 92 95 age range (m) 22-31 (25.2) 22-30 (24.5) 21-30 (26.2) 23-31 (25.3) note. m = males, f = females 3.3. data collection quantitative data on four variables were collected for statistical analyses: emi academic success (i.e., general grade point average [gpa] scores for english-medium taught courses), tmi academic success (i.e., general gpa scores for turkish-medium taught courses), general english proficiency (i.e., english language test scores), and the academic subject students were studying. after the university had granted all the necessary ethical and legal permissions, and when students gave their informed consent, data were obtained from the university registrar office. the four variables were measured as follows: · emi academic success was calculated by dividing the sum of final course scores for all courses taken in english by the total number of englishmedium courses each student took. final course scores for the students were generated by combining students’ mid-term and final exam scores, as well as grades for presentations, projects, and quizzes. all assessment tools used in each course are publicly available on the course list server investigating academic achievement of english medium instruction courses in turkey 125 of the university. to gain a comprehensive overview of students’ emi academic success, a minimum of 18 english-medium courses was used as a unit threshold to be included in this study. · tmi academic success was calculated by dividing the sum of final course scores for all courses taken in turkish by the total number of courses each student took in turkish. similar to emi academic success, final course scores were derived from various assessment tools including mid-term and final exam scores, presentations, projects and quizzes. a minimum of 35 turkish-medium courses was used as a unit threshold to be included in this study. · general english proficiency: a version of the cambridge preliminary english test (pet) at the b1 difficulty level (cambridge esol, 2014) was used to measure general english language proficiency. this included sections on all four language skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. pet exam reports include scores in each skill as well as a single final score. the final scores of the students were used in this study. the validity and reliability of each component of the pet was verified in a series of studies: shaw and weir (2007, writing), khalifa and weir (2009, reading), taylor (2011, speaking) and geranpayeh and taylor (2013, listening). · the framework for academic divisions and departments, as adopted by the university of oxford (oddf; university of oxford, 2020), was used as a model to classify and group academic subjects into two academic divisions: mpls, and social sciences. academic subject is a general term that encompasses the different levels of academic division, academic department, and academic program. 3.4. data analysis using the computing software r, we performed multiple linear regressions on the dataset to determine if general english proficiency, tmi academic success, and academic subject predict emi academic achievement. separate models were run at the macro level (division, rq1), the meso level (department, rq2), and the micro level (program, rq3). levels of analysis are illustrated in figure 1. this was done to determine the unique variance in emi academic success as explained by each of the predictor variables at each level. multi-level modelling was determined to be inappropriate due to the sample size (cohen, 1998). there were missing data, and each model met the assumptions for multiple linear regressions (i.e., linearity, normality, multicollinearity, correlation, and homoscedasticity; field, 2013). as the variables in each model (at each level) were very mehmet altay, samantha curle, dogan yuksel, adem soruç 126 similar, the hypothesis was that the results of each model would be similar. however, the next section demonstrates that this was not the case. figure 1 levels of data analysis 4. results to answer each research question, we ran multiple linear regressions on the dataset at three different levels: the macro level (academic division), the meso level (academic department), and the micro-level (academic program). research questions 2 and 3 are presented separately according to division, with the results grouped for mpls subjects and social science subjects. 4.1. to what extent do general english proficiency, tmi academic success, and academic division predict emi academic achievement? model 1 (see table 2) showed that all three predictors statistically significantly predicted emi academic success (f(3, 712) = 63.69, p = .000). this included: general english proficiency (beta = .145, t = 4.275, p = .000), tmi academic success (beta = .384, t = 11.082, p = .000), and academic division (beta = .129, t = 3.686, p = .000). the adjusted r2 showed that these three predictors explained 20% of the variance in emi academic success. table 2 model 1: general english proficiency, tmi academic success, and academic division predicting emi success according to division b estimate std. error t constant .000 12.588 4.921 2.558* general english proficiency .145 .248 .058 4.275*** tmi academic success .384 .406 .036 11.082*** academic division .129 3.232 .876 3.686*** note. adjusted r2 = .20***; significance codes: * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001 investigating academic achievement of english medium instruction courses in turkey 127 4.2. mpls academic subjects 4.2.1. to what extent do general english proficiency and tmi academic success predict emi academic achievement in engineering? (division level) the model presented in table 3 shows that tmi academic success was the only statistically significant predictor of emi academic success in the engineering department (f(2, 354 = 193.7, p = .000). the adjusted r2 showed that tmi academic success explained 51.9% of the variance in emi engineering academic success (beta = .727, t = 19.584, p = .000). table 3 model 2: general english proficiency, tmi academic success, and academic division predicting emi success in engineering b estimate std. error t constant .000 11.555 5.544 2.084*** general english proficiency -.036 -.068 .069 -.983*** tmi academic success .727 .860 .043 19.58*** note. adjusted r2 = .519***; significance codes: * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001 4.2.2. to what extent do general english proficiency and tmi academic success predict emi academic achievement in civil engineering? (program level) model 3 (see table 4) showed that both predictors statistically significantly predicted emi academic success in civil engineering (f(2, 90) = 76.27, p = .000). this included: general english proficiency (beta = -.182, t = -2.738, p = .007) and tmi academic success (beta = .820, t = 12.341, p = .000). the adjusted r2 showed that these two predictors explained 62% of the variance in emi civil engineering academic success. table 4 model 3: general english proficiency, tmi academic success, and academic division predicting emi success in civil engineering b estimate std. error t constant .000 -23.706 12.450 -1.904*** general english proficiency -.182 -.407 .148 -2.738*** tmi academic success .820 1.752 .142 12.341*** note. adjusted r2 = .62***; significance codes: * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001 mehmet altay, samantha curle, dogan yuksel, adem soruç 128 4.2.3. to what extent do general english proficiency and tmi academic success predict emi academic achievement in electronics and communication engineering? (program level) table 5 illustrates that tmi academic success was the only statistically significant predictor of emi academic success in electronics and communication engineering (f(2, 82 = 68.62, p =.000). the adjusted r2 showed that tmi academic success explained 61.6% of the variance in emi electronics and communication engineering academic success (beta = .793, t = 11.636, p = .000). this strong, positive, linear relationship is illustrated in figure 2; the more successful students were in their tmi courses (see the incremental rise on the y axis), so too were they more successful in their emi courses (see the incremental rise on the x axis). figure 2 scatterplot of emi academic success in electronics and communication engineering and tmi academic success table 5 model 4: general english proficiency, tmi academic success, and academic division predicting emi success in electronics and communication engineering b estimate std. error t constant .000 -.433 .252 -.047*** general english proficiency -.015 -.024 .109 -.223*** tmi academic success .793 .925 .079 11.636*** note. adjusted r2 = .616***; significance codes: * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001 investigating academic achievement of english medium instruction courses in turkey 129 4.2.4. to what extent do general english proficiency and tmi academic success predict emi academic achievement in mechatronics engineering? (program level) model 5 (see table 6) highlighted that tmi academic success was the only statistically significant predictor of emi academic success in mechatronics engineering (f(2, 88 = 120.2, p = .000). the adjusted r2 showed that tmi academic success explained 72.5% of the variance in emi mechatronics engineering academic success (beta = .855, t = 15.212, p = .000). table 6 model 5: general english proficiency, tmi academic success, and academic division predicting emi success in mechatronics engineering b estimate std. error t constant .000 13.377 8.150 1.641*** general english proficiency .001 .003 .107 .031*** tmi academic success .855 .863 .056 15.212*** note. adjusted r2 = .725***; significance codes: * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001 4.2.5. to what extent do general english proficiency and tmi academic success predict emi academic achievement in environmental engineering? (program level) in table 7, model 6 demonstrates that tmi academic success was the only statistically significant predictor of emi academic success in environmental engineering (f(2, 85 = 304.6, p = .000). the adjusted r2 showed that tmi academic success explained 87.4% of the variance in emi environmental engineering academic success (beta = .940, t = 24.643, p = .000). table 7 model 6: general english proficiency, tmi academic success, and academic division predicting emi success in environmental engineering b estimate std. error t constant .000 3.103 5.359 .579*** general english proficiency -.044 -.079 .068 -1.162*** tmi academic success .940 1.017 .041 24.643*** note. adjusted r2 = .874***; significance codes: * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001 mehmet altay, samantha curle, dogan yuksel, adem soruç 130 4.3. social sciences 4.3.1. to what extent do general english proficiency and tmi academic success predict emi academic achievement in economics and administrative sciences? (department level) in table 8 model 7 displays general english proficiency as the only statistically significant predictor of emi academic success in the economics and administrative sciences department (f(2, 356 = 22.74, p = .0000). the adjusted r2 showed that english proficiency explained 10.8% of the variance in emi economics and administrative sciences academic success (beta = 0.337, t = 6.741, p = .0000). table 8 model 7: general english proficiency, tmi academic success, and academic division predicting emi success in economics and administrative sciences b estimate std. error t constant .000 30.065 6.165 4.877*** general english proficiency .337 .508 .075 6.741*** tmi academic success -.033 -.31 .047 -.664*** note. adjusted r2 = .108***; significance codes: * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001 4.3.2. to what extent do general english proficiency and tmi academic success predict emi academic achievement in business administration? (program level) table 9 (model 8) shows both predictors were statistically significant for business administration (f(2, 80) = 21.22, p = .000). this included: general english proficiency (beta = .559, t = 6.169, p = .000) and tmi academic success (beta = .239, t = -2.644, p = .009). the adjusted r2 showed that these two predictors explained 33% of the variance in emi business administration academic success. table 9 model 8: general english proficiency, tmi academic success, and academic division predicting emi success in business administration b estimate std. error t constant .000 22.003 9.973 2.206*** general english proficiency .559 .802 .130 6.169*** tmi academic success -.239 -.200 .075 -2.644*** note. adjusted r2 = .33***; significance codes: * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001 investigating academic achievement of english medium instruction courses in turkey 131 4.3.3. to what extent do general english proficiency and tmi academic success predict emi academic achievement in international relations? (program level) table 10 shows the results from model 9. general english proficiency was the only statistically significant predictor of emi academic success in international relations (f(2, 86 = 3.79, p = .000). the adjusted r2 showed that english proficiency explained 5.9% of the variance in emi international relations academic achievement (beta = .274, t = 2.617, p = .01). table 10 model 9: general english proficiency, tmi academic success, and academic division predicting emi success in international relations b estimate std. error t constant .000 14.244 18.248 .781* general english proficiency .274 .489 .187 2.617* tmi academic success .136 .180 .138 1.302* note. adjusted r2 = .059***; significance codes: * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001 4.3.4. to what extent do general english proficiency and tmi academic success predict emi academic achievement in labor economics? (program level) model 10 (see table 11) shows that general english proficiency was the only statistically significant predictor of emi academic success in labor economics (f(2, 89 = 11.81, p = .000). the adjusted r2 showed that english proficiency explained 19% of the variance in emi labor economics academic success (beta = .458, t = 4.85, p = .000). this relationship is illustrated in figure 3. this scatterplot shows a strong, positive, linear association between that english proficiency and emi labor economics academic success. table 11 model 10: general english proficiency, tmi academic success, and academic division predicting emi success in labor economics b estimate std. error t constant .000 10.687 12.402 .862*** general english proficiency .458 .719 .148 4.856*** tmi academic success .038 .034 .085 .408*** note. adjusted r2 = .191***; significance codes: * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001 mehmet altay, samantha curle, dogan yuksel, adem soruç 132 figure 3 scatterplot of emi academic success in labor economics and general english proficiency 4.3.5. to what extent do general english proficiency and tmi academic success predict emi academic achievement in political science and public administration? (program level) model 11 (table 12) highlights general english proficiency as the only statistically significant predictor of emi academic success in political science and public administration (f(2, 92 = 4.4, p = .013). the adjusted r2 showed that english proficiency explained 6% of the variance in emi political science and public administration academic success (beta = .280, t = 2.786, p = .006). table 12 model 11: general english proficiency, tmi academic success, and academic division predicting emi success in political science and public administration b estimate std. error t constant .000 33.422 10.966 3.048** general english proficiency .280 .368 .132 2.786** tmi academic success .062 .059 .095 .624** note. adjusted r2 = .06; significance codes: * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001 investigating academic achievement of english medium instruction courses in turkey 133 5. discussion 5.1. rq1: to what extent do general english proficiency, tmi academic success, and academic division predict emi academic achievement? this study investigated the influence of general english language proficiency, tmi success, and academic discipline on emi academic achievement at three different levels (i.e., macro, meso, and micro). when the dataset was analyzed at division level, all three independent variables statistically significantly predicted emi academic success, explaining 20% of the variance. this finding partially supports previous studies that have examined the impact of these variables independently (e.g., rose et al., 2020; soruç et al., 2021; yuksel et al., 2021) but contradicts curle et al., (2020), who only found l1 moi success to be a significant predictor of emi academic success. general english language proficiency was found to be a strong predictor of emi success in the social sciences (at the macro, meso and micro levels). it cannot be ignored that the matthew effect (merton, 1968) might be present here: students most likely to achieve high grades in social science emi programs are those who might already be highly proficient in english. nevertheless, this finding may be due to the role that english plays in this discipline. kuteeva and airey (2014) argue that english-taught programs in social sciences rely heavily on l2 skills because of the need to use the language flexibly and creatively. evidence related to this was reported by dearden and macaro (2016). in their study, emi lecturers in this discipline reported that they focused on language issues to a large extent. in addition, bolton and kuteeva (2012) state that the teaching and learning of social sciences involve more interactive, small group seminars, which leads to a heavy reliance on language (i.e., the use of, practice, and need for english). the overall finding that general english language proficiency did not predict emi academic achievement in mpls disciplines may be explained from two perspectives, that is, the language used in emi materials, and also, actual language practices in emi classrooms. firstly, ward’s (2009) analysis of five engineering textbooks found that students only need to know 299 word types for comprehension. emi students may, therefore, have mastered these word types, which broadly are mpls-related jargon. it stands to reason, therefore, that general english language proficiency would play less of a role in this academic discipline. this may, however, vary from mpls discipline to mpls discipline. an anomaly in this study was civil engineering, where both general english proficiency and tmi success were significant predictors. therefore, to further understand these subtle disparities in the influence of general versus academic vocabulary knowledge in emi mpls disciplines, further mpls discipline-comparative mehmet altay, samantha curle, dogan yuksel, adem soruç 134 research (at micro level) needs to be conducted. secondly, findings of roothooft’s (2019) study illustrated that humanities emi lecturers were stricter about limiting the use of the mother tongue in the emi classroom than stem lecturers. this discipline-specific, in-classroom use of language may provide insight into why, in this study, tmi academic achievement was a strong predictor of mpls students’ emi academic achievement. mpls students may be benefiting from the l1 in tmi not only in terms of knowledge transfer, but also through their daily emi learning experience, thus possibly explaining the heavy influence of l1 success. however, the situation may vary from one emi context to another; therefore, it is necessary to conduct further research into how in-classroom emi language practices directly influence emi academic achievement. 5.2. rq2: to what extent do general english proficiency and tmi academic success predict emi academic achievement in: engineering and economics, and administrative sciences? when each department was analyzed, results indicated that academic achievement in tmi courses played a significant role in emi academic achievement in engineering (a mpls department), whereas general english language proficiency influenced emi success in economics and administrative sciences (a social sciences department). these findings are in line with previous studies that have explored emi academic achievement in the social sciences. for example, curle et al. (2020) found that tmi was a statistically significant predictor while general english proficiency of the students was also found to have a significant impact. with respect to general english proficiency, kuteeva and airey (2014) argue that students rely heavily on language in the social sciences because they need to use it flexibly and creatively. on the other hand, dearden and macaro (2016) suggest that lectures in mpls depend more on formulae and downplay the significance of the medium of instruction. 5.3. rq3: to what extent do general english proficiency and tmi academic success predict emi academic achievement in the following academic subjects: civil engineering, electronics and communication engineering, mechatronics engineering, environmental engineering, business administration, international relations, labor economics, and political science and public administration? when each program was analyzed individually, nuances in the data emerged. results showed that general english language proficiency and tmi achievement predicted achievement in emi business administration courses (33% of the variance). this is somewhat in line with curle et al.’s (2020) study of economics investigating academic achievement of english medium instruction courses in turkey 135 students in turkey, which found tmi success rather than english proficiency predicted student emi achievement in economics. these subtle differences in findings need to be further explored in various emi contexts in order for results to be generalizable. furthermore, even though halliday (2004) states that the social sciences make greater use of narrative or expository language, some subjects (such as economics and business studies) may rely more on numbers and formulae rather than language as such. more research is therefore called for in this respect. furthermore, the type of support we provide for emi students should be tailored at the micro-level (program). providing economics and business students with some courses through their l1 appears to positively affect their emi academic achievement. when academic programs in the mpls division were analyzed separately, results revealed that academic achievement in turkish-medium courses was the strongest, most consistent predictor of emi success, explaining overall 51.9% of the variance in emi success scores. these findings therefore indicate that emi academic achievement is enhanced when mpls students study some courses through their l1 alongside their emi courses. the phenomenon of “transfer of knowledge” might explain this influence (olivares, 2002). as students are acquiring knowledge in their l1 at the same time as learning similar (or even more advanced) concepts through english, understanding of abstract concepts is faciliated (cummins, 2017), thus positively affecting learning outcomes. applying the knowledge acquired in the l1 helps students to become more academically successful in the l2 (brooks & danserau, 1987; dong, 2002; lemberger & vinogradova 2002). cummins’ (2017) model of multilingual transfer, therefore, provides theoretical support for the cognitive transfer of conceptual elements as well as metacognitive and metalinguistic learning strategies from l1 to l2. this issue deserves further research, particularly in contexts employing multilingual models of emi (macaro, 2018). 6. limitations our results should be evaluated taking the limitations of this study into account. firstly, only partial emi students were sampled since the effect of tmi over emi academic achievement could have only been investigated in this emi model. in addition, only turkish students were included. future studies might attempt to undertake multiple-country comparisons to increase generalizability. furthermore, the effect sizes in this study might be another limitation. first, although cohen (1988) argues that power, significance criterion, sample size, and effect size are a function of the other “which means that when any three of them are fixed, the fourth is completely determined” (p. 14). nevertheless, replication mehmet altay, samantha curle, dogan yuksel, adem soruç 136 studies are called for to compare effect sizes. second, this study adopted a quantitative research approach, reporting only the nuanced statistical significance of the influence of certain variables on emi academic success. future studies might adopt a qualitative or mixed-method approach. interview or classroom observation data might shed further light on the role of english language proficiency and the mother tongue in emi students’ academic success, as well as other possible influencing variables. finally, limitations of the measures used in this study should be recognized. in particular, emi academic success has been operationalized as a single number in this study. however, the complexity of this construct should be acknowledged and thus future studies might take a more nuanced measurement approach to capture this complexity. 7. conclusion this study examined the influence of general english proficiency, success in tmi, and academic subject (or discipline), on emi academic achievement. it presented evidence of the influence of these variables at three different academic levels: macro (division), meso (department), and micro (program). findings illustrated subtle differences at each level. this has clear implications for emi policymakers. based on this evidence, these stakeholders should consider discipline-specific issues faced by emi lecturers and students at the three different levels. aizawa and rose (2019) argue that emi policy and practice usually do not overlap and top-down policies usually ignore academic discipline-based practices. to have sound practices, policies should be tailored according to the needs of each academic discipline in terms of the number and role of l1 courses students take alongside their emi courses as well as the english language support offered to students. results from this study also have implications for emi practitioners. lecturers teaching the academic subjects examined in this paper may draw on this evidence to further support their students. for example, civil engineering lecturers are now aware that not only do courses taught through turkish enhance emi learning, but that students may also require more, sustained english language support (compared to, for example, mechatronics engineering students). these academic disciplinary differences in emi contexts need to be taken into account when designing emi student support programs. investigating academic achievement of english medium instruction courses in turkey 137 references aizawa, i., & rose, h. 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(2020). divisions and departments, university of oxford. retrieved 30 january 2020, from http://www.ox.ac.uk/about/divisions-and-departments studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (silesian university of technology, gliwice, poland) vol. 10 no. 4 december 2020 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) maria dakowska (university of warsaw, poland) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2020 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: jakub bielak mariusz kruk aleksandra wach © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: jakub bielak, melanie ellis, mariusz kruk, aleksandra wach cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · social sciences citation index (wos core collection) · journal citation reports social sciences (wos) · scopus · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) · current contents – social and behavioral sciences (wos) · essential science indicators (wos) studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 10, number 4, december 2020 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ....................................................................665 editorial ..........................................................................................669 articles: chika takahashi, seongah im – comparing self-determination theory and the l2 motivational self system and their relationships to l2 proficiency .....673 d. reid evans – on the fractal nature of complex syntax and the timescale problem .................................................................................... 697 kriss lange, joshua matthews – exploring the relationships between l2 vocabulary knowledge, lexical segmentation, and l2 listening comprehension ................................................................................ 723 anna krulatz, tülay dixon – the use of refusal strategies in interlanguage speech act performance of korean and norwegian users of english......751 joanna nijakowska, dina tsagari, george spanoudis – cross-country comparison of efl teacher preparedness to include dyslexic learners: validation of a questionnaire .......................................................... 779 book reviews: mirosław pawlak – review of directed motivational currents and language education: exploring implications for pedagogy by christine muir ........807 haydab almukhaild – review of engaging language learners in contemporary classrooms by sarah mercer and zoltán dörnyei ..................................813 reviewers for volume 10/2020 ........................................................ 819 notes to contributors ......................................................................825 665 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors tülay dixon is a phd candidate in applied linguistics at northern arizona university (nau) and a graduate teaching assistant in the program in intensive english at nau where she teaches eap courses to graduate and undergraduate students. her research focuses on academic writing, computer-assisted language learning (call), and pragmatics. she is also passionate about research methodology in applied linguistics. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4502-2874 contact details: northern arizona university, department of english, 705 s beaver st, flagstaff, az 86011, usa (to283@nau.edu) d. reid evans is assistant professor and education specialist for graduate medical education at the university of massachusetts medical school, usa. his work in applied linguistics focuses on understanding the dynamic interactions of the complex l2 system and the resulting patterns and behaviors that emerge over time. he has received the shang-lin chung graduate research award from the university at buffalo for his work on bifurcations and fractals in l2 development. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8341-488x contact details: office of graduate medical education, university of massachusetts medical school, 55 lake avenue north, worcester, ma 01655, usa (reid.evans@ umassmed.edu) haydab almukhaild is a phd candidate in applied linguistics at the university of leicester, uk, and a lecturer in the department of english, king saud bin abdulaziz university for health sciences, saudi arabia. she holds an ma in tesol and applied linguistics from the university of salford, uk. her research interests include speaking-related language anxiety, language learner engagement and task-based language teaching. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5899-0364 666 contact details: p.o. box 36428, english department, king saud bin abdulaziz university for health sciences, alahsa 31982, kingdom of saudi arabia (haaa6@ leicester.ac.uk) seongah im is professor in the department of educational psychology at the university of hawai’i at mānoa, usa. her research interests focus on theories and applications of psychometric and statistical methods in the contexts of education and social sciences. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8447-6484 contact details: university of hawai’i at mānoa, college of education, 1776 university avenue, honolulu, hawaii 96822, usa (seongahi@hawaii.edu) anna krulatz is professor of english in the department of teacher education at the norwegian university of science and technology. she holds a phd in linguistics from the university of utah. her research interests include multilingualism with english, pragmatic development in adult language learners, content-based instruction, english-medium instruction, dominant language constellations, and language teacher education. she is currently involved in the project “acquisition of english in the multilingual classroom,” funded by the research council of norway. she has just been elected as board member for the international research foundation for english language education (tirf). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8588-273x contact details: norwegian university of science and technology, department of teacher education, no-7491 trondheim, norway (anna.m.krulatz@ntnu.no) kriss lange is associate professor in the faculty of humanities and education at the university of shimane matsue campus, japan. he has been teaching courses in practical english skills to japanese efl learners for over 18 years. his main research interests are investigating effective pedagogy and call applications for l2 listening, reading and speaking development. he is currently pursuing his doctoral degree in english education at hiroshima university, japan. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7201-1751 contact details: university of shimane matsue campus, 7-24-2 hamanogi, matsue, shimane, 690-0044, japan (k-lange@u-shimane.ac.jp) joshua matthews, phd, is lecturer in the school of education at the university of new england, australia. his major research interests include computer assisted language learning, online language teaching, l2 listening, l2 vocabulary, 667 and language testing. he has undertaken language learning research projects in thailand, china, japan and australia. his previous publications have appeared in journals including computer assisted language learning, recall, language learning and technology, and language testing. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2260-2331 contact details: school of education, university of new england, armidale, nsw, 2351, australia (joshua.matthews@une.edu.au) joanna nijakowska is university professor in the centre for foreign language teacher training and european education, university of warsaw, poland. she has published on foreign language teaching, specific learning difficulties and effective classroom practices with sen students, initial and in-service teacher training, as well as foreign language teachers’ professional development needs, concerns and beliefs about spld and inclusion. she has participated in various research groups as well as international, eu-funded projects. she initiated and coordinated the award winning dystefl (dyslexia for teachers of english as a foreign language) and dystefl2 projects. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0776-9448 contact details: centre for foreign language teacher training and european education, university of warsaw, al. niepodległości 22, 02-653 warsaw, poland (j.nijakowska@uw.edu.pl) mirosław pawlak is professor of english in the english department, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland, and department of research on language and communication, faculty of humanities and social sciences, state university of applied sciences, konin, poland. his main areas of interest are formfocused instruction, corrective feedback, pronunciation teaching, classroom interaction, learner autonomy, learning strategies, motivation, willingness to communicate, boredom and study abroad. his most recent publications include error correction in the foreign language classroom: reconsidering the issues (2015, springer), willingness to communicate in instructed second language acquisition: combining a macroand micro-perspective (with anna mystkowska-wiertelak, 2017, multilingual matters), and boredom in the foreign language classroom: a micro-perspective (with joanna zawodniak and mariusz kruk, 2020, springer). he is editor of the journals studies in second language learning and teaching and konin language studies, as well as the book series second language learning and teaching, published by springer. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7448-355x contact details: adam mickiewicz university, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, ul. nowy śwait 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl) 668 george spanoudis is associate professor in cognitive and developmental psychology, department of psychology, faculty of social sciences and education, university of cyprus, cyprus. his research is in the areas of intelligence, cognitive and language development, focusing on developmental language disorders. he has authored numerous journal papers, book chapters and two books. he is an associate editor for the journal psychology. he also has extensive experience in coordinating and participating in various eu-funded and international projects. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4853-8745 contact details: department of psychology, faculty of social sciences and education, university of cyprus, p.o. box 20537, 1 panepistimiou avenue, 2109 aglantzia, nicosia, cyprus (spanoud@ucy.ac.cy) chika takahashi is associate professor in the faculty of law and letters at ehime university, matsuyama, japan. she holds a phd in second language studies from the university of hawai’i at mānoa, usa. her research interests include second language motivation, second language self-instruction, and research methods. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0719-2167 contact details: ehime university, faculty of law and letters, 3 bunkyo-cho, matsuyama, ehime 790-8577, japan (takahashi.chika.qr@ehime-u.ac.jp) dina tsagari is professor in english language pedagogy/tesol, department of primary and secondary teacher education, faculty of education and international studies, oslo metropolitan university, norway. her research interests include language testing and assessment, materials design and evaluation, differentiated instruction, multilingualism, distance education and learning difficulties. she is editor and author of volumes, journal papers, and book chapters. she is coordinating research groups in norway and internationally and has been a consultant/expert for international examination committees and scientific consortia. she has long experience in coordinating and participating in various eufunded and international projects (dingle, dystefl, enrich, palm, tale, cost action on migration and integration, etc.). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6884-108x contact details: department of primary and secondary teacher education, faculty of education and international studies, oslo metropolitan university, p.o. box 4, st. olavs plass, n-0130 oslo, norway (dina.tsagari@oslomet.no) 335 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (2). 2017. 335-354 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.2.9 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl plurilingual reading practices in a global context: circulation of books and linguistic inequalities marie rivière diltec laboratory, université sorbonne nouvelle paris 3, france mnriviere@yahoo.fr abstract media consumption is commonly seen as a major way of appropriating languages and cultures. availability and accessibility of material are essential conditions for developing plurilingual cultural practices. transnational circulation of cultural goods has reached a particular intensity in today’s world but is still marked by deep language inequalities. combining sociolinguistic, language education, cultural sociology, and multiliteracy approaches, this study examines how plurilingual readers access books in their different languages. this qualitative analysis is based on 24 in-depth interviews with both migrant and non-migrant adults living in western europe. the findings indicate that printed and digital books in dominant languages circulate more easily, and through more visible and formal channels than books in dominated languages. in addition, the local and online book supply in dominant languages is generally cheaper and more varied, thus being more attractive. however, a wider range of means of access to books, and the active participation of the readers themselves in the circulation of cultural goods enable book-reading practices in less disseminated languages. pedagogical recommendations for language teachers to encourage autonomous cultural practices among learners according to global evolutions and local specificities are provided. keywords: plurilingualism; reading practices; language appropriation; circulation of books; linguistic inequalities marie rivière 336 1. introduction media consumption is commonly seen as a major way of appropriating languages and cultures (coste & simon, 2009; porcher, 1991). cultural practices play a huge role in language appropriation and maintenance in many respects: by motivating, by improving communicative skills, by enhancing cultural knowledge, by participating in emotional relationships with languages and personal identity evolutions (norton & vanderheyden, 2004; piller & takahashi, 2006; rivière, 2014). therefore, accessibility to cultural goods in different languages is or should be an important educational concern (cenoz & gorter, 2014). there is a need to better understand how globalisation concretely affects day-to-day cultural consumption and to develop realistic and appropriate ways of linking school and out-of-school plurilingual practices. focusing on plurilingual reading practices, this article aims to analyse how plurilingual readers get access to books in different languages through or despite language inequalities on both global and local scales. 2. circulation of books in a global context the circulation of books is not a new phenomenon. scrolls and codices have travelled across kingdoms, seas and continents since very ancient times (cavallo & chartier, 1997), and plurilingual reading practices are as old as the invention of writing (herrenschmidt, 2007). nonetheless, until recently the ability to access and read books in several languages was generally reserved for the elite. the relative democratization of literacy education worldwide in the 19th and 20th centuries, along with the development of mass production and accelerated forms of transport—decreasing production and trade costs—have greatly intensified the circulation of books (barker & escarpit, 1973; michon & mollier, 2001). in the second part of the 20th century, the growth of mobility and migrations, and the increasing economical value of some languages (ammon, 2010; duchêne & heller, 2012) have also favoured the banalisation of plurilingual reading practices (rivière, 2014). the development of online bookstores and online libraries in the last two decades, and the recent rise of e-books have further expanded the possibility to disseminate and access books that are not produced locally (lane, 2007; sapiro, 2009a; steiner, 2005; wischenbart, 2013). thus, one could suppose that books in many languages are easily available anywhere in today’s world. however, the circulation of books is not equal in all languages, and plurilingual readers have to find various ways to access books in less dominant languages, as we will see below. plurilingual reading practices in a global context: circulation of books and linguistic inequalities 337 3. language inequalities in the globalised book market linguistic and cultural areas have never been hermetic or rigid, but they appear increasingly blurred and permeable in the contemporary globalized world. according to the unesco institute for statistics, printed books represented one of the five “core cultural goods” in 2002 (unesco, 2005, p. 10). they ranked second, just like visual arts (photography, paintings, etc.), behind recorded media (music, etc.) and before audiovisual media (films, series, etc.). imports and exports of books significantly increased at the turn of the 21st century, with an annual growth rate of 3.5%, which is particularly high (12.5%) in the low-income economies (unesco, 2005, p. 69). in addition to technological innovations, the deployment of multinational producers and book-traders, the rise of co-publishing and translation, the multiplication of book fairs, and the intensification of imports and exports have contributed to the denationalisation of the world book market (sapiro, 2009a; wischenbart, 2010). however, depending on the language in which they are written, books are not exchanged and distributed evenly across the globe. at the beginning of the 21st century, 86.7% of the exports of books came from high-income economies. the united states of america was the first importer and exporter of books; and europe marked 53.1% of the world’s exchanges of books (exports and imports; unesco, 2005, p. 38, 77). as noted by petrucci (1997) and sapiro (2009b), dominance in the global book trade, economic power, linguistic imperialism, and historical cultural influence are generally closely tied. it is no coincidence that the official languages of the largest book producers and exporters are the languages that dominate on a global scale. linguistic inequalities are both reinforcing and reinforced by cultural inequalities. observing the international literary translation market, heilbron and sapiro (2008) have noted that the dominant or dominated statuses of languages are determined by their amount of symbolic capital, which is historically based on prestige, seniority, and (supposed) universality of their literary production. although the most dominant languages have attracted greater attention, the linguistic aspect of globalization does not only concern the “world languages” (ammon, 2010): english, french, chinese, german, spanish, italian, japanese, and russian. as noted by blommaert (2010), “many (indeed, very many) smaller languages are effectively globalized” (p. 64), notably through the circulation of cultural goods within diasporas. the weakening of states (bauman, 1998), and of the model of linguistic and cultural homogeneous nation-states (abélès, 2008; appadurai, 1996), have opened new opportunities to dominated languages in education (cenoz & gorter, 2012) and media production (androutsopoulos, 2007). in western europe, and marie rivière 338 particularly in spain since the end of franco’s regime, dominated languages such as catalan and basque have become editorial languages on their own right, with relatively important productions: about 10,000 titles in catalan and 2,000 titles in basque are published annually (ministerio de educación, cultura y deporte, 2012). this multilingual production also benefits catalan and basque readers in france, where the publication in minority languages is almost non-existent (bnf, 2013). indeed, languages’ statuses vary according to time and place, and a dominant language in some contexts may be dominated in others (coste, 2010). for instance, even if the arabic language has a high status in many countries throughout the world, it can be considered as a dominated language in france. catalan is a dominated language on the spanish scale, but it is a dominant language in catalonia in administrative and educational settings. 4. plurilingualism and multiliteracies this study contributes to the european research on plurilingualism and pluriculturalism, which is located at the intersection of sociolinguistics and language education. from a plurilingual perspective, based on the concept of “plurilingual competence” as defined by coste, moore, and zarate (2009) in 1997, plurilingualism is a matter of usage rather than mastery. in order to be plurilingual, there is no need to have been an early “bilingual,” nor to have become an outstanding “polyglot.” it suffices to have used or to have been exposed to more than one language (variety) in the course of one’s life, like everyone else. all first and foreign languages and cultures of any individual are seen as part of a unique linguistic and cultural repertoire, which is subject to change over time and circumstances (coste et al., 2009; moore & gajo, 2009). despite a common discourse valuing plurilingualism per se, linguistic repertoires are far from equal, and a small number of languages are worth more than others in the global language market (lo bianco, 2000; pujolar, 2007). in line with the multilingual literacies and multiliteracies studies (cope & kalantzis, 2000; martin-jones & jones, 2000), this work considers language and literacy practices as “situated, contested, social practices” raising issues of “discourse, ideology and power” (warriner, 2012, p. 512). languages and language varieties are unequal since they are instruments of power through which inequalities between groups may be perpetuated and, sometimes, challenged (bourdieu, 1977, 2001; fishman, 1998; heller, 2007; romaine, 2000). that is why this article aims to analyse how sociolinguistic and cultural inequalities are reflected, and sometimes challenged, in the ways plurilingual readers get access to books in different languages. plurilingual reading practices in a global context: circulation of books and linguistic inequalities 339 5. data gathering this research is a part of a completed doctoral study about plurilingual bookreading practices in western europe—for pleasure as well as for professional, religious, learning, family and other purposes. the term book refers to any nonperiodical publications, that is, all kinds of novels and scientific books as well as comics, children’s literature, cook books, travel guides, and so on. the main corpus consists of 24 semi-structured interviews with plurilingual readers living in four different sociopolitical and sociolinguistic contexts: spanish catalonia, ile-de-france (paris region), french basque country and western (french-speaking) switzerland. the first criterion used in choosing the participants was that they had read books in at least three languages during their life.1 then, i selected adults with different reading habits, in terms of kinds of books as well as reading frequency, and different book-reading languages (see table 1). the people interviewed, whose socio-demographic details are presented in table 1, were 12 women and 12 men of different ages and nationalities, working or studying in different fields. most of them were migrants at the time of the interview. while not all participants were members of the middle or upper class, the majority of them had had acquired university education. table 1 participants’ socio-demographic information pseudonym age gender professional activities nationalities countries of residence 1st languages (family and 1st schooling languages) books-reading languages other learned languages catalonia violeta 32 f lawyer catalan spain catalan, spanish catalan, spanish, french, english italian, russian isaac 22 m medical student french & canadian france, canada, spain french french, english, spanish, catalan italian sargon 55 m restaurateur, translator, writer iraqi iraq, uk, spain aramaic, kurdish, arabic aramaic, kurdish, arabic english, catalan, spanish, french, italian, portuguese akhil 39 m documentary filmmaker indian france, india, thailand, usa, netherlands, germany, argentina, spain marathi, english, hindi, thai, french english, french, spanish, german, portuguese catalan, dutch montalbano 30 m doctor spanish spain, france, argentina spanish, catalan spanish, catalan, english, french, german 1 this criterion is closely linked to some practical constraints of the current doctoral research and should not be generalized. according to the definition above, people who have read any kind of written material, whether published or not, in at least two languages that were perceived as different could be considered plurilingual readers. marie rivière 340 portuguese, italian ento 44 m metalworker dutch curaçao, netherlands, spain papiamento, dutch dutch, papiamento, spanish english, catalan île-de-france milda 27 f phd student (sociology), employee in a consulting firm lithuanian lithuania, syria, france lithuanian, russian lithuanian, english, arabic, french turkish taiga 27 m waiter, visual artist japanese japan, france japanese japanese, french, english samar 28 f arabic teacher lebanesefrench lebanon, france french, lebanese arabic, italian, standard arabic french, standard arabic, spanish, italian, english, syrian-lebanese arabic german, russian, chinese, hebrew dani 30 f phd student (linguistics), turkish and bulgarian teacher bulgarian bulgaria, france bulgarian, russian bulgarian, russian, french, english, turkish italian, spanish, german, bengali giselle 58 f adult educator chileanfrench chili, pays-bas, france spanish spanish, french, portuguese english mi-ying 39 f marketing executive french & taiwanese taiwan, usa, france chinese, japanese chinese, english, french arabic french basque country amelia 78 f musician, widow of a united nations executive french (former nationality: colombian) colombia, usa, canada, italy, mexico, argentina, switzerland, france, etc. spanish, french spanish, french, english, italian basque oihana 20 f medical student french basque country french french, english, basque, spanish mikel 50 m adult educator, consultant french france, peru french, basque french, spanish, basque, english elvis 44 m dentist spanish spain, france spanish, basque, french spanish, french, basque, english latin, modern greek chloé 43 f farmer french (former nationality: ukrainian) ukraine, france russian, ukrainian russian, ukrainian, french english, italian lou 28 f guide-interpreter, sport educator (swimming) french & basque france, suede + 8 months in latin america basque, french basque, french, spanish, english portuguese, occitan, swedish w estern sw itzerland stéphane 27 f bank clerk french france, egypt, spain, usa (6 months), syria (6 months), switzerland french, egyptian arabic french, spanish, english, german standard arabic, portuguese gulo 32 m phd student (political sciences), research assistant kurdish turkey, switzerland zazaki, turkish turkish, kurmanji french, english, zazaki sorani, spanish, italian, german anne 83 f retired interpreter & german/english teacher swiss (former nationality: german) germany, france, switzerland, italy + some months in the uk german german, english, french, italian, spanish latin ush 53 m linguist, professor american & israeli israel, usa, canada, switzerland hebrew, english hebrew, english, french arabic, italian, spanish, portuguese franck 24 m consultant in corporate communication and lobbying norwegian norway, switzerland albanese, norwegian norwegian, english, albanese, serbian, french german, swedish plurilingual reading practices in a global context: circulation of books and linguistic inequalities 341 michael 34 m bank clerk swiss switzerland + 6 months in germany german, french german, french, english note. most of the readers interviewed had appropriated other foreign languages that were never used to read books. these are not mentioned here because of space limitations. the nationalities reported by the participants may be more subjective than official. the definition of languages and varieties is a delicate question (makoni & pennycook, 2012; moore, 2006). therefore, definitions and distinctions reflected here are based on those of the interviewees. this explains why, for sargon, arabic is a unified language, while samar distinguishes between standard arabic and lebanese arabic. the interviews were conducted in informal settings at the beginning of 2010. to minimize the “symbolic violence” between interviewer and interviewees, i contacted participants by intermediaries in informal settings (see bourdieu, 1998). this approach ascribed to the investigator the less intimidating status of a “friend of a friend” (milroy & gordon, 2003, pp. 32, 75). when we shared more than one language, the choice was left to the interviewees. consequently, four interviews were conducted (mainly) in spanish, one in english, and the others in french. in addition, i conducted interviews with four cultural stakeholders: a sociologist coordinating national surveys on cultural practices; the director of a multilingual bookshop in barcelona; an employee from a parisian bookshop dedicated to american comics, imported in their original version or translated into french; and the head of an ngo library in geneva, intended primarily for migrants and refugees. the present paper is based on the statements regarding how the readers access the books they read, and how cultural stakeholders manage to obtain nonlocal books for their respective bookshop or library. some of these statements were spontaneous, mingled with different kinds of information; others were prompted by specific questions. all transcripts were analysed by qualitative content analysis (bardin, 1991) with the facilities of a word processing program. the analysis was conducted in the original version of the interviews (pavlenko, 2007), but since it was the main language of the doctoral study, the common codes and sub-codes were for the most part in french. the coding for analysis considered the commercial and non-commercial, online and brick and mortar means of access to books, including informal exchanges within social networks. the participants themselves chose their pseudonyms. 6. findings and discussion 6.1. a wide range of means to access books one striking thing that emerges from the analysis of the readers’ interviews is the diversity of the ways they access books. most of the readers find their books through different channels and networks, although many of them declare having a preference for buying the books they read when they can afford it. marie rivière 342 living in a rural area, the readers interviewed in the french-basque country have difficulties buying books in all their languages. they need to go to the town of bayonne, about an hour drive away, to find bookshops. for those living in big cities (barcelona, geneva, paris), books in the local languages (french in france and french-speaking switzerland, catalan and castilian in catalonia) seem much more available. to purchase books in dominated languages or non-local languages in their everyday environment, all interviewees resort to several means: oihana: . . . souvent je les achète. à l’aéroport. enquêtrice : les livres en… oihana: en anglais. je les achète à l’aéroport, oui. [rire] enquêtrice: et en espagnol? oihana: en espagnol je les emprunte à ma sœur. et en basque je les achète à bayonne – ou je les emprunte à des copines, mais plutôt je les achète à bayonne. et voilà. [oihana: . . . i buy them often. at the airport. investigator: books in… oihana: in english. i buy them at the airport, yes. (laugher) investigator: and in spanish? oihana: in spanish i borrow them from my sister. and in basque i buy them in bayonne—or i borrow them from friends, but most often i buy them in bayonne. and that’s it.] 6.2. language inequalities in multilingual local supplies in addition to a variety of means to access books, oihana’s statement above illustrates the fact that both books in dominant languages and books in dominated languages circulate through the same channels, though not identically. many of the participants in this study noted that the book supply is more multilingual than in the past in the countries they have lived in. this increasing presence of books in non-local languages in given places is especially notable for english books. printed books in english are perceived to be much more available in vilnius (milda), zurich (stéphane), geneva (stéphane, franck, ush, anne), israel (ush), paris and beirut (samar) in bookstores chains, such as fnac and payot at the time of the survey,2 as well as in independent shops. the director of a multilingual bookshop in barcelona indicates that english bookstores “muy buenas y muy grandes” (very large and good) have opened their doors in the city. in addition, some readers indicate that english scientific books can be borrowed in university libraries. printed books in english are easy to find nowadays in great cities of europe and the mediterranean area. these statements corroborate 2 after having been the property of multinational media groups (edipress, hachette) for twenty years, the bookshops chain payot has become again an independent swiss chain in 2014. plurilingual reading practices in a global context: circulation of books and linguistic inequalities 343 the observation of the researchers who noted that the growing transnational flows of books primarily benefit english (see wischenbart, 2013, p. 82). intensified circulation of books is nonetheless a factor of linguistic diversification. the bookshop director mentions the suppression of customs duties between spain and france, resulting from internal agreements within the european union. thanks to these conventions, along with reductions in transportation time, french books are delivered to barcelona as fast as to any french city: “tres cuatro días y tenemos aquí cualquier libro en francés” (in three four days we get any book in french here). anne reports that books in german were rather rare in geneva a few decades ago, but that she can find some without difficulty today. she personally frequents an independent german-language bookshop. three readers mention independent specialised bookshops selling books in arabic (samar) and turkish (dani and gulo) in paris. three other readers (mikel, oihana, chloe) buy books from a basque language bookshop in bayonne, which imports publications from the comunidad autónoma de euskadi in spain. bookshop chains with multilingual departments sell foreign books in widely disseminated european languages: french in barcelona (montalbano, violeta), and spanish and italian in paris (samar, giselle). the same languages would be easy to find in second-hand bookshops and flea markets: english in geneva (gulo) and barcelona (akhil), and spanish and italian in paris (samar, giselle). in a given place, second-hand circuits reflect with some time difference book consumption habits of residents, as well as of people passing by: second-hand books have not necessarily been bought where they are sold again. books in non-dominant non-local languages appear to be more present in non-commercial and informal channels. dani and franck found books in bulgarian and serbian in university libraries in paris and geneva. until the economic crisis, catalan public libraries used to order books in arabic and in romanian from the catalan multilingual bookshop. gulo is delighted by the fact that there are books in zazaki (a variety of kurdish) at the ngo library. he also indicates that books in turkish and kurdish are sold at kurdish celebrations in geneva. franck mentions “a norwegian church” and some “albanian, serbian clubs or associations” selling or lending books in the same city. he notes the low visibility of these networks, which promote lesser-used languages: interviewer: but that’s… little circles. franck: yeah. very little circles and you need to know that they exist. if you don’t know, you can’t find them. marie rivière 344 the head of an ngo multilingual library in geneva confirms that it is ten times easier to find books in turkish than in kurdish. she adds that books in mongolian or creole, among others, are “really hard to find.” she suggests that the more a language is read in the world, the easier it is to find books in this language. 6.3. cost and choice accessibility is not only a matter of availability (gambier, 2006); one of the main challenges for accessing books in non-dominant languages is their price. the head of the library, dani, and gulo mention the high cost of books in turkish and kurdish circulating in western europe. in general, foreign books are more expensive than local publications, even when they are published in the dominant language of the destination country or region such as french books in western switzerland or latin american books imported into spain. but, as signalled by the head of the ngo library, book prices are correlated to the number of readers both inside and outside of a traditional linguistic area. books in english constitute a perfect example. the employee of a parisian bookshop specialized in american comics explains that, despite transport fees, american editions appear to be more profitable for the booksellers than their translations in french. since foreign books are not subject to the french fixed book price agreement, booksellers may benefit from higher margins on english comics. editorial traditions also impact prices: publishers in the united states are more likely to produce cheap editions of comics, along with luxury editions for collectors. the low cost of american comics, as well as of paperbacks, is not only due to cultural differences. the importance of the united states internal market, and its low permeability to foreign productions, allows american publishers to leverage their products before exporting them. consequently, they can sell them abroad at relatively low prices (cohen & verdier, 2008, p. 9), and they can therefore sell more. language domination is both a cause and an effect of economic advantage. language status inequalities are also reflected in bookstores supplies. samar believes that arabic language bookshops in paris “ont très peu de choix” (have very little supply). turkish language bookshops in the same city do not satisfy dani, who rarely finds books of her interest on their shelves. such bookshops appear to be less well stocked than shops specialised in more dominant languages in western europe. the comments of these two readers echo buch’s (1996) observations, who noted considerable differences between foreign language bookshops in paris in the 1990s, according to the purchasing power of the diasporas, and the prestige of their respective cultures in france. plurilingual reading practices in a global context: circulation of books and linguistic inequalities 345 . . . les librairies de langues européennes (allemandes, espagnoles, anglaises, italiennes, polonaises, russes…) ont l’air plus prospères et plus intégrées que celles du tiers-monde (arabes, chinoises, vietnamiennes, colombiennes). ces librairies européennes offrent des littératures plus traduites, plus éditées, plus vendues, plus légitimées, écrites dans des langues plus enseignées, plus apprises de manière institutionnelle, que ne le sont leurs semblables non occidentales. (p. 233) [. . . european languages bookshops (german, spanish, english, italian, polish, russian…) seem to be more thriving and better integrated than those from the third world (arabic, chinese, vietnamese, colombian). these european bookshops offer more translated, more published, better sold, and more legitimate literature, written in more taught languages, learned in more institutional settings, than their non-occidental counterparts.] 6.4. online supply although local multilingual book supplies are asymmetric, online book supply could compensate for linguistic inequalities. yet, this is not so simple and clear cut. a third of the interviewees regularly buy books from online bookstores.3 for four of these readers,4 it is a way to access printed books in non-local languages: taiga in japanese in paris, franck in english and norwegian in geneva, lou in english and spanish in the french basque country, samar in arabic and, to a lesser extent, into her other non-local languages (english, italian, spanish) in paris. it was to meet this demand that the multilingual bookshop in barcelona developed an online platform to sell books in arabic that are difficult to reach, since they are published by foundations and small publishers. nonetheless, except for norwegian, this means of access is sparsely used by the interviewees to buy books in “small” languages. the multilingualism of its catalogue is a major marketing argument of the amazon kindle. getting access to books in various languages was one of the top ten reasons to prefer e-books in a survey conducted in france in 2012 (sgdl, sne, & sofia, 2012). book digitalization is supposed to enable the purchase of books in languages little present in local contexts. passionate for anglo-saxon science fiction, elvis used to struggle to find such novels in their original version 3 online bookselling services emerged in the 1990s and really entered the european market in the mid 2000s. in 2010, 13% of the printed books bought in france were purchased on the internet, 40% of them through amazon. internet bookstores are particularly challenging foreign bookshops although sometimes higher shipping costs and delivery times roughly equal those of the brick and mortar shops (hugueny, 2012). 4 for mi-ying (living in paris) and michael (living in the geneva region), online bookstores are the favorite providers of books, in any language. even though they would prefer brick and mortar bookshops, mikel and chloé have bought some books online to compensate for the generally low editorial supply in their rural area. marie rivière 346 in the french basque country. that is no longer the case since he has a tablet computer and buys books on the itunes bookstore. elvis: . . . maintenant que y’a les tablettes, enfin que tu peux les acheter sur internet, les télécharger, t’as beaucoup plus de choix. beaucoup plus de choix ! d’ailleurs, c’est total quoi, choix complet. [elvis: . . . now that tablets exist, or rather you can buy them online, download them, you have much larger choice. much larger choice! it’s actually a total, complete choice.] however, this “complete” choice does not apply to all languages. from the time he started reading almost exclusively electronic books, elvis stopped reading in his other regular reading languages, french and spanish, even though he continues reading printed books in basque with his children. ush was the other interviewee reading principally e-books at the time of the survey. delighted, he explains that he reads more than in the past since he has an e-reader, but only in english and french, because there are no e-books in hebrew. as noted by wischenbart (2013), “only some languages are supported—or even tolerated— in e-books on those ‘global’ platforms” (p. 71) that are amazon, google, apple, kobo, and barnes & noble. arabic and hebrew, notably, were scarcely represented in the e-book market at the time of the interview. it is interesting to note that, for both readers, the digitalization of their reading practices led to a reduction of the number of their reading languages, in favour of the most dominant ones. as noted by kelly-holmes (2012), new technologies play an ambivalent role in the world’s sociolinguistic imbalance. on the one hand, the internet fosters english domination, in particular by increasing the dissemination of cultural goods in this language (danet & herring, 2007). on the other hand, the web provides new opportunities for books in dominated languages to circulate. this last role is mentioned by gulo and dani, who managed to find digitalised scanned books in turkish and in bulgarian that they downloaded for free or consulted online. economist françoise benhamou has argued that the major issue in online commercialisation of printed books, digital libraries, and the emergence of the ebook are less the book content (texts, images) than the struggle for linguistic and cultural hegemony (benhamou, 2008, p. 92). the global e-book market is still in its infancy: e-books really started to penetrate non-traditional english book markets in europe and asia in 2012 (wischenbart, 2013). its further growth will show us better how it may affect both dominant and dominated languages. 6.5. informal exchanges and mobility books do not circulate only through commercial, associative, and institutional channels. they also spread within professional and private social networks. all plurilingual reading practices in a global context: circulation of books and linguistic inequalities 347 interviews contain at least one reference to books exchanged or given as presents. informal sociability plays a critical role in multilingual reading practices since books in various languages circulate among couples, families, and friends. as mentioned by oihana in the quote above, and confirmed by milda, stéphane, violeta, oihana, montalbano, and ush, book exchanges between parents and children, and especially between brothers and sisters, do not only concern books in their family languages. the same goes within couples: the range of languages read is frequently wider than those spoken between partners and with the children. these book exchanges foster “la reconstitution de communautés affectives [the reconstitution of emotional communities]” (collovald & neveu, 2004, p. 279), notably among migrant readers living far away from their family and friends. taiga receives books in japanese from his parents. a friend of chloé’s sends her books in russian from ukraine. gulo and dani ask friends living in turkey to send them books in turkish. the data gathered do not enable the measurement of the mutual impact of language inequalities and informal books exchanges. loans and presents seem to occur in both dominant and dominated languages. isaac and sargon would rather offer books in catalan when it is possible; lou and oihana borrow books in basque at times. however, dominant local languages and english have the advantage of being more widely read, and therefore more easily given or lent. samar easily offers or recommends books in english since she assumes that most people in her surroundings read in english. like the stakeholders of the ngo multilingual library in geneva, gulo and dani also ask friends to bring them books whenever they travel to turkey. mobility appears to be a key-factor in plurilingual book-reading practices. many readers report stocking up on books while travelling. for example, samar and sargon buy books in arabic during trips to beirut. ush goes whenever he can to the israel book fair to buy recent novels in hebrew. each time she goes to spain, anne takes “un sac special” (a special bag) with her to carry books. train stations and airports are also mentioned as frequent points of buying books. in the same manner as oihana, akhil gets english books at airports, whether in italy or the netherlands. elvis has bought comics in spanish at an airport in spain. lou evokes paperback books she bought in french at railway stations in the south west of france, where she never has seen books in basque. “non-lieux [non-places]” (augé, 1994, p. 162-171) dedicated to human mobility seem to benefit primarily the most disseminated languages. however, local purchases while travelling provide a wider choice of books and cheaper prices. this may favour little-disseminated languages, whose publications rarely circulate through the main commercial channel. informal exchanges and human mobility do not really challenge, but somewhat compensate, for the unequal circulation of cultural goods. marie rivière 348 7. summary and implications for language teaching as in other cases, in the case of books globalisation is not only a process of homogenisation (appadurai, 1996; coupland, 2010). adopting the point of view of plurilingual readers enabled us to consider the availability and accessibility of books from a different perspective than large-scale studies on the global book trade. the results are in agreement with giddens’ observation (1999) that globalisation affects individual lives, down to the smallest details. they also corroborate the view that “the global village is still stratified unequally according to differences in power and material resources” (canagarajah, 2002, p. 135). the increasing multilingualism of the local book supply in western europe does not benefit all languages equally. on the whole, books in dominant european languages tend to circulate within larger and mostly formal commercial channels, whereas books in dominated languages seem to travel by less visible and non-commercial channels. books in dominant languages appear to be generally more abundant, more varied, and frequently cheaper than books in less dominant languages. they are also represented in online bookstores and e-book catalogues to a grater extent. however, all the readers who have participated in this study resort to several means to access books. these means allow them to obtain books that are not easily available in their daily context. diaspora networks, university and charity libraries, websites offering access to scanned books, informal books exchanges, sending by relatives and purchase while travelling are some of the means enabling access to books in little-disseminated languages. even languages “that do not belong to the sociolinguistic top of the world” may benefit from globalisation (blommaert, 2010, p. 77): “the spread of globalized cultural formats and the emergence of globalized communities of consumers thus create new, and positive, opportunities for languages to circulate . . .” (blommaert, 2010, p. 78). this “globalization from below” (mathews, ribeiro, & vega, 2012) is only possible because ordinary consumers are clients of the main formal offer but do not content themselves with it. by searching for more books in more varied languages, they play an active part in the circulation of cultural goods in less dominant languages. just as “globalization can both promote and diminish linguistic diversity” (pool, 2010, p. 142), plurilingual consumers of cultural goods both perpetuate and challenge language inequalities in their everyday lives. acquiring and borrowing books as well as other cultural goods are concrete ways in which languages are appropriated or re-appropriated. cultural practices may constitute an affective investment and play an import ant part in the emotionality of languages (rivière, 2016). the very act of searching for cultural goods may even affect one’s relationship with a language, as explained by plurilingual reading practices in a global context: circulation of books and linguistic inequalities 349 samar and stéphane. these two regular readers in english used to hate this language until they started to read books in english in out-of-school contexts: stéphane: . . . on avait toujours eu des profs qui essayaient de nous faire lire en anglais et moi… ben j’avais jamais réussi à lire quoi que ce soit en anglais avant finalement de débarquer à new york et puis… et puis aller de moi-même chez le marchand de livres d’occasion, et puis de farfouiller! [stéphane: . . . we always had teachers who were trying to make us read in english and i... well, i’ve never managed to read anything in english before i arrived to new york and then... and then went to the second-hand bookshop on my own, and started rummaging!] furthermore, according to the participants, reading practices play an important role in language re-appropriation and maintenance. cultural consumption might be an essential practice to “keep in touch with the language,” as reported by franck and many other readers. consuming cultural products is a way to develop one’s skills in her or his different languages, but it is perhaps most important as a way of preventing language forgetting (see rivière, 2014). since the goal of language learning and teaching is to foster social uses of languages in the long run, teachers should also teach the ways in which students can use these languages on a regular basis in out-of-school contexts. yet, even in a global world, access to cultural goods “cannot be taken for granted” (duff, 2002, p. 486), especially regarding in dominated and/or non-local languages in a given context. for this reason, it is important for language teachers to be aware of commercial and non-commercial, online and offline, formal and informal ways of accessing cultural goods in their local context. education professionals should also try to compensate for language inequalities through paying particular attention to multimedia centres and school library collections. in addition, they may find other ways of making cultural goods available and accessible, according to the means of the students: cultural clubs, inter-individual exchanges, second-hand sale, outing activities to acquire cultural goods, and so on. instead of doing that alone, they could involve the learners in the discovery of the different ways to access cultural content, some of which are evolving very quickly. they should not only inform their students about but also learn with them to use creative and personal means of accessing cultural goods and of compensating for language inequalities. by encouraging students to play an active part in the process, they would foster concrete and dynamic appropriation of the languages they teach. thus, they would also teach them to play an active albeit modest part in (more equal) cultural exchanges on both global and local scales. marie rivière 350 references abélès, m. 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(2013). the global ebook market: current conditions and future projections. revised february 2013. sebastopol, ca: o’reilly media. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: miros aw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: krzysztof kwiatkowski (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) vol. 3 no. 1 march 2013 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (trinity college, dublin) simon borg (university of leeds) piotr cap (university of ód ) anna cie licka (texas a&m international university, adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) kata csizer (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) krystyna dro dzia -szelest (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabry -barker (university of silesia) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of ód ) jan majer (university of ód ) paul meara (swansea university) anna micho ska-stadnik (university of wroc aw) anna ni egorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) terrence odlin (ohio state university) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) pawe scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) david singleton (trinity college, dublin) odzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) merrill swain (university of toronto) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of ód ) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – pozna 2013 editor: miros aw pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak krzysztof kwiatkowski anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydzia pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam pozna proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, pozna contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy wiat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. wierzawska 1, 60-321 pozna print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: index copernicus central and eastern european online library (ceeol) the mla international bibliography the mla directory of periodicals linguistic abstracts ebsco efforts are being made to include studies in second language learning and teaching in the index of journals published by the polish ministry of science and higher education, and to have it listed by the european reference index for the humanities (erih) and the thomson reuters master journal list. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 3, number 1, march 2013 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors ....................................................................... 7 editorial ...........................................................................................11 articles: annie morris, marc lafontaine, françois pichette, linda de serres – affective variables, parental involvement and competence among south korean high school learners of english ........................................... 13 jean-marc dewaele, tsui shan ip – the link between foreign language classroom anxiety, second language tolerance of ambiguity and self-rated english proficiency among chinese learners .................................. 47 reza barzegar, sajjad aref sadr – the effect of emotional intelligence awareness raising activities on l2 motivation ............................................... 67 zainab abolfazli khonbi, karim sadeghi – self-, peer-, and teacherassessment: an investigation into iranian efl students’ attitudes....... 87 colleen a. neary-sundquist – the development of cohesion in a learner corpus.................................................................................. 109 elisabetta pavan – the simpsons: translation and language teaching in an efl class .......................................................................................... 131 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 147 7 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors zainab abolfazli khonbi has an ma in teaching english as a foreign language from urmia university. her main research interests include alternative assessment and language testing. contact details: english language department, urmia university, urmia 165, iran (e-mail: z.abolfazli1986@gmail.com) sajjad aref sadr has an ma in teaching english as a foreign language. his areas of interest are emotional intelligence, l2 motivation, autonomous learning, bilingualism, and discourse analysis. contact details: (e-mail: s.arefsadr@gmail.com) reza barzegar has a phd in teaching english as a foreign language. he is currently assistant professor at azad university of damavand, iran. his areas of interest include language testing, alternative assessment, e-learning, and computer assisted language learning. contact details: (e-mail: barzegar72@yahoo.com) jean-marc dewaele is professor of applied linguistics and multilingualism at birkbeck college, university of london, uk. he investigates individual differences in sla and multilingualism. he has published several edited volumes and a monograph emotions in multiple languages (2010). he is former president of the european second language association. he became general editor of the international journal of bilingualism and bilingual education in 2013. contact details: (e-mail: j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk) tsui shan ip obtained her ma in the department of applied linguistics and communication at birkbeck college, university of london. she is currently living and working in hong kong. contact details: (e-mail: tsip@ied.edu.hk) 8 marc lafontaine is a lecturer at université laval, canada, where he teaches french as a second language, didactics and psycholinguistics. his research interests include learning and reading strategies as well as attitudes and motivation towards learning and reading. contact details: département de langues, linguistique et traduction, université laval, québec, qc, canada g1v0a6 (e-mail: marc.lafontaine@lli.ulaval.ca) annie morris is an english as a second language teacher for la capitale school board in quebec, canada. her teaching and research interests include students' attitude and motivation to learn english, as well as the teaching and learning of the english stressed syllables. contact details: (e-mail: morris.annie@educ.cscapitale.qc.ca) colleen neary-sundquist, phd is an assistant professor of applied linguistics in the school of languages and cultures at purdue university, west lafayette, usa. her research interests include the use of corpora in language teaching and research, task-based language teaching, the development of complexity in learner language, and materials development for language teaching. she has taught both german and english as second languages and regularly teaches graduate courses on language pedagogy and theories of second language acquisition. contact details: purdue university, school of languages and cultures, 640 oval drive, west lafayette, in 47907, usa (e-mail: cnearysu@purdue.edu) elisabetta pavan took her ma (hons) in modern foreign languages, masters in teaching italian language and culture to foreigners, and her phd in applied linguistics at venice university, italy. she teaches at the university of venice, italy, and at the university of primorska, koper, slovenia. she is a research fellow and visiting professor at the university of sao paulo usp, brazil, and participates in eu projects on teaching foreign languages and cultures. she has presented papers at various national and international conferences. her interests include intercultural communication and its implications for teaching and learning english and foreign languages, and the use of media and authentic materials in teaching foreign languages. contact details: (e-mail: pavan.elisabetta@gmail.com) francois pichette is professor of linguistics at teluq/universite du quebec a montreal, canada. his teaching and research interests include language acquisition and development, reading and writing, and second-language vocabulary acquisition. dr. pichette has also taught spanish and french at universities in mexico and 9 the united states, and has published in several peer-reviewed journals such as the modern language journal, the canadian modern language review, the canadian journal of applied linguistics and foreign language annals. contact details: (e-mail: pichette.francois@teluq.uqam.ca) karim sadeghi lectures at the english language department of umria university, iran. he is the editor-in-chief of the iranian journal of language teaching research. he has a phd in applied linguistics from the university of east anglia, uk. his publications have appeared in tesl canada journal, asian efl journal, ijal, tell, asia pacific education researcher, and the modern language journal among others. contact details: english language department, urmia university, urmia 165, iran (e-mail: ksadeghi03@gmail.com) linda de serres is a professor of linguistics at université du québec à troisrivières, canada. her main current research interests include firstand second-language learning with traditional and multimedia support material, second-language reading, and language testing. contact details: département de lettres et communication sociale, uqtr, c. p. 500, trois-rivières, québec, qc, canada g9a5h7 (e-mail: linda.de.serres@uqtr.ca) 247 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (2). 2018. 247-267 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.2.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt past and future research agendas on writing strategies: conceptualizations, inquiry methods, and research findings rosa m. manchón university of murcia, spain manchon@um.es abstract this paper offers a retrospective narrative review of research on l2 writing strategies and a prospective discussion of potential theoretical and pedagogical relevant lines of inquiry to be explored in future research agendas. the retrospective analysis will synthesize the main trends observed in the conceptualization of writing strategies as well as central directions followed in empirical research in the domain. the prospective discussion tries to advance research agendas on the basis of several observations about l2 writing that are presented as key points to be considered when analyzing existing or thinking about future research in the domain. special mention will be made of future research avenues centrally concerned with theoretical and empirical questions on the manner in which strategic behavior during writing and during written corrective feedback processing may foster language learning. it will be suggested that following this route can result in interesting and profitable synergies between research on language learning strategies and recent sla-oriented l2 writing research initiatives on the language learning potential associated with l2 writing. keywords: feedback processing; learning-to-write; l2 writing; problem solving; writing-to-learn-language; strategies rosa m. manchón 248 1. introduction the analysis of writing strategies presented in this contribution to the special issue builds on, expands, and updates previous narrative and synthetic reviews of this research domain published over the course of the last 15 years. it might be relevant to note that these previous reviews were included in a book on language learning strategies (manchón, roca de larios, & murphy, 2007), a book on bilingualism (manchón, 2013) and three collective works on writing (manchón, 2001; roca de larios, coyle, & nicolás-conesa 2016; roca de larios, murphy, & marín, 2002). coincidentally, a number of key developments have taken place in second language (l2) writing scholarship during these 15 years, and these bear important implications for any critical account of what is already known and remains to be known about writing strategies. therefore, the present analysis tries to incorporate these developments and resulting implications, and this explains the orientation and structure of the article. in essence, i offer both a retrospective, narrative review of existing research, and a prospective analysis of what i consider to be theoretically and pedagogically relevant future disciplinary developments in the study of l2 writing strategies. the retrospective analysis will synthesize the main directions followed in the conceptualization of writing strategies, central lines of inquiry and main research methods employed in relevant cognitively-oriented research strands. complementing this retrospective analysis, the prospective discussion will take stock of a number of key developments in l2 writing scholarship at large and it will offer proposals for advancing research agendas, especially concerning theoreticallyand pedagogically-relevant questions on the manner in which strategic behavior during writing and during written corrective feedback processing can foster language learning. 2. research on writing strategies: looking back 2.1. trends in conceptualizations in our synthesis of research on writing strategies (manchón et al., 2007), we concluded that work in the field (including cognitively-oriented and socially-oriented research strands) was characterized by: (i) a plethora of conceptualizations explicitly or implicitly guiding research, (ii) a diversity of approaches to empirically operationalizing and investigating the phenomenon, and (iii) an equal diversity of taxonomies of strategies. in manchón (2001) and manchón et al. (2007) an attempt was made to make sense of these diverse approaches and positions, and a distinction between a broad and a narrow characterization of strategies was proposed. the broad conceptualization would equate strategies with just any action or process implemented past and future research agendas on writing strategies: conceptualizations, inquiry methods, and. . . 249 in the act of writing, whereas narrow conceptualizations of the phenomenon equate strategies with specific writing actions and behaviors. in general terms, these broad and narrow conceptualizations are linked to the linguistic, social, and cognitive dimensions of l2 writing, three complementary angles that reflect the multi-faceted nature of l2 writing (see leki, cumming, & silva, 2008). a linguistic perspective is adopted when the focus is on the characteristics of the texts l2 writers produce. viewing writing through a socio-cultural and socio-cognitive lens, in contrast, is rooted in the consideration of writing as a socially-situated activity and hence it takes into account the myriad of contexts where writers write and learn to write. finally, in order to produce their texts, writers engage in a number of mental actions and processes, whose study represents the more cognitively-oriented, processing dimension of writing research. given these diverse dimensions of l2 writing, and hence of writing strategies, a whole range of theoretical frameworks have guided scholarly work in this area. these include (but are not limited to) linguistic theories, genre theories, theories of literacy development, cognitive models of l1 writing, the problem-solving paradigm in cognitive psychology, research on l2 language learning and language use strategies, and theories of self-regulation, the latter being a prominent paradigm in recent studies (see, for instance, csizér & tankó, 2015; teng & zhang, 2016). the tripartite distinction among linguistic, social, and cognitive dimensions of writing can help us discern patterns and tendencies in the conceptualizations guiding the available research on writing strategies. 2.1.1. linguistic perspective two main lines of inquiry have approached the study of strategies in the domain of writing from a linguistic perspective. one has focused on the description of and/or instruction on the mechanisms to be used in producing different kinds of writing in terms of features, patterns, and forms of organization characteristic of various text types and genres (see abbuhl, 2012; maier, 1992; vergaro, 2004, for examples; see also contributions to plo alastrué & pérez-llantada, 2015). the other prominent trend is more closely linked to the area of biliteracy and includes analyses of multilingual strategies and resources characteristic of biliteracy development, as well as debates of a more ideological nature on issues related to the promotion of and commitment to biliteracy (see manchón, 2016, 2017; palfreyman & van der walt, 2017). although this linguistic approach to the study of strategies is not going to be further reviewed in the present article, it is relevant to make passing reference to a current issue of debate in l2 writing studies (which was not covered in previous ones) that has obvious connections to writing strategies and, more rosa m. manchón 250 precisely, to the analysis of strategies in the area of academic writing. i am referring to ongoing debates on the once denounced linguistic inequality/disadvantage of additional language writers, especially publishing academics, a debate more recently referred to by hyland as the “linguistic advantage orthodoxy” (hyland, 2015, 2016a). the point i would like to raise is that it might be somewhat problematic to talk about “l2 writing strategies” in this domain because, as repeatedly mentioned in the relevant literature, academic writing is not part of anyone’s native language capacities. in fact, a recent development in this area is the increasing relevance accorded to expertise rather than nativeness when considering multilingual writers’ literacy acquisition and practices. as argued by hyland (2016a; see also casanave, 2017), being a native speaker per se (i.e., without the necessary investment, training, and experience) does not guarantee possession of the “necessary know-how and experience to produce publishable papers” (hyland, 2016a, p. 61-62), whereas experience and training can potentially make l2 users “academically bilingual” (p. 62). this position has nevertheless been contested recently. to encounter the full debate, see the response by politzer-ahles et al. (2016) to hyland (2015, 2016a), and read hyland’s (2016b) response. for our current purposes, the important point to be made is the relevance of applying a critical lens when assessing whether or not some research strands on writing strategies undertaken within this linguistic perspective in effect look into strategies critically linked to writing in an additional language or, rather, the phenomena in focus are general strategies used when approaching the writing of academic texts for diverse purposes and audiences, regardless of the status that the language in which the text is written has in the writer’s total linguistic repertoire. a case in point is the abundant research on intertextuality and plagiarism (see pecorari, 2016a, 2016b, for recent comprehensive reviews), often viewed as studies on how l2 writers learn to incorporate other sources into their own writing, when in effect more often than not the real research foci are general intertextuality strategies that need to be mastered by anyone learning to write academic texts and becoming acculturated into academia in any of the languages that form part of one’s own linguistic repertoire. 2.1.2. socio-cognitive and socio-cultural perspectives closely linked to the point made in the last paragraph, a socio-cultural and sociocognitive perspective on strategies looks at the interaction between the social and the cognitive dimensions of writing in the development of l2 writers’ strategic competence (see roca et al., 2016). accordingly, under this paradigm, strategies are viewed as actions implemented by l2 writers to respond to the demands encountered in the discourse community where they write and learn past and future research agendas on writing strategies: conceptualizations, inquiry methods, and. . . 251 to write. an important concern in this strand has been to ascertain the manner in which strategic behavior is mediated by the social context in which writing takes place (e.g., cumming, 2006; lei, 2008; leki, 1995, 2011; sasaki, 2004, 2007; spack, 1997, for representative examples). research in the area has been framed in socio-cognitive views of literacy development as well as goal theories in educational psychology. due to space limitations, this approach to the study of writing strategies will not be part of the analysis that follows (but see reviews in leki et al., 2008; manchón et al., 2007). 2.1.3. cognitive perspectives strategies in the domain of writing have also been approached from a more cognitive perspective, this being the main strand in focus in the present review. seen from this angle, strategies refer to a whole array of phenomena that, at one end, are made to coincide with general macro-writing writing processes (i.e., planning, formulation, revision, and monitoring) and, at the other end, with specific actions implemented within those macro-writing processes, including control mechanisms of one’s writing behavior as well as problem-solving devices (as reviewed in manchón, 2013; manchón et al., 2007; roca de larios et al., 2016). the list of specific strategies inspected in research include, among others (in alphabetical order): avoidance, backtracking, evaluation, reformulation, recourse to the l1, rehearsing, restructuring, or rhetorical refining. this variation in the range of actions subsumed under the category of strategies explains the long list of terms used interchangeably with that of strategies, among others, behaviors, operations, procedures, processes, skills, or techniques (see manchón et al., 2007, for references). the most recent development in the conceptualization of strategies from a cognitive perspective is associated with macaro’s work. based on his previous conceptualization of strategic behavior from the perspective of the manner in which clusters of strategies are combined and evaluated against language users’ own goals and task demands (macaro, 2006), his basic argument is that: (a) we should expect important individual variation in the way in which l2 writers interpret the goal of the task (which, in turn, depends on their own goal-setting in relation to the task) and, accordingly, (b) we should also expect variation in the degree of effectiveness of the strategic behavior adopted. this view is very much related to the concept of task representation in writing, which is crucial in any consideration of l2 writers’ strategic behavior (see manchón, 2014). rosa m. manchón 252 2.2. cognitively-oriented research on writing strategies: directions in research agendas and empirical findings as shown in figure 1, three main directions can be discerned in cognitively-oriented empirical work on writing strategies: (a) cross-sectional and longitudinal explorations of (antecedents and effects of) strategy use; (b) studies looking into the effect of strategy instruction; and, finally, (c) validations of writing strategies questionnaires. figure 1 overview of empirical research on strategies used while writing in what follows i shall briefly review main research directions in these domains and will point to representative studies within each strand, including both work covered in previous reviews, as well as studies published since. 2.2.1. strand 1: strategy use – mediating factors and effects the first (and main) strand of research into writing strategies corresponds to an important number of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies that have tried to shed light on the strategies used by l2 users, including strategy use in l2 writing as well as comparisons of strategy use in first language (l1) and l2 writing. this body of work has also looked into the learner-related, task-related, and contextrelated variables influencing strategy deployment (1.1. in figure 1), on the one hand, and into the effects of strategy deployment on several ideational and linguistic dimensions of the texts produced (1.2. in figure 1), on the other. the main groups of l2 writers in focus in this body of work have been second and foreign language university students (e.g., csizér & tankó, 2015; manchón et al., 2009; sasaki, 2004, 2007), although some studies have investigated professional strand 1. use of writing strategies: mediating factors and effects antecedents/ contributing factors use of strategies effects on writing products • learner-related factors • task-related factors • contextual factors • l1 & l2 writing • cross-sectionally and longitudinally • texts_caf measures • ideas produced strand 2. strategy instruction strand 3. validation of writing strategies questionnaires 1.1. 1. 2 past and future research agendas on writing strategies: conceptualizations, inquiry methods, and. . . 253 writers (e.g., beare & bourdages 2007) and secondary school students (e.g., maarof & murat, 2013; schoonen et al., 2009, 2011; simeon, 2016; tillema, 2012; tillema, van den bergh, rijlaarsdam, & sanders, 2011). given the nature of research preoccupations and the fact that the phenomena under the spotlight are not always directly accessible, data collection procedures have included introspective techniques (e.g., think-aloud protocols or stimulated recalls), survey data collection procedures (i.e., questionnaires or interviews), text analysis, and computerized tracking (e.g., keystroke logging), often triangulating data from several sources. most of this research is cross-sectional in nature, although there are solid longitudinal studies in the area (e.g., sasaki, 2004, 2007, 2009; spack, 1997). in studies concerned with the antecedents of strategy deployment, the main independent variables whose effect on strategy use is measured include learner-related, task-related, and context-related variables. as for learner-related variables, plenty of scholarly attention has been paid to l2 proficiency (e.g., cumming 1989; manchón et al., 2009; sasaki, 2000, 2004), and degree of writing competence or expertise, with important differences reported between skilled and unskilled writers (e.g., chien, 2012; cumming, 1989; raoofi, binandeh, & rahmani, 2017). these two factors have been found to influence the quantitative and qualitative use of strategies, as well as the effect that a given strategy may have (see roca de larios et al., 2002, for a thorough review). additional writer-related variables investigated include gender (mcmullen, 2009), motivation, (e.g., csizér & tankó, 2015), or the writer’s mental model of writing, that is, the set of conceptions and beliefs that guide writing performance (e.g., cumming, 1989; devine, raley, & boshoff, 1993; manchón et al., 2009; nicolás-conesa et al., 2014). regarding task-related variables, earlier studies looked into how more and less complex tasks influenced cognitive activity while writing (cf. manchón et al., 2009; roca de larios et al, 1999, 2001). for instance, argumentative tasks were found to trigger more decisions involving simultaneous thinking about gist and language than letter writing (cumming, 1989), and backtracking behavior was found to differ in narrative and argumentative tasks (manchón et al., 2000). more recently, several studies (ong, 2013, 2014; ong & zhang, 2010) framed in second language acquisition (sla) theories of task complexity (essentially robinson’s cognition hypothesis; see robinson, 2011, for the latest formulation), have looked into various task complexity factors contemplated in the cognition hypothesis (such as planning time, or the availability of writing assistance in terms of ideas to be included in the text or its macro-structure) on writing processes (metacognitive processes, ong, 2014) and ideational and linguistic characteristics of the resulting texts (quality and quantity of ideas in the text [ong, 2013], or fluency and lexical complexity [ong & zhang, 2010]). another task-related factor found to mediate strategy use is time, as reported, for instance, by sasaki rosa m. manchón 254 (2004) with respect to the strategies of local or global planning and use of the l1, by porte (1995, 1996) with respect to revision behavior, and by tillema et al. (2011) with respect to the temporal distribution of six (meta)cognitive activities (reading the assignment, planning, text production, reading own text, evaluating own text, and revising). finally, context-related variables have also been found to mediate strategy use. special research attention has been devoted to the influence of previous l1/l2 literacy and educational experience (cf. bosher, 1998; cumming, 1989; kobayashi & rinnert, 1992; porte, 1995; sasaki, 2000, 2004; sasaki & hirose, 1996; zainuddin & moore, 2003), as well as to the strategies used when transferring previous genre knowledge and expanding genre repertoires across contexts of learning (e.g., leki, 2011). another line of research has looked into strategy use in study-abroad stays (e.g., sasaki, 2004, 2007). an abundant body of work also exists in the other two areas of research in strand 1 depicted in figure 1, namely, use of strategies and effects of strategy use on writing products, including both ideational and linguistic characteristics of the texts produced (see roca de larios et al., 2016, for a fuller analysis). research concerned with the qualitative and quantitative use of strategies in l2 writing has provided holistic descriptions of l2 writers’ composing behavior either (a) globally (cf. cumming 1989; manchón et al, 2009; sasaki, 2000, 2002) or (b) with reference to just one macro-writing process, be this planning (cf. akyel, 1994; manchón & roca de larios, 2007a), formulation (e.g., chenoweth & hayes, 2001; roca de larios et al., 2001; zimmermann, 2000), or revision (e.g., porte, 1995, 1996, 1997; sengupta, 2000; takagaki, 2003). some taxonomic approaches in the general literature of strategies have been used in the classification of writing strategies (see the review in manchón et al., 2007), and a more recent trend in research has been framed in theories of self-regulation (e.g., csizer & tang, 2015). studies of strategy deployment also include comparative analyses of cognitive activity in l1 and l2 writing (beare & bourdages, 2007; chenoweth & hayes, 2001; schoonen et al., 2003; stevenson, schoonen, & de gloper, 2006; thorson, 2000; tillema, 2012; van weijen, 2009), an area in which diverse and contradictory findings exist (see manchón, 2013). an important empirical preoccupation in this domain has been the transfer of strategies across languages, with special attention being paid to whether or not writing skills acquired in one’s l1 can be transferred to the l2 condition, as well as the potential inhibiting role that l2 proficiency may have in this process. in our analysis of this research (manchón et al., 2007), we concluded that: (a) the empirical evidence shows that writing strategies transfer across languages, although quantitative use may differ from the l1 to the l2, and (b) the transfer of strategies across languages is mediated by both writer-related factors (e.g., proficiency and one’s own goals) past and future research agendas on writing strategies: conceptualizations, inquiry methods, and. . . 255 and task-related factors (see manchón et al., 2007, for a fuller analysis). more recent research has shed further light on the interaction between proficiency and writing expertise by adding a further piece of the puzzle. thus, we found a more consistent correspondence between l1 and l2 performance at lower and advanced proficiency levels than at intermediate levels of l2 proficiency (see manchón et al., 2009). our research showed that lower proficiency writers showed similarities in the way in which they approached their writing in their l1 and l2: they engaged in very superficial processing in their l1 writing, which they transferred to their l2 writing, for which their low level of l2 proficiency was sufficient. the advanced participants could also maintain their level of “expert-like” l1 writing performance in the l2 condition because their l2 proficiency allowed them to do so. in contrast, the intermediate participants, also expert writers in their l1, had not reached the necessary level of linguistic competence in their l2 that would have allowed the transfer of their l1 writing skills to the l2 condition. the continuous interest in shedding light on the interaction or separation of language abilities and writing skills has more recently resulted in explorations of the way in which multilingual writers make use of their various knowledge resources and skills when approaching the writing of texts in the various languages that form their linguistic repertoire (see manchón, 2013, for further elaboration). 2.2.2. strand 2: strategy instruction studies the second strand of research in figure 1 corresponds to research on writing strategy instruction, an area of research conspicuously almost absent from chamot’s (2005) review of language learning strategy instruction. what is more, in his meta-analysis of strategy instruction research, plonsky (2011) noted an imbalance in the attention paid to the four language skills in strategy instruction research and concluded that “further research [is] needed on the effects of si on writing” (plonsky, 2011, p. 1017). although scant as compared to the more abundant research on speaking, listening and reading strategy training, the available studies on writing strategy instruction include both comprehensive longitudinal instructional programs (the most comprehensive one being olson & land, 2007; see also de silva, 2014) as well as training approaches in the use of specific strategies, such as dictionary use (e.g., bishop, 2000, 2001), lexical fluency (van gelderen, oostdam, & schooten, 2011), working memory strategies (ransdell, lavelle, & levy, 2002), metacognitive self-regulation strategies (nguyen & gu, 2013), planning and revision (ching 2002), revision strategies (sengupta, 2000), or peer feedback provision (rahimi, 2013). collectively, studies either of descriptive nature or following pre-test post-test experimental research designs have measured (and provided empirical rosa m. manchón 256 evidence for) the effects of strategy use on the characteristics of writing products and on a rage of learner-related attributes, including writers’ beliefs and conceptions of writing, their self-determination, confidence and autonomy, and their global approaches to writing. as could be expected, some of these studies have been conducted in the context of academic writing programs (e.g., de silva, 2014; nguyen & gu, 2013), although, in contrast to other strands in writing strategy research, a significant part of these training programs was addressed to secondary students. for instance, in van gelderen, oostdam, and schooten´s (2011) classroom experimental study with secondary school dutch students of english, the researchers measured the effect of training students in lexical retrieval of familiar words (as compared to a group of writers that did not have the benefit of lexical fluency training) on text quality. along similar lines, in another experimental study, snellings, van gelderen, and de glopper (2004a) implemented a computerized training program for improving fluency of lexical retrieval in a secondary school classroom. they then measured the effects of enhanced lexical retrieval on several aspects of l2 narrative written by their dutch secondary education students. in a more comprehensive cognitively-oriented strategy instructional program in reading and writing, olson and land (2007) reported the implementation of a 7-year instructional approach conducted by 55 secondary school teachers with english language learners in 13 secondary schools in large urban district in california. the researchers found robust empirical evidence for the effects of the cognitive strategies instruction on written products, which they attributed to a combination of variables that together contributed to the quality of the instructional program: its comprehensiveness (“teachers and students were exposed to an extensive set of cognitive strategies and a wide array of curricular approaches to strategy use,” p. 269), as well as the density of the treatment and its duration (8 years of exposure to curriculum-embedded instruction). 2.2.3. strand 3: validating writing strategy questionnaires and research instruments finally, the third strand in figure 1 corresponds to research initiatives aimed at validating writing strategy questionnaires as well as research instruments directly or indirectly related to writing strategies. these initiatives include cheng’s (2004) validation of a writing anxiety scale, petric and czárl’s (2003) validation of a strategy writing questionnaire, snellings, van gelderen and de glopper’s (2004b) validation of a test of second language written lexical retrieval and, more recently, teng and zhang’s (2016) validation of a strategy questionnaire. past and future research agendas on writing strategies: conceptualizations, inquiry methods, and. . . 257 3. research on writing strategies: looking ahead it is pertinent to reflect on several key points about l2 writing that ought to be central in the analysis of future work in the field. 3.1. l2 writing purposes and conditions. implications for future research on strategies any consideration of past and future research on strategies and strategic behavior in the written modality needs to acknowledge that l2 writing is not a unitary, monolithic phenomenon. much to the contrary, the purposes, conditions, and outcomes of writing in an additional language are varied, which adds an extra layer of complexity to thinking about and researching strategies in this language modality. hence, as macaro (2014) has recently observed, “different tasks demand different clusters of strategies” (p. 56). in a recent contribution to a collective volume on tasks and writing (manchón, 2014), i suggested that l2 writing should be made to encompass a whole range of conditions that, to a minimum, include performing writing in: individual and collaborative writing, in time-constrained and time-unlimited conditions, in both pen-and-paper and computer-mediated environments, totally or partially performed within and/or outside the confines of the language classroom, with and without the availability of (printed or electronic) external sources, and, importantly, with and without the availability of (different types of) feedback provided at different points in the composing process, which may serve different functions. (manchón, 2014, pp. 29-30) it is relevant to consider this wide range of variables when revisiting the available research on writing strategies and when thinking about future research agendas. hence, i would suggest that past and future work in the field ought to be inspected in terms of whether or not this collective body of work has accounted/ought to account for strategic behavior in several conditions. first, it is relevant to study strategy use during writing as well as during written corrective feedback (wcf) processing, the latter being an almost uncharted territory in the otherwise abundant research on wcf. second, it would be pertinent to look into writing strategies in individual and collaborative writing conditions, the latter, once again, are hardly present in mainstream explorations of writing strategies (but see simeon, 2016), while, at the same time, the study of strategies has not been a central concern in collaborative writing research (see storch, 2016, for a recent comprehensive review). third, more empirical attention should be paid to strategic behavior in traditional pen-and-paper conditions and in computer-mediated environments, a distinction that has not featured prominently in theoretical and empirical research on writing strategies. similarly, given the attested time-dependency of both strategy rosa m. manchón 258 use and the linguistic processing while writing that may be conducive to language learning (see manchón & roca de larios, 2007b), time-on-task conditions ought to be a key variable to feature more prominently in future investigations. finally, an important parameter to be included in future investigations of writing strategies relates to whether l2 writers engage in writing using their own and/or external resources, the former being more prominent in research and the latter constituting a central preoccupation in studies of dictionary use in writing (cf. christianson, 1997) and in the abundant research on writing from sources (as reviewed in pecorari, 2016a, 2016b), including electronic sources (see stapleton, 2005). accordingly, a first concluding remark to be made is to acknowledge that the extant body of research on strategies in the domain of writing covers only a few pieces of what is a much bigger puzzle, hence the relevance of expanding future research agendas. 3.2. dimensions of l2 writing: learning to write and writing to learn language. implications for the study of writing strategies as discussed in some recent work (e.g., manchón, 2011), the learning and teaching of l2 writing may be guided by two main purposes, generally referred to as “learning to write” and “writing to learn,” the latter including learning both content and language. in learning-to-write conditions, writing is learned and taught as an end in itself, the ultimate aim being the development of (multi)literacy for a variety of personal, social, academic, and/or professional purposes. in contrast, in writing-tolearn conditions, writing would be learned and/or taught as a means to an end, including both learning disciplinary subject-matter in the content areas, on the one hand, and engaging in writing as a tool for language learning, on the other. important for our current purposes, a key disciplinary development in l2 writing studies corresponds precisely to the consideration of the writing-tolearn language (wll) dimension. this is a rapidly expanding research strand at the interface between sla and l2 writing that has been instrumental in the consideration of l2 writing as a site for language learning. research efforts in this area have materialized in a body of publications collectively concerned with theorizing the language learning potential of l2 writing and feedback processing, setting a challenging future research agenda and providing empirical evidence on the manner in which writing itself and the processing of feedback can contribute to developing l2 knowledge and competences (see bitchener, 2012; bitchener & storch, 2016; byrnes & manchón, 2014; manchón, 2011; manchón & williams, 2016; roca de larios, 2013; williams, 2012; zhang, 2013). concerning the learning-to-write/writing-to-learn-language dichotomy in its application to research on strategies, several observations are pertinent. to start past and future research agendas on writing strategies: conceptualizations, inquiry methods, and. . . 259 with, most of the available empirical work on writing strategies has explicitly or implicitly looked into strategies from the perspective of the mechanisms used when approaching the writing of texts, therefore being closely linked to the learning-towrite dimension of l2 writing (this is evident in the preceding analysis as well as in previous reviews of writing strategies in manchón, 2013; manchón et al., 2007; roca de larios et al., 2002, 2016). therefore, new avenues for future research agendas ought to be concerned with the manner in which strategic behavior during writing and during wcf processing can be conducive to language learning. crucial in these future developments are questions of learners’ depth of problem-solving and depth of processing, variables that have been proposed as being centrally related to any potential language learning associated with the acts of writing and wcf processing (see bitchener & storch, 2016; manchón & roca, 2007b; manchón & williams, 2016). we therefore need new studies within research strands 1 and 2 in figure 1 mentioned in an earlier section, these being studies that relate the concept of strategy use and strategic behavior to central concerns in the cognitively-oriented research on the wll dimension of l2 writing. in this respect, it is important to note that the available research on the wll dimension of l2 writing and wcf processing has already started to establish links with central preoccupations in cognitively-oriented sla disciplinary developments, including, for instance, the role of attentional processes in sla, or the acquisition and use of explicit and implicit knowledge (see bitchener & storch, 2016; manchón & williams, 2016). yet, to my knowledge, such a link between wll preoccupations and cognitively-oriented research on strategies is uncharted territory, with the notable exception of macaro’s (2014) discussion of strategic behavior and writing task execution, a position mentioned in earlier sections (see also garcía-hernández, 2017; garcía-hernández, roca de larios, & coyle, 2017). it follows that it is relevant to acknowledge the theoretical and pedagogical relevance of investigating writing strategies from the perspective of l2 users’ attempts to develop their writing expertise (learning-to-write), as well as from the perspective of l2 users’ efforts to make the most of their writing experience for l2 development (writing-to-learn-language). the latter is especially important if, as has been repeatedly claimed in the strategy literature the ultimate aim of strategy research is to develop knowledge that can be useful in improving language learning and teaching in second and foreign language classrooms. 4. concluding remarks in short, the consideration of (a) whole range of purposes, conditions and outcomes of writing (i.e., writing in individual/collaborative conditions, with/without the availability of feedback, in diverse time-on-task conditions); (b) the various dimensions of writing (i.e., learning to write/writing to learn content/writing to rosa m. manchón 260 learn language); and (c) the tripartite consideration of writing as a linguistic, social and cognitive phenomenon provide convincing evidence of the complexity inherent to investigating strategies in the domain of writing. at a minimum, three key concerns should be made central in future work on writing strategies. first, writing strategies cannot be narrowly conceived as being related solely to the development of writing abilities; rather, writing strategies should be linked to both learning-to-write and writing-to-learn purposes, conditions, and settings. second, writing strategies ought to be linked to both the act of writing before and after receiving wcf, the latter implying the development of strategies to process and make use of wcf. as for writing itself, concepts of writing strategies ought to go beyond individual, solitary acts of writing and be made to encompass strategic behavior in both individual and collaborative writing conditions. thirdly, if it is accepted that writing is a linguo-cognitive activity embedded in particular social settings, writing strategies can be viewed from a linguistic perspective and from a cognitive perspective, the phenomenon hence meaning different things in the two domains and, consequently, opening the possibility of being informed by a range of theories. in addition, and closely related to the socially-situated nature of learning and teaching l2 writing, a central preoccupation in future work on writing strategies (also part of sla-oriented l2 writing research at large) ought to be the study of strategies in contexts in which instructed l2 learners (especially pre-university l2 users in foreign language settings) develop simultaneously their writing abilities in all the languages of their curriculum (i.e., their l1 and all the l2s that may form part of their school curriculum) and their l2 general proficiency (see manchón & williams, 2016). to conclude, it is hoped that the preceding retrospective narrative review of research on l2 writing strategies has made evident the wealth of available perspectives on writing strategies, and that the prospective discussion of potential theoretical and pedagogical relevant lines of inquiry shows profitable and worthy avenues to be explored in future research agendas. following these routes can result in interesting and profitable synergies between research on language learning strategies and recent sla-oriented l2 writing research initiatives centrally concerned with the language learning potential associated with l2 writing and written corrective feedback processing. acknowledgements the review presented in this article is part of the research activities conducted within a program of research on l2 writing financed by the spanish ministry of economy and competitiveness (research grant ffi2016-79763-p). past and future research agendas on writing strategies: conceptualizations, inquiry methods, and. . . 261 references abbulh, r. 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(2000). l2 writing subprocesses: a model of formulating and empirical findings. learning and instruction, 10(1), 73-99. 251 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (2). 2017. 251-273 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.2.5 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl unscrambling jumbled sentences: an authentic task for english language assessment? betty lanteigne american university of sharjah, dubai blanteigne@aus.edu abstract jumbled sentence items in language assessment have been criticized by some authors as inauthentic. however, unscrambling jumbled sentences is a common occurrence in real-world communication in english as a lingua franca. naturalistic inquiry identified 54 instances of jumbled sentence use in daily life in dubai/sharjah, where english is widely used as a lingua franca. thus it is seen that jumbled sentence test items can reflect real-world language use. to evaluate scrambled sentence test items, eight test item types developed from one jumbled sentence instance (“want taxi dubai you?”) were analyzed in terms of interactivity and authenticity. items ranged from being completely decontextualized, non-interactive, and inauthentic to being fully contextualized, interactive, and authentic. to determine appropriate assessment standards for english tests in schools in this region, the english language standards for schools and english language requirements for university admission in the uae were analyzed. schools in dubai/sharjah use inner circle english varieties of english (e.g., british or american english) as the standard for evaluation, as well as non-native-english-speaker varieties (e.g., indian english(es)). also, students applying to english-medium universities in the uae must meet the required scores on standardized english tests including the ielts and toefl. standards for evaluation of communication in english involving tasks of jumbled sentences in classroom tests must reflect the language learning goals of the school and community. thus standards for classroom assessment of english in dubai/sharjah are determined by local schools’ and universities’ policies. keywords: english as a lingua franca; language assessment; authentic; interactive; jumbled sentences betty lanteigne 252 1. introduction ockey (2009, p. 844) suggests that “in the real world, test takers may never encounter a situation in which they would be expected to rearrange groups of words into an appropriate sentence.” when i read this statement, i thought, “he’s never been in a lingua franca situation.” i then walked from my office to the street where taxis were waiting, an area where people of multiple nationalities interact in english. an indian/pakistani taxi driver came up to me and asked, “want taxi dubai you?” i replied, “no, thank you.” as he walked away, i thought, “that was a jum-bled sentence.” language by its very nature involves variation and change as people seek to communicate, often inventing new uses of language to express ideas, concepts, feelings, events, and information. this creative communication by means of language(s) involves what bachman and palmer (1996) refer to as real-world target language use (tlu). on the other hand, educational measurement seeks to document systematically the achievement of student learning outcomes, attempting at achieving consistency in evaluation through standardization. combining both, language assessment endeavors to measure what people do in use of a target language. this tension between creativity in language use and standardization in language assessment is keenly manifested in the issue of authenticity in language assessment. davidson, turner, and huhta (1997, p. 309) point out that “[t]here is a constant tension between a desire to coordinate and control testing on the one hand and a need to recognize contextualized diversity on the other.” a case in point is the use of jumbled sentences in language assessment, for example, in the versant test (versanttm english test, 2011), which has created controversy as some authors have criticized them as inauthentic tasks considered dissimilar to language use tasks in real-world communication. chun (2006) criticizes versant tasks as inauthentic. indeed, implausible jumbled sentences such as “smokers like heavy looks jam think traffic” (smokers think heavy traffic is like jam) truly are inauthentic (bilbrough, as cited in elt laura, 2013). ockey (2009) points out a second problem specifically with the task of reordering sentences: negative washback. he states, “students may spend time putting groups of words into appropriate order rather than using time to practice speaking and listening in real-world contexts, such as having a conversation with other students” (p. 845). such concern is warranted in particular for language tests which seek to assess test takers’ communicative language proficiency as opposed to knowledge about aspects of language. however, what these views do not appear to recognize is that unscrambling jumbled sentences is a common occurrence in real-world communication in regions which have large, linguistically diverse expatriate populations, where english is used by nativeand unscrambling jumbled sentences: an authentic task for english language assessment? 253 non-native speakers of english at all skill levels, as a lingua franca (lf), a second language (sl), and/or a first language (l1). thus this investigation sought to document instances of real-world use of jumbled sentences in lingua franca communication in sharjah/dubai in the united arab emirates (uae): research question 1) what are instances of english-as-a-lingua-franca communication in dubai/sharjah, uae involving jumbled sentences? of interest in language assessment is the authenticity of jumbled sentences as test tasks in terms of interactiveness and correspondence to real-world english language use in general. in this research, the focus is appropriateness for classroom evaluation of student proficiency in english in the uae: research question 2) to what extent do jumbled sentence test items developed from an observed real-world interaction reflect authentic, interactive english language use? and research question 3) what standard(s) are appropriate for assessment of jumbled sentences in english language tests in schools/universities in dubai/sharjah? 2. review of literature three issues are pertinent to this research: jumbled sentences, authenticity in language assessment, and english as a lingua franca. 2.1. jumbled sentences in language assessment although referred to in different terms by various authors, unscrambling jumbled sentences is a familiar language teaching/testing task in english. some authors use terms that refer to the characteristic test item input format, such as jumbled sentences, jumbled lines, scrambled sentences, or shuffled sentences (see bilbrough, 2007; butler, 2009; mukundan, 2011; and yeh & yang, 2011), while others refer to the test item response format, labeled as sentence shuffling, sentence unscrambling, reordering jumbled words, text manipulation, and sentence builds (see chapelle et al., 2010; hewer, 1997; johns & lixun, 1999; killgallon, 1997; and versanttm english test, 2011). the task of unscrambling jumbled sentences can be accomplished with pencil and paper, in person, or via computer. programs such as hot potatoestm (see hot potatoestm, n.d.) and blackboard (see blackboard, 19972015) can be used by classroom teachers to develop computer-based jumbled sentence tasks, allowing test takers to see their work as they reorder the words, with hot potatoestm also providing the option of giving hints and clues. 2.2. authenticity in language assessment views of authenticity in language assessment vary. summarizing discussions of authenticity, gilmore (2007, p. 98) identifies eight possible meanings and concludes betty lanteigne 254 that “the concept of authenticity can be situated in either the text itself, in the participants, in the social or cultural situation and purposes of the communicative act, or some combination of these.” he points out that even focusing only on real language actually used by people to communicate meaning to others, still involves considerable language variety, and thus he suggests that, at the classroom level, teachers focus on desired instructional goals instead of debating authenticity vs. contrivance. interactiveness is an attribute closely associated with authenticity. balancing communicativeness and construct validity in language tests, bachman (1990) explains the interactional/ability and real-life views of authenticity. the interactional/ability view is that authenticity in language assessment is a function of the “interaction between the test taker, the test task, and the testing context” (p. 322), and the real-life view “essentially considers the extent to which test performance replicates some specified non-test language performance” (p. 301). bachman and palmer (2010, p. 79) explain that external interactiveness involves “interaction among and between participants and equipment and materials in the language use task or an assessment task.” they point out that such interactiveness can be reciprocal (involving interaction between interlocutors), non-reciprocal (without interlocutor interaction or feedback), or adaptive (with subsequent test items dependent on test taker response to previous items). reciprocal interactiveness is the type of interactiveness most closely resembling real-world communication between interlocutors, although non-reciprocal interactiveness can also be found in real-world tasks such as reading signs or listening to announcements. connecting test tasks with real-world tlu tasks, bachman and palmer (1996, p. 23) define authenticity as “the degree of correspondence of the characteristics of a given language test task to the features of a tlu task.” they identify three activities for test development using their framework of task characteristics. for classroom teachers/school test developers these activities would involve identifying instances of real-world target language use in their communities that will benefit their students, developing test tasks based on the tlu tasks, and checking to see how well those test tasks reflect characteristics of the tlu tasks. of import is that effective elf communication involves the ability to interact with speakers at diverse levels of language ability (elder & davies, 2006), and a very real component of such interaction is the task of figuring out the intended meaning of speakers whose sentence order is considerably different (sifakis, 2004) from that of any standard language varieties, or even of non-standard varieties. unscrambling jumbled sentences: an authentic task for english language assessment? 255 2.3. english as a lingua franca today, english is being used as a lingua franca “between non-native speakers of different nationalities, in situations where no native english speakers are present” (watterson, 2008, p. 378). english as a lingua franca (elf) is defined by firth (1996, p. 240) as use of english as “a ‘contact language’ between persons who share neither a common native tongue nor a common (national) culture, and for whom english is the chosen foreign language of communication.” however, english is also being used as an international lingua franca (eilf) for communication between native-english speakers (nes) and non-native-english speakers (nnes) (smith & bisaza, 1982), which mckay (2011, p. 127) describes as “the use of english between any two l2 speakers of english, whether sharing the same culture or not, as well as between l2 and l1 speakers of english.” mckay points to research about essential characteristics of eilf interaction resulting in consensus about goals for eilf curricula. one goal in particular is that “[e]xplicit attention should be given to introducing and practicing repair strategies, such as asking for clarification and repetition, rephrasing and allowing wait time” (p. 133). in lingua franca communication, flexibility is of particular importance with emphasis on negotiation of meaning (see canagarajah, 2006; sifakis, 2004). in elf contexts speakers may have a wide range of levels of english ability (see jenkins, 2006; friedrich & matsuda, 2010, regarding elf users). firth and wagner (1997, p. 292) describe some language users as “people who are demonstrably not engaged in the formal learning of a l2, but who nevertheless voluntarily use a l2 in their everyday affairs (e.g., at work or play).” elf communication is not limited to expert users in high level business or academic interactions, and its users may or may not have formally studied the language. realistically, school students who are language learners in such elf settings are likely to encounter real-world use of english that is neither standard nor established non-standard varieties of english. ellis (1997) points out that syntactic irregularities are common in the speech of people acquiring a language, and wen (2012, p. 374), discussing elf pedagogy, says that “the students are expected to understand what non-native speakers say in english.” in particular, in some elf regions such as areas in the united arab emirates, many of the non-native english speakers that language students interact with will not be expert users of standard or non-standard varieties of english. 3. methodology there were two phases to this research: identification of jumbled sentences in real-world elf communication and analysis of test items developed based on the utterance “want taxi dubai you? betty lanteigne 256 3.1. the dubai/sharjah context in the uae, the language of education policy and the language of government policy intersect with policies about the language(s) of the workplace, part of what shohamy (2006, p. 110) refers to as “language in the public space” including “actual language items that are found in streets, shopping centres, schools, markets, offices, hospitals and any other public space.” while the official language of the uae is arabic (cia world factbook, n.d.; eiu country profiles and reports, 2012), which means that government laws, regulations, and documents are in arabic, actual language practice in the public space reflects the plurality of languages spoken by the citizens and expatriates in these countries. both of these sources indicate that there is a large expatriate population in the uae consisting of people whose first languages are extremely diverse. large expatriate populations are primarily located in major cities of the region including dubai and abu dhabi. in particular, language use data indicates english is widely used in the uae. due to the importance of flexibility in negotiation of meaning in elf communication in the uae between english users of a variety of skill levels and language backgrounds, real-world english language use in areas in/close to dubai, such as sharjah, necessitates the unscrambling of jumbled sentences by hearers. randall and samimi (2010) describe the linguistic context of dubai: english is required for a much greater range of social interactions, from shopping to receiving medical attention. [. . .] for example, there can be few societies in the world where a second language is necessary to carry out basic shopping tasks, from buying food in supermarkets to clothes in shopping malls. (pp. 43-44) these observations point to the frequent use of english as a lingua franca for daily life interactions in this city. such interactions in dubai/sharjah can range from high-level international business negotiations and workplace communications to low-level, minimal communication of basic functions such as simple requests or commands, for egzample, instructions for gardeners or cleaners. 3.2. data collection the field observations of elf communication in the public domain involving jumbled sentences were naturally occurring (firth, 2009, p. 130), in that they were “interactions recorded for research purposes occurred without regard for, and without being arranged and/or organized by, the researcher(s) concerned.” all of the identified utterances were spontaneous, spoken by users of english in daily life tasks. such interactions, by their very nature, are spontaneous and unscrambling jumbled sentences: an authentic task for english language assessment? 257 transitory, and these elf incidents consisted of brief exchanges (less than one minute) between clerks and customers, security guards, students, janitors and teachers, presenters and their audience, and a taxi driver and a pedestrian of various nationalities, observed in the dubai/sharjah area. in all of the observed interactions, the speakers/hearers were of different nationalities and language backgrounds. in some of the observed instances, the language learning status of the language users was known by the researcher. the german presenter was known to be not enrolled in formal english language study, but it is unknown whether or not the remaining language users were formally studying english. it is also unknown to what extent they were seeking to improve their english language informally. the sentences containing jumbled sentences were written down when they occurred, and fuller descriptions of the interactions were subsequently documented at the earliest opportunity. 3.3. data analysis the observed interactions were described, combining bachman and palmer’s (1996) characteristics of tlu tasks and fishman’s (1972) description of interaction in sociolinguistic context, which include the domain/physical setting, the participants/their relationships, and the time involved. the purposes of communication and standard english equivalents were also identified. the first identified jumbled sentence interaction (“want taxi dubai you?”) was the basis for development of eight test items (hard copy and computer-based), ranging from simple jumbled test item formats often used in classroom tests to item formats used in the internet-based toefl (toefl ibt® test questions, 2015). in evaluating the authenticity of the test items proposed here using jumbled sentences based on realworld elf communication, both real-world tlu correspondence and interactiveness are considered. 4. findings field observation identified 54 jumbled sentences in real-world elf oral communication. all of these real-world elf interactions involved utterances containing jumbled sentences, or syntactical errors (ellis, 1997), while some also included non-standard word form and/or missing words. while the 54 naturalistic observations are not extensive, they do point to language use by speakers communicating in language contact situations via english because it was the most readily available common language, if not the only common language. appendix a presents the 54 jumbled sentences. all of the sentences contain scrambled word order, to a greater or lesser extent. missing words are seen in sentences betty lanteigne 258 #1-3, 11, 14-15, 17, 19, 22, 27, 29, 31-32, 35-37, 39, 42, 44-45, 47-50, and 53; and non-standard word form is seen in sentences #23-24, 45, and 51. one common characteristic of these elf language users was that they utilized whatever words were available to them to communicate their desired meaning. communication of meaning was more important than grammatical accuracy. the irregular grammatical structure of their utterances may have been the result of first language influence, fossilization, interaction with other language users, or simply language decisions made at the moment of interaction. 4.1. evaluating interactiveness and authenticity in test items based on a real-world language use task to evaluate possible interactiveness and authenticity in language assessment tasks of unscrambling jumbled sentences, the first of these jumbled sentence tlu tasks is examined more closely as a case in question: a nnes, indian/pakistani-looking taxi driver’s question described above, “want taxi dubai you?” such interactions are common between interlocutors of diverse levels of english ability. in this case the intended meaning was obvious even though the syntax was jumbled: the taxi driver wanted to know if she would like a taxi to dubai. in other words, was she a potential customer? the nes woman needed to be able to unscramble the taxi driver’s utterance to be able to respond appropriately. the fact that the nes was a western-looking woman was very likely also a pertinent factor in the taxi driver’s choice of language. if the woman had looked indian or pakistani, he might have used hindi/urdu instead of english. also, if he knew some arabic and the pedestrian had been an arab-looking woman, arabic might have been used as the lingua franca. however, with a western-looking woman, english was the obvious choice of lingua franca for this indian/pakistani taxi driver, even if she was not a nes, since it would have been logical for him to assume that she would be more likely to be able to speak english than hindi/urdu or arabic, the other widely spoken languages in the region. the skills used by the second interlocutor (the nes woman) in this taxi driver-pedestrian elf communication task involved knowledge of english syntax, as well as the ability to understand the intended illocutionary force of the taxi driver’s utterance and to respond appropriately. she had to reorder the words in the question and add the missing words to come up with the intended meaning: “do you want a taxi to dubai?” this real-world english language use task points to the importance of english users (nnes and nes) in this gcc context being able to understand utterances by speakers with low english levels. one aspect of this ability would include being able to unscramble jumbled sentences and fill unscrambling jumbled sentences: an authentic task for english language assessment? 259 in any necessary words that are omitted, in order to determine the intended meaning and an appropriate response. 5. analysis 5.1. examples of jumbled sentence test items using this real-world elf use task, it is possible to develop test tasks to evaluate test takers’ ability to unscramble the sentence “want taxi dubai you?” and add the missing words. presented here are eight test items (hard copy and computer-based) developed from this tlu task, which are possible in classroom assessment. the last two test tasks discussed would require delivery systems not readily available in many language classrooms of the gcc but which are possible in some locations. while these test items use the name of the city the taxi driver mentioned (dubai), it would be possible to change the city name to that of a city familiar to test takers in other regions. example 1 is a decontextualized jumbled sentence in pencil-and-paper format, a test item frequently utilized in language instruction. (for example, see “jumbled sentence worksheets,” n.d.; “rearranging jumbled words to make sentences,” 2015; “connect series,” 1995-2015.) assessment with this item would consist of identifying how many words the test takers put in correct order and whether or not they capitalized the first word and included a question mark. example 1 decontextualized jumbled sentence (hard copy) 1. put the following words in correct order to form a sentence, adding appropriate capitalization and punctuation. a want dubai to do you taxi _____________________________________________________________ in terms of authenticity in assessment, this test item has little to recommend it. true, it is based on a real-world tlu task, but no description of the setting is provided, and there is no attempt to elicit meaningful communication. while test takers would be required to interact with the text by manipulating the order of the words, the interaction is only for the purpose of displaying their knowledge of standard question format. example 2 is similar to example 1, also a decontextualized jumbled sentence item but this time using hot potatoestm (see figure 1). the test takers may click on “hint” for information about the next correct word, but they lose points for doing so. they can also start over again easily by clicking “restart.” in addition, they receive immediate feedback about how well they did on the test item. the betty lanteigne 260 advantage of this format is that the test takers can see the sentence as they reconstruct it and are informed immediately if they answered correctly or not. figure 1 decontextualized jumbled sentence using hot potatoestm admittedly, this computer-based task is more fun than just rewriting the sentence in correct word order. however, in terms of authenticity, the same criticisms would apply to this test item as for example 1. there is no meaningful interaction with any real-world connection, and the item only elicits display of correct question formation. however, there is increased interaction with the test item itself through the computerized word order manipulation and the option of asking for hints. nonetheless, these computer interaction elements are unrelated to any real-world tlu task and thus increase the element of artificiality in the task. example 3, also developed using hot potatoestm, provides some contextualization and asks the test takers to rewrite the sentence, similar to the hard copy format of example 1 (see figure 2). they are asked to provide the missing words, which means they must produce them instead of just copying, and correct spelling is required. as with the previous computer-based exercise, the test takers can see their sentences and redo them easily, as well as have the option to get clues about how to answer or hints about what letter comes next (with an associated loss of points). figure 2 briefly contextualized jumbled sentence using hot potatoestm unscrambling jumbled sentences: an authentic task for english language assessment? 261 in terms of authenticity, this test item is an improvement on the items in examples 1 and 2. assessing an aspect of pragmatic competence, specifically appropriate language use in social context (eslami & mirzaei, 2012), this item provides a brief scenario and then asks the test takers to develop an appropriate response. characteristics of the setting for the task are provided, briefly indicating the people involved, who said and did what, and implying the physical location (a place where taxi drivers would be looking for customers). also, test takers are asked to fill in the words that the taxi driver left out, a task which is a characteristic of lingua franca communication. however, the computer-interactive component of the task, although more engaging for the test takers than just rewriting the question, still does not reflect the real-world interaction of the tlu task of communication between two people. example 4 illustrates a fill-in-the-blank test item format using blackboard, which is another program which teachers/school test developers can use to develop test items (see figure 3). similar to example 3, this item provides brief contextualization and allows evaluation of test takers’ ability to reorder the taxi driver’s jumbled sentence. this test item can be automatically graded by blackboard (thus saving teacher/rater time), but there is an option of grading manually, if so desired. the fill-in-the-blank item format can require exact spelling or allow previously identified spelling variants if spelling is not to be evaluated. it requires test takers to rewrite the sentence and allows up to 20 possible correct answers which would be provided by the teacher/rater. in this item, only four correct answers are provided with this test item because they are the most common and also most widely accepted standard english rewordings of this jumbled question. figure 3 briefly contextualized jumbled sentence item using blackboard overall, the test item in example 4 is basically a variation on the typical jumbled sentence item format, with added computer-based features. the contextualization provided in example 4 could also be included in examples 1 and 2, making them somewhat more in line with the real-world tlu task characteristics, although there still is only limited interaction in terms of actual communication of meaning. betty lanteigne 262 however, it is possible to make the jumbled sentence test task even more interactive, by having test takers recognize the taxi driver’s intended meaning and identify appropriate response(s) – measuring pragmatic comprehension and production (eslami & mirzaei, 2012). examples 5 and 6 show two contextualized, sequential test items developed with blackboard, using multiple-choice and multiple-answer formats. (see figure 4.) these two items ask test takers to choose the answer most closely representing the taxi driver’s intended meaning and then select the appropriate responses to his question. in the second question of the pair, the multiple-answer question, the test takers are instructed to check all answers that apply, indicating that more than one response is possible. as with the other computer-based test items, these are selected-response items which are scored automatically, although it is possible to score them manually. figure 4 two-part jumbled sentence and response item using blackboard in terms of authenticity, this pair of test items taps into skills involved in realworld tlu such as determining the speaker’s meaning, which may include mentally reordering the jumbled sentence, and determining an appropriate response. thus they go beyond simple reordering of words in a sentence presented in isolation. however, the selected-response format limits the possible responses to the second question, making it easier to grade because the accepted responses are predetermined, but also making the item less interactive than a short-answer format would be. unscrambling jumbled sentences: an authentic task for english language assessment? 263 two even more authentic possibilities for interactive test items would be listening/writing and listening/speaking tasks, similar to tasks in the internetbased toefl (ibt) listening and speaking sections (toefl, 2012). one interactive listening/writing test item could be to present the taxi driver’s question audio recorded. the recording could be spoken by someone with typically accented english, complete with background noise, or videotaped in an appropriate setting, which would address phonological flexibility as well as knowledge of sentence structure and recognition of intended meaning. this test task could be selected response, or it could be short answer, thus requiring setting evaluation criteria for acceptable responses (see example 7). example 7 listening/writing task 1. [audiotaped or spoken by narrator: you are waiting for someone, and a taxi driver comes to you and asks: (audiotaped of someone representing taxi driver: “want taxi dubai you?”) (gulf news) what does he mean?] _____________________________________________________________ in terms of both interactiveness and correspondence to real-world tlu, this test item is a considerable improvement over the previous decontextualized tasks. the test takers would actually listen to a description of the scenario and determine the taxi driver’s meaning, interacting with the spoken question. betty lanteigne 264 the second interactive task, example 8, can be a listening/ writing test task or a listening/speaking task. although a speaking item would very likely be challenging in many classroom settings due to time and equipment limitations as well as logistical considerations, an interactive listening/speaking test task could include contextualized presentation (videotaped) of the taxi driver’s question (as in example 7) followed by a spoken response by the test taker. example 8 listening/writing task (or possibly listening/speaking) [videotaped, or audiotaped/spoken by narrator with picture of taxi: “you are waiting for someone, and a taxi driver comes to you and asks”: (audio spoken by someone representing taxi driver): “want taxi dubai you?”] a. what does he mean? b. how would you respond? ________________________________________________(written or spoken) the listening/speaking task could be administered in a computer lab with the spoken response audio recorded, or it could be administered as part of a oneon-one oral evaluation with the spoken response evaluated by the teacher/rater on the spot. in terms of correspondence to the real-world tlu task and interactiveness, such an interactive listening/speaking test task would be much more authentic than test items that simply require test takers to reorder scrambled words, with or without contextualization. the test taker would hear a real question, determine the intended meaning, and then respond appropriately. 5.2. standards for assessment of english in the uae from the above-mentioned examples of test tasks using jumbled sentences, it is evident that it is possible to construct jumbled sentence test items with varying degrees of authenticity, ranging from decontextualized, written sentencereordering tasks to contextualized, integrated tasks of listening/reading/writing or listening/reading/speaking. such test tasks could be used to measure knowledge of specific aspects of sentence structure, with the possibility of measuring recognition of intended meaning and/or ability to respond appropriately, using spoken or written form for both task input and test taker response. however, such measurement requires identification of evaluation criteria, and in elf settings the issue of standards for assessment is controversial, particularly concerning grammar. mckay (2011) discusses this issue, pointing out arguments for and against inner circle english grammar being held as the standard. one view is that grammatical elements which do not impede mutual intelligibility should not be the basis for evaluation, while another view is that students and unscrambling jumbled sentences: an authentic task for english language assessment? 265 teachers of elf desire to achieve standard english grammatical accuracy (of the standard english variety appropriate for their purposes) and standard english (british or american) grammar should be the basis for evaluation. mckay (2011, p. 134) says that “[t]hose who argue for a monolithic model contend that nativespeaker models should be promoted because they have been codified and have a degree of historical authority,” but those advocating a “pluricentric model of english [. . .] argue that the development of new varieties of english is a natural result of the spread of english.” in addition, jenkins (2006, p. 42) points to “the emergence of a range of educated l2 english varieties which differ legitimately from standard ns english” and says that “supporters of this [pluricentric] view are able and willing to distinguish between nns language variety and interlanguage, that is, between acceptable nns variation from ns english norms and nns error caused by imperfect or incomplete language learning” (pp. 42-43). this distinction between established language varieties and interlanguage is crucial for language assessment at all levels, from low-stakes classroom quizzes to high-stakes regional, national, and international tests. in a sense, for the pluricentric view to work, the nnes varieties would have to develop their own standardization, as suggested by elder and davies (2006), and distinguish between syntactical error diverging from standard ns english grammar and acceptable l2 english variation. in the uae context, reflecting the reality of language policy in this region, both views of language assessment are present: inner circle englishes as the standard and nnes varieties as the standard. english can be one subject taught in the curriculum, one of multiple languages of instruction, or the primary language of instruction. there are schools in which the language of instruction is arabic with english being taught as a subject (usually based on a form of british english), bilingual schools with some subjects (such as mathematics and science) taught in english and the remaining subjects taught in arabic or other language(s), and english-medium international schools where the entire curriculum is taught in english except for other language classes, with many using british english, american english, or indian english(es) (see “the uae has the highest number of international schools globally,” 2015). since many of the students attending these schools will very likely return to their home countries and enter the educational systems there, it is necessary that they be able to meet the educational requirements of their national school systems. thus, english assessment in these schools would need to follow the standards determined by the home country school system, which may be an inner circle standard english or other variety based on expert users (elders & davies, 2006) of the specified variety. in addition, a complicating factor in standards for english in the uae is the language of instruction for universities. expatriate students often choose to attend universities which are internationally accredited in order to obtain a degree recognized outside of their resident country. such universities often use english as the language betty lanteigne 266 of instruction with the linguistically diverse student and faculty population, requiring students to pass international english tests such as ielts or toefl, or the cepaenglish. the cepa is the comprehensive educational proficiency assessment, an educational proficiency test administered in year 12 in k-12 schools in the uae, with one of the components being an english test (cepa – english, 2011-2012). (see admission tests, n.d.; american university of sharjah undergraduate catalogue, 20152016; undergraduate admissions, 2016; english language requirements, 2016, for undergraduate admission requirements for english competency). students seeking admission to these universities would need to be able to meet the admission requirements of their desired universities, which would entail adhering to the grammatical standards of the specified standard english varieties, by passing “an externally-created [sic] and validated international test of general language proficiency in order to enter the university” (lloyd & davidson, 2005, p. 323). the reality for language assessment standards for students wishing to attend internationally accredited universities in the uae is that even though they do not live or work in an inner circle country, they may be required to pass tests which are based on established standard english norms. in terms of rating of test tasks involving use of jumbled sentences in eilf communication, teachers and/or test developers for schools would thus need to follow the agreed-upon standards in their school/community setting for grammar, spelling, vocabulary, and punctuation. for example, in addition to the four rebuilt versions of the taxi driver’s question provided as answers to the sample test items above, two other versions in some indian english varieties are “you want a taxi to dubai, isn’t it?” and “you want a dubai taxi, isn’t it?” (see sailaja, 2009.) if such englishes were the standard for rating these test items, expert users of each variety would have to evaluate whether these tag question versions were correct or not. while the choice of language variety assessed at the school level may be a non-standard variety local in scope, limited to a specific domain, that choice may have wider implications as students go on to study in universities or work in workplaces which use standard english varieties. in this light elders and davies (2006) caution that although the various features of elf use in particular contexts can conceivably be captured in domain-specific esp tests, there are important practicality considerations to bear in mind. special purpose testing is, by its very nature, restricted in scope and as such likely to have limited generalizability and less sway with score users, and possibly test takers themselves (see research by bolton, 2004; timmis, 2002), than is the case with current tests of se [standard englishes] which have greater prestige and wider currency. (p. 295) this observation is particularly pertinent in the uae where varieties of english abound in public spaces, with american and british english varieties considered valued currency by internationally accredited universities. unscrambling jumbled sentences: an authentic task for english language assessment? 267 6. conclusion while it is true that decontextualized jumbled sentence test items are uncommon in real-world english language communication, unscrambling contextualized jumbled utterances of an interlocutor with low language proficiency definitely is a task common in real-world communication in regions where english is used as an international lingua franca by nes and nnes at all proficiency levels. in the uae, nes and nnes users of english are apt to encounter and communicate with speakers of diverse levels of language proficiency in different varieties of english in this region, as well as elf, and they need to develop the skills needed to be able to comprehend meaning in jumbled utterances. thus, such real-world tlu tasks can be the basis for interactive and authentic assessment tasks. while the primary focus of this discussion has been use of contextualized jumbled sentences in classroom assessment, such test tasks could also be appropriate for high-stakes international language tests. classroom teachers/school test developers and large-scale test developers alike can make use of contextualized jumbled-sentence tasks to evaluate test takers’ language proficiency. further, such tasks can enhance authentic assessment of skills necessary to elf communication, such as identifying intended illocutionary force and producing an appropriate response. reflecting the tension between creativity in language use and standardization in language assessment, standards for evaluation of communication in english involving tasks of jumbled sentences in classroom tests must reflect the language learning goals of the school and community. thus, if it is important to the local community that students learn a specific variety of standard english, then the standards of that standard variety should be adhered to in determining the accuracy of student responses in classroom assessments. a potential area of research combining sociolinguistics and language assessment would be to identify characteristics of real-world language use tasks involving jumbled sentences. what patterns of jumbling are typical of authentic jumbled sentences as opposed to idiosyncratic scrambling? at the regional/school/classroom level it would be helpful to identify patterns of jumbling typical of international lingua franca communication in particular areas. interactive test items based on such real-world elf interaction could not only be authentic and interactive, but could result in positive washback as students interact with test items reflecting nonstandard communication patterns they are likely to encounter in their environment. it could also increase their awareness of which forms of english are appropriate in which contexts, for example, elf vs. esl (for academic purposes or in international business communication). betty lanteigne 268 references admission tests. 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(2011). metacognitive process in online text construction. educational technology & society, 14(3), 82-101 unscrambling jumbled sentences: an authentic task for english language assessment? 271 appendix a – 54 jumbled sentences setting purpose participants utterance standard equivalent 1. work/taxi driver talking to potential customer asking if she wants a taxi pakistani/indian male driver and american female pedestrian “want taxi dubai you?” do you want a taxi to dubai? 2. store/saleswoman talking to customer asking if the customer had a rewards card philippina saleswoman and arab customer “shukran card you have?” do you have a shukran card? 3. store/salesman talking to customer asking if the customer had a rewards card indian salesman and arab customer “shukran card do you have?” do you have a shukran card? 4. school/two friends talking talk about how she looks two arab females “cute i am.” i am cute. 5. school/two students talking asking about a competition arab female and arab male students “competition what?” what competition? 6. school/two students talking commenting about a dinner two arab females “so professional it seems.” it seems so professional. 7. school/student talking to friends saying he would talk to the professor afghani male student to friends of different nationalities “professor i will tell him.” i will tell the professor. 8. store/saleswoman talking to customer asking if she has three coins philippina saleswoman and arab female customer “three dirhams you have?” do you have three dirhams? 9. store/salesman talking to customer asking about customer order philipino salesman and arab customer “kiwi blueberry without?” without kiwi and blueberry? 10. store/salesman talking to customer asking about customer order philipino salesman and arab customer “yogurt you don’t want?” you don’t want yogurt? 11. store/salesman talking to customer asking if customer had completed a form philippino salesman and arab customer “the rest you fill all?” you filled out all the rest? 12. store/salesman talking to customer asking about customer order philipino salesman and arab customer “nutella you don’t want?” you don’t want nutella? 13. store/saleswoman talking to customer asking for change philippina saleswoman and arab customer “do you have dirham two?” do you have two dirhams? 14. store/salesman talking to customer informing customer about available products indian salesman and arab customer “chocolate only we don’t have.” it’s only chocolate that we don’t have. 15. store/saleswoman talking to customer asking if customer has a rewards card philippina saleswoman and arab customer “my club card you have?” do you have a my club card? 16. store/store clerk talking to customer telling a customer where a product is asian store clerk and american female customer “cheese mozzarella this one.” this is the mozzarella cheese. 17. store/saleswoman talking to customer complimenting a customer philippina saleswoman and arab female customer “proud you make.” you will make your father proud. 18. store/stock clerk talking to customer informing customer that the tea is not good indian male stock clerk and arab female customer “not good karak.” the karak is not good. 19. store/customer talking to salesperson asking the price indian female customer to chinese salesperson “this how much?” how much does this cost? betty lanteigne 272 20. store/customer talking to salesperson asking if an item is available in blue indian female customer to chinese salesperson “blue you have?” do you have this item in blue? 21. store/salesman talking to customer saying the price is good indian salesman and arab female customer “price very good.” it’s a very good price. 22. store/salesman talking to customer saying the customer should believe indian salesman and arab female customer “believe make.” you should believe me. 23. store/ salesman talking to customer telling a customer it’s a good deal indian salesman and arab female customer “good deal i make.” i made a good deal. 24. store/ salesman talking to customer telling a customer to trust him indian salesman and arab female customer “trust you make.” trust me. 25. store/salesman talking to customer telling the customer the quality is good indian salesman and arab female customer “quality very good.” the item is of very good quality. 26. store/saleswoman talking to customer expressing confidence saleswoman (unidentified race/nationality) and arab female customer “100% sure i am.” i am 100% sure. 27. store/customer talking to salesperson saying the price is too high arab female customer and turkish saleswoman “too high price.” the price is too high. 28. store/customer talking to saleswoman requesting the price be lowered arab female customer and turkish saleswoman “price lower.” lower the price. 29. store/customer talking to salesman asking about colors arab male customer and turkish salesman “color you have?” what colors do you have this item in? 30. store/customer talking to cashier asking for change indian female customer to turkish male cashier “change you have?” do you have change? 31. store/salesperson talking to customer telling about product salesman (unidentified race/nationality) and arab female customer “italy made.” it is made in italy. 32. store/wife talking to husband giving opinion about color arab wife to her arab husband “better color black.” black is the better color. 33. store/wife talking to husband telling about color arab wife to her arab husband “black is this.” this is black. 34. store/salesman talking to customer asking for change indian salesman to asian female customer “change bring.” do you have change? 35. store/customer talking to salesperson denying responsibility asian female customer to indian salesperson “problem not mine.” this is not my problem. 36. store/customer talking to salesperson asking for a discount arab female customer to indian salesperson “discount you make?” can you make a discount? 37. store/customer talking to salesperson requesting an item be wrapped arab male customer to salesperson “wrap you make?” can you wrap the item? 38. restaurant/worker talking to customer asking about order turkish male worker to arab female customer “spicy you want?” do you want the spicy flavor? unscrambling jumbled sentences: an authentic task for english language assessment? 273 39. restaurant/worker talking to customer asking about change turkish male worker to arab female customer “change you get?” can you get change? 40. social/two acquaintances talking asking about length of stay south african woman to american woman “for how long you are here?” how long have you been living here? 41. social/woman talking to friends asking if door is open german woman to american women friends “is the door open of the car?” is the car door open? 42. school/student talking to friends asking what someone said unidentified race/ nationality male to group of friends “what he said?” what did he say? 43. social/woman talking to friends asking about a music performance arab female to group of friends “why they are not playing _____?” (some name of music) why didn’t they (performers) play __? (some piece of music) 44. hospital/ receptionist to hospital patient asking about parking ticket philippina female receptionist at hospital to american female patient “parking ticket you need?” do you need a parking ticket? 45. work/two security guards talking requesting help asian male security guard to african male security guard “oh now water have inside. come looking.” now we have water inside. come and see. 46. school/student requesting clarification asking for clarification arab female student to american female teacher “how you can know?” how can you know? 47. work/presenter speaking to audience rhetorical question german male presenter to multinational audience “how you would feel if this happen to you?” how would you feel if this were to happen to you? 48. store/salesman talking to customer informing about product availability asian male store clerk to arab male customer “plastic no have.” we don’t have it in plastic. 49. store/salesman talking to customer asking about giving change philippino salesman to arab female customer “ma’am, if i give you small bill, is it ok?” ma’am, is it ok if i give you small bills? 50. store/saleswoman talking to customer talking to another salesman indian saleswoman to philippino salesman “i make no invoice.” i didn’t make any invoice 51. store/saleswoman talking to customer explaining about a product arab saleswoman to american female customer “this one is not shampoo leave.” this is not leave-in conditioner. 52. store/stock clerk talking to customer clarifying customer’s question arab male store clerk to american female customer “kiwi this one cranberry?” do you mean kiwicranberry juice? 53. store/stock clerk talking to customer answering customer question arab male store clerk to american female customer “like this [ma fi] don’t have.” we don’t have any like this. 54. bank/teller talking to customer asking if he can copy something arab male teller to american female customer “this i can take with me?” can i take this with me? (can i copy this?) 423 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (3). 2020. 423-447 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.3.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt language-related episodes and pair dynamics in primary school clil learners: a comparison between proficiency-matched and student-selected pairs maría basterrechea university of the basque country, vitoria-gasteiz, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7993-445x maria.basterrechea@ehu.eus francisco gallardo-del-puerto university of cantabria, santander, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8578-9861 francisco.gallardo@unican.es abstract a considerable body of research within the interaction framework (long, 1996) has centred on the language-related episodes (lres) which occur when learners topicalize a specific linguistic item while they are engaged in meaning-focused tasks. several studies have shown that the production of lres may be influenced by the proficiency level of the learners (kim & mcdonough, 2008; leeser, 2004). sociocultural theory (lantolf & appel, 1994) has also explored collaborative work and the effect that pairing learners with the same proficiency levels or different patterns of interaction (storch, 2002) has on the production of lres (e.g., mozaffari, 2017; storch & aldosari 2013), but little research has compared the effect of the pair formation method (student-selected vs. proficiency-matched) on young learners’ production of lres and pair dynamics. this study compares young clil learners (aged 10-12) in student-selected and proficiency-matched pairs in task-based interaction. results maría basterrechea, francisco gallardo-del-puerto 424 indicate that learners produce more meaning-based than form-based lres, regardless of their pair formation method. the percentage of meaning-based lres which are resolved accurately is much higher in proficiency-matched dyads than in student-selected ones. as for the patterns of interaction (storch, 2002), the dynamics of proficiency-matched dyads are of a more collaborative nature than those of self-selected pairs. keywords: language-related episodes (lre); pair dynamics; pair formation; collaborative task; content and language integrated learning (clil) 1. introduction research within the interaction framework (long, 1996) has examined the facilitative role of collaborative interaction in providing opportunities for comprehensible input, peer feedback and output, which are important mechanisms in the process of l2 learning (loewen & sato, 2018). a considerable body of research has centered on the language-related episodes (lres) which occur when learners topicalize a specific linguistic item while they are engaged in meaningbased tasks. lres are “. . . any part of the dialogue in which students talk about the language they are producing, question their language use, or otheror selfcorrect” (swain, 1998, p. 70). several studies have shown that the production of lres may be influenced by the proficiency level of the learners (basterrechea & leeser, 2019; benson, pavitt, & jenkins, 2005; kim & mcdonough, 2008; kowal & swain, 1994; leeser, 2004; malmqvist, 2005; williams, 1999, 2001), gender (ross-feldman, 2007), or personality traits (storch & aldosari, 2013; watanabe & swain, 2007), factors that seem to affect the nature of interactional feedback, as well as the quantity, quality and outcome of lres. more recently, collaborative work has also been researched from the perspective of sociocultural theory (lantolf & appel, 1994). a growing number of studies within this framework explore not only how learners engage in problemsolving and knowledge building (swain, 2000) or construct new knowledge about language collaboratively (storch, 2007), but they also focus on how learners’ behavior and affective factors impact language learning opportunities that arise in collaborative dialogue (swain, 2000). in particular, some studies within this framework have examined the effect that pairing learners with same proficiency levels or pair dynamics has on the production of lres in terms of amount and type (e.g., garcía mayo & imaz aguirre, 2019; mozaffari, 2017; storch, 2002; storch & aldosari, 2013; watanabe & swain, 2007). results seem to suggest that these are crucial moderating factors that influence the potential that peer collaboration may language-related episodes and pair dynamics in primary school clil learners: a comparison. . . 425 have for language learning. hence, the impact of pair dynamics and the learners’ relative proficiency on the production of lres need to be explored experimentally. a population that has received scant attention in lre research is that of young learners, as most research on lres has investigated adults in english-asa-second-language (esl; benson et al., 2005), immersion (kowal & swain, 1994; swain 1998; swain & lapkin 1998), content-based instruction (leeser, 2004), or foreign language settings (basterrechea & garcía mayo, 2013; basterrechea & leeser, 2019; kim & mcdonough, 2008; garcía mayo, 2002a, 2002b; garcía mayo & azkarai, 2016; malmqvist, 2005; storch & aldosari, 2013). hence, more research on child interaction is needed in order to explore if: (a) young learners focus on language form while interacting, (b) they consciously reflect on their language, and (c) pairing learners according to proficiency or friendship affects pair dynamics. with the exception of garcía mayo and imaz aguirre (2019), no studies have investigated the impact that matched proficiency or student selfselection have on the production of lres by young efl learners. therefore, this study investigates how pair formation (student-selected vs. proficiencymatched) may influence the quantity and quality of lres produced by young content-and-language-integrated-learning (clil) learners of english in two oral tasks, namely a narration task and a map task. in addition, drawing on storch’s (2002) model of patterns of interaction in pair work, this study focuses on pair behavior by student-selected and proficiency-matched pairs in order to explore how pairing method influences pair dynamics in collaborative work as “. . . simply assigning students to work in groups or pairs will not necessarily create conditions conducive to learning “ (storch, 2002, p. 122). 2. literature review 2.1. lres and pair formation method one strand of research on lres has investigated how learner-internal factors, such as target language proficiency, affect the quantity, quality and outcome of lres (basterrechea & leeser, 2019; benson et al., 2005; kim & mcdonough, 2008; kowal & swain, 1994; leeser, 2004; malmqvist, 2005; mozaffari, 2017; payant, 2018; storch & aldosari, 2013; watanabe & swain, 2007; williams, 1999, 2001). since lres are claimed to be a window into the learners’ level of proficiency (kowal & swain, 1994), the assumption behind these studies is that proficiency may have an impact on the type of lres produced. several studies have shown that high proficiency learners produce a greater number of form-based lres than meaning-based lres, and correctly resolve a higher amount of lres than high-low and low-low proficiency dyads (basterrechea & leeser, 2019; maría basterrechea, francisco gallardo-del-puerto 426 leeser, 2004). however, it has been observed that the relationship formed by dyad members or personality traits influence the number and type of lres. for instance, malmqvist (2005) examined the production of lres by swedish learners of german as a foreign language. although lower proficiency learners attended to lexical items, it was these same learners who took a leading role in group discussion. the study concluded that the relationship formed by dyad members should be considered when pairing learners. it is still unclear how we can best form “high performance groups” (mozaffari, 2017, p. 496), and whether dyad members’ attention to form may be influenced more by their proficiency than by the relationships they form. mozaffari (2017) compared, among other issues, the production of lres by student-selected and teacher-assigned pairs in adult (age 20-26) english-as-a-foreign-language (efl; iranian l1) learners, as well as the nature of the talk of the comparison groups. all the participants represented an intermediate level according to the oxford placement test (allan, 2004). teacher-selected pairs were randomly assigned on the basis of their test scores. in the case of student-selected pairs, friendship was mentioned as the sole criterion for choosing a companion. results revealed that teacher-assigned pairs produced significantly more lres than student-selected ones. in terms of type, teacher-assigned pairs produced more formbased episodes and meaning-based episodes than student-selected pairs. the analysis of the nature of the talk indicated that student-selected pairs talked about matters unrelated to the task more frequently than teacher-selected pairs. the results reported by garcía mayo and imaz aguire (2019) mirror those of mozaffari in a study that examined the effect of the pair formation method on the production of lres with young efl learners, a population that has received scant attention in the lre research (but see gallardo-del-puerto & basterrechea, in press). they compared the number and type of lres produced in an oral and an oral + written task by proficiency-paired, teacher-selected (based on their personality, according to their teacher) and student-selected pairs. results showed that proficiency-matched pairs produced more lres in both types of tasks, followed by the teacher-assigned pairs and finally by student-selected pairs. experimental studies on the effect of the pair formation method on the production of lres seem to show that the relationship formed by the dyad members may be a more relevant factor than proficiency. thus, the relationship among lres, proficiency and pair dynamics needs to be further explored. 2.2. collaborative dialogue and pair dynamics more research is needed that will bring to light the factors that can create conditions conducive to language learning during collaborative tasks. one important language-related episodes and pair dynamics in primary school clil learners: a comparison. . . 427 issue related to linguistic interactions is the impact of pair behavior in collaborative tasks. studies such as donato (1998) showed that some patterns of interaction are more beneficial than others, as it was found that collaborative scaffolding (i.e., those patterns facilitating actions that a more competent peer provides to the learner [wood, bruner, & ross, 1976]) did not occur in all groups. in fact, collaborative dialogue research has shown that pair dynamics plays a crucial role in the degree to which pairs collaborate (e.g., kim & mcdonough, 2008; kowal & swain, 1994; 1997; nelson & murphy, 1993). storch (2002) examined the patterns of interaction and the quantity and quality of lres produced by 10 pairs of adult esl students. based on the data, she put forward four different patterns of dyadic interaction that described the role relationships in pair work, which depicted: (a) the degree of control or authority over the task (equality), and (b) the level of engagement with the contributions of the peer (mutuality). based on these two axes, four interactional styles or patterns of interaction were defined: · collaborative – a pattern where there is high equality and mutuality; learners work together and contribute jointly to the task; · dominant/dominant – a pattern where there is high equality but low mutuality; both participants contribute to the task but do not engage with each other’s contribution, and hence, do not reach a consensus easily; this pattern includes a cooperative type of interaction, subsequently labelled as passive/parallel (butler & zeng, 2015), where both members participate but there is “division of labor,” as they do not engage with each other’s contribution; · dominant/passive – both equality and mutuality are low; one of the members dominates the discussion and little negotiation occurs; · expert/novice – a pattern where there is low equality but high mutuality; the expert or more capable peer takes control over the task but encourages the novice or less capable peer to contribute to the task. storch (2002) showed that the patterns that are more conducive to language learning are collaborative and expert/novice, since it was attested that the pairs that exhibited these two types of pair dynamics transferred the knowledge gained in the lres more frequently to subsequent individual tasks. following storch’s (2002) model of dyadic interaction, kim and mcdonough (2008) analyzed the collaborative dialogue of intermediate and advanced learners of korean as a second language (sl) in terms of lres and patterns of interaction when they were paired with peers having different proficiency levels. it was found that learners who were collaborative with an intermediate interlocutor, were passive or novice when paired with an advanced peer. however, learners that exhibited a dominant role with an intermediate peer took a collaborative role with an advanced interlocutor. in addition, and unlike other studies maría basterrechea, francisco gallardo-del-puerto 428 (leeser, 2004; malmqvist, 2005), learners produced more meaning-based lres with an advanced interlocutor than with an intermediate one, whereas no differences were found in the production of form-based lres. the researchers concluded that, as long as pair dynamics are of a collaborative type, intermediate learners can benefit from being paired with an equally intermediate or equally advanced peer. following the work by leeser (2004), storch and aldosari (2013) investigated what effect proficiency pairing and patterns of interaction have on lre production in an efl classroom in saudi arabia with 15 pairs with similar and varying proficiency levels. similar proficiency dyads (high-high [h-h] and low-low [l-l]) exhibited a tendency to make more collaborative contributions and produced the highest number of lres, whereas mixed proficiency dyads (h-l) exhibited a wider range of patterns. in addition, mixed proficiency dyads produced more lres when they formed a collaborative or expert/novice type of relationship, but when they formed non-collaborative relationships, the more proficient learner tended to take a leading role, while the less proficient learner contributed neither to the task nor to the focus on language use. in terms of production of lres, h-h produced the greatest number of form-based and correctly solved lres, followed by h-l and l-l pairs, as evidenced in previous studies (e.g., leeser, 2004). as mentioned above, garcía mayo and imaz aguirre (2019) examined the influence of pair formation on the production of lres by young efl learners. to our knowledge, theirs is the only study addressing those issues with this age group. no differences were found in the different pairs (proficiency-paired, teacher-selected and self-selected groups), as all featured a collaborative type of dynamics. in summary, the scarce research on the effect that the pairing method has on the production of lres seems to show that pairing learners based on their relative proficiency is more beneficial in fostering attention to language form than having students choose their partners, but how pair behaviour impacts the production of lres in the two pairing methods needs to be further explored. thus, this study has been conducted in an attempt to shed light on this under-explored area by examining the occurrence, type and outcome of lres in proficiency-matched and student-selected dyads of l2 english learners. the study also seeks to take a close look at the learners’ interactional patterns. more specifically, it attempts to investigate what effect the pair formation method has on young clil learners’ patterns of interaction and on their attention to formal aspects of language in a context where learners’ attention to form needs further investigation. on the basis of previous research, two research questions were posed: 1. does the pairing method have an effect on the number, type and outcome of lres? 2. does the pairing method exert an influence on the patterns of interaction? language-related episodes and pair dynamics in primary school clil learners: a comparison. . . 429 3. methodology 3.1. participants twenty-seven pairs of efl learners in grades 5 and 6 at a primary education school in the basque country took part in the study. they were all basque-spanish bilinguals aged 10 to 12 who started learning english as a school subject in pre-primary education, and subsequently in grade 3 (age 9) they were engaged in a clil program where they have been learning various content subjects in english (e.g., arts and crafts, physical education, science). on average, these beginner learners had received 832 hours of exposure to english in a formal setting. students were divided into two different groups depending on the pair formation method, namely, a proficiency-matched group and a student-selected group. they were recruited from 5 intact classrooms: 2 of them from 5th grade, and 3 of them from 6th grade. in each grade, participants were randomly assigned to the two groups, resulting in one proficiency-matched group and one self-selected group in 5th grade, and one proficiency-matched group and two self-selected groups in 6th grade. as a result, 17 pairs were formed according to the similarity of their members’ scores in the key english test (ket; cambridge university press, 2008), which they had taken before data collection. ten pairs were formed on the basis of self-selection (see mozaffari, 2017, for the same pairing method). 3.2. instruments apart from a general background questionnaire and an english proficiency test (ket; cambridge university press, 2008), which were administered to obtain information about participants’ biographical profiles and english proficiency, students completed two consecutive collaborative tasks. in the first task, the members of the dyad collaborated to put a set of pictures in order to create a story (see mackey, 1994). participants were instructed to find the story behind a set of pictures adapted from dotty’s doll activity (sparks 1: teacher’s book; house & scott, 2009, p. 74). the pictures, which are included in appendix a, tell the story of a girl who does not know how to put the different broken pieces of her doll together, but with the help of a friend she finally succeeds. once the participants agreed on the order, they were asked to tell the story orally in turns. the second task (see appendix b) was specifically designed for this study and it was made up of three different phases. in the first phase, students were shown two pictures. in the first picture, a boy named ben finds a lost dog in a park. the dog has a photograph in its mouth, presumably of its owner, and its collar reads “i belong to j. smith.” the second picture shows some possible owners and their maría basterrechea, francisco gallardo-del-puerto 430 professions (e.g., doctor, vet) together with the map of a town showing the different places where these people might work (e.g., hospital, vet clinic, nursing school). students were required to agree on the owner of the dog and on where s/he works. in the second phase, students had to agree on the itinerary they had to follow around various landmarks in the map from the park to the place where the dog’s owner works. in the final stage, they had to collaborate in the writing of a short note for ben explaining who the dog’s owner is and giving directions from the park to the owner’s workplace so that ben can take the dog back to its owner. in sum, both were collaborative close-ended tasks in which the learners in dyads worked towards a convergent goal, but they differed in the end product in that the first task had a final oral outcome, and the second one had a final written component, which enabled us to assess the participants in both oral and written modes. 3.3. procedure the two tasks described above were completed by the dyads consecutively in a quiet room at school. a researcher was in the room with the students as they performed the tasks, but s/he did not intervene in their interaction unless they so required. the researcher encouraged dyad members to work jointly in the process and to ask one another for assistance when needed. it is also important to note that students were reminded of the importance of paying attention to the language they used to accomplish the last phase in each task, that is to say, the story telling in turns in the first task and the note writing in the second one. at this stage, they were also informed about the possibility of giving each other corrective feedback during the tasks. more specifically, they were told to make sure that their pronunciation (task 1) or spelling (task 2) was correct and there were no mistakes in their eventual oral and written productions. on average, student pairs needed about 30 minutes to complete both tasks consecutively. dyadic interactions were both audiotaped and videotaped. recorded productions were transcribed and later analyzed for the production of lres with the help of childes codification protocols (macwhinney, 2000). lres were identified at various stages during the completion of each task, that is, both when learners interacted in order to resolve the first phases in each task (task 1: picture ordering; task 2: deciding on the dog’s owner), and in the course of producing the final outcomes collaboratively (story-telling in task 1; note writing in task 2). all cases in which students discussed a language issue or self-corrected were independently identified by two researchers, who showed a high degree of agreement in their judgements. any occasional controversy in the classification of the lres was solved by the two researchers together on a case-by-case basis. language-related episodes and pair dynamics in primary school clil learners: a comparison. . . 431 3.4. analysis two types of analysis were conducted: an analysis of the different types of lres and analysis of the pair dynamics. regarding the former, lres were initially categorized as meaning-based, when the addressed issue was lexical choice or meaning, or form-based, when phonology, spelling, morphosyntax or prepositions were involved, following garcía mayo and azkarai’s (2016) taxonomy. each of these two categories was further classified according to leeser (2004) as resolved or unresolved, depending on whether interactants reached a final decision on the matter discussed or left it unresolved. finally, whenever a decision was made, the linguistic outcome was assessed for accuracy and the lre in question was further labelled as either target-like, when the outcome corresponded to a correct l2 element, or nontarget-like, when the outcome deviated from the intended english word or form. hence, six different lre types emerged from our classification, as illustrated in the following examples taken from the students’ oral productions in our database: (1) target-like resolved meaning-based lre *chi1: and later they start doing it. *chi2: making it. *chi1: making it later. in excerpt 1 (1), child 1 proposes the use of do, but child 2 corrects child 1 and suggests using make, which is accepted by child 1 in the following turn, reaching a correct resolution. (2) non-target-like resolved meaning-based lre *chi1: is the same (…) the same. *chi2: draw? *chi1: yes (.) the same picture. *chi1: bueno no. [well no] *chi2: is the same. *chi1: the same draw. in excerpt 2, child 2 suggests the word draw (for the intended english word picture) to help child 1 finish his/her previous utterance. child 1 provides a correction it in the next intervention and uses the right word picture, but he then hesitates and finally incorporates draw unsuccessfully in the last turn. (3) unresolved meaning-based lre *chi2: ¿cómo se decía coser? [how do you say to sew?] *chi1: eh (.) ni idea. [no idea] maría basterrechea, francisco gallardo-del-puerto 432 in excerpt 3, child 2 asks about the english word for the spanish verb coser ‘to sew,’ but child 1 does not know the word and leaves her partner’s question unanswered. (4) target-like resolved form-based lre *chi2: then the girl has a new idea and (.) it eh and he want she wants to eh. in excerpt 4, child 2 corrects his own utterance by adding the english 3rd person singular marker –s in want, while child 1 is not involved in the correction. (5) non-target-like resolved form-based lre *chi1: children happy (.) eh. *chi2: children is happy. *chi1: children is happy. in excerpt 5, child 1 omits the copula, which is incorporated as is by child 2 in the following turn, an incorrect outcome because of the lack of subject-verb agreement, which is eventually accepted by child 1 in her last utterance. (6) unresolved form-based lre *chi1: puede ser [may be] go to the chu church. *chi2: ¿cómo? [what?] *chi2: bueno no sé cómo se pronuncia. [well i do not know how to pronounce it] in excerpt 6, child 1 attempts the pronunciation of the word church while child 2 seems not to understand his partner and finally admits that he does not know how to pronounce it either, as evidenced in the last turn. as for pair dynamics, the patterns of dialogic interaction shown by the various dyads were classified according to the taxonomy proposed by storch (2002). the following excerpts, also taken from our database, exemplify the different dialogic dynamics: (7) collaborative (high equality high mutuality) *chi2: in the pocket he’s have a (…). *chi1: eh. *chi2: like a snake (.) in a. *chi1: a eh (.) a glass? *chi2: a glass. in excerpt 7, both learners help one another to elaborate the content and take into account each other’s utterances so as to build up ideas which follow from language-related episodes and pair dynamics in primary school clil learners: a comparison. . . 433 each other’s contributions. child 2 needs an english word (cup) and child 1 suggests a word (glass), which child 2 incorporates into his final utterance. (8) dominant/dominant (high equality low mutuality) *chi1: to the (.) así no se escribe the. [this is not the way the is written] *chi2: ah eso. [that] (he changes the spelling) *chi1: the se escribe te hache e. [the is written tee – aitch – e] *chi2: ya lo sé. [yes, i know that] in excerpt 8, both learners exhibit a desire to control the completion of the task in addition to a lack of engagement with each other’s contribution. child 1 reproves his partner for a word which was being spelt inaccurately, but child 2 corrects it on his own and impolitely ignores his/her partner’s correction. (9) dominant/passive (low equality low mutuality) *chi1: cerca? [near] *inv:1 chi2 is writing? *chi2: cerca? [near] *inv: cerca? [near] *inv: how do you say cerca [near] chi1? *inv: in english. *chi1: cerca. [near] (thinking) %sit: 2 chi2 continues writing on his own *inv: you speak english very well! *inv: near. *inv: but you have to help chi2. in excerpt 9, one of the learners has totally delegated his responsibility in the task to child 1, who has taken the lead in writing. the researcher unsuccessfully makes an indirect attempt to get child 1 engaged in the task, but eventually explicitly tells her that she should help her partner. (10) expert/novice (low equality high mutuality) *chi2: eh (…) eh (..) esto es una chica o un chico? [is this a girl or a boy?] *chi1: es una chica [it is a girl] one girl. *chi2: ah one girl. *chi1: this girl. *chi2: this girl eh (…). 1 inv = investigator. 2 %sit = situation. maría basterrechea, francisco gallardo-del-puerto 434 in excerpt 10, child 1 takes a more leading role than his partner but they both contribute to the task. using their first language (l1), child 2 asks about the gender of the child in the picture and child 1 answers first in spanish but immediately afterwards he provides the english term girl in an attempt to encourage his partner’s contribution to the task. child 2 incorporates the given word preceded by the numeral one, but child 1 makes the better suggestion of the phrase this girl, which is fully reproduced by child 2 in the last utterance. 4. results the results described in this section are organized according to the two research questions in the study. first, we will show the results of the analyses carried out in order to examine whether the pairing method (proficiency-matched vs. student-selected) had an impact on the quantity and quality of the lres produced. afterwards, the results concerning the types of pair dynamics identified in the dyadic interactions of the two research groups are shown. regarding the first research question (does the pairing method have an effect on the number and type and outcome of lres?), tables 1-5 display the total number of the various lre types as well as the percentages of each lre type, the mean number of lres per subject, and the range of each of the lre types. additionally, these tables offer information related to the two types of inferential statistical analyses which were carried out – independent samples t-tests and mann-whitney tests for intergroup comparisons between proficiency-matched and student-selected learners (see table rows), and dependent-samples t-tests or wilcoxon tests for intragroup comparisons between the two lre types examined in each table (see table columns). statistical significance is marked at p ≤ .05 (*), p ≤ .01 (**), and p ≤ .001 (***) values in tables 1-5. table 1 displays the results for the meaning-based and form-based lres produced by the two research groups (proficiency-matched vs. student-selected). as shown by the percentages and mean scores obtained, meaningbased lres were significantly more abundant than form-based lres in both proficiency-matched and student-selected samples. however, student-selected pairs achieved a significantly higher percentage and mean of meaning-based lres compared to the proficiency-matched pairs (75.86% vs. 64.07%; respectively; 11.00 vs. 6.29, respectively), whereas their percentage of form-based lres was lower than that of proficiency-matched learners (24.14% vs. 35.93%). this difference, however did not reach significance. language-related episodes and pair dynamics in primary school clil learners: a comparison. . . 435 table 1 types of lres according to pairing method proficiency-matched (n = 17) (t = 3.358, p ≤ .01**) student-selected (n = 10) (t = 4.858, p ≤ .001***) meaning-based (t = -2.889, p ≤ .05*) number % mean range 107 64.07% 6.29 0-16 110 75.86% 11.00 3-17 form-based (t = .029, p > .05) number % mean range 60 35.93% 3.53 0-11 35 24.14% 3.50 0-10 as for the outcome of lres, tables 2 and 3 display the results for meaningbased and form-based lres, respectively. as for the former, the data in table 2 indicate that most of the meaning-based lres produced were resolved to a significantly larger extent, with resolution percentage figures of 77.57% and 83.64% in the proficiency-matched and student-selected dyads respectively. regarding the gaps between the means for resolved and unresolved lres in each research group, this tendency turned out to be slightly more obvious in the student-selected sample (9.20 vs. 1.80) than in the proficiency-matched (4.82 vs. 1.41) sample. as for intergroup comparisons, proficiency-matched learners’ mean of resolved lres was statistically lower than that of student-selected pairs (4.82 vs. 9.20), whereas there were no differences between the two research groups for unresolved lre means (1.41 vs. 1.80). table 2 outcome of meaning-based lre types according to pairing method proficiency-matched (n = 17) (z = 3.415, p ≤ .001***) student-selected (n = 10) (z = 2.807, p ≤ .01**) resolved (t = -3.100, p ≤ .01**) number % mean range 83 77.57% 4.82 0-14 92 83.64% 9.20 2-15 unresolved (z = -.854, p > .05) number % mean range 24 22.43% 1.41 0-5 18 16.36% 1.80 1-5 maría basterrechea, francisco gallardo-del-puerto 436 regarding the outcome of form-based lres (table 3), it was found that both groups behaved in a very similar way, since they equally resolved most of the form-based lres (96.67%; 97.14%), the unresolved category being underrepresented (3.33%; 2.86%). comparisons between the means also pointed to this similarity between the two groups, since the mean of resolved lres was significantly higher than the mean of unresolved lres in both proficiencymatched (3.41 vs. 0.12) and student-selected (3.40 vs. 0.10) pairs. moreover, no significant differences were found between the two research groups either for resolved (3.41 vs 3.40) or unresolved (0.12 vs. 0.10) lres. table 3 outcome of form-based lre types according to pairing method proficiency-matched (n = 17) (z = 3.526, p ≤ .001***) student-selected (n = 10) (z = 2.524, p ≤ .05*) resolved (t = .012, p > .05) number % mean range 58 96.67% 3.41 0-10 34 97.14% 3.40 0-10 unresolved (z = -.138, p > .05) number % mean range 2 3.33% 0.12 0-1 1 2.86% 0.10 0-1 tables 4 and 5 focus on the outcome of lres. for each kind of pairing group, they show the data related to the (in)accuracy in the lres which had been resolved. as for meaning-based resolved lres (table 4), it was observed that both proficiency-matched and student-selected dyads resolved more lres in a targetlike manner than in a non-target-like manner. what is more, this was particularly true of the proficiency-matched dyads, as their percentage of correct resolutions of meaning-based lres amounted to 73.49% whereas that of student-selected groups only reached 54.35%. the mean scores obtained also yielded greater target-likeness differences in the proficiency-matched sample than in the studentselected one. whereas the means of right and wrong resolutions in the latter were not significantly different (5.00 and 4.20), in the former the mean of accurately resolved meaning-based lres was significantly higher than that of inaccurately resolved ones (3.59 vs. 1.29). as for intergroup comparisons, no statistically significant differences were found for target-like resolved meaning-based lres between proficiency-matched and student-selected learners (3.59 vs. 5.00). however, language-related episodes and pair dynamics in primary school clil learners: a comparison. . . 437 proficiency-matched pairs produced significantly fewer non-target-like resolved meaning-based lres than student-selected dyads (1.29 vs. 4.20). table 4 accuracy in meaning-based lre resolution according to pairing method proficiency-matched (n = 17) (z = 2.704, p ≤ .01**) student-selected (n = 10) (z = 1.198, p > .05) target-like (z = -1.192, p > .05) number % mean range 61 73.49% 3.59 0-11 50 54.35% 5.00 1-9 non-target-like (z = -2.859, p ≤ .01**) number % mean range 22 26.51% 1.29 0-5 42 45.65% 4.20 0-10 regarding the nature of resolved form-based lres, the percentages and means shown in table 5 seem to indicate that both groups behaved alike, as they resolved 75.86% and 73.57% of the form-based lres respectively, their mean scores for target-likeness (2.59 and 2.50) and for non-target-likeness (0.82 and 0.90) being quite similar. table 5 accuracy in form-based lre resolution according to pairing method proficiency-matched (n = 17) (z = 2.474, p ≤ .05*) student-selected (n = 10) (t = 2.058, p > .05) target-like (t = .097, p > .05) number % mean range 44 75.86% 2.59 0-9 25 73.53% 2.50 0-8 non-target-like (z = -.135, p > .05) number % mean range 14 24.14% 0.82 0-3 9 26.47% 0.90 0-5 as for the second research question (does the pairing method exert an influence on the patterns of interaction?), the data are presented in table 6. the maría basterrechea, francisco gallardo-del-puerto 438 number of student pairs classified into each of the patterns of interaction, as well as the percentages which these total numbers represent is shown for the proficiency-matched sample and the student-selected sample, separately. as can be seen in table 6, some dyads fell into a mixed pattern, something which happened in the data when pairs did not behave consistently. even if in storch’s 2002) model dyads globally fell into one of the patterns of interaction, the variability found in some of the dyads in this regard led us to consider the possibility of mixed patterns. table 6 further specifies the types of pair dynamics involved in these mixed patterns whenever this occurred. table 6 pair dynamics according to pairing method proficiency-matched (n = 17) student-selected (n = 10) collaborative number % 14 82.35% 4 40.00% dominant/dominant number % 1 10.00% dominant/passive number % expert/novice number % mixed number % collaborative & dominant/passive number % % over mixed dynamics collaborative & expert/novice number % % over mixed dynamics dominant/passive & expert/novice number % % over mixed dynamics 3 17.65% 1 5.88% 33.33% 2 11.76% 66.67% 5 50.00% 3 30.00% 60.00% 1 10.00% 20.00% 1 10.00% 20.00% as evidenced by the data shown in table 6, differences were observed according to the pairing method. proficiency-matched dyads overwhelmingly featured a collaborative pattern (82.35%), with none of them being labelled as fully dominant/dominant, dominant/passive or expert/novice. as for the mixed category, 100% of the pairs included the collaborative pattern in the mixed composition. language-related episodes and pair dynamics in primary school clil learners: a comparison. . . 439 moreover, 66.67% of the mixed pairs exhibited collaborative plus expert/novice patterns, both of which are considered to foster optimal collaboration according to storch (2002). as for the student-selected pairs, data showed that only 40.00% of the dyads were labelled as collaborative, whereas 10.00% of them exhibited a dominant/dominant pattern, which was not present in proficiencymatched dyads. however, half of the student-selected pairs were of a mixed nature (50.00%). the majority of mixed dynamics (80.00%) included the pernicious dominant/dominant pattern, and only a small percentage (20.00%) was of a beneficial collaborative plus expert/novice kind. 5. discussion the purpose of this study was to explore the effects of the pair formation method (proficiency-matched vs. student-selected) on both the production of lres and the pair dynamics exhibited in young clil learners’ dialogic interaction elicited from the joint completion of two collaborative tasks. the first research question addressed the issue of how the pairing of the learners affected the production of lres in terms of their number, type and outcome. it was found that learners produced more meaning-based than form-based lres, regardless of the pairing method. this is consistent with previous studies which found that low proficiency learners produced more meaning-focused lres, independently of the criterion used for pairing them (gallardo-del-puerto & basterrechea, in press; garcía mayo & imaz aguirre, 2019), or studies that examine the effect of proficiency on the type of lres with adults (leeser, 2004; malmqvist, 2005). this tendency to produce more meaning-based lres was more prominent in the case of student-selected pairs since the differences reached significance. this result must be linked to the fact that self-selection leads to a greater incidence of meaningbased lres in students’ interactions, regardless of their outcome. we might tentatively conclude that self-selection promotes dyad members’ engagement in attempting to solve the lexical difficulties encountered to move the tasks forward. therefore, it can be suggested that friendship (following mozaffari, 2017) makes self-selected pair members feel less shy in their collaborative interaction, at least in terms of discussion of lexical gaps. the current study provides support for the importance of interpersonal relationships in task-mediated interaction (philp, walter, & basturkmen, 2010). as for the limited occurrence of form-focused lres attested in the data, descriptive statistics indicated that proficiency-matched pairs produced a greater proportion of lres with a focus on form than student-selected pairs, although the difference did not reach statistical significance. it seems that pairing based on proficiency may enhance attention to language form, a finding that has maría basterrechea, francisco gallardo-del-puerto 440 also been reported for higher proficiency learners in studies that examine the impact of proficiency level on the type of lres produced by adolescent efl (basterrechea & leeser, 2019), adult efl (storch & aldosari, 2013) or learners of spanish as a fl (leeser, 2004). this study built on and extended previous research on the type of lres produced by young efl learners, as no previous studies have shown an advantage for proficiency-matched pairs in the production of form-based lres in this population. as far as outcome is concerned, no differences were found between the two groups in form-focused episodes, as both proficiency-matched and student-selected pairs resolved the majority of the lres that involved a focus on form, and, when doing so, they reached an accurate outcome on most occasions. however, analyses of accuracy showed that the percentage of meaningbased lres which were resolved in an inaccurate manner was significantly lower in proficiency-matched dyads than in student-selected ones, which again, provides support for the former type of pairing method. both for meaningand form-based lres the percentage of target-like solutions was significantly higher than that of incorrect ones in the proficiency-matched group, whereas studentselected pairs did not significantly distinguish between accurately and inaccurately resolved lres. these findings lend support to the idea that matched proficiency would be a better pairing method than self-selection as it results in more accurate resolutions. the effect of the pairing method on the target-likeness of lres is still an underexplored area in research. thus, our study provides a first step in showing the beneficial relationship between dyad members’ matched proficiency and higher target language accuracy. the second research question focused on the impact of the pairing method on pair dynamics. the analysis of patterns of interaction put forward by storch (2002) also yielded interesting differences according to the pairing method. proficiencymatched dyads predominantly fell into the collaborative pattern with minimal representation of the expert-novice or dominant-passive categories. student-selected pairs, however, collaborated much less in their interactions and presented a higher proportion of less negotiated or consensual dynamics (storch, 2002) such as dominant-passive and dominant-dominant interactive behaviours. these results contradict previous research findings conducted with young efl (garcía-mayo & imaz aguirre, 2019) and adult efl learners (mozaffari, 2017), where no differences were found in pair dynamics, as all dyads exhibited a collaborative relationship. 6. conclusion the present study has shown that young clil learners produced more meaningbased than form-based lres, regardless of the pairing method. self-selected language-related episodes and pair dynamics in primary school clil learners: a comparison. . . 441 pairs also produced more meaning-focused lres and resolved a larger number of lres than proficiency-matched pairs. however, proficiency-matched dyads produced more meaning-based lres which were resolved in a target-like manner than self-selected dyads. as for the patterns of interaction, the dynamics of proficiency-matched pairs were of a more collaborative nature (collaborative or expert-novice) than those of self-selected pairs, whose rate of deleterious patterns (dominant-passive or dominant-dominant) was higher. overall, while student-selection seems to promote the occurrence and outcome of meaning-based lres, it is proficiency-matching that makes learners engage in optimal patterns of interaction as well as achieve higher levels of accuracy in both meaningand form-based lres. matched proficiency seems to boost young clil learners’ focus on language and collaborative dynamics during task-based interaction to a greater extent than friendship. this could lead us to speculate that pair dynamics in the student self-selected pairs might not be based on friendship, as demonstrated by previous findings (mozaffari, 2017; russell, 2010). it should not be taken for granted that friendship is the sole reason for student self-pairing, as there may be other factors such as expediency, gender or foreign-language competence, for instance, that might account for students’ choices. our findings call for a more complex understanding of peer relationships, namely one that should consider learners’ attitudes in group discusions, especially when making errors or giving and receiving feedback, as has already been suggested in the literature (philp et al., 2010). hence, the data presented here should be triangulated with qualitative tools, namely think-aloud protocols providing insight into learners’ reported reasons guiding the selection of their peer. while we await further research to address this issue, we may conclude that the higher variability of patterns of interaction and the higher proportion of deleterious dynamics found in student-selected pairs indicate that factors other than friendship may be playing a crucial role when young clil learners choose a partner for pair work. a further limitation of this study is the fact that we did not control for tl proficiency in the two members of self-selected pairs, and thus the effect of this intervening variable could not be ruled out. studentselected dyads may have been made up of learners with the same or different proficiency, and this fact may have exerted an influence on their comparison with proficiency-matched dyads. further studies should also explore any task effects mediating the relationship between the independent (pairing method) and the dependent (lres and pair dynamics) variables. task modality (speaking vs. speaking + writing) has already been found to exert an influence on language focus during learners’ interaction (adams, 2006; adams & ross-feldman, 2008; azkarai & garcía mayo, 2012; garcía mayo & azkarai, 2016; garcía mayo & imaz aguirre, 2019; niu, maría basterrechea, francisco gallardo-del-puerto 442 2009; payant & kim, 2017). further analyses of our two tasks independently may shed new light on the interplay among types of task, lres, pair dynamics and pairing methods. this issue is worth investigating not only for theoretical reasons, but also because of its pedagogical implications, as it would be very useful for teachers to know which kinds of task trigger optimal lres and advantageous patterns of interaction for different types of pair formation. acknowledgements this work was supported by grants ffi2016-74950-p (spanish ministry of economy and competitiveness, national research agency and european regional development fund (aei/feder/eu) and it904-16 (basque government). we are grateful to the school, the teachers and, more particularly, the students who took part in the project. thanks also go to alberto san emeterio bolado for the vignettes in task 2. language-related episodes and pair dynamics in primary school clil learners: a comparison. . . 443 references adams, r. 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(1976). the role of tutoring in problem solving. journal of child psychology and psychiatry 17, 89-100. maría basterrechea, francisco gallardo-del-puerto 446 appendix a pictures for dotty's doll activity source: sparks 1: teacher’s book (house & scott, 2009, p. 74; reproduced with publisher's permission). language-related episodes and pair dynamics in primary school clil learners: a comparison. . . 447 appendix b pictures for the second task alberto san emeterio bolado© (published with author's permission) studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: miros aw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: mariusz kruk (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) vol. 2 no. 2 june 2012 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (trinity college, dublin) simon borg (university of leeds) piotr cap (university of ód ) anna cie licka (texas a&m international university, adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) kata csizer (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) krystyna dro dzia -szelest (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabry -barker (university of silesia) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of ód ) jan majer (university of ód ) anna micho ska-stadnik (university of wroc aw) anna ni egorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) terrence odlin (ohio state university) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) pawe scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) david singleton (trinity college, dublin) odzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) merrill swain (university of toronto) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of ód ) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – pozna 2012 editor: miros aw pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak mariusz kruk anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydzia pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam pozna proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print and online, with the print edition being the original version. published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, pozna contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy wiat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. wierzawska 1, 60-321 pozna special issue: affect in second language learning and teaching guest editors: danuta gabry -barker ewa piechurska-kuciel studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 2, number 2, june 2012 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors .................................................................... 151 editorial ......................................................................................... 155 articles: jelena mihaljevi djigunovi – dynamics of learner affective development in early fll .............................................................................. 159 larissa aronin – material culture of multilingualism and affectivity ... 179 peter macintyre, tammy gregersen – emotions that facilitate language learning: the positive-broadening power of the imagination ............. 193 robert c. gardner – integrative motivation and global language (english) acquisition in poland ........................................................ 215 ewa piechurska-kuciel – gender-dependent language anxiety in polish communication apprehensives ................................................. 227 miros aw pawlak – the dynamic nature of motivation in language learning: a classroom perspective ....................................................... 249 book reviews ................................................................................. 279 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 283 151 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors larissa aronin is professor at oranim academic college of education in israel. she has published in a range of international journals on a wide array of topics connected with multilingualism such as the international journal of the sociology of language, the international journal of multilingualism, and language teaching. she is the co-author of multilingualism (john benjamins, 2012), contributed to the encyclopedia of applied linguistics (wiley-blackwell, to be published in 2013) and co-edited the exploration of multilingualism: development of research on l3, multilingualism and multiple language acquisition (john benjamins, 2009). she is an advisory board member of language teaching (cup) and an editorial board member of studies in second language learning and teaching and international journal of multilingualism (routledge). contact details: (e-mail: larisa@research.haifa.ac.il) danuta gabry -barker is professor of english at the university of silesia, katowice, poland, where she lectures in second language acquisition. her main areas of interest are multilingualism and psycholinguistics (modalities, learner profiles and affectivity). she has published numerous articles nationally and internationally, and two books, aspects of multilingual storage, processing and retrieval (university of silesia press, 2005) and reflectivity in pre-service teacher education: a survey of theory and practice (university of silesia press, 2012). she has also edited the volume morphosyntactic issues in second language acquisition (multilingual matters, 2008). she is the co-editor of international journal of multilingualism (routledge). contact details: (e-mail: danuta.gabrys@gmail.com) robert c. gardner obtained his phd in psychology from mcgill university in 1960. he joined the department of psychology at the university of western ontario as a lecturer in 1961 and continued his work there till july 2000, when he was appointed 152 professor emeritus of psychology. he has written several books, among them social psychology and second language learning: the role of attitudes and motivation (edward arnold, 1985) and psychological statistics using spss for windows (prentice hall, 2001). in addition, he has published approximately 150 journal articles and book chapters, many of which deal with the role of attitudes and motivation in second language learning. others are concerned with ethnic relations, ethnic stereotypes and ethnic attitudes, psycholinguistics, and statistical analysis. contact details: (e-mail: gardner@uwo.ca) tammy gregersen is professor of tesol at the university of northern iowa, usa. she received her phd in linguistics from universidad catolica de valparaiso, chile in 1998. she spent 17 years teaching english, preparing efl teachers, and researching at universidad de atacama in copiapo, chile. her area of research centers on the individual differences that affect second language learning processing, including such factors as anxiety, motivation, self-esteem, beliefs, language learning strategies, perfectionism and learning styles. besides her many conference presentations in chile, dr. gregersen has also shared her research in portugal, spain, france, poland and the united states. contact details: (e-mail: tammy.gregersen@uni.edu) peter macintyre is professor of psychology at cape breton university in sydney, canada. in 2004, he received the gardner prize for contribution to the study of language from the international association for language and social psychology. he has published over 50 articles and chapters in the area of the psychology of second language acquisition, that is, how attitudes, motivation, anxiety and related variables affect the acquisition of and communication in a second language. his interests are also in public speaking anxiety and volunteerism. contact details: (e-mail: peter_macintyre@cbu.ca) jelena mihaljevi djigunovi is sla and tefl chair at zagreb university's english department. her main research interests centre round teaching young learners, the age factor, affective learner variables, and fl teacher education. she has participated in several international projects on language learning and teaching. the most recent project she has been involved in is the early language learning in europe (ellie) study, a longitudinal multi-national project carried out in seven european countries. she has published extensively in national and international journals. her publications include two research books, several volumes that she co-edited, and over 100 research papers. contact details: (e-mail: jdjigunovic@gmail.com) 153 miros aw pawlak is professor of english in the english department at the faculty of pedagogy and fine arts of adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland. his main areas of interest are sla theory and research, form-focused instruction, corrective feedback, classroom discourse, learner autonomy, communication and learning strategies, individual learner differences and pronunciation teaching. his recent publications include the place of form-focused instruction in the foreign language classroom (adam mickiewicz university press, 2006), production-oriented and comprehension-based grammar teaching in the foreign language classroom (with anna mystkowska-wiertelak, springer, 2011), the place of error correction in the foreign language classroom (adam mickiewicz university press, 2012), and several edited collections on learner autonomy, language policies of the council of europe, form-focused instruction, speaking in a foreign language and individual learner differences. contact details: (e-mail: pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl) ewa piechurska-kuciel is professor of applied linguistics at the institute of english, opole university, poland, where she teaches efl methodology and sla courses. she specializes in the role of affect in the foreign language learning process (anxiety, motivation, willingness to communicate in l2). her interests also include special educational needs (developmental dyslexia, autism and ad/hd). she has published two books: the importance of being aware: advantages of explicit grammar study (2005) and language anxiety in secondary grammar school students (2008), as well as papers in poland and worldwide. contact details: (e-mail: epiech@uni.opole.pl) 7 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (1). 7-8 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial this first 2012 issue opens the second volume of studies in second language learning and teaching and also inaugurates the second year of its existence. on the one hand, given the amount dedication, persistence, effort and hard work that it took to launch the journal, put together the first four issues, spread the word about the publication and, what is the most important, uphold high academic standards, it is without doubt comforting that ssllt is still around and it is in fact in very good shape. on the other hand, however, there is a realization that even more effort and perseverance will be necessary not only to maintain what has been accomplished, but to try to make the journal even more successful, make it available to wider audiences, and ensure that it only carries papers of highest quality. we are determined to do our utmost to achieve all of these goals because we are deeply convinced that the journal is in many ways unique, one manifestation of this uniqueness being the fact that articles by leading authorities in the field and somewhat less known scholars are often published side by side, which testifies to a healthy balance between knowledge and experience, and enthusiasm and freshness of outlook, and in many cases helps combine these in beneficial ways. the current issue opens with a paper by xiaoli jiang and andrew cohen, who provide an excellent overview of research on language learning strategies in china, focusing not only on synthesizing the results of relevant studies, but also tackling methodological issues as well a providing important directions for future empirical investigations. ma gorzata baranucarz shifts attention to the importance of the affective domain by reporting the findings of a study which set out to explore the relationship between the thickness of ego boundaries and the attainment in the formal study of pronunciation by polish students majoring in english. in the next contribution, déogratias nizonkiza demonstrates, much in line with the findings of the previous research, that controlled productive knowledge of collocations increases together with profi 8 ciency, its development is facilitated by the frequency of exposure and it can best be fostered with advanced learners. in yet another research-based paper, hadi farjami focuses on the role of images and metaphors about foreign language learning and, using the data gleaned from iranian learners of english, argues that teachers’ awareness of these can be instrumental in dealing with various language learning problems. in the last paper included in the present issue of ssllt, darío luis banegas draws upon the tenets of sociocultural theory to offer a rationale for integrating language and content in the english language classroom, and shows how this can be attained by discussing the benefits, models and challenges of content-based instruction and content and language integrated learning. miros aw pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl 673 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (3). 2018. 673-696 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.3.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt english medium instruction: comparing teacher beliefs in secondary and tertiary education jessica g. briggs university of oxford, uk jess.briggs@education.ox.ac.uk julie dearden university of oxford, uk julie.dearden@education.ox.ac.uk ernesto macaro university of oxford, uk ernesto.macaro@education.ox.ac.uk abstract learning content through the medium of a second language is a form of education which is growing rapidly in both secondary and tertiary educational phases. yet, although considerable research now exists on these phases of education viewed separately, virtually no comparisons have been made between the two phases. this study compared beliefs about english medium instruction (emi) held by 167 secondary and tertiary emi teachers from 27 countries. teachers’ beliefs were elicited in four key areas: emi teachers’ goals, emi policy, benefits and drawbacks to students, and challenges to teachers. the findings indicate that secondary teachers felt more strongly that emi provides students with a high quality education. more secondary than tertiary teachers reported an institutional policy on the english proficiency level required of teachers to teach through emi, yet in neither phase was there evidence of adequate support to reach a required proficiency level. teachers deemed emi beneficial to advancing students’ english but felt that emi would affect academic content, with no clear difference between the phases. jessica g. briggs, julie dearden, ernesto macaro 674 our conclusions indicate that emi is being introduced without thorough institutional stakeholder discussion and therefore without clear policies on levels of teacher expertise. neither is there evidence of a dialogue between phases regarding the challenges faced by emi teachers and students. keywords: english medium instruction (emi); content and language integrated learning (clil); teacher cognition; teacher professional development 1. introduction in both secondary and tertiary education the world is seeing a major transformation in the way that the teaching of english as a foreign or second language (l2) is being conceived of and offered to adolescents and young adults. instead of relying essentially on classrooms in which the primary aim is to teach the l2, the vehicle through which l2 english is being delivered is an academic subject other than english. in other words, a “content subject” is being taught in a language which is not the first language (l1) of (usually) the majority of the students in a class, nor of the majority population outside that class. it is this latter criterion that distinguishes english medium instruction (emi) from what some researchers call content-based learning, or content-based language learning (e.g., met, 1999; stoller, 2004). in countries such as the united states or australia, although english may be an l2 for the majority of the students in a class, it is not an l2 for the majority of people outside the class. in this paper we are not including the latter educational setting in our definition of emi. there are a number of labels given to the emi phenomenon, among which there are the following: english medium instruction (byun et al., 2011; tatzl, 2011), english medium of instruction (chu, 2005), english as a medium of instruction (sultana, 2014), english-medium education (earls, 2016), and english as the lingua franca medium of instruction (björkman, 2010). although the words english and medium have tended to be used more in tertiary education, they have also been used in secondary (e.g., studies in hong kong, pakistan, bangladesh). another label given to the practice of teaching content through an l2 in countries where the majority of the population does not have that language as their l1 is clil (content and language integrated learning). this label is normally to be found in european contexts (e.g., ruiz de zarobe & jiménez-catalán, 2009), but not exclusively so (e.g., in taiwan; tai, 2015). clil tends to be used in secondary education but has also been used occasionally in tertiary (see the taiwan study) and recently the term integrating content and language in higher education has been coined, thereby grafting a secondary label onto a tertiary one. in this article, we adopt the label emi as an umbrella term to cover all these other labels. english medium instruction: comparing teacher beliefs in secondary and tertiary education 675 we raise issues of labeling because in a comparison of teacher beliefs between secondary and tertiary education, it is apparent that researchers and policy makers have come to the topic from very different directions and different educational research fields. this is made evident by the fact that, to our knowledge and despite an extensive literature search, no studies have compared the two phases of education (apart from the few cited below), and within those the comparison is only an indirect one. however, we believe that to treat in research terms (and indeed teacher professional development terms) the phases as completely separate risks obscuring the many important transition-phase issues related to content knowledge, language proficiency, teaching styles, size of classrooms and curriculum emphasis (macaro, 2018). moreover, it appears that the increase in emi is occurring concurrently in both phases rather than one being followed by the other; yet the different reasons for this concurrent growth have hardly been explored to date. as shohamy (2012, p. 197) has argued: the teaching of emi at universities cannot be detached from broader settings where medium of instruction approaches are implemented [and] . . . there are major lessons that can be learned from each of the settings that may have an impact on the others. throughout the world many universities are increasing the number of courses they are offering students through the medium of english. the primary reason for this as reported by most researchers is the need to attract lucrative international students by internationalizing the institution and thereby gaining it prestige though global or regional university rankings. the secondary reason is to be able to offer home students an emi curriculum which will prepare them better for the globalised world. in some areas, the growth in emi is researched using quite rigorous research instruments. for example, in europe wächter and maiworm (2008) and brenn-white and faethe (2013) report (based on statistical data available online and by surveying directors of programmes) increases in postgraduate courses in the region of 30%. in asia (fenton-smith, humphries, & walkinshaw, 2017) and the middle east (e.g., ryhan, 2014), there are less statistical data available, but almost without exception researchers and commentators in tertiary education report that countries are increasing the number of programs taught through english and that they are doing so because of the need to prepare students for the global employment market. in latin america, brazil appears to be one of the leading countries in developing an international dimension to its tertiary education with the launch of the science without borders and subsequently english without borders programs (british council, 2015). the “juggernaut” of emi is likewise “trundling along” (hu, 2008) the secondary educational road. leone (2015) in italy, lasagabaster (2009) in spain, and gierlinger (2015) in austria are just some of the many european researchers or observers jessica g. briggs, julie dearden, ernesto macaro 676 of the growth, which has its origins in the plurilingual aspirations of the european union (the “mother tongue plus two” policy; ec, 2003). in the middle east, the origins are quite different; shortage of labor, and very large migrant and expatriate populations appear to be the emi drivers in secondary education with the additional competition of the private sector (al-maadheed, 2013; mcmullen, 2014; moorejones, 2015), a drive which is contested by strong cultural and religious beliefs (karmani, 2015). in sub-saharan africa, the phenomenon of emi is almost exclusively confined to pre-tertiary education, at least in terms of the research available (mcilwraith, 2012; muthwii, 2004), and has its roots in the post-colonial legacy. in many of these african nations its introduction and pervasiveness is hotly contested by researchers and commentators (if not very often by policy makers) because of the evidence that studying content subjects through english before the home language is fully developed is proving highly deleterious to the life chances of young people and their educational outcomes. in asia, the origins either lie in the outer circle countries (kachru, 1985), which were formally colonized by the british and (to a lesser extent) the americans and spanish, or in the expanding circle countries such as china (hu, 2008), which lament the apparent lack of progress with english among its pre-tertiary student population. very little research attention appears to have been given to emi in secondary education in latin american countries. these then are just some of the pieces which make up the complex picture of emi in both secondary and tertiary education (the picture is further complicated by the immersion phenomenon in primary education, but that phase is beyond the scope of this paper). in light of this complex picture, it is important to find out whether the different drivers of emi, both between and within the two phases, lead to different teacher beliefs about the advantages and disadvantages of emi. it is the research on teacher beliefs to which we now turn. 2. literature review this section adopts a teacher perspective, often referred to as teacher cognition (borg, 2003), which focuses on the way in which teachers’ beliefs are socially constructed by the environment in which they operate and which may or may not coincide with their actual practice. the emi higher education literature is replete with studies of teacher beliefs; the secondary one is less so, and, as we have said, none compare the two phases. university teachers in korea already teaching through emi were asked about whether, if they had the choice, they would prefer to revert back to teaching through the l1 (cho, 2012). the strong suggestion in cho’s paper is that emi had been imposed on them rather than having been adopted voluntarily. more than 50% of respondents said they would prefer to revert back to teaching in english medium instruction: comparing teacher beliefs in secondary and tertiary education 677 korean, with some 22% saying they were not sure how they would react to the offer. more than half of respondents also claimed that it took far longer to prepare their classes in english than in l1 and as few as 14.6% claimed to be satisfied with their emi teaching performance. secondary school mathematics teachers in italy were asked about their attitudes to different aspects of clil (favilli, maffei, & peroni, 2013), and they reported a number of difficulties related to their linguistic ability. a similar study in italy by di martino and di sabato (2012) found negative attitudes towards the quite sudden imposition of emi at the upper secondary level without adequate teacher or student preparation. thus, one of the themes that sometimes arises in the emi teacher beliefs literature is the extent to which the stakeholders (in this case teachers) are involved in the decision to introduce it, to what extent and when. on the other hand, francomacaro’s (2011) study explored italian engineering teachers’ perceptions of students’ proficiency levels and found that most respondents were not concerned that students’ understanding of the subject would suffer as a result of it being taught through english. in the turkish university context, başıbek et al. (2014) asked respondents whether they supported introducing emi, and, unlike in the korean situation above, found that a small majority were in favor of its introduction, possibly because there was less evidence that it had been imposed. nevertheless, they did allude to some of the difficulties they were experiencing, most of which were in connection with their students’ lack of proficiency in english. kiliçkaya (2000), more than a decade earlier in the same country, had found that university teachers were convinced that teaching through turkish would achieve better content results; so perhaps there has been a change in attitudes or possibly attitudes are variable dependent on the institution type. in malaysia, othman and saat (2009) surveyed pre-service science teachers asking them about the kinds of challenges they considered they were facing. the teachers cited once again the difficulty in explaining complex scientific concepts in english, and their own lack of skill in being able to integrate teaching content and improving their students’ english competence. in the same country, tan and lan (2011) surveyed secondary mathematics teachers. they made a further distinction by asking both rural and urban teachers about their preferred medium of instruction. there was strong evidence to suggest that the rural teachers faced greater challenges and would have preferred to teach through bahasa malaysia (the national language and l1 of the malay ethnic group), which the authors interpret as being connected to the fact that urban students have greater exposure to english and better efl preparation generally. what we have found so far in our perusal of the existing literature on teacher beliefs in both educational phases is that there is no clear pattern or jessica g. briggs, julie dearden, ernesto macaro 678 distinction between the phases, yet there appear to be some within-country discrepancies. one of the problems in this body of literature is that these disparate studies ask different types of questions of different phases and in different countries, something which our study sought to remedy by asking the same questions of both phases of education. nevertheless, the pattern of concern about students’ english proficiency levels is widespread and consistent. in iraqi kurdistan, borg (2016) found that university teachers believed their students were at very elementary levels of proficiency in english, well below that needed to successfully operate in an emi program. in the united arab emirates, rogier’s (2012) study of university teachers found that students were weak in the areas of listening and writing. this is interesting in that clearly listening is one of the skills that one would expect to be developed precisely through emi exposure, whereas the skill of writing might be developed separately in english for academic purposes courses. thus, in both of these studies the expectation is that students should come from secondary education to their university courses with the right level of english, not that the emi content teacher is responsible for moderating their teaching to suit the level of the students. kim and shin (2014) in korea also report that teachers in their study believed that nearly a third of their students were not at the right level to operate successfully in an emi class, and this despite the fact that their study was conducted in a prestigious university. in finland, on the other hand, moate’s (2011) secondary school teachers seemed to attach less blame to the students’ level of english even though they considered teaching through emi a challenge. this difference could possibly be a result of the fact that their classes were designated “clil classes” (and, therefore, the development of language and content may have been explicit as dual pedagogical aims), or it could be that secondary teachers simply consider their role as educators in a different way to that of tertiary teachers. we cannot tell from moate’s (2011) study as there is no clear evidence that teachers were “integrating content and language.” nor do we have any evidence from tan and lan’s (2011) study in malaysian secondary schools that teachers were not integrating language and content in some way (perhaps by providing language support materials). yet one maths teacher’s comments seemed to typify the attitudes: if they were teaching in bahasa malaysia, the students would understand a lot more mathematics; in english some students might understand as little as 60% (tan & lan, 2011, p. 13). in lower secondary education in south africa, probyn (2001) reported that in grades 8 and 9 students, according to their teachers, were experiencing great difficulties because of their low levels of english proficiency. even though the teachers were described by the authors as “excellent teachers,” they were not english medium instruction: comparing teacher beliefs in secondary and tertiary education 679 able to adapt their levels of english sufficiently to be able to permit their students to access the curriculum and were having to resort to the students’ l1. in summary, we have a great deal of research evidence on teacher beliefs about emi but all from different studies adopting different instruments, phrasing questions differently, and with different administration procedures. although we cannot claim in our study, given that it also has a broad international sweep, to have dealt with all the variables, we can at least begin a more methodical analysis of the different phases of education through the use of a single instrument and a single procedure. the above led us to formulate the following research questions with regard to the two phases of education: 1. what do teachers believe they are trying to achieve when teaching through emi? 2. are policies with regard to emi available in their institutions? 3. to what extent do teachers believe their students benefit from and are limited by emi? 4. what are the challenges that teachers face teaching through emi? 3. methodology 3.1. study design we adopted a cross-sectional, mixed-methods design within a single instrument, an online global survey titled english medium instruction: a global view of emi investigating the views and opinions of the population of secondary school and tertiary level teachers around the world. we used multiple question formats on the instrument in order to gather both qualitative and quantitative data. 3.2. sample we drew potential respondents’ attention to the survey through the contacts that our institution has in secondary schools and universities in various countries. the survey link was made available via our departmental website. invited participants were further encouraged to pass the link to other teachers in their institution, and so some snowball sampling took place. there was also a self-selection sampling aspect in that respondents could happen across the survey in the course of their normal browsing and were not proactively solicited by the researchers or by other participants. 435 responses were collected in total. of these there were 236 respondents who teach english (i.e., english language and english literature through english): jessica g. briggs, julie dearden, ernesto macaro 680 these respondents were filtered out of the analyses, as the teaching of english through english does not fit with our previously stated definition of emi. of the remaining 199 participants, 32 omitted to state the educational level (secondary/tertiary) in which they work. given that the focus of this study is a comparison of secondary and tertiary teachers’ beliefs, these 32 participants were also excluded from the analyses, yielding a final sample of 167. the remaining 167 respondents worked in 29 different countries, the most frequently reported of which were germany, vietnam, spain, austria, pakistan, hungary, romania, italy, thailand, poland, china, the philippines and nigeria. a large majority were working in state-owned institutions (82.8%) whereas 17.2% worked in private institutions. most respondents were aged between 30-49 (57.7%) whereas smaller proportions were aged 18-29 (17.9%) or 50+ (24.5%). most participants had been teaching for a total of 5-15 years (36.4%) or 15-30 years (28.8%), indicating a wealth of teaching experience within the sample. 65.3% worked in tertiary institutions and 34.7% in secondary institutions. nearly half the total sample (44.9%) reported that their emi classes comprise 100% home country students; 31.7% teach mostly home country students with a few international students; 19.8% teach a mix of home and international students; and 3.6% teach solely international students. 3.3. instrument the survey was generated as a consequence of preliminary research conducted in 2013 by two of the authors. this prior research took the form of semi-structured interviews; thus, the current study adopted a qualitative to quantitative approach in instrument design. rather than attempting to provide as an appendix the complex online survey utilized in the present study, we describe it for the reader in what follows. the survey comprised 28 items, of which questions 1-11 (q1-q11) were the same for all respondents. these probed background and demographic information (e.g., age and teaching location), information about the institutions for which they work, the educational level at which they work, and the students that they teach. q12 (secondary) and q13 (tertiary) asked what the respondent was trying to achieve by teaching through emi. to investigate these goals, respondents were presented with 26 sub-items, each of which listed one possible emi goal (e.g., “improve my english” and “provide a high level education”) and utilized a 5-point response scale with the anchors 1 (this sounds a lot like me) and 5 (this sounds not at all like me). many of the 26 sub-items were necessarily different for secondary teachers and tertiary teachers respectively. for example, the secondary items probed goals such as preparing pupils for leaving school and pleasing english medium instruction: comparing teacher beliefs in secondary and tertiary education 681 pupils’ parents, whereas the tertiary items pertained to goals such as attracting doctoral students and internationalizing the university. however, some items on goals were the same for both educational levels (e.g., “enroll more students” and “improve my english”). the internal consistency of the responses for these items was high at α = .94 for the secondary items and α = .89 for the tertiary items. q14 asked secondary teachers how they prepare their pupils for learning through emi at university. this item had a free-write response format as a means of eliciting detailed qualitative data. from q15 on all respondents answered the same questions. q15, q16 and q17 asked for opinions on whether emi was beneficial or damaging. regarding the reasons why teachers believe that emi is beneficial to their students, an 11item series of questions probed respondents’ views (e.g., “makes them competitive in a global marketplace”), using a 5-part “how true of me” scale ranging from 1 (this sounds a lot like me) to 5 (this sounds not at all like me). the internal consistency of this scale was high at α = .89. the sample also responded to a series of 8 items which probed their beliefs about the potential damaging effects to students of being taught through emi (e.g., “they will not understand the content of the lesson”). these items took the same “how true of me” 5-point response format, the internal consistency being high at α = .88. q18 probed the extent to which emi teachers find certain aspects of teaching through english difficult (e.g., “preparing materials for the lesson”). respondents were presented with 14 sub-items, each of which listed one aspect of teaching through english, with a 5-point response scale from 1 (very difficult) to 5 (very easy). the internal consistency of this scale was very high at α = .96. q19 and q20 explored beliefs about the effects of emi. q19 asked whether teachers think that emi students will improve their english, with a tripartite response format (yes, no, to some extent) and the opportunity to provide free-write qualitative comments to expand on their selected response. q20 probed whether teachers think that the other academic subject content will be affected, with tripartite quantitative and free-write qualitative response formats. q21-q24 elicited data on the extent to which teachers believe that all teachers are capable of teaching through emi and the role of english language proficiency in emi teaching ability (i.e., the requisite proficiency level, whether their institution has a policy on teachers’ proficiency level, and the means by which teachers attain the requisite proficiency level). these items further used 3-option and free-write response formats. likewise, q25-28 probed the extent to which all students are capable of learning through emi and the role of english language proficiency on the part of emi students. jessica g. briggs, julie dearden, ernesto macaro 682 3.4. procedure the survey was piloted with 9 participants in march 2014 and minor changes were made to ensure that items were clearly worded, specific and appropriate for the population and that they followed in a logical fashion. the final survey went online in april 2014 (administered via survey monkey), and responses were collected mainly between april and october 2014, although the survey was left online and finally closed in may 2016. the data were captured on a network server connected directly to the survey monkey database program, which guaranteed confidentiality. the data were then transferred to spss for analysis. 4. results the results are structured according to the research questions. for each research question we first present the findings in general, and then provide a comparative account of teacher beliefs in secondary and tertiary education. 4.1. emi goals the descriptive statistics listed in tables 1 and 2 indicate that, for both secondary and tertiary teachers, providing a high level of education for home country students and giving home country students opportunities were their primary goals of teaching through english. table 1 secondary teachers’ emi goals rank item n m sd 1 provide a high level education for home students 44 1.272 0.544 2 give the home students opportunities 44 1.318 0.638 3 improve pupils’ understanding of the subject content 44 1.318 0.707 4 prepare pupils for when they leave school 44 1.340 0.887 5 give myself a challenge 44 1.386 0.784 7 improve my english 44 1.477 0.952 6 prepare pupils for going to university 43 1.488 0.909 7 offer a syllabus which is attractive 44 1.522 0.875 8 help students to study abroad 43 1.534 0.908 9 make home students more aware of other cultures 41 1.585 0.805 10 facilitate exchanges 44 1.636 0.942 11 improve my career 43 1.697 1.035 12 teach the home pupils english 43 1.697 1.058 13 make our school more attractive than others 44 1.704 1.132 14 follow school policy 44 1.886 0.945 15 promote my school 45 1.933 1.095 16 give my school an international reputation 44 1.954 1.055 17 follow government policy 45 2.088 1.183 english medium instruction: comparing teacher beliefs in secondary and tertiary education 683 18 enroll more students 44 2.113 1.104 19 please the students 45 2.222 1.241 20 achieve peace between countries 44 2.227 1.309 21 give myself the chance to teach abroad 44 2.318 1.307 22 reach international students who come here 43 2.372 1.397 23 provide a high level education for international students 44 2.454 1.421 24 attract international students 44 2.477 1.337 25 please the parents 44 2.613 1.242 26 improve the financial situation of my school 44 2.977 1.372 table 2 tertiary teachers’ emi goals rank item n m sd 1 provide a high level education for home students 97 1.690 1.054 2 give the home students opportunities 94 1.723 1.020 3 prepare students for a global workplace 96 1.736 1.107 4 offer courses which are attractive 98 1.755 1.055 5 improve home students’ english 97 1.783 1.002 6 improve students’ careers 97 1.804 1.105 7 facilitate exchanges 96 1.843 1.108 8 help students to study abroad 97 1.896 1.131 9 enable students to access international publications 97 1.907 1.199 10 enable international students to learn 96 2.041 1.247 11 provide a high level education for international students 97 2.051 1.193 12 give my institution an international reputation 97 2.061 1.170 13 promote my institution 95 2.147 1.148 14 improve my career 98 2.255 1.326 15 improve our institution’s ranking 97 2.257 1.268 16 attract international students 97 2.268 1.287 17 attract better quality students 96 2.312 1.259 18 prepare students for international conferences 97 2.340 1.281 19 give myself the chance to teach abroad 95 2.410 1.371 20 improve my english 98 2.489 1.587 21 follow policy 95 2.536 1.311 22 enroll more students 96 2.593 1.302 23 attract future doctoral students 97 2.721 1.359 24 achieve peace between countries 97 2.948 1.372 25 improve the financial situation of my institution 97 3.041 1.282 26 implement the bologna process 94 3.095 1.459 15 of the 26 sub-items were the same (or very similar) across both levels. these items formed the basis of a series of independent-samples t tests to determine whether secondary and tertiary teachers’ goals differed. the t tests, the results of which are presented in table 3, identified three significant differences (with moderate and large effect sizes) between secondary and tertiary teachers’ self-reported emi goals, after application of the bonferroni adjustment (.05/15 = p = .003*). these findings indicate that secondary teachers felt significantly and substantively more strongly that when teaching through emi, they are aiming to jessica g. briggs, julie dearden, ernesto macaro 684 provide a high level education for home students, to improve their own english, and to follow institutional policy. a very large effect size (d = .76) for institutional level was found with regard to teachers aiming to improve their english by teaching through english. table 3 comparison of secondary and tertiary teachers’ emi goals item secondary tertiary t df p d n m sd n m sd provide a high level education for home country students 44 1.27 0.54 96 1.70 1.05 -3.14 136.1 .002 .52 improve my english 44 1.48 0.95 97 2.46 1.57 -4.59 127.8 .000 .76 follow (school) policy 44 1.89 0.95 94 2.53 1.32 -3.28 113.3 .001 .56 4.2. emi policy 55.3% of the sample overall reported that teaching through english was the policy in their school or university, with 27.4% reporting that it was not the policy, and 17.3% reporting that they were not sure. for secondary teachers, these proportions were 54.4%, 28.1% and 17.5% respectively, and for tertiary teachers 55.1%, 26.2% and 18.7%. a chi-square test for independence found no significant differences in this regard. 57.5% of the secondary-level institutions were reported to have a policy on the level of english required of emi teachers, whereas 27.8% of the tertiary teachers reported an institutional policy in this regard. a chi-square test for independence examined the association between educational level and reported institutional policy on emi teachers’ level of english. the association between these variables was significant [χ²(2, n = 132) = 7.19, p = 0.27, phi = .23], indicating that secondary institutions are more strongly associated with a reported policy on emi teachers’ level of english in comparison with tertiary institutions. a large proportion (78%) of the sample overall stated that they do not know how teachers in their institution usually reach the appropriate level of english to teach through english. for secondary teachers, one of the most commonly reported means of reaching the appropriate level of proficiency related to self-development of english language skills, for example: “just private diligence.” another commonly reported means related to secondary-level institution-led/sanctioned opportunities for english language development/validation, for example: “they are allowed to attend language courses and are supported to undergo job-shadowing in partner schools.” some secondary teachers referred to english language development as a result of teaching through emi, for example: “they can pick it up along the way (slightly dangerous).” however, some secondary teachers reported skepticism regarding the extent to which they are supported in reaching the right level of english medium instruction: comparing teacher beliefs in secondary and tertiary education 685 english language proficiency, for example: “there is no set criteria to judge the english level of a teacher. if she can speak english to some extent she can teach (i do not agree). there should be a test to judge the level.” many tertiary teachers, similarly to the secondary teachers, expressed the opinion that english language development is primarily the responsibility of the individual teacher. for tertiary teachers, one commonly reported means of reaching the right level of english proficiency related to academic study of their subject discipline through english, for example: “reading english papers, writing papers in english, attend and present at academic conferences in english.” another common means of language development reported by tertiary teachers refers to international travel and collaboration as part of their work, for example: “most of my colleagues studied in an english-speaking country or have worked abroad.” a large majority (70.1%) of the total sample stated that they did not believe that all teachers were capable of teaching through emi. for secondary teachers specifically, this proportion was 66.7% and for tertiary teachers 73.6%. a chi-square test for independence (with yates continuity correction) indicated no significant difference by educational level regarding beliefs about whether all teachers are capable of teaching in emi [χ²(1, n = 126) = .34, p = .56, phi = .07]. regarding the level of english a teacher needs to teach emi, 49.3% of the total sample indicated that advanced proficiency was required, and “advanced” was the most frequently selected response. for secondary teachers considered separately, this proportion stood at 37.5% and for tertiary teachers 56.5%. at both levels again “advanced” was the most frequent response. 4.3. the benefits and drawbacks to students of emi a large majority (79.3%) of the sample overall stated that they believe that emi is beneficial to students, whereas 2.1% do not believe it is beneficial to students, and 18.6% believe it is beneficial “to some extent.” of the secondary teachers, 89.2% felt that emi is beneficial to students, 2.7% felt that it is not, and 8.1% responded “to some extent.” of the tertiary teachers, 78.2% believe that emi is beneficial to students, 1.1% believe it is not, and 20.7% believe it is beneficial “to some extent.” a chi-square test for independence found no significant association between institutional level and beliefs about whether emi is beneficial to students (p = .20). the descriptive statistics for the benefits items, which are presented in table 4, suggest that the sample overall believe that emi is beneficial to students primarily because learning content through english teaches them english, makes them competitive in a global market, and provides them with a high level of education. as none of the means for these items is higher than 2.5, these data indicate that the sample felt that all 11 items are reasons why emi is beneficial to their students. jessica g. briggs, julie dearden, ernesto macaro 686 table 4 overall sample beliefs about benefits to students of emi rank item n m sd 1 teaches them english 155 1.55 0.85 2 makes them competitive in a global market 150 1.61 0.93 3 provides a high level education 152 1.63 0.94 4 gives them a challenge 148 1.64 0.85 5 motivates them 148 1.91 1.09 6 makes the lesson more interesting 148 2.00 1.07 7 is what they expect 148 2.22 1.21 8 makes them part of an elite 147 2.39 1.26 9 is what their parents expect 150 2.43 1.34 10 makes problem-solving easier 150 2.45 1.20 11 makes the concepts easier to understand 149 2.48 1.22 independent-samples t tests, the results of which are presented in table 5, identified a number of significant differences (with moderate and large effect sizes) between secondary and tertiary teachers’ viewpoints on the benefits to students of emi, after application of the bonferroni adjustment (.05/11 = p = .004*). these findings indicate that secondary teachers felt significantly and substantively more strongly that emi is beneficial to their students in terms of making them more competitive in a global market, providing a high level of education, giving them a challenge, motivating them, making lessons more interesting, making problem-solving easier, and making concepts easier to understand. very large effect sizes for educational level were found regarding making the lesson more interesting (d = .99), motivating students/pupils (d = .75), and making concepts easier to understand (d = .76). table 5 comparison of secondary and tertiary teachers’ beliefs about benefits of emi to students item secondary tertiary t df p d n m sd n m sd makes them more competitive in a global market 42 1.28 0.45 94 1.72 1.02 -3.46 133.9 .001 .56 provides a high level education 43 1.22 0.47 94 1.74 1.03 -4.02 135.9 .000 .65 gives them a challenge 42 1.30 0.59 93 1.78 0.91 -3.66 118.9 .000 .63 motivates them 43 1.39 0.72 93 2.11 1.15 -4.42 121.8 .000 .75 makes the lesson more interesting 43 1.35 0.65 94 2.26 1.12 -5.89 124.8 .000 .99 makes problem-solving easier 43 1.97 1.05 94 2.63 1.23 -3.04 135 0.003 0.58 makes the concepts easier to understand 43 1.86 1.10 94 2.73 1.19 -4.07 135 .000 .76 the descriptive statistics for the drawback items, included in table 6, suggest, as none of the means for these items is lower than 2.5, that the sample overall felt that none of these items is a reason why emi is damaging to their students. a series of independent-samples t tests found no significant differences between secondary and tertiary teachers on these eight individual items. english medium instruction: comparing teacher beliefs in secondary and tertiary education 687 table 6 overall sample beliefs about why emi is damaging to students rank item n m sd 1 they will not understand the content of the lesson 142 3.02 1.26 2 we will have to simplify concepts 143 3.17 1.30 3 some students cannot learn english 145 3.22 1.38 4 the other academic subject will be affected 141 3.62 1.28 5 they will learn less in english than in their home language 143 3.67 1.24 6 my english is very bad so they will learn bad english 141 4.01 1.11 7 they will not develop their home language 140 4.04 1.23 8 they will forget their home language 142 4.18 1.19 in response to the question: “do you believe that other academic subject content will be affected?,” 46.6% of the sample overall stated that they do not believe academic content will be affected, whereas 25.3% thought that content would be affected, and 28.1% felt it would be affected “to some extent.” the descriptive statistics indicate that secondary teachers (29.3% selected “yes;” 48.8% “no;” 22% “to some extent”) and tertiary teachers (25% “yes;” 44.6% “no;” 30.4% “to some extent”) responded similarly to this question. a chi-square test for independence indicated no significant association between institutional level and the belief that emi will affect other academic subject content (p = .56). secondary teachers’ free-write comments in response to this item were almost exclusively positive about the effect of emi on academic subject content learning, for example: “i consider it will be affected in the right way, students will understand the other academic subject more deeply.” however, some secondary teachers pointed out that the effect of emi on subject discipline knowledge is dependent on the pedagogical approach, for example: “subject content is only affected when clil is done defectively.” tertiary teachers similarly felt largely positive about the impact of teaching through english on other subject discipline content, for example: “the other subject content will be affected positively because the other subjects are also in english.” nevertheless, a number of tertiary teachers also suggested that students with a deficit of english language proficiency were likely to be negatively affected with regard to their subject discipline content learning, for example: “those students who are not capable to understand the information because of the language barrier will be affected.” further, some tertiary teachers felt there is a trade-off between depth and breadth regarding subject discipline content delivered through emi, for example: we find that we are covering less material but perhaps more deeply that [sic] we would if we were doing in japanese. in the students’ l1 there is a tendency to overload them with content and hope for the best. jessica g. briggs, julie dearden, ernesto macaro 688 4.4. the challenges to teachers of emi the descriptive statistics included in table 7 indicate that working with textbooks was the least difficult aspect of teaching through english for both secondary and tertiary emi teachers combined. preparing lessons and materials was more challenging, as was motivating the students. however, as all the means are higher than 2.5, these data suggest that for the sample overall none of these aspects of teaching through english is particularly difficult. a series of t tests found no significant differences between secondary and tertiary teachers on these 14 items. table 7 overall sample beliefs about the challenges to teachers of emi rank item n m sd 1 prepare the lessons 147 3.13 1.23 2 prepare the materials for the lesson 144 3.19 1.24 3 motivate the students 145 3.26 1.10 4 know if the students have understood you 145 3.32 1.12 5 pronounce words properly 143 3.38 1.24 6 write tests and exams 145 3.39 1.23 7 know the subject vocabulary in english 144 3.40 1.21 8 correct tests and exams 145 3.41 1.16 9 give alternative explanations 143 3.42 1.25 10 explain clearly 142 3.46 1.26 11 translate your subject knowledge into english 144 3.47 1.27 12 link sentences when you are speaking 143 3.48 1.28 13 speak fluently 144 3.52 1.30 14 work with the text books 144 3.62 1.21 4.5. summary of findings we are now able to summarize what we believe are the key findings of our survey. firstly, secondary teachers were generally more positive than tertiary teachers about the potential for emi to provide home country students with a high quality education, and particularly about its potential to improve their english. in addition, secondary teachers believed far more than tertiary teachers that emi would offer students greater career opportunities. only a small majority of teachers in both phases reported that emi was based on an explicit policy in their institution, and significantly more secondary teachers reported the existence of a policy in their institution on the level of english required to teach through emi. in both phases of education there was little evidence of adequate support for teachers to reach a required level of english proficiency. however, some qualitative evidence suggested that tertiary teachers had far greater exposure to academic english. teachers in both phases of education believed that emi was beneficial in terms of advancing the students’ level of english, yet a majority of teachers in both english medium instruction: comparing teacher beliefs in secondary and tertiary education 689 phases felt that academic content would be affected at least to some extent as a result of students learning through english, with no clear difference in attitudes between the two phases. in general, teachers in both phases of education felt that the challenges they faced in teaching through english were not insurmountable. 5. discussion we will now discuss our findings in the light of previous literature on emi teacher beliefs and specifically in relation to our research questions. 5.1 what do teachers believe they are trying to achieve when teaching through emi? our data indicate that emi teachers at both secondary and tertiary levels have a wide range of goals when teaching through english in emi educational settings. for both secondary and tertiary teachers, providing home country students with a high level of education and with opportunities were their primary goals of teaching through english. goals referring to preparing students for the next phase of their educational or professional lives were generally highly ranked by the sample overall. this is in line with the views expressed by other researchers in the field and in various geographical areas (e.g., byun et al., 2011; yeh, 2014). less important to our participants were aims such as improving the financial situation of their educational institution or attracting future (international) students. their focus appears to be very much on the benefits of emi to home country students, at the present moment and in the future. secondary teachers felt substantively more strongly than tertiary teachers that when teaching through emi they are aiming to provide a high-quality education to home country students and to follow institutional policy, and particularly with regard to aiming to improve their own english by teaching through english. this level of confidence may be explained by the fact that tertiary teachers are more aware of the difficulties and limitations that students face at the undergraduate level. for example, in vinke’s (1995) study, dutch tertiary teachers believed that the more limited vocabulary that they could use with their students diluted the content being taught and introduced less flexibility, and cho (2012) in korea concluded that his respondents believed that emi would set a barrier to content learning. 5.2. are policies with regard to emi available in their institutions? a small majority of the sample overall work in institutions in which teaching through english is an institutional policy, and there was no significant difference between secondary and tertiary level teachers’ responses in this regard. the fact jessica g. briggs, julie dearden, ernesto macaro 690 that it was only a small majority does echo many of the complaints found elsewhere in the literature (cho, 2012; di martino & di sabato, 2012; kiliçkaya, 2000) about lack of stakeholder consultation on the introduction of emi. secondarylevel institutions were more strongly associated with a teacher-reported emi policy on emi teachers’ level of english in comparison with tertiary-level institutions. the qualitative data on how teachers reach the appropriate level of english to teach through english overwhelmingly indicates that the main means of attainment in this regard is self-development of english language skills. the data further suggest that secondary teachers, more so than their tertiary-level counterparts, believe that the responsibility for improving their english should be more equitably shared between themselves and the institutions for which they work. here a discrepancy appears to exist between previous studies according to who the informants are. in wächter and maiworm’s (2008) european study, program directors appeared to be confident about the level of language support teachers were getting, whereas in o’dowd (2015) we find evidence from teachers of a distinct lack of language development support. 5.3. to what extent do teachers believe their students benefit from and are limited by emi? our findings suggest that a large majority of emi teachers in both phases believe that emi is beneficial to students. the findings correspondingly indicate that emi teachers do not feel strongly that emi is damaging to students in terms of language learning, although some concerns are expressed regarding content learning. these findings appear to be generally more positive than in some of the studies cited above (e.g., othman & saat, 2009; tan & lan, 2011) and may be due to the nature of an online questionnaire (see the limitations section below). there is less agreement amongst the sample with regard to the impact of emi on the content subject. 53.4% of the total sample believe that emi affects academic subject content, and there was no significant difference by institutional level. the qualitative data in this regard suggest that factors that may engender a negative effect of emi include pedagogical approach and students’ english language proficiency level. the top five reasons why teachers believe emi is beneficial are that learning content through english teaches them english, makes them competitive in a global market, provides them with a high level of education, gives them a challenge, and motivates them. secondary teachers in the present study felt significantly and substantively more strongly than tertiary teachers about the reasons why emi is beneficial to their students, particularly those related to making the lesson more interesting, motivating students, and making the concepts easier to understand. english medium instruction: comparing teacher beliefs in secondary and tertiary education 691 5.4. what are the challenges that teachers face teaching through emi? our sample indicated that they do not feel strongly that teaching through english presents any specific challenges. whilst this is not necessarily in line with previous studies, it nevertheless supports the views of soren’s (2013) danish teachers who repeatedly reflected on how the science terminology they were using was inevitably english. not surprisingly, then, in the current study working with textbooks was the least difficult aspect reported, whilst preparing lessons and materials was more challenging, as was motivating the students, yet none of these were difficult for the sample overall and there was no effect of institutional level on reported difficulty level. in this discussion we have compared our findings to those of previous studies, all of which were carried out at the single educational phase level and indeed most at the single institution case study level. this means that comparisons may not be completely valid. yet we would argue that the emi research field suffers from a lack of studies which compare institutions or phases. thus, that our findings sometimes concur with previous studies and sometimes deviate from them is not surprising. 5.5. limitations there are limitations with gathering data via an online questionnaire because whatever procedure one follows (snowballing sampling or open call to anyone who might be interested) inevitably means that generalizability is affected by perhaps only the most interested respondents (or the angriest) bothering to answer the questions. yet, given the resources available to us, it would have been difficult to adopt a more secure generalizable sampling frame, for example via stratified random sampling of a dozen countries across the world. moreover, the sample of 167 was relatively small given the huge geographical area it covered (27 countries in total). further, it could be argued that the time lapse (the period during which the survey was open) was too long although, as we have said, the majority of the respondents did respond in a relatively shorter period. nonetheless, given the rapidly changing nature of the emi phenomenon, we acknowledge this as a limitation. 6. conclusions our conclusions concur with previous research that emi is being introduced without thorough stakeholder discussion at the institutional level and therefore without clear policies on expectations of teacher language proficiency levels or jessica g. briggs, julie dearden, ernesto macaro 692 on levels of other aspects of teacher expertise. moreover, there is clearly not a dialogue going on between the different phases of education about what the challenges are that students and teachers alike face in ensuring quality programs taught through the medium of english. both of these conclusions have clear implications for adequately resourced professional development provision. that provision, we would propose, is not merely restricted to focusing on raising content teachers’ level of general english but also on the pedagogical changes necessary to ensure that academic subjects are not affected. teachers in both phases believed that the greater exposure brought about by emi was beneficial to students in terms of their english language learning. whether this was because of a belief in “immersion” theories of language acquisition or whether it was because they considered more traditional efl provision as inadequate as vehicles for language learning, we cannot say. what it does imply however is that a dialogue could also be engendered between content teachers and english language specialists in order to ensure that a consensus on the benefits of emi in terms of language learning might be reached. it is no coincidence that we had to eliminate a considerable number of respondents who claimed that they were english language teachers despite the fact that the introduction to the survey made it clear that we were asking content teachers to contribute their thoughts. a comparison of emi teacher beliefs with those of english specialists might form the basis of future research. lastly, we conclude that there continue to be concerns that content learning will be affected by emi and that professionals of all types should not turn a blind eye to those concerns. again, a dialogue within the professions about what level of temporary deficit to content might be tolerable is needed given that, one might hope, in the long run, 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(2015). writing development in syntactic complexity, accuracy and fluency in a content and language integrated learning class. international journal of language and linguistics, 2(3), 149-156. tan, m., & lan, o. s. (2011) teaching mathematics and science in english in malaysian classrooms: the impact of teacher beliefs on classroom practices and student learning. journal of english for academic purposes, 10, 5-18. tatzl, d. (2011). english-medium masters’ programmes at an austrian university of applied sciences: attitudes, experiences and challenges. journal of english for academic purposes, 10, 252-270. vinke, a. a. (1995). english as the medium of instruction in dutch engineering education (unpublished doctoral dissertation). technische universiteit delft, the netherlands. retrieved from: http://repository.tudelft.nl/view/ ir/uuid:491b55f9-fbf9-4650-a44d-acb9af8412a8/ wächter, b., & maiworm, f. 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(2014). taiwanese students’ experiences and attitudes towards english-medium courses in tertiary education. relc journal, 45(3), 305-319. 325 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (2). 2018. 325-350 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.2.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt validation of an online questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies for esl learners peter yongqi gu victoria university of wellington, new zealand peter.gu@vuw.ac.nz abstract this article reports on the updating and validation of a questionnaire for vocabulary learning strategies. an english as a second language (esl) version of the vocabulary learning questionnaire (vlq), first published in gu and johnson (1996), was created based on its latest version. two response formats were piloted, that is, a paper version with a 7-point likert scale and an online version with a 100-point slider bar. a series of validation procedures resulted in a 62-item instrument which was then administered online among 682 english language learners at the tertiary level in china. the paper presents evidence of content validity, construct validity, internal consistency reliability, and predictive validity. it also provides suggestions for interpreting and using the questionnaire for both research and instructional purposes. keywords: vocabulary learning strategies; questionnaire validation 1. introduction research on vocabulary learning strategies (vls) frequently makes use of questionnaires to elicit data. teachers and learners of vocabulary may also make use of a questionnaire to diagnose vocabulary learning problems. there is, however, an apparent lack of information on the validation of the most often used taxonomies of vls. this study aims to create an updated english as a second language peter yongqi gu 326 (esl) version of the vlq (gu & johnson, 1996). it also aims to pioneer the use of an online 0-100 slider bar as a potential alternative to the likert scale format. the main body of this article will document the updating and validation procedures, and provide various evidences of validity. i will finally offer suggestions for the interpretation and use of the questionnaire. a few remaining concerns for using the vlq will be presented at the end. 1.1. vocabulary learning strategies learning vocabulary in a second language is a conspicuously long and demanding task. we start the whole process of language learning by learning the most basic words and phrases, and we never stop developing our vocabulary even at the highest level. the demanding nature of the task makes strategic learning necessary, in the sense that the appropriate choice and deployment of strategies can make a big difference in determining if vocabulary learning becomes an efficient or inefficient, and even pleasant or frustrating experience. strategic learning is a deliberate, dynamic and iterative process for solving a learning problem, boosting the learning speed, or making the learning process efficient, effective, and pleasant. although we can proactively plan for our learning and deploy pre-emptive strategies, a large part of strategic learning is essentially a problem-solving process. in other words, when a novel or demanding task comes into our attention, we quickly analyze the task, analyze our own resources for learning, and analyze the context of learning so as to come up with a plan to overcome the learning hurdle. as the plan is carried out, we monitor its effectiveness and adjust the plan accordingly. when the task reaches a completion stage, we evaluate if, when, and which strategic effort has succeeded or failed in helping us solve the problem. this process repeats itself in cycles every time a new or difficult task is being attended to. repeated and successful deployment of the same strategy can turn the strategy from a declarative stage to a procedural and automatic stage (o’malley & chamot, 1990), with many of the conditions associated with each successful or unsuccessful application stored together as conditional knowledge. when a strategy reaches this level of expertise, future tasks and conditions that are similar enough can trigger an automatic application of the strategy with or without the learner’s awareness. there has been a sustained interest in vls in second language acquisition. as in the research of language learning strategies in general, initial efforts concentrated on the identification, description and classification of vls (e.g., ahmed, 1989). typically the research is exploratory and bottom-up. researchers used interviews, observations and other qualitative measures to collect the naturally occurring strategies for vocabulary learning. the resulting list is then matched validation of an online questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies for esl learners 327 against theory for classification and grouping. this research has resulted in a few taxonomies of vls that have been widely used. in the latest edition of nation’s (2013) comprehensive book on vocabulary learning and teaching, he retains his three-way classification of “vocabulary-learning strategies” in the 2001 edition of the book: planning (choosing what to focus on and when to focus on it), sources (finding information about words), and processes (establishing knowledge). in addition, nation devotes five other chapters to vocabulary learning: “learning words from context,” using “word parts,” “using dictionaries,” “deliberate learning from word cards,” and “finding and learning multiword units.” one of the most often used taxonomies is schmitt’s (1997) vls taxonomy of 58 items. schmitt groups vls into two: discovery strategies and consolidation strategies. the former include determination strategies and social strategies. the latter cover social strategies, memory strategies, cognitive strategies, and metacognitive strategies. gu’s (2013) taxonomy includes two main components: metacognitive and cognitive vls. the metacognitive component includes beliefs about vocabulary learning and metacognitive regulation of vocabulary learning. the cognitive component includes initial handling strategies, reinforcement strategies, and activation strategies. the three taxonomies overlap considerably. for example, all three include selectively choosing words to learn; all three contain strategies for initial learning after a word is chosen (sources for information in nation, or discovery in schmitt), and further consolidation after initial handling. in fact, this process perspective is also reflected in another classification by brown and payne (1994) who describe “five essential steps in vocabulary learning” (hatch & brown, 1995, p. 372): encountering new words, getting the word form, getting the word meaning, consolidating the word form and meaning in memory, and using the word. a latest addition is tseng, dörnyei, and schmitt (2006), whose 20-item self-regulating capacity in vocabulary learning scale is meant to measure the “capacity of strategic learning.” these 20 items are grouped into five subscales: commitment control, metacognitive control, satiation control, emotion control, and environment control. as a theory-driven taxonomy, these “action control strategies” represent holistic approaches in learning management. they are more related to generic self-regulation behaviors and not directly related to the various tasks for vocabulary learning (e.g., “when i feel stressed about vocabulary learning, i know how to reduce this stress,” “when learning vocabulary, i have special techniques to achieve my learning goals). as a measure of a learner’s capacity for self-management and control, the self-regulating capacity in vocabulary learning scale does not serve the purpose of guiding learners and teachers as to how vocabulary should be learned. in addition to discovering types of vls, considerable efforts have been invested in mapping the relationship between vls and learning results. in general, peter yongqi gu 328 qualitative explorations (e.g., gu, 2003; parry, 1993; sanaoui, 1995) confirm correlational patterns (e.g., gu & johnson, 1996; kojic-sabo & lightbown, 1999) that a large repertoire and frequent use of strategies are positively related to vocabulary size and even general proficiency. teaching vls (e.g., mizumoto & takeuchi, 2009) has resulted in improvement in measures of strategic learning as well as in vocabulary. recent years have also seen research efforts concentrating on relating vls to different aspects of vocabulary and language learning. for example, zhang and lu (2015) explored the relationship between vls and both vocabulary breadth and vocabulary depth. ranalli (2003, 2012) examined the incorporation of vls in coursebooks and in web-based training. there is also effort in exploring the effect of vls instruction for the learning of english for specific purposes (little & kobayashi, 2015). 1.2. questionnaire validation systematic studies of vls need valid, reliable and practical instruments. among all the elicitation tools available, questionnaires stand out as a quick instrument that can easily collect data and map out the strategy pattern among a large group of students (oxford, 2017). unfortunately, the most popular taxonomies of vls have never been properly validated; or the validation information has never been formally published. it is therefore the intention of the present article to provide not just an update, but also validation information for the vocabulary learning questionnaire (vlq) based on gu’s (2013) taxonomy. a basic assumption underlying the use of a questionnaire as an elicitation tool for vls is that strategies are latent sets and episodes of behavior that can be observed and described. for both research and pedagogical purposes, a convenient tool for “catching” learning strategies is the use of questionnaires. in these cases, sets of statements representative of the strategic learning behavior are presented to learners. respondents are asked to rate how true of them each statement is or how often they perform the strategy represented by a particular statement. when the cumulative deployment of certain strategic learning behaviors reaches a certain level, we say that the learner uses this strategy. in this sense, like the items in a test, statements in a questionnaire are at best representative samples of strategic learning performance. they can approach a complete representation but will never completely represent the construct being studied. a good questionnaire instrument endeavors to validly elicit the intended construct by systematically making sure that the statements included in the questionnaire are relevant to and representative of the target construct, and that the overall structure of the construct being elicited should resemble as closely as possible the theoretical conceptualization of the construct. in addition, a good questionnaire instrument should make sure that the statements constituting the same scale should validation of an online questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies for esl learners 329 be consistent among themselves. finally, a good questionnaire should also make sure that the interpretation of the scores and sub-scores is appropriate, and that they are used for the right purposes and among the suitable population. validation is a process of making sure an instrument is good enough for its intended purpose. since major threats to content validity include construct irrelevance and construct underrepresentation (messick, 1989), content validation should have started from the moment the vls construct is conceptualized and operationalized. construct validation will require trialing among a large-enough sample so as to be sure that the theoretical construct of vls matches the patterns that emerge from the data. 1.3. the vocabulary learning questionnaire the vocabulary learning questionnaire was initially designed to be used among chinese efl learners at the tertiary level (gu & johnson, 1996). although it was designed in english, only the translated chinese language version was used and validated. an updated version (vlq5) was published in 2003 (gu & hu, 2003) but, again only the chinese version was validated and used. twenty years after the initial publication, when teachers and learners are still very much interested in the strategic learning of vocabulary, it would be useful to design an esl version that can be easily understood by english language learners. the vlq was originally designed based on both top-down (review of theories and empirical research on vocabulary and learning strategies) and bottom-up (observing and interviewing learners) procedures. it contained a metacognitive component (beliefs and self-regulation) and a cognitive component which followed the natural stages of word learning from initial handling of a new word (i.e., guessing, dictionary use, note-taking) to consolidation and reinforcement (i.e., rehearsing and encoding), and finally to the activation and use of the newly learned word. the broad coverage resulted in a long questionnaire, with 21 strategies elicited through 108 items in gu and johnson (1996). in the early 1990s when the original study was conducted, the chinese students were not exposed to many strategies for learning vocabulary, and they rarely completed questionnaires. as a result, many students loved the long version and thought that the questionnaire raised their awareness of a whole range of strategies for vocabulary learning. over the years, when scholars began to adapt the questionnaire for learners in other parts of the world, i have heard many complaints about the questionnaire being too long, even after the updated 90-item version came out in 2003. thus a major aim of the current update, in addition to creating an esl version, is to reduce the vlq to a shorter version while maintaining the same content coverage. peter yongqi gu 330 the vlq makes use of a 7-point likert scale, ranging from “extremely untrue of me” (1) to “extremely true of me” (7). likert scales that specify a bipolar continuum of a few points (e.g., 3, 5, or 7 points) have become standard practice in survey research. however, the ordinal nature of the data thus obtained has received on-going debate in terms of statistical analysis. with the increasing ease of online research tools such as qualtrics, it is felt that a slider bar between bipolar ends with an extended scale (0-100) may provide continuous data with finer grains than traditional likert scales, which, as a result, may bring an alternative, if not a solution, to the problem presented by ordinal scales. hence a second aim of the project is to create a slider bar version of the vlq and see how it performs against the likert scale version. 2. this study this study aims to update and validate the vlq. specifically, the first aim is to create an esl version that is easy to read for esl learners of english. in addition, an online slider-bar format will be trialed. the second aim is to provide validation information detailing various sources of evidence for the validity and reliability of the online version. the research questions i will try to answer include the following: research question 1: what is the evidence for content validity? 1. is the esl version easy enough for esl students? 2. are all variables and items relevant to and representative of vocabulary learning strategies? research question 2: what is the evidence for construct validity? 1. does the underlying factor structure match the theoretical structure of vocabulary learning strategies? 2. do inter-factor correlations show meaningful relationships among the strategies? research question 3: what is the evidence for reliability? research question 4: is there evidence for predictive validity? 3. updating the vlq 3.1. the questionnaire vlq5 is a 90-item questionnaire measuring 21 strategies under metacognitive and cognitive dimensions (gu, 2013). each item is rated on a 7-point likert scale. validation of an online questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies for esl learners 331 the section on metacognitive beliefs about vocabulary learning uses a scale from “1 = absolutely disagree” to “7 = absolutely agree.” the rest of the questionnaire on strategies uses a scale ranging from “1 = extremely untrue of me” to “7 = extremely true of me.” two versions of vlq6 were designed based on vlq5, a paper version using the same 7-point likert scale, and an online slider-bar version using the qualtrics platform. the slider bar version made use of a slider bar with 0 at one end and 100 at the other, as presented in figure 1. figure 1 a slider bar item 3.2. procedures the updating started with the creation of an esl version for the 90 chinese language items in vlq5 (table 1). first, all previous english versions were combed through and each chinese statement was matched with an english version. then, a research assistant with a recent degree in applied linguistics went through the 90 items one by one and wrote a simplified version. tom cobb’s lextutor.ca was used to make sure that the vocabulary of the questionnaire was as simple as possible. the resulting version was labelled as version 6.0. the following criteria were applied to vlq6.0: · include mainly the first 2000 most frequent bands. · include as few as possible academic words and off-list words. · include as few as possible meta-language jargons. · where jargons cannot be avoided, give simple examples. · use simple sentence structures. table 1 vlq6 updating procedures version purpose procedures vlq6.0 create english version of vlq5. find all english statements in previous versions and match them with the 90 statements in vlq5. make an esl version. go over each statement and simplify them. vlq6.1 trial and fine-tune for clarity. · get esl teacher feedback re clarity of statements. · trial 1, one advanced level esl user, to ensure clarity of statements. peter yongqi gu 332 vlq6.2 create online slider-bar version. trial among a small group of students. · trial 2: four esl students complete both paper and online versions. perform item-by-item think-aloud on both versions to: ocatch understanding issues and simplify statements further, and ocatch potential similarities and differences for likert scale and slider bar versions. · re-write problematic statements after trial 2. vlq6.3 formal piloting. · trial 3: among a group of 105 esl learners: ostatistically compare the likert-scale version with the slider bar version; ocatch potentially problematic items; ocatch problems with online administration. vlq6.4 construct validation. · administer questionnaire among 699 participants. · factor analysis. odo the data support the existing structure of the questionnaire? ocan the questionnaire be shortened? §should certain categories be deleted? §can some categories be combined? §can some items be deleted? omake sure resulting categories are meaningful. omake sure resulting categories are internally consistent (cronbach’s alpha). · predictive validity: relate vls to learning outcomes. vlq6.0 was presented to a group of teachers teaching on the english language proficiency (epp) program at victoria university of wellington, new zealand. these teachers were asked to provide feedback on the clarity of the statements and the possible problems their students could have when reading the statements. at this consultation session, it was decided that “looking-up strategies” containing five items about how a word is looked up in the dictionary were removed. this was partly due to the complaint from these teachers that the questionnaire was too long, and the deleted items all contained jargons (e.g., inflected form, affixes, collocation) that were not necessarily familiar to the esl students. the most important reason was that “looking up” a new word was not considered to be a challenging task. after teacher consultations, one advanced efl learner from china trialed the 85-item version and provided feedback itemby-item about possible misunderstanding and potential difficult words. the resulting version was labelled as vlq6.1. at this point, an online version of vlq6.1 was created on the qualtrics platform with a slider bar scale ranging from 0 to 100. the default point was placed at 50 on the slider-bar. respondents could drag the bar left or right to a point they felt best described their use of the strategy. if the bar was not moved by a respondent, the system would record a missing value. four esl students from the epp program were asked to complete both the paper version and the online version, and to think-aloud item-by-item as they completed the questionnaires. these sessions were audio-recorded. the digital files were then transcribed. the validation of an online questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies for esl learners 333 think-aloud procedure was meant to catch potential issues of understanding and simplify the statements further if problems were found. it was also meant to capture the students’ perceptions of the similarities and differences between the likert-scale and slider bar versions. a few issues were found and fixed, and the resulting version was labelled as vlq6.2. next, one hundred and five (105) students in the epp program were asked to answer the likert-scale version in a lecture theatre. they were all able to complete the questionnaire within 15-25 minutes. they were also invited to complete the online version within one week. twenty five of these students answered both the likert-scale version and the slider bar version. preliminary analysis of the data from this trial (gu, 2015) suggested that the online version was comparable to the paper version, and that the students perceived the slider bar version as providing them with choices that were more fine-grained than the 7-point likert scale version. the final slider bar version was administered online over a period of three weeks, among 699 students from two chinese universities. after initial cleaning which removed 17 cases that contained duplicate data or too little data, 682 cases remained to form the final data for analysis. among them, 127 were male, and 474 female, with 81 missing data. the majority were non-english majors (n = 423, 62%). there were 179 english majors (26.2%). 80 students did not declare their majors. most of the students were studying in year 1 (n = 354, 51.9%), and year 2 (n = 164, 24%). there were also 57 year 3, 27 year 4 students, and 80 missing values. in order to answer research question 4, that is, to gauge the predictive validity of the vlq, the participants in the final round of validation were asked to complete paul nation’s online vocabulary size test at http://my.vocabularysize.com/ and report their scores along with other items in the questionnaire. 4. validating the vlq 4.1. content validity 4.1.1. is the esl version easy enough for esl students? the final version (vlq6.4, online version) contains 62 items, and 925 tokens. the following is the vocabulary profile of this version. · first 1000 most frequent words (k1): 90.59%. · first 2000 most frequent words (k2): 5.30%. · k1+k2 words: 95.89%. · words on the academic word list (awl): 1.84%. the words included: context, create, focus, items, link, logical, paragraph, similar, similarities, similarly, structure, text, topic. peter yongqi gu 334 · off-list words: 2.27%. the words included: collocations, grammatical, phrase, prefixes, pronunciation, repetition, suffixes, textbooks, usage, usages, vocabulary. k1+k2 words account for almost 96%, nearing the 98% necessary for comprehension ease (nation, 2013). a close look at the awl words suggests that none of these words should be unknown for students preparing to study at university. there are still a few technical terms in the off-list category, such as collocations, prefixes and suffixes. clear examples have been provided where these jargons appear. other offlist words such as grammatical should be easy for esl students as well. the sentence structures of all statements are kept simple, and difficult words and jargons have been removed, replaced, or explained in examples. after the teacher consultations and trials among esl students preparing for university entry in new zealand, it can be claimed that the latest version is esl-friendly. in fact, no student has ever voiced any concerns of difficulties in understanding after vlq6.2, and this was corroborated by the think-aloud protocols (gu, 2015). 4.1.2. relevance and representativeness the only issue of relevance comes when we look at the metacognitive component of the questionnaire. in other words, a question arises whether metacognitive beliefs about vocabulary learning and metacognitive self-regulation of vocabulary learning (such as selective attention and self-initiation) should be included in an instrument on vls? strictly speaking, beliefs are not strategies, but are directly linked to the choice and use of strategies. selecting which word to learn, what information about the word to pay special attention to, and exercising human agency in the proactive learning of vocabulary are very much part of vls, although they do not deal with the cognitive tasks of vocabulary learning. in other words, if we include only the strategies for cognitive tasks, we may well miss out on the learner self-management aspect of vocabulary learning, which are essentially a crucial part of language learning strategies. i have therefore decided to keep the metacognitive component in the questionnaire. coverage becomes a critical issue in maintaining construct representation while at the same time trying to shorten the questionnaire. the main guiding principle in this process was the principle of parsimony. two other principles were theoretical meaningfulness and the guidance of data. except for deleting the “look-up strategy,” all other deletions were based on the structure that the data revealed. a rule of thumb which was also applied was that there had to be at least three items representing each strategy. given that strategies are latent variables, there would be serious construct under-representation if the number of items eliciting each strategy drops down below three. validation of an online questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies for esl learners 335 4.2. construct validity 4.2.1. factor structure exploratory factor analysis (efa) was the major tool used to explore the underlying structure of the data and see if it matched the theoretical structure of the questionnaire. two rounds of efa were performed taking into account sampling concerns. costello and osborne (2005) maintain that sampling adequacy is crucially important for efa, and that a minimum subject to item ratio of 10:1 should be reached before efa results could be trusted. maximum likelihood was the extraction method selected because it produces “more generalizable and reproducible results, as it does not inflate the variance estimates” (p. 6). promax with kaiser normalization was chosen as the method of rotation because oblique rotation normally renders a “more accurate, and perhaps more reproducible, solution” (p. 3) for variables that are expected to correlate to a certain degree. for the first round of efa, separate efa were performed on the following categories: metacognitive beliefs (12 items), metacognitive strategies (10 items), inferencing (10 items), dictionary use (9 items), note-taking (8 items), rehearsal strategies (11 items), encoding strategies (20 items), and activation strategies (5 items). in all cases, both kaiser-meyer-olkin (kmo) measure of sampling adequacy and bartlett’s test of sphericity indicated that the data were appropriate for efa (field, 2009). the majority of these categories yielded factor patterns corresponding to the theoretical constructs. in other words, the items designed to represent a strategy loaded onto the same factor. items with weak loadings below .30 or cross-loaded onto different factors (>.32) were removed. interestingly, the eight note-taking strategies revealed a factor structure different from the original two-strategy structure (meaningvs. usage-oriented note-taking). examined closely, the new structure was meaningful as well. four items in one of the two factors represented a strategy to choose words for notetaking, while the other four items in the second factor represented a strategy to decide what information goes into the notes. the new factor structure was therefore adopted and new strategy labels given. the largest category, encoding strategies, turned out to be the most problematic. the original construct had six sub-categories of encoding strategies represented by 20 items: association, visual encoding, auditory encoding, use of word-structure, semantic encoding, and contextual encoding. instead of a six-factor structure, the first round of efa produced a 5-factor structure, with two of the three items for semantic encoding loading weakly under contextual encoding, and the other item loading under use of word-structure. another problematic strategy was association. although all four items loaded onto the same factor, the loadings peter yongqi gu 336 were weak; and three out of four items cross-loaded under other factors. removing the weak and cross-loaded items resulted in a four-factor structure, practically removing association strategies and semantic encoding strategies. the remaining 62 items were subjected to a second round of efa. the kmo measure of sampling adequacy was .899, well above the .50 cut-off suggested by field (2009). bartlett’s test of sphericity was also acceptable (chi-square = 17672.477, df = 1891, p = .000). eigenvalue greater than 1 was used as the main criterion for factor extraction. fifteen factors were extracted. the 15 factors with initial eigenvalues of 1.0 or above explained 67.42% of the total variance (see figure 2). the extracted 15 factors accounted for 57.42% of the total variance. figure 2 rotated factor pattern factor 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 communality 1. once the english words of all my native language meanings have been remembered, english is learned. .45 .31 2. the best way to remember words is to memorize word lists or dictionaries. .68 .47 3. the purpose of learning a word is to remember it. .65 .51 4. a good memory is all you need to learn a foreign language well. .69 .48 5. repetition is the best way to remember words. .72 .49 6. you can only learn a large vocabulary by memorizing a lot of words. .71 .56 7. the meanings of a large amount of words can be picked up through reading. .67 .47 8. learners should pay attention to expressions (e.g., pick up) and collocations (e.g., heavy rain; strong wind) that go with a word. .78 .68 9. learners can learn vocabulary simply through reading a lot. .89 .74 10.the least a learner should know about a word is its spelling, pronunciation, meaning, and its basic usage. .49 .43 11.i know whether a new word is important in understanding a passage. .20 12.i know which words are important for me to learn. .24 13.when i meet a new word or phrase, i know clearly whether i need to remember it. .19 14.besides textbooks, i look for other readings that fall under my interest. .42 .42 15.i wouldn’t learn what my english teacher doesn’t tell me to learn. (reversed value) .71 .57 16.i only focus on things that are directly related to examinations. (reversed value) .89 .75 17.i wouldn’t care much about vocabulary items that my teacher does not explain in class. (reversed value) .83 .70 18.i make use of the logical development in the context (e.g., cause and effect) when guessing the meaning of a word. .79 .60 19.i use common sense and knowledge of the world when guessing the meaning of a word. .71 .58 20.i check my guessed meaning in the paragraph or whole text to see if it fits in. .78 .61 validation of an online questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies for esl learners 337 21.when i don’t know a new word in reading, i use my background knowledge of the topic to guess the meaning of the new word. .78 .66 22.i look for explanations in the reading text that support my guess about the meaning of a word. .96 .79 23.i make use of the grammatical structure of a sentence when guessing the meaning of a new word. .59 .47 24.i make use of the part of speech of a new word when guessing its meaning. .52 .44 25.when i see an unfamiliar word again and again, i look it up. .48 .27 26.when not knowing a word prevents me from understanding a whole sentence or even a whole paragraph, i look it up. .65 .39 27.i look up words that are important to the understanding of the sentence or paragraph in which it appears. .71 .46 28.i pay attention to the examples when i look up a word in a dictionary. .31 .41 29.when i want to have some deeper knowledge about a word that i already know, i look it up. .65 .64 30.when i want to know more about the usage of a word that i know, i look it up. .79 .62 31.i check the dictionary when i want to find out the similarities and differences between the meanings of related words. .76 .61 32.i make a note when i think the meaning of the word i’m looking up is commonly used. .99 .81 33.i make a note when i think the word i’m looking up is related to my personal interest. .80 .72 34.i make a note when i see a useful expression or phrase. .57 .59 35.i write down the english explanations of the word i look up. .79 .77 36.i write down both the meaning in my native language and the english explanation of the word i look up. .94 .52 37.i note down examples showing the usages of the word i look up. .42 .54 38.i go through my vocabulary list several times until i remember all the words on the list. .75 .66 39.i make vocabulary cards and take them with me wherever i go. .67 .54 40.i make regular reviews of new words i have memorized. .80 .70 41.when i try to remember a word, i say it aloud to myself. .34 .48 42.when i try to remember a word, i repeat its pronunciation in my mind. .85 .67 43.repeating the sound of a new word to myself would be enough for me to remember the word. .78 .66 44.when i try to remember a word, i write it again and again. .71 .51 45.i memorize the spelling of a word letter by letter. .33 .40 46.i write both the new words and their translation in my native language again and again in order to remember them. .77 .63 47.i act out some words in order to remember them better (e.g., jump). .53 .62 48.i create a picture in my mind to help me remember a new word. .86 .83 49.to help me remember a word, i try to “see” the spelling of the word in my mind. .72 .64 50.i put words that sound similar together in order to remember them. .95 .79 peter yongqi gu 338 51.when words are spelled similarly, i remember them together. .80 .70 52.when i try to remember a new word, i link it to a sound-alike word that i know. .65 .59 53.when i learn new words, i pay attention to prefixes, roots, and suffixes (e.g., inter-nation-al). .51 .42 54.i intentionally study how english words are formed in order to remember more words. .76 .61 55.i memorize the commonly used roots and prefixes. .74 .61 56.when i try to remember a word, i also try to remember the sentence in which the word is used. .85 .71 57.i put words in set expressions or sentences in order to remember them. .90 .79 58.i remember a new word together with the context where the new word appears. .78 .65 59.i make up my own sentences using the words i just learned. .52 .53 60.i try to use the newly learned words as much as possible in speech and writing. .90 .72 61.i try to use newly learned words in real situations. .86 .74 62.i try to use newly learned words in imaginary situations in my mind. .78 .73 initial eigenvalue 13.83 5.38 3.83 2.76 2.23 1.83 1.72 1.48 1.43 1.38 1.29 1.26 1.20 1.12 1.06 variance explained (%) 22.31 8.68 6.18 4.45 3.60 2.95 2.78 2.38 2.30 2.23 2.08 2.03 1.94 1.81 1.70 accumulated variance explained (%) 22.31 30.99 37.17 41.62 45.22 48.17 50.94 53.32 55.62 57.86 59.94 61.97 63.90 65.72 67.42 the 15-factor structure neatly corresponded to the theoretical constructs. the two original inferencing strategies (i.e., guessing by making use of global clues, and guessing by the use of local clues) loaded onto the same factor and were combined. the two dictionary strategies (i.e., using dictionary for comprehension, and using dictionary for learning) also loaded onto the same factor and were combined into one strategy. only one item cross-loaded under both oral repetition and visual repetition. the item is: “when i try to remember a word, i repeat it aloud to myself.” removing this item would have messed up the factor structure; and it does not make sense to be grouped under visual repetition. i therefore decided to retain this item and reword it to: “when i try to remember a word, i say it aloud to myself.” another problem was the metacognitive strategy of selective attention. the loadings for all three items were too low to form part of the 15-factor solution. however, selective attention for vocabulary learning has been proven to distinguish between successful and non-successful learners (gu, 1994). it was therefore decided to retain the three items constituting the selective attention strategy. 4.2.2. factor correlations another source of evidence for the construct validity of the questionnaire was to examine the inter-factor correlations. intra-factor and inter-item correlations among the items that form the same strategy or item-total correlations show convergent validity. this will be reflected in the reliabilities section below. at the same time, inter-factor correlations that are not too high (.70 or above) would validation of an online questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies for esl learners 339 indicate discriminant validity. in other words, these low correlations would indicate that the factors are indeed separate, though correlated, factors. table 2 factor correlation matrix factor 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 1. guessing 1 2. dictionary .39 1 3. memorise -.15 -.09 1 4. activation .40 .34 -.06 1 5. self-initiate .30 .30 -.43 .31 1 6. learn .47 .36 -.16 .09 .23 1 7. codingvis .18 .04 .04 .43 .05 -.04 1 8. codingcntxt .49 .36 -.21 .65 .31 .17 .44 1 9. codingaud .42 .29 -.01 .52 .23 .18 .33 .50 1 10. noteinfo .25 .27 -.03 .56 .21 -.08 .29 .47 .34 1 11. wordlist .22 .11 .13 .64 .18 -.17 .38 .44 .41 .61 1 12. notewhat .48 .49 -.15 .44 .45 .44 .09 .44 .43 .37 .26 1 13. codingstr .40 .31 -.06 .50 .22 .22 .30 .50 .50 .39 .39 .39 1 14. repeatoral .47 .29 -.04 .40 .27 .29 .13 .35 .35 .33 .32 .43 .33 1 15. repeatvis .09 .14 .36 .23 -.16 .07 .24 .15 .20 .18 .29 .16 .20 .19 note. guessing = inferencing; dictionary = dictionary strategies; memorize = vocabulary should be memorized; activation = activation strategies; self-initiate = self initiation; learn = vocabulary should be learned and used; codingvis = visual encoding; codingcntxt = contextual encoding; codingaud = auditory encoding; noteinfo = choosing what information to note down; wordlist = using word lists; notewhat = choosing which word to note down; codingstr = using word structure; repeatoral = oral repetition; repeatvis = visual repetition the factor correlation matrix in table 2 shows good discriminant validity of vlq6.4. only three inter-factor correlations were above .6, the highest being .653, between contextual encoding and activation strategies. this is a reasonable finding, because part of activating a newly learned word is to put it into at least a sentential context. 4.3. reliability cronbach’s alpha for each strategy was obtained to collect evidence for the internal consistency reliability of the questionnaire. table 3 below indicates that vlq6.4 is a largely reliable instrument. only one of the 15 strategies, that is, visual repetition, had an alpha of .638. the remaining strategies were all above .70. in fact, the overwhelming majority of them were above .80. the strategy that was not in the 15-factor structure, that is, selective attention, also showed low but acceptable internal consistency (alpha = .627). peter yongqi gu 340 table 3 internal consistency reliability (cronbach’s alpha) dimensions categories strategies number of items alpha metacognitive beliefs about vocabulary learning words should be memorized 6 .821 words should be learned through use 4 .813 metacognitive regulation selective attention 3 .627 self-initiation 4 .820 cognitive inferencing guessing strategies 7 .884 using dictionary dictionary strategies 7 .816 taking notes choosing which word to put into notebook 3 .851 deciding what information goes into notes 3 .798 rehearsal use of word lists 3 .807 oral repetition 3 .735 visual repetition 3 .638 encoding visual encoding 3 .833 auditory encoding 3 .850 use of word-structure 3 .732 contextual encoding 3 .874 activation activation 4 .874 4.4. predictive validity it follows that if vls are meant to improve vocabulary learning results, there should be evidence linking the vlq to measures of vocabulary learning and other types of second language achievement in general. based on previous research (e.g., gu & johnson, 1996), it is predicted that believing in memorization should negatively affect vocabulary learning. likewise, visual repetition should also be negatively correlated with vocabulary size. all other strategies should show a positive correlation between strategy use and vocabulary size. in other words, for the majority of strategies, the more often a strategy is used, the larger the vocabulary size should be. in order to see if this predicted relationship can be replicated, vocabulary size was broken into three groups, that is, bottom, middle, and top groups, and one-way analysis of variance (anova) was performed to check if a significant difference can be found between the group mean scores of vocabulary size. four hundred and fifty two (452) students provided their vocabulary size scores with a mean vocabulary size of 6,822.34. the vocabulary size for the 33.33 percentile was 5,900, and that for the 66.67 percentile was 7,300. based on these percentile scores, the whole group was then divided into three subgroups. group 1 (n = 153) included those with a reported vocabulary size of 5,900 or lower; group 2 (n = 146) contained those who reported a vocabulary size between 5,901 and 7200; and group 3 (n = 153) included those whose vocabulary size was 7,201 or above. validation of an online questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies for esl learners 341 table 4 relationship between vls and vocabulary size n mean sd f p memorise 1.00 105 45.7143 17.83686 4.656 .010 2.00 115 43.6449 16.63307 3.00 119 38.7031 18.82705 total 339 42.5511 17.99107 learn 1.00 137 78.4982 11.65270 6.363 .002 2.00 137 77.2445 13.35500 3.00 140 82.3500 12.22558 total 414 79.3859 12.59012 selective 1.00 125 50.1227 16.13432 10.629 .000 2.00 107 57.5732 15.46158 3.00 118 58.7655 15.80654 total 350 55.3143 16.25128 selfinitiate 1.00 122 44.7480 20.66232 15.066 .000 2.00 111 47.7477 16.25166 3.00 122 57.5533 19.59466 total 355 50.0866 19.74810 guessing 1.00 118 64.0097 14.12093 6.453 .002 2.00 117 66.5458 12.09791 3.00 130 70.1275 14.09587 total 365 67.0016 13.69706 dictionary 1.00 120 60.7381 16.57932 5.492 .004 2.00 116 62.6700 13.62583 3.00 126 67.0193 15.34798 total 362 63.5434 15.44013 notewhat 1.00 123 63.1897 19.23993 3.147 .044 2.00 123 66.3225 17.56699 3.00 130 68.9231 17.71579 total 376 66.1968 18.28496 noteinfo 1.00 122 47.2022 21.42532 2.405 .092 2.00 119 48.0896 20.13105 3.00 128 52.5885 20.99162 total 369 49.3568 20.94387 wordlist 1.00 124 38.8575 20.51620 3.220 .041 2.00 125 38.0853 18.82364 3.00 126 44.0185 21.01941 total 375 40.3342 20.26227 repeatoral 1.00 128 55.7500 18.37311 6.389 .002 2.00 122 58.7896 16.69723 3.00 129 63.4677 17.15946 total 379 59.3553 17.68176 repeatvis 1.00 128 55.2786 19.15698 .598 .550 2.00 123 52.9079 18.83276 3.00 130 53.2410 18.09050 total 381 53.8180 18.67403 codingvis 1.00 124 49.3333 22.62342 .333 .717 2.00 123 48.7073 20.38726 3.00 138 50.8116 21.47693 total 385 49.6632 21.47929 peter yongqi gu 342 codingaud 1.00 127 53.6010 21.11003 6.294 .002 2.00 124 54.0134 20.25922 3.00 136 61.5172 19.95195 total 387 56.5151 20.71466 codingstr 1.00 125 55.3840 21.06940 9.426 .000 2.00 122 57.7377 16.91556 3.00 137 64.9538 17.80574 total 384 59.5460 19.07503 codingcntxt 1.00 119 49.5938 23.33641 3.305 .038 2.00 120 52.9583 20.66796 3.00 133 56.6090 20.95395 total 372 53.1873 21.78992 activation 1.00 127 48.9528 21.81414 2.819 .061 2.00 115 48.6587 19.08534 3.00 126 54.1012 19.77069 total 368 50.6236 20.39560 table 4 shows the predictive validity of vlq6.4. believing that vocabulary should be memorized showed a negative relationship with vocabulary size. although the entire group tended not to hold this belief (m = 42.55), the bottom group (group 1) had the largest mean score for this belief (m = 45.7), and the top group (group 3) had the lowest mean score (m = 38.7). another strategy variable that was predicted to hold a negative relationship was visual repetition. although one-way anova did not produce a significant overall f value, and even post-hoc comparisons between groups did not produce any significant differences, table 4 still shows that the bottom group used this strategy more often than the other two groups. the only surprise was the visual encoding strategy, which included items such as “i create a picture in my mind to help me remember a new word.” although the top group used the strategy slightly more than the other groups, the three groups basically did not significantly differ from each other in using this strategy, and the overall mean score of 49.67 basically indicated that the chinese students in this study had a lukewarm endorsement of visual encoding for vocabulary learning. 5. using vlq6.4 5.1. potential uses of vlq6.4 the vlq has been designed as a research tool. it can be used to explore the range of strategies a group of students use for the learning of vocabulary. it can also be used to explore the relationship between different vls and vocabulary learning outcomes. in a study focusing on strategy instruction for the improvement of strategic learning behavior, vlq6.4 can be used as a pre-test and post-test to show the extent of learning of various strategies as a result of the instruction. validation of an online questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies for esl learners 343 with this simplified and shortened esl version, the vlq should be a useful diagnostic tool for teachers and learners. for example, if a group of learners complain that their vocabulary is limited and that they do not know how best to learn vocabulary, vlq6.4 can be quickly administered in this group of students to diagnose the repertoire of strategies and the frequency of strategy use as a group measure or for a specific student. the least the questionnaire can do is to raise the awareness of students about their vocabulary learning behaviors so that they can become more reflective about their own learning. vlq6.4 should be suitable for esl learners with a basic grasp of the first 2,000 most frequent words in english. it is most suitable for those who are studying or preparing to study at the tertiary level. esl learners beyond the basic level who need to examine their own vocabulary learning processes will also find the questionnaire useful as an awareness-raising or diagnostic tool. teachers of english at the beginning of a course may use vlq6.4 as a quick tool to help them gauge their students’ vls and make decisions about their vocabulary teaching. teachers who have already found vocabulary learning problems among their students may use it to catch potential learning strategy causes of the problems they have discovered. 5.2. administration, scoring and interpretation it is very easy to set up the online slider bar version using an online survey service such as qualtrics. the benefit of such an online tool is the convenience and flexibility for data collection. once the survey is set up, the target population can be approached with an email with a link to the survey. students can then do the survey at their own time and using their own laptops or even smart phones. once it is done, the data can be downloaded for processing. alternatively, a simple paper version with a scale from 0 to 100 can be easily reproduced, with spaces provided every 10 or 5 points. the only drawback is that the data will need to be manually entered for later processing. scoring is done in two steps. the first step is to obtain the average item score (the mean score) under each strategy, in other words, by adding all items up and dividing the sum by the number of items. for example, to get a respondent’s strategy score for the activation strategy, all four items for the strategy are added up, and the sum is then divided by 4. mapping out the mean score for each strategy on the vlq would give the user a quick idea about the repertoire and level of strategy use for each sample or respondent observed. for research purposes, this mean score is enough. for diagnostic purposes, the second step will help. to diagnose vls problems, i suggest one standard deviation above and below the mean score as the cut-off points for “moderate use.” theoretically, this accounts for 34% above the mean and 34% below the mean. another way of seeing peter yongqi gu 344 it is that we would see the level of strategy use being “moderate” if a student’s strategy use falls within 68% around the mean score. this group’s strategy use can be boosted further to improve strategic learning, but there is little to worry about. for a strategy that is supposed to be good for vocabulary learning, if a student’s score is below -1 standard deviation, s/he belongs to the 16% at the bottom end, which begs for attention. anyone above the +1 standard deviation belongs to the 16% at the top who already use the strategy with experience. on the contrary, for a strategy that is normally linked to low vocabulary achievement (e.g., visual repetition), high strategy use would be reason for alarm. table 5 interpreting vlq6.4 scores (slider bar version, 0-100) mean sd low strategy use moderate strategy use high strategy use memorize 41 18 (41-18) 23 or below 24-58 (41+18) 59 or above learn 79 12 (79-12) 67 or below 68-90 (79+12) 91 or above selective 56 16 (56-16) 40 or below 41-71 (56+16) 72 or above selfinitiate 53 20 (53-20) 33 or below 34-72 (53+20) 73 or above guessing 67 14 (67-14) 53 or below 54-80 (67+14) 81 or above dictionary 65 15 (65-15) 50 or below 51-79 (65+15) 80 or above notewhat 67 18 (67-18) 49 or below 50-84 (67+18) 85 or above noteinfo 51 21 (51-21) 30 or below 31-71 (51+21) 72 or above wordlist 42 20 (42-20) 22 or below 23-61 (42+20) 62 or above repeatoral 59 18 (59-18) 41 or below 42-76 (59+18) 77 or above repeatvis 53 19 (53-19) 34 or below 35-71 (53+19) 72 or above codingvis 50 21 (50-21) 29 or below 30-70 (50+21) 71 or above codingaud 57 20 (57-20) 37 or below 38-76 (57+20) 77 or above codingstr 60 19 (60-19) 41 or below 42-78 (60+19) 79 or above codingcntxt 55 21 (55-21) 34 or below 35-75 (55+21) 76 or above activation 53 20 (53-20) 33 or below 34-72 (53+20) 73 or above for the busy classroom teacher or individual learner who does not want to do the tedious calculation of standard deviations, a rough guide is to add or delete 20 from the arithmetic average (table 5). the average standard deviation of all the strategies in vlq6.4 for this sample is 18.28. there may well be a slightly different distribution of data with another sample. although the sample in this study is not large enough to play the role of a norm, it can still be a reasonable guide for quick diagnostic purposes. as a crude classification measure, it seems safe that each student’s strategy use can be classified into high, moderate, and low categories by adding to or deleting 20 from the average score (mean) of each individual strategy. validation of an online questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies for esl learners 345 6. conclusion and remaining issues the present update and validation effort has focused mainly on producing an esl version of the vlq, shortening the questionnaire, and on trialing the use of the 100-point slider bar. as such, conceptualization of the construct of vls has not changed since the beginning of the instrument. readers should be aware that the vlq focuses on strategies for learning single words and not multi-word units. in addition, the vlq does not distinguish between strategies for vocabulary breadth from those for the depth of vocabulary knowledge. the vlq does not explicitly cover strategies for the development of automaticity and appropriateness in vocabulary use either. furthermore, partly because of the focus on vocabulary breadth (size), the overwhelming majority of items cover strategies for the learning of receptive vocabulary. only the last category with 4 items in the latest version attempts to elicit strategies for “activation.” in addition, the vlq covers metacognitive and cognitive, but not social strategies and affective strategies. depending on the purpose, future instruments on vls should aim at covering the areas of vocabulary learning that the vlq does not cover adequately. this report has mainly included the validation of the slider bar version of the vlq. when i started exploring the slider bar as a survey scale, i had hoped that eventually it might be a replacement for the likert scale. the reasoning was simple. if the slider bar was not perceived to be psychologically different from the likert scale when the students responded to the items, and if the respondents saw the slider bar as providing more fine-grained choices than the likert scale, the slider bar should be the right choice. statistically, hatch and lazaraton (1991) suggested that “wider scales encourage more precision in rating and thus approach equal intervals” (p. 57). when i stretched the scale from seven points to a hundred points on the slider bar, i had hoped that the resulting data would be approaching interval more than ordinal data. in the piloting round for vlq6.3 which was not reported in this article, 25 students answered both the paper version and the online version. while the students themselves did see the slider bar as giving them more choices and that they generally did not feel much of a difference, the judgment process in responding to the slider bar was still found to be very much ordinal (fernandez, liu, costilla, & gu, forthcoming). despite the possibility of a seemingly continuous scale, human judgement is by nature imprecise, and the majority of the choices were placed on or near 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30… and 100. in other words, the 100-point slider bar data is still more ordinal than interval, although it can be taken as similar to the marks we give our students for their written assignments. the vlq has shown considerable stability over the years. however, students from different cultural and educational backgrounds may demonstrate different peter yongqi gu 346 preferences in strategy choice and use. responses to questionnaires are known to be dependent on the specific sample on which a questionnaire is administered (horwitz, 2016). therefore, even if the basic construct of vocabulary learning strategies remains the same, interpretations of the construct may vary among different samples. in this sense, there is no such thing as an absolute “validated version” of a questionnaire instrument. for research purposes, i suggest revalidation whenever possible, rather than adopting the “validated version” of the vlq. this is especially true of reliability if the new study is examining the same construct as defined in the vlq. even if the exact version of vlq6.4 is used, a re-calculation of reliability for each strategy category backed up by a complete description of the sample would be warranted. diagnostic uses can of course exercise the license of flexibility. validation of an online questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies for esl learners 347 references ahmed, m. o. 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(2015). the relationship between vocabulary learning strategies and breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge. modern language journal, 99(4), 740-753. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12277 validation of an online questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies for esl learners 349 appendix vocabulary learning questionnaire (version 6.4): categories, strategies, items categories strategies items beliefs about vocabulary learning words should be memorized 1. once the english words of all my native language meanings have been remembered, english is learned. 2. the best way to remember words is to memorize word lists or dictionaries. 3. the purpose of learning a word is to remember it. 4. a good memory is all you need to learn a foreign language well. 5. repetition is the best way to remember words. 6. you can only learn a large vocabulary by memorizing a lot of words. words should be learned through use 7. the meanings of a large amount of words can be picked up through reading. 8. learners should pay attention to expressions (e.g., pick up) and collocations (e.g., heavy rain; strong wind) that go with a word. 9. learners can learn vocabulary simply through reading a lot. 10. the least a learner should know about a word is its spelling, pronunciation, meaning, and its basic usage. metacognitive strategies selective attention 11. i know whether a new word is important in understanding a passage. 12. i know which words are important for me to learn. 13. when i meet a new word or phrase, i know clearly whether i need to remember it. self-initiation 14. besides textbooks, i look for other readings that fall under my interest. 15. i wouldn’t learn what my english teacher doesn’t tell me to learn. (reversed value) 16. i only focus on things that are directly related to examinations. (reversed value) 17. i wouldn’t care much about vocabulary items that my teacher does not explain in class. (reversed value) inferencing guessing strategies 18. i make use of the logical development in the context (e.g., cause and effect) when guessing the meaning of a word. 19. i use common sense and knowledge of the world when guessing the meaning of a word. 20. i check my guessed meaning in the paragraph or whole text to see if it fits in. 21. when i don’t know a new word in reading, i use my background knowledge of the topic to guess the meaning of the new word. 22. i look for explanations in the reading text that support my guess about the meaning of a word. 23. i make use of the grammatical structure of a sentence when guessing the meaning of a new word. 24. i make use of the part of speech of a new word when guessing its meaning. using dictionary dictionary strategies 25. when i see an unfamiliar word again and again, i look it up. 26. when not knowing a word prevents me from understanding a whole sentence or even a whole paragraph, i look it up. 27. i look up words that are important to the understanding of the sentence or paragraph in which it appears. 28. i pay attention to the examples when i look up a word in a dictionary. 29. when i want to have some deeper knowledge about a word that i already know, i look it up. 30. when i want to know more about the usage of a word that i know, i look it up. 31. i check the dictionary when i want to find out the similarities and differences between the meanings of related words. peter yongqi gu 350 taking notes choosing which word to put into notebook 32. i make a note when i think the meaning of the word i’m looking up is commonly used. 33. i make a note when i think the word i’m looking up is related to my personal interest. 34. i make a note when i see a useful expression or phrase. deciding what information goes into notes 35. i write down the english explanations of the word i look up. 36. i write down both the meaning in my native language and the english explanation of the word i look up. 37. i note down examples showing the usages of the word i look up. rehearsal use of word lists 38. i go through my vocabulary list several times until i remember all the words on the list. 39. i make vocabulary cards and take them with me wherever i go. 40. i make regular reviews of new words i have memorized. oral repetition 41. when i try to remember a word, i say it aloud to myself. 42. when i try to remember a word, i repeat its pronunciation in my mind. 43. repeating the sound of a new word to myself would be enough for me to remember the word. visual repetition 44. when i try to remember a word, i write it again and again. 45. i memorize the spelling of a word letter by letter. 46. i write both the new words and their translation in my native language again and again in order to remember them. encoding visual encoding 47. i act out some words in order to remember them better (e.g., jump). 48. i create a picture in my mind to help me remember a new word. 49. to help me remember a word, i try to “see” the spelling of the word in my mind. auditory encoding 50. i put words that sound similar together in order to remember them. 51. when words are spelled similarly, i remember them together. 52. when i try to remember a new word, i link it to a sound-alike word that i know. use of word-structure 53. when i learn new words, i pay attention to prefixes, roots, and suffixes (e.g., inter-nation-al). 54. i intentionally study how english words are formed in order to remember more words. 55. i memorize the commonly used roots and prefixes. contextual encoding 56. when i try to remember a word, i also try to remember the sentence in which the word is used. 57. i put words in set expressions or sentences in order to remember them. 58. i remember a new word together with the context where the new word appears. activation activation 59. i make up my own sentences using the words i just learned. 60. i try to use the newly learned words as much as possible in speech and writing. 61. i try to use newly learned words in real situations. 62. i try to use newly learned words in imaginary situations in my mind. 21 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (1). 2018. 21-45 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.1.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt does the effect of enjoyment outweigh that of anxiety in foreign language performance? jean-marc dewaele birkbeck college, university of london, uk j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk mateb alfawzan university of birmingham, uk matebalfawzan@hotmail.com abstract interest in the effect of positive and negative emotions in foreign language acquisition has soared recently because of the positive psychology movement (dewaele & macintyre, 2014, 2016; macintyre, gregersen & mercer, 2016). no work so far has been carried out on the differential effect of positive and negative emotions on foreign language performance. the current study investigates the effect of foreign language enjoyment (fle) and foreign language classroom anxiety (flca) on foreign language performance in a group of 189 foreign language pupils in two london secondary schools and a group of 152 saudi english as a foreign language learners and users of english in saudi arabia. correlation analyses showed that the positive effect of fle on performance was stronger than the negative effect of flca. in other words, fle seems to matter slightly more than flca in foreign language (fl) performance. qualitative material collected from the saudi participants shed light on the causes of flca and fle and how these shaped participants’ decisions to pursue or abandon the study of the fl. keywords: foreign language anxiety; foreign language enjoyment; individual differences; learner-internal variables; teacher-centered variables jean-marc dewaele, mateb alfawzan 22 1. introduction while the negative role of foreign language anxiety (fla) on learners’ progress and performance in a foreign language (fl) is well established (gkonou, daubney, & dewaele, 2017; horwitz, 2010; liu & jackson, 2008; macintyre, 1999; macintyre & gregersen, 2012a, 2012b; saito, garza, & horwitz, 1999), no research so far has compared its effect with that of positive emotions such as foreign language enjoyment (fle) (dewaele & macintyre, 2014, 2016; macintyre, gregersen, & mercer, 2016). early research did acknowledge the role of both negative and positive emotions in fl learning (krashen, 1982) but it was buried in complex models, which made a direct comparison of their effect on fl acquisition and performance impossible. the introduction of positive psychology in applied linguistics, and the work of educational psychologists such as schutz and pekrun (2007) have caused a reconsideration of the importance of both positive and negative emotions in the learners’ journey. the main argument of positive psychologists is that general psychology has been too exclusively focused on the negative and not enough on the positive. rather than combatting the negative, they argue to try and boost the positive by fostering greater engagement, increasing the appreciation of meaning in life and its activities (macintyre & mercer, 2014). this has been interpreted in applied linguistics as a call for a more holistic view on the range of emotions that learners experience in the classroom (dewaele, 2017; dewaele, & dewaele, 2017; dewaele & macintyre, 2014, 2016; dewaele, witney, saito, & dewaele, 2017; macintyre & gregersen, 2012a, 2012b; oxford, 2015; pishghadam, zabetipour, & aminzadeh, 2016). just as the interlanguage paradigm swept away the deficit view of language learners, the positive psychology movement in applied linguistics wants to consider the combined effect of both negative and positive emotions on fl acquisition and performance (dewaele et al., 2017). it might be a relatively new perspective to researchers, but it is not so among fl teachers who have always known that neutralizing negative emotions is insufficient to stimulate fl learners. macintyre and mercer (2014) express this view convincingly: many language educators are aware of the importance of improving individual learners’ experiences of language learning by helping them to develop and maintain their motivation, perseverance, and resiliency, as well as positive emotions necessary for the long-term undertaking of learning a foreign language. in addition, teachers also widely recognise the vital role played by positive classroom dynamics amongst learners and teachers, especially in settings in which communication and personally meaningful interactions are foregrounded. (p. 156) does the effect of enjoyment outweigh that of anxiety in foreign language performance? 23 this research proposes to extend the inquiry into the effect of emotions on performance in the foreign language by considering the combined effect of fle and flca in two different contexts: two british secondary schools and saudi universities. after the literature review we will present our two research questions. this will be followed by the presentation of the methodology employed in the two studies. the results of the two sets of quantitative analyses will be presented and discussed in the following section. we will finally present some tentative conclusions. 2. literature review 2.1. the origins of fl anxiety research the earliest studies into the relationship between anxiety and fl achievement produced mixed, confusing, ambiguous, and contradictory results (horwitz, 2010; macintyre, 1999, 2017). the confusion arose from a variety of definitions or misunderstanding of the concept of anxiety and anxiety measure inconsistencies. macintyre (2017) described this first phase of research into fla as the “confounded approach,” “because the ideas about anxiety and their effect on language learning were adopted from a mixture of various sources without detailed consideration of the meaning of the anxiety concept for language learners” (p. 32). the publication of horwitz (1986) and horwitz, horwitz, and cope (1986) heralded a new phase of anxiety research in sla, labelled by macintyre (2017) as the “specialized approach.” horwitz had been influenced by gardner’s suggestion (1985, p. 34) that “the conclusion seems warranted that a construct of anxiety which is not general but instead is specific to the language acquisition context is related to second language achievement.” horwitz, horwitz and cope (1986) felt that since anxiety can have a significant negative impact on the learning of a fl, teachers need to be able to identify particularly anxious learners in the fl class. they defined foreign language (classroom) anxiety as: “a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings and behaviours related to classroom learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process” (p. 128). by “distinct” the authors meant that it was a unique form of state anxiety (rather than trait anxiety).1 fl learners who experience flca “have the trait of feeling state anxiety when participating in language learning and/or use” (horwitz, 2017, p. 68). the differentiation between general 1 trait anxiety is a stable personality trait reflecting the tendency to respond with state anxiety when faced with threatening situations. state anxiety is defined as an unpleasant emotional arousal in face of threatening demands or dangers (spielberger, 1983). jean-marc dewaele, mateb alfawzan 24 anxiety and flca was confirmed in macintyre and gardner (1989, 1991). horwitz (1986) described the development and the validation process of the 33-item foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas). the items came from a number of sources and included the experiences of her own anxious language learners. internal consistency for the flcas, measured by cronbach’s alpha, was high (.93). the idea that negative emotions interfere with l2 development emerged during the “confounded approach.” krashen (1982) argued that every learner has an affective filter that determines “the degree to which the acquirer is "open"” (p. 9). negative emotions push learners to bring the filter “up,” reducing their understanding and processing of language input. to bring filters down, teachers are encouraged to try and spark interest, provide low-anxiety environments, and bolster learners’ self-esteem (krashen, 1982, p. 10). macintyre and gardner (1994) investigated the effects of anxiety on performance in the first language (l1) and second language (l2) of canadian students across three stages of cognitive processing: (1) language input stage, (2) processing and interpreting the language, and (3) the output stage at which knowledge of the language can be demonstrated. they concluded that: “the potential effects of language anxiety on cognitive processing in the second language appear pervasive and may be quite subtle. performance measures that examine only behavior at the output stage may be neglecting the influence of anxiety at earlier stages as well as ignoring the links among stages” (p. 301). 2.2. the dynamic approach in fl anxiety research macintyre (2017) argues that around 2010 anxiety research had reached a third phase, the “dynamic approach,” which has as principal aim to situate anxiety among a range of interacting factors that affect acquisition of the fl and performance in the fl. anxiety is defined as an emotion that is constantly fluctuating over different timescales and that negatively affects motivation, perceptions of competence and willingness to communicate. in an overview of fl anxiety research, dewaele (2017) argued that “the effects of various psychological variables on levels of fla/flca are not constant but dynamic and often language specific. on top of these complex interactions come other layers of sociobiographical, situational, and social variables, which could interact among themselves but also with a wide range of psychological variables” (p. 444). şimşek and dörnyei (2017) proposed capturing the dynamic character of flca by reframing it within a self-concept framework. the authors interviewed 20 highly anxious turkish university learners of english at an intermediate level about their perceived anxiety, its causes and their awareness of anxiety. exploratory qualitative data analysis revealed that “several learners talked about the does the effect of enjoyment outweigh that of anxiety in foreign language performance? 25 way in which they were affected by anxiety in a somewhat detached manner, referring to an anxious persona that they were not fully in control of” (p. 100). this “anxious self” was “a side of themselves that was fairly distinct from other aspects of their existence, having a life of its own” (p. 114). the analysis of the learners’ narratives foregrounded three typical approaches when faced with anxiety, representing three reaction styles: “fighter, quitter and safe player” (p. 111). the fighters tried to deal with their flca in a combative and constructive manner. the quitters – whose anxiety levels were as high as that of the fighters – were convinced that their flca was unsurmountable and chose flight rather than fight. finally, the safe players tried to avoid potentially negative events by remaining silent and/or invisible. personality traits of individual learners are associated with increased fla. these include neuroticism, extraversion, and psychoticism, perfectionism, trait emotional intelligence and second language tolerance of ambiguity (for an overview, see dewaele, 2017). a range of other characteristics of learners has been linked with fla/flca. dewaele (2013) found lower fla in adult fl users who were younger during the learning phase, who were older at the time of the study, who used the fl in authentic situations (rather than just in the classroom), who used the fl frequently, socialized regularly in a fl and had a large network of fl users. the climate in the classroom also plays a crucial role, as poor relationships between teachers and learners can increase the latter’s fla (gregersen & macintyre, 2014). while the majority of work carried out on flca has been conducted in western cultures, it has been picked up by researchers around the globe, including in saudi arabia (al-saraj, 2011, 2014; al asmari, 2015; alrabai, 2014; dewaele & al-saraj, 2015). in saudi arabia, english is used in businesses and hospitals among many other sectors and is the only foreign language taught in government schools. within english classes, levels of anxiety tend to be high with low overall mastery of english (alrabai, 2014). in this context, students have been described as being passive learners, with overreliance on the teacher, who tends to dominate the learning process (alrabai, 2014). in a series of 10 qualitative interviews with female english as a foreign language (efl) learners in saudi arabia, teacher actions and interactions between students and teachers were identified as sources of anxiety by all participants (al-saraj, 2011). saudi students have reported competitiveness and fear of failure as important sources of anxiety (al-saraj, 2011). low level of english proficiency common among saudi students was found to be a major contributing factor to flca levels in a quantitative study of 1389 saudi efl learners (alrabai, 2014). ismail (2015) reported that emotions (i.e., anger, anxiety, enjoyment, hope, hopelessness, pride, boredom and shame) explained two thirds of variance of 315 saudi efl university students’ english achievement. jean-marc dewaele, mateb alfawzan 26 2.3. positive psychology and a more holistic view on classroom emotions positive psychologist barbara fredrickson argued that there is a natural tendency to study what afflicts humanity, which may in part explain the neglect of the role of positive emotions in life (fredrickson, 2003). positive emotions differ in some crucial aspects from negative emotions in human behavior. in her broaden-andbuild theory, fredrickson (2013) argued that the role of positive emotions has been shaped over time and generations through the process of natural selection to build survival resources. while negative emotions are important at the time they are experienced, for example, causing a fight or flight reaction and important for survival, positive emotions broaden the mind-set over time. fredrickson described the role of positive emotion in building resources as follows: certain discrete positive emotions – including joy, interest, contentment, pride, and love – although phenomenologically distinct, all share the ability to broaden people’s momentary thought-action repertoires and build their enduring personal resources, ranging from physical and intellectual resources to social and psychological resources. (2003, p. 219) while a positive emotion may not save lives in specific circumstances, the broadening of the mind over time was described by fredrickson (2013) as being key for the discovery of new knowledge which over time may improve chances of survival. macintyre and gregersen (2012a, 2012b) introduced the concept of positive psychology into sla, pointing out that positive emotions are much more than pleasant feelings. learners in the grip of positive emotions are better able to notice things in their classroom environment and become more aware of language input, which allows them to absorb more of the fl. positive emotions can also drive out negative arousal, which is crucial because negative emotions cause a narrowing of focus and limit the potential language input. positive emotions also have longer-term effects outside the classroom as they can make students more resilient and hardy during difficult times. experiencing positive emotions also allows learners to take some measured risks, to explore and play, which can boost social cohesion. the researchers have further explored this avenue in a special journal issue (macintyre & mercer, 2014) and an edited book (macintyre, gregersen, & mercer, 2016). dewaele and macintyre (2014) argued that “there is good reason to believe that studying positive emotion in greater detail will produce a novel understanding of the process involved” (p. 240). they developed a fle scale consisting of 21 items with likert scale ratings reflecting positive emotions towards the learning experience, peers and teacher, which they combined with 8 items reflecting flca. a moderate negative correlation was found to exist between fle does the effect of enjoyment outweigh that of anxiety in foreign language performance? 27 and flca of 1740 fl learners (of all ages and from all over the world), suggesting that they are essentially separate dimensions. further statistical analysis revealed that a high level of multilingualism, more advanced students, who felt that they did better than their peers in the fl class, who were at university rather than secondary school and who were older, reported significantly higher levels of fle and significantly less flca. the analysis of feedback on an openended question concerning enjoyable episodes from 1076 out of the 1746 participants in the fl class showed that specific positive classroom activities could boost fl learners’ levels of fle. these included debates, making a film or preparing group presentations. in other words, these were activities that empowered students, giving them a choice in shaping an activity so that it matched their immediate concerns and interests. the narratives also pointed to the crucial role of the classroom environment in the experience of fle and flca. participants reported episodes where teachers had been funny and encouraging, using humor judiciously and praising students for good performance. sympathetic laughter was particularly appreciated when used to defuse a potential embarrassment. teachers were found to directly contribute to their students’ fle. peers could also boost – or destroy – fle. a follow-up study by dewaele and macintyre (2016) used a principal components analysis of the same dataset, and revealed three dimensions explaining nearly half of the variance, and showing the independence of two dimensions of fle, namely social and private fle. the former accounted for 13% of the variance and the latter explained an additional 6% of variance. a final study on the same database focused on the gender differences at item-level (dewaele, macintyre, boudreau, & dewaele, 2016). female participants reported having significantly more fun in the fl class, agreed more strongly that they learned interesting things, and were prouder than the male peers of their fl performance. the female learners also tended to experience more enjoyment and excitement in a positive fl classroom environment that allowed them to be creative, and tended to agree more that knowing a fl was “cool.” however, they worried significantly more than their male peers about mistakes and lacked in confidence in using the fl. the authors speculated that the females’ heightened emotionality might boost the acquisition and use of the fl and that both emotions fluctuated quite rapidly. dewaele, witney, saito and dewaele (2017) explored the effect of learnerinternal and learner-external variables on levels of flca and fle of 189 secondary school pupils in london (the same corpus on which the present study is based) who were mostly studying french, german or spanish as a fl. participants reported significantly higher levels of fle than flca, with a weak negative relationship between both (r = -.194, p < .007), confirming the finding in dewaele and macintyre (2014). pupils’ age was not linked to flca but was positively linked jean-marc dewaele, mateb alfawzan 28 to fle (despite a dip among the 15-year olds). female pupils scored higher on both fle and flca. higher levels of fle were further linked to more positive attitudes towards the fl, the fl teacher, frequent use of the fl by the teacher in class, a strong proportion of time spent by pupils on speaking, a higher relative standing among peers in the fl class and being more advanced in the fl. lower levels of flca were linked to positive attitudes towards the fl, higher relative standing among peers in the fl being more advanced in the fl. it was striking that flca is much less related to teacher and teacher practices than fle, which suggests that an effective teacher needs to fuel learners’ enthusiasm and enjoyment and not worry overly about their flca – while creating a friendly low-anxiety environment. a second study on the same database (dewaele & dewaele, 2017) used a pseudo-longitudinal design to investigate how fle and flca evolved over time. a comparison of the mean values of 12-13 year olds (age group 1), 14-15 year olds (age group 2) and 16-18 year olds (age group 3) showed little variation in flca and a slight increase in fle. multiple linear regression analyses showed that fewer learner-internal and teacher-centered variables predicted fle and flca in age groups 1 and 3 compared to age group 2. it thus seems that the sources of positive and negative emotions are dynamic and ever-evolving. saito, dewaele, abe and in’nami (to appear) carried out a crosssectional and longitudinal analysis of the comprehensibility of 108 japanese efl high school students. learning patterns were found to be associated with fle and flca and also with their motivational dispositions (clear vision of ideal future selves). flca and a weaker ideal l2 self were negatively linked to performance at the beginning of the data collection (when learners had had several years of efl instruction). fle and a stronger ideal l2 self predicted the amount of english practice and the rate of development over a period of three months. it this seems that more regular/frequent fl use with positive emotions boosts acquisition, which may dampen negative emotions and lead to better fl proficiency in the long run. 3. research questions the overall research question is whether positive emotions (fle) are better predictors of fl performance than negative ones (flca) in two completely different contexts, that is, british secondary school students in the uk and adult university students in saudi arabia.2 more specifically, we will investigate the following two research questions: 1. to what extent are fle and flca in two british secondary schools linked with self-reported fl test results (study 1)? 2 finding similar patterns in the two contexts would allow us to claim that the relationship between the in/dependent variables could be universal rather than a random effect of the local context. does the effect of enjoyment outweigh that of anxiety in foreign language performance? 29 2. to what extent are fle and flca in undergraduate efl classes in saudi universities linked with general english proficiency (study 2)? 4. methodology 4.1. study 1 4.1.1. foreign languages in the uk: background, data collection and ethics the study of an fl is compulsory in british schools for pupils aged 11-14. pupils aged 14-18 have the option of studying a fl. pupils in british secondary schools face two national tests which are high stakes for themselves and for their schools. pupils’ admission into sixth form colleges or universities depends on their results and constitute the basis for the calculation of national league tables which play a crucial part in the prestige of the schools. the first hurdle is the general certificate of secondary education (gcse). pupils who sit their gcse exams in the uk are typically 16 years old but some schools encourage their students to sit their igcse3 french a year early at 15. fls are optional also after gcse, when pupils choose three or four subjects to study during the last two years of school (sixth form colleges), and which they usually sit at the end of their schooling, aged 18 (a-level). teachers and pupils are under relentless pressure as universities typically make conditional offers to sixth form pupils who are in their final year, based on pupils’ personal statement, gcse results, predicted a-level results (oxford and cambridge typically expect top scores for the three subjects, in addition to good university entrance test results and a convincing interview performance). data were collected in 2015 through an anonymous online questionnaire: no names of participants or their teachers were collected. once the research design and questionnaire had obtained ethical approval from the school of social sciences, history and philosophy at birkbeck, the headmasters of westminster school and dame alice owen’s school gave their approval after consultation with the teachers. consent was obtained in two stages. first, the school contacted parents to explain that their children would be invited to participate in a survey on affective variables in the fl classroom offering them a chance to ask for extra information and/or opt out of the survey. next, the parents received an email in which they were asked to invite their child to participate in the study. pupils’ individual consent was obtained at the start of the survey. the questionnaire was posted online using googledocs and remained online for one month in 2015. 3 the international general certificate of secondary education (igcse) is an english language curriculum offered to students to prepare them for international baccalaureate, a level and btec level 3 (which is recommended for higher tier students). jean-marc dewaele, mateb alfawzan 30 4.1.2. participants study 1 is based on the feedback from 189 secondary school pupils (49 females, 140 males) from two schools in greater london: 63 pupils from dame alice owen’s, a semi-selective state school in potters bar, and 126 pupils from westminster school, an independent boarding and day school within the precincts of westminster abbey, which is selective and fee-paying. the schools are amongst the best performing schools in the uk.4 dame alice owen’s employed 16 fulltime and part-time fl teachers, while westminster school employed 22 fulltime and part-time fl teachers at the time of data collection. all participants were studying fls and 85 pupils from westminster school were also enrolled in courses of latin and/or ancient greek. participants’ age ranged from 12 to 18. three age groups were created: those aged 12-13 (n = 34), aged 14-15 (n = 108) and aged 16-18 (n = 47). gender distribution was quite different across groups: those aged 12-13 (12 females, 22 males), aged 14-15 (12 females, 96 males), and aged 16-18 (25 females, 22 males). most participants were british (n = 156), often with double nationalities. other nationalities included american, argentinian, australian, belgian, brazilian, canadian, chinese, german, greek cypriot, hungarian, indian, iranian, irish, israeli, italian, korean, lebanese, new zealand, nigerian, portuguese, spanish, russian, singaporean, swiss and turkish. a majority of pupils reported english (n = 169) as a first language (l1) which was often combined with other l1s, such as afrikaans, arabic, bengali, bulgarian, cantonese, dutch, farsi, french, german, greek, gujarati, hindi, hungarian, italian, kannada, korean, macedonian, mandarin, portuguese, punjabi, polish, russian, sinhalese, spanish, swahili, tamil, telugu, tulu, turkish and urdu. close to a third of participants (n = 57) grew up with two or three languages from birth. french was the most popular fl (n = 144, 68%), fewer pupils studied spanish (n = 21), german (n = 15), with smaller numbers studying arabic, dutch, english, farsi, hindi, greek, italian, japanese, mandarin, polish, portuguese, and russian.5 4 dame alice owen’s school reported that 81% of all grades were awarded a*b at a-level in 2015 (with 205 students participating in the exams). (http://www.damealiceowens.herts .sch.uk/sixth_form/results.html). westminster school reported that 97% of all grades were awarded a*b at a-level in 2015 (with 583 students participating in the exams). 5 the rank order corresponds to national figures for the 23,031 a-level entries in the uk in 2015, with 45% of students choosing french, followed by spanish (38%) and german (17%) (http://www.all-languages.org.uk). does the effect of enjoyment outweigh that of anxiety in foreign language performance? 31 4.1.3. the independent variables students completed 10 items extracted from the foreign language enjoyment questionnaire (dewaele & macintyre, 2014). they were chosen to reflect the dimensions of the original scale without sacrificing the reliability of the measurement. they included items reflecting the two fle dimensions: social fle (“the peers are nice,” “there is a good atmosphere,” “we laugh a lot,” “it’s a positive environment”) and private fle (“i enjoy it,” “i’m a worthy member of the fl class,” “in class, i feel proud of my accomplishments,” “it’s a positive environment,” “it’s cool to know a fl,” ”it’s fun”) (dewaele & macintyre, 2016). they were based on standard 5-point likert scales with the anchors “absolutely disagree” = 1, “disagree” = 2, “neither agree nor disagree” = 3, “agree” = 4, “strongly agree” = 5. all items were positively phrased. a scale analysis revealed high internal consistency (cronbach alpha = .88). the mean score for fle was 3.9 (sd = 0.6). eight items which reflected physical symptoms of anxiety, nervousness and lack of confidence were extracted from the flcas (horwitz, et al. 1986). they also captured the reliability of the original scale (dewaele & macintyre, 2014). two flca items were phrased to indicate low anxiety (“i don’t worry about making mistakes in fl class,” “i feel confident when i speak in foreign language class”) and six were phrased to indicate high anxiety (“even if i am well prepared for fl class, i feel anxious about it,” “i always feel that the other students speak the fl better than i do,” “i can feel my heart pounding when i’m going to be called on in fl class.” “i get nervous and confused when i am speaking in my fl class,” “i start to panic when i have to speak without preparation in fl class,” “it embarrasses me to volunteer answers in my fl class”). the low anxiety items were reverse-coded so that high scores reflect high anxiety for all items on this measure. a scale analysis revealed high internal consistency (cronbach alpha = .85). the mean score for flca was 2.4 (sd = 0.8). 4.1.4. the dependent variable participants were asked about the result on their last major fl test. these tests were different for pupils in different year groups but followed the same standard format within the school. test scores ranged from 49% to 100%, with the mean of 87.7% (sd = 10). in other words, these were excellent fl students. a kolmogorov-smirnov test revealed that the distribution of scores was not normal (ks = 0.30, p < .001) (see figure 1). as a result, we opted for non-parametric statistics, namely spearman correlation analyses. jean-marc dewaele, mateb alfawzan 32 figure 1 distribution of test scores in the uk sample 4.2. study 2 4.2.1. english as a fl in saudi arabia: background, data collection and ethics english education in the kingdom of saudi arabia starts in 4th grade of elementary school, when students are 10 years old, and continues through secondary education. primary school students have two 45-minute english classes a week. this increases to four classes per week in intermediate and secondary schools. most saudi universities use english as the language of instruction in medicine and engineering. in courses where arabic is the language of instruction, students need to take an english class as an additional compulsory unit (alrashidi & phan, 2015). convenience sampling was used to recruit participants. a link was sent in 2016 to the online questionnaire using twitter, whatsapp and e-mail to acquaintances of the second author and to saudi residents in saudi arabia who indicated in their profile on social media that they recently obtained an undergraduate degree in english language or were pursuing one. there was no time limit to fill out the questionnaire. participants who agreed to be cited left their first name. the research design and questionnaire obtained approval from the ethics committee of the school of social sciences, history and philosophy at birkbeck, university of london. 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 forties fifties sixties seventies eighties nineties one hunderd % of pa rt ic ip an ts test results (in bands) does the effect of enjoyment outweigh that of anxiety in foreign language performance? 33 4.2.2. participants a total of 152 saudi learners and users of english participated in the data collection (82 males, 70 females). their age ranged from 18 to 40 (m = 26, sd = 6). the majority of participants had recently completed their undergraduate education (60%), with the remaining participants being english students at the time of the data collection. about a quarter of participants reported using english regularly in daily life. the remaining participants used english “sometimes” (42%), “rarely” (29%) or “never” (5%). over half of participants had travelled outside of saudi arabia where they had studied or used english (59%), though a substantial number had not been abroad (41%). 4.2.3. independent variables participants filled out the same instruments to determine their levels of fle and flca as in study 1. the mean score for fle was 3.4 (sd = 0.9), and the mean score for flca was slightly lower: 2.6 (sd = 0.6). cronbach’s alpha was .92 for the fle scale, suggesting excellent internal consistency. an identical value emerged for the flca scale: cronbach’s alpha = .92. participants also filled out two open-ended questions on fle and flca which were formulated as follows: (1) “in as much detail as possible, write about an enjoyable learning experience in your english class and how you felt about it,” and (2) "in as much detail as possible, write about an anxious learning experience in your english class and how you felt about it.” we will focus on the answers where participants linked fle and flca with their english proficiency. 4.2.4. dependent variable participants filled out the english version of the lextale (lemhöfer & broersma, 2012). this lexical decision test consists of 60 items, some of which are existing (british) english words while other are english-looking non-words. participants are asked to distinguish the real words from the non-words. research has demonstrated that this test provides a reliable measure of the lexical proficiency of learners with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds and is a good indicator of overall english proficiency, at least for learners with intermediate and advanced proficiency levels (lemhöfer & broersma, 2012). students’ lextale scores ranged from 37.5 to 98.7. the mean score was 57.4 (sd = 10.4), just within the lower intermediate level according to lemhöfer and broersma’s (2012) classification of general proficiency levels: upper and lower advanced/proficient users (80-100), upper intermediate users (60-79) and jean-marc dewaele, mateb alfawzan 34 lower intermediate and lower (below 59). a kolmogorov-smirnov test revealed that the distribution was not quite normal (ks = 0.13, p < .01). although the distribution shows the distinctive bell curve, it is slightly skewed towards the lower end of the continuum (see figure 2). as a consequence, the data were analyzed with non-parametric statistics. figure 2 distribution of english proficiency scores in saudi sample 5. results 5.1. study 1: the relationship between fle, flca and test results a spearman correlation analysis revealed a positive relationship between fle and test results (rho = .34, p < .0001, r2 = 11.6) and a negative relationship between flca and test results (rho = -.30, p < .0001, r2 = 9.0). in other words, higher levels of enjoyment and lower levels of anxiety in the fl class were linked with better test results (see figures 3 and 4). the effect size was slightly greater for fle (12%) than for flca (9%) but both fall somewhere between “small” and “medium.”6 6 plonsky and oswald (2014, p. 889) describe correlation coefficients of .25 as small, and .40 as medium. 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 30-39.99 40-49.99 50-59.99 60-69.99 70-79.99 80-89.99 90-100 % of pa rt ic ip an ts lextale score band does the effect of enjoyment outweigh that of anxiety in foreign language performance? 35 figure 3 the relationship between fle and test results figure 4 the relationship between flca and test results 1 1,5 2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 5 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 fl e test results 1 1,5 2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 5 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 fl ca test results jean-marc dewaele, mateb alfawzan 36 5.2. study 2 the relationship between fle, flca and test results spearman rho correlation analyses revealed that fle and flca were both associated with proficiency in english as a fl, though only the relationship with fle was significant (rho = 0.242, p < 0.003, r2 = 5.8) (see figure 5). the effect size for fle (5.8%) can thus be described as “small.” figure 5 the relationship between fle and english proficiency scores the negative relationship between flca and proficiency scores showed the expected pattern but failed to reach significance (rho = -0.145, p = 0.075, r2 = 2.1%) (see figure 6). figure 6 the relationship between flca and english proficiency scores does the effect of enjoyment outweigh that of anxiety in foreign language performance? 37 many participants linked their classroom emotions with their english proficiency in the feedback on the two open questions. some responded in english and some in arabic. widad described how the teacher’s character not only made the class enjoyable but how this, in turn, lead to good attendance and test results: هاألعواماحدىي هالمواد احدىمعلمانتالدراس ل لهلغتها براز طهجم س اتها واستمتعو محا حالمزاحتحبانتجدآ تومتواضعهمعنا والم از المادەاج مت بولمب دآ اتغ اتها عنا كنتمحا تنا قدومها الصفارغانتظر لهبروحها المادەحب موعادةالجم "مللدونع الوقتما [in one of my undergraduate years my teacher for one module was brazilian. her english was good and simple, i enjoyed her class. she was humble, joked with us and had great sense of humor. i passed her class with excellent grades and i have never been absent from her class. i always looked forward to her lecture. it is thanks to her great character that we liked the class and that time goes by so quick]. (widad, female, 29) the successful execution of a well-prepared presentation could boost the enjoyment level of the learner and reduce anxiety in the long term, as safana explained: هاللغهرائععرضقدمت" هعناالنجل ف دتصناعهك د اعجابها المعلمهالعطورا الدرجهونلتاداالشد امله معد ال هاللغهعرضايعملعند والتوتر الخوفعنديوقلنفتجاەالفخر شعرتالتقي "االنجل [i did an excellent presentation on how perfumes are made which received high praise from my teacher on my performance. i got a full mark on that presentation and levels of fear and anxiety have decreased when i do any presentation in english]. (safana, female, 26) some participants reported strong positive emotions when addressing their peers in fluent english, as safaa explained: شنعرضخالل هامامبرزنت لشعور انالطل ةاللغةاتحدثوانا جم هالمدەق رغماألجن الزمن [in spite of the short time, i had such a beautiful feeling when i gave a presentation in the foreign language before students]. (safaa, female, 23) however, many participants reported high levels of anxiety in public speaking which negatively affected their english fluency and accuracy. this typically occurred early on in the course, as nourah observed: ــعمنأقللهخلصتهلدرجةعرضقدمتمرةأولعند توترت قةر المعمنفهمومحد دق ال [i got anxious the first time i gave a presentation to the extent that i finished the whole presentation in less than 25 seconds. no one could understand anything as i was speaking so fast]. (nourah, female, 22) public speaking anxiety can even cripple those who feel competent in english, as is depicted in the following extract from ahmad: jean-marc dewaele, mateb alfawzan 38 ةاللغةعرضقدمتالعمل التحدثعقدرمنالرغمبنفثقفقدتلدرجةوتوترتاالنجل ةاللغة االنجل [at work, i gave a presentation in english and i got anxious to the point that i lost my self-confidence despite my competency in the english language]. (ahmad, male, 24) bad pedagogical practices were highlighted as having a negative effect on students’ emotions, which had repercussions on their ultimate attainment in english: what really irritates me is that schools in the educational system in saudi arabia used to recruit unqualified teachers who do not exhibit fair knowledge of english. moreover, they dealt with us on the basis of reducing marks. for that we felt a sense of horror and difficulty and eventually we ended up graduating from secondary school with low attainment in english and a psychological complex that english is boring and impossible to learn when the reality is the opposite. (sami, male, 34). belittling learners and ignoring their efforts has been a source of anxiety for several participants like reem: ت ةاللغهأستاذةمطل تباناألنجل التامامالسطور عضا لماتإحدىإمالءأخفقتوقد الزم ال حهالسطور جميعومسحتالجميعأماممفسخرت بالصح واحدحرفإخفاس [my english language teacher requested that i write a few lines on the board in front my classmates. i misspelled one word. therefore, she ridiculed me in front of everyone and wiped out all correct lines for failing in spelling just one word]. (reem, female, 22) physical abuse (which was officially banned in the educational system in the kingdom of saudi arabia in october 2013) did make khalid anxious about the english language course: after i was beaten by my english language teacher, i have become afraid of it even though i like it. (khalid, male, 32) negative emotions linked to a perceived lack of english proficiency might create a vicious circle for some learners who might be tempted to give up. some managed to overcome this obstacle thanks to teacher support, as naif’s explained: ەايهناكتكنلماالوالسنه هللغهخ اناالنجل لماتعضمعرفةالصعبمنف او ال بالمتعلقهالقواعد ت هوعدمالتوتر منءفشعرتالجملب مالرغ تعلمعالعملا ناللغه فاالساتذەمساعدةول از استطعتالمواد تلكعالم هالمرحلههذەاجت " الصع does the effect of enjoyment outweigh that of anxiety in foreign language performance? 39 [in my first year there i had no experience in english so it was difficult knowing some words or sentence structure rules. i experienced some degree of anxiety and unwillingness to pursue learning the language, but thanks to the teachers of those modules i managed to overcome this tough phase]. (naif, male, 29) 6. discussion the research questions focused on the effect of positive and negative emotions on fl performance in two very different contexts: two london-based secondary schools with pupils studying various fls and current and former saudi students of english as a fl in saudi arabia. correlation analyses in study 1 revealed a positive relationship between fle and self-reported test results in the fl among the london pupils. a slightly weaker negative relationship emerged between flca and their test results. in other words, pupils with higher levels of fle and lower levels of flca were more likely to perform well on fl tests. correlation analyses in study 2 on saudi university efl students revealed a similar picture. higher levels of fle were linked to significantly higher english proficiency scores and higher levels of flca were linked to marginally lower english proficiency scores. the qualitative material collected in study 2 allowed us to get a glimpse of the complex interactions between participants’ enjoyment and anxiety in their efl classes. these were generally linked to the perception of the teacher and teachers’ pedagogical practices. participants remembered how anxiety had negatively affected their performance in english. negative practices and comments by teachers – sometimes even physical abuse – weighed on the participants’ mood and caused shame (galmiche, 2017). some reported little enjoyment, increased anxiety and a growing lack of self-confidence in english, which could lead to abandonment of the english course. yet, participants in the current study managed to overcome these hurdles thanks to good teachers, resilience and a strong desire to master english. the results are in line with brantmeier (2005), who showed that enjoyment was associated with higher self-assessed fl ability and scores on a reading comprehension test. our results also show that more enjoyment is typically linked with less anxiety but that both can co-occur (dewaele & macintyre, 2014, 2016; dewaele et al., 2016). finally, some saudi participants confirmed that their levels of enjoyment typically increased over time while they learned to better control their anxiety (dewaele & dewaele, 2017). these were typically the “fighters,” to use şimşek and dörnyei’s (2017) terminology. the present study provided further confirmation of the negative relationship between anxiety and fl achievement (horwitz, 2010; krashen, 1982; liu & jackson, 2008; macintyre, 1999, 2017; macintyre & gardner, 1994; tran, jean-marc dewaele, mateb alfawzan 40 2012). the relationship between level of mastery in the fl and higher levels of enjoyment, combined with lower levels of anxiety (cf. dewaele & macintyre, 2014) seems also to exist among the saudi participants. several saudi participants described anxiety arising from their low proficiency level and having toyed with the idea of giving up the study of english rather than actively combatting their anxiety (i.e. potential “quitters,” cf. şimşek & dörnyei, 2017). in other words, only those who actively rejected the crippling effects of anxiety and were resilient enough to overcome their negative emotions managed to progress to higher levels of proficiency – and to higher levels of fl enjoyment. dewaele and macintyre (2014) also found that at higher levels of proficiency fle levels increased while flca levels dropped. the gap between both was smallest among beginners and widest among advanced fl learners. it suggests that there is a process of attrition among fl learners in the education system (cf. dewaele & thirtle, 2009), with the “fighters” surviving and the “quitters” and “safe players” dropping off along the way. research into fl learning is inevitably hampered by a self-selection bias, which means it is close to impossible to have a “representative sample” of the fl population (dewaele, to appear). this is also an inherent limitation in the present research design. it is likely that the sample contains a larger proportion of successful learners with even the anxious ones being “fighters” rather than “quitters.” the successful learners are more likely to be willing to share the story of their success in an anonymous online questionnaire than the unsuccessful ones who may still experience guilt and shame about their decision to quit before reaching the end of the english course or realizing that having played it safe in the classroom, they ended up with more limited english proficiency compared to their more daring peers. the context of acquisition of the fl continues to affect students’ perception and use of the fl for many years after graduation (cf. dewaele, 2013). this pattern was confirmed in the current study with saudi efl students having vivid memories of the emotions they had experienced in english fl classes and how these shaped their self-perceptions at the time and in the years that followed. because we opted for a correlational design, we cannot establish causality between the emotions and fl performance. although it is very likely that the classroom emotions affected fl performance, it is not unlikely that fl performance also affected classroom emotions. such a bi-directional causal pathway could explain the reinforcement of fle and the relative weakening of flca and its debilitating effects over time. finally, since pedagogical practices have been found to be linked to fle and flca (dewaele & macintyre, 2014; dewaele et al., 2016) and were often reported to be the main causes of anxiety and enjoyment in study 2, it is imperative that teacher training courses pay attention to these crucial emotional dimensions in order to allow teachers to create a positive climate in their classrooms. does the effect of enjoyment outweigh that of anxiety in foreign language performance? 41 7. conclusion the present study investigated the effect of foreign language enjoyment (fle) and foreign language classroom anxiety (flca) on self-reported results in an fl test among 189 foreign language pupils in two london schools and actual performance in a group of 152 current and former saudi efl undergraduate students. correlation analyses revealed that the relationship between fle and performance was significant, positive and slightly bigger in both studies than the significant negative relationship between flca and performance in study 1 and the marginal negative effect in study 2. in other words, positive emotions seem to be more strongly linked to performance in the fl than negative emotions. overall the effect sizes hovered between small and medium. qualitative material collected from the saudi participants revealed that pedagogical practices were often reported to be the main causes of anxiety and enjoyment, which, in turn, weighed on decisions to pursue or abandon the study of english and which ultimately contributed to the level of proficiency they had reached in english. further research could focus on the effect of specific target languages on fle, flca and fl performance. acknowledgment in relation to study 1, we thank dr. davison, the headteacher, the head of languages, ms. davies and the teachers of dame alice owen’s as well as the head master of westminster school, mr. derham, the head of languages, dr. witney and the language teachers for allowing us to contact their fl students. thanks also to the students’ parents and the students themselves for their collaboration in this project. in relation to study 2, we would like to thank the participants for sharing their current and past efl experiences with us. finally, we would like to thank the reviewers for their excellent feedback. jean-marc dewaele, mateb alfawzan 42 references alrashidi, o. & phan, h. 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(2012). a review of horwitz, horwitz and cope’s theory of foreign language anxiety and the challenges to the theory. english language teaching, 5(1), 69-75. doi: 10.5539/elt.v5n1p69 127 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (1). 2017. 127-148 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.1.7 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl finding the key to successful l2 learning in groups and individuals wander lowie university of groningen, the netherlands w.m.lowie@rug.nl marijn van dijk university of groningen, the netherlands mwgvandijk@gmail.com huiping chan university of groningen, the netherlands huipingchan1981@gmail.com marjolijn verspoor university of groningen, the netherlands m.h.verspoor@rug.nl abstract a large body studies into individual differences in second language learning has shown that success in second language learning is strongly affected by a set of relevant learner characteristics ranging from the age of onset to motivation, aptitude, and personality. most studies have concentrated on a limited number of learner characteristics and have argued for the relative importance of some of these factors. clearly, some learners are more successful than others, and it is tempting to try to find the factor or combination of factors that can crack the code to success. however, isolating one or several global individual characteristics can only give a partial explanation of success in second language learning. the limitation of this approach is that it only reflects on rather general personality characteristics of learners at one point in time, wander lowie, marijn van dijk, huiping chan, marjolijn verspoor 128 while both language development and the factors affecting it are instances of complex dynamic processes that develop over time. factors that have been labelled as “individual differences” as well as the development of proficiency are characterized by nonlinear relationships in the time domain, due to which the rate of success cannot be simply deduced from a combination of factors. moreover, in complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) literature it has been argued that a generalization about the interaction of variables across individuals is not warranted when we acknowledge that language development is essentially an individual process (molenaar, 2015). in this paper, the viability of these generalizations is investigated by exploring the l2 development over time for two identical twins in taiwan who can be expected to be highly similar in all respects, from their environment to their level of english proficiency, to their exposure to english, and to their individual differences. in spite of the striking similarities between these learners, the development of their l2 english over time was very different. developmental patterns for spoken and written language even showed opposite tendencies. these observations underline the individual nature of the process of second language development. keywords: individual differences; second language development; complex dynamic systems; variability process study 1. factors to predict l2 success in group studies if there is one issue that the majority of researchers in second language acquisition agree on, it is the observation that individual differences (ids) between learners are statistically associated with the success in second language learning. differences between individuals like motivation, aptitude, and age have traditionally been treated as influential factors affecting success in second language learning. within the long standing tradition of id research in psychology, many studies have focused on understanding the cause of the differences between individuals in relation to learning achievement. the attention in the literature to ids in second language development, most notably to aptitude and motivation, is still increasing. the focus on the effect of motivation alone has shown a surge in research output of the past ten years, from 33 to 138 publications, more than half of which appeared in peer review top journals in the field (boo, dörnyei, & ryan, 2015). with ever more sophisticated statistical analyses, studies have attempted to identify the ids that most accurately predict the success in learning. for instance, gardner, trembley, and masgoret (1997) used structural equation modelling to identify the relative importance of a large number of ids and explored the causal relationship between them. using a causal modelling finding the key to successful l2 learning in groups and individuals 129 approach in which they simultaneously evaluate the relationships among a large number of ids, they show that motivation most strongly predicts achievement in the l2 (.48), followed by aptitude (.47), while confidence is most strongly loaded by achievement (.60). these and other studies focusing on the relative importance of ids seem to agree that aptitude (the “talent for language learning”) is one of the most promising factors (prediction of success is .50), followed by motivation (.40). another influential factor turns out to be the age of onset (.50). the relatively high correlations between success in the l2 (either based on grades or on self-assessment) and motivation is reliable and consistent, as was shown by masgoret and garner (2003), who carried out a meta-study of 75 independent samples. multiple regression analyses show that the combination of aptitude and motivation, which show hardly any overlap between themselves, leads to even better prediction of success (.60). the statistical analyses have improved from simple correlations to more advanced types of analysis. for instance, using hierarchical regression analyses to determine the effect of musical ability on l2 proficiency, slevc and miyake (2006) find that musical ability contributes to receptive l2 phonology (.37), while age of arrival is the most important factor to predict lexical knowledge (-.42). a fully up-to-date approach to investigate the relative importance of ids is the use of mixed effect modelling techniques in which ids are successfully “neutralized” by including the individual as a random factor in the analysis (kozaki & ross, 2011; tremblay, derwing, libben, & westbury, 2011; see also cunnings, 2012, and linck & cunnings, 2015). in spite of all these promising developments, however, there have also been critical views on the relevance of ids. for instance, dörnyei (2009) refers to ids as a “myth” and argues that they do not exist as identifiable factors that can contribute to success in second language learning. he disputes the major assumption that learner internal variables are independent of the environment. he argues that ids are not distinctly definable, not stable, and not monolithic; in addition, they are strongly dependent on time and context. dörnyei (2010) also finds that the distinction between motivation and aptitude is untenable, as illustrated by the concept of “flow,” a balanced mixture of motivation and aptitude, which demonstrates that the distinction between the two is artificial. arguments about the non-monolithic nature of ids have been worked out in more detail in dörnyei and ryan (2015), who convincingly show that the classical approach to ids may be intuitively appealing but does not provide a realistic representation of how second language development varies as a function of time and context. several studies have shown that ids are far from stable over time. jiang and dewaele (2015) investigated several aspects of motivation at three moments in time. their analyses revealed a complex picture of the ideal and oughtto l2 selves, which changed over time and were affected by various motivational wander lowie, marijn van dijk, huiping chan, marjolijn verspoor 130 variables. significant changes occurred in the ideal-l2 self and the ought-to l2 self and their relationship with other motivational factors over the year. “the nonlinear changes in ideal/ought-to l2 self,” they show, “were consistent with the basic dynamic features of self-concept” (jiang & dewaele, 2015, p. 349). this study clearly showed that several id variables interact and change over time (see figure 1). the variable nature of ids over time was also found in a study by wanninge, dörnyei, and de bot (2014) on motivational dynamics during a spanish lesson. even at a short timescale, which was the focus of their study (5-minute steps), motivation was highly variable and showed unique patterns of variability for different individuals in their study. we can conclude from these studies that ids change over time at different timescales. one proposal is to redefine ids in a more dynamic framework, as is done by dörnyei (2009, 2010). from a complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) perspective, dörnyei argues, higher-order id variables can be seen as attractors that act as stabilizing forces in the developmental process. he considers id variables in the framework of cognition, motivation and affect, and introduces factors like “possible selves” to represent individually motivated change over time. however, he also argues that there can never be a direct causal effect between these attractor states and l2 learning. figure 1 variability in ought-to-self scores (1-5) for five individual participants (f11-f85) over a period of 12 months divided over three measurements (from jiang & dewaele, 2015) 2. group studies versus individual case studies in addition to the fact that ids are not stable and delineable and may change as a function of time, there is another more serious statistical limitation to many current id approaches. most, if not all ids studies have focused on inter-individual finding the key to successful l2 learning in groups and individuals 131 variation and use gaussian statistics to make conclusions about ids based on group measures. however, such a generalization does not take into account the individual’s process of development over time. this point is clearly explained by molenaar (2015), who refers to catell’s (1952) data box. in most research, essentially two dimensions are investigated (see figure 2). the first dimension investigates how different variables (say motivation, aptitude, and language achievement) are statically related by generalizing over observations across individuals (inter-individual variation, which we will refer to as variation). in the second dimension, the relationships of variables can be described in one individual case as it emerges over time (intra-individual variation, which we will refer to as variability). molenaar (2015) shows that the combination of heterogeneity across subjects and heterogeneity in time violates assumptions for generalization. although innovations in statistical techniques are developing, most statistics currently used do not allow for generalizations across variables for different individuals in the time domain, and the analysis used is essentially a choice between either of the two dimensions. molenaar argues that there is no relation between results obtained in statistical analyses on group data at one moment in time and an individual’s development as it emerges over time, so data on the interaction of variables based on groups of individuals at one point in time cannot say anything about individual development over time and vice versa. since most ids have been demonstrated to be unstable and change over time, the analysis of variation will need to be complemented by analyses of variability over time. figure 2 catell’s cube illustrating the dimensions of data analysis (molenaar, 2015) wander lowie, marijn van dijk, huiping chan, marjolijn verspoor 132 the analysis of variability is important if we are genuinely interested in how language changes over time in relation to ids. in these cases, molenaar (2015) argues in favour of subject specific data analysis for person-oriented processes. since language development can clearly be classified as an individual person-oriented process, the combination of interacting variables and changing development must be seen as separate dimensions. one line of research is to focus on interacting variables for groups of learners, ignoring the time dimension. virtually all studies on ids in l2 learning have followed this line. therefore, it is important to complement id group studies with variability studies in which individual “differences” are excluded, but the focus is on the development over time of individual learners. 3. degrees of variability to predict l2 success in individual learners thelen and smith (1994) argue that there is not one direct cause for new behavior, but that it emerges from the confluence of different subsystems, and variability will occur in some of these subsystems because it is necessary to drive the developmental process as it allows the learner to explore and select. because variability reflects the manifestation of the system’s adaptability to the environment and signals the process of self-organization after perturbations of the system, it is a sign of development. from a more formal perspective, systems have to become “unstable” before they can change (hosenfeld, van der maas, & van den boom, 1997). for instance, high intra-individual variability implies that qualitative developmental changes may be taking place (lee & karmiloff-smith, 2002). the cause and effect relationship between variability and development is considered to be reciprocal. on the one hand, variability permits flexible and adaptive behavior and is a prerequisite to development. (just as in evolution theory, there is no selection of new forms if there is no variation.) on the other hand, free exploration of performance generates variability. trying out new tasks leads to instability of the system and consequently to an increase in variability. variability is especially large during periods of rapid development because at that time the learner explores and tries out new strategies or modes of behavior that are not always successful (thelen & smith, 1994). therefore, the claim is that stability and variability are indispensable aspects of human development that should be part of any analysis. when we apply cdst insights to language development, we may assume the following: a first or second language is a complex dynamic system consisting of many subsystems such as the sound system, the grammar system, the lexical system, and so on, all of which are interrelated and may influence each other. many internal states such as language aptitude, motivation, attitude, personality finding the key to successful l2 learning in groups and individuals 133 traits, and other “individual differences” have effect on the developmental trajectory. the developmental path may further be affected by external states or events such as the general context in which a language is learned, a particular teacher, an illness, and other conditions at any given moment. all these dynamically interrelated factors may cause any part of the learner’s language system to fluctuate from one moment to the next. these fluctuations are normal for any (sub)system that has stabilized to any extent. however, strong fluctuations may indicate that a (sub)system is changing. learning is not linear: in both first and second language development, some subsystems may take off slowly at first, then all of a sudden jump off, and level off at the end. other subsystems may develop in completely different ways. however, the interaction of developing subsystems will be manifested in a great deal of variability in the learner’s language. because learners may have different starting points and learning contexts, variation among learners is also bound to exist. a great number of studies (cf. bulté, 2013; byrnes, 2009; caspi, 2010; larsen-freeman, 2006; murakami, 2013; tilma, 2014; van geert, 2008; verspoor, lowie, & van dijk, 2008; vyatkina, 2012) now have traced individual learners and shown that learners each have their own unique developmental trajectory, showing high degrees of variability and changes in variability patterns. without explicitly mentioning it, these studies have concentrated on one individual slice of catell’s cube, showing how variables interact in the time dimension of that individual. in these longitudinal, process-based studies with dense data, it has been found that different degrees of variability may indicate different degrees of development. for instance, high initial within-subject variability tends to be positively related to subsequent learning, and such learning reflects the addition of new strategies, greater reliance on relatively advanced strategies already being used, improved choices among strategies, and new ways to execute existing strategies (verspoor, lowie, & van dijk, 2008). for example, on a number of conservation and sort-recall tasks, children who used more and different strategies on the pre-test used more advanced strategies on subsequent tasks (coyle & bjorklund, 1997; siegler as cited in siegler, 2006). these studies have concentrated on single learners; no study so far has compared two learners to explore to what extent the degree of variability in the development over time may be related to interacting variables. according to catell’s separation of dimensions as explained by molenaar (2015), interacting variables in the time dimension are not likely to be identical for different individuals. if the possibility of similarity between learners in the time dimension are investigated, it will have to be done with very similar learners to minimize the myriad of factors that may affect the degree of variability, such as differences in initial conditions, differences in personality and other “individual differences,” wander lowie, marijn van dijk, huiping chan, marjolijn verspoor 134 and differences in external factors such as the kind and amount of exposure. therefore, we focus on the developmental pattern of identical twins that have grown up in an identical environment and have been exposed to identical l2 input. 4. a case study of identical twins as in chan, verspoor, and vahtrick (2015), we compare identical twins, who were very similar in many respects. they live in the same home and have attended the same school in the same class. most traditional twin studies investigate the effect of genetic factors by comparing monozygotic (mz, or identical) twin pairs with dizygotic (dz, or fraternal) twins (segal, 2010; stromswold, 2006). the current study does not focus on the genetic effect and does not compare the two types of twins but examines only one pair of mz twins. the majority of twin studies focusing on linguistics have found identical twins to perform more similarly than fraternal twins, which validates the identical nature of their genetic makeup in the current study (stromwold, 2006). in stating that the participants are identical twins, we are not invoking the much-maligned equal environments assumption (plomin, defries, mcclern, & mcguffin, 2008), which argues that mz and dz twins share equal environments, so any significantly closer developmental patterns found in mz twins must be due to genetics. instead, we merely assume that twins who share 100% of their genes and who have been raised in an identical environment are more likely than any other pair of learners to exhibit similar developmental patterns (hayiou-thomas, 2008). chan et al. (2015) investigated their developmental stages over several syntactic complexity measures in both their speaking and their writing to see whether the sequences of observed developments in writing and speaking occur simultaneously or in a different order, and whether the twins develop in a similar manner. the finding was that abilities tapped by different measures developed in the spoken language before the written language and that the stages in the twins were not the same. in the current paper, we will re-examine the data to answer our main research questions: 1. can the degrees of variability in individuals be associated with l2 success in individual learners? 2. can similar interactions of variables be detected in the developmental patterns of two highly similar individuals? to be able to answer these questions, we will first investigate the development of two variables in lexical and syntactical development in both written and spoken free production tasks. the specific sub-questions pertain to each of the four variables: finding the key to successful l2 learning in groups and individuals 135 1. is there a difference between the average scores of the twins? 2. is there a significant increase or decrease in each individual time series of scores? 3. is there a difference in the amount of variability between the twins for all variables? 4. is there a changing slope in the range of variability in the time series of each of the learners? 5. method 5.1. participants gloria and grace (not their real names) are two female identical twins, aged 15 at the time of the study. for ten years, they attended school in taiwan in the same english class with the same english teacher, where english classes were taught in chinese with a focus on grammar. in other words, until the current study began, they had mainly received only written input in english. at the beginning of the study, they had a very similar english proficiency level (see table 1) as measured by the general english proficiency test (gept; wu, 2012). table 3 english proficiency scores (gept) for the twins grace gloria listening (120) 112 112 speaking (100) 80 80 reading (120) 108 105 writing (100) 88 82 as shown by an informal personality test, the big five test,1 carried out at the onset of the experiment, the two girls also had similar personalities; they were rather strongly sociable, friendly, and talkative. the individual scores for the participants are represented in table 2. table 4 big five personality test for the twins (percentiles) trait description gloria grace openness to experience/intellect high scorers tend to be original, creative, curious, complex; low scorers tend to be conventional, down to earth, characterized by narrow interests, uncreative. 7 10 conscientiousness high scorers tend to be reliable, well-organized, self-disciplined, careful; low scorers tend to be disorganized, undependable, negligent. 21 8 extraversion high scorers tend to be sociable, friendly, fun loving, talkative; low scorers tend to be introverted, reserved, inhibited, quiet. 79 79 1 the big five personality test available at http://www.outofservice.com/bigfive/ wander lowie, marijn van dijk, huiping chan, marjolijn verspoor 136 agreeableness high scorers tend to be good-natured, sympathetic, forgiving, courteous; low scorers tend to be critical, rude, harsh, callous. 22 10 neuroticism high scorers tend to be nervous, high-strung, insecure, worrying; low scorers tend to be calm, relaxed, secure, hardy. 32 27 5.2. materials during the time of the data collection, the participants produced oral and written texts approximately three times a week, which was usually on friday, saturday, and sunday. for each participant, 100 oral texts and 100 written texts were gathered. the topics, selected from the list of standard toefl tests by one of the researchers, were of the same genre. all the topics were presented to the two participants at the beginning of the study. examples of the topics for writing and speaking are given below. example of a speaking topic: “which of the following statements do you agree with? some believe that tv programs have a positive influence on modern society. others, however, think that the influence of tv programs is negative. what tv programs have a positive influence? why? what tv programs have a negative influence? why?” example of a writing topic: “do you agree or disagree with the following statement? with the help of technology, students nowadays can learn more information and learn it more quickly. use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.” in order to motivate and remind the participants to obtain extra exposure to english and to do the speaking and writing tasks, one of the researchers created a private group on facebook for the project, which only the researcher, the participants, and the parents had access to. the researcher reminded the twins every week to record themselves and to write the texts. recordings were sent through email, and the written texts were posted in the facebook account. to keep the participants motivated in the study, the researcher reacted to the content of each text, but no corrective feedback on form was given for either the oral or the written texts. all texts were prepared for automatic processing in lu’s automatic syntactic complexity analyzer (lu, 2010). the analyzer is designed to investigate the syntactic complexity in writing in second language acquisition, and 14 indices of syntactic complexity are calculated (see p. 479). for our study, we used length of t-units as the complexity measure. a t-unit is defined as “one main clause plus any subordinate clause or non-clausal structure that is attached to or embedded in it” (hunt, 1970, p. 4). a dependent clause is defined as a finite adjective, adverbial, or nominal clause, while non-finite verb phrases are excluded from the definition of clauses (e.g., bardovi-harlig & bofman, 1989). finding the key to successful l2 learning in groups and individuals 137 all oral texts (each about 200 words in length) were first transcribed by the researcher. to avoid redundancy in the oral production, filled pauses, dysfluencies (e.g., repetitions, restarts, and repairs), and utterances that did not involve linguistic meaning or form (e.g., laughter) were excluded. then both the oral and written data were pre-processed for the analyzer, mainly to enable correct calculations, for instance by correcting punctuation. all other errors were left unchanged to keep the data as original as possible. after pre-processing, the text files were submitted one by one to the automatic processing tool to obtain the value of the syntactic measure for observation (mean length of t-unit = mlt). for the lexical diversity in this study we used vocd (malvern, richards, chipere, & purán, 2004, p. 47). vocd is an adjusted metric for the type/token ratio (ttr), which is standardized for text length. in view of the differences in text length in the data, some of which were relatively short, vocd was used as a reliable measure of lexical diversity. vocd was measured as described in the following equation, illustrating standardization for text length: vocd is the single parameter of a mathematical function that models the falling ttr curve. the higher the d, the greater the diversity of a text, independent of text length. a computer program called vocd in clan (macwhinney, 2000) provides a standardized procedure for measuring d (see malvern et al., 2004). 5.3. procedure for this longitudinal study 100 written and 100 spoken language samples were collected during a period of eight months. for a different study that used these same data (chan et al., 2014), the effect of input on vocabulary knowledge was investigated. for this purpose, the data contained manipulations of the input condition in three stages. a stage of relatively low input was followed by a stage of high input, followed by a stage of low input. according to the self-reports in the diaries of the participants, they obtained about 2 to 5 hours per week of extra input until data point 20; 5 to 15 hours per week until data point 56; and again 25 hours per week until the last data point. although the manipulation is not relevant for the study reported here, it does illustrate that the two participants were exposed to virtually identical input during the period of recording the data. 5.4. data analysis first, we averaged the scores of each data series (mlt/written, mlt/spoken, vocd/written, vocd/spoken) to see if there was a difference between the girls wander lowie, marijn van dijk, huiping chan, marjolijn verspoor 138 across the entire trajectory. secondly, we tested for each girl whether there was a significant increase (or decrease) in the score over time. then we looked at the degree of variability in the data. we aimed to discover whether there is a difference in the global variability (see below) between the two girls across the entire trajectory. finally, we tested whether patterns of variability changed over time. more explicitly, we were interested to see whether there was a significantly greater degree of variability early on than towards the end or vice versa, and whether there was a global trend in the amount of variability across time. in order to test the significance of the observed differences between the girls and increases or decreases within each time series, monte carlo permutation analyses were performed. this is a statistical testing procedure that estimates probabilities by randomly drawing samples from a dataset based on the null hypothesis, and comparing the empirically found values with a random resampling procedure. if the probability of finding the observed value in the output of the resampling procedure is very low (in this case below 5%), the result is considered to differ significantly from the null hypothesis model. (for more information on the use of permutation tests, see todman & dugard, 2001.) in the current data, the monte carlo analysis was used to (a) test whether there was a difference between grace and gloria (for the mean level of mlt/spoken, mlt/written, vocd/spoken and vocd/written), (b) to test whether there was a significantly increasing or decreasing slope in each individual time series of scores, (c) to test whether there is a difference in the amount of variability between gloria and grace for all variables, and (d) to test whether there was a significantly increasing or decreasing slope in the variability (range) of each time series. all analyses were performed in excel in combination with poptools (hood, 2004). for the first monte carlo test, our testing criteria were the differences in the mean scores of mlt/spoken, mlt/written, vocd/spoken and vocd/written between gloria and grace (gloria’s mean minus grace’s mean). we reshuffled the data of the two participants across each other (5.000 times) to create resampled time series. this simulates results for the null hypothesis that there is no difference between the girls. from these simulated time series, we computed the difference between the two participants again and compared these to the empirically found differences. for the second monte carlo test, the procedure was highly similar to the first, but in this case we took the global variability of each time series as testing criteria. this global variability was determined as the average of a moving range across five data points. this means that we took a moving window of five consecutive data points and calculated the local range (the maximal value in the window minus the minimal value in the window). the average of this moving finding the key to successful l2 learning in groups and individuals 139 range was compared to the average of the moving range of simulated time series, based on the null hypothesis that there are no differences between the girls (see above). for both tests, we considered the difference to be significant when the probability that the reshuffled data produces the same (or larger) difference between gloria and grace as the observed difference is less than 5%. the third and fourth monte carlo tests are based on the trend of each individual data series. the testing criteria were the linear slopes of each of these series. for the third test, we computed the slope of each data series and compared these to the slope of simulated individual time series. these are based on 5.000 reshuffles of each data series across time. this simulates the null hypothesis that the data points are independent on time. the fourth test follows the same procedure, but here the slope is based on the values of the moving ranges (with a moving window of five data points) that were computed the estimate the local variability. this slope shows whether this “local” variability is inor decreasing over time. for both tests, we considered the result to be significant when the probability that the reshuffled data produced a slope similar or larger than the observed slope is less than 5%. in order to analyze the relation in the performance between both girls and between the individual linguistic variables, we also performed pearson correlation analyses. these are based on the observed values of each time series. because of the number of tests we performed, we used a rather strict alpha of p < .01. 6. results 6.1. mlt/written when visually inspecting the trajectories of mlt/written, it stands out that grace seems to be much more proficient than gloria (see figure 3). both girls start out at a reasonably proficient level, at the beginning of the measurement period, and only grace seems to increase during the measurements. it also shows a large degree of intra-individual variability, with several peaks, especially for grace. the monte carlo analysis confirmed the difference between the girls in global mlt/written. the average of gloria is 9.967, the average of grace is 12.866, and this difference is significant (p < .001). this means that grace is generally more proficient than her sister. the results further showed that both slopes are positive and significant (gloria: slope = 0.012, p = .002; grace: slope = 0.032, p = .001), which means that both girls show an increase in mlt/written over time, though grace’s slope is steeper. with regard to intra-individual variability, the local range of grace is larger (gloria has an average of 0.004, grace 0.031). this difference tested to be significant (p < .0001), indicating that grace wander lowie, marijn van dijk, huiping chan, marjolijn verspoor 140 has more variability overall. we also tested whether this range increases or decreases over time (indicating a global change in amount of variability). the results show that both slopes are positive (0.012 for gloria and 0.032 for grace), but the increase was only significant for grace (p = .122 for gloria, p = .009 for grace). combined, the results show that the trajectories of the girls are rather dissimilar: grace is more proficient, has a steeper increase, and has more variability than gloria. her variability is also increasing over time, which is not the case for gloria. figure 3 written mlt for both gloria (grey) and grace (black) 6.2. mlt/spoken visual inspection the data of mlt/spoken suggest that the trajectories of the girls largely overlap (see figure 4). again, we observe relatively high levels of proficiency at the start of the observations and much intra-individual variability from measurement to measurement. however, it seems that the variability is more concentrated in the first half of the measurement period and decreases over time. the results of the monte carlo analyses show a small difference in spoken mlt (gloria is 13.148 and for grace 14.204), which almost reaches significance (p = .011). furthermore, the slope of grace was significantly negative (-0.031, p = .006), and nonsignificant for gloria (0.018; p = .436). this means that gloria’s performance is relatively stable over time and that there is a slight but significant decrease for grace. with regard to the amount of variability, the analyses show that grace has generally more variability over the entire trajectory (gloria has an average local range of 6.610 and grace of 7.972, p = .005) and that the amount of intra-individual variability decreases over time for both. the slopes of the local ranges are negative and significant for both girls (-0.0474 for gloria and -0.079 for grace; p < .001 in both cases). finding the key to successful l2 learning in groups and individuals 141 combined, this shows that there is no general increase in proficiency in spoken syntactical development, but instead that both girls seem to stabilize. grace’s performance is somewhat more variable from moment to moment. figure 4 spoken mlt for both gloria (grey) and grace (black) 6.3. vocd/written when visually inspecting the trajectories of written vocd, the values for gloria seem to be generally somewhat higher (see figure 5). again, no clear increase over time can be detected and grace even seems to decrease over time. the amount of variability is also large again. notably, grace’s variability seems to drop after measurement 57. the monte carlo analysis confirmed that gloria has a higher general level of proficiency. the average for gloria was 60.918 and for grace 53.879, and this difference was significant (p < .001). both slopes are negative (-0.052 for gloria and -0,126 for grace), but only grace’s is significant (p values are 0.898 and 0.001 respectively). this means that grace’s proficiency is decreasing over time. with regard to variability, no differences were found (the local range for grace was 27.172 and for gloria 27.595; p = 0.615). for both girls, there is a negative trend in local variability, indicating a general decrease of variability (gloria’s slope is -0.004 and grace’s is -0.132), but only grace’s is significant (p values are .548 and < .001 respectively). this means that only grace is decreasing in her variability, indicating that her level is stabilizing. together, the results are somewhat different for each of the girls: grace has a relatively low level and is decreasing over time. in addition, her variability is decreasing. though gloria generally shows the same patterns, they were much less pronounced and did not reach significance. wander lowie, marijn van dijk, huiping chan, marjolijn verspoor 142 figure 5 written vocd for both gloria (grey) and grace (black). 6.4. vocd/spoken finally, for vocd/spoken, gloria seems to be slightly more proficient than grace, especially at the beginning of the trajectory (see figure 6). visual inspection also suggests a positive trend for grace, and it looks like she is “catching up” with her sister. with regard to variability, this is clearly present across vocd/spoken as well, but it is hard to distinguish a clear trend. figure 6 spoken vocd for both gloria (grey) and grace (black) the monte carlo analyses show that gloria’s proficiency is indeed higher than her sister’s (the average for gloria is 42.626 and for grace 38.580; p = .001). furthermore, only grace has a significant positive slope (0.090, p = .002), and gloria does not (-0,018, p = .711). with regard to the amount of variability, there is no difference between the girls (the average local range for gloria is 19.158 and for grace is 17.578, p = 0.067). in addition, the slopes of the variability are different for each individual: gloria’s variability is decreasing across time (0.081, p < .001) whereas grace’s is increasing (0.078, p = .003). in combination, these results show clear differences between the two girls: grace is the one who is showing signs of development (increase in level finding the key to successful l2 learning in groups and individuals 143 and increase of variability), whereas gloria, who has an initial higher level of proficiency, only seems to stabilize over time. 6.5. correlations when looking at the statistical associations between the data for the two girls, the results show that there is only a significant moderate correlation between gloria and grace for the written vocd (r = .297, p = .003), and one trend towards moderate correlation for written mlt. the other correlations are not significant (see table 3). table 5 correlations between gloria and grace for all variables mlt/written mlt/spoken vocd/written vocd/spoken r 0.243 -0.124 0.297* 0.110 p 0.015 0.219 0.003 0.278 7. discussion and conclusion table 4 summarizes the findings of our study. there are significant differences between the twins in both the degree of development and the degree of variability for the two variables in the two modes. the summary in the table could indicate whether one of the girls is more proficient than the other across the entire measurement period. significant increase or decrease in score over time refers to a global trend in proficiency across time, that is, the average degree of variability across the entire trajectory. significant increase or decrease in degree of variability over time refers to an increase or decrease in the amount of variability across time, indicating when the degree of variability would be increasing or decreasing. table 6 summary of the findings of the study mlt vocd written spoken written spoken gloria grace gloria grace gloria grace gloria grace higher average scores x x x significant increase or decrease in score over time x x x neg x neg x pos more variability in scores x x significant increase or decrease in degree of variability over time x pos x neg x neg x neg x neg x pos we observe that the patterns are dissimilar in many cases. grace is obviously changing, but not always in the assumed direction and in different directions wander lowie, marijn van dijk, huiping chan, marjolijn verspoor 144 in written and spoken production. she improves in written mlt but decreases in spoken mlt; she decreases in written vocd but improves in spoken vocd. she also has significantly more variability than her sister in both mlt scores. gloria changes very little over time but increases in written mlt. she does not change in the other variables and seems to have stabilized, which is accompanied by a decreasing amount of variability in spoken mlt and spoken vocd. also the correlation analyses showed that none of the variables strongly correlated with each other over time within each learner. our main research question was whether the degrees of variability in individuals might correlate with l2 success in individual learners. if we look at table 4 we may conclude that although there is no direct one to one relation between variability and change, we may tentatively conclude that without a certain degree of variability there is little l2 change. in our data, if there is an increase or decrease, it is usually accompanied by relatively higher degrees of overall variability, and can also be seen in the direction of the slopes of variability. variability does not guarantee success, but it does strongly seem to be a prerequisite for change to take place. how do these case studies relate to the group studies on ids? first of all, by controlling for as many factors as humanly possible (age of onset, general aptitude, general personality types, and so on) by investigating identical twins learning the l2 in the same environment and doing the same tasks over time, we do see remarkable differences. one of the twins is changing rather erratically in all the measures whereas the other is not. could this have been because grace is slightly more motivated or anxious than her sister? even if so, it would not explain the opposite patterns for spoken and written variables. when we link these observations to the argument in molenaar (2015), the conclusion we can draw from our study is that molenaar’s mathematically based assumptions that observations in the time dimension need to be person specific are confirmed in the analysis of behavioral data of second language development. in this study we have explored the interacting variables in the development of two individuals, which was manifested by the amount of variability and its timing. in other words, we have investigated interacting variables at two individual slices in the time dimension of catell’s cube. in doing this, we made sure that the individual learners were maximally similar to optimize the comparability of the data. the conclusion is that in spite of the similarity of the cases achieved by minimizing ids, very clear differences in process characteristics were found between the individual cases. this is clearly found in the data and confirmed by the correlation analysis of speaking and writing measures between the twins. only one significant, though weak, correlation was found here. finding the key to successful l2 learning in groups and individuals 145 the study into the effect of ids on second language acquisition can focus on two dimensions. on the one hand we find evidence for the relevance of several personal characteristics that have been marked as ids, such as motivation, aptitude, anxiety, personality, etcetera, as these variables have shown to be significantly related to achievement in second language acquisition. it has been argued that the individual variables that have been related to second language acquisition are neither monolithic nor stable, which casts some doubt on their value when they are measured at one point in time. on the other hand there is the undervalued dimension of the individual’s process of development. the patterns of development emerging in individual processes are at least as revealing as the global associations coming to light in the analysis of groups of learners. in this paper we have argued that these two approaches comprise complementary perspectives as they represent different dimensions of catell’s cube (molenaar, 2015). the relevance of the distinction between these dimensions was corroborated in our study of identical twins since even for identical twins that learn the language in identical environments, interacting variables of language development as it emerges over time are essentially different between these learners. many studies have attempted to crack the code to success in l2 learning by identifying ids that are associated with the prediction of high achievement. however, the study of global differences between learners is not the only way to identify ids as these differences can also relate to the process of learning. this process is best studied by following individual development over time. our study of identical twins has illustrated that a focus on variability can reveal relevant and interesting differences in the individual learning process. ideally, when advanced statistics allow us to do so, future studies should trace the interactions between variables like motivation, aptitude and achievement as they affect the process of individual development over time for groups of learners with different backgrounds and in different settings. until that time, we should acknowledge that different dimensions of behavior need to be studied, and that the study of the process of individual development over time is at least equally revealing as group studies concentrating on interacting factors at one point in time. as van geert (2011) argues, “a theory of development is a theory of change, which explains how basic developmental mechanisms can generate specific developmental patterns” (van geert, 2011, p. 276). such a theory can provide predictions and models of developmental trajectories that single case studies can fruitfully examine. wander lowie, marijn van dijk, huiping chan, marjolijn verspoor 146 references bardovi-harlig, k., & bofman, t. 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(2012). gept and english language teaching and testing in taiwan. language assessment quarterly, 9(1), 11-25. doi: 10.1080/15434303.2011.553251 537 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (3). 2016. 537-539 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.3.8 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book review working memory and second language learning. towards an integrated approach author: zhisheng (edward) wen publisher: multilingual matters, 2016 isbn: 9781783095711 pages: 208 a new book by z. e. wen on working memory (wm) was written with a view to presenting an up-to-date and comprehensive review of our knowledge of this cognitive factor which has been gaining popularity but still remains poorly examined. the book includes an introduction, preceded by a foreword written by peter skehan, three theoretical parts and concluding remarks. the author’s goal was to integrate wm research into cognitive science and second language acquisition (sla) research in applied linguistics, the two in which he specializes. the book consists of three parts. part 1 contains two chapters which present the theoretical and methodological foundations of the discussed domain. in chapter 2, the author focuses on the origins and evolution of the concept of wm in cognitive science and in sla. the current theoretical models of wm are presented as well as the discussion of the controversies surrounding the construct. in the final sections of this chapter, the author attempts to integrate the existing models into a unified theory, taking as a point of reference six themes which can 538 serve as indicators to nomothetic theories of wm. in chapter 3, wen discusses the measures and assessment procedures of wm currently applied in cognitive psychology, specifically the simple and complex memory span tasks used to measure the phonological loop and the central executive. the methodological problems of wm measurement are one of the most difficult research challenges in this area; this discussion is therefore very timely. part 2, “research syntheses of working memory in l1 and l2 learning,” outlines the most important issues in first and second language learning connected with wm functioning. chapter 4 presents a synthesis of research findings concerning the links between wm and first language acquisition in two main research traditions, namely the european one, associated with alan baddeley’s classical model, and the north american one led by nelson cowan. the author analyzes the roles of the two acquisition-relevant components of wm, the phonological loop (pwm) and the central executive (ewm), in l1 subdomains and activities. chapter 5, in turn, provides a state-of-the-art overview of the relationships between wm and l2 acquisition and processing. the major asset of this part is a comprehensive reassessment of research studies, presented in a table and accompanied by a summary of findings and the author’s critical evaluation. i find the revision of shortcomings, caveats and inconsistencies in the field, which, as wen correctly underlines, come mainly from the lack of a standardized assessment procedure, particularly useful for a researcher. part 3 presents an integrated perspective on wm in sla research. the author's intention was to reconceptualize and reframe specific areas of the wmsla connection and propose a more principled approach to this issue. consequently, in chapters 6 and 7, the author reconceptualizes and redefines the two main constructs, that is pwm and ewm, in the wm-sla nexus. the main tenet of the integrated framework of wm for sla, according to wen, is “the postulation that the construct of wm consists of multiple components that are associated with multiple mechanisms/functions distinctively implicated in complex l2 cognitive tasks” (pp. 89-90). his proposed p/e model (chapter 7, see also wen, 2015) has solid theoretical foundations as well as a strong empirical support from cognitive psychology and sla. in chapter 8, the author discusses the possible effects of pwm and ewm on different dimensions of l2 speech production and performance within the cafl (complexity, accuracy, fluency and lexis) framework (skehan, 2009). the last issue the book touches upon is the relationship between wm and foreign language aptitude. the author has long been a supporter of the incorporation of wm construct into the modern theory of foreign language aptitude (wen & skehan, 2011) and, therefore, chapter 9 is a logical consequence of this line of reasoning. the author postulates that this relationship should be reconfigured within the sla developmental stages. 539 finally, chapter 10 includes conclusions and implications for further research. apart from a revision of the main aspects of his p/e model, wen calls for a more interdisciplinary approach including psychology, linguistics, computer science, biology, neuroscience, anthropology and philosophy. he also suggests the most important directions for further research, including a more systematic approach and practical application of wm framework in informing l2 instruction. summing up, the volume presents a comprehensive, thorough and updated review of both the theory and research in wm-sla relationship. evidently, wen is highly influenced by skehan’s (2009) theories, which should by no means be seen as a reason for criticism. he not only presents a relevant analysis of the literature, but also explains his own conceptual framework, referred to as the p/e model, which relates the distinctive roles of pwm and ewm to l2 fields, processes and skills. a great advantage of the book is the way the author provides information in the form of tables, which is of great assistance to the reader. another asset is the critical perspective on the research methodology employed and the attempt to pinpoint the gaps and inconsistencies in empirical studies. therefore, this book will be extremely useful for sla undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers interested in investigating cognitive differences. reviewed by adriana biedroń pomeranian academy in słupsk, poland adriana.biedroń@apsl.edu.pl references skehan, p. (2009). modeling second language performance: integrating complexity, accuracy, fluency and lexis. applied linguistics, 30, 510-532. wen, z. (2015). working memory in second language acquisition and processing: the phonological/executive model. in z. wen, m. b. mota, & a. mcneill (eds.), working memory in second language acquisition and processing (pp. 41-62). bristol: multilingual matters. wen, z., & skehan, p. (2011). a new perspective on foreign language aptitude: building and supporting a case for “working memory as language aptitude”. ilha do desterro: a journal of english language, literatures and cultural studies, 60, 15-44. 351 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (3). 2021. 351-376 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.3.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt exploring the importance of vocabulary for english as an additional language learners’ reading comprehension gavin brooks kwansei gakuin university, sanda, japan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9839-1593 gavinbrooks@gmail.com jon clenton hiroshima university, hiroshima, japan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3048-8807 jclenton@hiroshima-u.ac.jp simon fraser hiroshima university, hiroshima, japan https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8151-4625 fraser@hiroshima-u.ac.jp abstract this exploratory study represents an attempt to investigate the factors that may affect the reading comprehension abilities of english as an additional language (eal) learners. for this study, we examined a participant group of 31 (25 eal and 6 first language english) learners studying at an international school in japan. we assessed the participants according to four factors shown to influence reading comprehension: vocabulary knowledge, word decoding skills, reading fluency, and general linguistic ability. our results show that differences in vocabulary knowledge show more variance in reading comprehension scores than the other factors examined in this study, highlighting the importance of vocabulary knowledge for reading comprehension. however, other factors such as reading fluency and general linguistic knowledge are also gavin brooks, jon clenton, simon fraser 352 shown to be moderate to strong predictors of reading comprehension. based on these results, we suggest that eal learners need targeted language support to enhance academic text comprehension. keywords: english as an additional language (eal); vocabulary knowledge; general language ability; reading comprehension 1. introduction in recent years, pressure has been rising worldwide to provide support for learners without english as their first language (murphy, 2014). such pressure is evident in the uk, for instance, with schools experiencing increases as dramatic as 16.2% (2013) in the number of learners whose home language is one other than english (strand et al., 2015). to support education in light of such increases, a better understanding of the needs of these english as an additional language (eal) learners is an essential and urgent requirement (hawkins, 2005). one specific aspect of knowledge with which eal learners have been shown to struggle is vocabulary. typically, eal learners start their educational careers with significantly lower levels of vocabulary knowledge compared to their first language english (fle) counterparts (naldic, 2015). moreover, eal learners also typically take longer to master the high-frequency vocabulary essential for academic success (coxhead & boutorwick, 2018). while previous research (e.g., august et al., 2005; coxhead & boutorwick, 2018) supports the assertion that eal learners likely have less developed vocabularies than their fle counterparts, what remains unclear is how such discrepancies impact their ability to function in english as a medium of instruction (emi) classrooms. one area where this acknowledged lack of vocabulary knowledge (murphy & unthiah, 2015) has the potential to influence eal learner academic success is reading comprehension, a specific and manifestly important academic skill eal learners have been shown to struggle with (droop & verhoeven, 2003). vocabulary is central to the reading process, and learners who are unable to master the vocabulary of the texts that are being used in their classes often struggle to comprehend the required classroom reading (coxhead et al., 2010). while it is unclear precisely how much vocabulary eal learners need to succeed academically in emi schools, research has shown that eal learners often struggle with two types of vocabulary that are known to be essential for academic success, that is, high-frequency and academic vocabulary (coxhead & boutorwick, 2018). the exact number of words learners need to know to understand a given text is grade and subject dependent (green & lambert, 2019; greene & coxhead, exploring the importance of vocabulary for english as an additional language learners’ reading. . . 353 2015). however, research acknowledges that knowledge of both high-frequency and academic vocabulary, in a generic sense, is essential across all grades and subjects (nation, 2016). laufer (1997) suggested that, in order to understand a text, learners need to be able to automatically access at least the 3,000 most frequent word families. for eal learners studying in a classroom where english is the medium of instruction, the number of words required is higher: nation (2006), for instance, indicates that students need to know the first 8,000 to 9,000 word families to be able to understand the types of literary novels eal students are expected to engage with in the classroom. this number is relatively consistent over many different types of literary works and non-fiction books (coxhead, 2012). vocabulary knowledge is also vital for eal learners to be able to succeed in technical subjects like math and science (trakulphadetkrai et al., 2020). for example, a study by greene and coxhead (2015), examining the range and frequency of words found in a corpus compiled from science textbooks being used by middle-school classrooms in the usa, found that eighth-grade students would need a vocabulary of at least the first 7,000 word families to understand these texts. this number is supported by a similar study done by coxhead et al. (2010) on high school science textbooks being used in new zealand. they found that learners would need to know between 11,000 (for grade 9 and 10) to 15,000 word families (for grade 11) plus proper nouns to reach the 98% coverage nation (2006) found to be necessary for comprehension. given that many eal learners reportedly fail to master even the 2,000 most frequent words right up until the ninth grade (coxhead & boutorwick, 2018), it is evident that they would struggle when having to comprehend such texts. however, despite the clear need for vocabulary knowledge across grades and subjects, it is still unclear to what degree discrepancies in the vocabulary knowledge of eal learners will impact their ability to succeed academically in the emi classroom. the current study, therefore, is designed to respond to this gap, following up on the call by a variety of researchers for more studies explicitly designed to provide a better understanding of the academic challenges faced by eal learners worldwide (e.g., graves et al., 2012; henriksen & danelund, 2015; oxley & de cat, 2019). 2. literature review 2.1. the importance of reading comprehension for eal learners reading comprehension difficulties are a primary reason for eal academic underperformance (murphy & unthiah, 2015). in the uk, both research (twist et al., 2007) and national test scores (burgoyne et al., 2009) indicate that a lack of reading comprehension in english is one of the main reasons why eal learners gavin brooks, jon clenton, simon fraser 354 consistently struggle academically in comparison to their fle peers. because of the various components involved in creating meaning from a written text, reading comprehension is a complex skill for eal learners to master. lower levels of grammatical and lexical eal proficiency are often compounded by commensurate unfamiliarity with cultural references found in classroom texts (hill, 2011). such difficulties need to be considered in light of other issues that relate to learner strategies: strategies that help to facilitate reading comprehension are an essential component for the meaningful understanding of written input (lin, 2010), and reading comprehension itself is an integral part of the reorganization and evaluation modes of comprehension necessary for academic success (hill, 2011). accordingly, eal learners are at a much higher risk of prolonged academic failure because many enter the (english language) education system after classes have begun (fawcett & lynch, 2000). because of this, the acquisition of the essential skills they require to be able to read at the same level as their peers can take a considerable amount of time and effort to develop (murphy, 2014). to address these concerns, a better understanding of the underlying factors responsible for this group of learners, struggle to comprehend texts written in english is essential. 2.2. factors influencing eal learners’ reading comprehension the above section has outlined the importance of reading comprehension for eal learners; here, we detail the factors acknowledged to influence reading comprehension. while reading comprehension is a complex process and a difficult skill to assess, various influencing factors have been found to affect a learner’s ability to comprehend english language texts (melby-lervåg & lervåg, 2014). these factors include, but are not exclusive to: vocabulary knowledge (qian, 2002), the ability to decode the english orthographic representation of words (melby-lervåg et al., 2012), reading fluency (fraser, 2007), and general language proficiency (trakulphadetkrai et al., 2020). the following subsections explore these different factors, attempting to summarize some of the major findings relevant to the study reported later in the current paper. 2.2.1. vocabulary knowledge vocabulary knowledge has been shown to be a key predictor of reading comprehension for both eal learners (melby-lervåg & lervåg, 2014; lervåg & aukrust, 2010) and fle learners (ouellette & beers, 2010; tunmer & chapman, 2012). such vocabulary studies indicate that poor vocabulary skills can significantly limit a learner’s ability to comprehend written texts (burgoyne et al., 2009). exploring the importance of vocabulary for english as an additional language learners’ reading. . . 355 while higher levels of vocabulary coverage (e.g., 98% to 100%) do not necessarily result in 100% comprehension, studies indicate that vocabulary knowledge is a necessary condition for comprehension (e.g., hsueh-chao & nation, 2000; laufer, 1989; schmitt et al., 2011). in the classroom, lack of vocabulary knowledge can make it challenging for eal learners to use written texts to complete tasks and answer questions (burgoyne et al., 2009), which can result in eal learners struggling academically. 2.2.2. word decoding skills to effectively comprehend texts, learners need to both decode words in texts (word recognition) and use lexical information to understand meaning at both sentence and discourse levels (hoover & gough, 1990). the simple view of reading emphasizes that decoding and comprehension are separate skills and function independently of each other (gough & tunmer, 1986). it is, therefore, possible for learners to achieve good comprehension skills while having poor decoding skills (such as for the learners with dyslexia). there are also learners, known as poor comprehenders who have good decoding skills but poor comprehension skills (yuill & oakhill, 1991). research suggests that such findings are equivocal for eal learners. while most research shows that eal learners struggle with reading comprehension skills despite having good decoding skills (burgoyne et al., 2009; hutchinson et al., 2003), some studies suggest that there are situations where eal learners also struggle with decoding skills (garcía & cain, 2014; k. nation & snowling, 2014). 2.2.3. reading fluency the national reading panel (2000) defines reading fluency as the ability to read a text quickly, accurately, and with proper expression, which refers to the ability to use the appropriate pauses and intonation when reading a text aloud. a fluent reader is one that can read both accurately and fast (grabe, 2010). fluency is seen as an essential aspect of reading comprehension because it is indicative of the amount of cognitive resources the reader has to allocate to word decoding and word recognition (adlof et al., 2006). as readers become able to decode and recognize words faster and more automatically, they are able to allocate more of their limited cognitive resources to the task of textual comprehension (geva & zadeh, 2006). accordingly, both l1 (geva & zadeh, 2006) and l2 (fraser, 2007; jiang et al., 2012) studies show strong and significant correlations between fluency and reading comprehension. however, despite the apparent link between fluency and reading comprehension, for eal learners, high levels of reading fluency may not correlate with good reading comprehension (lesaux et al., 2010). a study by rasinski et al. (2011) gavin brooks, jon clenton, simon fraser 356 with 16,143 grade 4 through 10 students studying at schools in the usa found that improvements in fluency resulted in better reading comprehension, for all groups except eal learners. eal specific studies (e.g., farnia & geva, 2011; lee & chen, 2019) suggest an evolving proficiency dynamic: where for less proficient l2 learners, fluency can contribute independently to reading comprehension, while for more proficient l2 learners reading comprehension is better explained by the interaction between reading fluency, oral proficiency, and vocabulary. 2.2.4. general language ability while most researchers agree that language ability is multidimensional (bachman & palmer, 2010), renewed interest is emerging in language testing regarding how these discrete dimensions of proficiency can be united under an overarching construct (e.g., harsch, 2014; wang & treffers-daller, 2017). this notion of general language ability allows for individual learner language proficiency to be conceptualized as both unitary and divisible, depending on the purpose of the assessment and the level of abstraction (harsch, 2014). by including both holistic and discrete measures of language proficiency in our study of eal learners’ reading comprehension, we are able to explore the extent to which measures of specific components of language ability, such as scores on a vocabulary levels test, are able to explain variance in reading comprehension over and above measures of the participants’ general language ability. while the contribution that specific language skills, such as vocabulary and word decoding skills, make to reading comprehension is widely acknowledged, the contribution of general language ability to reading comprehension appears comparatively under-researched. one potential reason for this imbalance might relate to the reported difficulty in assessing eal learners’ general language abilities. one recent study (trakulphadetkrai et al., 2020), however, showed that the c-test was useful in understanding the specific language proficiency profiles of eal learners. the c-test measures general language ability by making use of the reduced redundancy principle (rrp), testing learner linguistic knowledge by introducing interference and seeing how well the test taker can use their other linguistic skills to compensate (babaii & ansary, 2001). the c-test appears to be an effective measure of linguistic proficiency for the eal learner because it measures both micro-level skills (word-level skills) and macro-level skills. gaps in the text can only be completed if test takers understand and take into account the broader grammar or vocabulary of the text (baghaei & grotjahn, 2014). c-test scores have been reported to correlate strongly with scores on more comprehensive written and spoken tests (eckes & grotjahn, 2006), as well as to provide indications of global language proficiency (dörnyei & katona, 1992). the exploring the importance of vocabulary for english as an additional language learners’ reading. . . 357 current study aims to shed more light on the relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension by including the c-test to measure the learners’ general language ability along with a measure of both decoding and vocabulary skills. 2.2.5. multiple factors while the majority of the studies discussed above focus on the effects of a single factor on reading comprehension, studies have also looked at the effects of multiple factors with regard to their effect on reading comprehension. melby-lervåg and lervåg (2014) conducted a meta-analysis on 82 studies that look at both l1 and l2 reading comprehension in relation to a number of factors, including language comprehension, phonetic awareness, and decoding skills. they found that in these studies both language comprehension and decoding were factors as to why second-language learners lagged behind their first-language counterparts in reading comprehension. another meta-analysis of 58 studies conducted by jeon and yamashita (2014) found that grammatical knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, and word decoding skills were the three strongest correlates of reading comprehension for l2 learners. in a longitudinal study of young learners (grade 1 to 3), bellocchi et al. (2017) looked at how seven different factors influenced learners’ reading comprehension for both l1 and l2 italian speakers. while both vocabulary and letter knowledge were shown to be significant predictors for the l1 italian learners, the only significant predictor for the l2 italian learners was morphosyntactic comprehension. these results were different from those obtained by tunmer and chapman (2012), who looked at the factors affecting reading comprehension with third-grade eal learners studying at primary schools in new zealand. they found that vocabulary, word recognition, and listening comprehension all made unique and significant contributions to reading comprehension. 2.3. assessing reading comprehension to accurately measure learners’ reading ability, it is first necessary to find an assessment tool that measures the constructs that directly relate to reading comprehension (ready et al., 2013). according to treffers-daller and huang (2020), the most widely accepted description of the construct of reading comprehension is gough and tunmer’s (1986) simple view of reading. the simple view of reading states that a learner’s reading ability is defined by two different factors, that is, their ability to decode words and their linguistic comprehension (hoover & gough, 1990). first, decoding refers to the learner’s ability to link the symbols written on the page and the appropriate entry in their mental lexicon. this process requires the learner to make use of letter-sound relationships to identify unfamiliar words in the text and gavin brooks, jon clenton, simon fraser 358 to be able to connect these printed words with the spoken counterparts in their lexical memory (tunmer & nicholson, 2011). beyond allowing the learner to read the text in front of them, this process also enables them to develop detailed orthographic representations of words required for the automatization of word recognition (ehri, 2005). a second important factor for reading ability is the learner’s ability to use the lexical information they have decoded from the text to construct meaning at both the sentence and discourse level (gough & tunmer, 1986). the york assessment of reading comprehension (yarc; snowling et al., 2009) is a comprehensive test of reading, which was developed based on the simple view of reading. the test was initially developed for 11to 16-year-old learners studying in the uk. while the test has been validated for and used extensively to assess fle speakers, it is also suitable for non-native speakers of english studying in an emi secondary school context. the original sample of learners that was used to standardize the test includes data from 89 eal learners who were studying at schools in the uk. furthermore, this test has been used and validated as a measure of l2 english learners’ reading comprehension skills in previous studies (e.g., treffers-daller & huang, 2020). while the scores of non-native speakers will usually fall below those of native speakers, the test is still able to provide insight into how well eal learners are able to meet the reading comprehension levels required for their grade level (see https://www.gl-assessment.co.uk/support/yarc-support). 3. the current study while numerous studies have investigated the importance of vocabulary for reading comprehension, most have focused on adult efl or esl learners (e.g., laufer & ravenhorst-kalovski, 2010; qian, 2002). even studies that have investigated young learners have usually done so in the context of efl language classes (henriksen et al., 2004; stæhr, 2008). studies that have investigated vocabulary across age groups or learning environments suggest that the relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension may vary according to participant age (e.g., schoonen et al., 1998), linguistic background (geva & farnia, 2012), and learning context (e.g., miralpeix & muñoz, 2018). an agreed understanding of the relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension is further complicated by the fact that there are a number of additional factors that appear to influence reading comprehension. those most cited in the literature are word decoding skills (droop & verhoeven, 2003), reading fluency (geva & zadeh, 2006), and general language proficiency (trakulphadetkrai et al., 2020). accordingly, the current study contributes to discussions on the relationship between reading comprehension and vocabulary by considering this relationship in the context of a specific group of learners: young eal learners. we build on earlier exploring the importance of vocabulary for english as an additional language learners’ reading. . . 359 studies that have investigated reading comprehension influences and investigate the relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension in light of the three most cited areas in the literature, namely: (a) word decoding skills, (b) reading fluency, and (c) general linguistic ability. our two research questions are: 1. to what degree does vocabulary knowledge correlate with reading comprehension, and how does this relationship compare with the way reading comprehension correlates with other factors such as the learners’ word decoding skills, fluency, and general language ability? 2. does vocabulary knowledge have a significant and independent effect on learners’ reading comprehension ability? 4. methodology 4.1. participants thirty-one learners (n = 31) took part in the study (11 male and 20 female learners). the student population of the school was heterogeneous and the participants in this study are representative of the mix of nationalities and language backgrounds that is commonly seen in international schools. students were grouped using their survey data as fle or eal speakers. twenty-five (seven male and 18 female) students were identified as eal speakers and six (four male and two female) were identified as l1 (english) speakers. of the 25 who were identified as eal, 17 (five male and 12 female) were classified as non-native speakers of english as an additional language (nnseal), students identified by their classroom teachers as requiring additional language support in the classroom. with the exception of one learner who had just turned 16, all of the learners in this study ranged in age from 11 to 15. furthermore, all the participants had studied in english in the international school context for at least two years. the eal learners came from a diverse background of first languages, including japanese, korean, dutch and croatian. the study took place at an international school in western japan. outside of a specific japanese language class, instruction in the school is delivered exclusively in english. the school curriculum follows the international baccalaureate middle school and diploma programs. informed consent was obtained from the learners and their respective parents or guardians prior to the start of the study. 4.2. survey instruments and procedure data collection took place over two months between december 2017 and january 2018, during two sessions. during the first session, learners were given a battery of gavin brooks, jon clenton, simon fraser 360 two language tests, along with a survey designed to provide insight into their language background. during the second session, learners were interviewed individually and given snowling et al.’s (2009) york assessment of reading for comprehension as well as a single word reading test (swrt). the first session took about an hour to complete, while the second session took about 45 minutes per learner. in the first session, learners were given the language survey, the c-test and the new vocabulary levels test (nvlt; see below) during regular class time. the assessments were distributed and monitored by the learners’ regular classroom teachers. while an hour was scheduled for the first session, most participants were able to complete the survey and assessments in around 45 minutes. the c-test was used to measure learners’ general language ability. the ctest is a modified version of a cloze test that requires test takers to complete the missing parts of words in a text. as discussed above, the c-test uses rrp to measures test takers’ micro-level skills (word-level skills) and macro-level skills (babaii & ansary, 2001), and has been used effectively in the past to get a clearer picture of eal learners’ general language knowledge (e.g., trakulphadetkrai et al., 2020). in an earlier version of the c-test, raatz and klein-braley (1981) deleted the second part of every other word to present a consistent format (e.g., “the deleted parts are given in bold”). subsequently, others (e.g., kamimoto, 1993) suggested that a format where appropriate words are selected at random intervals throughout the text would be more effective at measuring underlying language proficiency. kamimoto (1993) also emphasizes the importance of topic familiarity and text readability when constructing the c-test. the c-test we opted to use had been validated in a number of previous studies (e.g., ishihara et al., 2003; neff, 2015) and included text related to situations and contexts that would be easily understood by eal learners studying in japan. the c-test was also prepared following the principles for word deletion described by kamimoto (1993), and 20 words, selected at random intervals, were deleted from each of the passages, instead of reducing every second word as is done in some c-tests. the c-test was scored by two raters with any discrepancies discussed. altogether, 12 responses across the three passages were highlighted. these responses ranged from misspellings (e.g., different vs. diffrent), grammatical errors (e.g., group vs. groups) and semantic differences (e.g., where vs. wherever). while some studies that use c-tests with adults only accept correctly spelt answers (eckes & grotjahn, 2006), studies with younger learners often overlook minor spelling errors (linnemann & wilbert, 2010; trakulphadetkrai et al., 2020). for example, trakulphaderkrai et al.’s (2020) study of young eal learners awarded a point for grammatically and semantically correct variations as well as simple misspellings. in our study, with careful consideration of the learners’ age and proficiency, we awarded points for words with minor spelling errors provided they exploring the importance of vocabulary for english as an additional language learners’ reading. . . 361 were grammatically correct, as this could be seen as a demonstration of comprehension by the learner. each item on the test was worth two points, and the maximum score possible on the c-test was 100. the other assessment that the participants completed during the first session was mclean and kramer’s (2016) new vocabulary levels test. the nvlt was chosen over the vocabulary levels test (vlt; schmitt et al., 2001) because it was developed using a more modern set of word lists, that is, nation’s (2012) british national corpus (bnc)/corpus of contemporary american english (coca) word lists. the nvlt is a test of word families and includes a measure for each of the first 5,000-word bands as well as the academic word list (awl). the use of multiple-choice questions also made it easier to examine the test residuals for possible mis-fitting items or participants (kremmel, 2018). in the nvlt, each word band consists of 24 items, while the section assessing the awl is made up of 30 items. following earlier studies (coxhead & boutorwick, 2018; read, 1988; schmitt et al., 2001), the level of mastery was set at 86%. learners needed a score of 21 or more on each of the frequency bands to be considered to have mastery of a specific band. for the awl section, a score of 26 or higher was used. the second session, in which the yarc test was conducted, consisted of participants completing two different assessments, the first of which was the swrt, a test of word decoding. the swrt assessment consists of 70 words grouped into bands of ten, with the words becoming progressively more difficult as test-takers advance through the test. the first band consists of words such as see and look, and the seventh band is made up of words such as lacerate and pharmaceutical. the swrt, which can be done independently or as part of the yarc procedure, serves a dual purpose: the first is to provide information about test taker decoding skills whereas the second is as a diagnostic, positioning test takers at the correct level of the yarc test and determining the passages they are to read. the yarc test was then used to assess the learners’ reading ability (accuracy, comprehension, and rate). the yarc test consists of three levels, and each level has three sections. for the first section, the participants are asked to read two passages, one fiction and one non-fiction. these passages are read silently. after the participants have finished reading the passage, they have to answer thirteen comprehension questions, each one worth one point, about the passage. while answering the questions, the participants are able to refer back to the passage. for the second part of the yarc, the participants are asked to summarize the passage that they just read from memory. the summarization part of the assessment is worth eight or nine points, depending on the passage, with one point awarded for each of the key details from the passage that the participant is able to recall and summarize. part three of the yarc assesses reading fluency. for this section, the gavin brooks, jon clenton, simon fraser 362 participants are asked to read a passage out loud. depending on the level, the passage contains 129 or 137 words. one point is awarded for each word read correctly, and the reading rate is calculated by dividing the number of words read correctly by the time taken to read the passage. the test taker’s age, along with the difficulty of the passage they read, and the number of words they read per second is used to determine a reading fluency score out of 130. the standardized scores for the yarc test, rather than the raw scores, were used for analysis. this was done because the yarc consists of different passages for different proficiency levels. the yarc provides a way to convert the raw scores from each of the passages to an ability score that provides an estimate of the participant’s level based on the abilities being measured in that passage. to determine the test taker’s reading comprehension performance in relation to standardized norms, these ability scores are then converted to standardized scores. the standardized scores were calculated out of the 130 points possible. thus, for each participant, five separate data points were obtained: (a) a measure of their general language ability in english, as given by the c-test; (b) a measure of their vocabulary knowledge provided by the nvlt; (c) a measure of their word decoding skills, as measured by the swrt; (d) a measure of their reading fluency, as given by their scores on the fluency passage of the yarc assessment; and (e) a measure of their reading comprehension scores, as given by the yarc reading comprehension assessment. 4.3. analysis the descriptive statistics of both the response variable and the explanatory variables are provided in table 1. we also investigated if the scores on the different assessments were normally distributed. no significant differences were found with the normal distribution for any of the test results, and the scatter plots of the response and explanatory variables showed that they were distributed in a linear pattern. furthermore, no floor or ceiling effects were found. table 1 means and standard deviations of all variables (n = 31) mean sd minimum maximum reading comprehension 108.19 12.74 79 128 nvlt 124.19 22.27 58 147 c-test 77.23 20.72 14 98 swrt 58.06 7.97 35 69 fluency 104.13 14.63 70 130 note. reading comprehension = yarc reading comprehension ability scores (maximum 130); nvlt = raw scores of the nvlt (maximum 150); c-test = raw scores of the c-test (maximum 100); swrt = raw scores on the swrt (maximum 70); fluency = yarc reading fluency standardized scores (maximum 130) exploring the importance of vocabulary for english as an additional language learners’ reading. . . 363 an initial overview of the nvlt scores (see table 2) indicates that there was still a high number of learners who had not achieved mastery of the mid-frequency word bands or the awl. mirroring the results found in previous studies (coxhead & boutorwick, 2018), we found that prior to grade 9 a high number of the participants were still unable to master the high-frequency words in the 2,000 and 3,000-word bands, and learners from all grade levels struggled to master the awl. given the importance of the awl for the understanding of school textbooks (greene & coxhead, 2015; nagy & anderson, 1984), a lack of mastery of these vocabulary items would mean that these learners would struggle to be able to read at their grade level. table 2 mastery of vocabulary by grades (all learners) 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 awl grades 6 to 8 (n = 17) 100% 65% 29% 53% 53% 29% grades 9 to 10 (n = 14) 100% 100% 43% 43% 64% 57% note. awl = academic word list furthermore, eal participants were much more likely to struggle to master high-frequency vocabulary than fle learners (see table 3). only one of the fle participants (a grade 7 student) did not show mastery of the 5,000 most frequent word families. however, there were two fle learners who did not show mastery of the awl, indicating that vocabulary knowledge may still be an issue even with this group of learners. table 3 mastery of vocabulary by language background 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 awl fle (n = 6) 100% 100% 83% 100% 100% 67% eal (n = 25) 100% 76% 28% 48% 44% 28% note. fle = first language english; eal = english as an additional language learner; awl = academic word list for each of the nvlt, c-test and yarc assessments validity was assessed using a combination of a rasch analysis (nvlt and c-test; beglar, 2010) and cronbach’s alpha (ca) (c-test and yarc; trakulphadetkrai et al., 2020). for the c-test, the rasch analysis showed a good fit to the model and there were no mis-fitting questions or learners found in the residuals. the reliability of the ctest was high with a ca coefficient of .824. together, these show that the c-test was a reliable measure of the participants’ general language ability. overall, the majority of the nvlt scores displayed a good fit to the rasch model. however, one grade 10 eal learner was shown to have a very high outfit score (zstd = 8.76), so his results were removed from the analysis. the residuals showed no other problems with the fit of the learners’ scores. the yarc was also shown to be highly reliable with a ca coefficient of .936. gavin brooks, jon clenton, simon fraser 364 5. results in order to address the first research question (to what degree does vocabulary knowledge correlate with reading comprehension, and how does this relationship compare with the way reading comprehension correlates with other factors such as the learners’ word decoding skills, fluency, and general language ability?), bivariate correlational analyses were conducted using the scores on the assessments in relation to the learners’ reading comprehension scores. table 4 gives an overview of all pearson correlations between the variables for all learners. it reveals that the yarc reading comprehension correlated most strongly with the nvlt (.86***), and the ctest (.83***). the learners’ swrt and fluency scores showed moderate and statistically significant correlations with reading comprehension, with r values of .67*** and .70***, respectively. the fact that both the participants’ reading rates and their word decoding skills correlated moderately and significantly with their yarc reading comprehension scores means that the test potentially taps into the word decoding dimensions of reading detailed by the simple view of reading. table 4 correlations between variables (n = 31) c-test swrt yarc fluency yarc comprehension nvlt .90*** [.79, .95] .86*** [.73, .93] .73*** [.50, .86] .86*** [.73, .93] c-test .85*** [.70, .92] .71*** [.47, .85] .83*** [.68, .92] swrt .74** [.52, .87] .67*** [.42, .83] yarc fluency .70*** [.47, .85] note. swrt = single word reading test; yarc = york assessment of reading comprehension; nvlt = new vocabulary levels test. ** correlation significant at p < .01; *** correlation significant at p < .001; values in square brackets indicate the 95% confidence interval for each correlation similar correlations were found when examining data from only the eal learners (see table 5). again, for this group of learners both the nvlt and c-test correlate most strongly with reading comprehension with r values of .86*** and .87***, respectively. table 5 correlations between variables for eal learners (n = 25) c-test swrt yarc fluency yarc comprehension nvlt .90*** [.78, .96] .89*** [.75, .95] .71*** [.43, .86] .86*** [.70, .94] c-test .84*** [.67, .93] .74*** [.49, .88] .87*** [.73, .94] swrt .74** [.49, .88] .70*** [.42, .86] yarc fluency .69*** [.41, .85] note. swrt = single word reading test; yarc = york assessment of reading comprehension; nvlt = new vocabulary levels test. ** correlation significant at p < .01; *** correlation significant at p < .001; values in square brackets indicate the 95% confidence interval for each correlation exploring the importance of vocabulary for english as an additional language learners’ reading. . . 365 moving on to the second research question (does vocabulary knowledge have a significant and independent effect on learners’ reading comprehension ability?), a partial correlation test was run (see table 6) to determine the relationship between the participants’ reading comprehension and their vocabulary ability whilst controlling for general language ability (c-test), reading fluency (fluency), and word decoding skills (swrt). in order to help compensate for the small sample size the partial correlational analysis was done using bootstrapping (field et al., 2012). bootstrapping provides a more robust method for examining small sample sizes by estimating the properties of the sampling distribution from the sample data (bruce, 2015). it does this by treating the sample data as the population and drawing smaller samples from this data, putting back the data before a new case is drawn. the correlational coefficient can then be calculated from each of these samples and the standard deviation of the sampling distribution of the bootstrapped samples can be used to estimate the standard error of the correlational coefficient (see wright et al., 2011). from this standard error, confidence intervals and significance tests can be computed. the partial correlational test showed that there was a strong and statistically significant partial correlation between the nvlt scores and reading comprehension (r = .57, p < .001) whilst controlling for the other variables. in this model vocabulary can be said to account for around 33% of the variance seen in the participants’ reading comprehension scores, indicating that vocabulary does indeed have a strong and independent effect on the participants’ reading comprehension. table 6 partial correlational analysis of vlt and reading comprehension (n = 31) control variables independent variable reading comprehension c-test, swrt, & yarc fluency nvlt correlation .573*** significance (2-tailed) .001 bootstrapa bias -.057 std. error .186 bca 95% confidence interval lower .194 upper .762 note. swrt = single word reading test; yarc = york assessment of reading comprehension; nvlt = new vocabulary levels test. *** partial correlation significant at p < .001. a = bootstrap results are based on 2000 bootstrap samples further partial correlation analyses were then used to determine if the effects of general language ability, word decoding, and fluency still correlated to reading comprehension when vocabulary knowledge was accounted for (see table 7). in all cases, when controlling for vocabulary knowledge, the other assessments did not show strong or significant correlational relationships with reading gavin brooks, jon clenton, simon fraser 366 comprehension. this would seem to indicate that these factors do not explain a significant level of the variance in reading comprehension scores after vocabulary knowledge has been taken into account. this serves to further highlight the importance of vocabulary for reading comprehension. table 7 partial correlational analysis of the c-test, swrt, fluency, and reading comprehension while controlling for vocabulary knowledge (n = 31) control variables independent variable reading comprehension nvlt c-test correlation .273 significance (2-tailed) .144 bootstrapa bias -.035 std. error .149 bca 95% confidence interval lower -.027 upper .721 nvlt swrt correlation -.279 significance (2-tailed) .136 bootstrapa bias .027 std. error .198 bca 95% confidence interval lower -.654 upper .275 nvlt yarc fluency correlation .225 significance (2-tailed) .232 bootstrapa bias -.003 std. error .139 bca 95% confidence interval lower -.043 upper .488 note. swrt = single word reading test; yarc = york assessment of reading comprehension; nvlt = new vocabulary levels test. a = bootstrap results are based on 2000 bootstrap samples 6. discussion the findings presented in this paper align with a growing body of eal learner research indicating a critical relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension (burgoyne et al., 2009; melby-lervåg & lervåg, 2014; k. nation & snowling, 2004). similar to burgoyne et al. (2009), our results show that vocabulary knowledge had the strongest correlation to the participants’ reading comprehension abilities when compared to factors such as fluency or word decoding. accordingly, we agree with burgoyne et al.’s (2009) assertion of the central place for strengthening vocabulary knowledge to improve eal learners’ reading ability. we also saw moderate correlations between reading comprehension and reading fluency, as grabe (2010) predicted, and word decoding. while some previous studies have shown stronger correlations between word exploring the importance of vocabulary for english as an additional language learners’ reading. . . 367 decoding skills and reading comprehension (e.g., nation & snowling, 2004), the most probable reason for this difference is that these studies have tended to involve younger eal learners and the relationship between word decoding and reading comprehension has been shown to decrease with age (garcia & cain, 2014). one important difference between the current study and earlier studies relates to the context. while earlier eal learner reading comprehension studies have come from predominantly english speaking countries, the current study focuses on learners in an international school context. we suggest, accordingly, that findings in the current study might not entirely align with studies such as hutchinson et al. (2003), who looked at young eal learners studying in the uk. while hutchinson et al. (2003) report that their eal learners had lower vocabulary knowledge, the learners in their study only showed a two-year lag in receptive vocabulary knowledge compared to fle counterparts. by contrast, in the current study, our findings suggest a significantly larger gap in the levels of vocabulary knowledge between the eal and fle participants. this finding is consistent with other studies that have measured eal learner vocabulary knowledge in an international school context (coxhead & boutorwick, 2018). one potential reason for such differences when comparing our findings and coxhead and boutorwick’s (2018) with those of hutchinson et al. (2003) might relate to the limited opportunities eals have to use english outside of the classroom in the international school context. when considered in conjunction with the strong and significant correlation between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension outlined above, such lower levels of vocabulary knowledge among international school eal learners underline the primary importance of vocabulary intervention for this group of learners. furthermore, on the basis that the international school eal learners appear to exhibit different linguistic profiles when compared to eal learners in predominantly english language speaking contexts, additional studies are necessary to determine eal learner needs in international contexts. we believe that the current study is an important step in this direction. an additional strength of the current study rests with the inclusion of tests for general language ability (c-test) as well as word decoding skills (swrt) alongside vocabulary knowledge. by including such additional tests, the current study provides a platform to investigate the potential contributions different aspects of language knowledge make towards eal learner reading comprehension. while still a relatively new area of research, studies are beginning to examine how different aspects of language knowledge along with more holistic measures of general language proficiency correlate to skills such as listening comprehension (wang & treffers-daller, 2017), reading comprehension (droop & verhoeven, 2003), and mathematics (trakulphadetkrai et al., 2017). our results add to this growing body of research and are supportive of the contribution general language ability provides to reading comprehension (droop & verhoeven, 2003). the strong gavin brooks, jon clenton, simon fraser 368 correlation seen in our study between general language ability and reading comprehension might relate to suggestions (trakulphadetkrai et al., 2020) that less successful readers tend to focus on smaller units (word or sentence level) when constructing meaning from written text, whereas more proficient and successful learners may employ a wider range of top-down, global strategies for text comprehension. as the ctest requires learners to use a combination of bottom-up, word-based strategies along with top-down, text-based strategies (babaii & ansary, 2001), the strong and significant relationship between reading comprehension and this measure of general linguistic knowledge seen in this study suggests that the c-test could provide a useful tool for teachers to use in eal classrooms, with a wide range of learner proficiencies, to identify learners struggling with reading comprehension. 7. limitations and implications the current study has some limitations that need to be considered when interpreting its findings. one potential issue concerns the vocabulary assessment tool being used in the study, which is intended for use with adult learners. currently, there are limited assessment tools available specifically for eal learners, and none that are designed to measure the vocabulary knowledge of the type of eal learners that participated in this study. while some overlap of knowledge is likely, without further research, it remains a challenge to determine the extent to which the word-frequency lists developed for adults, or the methods of assessing learners’ mastery of those frequency bands, are appropriate for the young eal learners. however, previous studies (green & lambert, 2019; greene & coxhead, 2015) have shown that there are a number of important differences between the vocabulary eal learners are likely to encounter in the classroom, compared to frequency lists developed for adult learners. accordingly, as part of a larger ongoing project, we are developing and testing vocabulary assessment tools that can specifically be applied to young eal learner assessment, which we aim to publish in the future. further limitations of the current study relate to the context of the research. while our data represent assessments conducted with learners from diverse linguistic backgrounds, the study focuses exclusively on learners studying in the japanese context. we intend to expand the scope our study in the future by investigating participants from international schools outside of japan, in order to explore the extent to which our findings can be applied elsewhere. furthermore, the number of participants assessed in this study was relatively small, and so we also hope to extend our research to other international schools in japan to increase the number of learners participating in the study. despite the limitations discussed above, the current study offers two important implications for the classroom. first, as other researchers have advocated (e.g., coxhead et al., 2010; green & lambert, 2019), eal teachers who wish to improve exploring the importance of vocabulary for english as an additional language learners’ reading. . . 369 their learners’ reading comprehension should focus first and foremost on improving their learners’ vocabulary knowledge. given that the current study was not an intervention study, we cannot use our results to offer suggestions regarding the specific types of vocabulary instruction teachers should follow. however, ample support from previous studies shows that a principled approach to the teaching of vocabulary, with both intentional vocabulary learning activities and sufficient opportunities for incidental learning, can aid eal learners in improving their reading comprehension (greene & coxhead, 2015; murphy & unthiah, 2015). second, the results of our study demonstrate the potential benefits of using vocabulary assessment as a pedagogical tool to help identify learners who may need additional support in the classroom; something other researchers in the field (e.g., coxhead & boutorwick, 2018; greene & coxhead, 2015) also endorse. 8. conclusion given that our study has demonstrated that vocabulary knowledge appears so important for eal learners, we feel that it is essential for teachers to provide vocabulary support for both eal and fle learners in the classroom. furthermore, the apparent importance of vocabulary for eal learners’ reading comprehension indicates that teachers should focus on improving these learners’ vocabulary knowledge. teaching eal learners the vocabulary they need to succeed academically is something that can be done both inside the classroom and through pullout programs. eal and fle learners alike should be encouraged to expand the depth and breadth of their vocabulary knowledge as both have been shown to be important factors for reading comprehension in both this and other studies (e.g., treffers-daller & huang, 2020). this greater focus on vocabulary in the classroom is essential if eal learners are to be able to comprehend the texts that they are being asked to read for class. however, it is important to stress that vocabulary must be looked at in the context of the other factors that have been shown to influence reading comprehension, such as reading fluency and general language ability. as such, it would be prudent for teachers, even in the eal context where there is often a greater focus on having students learn the content of the course rather than the language itself, to incorporate tasks that help students to improve their overall english language abilities as well as their reading fluency. acknowledgements this work was supported by the japanese ministry of education, culture, sports, science and technology grant-in-aid for scientific research under grant number 17k03035. gavin brooks, jon clenton, simon fraser 370 references adlof, s. m., catts, h. w., & little, t. d. 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(1991). children’s problems in text comprehension: an experimental investigation. cambridge university press. 89 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (1). 2020. 89-109 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.1.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt working memory and second language development: a complex, dynamic future? daniel o. jackson kanda university of international studies, makuhari, japan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1102-0379 jackson-d@kanda.kuis.ac.jp abstract working memory (wm) is inherently dynamic and complex, being a multi-faceted system that links storage and processing components; yet it is widely understood as internal. hence, in second language (l2) research, its connection to complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) remains underspecified. this paper seeks to bridge a gap between cdst and wm in l2 research. first, definitions of wm are reviewed, along with evidence for its relationship to l2 outcomes. next, a brief overview of cdst highlights its metatheoretical and methodological implications. three perspectives are presented to illustrate how wm can be viewed in terms of major tenets in cdst. these consider wm effects as: (1) context-dependent, (2) interrelated with those of other variables, and (3) amenable to change across the lifespan. despite this reappraisal, numerous challenges remain. thus, in addition to noting research opportunities, the paper also considers measurement issues, such as the determination of boundaries and selection of appropriate timescales. in closing, while wm studies have shown its influence on l2 proficiency and processing, to more fully understand its dynamic nature, what is needed is further research on the reciprocal influences of bilingual development and changes in wm components, such as control of attention. keywords: individual differences; working memory; complex dynamic systems theory; second language development; theoretical complementarity daniel o. jackson 90 1. introduction the goal of this article is to offer a state-of-the-art review of working memory (wm) and second language (l2) development that situates wm within complex dynamic systems theory (cdst). the view offered here has consequences that may inform research agendas incorporating cognitive ids, as well as the conceptualization and procedural stages of measuring wm in l2 research. as to the question of whether wm is complex and dynamic, the answer, in some respects, is a simple yes. ellis (2005) has invoked wm as the home of “explicit deduction, hypothesis formation, analogical reasoning, prioritization, control, and decision-making” (p. 337), implicating it in language learning and use. there is also abundant evidence that wm capacity increases throughout childhood and declines later in life (alloway & alloway, 2013; gathercole & alloway, 2008; park & payer, 2006; simmering & perone, 2013). in l2 research, these changes have been viewed as having the potential to explain issues such as the critical period hypothesis (brooks & kempe, 2019; newport, 1990). there is an expanding body of studies using wm measures in adult l2 learning and processing that informs a number of key areas in second language acquisition (sla) research. however, this literature does not often seem to reflect the longterm trajectory of wm development. this seems surprising given that lifespan changes in wm are well-documented. sla studies may target a narrow population, such as high school or university language learners. or, they may regard wm as a control variable which is less relevant than the study’s primary foci. the tendency in sla research to rely on cross-sectional designs (doughty & long, 2003) is at least partly to blame for this situation, though calls for longitudinal work have resonated throughout the field for some time now (ortega & byrnes, 2008). given the proliferation of studies orienting to l2 learning as a complex, dynamic system, and their potential to advance our understanding of ids (e.g., lowie & verspoor, 2019; see also dörnyei, 2017, macintyre, mackay, ross, & abel, 2017), the time is ripe to reassess how wm is treated in l2 research. this conceptual review article will describe findings on wm and l2 learning, consider ways that such research may be compatible with cdst, specify reasons for considering wm as more than a static variable, and close by arguing that viewing wm as dynamic is more an opportunity than a challenge. 2. what is working memory and why does it matter? 2.1. defining working memory as described by baddeley (2007, 2012), working memory is a psychological construct that evolved from views of memory as a simple, temporary storage space working memory and second language development: a complex, dynamic future? 91 (or short-term memory) to a multi-componential model, comprised of a central executive and two storage systems: the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad. these fluid systems, to which the episodic buffer was later added, interact with the so-called crystallized systems including visual semantics, episodic long-term memory (ltm), and language. each of the aforementioned components serves distinct functions in the multi-component model. the phonological loop helps to retain speech for long-term learning through storage and rehearsal. the visuospatial sketchpad, likewise, facilitates rehearsal of visual and spatial information. the episodic buffer, which is the model’s newest component, functions to integrate chunks by binding information from various sources into episodes. as baddeley (2019) explained, it combines “visual and verbal information together with their semantic associates. a simple example might be a ringing alarm clock” (p. 289). these three storage components are regarded as limited in capacity, and they serve the central executive, the role of which is to focus and divide attention, switch tasks, and connect with ltm. in sum, wm involves storage, rehearsal, and processing. baddeley’s (2012) multicomponent model of wm (see figure 1a), originating in the 1970s, has informed countless studies in psycholinguistics and sla, and its longevity is impressive considering that there are a number of competing proposals. for instance, other wm models include cowan’s (2005) embedded processes model (figure 1b), which emphasizes the role of central executive processes during attentional focus within activated ltm, as well as engle, kane and tuholski’s (1999) resource-dependent inhibition model (figure 1c), which posits that individual differences in the ability to control attention underlie wm capacity (for theoretical overviews, see conway, jarrold, kane, miyake, & towse, 2008; miyake & shah, 1999). the notion of wm has even sustained the counter argument that emerging processing capacity could better account for ids in language comprehension (macdonald & christiansen, 2002). what these three wm models all have in common is that each assumes a major role for executive processes, specifically those involving attention, and links them to ltm. this role is clear from the label and the prominence of the central executive in the three model visualizations depicted in figure 1. therefore, it is useful to consider, from the outset, the view of attention adopted within wm models. in baddeley’s own words, “the capacity to direct and focus attention is perhaps the most crucial feature of working memory” (2007, p. 124). returning to this model, it is assumed that behavior is controlled either automatically (e.g., in my case, reading from left to right in english) or via the mechanism of a supervisory attentional system (e.g., overriding this habit when reading japanese tategaki text from right to left). such supervised control is conscious, although it has been proposed that wm could operate outside of consciousness (hassin, bargh, engell, & mcculloch, 2009). nonetheless, baddeley (2007, p. 306) clearly states that wm depends on conscious awareness, daniel o. jackson 92 which is necessary for explicit l2 learning, whether such learning is intentional or incidental (see schmidt, 2012). figure 1 three models of wm: (a) baddeley’s (2012) multicomponent model, (b) cowan’s (2005) embedded-processes model; and (c) engle and colleagues’ (1999) model (ltm = long-term memory; stm = short-term memory; wmc = working memory capacity) 2.2. the role(s) of wm in l2 research empirical studies applying wm models to investigate issues in l2 learning and performance have been published since the early 1990s. the expanding literature has been reviewed at various times (e.g., juffs & harrington, 2011; robinson, 2003; williams, 2012) and has resulted in a research synthesis of wm measures (watanabe & bergsleithner, 2006), a large-scale meta-analysis of the results (linck, osthus, koeth, & bunting, 2014), and a recent book-length survey (wen, 2016). this section will attempt to briefly summarize major themes and findings that have emerged from this corpus of research, focusing on six strands of sla research in which cognitive ids are relevant, as identified in granena, jackson, and yilmaz (2016). working memory and second language development: a complex, dynamic future? 93 these strands included: (1) aptitude theory, (2) instructed sla, (3) comprehension and production, (4) novel sla, (5) psycholinguistic approaches to bilingualism, and (6) transfer of training. measurement issues, as another area of potential interface between wm and sla will be considered later (see section 4.2.). the emphasis here will be on recent studies, which may not have been previously reviewed. the most recent comprehensive review by wen (2016) covered studies from 1992 to 2015. in the time since then, this literature has expanded considerably. for reference, a search of the eric database for peer-reviewed studies published between 2016 and february 2019, with specifications for the keyword second language, with working memory included in the abstract, yielded 53 publications, of which 45 reported on empirical studies. what follows is a selective review based on only a portion of these studies, as well as others published as book chapters. for each area of sla research, a brief summary of what is known, and what recent research adds, will be provided. aptitude theory: wm has long been theorized to play a key role in foreign language aptitude, whether it is regarded as central to it (miyake & friedman, 1998) or as a primary cognitive ability that contributes to ability factors which comprise aptitude complexes for, for example, learning from recasts (robinson, 2007). categorizing l2 aptitudes according to whether they are (a) domain-general vs. domainspecific and (b) implicit vs. explicit, skehan (2016) characterized wm as both domain-general and explicit. in the macro-sla aptitude model (skehan, 2016; wen, biedroń, & skehan, 2017), wm is associated with a range of l2 cognitive processes, including input segmentation, noticing, pattern recognition, complexification (or, the adoption of more structurally complex constructions), feedback handling, and error avoidance. evidence from a recent large-scale meta-analysis reveals that executive wm was moderately correlated with overall aptitude and one of its components, phonemic coding ability, while phonological stm (pstm) showed weaker or non-significant correlations with these constructs (li, 2016). this suggests that executive wm, in particular, plays a role in ones’ ability to learn an l2. instructed sla: studies of sla in instructional settings have for some years examined correlations between wm and processes in instructed l2 learning (e.g., mackey, philp, egi, fujii, & tatsumi, 2002). these studies can be designed to provide insight into possible wm-treatment interactions (see vatz, tare, jackson, & doughty, 2013, for review). to a lesser degree, longitudinal work has also shown that wm predicts the development of proficiency in classroom-based instruction, after controlling for gpa, sat, and motivation scores (linck & weiss, 2011). three recent studies that used the framework of task-based language teaching (tblt) are briefly reported here. first, wen (2018) found that executive wm (but not phonological wm) was significantly related to the use of formulaic sequences in l2 english during a narrative retelling task, regardless of whether daniel o. jackson 94 planning time was provided. in another planning study, with learners of l2 chinese, li and fu (2018) revealed consistent, significant correlations between an operation span test of wm and measures of accuracy and fluency under an unpressured, within-task planning condition, but not a strategic planning condition. finally, zalbidea (2017) manipulated task complexity, finding that operation span correlated with linguistic measures of performance in l2 spanish on complex (but not simple) versions of an argumentative task, in both spoken and written modalities. such studies suggest that instructional conditions in tblt differentially engage wm, sometimes facilitating performance. comprehension and production: one of the findings of the meta-analysis by linck et al. (2014), who reviewed data from 79 independent samples including over 3,700 participants, was that positive relations with wm held across outcomes targeting comprehension and production, as well as those incorporating both skills. in light of this result, the authors suggested that wm studies could focus on its role in specific l2 processes across skills (e.g., lexical access during reading versus speaking). in spite of this suggestion, most studies seem to focus separately on either comprehension or production. the tblt studies just reviewed are an example of the latter, as they used l2 production as the outcome. as for a recent study of comprehension, sagarra (2017) stands out for its longitudinal focus. the study examined whether wm predicts improvement in l2 spanish grammar and reading comprehension. despite initially finding no effect for wm, in a follow-up experiment, beginning l2 spanish learners showed gains over one semester of instruction, which were related to a wm measure with a taxing processing component. this study points to the challenge of identifying wm tests with predictive validity over the long-term. novel sla: there have been, for many years, studies that address the role of wm at the initial stages of sla (see kempe & brooks, 2016, for a comprehensive review of this work). these theoretically motivated studies use language input unfamiliar to participants (i.e., artificial, semi-artificial, or miniature natural languages) to explore the conditions and ids that shape early sla. for instance, a study reported by jackson (2016) hypothesized that variation sets, or partially repeated sequences found in child-directed speech, would support cognitive comparison (doughty, 2001), and thus yield lower correlations between wm and learning of morphology in an artificial language. this claim was partly supported by the results, which further showed that mixed-effects models incorporating awareness and wm provided the best fit to the data. other recent studies, particularly those targeting novel syntax, have not shown significant correlations between wm and outcomes (mcdonough & trofimovich, 2016). thus, while wm is an important predictor in incidental l2 learning, its status in learning aspects that participants may be less aware of remains unclear (see jackson, 2013). working memory and second language development: a complex, dynamic future? 95 psycholinguistic approaches to bilingualism: the topic of wm in bilingual research raises particularly puzzling challenges. as biedroń and birdsong (2019) put it, “the chicken-egg problem of whether multilingual experience enhances wm capacity, or whether it is wm capacity that augments fl success, is unresolved” (p. 313). the cognitive consequences of bilingualism are often discussed in terms of executive function, which includes: (a) shifting, (b) updating (measured by wm operation span), and (c) inhibition (miyake et al., 2000; see for discussion, bialystok, 2018; schwieter, 2016). perhaps some of the most interesting recent evidence in this area comes from a meta-analysis conducted by grundy and timmer (2017). these authors pooled data from 27 independent studies (with over 2,900 participants) that examined wm performance amongst monolingual versus bilingual groups. they found a significant, positive mean effect size (ρ = .20), which showed that bilinguals had greater wm. regarding the issue of causation, these authors noted that: . . . it is not likely that bilinguals in the present study became bilingual because of greater wm capacity, nor is it likely that monolinguals in the present study became so because of smaller wm capacity . . . we propose that second language experience has a positive effect on wm capacity. (grundy & timmer, 2017, p. 334) so, it seems that while wm facilitates l2 processing and learning under certain conditions, it is also the likely the case that an individual’s experience of living with two or more languages strengthens wm. transfer of training: another element to consider when seeking to understand the bidirectional relationship between wm and l2 outcomes is that of training. indeed, the case has been made that interventions designed to enhance wm could plausibly foster gains in l2 performance (tsai, au, & jaeggi, 2016). a related, but different, view is that certain types of musical training, along with wm, foster abilities useful in acquiring specific aspects of an l2, such as phonology (christiner & reiterer, 2016). due to a lack of studies, much more research is needed to examine these intriguing possibilities. 3. wm and l2 development through the prism of complex dynamic systems theory the view of cdst adopted in this paper is based on larsen-freeman’s (2015, 2017) presentation of it as a metatheory (see also de bot & larsen-freeman, 2011). in her view, a metatheory presents concepts as broad in scope in order to seek out their interconnections, whereas a theory focuses on the particular details uncovered by empirical evidence (larsen-freeman, 2017, p. 21-22). within cdst, a number of concepts relevant to second language development (sld) have been identified. a system is understood to be a constellation of entities daniel o. jackson 96 that function as a whole, and which are both embedded in larger systems and comprised of subsystems. some concepts used to characterize systems include constant change, which is dependent on initial conditions, and related to this, context-dependency, as well as interconnectedness. furthermore, systems are open, adaptive, and show nonlinearity. the remainder of this section will focus on ways in which wm is context-dependent, interrelated with other variables, and changes over the lifespan, in keeping with these core tenets of a complex, dynamic approach. 3.1. the context dependence of wm as noted above, there is evidence to suggest that the extent to which wm is engaged during l2 processing and learning depends on the context or type of instruction. instruction here can refer either to the pedagogic techniques used or the task instructions given to participants. vatz et al. (2013) reviewed l2 instruction studies that reported interactions such that wm showed stronger relationships to outcomes in classroom conversations than in online chat rooms, as well as in recast versus metalinguistic feedback conditions. it may even be possible to trace such differences to the neurological level by using fmri, as in a study reported by li (2015). here, participants were asked to do an artificial grammar learning task, under rule-search or exposure-only conditions. the data showed that the neural structures used by participants in these different groups overlapped, but their connectivity differed. also, while both groups learned, wm correlated with performance only in the rule-search condition. this again points to the role of wm in explicit learning contexts. 3.2. interrelationships between wm and other variables the massive amount of research that has attempted to situate wm alongside other cognitive id variables, such as intelligence, is impossible to summarize easily. suffice it to say that wm can be regarded as a subsystem within the system of executive functions, defined as shifting, updating, and inhibition. miyake et al. (2000) identified the operation span task as an indicator of updating, which they describe as “updating and monitoring of working memory contents” (p. 86). this ability is distinguished from, but related to, shifting between tasks and inhibiting prepotent responses. apart from these interrelationships between wm and other cognitive components, the relation to l2 factors must be closely considered. previously, the link between wm and l2 aptitude was noted (see aptitude theory in section 2.2.). a study by serafini and sanz (2016; see also serafini, 2017) shows how the effect of wm may be mitigated by l2 proficiency. three proficiency groups (beginner, intermediate, and advanced) were tested at four times during and upon working memory and second language development: a complex, dynamic future? 97 completion of instruction. positive relationships between wm and l2 outcomes were clearest for the beginning learners, suggesting that wm is especially valuable at the initial stages of exposure and practice. it is worth noting, though, that participant attrition (the sample decreased from 87 to 33) could have influenced these results. this evidence for a decreasing role of wm contrasts with the meta-analysis by linck et al. (2014), which reported similar, positive effect sizes for learners and bilinguals. 3.3. changes in wm across the lifespan despite the fact that in research with adult l2 learners, wm is often conceptualized as more or less static, capacity varies among children, teenagers, and adults. improvement is dramatic during childhood, with scores increasing steadily from age 5 to 15, when adult-like performance is attained (gathercole & alloway, 2008). later, there is clear evidence for a gradual decline in wm ability from age 20 onward, in contrast to verbal abilities, which increase steadily with age (park & payer, 2006). however, cohort averages may not be helpful to understanding individual change. in addition to the robustness of this evidence, it is also clear that there are wide-ranging differences between individuals in each age group, and that different wm tests yield different results at any given age. these basic facts are useful for understanding the scope and interpretation of effects in l2 studies on wm. moreover, they also point to the need for careful sampling procedures and detailed reporting. for instance, in studies of younger l2 learners, age is often linked to grade level, as in hansen et al. (2016), whose study focused on school children aged 7 to 14 years old. however, in university samples, the association between age and educational level may be less predictable, thus requiring researchers to establish careful sampling criteria. studying college learners, sagarra (2017) noted that only those between the ages of 18 and 30 were admitted, because “wm and processing speed start decreasing at the age of 40” (p. 348). in one of the few studies to focus on the role of wm among older language learners, mackey and sachs (2012) recruited participants between 65 and 89, explicitly justifying this age range. note that in each of these studies a specific age range was provided. this is more informative than merely reporting average age, based on which readers cannot determine the potential influence of age-related variation in wm. to conclude this section, as a means of better accounting for wm capacity increases from 2 to 15 years of age (as well as task-related variation), simmering and perone (2013) proposed that a dynamic account is needed. in their own words, wm “capacity does not exist in the way it has been traditionally conceptualized, but is an emergent process within a dynamically coupled, self-organizing cognitive, and behavioral system” (p. 16, emphasis in original). advancing a dynamic daniel o. jackson 98 view, according to their argument, requires: (1) specifying the coupling between cognitive and behavioral components in context, (2) linking theories to real-time behavior, and (3) seeking to integrate verbal and visual wm tasks, so as to gain insight into shared processes across domains. these recommendations might support future studies to better understand why wm varies across the lifespan, as well as to potentially inform research into differences in child versus adult l2 learning, where the effect of developing cognitive capacity is controversial (see brooks & kempe, 2019). 4. a cdst view of wm: opportunities and challenges in this section, i would like to return to the previously described issue of bidirectionality, frame this as a research problem that cdst seems equipped to explore, recast the bidirectionality issue in terms of the way relationships between variables are described in dynamic approaches, and then, finally, point out some challenges in implementing such research. 4.1. opportunities it turns out that the wm-sld bidirectionality issue has been used as an example of how research based on a narrow theory may not, in fact, yield a complete understanding of processes in sld, which is where a metatheoretical view shows its usefulness. as de bot and larsen-freeman (2011) wrote: in the evaluation of theories, the notion of what constitutes proof is essential: a theory makes certain assumptions, and empirical data are gathered to test whether these assumptions hold or not. an assumption could be that there is a relation between the storage capacity in working memory and sld . . . another possibility is that people who practice learning an l2 a lot will have a larger working memory, so the larger memory capacity is a result and not a cause of language learning. (pp. 7-8) to make matters even more complicated, this is not a dilemma that is easily resolved by looking to chronologically earlier stages of development. interestingly, there are studies showing that visual wm develops in infants between 6 and 10 months (simmering & perone, 2013) and also that the bilingual advantage emerges as early as 7 to 12 months (bialystok, 2018). however, by taking a more bird’s eye view of this situation, especially one that incorporates the notion of change across time, cdst may promote greater clarity regarding the issues. to begin with the evidence, a large-scale meta-analysis has demonstrated that wm predicts l2 outcomes overall (ρ = .25), in processing and proficiency, and that its role is evident in comprehension and production (and on measures combining these modalities), for both learners and bilinguals (linck et al., 2014). working memory and second language development: a complex, dynamic future? 99 in contrast, wm was considered an outcome variable by adesope, lavin, thompson and ungerleider (2010) in a similarly large meta-analysis, which revealed positive effects for bilingualism on a range of cognitive measures, including attentional control and wm. so, there are opposite accounts, both of which are convincing, based on the evidence. yet what remains to be understood is the direction of these relationships. pointing out that their study was based on correlations, linck and colleagues (2014) cautiously noted that the possibilities that (a) wm enhances l2 learning and use, and (b) l2 learning and use improves cognitive mechanisms, such as wm, are not mutually exclusive. using a group design, the issue was again addressed by grundy and timmer (2017, see above), who provided evidence that bilinguals outperform monolinguals on wm span tasks, with an overall effect size of ρ = .20. to summarize, there is clear support for relationships between wm and sld among those learning or using an l2, there is a positive association between bilingualism and several cognitive ids, and there is a small wm advantage in bilinguals over monolinguals, which lends support to the view that bilingualism boosts wm, if only slightly. at this point, it is tempting to accept grundy and timmer’s logic, and to conclude that bilinguals owe this gain to l2 experience. this, however, is not the end of the story. first, as these authors noted, bilingualism is not a categorical variable, though it was treated as such in the studies they meta-analyzed. second, it remains unclear precisely what kinds of experience comprise the necessary and sufficient conditions of this bilingual advantage. therefore, these studies can guide future work that includes degrees of bilingualism and also, similar investigations focused on different language pairings, literacy levels, and social contexts. more importantly, though, whether they were based on evidence from correlational or group designs, each of these meta-analytic studies represents a cross-sectional approach. cdst, instead, focuses on dynamics over time. thus, the bidirectionality issue could be seen somewhat differently, in line with the view that “when one component changes, another component will change too, and the other way around” (verspoor & van dijk, 2011, p. 85). from this perspective, it is not a chicken-or-egg dilemma, but instead a matter of understanding the interconnectedness of these systems without assuming that simple causation can explain their growth. this new framing may be more appropriate for describing the interdependence of wm and language. this paper has so far presented wm as dynamic and multi-componential, but what of language? that too, must be reassessed and explicitly defined to allow for a fuller understanding of the implications of cdst. here is one relevant definition, which can be adapted to learning and use: daniel o. jackson 100 language, like the rest of perception and cognition, is a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional state space that combines phonetic, semantic, and syntactic constraints for understanding with perceptual and motor constraints for continuously converting this developing understanding into successful bodily interaction with the environment. (spivey, 2007, p. 206) the experience of bilingualism involves juggling languages in a way that makes this trajectory perhaps all the more fluid. if we assume that system components are in constant motion, as do l2 researchers adhering to cdst, and as do simmering and perone (2013) for wm, then we should redirect our efforts to understanding their temporal dynamics. while the evidence reviewed so far is intriguing, there is, it seems, very little that we know about the longitudinal growth within specific individuals of wm and bilingualism, both of which change and can be measured over time. note that, to date, longitudinal studies of wm and l2 outcomes, which are relatively scarce, have typically measured wm at a fixed time point, using repeated measures only for the l2 variable. this is clearly not the only design choice possible. verspoor and van dijk (2011) offer a methodological overview of how study design can be informed by cdst, beginning with terminology which i will introduce here, before turning to an example of its application. first, various resources in the environment, in combination with ids, foster the development of growers, or pairs of variables that exhibit a meaningful relationship. this relationship can be defined as supportive, competitive, or conditional. supportive growers develop together, competitive growers inversely affect each other, and conditional growers entail a minimum level of one variable as a prerequisite for the development of another. for any given pair of components, or growers, the relationship can change across time. consider the case of a young adult learner, who, while simultaneously exposed to her l1, spends a considerable number of years learning a foreign language (l2), from junior high school to college, with brief periods of intensive study abroad, resulting in high proficiency. this period of learning is subsequently followed by a transition to a work environment in another country (where the l2 is dominant) and daily use of the l1 and l2, at which point the label bilingual becomes apt. in the initial stages of her learning, l2 development is supported by wm (as well as average or better motivation, aptitude, and strategy use). upon transitioning to overseas employment, her wm benefits from her daily use of two languages. of course, this is just one straightforward scenario of the many that could be offered. assuming this case to be of practical interest, the possibilities in terms of the wm-sld relationship, under a cdst account, may then be cast as research hypotheses. for example, it seems reasonable to suggest that, as for viewing wm and sld as connected growers, the relationship is initially supportive, with a moderate working memory and second language development: a complex, dynamic future? 101 connection between these variables from the early stages of l2 development onwards (i.e., wm and sld grow together). recall that a positive relationship between wm and outcomes was found for both learners and bilinguals by linck et al. (2014). later, as wm begins to decline (after one’s 20s), the daily use of two languages presumably has a facilitative effect on attentional control (discussed later, see section 5.). thus, the relationship here is conditional, as a certain level of daily use is needed to moderate the effect of aging on wm. although speculative, the overall pattern seems likely to be asymmetric. the literature cited herein would suggest a certain degree of flux, as neither sld nor wm remains entirely stable. to add to this, one could also assume that these relationships might vary according to proficiency-related factors, such as whether sld is conceptualized as basic or higher language cognition (blc vs. hlc, respectively), wherein blc concerns grammar and lexis in speech reception and production, while hlc extends to low-frequency vocabulary and constructions, as well as written language, which are outside of typical daily usage (hulstijn, 2015). indeed, hulstijn has suggested that wm is associated more strongly with hlc (p. 47). given the varying degrees of biliteracy associated with sld, it seems appropriate to consider these dimensions as well. to measure the dynamic relationship between these growers would require a longitudinal design, in which both sld and wm are measured repeatedly. as macintyre et al. put it, “evidence that best addresses the concerns of cdst is dense, longitudinal and individual” (2017, p. 99). although such data are the backbone of cdst studies, as implied already, cross-sectional rather than longitudinal designs are presently the norm in sla research on cognitive ids, and the few longitudinal studies to date seemed to assume that wm was static for the duration of the study, as it was measured only once. thus, there is a clear opportunity to expand research on wm and l2 learning and use in this direction, which possesses the distinct advantages of using cdst’s metatheoretical and methodological insights to inform the vexing issue of how these variables may reciprocally influence each other. an initial attempt can be found in serafini (2017), who argued that wm and other ids enter supportive or conditional relationships. furthermore, the visualization and modeling techniques described throughout verspoor, de bot, and lowie (2011) offer sophisticated tools for analyzing longitudinal data. 4.2. challenges what, then, are the major challenges? measurement of wm in this relatively new domain entails considering at least two distinct problems. these involve the scope and timing of measurement. the boundary problem: as a conceptual problem, a focus on changes in wm and sld unleashes a wide array of nested systems that could be studied. cdst is daniel o. jackson 102 useful in that it makes explicit the need, as in any research endeavor, to draw a line somewhere with respect to the limits of an investigation. larsen-freeman (2017) described this “boundary problem” (p. 32) as one of delineating the system(s) of interest, yet acknowledging their connection to the wider ecology. among cognitive ids, and ids in general, what insight is potentially lost by restricting the focus to wm? amid personal development, and the growth of professional skills, what remains in the shadows when either blc or hlc is in the spotlight? choices have to be made. the foregoing sections indicate some plausibly relevant distinctions and foci, involving language (hlc), cognitive ids (executive function), and time (childhood to early adulthood). more diverse sampling can further extend the boundaries to expand our knowledge. for instance, there is a need for research on wm among younger learners (see geva & ryan, 1993; hansen et al., 2016). too few studies highlight the impact of geographic context, educational level, and socioeconomic status (but see adesope et al., 2010). more insight can come from a focusing on a range of interlocutors (gurzynski-weiss, 2017). finally, in a remarkable study, the effect of l1 structure on wm was recently demonstrated through an investigation with speakers of eight languages (amici et al., 2019). using a range of wm tasks, the recall performance of speakers of left-branching languages was better on initial than final stimuli, whereas the opposite trend was observed among speakers of right-branching languages, arguably because of differential processing demands across languages. in short, there are myriad connected systems to untangle. the timescale problem: as a procedural – and practical – problem, the longitudinalness of investigations into wm and cdst is the next major challenge. although detailed investigations of interrelatedness between system components can be done via cross-sectional sampling (gass & lee, 2012), many of its proponents view cdst as requiring longitudinal data (macintrye et al., 2017). with respect to the id in question, wm changes on a timescale that is meaningful, but extends well beyond the reach of many empirical studies. earlier, it was noted that more rapid growth is seen among children between the ages of 5 and 15 years old, and that decline is more gradual, potentially from age 20. thus, wm is not comparable to a system such as willingness to communicate, which fluctuates over a matter of minutes (macintyre & legatto, 2011, macintyre, this issue). in any case, the extent of change also depends on the individual. though daunting, it may be useful to consider here conceptual macroscopic versus microscopic turning points (ortega & byrnes, 2008), the former referencing milestones in cognitive development, as well as key events in life histories, and the latter perhaps establishing gains through wm training. for example, tsai et al. (2016) reported on a study in which third graders exposed to 12 days of training showed improvements in reading comprehension over a control group. working memory and second language development: a complex, dynamic future? 103 5. conclusion the construct of wm is inherently dynamic and complex, being a multi-faceted system that links storage and processing components, influences outcomes, and is shaped by time and experience. however, it is somewhat narrowly construed and measured in l2 research. hence, its role remains underspecified at this time. this review has attempted to offer a reappraisal of wm and to identify the challenges and opportunities ahead. it has been argued that cdst invites closer consideration, especially, of the issue of reciprocal influences of bilingual development and changes in wm. by way of limitations, this selective review has focused heavily on how cdst encourages a longitudinal approach to conceptualizing change and sampling data. however, the issue of time is best viewed in terms of the particular research questions at hand. the value of incorporating elements of cdst into studies that pertain closely to wm, but are not longitudinal, should also be acknowledged. trait and state perspectives on ids are complementary in the sense that they can address different dimensions of a given research problem, with the former appropriate for understanding structural relations and the latter suited to understanding temporal dynamics; however, they are not typically compatible in terms of their results, due to the ergodicity problem (see lowie & verspoor, 2019). furthermore, the bidirectionality issue is not the only, or the most important, issue. other key themes that may benefit from such focus as offered here, and throughout this special issue, include interactions between wm and other ids, the role of wm under different learning conditions and with different l2 constructions, and the use of wm interventions to foster l2 learning and performance. as a practical example, gregersen and macintyre (2014, pp. 87-97) offered several lesson plans integrating wm enhancement with instruction on verb tenses and formulaic expressions. there is accumulating research evidence that wm supports sld and that, conversely, bilingualism benefits wm. the mechanisms underlying this latter effect remain obscure, however. bialystok (2018) has recently argued that executive function (i.e., switching languages, updating wm, and inhibiting active representations irrelevant to the target language) could be replaced by the construct of executive attention, which is closely related to the central executive component in baddeley’s (2007, 2012) model. it remains to be seen whether or not cdst can shed light on how “bilingual experience shapes attention throughout life” (bialystok, 2018, p. 297). however, given the opportunities noted here, it seems likely that wm will have a complex, dynamic future. daniel o. jackson 104 references adesope, o. o., lavin, t., thompson, t., & ungerleider, c. 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(2017). “one task fits all”? the roles of task complexity, modality, and working memory capacity in l2 performance. modern language journal, 101(2), 335-352. 271 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (2). 2016. 271-292 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.2.5 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl increasing fluency in l2 writing with singing jenni alisaari university of turku, finland jenni.alisaari@utu.fi leena maria heikkola åbo akademi university, finland lheikkol@abo.fi abstract fluency is an essential part of a language learner’s skills. despite various studies on fluency, little is known about the effects of different pedagogical methods on the development of written fluency. in this paper, we examine how different pedagogical methods affect the development of second language learners’ written fluency. participants in this study were 51 language learners enrolled in two intensive finnish courses. the pedagogical methods investigated in the study were singing, listening to songs, and reciting lyrics of songs. written stories based on cartoon strips were used as a pretest and a posttest. the fluency of written stories was analyzed based on the number of words used in the texts. differences between the groups taught by different pedagogical methods were analyzed. the results seem to indicate that fluency increased the most in the singing groups compared to the other groups. there was also a statistically significant difference between the singing group and the group reciting lyrics, as well as between the group listening to songs and the group reciting lyrics. keywords: fluency; l2 writing; singing jenni alisaari, leena maria heikkola 272 1. introduction fluency plays an important role in language production. language learners are often judged as fluent users of language if they use their second language with ease and in a native-like way (housen, kuiken, & vedder, 2012). according to chenoweth and hayes (2001), written fluency is especially important for second language (l2) learners’ success in their studies. investigating fluency, as well as accuracy and complexity, is a popular topic within second language acquisition studies (see e.g., housen et al., 2012). however, little attention has been paid to the relationship between different pedagogical methods and fluency in l2 writing. a number of studies have reported the benefits of music and singing for learning (see e.g., legg, 2009; medina, 2000). music stimulates memory and increases motivation and interest in learning situations (abbott, 2002; eerola & saarikallio, 2010, pp. 265-266; stansell, 2005). singing, in turn, makes learning processes more efficient by activating both brain hemispheres simultaneously and combining language learning with emotions (lake, 2002, pp. 102-103). recent neuroimaging studies have shown that music and language are intertwined on the neural level (besson, schön, moreno, santos, & magne, 2007; putkinen, tervaniemi, saarikivi, de vent, & huotilainen, 2014), and that music can improve language skills (moreno, marques, santos, santos, castro, & besson, 2009). previous studies have found that singing has a positive effect on second language learning, especially on vocabulary (coyle & gómez garcia, 2014; legg, 2009). however, little is known about how singing and music affect written fluency. the objective of this study is to investigate how three different pedagogical methods affect written fluency in stories by 51 learners of finnish. the pedagogical methods used in the study are singing, listening to songs and reciting the lyrics of the same songs. the data were collected by a pretest and a posttest in which students wrote stories based on comic strips. both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to analyze the data. the article is divided into five sections. the first section lays out the theoretical dimensions of the research and looks at how singing affects language learning. the second section explains the methodology of the study. the third section includes results, focusing on how the different pedagogical approaches affect written fluency. in the fourth section, we discuss the results and their implications. finally, conclusions and areas for further research are discussed. 1.1. effect of singing on learning the first serious discussions and analyses of the effect of music on learning emerged during the 1970s with a study by hurwitz, wolff, bortnick, and kokás (1975), in increasing fluency in l2 writing with singing 273 which they found that children’s literacy skills were enhanced with musical practices. in recent years, a number of other studies have shown that music and singing have positive effects on learning (abbott, 2002; legg, 2009; stansell, 2005). recent evidence from studies examining language learning suggests that music and singing greatly enhance verbatim recall and receptive learning of vocabulary and grammar (alisaari, 2015; coyle & gómez gracia, 2014; dowling, tillmann, & ayers, 2002; legg, 2009; ludke, ferreira, & overy, 2014; medina, 2000; murphey, 1990). previous studies have investigated the effects of singing, melody and rhythm on language learning. a number of studies have reported that melody combined with language helps learners memorize words more efficiently than mere linguistic input (ludke et al., 2014; sammler et al., 2010; thaut, peterson, & mcintosh, 2005; yalch, 1991). furthermore, it has been suggested that along with melody, rhythm enhances word memorization more than traditional ways of presenting language. some studies suggest that rhythm is, in fact, the most essential element in musical presentation for language learning (purnell-webb & speelman, 2008; stahl, kotz, henseler, turner, & geyer, 2011). however, if the musical or rhythmic presentation is too difficult, it may impede learning (racette & peretz, 2007; wallace, 1994). a study by ludke et al. (2014) investigated how singing, rhythmical speech and normal speech affected the learning of a hungarian text; the results indicated that singing is the most efficient method for learning to memorize a text. so far, very few studies have investigated the effects of music on language learning in a classroom setting (sposet, 2008). in the language classroom, the positive effects of singing are not limited to memorizing words or grammar. learners are able to participate in singing from the beginning of their language studies (domoney & harris, 1993). learners at the beginners’ level may sing a song’s chorus at first and gradually broaden their participation (lake, 2002, p. 100). furthermore, singing together provides learners with more opportunities to practice producing the target language. as a result, singing may assist the development of fluency for l2 learners. 1.2. fluency in second language writing in second language acquisition research, fluency is generally defined as the language user’s ability to produce language at normal speed without interruptions (skehan, 2009, p. 510), or as the automatic production of language (segalowitz, 2000). written fluency is generally determined through analyzing the number of words in a written text, the text’s length (see e.g., fathman & whalley, 1990, p. 185; reid, 1990, p. 195), or the amount of time used for writing (chenowith & hayes, 2001, p. 84; skehan, 2009, p. 511). fluency has also been determined as the number of corrections the jenni alisaari, leena maria heikkola 274 learner makes (knoch, 2007), although abdel latif (2012) argues that corrections may not be related to writing fluency. alisaari and heikkola (2014) have also previously shown that between a pretest and a posttest there was no difference in corrections measured as actual words and percentages. due this, in this paper, we measure fluency by examining the number of words produced in a limited time. the language learner’s knowledge of the target language affects fluency. fluency increases when the language learner’s knowledge of grammar and vocabulary grows (chenowith & hayes, 2001, p. 89; williams, 2012, p. 322). the more fluent the writer is, the less conscious attention is needed for producing single words. if spelling requires extensive attention, the writer may not be able to focus on the content of the text while writing (chenowith & hayes, 2001, p. 82). in addition, according to housen et al. (2012), more automatic language processing leads to more fluent production of language. towell (2012, p. 56) also argues that a learner is fluent if his or her knowledge is “available via practiced processes.” the more automatic the recall of a language pattern, the easier and more fluent the production becomes (towell, 2012). recent evidence suggests that input plays an essential role in the development of fluency (see e.g., williams, 2012, p. 322). in this study, we assume that music is important for written fluency because singing stimulates memory, and memory has been shown to play a major role in both the writing process and written fluency (chenowith & hayes, 2001, p. 84; skehan, 2009, p. 511). towell states that “it is through language production that what is learnt becomes proceduralized and stored in memory in way which (a) make it accessible in real-time and (b) give it an economic and stable form” (2012, p. 61). through singing, the language learner can practice using the target language, while the melody of the song helps the learner memorize words and patterns in the language. the aim of this study is to investigate how different teaching methods affect written fluency. we examine whether singing, listening to songs, and reciting song lyrics have different effects on the development of written fluency. our hypothesis is that singing increases written fluency more than other methods, since singing has already been shown in many studies to benefit language learning (see e.g., coyle & gómez garcia, 2014; ludke et al., 2014; schön, boyer, moreno, besson, peretz, & kolinsky, 2008). our second hypothesis is that reciting lyrics increases written fluency more than listening to songs, since rhythm has been shown to be an important factor in language learning (purnell-webb & speelman, 2008). 2. method in this section, we present the participants of the study, the three teaching methods under investigation, and our methods for collecting and analyzing data. increasing fluency in l2 writing with singing 275 2.1. participants two intensive courses in finnish were organized by one finnish university in cooperation with the center for international mobility (cimo). the courses were organized simultaneously and lasted for approximately four weeks. the course participants (n = 67) were preselected for course i or iia by cimo and the local course organizers based on their finnish language proficiency. all 67 participants gave their written consent to participate in the research. the participants in course i had studied finnish for 0.5 to 1 year, and they were mainly at the a1-a2 language proficiency level (council of europe, 2011). the participants in course iia had studied finnish for 1 to 2 years, and they were at the a2-b1 language proficiency level (council of europe, 2011). all the participants were university students between the ages of 18 and 33, mainly from europe and north america. originally, the language proficiency levels were evaluated by the participants’ teachers at their home universities. later, the levels were re-evaluated by the authors. on the first day of the courses, the students took a test given by the course organizers. the test focused on grammatical knowledge and tested mainly passive knowledge of the language. based on the test, the students in each course were divided into three groups, and altogether six different groups were formed, as shown in table 1. the authors of the study had influence neither over this test nor the group division. the division made by the organizers was not ideal for the purpose of the study, but since this was a classroom study, the authors had to settle for these conditions. table 1 the division into groups in course i and course iia made by the organizers course i course iia singing group i n = 11 listening group i n = 10 reciting group i n =12 singing group iia n = 11 listening group iia n = 11 reciting group iia n = 12 in this study, we examined the effect of three different teaching methods on written fluency: singing, listening to songs, and reciting song lyrics. at both course levels, singing was assigned to the weakest group, listening to songs to the middle group, and reciting song lyrics to the strongest group based on the test given by the course organizers, which mostly tested grammatical knowledge. in an ideal research setting, all the groups would have been balanced by their language proficiency. however, the differences in the language proficiency levels between the different groups were not great. since the original language proficiency level estimates were made by many different teachers, the authors re-evaluated the participants’ written language proficiency levels according to the common european framework of refjenni alisaari, leena maria heikkola 276 erence (council of europe, 2011). the evaluations were based on the texts written for the pretest of the study in order to have more consistent assessments. the pretest was not the same as the level test given by the course organizers. the inter-rater reliability was over 95% and the remaining cases were assigned into language proficiency levels through negotiation between the authors. the participants were all at the a1 to b1 level, as shown in table 2. to make the results of the study comparable between groups, only the participants at the a2 level (n = 52) were selected for the study. these students formed the majority of all the participants (77.6%). one of the students from the course i reciting group (student ir1) was left out of the analysis since she wrote only one of the stories on the posttest. altogether, 51 students were included in the analysis. table 2 numbers of course participants in different groups at different language proficiency levels groups level a1 a2 b1 singing group i 7 4 0 listening group i 1 9 0 reciting group i 2 9 1 singing group iia 1 10 0 listening group iia 0 11 0 reciting group iia 0 9 3 total (n = 67) 11 52 4 2.2. teaching methods the finnish language and culture courses included 80 hours of teaching. instruction in the course was based on a functional and communicative approach and included both language and culture classes. instruction was organized as workshops: vocabulary and grammar, reading comprehension, and interaction. in addition, during the course, all the students participated in 7 teaching sessions related to this study. these sessions were spaced evenly throughout the course (see appendix a). the sessions were 15 minutes each, altogether 105 minutes of the total of 80 hours of instruction. they were organized in the following way: singing groups learned finnish by singing, listening groups learned finnish by listening to songs, and reciting groups learned finnish by reciting the lyrics of the songs. the same songs were used in all the groups; the only difference between the groups was the teaching method. the authors taught these research-related sessions only, and they did not participate in the rest of the instruction offered in the course. the rest of the 80 hours of instruction included in the course was taught by three different teachers in each course, altogether six different teachers, who were each responsible for one workshop theme in each course. increasing fluency in l2 writing with singing 277 the songs used in the teaching moments were finnish children's songs (11) and pop songs (7). the information about the 18 songs which were used are included in appendix b. the children’s songs had easier lyrics and melodies, while the pop songs were more challenging. both types of songs included similar vocabulary and grammar, and they were selected to suit the daily themes of the course, including nature, food, literature, and sauna. often the children’s songs were sung, listened to, or recited during two or more sessions. in the singing and reciting groups, some children's songs were combined with play or some gestures and movements (8 out of all the 11 children's songs) since embodiment is considered to enhance learning, as well as understanding and recall of the lyrics (see e.g., coyle & gomez gracia, 2014; lake, 2002, pp. 102-103). all the lyrics were given to the students as illustrated handouts (see an example in appendix c) to facilitate understanding. in addition, the meaning of lyrics was discussed in all the groups. in the singing groups, the authors taught children’s songs to the students in the following manner: one author sang one verse of the song as a model, and then the other author repeated the verse together with the students. the whole song was first learned in this way, and, after this, the song was sung together a cappella or with a recording of the song. often the children’s songs were sung using gestures and movements typical for that song, and they were sung during two or more sessions. recordings of the pop songs were always played, and they were listened to and sung at the same time. often the pop songs were sung only once during the learning sessions. the meanings of all the songs were discussed either before or after singing them. listening groups listened to the same songs as the singing groups. because in these groups the students did not practice singing or reciting songs, there was more time to listen to more songs than in the singing or reciting groups. thus, the amount of input was the same in all the groups. while the songs were played, the participants actively listened to them and paid attention to the lyrics on the handouts. in this group, no gestures or movements were combined with listening. the reciting groups recited the lyrics of the songs rhythmically. the lyrics were introduced to the participants by one of the authors reciting one verse of the lyrics at a time, after which the other author repeated it together with the students. then, the whole song was recited together. a few songs were also recited in pairs expressing different moods. gestures and movements related to the songs were used similarly to the singing groups. as in the other groups, the meanings of the songs were discussed before or after they were recited. the singing groups’ and the reciting groups’ research-related activities differed from each other only in that the singing groups used melody in addition to rhythm. the listening groups differed the most from the other two groups since in this group the students’ role was very passive, while the students in the jenni alisaari, leena maria heikkola 278 other groups were invited to actively participate in producing finnish either by singing or reciting. the research-related songs were sung, recited or listened to only during the research-related sessions instructed by the authors. these sessions were independent from the rest of the course. besides these researchrelated teaching sessions, the courses were the same for all the participants within their course level. 2.3. data collection and analysis the data was collected by a pretest and a posttest in which the students were asked to write stories based on two comic strips focusing on everyday situations. the pretest and posttest were identical. the first comic strip consisted of six pictures depicting a story about two birds, one of which flew out of a cage, and their owner, a young boy, looking for the lost bird. the other comic strip consisted of five pictures depicting a black cat that went to sleep on an armchair on which its owner sat down. these comic strips were designed for language learning and teaching by schubi (1990). the comic strips used for the pretest and posttest were the same. the pretest was carried out on the first day of the course, and the posttest on the last day of the course. on both occasions, the participants had approximately 60 minutes to write the two texts. in this study, written fluency was operationalized as the number of words used in a written text. we used quantitative analysis to examine the number of the words and the changes in them from the pretest to posttest. we carried out a repeated measures anova test and calculated effect sizes for the different groups in order to investigate whether there was an interaction between written fluency—that is, the number of words produced in a limited amount of time— and the different teaching methods. 3. development of written fluency in different groups in this section, we examine 51 course participants at the a2 language proficiency level. first, we look at the development of written fluency in the different groups: the singing groups, the listening groups and the reciting groups. the six groups will be consolidated into three groups based on the teaching method used. for all 51 participants, we examined written fluency by looking at the number of words produced on the pretest and posttest. on average, written fluency increased by 35% (min. -31%, max. 152%, sd = 39%). as shown in figure 1, in all the groups, written fluency increased on average. the numbers of actual words used on the pretest and posttest by individual participants are presented in appendix d. increasing fluency in l2 writing with singing 279 figure 1 percentage fluency gains/losses for the groups taught by different methods written fluency, examined as a number of words, increased the most in the singing group and the least in the listening group. a repeated measures anova test was carried out to find out whether there was an interaction between the development of written fluency and different teaching methods. the interaction between the increase in fluency and the different teaching methods was not statistically significant (f(2, 48) = .729; df = 2; p = .488; eta squared = .027). however, there was a statistically significant difference in the fluency between the pretest and posttest (f(2, 48) = 43.522; df = 2; p < .001; eta squared = .465). we also carried out post hoc tests to do multiple comparisons between the three different groups (singing, listening, and reciting). there was a statistically significant difference between the singing and reciting groups (p = .014; 95%ci = -55%, -5%), and between the listening and reciting groups (p = .013; 95%ci = -51%, -5%). there was no difference between the singing and listening groups (p = .970; 95%ci = -26%, 21%). also, looking at effect sizes, there seemed to be a difference between the singing and reciting groups (cohen’s d = .39). the effect size was near medium, which suggests that the difference between these groups could have been statistically significant with a bigger sample size. the singing n = 14 listening to songs n = 20 reciting lyrics n = 17 teaching method pe rc en ta ge flu en cy ga in /l os s max. 152% min. -20% mean 44% max. 125% min. -31% mean 31% max. 85% min. -1% mean 32% jenni alisaari, leena maria heikkola 280 effect sizes between the singing group and the listening group, and between the listening and the reciting group, however, were quite small, with cohen’s d =.25 and cohen’s d =.15, respectively. moreover, the group numbers were quite small and somewhat unequal, so it is not possible to draw very strong conclusions based on the effect sizes. in the singing group (n = 14), fluency increased on average by 44% (min. 20%, max. 152%, sd = 51%), considerably more than in the other two groups. even though fluency increased in this group on average, fluency decreased for two of the participants’ written stories (by -20 % and by -10% respectively). the reciting group (n = 17) showed the second largest increase in written fluency, on average by 32% (min. -1%, max. 85%, sd = 32.36%). all except one participant increased their written fluency from the pretest to the posttest. participant iir4’s written fluency decreased by 1% between the tests. also, one participant’s (ir8) performance differed strongly from the rest of the group, as can be seen in figure 1. her fluency increased by 85.07%. the increase in written fluency was 29% on average for this group, if this deviant result is left out. however, the difference between the group mean and the mean excluding the deviant result is not great. in the listening group (n = 20), written fluency increased the least, on average by 31% (min. -31%, max. 125%, sd = 25%). in this group, four students’ fluency decreased, by -31%, -26%, -18% and -4%. 4. discussion previous studies have shown that music has a positive effect on language learning (see e.g., coyle & gómez gracia, 2014; legg, 2009; medina, 2000). in addition, rhythm has been found to be important for language learning (purnell-webb & speelman, 2008; stahl et al., 2011), although some studies have also shown that melody can enhance language learning more than rhythm (ludke et al., 2014). in this study, our objective was to study whether singing enhances written fluency more than listening to songs or reciting song lyrics. participants in this study were 51 students enrolled in two intensive finnish courses organized by one finnish university in cooperation with the center of international mobility (cimo). the participants were selected from 67 students in the courses based on their level of language proficiency. the levels varied from a1 to b1, but since more than 75% of the students were at a2, these 51 students were chosen for the study. we examined fluency by counting the number of words in a text and comparing pretest and posttest results, as is typical in second language acquisition research. we hypothesized that written fluency would increase the most in the singing group. we also hypothesized that written fluency would increase more in the reciting group than in the listening group. increasing fluency in l2 writing with singing 281 looking at descriptive statistics, on average, written fluency in the singing group increased by 44%, in the reciting group by 32%, and in the listening group 31%. looking at the changes in the fluency, the singing group enhanced their performance the most. the listening group and the reciting group differed only narrowly in their performance. repeated measures anova and post hoc tests were carried out to investigate the possible relationship between the teaching methods used and written fluency. in all the groups, fluency increased from the pretest to posttest statistically significantly, although there was no statistically significant interaction between fluency and the different teaching methods in the anova. however, the post hoc tests showed that there was a statistically significant difference between the singing and the reciting groups, as well as between the listening and reciting groups. also, looking at effect sizes, there seemed to be a considerable difference between the singing and reciting groups. even though there was a significant difference between the reciting and listening groups, looking at the means, the listening group and the reciting group did not seem to differ; in both groups, the increase in fluency was approximately 30%. this was not in accordance with our hypothesis: we expected the reciting group to perform better than the listening group since rhythm had a greater role in the reciting group. however, the post hoc tests revealed that there was a difference between these groups although it is not clear which teaching method has affected written fluency more. in some studies, rhythm has been shown to be more important for language learning than melody (purnell-webb & speelman, 2008; stahl et al., 2011). in this study, there was also a statistically significant difference between the singing group and the reciting group. the groups’ means seem to suggest that written fluency increased more in the singing group than in the reciting group, 44% and 32% respectively. this would suggest that singing has a stronger effect on written fluency. comparing the singing group and listening group, there was no statistically significant difference between them even though the singing group increased their written fluency on average by a greater percentage, 44% compared to the 31% of the listening group. in the research literature, there is no consensus regarding the roles of rhythm and tone in second language learning; some have shown rhythm to be the most important factor for language learning (see e.g., purnell-webb & speelman, 2008), while others have argued that tone has a greater effect (see e.g., hébert & peretz, 1997; schön et al., 2008). however, some studies have shown that both rhythm and tone may support language learning and memory equally (ludke et al., 2014). in this study, written fluency increased in all the three groups at the group level. however, written fluency decreased in the posttest texts written by a few participants (1-4 people per group). in the singing group, written fluency decreased in jenni alisaari, leena maria heikkola 282 the texts of two participants. this may be explained by the fact that these participants’ pretest stories were long to begin with. in addition, their posttest texts were structurally more complex, and more like narratives than descriptions, which resulted in denser texts. this would suggest a higher level of language proficiency and an increase in textual complexity, which would be an interesting research topic for the future. according to some researchers (larsen-freeman, 2006; skehan, 2009), increases in complexity and accuracy often have a negative effect on fluency. in the listening group, four participants’ written fluency decreased. reasons for this may be similar to those mentioned for the singing group. in addition, these participants’ posttest stories were not as detailed as their pretest stories because they were more like narratives than descriptives. in the reciting group, one participant’s written fluency did not change from the pretest to the posttest. while drawing conclusions, it has to be taken into consideration that in two of the three groups (singing and reciting), gestures and play were used in addition to the tone and/or rhythm. in the listening groups no gestures or play were used. this is another factor besides the factors under investigation, and it may have affected the results of the study. the reason for not using gestures and play in the listening groups was that the participants were adults, and play and using gestures would not have been natural in the listening condition. also, gestures and play were only used in 8 out of 18 songs used in the study, so the greater part of the input during the sessions was without gesture and play. it should also be noted that using the same task in the pretest and posttest, as we have chosen to do in this study, may also enhance fluency (see e.g., larsen-freeman, 2006, p. 595). however, even though the repeated use of the same task may have affected fluency in this study, the task was administered to all the three groups in a similar fashion, so the effects of using the same tasks in the pretest and posttest were the same for all the groups. the study was carried out during two intensive finnish language courses. since the course schedules were very tight, the authors were not able to influence the assignment to the six different groups. the assignments to the three different teaching groups in course i and course iia, six groups all together, were made by the course organizers based on a test measuring grammatical knowledge and passive language knowledge. obviously, this was not ideal. due to the variability of language proficiency levels in the six groups (a1-b1), we decided to focus on the participants at the a2 level. this seems appropriate, since over 75% of the participants were at this level. the proficiency levels were estimated by the two authors based on the written stories produced by the participants on the research-related pretest on the first day of the two courses. in the future, although classroom experiments are valuable and can shed light on language learning in authentic environments, it would be useful to study participant increasing fluency in l2 writing with singing 283 groups in a more controlled manner. this way, sample size, language proficiency, and other factors could be controlled to a larger extent, which would increase the reliability of the study. other researchers have studied the effect of singing on language learning with shorter duration of the instruction period (e.g., ludke et al., 2014). however, in this study we wanted to do an intervention in the classroom in an actual course so that the results could be compared with and applied to actual classroom teaching. this was our attempt to ensure the ecological validity of the study. 5. conclusions according to our results, singing seems to be a good method for second language teaching, at least at the a2 proficiency level. we found statistically significant differences between the singing and reciting groups, as well as between the listening and reciting groups. the effect sizes point to there being a difference especially between the singing and the reciting groups. also, the average increase in written fluency was the highest in the singing group compared to the other two groups. with this study, our aim was to initiate a series of studies on the effects of singing on second language learning. next, we will concentrate on other aspects of second language acquisition besides written fluency, for example pronunciation and spoken fluency, as well as accuracy and complexity both in writing and in speech. in this study, we have shown that there are some differences between the three teaching methods used in the study, and that there is some evidence that singing is the most effective method used in the study. however, further research with a greater number of participants and more controlled language proficiency level is needed in order to draw more exact conclusions on whether singing is a more effective teaching method than listening to songs or reciting song lyrics. acknowledgements we would like to thank the following people for their help in conducting this study and writing this paper: mariia dunaeva, kirsti siitonen, marja vauras, elina kouki, eero laakkonen, and nina reiman. we also thank the anonymous reviewers who provided useful feedback on an earlier version of this article. in addition, we would like to offer our special thanks to the participants and the staff of the summer courses i and iia for participating in this study. jenni alisaari, leena maria heikkola 284 references abbott, m. 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(1991). memory in a jingle jungle: music as a mnemonic device in communicating advertising slogans. journal of applied psychology, 6, 268275. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037//0021-9010.76.2.268 jenni alisaari, leena maria heikkola 288 appendix a the schedule for the research related singing, listening and reciting sessions, and the pretest and posttest. monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday week 1 students arrive in finland level test pretest session 1 session 2 week 2 session 3 session 4 session 5 week 3 session 6 session 7 week 4 posttest students leave increasing fluency in l2 writing with singing 289 appendix b the list of songs used in the study (c = children’s song, mp = movement and play) 1. aamulla herätys (c, mp), trad., finnish lyrics by liisa tenkku 2. bingo (c, mp), trad. 3. leipuri hiiva (c, mp), trad. 4. löylyä lissää by tapio rautavaara, trad., lyrics by reino w. palmroth 5. makkaralaulu (c, mp), trad. 6. matkalaulu (c, mp), music & lyrics by petter ohls 7. matkustaja by egotrippi, music & lyrics by knipi 8. ostakaa makkaraa (c), trad. 9. popsi, popsi porkkanaa (c, mp), music by markku kopisto, lyrics by asta kaukonen & chrisse johansson 10. suosi suomalaista by ultra bra, music by kerkko koskinen, lyrics by pekka lahdenmäki 11. tiitiäisen tuutulaulu (c), music by risto suurla, lyrics by kirsi kunnas 12. tällaisena kesäyönä by scandinavian music group, music by joel melasniemi, lyrics by terhi kokkonen 13. täti monika (c, mp), trad. 14. ukko nooa (c), trad., lyrics by c. m. bellman 15. u-l-o-s by puhuva kone 16. vadelmavene by kasmir, music & lyrics by kasmir, hank solo, jonas w. karlsson, mikko kuoppala 17. vihreän joen rannalla (kauan sitten), by eppu normaali, music by pantse syrjä, lyrics by martti syrjä 18. ville ja valle (c, mp), music by eero koivistoinen, lyrics by kirsi kunnas jenni alisaari, leena maria heikkola 290 appendix c ville ja valle ville ja valle mökissänsä, elivät olivat yksinänsä. ovi oli lukossa, ja ikkunat oli tukossa ja piipun päällä oli hattu. ville oli ville ja valle oli valle, senhän voi kuuluttaa kaikkialle! ville piti rahasta ja valle piti mahasta, varsinkin kun se oli täysi. lyrics: kirsi kunnas music: eero koivistoinen pictures: papunet http://papunet.net/kuvatyokalu/fi piippu mökki ovi ikkuna hattu raha maha increasing fluency in l2 writing with singing 291 appendix d the numbers of actual words on the pretest and posttest for individual participants and their gains/losses in numbers of words and percentages from the pretest to the posttest participant code number of words gain/loss from pretest to posttest pretest posttest number of words percentage is2 91 175 84 92.31 % is3 80 87 7 8.75 % is6 78 101 23 29.49 % is10 100 127 27 27.00 % iis1 77 194 117 151.95 % iis2 89 111 22 24.72 % iis3 159 128 -31 -19.50 % iis4 52 106 54 103.85 % iis7 48 104 56 116.67 % iis9 69 88 19 27.54 % iis10 109 138 29 26.61 % iis11 116 105 -11 -9.48 % il1 103 104 1 0.97 % il2 106 121 15 14.15 % il3 115 85 -30 -26.09 % il4 52 117 65 125.00 % il6 94 146 52 55.32 % il7 87 130 43 49.43 % il8 79 96 17 21.52 % il9 84 88 4 4.76 % il10 89 154 65 73.03 % iil1 89 155 66 74.16 % iil2 69 121 52 75.36 % iil3 115 94 -21 -18.26 % iil4 150 144 -6 -4.00 % iil5 74 129 55 74.32 % iil6 133 92 -41 -30.83 % iil7 85 115 30 35.29 % iil8 74 88 14 18.92 % iil10 90 122 32 35.56 % iil11 159 192 33 20.75 % iil12 87 110 23 26.44 % ir2 118 191 73 61.86 % ir4 118 145 27 22.88 % ir7 174 300 126 72.41 % ir8 67 124 57 85.07 % ir9 157 182 25 15.92 % ir10 109 126 17 15.60 % ir11 107 137 30 28.04 % ir12 88 106 18 20.45 % iir1 105 106 1 0.95 % iir2 150 153 3 2.00 % iir3 85 110 25 29.41 % iir4 137 136 -1 -0.73 % jenni alisaari, leena maria heikkola 292 iir5 113 132 19 16.81 % iir7 72 103 31 43.06 % iir8 140 193 53 37.86 % iir11 93 148 55 59.14 % iir12 78 103 25 32.05 % note. i = course i; ii = course iia; s = singing teaching method; l = listening teaching method; r = reciting teaching method; the final number = individual participants within the six groups. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: chengchen li (huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan, china) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) editor: joanna zawodniak (university of zielona góra, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (silesian university of technology, gliwice, poland) vol. 11 no. 2 june 2021 editorial board: ali al-hoorie (royal commission for jubail and yanbu, jubail, saudi arabia) larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) maria dakowska (university of warsaw, poland) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) tammy gregersen (american university of sharjah, united arab emirates) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2021 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: jakub bielak mariusz kruk chengchen li aleksandra wach joanna zawodniak © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: jakub bielak, melanie ellis, mariusz kruk, chengchen li, aleksandra wach, joanna zawodniak cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 61 829 64 20 fax +48 61 829 64 21 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · social sciences citation index (wos core collection) · journal citation reports social sciences (wos) · scopus · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) · current contents – social and behavioral sciences (wos) · essential science indicators (wos) studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 11, number 2, june 2021 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ....................................................................179 editorial ..........................................................................................183 articles: carmen muñoz, teresa cadierno – how do differences in exposure affect english language learning? a comparison of teenagers in two learning environments ........................................................................................... 185 hyang-il kim – the underlying factors of foreign language reading anxiety: their effects on strategy use and orientation toward reading ...... 213 xuan van ha, jill c. murray, a. mehdi riazi – high school efl students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback: the role of gender, motivation and extraversion .............................................................................. 235 xiaozhou (emily) zhou, steve mann – translanguaging in a chinese university clil classroom: teacher strategies and student attitudes ................265 book reviews: ella alhudithi – review of understanding formulaic language: a second language acquisition perspective edited by anna siyanova-chanturia and ana pellicer-sánchez ....................................................................... 291 jakub bielak – review of situating language learning strategy use: present issues and future trends edited by zoe gavriilidou and lydia mitits ......297 katarzyna papaja – review of teacher development for immersion and content-based instruction edited by laurent cammarata and t. j. ó ceallaigh .......................................................................................... 305 notes to contributors ......................................................................311 179 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors ella alhudithi is a doctoral student and graduate teaching assistant in the department of english at iowa state university, ames, usa. her research interests lie in the areas of lexicology, academic written discourse, corpus linguistics, and pedagogy. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4983-0286 contact details: iowa state university, department of english, ames, ia 50011, usa (ella@iastate.edu) jakub bielak is assistant professor in the department of english studies, adam mickiewicz university, poznań/kalisz, poland. he has done research into applied cognitive linguistics, form-focused instruction and individual differences in language learning, including learning strategies, motivation and learner emotions. he has authored and co-authored one book and a number of articles in journals and chapters in edited volumes, and co-edited three edited books. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5338-4202 contact details: uniwersytet im. adama mickiewicza w poznaniu, wydział pedagogicznoartystyczny w kaliszu, ul. nowy świat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (kubabogu@amu.edu.pl) teresa cadierno is professor of second language acquisition at the university of southern denmark. her research interests include instructed second language acquisition and the investigation of l2 acquisition from cognitive/usage-based perspectives. her recent publications include the co-editing of usage-based perspectives on second language learning (2016, mouton de gruyter) and lingüística cognitiva y español le/l2 (2019, routledge). her research has been financed by funding bodies such as the velux foundation, the danish research council for independent research and the marie curie multi-partner itn program. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8305-1027 contact details: university of southern denmark, campusvej 55, 5230 odense m., denmark (cadierno@sdu.dk) 180 xuan van ha is a doctoral candidate in applied linguistics at the department of linguistics, macquarie university, australia. he has been a lecturer in language education at ha tinh university, vietnam. his main research interests include corrective feedback, language teacher education, and teacher professional development. his current project investigates the impact of in-service training on teachers’ beliefs and practices regarding oral corrective feedback. his recent works have been published in system and language teaching research. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7538-0659 contact details: department of linguistics, macquarie university, building 12 second way, north ryde, nsw 2109, australia (xuan.ha@mq.edu.au) hyang-il kim is assistant professor at smith college, sahmyook university, korea. her research interests include individual differences, such as motivational and emotional variables in second language learning. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4340-0173 contact details: smith college, sahmyook university, 815, hwarang-ro, nowongu, seoul, 01795, the republic of korea (hyangil@syu.ac.kr) steve mann, associate professor, currently works at the centre for applied linguistics at the university of warwick, uk. he previously lectured at both aston university and the university of birmingham. he has experience in hong kong, japan and europe in both english language teaching and teacher development. steve supervises a research group of phd students who are investigating teachers’ education and development. the group’s work considers aspects of teacher development, teacher beliefs and the development of knowledge, the first year of teaching, reflective practice, mentoring, blended learning, and the use of technology in teacher development. he has published various books including innovations in pre-service teacher education (2013, british council). his most recent books are the research interview: reflexivity and reflective practice in research processes (2016, palgrave) and reflective practice in english language teaching: research-based principles and practices (2017, routledge). he also is co-editor of the routledge handbook of english language teacher education (2019, routledge). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6347-1614 contact details: centre for applied linguistics, university of warwick, coventry, cv4 7al, uk (steve.mann@warwick.ac.uk) carmen muñoz is professor of applied linguistics at the university of barcelona. her research interests include instructed foreign language acquisition, age and 181 individual differences in second language learning, young learners, and multimodal input. her recent publications include “a new look at age: young and old l2 learners” in the cambridge handbook of language learning (2019, cambridge university press), and “examining adolescent efl learners’ tv viewing comprehension,” with geòrgia pujadas, in studies in second language acquisition (2020). she was granted the eurosla distinguished scholar award in 2017. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7001-4155 contact details: universitat de barcelona, dept. of modern languages and literatures and english studies, gran via de les corts catalanes 585, 08007 barcelona, spain (munoz@ub.edu) jill c. murray is an honorary lecturer in the department of linguistics at macquarie university, australia, where she taught applied linguistics and undertook and supervised research from 2002-2020. she has published in the areas of language assessment, pragmatics, second language writing and teacher professional development. her ongoing research interests include second language pragmatics (specifically in the area of heritage language maintenance), teacher development and context sensitive language teaching methodology. her recent works have appeared in system, language teaching research, tesl-ej and intercultural pragmatics. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8970-2241 contact details: department of linguistics, macquarie university, building 12 second way, north ryde, nsw 2109, australia (jill.murray@mq.edu.au) katarzyna papaja received her phd degree in applied linguistics and works as assistant professor at the institute of linguistics, university of silesia, poland. she is former deputy dean for philology and business linguistics at the european tischner university in kraków. she specializes in methods of teaching english as a foreign language and bilingual education. she has published widely on bilingual education methodologies (mainly content and language integrated learning [clil]). she was part of the team which conducted groundwork leading to the publication of profile report – bilingual education (english) in poland. she was also awarded scholarships and was thus able to gain teaching experience in countries such as great britain, the usa, germany and switzerland. she has also organized a number of international conferences and teacher trainings in clil and clilig. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2808-443x contact details: institute of linguistics, faculty of humanities, university of silesia, grota-roweckiego 5, 41-205 sosnowiec, poland (katarzyna.papaja@us.edu.pl) 182 mehdi riazi is professor in the college of humanities and social sciences (chss) of hamad bin khalifa university (hbku) in qatar. he was previously a professor in the department of linguistics of macquarie university and currently holds an honorary professor title with macquarie university. his research interests include second language writing (its learning, teaching, and assessment), english for academic purposes (eap), test validation (especially the argument-based approach), research methods (especially mixed methods research), and issues related to (language) teaching and learning. he is the author of the routledge encyclopedia of research methods (2016, routledge) and mixed methods research in language teaching and learning (2017, equinox). his most recent coauthored papers were published in the journal of english for academic purposes, and australian review of applied linguistics. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7648-8116 contact details: college of humanities and social sciences, hamad bin khalifa university, doha, qatar (ariazi@hbku.edu.qa) xiaozhou (emily) zhou, associate professor at the school of english studies, shanghai international studies university, china. she received her msc degree from university of oxford and phd degree from university of warwick. her main research areas include classroom discourse, translanguaging, and teacher development. she has published in tesol quarterly, english today, and círculo de lingüística aplicada a la comunicación. she is the author of the monograph behind classroom codeswitching: culture, curriculum and identity in a chinese university english department (2012, lambert academic publishing). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0435-5784 contact details: 550 west dalian road, hongkou district, shanghai 200083, china (xzhou@shisu.edu.cn) 423 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (3). 2016. 423-454 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.3.4 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl unconscious motivation. part i: implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers ali h. al-hoorie the english language institute, jubail industrial college, saudi arabia hoorie_a@jic.edu.sa abstract this paper reports the first investigation in the second language acquisition field assessing learners’ implicit attitudes using the implicit association test, a computerized reaction-time measure. examination of the explicit and implicit attitudes of arab learners of english (n = 365) showed that, particularly for males, implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers are associated with self-reported openness to the l2 group and with strength of correlations among attitudinal and motivational variables. implicit attitudes also moderated important paths in the l2 motivational self system. the paper concludes that implicit attitudes seem to be a meaningful individual difference variable, adding a new dimension to our understanding of language motivation. keywords: implicit attitudes; implicit association test; motivation; ideal l2 self; explicit–implicit correspondence we may—no matter how deeply we explore— discover that this simple, conscious report is the whole truth. it can be taken at its face value. gordon allport (1953, p. 114) ali h. al-hoorie 424 1. introduction for many readers, the claim that there are implicit, or unconscious, influences on human motivation would seem commonsense. indeed, implicit processes constitute an important aspect of investigation in some second language (l2) subdisciplines such as learning, teaching, and testing (e.g., ellis et al., 2009; rebuschat, 2015; trofimovich & mcdonough, 2011). curiously, however, language learner psychology in general—and l2 motivation in particular—has paid little systematic attention to such implicit processes to date. major language motivation theories have instead focused primarily on explicit constructs (e.g., integrative motivation, intrinsic motivation, the ideal l2 self), thus portraying the learner as a rational agent who first weighs the pros and cons of a certain activity and then decides whether to engage in it based on that explicit forethought. as an illustration, dörnyei (2005, p. 107) states that “the ideal and oughtto l2 selves are by definition involved in pre-actional deliberation [emphasis added].” even more explicitly, lanvers (2016) claims that “many students calculate the benefits of languages as a formula” and then “this calculation might lead students to consider language learning as worthwhile, or not” (p. 87). to date, l2 motivation theory has not seriously considered the possibility of a parallel unconscious motivation influencing language learning. therefore, conscious motivation is, in effect, treated as if it is the “whole truth,” just as allport claimed over half a century ago. the consequences of a conscious-only view of motivation are not limited to theoretical conceptualizations only but also extend to the types of data that researchers would collect to further advance these conceptualizations. language motivation research today still relies predominantly on self-report measures, such as questionnaires and interviews (ushioda, 2013). just as they have justified a conscious-only view of motivation by resorting to pre-actional deliberation and formulaic calculation, some motivation researchers have also tried to justify their reliance on self-report measures. for instance, some have argued that “language learners’ self-reports might contain sufficient clues” and so “to get to the bottom of this . . . all we need to do is ask the right questions!” (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, pp. 98-99). this state of affairs was foreseen decades ago by david mcclelland, a major proponent of unconscious motives, when he stated, “and the hope still persists that asking a person just the right questions will yield a measure of implicit motives” (mcclelland, koestner, & weinberger, 1989, p. 691). recent interest in dynamic systems theory (dörnyei, macintyre, & henry, 2015) has led researchers to draw from some innovative measurement instruments. nevertheless, the learner’s conscious perspective is typically still at the heart of these instruments. in the idiodynamic method, for example, it is not unconscious motivation. part i: implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers 425 clear how the researcher can make sense of the data without recourse to the “respondent’s interpretation” (macintyre, 2012, p. 363) of these idiodynamic ratings at the end of the day. due to the lack of a systematic alternative, it is left up to “the skill of the researcher in carefully probing participants’ perceptions [emphasis added] during the stimulated recall interview” (ushioda, 2015, p. 50), and thus we are limited to what the participant might “rationalise retrospectively” (ushioda, 2013, p. 236). in the spirit of ushioda’s (2013) call for multimethod investigations, this paper examines the potential of using an implicit test to tap into the unconscious side of the individual’s attitudinal/motivational disposition. it starts by reviewing evidence for implicit attitudes and motives in mainstream psychology in order to gain some insights for our field. it then presents data supporting the relevance of implicit attitudes to language motivation. 2. the unconscious in motivational psychology contemporary motivational psychology has started to reconsider some of the fundamentals of the cognitive revolution (for reviews, see e.g., al-hoorie, 2015; bargh, gollwitzer, & oettingen, 2010). more specifically, there has been a resurgence in the interest in attitudes and motivation that operate outside conscious awareness. human motivation and behavioral engagement are no longer seen as the sole product of conscious premeditation by a rational agent. one line of inquiry providing evidence for this view is research on implicit attitudes. implicit attitudes are defined as “introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects” (greenwald & banaji, 1995, p. 8). we live in a complex world, in which survival requires efficient navigation, and therefore humans have evolved the ability to simplify the overwhelming amount of information they encounter everyday. this simplification process is so efficient that it allows us to make evaluative judgments “without having to think about it much, sometimes without really thinking at all” (nosek & banaji, 2009, p. 84). conscious, deliberative processing is more resource-intensive of our cognitive capacity, and therefore it is typically reserved for unfamiliar situations. in familiar situations, it is more efficient to leave things on autopilot (for more on this functional analysis, see macrae, milne, & bodenhausen, 1994; macrae, stangor, & milne, 1994). unfortunately, this efficiency can come at the expense of behaviors that are not endorsed by our conscious evaluation. for example, having a more favorable implicit attitude toward one group can prejudice our perception and beali h. al-hoorie 426 havior against another group. in one study, green et al. (2007) compared the explicit and implicit racial attitudes of medical doctors with their medical recommendations. at the explicit level, all doctors expressed equal preference for black and white patients, as expected. at the implicit level, however, the more they favored white patients, the more they also offered them better medical recommendations. thus, their behavior was in line with their implicit—not explicit—attitudes. other research on implicit attitudes has generated similar results in a variety of areas, such as successfully predicting how far away from an obese woman one would choose to sit (bessenoff & sherman, 2000) and how friendly one behaves toward a white versus black female confederate (mcconnell & leibold, 2001). these findings might reflect attitudes that participants are unwilling to express, or attitudes they themselves are unaware of. the latter might be inferred from the recurring observation that many participants first report (conscious) egalitarian attitudes in questionnaires and then express considerable surprise and disbelief at the empirical evidence showing their biases. indeed, “when it comes to socially sensitive issues or personality characteristics, implicit measures may reveal attitudes or traits that people are reluctant to admit even to themselves” (ajzen, 2005, p. 18). a second research tradition demonstrating the importance of unconscious influences has investigated implicit motives. unlike implicit attitudes, implicit motives have typically been limited to a few, biologically-constrained needs such as achievement, affiliation, and power (schultheiss & brunstein, 2010). these implicit motives are unconscious affective predispositions acquired from experiences very early in life (mcclelland, 1987). explicit and implicit motives are related to two different types of motivated behavior. more specifically, explicit motives stem from external social incentives, and so they predict immediate responses to specific tasks, while implicit motives stem from the pleasure of the activity itself and so they predict long-term engagement (e.g., mcclelland et al., 1989). because implicit motives are concerned with long-term engagement, their impact extends even to the physiological system, as individual differences in implicit motives are associated with different health conditions, such as type i diabetes and infectious diseases (mcclelland, 1989). research shows that explicit and implicit motives generally do not correlate with each other (e.g., schultheiss, yankova, dirlikov, & schad, 2009). however, for some individuals, explicit and implicit motives do display a positive correlation and these individuals consequently experience “personality coherence,” which takes place when one embraces his/her “true self” and its “deeply rooted affective proclivities” (thrash & elliot, 2002, p. 746). this explicit–implicit congruence predicts positive outcomes related to flow, volitional strength, identity, and well-being (e.g., thrash, maruskin, & martin, 2012). in contrast, a lack of unconscious motivation. part i: implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers 427 correlation between explicit and implicit motives is associated with fragmentation due to adopting social norms not compatible with one’s preexisting implicit values. this explicit–implicit incongruence is undesirable because success in long-term pursuits requires both (explicit) proactive organization of goals, as well as (implicit) spontaneous inclination to keep pursuing these goals (thrash, cassidy, & maruskin, 2010). thus, the emerging evidence from psychological research casts serious doubt on the view that humans are rational agents who always weigh the advantages and disadvantages of a course of action consciously and systematically before engaging in it. conscious motivation does play a role, but without considering the role of unconscious influences also, a substantial proportion of human motivation may go unaccounted for. 3. insights for language motivation it is possible for the language motivation field to gain insights from the above literature. one of the most central concepts in l2 motivation theory is the notion that positive attitudes toward l2 speakers play an important facilitative role in l2 learning success. first introduced by gardner and lambert (1959), the claim that learning an l2 is unlike other school subjects—because of the social baggage it entails— has enjoyed continuing popularity throughout the decades. in more recent developments, l2 motivation has been construed cognitively in terms of future selfguides (e.g., dörnyei, 2009; dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014), and because l2 speakers are the closest parallel to a desired future self-guide, the new self interpretation is “fully compatible” with traditional emphasis on attitudes toward l2 speakers (dörnyei, 2009, p. 28). however, research on learners’ attitudes toward l2 speakers has generally focused on explicit attitudes, as evident from the reliance on selfreport questionnaires and interviews. it is plausible that another, implicit dimension also plays a role in language motivation. the present study therefore investigated this possibility by adopting implicit attitudes as a broad framework, and by drawing from some aspects from the implicit motives tradition. in addition, the role of implicit attitudes might be gender-specific. research has shown that females tend to show more implicit positivity toward language and arts (vs. math and science) than do males (nosek, banaji, & greenwald, 2002). this effect has also been observed in schoolchildren as young as 6 years of age (cvencek, meltzoff, & greenwald, 2011). these findings mirror results from the l2 motivation field, where a “recurring source of systematic variation” (you, dörnyei, & csizér, 2016, p. 100) is that females exhibit more positive attitudes toward language learning. this study therefore examined the relationship between gender ali h. al-hoorie 428 and implicit attitudes. more detailed discussion of the insights that this study gained from the above literature is discussed next. 3.1. openness to the l2 group since l2 motivation is associated with openness to the l2 group (dörnyei, 2009), this study investigated whether learners with positive implicit attitudes would exhibit more openness. openness might be indicated directly by more favorable attitudes toward the l2 group, or indirectly by lower l1 group affiliation such as ethnocentrism and fear of assimilation (see freynet & clément, 2015). especially in europe, another indication of l1 group affiliation is religiosity, which is commonly viewed as a hindrance to openness to other groups (e.g., foner & alba, 2008). since the participants of this study are l1 arabic learners of english in the uk (see section 5.1), and since islam is inseparable from one’s l1 identity for many arabs, this study also investigated the association between religiosity and implicit attitudes toward the l2 group. religiosity has not been investigated systematically in the context of language learning previously (for an exception, see wong, kristjansson, & dörnyei, 2013). furthermore, rather than simply comparing learners with positive versus negative attitudes, this study examined the congruence between explicit and implicit attitudes. drawing from the literature on explicit–implicit congruence, one might think of attitudes as varying along two dimensions. an individual’s attitude toward a certain social object might be congruently favorable (or unfavorable) at the explicit and implicit levels, or it may be incongruently favorable on one dimension but not the other, as shown in table 1. table 1 the four types resulting from the two-dimensional conceptualization of attitudes type attitudes comment explicit implicit 1 positive positive most favorable scenario 2 negative negative least favorable scenario 3 negative positive norm of mediocrity? 4 positive negative resilient motivation? note. although attitude falls along continua, this categorical classification (positive vs. negative) is intended for illustrative purposes. type 1 in table 1 is the ideal scenario, while type 2 is the least preferable one. type 3 would be unusual, and might be a reflection of the norm of mediocrity (see dörnyei & ushioda, 2011; taylor, 2013). the norm of mediocrity refers to the situation where some learners deliberately show mediocre motivation and achievement in order to avoid being penalized by their peers. type 4 unconscious motivation. part i: implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers 429 can arguably be seen as the most interesting scenario for the present purposes because it parallels type 1 in terms of explicit attitudes. individuals in both types express positive attitudes explicitly, but they differ in their implicit attitudes. comparison of these two types could shed important light on the role of implicit attitudes. for this reason, the first research focused on types 1 and 4 by first selecting learners who expressed positive attitudes at the explicit level, and then dividing them into those with congruently positive and incongruently negative attitudes at the implicit level. still, because this type of classification might seem artificial, cluster analysis was also conducted.1 as detailed below, the results of the two approaches led to very similar results. the first research question could be summarized as follows: rq 1: compared with incongruent learners, do congruent learners exhibit more openness to the l2 group? 3.2. personality coherence based on the personality coherence literature, the explicit–implicit conflict is uncomfortable and therefore individuals with incongruent attitudes (i.e., types 3 & 4) may tend to adopt explicit attitudes that are aligned with their implicit attitudes. this is certainly good news for individuals whose implicit attitudes are positive. however, when implicit attitudes are negative (e.g., against another group), research shows that these negative implicit attitudes can be counteracted by factors such as high explicit motivation. for example, devine et al. (2002) have shown that when participants had implicit biases against an outgroup but also had internalized motivations to control these biases, they were able to control their prejudice better than participants with similar biases but without the motivation (see also glaser & knowles, 2008, for similar results). when it comes to language learning, it is therefore plausible that the effect of negative implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers may not be the same across the board: while some learners might submit to these attitudes (by adopting explicit attitudes that are also negative), others may have sufficiently high motivation to actively counteract them (and adopt positive explicit attitudes instead). the latter can happen when the learner recognizes the value of the language in degree attainment or career advancement. from this perspective, then, learners with negative implicit attitudes range from those adopting their negative attitudes explicitly (for the sake of psychological comfort) to those counteracting them (for the sake of the pragmatic value of the language). in contrast, those with already positive attitudes implicitly would have little reason to adopt negative attitudes explicitly. 1 i thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion. ali h. al-hoorie 430 thus, the personality coherence literature suggests that individuals with positive versus negative implicit attitudes may be two distinct groups. if this is the case, then treating them as a single group can be misleading. in the context of correlational analysis, for example, pooling heterogeneous groups and then calculating correlation coefficients has been described by some statisticians as nonsensical (hassler & thadewald, 2003). because correlational analysis is by far one of the most common statistical procedures in language research (plonsky, 2013), it would be interesting to find out whether taking implicit attitudes into account changes the resulting correlations. this study therefore compared the correlations among attitudinal and motivational variables within each of these two groups. the second research question can be formulated as follows: rq 2: do learners with positive versus negative implicit attitudes exhibit equivalent correlations among attitudinal and motivational scales? 3.3. the moderating effect of implicit attitudes although finding novel results is interesting in itself, it is also important to consider how they relate to existing theory. one particularly popular theory of l2 motivation at present is the l2 motivational self system (l2 mss; dörnyei, 2005, 2009). in this model, which is schematically represented in figure 1, attitudes toward l2 speakers predict the strength of the individual’s ideal l2 self, which in turn predicts both the criterion measures and attitudes toward learning the language. the current study focuses on arrows a and b in figure 1 (arrow c is relatively weak; see for example taguchi, magid, & papi, 2009; you et al., 2016; for a discussion, see islam, lamb, & chambers, 2013, p. 239). the analysis explored whether implicit attitudes moderate either of these two paths. because this was the first attempt to integrate implicit attitudes with the l2 mss, no prior expectations were made about the direction of the effects. the relevant research question can be stated as follows: rq 3: do implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers moderate the relationship between explicit attitudes toward l2 speakers and the ideal l2 self, and between the ideal l2 self and attitudes toward learning english? unconscious motivation. part i: implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers 431 figure 1 schematic representation of the l2 motivational self system (adapted from taguchi et al., 2009) 4. the implicit association test an important question now is how to investigate implicit attitudes. if the individual is unaware of these influences, then explicit self-report (via a questionnaire or an interview) would be of limited utility: any adequate measure would have to tap into these influences indirectly. at present, the most widely used measure of implicit attitudes is the implicit association test (iat; greenwald, mcghee, & schwartz, 1998). the iat is a computerized reaction-time measure that simply requires classifying a series of words to the right or left as fast as possible. as an illustration of how this test works, figure 2 gives an example of the flower–insect iat. this test measures how strongly the participant associates flowers and insects with good and bad. in the first part of the test (figure 2a), a stimulus appears in the middle of the screen (e.g., roses) and the participant has to decide which box this stimulus belongs to by pressing one of two designated buttons on the keyboard. the correct answer in figure 2a is the left box. afterward, another stimulus appears and, again, the participant has to decide which of the four categories the stimulus belongs to in order to classify it to the correct box. the stimuli may belong to flowers (e.g., roses, orchids, tulips), insects (e.g., cockroaches, mosquitoes, wasps), good (e.g., smart, friendly, clean), or to bad (e.g., dumb, enemy, dirty). note that this is not an attitude test per se. the stimuli are shown to the participant in advance with their correct categorization, and so the participant’s attitudes to english-speaking people ideal l2 self attitudes to learning english ought-to l2 self criterion measures a b c ali h. al-hoorie 432 task is not to guess (or express their attitude about) the correct response, but to simply perform the test as fast as possible. most participants therefore find the configuration in figure 2a very easy to perform and breeze through it. in the second part of the test (figure 2b), flower is paired with bad while insect with good. this part suddenly feels considerably harder. this is because, in the first part, flower and good form one higher category (e.g., pleasant things), and insect and bad form another category (e.g., unpleasant things). therefore, the participant in effect classifies the stimuli into only two—rather than four—categories (i.e., simply move all pleasant things to the left and unpleasant things to the right). in the second part, however, the participant has to sort the stimuli into the four categories (neither of the two pairs readily merges into one intuitive category), and so the task requires substantially more cognitive resources, resulting in slower performance. this is why it is called the implicit association test: it is implicit because participants find it hard to anticipate which configuration would be more difficult and are usually surprised by their own results; it is an association test because it measures the strength of the association of the categories in each pair; and it is a test because it measures the participant’s performance speed. to the extent that categories of interest are paired with evaluative adjectives (e.g., good, bad), implicit attitudes are inferred from the response speeds in the two parts of the test.2 a. b. figure 2 an illustration of the flower—insect iat the iat is flexible and can be easily adapted to measure implicit associations about various social objects, such as racial prejudice (e.g., white–good, black–bad) and gender stereotypes (e.g., male–work, female–home). the popularity of the iat has generated a sizable amount of literature utilizing it in various domains, thus 2 readers who find this description too abstract are encouraged to try out a demonstration of the iat first-hand at www.implicit.harvard.edu. unconscious motivation. part i: implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers 433 permitting scrutiny of its reliability and validity. the reliability of the iat is considered the highest among all implicit measures of attitudes available, with internal consistency and split-half reliabilities amounting to r = .79 across 50 studies in a meta-analysis by hofmann, gawronski, gschwendner, le, and schmitt (2005). as for the validity of the iat, there is still continuing debate concerning what exactly the iat is actually measuring. critics of the iat question the implicit attitudes construct. in the context of racial prejudice, for example, they argue that the iat measures shared cultural stereotypes rather than personal animus (e.g., arkes & tetlock, 2004). similarly, oswald, mitchell, blanton, jaccard, and tetlock (2013) question the iat on the basis of overall poor prediction of relevant criterion measures. however, in their meta-analysis, both explicit and implicit measures performed almost as poorly. additionally, this meta-analysis was criticized for including correlations that have no theoretical basis (greenwald, banaji, & nosek, 2015). proponents of the iat, in contrast, argue that the validity of the iat is a “scientific certainty” (rudman, 2008), drawing from findings in various domains including consumer references, political preferences, personality traits, sexual orientations, and close relationships (see greenwald, poehlman, uhlmann, & banaji, 2009). proponents also cite the iat’s known-groups validity. that is, research shows that the iat is capable of correctly distinguishing among members of different groups in accordance with our a priori knowledge of them, such as reliably determining the participant’s gender, nationality, and even affiliation to a group artificially created in the laboratory (for a review, see lane, banaji, nosek, & greenwald, 2007). the present study constitutes the first contribution of the l2 field to the debate over the validity of the iat. 5. method 5.1. participants a total of 365 arabic l1 speakers qualified for the final analysis. data were collected from eight more participants who were excluded for having more than 10% latencies faster than 300 ms in the implicit test, which is indicative of random responding. three more participants were excluded because their l1 was kurdish and not arabic, though they passed as native speakers of arabic. the sample was restricted to arabs because the scales related to l1 group affiliation (see section 5.2.2.) were worded to specifically address arab identity and arabic as l1. the qualifying participants (male = 257, female = 108) were studying english at various british universities and language institutes when they volunteered to take part in the study. they came from various arab countries, including saudi arabia (33.2%), libya (29.3%), and iraq (22.5%), and had lived in an english-speaking country for ali h. al-hoorie 434 a minimum of half a month and a maximum of 96 months (m = 22.43, sd = 20.3). different age groups were also represented in the sample (11% 17–20 years old, 25.5% 20–25, 23.3% 26–30, 16.4% 31–35, 14.8% 36–40, 7.9% older), with four participants having missing age data. as detailed below, length of residence and age were statistically controlled for (and this had no effect on the results). 5.2. materials 5.2.1. implicit test the iat was adapted to measure attitudes toward english speakers. as shown in table 2, in each of the seven parts (called blocks), a left or right button on the keyboard was to be pressed in order to rapidly categorize a series of stimuli appearing in the center of a computer screen. in the first two blocks, the participants practiced categorizing words as to whether they were pleasant or unpleasant (conventionally called attributes), and then whether they were related to arabic or english (categories). then the actual test started. in the first condition, blocks 3 and 4, arabic was paired with pleasant while english with unpleasant, as shown in figure 3. in the other condition, blocks 6 and 7, the categories were switched so that english was now paired with pleasant, and arabic with unpleasant. the participants also practiced the reversed attributes alone in block 5. before each block, the participants read instructions and were reminded to perform as fast as possible. the whole implicit test took around five minutes to complete. the stimuli used appear in appendix a. table 2 overview of the implicit association test block trials function response key assignment left button (e) right button (i) 1 20 practice pleasant unpleasant 2 20 practice arabic english 3 20 test 1 pleasant or arabic unpleasant or english 4 40 test 2 pleasant or arabic unpleasant or english 5 20 practice unpleasant pleasant 6 20 test 1 unpleasant or arabic pleasant or english 7 40 test 2 unpleasant or arabic pleasant or english unconscious motivation. part i: implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers 435 figure 3 a trial of the iat. the correct answer here would be the left button (e) because the stimulus honest belongs to pleasant. in the actual test, pleasant, unpleasant, and their stimuli appeared in green font, while arabic, english, and their stimuli appeared in white. the order of the combined tasks was not counterbalanced because counterbalancing can artificially suppress explicit–implicit correlations (banse, seise, & zerbes, 2001; gawronski, 2002) and sometimes artificially inflates them (hofmann et al., 2005). when an incorrect response was given, a red x appeared and the participant had to correct the error, by pressing the other button, before proceeding to the next trial. the stimuli in the test blocks were alternatively drawn from the arabic and english categories (odd-numbered trials) and from the pleasant and unpleasant attributes (even-numbered trials). each stimulus was selected randomly and without replacement, and therefore all stimuli were used once before any were reused. split-half analysis based on even-versus-odd trials showed that the iat had very good reliability (spearman-brown’s ρ = .83). all participants were taking the iat for the first time. the software used was inquisit 4 (2014). the iat scores were coded so that a positive score reflected implicit preference for the l2 group, and a negative score reflected implicit preference for the l1 group. the iat is a relative measure, in that a positive score indicates preference for the l2 group but does not necessarily imply negative attitudes toward the l1 group (i.e., only more positive attitudes toward the l2 group). for this reason, instead of using the conventional terminology that describes learners as having positive versus negative attitudes toward the l2 group, they are labelled here simply as having implicit preference for the l2 group versus the l1 group, respectively. 5.2.2. explicit measures the participants also completed nine self-reported attitudinal and motivational scales that seemed particularly relevant when drawing comparisons between explicit and implicit dispositions: ali h. al-hoorie 436 1. attitudes toward english-speaking people (3 items, cronbach’s α = .85). example item: “i wish i could have many more english friends.” 2. attitudes toward learning english (4 items, α = .74). example item: “learning english is very interesting.” 3. the ideal l2 self (4 items, α = .78). example item: “i can imagine myself mastering english one day.” 4. the ought-to l2 self (3 items, α = .65). example item: “i must study english because it will earn me respect in the society.” a higher score in each of these four scales, adapted from taguchi et al. (2009), indicated more positive attitudes. three other scales measured the strength of affiliation to one’s own group and the desire to preserve and spread its values: 5. fear of assimilation (5 items, α = .78), adapted from taguchi et al. (2009). example item: “i think that the interest in the west has a negative influence on the arab culture.” 6. ethnocentrism (5 items, α = .74), adapted from neuliep and mccroskey (1997). example item: “i find it difficult to work together with people who have different customs.” 7. religious attitudes (4 items, α = .71), developed for this study. example item: “the idea of sharing my islamic faith with my non-muslim friends is always present in my mind.” a higher score in each of these three scales reflected stronger l1 group affiliation. the above seven scales all involved a 7-point likert response format ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. finally, the instrument also included two semantic differential scales developed for this study: 8. attitudes toward the english (10 bipolar adjective scales, α = .74). 9. attitudes toward arabs (10 bipolar adjective scales, α = .84). the ten adjectives used in these two scales were identical to each other, and to the stimuli used for the pleasant and unpleasant attributes of the iat (though clean and dirty were dropped from the semantic differential scales; see appendix a for the complete list). semantic differential scales were used here instead of likert scales due to the observation that a higher explicit–implicit consistency is found when implicit scores are compared with scores from semantic differential scales (hofmann et al., 2005). because the participants were residing in the uk, both explicit and implicit measures addressed british speakers of english specifically. all materials in the explicit and implicit measures were also translated into arabic to avoid language interference. unconscious motivation. part i: implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers 437 5.3. procedure during a one-to-one meeting with the researcher, each participant responded to items randomly drawn in a fixed order from the seven likert scales, to the arab semantic differential scale, to the english semantic differential scale, to the implicit test, to demographic questions, and to the religious attitudes scale, in this sequence—all on a computer. the explicit and implicit parts were not counterbalanced because previous research has documented little order effect (see lane et al., 2007). the procedure followed in this study was endorsed by the ethics committee at the researcher’s institution. 5.4. data analysis for the implicit test, the analysis closely followed the improved scoring algorithm, called the d measure, recommended by greenwald, nosek, and banaji (2003). the four test blocks were included in the analysis, and the latency of each incorrect response was replaced with the block mean plus 600 ms error penalty. the analysis differed from the recommended algorithm in two ways, however. first, the 10,000 ms latency threshold used to determine and exclude extreme responses, which was selected “somewhat arbitrarily” (greenwald et al., 2003, p. 201), was replaced with the more stringent threshold of 5,000 ms. despite the stringency of this new procedure, virtually all participants had less than 10% latencies that were slower than 5,000 ms, thus no participant had to be excluded because of it. second, the standard iat score ranges from –2 to +2 (nosek & sriram, 2007), with conventional break points of >.15, >.35, and >.65 signifying slight, moderate, and strong implicit preference, respectively. the iat scores were multiplied by 1.5 here so that the new scale ranged from –3 to +3. the break points therefore became .20, .50, and 1.0 after rounding. in addition to its intuitive appeal, this rescaling made the iat scores directly comparable to scores derived from the explicit measures. for the explicit measures, all items were centered on zero, so that they also ranged from –3 to +3. following greenwald et al. (2003), a relative explicit measure was obtained from the two semantic differential scales using a formula adapted from the d measure in order to facilitate comparison with the implicit scores: − × 1.5, where en is attitudes toward the english, ar is attitudes toward arabs, and sdinclusive is their combined standard deviation. the resulting score, called the explicit d ali h. al-hoorie 438 measure here, ranged from almost –3 to +3 (from –2.92 to +2.92 to be exact) and correlated very strongly with the mean of these two semantic differential scales (r = .96, p < .001). 6. results 6.1. descriptive statistics table 3 presents the descriptive statistics of the variables and their inter-correlations. the explicit d measure had a neutral mean but a relatively higher standard deviation—indicating wide disagreement among the participants—while the implicit d measure suggests that the overall sample was actually moderately inclined more toward their l1 group. the newly developed religious attitudes scale correlated moderately to strongly with ethnocentrism and fear of assimilation, suggesting that it also reflects an aspect of l1 group affiliation. the table also shows that the participants expressed generally positive explicit attitudes toward english-speaking people and toward learning english and had high ideal l2 selves. this was to be expected given that the sample was made up of individuals who chose to go to the uk to study english. this positive slant would make the case more interesting if subsequent analyses reveal that some participants have an influential l1 implicit preference operating beneath this positive surface. table 3 means, standard deviations, and zero-order correlations for the overall sample (n = 365). all scales are centered on zero and range from -3 to +3 m sd 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1. attitudes to english-speaking people 1.59 1.05 — 2. attitudes to language learning 1.77 0.84 .41*** — 3. ideal l2 self 1.95 0.77 .17** .17*** — 4. ought-to l2 self 0.77 1.27 .30*** .32*** .15** — 5. fear of assimilation 0.00 1.29 –.14** –.06 –.07 .14** — 6. ethnocentrism –0.65 1.29 –.10† .13* –.03 .19*** .53*** — 7. religious attitudes 1.17 1.40 –.02 .12* .04 .01 .34*** .48*** — 8. attitudes to arabs (sds) 0.73 0.90 .05 .04 .12* .03 .11* .27*** .29*** — 9. attitudes to the english (sds) 0.77 0.76 .36*** .20*** –.03 .19*** –.20*** –.11* –.10† .12* — 10. explicit d measure 0.01 1.11 .21*** .13* –.10† .09 –.22*** –.30*** –.27*** –.70*** .56*** — 11. implicit d measure –0.78 0.61 .02 .00 –.01 –.03 –.24*** –.16** –.18*** –.11* .02 .07 note. sds = sematic differential scale. *** p ≤ .001, ** p ≤ .01, * p ≤ .05, † p < .10. the correlations in table 3 show that the explicit and implicit d measures did not correlate with each other. however, they did behave similarly in correlating negatively with all three l1 group affiliation scales. there were no significant unconscious motivation. part i: implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers 439 differences in how strongly they correlated with these three scales (the strong correlations between the explicit d measure and the two semantic differential scales were merely an artifact of being derived from them). finally, in line with previous research, females outperformed males both in the implicit test, t(363) = 1.91, p = .057, d = 0.22, and in the ideal l2 self, t = 4.93, p < .001, d = 0.57. 6.2. rq 1: openness to the l2 group this question is concerned with whether participants with explicit–implicit congruence (i.e., type 1 in table 1) would exhibit more openness to the l2 group than would incongruent participants (type 4 in table 1). because both of these types share positive attitudes toward l2 speakers at the explicit level, this part of the analysis included only participants who obtained a score higher than the neutral zero (i.e., positive) in attitudes toward english-speaking people. this is the first step. the two types differ in their implicit attitudes, hence the participants selected in the first step were then subdivided based on their implicit d measure scores into those in the upper and lower quartiles (i.e., excluding middle-range participants). as a result, this two-step selection procedure produced two subgroups with contrasting implicit attitudes but commonly shared positive explicit attitudes. a t-test demonstrated that participants who exhibited explicit–implicit congruence also exhibited significantly more positivity in attitudes toward englishspeaking people (m = 2.05, sd = 0.75, n = 78) than the ones with explicit–implicit incongruence (m = 1.81, sd = 0.77, n = 84), t(160) = 1.99, p = .048, d = 0.32. these results lend support to the view that explicit–implicit congruence predicts more openness to the l2 group. table 4 contains a summary of the differences in the other group-related scales. all results are also consistent with this view. table 4 differences between participants with explicit–implicit congruence (n = 78) and incongruence (n = 84) scale group m sd t d fear of assimilation congruent –0.42 1.27 3.35*** 0.53 incongruent 0.28 1.36 ethnocentrism congruent –0.96 1.27 2.49** 0.39 incongruent –0.45 1.34 religious attitudes congruent 0.82 1.44 3.11** 0.49 incongruent 1.47 1.22 attitudes toward arabs congruent 0.50 0.89 2.48** 0.40 incongruent 0.85 0.86 note. bonferroni correction have been implemented. adding length of residence in an english-speaking country and age as covariates does not influence these results. ** p ≤ .01, *** p = .001. ali h. al-hoorie 440 a two-step log-likelihood cluster analysis based on these five scales readily yielded two clusters with a ratio of 1.05. a t-test showed that the cluster showing more explicit openness to the l2 group also scored significantly higher in the implicit test, t(363) = 3.60, p < .001, d = 0.38. this suggests that implicit attitudes are associated with openness to the l2 group for the sample overall. further analyses showed that this effect is markedly stronger within the male subsample, t(250) = 3.27, p = .001, d = 0.41; but not statistically significant for the female subsample, t(106) = 1.49, p = .14, d = 0.29. these results suggest that implicit attitudes are especially relevant for male language learners. 6.3. rq 2: personality coherence this question compared the correlation coefficients for learners with implicit preference for the l1 versus l2 groups. an analysis was conducted based on a median-split of the implicit d measure scores. table 5 presents the results for the two genders. typically, researchers examine the first column (i.e., rall), which pools all participants regardless of their implicit attitudes. the next two columns separate those with a low implicit score showing preference for the l1 group (the rl1-pref column) from those with a high implicit score showing preference for the l2 group (the rl2-pref column). the crucial part is the last column. it examines whether the correlation coefficients in the rl1-pref and rl2-pref columns differ significantly. (that is, two correlation coefficients might be different [e.g., .20 vs. .22] but the magnitude of this difference may not be large enough to warrant statistical significance.) this column reports fisher’s r-to-z transformation, which is a standard approach to comparing correlation coefficients (kenny, 1987, p. 275). dörnyei and chan (2013) for example have used it to compare correlation pairs related to the motivation to learn two different languages. table 5 shows a total of 17 instances in which pairs of correlation coefficients differed significantly between the two subgroups (the full correlation tables are available in appendix b). as mentioned above, the rall column—which does not take implicit attitudes into account—is the one typically examined by researchers. however, when the participants were separated based on their implicit attitudes, the correlations of the l1 preference participants dropped to non-significance in 14 instances, whereas the correlations of the l2 preference participants became even stronger. for example, for females, attitudes toward l2 speakers and attitudes toward l2 learning appeared moderately correlated for the overall sample, which is the expected result from the literature as reviewed above. however, the next two columns show that this pattern actually holds only when implicit attitudes toward the l2 group are favorable. this suggests that pooling these two different groups can be misleading. unconscious motivation. part i: implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers 441 table 5 correlations for males and females comparing the overall sample, those with l1 and l2 implicit preference, and the difference between the latter two groups scales rall (n = 257) rl1-pref (n = 128) rl2-pref (n = 129) z male explicit d measure implicit d measure .14* –.08 .21* 2.32* explicit d measure attitudes to l2 speakers .18** .03 .33*** 2.48* explicit d measure attitudes to l2 learning .13* –.04 .29*** 2.68** attitudes to l2 learning attitudes to the english (sds) .21*** .09 .32*** 1.91† attitudes to l2 learning fear of assimilation –.08 .08 –.23** 2.49** attitudes to l2 speakers ideal l2 self .31*** .04 .32*** 2.31* implicit d measure fear of assimilation –.27*** –.11 –.34*** 3.68*** implicit d measure ethnocentrism –.19** –.01 –.22** 1.69† implicit d measure religious attitudes –.21*** –.05 –.29** 1.97* implicit d measure attitudes to arabs –.12* .05 –.19* 1.92* attitudes to l2 speakers fear of assimilation –.13* –.06 –.27** 1.72† attitudes to l2 speakers attitudes to arabs (sds) .03 .18* –.10 2.24* scales rall (n = 108) rl1-pref (n = 54) rl2-pref (n = 54) z female attitudes to l2 speakers attitudes to l2 learning .34*** .05 .61*** 3.33*** implicit d measure ideal l2 self –.02 –.08 .29* 1.91† explicit d measure ethnocentrism –.12 .08 –.29* 1.91† attitudes to l2 learning implicit d measure –.09 –.32* .11 2.23* attitudes to the english—sds ethnocentrism .06 .27* –.18 2.32* note. all hypotheses are two-tailed. sds = semantic differential scale. † p < .10, * p ≤ .05, ** p ≤ .01, *** p ≤ .001. in the only three instances in which this pattern was reversed, the correlations that emerged for those with l1 preference were theoretically somewhat unexpected. it is not clear why the women had a negative correlation between ali h. al-hoorie 442 l2 learning attitudes and implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers, or why the more they rated the english favorably the more they were also ethnocentric. also, the men tended to rate the two groups similarly as if they did not see much difference between them. these results suggest that learners with lower implicit attitudes do not seem to follow theoretically expected patterns. future research is needed to shed more light on the motivation of this group of learners. again, this effect is more marked for males than females, as fewer significant differences emerged from the female subsample. this pattern supports the results related to rq 1 showing that implicit attitudes play a larger role for males. overall, therefore, the results demonstrate that pooling learners without regard to their level of implicit attitudes carries the danger of masking salient internal differences that may in turn suppress the overall correlation coefficient.3 6.4. rq 3: moderating the l2 mss this question examined whether implicit attitudes moderate the relationship between (explicit) attitudes toward l2 speakers and the ideal l2 self, and between the ideal l2 self and attitudes toward learning english. a multi-group structural equation modeling (sem) analysis was conducted using amos 22 (arbuckle, 2013). the sem analysis followed the recommended two-step approach of examining the measurement model before proceeding to the structural model (for details, see appendix c). the results for the overall sample, displayed in figure 4 above the arrows and in table 6, show that both paths are statistically significant. again, these are the typical results researchers obtain when they do not take implicit attitudes into account. however, when implicit attitudes were taken into account, a different picture emerged. learners with an l2 preference outperformed their l1 preference counterparts in the path from attitudes toward english-speaking people to the ideal l2 self (z = 1.88, p < .10), while the opposite pattern emerged in the other path (z = 2.48, p < .05). these results suggest that learners resort to the l2 group to develop their ideal l2 selves only when their implicit attitudes toward that group are favorable. at the same time, these learners—because of their favorable attitudes at the implicit level—may not need to consciously resort to their ideal l2 selves to remain motivated; their motivation may be maintained spontaneously. this pattern implies that a conscious ideal l2 self is more relevant to learners with lower 3 the bonferroni correction was not implemented in this part of the analysis following the convention in the field. language motivation researchers do not correct for multiple comparisons when they use correlations (like those in table 3), and the present analysis is intended to show what the results might look like when implicit attitudes are taken into account. unconscious motivation. part i: implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers 443 implicit attitudes toward the l2 group, and that because of their lower implicit attitudes these learners might derive their ideals from sources other than the l2 group to sustain their motivation. thus, implicit attitudes seem to reveal a more nuanced picture of language motivation, showing very different motivational dynamics underlying these two types of learners. figure 4 standardized coefficients of final model for all participants (above the arrows) and for those who had l1 vs. l2 implicit preference (under the arrows). indicators and error terms were deleted for simplicity. the structural model had an adequate fit, χ²(75) = 199.701, p < .001, χ²/df = 2.663, gfi = .943, cfi = .945, rmsea = .048, pclose = .660. *** p < .001, ** p < .01, * p < .05. table 6 standardized and unstandardized coefficients, standard errors, and critical ratios in the final model for the overall sample, and for participants with l1 vs. l2 implicit preference path group β b se cr attitudes toward l2 people → ideal l2 self overall .16 0.13 .05 2.51* l1-pref .05 0.04 .07 0.51 l2-pref .28 0.23 .08 3.09** ideal l2 self → attitude toward l2 learning overall .30 0.40 .09 4.48*** l1-pref .45 0.62 .14 4.34*** l2-pref .13 0.17 .12 1.45 note. * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001. 7. discussion conventional l2 motivation theories tend to portray language learners as rational agents, varying along one (conscious) dimension: a continuum from high to low motivation. this is evident both in theoretical discussions and in actual empirical investigations where self-report questionnaires and interviews are predominant. the present paper has presented the first study in the l2 field using the iat to examine language learners’ implicit attitudes. the results demonstrate that another (unconscious) dimension has important implications for language learning motivation. the implicit attitudes construct may therefore have the potential to move the field forward toward interesting directions. attitudes to englishspeaking people ideal l2 self attitudes to language learning .16* .05 / .28** .30*** .45*** / .13 ali h. al-hoorie 444 implicit attitudes also appeared more relevant to males than to females. this supports previous research showing that females tend to exhibit more positivity toward languages (vs. math and science) both explicitly and implicitly, and consequently they may have less reason to develop explicit–implicit incongruence. implicit attitudes may therefore be a valuable pathway for a better understanding of gender differences in language learning. the present study also offers support for the utility of religious attitudes for arab learners as a further indicator of openness to the l2 group. it is still unclear to what extent this would be useful in societies in which religion is not a salient aspect. that implicit attitudes correlated negatively with l1 group affiliation invites speculation on the nature of implicit attitudes. originally, fear of assimilation was investigated primarily in the canadian context, where french speakers were at risk of being assimilated into the dominant anglophone culture (e.g., clément, 1980). today, with the unprecedented worldwide spread of the english language, fear of assimilation may no longer be confined to minorities living in the shadows of another dominant group. many learners around the world feel that global english is a form of westernization invading their cultural distinctiveness (see dörnyei, csizér, & németh, 2006, for an in-depth analysis), especially if we remember that the basis of fear of assimilation is the threat to perceived ethnolinguistic vitality (i.e., language status, demography, and institutional support; see giles, bourhis, & taylor, 1977). the ensuing fear of assimilation need not be explicit, however, considering the undeniable advantages of english proficiency for one’s future career. a learner faced with this situation may be bound to experience ambivalent feelings reflecting an explicit–implicit conflict. further research is needed to scrutinize these hypotheses. 8. limitations one potential limitation of this study is that the sample contains a mixture of different ages and educational levels. in fact, because of this diversity, a standardized measure of l2 achievement was not feasible. therefore, little can be said about the extent to which implicit attitudes are relevant to actual classroom learning. in addition, the female sample was smaller, which limits the generalizability of the results. another limitation is the exclusive reliance on the iat. since no measure is perfect, utilizing other measures of implicit attitudes in future research would be more informative. nosek, hawkins, and frazier (2011), for example, review 20 different implicit measures. in a first attempt to address some of these limitations, a follow-up study by al-hoorie (in press) involved undergraduate language learners from one institution, and so a measure of l2 achievement could be obtained. these participants unconscious motivation. part i: implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers 445 also had very similar ages and most had never visited an english-speaking country. they performed the single-target implicit association test (wigboldus, holland, & van knippenberg, 2005), and their results showed that implicit attitudes were indeed able to predict l2 achievement. moreover, implicit attitudes still predicted achievement after controlling for the other explicit variables in the study (e.g., the ideal l2 self, attitudes toward the learning situation, intended effort), suggesting that the effect of implicit attitudes is not mediated by those variables. additionally, this effect could not be explained either by social desirability biases or by other cognitive confounds. these findings serve to reinforce the relevance of implicit attitudes to language learning. 9. conclusion this paper has argued that the implicit side of attitudes and motivation may constitute a more important component in the overall understanding of language learning motivation than is currently acknowledged in mainstream theories. focusing entirely on explicit attitudes and motivation in empirical studies could mask the potential impact of any conflicting implicit attitudes. the findings of this study offer evidence that this impact can in some subgroups change the results substantially, which in turn suggests that adding an implicit dimension to our overall understanding of motivation may be a fruitful future direction. acknowledgements i would like to thank zoltán dörnyei, phil hiver, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft. ali h. al-hoorie 446 references 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(2016). motivation, vision, and gender: a survey of learners of english in china. language learning, 66(1), 94-123. doi: 10.1111/ lang.12140 unconscious motivation. part i: implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers 451 appendix a implicit test stimuli pleasant: fair, polite, cheerful, kind, hardworking, beautiful, knowledgeable, honest, optimistic, clean unpleasant: unfair, impolite, cheerless, mean, lazy, ugly, ignorant, dishonest, pessimistic, dirty english: george, elizabeth, london, britain, newton, robin hood, shakespeare, oxford university, pound sterling, bbc arabic: mohammad, fatimah, mecca, jordan, ibn khaldun, hatim al-tai, al-mutanabbi, cairo university, kuwaiti dinar, aljazeera ali h. al-hoorie 452 appendix b correlation tables table b1 zero-order correlations for the male (above the diagonal, n = 257) and female (below the diagonal, n = 108) subsamples 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 1. attitudes to englishspeaking people — .45*** .18** .31*** –.17** –.13* –.08 .03 .30*** .18** .08 2. attitudes to language learning .34*** — .21*** .34*** –.08 .09 .09 .06 .21*** .13* .03 3. ideal l2 self .18† .10 — .17** –.07 .06 .08 .15* .00 –.09 –.05 4. ought-to l2 self .27** .27** .09 — .18** .19** .02 .03 .24*** .13* –.09 5. fear of assimilation –.02 –.02 –.08 .04 — .55*** .35*** .18** –.24*** –.31*** –.27*** 6. ethnocentrism –.04 .22* –.18† .21* .49*** — .52*** .32*** –.17** –.38*** –.19** 7. religious attitudes .13 .16† .00 –.02 .30** .38*** — .32*** –.12* –.31*** –.21*** 8. attitudes to arabs (sds) .11 –.01 .02 .02 –.04 .18† .24** — .07 –.70*** –.12* 9. attitudes to the english (sds) .52*** .18† –.09 .08 –.09 .06 –.04 .23* — .59*** .10 10. explicit d measure .28** .16 –.05 .02 .00 –.12 –.19* –.70*** .49*** — .14* 11. implicit d measure –.11 –.09 –.02 .08 –.16† –.06 –.10 –.10 –.16† –.05 — note. sds = semantic differential scale. *** p ≤ .001, ** p ≤ .01, * p ≤ .05, † p < .10. table b2 zero-order correlations for the male participants who had l1 (below the diagonal, n = 128) and l2 (above the diagonal, n = 129) implicit preference 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 1. attitudes to englishspeaking people — .50*** .32*** .39*** –.27** –.16† –.20* –.10 .36*** .33*** .09 2. attitudes to language learning .40*** — .23** .34*** –.23** .11 .05 –.02 .32*** .29*** .03 3. ideal l2 self .04 .19* — .20* –.10 –.02 –.02 .14 –.04 –.10 –.01 4. ought-to l2 self .25** .35*** .14 — .12 .15† –.01 –.01 .26** .20* –.07 5. fear of assimilation –.06 .08 –.06 .22** — .51*** .39*** .17* –.22** –.30*** –.34*** 6. ethnocentrism –.08 .09 .13 .20* .57*** — .55*** .32*** –.11 –.31*** –.22** 7. religious attitudes .08 .16† .18* .05 .28*** .47*** — .35*** –.13 –.33*** –.29*** 8. attitudes to arabs (sds) .18* .14 .14 .05 .16† .31*** .27** — .00 –.68*** –.19* 9. attitudes to the english (sds) .23** .09 .05 .23** –.25** –.22** –.11 .16† — .66*** .15† 10. explicit d measure .03 –.04 –.07 .08 –.29*** –.42*** –.26** –.71*** .52*** — .21* 11. implicit d measure –.03 –.07 .01 –.03 –.11 –.01 –.05 .05 –.01 –.08 — note. sds = semantic differential scale. *** p ≤ .001, ** p ≤ .01, * p ≤ .05, † p < .10. unconscious motivation. part i: implicit attitudes toward l2 speakers 453 table b3 zero-order correlations for the female participants who had l1 (below the diagonal, n = 54) and l2 (above the diagonal, n = 54) implicit preference 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 1. attitudes to englishspeaking people — .61*** .14 .37** .00 –.06 .16 .06 .61*** .36** –.01 2. attitudes to language learning .05 — .07 .21 .05 .22 .21 .00 .22 .16 .11 3. ideal l2 self .20 .12 — .17 –.09 –.20 –.17 –.05 –.04 .08 .29* 4. ought-to l2 self .14 .32* .00 — .12 .20 –.03 –.02 .12 .08 .15 5. fear of assimilation –.10 –.13 –.13 –.08 — .54*** .24† .05 –.15 –.09 –.08 6. ethnocentrism –.02 .22 –.17 .22 .34*** — .39** .22 –.18 –.29* .09 7. religious attitudes .08 .12 .14 –.02 .37** .36** — .37** .02 –.25† .02 8. attitudes to arabs (sds) .18 –.02 .09 .07 –.22 .12 .09 — .16 –.76*** –.07 9. attitudes to the english (sds) .41** .14 –.16 .04 –.03 .27* –.11 .30* — .47*** –.19 10. explicit d measure .16 .16 –.21 –.06 .15 .08 –.13 –.63*** .53*** — –.04 11. implicit d measure –.10 –.32* –.08 .23† –.07 .06 –.08 –.03 –.15 –.18 — note. sds = semantic differential scale. *** p ≤ .001, ** p ≤ .01, * p ≤ .05, † p < .10. ali h. al-hoorie 454 appendix c sem measurement and structural models the measurement model is a confirmatory factor analysis aiming to establish construct validity, and so both convergent and discriminant validity had to be examined. to examine convergent validity, i.e., so that the indicators satisfactorily represent their latent constructs, three aspects were investigated. first, the rule of thumb for the construct reliability is to be .70 or higher, which was satisfied for the three constructs as shown in table c1. second, the average variance extracted (ave), as the rule of thumb, should be .50 or higher. attitudes toward english-speaking people satisfied this recommendation, but each of the ideal l2 self and attitudes toward language learning had to have one item dropped. this improved their ave to a satisfactory level (see table c1). a final rule of thumb suggests that the standardized factor loadings of each indicator variable should be .50 or higher. all factor loadings were statistically significant and higher than this threshold except for one indicator of attitudes toward language learning that was just under this threshold (.46). the overall trend, therefore, suggested acceptable convergent validity. to examine discriminant validity, i.e., to make sure that the constructs are sufficiently distinct from each other, the recommended measure is that the ave values should be greater than their respective inter-construct correlations squared. this was also satisfied, as shown in table c1. finally, most of the standardized residuals did not exceed the recommended threshold of ±2.0, suggesting that the observed covariance terms fitted the estimated covariance terms. the fit of the measurement model was also acceptable, χ²(175) = 391.517, p < .001, χ²/df = 2.237, gfi = .928, cfi = .937, rmsea = .034, pclose = 1.00. these results suggested that the measurement model was satisfactory and that it was safe to proceed to the structural model. table c1 reliability and validity of the constructs in the measurement model and their interconstruct correlations cr ave 1 2 3 1. attitudes to language learning .741 .503 .709 2. ideal l2 self .745 .494 .356 .703 3. attitudes to english-speaking people .853 .662 .406 .165 .813 note. cr = construct reliability, ave = average variance extracted. values in the diagonal are the square roots of their respective ave. for the structural model, the measurement invariance assumption was satisfied, indicating that the groups did not substantially differ in terms of how they understood and responded to the various items. the residuals of attitudes toward english-speaking people and attitudes toward language learning correlated with each other, possibly due to their shared underlying theme related to aspects of the l2 culture. none of the standardized residuals exceeded ±2.5, suggesting a very good fit between the observed and estimated covariance terms. the structural model also had an adequate fit, χ²(75) = 199.701, p < .001, χ²/df = 2.663, gfi = .943, cfi = .945, rmsea = .048, pclose = .660. there were no missing data to handle in this part of the analysis because the computer program reminded the participant if s/he left an item unanswered. 325 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (3). 2021. 325-330 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.3.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial: introduction to the special issue on teaching english reading and writing to young learners we aimed for this special issue to offer up empirically supported advice to teachers for tackling some of the challenges in teaching reading and writing to young english as a second (l2) or foreign language (fl) learners. these challenges teachers face when providing instruction to young learners include cognitive development, motivation, attention, strategy use, and assessment (nunan, 2011). it is now well understood that the teaching of reading and writing to young learners can no longer be equated with the teaching of adult learners (cameron, 2001). in terms of cognitive development, language learners need to go through significant developmental changes in their learning journey from infancy to adulthood (richardson, 2019). these differences in language learners’ cognitive development call for a need to design language learning tasks and materials that can fit the developmental stages of learners (teng, 2020a). language learner motivation can decline over time due to a lack of clarity in the goals of language learning and potential feelings that effort invested in learning the language has not paid off (linse & nunan, 2006). furthermore, as young learners tend to have short attention spans, activities that can maintain their motivation and involvement are essential (fenyvesi, 2020). language learning strategy researchers have focused their attention on adult learners; however, we believe they should begin considering young learners’ language use and learning preferences, as this knowledge could help inform teachers’ instruction (plonsky, 2019). to provide proper instruction, an educator of young learners must understand these needs. this requires the construction of appropriate language assessment tools, which will allow teachers to gauge learners’ strengths and weaknesses; doing so can further facilitate teacher scaffolding and other forms of feedback (ma & bui, this issue). despite the acknowledged impact that these issues have on the teaching of reading 326 and writing to young learners, we are still lacking in empirical evidence to support many creative and pedagogical decisions made in the young learner classroom (cameron & mckay, 2010). our intention in this special issue was to further focus language researchers’ attention on the young learner classroom and to encourage a rethinking of classroom practices for teaching reading and writing. we focused the special issue on english as it has become the de facto lingua franca of the global world, and we highlighted reading and writing skills as these are fast becoming an important part of compulsory primary and secondary english classes all over the globe. according to reynolds and teng (2019), reading, a skill of accurately decoding and comprehending written texts, is an important foundation skill for young learners. similarly, writing, a skill for learners to use symbols (letters of the alphabet, punctuation, and spaces) to produce connected text, is increasingly becoming an essential skill in english learning. l2 reading and writing development often begins in the early childhood language classroom. for example, according to teng and zhang (2021), the development of young learners’ reading and writing starts as early as primary school grade 1. when learners receive writing instruction, their reading comprehension improves. with this improvement comes the increased ability to synthesize multiple sources of information to produce l2 writing. while few would argue against the claim that l2 reading and writing skills are related, there is a lack of empirical investigations into how to best integrate reading and writing instruction for young learners (teng & zhang, 2021). despite researchers acknowledging that well developed reading and writing skills are essential for l2 learners to engage in critical thinking, learning, and expression, little has been done to reduce the difficulties that many classroom teachers face in the young learner classroom (reynolds & teng, 2019). likewise, learners often find english reading challenging due to the lack of vocabulary knowledge (teng, 2020b) and struggle to write in english due to their lacking knowledge in how to apply writing strategies (teng, 2019, 2021). given that english is being taught at an increasingly younger age around the world (nunan, 2011), it is important for english language teaching (elt) researchers to offer frontline teachers empirically informed routes to enhance reading and writing learning and instruction for young learners. collected together in this special issue, you will find six studies leading the way in addressing some of the issues discussed above. the first two studies investigated english reading from the learners’ point of view. ke and zhang’s “morphological instruction and reading development in young l2 readers: a scoping review of causal relationships” starts off the issue with the aim to explore the causal relationship between morphological instruction and l2 reading development by synthesizing 12 primary studies published between 2004 and 2019. the focus was on learners in four countries 327 (china, egypt, singapore, and the usa) learning english in kindergarten up to and including grade 12. the results of the scoping review supported the view that explicit morphological instruction could lead to an increase in morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge for learners in grade 3 and above. however, the authors also pointed out that the evidence concerning whether morphological instruction is more or less effective for phonological awareness, word reading accuracy and fluency, spelling, and reading comprehension was lacking. in addition to succinctly synthesizing these study results, they laid out a research agenda for future researchers, advising them to consider measuring transfer effects, adopting a cross-linguistic perspective, and exploring morphological instruction in younger children. in the second paper, “exploring the importance of vocabulary for english as an additional language learners’ reading comprehension,” brooks, clenton, and fraser report on an investigation of factors (i.e., vocabulary knowledge, word decoding skills, reading fluency, and general linguistic ability) that may affect the reading comprehension abilities of english as an additional language (eal) learners in a japanese secondary school. although their findings suggested linguistic ability and reading fluency are important variables, differences in vocabulary were a more robust predictor of reading comprehension. given this finding, they argued that it is essential for english teachers to provide vocabulary support to eal and l2 learners to enhance their reading comprehension of academic texts. the next two studies in this special issue investigated english writing from the learners’ point of view. in the third paper, “topic familiarity and story continuation in young english as a foreign language learners’ writing tasks,” bui and luo investigated how story continuation under different topic familiarity conditions serves as a viable pedagogical means for secondary school students to practice l2 writing. their results showed that learners who wrote on familiar topics produced longer texts and demonstrated greater lexical diversity than those who wrote about unfamiliar topics; however, topic familiarity did not affect writing quality or lexical sophistication. they suggested that teachers use familiar stories as a catalyst in english writing tasks designed for young learners. they also added that teachers may consider the use of story continuation as a means of encouraging creativity in the writing produced by young learners. in the fourth study, “creative writing for publication: an action research study of motivation, engagement, and language development in argentinian secondary schools,” banegas and lowe report on an action research project aimed at encouraging the motivation and engagement of teenage learners in argentina through their involvement in a creative writing for publication project. they found that this teaching approach resulted in increased learner engagement and motivation due to the authenticity afforded by enabling the learners to become 328 l2 materials developers as a part of their own l2 learning experiences. the authors suggest that other english writing teachers who wish to implement similar projects initially focus primarily on meaning in their feedback, which can be later accompanied by a focus on form, and include some external motivation factor such as their use of e-book publication, to be read by language learning peers. the last two studies in this special issue focused on matters related to teacher feedback and assessment. in the fifth paper, “innovating teacher feedback with writing activities aimed at raising secondary school students’ awareness of collocation errors,” reynolds and teng reported on an examination of the types of written corrective feedback given by second language writing teachers with reference to taiwanese secondary school students’ verb-noun collocation errors. the data were extracted from the english taiwan learner corpus, the largest annotated learner corpus of english in taiwan. teacher feedback given to 518 students during one academic year was extracted from the corpus for analysis. results indicated that the secondary school writing teachers provided direct and indirect feedback more often than metalinguistic feedback. the researchers argued that the teachers’ limited linguistic resources, as evidenced by multiple occurrences of inappropriate feedback, may have predisposed them to providing ill-informed or incomplete written feedback for word choice errors. as one solution, the authors offer up the suggestion that teachers provide fourstage writing activities that target pre-selected formulaic language which can simultaneously increase young learners’ awareness of formulaic language while also reducing the burden of teacher marking to that of the targeted items. in the last contribution, “chinese secondary school teachers’ conceptions of l2 assessment: a mixed-methods study,” ma and bui report on an investigation of chinese secondary school teachers’ conceptions of l2 assessment in the context of an exam-oriented educational system. their quantitative results showed that the 66 teacher participants viewed assessment as an aid to learning; however, the results also indicated that teachers may be less likely to adopt formative assessment initiatives that emphasize student development. the qualitative findings further revealed individual differences in the two case study teachers’ conceptions and practice of assessment as well as the interplay among mesolevel (e.g., school), micro-level (e.g., student), and macro-level (e.g., sociocultural and policy contexts) factors in shaping the teachers’ different conceptions and practices of assessment. the researchers argued that it is important to consider the interplay of macro-, meso-, and micro-level factors in order to develop teachers’ assessment literacy. while the benefits of introducing reading and writing to learners in early years are evident, recent economic, social, political, and educational developments have also made it clear to classroom practitioners and education researchers that 329 there is still a need for change in the approaches used in the teaching of reading and writing (reynolds & teng, 2021). more research is needed to address the question whether these approaches or techniques can be implemented within the confines of current education systems. this special issue, responding to these needs, aimed to draw a fuller picture of the diversity of approaches available to teachers and address the challenges faced by young learners when learning to read and write in english. this special issue delineates innovative teaching, serving as a useful descriptor of current trends in the development of reading and writing instruction for young learners. learning to read and write is a complex and difficult process because it requires metacognitive knowledge, cognitive activities, strategies, motivation, attention, and skills in text organization, production, and revision (teng & zhang, 2021). we cannot address all of these in one special issue, and it is clear to us that additional research is still sorely needed. however, we hope that this special issue can drive evidence-based assessment, instruction, and intervention, and push educational public policy to support the advancement of the teaching and assessment of reading and writing for young learners. to conclude, we would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to the editorin-chief of studies in second language learning and teaching, professor mirosław pawlak, for supporting our idea of the special issue and guiding us through the process of editing it. we are also thankful to the contributors, who were patient and persistent throughout the review process. a very special thank you goes out to all the reviewers, who were kind enough to lend their time and provide their professional feedback on the submissions: sihui echo ke, qin xie, charles m. mueller, dale brown, angus cheng, rining (tony) wei, shu-ping gong, mei-lee ng, xuyan qiu, chian-wen kao, lucilla lopriore, jean-paul duquette, akifumi yanagisawa, jason fan, kevin m. wong, saihua xia, maria nilsson, jianping xie, yao zheng, jun scott chen hsieh, fang-chi chang, shu-chen huang, fan fang, po-han lin, barry lee reynolds, and mark feng teng. lastly, we also acknowledge the financial support of the university of macau under grant myrg2018-00008-fed. barry lee reynolds faculty of education, university of macau, macau sar, china centre for cognitive and brain sciences, university of macau, macau sar, china barryreynolds@um.edu.mo mark feng teng faculty of education, university of macau, macau sar, china markteng@um.edu.mo 330 references cameron, l. (2001). teaching languages to young learners. cambridge university press. cameron, l., & mckay, p. (2010). bringing creative teaching into the young learner classroom. oxford university press. fenyvesi, k. (2020). english learning motivation of young learners in danish primary schools. language teaching research, 24(5), 690-713. linse, c., & nunan, d. (2006). practical english language teaching: young learners. mcgraw-hill. nunan, d. (2011). teaching english to young learners. anaheim university press. plonsky, l. (2019). language learning strategy instruction: recent research and future directions. in a.-u. chamot & v. harris (eds.), learning strategy instruction in the language classroom: issues and implementation (pp. 321). multilingual matters. reynolds, b. l., & teng, f. (eds.). (2019). english literacy instruction for chinese speakers. palgrave macmillan. reynolds, b. l., & teng, f. (eds.). 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(2021). development of children’s metacognitive knowledge, and reading and writing proficiency in english as a foreign language: longitudinal data using multilevel models. british journal of educational psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12413 819 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (4). 2020. 819-824 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.4.9 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt reviewers for volume 10/2020 the editors would like to express their gratitude to the following scholars who have kindly consented to review one or more submissions to volume 10/2020 of studies in second language learning and teaching. their insightful and thorough comments and suggestions have without doubt greatly enhanced the quality of the papers included in the 2020 volume: rebekha abbuhl california state university long beach, usa sunyoung ahn harvard university, cambridge, usa ágnes albert eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary saleh al-busaidi sultan qaboos university, muscat, oman ali al-hoorie jubail industrial college, saudi arabia elissa allaw concordia university, montreal, canada hesham alyousef king saud university, riyadh, saudi arabia carmen amerstorfer university of klagenfurt, austria mohammad amiryousefi university of isfahan, iran charles anderson university of edinburgh, uk alberto andujar university of almería, spain tanja angelovska university of salzburg, austria rodrigo aragão state university of santa cruz, ilhéus, brazil larissa aronin oranim academic college of education, haifa, israel erhan aslan university of reading, uk darío luis banegas university of strathclyde, glasgow, uk anna maria barcelos federal university of viçosa, brasil khaled barkaoui york university, toronto, canada david beglar temple university, japan mireille besson aix-marseille université, france yves bestgen universite catholique de louvain, louvain-la-neuve david birdsong the university of texas at austin, usa joel bloch ohio state university, columbus, usa frank boers university of western ontario, london, canada jill boggs swansea university, uk sonja brunsmeier ludwigsburg university of education, germany m. camino bueno alastuey public university of navarre, spain gavin bui the hang seng university of hong kong, china 820 marco cancino university andrés bello, santiago, chile yiqian katherine cao the university of melbourne, australia angelica carlet international university of catalonya, barcelona, spain j. elliott casal pennsylvania state university, state college, usa maría jiménez catalán university of la rioja, spain meilin chen hong kong baptist university, china tsuiping chen kun shan university, tainan city, taiwan, china anisa cheung hong kong baptist university, china evgeny chukharev-hudilainen iowa state university, ames, usa llorenc comajoan central university of catalonia, vic, spain russell cross the university of melbourne, australia kata csizér eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary sophia czapka university of potsdam, germany jennifer dailey-o'cain university of alberta, edmonton, canada marek derenowski adam mickiewicz university at kalisz, poland radhika de silva open university of sri lanka, colombo, sri lanka jean-marc dewaele birkbeck college, university of london, uk nuwar diab lebanese american university, beirut, lebanon kenan dikilitaş university of stavanger, norway anne edstrom montclair state university, usa majid elahi shirvan university of bojnord, iran elizabeth ellis university of new england, armidale, australia anna ewert adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland nasser fallah university of zabol, iran anne feryok university of otago, dunedin, new zealand matthew foster university of south florida, tampa, usa danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia, katowice, poland xuesong (andy) gao university of new south wales, sydney, australia edgar garzón-díaz university of los andes, bogota, colombia nasim ghanbari persian gulf university, bushehr, iran mousa ghonchepour farhangiyan university, tehran, iran debra giambo florida gulf coast university, fort myers, usa ufuk girgin erciyes university, kayseri, turkey julia goetza washington university in st. louis, usa tammy gregersen american university of sharjah, united arab emirates carol griffiths university of leeds, uk yan guo huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan, china nicola halenko university of central lancashire, preston, uk osamu hanaoka tokyo international university, japan judith hanks university of leeds, uk mohammad ali heidari-shahreza islamic azad university, tehran, iran carly henderson augusta university, usa ashlie henery university of minnesota, minneapolis, usa mairin hennebry-leung university of tasmania, australia todd hernández marquette university, milwaukee, usa coralie herve university of lille, france phil hiver florida state university, tallahassee, usa franz holzknecht university of innsbruck, austria geraldine horan university college london, uk marlise horst concordia university, montreal, canada martin howard university college, cork, ireland 821 liwei hsu national kaohsiung university of hospitality and tourism, taiwan, china zana ibrahim university of kurdistan hewlêr, iraq solene inceoglu australian national university, canberra, australia bimali indrarathne king's college london, uk tania ionin university of illinois at urbana-champaign, usa christina isabelli-garcía gonzaga university, spokane, usa lindsey ives embry-riddle aeronautical university, daytona beach, usa janina iwaniec university of bath, uk daniel jackson kanda university of international studies, japan guiying jiang xiamen university, fuijan, china jingyang jiang zhejiang university, hangzhou, china yinxing jin university of groningen, the netherlands mark d. johnson east carolina university, greenville, usa deng jun central south university, china daniel jung indiana university, bloomington, usa janina kahn-horwitz oranim academic college of education, israel nobuhiro kamiya gunma prefectural women's university, japan okim kang northern arizona university, flagstaff, usa eva kartchava carleton university, ottawa, canada tomoyuki kawase doshisha university, kyoto, japan david kellogg sangmyung university, seoul, south korea gholam hassan khajavy university of bojnord, iran ferit kılıçkaya mehmet akif ersoy university, turkey alicia kim university of wisconsin, madison, usa yasemin kırkgöz çukurova university, adana, turkey romana kopeckova university of münster, germany terry lamb university of westminster, london craig lambert curtin university, sydney, australia ursula lanvers university of york, uk eun-kyoung rosa lee university of maryland, college park, usa ju seong lee education university of hong kong, china dmitri leontjev university of jyväskylä, finland john m. lewis iowa state university, ames, usa chengchen li huazhong university, wuhan, china shuai li georgetown state university, usa benedict lin nanyang technological university, singapore lilian lin national taiwan normal university, taipei, taiwan meihua liu tsinghua university, beijing, china yeu-ting liu national taiwan university, taipei, taiwan ana llinares universidad autónoma de madrid, spain enric llurda giménez university of lleida, spain hanneke loerts university of groningen, the netherlands nigel mantou lou university of alberta, canada wander lowie university of groningen, the netherlands qing ma the hong kong institute of education, china ernesto macaro university of oxford, uk peter macintyre cape breton university, sydney, canada kouider makhtari university of texas at tyler, usa wojciech malec the john paul ii catholic university of lublin, poland rosa maría manchón ruiz university of murcia, spain soheil mansouri webster university, webster groves, usa 822 mónica marcos-llinas university of missouri, columbus, usa joshua matthews university of new england, armidale, australia shannon mccrocklin southern illinois university, carbondale, usa paul meara cardiff university, uk mariza g. méndez lópez universidad veracruzana, xalapa, mexico sarah mercer university of graz, austria nicole mills harvard university, usa rosamond mitchell university of southampton, uk shahab moradkhani razi university, kermanshah, iran jeansue mueller university of maryland, college park, usa gerrard mugford university of gualadajara, mexico christine muir university of nottingham, uk akira murakami university of birmingham, uk anna mystkowska-wiertelak university of wrocław, poland shingo nahatame university of tsukuba, japan colleen neary-sundquist purdue university, west lafayette, usa phyllis ngai university of montana, missoula, usa laura nicholson edge hill university, ormskirk, uk tarja nikula university of jyväskylä, finland katharina nimz bielefeld university, germany william ludwell oga-baldwin waseda university, tokyo, japan gabriela olivares university of northern iowa, cedar falls, usa katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia university of bielsko-biała, poland manuel padilla cruz university of sevilla, spain kate paesani university of minnesota, minneapolis, usa spiros papageorgiou educational testing service, lawrence township, usa hae in (lauren) park state university of new york, albany, usa jing paul agnes scott college, decatur, usa višnja pavičić takač osip juraj strossmayer university of osijek, croatia caroline payant the university of idaho, moscow, usa lynn pearson bowling green state university, usa cristina petersen university of victoria, canada françois pichette téluq university of quebec, canada nadya pincus university of delaware, newark, usa manuela pinto utrecht university, the netherlands luke plonsky northern arizona state university, flagstaff, usa eva puimège university of leuven, belgium xuyan qiu the university of hong kong, china muhammad rahimi university of auckland, new zealand melinda reichelt university of toledo, usa pia resnik university of vienna, austria jeffrey m. ringer university of tennessee, knowcskville, usa karen roehr-brackin university of essex, colchester, uk arkadiusz rojczyk university of silesia, sosnowiec, poland hanne roothooft university of navarre, spain fernando rubio-alcalá university of huelva, spain vanessa natale rukholm university of tampa, usa stephen ryan waseda university, tokyo, japan richard james sampson rikkyo university, japan adelina sánchez centeno national university of rio cuarto, argentina eirini sanoudaki bangor university, uk 823 veronica sardegna university of pittsburgh, usa masatoshi sato andrés bello national university, santiago, chile elke schneider winthrop university, usa geoffrey schwartz adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland meral seker çukurova university, adana, turkey ellen j. serafini george mason university, fairfax, usa olcay sert mälardalen university, sweden yvette slaughter the univesity of melbourne, australia paweł sobkowiak adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland neal snape gunma prefectural women’s university, japan adem soruç university of bath, uk jeffrey stewart tokyo university of science, japan tim stoeckel university of niigata prefecture, niigata, japan jill surmont vrije universiteit brussel, belgium agneta svalberg university of leicester, uk liss kerstin sylvén university of gothenburg, sweden paweł szudarski university of nottingham, uk michael tallon university of the incarnate word, san antonio, usa mitsuko tanaka osaka university, japan mengmeng tang university of york, uk yasser teimouri georgetown university, usa martha isabel tejada-sánchez los andes university, bogotá, colombia feng (mark) teng hong kong baptist university, china marta thindle karunahar snn college of engineering, chennai, india amy s. thomson west virginia university, morgantown, usa ron thompson brock university, st. catharines, canada teresa ting university of calabria, rende, italy zsuzsa tóth pázmány péter catholic university, budapest, hungary pavel trofimovich concordia university, canada francis john troyan the ohio state university, columbus, usa wai lan tsang the university of hong kong, china sheng-shiang tseng tamkang university, new taipei city, taiwan, china blake turnbull kyoto university, japan camilla vásquez university of south florida, tampa, usa nina vyatkina the university of kansas, lawrence, usa tina waldman kibbutzim college of education, tel aviv-yafo, izrael rining wei xi’an jiaotong-liverpool university, suzhou, china camille welie university of amsterdam, the netherlands zhisheng (edward) wen macao polytechnic institute, china valentin werner university of bamberg, germany daniel williams university of potsdam, germany danuta wiśniewska adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland katrin wisniewski university of leipzig, germany david wood carleton university, canada magdalena wrembel adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland mark wyatt khalifa university, united arab emirates tomoko yabukoshi nihon university, tokyo, japan tomoko yashima kansai university, japan zihan yin university of canberra, australia vickie y. yu california state university northridge, usa feng xiao pomona college, calaremont, ca, usa 824 yolanda ruiz de zarobe university of the basque country, spain nourollah zarrinabadi university of isfahan, iran yajun zeng yangtze university, yingzhou, china yiran zhang florida state university, tallahassee, usa 87 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (1). 2022. 87-115 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.1.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt exploring the predictive role of teacher immediacy and stroke behaviors in english as a foreign language university students’ academic burnout ali derakhshan golestan university, gorgan, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6639-9339 a.derakhshan@gu.ac.ir zohreh r. eslami texas a&m university, college station, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2969-5056 zeslami@tamu.edu samantha curle the university of bath, united kingdom https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3790-8656 samanthamcurle@gmail.com kiyana zhaleh allameh tabataba’i university, tehran, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0918-5246 k_zhaleh97@atu.ac.ir abstract to expand the literature on the rather new concept of student burnout, the present study examined the influence of teacher immediacy and stroke variables on english as a foreign language (efl) students’ experience of burnout. to fulfill this aim, a group of 631 undergraduate efl students from various universities in iran answered questionnaires including the immediacy behavior scale, the student stroke scale, and the maslach burnout inventory-student ali derakhshan, zohreh r. eslami, samantha curle, kiyana zhaleh 88 survey. the results of confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) of immediacy and burnout scales demonstrated the validity of the two scales in the iranian efl context. subsequently, pearson multiple correlation coefficients and structural equation modeling (sem) were used to analyze the data. it was found that student burnout subscales negatively and significantly correlated with teacher immediacy and stroke subscales. moreover, the results indicated that teacher immediacy and stroke variables, in combination with their subscales, could predict student burnout. on the whole, it can be concluded that teacher immediacy and stroke concepts, characterized as positive teacher interpersonal communication behaviors enhancing rapport and positive interaction between the teacher and students in efl contexts, are potential preventers of negative student-related outcomes such as burnout. keywords: english as a foreign language; positive interpersonal communication; student burnout; teacher immediacy; teacher stroke 1. introduction many years of research in instructional communication have recurrently confirmed the influential role that instructor positive communication behaviors and instructor-student relationships play in student academic outcomes (frymier et al., 2019; xie & derakhshan, 2021), including student engagement, learning, motivation, class attendance, learning loss, anxiety, and burnout (houser & hosek, 2018). effective instructor-student relationships bring about classroom vitality and are an essential aspect of classroom climate (pishghadam et al., 2021), for which neither the instructor nor the student is individually responsible (delos reyes & torio, 2020). the importance of favorable instructor-student relationships and interactions is even more highlighted in the english as a foreign language (efl) context, where students typically do not receive the target language (tl) input outside the confines of the classroom (pishghadam et al., 2021), and classes are more relationship-based (mercer & dörnyei, 2020). the tl knowledge is normally learned and used through various modes of communication since language learning is essentially social (mercer & gkonou, 2020). thus, interactions that occur in second or foreign language (l2) classrooms play a crucial part in increasing students’ tl acquisition (wang et al., 2019), and engagement (mercer & dörnyei, 2020), as well as decreasing their anxiety (ballester, 2015) and burnout (gholamrezaee & ghanizadeh, 2018). in this regard, ballester (2015) argues that positive interactions between efl students and the teacher facilitate l2 learning and allow them to display their true characteristics and talents. following the recent flowering of positive exploring the predictive role of teacher immediacy and stroke behaviors in english as a foreign . . . 89 psychology in sla (mercer et al., 2018; wang et al., 2021), it is posited that positive emotions, arising from positive teacher-student relationships and pleasant classroom environments, are among the most important contributors to successful l2 teaching and learning (dewaele et al., 2019; joe et al., 2017). positive class atmosphere, teacher understanding, attention to and recognition of students, and teacher positive attitudes and care toward students promote high quality of teacher-student relationships (li et al., 2018; xie & derakhshan, 2021). these factors also contribute to fulfilling l2 students’ need for emotional support and fostering an enjoyable l2 learning environment (khajavy et al., 2018; pavelescu & petrić, 2018). they can also prevent undesirable student academic outcomes such as burnout (cakir, 2015). care, humor, clarity, and immediacy are all instances of positive teacher communication behaviors that facilitate students’ perceived understanding of the instructor and enable teachers to achieve their instructional goals. through using these communication behaviors, teachers can empower learners to engage with the course content and the teacher, and finally learn (finn & schrodt, 2012; mercer & dörnyei, 2020; myers et al., 2018; xie & derakhshan, 2021). two of such positive teacher interpersonal variables examined in the present study are teacher immediacy and stroke, both found to enhance the experience of students’ pleasant academic outcomes and mitigate the occurrence of unfavorable ones such as burnout (e.g, derakhshan, 2021; gholamrezaee & ghanizadeh, 2018; pishghadam & khajavy, 2014). teacher immediacy and teacher stroke are respectively defined as psychological and physical proximity of individuals (richmond, 2002) and any action taken to appreciate another person’s worth and presence (shirai, 2006). xie and derakhshan (2021) called on researchers worldwide to shift their long-held focus from studying teacher interpersonal communication behaviors like immediacy in the american context to other dissimilar and less-investigated cultures. such studies help better understand the functioning of teacher interpersonal communication behaviors and expand the scant literature on the fledgling line of culture-centered instructional communication research. to address this issue, the present research project replicates previous studies in the immediacy literature, which have demonstrated the influential role of teacher immediacy behaviors in students’ response variables in non-iranian cultures (e.g., estepp & roberts, 2015; finn & schrodt, 2012; kelly et al., 2015; violanti et al., 2018). in this study, we replicate them in the iranian university efl context by exploring the role of teacher immediacy behaviors in students’ experiences of academic burnout. furthermore, in the present study, we added teacher stroke, which is conceptualized by pishghadam and khajavay (2014) and pishghadam et al. (2015) as a sub-component of teacher care and is a new and underresearched teacher instructional behavior variable, to this relationship by drawing ali derakhshan, zohreh r. eslami, samantha curle, kiyana zhaleh 90 on the rhetorical/relational goal theory (mottet et al., 2006) the previous empirical studies (e.g., finn & schrodt, 2012; violanti et al., 2018) which support the argument that different teacher communication behaviors (e.g., immediacy and stroke) can interact to impact students’ response variables. 2. literature review 2.1. student burnout freudenberger (1974) conceptualized the notion of burnout as a negative occupational state being prevalent among and restricted to those individuals working in the service industries (maslach & schaufeli, 1993). following its emergence, the most widely accepted definition of burnout as a multi-faceted concept was proposed by maslach and jackson (1984), which included the dimensions of reduced personal accomplishment, emotional exhaustion, and cynicism. burnout is typically measured through the maslach burnout inventory (mbi) (maslach & jackson, 1981). the scale originally focused only on employees that needed to interface with other people in the service industry. however, recently, due to a broader conceptualization of burnout, maslach et al. (2001) extended this phenomenon to any type of profession, invalidating the previous belief that burnout is only experienced by people who interact with other people in their day-to-day work. the mbi-general survey was therefore developed, making it possible to examine burnout across various jobs and occupations (schaufeli et al., 1996). later it was found that burnout is also experienced by students within higher education settings. students’ day-to-day academic responsibilities may be considered to be work, and therefore, the meaning of burnout was redefined (schaufeli & taris, 2005). student burnout is characterized by feelings of exhaustion resulting from high levels of study demands, feelings of incompetence and inefficiency as a higher education student, and being detached from (and cynical towards) one’s studies. the mbi-general survey was then adapted and revalidated (schaufeli et al., 2002) to create a unique instrument measuring university students’ burnout named the mbi-student survey. since 2005, a number of factors have been identified that can be triggered by burnout, namely decreased emotional intelligence (roohani & esmailvandi, 2016), assignment overload, teacher behavior and attitude, and lack of motivation (cushman & west, 2006). teacher interpersonal behaviors were also found to prevent students’ experience of burnout (cushman & west, 2006). numerous studies have demonstrated the crucial role that teachers play in the academic experience and performance of their students in both general education and language education (e.g., mercer & gkonou, 2020; pishghadam al., 2019). despite exploring the predictive role of teacher immediacy and stroke behaviors in english as a foreign . . . 91 these significant findings, a noticeable gap exists in this research area. except for cushman and west’s (2006) study of teacher behaviors and attitudes along with two other studies of teacher immediacy in relation to student burnout (cakir, 2015; gholamrezaee & ghanizadeh, 2018), no studies have explored the effect of positive teacher communication behaviors on students’ level of burnout. gholamrezaee and ghanizadeh (2018) examined whether instructor verbal and non-verbal immediacy behaviors affected 206 iranian efl students’ cognitive learning, emotional state, and the emotional exhaustion dimension of student burnout. the results indicated that (non)verbal immediacy cues significantly influenced student-related factors of self-esteem, cognitive learning, selfactualization, burnout, and stress tolerance. instructor (non)verbal immediacy negatively affected efl learners’ emotional exhaustion experience. the authors interpreted this finding by suggesting that when efl teachers praise students’ efforts, are available for them before or after class, are fun, and communicate with them outside class, students are less inclined to become emotionally exhausted. these results are in line with the findings of another study by cakir (2015), who attempted to examine the influences of teacher immediacy and student burnout variables on 329 turkish pre-service instructors’ empowerment and resistance. immediacy correlated significantly negatively with reduced personal accomplishment, emotional exhaustion, and cynicism. drawing on the existing empirical evidence, the present study, therefore, makes an original contribution to knowledge in the field of english language teaching and learning by filling this gap in the research literature. 2.2. teacher immediacy as indicated by gabryś-barker (2016), instructors employ positive interpersonal behaviors such as immediacy to accomplish various goals. such behaviors include building teacher-student rapport, creating an enjoyable language learning environment, and communicating instructional learning goals (finn & schrodt, 2012; pavelescu & petrić, 2018). positive teacher interpersonal behaviors in the classroom directly influence l2 learners’ academic experiences and gains (li et al., 2018; xie & derakhshan, 2021). as one of such interpersonal behaviors, immediacy, originally introduced by mehrabian (1969), pertains to the extent of psychological or physical proximity between individuals (richmond, 2002), including the verbal and non-verbal channels through which immediate behaviors are assessed. accordingly, in educational research, immediacy concerns the extent to which the teacher and students’ relationship is close. to promote student-teacher rapport and closeness, teachers may “give” various immediacy cues to their students (delos reyes & torio, 2020; derakhshan, 2021). verbal ali derakhshan, zohreh r. eslami, samantha curle, kiyana zhaleh 92 teacher immediacy cues can be defined as “verbal messages that show empathy, openness, kindness, praise, feelings of inclusiveness, and willingness to engage students in communication, among others” (ballester, 2015, p.10). such verbal cues include having a sense of humor, promoting discussion, being accessible to students outside the class, and praising students’ efforts (gorham, 1988). on the other hand, non-verbal immediacy cues refer to non-verbal communicative behaviors that enhance the physical and affective proximity of teachers and students. this, in turn, promotes students’ engagement with their studies, the course content, and the teacher (derakhshan, 2021). examples of teacher non-verbal immediacy behaviors are appropriate touching, nods, relaxed body posture, eye contact, smiling, humor, and vocal and facial expressions (richmond et al., 1987). as asserted in the literature (e.g., kelly & gaytan, 2020; kelly, rice, et al., 2015; violanti et al., 2018), teacher immediate behaviors are unique to cultures. gregersen (2010) explains this culturally bounded nature of teacher immediacy behaviors by stating that psychological and physical closeness (i.e., immediacy) is defined, accepted, and enacted differently in different cultures. teacher immediacy has received unparalleled attention from researchers in comparison to other teacher interpersonal communication behaviors (e.g., derakhshan, 2021; frymier et al., 2019; kelly & gaytan, 2020) since its emergence. kelly et al. (2015), kelly and gaytan (2020), and violanti et al.’s (2018) studies investigated perceived immediacy in addition to instructor immediate behaviors. as overviewed in these studies, teacher immediate behaviors are unique to cultures. however, perceived immediacy, the change in perceived closeness because of those immediate behaviors, is a variable that pertains to all humans. they found that perceived immediacy mediates the relationships between instructor immediate behaviors and students’ responses to those behaviors. moreover, verbal and non-verbal teacher immediacy cues were found to foster students’ understanding (finn & schrodt, 2012), affective and cognitive learning (violanti et al., 2018), academic motivation (estepp & roberts, 2015; frymier et al., 2019), engagement (derakhshan, 2021; dixson et al., 2017), willingness to communicate in english (sheybani, 2019), empowerment (finn & schrodt, 2012), and communication self-confidence in english (fallah, 2014). such research findings can be accounted for in terms of the rhetorical/relational goal theory (frymier et al. 2019; mottet et al., 2006), which posits that students’ and instructors’ goals interact, and instructors employ positive communication behaviors, such as immediacy, to satisfy students’ academic goals and wants including motivation, learning, engagement, and empowerment (houser & hosek, 2018). thus, when instructors employ appropriate (non)verbal communication behaviors like immediacy, care, or clarity, positive instructional outcomes exploring the predictive role of teacher immediacy and stroke behaviors in english as a foreign . . . 93 increase and negative academic outcomes are reduced (finn & schrodt, 2012; myers et al., 2018). student burnout is one such negative outcome negatively associated with teachers’ employment of (non)verbal immediacy cues (cakir, 2015; gholamrezaee & ghanizadeh, 2018). mazer (2013) also developed a model positing that, when mediated by teacher emotional and cognitive interest, teacher immediacy predicts student engagement, which is the positive counterpart of student burnout. teacher immediacy behaviors have been reported to mitigate students’ level of pressure, amount of learning loss, l2 anxiety (ballester, 2015), classroom and quantitative reasoning anxiety (kelly et al., 2015), and academic burnout (cakir, 2015; gholamrezaee & ghanizadeh, 2018). thus, it seems that instructors’ employment of (non)verbal immediacy cues can potentially prevent students’ academic burnout experience in view of the increase in the psychological closeness which is likely to follow. 2.3. teacher stroke one of the approaches shedding light on the nature and promotion of positive relationships between individuals is eric berne’s transactional analysis (ta), which is defined as “a theory of personality and a systematic psychotherapy for personal growth and personal change” (stewart & joines, 1987, p. 3). the argument is that when applied in educational settings, ta can facilitate effective teacher-student communication and prevent the occurrence of ineffective confrontations (stewart & joines, 1987). a noteworthy concept within ta theory, with clear relevance to education, is stroke (berne, 1988). stroke is considered to be any action taken to appreciate another person’s worth and presence (shirai, 2006) or simply put the “unit of recognition” (stewart & joines, 1987, p. 72). according to stewart and joines (1987), “any kind of stroke is better than no stroke at all” (p. 73), and when positive strokes are not received, negative strokes are sought. strokes are constantly and unconsciously given and received by individuals. in any stroke exchange, the person who gives strokes is named the stroker, and the one who receives strokes is called the strokee. individuals can, however, exchange their roles as the stroker and strokee in any interaction (pishghadam & farkhondehfal, 2017). strokes are categorized based on whether they are positive or negative, conditional or unconditional, and verbal or nonverbal (stewart & joines, 1987). positive strokes are perceived by the receiver to be satisfactory and pleasing, whereas negative strokes are perceived to be undesirable. unconditional strokes pertain to what people are, whereas conditional strokes relate to what people do. finally, verbal strokes are utterances that may be as short as saying “hello” or may be as long as a conversation (steward & joines, 1987). in l2 instruction and learning environments, the stroker ali derakhshan, zohreh r. eslami, samantha curle, kiyana zhaleh 94 (i.e., the teacher) can satisfy the need of the strokees (i.e., the students) to be noticed through giving stroking cues such as smiling, praising, making eye contact, encouraging, and calling out names (irajzad et al., 2017). according to freedman (1993), teacher stroke can result in students’ academic success as learners tend to perform better in stroke-rich situations. based on the review of the instructional communication literature, it can be stated that teacher immediacy, stroke, and confirmation are three distinct but similar instances of teacher positive interpersonal communication behaviors. regarding their similarities, first, teacher stroke, immediacy, and confirmation are crucial interpersonal cues facilitating positive interactions and rapport between an instructor and students (derakhshan, 2021; johnson & labelle, 2020; pishghadam, derakhshan, et al., 2021; pishghadam & khajavy, 2014); and, second, immediacy, stroke, and confirmation concepts all involve verbal and non-verbal communication aspects of the teacher-student relationship, including behaviors such as smiling, making eye contact, and having a sense of humor (ellis, 2000; frymier et al., 2019; irajzad & shahriari, 2017). such teacher relational behaviors tend to be positively related to each other (myers et al., 2014). however, it should be noted that teacher stroke is distinct from both teacher immediacy and confirmation in that while stroke refers to teacher cues that satisfy students’ innate emotional hunger for recognition and acknowledgment (berne, 1988), immediacy refers to the degree to which the teacher and students’ relationship is close (richmond, 2002), and confirmation pertains to teachers’ communicative attempts to convey to students that they are valuable (ellis, 2000). moreover, pishghadam and khajavy (2014) and pishghadam et al. (2015) conceptualized stroke as a sub-component of teacher care. all in all, according to the rhetorical/relational goal theory, most of the teachers’ communication behaviors can potentially address the relational and rhetorical goals of teachers and the needs of students (houser & hosek, 2018; mottet et al., 2006; myers et al., 2018). thus, in this study, it is argued that teacher stroke, which is a sub-component of teacher care, plays a complementary role to teacher (non)verbal immediacy to facilitate students’ positive outcomes and prevent the occurrence of negative experiences such as academic burnout. in contrast to teacher immediacy, which has been extensively studied within the educational context (see kelly & gaytan, 2020), there is a dearth of research on teacher stroke. the few studies focusing on the concept of stroke have been mostly limited to the efl (hosseini, 2016; irajzad, pishghadam, et al., 2017; irajzad & shahriari, 2017; namaghi, 2016; noorbakhsh et al., 2018; pishghadam et al., 2019; pishghadam et al., 2021; yazdan pour, 2015). additionally, most of these studies have been motivated by the design and development of the student stroke scale in the iranian efl university context (pishghadam & khajavy, 2014). teachers’ stroke has been associated with l2 students’ academic success (freedman, 1993), motivation exploring the predictive role of teacher immediacy and stroke behaviors in english as a foreign . . . 95 (pishghadam & khajavy, 2014), l2 learning, willingness to attend english classes (pishghadam et al., 2021), and socioeconomic status (irajzad & shahriari, 2017). in this study, we examined the predictability of student burnout through both teacher stroke and immediacy based on the additivity hypothesis (comadena et al., 2007) which posits that the positive main effect of teacher immediacy can be combined with those of other positive instructional behaviors to develop an ideal learning environment for learners. thus, it is hypothesized that teacher stroke behaviors can complement teacher verbal and non-verbal immediacy behaviors to mitigate iranian university efl students’ academic burnout experiences. since positive teacher communication behaviors (e.g., stroke and immediacy) can facilitate desirable student academic outcomes, it is expected that these behaviors may potentially mitigate undesirable student experiences such as burnout. all in all, based on what was mentioned so far, we posed three hypotheses in this study (see figure 1): h1: instructor (non)verbal immediacy cues negatively predict iranian efl students’ burnout experience. h2: iranian efl teachers’ stroke behaviors correlate positively and significantly with their (non)verbal immediacy behaviors. h3: teacher stroke behaviors negatively predict iranian efl students’ academic burnout. figure 1 the hypothesized model of teacher stroke, teacher immediacy, and student burnout 3. methodology 3.1. participants based on a convenience sampling procedure, 631 participants responded to the scales. they were undergraduate students of teaching english as a foreign language ali derakhshan, zohreh r. eslami, samantha curle, kiyana zhaleh 96 (tefl), english translation, or english language and literature studying at diverse universities in iran. regarding their context, they were from different provinces of iran, such as golestan, mazandaran, tehran, qazvin, and khorasan. the sample comprised 183 male and 470 female participants. the participants’ age ranged from 18 to 40. the participants also differed in their undergraduate status, as they were freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors in the sample. the students were from different self-perceived english language proficiency levels ranging from intermediate, advanced, to fluent speakers of english. the reason for choosing the participants from universities located in various parts of iran, different age groups, levels of proficiency, gender, and undergraduate status was to increase the extrapolation of the present study findings to the statistical population of iranian efl undergraduate students. 3.2. research instruments 3.2.1. immediacy behavior scale for the development of the immediacy behavior scale, gorham (1988) added 20 items related to verbal teacher immediacy to the 14-item nonverbal immediacy scale (richmond et al., 1987). this scale, developed and validated with a group of american undergraduate communication students, consisted of 34 items, the responses to which can range from 0 (“never”) to 4 (“very often”). these items described various examples of teachers’ verbal immediacy cues (e.g., item 2: “my teacher asks questions or encourages students to talk;” item 4: “my teacher uses humor in class”) and nonverbal immediacy cues (e.g., item 24: “my teacher looks at class while talking;” item 33: “my teacher smiles at individual students in the class”). the learners were required to rate how frequently one of their english university teachers, with whom they had class at the time of completing the scale, showed these communication behaviors toward them. items 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 23, 26, 29, 30, and 31 were marked as nonimmediate for which reverse scoring was done during data analysis. furthermore, item 27, “touches students in the class,” was removed due to the socio-cultural values of the population of this study and because it was not suitable for this level of students. previous reliability estimates reported for the scale and its subscales ranged from .80 to .94 (gorham, 1988; richmond et al., 1987). to ensure the factor structure of the scale in the cultural context of the present study, confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) was run on the participants’ responses to this scale. 3.2.2. student stroke scale this scale was originally designed and validated with a group of iranian efl and non-efl university students (pishghadam & khajavy, 2014). the students were exploring the predictive role of teacher immediacy and stroke behaviors in english as a foreign . . . 97 asked to rate how frequently one of their english university teachers, with whom they had classes at the time of completing the scale, gave a stroke to them inside and outside the classroom. the scale contains 18 items measuring various kinds of stroke (i.e., negative, positive, non-verbal, and verbal strokes) on a 5-point likert scale which ranges from (1) “never” to (5) “always” (e.g., item 1: “my teacher smiles at me;” item 4: “my teacher pays attention to me;” item 9: “my teacher dedicates enough time to me in class”). the results of exploratory factor analysis and structural equation modelling (sem) in the original study revealed that the items of the scale loaded onto the four factors of valuing (4 items: 9, 10, 11, 12), non-verbal stroke (4 items: 1, 2, 3, 4), verbal stroke (6 items: 5, 6, 7, 8, 13, 17), and classroom activities (4 items: 14, 15, 16, 18). 3.2.3. maslach burnout inventory (mbi) student survey schaufeli et al. (2002) validated the student version of the mbi (maslach & jackson, 1981) with university students from the netherlands, spain, and portugal. it assesses higher education students’ level of academic burnout. the mbi student survey includes 15 items measuring the three subscales of cynicism (four items; e.g., item 2: “i have become less enthusiastic about my studies”), emotional exhaustion (five items; e.g., item 1: “i feel emotionally drained by my studies”), and professional efficacy (six items; e.g., item 4: “i feel stimulated when i achieve my study goals”). the responses range from from 0 (“never”) to 6 (“always”). furthermore, cfa was run to ensure fitness of the present study data to this scale in the iranian efl university context. table 1 presents means, standard deviations, and alpha reliability for all measures. table 1 means, standard deviations, and alpha reliability for all measures mean (sd) cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficients teacher immediacy 72.960 (12.165) .79 verbal immediacy 41.820 (9.113) .73 non-verbal immediacy 31.139 (5.795) .77 teacher stroke 51.297 (13.422) .91 valuing 10.412 (3.922) .92 classroom activities 13.500 (3.803) .89 non-verbal stroke 10.568 (3.025) .83 verbal stroke 16.816 (5.030) .87 student burnout 29.920 (17.576) .91 exhaustion 10.497 (7.799) .91 cynicism 6.451 (6.731) .92 reduced professional efficacy 12.971 (7.167) .84 ali derakhshan, zohreh r. eslami, samantha curle, kiyana zhaleh 98 3.3. procedures of data collection and analysis before gathering the data, the general aim of the study and specific instructions for filling out the questionnaires were presented to the students. informed consent to participate in this study was also obtained. the participants were assured regarding the confidentiality of the data they provided to the researchers. the three questionnaires concerning immediacy, stroke, and burnout were prepared consecutively in a single google form as a composite questionnaire. then, the link to the questionnaire was sent to the participants via email. the participants were supposed to click on the invitation link to complete the questionnaires. first, the students were required to rate one of their english language university professors with regard to the frequency of his/her immediacy and stroke behaviors, and then, to rate their own level of academic burnout. initially, to check whether the data approved the normality assumption or not, the kolmogorov-smirnov test was run (see table 2). it is argued that when the p value is larger than .05, the normality assumption is confirmed. according to table 2, it is obvious that data pertaining to immediacy (p = .08), burnout (p = .11), and stroke (p = .06) are all distributed normally. to check the validity of the immediacy and burnout scales, cfa was employed utilizing the 24th version of amos. furthermore, pearson multiple correlation coefficients were obtained through running the 24th version of spss. finally, to examine the hypothesized predictive linkages in figure 1, sem was utilized using amos (version 24). because of the “sensitivity of large sample sizes in the chi-squared statistics” (finn & schrodt, 2012, p. 120), comparative fit index (cfi), the good fit index (gfi), normed fit index (nfi), root mean square error of approximation (rmsea), and chi-square divided by the degrees of freedom (χ2/df) were checked for assessing the model-to-data fit. table 2 the results of kolmogorov-smirnov test statistic df sig. teacher immediacy .05 631 .08 student burnout .04 631 .11 teacher stroke .06 631 .06 4. results 4.1. confirmatory factor analyses the results of cfa of the teacher immediacy scale are displayed in figure 2. this inventory has two sub-factors: verbal and non-verbal immediacy. goodness of exploring the predictive role of teacher immediacy and stroke behaviors in english as a foreign . . . 99 fit indices were checked to examine the model fit to the data. because some measurement models did not show adequacy to the data, the researchers made some modifications to the model. these modifications included the removal of two nonverbal immediacy items (item 21: “sits behind desk while teaching” and item 28 “moves around the classroom while teaching”) due to low loadings (below 0.3). according to hair jr et al. (2009, p. 16), for samples larger than 350, loadings below 0.3 would be non-significant and must be removed as they endanger convergent validity. therefore, 31 items remained in the last draft of the questionnaire (see appendix a). loadings of the verbal immediacy, with 20 items ranged from .34 to .63, and loadings of the non-verbal immediacy, with 11 items, ranged from .32 to .62. the goodness of fit indices before and after modification are presented in table 3. it demonstrates that all the goodness of fit indices is within the acceptable range, thus proving that the instrument has acceptable validity after modification, and the expected two-factor structure of the scale fitted to the data of the sample. figure 2 cfa model of the teacher immediacy scale table 3 goodness of fit indices for the teacher immediacy scale x2/df gfi cfi rmsea acceptable fit <3 >.90 >.90 <.08 model 3.04 .89 .88 .08 revised model 2.97 .92 .91 .07 ali derakhshan, zohreh r. eslami, samantha curle, kiyana zhaleh 100 to assess the validity of the burnout inventory, cfa was used. accordingly, the linkages between the three sub-constructs of the scale were estimated, and the results are presented in figure 3. this instrument has three sub-factors: exhaustion, cynicism, and professional efficacy. scores of professional efficacy were reversed for the analysis of data, and therefore it assesses professional inefficacy. loadings of the exhaustion factor with five items ranged from .75 to .88, loadings of the cynicism factor with four items ranged from .79 to .94, and, finally, loadings of the professional inefficacy factor with six items ranged from .49 to .88. goodness of fit indices were employed to assess the model-to-data fit, as presented in table 4. it shows that all the goodness of fit indices is within the acceptable range. thus, the instrument enjoyed acceptable validity in the iranian efl context (see appendix b). figure 3 cfa model of the student burnout scale table 4 goodness of fit indices for the student burnout scale x2/df gfi cfi rmsea acceptable fit <3 >.90 >.90 <.08 model 2.52 .97 .93 .06 4.2. correlational analysis to examine the associative linkages among stroke, immediacy, and burnout subscales, pearson multiple correlation coefficients were calculated. the data met all the assumptions for this analysis. there were no missing data. table 5 provides the correlations between immediacy, stroke, and burnout subscales. accordingly, exploring the predictive role of teacher immediacy and stroke behaviors in english as a foreign . . . 101 the emotional exhaustion, reduced professional efficacy, and cynicism subscales of student burnout negatively and significantly correlated with verbal and non-verbal immediacy subscales (ranging from r = -.089 to -.282) these results represent small effect sizes, according to plonsky and oswald (2014), as the variance accounted for ranged from 0.7% to 8%. reduced professional efficacy correlated negatively and significantly with all stroke subscales (ranging from r = -.254 to -.433). among these subscales, verbal (r = -.254) and non-verbal (r = -.372) strokes accounted for 6.5% and 13.8% of the variability, respectively, representing small effect sizes. however, valuing (r = -.411) and classroom activities (r = -.433) signified medium effect sizes by explaining 16.9% and 18.8% of the variability, observed respectively. cynicism significantly and negatively correlated with valuing (r = -.143, representing small effect size, with 2.1.% of the variance being accounted for) and class activities (r = .198, representing a small effect size, with 3.9% of the variance being explained) subscales of stroke. emotional exhaustion negatively correlated with valuing (r = .204, representing a small effect size, with 4.2% of the variance being explained) and class activities (r = -.213, representing a small effect size, with 4.5% of the variability being accounted for) subscales. there were positive significant relationships between all subscales of stroke and immediacy. in the case of non-verbal immediacy, the effect sizes were small and the variabilities explained by all subscales of stroke ranged from 5.7% to 11.4%. this was also the case for verbal immediacy and classroom activity (11.6% of the variability explained) whereas the other three subscales of stroke and verbal immediacy had correlations with medium effect sizes (16.3% to 21.9% of the variance accounted for). table 5 correlations of teacher immediacy, stroke, and student burnout subscales subscale nvi vi e c rpe vs nvs v ca non-verbal immediacy (nvi) 1.00*** verbal immediacy (vi) .297** 1.00*** exhaustion (e) -.156** -.148** 1.00*** cynicism (c) -.137** -.089** .714** 1.00*** reduced professional efficacy (rpe) -.144** -.282** .376** .356** 1.00*** verbal stroke (vs) .239** .445** -.075** -.035** -.372** 1.00*** non-verbal stroke (nvs) .338** .404** -.020** -.071** -.254** .639** 1.00*** valuing (v) .300** .468** -.204** -.143** -.411** .666** .527** 1.00*** classroom activities (ca) .270** .341** -.213** -.198** -.433** .699** .482** .663** 1.00 note. ** correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). * correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). correlations indicate effect sizes via their absolute values (cohen, 1992). 4.3. sem analysis to assess whether the proposed model fit the data of this study, fit indices of root mean square error of approximation (rmsea ), comparative fit index (cfi), normed fit ali derakhshan, zohreh r. eslami, samantha curle, kiyana zhaleh 102 index (nfi), good fit index (gfi), and chi-square divided by the degrees of freedom (χ2/df) were calculated. as stated by hu and bentler (1999), to achieve the model-todata fit, rmsea must be lower than .08, cfi, and nfi cut values must be larger than .90, and χ2/df must not be above 3, and gfi must be larger than .90. according to table 6, in this study, a good fit between the model and the data was revealed (i.e., chi-square/df ratio (2.14), gfi (.92), cfi (.93), nfi (.91), and rmsea (.07)). table 6 goodness of fit indices for the proposed model rmsea nfi cfi gfi x2/df acceptable fit <.08 >.90 >.90 >.90 <3 model .07 .91 .93 .92 2.14 subsequently, the standardized estimates were calculated to investigate the strengths of the predictive relations among the variables. figure 4 shows the finalized sem model of the interrelationships between immediacy, stroke, and burnout. as indicated in table 5 and figure 4, the findings supported all three hypotheses of this study. teacher immediacy behaviors (β = -.20, p < .05) are negative significant predictors of burnout (h1 supported). teacher stroke behaviors (β = -.27, p < .05) negatively predict burnout (h3 supported). finally, stroke was associated significantly, positively with teacher immediacy (β = .52, p < .05) (h2 supported). figure 4 the finalized sem model of teacher immediacy and stroke as predictors of efl students’ burnout. all parameter estimates are standardized exploring the predictive role of teacher immediacy and stroke behaviors in english as a foreign . . . 103 5. discussion the current replication study sought to discover whether there would be associative/predictive relationships between teacher immediacy, stroke, and efl students’ burnout. to this aim, a hypothesized model of stroke, immediacy, and burnout was proposed including three research hypotheses. cfa was first run on the data to check if the scales were characterized by acceptable psychometric properties in the iranian context. regarding the immediacy scale, with the omission of two items, the model-to-data fit was reached. however, the burnout scale showed acceptable validity without the necessity of any modification. subsequently, the correlation results showed that non-verbal immediacy was significantly and negatively linked to cynicism, exhaustion, and personal inefficacy subscales of burnout, while verbal immediacy was negatively associated with exhaustion and personal inefficacy. this finding is in line with previous empirical studies (kelly & gaytan, 2020; mercer & dörnyei, 2020; violanti et al., 2018), showing that positive teacher interpersonal behaviors of verbal and non-verbal immediacy foster the creation of a favorable learning environment, which reduces students’ experience of burnout. from a theoretical perspective, the current study lends further credence to rhetorical/relational goal theory (houser & hosek, 2018), which posits that instructors’ employment of positive teacher interpersonal behaviors, such as (non)verbal immediacy as well as stroking cues, which is a sub-component of teacher care (myers et al., 2018), helps fulfill students’ personal and academic needs. when students’ needs are satisfied, their experience of burnout is mitigated. the negative association of burnout and immediacy subscales in this study can also be justified by explaining that language teaching is an emotionally demanding task, necessitating language teachers’ interpersonal and emotional understanding of students (golombek & doran, 2014). these results are also in congruence with the study of cakir (2015), finding a reverse association between student burnout and teacher immediacy. gholamrezaee and ghanizadeh (2018) also reported that efl teachers’ immediacy is negatively associated with their students’ burnout. they justified this finding by stating that when efl teachers praise students’ efforts, are available for them before or after class, are engaging, and effectively communicate with students, students are less inclined to become emotionally exhausted. moreover, when there is a positive, caring relationship between efl students and teachers, students’ l2 enjoyment, l2 proficiency, willingness to communicate, and performance are enhanced (gabryś-barker, 2016; khajavy et al., 2018). given that teacher immediacy behaviors contribute to students’ understanding (finn & schrodt, 2012), learning (frymier et al., 2019; violanti et al., ali derakhshan, zohreh r. eslami, samantha curle, kiyana zhaleh 104 2018), willingness to communicate in english (sheybani, 2019), engagement (dixson et al., 2017), and motivation (estepp & roberts, 2015), it is logical to assume that, as mentioned in the first hypothesis of this study, teacher immediacy can also reduce student burnout. the results have now provided empirical evidence for this hypothesis. results of correlational analyses also showed positive significant relationships between all subscales of stroke and immediacy. thus, these findings confirmed the second hypothesis of the study. the findings also supported myers et al.’s (2014) argument that teacher relational behaviors tend to be positively related to each other. additionally, the correlation between stroke and efl student burnout subscales revealed that the burnout subscales were negatively related to stroke and most of its subscales (i.e., the more teachers stroked students, the less students experienced burnout). in other words, when a student’s hunger for recognition is appeased by the teacher in the instructional context, she/he feels more engaged (derakhshan, 2021) and is less prone to burnout. particularly, when teachers provide both verbal and non-verbal strokes, students felt more of a sense of personal accomplishment. the valuing subscale of stroke correlated negatively with emotional exhaustion and personal inefficacy. these results are in line with those of yazdan pour’s (2015) study, which reported that teacher stroking behaviors negatively relate to efl teachers’ experience of burnout. although it is recognized that yazdan pour’s study was concerned with teacher burnout, this state can be experienced by both teachers and learners. therefore, the results of the present study, in conjunction with those of yazdan pour’s (2015), lead to the conclusion that teacher stroking behaviors can mitigate the experience of academic burnout both by efl teachers and learners. this is also in line with ta theory as berne (1988) argued that when teachers give strokes to their learners, they satisfy those learners’ need for recognition. this, in turn, promotes students’ positive perceptions that their teacher is credible and effective (pishghadam & karami, 2017; pishghadam, derakhshan, zhaleh, 2019; pishghadam, derakhshan, zhaleh, al-obaydi, 2021). when such positive perceptions toward the teacher are constructed, it is possible, as found in the present study, that students become less prone to burnout. examining the predictability of students’ level of burnout by teacher immediacy and teacher stroke, sem analysis indicated that both teacher immediacy and stroke were influential in efl students’ burnout. thus, the results confirmed the first and third hypotheses of the study. the findings also corroborated and extended previous research on the mitigating role of positive instructor communication behaviors in students’ experience of academic burnout. with regard to teacher immediacy (both verbal and non-verbal cues), these results were the same as the ones found in gholamrezaee and ghanizadeh’s (2018) study. cushman and west (2006) also reported similar findings, concluding that exploring the predictive role of teacher immediacy and stroke behaviors in english as a foreign . . . 105 negative teacher attitudes and behaviors (the opposite of teacher immediacy) are contributing factors to students’ experience of burnout. teachers who use immediacy behaviors are more prone to advance students’ engagement, motivation, and finally, fullest potential (delos reyes & torio, 2020; derakhshan, 2021; dixson et al., 2017; estepp & roberts, 2015), thus prospectively mitigating students’ level of burnout. these results are also in congruence with other studies that have reported that teacher immediacy can decrease students’ level of academic pressure and quantitative reasoning anxiety, aspects related to student academic burnout (ballester, 2015; kelly et al., 2015). overall, all the results of the current study provided empirical support for the hypothesized model (see figure 1). while recognizing the value of these results, the current study is not without limitations. these results were obtained through data collected only from efl university students. moreover, it should be noted that although sem takes into account the measurement errors for each component, and by doing so, it is a more accurate measure compared to traditional regression analyses, it does not account for the measurement error of the extraneous variables (in our case, stroke and immediacy) as a whole. nevertheless, the model fit measures show that the results have high generalizability power, despite the possible unaccounted errors. similarly, it should be acknowledged that the teacher immediacy scale used in this study was rather dated. however, we employed this scale based on this rationale that despite its early origin, it is still used as a valid and reliable measure by researchers in the general and language education domains (ballester, 2015; fallah, 2014; finn & schrodt, 2012; gholamrezaee & ghanizadeh, 2018). to ensure its applicability to the context of the present study, we conducted a cfa with a large sample from the iranian university efl students’ population, which after modifying the original 34-items immediacy scale to a 31-items one, demonstrated its good psychometric properties of validity and reliability in our context. in the present study, we only looked at measures of noted behavioral frequency rather than the perceptual change due to perceiving those behaviors. moreover, we hypothesized, measured, and reported both verbal and non-verbal immediacy. it should be mentioned, however, that the verbal immediacy scale used in this study might measure perceived effective teaching, but not verbal immediacy. 6. conclusion, implications and directions for future research the conclusion based on the findings of this study is that effective efl teacher communication behaviors that promote positive teacher-student interactions and good rapport have the potential to prevent the occurrence of efl students’ academic burnout. these results may therefore be beneficial to preand in-service ali derakhshan, zohreh r. eslami, samantha curle, kiyana zhaleh 106 efl instructors as well as efl teacher educators. these stakeholders can identify teacher behavioral characteristics that contribute to increasing students’ level of burnout and take appropriate actions to mitigate replicating such behaviors. this study indicates possible behaviors that may reduce the rate of burnout experienced by students. decreased burnout is likely to have positive effects on students’ academic outcomes. as gourneau (2005, p. 1) states, “effective attitudes and actions employed by teachers can ultimately make positive differences in the lives of their students.” thus, practically, as two instances of positive teacher communication-relational behaviors, teacher immediacy and stroke can be explicitly taught to preor in-service efl teachers as encouraging behaviors to foster good practices. these behaviors include building a good rapport, paying attention to students, making eye contact, promoting in-class discussion, praising student achievements, having a sense of humor, smiling, calling out names, and nodding. this would then facilitate effective discussions and quality interactions between the teacher and students inside and outside the lecture hall environment, thereby leading to students’ experiencing less burnout. to replicate the present study, future research could examine immediacy, stroke, and burnout variables at the secondary or school level. alternatively, contexts such as the use of english to teach/learn academic subjects (englishmedium instruction, emi) could also be investigated. moreover, it might be hypothesized that a university teacher may lack the immediacy and/or stroke behaviors due to linguistic barriers; however, this assumption has yet to be explored. furthermore, how these communication behaviors affect not only student burnout but also student ‘success’ in emi would also be worth investigating (see xie & curle, 2020). similarly, future studies can use more recent immediacy scales that have more robust validity and measure verbal immediacy more directly. future investigations could also focus on samples chosen from other cultures and geopolitical contexts. future research may also take a more qualitative approach by using narrative journals, interviews, and diary writing to elicit further in-depth reflections from students on their perceptions and experiences. additionally, subsequent replication studies may focus on other potential teacher communication behaviors like instructor confirmation, classroom justice, humor, clarity, and credibility which may play a part in efl students’ level of burnout. finally, the small correlations found between the teacher immediacy measures and the student response variables as well as the patterns of fit in the present study leave room for a mediating variable and are consistent with all of the recent literature on perceived immediacy (e.g., kelly et al., 2015; kelly & gaytan, 2020; violanti et al., 2018). thus, we recommend that researchers consider the need for adding perceived immediacy as a mediator in the relationship of immediacy behaviors and student response variables in future studies. exploring the predictive role of teacher immediacy and stroke behaviors in english as a foreign . . . 107 acknowledgments this work was supported by golestan university under grant number 981945. the authors wish to thank golestan university for its support. they are also grateful for the insightful comments suggested by the editor and the anonymous reviewers. ali derakhshan, zohreh r. eslami, samantha curle, kiyana zhaleh 108 references ballester, e. p. 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(2015). constructing and validating a teacher stroke scale and examining its relationship with burnout [unpublished master’s thesis]. ferdowsi university of mashhad. ali derakhshan, zohreh r. eslami, samantha curle, kiyana zhaleh 114 appendix a modified immediacy behavior scale never (0) rarely (1) sometimes (2) often (3) very often (4) 1. uses personal examples or talks about experiences she/he has had outside of class. 2. asks questions or encourages students to talk. 3. gets into discussions based on something a student brings up even when this doesn’t seem to be part of his/her lecture plan. 4. uses humor in class. 5. addresses students by name. 6. addresses me by name. 7. gets into conversations with individual students before or after class. 8. has initiated conversations with me before, after or outside of class. 9. refers to class as “my” class or what “i” am doing. 10. refers to class as “our” class or what “we” are doing. 11. provides feedback on my individual work through comments on papers, oral discussions, etc. 12. calls on students to answer questions even if they have not indicated that they want to talk. 13. asks how students feel about an assignment, due date or discussion topic. 14. invites students to telephone or meet with him/her outside of class if they have questions or want to discuss something. 15. asks questions that have specific, correct answers. 16. asks questions that solicit viewpoints or opinions. 17. praises students’ work, actions or comments. 18. criticizes or points out faults in students’ work, actions or comments. 19. will have discussions about things unrelated to class with individual students or with the class as a whole. 20. is addressed by his/her first name by the students. 21. gestures while talking to class. 22. uses monotone/dull voice when talking to class. 23. looks at class while talking. 24. smiles at the class as a whole, not just individual students. 25. has a very tense body position while talking to the class. 26. sits on a desk or in a chair while teaching. 27. looks at the board or notes while talking to the class. 28. stands behind podium or desk while teaching. 29. has a very relaxed body position while talking to the class. 30. smiles at individual students in the class. 31. uses a variety of vocal expressions while talking to the class. exploring the predictive role of teacher immediacy and stroke behaviors in english as a foreign . . . 115 appendix b validated mbi student survey always (6) almost always (5) often (4) sometimes (3) rarely (2) almost never (1) never(0) exhaustion 1. i feel emotionally drained by my studies. 2. i feel used up at the end of a day at university. 3. i feel tired when i get up in the morning and i have to face another day at the university. 4. studying or attending a class is really a strain for me. 5. i feel burned out from my studies. cynicism 1. i have become less interested in my studies since my enrollment at the university. 2. i have become less enthusiastic about my studies. 3. i have become more cynical about the potential usefulness of my studies. 4. i doubt the significance of my studies. professional efficacy 1. i can effectively solve the problems that arise in my studies. 2. i believe that i make an effective contribution to the classes that i attend. 3. in my opinion, i am a good student. 4. i feel stimulated when i achieve my study goals. 5. i have learned many interesting things during the course of my studies. 6. during class i feel confident that i am effective in getting things done. 155 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (2). 155-157 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial with this volume, we propose to join the discussion on the role of affect in the process of second/foreign language learning. we hope to make a contribution to academic, and especially linguistic, research which has previously focused mostly on cognitive aspects of language acquisition but also, at its best, on the strategies (many of them affective ones) necessary for developing language competence. in our view, emotional factors do not deserve the role of “the cinderella of mental functions” (arnold & brown, 1999, p. 1), because the complex processes taking place in the brain originate in the interplay of affect and cognition (e.g., duncan & barrett, 2007; panksepp, 2003; paradis, 2004). consequently we cannot be fully understood without attending to our emotional profiles. like scovel (2000), we also believe that “the great irony is that they (i.e., emotions) could very well end up being the most influential force in language acquisition, but sla researchers have not even come close to demonstrating such a claim” (p. 140). for this reason, the present issue of studies in second language learning and teaching has brought together scholars in the field of second language acquisition for whom one of the major concerns is the affective dimension of the acquisition processes. it discusses affectivity and emotions from various and very diverse perspectives, from those of both the individual and the community. the description of the affective characteristics of young fl learners from developmental and contextual perspectives is the purpose of jelena mihaljevi djigunovi ’s paper, “dynamics of learner affective development in early fll.” analysis of the affective profiles of three young croatian learners of english as a foreign language validates the role of affectivity in the dynamic complexity of early fll. attitudes and motivation, as well as learner self-concept, enter into complex interactions with one another, and with contextual factors. their curvilinear interdependence suggests that learner self-concept is a good predictor of motivated behavior. 156 in her article “the material culture of multilingualism and affectivity,” larissa aronin introduces the concept of material culture and its artifacts (objects), demonstrating its significance in studying language acquisition processes as well as the links between affectivity and material culture. the discussion is set in the multilingual context of israel, in the circassian community, which constitutes an important part of the linguistic landscape of this country. studying material culture offers a fairly new research approach in the discussion of affectivity in language acquisition processes, and aronin is one of the first scholars to investigate this dimension of multilinguality. peter macintyre and tammi gregersen, in their article on “emotions that facilitate language learning: the positive-broadening power of the imagination,” define and characterize emotions. they argue that “positive emotion facilitates the building of resources because positive emotion tends to broaden a person’s perspective, opening the individual to absorb the language,” whereas “negative emotion produces the opposite tendency, a narrowing of focus and a restriction of the range of potential language input.” they therefore emphasize the role of imagination in building the l2 self. the remaining papers focus on selected affective dimensions. the role of integrative motivation in the prediction of l2 achievement is the focus of robert gardner’s paper, entitled “integrative motivation and global language (english) acquisition in poland.” the results of his empirical study demonstrate that for older samples (15-year-olds), integrative motivation is a consistent predictor of grades in english. in younger samples (13-year-olds), it also contributes to the prediction of l2 grades. the research proves that integrative motivation is a multi-dimensional construct incorporating various elements which, playing differently, affect each individual. in ewa piechurska-kuciel’s text on “gender dependent language anxiety in polish communication apprehensives,” the reader will find a report on a very interesting quantitative study on the influence of gender on language anxiety in a group of apprehensives in the context of a polish secondary grammar school. the paper proves that secondary grammar school communication apprehensives, both male and female, do not differ in their levels of language anxiety, while nonapprehensive males experience significantly lower language anxiety than their female peers. it is a study which aims to fill a gap in second language acquisition research, as the variable of gender has scarcely been dealt with in a scholarly fashion. miros aw pawlak, in his article on “the dynamic nature of motivation in language learning: a classroom perspective,” reports the findings of a classroom-based study which investigated changes in the motivation of 28 upper secondary school students as a function of the tasks performed, the aims and 157 stages of a lesson, and a sequence of lessons over the period of 4 weeks. analysis of the data collected by means of questionnaires, observations and interviews showed that motivation is indeed subject to variation on a minute-to-minute basis and this fact has to be recognized even in large-scale, cross-sectional research in this area. we hope that the question of affectivity in second language acquisition will be of interest to a wide range of readers, both language acquisition researchers, teachers and learners themselves, and that the issues discussed by individual authors will add to awareness of and knowledge about what affectivity is and what impact it has on both general and individual second language acquisition processes. danuta gabry -barker university of silesia, katowice, poland danuta.gabrys@gmail.com ewa piechurska-kuciel opole university, poland epiech@uni.opole.pl references arnold, j., & brown, h. d. (1999). a map of the terrain. in j. arnold (ed.), affect in language learning (pp. 1-27). cambridge: cambridge university press. duncan s., & barrett, l. f. (2007). affect is a form of cognition: a neurobiological analysis. cognition and emotion, 21, 1184-1211. panksepp, j. (2003). at the interface of the affective, behavioral, and cognitive neurosciences: decoding the emotional feelings of the brain. brain and cognition, 52, 4-14. paradis, m. (2004). a neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism. amsterdam: john benjamins. scovel, t. (2000). learning new languages: a guide to second language acquisition. boston: heinle & heinle. 149 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (1). 2018. 149-170 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.1.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt enjoyment and anxiety in second language communication: an idiodynamic approach carmen boudreau cape breton university, canada carmen.boudreau@dal.ca peter d. macintyre cape breton university, canada peter_macintyre@cbu.ca jean-marc dewaele birkbeck college, university of london, uk j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk abstract emotions are a fleeting experience, sometimes lasting only moments before dissipating. prior research in sla has either ignored emotions, underestimated their relevance, or has studied them as a relatively stable individual difference variable. in contrast, the present study takes an idiodynamic approach to examine the rapidly changing relationship between enjoyment and anxiety in second language communication, on a moment-to-moment timescale. university students who speak french as a second language were recruited to complete oral tasks in their second language. participants then rated their per-second fluctuations in each emotion while watching a video recording of their tasks. immediately after this, they were interviewed about their attributions for fluctuations in their ratings. we found that the relationship between enjoyment and anxiety is highly dynamic, resulting in varying patterns of correlation ranging from negative to positive. triangulation of ratings of anxiety and enjoyment with interview data produces a richer understanding of the role of emotions in second language communication. keywords: emotions; anxiety; idiodynamic; second language communication; dynamics carmen boudreau, peter d. macintyre, jean-marc dewaele 150 1. introduction the role of emotions in language learning has been severely underestimated and is deserving of a great deal more research attention (macintyre, 2002). emotions are implicated in almost everything people do, functioning to both facilitate motivation as well as provide a “read out” of a person’s ongoing activities (reeve, 2015). emotion is an abstract term that represents several complex and multifaceted processes. a single emotion, such as fear or surprise, can be conceptualized as an emergent, integrated whole encompassing several coordinated processes, including subjective feelings, biological responses, and social phenomena (izard, 1993). specific emotions emerge in response to a specific event or environmental cue and synergize to form a coherent experience. emotional reactions tend to be short-lived, fleeting responses; their purpose is dependent on the event that cued them (reeve, 2015). unfolding interpersonal contexts that feature communication and facilitate language learning make emotions especially relevant as changes in emotion trajectories interact between/among persons, and at times can lead to rapid and dynamic changes in the social context. emotional reactions and the events that trigger them are often so brief that they are overlooked when using traditional research methods based on collecting retrospective data, and the dynamics of emotion can be obscured when data is averaged over multiple persons. the present study will take a novel approach to consider the relationship between a positive emotion (enjoyment) and a negative emotion (anxiety), within individuals, over a brief period of second language (l2) communication. we will address the nitty gritty of emotional experience and describe how it might be relevant to l2 communication processes (see macintyre & serroul, 2015). 2. emotion in second language learning the most commonly studied emotion in second language learning is anxiety (dewaele & macintyre, 2014). anxiety arousal is associated with cognitive disruptions and distractions often associated with self-focused thinking (eysenck, 1979; norton & abbott, 2016), subjective feelings of tension, apprehension, nervousness, and worry (scatterfield & feldman, 2014; leigh, 2015), along with physical reactions such as increasing heart rate, sweaty hands and body, blood flow to large muscles and “butterflies” in the stomach (spielberger & reheiser, 2009). more specifically, anxiety in the context of foreign language learning is defined as “the worry and negative emotional reaction aroused when learning or using a second language” (macintyre, 1999, p. 27). anxiety is rooted in fear, one of the most basic of negative human emotions. the function of fear fundamentally is enjoyment and anxiety in second language communication: an idiodynamic approach 151 adaptive: it motivates protection responses, such as fighting, freezing, and fleeing, in response to a threatening event or stimulus. the perception of threat can stem from common roots tied to evolution (e.g., fear of snakes) or sociocultural factors (e.g., responses to angry faces, strangers; mallan, lipp, & cochrane, 2013). regardless of the origin, fear’s function remains the same: to motivate protection. anxiety is closely related to fear. ohman (2008) describes anxiety as fear with no identifiable threat that leads to a state of undirected arousal. essentially, anxiety is fear in a diffuse form. fear and anxiety can be highly detrimental to the learning process (macintyre, 2017). in fact, anxiety has been described as the strongest predictor of success or failure for second language students (macintyre, 1999). feelings of anxiety associated with learning a second language can be traced back to a variety of sources, some of which include competition in the classroom (bailey, 1983), personality traits (dewaele, 2013), and strained relationships between teachers and students (gregersen & macintyre, 2014), among many other factors. further, learners who are particularly anxious tend to underestimate their proficiency in second language communication (gardner, 1985; gardner & macintyre, 1993). experts have suggested that teachers actively implement techniques to reduce the prevalence of anxiety in foreign language classrooms (see horwitz & young, 1991; young, 1999). some examples of this include teaching students to recognize irrational fears or anxieties, role playing activities, group discussion, and active monitoring of feelings of anxiety during classroom sessions (young, 1991). these types of activities focus on the reduction of the negative outcomes associated with anxiety in order to produce a better learning experience. however, it must be noted that positive emotion is not simply the lack of negative emotion (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000). with the sla literature showing such a heavy focus on language anxiety, the role of positive emotions in language learning has received little attention until recently (arnold, 2009; macintyre & gregersen, 2012). prominent theories on the role of positive emotions, including the broaden-and-build theory (fredrickson, 1998, 2004), can give us some insight into the impact that they may have in second language communication. 2.1. the broaden-and-build theory the broaden-and-build theory suggests that positive emotions function to “broaden peoples’ momentary thought action repertoires and build their enduring personal resources” (fredrickson, 2004. p. 1369). the theory proposes three specific effects of positive emotions: they broaden our thought-action repertoires, they build resources for the future, and they undo the undesirable effects of negative emotions (fredrickson, 2013). positive emotions encourage carmen boudreau, peter d. macintyre, jean-marc dewaele 152 behaviors such as play, creativity, curiosity, and exploration; these are behaviors that are widely seen as beneficial in learning. these broadening behaviors are very different from those produced by a negative emotional response. in particular, negative emotions are often connected with a specific action tendency (lazarus, 1991). reeve (2015) provides examples: the emotion of anger elicits the action of destroying an obstacle, sadness promotes reversal of separation, and contempt tends to maintain social hierarchies. a negative emotion serves to focus the stream of consciousness toward a specific target and direct resources to some purposive act. in contrast, fredrickson (1998) argues that positive emotions do not work to narrow an individual’s focus to one specific action tendency, but rather to expand it. in practice, it can be difficult to specify a highly specific action tendency that would be linked to a positive emotion, such as joy or interest, in the way that one can envision negative emotions leading to specific actions. often, positive emotions are linked with approach behaviors (frijda, 1994), but this is a vague term encompassing many different kinds of actions. approach behavior does not necessarily fit into the mold of “specific action” the way negative emotions do. yet the experience of positive emotion is both desirable and valuable in its own right. based on the broaden-and-build theory, it becomes clear that the implications of introducing positive emotions into second language learning could extend far beyond that of reducing or undoing the effects of negative emotions. applying this theory suggests that positive emotions broaden the perspective of an individual learner, facilitating engagement with the language, play, and exploration within unfamiliar settings. such activities might allow learners to better notice l2 input (mackey, 2006), helping build resources for the future by including specific language experiences stemming from interpersonal interactions that accumulate learners’ social capital (gregersen, macintyre, & meza, 2016). positive emotions may even serve a preventative or protective function against negative emotions, such as language anxiety, when anxiety is difficult to avoid (macintyre, 2017). taking a broaden-and-build perspective on positive emotions could lead to a change in the pedagogical strategies employed in the foreign language classroom (dewaele & macintyre, 2016). one positive emotion that is of particular interest for this study is enjoyment because it is widely applicable to language learning and communication contexts; one can enjoy many types of l2 experiences from a lesson, to conversations, to a trip abroad, to new friendships with speakers of other languages. but we know little about how enjoyment operates in l2 contexts (dewaele & macintyre, 2016), and we know even less about how enjoyment interacts with anxiety during l2 communication. enjoyment and anxiety in second language communication: an idiodynamic approach 153 2.2. enjoyment humans tend to experience pleasure when they meet a need that is driven by biological function or social conditioning (csikszentmihalyi, 1997). enjoyment is pleasure taken one step further. enjoyment is the emotion that is felt when one not only meets their needs but also surpasses them to accomplish something unexpected or surprising (csikszentmihalyi, 2008). if pleasure can occur simply by performing an activity or completing an action, enjoyment takes on additional dimensions such as an intellectual focus, heightened attention, and optimal challenge. for example, playing a casual game of tennis with a friend may be a pleasurable experience. playing well in an intensive and competitive game of tennis that both tests and develops one’s skill and physical conditioning is more likely be considered an enjoyable experience. one way to compare pleasure and enjoyment is to think of pleasure as a function of conserving or maintaining needs, and enjoyment as a function of progression or challenging limits. framing emotions in this manner, where there is risk inherent in enjoyment, creates a potentially complex relationship between positive and negative emotions. although the importance of enjoyable experiences in second language learning seems intuitive, research into the relationship between the emotions that underlie enjoyment and language learning is in its early stages (dewaele & macintyre, 2014, 2016). the notions of testing one’s skills, using language in new ways, and engaging with learning challenges are likely to implicate anxiety; they are not neutral experiences. in fact, some level of anxiety may be a necessary feature in producing a highly enjoyable experience. when dewaele and macintyre (2014) studied foreign language anxiety and enjoyment in a large sample, the two variables were found to be negatively correlated (r = -.34) but shared less than 13% of their variance. instead of being two ends of the same emotional continuum, where anxiety implies the lack of enjoyment and enjoyment means the lack of anxiety, dewaele and macintyre (2014) suggest that it may be more appropriate to conceptualize them as two distinct emotions working along separate pathways whose trends can converge or diverge from time to time. situations where anxiety is falling and enjoyment is rising can be easily brought to mind: meeting a stranger and finding you have a lot in common, writing a test where the answers are coming easily to mind, or giving a presentation to a warm and receptive audience. the opposite trend – rising anxiety and falling enjoyment – can be found when we meet an uncooperative stranger, experience difficulty writing a test, or give a presentation to an unpleasant audience. however, considering a more complex emotional context, it is not difficult to imagine both anxiety and enjoyment rising at the same time if a second language learner is feeling challenged, engaged, and creative. amcarmen boudreau, peter d. macintyre, jean-marc dewaele 154 bivalent or conflicted emotional states, such as simultaneously feeling both enjoyment and anxiety, may be overlooked when assessing only the overall correlation between the two variables (macintyre, 2007). considering how the variables rise and fall together leads to new research questions that can drive innovations in theorizing. instead of asking what is the correlation between anxiety and enjoyment, we advocate exploring a dynamic conceptualization of emotion processes, asking instead when is there a positive/negative/zero correlation between anxiety and enjoyment (macintyre, mackay, ross, & abel, 2017). 2.3. emotion in language learning: a dynamic perspective emotions, defined as short-lived reactions to events, are ideal candidates to be studied from a dynamic perspective. complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) has made significant inroads into studies of language development over the past decade, spurred by landmark texts by larsen-freeman and cameron (2008) and verspoor, de bot, and lowie (2011). larsen-freeman and cameron (2008) describe complex systems as having defining features and properties, including being (1) dynamic, (2) emergent, (3) open, (4) self-organizing and (5) adaptive, all of which apply to emotions. emotions fluctuate over time in constant interplay with other systems and thus change is inherent in emotions because they occur as reactions to events and have a time course of their own. emotional states also have emergent qualities: they are a combination of physical changes (e.g., increased heart rate), feelings (worry, nervousness), cognitions (e.g., self-deprecating thoughts), behavioral tendencies (e.g., to escape), and so on, which together constitute an anxiety reaction. as an open system, emotions can potentially be influenced by any number of internal or external factors, including personality traits, psychoactive medications, certain foods, sleep deprivation, self-related thoughts, happy or sad memories, and the proximal occurrence of other emotions on the internal side, and a myriad of interpersonal, social, cultural, contextual, and other factors external to the person. yet, despite the many interacting components of the systems underlying emotion, cognition, language, communication, and so on, we experience coherence in emotions, even conflicted ones. we know how these components selforganize; that is, they combine in meaningful ways that are maintained for some period of time. the experience of anxiety, for example, is self-exacerbating: as the interacting components of anxiety are experienced, a person can worry about the future effects of anxiety-arousal, a process that ironically fuels further anxiety. the interacting systems that produce an emotion are not controlled by an external agent and are not assembled with a final goal in mind; they selfenjoyment and anxiety in second language communication: an idiodynamic approach 155 organize in the moment and can dissolve very quickly or be rapidly supplanted by another emotion. finally, complex systems are adaptive, a characteristic that also is a defining feature of emotion. negative emotions focus attention on specific actions that will aide in adaptation to a situation, in a way similar to the ways in which physical pain alerts the body to tissue damage. positive emotions, as described by the broaden-and-build theory, also aid adaptation by fostering conditions of exploration, play, and developing social relationships. the emergence of interest in cdst portends the need for new research questions and methods to address them. as macintyre et al. (2017) noted, at the moment, metaphorical thinking about dynamic systems in second language development is well ahead of rigorous, empirical descriptions of those systems, but perhaps the gap is closing. if complex dynamic systems approaches are to make a lasting contribution to the field of second language development, researchers must do more to generate specific studies of phenomena that produce novel insights into the processes of language learning and communication. (p. 118) van dijk, verspoor, and lowie (2011) proposed three key criteria for research methods to address cdst questions. they suggest a need for data that is dense (many data points), longitudinal (collected over a defined period of time, with more than the two testing occasions than a test-retest study would produce), and that analyses be performed at the individual level (not averaged over the members of a group). the eminent psychologist gordon allport (1962) admonished psychological research to test generalizations against the experience of individual persons, “not for the mechanical application of laws (as we do now), but for a fuller, supplementary, and more accurate assessment than we are now able to give” (p. 407). recent work by molenaar and campbell (2009) has shown that research results that summarize groups of people apply to individuals only under rarely obtained conditions. the idiodynamic method produces dense, individual-level data that can be interpreted with a focus on differences across a group of people, or changes within an individual over time, helping to address the longstanding deficit in research identified by allport who told us that we must confront general principles with real people. data from most studies in the sla literature, including studies of emotion in language learning and communication, would not meet the criteria above for dynamic approach to research. however, new methods are being developed that will allow cdst studies (see dörnyei, macintyre, & henry, 2015). in the present study we will use the idiodynamic method, a mixed methods approach, to investigate individuals’ experience of anxiety and enjoyment, measured in real time. carmen boudreau, peter d. macintyre, jean-marc dewaele 156 2.4. the idiodynamic method originally developed by macintyre (2012), the idiodynamic method allows us to take a closer look at the dynamic changes in a variable at a per-second timescale. this method can be broken down into four steps: 1. a communication task is recorded for immediate playback. 2. the recording is reviewed by the participant who completes momentby-moment ratings of the variable under investigation using specially designed software. 3. a graph is produced showing fluctuations in the variable. the graph is reviewed and reasons for changes in the variable are discussed. 4. the complete session is transcribed. the method has been employed in several studies of second language communication and has produced results that would not have been obtained using a larger timescale or retrospective data collection technique. in the first published study that used the method, macintyre and legatto (2011) measured willingness to communicate and found that it proceeds in a dynamic way, with within-participant ratings fluctuating from high to low several times over the course of a communication event. if an overall mean score of willingness to communicate was calculated for each participant and used for between-subjects comparisons, individual-level findings would have been lost in analysis. another study used the idiodynamic method to look at approach-avoidance motivation in a second language communication task (macintyre & serroul, 2015). this study found that participants’ motivation on a second language communication task fluctuated throughout the course of the activity due to an array of factors such as vocabulary retrieval and the process of choosing what to say and how to say it. taking a dynamic systems approach to language learning has opened up a new space for explanatory models that directly consider the complexity of human communication (macintyre & serroul, 2015). gregersen, macintyre, and meza (2014) assessed idiodynamic self-ratings of anxiety for oral presentations given in spanish by native english speakers. they also measured participants’ heart rate over the course of the presentation. some of their results emerged as expected. for example, they found that high anxiety participants had both a higher starting and mean idiodynamic anxiety rating than low anxiety participants. however, they also reported individual level results that conflicted with the general trends. for example, one of the low trait-anxiety participants showed instances of accelerated heart rate and unexpectedly high idiodynamic anxiety ratings. the authors attributed this pattern to this presenter’s unexpected anxiety reaction, one that generated the self-exacerbating anxiety pattern described above. this type of result emphasizes the enjoyment and anxiety in second language communication: an idiodynamic approach 157 importance of studying the learner at the individual level, and as an integrative person. gregersen et al. (2014) did not consider the interaction of anxiety with other emotions, which will be the focus of the present study. 3. the present study the goal of the present study is to describe the dynamic relationship between enjoyment and anxiety, on a per-second timescale, to deepen our understanding of ways in which these two variables rise and fall over the course of a second language communication task. fluctuations in both enjoyment and anxiety will be examined with two types of tasks, one an oral interview and the other a storytelling task, in a controlled setting. our specific questions are: 1. what is the relationship between anxiety and enjoyment and does that relationship change over time, within person? 2. when interviewed post-task, to what do participants attribute the observed fluctuations in emotion? 3.1. method 3.1.1. participants participants were recruited from the student population at cape breton university, canada. english-speaking students who spoke french as a second language were invited to participate. individual sign-up sheets that included a brief explanation of the nature of the study were distributed. the final sample consisted of 10 participants (7 female, 3 male) in 2nd and 3rd year university. the age of participants ranged from 19 to 29 (m = 20.8, sd = 2.97). demographic information including age, gender, year of study, first language, other languages spoken, and grades in which french was studied was also collected. 3.1.2. materials and measures computer software, specifically anion variable tester v2 software, was used to allow participants to give moment-by-moment ratings of their anxiety and enjoyment while viewing the recorded tasks. the scale used by this program ranged from -5, which was defined as very low enjoyment or anxiety, to +5, which was defined as very high enjoyment or anxiety. upon completion of ratings, the software produced graphs that gave a visual representation of how each variable fluctuated over the course of each communication event. all participants were given a thorough description of how to use the anion variable carmen boudreau, peter d. macintyre, jean-marc dewaele 158 tester v2 software before data collection began and practiced inputting ratings until they felt comfortable with the software. 3.2. procedure the evening prior to testing, participants were contacted by phone, text, or email and asked to bring with them to the lab testing a photograph of something that they find enjoyable. participants were informed that they would be asked to speak about this photograph in french (their l2). examples of photos used include those taken at an event, performing a hobby, photos of a favorite place, and photos of persons. upon arriving for their appointment, each participant was asked to fill out a demographic information sheet, a consent form, and a video release form. they proceeded to complete two types of tasks in french, a photo narrative and oral interview: 1. photo narrative task – one of the tasks completed was the photo narrative task where participants discussed the photograph they brought for three to five minutes in french; 2. oral interview tasks – for the other type of task, participants were presented with five oral interview style questions drawn from macintyre and legatto’s (2011) study; the five questions were posed in english and participants responded in french. the questions were as follows: · describe what you are wearing; · discuss the education system in your home province in some detail; · count to 100 by 10s; · give direction from this point to the mayflower mall (a local shopping center); · discuss the role of parliament in the canadian system of government. all of the tasks were video-recorded. it was randomly determined whether participants began with the photo narrative or the oral interview questions; half of them started with photos and the other half with interview questions. upon the completion of each type of task, the video recording was loaded into the anion variable tester v2 software. half of the participants began by rating their levels of enjoyment and the other half began by rating their levels of anxiety. as soon as the first set of ratings was complete, a graph of the participant’s ratings was printed. the researcher and the participant looked at the graph together and discussed points of interest, such as spikes and dips in ratings. this portion of the process was also audio-recorded. some examples of questions that were asked by the researcher include: 1. you rated your (anxiety/enjoyment) as particularly high at this particular interval, can you explain why? enjoyment and anxiety in second language communication: an idiodynamic approach 159 2. your (anxiety/enjoyment) ratings were particularly low here, why do you think that was? 3. your ratings remained stable and neutral over this time interval. can you explain why? 4. do you have anything else to add about your overall experience with the task? after the first graph was analyzed, participants repeated the procedure with the remaining variable (anxiety or enjoyment). all interview results were transcribed. the procedure produced a lot of information for each person. to focus analysis on the specific research questions noted above, all data was analyzed within person. first, we examined the overall correlation between anxiety and enjoyment, within person, for the oral interview and photo narrative separately. this approach provides an estimate of the strength of relationship between anxiety and enjoyment. the interviews were examined for specific rationales given for changes in emotion and are used to add the participant’s voice to the accompanying statistical results. for some individuals, the results will be analyzed by segment, especially when the overall pattern of changes in anxiety and enjoyment produces a low correlation that might reflect multiple, competing tendencies. within person, we will look for segments with a negative correlation between anxiety and enjoyment to be contrasted with segments showing a positive correlation, within the same person. 4. results and discussion 4.1. what is the within-person, dynamic relationship between anxiety and enjoyment? the first step in considering the relationship between anxiety and enjoyment is to examine data on a per-person basis. to begin, we computed the correlation between enjoyment and anxiety for each participant separately for the oral interview and photo narrative. the correlations are shown in table 1. as can be seen from this table, 18 out of the 20 tasks showed an overall negative correlation between the two emotions; none showed strong positive correlation. given the descriptive nature of the research question, traditional testing for statistical significance is not appropriate. using an arbitrary benchmark of r = .30, the socalled personality coefficient (mischel, 1968), for identifying correlations of interest, we see that 12 of the 20 correlations are substantial and all of those are negative. the rest of table shows smaller negative, and near-zero correlations. carmen boudreau, peter d. macintyre, jean-marc dewaele 160 table 1 correlation between per-second ratings of enjoyment and anxiety for each participant for each task type participant correlation photo narrative oral interview 1 -.65* -.87* 2 -.30* -.09* 3 .05* -.07* 4 -.65* -.59* 5 -.56* -.72* 6 -.40* -.04* 7 -.86* -.29* 8 -.56* -.33* 9 -.48* -.15* 10 .09* -.57* note. * correlations greater than .30. a very strong, negative correlation indicates a regular pattern: when scores on one variable go up, scores on the other reliably go down, and vice versa. data for the question task for participant 1, across the oral interview questions, is particularly indicative of a regular, dynamic relationship between anxiety and enjoyment. the data showed an overall negative correlation within participant 1’s data of r = -.87. the idiodynamic graph of this data shows a clear seesaw relationship between anxiety and enjoyment ratings. there is a great deal of variability in the ratings and the variation is quite predictable: when one emotion goes up, the other goes down (see figure 1). figure 1 idiodynamic ratings during the oral interview for participant 1 for other participants, a substantial but not as strong pattern is revealed by correlations in the .50-.65 range. inspecting the graphs, in conjunction with the subsequent interviews, suggests that in two specific cases, anxiety began to overpower enjoyment as time went along. this occurred especially for participant 1 (r = -.65; see figure 2) and for participant 5 (r = -.56; see figure 3) during the photo narrative task. both participants began the task with positive enjoyment ratings. however, language-related anxiety arose quickly and became the -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 0 20 40 60 80 100 id io dy na m ic ra ti ng time (sec)enjoyment anxiety enjoyment and anxiety in second language communication: an idiodynamic approach 161 dominating perceived emotion for the remainder of the activity; as anxiety rose, enjoyment fell. in the words of participant 5, it was just kind of like, got worse and worse and worse and i kept forgetting more and more. so my anxiety just kind of increased and i could feel that emotion and it just made things worse. i was comfortable starting, but then i got uncomfortable and then it just kind of went to an extreme uncomfortable where it just blocked anything i could think of to say. here, the cumulative effect of anxiety arousal is apparent. in a type of self-fulfilling prophesy, the arousal associated with anxiety can lead to even more anxiety in a cascading pattern that a person can find overwhelming. such an experience, in turn, heightens anxiety even more as one feels effective communication slipping away, interference with ongoing cognition mounts, and the frustration associated with the process further feeds the anxiety experience (macintyre & serroul, 2015). this phenomenon, which has been described as a selfexacerbating quality of anxiety (gregersen et al., 2014), is evident in both the pattern of data and the words participant 5. high levels of anxiety eventually edge out the perceived comfort that initially was present. more broadly, this pattern is indicative of the power of negative emotion, which functions to narrow attention and focus in on a particular potentially threatening stimuli in the environment. strong anxiety arousal can overpower the positive emotion. figure 2 idiodynamic ratings during the photo narrative activity for participant 1 figure 3 idiodynamic ratings during the photo narrative activity for participant 5 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 110 120 130 140 150 id io dy na m ic ra ti ng time (sec)enjoyment anxiety -5 0 5 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 110 120 130 140 id io dy na m ic ra ti ng time (sec) enjoyment anxiety carmen boudreau, peter d. macintyre, jean-marc dewaele 162 other participants did not show a clear relationship between the two emotions throughout the tasks. in some cases, the overall negative correlation masked underlying dynamic fluctuations in the correlation between anxiety and enjoyment. specific communicative events seemed to drive the changing patterns. participant 8’s data from the photo narrative is an example of the potential for masking interesting emotional phenomena (see figure 4). although participant 8 showed an overall negative correlation between enjoyment and anxiety (r = -.33), a closer look shows a more complex pattern within specific sections of the data. in some segments of participant 8’s photo-related ratings, anxiety and enjoyment are strongly negatively correlated, for example during the 20 second segment from 90110 seconds (r = -.66). however, other segments within the same person’s data actually show a positive correlation between anxiety and enjoyment (190-236 sec, r = .38), and others still show a near zero correlation (10-40 sec, r = -.01). the variation in the relationship between anxiety and enjoyment in participant 8’s data provides evidence of negative, positive, and near-zero correlations. indeed, the relationship between anxiety and enjoyment, as expressed by the correlation between them, fluctuated in a similar way within the majority of participants. figure 4 idiodynamic ratings during the photo narrative activity for participant 8 as can be seen in table 1, there were also near-zero correlations between enjoyment and anxiety overall the data in five of the 20 tasks. there were two main patterns that show near zero correlations. on the one hand, some idiodynamic graphs, such as those for participant 2 (r = -.09; see figure 5) and participant 6 (r = -.03; see figure 6) responding to the question task, showed very little emotional fluctuation. these participants might have been feeling muted, weak emotional responses. it also is possible that they used the rating software differently than the other participants, simply not clicking the ratings software as often as other participants. given that the qualitative themes that arose from the interviews of these participants were similar to the rest of the sample, we think that the latter explanation is more likely. -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200 220 240 id io dy na m ic ra ti ng time (sec) enjoyment anxiety enjoyment and anxiety in second language communication: an idiodynamic approach 163 figure 5 idiodynamic ratings during the oral interview for participant 2 figure 6 idiodynamic ratings during the oral interview for participant 6 on the other hand, data for both participant 10 (r = .09, p = .06; see figure 7) and participant 3 (r = -.07, p = .25; see figure 8) showed a great deal of variability in the ratings. both were relaxed speakers with versatility in task response strategy; they were generally comfortable with making mistakes, and expressed a genuine interest in learning french. figure 7 idiodynamic ratings during the oral interview ratings for participant 10 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200 220 240 260 280 id io dy na m ic ra ti ng time (sec)enjoyment anxiety -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200 220 id io dy na m ic ra ti ng time (sec)enjoyment anxiety -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 0 30 60 90 120 150 180 210 240 270 300 330 360 390 420 450 id io dy na m ic ra ti ng time (sec)enjoyment anxiety carmen boudreau, peter d. macintyre, jean-marc dewaele 164 figure 8 idiodynamic ratings during the oral interview for participant 3 in the post-task interview, participant 10 said: well i felt a lot more comfortable once i started to get the rust off, once i started realizing that you know, it’s okay to make mistakes and whatnot. it’s okay to forget words because, like, it’s part of the learning experience. participant 3 noted: i guess i just found that even when i’m feeling kind of anxious, i like speaking french. i like practicing; i like having the opportunity to use the language. so, even when i’m feeling a little anxious about it, i still found it fun. in their study of second language oral communication, gregersen et al. (2014) found that low anxiety participants were able to use more flexible communication strategies, such as speaking extemporaneously as opposed to memorizing. participants 3 and 10 both reported the use of similar communication techniques. further, these respondents were able to mitigate the detrimental impact of anxiety and avoid anxiety’s self-exacerbating quality by maintaining a form of mastery motivation or a growth mindset, accepting the idea of making mistakes and seeing the task as an opportunity as opposed to a threat (dweck, 2006). although negative emotion was not eliminated for these participants, they were able to maintain a manageable level of anxiety where successful task completion was still possible. although the majority of the tasks showed a negative correlation between anxiety and enjoyment at the overall level, which is consistent with survey results (dewaele & macintyre, 2014, 2016), it is evident that the relationship between enjoyment and anxiety is not at all a simple seesaw pattern. these two emotions can interact continuously in complex, dynamic ways. they can be negatively correlated (high anxiety, low enjoyment; low anxiety, high enjoyment), positively correlated (high anxiety, high enjoyment; low anxiety, low enjoyment), or show near zero correlation even within the same individual over a very -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200 220 240 260 id io dy na m ic ra ti ng time (sec) enojyment anxiety enjoyment and anxiety in second language communication: an idiodynamic approach 165 brief time period (a few minutes). we also found preliminary evidence that, beyond a certain threshold, the strength of the negative emotion can override the impact of the positive emotion, such that it is not felt or perceived to be present anymore. the notion of emotion thresholds, within person, might have pedagogical implications as teachers deal with particularly anxious students whose behavior changes when anxiety becomes overwhelming (see horwitz & young, 1991; gkonou, daubney, & dewaele, 2017). there is a great deal of interpersonal variation in how enjoyment and anxiety fluctuate over the course of communication tasks, much of which would have been missed if only the overall correlations were assessed or if we averaged data across the participants. however, after taking a closer look at this relationship, it becomes evident that enjoyment and anxiety are best considered distinct emotions that do not follow a single, simple, pattern. each emotion appears to operate somewhat independently of the other. of course the two emotions interact, converging or diverging during specific events. the idiodynamic method allows us to take one step further and assess each correlation pattern in conjunction with the qualitative themes that explain them. 4.2. limitations and future directions like all research, this study has limitations. the first limitation to consider is the artificiality of the setting. some of the participants mentioned the unusual communication situation when being interviewed about their anxiety ratings. in the words of participant 5: i think feeling a little uncomfortable, because normally when i do speak it with my brother it’s not like anyone’s really watching. it’s just like a back and forth casual conversation and like, if i mess up no one is going to know about it. but, with this it was kind of just like, i knew it was being recorded and it just kind of, made me . . . flabbergasted? in future studies, the per-second, dynamic relationship between emotion and anxiety could be examined in naturally occurring situations, such as with different activities during a second language classroom lesson. a classroom environment might be more natural and comfortable for second language speakers, but the video recordings and immediate stimulated recall procedures of the idiodynamic method must be taken into consideration. secondly, there may have been some discrepancies in how different participants were using the rating software. the researcher explained and demonstrated the software in a similar way to all participants. however, some participants did not click very often. a program that uses a rating system at a slightly larger time interval, even one carmen boudreau, peter d. macintyre, jean-marc dewaele 166 that takes ratings every 2 seconds instead of 1 second, could be more userfriendly. further analysis of physiological data such as heart rate (beats per minute), heart rate variability, or r-r intervals in conjunction with the existing analysis of the idiodynamic ratings and qualitative interview data could lead to a more complete understanding of participants’ emotional reactions. a measure of physiological arousal or reactivity might help identify whether the emotional reaction was stronger in participants with the more pronounced ratings, or if some people were simply using the rating system differently than others. it might also explain why participants might be simply clicking more or less often. finally, this study was conducted with native english speakers who speak french as a second language. the majority of participants were french immersion students who practice their french predominantly in a classroom setting. future studies could compare participants with differing levels of language proficiency. in this way, a better understanding of how the role of emotion in second language communication changes over the course of the learning experience could be established. further, the same method could be used to look at individuals who speak english as a second language, or any other language of interest. different language learning motivations (such as learning a heritage language, an endangered language, or the language of a majority group after immigrating) may produce a different emotional response moment-to-moment during learning and communication tasks than learning a language with different emotional connotations. 5. conclusion this study adopted a novel methodological approach and generated novel findings showing the complexity of the interaction between positive and negative emotion in l2 communication. first, we showed that the relationship between enjoyment and anxiety can be both conceptualized and measured dynamically. sometimes the two emotions move in converging patterns in relation to specific events, at other times anxiety and enjoyment show divergent trajectories. sometimes they operate independently of one another, moving forward and following unpredictable trajectories. both the presence and the strength of positive and negative emotions impact the individual’s subjective experience. the dynamic relationship of enjoyment and anxiety has been shown to impact the speaker’s experience in meaningful ways in the context of second language communication. we are making inroads to a better understanding of the moment-to-moment experience of emotion and how it relates to language, but there is much more yet to be learned. enjoyment and anxiety in second language communication: an idiodynamic approach 167 references allport, g. w. 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(1999). affect in foreign language and second language learning: a practical guide to creating a low-anxiety classroom atmosphere. boston, ma: mcgraw-hill college. 651 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (4). 2016. 651-676 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.4.5 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl dynamics of classroom wtc: results of a semester study anna mystkowska-wiertelak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland mystkows@amu.edu.pl abstract the fact that l2 willingness to communicate (wtc) can fluctuate over different time scales is no longer disputed as numerous studies have proved a dynamic rather than trait-like character of the concept (cf. macintyre & legatto, 2011; macintyre, burns, & jessome, 2011; mystkowska-wiertelak & pawlak, 2014). the changes in the intensity of l2 learners’ readiness to engage in communication in the classroom context have been investigated in a number of studies attempting also to establish factors capable of stimulating or hindering wtc (e.g., cao & philip, 2006; pawlak & mystkowska-wiertelak, 2015; peng, 2014). many of empirical explorations of l2 learners’ wtc, although representing the ecological perspective, provide solely a snapshot of classroom reality, thus generating a question if such one-at-a-time picture frame can sufficiently accommodate diverse factors that impinge on learners’ readiness to engage in communication. the application of a longitudinal design was thus dictated by the author’s intention to gather information on wtc ebbs and flows not only during single lessons but also continuing over a number of lessons conducted throughout a semester of study, which allowed for exploring a wider spectrum of conditions that affect wtc of advanced learners of english attending speaking classes. detailed lesson plans, interview and questionnaire data were used to interpret wtc fluctuations reported by the participants at 5-min intervals in the course of 7 lessons. qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data revealed that the intensity of communicative behaviour depends on an intricate interplay of personal and group-related factors, with anna mystkowska-wiertelak 652 a special role ascribed to the instructor whose knowledge of the group characteristics and needs coupled with didactic skills can greatly contribute to increasing wtc in the classroom. keywords: willingness to communicate; language classroom; communicative behaviour; classroom context 1. introduction the study of willingness to communicate (wtc), which emerged from exploring, first, mother tongue (l1) and next, second/foreign (l2) learners/users’ reticence or reluctance to communicate, has been attracting the attention of researchers for a few decades now. the early conceptualization of l2 wtc as a learner’s stable characteristic or as a predisposition to initiate or avoid communication with others when given a choice (mccroskey, 1992) has been overruled following the advances made by macintyre, clément, dörnyei, and noels (1998), who presented l2 wtc as an outcome of a joint operation of a number of distal and proximal antecedents comprising both individual tendencies as well as intergroup relations. this shift of focus to the contextual nature of wtc resulted in a whole host of studies aimed at disclosing situated, personal, and context-related variables shaping l2 wtc in the classroom setting (cf. cao, 2011, 2013; cao & philip, 2006; kang, 2005; mystkowska-wiertelak & pawlak, 2014; weaver, 2007). the recognition of the role of context in the emergence of wtc has highlighted the dynamic character of the construct capable of fluctuating in different time scales, within a single class or a single task. investigations into the dynamic character of wtc have differed considerably in focus and scope involving laboratory-style investigations, the prime examples being the application of the idiodynamic method by macintyre and legatto (2011) or classroom-based studies like those conducted by peng (2014), pawlak and mystkowska-wiertelak (2015) or pawlak, mystkowskawiertelak, and bielak (2016). although some of the studies of classroom wtc looked into shifts in its intensity over different periods (cf. cao, 2006, 2013; de saint léger & storch, 2009; weaver, 2007), most of the investigations offered insight into single lessons or tasks. the present study attempts to join the two perspectives providing accounts of wtc fluctuations in individual lessons as well as those spanning the period of a semester of study. the paper starts with a brief overview of research conducted with regard to factors contributing to wtc ups and downs in the classroom. this is followed by the description of the current study, the presentation and discussion of its findings and, finally, some pedagogical recommendations as well as suggestions for future research. dynamics of classroom wtc: results of a semester study 653 2. classroom wtc early questionnaire studies that were mainly performed in the second language context did not at first make the distinction between in-class and out-of-class wtc (cf. macintyre & charos, 1996; mccroskey, 1992). the scale aimed at gauging l2 wtc consisted of items concerning various situations in which the target language (tl) might be used, including those naturally occurring in the second language context, such as talking to a stranger on the bus, a janitor or a garbage collector. soon it became evident that l2 learners in foreign language contexts may not be able to indicate the level of readiness to engage in communication in response to items that do not reflect the conditions in which they are required to use this language. for example, in the study conducted by asker (1998), learners of english in hong kong found the scale items confusing and asked whether they should “imagine” their behaviour in situations they normally do not experience. macintyre, baker, clément and conrod (2001), exploring wtc in the immersion context, used one and the same scale to tap inand out-of-class wtc, but instructions required a response referring to interaction either in the classroom or outside. the items were grouped around the four basic skill areas and concerned situations that were perceived as typical for immersion students. additionally, this time no reference was made to interaction with people representing specific professions but rather with “strangers” or “friends.” an important modification was made by weaver (2005), who, trying to identify situation-dependent factors shaping learners’ wtc in the classroom, used a scale consisting of items measuring both willingness to speak and willingness to write in a whole range of tasks and situations typically occurring in an l2 classroom, such as doing a role-play, writing a paragraph, or translating a sentence from one’s mother tongue. peng (2007), in turn, relied on macintyre et al.’s (2001) scale, but certain adaptations were made to reflect classroom realities the participants knew from everyday practice. peng (2013) criticized weaver’s (2005) scale for the use of the word someone to denote an interlocutor, on the grounds that it did not ensure a clear reference to the nature of intended communication, since it might imply conversing with another student or a teacher, a difference that might importantly affect learners’ wtc. nevertheless, the study by peng and woodrow (2010) made use of selected items from weaver (2005) to supplement the scale designed by mccroskey and baer (1985) in order to measure l2 wtc in various tasks differentiating between three types of interlocutors: a teacher, a peer, or a group of peers. a finer-grained perspective was adopted by khajavy, ghonsooly, fatemi, and choi (2016), who used peng and woodrow’s (2010) data collection tool to measure classroom wtc, discerning between readiness to engage in meaning-focused and form-focused activities. the foregoing anna mystkowska-wiertelak 654 discussion illustrates researchers’ constant quest for data gathering tools and procedures, which, still within the quantitative paradigm, would be able to identify factors and conditions pertinent to increasing or decreasing l2 learners’ readiness to engage in communication. a considerably richer pool of data has been accrued in the course of recent mixed-methods or qualitative studies, which will now be discussed. these were undertaken with a view to, first, disclosing a wider range of factors that might impinge on classroom wtc, and secondly, revealing the mechanisms underlying the dynamic shifts in wtc intensity displayed in longer or shorter time spans. thus, observation and stimulated recall allowed kang (2005) to discover that the decision to start or enter into communication emerged in the presence of the feeling of security as well as excitement and responsibility. an important contribution was made by cao and philip (2006), whose investigation of wtc concerned three interactional situations: pair work, group work, and whole class. the scholars adopted a mixed-methods approach using observations and structured interviews as well as questionnaires to elicit data on learners’ classroom wtc. interestingly, the results did not show a correlation between selfreported wtc and the observed communicative behaviour. a much quoted study by de saint léger and storch (2009) reported the changes in wtc levels in speaking classes as reported repeatedly within a semester, which appeared to be dependent on the respondents’ perceptions concerning speaking activities and themselves as learners. another step undertaken with a view to gaining even deeper insight into what increases or hinders readiness to interact in the classroom was that of bernales (2016), who, apart from employing surveys, elicited information by means of stimulated recall to account for both speaking and reticence at specific moments during classes that were observed and video-recorded. the main focus of bernales’s study was on the ratio between planned and actual speaking behaviour, which turned out to be dynamic and dependent on learners’ goals, motivation, classroom norms as well as teacher expectations. a completely new phase of the enquiry of the dynamic character of wtc started with the innovative methodological approach advanced by macintyre and legatto (2011), in which specially developed software was used to tap into minute-by-minute fluctuations of a learner’s wtc in the course of a speaking activity. the idiodynamic method, as this method was termed, involves indicating levels of wtc while watching a video of one’s own performance using a computer mouse, on the basis of which a graph representing wtc ups and downs is created. then wtc fluctuations depicted in the graph are discussed with a researcher in order to identify the reasons underlying the changes. in macintyre and legatto’s (2011) study, which is not classroombut laboratory-based, readiness to speak faltered due to anxiety and insufficient vocabulary resources. similarly, dynamics of classroom wtc: results of a semester study 655 mystkowska-wiertelak and pawlak (2014) and pawlak and mystkowska-wiertelak (2015) also report on shifts in wtc intensity, using a different data collection method, which required the respondents to indicate the level of readiness to engage in individual tasks performed in the course of a naturally occurring class they regularly attended. wtc was recorded in response to a beep heard at equal intervals of time (5 min. or 30 sec.), depending on whether an entire class or one specific task is taken into account. disturbing as the sound must have undoubtedly been, the technique allowed the researchers to depart from a laboratory-style investigation and collect data in the real classroom, which, as was hoped, would render a wealth of information on the intricate interplay of factors and processes underpinning the development of communicative competence in a language class. the same data-gathering tool was again employed by pawlak, mystkowska-wiertelak, and bielak (2016) and mystkowska-wiertelak and pawlak (2017), who investigated wtc ebbs and flows during whole classes devoted to the development of the speaking skill. the study reported here, which is a partial replication of the studies mentioned above, extends the scope of enquiry to wtc fluctuations reported during classes spanning a whole semester of a speaking course for advanced students majoring in english, with the present author being their regular teacher. the choice of a context-sensitive perspective enables getting insights into ways in which l2 wtc interacts with a whole host of other classroom-embedded factors, both situational (e.g., group dynamics, the teacher, type of task), or individual (e.g., learner preferences or learning style), and how such interactions impinge on the teaching/learning process. 3. method 3.1. purpose of the study the overall aim of the research project was to explore the dynamic nature of wtc among advanced learners attending a speaking class which was part of an intensive english as a foreign language programme in order to identify individual and contextual variables accounting for the ups and downs in the participants’ readiness to interact in this setting. like other empirical investigations of wtc carried out in the classroom context (e.g., cao, 2011, 2013; peng, 2014), the study reported here can be said to have high ecological validity and thus its findings can be seen as indicative of real-life conditions and serve as a point of reference for classroom practices (cf. hulstijn, 1997; lightbown, 2000). the main aim of the study was to document fluctuations in levels of wtc during conversation classes among advanced learners of english over a period of one semester and identify variables causing wtc growth and decrease. more specifically, the study was conducted to address the following questions: anna mystkowska-wiertelak 656 1. what is the extent to which the participants’ wtc fluctuates in the course of individual speaking classes investigated for the purpose of this study? 2. what is the extent to which the participants’ wtc fluctuates in speaking classes in the course of the semester of study? 3. which context-dependent and individual factors decrease and which increase the participants’ wtc in the course of the speaking classes under study? 3.2. participants the participants were a group of 12 students (5 male and 7 female), enrolled in the final year of a three-year bachelor programme (ba) and majoring in english. at the time the research was conducted they were on average 21.3 years of age (sd = 1.8) and their mean experience in learning english was 11.75 years (sd = 2.80), which shows that most of them started learning english while at primary school. generally, their proficiency level could be estimated at b2/c1, according to the common european framework of reference for languages; however, it needs to be stressed that a wide range of individual variation could be observed among students as well as with respect to particular skills and language subsystems within individuals. the average grade in end-of-the-year efl examination in the group was 3.6 on the scale from 2 (lowest) to 5 (highest) (sd = 0.71) and, as the study took part in the second semester, the end-of-semester grade in the conversation class was 4.15 (sd = 0.67). when asked to self-evaluate their ability to speak, the skill of particular relevance to the present study, the respondents indicated a slightly lower score at 4.05 (sd = 0.57). apart from attending an intensive course in english divided into separate classes of speaking, writing, use of english, phonetics and grammar, the students were also required to attend a number of content courses in literature, history, culture, linguistics, language teaching methodology and social sciences, where english was also a means of instruction, which importantly increased their exposure to the target language and increased opportunities for communication. the conversation classes during which fluctuations in wtc levels were analyzed were all taught by the present author, an experienced teacher of english, over the period of a semester. the topics around which the speaking activities revolved were chosen and ordered according to the syllabus designed by instructors teaching various groups at the same level, in compliance with the curriculum approved by the faculty. focusing on the development of the speaking skill as the classes understandably were, much heed was paid to vocabulary practice and tests. for this reason, not all of the classes were included in the present analysis. another reason for which only 7 classes out of 12 were taken into account was the fact that, given the intrusive character of the procedure, it dynamics of classroom wtc: results of a semester study 657 was decided that the students had the right to receive instruction of the ordinary type, without beeps sounded every 5 minutes, so that the study did not negatively affect their learning and, eventually, grades. due to space limitations the lesson plans will not be presented in detail; however, table 1 presents a short description of each of the classes containing the general theme and information on the organization mode, type of activity and its approximate duration. table 1 topics and tasks performed in individual classes and their duration class topic tasks and their characteristics 1. feminism whole class: vocabulary quiz (15 min); pairs: questions on feminism (ca. 10 min); whole class: a documentary about gloria steinem (ca. 10 min); pairs: answering questions about the video (ca. 10 min); whole class: feedback and summary (ca. 10 min) 2. cold case files whole class: power point presentation and video (ca. 10 min); individual or pairs: inspection of documents and materials (ca. 35 min); pairs: discussing students’ own hypotheses (ca. 10 min); whole class: feedback and summary 3. urban myths small group discussion: questions to text on gullibility (ca. 5 min); pairs: cards with questions concerning popular urban myths (ca. 10 min); pairs: creating students’ own urban myths (ca. 20 min); new pairs: interviews on the new myths (ca. 10 min); small groups: discussion on frightening events (ca. 10 min) 4. mysteries whole class: video about conspiracy theories (ca. 10 min); small groups: providing explanations for conspiracy theories in response to a power point presentation (ca. 10 min); pairs: answering questions to text (ca. 15 min); whole class: hot seat (ca. 10 min); individual: text on fortune telling (ca. 10 min); pairs: timed fortune telling (ca. 10 min) 5. ufo individual or pairs: vocabulary exercises (ca. 15 min); video – movie trailer (ca. 5 min); small groups: discussion on ways aliens are depicted in movies (ca. 10 min); whole class: report on pair work (ca. 5 min); pairs: preparing a report on humans that aliens would make (ca. 10 min.); whole class: feedback and summary (ca. 10 min) 6. superstitions individual: listening to a song and filling gaps in lyrics (ca. 10 min); pairs: comparing answers and feedback (ca. 5 min); whole class: video on superstitions’ impact on human life (ca. 20 min); pairs: comprehension check questions (ca. 5 min); pairs; good and bad luck (ca. 10 min); pairs: call my bluff (ca. 10 min); pairs: answering questions to text (ca. 10 min) 7. addictions whole class: video on addictions and comprehension questions (ca. 10 min); whole class: discussion on ways addictions are presented in the media (ca. 15 min); pairs: making a list of things people get addicted to (ca. 5 min); small groups: questions on text read at home (ca. 15 min.); pairs: discussion on students’ own addictions (10 min) 3.3. data collection and procedures the data collection tools used in the present study included self-assessment grids that required the respondents to indicate on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much) how willing they felt to contribute to ongoing activities in reaction to a beep they heard every 5 minutes. the grids were printed on a sheet of paper and included spaces where students provided their names and the date on which the lesson was held. another way of gathering data were interviews conducted with one randomly appointed student after each of the lessons. each of anna mystkowska-wiertelak 658 the students was interviewed only once and the discussion, which was recorded and transcribed, concerned the reasons for changes in wtc levels depicted in the grid as well as the interviewee’s general opinions and comments on the particular lesson. another source of information were detailed lesson plans, which included comments on the implementation of the plan and the indication of the exact stages of the class when individual sound signals were heard. the students were also required to fill a questionnaire based on the scale developed by mystkowska-wiertelak and pawlak (2016) (cronbach alpha = 0.89) to tap into the general level of classroom wtc at the beginning and end of the period the study took place. the tool consists of 16 6-point likert-style items denoting situations that are likely to take place in the classroom in the context of advanced learners of english at a polish university. individual items discriminate between communication with a teacher, one peer, small group, or the whole class. additionally, four items refer to reacting to or providing corrective feedback and one item to the use of the mother tongue. moreover, the survey included an open-ended question that asked to enumerate factors responsible for a rise or fall of wtc levels the students experienced, first, at the beginning of the course, and next, at the time of its duration. all of the instructions in the grid and questionnaire as well as tool’s items were written in the students’ mother tongue (polish) to avoid misunderstanding or misinterpretation, which, in turn, might have led to imprecise responses. for the same reason, polish was also used during the interviews as well as in the responses to the open-ended question, as it was believed to ensure greater depth of insight and ease of expression. it needs to be explained here that while the classes lasted 90 minutes, the self-report procedure differed in length between lessons, on account of the fact that various administrative and testing actions had to be performed, thus leaving between 55 to 75 minutes to be subject to investigation. it was decided, however, that 55-minute periods of each lesson will be investigated, to enable cross-lesson comparisons. the students were asked to give a consent to take part in the research project and assured that they could withdraw at any moment without any consequences whatsoever. they were also informed that agreeing or not agreeing to participate in the present study would not affect their course grades. however, to encourage them to take part in the research and approach data gathering procedures seriously and sincerely, they were offered some additional credit in the language teaching methodology course that all of them attended. 3.4. data analysis the present empirical investigation of learners’ wtc is a mixed-methods design where both qualitative and quantitative analysis was performed. the former dynamics of classroom wtc: results of a semester study 659 concerns data collected by means of interviews and the open-ended question included in the survey, while the latter refers to the numerical data rendered by self-evaluation performed and indicated on the wtc grid and responses to likert-type items included in the questionnaire. the qualitative enquiry involved identification and categorization of recurrent themes, whereas numerical data were used to calculate means and standard deviation values for individual beeps and entire classes, which enabled subsequent comparisons. the decision was made not to use inferential statistics with the exception of comparing the results of the administration of the in-class wtc scale. for this purpose ttests were applied to establish whether the difference was significant. the decision not to use inferential statistics with reference to wtc levels was dictated by the exploratory character of the study and the research questions posed that concerned the existence of fluctuations in wtc levels and establishing context-dependent variables causing them, rather than making between-point comparisons or comparing individual classes. the figures representing the mean levels of wtc were plotted against the activities and tasks demonstrated in the lesson plans. the interpretation of wtc ups and downs was performed with the use of the information gleaned from the detailed lesson plans and teacher notes on what the students were doing at the moments the beeps were played as well as commentary provided by students in the interviews conducted after every lesson. 4. results the analysis of the data collected by means of research instruments described above provided evidence for the dynamic character of l2 learners’ wtc during single lessons as well as in the course of a semester of study. some degree of variation was reported within the group and within individuals. additionally, diversity was also noted in the factors that the students reported as increasing or decreasing their wtc. for the sake of clarity, the discussion will first concentrate on the comparison of wtc levels in the seven classes, which will be followed by the presentation of the results for each of them separately with respect to temporal variation for all of the students as well as the variables contributing to wtc ups and downs that were revealed in the interview and questionnaire administered at the beginning and end of the research. 4.1. wtc variation in the course of the semester as can be seen in table 2 and figure 1, the self-reported levels of wtc in the seven speaking classes slightly decreased throughout the semester until measurement 7, at which time the average wtc level increased a little. when average anna mystkowska-wiertelak 660 wtc levels are compared, it is evident that the students appeared most willing to contribute to classroom interaction at the beginning of the research project and least willing at the next-to-last lesson. while the wtc means in the first four classes oscillated around 4 or neared 5, as in lesson 1 (m = 4.91), a decrease was noted for lesson 6, at which time the participants’ level of readiness to interact slightly crossed the mid-point of the scale, remaining at m = 3.89. as evidenced later in the qualitative data, the drop might be ascribed to the overall preoccupation with end-of-the year tests and exams as well as general tension and tiredness, or perhaps the impact of the data collection procedure as such. table 2 the means and standard deviations for wtc levels (from 1 to 7) during the seven classes time 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 m (sd) lesson 1 m 5.00 4.83 4.50 4.67 5.50 5.33 5.17 5.17 4.50 4.50 4.83 4.91 sd 0.76 1.55 1.83 1.31 1.28 1.23 1.47 1.13 0.77 1.05 1.38 (0.34) lesson 2 m 4.18 3.91 4.45 4.82 4.45 4.36 3.91 3.73 3.82 3.55 3.73 4.08 sd 0.55 0.86 1.11 0.90 0.63 0.94 0.49 0.59 0.90 0.75 0.83 (0.38) lesson 3 m 3.75 4.42 4.42 3.58 3.92 4.08 3.92 3.92 3.17 3.67 4.25 3.92 sd 1.42 1.26 1.11 0.95 1.04 1.04 1.11 1.26 1.28 1.25 1.42 (0.36) lesson 4 m 3.50 3.50 4.50 4.25 4.38 4.13 3.88 4.13 4.88 5.13 4.50 4.25 sd 1.00 0.71 0.50 0.83 0.70 0.78 1.36 0.60 0.60 0.78 1.00 (0.49) lesson 5 m 4.00 4.00 4.10 4.10 4.40 4.70 4.00 4.70 4.60 4.50 4.30 4.31 sd 0.77 0.77 1.04 1.37 1.20 1.00 1.26 0.78 0.80 1.20 1.19 (0.27) lesson 6 m 3.75 3.75 3.63 3.75 3.75 3.88 3.88 4.25 4.13 4.00 4.00 3.89 sd 0.83 0.66 0.70 0.43 0.83 0.93 0.60 0.43 0.60 0.87 1.00 (0.18) lesson 7 m 3.83 3.83 4.25 4.17 4.42 3.83 4.00 4.67 4.50 4.58 4.38 4.22 sd 0.69 0.99 1.01 1.07 1.04 1.07 0.91 1.03 0.96 0.95 0.99 (1.59) when it comes to the overall patterns of wtc fluctuations in the seven classes, the results show, as can be seen in table 2 and figure 1, that the participants’ readiness to speak was the most stable during lesson 6 and most diverse during lesson 1, in the course of which the highest ratings appeared roughly in the middle of the class and remained at the same relatively high level for 4 consecutive beeps, which spans the period of 20 min. quite a reverse trend could be observed in lessons 2, 4 and 7, where, after initially increasing scores, a slight drop was reported with its bottom around times 6 and 7, only to increase towards the end of the lessons. the lowest value of the respondents’ readiness to dynamics of classroom wtc: results of a semester study 661 contribute to the interaction was noted during lesson 3 at time 9 amounting to 3.17. the lesson whose onset was marked with the lowest value for learners’ readiness to speak was lesson 4 (m = 3.50); however, the initial trend was reversed until the end of the lesson, when, at times 9 and 10, the ratings were the highest. an attempt to relate these patterns to the ways in which the classes were conducted will be made in the following section. figure 1 fluctuations of mean levels of wtc during seven classes 4.2. variation in wtc during individual lessons and their causes due to space limitations the following discussion will concern only the most striking changes of wtc levels as well as most conspicuous trends evident in the selfreports produced by the participants in each of the lessons. additionally, a more careful examination will concern the fluctuations connected to the reasons that were especially salient in the post-lesson interviews. the following analysis relies also on the researcher’s own observations and notes taken during the classes. 3 3,5 4 4,5 5 5,5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 0 1 1 lesson 1 lesson 2 lesson 3 lesson 4 lesson 5 lesson 6 lesson 7 anna mystkowska-wiertelak 662 4.2.1. lesson 1: feminism the first speaking class during which the grids were used was devoted to feminism. responses to the post-lesson interview and the open-ended question indicated that students were not very fond of the topic, but nevertheless their readiness to contribute to classroom speaking activities was the highest from among all of the classes under investigation (m = 4.91). the numerical information about wtc (table 2 & figure 1) demonstrate that the participants were generally willing to take part in the tasks and discussions. during the class wtc fluctuated depending on the organization mode and type of task. the first rating was the highest time 1 score in the whole research reported in the present paper (m = 5.00), and was observed during a quiz intended to help students revise requisite vocabulary. because of the competitive character of the quiz, the students remained agitated and talkative for the following 15 minutes; however, a moderate downward trend was registered at the next two beeps (m = 4.83 and m = 4.50 respectively) due to repetitiveness of the procedure and perhaps boredom, as was hinted by the interviewed student: “you know, when it went for too long we didn’t feel like going on.” the biggest increase of 1.0 in wtc was noted between time 3 and time 5, which was the highest of all of the measurements in the study (m = 5.50). time 5 and the following three beeps were heard while the students were working in pairs discussing various questions related to the main topic of the lesson presented as cards a or b. they were also encouraged by the teacher to paraphrase the answer of their partner before proceeding to the next question, so as to make sure that they understood them correctly. this technique turned out to be most conducive to increasing students’ readiness to speak. wtc levels dropped at time 9 (m = 4.50) when students were watching a short documentary about a well-known feminist activist, at which moment they were not actually required to say anything. activities that do not entail immediate production affect wtc levels in a negative way; however, as elucidated by the student in the subsequent interview, even if no speaking was performed, her wtc levels were initially high because, while watching, she found answers to some of the questions posed before the task: “i felt ready to speak because at first i understood everything and knew what to say.” unfortunately, failing to find answers to all of the questions towards the end of the video, she eventually started to feel less eager to talk, hence, her wtc dropped. the values of selfreported readiness to contribute to interactions slightly increased towards the end of the class when the teacher was asking questions about the film in the whole-class arrangement providing prompts and explanations, which might have positively affected the students’ wish to speak. dynamics of classroom wtc: results of a semester study 663 4.2.2. lesson 2: cold case files much in the same vein, in this lesson too, activities that did not require immediate production did not drastically decrease the students’ wtc. the class reported here revolved round a “cold case,” an unsolved murder or suicide mystery. the class started with a short powerpoint presentation including also a short audio material in which journalists interviewed a lawyer about the case. the introductory part lasted 10 min during which time two beeps were heard. mean values for time 1 and 2 were relatively high (4.18 and 3.91, respectively) which showed that the participants must have been interested and eager to contribute to classroom interaction without even knowing what tasks they would be expected to perform. just after the second beep the students were instructed to, first, get familiar with the documents describing the case in detail from numerous perspectives, and then, discuss in pairs the most probable cause of the main character’s death. the documents that the students were to inspect included, among others, a coroner’s report, a newspaper article describing the victim, interrogation transcripts, documents found in the possession of the victim at the moment of his death. the students were also encouraged to watch the teacher’s presentation and the film again. during this phase of the lesson the beeping sound could be heard seven times and the wtc levels indicated by the students showed an increase in comparison to the introductory part of the class reaching wtc highest level at time 4 (m = 4.82). at time 9, which was the last measurement during this activity, the mean wtc was slightly lower (m = 3.82), which is hardly surprising given its length and character and the fact that the students worked on their own, only occasionally asking the teacher or other students to explain new words or unknown concepts. the next stage of the class involved discussing with a partner the hypothesis formulated on the basis of the available evidence and, as indicated by time 10 value, the students’ willingness to present their interpretations of the facts was at its lowest, only to rise slightly at time 11 when a whole-class feedback session was held. this very moment turned out to be the second occasion in the study during which a whole-class arrangement resulted in an increase of the students’ wtc, contrary to the students’ assertion that this way of conducting classes was most anxiety-provoking and thus hindering wtc. the increase might have been caused by the fact that at that moment students could verify their hypotheses concerning the death of the main character, presenting counterarguments to those demonstrated by others to support their point of view. the task proved to be inherently engaging and the lengthy session of the evidence analysis generated more readiness to share opinions with the teacher and the rest of the group. interestingly, the highest levels of wtc which continued for times 5, 6, 7 and 8 were indicated anna mystkowska-wiertelak 664 when the students were hardly expected to say anything. as clarified in the interview following the lesson, the students found the material interesting and being given an opportunity to gather information that would be useful during the discussion part of the class inspired more willingness to speak. according to the interviewee, possessing background knowledge on the topic or being provided with information on the issues to be discussed, which naturally entails the provision of useful vocabulary, is critical in provoking engagement and willingness to participate in speaking activities. in the words of the student: “all the difficult words about forensics and so on were there so i didn’t need to look them up in a dictionary and i had some ideas who might have done it, killed . . . it was like in a detective movie.” the impact of negative affect on learners’ wtc was manifested in the student’s account of the situations in which he realized that other students knew more about the case or understood better the audio material presented by the teacher. the feeling of lagging behind, in the words of the student, caused “frustration and reluctance to do anything.” additionally, he complained about being “overwhelmed by a mass of information” and the brisk tempo in which the class proceeded. 4.2.3. lesson 3: urban myths as can be seen in table 2 and figure 1, lesson 3 did not generate as much willingness to interact as the previous ones and amounted only to the level of m = 3.92. although this lack of eagerness to speak might have been caused by some external factors, it seems plausible that the initial activity had a bearing on what happened throughout the lesson. the main topic around which the class discussion revolved was urban myths. at the beginning, the students worked in small groups and discussed questions referring to a newspaper article on people’s gullibility, which they had to read at home. this stage initiated a moderate level of wtc at m = 3.75. this authentic text, despite the fact that it had been read as homework, turned out to be challenging, and conversations in groups did not proceed in a lively neither animated manner, which necessitated the teacher’s prompting or participation in group discussions. a slight increase was reported for the two following times (m = 4.42 at times 2 and 3) when students worked in pairs and answered questions provided by the teacher on separate work cards related to the main topic, at which time they could refer to their own experience and opinions. the task that was set later on immediately decreased the students’ wtc (m = 3.58) as they were expected to create their own urban myths according to the criteria provided by the teacher. the student interviewed afterwards explained that the drop might have occurred because the learners found the task very challenging and requiring much creativity. this time they were not dynamics of classroom wtc: results of a semester study 665 provided with any materials to rely on but were supposed to produce something almost from scratch. the wtc level remained relatively stable throughout this phase of the lesson. on completing the task the participants created new pairs and interviewed one another on the myths they produced, which resulted in the lowest wtc level (m = 3.17) during the whole class. a slight increase (m = 4.25) was indicated towards the end, when students were engaged in small group discussions concerning frightening events, which entailed a reference to students’ own experiences, generally conducive to increased willingness to interact. additional incentive came from a list of idioms expressing varying degrees of fear that the students were instructed to use in their conversations. the student interviewed after the lesson stressed the importance of “having things to communicate,” which he understood as talking about his own experience or things he knew really well without the need to refer to any area of knowledge; thus, an opportunity to talk about things he found scary led to his highest wtc rating. his lowest wtc value was indicated during the activity that required designing a new myth, which, as he complained, “was hard because nothing came to [his] mind.” 4.2.4. lesson 4: mysteries lesson 4, during which the mean wtc value amounted to 4.25 (range between 3.50 and 5.13), concerned the topic of unresolved mysteries and started with a short film shown without any introductory questions and depicting various popular conspiracy theories. the first two beeps, which sounded while the film was presented, both rendered m = 3.50, the exact midpoint on the scale used for self-report. an increase to 4.50 was reported at time 3 when the students were providing possible explanations of conspiracy theories that they saw in a powerpoint presentation. wtc values remained at a similar level at times 4, 5 and 6 (4.25, 4.38, 4.23 respectively) during pair work involving answering questions posed by the teacher with reference to a short text on superstitions. the reported wtc level dropped at time 7 (m = 3.88) during “hot seat,” a game-like activity, necessitating guessing words written on the blackboard behind, using the prompts offered by the rest of the group. enjoyable as the game was, it must have generated some anxiety in weaker students, who may have felt uneasy at the necessity to perform in front of the group. in the course of the next activity, reading a text on fortune telling, wtc ratings began to grow gradually (4.13, 4.88) to reach its peak at time 10 (m = 5.13) when the students took part in a task resembling “speed dating” in which they acted as fortune tellers themselves. asked about the initially modest values reported for willingness to contribute to class interaction, the interviewed student commented that he was “neither willing nor unwilling” but simply waiting for the teacher to “show something anna mystkowska-wiertelak 666 interesting.” in his view, the increase of wtc during the vocabulary game was only likely among students who felt confident about their lexical knowledge: “you have to know quite a few words to enjoy a game like that.” 4.2.5. lesson 5: ufo given the nature of the warm-up phase of lesson 5, it is surprising perhaps that the opening wtc rating was relatively high, not the highest in the whole study but definitely one of the highest at m = 4.00. at that moment as well as while hearing the three consecutive beeps, the students were doing vocabulary exercises in pairs and in the whole-class arrangement, filling gaps, providing definitions and doing crossword puzzles. such a high level of wtc testifies perhaps to the students’ generally favourable disposition on that particular day, rather than their appreciation of the tasks or their willingness to interact. an alternative interpretation was that the exercises were performed in pairs in the usual sitting arrangement, thanks to which learners could work with partners they knew well and liked. beep 5 was heard while the students were watching a trailer of a new alien invasion movie, which generated an increase in the self-reported wtc values to m = 4.40. a further upsurge was noted at time 6 (m = 4.70) when group discussions were held on different ways of depicting aliens in science-fiction movies. since the genre appears very popular with this audience, most of the students were highly engaged, recalling their favourite scenes in an animated way. general enthusiasm waned, as did the reported wtc level, at time 7 when the teacher asked group representatives to outline discussions in their groups and then introduced a pair activity in which the participants were supposed to compile a report that aliens might prepare as a result of encountering humans. when this task was in progress the students’ readiness to communicate remained at a relatively stable level (m = 4.70, m = 4.60, m = 4.50) but dropped (m = 4.30) during a whole-class feedback session that followed. in the opinion of the student interviewed afterwards, talking about science-fiction movies was the most conducive to wtc mainly because many of the group members had recently seen a newly released film on the topic and the memories were rather fresh. another factor that according to that student contributed to the increase of her willingness to interact was her partner’s willingness to cooperate and good atmosphere during the lesson: “[name] was today really talkative, she spoke a lot and i didn’t have to do all the talking myself.” her lowest wtc rating was associated with one of introductory vocabulary exercises that entailed speaking in front of the group. knowing that she might be the next person to be appointed by the teacher to perform at the blackboard made her really anxious and unwilling to say anything. dynamics of classroom wtc: results of a semester study 667 4.2.6. lesson 6: superstitions as shown in table 2 and figure 1, fluctuations in lesson 6 were the smallest from among all the classes the present study concerned. the standard deviation (0.18) was the lowest, as was the mean of wtc ratings (m = 3.89). it is difficult to pinpoint one variable whose impact could be blamed for low wtc ratings, but perhaps a combination of factors contributed to such a situation, beginning with an ineffective introduction: listening to a song to fill gaps in the song lyrics. the students were encouraged to check their answers with other students. it was evident that the students did not like the song itself and that the task was too easy. this was time 1 and the rating amounted to 3.75. exactly the same value appeared at times 2, 4 and 5 when students were watching a short documentary on the impact of superstitions on people’s lives and answered in pairs the teacher’s questions checking the understanding. readiness to engage in communication increased at times 6 and 7 to the level of 3.88 when students worked in pairs and recalled omens of good or bad luck. an increase to 4.25, the highest on that particular day, at the next beep overlapped with the onset of a “call my bluff” activity and a similar rating (m = 4.13) was reported at time 9 when the activity was in progress. the final phase of the lesson involved answering questions concerning origins of superstitions on the basis of a short text. the wtc level reported at the two measurements that took place during that period equaled 4.00. a conversation with one of the students that was conducted immediately after the lesson confirmed the teacher’s assumption that the group did not like the topic. the materials used in class, including both the song, handouts with questions and texts were considered simple and unmotivating, thus the lesson design failed to generate more enthusiasm and eagerness to talk. the impact of group dynamics was visible in a comment by the interview participant, a usually quiet and shy student, who was more active during the lesson. asked about the cause of the change, he remarked that it was due to the absence of a student who tended to dominate whole-class activities. 4.2.7. lesson 7: addictions the last class took place at the very end of the spring semester. not only was the mean at 4.22 higher than that in lesson 6, so was the standard deviation (sd = 1.59) testifying to more dynamic shifts in the participants’ willingness to contribute to tasks and activities taking place during the lesson. the first two beeps rendered measurements amounting to 3.83, the lesson’s lowest value, and were sounded while the students were watching a youtube clip on drug addiction (time 1) and answering the teacher’s questions related to the material they anna mystkowska-wiertelak 668 watched. the students wtc fluctuated over the three consecutive beeps above the level of 4.00, which coincided with a discussion of ways in which addicts and addictions are depicted in mass culture. a slight drop to the level of 3.88 was registered at the subsequent measurement when the class were asked to make a list of things people can get addicted to, which was followed by a small group discussion in response to a set of questions provided by the teacher and corresponding to the text the learners were supposed to prepare at home. group work inspired more communicative behaviour and readiness to talk as became evident in mean values at time 7 (m = 4.00), time 8 (m = 4.67), and time 9 (m = 4.50). the largest value of wtc ratings appeared at time 10 in the course of the discussion in pairs on students’ own addictions. this part of the class, as testified by the student who was interviewed once the lesson finished, was the most engaging because students could talk about their own experiences or share information about family members who suffered from different types of addictions. as one of the participants commented in the interview: “i talked about my brother. he is addicted to video games and we are really worried. he is allowed to play only a few hours a day and when he is not playing he is a normal kid, but he can be aggressive or depressed when playing; his mood changes so quickly.” the interviewee enjoyed the video that was used at the beginning of the class to introduce the topic and, as she admitted, was nicely intrigued and waited for the lesson to unwind, which resulted in a surge of her wtc. she reported a decrease in her readiness to interact while answering questions because there were “too many of them” and some of them referred to exactly the same issues. another aspect of the class that she particularly enjoyed was diversity of tasks and arrangements as well as a quick tempo the class proceeded. 4.3. in-class wtc scale on two occasions, the beginning and end of the study, the respondents were asked to fill in a questionnaire based on the scale developed by mystkowskawiertelak and pawlak (2016) to tap into the general level of classroom wtc. the mean value at the first administration of the questionnaire amounted to 3.12 (sd = .43), whereas the second time the tool was used rendered a slightly higher mean of m = 3.62 (sd = .43). on both occasions the respondents’ readiness to interact in the classroom reached a moderate level; however, on the second occasion the level was slightly higher and the comparison of means showed that the difference was statistically significant (t = 7.44, p < .000). the low value of standard deviation, the same at both measures, testifies to a uniform character of the sample, which is not surprising, given the similar background of the participants, almost identical aims and the fact that the items concerned classes dynamics of classroom wtc: results of a semester study 669 taught by the same teacher. the students’ wtc turned out to be higher at the end of the course, which can be accounted for by the growth in their general proficiency level as well as the fact that both the students within their group and the teacher had got to know each other better, thanks to which positive classroom atmosphere was created, increasing the feeling of security and reducing anxiety. the survey included one open-ended question aimed at tapping individual factors the respondents identified as responsible for increasing and decreasing their willingness to contribute to speaking activities in the classroom. not all of the multitude of variables that impinge on wtc fluctuations in the classroom could be taken into account: the analysis concerned only those that were mentioned most frequently by the participants. on the first occasion only 5 out of 12 respondents provided answers to the question. only two aspects of the lesson that could impact the students’ willingness to talk were mentioned: uninteresting topics and having to talk in front of the whole group. what positively impacted on the learners’ wtc was an opportunity to discuss topics in pairs or small groups, preferably with a friendly, well-known interlocutor. the second time the questionnaire was administered all of the participants answered the question concerning reasons for wtc growth or decrease, and their responses were not as laconic as before. the students declared that they felt reluctant to speak if the topic of the lesson was uninteresting or required having specific background knowledge. moreover, longer or repetitive tasks, like answering a list of questions, caused a dip in their willingness to interact. two of the participants complained about the study procedure involving the use of the beeping sound which was distracting and annoying. most of the students, however, mentioned one factor responsible for reluctance to speak: having to take part in whole-class discussions. this least preferred mode of arrangement provoked most tension and anxiety related not as much to the presence of the teacher as to the fact that all other students were listening. among factors contributing to the increase of their wtc, the students mentioned a partner who is willing to interact him/herself, preferably a good friend of theirs or someone they like. positive classroom atmosphere enhanced by the teacher’s supportive behavior together with engaging topics that referred to common rather than specialist knowledge as well as variety of tasks were mentioned as most conducive to interaction in the classroom. 5. discussion the aim of the present section is to offer a discussion of the findings of this longitudinal study performed during regularly-scheduled speaking classes taught to english majors by one teacher by addressing the research questions, the first of which referred to the extent to which the participants’ wtc fluctuates in anna mystkowska-wiertelak 670 the course of individual speaking classes. as can be seen in the analysis of the self-ratings marked on the wtc grids, the students’ readiness to speak during all the 7 classes reported here exhibited a considerable degree of fluctuation. wtc ups and downs were reported not only in the course of single lessons but also during specific tasks and activities, as was also established in the course of previous studies into classroom wtc (e.g., cao & philips, 2006; cao, 2011, 2013; mystkowska-wiertelak & pawlak, 2014; pawlak & mystkowska-wiertelak, 2015; pawlak, mystkowska-wiertelak, & bielak, 2016). the magnitude of these fluctuations differed between single lessons but also between individual students, and even if these differences were not conspicuous, as evident in the low values of standard deviation, the impact of individual characteristics cannot be excluded; however, it needs to be noted here that discussing wtc fluctuations of individual students was not the focus of the present study. some explanation, however, pertinent to the present research question is also tied to the other research questions and thus will be provided in what follows. the differences in the levels of students’ wtc between the speaking classes they attended were addressed by question two. the means for wtc selfratings made on a 7-point scale oscillated around 4 in all of the seven classes under investigation, with 5 classes’ ratings slightly above and 2 slightly below this point. this largely uniform trend shows only a mild degree of variation between classes despite the fact that each of the lessons referred to a different topic. however, it needs to be taken into account that each of the classes involved a combination of pair, group and whole-class groupings and that interaction was each time triggered by written text or visual stimuli. the fact that lesson scenarios differed considerably, varying the tempo, sequencing, arrangement and so on, as demonstrated in the results section, turned out not to be decisive in causing greater shifts in wtc levels. the factor that was more influential in this respect was the fact that all of the classes were designed and conducted by the same teacher representing a specific teaching style, thanks to which a consistent environment was created rendering, in turn, a relatively stable wtc ratings over the whole semester. another condition whose impact might be held responsible for moderate semester fluctuations is the group composition with its dynamics and power distributions. this aspect is also tied to the third question the present investigation addressed, namely, which context-dependent and individual factors decrease and which increase the participants’ wtc in the course of the speaking classes under study. it needs to be stressed here that not all of the context-related and especially individual characteristics lend themselves to an orderly and precise analysis as the characterization of ways in which they operate should take into account the influence of other factors exerted on them. an attempt to dynamics of classroom wtc: results of a semester study 671 separate in the analysis the impact of specific factors seemed futile at times as their effects can only be seen in conjunction with the operation of one or more other variables. sketchy as the present discussion has to be due to space limitations, it will concentrate on the influences whose impact was perceived as most significant. moreover, it seems warranted at this juncture to note that there appeared a certain degree of mismatch between the opinions and perceptions disclosed by the students in interviews and the open question and observations made the researcher – the group’s regular teacher, as was the case with discussions held not with their regular partners during which they appeared more engaged and lively, despite declaring that their wtc increases with their best friends. talking to a person one has limited contact with perhaps turned out inherently more interesting that conversing with someone whose point of view and preferences we know really well. only some out of the many factors and influences shaping learners’ wtc in the classroom setting will become part of the present discussion. the criterion that was used for selecting them was the frequency with which the participants referred to a particular variable. hence, the present considerations will comprise a reference to class-arrangement modes, interlocutor, topics and tasks as well as stage of the class. as to the first of these, the way the students were supposed to perform a particular task, in groups, pairs, or whole-class, was perceived as the crucial condition in boosting or hindering their readiness to interact. as has been mentioned above, pair work was unanimously considered as the most convenient arrangement. it seems that working with one person at a time provided a feeling of security, which affected willingness to speak in a positive way. by contrast, the need to speak in front of all others in the whole-class mode was perceived as most unpleasant and daunting because of its facethreatening nature, which was exacerbated by antagonistic group dynamics in the class. directly related to the role of the factor discussed so far is the impact of the interlocutor on the speaker’s wish to sustain communication. the interviewed students expressed a preference for working with familiar people, which might be reminiscent of the tension within the group as well as their apprehension that more proficient speakers might dominate discussions thus diminishing their own practice opportunities. the sentiments might have also originated from unfavourable reactions some of them experienced in other classes as well. on the other hand, more proficient learners preferred to cooperate with their regular partners representing a similar level because it ensured an interesting exchange of ideas without the need to stumble over language problems. as was noted by some of the participants and also corroborated by the researcher’s observations, highest wtc levels were generated if all/both group members were equally engaged and willing to complete a task. it appeared that the interlocutor’s anna mystkowska-wiertelak 672 involvement and general positive disposition exerted a positive impact on all of the participants working in a particular organization mode. another issue that was frequently evoked by the participants was the topic of a lesson. the respondents agreed that interesting topics enhanced their willingness to speak but were not able to specify what makes a particular theme interesting to them. in the course of interviews it turned out that “interest” boils down to concepts and ideas that students are familiar with, and possess requisite vocabulary and knowledge about. although the impact of diverse individual preferences was also visible, generally, the topics they considered interesting were those that referred to pop culture, and mass media, were related to everyday existence, and allowed them to draw upon personal experience. by contrast, learners’ wtc dropped when boring topics were made the leading theme of a lesson. these included discussions concerning complicated, sophisticated subjects that could not be dealt with without solid factual background, the knowledge of related concepts and the use of advanced language, all of which might impede communication among most of speakers. on the other hand, relying on written sources deprives interaction of its authentic character, since all answers are included in the text everyone has read. the task the students were supposed to perform also importantly affected their reported readiness to initiate or sustain communication. closely related to the organization mode, the nature of the task immediately translated into the learners’ involvement, resulting in either an increase or a decrease of wtc. repetitive activities, for example, those involving answering a list of questions in pairs or finding answers while analyzing written material rarely instigated enthusiasm and wtc levels dropped. in turn, game-like activities were preferred by more proficient and less anxious students whose willingness to participate increased. interestingly, receptive activities, such as watching a video, that did not necessitate immediate production did not adversely affect learners’ wtc ratings. conversely, they either increased or remained at roughly the same level. what was stressed in the responses to the open-ended question included in the survey was the students’ appreciation of frequent changes of tasks in the course of one class, which increased the tempo of the procedure, added variety and necessitated changes of partners and arrangements as well as shifts between production and reception. apart from lesson 1, all lessons’ self-ratings were lower at the beginning and grew towards the middle. as noted by some of respondents, this was because they were “waiting for the lesson to unwind,” not knowing what to expect as each of the classes followed a different scenario. a downtrend was observed towards the end of the classes in all but two of them; however, it needs to be borne in mind that these were not the actual lesson closings, following the initial decision to compare identical time spans in each of the classes under investigation. dynamics of classroom wtc: results of a semester study 673 generally, it might be assumed that with time boredom and tiredness set in and, as a result, wtc levels fall. a comment appears in order here that not all of the above-mentioned factors played an equally prominent role in each of the classes; moreover, their impact was not even across group members. what is more, it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish the impact of various factor parameters on the shifts in wtc levels. 6. conclusions and limitations as demonstrated above, classroom-based investigations of willingness to initiate or sustain communication enable gaining a deeper insight into its fluctuations and factors underlying them. the departure from laboratory-style procedures, like those applied by macintyre and legatto (2011), allowed for including a wider range of variables in the investigation and shed light on the ways these variables mutually interact. moreover, joining the role of the teacher and researcher created opportunities for, on the one hand, shaping the conditions that were investigated and, on the other, conducting observations and enquiring students about their behaviour and opinions almost at the moment they occurred. although the study has, to some extent, contributed to the understanding of the changes that willingness to contribute to speaking activities undergoes in the course of language classes in the instructional setting and factors underpinning these changes, it is not free from limitations that need to be addressed here. the first line of criticism can be leveled against the procedure that required the participants to react to a beeping sound at 5-minute intervals throughout the whole lesson unit. disruptive as it was, which was also confirmed by the students, it offered an opportunity to tap into fluctuations on a moment-by-moment basis (for a discussion of the procedure flaws and merits see mystkowska-wiertelak & pawlak, 2017). another weakness of the investigation procedure that deserves attention is the fact that in-class wtc surveys were not administered after every class and only one student was interviewed each time. however, the decision was taken not to disrupt the usual lesson schedule, not to use up lesson time, otherwise compromised, neither require students to be engaged in data collection instead of enjoying breaks. other logistical problems concerned students having to attend other classes and the teacher conducting others. naturally, the present discussion did not take into account all of the variables that impact on in-class wtc, offering just a glimpse at the intricate interplay of situated wtc antecedents. the analysis of the data would have undoubtedly benefitted from juxtaposing the identified trends and regularities against individual differences variables such as personality, learning styles or language anna mystkowska-wiertelak 674 learning strategies, the more so that, even if some remain stable, certain aspects might be developed or transformed thanks to teacher intervention. undoubtedly, the study of communication-related variables deserves further attention, especially in the context they naturally occur before sound pedagogical recommendations are offered. nevertheless, some tentative suggestions seem in order here, especially those concerning organization modes and group composition. it appears that willingness to perform communicative activities grows in the presence of individuals that students like and trust. the most nerve-racking arrangement proved to be the one with the biggest audience – whole-class. however, contrary to students’ declarations, when the activities performed in this mode necessitated genuine exchange of information, they turned out effective in increasing wtc levels. that is why teachers should pay special attention to the ways in which classroom interaction is organized and students are grouped. moreover, it seems that warm-up or introductory activities can shape the mood for most or all of the class, starting either an upward or a downward trend. hence, a lively, invigorating, funny, or intriguing opening activity can make students more willing to work during the class. what also appears critical is the opportunity on the part of the students to prepare for the speaking phase, hopefully, in the course of engaging in listening or reading activities, during which requisite vocabulary is provided or revised and factual information is offered. acknowledgements i would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions. dynamics of classroom wtc: results of a semester study 675 references asker, b. 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(2007). willingness to communicate: a mediating factor in the interaction between learners and tasks. in k. van den branden, k. van gorp, & m. verhelst (eds.), tasks in action: task-based language education from a classroom-based perspective (pp. 153-187). cambridge: cambridge scholars press. 257 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (2). 2020. 257-281 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.2.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt beliefs and experiences in the english classroom: perspectives of swedish primary school learners maria nilsson stockholm university, sweden https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4201-0867 maria.nilsson@isd.su.se abstract this study investigates how swedish learners make sense of and perceive english instruction and the process of foreign language learning in a target language-only primary school classroom. in small group discussions, 26 learners aged 9-10 were audio recorded while discussing questions related to their language learner beliefs and their classroom experiences. learners expressed a strong consensus about the importance of both the teacher’s extensive target language input and the learners’ oral engagement, in alignment with the beliefs of the teacher. however, the analysis identified three mismatches among high anxiety learners in this context, related to incomprehensible teacher talk, social fear of making mistakes and classroom organization. as their voiced beliefs were at odds with their emotionally guided behavior of refraining from asking questions or volunteering to speak, their sense of agency was reduced. in this context, the target language-only approach appeared to have a negative impact on the emotional, organizational and instructional dimensions of foreign language instruction for many of the young learners. the findings illustrate the interrelated dynamics of beliefs, emotions and classroom context, and contribute to our understanding of learners’ foreign language anxiety and sense of agency in the primary foreign language classroom. keywords: young language learners; learner beliefs; target language use; foreign language anxiety; sense of agency maria nilsson 258 1. introduction the number of young learners of english as a foreign language around the world has increased dramatically during the last decade (garton & copland, 2019). however, little is still known about foreign language education for young language learners (ylls) as compared to adult foreign language instruction. approaches from adult education, such as exclusive target language (tl) use and communicative language teaching (clt), have been adopted without considering whether they are appropriate for the age group and without concern for the realities of classroom instruction in different contexts (garton & copland, 2019). a large mixed methods study involving more than 4,000 teachers in 142 countries found that the most challenging aspects of teaching, according to the participants, were implementing clt and making young learners speak english (copland, garton, & burns, 2014). other issues of concern were how to deal with a lack of motivation, discipline, class size and the diversity of language proficiency. however, the perspectives of ylls themselves are seriously under-researched (muñoz, 2017). a deeper understanding of how ylls within mandatory education may perceive language learning and the instruction they receive, can inform the development of age appropriate teaching approaches that consider cognitive, emotional as well as social needs of learners. since negative emotions that develop in early education are known to have long-term effects on motivation and self-esteem (mihaljević djigunović, 2009), more research is needed that considers a holistic perspective on learning and takes into account the complex interplay between ylls’ cognition, emotion and the classroom context. such interaction involves, for example, learner beliefs, which entail different aspects of learners’ meaning-making in connection to language learning and instruction (kalaja, barcelos, & aro, 2018). the purpose of this study is to explore ylls’ beliefs about foreign language teaching and learning in relation to their own classroom experiences. more specifically, the focus is on how learners with varying degrees of foreign language anxiety (fla) perceive english instruction and their own classroom participation. in a previous study, swedish ylls aged 8-12, in ten classrooms, completed a questionnaire targeting fla, where learners reported their reactions to oral classroom interaction (nilsson, 2019). the present study is based on qualitative data from group discussions with learners from the classroom where the highest mean level of fla was reported and where many of them frequently experienced negative emotions in relation to english lessons. beliefs and experiences in the english classroom: perspectives of swedish primary school learners 259 2. background 2.1. learner beliefs language learner beliefs encompass “the conceptions, ideas, and opinions learners have about l2 learning and teaching and language itself” (kalaja et al., 2018, p. 222). such beliefs have attracted attention since the late 1980’s, in parallel with the introduction of clt and an increasing interest in the learner (kalaja & barcelos, 2013). in a pioneering study, horwitz (1988) set out to raise awareness of common learner beliefs among adult students, many of which were considered unrealistic and counterproductive. in such early studies, beliefs were seen as rather stable preconceptions residing in the mind of individual learners. since then, more contextual approaches have been implemented that consider the voices and experiences of learners and their interpretations of learning (kalaja, barcelos, aro, & ruohotie-lyhty, 2016). from this perspective, learner beliefs emerge in the learning context as a result of an ongoing meaningmaking process of interaction. dufva (2003) highlights that communication and cognition are integrated and that beliefs take shape as they are formulated and negotiated in interaction with others. this may be especially true for children, who have less experience of language instruction and are generally less used to talking about their learning. learner beliefs have social origin as they are influenced by significant others and norms in society at large, and develop in response to the environment (aro, 2009). at the same time, each individual has a unique subjective perspective, anchored in personal experiences. in relation to foreign language learning, such experiences refer to our accumulated perceptions, which involve both cognitive and emotional processes, resulting from the situated learning environment (csizér & kálmán, 2019). there is a reciprocal interaction between beliefs and experiences. on the one hand, our beliefs influence our understanding and recollection of our personal experiences. on the other hand, these experiences help us maintain or renegotiate these same beliefs (kalaja et al., 2018). learner beliefs are therefore social, dynamic and contextual. furthermore, they are personal and unique but also collective. for example, dufva (2003) found that adults who were asked to share their language learner beliefs often referred back to experiences from childhood. although such memories were quite personal, incidents that took place within the same educational context often resembled each other, generating rather similar beliefs. findings like these also point to more stable aspects of learner beliefs, where beliefs that are established early on and connected to emotional incidents often remain influential (barcelos & kalaja, 2013). maria nilsson 260 rather than pinning down certain learner beliefs, recent studies focus more on how beliefs develop and guide learners’ behaviors and approaches to language learning in specific contexts. mismatches between adult students’ and teachers’ preferred teaching approaches in language education may, for example, cause frustration for both parties (brown, 2009). in order to gain a deeper understanding of the role of beliefs in instructed language learning, kalaja et al. (2018) have called for research on a broadened range of learner beliefs and related aspects, such as affect and agency. 2.2. beliefs, emotion and sense of agency the influence of emotions on our thinking, perception, sense-making, and learning has been acknowledged in research (arnold, 2011). mahn and john-steiner (2002) have even pointed out that the notion of the zone of proximal development (zpd) cannot be fully understood without recognizing the interaction between cognition and emotion. negative emotions make learners less focused on a task while also making the learning experience itself less pleasant, and therefore less effective (arnold, 2011). the relationship between beliefs and emotion is reciprocal. horwitz (1988) highlighted the detrimental impact that certain beliefs may have on language learning and thus contribute to fla, for instance, beliefs related to the importance of accuracy. in turn, emotionally loaded experiences of joy, anxiety or embarrassment may have a pervasive impact on our language learner beliefs (dufva, 2003) and beliefs about ourselves as language learners, that is, our selfconcept (mercer, 20011). this self-concept involves both cognitive and affective dimensions and is linked to confidence and evaluations of our ability to learn and perform. self-concept and beliefs about language learning, in interaction with the social context and the affective atmosphere, contribute to a sense of agency (mercer, 2011), which refers to our perceived potential to act in a particular environment. in sum, the way learners make sense of language instruction and language learning involves both rational and affective dimensions. beliefs and previous experiences are crucial for learners’ approaches, perceptions and responses to language instruction and the learning environment. to visualize the impact of emotion on beliefs, agency and identity (the latter will not, however, be discussed further in this paper), kalaja et al. (2016) suggest a model, presented in figure 1, where emotion serves as background to the other three overlapping constructs (see figure 1). beliefs and experiences in the english classroom: perspectives of swedish primary school learners 261 figure 1 the interaction of beliefs, agency, identity and emotion according to kalaja et al. (2016) yet, recent empirical studies from a variety of settings with adult learners have found beliefs that were at odds with emotion and behavior. for instance, learners’ perceived risk of social embarrassment resulted in frustration and avoidance behaviors in spite of their expressed beliefs about the importance of interacting in the target language (aragão, 2011; garcía-ponce, crawford, lengeling, & mora-pablo, 2018; gkonou, 2017; yoshida, 2013). these researchers concluded that teachers should therefore reflect on, address and conduct classroom discussions about beliefs and expectations, to counteract negative emotion. arnold (2011), however, adds that while this may be important, the most effective boost to learners’ self-concept comes from the actual experience of successful interaction in the tl. 2.3. studies of children’s learner beliefs and experiences although research on yll beliefs is limited, a number of studies confirm the emergent, social and contextual aspects of such beliefs. primary school learners are metacognitively aware and able to reflect on their beliefs. in spain, muñoz (2014) found that learners aged 7-12 were able to formulate and motivate beliefs and opinions about english learning. furthermore, they could differentiate between activities they liked and those that they found most beneficial to learning. while they favored listening, they reported learning more from speaking. kolb (2007) interviewed german learners aged 8-9 and found that they held conceptions about language, ranging along a continuum of atomistic and more holistic views, rather similar to those held by adults, and which were likely to impact on their approach to learning. a longitudinal interview study with 7-11year-olds in finland highlighted how beliefs were appropriated from the onset of foreign language instruction (aro, 2009). pedagogical practices and increasing personal experiences influenced learner beliefs although “authoritative voices” maria nilsson 262 (p. 154) affected learners’ interpretations of these experiences. this adult influence diminished with age, in support of the claim by mihaljević djigunović (2015) that such influence may have been exaggerated and that ylls form their own beliefs and opinions rather quickly, based on their own foreign language classroom experiences. cameroon, kuchah, and pinter (2012) used a focus group approach with 10-11-year-old participants, aiming to reduce the power imbalance between the researcher and the participants while prompting them to share their thoughts about good teaching. the findings revealed that learners did not share the views of their teachers, and the authors concluded that “affective factors are at the centre of the pedagogic process” (p. 295) for ylls. they argued that approached with a safe and less formal method of data collection, ylls may share opinions and explore perspectives that adults may not have expected. a previous study by nilsson (2019) adapted the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas; horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986) to the age, classroom routines and activities in ten swedish primary classrooms to investigate emotional responses to common classroom practices, such as listening, speaking and volunteering. the findings revealed that 18% of the 225 learners, aged 8-12, belonged to the high anxiety category. these high anxiety learners were unevenly distributed across the classrooms and reported frequently feeling uneasy or nervous during english lessons. speaking and the fear of making mistakes were the top concerns among these learners, echoing similar findings from quantitative yll studies in other contexts (e.g., mihaljević djigunović, 2009 in croatia; yim & yu, 2011 in korea). however, more contextualized and qualitative approaches are necessary to gain deeper insight into the experiences of ylls and illuminate the complexity of early language instruction (mihaljević djigunović, 2012; muñoz, 2017; yim & yu, 2011). the prior study (nilsson, 2019) that found fla in all the ten well-functioning classrooms, raised a question about the possibility that more anxious learners hold beliefs and expectations different to those with less fla. to add to the growing body of research based on the voices of young learners themselves, the present study focuses on one of these classrooms, with the highest levels of fla, to illustrate the beliefs and experiences among learners with varying levels of fla within a swedish context. in addition, the paper explores a new methodological approach in the study of yll beliefs, by orchestrating simultaneous group discussions without a participating adult. 2.4. the swedish context in sweden, english is a mandatory school subject, taught as the first foreign language from grade 3 at the latest, although instruction is common from grade 1, at age 7. there are no grades awarded until year 6 when national tests are implemented to beliefs and experiences in the english classroom: perspectives of swedish primary school learners 263 secure that learners have reached an a2.1 level according to cefr. the amount of teachers’ tl use during english lessons varies as steering documents do not comment on this aspect, until upper secondary school, when teaching should be conducted in english as far as possible (swedish national agency for education, 2011). english enjoys high status in swedish society. swedes are surrounded by english in their daily life (swedish national agency for education, 2011), and sweden places high in international surveys (e.g., european commission, 2012). out-of-school language instruction is rare for primary learners. however, many of them spend a considerable amount of their free time interacting with english online (sylvén, 2019). this extensive extramural exposure contributes to heterogeneous language proficiency in the classroom. 3. the study 3.1. aim and research questions the study aims to explore learners’ beliefs and experiences with regard to the purpose and the process of foreign language teaching and learning in a swedish year 3 classroom. furthermore, as 38% of learners in the class reported frequently experiencing fla (nilsson, 2019), the relationship between negative emotions and learner beliefs may be illuminated by comparing data from learners with varying degrees of learner anxiety. based on group discussions among the 26 participants, the following research questions are addressed: 1. what beliefs and experiences do these young learners express in relation to foreign language instruction? 2. what similarities and differences can be found when comparing the expressed beliefs and experiences of more and less anxious young learners, respectively? 3. can any conflicting beliefs and experiences be identified, and if so, what are they? 3.2. participants the class consisted of 29 learners who had all opted for taking part in this study, and consent was obtained from them and their parents/caregivers. however, only 26 of them were present on the day of data collection. the learners, aged 9-10, were in year 3 in a primary school in a socio-economically stable suburb of stockholm. all learners had swedish as their l1, according to the class teacher. consequently, they constituted a relatively homogeneous group regarding age maria nilsson 264 and experiences of language instruction and presumably also relatively so regarding socio-economic background. the generalist teacher was certified to teach english and had taught the class since year 1. 3.3. classroom context classroom observations were conducted in order to contextualize the study, assert the relevance of the group discussion prompts and facilitate the analysis, as learners made references to their classroom practices and routines. the researcher sat at the back of the classroom as a reactive observer (responding when addressed but otherwise not engaged in the lesson). these observations included morning circle time and the weekly 50-minute english lesson that followed, on three occasions prior to data collection, about 220 minutes in total. in the morning assembly, all learners and their teacher gathered on a carpet to go through the daily information. according to the teacher, part of this 20 minute circle time was conducted in english every day, and once a week, before the english lesson, it was done exclusively in english. during the observations, the teacher used an english-only approach, offering a lot of oral input and with all instructions and explanations in english. on very few occasions, the teacher would add a swedish word: “big letters, like when we do crosswords, korsord.” on other occasions she would ask learners to translate a word into swedish: “what does individual mean?” apart from that, learners were discouraged from speaking in swedish: “if you want to talk you have to speak english.” a few times learners posed questions in swedish that the teacher replied to in english, adding: “and i only want to hear english.” activities were mainly teacher-centered. during circle time the teacher spoke to the group, addressed one learner at a time or sent around a question (about, for example, breakfast or a favorite animal) that the learners were to respond to in the circle. several learners exhibited avoidance behavior or looked confused at times. the teacher would then prompt them with leading questions, or suggest an answer to open questions. during the lessons the learners mostly volunteered by raising their hands. the teacher made frequent use of gestures and objects and used the whiteboard to write words, scaffold phrases and stress certain sounds. pronunciation was highlighted in a playful way: “i think we all need to say furniture.” activities involved written individual work and oral pair work where learners practiced vocabulary and sentences based on specific patterns or pictures. the teacher would remind the learners to speak english: “i hear swedish in here, and i don’t like it.” from the observations, it was clear that some learners struggled to understand instructions and complete oral activities in pairs, uttering words in quiet voices, seeking confirmation from their peer. at the end of the beliefs and experiences in the english classroom: perspectives of swedish primary school learners 265 lesson the teacher would state that swedish was now allowed again. on one such occasion, the teacher brought up her tl-only approach and that although she could understand the students’ frustration, it was “the best way to learn languages. do you remember how you learnt your first language?” this topic did not seem new to the learners but may also have been prompted by the presence of the researcher. in spite of the rather rigid language policy, the classroom atmosphere was friendly. the teacher was spontaneous, enthusiastic, and showed a clear interest in her learners as individuals. children were encouraged to help each other. attempts and guesses were praised. the atmosphere was relaxed and the teacher would openly admit to being uncertain of spelling on a few occasions. learners seemed fond of their teacher and would approach her for a hug or a chat entering the classroom. the current classroom can thus be described as supportive, but with high expectations on the learners to tolerate extensive tl input and to attempt to speak english themselves. as indicated by the prior questionnaire study (nilsson, 2019), 11 learners in this group reported that common classroom practices evoked negative emotions such as anxiety and nervousness. the observations confirmed that apart from circle time, talk time was unevenly distributed and many learners did not volunteer to speak in front of the group. 3.4. data collection simultaneous group discussions were conducted, with the researcher present, but not the teacher. the group discussion arrangement allowed participants to benefit from group interaction in a familiar environment to articulate and explore their beliefs in joint sense-making. the design aimed to empower learners to share thoughts, and test, suggest and negotiate ideas, based on their personal experiences within the shared context. consequently, the group is not considered to interfere or stand in the way of accessing learner beliefs. instead, the social interaction constitutes the “cognitive workspace” (dufva, 2013, p. 53) for the participants. the classroom environment and the group dynamics are part of learners’ everyday school experience in which their beliefs evolve. furthermore, the design prevented the negative impact of the power-imbalance in adult-child interaction on children’s emotional state and willingness to communicate (ravet, 2007). based on the learners’ individual fla scores from the previous study on fla (nilsson, 2019), which were known only to the researcher, learners were seated in groups of 3-4, sharing similar levels of fla. this was thought to facilitate fruitful interaction between learners, especially those who find speaking english, or oral classroom interaction in general, uncomfortable. without revealing the rationale behind the group division, the teacher had been consulted to maria nilsson 266 suggest any modifications that would be appropriate for social reasons. one such change was made. the teacher was confident that the rationale behind the group arrangement would not in any way be obvious to the children. in one group, mean levels of fla were quite low, three groups had moderate levels, while the remaining four groups had mean scores that indicated high anxiety. in reality, learners were spread along a continuum of anxiety levels. this division was therefore purely methodological, for the sake of studying possible similarities and differences among learners. the group discussion activity aimed to engage and interest learners while also being brief enough to maintain their concentration. in their groups, learners took turns drawing questions out of a box, which added a slightly playful element, to read aloud and discuss in swedish while being recorded on a dictaphone. based on the researcher’s teaching experience and observations in connection to the present project, questions had been formulated and piloted in two other classrooms. in total, there were 13 questions (see appendix), although all groups did not have the time to discuss them all. the questions were worded in a way that should not guide the learners in a specific direction, while remaining clear in terms of meaning and scope. learner beliefs in connection to the language learning process were in focus: the value of certain teaching practices, accuracy and intelligibility, guessing, the tl-only approach, how best to learn, and expectations for future proficiency. there were also questions that addressed attitudes to making mistakes and being challenged with new content. while introducing the activity, the researcher encouraged learners to discuss and share their thoughts, not necessarily agree, but elaborate and share the speaking time. the idea that the questions had no right or wrong answers was underscored. the group discussions lasted for 20-28 minutes. 3.5. data analysis in order to analyze the subjective thoughts and experiences of the participants, qualitative content analysis was conducted, following the guidelines and the terminology of graneheim and lundman (2004). qualitative content analysis focuses on lived experiences and allows researchers to focus on descriptive content, a manifest level, but also on a more interpretative and latent level, to find recurring and underlying themes. based on the assumption of the contextual and social dimensions of learner beliefs, utterances were not regarded as personal but rather as generated within the group of a certain anxiety-level and interpreted within the specific conversation, that is, unit of analysis. in other words, although the voice of each individual is considered in the interpretation, each discussion represents beliefs and experiences in the english classroom: perspectives of swedish primary school learners 267 an event of joint meaning-making, with the analytical focus on beliefs and experiences that emerge within each interaction. the discussions, a total of 3.5 hours, were transcribed by the researcher, which offered good familiarity with the data. meaning units addressing beliefs and experiences were identified, most often a phrase or a sentence, sometimes a longer interaction. the observations and recordings served as contextual backdrop facilitating the interpretation as the meaning units were condensed and coded. in this process, care was taken to stay close to the obvious, manifest content, both for the sake of maintaining the children’s own words and to avoid the risk of an adult perspective in the interpretation. initially, codes were printed, cut apart and sorted into tentative categories. all codes were then imported into nvivo 11 and categories were revised further until two major categories were generated, one labeled beliefs and the other experiences. beliefs include learners’ beliefs, assumptions and value judgements on the purpose of studying english and the process of language learning and teaching. experiences focus on students’ perceptions about themselves as language learners and of english as a school subject, memories, descriptions of classroom practices and behavior. the former thus revolve around ideal principles and techniques that should guide teaching and learning whereas the latter represent what learners refer to as actual perceptions, reactions and experiences, which were both cognitive and emotional. following the abstraction process, the attention was focused on similarities and differences within subcategories in the class as a whole, and between less and more anxious groups within and across each subcategory. 4. findings the two initial research questions concern the expressed language learner beliefs and experience, and any similarities and differences among more and less anxious learners in this regard. sections 4.1-4.3 below address this manifest content in the data and focus on learners’ beliefs and experiences in relation to oral tl input and output as well as classroom organization during english lessons. in the process of analysis, salient tensions were detected, in response to the third research question which concerned whether conflicting beliefs and experiences could be found. these mismatches are summarized in section 4.4, to synthesize the perspectives of the more anxious young learners. quotes from the group discussions are included, translated into english. real names have been replaced with pseudonyms. a group number corresponding to the level of fla (low anxiety – group la1, moderate anxiety – groups ma2-ma4 and high anxiety – groups ha5-ha8) follows each excerpt. maria nilsson 268 4.1. beliefs and experiences related to listening and understanding english the learners expressed consensual beliefs about the importance of the teacher’s predominant use of english, as it challenged learners to process input, make use of strategies and build vocabulary: excerpt 1 i guess it’s good that they can ... that she speaks a lot of english, cause then you have to think a bit, too, like, hm … what does that sound like? or what could that be? and things like that … so i think, it’s good. (aron, la1) the value of extensive tl input was recognized in all eight groups, resonating with the approach adopted by the teacher. although arguing that monolingual teaching was beneficial for language learning, some low and medium anxiety learners also expressed a desire to know exactly what was said and to get the “correct information” (ma3). while the teacher’s abundant use of english would help them learn, the absence of translations could cause frustration. some utterances reflect the idea that it is the responsibility of the teacher to make herself understood and adjust her speech to a level appropriate for the learners. some suggested the use of more swedish to summarize information that would follow in english: excerpt 2 tyra: i think it’s easier when someone explains in advance … you know … what she is going to say. lova: yes, and what to do. tyra: yes, what to do, cause i usually don’t understand what they say in english. (ma4) the learners thus expressed a concern about not being able to follow the lesson content, calling for some support in the l1. high anxiety learners also spoke of the challenges of not understanding and observations confirmed that several learners were unable to respond to or follow the teacher’s instructions. nevertheless, in spite of these difficulties they maintained that they were positive towards the monolingual approach and questioned it less than their peers. the nervousness or frustration that many articulated was associated with their own output rather than input: excerpt 3 it’s hard when our teacher speaks english, sometimes, because sometimes you don’t understand and you get like nervous, cause you don’t know what to say ... you don’t really know what to say … but … otherwise i guess it’s good. (bea, ha5) beliefs and experiences in the english classroom: perspectives of swedish primary school learners 269 in other words, incomprehensible teacher talk was reported to ignite anxiety only when learners were expected to respond in some way. high anxiety learners accepted not understanding as they believed they would learn in the long run, subscribing to an immersive approach to learning where they will acquire the target language with time, as long as it is offered in great quantity”: excerpt 4 you learn automatically, you don’t even think, you think that it’s hard, but then if you don’t think you learn automatically, and … it’s because the teacher speaks very much, and then you get more and more into the brain. (kim, ha6) similar thoughts were voiced in all four groups of high anxiety learners, using expressions such as “stick to your brain” (ha7) or “getting into the head” (ha8). some learners would deal with incomprehensible input by hoping that explanations would follow, while others reported getting by without understanding the teacher’s instructions and instead figuring out the activity once they had started working on it. 4.2. beliefs and experiences related to speaking english all groups discussed the value of listening and/or speaking in order to learn english. many low or medium anxiety learners said that they put more weight on listening than speaking, as this offered new input for them to pick up. the high anxiety learners put greater emphasis on speaking and interacting. according to them, they learn best from speaking about everyday topics, using vocabulary that they understand and having to formulate phrases and search for words. all learners highlighted the importance of participating, guessing and trying: excerpt 5 erik: the most important thing in english is that you have to dare to speak english. bea: yes … you have to dare, like, to speak up. erik: speak english. sara: yes, if not, you don’t learn anything. (ha5) the sample illustrates beliefs about the role of the learner, recognizing the value of pushing oneself to participate orally. similar interactions were found in all groups, promoting positive thinking, exerting and believing in oneself, and persevering. for many less anxious learners, the need to speak english was not a problem: “it feels good to speak english because then you learn a lot, and … it feels, my whole body gets warm when i do that” (anna, ma2). high anxiety learners, however, spent a lot of time talking about their own emotions when it comes to maria nilsson 270 talking in english. although emphasizing beliefs about the importance of speaking, they hesitated to do so, using words such as feeling afraid, worried, nervous and embarrassed. this anxiety centered on the risk of making mistakes in front of the others. consequently, in spite of the unanimously voiced belief that making mistakes is a natural and unavoidable part of language learning, this conviction was overshadowed by the fear of embarrassment for high anxiety learners, as expressed in ha5 (excerpt 6). subsequently, the group went on to elaborate on this tension and self-doubt, and the consequences for their behavior in the classroom (excerpt 7). excerpt 6 i think it’s natural to make mistakes, like really natural to say it wrong, because when you’re learning english you have to make mistakes . . . but for me, it feels as though the whole class knows english, and, if i speak and say it wrong, then i feel like i am no good at english and that everyone will like laugh, not because they do, but i feel it could happen … (sara, ha5) excerpt 7 sara: i don’t say anything at circle time, cause i believe i will say the wrong word and like, embarrass myself. bea: i usually don’t ask anything in the english lessons … or in circle time, cause it’s like … you get like nervous. sara: but ... i don’t have like a very good memory when we’re sitting in the ring, so i’m not very good at english … bea: no, me neither. sara: cause, i don’t remember things very well … and if i feel that i do remember them … then i feel like, that maybe it’s wrong and then i will make a mistake when i say them. (ha5) likewise, interactions in the other high anxiety groups also reflect a conflict between beliefs and emotionally guided behavior and reveal how the tlonly policy plays out in the classroom for the more anxious learners (for example excerpt 8). the fear of laughter and negative reactions from peers was expressed in strikingly similar ways among the more anxious learners. a few pointed out that, in reality, that does not happen and that they themselves never found it odd or funny when a classmate made a mistake. yet, the class as a group was perceived as a potential threat, although peers could also offer support when speaking in full class felt intimidating (excerpt 9). excerpt 8 kim: and you have to speak english, and then you really try, and then you learn. siri: and then you try, but we’re a bit cowardly in our class, and we don’t talk a lot. kim: yes, we’re a bit cowardly. beliefs and experiences in the english classroom: perspectives of swedish primary school learners 271 siri: until she says that we can say things in swedish, and then everyone raises their hands. (ha6) excerpt 9 emil: … and when you’re standing in the circle, or by the board, sometimes it feels good when a classmate just like whispers a bit, what to say. kim: yes, and helps out. emil: when you just like … lose, what to say. kim: yeah, in the classroom … siri: lose it, like. emil: like brainfreeze. kim: in the classroom i think saying it right is the most important thing, cause i don’t dare make mistakes, so i hardly ever say anything. (ha6) taken together, the excerpts in this section signal shared beliefs about the importance for the individual learner to engage. however, for the more anxious learners, social considerations appear to govern behavior in contrast to those same beliefs and make them refrain from speaking. 4.3. experiences of lesson organization some learners pointed out that working next to someone you can ask, or in pairs, at least with a slightly more proficient partner, felt safer than speaking in full class. nevertheless, in general, high anxiety learners expressed a preference for full class activities. this way they could benefit from scaffolding offered by the teacher, as she gestured, used the board and pictures, explained, repeated and modeled. they expressed a strong reliance on the teacher. with her instruction and support, learners would understand, learn and remember. repeating words and phrases after the teacher was much appreciated, also for those with less anxiety. the activity was described in terms of making english “get into your brain” (ma3) and “get stuck to your mouth” (ha6) and helps develop pronunciation. and so, while many high anxiety learners preferred teacher-led activities in full class, they reported feeling inhibited from speaking under those conditions (excerpt 10). one group in particular went on to discuss their preference for working together in full class (excerpt 11). excerpt 10 sara: i learn english best, like bea when we sit in the ring and talk, and, but i don’t like speaking a lot. erik: me neither. sara: i understand but i don’t have a very good memory but like they speak pretty much the same way every time so then i remember better, when you take the words over and over again. (ha5) maria nilsson 272 excerpt 11 bea: sometimes it can be a bit difficult … and stressful when the others are done and we’re like last, if you’re last … that can be quite hard . . . when you don’t really understand what it says on the worksheet and the teacher can’t help you and there are others who don’t understand either. sara: yes. bea: that can be a bit hard. sara: for me, if we get worksheets i like it best when we work together in the whole class. bea: yes, and when she uses the board. sara: yes, when she uses the board, and maybe flashcards and we work together … i don’t like when i’m alone with it, i like it better when it’s the group and when we are the whole class, cause when i’m alone it feels a lot harder. . . . sara: i’m not very good at english and i feel that i’m going to be last with the worksheets. bea: yes, exactly. . . . sara: so i feel stressed … and a bit difficult. (ha5) to summarize, the learners expressed similar beliefs reflecting the importance of listening and speaking, and extensive tl input. perhaps a bit surprisingly, the less anxious learners voiced a more critical attitude towards not understanding everything the teacher said, compared to their peers. yet, the situation for the more anxious learners in this classroom involved three mismatches, or conflicting ideals, all related to fla. 4.4. mismatches between beliefs and/or experiences the first mismatch revolves around incomprehensible input. all group discussions reflected a positive attitude towards the immersive approach adopted by the teacher, and the high anxiety learners questioned it less than their more confident peers did. nevertheless, from the observations and the group discussions it was clear that a monolingual approach was a hindrance for these learners. they admitted missing out on instructions and not being able to understand the content of classroom talk, which generated negative emotion and frustration and inhibited their oral participation. these high anxiety learners, however, remained loyal to the teacher and her monolingual approach, and did not blame their unwillingness to communicate on the lack of comprehensible input, but rather on their inadequate proficiency and bad memory. the second mismatch relates to high anxiety learners’ beliefs about their own role and actions. on the one hand, learners expressed a conviction about the importance of speaking and that they must engage and dare communicate. beliefs and experiences in the english classroom: perspectives of swedish primary school learners 273 on the other hand, many of them admitted that they refrain from interacting due to fear of making oral mistakes and receiving negative reactions from peers. the learners were thus not able to act in accordance with the beliefs that they expressed. the third mismatch concerns the organization of lessons. high anxiety learners preferred teacher-led activities in full class, where they received multimodal support. ironically, this was exactly the situation in which they did not feel comfortable enough to ask questions or volunteer to speak. another benefit of working in full class was that learners did not risk falling behind, a fear anchored in their own experiences from working with individual tasks. there was thus a gap between this preference for input in full-class and the negative feelings associated with interaction in the same setting. in the simultaneous group discussions, learners in all groups referred to their own experiences as they voiced their opinions and preferences about useful activities and classroom practices. all the three mismatches identified among the high anxiety learners involved negative emotional experiences, related to speaking english in class. such situations were perceived as vicious cycles where negative emotions themselves had a detrimental effect on their ability to recall vocabulary and avoid mistakes. the high anxiety learners pointed to the importance of peers, teacher and classroom atmosphere, and shared their concerns about comparison to others, false fear of laughter and reluctance to guess, which influenced their behavior and self-concept. 5. discussion the language learners in this case study shed light on the close interaction between learner beliefs, emotion and behavior, as well as learners’ perceptions of situated needs and constraints. the context of the present study is interesting since the english lessons with this teacher constitute the learners’ joint history of language instruction and is thus the same for all of the participants. within this classroom, similar beliefs but quite varying experiences of fla emerged. in this section, findings are interpreted and discussed in relation to the research questions. subsequently, implications for language teaching are addressed. the first research question concerns the expressed beliefs and experiences of the young participants. in general, and regardless of anxiety levels, the ylls voiced beliefs similar to those of their peers and their teacher. although many learners found monolingual teaching to be challenging, they expressed support for the approach and stressed the need for extensive tl use. as for their role as learners, they highlighted the importance of daring to speak, guess, and engage. the current findings offer support for the impact of the teacher on yll beliefs (aro, 2009). it is likely that the beliefs articulated in this study were appropriated from maria nilsson 274 the teacher, who is perceived as the expert and a much-appreciated adult for these beginner language learners. their voices may also reflect the beliefs of parents (in turn potentially impacted by the teacher). a further possibility is that learners consciously echo the beliefs of their teacher, believing that they ought to. regardless, the discussions demonstrate that the beliefs about desired learning behavior have a strong impact on the way learners assess their own performance. in response to the second research question, while learner beliefs were shared among learners of varying anxiety levels, their expressed experiences of oral classroom interaction differed. notably, although discussion prompts focused on beliefs about teaching and learning, all groups brought up aspects of emotional experiences. the accounts of the high anxiety learners reveal the profound impact of fla on their learning experience. their worries center around speaking in front of peers and are strikingly similar to accounts from adult learners (gkonou, 2017). the findings thus offer further evidence for the strong affective impact on the learning process of young learners, echoing findings by kuchah and pinter (2012). in response to the third research question, three mismatches related to beliefs and experiences were found among high anxiety learners in the present classroom, all directly or indirectly related to speaking. firstly, although these learners expressed strong support for extensive tl input, they feared situations in which they were not able to respond or act appropriately, for lack of understanding. secondly, like their peers, they underscored the importance of daring to speak although they themselves admitted to refraining from interacting, to reduce social exposure and the risk of making mistakes in front of peers. thirdly, while preferring full class teaching modes, as this means that they can benefit from multimodal scaffolding and keep the pace of the rest of the class, this situation inhibits them from engaging and asking for clarifications. the perspectives of these high anxiety language learners thus illustrate a situation where they feel unable to live up to the shared classroom ideals. researchers have encouraged teachers to address and reflect on teaching approaches and beliefs with older students (aragão, 2011; brown, 2009; garcíaponce et al., 2018; kalaja et al., 2018) to improve classroom atmosphere and motivation, and mitigate anxiety. in this case, rather than have learners share and reflect on their own beliefs and perceptions, the teacher spoke enthusiastically about the benefits of exclusive tl input in order to convince learners and have them accept not always understanding. presumably, the intention was to counteract fla. indeed, discrepancies between the teacher and learner beliefs are possible sources of fla (brown, 2009; garcía-ponce et al., 2018; kalaja & barcelos, 2013). in the present context, however, the identified mismatches are not the result of competing beliefs. rather, the fact that learners share the beliefs of beliefs and experiences in the english classroom: perspectives of swedish primary school learners 275 the teacher (for whatever reason) creates a cognitive and emotional dissonance for high anxiety learners, while they remain loyal to the approach of the teacher. in this tl-only context, learners reported that negative emotions guide behavior in stark contrast to their beliefs about the importance of speaking, echoing results from studies with university students (garcía-ponce et al., 2018; yoshida, 2013). with this tension, their perceived ability to act within the classroom, that is, their sense of agency, was restricted. they nevertheless remained loyal to the language learner beliefs shared in the classroom and instead blamed themselves, their lack of proficiency or their personality, which itself has a negative impact on their self-concept and their emotion. similarly, in a study by gkonou (2015), anxious adult learners of english concluded that their avoidance behaviors and non-actions increased their fla further. arguably, the cognitive and emotional challenge of oral performance for high anxiety learners in this situation is likely to decrease the zone of proximal development, as suggested by mahn and john-steiner (2002). as both a sense of agency and the prevention of anxiety have been identified as crucial for early language learning, these findings may be relevant to consider in other instructional contexts as well. according to kalaja et al. (2016), agency and beliefs overlap, with emotion serving as background (see figure 1, section 2.2.). the present findings stress a strong influence of emotions on agency. in this context, a sense of agency may in fact be conceptualized as the overlap between beliefs and emotion (see figure 2). in situations where learners feel that their emotions align with their own beliefs and expectations, the overlap is large and learners’ perception of their action potential increases. however, beliefs about teaching and learning do not always correspond with the emotional readiness to act in accordance with those beliefs, as is the case with the high anxiety learners in the current classroom. the sense of agency is thus reduced, which in turn has a negative effect on selfconcept. in this situation, learners make sense of the situation by blaming their perceived incompetence and referring to themselves as cowardly or less proficient. figure 2 sense of agency as an overlap between learner beliefs and emotion the findings have possible implications for teaching practices. the learners in this classroom seemed convinced about the benefits of extensive tl input. maria nilsson 276 at the same time, many of them frequently experienced fla. no conclusion can be drawn about monolingual teaching as the cause of fla. as in all classrooms, many learner variables come into play, such as personal aptitude and language proficiency of each learner, variables that were not considered in this study. nevertheless, according to the learners who often experience fla and are reluctant to participate orally, the tl-only approach presents a major constraint. their accounts suggest that the monolingual policy decreases engagement and their ability to benefit from instructions and explanations, and respond to prompts. copland and ni (2019) argue that creating a low-anxiety classroom should be a primary concern for teachers of ylls, which involves flexible language use and sensitivity to learner reactions and responses. a reconsideration of monolingual language teaching for this age group has gained ground among researchers (e.g., macaro & lee, 2013). as a tl-only approach is recommended, or even mandated, in many other educational contexts (copland & ni, 2019), the mismatches found may have bearing in other classrooms with ylls. arguably, afforded instructions, modelling and scaffolding must be comprehensible to learners. allowing for students to draw on their l1 resources may thus be more effective, in order to encourage and empower learners to respond and interact. other implications point to organizational lesson aspects and the need for non-threatening opportunities to speak and practice in pairs or small groups. offering ylls more time to talk and fewer interlocutors may itself reduce the risk of anxiety and give learners the experience of successful communication that is important for their self-concept (arnold, 2011). if not, learners’ cognitive processing may be severely impaired by negative emotions (arnold, 2011; mahn & john-steiner, 2002). from the perspective of the model above (see figure 2), teachers should thus consider ways of helping learners push the circles closer together. 6. conclusion the present study investigated the beliefs and experiences of ylls in a swedish tl-only english classroom. in this particular case, the collective nature of learner beliefs was evident as learners expressed beliefs similar to those of their peers and also in alignment with the instructional approach of the teacher. this is not very surprising since the learners had had all their foreign language lessons in this classroom with the same teacher. nevertheless, affective and behavioral responses to instruction varied greatly and according to the high anxiety learners, english education involves contradictory beliefs and behaviors, creating a negative cycle where they conclude their own incompetence. the findings thus illustrate the contextual and interrelated dynamics of language learner beliefs, foreign language anxiety and a sense of agency. although the perspectives and experiences beliefs and experiences in the english classroom: perspectives of swedish primary school learners 277 of the ylls in this classroom are unique, the case study reveals mismatches and challenges that may face learners, and their teachers, in other contexts as well. the findings also suggest that the possible consequences of monolingual foreign language instruction for ylls should be considered carefully. using group discussions to collect data has its limitations. it is possible that peer pressure played a role and led some learners to withhold their actual opinions. for this reason, thorough instructions about the purpose of data collection and stressing that the items discussed did not have a right or wrong answer, were very important. the recordings show how learners co-construct, negotiate and build on each other’s ideas in their interactions, without the presence of an adult moderator. it is reasonable to think that interviews conducted with an unfamiliar researcher would have generated less elaborate data. nevertheless, with the group discussion method opted for in this study, it was not possible to ask for clarifications and further elaborations. furthermore, there is always a risk of adult researchers misinterpreting what children mean to say (spyrou, 2011). involving a second researcher to listen to the recorded discussions and be involved in interpretation and abstraction of categories might therefore have been beneficial. the project will go on to examine beliefs and experience in seven other classrooms where fla levels were investigated (nilsson, 2019). those classrooms had fewer learners categorized as highly anxious and varying amounts of tl use. whether similar beliefs and mismatches can be identified there remains to be seen. further studies are needed on the complex interplay between ylls’ beliefs, emotions and sense of agency, and ways to resolve possible mismatches that learners may experience. the articulate voices and perspectives of these young learners, and their eagerness to participate in the discussions, imply that an important point of departure, for teachers and researchers striving to develop optimal learning conditions for ylls, is to ask young learners to share their beliefs and experiences. maria nilsson 278 references aragão, r. 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(2013). conflict between learners’ beliefs and actions: speaking in the classroom. language awareness, 22(4), 371-388. beliefs and experiences in the english classroom: perspectives of swedish primary school learners 281 appendix questions used in the independent group discussions · do you think it’s good or bad that the teacher speaks a lot of english even though the students may not understand everything? explain what you think. · do you think different people learn english in different ways? tell me. · what do you think is most important when you speak english – that what you say is correct or that others understand what you mean, although you may say things a bit incorrectly? · do you think it’s smart to guess when there is a word you don’t know in english? · in your experience, do you learn a lot by practicing and repeating and doing things several times? · what do you think is the best way to learn how to speak english? explain what you think. · in your opinion, what are the most important things to learn in english? why? · what is the best way for you to learn english? tell me. · do you think you will be quite good at english once you get older? · do you learn best when you listen or when you speak? explain what you think. · how do you feel when you are working with something that is new or a bit difficult? tell me. · do you think you learn a lot by imitating and repeating after others? explain what you think. · do you believe it’s natural to make mistakes when you learn english? tell me. 523 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (3). 2020. 523-546 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.3.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt oral english performance in danish primary school children: an interactional usage-based approach søren w. eskildsen university of southern denmark, sønderborg, denmark https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2432-9161 swe@sdu.dk teresa cadierno university of southern denmark, odense, denmark https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8305-1027 cadierno@sdu.dk abstract following the call in sandlund, sundqvist, and nyroos (2016) for incorporating discursive approaches into the field of oral second language (l2) testing, this paper proposes an interactional usage-based approach to the analysis of oral l2 performance. based on eskildsen (2018a), we combine analytic tools from usage-based linguistics and conversation analysis. we draw on usage-based linguistics to analyze performance in terms of test-takers’ inventories of linguistic constructions and on conversation analysis to understand their interactional competence in terms of the relation between the linguistic constructions and the actions they are used to accomplish. performance assessment is thus constructional and interactional. participants in this pilot study were two danish primary school children who performed two consecutive oral tasks: a semi-guided interview and a picture-elicited narrative task. data were analyzed by means of cross-child comparisons and cross-task comparisons within each child. our data confirm the observation from previous research that simple question-answer(-assessment) sequences dominate oral test formats, but also that the format is sometimes abandoned, which allows for the accomplishment of new social actions. moreover, the picture-description task affords a different speech exchange system with the interviewer participating søren w. eskildsen, teresa cadierno 524 more as an active listener when the children do not voluntarily carry out the requested task. keywords: danish young learners; oral english proficiency; interactional usage-based linguistics 1. introduction this paper discusses the inclusion of interactional competence in the assessment of second language (l2) oral skills (roever & kasper, 2018; sandlund, sundqvist, & nyroos, 2016). since the early days of communicative competence in second language acquisition (sla) research (canale & swain, 1980) and language testing (e.g., bachman, 1990), there has been a growing interest in the situated and interactional aspects of the test situation (e.g., he & young, 1998; kasper & ross, 2013; macnamara & roever, 2006; roever & kasper, 2018; van compernolle, 2011). traditional approaches to testing have emphasized test-takers’ individual linguistic performance, typically through measures of complexity, accuracy and fluency (housen & kuiken, 2009; skehan, 2009). this perspective taps into the test-takers’ spoken language without much regard for their interactional abilities, as pointed out by roever and kasper (2018), who propose instead to use the concept of interactional competence as an assessment tool. building further on this, we aim to develop an interactional usage-based approach to the analysis of oral l2 performance, that is, to provide a new method for assessing oral skills in a bottom-up, usage-based fashion. this method, in addition to capturing linguistic skills, encompasses test-takers’ interactional competence, that is, test-takers’ methods of accomplishing specific actions through semiotic resources, including language (pekarek doehler, 2018). based on eskildsen (2018a, 2018b), this implies combining analytic tools from usage-based linguistics (ubl) and conversation analysis (ca). we draw on ubl to analyze performance in terms of test-takers’ inventories of linguistic constructions and on ca to understand their interactional competence in terms of the relation between the linguistic constructions and the actions they are used to achieve. performance assessment is thus constructional and interactional, bridging the gap between psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches to assessment (cf. discussion in roever & kasper, 2018). it should be noted, however, that we are not interested in testing per se but in understanding our participants’ oral linguistic and interactional skills. our data come from oral interviews with young learners of english in denmark. these interviews are an elicitation instrument rather than a test, and oral english performance in danish primary school children: an interactional usage-based approach 525 we use the data to: a) assess, that is, understand and describe, our test-takers’ l2 oral skills; and b) develop an interactional usage-based way to do it. 2. literature review 2.1. assessing young learners’ proficiency over the last two decades (e.g., mckay, 2006; nikolov, 2016a; rea-dickins, 2000), the assessment of young learners’ proficiency has become a central issue in language learning research. this assessment is usually concerned with how children progress over time in their l2 and what levels of proficiency they achieve in one or more of the four language skills (i.e., listening, speaking, reading, writing) by the end of certain periods (nikolov, 2016b). nikolov (2016b) provides a useful overview of the different kinds of assessments used for young language learners and divides these into three categories according to the purpose they were developed for. the first category covers international research projects like the ellie project (enever, 2011), which used the same achievement tests for learners over a period of three years in seven different countries. a single task was used for assessing each language skill. the second category involves international examinations developed for young learners to be certified in their english proficiency, including the cambridge young learners english tests, the pearson test of english young learners and the toefl primary test. the final category involves what is referred to as assessment for learning, that is, ongoing teacher-based assessment which can be used to promote children’s l2 development in the classroom (sternberg & grigorenko, 2002). the purpose of our oral task differs from the above in that it was deployed as an elicitation tool to provide data that could be used to analyze, understand and describe our testtakers’ linguistic and interactional performance. this will lay foundations for subsequent large-scale comparisons between our test-takers with a specific focus on investigating whether and to what extent there are age-related differences in their linguistic and interactional competence. while previous research on young learners’ language has predominantly examined linguistic performance alone, the approach that we adopt here involves the co-investigation of interactional competence and linguistic repertoires. that is, we look at the actions accomplished, and the linguistic resources used to accomplish them. our approach to the analysis of the linguistic repertoires, ubl, implies taking a construction-based view that does not compartmentalize language (cf. eskildsen & cadierno, 2007). this will be explained in the next section. søren w. eskildsen, teresa cadierno 526 2.2. usage-based linguistics ubl is a cover-term for a range of linguistic theories that, in brief terms, unite in abolishing the syntax-lexis distinction and the competence-performance dichotomy, and instead insist that all linguistic units are meaningful, and that language is learnable on the basis of experience. ubl is concerned with the semiotic nature of language, that is, the form-meaning pairings which language is seen to consist of. these form-meaning pairings, also called symbolic units or constructions, are described along a continuum of specificity (i.e., from fixed formulas to abstract schematic templates which in turn sanction the single instantiations) and complexity (i.e., from morphemes to full utterances). language knowledge, in this conception, is a structured inventory of these constructions. usage-based first language (l1) research has revealed how the linguistic inventory develops from recurring linguistic material in use (e.g., ellis, 2002; lieven, salomo, & tomasello, 2009; tomasello, 2003), following a trajectory from specific multi-word expressions to partially fixed, partially schematic utterance schemas, to increasingly schematic constructions based on systematic commonalities among patterns – for example, shifting from where’s the ball? to where’s the x?, and eventually to where copula np?. similar learning trajectories have been observed in adult l2 learning in larger corpus analyses of l2 english as well as in case studies of l2 use and learning over time (e.g., ellis & ferreira-junior, 2009; eskildsen, 2012, 2015; roehr-brackin, 2014; tode & sakai, 2016). usage-based research on children learning an l2 is virtually non-existent, with the exception of karrebæk (2011), who used a construction-based apparatus to analyze the development of the majority language in a bilingual child, suliman, in a danish kindergarten. her study focused on suliman’s socialization into the kindergarten, but karrebæk also analyzed suliman’s linguistic utterances and found a high degree of repetition and reliance on recurring multiword expressions in line with usage-based predictions. 2.3. conversation analysis recently, it has been argued that ubl needs to draw on a theory of social action, that is, ca, to capture how social practices are constructed and made visible for people to learn (from) them (eskildsen, 2018a; eskildsen & kasper, 2019). crucial to an understanding of ca is the idea that when an action is produced, the next relevant action is occasioned, and this next action gives meaning to the prior one. in this view, the ascribing of functions to linguistic expressions is done by people in situ rather than a priori (cf. levinson, 2013). in other words, by providing an answer to a question, accepting an invitation, or mitigating and producing an oral english performance in danish primary school children: an interactional usage-based approach 527 objection to a comment or assessment, people show their understanding of what their co-participant has just said, thus ensuring constant construction and maintenance of intersubjectivity. if intersubjectivity is challenged, people can initiate repair and work through the challenge to restore intersubjectivity (for further detail on ca, see e.g., hutchby & wooffitt, 2008; schegloff, 2007). it should be observed, however, that ca is not solely concerned with the modality of talk but with all interactional behavior, including embodied actions such as gesture, gaze, and body posture (nevile, 2015). this is also brought to bear on the analyses below. 2.4. combining ubl and ca ubl shares with ca the core concept that (l2) learning derives from observable phenomena in the environment (eskildsen & cadierno, 2015; kasper & wagner, 2014). ubl makes it possible to investigate the fabric of linguistic-semiotic resources that transcend lexical specificity and contextual borders, allowing explorations of constructions as cognitive routines toward which ca takes an agnostic stance (burch, 2014). ca, on the other hand, throws light on the situated specifics of the interactions in which people put their linguistic repertoires to use to accomplish social actions. a branch of conversation analytic sla (ca-sla), which is of direct relevance to this paper, has explored l2 speakers’ interactional competence – that is, socially shared methods of accomplishing particular actions, such as repair, turn openings and closings, story-telling, dispreferred responses, and how those methods change over time (for a recent overview, see salaberry & kunitz, 2019). our perspective here is an “interactional usage-based approach” (pekarek doehler, 2018), which draws on the methodological combination of ubl and ca (eskildsen, 2011, among others). we apply this two-pronged methodology to two oral tasks given to two young learners of english to propose a way forward for formulating an interactional, usage-based approach to assessing l2 proficiency. we explore how interactional competence is displayed in the oral tasks and what linguistic material is used to perform the social actions identified. therefore, the focus will be on an empirical description of the sequential structure of the interviews, the social actions found therein, and the linguistic resources deployed to accomplish them. this description concerns the relationship between social action and linguistic expression in situ, adding to the current research on the interface between “form-meaning patterns” and “construction-action relations” (eskildsen & kasper, 2019). the analyses of social actions and linguistic expressions will include both cross-child comparisons and cross-task comparisons within each individual child. of particular interest in relation to the latter is examining possible differences in children’s performance on tasks that are more or less constrained in nature and thus allow for more or less spontaneous talk. søren w. eskildsen, teresa cadierno 528 3. method 3.1. participants the participants in the study were two danish primary school children who had started learning english either in the first grade (age 7; nicoline) or the third grade (age 9; bo). at the time of data collection, the children had received english instruction for two years and were thus attending the third and fifth grades, respectively (age 9 and 11). the two children attended two elementary schools in odense, denmark, which followed the national guidelines on english language teaching (danish ministry of education, 2019). applying to all learners irrespective of their starting age, the guidelines establish what children should be able to do after finishing the fourth, seventh, and ninth grade. after the fourth grade, the relevant benchmark point in this case, children should be able to participate in short and simple conversations as well as understand frequent words, expressions and short texts on everyday topics in english. the participants were part of a larger-scale research project investigating the role of age of onset, that is, the age factor, and a range of contextual factors (i.e., the quantity and quality of exposure to english inside and outside the classroom) and socio-affective factors (e.g., children’s motivation and attitudes towards english) in children’s rate of l2 learning and short-term language proficiency (see cadierno & eskildsen, 2018, for details). while the total number of participants in the large-scale project is 276 children, the participants for the present study were selected out of the 36 children whose oral data were transcribed. selection took place through a purposeful sampling technique aimed at choosing two children with very different degrees of language proficiency. the reason for this criterion is that we wanted two very different children in order to test the scope and validity of our analytical apparatus. bo, the more proficient one, was a late starter and nicoline, the less proficient one, was an early starter. the fact that there was one from each group is a by-product of the first selection criterion: the early starters, as we know from the quantitative studies in the large-scale project (cadierno & eskildsen, 2018; cadierno et al., 2020), are generally much less proficient than the late starters. 3.2. instrument and procedure children performed two consecutive oral tasks within one single session, which constituted our elicitation instrument. the choice of tasks was inspired by the baf project (muñoz, 2006). both tasks were conducted on an individual basis in a face-to-face situation with a native speaker (ns) of english who had very little oral english performance in danish primary school children: an interactional usage-based approach 529 danish proficiency. the first one was a semi-guided interview where the ns asked each child a series of personal questions related to their age, their family and friends, and their free time activities, followed by a few questions about what they did the weekend before and what they would do the weekend after. finally, they were given the choice of asking the interviewer questions about her or her family. even though the interviewer had an interview guide with a series of fixed questions, there was room for extra questions and follow-ups on child-initiated topics. after completing the interview, children performed the picture-elicited narrative task. children were shown a series of six pictures that form a story (the so-called “dog story;” heaton, 1966) and were asked to re-tell the story depicted by the pictures. they had the pictures in front of them when retelling the story. a series of prompts were used if the children did not engage in re-telling the story. the prompts inquired about what was going on in several of the pictures. after re-telling the story, children were asked a series of personal questions related to the story. before moving on to our analyses of our two focal children’s oral performance, we present an outline of the sequential structures found in the data. this is necessary for the discussion of the children’s interactional competence in the results section. 4. results: sequential structures of the tasks participants in interaction, irrespective of the type of interaction, must collaborate to distribute turns-at-talk and design their turns as actions so that they build adjacency pairs and sequences (question-answer, invitation-acceptance, assessment-agreement, etc.) as well as potentially larger interactional structures, such as story-telling and descriptions. interlocutors may also engage in sequentially organized repair work in order to achieve and maintain intersubjectivity, that is, on-going mutual understanding (schegloff, 2007). the ability to engage in interaction, among other things along these lines, is what the concept of interactional competence captures. the first part of the task, the semi-guided interview, is characterized by recurring sequential environments: question-answer sequences with a possible sequence-closing third turn (4.1), insertion sequences (4.2), and multi-turn responses (4.3). the second part, the transitory sequence between the semiguided interview and the picture-description task, is dominated by question-answer sequences with a possible sequence-closing third turn but with the child asking the questions. the third part, the picture-description task, is sequentially different with the interviewer playing a less dominant, yet active, role as she displays listenership through nods and acknowledgment tokens, does confirmations søren w. eskildsen, teresa cadierno 530 and encouragements, and elicits further descriptions that then predominantly follow the question-answer (-assessment) format. 4.1. question-answer sequences and a sequence-closing third turn the predominant sequential environment is that of question-answer pairs with the possibility of sequence-closing third turn, that is, question-answer-assessment sequences (schegloff, 2007), in which the third turn functions as an evaluation of the appropriateness and relevance of the answer (van compernolle, 2011). in most cases, these pairs and sequences center on requests for information (from karen, the interviewer) and the children providing the information in their responses. the second question in the interview guide, concerning the children’s age, will serve as an example (note that karen’s turn at line 3 is the sequentially optional assessment; transcription conventions can be found in the appendix): extract 1. question-answer-assessment sequence: 01 k: bo how old are you 02 b: i’m: eleven years old 03 k: okay cool 4.2. insertion sequences the participants may also engage in repair work/confirmation request sequences that are insertion sequences in these formats. insertion sequences work to put the current sequential progression on hold until some elaboration or information is provided, or the trouble has been resolved (schegloff, 2007). the example, extract 2, shows bo’s ability to initiate repair. karen is asking a follow-up question to what bo plays on the computer (line 1). instead of responding immediately, bo initiates repair as he asks for confirmation that karen is referring to a specific pokemon game (line 2). given confirmation (line 3), bo then responds that he plays it on his phone (line 4) and karen acknowledges receipt of the response before continuing with a new follow-up question (not shown): extract 2. insertion sequence. 01 k: do you play the pokemon game? 02 b: yea pokemon go? 03 k: yea nods 04 b: yea on my phone? nods 05 k: mhm 06 b: yes nods oral english performance in danish primary school children: an interactional usage-based approach 531 4.3. multi-turn responses lastly, some questions potentially invite responses that run over several turns, before a next question is asked. these are typically the more open-ended ones such as can you tell me about x?, which result in reports or “mini-story-tellings”. extract 3 is an example where karen is asking bo about the most recent movie he saw (line 1). bo embarks on a telling, spanning two turns with an acknowledgment token from karen in between (lines 2-5). we note how bo’s intonation patterns may also work to signal that he is not done after the first turn at line 2 (rising intonation) and that his story is complete at line 5 (falling intonation). this is also how karen treats his turn-design, as seen in her acknowledgment token (line 3) and follow-up question (line 6): extract 3. multi-turn response 01 k: hokhahay what’s that about 02 b: about a: rich man da:h (.) ø:h (0.5) he’s came to prison? 03 k: nods okay? hah ha[h .hh] 04 b: [a:nd ] he::: (.) is (.) <really> >hvad hedder det nu<= glo: >what’s it called< 05 =e::h fat. 06 k: .hh okay ah hah hah hah .hhh was it a funny movie? 5. results: the two children’s performance in this section we present the results of the two children’s linguistic and interactional repertoires. for each child we follow the same structure. we first provide an overview of the child’s linguistic inventory, extracted from the data and describe it in terms of concrete instantiation and assumed schematicity, following general ubl principles. we then couple the linguistic repertoire with the social actions accomplished by the child. in a subsequent summary section, we outline the commonalities and differences between the children’s achievements of the actions found in the data with respect to both linguistic repertoires and interactional competence. 5.1. bo: linguistic repertoire table 1 below provides an overview of bo’s linguistic repertoire. in the table we specify the task type (i.e., interview vs. picture-based narration), the linguistic expressions used by the child (i.e., instantiations), and the type of schema that sanctions the linguistic expressions. søren w. eskildsen, teresa cadierno 532 table 1 bo’s linguistic inventory task instantiations schema interview yes, no, names one word movies/right wing/a surprise party n (np) i swim i v i sleep with my friends i v pp play football/i play cs go/watch a movie/i have a big sister, a little brother/o like football/he like candy he like sport/i don’t like pasta (pron) v (neg) np play football in [name of club] (pron) v noun pp about a rich man/on my phone/in the klosterparken pp i have a big sister and i have a little brother coordination my name is bo/her name is maj/ i’m 11 years old/he is 17 years old/we are brothers/my best pokemon is tentacool/it was my sister’s birthday/it was her friends and my mother and father np copula np the pokemon is nice/he’s really fat np copula adj i was in swimming (lacks word) i copula pp he’s came to prison he’s v pp i eh gonna play football in [name of club] igonna-future np pp how old are you?/what do you do in denmark? wh-question i thought you was 28 subordination you’re welcome mwe narration a brother and a sister/and a dog/and a mother (and) np make sandwiches/they look at map (pron) v np/pp i can see two cows, a house/i can (and) pron (np) can/say (neg) see the dog/i can’t say that word/ i can see a sister and a brother winking to his mother/(and) i can see the children go to the wood/i can see the brother and sister/the brother and sister can see the dog/ np x i can see the dog has eats the food subordination in hvad hedder pp the dog is climbing in the:/ the mother is winking to them again np copula v-ing pp the dog is in the hvad er nu der hedder x) np copula pp the brother and sister are surprised np copula adj angry, yes, no one word (and) is really fun copv adj there is a wood/there is a place to play there is a np (and) there can i buy ice cream adv can pronv np oral english performance in danish primary school children: an interactional usage-based approach 533 that was with my father, my brother, my sister and my mother proncopula pp thank you/have a nice day mwe as shown in table 1, bo’s linguistic inventory predominantly consists of repeated patterns centered on five verbs and one auxiliary, all high-frequency verbs in english, namely the copula, have, like, play, see and can. in addition, there are prepositional phrases, some of which are stand-alone uses, drawing on to, about, with and on as well as a few instances of other verbs (go, buy) and what is probably an instance of cross-linguistic transfer, winking, essentially an anglified version of the danish word for wave, namely vinke, coerced into the progressive form. in addition, bo’s linguistic inventory consists of constructions of varying degrees of specificity and schematicity: seemingly fixed multiword expressions with a coherent pragmatic function such as you’re welcome; thank you; have a nice day, constructions consisting of fixed parts and open slots (e.g., i can see x; there is a np) and more schematic constructions such as the copula construction (e.g., the pokemon is nice), the intransitive construction (e.g., i swim, i sleep with my friends), the transitive construction (he like candy; i have a big sister), interrogative questions with wh-words (how old are you?; what do you do in denmark?), motion constructions (e.g., he’s came to prison; the dog is climbing in the x), the future construction with the verb gonna, and coordinated and subordinated clauses. we note that the transitivity schemas in danish are syntactically identical to the english ones. the only notable difference in bo’s production across the two tasks is the heavy repetition of the i can see x-pattern in the narration task. 5.2. bo: embodied interactional competence the point of this section is to outline how bo uses his linguistic repertoire, mapped out above, and to empirically illustrate the aspects of his interactional competence that transcend the accomplishment of the basic sequential structure. the purpose is to understand how the linguistic repertoire plays into his interactional competence. as mentioned above, question-answer(-assessment) sequences dominate the interview. in this part of the data, bo answers relevantly and appropriately in english to all karen’s questions – with, perhaps, one exception when he replies to her nice to meet you at the beginning with a thank you. from a usage-based emergentist perspective, it is interesting to note that his responses often carry traces of the questions (e.g., what’s her name – her name is; who are your best friends – o is my best friend and s is my best friend; what’s that about – about a rich man; what do you play on the computer – i play cs go), which underlines the pervasive nature of recurrence in discourse (cf. bates & macwhinney, 1988; hopper, 1998). in terms of interactional competence, then, the bulk of the interview-part of the data concerns the children’s ability to respond appropriately to information-seeking questions, and one way to accomplish this søren w. eskildsen, teresa cadierno 534 is through reuse of components of the question. this indicates an interrelationship, worthy of more future research, between linguistic resources, interactional competence and the affordances brought about by the contents of the interview itself. there are also situations where bo draws on other aspects of interactional competence. we already saw an example of bo initiating repair in extract 2. next, in extract 4, which comes from the beginning of the picture-description task, we see an example of a word search. a word search is initiated when a current speaker runs into production trouble. in the extract, bo is answering karen’s question about what he sees in the pictures. he then encounters a problem and begins the word search (line 2). the typical resources people use to signal that they are searching for a word include pauses, speech perturbations, prolonged vowels and displays of “doing thinking” (brouwer, 2003; goodwin & goodwin, 1986). here we see bo pausing and producing speech perturbations and a signal that he is currently thinking of a way to formulate (hvad hedder det nu ‘what’s it called’). at line 4 he finally produces make sandwiches with rising intonation, which receives a nod and an acknowledgment token from karen (line 5). bo thus provides a candidate solution to the word search himself but also seeks and gets confirmation from karen: extract 4. self-initiated self-repair: doing word searches 01 k: so what’s going on what do you see 02 b: ehm a brother and a siste[r (.) e:h they eh >hvadhedder det nu< .hh= glo: >what’s it called< 03 k: [nods several times 04 b: =e::h make sandwich?es looks up at k 05 k: nods mhm:? in the next example, we see that bo has linguistic resources to do turn-allocation. this extract, 5, follows immediately extract 4, hence the beginning at line 6. karen’s turn at line 5 (extract 4) also works as an invitation to bo to continue and he does so, adding a dog to the list he has begun creating. karen produces an acknowledgment token and following a pause bo again continues with yet another observation and a mother (lines 7-9). then a long pause ensues (line 11). such pauses usually happen when trouble occurs, and here it seems that it is not clear whose turn it is. bo’s yes-token with falling intonation (line 12) finally allocates the turn to karen who asks him about the next picture (line 13): extract 5. allocating the turn 06 b: and a dog? 07 k: mhm 08 (0.8) 09 b: [and] a mother ehm: oral english performance in danish primary school children: an interactional usage-based approach 535 10 k: [mhm] 11 (1.2) 12 b: ja. 13 k: okay yeah what’s happening here pointing to handout extracts 5 and 6 will also be used to discuss some differences in the sequential structures and bo’s interactional accomplishment. these extracts, taken from the narrative task, show how bo is providing the description over multiple turns (2, 4, 6, 9, 12) and how karen is contributing to the co-construction of this sequential structure by displaying listenership through short acknowledgment tokens and head-nods (3, 5, 7, 10). resembling how people do story-telling, this sequential structure is sustained by the participants’ actions and might be expected to characterize the narrative task across the children. therefore, it calls not only on other linguistic expressions (e.g., i can see x) but also on other interactional skills such as signaling turn-completion and turn-allocation. such skills may also be found in the interview part of the data, but to a lesser degree, namely in cases where karen is asking questions of a more open-ended nature, as seen in extract 3. the last example is of bo giving an account. extract 6 comes from the part in the interview where karen asks the children if they have any questions for her. bo responds by asking karen how old she is (line 1). the question itself is probably a bi-product of the interview situation: the children have been asked the same question and now that it is their turn to ask, it may seem like a natural place to begin (other children do the same). bo receives karen’s provided information with surprise (oh in line 3). karen treats this as a need for confirmation (line 4), and bo then upgrades his surprise with another verbal token and a facial expression of skepticism with lowered inner corners of the eyebrows (“the not face,” recently found to be a straightforwardly recognizable facial expression, perhaps universally, cf. benitoz-quieroz, wilbur, & martinez, 2016). the disbelief on the part of bo continues until he finally produces an account at line 13 – he claims to think karen was younger, which she meets with laughter and praise. she verbally thanks him – which he responds to with a you’re welcome, seemingly aware of the thank you-you’re welcome adjacency pair: extract 6. accounting for surprise 01 b: how old are you 02 k: .hh i’m thirty-five years old 03 b: oh 04 k: yeah 05 b: ooh? does a skeptical face 06 b: ye[ah]nods søren w. eskildsen, teresa cadierno 536 07 b: [th]irty-five? 08 k: uhuh nods 09 b: oh, 10 k: i know 11 (0.9) 12 k: [( )] 13 b: [i th]ought you was: twenty-eight? 14 k: tsuh you canyeah, i’m twenty-eighthhhehno:hoho i’m thirty-five thank you 15 bo that[‘s nice] 16 b: [you’re ] welcome 5.3. nicoline: linguistic repertoire table 2 below provides an overview of nicoline’s linguistic repertoire. it is clear that nicoline’s linguistic inventory predominantly consists of one-word constructions comprised of three main word types: nouns (e.g., dog, girl, boy, cow), numerals (i.e., nine, one) and adverbials (i.e., yes, no). there is only instance of a transitive construction with the verb like (i.e., i like swim), where the preposition to is omitted. in addition, nicoline uses several danish expressions that can consist of: (a) single words, that is, numerals like fem ‘five’ and seks ‘six;’ nouns like børn ‘children’ and pige ‘girl’ and a single verb vinker ‘wave;’ (b) phrases (e.g., en kurv ‘a basket;’ efterskole ‘after school’); and (c) clauses (i.e., det ved jeg ikke ‘i don’t know;’ spiller rundbold ‘sandlot baseball;’ er det mom? ‘is it mum?’). there does not seem to be any difference in nicoline’s linguistic inventory across the two tasks. she mostly uses one-word expressions in both tasks. in the narration task these are mainly nouns whereas in the interview task other forms of short responses are employed. table 2 nicoline’s linguistic inventory task instantiations schema interview hello/names/yes/no/nine/one one word i like swim pron like v narration dog/sandwich/girl/boy/mom/cow one word no/pizza/bye one word 5.4. nicoline: embodied interactional competence it is clear from table 2 that nicoline does not produce much english. however, many of the basic components in the interview can actually be accomplished with very limited means. the information-seeking questions can, in many cases, be answered appropriately with one-word answers, such as name or age. it does seem, however, that her limited linguistic repertoire also has a bearing on her oral english performance in danish primary school children: an interactional usage-based approach 537 interactional performance. we will use the third question, do you have any brothers and sisters?, as illustration. prima facie, this is a polar question that can be answered with a yes or no (the direct speech act), but it can also be interpreted as a request for information about what siblings the children have (the indirect speech act). whereas bo seemed to operate on the latter interpretation as he responded with i have a big sister and i have a little brother, nicoline orients solely to the question as a polar question as she produces a yes in response. now, according to the interview guidelines, the next thing is for karen to ask about the sibling’s age. in bo’s interview, this is a straightforward enterprise as karen asks about his sister’s age, but in nicoline’s case, the interactional trajectory is different as karen proceeds to ask follow-up questions that will allow her to ask about siblings’ ages. table 3 displays the transcription and the actions in the unfolding question-answer sequences. table 3 extract 7 – nicoline’s one-word responses to polar questions transcription actions 21 k: do you have any brothers or sisters 22 n: yes 23 k: do you have a brother 24 n: yes 25 k: what is his name 26 n: eh jacob 27 k: okay jacob mh hm 28 n: ja glo: yes 29 k: and you have a sister 30 n: ja glo: yes 31 k: what is her name 32 n: eh vanessa 33 k: how old is jacob 34 n: eh eh fem glo: five 35 k: okay 36 k: mh 37 n: nej seks seks glo: no six six 38 k: okay 39 n: seks glo: six 40 k: how old is your sister 41 n: one 42 k: aw still little 1. follow-up question 1, ‘do you have a brother?’ (line 23) 2. response, ‘yes’. (line 24) 3. inquiry about sibling’s name (line 25) 4. response, name (line 26) 5. follow-up question 2, ‘and you have a sister?’(line 29) 6. response, ‘yes’ (line 30) 7. inquiry about sibling’s name (line 31) 8. response, name (line 32) 9. how old is [brother] (line 33) 10. response, five no six (lines 34 + 37) 11. how old is [sister] (line 40) 12. response, one (line 41) søren w. eskildsen, teresa cadierno 538 there are also cases where nicoline does not seem to be able to deliver a response. in these cases, she may respond with speech perturbations (ehm, eh, m::), laughter tokens, and gazes away from karen, initiation of repair in danish (hvad? ‘what?’), or claims of insufficient knowledge, either in danish (det ved jeg ikke ‘i don’t know’) or through embodied conduct (arms open, palms upward, headshakes) or a combination of these (on embodied claims of insufficient knowledge, see e.g., sert & walsh, 2013). the question about nicoline’s favorite tv-show will serve as example. here, karen makes three attempts to elicit a response (lines 1, 3, 5) before nicoline delivers her embodied claim of insufficient knowledge (line 6): extract 8. claim of insufficient knowledge 01 k: what is your favori::te show. 02 (1.1) 03 k: on tv. 04 (1.2) 05 k: favorite tv show. 06 n: m:: (2.1) ehm::: (3.1) m:: (5.2) e:h (3.1) shakes head, spreads arms, 07 palms upward det ved jeg ikke glo: i don’t know 08 k: okay there is one instance where nicoline produces more than a one-word response in english (extract 9). karen asks nicoline what she likes to do (in her free time), and when she receives a claim of insufficient knowledge (lines 1-3), she gives nicoline two embodied examples and repeats the question (lines 4-6), following which nicoline reproduces a reduced version of karen’s first example, i like to swim (line 8). extract 9. afforded response. 01 k: what do you like to do nicoline. what do you like to do. 02 (0.9) 03 n: spreads arms, palms upward ehheh 04 k: i like to:: swim? mimicks swimming strokes with both hands i like to: 05 ride my bicycle? mimicks handling a bicycle steering wheel with hands 06 what do you like to do. 07 (1.2) 08 n: i like swim? 09 k: nods overall, then, nicoline responds to karen’s interview questions with minimal responses, claims of insufficient knowledge or an open-class repair initiator oral english performance in danish primary school children: an interactional usage-based approach 539 (hvad?) in danish. this repair-initiator is referred to as open-class because the speaker of the first turn cannot know what parts of her turn caused trouble, or even if the trouble was a hearing issue. karen’s reaction in the two cases where nicoline produces hvad? is to respond with an okay, suggesting either that she simply does not understand the danish word and closes the sequence, or that she interprets it as a token of lack of comprehension and lets nicoline know that she need not worry about not having understood. in the picture-description task, nicoline does not produce any lengthy talk either. her linguistic performance is so limited that virtually no analyzable english is present (cf. table 2). her interactional competence is displayed through understanding of and responses to some of karen’s interview questions and repair-initiations and various instances of claims of insufficient knowledge. much of this, however, is carried out in danish or through embodied resources. nicoline represents a case of limited l2 performance and interactional competence. 6. discussion the data have shown that the two tasks, with bo and nicoline respectively, run off in very different ways. for example, the two children’s different responses to the question about siblings are indicative of their interactional competence: bo responds to the indirect speech act of the question (and by implication to the direct speech act, too), whereas nicoline only responds to the direct speech act. these differences in their interactional competence have a fundamental impact on the interactional trajectories of the interviews. one might speculate that this is a matter of perspective on the task on the part of the children, but given nicoline’s displayed trouble in understanding some of karen’s questions and her apparent reluctance to say much in english, this probably has more to do with comprehension and production difficulties in english. this is supported by table 2 outlining nicoline’s limited linguistic inventory. however, the question-answer(-assessment) sequences and the information-seeking nature of the questions make it difficult to ascertain the assumed co-dependency of linguistic repertoire and interactional competence, because the children’s turn in the sequence, the answer, is designed to provide information, and this can be accomplished in various ways, linguistically, without consequences for the interactional accomplishment. for example, in the case of how old are you?, the responses found in the interviews we have looked at so far are age (e.g., nine), “i’m age,” “i’m age years old,” and “age years old.” all answers are apt, interactionally and linguistically, and one variety does not point to greater l2 proficiency than the others. in this case, longer and more complex responses are not necessarily indicative of a higher degree of interactional competence. søren w. eskildsen, teresa cadierno 540 aside from providing information when requested, the participants are performing other social actions through their turns-at-talk and embodied conduct. bo, for example, engages in repair sequences, he successfully elicits confirmations from karen in word searches by producing candidates with rising intonation, and he does “thinking faces” and gazes that normatively preempt interruptions from co-participants. nicoline, on the other hand, only initiates open-class repair in danish and the trouble is never resolved in these cases, or she produces embodied claims of insufficient knowledge, in which case karen either closes the sequence (extract 9) or pursues the answer by elaborating on the question (extract 10). as may be inferred from the preceding discussion, we investigate actions that are targeted by the oral tasks and hence predictably found in the data as well as actions that are occasioned by the on-going talk and thus not targeted by the tasks. those targeted include providing information, asking for information, and giving a description, whereas the more emergent skills, taking bo’s interview as our starting point, include accomplishing repair and word searches and contributing to turn-taking organization. bo’s varied resources, including embodied conduct, to accomplish these social actions, targeted by the task or not, all illustrate his interactional competence. these resources and the social actions they are used to accomplish are essential to the in-situ co-construction of meaning in the interviews, even if they are not targeted by the task, so in order to gain holistic insight into the children’s proficiency it is important that they be taken into consideration in l2 proficiency assessment and testing (cf. roever & kasper, 2018). our data allow us to map out and compare the children’s linguistic repertoires, on the one hand, and how they engage in providing answers to information-seeking questions, on the other. moreover, we can also compare how they accomplish the other more emergent social actions to the extent that these interactional environments are found across children. other test designs are aimed at investigating test-takers’ accomplishment of the same social actions, for example as found in the work by youn (2015). her test-design is a scenario in which students are instructed to make a request a professor for a recommendation letter. both participants are provided with instructions of what to do but not what to say. this design allows a comparison between test-takers’ methods to accomplish the act of requesting. the downside to this approach is that it only tests one particular aspect of interactional competence. a combination of test designs that, on the one hand, target how l2 speakers accomplish particular and specific social actions and, on the other, allow investigations of emergent, locally occasioned aspects of interactional competence may be a way ahead for future developments in l2 assessment. oral english performance in danish primary school children: an interactional usage-based approach 541 7. conclusion the differences between bo and nicoline, both with respect to linguistic repertoires and interactional accomplishment, can be fairly straightforwardly drawn out. this pilot study has helped us identify both linguistic patterns and interactional practices that we can expect to find (or be absent) in the remaining data, thus guiding us empirically to possible points of comparison across all our informants. the nut to crack in terms of l2 assessment is then to provide a solid account of the relationship between the children’s linguistic repertoires and their accomplishment of social actions. we have argued here that our combination of ubl and ca provides a fruitful methodology for doing precisely that. søren w. eskildsen, teresa cadierno 542 references bachman, l. 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(2015). validity argument for assessing l2 pragmatics in interaction using mixed methods. language testing, 32(2), 199-225. søren w. eskildsen, teresa cadierno 546 appendix transcription conventions 01, 02 etc. line numbering k:, b: speaker identification glo: english gloss wei[rd w]ord [yeah] beginning and end of overlap <really> slower than surrounding talk >hvad hedder det nu< faster than surrounding talk .hh in-breath. the number of h’s indicates length of in-breath ? / . rising/falling intonation ( ) unintelligible talk (0.5) / (.) pause in tenths of a second/pause shorter than 0.3 seconds (micro-pause) nods embodied conduct. only embodied conduct of central relevance to the analyses is transcribed. 245 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (2). 245-259 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl effects of communication strategy training on efl students’ performance in small-group discussions stuart benson kanda university of international studies, japan stuart-b@kanda.kuis.ac.jp danielle fischer kanda university of international studies, japan danielle-f @kanda.kuis.ac.jp joe geluso iowa state university, usa jgeluso@iastate.edu lucius von joo kanda university of international studies, japan lucius-v @kanda.kuis.ac.jp abstract in recent years, a number of studies have been conducted with regard to communication strategy training and performance on communicative tasks (lam, 2009; nakatani, 2010; naughton, 2006). this study aims to add to the literature by examining how two strategies, clarifying/confirming and extending a conversation, and two methods of teaching the strategies, affected the interactional sequences and overall group discussion performance of efl students at a university in japan. pre and posttreatment small-group discussions were recorded for assessment, and a stimulated recall interview was administered to determine the participants’ perceptions of their learning and language use. posttest results reveal that the experimental groups stuart benson, danielle fischer, joe geluso, lucius von joo 246 that were taught predetermined phrases aimed at clarifying/confirming and extending a conversation employed such phrases more frequently than the control group. however, this employment of phrases did not lead to higher gains in group discussion skills as the control group enjoyed the largest gains from pre to posttest. the researchers consider the findings in light of previous research, and conclude with recommendations for future research on the topic with special regard to research design. keywords: english as a foreign language, small-group discussions, communication strategies, explicit instruction, co-constructed learning this article reports on research that explored the implementation of communication strategy instruction for in-class small-group discussions. the research had multiple purposes: to explore how strategy training affected students’ performance on an institutionalized oral communication skills test, to measure the effects of two different styles of strategy training, and to record and analyze student perceptions of their own strategy learning and usage. to begin, three principal studies that influenced the current research will be reviewed, followed by an overview of the conversation strategies chosen for the present study, and descriptions and rationale behind the implementation of two different instruction styles. methodology with regard to data collection and analysis will then be reviewed for the two teaching styles for the experimental groups and the control group (test scores). attention will then be turned to the findings of the stimulated recall which aimed to shed light on student self-perceptions of their strategy use. lastly, limitations of the present study will be identified and briefly discussed before concluding with suggestions for future research and research design. group interaction and language development support for small group interaction in language learning is based on years of research in sla. long (1983) showed how learners negotiate the meaning of language used in conversation with interlocutors both by modifying their own output based on their interlocutor’s reactions and requesting modification of input based on their understanding of what their interlocutor says. when engaged in conversation, language learners have a chance to test their knowledge of language by observing the reactions listeners have to their own output (swain, 1985). language learners can store in their memory language that met with positive results and reform language that did not. the effects of communication strategy training on efl students’ performance in small-group discussions 247 meaning of the language used in conversation becomes clear and language use consequently improves through this process. despite the promising research on language learning through group discussion, there is also a downside to using group discussions to improve language skills. in some cases, conversation is simple enough that there is no need for negotiation of meaning and thus no new language learning takes place (foster, 1998). this dearth of opportunities for miscommunication is even more likely in a classroom where all speakers share the same l1 (buckwalter, 2001). in addition, using group discussion specifically with the intention of improving grammatical accuracy may be ineffective. if the main goal of a task is communication, listeners may feel there is no need to correct the words of a speaker if the meaning of the utterance is clear, bringing the unfortunate result of no negotiation of meaning (pica, 1994). even if accuracy is an explicit goal of a language task, language learners may not be able to focus on meaning and accuracy at the same time. according to skehan (1998), students may even feel overwhelmed when they are trying to concentrate on both what they want to say and how to say it accurately. even when accuracy is set aside and communication set as the primary goal of a group discussion task, some individuals may be more successful at conversation than others by utilizing their strategic competence to avoid or repair communication breakdowns caused by lack of knowledge of the target language (canale, 1983; canale & swain, 1980). in spite of these pitfalls, the researchers of the present study believe that group discussions are beneficial to language learning as well as necessary to facilitate other activities in a content-based curriculum. dörnyei (1997) suggested that if a teacher is well trained in the effects of group dynamics and chooses appropriate tasks for group interaction, there will be a greater possibility for the negotiation of meaning and language learning opportunities in small-group discussion. however, strategic competence is not an innate skill and can be developed. learners can be trained in various communication strategies in order to improve their language development in group interactions, as supported by research discussed in the following section. studies on strategy instruction naughton’s (2006) research on training for communicative tasks focused on four strategies: follow-up questions, requesting and giving clarification, repairing non-target-like utterances, and requesting and giving help. the experimental groups were given explicit training in the strategies, while the control group received no training. all classes in the study were given the same group tasks, which were designed to naturally bring out the opportunity to use the communication stuart benson, danielle fischer, joe geluso, lucius von joo 248 strategies whether or not the students were trained to use them. the results showed a slight increase in overall strategy use in the control group and “a pronounced increase” (p. 174) in the experimental groups. naughton concluded that in order to improve students’ strategy use and, consequently, their group conversation skills, it is not enough to just give students the opportunity to work on group tasks together; it is also necessary to teach cooperative communication strategies explicitly. implementing the explicit instruction of communicative strategies, specifically in an efl setting like the current study, may be an effective solution to the lack of natural opportunities for negotiation of meaning. in another study, lam (2009) investigated the impact of metacognitive strategies (mcss) on group tasks. the concept of mcs was taken from o’malley and chamot (1990). lam explains that the goal of mcss is “to oversee the general learning process by enabling the learner to think ahead of the goal and demand of the learning task, to plan for some action to tackle the task, and to assess how well one has done the task” (p. 130). as in naughton’s study (2006), both groups were engaged in the same classroom tasks, but only the experimental group received explicit strategy instruction and how to implement them for the task. seven strategies were employed: identifying the task problem, planning the content, planning language to use, evaluation of performance, asking for help, giving help, and positive self-talk. the study sought to investigate if these strategies would improve overall task performance and if students would utilize the strategies in future tasks. while lam’s (2009) research was not unique in relation to strategy training in group tasks, it was unique in its implementation of a multi-method approach to assessment. a total of four assessment methods were used: audio recordings, questionnaires, task session observations, and stimulated recall interviews (gass & mackey, 2000). the stimulated recall interviews were conducted to record the students’ strategic thinking. the compiled results of all four assessment methods showed a statistically significant increase in the self-perceived use of strategies, the actual frequency of strategy use, and an increase in performance ratings in the experimental group. however, the increased frequency of actual strategy use did not correspond to that of the perceived use. lam concluded that while the study was successful in fostering awareness of strategy use in a more immediate task, more practice and more time spent on the instruction of each strategy might help automatize students’ declarative knowledge to be carried over successfully to future tasks, a point that we will come back to in the present study. finally, nakatani (2010) administered communication strategies training to groups of japanese university students in an efl setting. in comparison to naughton (2006) and lam (2009), nakatani (2010) used a more diverse set of effects of communication strategy training on efl students’ performance in small-group discussions 249 communication strategies; the use of fillers and shadowing were considered a subcategory of communication strategies referred to as communication enhancers. similarly to the other two studies, the strategies in nakatani’s study were taught explicitly. nakatani also utilized multiple methods of assessment to obtain data on learners’ cognitive processes and their perceptions of strategy use. the participants received a five-phase strategy training that consisted of review, presentation, rehearsal, performance, and evaluation of a task. learners were presented with a list of strategies and could freely choose which ones to use during each training session. the results showed a correlation between students’ proficiency levels; length of utterances typically produced, or words per c-unit; and type of strategy use, with maintenance strategies being the most significant predictor of performance. the research also reiterated the point that strategy training and negotiation of meaning in general is not automatically conducive to improving accuracy. thus, the ideal use for strategy training in the classroom may best be reserved for tasks that focus primarily on meaning, reducing miscommunications, and maintaining the conversation flow. the study the environment of the current study is unique in that the learners, while all sharing the same l1 of japanese (or categorized as fluent speakers of japanese), are expected to use the target language they learn in class, english, with foreign exchange students and teachers for a multitude of projects outside the classroom such as conversation activities and interview projects. it is thus necessary to define which communication strategies would serve them best in this capacity and train them accordingly. the present study investigates how communication strategy training can be used in group discussion activities to both reduce misunderstandings through clarification and confirmation, and to extend conversations through asking for more information. thus, the strategies that are the object of this study are asking for clarification and extending a conversation. in addition, while the aforementioned studies that inspired the present study all focused on the explicit instruction of such strategies, the current study has the additional aim of investigating the outcome of an additional experimental group featuring a student and teacher coconstructed approach to strategy training to see if students are able to draw on their own preexisting knowledge of communication strategies. lastly, in light of lam’s (2009) implementation of a multi-method approach to assessment, the current study analyzes the effectiveness of the conversation strategies in three ways: video-recorded observations, test scores on an oral communication test, and stimulated recall sessions. stuart benson, danielle fischer, joe geluso, lucius von joo 250 methodology research questions. this study investigated the potential correlation between various instructional methods used to promote the application of communication strategies and the frequency of use of the said strategies in small-group discussion tasks. in addition, the overall effect of communication strategy training on group oral discussion performance was evaluated. for this purpose, the following research questions were addressed: 1. what is the extent (frequency) with which students use communication strategies before and after training? 2. is there a relationship between the frequency of use of the oral communication strategy taught for the purposes of this study and the overall group discussion performance as determined by posttest scores? 3. does co-constructed or explicit instruction of communication strategies result in more student-employment of the said strategies and/or improved discussion performance? participants. the participants in this study were 76 native speakers of japanese at a private university in japan. they were from three sections of an english for international communication course for first-year students; there was a total of seven sections at the time of the study. the participants’ age ranged from 1819, and all the participants had studied english as a foreign language for a minimum of 6 years before entering the university. the toeic test was administered one month before the study and the mean score was 439.7 across the seven sections of the course. the study was conducted within the first three weeks of the academic year with the intent being to minimize the effect students’ other english courses and interactions with native english speaking international students at the university would have on their learning, and also to lessen the influence of teaching styles, as each section had a different teacher. teaching procedure. the sample consisted of three groups: experimental group 1, the group that received explicit instruction on conversation strategies from the instructor (n = 26); experimental group 2, which went through “co-constructed learning” with the instructor (n = 26); and a control group (n = 24). the treatments took place over two 90-min class periods in which the communication strategies were taught. the communication strategy in lesson 1 was clarifying and confirming and the conversation strategy taught in lesson 2 was extending the conversation. the instructors were given effects of communication strategy training on efl students’ performance in small-group discussions 251 a carefully scripted lesson plan with the goal being to lessen the effect of the teaching style for each treatment. in order to further compensate for teacher effect, and in turn increase validity, the experimental groups were formed by dividing two intact classes in half and matching them with each other for the treatments. that is, half the participants from each of the two intact classes formed experimental group 1, and the other half formed experimental group 2. for treatments, lesson 1 and 2, the respective experimental halves of the classes were brought together for treatment from instructor a, and the remaining students from each group were put together for treatment from instructor b. for treatment 2, the instructors taught the opposite group. experimental group 1 was taught the two communication strategies in a teacher-fronted explicit manner. predetermined formulaic sequences or phrases that were deemed useful in realizing the target communication strategies were taught to the group lecture style. the lecture was followed by an instructional video, produced in-house, that showed examples of how the predetermined phrases could be used in a small-group discussion to facilitate communication. after viewing the video, the participants were given a discussion question and had 7 min to discuss it, along with the chance to use the phrases. the participants were explicitly told to try to incorporate the phrases into their discussion. experimental group 2, the co-constructed group, did not receive predetermined phrases explicitly from the teacher. instead, they were given a transcript of a discussion and instructed to identify phrases that they believed facilitated the conversation. the teacher asked the participants to describe the strategy being realized by the phrases in their own words, and after they had done so, to highlight the formulaic sequences in the transcript that matched with the respective strategy. lastly, participants brainstormed further phrases to realize the target strategies and collected them via a student-generated list on the whiteboard. after the participants exhausted their knowledge of phrases, the teacher made any necessary grammar corrections. they were then given the same discussion question as the explicit group and had 7 min to discuss it with the chance to use the phrases co-constructed with the teacher in class. in the treatment the participants identified the phrases included in table 1. for the duration of the 3-week study, the control group did not receive any instructional training targeting communication strategies. they did, though, have two 7-min discussions using the same discussion questions as the experimental groups as a warm-up activity to their daily lessons. they then proceeded with the usual tasks and activities in the course unit packet. stuart benson, danielle fischer, joe geluso, lucius von joo 252 table 1 phrases used in the study conversation strategy explicit group co-constructed group asking for clarification and your opinion is... right? you gave an example... right? sorry to interrupt, but what is...? so you mean...? you mean...? that is to say...? do you want to say...? are you saying that...? your point is...right? extending a conversation have you...? no. but... how about you...? by the way... what do you think about.? how about you? what about…? however... assessment procedures conversation test. the pre and posttreatment discussion tests were used to investigate whether participants’ overall oral proficiency had increased by receiving communication strategy training. the pre and posttest consisted of a 7-min discussion in the same style as the training session discussions. for the discussion, groups of three or four learners sat at a table and discussed a set topic. the prompts used in both the pre and posttest were taken from the preexisting in-house test (bonk & ockey, 2003) and designed specifically to be answerable without requiring special topic knowledge. each discussion group was taken into a private room for the pre and posttest and both test sessions were video recorded and backed up with an audio recording. participants were told they were being recorded for research purposes and all participants signed a consent form. they were not informed of the experimental or control group conditions. in order to use the videos for pedagogical purposes beyond that of research, the videos were later uploaded onto a private youtube station. participants were given access only to the videos in which they were featured and they could reflect on their own language use in group discussions by comparing their pre and posttreatment performances. video stimulated recall interviews. immediately following the posttest, a video stimulated recall interview was performed. using the notes and the video recording taken during the posttest, two raters used a 3-staged approach to interview learners on conversation strategies that were used during the posttest. the 3-staged approach allowed raters to achieve an appropriate answer without influencing the participant’s reflection. the questions asked were: 1. why did you say that? / what made you say that? 2. where did you learn ‘_________’? 3. have you used that phrase before? effects of communication strategy training on efl students’ performance in small-group discussions 253 these questions were asked in the order outlined above as necessary. so, for example, if a student’s answer to the first question led him or her to answer questions 2 and 3 without being prompted, no further questions were asked. rating of conversation test. the participants’ pre and posttest performances were scored using the conversation skill band of a rubric that was developed and used at the time of this study for the university in-house oral assessment test: kept (bonk & ockey, 2003). three raters, all of whom had had training in the kept test, rated both pre and posttests. each rater watched the video-recorded tests on a private website which housed the videos and digital scorecards. the raters were able to assess the conversations online at their leisure within a 3-week period. this method of rating was chosen to avoid burnout the raters might have suffered had they watched the live pre and posttests as they were administered. after watching the videos of the small-group discussions, the raters assigned scores to the participants’ conversations. the raters were not given any information on whether a video was pre or posttreatment and a few of the videos were repeated to test intrarater consistency. all the results were tabulated and the interrater reliability was calculated. results descriptive data. as can be seen in table 2, the participants in this study who received instruction on how to incorporate conversation strategies into their small-group discussions demonstrated higher rates of strategy employment in terms of raw frequency than the control group. experimental group 1 employed the taught conversation strategy phrases for extending a conversation and asking for clarification a total of 49 times. experimental group 2 had the second highest rate of strategy employment at 45 instances, and the control group had the lowest at 37 instances. table 2 raw frequency of strategy employment group frequency explicit 49 co-constructed 45 control 37 table 3 outlines the average raw gains between pre and posttreatment performances for each group. as can be seen, the control group enjoyed the highest average raw gain in score from pretest to posttest with a gain of 1.11. the explicit instruction experimental group enjoyed the next largest gain with stuart benson, danielle fischer, joe geluso, lucius von joo 254 an average increase of 0.87 points. finally, the group that participated in the coconstructed approach to instruction demonstrated the smallest gains at 0.23. table 3 raw gains from pre to posttest group pre post difference explicit 5.33 6.20 +0.87 co-constructed 5.46 5.69 +0.23 control 4.87 5.98 +1.11 inferential data. in order to determine the statistical significance of the groups’ performances in relation to one another, an analysis of covariance (ancova) was carried out. the ancova was chosen over the more common analysis of variance (anova) in order to tap the difference in pretest scores between the groups. that is, the pretest scores are the covariate and the posttest scores are the response variable. as table 4 illustrates, despite the more frequent employment of the formulaic sequences representative of the conversation strategies in experimental groups as shown in table 2, the control group outperformed both experimental groups. the difference between the control group and experimental group 1, however, did not reach levels of significance. table 4 statistical significance for ancova comparisons of experimental and control groups group control co-constructed explicit 0.772 0.030 control 0.018 discussion the results show that both experimental groups, explicit and co-constructed, employed the expressions in conversations more than the control group. this increased frequency of employment of phrases reflects the results of naughton (2006), lam (2009) and nakatani (2010). however, judging from the ratings participants received on the in-house proficiency test, this increase in employment of expressions did not result in an overall improved score of conversation skills that outshone the control group. on the contrary, the control group demonstrated the largest gain from pre to posttest. although this was unexpected, several conclusions as well as limitations and suggestions for future research may be drawn from the data. firstly, the treatment sessions were short with only 90 min for each of the communication strategies. with the learners receiving little strategy instruction, it could be argued that students’ declarative knowledge about the effects of communication strategy training on efl students’ performance in small-group discussions 255 strategies had increased, but instruction had yet to affect the participants’ procedural knowledge (dekeyser, 2003). this means that the learners were knowledgeable of the strategies, such as their effectiveness in conversation and speaking proficiency, yet were still unable to effectively use the strategies in conversation, resulting in lower scores given by the raters. recall that lam (2009) observed as much in her own study: it is through repeated practice that declarative knowledge of strategy use may be automatized to become observable, procedural knowledge of strategy use . . . hence, while the instruction effect may not yet be observable, the value of strategy instruction may lie in explicit learning. (p. 144) aston (1986) noted that the intentional incorporation of strategies into conversations may disrupt smooth interaction, resulting in exactly the opposite of the desired effect. more time spent on the acquisition of the strategies, in terms of introducing the strategy, the phrases and explicit practice with them, might have allowed participants to effectively go from the knowing stage to the using stage of the strategies (dekeyser, 2003). this is a question that could be addressed via a delayed posttest. future studies may consider taking a more longitudinal approach to data collection to address this issue. with respect to experimental group 2, the co-constructed group, it could be that not only did they need more time to learn the phrases associated with the speaking strategies, but that the participants needed more time to become comfortable with the central tenets of co-constructed learning. research has indicated that the japanese secondary schooling system rarely uses co-constructed instruction; the prominent approach being explicit instruction (kikuchi & browne, 2009; nishino, 2008; taguchi, 2005). the fact that the participants had not studied english in a co-constructed manner prior to the study could be detrimental to their learning of the expressions. as stated earlier, in order to minimize teacher effect and outside influence, the study was conducted in the first three weeks of the school year. therefore, we should consider the timing in the academic year in which the study was conducted. perhaps replicating this study at the end of an academic year would yield higher gains as it would afford students more time to get accustomed to a more co-constructed style of learning. this is also an issue that would benefit from a more longitudinal study. in addition to providing the students with more time to use and learn the target phrases, teaching the students fewer phrases or limiting or pruning the number of phrases they generate in the treatment may have increased student mastery of the phrases and thereby increased conversation proficiency. perhaps future studies can prioritize limiting the number of phrases to be studied. stuart benson, danielle fischer, joe geluso, lucius von joo 256 finally, the function of the strategies taught may also have an impact on the scores doled. nakatani (2010) found that the most significant predictor of positive posttest scores was the use of maintenance strategies, such as providing an active response, for example, i see or that sounds good, and shadowing, or repeating what the interlocutor just said to show that you are engaged in the conversation (pp. 122-123). recall that the conversation strategies focused on in this study were clarifying and confirming and extending a conversation. future studies may find more powerful results by focusing on maintenance strategies, or simply focusing on a wider gamut of conversation strategies in general over a longer period of time. conclusion the studies on conversation skills conducted by naughton (2006), lam (2009), and nakatani (2010) all found that students increased their frequency of employment of strategies after conversation strategy training when compared to control groups. the present study had similar findings; students who took part in treatments representing both approaches to strategy training, explicit and coconstructed, employed the interactional communication strategies more frequently than the control group. however, the results show that experimental group 2 did not receive as high marks with respect to conversation skills as the other two groups. considering the limitations of the study outlined in the previous section, though, we caution the reader not to be too quick to dismiss the use of co-constructed learning when teaching communication strategies. it could be that students in this context were not yet accustomed to the coconstructed style of teaching and learning, and the approach could be more effective in another context or at a later point in the students’ careers at the university in this study. nakatani’s (2010) study was conducted 12 weeks into the course, which allowed learners to get accustomed to the learning style of the institute. as was suggested above for future research in this area, delaying the time period in which data is collected could allow the learners to study in a co-constructed learning setting and in turn not be a factor in the study. however, if the study was delayed to allow learners to study in a co-constructed setting, care would need to be taken in the treatment to ensure that teacher effect was minimal. one way to decrease teacher effect would be to have different instructors from those of the learners to conduct the treatment classes. despite the limitations, the results do indicate that students are able to increase their employment of predetermined phrases with the aim of improving the fluidity of their conversations. while this increased use of phrases did not result in outside raters in this study perceiving the participants as having increased convereffects of communication strategy training on efl students’ performance in small-group discussions 257 sation skills mere weeks after treatment, it remains to be seen if longer-term effects can be found. this in turn could influence the way in which a teacher constructs the class. an example of this could be allowing learners to work together to formulate their own phrases instead of explicitly giving phrases. future studies in the area of communication strategies should also consider two important issues when deciding what set phrases to incorporate in the study. one issue would be the number of set phrases to use. this study used 17 phrases from two communication strategies. it could be argued that 17 phrases were overwhelming for the learners to study and produce in a short period of time and thus had an adverse effect on their conversation. one may consider setting a limit on the number of phrases that are produced in the co-constructed learning group. the other issue for researchers to consider is what type of communication strategy to incorporate. nakatani’s (2010) study looked at a broad array of strategies and found that learners who used maintenance strategies, specifically active response and shadowing, received the highest scores. a comparative study involving two types of strategies between experimental groups could provide valuable results as to which strategies are worthwhile to incorporate into a curriculum. with also using two types of strategies in different learning styles, the results could indicate what type of strategy would be best for a particular setting, such as japan. finally, and perhaps most importantly, we wish to reiterate our recommendation that future studies take a more longitudinal approach. lam’s (2009), naughton’s (2006) and nakatani’s (2010) studies were longer than this study, with lam’s (2006) being conducted over a 5-month period. expanding the instructional period of time could allow learners to further understand the set phrases and in turn produce more substantial results. a delayed posttest would also indicate if learners had achieved the procedural knowledge necessary to accurately produce the set phrases in a conversation in an extemporaneous fashion. stuart benson, danielle fischer, joe geluso, lucius von joo 258 references aston, g. 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(1985). communicative competence: some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. in s. m. gass & c. g. madden (eds.), input in second language acquisition (pp. 235253). rowley, ma: newbury house. taguchi, n. (2005). the communicative approach in japanese secondary schools: teachers’ perceptions and practice. the language teacher, 29(3), 3-11. 343 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (3). 2013. 343-356 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl engaging students’ imaginations in second language learning gillian judson simon fraser university, canada gcj@sfu.ca kieran egan simon fraser university, canada kieran_egan@sfu.ca abstract imagination is rarely acknowledged as one of the main workhorses of learning. unfortunately, disregarding the imagination has some clearly negative pedagogical impacts: learning is more ineffective than it should be and much schooling is more tedious than it need be. in this paper, we outline a somewhat new way of thinking about the process of students’ language education. we focus on the kinds of “cognitive tools” or learning “toolkits” human beings develop as they grow up, which connect emotion and imagination with knowledge in the learning process. we show how employing these tools—indeed, how their central employment in all aspects of planning—can make learning other languages engaging and meaningful. keywords: imagination, cognitive tools, embodied learning, oral language, literacy games, drama, play, rhythm and rhyme, pattern, story, image creation, metaphor, personalizing objects, changing the context, a sense of wonder, a sense of mystery, and the odd (and not-so-odd) joke are all tools that com gillian judson, kieran egan 344 pose the pedagogical toolkit of most, if not all, second language teachers. let us look at three such teachers. teacher one. it is not uncommon for a brand new teacher of a second language to emerge from her teacher education program with fully equipped pedagogical toolkits; the sun glints off, as yet, unscratched tools designed to smoothly teach the elements of a second language. she has games for everything. she may even have images and stories at hand, as well as songs and funky raps intended to make learning a second language fun, to creatively teach new vocabulary, to facilitate understanding of the subtleties of verb conjugation, to aid in memorization and, hopefully, to engage students’ imaginations in the process. teacher two. enter the classroom of a seasoned second language teacher. the same teaching tools pave the way for student understanding. there are games for every unit. the teacher may have pictures on the walls of different countries, evoking images of language and culture. the teacher plays music and shows clips of films and television as a means to connect the classroom a little more authentically to the target language. in this second language classroom—it happens to be french—the teacher throws out one of his best jokes, “how many eggs does johnny eat in the morning.” no answer. a few eyes roll and a couple of sighs and groans are heard. “just one – one egg is enough” (un oeuf – get it? ouch!). in this classroom, learning a second language is described as a voyage; a voyage into uncharted territory where the unfamiliar, and yet familiar, characterize the land. the tools of the seasoned second language teacher are worn, scratched, even dented, but still do the job. they aid in memorization and make learning all the more palatable for students and teacher alike. the students enjoy the process. consider now a third kind of teacher. she has been trained in imaginative second language instruction. while she enters the classroom with the same tools as those described above, she understands that these tools are in fact features of her students’ thinking. she has many other tools at her disposal for teaching a second language, as well as a thorough training in their use and application to second language acquisition. we look now at what characterizes the classroom of the imaginative second language teacher and practical ways in which any second language teacher may more thoroughly engage their students’ imaginations in learning by employing cognitive tools. watch the story structure and narrative understanding, personalizing objects, metaphor, image creation, abstract binary oppositions, games, drama and play, rhyme, rhythm and pattern, extremes of experience and limits of reality, the sense of wonder, and the sense of mystery render second language acquisition meaningful for students. in this paper, we will outline a somewhat new way of thinking about the process of students’ language education. we focus on the kinds of “cognitive engaging students’ imaginations in second language learning 345 tools” or learning “toolkits” students develop as they grow up. in schools and institutes for training language instructors and in most currently dominant psychological theories of development, from piaget’s and vygotsky’s to information-processing and more recent forms of evolutionary and ecological theories, short-shrift is given to some of the most powerful learning tools students have available to make sense of their world and experience and of the languages that surround them (cf. e.g., miller, 2009; shafer & kipp, 2013). often, it seems, educators think of the imagination as something of an educational frill—something to try to engage after the hard work of learning had occurred. in this article, we will try to show that focusing on central features of students’ learning “toolkits” makes it clear that the imagination is one of the great workhorses of learning, and that we ignore it at the cost of making learning more ineffective than it should be and much schooling more tedious than it need be. rather than continue to think about these tools as “tricks” or “hooks” for learning, we indicate how their routine use—indeed, how their central employment in all aspects of planning—can make learning other languages engaging and meaningful. before looking at the individual tools and how we might deploy them in teaching, let us begin with an example that can give a clearer impression of what we are suggesting in our introduction. imagine inviting your students with you through the creaking door of the dilapidated old shed hidden in the woods of a nearby park. inside, through the moonlight that manages to penetrate the solitary window, thick with dust, mildew, and cobwebs, you can see shelves of rusted tins and glass jars of all shapes and sizes. in the corner, slowly rocking back and forth, twisting her hands, is a grizzly old woman wearing a long, torn, black cloak. her face is shrouded with thick layers of greasy grey hair, her face deeply lined and covered with black and brown moles each sprouting three or four coarse black hairs. and yet this repulsive person has the magic spells required to move through time. for those who have the nerve to enter her lair—a shed, you might add, that is only visible on certain cycles of the moon and at exactly six minutes before dawn—she can provide the spell required. the spell required to move back in time is a little more complicated than most. it requires a steady hand and a sober head. she throws three items into the cauldron that bubbles in the centre of the room––a subject of some kind, either avoir or être, and a verb in past form. when cast in the proper way, this spell allows one to express the past—to in effect move in time. this example hints at how to engage students’ emotions and imaginations in learning about a verb tense—something that, perhaps, does not seem particularly imaginatively engaging. while our example is for french language teaching, it could easily be adapted to any other foreign language. the key is gillian judson, kieran egan 346 that imaginative teachers will try to engage their students’ sense of wonder around the “tool” that is the past tense—to give some sense that what is so commonly taken for granted that it is just a chore to learn is in fact an astonishing human achievement. the use of the imagination brings out again that sense of wonder at the achievement, rather than focus entirely on the routines of everyday translation. teachers might engage their students’ sense of mystery in this particular feature of language learning by creating a harry potteresque story line. this example shows one way to begin to engage students’ imaginations with the sense of mystery lying at the heart of a structure of language that symbolically moves us through time. it also teaches students the knowledge they need to properly write the past tense but it does so in a way that leaves them feeling something for the topic; they are intrigued, and possibly a little spooked, by the power of the tense. some theoretical background we begin by sketching the main ideas that have accumulated historically into our current conception of education, in order to indicate what is distinctive about the approach we are recommending. the first and oldest educational idea is that we should shape children to the norms, values, and beliefs of the adult society around them through socialization processes. we recognize this idea of education when items in the curriculum are justified on the basis of their future social utility. so, for example, reading, writing, computing, sex-education, consumer-economics, basic common knowledge, teaching other languages, and so on, are all justified in terms of their importance for someone to get on, get a job, and be a good citizen in today’s society. the second educational idea was largely plato’s. as he chatted with the best and brightest of athens, he concluded that well-socialized citizens were more or less contemptible. their ready acceptance of the conventional norms and values of the society they grew into seemed to him appalling. he showed that such beliefs were typically a collection of confusions, illusions, stereotypes, prejudices, and dogmas that did not bear much scrutiny. plato conceived of education as the process of seeking the truth about reality. for plato, the mind is made up largely of the knowledge that it accumulates, and accumulating a lot of the right kind of disciplined knowledge can turn the mind from its easy acceptance of whatever conventional rubbish happens to be fashionable to an austere and disciplined search for what is true, good, and beautiful. the third idea is largely derived from jean-jacques rousseau. he shared plato’s view that early socialization generally taught children a lot of nonsense that was immensely difficult to dislodge once learned. however, he thought plato engaging students’ imaginations in second language learning 347 was wrong in his view that children’s minds were shaped largely by the knowledge that they accumulate. he argued that the mind has an internal, spontaneous, natural developmental process through which it grows, and proper education is the process of furthering its fullest development. so, for rousseau, education became a matter of facilitating the fullest development of a natural psychological process, and thereby fulfilling as far as possible the potential of each individual student. this has become the anchoring idea of “progressivism.” pretty well all modern conceptions of education, from the most radical to the most conservative, are compounded from these three ideas. nobody subscribes to one of these ideas exclusively. we all believe in each of them to some degree but we tend to differ in the balance. so the more radical conceptions tend to combine a large amount of rousseau with a small dose of socializing and are very sparing with the plato. the conservative tends to stir in a good measure of plato, a healthy dose of socializing, and go light on the rousseau. the average politician throws in a very large dose of socializing, is very sparing with rousseau, and sprinkles in just a little bit of plato. how else can we think about education? we can think of it as learning to use as well as possible the cognitive tools developed in our evolution and cultural history. we think we can reconceive education as the process whereby we acquire as fully as possible the major symbolic tools invented or discovered in human cultures. each major set of tools generates somewhat distinctive kinds of understanding. we now briefly outline these main sets of tools and describe the kinds of understanding to which they give rise. but what does a “cognitive tool” look like? imagine you are on the plains of africa 75,000 years ago. it is mid-day and very hot. ahead of you is a large lean-to built around a thorn tree. you can wander inside the shelter, and can see and hear the small tribe work and talk. at the back of the lean-to, on the most comfortable skins, a corpulent gentleman lies snoring. he is clearly held in high regard by the tribe. you discover that he is held in high regard because a dozen years earlier he invented the past tense. everyone is using the past tense now, including neighbouring tribes, through whom it is passing like wildfire, and your tribe is receiving much praise for its invention. the past tense adds to people’s ability to articulate features of our experience with greater clarity and scope. but, you learn, the corpulent gentleman at the back of the tent has twin daughters, and it was actually the daughters who invented the past tense, and their father has since taken the credit. the daughters are now young adults and, more sensitive to intellectual property rights, plan a launch of the subjunctive in the following week. well, someone invented the past tense and the subjunctive. they did not just happen. the invention and elaboration of these features of our language adds gillian judson, kieran egan 348 to our ability to make sense of our experience and to articulate it to others. when we learn a language, we pick up endless “tools” of this kind, which become for us tools for thinking, learning and communicating. in the 75,000 years since our scenario on the african plains, human beings have invented a huge array of cognitive tools that can enhance our ability to think, to learn, to communicate, and to understand our world and our human condition. the simplistic scenario is designed to illuminate a little lev vygotsky’s (1962, 1997) conception of development as picking up sets of cognitive tools as we grow up in a society. the theory of “imaginative education” we describe here, then, is a conception of education that sees the aim of schooling as maximizing for us the array of cognitive tools we pick up as we interact with the cultural world around us (egan, 1997). the body’s toolkit the first tool we have available for understanding the world is our body. if you have a body—you might want to check this now—you have a set of sense-making and learning tools available to you; these are tools that remain with you for the rest of your life—though they change somewhat over time. the potent role of embodied learning is increasingly being recognized (cf. bresler, 2004; kaparo, 2012; katz, 2013). senses: the inescapable elements of our body’s toolkit are our senses—our sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, which we value more or less in that order. these senses are stimulated in our earliest years, and babies take a particular delight in games that combine a number of them: plops, clicks, and squeaks that create, then follow, patterns that involve sight, touch, and hearing. our senses are necessary for our initial understanding of the world and allow us to perceive and deal with a certain range and scale of the phenomena of our environments. emotions: a central feature of our bodies’ meaning-making toolkit is its emotional nature. these emotions will persist and develop as the most basic orientors and organizers of our cognition throughout our lives. the way in which we respond to the physical and social world around us depends, importantly, on our emotions: from an early age, we experience profound emotional patterns such as expectation and frustration, or satisfaction of the expectation. indeed, the way we interpret events, including our later ability to critically analyse them, will always be shot through with emotions. delight, distress, elation, horror, satisfaction, anger, compassion, or fear constitute elements of the underlying matrix that shapes our responses, and thus even rationality itself. if we recognize the foundational development of our bodies’ emotional core, we will be less likely to see cognition, and cognitive tools, as somehow separate from our emotional lives; however sophisticated our thinkengaging students’ imaginations in second language learning 349 ing becomes, it will always be oriented and shaped by the emotions of the body within which it occurs (cf. benesch, 2012; swain, 2013). pattern and musicality: stephen mithen’s the singing neanderthals (2007) has helped to show how profoundly we are musical animals. our musicality seems a central feature of our body’s toolkit, perhaps, as mithen suggests, from early in our evolution as modern humans. we look for meaning in patterns from our earliest years of life, even when what we see, hear, or touch may be quite random. we begin to construct that uniquely human kind of meaning on the back of these patterned regularities our senses deliver to us. there is, of course, a huge amount of recent research showing the importance of pattern recognition in infants’ learning, in language learning and visual recognition of their world (see, for example, kirchhoff & schimmel, 2005; and the multitude of studies from the stanford university center for infant studies: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~babylab/index.html). humour: another prominent component of our bodies’ toolkit is humour. while educators have typically neglected humour, or treated it as some relatively casual frill, the presence of humour in our earliest interactions suggests that its stimulation and development might be profoundly important to us, and consequently should be considered as a constituent of any adequate program of education. it is useful to remember that humour, in many of its forms, is based on incongruity (clossen, 2007; gordon, 2013; monro, 2012). an ability to deal easily and pleasurably with incongruity contributes to flexibility of mind, which is an important component of an educated person. humour is important for many things, not least the delight it can give to experience, but it has a distinctive educational importance in its contribution to flexible, imaginative, and creative thinking. our bodily sense of humour becomes evident in such early activities as the mutual sticking out of tongues, tickling, the hiding and revealing of peek-aboo, and other forms of pretend that so delight babies and elicit laughter. all our behaviors seems accessible to a sense of humour, both to enrich the experience itself and to recognize it as parts of contexts that we can also transcend. there is a range of research now available showing a number of dimensions of learning that are aided by humour (see garner, 2005, 2006). many other learning tools of the body could be explored (egan, 1997, 2006). but these few examples suffice to suggest how we might see the body as providing a set of important “tools” whose development can properly be seen as appropriate for an educational program. their value to all learning, perhaps especially learning languages, is, we hope, evident. gillian judson, kieran egan 350 the toolkit of oral language when we become fluent users of an oral language, we acquire a further toolkit for sense-making. these tools will remain with us throughout life and can be drawn on for imaginative teaching of adults no less than children. all people who can use an oral language, or some other form of language, such as signing, will have the following tools available in varying degrees. story form: one implication of being an oral language-user is responsiveness to stories. all oral cultures that we know of have developed and used stories. shaped by logical and psychological constraints, the invention of language seems to imply the inevitable development of stories. but what are stories? how are they distinguishable from other narratives? if we were to say “he shot tom,” you will likely have no particular or precise response (unless, perhaps, your name is tom). if we elaborate this narrative and add that “he” is a handsome, well-groomed young man who loves his grandmother, and that tom is generally scruffy, bearded, picks his nose in public, and uses foul language in front of children, you may begin to feel glad that he shot tom––given the conventions of fiction today. but if the narrative is extended further, telling you that “he” and the grandmother are leaders of a drug-pushing operation who specialize in selling to kids outside schools, and also that tom, despite his unprepossessing exterior, has a heart of gold and is taking terrible risks to stop the grandmother’s and her grandson’s nefarious operations . . . well, you will probably begin to feel sorry that he shot tom. when we know securely how to feel about “he shot tom,” we know we have reached the end of the story. stories, then, are one of the forms of narrative, but a distinctive form that uniquely can fix our emotional orientation to the elements that make them up. no other narrative form can do this. we ascribe affective meaning to events, and to people, and to our own lives, by plotting them into provisional or partial stories. the reason we might reasonably consider the story as the most important social invention is that they orient the emotions of their hearers to their contents. we can, of course, make sense of our experience in a number of other modalities, but to whatever degree our emotional orientation is involved, then the plotting of events into partial or provisional or overarching stories will be involved. we are creatures who understand an important dimension of our experience and our world in story shapes. abstract and affective binary opposites: forming, and mediating between, binary opposites, also seems to be another development of the kinds of sensemaking we employ prior to language development. fairy tales such as cinderella, hansel and gretel or jack the giant killer are all built on top of powerful, abstract, engaging students’ imaginations in second language learning 351 binary oppositions such as security and anxiety, pleasure and pain, expectation and satisfaction, happiness and sadness, and so on. bettelheim (1976) analyses the “manner in which [children] can bring some order into [their] world by dividing everything into opposites” (p. 74; see also propp, 1985; zipes, 1991). jokes: in much the same way as physical rhythm transforms into our language, so too do our earliest bodily games and humour give birth to jokes; the physical fun of peek-a-boo becomes the fun of the concocted language of riddles, puns and other forms of jokes. “maybe you know when cooks are mean? when they beats eggs and whip cream.” jokes such as these, which typically delight young children, rely greatly on incongruity. they also make visible features of language that might otherwise be taken merely as behaviours. that is, the child has to recognize that while whipping and beating are often expressions of meanness, they are not so in the case of cooks in their kitchens. the humour comes from recognizing the different meanings of the same words in special contexts. so we learn to see language as an object, not merely as a behaviour. this develops “metacognition” of language, which is crucial to the development of flexible and creative language use (herriman, 1986). images: like humour, the array of images available to our minds, while somewhat limited in our early years, is suddenly enriched immensely by the acquisition of language. we seem unable to not form images as we hear events described in words, and a range of the effects of stories depends, to a great extent, upon listeners’ ability to form images in their minds. these can be so intense initially that most people seem able to recall with surprising clarity the images they formed when listening to stories in their early years (cowan, 1998). the ability to call up precise and rich images is a unique feature of our minds and is clearly connected with the development of the imagination. the toolkit of literacy once we become fluently literate we can pick up a whole new toolkit. literacy in general can deliver to the developing mind a new kind of conception of reality (bruner, 1986). the impact of coming to terms with this new intellectual world generates a new set of cognitive tools, which we can deploy in teaching, because we can be sure all our literate students will also have these tools, in addition to the ones explored above. the extremes of reality: the initial literacy-driven exploration of reality is of its extremes, of the strange, the bizarre, the wonderful. it is not just coincidental that one of the world’s most popular books with newly literate children is the guinness book of records, nor that the best-selling texts are such papers as the national inquirer. a rather odd part of the folklore of teaching is that gillian judson, kieran egan 352 students’ exploration of the world will be more enthusiastic if we begin with what is immediate and relevant to their everyday experience. but we can readily observe that their interest is most commonly and energetically engaged by the exotic, the strange, the wonderful, by the limits of reality and the extremes of experience—with who had the longest finger nails ever rather than the structure of their local neighborhood. associating with the heroic: while the exploration of this newly problematic reality can be exciting, it can also be threatening. the threats can be significantly relieved by associating with someone or something that seems best able to overcome them. so associations are formed with embodiments of those human qualities that transcend the everyday constraining and threatening world; whether it is an association with the outrageousness of a popsinging lady ga-ga (and her freedom from having to behave conventionally, and her money and power) or with the skill and strength of a sports star (and his/her skill, money, and power). accumulation of details: nearly all young people begin a hobby or a collection at about age seven (burk, 2010; coe, 1984; opie & opie, 1959). the activity reaches a peak of intensity at about age eleven, and usually dies out at about age fifteen. what is going on? why do nearly all students engage in this kind of activity? why do we see this powerful spontaneous intellectual engagement in nearly all children? an adequate explanation is beyond what we can manage here, or anywhere, but we can see it as a response to young people’s orientation to reality. that is, when a child learns to read (indeed, when we, too, learned to read— though we do not often recall) we often see that santa claus and the tooth fairy are left behind, and the real world is seen as worryingly extensive. one way we can achieve some security is to gain exhaustive intellectual control over some part of it. commercial interests, of course, are very alert to this engagement, and so they produce sets of collectible objects that have the twin requirements of being moderately extensive but also limited and exhaustible. we can draw on this cognitive tool when teaching almost anything. all topics have within them some area of knowledge that is both moderately extensive and also exhaustible. human knowledge: we sometimes suggest to our students that there is no knowledge in the library or on the internet. what they find in these places are only codes, which we can reconstruct into knowledge if we become familiar with the tools of literacy. but no one derives the same knowledge from any particular set of codes, and the only source of knowledge is in living human tissue, in our brains. this leads to a simple principle—that all knowledge is human knowledge; that it is derived from human hopes, fears, and passions; and that if we want students to understand the knowledge—reconstruct it engaging students’ imaginations in second language learning 353 from the codes in their minds—they need to see it in the context of the human hopes, fears, and passions that generated it in the first place or within which it finds a living meaning today. this connection to human emotional experience is as important in the context of foreign language learning as it is in mathematics, history, or visual arts. essentially, we could go on characterizing additional cognitive tools in each category above, and we could also extend this description to further sets of toolkits. however, given the shortage of space, let us instead recommend further reading in egan (1997) or, for a more practically oriented book, egan (2005). the implications for how these kinds of observations lead directly to methods of teaching can be found on the website of the imaginative education research group (www.ierg.net). conclusion what we want to suggest is that we can reconceive education as an enterprise aimed at ensuring for each of our students as full as possible an acquisition of each of these toolkits. each set of cognitive tools yields a somewhat distinctive kind of understanding, and we can describe the educational process as a series of kinds of understanding (egan, 1997). acquiring them ensures that the sensible aims of education embodied in the old ideas will be achieved incidentally; a person who gains in significant degree the use of the toolkits briefly described above will necessarily have to acquire a lot of knowledge, will have to attain significant psychological maturity, and will become socially competent. what will not happen is traditional socialization to conformity, nor the acquisition of particular "élite" knowledge that privileges one against others, nor the pursuit of some supposedly proper developmental process; and we will leave behind us the enervating battles among these incompatible aims. instead, the emotional lives of our students are given the central place they are due in the context of schooling. teachers of foreign languages, then, will make learning meaningful—and language acquisition more effective—by employing their students’ cognitive tools. by doing so, language learning aligns with and enriches students’ kinds of understanding. these are not stages we pass through; they are kinds of understanding we accumulate and that coalesce to some degree. this scheme does not describe a psychological process through which we spontaneously develop as we grow older; rather, it characterizes forms of thinking evoked in individuals today, as they were evoked in our cultural history, by the development of particular symbolic tools. if these tools are not supported by appropriate educational activities, they will not be acquired in any adequate way, and the forms gillian judson, kieran egan 354 of understanding they stimulate will not develop. each of the sets of cognitive tools mentioned above also gives us clues to how we can teach more effectively, engaging students’ imaginations in learning anything in the curriculum. for second language teachers—as for any teacher—when we shape our teaching in ways that employ these tools then we can make knowledge meaningful for students. as we acknowledge at the beginning, many of these tools are not “new” for language teachers—indeed, many consider them tried and true “tricks” for learning and making it enjoyable. our aim in this paper has been to indicate the much more profound pedagogical role these tools play for student learning and engagement and the central position they should play in teaching. engaging students’ imaginations in second language learning 355 references benesch, s. 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(2013). developmental psychology: childhood and adolescence (9th ed.). independence, ky: cengage learning. swain, m. (2013). the inseparability of cognition and emotion in second language learning. language teaching, 46(2), 195-207. vygotsky, l. (1962). thought and language (e. haufmann & g.vakar, trans.). cambridge, ma: mit press. vygotsky, l. (1997). the collected works of l. s. vygotsky (r. w. rieber & j. wollock, eds.). new york, ny: plenum. zipes, j. (1991). spells of enchantment. new york: viking. 225 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (1). 2023. 225-231 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.35760 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review an advanced guide to multilingualism author: larissa aronin publisher: edinburgh university press, 2022 isbn: 978-0-7486-3564-1 pages: 233 as a researcher in multilingualism and multilinguality, i always await any new publications by larissa aronin. they not only add to our understanding and knowledge of this fascinating field, but also inspire us to look into the various dimensions not yet explored by other researchers. a truly imaginative and inspiring mind, hers has been a significant contribution to models of multiple language acquisition, the theory of affordances (singleton & aronin, 2007), and the material culture of multilingualism, not to forget – what i consider to be her biggest and most fascinating area of research – dominant language constellations (aronin & vetter, 2021; lo bianco & aronin, 2020,) and also, fairly recently and still at the developmental stage, the philosophy of multilingualism (aronin & politis, 2015) . the book an advanced guide to multilingualism consists of five parts divided into sections and detailed subsections delineating the areas under discussion. the publication starts with a “foreword” by muiris ớ laoire, a long-standing co-researcher, whose comment on the book would alone suffice as a positive review of this publication and which makes it difficult for me to add to what the readers will find in his text. but as a reviewer i will try to expand on these comments. in 226 the introduction that follows, aronin justifies her choice of topic. readers will also find here a detailed description of the contents of the publication and a very extensive presentation of ideas for teachers, students or, more generally, multilinguals on how the book could be put to use, given the clear and welldesigned structure of the chapters. each chapter contains not only a contentfocused part but also a summary, further reading suggestions, a chapter review as well as reflective questions and exercises for classroom or individual use. in part i of the book “the field of multilingualism,” a detailed discussion of the phenomenon of multilingualism is offered, starting with its definition, which appears to be simple but has brought about multiple controversies and ongoing disagreements among scholars. aronin’s understanding is that multilingualism is different from bilingualism and her forceful arguments do justice to such a belief. following the assumption that being multilingual seems to be natural to people, as about one-third of humanity is multilingual, even though this applies more to some geographical areas than others (gabryś-barker, 2022), her in-depth analysis seems well-justified. aronin points out that in her discussion she will focus both on individual multilingualism as determined by unique “multilinguals’ life trajectories” (p. 14) and societal multilingualism, as dictated by the language policies and practices of a given country. it is important to point out that multilingualism, so much promoted these days, is not new and that multilinguality was rife in ancient times, as many historical sources demonstrate (e.g., clackson, 2015). larissa aronin presents the readers with a brief overview of historical multilingualism, emphasizing that studying multilingualism requires a multidisciplinary perspective embracing the various scholarly methods of linguistics, sociolinguistics, as well as linguistic ethnography and anthropology. it is the domain of language use by people in various contexts. i would also add here the importance of psycholinguistics as significant for the multilinguality of individuals. multilingualism is seen by aronin as a unique resource comprising a whole array of features of all languages (i.e., language universals) and linguistic characteristics of individual languages (e.g., scripts, numerals, color terms, time and space terms), which have only attracted scholarly attention in the last few decades. language study and study of its use have gone through the phases of monolingual, bilingual and, finally, in more recent times, multilingual focus, leading to a new linguistic dispensation, the term promoted by aronin in her other research and publications (aronin & singleton, 2008) and also outlined in this book. following the discussion of the nature of multilingualism and its scope as a scholarly domain, emphasis in part ii, titled “languages,” is shifted to the presentation and discussion of languages of the world as a major resource in multilingualism. i believe that this part of the book is aimed at readers whose knowledge of linguistics is elementary or who want to sharpen their understanding of the nature of 227 languages. thus, readers will find here an overview of multilingualism-related terminology and phenomena (e.g., language versus dialect, codification and standardization, language varieties, pidgins and creoles), issues in language distance (e.g., linguistic distance) and also the position of english as a lingua franca. all of these concepts are clearly explained and illustrated with examples. additionally, the classification of languages is offered from different perspectives – those of structural typology, genetics and sociolinguistics (among others). importantly, aronin also discusses at length the evolving character of sign languages and their significance, adding a brief comment on artificial (constructed) languages (of the future?). in part iii “multilingualism in society,” aronin first of all presents basic concepts for this aspect of multilingualism, such as language contact and language convergence (“sprachbund,” p. 98), (language) borrowing together with its different types in different languages, language domain and speech community (e.g., language community) alongside its different forms. one of the phenomena related to speech community is diglossia, a term that has been at issue in scholarly research since the 1950s and much elaborated by joshua fishman (1972), to whom aronin rightly pays tribute in this part of the book. having discussed the basic terminology, she moves on to the presentation of multilingualism from a geographical perspective, demonstrating language diversity across the world and the different types of multilingualism in existence. there is plenty of information here on multilingual regions such as africa and india, as pre-eminently multilingual but not without linguistic challenges and problems. perhaps some more comment could have been made here on the multilinguality of the european continent and the tensions brought about by language and identity conflicts. part iv “individual multilingualism” takes into consideration the other important dimension of multilingualism: what is more personal and unique to an individual. here the focus is on the psycholinguistic and cognitive aspects of multiple language use by an individual, such as language modes, crosslinguistic interactions observed in learning and performance behaviors of a multilingual, language development across one’s lifespan and the role of age in multilingual development. also, ideas about early and late multilinguals and the role of language learning in later stages of life (both in healthy and debilitated states) are clearly and coherently discussed here. aronin supports her discussion with the findings of more than just recent research, which has been quite extensive. the discussion of individual multilinguality is rightly portrayed here not only as a person-related phenomenon, but, importantly, as also having a social dimension related to identity of a multilingual, inevitably functioning in a social context. research in this field has led to a better understanding of identity based on the complexity of intertwined personal, social and professional factors, an advance which is rightly emphasized in this part of the book. aronin also sees the impact 228 of multimodality and “external entities” (p. 140) on identity development, such as, for example, material culture (to which she had made a significant contribution). additionally, human interaction with technology is another factor in identity building overviewed in this part of the book. we have observed it in our recent experience of the pandemic, our functioning in virtual reality, where technology became an indispensable tool for operating effectively not only in our professional lives but also in social and family contexts, becoming integral to our identities. aronin once again demonstrates the complexity and challenges of individual multilinguality by presenting the different “trajectories of becoming multilingual” (p. 142) in terms of the order of language acquisition/learning (i.e., simultaneous or successive) or contextually determined, following the typology of hoffmann (2001). she also raises the issue of how multilingual families function. the reader will find here a brief discussion of esoteric multilinguals, such as the so-called polyglots and savants. the final part, part v, “how we experience and study multilingualism,” is the longest in the book. this is not surprising, as it focuses on three fundamentals in multilingualism: language nominations, methods in researching multilingualism and models of multilingualism based on research findings. firstly, aronin offers a clarification of terms basic to multilingualism research in relation to socalled language nominations (e.g., the mother tongue, second and foreign language) and their application to existing language practices of multilinguals/multilingual societies. multilingual language functioning inevitably leads to the emergence of code-switching and translanguaging, two concepts which are also defined and contextualized here. an important part of the discussion of language nominations and languages’ status in a multilingual mind relates to the concepts of language repertoires (lr) and dominant language constellations (dlc), as well as the impact of material culture on multilingual language development and functioning, all of which are explored and clarified with respect to their individual features. secondly, the reader is presented here with an overview of the research methodology used in various studies derived from certain philosophical assumptions as well as the challenges that researching such a complex phenomenon faces. these methodological approaches embrace quantitative research (i.e., descriptive, correlational, causal/comparative, experimental), language demography (i.e., censuses, surveys), qualitative research (i.e., case study, action research, ethnography), and holistic and complexity research derived from cdts (complex dynamic systems theory). even though each of these research paradigms is described in detail, it would perhaps have made this section more interesting if they were illustrated with references to specific studies using these methods and/or combinations of them. thirdly, the chapter discusses various conceptual explanatory models of multilingualism derived from theoretical assumptions. the models 229 specific to multilingualism presented by aronin are: factor model (brita hufeisen), dynamic model (philip herdina and ulrike jessner), role-function model (sara williams and björn hammarberg), multilingual processing model (franzjoseph meissner), and multilingual modelling in dlc (mentioned earlier). dlc, as an innovative approach representing multilinguality, goes beyond the verbal expression of the earlier models by using visual, olfactory and tactile aspects of language use. this is a very promising, new avenue of research promoted by the author here and in her other specific publications. the book closes with a brief “conclusion” in which larissa aronin pinpoints the major tendencies in the study of multilingualism embraced by research, expressed in terms of the need to understand the complexity and diversity of multilingualism and the growing importance of social dimensions in redefining some traditional concepts in line with new global realities. each of the tendencies is exemplified and discussed throughout the book. the “bibliography” of sources cited in the book comprises over 400 publications. these are virtually all of the major (and recent) publications by established scholars in multilingualism, including a broad selection of aronin’s own contribution to the field. therefore, this part of the book constitutes an excellent resource for all researchers, both those long established and new to the field. aronin’s an advanced guide to multilingualism accessibly puts together theories and facts about multilingualism, incorporating research findings and their implications. it clarifies and defines the key concepts in the field and recognizes its interdisciplinary character. it shows the author’s expertise in the field, both with respect to detailed analysis and her ability to present a synthesis of hotly disputed issues in multilingualism and multilinguality. this book is also valuable as it caters equally well for the needs of language students and individuals who may just have an interest in finding out what it is that makes them multilinguals and how their (and societal) multilinguality works. it will also be of great help to academics conducting research in the field as it clarifies a lot of the imprecision in definitions still present in this fairly new field (in comparison with wellestablished studies in bilingualism). the book is organized in such a way that it can be used as a basic coursebook for university lectures in multilingualism, offering not only fundamental knowledge as a starting point, but also expanding on it and offering suggestions both for further reading and class activities. i am sure that this aspect will be appreciated by lecturers and students alike. to conclude this review, i can fully recommend larissa aronin’s most recent monograph to many different types of reader. these would be academics at different stages of their research and teaching careers, students enrolled in various courses related not only to languages but also to sociology or psychology and, last but not least, multilingual language users themselves, as the publication 230 will help them make sense of their identity as multilinguals and how multilingualism works for them in different contexts. reviewed by danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia, katowice, poland danuta.gabrys-barker@us.edu.pl 231 references aronin, l., & politis, v. (2015). multilingualism as an edge. theory and practice of second language acquisition 1(1), 27-49. aronin, a., & vetter, e. (eds.). (2021). dominant language constellations approach in education and language acquisition. springer. clackson, j. (2015). language and society in the greek and roman worlds. cambridge university press. fishman, j. (1972). the sociology of language: an interdisciplinary social science approach to language and society. rowley. gabryś-barker, d. (2022, september 15-17). a diachronic perspective on multilingualism: past, present and future [keynote address]. the 12th international conference on third language acquisition and multilingualism, university of zagreb, zagreb, croatia. https://iaml3conference.ffzg.unizg.hr/ hoffmann, c. (2001). towards a description of trilingual competence. international journal of bilingualism, 5(1), 1-17. lo bianco, j., & aronin, l. (eds.). (2020). dominant language constellation: a new perspective on multilingualism. springer singleton, d., & aronin, l. (2007). multiple language learning in the light of the theory of affordances. innovation in language learning and teaching, 1, 83-96. 193 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (2). 193-213 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl emotions that facilitate language learning: the positive-broadening power of the imagination1 peter macintyre cape breton university, sydney, nova scotia, canada peter_macintyre@cbu.ca tammy gregersen university of northern iowa, cedar falls, usa tammy.gregersen@uni.edu abstract the imagination is powerful, in part, because of the emotions that can be activated by imagining future states. imagined future states are a key feature of the l2 self-system proposed by d rnyei, and emotion may be the key to the motivational quality of the imagined future self. in particular, this paper focuses on positive anticipated and anticipatory emotions related to language learning. it is argued that, in general, positive emotion has a different function from negative emotion; they are not opposite ends of the same spectrum. based on the work of fredrickson, we argue that positive emotion facilitates the building of resources because positive emotion tends to broaden a person’s perspective, opening the individual to absorb the language. in contrast, negative emotion produces the opposite tendency, a narrowing of focus and a restriction of the range of potential language input. this article draws a framework for finding a balance between the positivebroadening and negative-narrowing emotions in the language classroom, 1 authors’ note: this research was facilitated by a grant from cape breton university. we would like to thank jillian burns for comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. correspondence may be sent to: tammy gregersen, university of northern iowa, department of languages and literatures, cedar falls, ia, 50613, usa or tammy.gregersen@uni.edu peter macintyre, tammy gregersen 194 and beyond. the emotion system is an engine for the positive-broadening power of the imagination. keywords: imagination, motivation, self, emotions, positive-broadening imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try – john lennon imagination is powerful. songwriters, poets, politicians, and motivational speakers draw upon the potency of imagination to reveal truths about the present and propel us toward their version of the future. imagination works best when it activates emotion; the poets have known this all along. as language teachers, learners and researchers we have yet to fully appreciate the value of imagination and the power of emotion in our accounts of the learning process. our goal in this paper is to establish a theoretical foundation on which to build a more complete understanding of the ways in which affect and imagination contribute to language learning. after laying out our conceptual foundation by characterizing emotions through a variety of defining features, we attempt to demonstrate how teachers can create classroom and task conditions that draw upon the power of their learners’ imaginations to both provoke essential reactions and optimize the cognition that modifies learners’ emotional schemas. when learners feel the burden of negative-narrowing emotion, it is our goal to help teachers find ways to transform it into positivebroadening, empowering resources. characterizing emotion defining a concept like emotion is not an especially easy task. common usage seems to arrive at a circular definition where emotions are defined as feelings and feelings are defined as emotional states. johnmarshall reeve (2005, p. 294) offers a good discussion of emotion and its definitional issues. reeve settles on a multidimensional definition: “emotions are short-lived, feelingarousal-purposive-expressive phenomena that help us adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events.” the feeling component reflects the subjective experience we so often equate with emotion. the second component, arousal, has been the topic of considerable research, successfully finding unique patterns of physical responses that accompany certain specific emotions, as when heart rate and blood pressure increase during anxiety. the third component is purposive, reflecting the goal-directedness of emo emotions that facilitate language learning: the positive-broadening power of the imagination 195 tion. finally, the expressive component gives emotion its social and communicative dimension; for example, involuntary (unlearned) facial expressions are associated with universal emotions and tend to be easy to read. but emotions must be understood to be more than the sum of these parts. an emotion is emergent from the coordination of these four aspects of experience. anxiety is perhaps the most studied emotion in second language acquisition (macintyre & gregersen, 2012). consistent with reeve’s definition, language anxiety can be understood as an emergent, coordinated emotion with feeling, arousal, purposive and expressive phenomena. the feelings associated with language anxiety, well described in qualitative research, include tension, nervousness, worry, dread, upset, and similar terms. the physical dimension also is present – the heart races, the body sweats, the hands tremble, and there is a sinking feeling in the stomach (reeve, 2005). this is a coordinated reaction governed by the interaction of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, often called the “fight-or-flight” response. the purpose of a fight-or-flight response in language learning might not be readily apparent, but can be found just below the surface. the feelings associated with language anxiety typically precede avoidance or escape; we want to leave a situation that makes us anxious as a means of self-protection. we are at risk in a situation where we cannot understand what is being said. if we do not understand the people around us, we are subjected to a primitive question: how can we fit into, and avoid being rejected by this group? the expression of language anxiety is a voluntary and/or involuntary call for help, a cue to the other people in the situation that the anxious learner is or might be in distress. a long standing question in emotion research has focused on the number of emotions. in response to this line of enquiry, a small number of discrete, core, basic emotions have been identified cross-culturally. paul ekman’s (1972) work on facial recognition has shown that facial displays of basic emotions can be correctly interpreted across cultures. robert pluchick (2011) emphasizes an evolutionary perspective to identify emotions that are foundational, common across species and divisions within a species (e.g., cultures). according to reeve (2005), the list of emotions generated by this approach has featured mostly negative emotions (fear, anger, disgust, sadness) with one or two positive emotions (joy, interest). perhaps the appeal of seeking to identify the basic emotions is that the number has been rather small, between three and eleven different emotions, depending on how the classification is developed. an alternative to the search for basic emotions is a search for emotion words in the lexicon. a lexical-cognitive perspective emphasizes the role of social, contextual and attribution processes in defining the many shades of emotional experience. a woman might love learning french, but that is not the peter macintyre, tammy gregersen 196 same love she has for her father, her mother, her eldest daughter, the cat, playing bridge, and eating chocolate. some core emotion in these cases (love, affection, care) might be similar but the shades of interpretation and meaning are very different and integral to the experience of each type of love. dewaele (2010) emphasizes this dimension of emotion when he discusses the difficulties learners encounter in expressing emotions across languages. pavlenko (2002) also discusses how bilinguals’ conversation about emotion evolves through the process of second language socialization as evidenced by examples of second language influence on first language performance. caroll izard’s (2011) recent work on differential emotions has offered a valuable distinction between basic or “first-order” emotions and more complex emotion schemas. first-order emotions require only the minimal cognitive processes of perceiving and imaging in order to trigger a rapid and sometimes automatic action. these processes may often occur without reportable awareness, particularly in early development. in contrast, emotion schemas always involve interactions among emotion feelings and higher order cognition – thoughts, strategies, and goals that complement and guide responding to the emotion experience. (p. 372) izard (2011) identified the first-order emotions as interest, enjoyment/happiness/contentment, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, and possibly contempt. higher-order emotion schemas can be simple or complex combinations of emotions, mixed with cognitive and self-regulation elements, that allow for interpretation and continual interaction with the surrounding context. complex emotion schemas are similar to what epstein (1993) calls vibes, part of the lower-level experiential system, as differentiated from the higher-level rational, logical, cognitive system. vibes are subtle feeling states that occur instantly, automatically, and often below the level of conscious awareness. “a typical sequence of behavior is that an event occurs; the experiential system scans its memory banks for related events; and vibes from the past events are produced that influence conscious thoughts and behavior” (epstein, 1993, p. 323). except in unusual circumstances (e.g., a time of war, natural disaster, or intense fear), first-order emotions are rarely experienced directly. adults’, and even adolescents’, day-to-day emotional experience features conscious complex emotion schemas and/or subtle vibes, having been shaped since childhood. the proximity of the neural circuitry for emotion and cognition suggests that even when first-order emotions are activated, they begin being shaped by cognition and self-regulation processes almost immediately. in turn, the emotion system shapes cognition, sometimes with and sometimes without our conscious awareness. emotions that facilitate language learning: the positive-broadening power of the imagination 197 it is important to emphasize the distinction between emotions and two related concepts, mood and temperament. whereas emotions are short-lived reactions to personally significant events, moods are longer-lasting, more diffuse experiences; their origins in recent experience might be difficult for a person to identify. moods do not carry the potential for specific action that emotions do, partly because moods operate in the background and emotions in the foreground of conscious experience. moods are the more common experience, with each day being shaped in subtle ways by one or more moods. more broadly, temperament is a stable tendency for an individual to experience certain moods and emotions. temperament is a personality-level construct that is often linked to physiology. using anxiety as an example, speilberger (1966) differentiated the emotional experience of anxiety at a specific time (state anxiety) from the long term tendency or disposition to experience anxiety reactions (trait anxiety). the positive-broadening and negative-narrowing power of emotion recent developments in the literature have begun to highlight the nature of positive emotions, long neglected by researchers in the area. barbara fredrickson (2001, 2003, 2006) has proposed the “broaden and build” theory of positive emotion that clearly differentiates the functions of positive and negative emotions. fredrickson acknowledges that the action tendencies produced by negative emotions powerfully dispose a person to a specific action (e.g., disgust leads to rejection as in spitting out spoiled food). fredrickson (2003) proposes that positive emotions carry a different implication for ongoing activity: [the broaden and build] theory states that certain discrete positive emotions – including joy, interest, contentment, pride, and love – although phenomenologically distinct, all share the ability to broaden people's momentary thought-action repertoires and build their enduring personal resources, ranging from physical and intellectual resources to social and psychological resources. (p. 219) the broaden and build theory suggests that positive emotions function in at least five important ways (fredrickson, 2006). first, positive emotions tend to broaden people’s attention and thinking, leading to exploration and play, new experiences and new learning. second, positive emotion helps to undo the lingering effects of negative emotional arousal. a related, third function of positive emotion is to promote resilience by triggering productive reactions to stressful events, such as improving cardiovascular recovery and making salient feelings of happiness and interest while under stress. fourth, positive emotion promotes building personal resources, such as social bonds built by smiles, peter macintyre, tammy gregersen 198 intellectual resources honed during creative play, and even when young animals practice self-preservation maneuvers during rough-and-tumble play. fifth, positive emotions can be part of an upward spiral toward greater wellbeing in the future, essentially the vicious cycle in reverse. a positive spiral is possible because the acquisition of resources facilitated by positive emotions endure long after the emotional reaction has ended. that is, rather than simply being the absence of negativity, positive emotions actively produce health and well-being (fredrickson, 2001). if negative and positive emotions function differently, and everyday emotion schemas include both positive and negative emotions simultaneously, it seems best to conceptualize emotion along two separate dimensions, positive-broadening and negative-narrowing. the potentially disruptive effects of negative emotion, especially language anxiety, have been well described in the literature. high anxiety tends to lead to closing off, withdrawal, and self protection behavior (ely, 1986; horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986). however, the potentially powerful effects of positive emotions have not been widely studied in second language acquisition. to what extent do things like perseverance over the course of language learning, bouncing back from embarrassing l2 gaffs (real or imagined), and dealing with the threat to identity of subtractive bilingualism depend on positive emotional resources? more specifically, it has been argued that noticing language input, and an awareness of languages in a multilingual context, significantly promotes learning. the language awareness approach holds as one of its basic tenets that learning is enhanced when learners are “affectively engaged and when they willingly invest energy and attention in the learning process” (bolitho, carter, hughes, ivanic, masuhara, & tomlinson, 2003, p.252). bolitho et al. (2003) further suggest: sensitivity to affect in teachers may influence lesson and course design in a profound way through choice of texts and activities, and may help them to ‘unblock’ failing learners by encouraging them to respond affectively as well as cognitively to language inputs of various kinds. affective engagement with language in use also has the considerable advantage of stimulating a fuller use of the resources of the brain. positive attitudes, self-esteem, and emotive involvement help to fire neural paths between many areas of the brain, and to achieve the multi-dimensional representation needed for deep processing of language. macintyre (2007) has recently noted that ambivalent emotion is prevalent in language learning. the two-dimensional view of emotion proposed in the present article, with positive-broadening and negative-narrowing continua, makes it easier to discuss ambivalence. although there are many times when the emotional component of the individual’s ongoing stream of activity will be emotions that facilitate language learning: the positive-broadening power of the imagination 199 congruent with the surrounding context (fear and running away; love and cuddling; excitement and celebrating), there will be other times when emotions function to oppose what we are doing (fear and skydiving; anxiety and test taking; embarrassment and speaking a second language). when emotions are in conflict with ongoing actions, when we have to overcome an emotional reaction in order to take action, we are in a state of ambivalence. the perception of a conflicted emotional state reflects a complex, underlying motivational process. when emotions motivate action, conflicted or ambivalent emotions produce instability that might be best understood as a coordination of approach and avoidance tendencies. rather than looking at emotion as approach versus avoidance, we can discuss interesting moments of approach and avoidance, to capture in theory the tensions experienced by learners so that pedagogy can actively deal with the issues raised by affective reactions, and better understand the breadth of facilitative and debilitating emotional processes. language learning is a long term process, and the conceptualization of time has become more relevant to motivation theory; a sense of time is a central feature of both the l2 self system (d rnyei, 2005, 2009) and a focus on possible future selves (macintyre, mackinnon, & clement, 2009). with respect to futureoriented emotions, baumgartner, pieters, and bagozzi (2008) offer a potentially important distinction between anticipatory emotion and anticipated emotion: on the one hand, a person may currently experience an emotion due to the prospect of a desirable or undesirable future event (i.e., hope or fear). these affective reactions are anticipatory emotions, because they are currently experienced due to something that could happen in the future. on the other hand, a person may imagine experiencing certain emotions in the future once certain desirable or undesirable future events have occurred (e.g., anticipated joy or regret). these affective reactions are anticipated emotions. (p. 685, emphasis added) baumgartner et al. (2008) state that there are two prototypical categories of positive and negative anticipatory emotions: hope and fear (respectively). these are the same categories used in possible selves research: the hoped-for and feared future self (markus & nuirius, 1986; macintyre et al., 2009) we argue that the motivational force behind possible future selves stems in large part from anticipatory and anticipated emotions. in addition, we propose that the formation of possible future l2 selves would be facilitated by the positive-broadening power of anticipatory emotion. to wit, one might imagine speaking fluently on an upcoming international vacation or important future business trip, but unless this thought arouses positive emotion schemas such as interest in the local culture (to facilitate broadening language skill) or a negative emotion schema such as fear of failure (to narrow peter macintyre, tammy gregersen 200 the focus to the language learning task at hand), then the possible future self seems impotent. drawing on an analogy with the well-established literature on cognitive dissonance (cooper & fazio, 1984), the discrepancy between the present and future self has motivating force only to the extent that (a) the discrepancy is noticed and (b) it arouses an emotional reaction. the cognitive dissonance literature has shown that people can have dissonant attitudes and not care too much about resolving the discrepancy; likewise, people can think how nice it might be to learn another language without feeling much of a need to do so. but when learners do feel excitement, interest, or a love of learning, the positive-broadening power of emotion comes to the fore. pedagogical implications concerning emotion to assist teachers in putting this theory into practice, we provide guidelines that set up a framework for language classroom activities that draw upon the theoretical bases above and attempt to channel the power of positive-broadening and negative-narrowing emotions. it is important to keep in mind that emotional reactions are semi-controllable; this is both bad news and good news. the bad news is that emotions sometimes just happen, they are reactions, and there can be an unpredictable quality to them. the good news is that whereas emotion is often an involuntary reaction, it is possible for teachers to approach influencing students’ emotion in at least two ways: (a) to set up conditions to provoke a reaction; and (b) to work with the cognition that modifies the emotional schema. one of the essentials to effectively capitalizing on teachers’ potential influence on emotions is the invocation of learners’ imaginations. the imagination is a powerful route with which to influence emotions, both present (anticipatory) and future (anticipated). emotions are central to energizing a reduction of the discrepancies between students’ present and future selves. to demonstrate the power of imagination for modifying cognition, we draw upon the wellestablished systematic desensitization technique, in which the intensity of negative emotions, including anxiety, is lessened in a controlled, safe setting. furthermore, we provide some ideas from positive psychology that will encourage play and exploration; promote joy, interest, and contentment; create resiliency and community-building; stimulate learners to find constructive meaning and long-term benefits to their actions, and advance flourishing social networks. recent research shows not only that these emotions facilitate learning but how these emotions facilitate learning. in providing pedagogical guidelines that draw upon the power of the imagination in the elaboration of possible selves and in systemic desensitization, as well as parameters from positive psychology, we emotions that facilitate language learning: the positive-broadening power of the imagination 201 hope to equip teachers to create positive-broadening emotional conditions for their students and modify learners’ negative-narrowing reactions. l2 self system and possible selves: using the imagination to provoke a reaction the “possible selves” paradigm (markus & nurius, 1986) offers teachers an interesting option for arousing language learners’ emotional reactions and ways of moving them in a positive-broadening direction. in implementing this model, learners create specific, vivid representations of what they might become, what they would like to become, and what they are afraid of becoming. “possible selves are specific representations of one’s self in future states, involving thoughts, images, and senses, and are in many ways the manifestations or personalized carriers, of one’s goals and aspirations (and fears, of course)” (d rnyei, 2005, p.99). these imagined possible selves must be a present reality for the individual, and frame future goals through creating vivid self-images. through possible selves, learners create dynamic future guides that encourage action. by elaborating possible selves, integrated goals and plans for achieving them are set that include ways to translate ideas into action. “thus, possible selves give form, meaning, structure, and direction to one’s hopes and threats, thereby inciting and directing purposeful behavior. the more vivid and elaborate the possible self, the more motivationally effective it is expected to be” (d rnyei, 2005, p.100). furthermore, efficacy is increased when the positive image is linked with images of potential negative outcomes if the desired state is not reached, creating a dynamic balance between what one hopes and what one fears (markus & ruvolo, 1989). building on the possible selves model, d rnyei (2005) proposed the l2 self system is a broad construct composed of three dimensions: the ideal l2 self, which incorporates the future vision one has of oneself; the ought-to self, which focuses on duties obligated by external forces; and the l2 learning experience, which relates to the immediate learning environment and considers variables like the teacher, curriculum, peer group and previous experience with success. in essence, the ideal self is the person learners would like to become and the ought-to self is the persona created to meet expectations and avoid possible negative outcomes. the l2 learning environment is conceptualized differently from the other two self-guides as it is connected to the present (rather than future) motivation inspired by previous experience working together with the immediate learning environment and necessitates ongoing activity. the central hypothesis behind this model is that if progress in the target language is linked to one’s ideal and ought-to selves, motivation to peter macintyre, tammy gregersen 202 learn the language is enhanced because of the learner’s psychological desire to reduce the discrepancy between current and possible future selves (d rnyei & ushioda, 2009). in other words, teachers using activities based on this model can set up the conditions to arouse an emotional reaction in their learners with an inherent positive-broadening direction. rnyei (2009, p.18) lists six specific conditions that enrich or thwart the motivational force of the ideal and ought-to selves that help prepare a framework for pedagogical activities. the ease with which individuals can create an effective possible ideal self varies from person to person, and once established, a self-image must be elaborate and vivid to be an effective motivator – in fact, the more elaborate and vivid, the better. possible selves only have value when the creator indeed believes their attainment is possible and likely; possible selves are not pure fantasy, vague wishes, or dreams. harmony between the ideal and ought-to selves, when a learner’s social and personal identities may be brought into alignment increases the efficacy of possible selves as a motivational tool. activation of the possible self in working memory can be prompted by reminders, classroom exercises, and self-relevant actions, or learners can be taught to purposefully summon possible selves in reaction to external events. in order to go from potential to action, learners must have accompanying procedural strategies that consist not only of an imagery element, but also an inventory of applicable plans and procedures. finally, for ideal and ought-to selves to function optimally, they need to be offset by the impact of the feared self. maximum motivational effectiveness is reached when the ideal self is balanced with a counteracting feared possible self that focuses on the potential results that could befall if the original image fails. in terms of the practical application of the l2 self system, d rnyei (2009) lists six strategic implications. the first strategy is to raise awareness of the construction of the ideal l2 self; creating the vision. this process is more like “awareness raising and guided selection from the multiple aspirations, dreams, desires, and so on that the students have already entertained in the past” (p. 33). it also entails intensifying the learners’ consciousness about the importance of ideal selves, asking them to revisit the possible selves they have imagined in the past, and acting as influential models. the second strategy strengthens the vision of the possible selves through imagery enhancement, such as through the invocation of creative or guided imagery. the idea is to emotions that facilitate language learning: the positive-broadening power of the imagination 203 have learners both boost their controllability of the image and make it more vivid. making the ideal l2 self plausible through substantiating the vision is the third strategy. this strategy is based on the need for a sense of realistic expectations and built on the premise that the greater the prospect of goal achievement, the higher the degree of positive motivation. the fourth strategy encompasses keeping the vision alive through activation of the l2 ideal self. rnyei (p. 37) urges teachers to “provide an engaging framework that keeps the enthusiasts going and the less-than-enthusiasts thinking.” fifthly, by developing an action plan, teachers can help learners operationalize their visions. these self-guiding images are only effective when accompanied by a set of concrete action plans and continual self-evaluation. once in place, plans need to be reviewed and kept up to date. ineffective plans are modified; successful plans celebrated. the final strategy concerns counterbalancing the positive vision by considering the repercussions of failure. for optimal benefit to be squeezed from the possible selves model, learners need to regularly activate their “dreaded” selves. table 1 d rnyei’s qualities of the l2 self and strategic directions for imagery no. quality (of a motivating l2 self) strategy (what can we do) 1 vivid raise awareness of l2 self 2 possible or likely guide the imagery 3 internally consistent instantiate the l2 self 4 active, salient remind learners of the l2 future self 5 comes with a roadmap, action plan ongoing planning for achieving the vision 6 ambivalent, positive and negative highlight not only the benefits of success but (less often) the costs of failure the qualities of the l2 self, and the strategic directions suggested by rnyei (2009) are consistent with emotion theory laid out above. the activation of possible selves arouses both anticipatory and anticipated emotion. phrases such as “imagine how proud you will be when you graduate” or “imagine the feeling of representing your company/country/group at an international convention” arouse specific anticipated feelings in the future, as well as an emotionally energizing present context. inherent in these types of interventions is the ambivalence of possible selves – there is something important at stake. imagining pride at graduation implies the possibility that one might not make it that far; imagining a successful international convention implies, in the background at least, potential failure on the same stage. one must be careful to harness the broadening power of positive emotion without tipping the scales too far toward the implied negative dimension. effectively guiding imagery might take advantage of the “positivity peter macintyre, tammy gregersen 204 ratio.” fredrickson and losada’s (2005) research suggests that, in general, well functioning persons have a ratio of between 3 and 11 positive emotions to each negative one. this seems as good a guide as any for balancing the positivebroadening and negative-narrowing emotions, and shows the importance of concentrating on the positive side of the ledger. differences among individual learners, whose temperament may lead them to dispositional optimism or pessimism, must be taken into account. for example, we suggest that the optimist might need to be reminded more often than the pessimist of the need for a narrow focus on tasks, from time to time. working out the balance of positive and negative, anticipatory and anticipated emotion, can be facilitated by considering the discrepancy between the present and future self and asking whether the learner is concerned about adding a new self-dimension or maintaining an existing one? macintyre et al. (2009) propose two questions: (a) does the creator of the possible self actually see this self as potentially viable in the future?; and (b) does that self describe them presently? there are four possible combinations in answer to these questions; two could potentially enhance positive-broadening emotion and two are far less likely to support motivated behavior. if an element of the present self is perceived as being relevant in the future, there will be ongoing maintenance and development because the future self is close to the present self; imagery can be concrete and goals close in time. however, if key selfrelated factors are not currently part of the self concept, but could conceivably be added, the self-development is likely best described in more vague terms and along a longer time line. the other two options incorporate the thinking that a present self is not expected to continue and will not therefore stimulate positive-broadening behavior. the answers to these questions are important because for possible selves to be productive, the imaginer must have a plan of action to achieve the goals and not just be a “feel good” strategy. “thus, it is important to find out how likely participants consider a possible self to be; a highly unlikely possible self probably will have little relation to motivation” (macintyre et al., 2009, p. 197). these strategic implications bring us back to our original premise, that learners who successfully invoke their imaginations to notice the discrepancy between their present and future selves, and between their feared and ideal selves, will experience an emotional reaction that can then be modified through cognition to act as a positive-broadening motivator. one well studied example of modifying emotion through cognition is systematic desensitization, a technique that lessens the intensity of negative emotions, including anxiety, and returns learners’ sense of empowerment. teachers can facilitate the language learning process by encouraging their learners to chan emotions that facilitate language learning: the positive-broadening power of the imagination 205 nel negative-narrowing emotion into positive-broadening emotion by teaching relaxation techniques and then consequently guiding learners through a structured series of increasingly anxiety-provoking activities. systemic desensitization: using the imagination to modify emotional schema through cognition pavlov’s experiments with his infamous salivating dogs introduced the world to the notions of classical conditioning and conditioned and unconditioned responses. what pavlov discovered was that when he gave the dog food (unconditioned stimulus), this led to an unconditioned response (salivation), and when he consistently paired a conditioned response (a bell) with an unconditioned stimulus (food), he received what now had become for the dog a conditioned response (salivation). the systematic desensitization guidelines are the reverse of classical conditioning – they use counter-conditioning. in essence, we aspire to reduce the intensity of conditioned negative-narrowing emotional responses that individuals associate with language learning by replacing it with a relaxation response when confronted with the negatively conditioned stimulus. in the guidelines below, we concentrate on transforming the specific negative-narrowing emotion of language anxiety. proponents of systematic desensitization advocate that contact with the trigger(s) producing the anxiety is the critical component of treatment, and that systematic desensitization is merely the medium through which affected individuals gain exposure. desensitization for language learning anxiety may work for some learners because, put simply, a learner’s language anxiety response to the imagined or anticipated situation closely resembles his/her anxiety response to the real situation. thus, when language learners feel completely comfortable and relaxed when imagining the foreign language classroom or interacting in the target language, their real encounters have a chance to be progressively less anxiety-provoking. systemic desensitization activities are grouped into three consecutive steps: (a) construction of a hierarchy chart; (b) relaxation training; and (c) desensitization sessions. in the first step, the construction of the anxiety hierarchy, learners create their own individualized list of situations relating to language learning to which they react with varying degrees of anxiety. these may range from giving a public presentation in the target language to being called upon by the teacher to respond orally to a question in class. the most powerful triggers should be located at the bottom of the list with the least disturbing ones at the top. as learners work through the list in the next two steps, they will begin with the least anxiety provoking triggers and work progressively through the hierarchy peter macintyre, tammy gregersen 206 until they attain the last item – the trigger they define as most powerfully anxiety-provoking. a sample hierarchy is included in table 2. table 2 sample hierarchy for desensitization training feeling comfortable 1 using my first language to clarify a l2 grammar point 2 doing fill-in-the-blank grammar exercises in the target language with an open book 3 conversing in the target language with a close friend who is at my proficiency level 4 writing a journal entry in the target language 5 being called upon in language class when i am unprepared 6 making a mistake in front of the whole class 7 being harshly corrected in front of the class by the teacher 8 failing to speak the target language correctly in class and suffering the laughter of my peers 9 conversing with a native speaker 10 role playing in front of the class in a small group 11 taking an oral exam in the teacher’s office 12 making a public presentation in front of the class with little opportunity for preparation feeling most anxious the next step in systemic desensitization is relaxation training. wellmanaged stress opens the door to positive-broadening emotion. people enjoy mastering a challenge, overcoming an obstacle. but first, the negative-narrowing emotion must recede into the background. a state of relative relaxation targets many dimensions of human functioning: (a) physiologically speaking, practicing relaxation slows the heart rate, lowers blood pressure, slows breathing, increases blood flow to muscles, and reduces muscle tension; (b) as concerns the cognitive system, carrying out relaxation exercises tends to improve concentration by allowing a person to shift focus away from the experiential system toward the rational system; (c) in the affective domain, relaxation techniques reduce frustration and boost confidence (http://www.mayoclinic.com); and (d) in terms of the social dimension, relaxed communicators usually maintain a slower pace of conversation, providing a socially accepted longer length of time to process language, and most likely produce more clearly articulated speech. three specific relaxation techniques to guide language learners to reduce their anxiety and tension are as follows. autogenic. the first technique is called “autogenic” because it means that something comes from within oneself. in this technique, learners use both visual imagery and body awareness to reduce stress by repeating words or suggestions in their minds to relax and reduce muscle tension. for example, teachers may ask learners to imagine a peaceful setting and then emotions that facilitate language learning: the positive-broadening power of the imagination 207 focus on controlled, relaxed breathing, slowing their heart rates or feeling different physical sensations, such as relaxing each arm or leg one by one. progressive muscle relaxation. this technique encourages learners to focus slowly on tensing and then relaxing each muscle group. this will help them focus on the difference between muscle tension and relaxation and become more aware of physical sensations. visualization. this approach asks learners to form mental images to take a visual journey to a peaceful, calming place or situation. teachers guide learners in their visualization to invoke vividly as many senses as possible, including smell, sight, sound, and touch. this process may begin by teacher modeling of the visualization process. for example, teachers encourage learners to imagine relaxing at the ocean and thinking about the smell of the salt water, the sound of crashing waves and the warmth of the sun on their neck and shoulders. if students prefer, they may close their eyes and make themselves comfortable somewhere in the room. we suggest that teachers ask their learners to practice each of these relaxation techniques and choose which one is the most successful. when learners are able to relax completely in three or four minutes by quickly running through one of the procedures, then they are ready to begin the third step, the desensitization sessions. the third step in the overall process, the desensitization sessions, culminates when an item from the personally constructed anxiety hierarchy chart from the first activity is imagined vividly and realistically in detail while feeling completely relaxed. for desensitization to be complete, the image needs to be repeatedly imagined until language learners are able to imagine it without feeling anxiety or worry. when a learner is able to imagine a given item and feel completely relaxed, he/she can then move to the next item and repeat the process. beyond relaxation: harnessing the power of positive emotion considering the attention paid to the effects of negative emotion in general, and how emotions interfere with learning in particular, perhaps it is not surprising that the power of positive emotion has not been fully explored. the important point to make here is that positive emotion functions differently from negative emotion, and therefore the absence of a negative emotion is not the sought-after goal, we should strive to create positive mood and emotion and to prolong it whenever possible. fredrickson (2001) lists five specific examples of positive emotions and the tendencies they predict: 1. joy creates the urge to play, expand boundaries, and creativity. peter macintyre, tammy gregersen 208 2. interest generates an urge to explore, absorb new information, and develop the self. 3. contentment allows one to savor positive events, relive them, and integrate them into our worldview. 4. pride is associated with an urge to share accomplishments with people who are important to us, and to imagine future achievements. 5. love is an aggregation of positive emotions (e.g., joy, interest, contentment) that leads us to deeply meaningful relationships with others, and relationships with loved ones predict all of the specific tendencies for joy, interest, contentment and pride. these tendencies are not merely the absence of negative emotions; they have a place of their own in the language classroom. the experiences associated with positive emotions have an additional benefit, according to fredrickson (2003), they build resources that aid in dealing with future negative events. it is important to note that positive psychology is very clear that positive emotion is not a trivial matter; it is not simply feeling happy. indeed, happiness, as understood in common usage, is perhaps a silly thing. the thesaurus lists synonyms for happiness that include: jovial, cheery, ecstatic, blissful, and cheerful. yet feeling a “giddy,” bubbly hedonism is synonymous with many volatile and frivolous experiences. this is not happiness as discussed by positive psychologists such as christopher peterson (2006) who prefer to focus on eudaimonia, being true to oneself and living according to virtues, and the pursuit of genuine engagement. a mature form of happiness can be found in a state of flow, as discussed by mihaly csikszentmihalyi (1990). a mathematician solving equations, a composer working hard on the notes in a melody, a scholar pouring over reams of data, an exhausted marathon runner approaching the finish line are all experiencing a form of happiness, even though they might not seem particularly cheery at the moment. dual purpose broaden and build theory ideas: the individual and community our teaching guidelines so far have been characterized by the use of the imagination to provoke an affective reaction in language learners. our last group of guidelines is inspired by the positive tenets of the broaden and build theory and draw upon the synergy of an individual’s resiliency and its positive transformational effect upon the classroom community. one of fredrickson’s (2004, p. 1367) primary proposals to broaden learners’ mindsets is for teachers to encourage play and exploration which in turn promotes learners’ “discovery of novel and creative actions, ideas and social emotions that facilitate language learning: the positive-broadening power of the imagination 209 bonds.” positive emotions lead to action tendencies that differ from negative emotions. joy ignites the urge play, interest kindles the urge to explore, contentment awakens the urge to savor and integrate, and love inflames a continuing series of these human yearnings within protected intimate relationships. if teachers can inspire these positive-broadening emotions, the ensuing actions seem likely to boost language learning; what could be healthier for language growth than learners who want to play, explore, integrate and establish relationships (see crooks & schmidt, 1991; d rnyei, 2008; gardner, 2010)? an additional benefit of positive emotions is the development of resiliency, or the ability to recover from stressful situations (fredrickson, 2004). researchers have found that resilient people use strengths such as humor, creative exploration, relaxation, and optimistic thinking as coping mechanisms that both reduce levels of stress and promote faster recovery from difficulties. the resulting task for teachers, then, would be to create a classroom environment where these strengths are not only modeled by the teacher, but also developed by learners through encouragement and the careful selection of language activities that also stimulate the development of resiliency in l2 contexts. it is important to emphasize that these personal characteristics can be taught and tailored to behavior in second language contexts. fredrickson’s (2004) students experienced positive emotional results which built upon their personal resources when she asked them to find the positive meaning and long-term benefits within their best, worst and seemingly ordinary experiences each day. fredrickson and losada (2005) also taught positive emotion coping strategies by asking students to reflect upon novel ways to deal with a problem and to step back from the negative stimulus by incorporating greater objectivity. teacher immediacy is another means of stimulating positivebroadening emotions in the classroom as it reduces the physical or psychological distance between teacher and learners and fosters affiliation. linked to the approach/avoidance construct that assumes people generally approach things they like and avoid things they dislike or that induce fear, immediacy includes nonlinguistic approach behaviors (e.g., reducing physical distance, displaying relaxed postures and movements, using gestures, smiling, using vocal variety, and engaging in eye contact during interactions) as well as language that signals availability for communication (e.g., using personal examples, asking questions, using humor, addressing others by name, praising others, initiating discussion and using inclusive pronouns) (gorham, 1988). classroom activities and interaction can be utilized to both teach language and reinforce students’ individual, burgeoning affective strengths in l2 contexts. the dynamism of resiliency is evident in the fact that while resiliency resides in individuals, there is also a positive kick-back to the group. “resilient peter macintyre, tammy gregersen 210 individuals not only cultivate positive emotions in themselves to cope, but they are also skilled at eliciting positive emotions in others, which creates a supportive social context that also facilitates coping” (fredrickson, 2004, p. 1372). while immediate teachers develop interpersonal closeness with their students, they also have a role in team-building and socially constructing positive group emotion. by modeling in their own discourse and attitudes and in encouraging learners to use the same, teachers can create flourishing groups by using language that is overtly supportive, encouraging and appreciative, and avoids negativity, disapproval, sarcasm and cynicism. by asking questions using “inquiry” language that is aimed at exploring or examining a position, teachers and learners together can generate the dynamics necessary for highperformance teamwork. by modeling language and attitudes of “advocacy”, teacher and learners together try to offer arguments in favor of another’s viewpoint to limit self-absorption which ultimately narrows the functionality and flourishing of the group. conclusion the elusiveness of defining such a complex concept as emotion is exhibited in the multi-faceted manner necessary to characterize it: short-lived, feelingarousal, purposive expressive, adaptive mechanisms. how many are there? how are they represented in the lexicon? how do they interact with cognition? what is their relationship to mood and temperament? how do positive and negative emotion and ambivalence incite specific actions? what are the implications of anticipatory versus anticipated emotions? the purpose of this paper was to start a conversation concerning these questions so that as language learners, teachers and researchers, we can begin to think about how emotions work and how they can be harnessed in service to cognitive and other human goals. by seeking clarity and concreteness concerning the abstract principles surrounding emotion, we strive to understand it better in the hopes that we become happier, healthier and more productive, on both sides of the language classroom door. it is our contention that our lack of understanding of how emotion works holds us back, and although we may have a better handle on cognition, we may often be ambivalent or refuse to use this knowledge. this discussion on emotion has direct pedagogical implications for the language classroom. in creating the learning conditions for their students, teachers will often use activities that they expect students to enjoy, find interesting, and love doing. such teachers are working to create positivebroadening emotional conditions among their students. teachers also will create situations that produce negative-narrowing emotions as well (e.g., ex emotions that facilitate language learning: the 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(1966). anxiety and behavior. new york: academic press. 337 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (2). 2020. 337-358 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.2.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt a comparison of the impact of extensive and intensive reading approaches on the reading attitudes of secondary efl learners a young park changwon jungang girls’ high school, south korea https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7006-4809 sonnik@hanmail.net abstract extensive reading (er) which encourages second or foreign (l2) learners to engage in a great deal of reading, has long been recognized as an efficient approach in l2 reading pedagogy. while many attempts have been made to understand the effect of er on the cognitive domains of l2 learners, there has been insufficient investigation into how er influences their affective domains. particularly, reading attitudes, one of the key elements of affective factors involved in l2 reading, have received little attention. this classroom-based intervention study investigated the impact of er on english as a foreign language (efl) learners’ attitudes toward english reading compared to the influence of the traditional intensive reading (ir) approach. in addition, this study explored whether the impact of the er approach on efl learners’ reading attitudes is different depending on l2 proficiency. the study included two intact classes of efl secondary learners (n = 72) who received either er or ir instructional treatments for a 12-week period. for the results, ancova showed that the er approach fostered positive reading attitudes significantly more than the ir approach. in addition, the analysis indicated that the participants’ proficiency levels did not have a significant effect upon changes in their reading attitudes. that is, regardless of proficiency level, the er approach demonstrated a significantly positive effect on participants’ reading attitudes in comparison with the ir approach. keywords: extensive reading; intensive reading; reading attitudes; efl learners; proficiency levels a young park 338 1. introduction affective factors have been identified as key components in predicting the success or failure of l2 reading (lu & liu, 2015; macalister, 2014; yamashita & kan, 2011). however, in spite of the critical role played by affective factors in second or foreign language (l2) reading, there has been limited investigation into the affective dimensions in l2 reading (lee, schallert, & kim, 2015). this research trend, reflecting a lack of research into affective dimensions, is also evident in extensive reading (er) studies. the er approach encourages l2 learners to read long and easy material in quantity based on each individual learner’s interests. er has been viewed with increasing interest in the field of l2 reading pedagogy as effective reading instruction. while there is a great deal of research exploring the effect of the er approach on the l2 learners’ cognitive dimensions such as listening (renandya & farrell, 2011; ware, yonezawa, kurihara, & durand, 2012), writing (sun, yang, & he, 2016) and reading skills (cha, 2009; huffman, 2014; park, 2017; stephens, 2016; shih, chern, & reynolds, 2018), as well as vocabulary knowledge (park, isaacs, & woodfield, 2018; rashidi & piran, 2011; webb & chang, 2015), the affective dimensions remain comparatively under-researched. in particular, reading attitude, one of the primary affective dimensions involved in l2 reading (mckenna, cramer, & castle, 1994), has received inadequate attention. since the primary goal of the er approach is to promote l2 learners’ enjoyment of reading through nurturing a positive reading attitude, it is necessary to investigate how l2 learners’ reading attitudes change after an er session. additionally, little attention has been paid to whether the er approach affects l2 learners’ proficiency levels. in terms of the cognitive domains of l2 learners, such as vocabulary, reading fluency, and grammar knowledge development, a number of empirical studies suggest that learners at different proficiency levels benefit differently from the er approach (e.g., lee, schallert, & kim, 2015; park, isaacs, & woodfield, 2018; yamasitha, 2013). these findings yielded supportive evidence for linguistic threshold theory (cummins, 1976), which contends that l2 learners should acquire a threshold level of l2 proficiency to obtain functional target language ability. in other words, low levels of lexical and syntactic knowledge may prevent readers from experiencing fluent and pleasurable reading, and can impede low proficiency level learners who are using the er approach from learning linguistic skills (lee, schallert, & kim, 2015; morvay, 2012). therefore, further investigation is needed in order to determine whether linguistic threshold theory can also be applied to the affective domain (e.g., reading attitudes). to bridge the gap in the aforementioned existing literature, this study examined the effect of the er approach, in comparison with the traditional intensive reading (ir) approach, on korean secondary learnes’ attitudes toward reading. the a comparison of the impact of extensive and intensive reading approaches on the reading. . . 339 ir approach, which has been widely accepted in english as a foreign language (efl) classroom contexts, requires learners to construct the precise meaning of reading material through close analysis of the language and translation guided by the instructor. moreover, the current study attempted to expand previous er research to reading attitudes by exploring learners at different english proficiency levels (advanced, intermediate, low) to investigate which learners stand to benefit the most from each instructional approach. 2. background 2.1. l2 reading and reading attitudes a considerable amount of recent literature suggests that affective factors perform a significant role in evaluating the success or failure of l2 reading (lu & liu, 2015; macalister, 2014; yamashita & kan, 2011). however, when compared to the number of studies of l2 reading focused on cognitive factors, relatively few studies have been devoted to affective factors (de burgh-hirabe & feryok, 2013; mckenna, cramer, & castle, 1994; yamashita, 2013). this is somewhat surprising considering that many l2 reading researchers, including mckenna et al. (1994, p. 3), argue that “affective aspects of reading are equal in importance to cognitive aspects.” reading attitude has generally been considered to be one of the important affective factors of l2 reading (mckenna, cramer, & castle, 1994; sainsbury & clarkson, 2008; van schooten & de glopper, 2002; yamashita, 2013). in fact, smith (1990, p. 215) describes reading attitude as “a state of mind, accompanied by feelings and emotions that make reading more or less probable.” in other words, attitude is one of the important affective factors influencing the decision to read (krashen, 1994). therefore, l2 readers who have a positive reading attitude are more likely to continue self-directed reading, which enhances their l2 acquisition (al-homoud & schmitt, 2009; takase, 2009). considering that the main purpose of er is to encourage l2 learners to read for pleasure and foster a positive attitude towards reading, this study examined the impact of the er approach toward reading attitudes of l2 secondary learners (day & prentice, 2016; lee, schallert, & kim, 2015). despite the importance of reading attitude in developing reading fluency (shin & ahn, 2006; yamashita, 2008, 2013), few studies have attempted to integrate reading attitude into a reading model (e.g., mckenna et al., 1994; mckenna, stratton, grindler, & jenkins, 1995; yamashita, 2013). one study that did just that is van schooten and de glopper (2002), which proposed the reading attitudes model. the model has been widely accepted in research aimed at investigating l2 learners’ attitudes toward reading in relation to diverse variables a young park 340 (mizokawa & hansen-krening, 2000; yamashita, 2008, 2013). van schooten and de glopper’s (2002) reading attitudes model was suitable for understanding learners’ attitudes toward reading in the current study, because it helped to elucidate the complex hypothetical construct of reading attitudes from diverse perspectives, incorporating cognitive, affective, and conative angles (yamashita, 2008, 2013). the next section will explore van schooten and de glopper’s (2002) reading attitudes model in detail in order to further illuminate what comprises reading attitude and how reading attitude has been defined in the current study. 2.2. van schooten and de glopper’s (2002) reading attitude model van schooten and de glopper’s (2002) model was adopted to define how reading attitude would be conceptualized in the current study. the model was selected because it effectively illustrates l2 learners’ reading attitudes utilizing the three-dimensional reading attitude framework. in addition, van schooten and de glopper’s (2002) model explains effectively how these dimensions form a series of causal links. the first component in their model is cognitive attitude (belief in and evaluation of an outcome), which influences affective attitude (liking and enjoyment), which, in turn, influences conative attitude (reading), with the latter predicting actual reading behavior. the model suggests that the influence of affect (i.e., affective attitude) on behavioral intention (i.e., conative attitude) is direct and very strong (van schooten & de glopper, 2002). while affective attitude influences conative attitude significantly, the influence of cognitive attitude on conative attitude is indirect and weak. therefore, cognitive attitude has a non-significant influence on conative attitude. van schooten and de glopper (2002) conclude that in terms of promoting reading among l2 learners, the most important aspect of reading attitude is the affective aspect, since it directly influences learners’ intention to read (i.e., conative attitude), and ultimately initiates the act of reading itself. in other words, one of the most effective ways to encourage reading is to empower l2 learners to enjoy reading by way of promoting their affective attitude in a positive way. the importance of cultivating such attitudes toward reading is also emphasized within the pedagogical perspective, as shown in nuttall’s (1996, p. 127) virtuous circle. according to nuttall (1996), the virtuous circle operates as follows: if learners “enjoy reading,” it leads them to “read faster” and then to “understand better,” which in turn leads them to “read more.” coady (1997, p. 233) suggests that fostering “enjoyment and increasing the quantity of reading,” that is, using the er approach, draws learners into this virtuous circle. this is why, many researchers recommend er for fostering positive affective attitude, and, in turn, for l2 development (day & prentice, 2016; ehri, 2005; nation, 2015; wolf & katzir-cohen, 2001). accordingly, it is meaningful to explore a comparison of the impact of extensive and intensive reading approaches on the reading. . . 341 the positive impact of the er approach on learners’ affective attitude compared to that of the ir approach. 2.3. er studies on reading attitude previous er studies have largely focused on the effect of the er approach on learners’ cognitive domain, which includes reading, vocabulary, and writing (yamashita, 2004, 2015). by primarily focusing on the cognitive domain, existing er literature has paid little attention to affective issues. however, research into the affective domain is important because it is one of the critical factors in motivating learners to engage in the actual act of reading (day & prentice, 2016; mckenna et al., 1994; takase, 2009). for example, elley (2000) argues that learners’ attitudes toward reading closely relate to their reading habits, which, in turn, influence their l2 development. since it has only been in recent years that er researchers have attempted to explore the affective domain in regard to areas such as reading attitude (e.g., powell, 2005; shin & ahn, 2006; takase, 2009; yamashita, 2007, 2013; yamashita & kan, 2011), more empirical studies are required in order to develop greater understanding of the impact of the er approach from diverse perspectives. in addition to learners’ attitudes toward reading, learners’ motivation is another well-known affective domain that plays an important role in successful l2 reading development (shih & reynolds, 2015; shih et al., 2018). day and bamford (1998, p. 27) refer to motivation as the l2 learners’ emotional drive, or lack thereof, that “makes people do (or not do) something.” however, motivation toward l2 reading is not discussed, being beyond the research scope of the current study. in terms of the effect of er on l2 reading attitude, few er studies have specified in detail how participants’ reading attitudes were measured or why a particular measurement tool was chosen. as yamashita (2004) points out, most of the er studies on reading attitude used instruments with diverse methodological errors (shin & ahn, 2006; ware et al., 2012). for example, takase (2007) interviewed participants to measure how their reading attitude changed after an er intervention. however, the questions used in the interviews were not clearly reported in the study and there was no explanation of how the questions were designed and selected for the interview. moreover, even where er studies made use of a methodologically sound reading attitude measurement tool, participants’ reading attitudes were measured only after the intervention, without carrying out an initial measurement (takase, 2009). for example, al-homoud and schmitt (2009) used an in-house developed questionnaire to tap the reading attitudes of 70 efl saudi arabian university students. their study explained in detail how they designed and developed the questionnaire based on the diverse a young park 342 aspects of reading attitude. nevertheless, the questionnaire was administered only after the intervention. in fact, it would seem that the questionnaires served more as a course evaluation than reading attitude measurement. without conducting a survey of reading attitude before the intervention, convincing evidence that there was a statistically significant change in reading attitudes after the er intervention could not be provided. a recent study by lee et al. (2015) systematically measured the effect of the er approach on learners’ attitudes before and after er intervention compared to the previous er studies. however, the main focus was on learners’ attitudes toward various er approaches rather than their reading attitudes. in summary, a review of the existing er literature found that relatively few studies have examined the effect of the er approach on the affective dimensions of l2 learners compared to the cognitive dimensions. to bridge the gap in the existing er literature, the current study explored the impact of the er approach on the affective domain of efl learners; more specifically, it measured participants’ attitudes toward english reading and how those attitudes changed after an er intervention. the present study contributes to the existing er literature on reading attitudes through addressing the following research questions (rqs): rq1: to what extent do er and ir approaches affect korean secondary efl learners’ attitudes toward reading after a 12-week instructional period? rq2: does english proficiency or a particular reading instructional approach affect korean secondary efl learners’ attitudes toward reading after a 12-week instructional period? 3. method 3.1. participants two intact classes (n = 73) of a suburban secondary school in korea were included in this quasi-experimental study. the participants were korean high school students, whose ages ranged from 15 to 16 years old (mage = 15.3 years). a class of 36 secondary students received er treatments and another class of 37 received conventional ir treatments. both er and ir treatments were performed once a week for two hours over one 12-week academic term. since the current study was carried out in a regular academic context, it was inevitable that all students received some kind of instruction. consequently, instead of having a control group receiving no instruction, each group performed as a control group for the other. although all of the participants had studied english as a compulsory subject for more than 6 years, their english proficiency levels varied a comparison of the impact of extensive and intensive reading approaches on the reading. . . 343 due to different degrees of exposure to external learning experiences including private english instruction or tutoring. the participants in both er and ir groups were classified into three groups based on their proficiency levels in english: low, intermediate, and advanced. proficiency levels were determined on the basis of the participants’ overall scores on a practice college scholastic ability test (csat) which is designed to measure general english proficiency. 3.2. treatment the er group took reading instruction based on a class library of graded readers that contain controlled vocabulary items and sentence structure to afford gradual difficulty and complexity for readers with different proficiency levels (crossley & mcnamara, 2008; hill, 1997, 2001). four sets of fifty graded readers (i.e., a total of 200 graded readers) from the “oxford bookworm” series were introduced to the er group. this graded readers series consisted of fiction literary classics and non-fiction works. participants received reading lessons once a week for two hours for an academic term (i.e., 12 weeks). they were guided to read one graded reader per week, both in and outside of class. this amount of reading is regarded crucial for an effective er approach in a number of studies (day & prentice, 2016; nation, 2013; waring & takaki, 2003). as nation and ming-tzu (1999, p. 355) assert, “learners need to read about one graded reader per week in order to meet repetitions of the new words soon enough to reinforce the previous meeting.” in terms of book selection, the participants were guided to choose books based on their interests and proficiency level. according to the books they had selected in the graded readers collection, each participant made a wish list of books that they felt like reading in the er course for the 12 weeks. participants were instructed to read extensively but not to concentrate on new vocabulary or grammatical structures (day & bamford, 2002). in every er lesson, they were encouraged to finish the remainder of their reading as an assignment. additionally, participants were requested to write a reading log to check whether they had completed the assigned reading. this reading log was an important tool for monitoring the er participants’ reading, since how much written input participants are exposed to is one of the key elements of success in the er approach (day & bamford, 1998). while the purpose of an er lesson is to provide learners with reading material that they can comfortably comprehend for rapid and enjoyable reading, the main goal of an ir lesson is to “recycle and reinforce language items through intensive micro-linguistic analysis of the texts” (bell, 2001, p. 3). taken in sequence, the ir lessons heavily focused on analyzing and interpreting reading material once a week over a 12-week academic term. in each two-hour ir lesson, the participants were instructed to read four reading materials (700-800 words each) a young park 344 and complete the accompanying exercises. at the end of each lesson, four new reading texts were given to the participants as a reading assignment. unlike the graded readers used for the er group, the reading texts chosen for the ir group were texts above the participants’ proficiency levels (day & bamford, 1998; prowse, 2002; renandya, 2007; schörkhuber, 2009). accordingly, the texts used for the ir group contained many unfamiliar words and grammar items that the participants were required to learn in order to understand the texts. as a result, the teacher’s assistance was required for the ir group to comprehend the specific meaning of the reading texts (carrell & carson, 1997; rashidi & piran, 2011; renandya, 2007). according to each group’s reading logs, the average amount of reading outside of class was calculated. every week, the er group spent 164 minutes on average for reading outside of class. this period amounts to 240 minutes of class reading (20 minutes*12 weeks) plus an average of 1968 minutes of reading outside of class (164 minutes * 12 weeks). meanwhile, the ir group spent an average of 192 minutes (16 minutes*12 weeks) of reading outside of class plus an average of 240 minutes of class reading (20 minutes*12 weeks) during the 12 weeks of intervention. 3.3. data collection instruments to measure the participants’ attitudes toward english reading, the present study used a modified version of yamashita’s (2004) questionnaire. yamashita (2004) developed a questionnaire successfully applying van schooten and de glopper’s (2002) three-dimensional framework to analyze the reading attitudes of l2 learners in a manner similar to that used in the current study. furthermore, each of the question items possessed its own distinct variance, not overlapping with items representing the other two components in the questionnaire. therefore, the current study adopted yamashita’s (2004) instrument, which is firmly grounded in van schooten and de glopper’s (2002) three-dimensional framework of reading attitude. the questionnaire contained 5-point likert-scale items, ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5), enquiring about the students’ affective (section i), cognitive (section ii) and conative (section iii) reactions towards reading in english (see appendix). each participant’s scores for all the items which corresponded to the three categories were summed up. yamashita’s (2004) adopted questionnaire was examined by three experts in teaching english to speakers of other languages (tesol) for the current study. each expert was asked to assess and provide feedback on the preliminary list of the reading attitude questionnaire items. the tesol experts suggested that since yamashita’s (2004) reading attitude questionnaire focused on university students, a revision of each question was needed to make it appropriate for the high school reading context. accordingly, the questionnaire was modified to a comparison of the impact of extensive and intensive reading approaches on the reading. . . 345 make it suitable for the target population in the current study. for example, a section asking for participants’ background information, such as formal and informal english education study time per week and a mock college scholastic ability test (casat) score, was added. the questionnaire items’ internal consistency of in each domain was estimated by calculating cronbach’s alpha and the values were as follows: cognitive domain (.886), affective domain (.788) and conative domain (.889). a korean version of the reading attitudes questionnaire was administered for the main study, since the purpose of the questionnaire was to explore participants’ english reading attitudes and not to measure their l2 reading comprehension ability. in other words, to prevent comprehension problems from affecting the reliability of the collected data, the participants’ mother tongue was used. the present study also made use of a placement test to identify participants’ proficiency level. the test used was the mock csat for english, which is one of the most widely used placement tests among secondary schools in korea due to its practicality and accessibility (shin & ahn, 2006). csat for english is a high-stakes university entrance test approved by the korean administration of education, which is designed to test listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills of english. all the participants in the current study had already been placed according to test results by the participating school before the intervention. 3.4. data analysis to answer rq1, an independent samples t test was carried out to examine whether there was a significant difference between the pre-intervention questionnaire responses for the participants in the er and ir groups. the independent variable was the type of the treatment (the er or ir approach), and the dependent variable were the responses to the questionnaire at time 2 (post-intervention). furthermore, a one-way ancova adjustment was separately applied for each of the three aspects of reading attitude (cognitive, affective and conative) to examine whether there were any differences in this respect. ancova was applied to control for initial differences between the two groups, to attain more statistically accurate comparisons and to reduce the sampling error. the current study adopted convenience sampling using two intact efl classes rather than random sampling. although the english proficiency level of experimental group 2 (the ir group) was equivalent to that of experimental group 1 (the er group), the two groups were not necessarily equivalent in terms of reading attitudes. ancova is an effective tool for examining the significance of a treatment impact (i.e., the er and ir approaches) on the dependent variable (i.e., the post-intervention reading attitudes results), while accounting for another variable (i.e., the initial difference in the a young park 346 two groups’ pre-intervention reading attitudes results) that may also impact the dependent variable, but not part of the treatment (pallant, 2010). for rq2, a two-way ancova was carried out to scale the effect of the er and the ir approaches on reading attitude based on the proficiency levels of participants. the participants were placed in one of three english proficiency groups based on the placement test results: group 1 = advanced; group 2 = intermediate; group 3 = low. the independent variables were the type of treatment (the er or the ir approach) and proficiency level (advanced, intermediate, or low). the dependent variable were the reading attitude questionnaire mean scores of each group taken at time 2 (post-intervention). the mean scores from the reading attitude questionnaire carried out at time 1 (pre-intervention) were employed as the covariate to adjust initial group differences. the probability value was set at p < .05 for all statistical tests. 4. results for rq1, as displayed in table 1, the er group scored significantly higher (m = 71.14, sd = 7.4) than the ir group (m = 62.11, sd = 11.87) in the pre-intervention questionnaire (t(58.64) = 3.87, p < .001, two-tailed). this significant difference might have arisen as a result of this study’s use of two intact classes rather than random sampling (pallant, 2010). the independent t-test results showed a significant initial difference between the mean scores of the er and ir group at time 1 (pre-intervention). to control for this initial difference and reduce sampling error, a one-way ancova was used (field, 2009). in this analysis, the independent variable was the style of approach (the er or ir approach), and the dependent variable was the reading attitude questionnaire responses at time 2, after 12 weeks of treatment. the responses to the reading questionnaire at time 1 (pre-intervention) were employed as a covariate. covariates value of reading attitude mean score at time 1 (pre-intervention) in each group was estimated at 66.63. the maximum possible score was 120 and the minimum possible score was 24. table 1 comparison of reading attitude mean score (standard deviations) by t test and adjusted mean score (standard deviations) by one-way ancova at time 1 (pre-intervention) and time 2 (post-intervention), partialling out time 1 score time 1 time 2 estimated time 2a er (n = 36) 71.14 (7.40) 80.19 (14.12) 76.42* ir (n = 36) 62.11 (11.87) 62.36 (10.69) 66.14* notes. er = extensive reading, ir = intensive reading * a significant difference between the groups after a one way ancova adjustment a covariates value of the questionnaire response of mean score at time 1 (pre-intervention) in both groups is evaluated at 66.63 *p < .05 a comparison of the impact of extensive and intensive reading approaches on the reading. . . 347 after applying ancova analysis to the questionnaire responses at time 1 (pre-intervention), the adjusted mean score (estimated time 2) for the questionnaire responses was significantly higher in the er group by 10.28 than in the ir group at time 2 (post-intervention) as presented in figure 1. figure 1 estimated means of reading attitude at time 2 (post-intervention) in addition, further analysis was conducted to explore where these significant main effects held among the three main aspects of reading attitude, that is cognitive, affective, and conative (van schooten & de glopper, 2002). for this purpose, a one-way ancova was carried out separately for each aspect. covariates value of reading attitude mean scores at time 1 (pre-intervention) in both groups was evaluated at 28.14 for cognitive attitude, 22.79 for conative attitude and 15.69 for affective attitude (see figure 2). an asterisk designates a significant difference between the two groups after a one-way ancova adjustment. the maximum possible score was 40 and the minimum possible score was 8. figure 2 estimated means of reading attitude in terms of cognitive, affective and conative attitude at time 2 (post-intervention) a young park 348 as presented in figure 2, the result of the er group was significantly different from that of the ir group at time 2 (post-intervention) in terms of affective and conative attitude, while non-significantly different in terms of cognitive attitude. the results indicated a non-significant improvement in cognitive reading attitude and a significant improvement in affective and conative reading attitude for both the er and the ir group. in order to address rq2, the mean scores from the reading attitude questionnaire taken at time 1 (pre-intervention) were employed as the covariate to adjust the initial group differences. after adjusting the difference in reading attitude scores at time 1 (pre-intervention) using a two-way ancova, there was no significant interaction effect, f(2, 65) = 2.42, p = .09, with a minimal effect size (partial eta squared = .07). in addition, there was no significant main effect for proficiency level, f(2, 65) = 2.42, p = .1. however, there was a negligible effect size (partial eta squared = .007). the results suggest that the participants’ proficiency level did not have a significant influence on the change in reading attitude. in other words, the er approach promoted the participants’ positive reading attitude compared to the ir approach, regardless of their proficiency level. 5. discussion rq1 aimed to investigate the effects of the er and ir approaches on korean secondary efl learners’ reading attitude, specifically focusing on three aspects: (a) cognitive (personal, evaluative beliefs), (b) affective (feelings and emotions), and (c) conative (action readiness and behavioral intentions). these are the three main components of reading attitude (mckenna et al., 1994) measured by the current study. the results showed that the er approach significantly promoted positive attitudes toward reading compared to the ir approach. more specifically, among the three components of reading attitude, the affective and conative aspects increased significantly, while the cognitive aspect showed a relatively small increase. firstly, the impact on reading attitude is discussed from the perspective of cognitive reading attitude. the results showed that the er group’s cognitive attitude had improved after the intervention in comparison with that of the ir group. although this improvement was non-significant, the er approach had more of a positive impact than the ir approach. this enhancement might have resulted from “the intellectual satisfaction that students experienced from gaining new knowledge and information through reading” (yamashita, 2013, p. 257). meanwhile, the ir group showed almost no increase in positive cognitive attitude, despite also having had the chance to read diverse texts with new information. this might have been due to the fact that the participants in the ir group could not select their own reading materials. since the reading materials were less likely a comparison of the impact of extensive and intensive reading approaches on the reading. . . 349 to appeal directly to each participant’s personal interests or curiosity, it is reasonable to assume that the students in the ir group may have found the reading experience to be less intellectually satisfying than those in the er group. secondly, the findings revealed the er approach had a significantly positive effect on promoting affective attitude compared to the ir approach. this finding was different from the results for cognitive attitude, which was not significantly promoted by the er approach. more specifically, among the three components of reading attitude (cognitive, affective, and conative), affective reading attitude increased the most. this is not a surprising finding, since the main goal of er is to foster the conditions for enjoyable reading (day & bamford, 1998, 2002; day & prentice, 2016; jacobs & farrell, 2012; schörkhuber, 2009), which allows nurturing positive affective attitudes. this finding was meaningful, because according to van schooten and de glopper’s (2002) reading attitude model, affective attitude is the component of reading attitude that is most likely to initiate the act of reading itself. in other words, based on van schooten and de glopper’s (2002) reading attitude model, it can be said that an effective way to encourage efl learners to read is to foster their positive affective attitudes towards this skill. thus, cultivating the conditions for enjoyable reading helps to create positive affective attitude, as was successfully done by the er approach in the current study. furthermore, this improvement is noteworthy as it suggests that the participants from the er group will tend to continue reading by themselves, which could continue to improve their english knowledge and skills (van schooten & de glopper, 2002; yamashita, 2004). thirdly, comments are in order on the impact on reading attitude from the conative perspective. similar to the findings related to affective attitude, those related to conative attitude also showed the er approach had a more positive impact. in other words, the participants’ conative reading attitude improved significantly more in response to the er approach than to the ir approach. however, it is interesting to note that while the er approach did enhance participants’ cognitive reading attitude, the improvement was not as significant as it was the case with their affective and conative attitudes. this difference can be explained by van schooten and de glopper’s (2002) model, which suggests that the affective attitude is directly linked to conative attitude; that is, affective attitude strongly influences conative attitude. on the other hand, cognitive attitude and conative attitude are indirectly linked; that is, cognitive attitude weakly influences conative attitude. for example, if affective attitude improves, conative attitude also improves automatically due to the influence of the former (yamashita, 2013). at the same time, if cognitive attitude improves, it makes little difference for conative attitude as presented. therefore, van schooten and de glopper’s (2002) model offers an explanation for why both affective and conative a young park 350 reading attitude were significantly promoted, while cognitive reading attitude was non-significantly impacted. consequently, the results of the study provide support for the reading attitude model, which, it should be recalled, holds that in order to promote reading among efl learners, the most important is the affective aspect of reading attitude, since it directly influences the intention to read (i.e., conative attitude) and finally initiates the act of reading itself (day & prentice, 2016). when it comes to rq2, the results revealed that the er approach cultivated positive reading attitude of participants significantly more than the ir approach, irrespective of their proficiency levels. in other words, learners’ proficiency did not turn out to be a significant factor in promoting positive reading attitude irrespective of the instructional approach used. although there are few er studies related to l2 reading attitude development according to learners’ proficiency, these results are in line with those of yamashita (2004, 2007, 2013) or rashidi and piran (2011). however, they stand in contrast to lee et al.’s (2015) research which demonstrated a correlation between l2 learners’ proficiency levels and their attitudes toward reading. more specifically, in lee et al.’s (2015) study, the er approach led to a negative impact on reading attitude for learners with low proficiency level. lee et al. (2015) suggested that the story line of graded readers designed for learners with low proficiency tended be too easy for secondary learners and, consequently, participants in the low proficiency group developed negative attitudes toward reading. one of the possible reasons why the current study yielded different results is that it employed “language learner literature” (day & bamford, 1998, p. 74), which is deliberately written for language learners. such literature is a good example of how to satisfy learners’ interests while remaining within their reading level. unlike graded readers, which are simplified versions of original texts, language learner literature can do so without trivializing the content of an original story in order to control readability. in effect, in this study even the low proficiency level learners in the er group seemed to enjoy the readings. in regard to reading attitude improvement according to proficiency level, there are two interesting points to note in the findings. firstly, contrary to the significant impact of learners’ proficiency levels on their l2 development in terms of reading fluency, vocabulary, grammar development (included in the cognitive domain) in previous er studies, attainment did not turn out to be a significantly influential factor in the development of reading attitude (included in the affective domain) in this investigation. in other words, the er approach promoted the participants’ positive reading attitude when compared to the ir approach, irrespective of proficiency levels. secondly, because learners’ proficiency was not a significant factor in developing reading attitude, linguistic threshold theory does not support the effect of the er and ir approaches on the promotion of participants’ reading attitude. however, this suggests that even learners at a low proficiency level a comparison of the impact of extensive and intensive reading approaches on the reading. . . 351 are likely to develop a more positive reading attitude to reading through the er approach than through the ir approach. a possible reason for this might be found in powell’s (2005) suggestion that in the er approach learners can choose their own reading materials from a range of texts within their own proficiency level. for this reason, learners with low proficiency do not need to be “embarrassed by not getting abreast of learners with more advanced proficiency” and are thereby “less likely to get frustrated and demotivated” (powell, 2005, p. 29). this kind of positive experience provided by the er approach might consequentially promote a more positive reading attitudes in different learner groups. this result lends support to schörkhuber’s (2009) and renandya’s (2007) claim that even low proficiency learners are able to draw pleasure from the very experience of reading books in the target language. 6. conclusion the findings of the study showed that the er approach significantly promoted positive attitudes toward reading compared to the ir approach. among the three components of reading attitude (i.e., cognitive, affective, and conative), the affective and conative reading attitudes showed a significant improvement, with the affective attitude improving the most. this result is important because affective attitude is directly connected to conative attitude, which in turn leads to the act of reading, as shown in van schooten and de glopper’s (2002) reading attitude model. thus, the investigation showed that the er approach is an effective way of enhancing learners’ attitude toward reading and thereby promoting the act of reading itself. in addition, unlike er studies focusing on different aspects of the cognitive domain (i.e., reading fluency, vocabulary knowledge, grammar), the analysis revealed that proficiency level did not significantly influence learners’ reading attitudes toward english reading after the intervention. the present study provided evidence that the er approach successfully promotes efl learners’ enjoyment of reading in english, with affective reading attitude (i.e., feelings and emotions) showing the largest improvement. this suggests that, in order to help efl learners achieve the greatest benefit from the er approach, practitioners need to foster environments in which students can genuinely enjoy reading. specifically, when designing reading lessons, teachers in korea should begin by diagnosing l2 learners’ interests and needs. for example, before an er course begins, the practitioner should survey the learners’ preferred genres and proficiency levels. only on the basis of such information should reading materials be selected. in this way, learners can read books that interest them while remaining in their “comfort zone” (i.e., within their proficiency level) and therefore they can enjoy the act of reading. furthermore, this a young park 352 result can serve as a reminder to reading material developers in korea of the importance of designing books that can appeal to learners within an appropriate reading level such as language learner literature. this study suffers from several limitations that require careful attention in follow-up studies. the first is associated with the absence of qualitative data. through triangulation with the qualitative data, the current study’s quantitative data could have supported the findings more strongly. the second limitation relates to the experimental design. this quasi-experiment compared experiment group 1 (the er group) with experimental group 2 (the ir group) before and after the intervention. however, there was no true control group involved in the study that did not receive any treatment. thus, further research would surely benefit from the inclusion of qualitative data obtained through interviews or diaries, as this would offer greater insight into the effectiveness of er and ir approaches in shaping efl learners’ attitudes towards reading in english. in addition, future investigations should include 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(2011). examining effects of l2 extensive reading in the cognitive and affective domains. in mccoll millar, robert and durham, mercedes (eds.), applied linguistics, global and local: proceedings of the 43rd annual meeting of the british association for applied linguistics, 9-11 september 2010, university of aberdeen (pp. 375-385). london: scitsiugnil press. 375-385. a comparison of the impact of extensive and intensive reading approaches on the reading. . . 357 appendix reading attitudes questionnaire section i, ii (q1 – q16): below are a number of statements with which you may agree or disagree. please indicate your opinion after each statement by putting an “x” in the box that best describes the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement. section iii (q17 – q24): below are a number of statements relating to english reading habits. please respond to each statement by putting an “x” in the box that best describes the frequency of your english reading habit. the term “english written material” below includes books, magazines, newspapers, internet sites and any other source of written english. section i strongly disagree disagree neutral agree strongly agree 1. i think i understand the content accurately when i read english written materials. 1 2 3 4 5 2. i think i can read english written materials very fast. 1 2 3 4 5 3. i think i will read more english written materials in my free time in the future than i do now. 1 2 3 4 5 4. i think reading english written materials enables me to communicate better with english-language speakers. 1 2 3 4 5 5. i think reading english written materials is advantageous for taking the english section of the csat (college scholastic ability test). 1 2 3 4 5 6. i think that reading english written materials enables me to quickly access news from around the world. 1 2 3 4 5 7. i think that reading english written materials is advantageous for getting a job. 1 2 3 4 5 8. i think that reading english written materials is beneficial for learning to read in english. 1 2 3 4 5 section ii strongly disagree disagree neutral agree strongly agree 9. i am proud of myself when i read english written materials. 1 2 3 4 5 10. i’m scared that people may find out what a poor english reader i am. 1 2 3 4 5 11. reading english written materials is fun. 1 2 3 4 5 12. i feel anxious when i am unsure whether i have correctly understood english written materials. 1 2 3 4 5 13. it is easiest for me to read in english, compared to writing, listening and speaking in english. 1 2 3 4 5 14. i try to avoid reading in english as much as possible. 1 2 3 4 5 15. i feel frustrated when i have to read a long english passage. 1 2 3 4 5 16. i feel anxious if i encounter an unknown word when i read english written materials. 1 2 3 4 5 a young park 358 section iii never rarely sometimes often always 17. i read english written materials in my free time. 1 2 3 4 5 18. when i read english written materials, i get tired and sleepy. 1 2 3 4 5 19. when i read english written materials, i keep going until i have reached the end. 1 2 3 4 5 20. i buy my own english written materials to read. 1 2 3 4 5 21. i borrow english written materials from school or from public libraries. 1 2 3 4 5 22. i keep a reading journal to record the english books i read. 1 2 3 4 5 23. when i read something interesting in an english written material, i tell my friends and family members about it. 1 2 3 4 5 24. i recommend reading english written materials to my friends and family members. 1 2 3 4 5 305 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (2). 2021. 305-310 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.2.8 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review teacher development for immersion and content-based instruction editors: laurent cammarata, t.j. ó ceallaigh publisher: john benjamins publishing company, 2018 isbn: 97890272074877 pages: 201 searching for ways to expand the spectrum of methods of teaching and learning foreign languages triggers valuable initiatives and offers support for both students and teachers. programs such as french immersion in canada, contentbased instruction (cbi), and content and language integrated learning (clil) have become popular across the world (harrop, 2012), which is rapidly becoming a global village where the role of languages is crucial. in an integrated world, teaching content through language is viewed as a modern form of educational delivery; therefore, as the editors emphasize “teacher preparation and professional development endeavors are key drivers of successful i/b and cbi programs across a variety of models” (p. 3). teacher development for immersion and content-based instruction is a key contribution to the field, which offers valuable insights into the complexity of teacher preparation as well as further professional development in the case of immersion/bilingual contexts. the book opens with a concise “introduction” in which the authors briefly discuss the theoretical background concerning research on immersion, bilingual, 306 and content-based instruction. additionally, they provide an overview of the volume, which comprises seven chapters written by leading scholars in the field. the editors also state that “this volume endeavors to respond to the identified lack of knowledge by presenting a strand of research that has not to date received the academic attention it deserves” (p. 4). chapter 1, “becoming a ‘language-aware’ content teacher,” written by peichang he and angel m. y. lin, focuses on effective teaching of academic content in second or foreign language (l2) instruction and content-based/clil education. the researchers investigated the development of teacher language awareness (tla) as well as teacher identity in the case of a science teacher and teacher identity through an ethnographic case study. by analyzing data collected from classroom observations, interviews, and lesson video-stimulated commentaries, the researchers manage to establish a teacher professional development model focusing on collaboration, dynamicity, and dialogue. chapter 2 by laurent cammarata and martine cavanagh, entitled “in search of immersion teacher educators’ knowledge base,” examines immersion teacher educators’ (ite’s) knowledge with reference to the integration of content, language and literacy integration in curriculum planning and actual teaching. the researchers developed and used an analytic framework to examine this kind of integrated knowledge. the data collected in the course of this qualitative study led the authors to conclude that there is a pressing need for the elaboration of a professional development program, especially in the context of pedagogical integration. chapter 3, “unpacking dimensions of immersion teacher educator identity” by aisling leavy, mairéad houringan and t. j. ó ceallaigh is an investigation of the professional learning and experiences of three mathematics teacher educators’ (mtes) who develop new professional identities by being engaged in lesson study. japanese lesson study (lewis & tsuchida, 1998; stingler & hiebert, 1999) was used as an organizing framework. the study was divided into three stages and lasted 12 weeks. data analysis focused on tes’ reactions to the activities and critical incidents provided during all the stages. the findings reveal that “crafting identities is a social process and becoming more knowledgeably skilled is an aspect of participation in social practice” (lave, 1996, p. 157). in chapter 4, entitled “teacher adaptations to support students with special education needs in french immersion: an observational study,” callie mady explores nine french immersion (fi) teachers’ ability to adapt their classroom practices to students with learning difficulties. the study was based on observations and only qualitative data were collected. the analysis of such data revealed that the teachers are willing to adapt their instruction to the whole class but are 307 less inclined to adjust it to the needs of individual students. the author concludes that teachers should be provided with more professional development opportunities focused on individual students’ needs. chapter 5, “teacher perceptions of immersion professional development experiences emphasizing language-focused content instruction” by diane j. tedick and caleb zilmer, focuses on immersion teachers’ perceptions of professional development (pd) experiences in the area of language-focused content instruction. the authors based their study on wenger’s (1998) theoretical framework (i.e., community, practice, meaning, and identity), and collected information from 75 participants as well as four focus groups. the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data revealed a strong relationship between community, identity, meaning, practice and teacher learning through professional development. additionally, the findings allowed the conclusion that educators providing cbi/immersion teacher training should highlight the need for authenticity, relevance and meaningfulness. in chapter 6, “‘it was two hours . . . the same old thing and nothing came of it’: continuing professional development among teachers in gaeltacht post-primary schools,” laoise ní thuairisg reports the findings from a qualitative study focused on irish-medium post-primary school teachers’ engagement in professional support services and their perceptions regarding the applicability of such services to everyday teaching practice. the findings indicate that teachers are dissatisfied with the provision of professional development as it does not meet their expectations and fails to address the challenges they face. the author also suggests that “the teachers [under investigation] are in need of professional development services which address and acknowledge the context in which their professional practice is situated” (p. 165). finally, chapter 7, “the common european framework of reference (cefr) in french immersion teacher education – a focus on the language portfolio” by stephanie arnott and marie-josée vignola, reports on the implementation of a portfolio project, which included the perspectives of both studentteachers enrolled in the french immersion program (fi) and their instructor. having completed the adapted portfolio, the teacher participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire and they also took part in an interview with the instructor. the findings show significant differences with respect to the portfolio experience, which suggests that teacher educators and decision-makers should support and promote cefr-informed instruction. the book teacher development for immersion and content-based instruction is a crucial contribution to research into immersion, content-based instruction, and clil education. first, the contributors considerably expand theoretical knowledge about immersion/bilingual (i/b) education, cbi and clil by presenting particular research cases concerning teacher preparation and professional 308 development programs from around the world. even though numerous studies have been conducted in recent years on the effectiveness of i/b, cbi, or clil programs (e.g., genesee & lindholm-leary, 2013; gierlinger, 2007; lyster & mori, 2006; morton, 2016, 2018), the role of the teacher preparation programs and teacher educators has been blatantly neglected. in my opinion, the book fills the gap in research and provides a comprehensive picture of teacher preparation and professional development, which are critical issues for effective language immersion education and other l2 programs driven by subject matter (cammarata & ó ceallaigh, 2018). what is particularly appealing about the volume is the focus on the teacher educators themselves. having gone through the research available in the field, i can see that we sorely lack a proper understanding of the nature of the teacher educators’ expertise and their needs in terms of professional development. therefore, this volume can be seen as a so-muchneeded response to the call for increased attention on the teacher. another important merit is that the book, which successfully seeks to strike a balance between theory and practice, is intended not only for researchers who specialize in the field but also for teachers, teacher trainers and decision makers who will find many practical approaches and guiding principles in varied educational contexts. bearing in mind the breadth of experience and academic engagement represented by the contributors, this volume is an invaluable resource in the field of immersion, content-based instruction and clil education. despite all the undeniable merits listed above, i believe that the book fails to provide a clear distinction between content-based instruction (cbi) and content and language integrated learning (clil), especially in the introductory part. the editors seem to treat the two concepts as representing the same instructional approach that is described by means of different labels. even though it is certainly true that these approaches are closely related (cf. cenoz, 2015; larsenfreeman & anderson, 2016), however, they are definitely not identical. this is because cbi aims to develop a high level of content competence with the development of language skills being to some extent seen as a by-product of this process, clil is implemented with the purpose of developing both content and language skills at the same level with focus on intercultural understanding as a response to globalization (richards & rodgers, 2014). therefore, the main aim of clil is to enable learners to communicate in the target language by involving them in active participation (dalton-puffer, 2017). a separate issue is that, since clil is also the focus of investigation in some of the chapters, this fact could have also been reflected in the title of the edited collection which could then read: teacher development for immersion, content-based instruction and clil. this would surely help potential readers understand what the book is about and decide whether or not they would indeed like to delve into it. 309 such minor reservations notwithstanding, i highly recommend this book, as it addresses a central issue and has the potential to stimulate further discussion about the role importance of teacher preparation for teaching content in an additional language as well as providing an impetus for further research in this area. furthermore, the volume is surely a thought-provoking reading for researchers, teachers, teacher educators and policy makers. i strongly believe that this volume will pave the way for future empirical investigations, which i hope will enhance our understanding of how to best prepare pre-service and in-service teachers for dealing with the intricacies of integrating language and content. reviewed by katarzyna papaja university of silesia, katowice, poland katarzyna.papaja@us.edu.pl references cenoz, j. (2015). content-based instruction and content and language integrated learning: the same or different? language, culture and curriculum, 28(1), 8-24. dalton-puffer, c. (2017). putting clil into practice. elt journal, 72(1), 109-111. genesee, f., & lindholm-leary, k. (2013). two cases of studies of content-based language education. journal of immersion and content-based language education, 1(1), 3-33. gierlinger, e. (2007). modular clil in lower secondary education: some insights from a research project in austria. in c. dalton-puffer & u. smit (eds.), empirical perspectives on classroom discourse (pp. 79-118). peter lang. harrop, e. (2012). content and language integrated learning (clil): limitations and possibilities. encuentro, 21, 57-70. larsen-freeman, d., & anderson, m. (2016). techniques and principles in language teaching. oxford university press. lave, j. (1996). teaching, as learning, in practice. mind, culture, and activity, 3, 149-164. lewis, c., & tsuchida, i. (1998). a lesson is like a swiftly flowing river: how research lessons improve japanese education. american educator, 22(4), 12-17, 50-52. lyster, r., & mori, h. (2006). interactional feedback and instructional counterbalance. studies in second language acquisition, 28, 269-300. morton, t. (2016). conceptualizing and investigating teachers’ knowledge for integrating content and language in content-based instruction. journal of immersion and content-based language education, 4, 144-167. 310 morton, t. (2018). reconceptualizing and describing teachers’ knowledge of language for content and language integrated learning (clil). international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, 21(3), 275-286. richards, j. c., & rodgers, t. (2014). approaches and methods in language teaching. cambridge university press. wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. uk: cambridge university press. 265 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (2). 2021. 265-289 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.2.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt translanguaging in a chinese university clil classroom: teacher strategies and student attitudes xiaozhou (emily) zhou shanghai international studies university, china https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0435-5784 xzhou@shisu.edu.cn steve mann university of warwick, coventry, uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6347-1614 steve.mann@warwick.ac.uk abstract pedagogical translanguaging has been extensively researched over the past decade. yet, little is known about the attitudes of students towards this practice. students constitute an integral part of classroom interactions and their learning process is significantly affected by teachers’ classroom discourse. this action research (ar) study, situated in a chinese university content and language integrated learning (clil) reading classroom and aided by lesson recordings and two sets of questionnaires, explores the translanguaging strategies employed by the teacher as well as the students’ attitudes to such strategies. through incorporating feedback collected from students regarding the teacher’s modifications of language use, the study has demonstrated how the teacher mobilizes her full linguistic resources, in the form of translanguaging, to achieve pedagogical outcomes, which eventually leads to the establishment of a mutually beneficial classroom ecology. the study also indicates that advanced efl learners, highly motivated to improve language proficiency and acquire subject content unanimously reject the traditional monolingual approach to teaching. the findings call for further research into the impact of pedagogical translanguaging on students’ learning process in multilingual classrooms. keywords: translanguaging; action research; clil; chinese; pedagogy xiaozhou (emily) zhou, steve mann 266 1. introduction the use of first language in second or foreign language learning environments has been extensively researched in the past three decades, challenging the tenets of the monolingual teaching approach (antón & dicamilla, 1998; brice, 2000; ferguson, 2003; lin, 2013). terms such as code-switching, code-mixing, and code-meshing were initially used in naturalistic bilingual settings to describe the “systematic alternating use of two languages or language varieties within a single conversation or utterance” (liebscher & dailey-o’cain, 2005, p. 235). extensive research into the functions and patterns of such language alternation has led to the scope of empirical studies widening to include pedagogical domains (cook, 2001; lee & lo, 2017; macaro & tian, 2015; moodley, 2007; qian et al., 2009). meanwhile, whilst our understanding of bilingual and multilingual competences and practices is continuously deepening, the concept of translanguaging has captured the idea of interlocutors’ flexible maneuvering between two or more language entities. the common european framework of reference for languages (council of europe, 2018) has specifically emphasized pluricultural competence and translanguaging, with the purposeful juxtaposition of the languages of input and output. unlike codeswitching, which assigns language choices to a particular code, translanguaging practices draw on multiple codes. this involves “the speakers’ construction and use of original and complex interrelated discursive practices that cannot be easily assigned to one or another traditional definition of a language, but that make up the speakers’ complete language repertoire” (garcía & li, 2014, p. 22). furthermore, instead of maintaining a dichotomous view that looks at different languages involved as separate entities, translanguaging, being intrinsically interactive, performative and creative (canagarajah, 2011), approaches bilingualism/multilingualism from a holistic perspective. it softens the boundaries between languages, thus offering a new paradigm for second/additional language teaching and researching (cenoz, 2017; li, 2018). in spite of the expanding interest in pedagogical translanguaging in foreign language learning contexts, little attention has been paid to students’ attitudes to teachers’ translanguaging practices. our argument in this paper is that collecting student feedback represents an additional informational resource. this provides teachers with a straightforward opportunity to increase their awareness of how their use of classroom discourse can be adapted in order to maximize pedagogical impact. therefore, this mixed-methods action research (henceforth ar) study sets out to investigate the teacher’s translanguaging strategies as well as students’ attitudes. adapting teaching in response to students’ views can help teachers to be better informed regarding engaging translanguaging strategies for the purpose of effective and efficient learning, fostering an up-close and “ecological” (van lier, 2000, p. 251) understandings of classroom interaction. translanguaging in a chinese university clil classroom: teacher strategies and student attitudes 267 2. literature review originating in the context of welsh bilingual education in the 1980s (williams, 1996), translanguaging began to gain global popularity as a term against a background of changing views on bilingual competence in the late 20th century (lewis et al., 2012). defined as “the process of making meaning, shaping experience, gaining understanding and knowledge through the use of two languages” (baker, 2011, p. 288), it has been recognized as a significant feature of bilingual/multilingual communities and educational domains. the flexible and creative employment of multiple linguistic resources which transcends the boundaries of named languages has been investigated in naturalistic interactions (creese & blackledge, 2019; li & zhu, 2020), including internet spaces (li & zhu, 2019), as well as pedagogical contexts, both of which involve the communicative challenges and opportunities to which translanguaging responds. particular attention has been paid to pedagogical translanguaging, in the hope of exploring the possibilities of increasing understanding and improving learning effectiveness by drawing on both teachers’ and students’ whole linguistic repertoires (cohen, 2015; creese & blackledge, 2015; king & ridley, 2018; leonet et al., 2017; lin & lo, 2017; mazak & herbas-donoso, 2015; wang, 2019a; 2019b, to name a few). recently the concept of translanguaging practice has been further broadened by transcending interlocutors’ linguistic competence to take into account their diverse semiotic repertoires, including body language and visual aids. this adds a spatial dimension to the understanding of the connotation of translanguaging (blackledge & creese, 2017; canagarajah, 2018a, 2018b; pennycook, 2017). translanguaging research in the educational domain has been widely conducted with varied groups, from young bilingual children (garcía, 2011; kirsch, 2020; seals & olsen-reeder, 2020), students in secondary education (lin & he, 2017; lin & wu, 2015; nikula & moore, 2019), university students (mazak & herbas-donoso, 2015; moore, 2014) to adult learners (li & ho, 2018). a recent trend has witnessed the concept of translanguaging being implemented in professional development courses for pre-service and in-service teachers. the aim is to raise their awareness of the multilingual and crosslinguistic approach to teaching language and subject content (cenoz & santos, 2020; gorter & arocena, 2020; makalela, 2015; woll, 2020). in such studies, a translanguaging perspective has been found to have a positive impact on exploring one’s multilingual repertoires, facilitating interaction and enhancing learning. translanguaging became conceptualized as a pedagogical practice at the beginning of the 21st century (baker, 2011). given the consideration that the target language is often prized in traditional l2 classrooms, challenges exist in terms of determining the extent to which translanguaging can be seen as a variable xiaozhou (emily) zhou, steve mann 268 pedagogical resource and whether translanguaging strategies can be developed with the purpose of multilingual language acquisition (canagarajah & gao, 2019). issues such as errors or mistake correction, rhetorical considerations and the ways students negotiate power remain to be considered in assessing the effectiveness of translanguaging as a pedagogical strategy (canagarajah, 2011). nonetheless, efforts have recently been made to explore instances where translanguaging is employed as a classroom teaching strategy. researchers have found that in a number of bilingual/multilingual clil or second/additional language education contexts, teachers actively deploy translanguaging in a variety of classroom scenarios to fulfill communicative and pedagogical purposes. examples include explaining subject content (mazak & herbas-donoso, 2015; wang, 2019b), eliciting students’ l2 output (makalela, 2015), elaborating on contrastive linguistic knowledge (makalela, 2015), facilitating interpersonal communication and creating a welcoming atmosphere (yuan & yang, 2020), and managing classroom discipline (probyn, 2015; wang, 2019b). previous research into classroom translanguaging practice has revealed a dynamic and rich picture of interlocutors’ maneuvering between multiple languages, demonstrating translanguaging as a resource to make meaning and facilitate learning (li & ho, 2018; nikula & moore, 2019; poza, 2018). however, its contribution to pedagogical refinement is limited by the paucity of knowledge about students’ attitudes to teachers’ translanguaging practices. as most classrooms are dominated by teacher talk, the teacher might well be the most visible translanguager (walsh & mann, 2015). on the other hand, it is of equal importance to pay attention to the students who are most directly affected by translanguaging activity. it is important to know their views on the teachers’ translanguaging practices, so as to enable teachers to modify classroom discourse in order to enhance learning and teaching. in the existing literature, wang (2019b) and galante (2020) attempted to gauge students’ attitudes to classroom translanguaging. wang (2019b) explored students’ views on the desired and actual multiple language use in class by the teachers as well as by themselves, whereas galante (2020) investigated students’ perceptions of challenges in pedagogical translanguaging. nevertheless, neither of these studies employed action research and hence neither provided space for teachers to modify their multilingual practices based on students’ feedback. there is still a paucity of empirical evidence which could further our understanding of students’ attitudes and how it could help teachers make amendments and improvements. in order for translanguaging to be recognized and perhaps developed as part of appropriate pedagogy (holliday, 1994), it would be instructive for teachers, who are in most cases the main translanguagers, to have access to students’ feedback on their translanguaging practices in order to modify their language translanguaging in a chinese university clil classroom: teacher strategies and student attitudes 269 use accordingly, and thus eventually achieve a situated classroom ecology where students can benefit fully from their teachers’ language input. in order to achieve this, an ar study, which offers the teacher/researcher the opportunity to gain students’ feedback, incorporate it into modifications and observe their attitudes to such modifications, would serve as a useful addition to our understanding of translanguaging practices. 3. research methodology 3.1. research questions as discussed previously, existing research into pedagogical translanguaging has largely focused on teachers’ translanguaging practices but has rarely addressed students’ perceptions of these practices, and how, in their view, translanguaging practices in classrooms can aid the learning process. it is of benefit to understand in what way translanguaging can be conducted in order to create a mutually beneficial learning ecology for both teachers and students. therefore, this study aims to answer the following three research questions: 1. what translanguaging strategies does the teacher/researcher employ? 2. what are the students’ attitudes to such translanguaging practices in class? 3. in what way can the teacher/researcher learn from students’ attitudes and adapt her teaching accordingly? 3.2. context the research took place in a clil classroom where a theme-based reading course was taught to help first-year english majors (cefr b2 level) improve english language proficiency and gain a comprehensive spectrum of humanities-related knowledge in the fields of literature, culture, history, arts etc. in english-speaking countries. the teacher/researcher in this case was a young female practitioner in her mid 30s with six years of teaching experience and higher education degrees from an english-speaking country. the class consisted of 25 students aged 18 or 19 years old who had just graduated from high schools. they had been learning english as a foreign language since the age of six and thus possessed a good command of english speaking, listening, reading and writing skills. though both the teacher and students were capable of communicating exclusively in english, in reality, constant switches between the two languages were still evident and, on occasion, essential. this was for two reasons. firstly, some of the course content posed linguistic challenges to students. secondly, xiaozhou (emily) zhou, steve mann 270 cross-cultural awareness is a vital learning outcome prescribed by the national guidance on curriculum for english majors. this led to discussions on literature and culture from both chinese and western perspectives, prompting a shuttle between english and mandarin in order to elaborate such subtle and nuanced relations. 3.3. data collection methods this was a mixed-methods ar study where qualitative analysis of classroom discourse provided a detailed picture of a teacher/researcher’s translanguaging practices, thus opening possibilities for particular patterns or categories to emerge (burns, 2005). at the same time, quantitative data from questionnaires provided a general yet holistic picture from a sample of 25 participants. in the data that follows, the teacher featured was the first author (therefore also referred to as teacher/researcher) and the study offered an evaluation of the value of this kind of practitioner research, as well as providing the basis for an evaluation of the pedagogic nature of translanguaging practices. action research is interventionist in nature and the “teacher/researcher” is at the heart of the research, focusing simultaneously “on action and research” (burns, 2005, p. 58). thus, by definition, action research is based on some kind of intervention. this creates the possibility of change in the participants and the educational setting, and consequently generates theories and insights anchored in that specific setting. the strength of the methodology is that there is a close connection between theory and practice, but the limitation is that results are not generalizable because the dataset is focused on one context. however, because action research pays close attention to the interaction, learning and impact and investigates “a small-scale intervention,” there can be “a close examination of the effects of such an intervention” (cohen et al., 2017, p. 226). such insights can at least be transferable to other contexts (richards, 2003). an ar process was undertaken in the current study in order to gain a better understanding of the classroom dynamics and improve the effectiveness of the teacher/researcher’s teaching practices (dörnyei, 2007). through studying students’ attitudes towards the teacher’s translanguaging activity and then modifying the pedagogical use of translanguaging accordingly, it conforms to the two central characteristics of ar: enhancement of practice and iterative introduction of change (burns, 2005). the process also allows the practitioner to reflect on actions at the micro-level (van lier, 2000). there were two ar cycles in this study: ar1: analysis of translanguaging practices and collection of students’ attitudes. ar2: reflections on and modifications of translanguaging practices, as well as further collection of students’ attitudes for contrastive analysis. translanguaging in a chinese university clil classroom: teacher strategies and student attitudes 271 the analysis drew on lesson recordings, questionnaires, and teacher reflective notes. lesson recordings provided transcripts for reflection and helped to gain insights into the nature of the classroom community so that informed decisions could be made before any changes were put into practice. questionnaires, on the other hand, are a standard approach to understanding the learners’ mind and obtaining specific information from a group of participants (richards et al., 2012). 3.4. data collection procedures and analysis the data collection process for this ar study was conducted over the course of two terms in one academic year. lesson recordings, questionnaires and teacher reflective notes were utilized to provide details and insights into the teacher’s translanguaging practices and gauge the students’ attitudes. a total of 60 sessions (30 sessions per term), each lasting 90 minutes, were audio-recorded. two sets of questionnaires were completed by the participants (n = 25) at the end of the first and second terms respectively, with the intention of making a comparison of their feedback before and after the teacher/researcher’s modification of classroom language use. to be more specific, the first set of questionnaires aimed to gain a preliminary understanding of students’ views on the teacher’s language use, whereas the focus shifted to students’ attitudes towards the teacher’s modification of language use in the second set of questionnaires. a synthesis of key factors in these two sets of questionnaires can be found in table 1. table 1 key factors in two sets of questionnaires questionnaire 1 questionnaire 2 circumstances where translanguaging practices involving english and mandarin are preferred/should be avoided whether changes are noticed and what specific changes are observed attitudes towards current and ideal classroom talk by the teacher attitudes towards the changes impact of the teacher's language use on students’ language use and learning process impact of changes on students’ learning process all instances containing translanguaging practices involving both the teacher and students were transcribed, closely studied, and subjected to microanalysis for patterns of purposeful translanguaging strategies. categories of translanguaging strategies which emerged from the current study were further examined in reference to those in previous studies (li, 2014, 2016; makalela, 2015; moore, 2014; poza, 2018; wang, 2019a) as a form of comparative analysis. proportions of english/mandarin spoken by the teacher in class were calculated based on word count and timed analysis methods (macaro, 2001). this xiaozhou (emily) zhou, steve mann 272 served as an important reference point when evaluating students’ views on the teacher’s bilingual practice. meanwhile, items of multiple choice in the questionnaires were analyzed quantitatively, whereas open-ended questions in the questionnaires were subject to content analysis. 4. findings broadly speaking, results from the current study were presented from two perspectives: the teacher’s translanguaging strategies and students’ attitudes towards them. firstly, categories of teachers’ translanguaging strategies were illustrated with examples from lesson transcripts. secondly, longitudinal findings relevant to students’ attitudes in the two ar cycles were reported from four perspectives: their general views about the teacher’s translanguaging practices, attitudes to translanguaging practices in different pedagogical moments, the impact of the teacher’s translanguaging practices on students, and lastly, how the teacher/researcher modified her translanguaging practices based on students’ attitudes and how such attitudes changed after the modifications. it is worth noting that the first three above-mentioned perspectives entailed results from ar 1 and the fourth concerned ar 2. 4.1. the teacher’s translanguaging strategies the analysis of lesson transcriptions revealed that the teacher’s pedagogical translanguaging practices could be categorized into three types: explanatory strategies, attention-raising strategies, and rapport-building strategies. the following sections provided data-led descriptions on these three areas, with a focus on how translanguaging was used to achieve interactional means in those pedagogical moments. 4.1.1. explanatory strategies this type of strategy occurred when the teacher employed a combination of english and mandarin to explain textbook-related content. this focus might be on specific features of the english language, such as grammar and vocabulary (in textbook and after-class exercises), or might be related to the understanding of cultural differences between china and english-speaking countries. the following two examples of extracts aim to illustrate the purposeful use of translanguaging in these particular circumstances. translanguaging in a chinese university clil classroom: teacher strategies and student attitudes 273 example 1: s: what is the difference between “despair” and “desperation”? t: “despair” is more about disappoint and frustration after losing hope, 灰心丧⽓ (losing hope and motivation), feeling hopeless after being disappointed. s: and “desperation” is having nowhere to go? t: well, sort of . . . “desperation” means making reckless and perhaps irrational efforts knowing that you might fail, 是一种孤注一掷 (kind of putting all the money in my bet and giving it a go). in the above teacher-student interaction, the teacher actively deployed translanguaging as a pedagogical strategy, by incorporating two commonly used four-character chinese idioms (underlined) which were known for expressing rich meaning in the most concise and economic manner. in this particular moment, translanguaging offered a more effective explanation with the minimal possibility of misinterpretation. example 2: t: we chinese are passionate in pursuing loyalty as the value of our lives. loyal to whom? to the emperor, the sovereign, the highest power. we talk about 忠孝价值，忘我的精神境界 (value of loyalty, a mental state where one forgets his/herself completely). death has to be a form of self-sacrifice, like in 杀⾝成仁舍⽣取义 (to die a martyr, to sacrifice one’s life for a noble cause). we chinese are very much afraid of death because we fear that we can’t achieve 立德立功立言 (firstly to set a moral example, then make contributions to society, lastly to document one’s experiences and self-reflections for descendants to read), such so-called great cause. in example 2, the teacher aimed to explain why chinese people regarded loyalty as their life value and assumed that students had acquired the content in their previous learning of chinese history and culture. hence, she switched between languages to facilitate understanding so as to achieve the pedagogical purpose in that moment, namely explaining cultural differences and developing students’ intercultural awareness. 4.1.2. attention-raising strategies observation in previous classrooms and casual conversations with students had made the teacher/researcher aware that students would gradually lose concentration and interest if 100% of the teacher’s talk in class was conducted in english. thus, translanguaging was employed when student attention needed to be raised and focused on important learning points as well as for instructional and xiaozhou (emily) zhou, steve mann 274 managerial purposes. this kind of language was what willis (2013) called the “outer language” of the classroom. in the following two examples, the teacher proactively deployed translanguaging to gain students’ attention while maintaining the flow of the classroom discourse. example 3: t: 这⼀段作者想表达的中⼼思想是 (in this paragraph what the author mainly wishes to express is that . . .) the freedom most people claim for themselves is a form of right, but the freedom they adhere to others is a form of toleration. 但是作者认为这是错的，为什么呢? (but the author thinks it is wrong. why?) because we let them speak not because we are magnanimous but because we must hear what they have to say. example 3 illustrates an attention-raising translanguaging strategy in the context of calling students’ attention to key learning points in the textbook. in the monologue paragraph provided above, the teacher did not resort to their shared l1 because she felt under pressure. instead, she strategically employed translanguaging as a linguistic resource to ensure that students were engaged in the learning of the content when there was no teacher-student interaction present. by doing this, the aim of keeping the class on track and directing students to particular aspects of the text in that particular pedagogical moment was achieved. example 4: t: in this mid-term examination, as usual, one of the ten sections on the test paper is sentence paraphrasing. 请⼤家⼀定注意 (please pay attention), when you are completing this section, that you should only paraphrase 划线部分 (the underlined part). 千万不要 (please never ever) paraphrase the whole sentence. example 4 depicted a scenario where the typical “outer language” in terms of classroom management (willis, 2013) was used. having failed to help students avoid careless mistakes when using full l2, the teacher prioritized the pedagogical outcome and switched to translanguaging to raise students’ attention. 4.1.3. rapport-building strategies this type of translanguaging strategy mostly occurred in teacher-student interactions and took places in two typical ways, as illustrated in the following examples. the first (see example 5) occurred when one or more students initiated the use of l1, generally because of an inability to understand or express certain words or concepts. the teacher, aiming to elicit more output from the students without intimidating or discouraging them, would employ translanguaging that translanguaging in a chinese university clil classroom: teacher strategies and student attitudes 275 incorporated the student’s use of l1, and maintain a natural flow of interaction. the second circumstance was normally characterized by the teacher participating in students’ group discussions. when challenged by ideas too complicated to be expressed in english, students tended to rely on the use of mandarin, and since all students shared the same first language, such use would not obstruct communication or raise complaints. however, given the course objectives being the acquisition of both language and content, it was expected that students should make sufficient use of the opportunities in classroom discussions to improve their capability of expressing complex ideas in english. consequently, the teacher would join the group discussions upon noticing students speaking 100% in mandarin and through initially using translanguaging, would gradually guide students towards a fuller use of english without disrupting the smooth course of communication (see example 6). example 5: t: what is your understanding of the quotation: “acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristics of western religion, rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristics of western science”? s: . . . i am not sure . . . t: what about the phrase at the beginning: “acceptance without proof”? s: 没有证据就接受? (literal chinese translation of “acceptance without proof”) t: yes, exactly. can you think of an example of 没有证据就接受 in religion? in the situation illustrated by the above example of interaction, the student encountered some difficulty in offering his own explanation of the text (line 4), which was why the teacher opted to break it down for a step-by-step comprehension. when the student was unable to explain the phrases in english, he resorted to mandarin for assistance (line 6). in this pedagogical moment, the teacher, instead of criticizing or correcting him, employed translanguaging which acknowledged the student’s l1 use, but continued to elicit a detailed answer. in this way, the flow of interaction was maintained, more effective communication was accomplished, and the student was not discouraged. the same strategy could be seen in example 6 where the tactic seemed slightly different, given that the conversation occurred in a group discussion with the teacher participating later as the fourth speaker. example 6: s1: david thoreau says “i love to be alone. i never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” what do you think? do you agree? s2: i think he means that he enjoys being with himself most? s3: yes . . . but don’t you find it strange? is there really someone who wishes to be by himself most? i read his book . . . the very famous one . . . the . . . the . . . xiaozhou (emily) zhou, steve mann 276 s2: you mean 瓦尔登湖? (walden pond) s3: yeah, yeah, 瓦尔登湖. i read it but i don’t understand it well. i found it . . . weird . . . that . . . 就是一个人为什么要到⼀个没有⼈的地⽅，徒⼿造个房⼦住在那 ⾥很久，去故意让⾃⼰在⼀个很孤独的环境⾥，他能感受到什么呢? (why would someone go somewhere alone, build a house from scratch, and live there for so long? why would he deliberately put himself in such a lonely environment? what could he feel exactly?) s1: 对啊，我也不知道。(yes, i don’t know either.) 我没有过这样的体验。(i’ve never had this kind of experience.) t: 想象一下，(imagine for a while) if you were put in that situation, 如果把你 一个人放在一个湖边，(if you were left alone near a pond) nobody around, what would you do every day? 有什么事情可做呢？(anything worth doing?) s2: reading, writing . . . s3: 种菜 (growing vegetables), 哈哈哈 (hahaha), keeping a pet maybe. s1: probably walking a lot. t: yes, very good. so, you would find, when you are in that situation, what can you connect with most easily? one thing in common. s1, s2, s3: nature. t: exactly. so when one is alone in that situation, one can be as close to nature as one wishes to be. it can be very enlightening to you, you know, stimulating your thoughts . . . s3: yeah, and a lot of ancient chinese poets, they all lived in places close to mountains and lakes. when students shifted from english to mandarin for the ease of communication, the teacher joined in with the pedagogical aim of navigating the conversation back to full use of english and meanwhile acting as a supportive and encouraging team member in the discussion. therefore, she chose translanguaging, rather than the monolingual use of english which might unnerve the students in any way, to negotiate meaning and eventually achieve her objective. 4.2. students’ attitudes the nature of the ar study required that the analysis of students’ attitudes be presented in two parts: attitudes before (the first questionnaire) and after the teacher’s modification of her translanguaging practices (the second questionnaire). students’ attitudes in the first part were reported from three perspectives focusing on their feedback on the teacher’s bilingual use in class. 4.2.1. general views about the teacher’s translanguaging practices analysis indicated that before the teacher’s modification of her classroom discourse, 80% of all 25 participants expressed satisfaction about the current balance translanguaging in a chinese university clil classroom: teacher strategies and student attitudes 277 in relation to the teacher’s translanguaging practices, whereas 20% believed that the teacher’s reference to mandarin exceeded their expectations. with respect to the use of english in the teacher’s classroom talk, 28% of the participants wished that it could be increased. in addition, 52% (n = 13) and 41% (n = 9) of the students expressed that their ideal proportion of the teacher’s use of english was 70-80% and 80-90% of classroom talk respectively. at this point, the average proportion of english employed by the teacher throughout the first term, at the end of which the first set of questionnaires was distributed, was 85.6% as recorded using word count and timed analysis methods. 4.2.2. translanguaging practices in different pedagogical moments the analysis showed that, despite the disparity of english proficiencies among the participants, the majority of respondents were in favor of the teacher’s translanguaging strategies in class. with regard to translanguaging in specific pedagogical moments, the majority believe that translanguaging should be avoided when the teacher explained the literal meanings of the text (n = 21), discussed literature or cultural contents directly or indirectly related to the text (n = 17), and conducted teacher-student interactions (n = 21). on the other hand, the results showed a tendency to favor the use of translanguaging in pedagogical moments where the teacher was assigning homework and briefing teaching arrangements (n = 17), as well as explaining answers to after-class exercises (n = 17). the suggestion that the teacher should use more mandarin in the above two situations was also well evidenced in the results of the open-ended question on the questionnaire. as for other pedagogical moments, including explaining grammar and vocabulary, and telling anecdotes, there was no significant preference as to whether or not translanguaging practices should be adopted. 4.2.3. impact of the teacher’s translanguaging practices on students the impact of the teacher’s translanguaging practices on students could be looked at from two points of view: the impact on students’ language choice and on their learning process as a whole. 72% of the respondents (n = 18) stated that the teacher’s translanguaging practices would not have a negative impact on their spoken language choice in class, whereas the remaining 28% (n = 7) believed that the teacher’s use of mandarin could affect them negatively in the sense that they no longer felt obliged to speak english in class the whole time. furthermore, 96% (n = 24) of the respondents considered that a small amount of translanguaging was more conducive to the learning of the english language and content compared to an exclusive use of english. meanwhile, 24% (n = 6) of xiaozhou (emily) zhou, steve mann 278 the participants also believed that over-reliance on the use of translanguaging could potentially interfere with the students’ learning. 4.2.4. modifications of the teacher’s translanguaging practices analysis of the first set of questionnaires prompted the teacher to make a number of modifications to her translanguaging practices, by incorporating views and expectations expressed by the participants. the process of classroom talk modifications lasted throughout the second term of the academic year, by the end of which the second set of questionnaires had been distributed and completed by the same group of participants. the modifications involved clear quantitative shifts in the use of a number of strategies. the appendix provides examples to illustrate the nature of the changes involved. below is a list of the three features of the modifications: · the teacher reduced the employment of translanguaging strategies in a number of pedagogical moments, including explaining the literal meanings of the text, discussing literature or cultural content directly or indirectly related to the text, and conducting teacher-student interactions. · the teacher increased the employment of translanguaging strategies in other pedagogical moments, including assigning homework and briefing teaching arrangements, as well as explaining answers to after-class exercises. · the teacher maintained the current balance of translanguaging practices when explaining grammar and vocabulary, and telling anecdotes. the researchers calculated the number of instances where each translanguaging strategy was used and the total number of translanguaging instances in all observed sessions. table 2 below presents the percentages of each translanguaging strategy employed in these two ar cycles respectively. although there appear to be slight changes regarding the frequency of using explanatory and attentionraising strategies, these were not significant. table 2 percentages of each translanguaging strategy used in two terms term 1 term 2 explanatory strategies 64% 61% attention-raising strategies 27% 31% rapport-building strategies 9% 8% the data collected regarding students’ attitudes based on the second set of questionnaires focused on two areas: their thoughts on the teacher’s modifications of translanguaging practices and their current beliefs on the teacher’s classroom translanguaging practices in general, as compared to those before the translanguaging in a chinese university clil classroom: teacher strategies and student attitudes 279 changes. of all the 25 respondents, 88% of them (n = 22) had noticed certain changes in the teacher’s language use in class and all 22 participants believed that the changes were positive with regard to their learning effectiveness. when asked to be specific about the changes they had noticed, their answers included the modifications the teacher planned and deliberately implemented but were not exclusively restricted to those measures, such as: · fewer translanguaging practices in teacher-student interactions and text explanation. · the teacher’s use of full english to comment on students’ presentation performance and more translanguaging practices in recounting anecdotes. students’ feedback on the teacher’s translanguaging practices was further explored in the second set of questionnaires with the specific aim of comparing the results before and after the modifications were implemented. the percentage of students who were satisfied with the teacher’s translanguaging practices increased from 80% to 92%. it is worth mentioning that the teacher’s actual use of english by word count and timed analysis in the second term was 87.1%, in contrast to 85.6% in the first term. in this case, the teacher’s translanguaging practices count for less than 15% of the total classroom talk in both the first and second terms. it can thus be argued that such calculations have clearly demonstrated the potential of translanguaging as a valuable linguistic resource – it can be employed in a variety of ways, helps to achieve a wide range of pedagogical purposes, and pays dividends when set against a small proportion of classroom time dedicated to it. 5. discussion one of the most noteworthy findings revealed by the results was as follows. in a classroom where both language and content are the reflexive learning objectives, obtaining insights into students’ attitudes to the teacher’s translanguaging practices and incorporating those attitudes in a process of modifications is highly beneficial. students are more satisfied and supported with the role translanguaging plays in enhancing learning effectiveness and the classroom has become a more mutually beneficial learning ecology. this finding underlines the value and potential of translanguaging as a linguistic and pedagogical resource. in the current research, instead of fixating on which particular language should be prioritized, the priority is placed on the pedagogical moments where translanguaging is actively deployed to facilitate communication, enhance understanding and maintain classroom rapport. this ar study has demonstrated how students’ feedback on the teacher’s translanguaging practices and their views about classroom talk in general can be collected, analyzed and further integrated into the changes that the teacher effects. xiaozhou (emily) zhou, steve mann 280 meanwhile, translanguaging theory suggests that boundaries between different languages are blurred when facing the challenges of the post-multilingualism era. the focus is now placed upon the context in which languages are used interchangeably and are seamlessly woven in the meaning-making process (canagarajah, 2011; cenoz, 2017; li, 2018). the effectiveness of communication becomes the key focus. however, this article takes the view that the artful weaving of two languages is not only a valid strategy to maximize students’ learning but also a useful focus for reflection (mann & walsh, 2017). these pedagogical translanguaging strategies encompass not only the specific blending of one’s multilingual resources on a meta-linguistic level, but also the pedagogical moments (in relation to classroom tasks) in which one decides to employ translanguaging practices, based on a holistic consideration of a range of factors such as learning outcomes and rapport building. the following two sections discuss the findings from the current study based on two main aspects of the research questions: the teacher’s translanguaging strategies and students’ attitudes. 5.1. translanguaging strategies in line with the findings of previous studies conducted in clil contexts, the present study also provided evidence of translanguaging strategies employed for the purpose of simultaneous acquisition of disciplinary content and linguistic knowledge (lin & lo, 2017; moore, 2014; poza, 2018). three major translanguaging strategies were evident in this study: explanatory strategies, attention-raising strategies, and rapport-building strategies. of these, the explanatory strategies, which are usually used to elaborate on grammar, vocabulary and subjectrelated contents, have often been identified in previous studies (li, 2014, 2016; mazak & herbas-donoso, 2015; makalela, 2015; wang, 2019a). attention-raising strategies for the purpose of keeping students alert have been mentioned rarely in previous research, but when used in giving instructions, they serve similar purposes to managerial translanguaging practices (probyn, 2015; wang, 2019a). in addition, rapport-building strategies, though categorized as interpersonal strategies in some contexts with the aim of maintaining a good flow of classroom interactions (nikula & moore, 2019), convey the intent of constructing a supportive and beneficial learning ecology within a group and as a whole in the current research. this was echoed in yuan and yang (2020) where students’ l1 was used as a facilitative semiotic resource to create an engaging learning atmosphere. research into classroom codeswitching has revealed similar functional bilingual/multilingual practices (ferguson, 2003, 2009; lin, 2013; macaro, 2001; van der meij & zhao, 2010). the use of teachers’ and students’ l1 is regarded as translanguaging in a chinese university clil classroom: teacher strategies and student attitudes 281 a pedagogical strategy to enhance learning effectiveness. however, as previously discussed, though translanguaging and codeswitching strategies may bear similarities in form, the theoretical premises and pedagogical implications of conducting research from these two analytical lenses differ significantly. while codeswitching studies tend to accentuate the microanalysis of the functional usage of each language involved as well as the discussion around an optimal l1 (chavez, 2016; macaro, 2009), studies in classroom translanguaging embrace a holistic and progressive view on the linguistic repertoire and previous learning experiences of teachers and students. this is conducted without prioritizing or devaluing any language involved, thus opening up more spaces for teachers to explore pedagogical opportunities which can potentially help students achieve their learning outcomes more efficiently. the findings of the current study indicate that although students may claim that they have a preference for a certain type of teacher talk, in reality it is how and when the teacher proactively puts into service her entire language repertoires, rather than emphasis on any given language, that has an impact on students’ feedback on their learning. it can thus be suggested that in classroom discourse research, the focus should not be limited to the functional usage of one language, but broadened to translanguaging as a pedagogical asset for interactional and communicative purposes. additionally, these three translanguaging strategies may reflect the disciplinary characteristics of this particular educational context, namely the learning of humanities-related knowledge through the medium of english. in order to understand the extent to which discipline-specific differences influence teachers’ translanguaging strategies, more research into translanguaging in emi contexts would be required. 5.2. students’ attitudes and the monolingual approach to teaching as discussed in the literature review, the lack of data concerning students’ attitudes in translanguaging classroom research is evident and requires further study. though lee and lo (2017) attempted to investigate students’ attitudes towards classroom language choice, they approached the issue from the perspective of code-switching and placed the emphasis on its co-relation with learner motivation and english proficiency. to explore teachers’ translanguaging practices in detail privileges one side of the interactional scenario. with little knowledge of how students perceive their teachers’ shuttling between multiple languages, it is not feasible to justify its necessity and evaluate its effectiveness. in the current study, students’ attitudes were obtained from two sets of questionnaires, before and after the teacher made modifications to her classroom language use. it is a step further than wang (2019b) and galante (2020) in the xiaozhou (emily) zhou, steve mann 282 way that students’ feedback is not only collected and analyzed but also incorporated in prompting changes to be implemented. an action-research orientation has provided an extra dimension, where the teacher/researcher had the opportunity to observe and modify her translanguaging practices so as to situate the students in a more efficient and satisfying learning environment. wang’s (2019b) study revealed that a large number of students opted for a monolingual approach to classroom discourse, both from the teachers and the students themselves. however, in the current study, participants unanimously expressed the opinion that making full use of one’s linguistic resources in the form of translanguaging is much more conducive to learning than the traditional monolingual approach. in fact, students consider the teacher/researcher’s rather infrequent (less than 15% of the classroom talk), but well-selected use of the l1 to be successful. one possible interpretation of this finding is that the participants in the current study expect not only an improvement in their english proficiency but also gaining knowledge of the subject content. in this case, their whole linguistic repertoire and previous learning experiences could be a valuable asset in classroom teaching and learning. this might explain why the participants in this study tended to favor a translanguaging pedagogy over the monolingual approach to teaching. 6. conclusion to conclude, the current research serves as a preliminary attempt to explore translanguaging practices and students’ attitudes in a university clil classroom, and more importantly, to examine to what extent and in what way the use of translanguaging strategies can facilitate students’ learning process. data-led consideration of translanguaging can inform “decision-making for building l2 classroom environments that are engaging, demanding, and supportive of learners’ development” (hiver et al., 2019, p. 1). due to the intrinsic nature of an action research framework, the study is limited by the subjectivity of the teacher/researcher and the small group of participants. the lack of data from students’ classroom performance could be considered another limitation of the study. future directions in researching classroom translanguaging can focus on employing translanguaging as an analytical lens to explore teachers’ use of multimodal resources, as well as the implications and effectiveness of drawing upon one’s whole cognitive and linguistic repertoires in emi contexts. it would also be interesting to situate translanguaging studies in foreign language learning contexts where three or more languages are involved. this would deepen our understanding of the interplay of multiple languages and how such interplay could help teachers achieve pedagogical purposes and students improve their learning outcomes. translanguaging in a chinese university clil classroom: teacher strategies and student attitudes 283 acknowledgements we would like to thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers. their constructive and valuable insights have been of considerable help in improving this manuscript. funding this work was supported by shanghai international studies university (grant number 2019114018) and shanghai municipal education commission (grant number c2021236). xiaozhou (emily) zhou, steve mann 284 references antón, m., & dicamilla, f. 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(2020). towards an understanding of translanguaging in emi teacher education classrooms. language teaching research, https:// doi.org/10.1177/1362168820964123 translanguaging in a chinese university clil classroom: teacher strategies and student attitudes 289 appendix examples exhibiting the comparisons of the teacher’s classroom discourse before and after the modifications steps taken to modify bilingual practice examples before modifications examples after modifications to reduce the employment of translanguaging (fuller use of english with fewer references to mandarin) when explaining the literal meanings of the text, discussing literature or cultural content directly or indirectly related to the text, and conducting teacher-student interactions. in this sentence, the author wishes to say that 你会成为机械化野蛮人的新 物种 (you will become new species of mechanized savages), and at the same time, 也会成为会按开关的尼安德特 人 (will also become push-button neanderthal) 这里 (here)，the species of mechanized savages 和 push-button neanderthal 是同位语 (are appositives). here russell uses humor and irony to say that one of his ancestors died of a disease which is now rare. because 被 斩首 (having his head cut off) is not really a disease, correct? but he is using this example in order to contribute to his previous point that he has had many long-lived ancestors. to increase the employment of translanguaging (i.e., more frequent shuttling between mandarin and english) when assigning homework and briefing teaching arrangements, as well as explaining answers to afterclass exercises. in the first half of the term, we are going to cover the first, second and fourth chapters of this textbook. within each chapter, we are going to study the first, second, third and fifth parts in class, leaving the fourth and sixth parts to be studied on your own. from this month on till the end of this term, we will finish 第五、六、八， 这三个单元 (the fifth, sixth and eighth chapters). and as usual, in each chapter, 第四部分和第六部分是自学内 容，考试不考 (part four and six are self-study parts and won’t be included in the exams). to maintain the current balance of translanguaging practices when explaining grammar and vocabulary, and telling anecdotes. “live off” means to provide for one’s needs by taking advantage of someone or something else, 也就是靠什么来供 养，依赖什么而生活的意思 (which is to depend on something, rely on something). 它和live on的主要区别 在于live on表示以什么为主食，靠 吃什么而生活 (its main difference from to “live on” is that to “live on” means relying on eating certain food to survive). “average out” 注意它的用法是 (pay attention that it is used as) average作 动词，且是主动形式 (a verb, and in its active form), so you say: people’s wealth may differ but their sense of happiness tends to average out. 或者 (or) time spent on homework for chinese kids average out to 3 hours per day. 而不会说 (but you don’t say) be averaged out. 67 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (1). 67-92 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl quantifying controlled productive knowledge of collocations across proficiency and word frequency levels déogratias nizonkiza university of antwerp, belgium deogratias.nizonkiza@student.ua.ac.be abstract the present study explores the relationship between controlled productive knowledge of collocations and l2 proficiency, the role of frequency in controlled productive knowledge of collocations, and the quantifiability of controlled productive collocational knowledge growth alongside l2 proficiency and word frequency levels. a proficiency measure and a productive collocation test modelled on laufer and nation (1999) were presented to belgian and burundian english majors. the results show that scores on both tests distinguish between proficiency levels and, furthermore, highly correlate. this suggests that controlled productive knowledge of collocations develops as proficiency increases, supporting earlier studies (boers, eyckmans, kappel, stengers, & demecheleer, 2006; bonk, 2001; eyckmans, boers, & demecheleer, 2004; gitsaki, 1999) that had established a relationship between collocational knowledge and l2 proficiency. the results also show that the more frequent the collocations, the better they are known, which highlights the crucial role played by frequency in knowing words (nation & beglar, 2007). furthermore, the number of collocations added can be quantified and we observe moderate gains at beginner and advanced levels, and impressive gains at intermediate levels. this supports and extends laufer’s (1998) and zhong and hirsh’s (2009) findings and lays basic ground work for teaching collocations, the amount of which should increase with proficiency levels. keywords: quantifying, controlled productive knowledge, l2 proficiency, frequency levels déogratias nizonkiza 68 collocations have attracted increased research attention over the past decades, and four fundamental questions have been examined. while two of the questions, namely, the importance of collocations and the relevance of explicitly teaching them, have been properly addressed and are not contentious issues anymore, the two others, namely, how to teach collocations and exactly what collocations to teach, do not seem to have been properly addressed. over the past few years, a number of studies have demonstrated the importance of collocations in an l2 context (see among others cowie, 1998; granger & meunier, 2008; howarth, 1998; nesselhauf, 2005; pawley & syder, 1983; wray, 2002). collocations have been found to characterise l2 proficiency, with empirical evidence showing that collocational knowledge develops alongside proficiency both receptively (eyckmans, 2009; gyllstad, 2007, 2009; keshavarz & salimi, 2007) and productively (bonk, 2001; eyckmans, boers, & demecheleer, 2004; gitsaki, 1999; nizonkiza, 2011a). subsequent to the growing importance and significance attributed to collocations in research, several calls to teach vocabulary/foreign language with special emphasis on collocations have been made. many scholars have recommended teaching collocations explicitly as a way forward in foreign language teaching (see among others boers, eyckmans, kappel, strengers, & demecheleer, 2006; lewis, 1993, 1997, 2000; martynska, 2004; nattinger & decaricco, 1992). however, neither how to teach collocations nor exactly what to teach have been properly addressed so far. recently, pedagogical experiments have been conducted in order to address the ‘how’ to teach collocations. although no common teaching method has been adopted so far, different studies point to the general observation that raising learners’ awareness of the phenomenon of collocations constitutes the best strategy to adopt while teaching collocations (see among others barfield, 2009; boers et al., 2006; boers & lindstromberg, 2008; coxhead, 2008; jiang, 2009; peters, 2009; wray & fitzpatrick, 2008; ying & o’neill, 2009). two approaches, that is, the awareness-raising and attention-drawing techniques, which are basically similar in nature and which find their theoretical ground in nation’s (2001) three psychological conditions, that is, noticing, retrieving, and generation (coxhead, 2008), have been tried. the awareness-raising approach was trialled in different contexts by means of different tasks, the different studies pointing to the same observation that raising l2 learners’ awareness of collocations is efficient. it helps learners overcome the fundamental problem they have when learning collocations. l2 learners generally attend to individual words, breaking the collocation down into separate units, which impinges on their fluency as they have to reconstruct the words in appropriate pairings at the time of use (barfield, 2009; wray, 2002). this approach, which puts awareness-raising activities at the front in quantifying controlled productive knowledge of collocations across proficiency and word frequency . . . 69 teaching collocations, was felt to be an option to fill the gap in teaching collocations/multiword units. the attention-drawing technique also referred to as the effectiveness of ‘phrase-noticing’ is an approach inspired by lewis’s lexical approach that has been put to the test by boers et al. (2006) among others. boers et al. (2006) measured the possible gains in terms of oral proficiency of participants as a result of phrase-noticing activities in which they had taken part. the authors came to the conclusion that the phrase-noticing approach helps students to recognize chunks/collocations that they are able to use in real conversations, therefore improving their oral proficiency. equally important is the question of ‘what’ collocations to teach, and it is far from being properly addressed. collocation dictionaries, which provide common collocations, are helpful for teachers and l2 learners and can be relied on in this perspective. for instance, an assessment of the the bbi combinatory dictionary of english: a guide to word combinations (benson, benson, & ilson, 2010) and macmillan collocations dictionary for learners of english (2010) shows that they are indeed important for learners and teachers. according to ptaszy ski (2011), the bbi dictionary presents data useful to a heterogeneous audience (students, teachers, translators, writers, etc.) and can therefore be referred to as a one-size-fits-all dictionary. the dictionary provides its users with useful and detailed information particularly important for learners of english who want to improve their productive skills. however, very little is known about the proficiency levels of the learners, the nature of the text they want to write, and their mother tongue, which makes it hard to believe that the data presented in the dictionary and its accessibility match the profile and needs of its prospective users. therefore, the dictionary “. . . remains a dictionary of a linguist, by a linguist, and for a linguist” (ptaszy ski, 2011, p. 151). coffey (2011), who has assessed the macmillan collocations dictionary for learners of english (2010), finds it well planned as a pedagogical dictionary. it offers learners ways to find relevant collocations easily, for instance, by grouping collocates in semantic sets with their meanings provided. however, the dictionary does not have an overview of the collocations on which it focuses and does not draw more attention of learners to collocational patterns such as verb and adjective headwords that lead to noun collocates learners may otherwise overlook. wible, kuo, chen, tsao, and hung’s (2006) tool, namely, the collocator, which basically functions in the same way as collocation dictionaries, was designed in an attempt to help teachers/learners find out which collocations to teach/learn. the collocator is a web-based tool, which once activated, selects and detects the multiword expressions from the british national corpus (bnc) occurring on the webpage a user is viewing. they are highlighted déogratias nizonkiza 70 and presented in pairs. this tool presents a significant turn for extracting and determining which collocations are important, thus helping both learners and teachers to focus on common collocations. however, the large amount of collocations that the collocator detects may be confusing, especially for learners who need to be helped as to which collocations to attend to (wible, 2008). like dictionaries of collocations,1 the collocator does not specify which collocations to teach at which level of proficiency, an issue that needs exploring. in view of the above, i believe that tracking the collocational knowledge growth as proficiency develops and across word frequency bands may be one way to address this question. the present study has been initiated in this light and builds on the established relationship between collocations and l2 proficiency in order to study the measurability of productive collocational knowledge growth. it replicates nizonkiza (2011b) and will pursue the same objectives, namely, (a) the extent to which controlled productive collocational knowledge increases as overall l2 proficiency develops, (b) the extent to which controlled productive collocational knowledge of l2 learners develops according to word frequency levels to which it adds, and (c) the quantifiability of collocations gained according to proficiency and word frequency levels. the first aim of the study was motivated by research findings according to which a strong relationship between receptive collocational competence and l2 proficiency exists (gyllstad, 2007, 2009; keshavarz & salimi, 2007; nizonkiza, 2011a). the pertinent question here is whether or not the same holds for productive knowledge of collocations. the assumption is that the same relationship should be logically found for productive knowledge of collocations (cf. bonk, 2001; gitsaki, 1999), or controlled productive knowledge, in the present case. empirical evidence suggests that productive knowledge always lags behind receptive knowledge (jaén, 2007; laufer, 1998; laufer & paribakht, 1998) and that learning vocabulary in general, and passing from receptive to productive knowledge in particular, is not a linear activity (laufer, 1998; meara, 1996; melka, 1997; read, 2004). i therefore assume that controlled productive knowledge of collocations increases with l2 proficiency, but the gain from one level of proficiency to another is not always significant, a hypothesis that was confirmed in the original study. however, the sample population consisted of three levels of proficiency at the beginner and low intermediate levels and nizonkiza (2011b) suggested replicating the study in order to include more levels, which is the raison d’être of the present study. the second issue explored is the extent to which controlled productive knowledge of collocations is influenced by word frequency, as it has been demon 1 for a comprehensive overview of collocation dictionaries, i refer the reader to handl (2009). quantifying controlled productive knowledge of collocations across proficiency and word frequency . . . 71 strated that the more frequent words are better known at the vocabulary size level (beglar, 2010; nation, 1983; nation, 1990; nation & beglar, 2007) and for receptive collocational competence (gyllstad, 2007; nizonkiza, 2011a). it was shown that controlled productive collocational competence of l2 learners increased from the less frequent to the more frequent word levels in the original study, which will be tested in the present study with more levels of proficiency. a twofold question, not tackled in the original study, has been added. as controlled productive knowledge of collocations grows with proficiency and word frequency levels, it makes sense to reflect about the extent to which we can quantify the collocations gained (a) from one level of proficiency to another; and (b) from one word frequency level to the next. in other words, the following question will be answered: if collocational knowledge develops with proficiency and word frequency levels, is the knowledge acquired quantifiable? in brief, the present study will test the following assumptions: 1. controlled productive knowledge of collocations grows with proficiency, but the gain from one level of proficiency to another is not always significant. 2. controlled productive collocational competence of l2 learners increases from less frequent to more frequent word levels. 3. as collocational knowledge develops with proficiency and word frequency levels, the knowledge added can be quantified and, following the nonlinear nature of vocabulary growth in general (cf. laufer, 1998; meara, 1996; melka, 1997; read, 2004), the gains are dependent on both proficiency and word frequency levels. measuring vocabulary growth research in vocabulary has, among other things, tried to measure vocabulary growth. nation’s (1990) vocabulary levels test (vlt), which requires “learners to match target words to their synonyms or definitions” (read, 2000, p. 171) is the most widely used matching test for this purpose (ishii & schmitt, 2009; read, 2007). it involves word definition matching in either sense, namely, word-definition or definition-word matching. findings from measuring vocabulary size have come up with interesting pedagogic and research implications that are considerable both for teaching and research, enabling syllabus and material developers to (a) design what may be an optimal syllabus, namely, one that brings in optimal conditions for the learning/teaching activities to succeed (laufer, 1998; schmitt, schmitt, & clapham, 2001); and (b) decide on how many words to teach in a unit and how to teach them (read, 2000). they enable researchers to (a) quantify the déogratias nizonkiza 72 threshold instruction for comprehending written materials (laufer, 1998) and (b) use the materials generated for studying the relationship between vocabulary growth and the learning conditions (laufer, 1998). for a complete overview of vocabulary size and text coverage, i refer the reader to nation and waring (1997) and nation (2006). measuring vocabulary growth has been extended to productive knowledge. laufer and nation (1999) adapted the vlt and came up with its active version, which measures the controlled productive ability, where each test item is presented in a sentential context with the first two letters provided and the test-takers’ role is to fill in the missing letters (laufer & nation, 1999). however, whenever two letters can start two words, a third letter is added in order to disambiguate the cue. laufer (1998) used this test in order to compare three types of vocabulary knowledge, namely, receptive,2 free productive, and controlled productive, after one year of instruction. the study involved two groups of israeli english learners with six and seven years of exposure to the language. the study examined the gains in these types of knowledge, how they are related to one another, and the changes that occur in these relationships. laufer (1998) observed that both receptive knowledge and controlled productive vocabulary progressed well, but with more progress at the receptive level, while free productive vocabulary did not progress at all. the receptive vocabulary size was found to be larger than controlled productive size, with a larger gap in the more advanced group. zhong and hirsh (2009) used an adapted version of the controlled productive test to examine the growth of controlled productive knowledge and compare it to receptive knowledge. the study involved high school students in china. the test presented to participants consisted of items selected from the 2000-word, 3000-word, 5000-word levels and the academic word list (awl). it was administered in pre(third week of class) and post-experimental conditions (10 weeks later). as indicated by the findings, both receptive and controlled vocabulary knowledge grow significantly at some word levels after a 10-week course. overall, greater growth was observed at the controlled productive knowledge than the receptive knowledge, but the receptive knowledge was larger than controlled productive knowledge at all the levels. however, the gap between the two lessened after 10 weeks of study. my study is in line with zhong and hirsh’s (2009) study and will measure controlled productive collocational knowledge growth. 2 i adopted the terms mostly used in the literature although laufer (1998) used passive, active, and controlled active. quantifying controlled productive knowledge of collocations across proficiency and word frequency . . . 73 quantifying controlled productive collocational competence across proficiency levels sample population english majors from a university in belgium and in burundi participated in the study. the first data set was collected from english majors in burundi and the results are reported in nizonkiza (2011b). participants from burundi are aged between 20 and 26. they speak kirundi, their mother tongue; french, a language of wider communication in burundi and used in official matters; and swahili (for a few of them), a lingua franca of east africa. they were selected from year one (n = 36), year three (n = 44), and year four3 (n = 36) using the systematic random sampling technique4 (cf. babbie, 1990; dagnelie, 1992). participants sat the tests on three successive days in the following order: year four, year three, and year one. they were invited by their lecturers and sat the tests in two sessions (toefl first and the collocation test afterwards) with a short pause in between (30 minutes). toefl was administered and marked following the educational testing service’s instructions. as regards the collocation test, students were required to follow the instructions and an example was provided. the test lasted 10 to 30 minutes and students were awarded 1 point per correct answer. toefl scores were used in order to determine the proficiency levels of the participants. their scores ranged between 310 and 506 and the mean scores of the groups are 335.17 in level 1; 386.40 in level 2; and 444.63 in level 3 (paper-based toefl total score is 677); levels were confirmed as different by a post-hoc analysis test (scheffe). given the low level of proficiency of participants (from beginner to intermediate), nizonkiza (2011b) recommended replicating the study in order to include more english majors and therefore get more levels of proficiency. then, 100 belgians doing english majors, almost at the end of their first year at the university (end of april), with dutch as their l1, aged between 18 and 20, volunteered to participate. the students were invited through their lecturer in a proficiency course. those who attended the following class a week later participated. i was allowed in 20 minutes before the class ended and presented the test, which lasted 5 to 15 minutes. 3 in burundi, the bachelor degree is organised in four years. year two could not be included in the study because the data was collected towards the end of the year and second year students who had finished their exams were away. 4 according to the technique, every nth subject is selected from a random starting point. déogratias nizonkiza 74 the belgian students had sat an old paper-based version of toefl for other purposes and their level of proficiency was quite high with scores ranging from 493 to 657. the burundian and the belgian data were encoded and put in the same data set. however, 30 of the belgian students who either did not finish the collocation test or who did not have any toefl scores were excluded from the analysis. after merging the two data sets, participants were allocated to proficiency levels on the basis of their toefl scores. bearing in mind bouma’s (1984) suggestion that a group should consist of at least 30 candidates for statistical reasons, five levels of proficiency were distinguished. level 1 (n = 33) scored between 310 and 356; level 2 (n = 42) scored between 360 and 410; level 3 (n = 40) scored between 413 and 493; level 4 (n = 40) scored between 503 and 577; while level 5 (n = 30) scored between 580 and 657. a scheffe analysis test was run and confirmed that the different proficiency levels belonged to different groups. the test battery a controlled productive test of collocations (see appendix b) was developed and presented to participants. frequency of words and their syntactic nature guided the selection and only verb-noun (v + n) combinations were retained. the v + n combinations constitute the collocations investigated in this study for the three reasons explained in gyllstad (2007), namely, (a) they constitute frequent occurrences, (b) they are very difficult for l2 learners, and (c) they contain the most important information for communication. the fourth reason is that when we express ourselves, we do not think of the verb first. we tend to start with the noun, standing for the action we want to do and then think of a verb which goes with it, which stands for how to do the action (oxford collocations dictionary for students of english, 2002). the target words were selected from nation’s (2006) word frequency count, a database of word families based on the bnc and organised in frequency bands of 1000 words each. words were selected from the 2000-word, 3000word, 5000-word levels (cf. nation, 1983; nation, 1990; schmitt et al., 2001), and coxhead’s (2000) awl, which consists of frequent words in academic contexts, but which do not appear in the first 5000 words. the 10000-word level, another level considered by nation and colleagues was excluded, due to the fact that it consists of words deemed to be too infrequent to allow us to learn much from scores at this level, given the proficiency level of the initial sample population (burundians) of the study (cf. nizonkiza, 2011b). ten words (cf. nation & beglar, 2007) were selected from each of the word frequency bands, making a total of 40 target items. the target words, known as nodes, had to be nouns and quantifying controlled productive knowledge of collocations across proficiency and word frequency . . . 75 were selected using systematic random sampling (babbie, 1990; dagnelie, 1992), according to which each nth (100th in this case) word is selected from a random starting point. whenever the 100th word was not a noun, the next noun was selected instead. the next step was to select their collocates (verbs in the v + n combination) from the oxford collocations dictionary for students of english (2002). the frequency of collocates was also controlled and they had to be of higher frequency level than the nodes (cf. gyllstad, 2007) or similar frequency, in case no collocate of higher frequency was found. the whole selection procedure is summarised through the following steps: a noun was selected from nation’s (2006) word frequency count. all the verbs collocating with it in the v + n combination (from the oxford collocations dictionary for students of english, 2002) were listed. their frequency level was checked in nation’s (2006) word frequency count. the verbs of similar frequency level, if not possible to find higher level, were retained. an online collocation sampler,5 which gives different collocates of the node, and information on how many times they appear in the bank of english, how many times they cooccur with the node, and how significantly they do so, was run with the most significant collocate considered for selection. for instance, the collocates of the word accuracy include of, with, be, correct, checked, ensure, lack, predict, fly, and so on, up to the 100th cooccurring word. improve, increase, check, confirm, test, ensure, doubt, and question are presented in the oxford collocations dictionary for students of english (2002) as the relevant v + n combinations. i selected ensure because it belongs to the 1000-word level, being thus more frequent than accuracy, which belongs to the 2000-word level, and collocates with it more significantly with mutual information (mi) of 2.3, higher than the other verbs of the v + n combination. the collocations were presented in a sentential context with the verb to the left of the noun. as regards the format, the test was modelled on laufer and nation’s (1999) vocabulary levels test active version, which presents words in a sentential context. in the present test, once the collocates were identified, authentic illustrations were selected from the oxford collocations dictionary for students of english (2002), which was chosen because it was designed as a learning tool, compiled on the basis of the bnc (frequency of collocations was 5 the collocation sampler is available online at: http://www.collins.co.uk/corpus/corpusse arch.aspx déogratias nizonkiza 76 checked from the corpus), and containing sentences from the bnc, or with minor modifications aimed at making them more accessible to learners, without altering the meaning of the collocations. laufer and nation’s (1999) original test was developed from nation’s (1990) vocabulary levels test and was designed to test the controlled productive ability, which refers to the ability to use a word when compelled to do so by a teacher or researcher, whether in an unconstrained context such as a sentence writing task, or in a constrained context such as a fill in task where a sentence context is provided and the missing target word has to be supplied. (p. 37) the verb was deleted (in each sentence) with the first two letters provided and underlined in order to avoid wildly varying answers (cf. laufer & nation, 1999). test-takers were instructed to complete the underlined word whereon an example was provided so as to ensure transparency (see the example below). instruction: complete the underlined words in the sentences below. example: she is conducting campaigns to at……… new clients. she is conducting campaigns to attract new clients. results controlled productive knowledge of collocations grows with proficiency. the first aim of the study was to measure the extent to which controlled productive collocational knowledge grows with proficiency. as the test-takers were ranked and grouped in five levels of proficiency according to their toefl scores, the collocation test scores were analysed in this light.6 the means and standard deviations are presented in table 1 and show that the same levels are reflected through the collocation test scores with much variability at the beginner levels. the means significantly distinguished between the levels as indicated by the results from a one-way analysis of variance (anova) and its related significance level of 0.000, 2-tailed. post-hoc comparisons that used the scheffe test were conducted and indicate that the mean differences between the different levels (table 2, column 2) and their related significance levels (table 2, column 4) are statistically significant except the difference between levels 1 and 2. what we learn from this finding is that levels 1 and 2 actually belong to one group. 6 although not reported here, reliability of items was measured. the cronbach’s alpha, which is .90, indicates that the test is internally consistent although a few items (5), whose corrected item total correction is below ebel’s (1979) scale cut-off point (.19), need revising. quantifying controlled productive knowledge of collocations across proficiency and word frequency . . . 77 table 1 mean scores on collocation test level n mean sd 1 2 3 4 5 33 42 40 40 30 20.85 21.02 25.85 33.38 36.50 4.18 5.06 4.37 2.46 1.99 table 2 groups set by scheffe test (i) level (j) level mean difference (i-j) std. error sig. 1 2 -.175 .901 1.000 3 -5.002* .911 .000 4 -12.527* .911 .000 5 -15.652* .978 .000 2 1 .175 .901 1.000 3 -4.826* .856 .000 4 -12.351* .856 .000 5 -15.476* .926 .000 3 1 5.002* .911 .000 2 4.826* .856 .000 4 -7.525* .867 .000 5 -10.650* .936 .000 4 1 12.527* .911 .000 2 12.351* .856 .000 3 7.525* .867 .000 5 -3.125* .936 .028 5 1 15.652* .978 .000 2 15.476* .926 .000 3 10.650* .936 .000 4 3.125* .936 .028 *. the mean difference is significant at the 0.05 level. the predictive relationship between collocational knowledge and l2 proficiency was studied further by fitting a regression line (figure 1). the formula of the regression line can be expressed in the following terms: y = b x + a (cf. salkind, 2011), where y = proficiency, expressed by toefl score; b = the slope or direction of the line; x= the score used as the predictor, collocation test in this case; and a = the point at which the line crosses the y-axis. using the coefficients from table 3, the formula can be numerically written as follows: y = 11.215x + 152.826. we can therefore use this equation to predict the level of proficiency, namely, toefl score (y), given any score in the collocation test (x). as figure 1 shows, the regression line has a positive slope, which re déogratias nizonkiza 78 flects a positive correlation (.837, appendix b) between knowing collocations and level of proficiency. then, it appears from this finding, that the more collocations a learner knows, the more proficient he is, suggesting that controlled productive knowledge of collocations grows alongside proficiency level. however, as can be seen from table 2, the post-hoc test put proficiency levels 1 and 2 in the same group, implying that knowledge gained from one proficiency level to another is not always significant. the findings above confirm the first hypothesis of the study, which says that controlled productive knowledge of collocations grows with proficiency, but the gain from one level of proficiency to another is not always significant. table 3 collocation-proficiency regression model model unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients t sig. b std. error beta 1 (constant) 152.826 15.267 10.010 .000 collottot 11.215 .542 .837 20.698 .000 note: dependent variable: toefl (proficiency) figure 1 correlative links between toefl and productive collocation test quantifying controlled productive knowledge of collocations across proficiency and word frequency . . . 79 word frequency affects controlled productive knowledge of collocations. the second issue addressed in the study is the extent to which controlled productive knowledge of collocations of l2 learners develops according to word frequency levels. as words were selected from different word frequency levels, a one-way repeated anova, involving the word frequency levels the collocation test consists of, was performed and results are presented in table 1, appendix a. they show that the overall difference in mean scores is statistically significant as shown by the sphericity assumed correction test and its associated significance level that is 0.000. however, the test (sphericity assumed correction) does not point to where significant differences occur even though it can be seen from the mean scores that the higher the frequency band, the higher the score. the mean is 7.65 at the 2000-word level; it drops slightly to 7.42 and 6.62, respectively at the 3000-word level and awl; while it drops dramatically to 5.53 at the 5000word level. the data were therefore analysed further using the bonferroni post-hoc test, which is a multiple-comparison test that shows where the differences are significant (table 2, appendix a). from the second column (mean difference i-j), we can see that the differences are statistically significant between all the word frequency levels except between the 2000-word and 3000word levels.7 this confirms the second hypothesis of the study, according to which controlled productive knowledge of collocations of l2 learners increases from the less frequent to the more frequent word levels. quantifying collocation gains across proficiency and word frequency levels. the third aim which the study addressed was the quantifiability of collocations gained across proficiency and word frequency levels. in order to quantify additions according to proficiency, means from table 1 were used. the last column shows that means are higher at higher levels of proficiency and range between 20.85 and 36.35. the mean differences between two successive proficiency levels, which are 0.17 from level 1 to level 2, 4.83 from level 2 to level 3, 7.53 from level 3 to level 4, and 2.97 from level 4 to level 5, virtually represent estimates of collocations learners can add from one level of proficiency to another. overall, additions tend to be small at the beginner (between levels 1 and 2) and advanced (between levels 4 and 5) levels, while impressive gains are observed at the intermediate (between levels 2 and 3 and especially between levels 3 and 4) levels, clearly indicating that the additions depend on proficiency levels. 7 in table 2 in appendix a, 1 stands for 2000-word, 2 for 3000-word, 3 for 5000-word, and 4 for awl. déogratias nizonkiza 80 in order to quantify additions according to word frequency levels, means were computed and are presented in table 4. table 4 collocation means across word frequency levels n minimum maximum mean sd 2000-word 185 2 10 7.65 2.01 3000-word 185 1 10 7.42 2.09 awlist 185 1 10 6.62 2.14 5000-word 185 1 10 5.53 2.14 the mean scores in table 4 stand for estimates of collocations likely to be known at each word frequency level. the standard deviations do not differ across the frequency bands although they are slightly lower at higher word frequency levels, levels likely to be better known. according to n. schmitt (personal communication, 2003 as cited in xing & fulcher, 2007), the expected score at an acquired word frequency level should be 80%, which means 8 out of 10 in the present case.8 the scores were weighed against this scale, which shows that learners need to add at least 0.35 at the 2000-word level, 0.48 at the 3000-word, 1.38 at the awl, and 2.47 at the 5000-word. clearly, it will take much more time to take learners to the 5000-word level than to the 2000-word, where they need 2.47 and 0.35, respectively. in other words, more time is needed in order to take learners to a less frequent word band than to a more frequent one, which implies that words acquired depend on frequency bands with more words added at higher ones. the two findings above allow me to confirm the third hypothesis, according to which collocational knowledge added can be quantified and the gains depend on both proficiency and word frequency levels. discussion the present study attempts to measure controlled productive knowledge of collocations, operationalised through verb-noun combinations, across proficiency and word frequency levels. in order to achieve the three aims of the study, a proficiency test (toefl), and a collocation test were presented to belgian and burundian english majors. the first aim pursued in the study is the extent to which controlled productive knowledge of collocations increases as proficiency develops. the proficiency measure used to allocate participants to proficiency groups distinguishes between five different groups, 8 ten words were selected from each word frequency band and students were awarded 1 point per correct answer and 0 points for a wrong answer. quantifying controlled productive knowledge of collocations across proficiency and word frequency . . . 81 the same groups that are also reflected in the collocation test with significant differences. however, the differences between the levels are consistently more moderate at beginning and advanced levels, namely, from level 1 to level 2 and from level 4 to level 5 (cf. table 1), which empirically supports laufer’s (1998) observation that vocabulary growth is slow at beginning levels and gains momentum as proficiency increases. it complements laufer’s study by showing that a plateau in collocations’ growth can be reached, confirming li and schmitt (2009), who did not find any progress in terms of collocation production among advanced chinese learners of english. the study also supports the nonlinearity nature of vocabulary growth (laufer, 1998; meara, 1996; melka, 1997; read, 2004). for these scholars, word acquisition is not a steady progression along a continuum and has shifting and transition zones, especially from receptive to productive knowledge: two levels of word knowledge which i believe characterise proficiency levels of learners. while the present study confirms nizonkiza’s (2011b) findings, it also presents empirical evidence for his assumption that collocation growth is slow at low levels, gains momentum at intermediate levels and stabilises and even reaches a plateau at very advanced levels, an assumption formulated on the basis of laufer’s (1998) and li and schmitt’s (2009) observations above. however, reservation should be made as regards the predictive power of controlled productive knowledge of collocations over l2 proficiency. while controlled productive knowledge of collocations is a predictor of overall proficiency, it may not be a reliable one at beginner levels. the second question addressed in the study is the role of word frequency in controlled productive knowledge of collocations. as the test items were selected from different word frequency levels, the test scores were analysed accordingly and results indicate that the differences in mean scores are significantly different between each two word frequency levels, except between the 2000-word and 3000-word levels. the presence of upper intermediate and advanced learners among the participants may account for the less significant difference between scores at these two word frequency levels that are at the borderline of the frequency cut-off point. according to schmitt et al. (2001), the cut-off point of frequency is the 2000-word level. results also indicate that the higher the frequency band is, the higher the score will be, which highlights the fundamental role played by frequency in knowing words (beglar, 2010; nation, 1983; nation, 1990; nation & beglar, 2007). this finding extends the role played by frequency in word knowledge, which has empirical support at the vocabulary size level, to controlled productive knowledge of collocations. the quantifiability of collocations gained across proficiency and word frequency levels is the third aim of the study. estimates of collocations that déogratias nizonkiza 82 can be added according to proficiency are represented by mean scores differences between each two successive proficiency levels. they tend to be smaller at beginner and advanced levels than at intermediate levels, clearly demonstrating that collocation gains are dependent on proficiency level. as regards collocations gained according to word frequency levels, mean scores at each frequency word band were weighed against schmitt’s cut-off point of an acquired word frequency band. the differences between the actual scores and the cut-off point were found to be minor at higher word frequency bands, gradually becoming more substantial at less frequent word bands. this implies that gains depend on word frequency band and it logically takes less time to take a learner from the 2000-word level to the 3000-word than taking her/him from the 3000-word to the 4000-word for instance. the teaching implication from the above findings is that frequency should definitely be attended to when selecting collocations to teach in addition to learners’ proficiency levels. focus should be put on the most frequent words first, namely, up to the 2000-word level while teaching collocations, which has support at the vocabulary size level (nation, 2006), where it is suggested that the 2000word level should be explicitly taught while the other vocabulary levels can simply be taught through reading. the present study suffers chiefly from two major drawbacks. firstly, the vocabulary size of the participants was not tested by means of a standardised vocabulary size test. this would have allowed me to know whether the collocation test scores at a given word frequency band was low because of individual items or because of collocations, especially at infrequent word frequency bands. it would also have allowed comparing the findings of the present study with those at the vocabulary size level. furthermore, the study did not do any qualitative analysis of the test items, which is the only way to address the main limitations of the test construct, especially when the context and the two letters provided are analyzed. conclusion as discussed above, the results of the study suggest that (a) controlled productive knowledge of collocations develops parallel to l2 proficiency as the same proficiency levels distinguished by means of toefl are reflected through the collocation test scores, (b) frequency is found to play a fundamental role in controlled productive knowledge of collocations’ growth as the test-takers gradually scored better from the less frequent to the more frequent levels, and (c) collocational knowledge growth can be quantified, where the gains are dependent on both proficiency and word frequency levels. quantifying controlled productive knowledge of collocations across proficiency and word frequency . . . 83 the present study has achieved the set objectives, but has also posed challenging questions worth considering in future research. the findings of the study show that more proficient l2 learners do better and that more frequent collocations are better mastered. however, the study did not make any reference to the teaching approaches the participants followed, which was practically impossible given the wide range and background of participants. a follow-up study, more experimental in nature, in associating an approach to teaching collocations and test scores of participants, would tell us more about controlled productive knowledge of collocations and thereby enhance the quality of the present study, which only gave an overall indication of the collocational knowledge growth across proficiency and word frequency levels. moreover, the present study is semi-longitudinal, namely, the participants were specifically selected from different learning levels (year one, year three, and year four among the burundian students) and more proficient participants (belgian students), and the question is whether or not a purely longitudinal study would come up with the same observations. furthermore, the test used provides the first two letters of the word to be supplied (the collocate), which is actually the main limitation of the test; it remains to be seen whether or not the same test taken without the first two letters provided would lead to the same conclusions. it would be interesting to explore this in a follow-up study. extending this study to other types of collocations will certainly yield interesting results too, which will contribute towards modelling collocations better than they are today. in summary, the study has clearly demonstrated that collocational growth follows proficiency levels as well as frequency of words, which lays basic ground work for a collocation-based syllabus. for instance, the oxford collocation dictionary for students of english (2002) and nations’s (2006) word frequency counts considered in developing the collocation test used in the study can also be considered in selecting ‘which’ collocations to teach. this kind of selection along with the awareness raising approaches reported in barfield and gyllstad (2009), boers and lindstromberg (2009), or the cognitive-linguistics-inspired pedagogy reported in boers and lindstromberg (2008) will definitely take this debate a step further, especially now that the question of teaching collocations is much more related to what aspects to teach and how to teach them (granger & meunier, 2008). it is hoped that the study has made a considerable step in this direction. all the above studies, though conducted in different contexts using different tasks, point to the same observation, that raising students’ awareness of collocations improves their knowledge of collocations. my study, which has shown that moderate gains of collocations are found at low and advanced levels while impressive gains of collocations are found at intermediate levels, sheds some light as to finding out exactly déogratias nizonkiza 84 what collocations to teach at which learning stages, namely, deciding on what collocations to teach at which level of proficiency taking into account both word frequency and proficiency levels. acknowledgements this study was successfully completed thanks to the great contribution of prof. kris van de poel from the university of antwerp who has provided constructive criticism from the design of instruments used for data collection up to the present stage. i owe her more than i can express. many thanks are also addressed to prof. piet swanepoel from the university of south africa for his comments on the final draft of the paper. i am greatly indebted to mr daniel sossi who participated in the design of the test and proofread the final manuscript. it would be unfair not to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable suggestions. quantifying controlled productive knowledge of collocations across proficiency and word frequency . . . 85 references babbie, e. r. 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(2009). vocabulary growth in an english as a foreign language context. university of sydney papers in tesol, 4, 85-113. quantifying controlled productive knowledge of collocations across proficiency and word frequency . . . 89 appendix a one-way repeated anova tables table 1 word frequency levels one-way repeated anova source type iii sum of squares df mean square f sig. partial eta squared level sphericity assumed 509.939 3 169.980 119.480 .000 .394 greenhouse-geisser 509.939 2 .874 177.451 119.480 .000 .394 huynh-feldt 509.939 2.924 174.392 119.480 .000 .394 lower-bound 509.939 1.000 509.939 119.480 .000 .394 error (level) sphericity assumed 785.311 552 1.423 greenhouse-geisser 785.311 528.758 1.485 huynh-feldt 785.311 538.034 1.460 lower-bound 785.311 184.000 4.268 table 2 multiple comparisons of means at word frequency levels (i) level (j) level mean difference (i-j) std. error sig.b 95% confidence interval for differenceb lower bound upper bound 1 2 .238 .114 .229 -.066 .542 3 2.124* .121 .000 1.800 2.448 4 1.038* .115 .000 .732 1.343 2 1 -.238 .114 .229 -.542 .066 3 1.886* .139 .000 1.515 2.258 4 .800* .125 .000 .466 1.134 3 1 -2.124* .121 .000 -2.448 -1.800 2 -1.886* .139 .000 -2.258 -1.515 4 -1.086* .128 .000 -1.428 -.745 4 1 -1.038* .115 .000 -1.343 -.732 2 -.800* .125 .000 -1.134 -.466 3 1.086* .128 .000 .745 1.428 a. based on estimated marginal means *. the mean difference is significant at the .05 level. b. adjustment for multiple comparisons: bonferroni. déogratias nizonkiza 90 appendix b correlations between toefl, collocation test and word frequency levels table 3 correlations 2000-word level 3000-word level 5000-word level awlist collottot toefltot 2000-word level pearson correlation 1 .717** .686** .721** .894** .746** sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 n 185 185 185 185 185 185 3000-word level pearson correlation .717** 1 .600** .677** .858** .730** sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 n 185 185 185 185 185 185 5000-word level pearson correlation .686** .600** 1 .670** .850** .700** sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 n 185 185 185 185 185 185 awlist pearson correlation .721** .677** .670** 1 .882** .740** sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 n 185 185 185 185 185 185 collottot pearson correlation .894** .858** .850** .882** 1 .837** sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 n 185 185 185 185 185 185 toefltot pearson correlation .746** .730** .700** .740** .837** 1 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 n 185 185 185 185 185 185 **. correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). quantifying controlled productive knowledge of collocations across proficiency and word frequency . . . 91 appendix c productive collocation test productive vocabulary test name: date: level of study (year): start hour: university: end hour: instruction: complete the underlined words in the sentences below. example: she is conducting campaigns to at……… new clients. she is conducting campaigns to attract new clients. 1. i ha…………… no intention of changing jobs because i am happy where i am. 2. enemy planes were seen to dr…………… bombs along the railway line. 3. they always pa…………… a 10% commission on every sold encyclopaedia. 4. i wonder, this unusual building seems to barely fi…………… the definition of a house. 5. better sa…………… your energy not trying to persuade people who are not interested. 6. she asked him if he could ke…………… a secret before telling him the horrible story. 7. great care is being taken to en…………… the accuracy of research data with good planning, several revisions and rewrites as part of the procedure. 8. she felt she would ma…………… a terrible mess of her life if she were to throw everything overboard now. 9. they did not ge…………… the permit for a street demonstration against university fees they had applied for a couple of months ago. 10. her appointment will fi…………… the gap created when the marketing manager left. 11. they held celebrations to ma…………… the anniversary of mozart’s death. 12. it is common practice that when a song ends, the performer has to ta…………… a bow. 13. they plan to se…………… congratulations to tony on his new job and bought a nice card. 14. we could he…………… a faint echo, before it slowly died away. 15. victory will br…………… glory, fame, and riches to the football team. 16. she inherited all the family precious stones, but she does not like to we…………… jewellery. 17. in may and june, females leave the males to bu…………… a nest and incubate their eggs. 18. she joined the navy where she expects to re…………… the rank of captain before retiring. 19. he is a person who can se…………… his soul to the devil provided he gets money. 20. why didn’t the referee bl…………… the whistle just before he shot the goal; it would have prevented the clash between rival supporters. 21. when she got pregnant at the age of 16, she decided to ha…………… an abortion. 22. the estate expects to ho…………… an auction to raise money. 23. our party should en……………… diversity, not division, in order to attract new members. 24. how do you ex……………… the discrepancies between the money and the receipts? 25. jumbo jets somehow la…………… the glamour of the transatlantic liner which has an impact on the number of passengers. 26. she had a short time to dress and ap…………… lipstick before rushing out to the party. 27. the burglars had to br…………… a pane of the front window to enter the house. 28. he vowed to ta…………… revenge on the man who had killed his brother. déogratias nizonkiza 92 29. they have decided to ch………………. the catwalk stereotype of the skinny model. 30. they called on the government to help pro…………… native wildlife as a response to the major environmental concerns of the century. 31. she was hoping she would not have to gi…………… evidence in court. 32. i can’t re…………… any conclusions from their vague observations. 33. she had to pa…………… some compensation for the damages she had caused. 34. with the new computer, you can ha…………… access to all the files. 35. the mechanic can ma…………… the necessary adjustments to the broken engine. 36. many universities in the uk ch…………… special fees to overseas students. 37. his sound argument will la…………… the foundations for future cooperation between the two countries. 38. we have to fo……………… the safety guidelines laid down by the government. 39. it is the duty of the local community to pr……………… accommodation for the homeless. 40. he was found to su…………… from clinical depression after several months of hospitalisation. 631 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (3). 2020. 631-655 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.3.9 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt teachers’ self-reported l1 and l2 use and self-assessed l2 proficiency in primary efl education eva wilden university of duisburg-essen, germany https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0885-1542 eva.wilden@uni-due.de raphaela porsch university of magdeburg, germany https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1548-3776 raphaela.porsch@ovgu.de abstract this study investigates teachers’ first language (l1, german) and second language (l2, english) use in the primary english as a foreign language (efl) classroom in two federal german states. it particularly focuses on the question of whether a more frequent, (self-reported) use of the l2 is positively correlated to teachers’ professional qualification as well as (self-assessed) l2 proficiency. to this end, data was collected in 2017 through an online survey among german primary teachers teaching efl in year 4 (n = 844). l2 use was assessed through a 4-point likert scale comprising 16 items on various classroom situations. l1 use was surveyed with an open question on situations of l1 use in the l2 classroom. moreover, teachers self-assessed their l2 proficiency with a 4-point likert scale and adapted cefr descriptors for speaking. findings indicate that teachers claim to use the l2 more in l2-related situations and the l1 more in classroom management situations. the study shows that teachers with a higher formal qualification tend to assess their l2 proficiency higher and claim to use the l2 more often in the primary efl classroom. in contrast, teachers with a lower formal qualification tend to assess their l2 proficiency lower and claim to use the l1 more frequently in the l2 classroom. keywords: l1 use; l2 use; primary school; teacher’s language proficiency eva wilden, raphaela porsch 632 1. introduction the guiding principle “as much l2 as possible, as little l1 as necessary” has been widely accepted for instructed foreign language learning (e.g., butzkamm & caldwell, 2009). proponents argue that native language (l1) use can support learning of the foreign language (l2). in contrast, there is the danger of teachers overusing the l1 and thus disadvantaging their learners by providing less l2 input and fewer learning opportunities (turnbull, 2001). prior studies found negative correlations between frequent l1 use and learners’ l2 proficiency (helmke et al., 2008). thus, l2 teachers should make a conscious decision in which situations and for what purposes they revert to the l1. english as a foreign language (efl) teachers’ use of the l1 in the l2 classroom can be explained by factors such as their l2 proficiency or beliefs (e.g., mcmillan & rivers, 2011). moreover, teachers’ perceptions of their learners’ needs, including learners’ l2 proficiency, impact their uses of the l1 or l2. studies investigating out-of-field l2 teachers, that is, teachers who did not major in an l2, found that they use the l2 less frequently, have a lower l2 proficiency (dörr, 2018), and feel insecure when using the l2 (deters-philipp, 2018). the present study was conducted in the german context of primary efl education. it aims to explore in which situations primary efl teachers report using the l1 (german) and the l2 (english). it also investigates if more frequent use of the l2 is positively correlated to the teachers’ professional qualifications as well as their self-assessed l2 proficiency. 2. contextual and theoretical background the context of primary efl education and teacher education in germany will first be sketched out to illustrate the background of the study. second, findings from prior studies regarding primary efl teacher education as well as l1 and l2 use will be summarized. 2.1. primary efl education in germany in germany, the federal states (länder) are responsible for the provision of education. consequently, the 16 german federal states have their own school system with their different curricula as well as teacher training and development agendas. however, in all of the 16 federal states children enter primary education at the age of six and, with the exception of the federal states of berlin and brandenburg, transfer to secondary education at the end of year 4. since the school year 2004/2005, foreign language education – in most states efl – has been obligatory in primary schools across germany. as of 2020, teachers’ self-reported l1 and l2 use and self-assessed l2 proficiency in primary efl education 633 children begin learning a foreign language in the majority of federal states in year 3 and in four states as early as year 1 (rixon, 2013). data for the present study was collected online from primary efl teachers in two federal states with different ages of onset: whereas in lower saxony (los) primary school children begin learning efl in year 3, at approximately 8 years of age, they start as early as year 1 in north-rhine westphalia (nrw), when learners are approximately 6 years old. in both states, curricula stipulate oral skills as one of the main objectives of early efl education (msw nrw, 2008; nkm, 2006). regarding written skills, however, the curricula are slightly different. whereas the los curriculum emphasizes the oral skills (nkm, 2006), the nrw curriculum prescribes a more pronounced integration of written language: teachers are required to provide written language input to support efl learning right from the start. furthermore, in contrast to the los curriculum, the nrw curriculum specifies the expected efl competence levels for both oral and written skills at the end of primary education in year 4 (msw nrw, 2008). the overarching goal of the political decision to introduce primary foreign language education was to further consolidate learners’ language proficiency and, thus, meet the goals of european language policy. however, both the introduction of primary foreign language education as well as the introduction of primary foreign language teacher education has not been empirically evaluated on a large scale (e.g., porsch & wilden, 2017). 2.2. primary efl teacher education in germany teacher education in germany is structured in two phases (cortina & thames, 2013). in the initial phase, prospective teachers study for a master’s degree (or its equivalent). in the second phase, they complete a school-based pre-service training. for primary teacher education, the 16 federal states follow different policies concerning the school subjects future primary teachers are required to study. in almost all states student teachers study three subjects. also, in most states there are requirements as to the subjects they can choose to study (porsch, 2017). in most states, such as for example nrw, trainee primary teachers are obliged to study german (as the language of schooling) and mathematics in addition to a third primary subject. as a result, the route to becoming a primary teacher is very diverse across germany. with the introduction of compulsory primary foreign language education across germany, this diversity of formal teacher qualifications has been further increased by the introduction of yet another option. at the time that this modification came into effect there was an immense lack of qualified foreign language teachers. thus, the federal governments provided short-term, intensive post-qualification eva wilden, raphaela porsch 634 courses to qualify teachers with other majors for teaching primary efl. it should be assumed that to this day the majority of efl learners in german primary schools will learn the language from a teacher who did not major in efl education. in the context of primary efl education it is empirically unclear which effects different formal teacher qualifications have on their learners’ achievement. internationally, a number of studies have investigated whether teacher certification matters (goldhaber & brewer, 2000). these studies are principally based on the assumption that subject-related competence acquired by teachers during their initial teacher education is essential for effective teaching (cf. garton, 2019). this leads to the assumption that learners who learn from teachers qualified and certified for a subject – also called in-field teachers or specialized teachers – are advantaged over those learners taught by out-of-field teachers, or teachers who are formally qualified for a subject or “field” other than the one they are teaching. in the context of primary education in germany, teaching primary efl outof-field happens regularly due to two reasons: a dramatic lack of teachers trained as specialists (see above) and the so-called class teacher principle (porsch, 2020). the latter means that in a given class the same primary teacher will teach almost all subjects. in this context, it should be noted that in most universities student teachers electing to study primary efl will be expected to have l2 proficiency at the c1 level. teachers without an efl certificate can opt to attend an intensive post-qualification course in order to obtain a subject-specific teaching certificate. however, these courses mainly focus on teaching methodology and do not assess or develop teachers’ l2 proficiency. in sum, primary efl teachers with at least three different types of qualifications currently work in german primary schools: 1) those who majored in efl, 2) teachers who majored in other subjects and participated in a post-qualification course for teaching efl, and 3) teachers who majored in other subjects and did not undergo any training in teaching efl. these teachers’ l2 proficiency is not tested at any point; however, primary teachers who majored in efl are likely to be at the c1 level or higher. several studies have identified subject-specific teacher qualification as a factor associated with improved learning outcomes of pupils in this particular subject (e.g., clotfelter, ladd, & vigdor, 2010). however, other studies yielded contradictory evidence and were not able to explain learner achievement by indicators of teachers’ qualification (e.g., porsch & wendt, 2017). the inconclusive nature of prior findings possibly originates in different research designs (see porsch & whanell, 2019) and, more importantly, varying definitions of what constitutes an “out-of-field” teacher or who counts as a “qualified/non-qualified teacher.” the cohort of out-of-field teachers is rather diverse with some “pursuing an interest” (hobbs, 2013, p. 294) by teaching a new subject and possessing subject-specific knowledge, whereas others are “just filling in” (hobbs, teachers’ self-reported l1 and l2 use and self-assessed l2 proficiency in primary efl education 635 2013, p. 294). except for individual characteristics, the provision of support by colleagues and school management potentially reduces the challenges for outof-field teachers (see hobbs, 2013). in efl education, proficiency in the target language is an essential element of the professional competence of teachers. thus, in the context of efl education, learners’ achievement depends largely on their teachers’ l2 skills. in fact, studies indicate the significance of teachers’ l2 proficiency for the development of their pupils’ language skills (e.g., unsworth, persson, prins, & de bot, 2015). in an interview study in german primary schools, deters-philipp (2018) found that efl teachers’ confidence in speaking english is closely related to their formal qualifications. out-of-field teachers tend to feel less secure when using the l2. another study in lower secondary efl education using data from classroom observations and teacher interviews found that out-of-field-teachers use the l2 less and have a lower l2 proficiency than those with a major in efl (dörr, 2018). this is in line with a longitudinal observation study in mexico by izquierdo, garcía martínez, garza pulido, and aquino zúñiga (2016), which found that secondary teachers’ l2 proficiency seemed to play a key role in their classroom l2 use. as these findings suggest, formal teacher qualification ought to be considered a factor in early efl education and the same should apply to its effect on actual classroom teaching and children’s learning outcomes. 2.3. l1 and l2 use in (primary) efl education in this section, prior findings regarding l1 and l2 use in the efl classroom will be reviewed. first, the focus will be on studies investigating actual classroom practice. second, studies investigating learners’ and teachers’ perspective on language use will be summarized. the review focuses particularly on studies in the context of efl education for young learners. however, in some instances the authors also included esl contexts or older learners as they directly relate to the research focus of the present study. across germany, curricula for primary efl education stipulate the l2 as the predominant means of communication in the foreign language classroom (kmk, 2013). however, they suggest functional language use, which means that the l1 may be used as well to support target language learning. this is in line with findings from second language acquisition studies as well as learning psychology which show that the l1 is a central element in acquiring a new language. large-scale observations studies in germany found that secondary efl teachers switch to the l1 on a regular basis and in different situations (desi-konsortium, 2008; ott, 2011). even though the frequency of l1 use by the teachers varies, most teachers claim to be insecure about the potential benefits or disadvantages of eva wilden, raphaela porsch 636 their own l1 use for their pupils (ott, 2011). similarly, the longitudinal observation study by izquierdo et al. (2016) conducted in 37 mexican secondary schools provided evidence that english language teaching is characterized by overreliance on the l1. in many contexts of instructed foreign language learning, teachers are the main source of target language input and function as main role models. thus, too much l1 use by the teacher is likely to reduce l2 learning opportunities and, hence, might have a negative impact on the development of their target language proficiency. on the other hand, there is ample evidence supporting the notion that l1 use in the l2 classroom can support l2 learning. for example, previous studies found that teachers successfully use the l1 to explain the meaning of new words or a grammatical structure (e.g., deters-philipp, 2018; hall & cook, 2013; la campa & nassaji, 2009; macaro, tian, & chu, 2018; nakatsukasa & loewen, 2015; paker & karaağaç, 2015; sali, 2014). in doing so, they use the l1 as a scaffold (bhooth, azman, & ismail, 2014) and to exploit the l1-l2 connections learners often make in their minds (mcmillan & rivers, 2011). it was found that code-switching can support learning target vocabulary and can in particular benefit intermediate learners (lee & levine, 2018; also see tian & macaro, 2012). furthermore, an observation and interview study by la campa and nassaji (2009) found that teachers sometimes use the l1 to facilitate classroom communication and thus support the development of learners’ l2 communicative competence (also see atkinson, 1987; auerbach, 1993). prior studies focusing on the learners’ perspective have provided evidence that learners favor the inclusion of the l1 in the l2 classroom. for example, macaro and lee (2013) in a survey (plus follow-up interviews with a subsample) of elementary and adult learners of english in south korea found that both younger and older learners favor the inclusion of the l1 in the classroom (also see lee & macaro, 2013). particularly relevant in this context, the study found that younger learners welcomed l1 use much more than the adult learners. similarly, the findings by lee and lo (2017) point to the necessity of carefully considering the particular target group when determining the amount of l1 and l2 use. the study found that learners’ ideal l2 self (i.e., the vision of themselves as l2 users in the future) was a stronger predictor of their attitudes towards classroom language choice than their l2 proficiency. shifting the focus to teachers’ perspectives on language choice in the l2 classroom, it is interesting to consider the survey among japanese university teachers of english by mcmillan and rivers (2011), who found that, contrary to official policy, many teachers believed that occasional use of their learners’ l1 could enhance their l2 learning. similarly, la campa and nassaji (2009) offered evidence that teachers believe in the benefit of using the l1 to facilitate l2 learning. teachers’ self-reported l1 and l2 use and self-assessed l2 proficiency in primary efl education 637 in this context, it is interesting to focus on teachers’ reasons for l1 use. for example, deters-philipp (2018) found that teachers sometimes feel forced to switch to the l1, for example, on account of reasons of classroom organization, discipline issues or to avoid misunderstandings. based on the available evidence, cummins (2007, p. 227) summarizes that there is “no empirical justification for any absolute exclusion of learners’ l1 from tl [i.e., target language] instruction.” even in monolingual classrooms, “[like] nature, the l1 creeps back in, however many times you throw it out with a pitchfork” (cook, 2001, p. 405). thus, in germany as well as in many other contexts the following guiding principle has been widely accepted (e.g., bhooth et al., 2014; cameron, 2001; rolin-ianziti & varshney, 2008; shabir, 2017): “as much l2 as possible, as little l1 as necessary.” also, there seems to be a general consensus that the amount of l1 use should slowly decrease while increasing classroom discourse in the l2 (cameron, 2001; hall & cook, 2013). in this context, from a pedagogical point of view, butzkamm and caldwell (2009) argue that l1 use in l2 education allows teachers to create a safe and friendly learning atmosphere, in which learners gain confidence and become less dependent on their l1 (also see auerbach, 1993). they characterize the l1 “as the most important ally a foreign language can have” (butzkamm & caldwell, 2009, p. 24), which values and recognizes the learners’ l1 as a rich learning resource. in view of the above considerations, the present study investigates primary efl teachers’ self-reported l1 and l2 use, with a special focus on teachers’ self-assessed l2 proficiency and professional qualification. in doing so, the study distinguishes between l2-related situations and classroom management situations of l1 and l2 use in primary efl education (atkinson, 1987; auerbach, 1993; cameron, 2001; cook, 2001; hall & cook, 2013; rolin-ianziti & varshney, 2008). this is because the language used by the teacher in the classroom serves various functions. first, in foreign language education the l2 represents the content or subject-matter students learn. second, the quality of language plays an important role for effective classroom management (macías, 2018). other functions are, for example, creating a relaxed learning atmosphere by, for example, using humor. l2-related use of the l1 refers to classroom interactions that focus on teaching or learning the target language. this could, for example, include the provision of corrective feedback in the l1 or situations of l1 use in which there is talk about characteristics of the l2 or meta-cognitive talk. this could also include using the l1 to support individual learners to keep up with the group. classroom management situations of l1 use involve giving instructions, setting up activities or rearranging the classroom. the major objective of l1 use in this regard appears to be saving time as well as increasing time-on-task by ensuring that all learners can follow. in this context, cameron (2001) encourages teachers eva wilden, raphaela porsch 638 to make a conscious decision about which language they use depending on what they consider supportive of learning outcomes. similarly, ott (2011) and inbarlourie (2010) differentiate between motivated code-switching, that is, intended and conscious l1 use in l2 education, and performance switching, that is, spontaneous, unintentional and compensatory l1 use. these motives for teachers’ l1 use in l2 education relate to very typical l2 classroom situations. in the present study, we distinguish between learner-related reasons and teacher-related reasons for l1 use in the l2 classroom. l2 teachers might either use the l1 because they respond to learners’ needs and assume that l1 use in some situations supports individual learners better. in addition, l2 teachers might use the l1 from time to time in order to deal with managerial issues. this in turn may have to do with specific teacher characteristics and less with students’ needs. for example, if teachers lack sufficient subject-specific training and do not have a high level of language proficiency, they potentially feel less confident in using the l2. consequently, out-of-field teachers are more likely to use the l1 in stressful situations, for example, when they need to manage discipline issues. 3. method 3.1. research questions the present study examines the use of l1 and l2 in the context of efl primary education in germany. it extends earlier research by considering different professional qualifications of primary efl teachers as well as their language proficiency in this regard. teachers who are not qualified or not fully qualified to teach english or language teachers with a lower l2 language proficiency are more likely to switch to their l1 in the l2 classroom (deters-philipp, 2018; dörr, 2018; izquierdo et al., 2016). therefore, the study addresses the following research questions: 1. in which classroom situations do primary efl teachers report using the l2 (english) and in which situations the l1 (german)? 2. which reasons do primary teachers give for their use of the l1 in the efl classroom? 3. are differences in the self-reported l1 or l2 use of primary efl teachers related to different professional qualifications? 4. is there a statistically significant relationship between the self-assessed language proficiency of primary efl teachers and their self-reported l1 or l2 use in the classroom? teachers’ self-reported l1 and l2 use and self-assessed l2 proficiency in primary efl education 639 3.2. participants and procedure data was collected in summer 2017 through a computer-based survey among german primary teachers teaching efl in year 4 (n = 844). for all teachers that participated in the study, german was the l1 and english was the l2. all teachers responded to all closed items that were part of the questionnaire. in order to invite participants to the study, the authors e-mailed the school management of all primary schools in two federal states. in this e-mail the purpose of the study was explained and the school management was requested to forward the information on the study to efl teachers at their school. participation in the study was voluntary. eight hundred and nine (n = 809) of the participating teachers were female (95.9 %). they were between 25 and 67 years old (m = 40.86, sd = 10.09). all of the teachers taught primary efl at the time of the survey. with regard to their subject-specific qualification, the following groups can be distinguished: 339 teachers (40.1 %) had a major in efl education, 404 participants (47.9 %) had majored in other subjects but participated in a post-qualification course in primary efl, and 101 teachers (12 %) had majored in other subjects and obtained no further professional training to teach efl. 3.3. instruments in order to answer the research questions, the following data from the questionnaire was considered for analysis: · l2 use in the efl classroom: the 4-point likert scale (1 = “never or almost never” to 4 = “always”) comprised 13 items on various classroom situations (see appendix a). teachers were asked “how often do you use english in the following situations?” the items were adapted from two previous studies, the desi-study and big-study, conducted in germany (barucki et al., 2015; wagner, helmke, & rösner, 2009). however, neither of the studies considered a classification of situations. by considering findings from the qualitative analysis (see below), this study distinguishes between situations that focus on teaching the language (l2-related, 8 items, e.g., “to introduce new words,” ɑ = .72) and those that refer to classroom management activities (classroom management, 5 items, e.g., “in case of disruptions,” ɑ = .71). the correlation between the two scales was moderate (r = .58, p < .001), and thus we opted for a separability of the two dimensions instead of using one scale. · l1 use in the efl classroom: the survey included the following openended question: “are there any situations in which you speak german? and if so, in which?” 563 teachers answered the question. in total, 66 of eva wilden, raphaela porsch 640 the teachers answering this question had obtained no professional training for teaching efl, 282 had completed a post-qualification course in primary efl, and 215 had majored in efl education. the authors can only speculate about why not all teachers responded to this question. it is possible that those who failed to do so were teachers who never used german in their l2 classroom. others might not have answered because they considered l1 use as undesired and thus did not want to reveal their l1 use even if the survey was conducted anonymously. · efl teachers’ l2 proficiency: all teachers were asked to assess their proficiency in english (see appendix a). to this end, cefr descriptors for speaking were adapted (council of europe, 2001; levels a1 to c2; m = 3.38, sd = .56, 6 items, ɑ = .88). the teachers were asked the following question: “to what extent do these statements apply to your ability to speak english?” the teachers could answer on a 4-point likert scale ranging from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 4 (“strongly agree”). 3.4. analysis the statistical analyses were carried out using spss (version 25.0). to compare mean differences between two groups/scales we used t-tests with bonferroni correction. a multivariate analysis of variance (manova) was applied in order to estimate the effects of the independent variable (“qualification”) on the dependent variables (the two situations). as the data from the open question was not normally distributed, non-parametric tests of variance (kruskal-wallis) were used to assess the statistical significance of group differences. the open answers regarding primary teachers’ l1 use in the efl classroom were analyzed with the help of structuring qualitative content analysis (qca; kohlbacher, 2006; schreier, 2012) with the maxqda software package, which allows both an open and flexible as well as theory-guided and systematic approach to analyzing verbal data. the coding frame was developed in a deductiveinductive process right on this dataset (zech, 2019). consistency of the coding frame and data analysis was checked both through cyclical as well as consensual coding (kohlbacher, 2006; schreier, 2012). the final coding frame which was applied to the entire data set comprises six main categories which capture the different dimensions of l1 use in the efl classroom (multiple coding possible): 1) l2-related situations, 2) classroom management situations, 3) other classroom situations, 4) unspecific or unclear answers, 5) learner related reasons, and 6) teacher-related reasons. main categories 1 and 2 were developed theory-based regarding the l2-related and classroom management dimension of l1 use in the foreign language classroom. main categories 3 and 4 were theory-guided teachers’ self-reported l1 and l2 use and self-assessed l2 proficiency in primary efl education 641 as well as data-driven but will not be further considered here as they do not relate to the focus of the present study. main categories 5 and 6 were derived from the data as participants’ answers not only related to situations but in some instances also gave reasons for the their decision to use the l1 (see section 4.3). for each main category, a set of subcategories was developed in a deductive-inductive process in order to capture the different aspects of each dimension. as some responses were assigned to more than one category, there was a total of 1,122 codings. sixty eight (n = 68) answers were unclear or unspecific and could not be further considered in the analysis (main category 4). one hundred and fifty seven (n = 157) answers were assigned to main category 3) other classroom situations. 4. findings 4.1. teachers’ l2 use in the primary efl classroom the means for the two scales and all participants of the survey (see table 1) indicated that teachers used the l2 (english) in their classroom most frequently in situations focusing on the target language and less often in classroom management situations. the difference was statistically significant (p < .001). the mean value of l2 usage in classroom management situations was comparably low (m < 3), but indicated that the teachers did use the l2 for classroom management purposes as well. table 1 means (and standard deviations) of l2 (english) use of primary efl teachers in l2-related or classroom management situations all teachers (n = 844) (1) teachers with no professional training in efl (n = 101) (2) teachers with a post-qualification course in efl (n = 404) (3) teachers with efl major (n = 339) l2-related situations 3.21 (.36) 3.07 (.43) 3.15 (.36) 3.32 (.31) classroom management situations 2.81 (.50) 2.70 (.48) 2.73 (.49) 2.94 (.49) a multivariate analysis of variance (manova) showed a main effect for teacher qualification (f(2, 843) = 31.526, p = .001, ƞ2 = .07 and f(2, 843) = 20.388, p = .001, ƞ2 = .05), respectively. comparisons between the three groups (t-tests with bonferroni correction) confirmed that there were statistical differences of group mean scores (p < .001), with the exception of the means for l2 use between group 1 and group 2 in both l2-related (p = .086) and classroom management situations (p = 1.00). the mean comparisons suggested that a higher professional qualification in teaching efl was related to a more frequent use of l2 in the primary school classroom. eva wilden, raphaela porsch 642 4.2. teachers’ l1 use in the primary efl classroom the open answers regarding teachers’ use of the l1 (german) in their efl teaching were coded according to the qca coding frame. in the following, the focus will be on findings in main categories (1) l2-related situations and (2) classroom management situations. in total, 351 teachers’ answers were coded as l2-related (see table 2) and 404 as classroom management situations (see table 3) of l1 use in the primary efl classroom. thus, there was a slight majority of answers relating to aspects of classroom management. when comparing this dimension to l2-related situations, it is interesting to see that the latter were spread over several sub-categories: almost 30% of the teacher answers related to using the l1 to explain words, phrases or larger units of meaning, for example: “[i use german] when i don’t get on with gestures and facial expressions. . .“ (1.1; our translations). approximately 26% of the answers related to explaining grammar aspects and about 12% referred to situations in which learners failed to mediate or translate to the l1, for example: “when there are huge difficulties in understanding and not even a very good pupil can translate“ (1.4). about 15% of the answers referred to using the l1 to support individual learners in their l2 learning, for example: “after storytelling to ensure comprehension of weaker learners“ (1.7). fewer answers related to l1 use to talk about characteristics of the l2, about l2 learning processes or aspects of testing and assessment. table 2 l1 (german) use of primary efl teachers in l2-related classroom situations (answer to open question, multiple answers possible) sub-category all teachers (n = 563) (1) teachers with no professional training in efl (n = 66) (2) teachers with post-qualification course in efl (n = 282) (3) teachers with efl major (n = 215) % n % n % n % n 1.1 explaining words or meaning 29.9 105 37.5 15 35.0 57 22.3 33 1.2 explaining grammar 25.9 91 20.0 8 24.5 40 29.1 43 1.3 talk about l2 4.3 15 10.0 4 3.7 6 3.4 5 1.4 failed mediation by learners 11.7 41 7.5 3 11.7 19 12.8 19 1.5 meta-cognitive talk 5.4 19 2.5 1 4.3 7 7.4 11 1.6 testing or assessment 7.7 27 2.5 1 7.4 12 9.5 14 1.7 individual support 15.1 53 20.0 8 13.5 22 15.5 23 total 351 40 163 148 teachers’ self-reported l1 and l2 use and self-assessed l2 proficiency in primary efl education 643 in addition, the kruskal-wallis-test (a rank-based nonparametric test as an alternative to the one-way anova) was used to test for statistically significant differences between the three groups in the frequency of l1 use in the various l2-related situations (codes 1.1 to 1.7). the analysis found no significant differences for l1 use in l2-related classroom situations between the groups of teachers with different professional qualifications (code 1.1: χ2(2) = 2.717, p = .257; code 1.2: χ2(2) = 3.939, p = .140; code 1.3: χ2(2) = 3.338, p = .188; 1.4: χ2(2) = 1.623, p = .444; 1.5: χ2(2) = 3.382, p = .184; 1.4: χ2(2) = 3.117, p = .210). the classroom management dimension had two clear foci of l1 use in the primary efl classroom. more than 48% of teacher answers related to aspects of giving instructions, such as explaining activities or setting up the classroom, for example: “for very complex tasks“ (2.1). almost 35% referred to situations linked to keeping up classroom discipline, for example: “when there are persistent disruptions of the lesson“ (2.3). table 3 l1 (german) use of primary efl teachers in classroom management classroom situations (answer to open question, multiple answers possible) sub-category all teachers (n = 563) (1) teachers with no professional training in efl (n = 66) (2) teachers with post-qualification course in efl (n = 282) (3) teachers with efl major (n = 215) % n % n % n % n 2.1 giving instructions 48.3 195 50.0 22 55.1 109 39.5 64 2.2 lesson transparency 1.5 6 6.8 3 1.0 2 .6 1 2.3 classroom discipline 34.7 140 29.5 13 30.8 61 40.7 66 2.4 only in year 1 and 2 3.7 15 2.3 1 3.0 6 4.9 8 2.5 general organization 11.9 48 11.4 5 10.1 20 14.2 23 total 404 44 198 162 again, the kruskal-wallis-test was applied to test for significant differences between the three groups of teachers with different professional qualifications regarding their l1 use in classroom management situations (codes 2.1 to 2.5). the analysis found significant differences between the three groups of teachers for the code 2.2 “lesson transparency” (χ2(2) = 8.640, p = .013) and code 2.3 “classroom discipline” (χ2(2) = 6.2425, p =.040). however, as there were no equal variances between the groups, pairwise multiple comparison were conducted by using dunnett’s c, a test that is appropriate when the variances are unequal. the analysis did not show any statistically significant differences. also, eva wilden, raphaela porsch 644 for no other code were significant differences between the different groups identified (code 2.1: χ2(2) = 4.302, p = .116; code 2.4: χ2(2) = 1.572, p = .456; code 2.5: χ2(2) = 2.116, p = .347). 4.3. reasons for teachers’ l1 use in the primary efl classroom analysis of teachers’ answers regarding their l1 use in the primary efl classroom showed that some also gave reasons for such use, even though the question had only asked for classroom situations. in the qca, a total of 72 answers were assigned to main category learner-related reasons and 46 (see table 4) to teacher-related reasons (see table 5). in the learner-related dimension, the subcategories with most codings were support individual learners (n = 23, 31.9 %) and keep affective barriers low (n = 27, 37.5 %), for example: “to encourage them, reduce inhibitions” (5.5, our translations). table 4 learner-related reasons for teachers’ l1 (german) use in the primary efl classroom (answer to open question, multiple answers possible) sub-category all teachers (n = 563) % n 5.1 l1 & l2 development 9.7 7 5.2 raise language awareness 11.1 8 5.3 support individual learners 31.9 23 5.4 keep learners’ focus 9.7 7 5.5 keep affective barriers low 37.5 27 total 72 table 5 teacher-related reasons for teachers’ l1 (german) use in the primary efl classroom (answer to open question, multiple answers possible) sub-category all teachers (n = 563) % n 6.1 keep lesson going 8.7 4 6.2 saving time 54.3 25 6.3 emphasize teacher authority 17.4 8 6.4 lack of word knowledge 19.6 9 total 46 in the teacher-related dimension, the sub-category with most codings was saving time (n = 25; 54.3%), for example: “when i’m running out of time.” in the context of this study, it was particularly interesting to note the small number of responses in which teachers quite openly admitted to using the l1 in order to compensate for a lack of l2 proficiency, for example: “when i don’t know the teachers’ self-reported l1 and l2 use and self-assessed l2 proficiency in primary efl education 645 right [english] word“ (6.4; our translation). because of the small number of responses regarding teachers’ reasons for using the l1 in the l2 classroom, we do not report differences by teacher qualification in this regard. 4.4. relationship between teachers’ l2 proficiency and their l1 or l2 use in the present study, teachers were asked to self-assess their l2 (english) proficiency for speaking in addition to reporting on their l1 and l2 use in the primary efl classroom. the pearson correlation between self-assessed l2 proficiency and self-reported target language use in l2-related situations was about .29 (p < .001) and in classroom management situations .32 (p < .001), which indicates a small positive relationship between these variables. in other words, the higher the teachers self-assess their l2 (english) proficiency, the more often they use the l2 in the primary efl classroom. in order to analyze the relationship between teachers’ l2 proficiency and l1 use in the classroom, the quantitative and qualitative data from the present study were merged. the spearman correlation shows only in one case a significant relationship between (the absolute frequency of) l1 (german) use in the efl classroom and teachers’ self-assessed l2 (english) proficiency significant on a 99% level: there was a negative correlation of -.15 (p < .001) between giving instructions as a classroom management situation and teachers’ self-assessed l2 proficiency (all correlations are reported in the appendix b). this indicates that the likelihood of giving instructions in the l1 (german) was higher the lower teachers self-assessed their l2 (english) proficiency for speaking. thus, to further explore the relationship between teachers’ professional qualification for teaching efl and their l2 proficiency, the correlation coefficient was estimated for these two variables. the analyses found a significant correlation of .39 (p < .001) between the two variables (professional qualification for efl and l2 proficiency). this indicates that primary efl teachers with a higher professional qualification for teaching efl were those who self-assess their l2 proficiency higher; also, they tended to use the l1 less often in the efl classroom than their colleagues who were formally less qualified. 5. discussion this study investigated teachers’ use of l1 and l2 in the context of primary efl education in two german federal states. it extends earlier research on language use in the l2 classroom by considering different professional qualifications of primary efl teachers as well as their self-assessed language proficiency. to this end, primary efl teachers were surveyed on their l1 (german) and l2 (english) eva wilden, raphaela porsch 646 use in the classroom, on their professional qualification and on their self-assessed l2 proficiency. similar to previous studies (desi-konsortium, 2008; izquierdo et al., 2016; ott, 2011), the present investigation found that primary efl teachers reported using both l1 and l2 in the l2 classroom. they reported to use the l2 more in classroom situations focusing on target language learning. in addition, the study found that primary efl teachers claimed to use the l1 more in classroom management situations. these findings indicate that many primary efl teachers make a conscious decision as to when they use the l1 or l2, as suggested by various authors (e.g., cameron, 2001; ott, 2011). the fact that the teachers claimed to use the l2 more in target language situations and the l1 more for classroom management indicates that teachers consider both the need to provide their learners with ample l2 learning opportunities and follow a learner-centered approach by using the l1 as a form of scaffolding. this is in line with findings from prior studies which identified teachers’ positive attitudes towards l1 use in the l2 classroom (la campa & nassaji, 2009; mcmillan & rivers, 2011). at the same time, the findings are in line with previous findings that teachers sometimes feel forced to switch to the l1 for classroom management aspects (deters-philipp, 2018). focusing on primary efl teachers’ professional qualifications and selfassessed l2 proficiency, the study found the following: the higher primary efl teachers’ professional qualification, the higher they tend to self-assess their l2 proficiency and the more often they claim to use the l2 in the classroom. and, similarly, the lower primary efl teachers’ professional qualification, the lower they tend to self-assess their l2 proficiency and the more often they report to use the l1 in the classroom. these findings are in line with those in previous studies, which suggests that teachers with lower l2 proficiency use the l1 more often in the l2 classroom (izquierdo et al., 2016). furthermore, prior studies identified lower l2 proficiency among out-of-field (primary) efl teachers, who feel less secure in using the l2 and use the target language less in their l2 teaching (deters-philipp, 2018; dörr, 2018). considering that teachers’ target language proficiency seems to be significant for their pupils’ l2 development (e.g., unsworth et al., 2015), the apparent (self-assessed) lower l2 proficiency of outof-field efl teachers should be a reason for concern among educational policymakers. in short, the less input students receive in the l2, the fewer learning opportunities they have, which can lower their potential learning growth. this assumption is supported by a large representative study from germany which demonstrated that year 9 learners who were taught efl by out-of-field teachers are considerably less proficient in l2 reading and listening comprehension than those taught by specialist efl teachers (hoffmann & richter, 2016). teachers’ self-reported l1 and l2 use and self-assessed l2 proficiency in primary efl education 647 this study has some shortcomings that need to be acknowledged. thus, at the methodological level, the sample was not representative as participation was voluntary. in effect, the authors assume that primarily those teachers participated who were motivated and interested in the topic. another limitation is the fact that, for pragmatic reasons, only self-reported data were used, particularly regarding the teachers’ l2 proficiency but also regarding their actual l1 and l2 use. this relates to questions of validity, since teachers might have responded in a way they thought the researchers expected. preferably, future research initiatives in this area ought to assess teachers’ l2 proficiency (e.g., by using standardized language tests) and investigate their actual language use as well as teaching methods through classroom observations (e.g., by rating teachers’ language use). at the content level, a number of limitations need to be considered as well. firstly, the study only focused on teachers’ use of the l1 and the l2. in doing so, it disregarded how teachers actually understand and integrate their learners’ utterances in the l1. the l1 is an important variable in children’s l2 learning processes. if efl teachers are unable to comprehend their learners’ l1, for example in the context of this study with children growing up with l1s other than german, this might disadvantage learners. secondly, the teachers’ open responses revealed a lot about their teaching methods and beliefs, but the exploration of that data was beyond the scope of this paper. as teachers’ beliefs are closely linked to their teaching behavior, this aspect might be considered in future studies. 6. conclusion findings of this study are highly relevant in the current context of primary efl education in germany, especially regarding the ongoing political and public debate on this school subject (wilden & porsch, 2020). for example, due to teacher shortage, the current federal government of nrw has specifically encouraged out-of-field teachers (so-called seiteneinsteiger) to take up positions as primary efl teachers. at the same time, it is considering plans to move the start of efl education from year 1 back to year 3. in the light of this political debate, the authors suggest considering findings from the present study as arguments for the employment of fully qualified primary efl teachers. finally, further research initiatives are needed to investigate both teachers’ l2 proficiency in relation to other aspects of primary efl education and the effects of primary efl teachers’ qualifications on their learners’ l2 proficiency. acknowledgments we thank the anonymous reviewers for their highly helpful comments and suggestions. the authors are indebted to the following persons for their invaluable eva wilden, raphaela porsch 648 support in collecting and processing data for this study: janina ehmke (essen), natalie hofstra (essen), benjamin möbus (vechta), rebecca schlieckmann (paderborn), and jule zech (essen). teachers’ self-reported l1 and l2 use and self-assessed l2 proficiency in primary efl education 649 references atkinson, d. 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(2019). primary efl teachers’ language use in class: an empirical study. essen (unpublished master thesis). university of duisburg-essen, germany. teachers’ self-reported l1 and l2 use and self-assessed l2 proficiency in primary efl education 653 appendix a items from the teacher questionnaire l2 use in the efl classroom: “how often do you use english in the following situations?” scales i use the english language… never or almost never rarely often always cm …for discipline issues in my class. cm …for organisational matters. l2 …when discussing familiar grammatical issues. l2 …to introduce new grammatical issues. l2 …to introduce new words. l2 …to introduce new intercultural phenomena. cm …when i return tests. cm …to give instructions. cm …to explain group work. l2 …to welcome the class. l2 …to say goodbye to the class. l2 …for corrective feedback. l2 ...to praise the learners. notes: l2 = l2-related situations = l2; cm = classroom-management situations. efl teachers’ l2 proficiency: “to what extent do these statements apply to your ability to speak english?” strongly disagree disagree agree moderately strongly agree i can use simple phrases and sentences and make simple descriptions. i can use a series of phrases and sentences to describe in simple terms my family and other people, living conditions, my educational background and my present or most recent job. i can connect phrases in a simple way in order to describe experiences and events, my dreams, hopes, and ambitions. i can briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans. i can narrate a story or relate the plot of a book or film and describe my reactions. i can present clear, detailed descriptions on a wide range of subjects related to my field of interest. i can explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options. eva wilden, raphaela porsch 654 i can present clear, detailed descriptions of complex subjects integrating sub-themes, developing particular points and rounding off with an appropriate conclusion, i can present a clear, smoothly-flowing description or argument in a style appropriate to the context and with an effective logical structure which helps the recipient to notice and remember significant points. teachers’ self-reported l1 and l2 use and self-assessed l2 proficiency in primary efl education 655 appendix b spearman correlations between (self-assessed) language proficiency and situations of teachers’ (self-reported) l2 usage in the classroom l2-related classroom situations l2-language proficiency 1.1 explaining words or meaning r = -.036 (p = .435) 1.2 explaining grammar r = .055 (p = .225) 1.3 talk about l2 r = .085 (p = .061) 1.4 failed mediation by learners r = .076 (p = .093) 1.5 meta-cognitive talk r = .055 (p = .226) 1.6 testing or assessment r = .042 (p = .361) 1.7 individual support r = .109 (p = .016)* classroom management situations language proficiency 2.1 giving instructions r = -.152 (p = .0005)** 2.2 lesson transparency r = .030 (p = .511) 2.3 classroom discipline r = -.084 (p = .065) 2.4 only in year 1 and 2 r = .059 (p = .192) 2.5 general organization r = .028 (p = .543) notes: ** means p < .001, * p < .05; n = 563. 157 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (2). 2022. 157-171 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.2.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial: introduction to the special issue on conducting research syntheses on individual differences in sla we dedicate this study and the special issue to zoltán dörnyei, the most eminent hungarian applied linguist. 1. introduction as systematic research syntheses and meta-analytic studies are becoming more prominent in the social sciences, especially in the fields of psychology and education, it appears that applied linguists have also started to follow suit (in’nami et al., 2019). one of the main reasons for this is that abundant knowledge has accumulated through the years about second and foreign language (l2) learning and teaching, making the time ripe to systematically synthesize the research findings in order to draw further conclusions and identify paths future studies could take. this is also true for the subfield of individual differences (ids) research within applied linguistics, where proliferation in the number of studies focusing on individual learner differences with respect to a large variety of issues has been witnessed in the past decades. hence, we saw it timely to compile a special issue on research synthesis in the subfield of ids in l2 learning. we formulated the following aims to guide our venture: first of all, we intend to inform scholars of the nature and utility of research syntheses in our field. second, we hope that the articles included in the special issue would serve as examples for researchers wishing to embark on conducting similar studies. our third and not negligible aim was to see what tendencies regarding particular individual differences can be outlined based on previous research results. in order for the readers to make the most of these articles, in this editorial introduction we would like to articulate how we see the role of research synthesis in general and meta158 analysis in particular in our field. to this end, we will offer relevant definitions and a short discussion on their utility. we will then move on to outline very generic guidelines for conducting systematic research syntheses, and, finally, we will summarize the studies included in the volume and their contribution to the field of research on ids. 2. definition of research synthesis in applied linguistics it is common to summarize and synthesize literature available on a given topic in order to set the ground for our own empirical work. indeed, most researchers have compiled literature reviews at the beginning of papers reporting on empirical research in the form of narratives, to provide an overview of a field or subfield and to identify a research niche (either in the form of a gap in our knowledge, an area where evidence has been found to be conflicting, or the emergence of a new phenomenon, which we know very little about) (chong & plonsky, 2021b). usually, these reviews of literature are left to the discretion of the author to select and argue for the necessity of their own empirical work; hence, the works chosen and the way in which their findings are presented rely heavily on the authors’ knowledgeability and stance. since the turn of the millennium, scholars have started to call for more systematic overviews of literature as opposed to narrative reviews (e.g., norris & ortega, 2006; oswald & plonsky, 2010) that aim to synthesize what can be known about a particular issue in our field in a more objective manner with the purpose of aggregating the findings, identifying trends or inconsistencies, and outlining future directions in research. norris and ortega (2006) label such reviews as research syntheses and identify them as “pursu[ing] systematic (i.e., exhaustive, trustworthy, and replicable) understandings of the state of knowledge that has accumulated about a given problem across primary research studies” (p. xi). this is also the definition that we abided by when putting together the call for this special issue. the main reason for our choice lies in the fact that norris and ortega (2006) hold a non-restrictive view on the possible forms of research synthesis (including e.g., meta-analyses, meta-syntheses, qualitative comparative analyses, methodological syntheses). they suggest that the content being synthesized and the purpose of the synthesis is what should be key, with an emphasis on systematicity in selecting the content of the review as well as in analyzing and interpreting the empirical findings. for our purposes, we decided to cast a wide net in terms of research synthesis on ids and invited contributions to the special issue that were either focused on particular areas of individual differences research, in other words were substantive in nature (li & wang, 2018), or had a methodological focus in the form of methodological syntheses (li & wang, 2018). within 159 these types of syntheses, we considered papers presenting systematic quantitative as well as qualitative reviews of both quantitative and qualitative empirical studies within individual differences research focusing on primary studies’ results and/or the methods used. 3. utility of research syntheses when discussing the utility and merits of research syntheses, we would like to juxtapose such works with traditional literature reviews. therefore, first it is important to provide a brief overview of the traditional literature review. the main aim of these reviews is to establish the construct validity of an empirical study (dörnyei, 2007) and provide a convincing argument about the necessity and rationale of the research niche presented in this study. as empirical studies are conducted in various research contexts, there is no need for an overview of the entire research field, but it is usually necessary to provide contextually relevant information. in addition, a traditional literature review can serve as a basis for a theoretical analysis in which a problem is solved by critically synthesizing various lines of previous research studies. this is in contrast with the main aim of any research synthesis, as stated earlier in this article, to provide an exhaustive overview of the given field of inquiry. as li and wang (2018) outline the characteristics of such research synthesis, it becomes clear that these types of studies stand on their own in an attempt to answer specific research questions. in this process, data includes previous research studies with transparent selection criteria and clearly outlined analytical steps. the write-up follows the structure of research studies and remains objective rather than critical; hence the quality of previous studies has a direct impact on the quality of the research synthesis (see albert & csizér, this special issue). we are in agreement with li and wang’s (2018) view who convincingly argue that “traditional reviews and research syntheses have merits, that they serve different purposes, and that they do not have to be mutually exclusive” (p. 124); therefore, it is important to retain their separate roles in good quality research projects. the exhaustive perspective of research synthesis should be counterbalanced by the critical appraisal of the traditional literature review. in addition, traditional literature reviews should try to avoid the subjective selection of articles to serve one’s own purposes and instead establish the validity of a given study by providing as broad an overview as necessary. 4. types of research syntheses as scholars in various overviews have suggested, there are different ways research syntheses in applied linguistics can be categorized in terms of their focus 160 and approach (e.g., chong & plonsky, 2021b; li & wang, 2018). first of all, here we would like to make a distinction between substantive and methodological syntheses. according to li and wang (2018), “substantive syntheses seek to aggregate the results of primary studies and reach conclusions about whether an instructional treatment is effective or a certain relationship exists or how frequently a certain phenomenon occurs” (p. 132), while a “methodological synthesis provides a survey of one or more methodological aspects of the primary research with a view to evaluating whether current practices meet certain criteria and what improvements can be made” (p. 132). both types of research syntheses can be further categorized according to their approaches being quantitative or qualitative. however, other taxonomies of secondary research types also exist. in their most recent overview, chong and plonsky (2021b) describe altogether 13 different types of secondary research studies. since reviewing all these is beyond the scope of this introduction, we would only like to highlight below those that are directly relevant to our current discussion. a special type and probably mostly widely known quantitative approach to research synthesis with a substantive focus is meta-analysis, which “involves the statistical analysis of the results from more than one study” (card, 2012, p. 5). more specifically, it uses quantitative methods to synthesize and analyze findings of (quantitative) primary studies with the aim of formulating more general conclusions about the issue under scrutiny. it mainly relies on making inferences from effect sizes as reported or calculated from the reported results of primary studies. this means that meta-analysis is not concerned with analyzing raw data but rather scrutinizes results of several empirical data analyses on the same subject (card, 2012) or the same construct in order to identify trends at a more general level. as such, li et al. (2012) state that “meta-analysis is a statistical method used to synthesize the cumulative effect of an interventional treatment or a certain relationship that has been subjected to empirical investigation” (p. 1). the quantitative approach of this type of research synthesis aims to ensure the quality and minimize the subjectivity of the conclusions drawn. within the subfield of individual differences research, several studies focusing on motivation (e.g., al-hoorie, 2018; masgoret & gardner, 2003; mendoza & phung, 2019; yousefi & mahmoodi, 2021), learning strategies (e.g., donker et al., 2014; plonsky, 2011), aptitude (e.g., li, 2015), age (e.g., qureshi, 2016), language anxiety (e.g., botes et al., 2020; teimouri et al., 2019; zhang, 2019) and willingness to communicate (elahi shirvan et al., 2019; jin & lee, 2022) fall into this type of review of primary research. in the current special issue, besides focusing on language anxiety (piniel & zólyomi, this special issue), the paper by botes et al. provides a meta-analysis on research concerning foreign language enjoyment, while goetze and driver’s paper focuses on synthesizing research on self-efficacy and achievement. 161 although statistical methods offer a relatively straightforward way of aggregating research results of quantitative studies, synthesizing the findings of qualitative studies originating from various research traditions and employing a wide range of data collection and interpretation techniques appears to be more troublesome. acknowledging the potential problems involved, norris and ortega (2006) argue that both quantitative and qualitative summaries of qualitative research findings have been attempted. they claim that quantitative synthesists “superimpose a (post)positivist lens onto a body of interpretive qualitative studies” (norris & ortega, 2006, p. 12) in a way that qualitative information is recoded into variables and subjected to statistical analysis. however, the approach, which is probably more in line with the philosophical stance of qualitative researchers, is adopted when a qualitative research synthesis is created. this involves synthesizing the findings of the different qualitative studies with the help of a qualitative analytical technique like the constant comparison method of grounded theory (maykut & morehouse, 2002) as stated by norris and ortega (2006) and chong and plonsky (2021a). as was explained above, both meta-analyses and qualitative research syntheses comprise rather specific groups of studies within the larger category of research syntheses. in the former, the results of quantitative studies are summarized using statistics, while the latter refer to the aggregation of qualitative research evidence employing qualitative methods. besides these, there can be many other options when providing a systematic overview of empirical studies. since none of the remaining review types utilize statistical tests as part of their analytical procedures, they are frequently viewed as employing qualitative analyses despite the fact that their results are often numerical and are based on tallying the occurrence of different constructs, variables, or features. some of these research syntheses aim to assess the range and quality of studies conducted so far in order to provide an updated literature search and offer the possibility of informing new research questions without the authors focusing on the aggregation of effect sizes (e.g., on motivation research, see boo et al., 2015 and mahmoodi & yousefi, 2021; on directed motivational currents, see jahedizadeh & al-hoorie, 2021; on aptitude, see granena & yilmaz, 2019). the paper by tajeddin et al. in this special issue also provides an example of this approach. others tend to investigate the methodological approaches, designs, and tools within a given domain, or concentrate on a particular research technique or tool. gurzynski-weiss and plonsky’s (2017) work is an example of this methodological approach synthesizing various methods used to conduct empirical research on interlocutors’ individual differences and their influence on interaction, while mendoza and phung (2019) looked at the methods used to investigate motivation in learning foreign languages other than english, and li and zhou (2021) recently reviewed the methodology of research 162 on aptitude. albert and csizér’s paper in this special issue also demonstrates an example of this type of methodological research synthesis. 5. conducting research syntheses for research syntheses to be able to formulate well-founded claims based on primary research results or methodologies, scholars have suggested following rigorous standards in gathering, analyzing, interpreting data and reporting the findings. essentially, we can say that not only meta-analyses (li et al., 2012) but generally all systematic research syntheses are advised to view the analysis of existing literature as a parallel to conducting empirical studies, where the published works constitute the data itself. this analogy suggests that when compiling a research synthesis, similarly to empirical studies, rigorous standards must be met in planning the study, and in gathering, analyzing, and interpreting the relevant literature (norris & ortega, 2006). in the planning phase, the researchers should clearly outline the problem under scrutiny, provide information about the context and a framework including definitions of the concepts the synthesis focuses on. carrying out the research synthesis involves formulating research questions and designing the methods of collecting and analyzing the literature in a way that is coherent with the research questions. documenting these steps in a transparent and systematic manner adds to the rigor of research syntheses and thus allows arriving at well-founded conclusions. in the following sections, we will provide more detail concerning the methods that should be kept in mind concerning data collection and analysis when carrying out a systematic research synthesis. 6. data collection continuing with the analogy of empirical studies, in this section we focus on the gathering of the data through the search of the literature, the notion of inclusion and exclusion criteria, as well as coding the data and preparing it for analysis (either quantitative or qualitative). as noted earlier, the data in research syntheses comprise primary individual studies on the chosen topic. depending on the purpose of the synthesis and the research questions, the appropriate literature must be selected for the review. specific details concerning the search for this literature should be documented. this includes keeping a record of the databases that were looked at as well as the key words and expressions that were used to run the searches (norris & ortega, 2006; plonsky & oswald, 2012). it should be transparent for the consumers of the synthesis how the issue of sampling bias was addressed (whether unpublished works or papers in certain languages were prioritized over others for practical reasons) in order to be accountable when 163 making inferences based on the results. further inclusion and exclusion criteria should also be explicitly formulated so that the final sample of papers selected for the synthesis are indeed papers that are comparable and relevant to the research focus. when reporting these steps, authors can opt to use flow charts which are straightforward and transparent for the reader (e.g., see botes et al. in this special issue). following the selection of primary studies to be included in the synthesis, the data is usually coded for basic and relevant features. the key categories should be listed to provide a comprehensive view of the synthesis that was conducted for the readers and the coding procedures should be documented. to this end, norris and ortega (2006) suggest using a code book, while plonsky and oswald (2012) recommend a code sheet. for quality insurance, it is also important to account for the reliability of the coding procedure; hence, researchers, besides coding the data, should also employ double-coding and check the consistency of the coders (cf. li et al., 2012; plonsky & oswald, 2012). when reporting the methods used for the research synthesis, these pieces of information should be made available to the readers. up till this point, all systematic research syntheses should ideally go through the steps of data collection described above. when preparing the data for analysis, we can make a distinction based on the approach we would like to take. for quantitative analysis of the literature, such as meta-analyses, besides the primary studies’ features, information concerning the effect sizes and moderator variables, whose relationships to the construct(s) under scrutiny are also important, should be noted (card, 2012). the data for quantitative analyses are recorded in a spreadsheet using software which can further assist the researcher in statistical analyses (e.g., comprehensive meta-analysis software, borenstein et al., 2005). in the case of a qualitative research syntheses and all other types of research syntheses, some of the data can also be extracted with the help of a checklist, such as, for example, details concerning the design, population, data collection instruments used, and so on. this requires data collection methods and recording of the data on spreadsheets, similarly to the procedures employed in the case of meta-analyses but without the need to record statistical details. however, a step that is specific to qualitative research syntheses is that a decision needs to be made concerning the findings with respect to the type of data that is going to be extracted from primary studies (chong & plonsky, 2021a). here options include raw data, interpreted findings, or both. interview transcripts, recorded and transcribed spontaneous speech, or artifacts used by the participants would all count as raw data, whereas interpreted findings would subsume researchers’ discussion and interpretation of these. chong and plonsky (2021a) claim that researchers should be consistent with regard to the type of data they extract and they should be ready to justify the reasons for their choices 164 as currently there seems to be no consensus as to what the best option might be. they also mention that the potentially large amounts of textual data might require the use of computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (caqdas, see e.g., miles et al., 2018) for effective data management. 7. data analysis and interpretation this section begins by summarizing the key aspects of data analysis and interpretation in meta-analytic studies and continues in the same vein with respect to qualitative research syntheses as well as other research syntheses. overall, however, irrespective of the approach taken, just as in the previous steps, in terms of data analysis and interpretation in systematic research syntheses, clear and transparent documentation is emphasized. there is a variety of meta-analytic techniques available for researchers to choose from, from the simple to the more complex. plonsky and oswald (2012) advise researchers to choose the most reliable, parsimonious, and informative technique for their purposes. essentially, in the quantitative analysis of primary studies with quantitative results, the effect sizes reported in the empirical studies included in the sample are compared. in addition, their means and variances are calculated in order to make inferences about the trends regarding the constructs under investigation (norris & ortega, 2006). usually, to this end, it is necessary to choose and calculate a standardized index, such as, for example, cohen’s d, hedge’s g, pearson r, or odds ratio (or) (cho, 2015; li et al., 2012; norris & ortega, 2006; plonsky & oswald, 2012). for interpretation of effect sizes, plonsky and oswald (2012, 2014) emphasize the importance of using field-specific benchmarks and li et al. (2012) also suggest including confidence intervals, p, standard error/standard deviation for all effect sizes and subsequent analyses. for the comparison of effect sizes, based on relevant theory, researchers can opt for a random-effects model or a fixed-effects model (in’nami et al., 2019). it is also advisable to check the magnitude of heterogeneity of the effect sizes using q tests (li et al., 2012; lipsey & wilson, 2001). cho (2015, p. 1) comments: when the effect sizes are homogeneous, the researcher may estimate the common effect size and construct a confidence interval for the common effect size. based on the common effect size and the confidence interval, hypotheses for the meta-analysis can be tested. when the effect sizes are not homogeneous, the researcher may try to explain the reasons for variation among the effect sizes by applying moderator analyses. moderator analysis is a method used to check whether the heterogeneity of effect sizes is linked with certain study features, especially in the context where the primary studies were conducted. in other words, it can be used to investigate the 165 possible source of systematic variation in effect sizes. this way, findings of effect size analyses and moderator analyses can further enhance our knowledge on a particular topic in the field (li et al., 2012). finally, researchers conducting meta-analyses should also account for a number of additional issues that can influence the interpretation of the findings. one such point involves taking publication bias into account and presenting a funnel plot along with the results of trim-and-fill procedures (e.g., duval & tweedie, 2000). apart from these, dealing with several effect sizes per study, handling missing data, and considering weighting (plonsky & oswald, 2012) should also be ideally addressed and the decisions documented and justified (in’nami et al., 2019). finally, it is advisable to include a note on measurement and its reliability (e.g., larsen-hall & plonsky, 2015; teimouri et al., 2019) as well as whether and how correction for artifacts was considered (card, 2012). meaningful interpretation of the findings is also of paramount importance. care should be taken not to jump to conclusions when it comes to large effect sizes (plonsky & oswald, 2012). the interpretation of cumulative effects should be done with caution (norris & ortega, 2006) and “within/with the help of a frame of reference, refer[ring] to theory, context, constructs of the domain” (p. 38). in this way, the findings of the meta-analysis can provide a more meaningful contribution to the field. although norris and ortega (2006) offer examples of synthesizing qualitative studies using a quantitative approach, recent guidelines offered by chong and plonsky (2021a) tend to favor qualitative approaches in synthesizing qualitative studies. data extracted from primary studies for the purpose of qualitative synthesis, which, as it was stated earlier, can include either raw data, researchers’ interpretations, or both, serve as the starting point of the analysis. using this data, researchers can adopt either an inductive or deductive approach to analysis. in the case of inductive approaches, the analysis must start from whatever has been extracted from the studies as primary data; this is the approach adopted by grounded theory. when using deductive approaches, there is an already existing framework that researchers can rely on and they need to attempt to fit the extracted data into these predefined categories, if possible. chong and plonsky (2021a) list meta-ethnography, narrative synthesis, grounded theory, and thematic analysis as potential interpretive approaches. the third type of research syntheses we have covered in this introduction usually arrives at its conclusions based on those particular aspects of primary studies that have been tallied, drawing conclusions on the basis of numerical data without the help of statistics. these may focus on either the content or the methodology used in primary studies or both. in this case, there are no well-documented specific guidelines available to adhere to in contrast with meta-analyses and qualitative research syntheses; therefore, following and documenting the data analysis in a rigorous fashion becomes even more important. 166 8. reporting research synthesis results besides the considerations addressed above, it is also important for authors of research syntheses to generally follow consistent guidelines in terms of reporting such studies. apart from the pioneering work by plonsky and associates (e.g., plonsky & oswald, 2012) within the field of applied linguistics, the reader is referred to the more general checklist of the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and metaanalyses (prisma) (page et al., 2021), which has recently been revised. some journals in other fields, such as medicine, have already started endorsing the use of these guidelines in their instructions for authors for reporting research syntheses; however, we do not yet know of any applied linguistics journal having included prisma in their submission guidelines and only a few published articles synthesizing individual differences research refer to using it, especially the flow chart depicting the sampling process (e.g., botes et al. in this special issue; jin & lee, 2022; yousefi & mahmoodi, 2022). nonetheless, based on what we have conveyed in this editorial introduction, we would like to recommend authors of a wide range of research syntheses (including the various types discussed in this editorial) to follow and even perhaps adhere to the prisma as much as possible, to add to the rigor in their publications as well as to promote and spread this practice of systematicity in reporting. chong and plonsky (2021a) also provide further guidelines regarding possible ways to report the results of a qualitative research synthesis specifically. they argue that although by using the thematic-narrative approach findings of such studies can be presented in an accessible and reader-friendly manner, this reporting tradition might undermine the trustworthiness of the interpretation since it excludes quotations from primary studies. as a way of circumventing this problem, chong and plonsky (2021a) recommend using an evidence-based approach when reporting the findings of qualitative research syntheses, which enhances the trustworthiness by presenting the documented data synthesis process without jeopardizing the smooth flow of the text. they recommend the use and presentation of a detailed coding scheme together with the number of studies that have been coded with that category and a sample code used in one of the primary studies. moreover, they argue for the inclusion of a data synthesis map, which can help illustrate the relationships between the coded categories. benefits associated with the use of a data synthesis map include assisting the reader in interpreting the findings and increasing the trustworthiness of the research endeavor. 9. results of research syntheses in this special issue the current si contains five research syntheses that cover individual difference factors from different angles presenting both quantitative and qualitative studies. emotions 167 pertaining to language learning constitute an important area of current research within the field of ids; therefore, we start the si issue with two studies concentrating on these variables. first, piniel and zólyomi present a meta-analysis of 48 studies and show that language anxiety affects language learners in very similar ways as they did not find significant effects of the investigated background variables. taking a positive psychology perspective, botes et al. looked at foreign language learning enjoyment and found a positive correlation between enjoyment and willingness to communicate (k = 97). these studies not only call our attention to the fact that emotions cannot be ignored when it comes to l2 learning and use but also highlight the importance of positive psychology constructs in the classroom and beyond. hence, another important construct of positive psychology is included in this si, namely, self-efficacy: learners need to believe that language learning and use is within their reach. indeed, goetze and driver show (k = 37) that self-efficacy is undoubtably linked to l2 achievement (with variations concerning students’ first language, target language and proficiency levels). their study also underlines the importance of systematically measuring learners’ achievement in research on ids. the next study in this special issue concentrates on an important contextual variable in l2 learning and compared the development of intercultural competence in home and study abroad environments. tajeddin et al.’s findings indicate that, maybe surprisingly, intercultural competence development practices were largely completed in home contexts. in addition, they uncovered an important research niche as it was pointed out that no study mapped differences in home and study abroad contexts. the final article in this special issue, written by albert and csizér, does not concentrate on a single id variable but, instead, provides a systematic overview of top applied linguistic journals and their treatment of id variables within the qualitative paradigm. one of their most important results shows that the investigation of cognitive processes in l2 learning seems to be gaining ground in this paradigm. in addition, their appraisal of quality control issues indicates that more rigorous practices need to be employed for reporting practices even in the aces of top journals. the overall conclusion that can be derived from the papers included in this special issue is that that even a handful of such studies can show great research variation and point towards fruitful future research directions. 10. conclusion it is clearly beyond the scope of this special issue to provide a comprehensive overview of the field of id variables as their sheer number calls for a book-length work. on completing this project, we became fully aware that such work is much needed within a reasonable timeframe as meta-analytical studies are labor-intensive enterprises and have relatively short shelf-lives. in addition, we could not include all the variables that we intended to due to various reasons, but we clearly see 168 the need for continuously appraising the development of our field. apart from advocating for more studies on id variables, we would also like to emphasize that not only various background variables but also different contexts should be taken into account (cf. illés, 2020). contexts should be compared systematically to see their effects on learning and using second/third/foreign languages and learners should also be considered when moving across contexts (e.g., from home study to study abroad and then home study again). in addition, l2 learning and use should be explored separately when it comes to the effects of id variables as, in the era of globalization, one cannot restrict empirical studies to classroom contexts (henry et al., 2019). finally, the research field of id variables includes various research paradigms, research strategies, and research techniques; hence, systematic research syntheses and meta-analytic studies should also reflect those methodological variations. our summary shows that it is not only quantitative analysis of effect sizes that uncovers important pieces of information, but that systematic qualitative reviews also contribute significantly to professional discourse. acknowledgements 1. we would like to thank the authors and reviewers for their hard work as well as the editors for their patience while we were completing this project. studies in second language learning and teaching truly feels home to us. 2. kata csizér and ágnes albert were supported by the research program for public education development of the hungarian academy of sciences. both of them are members of the mta-elte foreign language teaching research group. 3. katalin piniel completed her work under the aegis of the national research, development and innovation office in hungary (nkfi-6-k-129149). kata csizér eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary wein.kata@btk.elte.hu ágnes albert eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary albert.agnes@btk.elte.hu katalin piniel eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary brozik-piniel.katalin@btk.elte.hu 169 references al-hoorie, a. h. 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(2019). foreign language anxiety and foreign language performance: a meta-analysis. modern language journal, 103, 763-781. 37 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (1). 2022. 37-58 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.1.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt potential sources of foreign language learning boredom: a q methodology study mariusz kruk university of zielona góra, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5297-1966 mkruk@uz.zgora.pl mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland university of applied sciences, konin, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7448-355x pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl majid elahi shirvan university of bojnord, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3363-8273 elahishmajid@gmail.com; m.elahi@ub.ac.ir tahereh taherian yazd university, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2583-8224 taherian87@yahoo.com elham yazdanmehr attar institute of higher education, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9414-7251 yazdanmehr@attar.ac.ir abstract the present study employed an interpretive approach to investigate individual learners’ viewpoints on foreign language learning boredom (fllb). to this aim, mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, majid elahi shirvan, tahereh taherian, elham yazdanmehr 38 a q method, which shares features of both qualitative and quantitative research approaches, was used to explore 37 iranian english as a foreign language (efl) learners’ perceptions of potential sources of boredom in the classroom. nonprobability purposeful sampling was used to select participants from two private language institutes in mashhad, iran. a hybrid-type q sampling was employed to produce 40 statements related to the sources of fllb. using pq method, an exclusive statistical package for q methodology, the q sorts were intercorrelated and factor-analyzed. three factors were extracted and rotated using varimax rotation and hand adjustment. factor arrays and qualitative analyses were utilized to find and interpret three different accounts of fllb. the three factors showed that the students held three divergent prototypical points of view about the sources of boredom experienced in efl learning in class: (a) teacher-induced boredom, (b) student-induced boredom, and (c) activity-induced boredom. the findings also showed that different learner prototypes experience fllb distinctly. thus teachers should consider using different strategies to prevent or reduce this negative emotion in the context of l2 learning since otherwise this process could be impeded. keywords: foreign language learning boredom (fllb); q methodology; teacherinduced boredom; student-induced boredom; activity-induced boredom 1. introduction boredom is known as an unpleasant and distressing experience that adversely affects the quality of an individual’s work (thackray, 1981). teachers mostly view student boredom as a regular, commonplace event that is not worthy of attention or they simply attribute it to laziness, depression, anxiety or personality factors (macklem, 2015). in practice, teachers neglect boredom and dislike talking about it with learners, which has made this emotion a formidable obstacle in the learning environment (suárez-orozco & suárez-orozco, 2013; weinerman & kenner, 2016). more specifically, boredom refers to a negative emotion characterized by disengagement, dissatisfaction, distraction, change of time perception and lower vitality (fahlman, 2009) and it has been reported as one of the most commonly occurring emotions in educational contexts (goetz & hall, 2014). however, thus far this aversive emotion has attracted conspicuously less empirical attention than other emotional conditions including anxiety, joy or interest (goldberg et al., 2011; pekrun et al., 2010), particularly in second or foreign language (l2) acquisition (cf. chapman 2013; kruk & zawodniak, 2017, pawlak et al., 2020c). thus, the present research used q methodology to reveal foreign language learners’ emic perspectives regarding sources of their boredom in the classroom. it sought to categorize situations that may cause boredom as well as potential sources of foreign language learning boredom: a q methodology study 39 to determine which situations represent the strongest antecedents of boredom in language learning. this study offers insights into different reactions to events peculiar to the classroom context. in addition, by employing q methodology, it expands the methodological instruments commonly employed in research on foreign language learning boredom (fllb). although this methodology has been formerly employed in the domain of second language acquisition (sla) (e.g., fraschini & park, 2021; irie & ryan, 2014; irie et al., 2018; jodaei et al., 2021), its potential remains unexplored, and it has not yet been used to explore boredom in l2 learning (fraschini & park, 2021). the results can provide an important point of reference for the management of negative emotions in l2 instruction. 2. literature review recently sla researchers have oriented themselves towards a more situated, context-dependent perception of individual difference (id) variables (cf. dörnyei & ryan, 2015; dörnyei et al., 2015; gkonou et al., 2017; pawlak, 2020). this context-specific view maintains that ids are experienced by an individual learner in the immediate setting (toth, 2010), and emphasizes the situated nature of l2 learners’ emotions such as boredom. influenced by this approach to emotions in learning, the main focus of this study is on a situated, context-specific view of fllb. it addresses boredom that learners experience in specific l2 learning situations, which can be influenced by subjective and environmental factors. before reviewing the existing literature on fllb, it is warranted to overview the theoretical foundations of boredom. 2.1. theoretical foundations of boredom several theoretical explanations of boredom have been proposed in educational psychology. one of them is the forced-effort model (hill & perkins, 1985), where boredom is described as resulting from imposing on students tasks which require much cognitive effort, although they view these tasks as dull and uninteresting. in the under-stimulation model (larson & richards, 1991), boredom results from the lack of stimulating motives to learn, which discourages students from enthusiastic participation in classroom activities. according to the attentional theory of boredom proneness (harris, 2000), the main cause of boredom is one’s failure to self-regulate attention. problems with attention are associated with individual differences among learners and can occur due to the cognitive difficulty of a task but can as well be linked with interests, obsessions and values (mercer-lynn et al., 2014). according to the emotion theory (eastwood et. al., 2007, 2012), boredom can originate from problems with recognizing, accessing mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, majid elahi shirvan, tahereh taherian, elham yazdanmehr 40 and communicating one’s own feelings, a condition that is known as alexithymia. the control-value theory of achievement emotions (pekrun, 2006; pekrun et al., 2010) attributes the occurrence of boredom to students’ evaluation of control over the task and the value they assign to it. finally, the dimensional model (pekrun et al., 2010) perceives boredom as both a limiting and stimulating emotion. in the latter case, in specific conditions, the negative state of emotional ennui may trigger arousal behavior in search of change. therefore, boredom acts as a practical negative emotion that can encourage learners to set new goals or rethink those that they currently pursue (cf. komorowska, 2016). explaining boredom through the lens of the aforementioned theories helps better understand the different shared responses occurring in the same l2 learning context. 2.2. empirical studies of fllb the number of studies on fllb is distinctly limited and largely related to the polish and asian contexts. the antecedents of boredom in these studies are mostly explainable in the light of the theories of boredom overviewed above. the studies in which the causes of boredom were the primary or secondary focus of investigation are presented and briefly synthesized in table 1. table 1 empirical studies of fllb author (year) participants/context method cause(s) and source(s) of boredom chapman (2013) 4 weeks, 57 students in the second semester studying german as a foreign language mixed-methods students’ perception of the teacher, textbook activities, uninterested classmates, feeling unchallenged kruk (2016) changes in the boredom of 16 students majoring in english, motivation and anxiety in their visits to second life (sl) over one semester mixed-methods reluctance to communicate, unfriendly and impolite interlocutors zawodniak et al. (2017) 30 polish ma students with an english teacher ’s position in prospect qualitative analysis of participants’ diaries language tasks (e.g., easy/difficult), tasks seen as irrelevant or unnecessary, lacking diversity, language classes (e.g., no choice of material), teacher behavior (e.g., indifferent and unsupportive role), class preparation and management zawodniak & kruk (2018) impact of 4 efl learners’ visits to sl on changes in boredom, motivation and anxiety qualitative learners’ expectations, grit, belief in their abilities, desire for stimulation, interlocutors’ attitude, topics, time of visiting sl kruk & zawodniak (2018) 15 polish university students majoring in english qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews held with participants lacking inherent challenge, teacher control, teacher personality, teaching methods/strategies, recurrent dull tasks, difficult/uninteresting tasks, insufficient perceived purpose for tasks potential sources of foreign language learning boredom: a q methodology study 41 kruk & zawodniak (2020) 30 polish university students learning english (l2) and german (l3) content analysis of fllb in retrospect boredom questionnaire lesson-related (e.g., too much use of the same content, uselessness of lessons, mismatched difficulty level), teacher-related (e.g., no involvement/engagement, teaching methods/strategies, personal/physical qualities), other variables (e.g., class time, weather, excessive work) pawlak et al. (2020a) 107 polish-speaking students majoring in english exploratory factor analysis of bpelcr questionnaire lack of involvement, monotony and repetitiveness, lack of satisfaction and stimulating nature pawlak et al. (2020b) 11 english majors mixed-methods repetitive nature of activities, poor match between the learning challenge and proficiency level, topics and/or their implementation li (2021) efl learning among chinese university students (n = 2,002) mixed-methods extremely high and low control, students feeling highly challenged or underchallenged, students’ low proficiency, unchallenging or meaningless activities or tasks, students’ lack of interest in subject matter li et al. (2021) chinese efl students and teachers. study 1: students and teachers were interviewed and 659 students completed a questionnaire, experiences and evaluations of fllb. study 2: the fllb scale was developed. mixed-methods teacher dislike, boring peers, understimulating tasks or content, unchallenging materials and assignments derakhshan et al. (2021) 208 iranian english majors qualitative, openended questionnaire and semi-structured interviews teachers’ lengthy, monotonous monologues, inadequate student participation, logistical problems, and improper repetitive tasks nakamura et al. (2021) thai university students in english oral communication course for 15 weeks triangulating data from whole-class surveys, focus group interviews, and the toolkits inappropriate activity, lack of comprehension, inadequate l2 skills, task difficulty, excessive input, lack of innovative ideas kruk et al. (2021) to investigate the trajectories of boredom, 13 english majors mixed-methods different constellations of factors, repetitiveness, monotony and predictability of what transpires during lessons even a cursory look at this synthesis shows the need for further exploration of fllb from an emic, internal subjective perspective, with insights into individual variation in different contexts of l2 learning as the bulk of studies on the construct are limited to the polish context. kruk and zawodniak (2020, p. 432) pointed out that “interestingly, the respondents made no comments on their own contribution” to the sense of boredom and they called for further investigation of this emotion in learners from different countries. thus, the present study was motivated to look for sources of boredom in efl classes in the iranian context, yet through an innovative methodology, the q methodology, which has not yet been employed to explore fllb. mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, majid elahi shirvan, tahereh taherian, elham yazdanmehr 42 2.3. q methodology and sla studies q methodology, which is a method of investigating individuals’ viewpoints, has been embraced in many disciplines in social sciences, including psychology, education or policy research. this method has been employed so far to delve into teachers’ and learners’ perceptions (rimm-kaufman et al., 2006). its use in sla body of research has been limited but there are signs of a growing interest (collins & angelova, 2015; irie, 2014; irie & ryan, 2014). q methodology stands in contrast to the use of multivariate factor analysis in studies of psychological processes, which explore human behavior from an external viewpoint. rather, it opts for addressing human behavior from the internal subjects’ perspective (brown, 1980) and takes advantage of social categorization. in recent years, a number of researchers have begun to recognize the potential of this methodology (irie & ryan, 2014; pemberton & cooker, 2012; rodriguez & shepard, 2013) in disentangling the role of individual variation in l2 learning. since id research aims “to understand the general principles of the human mind and to explore the uniqueness of the individual mind” (dörnyei, 2005, p. 1), it would seem that it can considerably benefit from q methodology. this is because, instead of attempting to present universal models and offer holistic understanding of the role of ids, it favors providing insights into individual variation in specific learning contexts. q methodology is most often employed in investigating very complicated and socially challenging constructs from the participants’ viewpoints (stainton rogers, 1995; watts & stenner, 2003). a relative newcomer to research in applied linguistics, q methodology has been viewed as a truly innovative approach that has the potential to portray the emotional and cognitive complexity of a certain instructional setting by considering individuals’ thoughts about a specific issue (irie, 2014). fllb can be seen as a complex, dynamic, and socially constructed state and thus the q methodology lends itself well to exploring this aversive emotion. rather than relying on a passive response dimension, q methodology acts as a dynamic means of expressing subjectivity (watts & stenner, 2003). it focuses on the particular context from a situated and subjective perspective rather than an objective one (jodaei et al., 2021). thomas and baas (1992) posited that, since a limited number of attitudes exist on a particular issue, similar but different q sorts given to different participants identify factors underlying the same perceptions. in light of the above considerations, the purpose of this study was to explore the variety of perceptions among iranian learners of english as a foreign language (efl) about the potential sources of fllb. with this aim in mind, we developed the following research question: potential sources of foreign language learning boredom: a q methodology study 43 what are the different types of individual responses to the potential sources of boredom in the context of foreign language learning? 3. method 3.1. participants and setting thirty-seven english language learners (26 females, 11 males) were purposefully selected from two private online language learning institutes during the covid19 pandemic in mashhad, the second largest city of iran. they were asked to sort the q statements. in q methodology research, the number of participants is typically set between a minimum of one-third of the statements and a maximum equal to the total number of statements (slaughter et al., 2019), which for the present study was 40. q methodology does not require a large number of participants because the aim is not to generalize the findings but, rather, to emphasize the significance of each point of view (slaughter et al., 2019). participation in the study was voluntary and the data were collected online. table 2 shows the demographic information for the participants. the mean age was 26.8 years (sd = 3.76), ranging between 17 and 33 years. their level of language proficiency ranged between lower-intermediate to upper-intermediate as measured by oxford placement test (opt). all the language learners’ l1 was persian. table 2 participants’ demographic information gender 11 males, 26 females mean age 26.8 (sd = 3.76) language proficiency lower-intermediate: 16; intermediate:13, upper-intermediated: 8 total number 37 3.2. data collection and analysis in accordance with the principles of q methodology, the following steps were taken with the purpose of collecting and analyzing the data: defining a research question, developing a q set, distributing q sorts (among participants), doing statistical analyses, and interpreting the results (watts & stenner, 2003). these stages are elaborated upon below. step 1: defining a research question formulating a proper research question is extremely important in q methodology research. this is because the nature and overall design of a q set are influenced mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, majid elahi shirvan, tahereh taherian, elham yazdanmehr 44 by the nature of what we wish to investigate. in light of the literature reviewed above and recent attention to fllb in sla, the study aimed to explore various shared experiences of l2 learners relating to their perceptions of potential sources of boredom in the language learning context. step 2: developing a q set a q set is used in q methodology to collect requisite data. it consists of a number of heterogeneous statements with the aim of evaluating participants’ views about a particular topic. for the q set in this study, the statements were collected from the literature on boredom and the already existing questionnaires employed in previous l2 boredom studies (e.g., li et al., 2021; pawlak et al., 2020a). the aim of this stage was to cover the relevant discourse about fllb. at first, a set of 87 items was collected and this pool was then checked for repetition, relevance and total coverage by a panel of five field specialists, all of whom were experts in sla. the result was the reduction of the initial set to 43 items, which were then used in an extensive pilot study of a purposive sample of l2 learners who were perceived as likely to offer extensive comments. as a result of the piloting stage, three ambiguous statements, were discarded, leading to the final total of 40 statements. step 3: administering the q sorts at the core of a q study is the collection of data in a sorting activity. thus, first, the language learners were supposed to sort the statements relating to fllb, from those representing the least important (-4) to the most important (+4) causes and sources of boredom. in this q study, participants were asked to sort these statements based on a set pattern determined by a sorting grid, the forced distribution pattern indicated in figure 1. -4 -3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3 +4 figure 1 the final q sort grid also, to gather further subjective data and gain a better understanding of the responses given by the participants an interview was conducted with the potential sources of foreign language learning boredom: a q methodology study 45 most representative members of each factorial group based on the findings of the q analysis. in this way, the participants were offered a chance to give their ideas and reasons for ranking the items as they actually did. holding interviews with participants who rank items (in a q study) is essential for q methodology research because interviews can provide researchers with a more comprehensive, rich, and detailed understanding of various points of view (watts & stenner, 2012). step 4: doing statistical analysis in q methodology, statistical analysis involves an inverted factor analysis. in the present study, pq method (schmolck, 2002) was employed to produce the initial by-person correlation matrix. through the analysis, the categorization of the constructs is based on the ranking of all items relative to each other and not on the similarity of independent responses to each item, which is often the case for likert-scale-type questionnaires (dörnyei & ryan, 2015). following factor extraction, varimax rotation, and by-hand adjustment, the results were judged upon according to the factor arrays. the last stage involved using a factor arrays table and the configurations of statements. the main aim was to identity the highest and the lowest scores in terms of factor loading. step 5: interpreting the results the results of factor analysis, demographic description, and the interview content were utilized to arrive at conclusions. we used a narrative mode to report the interpretation of the factors. in the narrative mode, the related items of a factor are ordered and linked together to generate a holistic and single account of the perceptions the factors (watts & stenner, 2012). besides, the interview content from the significantly loaded participants was incorporated to generate a more detailed understanding of the learners’ subjective viewpoints. the factor analysis allowed extraction of three main factors. these were rotated and accounted for 51% of the variance, with 39 out of the 41 sorts loading significantly on at least one of the factors at p < .01 level, with loadings in excess of +/-.41. we selected the three-factor solution not only according to the eigen values (above 1.00), the volume of the variance, but also the number of the sorts covered. a distinctive identification code was used for each q sort. pq permits eight characters to be used to name the q sorts. thus, to summarize the demographic data, we used the information about the participants’ gender (male as m, female as f), their age and proficiency level (lower-intermediate as l, intermediate as i and upper-intermediate as u). therefore, a participant id of f20u indicates that the q sort represents a female, 20-year-old, upper-intermediate english language learner. mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, majid elahi shirvan, tahereh taherian, elham yazdanmehr 46 4. results results of analyzing the q sorts are presented here in a narrative format (watts & stenner, 2012). in choosing the statements representative of each factor, we checked, firstly, if the statement had been rated significantly higher (or lower) in a factor relative to other factors. secondly, we considered if the statement was rated higher (or lower) than other statements for the same factor. the illustration of each factor is followed by examples from interviews and answers to openended questions. the three factors were labeled as follows: (f1) teacher-induced boredom, (f2) student-induced boredom, and (f3) activity-induced boredom. table 3 shows the z-scores estimated for each statement via the average of all the individual q sorts that loaded significantly and only on that factor. because not all these q sorts contributed to the same extent to the identification of the factor, the technique of weighted average was used (brown, 1980). this score allowed us to compare how each statement was valued across the factors. for example, z-scores of statement 2 are 1.39 for factor 1, -.36 for factor 2, and .84 for factor 3. this shows that participants who loaded significantly on factor 1 felt that having an unsupportive teacher was a much more important source of boredom than others who shared the views that emerged in factors 2 and 3. table 3 z-scores for each statement no. statement f1 f2 f3 1 seeing no progress in my foreign language class makes me bored. -.27 1.24 .4 2 an unsupportive teacher makes me bored in the foreign language class. 1.39 -.36 .84 3 memorizing activities makes me bored. .58 -.47 1.33 4 the teacher who does not pay attention to my learning progress makes me bored. 2.04 -1.23 1.48 5 unchallenging activities in the class makes me bored. .64 -.73 .96 6 an unfriendly teacher makes me bored. 1.64 -1.17 .77 7 lack of aim in learning a language makes me bored. -.44 2.18 .59 8 comprehension difficulty in materials or teacher talk makes me bored. 1.25 1.64 1.02 9 the teacher who does not make me believe in the value of learning a foreign language makes me bored. 1.38 .87 -.35 10 experiencing anxiety in the language class leads to my experiencing boredom in the class. .56 1.74 -.43 11 the teacher who does not let me share my opinion in the class makes me bored. 1.51 .58 .38 12 when i cannot find meaning in learning a language, i get bored. -.16 .87 -1.13 13 when i feel the task or material is useless, i get bored. -.84 -.29 1.47 14 when the teacher does not have clear objectives for each lesson, i get bored. .44 -1.12 -.97 15 too fast or too slow pace of teacher talk makes me bored. .24 -1.71 -.94 16 activities that do not have clear purpose make me bored. -1.5 -1.08 .44 17 feeling like doing nothing in english classes makes me bored. 1.08 1.97 .57 18 the teacher with unchanging routine in his/her instruction makes me bored. .74 -1.27 -.32 19 the teacher who does not care for my concerns and feelings makes me bored. .21 -1.53 -.14 20 being passive in language class makes me bored. .95 2.01 .32 21 activities that are not interesting make me bored. -.18 -.56 .99 22 limited ability in language skills makes me experience more boredom in the class. -1.7 .48 -.81 23 the teacher who has excessive control makes me bored. 1.94 .38 .69 24 repetitive or monotonous tasks make me bored. .18 .68 1.01 potential sources of foreign language learning boredom: a q methodology study 47 25 if i am taught by being told what to do and/or by memorizing rather than by being given problems to solve in my own trial-and-error way, i am likely to switch off. .45 -.78 .36 26 lack of interest in the subject matter makes me bored. .66 .98 .57 27 the teacher who does not provide challenge in the class makes me bored. 1.84 .32 .41 28 the teacher who uses old-fashioned teaching techniques makes me bored. .69 -1.45 -.34 29 low level of mental energy in the class makes me bored. .24 .93 .48 30 when the teacher overloads me with language input, i get bored. .84 .59 -.31 31 the teacher who decreases my self-satisfaction during his/her evaluation makes me bored. .73 -.15 -.89 32 mismatch in the aims of an activity and my proficiency level makes me bored. -.12 .38 .94 33 when the teacher does not pay attention to my needs, i feel bored. .56 -.44 -1.28 34 the teacher who does not let me correct my mistakes makes me bored. .44 -1.84 -.81 35 finding myself at loose ends in a language class makes me bored. .58 1.35 .48 36 meaningless activities make me bored. .44 -.59 .88 37 the teacher who does not provide variety in language learning makes me bored. .96 -1.41 -.28 38 activities that do not make me cooperate with my classmates in the class make me bored. -1.33 -.79 .67 39 the threatening environment of the class makes me bored. .69 -.23 -1.35 40 a strict teacher makes me bored. .47 -1.89 -1.25 the three factors are described below together with tables showing statement clusters for meaningful interpretation of the patterns identified. the related statements, their numbers, and their q sort rankings are included in each table. this allows reporting important items for each factor consistently and indicating the polarization of perceptions in a data-oriented way. factor 1: teacher-induced boredom factor 1 explained 21% of the whole variance and 15 participants were significantly affiliated with this factor. we named this factor teacher-induced boredom as the teacher is regarded as a direct source of boredom in the class. table 4 summarizes the top (i.e., 27, 6, 37, 23, 2 and 11) and bottom (i.e., 31, 39, 15, 4, 34 and 18) ranking statements included in this factor. table 4 factor 1: the top and bottom ranking statements item # statement ranking top 6 27 the teacher who does not provide challenge in the class makes me bored. +4 6 an unfriendly teacher makes me bored. +4 37 the teacher who does not provide variety in language learning makes me bored. +3 23 the teacher who has excessive control makes me bored. +3 2 an unsupportive teacher makes me bored in the foreign language class. +3 11 the teacher who does not let me share my opinion in the class makes me bored. +3 bottom 6 31 the teacher who decreases my self-satisfaction during his/her evaluation makes me bored. -3 39 the threatening environment of the class makes me bored. -3 15 too fast or too slow pace of teacher talk makes me bored. -3 4 the teacher who does not pay attention to my learning progress makes me bored. -3 34 the teacher who does not let me correct my mistakes makes me bored. -4 18 the teacher with unchanging routine in his/her instruction makes me bored. -4 mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, majid elahi shirvan, tahereh taherian, elham yazdanmehr 48 the label teacher-induced boredom refers to concepts such as having an unsupportive teacher (2: +3), not providing learners with challenges (27: +4) or variety (37: +3), excessive teacher control (23: +3), lack of clear teaching objectives (14: +2), lack of teachers’ attention to learners’ progress (4: -3) and teachers’ unsuitable use of correction strategies (34: -4). it is intriguing to observe that particular interpersonal qualities such as not creating good relationships with students, being unfriendly (6: +4), unsupportiveness (2: +3), lack of care (19: +2) and acting as a mentor with excessive control over students (23: +3) are seen as factors which are the most likely to induce boredom. here is an extract from an interview with a representative participant (f23i) affiliated with factor 1 concerning the effect of an unsupportive teacher on students’ boredom (2: +3): sometimes i don’t feel like answering questions that occur to me because the teacher either refers me back to my dictionary or online encyclopedia to find the answers. i feel abandoned and would rather keep my obsessions to me. i keep silent most of the time and wish the class is over soon. moreover, also prevalent in the first factor were pedagogical aspects, such as not providing challenge (27: +4), variety (37: +3) and clear objectives (14: +2); excessive use of repetition and memorization (25: +2); using old-fashioned teaching techniques (28: +2), not providing opportunities for sharing opinions (11: +3), and not identifying the value of learning a language (25: +2). however, there are other aspects of factor 1, those related to evaluation, such as not allowing self-correction and peer correction (34: -4) as well as not paying attention to the learners’ progress (4: -3), that are seen as the least boredom-arousing. one participant provided an example of a situation of not being given the chance of self-correction in the classroom: when she [the teacher] picks on me to hinder and correct my speech or interrupts me to correct what i say, i feel the time is lengthened; it is wasted somehow. we can do more different things rather than stick to one mistake or two at a time. it really gets on nerves. factor 2: student-induced boredom factor 2 explained 18% of the variance and 16 participants were significantly related to it. we named this factor student-induced boredom as the learner herself/himself was the center of his/her boredom. table 5 summarizes the top (i.e., 20, 17, 35 and 1) and bottom (i.e., 8, 26, 7 and 10) ranking statements included in this factor. potential sources of foreign language learning boredom: a q methodology study 49 table 5 factor 2: the top and bottom ranking statements item # statement ranking top 4 20 being passive in language class makes me bored. +4 17 feeling like doing nothing in english classes makes me bored. +4 35 finding myself at loose ends in a language class makes me bored. +3 1 seeing no progress in my foreign language class makes me bored. +3 bottom 4 8 comprehension difficulty in materials or teacher talk makes me bored. -1 26 lack of interest in the subject matter makes me bored. -2 7 lack of aim in learning a language makes me bored. -4 10 experiencing anxiety in the language class leads to my experiencing boredom in the class. -4 participants in this factorial group acknowledged a rather less significant role for language teachers and attributed boredom to self-related factors. most of the boredom-inducing situations related to this factor are associated with learners’ disengagement from what transpires in the classroom. for instance, being passive (20: +4), feeling like doing nothing (17: +4), feeling at the loose end (35: +3), and seeing no progress in foreign language classes (1: +3) are some of the items reflecting sources of the learners’ boredom as represented in the top ranking statements of this factor. below is an excerpt from an interview with a typical participant (m28u) affiliated with factor 2 concerning the passive role (20: +4) and feeling at a loose end (35: +3): we are many in number in class and not all are equally active. i, by nature, do not initiate talks unless i am asked or encouraged to. what’s worse is that sometimes i see no point in what we do in class or just don’t like it and can’t say it freely. so, i just tolerate it until the class is over. the extract shows that the boredom that the participant (m28u) experienced is more internally originated. yet, it by no means implies that nothing can be done externally to ameliorate the occurrence of this negative emotion. for example, the issue of over-populated classes was mentioned, which could have caused some students to be left to their own devices and to feel less capable of overcoming boredom. this is certainly an issue that can be externally tackled at least to some extent. factor 3: activity-induced boredom factor 3 explained 12% of the variance and nine participants were significantly associated with it. table 6 summarizes the top (i.e., 5, 21, 13 and 32) and bottom (i.e., 38, 24, 16 and 3) ranking statements included in this factor. the learners in this factorial group believed that boredom was partly caused by tasks and activities used in the fl class; thus, the factor was labeled activity-induced boredom. mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, majid elahi shirvan, tahereh taherian, elham yazdanmehr 50 this means that learners related to this factor might experience boredom when they are doing tasks that are unchallenging (5: +4), uninteresting (21: +4), repetitive (24: -2), and need memorization (3: -4). additionally, learners can succumb to boredom when they cannot grasp the purpose of the task (16: -4) or when the task is not matched to their proficiency level (too hard or too easy) (32: +3). table 6 factor 3: the top and bottom ranking statements item # statement ranking top 4 5 unchallenging activities in the class make me bored. +4 21 activities that are not interesting make me bored. +4 13 when i feel the task or material is useless, i get bored +3 32 mismatch in the aims of an activity and my proficiency level makes me bored. +3 bottom 4 38 activities that do not make me cooperate with my classmates in the class make me bored. -1 24 repetitive or monotonous tasks make me bored. -2 16 activities that do not have clear purpose make me bored. -4 3 memorizing activities makes me bored. -4 one participant related to this factor also considered the lack of cooperative task (38: -1) as an important factor which induces boredom in the class. an excerpt from an interview with a representative participant (f29i) with respect to factor 3 follows: the silent reading task is the most boring to me. i think others feel the same too. it takes too much time for us to read the texts fast and try to memorize the key points to report later to class. the same goes for writing assignments that we should do in class. such activities should be assigned as homework. in class, we prefer to speak english. of course, when instead we read and write more we feel it a waste of time and we feel bored. it is evident that the participant found the silent reading task and in-class writing uninteresting (21: +4) and unchallenging (5: +4). the need to quickly memorize the key points in the reading passage seems to be another source of boredom (3: -4). when the participant was asked how the activities could be made more interesting, she (f29i) continued: we prefer to have more speaking tasks in class. we enjoy speaking english together though it is often delayed to the end of each session. but, we get engaged in speaking english together, we don’t feel the time pass. this can constitute one example of how class activities can be made less boring if they are replaced with enjoyable ones, as perceived by efl learners. in particular the role of more cooperative tasks is highlighted (38: -1) as a way of diminishing in-class boredom. potential sources of foreign language learning boredom: a q methodology study 51 5. discussion in order to seek an answer to the research question, the potential sources of boredom in an efl class were investigated using q methodology. three different accounts of fllb emerged and were analyzed and discussed using factor arrays and qualitative interview data analysis. the three factors point to the salient student types in the target setting. the participants from each factorial group also constitute the students who best represent the major prototypes of each factor. these three factors indicate that the learners hold three different prototypical points of view about sources of boredom in efl classes: (a) teacher-induced, (b) student-induced, and (c) activity-induced. these factors, directly or indirectly, play an important role in generating boredom. factor 1 was named teacher-induced boredom. the most salient sources of boredom emanating from the teacher were related to an unsupportive role, failure to provide learners with required challenge or variety, excessive control over students and failure to set clear objectives. moreover, the teacher’s unfriendly behavior, lack of care, excessive use of repetition and memorization, reliance on outdated teaching techniques, failure to create opportunities for students’ sharing of opinions as well as failure to perceive the value of language learning were also found among teacher-induced sources of boredom. these can be explained in light of the forced-effort theory (hill & perkins, 1985), the control-value theory (pekrun, 2006) and the under-stimulation model (larson & richards, 1991). the relationship between the first two theories in explaining the kind of boredom learners experience is that in highly teacher-controlled circumstances students mostly have to deal with monotonous class learning situations. thus, they are less motivated to show any mental interest in these classroom events and, as a result, they get easily bored. the online environment during covid-19 pandemic made l2 classes much more teacher-controlled. in effect, learners started perceiving teachers as less caring or supportive but they also felt dissatisfied with being exposed to less challenging, monotonous, and repetitive learning experiences. this controlling orientation embraced by teachers might have been triggered by the sudden, unexpected switch to the online environment. that is, in order to effectively manage the learners’ confusion in this new environment and to help them accommodate to the new situation, teachers might have decided to exert more control in online classes. however, this may have caused learners to assign less value to their learning and class activities. the findings of the interviews provided support for these explanations as some learners neither took the tasks assigned in class seriously nor considered them valuable. besides, some participants viewed their teachers as unsupportive as they could rarely find space for expressing their concerns and were not properly mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, majid elahi shirvan, tahereh taherian, elham yazdanmehr 52 praised for completing the classroom assignments. this can be discussed in light of the under-stimulation model (larson & richards, 1991), which highlights the lack of stimulating incentives to learn as the reason for deactivating students and discouraging them from enthusiastic participation in school activities. in other words, if students’ emotions are not positively activated, they are not properly engaged in the learning experience and they are not adequately encouraged to get involved in the learning process, signs of boredom are soon bound to appear, which can decrease motivation and thus academic achievement (e.g., kruk & zawodniak, 2018; pekrun, 2006; tulis & fulmer, 2013). factor 2 was labeled student-induced boredom, which was primarily marked by learner disengagement in classroom. the most salient sources of boredom of this type were learners’ passive role in class, feeling like doing nothing, feeling at a loose end and seeing no progress in l2 learning. these results can be explained in light of the attention theory of boredom proneness (harris, 2000; lepera, 2011). this is because poor attention management, which can possibly be attributed to a low degree of self-awareness of attention, can induce boredom, resulting in distractibility and memory lapses. learners’ passive role in class and seeing no progress in their learning might be rooted in their poor degree of self-awareness of attention. it can be argued that misallocation of attention which can disrupt sufficient engagement with the information related to the current activity can cause boredom. damrad-frye and laird (1989) also investigated the effect of self-perceived attention on the experience of boredom and found that even minor distractions can enhance this negative emotion. factor 3 was named activity-induced boredom. learners associated with this factor experienced boredom when they were instructed to do tasks and activities that were unchallenging, uninteresting, repetitive, or those that needed memorization. additionally, when learners could not understand the purpose of the task or when the task did not match their proficiency level (i.e., when it was too hard or too easy), they tended to succumb to boredom. the participants affiliated with this factor also considered the role of cooperative tasks as an important issue preventing the feeling of boredom. such findings can be discussed in light of the under-stimulation model (larson & richards, 1991), the forcedeffort theory (hill & perkins, 1985) and the control-value theory (pekrun, 2006). as highlighted in the under-stimulation model (larson & richards, 1991), unchallenging and demotivating class activities can be a major source of boredom. it would appear that efl learners find more challenge and attraction in speaking rather than reading and writing tasks (pawlak et al., 2020b). the boredom caused by the repetitive and monotonous nature of class activities can be explained with reference to the forced-effort model as well. this is because this model relates the major source of boredom to highly teacher-controlled circumstances potential sources of foreign language learning boredom: a q methodology study 53 where students have to complete activities they consider monotonous and thus undeserving of increased cognitive effort (hill & perkins, 1985). the finding that learners could not grasp the purpose of the task and, as a result found it boring, can be linked to the control-value theory (pekrun, 2006). 6. conclusions, limitations and implications the present research explored the potential sources of boredom in l2 classes. to this aim, q methodology, which is an innovative research method in investigating fllb, was employed for data collection, analysis, and interpretation. findings showed that different learner prototypes experience boredom differently, so teachers are advised to apply alternative preventive or reactive strategies to manage boredom in l2 learning. the study demonstrated the robustness of q methodology in investigating fllb. the findings of the qualitative analysis of interviews with the most typical participants of factorial groups were consistent with the results of the q analysis. this indicates that q methodology is a reliable way of exploring l2 learners’ subjective viewpoints of the sources of boredom. this study also confirmed the presence of general boredom sources in all participants and specific boredom patterns related to each participant. the multidimensional perspective on fllb can serve as a basis for several pedagogical implications. most importantly, it is essential to raise the awareness of l2 teachers and material developers of different student prototypes in the l2 learning process. specifically, if teachers know that each prototype of efl learner is bored for different reasons, they can develop the right tasks with the right level of challenge and stimulation or use the most suitable boredom-preventing strategies. for instance, learners who experience boredom mainly due to the activities performed in class can be assigned communicative tasks that encourage cooperation as a way of preventing this negative emotion. by contrast, learners who are more dependent on the teacher can be monitored more closely so that they do not get confused or feel abandoned, which can generate boredom. similarly, language learners who get bored mainly because of individual factors can be monitored closely by the teacher so that their attention is not easily diverted and they do not feel disengaged and off-track. seeing no control over the task and perceiving little value in doing it might also result in the occurrence of boredom. this problem could at least partly be solved by appropriate teacher interventions intended to highlight the value of the task and clarify its purpose. furthermore, as the findings revealed, the use of more cooperative tasks could prevent boredom to some extent. as the interviews also showed, some students preferred class discussions and speaking tasks (which are by nature more cooperative) than reading and writing tasks. mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, majid elahi shirvan, tahereh taherian, elham yazdanmehr 54 the methodology used in this research project and the procedures involved in q sorting encouraged participants to express their subjective points of view about sources of boredom. the typical instruments employed in methodologies of etic, external objective, perspective (in sharp contrast with q methodology) cannot offer a thorough picture of participants’ perspectives. thus, researchers who intend to apply q methodology are advised to carefully explain all the procedures to participants. watts and stenner (2003) warn against very common misunderstandings of the q sorting and q pattern analysis. although we are aware that there are many ways to explore fllb in efl learning contexts, we believe that q methodology is highly efficient in tapping into the dynamicity of complex systems in language learning. as it combines features of both 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(2017). towards conceptualizing boredom as an emotion in the efl academic context. konin language studies, 5(4), 425-441. 449 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (3). 2020. 449-472 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.3.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt efl child peer interaction: measuring the effect of time, proficiency pairing and language of interaction elisabet pladevall-ballester universitat autònoma de barcelona, spain https://orcid.org/ 0000-0002-2793-9179 elisabet.pladevall@uab.cat alexandra vraciu universitat de lleida, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2239-2039 alexandra.vraciu@udl.cat abstract child peer interaction in english as a foreign language (efl) settings has recently received increasing attention with respect to age, instruction type and first language (l1) use, but longitudinal studies remain scarce and the effects of proficiency pairing and language choice on meaning negotiation strategies are still rather unexplored. within a primary school efl context, this paper aims to explore the amount and types of meaning negotiation, and the effects of time, proficiency pairing and language choice in a spot-the-differences task. forty catalan/spanish bilingual children were paired into mixed and matched proficiency dyads, and their oral production was analyzed twice over the course of two years (i.e., 9-10 and 11-12 years old). the analysis included conversational adjustments, selfand other-repetition and positive and negative feedback in the learners’ l1 and second language (l2). our data show that the amount of meaning negotiation is low, although l2 meaning negotiation is higher than l1 meaning negotiation, and all the strategies are present in the data except for comprehension checks. time effects are hardly observed. however, proficiency pairing and language effects are more generally found, whereby mixed proficiency dyads tend to negotiate for meaning more than matched dyads and meaning negotiation instances are more frequent in the l2 than in the l1. keywords: efl child peer interaction; time; proficiency pairing; language elisabet pladevall-ballester, alexandra vraciu 450 1. introduction although there is currently little doubt that interactional processes push the development of learners’ second or foreign language (l2) both in symmetrical (i.e., learner-learner or peer) and in asymmetrical (i.e., native speaker/teacherlearner) interaction (gass & mackey, 2006; long, 1996; mackey, 2007; philp, adams, & iwashita, 2014; sato & ballinger, 2016, among others), some may question the extent to which these processes are fostered in foreign language (fl) peer interaction. in fl contexts, peer interaction has not been found to be a lacking version of interaction with native or proficient speakers (philp & tognini, 2009). fl learners can provide each other with comprehensible l2 input and grammatically accurate feedback, and can produce modified output in response to feedback, just as efficiently as in native speaker-learner interaction, albeit not with the same frequency (garcía mayo & pica, 2000). fl learners are not limited in negotiating for meaning in communicative tasks (gass, mackey, & ross-feldman, 2005) and are capable of reflecting on the adequacy of l2 forms, correctly solving language-related episodes and assisting each other in producing l2 utterances beyond what they would be individually able to produce (alegría de la colina & garcía mayo, 2007; ohta, 2000, 2001). fl peer interaction has also been shown to bring about gains in learners’ l2 competence, as manifested in their enhanced awareness of certain l2 forms (kim, 2013; kuiken & vedder, 2002) or, even, in the uptake of grammatical structures and pragmatic strategies at an individual level (alcón, 2002; mcdonough, 2004). nonetheless, at low proficiency levels, negotiation of meaning and reflection on l2 form in fl peer interaction often take place in the learners’ first language (l1), which plays an instrumental role in task completion (alegría de la colina & garcía mayo, 2009; dicamilla & antón, 2012; vraciu & pladevall-ballester, 2020). the quantity and quality of fl peer interaction have been found to depend on a number of mediating factors such as task type and proficiency level. tasks which require an information exchange (e.g., picture differences, map-based tasks) generate more negotiation of meaning than tasks where such an exchange is optional (gass et al., 2005), whereas form-focused tasks that involve some kind of written input (e.g., text reconstruction) generate more reflection on l2 forms than form-focused tasks which lack this type of input (e.g., dictogloss; garcía mayo, 2002). with regard to proficiency levels in dyads, whether learners interact in same or mixed proficiency dyads does not seem to affect opportunities for modified output or the proportion of interactional moves. however, proficiency does seem to affect the actual production of modified output. low proficiency learners produce more modified output when they work with better peers than when they work with matched proficiency peers, whereas efl child peer interaction: measuring the effect of time, proficiency pairing and language of interaction 451 high proficiency learners modify their output more in same rather than mixed proficiency dyads (iwashita, 2001). more recently, learners’ age has also been shown to affect the amount and the type of meaning negotiation in fl peer interaction, with 10-year-old children negotiating less and less effectively than adult learners (pinter, 2006). interactional research has uncovered the specificity of peer exchanges among young learners and the need to consider children as an idiosyncratic l2 learner population on account of their cognitive, social and linguistic developmental traits (muñoz, 2007). older children (aged 7-11 years, the age range targeted in this study) differ from very young learners in that they show an increased awareness of turn-taking, others’ viewpoints, and the pragmatics of speech acts (philp, oliver, & mackey, 2008). this awareness enables them to enter into horizontal relations with their peers, much more geared towards reciprocity than adult-child interactions (hartup, 1989). this mutuality, together with a consolidating metalinguistic and analytic capacity in the l2 at this age (pinter, 2017), could be propitious ground for key interactional processes such as negotiation of meaning or provision of corrective feedback. therefore, charting these emerging interactional skills is fundamental for a better understanding of child l2 development, even more so when it is done by means of longitudinal data (garcía mayo, 2018). child peer interaction has been extensively researched in english as a second language (esl) contexts, where the empirical evidence conclusively supports the claim that young learners can negotiate for meaning in english l2, provide each other with corrective feedback and incorporate this feedback into their output, just like adult english l2 learners (mackey, kanganas, & oliver; 2007; oliver, 1998, 2000, 2002, among others). yet, child fl contexts are less widely explored and in need of further investigation. in the present study, we aim to explore the frequency and patterns of negotiation of meaning in task-based interaction by primary school children learning english as a foreign language (efl) in a minimal exposure context. to set the background for our study, we will review the findings regarding child peer interaction and negotiation of meaning in efl contexts. 2. child peer interaction in efl contexts the evidence regarding child peer interaction in efl is scarce in comparison with that from esl settings. this is striking given the ever earlier start of efl programs (collins & muñoz, 2016) and the specificity of this language learning context, namely the limited exposure to the target language outside the classroom and the lack of opportunities for interaction with native speakers. the little evidence available seems to indicate that, in line with what happens in esl contexts, children engaged in task-based peer interaction are capable of negotiating for meaning elisabet pladevall-ballester, alexandra vraciu 452 in efl. in a study of the interactional strategies employed by 10 dyads of 10-11 year-old hungarian l1 children and 5 dyads of hungarian l1 adults, matched for proficiency level and carrying out a spot-the-differences task, pinter (2006) found that children were able to signal their lack of understanding and ask for clarification, but resorted to these strategies less than the adult participants. they also co-constructed utterances by pooling together their lexical resources. an age effect was visible in the task outcome, with young learners not finding as many differences as the adult learners and adopting a much looser approach to handling referential conflicts, possibly on account of their cognitive immaturity. in a subsequent qualitative exploration of child peer interaction in efl, pinter (2007) identified task familiarity, achieved by means of task repetition, as a mediating factor for peer assistance and engagement in a two-way spot-thedifferences task performed by two hungarian l1 learners of efl aged 10. by the last repetition of the task, the learners not only helped each other more systematically with unknown lexical items but they also paid more attention to the formal accuracy of their production. with increasing task familiarity, the children concentrated more on each other’s messages and attempted to work out ambiguities and misunderstandings as they occurred. nevertheless, a quantitative exploration of the effect of task repetition on efl children’s negotiation of meaning carried out by garcía mayo and imaz agirre (2016) with spanish l1 children aged 8-9 and 10-11 did not reveal any statistically significant differences between the amount of interactional strategies employed by the children at two data collection times, two months apart. in line with pinter’s (2007) findings, task repetition did have an impact on the pair dynamics, prompting participants to work more collaboratively, especially the younger children in the study. in efl settings, the type of instruction has also been found to be a mediating factor in child peer interaction. garcía mayo and lázaro-ibarrola (2015) analyzed the meaning negotiation strategies used by 10 dyads of spanish l1 children aged 8-9 and 10 dyads of older children, aged 10-11, matched for proficiency and carrying out a picture-placement task. within each group, half of the dyads received standard efl instruction only, and the other half received efl and meaning-focused instruction (i.e., content and language integrated learning/clil). the data revealed an effect of the instructional approach on the amount of meaning negotiation, with clil + efl learners outperforming their efl-only peers in the use of conversational adjustments (i.e., clarification requests, confirmation checks, comprehension checks) and repetitions (i.e., self and other-repetitions). clil + efl learners also resorted less to their l1 than their efl counterparts to overcome communicative breakdowns. overall, the combination of clil and efl instruction appeared to better equip children for meaning negotiation in task-based peer interaction. the age of the children was efl child peer interaction: measuring the effect of time, proficiency pairing and language of interaction 453 also found to have an impact on the number of interactional strategies used, with older learners producing fewer conversational adjustments and repetitions than the younger children, irrespective of instructional context, indicating that negotiation of meaning declines with increasing l2 proficiency. enlarging the data set in garcía mayo and lázaro-ibarrola (2015) to include not just the picture-placement (i.e., two-way) task but also a guessing game (i.e., one way) task, azkarai and imaz agirre (2016) further confirmed that the younger learners in the study, aged 8-9, employed certain negotiation of meaning strategies more often than the slightly older learners, aged 10-11. the instructional setting was also found to play a role in the quantity of interactional strategies used by the learners, irrespective of their age. yet, on the basis of this enlarged data set, it was the efl-only learners who, on the whole, outperformed their clil + efl counterparts with regard to interactional strategies. the analysis of the conversational data also revealed a partial task effect, namely that, in the efl-only group, there were more opportunities to negotiate for meaning in the guessing game than in the picture placement task. additionally, the proficiency level of the learners appears to condition their involvement in meaning negotiation in efl communicative tasks. working with eight pairs of spanish l1 children aged 7-8, all of them at a beginner level, lázaro-ibarrola and azpilicueta-martínez (2015) showed that, even though the children used interactional strategies in efl and were able to provide corrective feedback to each other, the rates were very low. for the researchers, this seemed to indicate that the proficiency level of the learners was too low for them to use interactional strategies systematically. thus, for this to happen, a certain proficiency threshold needs to be attained in the l2. similar to what was observed by oliver (1998) in esl contexts, the efl children in this study produced no comprehension checks, most certainly on account of the egocentric nature of children at that age. the participants were also capable of providing corrective feedback to each other, and they used their l1 on very few occasions. young efl learners’ use of interactional strategies has also been found to change over time. the effect of time was initially gauged indirectly from comparisons between younger and older learner groups from the same instructional context as, for instance, in garcía mayo and lázaro-ibarrola (2015), and azkarai and imaz agirre (2016). as already mentioned, these studies found a decrease in children’s reliance on meaning negotiation strategies as they got older. it is only recently that longitudinal data on the development of interactional strategies in young efl learner interaction have become available. garcía mayo and imaz agirre (2017) charted the one-year development of conversational adjustments, repetitions and l1 use in the oral interaction of 27 dyads of spanish l1 children organized into two age groups (i.e., 8-9 years old and 10-11 years old) elisabet pladevall-ballester, alexandra vraciu 454 and enrolled in efl-only and clil + efl in each age group. in line with garcía mayo and lázaro-ibarrola (2015), and azkarai and imaz agirre (2016), the findings indicated that learners’ reliance on conversational adjustments and repetitions decreased with time, irrespective of their age at the onset of the study and their instructional modality, though this decrease was significant particularly with the youngest children in the clil + efl group. moreover, a decrease was also observable in the amount of l1 use of all learners, irrespective of age and instructional settings, except for older clil learners, who were assumed to have found the task not motivating enough on the second data collection. to our knowledge, no studies have explored the evolution of interactional strategies in child peer interaction in efl over time spans longer than a year. finally, none of the studies on child peer interaction in efl available to date has analyzed the extent to which the negotiation of meaning during l2 communicative tasks is carried out in the learners’ l1, even though l1 use has been shown to be instrumental in l2 peer interaction task completion, particularly at low proficiency levels (dicamilla & antón, 2012; storch & aldosari, 2010). studies on adult peer interaction in efl have shown that learners’ l1 assists them in completing l2 tasks beyond their l2 competence level, acting as a tool for managing the tasks, dealing with grammar issues and performing lexical searches (alegría de la colina & garcía mayo, 2009; azkarai & garcía mayo, 2015). with regard to child peer interaction in efl, some of the studies reviewed above reveal that this type of interaction is also characterized by a certain amount of l1 use, varying with the age of the learners (i.e., older learners tend to rely more on their l1 than younger learners) and the type of instruction they received (i.e., efl-only learners use their l1 more frequently than their efl + clil counterparts), mostly with a metacognitive function or for dealing with vocabulary deliberations (garcía mayo & hidalgo, 2017; garcía mayo & imaz agirre, 2016, 2017; garcía mayo & lázaro-ibarrola, 2015). in efl settings, interactional data elicited from young learners also suggest that meaning-focused tasks (e.g., information gap tasks) generate more l1 use than form-focused tasks (e.g., l2 form written exercises; tognini & oliver, 2012). insights into the interplay between learners’ l2 and l1 for meaning negotiation during task-based peer interaction should further our understanding of the communicative strategies deployed by young learners in the early stages of instructed efl and the extent to which they are able to stretch their l2 knowledge to overcome communicative breakdowns during task performance. as can be seen from the review undertaken in this section, the understanding of interactional strategies used in task-based interaction by young learners of efl is still in need of empirical evidence regarding the different mediating factors identified in previous studies, most of which were carried out in efl child peer interaction: measuring the effect of time, proficiency pairing and language of interaction 455 the same context (i.e., northern spain). factors such as the proficiency pairing of learners or the language in which they carry out the negotiation of meaning (i.e., l2 or their l1) have not been addressed in efl contexts yet. furthermore, little is known about the extent to which the different mediating factors (i.e., time, proficiency pairing, and the language of interaction) interact among themselves in children’s output in efl. 3. the study in this study we explore the amount and types of meaning negotiation produced during task-based peer interaction by efl primary school learners over a period of two years. we also analyze the extent to which negotiation of meaning instances are dependent on time, proficiency pairing and language choice effects, or on any interactions among these factors. to achieve this, oral production data were elicited twice by means of a spot-the-differences peer interaction task with children grouped into mixed and matched proficiency dyads. the following three research questions were posed: 1. what is the amount of l1 and l2 meaning negotiation and what are the most frequently used types during task-based child peer interaction? 2. what is the effect of time, proficiency pairing and language (i.e., l2 or l1) on efl primary learners’ meaning negotiation during task-based child peer interaction? 3. is there any interaction between any of the three factors (i.e., time, proficiency pairing and language) analyzed in relation to efl primary learners’ meaning negotiation during task-based peer interaction? on the basis of previous research on efl child peer interaction, we predict that primary learners will indeed make use of negotiation of meaning (nom) strategies both in the l2 and in the l1, although the frequency of occurrence of meaning negotiation strategies is predicted to be low (garcía mayo & imaz agirre, 2016; 2017; garcía mayo & lázaro-ibarrola, 2015; lázaro-ibarrola & azpilicueta-martínez, 2015; pinter, 2006; 2007). repetitions are expected to prevail over the rest of the strategies, and comprehension checks are expected to be used infrequently or to be nearly absent (garcía mayo & lázaro-ibarrola, 2015; lázaro-ibarrola & azpilicueta-martínez, 2015). we also expect that the age of the children (measured here as time) will affect the frequency and types of meaning negotiation (azkarai & imaz agirre, 2016; garcía mayo & imaz agirre, 2017; garcía mayo & lázaro-ibarrola, 2015). to our knowledge, the effects of proficiency pairing have not been studied in relation to negotiation of meaning among child efl learners, elisabet pladevall-ballester, alexandra vraciu 456 but previous studies on adult learners suggest that low proficiency learners in mixed dyads negotiate more than in matched dyads whereas high proficiency learners negotiate and modify their output more often in matched dyads (iwashita, 2001). differences between l1 and l2 meaning negotiation within the same task by the same learners and using the same categories have not been explored thus far. 3.1. participants as part of the same project on efl task-based child peer interaction (vraciu & pladevall-ballester, 2020), our participants were 40 bilingual catalan/spanish primary school children (21 male, 19 female) learning efl in a limited exposure and low proficiency context. they were aged 9-10 years old at the time of the first data collection and 11-12 at the second data collection (i.e., 4th and 6th grade, respectively). a small group of children (n = 9) were not included in the study. two of them had special educational needs, and the remaining seven children had a native speaker father/mother or had lived and been schooled in an english-speaking country for more than one year. with regard to their l2 exposure, children in 4th grade received 2 hours of efl instruction and a 45-minute session of science clil per week. at the time of the first data collection, they had had 300 hours of in-school exposure over 5 years. children in 6th grade received 3 hours of efl instruction per week and had had a total of 510 hours of in-school exposure at the time of the second data collection. the children were organized into 10 matched proficiency dyads and 10 mixed proficiency dyads. given that the researchers did not obtain permission from the school to run a placement test, proficiency differences among children were established on the basis of their english language academic achievement (i.e., general course marks) and teachers’ perceptions on the students’ oral abilities. in 4th grade, 40% (16 out of 40) of the children attended extracurricular efl afternoon sessions. the percentage rose to 53% (21 out of 40) students in 6th grade, but the majority had only started in the same year or the year before, and these sessions were limited to 1 up to 2.5 extra hours per week. the percentage of students attending extracurricular efl sessions in each type of proficiency pairing was fairly similar at both data collection times (i.e., 30% in matched dyads vs. 50% in mixed dyads in 4th grade and 50% in matched dyads vs. 55% in mixed dyads). a pearson chi-square test revealed that attendance to extracurricular sessions and dyad type membership were not related at either of the data collection times (χ2(1, n = 40) = 1.66, p = 0.19; χ2(1, n = 40) = 0.10, p = .752), so extracurricular exposure was therefore considered to have a similar impact in both groups. efl child peer interaction: measuring the effect of time, proficiency pairing and language of interaction 457 3.2. instruments and procedures the data were collected by means of an oral two-way spot-the-differences task (mackey, 2012). in pairs, learners were given 7 minutes to find as many differences as they could between their pictures by asking each other questions and providing descriptions. the two pictures showed a similar beach scene. differences were related to the weather, children and adults’ clothes and their activities on the beach. the researchers made sure the participants were generally familiar with the vocabulary to be used by consulting the teacher and reviewing the children’s textbooks to ensure that the majority (but not all) of the vocabulary items had been at least presented and used in class. the recordings took place in a meeting room adjacent to the children’s regular classroom. the task instructions were provided in catalan/spanish to make sure that the children understood them. additionally and right at the start of the task, the researchers would ask some short personal questions in english to create a friendly atmosphere. 3.3. data analysis the children’s oral production was audio recorded and transcribed according to the chat conventions from the child language data exchange system (childes) database (macwhinney, 2000). following the coding scheme in lázaro-ibarrola and azpilicueta-martínez (2015), several categories of learner negotiation of meaning were selected and coded in the data: conversational adjustments (i.e., clarification requests, confirmation checks, comprehension checks), self and other repetition and positive and negative feedback (long, 1996). as these categories were found to be used in the target language of the task (i.e., english) and also in the learners’ l1 (i.e., catalan and/or spanish), it was decided to code them in each of the languages and establish language as a factor as well. a general variable that included all the strategies was also created (i.e., nom). percentages were calculated against numbers of utterances produced in each dyad, following garcía mayo and lázaro-ibarrola (2015), and oliver (1998). the following definitions and examples from our data illustrate each of the categories in each language. a clarification request is an expression that asks for clarification on the previous utterance (long, 1983). they are mainly achieved through the use of questions or imperatives, as indicated in italics in (1): (1) *chb: you have papers in the floor? *cha: no, i can you repeat please? *chb: you have papers in the floor? (dyad 2, mixed proficiency – child a: high/child b: low, time 1) elisabet pladevall-ballester, alexandra vraciu 458 (2) *cha: ehm in your picture (..) there is a red flag? *chb: <què és?>@s:cat 1 [what is] *cha: <bandera, és una bandera>@s:cat [flag, it is a flag] (dyad 7, mixed proficiency – child a: high/child b: low, time 2) a confirmation check is an expression which seeks confirmation by the interlocutor that what has previously been said has been correctly heard or understood (long, 1983). it is normally a repetition of the interlocutor’s immediately preceding utterance with rising intonation: (3) *chb: in your paper there are a (...) one (...) [/] one woman drinking with the shirt blue, drinking water? *cha: a [/] a woman? (dyad 10, mixed proficiency – child a: low/child b: high, time 2) *chb: uh mm you do want the barca@s:cat in the sea? [boat] *cha: barca@s:cat? ah yes. [boat] (dyad 8, matched proficiency – high/high, time 1) a comprehension check2 seeks to confirm that one’s interlocutor understands or follows what one has previously said (long, 1983), mainly through the use of questions: (4) *chb: do you have a tower in the sea? you understand? *cha: tower in the sea? no, do you have this ? *cha: there is a flag, <saps què és>@s:cat? [you know what it is?] *chb: sí@s:cat, i have. [yes] self-repetitions and other-repetitions included exact repetitions of whole or parts of utterances produced by the same learner or by the interlocutor within five turns (as in garcía mayo & lázaro-ibarrola, 2015, and oliver, 1998): 1 following the childes transcription conventions, @s: cat and @s: spa mean that the word preceding them is uttered in the child’s l1 (i.e., catalan or spanish). 2 the examples in this category are invented and not selected from our data as we did not find any comprehension checks in the l1 or in the l2. efl child peer interaction: measuring the effect of time, proficiency pairing and language of interaction 459 (5) *chb: i havent’t got sunny. *cha: eh? *chb: i havent’t got sunny. (dyad 1, matched proficiency – high/high, time 1) (6) *cha: <com es deia castell, castell de sorra>@s:cat? [how did you say castle, sand castle?] *chb: com@s:cat? [what is this?] *cha: <castell de sorra>@s:cat. [sandcastle] (dyad 5, matched proficiency – low/low, time 1) (7) *cha: and... <com es diu cel?>@s:cat [how do you say sky?] *chb: sky! sky! *cha: and your sky is black and my is blue. (dyad 5, mixed-proficiency – child a: low/child b: high, time 2) (8) *cha: <com es diu dormint>@s:cat. [how do you say sleeping?] *chb: <dormint, no me’n recordo>@s:cat, podries dir>@s:cat, one [sleeping, i don’t remember] [you could say] person dormint@s:cat. [sleeping] *cha: one person dormint@s:cat. [sleeping] (dyad 9, mixed-proficiency – child a: high/child b: low, time 1) in addition to conversational adjustments and instances of repetitions, we also analyzed instances of explicit positive and negative corrective feedback as part of the learners’ interaction and process of meaning negotiation (mackey, 2012). they are mainly instances of form-meaning mapping whether in the l2 or in the l1: (9) *cha: waterskiing *chb: what is? *cha: is is the, the one person in the (..) skies of the water. (dyad 6, matched proficiency – high/high, time 1) (10) *cha: there [/] there are trash in your picture? *chb: what is trash? *cha: es@s:spa mm basura@s:spa [it’s trash] (dyad 6, matched proficiency – high/high, time 2) elisabet pladevall-ballester, alexandra vraciu 460 (11) *cha: <com es diu barco@s:cat?> i have a barco@s:spa. [how do you say boat?] [a boat] *chb: barco@s:cat is boat. (dyad 1, mixed child a: low/child b: high, time 1) (12) *chb: this fish they are fish. *cha: fishing, seria@s:cat fishing. [would be] (dyad 5, matched proficiency – low/low, time 1) we performed a generalized linear mixed model using spss statistical package with time, proficiency pairing and language (i.e., l2 and l1) as fixed factors and negotiation of meaning categories as the dependent variables. subject (i.e., pairs) was included as a random effect. the model also analyzed interaction effects between the factors (i.e., two-way interactions: time*proficiency pairing, time*language and proficiency pairing*language; a three-way interaction: time*proficiency pairing*language), but only those that were significant differences have been reported. the alpha level of the model was set at .05. we also compared the dependent variables among each other within each of the two languages through a friedman test and subsequent wilcoxon signed-rank tests. the alpha levels in these two tests were set at .01. 4. results our research questions addressed the amount of l2 and l1 meaning negotiation used by primary school efl learners, the most frequently used types of meaning negotiation in each language and the effects of time, proficiency pairing and language on them together with potential interactions between the factors during task-based peer interaction. amount of l2 and l1 meaning negotiation, as measured by percentage of meaning negotiation types together (i.e., nom) in relation to number of utterances is remarkably low and appears to be higher in the l2 (m = 10.24, sd = 7.10) than in the l1 (m = 7.30, sd = 5.89). table 1 and figure 1 show the percentages of the use of the different categories of learner nom in each language. no instances of comprehension checks were found in our data. within l2 meaning negotiation, other-repetition prevails over the rest of the categories (m = 2.25, sd = 2.38), followed by clarification requests (m = 2.11, sd = 3.45), positive feedback (m = 2.07, sd = 2.50), confirmation checks (m = 1.82, sd = 2.68), self-repetition (m = 1.60, sd = 2.88), and negative feedback (m = 0.37, sd = 0.98). a friedman test revealed significant differences among the percentages (χ2(5) = 23.429, p < .001), with negative feedback being significantly less widely used than the rest of the categories (p < .01). efl child peer interaction: measuring the effect of time, proficiency pairing and language of interaction 461 table 1 descriptive statistics of meaning negotiation categories in each language l2 l1 % mean3 sd % mean sd clarification requests 2.11 (39/1886) 3.45 3.13 (56/1886) 3.00 confirmation checks 1.82 (36/1886) 2.68 1.34 (22/1886) 1.93 self-repetition 1.60 (27/1886) 2.88 0.86 (15/1886) 1.49 other repetition 2.25 (46/1886) 2.38 0.25 (6/1886) 0.63 positive feedback 2.07 (40/1886) 2.50 1.64 (31/1886) 2.27 negative feedback 0.37 (8/1886) 0.98 0.05 (1/1886) 0.31 figure 1 percentages and distribution of meaning negotiation categories in each language when examining l1 meaning negotiation, clarification requests prevail over the rest of the categories (m = 3.13, sd = 3.00), followed by positive feedback (m = 1.64, sd = 2.27), confirmation checks (m = 1.34, sd = 1.93), self-repetition (m = 0.86, sd = 1.49), other-repetition (m = 0.25, sd = 0.63) and negative feedback (m = 0.05, sd = 0.31). a friedman test revealed significant differences among the percentages (χ2(5) = 58.588, p < .001), with clarification requests being significantly more widely used than the rest of the categories (p < .01), positive feedback being significantly more widely used than other repetition and 3 raw numbers of frequency of occurrence of each strategy and the number of utterances are provided (n/n). notice that the percentages resulting from these raw numbers slightly differ from the ones provided as they were obtained as a result of the mean of each dyad’s percentages; therefore, rounding effects are responsible for the slight differences. elisabet pladevall-ballester, alexandra vraciu 462 negative feedback (p < .01), and negative feedback being significantly less used than the rest of the categories (p < .01) and descriptively less used than other repetition. as for the effects of time, proficiency pairing, language and their interaction on the general category nom, we find a significant proficiency pairing effect, irrespective of time and language (f(1, 72) = 5.653, p = .020), with mixed dyads negotiating for meaning more (m = 10.42, sd = 6.97) than matched dyads (m = 7.12, sd = 5.96), and a significant language effect, irrespective of proficiency pairing and time (f(1, 72) = 4.496, p = .037) with significantly more instances of l2 (m = 10.24, sd = 7.11) than l1 meaning negotiation (m = 7.30, sd = 5.89). time does not show any significant effects, and, hence, similar amounts of nom are found at the two data collection times, which are two years apart. our analysis displayed one significant interaction, namely between proficiency pairing and language (f(1, 72) = 4.406, p = .039), where mixed dyads produced more nom (m = 13.17, sd = 7.13) than matched dyads (m =7.31, sd = 5.90) but only in the l2. table 2 and figure 2 display descriptive statistics of nom by proficiency pairing, time and language. table 2 descriptive statistics of nom by proficiency pairing, time and language mean % sd matched t1 l2 7.35 (35/472) 5.74 l1 10.06 (46/472) 5.07 t2 l2 7.27 (45/542) 6.37 l1 3.82 (22/542) 5.75 mixed t1 l2 14.01 (58/409) 7.84 l1 7.39 (30/409) 5.09 t2 l2 12.33 (58/463) 6.65 l1 7.94 (33/463) 6.58 notes. t1 = time 1; t2 = time 2. figure 2 nom by proficiency pairing, time and language efl child peer interaction: measuring the effect of time, proficiency pairing and language of interaction 463 in relation to clarification requests, only a marginal time effect was observed (f(1, 72) = 3.847, p = .054), irrespective of proficiency pairing and language, with a significantly higher percentage of clarification requests at time 1 (m = 3.30, sd = 3.63) than at time 2 (m = 1.94, sd = 2.72). a significant threeway interaction was found between proficiency pairing, time and language (f(1, 72) = 4.225, p = .043), where a pairwise comparison on the basis of time determined a significantly higher percentage of clarification requests at time 1 (m = 4.99, sd = 3.02) than at time 2 (m = 1.41, sd = 2.52) in matched dyads and in the l1 (f(1,72) = 8.008, p = .006). figure 3 illustrates clarification requests by proficiency pairing, time and language. confirmation checks showed a significant proficiency pairing effect (f(1, 72) = 7.960, p = .006), irrespective of time and language, with mixed dyads producing higher percentages of confirmation checks (m = 2.29, sd = 2.78) than matched dyads (m = 0.88, sd = 1.53). a significant interaction was found between proficiency pair and time (f(1, 72) = 5.468, p = .022), where mixed dyads produced a significantly higher percentage of confirmation checks (m = 2.80, sd = 3.09) than matched dyads (m = 0.22, sd = 0.74) at time 2. figure 4 illustrates confirmation checks by proficiency pairing, time and language. regarding self-repetitions, a significant time effect was observed (f(1, 72) = 4.227, p = .043) since a higher percentage of self-repetitions was found at time 1 (m = 1.74, sd = 2.86) than at time 2 (m = 0.73, sd = 1.45). no interaction effects were found. figure 5 illustrates self-repetitions by proficiency pairing, time and language. other-repetitions showed a significant language effect (f(1, 72) = 26.423, p < .001) with more l2 other repetitions (m = 2.25, sd = 2.39) than l1 other repetitions (m = 0.26, sd = 0.64). a significant interaction was found between proficiency pair and language (f(1, 72) = 3.982, p = .050), where both mixed and matched dyads produced a significantly higher percentage of other repetitions in the l2 than in the l1 (m = 2.89, sd = 2.64; m = 0.12, sd = 0.55; f(1,72) = 25.461, p < .001) (m = 1.62, sd = 1.98; m = 0.39, sd = 0.71; f(1,72) = 4.945, p = .029). figure 6 illustrates other-repetitions by proficiency pairing, time and language. regarding positive feedback, no significant effects of any of the factors were observed. figure 7 illustrates positive feedback by proficiency pairing, time and language. the last strategy analyzed was negative feedback, where a proficiency pairing significant effect (f(1, 72) = 5.086, p = .027) and a language significant effect (f(1, 72) = 4.233, p = .043) were found, whereby mixed dyads again produced more negative feedback (m = 0.39, sd = 1.00) than matched dyads (m = 0.03, sd = 0.22), and higher percentages of negative feedback were observed in the l2 (m = 0.38, sd = 0.98) than in the l1 (m =0.05, sd = 0.32). no interaction elisabet pladevall-ballester, alexandra vraciu 464 effects between any of the factors examined were found. figure 8 illustrates negative feedback by proficiency pairing, time and language. figure 3 clarification requests figure 4 confirmation checks figure 5 self-repetitions figure 6 other repetitions figure 7 positive feedback figure 8 negative feedback efl child peer interaction: measuring the effect of time, proficiency pairing and language of interaction 465 5. discussion our first research question targeted the amount of l1 and l2 meaning negotiation and their most frequently used types during efl child peer interaction. our results indicate that child learners could indeed negotiate for meaning and followed the same pattern as in previous research in efl contexts, whereby the amount of meaning negotiation in relation to the utterances produced was remarkably low (azkarai & imaz agirre, 2016; garcía mayo & imaz agirre, 2016; garcia mayo & imaz agirre, 2017; garcía mayo & lázaro-ibarrola, 2015; lázaro-ibarrola & azpilicueta-martínez 2015; pinter, 2006, 2007). yet, l2 meaning negotiation was significantly higher than l1 meaning negotiation in a set of data where general l1 use while carrying out the task was much higher than in similar studies (63.28% at time 1 and 32.01% at time 2, vraciu & pladevall-ballester, 2020). this indicates that nom strategies are part of the children’s linguistic repertoire in their target language and that, despite their low proficiency levels, the young learners in our study display a certain readiness to engage in nom in the target language, just like low proficiency dyads in esl settings (oliver, 2002). the laboratory conditions under which the data were collected (i.e., with the researcher monitoring the unfolding of the task) may also have enhanced learners’ commitment towards using the target language to deal with communicative breakdowns during the task. this commitment may have been different in the context of the classroom (foster, 1998) although other studies (gass et al., 2005) found no differences in various interaction features between classroom and laboratory studies. all types of meaning negotiation strategies were present in the data to various extents, except for comprehension checks, which were not revealed, similar to lázaro-ibarrola and azpilicueta-martínez (2015). scarcity of the use of comprehension checks was already observed in oliver (1998) in esl contexts, and in garcía mayo and lázaro-ibarrola (2015) for efl and clil learners. this was explained in terms of the age of the children and their tendency not to anticipate understanding problems of the other member of the dyad. it is also true that their limited level of english most probably forces them to focus on their own speech and not on whether their interlocutors understand or follow what they are trying to communicate. within l2 meaning negotiation, other-repetition was the strategy that prevailed over the rest, albeit not significantly. in line with garcía mayo and lázaro-ibarrola (2015), and lázaro-ibarrola and azpilicueta-martínez (2015), child learners often resorted to incorporating (part of) their peers’ contribution into their own turns, particularly when they did not know specific lexical items to carry on with the task. in this sense, l2 other-repetitions represent a communicative scaffolding, which allows low-proficiency learners to perform beyond their level of expertise, stretching the boundaries of elisabet pladevall-ballester, alexandra vraciu 466 their l2 competence (ohta, 2001; swain, brooks, & tocalli-beller, 2002). the strategy that children used the least in the l2 was negative feedback, which was also the case in oliver (1998) for esl child peer interaction. the children probably had too low a level of english to focus on form and give feedback on the output of their interactional partner. also, the tasks employed in the study were not form-focused enough to prompt learners into discussing language use, as they did not involve any text reconstruction (garcía mayo, 2002). as for the strategies of meaning negotiation in the l1, clarification requests were the most widely used while negative feedback was hardly ever present in the data. clarification requests were common in the l1, particularly when children asked about the meaning of certain lexical items used by their interlocutors or when they did not understand the utterance as a whole. the very few instances of negative feedback in the data were mainly the provision of the correct l2 lexical item, they very rarely concerned the form or structure of the children’s utterances and, therefore, they were mainly provided in the l2. our data support the claim that the use of the learners’ l1 is instrumental in the fulfilment of the l2 communicative task, particularly with low-proficiency learners (pladevall-ballester & vraciu, 2017). the second research question dealt with the potential effects of time, task, proficiency pairing and language on the children’s use of meaning negotiation strategies (on the whole and for each category separately) both in the l2 and the l1. as for the general category nom, no effects of time emerged from the data, although the two data collection times were two years apart and the same cohort of children had reduced their use of the l1 almost by half at time 2 (vraciu & pladevall-ballester, 2020). the lack of effects of time in the present study contradicts the effects of age/time observed in garcía mayo and lázaro-ibarrola (2015), garcía mayo and imaz agirre (2017), and azkarai and imaz agirre (2016), where the older groups used fewer instances of conversational adjustments and repetitions. however, it is in line with oliver (1998), who did not find significant age differences in the use of nom strategies with similar age groups. proficiency pairing and language significant effects were observed, whereby, as expected, mixed dyads negotiated more irrespective of language and task, and l2 meaning negotiation was significantly more frequent than l1 meaning negotiation. unlike what was observed in esl settings (e.g., oliver, 2002), mixed dyads tended to negotiate more and produce more modified output than matched dyads. in our data, although the number of matched versus mixed dyads was the same, mixed dyads were always formed by high-low pairs whereas half of the matched dyads were formed by low-low pairs and the other half were formed by high-high pairs. the higher number of high-low pairs probably resulted in higher percentages of nom, since the members of such dyads need to readjust their output and input in order efl child peer interaction: measuring the effect of time, proficiency pairing and language of interaction 467 to accommodate or understand their conversational partner. thus, using meaning negotiation strategies becomes essential to accomplishing the task (iwashita, 2001). the fact that nom was significantly more frequent in the l2 than in the l1 is indeed a very positive finding of the study, considering the children’s command of the target language, the kind of exposure they have to it, their context of learning, and the limited use of task-based interaction in their regular classes. with regard to the effects of the fixed factors on each of the strategies, time effects were only observed in self-repetitions and marginally in clarification requests, with fewer self-repetitions and clarification requests at time 2, where proficiency is higher and learners are older and do not need to reproduce their own contributions to carry on with the task, which is usually seen as a sign of low-level interlanguage, both in esl (oliver, 2002) and in efl (garcía mayo & imaz agirre, 2017). proficiency pairing effects were evident in confirmation checks and negative feedback, and it was always the mixed dyads that produced more meaning negotiation strategies. following watanabe and swain (2007), this seems to indicate that working with less proficient peers is beneficial also for the higher proficiency member of the dyad who has to deploy a series of conversational strategies that may prompt them into noticing form-meaning connections as they try to make themselves understood. matched dyads probably did not have that much need to adjust their interaction within the dyad. furthermore, in the case of matched low dyads, their level of english had not reached the minimum threshold to negotiate for meaning (lázaro-ibarrola & azpilicueta-martínez, 2015). in the case of language of interaction effects, it was always the l2 that was favored over the l1, and while these effects were not seen in the use of conversational adjustments, they were evident in other-repetitions and negative feedback. the children’s level of english might probably account for similar levels of l1-l2 conversational adjustments, but it also explains their need to repeat their interlocutor’s utterances in the l2 to reinforce their own understanding and production of target contributions. regarding negative feedback, it was linked to the provision of corrections of target lexical items in the l2. very rarely did the learners manage to correct grammatical form (see (12) in the data analysis section). finally, the third research question addressed potential interaction effects among the factors analyzed. three two-way and one three-way interaction effects were found in the data, namely with nom, confirmation checks, other repetition and clarification requests. with the general category nom, there was a significant interaction between proficiency pairing and language, by which mixed dyads produced higher percentages of nom than matched dyads but only in the l2. as already mentioned, the mixed dyads in our study combined the lexical expertise of the proficient learner with an increased need to deal with communicative breakdowns on account of the weaker member of the dyad. the elisabet pladevall-ballester, alexandra vraciu 468 contrast between the two types of dyads was not seen in the l1 instances of nom. other-repetitions displayed the same interaction between proficiency pairing and language but this time both types of dyads produced more otherrepetitions in the l2 than in the l1. low proficiency learners are more in need to repeat their interlocutor’s utterances in the l2 to carry on with the task. confirmation checks displayed a significant interaction between proficiency pairing and time, where mixed dyads produced significantly more confirmation checks than matched dyads at time 2. finally, clarification requests showed a threeway interaction between all the factors where the pairwise comparisons yielded time differences in matched dyads and only in the l1, which would be in line with the general decrease of the l1 in the whole set of data. 6. conclusions this study has explored the amount of nom, repetition and feedback produced by efl young learners in task-based peer interaction and the mediating effect of time, proficiency pairing and the choice of the language of interaction. our data show that, in the case of spot-the-difference tasks, young learners are able to engage in meaning negotiation, making their production more comprehensible for their partner, providing feedback and incorporating it into their utterances, all of which constitute opportunities for l2 learning. further research should explore the immediate outcomes of the negotiation of meaning strategies and the extent to which these opportunities result in l2 gains, particularly when child peer interaction takes place in the actual classroom context. while we have tried to refine the grain of the analysis of interactional strategies in child peer interaction by considering mediating factors not explored until now in efl contexts, other dimensions still need to be considered, such as the interactional style of the dyads or a wider range of communicative tasks, and the proficiency pairings need to be further discriminated, particularly within the matched dyads. nonetheless, we believe that our findings should encourage efl instructors in primary schools to promote task-based peer interaction in their classes and provide their learners with more scaffolding for meaning negotiation in l2 through formulaic language and explicit training in meaning negotiation strategies. acknowledgements the authors wish to acknowledge the research group eflic (2017sgr752) at universitat autònoma de barcelona. alexandra vraciu is a serra húnter fellow at the facultat de ciències de l’educació (universitat de lleida). efl child peer interaction: measuring the effect of time, proficiency pairing and language of interaction 469 references alcón, e. 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(2012). l1 use in primary and secondary foreign language classrooms and its contribution to learning. in e. alcón soler & m. p. safont elisabet pladevall-ballester, alexandra vraciu 472 jordá (eds.), discourse and learning across l2 instructional contexts (pp. 53-78). amsterdam: rodopi. vraciu, a., & pladevall-ballester, e. (2020). l1 use in peer interaction: exploring time and proficiency pairing effects in primary school efl. international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism. advance online publication. http://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2020.1767029 watanabe, y., & swain, m. (2007). effects of proficiency differences and patterns of pair interaction on second language learning: collaborative dialogue between adult esl learners. language teaching research, 11(2), 121-142. 71 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (1). 2021. 71-101 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.1.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt exploring learners’ understanding of technical vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine cailing lu zhejiang university of technology, hangzhou, china https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9911-2824 lucailing68@126.com frank boers university of western ontario, london, canada https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7552-4931 fboers@uwo.ca averil coxhead victoria university of wellington, new zealand https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3392-6961 averil.coxhead@vuw.ac.nz abstract this study explores english for specific purposes learners’ understanding of technical words in a previously-developed technical word list in traditional chinese medicine (tcm). the principal aim was to estimate what kind of technical terms pose problems to tcm learners and might therefore merit special attention in instruction. of particular interest was the question whether there is a divergence in the understanding of technical vocabulary in tcm between chinese and western background learners. to achieve these aims, a combination of word association tasks and retrospective interviews was implemented with 11 chinese and 10 western background tcm learners. the data showed that both chinese and western learners encountered certain difficulties in understanding technical vocabulary in their study. however, their sources of difficulty were different. comparisons of typical word associations between chinese cailing lu, frank boers, averil coxhead 72 and western learners indicated that there was a degree of divergence in the way these two participant groups understood tcm terms. keywords: technical vocabulary; word list; word associations 1. introduction traditional chinese medicine (tcm) is situated in china, where 24 tcm universities and most other medical institutions provide degrees in the subject (ministry of education of the people’s republic of china, 2020). students are required to study specialized english as part of their degrees to prepare for communicating in english in global settings. tcm is also taught in english-speaking countries such as new zealand and australia because of a growing interest in chinese medicine. in china and elsewhere, students come from chinese and non-chinese speaking backgrounds and need to be able to carry out a wide range of academic tasks in english. learners of tcm need a large vocabulary in english to read academic texts (lu & coxhead, 2020), and technical vocabulary makes up a substantial proportion of the lexis in written academic texts (chung & nation, 2003; coxhead, 2018). previous research has shown that learners of english for specific purposes (esp) have difficulty in understanding, learning, and utilizing technical vocabulary in their studies (ardasheva & tretter, 2015; evans & morrison, 2011; ha & hyland, 2017), even if english is their first language. it is useful to explore what kinds of technical words are difficult to understand for the learners so that they can be prioritized in class and/or instructional materials. to help learners and teachers in tcm decide what specialized lexis requires attention, a technical word list of tcm was developed using a written corpus (lu, 2018), including items such as qi and heart. to optimize the usefulness of such frequency-based wordlists, martinez and schmitt (2012) suggested that the potential difficulty of the lexical items for the learners should also be taken into consideration. this study aims to investigate whether tcm learners from different language backgrounds understand technical words in the same way. it is possible that some tcm technical terms, either borrowed intact from chinese or substituted by an english-word translation, activate a network of associations in western-background tcm students that only partially overlaps with that of chinese-background students. if so, this might be attributable to differences in metaphoric conceptions of the body and matters of health. this hypothesis is based on research in cognitive linguistics showing that language is largely metaphorical in nature and metaphor use varies across different languages and cultures (boers, 2003; kövecses, 2005). exploring learners’ understanding of technical vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine 73 2. literature review 2.1. technical vocabulary technical vocabulary (e.g., morpheme and token in applied linguistics), defined as words which are recognizably specific to a discipline (nation, 2013, p. 303), can make up a fairly large proportion of a technical text. chung and nation (2003) found that 37.6% of the words in an anatomy text and 16.3% in an applied linguistics text were technical. coxhead and demecheleer (2018) found over 30% of the vocabulary in plumbing and fabrication written texts was technical, and quero (2015) found 37% of the words used in medical textbooks was technical. technical vocabulary occurs through high (first 1,000-3,000), mid (4,000-8,000) to low (9,000 onwards) frequency bands in english (nation, 2016). high-frequency vocabulary is important in esp, including tcm, for several reasons. firstly, lu and coxhead (2020) found that high-frequency vocabulary accounted for over 75% of an english tcm corpus made up of practice and theory textbooks and journal articles, with much lower coverage by mid-frequency (nearly 8.5%) and low-frequency (4%) words. tcm loan words (e.g., qi, xue) and medical terms (e.g., radix, rhizoma) from english made up an additional 6% of that corpus. secondly, high-frequency items tend to be polysemous and their technical meaning in a specialized field may not be transparent to learners even if they are familiar with the more common, non-technical uses (fraser, 2009, p. 155). fraser refers to these lexical items as crypotechnical, citing examples from pharmacology (expression and control). an example of a high-frequency word in english which has a technical meaning and high frequency in tcm is warm in gall bladder warms the spleen (warm here is a verb, which means providing heat to aid digestion). because high-frequency words look familiar, however, learners may assume they understand their contextual meaning, while this is not necessarily the case (e.g., bensoussan & laufer, 1984; watson todd, 2017). the challenge with technical vocabulary is thus not only a matter of learning new word forms and their meanings, but to a large extent also a matter of establishing new form-meaning pairings when the word forms are already familiar. because technical vocabulary is closely connected to content knowledge in a specific field (woodward-kron, 2008), it is useful to examine how well learners understand technical terms in their discipline, and whether this understanding varies depending on students’ backgrounds. tcm seems a particularly fruitful context for examining the role of learner background, because, although it obviously has its origins in a specific culture, tcm is now commonly taught not only in chinese settings but also in western settings, and it is now commonly taught in english. because tcm concepts are rooted in chinese culture, this raises cailing lu, frank boers, averil coxhead 74 the question whether l1 chinese learners have an advantage over l1 english learners when it comes to grasping these concepts, even if they are rendered in english. the small-scale exploratory study we report below addresses this question. 2.2. discipline-specific wordlists in tcm by prioritizing lexical items with high frequency, learners can have the greatest possible communicative success with the inevitably limited set of words they learn (durrant, 2013). thus, an increasing number of frequency-based technical wordlists in different disciplines have been developed (coxhead et al., 2016; fraser, 2009; hsu, 2013; lei & liu, 2016; valipouri & nassaji, 2013; wang et al., 2008; ward, 2009; yang, 2015). recently, several efforts have been made to develop wordlists specifically for tcm. using nation’s (2012) british national corpus/corpus of contemporary american english (bnc/coca) frequency lists, hsu (2018) identified the most frequent 605 bnc/coca midand low-frequency word families in english-medium tcm textbooks. based on relative keyness (in the tcm corpora compared to a general written english corpus), frequency and meaningfulness, lu (2018) developed a tcm technical wordlist with 2,747 items. a common issue with these discipline-specific wordlists is that they are probably too large to be covered in a course. thus, this study explores a way of identifying words in such long lists which learners are likely to need special assistance with. 2.3. metaphor in tcm as well as learning about the form, meaning and use of a word in english (see nation, 2013, p. 49), esp learners need to develop ways of thinking and frames of reference in their specific discourse domain (hirvela, 1997). words such as kidney have a very different meaning and set of references in tcm compared to western medicine. in tcm kidney is the organ which stores essence, governs birth, growth, reproduction and development, produces marrow, fills up the brain with essence, controls bones, houses will power and controls the gate of life (maciocia, 2005, p. 153). the extension of the concrete meaning of the word to these abstract notions is called metaphorization by cognitive linguists (e.g., yu, 2003). it is one of the major mechanisms that creates polysemy. partington (1998) states that discipline-specific lexis tends to be rich in metaphoric uses. for instance, when business people talk about ring-fencing, they mean limiting budgetary liability (littlemore et al., 2010, p. 192). low et al. (2008) found the metaphoric density in academic lectures to range from 10% to 13% of all lexical items. such metaphors were found to be semantically opaque to international students in english-speaking countries (e.g., littlemore, 2001; exploring learners’ understanding of technical vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine 75 littlemore et al., 2010) because they may require a considerable amount of figurative thinking (littlemore & low, 2006) in order to derive the metaphorical meaning from the basic, literal meaning of the words. it is often assumed that the learners will be familiar with the basic, literal meaning. this cannot always be taken for granted, however. the extended, metaphorical use of a word can be more frequent than its literal use in the samples of language that a learner is exposed to. for example, a student of commerce and economics is more likely to meet the words chronic, injection and recovery in phrases such as a chronic deficit, a financial injection and economic recovery than with reference to real health matters (e.g., boers, 2000). the original, literal meaning of a word or an expression may stem from a domain of life that is culture-specific, too, such as particular games and customs (boers, 2003). lack of familiarity with these will of course also hinder learners’ appreciation of how the literal underpinning informs the metaphorical use of a given word or expression. when it comes to tcm, it must be puzzling for newcomers to this discipline why certain words have developed their extended meanings. for example, in tcm theory, the gallbladder has three main functions: it stores and excretes bile that is secreted by the liver; it has the capacity to make decisions in mental processes and activities; and it gives people courage (maciocia, 2005). the gallbladder is the container of courage1 metaphor is a culture-specific metaphor shaped by tcm theory (yu, 2003). this illustrates that some tcm technical words might be difficult to understand for western-background learners, because, while the words look familiar, their technical meaning reflects culture-specific metaphors that are quite different from the metaphors which these learners have grown up with (possibly even including remnants of the jamesian view that emotions reside in the heart and reason in the mind). in the exploratory study reported below, we examine if this is indeed the case. specifically, this study addresses the following research questions: 1. to what extent do chinese-background and western-background tcm learners understand a selection of technical words in their discipline? 2. do western-background tcm learners understand technical words in tcm in the same way as chinese-background tcm learners? a) if not, what kind(s) of technical words manifest this divergence between the understanding of the two groups? b) what factors might account for the divergence, if any, in the understanding of the technical words by the two groups? 1 note that it is customary in publications about conceptual metaphors to write these in small upper case. cailing lu, frank boers, averil coxhead 76 3. methodology 3.1. participants a total of 21 tcm bachelor degree students participated in this study: 11 students from a chinese tcm university and 10 tcm students from a new zealand institution. table 1 presents the demographic information of the 11 chinese participants. all the 11 chinese tcm participants had chinese as their first language and had studied english for over eight years. they had high scores on the english college entrance examination. their medium of instruction was mainly chinese, but academic communication in english (e.g., reading english-medium journal articles) was required by the university. six had been english major students for two years at university prior to undertaking tcm study,2 meaning a second year tcm student would actually be in their fourth year of study at university level. other students took one compulsory college english course each semester, such as academic english. table 1 chinese participant (cp) demographic information participant gender sub-discipline year of studying tcm english major prior to tcm cp1 female chinese internal medicine 5 yes cp2 female chinese internal medicine 4 yes cp3 female chinese herbal medicine 3 no cp4 male acupuncture and moxibustion 2 yes cp5 female chinese internal medicine 1 no cp6 female chinese internal medicine 2 no cp7 female chinese herbal medicine 3 no cp8 female acupuncture and moxibustion 2 yes cp10 female acupuncture and moxibustion 2 yes cp11 female acupuncture and moxibustion 2 yes cp12 female chinese herbal medicine 4 no the bachelor’s degree of tcm in new zealand is a four-year program and english is the medium of instruction. as shown in table 2, these participants were students from year one to year four, including nine english speakers from new zealand, north america and the uk, and one taiwanese. none of the nine english native speakers had studied chinese as a second/foreign language, although one of them had chinese parents. the participant who self-identified as taiwanese had been living in new zealand for 20 years. the latter two participants will be 2 those participants studied in a 7-year program which combines english and traditional chinese medicine majors. in the first two years, the students have to learn what english majors learn and in the last five years the students have to learn what tcm learners learn. it is hoped that those students can have high specialized language proficiency through studying those two majors sequentially as a way to prepare them for international academic communication in their field. exploring learners’ understanding of technical vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine 77 labeled “western tcm learners with chinese background” in this article. the other participants in new zealand will for simplicity’s sake be referred to as “western tcm learners” and those based in china as “chinese tcm learners.” this categorization is over-simplistic since all learners could have multicultural backgrounds to varying degrees. table 2 new zealand participant (np) demographic information participant gender sub-discipline year of studying tcm np1 female acupuncture 4 np2 female chinese internal medicine 3 np3 male acupuncture 1 np4 female acupuncture 3 np5 female acupuncture 3 np6 male acupuncture 4 np7 female acupuncture 2 np8 male acupuncture 2 np9 female acupuncture 2 np10 female acupuncture 2 3.2. word association task 3.2.1. format of the word association task the association task used in this study was based on the format of read’s (1998) word association test. read’s task contains a target lexical item, four associates and four distractors. including as many as eight options makes the task less susceptible to guessing (schmitt et al., 2011) and is possibly especially suitable for high-frequency polysemous words (schmitt, 2000). the format is commonly used in word association research (qian, 1999; qian & schedl, 2004; read, 1993, 1998; schmitt et al., 2011). appendix a presents the word association task used in the present study. the participants were asked to choose four words of the eight options which they thought were most closely associated to the cue words in the context of tcm. the word association task served as input for a subsequent retrospective interview procedure where the association responses served as prompts. the task was limited to just 20 items, because it was felt desirable to complete the interviews within one hour to avoid fatigue on the part of the participants. 3.2.2. target cue words although we were especially interested in participants’ understanding of technical terms with meanings that reflect (culture-grounded) metaphors (see above), it was important to present them with a wider range of terms to compare the two cailing lu, frank boers, averil coxhead 78 groups’ overall familiarity with their field’s technical lexis. with a view to including diverse cue words in the associations test, frequency banding and likely semantic transparency/opacity were taken into account as complementary parameters, following a proposal by martínez (2013, p. 190). while martínez used frequency (an estimate of utility) and likely semantic opacity (an estimate of learning difficulty) as two complementary parameters to select multiword expressions, this study applied the same general parameters to single words. figure 1 shows the continua of frequency and likely transparency. on the vertical continuum, technical words from the first to the third 1,000 word families of the bnc/coca word lists are in the upper quadrant (e.g., heat and doctor) and items from the lower-frequency bands are in the lower quadrant (e.g., pathology and yang). the cut-off point at 3,000 bnc/coca level for distinguishing high-frequency words from mid-frequency words was proposed by schmitt and schmitt (2014). figure 1 the frequency-transparency framework for tcm technical words on the horizontal continuum, opaque items are on the right and transparent items are on the left. the first indicator of likely opacity is whether the technical sense of a word differs from its general sense (ha & hyland, 2017). if a word is metaphorical or is used in a sense that differs from its use in general discourse, it was considered opaque. for example, the literal meaning of heart is “a hollow muscular organ of vertebrate animals that by its rhythmic contraction acts as a force pump maintaining the circulation of the blood” (heart, n.d.), whereas in tcm it refers to the organ that is situated in the chest whose main functions are to govern blood and to house the mind (maciocia, 2005). the second indicator is whether a technical word is a loan word borrowed intact from chinese (e.g., qi, yang). interpreting loan words can be challenging even to people with knowledge of chinese, because the four tones of chinese are invisible in romanized versions of loan words, and so they are potentially ambiguous. exploring learners’ understanding of technical vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine 79 following these principles, the first author, with a bachelor’s degree in tcm, allocated the most frequent 200 technical words on the tcm technical word list (lu, 2018) into the four quadrants. appendix b presents the first 100 technical words in the aforementioned list. when there was uncertainty, an expert in tcm translation, who is also the second rater of the word association task, was consulted. five technical nouns or verbs from each frequency-transparency category were then randomly selected for the word association task and used as the prompts in the retrospective interviews. 3.2.3. associations and distractors word association tasks can indicate levels of mastery of cue words (read, 2012). using fitzpatrick’s (2006) categories and subcategories of association as presented in appendix c, each item was developed to contain a mixture of association options. this version of word association task was adopted because it was essentially used as prompts to explore learners’ deeper understanding of technical words. to make the task less susceptible to guessing, one to two distractors were provided for each item while the others were all possible associates. the respondents had to choose four associates out of eight options, six to seven of which were correct. the reason why more than four correct associates were provided was to capture the potential divergence among the learners as they made their selection of the four options they considered most closely associated with the given term. the respondents’ selection of associates was a measure of how well the target cue words were known, where lack of knowledge was observed when one of the distractors was chosen by the participant. the self-reported reasons for selecting the associates in the subsequent interview reflected the kind of knowledge that drove the associations and checked on the verity of the selections in the task. the distractors were selected from the tcm technical word list and checked to ensure there was no direct semantic link with the cue word. take joint, for example, in figure 2. in tcm, joints are “more than just anatomical entities, they have an important function with regard to the circulation of qi and blood, with several implications in pathology” (maciocia, 2005, p. 752). tendon and skeleton are paradigmatic associations from the same word class as joint, while qi and blood are meaning-based associations which form the conceptual meanings of joint. pain (joint pain) and shoulder (shoulder joint) are position-based associates. only when the learners understand joint in tcm well can they associate joint with qi and blood. choosing words other than qi and blood can also show that the learners understand the literal meaning of joint. in this example, heart and hepatitis are distractors and are on the tcm technical word list (see appendix a for more examples). cailing lu, frank boers, averil coxhead 80 figure 2 joint as an example in the word association task 3.3. semi-structured interviews semi-structured retrospective interviews were used to explore the reasoning behind participants’ answers (cohen et al., 2007). such open-ended format was chosen to ensure that the interviewees had the flexibility to elaborate on their answers within the given frame (dörnyei, 2007). the interviewer probed how well the participants really understood the target words by asking them to explain their choices, thereby adding to the validity of the word association task results. the participants chose either chinese or english to express their ideas. the interviews were recorded and transcribed. 3.4. procedures in each interview, a participant responded to one cue word on the task at a time, and was then asked to explain their response, before moving on to the next item on the test. the participants performed the word association task using paper and pencil, with no access to dictionaries or other reference texts and no time constraints. the first author sat face-to-face with each participant, and immediately after the participants had chosen associates for an item, she asked them to reflect on the reasons behind their responses to the association task, using questions such as, “why did you choose a?” and “why did you associate this word with b?” 3.5. data analysis table 3 demonstrates the scoring criteria for the word association task. the participants’ responses in the written word association task and the elaborations exploring learners’ understanding of technical vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine 81 given in the retrospective interview were assessed on a 5-point scale for each of the 20 items (maximum score = 100 points). for instance, in the case of root, one participant chose cause, manifestation, herb and chronic as the associations, and gave valid reasons for those associations in the interview. this participant was considered to have full knowledge of root and scored 5 points. table 3 scoring criteria for the word association task (adapted from schmitt et al., 2011) degree points criteria full knowledge 5 selected at least three associations related to tcm and demonstrated full knowledge of the cue word in tcm context partial knowledge 4 selected at least three associations related to tcm and demonstrated some knowledge of the cue word in tcm context 3 selected at least two associations related to tcm and demonstrated a little bit of knowledge of the cue word in tcm context 2 selected at least one association related to tcm and demonstrated no knowledge of the cue word in tcm context 1 selected association(s) unrelated to tcm but related to literal/general meaning and demonstrated no knowledge of the cue word in tcm context no knowledge 0 did not know the cue word at all or selected items that could not be justified the responses of one participant’s word association task were scored by the first author and then by a second rater. the level of agreement was 95% and agreement on the 5% other items was reached through discussion. the first author then scored all the tasks, and consulted the rater when needed. to answer research question 1, the mean score (m) and the corresponding standard deviation (sd) were calculated.3 to answer research question 2, the number of participants who chose each association were counted for each item. the four associations selected by the majority of participants in each group were then determined. divergence was identified when at least one of the four typical associations was not the same for the two groups of participants. interview data were then consulted to confirm divergence in the reasoning behind these associations of the two groups. the interview analysis followed the classic method for qualitative data analysis of holliday (2010) and involved firstly coding all divergences and then determining themes. the divergences concerning the opaque items were examined first to ascertain if they were indeed related to cultural background. if not, then they were explored further to determine what other factors drove the divergences. the transparent items were analyzed to determine what factors led to the divergences, without expecting cultural background factors to emerge. 3 given the small sample sizes, we consider this an exploratory study and will refrain from reporting inferential statistics (but see footnote 4). cailing lu, frank boers, averil coxhead 82 4. results 4.1. outcome of the word association task 4.1.1. performance of chinese tcm learners in the word association task as displayed in table 4, the mean score for the chinese tcm learners was 74.27 out of 100, suggesting that they had a good understanding of the majority of the technical words in the task. they did not demonstrate full knowledge of approximately 25% of the technical words in the task, and generally scored higher for the technical words from high-frequency vocabulary (a total mean of 19.91 + 23.64 = 43.55) than lowerfrequency bands (a total mean of 12.27 + 18.45 = 30.72). the cue words lumbar and diarrhoea caused great difficulty for these learners, as did wheezing and colorectal in the task. these participants reported in the interviews that they had not chosen the latter words as associations in the task because they were not familiar with them. the chinese participants appeared to have better knowledge of transparent high-frequency technical words such as cancer (m = 23.64) than opaque technical words such as mind (m = 19.91). interview data showed that four chinese tcm learners had problems with the metaphorical meaning of technical words in english, especially those who had not taken english for tcm purposes courses. for example, they understood the meaning of channel as in tv channel, but not in connection with tcm. in this case, the learners failed to understand the specialized meaning of polysemous words even though they knew another, more common meaning. as to the technical words from low-frequency bands, the results in table 4 indicate that chinese tcm learners knew the opaque items such as tang (m = 18.45) better than the transparent items such as lumbar (m = 12.27). these results are not surprising because the chinese learners had an advantage in understanding loan words which are from the opaque and infrequent category. table 4 also shows a wide range of scores in the word association task, from students who displayed almost full knowledge of the target words (the highest score being 98 out of 100) to ones who appeared to understand only a small percentage (the lowest score being 40 out of 100). table 1 descriptive statistics of chinese learners’ performance in the word association task (n = 11) category total minimum maximum m sd frequent and opaque technical words 25 16 25 19.91 3.48 frequent and transparent technical words 25 16 25 23.64 2.94 infrequent and transparent technical words 25 0 25 12.27 9.27 infrequent and opaque technical words 25 7 25 18.45 7.09 all 4 categories 100 40 98 74.27 21.12 note. m = mean; sd = standard deviation exploring learners’ understanding of technical vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine 83 4.1.2. performance of western tcm learners in the word association task table 5 displays the descriptive statistics of the word association responses from the western tcm learners. the mean score was 94.20 out of 100, indicating that the western tcm learners had a higher level of understanding of the technical words in the task, failing to understand, on average, only one out of twenty target words. they scored slightly lower on opaque technical words from both the high-frequency band, such as mind (m = 22.90), and the lower-frequency bands, such as tang (m = 21.40), than on the technical words expected to be transparent according to our framework, with mean scores of 24.50 (e.g., cancer) and 24.90 (e.g., lumbar) respectively. table 5 western learners’ performance in the word association task (n = 10) category total minimum maximum m sd frequent and opaque technical words 25 17 25 22.90 2.73 frequent and transparent technical words 25 23 25 24.50 .85 infrequent and transparent technical words 25 24 25 24.90 .32 infrequent and opaque technical words 25 19 25 21.40 2.55 all 4 categories 100 86 99 94.20 4.13 note. m = mean; sd = standard deviation the results indicate that opaque loan words, both among the cue items of the task and among the association options, appeared to pose some difficulty for the western learners. for example, these learners found it difficult to differentiate loan words which have similar forms (e.g., zhong, zong and zheng). two of the western participants mentioned explicitly in the interview that they found it especially challenging to learn loan words, and that some low-frequency technical words (e.g., colorectal and borborygmus) were also difficult (see extract 1). note that colorectal was not the cue word in the word association task, and so this difficulty was not reflected in the scores directly, but was revealed through the interview. extract 1: a western learner talks about associations of the cue word cancer np6: (looking at colorectal) what is this word? colorectal? i don’t know this word. interviewer: so, you’ve never seen this word? np6: no. the two western participants who had some chinese heritage scored 99 out of 100 on the word association task. perhaps these participants had the best of both worlds, in that they had exposure to low-frequency words in english and also understood the chinese loan words. cailing lu, frank boers, averil coxhead 84 4.2. comparison of typical associations between chinese and western learners in answer to subquestion b, typical associations were compared to other association options prompted by the target technical words in each participant group. table 6 shows that a major divergence of understanding was manifested with two (out of 20) target technical words (phlegm and tang), with only two typical associations shared by the two participant groups. it is not surprising that both items are low-frequency and opaque. table 6 summary of divergence between the two groups in each category of tcm specialized words degree of divergence major divergence minor divergence no divergence frequent and opaque technical words 0 2 3 frequent and transparent technical words 0 3 2 infrequent and transparent technical words 0 4 1 infrequent and opaque technical words 2 1 2 total 2 10 8 minor divergence was found in ten items (50%) where both participant groups shared at least three typical associations. it is interesting to note that minor divergence was identified from all four categories as indicated in table 6. for the remaining eight cue words, chinese and western tcm learners shared the same typical associations, accounting for 40% of the lexical items in the task. the divergence identified could come from technical words in any category of the frequency-transparency framework, but lower-frequency items manifested more divergence than high-frequency items. 4.3. factors contributing to divergence language knowledge and breadth of subject knowledge were identified in the qualitative analysis as the main contributors to divergence in the understanding of the technical words in the association task. in contrast, it was clear from the analysis that, against our expectations, cultural background did not stand out in the data. 4.3.1. language knowledge the language knowledge of the participants was identified in the interview data as the most important factor for the divergence. this factor was evident in the data in two ways. first, the chinese tcm learners appeared to lack knowledge of technical words in english from the lower-frequency bands. that is, their knowledge of words that they would have had few chances to meet in their english language exploring learners’ understanding of technical vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine 85 learning experience seemed to be limited. for example, 10 out of 11 chinese learners did not select borborygmus as an association for diarrhoea simply because they were not familiar with this technical low-frequency word (extract 2) in english (but did know it in their l1). in extract 2, typical associations from chinese learners are underlined (spleen, stool, dampness, and dizziness) and associations from western learners are in bold (spleen, borborygmus, stool, and dampness). extract 2: a chinese learner talks about associations of the cue word diarrhoea diarrhoea a. spleen b. heart c. borborygmus d. stool e. dampness f. ceaseless g. dizziness h. chronic interviewer: so, can i please ask why you didn’t choose c (borborygmus)? cp10: i don’t know this word. interviewer: so, if you had known this word means fuming (chinese translation of borborygmus), would you have chosen it? cp10: fuming, ah, i would. interviewer: why? cp10: i would remove dizziness, because it has stronger association. this disease has a symptom as such. similar patterns could also be found when the participants met other technical words from the lower-frequency bands such as lumbar as a cue word and mucus as an association. unfamiliarity with technical words from the lower-frequency vocabulary bands affected chinese tcm learners’ choices of associations. the second major divergence arose when the western tcm learners appeared to lack high levels of knowledge of the chinese loan words such as tang (cue word) and chengqi (association option). extract 3 from an interview with a western tcm learner illustrates this point. seven out of the ten western learners showed a similar reaction when they saw tang. extract 3: a western learner talks about associations to the cue word tang np8: (looking at tang) sounds very hard? interviewer: have you ever seen this word? np8: oh, no, tang, is that tong means pain? interviewer: no, not this one. np8: no, i don’t know. some western learners decoded this word as an english word rather than a loan word, despite the tcm context of the word association task. extract 4 is a case in point. tang is a mid-frequency word in english in nation’s (2012) bnc/coca lists and it is also a word form used in chinese when romanized. cailing lu, frank boers, averil coxhead 86 extract 4 thus demonstrates that such loan words were likely to create confusion for the learners if they were not explicitly explained. extract 4: a western learner encoded tang as an english word np1: ok, tang, i’m not familiar with this word. is this an english word or chinese word? i: actually, it’s pinyin [romanized chinese word]. np1: i don’t know what it is as a chinese. so, i can’t make associations. whereas if i choose to look at it as an english word, then i might be able to make associations. i: so, how would you choose as an english word? np1: as a taste like a flavor. 4.3.2. breadth of subject knowledge the second factor for the divergence was the breadth of subject knowledge of the learners. extract 5 shows an interview extract with one western tcm learner who is talking about herbs in relation to cold, and extract 6 concerns the same word with a chinese tcm learner. even though neither the western learner in extract 5 nor the chinese learner in extract 6 had specialized in herbal medicine, the chinese learner made the association without hesitation. extract 5: a western learner talking about herbs as association to cold cold a. fever b. heat c. yin d. pathogenic e. wind f. herbs g. intestine h. limbs note. western learners’ (np3) associations in bold and chinese learners’ (cp12) underlined. interviewer: not herbs? np3: i didn’t pick herbs because i don’t really know anything about herbs yet, and they feel more like a treatment than a problem, yeah. extract 6: a chinese learner talking about herbs as association to cold interviewer: so why did you choose herbs? cp12: i chose herbs because a lot of herbs are cold herbs, i mean, some herbs have a cold property. foundation tcm courses, such as acupuncture and herbal medicine, are compulsory in china. this means tcm learners must take such courses to get their degree. however, western tcm learners have specialized courses on acupuncture. this difference in educational systems might account for the western learners having somewhat narrower associations than the chinese learners. exploring learners’ understanding of technical vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine 87 4.4. divergence in understanding of technical words with the same typical associations even if the two groups of respondents produced the same typical associations for many words, this does not necessarily mean that their mental representations of these words were identical. the way knowledge is represented in the mind is likely determined by how it was acquired. extract 7 and extract 8 illustrate, for example, how a western tcm learner referred to the acupuncture knowledge from courses, whereas the chinese learner used their underlying theoretical and philosophical knowledge of tcm. extract 7: a western tcm learner talked about lung as association to spleen np1: i chose lung because in tcm you got your 12 primary channels, but they are paired up so there is taiyin, so the lung and the spleen are the same channel, and they have a really strong relationship, and they work together quite simultaneously in the body to, basically in creating qi and to ensuring smooth digestion, they both work together particularly in transforming, transporting and moving fluids around the body. extract 8: a chinese tcm learner talked about lung as association to spleen cp4: um, because, the spleen and the lung has mother-child relationship. then digestion, spleen governs transformation and transportation. then, stomach has an external-internal relationship (with the spleen). then blood, it’s the material basis for production of qi and blood. the western background learners who had some knowledge of chinese culture showed a better ability to decode loan words that are used in the subdiscipline outside their specialization. extract 9 shows the decoding process of a western learner who did not have any chinese background in comparison with extract 10, a western learner with a chinese background who used translation to help with decoding the technical vocabulary. extract 9: a western learner without chinese background talks about the cue word tang np9: um, tang, that’s a tricky one, i don’t really know. interviewer: you haven’t seen this word before? np9: no, well, in like yintang, that kind of thing, but i couldn’t tell you... ok, i will pick none [as an answer] because i can’t really, but yeah, i’ve heard yintang and that kind of thing, but i can’t think of any of these that would fit why. extract 10: a western learner with chinese background talks about the cue word tang np5: oh, it’s a tricky one coz i actually don’t know the meaning i think it’s herbs like you know when you have a formula unless i’m completely wrong, yeah, but i actually don’t know the meaning of that. um, also don’t even know the meaning of this one (chengqi), so therefore if i think it’s closely associated cailing lu, frank boers, averil coxhead 88 with herbs and i translated it into decoction, yeah, i tick that. and then with herbs you can have specific flavours, i’ll tick bitter, and them because usually you’ll smell them you know, i’ll tick that (pungent odour). interviewer: so how would you translate it if you don’t know . . .? np5: can you pronounce it for me or you’re not allowed to? interviewer: tang (the interviewer pronounces it with the tone). np5: i think possibly this (decoction), but other than this i don’t know. these extracts illustrate that when both western learners did not have much knowledge of chinese, the one who had some chinese background showed a better ability to decode the technical words that were not used very commonly in their sub-discipline but used very commonly in another important subdiscipline of tcm. the same trend applied to other western learners except one who had previously studied herbal medicine. 5. discussion in response to research question 1, this exploratory study revealed that the participants displayed good knowledge of the selected technical terms overall, although there were exceptions among the chinese learners, who showed limited understanding of the midand low-frequency terms unless these were chinese loanwords (see below for further discussion). largely because of this, the mean score of the chinese group on the word association task was lower than that of the western learners4 (for whom english was their first or dominant language). the min-max values and the standard deviations in tables 4 and 5 above indicate a much greater dispersion of the scores in the former group as well. while all the western learners obtained overall scores of at least 86 out of 100, this held true for only 5 of the chinese learners. it therefore looks as though instructional intervention would be especially welcome for certain learners in the latter population. in response to research question 2, this study showed that the divergence in the understanding of the technical words between the two groups of tcm learners was due in large part to different language backgrounds and the frequency of the vocabulary items. for chinese learners, specialized words used almost exclusively in medical or tcm contexts (e.g., lumbar) posed greater difficulty than those used in wider contexts. such specialized words are often from the midand low-frequency bands of english vocabulary or even outside nation’s (2012) frequency bands. these must be challenging to chinese-background tcm 4 the results of a t-test for independent samples indicates that the difference in scores between the two participant groups was statistically significant (t = 2.93; p = .009), and cohen’s d calculation confirmed that the effect for participant group was large (d = 1.31). given the small sample sizes, we should of course interpret these statistics with caution. exploring learners’ understanding of technical vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine 89 learners, because they have had few opportunities to encounter english words outside the general high-frequency vocabulary bands in their previous efl learning experience. after they enter their discipline where they are exposed to such technical words, they need to learn the subject knowledge and these technical words in chinese and english simultaneously. as one chinese participant commented, “i don’t have time to use these technical words in english after class because i have many courses to attend in one semester.” added to the challenge is the overwhelmingly large quantity of such technical words in their discipline. where problems did occur with western tcm learners, it concerned mostly chinese loan words which these participants were not yet familiar with (e.g., yang). further, they found it especially difficult to differentiate loan words which have similar forms (e.g., zhong, zong and zheng). we might expect loan words to cause difficulties for learners who are not first language speakers of chinese. these learners have to build knowledge of both the technical concept and the vocabulary that goes with it. in contrast, the findings revealed that tcm learners from both contexts did not encounter great difficulty with high-frequency words with specialized meaning. at first glance, this finding contradicts the argument of watson todd (2017) who, when developing an engineering word list, claimed that learners may need explicit help with high-frequency words that have taken on specialized meanings. however, watson todd’s word list served the purpose of helping learners prepare for english-medium study in engineering, whereas the esp learners in our study had already been studying their subject for at least one year. further, by indicating that learners from different linguistic backgrounds encountered different challenges, this study calls for attention to learners’ linguistic background in applying word lists in teaching. this study also highlights that insights from learners can be a valuable complement to the word lists developed solely based on corpora. we hypothesized at the start that cultural background would be a cause for divergence in the understanding of technical words between chinese and western learners. however, no compelling corroboration for this hypothesis emerged from our data. in general, western tcm learners demonstrated a good understanding of most technical words that contain cultural metaphors (e.g., mind, phlegm). this is perhaps not surprising for two reasons. first, these western-background learners had studied tcm for a considerable length of time. they had gained a reasonable or even excellent grasp of the technical knowledge and the underlying cultural knowledge. second, the western learners received english-medium instruction about the subject, which probably involved considerable semantic elaboration to support the learning of discipline-specific meanings of these technical words. given that the western learners are native or native-like speakers of english, they were familiar with the general meaning of these technical words. therefore, it may have been relatively easy for them to make appropriate transfer from general meaning of these technical cailing lu, frank boers, averil coxhead 90 words to the metaphorical meaning. this finding is consistent with the view of woodward-kron (2008), who pointed out that learning disciplinary knowledge involves understanding, engaging with, and adopting technical terms of that discourse. evidence of understanding chinese metaphoric conceptions of body and health demonstrated that the western-background learners in this study have really learned these technical words. therefore, even though tcm has culturally-bound metaphoric conceptions of the body and matters of health that differ from its western counterparts, the western-background tcm learners demonstrated similar comprehension to the chinese learners of the technical words which reflect such metaphoric meanings. this study also showed that the participants from both groups who studied the subject for even one year demonstrated good understanding of technical words with cultural metaphor. this finding contrasts with that of littlemore (2001) and littlemore et al. (2010), who found that metaphors in academic lectures created considerable comprehension difficulties among international students. one possible reason for this conflicting finding might be the difference between the participants’ l1 and the language used as the medium of instruction in their study. the participants in littlemore (2001) and littlemore et al. (2010) were international students and the medium of instruction in their study was english, which was not the participants’ l1. however, in the present study, the medium of instruction for chinese participants in their study was mostly chinese, while the medium of instruction for the western participants was english. that means almost all participants received instruction in their l1 (the taiwanese participant is a native-like speaker of english) in the current study. it is not surprising that participants could comprehend metaphors of their study in their l1. in addition, findings from the retrospective interviews shed light on the pathways that led the participants to choose certain associations. chinese and western-background learners of tcm seemed to acquire technical words through different pathways, although the resulting knowledge looks the same. the chinese learners had probably acquired much of the underlying tcm theory and philosophy knowledge incidentally in daily life and this knowledge then became enhanced and systematized in their field of study. the western learners, by contrast, probably acquired tcm technical words and their cultural underpinnings simultaneously through deliberate instruction with the aid of textbooks and course materials. this supports a broad interpretation of the concept of transfer appropriate processing proposed by morris et al. (1977), which suggests that the way of learning something will determine the nature of the resulting knowledge. it is important to note that this study contains only 20 technical tcm items and involved only a small number of participants. these small sample sizes are clearly limitations in this study. as regards the research procedure that we explored here, our findings highlight the value of retrospective interviews immediately after exploring learners’ understanding of technical vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine 91 task completion. this process allowed us not only to detect lacunae in esp learners’ vocabulary knowledge, but also to pinpoint some of the reasons for those gaps. taken together, this study has the potential to inform instructional interventions to help specific groups of learners to overcome their specific difficulties with technical words that they encounter in their study. 6. pedagogical implications there is a range of possible implications for esp learners, teachers and course designers based on this research. first, if there are technical loan words from another language in a subject, such as zhong, zong and zheng in the present study, learners (such as the western participants in this study) who do not have a working knowledge of that language should probably avoid trying to learn these words at the same time to avoid confusion between them. teachers could ensure that extra time and practice is allowed for these items. it is equally important for the course designers to select teaching materials which pay special attention to such loan words, for example, by providing explanations in the margins. if such materials are not available, the course designers and teachers could design supplementary learning materials and activities to help the learners with those loan words. second, learners such as the chinese efl learners in the present study will need considerable support for highly specialized and low-frequency words (e.g., pericardium), which involve acquiring new word forms and new meanings at the same time. deliberate learning and consolidation in memory, for example through using word cards, would be useful in this instance (nation, 2013). semantic elaboration tasks can also help learners work out the similarity between the ‘basic’ word meaning and its extended meaning as a specialized word (boers, 2000; nation, 2013). this kind of learning is part of language-focused learning, which is one of nation’s (2013) four strands. it is of course also important for the learners to encounter the specialized vocabulary of their discipline through reading textbooks (meaning-focused input strand), as well as giving presentations, retelling the main points of a carefully selected article abstract and discussion activities (meaning-focused output strand). for them to be able to use the technical vocabulary in real time communication, learners will also need to practice what they have learned through activities that foster fluency (the fluency strand in nation’s model). nation (2007) suggested that the learners spend a similar amount of time on each strand for learning to happen effectively. last, for subjects such as tcm which have a strong metaphorical component, it is important to plan for and consider the frequency, connection to the subject and learning of metaphors. the more learners know about a subject, the more likely they will also develop their understanding of metaphors in that area. tasks such as the one from this study could be used to tease out the knowledge cailing lu, frank boers, averil coxhead 92 of metaphors with learners, and teachers could be drawing attention to figurative meanings in class in a systematic way by pointing them out in reading texts and ensuring there are plenty of opportunities for both discussing metaphor in class and using technical terms in speaking and writing. 7. directions for future research the finding about factors affecting learners’ understanding of technical words is solely based on qualitative analysis of semi-structured interview data. the number of participants in each group was not sufficient for inferential statistics such as a regression analysis to identify the predictors of word knowledge in the present study. larger scale approximate replications would be welcome. further work could also include a group of western tcm learners who have prior knowledge of chinese, and include word frequency in chinese as another criterion to select the target words. another avenue would be to explore teachers’ approaches to technical vocabulary in university classes (see basturkmen & shackleford, 2015). extending this line of research to other academic disciplines where cultural knowledge might affect learners’ comprehension of technical vocabulary would also be welcome. 8. conclusion this study started with the assumption that the western and chinese-background tcm learners might understand technical words reflecting culture-specific metaphors in different ways. however, the findings of the present research showed that this assumption did not hold. a divergence was identified in that western learners struggled with chinese loan words and chinese learners struggled with lowfrequency english words. the interview data revealed that language knowledge and breadth of subject knowledge of the participants were the main contributors to the divergence. overall, this exploratory study provided us with useful insights into the kinds of technical words which merit pedagogical intervention. this can help to make more informed use of the inevitably long word lists that have been produced in recent years, including our own tcm word list as a case in point. this investigation may stimulate further research into specialized language learning and teaching in tcm as well as in other academic disciplines. acknowledgements we wish to thank the two editors and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. exploring learners’ understanding of technical vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine 93 references ardasheva, y., & tretter, t. r. 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(2003). metaphor, body, and culture: the chinese understanding of gallbladder and courage. metaphor and symbol, 18(1), 13-31. exploring learners’ understanding of technical vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine 97 appendix a word association task this task contains 20 target words. each target word (in bold) has eight (8) options. please choose four words of the eight options which you think are most closely associated to the following words in the context of traditional chinese medicine (tcm). put a tick (√) in the box for each option you choose. here is an example: joint � a. qi � b. tendon � c. skeleton � d. blood � e. pain � f. heart � g. shoulder � h. hepatitis you might answer the task like this: joint � a. qi � b. tendon � c. skeleton � d. blood � e. pain � f. heart � g. shoulder � h. hepatitis think aloud:5 as you make your choices, i would like you to talk about your choices and why you chose (or did not choose) each one. 1. mind � a. essence � b. qi � c. consciousness � d. heart � e. insomnia � f. calm � g. hiccup 5 we used this term in the instruction to encourage the participants to elaborate on why they selected or did not select certain associates as soon as they made the choice, but they actually told us their rationales after they finished each item, which is a retrospective technique. � h. feelings 2. root � a. herb � b. chronic � c. acute � d. manifestation � e. treat � f. abdomen � g. cause � h. strengthen 3. spleen � a. lung � b. digestion � c. stomach cailing lu, frank boers, averil coxhead 98 � d. blood � e. saliva � f. tongue � g. deficiency � h. eyes 4. channel � a. organ � b. penicillin � c. acupoint � d. collaterals � e. connecting � f. liver � g. oedema � h. stomach 5. skin � a. wheezing � b. tinnitus � c. tissue � d. outer layer � e. dry � f. disease � g. surface � h. muscle 6. qi � a. spleen � b. yang � c. vision � d. blood � e. defensive � f. movement � g. zong � h. stagnant 7. throat � a. mouth � b. neck � c. nasopharynx � d. kidney channel � e. dry � f. menopause � g. sore � h. backache 8. acupuncture � a. needle � b. alternative therapy � c. acupressure � d. moxibustion � e. treatment � f. auricular � g. points � h. stimulation 9. blood � a. fluid � b. yin � c. heart � d. leukaemia � e. gallbladder � f. red � g. cool � h. liver 10. knee � a. leg � b. joint � c. respiration � d. bend � e. injury � f. ear � g. soreness � h. pain 11. disharmony � a. argument � b. disease � c. imbalance � d. wind � e. vessel � f. internal � g. pattern � h. liver 12. cancer � a. tumour � b. toothache � c. malignant � d. stroke � e. lung � f. colorectal � g. gastric � h. chemotherapy 13. protein � a. nutrient � b. egg � c. glucose � d. enzyme � e. urine � f. expression � g. antibody � h. therapy 14. urine � a. waste � b. stool � c. kidney � d. bladder � e. yellow � f. spasm � g. cloudy � h. turbid 15. cold � a. fever � b. heat � c. yin � d. pathogenic factor � e. wind � f. herbs � g. intestine � h. limbs 16. diarrhoea � a. spleen � b. heart � c. borborygmus � d. stool � e. dampness � f. ceaseless � g. dizziness � h. chronic 17. phlegm � a. throat � b. mucus exploring learners’ understanding of technical vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine 99 � c. damp � d. cough � e. wind � f. turbid � g. heat � h. hepatitis 18. lumbar � a. cervical � b. vertebrae � c. diabetes � d. back � e. soreness � f. pain � g. spine � h. region 19. tonify � a. deficiency � b. harmony � c. nourish � d. expel � e. bladder � f. spleen � g. qi � h. kidney 20. tang � a. pungent odour � b. bitter � c. decoction � d. herbs � e. organ � f. water � g. chest � h. chengqi answer key 1. abcdefh 2. abdegh 3. abcdefg 4. acdefh 5. cdefgh 6. abdefgh 7. abcdeg 8. abcefgh 9. abcdfgh 10. abdegh 11. bcdfgh 12. acefgh 13. abdefg 14. abcdegh 15. abcdefh 16. acdefh 17. abcdefg 18. bdefgh 19. acdfgh 20. abcdfh cailing lu, frank boers, averil coxhead 100 appendix b the first 100 items of the tcm technical word list (adapted from lu, 2018) note. the word types were arranged by their number of occurrences in the tcm corpora. the concordance lines of word types falling into a single lemma (e.g., point, points) were checked to see if they had similar meanings and patterns of use in the tcm corpora. if so, they were combined into a single entry in the word list as point(s). 1. qi 26. pulse(s) 51. vessel(s) 76. pathogenic 2. blood 27. channel(s) 52. fluid(s) 77. pi 3. treatment 28. decoction(s) 53. fu 78. jiao 4. heat 29. low(er) 54. water 79. severe 5. yin 30. damp 55. herbal 80. excess 6. pain 31. lung(s) 56. trail(s) 81. tonify(ies/ing) 7. liver 32. formula(s/e) 57. mind 82. exterior 8. yang 33 effect(s) 58. red 83. mu 9. deficiency(ies) 34. disease(s) 59. function(s) 84. urine 10. acupuncture 35. zi 60. western 85. therapy/therapies 11. patient(s) 36. dampness 61. stasis 86. medical 12. radix 37. fire 62. fructus 87. ling 13. kidney(s) 38. herb(s) 63. dry 88. manifestation(s) 14. spleen 39. syndrome(s) 64. skin 89. flow 15. heart 40. tang 65. condition(s) 90. obstruction(s) 16. cold 41. pattern(s) 66. cause(s/d/ing) 91. coating 17. medicine(s) 42. control(led/s) 67. level(s) 92. health 18. point(s) 43. shen 68. treat(ed/ing/s) 93. painful 19. symptom(s) 44. zhi 69. cao 94. intestine(s) 20. phlegm 45. rhizoma 70. abdominal 95. prescription(s) 21. body 46. case(s) 71. organ(s) 96. system(s) 22. wind 47. chronic 72. bladder 97. internal 23. tongue 48. stagnation 73. cell(s) 98. deficient 24. stomach 49. chest 74. feeling 99. food(s) 25. clinical 50. clear(s/ing) 75. factor(s) 100. essence(s) exploring learners’ understanding of technical vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine 101 appendix c categories of word association responses (adapted from fitzpatrick, 2006, p. 131) category subcategory (x = cue word, y = response word) definition (x = cue word, y = response word) meaning-based association defining synonym x means the same as y specific synonym x can mean y in some specific contexts hierarchical/lexical set relationship x and y are in the same lexical set or are coordinates or have a metonymous or superordinate relationship quality association y is a quality of x or x is a quality of y context association y gives a conceptual context for x conceptual association x and y have some other contextual link position-based association consecutive xy/yx collocation x collocates with y, or y collocates with x phrasal xy/yx collocation y follows x in a phrase, or x follows y in a phrase 161 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (2). 161-185 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl working with language learner histories from three perspectives: teachers, learners and researchers sarah mercer university of graz, austria sarah.mercer@uni-graz.at abstract recent developments in sla, such as learner-centredness, social constructivism, the postmethod era, and complexity perspectives, have highlighted the need for more localized, situated understandings of teaching and learning and greater recognition of learner individuality and diversity. in this article, i suggest an effective way of meeting these needs is to employ learner histories. this powerful form of writing allows learners to use their l2 to engage in authentic, personally meaningful communication with others about their identities, experiences, perceptions and emotions related to their language learning histories. as a text type, they are able to facilitate a more holistic perspective of the learner’s life and reveal the unique interconnections that an individual makes across various domains. they also enable the situated, contextualised and dynamic nature of their learning experiences to become apparent and provide learners with a genuine, motivating purpose for writing. exploring data generated in austria with tertiary-level efl learners, i seek to illustrate some of the rich potential of these text types from three perspectives, namely, those of the teacher, learner and researcher. keywords: learner histories, narratives, autobiographies, complexity, agency sarah mercer 162 working with learner histories within sla there has been a growing acknowledgement of the potential of narratives, in particular autobiographies, as a useful reflective tool and a rich source of data. given their potential for providing “a window into people’s beliefs and experiences” (bell, 2002, p. 209), they have been found to be particularly suitable for investigating second language learners’ identities, beliefs, affective factors and individual differences (benson & nunan, 2005; kalaja, menezes, & barcelos, 2008; norton, 2000; oxford, 1996; pavlenko, 2001; tse, 2000). autobiographies are considered a form of narrative in which the narrator describes their own life retrospectively from their first-person point of view (cf. löschnigg, 2005). other related terms include learning histories, life stories, personal narratives and memoirs. autobiographical research refers to “a broad approach to research that focuses on the analysis and description of social phenomena as they are experienced within the context of individual lives” (benson, 2005, p. 4). i have chosen to employ the term language learner histories (llhs) in line with the rationale put forward by oxford (1995), who defines these as “self-report-based, introspective research narratives written by students about their own language learning. in language learning histories as a form of research, students thoughtfully take a second look at their own past learning experiences” (p. 582). i have chosen not to employ the alternative term language learning careers suggested by benson (2011), as in my cultural context i fear that learners might interpret this in a way which would unduly stress their more recent years of education given that many learners here attend “professional” schools with a specific career focus. i would also be concerned about the danger of eliciting a potentially curriculum vitae style response to the guidelines. however, i have embraced benson’s (2011) understanding of these texts which he defines as conveying “the sense that a language learner makes of experiences that might otherwise remain incoherent, by construing them, first, as experiences of language learning and second, as being sequentially and meaningfully interrelated” (p. 551). this definition enables us to accept that texts are constructed and not a factual record of a history, but to still recognise their value in facilitating an insight into how learners conceptualise themselves, their experiences and the process of language learning. as benson argues, “there is no reason to suppose that llhs understood here as stories told by learners, tell one any less about this reality than other kinds of data.” they represent “crafted constructions of themselves and their life experiences” (leppänen & kalaja, 2002, p. 201). however, the point of the story is what it tells us about the learner’s thinking and their interpretation of their experience of the language learning process. as goodson, biesta, tedder, and adair (2010) argue, “what matters working with language learner histories from three perspectives: teachers, learners and researchers 163 in narratives in not simply whether they correspond to reality or not, but how they function, both for the narrators themselves and in relation to the social settings in which the lives are narrated” (p. 12) [emphasis original]. in this article, i wish to examine narrative texts generated with tertiarylevel efl learners, in order to illustrate the potential insights offered by these texts from three different perspectives: the teacher, learner and researcher. in choosing to separate the three perspectives, i do not wish to give the impression that these represent three distinct, discrete categories. rather each has slightly different interests, drives and needs implying a different focus when working with the texts. however, all three also share core commonalities such as a mutual concern with enhancing the quality of and potential for learning and, thus, there is also considerable overlap in terms of the potentials for each, as shown in figure 1. before turning to examine the actual data generated in this study, i will begin by considering what we already know about these three perspectives in relation to llhs from the literature. figure 1 the overlap of the teacher, learner and researcher perspectives on llhs from the teacher perspective language learning as a process involves more than merely linguistic, structural and cognitive factors. as hanauer (2012, pp. 105-106) points out, it crucially involves learners who are holistic living, thinking, experiencing and feeling human beings. as such, successful teaching involves not only an understanding of the linguistic and cognitive needs of our learners, but it requires a respectful appreciation of their emotional and social needs as individuals. inspired by learner-centred and humanistic principles, nunan (2013) argues that if we truly wish to engage in more learner-centred approaches to language teaching, then it is essential that we incorporate learners’ views into both teacher perspective researcher perspective learner perspective sarah mercer 164 planning and implementation of teaching approaches and strategies. this means that rather than mechanistically imposing a curriculum designed to teach the “monolithic prototypical faceless learner” (dewaele, 2005, p. 367), we establish the “real” subjective needs and wants of our specific individual learners (cf. nunan, 1990). one effective way of doing this is by enabling them to tell their own stories about language learning and engage in what hanauer (2012) has termed “meaningful literacy.” language learning histories are a form of writing which can reveal valuable insights about our learners’ needs, motivations, beliefs, goals and strategies, thereby helping us to respect learner individual differences in our planning and lesson design. the texts also allow for authentic, meaningful communication between teacher and learner. it can convey a respect and genuine interest on the part of the teacher in the learners as individuals, which can thereby enhance the teacher/learner relationship. as nunan explains (2013, p. 212), we need to be able to understand our learners beyond simply the language they use. we need to listen carefully to what they tell us and llhs are ideally suited to providing teachers “with insights into the complex relationships between planning, teaching and learning” (nunan, 2013, p. 212). language learning histories therefore have considerable practical value as a pedagogical tool and as a vital component in lesson planning. from the learner perspective as a pedagogical tool, llhs enable learners to practise their english in authentic communicative tasks that are personally relevant and meaningful and thereby motivating. a key benefit for learners in writing their llhs is that this can help foster their metacognitive awareness both of language learning per se and of themselves as learners. as hanauer (2012) explains, the texts can generate “a reflective process that leads to a deepened appreciation and understanding of personal experience” (p. 108). such awareness can be empowering for learners as a vital ingredient in autonomy-inspired approaches to teaching and learning (see, e.g., cotterall, 2000; kohonen, 2000). it can promote learner motivation and willingness to engage in self-regulated behaviours by helping learners contemplate their progress in language learning and their own role as agents in this development. enhanced personal metacognition can also specifically help learners in constructing their identities as l2 learners and users and in contemplating future goals. in the current dominant model of l2 motivation, dörnyei (2005) outlines a motivational framework centring on current, ideal and future understandings of ourselves as language learners and/or users. the so-called “l2 self working with language learner histories from three perspectives: teachers, learners and researchers 165 system of motivation” (dörnyei, 2005) proposes that perceived discrepancies between our current selves and possible future or idealised selves can drive learner motivation. thus, learners need to have a realistic sense of self in the present and a clearly developed vision of themselves in the future. in addition, in order to be effective, these selves must also be accompanied by an enabling sense of agency and a metacognitive knowledge of strategies for achieving the goals. as such, llhs can serve a vital role in helping learners to envision their futures and set goals based on their current perceptions of themselves and their contextual affordances as well as their interpretation of their pasts. they can also facilitate learner reflection on the steps necessary to achieve these goals in terms of strategic behaviours and personal agency (cf. ryan & irie, in press). finally, although llhs traditionally represent a personal form of interaction between teacher and learner, if learners were happy to do so, there is great potential for learning by facilitating the exchange of learner histories between learners who can learn from each other and see for themselves the diverse ways of experiencing language learning (see also chik & breidbach, 2011). as pavlenko (2007) points out, autobiographies have considerable reflective value for both writers and readers who can be encouraged to “imagine alternative ways of being in the world” (p. 180). it can be important for learners to discuss their llhs to “open up pathways of thinking” and avoid the risk of their stories becoming “frozen” and thereby a static way of thinking and behaving (menezes, barcelos, & kalaja, 2006, p. 229). from the researcher perspective language learning histories also have important implications for the learner’s role in the research process and they potentially can provide learners’ with a voice. the texts can powerfully connect learners and researchers and ensure that the language learning process is understood from the perspective of the learners. their use can be empowering for the learner and invites them to take on a more collaborative role in which they are not merely the “subjects” of research but viewed more as co-constructors of knowledge and understandings. essentially, there are different approaches in research using narrative materials. as barkhuizen (2011) states, “narrative research means different things to different researchers” (p. 409). for example, llhs can be analysed as texts in terms of content, discourse or narrative structures. crucially, narratives enable the perspective of the storyteller to become visible and can reveal underlying schemas and beliefs based on which a narrative is constructed (cf. pavlenko, 2002). as with all forms of self-report data, narratives have been criticised for issues of distortion of memory and “truth.” amongst others, sarah mercer 166 pavlenko (2002) warns against treating narratives as factual data and subjecting them to simple content analysis. essentially, it is not the main purpose of working with such texts to seek to gain a “factual” account of the past but rather it is the learners’ interpretation and “construction” of their narrative that is useful in understanding their perspective, not the factual accuracy of their reports. as bell (2002, p. 209) points out, working with narratives means recognising that the consciously told stories may rest on deeper, more underlying stories of which the teller may even be unaware. as a research tool, llhs are especially well suited to revealing the dynamics and complexity of language learning and for exploring learner diversity (nunan & benson, 2005). the complexity inherent in llhs has been highlighted by nunan and benson (2005), who note how the texts display the strongly interrelated nature of various psychological and social variables with each other but also “with the learners’ larger life circumstances and goals” (p. 156). importantly, llhs can provide teachers with “glimpses of learners’ english worlds beyond the classrooms” (chik & breidbach, 2011, p. 158), allowing us to better understand them as holistic beings leading rich lives and experiencing their foreign languages beyond the bounds of the classroom. in terms of contextualised data, polkinghorne (1995) argues that narrative is “the linguistic form uniquely suited for displaying human existence as situated action” (p. 5). language learning histories reveal how learning is a fundamentally situated process interconnected with cultures, contexts and social settings. in terms of their temporality, nunan and benson (2005, pp. 155-156) highlight the inherently dynamic nature of the texts which reveal the changes over time in the learner’s development. as a text type, they imply a process-oriented view of learners and their development. clandinin and connelly (2000, chapter 5) astutely note that when learners write their llhs, they are still in the midst of continuing to live them. they thus stress the need to write about learners “becoming” given their ongoing narrative history and continuous movement forward into their continually emerging futures, rather than as “being.” recently, several researchers in sla have become interested in complexity perspectives on language learning processes and, indeed, language learners themselves (see, e.g., dörnyei, 2011; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008; mercer, 2011a, 2011b). such perspectives are marked by an interest in the complex, non-linear dynamic interaction of multiple components including contexts within a unified system. clearly, there are parallels in the insights narratives can offer such as revealing some of the complex interrelations between multiple components in a learner’s psychology and development, their dynamism, situatedness as well as the uniqueness and potentially unpredictable nature of individual lives (menezes, 2008; randall, 2007). indeed, benson and working with language learner histories from three perspectives: teachers, learners and researchers 167 nunan (2005) conclude that learner “complexity is particularly brought out through investigation of learners’ stories of their experiences” (p. 156). as such, narratives represent a valuable form of qualitative data which can challenge simplistic, reductionist, abstracted, static, linear thinking about language learning processes and learners themselves. current data set in order to explore the potential of llh from these three perspectives with real data, first-year university students in a general english language course at a university in austria were asked to write their llhs. to support the writing of the texts, the learners were provided with open guidelines including an outline with suggestions of possible content (see the appendix). although the focus was on language learning, the learners were also explicitly encouraged to report holistically on anything else they felt to be relevant. in terms of ethics, learners had to complete the texts for homework as part of the course content, but it was stressed that they did not have to share them for research purposes if they did not wish to. in the guidelines, the basic purpose of the study was outlined and it was explained that, “there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ versions; all your stories are interesting in their individuality.” learners were also assured anonymity. consequently, all the names of individuals as well as places names in the texts have been changed to protect learners’ identities. learners were also asked to provide explicit consent of their agreement to use the text for research purposes. in line with some of the underlying principles of exploratory practice (allwright, 2003), it has been a concern of mine that not only should i profit from the data collected as a researcher, but the learners should as far as realistically possible also benefit from the experience so that they are not merely “used” for researcher gains. thus, the data were generated with both a research and pedagogical purpose in mind. in my role as their teacher, i was keen to have them write the texts at the outset of their classes with me to help me to get to know them better as individuals and understand their beliefs, sense of agency and use of strategies. as both teacher and researcher, i was especially interested in understanding how learners position themselves as agents within their constructed llhs. in my role as researcher, i wanted to explore the complexity, dynamism and holistic situatedness of learners’ stories. for the learners themselves, the texts were intended to trigger reflection and serve an awareness-raising function about themselves and their approaches to language learning. sarah mercer 168 one potential limitation of working with such narratives is that learners can have different degrees of “self-literacy” (cf. randall, 2007, p. 379) and some are better able than others to reflect on and write about themselves and their experiences than others. however, it is hoped that all the learners will nevertheless benefit from the writing task and the data generated will still be rich given the breadth and diversity of learners involved. data collection context and participants the llhs were used with early-stage students who have recently transitioned to university. in order to choose their course of studies, the learners are likely to have reflected on themselves as language learners and thus may find it easier to write about themselves. during periods of transition, learners’ sense of self tends to be in flux (e.g., jackson, 2003; silverthorn, dubois, & crombie, 2005) and therefore it is an ideal time to explore the ongoing dynamism of their identity construction. from the learner perspective, it is important that they take stock and reflect on their llhs to date as they commence a new stage in their language learning lives within a new context. such metacognitive knowledge about themselves and their identities as learners will be crucial as they face the different demands, expectations and challenges of the university language learning context. as their teacher, confronted with wide diversity in my learners’ needs, goals and competencies (there are no national standardised school-leaving exams in austria and anyone with a school-leaving certificate can study at university), i find it extremely helpful to get to know about my learners, their histories, beliefs and self-related perceptions at the start of their university careers to help guide my instructional decisions and practices. in one of the initial general english language courses, students were asked to write their llh as their first compulsory homework task; however, whether they chose to share their text for this project was a voluntary decision as outlined explicitly in the consent form attached to the guidelines. in one parallel class taught by a colleague, the return rate was low with only 5 of the texts originating from her group of 26 students. in my own classes, the return rate was high and all the remaining 51 texts came from my two parallel classes. in total, 56 llhs were received (48 female, 8 male), which varied in length from a minimum of just under 2 pages (as suggested by the guidelines) to the longest being approximately 4 pages in length. all the students in this context have an advanced level of proficiency (b2/c1 in the european common framework of reference) and are capable of expressing themselves well and comprehensively in english. working with language learner histories from three perspectives: teachers, learners and researchers 169 analysis all the llhs were coded in line with a grounded theory (charmaz, 2006) approach to data analysis using the data management software atlas.ti. the data were initially coded line-by-line and then repeatedly re-coded until “saturation.” as pavleko (2007, p. 167) points out, as a researcher i cannot “step out of myself” during the data analysis; however, by attending to all the details and by keeping the codes close to the actual data and using several in vivo codes in my initial waves of coding, i hope to have been able to retain an open mind to emergent and possibly unexpected themes. the supercodes and memos generated during the coding process were then re-examined in line with the three perspectives which are the focus of this paper; the teacher, learner and researcher perspectives. however, it must be noted that in terms of the focus of the thematic analysis, i have naturally been guided by my own conceptual lens and areas of interest as a teacher and researcher, as will become explicitly apparent in the results discussed below and many other additional ways of working with these data are possible. in addition to the line-by-line micro-level of coding, each narrative was coded holistically in order to generate a “condensed narrative” (nunan, 2013) of the main themes and style of each individual text. this was recorded in a memo attached to each primary document. each narrative as a whole could then be examined for salient themes, notable absences, cases of uniqueness, and patterns of narrative style. findings the most striking dimension of working with the autobiographies is the diversity in the texts. despite all the learners being provided with the same guidelines and being in the same learning context, the content, style, format and focus of the texts varied considerably. not only did the learners focus on and report different unique experiences, but they also differed in terms of the writing styles, despite all being recognisably autobiographical narratives. thus, within the constraints of language, discourse, genre and contexts, the learner as narrator made individual choices where to begin and end the narrative, how to sequence and sustain the narrative, what to focus on, how much descriptive detail to provide and to what extent to simply report or also evaluate and interpret events (cf. leppänen & kalaja, 2002). although the majority of the learners were from the same cultural context (only two are identifiable from the texts as visiting students), their uniqueness as individuals overrode any potential uniformity implied by the shared cultural context highlighting sarah mercer 170 the personal nature of the texts and their ability to allow the individual’s voice to be heard (cf. leppänen & kalaja, 2002). in the thematic analysis of the llhs, multiple other dimensions of learner difference and diversity were revealed. the purpose of this article is to explore and illustrate with data the potential insights of these texts from the three different perspectives. for the analysis, the scope of what to choose to focus on is considerable as these texts contain a wealth of situated, detailed data. however, i have been guided in my focus on all three perspectives by my personal beliefs of the importance of learner psychology in language learning (mercer, ryan, & williams, 2012). as such, the analysis represents a personal choice of overall perspective and is by no means meant to be considered exhaustive, as the potential offered by the texts stretches well beyond what it is possible to discuss in this one article. to facilitate the presentation and discussion of the data, i have selected a particular emphasis for each of the three perspectives; however, it should be noted that all of the insights are relevant for all three perspectives and are highly interrelated. from the teacher perspective firstly, as their teacher, i am keen to get to know my group of learners as individuals and to understand their personal drives, needs, beliefs, selfconcepts and goals. each of the stories is a rich source of information in this respect. each llh is unique and reveals the diversity in the group of learners i am working with. the texts offer valuable insights into the personally meaningful connections and experiences learners have with respect to the language, such as the learner whose father’s language learning history as an immigrant inspired her own (#19) or the learner who was raised bilingually but who feels she falls short of her idea of a native-speaker model (#5). through writing these llhs, learners are able to express core elements of their language learning selves and, as their teacher, they help me to better comprehend and empathise with them as unique, holistic individuals. the llhs also provide an insight into specific aspects of the learners’ perception of themselves as language learners. my own professional interests centre on learners’ self-beliefs and their sense of agency (mercer, 2011a, 2011b). i consider these to play a central role in language learning and to be of direct relevance for teaching and learning. as van lier (2008, p. 163) explains, successful language learning crucially depends on the activity and initiative of the learner. in order to become active and engaged as a learner, the individual has to hold a “personal sense of agency – a belief that their behaviour can make a difference to their learning in that setting” (mercer, 2012, p. 41). working with language learner histories from three perspectives: teachers, learners and researchers 171 key factors contributing to a learner’s sense of agency are their self beliefs and their degree of positivity. in order for learners to become active agents in their learning processes, learners need to feel confident and comfortable in using and working in all areas of the language. the guidelines in this study explicitly prompted learners to reflect on this and all the texts contain reference to learners’ perceived strengths and weaknesses. given that most of these learners are advanced learners who have chosen to study english at university, it is unsurprising that the majority hold overall positive self beliefs in respect to themselves as language learners. however, all of the learners also indicate areas where they feel less confident and, in some cases, even experience feelings of anxiety as in the case of this female learner (#29): one of my weaknesses is definitely speaking english. most of the time i am afraid of making grammatical mistakes, pronouncing a word wrong or what people might think of my speaking skills. understanding learners’ fears and concerns is vital for me as a teacher and helps me to understand the domains in which learners feel they need more support. ideally, we want our learners to hold positive, but realistic, selfbeliefs. however, to develop more positive views of themselves as language learners and thereby reduce their anxiety, the learners fundamentally also need to believe that their competences and abilities can be developed and in this respect the constructs of agency and mindsets are crucial. mindsets refer to the implicit, and therefore difficult to consciously articulate, beliefs that we all hold about the malleability of certain human traits, such as language learning abilities (cf. dweck, 2006; mercer & ryan, 2010). there are two core mindsets, growth or fixed, which can be thought of as stretching on a continuum. a growth mindset reflects an underlying belief that one’s abilities can be developed and enhanced through hard work and strategic behaviours. in contrast, a fixed mindset centres on the beliefs that one’s abilities are fixed and immutable. such entity theories of abilities can be extremely limiting and can lead to helplessness when learners face difficulties or challenges as they believe change in their fundamental abilities to be out of their control (dweck, 2006). mindsets are intricately bound up with learners’ sense of agency but they are often hard to discern in data as they are rarely expressed explicitly given their “implicit” nature. as narratives allow “deeply hidden assumptions to surface” (bell, 2002, p. 209), the texts are ideal at revealing beliefs that learners themselves may not be conscious of such as mindsets. the llhs show how the learner positions themselves in the story of their language learning, as an active agent or merely as a respondent to circumstance and external factors. each text sarah mercer 172 essentially contains a discourse of personal agency as expressed through their choice of language and voice, attributions and beliefs about the nature of the language learning process (cf. murphey & carpenter, 2008), and this discourse is also indicative of the interconnected underlying framework of mindset beliefs. perhaps one of the most obvious expressions of learner agency concern learners’ attributions for their perceived successes and failures. these are the reasons learners ascribe their successes or failures to. these may not be the “true” reasons, but they reflect what the learner believes to be the cause (hsieh, 2012, p. 91). it is known that if learners attribute their perceived successes as being internally attributed and within their own control, such as the amount of effort expended or the types of strategies used, they are likely to engage in these or similar actions again in the future. however, if a learner attributes their success to a factor perceived as being out of their control, the learner will not feel able to influence the outcome and thus engender the same success again in the future. clearly, if a learner believes that success is due to a natural talent for languages that they are simply born with and cannot change (an attribution associated with fixed mindsets), then they will be unlikely to believe that there is anything they can actively do to influence future outcomes. consider, for example, the different attributions made by the following two learners: first, a very important strength that made me achieve quite a lot in language learning is my hard work and my power of endurance. one day i realized that i really spend a lot of time with learning languages. when i was in school i spent a lot more time studying for languages than others did. (#38) my teacher, who i had these first two years, was probably a little at fault too, because she could not stand me throughout all the years until my graduation. (#41) the first learner attributes her success to her hard work over extended periods of time and clearly this would be a worthy approach to continue with in the future. the second learner attributes her perceived lack of success in part to the fact her teacher who she felt disliked her. such external attributions are problematic given that the outcomes lie out of her control and are not something she feels able to influence. an indication of a growth mindset can be when learners describe strategies they have used and believe to have been effective. this indicates a willingness to engage in conscious effort to improve their skills and suggests that the learner believes that improving their abilities is within their control. this female learner (#16), for example, writes about her specific strategies for learning vocabulary: working with language learner histories from three perspectives: teachers, learners and researchers 173 when i have to learn vocabulary i like to learn through writing and repetition. in other words, i repeatedly write the new words down in order to remember them. i also tend to mark the most important words or facts with colours to aid my memory. learners also expressed a range of other beliefs about language learning which could perhaps be conceptualised as being facilitative or limiting in respect to the learner’s sense of agency. one of the most frequently expressed beliefs, for example, concerned learners’ beliefs about the power of a stay abroad to enhance their language skills. in analysing the llhs, a great number of the learners make reference to the perceived importance of such an experience, irrespective of whether they themselves had had such an experience or not. a crucial difference in the writing about this is in where the learners assign agency in such a context. some learners write in such a way that it is apparent that the success of such a stay lies in the actual practice of the language afforded by such a stay and the learner’s own autonomous behaviours. see, for example, extracts from the following learner: in my opinion, those vacations made more impact on my english skills and helped my confidence in talking english more than my last four years at school . . . during those visits, i was exclusively using the english language . . . i was his permanent accompanist, because he took me with him wherever he was going, which made me talk to the people he was talking to as well. (male #56) more worryingly, a small number of learners refer only to the stay abroad itself, rather than to any purposeful behaviours or practice on their part. consider, for example, the abridged excerpts from a female learner (#7) who writes about the key role in her llh of a trip abroad: the turning point in my language learner history took place when i was fourteen and my mum decided to invite my pen pal sally to visit us in austria . . . together with a friend of mine and sally i spent an awesome summer in austria. sally did not learn german in school and in order to communicate we had to speak english. after we had such a wonderful time in austria sally’s parents decided that we should come to the states and spend another summer there . . . it actually was one of the best experiences we have ever had. we spent three months living together with sally and her family and saw the most important parts and monuments of dallas. besides all the beautiful and exciting places we have seen my friend and i did not even recognize that our english improved every day. whilst such descriptions of a stay abroad are encouraging in terms of the positive affect towards the language gained from the experience, they do raise questions for me about whether individuals such as this learner may be attribsarah mercer 174 uting too great a proportion of their linguistic gains to the context itself or effortless acquisition processes, especially as her text contains no other expressions of language use or specific strategic behaviours on her part in respect to the stay abroad. as ryan and mercer (2011, p. 174) caution, if learners are to feel agentic and empowered to take autonomous control of their learning and continue making advanced level progress once they have returned from such a context, the agent of success stemming from a stay abroad needs to be the individual learner themselves. for learners’ long-term development, it may be more advantageous to appreciate that part of the linguistic benefits of a stay abroad stem from the hours of practice the stay affords, rather than perceived effortless acquisition of the language. summarising, to help me as a teacher to understand whether a particular learner is tending towards expressions of self-directed personal agency and growth mindsets or fixed mindsets involving more limited control and personal agency, i have drawn up a table of markers that have emerged from my analysis of these texts. it is not meant to be construed as a dichotomy but as a continuum. obviously, learners can lie between the two and their stories may contain elements of both. however, these markers help me to gain an impression of the degree of agency a learner is portraying in their narratives and the position that they assign themselves in the development of their llh. essentially, these expressions of voice and agency in the texts help to reveal learners’ underlying framework of mindset beliefs and attributions which can be vitally important to their future and ongoing approaches to language learning and their willingness to engage in self-regulated learning. table 1 markers of high and low agency in the llhs markers of high agency/growth mindsets markers of low agency/fixed mindsets controllable attributions growth mindset beliefs facilitative agency beliefs reference to specific strategies consistent use of the i pronoun in respect to behaviours and practice dynamism associated with learner as agent of change marked reference to effort, conscious strategy use, hard work, practice, improvement non-controllable attributions fixed mindset beliefs limiting agency beliefs limited or no reference to strategies reference to acquisition without or with minimum use of the i pronoun dynamism associated with time, others or contexts as agents of change marked reference to effortless acquisition, speed, ease of learning, intuitive, unconscious learning, natural talent working with language learner histories from three perspectives: teachers, learners and researchers 175 from the learner perspective as above, the learners too can benefit from a metacognitive understanding of their own beliefs about themselves and language learning as a process, their sense of agency, and their use of strategies. in my own teaching, llhs have served as useful springboards for explicit, guided in-class discussions of beliefs about and approaches to language learning. fundamentally, the underlying rationale for the learners is that writing the texts should facilitate enhanced metacognition about themselves as language learners through processes of self-recognition (cf. mcadams, 1993). indeed, a small number made explicit reference to this in their texts: this record and self-reflection on my language learning history led me to think about the origins of my interest in the english language and it has given me some important clues about me as learner and may explain why i tend to prefer to consolidate some language competencies more intensively than others. (female #42) one of the important characteristic features of llhs is their ability to show how learners make meaning of their lives and construct coherence “by finding connections or relating past experiences to the present and future” (ford, 2012, p. 30). whilst all aspects of this temporal interconnectivity in the narratives can be useful for learners and teachers, the future visions of these learners in relation to their goals are especially important in learners’ ongoing and long-term development beyond the bounds of my course, and it is these i will focus on in this analysis. interestingly, some of the learners express primarily or even only shortterm goals such as passing a test or getting a good grade in a course. there is a concern that focusing only on such goals may reflect certain extrinsic motivations and more performance-oriented goals in which the focus is on the outcome and “performance,” rather than on growth and learning gains (see woodrow, 2012), again paralleling some of the findings in respect to fixed mindsets. for example: to be honest, my goals for this semester are basically just to get my exams done with good marks and trying to keep up with my standard. (female #15) in contrast, other learners describe more clearly visions of a future self expressed with a more long-term perspective in which the emphasis is on improving their abilities, again reflective of a growth mindset. as woodrow (2006, 2012) explains, such “mastery”or “learning”-oriented goals are typicalsarah mercer 176 ly associated with higher levels of self-efficacy, a wider use of metacognitive strategies and generally more positively adaptive learning behaviours: i just want to improve my skills to a certain expertise so that i have the feeling of being able to use the language under all conditions and in every circumstance. in addition, learning is a lifelong process, so there is no stage where i will be finished with learning. for my long-term plans i wish to be able to teach students in an interesting and entertaining way by being kind, disciplined and supportive at the same time. i know that this needs a lot of practise, but that’s exactly what i’m going to do! (female #39) holding growth-inspired goals and clearly expressed future visions of the self are important ingredients for long-term motivation and effective selfregulated learning behaviours. in this respect, llhs can play an important role in supporting learners in critically reflecting on their future goals and contemplating the steps to realising them. from the researcher perspective currently, there is increased interest in sla in respect to complexity perspectives on language learning processes and language learners themselves. such complexity perspectives are inherently marked by an interest in the complex interaction of multiple components within a system and its diverse dynamics across time. they tend to be concerned with organic, holistic models which incorporate context into the system and reject linear cause-and-effect patterns. instead the emphasis is on processes of emergence by which the whole is appreciated as being greater than the sum of its component parts. as the analysis so far has shown, llhs effectively show how key aspects of learner psychology are highly interrelated such as learners’ sense of self, agency, attributions, beliefs, mindsets, strategy use and goals. given that learners can hold seemingly contradictory beliefs, an understanding of the overall interconnections in a learner’s psychology is more meaningful than an isolated, fragmented view of separate aspects of their psychology. perhaps one of the key characteristics of complex dynamic systems is their dynamism. it is important to stress that dynamism implies also stability, different degrees of dynamism, dynamism in different directions such as both forward progress and backward regression, and gradual as well as sudden change. others have already noted the rich insights in terms of dynamics provided by llhs (e.g., benson & nunan, 2005), and these texts too contain a vast number of instances of dynamism that can be of interest to researchers. given the longer timeframe that the texts cover, short-term, micro-level dynamics of the moment are less visible, even though learners do show some awareness of these dynamics too. for example: working with language learner histories from three perspectives: teachers, learners and researchers 177 there are periods when i am really motivated to improve myself but then there are also weeks in which i am not in the mood for studying. (female #32) in terms of the main dynamics evinced in these texts, i noted three key types of dynamics: gradual, temporal dynamics across the progression of time, situated dynamics of perceived change across both social and physical contexts, and, finally, causal dynamics referring to more dramatic changes believed by learners to have been caused by particular events or experiences. firstly, in instances of the temporal dynamics, learners did not necessarily attribute change to any specific agent but rather referred to the natural progression of time and the accompanying changes or relative stability they perceive: after some time i got more and more interested in foreign languages and especially in the english language . . . the time passed and i decided to study english in order to become a teacher. at first i had to get used to university but then everything worked out fine. (female #7) in terms of the situational dynamics, learners showed a remarkable awareness of the dynamics of their self perceptions across contexts. for example, this female learner (#35) describes how her perception of her spoken english changes depending on her interactional partner: i'm not shy to talk to people in a foreign language, though i know that i make many mistakes when talking. of course, it always makes me nervous if i'm aware of that my conversation partner examines my english skills, as in the case when i talk to english teachers. in such situations, it's normal that i make more mistakes than usual and that i lose my fluency, because i think too much in how to express myself. a particular form of situational dynamics evident in these texts is the change in learners’ self perceptions as they go through the transition from high school to the university context. given the absence to date of standardised school-leaving exams in this setting, students are often unaware of the different levels of proficiency across schooling contexts and the change in frames of reference on commencing at university can be a stressful experience. this female learner (#36) illustrates clearly the challenges to learners’ self-concept during the transition in this educational context: i have to say that i always enjoyed talking in english at school. this has changed at university. the reason for this is the high language level that many students have. a lot have already been abroad and speak perfectly english. next to them i often feel stupid and embarrassed when i make a mistake. sarah mercer 178 finally, in terms of causal dynamics, learners also refer to specific events, experiences or people which they perceive as having caused a more sudden or marked change possibly in their attitudes, motivation or way of approaching the language. for example, several learners believed that a stay abroad represented a crucial turning point in their llhs. this female learner’s description illustrates this kind of perceived change: although i hated english at school, my point of view changed when i first spend a week in london in 2003. that was the point, when i first realized that i was not only learning english to be graded good by this horrible teacher, but that i could gain personally from learning such a beautiful, important and wide spread language. during these holidays i discovered my passion for the english language. (female #30) these data therefore suggest that there are different types of dynamics and stabilities within a learner’s history related to both contexts (physical and social) and the progression of time. they also show the potential for growth and change in all our learners, which presents an essentially optimistic view of learning. in line with complexity thinking, the texts show how learners are complex individuals whose self perceptions are composed of multiple interconnected factors which can be differently dynamic across time and settings. as such, the texts caution strongly against static views of learners and their psychology. discussion the llhs discussed in this article were generated with advanced, tertiarylevel learners but potentially such narratives can be used in varied forms with a range of learner ages and levels of proficiency. considering the types of extended written narratives generated in this study, two issues need further discussion. firstly, the quality of the texts varied in terms of the depth of reflection, length and overall degree of engagement with the task. the guidelines in this study were relatively open, but it is possible that more structured questions might help focus some of the learners and provide scaffolding for the reflective process. secondly, the return rate differed across the two groups, which was perhaps in part due to the different ways in which the narratives were incorporated and embedded in the teaching in the different classes. however, it is important to find ways to help all of our learners feel that writing their llhs is beneficial for them, interesting, and relevant for their development as language learners. one step can be to ensure that there is an explicit discussion between teachers and learners about the nature of the task, its purpose and relevance for both teacher and learner. it may also be helpful to encourage alternative forms of expression and reflection to accommodate different learner types and working with language learner histories from three perspectives: teachers, learners and researchers 179 preferred forms of communication, especially for those who perhaps do not enjoy extended writing. thus, it may be worth considering the merits of alternative forms of narrative, as reflected in the “new cultures of learning” (thomas & seeley brown, 2011). recently, for example, i have started working with learners telling their histories through multimodal formats such as blogs, glogs and digital presentations (mercer, 2013), as well as through songs and drama (mercer & nunan, 2013). allowing learners to select and choose their preferred form of expression may enhance response rates and depth of engagement. indeed, initial work with multimedia formats and media indicate promising directions for the future of the field of narrative in sla for all three perspectives (see also chik & breidbach, 2011; menezes, 2008). however, it is perhaps interesting to note that, even when given the choice, many of my students still select to write more traditional llhs as a form of extended, personalised writing in english. a related potential issue that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been addressed is how to work with learners who may not wish to share their personal stories. i have to admit to never having been confronted by such a learner so far, but perhaps we need to be careful and considerate that we cannot and should not insist on learners sharing their stories if they do not wish to do so (alan waters, personal communication). as such, our planning as researchers and teachers needs to allow scope for learners not to write their llhs, if they would rather not and to offer alternatives for storytelling using their imagination. as work by egan (2005) suggests, there is great learning potential in storytelling of all kinds. perhaps engaging learners in imagining the language learning life history of an ideal learner may provide equally rich insights for the teachers, researchers and learners through guided discussions. as a research tool, these data reveal the depth of insights about learners that can be gained from an analysis of llhs. in particular, i was keen to consider aspects of learner psychology, which is an area of personal interest, and examine with actual data the potential these texts offer for extending our understandings in this respect. the subsequent analysis showed how the llhs can reveal the interconnections between various aspects of an individual’s psychology including deeper frameworks of beliefs, as well as its different forms of dynamism across time and place. given the contemporary interest in complexity and ecological perspectives on learners, these texts do indeed appear to represent a rich source of data for more holistic, situated views of unique individual learners. conclusions in this article, i have tried to show how llhs can be useful from three different perspectives by considering both the literature and exploring actual data sarah mercer 180 collected with advanced level efl learners in austria. it has been shown how the texts offer deep insights into learners’ psychological thinking and can serve as a useful tool both for teachers and learners in bringing to the surface beliefs and agentic thinking which may be facilitative or hindering for learners’ ongoing and future learning. they enable us to better understand the complex, unique individuals we work with and their dynamic experiences of progress and change. importantly, they can help us to “reconcile the gap that almost inevitably seems to exist between the researcher, teacher and the learner” (nunan, 2013, p. 212). they offer a way of humanising teaching and researching and of ensuring that learners are integrated in both undertakings as collaborators whose perspectives are respected and valued. together the insights they generate have the potential to be enlightening and beneficial for three of the major stakeholders in language learning: the teachers, learners and researchers. working with language learner histories from three perspectives: teachers, learners and researchers 181 references allwright, d. 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(2012). goal orientations: three perspectives on motivation goal orientations. in s. mercer, s. ryan, & m. williams (eds.), psychology for language learning: insights from research, theory and practice (pp. 188202). basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. working with language learner histories from three perspectives: teachers, learners and researchers 185 appendix an extract regarding the content of the language learning histories from the guidelines and consent form you should begin by describing how you see yourself as a language learner, considering, for example, your strengths, weaknesses, style preferences, habits, likes and dislikes, to help us to get a sense of who you are as a language learner. then you should write about your language learning life history from the point where you first developed an interest in languages or started to learn a language to the point in your language learning where you are now. although the focus is on your language learning experiences, in particular english, you may wish to mention other experiences which you think have played an important role in your development too. try to be as descriptive and detailed as possible about key events or people who have been important to you, rather than just writing a superficial chronology. finally, you should write about your specific goals for this semester and your longand short-term plans for the future. in this way, the text will cover your past, present and future. naturally, you can add any other comments, observations or reflections of your language learning development. 517 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (4). 2021. 517-541 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.4.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt directed motivational currents: a systematic review safoura jahedizadeh imam reza international university of mashhad, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8711-2608 jahedi.s1310@gmail.com ali h. al-hoorie jubail english language and preparatory year institute, education sector, royal commission for jubail and yanbu, saudi arabia https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3810-5978 hoorie_a@jic.edu.sa abstract directed motivational currents, unique and intense goal-directed motivational surges lasting over a period of time, have received increasing attention recently. this article reports the first systematic review of this phenomenon. a total of 21 reports appearing between 2013 and 2020 were included in the analysis. the results show that the majority of empirical reports were smallscale qualitative studies (median = 18 participants). the evidence on the three characteristics proposed as necessary and/or distinguishing conditions of directed motivational currents (vision, salient facilitative structure, and positive affect) is inconclusive due to the presence of directed motivational currents cases not exhibiting these features, and the absence of direct comparative analyses with non-directed motivational currents cases. a few intervention studies (n = 4) were conducted, but their results are also inconclusive due to a number of methodological limitations. contrary to the claim that directed motivational current experiences are the “optimal form” of motivation, the results additionally showed that these experiences could lead to intense stress, anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, and panic attacks, thereby raising ethical concerns about deliberately inducing directed motivational currents in learners. we conclude that, although the concept of directed motivational currents is safoura jahedizadeh, ali h. al-hoorie 518 promising, more research is needed to reach a better understanding of its potential. we end this article by suggesting directions for future research into directed motivational currents, including renaming them as sustained flow. keywords: directed motivational currents; dmc; sustained flow; systematic review; language learning; language motivation 1. introduction second language (l2) motivation has attracted the interest of researchers for several decades (al-hoorie, 2017; al-hoorie & macintyre, 2020). the critical role motivation plays in l2 learning success and achievement has become a truism (e.g., dörnyei & ryan, 2015; dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). more recently, some interest has been devoted to the “time” dimension of motivation. this interest has recently crystalized in what came to be known as directed motivational currents (dmcs; dörnyei et al., 2014). dmcs were first conceived of in 2013 by dörnyei et al. (2014), though this chapter appeared in print a year later (cf. dörnyei et al., 2016, p. 18, footnote 1). since they were introduced, dmcs have attracted the attention of l2 researchers and have grown in popularity year after year. for example, at the time of writing, the first book on dmcs (dörnyei et al., 2016) has been cited almost 300 times according to google scholar. similarly, the first theoretical papers introducing dmcs (dörnyei et al., 2015; dörnyei et al., 2014; muir & dörnyei, 2013) and the first empirical study (henry et al., 2015) have been cited over 100 times each. the past years have also witnessed further elaboration of the theoretical tenets underlying dmcs, as well as interest in their potential for classroom practice. all these developments make it timely to systematically review the empirical basis supporting the theoretical tenets and the practical significance of dmcs. 2. theoretical tenets of dmcs the dmc phenomenon has two defining characteristics: being a brief surge directed toward a certain goal. beyond these two defining features, dörnyei et al. (2014) proposed three other “necessary conditions” of dmcs in that it is “crucial that all of these conditions are present” (p. 12) for this experience to occur: vision, facilitative structure, and positive affect. the first feature refers to the notion that individuals experiencing a dmc are hypothesized not to merely have a target goal but to also imagine themselves, with a strong sensory element, achieving that goal. dörnyei et al. (2014) illustrated this notion with the goal of directed motivational currents: a systematic review 519 becoming a doctor; the individual would be expected to go beyond the abstract goal of earning a medical degree to “actually seeing him/herself receiving the degree certificate and practicing as a qualified doctor” (p. 13). dörnyei et al. (2014) further explained: “we believe that the intensity of a dmc cannot be achieved without adding this visionary quality to guiding goals” (p. 13). the second hypothesized feature of a dmc is its salient, facilitative structure. this includes the adoption of certain behavioral routines (e.g., spending three hours a day on learning a new language) that help the learner achieve the desired outcomes. these routines are thought not to require constant volitional control since they become automatized in the process (nonconscious self-regulation; dörnyei et al., 2016). progress checks have been proposed as a means of assessing the pace at which goals are achieved through affirmative feedback, resulting in a sense of satisfaction. it has been argued that adoption of a facilitative structure represents “the primary distinguishing feature” of this phenomenon (dörnyei et al., 2016, p. 80). the third characteristic of dmc is positive affect. however, this positive emotional load is believed to be unlike simple pleasure and happiness. instead, it results in self-fulfillment achieved through pursuit of self-concordant goals (dörnyei et al., 2016). according to this view, individuals may even consider as enjoyable and satisfying activities that were once boring to them. this notion draws on eudaimonic well-being, which refers to the actualization of one’s potential and thus going beyond mere hedonistic pleasure (ryan & deci, 2001; waterman, 1993, 2008). as dörnyei et al. (2015) explained, a dmc exhibits the characteristics of eudaimonic well-being as described by waterman (1993): (a) an unusually intense involvement in an undertaking, (b) a feeling of a special fit or meshing with an activity that is not characteristic of most daily tasks, (c) a feeling of intensely being alive, (d) a feeling of being complete or fulfilled while engaged in an activity, (e) an impression that this is what the person was meant to do, and (f) a feeling that this is who one really is. (p. 679) in short, dmcs have been presented to the language learning community as a “magic-like” experience where the learner is effortlessly carried in a “current” to their proficiency destination. beyond the two defining characteristics of dmcs (surge toward a goal), dmc proponents have argued that three characteristics are necessary for the dmc experience to take place: vivid imagery, facilitative structure, and positive emotional load. without all these elements, a dmc is hypothesized not to occur because, as dörnyei et al. (2015) emphasized, these characteristics “are exactly the primary domains where dmcs operate” (p. 101). safoura jahedizadeh, ali h. al-hoorie 520 3. practical significance of dmcs the discussion of dmcs has transcended theoretical speculations and penetrated classroom walls. as mentioned above, despite their short history, dmcs have been cited hundreds of times so far. a major driver behind this interest are the pedagogical implications of dmcs. according to dörnyei et al. (2015), the significance of dmcs lies in the potential that they can be deliberately induced. this could occur, for example, as part of an educational intervention so that the learner experiences this uniquely intense motivational surge and consequently improves their language uptake. involvement in projects, studying abroad, and performing personalized tasks are examples of situations in which learners may experience exceptional levels of motivation and which may function as a trigger to foster learner autonomy (dörnyei et al., 2015; muir, 2020). dmcs have therefore received overwhelming acclaim. a dmc is posited to represent “a perfect match” (dörnyei et al., 2016, p. 23) between vision and action plans, allowing learners to “perform beyond expectations and across several levels and timescales” (dörnyei et al., 2014, p. 9) because a dmc can “act as a precious organizing force which is able to regulate events in a complicated world” (dörnyei et al., 2014, p. 17). thus a dmc can “project positive emotionality to all the stages of the progress” (dörnyei et al., 2015, p. 101). all of this is attributed to the claim that the motivation generated from a dmc is significantly stronger than – and “qualitatively different” (dörnyei et al., 2016, p. 2) from conventional high motivation. the dmc literature has also attempted to equip teachers with specific strategies. through what came to be known as “frameworks of focused interventions,” it has been proposed that practitioners can deliberately induce dmcs in their learners (dörnyei et al., 2016). one of the most common approaches is collaborative projects (e.g., ibrahim & al-hoorie, 2019). this approach draws on group dmcs, where learners engage in groupwork and cooperate to achieve a shared goal. this collaboration may be short-term (e.g., over a weekend) or last longer (e.g., several weeks or a whole semester). learners may find this activity enjoyable and exert extra effort to achieve their collective goal, especially when the ultimate outcome is perceived as authentic such as presenting before a real audience or working for a charity. thus, dmcs, particularly group dmcs, have been argued to hold practical significance that classroom teachers can utilize. although a dmc may be experienced individually or as part of a group, the latter has been argued to be within the reach of average teachers without the need for fancy equipment or expensive facilities. this dmc experience eventually culminates in improved proficiency and language learning success (muir, 2020). all of this potential makes it essential to systematically examine the evidence backing dmcs and the extent to which the results support the effectiveness of inducing dmcs in language learning. directed motivational currents: a systematic review 521 4. the present study the above review shows that dmcs are posited to represent a novel and qualitatively different construct that might have useful implications as a motivational tool for classroom practitioners (e.g., dörnyei et al., 2015; dörnyei et al., 2014; ibrahim & al-hoorie, 2019; muir, 2020). at the same time, some concern has also been expressed about the broader paradigm that constitutes the theoretical basis of the dmc construct and that emphasizes selfand vision-based motivation (e.g., lamb, 2012; moskovsky et al., 2016; papi & abdollahzadeh, 2012). in fact, it has even been compared to a kuhnian normal science, where “there is a risk that central concepts are adopted uncritically and anomalies ignored” (henry & cliffordson, 2017, p. 732) and where the impact of methodological limitations may be underestimated (hiver & al-hoorie, 2020a). all this would suggest the need to examine more closely the concept of dmc, the empirical results with respect to it, and the methodologies used to obtain these results. to this end, we attempted to locate all studies on dmcs published since the introduction of the concept in 2013 in order to address the following research questions: rq1. to what extent have the three characteristics of dmcs (vision-orientedness, salient facilitative structure, and positive affect) been shown to be necessary and distinguishing features of this experience? rq1 therefore has a theoretical focus. it is concerned with the conceptualization of dmcs beyond their two defining characteristics (a surge toward a goal). we investigated whether the three hypothesized characteristics are borne out empirically. rq2. to what extent does the dmc experience improve actual l2 learning? rq2 is a more practical question. it is concerned with gains in l2 proficiency and achievement in learners experiencing dmcs. ideally, establishing this kind of language improvement requires some form of an experimental design (or intervention), where researchers deliberately induce a dmc in learners and then compare them either with other learners not experiencing it or with themselves in non-dmc states. 5. method 5.1. search procedure and criteria for inclusion a search was conducted in several databases including ebscohost, eric, google scholar, and proquest for “directed motivation currents,” “dmc,” “sustained flow,” safoura jahedizadeh, ali h. al-hoorie 522 and their variations. we also issued an informal call for papers sent to researchers active in this area. a total of 120 reports were subsequently identified. the following inclusion criteria were applied on this initial pool of reports: (1) dcms were a main focus of the report, and (2) the language of the report was english. for completeness, both conceptual analyses and empirical reports were initially included whether published as journal articles or book chapters, though poster presentations and book reviews were excluded. eventually, a total of 34 reports, 13 conceptual and 21 empirical, appearing between 2013 and december 2020 satisfied the inclusion criteria (see figure 1). some of these reports were in press at the time and were subsequently conferred a 2021 copyright. the focus in this article is on empirical reports, while conceptual analyses of dmcs are listed in the appendix for interested readers. 5.2. coding and analysis the reports satisfying the inclusion criteria were systematically coded by two coders based on the coding scheme included in table 1. each report was coded in relation to its publication outlet, research type (conceptual vs. empirical), publication information, context, purpose and methodology, and a brief overview of the main findings (empirical) and conclusions (conceptual). table 1 coding scheme used in this study basic information a. author(s) b. title c. year outlet a. article b. book/chapter c. thesis research type a. empirical b. conceptual context (if empirical) a. country b. no. of participants c. age of participants design (if empirical) a. method b. statistical analysis outcome a. purpose b. results (if empirical) c. arguments (if conceptual) we read the reports carefully and identified the ones that have direct relevance to the two research questions. we then synthesized the findings of these studies in order to address our research questions. for rq1, we attempted to find out whether learners experiencing dmcs exhibited the three characteristics hypothesized to be necessary for a dmc to occur (vision-orientedness, salient structure, and positive affect). for rq2, we focused on interventions attempting to induce dmcs and examined their findings and methodological rigor. we also extracted descriptive data about the reports, including sample size, gender distribution, age, and context. additionally, we summarized the main findings of each report. directed motivational currents: a systematic review 523 figure 1 flowchart of the report selection process 6. results and discussion 6.1. description of the report pool table 2 provides a summary of empirical reports on dmcs. a total of 21 reports attempted to investigate the theoretical underpinnings and the practical applicability of dmcs. most of this literature has relied on a qualitative approach employing semi-structured interviews; thus, it was not possible at this point to obtain effect sizes for a meta-analytic synthesis. in most investigations it was also attempted to determine the characteristics that learners exhibit during a dmc. a few studies additionally used self-plotted graphs and questionnaires. only four reports were published safoura jahedizadeh, ali h. al-hoorie 524 in journals that might be described as “major journals” in the l2 field (see al-hoorie & vitta, 2019; vitta & al-hoorie, 2017), namely elt journal, modern language journal, and tesol quarterly – and one appeared in frontiers in psychology. three reports were unpublished phd dissertations, in addition to one dissertation and one journal article that were later published as books. examination of the samples used also revealed some patterns. as can be seen in table 3, many studies had modest sample sizes (median = 18). age of the participants ranged from 16 to over 60, with most learning english as the l2 at university level. these participants came from different backgrounds, though as is generally the case with l2 motivation research africa and south america were underrepresented. finally, as explained earlier, conceptual analyses of dmcs were also synthesized for completeness (see the appendix). generally, these analyses aimed to introduce the concept of a dmc, motivational theories feeding into it, characteristics of effective dmcs, and the possibility of inducing dmcs in language classrooms. the overarching arguments in this literature include the claims that a dmc is a favorable state that is conducive to language learning; that it is characterized by vision-orientedness, salient facilitative structure, and positive affect; and that it is a useful motivational tool when intentionally induced by the language teacher. as explained above, the aim of this investigation was not to provide a comprehensive review of all aspects related to dmcs. instead, we had two specific foci: the extent to which the three hypothesized characteristics are supported empirically (theoretical side) and the extent to which dmcs contribute to actual learning gains (practical side). these two foci are discussed in the sections that follow. table 2 summary of empirical studies author(s) purpose method main findings colombo (2017) to explore student motivation in a technology-enhanced classroom and the factors affecting their motivation qualitative case study the group project helped promote a dmc, leading students to go beyond their teacher’s requirements. dastgahian and ghonsooly (2018) to examine the effect of teaching religious texts on students’ dmcs pre-post religious vocabulary test, interviews vocabulary scores improved significantly in the post-test, though no direct quantitative evidence on the role of dmcs in this increase was presented. direckze and ratwatte (2017) to test the effectiveness a dmc intervention with a group of schoolteachers in sri lanka intervention, observation, semistructured interviews teachers reported an increase in the level of their own motivation as well as an improvement in their students’ proficiency level. no quantitative analysis or a control group was included. ghanizadeh and jahedizadeh (2017) to validate the persian version of dmc disposition scale, and investigate the association between dmcs and learners’ proficiency and educational levels confirmatory factor analysis, anova, content analysis of openended questions the scale showed acceptable reliability and validity. most dmc experiences were related to competitively self-referenced, rather than other-referenced, objectives. upper intermediate students experienced more dmcs directed motivational currents: a systematic review 525 than their elementary counterparts. ba and ma students had higher levels of dmcs than diploma learners. jahedizadeh and ghanizadeh (2021) to explore the dynamic interplay between personal best goals and dmcs mixed-methods research students’ personal best goals predicted their dmcs, and competitively self-referenced goals created more dmc experiences than competitively other-referenced goals. jahedizadeh et al. (2021) to examine interactions among dmcs, personal best, buoyancy, evaluation apprehension, and academic achievement questionnaire significant correlations among the variables were obtained. henry et al. (2015) to investigate whether core characteristics of dmcs can be manifested in participants’ descriptions of motivated behavior to examine the validity of the dmc construct semi-structured interviews, selfplotted graphs reported dmc features included positive emotionality, a salient facilitative structure, and the direction toward long-term investment goals. vision did not seem to play a central role. henry and davydenko (2020) to compare approach and avoidance regulation foci during dmcs semi-structured interviews learners with approach orientations reported enjoyment and well-being, while those with avoidance orientations reported worry and stress. ibrahim (2016b, 2017) to explore the stages of a dmc and its characteristics phenomenological analysis of interviews a dmc was reported to follow a predictable structure from launch to closure. participants reported a central role for positive affect, but volitional self-control may be dispensable. a dmc can be experienced by learners at different levels and time-scales and by groups. ibrahim (2016a) to analyze the emotional element of the dmc experience phenomenological analysis of interviews participants reported excitement due to a sense of progress, development, and identity transformation. vision did not seem to play a central role for all participants. ibrahim and alhoorie (2019) to find out the conditions in which a group dmc can be experienced phenomenological analysis of interviews a group dmc was reported to be facilitated through forming a group identity, attaching personal value, and providing partial autonomy. ibrahim (2020) to explore what fuels the intense and sustained motivated behavior which distinguishes the phenomenon from other types of high motivated engagement questionnaire and interviews positive emotionality was the dominant type of affect experienced in a dmc (i.e., motivation was perhaps fueled by positive affect). this connection was attributed to making tangible progress toward a personally valuable learning goal and a perception of productivity, skill acquisition, personal development and transformation. koné (2020) to examine the effect of a group dmc on perception of assessment intervention with reflective journals the dmc experience led to students enjoying the assessment. there was no control group or pre-post quantitative assessment. muir (2016) study 1: to examine the recognizability of dmcs study 1: online survey study 1: dmcs seem to be well-recognizable and widely experienced. safoura jahedizadeh, ali h. al-hoorie 526 study 2: to examine inducibility of a dmc in language classes study 2: intervention, skype semistructured interviews, diary analysis study 2: participants reported that project-based teaching was successful in enhancing a group dmc and language development, though no quantitative measures or a control group was included. murphy et al. (2017) to explore the characteristics of a dmc and whether insights from neuroelt can help to explain it telephone interviews a dmc was reported to involve goal-orientedness, salient facilitative structure, and positive affect, though vision did not play a major role. dmc description seems to align with neuroelt maxims. pietluch (2018) to explore the relationship between self-efficacy and dmcs questionnaire with open-ended questions there is a strong association between self-efficacy and dmcs. participants’ responses suggest that self-efficacy increases during a dmc. selçuk and erten (2017) to explore the patterns and perceived causes of language learners’ motivational changes while studying a foreign language retrodictive qualitative modelling, self-plotted graphs one learner reporting to have experienced a dmc recalled more stable motivational and affective patterns than another learner not reporting to have experienced a dmc. sugino et al. (2017) to explore sources of teachers’ demotivation, their strategies to cope with it in order to extract factors that might lead to a dmc questionnaire with open-ended questions students’ attitudes were the most important factor for teacher demotivation. watkins (2016) to examine the feasibility of a curriculum structured around a dmc and its effect on learner confidence intervention, retrospective questionnaire descriptive results suggested improvement in self-confidence but with unexplained fluctuations in weekly motivation. it was difficult to determine whether learners actually experienced dmcs. no inferential statistics were presented, and no control group was used. zarrinabadi et al. (2019) to examine the characteristics of a dmc and explore its association with some psychological variables semi-structured interview, self-plotted graphs, stimulated recall a dmc was reported to involve goalorientedness and vision, salient facilitative structure, and positive affect. the participants linked their dmc experiences with willingness to communicate, self-confidence, self-concept, and autonomy. zarrinabadi and tavakoli (2017) to examine the characteristics of dmcs semi-structured interviews a dmc was reported to involve goalorientedness and vision, salient facilitative structure, and positive affect. table 3 characteristics of participants sample size (female) age m or range level context target language colombo (2017) 4 (50%) university usa spanish dastgahian and ghonsooly (2018) 63 (100%) 18 high school iran english direckze and ratwatte (2017) 4 (100%) school teachers sri lanka english ghanizadeh and jahedizadeh (2017); jahedizadeh and ghanizadeh (2021) 320 (79%) 24 universities and language institutes iran english directed motivational currents: a systematic review 527 jahedizadeh et al. (2021) 376 (87%) 24 universities and language institutes iran english henry et al. (2015) 3 (100%) 31 university sweden swedish henry and davydenko (2020) 18 (72%) 20-50 adult sweden swedish ibrahim (2016a, 2016b, 2017); ibrahim and al-hoorie (2019); ibrahim (2020) 18 (39%), 4 teachers, 1 principal 28* university uk english koné (2020) 60 (42%) 17-21 university mali english muir (2016) 1452 (72%, study 1) 16 (56%, study 2) 16-60+ 18-40 mixed university mixed australia mixed english murphy et al. (2017) 7 (72%) university japan english pietluch (2018) 88 (54%)** 20-42** university poland english selçuk and erten (2017) 2 (100%) 18 university turkey english sugino et al. (2017) 34 (74%) 20-50+ university teachers japan english watkins (2016) 25 (72%) university japan english zarrinabadi et al. (2019) 10 (30%) 16 high school iran english zarrinabadi and tavakoli (2017) 2 (100%) 26 language institute iran english note. * average of the learners (i.e., not teachers); ** female percentage and age range of the entire sample, including participants excluded for not exhibiting dmc characteristics. 6.2. rq1: characteristics of dmcs when it comes to rq1, the three characteristics argued to be necessary for distinguishing dmcs from other constructs, a major concern has to do with a situation analogous to a chicken-and-egg problem. recruiting participants was usually deliberately based on the posited dmc characteristics – while excluding those not exhibiting them – before concluding that the results supported these characteristics. as an illustration of this circularity, one report in our pool used “purposeful sampling” in that “the key components of dmcs functioned as the guide” and that “only those students whose motivational experience had all of the key elements of dmcs were recruited.” the researchers then concluded that “the dmc construct proposed by dörnyei and his associates accounted well for such a motivational experience.” such circularity leads to a conceptual confusion that makes it hard to determine whether those characteristics are actually necessary since some excluded learners might still experience dmcs without exhibiting all these characteristics. other reports excluded participants for not stating a specific goal beyond the desire to improve one’s l2 proficiency or not providing elaborate affective details. again, these exclusion criteria presuppose that these features are essential for the dmc experience. ideally, participants should be presented only with the two defining characteristics of dmcs (a surge toward a goal) without preconceived notions about this phenomenon (e.g., whether the goal should be specific, the emotion intense, or any other non-defining characteristic) to avoid confirmation bias. a major factor contributing to this problem is the fact that there is safoura jahedizadeh, ali h. al-hoorie 528 currently no psychometrically valid instrument showing adequate predictive validity which could be used to determine whether a dmc occurs, when, for how long, or how intensely (see also peng & phakiti, 2020). obviously, sound measurement is a prerequisite for any subsequent inference. our review also points to concerns about the evidence for each of the three characteristics posited for dmcs. when it comes to vision, though it has been argued that a dmc cannot be achieved without it (e.g., dörnyei et al., 2014, p. 13), several empirical reports have demonstrated that learners were in fact able to achieve a dmc without engaging in vision or visualization of their desired states (henry et al., 2015; ibrahim, 2016b; ibrahim & al-hoorie, 2019; murphy et al., 2017; see also muir, 2020). some participants explicitly denied that vision was essential to their dmc experience when directly questioned about it (murphy et al., 2017), while others even reported deliberately avoiding vision (ibrahim, 2016b). when it comes to group dmcs, vision has similarly been absent from the scene (ibrahim & al-hoorie, 2019; muir, 2016). these results are hard to reconcile with the argument that vision plays a central role in initiating or sustaining this experience. the second characteristic is a salient facilitative structure. this indeed turned out to be a recurring finding in the empirical literature. four issues remain unresolved, however. first, “structure” is used rather loosely and without a clear definition. for example, performing “progress checks” is something that probably most learners around the world already do – whether during the dmc experience or not – and something that they do in countless shapes and forms. this impreciseness makes the notion of structure essentially unfalsifiable since, on the one hand, different manifestations could be reinterpreted as structure, and, on the other hand, different researchers may define this aspect in different and possibly contradictory ways. second, structure has been reported in individual dmc experiences but not so much in group dmcs (e.g., ibrahim & alhoorie, 2019). in some instances of group dmcs participants reported feeling pressured to perform tasks that they might not have performed otherwise (muir, 2016), suggesting that a non-volitional motivational structure may not be an essential characteristic of group dmcs (see dörnyei et al., 2016, for differences between individual and group dmc). if individual and group dmcs follow different dynamics, then this suggests that many findings concerning individual dmcs may be irrelevant to classroom practitioners who are primarily concerned with groups of students. third, this literature has not addressed the potential conceptual confusion of treating such strategic behaviors (e.g., progress checking and subgoal setting) as part of motivation. in fact, this very point was one of dörnyei’s critiques of integrative motivation (gardner, 1985, 2010), arguing that motivation should be conceptualized as “the unobservable mental phenomenon” directed motivational currents: a systematic review 529 (dörnyei, 2005, p. 71), not the behaviors resulting from it. nor, finally, is it conceptually clear why a salient structure should be an integral part of a dmc in the first place. imagine a learner traveling to an l2 community to improve her speaking skills. she decides to engage in conversations with the locals about random topics and as a result experiences a motivational surge. should this learner be disqualified if she does not set “subgoals” or conduct “progress checks” of her speaking skill (see dörnyei et al., 2015, p. 100)? a lot of conceptual confusion can result if a motivational phenomenon is not distinguished from “descriptions of specific strategic behaviors” (dörnyei & ryan, 2015, p. 159). in terms of the third characteristic, positive affect and eudaimonic well-being, two main concerns emerge. first, the dmc literature has not engaged seriously with doubts about the very construct validity of eudaimonic well-being. kashdan et al. (2008), for example, argued that the philosophical distinction between eudaimonic and hedonic well-being does not translate well into science because eudaimonia is ill-defined and lacks consistent measurement. indeed, in our pool of dmc reports, not a single study presented a psychometrically valid measure of eudaimonic wellbeing to examine how individuals experiencing dmcs compare either with others not experiencing it or with themselves in non-dmc states. in fact, some research (fredrickson et al., 2013) even suggests that the eudaimonic-hedonic distinction might be genetically-determined and beyond conscious experience (for more on these controversial findings, see brown et al., 2014; fredrickson, 2016). along the same lines, a large-scale study by disabato et al. (2016), involving over 7,500 participants from over 100 countries, also could not establish discriminant validity between self-reported eudaimonic and hedonic well-being (r = .96), leading them to argue in favor of a single overarching construct only. second, the picture is further complicated by findings pointing to negative dmc experiences with some participants wishing not to repeat it (muir, 2016, 2020). some of these participants reported feelings of stress, anxiety, and even depression, and the overall experience being a “bad memory” (muir, 2016, p. 183). again, these results are hard to reconcile with the argument that positive affect and eudaimonic well-being are necessary conditions for a dmc, or with the claim that a dmc can project positive emotionality at all stages (dörnyei et al., 2015, p. 101). being a bad memory that the learner does not wish to repeat is additionally hard to reconcile with the claim that dmcs represent self-concordant goals (see later for more on this negative side). 6.3. rq2: effect on language learning regarding rq2, whether dmcs lead to an improvement in language learning, the above conceptual issues add a further layer of difficulty to this question. safoura jahedizadeh, ali h. al-hoorie 530 nevertheless, one of the striking observations in the literature to date is that there is not a single randomized controlled experiment (or other forms of experimentation, see hiver & al-hoorie, 2020b) testing the claims made about dmcs. conducting educational research, particularly interventions, is undoubtedly fraught with difficulties. after all, however, the ultimate promise of dmcs is that they lead to better learning and that classroom practitioners should therefore draw on them (e.g., dörnyei et al., 2015; ibrahim & al-hoorie, 2019; peng & phakiti, 2020). the predominant methodology is either qualitative (e.g., interviews) or observational (e.g., questionnaires and self-plotted graphs), both cases often involving a small number of participants. while the results of such studies are valuable and their emphasis is understandable in the early stages of research into a new construct, these methodologies offer limited insight into cause-and-effect claims of the sort that dmcs lead to better language learning or academic achievement, let alone making pedagogical implications for classroom teachers (see al-hoorie, 2018; al-hoorie et al., 2021). four studies did implement interventions (direckze & ratwatte, 2017; koné, 2020; muir, 2016; watkins, 2016), though a number of methodological limitations preclude unequivocal interpretation of their findings. most notably, there was no control group in any of these studies. without a control group, it is hard to rule out the role of maturation effects. furthermore, use of objective measures to assess the extent to which the dmc experience has advanced actual language proficiency or achievement was absent from these studies. instead, qualitative self-report (particularly of enjoyment and excitement) has been the primary criterion variable, sometimes obtained retrospectively at the end of the study. in one case (watkins, 2016), the researcher utilized a quantitative, self-assessed measure of self-confidence without inferential statistics, thus making it hard to determine whether any significant improvement had actually occurred (see al-hoorie & vitta, 2019). all in all, these results are in line with peng and phakiti’s (2020) observation that the effectiveness of dmcs with respect to actual language learning has not been systematically investigated or empirically demonstrated. 6.4. directions for future research dmc scholars acknowledge that research into dmcs is still in its infancy (e.g., muir, 2020). a great deal of research is therefore required to better understand this construct and its applicability to classroom practice. a major concern, however, is the falsifiability of dmcs. as peng and phakiti (2020) pointed out, “it is unclear whether dörnyei et al.’s (2016) dmc is a proposed theory, as it does not contain a set of hypotheses that establish or predict the relationships among aspects of dmcs as well as learners’ motivational behaviors” (pp. 2-3). if genuine directed motivational currents: a systematic review 531 progress is to be achieved, this lack of falsifiability needs be addressed in future research. clear hypotheses need to be formulated and tested, and the results independently replicated (see hiver & al-hoorie, 2020a). perhaps the first step in this direction is renaming a dmc as sustained flow (e.g., ibrahim, 2020; ibrahim & al-hoorie, 2019; murphey, 2019). ibrahim and al-hoorie (2019) argued in favor of using the synonymous term sustained flow for two reasons. first, this term acknowledges the connection to the mother construct, flow. a dmc is essentially “the temporal expansion of the flow mechanism” (dörnyei & ryan, 2015, p. 99), and such renaming thus helps achieve a cumulative literature built on findings concerning flow in the field of psychology. a primary difference between the two constructs is that flow is typically a singleepisode phenomenon whereas sustained flow “involves a prolonged process of engagement in a series of tasks” (dörnyei et al., 2016, p. 5, original emphasis). second, the term sustained flow may help alleviate the confusing terminological proliferation recently witnessed in the field (see al-hoorie, 2018). the remainder of this section discusses three research directions that seem to hold promise for better understanding of the dmc phenomena. 6.4.1. need for comparative evidence not only should the evidence on dmcs be drawn from experimental designs utilizing objective, quantitative measures of language learning, but it should also ideally compare the effectiveness of dmc interventions with other established interventions. just as bandura (1997) put it, “power is best gauged by comparing . . . with methods of proven strength, rather than with untreated controls or with weak treatments” (p. 339). from a cost-effectiveness analysis, practitioners are not only interested in some absolute effect of dmcs but also in how they compare to their current practice (see also peng & phakiti, 2020). investigations that attempted to induce dmcs have primarily focused on group dmcs (as opposed to individual dmcs), and the main strategy used to induce dmcs was involvement in projects. according to dörnyei et al. (2016), dmcs are directly linked to project-based language teaching: “we believe that a fullyfledged dmc can be seen as the optimal form of engagement with an extended project in general” (p. 20, original emphasis). from this perspective, dmcs seem to also have direct conceptual links to task-based language teaching. in fact, the prototypical example of a dmc triggering task is a group project followed by a class presentation (e.g., ibrahim & al-hoorie, 2019; muir, 2016). the way such tasks are operationalized seems to satisfy the four criteria of task-based language learning that ellis (2009) proposed: focus on meaning, genuine gap the activity fills, reliance on one’s own linguistic and non-linguistic resources, and presence of safoura jahedizadeh, ali h. al-hoorie 532 a defined outcome other than the use of the language. establishing whether a dmc indeed constitutes the “optimal form” of either projector task-based language teaching, in the sense that the additional dmc element leads to better language learning, requires comparative analysis with learners engaging in a similar activity – with high motivation – though without the dmc element. the need for comparative evidence is clear when the implicit assumptions in the dmc literature are considered. one implicit assumption seems to be that high intensity involvement in a project, typically outside the classroom (see ibrahim & alhoorie, 2019), would eventually lead to better learning (see, e.g., dörnyei et al., 2016, p. 20). however, research into the effectiveness of project-based homework shows that it is not very effective (hattie, 2009, p. 235; see also muir, 2020). a second implicit assumption is that building a vision of oneself in the future and raising one’s aspirations is effective for learning. again, existing research does not support this view. according to a synthesis of evidence by the education endowment foundation (2018), aspiration interventions are rather costly and have little to no impact on educational outcomes. the education endowment foundation (2018) rates the expected educational improvement in months, and aspiration interventions are one of the few interventions that are currently rated as improving learning by zero months. apart from projectand task-based language teaching, dmcs likewise bear curious resemblance to self-determined motivation. in the words of ryan and deci, integrated regulation represents the fullest type of internalization and is the basis for the most autonomous form of extrinsic motivation. achieving the integration of an identification or an introject is an active and transformational process and typically requires self-reflection and reciprocal assimilation. integrated regulation entails that one bring a value or regulation into congruence with the other aspects of one’s self . . . (ryan & deci, 2017, p. 188) therefore, there seems to be substantial overlap between the two constructs, including autonomy facilitation, goal-directedness, self-transformation, self-fulfillment, self-satisfaction, and self-congruence (see dörnyei et al., 2016). although a dmc is argued to be qualitatively different from high motivation as traditionally defined, there are no comparative analyses demonstrating that better learning occurs with a dmc than with high intrinsic motivation or integrated regulation. in fact, it might be the case that, in the long-term, a dmc might lead to less learning due to the fatigue the learner might experience after an intense burst (slow and steady wins the race). to truly be an optimal form of motivation, not only should a dmc show a significant difference from untreated control groups, but also from other established treatments, with the effect maintained over time. note also that hattie (2009) argued that a magnitude of d = 0.40 should be considered the minimum benchmark to judge educational effects. directed motivational currents: a systematic review 533 6.4.2. need for longitudinal evidence one of the glaring ironies in the dmc literature to date is that, despite the fact that “time” is the primary focus, most reports have used retrospective accounts of dmc experiences occurring several years in the past, in one case reaching 30 years (ibrahim, 2016b). this is in line with the trend in the language motivation literature more generally, where convenience has made cross-sectional designs reign (al-hoorie, 2018; sugita mceown et al., 2014; see colombo, 2017, for an exception). there is general agreement among memory researchers that the role of episodic memory is not to reproduce past experiences in an exact manner (the reproductive function), but to reconstruct these experiences along with various errors, biases, distortions, and illusions (the reconstructive function). schacter and addis (2007) comment: “retrieval of a past experience involves a process of pattern completion . . . in which the rememberer pieces together some subset of distributed features that comprise a particular past experience, including perceptual and conceptual/interpretive elements” (p. 774). in fact, even at the neural level, there is substantial overlap between the neural activity of true and false memories (see dennis et al., 2015, for a review). cognitive psychologists have therefore long emphasized the importance of obtaining verbal reports immediately during the activity (e.g., through stimulated recall and think-aloud protocols) rather than relying on long-term memory (see, e.g., ericsson & simon, 1980, 1984). real-time analysis of dmcs may shed light not only on whether language learning indeed becomes more effective during this experience, but also how. it is equally important to uncover the process leading to the outcome as it is to investigate the outcome (al-hoorie & al shlowiy, 2020; vitta & al-hoorie, 2020). several studies have used self-plotted graphs, sometimes asking the participant to retrospectively rate their motivation over the course of a whole previous year. this blunt approach would most likely fail to capture subtle fluctuations, leaving researchers with broad stages that participants report going through such as launch, stability, and closure (ibrahim, 2016b). these results might also simply represent post hoc rationalization by participants as to how it would make sense for motivation to develop over time. of course, prospective analyses may pose additional challenges since it may be hard to detect a dmc while it is happening or predict when it would occur or in whom (e.g., watkins, 2016). 6.4.3. need for emphasis on potential side effects the canonical example of a dmc experience is an overweight person suddenly deciding to work out and go on a diet. while this is usually a constructive decision, exercising and dieting without proper guidance can also backfire. extending this safoura jahedizadeh, ali h. al-hoorie 534 analogy to dmcs, it is not impossible to imagine a negative side of a dmc. the way dmcs are portrayed in the literature is in fact more akin to this overweight person injecting anabolic steroids. a dmc involves an unusually intense and sudden motivational surge that lasts for some time. some researchers (e.g., ibrahim & al-hoorie, 2019) have therefore cautioned against applying this approach frequently since inducing such intense surges may lead to learner fatigue. indeed, as mentioned above, findings by muir (2016) reveal that some participants consider their dmc experiences as unfavorable to the extent that they do not wish to experience them again. this is inconsistent with the initial claims that dmcs project positive emotionality at all stages and represent who the individual really is self-concordantly (e.g., dörnyei et al., 2015, p. 101). considering the acclaim dmcs had received before more careful empirical assessment, it is understandable that muir (2016) describes these findings as “a true eye-opener” (p. 182). some of these participants reported adverse health effects resulting from the intensity of their motivational surge. the experience was described as “time consuming and at times it causes depression, anxiety, sleeplessness and other disorders” and as leading to “intense stress and panic attacks” (muir, 2016, table 36). other students in muir’s study stated that the level of intensity required for the occurrence of a dmc was unnecessary. indeed, for many learners, language learning is a means to an end rather than a lifechanging activity. it would seem too ambitious, and even naïve, to expect all learners to embrace a language learning project with the eudaimonic spirit described by waterman (1993, p. 679): “an impression that this is what the person was meant to do” or “a feeling that this is who one really is.” as muir (2020) pointed out, a dmc is typically (and incorrectly) thought to lead to universally positive experiences. however, considering the above potential negative effects, there might be ethical concerns with recommending that classroom practitioners induce dmcs. some may argue that this situation seems akin to recommending an experimental drug to the public before a reasonable grasp of its side effects.1 without doubt, it is not justifiable to focus on the positive effects of an intervention without adequate consideration of its potential negative consequences. 7. conclusion “a theory that offers both predictive and operative power has greater utility than one that is limited mainly to prediction” (bandura, 1997, p. 286). indeed, it might 1 this example was included in the manuscript before the covid-19 pandemic. therefore, it must not be interpreted as implying that any covid-19 vaccine is or is not effective. directed motivational currents: a systematic review 535 well be the case that dmcs have useful operative power for classroom teachers. it is vital that understanding of the characteristics of dmcs and their effectiveness in language learning is refined to avoid generative entrenchment, which occurs when a concept has other concepts, theories and practices built on it, consequently making it resistant to change even after it is shown to be problematic (eronen & bringmann, 2021; see also henry & cliffordson, 2017). the results of the present review indicate that the current conception of dmcs may need to be refined. at the individual level, when a dmc emerges spontaneously, there are numerous accounts from individuals experiencing this phenomenon and enjoying it, though its exact characteristics are still debatable. at the group level, things become murkier when it is intentionally induced, however. demonstration of dmc effectiveness requires experimental designs and comparison with other interventions. it additionally requires building a cumulative science, where effect sizes are compared across contexts, student populations (e.g., age, gender, proficiency, etc.), and learning purposes (english majors, english for specific purposes, etc.). it further requires balanced scrutiny of the empirical results, considering both positive and negative aspects. in the case of dmcs, there is currently little direct evidence for their superiority over a slow-but-steady approach when it comes to tangible language learning outcomes, especially when considering long-term consistency and fatigue. acknowledgements we would like to thank zana ibrahim and phil hiver for feedback on a previous version of this manuscript. safoura jahedizadeh, ali h. al-hoorie 536 references al-hoorie, a. h. 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(2014). at the interface of the socio-educational model, self-determination theory and the l2 motivational self system models. in k. csizér & m. magid (eds.), the impact of self-concept on language learning (pp. 19-50). multilingual matters. vitta, j. p., & al-hoorie, a. h. (2017). scopusand ssci-indexed l2 journals: a list for the asia tefl community. the journal of asia tefl, 14(4), 784-792. https:// doi.org/10.18823/asiatefl.2017.14.4.14.784 vitta, j. p., & al-hoorie, a. h. (2020). the flipped classroom in second language learning: a meta-analysis. language teaching research. https://doi.org /10.1177/1362168820981403 waterman, a. s. (1993). two conceptions of happiness: contrasts of personal expressiveness (eudaimonia) and hedonic enjoyment. journal of personality and social psychology, 64(4), 678-691. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.64.4.678 waterman, a. s. (2008). reconsidering happiness: a eudaimonist’s perspective. the journal of positive psychology, 3(4), 234-252. https://doi.org/10.108 0/17439760802303002 watkins, j. (2016). planning a curriculum to stimulate directed motivational currents (dmcs). kwansei gakuin university: language center annual research report, 19, 59-73. zarrinabadi, n., ketabi, s., & tavakoli, m. (2019). directed motivational currents in l2: exploring the effects on self and communication. springer. zarrinabadi, n., & tavakoli, m. (2017). exploring motivational surges among iranian efl teacher trainees: directed motivational currents in focus. tesol quarterly, 51(1), 155-166. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.332 directed motivational currents: a systematic review 541 appendix list of dmc conceptual analyses dörnyei, z., henry, a., & muir, c. (2016). motivational currents in language learning: frameworks for focused interventions. routledge. dörnyei, z., ibrahim, z., & muir, c. (2015). “directed motivational currents”: regulating complex dynamic systems through motivational surges. in z. dörnyei, p. macintyre, & a. henry (eds.), motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 95-105). multilingual matters. dörnyei, z., muir, c., & ibrahim, z. (2014). directed motivational currents: energising language learning by creating intense motivational pathways. in d. lasagabaster, a. doiz, & j. m. sierra (eds.), motivation and foreign language learning: from theory to practice (pp. 9-29). john benjamins. henry, a. (2019). directed motivational currents: extending the theory of l2 vision. in m. lamb, k. csizér, a. henry, & s. ryan (eds.), the palgrave handbook of motivation for language learning (pp. 139-161). palgrave macmillan. muir, c. (2020). directed motivational currents and language education: exploring implications for pedagogy. multilingual matters. muir, c. (2021). investigating group-dmcs and complexity in the l2 classroom. in r. j. sampson & r. s. pinner (eds.), complexity perspectives on researching language learner and teacher psychology (pp. 189-207). multilingual matters. muir, c. (in press). group-dmcs and group-level emotion in the l2 classroom. in a. h. al-hoorie & f. szabó (eds.), researching language learning motivation: a concise guide. bloomsbury. muir, c., & dörnyei, z. (2013). directed motivational currents: using vision to create effective motivational pathways. studies in second language learning and teaching, 3(3), 357-375. muir, c., & gümüş, ö. (2020). directed motivational currents: an agenda for future research. eurasian journal of applied linguistics, 6(3), 501-519. https://doi.org/10.32601/ejal.834661 murphey, t. (2019). sustained flow experiences from facilitative structures can create guiding post-hoc visualizations and positive affect: get students to tell their positive stories to operationalize the process. relay journal, 2(2), 409-414. peng, z., & phakiti, a. (2020). what a directed motivational current is to language teachers. relc journal. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033688220905376 rubrecht, b. g. (2018). go with the flow! tracing language learning motivation research to directed motivational currents. the bulletin of arts and sciences meiji university, 533, 91-110. zarrinabadi, n., ketabi, s., & tavakoli, m. (2019). directed motivational currents in l2: exploring the effects on self and communication. springer. 629 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (4). 2021. 629-633 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.4.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review individual differences in language learning: a complex systems theory perspective authors: carol griffiths, adem soruç publisher: palgrave macmillan, 2020 isbn: 978-3-030-52900-0 pages: 220 second language acquisition (sla) researchers have been exploring individual differences (ids) to identify how variation in second or foreign language (l2) learners’ attainment can be explained by factors such as personality, language aptitude, learning styles, and motivation, to name but a few (e.g., dörnyei, 2005; gregersen & macintyre, 2014; pawlak, 2012). therefore, it is important for teachers to develop a solid understanding of id factors and their impact on l2 learning. however, except for a handful of notable publications that have attempted to close the gap between research and practice (e.g., gregersen & macintyre, 2014; pawlak, 2012), most extant id studies have been conducted with the aim of achieving theoretical development and rigorous methodological validation (ushioda, 2020). consequently, their findings are typically detached from pedagogical realities and cannot easily be translated into practical insights that can inform l2 teaching. for this reason, we believe that griffiths and soruç’s book is an important resource for practitioners as it offers a comprehensive and accessible review of id research that can guide teachers’ engagement with individual variation in l2 education. 630 the book contains a total of 13 chapters, with the introductory chapter framing 11 id factors within a variety of theoretical perspectives including “complex/dynamic systems theory,” “sociological context,” and “holism” (pp. 3-5). the book has an explicit message encouraging l2 teachers to adopt a holistic view of ids “in the interests of practicality” (p. 5). following benson and gao’s (2008) classification, we group the 11 id factors into two categories. the first group includes age, sex/gender, race/ethnicity/nationality/culture, aptitude, personality, and learning style. these id factors are relatively stable. the second group includes language learning strategies, autonomy, beliefs, affect, and motivation. these factors are dynamic and susceptible to change due to interactions between individual learners and contextual conditions as well as pedagogical interventions. in chapter 2, griffiths and soruç highlight the fact that age-related differences in l2 learning are closely linked to other variables, such as neurological maturation, psycho-affective factors (e.g., aptitude and motivation) and contextual conditions. chapter 3 demonstrates how individual l2 learners’ biological sex and culturally constructed gender interact with a variety of id factors, including beliefs, learning styles, race/ethnicity/nationality/culture, language learning strategies and contextual conditions in mediating their l2 learning. in chapter 4, griffiths and soruç engage with complex constructs such as race/ethnicity/nationality/culture. they not only focus on key issues such as culture shock and intercultural communication gaps but also emphasize that these constructs interact with other id factors such as affect (e.g., loneliness caused by cultural alienation of an international student in a study-abroad context) and cognition (e.g., learning beliefs) in impacting individual learners’ l2 learning. chapter 5 focuses on the construct of aptitude, which was once considered to be fixed and thus of limited relevance for language educators. griffiths and soruç make the point that examining exceptional learners’ accounts more closely has the potential of generating crucial insights into the mechanisms underlying successful l2 learning, such as working memory, aptitude, beliefs, multiple intelligences and motivation. by highlighting the interconnectedness of aptitude with other id factors, griffiths and soruç make a compelling argument that critical engagement with this variable can assist l2 teachers in developing relevant strategies that can aid their learners to enhance the mastery of additional languages. similar arguments are presented in chapter 6, which focuses on personality as an id factor. griffiths and soruç suggest that a deeper understanding of how personality mediates the process of language learning will help l2 teachers to adopt appropriate strategies that promote other desirable attributes such as willingness to communicate (wtc; see also macintyre & gregersen, 2021). in a similar vein, in chapter 7, griffiths and soruç direct readers’ attention to the 631 dynamism of learning styles, encouraging l2 teachers to use pedagogical strategies that help l2 learners to become “aware of the benefits of . . . [moving] beyond rigid ideas of their own stylistic preferences . . . to try new ways of doing things” (p. 107; see also gregersen & macintyre, 2014). chapter 8 engages with key issues in l2 learning strategy research. for instance, griffiths and soruç offer an extended discussion of strategy-integrated l2 education models such as the cognitive academic language learning approach (chamot, 2009) and strategies-based instruction (cohen, 2011). chapter 9 focuses on an issue closely related to language learning strategies, that is, learner autonomy, and it discusses its links with self-regulation, agency, and metacognition. the chapter concludes with a list of important principles that can guide l2 teachers’ efforts to promote learner autonomy, such as “choice” and “clear guidelines” (p. 143). chapter 10 discusses the dynamism and complexity of learners’ beliefs, stressing their situated nature. griffiths and soruç argue that it is important for l2 teachers to “recognize and respect learners’ belief systems” before creating conditions to enable learners to change their beliefs “as and when they feel the need to do so” (p. 161). subsequently, chapter 11 examines affect as a multi-faceted construct associated with a variety of factors such as anxiety, attitude, empathy, and self-related concepts (e.g., self-efficacy). the last id factor examined in the book, that is, motivation, is probably the most extensively researched id variable. chapter 12 emphasizes that l2 learners’ motivation, like their beliefs, is situated, complex, and dynamic. in line with the complex dynamic systems theory perspective, this chapter also illustrates the interconnectedness of motivation and other id factors such as volition and investment (e.g., tanaka, 2021). despite the complexity of the id factors mentioned above, griffiths and soruç present a highly accessible narrative about these id factors intended for l2 teachers. in fact, they have excelled at translating research into practical suggestions for l2 instruction. the book also includes multiple reader-friendly features that facilitate teachers’ engagement with id factors through research and critical reflection. each chapter contains summaries of key relevant findings related to each id factor that is examined. for instance, chapter 9, dedicated to learner autonomy, first summarizes the relevant research findings and then includes two studies for further illustration: gürergene’s study “of the relationship between learner autonomy and language proficiency” in turkey (p. 134) and zhang’s (2018) inquiry regarding “chinese students who study abroad in the uk” (p. 136). each chapter ends with a list of directions or questions for additional research. for example, chapter 10 focuses on beliefs and encourages readers to explore more deeply questions such as “how do learners’ beliefs change according to situation and/or other factors which impact on their lives and/or their ability/willingness to learn (longitudinal research designs are especially lacking and would be particularly useful here)?” (p. 161). 632 additionally, each chapter contains a list of questions for readers to consider if they wish to apply relevant findings on id factors in practice. for example, in chapter 4, the authors invite readers to critically reflect on questions such as, “do you think that hofstede’s metaphor of culture as the, software of the mind’ is useful? why/not?” (p. 59). in chapter 3, dealing with sex/gender, the readers are encouraged to interview “some male/female classmates, workmates, or others that [they] know, about their attitudes towards/experiences of language learning” and explore whether there are “any noticeable differences according to gender” (p. 43). griffiths and soruç also suggest additional key readings related to each id factor. all these features help l2 teachers to enhance their understanding of id factors and make informed pedagogical decisions. it must be noted that id research is a vibrant field of inquiry in sla. therefore, it is difficult for the book to capture all key, up-to-date research findings within the concise, reader-friendly narrative the authors have produced. however, it might be desirable for griffiths and soruç to include id constructs that have been conceptualized and examined in recent studies, such as linguistic giftedness (e.g., biedroń & pawlak, 2016) or emotions (e.g., pawlak et al., 2020). they could also consider expanding the discussion of affect by including recent studies on positive psychology (e.g., dewaele et al., 2019). that said, however, we believe that this book is a must-read for language teachers who seek empirical insights into id factors to develop effective pedagogical strategies. while individual readers can use this work as a guide for learning about id factors at their own pace, the book is also an ideal resource for l2 teacher educators who wish to develop id-related pedagogical activities in their courses. the book will help language teachers to become more flexible and responsive in supporting l2 learners with appropriate strategies. reviewed by mengyao ma wuhan university, wuhan, china mengyao.ma@whu.edu.cn xuesong (andy) gao university of new south wales, sydney, australia xuesong.gao@unsw.edu.au 633 references benson, p., & gao, x. (2008). individual variation and language learning strategies. in s. hurd & t. lewis (eds.), language learning strategies in independent settings (pp. 25-40). multilingual matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/ 9781847690999-004 biedroń, a., & pawlak, m. (2016). new conceptualizations of linguistic giftedness. language teaching, 49(2), 151-185. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261 444815000439 chamot, a. (2009). the calla handbook: implementing the cognitive academic language learning. pearson longman. cohen, a. (2011). strategies in learning and using a second language (2nd ed.). routledge. dörnyei, z. (2005). the psychology of the language learner: individual differences in second language acquisition. routledge. dewaele, j. m., chen, x., padilla, a. m., & lake, j. (2019). the flowering of positive psychology in foreign/second language teaching and acquisition research. frontiers in psychology, 10, 2128. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02128 gregersen, t., & macintyre, p. 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(2018). learner autonomy among chinese students who study abroad in the united kingdom [unpublished master’s thesis]. university of leeds, uk. 125 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (1). 2023. 125-149 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.31990 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt construct validation of the revised metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi-r) and its relation to learning effort and reading achievement abdullah alamer king faisal university, alhasa, suadi arabia https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4450-0931 aa.alamer@kfu.edu.sa ahmad alsagoafi king faisal university, alhasa, suadi arabia https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6788-3870 aalsagoafi@kfu.edu.sa abstract language students apply different strategies to learn a second language (l2), especially when they want to attain proficiency in reading. the aim of the present study was to revisit the validity of the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi-r) among saudi students using a new statistical method of confirmatory composite analysis (cca). past studies modeled marsi-r as a common factor and applied confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) to test its validity. however, studies struggled to provide support for the validity of the masri-r with each suggesting different model. instead, we treat the inventory as a composite, meaning that the items in marsi-r form and define the inventory and not the other way around. we use partial least squared structural equation modeling (pls-sem) to allow the composite model to be estimated. the results indicated that the constructs of marsi-r are better operationalized as composites not common factors as supported through cca exclusively. after confirming the nature of the inventory, we evaluated the extent to which marsi-r is related to reading proficiency through the mediational mechanism of motivational intensity (i.e., learning effort). descriptive statistics illustrated that problem-solving strategies abdullah alamer, ahmad alsagoafi 126 are the most used strategy and that females used the strategies more frequently than their male counterparts. most importantly, the structural model showed that metacognitive reading strategies only exert an indirect effect on reading proficiency, suggesting that the effect of strategies is mediated by motivational intensity (i.e., learning effort). thus, motivational intensity seems to be mediator in the relationship between metacognitive reading strategies and reading proficiency. finally, methodological and educational implications are provided. keywords: metacognitive reading strategies; marsi; marsi-r; construct validity; confirmatory composite analysis (cca); confirmatory factor analysis (cfa); partial least squared structural equation modeling (pls-sem) 1. introduction metacognitive reading strategies are one of the variables that are related to second language (l2) learners’ success in reading comprehension and proficiency (cai & kunnan, 2020). interest in the role of metacognitive reading strategies is observable in research studies and edited volumes in the field (see, for example, cai & kunnan, 2020; cohen, 2011; mokhtari & reichard, 2002, oxford, 2017; phakiti, 2006; purpura, 1997; among others). in l2 research, the concept of metacognitive reading test-taking strategies is closely related to students’ cognition process regarding reading and the self-awareness underlying comprehension of the text (mokhtari & reichard, 2002). although the importance of metacognitive reading strategies has been documented in the literature, the field agrees that they are multifaceted and not easy to assess (cohen, 2011). a prominent measure of metacognitive reading strategies is the marsi (mokhtari & reichard, 2002). the questionnaire was designed to evaluate learners’ awareness of metacognitive reading strategies when they read academic texts. the marsi has three subscales: global reading strategies (grs), problem-solving strategies (pss), and support reading strategies (srs). in essence, the marsi instrument (mokhtari & reichard, 2002) was originally designed to assess the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies among l1 students, not l2 students, although several authors have used it since its inception to measure the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies among l2 students as well. the modified version, the marsi-r (mokhtari et al., 2018), is a short version that the authors created by reducing the number of items in the original scale from 30 to 15 based on theoretical and empirical reasons. mokhtari et al. (2018) provided preliminary evidence of the constructs’ validity and reliability. however, methodologically, psychometric properties of marsi-r have yet to be established and further investigations are warranted to obtain the best model that mirrors construct validation of the revised metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory . . . 127 the theoretical underpinnings of marsi-r considering recent advances in the field of structural equation modeling (sem; dirsehan & henseler, 2022; hair & alamer, 2022; henseler & schuberth, 2021; schuberth, 2021; sparks & alamer, 2023). accordingly, the present study attempts to answer three research questions: rq1: how do l2 saudi undergraduate students of english use the marsi-r for reading learning? rq2: what is the best model representation of the internal structure of marsi-r? rq3: are metacognitive reading strategies directly or indirectly linked to l2 students’ reading proficiency through motivational intensity (criterionrelated validity)? 2. literature review interest in investigating learning processes in l2 research and theory has increased over the past five decades. the shift from examining teaching methods to investigating learning processes has led researchers to focus on the relationship between the processes and products of second language acquisition (sla) research and learners’ strategy use (purpura, 1997). similarly, language testing researchers have long been interested in examining the effect of candidates’ cognitive characteristics on test performance (kunnan, 1995; phakiti, 2003; purpura, 1997). in test situations, test takers apply language use strategies to enhance their test scores (cohen, 2011). more specifically, bachman and palmer (1996, 2010) proposed a theoretical framework for cognitive and metacognitive strategy use in language testing contexts. phakiti (2008) classified metacognitive strategies into planning, monitoring, and evaluation strategies. building on anxiety research in psychology, phakiti (2008) characterized bachman and palmer’s (1996, 2010) “strategic competence” as consisting of trait metacognition (i.e., knowledge about cognition) and state metacognition (i.e., regulation of cognition). 2.1. comprehension processes and strategies for reading texts cohen and upton (2007) maintained that readers consciously and purposefully “do exert a significant level of active control over their reading process through the use of strategies” (p. 211). specifically, the employment of cognitive strategies to comprehend reading texts assists students with making sense of a text, while metacognitive strategies help to monitor and appraise reading processes (griffiths, 2018; schallert & martin, 2003). nassaji (2003) noted that cognitive and metacognitive comprehension strategies are used at multiple levels to distinguish abdullah alamer, ahmad alsagoafi 128 between skilled and less-skilled english as a second language (esl) readers. for this reason, high-proficiency learners who frequently use reading strategies should not always be considered better readers (prichard, 2014). that is, strategy use should be tailored to personal choices because not all individuals may find a given strategy beneficial in all contexts and for all purposes (griffiths & soruç, 2020). carrell (1998) showed that successful strategy use and strategy instruction are context-dependent. in addition, rivera-mills and plonsky (2007) argued that there is no recipe for learning strategies that would be suitable for everyone. in order for test takers to succeed in test situations and identify the right answer, “the test items should invoke the construct-relevant strategies l2 test developers intend to use” (lin et al., 2019, p. 197). language testing research has focused on identifying the aspects that cause variation in test takers’ performance, chief among which are processing strategies (bachman, 1990). in language testing, cohen and upton (2007) classified strategies into three main categories: language learner strategies (e.g., confirming final understanding of the passage based on the content and/or the discourse structure), test management strategies (e.g., making an educated guess using background or extra-textual knowledge), and test wiseness strategies (e.g., using clues from other items to answer the item under consideration). cohen (2006) considered test management and test wiseness strategies to be test-taking strategies, and drew a clear distinction between those and language learner strategies. test management strategies are used to respond meaningfully to test items and tasks, whereas test wiseness strategies are used to respond to language tests without the use of l2 knowledge and performance ability (cohen, 2013). test-taking strategies can assist test takers with overcoming the challenges they face in test situations. gebril (2018) noted that giving test takers appropriate test-taking strategies can enhance their test performance. based on this distinction, this study will investigate the metacognitive strategies students use when taking a reading test at the b2 test. 2.2. studies on strategies used during reading tests and test performance language testing researchers have recognized the crucial role of cognitive and metacognitive strategies in the variation in language test performance. for instance, purpura (1998) examined the impact of metacognitive strategy use on candidates’ b2 test performance and found variation across the highand lowability groups in terms of lexico-grammatical and reading ability, based on the test takers’ use of retrieval and metacognitive strategies. similarly, phakiti (2006) investigated cognitive and metacognitive strategies in relation to 358 students’ reading test performance using the structural equation modelling (sem) construct validation of the revised metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory . . . 129 approach. he found that (1) memory and retrieval strategies promoted the candidates’ performance through comprehension strategies; (2) monitoring strategies had an “executive function” in relation to memory strategies, while evaluating strategy-controlled retrieval strategies; (3) planning strategies did not directly control memory, retrieval, or comprehension strategies, yet they controlled such cognitive strategies through monitoring and evaluation strategies; and (4) only comprehension strategies had a direct impact on students’ performance in the efl reading test (phakiti, 2006). similarly, zhang et al. (2014) explored the relationships between test takers’ metacognitive and cognitive strategy use and their test performance after sitting for an english as a foreign language (efl) reading test. using a multi-sample sem approach, their study comprised a total of 593 students. the findings of the study indicated that students’ strategy use significantly influenced their lexico-grammatical reading ability. in contrast, lin et al. (2019) found in their study, which had a total sample of 552 test takers, that only cognitive strategies had a direct impact on test takers’ reading test performance, whereas metacognitive strategies indirectly influenced test takers’ performance. however, metacognitive strategies had a strong effect on cognitive strategies. recently, wallace et al. (2021) investigated efl readers’ metacognitive strategy use in terms of gender and reading ability. using the marsi, they found that the participants in their study used pss more frequently than any other strategy. grs was used significantly more often than srs. moreover, their findings showed that gender differences did not affect strategy use. 2.3. marsi and marsi-r the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi) was developed by mokhtari and reichard (2002). it is a self-report scale constructed to measure students’ generalized use and awareness of different metacognitive reading strategies applied to the reading and comprehension of texts. the marsi scale has been useful in the field; however, the authors identified issues pertaining to the original scale, such as its appropriateness for college and adult readers, time consumption, and the generalized nature of the directions (for an in-depth discussion, see mokhtari et al., 2018). in an attempt to resolve these issues, the researchers made a few modifications and shortened the scale. in its modified version (i.e., the marsi-r), the scale was reduced from 30 to 15 items, as some statements covered the same reading strategy constructs. the marsir measures the same three constructs: grs, pss, and srs. mokhtari et al. (2018) validated the marsi-r by using confirmatory factor analysis (cfa). in sum, based on the misspecifications and related substantive considerations in the original marsi, the number of items was significantly reduced, and the validity of the abdullah alamer, ahmad alsagoafi 130 marsi-r was claimed to be established. nonetheless, empirical studies have been struggling with replicating this refined version in other socio-cultural contexts. although the inventory has undergone different validity assessments (see for example ondé et al., 2022), this was only done using cfa (by assuming marsi-r as common factor). nevertheless, cfa is not the most appropriate analytical tool for validating such composite constructs as we will explain later. 2.4. motivational intensity as a mediator learning an l2 is more likely to be successful when the language learners exert effort necessary to integrate more with the language tasks. similarly, learners who are aware of a set of learning strategies are less likely to proceed well in the language learning process if they do not put effort necessary for the learning to happen (alamer, 2022a, 2022b; gardner, 2010; griffiths, 2018). motivational intensity is defined as the expended effort the language learners exert to learn the language (gardner, 2010). as such, it can be hypothesized that for the metacognitive reading strategies to explain students’ reading achievement, learning effort should be considered as a means that translates into the awareness and use of metacognitive reading strategies. that is, it is postulated that learners who recognize which metacognitive reading strategies to use and then expend the learning effort are likely to have higher scores on reading achievement. thus, motivational intensity can be said to operate as a proximal variable that mediates the effect of metacognitive reading strategies on reading achievement (alrabai & alamer, 2022; griffiths, 2018). this indirect process has been less studied in the field; as such, the present study investigates the potential meditating role of motivational intensity between the predictor and the outcome. 2.5. methodological issues related to the validity of marsi-r and other related constructs the dominant type of model used in the field for testing the internal structure of language learning strategies in general and marsi-r in specific is the common factor model. common factor models are typically applied through exploratory factor analysis (efa), and cfa (alamer, 2022c; alamer et al., in press). in common factor models, the items (i.e., indicators) are conceptually viewed as interchangeable and similar in meaning; thus, the measurement model assumes that the items similarly reflect the construct (schuberth, 2021; schuberth et al., 2022). as such, items should be highly correlated because they are targeting one specific domain from slightly different angles. in this way, any item could be removed from the construct without changing its overall meaning (hair & alamer, 2022). when the construct follows this definition, construct validation of the revised metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory . . . 131 it should be referred to as a latent variable or common factor (schuberth et al., 2018). in the common factor model, the relationship goes from the factor to the items, meaning that if the conceptional meaning of the latent variable changes, all items should be changed simultaneously. in contrast to the common factor, emergent variable or composite comes as another type of construct configuration. the composite postulates that items constitute (i.e., define) the construct in a linear combination. each item in the composite holds unique information about the construct that is not expressed by the remaining items in the scale/inventory (alamer et al., in press). therefore, removing any item from the model likely alters the construct meaning (henseler & schuberth, 2021). accordingly, items in the composite model should not be highly correlated. when the construct follows this definition, it should be referred to as a composite (also called emergent variable and formative construct) (dirsehan & henseler, 2022; schuberth et al., 2018). hence, the relationship in the composite model goes from the items to the construct, meaning that the indictors independently form the construct. an example for a construct that follows composite definition from l2 literature is language achievement (e.g., sparks & alamer, 2022, 2023). see figure 1 for a visual representation of latent and emergent variables. figure 1 visual representation of cca (on the left) and cfa (on the right) when using cfa, the researcher assumes the constructs as latent variables. however, forcing emergent variables to work under the common factor approach (i.e., through cfa) is inappropriate. nonetheless, metacognitive reading strategies perfectly fit the definition of emergent variable because each item on the inventory represents a specific (i.e., distinct) aspect of the construct that is conceptually different from other items in the inventory. alternatively, confirmatory composite analysis (cca) has been developed to allow for the assessment of emergent variables (henseler, & schuberth, 2021; schuberth et al., 2018). to apply cca, researchers often rely on partial least squares structural equation modeling (pls-sem). pls-sem is a composite-based method that allows emergent variables abdullah alamer, ahmad alsagoafi 132 (i.e., composite) to be easily estimated (alamer et al., 2022; dirsehan & henseler, 2022; hair & alamer, 2022). among its benefits, pls-sem allows emergent variables to be estimated without identification issues that cfa faces. it allows higherorder constructs made of (caused by) lower-order constructs to be easily specified without special requirements (see alrabai & alamer, 2022 for an empirical example in l2 research). we believe that applying pls-sem to assess the composite model as well as the structural model is an important methodological contribution to the evaluation of marsi-r and other similar measures in the field (see hair & alamer, 2022 for pls-sem guidelines in l2 domain). based on the available literature, which will be discussed next, the postulated relationships in the process model are depicted in figure 2. figure 2 the structural (conceptual) model of the relationships linking metacognitive reading strategies, motivational intensity, and reading proficiency (constructs represented in hexagon denote composite; those represented in oval denote common factor; those represented in rectangle denote observable variable (sum/mean value)) 3. method 3.1. participants the participants in the present study were undergraduate students enrolled in one language level (intermediate level) at two saudi public universities. the original invitation was sent to around 200 students enrolled in the two universities. convenient sampling was utilized, and 108 students completed the questionnaire. all participants spoke arabic as their first language and were enrolled in the department of english studying english as an l2. their ages ranged from 18 to 35 years (mage = 22.73, sd = 2.72). the participants were students nested in their classes. thus, the language level of the participants was largely similar (intermediate), which was also confirmed by their teachers. regarding gender composition, 30.23% of the participants were male, while 69.77% were female. all students enrolled in the department of english at the two universities were invited via a message sent using a telegram channel dedicated to student announcements. construct validation of the revised metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory . . . 133 those who were willing to participate simply clicked the link provided in the message to access an online questionnaire created using google forms. a total of 108 students completed the online questionnaire. the study procedure was reviewed and approved by the department of english in the involved universities. the participants provided their written informed consent in the online questionnaire to participate in this study. the participants were not trained or prepared to take part in the reading test used this study. also, they had not received any instructions about reading strategies, though some textbooks from some language courses may have described some types of strategies. 3.2. instruments 3.2.1. marsi-r this study utilized the revised version of the marsi questionnaire (marsi-r), which consists of 15 items. mokhtari et al. (2018) reduced the number of items measuring global strategies in the original version from 30 to 15 in the revised version. participants were asked to indicate the extent to which they use the following strategies when they read english texts on a 5-point scale ranging from “i have never heard of this strategy before” to “i know this strategy quite well, and i often use it when i read.” the three subscales comprising the marsi-r are: (1) grs, for which an example item is “previewing the text to see what it is about before reading it,” (2) pss, for which an example item is “getting back on track when getting sidetracked or distracted,” and (3) srs, for which an example item is “using reference materials such as dictionaries to support my reading” (see appendix a for full scale items). 3.2.2. motivational intensity motivational intensity (also called effort in the literature) was measured using gardner’s (2010) scale. the scale has five items and is a self-reported measure that uses a 5-point likert-type response format. the participants were asked to indicate the extent to which each statement represented their efforts. an example item is “i really work hard to learn english.” the internal consistency reliability of this variable in this study was .80. 3.2.3. reading proficiency this study used the b2 first test, formerly known as cambridge english: first (fce). the b2 test is a test of the english language at level b2 based on the common european framework of reference (upper-intermediate level). the test measures abdullah alamer, ahmad alsagoafi 134 four skills: listening, reading, writing, and speaking. of the seven parts in the reading test, the researchers selected a free sample part which was a reading passage followed by eight questions from the cambridge website (see an example in appendix b). the whole reading test lasts for one hour 15 minutes. the focus of this part of the test is on detail, opinion, attitude, tone, purpose, main idea, gist, meaning from context, implication and text organization features (e.g., exemplification, reference). it follows the format of a text followed by six 4-option multiplechoice questions. the reading part of the b2 test was given to 108 students who participated in the study right after they had filled out the general information part about their reading levels. this was an external measure which functioned as a self-perception measure of students’ reading ability (mokhtari et al., 2018). the item reads as follows: “i consider myself (1) an excellent reader, (2) a good reader, (3) an average reader, or (4) a poor reader.” the aim of this item was to be included in the reading achievement construct as it hypothetically contributes to students achievement of the language. the test was administrated to the students, and they were given the choice to withdraw if they have changed their mind about participation. because this is a one item scale, no reliability test was reported. 3.3. statistical analyses 3.3.1. data screening and assumptions before we analyzed the data, a preliminary check was conducted for missing data, normality, and outliers. although normality of the data is not assumed by pls-sem (hair & alamer, 2022), it was assessed graphically and statically for extreme values by checking the q-q plots as well as the skewness and kurtosis values to check. outliers are data points that depart from the rest of the data points. in addition, a check was performed to ensure that the dataset was free from carelessness and intentional idiosyncrasies (e.g., answering all items with one response). 3.3.2. construct validity of the composite model to evaluate pls-sem models, researchers are required to assess the composite model first before assessing the structural model. the evaluation of the composite differs from common factor as it relies on three different indices (hair & alamer, 2022; dirsehan & henseler, 2022): (1) convergent validity, which is established by evaluating the relationship between the composite (also called formative measure) with a measure that generally reflect the phenomenon. in our case, we evaluate the extent to which the three strategies are positively associated with a general statement dictating the extent to which students use metacognitive reading construct validation of the revised metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory . . . 135 strategies as follows: “overall, i use different metacognitive reading strategies” a scale out of five are presented from “quite frequently” to “quite rarely;” (2) lack of multicollinearity, which is assessed by variance inflation factor (vif) with values of 5 or greater indicating serious collinearity; and (3) the size and significance of the indicators weights and loadings of composite constructs, which should be positive and significant. we also report the srmr of the composite model with srmr < .08 as the suggested cut-off value (dirsehan & henseler, 2022). 3.3.3. evaluating the structural model the structural model was examined using two measures: (1) the coefficient of determination (r2) in the outcome variable and (2) plspredict which assess the out-of-sample predictive power (hair & alamer, 2022; sparks & alamer, 2023). in plspredict, we compare the value of root mean squared error (rmse) in the pls model with the naïve linear regression model (lm). the model has good predictive power when it generates lower rmse values in the pls model compete to the lm model (hair & alamer, 2022). the structural model should also be free from collinearity issues by inspecting the vif value in the path coefficients. note that pls-sem can handle latent and emergent variables in one structural model (alamer et al., 2022; hair & alamer, 2022). 4. results 4.1. preliminary analysis data screening revealed no concerns regarding missing data, carelessness, or outliers. however, visual inspection of the data through q-q plots suggested that the data depart slightly from normality. the skewness and kurtosis values confirmed this, as seven variables slightly violated the cut-off values. accordingly, normality was not ideally established; thus, we used tests and estimations that are robust to non-normal and ordinal data. 4.2. main analyses to answer rq1 (how do l2 saudi undergraduate students of english use the marsi-r for reading learning?), in general, pss was the most reported type of strategy (m = 4.07, sd = .71), followed by srs (m = 3.83, sd = .84) and grs (m = 3.64, sd = .75). to investigate whether male and female students hold similar endorsements of these strategies, a t-test (welch’s version) was conducted. levene’s homogeneity test indicated that the equal variances assumption was abdullah alamer, ahmad alsagoafi 136 met (p values > .05). results of the welch’s test showed that gender was significantly different for grs (welch’s t = -4.59, df = 76.83, p < .001, d = -.92, d 95% ci [-1.36, -.47]) and srs (welch’s t = -5.03, df = 70.37, p < .001, d = -1.03, d 95% ci [1.51, -.59]) in favor of females (see figure 3), while pss did not show significant differences (welch’s t = -1.67, df = 82.36, p = .09, d = -.33, d 95% ci [-.73, .07]). figure 3 descriptive plots of the mean differences in srs, grs, and pss with a 95% ci to answer rq2 (what is the best model representation of the internal structure of marsi-r?), we evaluate the composite model through cca (alamer et al., in press; henseler & schuberth, 2021; schuberth, 2021) to establish the construct validity of marsi-r which is a precedent of assessing the structural model. first, convergent validity was tested by regressing each construct of marsi-r on the singleitem measure of the general use of metacognitive reading strategies. the results indicated that grs, pss, and srs predicted the general metacognitive reading strategies use item sufficiently (β = .70, .59 and .50, respectively); all regression paths were significant at p < .001. next, an assessment of multicollinearity was considered using vif measure. our analysis showed all items were below 3 (i.e., vif < 3) indicating lack of collinearity in the indicators. finally, the sizes and significance of the indicators weights and loadings as shown in table 1 illustrated that all weights are positive and all were significant at p < .01, with an exception to one item on pss construct validation of the revised metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory . . . 137 (item 5) whose weight was relatively weak. however, following hair and alamer (2022) guideline, items on composite measure should not be removed automatically based on empirical suggestions but must be informed by theory. hair and alamer (2022) explain that an item in composite may be considered for removal if both weight and loading are significantly negative which is not the case here. in addition, we believe that retaining this item “guessing the meaning of unknown words or phrases” is conceptually justified to maintain the fuller understanding of the pss. note that having the loading of this item significant (i.e., p value < .05) we have further reason to retain this item. table 1 item weights and loadings of grs, pss, srs in the composite (cca) and common factor models (cfa) items composite weights in cca model composite loadings in cca model factor loadings in cfa model grs items purpose .21 .45 .51 preview .26 .52 .84 check .31 .67 .77 typographical .34 .72 .37 analyzing .37 .65 .40 pss items get back .34 .70 .82 adjust .36 .61 .39 stopping .40 .77 .52 re-reading .29 .65 .73 guessing .06 .23 .30 srs items notes .39 .65 .66 aloud .21 .35 .35 discuss .24 .51 .29 underly .52 .91 .73 reference .14 .44 .28 correlation grs with pss .55 .43 pss with srs .55 .63 grs with srs .56 .52 note. all items are significant at p < .01 to ensure that composite model is a more appropriate representation of the inventory than the common factor model, we compare the results of cca to cfa. a cfa model with three factors has resulted in a poor fitted solution (i.e., x2 = 333.73, df = 87, p < .001, cfi = .53, tli = .44, srmr = .12, rmsea = .16). more importantly, there are several factor loadings in the model that are weak in magnitude (i.e., < .50) which, when assessed through common factor model, are candidate for removal to achieve better model fit. in contrast, the model fit abdullah alamer, ahmad alsagoafi 138 in the cca showed that srmr was .08 and that the composite weights and loadings were in the expected directions. therefore, our analysis supports marsi-r through the composite model exclusively, thus we continue with this type of model specification when evaluating the structural model. figure 4 the structural model linking metacognitive reading strategies, motivational intensity, and reading achievement (italicized and gray values represent 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals (ci). dashed lines indicate non-significant paths. constructs represented in hexagon denote composite constructs) table 2 standardized indirect and total effects in the structural model paths β p ci 95%* metacognitive reading strategies -> motivational intensity -> reading proficiency .12 .02 .05, .26 metacognitive reading strategies (total effect) .32 <.01 .39, .68 note. * based on the bias-corrected confidence intervals to answer rq3 (are metacognitive reading strategies directly or indirectly linked to l2 students’ reading proficiency through motivational intensity?), we run the structural model within pls-sem. the assessment of the structural model as shown in figure 4 starts with inspecting the r2 value on the outcome variable, which was found to be medium in size (r2 = .20) (hair & alamer, 2022). the direct effects are presented in figure 4, along with their 95% confidence intervals (cis), while the indirect and total effects are provided in table 2. we ran plspredict analysis to assess the model’s out-of-sample prediction ability, following shmueli et al.’s (2019) and hair and alamer’s (2022) recommendation. our results showed that the model had good out-of-sample predictive power, that is, the pls model showed lower errors (i.e., rmse = .935) compared to the linear regression (lm) model (i.e., rmse = .983). this implies that the hypothesized structural model has construct validation of the revised metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory . . . 139 predicted scores that are unused when executing the pls model. thus, the analysis illustrates evidence of the external validity of our results. as is evident in figure 4, metacognitive reading strategies only exerted a direct effect on motivational intensity, and that effect was moderate in size (β = .29, 95% ci: [.05, .49]); metacognitive strategies had no direct effect on reading proficiency. only motivational intensity directly affected reading proficiency, and that effect was moderate in magnitude (β = .40, 95% ci: [.22, .55]). thus, it can be said that motivational intensity functioned as a mediator in the relationship between metacognitive reading strategies and reading proficiency. this was substantiated by inspecting the indirect effect, which was significant (β = .07, 95% ci: [.01, .21]). regarding the total effect, a strong link was found between metacognitive reading strategies and reading proficiency (β = .52, 95% ci: [.39, .68]). overall, the structural model substantiated the nature of the association between metacognitive reading strategies and reading proficiency. most importantly, although the effect of metacognitive reading strategies on reading proficiency was not significant, it was substantial and meaningful when considering the mediator (i.e., motivational intensity). 5. discussion the present study aimed to replicate the findings pertaining to the marsi-r by assessing its construct and criterion validity using the advanced method of plssem in the saudi context. as for the rq1, the present study suggested that a model for the marsi-r, where srs, pss, and grs are operationalized as common factor model through cfa is infeasible, and thus not supported. as psychometric research explained (schuberth et al., 2018), cfa are typically used to assess common factor models that assume items to be interchangeable, representing a unidimensional construct, and share very similar meaning. common factor models conducted through cfa requires the items to be highly correlated as well as interchangeable, such that item removal does not affect the overall meaning of the construct (alamer & marsh, 2022; alamer et al., in press). however, items on metacognitive reading strategies inventory (among other constructs with a similar structure) hold unique details about the construct such that any removal likely changes the conceptual meaning of the construct (alrabai & alamer, 2022; henseler & schuberth, 2021; sparks & alamer, 2022, 2023). our selection of cca to assess the composite model excellently reflected this empirical observation and displayed that marsi-r should be operationalized as emergent variable, not latent variable (henseler & schuberth, 2021; schuberth, 2021). in this regard, the findings of this research add important details about the psychometric properties of certain types of scales in the field (mokhtari et al., 2018; mokhtari & reichard, 2002; phakiti, 2008; purpura, 1997). in fact, in their abdullah alamer, ahmad alsagoafi 140 marsi-r validation study, mokhtari et al. (2018) reported that they encountered “numerous cross-loadings for items and correlated errors between items” while fitting the standard cfa model (p. 227). empirically, it is vital to inform the field of the expected challenges when forcing the constructs to work according to the other construction domain (e.g., forcing composite to operate in a common factor model). if such misspecified model is assumed, researchers are often obliged to apply data-driven modifications to compensate for ill-fitted models (alamer, 2022c; alamer & marsh, 2022; alrabai & alamer, 2022). nonetheless, procedures such as multiple removal of items and multiple correlation of error terms negatively affect the quality of the internal structure of the models, which consequently provide questionable evidence of the construct validity of the instrument under assessment (shao et al., 2022). we encourage researchers in metacognitive reading strategies in general to consider composite models in their analysis. with respect to rq2, the results of this study showed that pss was the most reported type of strategy. this may indicate that these students were strategic when they faced reading difficulties reading english texts. this finding is consistent with wallace et al. (2021), who found that their study participants used pss more frequently than any other strategy. in contrast, our study found that srs was used more frequently than grs. this may suggest that the students in this study are independent and autonomous in their learning and thus need less help from their teachers. on the other hand, this study identified significant gendered differences in grs and srs in favor of females, while pss did not show significant differences. this gendered difference may suggest that females were actively engaged during the reading process, which, in turn, would be related to positive reading comprehension. this is consistent with chambers-cantrell and carter (2009), who found that females used pss, srs, and grs more than males. with respects to rq3, metacognitive reading strategies appeared to be only indirectly related to reading proficiency through motivational intensity (i.e., learning effort). this is consistent with cohen and upton (2007), who found that readers consciously and purposefully tend to be persistent in their reading process through the use of strategies. only motivational intensity exerted a direct effect on reading proficiency, and that effect was moderate in magnitude. this finding supports the conclusion that higher levels of reading engagement, can lead to more proficient reading comprehension (guthrie et al., 2004). this conclusion is similar to what l2 motivation literature often reports (see alamer, 2022a, 2022b; oxford, 2017). thus, it can be said that motivational intensity can be a mediator in the relationship between metacognitive reading strategies and reading proficiency. regarding the total effect, it was found that metacognitive reading strategies were moderately linked to reading proficiency, considering the two paths. overall, the structural model substantiated the nature of the association between metacognitive reading strategies construct validation of the revised metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory . . . 141 and outcomes, which is consistent with mainstream l2 metacognitive research (cohen, 2011; cohen & upton, 2007; phakiti, 2008). 6. pedagogical implications the present study has pedagogical implications for language learning and teaching. the findings of this research showed that male students reported less use of the three reading metacognitive strategies, with pss and srs being significantly different across the two genders. therefore, l2 teachers can promote the use of these strategies among their students, with a particular focus on male students. although females are often seen as more active in applying these strategies (see griffiths, 2018) teachers may keep this in mind to remind their male students about these strategies’ usefulness for improving their reading proficiency. teachers should also highlight metacognitive strategies’ conditional effect of increasing students’ reading attainment. as the present study has shown the indirect effect from reading metacognitive strategies to reading achievement, this might indicate that the effect of reading metacognitive strategies is better understood through effort (motivational intensity). therefore, teachers should ensure that students not only beware of the available reading metacognitive strategies to employ but also, students need to be reminded that exerting effort and showing persistence to achieve the reading proficiency is key for the effect of strategies to be observed. 7. limitations although the present study provided insight into the validity of the marsi-r model and the effects of reading metacognitive strategies on reading proficiency, it has limitations. first, although the study achieved the minimum sample size required to run pls-sem (hair & alamer, 2022), the sample size was not sufficiently large to generalize the results to the saudi population. however, we can hypothesize that students who share similar characteristics as the study participants may exhibit similar patterns regarding the use of reading metacognitive strategies, thus leading to a similar conclusion. this is supported by the results of the plspredict analysis as it showed that our model predicted unseen scores in the original analysis, thus supporting the external validity of the results (alamer et al., 2022). in addition, the present study was limited by the number of variables included in reading metacognitive strategies’ predictive literature. it is known from the literature that learning strategies do not operate in isolation of other individual difference variables (oxford, 2017). our study involved the evaluation of motivational intensity as a possible mediator, and the results showed that its inclusion was rather meaningful; thus, including other antecedents and consequences abdullah alamer, ahmad alsagoafi 142 of metacognitive strategy use can be beneficial for theoretical and empirical research in this area. 8. conclusion in conclusion, our study achieved three main objectives related to deepening the understanding of metacognitive strategies. the first aim was to replicate the findings of previous studies on the marsi-r in the context of saudi arabia. we investigated validity of the marsi-r considering a composite model, not a common factor model. to do so, we applied cca first and compared it to cfa. we found that marsi-r is only supported through cca which suggested that marsir is made of emergent variables, not latent variables. moreover, we evaluated the extent to which saudi students use the three strategies and whether there were significant gendered differences in their use of the grs, pss, and srs subscales. finally, we tested the explanatory power of the marsi-r in a mediational model in which motivational intensity was positioned as a mediator in the relationship between reading metacognitive strategies and reading proficiency. our findings illustrated the ways in which reading metacognitive strategies are connected to reading performance. this research offers theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical implications for the field of language learning. acknowledgment this work was supported by the deanship of scientific research, vice presidency for graduate studies and scientific research, king faisal university, saudi arabia [grant no. 2670]. construct validation of the revised metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory . . . 143 references alamer, a. 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(2014). analysis of test takers’ metacognitive and cognitive strategy use and efl reading test performance: a multi-sample sem approach. language assessment quarterly, 11, 76-120. construct validation of the revised metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory . . . 147 appendix a marsi-r scale items (mokhtari et al., 2018) strategy scale 1. i have never heard of this strategy before. 2. i have heard of this strategy, but i don’t know what it means. 3. i have heard of this strategy, and i think i know what it means. 4. i know this strategy, and i can explain how and when to use it. 5. i know this strategy quite well, and i often use it when i read. strategies 1-15 01. having a purpose in mind when i read. 02. taking notes while reading. 03. previewing the text to see what it is about before reading it. 04. reading aloud to help me understand what i’m reading. 05. checking to see if the content of the text fits my purpose for reading. 06. discussing what i read with others to check my understanding. 07. getting back on track when getting side tracked or distracted. 08. underlining or circling important information in the text. 09. adjusting my reading pace or speed based on what i’m reading. 10. using reference materials such as dictionaries to support my reading. 11. stopping from time to time to think about what i’m reading. 12. using typographical aids like bold face and italics to pick out key information. 13. critically analyzing and evaluating the information read. 14. re-reading to make sure i understand what i’m reading. 15. guessing the meaning of unknown words or phrases. abdullah alamer, ahmad alsagoafi 148 appendix b an example of a b2 reading test construct validation of the revised metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory . . . 149 377 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (3). 2021. 377-400 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.3.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt topic familiarity and story continuation in young english as a foreign language learners’ writing tasks gavin bui the hang seng university of hong kong, hong kong, china https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1567-9074 gavinbui@hsu.edu.hk xueya luo gaoxin middle school of shenzhen nanshan foreign language school (group), shenzhen, china https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9263-9335 67445021@qq.com abstract prior research demonstrates that primary and secondary school teachers often find teaching young learners to write in a second language a slow and effortful process. moreover, students in this age range lack the motivation to write. therefore, it is important to explore the efl writing pedagogy suitable for young learners. the present study investigated how story continuation (with or without reading input) under different topic familiarity conditions serves as a viable pedagogical means for secondary school students. ninetyone chinese students in four intact classes of comparable proficiency levels were assigned four writing task conditions in a 2 ⨉ 2 factorial design. group 1 (fam) was provided with the beginning of a familiar story in l1 chinese and was required to complete the story in l2 english. group 2 (unfam) had the same task as group 1, with an unfamiliar story. group 3 (fam+input) was initially provided with the complete familiar story in chinese (the same story as group 1) as reading input and were then instructed to write the story in english with the reading material taken away. group 4 (unfam+input) received the full unfamiliar story in chinese (the same story as group 2) as input before writing. again they were not allowed to refer to the reading in the composing gavin bui, xueya luo 378 process. the results revealed that the young learners who wrote on familiar topics (groups 1 and 3) produced longer texts and demonstrated greater lexical diversity than those with unfamiliar stories (groups 2 and 4), although topic familiarity did not affect their writing quality or lexical sophistication. as for the story continuation conditions, students who completed writing the story without the l1 reading input on the topics (groups 1 and 2) developed longer compositions and better writing quality than those with such input (groups 3 and 4), although their lexical profiles (both lexical diversity and lexical sophistication) remained uninfluenced. pedagogical implications for efl writing among young learners were also discussed in the present study. keywords: topic familiarity; reading input; l2 writing; story continuation; writing quality; text length; lexical diversity; lexical sophistication 1. introduction young learners often develop their literacy simultaneously in both their mother tongue and a second language (l2, which is usually english). such a bilingual learning mode constitutes both a challenge and an opportunity for these young learners and their teachers. it is reported that children have a preference for their first language (l1) in learning literacy (including writing), which may demotivate them in terms of english learning (bui & teng, 2021; man et al., 2018). on the other hand, it has been demonstrated that if skills in the two languages being learned are coordinated and aligned (pickering & garrod, 2004), literacy development in one language may benefit from that in the other. english writing is an important literacy skill; however, primary and secondary school teachers often report that teaching young learners to write in an l2 is a slow and effortful process (copland et al., 2014). moreover, secondary school students generally lack the motivation to write in english (lee et al., 2018). copland et al.’s (2014) global survey identified the following two challenges encountered by the english as a foreign language (efl) teachers of young learners: teaching learners to write correctly and teaching them to write creatively. the former concerns language forms, while the latter pertains to a focus on meaning expression. it appears that teaching writing for the sake of writing is far from adequate, and a certain integration of reading and writing involving both l1 and l2 literacy skills is required. prior research demonstrates that topic familiarity significantly improves language comprehension (bügel & buunk, 1996; leeser, 2007) and oral production (bui, 2014; qiu, 2020). therefore, it is reasonable to envisage such an effect on efl writing as well, which is the focus of investigation in the present research. in addition, a series of studies in the chinese context (peng et al., 2020; wang & topic familiarity and story continuation in young english as a foreign language learners’ writing tasks 379 wang, 2015; zhang, 2017) have consistently reported that having efl students complete the second half of a story based on english reading input assisted linguistic accuracy and general writing quality owing to the effects of language alignment (pickering & garrod, 2004). however, whether l1 input, which may appear more manageable to young learners, could achieve similar outcomes in efl writing has not been explored so far. it appears that topic familiarity and story continuation can serve as two potential pedagogical means for assisting young learners in both form and meaning expression in efl writing. the present study, therefore, investigated how topic familiarity and l1 input (with story continuation in l2 english) could be used for enhancing efl composition among secondary school students in china. 2. literature review in the context of the research objectives stated above, this section first discusses the cognitive constraints encountered by young students during their writing tasks. next, the literature on related topics is explored to demonstrate how the integration of reading and writing, along with topic familiarity, could be employed to mitigate these cognitive constraints. finally, based on the gaps identified in the literature, two general research questions are formulated. 2.1. writing and cognitive constraints among young learners kellogg’s (1996, 2001) model of working memory (wm) in writing explains that the general writing processes involve three basic stages, namely formulation, execution, and monitoring. the formulation stage includes the planning and translating processes; in the former process, the writer sets the goal and gathers ideas, while in the latter, the writer translates the intention and message into a linguistic blueprint. the execution stage comprises the programming and executing processes, which turn the linguistic plan retrieved from the translating process into actual texts either by hand or typing. the final stage is monitoring, which comprises reading and editing. the writer reads the text produced so far to evaluate and incorporate necessary revisions in this stage. kellogg (1996, 2001) attempted to establish a connection between these three stages and wm, claiming that its components, particularly the central executive (ce), affect writing processes. this model has important implications in teaching efl writing to young learners as these learners tend to have a shorter attention span and weaker wm capacity (bui & yu, 2019). as becker (2006) argued, expert writers tend to possess better overall memory capacity along with a developed set of skills to produce and revise texts effectively and may, therefore, operate automatically. gavin bui, xueya luo 380 such skills ease any overload on their ce in the wm as they write. the author contrasted good writers with learners who lack practice in idea planning and linguistic translating in kellogg’s (1996, 2001) terms. it could be further hypothesized that the disadvantages of this sort may be worsened by the following two factors: the young age of learners and timed writing tasks. the present study is an attempt to investigate these variables and explore ways of mitigating the cognitive and class implementation constraints (e.g., timed writing) imposed on secondary one (grade 7) students. 2.2. reading-writing integration there is general agreement that reading and writing, as literacy skills, develop interdependently, although research on the nature of this interdependency or the interactions between reading and writing is scarce (graham & hebert, 2010). efl students are encouraged to write from sources (braine & may, 1995), in which the source reading materials serve different purposes intended to improve esl writing. reading input may be cited as supporting details for university students’ argumentative essays or provided as content generation guides during brainstorming or planning the write-up. for instance, the toefl writing test requires the individuals undertaking the test to read certain texts provided to them and then compose their writings in response to/referring to the reading input. writing a book review and a critique of a literary work are other common practices involving reading-writing integration. in slight contrast to these conventional approaches, wang and wang (2015) proposed a relatively new efl pedagogy of writing continuation. the authors used english stories with their endings omitted as the reading input and asked the students to complete the story in english. in addition to content, language alignment (pickering & garrod, 2004) between the input materials and student essays was observed; the students demonstrated imitation of the style, tone, and logic of the original english writing. in contrast, the input of the same story in chinese induced significantly more l1 transfer errors. zhang’s (2017) study corroborated the findings of wang and wang (2015) as she found that students in writing continuation tasks with english input outperformed those with chinese input in terms of efl accuracy and content alignment. a recent study by peng et al. (2020) further investigated how linguistic complexity of the input material and its match and mismatch with student proficiency levels affect performance in efl writing continuation tasks. the authors reported that simplified efl reading input, which matched the proficiency level of the students, resulted in more automatic alignment and greater improvement in writing fluency and accuracy compared to original (more complex) input material. one may then wonder if l1 input is beneficial for beginners and young, topic familiarity and story continuation in young english as a foreign language learners’ writing tasks 381 low proficiency learners. l1 reading may familiarize learners with the content, which could assist them in idea generation; however, it would not assist in alignment with the target language. a summary of the above studies suggests that providing suitable input materials that allow students to continue writing the ending of a story or an essay is an effective and feasible approach to teaching efl writing. unfortunately, to the best knowledge of the present authors, no study so far has investigated the effects of story continuation writing tasks on young efl learners’ performance. the present study, therefore, is an attempt to fill this gap by examining secondary one efl students’ writing continuation task performance. 2.3. topic familiarity an important factor pertinent to reading-writing integration in efl teaching is topic familiarity as it acts as a potential mediator in the effectiveness of the reading input. topic familiarity was one of the task-internal factors used for preparing learners for an l2/esl performance in bui’s (2014) task-readiness framework. topic familiarity is generally defined as one’s prior knowledge of, and, therefore, familiarity with, a certain subject matter (bui, 2014; qiu, 2020). prior research, building on the concept of schema, has consistently demonstrated the importance of topic familiarity in language comprehension (kintsch, 1988; lee, 2007). familiarity with a certain topic facilitates learner understanding of a text or a speech in a top-down manner; that is, it reduces the need of attending to the larger structure and assists the learner in focusing on the details. such positive effects of topic familiarity were reported by several reading comprehension studies (bügel & buunk, 1996; chang, 2006; chen & donin, 1997; lee, 2007; leeser, 2007). moreover, topic familiarity aids learners in listening comprehension as well (long, 1990; markham & latham, 1987; schmidt-rinehart, 1994). the time pressure on listeners demands greater wm capacity, because of which topic familiarity has a greater weightage in efficient and accurate l2 listening compared to reading comprehension. in contrast, l2 production research, in general, has not paid enough attention to the effects of topic familiarity. skehan et al. (2012) argued that topic familiarity was an important consideration in their framework of task-based language production. bui (2014) observed that prior knowledge of a certain subject assisted the l2 speakers in gaining higher fluency and slightly greater accuracy, but not higher linguistic complexity. bui (2019) further reported that topic familiarity led to higher lexical diversity and lexical sophistication in the l2 speaking tasks of university students. moreover, qiu and lo (2017) discovered that students were behaviourally and cognitively more engaged in the efl speaking tasks involving familiar topics; the students also exhibited a more positive affective response to such topics. although a few studies gavin bui, xueya luo 382 on the effects of topic familiarity on l2 speech production have been reported in the past decade, research directly concerning the effects on efl writing is limited. one exception is the study by teddick (1990), who observed that writing performance in the task involving a field-specific (therefore, a more familiar) topic was superior to that involving a general topic. in addition, the field-specific topic appeared superior in terms of discriminating the learners of different proficiency levels in efl writing. besides the aforementioned study, there has been little research concerning how topic familiarity influences efl writing, not to mention such research on young learners. 2.4. research gaps and research questions as revealed in the above subsections, a review of the relevant literature demonstrated that the effects of topic familiarity and l1 reading input for story continuation in english on efl writing had been under-investigated. based on these research gaps, the following two research questions (rqs) were formulated to guide the present research: rq1. what are the effects of topic familiarity on young efl learners’ writing performance? rq2. what are the effects of efl story continuation (versus complete l1 reading input) tasks on young efl learners’ writing performance? 3. methodology 3.1. participants learners from four intact secondary one (s1 or grade 7) classes in a middle school in shenzhen, china, participated in the present study. prior to commencing the research, consent forms containing an explanation of the project’s nature were distributed to the parents and the students, who were also informed that the participation was voluntary and irrelevant to their academic evaluation at the school. moreover, they were assured that their identities would remain confidential and that they could withdraw from the study whenever they wished to. among the 98 students enrolled in the included four classes, consent for participation was obtained from 91 students (47 males and 44 females) and their parents. these participants were aged 12-13 years during data collection. all students were native mandarin chinese speakers (putonghua), although 17 students reported themselves to be mandarin-cantonese bilinguals. the students had topic familiarity and story continuation in young english as a foreign language learners’ writing tasks 383 learned english since primary one, with a learning history of seven years. according to their english teacher, they usually wrote one short english narrative composition of 100-150 words in the class every two weeks. 3.2. study design the four intact english classes (the students were combined into two bigger classes for other subjects) were selected randomly from the secondary one division in the school. the students were randomly assigned to four task conditions presented in table 1. considering the age of the students and their familiarity with the narrative genre, two fairy tale stories were selected as the writing prompts. a general communicative context for the writing tasks was provided at the beginning of the instruction, which stated: you have entered the final round of a storytelling competition and will be performing tomorrow. please write the story script as long and as creatively as possible to win the competition. the purpose of such a writing prompt was to contextualize the students and encourage them to achieve a non-linguistic outcome (winning the competition). group 1 (fam) (n = 24) was allowed ten minutes to read the beginning of little red riding hood (a familiar topic) in l1 chinese and to plan the content of the rest of the story. the participants were then allowed 40 minutes to complete writing the story in english. group 2 (unfam) (n = 24) was assigned the same task procedure as group 1, although with an unfamiliar topic, the pied piper of hamelin. while group 1 and group 2 were only provided with the topic and the beginning of the fairy tales, group 3 and group 4 received the complete text of their respective stories. group 3 (fam+input) (n = 22) was instructed to read the complete, familiar story of little red riding hood in chinese and then plan the subsequent writing within ten minutes. then, the students were allowed 40 minutes to write the story. group 4 (unfam+input) (n = 21) followed the same procedure as group 3, although with an unfamiliar topic, the pied piper of hamelin. all the instructions and reading materials, whether the beginning or the complete texts of the stories, were taken away before the actual writing session. students in all conditions were encouraged to write as much as they could and be creative (see appendices a-d for the instruction and input materials). in order to ensure that the effects of the independent variables (topic familiarity and story continuation) were not dampened by the varying english proficiency levels of the students, all the input materials, including the partial and complete story input, were in chinese. moreover, a survey was conducted before the writing session to confirm that all participants were familiar with the story of little red riding hood and none with the story of the pied piper of hamelin. therefore, the two selected stories were contrasting in their degrees of topic familiarity. gavin bui, xueya luo 384 table 1 presents the study design. the four groups constituted a 2 ⨉ 2 factorial design with two independent variables, namely topic familiarity (familiar topic, n = 46 distributed in group 1 and group 3 versus unfamiliar topic, n = 45 distributed in group 2 and group 4) and story continuation conditions (story continuation, n = 48 distributed in group 1 and group 2 versus complete story input, n = 43 distributed in group 3 and group 4). table 1 study design groups n topic condition story continuation condition 1. fam 24 familiar title + beginning in l1 chinese (story continuation in english)2. unfam 24 unfamiliar 3. fam+input 22 familiar title + full story in l1 chinese (rewriting in english)4. unfam+input 21 unfamiliar the dependent variables were the length of the composition, the overall writing quality, and the lexical performance (including lexical diversity and lexical sophistication). syntactic complexity was not included in the analysis as these secondary one students in the concerned school could produce only simple sentences and had not yet begun learning sub-clauses at the time of the research. considering the age range (12-13 years) and the english proficiency of the participants, it was assumed that the number of words produced, the lexical profile, and the overall writing quality (which included grammar, punctuation, ideas, and creativity) would be the appropriate criteria for evaluating the compositions. in particular, writing quality was assessed by two teachers based on the criteria set out in the recognized local public examination (see table 2). the component of creativity, which may be more subjective than language (e.g., grammatical errors), was assessed based on the adapted guilford measures, which include flexibility (types of responses), originality (the unusualness of the responses), and elaboration (the detail of the responses). the two teachers involved in the assessment reached a high level of agreement in terms of the writing quality of the student compositions (cronbach’s α = .94) on a 15-point scale. lexical diversity (d) is a corrected type-token ratio that represents the range of the different words used in a text and the degree to which one avoids returning to the same set of words. lexical diversity, therefore, reflects the breadth of lexical knowledge (bui, 2019). in contrast, lexical sophistication (lambda) describes the extent to which l2 learners employ low-frequency words, such as purchase versus buy, which reflects the depth of lexical knowledge (bui, 2019). table 2 delineates the operationalization of the dependent variables included in the present study. topic familiarity and story continuation in young english as a foreign language learners’ writing tasks 385 table 2 dependent variables variable methods sample studies text length the number of words produced during the 40-minute writing session. bui and yu (2019) writing score rated anonymously and independently by two experienced efl teachers according to the shenzhen senior high school entrance examination standard as described in bei (2009). with a full score of 15, if there was a discrepancy of 2 points or above between the two raters, a third rater’s opinion was sought, and the average of the two closest scores was adopted. bei (2009) d an index of lexical diversity obtained through the vocd subroutine of the clan program by brian macwhinney. bui (2019) lambda an index of lexical sophistication obtained through the p-lex program by paul meara. meara and bell (2001) besides the quantitative analyses, a “quick and dirty” discourse analysis following the conventional story structure including the beginning, the development, the climax, the ending, and the moral for a fairy tale (stevens et al., 2010) was conducted to examine whether qualitative differences in writing existed between the four groups. 3.3. pre-test an english midterm examination was conducted two weeks prior to data collection as a pre-test to ensure comparable english proficiency levels across the four classes/groups of learners. the examination evaluated items related to grammar, listening, reading, and writing, which provided the most recent estimate of the students’ efl proficiency. table 3 shows the means of the general english proficiency levels and the writing abilities of the four groups of students. an anova test indicated that they did not differ in either the overall score (f(3, 87) = .11, p = .95) or the writing component of the test (f(3, 87) = .49, p = .69). table 3 pre-test results and grouping group n total exam score composition score in the exam 1. fam 24 79.44 (17.03) 9.81 (2.77) 2. unfam 24 78.60 (17.01) 8.77 (3.33) 3. fam+input 22 81.30 (15.43) 9.52 (2.96) 4. unfam+input 21 79.65 (16.16) 9.26 (3.30) note. standard deviations in parentheses 3.4. statistical procedures since the present study had a factorial design involving two independent variables, which formed four independent groups, the data were analyzed using a gavin bui, xueya luo 386 two-way anova as it allowed analyzing not only the main effects of each independent variable but also any potential effects of the interaction among these variables. the reason for using an anova rather than a manova was that the correlation between the text length and the writing score (r = .63, p < .01) may violate the assumption of multicollinearity in manova. a series of k-s tests of normality (p = .16-0.38) and levene’s tests of equality of variances (p = .21-.70) were conducted on each dependent variable, which revealed that none of the data violated the assumptions of anova. the statistical significance level was set at .05. the partial eta squared (ηp2) was adopted as an index of effect sizes to indicate the magnitude of the effects in the present study. following pallant (2013, p. 218), the values of .01, .06, and .138 were considered as small, medium, and large, respectively. 4. results this section discusses the influence of topic familiarity and writing continuation on text length, writing quality, and lexical performance. table 4 presents the results of the average length of texts produced in the four timed writing tasks (10minute reading and planning + 40-minute writing), which could be considered an indication of both writing fluency and the amount of information generated. the young learners wrote compositions of significantly greater length on the familiar story (little red riding hood) compared to the unfamiliar one (the pied piper of hamelin), with a medium effect size (ηp2 = .13) which was close to the threshold of .138 for a “large” effect as defined by pallant (2013). topic familiarity appeared to drive these young students to write more fluently. surprisingly, the students provided with the complete story in chinese were outperformed by those who read only the beginning of the story and had to exercise their creativity to continue writing the remaining parts, although with a relatively small (nonetheless significant) effect size (ηp2 = .05). no interaction effect was observed, and the main effects of the two independent variables were distinct. discourse analysis (see subsection 3.2) revealed one of the reasons being the number of morals at the end of the story. it was observed that 28 among 46 (60.87%) students with familiar story writing completed the story with a moral. in contrast, only 16 among 45 (35.56%) students who wrote on the unfamiliar story did so. a mann-whitney u test, deemed suitable for categorical data like this, revealed a significant difference between the two familiarity conditions (z = 2.40, p = .02) in terms of the number of endings with the moral of the story. topic familiarity and story continuation in young english as a foreign language learners’ writing tasks 387 table 4 results of text length tasks n m (sd) sig. tfxsc interaction topic familiarity (tf) familiar topic 46 172.78 (62.99) f = 12.63 p < .01 ηp2 = .13 f = 1.00 p = .32 ηp2 = .01 unfamiliar topic 45 128.22 (57.37) story continuation (sc) full-text input 43 137.44 (50.26) f = 4.24 p = .04 ηp2 = .05no full-text input 48 162.67 (72.65) different from text length, writing quality did not appear to be affected by topic familiarity. as visible in table 5, there was no significant difference between writing on the familiar or unfamiliar topic in terms of writing scores (p = .43). in contrast, the young learners in the story continuation groups scored significantly higher when they were provided with the topic and the beginning of the story but not the complete text. the writing quality in the more creative writing continuation tasks appeared to be higher, with a medium effect size (ηp2 = .07). no interaction effect was observed between topic familiarity and story continuation. table 5 results of writing quality tasks n m (sd) sig. tfxsc interaction topic familiarity (tf) familiar topic 46 9.59 (3.23) f = .63 p = .43 ηp2 = .01 f = .08 p = .78 ηp2 = .001 unfamiliar topic 45 9.04 (3.60) story continuation (sc) full-text input 43 8.40 (3.62) f = 6.29 p = .01 ηp2 = .07no full-text input 48 10.15 (3.01) as presented in table 6, topic familiarity exerted a significant impact on lexical diversity, with a medium effect size (p = .02, ηp2 = .06). in comparison to writing on an unfamiliar topic, writing on the familiar one enabled the young learners to mobilize a wider range of lexical items. on the other hand, the two story-continuation groups and the l1 complete-text groups did not differ in terms of lexical diversity. it appeared that providing young learners with l1 reading materials did not have a significant impact on their lexical diversity in english as a foreign language. table 6 results of lexical diversity (d) tasks n m (sd) sig. tfxsc interaction topic familiarity (tf) familiar topic 46 34.24 (11.09) f = 5.57 p = .02 ηp2 = .06 f = .32 p = .57 ηp2 = .00 unfamiliar topic 45 29.22 (9.26) story continuation (sc) full-text input 43 30.95 (12.74) f = .55 p = .46 ηp2 = .01no full-text input 48 32.48 (8.00) gavin bui, xueya luo 388 the second lexical measure employed in the present study was lexical sophistication, indexed by the lambda value. this measure presented an intriguing contrast to lexical diversity. neither topic familiarity nor story continuation influenced lexical sophistication (see table 7). two points are worth noting here. first, the lambda values appeared to be quite similar across all groups. second, these values were consistently low in different task conditions among these young learners. table 7 results of lexical sophistication (lambda value) tasks n m (sd) sig. tfxsc interaction topic familiarity (tf) familiar topic 46 1.36 (.47) f = .04 p = .85 ηp2 = .00 f = 1.51 p = .22 ηp2 = .02 unfamiliar topic 45 1.37 (.43) story continuation (sc) full-text input 43 1.35 (.44) f = .13 p = .72 ηp2 = .00no full-text input 48 1.37 (.45) 5. discussion a recapitulation of the results discussed in section 4 reveals that prior knowledge of the story, termed topic familiarity, significantly motivated these young learners to produce longer texts using diverse vocabulary. however, topic familiarity did not influence the general writing scores or lexical sophistication. on the other hand, story continuation appeared to increase the length of the written texts and enhance the writing quality, while having no impact on lexical diversity or lexical sophistication in the writing of these junior high school students. the findings of the present study, summarized in table 8, will be discussed in this section regarding the effects of topic familiarity and story continuation (versus l1 complete story input) on different measures evaluated in the present study. in addition, the pedagogical implications for teaching efl writing to young learners will be presented based on these findings. table 8 the general pattern of the findings topic familiarity story continuation text length ✓ ✓ writing quality ☓ ✓ lexical diversity ✓ ☓ lexical sophistication ☓ ☓ note. ✓ indicates a significant, positive effect, and ☓ means no significant effect was found topic familiarity and story continuation in young english as a foreign language learners’ writing tasks 389 5.1. topic familiarity according to kellogg’s (1996, 2001) model of wm in writing, there are three stages of composition in the writing process, namely, formulation, execution, and monitoring. these stages impose demands on wm resources. as bui and yu (2019) argued, efl learners, especially younger learners, are bound to encounter greater challenges even in simple writing tasks. this is because their wm capacity and the coordination between the two slave systems (phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad) in wm are not as developed as in adults. such limited wm capacity is further complicated by the time constraint imposed in the writing tasks, such as the 40-minute writing session in the present study. topic familiarity, one of the two potential solutions investigated in the present research to assist in alleviating the processing constraints among young learners, appeared to have a significant influence. a familiar story provides learners with a schema when writing on the same topic. such a schema involves a general story structure: the beginning, the development, the climax, the ending, and even the moral that is usually included as part of the story. in addition, the schema includes detailed content at the immediate disposal of the learners. all this appears to reduce the pressure during the formulation stage in kellogg’s (1996, 2001) terms, especially in the process of the planning sub-component of this stage, where the writer conceives an intention, gathers ideas, and decides on the appropriate tone and formality. since the ideas are readily available from the prior encounter with the story, two related advantages emerge for young learners’ writing on familiar stories. first, learners may generate richer content and a fuller structure, as evidenced by the texts of much greater length and the significantly higher proportion of the endings with the moral of the story. second, they can achieve increased writing fluency (bei, 2009) compared to those lacking prior knowledge of the story. the significantly larger number of words (172.78 versus 128.22 words produced in 40 minutes) was indicative of the decreased demand for during-task planning while writing, which allowed shifting the focus from planning the content to translating the ideas into a linguistic plan in the formulation stage and then executing this plan in the execution stage. topic familiarity increased not only the text length but also the lexical diversity. higher lexical diversity implies a tendency to avoid recycling the same set of words in the text (skehan, 2009). it also serves to demonstrate the breadth of lexical knowledge of the learner (bui, 2019 online). as the findings indicated, students writing a familiar story proved to employ a wider range of words than their counterparts writing an unfamiliar story. the willingness to mobilize a more diverse set of words could again be attributed to the reduced pressure of planning, which enabled the remnant attention to be focused on translating the gavin bui, xueya luo 390 ideas into language in the execution stage. such increased attention capacity during translating assumes particular importance for efl learners as their foreign language lexicon is characterized by limited size and a less organized structure (skehan, 2009) in terms of lexical storage. furthermore, efl learners are prone to engage in an inefficient lexical retrieval process (bui, 2019). additional attentional resources saved from the previous planning process allowed these young learners better opportunities in lexical encoding during the translating process to thoroughly search and select a wider range of, and probably more appropriate, lexical items in the timed english writing tasks. the outcome was, therefore, a composition comprising a higher ratio of different words and less repetitive lexical items (cf. skehan et al., 2012). however, topic familiarity did not appear to influence the writing quality or lexical sophistication, which was slightly contrasting to the findings of bui’s (2014) topic familiarity study on speaking tasks. in bui’s study (2014), the university l2 english students were able to speak more fluently with significantly higher lexical sophistication when assigned familiar tasks. this discrepancy could be due to two reasons. first, there was a huge gap in terms of age and proficiency between the student populations in the two studies. the limited size of their english mental lexicon must have thwarted any attempts to retrieve rare words even when there was more time available for writing. in contrast, the university students were better in this regard. second, the requirement for composing the complete story felt more urgent to students rather than the concern for linguistic formality, which typically requires low-frequency words in such timed conditions and in their awareness for doing so. in other words, these young learners struggled for meaning expression to complete the tasks within the allowed time limit and, therefore, they tended to use the most common words they knew, as suggested by the low lambda values ranging from 1.35 to 1.37. the sophisticated words were simply neither within their capacity nor their priority during these writing tasks. 5.2. l1 reading input versus story continuation as discussed in subsection 2.2, prior research has affirmed the facilitative effect of english reading input that matches the proficiency levels of the learners on their efl writing performance. however, for beginners in foreign language learning, l1 reading input could serve as a potential means to reduce the tension occurring during idea generation and might work similarly to topic familiarity. it may also assist with the transition of the learner’s attention from the planning process to the translating process in the execution stage as it provides immediate familiarization with the story. unfortunately, the findings in the present research did not support this view; on the contrary, students’ performance was topic familiarity and story continuation in young english as a foreign language learners’ writing tasks 391 comparatively inferior in terms of the length of composition and the writing quality. these young learners produced more words that were compiled into essays of higher quality when they engaged in story continuation compared to when they relied on the complete l1 text of the stories. there are three possible reasons for this, that is, the nature of the input, the creativity of young learners, and the teacher's implementation strategies of the study design. the first reason concerns the input material presented in l1 chinese. zhang (2017) compared the effects of english reading input and chinese reading input in writing continuation tasks among chinese efl learners and observed that english reading input exerted an overall better influence compared to the chinese reading input in terms of english accuracy and content. the results in the present study were consistent with zhang’s findings in that providing the l1 input of the complete story that had to be read in ten minutes did not have any positive influence on these young learners’ language or content; rather, these learners performed worse than those who only received the topic and the beginning of the story. it appears that the complete text limited these young learners’ idea generation, as evidenced by the length of the essays. in addition, these young learners had to recall the l1 reading material and translate it into english, which was a challenging task, both linguistically (eckstein et al., 2011) and cognitively (wilson & korn, 2007). arguably, the learners encountered difficulty in expressing the l1 input in english, even though it reduced the requirement to come up with the content. as zhang (2017), and wang and wang (2015) argued separately, l1 input hampers both language alignment and content alignment in efl writing. the chinese reading materials interfered with these young students’ proper english expression, given their limited syntactic and lexical knowledge. this effortful process further compromised the language and the overall writing quality. the second reason concerns creativity arising from story continuation compared to complete-text input among the young learners. the two teachers involved in the assessment considered creativity in the writing quality scoring system from the perspectives of originality, flexibility, and elaboration, as mentioned in the methodology section. without the restriction of the l1 input of the stories, these young learners could exercise their discretion in designing the plots in the case of the unfamiliar story (originality) or adding more elements (elaboration) in the case of the familiar story. the longer texts produced by the learners in the two story-continuation tasks were evidence of more details. the higher writing quality was partly due to having more room for creativity as the learners were allowed to extend the topics in imaginative ways suitable for their age. this finding might be of particular interest to teachers and students of lower grades, where the learners are characterized by imagination and curiosity (kupers et al., 2019). gavin bui, xueya luo 392 the teacher’s study design implementation strategy per se may constitute the third possible explanation for the lack of positive influence of l1 reading input on the young learners’ english story writing. the learners in the l1 complete-text input groups were observed to spend most of the assigned time comprehending the stories (even for the familiar story). on the other hand, the story continuation group students used the ten-minute preparation time to plan their writing prior to the 40-minute writing session. most of the students in the two story-continuation groups noted down their main points or outlines they were going to develop in the instruction worksheet (see appendices a and b) while few students in the complete-text groups did so. the learners in the latter groups were occupied with l1 reading during the ten minutes and lacked the opportunity to plan their english writing. they had to conduct the planning and translating (from the chinese content into english expression) process “on the fly,” which consumed a large portion of their working memory capacity. it was, therefore, less probable that they could reserve sufficient remnant attentional resources for more innovative ideas and appropriate lexical encoding. 5.3. pedagogical implications on the basis of the findings of the present research, three pedagogical recommendations, two more manifest and one more latent, could be provided. the first recommendation is that teachers may begin with familiar stories for young learners in their english writing tasks. composing on familiar topics would allow learners to write longer texts with greater fluency and assist them in activating and retrieving more lexis compared to that previously learned. therefore, it appears that topic familiarity could enhance a certain degree of confidence in efl writing among young learners. the second recommendation concerns the teacher’s implementation strategies for story writing in the classroom. it appears that, for younger learners, allowing a certain degree of creativity (kupers et al., 2019) is desirable, and story continuation serves as a viable means for this. explicit l1 content scaffolding may not be necessary. the third suggestion is not immediately discernible from the current data, although it may be relevant here; while l1 input appears restrictive for young learners, english reading input may be more facilitative (peng et al., 2020; wang & wang, 2015; zhang, 2017) as it enables content and language alignment among the efl learners. however, to what extent this hypothesis works for the young learners, such as those in the present study, warrants further research. topic familiarity and story continuation in young english as a foreign language learners’ writing tasks 393 6. conclusion the present research explored the effects of topic familiarity and story continuation on efl writing among young learners. the findings confirmed that topic familiarity significantly increased the length as well the lexical diversity of the compositions, and not the writing quality or lexical sophistication. the story continuation groups outperformed the l1 complete-text input groups in terms of the length of writing and the writing quality, although the two input conditions did not influence lexical diversity and lexical sophistication. it appears that topic familiarity may be used to encourage young learners to write longer texts, probably incorporating more details. l1 reading input is not encouraged as it appears to jeopardize creativity and english expression, resulting in lower writing fluency and writing quality. future research should investigate the effects of english reading input in combination with topic familiarity in the efl writing performance among young learners. acknowledgments this research was supported by research grants council, university grants committee, hong kong. ref. no. ugc/fds14/h13/20. gavin bui, xueya luo 394 references becker, a. 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(2017). reading–writing integrated tasks, comprehensive corrective feedback, and efl writing development. language teaching research, 21(2), 217-240. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168815623291 topic familiarity and story continuation in young english as a foreign language learners’ writing tasks 397 appendix a group 1 little red riding hood + beginning of the story in chinese with instruction 要求： 请你在阅读故事开端之后, 用英文续写故事, 尽量发挥创意, 把故事写完整。 故事开端： 小红帽 有一个可爱的小姑娘, 头上总是戴着一顶红色的天鹅绒小红帽, 大家都叫她小红帽, 大家都叫她“小红帽”。 一天, 小红帽的妈妈让他给生病的奶奶送些好吃的, 并嘱咐小红帽说：“路上不要贪 玩, 快去快回啊”！小红帽边答应边跑出家门。 (以下请你用十分钟准备, 然后英文把故事细节写完整。 十分钟后本提示会被老师 收回。请注意：故事越长, 分数越高) there was a lovely little girl… gavin bui, xueya luo 398 appendix b group 2 the pied piper of hamelin + beginning of the story in chinese with instruction 要求： 请你在阅读故事开端之后, 用英文续写故事, 尽量发挥创意, 把故事写完整。 故事开端： 翰姆林的魔笛手 在遥远的翰姆林王国中, 某天城内受鼠患之害, 国王很是担心, 于是派人赴城外找寻 一位魔笛手。这位魔笛手真是厉害, 只要稍加一吹他的魔笛, 王国内的鼠群, 就会着 迷似的, 跟着魔笛手的美妙音符四处游行。 (以下请你用十分钟准备, 然后英文把故事细节写完整。 十分钟后本提示会被老师 收回。请注意：故事越长, 分数越高) in the remote kingdom of hamelin… topic familiarity and story continuation in young english as a foreign language learners’ writing tasks 399 appendix c group 3 little red riding hood + complete story in chinese with instruction 要求：请用阅读以下故事, 并发挥创意, 以英文重写故事。十分钟后故事文本会被 老师收回。请注意：故事越长, 分数越高) 小红帽 一天, 小红帽的妈妈让他给生病的奶奶送些好吃的, 并嘱咐小红帽说：“路上不要贪 玩, 快去快回啊”！小红帽边答应边跑出家门。 一路上, 小红帽一会儿闻闻花香, 一会又听听鸟鸣, 这时迎面走来了一隻灰狼, 他和小红帽搭讪道：“小红帽, 你要去哪儿”？小红帽回答：我要给生病的奶奶送东 西吃, 那隻灰狼问：你奶奶家住左哪儿啊, 小红帽又回答, 森林的边上, 三棵大橡树 下面。 狼盘算了一会儿, 接着说：“小红帽, 森林的深处很野花, 如果你摘些送给你的 奶奶, 她一定高兴极了”。小红帽觉得是个好主意, 转身向森林跑去, 狼见小红帽跑 的很远, 于是撒腿就到小红帽的奶奶家, 假装是小红帽, 骗开了奶奶家的门, 张开大 嘴巴把小红帽的奶奶吞了肚子。 过了一会儿。小红帽打开奶奶的门口到灰狼假扮成她奶奶的那裡, 突然, 一个 猎人从小红帽的奶奶过走过, 干好看见了灰狼的尾巴, 一抢把灰狼打死了, 那个猎人 对小红帽说“那只是一隻灰狼”后来猎人發现灰狼的肚子有东西在动, 然后, 猎人拿 着剪刀把灰狼的肚皮剪开, 家然, 跳了小红帽的奶奶。 gavin bui, xueya luo 400 appendix d group 4 the pied piper of hamelin+ complete story in chinese with instruction 要求：请用阅读以下故事, 并发挥创意, 以英文重写故事。十分钟后故事文本会被 老师收回。请注意：故事越长, 分数越高) 翰姆林的魔笛手 在遥远的翰姆林王国中, 某天城内受鼠患之害, 国王很是担心, 于是派人赴城外找寻 一位魔笛手。 这位魔笛手真是厉害, 只要稍加一吹他的魔笛, 王国内的鼠群, 就会着 迷似的, 跟着魔笛手的美妙音符四处游行。 走着, 走着, 这些鼠群, 最终被引导至城外的小河畔旁；随着笛声, 一群群老鼠, 就鱼 贯的跃入河中。 王国内从此再也没有鼠患了。 但贪心的国王, 却没有依照当初所答应的条件, 支付魔笛手应有的酬劳。 魔笛手在 一气之下, 发誓要翰姆林王国付出代价。 就在一晚, 魔笛手依然吹奏着美丽的音符, 但这次, 不是老鼠们着迷, 而是翰姆林内 的孩童们兴奋。 这些调皮的小孩子, 听到美妙的笛声, 彷佛着了迷般, 各个手舞足 蹈, 雀跃的追随魔笛手出城门, 慢慢的来到一个洞口外。 但此时, 有两位小朋友落了单；一个是瘸子, 另一个则是聋子, 两个小朋友因为某种 残障, 所以迟迟无法跟上队伍, 远远地被甩在阵容外。 但随着时光流逝, 两位还是龟 速的赶上队伍。 怎知原本浩浩荡荡的队伍, 最后只剩下几个小朋友还在洞口外, 其余的人, 都被魔笛 手的迷幻乐曲, 给蛊惑至一个大山洞内。 躲在草丛旁的两位小朋友见状, 深觉大事不妙, 于是赶紧往后跑；回城后, 火速告知 国王失踪孩童的下落, 国王终于发现自己一时的贪心, 酿成大祸；于是亲自赴洞口 旁找魔笛手。 支付他一笔不斐的酬劳, 于是孩童们再度回到国王的怀抱中。 219 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (1). 2023. 219-224 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.36132 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review exploring l1-l2 relationships: the impact of individual differences author: richard sparks publisher: multilingual matters, 2022 isbn: 9781800411791 pages: 392 the subject of individual differences (ids) has enjoyed continued popularity for more than half a century. factors affecting language learning such as foreign language aptitude, motivation or language anxiety have been analyzed by most distinguished researchers in countless contexts and various constellations (albert & csizér, 2022; resnik et al., 2022; wen et al., 2023a). nonetheless, few researchers have attempted to investigate ids from the perspective of the first and the second language (l1-l2) relationships, with longitudinal studies in this regard being even less frequent. richard sparks’ latest publication exploring l1-l2 relationships: the impact of individual differences, which summarizes 30 years of his research in the field of sla, perfectly bridges this gap. the author is the proponent of the linguistic coding deficit hypothesis (lcdh) (sparks et al., 1989), later modified as the linguistic coding differences hypothesis (sparks, 1995), which is one of the most cited theories in the context of research into foreign language aptitude (sparks, 2012; sparks, 2023). comprised of seven sections, each organized under one overarching theme, the volume allows you to navigate through the content and find selected 220 information. each of the first five parts, preceded by an introduction, contains three research articles written in the past by the author and his first collaborators (ganschow, patton, humbach, javorsky and luebbers), arranged in chronological order. part vi is a new essay reviewing the extensive literature on the correlation between ids in l1 and l2 ability and discussing the role of ids in l1 and l2 skills, whereas part vii is an epilogue. the chapters are proceeded by a foreword written by two outstanding scholars in the field of foreign language aptitude, that is, edward (zhisheng) wen and peter skehan, richard sparks’ colleagues and collaborators, whose opinion on the book is the best recommendation: “richard has presented to us a clear, up-to-date and comprehensive account of the relationships between l1 and l2, buttressed with extensive empirical evidence from systematic research programs, with the most rigorous designs, conducted by himself and colleagues, in particular the late leonore ganschow. in this sense, the contributions that this book makes to applied linguistics and language education are unique and extensive!” (wen & skehan, 2022, p. xiv). being not only a reader of the book, but also a researcher honored to cooperate with the author (wen et al., 2023b), i wholeheartedly subscribe to this opinion. in introduction and overview the author introduces the reader to the beginnings of the lcdh theory, which was based on an intuitive assumption that native-language skills in the fields of phonology, orthography, grammar and semantics operate as the basis for l2 learning. consequently, any problems with these language aspects will have a negative impact on both l1 and l2 learning. then he goes on to outline the gradual development of this theory and discusses the parallel research in the relationship between l1 and l2 abilities and achievement, language learning difficulties and the role of affective factors in l2 learning. part i presents papers covering the history and evolution of the lcdh and explains the bases for the theory. an introduction to this section outlines its foundational premises and focuses on how ids in l1 ability are related to ids in l2 aptitude and l2 achievement. the first two chapters contain previously published articles explaining the lcdh theory and chapter 3 explores how different individual factors are related to more and less successful l2 learning. part ii presents the results of three studies based on the theory described in part i that provided empirical support for connections between l1 and l2 skills and for cross-linguistic transfer from l1 to l2. chapters 4, 5 and 6 all present the results of longitudinal studies and deal with the notion of long-term cross-linguistic transfer of l1 skills to l2 skills. part iii aggregates findings related to l1-l2 associations and l2 aptitude. specifically, the focus is on ids in l1 development and ability and their relationship to l2 aptitude and l2 achievement. sparks elucidates that there are substantial differences in early l1 ability (5-6 years of age), which affect later 221 l2 aptitude and l2 achievement. it is worth emphasizing that longitudinal studies of ability and performance are rare in sla, especially those spanning the period of a few years. a 10-year longitudinal study described in chapter 8 that determined the best predictors of l2 achievement from among l1 skills, foreign language aptitude measured by the modern language aptitude test (carroll & sapon, 1959), and two affective factors, that is, anxiety and motivation, is a notable exception (sparks et al., 2009). the results of the study, which was published in language learning, revealed that the score on the mlat was the strongest predictor of l2 achievement, which can counterbalance l1 ability, what is more, it was found that l1 achievement and l2 aptitude tests measure similar language components. part iv presents probably the most controversial of sparks’ theories, namely, the one relating to l2 anxiety as a causal factor in l2 learning outcomes. the hypothesis that students’ l2 learning anxiety is related to their language ability, that is, those with stronger l1 skills and higher l2 aptitude will exhibit lower anxiety and vice versa, challenged the long-standing belief in the role of language anxiety as a cause of failure in l2 learning. accordingly, sparks and his team postulated that anxiety is a cognitive rather than an affective factor (cf. wen et al., 2023b). chapters 10, 11 and 12 include results from longitudinal studies presenting empirical evidence for the relationship in question, of which the one published in 1991 in the modern language journal (chapter 10) has become the most cited study by sparks-ganschow team. part v focuses on research on l2 reading and literacy. the author presents three research studies aimed at investigating the l1-l2 relationship within the framework of simple view of reading (svr) model (gough & tunmer, 1986) and contends that there are strong relationships between l1 reading skills and l2 reading achievement. in part vi, which is a new essay, richard sparks provides an overview of research into ids in l1 and l2 learning and convincingly argues that there are substantial interindividual and intraindividual differences in l1 skills and ability affecting l2 aptitude, and later l2 achievement. finally, in part vii epilogue and future directions, sparks proposes a theoretical model of l2 aptitude and makes recommendations for investigating the skills involved in l2 acquisition. his model termed a strong inference model is founded on the idea that language aptitude is the product of domain-specific, that is, language-related, and domain-general variables, which are not specific only to language learning and include such id as working memory, motivation and executive functions. domaingeneral factors are capable of providing limited compensation for poor domainspecific factors, and both groups of id depend on processing speed. the greatest advantage of the book is collecting and systematizing the author’s most valuable research in a comprehensive and at the same time accessible way. this is especially important for readers less familiar with the intricacies of the lcdh theory, who may find themselves lost in the vast variety of research by the sparks’ team. thanks to systemizing this knowledge, this volume can be a guide to 222 the studies conducted over the last 30 years. moreover, it is not restricted to summarizing and commenting on previous research, but proposes new insights such as the theoretical model of l2 aptitude, criticizes long-standing trends and views, and offers recommendations for further research. the author should be appreciated not only for the scientific rigor and reliability in presenting the data, but also for the courage to challenge prevalent “dogmas” in the sla. an example of a revolutionary, albeit underestimated, theory is the one concerning language anxiety as a cognitive factor resulting from inadequate language skills. another challenging statement is that of the great variation in l1 ability, which affects both l1 and l2 achievement. in my view, the book has very few limitations. among them, i would mention the saturation of the text with information. this is to say that the publication contains a lot of details, and some issues are repeated a few times being described from different angles. this is not a problem for a reader conversant with the subject, but may prove to be a challenge for students or novice researchers looking for basic information. another shortcoming are relatively lengthy introductions to all parts of the book, including personal reminiscences of the author and very detailed descriptions of the studies. it appears that a short, clear summary of the research accompanied by the author’s conclusions would contribute to higher intelligibility of the contents. i will not exaggerate by saying that richard sparks is one of the founders of foreign language aptitude theory whose contributions can be put on a par with the works of such renowned researchers as john carrol, peter skehan and peter robinson. his groundbreaking lcdh theory has become a milestone in ids research and continues to inspire many researchers. according to a survey investigating 60 years of research into foreign language aptitude (chalmers et al., 2021), the number of sparks’ publications in peer-reviewed journals ranks number one among all scholars conducting studies in this area. the reviewed book is particularly valuable for a novice researcher, who may have problems with keeping abreast of such a large amount of research, because it contains a compilation of studies published from 1986 to 2021 selected by the author according to the criteria of the frequency of citations and relevance to the contemporary research, accompanied by newly written commentaries as well as directions for further research. it showcases sparks’ insightful thoughts on theoretical and empirical aspects in different research areas including applied linguistics, psychology and education making it useful for students and researchers in sla, as well as educational practitioners. reviewed by adriana biedroń pomeranian university in słupsk, poland adriana.biedron@apsl.edu.pl 223 references albert, á., & csizér, k. (2022). investigating individual differences with qualitative research methods: results of a meta-analysis of leading applied linguistics journals. studies in second language learning and teaching, 12(2), 303-335. https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.2.6 carroll, j. b., & sapon, s. m. (1959). modern language aptitude test (mlat). the psychological corporation. chalmers, j., eisenchlas, s. a., munro, a., & schalley, a. c. (2021). sixty years of second language aptitude research: a systematic quantitative literature review. language & linguistics compass, e12440. https://doi.org/10.1111/1nc3.12440 gough, p. b., & tunmer, w. e. (1986). decoding, reading, and reading disability. remedial and special education, 7(1), 6-10. https://doi.org/10.1177/074193258600700104 resnik, p., dewaele, j.-m., & knechtelsdorfer, e. (2022). differences in foreign language anxiety in regular and online efl classes during the pandemic: a mixed-methods study. tesol quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3177 sparks, r. (1995). examining the linguistic coding differences hypothesis to explain individual differences in foreign language learning. annals of dyslexia, 45(1), 187-214. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02648218. sparks, r. (2012). individual differences in l2 learning and long-term l1-l2 relationships. language learning, 62(s2), 5-27. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.146 7-9922.2012.00704.x sparks, r. (2023, forthcoming). the linguistic coding differences hypothesis (lcdh) and l2 learning: a thirty-year retrospective. in wen, z. e., skehan, p., & sparks, r. (eds.). language aptitude theory and practice. cambridge university press. sparks, r., ganschow, l., & pohlman, j. (1989). linguistic coding deficits in foreign language learners. annals of dyslexia, 39, 79-97. https://doi.org/10.1 007/bf02656908 sparks, r., & ganschow, l. (1991). foreign language learning difficulties: affective or native language aptitude differences? modern language journal, 75, 3-16. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.1991.tb01076.x sparks, r., patton, j., ganschow, l., & humbach, n. (2009). long-term relationships among early l1 skills, l2 aptitude, l2 affect, and later l2 proficiency. applied psycholinguistics, 30, 725-755. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0142716409990099 wen, e. z., & skehan, p. (2022). foreword. in sparks, r., exploring l1-l2 relationships. the impact of individual differences (pp. xiii-xvi). multilingual matters. wen, e. z., skehan, p., & sparks, r. (eds.). (2023a, forthcoming). language aptitude theory and practice. cambridge university press. 224 wen, e. z., sparks, r., biedroń a., & teng, m. f. (eds.). (2023b, forthcoming). cognitive individual differences in second language acquisition: theories, assessment and pedagogy. de gruyter. 47 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (1). 2018. 47-71 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.1.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt classroom anxiety and enjoyment in clil and non-clil: does the target language matter? audrey de smet ilc, université catholique de louvain (ucl), belgium audrey.desmet@uclouvain.be laurence mettewie naltt, université de namur (unamur), belgium laurence.mettewie@unamur.be benoit galand ipsy, université catholique de louvain (ucl), belgium benoit.galand@uclouvain.be philippe hiligsmann ilc, université catholique de louvain (ucl), belgium philippe.hiligsmann@uclouvain.be luk van mensel naltt, université de namur (unamur), belgium luk.vanmensel@unamur.be abstract this study investigates pupils’ anxiety and enjoyment in the classroom when learning a second or foreign language. the particularity of this study lies in the comparison of two target languages (english and dutch) in two educational contexts (clil and non-clil) at different instruction levels (primary and secondary education). while most research on content and language integrated learning (clil) focuses on english as a target language, the belgian context calls for a comparison with the language of the “other” community, in this case dutch. audrey de smet, laurence mettewie, benoit galand, philippe hiligsmann, luk van mensel 48 data were collected from 896 pupils in french-speaking belgium through a selfreport questionnaire measuring pupils’ anxiety and enjoyment in the classroom, along with background characteristics. results indicate that while clil pupils experience significantly less anxiety than their non-clil counterparts, english learners report significantly less anxiety and more enjoyment than dutch learners. this suggests an important role of the target language for emotional engagement in the classroom and calls for further investigation into the role of target language perceptions. finally, the interactions with instruction level reveal that while primary school pupils report stronger emotions, the effects of clil and english are much larger at secondary level. keywords: anxiety; enjoyment; clil; english; dutch 1. introduction in an era of growing internationalization and multilingualism, content and language integrated learning (clil) provides an interesting alternative to traditional language education. this specific didactic approach increases the amount of input and authentic situations in the target language by organizing a part of the curriculum in this language (other than the mainstream school language). research indicates that this approach has a beneficial effect on pupils’ target language proficiency (admiraal, westhoff, & de bot, 2006; lasagabaster, 2008; lorenzo, casal, & moore, 2010). furthermore, clil is also believed to have a positive impact on socio-affective variables such as language attitudes, motivation and anxiety (lasagabaster, 2009). however, while the last decade has witnessed a growing interest in the role of both positive and negative emotions in language learning (dewaele, 2005a, 2015; macintyre & gregersen, 2012, 2016; oxford, 2015; ross & stracke, 2016), few large-scale and/or longitudinal studies have investigated those aspects in clil so far. therefore, the present study, as part of a larger multidisciplinary and longitudinal research project assessing clil in french-speaking belgium, aims to address this gap in the literature by investigating anxiety and enjoyment in clil and non-clil. considering the specific multilingual context of belgium, this study looks into both english and dutch as target languages. 2. theoretical and contextual framework 2.1. emotions in language learning surprisingly, while affective factors have been largely studied in second and foreign language (fl) acquisition research (dörnyei, 2003; gardner, 1985; gardner classroom anxiety and enjoyment in clil and non-clil: does the target language matter? 49 & lambert, 1959, 1972; gardner & macintyre, 1993a, 1993b), the literature on the role of emotions in language learning is still relatively scarce. a partial explanation lies in the fact that “the word ‘emotion’ itself was generally absent in the sla literature up to the start of the current century, although there had been interest in one specific emotion: foreign language anxiety,” as pointed out by dewaele (2015, p. 13). launched by the seminal work of horwitz, horwitz and cope (1986) and the scale they developed, foreign language classroom anxiety (flca) has been extensively studied in sla research and has been identified to have a debilitating effect on l2 learning and achievement (aida, 1994; dewaele & al-saraj, 2015; pérez-paredes & martinez-sanchez, 2000; thompson & sylvén, 2015). however, until recently, few other emotions have been looked into regarding their possible impact on language learning. with the emergence of positive psychology at the beginning of this century, positive emotions came into the picture and launched an additional line of research (gregersen, macintyre, finegan, talbot, & claman, 2014; gregersen, macintyre, & mercer, 2016; macintyre, 2016; macintyre & mercer, 2014; seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000). as indicated by macintyre and gregersen (2012), positive emotions have the potential to act as facilitators in the language learning process. in order to compare the effects of positive and negative emotions on language learners, dewaele and macintyre (2014) developed a foreign language enjoyment (fle) scale and combined it with a reduced version of the flca scale. overall, language learners’ enjoyment levels appeared to be significantly higher than their anxiety levels. the results also showed a moderate negative correlation between fl anxiety and enjoyment, “suggesting that they are partially interrelated, but essentially separate dimensions” (dewaele, witney, saito, & dewaele, 2017, p. 3). therefore, dewaele et al. (2017) conclude it is crucial to investigate anxiety and enjoyment simultaneously when it comes to language learning in the classroom. 2.2. content and language integrated learning (clil) the setting of our study is the alternative educational approach known as content and language integrated learning (clil), in which “a second language (a foreign, regional or minority language and/or another official state language) is used to teach certain subjects in the curriculum other than language lessons themselves” (eurydice, 2006, p. 8). crucial to this approach is the dual focus on content and language. both aspects are equally important and are to be integrated into each other. this is conceptualized by the 4cs framework, integrating content, communication, cognition and culture, as well as by the language triptych, connecting three types of language intervening in clil: language of learning, language for learning and language through learning (coyle, hood, & marsh, audrey de smet, laurence mettewie, benoit galand, philippe hiligsmann, luk van mensel 50 2010). this approach is promoted by the european commission in order to reach the commission’s general objective of proficiency in three community languages for each citizen at the end of secondary education (european commission, 1995). besides the main linguistic and educational goals, clil is also presented as pursuing socio-economic and socio-cultural aims (eurydice, 2006). moreover, the specific teaching/learning context of clil is believed to have a positive impact on socio-affective variables as it may enhance motivation, improve language attitudes, foster multicultural openness and reduce anxiety (lasagabaster, 2009). clil is even characterized as “a relatively anxiety-free environment” by muñoz (2002, p. 36). according to thompson and sylvén (2015), the theoretical underpinning for lower anxiety in clil lies in the focus on communicating content rather than on language form, which is what maillat (2010) calls “the mask effect.” when it comes to research on clil, the vast majority of the existing literature focuses on the linguistic aspects of the approach, indicating higher target language proficiency for clil learners. however, few extensive studies have looked at the role of socio-affective variables in clil. as for emotions, while anxiety has been considerably studied in sla research, enjoyment has only recently been applied to the context of language learning by dewaele and macintyre (2014, 2016), and both emotional dimensions are still fairly absent from clil research, especially in primary education. the rare studies that do look into emotions in clil tend to focus on negative rather than on positive emotions. recently, doiz, lasagabaster and sierra (2014) compared pupils in clil and non-clil in grades 7 and 9 in the basque autonomous community in spain. controlling for parental education and age, clil pupils appeared to be more motivated than non-clil pupils, but they also experienced significantly more anxiety than non-clil pupils in grade 7. the authors suggest that the more demanding clil approach might cause higher anxiety for clil pupils in grade 7 compared to non-clil pupils. however, no significant differences in anxiety were found in grade 9, leading the authors to conclude that as clil pupils gradually become more accustomed to using english in their content classes, they also become less anxious. however, to us, another possibility seems that being selected for clil by the school (only the case in grade 7) causes higher anxiety. in their subsequent study, lasagabaster and doiz (2017) followed the two age groups for respectively three and two years (from grade 7 to grade 9 and from grade 9 to grade 10). within the non-clil group, results showed little significant variation over time, except for the younger non-clil pupils displaying significantly more anxiety in english in grade 9 compared to grade 7. the means indicate that anxiety levels of non-clil pupils were particularly low in grade 7 and visibly higher as they progressed into grades 8 and 9. within the clil-group, the older pupils reported more anxiety when speaking english in grade 10 than in grade classroom anxiety and enjoyment in clil and non-clil: does the target language matter? 51 9, along with significantly more interest in the english culture. while this seems to contradict the results of the previous study, the authors suggest these changes might be related to the age factor. however, they do not specify in what way. in sweden, a study by thompson and sylvén (2015) revealed significant differences in anxiety profiles between clil and non-clil pupils in the first semester of high school (grade 10). compared to non-clil pupils, pupils in the clil-track reported significantly less english class performance anxiety as well as higher self-confidence, more affinity toward english classes, a more relaxed attitude towards english, higher confidence with native speakers and less fear of ambiguity in english. strikingly, these significant differences were found at the very beginning of high school, when pupils first started with clil in this case. therefore, the authors suggest these differences between groups cannot be the effect of clil, but rather the effect of voluntary selection, where pupils with more favorable profiles, such as lower anxiety, opt for clil. finally, möller (2016) investigated different forms of anxiety in clil and non-clil in secondary education in germany, controlling for the approach implemented in primary education. in terms of exam anxiety, no significant differences appeared between pupils in clil and in non-clil. however, the results indicated that pupils who had participated in immersive-reflective lessons (irl) in primary school (i.e., english as a fl at primary level) experienced significantly less inhibiting exam anxiety in their later school career than pupils who had not participated in irl. as to fear of success (i.e., the belief that success will lead to negative consequences such as jealousy or bullying), the reverse scenario applied. while no significant differences appeared as a function of participation in irl, pupils in clil reported significantly more fear of success than pupils in nonclil. the author points to the selectivity of the clil system in german secondary education as a likely cause or enhancer of this negative emotion. regarding positive emotions in clil, an exploratory case study conducted by hunt (2011) in england showed that pupils in secondary education are positive about clil (in french, spanish or german) and enjoy the lessons, which they experience as being fun, refreshing and challenging. according to the author, the positive reactions of the pupils might be linked to teachers’ efforts to make lessons accessible and the greater care taken in clil to help pupils overcome the hurdles. this overview of the scant literature on emotions in clil shows inconclusive results as to differences in anxiety between clil and non-clil. nevertheless, it identifies a number of factors impacting anxiety in clil, such as age (inconsistent tendencies) and voluntary selection in clil (more favorable profiles in terms of anxiety). regarding enjoyment, while it has hardly been studied in clil, hunt’s (2011) results suggest a positive influence of the pedagogy and the engagement dispensed by teachers in clil. furthermore, this overview illustrates audrey de smet, laurence mettewie, benoit galand, philippe hiligsmann, luk van mensel 52 the tendency of the existing literature to focus on clil in english in secondary education and to neglect clil in other languages (except for clil in englishspeaking areas such as canada and england) and/or at other instruction levels, particularly in primary education. 2.3. the language learning context in belgium in the specific context of belgium, with four official linguistic regions (dutchspeaking flanders, french-speaking wallonia, bilingual brussels and germanspeaking east cantons), bior multilingualism is not only a socio-cultural but also a socio-economic asset. however, while bilinguals (dutch-french) and multilinguals (dutch-french-english) are much needed on the job market (mettewie & van mensel, 2009), traditional fl classes in mainstream (monolingual) education in belgium fail to deliver satisfying results in terms of language skills (ginsburgh & weber, 2007; janssens, 2008). research pointed out the important role of socio-affective variables in this matter. it appears that attitudes towards the other main language in belgium (french for dutch-speakers and dutch for french-speakers) are not so positive, especially in comparison to attitudes towards english (housen, janssens, & pierrard, 2002; lochtman, lutjeharms, & kermarrec, 2005). moreover, these rather negative attitudes towards the l2 and/or the l2 community were found to be related to poor achievement in the l2 (dewaele, 2005b; mettewie, 2004). mettewie (2015) suggests that the ambient context of conflict between the dutchand french-speaking communities, fueled by the media, might lie at the basis of these negative attitudes and as such hinders the acquisition process of the l2. the above depicts a particularly paradoxical situation: while language skills are much needed and therefore considered an asset, l2 competence is generally very limited, partly due to negative attitudes towards the l2 and the l2 community within the tense socio-political situation of belgium. in this context, clil appears to be an interesting alternative to traditional language education as the approach seems to result in higher target language proficiency (admiraal et al., 2006; lasagabaster, 2008; lorenzo et al., 2010) as well as in improved attitudes towards the l2 and its community (mettewie & lorette, 2014). as such, clil could enhance socio-cultural openness and tolerance towards the other main language community (french-speaking vs. dutch-speaking; eurydice, 2006). hence, this socio-cultural dimension of clil raises the question as to the role of emotions and the possible impact of clil on emotions. however, emotions such as fl classroom anxiety and enjoyment have not yet been investigated in the context of belgium, let alone in clil in belgium. classroom anxiety and enjoyment in clil and non-clil: does the target language matter? 53 2.4. research questions and hypotheses given the dearth of research on emotions in clil and the tendency of the existing literature to focus on clil in english at secondary level, the present contribution aims to investigate positive and negative emotions in clil on a larger scale. the main research objective is to examine how these emotions vary across different settings. our research question is thus threefold: how do fl classroom anxiety and enjoyment vary and interact as a function of: 1. the educational approach (clil/non-clil)? 2. the target language (english/dutch)? 3. the level of instruction (primary/secondary education)? based on the literature review, we formulate the following hypotheses: h1: considering the theoretical basis for lower anxiety in clil (“focus on meaning”), as pointed out by thompson and sylvén (2015), we hypothesize more favorable emotions (less anxiety and more enjoyment) in clil compared to non-clil. h2: considering the far more positive attitudes towards english compared to dutch (housen et al., 2002; lochtman et al., 2005), as well as the tensions between the dutchand french-speaking communities (mettewie, 2015), we hypothesize more favorable emotions (more enjoyment and less anxiety) in english than in dutch. h3: in the absence of extensive research comparing pupils’ emotions in primary and secondary education, we cannot formulate firm hypotheses as to possible differences between those instruction levels. however, considering the tendency for pupils’ motivation and involvement to gradually decrease over the course of language learning and education (chambers, 1999; davies & brember, 2001; fernández fontecha & terrazas gallego, 2012; littlejohn, 2008; williams, burden, & lanvers, 2002), partly due to the differences in instruction organization between primary and secondary education (feldlaufer, midgley, & eccles, 1988; wigfield, eccles, & rodriguez, 1998), we can expect a similar pattern with regard to emotions. we therefore hypothesize more favorable emotions (more enjoyment and less anxiety) in primary compared to secondary education. 3. method this study is part of a larger multidisciplinary and longitudinal research project entitled assessing content and language integrated learning (clil): linguistic, audrey de smet, laurence mettewie, benoit galand, philippe hiligsmann, luk van mensel 54 cognitive and educational perspectives conducted at the université catholique de louvain and the université de namur in french-speaking belgium between 2014 and 2019 (hiligsmann et al., 2017). the present contribution addresses some of the socio-affective research objectives of the project as it investigates emotional engagement in the classroom with respect to anxiety and enjoyment. 3.1. participants the participants for this study are 896 pupils from 13 primary and 9 secondary schools in french-speaking belgium. the participating schools were selected in order to obtain diversity in terms of location (all provinces are covered), socioeconomic level, clil type (early or late) and organizing authority. at the time of the data collection, the pupils were in the fifth year of either primary (grade 5) or secondary (grade 11) french-medium education, learning dutch or english as a second or foreign language through either clil or non-clil. tables 1 and 2 display the distribution of the participants across the different subsamples as well as the background characteristics per subsample. table 1 distribution of participants across subsamples (n = 896) clil non-clil total dutch english dutch english primary 174 102 68 97 441 secondary 140 100 113 102 455 total 314 202 181 199 896 table 2 background characteristics per subsample n gender (%) bilingualism (%) ses (%) school failure (%) iq (m) female male french french + other mostly other low medium high primary english non-clil 97 52.6 47.4 58.3 30.2 11.5 53.5 26.8 19.7 26.6 25.95 clil 102 41.2 58.8 53.9 38.2 7.8 22.6 38.1 39.3 6.9 29.34 dutch non-clil 68 51.5 48.5 44.1 42.6 13.2 45.8 32.2 22.0 16.7 28.63 clil 174 57.5 42.5 66.1 29.9 4.0 14.3 5.1 50.6 2.9 30.25 secondary english non-clil 102 59.8 40.2 67.6 26.5 5.9 36.4 44.2 19.5 24.8 41.82 clil 100 55.0 45.0 64.0 25.0 11.0 19.8 44.4 19.5 20.0 43.67 dutch non-clil 113 56.6 43.4 69.9 26.5 3.5 28.4 38.2 33.3 25.9 42.41 clil 140 45.0 55.0 80.7 15.7 3.6 10.1 31.8 58.1 9.3 46.04 total 896 52.6 47.4 64.9 28.3 6.8 25.4 36.2 38.4 15.2 36.94 note. ses = socio-economic status. regarding the characteristics of these participants, 471 of them are female and 425 are male. as to bilingualism, in terms of languages spoken outside school, the majority of the participants (64.9%) speak french all the time, 28.3% classroom anxiety and enjoyment in clil and non-clil: does the target language matter? 55 speak both french and another language (not specified in the questionnaire), while 6.8% speak a language other than french most of the time. the socioeconomic status of the participants was measured by the highest degree of the mother. this resulted in three categories, from high to low: long-type higher education (38.4%), short-type higher education (36.2%) and secondary degree or lower (25.4%). comparison between groups revealed that the socio-economic status is significantly higher in clil than in non-clil, higher for pupils learning dutch rather than english and higher in secondary education compared to primary education (unianova, all p values lower than .05). considering these significant differences between groups, it is crucial to include socio-economic status as a control variable in further analyses. with respect to school trajectories, 15.2% of the participants reported having failed at least one year in their curriculum. comparison between groups indicated that there is significantly more school failure in non-clil than in clil, in secondary school than in primary school and amongst pupils who are learning english rather than dutch (unianova, all p values lower than .05). finally, in terms of nonverbal intelligence, measured by raven’s standard progressive matrices (raven, court, & raven, 1998), the means of the participants are in accordance with the norms for their respective ages. besides the expected significant difference between secondary education and primary education, the analyses also revealed significantly higher nonverbal iq-scores in clil compared to non-clil and for pupils learning dutch rather than english (unianova, all p values lower than .01). once more, the presence of significant differences between groups highlights the importance of controlling for these variables in further analyses. 3.2. instrument and procedure the data used for this study were collected through an extensive self-report questionnaire measuring, among other socio-affective variables, pupils’ anxiety and enjoyment in the classroom, along with background information such as socio-demographic variables, school trajectories and linguistic background. inspiration for the scales measuring emotions was found in the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (horwitz et al., 1986) and the foreign language enjoyment scale (dewaele & macintyre, 2014). however, both scales were reduced, adapted and translated in order to fit the specific context and needs of the study. a pilot study revealed that clil pupils do not distinguish between regular language classes and subject classes taught through the target language when it comes to classroom anxiety and enjoyment. therefore, some items from the pilot study were deleted and others adapted to keep only one version for clil and non-clil pupils, targeting both language and subject classes in the case of audrey de smet, laurence mettewie, benoit galand, philippe hiligsmann, luk van mensel 56 clil pupils. this resulted in one 9-item scale measuring fl anxiety and one 5item scale measuring fl enjoyment in the classroom. both were measured through 7-point likert scales, the anxiety scale ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (7), and the enjoyment scale ranging from never (1) to always (7). exploratory factor analysis supported the distribution of the selected items into their respective scales. both scales also showed satisfactory internal consistency with α = .838 for anxiety and α = .778 for enjoyment (see appendices a and b for the lists of items of both scales). there were two slightly different versions of the questionnaire as items were adapted to pupils’ (first) target language (english or dutch). all items were however formulated in french (see appendix a), the main language of education and most pupils’ first language. the questionnaire was completed during school hours in pen-and-paper format. the data were digitalized after completion through optical reading. 3.3. data analysis the data were analyzed using the statistical package for social sciences (spss) 24. considering we did not use existing, validated scales for this study, as explained in the previous section, we first conducted exploratory factor analyses and reliability analyses in order to validate the construction of our scales and their respective internal consistency. the preliminary exploratory analyses were completed by descriptive statistics and correlations. finally, in order to answer the research questions, a multivariate analysis of covariance (mancova 2x2x2) was conducted. in this analysis, the two dependent variables are the computed factors of anxiety and enjoyment. the different grouping variables were inserted as three fixed factors, namely educational approach (non-clil/clil), target language (english/dutch) and instruction level (primary/secondary). the background variables of gender, bilingualism, socio-economic status (ses), school failure and nonverbal intelligence (iq) were added as five covariates. post hoc tests were conducted using bonferroni’s correction to compare the main effects of the significant interactions. 4. results the results of the descriptive analyses are summarized in table 3. overall, fl anxiety in the classroom is relatively low as it remains under the neutral point of 4 with a general mean of 3.58 on a scale ranging from 1 to 7. the means are lower in secondary education compared to primary education, lower in clil compared to non-clil and lower in english than in dutch. on the other hand, enjoyment in the fl classroom is relatively high overall, with a general mean of 4.92. the means are higher in primary education compared to secondary education, classroom anxiety and enjoyment in clil and non-clil: does the target language matter? 57 higher for english than for dutch and higher in clil than in non-clil except for dutch in primary school. for both enjoyment and anxiety, analyses of variance will point out whether these observations are significant or not. regarding the relationship between the two emotions, the correlational analysis revealed a significant negative correlation of -.330 (p < .001) between fl anxiety and enjoyment in the classroom. table 3 descriptive analyses for anxiety and enjoyment n anxiety enjoyment m sd m sd primary english non-clil 97 4.06 1.38 5.40 1.23 clil 102 3.66 1.32 5.58 0.88 dutch non-clil 68 4.13 1.17 5.18 1.07 clil 174 3.74 1.19 5.09 1.20 secondary english non-clil 102 3.37 1.29 4.88 1.03 clil 100 2.77 0.09 5.26 0.82 dutch non-clil 113 3.77 1.33 3.98 0.96 clil 140 3.26 1.12 4.33 0.90 total 896 3.58 1.27 4.92 1.15 the mancova showed significant effects for three of the five covariates: gender (hotelling’s trace = 0.02, f(2, 6681) = 6.58, p < .01, η2p = .019), socioeconomic status (hotelling’s trace = 0.02, f(2, 668) = 6.37, p < .01, η2p = .019) and bilingualism (hotelling’s trace = 0.02, f(2, 668) = 5.91, p < .01, η2p = .017), while no significant effects were found for non-verbal intelligence and school failure. over and above these background effects, the analysis revealed significant main effects for the three grouping variables of instruction level (hotelling’s trace = 0.14, f(2, 668) = 47.42, p < .001, η2p = .124), target language (hotelling’s trace = 0.10, f(2, 668) = 33.05, p < .001, η2p = .090), and educational approach (hotelling’s trace = 0.03, f(2, 668) = 9.10, p < .001, η2p = .027). these main effects are qualified by two significant two-way interactions, one between instruction level and target language (hotelling’s trace = 0.02, f(2, 668) = 7.28, p < .01, η2p = .021), and the other between instruction level and educational approach (hotelling’s trace = 0.01, f(2, 668) = 3.38, p < .05, η2p = .010). for a better understanding of these different effects, the follow-up univariate analyses will be discussed separately for anxiety and enjoyment in the following subsections. 1 while the overall sample counts 896 participants, the multivariate analysis was conducted with 682 participants due to approximately 15% of missing values for ses (collected through a questionnaire for parents) and approximately 11% of missing values for nonverbal iq (collected on computers at the university), of which approximately 2% of missing values overlapped, for a total of 24% missing values. results of analyses performed without covariates on the total sample provide results similar to those presented in tables 4 and 5. audrey de smet, laurence mettewie, benoit galand, philippe hiligsmann, luk van mensel 58 4.1. anxiety at the univariate level, the analysis for fl anxiety in the classroom revealed significant effects of gender (lower anxiety among boys than girls), ses (lower anxiety among pupils with higher ses) and bilingualism (lower anxiety among bilinguals compared to monolinguals). beyond these background effects, significant main effects of educational approach, instruction level and target language were observed, as well as a significant two-way interaction between instruction level and target language. as illustrated in figure 1, the main effects indicate that pupils experience less fl anxiety in the classroom in clil than in non-clil, in secondary education than in primary education and when learning english rather than dutch. the statistical details can be found in table 4. figure 1 comparisons of means between groups for anxiety (** p < .01, *** p < .001) table 4 univariate analysis of covariance for anxiety source type iii sum of squares df mean square f p partial eta squared corrected model 154.756* 12 12.896 9.619 0.000 0.147 intercept 386.508 1 386.508 288.277 0.000 0.301 gender 15.132 1 15.132 11.286 0.001 0.017 socio-economic status 14.519 1 14.519 10.829 0.001 0.016 bilingualism 9.485 1 9.485 7.075 0.008 0.010 school failure 0.329 1 0.329 0.245 0.620 0.000 non-verbal intelligence 2.368 1 2.368 1.766 0.184 0.003 level (primary/secondary) 16.188 1 16.188 12.074 0.001 0.018 target language (english/dutch) 14.041 1 14.041 10.473 0.001 0.015 approach (non-clil/clil) 24.211 1 24.211 18.058 0.000 0.026 level x target language 6.661 1 6.661 4.968 0.026 0.007 level x approach 0.828 1 0.828 0.618 0.432 0.001 target language x approach 1.130 1 1.130 0.843 0.359 0.001 level x language x approach 1.084 1 1.084 0.809 0.369 0.001 error 895.623 668 1.341 total 9542.630 681 corrected total 1050.379 680 note. * r2 = .147 (adjusted r2 = .132) classroom anxiety and enjoyment in clil and non-clil: does the target language matter? 59 post hoc tests on the interaction between instruction level and target language (see figure 2) indicate that pupils learning english in secondary education experience significantly less fl anxiety in the classroom than the other groups. none of the other groups differ significantly from each other. there is thus no significant difference in fl classroom anxiety between pupils in primary school whether they are learning english or dutch, nor between pupils learning dutch whether in primary or secondary school, nor between pupils learning english in primary school and pupils learning dutch in secondary school. figure 2 effect of the interaction between instruction level and target language on anxiety 4.2. enjoyment at the univariate level, the analysis for enjoyment revealed a significant effect of bilingualism, with higher enjoyment amongst bilinguals compared to monolinguals. beyond this background effect, significant main effects of the grouping variables target language and instruction level were observed, as well as two significant two-way interactions between instruction level and target language and between instruction level and educational approach. as illustrated in figure 3, the main effects indicate that pupils experience more enjoyment in the classroom in primary education than in secondary education and more when learning english rather than dutch. however, the difference in enjoyment between pupils in clil and in non-clil is not significant. the statistical details can be found in table 5. 3.75 3.08 3.84 3.59 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 primary secondary english dutch audrey de smet, laurence mettewie, benoit galand, philippe hiligsmann, luk van mensel 60 figure 3 comparisons of means between groups for enjoyment (*** p < .001) table 5 univariate analysis of covariance for enjoyment source type iii sum of squares df mean square f p partial eta squared corrected model 238.918* 12 19.910 21.280 0.000 0.277 intercept 355.100 1 355.100 379.536 0.000 0.362 gender 0.000 1 0.000 0.000 0.986 0.000 socio-economic status 0.008 1 0.008 0.009 0.926 0.000 non-verbal intelligence 0.040 1 0.040 0.043 0.836 0.000 bilingualism 8.383 1 8.383 8.960 0.003 0.013 school failure 1.032 1 1.032 1.103 0.294 0.002 level (primary/secondary) 46.164 1 46.164 49.341 0.000 0.069 target language (english/dutch) 62.049 1 62.049 66.318 0.000 0.090 approach (non-clil/clil) 2.628 1 2.628 2.809 0.094 0.004 level x target language 12.836 1 12.836 13.719 0.000 0.020 level x approach 6.314 1 6.314 6.748 0.010 0.010 target language x approach 2.188 1 2.188 2.338 0.127 0.003 level x language x approach 0.030 1 0.030 0.032 0.858 0.000 error 624.991 668 0.936 total 17546.316 681 corrected total 863.908 680 note. * r2 = .277 (adjusted r2 = .264) post hoc tests on the interaction between instruction level and target language (see figure 4) indicate that pupils learning english in primary school experience significantly more enjoyment in the fl classroom than pupils learning dutch in primary school and more than pupils learning either english or dutch in secondary school. on the other hand, pupils learning dutch in secondary school appear to report significantly less enjoyment than the three other groups, with a score just above the neutral point in the scale. the two groups in the middle, pupils learning dutch in primary school and pupils learning english in secondary school, are the only groups that do not differ significantly from each other. classroom anxiety and enjoyment in clil and non-clil: does the target language matter? 61 figure 4 effect of the interaction between instruction level and target language on enjoyment for the interaction between instruction level and educational approach (see figure 5), post hoc tests indicate that pupils in the non-clil track in secondary education experience significantly less enjoyment in the fl classroom than pupils in the clil-track in secondary school and less than pupils in primary school, whether in clil or non-clil. moreover, pupils in primary education, both in clil and non-clil, appear to report significantly more enjoyment than pupils in secondary education, whether in clil or non-clil. amongst the pupils in primary school, there is no significant difference in enjoyment between the clil and the non-clil track. figure 5 effect of the interaction between instruction level and approach on enjoyment 5.59 5.115.24 4.17 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 primary secondary english dutch 5.45 4.47 5.38 4.81 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 primary secondary non-clil clil audrey de smet, laurence mettewie, benoit galand, philippe hiligsmann, luk van mensel 62 5. discussion this study investigated positive and negative emotions in clil by examining how fl classroom anxiety and enjoyment vary across different settings. our results revealed significant differences across groups for both emotional dimensions. in this section, we discuss and interpret the main effects of (1) educational approach (clil/non-clil), (2) target language (english/dutch) and (3) instruction level (primary/secondary), all qualified by the significant interactions between instruction level and respectively (a) target language and (b) educational approach. 5.1. h1: more favorable emotions in clil compared to non-clil the results confirmed the first hypothesis for anxiety, with pupils reporting significantly less anxiety in clil than in non-clil. however, for enjoyment, the differences were not statistically significant across the whole sample. a slight difference in favor of clil only appeared at secondary level, suggesting that the specific didactic approach might help to reduce the decrease in enjoyment from primary to secondary education. this is an interesting finding, as enjoyment had — to our knowledge — not been compared in clil and non-clil before. as for anxiety, our results are in line with those of thompson and sylvén (2015), who reported significantly less english class performance anxiety for pupils in clil compared to non-clil. however, as this difference occurred at the very onset of clil, the authors attributed the effect to voluntary selection into clil rather than to clil itself. in other words, pupils who opted for clil were already less anxious before the start of clil. considering this, the question remains whether the reduced anxiety we found in favor of clil pupils can be ascribed to the specific clil approach or rather to a selection effect. while there is no explicit selection for clil by the schools, the background differences we observed, that is, significantly higher ses, higher iq and lower school failure in clil compared to non-clil, suggest a voluntary selection effect, with more favorable profiles in clil. interestingly, our results also showed a significant effect of ses on anxiety, with pupils experiencing less anxiety when having a higher ses. given that pupils tend to have a higher ses in clil, lower anxiety in clil is thus partially explained by higher ses. while this effect was controlled for in the analysis by including ses as a covariate, anxiety still appears to be significantly lower in clil than in non-clil, regardless of ses. longitudinal studies would be needed to shed more light on this matter by unraveling “group progress, individual variation within groups and individual trajectories” (meunier, 2015, p. 382). classroom anxiety and enjoyment in clil and non-clil: does the target language matter? 63 5.2. h2: more favorable emotions in english compared to dutch the second hypothesis was confirmed by our results, indicating that pupils learning english experience significantly more enjoyment and less anxiety in the fl classroom in comparison to pupils learning dutch. however, as indicated by the interaction with instruction level, this language difference in favor of english is only visible at secondary level for anxiety and is stronger at secondary level for enjoyment. yet, the fact that both emotions (positive and negative) differ significantly according to the target language at secondary level is a valuable insight, especially considering the fact that most of the research focuses solely on english as a target language. moreover, in the context of belgium, this finding corroborates the existence of more favorable perceptions towards english than towards dutch (lochtman et al., 2005), even if secondary school pupils seem more affected by this than primary school pupils. further research on emotions should therefore look into the role of target language perceptions. interestingly, while we found more positive emotions in english than in dutch, the background differences according to target language revealed more favorable profiles for pupils learning dutch, with higher ses, higher iq and lower school failure compared to pupils learning english. hence, more favorable profiles in terms of background do not necessarily lead to more favorable emotions in terms of more enjoyment and less anxiety in the fl classroom. 5.3. h3: more favorable emotions in primary education compared to secondary education results partially confirmed our third hypothesis as pupils reported more enjoyment but also more anxiety at primary level. in other words, pupils in primary school appear to experience more emotions overall (both positive and negative) rather than more favorable emotions, compared to pupils in secondary school. while we expected (and confirmed) the drop of enjoyment from primary to secondary education based on the differences in instruction organization between the two levels (feldlaufer et al., 1988; wigfield et al., 1998), the unexpected higher anxiety we found in primary school might be due to the relatively short experience of the pupils with learning a new language at school, in comparison to secondary school pupils. furthermore, the interaction with target language revealed that differences between english and dutch mainly appear at secondary level and not (so much) at primary level. the same is true for the interaction with educational approach, showing that enjoyment is more favorable for clil only at secondary level. these findings provide an interesting contribution to the field of emotions in language learning as few studies integrate primary education audrey de smet, laurence mettewie, benoit galand, philippe hiligsmann, luk van mensel 64 in their design, while our results indicate that not all findings from secondary level can be generalized to primary level. 6. conclusion taken together, the findings of the present study provide a more complex picture of classroom emotions in clil and non-clil than expected. firstly, a stronger beneficial effect of clil was found for anxiety than for enjoyment, with the latter only appearing at secondary level. while the design of the study cannot rule out a selection bias for clil pupils based on unmeasured characteristics (e.g., motivation), the effects we found cannot entirely be explained by the more favorable background characteristics of clil pupils (higher ses, iq and school retention). secondly, target language appears to play a major role, with more favorable emotions in english than in dutch, especially at secondary level. this benefit for english (much larger for enjoyment than for anxiety) cannot be explained by background characteristics either as those are more favorable for pupils learning dutch. thirdly, the interaction effects with instruction level revealed that the largest effects of educational approach and target language occur at secondary level. besides, the effects of target language and instructional level are at least as large as the effect of educational approach. these results clearly invite researchers to conduct more studies on languages other than english and at other instructional levels than secondary school. moreover, in the specific context of belgium, future research should also investigate the role of target language perceptions. finally, significant sources of difference are not the same for anxiety and enjoyment, and the strength of the effects also differs, highlighting the importance of considering both positive and negative emotions in the study of second language acquisition. acknowledgments this work was supported by a concerted research action grant (arc 14/19-061) awarded to philippe hiligsmann (spokesman; ucl), benoît galand (ucl), laurence mettewie (unamur), fanny meunier (ucl), arnaud szmalec (ucl) and kristel van goethem (ucl). we thank amélie bulon, isa hendrikx and morgane simonis for their assistance in the data collection. classroom anxiety and enjoyment in clil and non-clil: does the target language matter? 65 references admiraal, w., westhoff, g., & de bot, k. 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(2002). “french is the language of love and stuff”: student perceptions of issues related to motivation in learning a foreign language. british educational research journal, 28(4), 503-528. doi: 10.1080/0141192022000005805 audrey de smet, laurence mettewie, benoit galand, philippe hiligsmann, luk van mensel 70 appendix a anxiety and enjoyment scales (french version used in the study) anxiety: 9 items 1. en classe, j’ai peur de faire des erreurs en anglais/néerlandais. 2. je me sens plus tendu(e) et nerveux(se) aux cours en anglais/néerlandais qu’aux autres cours. 3. cela m’angoisse quand je ne comprends pas ce que dit le professeur en anglais/néerlandais. 4. en classe, je panique quand je dois parler en anglais/néerlandais sans préparation. 5. cela me tracasse quand je ne comprends pas ce que le professeur corrige en anglais/néerlandais. 6. l’idée que les professeurs corrigent toutes mes erreurs en anglais/néerlandais me stresse. 7. j’ai toujours l’impression que les autres élèves parlent mieux anglais/néerlandais que moi. 8. je me sens très mal à l’aise de parler anglais/néerlandais devant les autres élèves de la classe. 9. j’ai peur que les autres élèves se moquent de moi quand je parle anglais/néerlandais. enjoyment: 5 items « lors de cours en anglais/néerlandais ... » 1. … je m’ennuie. (*) 2. … je m’amuse bien. 3. … je me sens en confiance. 4. … je suis fier/fière de ce que j’accomplis. 5. … je me sens bien. * reverse scoring classroom anxiety and enjoyment in clil and non-clil: does the target language matter? 71 appendix b anxiety and enjoyment scales (english translation) anxiety: 9 items 1. in class, i am afraid to make mistakes in english/dutch. 2. i feel more tense and nervous during classes in english/dutch than during other classes. 3. i feel anxious when i don’t understand what the teacher is saying in english/dutch. 4. in class, i panic when i have to speak in english/dutch without preparation. 5. it bothers me when i don’t understand what the teacher is correcting in english/dutch. 6. the idea that my teachers might correct every mistake i make in english/dutch stresses me. 7. i always feel that the other students speak english/dutch better than i do. 8. i feel very self-conscious about speaking english/dutch in front of the other students. 9. i am afraid that the other students will laugh at me when i speak english/dutch. enjoyment: 5 items « during classes in english/dutch ... » 1. … i get bored. (*) 2. … i enjoy myself. 3. ... i feel confident. 4. ... i feel proud of what i achieve. 5. … i feel good. * reverse scoring 331 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (3). 2021. 331-350 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.3.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt morphological instruction and reading development in young l2 readers: a scoping review of causal relationships sihui (echo) ke university of kentucky, lexington, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2665-0637 sihui.ke@uky.edu dongbo zhang university of exeter, uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4175-2052 d.zhang4@exeter.ac.uk abstract this scoping review explores the causal relationship between morphological instruction and reading development in young l2 learners by synthesizing 12 primary studies published between 2004 and 2019 (n = 1,535). these studies focused on reading english as the target language and involved participants between kindergarten and grade 12 from four countries (china, egypt, singapore, and the usa). findings suggested that (a) morphological instruction led to consistent and positive gains in l2 children’s morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge, and the effect sizes (cohen’s ds) ranged from small to large; and (b) the relationship between morphological instruction and other outcomes such as phonological awareness, word reading accuracy, word reading fluency, spelling, and reading comprehension was inconclusive. notably, transfer effects of l2 english morphological instruction on novel word learning in english or on reading development in an additional language were only examined and observed in four primary studies. discussion was provided regarding future instructional and research design. keywords: causal effect; morphology; second language reading; literacy; scoping review sihui (echo) ke, dongbo zhang 332 1. introduction english is a morphophonemic language. when there is inconsistency in soundgrapheme mapping, a morpheme is still preserved in orthographic units (e.g., healhealth, courage-courageous, cats-dogs; frost, 2012, p. 269). it is thus not surprising that an increasing number of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies found significant correlations between morphological awareness (i.e., a learner’s sensitivity to word-internal morphological structure) and english reading subskill development, including development in english as a second language (l2; e.g., hayashi & murphy, 2013; mcbride-chang et al., 2012; saiegh-haddad & geva, 2008; zhang et al., 2014). recently, emerging research has also started to test the causal relationship between morphology and reading development through morphological instruction. in this context, the question surrounding causal inference is not whether morphological knowledge is associated with reading outcomes, but whether changing or manipulating morphological knowledge via intervention might alter reading outcomes (see also an explanation of causal inference in developmental psychology in foster, 2010). morphological instruction draws learners’ attention to intraword morphological structure and supports learning unfamiliar words based on familiar word parts. a central component of morphological instruction is word problem solving (goodwin & perkins, 2015). for example, robotceptionist might be unknown to both native and non-native speakers of english. teachers can guide students to break down the novel word into robot and ceptionist, and students may then be able to infer the unknown word meaning as a robot that serves as a receptionist. evidence has been provided that morphological instruction is beneficial for english reading development in both l1 (first language) and l2 english-speaking children (e.g., carlo et al., 2004; kieffer & lesaux, 2012) and that the positive effect is more pronounced in l2 english reading (see a meta-analysis by goodwin & ahn, 2013). kirby and bowers (2017) posited that the question for research in this line should no longer be whether morphological instruction benefits reading development but how it can lead to positive gains in reading outcomes or achievement. this synthesis study, in the form of a scoping review, thus explored the ways in which morphological instruction contributes to english reading development in young l2 learners. to achieve this goal, we selected 12 studies from existing literature following a systematic approach and evaluated the primary evidence both quantitatively and qualitatively. a scoping review maps the literature from a particular topic or research area and provides an opportunity to identify key concepts, gaps in the research, and types as well as sources of evidence to inform practice, policymaking, and research (arksey & o’malley, 2005; morphological instruction and reading development in young l2 readers: a scoping review of . . . 333 pham et al., 2014). we examined the implementation of morphological instruction in the selected studies, explored the extent to which morphological instruction influences the acquisition of a range of l2 reading-related outcomes (phonological awareness, morphological awareness, vocabulary, word decoding accuracy and fluency, spelling, and reading comprehension) by summarizing the effect sizes (cohen’s ds), and evaluated study and instructional designs following systematic coding schemes. the findings of this synthesis study will provide implications for future research about the causal relationship between morphology and l2 reading development as well as real-world classroom instruction. 2. background: findings from previous reviews of morphological instruction recent reviews have discussed the causal relationship between morphological instruction and english literacy development, including critical reviews (henbest & apel, 2017; kirby & bowers, 2017; nagy et al., 2014), systematic syntheses (brandes & mcmaster, 2017; carlisle, 2010), and quantitative meta-analyses (bowers et al., 2010; goodwin & ahn, 2010, 2013; reed, 2008). in a meta-analysis of 30 independent studies and 92 standardized mean differences, goodwin and ahn (2013) assessed the overall effect of morphological instruction and examined possible moderator effects. their findings indicated that children who received morphological instruction performed significantly better on diverse measures of literacy achievement than comparison groups; the overall effect size was medium (d = 0.32). yet, effect sizes varied across the literacy outcomes, ranging from significant and moderate for five outcomes (i.e., phonological awareness, morphological awareness, vocabulary, word decoding, and spelling) to non-significant for reading fluency or reading comprehension. the authors further identified significant moderating effects of school level, type of experimental design, and type of literary measures. specifically, larger effect sizes were found in studies of younger children than those of older children; likewise, quasi-experimental studies that adopted researcher-designed measures generated larger effect sizes than did experimental studies that adopted standardized measures. no significant moderating effects were found for instructional features (e.g., stand-alone morphological instruction versus integrated instruction including morphology in a comprehensive curriculum, length, and learner types). instructional strategies (e.g., teaching affixes versus bases, promoting problem-solving or not), however, were not included in the analysis. lack of attention to instructional strategies was later addressed in kirby and bowers’ (2017) critical review, which sought to answer how morphology has been taught and to what extent, when, and for whom morphological instruction is beneficial for literacy development (in english). the authors observed great sihui (echo) ke, dongbo zhang 334 variation in how morphological instruction was implemented in prior studies. major instructional strategies analyzed in the review included the isolation/integration mode; teaching oral/written morphology, including affix/base items; focusing on orthographic changes; and promoting problem solving and scientific inquiries. kirby and bowers summarized four patterns regarding the overall effects of morphological instruction: (a) compared to regular classroom instruction, morphological instruction had positive effects; (b) effects of morphological instruction were roughly equal to those of alternative treatments; (c) effects of morphological instruction were positive for meaning-related as well as form-related outcomes; and (d) effects were the strongest at sub-lexical levels (e.g., phonological awareness), weaker at lexical levels (e.g., vocabulary and word decoding), and the weakest at supra-lexical levels (e.g., sentence or passage-level reading comprehension). kirby and bowers (2017) also proposed a set of instructional principles and hypotheses to be tested. one hypothesis was about the transfer1 effect of morphological instruction on word reading, spelling of unknown words, and reading comprehension at the sentence/paragraph level. similar questions have been posed in two other critical reviews (carlisle, 2010; nagy et al., 2014). nagy et al. (2014), for example, pointed out that previous research mainly focused on morphology as a tool for inferring the meaning of new words; yet emerging evidence has shown that morphological awareness is also related to reading development at the word form level (e.g., word decoding and spelling). regarding future inquiries concerning transfer effects of morphological instruction, carlisle (2010, p. 481) further raised the following questions: “what aspects of programs contribute to significant effects on measures of ‘transfer of learning’ to new words and passages? why is it that there are so few significant effects of morphological awareness on performance of reading comprehension measures?” those reviews called for more research on cross-language comparisons of morphological instruction and the extent to which the relationship between morphological awareness and reading development is language-specific. in summary, despite a strong association revealed in the literature between morphological awareness and l2 english reading development, the existing 1 transfer in this review is an overarching concept that refers to the influence of earlier learning in one situation on later learning in another situation (seel, 2012). it has also been referred to as learning transfer, transfer of learning, transfer of practice, or transfer of training in educational literature (see a review in larsen-freeman, 2013). one oft-examined specific type of transfer of learning in l2 research is restricted to learners’ application of knowledge or skills developed in one language to situations involving another language, which was reviewed in this review (e.g., zhang, 2016; zhang et al. 2010). another type of transfer effect we examined was learners’ application of morphological awareness in english to learning novel words in english (e.g., davidson & o’connor, 2019; deng, 2016). morphological instruction and reading development in young l2 readers: a scoping review of . . . 335 empirical evidence is mainly based on observation studies with correlational data, not interventional studies of causal connections. in addition, while some recent reviews provided evidence on a causal relationship in that morphological instruction was effective for english reading development, those reviews usually did not specifically target any particular learner group (e.g., goodwin & ahn, 2013; kirby & bowers, 2017). while larger gains seemed to emerge for less able english learners in those reviews, there was little immediate attention to l2 english readers. to this end, this scoping review synthesized the current body of primary studies and examined how morphological instruction contributes to l2 english reading development. it focused on young l2 english learners and was guided by three research questions (rqs): rq1: how has morphological instruction been implemented in the primary studies? rq2: to what extent has morphological instruction benefited the development of different reading-related skills (i.e., phonological awareness [pa], morphological awareness [ma], vocabulary, word decoding accuracy and fluency, spelling, and reading comprehension) in young l2 english readers? rq3: how has the causal effect of morphological instruction been examined? 3. method we followed the procedures of conducting a scoping review in the social sciences (arksey & o’malley, 2005; pham et al., 2014). a literature search was conducted in january 2020 with key words (morphological instruction, morphological awareness instruction, morphology instruction, teaching morphology, morphological awareness) entered in proquest databases, psycinfo, google scholar, and web of science2. in addition, a manual search was conducted by extracting references from previous reviews of l1 and l2 morphological instruction (bowers et al., 2010; brandes & mcmaster, 2017; carlisle, 2010; goodwin & ahn, 2013; henbest & apel, 2017; kirby & bower, 2017; nagy et al., 2014; reed, 2008). studies included in this review are those that (a) were reported in either published articles or unpublished dissertations; (b) reported morphological instruction in young l2 learners (defined as those below 18 years old and learning an additional language); and (c) included descriptive and/or inferential statistics for preand post-instruction testing results. unpublished dissertation 2 for all of the four databases, the search was conducted with the default settings. the initial search resulted in a total of 661 entries. sihui (echo) ke, dongbo zhang 336 studies were included to avoid publication bias (following oswald & plonsky, 2010). studies that focused solely on monolingual children or children with learning disabilities were excluded. repetitive samples were also excluded. as a result, 12 studies between 2004 and 2019 (n = 1,535) were identified. they consisted of 10 published journal articles and two unpublished dissertations. the primary studies focused on reading english as the target language and involved participants between kindergarten and grade 12 from four countries (china, egypt, singapore, and the usa); yet the dominant education setting was the usa. based on the target reading-related outcomes, the selected studies can be further categorized into seven groups: phonological awareness (pa), morphological awareness (ma), vocabulary knowledge, word decoding accuracy, word decoding fluency, spelling, and reading comprehension, as shown in table 3 in the next section. it is noteworthy that only two of the studies considered crosslanguage transfer effects of morphological instruction and observed gains in morphological awareness in another language (malay in zhang, 2016; chinese for children of high l2 english proficiency in zhang et al., 2010) as a result of english morphological instruction. the other ten studies mainly examined the effect of l2 english morphological instruction on l2 english reading development (i.e., intra-lingual effect of morphological instruction). an exception might be carlo et al. (2004), which included l1 spanish in the instructional phase. more details can be found in the results section. for the purpose of answering the three research questions, we followed these procedures: (a) morphological instruction design was coded after goodwin and ahn (2013) and evaluated (see also kirby & bowers, 2017), (b) effect sizes were coded and summarized, and (c) reading-related outcome measures were also coded after goodwin and ahn (2013) and compared across primary studies. the first author of this paper conducted coding twice and doublechecked coding until the intra-coder agreement rate was 100%. 4. results 4.1. the implementation of morphological instruction in the primary studies this section addresses how morphological instruction has been implemented in the primary studies. to answer this question, we first summarized the characteristics of instructional programs across studies and then examined the specific strategies in relation to morphological instruction. due to space limitations, we could not describe all the details of instructional implementation for each study in this review. an example of how to implement explicit morphological instruction into regular classrooms with young l2 learners can be found in lesaux et al. morphological instruction and reading development in young l2 readers: a scoping review of . . . 337 (2010), which reported a large-scale, mixed-methods study of the implementation and effectiveness of an academic vocabulary program designed for use in mainstream middle school classrooms with high proportions of language minority learners in the usa (including 21 classes in seven middle schools with 346 language minority learners and 130 native english speakers). the design of instructional program by study is shown in table 1, including seven major features: (a) learner profiles (grade level and language background), (b) randomization of treatment (experimental versus quasi-experimental), (c) instructional time (sessions and minutes in total), (d) the scope of intervention (standalone morphological instruction or morphological instruction as part of a more comprehensive instruction), (e) person/people implementing the intervention (researchers versus teachers), (f) control/comparison condition(s) (regular classroom or alternative treatments), and (g) fidelity and feasibility of the instructional program. fidelity is often defined as the determination of how well an intervention is implemented in comparison with the original program design during an efficacy and/or effectiveness study; feasibility refers to how likely an intervention will be implemented with fidelity in the classroom (o’donnell, 2008). table 1 characteristics of instructional program by study author(s) & year country grade learner background (l2 only/ mixed) research design (e/qs) length (weeks/sessions/minutes in total) scope (sa/p) instructor (t/r) control/ comparison condition (uc/at) fidelity feasibility badawi (2019) egypt 7 l2 only e na (two units) sa na uc na yes carlo et al. (2014) usa 5 mixed qs 60 sessions in 15 weeks, 2250 minutes p t uc yes yes crosson & moore (2017) usa 6-12 l2 only qs na (6 weeks) p t at yes yes davidson & o’connor (2019) usa 4-5 l2 only qs 10 sessions, 150 minutes sa r at yes yes deng (2016) usa 3-5 l2 only e 16 sessions, 480 minutes p r at yes yes filippini (2007) usa 1 mixed e 29 sessions, 394 minutes p r at yes na goodwin (2016) usa 5-6 mixed e 4 sessions, 120 minutes p r at yes na kieffer & lesaux (2012) usa 6 mixed qs 72 sessions,3780 minutes p t uc yes yes lesaux et al. (2010) usa 6 mixed qs 18 weeks, 8 day cycle, about 810 minutes p t uc yes yes zhang (2016) singapore 4 mixed qs 8 sessions, 400 minutes p t uc yes na zhang, et al. (2010) china 5 l2 only e 1 session, 45 minutes sa t uc & at no yes zoski & erickson (2017) usa k mixed qs 6 weeks, 720 minutes sa r at yes yes note. e = experimental, qs = quasi-experimental, sa = stand-alone, p = part of comprehensive instruction, t = teacher, r = researcher, uc = usual classroom, at = alternative treatment, na = not available our analysis suggested that there were six major trends: (a) most of the studies focused on older children in grade 3 or above; only two studies included young children in kindergarten or grade 1 (filippini, 2007; zoski & erickson, 2017); also, the majority of research was based on spanish-speaking l2 english learners in the us; (b) there were more quasi-experimental studies than experimental studies with treatment randomization; (c) eight out of 12 studies implemented morphological instruction as part of a more comprehensive curriculum rather than providing it as a stand-alone treatment; (d) the majority of primary studies reported fidelity and feasibility of morphological instruction; (e) there was great variation in the length of instructional time, ranging from one 45-minute session in sihui (echo) ke, dongbo zhang 338 total (zhang et al., 2010) to 72 sessions totaling 3,780 minutes (kieffer & lesaux, 2012); and (f) there was no notable trend with regard to the following three features. first, in terms of learners’ language backgrounds in the treatment group, half of previous research studies included l2 english learners only, and the other half mixed l2 and l1 english learners. second, the instruction was delivered by either teachers or researchers. last, for the control/comparison condition(s), about half of the research adopted regular classroom settings, that is, “business-asusual,” whereas the other half opted for alternative treatments such as phonological awareness and word decoding training or academic vocabulary learning. as to the specific characteristics of morphological instruction design, we coded five categories, as shown in table 2: (a) promoting morphological analysis versus morphological synthesis (analysis refers to instruction that guided learners to combine smaller word parts to produce words), (b) providing morphological instruction in oral modality versus written modality, (c) attending to spelling changes, (d) including word formation rules (inflection, derivation, compounding), and (e) including focal word parts (affixes and bases). table 2 features of morphological instruction author(s) & year analysis vs. synthesis oral and written morphology word parts: affixes & bases word formation rules spelling changes morphological foils badawi (2019) both na bases inflection and derivation na na carlo et al. (2004) analysis both bases derivation (& some monomorphemic words) yes na crosson & moore (2017) analysis both bases derivation yes yes davidson & o’connor (2019) analysis both both derivation yes na deng (2016) analysis written both derivation na na filippini (2007) both both both inflection yes na goodwin (2016) synthesis written both inflection and derivation yes yes kieffer & lesaux (2012) analysis written affixes derivation na na lesaux et al. (2010) analysis both affixes derivation yes na zhang (2016) both both affixes derivation yes na zhang et al. (2010) both both bases compounding na na zoski & erickson (2017) analysis both affixes inflection and derivation na na note. morphological foils refer to word pairs that are not morphologically related such as ear and earth; na = not available table 2 shows an emerging trend in previous studies: researchers focused largely on morphological analysis only (in seven out of 12 studies), included both oral and written modalities (in eight studies), and attended to spelling changes (in seven studies). another trend is that more than half of the studies (seven out of 12) focused on derived words, the dominant word formation rule in academic english words. there was, nonetheless, one study that targeted inflectional words with participants who were ggrade 1 students in the usa (i.e., filippini, 2007); other three studies included both inflectional and derived words; and one study examined compounding with l2 english learners in china (i.e., zhang et al., 2010). with regard to the reoccurring word parts used in instructional materials, one-third of the studies included affixes only, one-third included bases only, and the rest included both affixes and bases. morphological instruction and reading development in young l2 readers: a scoping review of . . . 339 to sum up, the analysis of both general program designs and specific features of morphological instruction suggested that most of the evidence was gathered from studies of a quasi-experimental design that implemented morphological instruction as part of a comprehensive curriculum with children in grade 3 and above. the aim of the explicit morphological instruction in the majority of the studies was to promote morphological analysis of affixed words with/without spelling changes. half of the studies focused on derived words only; three included both inflected and derived words; and the rest included inflected or compounded words only. most of the studies reported fidelity and feasibility of the instruction. in what follows, we further examine the impact of morphological instruction on l2 reading development in young learners. 4.2. the impact of morphological instruction on english reading subskills development in young l2 learners the 12 primary studies can be categorized into three tracks, the details of which are provided in table 3: (a) track 1 included seven studies that reported cohen’s d for preand post-testing comparisons as a result of morphological instruction in group(s); (b) track 2 consisted of three studies where the research design was similar to that of track 1, yet different effect sizes were reported (blake’s modified gain ratio in badawi, 2019; eta-squared (η2) in carlo et al., 2014; and hedges’ g in goodwin, 2016); (c) track 3 was comprised of two studies that adopted a multi-baseline single case design (i.e., davidson & o’connor, 2019; deng, 2016). it is noted that cohen’s d and hedges’ g are interpreted in a similar way: a small effect = 0.2; a medium effect = 0.5; a large effect = 0.8 (cohen, 1988; hedges, 1981). as to η2, according to miles and shevlin (2001), the benchmarks for small, medium, and large effects are 0.01, 0.06, and 0.14, respectively. table 3 effect sizes (cohen’s ds) by independent sample author(s) & year measurement type l2 only/ mixed treatment sample control sample grade level effect size pa ma vocabulary decoding accuracy fluency spelling reading comprehension crosson & moore (2017) r/s l2 only 27 na 11-12 cohen’s d na na 2.21 na na na na crosson & moore (2017) r/s l2 only 25 na 6-8 cohen’s d na na 0.57 na na na na crosson & moore (2017) r/s l2 only 30 na 9-10 cohen’s d na na 1.46 na na na na filippini (2007) r/s mixed 25 18 1 cohen’s d 0.44 0.44 0.64 0.3 0.3 na non-significant kieffer & lesaux (2012) r mixed 299 183 6 cohen’s d na 0.16 na na na na na lesaux et al. (2010) r/s mixed 296 180 6 cohen’s d na 0.2 0.39 na na na 0.15 zhang (2016) r mixed 64 45 3-4 cohen’s d na .30-.50 na 0.4 na na na zhang, et al. (2010) r l2 only 43 83 5 cohen’s d na 0.53 na na na na na zoski & erickson (2017) r/s mixed 17 na kindergarten cohen’s d na 3.96 na na na non-significant na note. r = researcher-designed, s = standardized, na = not available, pa = phonological awareness, ma = morphological awareness sihui (echo) ke, dongbo zhang 340 the seven studies in track 1, which reported cohen’s d for preand posttesting results, yielded nine independent samples of 826 participants who received morphological instruction treatment. the participants were kindergarten to grade 12 students from three countries (china, singapore, and the usa). seven reading-related outcomes were reported (as illustrated in table 3), including pa (k = 1), ma (k = 6), vocabulary knowledge (k = 5), word reading accuracy (k = 2), word reading fluency (k = 1), spelling (k = 1), and reading comprehension (k = 2). the effect sizes were medium for pa, small to large for ma, small to large for vocabulary knowledge, small for decoding accuracy and fluency, non-significant for spelling, and small or non-significant for reading comprehension. track 2 samples (k = 3) included 328 participants in grades 5 to 7 from two countries (egypt in badawi, 2019; and the usa in carlo et al., 2014 and goodwin et al., 2016). badawi (2019) focused on two reading-related outcomes (i.e., ma and reading comprehension), set the acceptable range for effect sizes (blake’s modified gain ratio) between 1.20 and 2.00, and found a small effect of morphological instruction on ma (effect size = 1.28) and a minimal effect on reading comprehension (effect size = 1.06). carlo et al. (2004) used η2 to assess the difference in the preand post-test results for two outcomes (i.e., vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension). the authors observed a large effect size for vocabulary knowledge (0.34) and a medium effect size for reading comprehension (0.08). lastly, the findings of goodwin (2016) suggested that the intervention versus comparison instruction was moderately effective at supporting vocabulary knowledge (gs were 0.41 and 0.47 for two different vocabulary tasks, respectively) and highly effective for ma (g = 0.69), and that non-significant differences were found for word reading fluency and reading comprehension. track 3 included two primary studies that had small sample pools and adopted multi-baseline single-case within-subject design (i.e., davidson & o’connor, 2019; deng, 2016). based on the two studies, a total of 12 participants (independent samples) from grades 3 to 5 received morphological treatment. davidson and o’connor (2019) measured the changes in vocabulary knowledge and observed large effect sizes (cohen’s ds) across participants (ranging from 1.83 to 1.96). deng (2016) measured gains in both vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. for both outcomes, the effect sizes ranged from small to large, 0.34 to 4.76 for vocabulary knowledge and 0.27 to 1.68 for reading comprehension. in sum, the 12 primary studies have examined the impact of morphological instruction on gains in seven reading-related outcomes, including pa, ma, vocabulary knowledge, word decoding accuracy, word reading fluency, spelling, and reading comprehension. there was notably more evidence for two outcomes: ma and vocabulary knowledge. it seems that, as a result of morphological instruction, there were consistent and positive gains in l2 children’s ma and morphological instruction and reading development in young l2 readers: a scoping review of . . . 341 vocabulary; the effect sizes varied from small to large. however, there were no conclusive findings with pa, reading accuracy and fluency, spelling, and reading comprehension because of the limited sample size (ks ≤ 2). 4.3. trends in the measurement of instructional effects as stated earlier, about half of the primary studies compared the effect in a morphological instruction treatment group against that in a regular classroom group (e.g., carlo et al., 2004) or a student group that received alternative treatments such as phonological awareness and decoding training (e.g., filippini, 2007) or academic vocabulary learning (e.g., crosson & moore, 2017). in this section, we further examine how previous studies measured gains for inferring the effect of morphological instruction in light of four issues, as shown in table 4: (a) reporting within-subject differences (e.g., preand post-test differences within the treatment group only) or between-subject differences (e.g., comparing gains between the treatment group and the control group) or mixed; (b) measuring reading-related outcomes based on standardized tests or researcher-designed instruments or mixed; (c) investigating transfer effects in word learning by including learned or novel word items in the tests; and (c) exploring cross-language transfer effects (e.g., whether morphological instruction in english can facilitate the development of reading subskills in another language). accordingly, there are four major findings. table 4 research design in the selected studies author(s) & year within-/ betweensubject standardized (s) / researcher-designed (r) transfer to novel word reading/learning cross-language transfer badawi (2019) between r na na carlo et al. (2004) between r na na crosson & moore (2017) within r/s na na davidson & o’connor (2019) within r yes na deng (2016) within r yes na filippini (2007) both r/s na na goodwin (2016) between r/s na na kieffer & lesaux (2012) between r yes na lesaux et al. (2010) between r/s yes na zhang (2016) both r na (not explicitly) yes (english to malay) zhang, et al. (2010) between r yes yes (english to chinese and chinese to english) zoski & erickson (2017) both r/s na na note. na = not available first, our analysis indicated that half of the studies adopted a betweensubject design, three other studies used mixed designs, and another three used a within-subject design (crosson & moore, 2017; davidson & o’connor, 2019; deng, 2016). in crosson and moore’s (2017) study, participants experienced two sihui (echo) ke, dongbo zhang 342 different interventions, that is, a morphology-focused academic vocabulary intervention versus an academic vocabulary intervention only, which were counterbalanced. whereas the majority of the studies examined treatment effects in participant groups, davidson and o’connor (2019) as well as deng (2016) focused on individual learners (total n < 10). both studies followed a multi-baseline, single-case design that compared each individual participant’s performance across three phases: baseline, intervention, and maintenance. participants’ responses were gathered through testing sessions during the baseline phase before morphological instruction, and there were multiple baselines (three, six, and nine sessions) across individual participants. both studies tested participants’ vocabulary knowledge, including both learned and novel words. effect size was calculated in the percentage of non-overlapping data (pnd, campbell, 2013). pnd scores over 90% indicate high effectiveness; scores between 70% and 90% are considered moderately effective; scores below 70% are questionable. a second finding was that seven of the 12 studies relied on researcher-designed outcome measures only, whereas the other five studies incorporated both researcher-designed and standardized outcome measures. a third finding was related to the use of novel word items in outcome measures. only five of the 12 studies explicitly reported that both learned and novel word items were included in preand post-tests. lastly, only two studies examined cross-language transfer effects, namely, effects of morphological instruction in english on the development of reading-related skills in the other language of l2 readers or bilingual children (i.e., zhang, 2016; zhang et al., 2010). specifically, zhang (2016) implemented instruction on english derivational morphology in grade 4 english-malay bilingual children in singapore and found that the instruction not only led to significant gains in english abilities but also improved children’s malay derivational awareness. in zhang et al.’s (2010) study on chinese-speaking learners of english as a foreign language in china, fifth graders received morphological instruction with a focus on compounding in either chinese or english, while other children did not receive any treatment. the authors found that in the english compounding treatment group, participants with high l2 english reading proficiency transferred english compound awareness to chinese compound awareness. in summary, in order to examine the causal effect of morphology on l2 english reading development, the majority of previous studies adopted a between-subject design and compared the preand post-instruction testing performance between an english morphological intervention group and a control group. few studies examined the transfer effects of morphological instruction, namely, learners’ application of morphological training in english to new word reading/learning in english or to reading tasks in another language. it should morphological instruction and reading development in young l2 readers: a scoping review of . . . 343 also be noted that researchers in previous studies sometimes considered the influence of learner-related factors when they assessed instructional effectiveness (e.g., grade level in crosson & moore, 2017; l2 english speaking versus l1 english speaking in kieffer & lesaux, 2012; and l2 english proficiency in zhang et al., 2010 reviewed above). the findings from these studies suggest that children in upper grade levels and those who speak a language other than english at home might benefit more from english morphological instruction and that there is a possibility for children to transfer l2 english morphological awareness to their l1 when their l2 english proficiency reaches a certain level. 5. discussion: evidence regarding the causal relationship between morphology and l2 english reading development this scoping review focused on the causal evidence of the impact of morphological instruction on english reading development in a specific learner group (i.e., young l2 learners). to answer the research questions, most of the existing evidence was gathered from studies that implemented morphological instruction as part of a comprehensive curriculum for children in grades 3 or above in the usa. while there were consistent and significant findings about the positive impact of morphological instruction on learners’ ma and vocabulary knowledge, the findings were inconclusive regarding the outcome of pa, word decoding accuracy and fluency, spelling, and reading comprehension, which was mainly due to the limited number of studies available in the literature. finally, the selected studies primarily adopted a between-subject, quasi-experimental design and compared the preand post-instruction testing performance between an english morphological intervention group and a control group. the research measurement instruments were mostly researcher-designed or a mixture of researcher-designed and standardized tests. notably, very few studies examined the transfer effects of morphological instruction, including gains in reading tasks of novel word items and changes in reading ability in another language (exceptions are discussed later). perhaps because our review focuses on l2 learners younger than 18 years old, the findings are both consistent with and divergent from those in previous systematic reviews where mixed learner groups were involved or little attention was paid to any specific learner group (e.g., carlisle, 2010; goodwin & ahn, 2013; kirby & bowers, 2017; nagy et al., 2014). specifically, consistent with previous reviews, we found positive gains in ma and vocabulary knowledge as a result of morphological instruction, yet the effects on reading comprehension were inconsistent. likewise, there was insufficient evidence for pa, word reading accuracy and fluency, and spelling as outcomes. on the one hand, the results of our analysis sihui (echo) ke, dongbo zhang 344 echo the calls in carlisle (2010) and nagy et al. (2014) for more research that targets word forms and reading comprehension as reading-related outcomes. on the other hand, our results could not validate kirby and bowers’s (2017) proposal that the effect size of morphological instruction is the largest at the sublexical level, followed by the lexical level, and the smallest at the supralexical level. another notable finding of this review, which seems to deviate from those of previous reviews, concerns the question of when morphological instruction should be implemented. goodwin and ahn’s (2013) meta-analysis suggested that learners below grade 3 benefited more from morphological instruction than those in upper grade levels. yet, this finding did not seem to be the case in our review. cross and moore (2017), for example, compared the performance among three grade groups (grades 6-8, 9-10, 11-12) and found that the largest instructional effects were observed in the oldest group (grades 11-12). in the present review, the samples were mainly of learners in grade 3 and higher; only two examined younger children. crosson and moore (2017) was the only one of the 12 selected studies that directly examined an age/grade effect. in this regard, our review evidence may not be conclusive and future research should pay more attention to younger (l2) learners. yet, a greater morphological instructional effect for older, as opposed to younger, l2 learners may be reasonable in that learners may need to achieve an adequate english proficiency (e.g., oral vocabulary and comprehension) to experience the maximum benefits of english morphological instruction. in this respect, goodwin and ahn (2013), which did not have an l2 focus, and the present review may not be at all contradictory, but rather show the complex interplay of factors – in the context of this discussion, learners’ language backgrounds and english proficiency – that needs to be taken into consideration for morphological instruction. lastly, it is worthwhile to note that although only a few studies have examined the transfer effects of morphological instruction (davidson & o’connor, 2019; deng, 2016; zhang, 2016; zhang et al., 2010), the research designs adopted by those studies provide much to inform future research. the concept of transfer, though often defined and approached in diverse ways, has received a lot of attention in research literature about reading. on the one hand, morphological instruction should aim to develop a capacity in learners to attend to morphological patterning and apply insights of the patterning in word learning and other literacy activities. achievement gains should thus not be narrowly restricted to what was taught (e.g., knowledge of affixes). in other words, transfer of taught skills is essential. in this respect, davidson and o’connor (2019) as well as deng (2016), which examined the transfer effect of morphological instruction to learning novel word items and formed the first track of transfer studies reviewed in this paper, shed light on future research on morphology and (l2) reading. in addition, morphological instruction and reading development in young l2 readers: a scoping review of . . . 345 their 3-phase (pre-instruction, post-instruction, and maintenance), within-subject case design with multiple baselines, in comparisons to the 2-phrase (preand post-instruction), between-subject design used in the majority of selected studies, seems particularly helpful to address transferred morphological learning and long-term literacy development. on the other hand, in light of the fact that young l2 readers are often concurrent learners of literacy skills in two or more languages (e.g., english and their l1), a natural issue to consider is whether morphological instruction in one language would benefit reading development in the other language, that is, cross-language transfer of instructional effects. as noted at the beginning of this paper, evidence supporting transfer of reading subskills in l2 or bilingual reading was almost exclusively based on cross-language correlational associations. in this respect, zhang (2016) and zhang et al. (2010), which constituted the second track of the transfer studies reviewed in this paper, have expanded our understanding of the impacts of morphological instruction in different bi-/multilingual and instructional contexts (e.g., english as the school subject and the medium of instruction in singapore, a multilingual society, or english as foreign language in china). more importantly, these two studies both implemented morphological instruction in a treatment group and administered literacy tests in two languages in both the treatment and control groups. subsequently, both betweenand within-group testing score differences can be compared (though zhang et al. 2010 only reported between-group comparisons results). this design can inform future research that aims to generate causal evidence for the cross-language transfer of reading subskills. finally, as carlisle (2010) pointed out, there is a need for cross-linguistic comparisons to explore the language-universal visà-vis language-specific effects of morphology in reading development. based on the positive transfer effects observed in zhang’s (2016) and zhang et al.’s (2010) studies, it seems that the contribution of morphology to reading development is language universal. zhang (2016) implemented derivation awareness instruction whereas zhang et al. (2010) focused on compounding. it is unclear whether the inclusion of different word formation rules (inflection, derivation, compounding) might alter the transfer effects of morphological instruction. 6. conclusions, limitations, implications and a research agenda this scoping review synthesized 12 primary studies pertinent to the relationship between morphological instruction and the development of a range of readingrelated outcomes in young l2 learners. the evidence was based on studies published between 2004 and 2019 (n = 1,535), which focused on reading english as the target language and involved participants between kindergarten and grade sihui (echo) ke, dongbo zhang 346 12 from four countries (china, egypt, singapore, and the usa). it can be tentatively concluded that explicit morphological instruction has a positive impact on morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge in l2 learners in grade 3 and above. however, there is insufficient evidence to conclude whether morphological instruction is more or less effective for other important outcomes, including phonological awareness, word reading accuracy and fluency, spelling, and reading comprehension; or whether morphological instruction is equally or more beneficial for younger children. emerging evidence has suggested that the effects of morphological instruction delivered in english is transferrable to novel word learning in english and to reading development in another language. however, because of the relatively small independent samples and vast variation in the primary studies, we could not conduct a meta-analysis to test moderating effects of construct-, learner-, linguistic-, instructionand assessment-related factors. another limitation was that the literature search did not combine other key words such as vocabulary instruction/learning and reading development, which could have affected the sample pool of this review. also, the coding was conducted by the first author and only intra-coder coding agreement was reported. more systematic reviews with a more rigorous literature search and inclusion/exclusion criteria, as well as inter-coding reliability, are needed. a few implications can be drawn for pedagogical practice. according to the majority of the selected studies reviewed above, it is feasible for teachers to implement explicit morphological instruction in the regular curriculum for l2 learners in grades 3 or above (for a more concrete design, see goodwin et al., 2012). educators and learners can anticipate positive gains in morphological awareness and vocabulary learning. it has also been recommended that the instruction should not just focus on analyzing word-internal structure but also engage students in problem-solving or inquiry-based activities to produce novel complex words (kirby & bowers, 2017). to improve the scientific understanding of the causal relationship between morphology and l2 reading development in young learners, researchers might consider the following agenda: (a) measure transfer effects; these effects should be tapped by including both learned and novel word items in testing instruments, measuring changes in an additional language other than the language targeted in morphological instruction, and administering immediate and delayed post-tests; (b) adopt a cross-linguistic perspective; it is necessary for researchers to include learners of less commonly examined (nonalphabetic) language backgrounds and consider different word formation rules (inflection, derivation and compounding) in the future; (c) explore morphological instruction in younger children; although it is often held that refined morphological awareness will not emerge until the upper grade levels in english-speaking children (e.g., morphological instruction and reading development in young l2 readers: a scoping review of . . . 347 berninger et al., 2010), recent studies have suggested that it is feasible and effective to implement morphological instruction for younger children (apel et al., 2013; devonshire et al., 2013); yet, it is still unclear as to whether there is any long-term benefit to l2 learners’ reading development by implementing morphological instruction at the kindergarten level and grades 1 to 2 when children typically transition from speaking to learning to read; and (d) expand the scope to different linguistic and educational contexts; so far, the majority of evidence is based on spanish-speaking l2 english learners in the usa, and the findings might not be readily generalizable to other language and educational contexts. sihui (echo) ke, dongbo zhang 348 references * indicates a study selected in the scoping review apel, k., brimo, d., diehm, e., & apel, l. 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(2017). multicomponent linguistic awareness intervention for at-risk kindergarteners. communication disorders quarterly, 38(3), 161-171. 215 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (2). 215-226 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl integrative motivation and global language (english) acquisition in poland robert c. gardner the university of western ontario, london, canada gardner@uwo.ca abstract this study investigated the consistency of a measure of integrative motivation in the prediction of achievement in english as a foreign language in 18 samples of polish school students. the results are shown to have implications for concerns expressed that integrative motivation might not be appropriate to the acquisition of english because it is a global language and moreover that other factors such as the gender of the student or the environment of the class might also influence its predictability. results of a hierarchical linear modeling analysis indicated that for the older samples, integrative motivation was a consistent predictor of grades in english, unaffected by either the gender of the student or class environment acting as covariates. comparable results were obtained for the younger samples except that student gender also contributed to the prediction of grades in english. examination of the correlations of the elements of the integrative motivation score with english grades demonstrated that the aggregate score is the more consistent correlate from sample to sample than the elements themselves. such results lead to the hypothesis that integrative motivation is a multi-dimensional construct and different aspects of the motivational complex come into play for each individual. that is, two individuals can hold the same level of integrative motivation and thus attain the same level of achievement but one might be higher in some elements and lower in others than another individual, resulting in consistent correlations of the aggregate but less so for the elements. keywords: socio-educational model of second language acquisition, integrative motivation, integrativeness, attitudes toward the learning situation, language anxiety robert c. gardner 216 considerable research has demonstrated that the successful acquisition of a second language is facilitated by two basic variables, language aptitude and motivation. language aptitude has been variously conceptualized and measured (see for example, carroll & sapon, 1959; pimsleur, 1966; robinson, 2005), as has motivation (for example see discussions of conceptualizations proposed by many researchers presented by gardner 1985, 2010). the intent here is not to discuss the various conceptualizations but to focus on one motivational perspective, that of integrative motivation. in the socio-educational model of second language acquisition it is proposed that integrative motivation is multi-dimensional, involving affective, cognitive, and behavioral components comprising four broad categories of variables, motivation, integrativeness, attitudes toward the learning situation, and language anxiety (see gardner, 2010). the attitude motivation test battery (amtb) has been developed to measure relevant variables. many studies have been conducted using this battery. initial studies focussed on the canadian context with english speaking students learning french (gardner, smythe, clément, & gliksman, 1976) and with french speaking students learning english (clément, gardner, & smythe, 1977). as a consequence some researchers have proposed that the socio-educational model applies only to the canadian context or at least bilingual contexts, or that it is not appropriate to the learning of english because it is a global language with no clearly identifiable language community. other researchers have adapted some or all of the amtb scales, and/or identified other related variables. examples of related variables include willingness to communicate, intrinsic motivation, self-confidence with the language, l2 self, classroom environment (cooperative vs. competitive), interest, relevance, satisfaction, and so on (for an overall review of these and others, see for example, dörnyei, 2001). as can be seen, each of these involves some aspect of motivation. still, other variables that have been considered include gender, age, level of training, relevance of the other language (i.e., heritage, second, foreign), and so on, which may or may not implicate motivation. still other researchers have contrasted integrative and instrumental orientations, implying that some motives may be more influential in language learning than others. the research is clear in indicating that all of these variables can be considered as correlates of achievement in the second language and thus can be expected to account for variations in success in learning the language. the socio-educational model of second language acquisition offers a means for organizing potential motivational variables into one of four clusters and explaining their functions. the primary variable is motivation, which gardner (1985, 2010) argues is itself multi-dimensional, involving affective, integrative motivation and global language (english) acquisition in poland 217 cognitive, and behavioral components. motivation implies effort, persistence, consistency, focus, interest, enthusiasm, goals, affect, and so on, but in the amtb it is assessed in terms of three scales, motivational intensity, attitudes toward learning the language, and desire to learn the language. the socio-educational model proposes that this motivation is dependent on two other classes of variables, integrativeness and attitudes toward the learning situation. the labelling of the integrativeness construct has been criticized by some (see, for example, dörnyei, 2005), but it derives from mowrer’s (1950) theorizing that initial language learning was motivated by identification with the parents. the label, integrativeness, was used to indicate that there must be some conceptually similar affective basis for second language learning but that it would typically be less personal and more general, involving an openness toward the other language community or other language communities in general. the precise nature of this openness might well reflect cultural differences. other researchers, for example, have identified constructs that are conceptually similar but reflecting characteristics of the host community (see, for example, international posture in japan (yashima, 2002), and social/political attitudes in israel (kraemer, 1993)). in the amtb, integrativeness is measured by three scales, integrative orientation, attitudes toward the other language community, and an interest in foreign languages. the other class of variables that is hypothesized to have an influence on the student’s level of motivation is attitudes toward the learning situation. the classroom environment involves many features such as the curriculum, the social atmosphere in the classroom, the style, interest, enthusiasm, clarity, and so on, of the teacher, instructional materials, teaching methods, and the like. each of these can have an influence on the student’s attitudinal reaction to the learning situation which in turn will be correlated with the student’s degree of integrativeness. in the amtb, attitudes toward the learning situation is measured by two scales, teacher evaluation and course evaluation. the fourth affective variable involved in the motivation to learn a second language is language anxiety. macintyre and gardner (1991) have demonstrated that language anxiety is independent of general anxiety, and in the socio-educational model it is hypothesized that individual differences in language anxiety develop in the context of second language acquisition as a result of experiences in class and the degree of success in learning the material. thus as time in training passes differences in language anxiety will result independently of general anxiety and although anxiety has motivational properties it will relate negatively to achievement as well as to attitudes toward the learning situation and possibly integrativeness. in the amtb, language anxiety is assessed by two scales, language class anxiety and language use robert c. gardner 218 anxiety, the latter relevant if there are contexts outside the language classroom where the language can be used. note that this characterization of integrative motivation in terms of the four major aggregate variables does not imply that there is a motive or a general factor of integrative motivation. as gardner (2010, pp. 201-202) states: in our research we talk about integrative motivation, not because it is something special but because it encompasses a number of attributes of the individual that appear to be associated with the successful acquisition of a second language. that is, there is no such motive. instead, someone who displays a number of affective characteristics can be said to be integratively motivated. as documented in this book, these characteristics include an open and accepting orientation toward the other language community and other communities in general, favourable attitudes toward the language learning situation, and a heightened motivation to learn the language; integrativeness, attitudes toward the learning situation, and motivation, respectively. an individual who displays each of these characteristics can be said to be integratively motivated. there is nothing magical here. integrative motivation facilitates second language acquisition because it supports the persistence so important to develop proficiency in a second language, it accounts for active searching to find opportunities to use and strengthen the language, it provides the affective backdrop to make other-language contacts enjoyable and satisfying, etc. furthermore because of the actions of these attributes, a related feature of the integratively motivated individual will be an absence of anxiety concerning the other language. obviously, many other attributes could be added, but to date our research indicates that this is the core of what distinguishes the individual who is motivated to learn another language from the one who is not. there might well be some other deep seated motivations that propel individuals to become proficient in a second language, but to date the research literature supports the generality of what we have defined as integrative motivation. thus, integrative motivation can be measured as the sum of integrativeness plus attitudes toward the learning situation plus motivation minus language anxiety. scores on this measure will correlate more consistently with measures of achievement than any of the elements themselves or any other single variable. the constituents of any one individual’s integrative motivation might well differ but it is the total score that reflects each individual’s level of motivation. thus, one person might have a moderate score on integrative motivation because of moderate scores on all four elements while another might achieve the same level of integrative motivation score because they are particularly high on some elements but lower on others. this implies that the elements might well play different roles for different individuals. single variable constructs require that the process must be uniform but complex integrative motivation and global language (english) acquisition in poland 219 variables such as integrative motivation permit different subprocesses that account for the same degree of predictability. the purpose of this article is twofold. the first is to assess the correlation of this integrative motivation score with grades in english in two samples of students in poland and to determine the consistency of the correlations of the elements of integrative motivation and other measures from the amtb with english grades in the two samples. the second is to assess the consistency of the regression of grades on integrative motivation in the various classes and the extent to which student gender and class environment act as covariates in this relationship. these two covariates were chosen because it is generally argued that gender and class environment are two variables that influence achievement in a second language. method participants the data for this investigation were obtained from two age levels of students from two cities in poland, namely, warsaw and pu awy. nine classes were tested at each grade level. there were 100 boys and 116 girls at the younger age level (mean age = 13.41, sd = .502) and 88 boys and 106 girls at the older level (mean age = 15.39, sd = .549). grades in english obtained at the end of the academic year were made available for 185 and 157 students respectively at the age levels, and only the data for these students were analysed in this study. measures the primary data for this study were based on the international form of the attitude motivation test battery. gardner (2006, 2010) has published information concerning the reliability, validity, and factor structure of the amtb scales obtained from two age-defined samples in each of six countries, including the two for this study. for the present investigation, item mean scores were computed for each of the 12 scales, and four aggregate mean scores were computed using 10 of the scale scores. the aggregate variables with their constituents were as follows: 1. motivation: the mean aggregate of three scales, motivational intensity, desire to learn english, and attitudes toward learning english. 2. integrativeness: the mean aggregate of three scales, integrative orientation, attitudes toward english speaking people, and interest in foreign languages. robert c. gardner 220 3. attitudes toward the learning situation: the mean aggregate of two scales, evaluation of the english teacher and evaluation of the english course. 4. language anxiety: the mean aggregate of two scales, english class anxiety and english use anxiety. the measure of integrative motivation is defined as the sum of integrativeness plus attitudes toward the learning situation plus motivation minus language anxiety. the amtb also provides scores on two additional measures, instrumental orientation and parental encouragement to learn english. these latter two variables are not included in the major analysis for this investigation because they are not generally considered elements of integrative motivation. results and discussion the results are presented in two sections. the first section considers the correlations of english grades with the various measures. in this regard, the correlation of the integrative motivation score with english grades was .47 in each age group, demonstrating what cohen (1988) would characterize as a strong degree of association. the consistency of this correlation with grades in english contrasts with the correlations of each of the four major variables as well as gender, instrumental orientation and parental encouragement (see table 1). table 1 correlations of the variables with grades in english for the two age samples variables year 1 year 3 z motivation .453*** .404*** 0.548 integrativeness .391*** .296*** 0.985 attitudes toward the learning situation .344*** .122 2.156* language anxiety -.301*** -.495*** 2.119* parental encouragement .121 .231** -1.038 instrumental orientation .358*** .145 2.088* gender .321*** .108 2.048* * p < .05 ** p < .01 *** p < .001 inspection of table 1 will reveal that with the exception of the measure of attitudes toward the learning situation for the year 3 students each of the correlations involving the aggregate measures are significant (p < .001). for both groups of students, grades in english at the end of the academic year are positively correlated with motivation and integrativeness, and negatively correlated with language anxiety. for the younger students grades are also significantly correlated with attitudes toward the learning situation. table 1 also shows that integrative motivation and global language (english) acquisition in poland 221 instrumental orientation and gender are significantly (p < .001) correlated with grades in english for the younger sample while parental encouragement is not. for the older students, parental encouragement is correlated significantly (p < .01) with grades but instrumental orientation and gender are not. note too that the correlations differ between the two age groups and that for four of the variables the difference is significant. this might lead to the speculation that the variables are differently related to grades in english at the two age levels but given the small difference in age it would be difficult to identify a process that could explain the difference. in fact, as indicated above the correlation between english grades and the integrative motivation score is very consistent across the two grade levels. thus, rather than speculate about possible age differences, it seems more likely that there are other variables that could explain such variations. two possibilities might well be the nature of the class environment and the gender of the student. the second section of the results uses hierarchical linear modeling to investigate the effect for each of these two variables in the prediction of english grades by integrative motivation. raudenbush and bryk (2001) make the point that when investigating the relationships among variables associated with students in classes, it is possible that the relationship could be influenced by the very nature of the class because it results in groups that are more uniform than random samples of students. they recommend that when investigating the regression of a variable on a set of predictors, the equation should take the class into account and that it be evaluated initially at the level of the class (level 1) and whether these are influenced by characteristics of the class (level 2). this is now done routinely in many areas of social science where it is meaningful to consider the research participants as being sampled by group. this section uses hierarchical linear modeling in which students in classes is the level 1 factor with grades as the outcome variable and integrative motivation and gender as predictors while class is the level 2 factor with mean attitudes toward the class as the potential level 2 moderator. the results for the year 1 students are presented in table 2. hierarchical linear modeling uses maximum likelihood to estimate the parameters for the regression of the outcome variable (grades in english) on the level 1 predictors (integrative motivation and gender) for each class. the level 1 fixed effects estimate the mean intercepts and slopes over the classes and tests these means against 0. examination of table 1 for the year 1 students indicates that the mean intercept was 0 = 4.138, t(7) = 25.587, p < .001, and that the mean slopes for integrative motivation was 1 = .551, t(7) = 6.616, p < .001 while that for gender was 2 = .461, t(7) = 2.363, p = .05. these results indicate that overall students obtained higher grades if they had higher robert c. gardner 222 levels of integrative motivation and were girls. none of these estimates were moderated by class environment. class means were not predicted by class environment, 3 = .276, t(7) = .409, ns, integrative motivation 4 = .441, t(7) = -1.266, ns, or gender 5 = .908, t(7) = .936, ns. in short, over all classes both integrative motivation and gender tended to predict grades in english at the end of the school year, and the results were not influenced by class environment as assessed by the mean attitudes toward the learning situation. table 2 summary of the hierarchical linear modeling analysis for year 1 students level 1 fixed effects coefficient t test (df = 7) p for intercept intercept class environment for gender slope intercept class environment for integrative motivation intercept class environment 4.138 .276 .461 .908 .551 -.441 25.587 .409 2.363 .936 6.616 -1.266 <.0001 ns .05 ns <.001 ns level 2 random effects variance chi-square (df = 6) p intercept gender slope integrative motivation slope residual .184 .115 .003 .757 38.859 10.678 4.794 <.001 ns ns the level 2 random effects assess the variability in the intercepts and slopes among the nine classes. as can be seen, although the class means vary among themselves, ² = .184, ²(6) = 38.859, p < .001, the slopes for both integrative motivation, ² = .003, ²(6) = 4.794, ns, and gender ² = .115, ²(6) = 10.678, ns, do not. comparable results were obtained with the students in year 3, the one exception being the regression of grades on gender, which was not significant. examination of the level 1 fixed effects in table 3 will reveal that the mean intercept varied significantly from 0 as did the mean slope for integrative motivation, but that gender was no longer a significant predictor of grades. furthermore, the coefficients were not moderated by class environment. similarly, though the variance in class grades was significantly different from 0, the variance of the slopes for both integrative motivation and gender were not. integrative motivation and global language (english) acquisition in poland 223 table 3 summary of the hierarchical linear modeling analysis for year 3 students level 1 fixed effects coefficient t test (df = 7) p for intercept intercept class environment for gender slope intercept class environment for integrative motivation intercept class environment 4.609 -.128 .224 -.053 .700 -.014 26.684 -.334 1.360 -.139 6.507 -0.056 <.0001 ns ns ns <.001 ns level 2 random effects variance chi-square (df = 7) p intercept gender slope integrative motivation slope residual .211 .007 .001 .911 35.230 8.019 5.502 <.001 ns ns conclusions the results of this investigation support three generalizations. first, correlations of aggregate scores will be more consistent from sample to sample than the elements that go to make up the aggregate. thus, as demonstrated, the correlations of integrative motivation will be more consistent than those for its elements and even the correlations of its elements will be more consistent than their elements, though this was not shown here. for a construct like motivation this is an expected result. motivation itself is multi-dimensional in nature and two individuals can evince the same degree of motivation for very different reasons hence the prediction of achievement would be the same overall but the prediction based on individual elements of motivation might be different. second, when investigating the prediction of a variable in samples of classes of students, it is important to take the class into account. for example, if the criterion is class related as in course grades, some of the variation in the grades from class to class will be dependent on the teacher, the class, the nature of the evaluation materials, and so on. and, because of the makeup of the class, the degree of individual differences might well vary from class to class. hence, class should not be ignored when calculating measures of association between the criterion and possible predictors. by taking class into account in this study it was demonstrated that motivation was a consistent predictor of english grades from class to class that was influenced by gender for the younger students but not for the older ones and that the prediction was not influenced by class environment. a similar result with respect to class environment was reported by bernaus and gardner (2008), who showed that engrobert c. gardner 224 lish achievement among catalan students was related to motivation but not to class environment in a study using hierarchical linear modeling. similarly in a factor analytic study using the class as the unit of analysis, bernaus, wilson and gardner (2009) demonstrated that teacher motivation was associated with student motivation and that whereas student motivation was associated with student achievement teacher motivation was not. in short, the results of the present study as well as these two suggest that the underlying process linking motivation to language achievement derives from the student’s perception of the class environment and not simply the environment itself. it should be noted that the results of this study pertain to the study of english as a foreign language and that the results are consistent with the many studies conducted based on the socio-educational model of second language acquisition and measures derived from the amtb. the important aspect of second language acquisition is that it involves taking on linguistic features of a community other than one’s own, and the motivation to do so is influenced by a set of attitudes reflecting openness to other cultural material (i.e., integrativeness), reactions to the learning environment (i.e., attitudes toward the learning situation), and anxiety associated with the experience of learning the language (i.e., language anxiety). and this configuration might well be called integrative motivation. integrative motivation and global language (english) acquisition in poland 225 references bernaus, m., & gardner, r. c. (2008). teacher motivation strategies, student perceptions, student motivation and english achievement. the modern language journal, 92(3), 387-401. bernaus, m., wilson, a., & gardner, r. c. (2009). teachers’ motivation classroom strategy use, student motivation and second language achievement. porta linguarum, 12, 25-36. carroll, j. b., & sapon, s. m. (1960). modern language aptitude test: mlat. new york: psychological corporation. clément, r., gardner, r. c., & smythe, p. c. (1977). motivational variables in second language acquisition: a study of francophones learning english. canadian journal of behavioural science, 9(2), 123-133. cohen, j. (1988). statistical power analysis of the behavioral sciences. hillsdale, nj: lawrence erlbaum. dörnyei, z. (2001). teaching and researching motivation. essex: longman. dörnyei, z. (2005). the psychology of the language learner. individual differences in second language acquisition. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. gardner, r. c. (1985). social psychology and second language acquisition: the role of attitudes and motivation. london: edward arnold. gardner, r. c. (2006). the socio-educational model of second language acquisition: a research paradigm. in s. h. foster-cohen, m. medved krajnovi , & j. mihaljevi djigunovi (eds.), eurosla yearbook vol. 6 (pp. 237-260). amsterdam: john benjamins. gardner, r. c. (2010). motivation and second language acquisition: the socioeducational model. new york: peter lang. gardner, r. c., smythe, p. c., clément, r., & gliksman, l. (1976). second language learning: a social psychological perspective. canadian modern language review, 32(3), 198-213. kraemer, r. (1993). social psychological factors related to the study of arabic among israeli high school students. studies in second language acquisition, 15(1), 83-105. macintyre, p. d., & gardner, r. c. (1991). language anxiety: its relationship to other anxieties and to processing in native and second languages. language learning, 41, 513-534. doi:10.1111/j.1467-1770.1991.tb00691.x mowrer, o. h. (1950). learning theory and personality dynamics. new york: ronald. pimsleur, p. (1966). pimsleur language aptitude battery. new york: harcourt brace jovanovitch. raudenbush, s. w., & bryk, a. s. (2002). hierarchical linear models: applications and data analysis. thousand oaks, ca: sage. robert c. gardner 226 robinson, p. (2005). aptitude and second language acquisition. annual review of applied linguistics, 25(1), 46-73. doi:10.1017/s0267190505000036 yashima, t. (2002). willingness to communicate in a second language. the japanese efl context. modern language journal, 86(1), 54-56. 157 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (1). 2021. 157-163 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.1.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review english language proficiency assessments for young learners editors: mikyung kim wolf, yuko goto butler publisher: routledge, 2017 isbn: 978-1-138-94036-9 pages: 295 language assessment has recently attracted a great deal of attention of both researchers and practitioners, which is evidenced, among other things, by a number of well-known monographs (brown & abeywickrama, 2010; coombe et al., 2012; gordon & rajagopalan, 2016; gottlieb, 2006; komorowska, 2002; tsagari & banerjee, 2016, to name just a few), as well as a proliferation of journals oriented towards language testing and assessment (e.g., language testing, assessing writing, language assessment quarterly, international journal of language testing and assessment, and educational assessment). in recent years, great popularity of computers and easy access to the internet have made it possible to move testing to a new dimension, through enabling web-based testing (delivered via the internet) as well as computer-adaptive testing (see krajka, 2016; malec, 2018; marczak et al., 2016). the use of computers has enhanced the assessment of not only target language skills and subsystems, which could be easily predicted, but also more complex constructs, such as intercultural communicative competence (marczak & krajka, 2014; wilczyńska et al., 2019). formative assessment, often referred to as assessment for learning (black et al., 158 2003), dynamic assessment (shohamy, 2015) or alternative assessment (alismail & mcguire, 2015; tedesco et al., 2014) is redefining the way school teachers think about assessment, moving them away from testing towards more comprehensive ways of evaluation. at the same time, even though a great number of publications have appeared on teaching young learners, also with a focus on assessment, this does not necessarily translate into widespread awareness of these assessment issues among teachers. the question might arise, then, whether there is a need for a new publication dealing with the complex nature of language assessment, and if yes, what kind of reader to aim at, how to bridge the gap between what is available and what might be desired, and how to structure it to respond to the changing educational reality. few of the existing publications actually bring three important perspectives together: language assessment, young learners and standardized testing. it is in this context that the current review attempts to evaluate the newly published book english language proficiency assessments for young learners edited by mikyung kim wolf and yuko goto butler. according to the series editors john norris, james purpura, steven ross and xiaoming xi (the series is innovations in language learning and assessment at ets),1 it “provides a comprehensive overview of issues related to assessing the language proficiency of young english second and foreign language learners,” covering “a host of issues that should be of central interest to the many stakeholders in young language learner assessment, including not only test developers, but also researchers, administrators, practitioners, and policy makers” (“series editors’ foreword,” p. viii). the purpose of this review, then, will be to see whether the book does what it claims to do, namely, discuss innovative ways of assessing young learners’ english language abilities, offer stimulating ideas for future research and development work, and constitute a useful resource for a number of participants of the teaching-learningassessment process (students, test developers, educators and researchers). the book is subdivided into fifteen chapters, which are preceded by the series editors’ foreword, acknowledgements, a list of contributors and a list of illustrations, and followed by a subject index. the chapters are arranged in five separate sections: “introduction” (chapter 1), “theoretical basis and assessment frameworks” (chapters 2-5), “empirical studies for validity evidence” (chapters 6-10), “future assessments and innovations for young learners” (chapters 11-14) and “conclusion” (chapter 15). overall, the structure of the book is transparent and helps guide the reader from general description of young learner assessment and overall characteristics of young learners as recipients 1 the fact that the book series is concerned with assessment at the educational testing service (ets), an american language services provider, is significant, as will be made clear later in the review. 159 of assessment, through a report on two recent ets tests (toefl junior and toefl primary), design characteristics for young learner assessments, empirical studies aimed at validating the two exams mentioned, to innovative assessment designs in the fourth section. this way of structuring the book is justified and makes a presentation of the ets offerings highly convincing, first by describing them in much detail in some chapters in section 2, and then providing solid empirical evidence for their effectiveness, validity and reliability in section 3. the chapters differ considerably in their format and level of accessibility for readers. chapters 1 and 2 are theoretical overviews of definitions, typologies, characteristics and approaches used in assessing young learners’ english language ability. well-documented in sources, covering relevant and topical literature, they are of great use for teacher trainers and practicing teachers interested in broadening their knowledge about assessing children and adolescents in a more general sense. on the other hand, chapters 3 and 4 have a clearly informative and reporting value, dealing with the process of defining constructs subject to testing; selecting target language use domains; selecting tasks; and designing, piloting and validating toefl junior and toefl primary. with little literature review and no empirical research, these two chapters are clearly structured more like technical reports, of great interest to those who want to find out the mechanics of the two tests. also, the two chapters would be invaluable for test developers planning future standardized assessments for learners of different ages. chapter 5, despite its fairly general title, focuses on the interconnection between the work of ets and us-k12 assessments, showing in particular how the evidence-centered design framework is operationalized in the latter. it also analyzes task types and test items in reference to the current context of english language education in the usa. the chapter also provides insight into challenges encountered and solutions proposed (at ets) while developing english language proficiency assessments for u.s. k-12 students. hence, this chapter has yet another target readership – educational authorities in different sectors of the u.s. educational system. chapters 6 and 7, as noted above, are of yet another kind in the sense that they constitute reports of in-depth empirical studies, with very little theoretical background and a bulk of space devoted to reporting all the steps of design and procedure, giving results, performing statistical analyses and discussing findings. both chapters take under scrutiny the two new assessment formats introduced by ets – toefl primary (chapter 6) and toefl junior (chapter 7). chapter 8, another one of a more descriptive and theoretical nature and thus devoid of empirical research, deals with the topic of the usefulness of the common european framework of reference for languages (cefr) in interpreting toefl junior and primary scores. the chapter also contains a discussion of 160 the challenges that might be encountered by test developers wishing to use the cefr to back up, interpret or justify their assessments. chapter 9, for a change, is similar in nature to chapters 6 and 7 as it reports upon empirical research intended to verify the validity of toefl junior in the process of monitoring young learners’ english language proficiency. employing a longitudinal data collection design, the authors analyzed the scores of a considerable number of students (a few thousand) who took the test more than once to prove its validity. on average, repeat test takers scored higher on the second administration. the longer the interval between testing was, the greater the score gain. even though formidable in sample size, the study’s findings have to be interpreted with caution due to the fact that as many as 65% of the participants came from one country – south korea. in chapter 10 another initiative of ets, a large-scale technology-enhanced language proficiency (telp) project, is given as an assessment option for k-12 english language learning. instituted in 2011, the telp project undertook a series of prototyping studies in which a set of design principles were empirically investigated with prototype tasks integrating various technology-enhanced features (multimedia, animation, touch-screen interactivity, immediate feedback, and embedded scaffolding functions). the core of the chapter is the report of a comparative study between the linguistic performances of english-language (el) and non-english language students, focusing on the speaking tasks. quite interestingly, both el and non-el students in kindergarten, and even grades 1 and 2, produced linguistic errors and demonstrated an insufficient command of discourse devices to retell a story or describe events coherently. chapter 11 opens the section devoted to future assessments and innovations for young learners. first of all, it deals with cognitive diagnostic assessment as one of the promising alternatives for language assessment. the chapter reports a study investigating how struggling young learners respond to one-onone diagnostic assessment interventions. the final part of the chapter contains recommendations on how to design young learner assessments. as evidenced by the study, the diagnostic assessment intervention proved to be instrumental in providing mediated scaffolding for individual students whose diagnostic profiles had indicated the most needs by facilitating their metacognitive control over their reading strategy use. in chapter 12 computerized dynamic assessment (c-da) is elaborated upon as an innovative alternative to traditional assessment in a young learner context. an explication of the theoretical principles behind c-da as well as presentation of examples from two recent projects conducted with l2 learners can be found therein. in practice, c-da is delivered in a computerized system focused on selected language skills (e.g., listening and reading abilities), with 161 assessments delivered online through a web-based interface written in php and html. both the listening and reading tests in chinese, french and russian are comprised of multiple-choice format questions. quite interestingly, upon completion of the test, students immediately receive an automatically generated report that includes a set of scores and a learning profile, which is what one would expect of c-da. thanks to the use of a learning profile, it is possible to capture both the abilities that have already developed and those that are still emerging. the strength of the chapter lies in showing the usefulness of c-da in highly diverse contexts (l2 spanish in elementary school vs. l2 chinese at university level). the final innovative approach to assessing young learners presented in the book is scenario-based assessment (sba), tackled in chapter 13. according to the chapter authors, sba combines a number of techniques for delivering a set of tasks and items that provide a platform for measuring reading skills while simultaneously enabling an increase in instructional relevance of the assessment. in reading, for instance, sba involves placing learners in authentic context of a series of interrelated activities that take the learner from more guided to more independent performance. what is important about sba is that those activities or items provide scaffolds and guidelines to better understand and model the target performance. thus, as evidenced in the chapter, sbas do not only measure selected abilities but also support their development and increase learner metacognitive awareness. the book concludes with a final chapter which sums up most of the discussions while elaborating upon challenges and future directions for young learner language assessments. well-documented and based on the previously published studies, this chapter makes a strong case for using english language proficiency standardized tests. it shows that since in reality more and more young learners are taking exams such as toefl primary and cambridge movers, the responsibilities of teachers, test developers and researchers are greater than ever before. despite a great number of strong points addressed above, however, the book has two minor shortcomings. one is the somewhat striking and disappointing confinement to the american perspective only, without coverage of other standardized exams or assessment frameworks for young learners (e.g., cambridge young learner english starters, movers, flyers, cambridge pet or ket, and european language portfolio, to name just some). quite clearly, the american perspective prevails – if there are references to some european or australian language policy landmarks (such as the cefr in chapter 8), this serves the purpose of confronting these with ets’s toefl junior and primary, rather than dealing with them in their own right. hence, while the book is immensely informative and argues strongly in favor of the ets exams for young learners, its more general coverage and impact is more limited. hence, the book would have benefitted 162 from a subtitle clearly indicating this us/toefl orientation to prevent some disillusionment of potential readers coming from non-us contexts who might not be able to see the name of the book series on the cover, where the reference to toefl is explicitly given. in addition, the second minus of the book is the shift in the readership profile across the chapters. for instance, due to its high level of specificity, and close reference to u.s. curricula and standards, chapter 5 might be less accessible to readers unfamiliar with the u.s. context to such a great extent. on the other hand, just the following chapter (chapter 6) is a research study with high sophistication of statistical measurement, which, of course, strengthens the points made by the researchers but, at the same time, makes the chapter difficult to read for non-researchers. to conclude, it goes without saying that offering a comprehensive, welldocumented and strongly-data-driven discussion of various aspects involved in english language assessments of young learners, especially standardized testing, is the purpose that the book manages to achieve to a great extent. especially those chapters that are not focused only on toefl junior and primary are a true asset of the book – c-das and sbas are only two examples of innovations in assessment convincingly presented in the book. because it is not mainly (or exclusively) focused on presenting and promoting the two newly implemented tests, the book assumes a very universal character, becoming highly relevant and applicable in diverse young learner contexts around the world. reviewed by jarosław krajka maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin, poland jarek.krajka@gmail.com references alismail, h. a., & mcguire, p. (2015). 21st century standards and curriculum: current research and practice. journal of education and practice, 6(6), 150-154. black, p., harrison, ch., lee, c., marshall, b., & wiliam, d. (2003). assessment for learning: putting it into practice. open university press. brown, h. d., & abeywickrama, p. (2010). language assessment: principles and classroom practice (2nd ed.). pearson education. coombe, c., davidson, p., o’sullivan, b., & stoynoff, s. (eds.). (2012). the cambridge guide to second language assessment. cambridge university press. 163 gordon, e. w., & rajagopalan, k. (2016). the testing and learning revolution: the future of assessment in education. palgrave macmillan. gottlieb, m. (2006). assessing english language learners: bridges from language proficiency to academic achievement. corwin. komorowska, h. (2002). sprawdzanie umiejętności w nauce języka obcego. kontrola – ocena – testowanie. fraszka edukacyjna. krajka, j. (2016). e-assessment of teaching skills: on evaluating teacher competence in blended learning. in m. krawiec (ed.), new insights into learning and teaching practices (pp. 191-206). sprachlit. malec, w. (2018). developing web-based language tests. wydawnictwo kul. marczak, m., & krajka, j. (2014). electronic assessment tools in learning management systems: perceptions of student teachers of foreign languages. in e. smyrnova-trybulska (ed.), e-learning and intercultural competence development in different countries (pp. 265-278). uniwersytet śląski. marczak, m., krajka, j., & malec, w. (2016). web-based assessment and language teachers: from moodle to webclass. international journal of continuing engineering education and lifelong learning, 26(1), 44-59. shohamy, e. (2015). from cloze to consequences and beyond: interview by anne lazaraton. in a. j. kunnan (ed.), talking about language assessment: the laq interviews (pp. 150-183). routledge. tedesco, j. c., opertii, r., & amadio, m. (2014). the curriculum debate: why it is important today. prospects, 44, 527-546. tsagari, d., & banerjee, j. (eds.). (2016). handbook of second language assessment. de gruyter mouton. wilczyńska, w., mackiewicz, m., & krajka, j. (2019). komunikacja interkulturowa: wprowadzenie. wydawnictwo naukowe uam. 159 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (2). 159-178 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl dynamics of learner affective development in early fll jelena mihaljevi djigunovi university of zagreb, croatia jmihalje@ffzg.hr abstract affective learner factors were first considered as a cause of success in language learning. this was followed by a change in approach and recently authors (e.g., edelenbos, johnstone, & kubanek, 2006) have considered them an important outcome, especially in early foreign language learning (fll). current research into affective learner factors in early fll tries to catch the developmental aspects too, and studies are emerging that take a contextual view as well. this paper describes a study on affective characteristics of young fl learners that combines the developmental and contextual perspectives. using the case study methodology the author analyses the affective profiles of three young learners of english as a foreign language who were followed for 4 years. the analyses are done taking into account their immediate language learning environment, home support, out-of-school exposure to english and language achievement. the findings suggest that affective learner factors contribute to the dynamic complexity of early fll. keywords: early language learning, attitudes, motivation, self-concept, contextual factors a closer analysis of how researchers have viewed the role of young learners’ affective characteristics reveals several approaches to the issue. until recently many (e.g., burstall, 1975) considered affect primarily as a cause of success in early foreign language learning (fll). other researchers (e.g., blondin et al., 1998; edelenbos, johnstone, & kubanek, 2006), however, approached the issue from a jelena mihaljevi djigunovi 160 different perspective and pointed out that it is precisely the development of learner affective characteristics (mostly positive attitudes and motivation) that is, in fact, the most relevant outcome or result to be looked out for in early fll. even more recently two more approaches have become quite salient. according to one, we should look for interactions of affective learner characteristics with other individual learner characteristics (e.g., language anxiety, learning strategies) or with contextual factors. the other focuses on the temporal dimension and investigates developmental aspects of various affective learner factors. major insights into affective characteristics of young fl learners to date the traditional view of young learners as being so similar to one another that individual differences were not a real issue resulted in a scarcity of studies into their affective characteristics. once this view was replaced with an awareness that young learners do differ among themselves, the need for investigations of learners’ affect became obvious. in-depth research that involves young learners, however, requires triangulation of data because children often find it hard to articulate their perceptions and feelings (lamb, 2004; mihaljevi djigunovi , 2009a). since it has been observed that young learners’ affect is not a set of stable factors but changes over time, the longitudinal approach is often applied. but longitudinal studies on young fl learners are still comparatively rare. some studies (e.g., low, brown, johnstone, & pirrie, 1995; nikolov, 2002; szpotowicz, mihaljevi djigunovi , & enever, 2009) found that, generally speaking, young learners adopt the attitudes of their significant others (parents, siblings, relatives, friends, teachers). nikolov (1999), however, stressed that their first experiences in fll enable young learners to form their own attitudes, which are shaped by the fl classroom processes. vilke (1993) found that the fl teacher plays an important formative role in attitude development. a closer look at the studies on the development of young learners’ attitudes indicates that findings can be quite ambiguous. some studies (chambers, 2000; macintyre, baker, clément, & donovan, 2002; nikolov, 1999) found that earlier starters’ attitudes are more positive than those of later starters but turn less positive over time. on the other hand, cenoz (2003) and mihaljevi djigunovi (1998) showed that positive attitudes can be maintained over extended periods of time under favourable learning conditions. in some studies (e.g., lasagabaster, 2003; williams, burden, & lanvers, 2002) no significant age-related differences in young fl learners’ attitudes to fll were found. it is assumed that such contradictory findings should be attributed to different research designs used in the studies listed. another possible reason may be that the discrapancies are due to the differences between the contexts in which the young learners were learning the fl. contextual influences, both at the macro and micro dynamics of learner affective development in early fll 161 levels, are now increasingly recognized as a significant factor in early fll (mihaljevi djigunovi , 2009b). from the temporal perspective, an interesting recent observation of young fl learners’ attitudinal development suggests that over the years young learners, especially the less successful ones, tend to become bored or disillusioned if they do not feel they have made expected progress in mastering the fl (bolster, 2009). such a turn of events may contribute to the young learner building up a negative self-concept. driscoll and frost (1999) suggested starting a different fl at certain points during primary education because a fresh start in language learning may lead to positive attitudes to fll. the relationship of motivation and language achievement was found not to be consistent in all the studies. some authors (e.g., masgoret, bernaus, & gardner, 2001; mihaljevi djigunovi & vilke, 2000) observed that it depended on what kind of measure of achievement was used: stronger correlations were found with self-assessment, course grades and integrative tests than with discrete-point tests. interestingly, it was also observed that the strong correlations between motivation and outcomes in younger learners decreased with age (tragant & muñoz, 2000). young learners’ self-concept was also found to correlate positively with learning outcomes (mercer, 2011; mihaljevi djigunovi & lopriore, 2011). nikolov (2001) warned that initial attitudes, motivation and self-confidence of young learners should not be underestimated as they can have a long-lasting effect on future learning. a study into dynamics of young learners’ affective characteristics in this paper we would like to look into affect in early fll using an approach that combines the temporal and contextual perspectives discussed above. we believed that such a complex aim could best be achieved using longitudinal case study methodology. collecting detailed information about specific young learners as individuals over 4 years could provide us with rich, holistic, context-sensitive data that could serve as a good base for researching developmental aspects of affective learner factors. in our opinion such an approach has the potential of providing broader and, also, deeper insights into the complexity of early fll. context of the study the qualitative study described below is part of the early language learning in europe (ellie) project1 (www.ellieresearch.eu), a 3-year transna 1 this research has been supported by a european commission grant under the lifelong learning programme, project no. 135632-llp-2007-uk-ka1scr. an additional british council grant supported the croatian team. jelena mihaljevi djigunovi 162 tional longitudinal study that was carried out between 2007 and 2010. the study (enever, 2011) was preceded by a scoping year2 so that data were collected over a total of 4 years. our focus here will be on the croatian cohort. the croatian context is characterised by a long tradition in early fll (vilke, 2007). since the first half of the twentieth century the starting age at which the fl was introduced as a compulsory school subject in primary school has been constantly lowered. in 2003 the national education authorities passed a law that requires all learners to start a fl at the very beginning of primary education, in grade one (age: 6-7). primary education in croatia includes eight grades and learners are 14 when they leave primary school. although there is no regulation that stipulates which fl to start with most learners start with english, which is the most popular fl (medved krajnovi & letica krevelj, 2009). the role of english is enhanced by the requirement that those primary learners who start with a fl other than english must take english in grade four (age: 10) so that no learner ends primary education without having learned english. following the recommendations of the council of europe, the croatian national curriculum (2010) allows for a second fl to be taken up at different points in the education cycle (in grades four or six of primary school or in secondary school). fll in both the primary and secondary sectors is centrally regulated and, currently, the main guidelines are included in two documents: the croatian national curriculum (croatian ministry of science, education & sports, 2010) and the croatian national educational standards (croatian ministry of science, education & sports, 2005). it is proposed in the guidelines that early fl teaching should be communicatively oriented, holistic and multisensory. it is explicitly stressed that in the early years metalanguage and grammatical explanations should be avoided. the fl learning goals are laid out in terms of the common european framework levels (council of europe, 2001) aiming at the a1 level by end of grade four. except for schools in the areas near the border, most classes in croatian schools are monolingual. teachers of english to young learners can obtain their qualification either by getting a university degree in english language and literature (teaching stream), or a university degree in early education with a minor in english. another characteristic of the croatian context relevant for this study is a relatively high exposure to english. foreign programmes in english shown on croatian national channels have always been subtitled, popular music with lyrics in english can be heard via the electronic media all the time, most computer software that learners normally use is english, and contact with englishspeaking foreigners (tourists, businessmen) is high too. with tourism as practically the main branch of national economy, croatian policy makers have al 2 the scoping year was partly sponsored by the british council. dynamics of learner affective development in early fll 163 ways paid lip service to fll and have claimed it is on their priority list, though national investments in this field do not substantiate this claim. generally speaking, attitudes to learning fls – english in particular – are very positive among most people. aim and methodology in this qualitative study we wanted to look into interactions of affective learner factors with contextual variables from the developmental point of view. the most suitable way to reach this complex aim was through the longitudinal case study approach. we followed three young learners of efl from the croatian cohort of the ellie sample for 4 years, from grade one till end of grade four. they were between 6 and 7 years old at the start and between 9 and 10 at the end of the project. concerning the affective aspects we gathered data on the young learners’ self-concept as learners of english, interest in fls, attitudes to english as a school subject, motivational orientation in learning english, perception of difficulty, preferences for classroom activities and attitudes to teaching english. on the contextual side, we collected information on the immediate learning context (the school environment, principals’ attitudes to early language learning, characteristics of classroom teaching, teachers’ attitudes), on the home environment (parents’ education, knowledge of english, using english for professional purposes, attitudes to early fll, family involvement in the child’s learning of english) and on exposure to english out of school. finally, information on the young learners’ achievement in english was also documented over the 4 years. the instruments used to collect the data included oral interviews, questionnaires and classroom observation schedules that were used each year; vocabulary recall tasks (grades one, two and three), listening comprehension tasks (all grades), reading comprehension tasks (only grade four) and oral tasks (grades two, three, four) and teacher assigned end-of-year grades in english. data on learner attitudes and motivation were elicited through oral interview questions about the favourite school subject, preferred classroom activities, perception of difficulty of english as a school subject and about why it might be good to learn it. to elicit data on attitudes to teaching english the young learners were asked during the oral interview to look at four pictures: one presented a traditional classroom with the teacher pointing to some writing on the board and pairs of learners sitting in three rows of desks and all facing the teacher and the blackboard; one presenting a classroom where group work was going on; one where both the teacher and her young learners were sitting on the classroom carpet in a circle and doing an activity with flash-cards; one with young learners jumping around jelena mihaljevi djigunovi 164 and the teacher just standing at a loss. the learners were asked to choose the classroom in which they thought they would learn english best and to explain why. in order to provide information on their self-concept the learners were asked in the oral interview to compare themselves to their classmates and say whether they thought they were the same, better or worse at english than their peers, and to explain how they could tell. data on the immediate learning environment were elicited from the school principals and english teachers by means of questionnaires and oral interviews. home support and out-of-school exposure to english were described on the basis of information collected from the young learners (oral interviews) and their parents (questionnaires). parents’ questionnaires also provided information on the parents’ education levels, background in learning and using english and the learners’ expressions of attitudes about learning and using english out of school. measures of language achievement were endof-year english grades, and vocabulary, listening and reading comprehension as well as oral production tasks used in different grades as specified above. using both end-of-year grades and specifically designed language tasks made it possible to use both discrete-point and integrative measures of language achievement. triangulation was secured by collecting information about the same aspect from different participants (e.g., the child and the parents) and using different instruments (e.g., oral learner interview and classroom observation). all the instruments used were designed jointly by the ellie team. more information about the instruments can be found in enever (2011). results in this section we will provide descriptions of each young learner based on the data gathered. each description will comprise (a) the young learner’s affective profile as it developed throughout the four years, (b) summary of the characteristics of the immediate learning environment each learner was exposed to, (c) summary of the characteristics of the home environment, (d) summary of the learner’s out-of-class exposure to english, and (e) summary of the learner’s language achievement. case study 1: ana affective profile. ana’s language self-concept was consistently low during the 4 years. every year she said that, compared to others in class, she performed badly. she explained her claim by referring to the low end-of-year grades she kept getting. ana believed it was good to learn english because it would be very useful if she went to england one day. she wanted to learn german as well because her grandmother lived in germany. in grade one, dynamics of learner affective development in early fll 165 english was among her favourite school subjects and she particularly liked colouring and drawing; in grade two it was just an ‘ok’ subject and she reported liking reading, playing and learning new songs; in grade three she liked some activities such as singing, but disliked tests because she found them difficult; in grade four she particularly enjoyed acting and, through acting, learning new words but still disliked tests because they were simply too difficult for her. from grade two on ana felt english was always more difficult than the previous year. she consistently preferred the traditional classroom arrangement explaining that it involved seeing things written up on the board and hearing the teacher well. while in grades one and two she thought her parents were happy about her learning english, from grade three on she felt her parents were not happy anymore because of her low grades in english. during classroom observation it was noticed that, in spite of high interest, ana’s engagement and performance ranged from average to low. she would consistently split her attention during classes between the teacher and other learners, was very active and loud in whole-class activities, but was often restless and got distracted easily. on many occasions she would raise her hand and quickly put it down after she heard the full question. ana’s parents reported that she was not keen on learning english, did not enjoy speaking english at home, felt insecure about her knowledge and found learning english rather hard. contextual factors immediate learning environment. ana attended a village school with about 150 pupils. the school offered english and german as fls. pupils did not have a chance to use english with native speakers but they could use it with the dutch (the school was involved in a number of international projects with the netherlands) and danish people (visits connected with international help to war-stricken parts of the country). both the school principal and teaching staff had highly positive attitudes to starting with english in grade one but were not as enthusiastic about starting a second fl during the primary years: they believed it was too much for children. most parents were happy and proud about their children learning english. the school was moderately equipped with digital media (cd player, video, computers) but only the cd player was used in english classes. in the school library there were only two english dictionaries and no books for children in english. ana had the same teacher of english during the 4 years. her teacher had a college degree in english and was qualified to teach english in primary school. her competence in english was at the c1 level. she had visited england and the us several times. she believed in early fll and thought the age of 5 jelena mihaljevi djigunovi 166 was the optimal age to start. in her opinion, fll was easy and natural for children, especially with regards to pronunciation. her knowledge about her learners’ lives outside school was rather poor. her teaching was dynamic and included a lot of games with flashcards, role-plays and songs. she said that her learners liked most playing games and writing tests, while reading and doing textbook work were the least popular activities. her classroom management skills were well developed and there were no major behavioural problems in class. on occasions she would be a little impatient with her learners. she used english about 75% of class time and resorted to l1 when she thought her learners could not understand what she was saying. children’s seating arrangement alternated between the u-shaped format and the desks in three rows with the learners sitting in pairs and all of them facing the blackboard. home environment. at home ana had one english dictionary but did not use it. she would tell her family about what she had learned in her english classes and would sometimes ask for help with homework. in grade one her mother would help. since her parents never leared english at school, in later grades it was her brother who could help her with homework more than the parents. ana’s parents had primary school education only. her mother was a housewife and her father a factory worker. the father did not need english at work. they believed that it was useful to learn english, that it contributed to a child’s openness to other cultures and that in the future knowing english would be as important as knowing l1. however, they thought that early fll was not really fun for children and that it could cause difficulties in learning other school subjects. out-of-class exposure to english. according to her parents, ana spent about 2 hr per week watching programmes in english and about 1 hr listening to music in english. she did not have access to the internet at home. during summer holidays she had opportunities to use english with foreigners but never used them. language achievement. ana’s final grade in english was a 33 in grade one and from grade two it was a 2. her vocabulary knowledge was average in grades one and two and turned below average in grade three. still, although her lexical diversity was low, her oral production showed consistent progress. listening comprehension varied over the years: it was above average in grades one and 3 the croatian grading system includes 5 grades, 1 being a fail and the other grades being a pass (2 = sufficient, 3 = good, 4 = very good, 5 = excellent). dynamics of learner affective development in early fll 167 three but below average in grades two and four. ana’s reading comprehension scores (grade four) were among the lowest third in the croatian cohort. case study 2: ivan affective profile. throughout the 4 years ivan thought very highly of himself as a language learner. he attributed this to the extra private classes he attended. he also pointed out that he could recognise many english words and stressed that his parents often praised him. in ivan’s opinion, learning english was a good thing because one could talk to many people. ivan wanted to learn german and french as well. english was a favourite subject only in grade one. by grade four german became his favourite subject because, he said, he was good at it; but he pointed out that he also enjoyed speaking english. his favourite classroom activities changed from learning new words (grade one) to reading, playing and arguing (!) in english (grade two) to reading (grade three) and, finally, to speaking (grade four). he disliked his classmates fighting in class and, in grade four, he did not like singing because of ‘silly’ words such as ‘twinkle, twinkle little star.’ his classroom teaching preferences varied: in grade one he claimed he liked the chaotic classroom best, in grade three he preferred the sitting on the floor format, while in grades two and four he opted for the traditional classroom arrangement. he felt his parents were satisfied with his knowledge of english and he himself felt proud when they would ask him about some words and he would know them. ivan looked very interested in all classroom activities and his engagement was generally very high. he often took the role of a leader during wholeclass and group-work activities. when he found an activity too easy, he would quickly get bored, start entertaining his classmates and would become quite disruptive. he seemed very aware of his language abilities and often tried to show off. sometimes he would misbehave to attract the teacher’s attention. according to parents’ reports ivan was enthusiastic about learning english, proud of his knowledge, liked speaking english, was not embarrassed to use it and did not perceive learning english as hard. contextual factors immediate learning environment. ivan attended an elite city school that offered, besides the regular croatian national curriculum, international programmes in english for foreign children, as well as the croatian national curriculum in english. this allowed croatian children opportunities to communicate in english with foreign pupils in the school. the school was involved in many national and international projects, and promoted multicultural communication, holistic learning, critical thinking, life skills, and development of jelena mihaljevi djigunovi 168 self-confidence. the fls on offer were english, french and german. by croatian standards it was extremely well equipped: the teachers had at their disposal video players, cd players, interactive whiteboards, and each classroom had at least one computer with english software. ivan’s class could enjoy an english corner display area, a self-access area with english readers and games, and a class library with books in english. the school library contained authentic books for children and children’s dictionaries. during the 4 years ivan had classes with three teachers of english. his first grade teacher had a university degree in early education with a minor in english. her communicative language competence was at the b2 level. she believed that even an earlier age may be the optimal time to start learning fls. she saw the main benefit of the early start in easier acquisition of pronunciation and development of writing skills. she insisted on oracy but introduced reading and writing quite early using age-appropriate teaching strategies. she knew her learners well and could point to individual differences among them. she was aware of what they were exposed to outside school and used the english they acquired elsewhere in classes. her use of english amounted to 50% of class time: she often code-switched in the middle of the sentence, strategically using l1 to make her teaching point more salient. the second grade teacher had the same qualification and the same level of competence in english as the first one. she considered starting in kindergarten as optimal, believing that an early start helped young learners to avoid language anxiety and to prepare well for later language learning. her classes included a wide range of activities because she knew children could not focus on one thing for a long time. her use of english varied between 25 to 50% of class time. the third teacher taught ivan’s class in grades three and four. she had a university degree in english language and literature and was not trained specifically to teach young learners. however, she believed that early learning was a good idea because it was easier to fight language anxiety later. her competence in english was at the c1 level. in her teaching she put special emphasis on listening comprehension because she found that this was a problem for her learners. her use of l1 was excessive: she kept translating practically everything she said into l1. she stressed that in grade four individual differences in motivation and self-confidence became prominent. the learners were occasionally seated in groups of four with two desks put together to form a bigger working surface. however, most of the time the children sat in pairs with desks arranged in rows and all the learners facing the blackboard. home environment. ivan had picture books in english at home, and often watched cartoons, children’s programmes and movies with his parents. he dynamics of learner affective development in early fll 169 also had access to the internet, played games and, by grade four, participated in group networks. ivan claimed he did not ask anyone for help with english because he did not need any. however, his mother reported that the family often helped by watching movies with him and checking homework. they sometimes sang and read books together, too. both parents had learned english at school, obtained university education and often used english at work. they believed early learning of english was useful, fun, not hard at all, had a positive effect on later learning and did not stand in the way of learning other school subjects. out-of-class exposure to english. according to his parents, ivan spent on average 3 hr per week watching films and other programmes in english, 2 hr playing video or computer games, 2 hr listening to music in english on the radio, 1 hr reading and 1 hr speaking in english. he met english-speaking people fairly often and communicated with them: besides speaking english to foreign children attending his school, during the summer he would also meet children from other countries, family friends and relatives who lived abroad, and had fun using english. language achievement. ivan obtained the top end-of-year grade in english in all the 4 years. he performed above average on listening and reading comprehension tasks. his listening skills showed constant progress from year to year. his vocabulary size increased as well and by grade three it was the largest in class. his oral production was characterised by high lexical diversity from the start, and it developed considerably over the years. case study 3: vesna affective profile. in grade one vesna thought she was better at english than her classmates. she changed her mind in grade two and for the rest of the lower primary years she thought she learned at the same rate as others. she believed it was good to learn english because she could use it to speak to many people. she wished she could also learn french and italian. in grade one all school subjects were her favourite, in grade two english was one of her four favourites, in grade three one of three, while in grade four it was her single favourite subject. vesna liked everything about her english classes but her favourite classroom activities were playing (grade one), singing (grade two), listening to stories (grade three) and learning new words (grade four). english was not getting difficult for her over the years, she claimed. but in grade three she said some things were easy and some were not that easy. she consistently preferred jelena mihaljevi djigunovi 170 the traditional classroom arrangement explaining her choice by saying there were things written up on the board; in grade two she said she liked it because both english and croatian words could be put on the board, while in grade four she pointed out that she preferred it because the teacher could show new words on the board. vesna knew her parents were happy about her progress in english because she would ask them about it and sometimes she would read and write something for them to show what she could do in english. vesna’s parents claimed she was very keen to use english, enjoyed speaking english a lot and felt proud of her language knowledge. she did not find it difficult and experienced no language anxiety. contextual factors immediate learning environment. vesna attended a small town school with around 800 pupils. it offered english and german as fls. the school administration advocated early fll and had offered it long before it became mandatory in 2003, with the local community covering the costs. the attitudes to english were very positive but german was highly popular too since many families had someone who had lived as a guest worker in german-speaking countries. the school principal was a very ambitious person and had won support of local authorities for many extra school activities. the school was very modern and well equipped, as well as generally well staffed. each classroom had a computer with fl learning software and a video and a cd player, there was an interactive whiteboard in the it classroom, while the school library contained authentic english books for children. the school was visited by pupils from canada several times, so the young learners in the school had opportunities to interact with native speakers. the efl teacher had a university degree in early education with a minor in english. she was very active, took part in many professional events and was a regional insett leader. her communicative language competence in english was at the b2 level. she used the communicative approach and her classes were highly interactive. she often based her classes on playing, singing and story-telling. classroom observation showed she used english 50% of the time, switching to croatian when she thought it was more efficient to use l1. she believed that grade one was the optimal starting age because at that age fll came more naturally, was less stressful and made acquisition of pronunciation easy. an earlier start might be good for some children, she claimed, but not for all. the teacher enjoyed teaching young learners, thought it was a highly appealing job, but felt it was difficult to keep her english at a high level without teaching more advanced learners, too. her classroom management skills were very good. in grades one and two the children sat at desks arranged in a dynamics of learner affective development in early fll 171 circle. from grade three on the desks were arranged in three rows with the children sitting in pairs and all facing the blackboard. home environment. at home vesna had access to picture books in english and read them frequently. she often listened to music in english on the radio and played computer games. she never asked any member of the family for help with english. both of vesna’s parents had secondary education. they had not learned english at school and did not need the knowledge of english at work. their attitudes to early fll were very positive: they believed it was very useful and fun, it helped children to be more open and to entertain positive attitudes to other cultures. they thought it was not hard to learn a fl at an early age and it did not interfere with learning other school subjects. out-of-school exposure. on average, vesna spent up to 2 hr per week watching tv programmes in english, about 1 hr playing computer games and the same amounts of time listening to music in english, reading and speaking in english. although she would never ask her family for help, she would regulary inform them about what she had learned in her english classes. she would have opportunities to speak english with foreign tourists during summer holidays and when meeting some relatives and friends who lived abroad. she reported enjoying speaking english. language achievement. vesna had top grades during all 4 years. her command of vocabulary increased steadily from average to above average to second highest in class. her oral production was characterised by average lexical diversity. in the first two years her listening comprehension was below average but increased in the last two years. her scores on reading comprehension tasks were, however, among the lowest in class. discussion our results paint a different picture about young learners’ affective development from the one that quantitative studies have painted (e.g., mihaljevi djigunovi & lopriore, 2011). the wealth of data about the three young learners described above offers a very dynamic and complex view of this development. it confirms conclusions of some other case study research (e.g., cekaite, 2007) that individual learner’s fll is not a linear process, and suggests that the development of the affective aspects of early fll is cyclical too. jelena mihaljevi djigunovi 172 contrary to popular belief as well as to results of many quantitative studies, affective profiles of our three young learners show that not all children necessarily start fll with a positive outlook nor that such an outlook is maintained. in our study two (vesna and ivan) out of three learners began learning english as “learning optimists” (pinter, 2011), assessing their language learning abilities high, but only one (ivan) maintained such a positive selfconcept throughout the whole lower primary education. it is very likely that this was the result of a very strong home support and a high exposure to english outside school. this corroborates findings of muñoz and lindgren (2011) about the role of home support and language exposure. ana, on the other hand, began her fll by seeing herself as less able than her peers. she based her self-assessment of language learning ability on her grades. ana started with a grade 3, which is considered very low for the first grade (her class grade point average in english being 4.7), and continued getting a grade 2 for the rest of the lower primary years. a comparison with her classmates’ english grades apparently suggested to her they were doing better than her. each year she perceived english as more difficult than the previous one. although she was moderately exposed to english through watching tv programmes and listening to the radio, she had no experience with using english in real life communicative situations, which possibly could have boosted her linguistic self-confidence, as suggested by marschollek (2002). her vocabulary acquisition, listening and reading comprehension were characterised by ups and downs over the years and, though consistent progress of oral production was recorded, her speaking skill was lower than her peers’. taking into account that ana’s parents did not speak english, ana’s overall learning achievement seems to confirm the findings of muñoz and lindgren’s (2011) study that stress the impact of parents’ knowledge and professional use of the fl on young learners’ achievement. the lower english grades, coupled with her parents’ growing dissatisfaction with her performance in english, probably enhanced her negative self-concept. in contrast, ivan developed a very positive self-concept from the very start and maintained it throughout the 4 years. the evidence he relied on were not only his top grades and parents’ acknowledgement of his high performance, but also the facts that he had extra, private tuition in english and ample opportunities to use english in real life communication with english-speaking people, all of which he reported as successful experiences. vesna, on the other hand, started with a high self-rating of her language learning ability but soon perceived herself to be not really better than others but just at the same level as her classmates. her exposure to english out of school was higher than ana’s and she had positive experiences with using english in real life situations. vesna’s teacher-assigned grades were high dynamics of learner affective development in early fll 173 during all 4 years and her parents praised her consistently. however, her performance on ellie tasks did not always reflect her teacher-assigned top grades. from her reports on the preferred classroom arrangement it is clear that vesna valued teacher written prompts on the blackboard a lot and had not yet developed much learner autonomy. in contrast to ana, neither vesna nor ivan perceived english as getting difficult in each subsequent grade. all three learners seemed very motivated to learn english and wished they could learn other fls too. although their motivational orientation was of the communicative type, which was found to be connected with high achievement among croatian learners of english (mihaljevi djigunovi , 1998), in ana’s case motivation was not positively related to achievement, probably due to the interfering effect of her negative self-concept. preferences for classroom activities showed different developments among the three learners, too. ana and vesna seemed to prefer playful activities (playing, singing) during the first three years and mentioned learning new words as favourute activities only in the last year. ivan, however, preferred learning new words from the start, and reported liking typical fll activities, such as reading and speaking, from grade two on. it seems that he developed a high meta-learning awareness very early. as far as attitudes to teaching english are concerned, ana and vesna seemed to like traditional teacher-controlled classrooms, which implied peace and quiet, hearing the teacher well and seeing the language material written on the board. ivan, who had more experience with different teaching formats, changed his preferences every year but the traditional teaching prevailed as his choice. although all three learners experienced different types of classroom arrangements during the 4 years, the general prevalence of the traditional format suggests that at a young age learners need structure and clear guidance in their fll. this is in line with the findings of the quantitative study on young learners in the ellie project (mihaljevi djigunovi & lopriore, 2011). as stressed elsewhere (e.g., pinter, 2011), discrepancies are often observed between what young learners claim they think and feel and what they do in the classroom. therefore, observation of the learner’s language learning behaviour is very valuable as a source of information, although it can be rather ambiguous, too. thus, ana seemed very interested in all classroom activities but it was not reflected in her engagement in class, which sometimes turned to be quite low. although her teacher described her as an average language ability pupil, already in grade one she perceived english difficult and even found it hard to fully understand the questions the teacher asked. she was also having difficulties with focusing attention on learning: she seemed to be trying to catch the teacher’s and peers’ attention and secure her place in the group. such efforts on her part proved to be overwhelming and caused a lot of distraction. ivan jelena mihaljevi djigunovi 174 seemed to manage his classroom behaviour better. he very early took the leading role in the class, both in terms of learning activities and socially. being more advanced in english than most of his peers, the classroom activities often seemed not challenging enough for him. this was especially evident in grades three and four, when his teacher kept translating all she said into croatian. as none of his three teachers adjusted their teaching to his cognitive and affective needs, he frequently behaved disruptively. vesna, who showed the same high level of interest as ana and ivan in everything that was going on in class, engaged very actively in all classroom activities. although at times she behaved in a somewhat shy way, probably thanks to her positive self-concept, this did not prevent her from being continually participative and active. conclusions in the qualitative research described above we collected data through 4year longitudinal tracking of affective development of three young learners of english as a fl. building our approach on insights from existing quantitative studies as well as the rare qualitative studies on young fl learners, we looked into young learners’ attitudes, motivation and self-concept, contextual factors and language achievement. data collected about the three learners were analysed with the aim to look into how affective learner characteristics developed over time as well as how they interacted with contextual variables and language achievement. this required a mixed-method approach and triangulation of data. our findings suggest that the development of affective learner variables in early fll is both dynamic and complex. we found that attitudes and motivation, as well as learner self-concept, can be unstable and still developing at this early age. at the same time they enter into complex interactions with each other, and with contextual factors. our case studies reveal that, consequently, the relationship of affective learner characteristics with language achievement is not linear. thus, for example, in our study interest was not necessarily reflected in the young learner’s engagement during fl classes, and was not always related to language achievement, either. one thing that emerged from the three case studies is that learner self-concept seems to be a good predictor of motivated behaviour, just as henry (2009) pointed out. it seems that a host of variables, both individual and contextual, interact between and among themselves resulting in very complex relationships. these relationships change over time as any of the elements develops. the affective learner development during the first 4 years seems to be making a considerable contribution to the dynamism and complexity of early fll. we could say that early fll is a dynamic and complex phenomenon that is hard to fully dynamics of learner affective development in early fll 175 grasp without including everything that can potentially have an impact. this in itself is next to impossible at the present level of knowledge. it seems to us that the qualitative research paradigm has a lot to offer and will one day, when an increasing number of case studies have accumulated enough insights, get us closer to what now seems next to impossible. implications for further study like any study about fll, this one has its limitations too. three case studies are, of course, not enough to make any sort of generalisations about affective development of young fl learners. thus, in future studies it would be useful to increase the number of cases included. as contextual factors may be crucial to understanding early fll, it would be enlightening to study learners from different macro and micro contexts. extending the number of affective learner factors in future research may also contribute to better understanding of affect development in early fll. new insights may be obtained also if different methodological approaches are used. following up the young 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(2002). “french is the language of love and stuff”: student perceptions of issues related to motivation in learning a foreign language. british educational research journal, 28(4), 504-528. 551 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (4). 2022. 551-574 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.4.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt developments in classroom-based research on l2 writing icy lee the chinese university of hong kong, china https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0749-3234 icylee@cuhk.edu.hk abstract this paper reviews and reflects on developments in classroom-based research on second or foreign language (l2) writing from 2001 to 2020, based on scholarship drawn from the journal of second language writing, the flagship journal of the field. the review covers a total of 75 classroom-based studies and examines the major research themes and key findings under three research strands: (1) students and student learning of writing; (2) teachers and teaching of writing; and (3) classroom assessment and feedback, as well as the key theories and research methodologies adopted in extant classroom-based studies on l2 writing. the article ends with a discussion of the practical implications arising from the review, as well as potential research gaps that inform future directions for l2 writing classroom-based research. by providing a state-of-the-art review of developments in classroom-based research on l2 writing, this article contributes to a nuanced understanding of salient issues about learning, teaching and assessment of writing that take place in naturalistic classroom contexts, with relevant implications for both l2 writing practitioners and researchers. keywords: second language writing; classroom research; pen-and-paper writing; digital writing icy lee 552 1. introduction in the field of education causal inference research that takes place in controlled conditions, which produces generalizable findings, is often seen to provide the gold standard. to make sense of complex, real-world phenomena in education, however, classroom-based studies that occur in naturalistic classroom conditions are valuable as they can bring nuanced understandings of classroom learning and teaching through in-depth investigation of salient issues in authentic classroom contexts (allwright & bailey, 1991). although not intended for the purpose of generalization, classroom-based research produces knowledge that is context-specific, with potentially powerful, practical impact that can enhance teaching and learning (kostoulas, 2015). in second or foreign language (l2) writing, research that has taken place in naturalistic classroom contexts has been in the minority. for example, in the journal of second language writing (jslw), the flagship journal in the field of l2 writing, out of a total of 349 studies (full-length articles and short reports) published from 2001 to 2020, only 75 (21.5%) are classroom-based. given the insight classroom-based research can produce to guide pedagogical practice in real-world contexts, there is a need to understand what classroom-based research has been conducted on l2 writing, how it has informed classroom teaching and learning, and what further issues merit research attention. the purpose of this paper, therefore, is to provide a review of developments in classroombased research on l2 writing with a view to yielding a nuanced understanding of key issues about writing in naturalistic classroom contexts, with relevant implications for both l2 writing practitioners and researchers. in this paper, classroom-based research refers to investigations undertaken by teachers themselves (e.g., action research) or by external researchers (e.g., case study research) in naturalistic classroom contexts (allwright & bailey, 1991; kostoulas, 2015). the term classroom is used in a broad sense, referring to a learning space in which teaching and learning take place in naturalistic conditions. such learning space can be physical or virtual and hence both pen-and-paper and digital writing is included. the learning space is not confined to the traditional classroom where a teacher is teaching a class of students through lectures and/or other pedagogical activities, but it also includes other learning spaces where teaching and learning occur in situ, such as tutorials in writing centers (nakamaru, 2010), conferences between supervisors and supervisees (merkel, 2020), doctoral writing workshops (thurlow et al., 2019), students’ group writing conferences, and dissertation support groups (e.g., russell-pinson & harris, 2019). the learners of classroom-based research are situated in educational contexts ranging from pre-school, elementary, secondary to college/university contexts that include undergraduate and graduate students as well as teacher learners in pre-service or in-service settings. developments in classroom-based research on l2 writing 553 2. the review: scope, method, and objectives this review covers the 20-year period (2001-2020) of classroom-based studies published in jslw. although it does not include relevant papers from other language journals and hence cannot qualify as a comprehensive review of classroom-based research on l2 writing during the period, in light of the status of jslw as the flagship journal of l2 writing, the review can provide rich and useful information about the major research foci, theories and methodologies that have informed classroom-based research on l2 writing in the last 20 years. after collecting the 75 articles published in jslw from 2001 to 2020, i had a careful read through the abstracts to get an overall view of the research covered in the articles, which quite unsurprisingly turned out to be wide-ranging. previous researchers have focused on five areas in classifying topics in l2 writing, namely writers’ characteristics, writing process, writing feedback, writing instruction, and writers’ texts (see zhang, 2008). my preliminary analysis of the 75 abstracts showed that while writing instruction and writing feedback were pertinent, there did not appear to be a prominent emphasis on writers’ characteristics, writing process, and writers’ texts (probably because research on these areas does not typically take place in naturalistic classroom contexts). instead, quite a number of studies addressed different aspects of student learning of l2 writing. initially, i had writing instruction and writing feedback as two possible areas, plus learning of writing, but then realized that it was necessary to broaden feedback to assessment, with feedback as part of assessment. as a result, teaching, learning, and assessment of l2 writing were the three broad areas that provided the point of departure for my analysis. such a broad classification coincides with that adopted by javadi-safa (2018) in his overview of key issues in l2 writing and research. i then re-read the 75 studies, categorizing them into one of the three main areas, that is, teaching, learning, and assessment. within the assessment area, a few studies have focused on feedback specifically; hence i renamed it as the classroom assessment and feedback strand. as for the teaching area, several studies have addressed teachers themselves; therefore, the second area was refined as the teachers and teaching of writing strand. similarly, in the third area on learning, some studies have focused on students themselves such as student beliefs and motivation; as a result, the third area was refined as the students and student learning of writing strand. the review reveals that the large majority (n = 51) (68%) of classroom-based studies have addressed the students and student learning aspect of l2 writing, with 22.7% (n = 17) focusing on teachers and teaching, and 9.3% (n = 7) dealing with classroom assessment and feedback. within each strand, i further identified the major themes of the studies drawing icy lee 554 on titles, keywords, and major research foci; the themes and key findings are reported in the following section. it is noteworthy that of the 75 classroom-based studies, 15 (20%) have been conducted in digital environments. unsurprisingly, the large majority of these 15 studies (13 – 86.7%) have been published in recent years, that is, from 2016 to 2020, addressing topics like multimodal composing (jiang, 2018), wiki collaborative writing (li & kim, 2016), and electronic feedback (ene & upton, 2018). the review was guided by the following questions: rq1: what are the major research themes and key findings of classroombased research on l2 writing under each of the three strands? rq2: what key theories and methodologies are adopted in extant classroom-based research on l2 writing? rq3: what pedagogical implications can be drawn from the review? rq4: what recommendations for further research arise from the findings of the review? 3. major research themes and key findings this section provides the findings for the review study, that is, the major research themes and findings of classroom-based research on l2 writing under each of the three research strands. 3.1. research strand 1: students and student learning of writing (n = 51) the bulk of classroom-based studies on l2 writing have focused on students and their learning of writing, under which four themes are identified: development of academic writing/literacy (n = 20); cognitive and affective dimensions of student learning/writing (n = 12); student writing in the digital space (n = 11); and student learning from interactions with tutors/supervisors (n = 8). 3.1.1. development of academic writing/literacy (n = 20) classroom-based research on students’ development of academic literacy has mainly taken place in undergraduate and graduate contexts. in this particular research theme, how students make use of source texts and engage in citation practices is crucial to their success in academic writing (friedman, 2019; li & casanave, 2012; wette, 2010, 2017a). while use of source texts continues to present a challenge to l2 students (li & casanave, 2012), socialization into citation as an academic practice is a complicated matter (friedman, 2019), since developments in classroom-based research on l2 writing 555 students tend to consider citation a formal requirement of academic writing rather than engage with source texts to project their own academic voice. although instructional intervention can help cope with the use of source texts in academic writing, students have difficulties grappling with complexities in texts and incorporating citations with their own voice (wette, 2010). on the whole, l2 writers need support to better understand rhetorical and disciplinary purposes of source text use and to engage in effective citation practices (wette, 2017a). development of genre knowledge and awareness plays a significant role in l2 students’ development of academic literacy, whether it is research article writing for doctoral students (negretti & mcgrath, 2018), writing book reviews and literature reviews for graduate students (wette, 2017b), or email and summary writing for undergraduate students (yasuda, 2011, 2015). the development of genre knowledge entails the development of metacognition (negretti & mcgrath, 2018). mind maps (wette, 2017b), genre-based tasks (yasuda, 2011) and sfl-informed genre analysis tasks (yasuda, 2015) are found to have a useful role to play in developing students’ genre knowledge (wette, 2017b), genre awareness, linguistic knowledge, and writing competence (yasuda, 2011), as well as genre awareness and meaning-making choices (yasuda, 2015). within this research theme on the development of academic writing/literacy, collaboration among students is another topic of investigation. such collaboration includes collaborative prewriting discussion (neumann & mcdonough, 2015), which fosters student reflection with potentially positive impact on the quality of their written products. prewriting collaboration in the form of online text chat before writing, compared with face-to-face discussion, can better promote linguistic accuracy in post-chat individual writing, and is more beneficial to less skilled l2 writers (liao, 2018). apart from prewriting collaboration, student collaboration can take place during writing, that is, collaborative writing. when compared with individual writing, collaborative writing can improve student texts in terms of task fulfillment, written accuracy, and complexity (storch, 2005). overall, the effectiveness of collaborative writing may hinge upon a number of factors, such as students’ first language (l1) as well as judicious use of this resource, l2 proficiency, education experiences, and group rules (such as task division, keeping group harmony, and taking leadership) (yang, 2014). in addition to collaborative writing, students can collaborate in group writing conferences, during which they engage in negotiation process regarding the ideal forms of genre, for example, thesis genre for doctoral students in the gradate context (mochizuki, 2019). two studies have addressed the challenges younger l2 students face in acquiring academic literacy, namely, adolescent english learners (spycher, 2007) and community college students (finn, 2018) in the us. to help students succeed in academic writing, teachers can provide explicit instruction that addresses icy lee 556 particular features of academic language (e.g., authoritative stance, conjunction, and reference) (spycher, 2007), as well as opportunities for students to reflect on and articulate their struggles (finn, 2018). finally, the research theme on students’ development of academic writing/literacy covers a few under-researched groups, namely, multilingual doctoral candidates (thurlow et al., 2019), late arrival immigrant students in us schools (fránquiz & salinas, 2011), and language minority adolescent students in the us (kibler, 2010). a novel area of inquiry is the role of creativity in doctoral writing and its potential in helping doctoral candidate take risks and discover their voice in doctoral writing (thurlow et al., 2019) – creativity as personal, product/outcome, practices/processes, and subject to social, cultural, political, and environmental influences. another interesting topic concerns efl students’ development of academic literacy as they exercise their agency to negotiate with an esl writing pedagogy that is imported from the usa (liu, 2008), and relatedly, the role of racial and language ideology in efl students’ learning of academic writing (liu & tannacito, 2013). these classroom-based studies highlight issues of writers’ identities, white prestige and native speaker ideologies, and unequal power relations, which are intertwined with students’ literacy practices. 3.1.2. cognitive and affective dimensions of student learning/writing (n = 12) the second research theme under the students and student learning strand includes several topics, one of which concerns student beliefs, views, perceptions, or attitudes, that is, students’ perceptions of non-native english speaking tutors in writing centers (okuda, 2019), their perceptions of l1 and l2 texts (abasi, 2012; liu & du, 2018), beliefs and goals regarding writing tasks (i.e., mental models) (nicolásconesa et al., 2014), views of content area writing (kibler, 2011), reactions to teacher feedback (lee, 2008), and attitudes towards corpus use (yoon & hirvela, 2004). these studies have enriched our understanding of the student perspectives on various important issues in l2 writing. for example, trust of non-native englishspeaking tutors is found to hinge on tutees’ preferences for specific tutoring strategies, confidence in tutors’ writing, and alignment between tutor and tutee motives (okuda, 2019). students’ l1 has been found to play an important role in influencing their perceptions of writing in l2, for example, l2 students’ interpretations of evidence use in argumentative writing of the target language are influenced by their l1 rhetorical knowledge (liu & du, 2018). l2 students’ beliefs and goals regarding the writing task (i.e., their mental models of writing), on the other hand, are related to their motivation, self-regulation, and writing performance. in particular, more sophisticated mental models (e.g., representing writing as a problem-solving process) are likely to result in more active student engagement and better writing products developments in classroom-based research on l2 writing 557 (nicolás-conesa et al., 2014). regarding feedback, although students welcome explicit error feedback from teachers, low-proficiency students react less positively to teacher error feedback since it is probably too overwhelming for them (lee, 2008). overall, these studies suggest that student cognitive and affective variables can have a crucial role to play in their writing. specifically, a few classroom-based studies have addressed student engagement, motivation, and anxiety/stress. the two studies that address student engagement both adopt the tripartite cognitive, behavioral, and affective engagement framework, exploring how students engage with peer feedback (fan & xu, 2020) and teacher written corrective feedback (wcf; han & hyland, 2015). these studies have enhanced our understanding of this under-explored aspect of feedback, suggesting that l2 students tend to engage with form-focused peer feedback more extensively in the cognitive and behavioral sense than content-focused feedback (fan & xu, 2020), and that student engagement with teacher wcf is a complex phenomenon mediated by individual and contextual factors (han & hyland, 2015). to enhance student engagement and motivation in the writing classroom, primary l2 learners benefit from a writing program that provides interesting and relevant writing topics as well as genuine audiences (lo & hyland, 2007). that said, student motivation may change over time during a writing class, students may experience an increased level of writing anxiety even though they display control of the target genre, and such anxiety can coexist with adequate levels of self-regulation and self-efficacy (han & hiver, 2018). the sources of l2 writer anxiety or stress can be attributed to different reasons, and for doctoral students, these could relate to not only challenges arising from text production, but also interpersonal difficulties and intrapersonal conflicts (e.g., lack of perseverance and poor time management skills) (russell-pinson & harris, 2019). 3.1.3. student writing in the digital space (n = 11) the ubiquity of technologies has, in recent years, witnessed an increase in classroom-based studies that investigate writing in the digital space. several studies have investigated online collaborative writing with specific attention to multimodal interactional skills (abe, 2020), interaction patterns (li & kim, 2016; li & zhu, 2017), as well as factors that mediate online collaborative writing (cho, 2017). l2 students are able to adapt their multimodal interactional skills to manage negotiations with peers as they engage in computer-mediated collaborative writing (abe, 2020). students demonstrate changes in interaction patterns during wiki-based collaborative writing within the group and across different tasks (li & kim, 2016), showing the dynamic nature of small group interactions and the fluid nature of scaffolding across wiki-based collaborative writing tasks. additionally, group interaction patterns are directly linked to the quality of writing icy lee 558 products, with a collective pattern yielding the greatest potential, followed by an expert/novice pattern, in producing high-quality collaborative writing products (li & zhu, 2017). factors that mediate synchronous web-based collaborative writing include communication modes (e.g., text-chat and voice-chat), task representations (i.e., students’ understanding of the nature of writing tasks), alignment/misalignment between students’ self-perceived roles and other-perceived roles, and students’ perceptions of peer feedback (cho, 2017). two studies have looked into student collaboration in cross-national digital spaces via email (liu, 2011) and an online forum (zhu, 2020). they demonstrated how taiwanese undergraduates use their textual identities and writing styles to negotiate power differentials with their american peers (in interactions that are characterized by balance, endurance, and resistance) (liu, 2011), as well as how efl students use mediational resources (e.g., microsoft word, corpus, and wikipedia) in their digital literacy practices to communicate with american undergraduate peers in a sino-us telecollaboration project (zhu, 2020), respectively. a number of recent classroom-based studies have specifically focused on digital multimodal composing (jiang, 2018; shin et al., 2020, smith et al., 2017). as students engage in multimodal composing, they enhance their awareness of semiotic systems of linguistic and visual resources and develop metalanguage mainly in mode choices and intermodal resources, which facilitate their writing development (shin et al., 2020). as a relatively new kind of writing, digital multimodal composing has different impacts on students’ investment, influenced by factors such as students’ different identity positions and sociocultural norms (e.g., value placed on high-stakes testing and mainstream curriculum) (jiang, 2018). in addition to the use of digital tools and modes, multilingual students can engage in multimodal code-meshing, using their heritage languages in the digital composing process to benefit their writing (smith et al., 2017). writing in the digital environment can benefit both younger and older learners, such as high school and graduate students. an ict-rich environment can benefit younger, high school students, who learn to appropriate the writing process in an esl course and transfer their use of the writing process to assignments for other school subjects (parks et al., 2005). for older learners such as graduate students, through email interactions with the instructor, they acquire rhetorical strategies that enable them to shuttle between formal and informal language according to the rhetorical context (bloch, 2002). 3.1.4. student learning from interacting with teachers/tutors/supervisors (n = 8) a number of studies have addressed learning that takes place in writing center tutorials, advancing our understanding of what actually happens in the learning developments in classroom-based research on l2 writing 559 space afforded by writing centers. compared with us-educated students, international students devote more time to the discussion of lexical issues with tutors in writing center sessions (nakamaru, 2010). affective support from tutors proves to be particularly helpful for international students attending writing center tutorials (weigle & nelson, 2004). tutees benefit most (e.g., engage in sentence-level revisions) when tutors give direct suggestions, mark critical features in student texts, emphasize goals of the session, and when tutees themselves actively participate in the conversation and put their plans down in writing during the tutorial (williams, 2004). in some cases, the benefits of writing center tutorials may not be immediately evident but only become noticeable after a period of time (weigle & nelson, 2004). within this research theme, several studies have focused on the graduate context, demonstrating the potential of tutor-tutee interactions in facilitating l2 students’ writing development. tutor-tutee interactions, which provide an optimal site for supporting l2 students’ writing development, are shaped by interpersonal, contextual, and institutional factors, suggesting that tutors should use tutoring strategies that are sensitive to tutees’ emerging abilities and responsive to their individual needs (yu, 2020). dialogic interactions, informed by bakhtin’s dialogism, can help tutees clarify their ideas through verbalizing their thoughts and transferring them to writing; tutees’ knowledge can be an important resource for tutors and empower tutees as they work on improving their writing (merkel, 2020). drawing on activity theory, multi-directional learning between tutors and tutees allows tutees to learn from tutors, and at the same time enables tutees to bring change to tutors’ teaching practices (fujioka, 2014). these findings are particularly relevant to the graduate context when students may be asked to write occluded genres. gender may play a role in tutor-tutee interactions in the graduate context too, as in the case of tutoring involving two transnational women, which facilitates the development of authorial voice, expertise, and disciplinary identity in the tutee (sánchez-martín & seloni, 2019). while one-on-one tutoring (or supervision) is prevalent in the graduate context, which explains why studies about tutor-tutee interactions are mostly conducted with graduate students, child-teacher interaction also plays a significant role in facilitating the literacy development of 5-and 6-year-olds; specifically, synchronicity – dynamic oneness characterized by a caring child-teacher relationship – can account for the bountiful l2 literacy development in children (blanton, 2002). 3.2. research strand 2: teachers and teaching of writing (n = 17) within the second research strand on teaching and teachers, three themes are identified: pedagogical focuses or approaches in l2 writing (n = 12); teacher learning (n = 3); and teacher beliefs and practices (n = 2). icy lee 560 3.2.1. pedagogical focuses or approaches in l2 writing (n = 12) the first research theme has addressed a range of pedagogical focuses in l2 writing classrooms, that is, teaching of coherence (lee, 2002), teacher conferences (ewert, 2009), peer review instruction (min, 2006), literacy narrative instruction (harman, 2013), genre-based instruction (de oliveira & lan, 2014; worden, 2018), summary-based instruction (mcdonough et al., 2014), metaphor-oriented intervention (wan, 2014), dialogical pedagogy for helping students construct voice (canagarajah, 2015), use of models in academic writing instruction (macbeth, 2010), critical reflection and critical language awareness pedagogies (britton & leonard, 2020), and multimodal authoring pedagogy (unsworth & mills, 2020). such pedagogical approaches have broadened the field of investigation to address not only how teaching can help students write better, such as through a focus on textual coherence (lee, 2002) and genres (harman, 2013; de oliveira & lan, 2014; worden, 2018), but also how explicit instruction can empower learners to take greater responsibility for learning, for example, through conducting effective peer review (min, 2006). 3.2.2. teacher learning (n = 3) the second research theme concerns preand in-service writing teachers. a genre-based approach has been found to be productive in helping pre-service teachers enhance their metacognitive awareness, which in turn facilitates their academic writing (negretti & kuteeva, 2011); it can also help l2 writing teachers develop their pedagogical content knowledge of unfamiliar genres, which at the same time enhances their sympathy and empathy for the writing challenges their own students face in their academic literacy development (worden, 2019). pre-service teachers’ learning can be an extended process even when it involves the teaching of simple yet unfamiliar concepts (such as parallelism), which is influenced by various factors including their interactions with course materials and teacher educators, as well as their own values and beliefs regarding the content of teaching (worden, 2015). 3.2.3. teacher beliefs and practices (n = 2) the final research theme has addressed l2 writing teachers’ beliefs and practices. instead of investigating the beliefs and practices of a large number of teachers through questionnaire surveys, the two classroom-based studies under this theme are situated within the teachers’ own classrooms – one novice esl university teacher in the us (junqeira & payant, 2015) and two novice secondary developments in classroom-based research on l2 writing 561 teachers in macao (yu et al., 2020). in line with the findings of previous research (e.g., lee, 2009), novice teachers’ beliefs regarding feedback are misaligned with their practices; for example, belief in the importance of global issues in written feedback is not reflected in teachers’ actual practice dominated by feedback on local issues (junqeira & payant, 2015). instead of viewing the relationship between beliefs and practices simplistically in terms of matches or mismatches, there are complex interactions among beliefs, practices, and contexts (e.g., contextual constraints arising from the curriculum and schools), suggesting that novice teachers’ beliefs and practices are best studied in situated contexts (yu et al., 2020). as such, complexity theory has great potential as an analytical lens to illuminate the complex interactions among teacher beliefs, practices, and contexts (yu et al., 2020). 3.3. research strand 3: classroom assessment and feedback (n = 7) three themes are identified for the classroom assessment and feedback strand: different aspects of feedback (i.e., teacher, peer, electronic feedback, and error correction) (n = 5); assessment for learning (afl) (n = 1); and multimodal composing (n = 1). 3.3.1. different aspects of feedback (n = 5) with a substantial amount of feedback research conducted in controlled classroom environments, several feedback studies (ene & upton, 2018; ferris et al., 2013; lee & schallert, 2008; yang et al., 2006) have shed important light on what happens when feedback is provided to students in naturalistic classroom contexts. focused written corrective feedback (wcf) is perceived as useful by students, especially when it is followed by opportunities for revision and one-onone discussion about errors (ferris et al., 2013). in classrooms where teachers build a trusting relationship with students, they tend to take teacher feedback seriously in their revision (lee & schallert, 2008). while research has found that a lot of l2 teachers focus on micro issues in their feedback (lee, 2008), electronic teacher feedback tends to be content dominated; specifically, the combined use of asynchronous feedback (via word comments) and synchronous text-based chats allows teachers to put more emphasis on higher-order issues in their feedback (ene & upton, 2018). in addition to electronic feedback, peer feedback is likely to engender student revisions at the meaning level (yang et al., 2006). although students tend to prefer teacher feedback to peer feedback (yang et al., 2006), peer feedback still has a significant role to play as it is “associated with a greater degree of student autonomy” (yang et al., 2006, p. 179). also, self-feedback generated from data-driven learning (through the use of corpora) is found to assist students’ self-correction of errors, with certain error icy lee 562 types (e.g., omission, noun number, and agreement errors) being more frequently and accurately corrected with corpus use than others (e.g., verb voice and verb form errors) (satake, 2020). 3.3.2. assessment for learning (n = 1) assessment for learning (afl) involves not only peer and self-feedback but also explicit sharing of learning goals and strengthened pre-writing instruction (lee & coniam, 2013). although these strategies sound uncomplicated, the implementation of afl in l2 writing classrooms is not a straightforward matter since teacher, student, school and systemic issues especially in examination-oriented school contexts (e.g., in hong kong) are found to be restraining factors (lee & coniam, 2013), posing impediments to teachers’ afl practices. a case in point is the need for teachers to correct all errors in student writing, which is against the spirit of afl. 3.3.3. multimodal composing (n = 1) an important afl strategy is to clarify the learning goals of writing, which directly inform the design of assessment criteria for classroom writing. little, however, is known about how afl can be designed to reflect learning goals in digital environments, such as the development of multiple-mode competencies in digital multimodal composing. recent classroom-based research has found that through adopting a process-based model for assessing digital multimodal composing, both teachers and peers can provide formative feedback on rhetorical organization and language use in the drafts of student scripts (hafner & ho, 2020), suggesting that the assessment design of digital multimodal composing should draw on both formative and summative strategies, and engage teachers, peers and self at different points in the design process (hafner & ho, 2020). 4. key theories and methodologies adopted my review of the 75 articles published in jslw reveals that 48 of them (64%) draw on theory, such as genre theory/systemic functional linguistics (wette, 2017b; worden, 2019; yasuda, 2011), sociocultural theory (liao, 2018), specifically activity theory (cho, 2017; fujioka, 2014), perezhivanie (mochizuki, 2019), ecological perspectives (zhu, 2020), intercultural rhetoric (abasi, 2012; liu & du, 2018), feminist theory (sánchezmartín & seloni, 2019), attribution theory (finn, 2018), complexity theory (yu et al., 2020), language socialization (friedman, 2019), critical perspectives (britton & leonard, 2020; liu, 2008), and bakhtin’s dialogism (merkel, 2020). in studies that do not make explicit reference to theory, the investigations usually start with a practical issue developments in classroom-based research on l2 writing 563 in the classroom, such as the role of technology in teacher feedback (ene & upton, 2018) and how students perceive corpus use in the writing classroom (yoon & hirvela, 2004). the researchers provide the rationale of the research by drawing on previous studies and let the data speak for themselves. in terms of methodology, 20 (26.7%) out of 75 studies are designed as teacher research, self-study (abasi, 2012; britton & leonard, 2020; worden, 2019) or action research (han & hiver, 2018; wette, 2010), with the investigations conducted by the teacher-researchers. other common methodologies are case study research (spycher, 2007; zhu, 2020) and ethnography (harman, 2013; kibler, 2011). myriads of data collection methods are used (primarily qualitative), notably student texts/textual data, interviews/focus groups, stimulated recall, think-aloud protocols, journals, written reflections, questionnaires, classroom observations, group discussions, and recording of writing sessions/interactions. to enhance the trustworthiness of findings, most classroom-based studies rely on several data sources with data triangulation performed. 5. pedagogical implications a number of pedagogical implications can be drawn from the review of the 75 studies published in jslw from 2001-2020, which are examined according to the three research strands that guide the review. 5.1. students and student learning of writing to facilitate l2 students’ development of academic literacy, it is important that teachers help students cope with source texts to facilitate effective citation practices (li & casanave, 2012; wette, 2017a). teachers can also make use of mind maps (wette, 2017b) and genre-based/analysis tasks (yasuda, 2011, 2015) to foster students’ genre knowledge and genre awareness. student collaboration can be exploited at different stages of the writing process; for instance, prewriting collaboration through face-to-face discussion or online text chat (liao, 2018; neumann & mcdonough, 2015), collaborative writing (during writing) (storch, 2005; yang, 2014), and group writing conferences (after writing) (mochizuki, 2019). further, teachers can pay greater attention to issues of student voice (thurlow et al., 2019), identities, agency (liu, 2008; liu & tannacito, 2013), as well as the obstacles students may face in their academic literacy development (finn, 2018; spycher, 2007) so that they can better design writing instruction to empower students and cater to their needs. moreover, it is crucial that l2 writing teachers bring to their teaching a good understanding of their students’ beliefs, views, attitudes, perceptions, motivations, anxieties, etc. (abasi, 2012; lee, 2008; okuda, 2019; yoon & hirvela, icy lee 564 2004), since these cognitive and affective dimensions have direct bearing on student learning of writing. with a better understanding of different student variables, teachers are more likely to provide motivational writing instruction and assessment/feedback that enhance student engagement and self-efficacy (han & hiver, 2018; han & hyland, 2015). the development of digital literacy has taken on new importance in the 21st century, as shown in the increase of published research on digital writing in the past few years. drawing from the findings of this review, teachers could provide opportunities for digital writing, encourage online collaboration (such as pre-writing online chats and online collaborative writing), and equip students with multimodal resources to develop their digital literacy. they can provide explicit instruction in digital interactional skills to maximize learning outcomes, and explore opportunities for students to engage in cross-national or telecollaboration projects that involve them in writing collaboratively with peers from other regions in digital spaces. research on tutor-tutee interactions has important implications not only for instructors based in writing centers, but also for teachers interested in using one-on-one conferences to support student learning of writing. in addition to affective support of the tutors and the use of learner-centered tutoring strategies, as demonstrated in this review, it is important to engage students in dialogic interaction, and empower them to take responsibility for learning in one-one-one interactions by, for example, making them set goals and monitor them, and for tutors to use strategies that cater to individual student needs and abilities. 5.2. teachers and teaching of writing as revealed in the findings, l2 writing teachers can explore a host of instructional or pedagogical approaches to promote l2 students’ writing development, such as coherence instruction (lee, 2002), summary writing instruction (mcdonough et al., 2014), and metaphor-oriented instruction (wan, 2014). specifically, genre-based pedagogy (de oliveira & lan, 2014; worden, 2015) has considerable potential for learners at different educational levels and contexts, including preand in-service teachers. for preand in-service teachers, it is important that they engage in ongoing professional development to enhance their own knowledge of writing (e.g., genre knowledge) and develop ability to critically evaluate and reflect on teaching content so as to enhance their professional competence as teachers of writing (worden, 2015, 2019). additionally, teachers can be made aware of their own beliefs about writing and the teaching of writing, how their beliefs may diverge from their practices, and what they can do to foster greater alignment between beliefs and practices. developments in classroom-based research on l2 writing 565 5.3. classroom assessment and feedback feedback is a central component of classroom writing assessment. aside from conventional written teacher feedback, teachers can explore alternative modes of feedback to maximize student learning, such as synchronous and asynchronous electronic feedback and other kinds of technology supported feedback, which is found to generate more feedback on content and higher-order issues (ene & upton, 2018). given that peer feedback can facilitate learner autonomy, it should be used in conjunction with teacher feedback (yang et al., 2006). teachers can incorporate data-driven learning to empower students to play a more active role in self-editing (satake, 2020). above all, afl has a pivotal role to play in classroom assessment (lee & coniam, 2013); despite the challenges, teachers should explore ways to integrate it into writing classrooms, including classrooms that practice digital multimodal composing (hafner & ho, 2020). 6. recommendations for future research future classroom-based research on l2 writing can continue to address the unanswered questions that emanate from previous research and explore new frontiers to push forward classroom-based writing research. this concluding section examines research directions by examining some possible topics/areas for further investigation, as well as methodological and theoretical perspectives that can be considered for future research. 6.1. research areas/topics for further research the majority of studies reviewed in this paper have focused on students and their learning of writing. it is envisaged that students’ development of academic writing and academic literacy is a topic that will continue to attract considerable research attention. while the bulk of such research has focused on older learners in higher education contexts, future studies can address underrepresented groups like young and adult l2 learners with emergent literacy. classroom-based research on different pedagogical focuses or strategies adopted by l2 writing teachers will continue to be of interest to researchers. apart from conventional focuses on form, structure, and language features as shown in the review study, it is useful to approach this research area from the perspective of the 21st century skills that l2 writers need, such as critical thinking and digital literacy skills, to ascertain how these 21st century skills could be fostered in l2 writing classrooms. this review has found a number of classroom-based studies that address l2 writing teachers, both pre-service and in-service; however, attention to l2 icy lee 566 writing teacher educators is non-existent. recent l2 teacher education literature has expanded to include a focus on language teacher educators, such as who they are (issue of identity), what they do (their teacher education practice), and how they develop professionally (barkhuizen, 2021; yuan & lee, 2021). in the realm of l2 writing, a lot more classroom-based research can be conducted to better understand the identity, work and lives of l2 writing teacher educators. feedback as a component of classroom writing assessment is of perennial interest to researchers. in this review, there is only one classroom-based study focusing on wcf. as suggested by atkinson and tardy (2018), research on wcf has to be conducted in situ, with more attention paid to wcf as one component of feedback and the broader pedagogical context of the classroom (see lee et al., 2021). we are entering the post-covid era. how technology can be further leveraged in classroom writing assessment and feedback is a promising area for further classroom-based research, for example, data driven learning, electronic feedback, and technology enhanced feedback in various forms (such as screencast feedback). with a rising number of studies on digital writing (13 in total from 2016 to 2020) in recent years, it is envisaged that digital multimodal writing will continue to gain currency. more classroom-based research could investigate how assessment for and as learning, and formative feedback strategies can be applied to writing in digital spaces to promote student learning. 6.2. methodological and theoretical perspectives in future research in terms of research methodology, less than 30% of the studies reviewed in this paper have been conducted by teachers themselves, with the majority undertaken by external researchers. the emic perspective can generate rich insight that benefits teaching, learning and assessment in the writing classroom. as such, l2 writing teachers can be encouraged and empowered to research their own practice by undertaking action research, teacher research, self-study or autoethnography. l2 writing teacher educators’ self-study can also provide an interesting methodological approach that generates new knowledge about the work and lives of writing teacher educators. this review shows that mixed-methods research has been under-utilized; future classroom-based research could use mixed methods to investigate teaching, learning, and assessment in the l2 writing classroom. given that classroom-based research captures what happens in the classroom, theoretical perspectives that draw on sociocultural theory, ecological systems theory, and complexity theory have great potential in l2 writing contexts. for example, they could be employed for exploring the interaction between student and context variables in the teaching and learning of l2 writing, and uncovering the complexity of feedback practices in situ – so as to yield research developments in classroom-based research on l2 writing 567 findings of greater pedagogical relevance. the utility of these theoretical perspectives remains to be more thoroughly investigated in future classroom-based research on l2 writing. 7. conclusion to conclude, this state-of-the-art review of developments in classroom-based research on l2 writing, despite its limitation (covering articles in jslw only), contributes to a nuanced understanding of salient issues about learning, teaching, and assessment of l2 writing in naturalistic classroom contexts. it is hoped that the pedagogical implications and recommendations for future research can provide useful information for l2 writing practitioners and researchers, respectively, to guide their practice. icy lee 568 references 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(2020). tracing efl writers’ digital literacy practices in asynchronous communication: a multiple-case study. journal of second language writing, 50, 100754. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2020.100754 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: chengchen li (huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan, china) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) editor: joanna zawodniak (university of zielona góra, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (silesian university of technology, gliwice, poland) vol. 11 no. 4 december 2021 editorial board: ali al-hoorie (royal commission for jubail and yanbu, jubail, saudi arabia) larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) maria dakowska (university of warsaw, poland) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) tammy gregersen (american university of sharjah, united arab emirates) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2021 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: jakub bielak mariusz kruk chengchen li aleksandra wach joanna zawodniak © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: jakub bielak, melanie ellis, mariusz kruk, chengchen li, aleksandra wach, joanna zawodniak cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 61 829 64 20 fax +48 61 829 64 21 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · social sciences citation index (wos core collection) · journal citation reports social sciences (wos) · scopus · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) · current contents – social and behavioral sciences (wos) · essential science indicators (wos) studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 11, number 4, december 2021 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors .....................................................................481 editorial ..........................................................................................487 articles: lanxi wang, peter d. macintyre – second language listening comprehension: the role of anxiety and enjoyment in listening metacognitive awareness ....................................................................................... 491 safoura jahedizadeh, ali h. al-hoorie – directed motivational currents: a systematic review ......................................................................... 517 jelena bobkina, maría-josé gómez-ortiz, maría cristina núñez del río, susana sastre-merino – why am i learning english? spanish efl sports science university students´ motivational orientations through the prism of the l2 motivational self system................................... 543 raees calafato – “i feel like it’s giving me a lot as a language teacher to be a learner myself”: factors affecting the implementation of a multilingual pedagogy as reported by teachers of diverse languages ................ 579 erdem akbaş, zeynep ölçü dinçer – accuracy order in l2 grammatical morphemes: corpus evidence from different proficiency levels of turkish learners of english ........................................................................... 607 book reviews: mengyao ma, xuesong (andy) gao – review of individual differences in language learning: a complex systems theory perspective by carol griffiths and adem soruç ................................................................ 629 breno silva – review of learning words from reading: a cognitive model of word-meaning inference by megumi hamada ........................... 635 reviewers for volume 11/2021 ........................................................ 641 notes to contributors ...................................................................... 647 481 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors erdem akbaş, phd, is assistant professor at the department of english language teaching, erciyes university, turkey. he has been co-organizing the first-of-itskind conference on metadiscourse since 2017 (mag2017, mag2019, mag2021: metadiscourse across genres: mapping interaction in spoken & written discourses). he also published a co-edited book and a co-edited special issue on metadiscourse. dr. akbaş is also a member of erumarg, a research group exploring social interaction from a micro-analytical perspective. he is currently working on a co-edited book on metadiscourse in non-academic genres to be published by lexington books (rowman & littlefield). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2204-3119 contact details: erciyes university, faculty of education, b404, kayseri, turkey (erdemakbas@erciyes.edu.tr, erdemakbas@alumni.york.ac.uk) ali h. al-hoorie is assistant professor at the jubail english language and preparatory year institute, education sector, royal commission for jubail and yanbu, saudi arabia. he completed his phd in applied linguistics at the university of nottingham, uk under the supervision of professors zoltán dörnyei and norbert schmitt. he also holds an ma in social science data analysis from essex university, uk. his research interests include motivation theory, research methodology, and complexity. his publications have appeared in various journals including language learning, modern language journal, studies in second language acquisition, elt journal, language teaching research, and learning and individual differences. his books include research methods for complexity in applied linguistics (multilingual matters, 2020, with phil hiver), student engagement in the language classroom (multilingual matters, 2021, co-edited with phil hiver and sarah mercer), and contemporary language motivation theory: 60 years since gardner and lambert (1959) (multilingual matters, 2020, co-edited with peter macintyre). the latter book is the winner of the jake harwood outstanding book award. 482 orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3810-5978 contact details: po box 10099, jubail english language and preparatory year institute, education sector, royal commission for jubail and yanbu, jubail industrial city 31961, saudi arabia (hoorie_a@jic.edu.sa) jelena bobkina, phd, is associate professor in the department of linguistics applied to science and technology at the universidad politécnica de madrid (upm), where she teaches english for specific purposes. her main publication and research interests are in computer-assisted language learning, discourse analysis in digital media environments, and efl/esl teaching methodology. her work has appeared in journals such as computer assisted language learning, education information technologies, teaching english with technology, studies in second language learning and teaching, and aila review, among others. she has recently co-edited two volumes published by igi global and peter lang. her recent monographs appeared in elt council, multilingual matters, mcgraw hill, and bloomsbury. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0432-9957 contact details: etsi informáticos, universidad politécnica de madrid, c/ciruelos, 2, 28660, boadilla del monte, madrid, spain (jelena.bobkina@upm.es) raees calafato, phd, is based at the university of bergen’s department of foreign languages. his research interests include multilingual pedagogy and teacher identity, the learning of languages other than english in super-diverse contexts, and the place of literature in language education. specifically, his research projects focus on language learning motivation, self-regulation, and mindsets in multilingual language learners, teacher identity in those who teach multiple languages, the implementation of multilingual teaching practices by teachers of english and other languages, the nature of literary and multimodal competence in multilingual language learners and teachers, and language policy and emotions in transnational multilingual families. his works, which include studies that are the first to have investigated the implementation of multilingual teaching practices in russia, have appeared in journals such as teaching and teacher education, language teaching research, foreign language annals, and system, among many others. he has presented the findings of his research at several international conferences, including com (conference on multilingualism) and momm (multilingualism on my mind). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8222-6772 contact details: department of foreign languages, university of bergen, hf-bygget, sydnesplassen 7, 5007 bergen, norway (raees.calafato@uib.no) 483 zeynep ölçü dinçer, phd, is assistant professor at the department of english language teaching, hakkari university, turkey and has been doing research on teacher education and career development, second language acquisition and english-medium instruction. her work has appeared in reputable international journals such as educational studies and journal of education for teaching. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3680-3986 contact details: hakkari university, faculty of education, kıran mah. zeynel bey yerleşkesi 30000, turkey (zeynepdincer@hakkari.edu.tr; zeynepolcudincer@gmail.com) xuesong (andy) gao is associate professor in the school of education, university of new south wales, australia. his research interests include language learner autonomy, language education policy, and language teacher education. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3426-8721 contact details: school of education, university of new south wales, high street, kensington, sydney, nsw 2052, australia (xuesong.gao@unsw.edu.au) safoura jahedizadeh is lecturer of applied linguistics at imam reza international university of mashhad, iran. she completed her phd in english language teaching at ferdowsi university of mashhad, iran. her research interests include psycholinguistics and particularly language learning motivation. she has published widely on psycholinguistic, psychological and emotional variables in the field of english as a foreign language. she won the award of elites foundation owing to extensive research and her first rank as an ma student in 2016 as well as a phd student in 2018. her recent book is higher order thinking skills in the language classroom: a concise guide (springer, 2021). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8711-2608 contact details: razavi khorasan province, 9185763788 mashhad, felestin square, imam reza international university, iran (jahedi.s1310@gmail.com) maría-josé gómez-ortiz holds a phd in applied linguistics and is associate professor in the department of linguistics applied to science and technology at the universidad politécnica de madrid (upm). her main areas of interest are discourse analysis, efl/esl teaching methodology, metaphor in science & technology and ele. she is co-author of bilingual dictionary of scientific and technical metaphors and metonymies. spanish-english/english-spanish (2016, routledge). her work has appeared in journals such as retos, ricyde, teaching english with technology and studies in second language learning and teaching. other research publications include book chapters published by mcgraw hill and bloomsbury. her 484 current project on specific vocabulary acquisition is called “sharing european architectural heritage” and is co-funded by the erasmus+ program of the european union (https://www.seahproject.eu/index.php). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8822-0320 contact details: facultad de ciencias de la actividad física y del deporte (inef), universidad politécnica de madrid, c/ martín fierro, 7, 28040, madrid, spain (maria.gomez.ortiz@upm.es) mengyao ma is a doctoral student in the school of foreign languages and literature, wuhan university, wuhan, hubei province, china. her research and teaching interests include foreign language literature and language teaching. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2994-0197 contact details: school of foreign languages and literature, wuhan university, wuhan 430072, china (mengyao.ma@whu.edu.cn) peter d. macintyre is professor of psychology at cape breton university, sydney, canada. his research focuses on the psychology of language and communication. he has published over 100 articles and chapters on language anxiety, willingness to communicate, motivation and other topics. he has co-authored or co-edited books on topics including positive psychology in sla, motivational dynamics, nonverbal communication, teaching innovations, and capitalizing on language learner individuality. his awards include being recognized for teaching excellence (atlantic association of universities), the gardner award (international association for language and social psychology) and the mildenberger prize (modern language association) for contributions to the study of language. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1085-6692 contact details: department of psychology, cape breton university, 1250 grand lake rd, b1p 6l2, sydney, nova scotia, canada (peter_macintyre@cbu.ca) maría cristina núñez-del-río holds a phd in educational sciences. she is associate professor at the institute for educational sciences (ice) at the universidad politécnica de madrid. she leads the forprofe research group. she is an expert in methods of applied statistics. her lines of research focus on educational guidance and attention to diversity as well as on assessment strategies and tools. she is the author of more than 30 papers in national and international journals, books and book chapters. her work has appeared in journals such as the international journal of engineering education, electronic journal of research in education psychology, jotse: journal of technology and science education, rie: 485 revista de investigación educativa, among others. she has also been a counselor for more than 15 years in a special education center. since 2011, she has lectured mase (methods of applied statistics in education) at the institute of education sciences of the technical university of madrid (upm). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3349-8015 contact details: instituto de ciencias de la educación-ice, universidad politécnica de madrid, c/ profesor aranguren 3, 28040, madrid, spain (mc.nunez@upm.es) susana sastre-merino, phd, is assistant professor at the institute for educational sciences of the technical university of madrid (upm), where she teaches educational processes and educational innovation and research. her research interests focus on active educational methods, experiential learning, competences development and evaluation. her work has appeared in journals such as aila review, international journal of engineering education, studies in educational evaluation and journal of technology and science education, among others. she has recently co-edited a special issue of australasian journal of educational technology. she also has experience in secondary education teaching. she has authored some book chapters in volumes published by springer and sage. she is also a member of the forprofe research group. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9511-3793 contact details: instituto de ciencias de la educación-ice, universidad politécnica de madrid, c. profesor aranguren 3, 28040, madrid, spain (susana.sastre@upm.es) breno silva is assistant professor of applied linguistics at the institute of english studies, university of warsaw. his research focuses on lexical learning among bilingual and multilingual learners. more specifically, his research explores the effectiveness of different types of tasks, particularly reading and writing tasks, to vocabulary learning and how different amounts of cognitive processing may affect lexical acquisition. breno silva has also been an efl teacher for over 15 years in three different countries. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6574-5896 contact details: institute of english studies, university of warsaw, hoża 69, 00-681, warsaw, poland (b.barreto-sil2@uw.edu.pl) lanxi wang is a graduate student at saint mary’s university in halifax, nova scotia, canada. she completed her bsc. with honors at cape breton university, sydney, canada. her research focused on anxiety and enjoyment in second language 486 listening comprehension. currently her research interests include occupational health and cross-cultural communication at workplaces. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6951-6177 contact details: department of psychology, saint mary’s university, 923 robie street, b3h 3c3, halifax, nova scotia, canada (lanxi.wang@smu.ca) 381 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (3). 2022. 381-404 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.3.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt research trends in task-based language teaching: a bibliometric analysis from 1985 to 2020 jie qin south china agricultural university, guangzhou, china https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1678-9195 qinjie@scau.edu.cn lei lei shanghai international studies university, shanghai, china https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3366-1855 leileicn@126.com abstract this study offers a bibliometric analysis of research trends in task-based language teaching (tblt) from 1985 to 2020. the analysis covers research questions related to the publication trends, venues for publication, productive authors, highly cited articles and references and, more importantly, the most frequently explored tblt-related topics and their developmental patterns across the past 35 years. results showed that tblt was still mostly approached from the traditional cognitive-interactionist and psycholinguistic perspectives with a focus on tasks, individuals (i.e., learners and teachers), task-related variables (e.g., task complexity and task repetition), task performance, and the resultant linguistic forms. while this field of research has witnessed a growing interest in learners’ individual differences and computermediated, technologies-assisted learning, a decreasing trend has been observed in topics related to error and recast. implications for task-based research, pedagogy, and research methodologies are discussed. keywords: task-based language teaching; bibliometric analysis; research trend jie qin, lei lei 382 1. introduction task-based language teaching (tblt), also labeled as task-based language learning and task-based instruction, constitutes an approach to language teaching and learning that prioritizes the use of authentic language to complete meaningful tasks in the target language. pedagogically originating from communicative language teaching and solidly grounded in second language acquisition (sla) theories and research, tblt has been exerting a significant influence on the teaching and learning of a second or foreign language (l2/fl) since its initiation in the 1980s (candlin, 1987; long, 1985; nunan, 1989; prabhu, 1987). by focusing on authentic, communicative tasks, tblt emphasizes learners’ incidental acquisition of and engagement with language as a meaning-making tool. hence, it constitutes a radical departure from the traditional, structural approaches that consider language as an object to be systematically taught and intentionally learned (ellis et al., 2020; long, 2016; van den branden, 2016). tblt is far from being a single, monolithic approach. researchers distinguish between the strong and weak versions of tblt1 and acknowledge a variety of perspectives from which tblt may be theoretically approached, such as the cognitive-interactionist, psycholinguistic, sociocultural, psychological, and educational perspectives (ellis et al., 2020).2 additionally, tblt is an important area of language teaching where pedagogy and research are complementary and closely intertwined (ellis et al., 2020). that is, attention to tblt comes from not only sla researchers interested in the effects of features of task design and their implementation on learning results (e.g., qin, 2019), but also teachers and educational authorities concerned with designing and implementing effective programs and language instruction (e.g., robinson, 2011). as the present study aims to conduct a systematic review of tblt as a whole and its developmental trend, it incorporates various versions and theoretical perspectives on tblt and takes into consideration both task-based pedagogy and task-based research. 1 the two versions of tblt hold different viewpoints regarding the role of tasks in language teaching. the strong version argues that tasks should be the unit of language teaching, while everything else should be subsidiary. in contrast, the weak version claims that although tasks are a vital part of language instruction, they may be preceded or followed by focused instruction (see skehan, 1996, for a more elaborate discussion). 2 ellis et al. (2020) elaborate on five theoretical perspectives on task-based research. the cognitive-interactionist approach examines the relationship between tasks, interaction, and acquisition, while the psycholinguistic perspective delves into the cognitive processes involved in the production of l2 tasks. in the sociocultural perspective, a task is viewed as an artefact for mediating learning through interaction. the psychological perspective draws on the theory and research that addresses individual learner factors. finally, the educational perspective focuses on general educational theories and research that draws on educational accounts. research trends in task-based language teaching: a bibliometric analysis from 1985 to 2020 383 over the past three decades or so, tblt has gained a well-respected status among sla researchers and language teachers (ellis, 2003; robinson, 2001; skehan, 1996; willis, 1996). it has recently attracted more attention and a growing number of works concerning tblt have been published, such as monographs (e.g., ellis et al., 2020; long, 2015), edited volumes (e.g., ahmadian & long, 2021; samuda et al., 2018), state-of-the-art articles (e.g., ellis, 2017; long, 2016; van den branden, 2016), and empirical studies (e.g., michel et al., 2020; qin & zhang, 2022). moreover, an international conference (the international conference on task-based language teaching) and a newly launched journal (journal on taskbased language teaching and learning) have been dedicated to the discussion of tasks and tblt. a number of meta-analyses have been conducted by synthesizing the effects of features of tblt on various outcome measures. some of them have focused on the overall effects of task-based, interaction-related features of tblt on learners’ acquisition of specific grammatical and lexical structures (e.g., cobb, 2010; keck et al., 2006; mackey & goo, 2007). others have laid emphasis on particular issues of task features, in particular task complexity, within tblt (e.g., jackson & suethanapornkul, 2013; johnson, 2017; sasayama et al., 2015). in comparison, few of the meta-analyses have targeted the implementation and evaluation of long-term tblt programs (e.g., bryfonski & mckay, 2019). these meta-analyses, along with other research syntheses (e.g., plonsky & kim, 2016), have contributed much to our understanding of task-based research (e.g., taskbased interaction in mackey & goo, 2007). however, what is still lacking in this line of inquiry is a presentation of the research status and current trends of tblt as a whole. up to now, the field has still been unequipped with a systematic, quantitative overview of the most frequently explored tblt-related topics and their developmental patterns that have come to the fore since its emergence. bibliometric analysis is a technique that uses bibliographic information to explore the research trends in a specific area (e.g., lin & lei, 2020 ) or country (e.g., lei & liao, 2017). it has recently begun to attract attention in the field of applied linguistics, due to its convenience and robustness in data analyses (e.g., zhang, 2020). in particular, it has been applied to survey research in certain areas, such as multilingualism (lin & lei, 2020), english as a lingua franca (o’neil, 2018), and cognitive processing of emotion words (liu et al., 2020). thus, in this study, we adopt the bibliometric perspective to explore the developmental trajectory of tblt research since 1985 when long initiated the proposal (long, 1985). more specifically, the following questions are to be addressed: 1) what is the research status in the field of tblt? 2) what are the research trends in tblt? jie qin, lei lei 384 the status of tblt will be addressed by looking at the overall publication trend in the examined years, the major publication venues, the most productive authors in the research area, and the most highly cited articles and references. the research trends will be explored by examining the most frequently explored tblt-related topics across the examined years. it is hoped that such a bibliometric exploration can help us better understand research concerning taskbased language teaching and learning, and the resultant synthesis may be of much interest and significance to tblt researchers, educational practitioners, syllabus designers, as well as language policy makers. in the sections below, we first describe the methods used for the data analysis, followed by the results and discussion with regard to the research questions, with a focus on the most frequently explored topics across time. finally, implications for task-based research, pedagogy, and research methodologies are discussed. 2. methods in this section, we describe the methods that were used in the study for the data analysis. 2.1. data the data that we used in the present study were the bibliometric information of journal articles downloaded from the web of science. in order to more accurately and exhaustively harvest the information of the articles on tblt, we first consulted literature pertinent to tblt (e.g., bryfonski & mckay, 2019; ellis et al., 2020; long, 2016; plonsky & kim, 2016) and prepared a list of 41 tblt-related search terms (see appendix). then, following previous bibliometric studies in applied linguistics such as lei and liu (2019b), we queried the terms in all ssciand a&hci-indexed journals in (applied) linguistics and education in the web of science core collection on september 8, 2020. similar to previous studies such as zhang (2020), we retrieved the web of science core collection for our data since the database is considered as one of the most well-known and widely used multidisciplinary bibliometric databases, which indexes high-quality journals with their bibliometric information (roemer & borchardt, 2015). we set the span of the queried literature from 1985 to 2020 since, as previously indicated, tblt research started from 1985 as michael long published his seminal work a role for instruction in second language acquisition: task-based language teaching in that year (long, 1985). we obtained the bibliometric information of 1,215 articles at this stage. since some of the articles might have been irrelevant to the present study, we closely read the titles and abstracts of the articles and selected a total of 518 articles for the follow-up analysis based on the following research trends in task-based language teaching: a bibliometric analysis from 1985 to 2020 385 criteria: 1) the article should focus on language teaching or learning, rather than research issues in other subjects such as nursery, physics, chemistry, and so on; and 2) the article should be pertinent to the implementation of either the strong or weak version of a tblt program or part of the program (such as needs analysis, task-based assessment, etc.); or 3) the article should include at least one taskrelevant factor (such as task type, task feature, task condition, etc.) as the independent or dependent variables. 2.2. data processing first, we counted the number of publications each year for the analysis of publication trend. it should be noted that 18 of the 518 publications were tagged as “early access,” and we considered them as published in 2020. then, we counted the number of publications for each journal and for each author for the analyses of major publication venues and most productive researchers in the area. second, we identified highly cited articles with both the normalized and raw citation counts. we used the normalized citation count because the raw citation count may be biased in favor of earlier publications since they have more chance to receive citations (lei & liao, 2017; lei & yan, 2016). the normalized citation count was calculated by dividing the raw citation of each article by the total citation count that all articles published in the same year received. for example, the raw citation count of skehan (2009) was 230 and the total citation count of all the 21 articles published in 2009 was 1202. hence, the normalized citation count of skehan (2009) was 0.1913 (230/1202 = 0.1913). it should be pointed out that we only considered the situation when more than one article was published in a certain year. if there was only one article published in a certain year, due to the limited size of the data, the normalized citation count of that article should be 1, which was skewed and meaningless. for the same reason, we also considered high raw citation counts in case some important articles were left out as a result of the normalized citation. to summarize, we combined and reported on the lists of the top 10 highly cited articles from both normalized and raw citation counts, which should paint a fuller picture of the highly cited articles in the area. third, we extracted all referenced works in the 518 articles and calculated their occurrence, that is, the number of citations they received in the articles. these highly cited works are considered as highly cited references in the research area (lei & liu, 2019a). last, we extracted and identified research topics on tblt. we syntactically parsed and extracted noun phrases from the abstracts with a homemade python script based on the package spacy (lei et al., 2020; the script will be provided upon request). we followed previous studies such as zhang (2020) and used the jie qin, lei lei 386 abstracts to identify the topics since the author-provided keywords are very limited in number and important topics may be overlooked (zhang, 2020). this also applies to the titles since they are short in length. for example, in the following sentence (example 1), both simple noun phrases such as it, such joint raised performance, accuracy, complexity, a function, and task difficulty and complicated noun phrases such as such joint raised performance between accuracy and complexity, accuracy and complexity, and a function of task difficulty were parsed and extracted. example 1 it is argued that such joint raised performance between accuracy and complexity is not a function of task difficulty… (skehan, 2009) we considered noun phrases as the candidate research topics for the reason that a research topic or theme is a lexical noun phrase of high frequency that occurs across a wide range of texts (justeson & katz, 1995; lei et al., 2020). due to the limited data size, we decided, after several rounds of experimentation, that for a noun phrase to be considered as a candidate topic it should occur at least five times across at least five abstracts. at this stage, a total of 296 noun phrases met the foregoing criteria. then, we closely read the 296 noun phrases and discussed if they could be considered as candidate research topics on tblt. noun phrases such as they, it, this study, and the results were left out, while 94 ones were filtered in. since some of the noun phrases were fairly similar in meaning, the 94 noun phrases were then combined into 44 research topics. for example, task types and task type were combined as the topic “task type,” and fluency, accuracy, and complexity were combined as “calf.” in order to identify the trend of the research topics, we categorized the examined years into three research phases (i.e., phase 1: 1985-2009, phase 2: 2010-2015, and phase 3: 2016-2020) for two reasons. first, the categorization should strike a balance between time and data size. the data of the present study were distributed unevenly with many more works published in more recent years (see the section on results). we performed several rounds of experiments and decided on the present categorization, which seemed to be the most acceptable option, with 96 abstracts for phase 1 and 211 abstracts for both phases 2 and 3. second, we considered 2009 and 2015 as the dividing years since they witnessed important publications such as skehan (2009), ellis (2009), and long (2015) (see the section on result), which may in part justify their roles of the turning points in the development of tblt research. we then calculated the raw frequency of the topics at each phase and the normalized frequency with the following formula (i.e., the relative frequency per 200 abstracts since both phases 2 and 3 contained approximately 200 abstracts). research trends in task-based language teaching: a bibliometric analysis from 1985 to 2020 387 normalized frequency= raw frequency number of abstracts at the phase *200 finally, we performed chi-squared tests of the normalized frequencies of each topic and determined the trend of each topic based on the standardized or pearson residual value of its chi-squared test. the standardized residual refers to the strength of difference between the observed and expected values, or which cell functions on the significance of the chi-squared test (sharpe, 2015). if the absolute value of the standardized residual was close to or larger than 2, the topic was considered as experiencing an increasing or decreasing trend; otherwise, it was stable across the examined span (agresti, 2007). 3. results and discussion in this section, we describe and discuss the findings with regard to the research questions, that is, the publication trend, important publication venues, the most productive authors, the most highly cited articles and highly cited references, and, last but not least, the most frequently explored topics across time. 3.1. publication trend the number of publications by year is presented in table 1 and the publication trend is illustrated in figure 1. it can be observed that during the first two decades (i.e., from 1987 to 2006) since tblt’s first appearance in the 1980s, barely a few works were published in journals, with an annual figure of only 2 or 3 in general or 6 at most. however, this does not mean that tblt did not attract researchers’ and educators’ attention at that time, as evidenced by a number of influential works on task-based teaching and learning in terms of monographs (e.g., ellis, 2003; nunan, 1989; prabhu, 1987; skehan, 1998a; willis, 1996), edited volumes (e.g., bygate et al., 2001; leaver & willis, 2004; van den branden, 2006), and book chapters (e.g., candlin, 1987; long, 1985), in addition to journal articles. beginning from 2007, the number of journal publications related to tblt began to show a discernibly upward trend, reaching a peak of 53 in 2015, approximately 30 years after the launch of the field in 1985. from then on, the figure remained relatively constant, with a range of 45 to 55 annual publications (except 36 in 2018), making tblt one of the hot topics in applied linguistics research. such an observation is confirmed by the result of the simple linear regression that showed that the number of tblt publications across the examined years had significantly increased (f(1, 29) = 90.330, p < .001) with a large effect size (multiple r2 = .757, adjusted r2 = .749). jie qin, lei lei 388 table 1 number of publications by year year number of publications year number of publications 1987 1 2006 1 1991 3 2007 9 1992 2 2008 14 1993 1 2009 21 1994 1 2010 20 1995 3 2011 23 1996 4 2012 34 1997 3 2013 37 1998 1 2014 26 1999 5 2015 53 2000 4 2016 45 2001 6 2017 55 2002 5 2018 36 2003 6 2019 46 2004 4 2020 47 2005 2 total 518 figure 1 number of publications by year 3.2. publication venues the top 10 journals in terms of the number of publications on tblt are presented in table 2. all of them are high-impact journals in the discipline of applied linguistics (high-impact in terms of their impact factor since they all rank amongst the top 15 journals out of a total of more than 180 ssci-indexed linguistics journals) and are to a great extent committed to language teaching and learning. the finding seemingly implies that tblt has been widely accepted as a pedagogical approach to the teaching and learning of an l2/fl. it is of particular interest to note that three of the top 10 journals, that is, language learning & technology, computer assisted language learning, and recall, are related to technology and computer-assisted learning. this demonstrates that researchers in tblt are research trends in task-based language teaching: a bibliometric analysis from 1985 to 2020 389 also interested in investigating the use of technology and computer techniques to design, implement, and manipulate task-based teaching and learning. table 2 top 10 publication venues journals number of articles published language teaching research 60 system 41 modern language journal 24 language learning & technology 22 applied linguistics 20 language learning 19 tesol quarterly 18 journal of second language writing 17 computer assisted language learning 15 recall 15 3.3. most productive authors the authors with six or more publications on tblt are listed in table 3. out of the nine authors, peter skehan and rod ellis, whose articles and books are often cited by tblt researchers (see tables 4 and 5), are highly productive as well, which reflects their leading roles in the field. also, both youjin kim and andrea révész are remarkably productive in the field of tblt, each with more than 10 published articles. other authors listed in the table are also well-established scholars in the research area: judit kormos, zsuzsanna abrams, laura gurzynski-weiss, craig lambert, and caroline payant. it should also be noted that michael long, though not listed as a productive author, contributed papers that are both highly cited and immensely influential (long, 2015; long & crookes, 1992), which, together with his pioneering work (long, 1985), have secured his position in the field of task-based learning and teaching. table 3 productive authors with six or more publications authors number of articles published kim, youjin 15 révész, andrea 11 kormos, judit 7 skehan, peter 7 abrams, zsuzsanna 6 ellis, rod 6 gurzynski-weiss, laura 6 lambert, craig 6 payant, caroline 6 jie qin, lei lei 390 3.4. most highly cited articles and highly cited references the most highly cited articles based on both raw and normalized citation counts are reported in table 4. as can be seen from the table, topping the list are state-of-theart articles on task-based syllabus design (long & crookes, 1992), instruction (skehan, 1996; swan, 2005), and performance (skehan, 2009), which set up conceptual and methodological frameworks for more in-depth examination of specific issues concerning task-based learning and teaching. moreover, many listed articles are theoretical reviews and empirical studies on task complexity (bishop et al., 1991; robinson, 1995, 2001; webster & ryan, 1991) and pre-task planning (ellis, 2009; skehan & foster, 1999; yuan & ellis, 2003), two task variables that have generated heated discussions in the field. in addition, one highly cited article addresses task-based innovation from teachers’ perspective (carless, 2004) and two others investigate feedback in task-based interaction (mackey et al., 2003) and children’s development of phonological sensitivity (anthony et al., 2003). table 5 lists the highly cited references extracted from the references of 518 articles. these include some iconic books (ellis, 2003; long, 2015; samuda & bygate, 2008; skehan, 1998a; willis, 1996) and book chapters (robinson, 2012; swain, 1995) on tasks and task-based language teaching and learning, in addition to journal articles. for instance, ellis’s (2003) task-based language teaching and learning, using tasks as a means of data collection and a teaching tool, established bridges between sla research and language pedagogy. skehan’s (1998a) a cognitive approach to language learning discussed language learning from the perspectives of psycholinguistics, cognition, and individual differences, with a focus on the practical applications of these themes in task-based learning and language testing. also among the most cited works by tblt researchers but without a particular focus on tasks is levelt’s (1989) speaking: from intention to articulation, a comprehensive book addressing the psycholinguistic processes of speech production in learners’ first language. this testifies to tblt researchers’ interest in borrowing psycholinguistic frameworks, in particular the speech production model, to conceptualize, analyze, and explain learners’ processing and production of oral tasks. furthermore, three articles addressing the methodological issues of sla research, including the measurements of language complexity (norris & ortega, 2009), the analysis of speech unit as a measurement unit of spoken language (foster et al., 2000), and the analysis of statistical power (cohen, 1988), were also frequently cited by tblt researchers. the researchers’ concerns on language measurements and statistical analysis are congruent with the growing number of empirical studies in this line of inquiry. upon a closer look at tables 4 and 5, it can be seen that five papers are both highly cited articles and highly cited references at the same time, demonstrating research trends in task-based language teaching: a bibliometric analysis from 1985 to 2020 391 their significant role in the field. these are skehan’s (1996) proposal for a comprehensive framework for the implementation of task-based instruction and the methods by which the instruction may be put into practice, as well as two stateof-the-art articles on the cognition hypothesis (robinson, 2001) versus the trade-off approach3 (skehan, 2009), the two highly influential and frequently cited yet competing theories that have ignited much empirical research on tblt. also listed are yuan and ellis’s (2003) skehan and foster’s (1999) empirical examinations of how task variables, such as task structure and planning conditions, may affect l2 learners’ speech production, especially in terms of fluency, complexity, and accuracy measurements. table 4 most highly cited articles article title raw citation normalized citation long & crookes (1992) three approaches to task-based syllabus design 204 0.9577 swan (2005) legislation by hypothesis: the case of task-based instruction 111 0.8880 skehan (1996) a framework for the implementation of task-based instruction 344 0.7765 robinson (1995) task complexity and second-language narrative discourse 93 0.7561 robinson (2001) task complexity, task difficulty, and task production: exploring interactions in a componential framework 324 0.6365 skehan & foster (1999) the influence of task structure and processing conditions on narrative retellings 203 0.6324 webster & ryan (1991) task complexity and manual reaction times in people who stutter 17 0.5000 yuan & ellis (2003) the effects of pre-task planning and on-line planning on fluency, complexity and accuracy in l2 monologic oral production 244 0.4171 bishop et al. (1991) age and task complexity variables in motor-performance of stuttering and nonstuttering children 14 0.4118 carless (2004) issues in teachers’ reinterpretation of a task-based innovation in primary schools 85 0.4106 anthony et al. (2003) phonological sensitivity: a quasi-parallel progression of word structure units and cognitive operations 158 0.2701 mackey et al. (2003) interactional input and the incorporation of feedback: an exploration of ns-nns and nns-nns adult and child dyads 112 0.1915 skehan (2009) modelling second language performance: integrating complexity, accuracy, fluency, and lexis 230 0.1913 ellis (2009) the differential effects of three types of task planning on the fluency, complexity, and accuracy in l2 oral production 148 0.1231 3 robinson’s (2010) cognition hypothesis was further developed into the ssarc (i.e., stabilize, simplify, automatize, restructure, and complexify) model, while skehan’s (2009) trade-off approach was later reconceptualized as the limited attentional capacity approach. a recent book chapter offers a comprehensive synopsis and comparison of the two (ellis et al., 2020, chapter 3). jie qin, lei lei 392 table 5 most highly cited references work title citation ellis (2003) task-based language teaching and learning 148 skehan (1998a) a cognitive approach to language learning 133 robinson (2001) task complexity, task difficulty, and task production: exploring interactions in a componential framework 90 levelt (1989) speaking: from intention to articulation 67 foster & skehan (1996) the influence of planning and task type on second language performance 64 yuan & ellis (2003) the effects of pre-task planning and on-line planning on fluency, complexity and accuracy in l2 monologic oral production 59 robinson (2005) cognitive complexity and task sequencing: studies in a componential framework for second language task design 58 samuda & bygate (2008) tasks in second language learning 57 skehan (1996) a framework for the implementation of task-based instruction 54 skehan & foster (1997) task type and task processing conditions as influences on foreign language performance 51 long (2015) second language acquisition and task-based language teaching 50 robinson (2012) task complexity, cognitive resources, and syllabus design: a triadic framework for examining task influences on sla 48 norris & ortega (2009) towards an organic approach to investigating caf in instructed sla: the case of complexity 46 skehan (2009) modelling second language performance: integrating complexity, accuracy, fluency, and lexis 45 swain (1995) three functions of output in second language learning 45 foster et al. (2000) measuring spoken language: a unit for all reasons 43 willis (1996) a framework for task-based learning 43 skehan & foster (1999) the influence of task structure and processing conditions on narrative retellings 42 cohen (1988) statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences 42 skehan (1998b) task-based instruction 37 3.5. most frequently explored topics across time the identified research trends for each topic, based on the above-described procedures of data processing and analyses, fall into six groups. a complete list of the 40 identified topics and their groupings, their normalized frequencies across the three phases (phase 1: 1985-2009, phase 2: 2010-2015, and phase 3: 2016-2020), as well as their chi-squared, p., and standardized residual values are presented in table 6. ten research topics, representing 25% of the total 40, have remained essentially constant in frequency over the three phases. among the topics, the most frequent ones are task complexity (frequency: 27.08, 30.33, 35.07) and task difficulty/demand (frequency: 22.92, 17.06, 23.70), two variables related to how tasks may be sequenced in terms of less to more difficulty or complexity in pedagogical practices. this echoes the observation made in the previous subsection that studies on task complexity and task difficulty/demand are listed among the most highly cited articles and references in this line of inquiry (see tables 4 and 5). ranking below them are meaning, testing/assessment, task implementation and pairs/dyads, all of which are widely explored topics in task-based research with an average frequency of 5 to 10. each of the remaining topics, that is, strategy, content, and comprehension, has an average frequency of below 5. research trends in task-based language teaching: a bibliometric analysis from 1985 to 2020 393 fourteen research topics (35%) have witnessed a significant increase in frequency from phase 1 to phase 3. first, results display researchers’ growing interest in some essential topics in this field – task (frequency: 50.00, 46.45, 81.52), tblt (frequency: 12.50, 36.97, 46.45), learner (frequency: 29.17, 38.86, 61.61) and teacher (frequency: 6.25, 21.80, 31.28), which is consistent with the accumulating status of tblt as a whole among sla researchers and language teachers. it should also be noted that four task-related variables, that is, task planning, task engagement, task repetition, and task modality, experienced a dramatic gain in frequency from almost 0 in phase 1 to around 15 to 20 in phase 3 (except task modality). such results, together with researchers’ sustained interest in task difficulty/demand and task complexity, demonstrate the field’s ongoing concerns with tasks and how implementation of factors related to tasks may affect learning results. an exceptional case here is task type (frequency: 2.08, 11.37, 7.58), which, in spite of the ascending tendency, gained less attention in phase 3 than in phase 2. additionally, two measurements of task performance – calf (complexity, accuracy, lexis, and fluency, frequency: 41.67, 48.34, 72.04) for monologues and language-related episode (frequency: 6.25, 14.22, 22.75) for interactions – have garnered growing attention over the past decades. also noteworthy is researchers’ increasing passion for technology-related tblt (frequency: 4.17, 19.91, 21.80), such as topics concerning technology, (synchronous) computermediated communication, and computer-assisted language learning. such results echo the presence of three technology-related journals as top publication venues on the one hand (see table 2) and the broader picture of sla research in which technology-related topics have gained momentum on the other (zhang, 2020). another group of five topics (12.5%) have also manifested a noticeably upward trend, although their increase is not significant enough. such topics are task completion (frequency: 2.08, 3.79, 7.58) and task performance (frequency: 16.67, 19.91, 26.54), two typical dependent variables in task-based research, and task condition/characteristics (frequency: 4.17, 3.79, 7.58), another task-related independent variable. also, moderating variables (frequency: 14.58, 15.17, 21.80) including l2 proficiency, working memory, anxiety, and motivation have gathered momentum. this indicates researchers’ rising interest in the psychological perspective of tblt, that is, how individual differences may affect the learning results or task performance, in addition to the traditional, cognitive-interactionist perspective (e.g., révész, 2011). two topics (5%), that is, error/monitoring (frequency: 12.50, 4.74, 2.84) and recast (frequency: 14.58, 13.27, 2.84), have become less popular within tblt over the three phases. the downward trend of error/monitoring suggests tblt researchers’ gradual loss of interest in learner errors or error analysis, which may be partly due to some scholars’ scepticism about native speakerism or standard language ideologies (e.g., ortega, 2019). the decreasing frequency of recast, together with the noticeable yet insignificant decrease in interaction (frequency: jie qin, lei lei 394 20.83, 23.70, 10.43) and feedback (frequency: 20.83, 20.85, 10.43), reflects that interactional feedback, which used to be widely explored among tblt scholars in phases 1 and 2, has received reduced concern over the past few years. however, this does not necessarily mean that task-based interaction has lost its momentum, as evidenced by researchers’ continuing and rising enthusiasm for pairs/dyads and language-related episode. rather, it might indicate a potential shift in taskbased interactional research from feedback and recast to task-related independent variables (e.g., task complexity, task repetition) and measurements (e.g., language-related episode, testing/assessment). two other topics showing the same noticeably but not significantly decreasing trend are form (frequency: 22.92, 15.17, 9.48) and language production (frequency: 8.33, 5.69, 3.79), which contrasts with the stable popularity of meaning and comprehension respectively. the last group of topics (a total of five, 12.5%) features a sharp decline in frequency in phase 2 yet regained growth in phase 3. these topics include pedagogy, task design, language development, and task-based instruction, each with a frequency of 6 to 13 in phases 1 and 3, but of less than 4 in phase 2. this reflects researchers’ fluctuating yet renewed interest in the pedagogical perspective of tblt and the learners’ long-term development in the target language. additionally, with regard to the learning contexts, topics related to both foreign language (frequency: 4.17, 10.43, 21.80) and second language learning contexts (frequency: 14.58, 18.96, 33.18) have attracted increasing attention across the three phases. as for the languages or countries involved in tblt studies, interest in english or english-speaking countries remains predominant (frequency: 29.17, 36.97, 50.24), showing a noticeable yet insignificant increase from phase 1 to phase 3. topics relevant to european countries or languages remain constant over the periods (frequency: 14.58, 15.17, 13.27), while those concerning eastern countries or languages witness a significant decrease in phase 2 (frequency: 12.50, 2.84, 10.43). table 6 a complete list of topics and their trends in the three phases topics p1 p2 p3 x_sq df p res. 1 res. 2 res. 3 remained constant meaning 10.42 6.64 11.37 1.33 2 .52 0.31 -0.92 0.62 strategy 4.17 4.74 1.90 1.26 2 .53 0.30 0.60 -0.90 task difficulty/demand 22.92 17.06 23.70 1.24 2 .54 0.37 -0.90 0.54 content 2.08 2.84 4.74 1.16 2 .56 -0.63 -0.21 0.85 task implementation 8.33 5.69 4.74 1.11 2 .57 0.83 -0.23 -0.61 task complexity 27.08 30.33 35.07 1.05 2 .59 -0.67 -0.09 0.76 testing/assessment 8.33 9.48 12.32 0.84 2 .66 -0.54 -0.18 0.72 comprehension 4.17 2.84 2.84 0.36 2 .84 0.49 -0.24 -0.24 pairs/dyads 6.25 6.64 7.58 0.14 2 .93 -0.22 -0.07 0.29 languages/countries europe 14.58 15.17 13.27 0.13 2 .94 0.06 0.22 -0.28 significantly increased task planning 2.08 14.22 17.06 11.38 2 .00 -2.71 0.93 1.78 task engagement 0.00 6.64 14.22 14.56 2 .00 -2.64 -0.12 2.76 research trends in task-based language teaching: a bibliometric analysis from 1985 to 2020 395 task repetition 0.00 11.37 18.96 18.01 2 .00 -3.18 0.40 2.78 task 50.00 46.45 81.52 12.56 2 .00 -1.21 -1.67 2.88 tblt 12.50 36.97 46.45 19.19 2 .00 -3.44 0.88 2.56 learner 29.17 38.86 61.61 12.84 2 .00 -2.14 -0.66 2.80 teacher 6.25 21.80 31.28 16.15 2 .00 -3.04 0.46 2.59 technology-related 4.17 19.91 21.80 12.26 2 .00 -2.84 1.18 1.66 fl learning context 4.17 10.43 21.80 13.18 2 .00 -2.29 -0.49 2.78 calf 41.67 48.34 72.04 9.43 2 .01 -1.68 -0.77 2.45 language-related episode 6.25 14.22 22.75 9.45 2 .01 -2.15 -0.05 2.20 l2 learning context 14.58 18.96 33.18 8.50 2 .01 -1.62 -0.70 2.32 task type 2.08 11.37 7.58 6.22 2 .04 -1.86 1.65 0.22 task modality 0.00 1.90 5.69 6.64 2 .04 -1.59 -0.40 1.99 noticeably but not significantly increased languages/countries-english 29.17 36.97 50.24 5.85 2 .05 -1.55 -0.29 1.84 task completion 2.08 3.79 7.58 3.53 2 .17 -1.13 -0.33 1.46 task performance 16.67 19.91 26.54 2.41 2 .30 -0.95 -0.25 1.20 moderating variable 14.58 15.17 21.80 1.87 2 .39 -0.63 -0.49 1.11 task condition/characteristics 4.17 3.79 7.58 1.69 2 .43 -0.45 -0.61 1.06 significantly decreased error/monitoring 12.50 4.74 2.84 7.82 2 .02 2.24 -0.76 -1.49 recast 14.58 13.27 2.84 8.09 2 .02 1.36 0.95 -2.31 noticeably but not significantly decreased form 22.92 15.17 9.48 5.74 2 .06 1.77 -0.17 -1.60 interaction 20.83 23.70 10.43 5.32 2 .07 0.59 1.26 -1.84 feedback 20.83 20.85 10.43 4.16 2 .12 0.83 0.84 -1.67 language production 8.33 5.69 3.79 1.75 2 .41 0.98 -0.10 -0.88 significantly or noticeably decreased in period 2 languages/countries-eastern 12.50 2.84 10.43 6.02 2 .05 1.33 -1.96 0.63 pedagogy 8.33 1.90 8.53 4.56 2 .10 0.83 -1.74 0.91 task design 8.33 1.90 8.53 4.56 2 .10 0.83 -1.74 0.91 language development 8.33 3.79 11.37 3.72 2 .16 0.18 -1.44 1.27 task-based instruction 6.25 2.84 6.64 1.66 2 .44 0.44 -1.05 0.61 to sum up, it seems that tblt researchers have retained and enhanced their interest in tasks, individuals involved in tasks (i.e., learners, teachers), a range of variables related to task conditions and task implementation (e.g., task complexity, task repetition), and how task-related variables may affect learners’ activities and performances (e.g., calf, task engagement). in other words, research in tblt has been and is still typically approached from the traditional cognitive-interactionist (e.g., mackey et al., 2003) and psycholinguistic perspectives (e.g., robinson, 2012), with the emergence of new task-related independent (e.g., task planning) and dependent variables (e.g., language-related episode). also, tblt research has been conducted in both l2/fl learning contexts addressing the teaching and learning of a variety of target languages. besides that, two conspicuous patterns are observed from the results. one is that the psychological perspective of tblt research, that is, how individual differences may bring about divergent performances of tasks or alter the relationships between task variables and learning effects, has represented a rising trend. another pertains to a growing concern with technology-related, task-based teaching and learning of languages. in contrast, the field has witnessed a diminished jie qin, lei lei 396 interest in topics related to errors, recast, and feedback. it should also be pointed out that only a few topics are related to the pedagogical perspective of tblt (i.e., pedagogy, task-based instruction) or to learners’ long-term development in the target language (i.e., language development), while no topics have been concerned with the sociocultural perspective. 4. conclusion and implications this bibliometric study on tblt has provided a bird’s-eye view of important, valuable information on the publication trend, venues for publication, productive authors, highly cited articles and highly cited references. more importantly, we have identified the most frequently explored tblt-related topics and analyzed the developmental patterns of those topics across the past decades, which may help us gain a more profound understanding of key issues related to tasks, task performance, task-based teaching, and so on. such a synthesis of research brings with it significant implications for task-based research and pedagogy and in terms of methodological innovation. apart from the traditional cognitive-interactionist and psycholinguistic approaches to tblt (e.g., mackey et al., 2003; robinson, 2012) which are very popular today and will probably remain so in the future, the findings seem to suggest that this research area may be further expanded in other ways. one is the emphasis on the individuals involved in task performance, including the consideration of learners’ individual differences and the investigation of factors related to teachers, such as teacher training. another implication concerns the application of technologies to task-based teaching and learning, which will enhance our understanding of the conceptualization, design, and evaluation of tasks (gonzález-lloret & ortega, 2014). moreover, research on tblt should be conducted with a greater variety of learners, with more divergent target languages, and in more diversified learning contexts, in order to gain a more holistic picture of this teaching approach. a further implication, which, however, does not find direct support in the present findings, may be an integration of tblt with other theoretical approaches in applied linguistics. for instance, in response to some scholars’ call to move the field of sla, including that of tblt, forward to its meaningoriented perspective, a few conceptual articles and empirical studies have endeavored to integrate systemic functional linguistics with tblt (byrnes, 2019; ortega, 2015; qin, 2022; ryshina-pankova, 2015). the present study also has important implications for pedagogical practices. first, as task-based pedagogy and task-based research are complementary and intertwined with each other, such important data on task-based research as presented in this study will surely inform and guide the teaching and learning research trends in task-based language teaching: a bibliometric analysis from 1985 to 2020 397 practices, which may in return provide valuable feedback and impetus for further disciplinary development. second, the topics that tblt researchers are most interested in may overlap with issues that language educators are concerned with to some extent. for instance, the rising popularity of topics related to teachers partly reflects educationists’ realization of the important role teachers play in task-based teaching, in addition to the attention already paid to learners and tasks. third, findings from this research synthesis also provide potential guidelines for language teaching, such as the sequencing of tasks informed by research results concerning task difficulty and complexity, the recognition that tasks do not work for every individual in the same way, and the active use of various technologies that may mediate teaching and learning. there are also some methodological considerations as to how studies like this should be conducted. for example, one possible methodological implication of this study is the use of dependency-based method for the extraction of research topic candidates. previous bibliometric studies used either the n-gramsbased method (lei & liu, 2019a, 2019b) or the topic modeling technique (li & lei, 2021) to extract topic candidates. although such methods seem to work, they were challenged due to their manual judgment and interpretability issues (lei et al., 2020). the present study adopted the dependency-based method and the results revealed it as an effective and efficient approach in the linguistics area with room for improvement. for example, future research may explore other measures than frequency and range as well as more sophisticated methods such as machine learning algorithms for the improvement of the newly proposed method. finally, it should be pointed out that the present study only used abstracts of research articles to explore tblt-related topics. future studies may consider full texts of not only research articles but also texts of other genres such as monographs and book chapters in order to paint a fuller picture of the research in the area. in addition, we used a list of tblt-related search terms for the retrieval of the research data. although such a method helped us more accurately and exhaustively harvest the data, the retrieval based on its application, may miss some emerging topics since any list of search terms may not be fully exhaustive. future research may employ umbrella terms such as “task” to search the data. acknowledgements 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(2020). a bibliometric analysis of second language acquisition between 1997 and 2018. studies in second language acquisition, 42(1), 199-222. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0272263119000573 jie qin, lei lei 404 appendix search terms used for the web of science query* we categorize the tblt-related search terms into three types. the first type corresponds to some general terms including tblt, tslt, tbl, task-based language teaching, task-supported language teaching, task-based learning, task-based learning research, task-based instruction, task-based interaction, task-based assessment, task-based evaluation, task-based implementation, task-based innovation, and task-based performance. additionally, as the field distinguishes the strong and weak versions of tblt (a distinction can be found in skehan, 1996), we also categorize the search terms into the two types. search terms concerned with the strong version of tblt include task-based needs analysis, target task, pedagogic task, task syllabus, methodological principle, pedagogic procedure, and task-based performance test. those relevant to the weak version of tblt cover such terms as task type, task complexity, task difficulty, task repetition, task sequencing, task planning, task familiarity, task implementation, task feature, task characteristics, task modality, task design, task condition, task-based program evaluation, task grading, and task structure. the inclusion of these search terms was based on two important monographs of the field (ellis et al., 2020; long, 2016) and some meta-analyses (bryfonski & mckay, 2019; plonsky & kim, 2016). * for terms with a hyphen such as task-based and task-supported, we searched variants with and without a hyphen for more accurate results (i.e., task-based, task based, task-supported, and task supported). 483 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (3). 2022. 483-507 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.3.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt second language psychological speaking and listening needs: scale development, symbiosis, and demographic differences jian xu sichuan international studies university, chongqing, china https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2275-6197 xujian@link.cuhk.edu.hk xuyan qiu the hong kong polytechnic university, hong kong sar, china https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4368-8039 christyxyq@hotmail.com abstract this study aimed to develop and validate two parallel scales to measure the psychological l2 speaking and listening needs of 863 english-as-a-foreign language (efl) learners. the associations between three psychological needs (i.e., autonomy, competence, and relatedness) of l2 speaking and of l2 listening were examined to develop insights into oracy (i.e., integration of speaking and listening) in l2 communication. subsequently, the impact of demographic variables was explored. the data, collected via a 5-point likert-scale questionnaire, were analyzed through descriptive and correlation analysis, factor analysis, and anova. exploratory factor analysis was conducted to determine the factor structures, followed by confirmatory factor analysis for validation. results demonstrated that the validity and reliability of the two developed scales were satisfactory. l2 speaking autonomy was significantly related to l2 listening autonomy, as were competence and relatedness. the three psychological needs of both l2 speaking and listening revealed varying patterns in terms of gender, major, university geographical context, schooling stage (first year to fourth year), and studyabroad experiences. the research findings reinforce the need for integration of jian xu, xuyan qiu 484 l2 speaking and l2 listening when satisfying university students’ psychological needs, contribute to the research field with the measurement scales of psychological needs in l2 speaking and listening settings, and yield implications for teaching the two language skills integratedly. keywords: l2 speaking; l2 listening; psychological needs; demographic information; oracy 1. introduction oral second/foreign (l2) communication is an overarching term to refer to l2 listening and speaking, which occur simultaneously in the classroom and in daily interactions (murphy, 1991). the ability to speak english logically and intelligibly on a particular topic is a key learning goal for english-as-a-foreign language (efl) learners. listening comprehension, likewise, is a significant language skill which enables access to various aural and visual l2 resources (vandergrift, 2007) and whose development has been demonstrated to improve l2 speaking (vandergrift & goh, 2012). driven by the concurrent and symbiotic nature of l2 listening and speaking in oral communication, goh (2014) used the term oracy to capture their combined equivalent importance. however, existing studies that address l2 speaking and listening together are relatively scarce in efl research (goh, 2014). research focusing on learners’ motivational constructs of both l2 speaking and listening is even less frequent. according to self-determination theory (sdt), the degree of a learner’s motivation depends on three psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness (ryan & deci, 2017). in our study, autonomy refers to l2 learners’ feelings of volition when they internalize their actions as an articulation of their free will in l2 speaking or listening practice. competence is defined as a feeling of effectiveness when the learners feel capable of achieving learning goals and are on the way to successfully perform the target activities in an l2 speaking or listening environment. relatedness is evident when individuals perceive a connection or develop a significant sense of belonging with others while communicating, such as with peers and teachers. even if previous studies have shed light on l2 speaking or listening motivation in isolation (e.g., vandergrift, 2005), the three basic psychological needs and the associations between psychological l2 speaking and listening needs are largely underexplored. moreover, little is known regarding how l2 learners’ psychological speaking or listening needs are shaped by demographic variables. this study, therefore, intends to address these research gaps by developing two measurement scales to investigate l2 learners’ psychological speaking and listening needs. second language psychological speaking and listening needs: scale development, symbiosis, and. . . 485 2. literature review 2.1. basic psychological needs and l2 learning the concepts of intrinsic (autonomous) and extrinsic (controlled) motivation are included in self-determination theory (ryan & deci, 2017). when learning is important and integral to the learner’s sense of him/herself, intrinsic motivation towards the task will be formed. learners are extrinsically motivated when learning is done for the purpose of rewards such as grades or appraisal given by teachers. sdt includes five motivational constructs: (1) intrinsic orientation (e.g., enjoyment), (2) identified regulation (e.g., recognized value of the extrinsic behavior), (3) introjected regulation (e.g., fear of disapproval), (4) external regulation (e.g., social approval), (5) integrated regulation (e.g., conversion into one’s beliefs) and (6) amotivation (ryan & deci, 2017). sdt contends that when specifiable psychological and social needs are satisfied in the context of an individual’s development, this will promote growth, integrity, and well-being. this contention has been proven effective in l2 research (cf. noels et al., 2000). researchers such as noels, lascano, and saumure (2019) and alamer and almulhim (2021) have examined these basic psychological needs of l2 learners from the sdt perspective in an efl learning context. these available empirical studies that are related to these psychological needs focus on three main aspects, and their findings not only reveal positive relationships between need satisfaction and the enhancement of learner motivation and academic achievement, but also point to the importance of need satisfaction in the development of specific language skills. the first strand of research has focused on psychological language needs and their relation to motivational orientations. for example, chow and chu (2007) found that relatedness occurred to chinese students when they were motivated to fulfil their filial obligations for their parents through satisfactory academic achievement. carreira (2012) reported that intrinsic motivation and introjected and identified regulation were significantly correlated with autonomy, competence, and relatedness in l2 learning. oga-baldwin et al. (2017) also found that autonomous motivation was significantly associated with need satisfaction, and this need satisfaction mediated the relationship between supportive teaching and student engagement in a language class. these findings were all consistent with ryan and deci’s (2017) assertion that satisfying the three basic psychological needs should generate a positive derivative through the embodiment of autonomous motivation. the second strand of research into psychological needs, as conceptualized by sdt, has attempted to investigate the relationship between l2 psychological needs and english language learning and achievement. for example, alamer and jian xu, xuyan qiu 486 lee (2019) identified a motivational process to explain l2 saudi students’ achievement in english. with the three basic psychological needs as the starting point, they found progressive influence first on goal-setting orientation, then motivational emotional state, and finally language achievement outcome. similarly, joe et al. (2017) found that l2 achievement was significantly predicted by perceived competence in a korean secondary-school context. it can thus be inferred that the three basic psychological needs in the l2 context are situated within the motivational process and play a crucial role in l2 learning and development. the third strand of research suggests the potential positive impact of need satisfaction on the development of particular language skills. alamer (2021) has investigated the impact of basic psychological needs on l2 vocabulary learning. he found that the three basic psychological needs in l2 learning were directly linked to vocabulary knowledge among saudi university students. however, apart from l2 vocabulary learning, few studies have attended to the three basic psychological needs in the learning process of other language skills, particularly l2 speaking and listening. given the critical role of psychological speaking and listening needs in communication (carreira, 2012), a domain-specific investigation can help reveal human functioning in a specific setting (ryan & deci, 2001) and more specific implications can be yielded for teaching l2 speaking and listening skills, especially when it comes to oracy instruction. to achieve these purposes, there is a need of empirical studies to measure the basic psychological needs of l2 speaking and listening so that the association between the two l2 skills can be explored in a more in-depth way. 2.2. l2 speaking and listening the current research into the association between l2 listening and speaking has been theoretically manifested in the current literature. brown (2004) argued that l2 listening functions as a part of l2 speaking, and thus without successful listening comprehension individuals cannot communicate effectively. more recently, goh (2014), in her review article, recommended the use of oracy instruction, involving both speaking and listening, in l2 pedagogy so that learners can understand, increase, and manage their learning processes in a holistic way. qiu and xu (2021) found that l2 speaking and listening motivation were associated with each other, highlighting the close relationship between l2 speaking and listening in the communication practices. however, the available empirical studies that have investigated the relationship between basic psychological needs in l2 listening and speaking were not found. thus, the present study seeks to first develop scales of psychological l2 speaking and listening needs and then examine how close l2 speaking and listening needs are associated with each other. second language psychological speaking and listening needs: scale development, symbiosis, and. . . 487 2.3. the importance of demographic factors to l2 learning l2 learning has also been shown to be both directly and indirectly influenced by demographic variables (fromkin et al., 2007), but the role that these demographic variables play in psychological l2 speaking and listening needs has not yet been fully clarified. specifically, gender differences have been shown to play a role in various aspects of l2 learning, such as the level of language anxiety in the efl learning context (jiang & dewaele, 2019), and attitudes toward learning french (l2) and english (l1) and french learning orientations (baker & maclntyre, 2000). furthermore, university locations have been found relevant to the regional inequality of general education (xiang et al., 2020); yet few studies have looked into the role of regional differences in l2 settings. it is assumed that l2 learning in universities is a process that progresses dynamically from the first year to the fourth. for example, sung (2019) found that an l2 learner’s sense of language competence progressed over time during their university study. empirical evidence has further shown that basic psychological needs vary from major to major; lau and gardner (2019) found that students with different majors had varying learning styles and preferences. finally, study-abroad experience is an important aspect when distinguishing the level of l2 listening motivation (xu & qiu, 2020). however, the studies overviewed above have not investigated how students’ psychological l2 speaking and listening needs are satisfied across different demographic groups (e.g., male vs. female). thus, the present study endeavors to explore variations in gender, university geographical context, university schooling stages, majors, and study-abroad experience in relation to psychological l2 speaking and listening needs. 3. the present study the present study aimed to develop and validate scales for psychological l2 speaking and listening needs among chinese university students, to examine how the l2 speaking and l2 listening needs were associated with each other, and to understand how the needs varied in terms of demographic qualities. the demographic characteristics explored include gender, major (humanities and social science, science, and engineering), university geographical context (beijing, coastal provinces, inland provinces of china), university schooling stage (freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior), and the presence or absence of study abroad experiences. the following three research questions guided the present study. 1. what is the factor structure model of the psychological needs scales on l2 speaking and listening among l2 chinese students? (rq1) jian xu, xuyan qiu 488 2. how are psychological l2 speaking and listening needs correlated with each other? (rq2) 3. how do psychological l2 speaking and listening needs vary in terms of gender, major, university geographical context, and schooling stage at university, and study abroad experiences? (rq3) 4. method 4.1. participants this study was conducted in a chinese tertiary context where students are efl learners taught in compulsory english courses. in total, 863 chinese university students, including 274 male and 589 female, from 16 to 22 years old (m = 18.67, sd = 1.26) were recruited. all the participants had been learning english for more than nine years. the surveyed participants represented a spectrum of different majors including language and literature, communication and journalism, geology, engineering, computer science, law, management, translation studies, and education. these were categorized into four main groups for analysis: humanities and social science, sciences, engineering, and medicine. their universities were located in nine chinese provinces representing major regions (northeast, southeast, northwest, southwest, and the capital city) of china: beijing, anhui, hubei, jilin, shandong, zhejiang, xinjiang, shanghai, and chongqing. these were organized into three subcategories for analysis: beijing, coastal provinces, and inland provinces. there were 549 freshmen, 188 sophomores, 87 juniors, and 39 seniors. they came from tier 1 universities (n = 711), tier 2 universities (n = 137), and tier 3 universities (n = 15). the three tiers of universities in china mainland all provided undergraduate courses and bachelor’s degrees. tier 1 universities are key public universities under the direct leadership of the ministry of education, whereas tier 2 universities refer to ordinary public universities under the leadership of the provincial government and tier 3 universities are independent and private ones with relatively low admission criteria. of the 863 participants, 114 had experienced studying abroad, which was defined as any short-term study, tour, or residence abroad for more than one week. 4.2. scale development the scales were developed through a two-phase process: item-generation, and item piloting. two recommendations informed the item-generation process. initially, we followed haynes, richard, and kubany’s (1995) advice that the content of developed items should originate from multiple sources: 1) prior literature and theoretical frameworks, 2) existing or related scales, and 3) the researchers’ own second language psychological speaking and listening needs: scale development, symbiosis, and. . . 489 deductive reasoning. next, we adopted devellis’s (2016) recommendation that scale developers develop the items three times and use those items that performed best in the final iteration. hence, the initial item pool was created based on the basic concepts of sdt and psychological needs (ryan & deci, 2017) as well as the empirical studies related to psychological needs in l2 contexts (e.g., alamer, 2021; carreira, 2012). additional items were created by modifying existing sdt instruments that were developed to measure the psychological needs in other contexts, such as education (deci et al., 2001; tian et al., 2014). keeping in mind the requirement that the designed item pool should be broad enough to retain only the best-performing items, the developed english scales were pretested with five students to further identify possible confusions or problems. the english scales were sent to two applied linguistics experts who were non-native speakers of english to check the content, wordings, and readability. subsequently, the revised questionnaire was piloted with 135 university students and achieved high reliability for the overall scale (cronbach α = .94) and each of the three dimensions (autonomy, α = .91; competence, α = .96; relatedness α = .90). 4.3. instruments 4.3.1. scale of psychological l2 speaking/listening needs in total, 13 items were designed to assess the psychological l2 speaking/listening needs scales: 4 items for autonomy, 5 for competence, and 4 for relatedness. for example, the samples item for autonomy were “i feel like i can pretty much be myself when speaking in/listening to english,” for the speaking/listening scale. the sample items for competence were “i can communicate the main point(s) of what i want to say/i can understand the gist of what i hear,” for the speaking/listening scale. the sample item for competence was “i experience a warm feeling with the teachers i spend time with,” for the speaking and listening scale. all items were designed using a 5-point likert scale from (1) strongly disagree to (5) strongly agree. a commonly used rule of thumb for evaluating internal consistency was below: α < 0.5 = unacceptable; 0.5 < = α < 0.6 = poor; 0.6 < = α < 0.7 = acceptable; 0.7 < = α < 0.9 = good; α > = 0.9 = excellent (hair et al., 2010). the overall reliability of the scale of psychological l2 speaking/listening needs was satisfactory (cronbach’s α = .91/.91). the reliability estimates of autonomy (α = .86/.90), competence (α = .87/.86), and relatedness (α = .96/.92) were all above the cut-off value 0.7, demonstrating good reliability. 4.4. data collection and analysis the chinese version of the questionnaires was distributed online. the translation was completed by the first author. the translated questionnaires were then jian xu, xuyan qiu 490 proofread by a professor in applied linguistics. an english language learner was invited to pick up the language errors. then, the back translation was conducted by the second author to ensure language accuracy. accordingly, the first author addressed the issues arising from the translation (e.g., clarity of questionnaire items). concerning the sample, we first identified our population as chinese university students and then considered the demographic variables when listing some potential participating institutions. next, the purposive sampling approach was used and english course instructors were contacted to request that data be collected from their students. those course instructors who agreed to help send the electronic questionnaire link to their students during their class periods. the participants’ consent was obtained before data collection. the ethical approval was also obtained from the first author’s university. the questionnaire data were initially screened before data analysis. to achieve the first goal of this study, exploratory factor analysis (efa) and confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) were conducted. efa was conducted with spss 25.0 in the pilot study (n = 135), and cfa was subsequently performed in the main study (n = 863), using mplus 8.0 to test both the theoretical model and an accurate specification of multiple hierarchies to confirm whether each indicator (item) loaded significantly on the expected factors. oblimin with kaiser normalization was the rotation method. the number of factors to be retained was assessed by judging whether eigenvalues were greater than 1, and if factor loadings were greater than 0.3, and by evaluating the scree plot of eigenvalues, and interpretability of factor structure (hair et al., 2010). maximum likelihood estimation with robust standard errors was employed when performing cfa to assess the hypothesized models. when evaluating the appropriateness of model fit, we followed kline’s (2016) suggestion that we establish whether the specified model fit the empirical data. the size of standardized factor loadings was interpreted according to cohen’s (1992) guidelines: trivial < 0.1 ≤ small < 0.3 ≤ moderate < 0.5 ≤ large with the cut-off values being 0.1, 0.3, and 0.5, respectively. alternative models were tested to select better model and were also calculated to further provide evidence for construct validity. to achieve the second goal, cfa models were computed with the 863 participants to see how closely the three psychological needs of l2 speaking were associated with those of l2 listening. for the third goal, t-tests and anova tests were performed independently to pinpoint the differences in autonomy, competence, and relatedness among 863 participants. independent t-tests were conducted to explore the roles of gender differences and study abroad experience, while anova tests were used to investigate regional and disciplinary differences, and also the differences of school year. when the anova was significant, post hoc tests (tukey test) were conducted to see differences between specific groups. second language psychological speaking and listening needs: scale development, symbiosis, and. . . 491 5. results 5.1. psychometric properties of l2 psychological speaking and listening needs scales 5.1.1. exploratory factor analysis we first performed an efa with the pilot data (n = 135). the kaiser-mayer-olkin of sampling adequacy was 0.91, which was above the cut-off threshold of 0.5, thus suggesting that efa was able to yield discrete and reliable factors. bartlett’s test of sphericity (χ² = 3124.06, df = 325, p < 0.01) indicated that the correlations between items were large enough to perform the efa. as presented in table 1, the pilot data generated six factors, as expected, which explained 77.36% of the variance. all of these factor loadings were above 0.3. a scree plot was not included because the factor dimensions in this study were set theoretically. only la4 showed cross-loadings on both speaking and listening autonomy, but its item loading was heavier on its corresponding factor, and thus it was retained. consequently, all the validated items in the pilot study were subject to cfa in a larger sample. table 1 efa results of psychological l2 speaking and listening needs item 1 2 3 4 5 6 sa1 .56 sa2 .51 sa3 .32 sa4 .37 sc1 .61 sc2 .64 sc3 .40 sc4 .75 sc5 .86 sr1 .79 sr2 .93 sr3 .97 sr4 .98 la1 .80 la2 .85 la3 .74 la4 .79 lc1 .58 lc2 .81 lc3 .51 lc4 .64 lc5 .81 lr1 .56 lr2 .69 lr3 .56 lr4 .59 note. sa(1) = speaking autonomy, sc(2) = speaking competence, sr(3) = speaking relatedness, la(4) = listening autonomy, lc(5) = listening competence, lr(6) = listening relatedness jian xu, xuyan qiu 492 5.1.2. confirmatory factor analysis based on our theoretical underpinnings, the hypothesized first-order correlated factor structure of psychological l2 speaking needs was tested with a larger sample (n = 863). there were three factors: autonomy (4 items), competence (5 items), and relatedness (4 items). the factor loadings can be seen in figure 1, and all the factor loadings were statistically significant (p < .01). the hypothesized l2 listening needs first-order correlated factor structure results suggested that the size of all standardized factor loadings of this test were also large and that all the factor loadings were statistically significant (p < .01) (see figure 1). figure 1 and figure 2 show the standardized results for the first-order and bifactor correlated model. table 2 model fit indices of four models (n = 863) fit indices x2/df p cfi tli resea srmr cutoff criteria ＜5 ＜.00 > .90 >.90 < .08 < .08 model 1 (first-order-speaking) 6.19 .00 .94 .92 .07 .03 model 2 (first-order-listening) 8.48 .00 .91 .90 .08 .04 model 3 (bifactor-speaking) 5.63 .00 .95 .93 .07 .12 model 4 (bifactor-listening) 6.62 .00 .94 .92 .08 .12 autonomy a1/au1 e1.38/.37 .79/.79 a2/au2 e2.31/.31.83/.83 a3/au3 e3.23/.23 .88/.88 a4/au4 e4.26/.26 .86/.86 competence c1/co1 e1.31/.27 .83/.85 c2/co2 e2.53/.57 .69/.66 c3/co3 e3.25/.26.86/.86 c4/co4 e4.22/.24 .89/.87 relatedness r1/re1 e1.35/.42 .81/.76 r2/re2 e2.30/.38.84/.79 r3/re3 e3.43/.21 .76/.89 r4/re4 e4.21/.30 .89/.84 c5/co5 e5.21/.37 .89/.79 figure 1 cfa of first-order correlated factor structure of psychological l2 speaking/listening needs (model 1/model 2) second language psychological speaking and listening needs: scale development, symbiosis, and. . . 493 to ensure that the above hypothesized model was the one with the closest model fit to the data, we tested the bifactor models of both of the developed scales. as shown in model 3 (figure 2), the size of factor loadings on the right side was large and all the factor loadings were statistically significant (p < .01). in model 4, also shown in figure 2, the size of factor loadings on the right side was large as well and all the factor loadings were statistically significant (p < .01). models 1 and 3 were equivalent, as were models 2 and 4. the cfa model fit indices of the four models are summarized in table 2, and all the results show that the data fit the model well. the value of x2/df was greater than 5 possibly because of the large sample size, which was a limitation. models 3 and 4 had better model fit than model 1 and model 2 because of the lower value of x2/df and higher value of cfi and tli, so we determined that the bifactor cfa models of psychological l2 speaking and listening needs better matched our theoretical underpinnings. autonomy a1/au1 .81/.82 .81/.82 a2/au2 .85/.84 .05/.05 a3/au3 .89/.88 .04/.04 a4/au4 .86/.86 .09/.08 competence c1/co1 .89/.89.88/.88 c2/co2 .73/.72.10/.10 c3/co3 .89/.90.07/.06 c4/co4 .90/.90 .06/.01 relatedness r1/re1 .78/.77 .91/.98 r2/re2 .83/.80 .11/.20 r3/re3 .76/.90 .10/.01 r4/re4 .89/.86 .04/.03 c5/co5 .90/.82 .01/.05 psychological speaking/listening needs figure 2 cfa of bifactor models of psychological l2 speaking/listening needs (model 3/model 4) 5.1.3. descriptive and correlation analysis after presenting the results of efa and cfa, results of descriptive and correlation analysis were presented in this larger sample (n = 863). mean, standard deviations, jian xu, xuyan qiu 494 skewness, kurtosis, and item-total correlation for the two scales on the item level were reported. drawing on the oxford’s (1990) classification of the level of self-reported questionnaire responses, a mean in the range of 3.5-5.0 was categorized as a high level, 2.5-3.4 medium level and 1.0-2.4 low level. the descriptive analysis of psychological l2 speaking needs at the item level showed means for each of the 13 items ranging from 2.66 to 4.09, with standard deviations ranging from 0.92 to 1.09 (see table 3). the value of skewness and kurtosis in the speaking study fell within the cut-off value range of between ± 3.0 and between ± 8.0 respectively, indicating the univariate normality of the responses (kline, 2016). the item-total correlation ranged from .56 to .73, which indicates that each item was closely correlated with the sum of items. in addition, descriptive analysis of psychological l2 listening needs at item level showed means for each of the 13 items ranging from 2.24 to 4.13, with standard deviations ranging from 0.87 to 1.10 (see table 4). similarly, the value of skewness and kurtosis for the listening study was less than the cut-off value of ± 3.0 and ± 8.0, signifying the univariate normality of the responses. violations of normality, multicollinearity and outliers were not detected in either of the psychological l2 speaking or listening needs scales. the item-total correlation ranged from .46 to .74, which shows that each item was well associated with the sum of items. table 3 descriptive analysis of psychological l2 speaking needs at the item level (n = 863) when speaking in english, i feel that… m sd skewness kurtosis autonomy (4 items) 1. i have a sense of choice about how to speak in english (e.g., the choice of language expression, content, speaking strategies). 3.52 1.05 -.17 -.60 2. i feel free to express my thoughts about the speaking topics. 3.48 1.07 -.11 -.69 3. i feel like i can pretty much be myself when speaking in english. 3.58 1.09 -.21 -.74 4. my decisions during the english-speaking process (e.g., decisions on language expression, content, speaking strategies) stem from what i personally want to do. 3.65 1.04 -.28 -.58 competence (5 items) 1. i can communicate the main point(s) of what i want to say. 3.46 .92 -.06 -.33 2. i can solve communication problems when i do not know how to say something. 3.18 .96 .06 -.23 3. i can accomplish a task in real life (e.g., asking the price of an item in a store). 3.57 .99 -.28 -.40 4. i can produce fluent english speech. 2.93 1.02 .22 -.21 5. i can produce grammatically accurate english speech. 2.66 .99 .36 -.08 relatedness (4 items) 1. i experience a warm feeling with the teachers i spend time with. 3.96 .95 -.51 -.52 2. the teachers are generally friendly towards me. 4.09 .92 -.67 -.22 3. i get along with my teachers. 4.03 .93 -.55 -.44 4. i get along with my peers. 3.98 .96 -.59 -.24 second language psychological speaking and listening needs: scale development, symbiosis, and. . . 495 table 4 descriptive analysis of psychological l2 listening needs at item level (n = 863) when listening to english, i feel that… m sd skewness kurtosis autonomy (4 items) 1. i have a sense of choice about how to listen to english texts (e.g., listening strategies). 3.77 1.02 -.48 -.30 2. i feel free to select the listening topics or text types that i am interested in. 3.70 1.08 -.43 -.57 3. i feel like i can pretty much be myself when listening to english. 3.62 1.10 -.33 -.68 4. my decisions during the english listening process (e.g., decisions on listening strategies) stem from what i personally want to do. 3.66 1.05 -.31 -.61 competence (5 items) 1. i can understand the gist of what i hear. 3.39 .90 -.34 .08 2. i can figure out the meanings of words or phrases i do not know. 2.63 .91 .30 -.03 3. i can use the information heard in english to accomplish a task in real life (e.g., follow directions to an unknown address). 2.92 .95 .03 -.33 4. i can understand speech of different english dialects (e.g., japanese english, indian english, etc.). 2.24 .87 .30 -.43 5. i can understand speakers’ underlying meaning. 2.38 .90 .28 -.14 relatedness (4 items) 1. i experience a warm feeling with the teachers i spend time with. 3.83 1.01 -.41 -.60 2. the teachers are generally friendly towards me. 4.13 .91 -.80 .11 3. i get along with my teachers. 4.06 .91 -.61 -.36 4. i get along with my peers. 4.05 .90 -.58 -.31 as seen in table 5, the mean of relatedness of l2 speaking at factor level was above 4 (4.01), showing a high level. the mean of competence was just above 3 (3.16), demonstrating a medium level, and the mean of autonomy was between 3 and 4 (3.56), suggesting a high level. likewise, the mean of relatedness of l2 listening at factor level was high (4.02), the mean of competence was medium (2.71), and the mean of autonomy was high (3.69). results of correlation analysis in table 5 showed that the three psychological l2 speaking needs correlated significantly with each other at p < .001 level. according to cohen’s (1988) criteria, competence and autonomy were related strongly (r = .61) as were autonomy and relatedness (r = .66), while relatedness and competence were associated moderately (r = .41). results of correlation analysis in table 5 showed that the three psychological l2 listening needs correlated with each other significantly at p < .001 level. autonomy and relatedness correlated strongly (r = .70). the associations between autonomy and competence (r = .37), and between competence and relatedness (r = .29) were moderate. table 5 descriptive analysis, correlation analysis, and reliability estimate of l2 speaking/listening needs at factor level (n = 863) m sd 1 2 3 α 1 autonomy 3.56/3.69 .93/.93 1 .86/.90 2 competence 3.16/2.71 .79/.72 .61**/.37** 1 .87/.86 3 relatedness 4.01/4.02 .89/.83 .66**/.70** .41**/.29** 1 .96/.92 note. **p < .001 jian xu, xuyan qiu 496 5.2. associations between psychological l2 speaking and listening needs to pinpoint the associations between l2 speaking and l2 listening, we first calculated a measurement model which entailed both their psychological needs (two second-order models; see figure 3). this yielded a satisfactory model fit (x²/df = 4.95; p < .001; cfi = .91; tli = .90; rmsea = .07, srmr = .05). in the interest of conciseness, only the latent variables are displayed in figure 3, which shows that the two constructs were highly associated (β = .81). then, the association between l2 speaking and listening autonomy, between l2 speaking and listening competence, and between l2 speaking and listening relatedness were calculated in another first-order cfa model with six latent variables, which also generated a good model fit (x²/df = 4.89; p < .001; cfi = .91; tli = .90; rmsea = .07, srmr = .05). considering publication word and space limits, this model is not illustrated here, but the correlation coefficients obtained from this cfa model are presented in table 6. the correlation coefficients between psychological l2 speaking and listening needs were all above .05, suggesting a large association in l2 oral communication (see table 6). autonomy competence relatedness psychological speaking needs psychological listening needs autonomy competence relatedness .97 .97 .98 0.81 .76 .98 .97 figure 3 the measurement model of psychological l2 listening and speaking needs table 6 the correlation between psychological l2 speaking and listening needs l2 speaking-listening needs correlation coefficient via cfa l2 speaking and listening autonomy .99** l2 speaking and listening competence .73** l2 speaking and listening relatedness .85** note. **p < .001 second language psychological speaking and listening needs: scale development, symbiosis, and. . . 497 5.3. demographic variations this section displays the demographic variations across gender, university geographical context, school years, disciplinary differences, and study abroad experience. regarding english speaking (table 7), results of independent t-tests showed that female participants manifested significantly higher degrees of autonomy and relatedness than their male counterparts whereas no significant differences were found in competence. regarding english listening, female learners were more confident about their competence than males, but the degrees of autonomy and relatedness between the two groups were similar. table 7 gender differences (speaking/listening) gender n autonomy competence relatedness m (sd) m (sd) m (sd) female 589 3.60 (0.90)/3.72 (0.90) 3.19 (0.76)/2.77 (0.67) 4.09 (0.83)/4.05 (0.79) male 274 3.46 (1.00)/3.61 (0.98) 3.11 (0.86)/2.59 (0.82) 3.86 (0.97)/3.95 (0.91) t 2.174/1.604 1.394/3.315 3.537/1.705 p .030/.109 .164/.001 <.001/.089 cohen’s d .15/-/.24 .25/furthermore, anova test results revealed significant differences among efl learners from the three university geographical contexts of china for all the psychological speaking and listening needs (table 8). specifically, according to the post hoc (tukey test) results in table 9, students from beijing and coastal provinces obtained significantly higher degrees of autonomy and relatedness than those from inland provinces in both speaking and listening. also, beijing participants were more confident about their speaking and listening than their inland peers, and the mean for listening competence for those from coastal provinces was significantly higher than those from inland provinces. table 8 university geographical context (speaking/listening) area n autonomy competence relatedness m (sd) m (sd) m (sd) beijing 90 3.80 (1.00)/3.93 (0.90) 3.47 (0.81)/3.03 (0.79) 4.23 (0.77)/4.20 (0.75) coastal 149 3.73 (0.80)/3.89 (0.83) 3.26 (0.72)/2.96 (0.67) 4.22 (0.75)/4.17 (0.73) inland 624 3.48 (0.94)/3.60 (0.94) 3.09 (0.80)/2.60 (0.70) 3.93 (0.92)/3.95 (0.86) f 7.834/9.143 10.509/26.089 9.782/6.620 p <.001/<.001 <.001/<.001 <.001/<.001 jian xu, xuyan qiu 498 table 9 tukey post hoc results for university geographical context speaking listening autonomy competence relatedness autonomy competence relatedness beijing vs coastal p = .838 p =.108 p = .997 p = .938 p = .753 p = .970 beijing vs inland p = .006 d = .33 p < .001 d = .42 p = .007 d = .35 p = .005 d = .36 p < .001 d = .58 p = .024 d = .31 coastal vs inland p = .009 d = .29 p = .054 p = .001 d = .35 p = .002 d = .33 p < .001 d = .53 p = .011 d = .28 when comparing the differences among students in different school years in the program, we again observed significant differences in competence and relatedness for speaking and competence for listening (table 10). unsurprisingly, year 4 students were more confident about their speaking and listening skills than year 1 students (table 11), and year 3 students felt more related to teachers and peers when learning english speaking than their year 2 counterparts. table 10 school years (speaking/listening) year n autonomy competence relatedness m (sd) m (sd) m (sd) year 1 549 3.59 (0.96)/3.72 (0.96) 3.12 (0.82)/2.67 (0.71) 4.05 (0.90)/4.04 (0.85) year 2 188 3.45 (0.90)/3.59 (0.89) 3.18 (0.78)/2.71 (0.75) 3.85 (0.87)/3.90 (0.82) year 3 87 3.66 (0.80)/3.79 (0.76) 3.21 (0.69)/2.86 (0.75) 4.17 (0.77)/4.12 (0.75) year 4 39 3.37 (0.92)/3.41 (0.99) 3.54 (0.63)/3.02 (0.67) 4.00 (0.87)/4.01 (0.78) f 1.986/2.382 3.756/4.325 3.332/1.848 p .114/.068 .011/.005 .019/.137 table 11 tukey post hoc results for school years speaking listening autonomy competence relatedness autonomy competence relatedness year 1 vs year 2 p = .327 p = .832 p = .076 p = .448 p = .910 p = .271 year 1 vs year 3 p = .951 p = .766 p = .678 p = .943 p = .151 p = .855 year 1 vs year 4 p = .567 p = .015 d = .57 p = .991 p = .253 p = .032 d = .51 p = .996 year 2 vs year 3 p = .391 p = .990 p = .049 d = .39 p = .456 p = .480 p = .232 year 2 vs year 4 p = .977 p = .079 p = .820 p = .740 p = .113 p = .913 year 3 vs year 4 p = .478 p = .203 p = .794 p = .218 p = .710 p = .911 second language psychological speaking and listening needs: scale development, symbiosis, and. . . 499 disciplinary differences were also observed among all the speaking and listening needs (table 12). in the case of psychological needs related to speaking, humanities and social science (hss) students demonstrated higher degrees of autonomy, competence, and relatedness than their peers in science and engineering (table 13), and the same trend was also observed in the listening needs between humanities and social science students and those of science and engineering students (table 13). table 12 disciplinary differences (speaking/listening) discipline n autonomy competence relatedness m (sd) m (sd) m (sd) hss 444 3.72 (0.89)/3.85 (0.89) 3.30 (0.74)/2.84 (0.71) 4.17 (0.80)/4.15 (0.75) science 266 3.36 (0.95)/3.47 (0.93) 2.99 (0.79)/2.62 (0.67) 3.88 (0.93)/3.88 (0.89) engineering 142 3.40 (0.96)/3.58 (0.97) 3.05 (0.91)/2.47 (0.78) 3.79 (0.97)/3.85 (0.90) medicine 11 3.59 (0.71)/3.73 (0.81) 3.22 (0.54)/2.87 (0.63) 3.75 (0.82)/4.07 (0.87) f 10.018/10.151 9.422/12.099 10.530/7.996 p < .001/< .001 < .001/< .001 < .001/< .001 table 13 tukey post hoc results of disciplinary differences psychological l2 speaking needs psychological l2 listening needs autonomy competence relatedness autonomy competence relatedness hss vs sci. p < .001 d = .39 p < .001 d = .41 p < .001 d = .33 p < .001 d = .42 p = .001 d = .32 p = .001 d = .33 hss vs eng. p = .005 d = .35 p = .017 d = .30 p < .001 d = .43 p = .027 d = .29 p < .001 d = .50 p = .003 d = .36 hss vs med. p = .975 p = .991 p = .468 p = .980 p = .999 p = .992 sci. vs eng. p = .986 p = .902 p = .822 p = .730 p = .254 p = .988 sci. vs med. p = .886 p = .829 p = .972 p = .843 p = .715 p = .910 eng. vs med. p = .932 p = .929 p = .999 p = .966 p = .348 p = .872 note. hss = humanities and social science; sci. = science; eng. = engineering; med. = medicine study-abroad experience was also an influential factor, as those with overseas learning experience significantly outperformed those without in all the speaking and listening needs (table 14). this indicates that study-abroad experience might also help to satisfy efl learners’ psychological needs. table 14 study abroad experience (speaking/listening) study abroad experience n autonomy competence relatedness m (sd) m (sd) m (sd) +experience 115 3.98 (0.84)/4.03 (0.84) 3.58 (0.77)/3.17 (0.71) 4.27 (0.77)/4.23 (0.76) -experience 748 3.49 (0.93)/3.63 (0.93) 3.10 (0.78)/2.64 (0.70) 3.98 (0.90)/3.98 (0.84) t 5.307/4.314 6.192/7.547 3.362/3.046 p <.001/<.001 <.001/<.001 .001/.002 cohen’s d .55/.45 .62/.75 .35/.31 jian xu, xuyan qiu 500 6. discussion this study developed the scales of psychological l2 speaking and listening needs, explored their associations, and examined how they were influenced by demographic factors. findings of this study are discussed in accordance with three research questions. 6.1. development and validation of the scales responding to rq1, our findings show that the parallel structured scales have been validated and that the three psychological needs correlated significantly within the speaking and the listening scales respectively (van den broeck et al., 2016). this further supports ryan and deci’s (2017) sdt and their claim that the three needs are antecedents of human motivation. this study also theoretically contributes to the understanding that basic psychological needs can be satisfied in l2 speaking and listening contexts. when these psychological needs are satisfied, the self-determined form of motivation can be enhanced, which, in turn, may generate desired or positive learning outcomes (noels et al., 2019). given the positive correlations among the needs within each scale, we can infer that enhancing the satisfaction of one need (e.g., autonomy) can also contribute to the fulfilment of other needs (e.g., competence, relatedness), which, in turn, motivate and promote l2 learning. in addition, from our results, the means of both l2 speaking and listening relatedness were above 4, suggesting that while communicating with others, chinese university students perceive a higher connection or a stronger sense of belonging with peers and teachers. this can be explained by the fact that in the chinese collectivist culture, students who have satisfying relationships with their parents are more likely to have a higher motivation to achieve better learning outcomes (chow & chu, 2007), and this satisfying relationship may also be extended to their teachers and peers. however, chinese university students proved to have a lower level of perceived competence in l2 listening. the reason might be that chinese university students do not have many opportunities outside the classrooms to engage in authentic and real-time communications to be competent listeners (xu & qiu, 2020). 6.2. correlations between psychological speaking and listening needs when it comes to rq2, the results further show that psychological l2 learners’ speaking and listening needs were correlated, indicating that satisfying learners’ psychological l2 speaking needs could lead to higher satisfaction of their l2 listening needs and vice versa. from the learner motivation perspective, this finding second language psychological speaking and listening needs: scale development, symbiosis, and. . . 501 echoes existing literature that has suggested listening and speaking skills to be interrelated, integrated, and inseparable (brown, 2004; goh, 2014). a possible explanation for this correlation is that the actual communication process is a combination of listening and speaking in which one needs to receive, understand, and decode the interlocutor’s information and then generate message content, formulate and articulate a response (vandergrift & goh, 2012). this study reveals a symbiosis between l2 speaking and listening autonomy, competence, and relatedness. students’ psychological listening needs are likely to be satisfied when they manifest high levels of speaking autonomy, competence, and relatedness. in this respect, this study demonstrates the close connection between l2 speaking and listening, further supporting the need for oracy instruction (goh, 2014). moreover, our study also illustrates the importance of social environment (i.e., l2 speaking and listening context) with respect to needs satisfaction (ryan & deci, 2017). this means that the needs satisfaction does not occur alone but simultaneously happen in l2 listening and speaking contexts. in addition, our findings support the essentiality of integrating listening and speaking into the concept of oracy to some extent. this is partially consistent with qiu and xu’s (2021) findings that l2 speaking and listening motivation were integrated and l2 speaking and listening should be taught and assessed together. 6.3. demographic information and need satisfaction moving on to rq3, the results also revealed gender and disciplinary differences, and that those with varying university contexts, stages of schooling, and with and without study-abroad experience also reported different degrees of need satisfaction. in this study, female participants’ satisfaction with l2 speaking autonomy and relatedness and l2 listening competence was significantly higher than those of males, whereas their degrees of l2 speaking competence and l2 listening autonomy and relatedness were similar. one explanation for this finding could be that females may be more willing to communicate in an l2 than males (donovan & macintyre, 2004), and being willing to communicate has been positively correlated with self-determined motivation and basic psychological needs (joe et al., 2017). therefore, female students might obtain higher satisfaction of basic psychological needs in these linguistic areas. also, in exam oriented l2 classrooms, such as china, where both male and female learners may have limited experience in interactive tasks and the lack of interaction causes both groups of learners to engage less inside and outside the classrooms (xu & qiu, 2020). thus, in this learning environment, their sense of autonomy and relatedness may not obviously differ as shown in our study. the university geographic context was also linked to l2 learners’ satisfaction of psychological needs. in china, coastal provinces (e.g., shanghai, zhejiang), jian xu, xuyan qiu 502 in general, are more developed than inland provinces (e.g., hubei, xinjiang) which leads to disparities in higher education (xiang et al., 2020). beijing was listed as an independent category because of its role as a capital province and its economic development as an inland urban province. in our findings, the means for l2 speaking and listening autonomy and relatedness for the beijing and coastal groups were significantly higher than those for inland participants, and beijing students obtained a higher degree of competence for speaking and listening than inland counterparts, implying that the basic psychological needs for l2 learners from more developed areas could be better satisfied than those for inland students. this may be attributed to the disparity in educational resources between the more developed and less developed areas reported in the literature (xiang et al. 2020), as inland learners may have relatively fewer opportunities to communicate in english and develop their speaking and listening skills than their beijing and coastal province peers, and they might be less confident about their language performance. there is also a trend of academic mobility or “brain drain” from inland to beijing or coastal universities, leading to an imbalance regarding teaching and research quality (chen, 2016). therefore, another explanation is that traditional teacher-centered and exam-oriented l2 classrooms may be more typical in inland provinces. in comparison, teachers in more developed areas may adopt more diverse teaching methodologies (e.g., learner-centered approaches such as task-based instruction), generating more real-time communication experience for learners and satisfying their psychological needs in a better way. students’ university schooling stage (years 1-4) was also related to learners’ satisfaction of needs. as expected, the means in speaking and listening competence for senior year students (year 4) were higher than those of year 1 students, which is likely due to their more developed english skills at the later stage of their university study. similarly, year 3 learners felt a stronger sense of relatedness with their teachers and peers than year 2 students, possibly because they were more familiar with their classmates and teachers after more than two years’ university studies. however, since no other significant differences were found in the schooling stage comparisons, these findings are inconclusive. the fourth factor that turns out to be influential is academic discipline, as the humanities participants were found to possess higher degrees of all the needs than their science and engineering counterparts in both speaking and listening. shaaban and ghaith (2000) found that the major did not affect learners’ motivation to learn english as a foreign language, but regarding basic psychological needs, the story could be different. science and engineering students’ basic psychological needs in l2 speaking and listening may require more attention than those for students of the humanities, social sciences and medicine. a possible reason is that learners from different disciplines may have different second language psychological speaking and listening needs: scale development, symbiosis, and. . . 503 learning styles and preferences. for example, lau and gardner (2019) found that l2 learners from soft science disciplines (e.g., humanities and social science) were more active in the learning process (being autonomous in l2 learning according to lau, 2017) than their peers in the hard sciences. their finding may also help explain the current result. english language learning itself belongs to the subjects of the humanities. while learning english, hss students can find out interest, advantage, and/or learning goal. moreover, although disciplinary differences have been regarded as crucial for teaching academic english due to different academic conventions in different disciplines, their relationship with l2 motivation is worth exploring further. finally, the lack of study-abroad experience has been reported to affect l2 performance and l2 listening motivation (xu & qiu, 2020), and our study further proposes that study-abroad experience strengthens l2 learners’ sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness in speaking and listening. overseas learning experiences offered the learners real-time communication opportunities to develop their knowledge and the strategies of listening and speaking in the target language; hence, they might be more confident about their communication skills and have better developed english speaking and listening learning strategies, and greater knowledge of what to include when communicating than those without prior study-abroad experience (xu & qiu, 2020). 7. concluding remarks this study examined basic psychological needs for l2 speaking and listening with two scales. our findings provide a basis for some pedagogical implications as well as directions for future research. the limitations are also acknowledged in this section. regarding pedagogical implications, teachers may focus on the instruction of integrated language skills and listening-and-speaking tasks, creating interactive communication experience (goh, 2014) to achieve the satisfaction of l2 learners’ psychological speaking and listening needs, as the need satisfactions of the two skills are correlated. teachers can also use the validated measurement scales to investigate the psychological needs of their own students so as to develop more insights into the motivational profiles of their students. moreover, they may consider students’ demographic information when designing tasks (e.g., gender), and try their best to satisfy students’ basic psychological needs in l2 communication. with respect to the methodological implication, our study successfully adopts both first-order and bifactor cfa models to verify the construct validity of basic psychological needs, which sheds light on future validation studies in l2 contexts. in relation to conceptual contribution, our study consolidates the concept of oracy by showing the close relationship between psychological jian xu, xuyan qiu 504 l2 speaking and listening needs, which inspires future researchers to treat and study l2 listening and speaking in an integrated manner. the present study has limitations. students’ questionnaire input were only self-reported data which might need to be triangulated with other data sources, such as observation, performance and so on. furthermore, due to practical constraints, data on students’ learning outcomes were not collected. consequently, the predictive validity of the psychological l2 speaking and listening needs scale on language outcomes was not addressed. in addition, although the data covering students from different regions of china were collected, the sample size was not very large compared with the student population in china. as to the suggestions for future validation studies, participants from different countries or regions can be recruited to address how psychological needs vary across different cultural contexts. in addition, future studies may collect the data of 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(2020). study abroad experiences count: motivational profile of efl listeners and its impact on top-down and bottom-up processing. applied linguistics review. https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2020-0037 177 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (1). 2020. 177-219 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.1.9 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study daniel jung indiana university, bloomington, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4678-7390 danjung@indiana.edu megan dibartolomeo indiana university, bloomington, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1969-7843 mdibarto@indiana.edu fernando melero-garcía indiana university, bloomington, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3554-314x fmelerog@indiana.edu lindsay giacomino indiana university, bloomington, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1658-2474 lgiacomi@indiana.edu laura gurzynski-weiss indiana university, bloomington, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2332-3198 lgurzyns@indiana.edu carly henderson augusta university, bloomington, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6546-9614 carhenderson@augusta.edu daniel jung, megan dibartolomeo, fernando melero-garcía, lindsay giacomino, laura. . . 178 marian hidalgo the public university of navarre, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7131-1880 mangeles.hidalgo@unavarra.es abstract individual differences (ids) have long been considered one of the most important factors explaining variable rates and outcomes in second language acquisition (dewaele, 2013). while traditional operationalizations of ids have, explicitly or implicitly, assumed that ids are static traits that are stable through time, more recent research inspired by complex dynamic systems theory (larsen-freeman, 1997, 2020) demonstrates that many ids are dynamic and variable through time and across contexts, a theme echoed throughout the current issue. this study reports the initial semester of a diachronic project investigating the dynamicity of four learner ids: motivation, personality, learning and cognitive styles, and working memory. in the initial semester, data from 323 participants in their first year of university-level spanish were collected and analyzed to determine what type of variability may be present across learners with respect to the four ids studied at one time point and to discern possible learner profiles in the data or patterns via which the data may be otherwise meaningfully described. the results revealed four types of learner profiles present in the dataset. keywords: individual differences; longitudinal; cluster analysis; dynamicity; spanish 1. introduction second language (l2) development is characterized as an inherently dynamic process. although it is commonly accepted that l2 learners pass through largely predictable stages in the acquisition of a given structure (brown, 1973; dulay & burt, 1973), variability across individuals in both the outcome and the rate of acquisition has been readily observed (van patten & williams, 2015, p. 10). learner individual differences (ids) have been posited to be one of the most important factors in accounting for this variability (dewaele, 2009, 2013; dörnyei, 2005, 2006; dörnyei & ryan, 2015). id research concerns the identification of the parameters along which people vary and attempts to describe the manner in which ids relate to observed differences in l2 development. as the papers in this special issue attest, there is growing awareness of the dynamic nature of ids, absent in more traditional operationalizations (dörnyei, 2005, 2009; dörnyei & ryan, 2015; dörnyei, macintyre, & henry, 2015), which calls into question the stability of ids over time (dewaele, 2013). this updated conceptualization considers ids as dynamic and complex, with multiple ids interacting with each tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study 179 other and with the learning context during l2 development (dewaele, 2013; dörnyei, 2009; dörnyei & ushioda, 2009; gurzynski-weiss, 2020a). this update, as seen throughout this collection, is consistent with the “dynamic turn” (de bot, 2015a) in research on l2 development, which emphasizes the dynamic nature of the l2 system (larsen-freeman, 2006, 2011, 2020; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). while there is shared conceptual agreement that ids may best be considered on a continuum of dynamicity (see the editorial introduction to this issue), there is much research to be done to uncover the dynamic nature of each id and how ids interact with each other and with the larger l2 developmental system over time. for example, some ids, such as anxiety, can be characterized as both state (highly variable, e.g., macintyre & serroul, 2015) and trait (less variable, e.g., horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986) ids, depending on the scope of the research question (see gregersen, this issue). recent work has shown that several ids, including anxiety, motivation, enjoyment, and willingness to communicate, interact over the course of a single task (e.g., boudreau, macintyre, & dewaele, 2018; gregersen, macintyre, & meza, 2014), suggesting that ids influence one another even in the short term. serafini (2017) has also provided evidence of longer-term interactions over the course of a semester between aptitude, working memory, and motivation. thus, ids may show variation and interinfluence over both shorter and longer time periods. despite these recent advancements demonstrating the dynamic and interactive nature of ids, the fact remains that decades of previous research have shown ids, when conceptualized and measured as more or less static, to be remarkably consistent predictors of l2 developmental outcomes. for example, at the level of individual studies, ids such as motivation and language aptitude regularly yield correlations above .50 with language outcome measures (dörnyei, 2006; dörnyei & skehan, 2003; sawyer & ranta, 2001). at the meta-analytic level, the correlations between ids and l2 outcomes may be lower; for example, li (2016) examined the relationship between language aptitude and language achievement and concluded that, based on 109 studies involving 13,035 participants, there was a medium-sized correlation (r = .49) that supported the role of language aptitude in l2 development. in an earlier meta-analysis, masgoret and gardner (2003) found that the correlation between motivation and language outcomes were .37 based on 75 studies involving 10,489 participants. even at the meta-analytic level, however, ids demonstrate a consistent, positive relationship with l2 development. specifically, the ids in this study, regardless of the particular operationalization used, have all been linked to l2 development (i.e., motivation: masgoret & gardner, 2003; learning styles: johnson, prior, & artuso, 2000; personality: hanafiyeh & afghari, 2017; working memory: linck, osthus, koeth, & bunting, 2014). thus, there is work to be done to reconcile: (a) the theoretical idea daniel jung, megan dibartolomeo, fernando melero-garcía, lindsay giacomino, laura. . . 180 that ids are more dynamic with (b) the empirical work that has found links between these ids, measured on a single occasion and assuming them to be stable, and l2 development. this project, both the first semester worth of data presented in this special issue, as well as the longitudinal component underway, seeks to address this need by examining these ids using the traditional, time-tested instruments that have been shown to be reliable and to relate the ids measured to l2 development, and collecting data longitudinally (once per semester over 2 years) with the goal of examining if and how these learner ids change over time. understanding how ids relate to each other has practical motivations as well. for example, existing research finds that ids may interact with instructional treatment, meaning that certain learners benefit more from a given task on the basis of their ids such as motivation (dörnyei, 2002) or aptitude (e.g., yilmaz & granena, 2016). however, this research largely considers only a single id at a time. as skehan (1986) noted, “it is possible that patterns or configurations of different abilities are important for language learning success” (p. 82, our emphasis). thus, understanding multiple ids of l2 learners in a given language department or unit may provide crucial information to program coordinators and curriculum designers. in other words, if certain profiles of l2 learners (for example, highly analytical, motivated learners) consistently outperform other groups of learners, or if only a certain subset of learners (e.g., integratively motivated leaners with high levels of extraversion) go on to advanced language classes as majors or minors while learners with other ids do not, identifying these ids may provide language programs with concrete ways to deliver more well-rounded instruction and with crucial information for creating better recruitment and retention strategies. this focus is also consistent with recent proposals to consider l2 development at the curriculum level, rather than at the level of task, treatment, or lesson plan (byrnes, 2018). the current paper reports on data from the initial semester of a longitudinal study designed to contribute to uncovering the dynamic nature of four learner ids: motivation, personality, learning/cognitive styles, and working memory. for the longitudinal project, we are interested in understanding (a) the dynamicity of each id over the first two years of language study;1 (b) whether and to what extent these ids interact with one another, and (c) the relationship between these ids (separately and/or together) and language learning decisions and behaviors such as 1 the current context can be considered a “foreign” language classroom context, where learners primarily learn and use the target language in the classroom with limited opportunities to use it in the outside community. an l2 classroom context on the other hand typically entails a range of learning contexts and opportunities to use the target language to communicate in everyday life (dörnyei, 1990). note that we do not consider spanish to be a foreign language within the united states; we are simply using this term (admittedly problematically) to clarify that there are minimal opportunities for use outside of the classroom. tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study 181 (dis)continuing language study, the amount of time using the target language outside of the classroom, and choosing to study abroad. in the current paper, we report on the patterns of ids present in the data collected during the first semester and on the process of identifying potential learner profiles in the first semester. 2. literature review 2.1. dynamic systems in l2 development a growing body of research in l2 development is conceptualized within the framework of complex dynamic systems theory (cdst; larsen-freeman, 2015, 2020). as outlined by larsen-freeman (2015, p. 228), complex systems are characterized as open (i.e., they interact with the environment and are shaped by it), adaptive (i.e., they respond to changes in the environment), and nonlinear (i.e., effects are not necessarily proportionate to the cause). this conceptualization is largely incompatible with the traditional view of ids as concrete, modular, context-independent traits, and with the tendency to study them in isolation from each other (segalowitz & trofimovich, 2012). instead, recent research has begun to adopt a more holistic approach, more in line with cdst, that examines multiple ids in relation to one another (dörnyei, 2009, 2010; dörnyei & ryan, 2015; geeslin, 2020; gurzynski-weiss, 2020b; lantolf, 2020; larsen-freeman, 1997, 2015, 2020). in particular, some recent scholarship has conceptualized ids as learner resources, which presumably change over the course of l2 learning and exert influence over other resources in the system. learner resources, such as ids, are limited in nature (van geert, 1995), and they may demonstrate supportive (mutual development of resources because of support), competitive (mutual development because of competition between resources), conditional (a cause-effect relationship, in which one resource causes change in another), or even compensatory (a low level in one resource is compensated for by higher levels in another) relationships (de bot, 2008; verspoor, de bot, & lowie, 2011). within these relationships, certain ids may act as attractors or stabilizers in the l2 system, pulling the system into certain configurations. about the effects of this role of certain ids, dörnyei (2010, p. 260) states: “a relatively wide range of starting points will eventually converge on a much smaller set of states because the process unfolds in the direction of the attractor.” this may be the reason that static operationalizations continuously emerge as such strong predictors of l2 development, as certain ids such as motivation or cognitive ability pull the system toward particular developmental paths, regardless of variability. cdst is a promising analytical framework for understanding ids because it posits that patterns of interaction between resources can vary across different daniel jung, megan dibartolomeo, fernando melero-garcía, lindsay giacomino, laura. . . 182 timescales (micro, e.g., a task, and macro, e.g., a university semester) and can also be different for individual learners (de bot, 2008, 2015b). given the longitudinal nature of this project and our interest in the dynamic, mutually influencing nature of ids, we adopt a cdst perspective to identify relationships between four ids (i.e., motivation, personality, learning/cognitive styles, and working memory) and, ultimately, to examine changes in these ids over time. 2.2. motivation motivation is one of the most studied ids in l2 development research. we adhere to dörnyei and ushioda’s (2011) assertion that motivation “concerns the direction and magnitude of human behaviour” (p. 4, emphasis original) related to the choice of, persistence in, and effort expended on a particular action (ushioda, 2008). specifically, to conceptualize motivation, we adopt dörnyei’s l2 motivational self system model (l2mss, dörnyei, 2005, 2009; dörnyei & ryan, 2015). the l2mss is comprised of three main dimensions: the ideal l2 self (i.e., the collection of desirable qualities one would like to possess), the ought-to l2 self (i.e., the attributes one believes others want them to possess), and the l2 learning experience (i.e., the present learning environment the learner finds themselves in; dörnyei, 2005, 2009). based in higgins’ (1987) self-discrepancy theory, the l2mss model posits that motivated behavior arises from the need to reduce the distance between one’s possible selves (the deal and ought-to l2 selves) and one’s current self. the l2mss brings the study of l2 motivation more in line with parallel strands of research in motivational psychology (dörnyei, 2005, 2009; dörnyei & ushioda, 2011), and has been applied to l2 research across a number of different contexts, including english as a foreign language in japan (ryan, 2009; yashima, 2009), china (taguchi, magid, & papi, 2009), iran (taguchi et al., 2009), and hungary (csizér & kormos, 2009), and the learning of languages other than english in the united states (thompson, 2017a, 2017b). when considering the relationship between motivation and l2 development, many researchers attempt to link motivation to language outcomes, positing a direct influence on language development. for example, outcome measures common in the literature are scales of self-perceived proficiency (e.g., macintyre, mackinnon, & clément, 2009), objective measurements of language ability (e.g., lyons, 2009), and course grades (e.g., gardner & macintyre, 1993). motivation tends to correlate with these measures: macintyre et al. (2009), for example, showed that stronger l2 selves correlated positively (r = .76) with perceived l2 proficiency in a sample of 135 female first language (l1) english high school learners of foreign languages. a recent meta-analysis of research on the l2mss (al-hoorie, 2018) found that the correlation between the ideal l2 self tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study 183 and language outcomes was .20, a small effect size (plonsky & oswald, 2014). others attempt to link motivation to language learning behaviors that support l2 development, such as language use. for example, hernández (2010) investigated the role of motivation in predicting language use both at-home (n = 24) and abroad (n = 20); for both groups, motivation significantly predicted l2 use outside of the classroom and improvements in oral proficiency. motivation as an id variable has also been investigated longitudinally. de bot (2015b) notes that change occurs across many interacting timescales, and dörnyei (2003) states that “many of the controversies and disagreements in l2 motivation research go back to an insufficient temporal awareness” (p. 18), indicating the need for more research into motivation across different timescales. motivation has been considered longitudinally across years, university semesters, weeks, and tasks. in terms of years, chan, dörnyei, and henry (2015) qualitatively tracked how motivation changed over the course of study through retrospective interviews with an l1 cantonese learner of english and taiwanese, finding that his motivation steadily increased over the course of his schooling. at the semester level, piniel and csizér (2014) observed that motivation showed quantitative variability during a composition course in hungary, although the ought-to l2 self exhibited more change than the ideal l2 self. at the level of weeks, willis allen and herron (2003) found no quantitative changes in integrative motivation (using the attitude/motivation test battery; gardner, 1985) during a six-week study abroad program in france, although willis allen (2010) did find qualitative changes in a subset of learners’ goals for language study. finally, at the level of the task, macintyre and serroul (2015) found that learners reported fluctuating levels of motivation as they completed eight speaking tasks in l2 french. thus, we can conclude from this body of research that motivation shows variation across different timescales. it should be noted, however, that at the largest timescale, years, research has only been conducted retrospectively (i.e., asking participants to reflect on their change in motivation; chan et al., 2015). longitudinal, quantitative research over timespans longer than a year is needed to better understand the dynamics of motivation and the relationship between motivation and the process of l2 development (e.g., its relationship to continuing or discontinuing l2 study). 2.3. personality personality has been defined as the set of characteristics that a person possesses which “account for consistent patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving” (pervin & john, 2001, p. 4). it has been analyzed from a variety of perspectives in the field of psychology, with the predominant model being that of the big five (costa & mccrae, 1992). this model, also referred to as the five-factor model (ffm) is comprised of the daniel jung, megan dibartolomeo, fernando melero-garcía, lindsay giacomino, laura. . . 184 following personality dimensions: (1) extraversion-introversion, (2) neuroticism-emotional stability, (3) conscientiousness, (4) agreeableness, and (5) openness to experience. many personality tests used in psychology (e.g., the neuroticism-extraversionopenness five-factor inventory, or neo-ffi; costa & mccrae, 1989) follow this model. more recently, researchers have situated the five dimensions within a sociocultural context to provide a more dynamic, integrative framework, as is proposed, for example, in the new big five (mcadams & pals, 2006). additional personality inventories have adopted supplementary dimensions to complement those of the big five, such as hexaco (ashton & lee, 2009), which adds the dimension of honesty-humility. in this study, we adopt the hexaco model to conceptualize personality, as it expands upon but remains aligned with the dimensions of the big five, which is the model that has traditionally been used in l2 research on personality (e.g., verhoeven & vermeer, 2002). an overview of the six dimensions of the hexaco model, their respective sub-dimensions, and their definitions is provided in table 1. table 1 hexaco dimensions with definitions (adapted from ashton & lee, 2009) honesty-humility sincerity fairness greed avoidance modesty high scorers avoid manipulating others for their own benefit, are not interested in wealth or luxuries, do not feel entitled to higher social status, and are not often tempted to break rules. emotionality fearfulness anxiety dependence sentimentality high scorers are characterized by higher levels of anxiety, a greater fear of physical danger, a greater need for emotional support from others, and tend to be more empathetic and form deeper sentimental attachments to others. extraversion social self-esteem social boldness sociability liveliness high scorers feel more positively about themselves, enjoy being around others in social settings, are confident when leading or addressing a group, and experience positive energy and enthusiasm. agreeableness forgivingness gentleness flexibility patience high scorers are more forgiving, more lenient regarding the actions of others, more cooperative and flexible, and have little trouble controlling their temper. conscientiousness organization diligence perfectionism prudence high scorers are disciplined, organize their time well, have a greater tendency toward accuracy and perfection in their work, and take care in making decisions. openness to experience aesthetic appreciation inquisitiveness creativity unconventionality high scorers are curious about a wide range of subjects, have a greater appreciation for art and nature, use their imagination, and are interested in unusual people or ideas. tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study 185 given the importance of social interaction in l2 development (e.g., cohen, 2012; duff & talmy, 2011; firth & wagner, 1997; long, 1996; van compernolle, 2014), it is reasonable to posit that learners’ personality may play an important role in l2 learning as it likely mediates their opportunities for l2 interaction both within and outside of the classroom context. nevertheless, the role of personality in l2 learning has not been robustly addressed in the literature (dewaele, 2012). the few studies that do exist have investigated a potential link between l2 learning and certain dimensions of personality, the most researched being the introversion-extraversion dimension. dewaele (2004), for example, found that extroverted learners (as determined by the eysenck personality inventory; eysenck & eysenck, 1984) used a higher proportion of colloquial words than more introverted learners. in the case of high achieving language learners, ehrman (2008) found that those who had more introverted personalities (as measured by the myers-briggs type indicator [mbti]) more frequently achieved an oral proficiency rating of 4/5 on the interagency language roundtable proficiency test. finally, macintyre, clément, and noels (2007) explored the potential interaction between learning conditions (i.e., very familiar vs. somewhat familiar vs. unfamiliar) and personality types and observed trends indicating that introverted learners of canadian french scored higher on vocabulary tests in the very familiar condition than extroverted learners, whereas extroverted learners performed better than introverted learners in the somewhat familiar condition; there were no differences in scores by personality type in the unfamiliar condition. beyond introversion-extraversion, few studies examine other dimensions of personality. verhoeven and vermeer (2002) investigated the potential relationship between the big five personality dimensions and communicative competence of l2 dutch learners and their l1 dutch peers. for l2 learners, they found that openness to experience positively correlated with strategic (making effective use of one’s abilities to complete a task), organizational (grammatical and textual knowledge), and pragmatic (sociolinguistic and functional knowledge) competence, that extraversion correlated positively with strategic competence, and that conscientiousness correlated positively with organizational competence. oz (2014) analyzed willingness to communicate and found it to be positively correlated with extraversion, openness to experience, and agreeableness in 168 learners in turkey. taken together, these findings suggest that, although there may be a link between l2 learning and certain personality dimensions, the nature of the relationship may vary depending on the situational context or the aspect of communicative competence under investigation. given the inconclusive findings for personality in the l2 literature outlined above, there is a need for investigation into how different personality dimensions may interact with other ids and/or potentially change over time. long (1996) daniel jung, megan dibartolomeo, fernando melero-garcía, lindsay giacomino, laura. . . 186 posited that personality may indirectly influence acquisition through consistent relationships with other variables, such as a preference for group learning, which would facilitate more interaction in the target language, affording more opportunities for negotiation and feedback. investigating the relationship between personality and other ids is a primary contribution of this project. additionally, although there is some evidence that personality may change while studying abroad (dwyer & peters, 2004; nash, 1976; tracy-ventura, dewaele, köylü, & mcmanus, 2016), to the best of our knowledge there is no research that considers if personality changes during at-home language study, although evidence suggests that multilinguals show significant differences in personality profiles in comparison to their monolingual counterparts (dewaele & stavans, 2014; dewaele & van oudenhoven, 2009). additionally, moody (1988) found that, when compared to a general sample of college students, students registered in university language courses showed significant differences in personality types (as measured by the mbti test), which suggests that certain types of personalities may gravitate towards language study over other subjects. the present paper stands to contribute information about the personality profiles of learners who elect to study (and continue studying) spanish at the university level. 2.4. cognitive and learning styles learning styles refer to “an individual’s natural, habitual, and preferred way(s) of absorbing, processing, and retaining new information and skills” (reid, 1995, p. viii). cognitive styles can be defined as “an individual’s preferred and habitual modes of perceiving, remembering, organizing, processing, and representing information” (dörnyei & ryan, 2015, p. 112). the overlap in these definitions underscores the proposal by some (e.g., nel, 2008) that the concepts and terms are interchangeable. following ellis (2008) and dörnyei and ryan (2015), we conceptualize learning and cognitive styles as two related constructs, with cognitive styles forming the core of learning styles. that is, if cognitive style refers to how individuals process information (kinsella, 1995), learning style subsumes cognitive style and refers to “consistent ways of responding to and using stimuli in the context of learning” (kinsella, 1995, p. 181). this conceptualization is in line with earlier research into cognitive and learning styles in general education, which proposed that learning style is a multi-layered construct (curry, 1983, 1991). curry conceptualized cognitive and learning styles to be layered like an onion; the first layer is comprised of environmental preferences, the second layer refers to information processing preferences, and the third layer refers to personality dimensions. it is important to note that the theoretical basis on which cognitive and learning styles are built is fraught with conceptual difficulties. riding (2000b) enumerates tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study 187 issues related to wide-ranging labels for different styles, questionable assessment techniques, and lack of clear distinctions between styles and other constructs (e.g., personality, strategies). additionally, research findings that examine the relationship between styles and learning outcomes have been mixed. for example, tucker, hamayan, and genesee (1976) found that cognitive style, operationalized as field dependence/independence, failed to correlate with learning measures, while seliger (1977) found that it did. conflicting findings and a lack of theoretical agreement has led some to call for the abandonment of learning and cognitive styles research (griffiths & sheen, 1992). although scholars are increasingly critical of the scientific foundation of styles (coffield, 2005; riding, 2000a, 2000b), language teachers continue to defend the construct based on their experience (dörnyei & ryan, 2015, p. 107). additionally, griffiths (2012) suggests that it is worth investigating cognitive and learning styles due to their potential practical applications in the classroom: “understanding [learning styles] has the potential to greatly enhance learning and to make learning more enjoyable and successful” (p. 151). early research into cognitive styles correlated performance on the group embedded figures test (witkin, oltman, raskin, & karp, 1971), which measures learners’ ability to discern patterns within a complex figure, with language achievement (abraham, 1983; alptekin & atakan, 1990; carter, 1988; chappelle & roberts, 1986; elliott, 1995; genesee & hamayan, 1980; hansen, 1984; hansen & stansfield, 1981, 1982; hansen-strain, 1987; jamieson, 1992). these studies have reported significant correlations between cognitive styles and learners’ performance in different language tests and settings. for example, chapelle and roberts (1986) found that field independence was linked to all components of the test of english as a foreign language, as well as performance on a grammar test, a diction test, and an oral communication test. likewise, genesee and hamayan (1980) found a positive correlation between field independence and achievement in french language arts and listening comprehension. nevertheless, johnson et al. (2000), in their study of 29 english learners, found field dependence to significantly and positively relate to teacher ratings of student performance and complexity (operationalized as the number of t-units produced during a 2-minute conversation sample). for learning styles, empirical evidence has been provided mainly by studies that seek to understand the effect of matches or mismatches between learners’ preferred style and instructional design, focusing on vocabulary (hatami, 2018; kassaian, 2007; tight, 2010; yeh & wang, 2003). for example, tight (2010) examined the effect of matching learning and instruction styles in a group of 128 learners of spanish and found that, although style matching promoted better retention of vocabulary items than mismatching, it was mixed-modality instruction that promoted greater retention of vocabulary items overall, regardless of learner style preference. daniel jung, megan dibartolomeo, fernando melero-garcía, lindsay giacomino, laura. . . 188 the dynamic turn in id research has the potential to address some recurrent issues in style research. specifically, cdst provides a theoretical framework through which to empirically examine whether and to what degree cognitive and learning styles interact with other ids such as learning strategies (e.g., cohen, 2003) or personality (e.g., zhang, sternberg, & rayner, 2012). additionally, as with the conceptualization of other ids, recent perspectives argue for the incorporation of a dynamic view of cognitive and learning styles. specifically, many early definitions defined both as stable, fixed variables that do not change (e.g., reinert, 1976). however, little and singleton (1990) suggest that learning styles are malleable and that learners can learn to adopt and apply new styles through experience and training. similarly, wong and nunan (2011) suggest that by expanding or “stretching” their teaching styles, instructors will be able to cater to a wider range of types of learners, and allow learners to expand or “stretch” their own learning styles. additionally, as dörnyei and chan (2013) point out, many instruments do not force choices between different styles, but rather ask learners to indicate preferences, which implicitly allows for the idea of change over time. nevertheless, current evidence does not provide a clear picture of the extent of dynamicity of styles. chen (2009), for example, found that sensory preferences differed by grade level in taiwanese junior high students, although it was not clear if learners change their preference as they advance in education or if the groups simply happened to have different preferences. the dynamicity of style and the role of learning and cognitive styles in l2 development remain open empirical questions. 2.5. working memory working memory (wm) has been defined as a “mental workspace” (lee, ning, & goh, 2013, p. 73) used for storing and manipulating information assumed to be necessary for a range of complex cognitive activities (baddeley, 2003). included in these cognitive activities are comprehending and producing an l2, which necessitates storing, selecting, and successively integrating information from a stream of discourse (miyake & friedman, 1998). among the various proposed models of the structure of wm, baddeley’s (1986) multicomponent model has received the most attention in l2 research. his model divides wm into a storage system responsible for the active maintenance of information and an executive/processing system, responsible for controlling attention and linking stored information to long-term memory. as detailed in jackson (this issue), wm has received considerable attention in l2 research given that many scholars (e.g., ellis, 1996; mackey, philp, egi, fujii, & tatsumi, 2002) view it as a robust window into the cognitive underpinnings of l2 learning. empirical support for the role of wm in l2 learning has tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study 189 been evidenced in a recent meta-analysis by linck et al. (2014), spanning 79 studies and 3,707 participants. results showed a positive relationship between wm and l2 outcomes, specifically production (ρ = .27)2 based on 42 studies involving 1,712 participants, and comprehension (ρ = .24) based on 43 studies involving 2,411 participants. in addition, executive components of wm predicted l2 outcomes to a greater extent than storage components. thus, differences among learners in terms of executive control (e.g., maintaining access to information, managing potentially competing representations in the l1 and l2, and inhibiting irrelevant information in order to process language) may play an important role in the variation in l2 outcomes. regarding specific linguistic outcomes, a positive relationship has been found between wm and vocabulary learning (e.g., speciale, ellis, & bywater, 2004); sentence processing (e.g., dai, 2015); l2 fluency (e.g., o’brien, segalowitz, collentine, & freed, 2006); lexical comprehension (e.g., sunderman & kroll, 2009); self-correction of errors (e.g., ahmadian, 2015); the ability to incorporate information learned from corrective feedback to facilitate l2 acquisition of various morphosyntactic structures (e.g., goo, 2012; li, 2015; mackey et al., 2002; sagarra, 2007; trofimovich, ammar, & gatbonton, 2007; yilmaz, 2013); and the production of modified output (e.g., mackey, adams, stafford, & winke, 2010; sagarra, 2007), which has been empirically linked to l2 learning (e.g., loewen, 2005; mcdonough, 2005). of note, wm has also been examined from longitudinal and dynamic perspectives. for example, serafini and sanz (2016) examined the role of wm in morphosyntactic development among beginning, intermediate, and advanced adult l2 learners of spanish during and after a semester of instruction. results revealed a positive relationship between wm capacity and l2 development at lower levels of l2 proficiency, but minimal positive effects for wm as proficiency increased. the observed wm effect at the lower levels also varied over time: it was stronger at the beginning of instruction and after one month of no instruction, and weaker at the end of instruction, indicating that classroom exposure to spanish may have neutralized the benefits of a higher wm capacity, whereas a break in exposure may lead to heavier reliance on wm. serafini (2017) further illustrates the dynamic nature of wm, finding evidence that wm interacts with motivation at different proficiency levels. specifically, serafini found that stronger motivational intensity or effort and a stronger ought-to l2 self were associated with a smaller wm among advanced l2 learners of spanish. these studies that examine wm from a dynamic perspective open the question of which other ids might interact with wm and how these relationships may change over time as l2 proficiency and experience increase. 2ρ = estimated population effect size. please see linck et al. (2014) for further discussion. daniel jung, megan dibartolomeo, fernando melero-garcía, lindsay giacomino, laura. . . 190 to measure wm, scholars have employed simple spans (e.g., digit span, non-word recognition/repetition) to measure the storage component of wm as well as complex spans (e.g., reading, counting, operation span) to measure both the storage and executive components. a commonly used measure of wm is the operation span (ospan, turner & engle, 1989), which requires participants to process the correctness of mathematical operations and then recall previously seen material (e.g., integers, letters, or words) in their correct serial position. the ospan is the most robust measurement of wm for several reasons. first, it measures the executive attention control component of wm, which, as mentioned previously, is argued to be most relevant for l2 learning (wen, 2012). second, it allows for the measurement of both storage and processing components of wm, which is appropriate given the argument that the relative importance of these components may change over time (juffs & harrington, 2011) as well as the notion that bilingualism can shape executive attention across the lifespan (see bialystok, 2018, for discussion).3 finally, the ospan’s reliability has been repeatedly established (conway et al., 2005; engle, tuholski, laughlin, & conway, 1999; klein & fiss, 1999), and the measurement tool has been employed in several l2 studies (e.g., baralt, 2015; goo, 2012; yilmaz, 2013). research is warranted that explores whether wm also relates to l2 development in the context of a foreign language department and that seeks to understand the range of learner wm present in such a context so as to maximize learning opportunities across different wm capacities. in fact, if we conceive of the relationship between wm and l2 development as contextually and instructionally dependent (jackson, this issue), wm may be particularly associated with outcomes in foreign language classroom context given that foreign language contexts often entail language as the object of study and use grammar-based pedagogy more so than l2 contexts (shehadeh & coombe, 2012) and may draw on explicit learning processes, which have been argued to be associated more with wm (tagarelli, ruiz, vega, & rebuschat, 2016). 3. the present study the dynamic turn in l2 research necessitates the examination of multiple factors over the course of l2 learning. examining ids from a dynamic perspective has been described as “the logical next step of conceptualizing ids” (dörnyei, 2010, p. 260). the longitudinal project described here seeks to address the dynamic nature of four ids: motivation, personality, learning and cognitive styles, and working 3 more research has been called for that examines the bidirectional influences of bilingual development and changes in wm functions (e.g., jackson, this issue). tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study 191 memory. we follow the same group of students at a large, public, mid-western university in the united states and measure their ids at four time points over the course of two years of language study, with the goal of identifying and tracking relationships between the four learner ids. furthermore, following serafini (2017), the study will investigate how these relationships change over time at a macro-level. here, we present findings from the initial semester of data collection; subsequent analyses of the following semesters will be conducted in the future to understand the evolution of the ids under study. this initial examination of the data is guided by two research questions: 1. how can first-semester learners’ ids be described and what variation exists in ids among the learners? 2. what relationships exist between the studied ids and how can learner id profiles be characterized? 3.1. method 3.1.1. participants participants were recruited from either a second semester spanish course or an accelerated, semester-long course that covered the first year of content (and therefore encompassed the previously mentioned spanish semester course) during the fall of 2018 at a large, public research university in the united states. of the 625 initial respondents, 325 provided complete data for motivation, personality, and cognitive and learning styles, and wm. participants who did not provide complete data for motivation, personality, cognitive and learning styles, or wm were excluded. additionally, two participants were excluded as outliers due to the low score on the processing component of the wm portion, resulting in 323 participants. of the 323 respondents, 223 (69%) were in their first year of university study, 74 (23%) were in their second year, 20 (6%) were in their third year, 5 (2%) were in their fourth year, and 1 (<1%) was in their fifth year. the average age of the overall sample was 18.7 years (sd = 1.14, range = 17-26). on average, participants took 1.9 years of spanish classes in primary school (sd = 2.50, range 0-11) and 2.7 years (sd = .93, range = 0-4) in secondary school. fourteen (4.3%) reported experience abroad. 3.1.2. instruments motivation: the motivation questionnaire was adapted from existing questionnaires designed to measure the l2mss. the core of the instrument was adapted daniel jung, megan dibartolomeo, fernando melero-garcía, lindsay giacomino, laura. . . 192 from taguchi et al. (2009), who performed a large-scale survey of learners in japan, china, and iran, and replicated the basic factor structure across all three contexts with minimal variation. given the location of the present study’s university in a predominantly politically conservative state, an additional scale, fear of assimilation, was adopted from ryan (2009). a pilot study of the current instrument at the same institution also replicated the same factor structure. the original instrument was a 70-item questionnaire with a 6-point likert scale anchored on the left by strongly agree (1) and on the right by strongly disagree (6). following the pilot study and initial validation, a shortened version of the questionnaire was created through an item-analysis, removing questions that did not significantly affect the overall reliability of the scale. the final instrument consisted of 47 items and measured effort towards l2 learning (8 items, alpha = .904), the ideal l2 self (6 items, alpha = .928), the ought-to l2 self (6 items, alpha = .862), family influence (4 items, alpha = .809), promotion orientation (5 items, alpha = .808), prevention orientation (6 items, alpha = .783), attitudes towards the l2 community (4 items, alpha = .834), attitudes towards the learning situation (4 items, alpha = .910), and fear of assimilation (4 items, alpha = .712). since the l2mss model predicts that motivated behavior comes from the drive to reduce the distance between future self-guides and the current self (dörnyei, 2005; higgins, 1987), only the scales representing the ideal l2 self and the ought-to l2 self were included in the analysis presented here. a sample item for each scale is provided in table 2. the full instrument can be downloaded from the iris (www.iris-database.org). table 2 sample items for the present study’s l2mss questionnaire scale # of items sample item effort towards l2 learning 8 i would like to study spanish even if i were not required. ideal self 6 i imagine myself as someone who is able to speak spanish. ought-to self 6 learning spanish is necessary because people surrounding me expect me to do so. familial influence 4 my parents encourage me to study spanish in my free time. promotion orientation 5 studying spanish is important because with a high level of spanish proficiency i will be able to make a lot of money. prevention orientation 6 i have to learn spanish because i don’t want to fail my spanish class. attitudes towards the l2 community 4 i would like to know more about people from spanish-speaking countries. attitudes towards the learning situation 4 i always look forward to spanish classes. fear of assimilation 4 using spanish in front of people makes me think i will be thought of as less american. personality: we adopted the 60-item hexaco-pi-r (ashton & lee, 2009) to measure learner personality. although there is also a 100-item instrument, the logistics of data collection in our context necessitated use of the shorter tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study 193 version of the questionnaire, which has been statistically shown to have internal-consistency reliability (ashton & lee, 2009). this instrument is comprised of 6 domain levels and 24 sub-traits. we address the six main dimensions in the present analysis: honesty-humility (10 items, alpha = .658), emotionality (10 items, alpha = .798), extraversion (10 items, alpha = .828), agreeableness (10 items, alpha = .775), conscientiousness (10 items, alpha = .774), and openness to experience (10 items, alpha = .778). participants rated each item on a 5-point likert scale, ranging from strongly agree (5) to strongly disagree (1). table 3 provides a sample item from the hexaco-pi-r. a full version of this instrument can be found at http://hexaco.org/. table 3 sample items for the hexaco-pi-r scale # of items sample item honesty-humility 10 having a lot of money is not especially important to me. emotionality 10 i would feel afraid if i had to travel in bad weather conditions. extraversion 10 the first thing that i always do in a new place is to make friends. agreeableness 10 most people tend to get angry more quickly than i do. conscientiousness 10 i always try to be accurate in my work, even at the expense of time. openness to experience 10 i like people who have unconventional views. learning and cognitive styles: based on the research described in the literature review, learning and cognitive style is operationalized here as a construct that has two dimensions: (a) cognitive style, based on the idea of field (in)dependence, and (b) learning style, considering sensory and social preferences. with this operationalization in mind, learners responded to 40 statements using a 5-point likert scale ranging from strongly agree (1) to strongly disagree (5), adapted from the perceptual learning style preference questionnaire (plspq; reid, 1995) for learning styles, and the style analysis survey (sas; oxford, 1993) for cognitive styles. there were five questions for each of the following cognitive and learning styles: field dependence (5 items, alpha = .530), field independence (5 items, alpha = .223), visual (5 items, alpha = .520), auditory (5 items, alpha = .667), kinesthetic (5 items, alpha = .724), tactile (5 items, alpha = .783), group learning (5 items, alpha = .878), and individual learning (5 items, alpha = .856). a summary of these scales with examples is presented in table 4. a full version of this instrument can be downloaded from iris (www.iris-database.org). working memory: an adapted version of the ospan (stone & towse, 2015) was used to measure participants’ wm. the task presented participants with an integer (ranging from 10-99) displayed on the screen for two seconds (storage component). this was followed by a mathematical operation with a given answer that participants had to indicate as correct or incorrect (processing component). after a series of integer-operation pairs, participants were prompted to recall each integer daniel jung, megan dibartolomeo, fernando melero-garcía, lindsay giacomino, laura. . . 194 seen in its correct serial position (i.e., a span). the span length increased as the task proceeded, increasing incrementally from two integers to seven. each span had three trials yielding a total of 18 trials and 81 integers to be recalled. the reader is referred to stone and towse (2015) for further details of the task. participants completed the task on a computer and worked at their own pace. an excel file containing the response data was generated for each participant. from that data file, each participant received a recall score (percentage of integers recalled correctly) and a processing score (percentage of mathematical operations solved correctly). table 4 sample items for learning and cognitive styles scale subscale # of items example field (in)dependence field dependent 5 when i learn something new, it is easy for me to see the overall plan rather than small details. field independent 5 i focus on the details rather than on the big picture. sensory preferences visual 5 i learn better when there is visual support, such as powerpoint presentations or videos. auditory 5 listening to someone explaining something is one of the most effective ways of learning for me. kinesthetic 5 i prefer to learn by doing something that keeps me physically active while i learn. tactile 5 when i build something, i remember what i have learned better. social preferences group learning 5 i learn best when i work with others. individual learning 5 i learn better when i work alone. 3.1.3. procedure participants completed all tasks in a single, 50-minute class period during their normally scheduled spanish class. all questionnaires were administered through qualtrics in the following order: demographic information, motivation, personality, and learning and cognitive styles. instructions for individual instruments were presented, and items within each instrument were randomized by qualtrics to avoid response bias. the ospan, which was completed last, was loaded to the individual computers. after completing the ospan, learners uploaded their data file to the survey for the research team. 3.1.4. data analysis the first research question asks how to best describe the id variables4 of the present learners in the first semester of language study as well as the variability present in the sample. to answer this question, composite (mean) values were 4 we use id to refer to the construct, and id variables to refer to the concrete subscales under investigation. tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study 195 calculated for all scales of interest of the ids under investigation, along with ranges and standard deviations. the descriptive statistics serve as a way to measure the variability of each id found in the data set and further contextualize the sample. violin plots are used for data visualization. these show the distribution of the data in a similar way to boxplots, with the addition of a density curve on both sides of the boxplot, therefore providing a clearer image of how the data is distributed. the wider the density band is, the more scores cluster at this value. to explore the best ways of meaningfully characterizing learner ids, and given the previous research demonstrating the potential interrelatedness of ids, we first employed pearson correlations between id variables in spss 24 (version 24.0). correlations are interpreted based on both the pearson coefficient, which can be interpreted as an effect size indicator (cohen, 1988) and on their significance level. plonsky and oswald (2014) have suggested that, in applied linguistics, effect sizes can be interpreted as small (r = .25), medium (r = .40), or large (r = .60). afterwards, we performed a k-means cluster analysis, which has been used in previous l2 studies to identify learner profiles (e.g., skehan, 1986). as skehan (1986) points out, there is no straightforward approach to determining the number of clusters. the bayes information criterion (bic, mooi & sarstedt, 2011), generated by spss, can be used by examining where discontinuities occur, indicating that clusters are being “forced” together because they are the remaining clusters in the analysis, not because they are alike (skehan, 1986). 4. results the first research question asked about the distribution of id dimensions in the sample as well as the variability in id dimensions among the learner participants. first, we present the motivation data. the descriptive statistics of the ideal and ought-to l2 selves are presented in table 5 and figure 1. overall, students at this level report a weaker ideal than ought-to l2 self (3.8 versus 2.5, respectively, with integers closer to 1 indicating a stronger self), indicating that they are more motivated by external pressures than their own desires to become l2 speakers. however, a visual inspection presented in figure 1 shows a wide distribution of ideal l2 self values, indicating considerably variability among participants. in comparison to the ideal l2 self, the ought-to l2 self shows much less variability, demonstrated by a wider band of learners clustered around 2.5. this suggests that, for these learners, the ought-to l2 self is more fully developed than the ideal l2 self. daniel jung, megan dibartolomeo, fernando melero-garcía, lindsay giacomino, laura. . . 196 table 5 descriptive statistics for the ideal and ought-to l2 selves scale mean minimum maximum sd ideal l2 self 3.8 1 6 1.2 ought-to l2 self 2.5 1 6 .9 figure 1 violin plots of ideal and ought-to l2 self scores for personality, the results of the six scales are presented in table 6. given that the scale is a 5-point likert scale, the results for all six scales cluster around the midpoint. an examination of the minimum and maximum values, however, indicates that learners responded using the entire scale. a visual inspection of the violin plots of these six variables in figure 2 corroborates the fact that, while responses across the spectrum are found in the data, the majority of responses cluster around the middle of the scales. table 6 descriptive statistics for personality scale mean minimum maximum sd honesty-humility 2.6 1.0 4.5 .6 emotionality 2.7 1.0 4.8 .7 extraversion-introversion 2.6 1.0 5.0 .7 agreeableness 2.8 1.3 4.4 .6 conscientiousness 2.4 1.0 4.3 .6 openness 2.7 1.1 4.6 .7 tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study 197 figure 2 violin plots for personality table 7 descriptive statistics for field (in)dependence scale mean minimum maximum sd field dependence 2.7 1.0 4.1 .6 field independence 2.6 1.2 3.8 .5 figure 3 violin plots for field (in)dependence daniel jung, megan dibartolomeo, fernando melero-garcía, lindsay giacomino, laura. . . 198 the results for cognitive and learning styles are presented in three parts. first, we consider the results for field (in)dependence; we then consider the results of the different sensory preferences and, finally, the results for social preferences. as can be seen in table 7, the mean values for both field dependence and field independence are very close, with similar minimum and maximum values, suggesting no strong differences according to cognitive style. this is confirmed with a visual inspection of figure 3, which shows that, while there is a wide range of responses in the data, the means and density bands cluster around the middle of the scale. the results for sensory preferences are presented in table 8. the means for visual, auditory, and kinesthetic preferences all cluster around 2.4, while the tactile preference is slightly weaker, at 2.7, although all means are similar. the wider bands around the lower ranges of the visual preference (see figure 4) indicate that participants mostly cluster around the lower values, which indicates a stronger overall preference. table 8 descriptive statistics for sensory preferences scale mean minimum maximum sd visual 2.4 1.0 4.4 .5 auditory 2.5 1.0 4.8 .6 kinesthetic 2.5 1.0 4.4 .7 tactile 2.7 1.0 5.0 .8 figure 4 violin plots for sensory preferences tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study 199 finally, the results for social preferences are presented in table 9 and figure 5. although both scales feature the same range and similar standard deviations, the average for individual learning is lower, indicating a preference for individual over group learning. an inspection of the violin plot (see figure 5) reveals that, for group learning, learners cluster around 3 (neutral) and seem to be distributed evenly above and below that value. regarding individual learning, two main clusters can be observed: one around 3 (neutral) and one around 2 (agree). table 9 descriptive statistics for social preferences scale mean minimum maximum sd group learning 2.9 1.0 5.0 .9 individual learning 2.5 1.0 5.0 .8 figure 5 violin plots for social preferences finally, the descriptive statistics for wm are presented in table 10 and in figure 6. with respect to the recall score, the average was 42.3 (calculated as the percentage of integers recalled correctly out of 81), with a standard deviation of 13.9. a visual inspection of the data in figure 6 shows a wide range of scores, with most learners (n = 242) between 30 and 60. this suggests that the daniel jung, megan dibartolomeo, fernando melero-garcía, lindsay giacomino, laura. . . 200 ospan task is capable of distinguishing a wide range of wm abilities. the processing score, presented in figure 6, shows much less variability, as is to be expected, given that the processing score is based on the classification of the math equations as correct or incorrect. the high average score (m = 91.7) indicates that learners were, overall, accurately engaged with the processing component of the task. table 10 descriptive statistics for working memory scale average % minimum % maximum % sd recall 42.3 2.5 88.9 13.9 processing 91.7 51.8 100 7.8 figure 6 violin plots for working memory the second research question focuses on the potential relationships between ids. following serafini (2017), who examined long-term interactions among id factors at different proficiency levels, correlations were run between all id variables to examine the degree to which they are related in the current data set. correlograms are used to visually present the correlation and make the interpretation easier. the larger the symbol in the box, the stronger the correlation is, while the color indicates the direction of effect: blue indicates a positive correlation, while red indicates a negative one. figure 7 presents the correlations within the data set. for the motivational variables, the ideal and ought-to l2 selves correlate moderately with each other, while they correlate negatively with tactile and kinesthetic learning styles. the ideal l2 self has a negative correlation with extraversion and openness to experience. for learning styles, some weak correlations tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study 201 emerge among the cognitive and learning style variables. for the personality variables, extraversion has a positive relationship with kinesthetic and group learning styles, while conscientiousness has a positive relationship with honesty/humility and a negative relationship with group learning and field dependence. figure 7 correlogram between id variables table 11 results of auto-clustering number of clusters bayesian criterion (bic) bic change 1 4228.946 2 4217.163 -11.783 3 4251.967 34.804 4 4343.928 91.961 5 4458.759 114.831 6 4584.121 125.362 7 4718.628 134.508 8 4860.892 142.264 9 5008.962 148.070 10 5160.864 151.903 11 5320.901 160.036 12 5481.389 160.488 13 5642.505 161.116 14 5804.530 162.025 15 5970.001 165.471 daniel jung, megan dibartolomeo, fernando melero-garcía, lindsay giacomino, laura. . . 202 in order to explore possible learner profiles in the dataset, a k-means cluster analysis was performed. the first step was to autogenerate clusters in spss to obtain a list of possible clusters and their bic. by examining the bic change, presented in table 11, we identified a four-cluster solution by observing the large discontinuity between five and four cluster solutions (ledger, ersozlu, & fischetti, 2019). the first cluster contained 38 participants, the second 94, the third 155, and the fourth 36. descriptive statistics on the four id variables (distinguished in italics) and their subcomponents are presented for each cluster in table 12. table 12 descriptive statistics by cluster sample 1 2 3 4 id variable m m sd m sd m sd m sd l2mss ideal l2 self 3.8 3.4 1.3 4.0 1.1 3.7 1.2 3.7 1.2 ought-to l2 self 2.5 2.2 .8 2.4 .9 2.4 .9 2.6 1.1 styles visual 2.4 2.5 .5 2.4 .5 2.5 .5 2.6 .5 auditory 2.5 2.5 .6 2.6 .6 2.5 .7 2.4 .6 tactile 2.5 2.7 .8 2.8 .8 2.7 .8 2.5 .8 kinesthetic 2.7 2.5 .7 2.5 .7 2.5 .7 2.4 .6 group learning 2.9 2.8 .9 3.1 .8 2.9 .9 2.8 1.1 individual learning 2.5 2.6 .8 2.4 .8 2.6 .9 2.4 .9 field dependent 2.7 2.7 .5 2.7 .5 2.8 .6 2.6 .7 field independent 2.6 2.6 .4 2.7 .5 2.7 .5 2.5 .6 personality honesty-humility 2.6 2.5 .3 2.5 .5 2.5 .5 2.6 .6 emotionality 2.7 2.4 .6 2.9 .7 2.7 .7 2.6 .6 extraversion 2.6 2.7 .7 2.5 .7 2.7 .7 2.4 .6 agreeableness 2.8 2.8 .5 2.7 .6 2.7 .6 2.9 .7 conscientiousness 2.4 2.4 .5 2.5 .6 2.4 .5 2.5 .6 openness to experience 2.7 3.0 .7 2.7 .6 2.8 .6 2.8 .7 working memory wm recall 42.3 20.4 8.5 58.0 8.1 39.3 5.3 35.2 8.9 wm processing 91.7 90.3 7.3 94.4 4.7 94.3 3.8 74.3 7.9 an examination of the descriptive statistics of each cluster reveals that, for most of the variables used in the analysis, there are slight differences within each. following skehan (1986), we present thumbnail descriptions of the four main clusters. these descriptions are reductionist, given the large number of variables, and represent an attempt to distinguish the clusters by referencing the mean values found in the sample, where appropriate, and comparing the values between the clusters. above average in this section is a reference to the mean in the current sample, while superlatives are references to values between clusters. field dependence and field independence show little variability between clusters and are not commented on. a summary of the thumbnail descriptions is presented in table 13. tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study 203 table 13 summary of thumbnail descriptions of clusters cluster 1 cluster 2 cluster 3 cluster 4 motivation strongest ideal and ought-to l2 self weakest ideal l2 self below average on both l2 selves below average for the ideal l2 self, above average for the ought-to l2 self cognitive and learning styles above average visual and tactile preferences, above average individual learning preference highest score on auditory and tactile preferences, highest score on group learning above average tactile preference, above average score for individual learning highest score on visual preference personality highest score on openness to experience, above average score on extraversion highest score on emotionality, below average on agreeableness above average score on extraversion highest score on agreeableness working memory below average on both measures, lowest score on recall measures above average on both measures below average on recall component, above average on processing below average on both measures, lowest score on processing measure the first cluster is characterized by the strongest ought-to l2 self of all four clusters. learners in this cluster have above average preferences for visual and tactile learning styles, as well as above average preferences for individual learning preferences. with respect to personality, learners in this cluster are more extraverted than the overall sample, and more open to experiences. their scores on both recall and processing components are below average. the second cluster is characterized by the strongest the ideal l2 self. learners in this second cluster have the highest preference for auditory, tactile, and group learning. for personality, they score highest on emotionality and have below average agreeableness scores; their wm scores are above average. the third cluster is characterized by below average scores for both the ideal and ought-to self. learners in this third cluster are above average on their preference for tactile learning, and they have above average preference for individual learning. their personality results are characterized by the highest scores on extraversion. for wm, they are below average on recall measures and above average on processing. finally, the fourth cluster is characterized by below average score for the ideal l2 self, and an above average score for the ought-to l2 self, similar to cluster 3. learners in this fourth cluster have the strongest preference for visual learning. in terms of personality, they have the highest score on agreeableness. for wm, they are below average on both processing and recall scores, with the lowest score on the processing measure of all four clusters. 5. discussion this article reports on the first semester of data from a longitudinal study designed to examine the potentially dynamic and interrelated nature of four learner daniel jung, megan dibartolomeo, fernando melero-garcía, lindsay giacomino, laura. . . 204 ids. while the larger study will examine the same cohort as they move through a language program over the course of two years, allowing an examination and characterization of different id profiles found in the program and their relation to different activities (such as continued language study), the aim of the current paper was to explore the patterns present in the initial semester of data. the first research question investigated the distribution of the four ids under study: motivation, personality, learning and cognitive styles, and working memory. overall, we observed a wide range of id variation in our learners. we can characterize the overall student population in our dataset as having more strongly developed ought-to l2 selves, a range of personality types, as well as a range of learning and cognitive styles (despite evidence of a subgroup that prefers individual learning), and a range of wm abilities. for almost all scales, learners utilized the full range of values present, indicating that the full range of possibilities of each id is available in the dataset. the range of scores observed in our study for the four ids and their subcomponents has both empirical and pedagogical implications, most particularly for our current context and longitudinal design. despite research that has found language learners of the same language to pattern similarly in comparison to other groups (moody, 1988), our study did not find a homogenous pattern, meaning that, empirically, it is a rich population in which to study the potential dynamic nature of ids. as the participants advance in language study, we expect their ids to change and to influence each other; we next aim to explore whether and how these influences can be modeled statistically and in meaningful ways. pedagogically, variation observed among learners with respect to their ids speaks to the importance of this language department taking into account the full range of ids in both task and curriculum design. this is particularly relevant as previous research has found the ids in this project to be significantly related to l2 achievement (griffiths, 2012; hanafiyeh & afghari, 2017, linck et al., 2014; masgoret & gardner, 2003). additionally, l2 learners from this level often serve as participants in research studies, many of which do not explicitly address or account for the ids of their participants. any sample of this population is likely to include a wide range in scores for the id dimensions explored. since these ids can all be linked with l2 learning behaviors and may result in differences in development (skehan, 1989), care must be taken when sampling from this and all large language programs to ensure the sample reflects the variation in ids present in the population. in our second research question we investigated if there were discernible learner id profiles in the data. this research question was motivated by insights from cdst research that suggests that ids are dynamic not only through time (gurzynski-weiss, 2020a; serafini, 2017, 2020), but that they also interact within individual learners (macintyre & serroul, 2015). pearson correlations showed a tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study 205 number of significant relations in the dataset. some of these patterns are rather intuitive – extraversion was positively associated with group learning and negatively associated with individual learning, indicating that more extraverted individuals prefer to learn in groups while more introverted learners prefer to learn alone. the ideal and ought-to l2 selves were negatively associated with tactile and kinesthetic preferences meaning that, in our sample, learners with these learning preferences tended to have less developed future self-guides, although future research is needed to understand the relationship between sensorial preferences and the l2mss. motivational self-guides are heavily dependent upon visualization and imagery (taylor, pham, rivkin, & armor, 1998), but it is not clear how sensorial preferences in learning interacts with visualization of future guides, nor what this means for l2 development. field independence was positively associated with a preference for visual learning, while field dependence was associated with a preference for auditory learning, which is surprising given the theoretical concepts underlying the field (in)dependence dimension. field dependent learners are thought to be highly dependent on the visual field (i.e., unable to distinguish a part from the whole), while field independent learners are more able to distinguish the part from the whole, and this distinction is assumed to “affect an individual’s whole behavior” (dörnyei & ryan, 2015, p. 124). however, another possibility is that a learner with a strong tendency towards field dependence may find auditory stimuli easier to process, as opposed to following a visual presentation of information (during which distinguishing different parts may be challenging). future research is needed to better understand the relationships between these concepts and what this means for l2 development. a k-means cluster analysis revealed four clusters of students in the sample. admittedly, differences between clusters were very small across most id variables. the largest differences in the current sample are found in wm, followed by l2mss, suggesting that these variables are largely responsible for the differences. in the dynamic turn in id research, ids and their subcomponents are conceived of as resources, which should (a) change through the processes of l2 learning, and (b) influence each other. given the proposed dynamic nature of the ids in the current study, these small differences may lead to larger differences in subsequent semesters, following observation that small differences in the initial state of complex dynamic systems may lead to large differences in their development. initial evidence of this process was provided by serafini (2017), who showed different patterns of influence between cognitive (aptitude, working memory) and socialpsychological (integrative/instrumental motivation, l2mss) ids at different levels of proficiency. serafini (2017) therefore suggests that the interaction and interinfluence between learner ids may change other over the course of the learning process, and this project is uniquely positioned to explore this question. daniel jung, megan dibartolomeo, fernando melero-garcía, lindsay giacomino, laura. . . 206 cdst predicts four types of relationships between learner resources: supportive, competitive, compensatory, or conditional. supportive relationships emerge because two variables mutually, beneficially influence each other, for example, extraversion and a propensity for group learning. competitive relationships emerge because two variables compete for limited resources, resulting in “[development] in alternating patterns (when one goes up the other goes down) because they compete with each other” (verspoor et al., 2011, p. 86), such as, hypothetically, group and individual learning (as a preference for group learning increases, the preference for individual learning decreases and vice-versa). conditional relationships develop when a minimal level of one resource or variable is necessary for another resource or variable to develop, for example, high levels of wm as a prerequisite for a more field independent style. finally, compensatory relationships are ones in which a low level in one resource is compensated by high levels in another, for example, low levels of wm may be compensated by a more conscientious approach to l2 learning opportunities. it is important to stress that these relationships presuppose that resources change and develop with time – and current empirical evidence strongly suggests a continuum of dynamicity (see gurzynski-weiss and other papers in this issue). while some ids may be less dynamic, more dynamic ids may develop in predictable patterns that conspire in l2 learning. an important, pressing question for id research is the dynamic nature that many ids exhibit. their malleability through time has important implications for theory as well as research methodology. for example, if wm is shown to change with increased proficiency in the target language, theories of wm must provide some explanation for this change, and research studies incorporating the id must also be cognizant of its variable nature and factor this into research design, analysis, and interpretation. as of now, many approaches to studying the dynamicity of ids is similar to our own approach in taking instruments designed to measure ids as static constructs and measuring the ids at multiple points (e.g., serafini, 2017). it may, instead, be necessary to develop new research methodology to study different timescales (e.g., macintyre & legatto, 2011). additionally, analyzing multiple ids in the same study (e.g., piniel & csizér, 2014) addresses calls in the literature to examine how different ids interact with each other as well as with the learning environment (dörnyei, 2009). a longitudinal study like the one described here has the potential to address this issue by following a cohort of language learners through their first two years of study, and examining the dynamicity of each id individually as well as how ids influence each other at each time point and over time. 6. future directions this preliminary analysis was successful in identifying possible areas for future research into how different ids interact over the course of l2 development. following tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study 207 serafini (2017), the macro-approach taken in this study, which will span two years of language study at the end of the project, complements the micro-approach being taken elsewhere to investigate ids over small timescales (serafini, this issue). de bot (2015b) proposed that different timescales capture different aspects of the dynamics of ids, and that timescales interact. while the research into micro-approaches will allow for a fine-grained look at the nature of dynamics, a macro-perspective allows us to identify possible points of influence between ids as experience increases, highlighting avenues for future research between these well-known and well-researched id variables. in subsequent semesters, the cohort considered here were/will be followed through their progress in the language program. that is, in spring 2019 all available sections of third semester spanish participated in the research project, and in fall 2019 all sections of fourth semester spanish participated. although some students will enter and leave the cohort every semester, a core group is present at all data collection times, which will allow for an examination of how their ids change over time and with increased proficiency. this will allow the project at its conclusion to shed light on current, important theoretical issues in the field – how dynamic ids are and how they influence each other over time. 7. conclusion this paper presents an initial semester of data that examines four learner ids from introductory levels of spanish. this data shows that the four ids considered here (motivation, personality, learning and cognitive styles, and working memory) demonstrate considerable variability in the sample, and learner profiles, distinguished most strongly with respect to wm and the l2mss, did emerge. the larger research project allows for the continued analysis of the subset of students who complete two years of language study in the same span as the research study took place. the analysis of this group will allow for an examination of how learners’ ids change over time and with increased proficiency in the target language, an enterprise that has great theoretical potential. the study will also explore how dynamic ids relate to and influence each other, and how these relationships may change over time. future research will be able to examine patterns of success and continuation in the language program, which may ultimately assist program directors and curriculum designers. acknowledgements we would like to thank alejandro cisneros for his assistance in creating and piloting this project, dr. megan solon for her editorial assistance during the revision of daniel jung, megan dibartolomeo, fernando melero-garcía, lindsay giacomino, laura. . . 208 this manuscript, and hanqing zhang and jiaming lu, from the indiana statistical consulting center, for their input on data analysis. we would also like to thank the reviewers for their generous time in providing constructive comments and exceptional suggestions. any remaining errors are ours. tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study 209 references abraham, r. g. 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(2012). handbook of intellectual styles: preferences in cognition, learning, and thinking. new york, ny: springer. 677 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (4). 2016. 677-696 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.4.6 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl literature and critical literacy pedagogy in the efl classroom: towards a model of teaching critical thinking skills jelena bobkina complutense university of madrid, spain jbobkina@filol.ucm.es svetlana stefanova international university of la rioja, madrid, spain svetlana.stefanova@unir.net abstract drawing on the numerous benefits of integrating literature in the efl classroom, the present paper argues that the analysis of a fictional work in the process of foreign language acquisition offers a unique opportunity for students to explore, interpret, and understand the world around them. the paper presents strong evidence in favour of reader-centered critical reading as a means of encouraging observation and active evaluation not only of linguistic items, but also of a variety of meanings and viewpoints. the authors propose a model of teaching critical thinking skills focused on the reader’s response to a literary work. the practical application of the method, which adopts the critical literacy approach as a tool, is illustrated through a series of activities based on the poem “if” by rudyard kipling. keywords: critical thinking skills; critical literacy approach; literature; efl classroom jelena bobkina, svetlana stefanova 678 1. introduction the last few decades have witnessed a growing interest in the benefits of linking the learning of a foreign language to the study of its literature. however, the relationship between english language teaching and literature has not always been smooth. there have been moments of mutual understanding and empathy (carter, 2007; cook, 1994; lazar, 1993), as might be the case of the early 1900s, marked by the dominance of the grammar translation method, which used literary texts as “illustrations of the grammatical rules” (duff & maley, 1990, p. 3). there have also been moments of a consistent rejection of the value of literature in the language classroom. in fact, in the mid-twentieth century literature almost disappeared from the language learning curriculum (carter, 2007), and priority was given to approaches focused on linguistics. despite those controversial viewpoints, at present, theories encouraging the inclusion of literature in language teaching prevail among teachers and scholars. in explaining the benefits of integrating literature in the language classroom, scholars make an appeal to different values of the literary text. while lazar (1993) claims that literature sharpens linguistic and cognitive skills and enhances students’ understanding of the human condition, horner (1983) points to literature as an important tool in the holistic development of students. duff and maley (1990) establish three criteria—linguistic, methodological, and motivational—to support the use of literary texts in the language classroom. a number of scholars emphasize the importance of culture and intercultural awareness as crucial factors in favour of the implementation of literature in efl (collie & slater, 1987; floris, 2004; hernández riwes cruz, 2010; tayebipour, 2009; van, 2009). a whole new paradigm of studies incorporating culture and literature as an essential part of language studies emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. numerous works on the use of literary texts in the foreign language classroom highlight its importance as a means of enhancing critical thinking and creativity among language learners (alvarez, calvete, & sarasa, 2012; gajdusek, 1988; ghosn, 2002; sivasubramaniam, 2006; van, 2009; yaqoob, 2011). thus, ghosn (2002) states that by not taking things for granted, literature may bring changes in the students’ attitudes towards the world. along the same line, langer (1997) argues that working with literary texts helps students to reflect on the world around them, opening “horizons of possibility, allowing them to question, interpret, connect, and explore” (p. 607). this characteristic of literature as a means of developing students’ ability to think critically and to explore and discuss social problems is becoming especially valuable nowadays. not surprisingly, in recent years there has been a strong move towards reintegration of literature into academic curriculum as a tool for developing critical awareness. literary texts have traditionally been employed as a source of studying grammar structures and vocabulary, and related exercises have aimed at general literature and critical literacy pedagogy in the efl classroom: towards a model of teaching. . . 679 comprehension of the text. however, recent studies have pointed to the possibility of engaging students into the process of giving meaning to the narrative strategies adopted by the author, stimulating them to cross interdisciplinary boundaries by including elements from areas such as postcolonial or gender studies. thus, to encourage students to generate and communicate their personal interpretation of a literary work, the reader-response approach that assigns the reader an active role in meaning-making (egan, 2005; guerin, labor, morgan, reesman, & willingham, 2005; hall, 2015; yaqoob, 2011) becomes the most suitable method to negotiate reading for pleasure and critical thinking. the advocates of different types of critical approaches to efl are strongly interested in the relation between language and social changes. in this sense, critical thinking skills are often dealt with from an ideologically sensitive approach. this perspective has recently been enhanced by scholars who argue for the need of introducing critical literacy pedagogy into the language teaching curriculum as a means of promoting social justice (crookes, 2010; curtis & romney, 2006; nelson, 2008; norton & toohey, 2004; riasati & mollaei, 2012). developed by critical social theorists, the method implies teaching students to read texts in an active, reflective manner for a better understanding of power, inequality, and injustice in human relationships. though it is a relatively old concept, primarily related to the educational philosophy of paulo freire (1970), critical pedagogy as an efl/esl teaching perspective is a rather new phenomenon that came to life in the 1990s. since then, an increasing number of researchers have promoted the examination of relevant sociohistorical and political aspects of language learning and have encouraged the reorganization of the language curriculum along critical pedagogy lines (aliakbari & faraji, 2011; benesh, 2009; degener, 2001; duncan-andrade & morrell, 2008; izadinia, 2011; norton & toohey, 2004; pennycook, 2001). taking into consideration the major development of critical perspectives on teaching literature in the efl language classroom, our aim is to present a model of using literature with high school students as a means of teaching critical thinking skills based on critical literacy and reader-response theory. although they do it in different ways, both methods support critical analysis of literary texts, active learning, and a learner-centered approach. 2. theoretical background 2.1. literature and critical thinking skills the importance of teaching critical thinking as one of the basic learning skills has been widely recognized. according to fisher (2001), the expression itself has become something of a “buzz word” in educational environments. though the jelena bobkina, svetlana stefanova 680 critical thinking approach is not new, it has become extremely popular in educational settings over the last two decades. the intellectual roots of critical thinking can be traced back to ancient times, in particular, to the teaching practice of socrates about 2000 years ago. in modern times, one of the most popular definitions of critical thinking belongs to glaser (1941), who describes it as (1) an attitude of being disposed to consider in a thoughtful way the problems and subjects that come within the range of one’s experience; (2) knowledge of the methods of local inquiry and reasoning; and (3) some skills in applying those methods. (p. 5) norris and ennis (1989) define it as reasonable, reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do. haskins (2006) insists on critical thinking as involving rational or objective thinking. he also identifies five steps that those thinking critically follow: (a) adopt the attitude of the critical thinker, (b) avoid critical thinking hindrances, (c) identify and characterize arguments, (d) evaluate information sources, and (e) evaluate argument. we should also bear in mind the version proposed by fisher and scriven (1997). according to these authors, critical thinking is “skilled and active interpretation and evaluation of observations and communications, information and argumentation” (p. 21). this definition is especially valuable for us as it focuses on the ability to interpret and evaluate oral and written texts as an essential part of critical thinking, an ability that is intrinsic to working with literature. working with literary texts in the english classroom can make a considerable contribution not only to learning a foreign language but also to inspiring critical thinking, which is inherent to a critical reading of a fictional work. for lazere (1987), literature is an academic discipline that “can come closest to encompassing the full range of mental traits currently considered to comprise critical thinking” (p. 3). engaging imaginatively with a fictional work is a complex process that requires readers “to recall, retrieve and reflect on their prior experiences or memories to construct meanings of the text” (tung & chang, 2009, p. 291). a personal response to a literary work urges students to interact with the text and with other students in order to communicate their interpretation of the work. they are expected to develop skills to help them understand hidden or implied meanings, separate facts from opinions, examine characteristics of the narrative from multiple points of view, reconstruct images from details, and apply what they have learnt to other aspects of life. in other words, close reading improves all those skills that are part of the critical thinking process: analysis, synthesis, argumentation, interpretation, evaluation, problem-solving, and reasoning, among others (brunt, 2005; facione, 2007). literature and critical literacy pedagogy in the efl classroom: towards a model of teaching. . . 681 2.2. critical reading and critical thinking skills when critical reading of a fictional work is included in a teaching proposal for the efl classroom, current creative pedagogical approaches often appear to distance themselves from literary theory, and the engagement of the didactic proposal with one interpretative perspective or another remains unclear. an interdisciplinary approach that combines working with linguistic aspects of a literary work and encouraging critical thinking requires a suitable method of analysis of the text. critical reading is mainly an act of interpretation, and adopting different methods of analysis can lead to different conclusions. the teacher should consider a variety of possibilities and opt for the one that privileges those elements of the literary work whose analysis contributes to the acquisition of critical thinking skills in the efl classroom. reception theory is an umbrella term used to refer to “a general shift in concern from the author and the work to the text and the reader” (holub, 1984, p. xii). it is represented by the approaches developed by hans robert jauss and wolfang iser. jauss’s method, oriented towards a dialogical relation between reception and production, highlights the importance of a historical study of literature. he argues that the quality and rank of a literary work result neither from the biographical conditions of its origin, nor from its place in the sequence of the development of a genre alone, but rather from the criteria of influence, reception, and posthumous fame. (jauss, 1982, p. 5) his idea that the reception of a work can be assessed within an “objectifiable system of expectations that arises for each work in the historical moment of its appearance, from a pre-understanding of the genre, from the form and themes of already familiar works, and from the opposition between poetic and practical language” (jauss, 1982, p. 22) applies to the approach proposed in our paper. for iser (1974), reading enacts an interaction between the structure of the literary work and the reader. the text is viewed as a complex web of different perspectives: narrator, characters, plot, and narrative devices employed by the author. in the process of understanding the meaning of a work, the reader often confronts his own expectations, which may result in a revision of his premise and perspective. by making the readers aware of the limits of their perception, the literary text is identified as a source of aesthetic pleasure and moral inspiration. “in this way”—iser (1974) claims—“the reader is forced to discover the hitherto unconscious expectations that underlie all his perceptions, and also the whole process of consistency-building as a prerequisite for understanding” (p. xiv). a number of theorists (barthes, 1969; culler, 1982; eagleton, 1983; fish, jelena bobkina, svetlana stefanova 682 1980; foucault, 1991) point to the limitations of iser’s theory and discuss the need to take into account the implications of the approach adopted for the analysis of a literary work for the understanding of the text. reader-response criticism is another widely accepted term that refers to the shift from the author of the text to the reader and the text itself. the term has applied to a variety of theorists such as stanley fish, norman holland, and jonathan culler, among others. tompkins (1980) argues that “reader-response criticism is not a conceptually unified critical position, but a term that has come to be associated with the work of critics who use the words reader, the reading process, and response to mark out an area for investigation” (p. ix). for instance, wolfgang iser, “one of the most important initiators of reception theory, is usually regarded as a ‘reader-response critic’ as well” (holub, 1984, p. xii). although there seem to be some features that separate reception theory from reader-response criticism, our proposal draws on the essence of both concepts, that is, the focus on the interaction between the reader and the text. in the present paper, we refer to the concept reader-response theory as some of the most significant studies about the benefits of critical reading of literary texts in the language classroom adopt this term (bainbridge, heydon, & malicky, 2009; boyd-batstone, 2002; courtland, french, owston, & stead, 1998; golden, 2002; smagorinsky, 2002). this approach displays numerous open-ended possibilities which enable students to interact with the literary work and project their views on the meaning given to the text. thus, in a complex process of anticipation and retrospection, they connect the fictional world with the familiar world, and gradually become aware of the meanings given to literary representations and the feelings these representations evoke. reading and the resulting response activate previous knowledge of syntax and semantics, and new linguistic structures are learned and mastered alongside the development of critical thinking. students’ abilities to reflect critically, relating experience and theory, undergo positive transformation in the course of formulating and discussing their vision of the text. to illustrate our proposal, we have chosen to design a series of activities based on a critical reading of kipling’s (1910) poem “if,” which is why our theoretical framework also takes into account two theories that focus on the analysis of poetry. the proposed critical reading of the poem departs from the highly influential theory called practical criticism approach first developed by the cambridge critic i. a. richards (1929) in his seminal work practical criticism: a study of literary judgment. richards’s theory emerged as a result of a number of experiments that aimed at introducing students to “close reading” of poems and exploring “the astonishing variety of human responses” they cause (richards, 1929, p. 11). he provides a list of the main difficulties that readers encounter when they discuss poetry and analyzes them. difficulties, according to richards, literature and critical literacy pedagogy in the efl classroom: towards a model of teaching. . . 683 include making out the sense of poetry, sensuous apprehension, the place of imagery, and mnemonic irrelevances, among others. widdowson (1992) adopts a slightly different approach under the name of practical stylistics. he defines two possible roles of the readers when they examine poetry: animator and author. as an animator the reader’s task is simply “to activate meanings deemed to be in the text”, that is, he “provides an exegesis.” on the other hand, the author “provides an interpretation” (p. x). widdowson argues that “the experience of poetry, and its educational relevance, depend on the reader assuming an author role” (p. xi). what is important for him is not the interpretation, but “the process of exploration of meaning; not the assertion of effects but the investigation of the linguistic features which seem to give warrant to these effects” (p. xiv). 2.3. critical literacy approach: history and theory the idea of using literature as a tool for developing critical thinking skills is best represented by the critical literacy approach. the development of critical literacy skills enables students to interpret different types of texts using critical lens. students are particularly encouraged to explore social phenomena and their effect on human relations in order to acquire tools that enable them to explore critically traditional norms and values. critical literacy takes its roots in the socio-cultural view of language, critical philosophy, pedagogy, educational sociology, feminist concerns and poststructualist theory (gee, 1996; janks, 2010; van, 2009). actually, the term critical literacy was introduced by social critical theorists concerned with issues of social injustice and inequality. they were particularly worried about power structures that dominate modern society, as well as the role of education for increasing or eliminating inequalities. the brazilian educator paulo freire (1970), beyond doubt one of the main contributors to the critical pedagogy philosophy, proposes a methodological approach based on problem-posing education that aims at making students critical thinkers. a set of different situations or problems are presented in class and students are encouraged to reflect on them and offer possible solutions. freire (1970) claims that this process involves uncovering of reality, striving for the emergence of consciousness, and, finally, critical intervention in reality. the teaching methodology offered by freire (1970) aims to counteract the “banking model” of education that considers students mere “depositories of knowledge.” opportunities to move beyond the characteristics of “banking education” include, according to breunig (2005), employing methodological practices that support students’ active learning, multiple “ways of knowing,” multiple sources of knowledge, as well as multiple ways of assessment. jelena bobkina, svetlana stefanova 684 the role of the teachers as dynamic coordinators of the learning process is formative and creative at the same time. they are responsible for providing appropriate conditions which enable students to act as active agents of their own transformation (kincheloe, 2008). besides, teachers help students to communicate effectively and learn from each other. according to degener (2001), the teachers’ role is essential for the successful implementation of the method as they design, plan, and put into practice educational activities. when applied to language teaching, this approach aims at adding “critical quality to the existing textbooks and everyday instruction” (riasati & mollaei, 2012, p. 224). given the relation between language and discourse, and the social nature of the latter, this method helps students interpret the texts they read in an attempt to challenge beliefs that sustain particular social structures of power. both language learning and language teaching are viewed as politically tinted processes that are at the heart of educational curricula (norton & toohey, 2004). as far as the curriculum is concerned, there is a strong conviction that it should be constructed taking into account students’ experiences and realties, with special emphasis on the use of authentic material and realia (ohara, saft, & crookes, 2001). figure 1 model of teaching critical thinking skills: reader-centered critical reading and critical literacy pedagogy critical reading of a literary work · interaction between the reader and the text · reflection and interpretation of the world · intercultural and ideological awareness · analysis and synthesis · evaluation and argumentation critical literacy pedagogy · critical awareness of the role of language in social interaction · students’ experiences and realities · social injustices and inequality · analysis and synthesis · reasoning and problem-solving teaching critical thinking skills · interpretation of the world · self-reflection · critical awareness · intercultural awareness · reasoning and problem-solving · language use literature and critical literacy pedagogy in the efl classroom: towards a model of teaching. . . 685 considering the main characteristics of the reader-centered critical reading approach and critical literacy pedagogy, we would like to argue that the two methods intersect, overlap, and interact at various points. figure 1, created to represent the theoretical rationale behind our model, illustrates the intersections—strategies endorsed by both theories—which provide an opportunity to teach and develop critical thinking skills in the efl classroom. as we see it, critical thinking skills involved in working with literary texts in the efl classroom can be broadly defined as a set of processes whose main dimensions include the interpretation of the world, self-reflection, intercultural awareness, critical awareness, reasoning and problem-solving, and language use. the model of teaching critical thinking skills we propose integrates a critical reading approach that focuses on the reader’s response, taking into account the author and the context of the creation of the literary work for its interpretation. our model builds on the idea that the intersection between reader-centered critical reading and critical literacy provides a unique opportunity for students to reflect on how the linguistic features of the text affect the creation of meaning and how this meaning is affected by and affects their personal experience and understanding of the social phenomena represented in the fictional work. 2.4. critical literacy approach in practical terms: application of the model of teaching critical thinking skills though it was not initially developed as an approach to working with literature, critical literacy pedagogy found its place both in mainstream english classrooms and efl classrooms (wallace, 1995). foreign language teachers became especially interested in critical literacy pedagogy after the mid 1990s, when freire’s ideas were adopted into the efl/esl language classes (benesch, 2009; ohara, saft & crookes, 2001). this method provides a key opportunity for developing critical awareness of the role of language in social relations, including those sustained by power structures, that is, how texts are related to issues of identity, political power, gender, ethnicity, class, and religion. all texts, using a set of linguistic devices, seek to make readers see the world in a particular way. readers’ response is not neutral either, as they bring “to the act of reading a set of discursive lens, each of which will interact with the discursive designs of a text in a particular way, ranging from submission to resistance” (locke & cleary, 2011, p. 121). the critical literacy approach stimulates readers to engage in discursive acts and discover the way a particular text is a part of a wider set of discursive practices, reflecting social-cultural, ideological, and economic realities. in other words, students explore the impact of social and historical phenomena on the literary work; they learn to recognize the jelena bobkina, svetlana stefanova 686 ways in which narratives construct different points of view on a particular topic; they become aware of the fact that texts are not neutral and that language and linguistic devices may affect our understanding of a text; finally, students learn to identify value judgments and bias, as well as to reflect on their own value judgments (locke & cleary, 2011). in designing activities to accomplish these aims, it is important to consider the four curricular components proposed by the new london group (cazden et al., 1996) and later adapted by kern (2003) for addressing the full range of literacies. the components, which are explained in the following list, are: situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice. 1. situated practice refers to immersion in language use. the focus is always on the here and now: students’ lives and experiences, their thoughts, opinions and expectations. no conscious reflection or metalanguage is used on this level. 2. overt instruction involves systematic, analytic and conscious understanding of the text. various elements contributing to meaning are identified, talked about, and learnt. in this way, overt instruction introduces elements of conscious analysis, allowing students to talk about the meaning design process. 3. critical framing deals with the reflective dimension of literacy instruction. it involves understanding the relationships between different elements of the linguistic system, communicative context, and sociocultural context. 4. transformed practice involves transformation and transduction (kern, 2003). according to kern (2003), the former concept refers to reshaping texts within a single mode, while the latter deals with changing the form of representation form one mode to another. figure 2 application of the model of teaching critical thinking skills literature and critical literacy pedagogy in the efl classroom: towards a model of teaching. . . 687 to translate the theoretical perspective of our model of teaching critical thinking skills into the reality of efl teaching, we have adapted the four elements proposed by the new london group (cazden et al. 1996) into a strategy that reflects the complex intersections between reader-centered critical reading and critical literacy pedagogy. figure 2 has been designed as a graphic representation of the way the four aspects mentioned above are projected into a learning sequence, suitable for the application of the model of teaching critical thinking skills. the first stage includes a set of prereading activities whose main purpose is to activate students’ schemata on the topic. students try to recall relevant information from the long-term memory. they will later read the text and share their feelings, ideas, and experiences on the topic under consideration. some activities in this stage can include creative writing, letter writing, readers’ theater, and so on. in the second stage the students read the text for general comprehension. the teacher checks understanding through general comprehension questions and a discussion of some key ideas of the text. for a more detailed analysis, the students read the text again, this time paragraph by paragraph, analyzing the main idea of each paragraph, its structure, and the way the key elements fit together. close reading should help students to understand the inner logic of the literary text. cohesive and coherence textual devices should be taken into consideration. other activities may include constructing knowledge maps, teaching genres, revision and editing, and so on. the third stage deals with the students’ conscious attention to relationships between linguistic forms and social-cultural contexts. they explore the writer’s attitude, point of view and intentions through the analysis of the lexical and structural choices he makes. the most adequate procedure for the successful completion of the task is a teacher-directed discussion. in the fourth stage the students are required to create their own texts. these can consist of reshaping the original texts within the same mode (for example, rewriting a dialogic extract as a narration) or changing a fragment from one mode to another (as might be the case with creating a short video based on the text). some other activities might include genre or stylistic reformulation of the text, inventing story continuations, translation, and so on. 3. practical illustration of the model of teaching critical thinking skills to put our model into practice, we have chosen kipling’s poem “if.” it has been selected as the british favourite one on numerous occasions, on which it is widely quoted. the poem reads as a piece of advice given by a father to his son on what it means to be a real man. the characteristics of the text make it highly attractive for students and suitable for efl teaching: jelena bobkina, svetlana stefanova 688 “if” if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you; if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too: if you can wait and not be tired by waiting, or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, or being hated, don’t give way to hating, and yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise; if you can dream – and not make dreams your master; if you can think – and not make thoughts your aim, if you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same: if you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, and stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools; if you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, and lose, and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss; if you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in you except the will which says to them: ‘hold on!’ if you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, if all men count with you, but none too much: if you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that’s in it, and – which is more – you’ll be a man, my son! (kipling, 1910) 3.1. stage i: situated practice 3.1.1. pre-reading activities: recalling relevant knowledge 1. in his poem, kipling describes some essential qualities a mature man should have. can you think of any characteristics a person should have in order to be considered mature? compare your answer with the poem after you have read it. literature and critical literacy pedagogy in the efl classroom: towards a model of teaching. . . 689 2. read the following quotes about maturity and being a mature person. do you agree with them? discuss your answers in groups. try to give your own definition of what maturity is. · “maturity is often more absurd than youth and very frequently is most unjust to youth.” thomas a. edison · “maturity is when your world opens up and you realize that you are not the center of it.” m. j. croan · “youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.” herman hesse · “the greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. that’s the day we truly grow up.” john c. maxwell 3. assuming that the poem tries to create a “set of rules” to describe the characteristics of a mature man and inspire people to follow them, which of these words would you expect to find in the text? explain your choice. dream, think, triumph, stomach, sound, city, abyss, delete, hate, light, wise, hurt 3.1.2. post-reading activities: reader-response activities 1. students read the poem and comment on how they feel about the ideas expressed in the poem. are they relevant to the contemporary world and to being a student? why/why not? 2. students comment on different situations when they had to give a piece of advice to a friend on how to behave in a particular occasion. what happened then? what piece of advice did they give? did it work? 3.2. stage ii: overt instruction 3.2.1. understanding general message students read the poem again and answer the general comprehension questions: · what is the general message in the poem “if” by rudyard kipling? · what is the main idea of the first stanza? · the second stanza focuses on overcoming obstacles that can impede our progress through life. how can we do it? · what advice does the poet, rudyard kipling, give when a person fails in his life, according to the text? · what are the pieces of advice the father gives in the third and fourth stanzas? jelena bobkina, svetlana stefanova 690 · can the series of advice offered in “if” by rudyard kipling be applied to the present-day reality? 3.2.2. analyzing the language details 1. identify the qualities kipling describes and divide them into positive and negative. 2. look at the syntactic structure of the poem. what type of grammatical structure is used by the author? 3. identify the features of conditional sentences used in the poem. in pairs, create your own conditional sentences related to becoming a mature person following the same structure as in the poem. you will be a real man/woman if . . . 4. choose five conditional sentences and change them into direct advice using should. example: if you can wait and not be tired by waiting. you should wait and not be tired by waiting. 3.3. stage iii: critical framing. connecting language with its social context 1. identify five adjectives and five verbs used by the author. analyse the emotions they evoke in the poem. 2. the poem is written as one long conditional sentence. why do you think the author chose this grammatical structure? does the syntactic structure of the poem contribute to its general message? why/why not? 3. the father uses the second person pronoun you throughout the poem. in which way do you think the use of this pronoun contributes to the creation of a special link between the author and the reader? 4. there are no women mentioned anywhere in the poem. why? do you think the poem is meant just for boys? 5. “if” is considered one of the british most favourite poems. in fact, lines 11 and 12 appear at the entrance to the central court at wimbledon. why do you think it is so popular? 6. compare kipling’s “if” with william ernest henley’s poem “invictus.” discuss some similarities and differences between the two poems. 3.4. stage iv: transformed practice. creating your own texts 1. students rewrite the poem changing it to a short story. they can add as many extra details as they need to make up a new story. literature and critical literacy pedagogy in the efl classroom: towards a model of teaching. . . 691 2. students rewrite the poem changing it into a letter written by a father to his son. they have to keep the conventions of an informal letter. 3. students are asked to write an essay reflecting on what being a man means for them nowadays. 4. pilot sample of the model of teaching critical thinking skills the model of teaching critical thinking skills described in the preceding sections was put into practice in a workshop as part of a master’s course at the complutense university of madrid during the academic year 2015-2016. the master’s course was aimed at efl/esl secondary teachers training. the workshop involved 19 participants and its objective was to familiarise students with the implementation of literature-based activities that enhance the development of critical thinking skills in the efl/esl classroom. the participants were asked to assess the sample designed to illustrate the model we propose. for this purpose, our model of teaching critical skills was introduced to students during the first week of classes. two subsequent sessions were devoted to sample implementation and its discussion in small groups. at the end of the workshop we conducted an interview with each of the groups in order to evaluate the quality of the sample proposed. students were asked to decide whether all the aspects of the model intended to encourage the development of critical thinking skills were dealt with in the sample and to what extent (from 1 not present to 5 fully developed). the aspects the participants evaluated included (a) the interpretation of the world, (b) self-reflection, (c) critical awareness, (d) intercultural awareness, (e) reasoning and problem solving, and (f) language use. the results obtained from the assessment process led us to examine the qualities and limitations of our proposal. the aspects related to language use and critical awareness of the role of language obtained the highest scores (with means of 4.7 and 4.5, respectively). students believed that the sample activities made them reflect on the use of language in a particular social context. in the same vein, the interpretation of the world and self-reflection were viewed as widely explored throughout the proposed activities (with a mean of 4.1 in both cases). as most of the participants stated, a great number of tasks were related to the readers’ world and involved students into direct interaction with the text. on the other hand, most of the participants reported to have found limitations in two aspects of the proposal: problem-solving and intercultural awareness (with means of 3.5 and 3.1, respectively). the results show that these particular areas require further analysis and reinforcement. jelena bobkina, svetlana stefanova 692 5. conclusions the benefits of integrating critical reading of a literary work to achieve students’ holistic language acquisition are evident. on articulating this view, the present paper has explored a wide range of perspectives underpinning the advantages of developing a model of teaching critical thinking skills in the efl classroom. an interdisciplinary approach to developing students’ ability to think critically has brought to light the implications of the intersection between learner-conscious critical reading and critical literacy pedagogy. the main purpose of our model is to develop skills for thought and to provide students with critical tools for selfknowledge and personal growth. to illustrate our model, we have designed a series of activities focused on the poem “if” by rudyard kipling. although the model was piloted in a workshop with students taking a complutense university of madrid master’s course aimed at the formation of efl/esl secondary teachers, it goes without saying that a further, more ample sampling and quantitative research is needed in order to reach definite conclusions. our proposal views critical thinking as a type of literacy, which is why it takes as a starting point the four curricular components developed by the new london group (cazden et al. 1996) that contemplate the teaching of the full range of literacies. these components— situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformation practice—have been creatively transformed into four stages and adapted to the characteristics of the reader-response approach to literature. thus, in the process of interpreting the meanings encoded in the literary text, students connect to the writer’s beliefs and relate them to conceptions and general values that determine social relations and shape our identities. the simultaneous analysis of figurative language and linguistic items encourages sophistication and spontaneity, hence confidence and fluidity in the use of efl as a means of expressing complex ideas that reflect students’ intellectual and emotional response to the fictional work. critical thinking skills have enormous value for students as they not only enable them to interpret and understand different viewpoints in the context of efl classroom but also offer them an opportunity to create their own reflective learning styles. our model seeks to enhance the ability to construct and justify one’s response and to reassess critically one’s expectations as to the meaning of the text. a pedagogical model that includes observation, description, interpretation, and production paves the way for future research on the possibility of integrating creative writing in the efl classroom. literature and critical literacy 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(1992). practical stylistics. oxford: oxford university press. 351 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (2). 2018. 351-379 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.2.8 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi): another look mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl abstract despite all the progress that has been made in research on language learning strategies since the publication of rubin’s (1975) seminal paper on good language learners, there are areas that have been neglected by strategy experts. perhaps the most blatant manifestation of this neglect is the paucity of research into grammar learning strategies (gls). the main premise of this paper is that for such research to gain momentum, it is to necessary to create valid and reliable data collection instruments that would enable tapping the use of different types of gls. in line with this reasoning, the article reports a study that aimed to determine the psychometric properties of the grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi), a tool constructed by pawlak (2009b, 2013) on the basis of his classification of strategies for learning grammar in a second or foreign language. exploratory factor analysis was also employed with the purpose of uncovering the underlying structure of strategic learning of grammar. the analysis provided evidence for largely satisfactory validity and reliability of the glsi, indicating at the same time there is room for improvement, with concrete changes being possible after the instrument has been tested with a much larger sample. keywords: grammar teaching; grammar learning strategies; grammar learning strategies inventory; validity; reliability; exploratory factor analysis mirosław pawlak 352 1. introduction research on language learning strategies (lls) has witnessed major advances over the last several decades, both with respect to the conceptualization of the construct, the main foci of empirical investigations and the methodology used (see e.g., amerstorfer & oxford, 2018; cohen, 2012, 2014; cohen & griffiths, 2015; cohen & macaro, 2007; grenfell & harris, 2017; griffiths, 2013, 2018; griffiths & oxford, 2014; oxford, 2011, 2017; oxford & amerstorfer, 2018; pawlak, 2011a). in fact, the field could even be said to have reinvented itself to some extent and lls researchers have successfully countered the claims that the concept of strategy as such should be abandoned altogether and replaced with the more inclusive notion of self-regulation (dörnyei, 2005; dörnyei & skehan, 2003). in the light of these developments, it must surely come as a surprise that some important areas of strategy use have barely been recognized by specialists as worthy of empirical investigation, let alone having been an object of thorough examination. one such domain are strategies that second or foreign learners (l2) draw on when learning and using grammar structures in the target language (tl), or grammar learning strategies (gls). the insufficiency of empirical investigations of gls has been highlighted in major overviews of lls. anderson (2005), for example, comments: “what is generally lacking in the research are studies that specifically target the identification of learning strategies that l2 learners use to learn grammar and to understand the elements of grammar.” oxford, lee and park (2007, p. 117) called gls the “second cinderella” of lls research, attributing this lack of focus to the predominance of the communicative approach when the study of strategies entered its heyday. in her most recent monograph, oxford (2017) points out that “grammar learning strategies have garnered the least interest and concern of any area of l2 learning strategies” (p. 246). pawlak (2009a), in turn, comments that specialists have yet to “identify, describe and account for all the various strategic behaviors that learners fall back on when studying target language grammar, not to mention appraise their effectiveness, determine the effects of training or describe the factors impacting their use” (p. 45). for these crucial goals to be achieved, however, it is necessary to develop tools that would yield valid and reliable data on the employment of strategies for learning tl grammar. the aim of the present paper is to present one such instrument, the grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi), describe the rationale behind its development, investigate its psychometric properties, and attempt to identify the factors underlying the different types of gls that the tool comprises. first, the concept of gls will be defined and the utility of such strategic devices will be considered, the available research will be succinctly overviewed, and the ways of examining the use of strategies for learning grammar grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi): another look 353 will be evaluated. this will be followed by the presentation of a classification of gls created by pawlak (2009b, 2013) which served as a point of reference for the development of the glsi. the remainder of the paper will be devoted to the description of a study which was conducted with the aim of validating the tool with a group of polish university students majoring in english. in the concluding section, the strengths and weaknesses of the glsi will be considered and further steps in the process of its validation will be outlined. 2. grammar learning strategies: the concept, utility, previous research and assessment the aim of this section is to provide a definition of grammar learning strategies, shed light on how such strategic devices can assist the process of mastering tl grammar, synthesize the available studies in this area, and take a critical look at the tools they have employed to measure gls use. however, two important caveats are in order at this juncture: first, due to space limitations and the aims of the paper, the emphasis will be placed on highlighting the main directions of previous research rather than detailing the findings of specific studies; second, owing to the same rationale, the discussion of measurement issues will be confined to quantitative studies in which inventories of some kind were administered to tap into the application of gls. one of the first attempts to define grammar learning strategies was provided by oxford et al. (2007), who, basing on the classical definition of lls proposed by oxford (1990), characterized gls as “actions and thoughts that learners consciously employ to make language learning and/or language use easier, more effective, more efficient, and more enjoyable.” more recently, extrapolating from her new, extensive, and all-inclusive definition of language learning strategies, oxford (2017) described l2 grammar learning strategies as “teachable, dynamic thoughts and behaviors that learners consciously select and employ in specific contexts to improve their self-regulated, autonomous l2 grammar development for effective task performance and long-term efficiency” (p. 244). this definition is extremely informative in highlighting all the key features of gls and therefore undoubtedly has the potential of guiding future research endeavors in this area. however, given the focus of the present paper and the rationale that underlay the construction of the glsi, following cohen and pinillaherrera (2010), gls are understood here as “deliberate thoughts and actions that students consciously [employ] for learning and getting better control over the use of grammar structures” (p. 64). apart from, like most other definitions of strategies, stressing elements of choice and awareness (although there are clearly different levels thereof), this definition brings to the fore the fact that the learning of l2 grammar involves not only getting to know and remembering relevant rules, mirosław pawlak 354 but also developing the ability to successfully employ them in different contexts in such a way that their use if accurate, meaningful and appropriate (cf. larsenfreeman, 2003). in other words, adept application of gls can be expected to aid learners in attaining the dual goal of developing both explicit and implicit knowledge of tl grammar structures (ellis, 2005, 2009). the former is conscious, declarative, relies on controlled processing and therefore involves planning difficulty, with the consequence that it can only be successfully accessed when learners have ample time to reflect on their language use and draw on pertinent rules, as is the case with the performance of controlled grammar exercises (e.g., translation, paraphrasing, etc.). the latter is subconscious, procedural, involves automatic processing and enables fluent performance, thus allowing effective meaning and message conveyance in real-operating conditions, such that hold in any spontaneous interaction. even if we were to assume, following dekeyser (e.g., 2007, 2010, 2015, 2017), that, due to typically scant exposure and age-related constraints, implicit knowledge may be beyond the reach of most foreign language learners, a sufficient amount of appropriate, communicative practice can lead to the automatization of explicit knowledge to such an extent that it will become functionally indistinguishable from implicit knowledge. thus, it can provide a basis for effortless, rapid and accurate tl performance. to relate this crucial distinction to gls use, when the learner analyzes relevant diagrams and tables illustrating the use of a given structure and later does a number of controlled exercises involving this structure, thereby engaging in the cognitive strategies of analyzing and practicing, such strategic learning is likely to contribute primarily to the growth of explicit knowledge. by contrast, when the learner deliberately attempts to use the structure in question in oral language production or attends to it in the speech of proficient tl users, this may lead to the development of implicit knowledge or at least to the gradual automatization of explicit knowledge. while such cognitive strategies can be assumed to play a key role in learning grammar, obviously learners will also draw on strategic devices that are not directly involved in the development of l2 knowledge, but may still enhance this process indirectly, a situation that is acknowledged in oxford’s (1990) initial division of lls into direct and indirect. for example, they will likely plan, monitor or evaluate their learning of grammar, thereby employing metacognitive strategies, cooperate with peers to better understand when a tl feature is used, thus drawing on a social strategy, or attempt to encourage themselves to persevere in the face of disastrous performance on a grammar test, thus resorting to an affective strategy. as indicated by specialists, there will also be situations in which a given strategy will simultaneously perform several functions or it may change its character over time (cf. cohen, grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi): another look 355 2014; cohen & wang, 2018; oxford, 2017). much less obvious is the role of compensation strategies as it is not easily discernable how they enhance grammar learning, which is the reason why they are excluded from the classification of gls presented below as well as the glsi. at any rate, attempts to classify strategies for learning grammar or design instruments tapping their use should be informed by such considerations. even cursory examination of the available research into gls allows three observations: (1) a paucity of such empirical investigations, (2) very limited scope of the studies conducted so far, and (3) fragmented, inconclusive and often contradictory findings. what is perhaps unsurprising and resembles the dominant trends in early research on lls, most efforts have been directed at the identification and description of the strategies that learners use for learning grammar. initially, this happened within studies that set as their aim depicting the profiles of good language learners or determining the overall repertoires of lls deployed in a variety of contexts. in such research, gls were just one type of strategic devices under investigation and were often incorporated into more inclusive categories of memory or cognitive strategies. insights concerning gls use derived from the studies carried out by, among others, rubin (1975), naiman, fröhlich, stern and todesco (1978), o’malley, chamot, stewner-manzanaraes, küpper and russo (1985), droździał-szelest (1997) or griffiths (2003a), demonstrated that, on the whole, strategies for dealing with grammar, especially of the cognitive type, play an important role in l2 learning. when it comes to research projects that specifically focused on the employment of gls, most of which have been undertaken in poland (e.g., gürata, 2005; kemp, 2007; mystkowska-wiertelak, 2008; pawlak, 2008, 2012; sarıçoban, 2005), they come in all shapes and sizes, being guided by diverse motivations, utilizing different data collection tools, and relying on quantitative and qualitative approaches, or combinations of both. even though the findings have been inconsistent, one clear trend is the predominance of cognitive strategies, with other gls types being relegated to the back seat. another consistent observation is a certain degree of correspondence between the way in which grammar is taught and evaluated, and the manner in which learners go about studying it. very little is known about the impact of mediating factors on gls, with the handful of available studies looking into such factors as attainment, gender and age (gürata, 2005; mystkowska-wiertelak, 2008; pawlak, 2009a, 2011b, tilfarlioğlu, 2005). since different tools were used in these studies, the key constructs were operationalized in different ways, and diverse statistical procedures were used, it is unsurprising that their results are mixed and inconsistent. empirical evidence is even more tenuous when it comes to the effectiveness of instruction in gls. still, the studies by morales and smith (2008), and trendak (2012) showed that such training mirosław pawlak 356 may have a positive contribution to the acquisition of the targeted forms, with some groups of gls being more efficacious in this respect than others. the main problem of research into gls conducted to date, apart from its limited volume and focus, is the way in which the strategies for l2 learning grammar have been categorized and been assessed. most studies that have included a quantitative component have adopted for this purpose one of the leading classifications of strategies, such as those proposed by oxford (1990) or o’malley and chamot (1990). the requisite data have been collected with the help of slightly modified versions of instruments employed in general research into lss, most notably oxford’s (1990) strategy inventory for language learning (sill, oxford, 1990). as pawlak (2013) pointed out, “although this approach is to some extent warranted . . . , it is obvious that adopting as a point of reference a general categorization of lls is not free from shortcomings as some of the techniques may be difficult to extrapolate to the learning of grammar structures while some strategic devices specifically employed for this purpose may simply be left out” (p. 198). to be more specific, it is hard to see how such sill statements as, for example, “i use flashcards to remember new words,” “i start conversations in english,” or “i first skim an english passage (read over the passage quickly), then back and read carefully,” can be modified to be related to grammar learning. they could obviously be eliminated or replaced, as has been the case in some studies, but then the tool is no longer the sill.1 in addition, not having been specifically designed with the task of tapping gls in mind, the sill cannot possibly do justice to the distinctiveness of learning this tl subsystem, such as the role of deduction and induction, controlled and communicative practice, or corrective feedback, 1 according to oxford, such modifications would be perfectly acceptable; in fact, in presentations and publications, she has repeatedly exhorted researchers to tailor the sill’s strategies to their own contexts, cultures, and targeted skill areas for the sake of ecological and validity (personal communication, june 12, 2018). in any case, it is important to recalculate the psychometric properties of the sill (or any instrument) for studies beyond the original one, because it makes no sense simply assume that the sill operates precisely the same way in all contexts, cultures, and targeted skill areas and with different samples (oxford, personal communication, june 12, 2018). not doing proper validity and reliability checks for each study undermines a key tenet of assessment: an assessment tool, such as the sill, should measure what it is purported to measure in the situation in which it is to be used; assumptions about relevance of earlier-reported reliability and validity should not be made. merely borrowing and reporting the psychometric properties of the sill from an early study (e.g., oxford & burry-stock, 1995) for use in a very different sill-related study (or not even reporting psychometric properties of the sill at all) is logically unsupportable and statistically unsound. doing the needed reliability and validity checks within any new studies is especially necessary if the effectiveness of strategy instruction or any other type of important decision-making is to be based on sill findings (oxford, personal communication, june 12, 2018). grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi): another look 357 to give but a few examples. oxford, the sill’s creator, never encouraged employing the sill to assess grammar strategy use, at least without drastic adjustments (personal communication, june 12 2018). following such major adjustments, the instrument could probably yield valuable information about indirect strategies (i.e. metacognitive, social and affective), but these devices cannot possibly be considered as constituting the core of strategic learning of l2 grammar. however, it should be stressed yet again that the sill was not designed to serve as an assessment tool for strategic learning of l2 grammar. one notable exception to some researchers’ propensity to draw on general classifications of lls and the related tools is the study conducted by pawlak (2012), who constructed a tool drawing on the descriptive scheme for gls proposed by oxford et al. (2007). however, the scheme, which is briefly described below, was not intended to constitute a comprehensive taxonomy or explanatory theory and was never validated for those purposes (oxford, personal communication, june 12, 2018). in light of the scheme’s limitations, there was a need to create a more inclusive classification of gls and to design a data collection tool on its basis. an attempt to achieve this goal, made by pawlak (2009b, 2013), is described in the following section. 3. the development of a classification of gls and a data collection tool when initially embarking on the task of imposing order on the field of grammar learning strategies, the present author was aware of two previous attempts to do so, neither of which, however, resulted in the emergence of a comprehensive taxonomy of gls. one of them, described in cohen and pinilla-herrera (2010), involved designing a website which was intended to aid learning spanish grammar. the website was created on the basis of the data collected from students and teachers concerning the most challenging grammatical features. it included a number of awareness-raising activities as well as examples of concrete strategies that could enhance the learning process, both in general and with respect to specific structures. while the utility of the website can hardly be denied and it can indeed point to the ways in which research on gls can eventually be applied to foreign language pedagogy, it is confined to one l2 and its utility beyond learning spanish is thus limited. a more general approach was embraced by oxford et al. (2007), who, building on research on form-focused instruction (e.g., doughty & williams, 1998; ellis, 2002), related gls to modes of grammar teaching, offering a number of representative examples. more specifically, they drew a distinction between implicit learning, which may involve an exclusive focus on meaning and an occasional focus on form, and explicit learning, which can be deductive and inductive mirosław pawlak 358 in character. since implicit learning which is entirely meaning-oriented is unlikely to involve the employment of gls, oxford et al. (2007) do not discuss the use of gls in this case, although, as they emphasize, “at heart learning depends on the student” (p. 119), and, therefore, even watching television in the tl can be done with the purpose of enhancing grammatical accuracy. thus, their framework focuses on three groups of gls which can be allied with the remaining three types of l2 learning. these categories are as follows (oxford et al., 2007, pp. 127-129): 1) strategies for implicit learning which includes a focus on form (e.g., paying attention to how more proficient people say things and imitating, noticing or remembering structures that are emphasized orally, through pitch, loudness or repetition, or keeping a notebook of new structures that seem very important or frequent); 2) strategies for explicit inductive learning (e.g., participating in rule-discovery discussions in class, creating hypotheses about how the tl operates and then verifying them, or checking with others who are more proficient to make sure that one’s interpretation of a rule is correct); 3) strategies for explicit deductive learning (e.g., previewing a lesson to identify key structures to be covered, attending to rules that the teacher or the book provides, making up sentences using the rule). although this scheme held considerable promise and provided a point of departure for the study conducted by pawlak (2012), it did not represent a complete classification. moreover, it suffered from some weaknesses, tied, for example, to inadequate focus on the learner’s point of view, the omission of different types of practice which can be viewed an integral component of grammar learning in most foreign language contexts, and the failure to include groups of strategies featuring prominently in major classifications of lls (cf. pawlak, 2012, 2013). however, it should be emphasized yet again that at most, the scheme was planned as a basis for international, collaborative, theoretical discussions, which could help in the eventual revision of the scheme and, after more collaboration, creation of a draft grammar strategy assessment instrument that would need extensive testing. however, no international, cooperative, conceptual discussions of the scheme have occurred in the dozen years since its publication (oxford, personal communication, june 12, 2018). it was the lack of a classification of gls that would be comprehensive and give justice to the actions and thoughts that learners actually engage in when trying to master tl grammar that prompted pawlak (2009b, 2013) to develop his own categorization. this effort was guided by four overriding principles, namely: (1) the classification should be general and thus applicable to any tl grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi): another look 359 rather than language-specific, (2) it should draw upon existing taxonomies of lls, (3) it should build on existing, comprehensive divisions of methodological options in teaching tl grammar, and (4) it should be informed by the findings of existing research on gls and attempts to categorize such strategies, such as the one by oxford et al. (2007). accordingly, pawlak’s (2009b) classification draws on the four-way taxonomy of lls into metacognitive, cognitive, affective and social, put forward by cohen and dörnyei (2003). it integrates the competing classifications developed by oxford (1990), and o’malley and chamot (1990), by including memory strategies in the category of cognitive strategies, retaining the division into affective and social strategies, and scrapping compensation strategies as devices not directly involved in the process of language learning. the second crucial point of reference was the division of techniques and procedures in form-focused instruction initially introduced by ellis (1997) and later modified by pawlak (2006; see also pawlak, 2014). it rests on a distinction between learner performance options, which require learners to use the targeted tl feature, and feedback options, which involve reliance on corrective techniques in case errors in the use of that feature occur. learner-performance options are further subdivided into focused-communication tasks, where the use of the targeted tl form is necessary or helpful in the attainment of a communicative goal, and feature-focused activities, in which learners’ attention is deliberately directed at a specific grammatical structure. feature-focused activities, in turn, which “constitute the mainstay of foreign language pedagogy in the majority of educational settings” (pawlak, 2014, p. 30), include consciousness-raising tasks, drawing on deduction (i.e. rule provision) or induction (i.e. rule discovery), or different types of language practice. the latter can be input-based (e.g., through visually highlighting a given form in written texts) or output-oriented, which can be more communicative, as in text-creation activities (e.g., telling a story using the past progressive), or more controlled, as in text-manipulation activities (e.g., filling in gaps). as for corrective feedback (cf), it can be more explicit (as in provision of metalinguistic information) or more implicit (e.g., a recast that provides the correct form but preserves the original meaning), but also outputprompting (e.g. as in a clarification request) or input-providing (e.g., as in a recast). in designing the classification, insights gleaned from the research projects on gls outlined in section 2 were taken into account, and some of the examples of gls provided in the descriptive scheme by oxford et al. (2007) were included. in effect, a classification of grammar learning strategies was proposed that comprises four main groups of strategies, with cognitive gls, which lie at the core of l2 learning grammar, being further divided into finer categories. the classification is diagrammatically presented in figure 1 and its components are described mirosław pawlak 360 in more detail below (cf. pawlak, 2009b, 2013; the letters and numbers at the end of each category or subcategory correspond to the sections in the glsi): figure 1 proposed classification of grammar learning strategies 1) metacognitive strategies, which are employed to supervise and manage the learning of l2 grammar through the processes of planning, organizing, monitoring and self-evaluating; this category includes such gls as paying attention to grammar structures when reading or listening, looking for opportunities to practice grammar structures in different ways, or scheduling grammar reviews in advance (a); 2) cognitive strategies, which are directly involved in the process of tl learning grammar and include the following subcategories (b): a) gls used to assist the production and comprehension of grammar in communication tasks, such as trying to use specific grammar structures in spontaneous oral production or making comparisons between one’s speech and writing and language production of more proficient tl users (b1); b) gls used to develop explicit knowledge of grammar, which can be subdivided into two groups (b2): · gls employed for deductive learning, such as trying to understand every grammar rule; grammar learning strategies metacognitive cognitive gls used in communication tasks gls for developing explict knowledge gls for deduction gls for induction gls for developing implicit knowledge gls for comprehension gls for production gls for controlled practice gls for communicative practice gls for dealing with cf affective social grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi): another look 361 · gls employed for inductive learning, such as discovering rules by analyzing examples; c) gls used to develop implicit knowledge of grammar, which can be subdivided into two groups (b3): · gls employed for comprehending grammar (i.e., understanding form-meaning mappings), such as listening to and reading texts containing many instances of a particular grammar structure; · gls employed for producing grammar, both in controlled practice, such as applying new rules to create sentences, and in communicative practice, such as using these rules in meaningful contexts; d) gls used to deal with corrective feedback on errors in the production of grammar, such as listening carefully for the feedback provided by the teacher on the use of grammar features, trying to notice and self-correct errors when practicing grammar, or trying to engage in negotiating grammar forms with the teacher (b4); 3) affective strategies, which serve the purpose of self-regulating emotions and motivations when learning tl grammar; examples of such gls include making an effort to relax in the face of problems with understanding or using grammar, encouraging oneself to practice grammar points that pose a learning challenge, or keeping a diary where regular comments on the process of learning grammar are made (c); 4) social strategies, which involve cooperation or interaction with the teacher, proficient tl users or other students, aimed at enhancing the process of learning grammar; the category includes such gls as trying to help others who experience difficulties in learning or using grammar structures, practicing grammar structures with peers, or asking the teacher for assistance in understanding a point of grammar (d). obviously, as noted above when discussing the utility of gls, although the categories only provide guidance as to the predominant functions of various strategic devices, with some of them possibly having the potential to perform several functions which can change from one learning task to the next. this said, it is also clear that such distinct categories are needed to avoid chaos in the description of gls use and they are indispensable for measurement purposes. the classification described above provided a basis for constructing a data collection tool for tapping into reported use of strategies for learning grammar, namely, the grammar learning strategy inventory, or the glsi. the core of the instrument is constituted by 70 5-point likert-scale statements representing different gls, subdivided into the four main categories included in the classification (a, b, c, and d) as mirosław pawlak 362 well as the four subcategories representing the broad types of cognitive gls (b1, b2, b3, and b4). the respondents are requested to indicate the extent to which a particular item reflects their strategic learning on a scale of on 1 to 5, where 1 indicates it does not apply to me at all and 5 stands for it perfectly describes my actions and thoughts. the glsi can be found in its entirety in the appendix but a few important comments are necessary with respect to this version. first, the instrument is intended for university students majoring in english or other foreign languages and, due to the nature of the items it includes, it would not be suitable for use with students majoring in other disciplines or with learners at other educational levels. second, since the tool can still be seen as very much work in progress, the copies administered to learners also include additional spaces for comments on items in all the categories in the hope of detecting problems in the wording, clarity or accessibility. in addition, the respondents are requested to answer in their l1 or in the tl four open-ended questions to reveal other potentially useful gls that may not have been included in the instrument (i.e., “can you think of any other ways of learning english grammar that are not mentioned in the statements?,” “what is your favorite way of learning english grammar?,” “what do you do to make sure you can use the structures you learn in communication?,” and “what problems do you experience when learning english grammar and how do you resolve them?”). for reasons of space and given the aims of the study reported below, these elements are not reproduced in the version included in the appendix. third, depending on the purposes of a given investigation, a variety of questions can be added, regarding, for example, demographic data, self-assessment or examination results, but such items are omitted here as well. fourth, although the names of specific groups and subgroups of gls are provided in the tool for the sake of convenience, they are absent from the versions that participants are requested to fill out to avoid confusion. as is the case with the sill, the analysis of the data consists in tabulating the means for the specific items, categories and subcategories and the entire instruments, and then, depending on the needs, employing various procedures of inferential statistics (e.g., to establish correlations with selected variables, such as experience in learning the tl).2 the interpretation of the frequency of gls use follows the guidelines introduced by oxford (1990), with the mean bands of: 5.0-3.5, 3.4-2.5, and 2.4-1.0, representing high, medium and low use, respectively. although the glsi was successfully tested in a pilot study conducted by pawlak (2009b), which generated evidence for satisfactory internal 2 the use of means and standard deviations for likert-scale items has been criticized by some specialists, as the results can be seen as representing ordinal data (e.g., griffiths, 2018). however, mizumoto and takeuchi (2018) argue that under specific conditions the use of means is acceptable for ordinal data. grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi): another look 363 consistency reliability (the value of cronbach alpha of 0.82), and has also been employed in other research projects (e.g., pawlak, 2011b), there was a clear need to examine its validity, reliability, utility and potential underlying structure in more detail. this was the aim of the study reported in the following section. 4. the study 4.1. aims as mentioned above, the study was motivated by the need to develop an instrument for tapping into the use of grammar learning strategies that would be geared to the complexity and specificity of this tl subsystem. thus, its aim was to test the validity and reliability of the grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi) and to determine whether it is possible to identify more general factors underlying reported use of grammar learning strategies. what should be stressed once again, the tool is intended for university students majoring in english and it is therefore in this particular context that its utility was appraised. 4.2. participants the participants were 106 (76 females and 30 males) university students majoring in english as a foreign language, enrolled in year 1, 2 and 3 of a three-year ba program in two regional universities in poland. their average experience in learning english amounted to 10.5 years, with the maximum of 18 and the minimum of 3, and the value of standard deviation (sd) amounting to 2.84. in terms of the common european framework of reference for languages, their proficiency level fell in between b2 and c1, although there was much individual variation in this respect. they self-evaluated their knowledge of english as 4.0 (sd = 0.49) on the scale of 1 (lowest) to 6 (highest), which was quite optimistic given the true tl ability that some of them manifested. their mean end-of-the-year or semester grade in a grammar class stood at 3.72 (sd = 0.62) on the scale of 2 (lowest) to 5 (highest), typically used for evaluation purposes in polish universities. a crucial caveat here, however, is that the classes were taught by different teachers, the syllabi differed and so did the requirements, which considerably lowers the reliability of this measure of attainment. the students were quite convinced of the importance of grammar in learning english, as evident in the mean of 3.92 on the scale of 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest), but there was the most variation in this case (sd = 0.77). based on their responses to an open-ended question accompanying in the glsi, the participants varied enormously when it comes to their contact with the tl outside the classroom. while some students stated that they had no out-ofmirosław pawlak 364 school access to the tl, which is somewhat hard to believe, and there were those who reported frequent opportunities for interactions with native-speakers or other proficient users of english, for the majority access to the tl boiled down to using the media, reading, surfing the internet or taking part in e-mail exchanges. when it comes to the ba program that the participants attended, it included an intensive course in english, which was divided into a number of components (e.g., grammar, speaking, writing, integrated skills) that differed across the three years. depending on the year, the students were also required to attend numerous content classes in linguistics, literature, foreign language pedagogy, or cultural studies, with english being the default language of instruction in most of them. the final requirement for graduating from the program was writing a ba thesis in the last year, which clearly required a high level of grammatical ability. 4.3. data collection and analytic procedures the glsi was administered in two ways: either in pen-an-paper version, which typically happened in class, or electronically, in which case the participants would return the competed copies through e-mail. the instructions and the likert-scale statements were worded in english, as in the version included in the appendix, but students could also use polish or the tl when providing additional comments or responding to openended questions, data that are not taken into consideration in the analyses conducted for the purposes of the present study. as a token of gratitude for their assistance, the students were given an additional credit in their foreign language methodology or foreign language pedagogy courses, which resulted in their enthusiastic participation and efforts to make sure that their questionnaires were in fact returned. the data obtained in these ways were subjected to a number of analyses that were aimed at ensuring that the glsi represents a valid and reliable tool which can be employed in gathering data on gls use but also to find out whether the statements it includes can be grouped differently, thus offering insights into sets of factors underpinning the strategic learning of tl grammar. these analytical procedures are described in detail in the following subsections. 4.3.1. validity an attempt was undertaken to establish three types of validity for the instrument, that is construct validity, content validity and face validity. the procedures applied in each case are provided below: 1) construct validity was determined by ensuring that the statements the glsi includes are solidly grounded in current theory and research concerning grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi): another look 365 grammar instruction as well as empirical investigations concerning lls; while the former was mainly achieved through the review of relevant literature, the latter involved tabulating correlations between the glsi and the sill (oxford, 1990), which may have been criticized on a number of counts, also by its creator (oxford, 2017), but it has been utilized in hundreds of research projects (murray, 2010; oxford & nyikos, 1989; solak & cakir, 2015); additionally, the use of this tool was deemed appropriate in view of the fact that the glsi was to some extent modeled on it; the sill comprises the following groups of lls: memory (a), cognitive (b), compensation (c), metacognitive (d), affective (f) and social (e) (letters a-e correspond to the parts of the sill referred to in the analysis); since the two tools include different categories, the main focus was on the correlations between the overall scores (means) for the glsi and the sill, metacognitive, social and affective strategies in both instruments, as well as the different groups of cognitive strategies in the glsi (b1-b4), and memory and affective lls in the sill; the data were normally distributed and thus pearson’s correlation coefficients were calculated; 2) content validity was established by a panel of five qualified judges, experts in the domains of language learning strategies and grammar instruction, who were requested to indicate on a scale of 1 (complete disagreement) to 5 (complete agreement) whether the different categories of the glsi represented strategic learning with respect to grammar learning; since the data were not normally distributed, kendall’s w was calculated to indicate the level of agreement between the judges; 3) face validity was assessed by asking 15 students, all of whom were english majors and did not later provide data for the analysis, to decide if, in their opinion, the items included in the categories and subcategories of the glsi were illustrative of the actions and thoughts that they engaged in when learning tl grammar; the same scale and statistical procedures (i.e., kendall’s coefficient) were used in this case as with the expert judges. 4.3.2. reliability the reliability of the glsi was assessed in three separate ways. first, in order to determine internal consistency reliability of the tool, the values of cronbach alpha were calculated for the four main scales (a-b), and the subscales (b1-b4), as well as the entire tool. second, the correlations between the different categories and subcategories of the glsi were computed, although critical here were those between different groups of cognitive strategies (b1) as, in contrast to the remaining groups, they represented the actions and thoughts directly involved in mirosław pawlak 366 learning tl grammar. the data were normally distributed, which allowed the use of pearson’s r also in this case. third, the coefficients of difficulty (p), or percentages of students choosing the highest value on the likert-scale (5), were determined for all the items included in the glsi. 4.3.3. underlying structure of the glsi in order to uncover the potential factors underlying the use of gls going beyond the categories in the instrument, an attempt was made to conduct exploratory factor analysis (efa), drawing upon principal component analysis and the varimax rotation method. the bartlett’s test and kaiser-meyer-olkin (kmo) test were run prior to efa with the purpose of determining whether the data collected by means of the glsi were suitable for factor analysis. 4.4. results and discussion as regards the construct validity of the glsi, which was determined by calculating pearson’s correlations with the sill, the results are provided in table 1. what is striking is that the vast majority of the correlations are not only positive and statistically significant at the .05 level but they are also at least medium in strength (.30 or higher), accounting for at least 9% of the variance. of particular interest here is the fact that the glsi and the sill in their entirety were highly positively correlated (r = .80), explaining 64% of the variance in each other, which strongly indicates that they measure a similar construct, that is the application of language learning strategies. we can also see moderate correlations of .56, .57 and .46 between the metacognitive, affective and social strategies in the glsi (glsi_a, glsi_c and gls_d) and the sill (sill_met, sill_a and sill_s). what is more, even the category of compensation strategies in the sill correlates positively at weak to medium levels, with all the groups of gls, which again speaks to the fact that the glsi is a good measure of strategic learning. the most interesting, however, are the relationships between cognitive gls (i.e., glsi_b, b1-b4), directly involved in grammar learning, and the groups of memory and cognitive strategies in the sill (i.e., sill_m and sill_c). the correlations fall somewhere in the medium range in the case of the entire cognitive gls category (r = .43 in the case of memory and r = .47 for cognitive strategies in the sill), and the same can overall be said about the cognitive strategies in the sill (sill_c) and the specific subtypes of cognitive gls (i.e., glsi_b1-b4, r = .32-41). the situation is more complex in the case of memory strategies in the sill (sill_m). this is because, although they correlate moderately with gls for the development of explicit knowledge (glsi_b2, r =.58) and moderately with grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi): another look 367 those employed in the development of implicit knowledge (glsi_b3, r = .33), the correlations are very weak in the case of gls for learning grammar in communication-based tasks (glsi_b1, r = .12) or even negative, almost non-existent and statistically insignificant in the case of strategies used to deal with cf (glsi_b4, r = -.04). the last two results, however, should not be overly surprising because it is difficult to see much in common between efforts to remember something and attending to form during message conveyance. besides, the sill could not have even given justice to this type of grammar instruction (learning) since the concept of focus on form was recognized around the time of its construction (cf. the seminal paper by long, 1991). in light of these results and the efforts to anchor the glsi in current theory and research, the instrument can be said to possess a satisfactory level of construct validity. table 1 correlations between the glsi and the sill as well as specific categories (pearson’s r, n = 106) sill_m sill_c sill_com sill_met sill_a sill_s sill_all glsi_a .26* .30* .25* .56* .25* .33* .48* glsi_b .43* .47* .40* .57* .42* .57* .69* glsi_b1 .12^ .41* .27* .52* .25* .48* .50* glsi_b2 .58* .33* .33* .39* .36* .45* .58* glsi_b3 .33* .40* .32* .45* .35* .46* .56* glsi_b4 -.04^ .32* .29* .45* .26* .31* .38* glsi_c .27* .19* .24* .26* .57* .31* .41* glsi_d .06^ .36* .19^ .38* .28* .46* .42* glsi_all .42* .48* .41* .62* .48* .59* .72* note. values of pearson’s r. an asterisk indicates statistically significant correlations at p =.05. glsi_a, gls_b, etc. indicate categories and subcategories in the instrument discussed in section 3; sill_a, sill_b, etc. refer to groups of lls mentioned in section 4.3.1. glsi_all and sill_all indicate the overall results for both tools even more promising are the outcomes of procedures employed to assess the content and face validity of the tool. in the case of the former, the analysis demonstrated that the values of kendall’s coefficient of concordance between the ratings given by expert judges ranged between .81 and .91 for the whole glsi and its specific categories, which justifies the assumption that the instrument is valid. the same can be said about face validity since there was also a high level of agreement in the students’ responses, with the values of kendall’s w ranging from .78 to .88. when it comes to the internal consistency reliability of the instrument, the cronbach alpha values for the entire glsi and for the scales and subscales it comprises are provided in table 2. in general, the results can be considered as satisfactory for the entire tool (.89) as well as in the case of most of the scales and subscales, with three exceptions. one of them of them are gls for the development of implicit knowledge of grammar, although here cronbach alpha exceeds mirosław pawlak 368 the 0.6 threshold (dörnyei, 2007). the situation is more disconcerting in the case of affective and social gls, since in both cases the values fail to meet this criterion. what should be noted, however, is that the coefficients are not drastically low and could have been higher had a greater number of participants been included in the study. additionally, the mean for the affective category of gls was low, which may have contributed to the unsatisfactory cronbach alpha value. on the whole then, the glsi can be considered as internally consistent, although improvement in some of the scales could surely be made. table 2 means, standard deviations and cronbach alpha values (n = 106) for the scales and subscales included in the glsi scale or subscale m (sd) cronbach alpha value glsi_a – metacognitive gls 3.49 (0.50) .69 glsi_b – cognitive gls 3.62 (0.39) .85 gsli_b1 – cognitive gls used in communication tasks 3.73 (0.52) .78 gsli_b2 – cognitive gls for developing explicit knowledge 3.29 (0.38) .71 gsli_b3 – cognitive gls for developing implicit knowledge 3.43 (0.60) .62 gsli_b4 – cognitive gls for dealing with cf 4.00 (0.55) .78 glsi_c – affective gls 2.97 (0.54) .56 glsi_d – social gls 3.69 (0.61) .54 glsi_all 3.44 (0.51) .89 note. glsi_a, glsi_b, etc. indicate categories and subcategories in the instrument discussed in section 3; glsi_all stands for the entire instrument table 3 correlations between the categories included in the glsi (pearson’s r, n = 106) glsi_a glsi_b glsi_b1 glsi_b2 glsi_b3 glsi_b4 glsi_c glsi_d glsi_all glsi_a .62* .49* .46* .53* 43* .15 .25* .69* glsi_b .74* .84* .81* .58* .37* .43* .98* glsi_b1 .39* .45* .64* .14 .45* .73* glsi_b2 .57* .20* .39* .30* .81* glsi_b3 .35* .27* .25* .77* glsi_b4 .24* .38* .60* glsi_c .19* .49* glsi_d .52* glsi_all note. values of pearson’s r. an asterisk indicates statistically significant correlations at p =.05. glsi_a, glsi_b, etc. indicate categories and subcategories in the instrument discussed in section 3; glsi_all stands for the entire instrument also largely satisfactory are the results of the correlational analysis between the different scales and subscales included in the glsi, which are presented in table 3. importantly, positive, in most cases strong relationships were detected between all the categories of gls and the entire instrument. this is most evident grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi): another look 369 in the case of all cognitive strategies (glsi_b) that correlate with the entire glsi at the .98 level, an outcome that is remarkable but also predictable to some extent as 50 out of 70 (71.4%) items in the tool represent cognitive gls. of particular significance, however, are the relationships between different types of cognitive strategies in the glsi (glsi_b1-b4). an immediate observation is that all the subscales correlate highly with the category of cognitive strategies to which they belong, with the correlation coefficients ranging from .58 in the case of gls for dealing with cf (glsi_b4) to .84 in the case of gls employed in the development of explicit knowledge of grammar (glsi_b2). things look somewhat less promising when we examine the relationships between the subscales, but even here the correlations are at least moderate in the majority of cases. two things deserve special attention in this regard. first, an uphill correlation (r = .64) was detected between the gls employed in communication tasks (glsi_b1) and those applied in dealing with feedback (glsi_b4). this should not be surprising as, for the most part, the conditions in which gls are applied in both cases are rather similar and entail some form of message conveyance. second, the lowest correlation (r = .20) was observed between gls for developing explicit knowledge (glsi_b2) and those for tackling cf on grammar errors. again, such an outcome could have been expected in light of the fact that understanding rules, be it through deduction or induction, does not involve much tl production, thus providing few opportunities for processing feedback. the last measure of reliability used in the present study involved tabulating the difficulty coefficients for all the statements included in the glsi. while the p values are mostly satisfactory, there are cases in which they exceed 0.8, which might indicate that the participants believe that a higher score is for some reasons desirable. the statements are the following: · “i know my strengths and weaknesses when it comes to grammar” (glsi_a5, p = .83); · “i pay attention to grammar structures in my own speaking and writing” (glsi_a_8, p = .81); · “i pay attention to rules provided by the teacher or coursebook” (glsi_b2_19, p = .81); · “i try to understand every grammar rule” (glsi_b2_20, p = .82); · “i listen carefully for any feedback the teacher gives me about the structures i use” (glsi_b4_53, p = .82); · “i pay attention to teacher correction when i do grammar exercises and try to repeat the correct version” (glsi_b4_54, p = .87); · “i try to notice and self-correct my mistakes when practicing grammar” (glsi_b4_55, p = .86); mirosław pawlak 370 · “i try to notice how the correct version differs from my own and improve what i said” (glsi_b4_58, p = .81); · “i like to be corrected when i make mistakes using grammar structures” (glsi_d_68, p = .81); · “i try to help others when they have problems with understanding or using grammar” (glsi_b4_70, p = .80). taking a careful look at these items, however, it is possible to speculate that the high levels of agreement among the participants may not stem from a desire to put themselves in a favorable light, but, rather, may be reflective of the exigencies of the context in which they are expected to function. after all, the specificity of the program dictated that high levels of grammatical accuracy are required for successful performance on end-of-the-year examinations and, perhaps even more importantly, the mastery of tl grammar is needed for successful completion of a diploma thesis. when it comes to underlying factors determining the employment of the gls included in the instrument and potentially cutting across the scales and subscales based on the classification proposed above, the study failed to achieve its goal. the major concern was that undertaking efa in the first place proved to be highly problematic because, while the results of the bartlett’s test of sphericity (t = 4151.64, p < .001) showed that the data collected by means of the glsi were amenable to factor analysis, the value of the kmo test (.0474) indicated that they are not suited to analysis of this kind. in view of such conflicting results of these two measures, an attempt to run efa was made anyway. what emerged was a potential three-factor solution, which, first, was not easy to interpret due to evident overlaps between the factors and sometimes contradictory nature of the gls they included, and, second, unacceptably msa values for as many as 34 items that would have needed to be eliminated, thus inevitably compromising the integrity of the tool. for these reasons, the three-factor solution was rejected and a decision was made that efa should be conducted with a considerably larger sample of participants in order to determine whether it is at all possible to tease out latent factors underlying the use of gls. in fact, this does not always have to be the case, one good example being the english language learning strategy inventory (ellsi) developed by griffiths (2003b). 5. conclusion the results of the analyses presented in the previous sections seem to indicate that the glsi is to a large extent a valid and reliable tool for collecting data on the use of strategies for learning and gaining greater control over tl grammar. for one thing, it possesses high construct validity, which was achieved by relating to items to cutting-edge research in grammar instruction and lls, and was grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi): another look 371 confirmed by in most cases statistically significant, mostly moderate, positive correlations between the glsi and oxford’s (1990) sill, both overall and with respect to the categories and subcategories the two tools include. the instrument is also characterized by high content and face validity, as verified with the help of the judgments made by experts and students for whom the tool is intended. secondly, the reliability of the glsi can also be regarded as largely satisfactory given the acceptable values of cronbach alpha in most cases and at least moderate, statistically significant correlations between most of the scales and subscales it comprises. what does constitute a cause for concern and should be addressed in future modifications of the tool is less than satisfactory internal consistency of the scales consisting of affective (glsi_c) and social (glsi_d) strategies, as well as the very high difficulty coefficients for as many as 10 statements. in addition, in light of the unsuccessful factor analysis, a question remains as to whether more general factors can be identified that would go beyond the divisions into categories and subcategories of gls on which the construction of the instrument rested. despite these overall positive findings concerning the validity and reliability of the glsi, it should be kept in mind that the tool still represents work in progress and the version included in the appendix should by no means be considered as complete or final. first, on closer inspection of the statements, it becomes clear that there is close correspondence between several items in some of the scales, such as gls for communication tasks (glsi_b1), those for the development of implicit grammar knowledge (glsi_b3), and those for dealing with corrective feedback (glsi_b4). this may blur the intended differences between different categories from the point of view of the respondents, which could have been one of the reasons for unsuccessful efa. second, a question arises as to whether the glsi should not comprise as well compensation strategies which at first blush may have little to do with successful l2 grammar learning but were at times mentioned in responses to the open-ended questions excluded from analysis in this study. after all, using one structure in place of another that the learner is unsure of may in some circumstances constitute a form of practice or complement other strategic devices, such as affective or social gls. third, the utility of the tool is constrained by the fact that it was designed for university students majoring in foreign languages, people who are cognitively mature and possess, at least in theory, a high degree of awareness of language, its learning and teaching. clearly, many of the items would need to be rephrased or even discarded if the glsi were to be used with other groups of respondents, such as junior and senior high school students. fourth, from the very outset, the tool was meant to be general rather than language-specific so that it could be employed with a variety of foreign languages. however, the grammatical systems of languages vary widely mirosław pawlak 372 (e.g., the existence and functions of articles, the role of inflection), which may necessitate the employment of gls suited to the grammar of a particular tl. therefore, it might make sense to treat different versions of the glsi as a core of strategic learning but complement them with scales dedicated to different l2 language systems. fifth, the present author is fully aware of the fact that the use of tools such as the glsi represents a macro-perspective in the study of gls, which needs to be complemented by a micro-perspective that would provide insights into the situated, context-sensitive but also variable nature of such strategic devices (cf. pawlak, 2013; see the conclusion to the special issue). while these concerns are without doubt salutary and future research on gls should heed them, there is certainly no reason to discard the glsi and instead efforts should be made to ensure that it constitutes an even more valid and reliable instrument for collecting data on the use of gls. with this goal in mind, the next logical step appears to be conducting similar analyses to those reported in this paper with a much more sizable sample as their outcomes can provide grounds for more or less extensive adjustments and the use of efa might in this case enable identification of factors underpinning the employment of gls. such efforts are without doubt warranted since, as fotos (1998) so aptly commented twenty years ago with respect to foreign language contexts, “grammar teaching has never left the classroom” (p. 301). if this is the case, it is the duty of researchers to identify ways in which the learning of grammar can be best supported. few would disagree that adept use of grammar learning strategies is a powerful crutch aiding the process of understanding and getting greater control over grammar structures in an additional language. acknowledgements the study reported in the present paper represents a contribution to the research project no. 2015/17/b/hs2/01704 (2016-2019) funded by the national science centre, poland. grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi): another look 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(2009b). investigating grammar learning strategies: in search of appropriate research tools. paper presented at the 19th conference of the european second language association, cork, 2-5 september. pawlak, m. (2011a). research into language learning strategies: taking stock and looking ahead. in j. arabski & a. wojtaszek (eds.), individual differences in sla (pp. 17-37). bristol: multilingual matters. pawlak, m. (2011b). investigating the link between the use of grammar learning strategies and language attainment. paper presented at an international conference topics in applied linguistics, opole, 14-16 november. pawlak, m. (2012). instructional mode and the use of grammar learning strategies. in m. pawlak (ed.), new perspectives on individual differences in language learning and teaching (pp. 263-287). heidelberg – new york: springer. pawlak, m. (2013). researching grammar learning strategies: combining the macroand micro-perspective. in ł. salski, w. szubko-sitarek, & j. majer (eds.), perspectives on foreign language learning (pp. 191-220). łódź, poland: university of łódź press. pawlak, m. (2014). error correction in the foreign language classroom: reconsidering the issues. heidelberg – new york: springer. rubin, j. (1975). what the “good language learner” can teach us. tesol quarterly, 9, 41-51. sarıçoban, a. (2005). learner preferences in the use of strategies in learning grammar. atatürk university journal of the institute of social sciences, 5, 319-330. solak, c., & cakir, r. (2015). language learning strategies of language e-learners in turkey. e-learning and digital media, 12, 107-120. tilfarlioğlu, y. (2005). an analysis of the relationship between the use of grammar learning strategies and student achievement at english preparatory classes. journal of language and linguistic studies, 1, 155-169. trendak, o. (2015). exploring the role of strategic intervention in form-focused instruction. heidelberg – new york; springer. grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi): another look 377 appendix grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi) the questionnaire aims to obtain information about the ways in which you go about learning english grammar. your responses will only be used for research purposes, so please be candid in your answers. feel free to use english or polish when answering open-ended questions. below you will find statements about learning english grammar. please read each statement and circle the response on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 indicates it does not apply to me at all and 5 it perfectly describes my actions and thoughts. feel free to add your own comments on the statements in any of the categories (a-d) in the spaces provided. answer in terms of how well the statement describes you. do not answer what you think you should do, or what other people do. there are no right or wrong answers in these statements. if you have any questions, please feel free to ask the teacher. part a – metacognitive gls 1. i preview the grammar structures to be covered in a lesson. 1 2 3 4 5 2. i pay attention to grammar structures when reading and listening. 1 2 3 4 5 3. i look for opportunities to practice grammar structures in many different ways. 1 2 3 4 5 4. i try to find more effective ways of learning grammar. 1 2 3 4 5 5. i know my strengths and weaknesses when it comes to grammar. 1 2 3 4 5 6. i have specific goals and objectives in learning grammar. 1 2 3 4 5 7. i schedule grammar reviews in advance. 1 2 3 4 5 8. i pay attention to grammar structures in my own speaking and writing. 1 2 3 4 5 part b – cognitive strategies part b1 – gls used to assist the production and comprehension of grammar in communication tasks 9. i try to use specific grammar structures in communication (e.g. telling a story). 1 2 3 4 5 10. i read for pleasure and watch television to improve my knowledge of grammar. 1 2 3 4 5 11. i notice (or remember) structures that cause me problems with meaning or communication. 1 2 3 4 5 12. i notice (or remember) structures that are repeated often in the text. 1 2 3 4 5 13. i notice (or remember) structures that are highlighted in a text by italics, boldface, underlining, etc.. 1 2 3 4 5 14. i notice (or remember) structures that are emphasized orally through pitch, repetition, etc. 1 2 3 4 5 15. i notice structures that are repeated extremely frequently in a short period of time (e.g. the past tense in a series of stories over the course of a few lessons). 1 2 3 4 5 16. i pay attention to how more proficient people say things and then imitate. 1 2 3 4 5 17. i compare my speech and writing with that of more proficient people to see how i can improve. 1 2 3 4 5 18. i use google or other search engines to see how a specific grammar structure is used in meaningful contexts. 1 2 3 4 5 mirosław pawlak 378 part b2 – gls used to develop explicit knowledge of grammar 19. i pay attention to rules provided by the teacher or coursebook. 1 2 3 4 5 20. i try to understand every grammar rule. 1 2 3 4 5 21. i memorize rules about frequently used linguistic forms/structures (e.g. formation and use of the passive). 1 2 3 4 5 22. i memorize rules about how structures change their form (e.g. form an adjective to an adverb). 1 2 3 4 5 23. i mark new grammar structures graphically (e.g. colors, underlining). 1 2 3 4 5 24. i paraphrase the rules i am given because i understand them better in my own words. 1 2 3 4 5 25. i make charts, diagrams or drawings to illustrate grammar rules. 1 2 3 4 5 26. i remember grammar information by location on a page in a book. 1 2 3 4 5 27. i use rhymes or songs to remember new grammar rules. 1 2 3 4 5 28. i physically act out new grammar structures. 1 2 3 4 5 29. i use a notebook/note cards for new rules and examples. 1 2 3 4 5 30. i group grammar structures to remember them better (verbs followed by gerund and infinitive). 1 2 3 4 5 31. i review grammar lessons to remember the rules better. 1 2 3 4 5 32. i use grammar reference books, grammar sections of coursebooks or grammatical information in dictionaries. 1 2 3 4 5 33. i use my mother tongue or other languages i know to understand and remember grammar rules. 1 2 3 4 5 34. i try to discover grammar rules by analyzing examples. 1 2 3 4 5 35. i create my own hypotheses about how structures work and check these hypotheses. 1 2 3 4 5 36. i use electronic resources (e.g. english websites, corpora) to figure out rules. 1 2 3 4 5 37. i work with others to reconstruct texts read by the teacher which contain many examples of a particular structure. 1 2 3 4 5 38. i analyze diagrams, graphs and tables to understand grammar. 1 2 3 4 5 39. i work with others to discover grammar rules. 1 2 3 4 5 40. i notice when the teacher leads me into overgeneralization error (e.g. saying breaked) and then i think about what went wrong. 1 2 3 4 5 41. i memorize whole phrases containing specific language forms. 1 2 3 4 5 42. when i do not know the part of speech, i consider such clues as form, meaning and context. 1 2 3 4 5 part b3 – gls used to develop implicit knowledge of grammar 43. i repeat the rules and examples to myself or rewrite them many times. 1 2 3 4 5 44. i do many exercises to practice grammar (e.g. paraphrasing, translation, multiple-choice). 1 2 3 4 5 45. i try to apply new rules carefully and accurately in specific sentences (e.g. to compete a gap). 1 2 3 4 5 46. i use newly learnt rules to create new sentences (to write about my plans). 1 2 3 4 5 47. i try to use grammar rules as soon as possible in a meaningful context (e.g. use them in my speech and writing). 1 2 3 4 5 48. i try to use whole phrases containing specific structures in my speech. 1 2 3 4 5 49. i notice (or remember) a structure which, when i encounter it, causes me to do something, like check a box, choose a drawing or underline a structure. 1 2 3 4 5 grammar learning strategy inventory (glsi): another look 379 50. i try to adjust the way i process spoken and written language in accordance with l2 spoken and written rules (e.g. in the case of some passive voice sentences). 1 2 3 4 5 51. i listen to and read texts containing many examples of a grammar structure. 1 2 3 4 5 52. i compare the way grammar is used in written and spoken language with how i use it. 1 2 3 4 5 part b4 – gls used to deal with corrective feedback on errors in the production of grammar 53. i listen carefully for any feedback the teacher gives me about the structures i use. 1 2 3 4 5 54. i pay attention to teacher correction when i do grammar exercises and try to repeat the correct version. 1 2 3 4 5 55. i try to notice and self-correct my mistakes when practicing grammar. 1 2 3 4 5 56. i try to negotiate grammar forms with the teacher when give a clue (e.g. a comment about the rule). 1 2 3 4 5 57. i notice when i am corrected on grammar in spontaneous communication (e.g. when giving opinions). 1 2 3 4 5 58. i try to notice how the correct version differs from my own and improve what i said. 1 2 3 4 5 part c – affective gls 59. i try to relax when i have problems with understanding or using grammar structures. 1 2 3 4 5 60. i encourage myself to practice grammar when i know i have problems with a structure. 1 2 3 4 5 61. i try to use grammar structures even when i am not sure they are correct. 1 2 3 4 5 62. i give myself a reward when i do well on a grammar test. 1 2 3 4 5 63. i notice when i feel tense or nervous when studying or using grammar structures. 1 2 3 4 5 64. i talk to other people about how i feel when learning grammar. 1 2 3 4 5 65. i keep a language learning diary where i include comments about language learning. 1 2 3 4 5 part d – social gls 66. i ask the teacher to repeat or explain a grammar point if i do not understand. 1 2 3 4 5 67. i ask the teacher or more proficient learners to help me with grammar structures. 1 2 3 4 5 68. i like to be corrected when i make mistakes using grammar structures. 1 2 3 4 5 69. i practice grammar structures with other students. 1 2 3 4 5 70. i try to help others when they have problems with understanding or using grammar. 1 2 3 4 5 165 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (1). 2021. 165-170 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.1.8 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review complexity perspectives on researching language learner and teacher psychology editors: richard j. sampson, richard s. pinner publisher: multilingual matters, 2021 isbn: 978-1-78892-354-5 pages: 304 one thing that immediately struck me when i sat down to write this piece was the realization that this is yet another review of a book devoted to the application of complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) to second and foreign language (l2) education. on the one hand, this might appear a little strange since i am certainly not an ardent believer in this theory and while i do recognize some of its merits, i have not used it as a theoretical framework in any of the studies i have conducted so far. on the other hand, though, the reason why i am attracted to publications on this topic could be that i am still waiting for someone to convince me that it is indeed the “silver bullet” that will not only help us disentangle the intricacies of l2 learning and teaching but also offer pedagogically sound insights that will contribute to more effective instruction. in fact, i finished my previous review of a recent book dealing with cdst-driven research methods in applied linguistics with the following comment: “i hope that phil hiver and ali al-hoorie will continue their efforts to show the utility of cdst and perhaps one day they will also write a book about how adopting complexity theory can actually 166 translate into more effective instruction in the language classroom” (pawlak, 2020a, p. 394). as fate would have it, a different tandem of scholars has decided to confront this formidable challenge. richard j. samson and richard s. pinner state in the introduction to their edited volume: “we united under the motto complexity should be made simple [emphasis in original]. our aim was to make complexity paradigms and research more accessible to people like ourselves, that is, practitioning language teachers who also engage in research” (p. 6). when going over the successive chapters included in this edited collection, i was constantly asking myself if the authors were succeeding in accomplishing this undoubtedly ambitious goal, and it is this vital issue that the review focuses on. given the nature of the book and limitations of space, i am not going to describe in detail, let alone evaluate, each of the chapters. rather, the comments are meant to refer to the entire publication, even though they might be illustrated by examples taken from specific papers. the volume consists of sixteen chapters that have not been divided into separate sections, but they have been ordered in such a way that similar themes are grouped together. the first chapter serves as an introduction in which the authors present their respective journeys into complexity, spell out their rationale for putting the book together, and briefly comment on the contributions it includes. in the second chapter, peter d. macintyre, sarah mercer, and tammy gregersen present the benefits of applying cdst to research into language learning psychology, offer examples of relevant studies, but also acknowledge the challenges involved in conducting such research and provide a handful of valuable recommendations in this respect. the following fourteen chapters focus on specific instances of empirical investigations grounded in cdst which have addressed a wide range of areas and used sometimes diverse methodologies. specifically, the following issues are touched on: emotions and emotion regulation strategies (sampson; oxford and gkonou), willingness to communicate (yashima), silence in the language classroom (smith and king), motivation (falout; consoli), l2 listening (simpson and rose), the application of the trajectory equifinality approach in exploring learners’ and teachers’ psychology (aoyama and yamamoto), class climate (nitta and nakata), directed motivational currents (dmcs; muir), the use of autoethnography to gain insights into group dynamics (pinner), teacher identity transformation seen from the perspective of hermans’ (1996) theory of the dialogical self (henry), and the use of microgenetic and frame analysis in researching teacher cognition (feryok). there are two common threads running thorough all of the chapters, albeit not foregrounded to the same extent in each of the contributions. one is the authors’ personal perspective on cdst and their engagement with it, as illustrated by samples of their own research and lessons learnt from it. the other is the focus 167 on demonstrating the pedagogical relevance of such research for everyday classroom learning and teaching of additional languages. in the last chapter, ema ushioda offers a commentary, superb as usual, on the prospects of making complexity research both doable and meaningful. the book closes with a glossary of key concepts related to cdst as such but also to the tools and approaches that the contributors used in their studies. the editors should definitely be applauded for compiling this impressive collection of papers and for their sincere efforts to make cdst more understandable to researchers and practitioners alike. thinking back to the question i posed at the beginning of this review, there is no doubt that they have succeeded in “making complexity simple” for those who wish to research different aspects of the psychology of l2 learning and teaching through the lens of cdst. for one thing, the chapters included in the book constitute excellent demonstrations of how complexitydriven research can be carried out in practice, highlighting the areas of learner and teacher psychology to which it can be applied as well as introducing tools and methodological approaches that can be employed for this purpose. while some lines of inquiry, such as motivation, willingness to communicate or self-concept have been investigated from this perspective for some time, some of the contributors successfully show how to apply it to new fields, such as silence in the classroom, classroom climate or language learning strategies. equally importantly, some of the chapters are ground-breaking in that they introduce novel conceptual frameworks, data collection procedures and analytical tools by means of which complexity can be investigated. all of this is bound to provide an inspiration for researchers planning to apply cdst to multiple aspects of l2 learning and teaching. yet another merit is that the chapters are written from a personal perspective, which enhances the credibility of the authors’ voices, and, on the whole, they are accessible and provide clearcut guidelines as to how a specific empirical approach can be implemented. what i personally find appealing is the fact that the contributors do not always slavishly adhere to the tenets of cdst and some of them openly admit that this is just one of many potential paradigms that can inform classroom-oriented research. smith and king, for example, make the following comment: “. . . we do not believe that the construct of complexity on its own can provide convincing holistic explanations of how language learners behave and how classroom environments work” (p. 88). i am not entirely sure that such flexibility concerning reliance on cdst is the message that the editors initially wanted to convey but, to my mind, this quality only enhances the value of this volume. all these merits notwithstanding, i have two main reservations about the volume stemming from my own research into different aspects of l2 instruction and in particular the dynamic nature of individual difference factors, as well as a my hands-on experience as a long-time practitioner, first in secondary school and 168 then at the university level. in the first place, once again when reviewing a book on the applications of complexity theory, i cannot escape the impression that the editors and some of the chapter authors make it seem as if this was the only “correct” way of investigating second language acquisition (sla). for example, such a stance is quite explicitly expressed in the introduction where the editors argue for the importance of grounding empirical investigations of l2 learning and teaching in complexity in the following way: “we feel that this is a crucial step, in order that our field can benefit and move forward, without falling back into reductionist, isolating, statistic-heavy and yet reality-evading research practices which do little to further our understanding of the vital psychological aspects to foreign language learning and teaching” (p. 8). for one thing, much of what we have so far learned about sla comes from such largescale studies and it would certainly be more prudent to see the macroand microperspectives as two sides of the same coin rather than discarding the former altogether (see e.g., pawlak, 2020b). in addition, it is hard to agree that only reliance on cdst and the related terminological apparatus can ensure ecological validity, result in the use of multiple sources of data, lead to the adoption of a mixed-methods approach, increase the frequency of longitudinal research projects or enhance relevance of research to everyday concerns of classroom teachers. as my colleagues and myself have shown in investigating motivation, willingness to communicate, anxiety or boredom, all of these goals can be quite successfully accomplished by studies that are not propelled by the complexity perspective and its conceptual framework (e.g., kruk, 2019; mystkowska-wiertelak & pawlak, 2017; pawlak, 2012; pawlak et al. 2020). by the same token, the person-in-context relational view of motivation proposed by ushioda (2009) is not grounded in cdst because, as she explains in her final chapter, “. . . it seems important to keep the abstract theorizing and discourse to a minimum, and to focus instead on people, events, behaviors or phenomena of interest to us as practitioner-researchers” (p. 273). the point i am trying to make is simply that there are many different ways in which the complexity of the l2 classroom can be approached and cdst is certainly not the only option. my second reservation concerns the belief voiced throughout the book that conducting research from the complexity perspective will, as if with a wave of a magic wand, make the results of this research somewhat by default relevant to everyday teaching and help translate them into guidelines for more effective l2 instruction. to quote the editors once again, “. . . by understanding complexity, we hope to empower practitioners and encourage them to share their rich understandings about the realities of classroom teaching and learning” (p. 8). i certainly wish this was so simple. however, several important questions immediately spring to mind. first, can we really expect that admitting that what transpires in the l2 classroom is highly complex will help us successfully deal with such complexities? rather, teachers are fully aware of these intricacies and they would rather see 169 concrete recipes on how to confront them, even if such recipes were based on a highly simplified view of reality. second, one is left to wonder whether practitioners can be realistically expected to engage in empirical investigations of their own classrooms, particularly cdst-rooted research, which requires gathering rich data and doing so at multiple points in time. after all, we should not allow ourselves to forget that the editors of the book are university teachers, scholars with doctoral degrees and extensive knowledge of the latest trends in sla, which is an exception rather than the norm in the majority of contexts. most teachers, especially those at lower educational levels, are expected to tackle so many challenges that they are unlikely to engage in extensive research, and even if they do so in order to gain an academic degree, they may be reluctant to adopt cdst, the tenets of which they might view as abstract and opaque. ushioda in her sobering commentary also mentions some other problems, such as the foci of cdst research, the need to integrate the teaching and research processes, as well as ethical concerns. yet another crucial difficulty that i would like to highlight here is related to time constraints. more specifically, collecting rich data in a longitudinal research study would inevitably take the precious time away from the act of teaching as such, which might be an unrealistic proposition in most contexts. with all of this in mind, while cdst has the potential of bringing us somewhat closer to making sla research more pertinent to classroom practice, it cannot be expected in and of itself to bridge the existing gap between teachers and researchers (larsen-freeman, 2015). much more is required of us as researchers or practitioner-researchers to achieve this goal. the comments offered above are by no means intended as criticisms of the book as such, which i believe is an invaluable contribution to the field, but, rather, represent my ruminations as a researcher and a teacher on the application of complexity theory and its value for practitioners. truth be told, i am convinced that the volume can indeed move cdst-based research forward and enhance the likelihood that this paradigm will inform everyday classroom pedagogy. i also think that in contrast to what richard j. sampson and richard s. pinner claim in the introduction, the volume is bound to appeal to a broad readership, ranging from researchers, to undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students, to classroom teachers. even if things might in fact be much more complex than the editors would have it, they surely should be commended for making yet another step towards making complexity more accessible to researchers and regular l2 teachers. reviewed by mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl 170 references hermans, h. j. m. (1996). voicing the self: from information processing to dialogic interchange. psychological bulletin, 119, 31-50. kruk, m. (2019). dynamicity of perceived willingness to communicate, motivation, boredom and anxiety in second life: the case of two advanced learners of english. computer assisted language learning. https://doi.org/10. 1080/09588221.2019.1677722 larsen-freeman, d. (2015). research into practice: grammar learning and teaching. language teaching, 48, 263-280. mystkowska-wiertelak, a., & pawlak, m. (2017). willingness to communicate in instructed second language acquisition: combining a macroand microperspective. multilingual matters. pawlak, m. (2012). the dynamic nature of motivation in language learning: a classroom perspective. studies in second language learning and teaching, 2, 249-278. https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2012.2.2.7 pawlak, m. (2020a). review of research methods for complexity theory in applied linguistics by ali phil hiver and ali h. al-hoorie. studies in second language learning and teaching, 10, 391-395. pawlak, m. (2020b). grammar learning strategies as a way of mastering second language grammar: a research agenda. language teaching, 53, 358-370. pawlak, m., kruk, m., & zawodniak, j. (2020). investigating individual trajectories in experiencing boredom in the language classroom: the case of 11 polish students of english. language teaching research. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1362168820914004 ushioda, e. (2009). a person-in-context relational view of emergent motivation, self and identity. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identify and the l2 self (pp. 215-228). multilingual matters. 59 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (1). 2022. 59-86 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.1.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt dynamic engagement in second language computer-mediated collaborative writing tasks: does communication mode matter? scott aubrey the chinese university of hong kong, china https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4365-0516 scaubrey@cuhk.edu.hk abstract this study takes a dynamic approach to investigating engagement, examining fluctuations in cognitive-affective variables at regular time intervals during online collaborative second language (l2) writing tasks. using online conference software and online editing software, 16 university students who use english as an l2, completed two collaborative problem-solution l2 writing tasks in two communication modes: video-chat and text-chat. after each task, learners viewed videos of their performances in 12 three-minute segments and were asked to rate their engagement on two scales (interest, focus). they were then interviewed about their attributions for fluctuations in their ratings. group-level analysis revealed that learners experienced significantly higher focus and interest during tasks performed in video-chat mode than text-chat mode. this was contrasted with an analysis from a dynamic perspective, which produced a more nuanced picture of individual engagement trajectories during the tasks. dynamic patterns of engagement fell into either moderately steady, increasing, decreasing, or rollercoaster pattern categories. a content analysis of 32 interviews revealed four factors that accounted for changes in engagement during tasks: task design (e.g., task familiarity), task process (e.g., instances of collaboration), task condition (e.g., communication mode), and learner factors (e.g., perceptions of proficiency). keywords: dynamic engagement; computer-mediated tasks; collaborative writing; affective engagement; cognitive engagement scott aubrey 60 1. introduction collaborative writing (cw) tasks engage two or more writers with the common goal of producing a single written text (storch, 2019). computer-mediated cw tasks utilize online platforms (e.g., google doc, wikis) that host a range of collaborative tools, potentially enhancing interaction, composition reflection, and learning in ways that are time/space independent (li, 2018). in an effort to understand how to optimize learner involvement, researchers have been encouraged to explore the implementation of more diverse communication modes during computer-mediated cw tasks (lee, 2010; yim & warschauer, 2017). so far, a handful of studies have compared the impact of oral (e.g., audio-chat) and written modes (e.g., text-chat) on the interaction/writing process (cho, 2017; kessler et al., 2020; liao, 2018). however, with mixed research findings, the relative benefit of these modes, in terms of learners’ interaction/observable task behavior, is unclear. an alternative approach to investigating this issue might be to examine learners’ cognitive-affective engagement. despite a surge in research into how task implementation and design can be manipulated to promote greater mental and emotional involvement (e.g., aubrey, 2017a, 2017b; aubrey et al., 2020; lambert et al., 2017; phung et al., 2020; qiu & lo, 2017), little is known about learners’ cognitive-affective responses to cw tasks, let alone how this aspect of engagement evolves over time. to fill this research gap, the present study explored differences in learners’ cognitive-affective engagement at regular intervals during computer-mediated cw tasks performed in video-chat (synchronous oral interaction via a live audio/video feed) and text-chat (synchronous written interaction via a chat function) mode. group-level analysis compared overall engagement between the conditions, which was then contrasted with an analysis from a dynamic, individual perspective. finally, the factors that accounted for learners’ engagement dynamics were also investigated. this study responds to calls for research to foreground the ways in which engagement is dynamic and emergent at different timescales (hiver et al., 2021). furthermore, the application of this approach to computer-mediated cw tasks is both novel and important as it may provide insights into how learners can be supported by technology at different stages during these tasks. 2. literature review 2.1. mode of communication in computer-mediated cw tasks computer-mediated cw studies have predominantly employed online platforms in which learners interact with each other to plan within the task, draft, dynamic engagement in second language computer-mediated collaborative writing tasks: does . . . 61 and revise the text cooperatively, using both asynchronous (e.g., the “comment” function) and synchronous written communication (e.g., the “chat” function) (for reviews of these studies, see aubrey & shintani, 2021; yim & warschauer, 2017). the almost exclusive focus on the written mode during these interactions has led to calls for investigations into more diverse channels of collaboration, specifically those involving “verbal interaction” (yim & warschauer, 2017, p. 158). relevant to the current study are two kinds of synchronous computer-mediated communication modes: text-chat and video-chat. several insights can first be gleaned from studies that have compared modes of communication during computer-mediated interactive tasks. early research in this area suggested that text-chat (i.e., synchronous written communication) affords several benefits over face-to-face (ftf) communication, which include a less stressful environment (chun, 1998), reduced anxiety, and greater quality of language production (warschauer, 1997). however, recent research has highlighted some of the more limiting aspects of text-chat, indicating that it can be time-consuming and impersonal (zeigler, 2016), and can make it difficult for learners to pay attention to language (loewen & wolff, 2016) because of the non-contingent nature of turn-taking (i.e., occurring in a delayed fashion) (lai et al., 2008). some studies have also addressed how text-chat affects the cw process in comparison to ftf and audio communication. cho (2017) compared interactions within a three-learner group while they collaboratively wrote a summary using google docs with text-chat followed by a summary using google docs with voice-chat (i.e., synchronous audio-only communication). she found that for the upper-intermediate/advanced english learner participants, the voice-chat condition facilitated collaboration better than text-chat because of its “interactive and instant nature” (p. 49). however, she also speculated that text-chat might benefit lower proficiency learners because of the slower pace of interaction and the visual aspect of text-chat output. more recently, pre-task planning studies, in which learners collaboratively plan for their compositions, have examined the relative effect of ftf and text-chat mode on learners’ collaborative behavior. liao (2018) examined the interactions of six university l2 chinese learners during pre-writing sessions. she found that learners generated more words, turns, ideas, and lexical discussions in the ftf mode, while text-chat mode resulted in more equal participation. additionally, because text-chat and composition writing both consist of textual output, learners could more easily retrieve planned ideas and language to use in their compositions. in this way, the visual access in text-chat facilitated information processing and retention, potentially easing attentional demands as learners wrote their compositions. in a conceptual replication of liao’s study, kessler et al. (2020) explored the collaborative pre-writing discussions of 10 l2 chinese learners. similar to liao, the study involved l2 chinese scott aubrey 62 learners who performed either ftf or text-chat discussions in dyads before completing an individual, timed l2 writing task. the study addressed the methodological flaws in liao’s study, namely, the lack of clear coding examples and reliability measures. kessler et al. (2020) also found that ftf planning resulted in more language production, while text-chat resulted in more equal interaction despite some learners finding it to be “much slower, awkward, and arduous” (p. 15). in sum, these studies indicate that oral and text-chat modes seem to prepare learners for writing in different ways, but such studies have been scarce, and findings have been mixed. unlike text-chat, video-chat (synchronous audio/video communication) involves actual multimodal communication as it represents both a non-verbal (visual) and verbal (audio) sensory input. this additional channel of communication could be argued to contribute to “social presence,” or a psychological feeling of nearness (yamada & akahori, 2009). social presence has three components: immediacy (i.e., the feeling of being physically close), intimacy (i.e., the feeling of being understood), and sociability (i.e., the feeling of connection) (shearer & park, 2019). these dimensions may be facilitated to different degrees via eye contact, smiling, laughing, or head nodding, which may serve to reduce the psychological distance between interlocutors (chamberlin quinlisk, 2008) and establish deeper emotional connections (develotte et al., 2010). however, according to the cognitive-affective theory of learning with media (moreno, 2005), multimodal channels, such as video-chat, carry a higher risk of creating excessive extraneous cognitive load for the learner, which can disrupt processing and induce anxiety. when multiple sources of input are received separately (i.e., spatially or temporally) in multimodal tasks, learners can waste attention integrating information from each stimulus, leading to what is called the split-attention effect (mayer & moreno, 1998). in l2 learning, the split-attention effect has been found to occur during audio-visual tasks where audio commentary and visual scenes are not directly related (guichon & mclornan, 2008), and in l2 reading tasks, where connected information is presented in different locations of a text (al-shehri & gitsaki, 2010). drawing on these ideas, we might expect video-chat and text-chat to strain learners’ attention in different ways. video-chat requires learners to simultaneously integrate information received from multiple stimuli, which may place an especially high burden on cognitive resources; on the other hand, the split-attention effect may occur during textchat if written messages overlap or are delayed (i.e., non-contingent turn-taking), which would require learners to expend extra attention to consolidate messages into meaningful discourse. dynamic engagement in second language computer-mediated collaborative writing tasks: does . . . 63 2.2. language learner engagement rooted in educational psychology, learner engagement refers to heightened attention, active participation, and meaningful involvement in a learning task (mercer & dörnyei, 2020). furthermore, engagement is seen as a prerequisite for learning and particularly sensitive to classroom interventions (zhou et al., 2021). although the exact nature of engagement is debated, there seems to be a consensus that it is a multifaceted construct comprising four components: behavioral engagement (e.g., time on task), affective engagement (e.g., enjoyment), cognitive engagement (e.g., mental effort) and social engagement (e.g., interaction) (philp & duchesne, 2016). studies on computer-mediated cw tasks have provided some insight into the observable aspects of behavioral and social engagement. research has shown that during computer-mediated cw, learners engage in collaborative behavior (elola & oskoz, 2010; lee, 2010), using their collective knowledge to resolve language, content, and organizational issues through interaction (hsu, 2019; li, 2013). this common line of inquiry reflects svalberg’s (2009) notion that engaged learners are those “who are actively constructing their knowledge not only by mental processes but also equally by being socially active and taking initiative” (p. 246). however, learners’ mental effort and emotional responses to writing tasks (i.e., the cognitive-affective dimension) are important invisible engagement factors (hiver et al., 2021) that are often overlooked (mystkowskawiertelak, 2020), particularly in the context of learners performing cw tasks. there is no consensus on what constitutes reliable indicators of affective engagement, though research has commonly used enthusiasm, interest, and enjoyment as positive markers (e.g., phung et al., 2020; skinner et al., 2009). of these, interest has been referred to as an outcome of engagement characterized by positive emotions related to an activity (fredricks et al., 2004; krapp, 2003). chen’s (2001) theory of interestingness suggests that momentary feelings of interest in a task derive from novelty, challenge, attention demand, exploration intention, and instant enjoyment. cognitive engagement, on the other hand, is associated with sustained attention and mental effort (fredricks et al., 2004), and is thus strongly associated with the notion of focus. having intense focus or concentration during an activity is a characteristic of flow (csikszentmihalyi, 1990), a state that has been described as the “ultimate in engagement” (philp & duchesne, 2016). though focus can relate to consciously attending to – or noticing – important linguistic features or patterns (schmidt, 1990), focus, as an indicator of task engagement, relates more to fluency and automaticity (egbert, 2003). interest and focus also have a close relationship. hidi (1990) argues that interest elicits spontaneous, automatic allocation of attention. similarly, csikszentmihalyi et scott aubrey 64 al. (2005) describes interest as being a by-product of focused involvement in an activity. according to aubrey’s (2017b) model of flow in the task-based language classroom, key characteristics of heightened engagement in a task are interest and focus, which are mediated by certain pre-conditions, such as an appropriate balance of proficiency and task difficulty level, personal relevance of the task topic, and an environment with few distractions. in the present research, interest and focus are measured as indicators of cognitive-affective engagement. an important characteristic of engagement is that it is dynamic (reschly & christenson, 2012). hiver et. al. (2021) argue that in future studies on engagement, “there will be clear value in . . . measures that allow the dynamics of engagement (e.g., how it is sustained and how it deteriorates) to be investigated” (p. 21). engagement dynamics can be investigated at larger timescales (e.g., between tasks) or smaller timescales (e.g., during tasks). aubrey et al.’s (2020) classroom-based study provides a rare example of the former. they required 37 japanese efl learners to provide engagement ratings (focus, desire to speak, anxiety, confidence), as well as written descriptions to account for their ratings, after their participation in weekly oral tasks over a 10-week period. findings revealed that engagement was highly variable throughout the period, with changes shaped by learner-level factors (e.g., cognitive/physical state), lessonlevel factors (e.g., understanding of the lesson before the task), task-level factors (e.g., task design), and post-task-level factors (e.g., satisfaction of performance). research on the dynamics of engagement at the within-task level has adopted a dynamic systems perspective in which data are collected at regular intervals over time and analyses are carried out on individual learners (larsenfreeman & cameron, 2008). these studies have primarily focused on the affective dimension of engagement. for example, using the idiodynamic method (macintyre, 2012) to measure moment-by-moment fluctuations in emotions, boudreau et al. (2018) had learners perform a speaking task before asking them to view their performances and rate their enjoyment and anxiety (i.e., markers of affective engagement) on a per-second timescale. they found that enjoyment and anxiety were highly dynamic, with patterns of correlation ranging from negative to positive, suggesting that elevated enjoyment occurred during varying levels of anxiety. in a recent classroom-based study, dao and sato (2021) measured dynamic affective engagement, operationalized as enjoyment and interest, via a questionnaire at three five-minute intervals during a 15-minute speaking task. they found these measures to increase significantly from the first to second interval, suggesting that, despite using less nuanced measurement methods, affective engagement is still susceptible to considerable change within a task. employing similar dynamic approaches, other studies have measured learner emotions during speaking tasks together with constructs such as task motivation and dynamic engagement in second language computer-mediated collaborative writing tasks: does . . . 65 willingness to communicate (e.g., guo et al., 2020; macintyre & gregersen, 2021; macintyre & serroul, 2015; pawlak et al., 2016), each providing support for the dynamism of engagement during short speaking tasks. however, this approach has not yet been applied to cw tasks. the current study thus builds on previous research to examine the trajectories of learners’ engagement (operationalized as focus and interest) during computer-mediated paired cw tasks in different modes. specifically, the following research questions will be addressed: 1. what are the differences in engagement during computer-mediated cw tasks when learners communicate synchronously in text-chat and videochat mode? 2. what factors do learners perceive to influence engagement during computer-mediated cw tasks when learners communicate synchronously in text-chat and video-chat mode? 3. what are common patterns of fluctuation in engagement during computer-mediated cw tasks when learners communicate synchronously in text-chat and video-chat mode? 3. method 3.1. participants participants included 16 learners of english (12 female, 4 male) who were attending a university in hong kong. due to the covid-19 pandemic, the university had conducted all courses online in the previous semester. thus, all participants had some recent experiences using online synchronous communication tools. based on information from a background questionnaire, all participants spoke cantonese as their first language (l1) and had scored “4” on the english language subject level of their hong kong diploma of secondary school exam (hkdse), which is benchmarked to the ielts score range of 6.31-6.51 (hong kong examinations and assessment authority [hkeaa], 2015) and equivalent to the common european framework of reference (cefr) b2/c1 level. participants were born and raised in hong kong and reported having no experience living in an overseas english-speaking country. although there are opportunities to use english on campus, all participants used cantonese almost exclusively on a daily basis and english sometimes in the classroom. eight participants were initially recruited by the researcher. to ensure a high degree of familiarity between interlocutors, the recruited participants were asked to find a task partner who they knew personally and who met the hkdse “4” requirement. informed consent was obtained from all participants before data collection began. participants scott aubrey 66 were aged between 19 and 22 and had a variety of university majors. a summary of participant information is provided in table 1. table 1 summary of participant information pair participant gender major age pair 1 p1 male chinese language 19 p2 female chinese language 19 pair 2 p3 male mathematics 20 p4 female mathematics 20 pair 3 p5 male philosophy 22 p6 female philosophy 22 pair 4 p7 male anthropology 19 p8 female anthropology 20 pair 5 p9 female chinese language 19 p10 female chinese language 19 pair 6 p11 female mathematics 20 p12 female mathematics 19 pair 7 p13 female psychology 21 p14 female nutritional sciences 21 pair 8 p15 female nutritional sciences 19 p16 female nutritional sciences 19 3.2. tasks participants completed two computer-mediated, problem-solution cw tasks in pairs. each task had a time limit of 36 minutes, which was decided based on piloting the two tasks before the study. task 1 presented the participants with a problem related to secondary school education (see appendix a), while task 2 presented participants with a problem related to university education (see appendix b). the instructions required learners to read the problem prompt, discuss possible solutions, agree on the most effective solution, and then jointly write a paragraph that summarizes the problem, their solution, and reasons. the problemsolution task was chosen because previous research suggests it is of high conceptual difficulty, which may compel learners to interact (németh & kormos, 2001). 3.3. procedures each pair completed task 1 followed by task 2 in separate sessions, with a oneweek break between sessions. to control for the effect of task topic, communication mode (video-chat, text-chat) was counterbalanced between the tasks by randomly dividing pairs into two groups (see figure 1). dynamic engagement in second language computer-mediated collaborative writing tasks: does . . . 67 n = 8 n = 8 session 1 task 1 task 1 video-chat mode text-chat mode ↓ ↓ session 2 task 2 task 2 text-chat mode video-chat mode figure 1 counterbalancing the tasks the tasks were performed online using zoom (online video/audio conferencing software) and google docs (online editing software). for each task, the researcher and each participant in the pair logged into the same zoom meeting and shared the same google document from separate locations, which ensured any interaction was done online. before the first task, the researcher conducted a training activity which involved demonstrating the simultaneous editing features of google docs as well as use of the chat function. the researcher then confirmed that all participants had some previous experience with the online tools. next, participants wrote a short introduction of themselves to demonstrate their understanding of the software. immediately prior to each task, the researcher stated the instructions, answered any questions, and explained the notion of cw to encourage interaction throughout the task. in video-chat mode, participants enabled their zoom video and audio so that they could see and speak to each other while completing their joint composition (see figure 2). figure 2 screenshot of task 1 writing (video-chat mode) in the text-chat condition, participants disabled their video and audio so they would only interact using the text-chat function in google docs (see figure scott aubrey 68 3). after 36 minutes, the researcher signaled the end of the task. all task performances were audio and video (screen) recorded. figure 3 screenshot of task 2 writing (text-chat mode) within 24 hours of completing of each task, learners participated in a rating and stimulated-recall interview session. each rating/interview session was done individually and took approximately 60 minutes. the procedure involved learners viewing a video of their performance in 12 three-minute segments. after each segment, the video was paused, and learners were asked to rate their focus and interest on a scale from -5 (very low) to +5 (very high). the rating procedure included a brief explanation of each variable, examples, and asking the questions: how focused were you during these three minutes? how interested were you in doing the task during this time? after the rating procedure, a line graph showing changes of each self-rated dimension was created in microsoft excel and shown to the participant. the researcher and the participant then looked at the graph together and discussed the trends for each variable across the task period. examples of questions that were asked by the researcher include: why did you rate focus/interest low at this stage of the task? can you explain why your ratings remained stable but then increased over this time interval? why did your ratings for focus/interest in the final minutes of the task suddenly decrease? the rating/interview procedure was an adapted version of the idiodynamic method, which was originally created to understand short-term fluctuations in cognitive-affective responses to oral tasks (macintyre, 2012). while previous studies using this method had learners rate each variable on a per-second timescale with the aid of computer software, the current study adopted a three-minute timescale due to the longer duration of writing tasks. 3.4. data analysis the data for the study consisted of 32 engagement ratings (focus, interest) and 32 transcribed interviews. rating data were entered into spss version 26. averaged dynamic engagement in second language computer-mediated collaborative writing tasks: does . . . 69 ratings for focus and interest across the 12 intervals were calculated and checked for normality. as data were not normally distributed, wilcoxon signed rank tests were performed on mean focus and interest scores to determine if there were significant differences in engagement between the video-chat and text-chat conditions. effect sizes (r) for differences in focus and interest were estimated by dividing the z value by the square root of the sample size. a content analysis of interview transcripts was then conducted to determine the reasons for trends in engagement during the tasks. this involved an initial review of the data, coding of data and categorization of codes into themes (cohen et al., 2007). in total, 357 separate reasons were identified and coded for positive and negative influences on engagement. due to the intertwined nature of interest and focus (hidi, 1990), participants were often unable to distinguish between their reasons for the two measures (e.g., p9: “interest and focus are different but kind of the same . . . i can talk about them together”). thus, comments related to interest and focus were aggregated into one engagement category. the researcher and a research assistant used a coding scheme to independently code 20% of the data and obtained a simple intercoder agreement of 91%. coding that resulted in disagreement was subject to further discussion until full agreement was reached. as seen in table 2, the analysis resulted in four categories: learner factors, task design factors, task process factors, and task condition factors. table 2 categories of comments on engagement at points of change categories examples learner factors perceptions of proficiency my english is not very good, so i have some . . . umsomething struggle to focus attitudes towards english i like english, so i started with high interest cognitive/affective state ii’ve just wake up (laugh) and a little bit sleepy task design factors task familiarity but thethe format is uhlike to the secondary school practice. i mean the exercise this time. topic interest the topic is about teenagers, which is close to methe topic, so i’m have a high interest in discussing this topic topic familiarity because i’m not familiar with the topic task process factors task understanding so i’m uhi’m figuring out what we are doing at this moment idea conceptualization i’m running out of ideas, so my focus dropped. collaboration we have some interaction with each other, so it makes me more interested focus on accuracy i spent a lot of time to think about grammar scott aubrey 70 focus on fluency i started to only write simple words, so my speed is faster transition between stages i change to start to the proofread end uhpart, so i lose my focus in this part. little relaxing here task condition factors environment and do not have anything to disturb me in the room and i just focus communication mode [my partner] also typed the same ideas on the chat box at the same time. it means we have mixed up some ideas and then waste time time constraints i’m in hurry at that time because it’s almost finished finally, to identify the patterns of fluctuations of focus and interest throughout the tasks, trajectories of each variable were plotted in line graphs showing changes across the 12 three-minute segments of the task. following macintyre and serroul (2015), “dips” and “spikes” were identified in learners’ ratings for each task performance. a “dip” was defined as a decline of three or more rating points during the task and a “spike” by an increase in three or more points during the task. participants’ engagement patterns fell into four categories: a moderately steady pattern (no dips or spikes), an increasing pattern (only spikes present), a decreasing pattern (only dips present), or a rollercoaster pattern (both dips and spikes present). though not the focus of this research, it was considered worthwhile to establish the relationship between focus and interest before presenting the results. to do this, pearson correlations were calculated between interest and focus scores for the 12 three-minute intervals. with the alpha set at .05, results indicated significant correlations for 10 out of 12 intervals in video-chat (.51 < r < .79) and 9 out of 12 intervals in text-chat (.51 < r < .79). non-significant relationships occurred during the 24-36-minute period for both video-chat (.33 < r < .47) and text-chat (.31 < r < .43), suggesting a close relationship between focus and interest (csikszentmihalyi et al., 2005; hidi, 1990), which weakened slightly towards the end of the task period. 4. results table 3 provides a summary of the descriptive statistics for focus and interest ratings averaged across the 16 participants. this is represented visually in figure 4. wilcoxon signed rank tests revealed that there were significantly higher focus scores reported in the video-chat condition, with a large effect size (z = 2.87, nvideo-chat = 16, ntext-chat = 16, p < .01; r = 0.72), and significantly higher interest scores in the video-chat condition, with a large effect size (z = 2.30, nvideo-chat = 16, ntext-chat = 16, p = .02; r = 0.58). the only time interval both focus and interest were not rated higher for the video-chat condition was for the last three minutes dynamic engagement in second language computer-mediated collaborative writing tasks: does . . . 71 of video-chat tasks where learners in the text-chat condition seemed to experience an increase in both measures. table 3 descriptive statistics for engagement fluctuations during the 36-minute writing tasks focus (n = 16) interest (n = 16) minute video-chat m (sd) text-chat m (sd) video-chat m (sd) text -chat m (sd) 0-3 3.19 (1.38) 1.94 (1.98) 2.63 (1.50) 2.00 (1.55) 3-6 3.38 (1.09) 2.19 (1.64) 2.81 (1.33) 1.43 (1.55) 6-9 3.31 (0.87) 2.25 (1.18) 2.69 (1.40) 1.56 (1.41) 9-12 3.31 (0.87) 2.44 (1.32) 2.31 (1.49) 1.68 (1.13) 12-15 3.44 (0.63) 2.44 (1.21) 2.44 (1.32) 1.93 (1.18) 15-18 3.06 (1.00) 2.25 (1.69) 2.19 (1.64) 1.81 (1.11) 18-21 3.13 (1.09) 2.31 (1.85) 2.00 (1.86) 1.75 (1.18) 21-24 3.25 (1.00) 2.44 (1.71) 1.94 (1.48) 1.69 (1.08) 24-27 3.13 (1.09) 2.19 (1.33) 1.75 (1.39) 1.56 (1.21) 27-30 3.25 (0.93) 1.94 (1.44) 1.88 (1.45) 1.44 (1.21) 30-33 2.88 (1.75) 2.38 (1.26) 1.69 (1.35) 1.50 (1.15) 33-36 2.31 (2.15) 2.63 (1.54) 1.63 (1.31) 1.88 (0.96) total mean 3.14 (1.22) 2.28 (1.53) 2.16 (1.47) 1.69 (1.24) figure 4 focus and interest ratings during video-chat and text-chat modes 1 1,5 2 2,5 3 3,5 0-3 3-6 6-9 9-12 12-15 15-18 18-21 21-24 24-27 27-30 30-33 33-36 ra tin g time (minutes) focus (video-chat) focus (text-chat) interest (video-chat) interest (text-chat) scott aubrey 72 table 4 factors influencing learners’ engagement during video-chat and textchat tasks video-chat mode text-chat mode positive negative positive negative learner factors perceptions of proficiency 0 9 0 3 attitudes towards english 1 0 0 2 cognitive/affective state 2 6 3 6 3.0% 3 18.8% 15 3.0% 3 14.1% 11 task design factors task familiarity 4 1 2 0 topic interest 8 5 4 6 topic familiarity 6 6 9 3 18.2% 18 15.0% 12 15.0% 15 11.5% 9 task process factors task understanding 4 3 6 4 idea conceptualization 12 8 7 3 collaboration 18 8 8 7 focus on accuracy 0 7 3 4 focus on fluency 4 1 3 0 transition between stages 9 16 12 8 47.5% 47 53.8% 43 39.0% 39 33.3% 26 task condition factors environment 2 1 1 2 communication mode 27 6 30 24 time constraints 2 5 12 6 31.3% 31 12.5% 10 43.0% 43 41.0% 32 total 100% 99 100% 80 100% 100 100% 78 table 4 shows the results of the content analysis on stimulated recall interviews, which indicate that engagement was influenced by learner factors, task design factors, task process factors, and task condition factors. for engagement during text-chat tasks, task condition factors and task process factors were the largest contributors. reasons for increasing or decreasing engagement related to communication mode were most frequent, with positive comments referring to a reduction in communication anxiety (e.g., p3: “chatting in the chat box is less stressful”), use of familiar abbreviations to communicate (e.g., p1: “we use texting… always use short versions of english, so it is quite easy for me”), and the permanent record of text-based interaction (e.g., p8: “i lost memory, so i double check by looking back at the chat box”). overall, however, the text-chat communication mode had a more negative impact on engagement than the video-chat communication mode. reasons for decreases in engagement dynamic engagement in second language computer-mediated collaborative writing tasks: does . . . 73 related to the perceived inefficiency of text-chat interaction (e.g., p10: “text is okay, but sometimes itwe will mix up with the ideas. uhthat means waste more time”), with several references to not noticing messages or feeling confusion due to overlapping, non-contingent messages (e.g., p6: “i am not finished point one, but he moves to point two. and then we miss two points together”). similar to text-chat, task condition factors and task process factors were the largest contributors to video-chat engagement. however, the video-chat communication mode seemed to facilitate greater collaboration and idea generation than text-chat (e.g., p2: “why my interest at the beginning is so high because i can discuss with [my partner] a lot so it is fun”), with several positive comments related to the immediacy of communication (e.g., p7: “it’s quicker for us to talk on uhin front of the camera, like it’s talking real life”) and the intimacy of communication due to the presence of visual cues (e.g., p11: “i can guess her emotion or her uhthrough her face”). a notable factor that suppressed engagement in video-chat was the transition between task stages, which, for some participants, occurred when learners reduced their speaking production to focus on writing (e.g., p13: “changing to writing now… it is difficult”). learner factors and task design factors were less influential. a lack of perceived english proficiency (e.g., p15: “it’s difficult because i’m not a good speaker”) accounted for some decline in video-chat engagement, while task interest and familiarity accounted for high initial engagement in the task (e.g., p10: “i start high interest because i know the topic”) for both modes. examining the dips and spikes in interest and focus throughout the task, individual participants displaying each of the four engagement patterns are shown in table 5. figure 5 visually shows examples of each pattern type. table 5 distribution of patterns of engagement across participants and communication condition pattern number of patterns participants (focus) participants (interest) video-chat text-chat video-chat text-chat moderately steady 35 (54.7%) p16, p12, p11, p10, p6, p4, p14, p13, p8, p7, p1 p16, p10, p9, p5, p6, p1 p16, p12, p11, p10, p8, p6, p5, p13, p7, p3 p16, p12, p9, p8, p5, p8, p4, p1 decreasing 15 (23.4%) p15, p9, p3, p2 p15, p14, p12 p15, p14, p9, p4 p15, p14, p11, p10 increasing 7 (10.9%) p5 p13, p8, p7, p4, p2 p13 rollercoaster 7 (10.9%) p11, p3 p1, p2 p6, p3, p2 scott aubrey 74 figure 5 examples of the four patterns of engagement most engagement trajectories fell into the moderately steady pattern category. however, this pattern was seen more in video-chat performances (69% of focus patterns; 63% of interest patterns) than in text-chat tasks (38% of focus patterns; 50% of interest patterns). for example, p16 increased her focus slightly during the 0-9-minute stage of the video-chat task from 3 to 4, which she attributed to an initial period of understanding the task and generating ideas, then maintained a high focus score of 4 for the rest of task (“once you understand and dynamic engagement in second language computer-mediated collaborative writing tasks: does . . . 75 generate ideas, you became more focused and-and concentrated. it lasted me”) (see figure 5). within this pattern, high steady engagement was most common, which often increased (or started high) during the initial stages of the tasks. the second most populated category was a decreasing pattern of engagement, with approximately equal proportion of this pattern found in video-chat task performances (25% of focus patterns; 25% of interest patterns) and textchat performances (19% of focus patterns; 25% of interest patterns). trajectories were either a slow or sudden decline. p15 is an example of the latter (see figure 5). p15 starts the video-chat task with a focus score of 4, which decreases to 2 at the 30-minute mark, before dropping to -3 in the last 6 minutes of the task. in her case, the initial decline was related to a perceived lack of proficiency (“i can’t speak well . . . it’s always a problem for me”), followed by a steep decline related to finishing the task early (“i think i finished, and i drop uhlost focus and interest very significantly”). a high initial interest in the task, triggering focused attention, and a lack of perceived proficiency, causing decreases in engagement, were common reasons for this pattern category. thirdly, increasing patterns of engagement were mostly confined to textchat experiences (31% of focus patterns; 6% of interest patterns), with only one pattern found in video-chat task performances (6% of focus patterns; 0% of interest patterns). most increasing patterns were for focus, such as for p7, who maintained a score of between 1 and -1 during the 0-27-minute portion of the task, but then increased to 3 in the final 9 minutes (see figure 5). p7 attributed this increase to a lack of initial understanding (“i’m not sure how should i do it”), successful collaboration (“as i discussed with her and i . . . we’re starting to find out a plan”) and a rush to finish due to time constraints (“time is out soon so i concentrate”). overall, this pattern seemed to be associated with a feeling of urgency to finish, causing focus to increase, and use of language and ideas written in the text-chat box to assist with composition writing. finally, the rollercoaster pattern was found in more text-chat trajectories (13% of focus patterns; 17% of interest patterns) than video-chat trajectories (0% of focus patterns; 13% of interest patterns). most of the participants in this category experienced a declining pattern but then rapidly increased their engagement at a certain moment in the task. for example, p11 experienced a sudden change in trajectory at 27-30 minutes during the text-chat task (see figure 5). she attributed this dramatic change to discovering a valuable idea that was written by her partner in the text-chat (“because i suddenly think something i can add in my part, because i saw my . . . i saw that i miss my partner’s message in uhin the right corner, so i need to finish my new part”) and the transition to editing her partner’s paragraph in the final minutes (“i need to check my partner’s part, so i have uhmaximum focus uhreversed”). sudden interruptions in communication scott aubrey 76 due to overlapping messaging, or breakthroughs, caused by retrieval of language or ideas from chat records, were characteristics of the rollercoaster pattern. 5. discussion the first research question asked whether there were group-level differences in learner engagement when computer-mediated cw tasks were performed in text-chat and video-chat conditions. the results revealed that learners’ cognitive-affective engagement when aggregated over 12 three-minute segments, was significantly higher in the video-chat mode than the text-chat mode for both focus (p < .01; r = 0.72) and interest (p = .02; r = 0.58). the elevated level of focus for the video-chat task is consistent with research that suggests focused attention is optimized during l2 multimodal tasks when multimodal input is integrated (e.g., synchronous audio/video communication) (al-shehri & gitsaki, 2010; guichon & mclornan, 2008). furthermore, the combined higher focus/interest scores suggest that video-chat tasks may generate interest as a by-product of heightened focus as learners experience feelings of challenge, automaticity, and enjoyment (chen, 2001; csikszentmihalyi et al., 2005; egbert, 2003). regarding group-level changes in engagement, although a slight decreasing trend in the video-chat condition could be observed, variation in both task conditions was minimal (less than a 2-point variation on a 10-point scale, see figure 4). this is in line with guo et al.’s (2020) finding that learners’ effort and enjoyment fluctuate minimally during learning tasks when measurements are averaged across learners. such little variation may indicate that group-level analyses obscure the more extreme fluctuations at an individual level, which is of interest in complex dynamic systems research (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008) and discussed in relation to the third research question. the second research question asked what factors influenced changes in engagement in each task condition. learner factors, task design factors, task process factors, and task condition factors were identified as perceived influences. task condition factors, such as communication mode, and task process factors, such as collaboration and idea conceptualization, were most prominent in accounting for changes in engagement in both tasks. consistent with previous research, reasons for reduced engagement in the text-chat communication mode were related to the time-consuming nature of text-chat interaction (zeigler, 2016) and non-contingent turn-taking due to overlapping messages (lai et al., 2008; loewen & wolff, 2016). as messages were sometimes reported to be delayed and out of sequence in text-chat mode, there was likely a split-attention effect (mayer & moreno, 1998), whereby learners needed to expend additional attention “untangling” overlapping messages, leading to cognitive overload, dynamic engagement in second language computer-mediated collaborative writing tasks: does . . . 77 anxiety, and reduced task engagement. however, increases in engagement were frequently attributed to learners’ use of the chat record as an ideational and linguistic resource, which may have facilitated productivity during writing. the straightforward process of transforming chat resources into resources for composing has been documented in pre-task planning research (liao, 2018) and is uniquely beneficial to learners performing computer-mediated cw tasks. overall, learners were less divided in their perception of the video-chat communication mode, with results indicating that engagement derived from substantial collaboration and idea conceptualization. as previous cw studies have indicated enhanced collaboration in ftf mode compared with text-chat mode (kessler et al., 2020; liao, 2018), it is possible that video-chat closely approximates ftf interaction in terms of the overall collaborative experience. in support of this claim, reports from several learners indicate that video-chat seemed to facilitate “social presence” to a greater degree as linguistic (verbal) and extralinguistic (visual) information were used to establish feelings of immediacy, intimacy, and sociability (chamberlin quinlisk, 2008; yamada & akahori, 2009). for both modes, task design factors and learner factors seemed to mediate engagement to a moderate extent. consistent with task-based research (e.g., aubrey, 2017a, 2017b; dao & sato, 2021; qiu & lo, 2017), task interest and familiarity played a facilitating role in engagement. the third research question asked whether there were common patterns of fluctuation in engagement during the tasks. four distinct patterns emerged from the data, with just over half of the participants’ engagement exhibiting little variation (i.e., moderately steady). the remaining engagement trajectories exhibited considerable variation (i.e., increasing, decreasing and rollercoaster patterns), with some participants reporting extreme changes from very positive to very negative interest and focus (e.g., p11 reported a 6-point increase in a 9minute period, see figure 5). this is consistent with previous research that has found affective variables (e.g., anxiety, enjoyment: boudreau et al., 2018) and conative variables (e.g., willingness to communicate: macintrye & gregersen, 2021; macintyre & serroul, 2015) to be susceptible to considerable change within short speaking tasks. admittedly, compared to these studies, which provided ratings on a per-second basis, the larger 3-minute rating interval in this study may have masked micro-fluctuations within each segment; however, measurements were sufficiently nuanced to the extent that it was possible to identify patterns that were not seen when engagement was averaged across all learners (see figure 2). a notable observation was that more video-chat task performances exhibited high and moderately stable engagement trajectories, while text-chat performances had more variable and increasing trajectories (see table 5). this might suggest a trade-off effect in how the two modes impact engagement scott aubrey 78 during cw tasks. that is, video-chat mode may afford learners a better environment to collaboratively generate ideas, thereby sustaining focus and interest during planning; on the other hand, the text-chat mode, which requires learners to permanently record written ideas during interaction, can facilitate more focused production during composition writing. at the same time, however, there is evidence to suggest that engagement-inhibiting learner factors (e.g., perceived lack of proficiency) can override task condition influences, leading to declining engagement regardless of mode for some learners (see p14 and p15, table 5). taken together, these findings highlight the complex relationship between learner internal and learner external factors and their combined influence on engagement during computer-mediated cw tasks. 6. implications importantly, this research addresses the pedagogical issue of how teachers should implement computer-mediated cw tasks. video-chat tasks demand more attention and generate a higher level “social presence,” which may benefit advanced learners who are comfortable with the quicker pace of spoken collaboration and/or who are familiar with their interlocutor(s) and thus value intimacy in communication. the video-chat mode may also be suitable for learners who complete tasks that require ample idea conceptualization (e.g., problemsolution tasks). however, the slower pace of text-chat may benefit learners who are less fluent, and the permanent nature of the chat script may provide a scaffold through which learners can refer to planned ideas and language as they compose their writing. if teachers decide to combine communication modes during a single task, they might consider doing so in a principled manner and in line with engagement needs of the writing process. for example, teachers might begin with an initial stage using video-chat which focuses on task understanding and idea generation, followed by a text-chat stage in which learners encode their ideas in the written language via interaction before they begin writing their joint composition. such integration would take advantage of the relative benefits of each communication mode while gradually diverting learners’ attention from planning ideas and language to drafting and editing, thus optimizing learners’ cognitive-affective engagement throughout the task. 7. conclusions this study has compared a group-level analysis and a dynamic-level analysis of individual learners’ engagement when hong kong learners of english completed computer-mediated cw tasks in video-chat and text-chat mode. in terms of dynamic engagement in second language computer-mediated collaborative writing tasks: does . . . 79 methodology, this research represents the first foray into engagement dynamics during computer-mediated cw tasks, an approach that has been encouraged by scholars (e.g., hiver et al., 2021). in contrast to previous studies in computermediated cw tasks that have looked at observable engagement via peer interaction (e.g., hsu, 2019; li, 2013), this research has probed into the more invisible cognitive-affective factors using self-reported measures of focus and interest. it has revealed that learners were significantly more engaged in video-chat than text-chat tasks overall, which can be primarily attributed to the more immediate way in which learners can process multimodal information during interaction to collaborate and plan ideas for the task, requiring high levels of focused attention and generating elevated levels of interest. examining individual dynamic patterns of engagement, findings suggest that the text-chat mode produces more increasing patterns as learners initially struggle with the less efficient communication mode but then experience more focused writing in the latter stages of the task as they draw on pre-planned ideas in their chat records. in sum, this study contributes to our knowledge of the relative benefits of different computer-mediated modes of interaction during cw and provides further evidence that engagement is dynamic in various kinds of l2 tasks. the limitations of this study should be highlighted. first, as this research examined the cognitive-affective aspect of engagement, we did not investigate the behavioral dimension of engagement (e.g., collaborative discourse or writing behavior). although some studies have looked at cw behavior at different stages of longer multi-week writing projects (e.g., kessler & bikowski, 2010), it would be a novel approach to examine changes in observable written and/or interactional behavior on a shorter timescale (e.g., per-minute). combining this with self-report ratings of engagement would shed light on the relationship between different dimensions of engagement (i.e., behavioral, cognitive, affective, social), which remains underexplored (philp & duchesne, 2016). similarly, writing outcomes (i.e., fluency, accuracy, complexity) were not analyzed. a processproduct approach (long, 2015), in which engagement (i.e., the process) is related to resultant writing quality (i.e., the product), may highlight which patterns of engagement are desirable for facilitating optimal writing outcomes. finally, regarding engagement ratings, having learners rate their focus and interest at three-minute intervals was deemed suitable considering the longer duration of cw writing tasks (as opposed to shorter speaking tasks). however, future research may consider employing ratings at smaller timescales (e.g., per-second) using idiodynamic computer software (e.g., boudreau et al., 2018; macintyre, 2012), which may capture important momentary changes. scott 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(2021). measuring l2 engagement: a review of issues and applications. in p. hiver, a. h. al-hoorie, & s. mercer (eds.), student engagement in the language classroom (pp. 75-98). multilingual matters. dynamic engagement in second language computer-mediated collaborative writing tasks: does . . . 85 appendix a task prompt 1 scott aubrey 86 appendix b task prompt 2 303 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (2). 2022. 303-335 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.2.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt investigating individual differences with qualitative research methods: results of a meta-analysis of leading applied linguistics journals ágnes albert eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8339-7119 albert.agnes@btk.elte.hu kata csizér eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1755-8142 wein.kata@btk.elte.hu abstract the aim of the present article is to provide a systematic review of qualitative studies in the leading journals of our field focusing on their distributional properties in the various journals as well as topic choice and selected quality control issues. in order to achieve this aim, we carried out a systematic review of research articles published in leading journals in our field, namely, applied linguistics, language learning, language teaching research, studies in second language acquisition and modern language journal between 2016 and 2020. our sample contains 93 articles in which researchers employed qualitative research methods or mixed methods including a qualitative component. our main results indicate that there is great variation among journals in terms of the number of qualitative studies. as for topic considerations, some traditional individual difference variables seem to have a dominant role, with cognitive processes involved in language acquisition gaining some ground as well. concerning quality control issues, there could be room for improvement with regard to reporting the quality control measures, including the tools employed in the studies. based on our results, we can conclude that a more systematic understanding of acceptable processes in ágnes albert, kata csizér 304 the field of applied linguistics could increase not only the number of qualitative articles published but also their topical importance. keywords: qualitative research; individual differences; quality control; metaanalysis; systematic review 1. introduction applied linguistics research has long been centered on individual differences (ids) among learners and why and how these differences influence the learning processes and outcomes. comparing the two editions of zoltán dörnyei’s comprehensive monograph on individual difference research (dörnyei, 2005; dörnyei & ryan, 2015), it becomes apparent that the qualitative approach, which “uses text as empirical material (instead of numbers), starts from the notion of the social construction of realities under study, and is interested in the perspectives of participants, in everyday practices and everyday knowledge referring to the issue under study” (flick, 2018, p. 2), is gaining ground in the investigation of these variables. this is because researchers are moving away from large-scale data collection to more situated and contextualized studies that are focusing on actual differences of learners instead of providing often vaguely generalizable results that might not be relevant in many contexts and learning environments. despite this seeming interest in qualitative methods, there are only few comprehensive reviews of qualitative studies (see chong & plonsky, 2021a, 2021b), while both content and quality-related meta-analyses of quantitative research appear more often in leading journals (e.g., plonsky & derrick, 2016). hence, the aim of this study is to provide a systematic review of qualitative studies in the leading journals of our field, that is, applied linguistics, language learning, language teaching research, studies in second language acquisition, and modern language journal. the importance of our research lies in its potential to inform future studies concerning possible quality control measures to be applied in qualitative investigations. in this article, we focus on multiple issues starting with the descriptive analysis of the distribution of the papers in these journals and the topics they cover. next, we analyze what type of data collection methods and techniques researchers used. finally, we touch upon quality control issues in connection with three of the data collection tools. 2. literature review 2.1. id variables and their investigation the investigation of ids is a diverse field including an ever-increasing number of variables that researchers think relevant for students and teachers in various investigating individual differences with qualitative research methods: results of a meta-analysis of . . . 305 contexts. some of the classic constructs include language learning aptitude that explains the rate of acquisition of language learners (carroll & sapon, 1959), language learning motivation that measures the amount of effort students are willing to invest in language learning (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011) or learners’ age and its influence on learning processes and outcomes (e.g., pfenninger & singleton, 2021). in addition, language learning styles and strategies have traditionally been seen important in the learning process, the former indicating the preferred cognitive styles used by students when processing information and completing tasks (reid, 1995), while the latter includes those conscious techniques that students might apply when learning or solving a task (o’malley & chamot, 1990). a further cognitive variable are language learning beliefs that concern those dispositions that students or teachers hold in connection with the target language, its learning, or themselves (dörnyei, 2005; mori, 1999). it has also been acknowledged that emotions play an important role in shaping learning. one influential emotion, anxiety, has widely been researched (horwitz et al., 1986), while the inclusion of further negative (e.g., shame, teimouri, 2017) and positive (e.g., enjoyment, dewaele & macintytre, 2016) emotions is a more recent advancement in our field. it has also been acknowledged that successful language learning is not possible without students taking responsibility for their own learning and regulating this process (kormos & csizér, 2014), which needs to be coupled with their willingness to communicate (macintyre et al., 1998). in terms of the most recent addition to the list of id variables, they include experience-related notions, such as the flow experience, that is, immersing oneself into the learning and forgetting about the passing of time (csíkszentmihályi et al., 2005), or engagement, which is a complex construct, including a range of psychological events, a certain quality of interaction, and positive emotions (shernoff, 2013). although id variables are mostly investigated individually, ryan’s (2019) recent call for the need to investigate such factors in concert in order to understand their interplay and the way they shape one another in complex ways should definitely be considered. it is an undeniable fact that the investigation of id variables has traditionally employed quantitative questionnaire studies that provide cross-sectional analyses of individuals, whose answers could be generalized to a wider population. while questionnaires are versatile and economical instruments to collect data, there are a number of possible critical considerations that show the limitations of such studies, which led to the use of qualitative investigations within the field of id research (dörnyei & ryan, 2015). however, given the diversity of these variables and the fact that researchers usually tend to concentrate on a limited number of them, research strategies might differ for different id variables. examples of addressing such limitations come from subfields in which qualitative ágnes albert, kata csizér 306 techniques have been employed to counter-balance certain shortcomings within the field. for instance, in the l2 motivation field, ushioda (2001) started to employ qualitative methods to map the longitudinal changes in l2 motivation and its relation to language learning autonomy. the number of qualitative studies has steadily increased in this field, which has resulted in a more balanced approach to l2 motivational issues (dörnyei & ryan, 2015). a similar tendency can be observed in the investigation of language learning strategies, as woodrow (2005) called our attention to the fact that in order to investigate learning strategies in a situated manner, more qualitative studies are needed. in fact, the special issue of system published in 2014 already contains quite a few qualitative studies. another such example is provided by mapping learners’ willingness to communicate (wtc). first, quantitative studies were used to operationalize and investigate this concept, but these later gave way to innovative qualitative studies in order to research the personal differences in wtc and its subtle temporal changes (macintyre et al., 2011; macintyre & legatto, 2011). another important issue that needs to be considered when looking at the methodological issues pertaining to the investigation of id variables is the extent to which a given variable is integrated into the field. the problem is the fact that although second language acquisition theories have long included a number of cognitive variables, such as attention, noticing or awareness, in explaining learning processes, the empirical investigation of such variables as id concepts has not drawn much attention (robinson, 1995, 2012; schmidt, 1990, 2010). the process-like characteristics of these variables would call for longitudinal and exploratory qualitative studies, which are not unheard of in our field but their meaningful combination is still a task ahead of us. another issue that needs to be mentioned here is the investigation of emotions. despite the fact that anxiety and its role in different aspects of learning has been researched in much detail (horwitz et al. 1986; macintyre & gardner, 1994), the efforts to include additional negative and positive emotions are recent. csizér, albert and piniel (2021; see also albert & piniel, 2021; albert et al., in press) investigated the role of various negative and positive emotions such as, for example, pride, hope, curiosity, shame, boredom, and apathy. one of their most important results concerns the fact that the supreme role of anxiety cannot be proved in all contexts, and other negative emotions play equally strong roles. in addition, in comparative studies of positive and negative emotions, the role of the former seems to be more defining. the next issue pertaining to id research that should be considered are the traitand state-characteristics of id factors. in the traditional operationalization of id variables, there seems to be agreement that these are trait-like characteristics which are individually consistent over time (dörnyei, 2005). however, drawing investigating individual differences with qualitative research methods: results of a meta-analysis of . . . 307 on long (2014), for example, one cannot neglect the fact that many id variables behave in a state-like manner and are susceptible to change due to contextual influences. in one of our recent theoretical overview papers (csizér & albert, 2021), it was shown that there are still only few investigations that focus on state-like characteristics of id variables. as we argued, this could be best achieved in complex qualitative and mixed methods studies, by including multiple sources of data within the same project. despite the fact the aim of any large-scale investigation is to obtain results that would be generalizable to the population from which participants were selected, lowie and verspoor (2019) convincingly show us that students scoring similarly on id scales can still be strikingly different when the actual learning processes are also considered. in this sense, naming the field individual differences is really a misnomer as researchers up until very recently were more interested in the ways learners are similar to one another (dörnyei, 2005; dörnyei & ryan, 2015). therefore, when investigating id variables, specific learning processes should also be included in empirical research, and qualitative designs lend themselves well to this purpose. these considerations all point to the conclusion that qualitative investigations should be fully integrated into the investigation of id variables, but this cannot be done without considering what quality control issues should be taken into consideration. as multiple issues should be tackled when designing and executing such studies, the next section provides an overview of quality control in qualitative studies. 2.2. quality control in qualitative research assuring that the quality of qualitative research meets given standards so that the findings of the study can be trusted is an important issue, discussed in most textbooks dealing with research methods (see e.g. creswell, 2002, 2018; delamont, 2012; dörnyei, 2007; fraenkel et al., 2012; heigham & croker, 2009; patton, 2015; tracy, 2019). nevertheless, establishing precisely what the basic ideals are that good qualitative research should adhere to and how those can be met in terms of specific actions are much less clear. the conceptual framework and the means to ensure good quality research seem to be more straightforward in quantitative studies: the overarching terms of validity and reliability and their related concepts and subcategories comprise the theoretical framework while different sampling and statistical procedures provide the means for implementing those ideals (dörnyei, 2007). although, according to mirhosseini (2020), students or beginner qualitative researchers who were mainly trained in the positivist tradition might believe that the ideals of objectivity, reliability and generalizability can be extended to and applied in qualitative research, he claims that this approach goes against the very nature of qualitative enquiry as “qualitative research is not ágnes albert, kata csizér 308 unbiased, replicable, and generalizable” (p. 178). hence, in what follows, we provide a succinct overview of the most important, overall quality control issues, but, as in this study we mainly concentrate on the most often used data collection tools, the section ends with a discussion of tool-related quality insurance. the initial approach to quality control in qualitative studies involves researchers trying to adhere to essentially quantitative principles of quality. this approach is apparent in guba’s (1981) famous work, in which he reinterpreted and relabeled several cornerstones of positivist ideals of good quality science. in order to ensure the trustworthiness of qualitative research, he came up with analogs to scientific understandings of conventional notions of internal validity (labelled credibility), external validity (called transferability), reliability (named dependability), and objectivity (termed neutrality). credibility pertaining to the truth value of research means that respondents’ perceptions are faithfully represented in the research, while transferability, reflecting the applicability of qualitative research, calls for detailed description of the research context based on which the reader can judge possible similarities to their own. dependability addresses the problem of consistency by calling for the trackability of any changes that occurred in the course of the research, and, finally, since true objectivity seems to be impossible even in physics (the dual nature of light is one example), the aspect of neutrality is ensured by confirmability of the data produced. what seems to be the recent trend is that authors working within the qualitative paradigm attempt to break with those ideals of good research that are rooted in positivism and create their own criteria organically from the philosophical underpinnings of the qualitative research paradigm (cf. creswell, 2018; mirhosseini, 2020; rallis & rossman, 2009; tracy, 2019). however, the existence of the many different qualitative research traditions such as phenomenology, narrative enquiry, ethnography or conversation analysis, to mention just a few, makes the creation of a unified framework similar to what exists in the positivist research tradition nearly impossible. as lazaraton (2003) points it out “the nature of the research cannot be separated from the methods used to carry it out, which are implicated in the criteria used to judge it” (p. 9). one solution under these circumstances could be creating specific quality criteria unique to each research tradition. another could be opting for the other extreme, creating very broad criteria that could synthesize different practices across theoretical traditions and paradigms. this latter approach is represented by tracy’s (2010, 2019) eight big tent framework for high quality qualitative research. the eight big tent framework (tracy, 2010, 2019) includes broad criteria, such as worthy topic, referring to the significance to the subject investigated, and significant contribution, addressing similar issues in connection with the research itself. rich rigor emphasizes the care and effort taken to carry out the study investigating individual differences with qualitative research methods: results of a meta-analysis of . . . 309 in an appropriate manner based on the theoretical constructs throughout the whole data collection and analysis process, while sincerity highlights the transparency of these issues and self-reflexivity about any values and biases. similarly to the meaning proposed by guba (1981), credibility aims to ensure that the reality represented in the research is plausible or appears to be true, whereas resonance refers to the effect that a study or its written account has on the audience. one of the final two tents house ethical issues, which, despite the fact that they are missing from guba’s (1981) original framework, feature increasingly prominently in more recent quality guidelines (howitt, 2016; mirhosseini, 2020; rallis & rossman, 2009). the other calls for meaningful coherence, which is a rather broad concept, and it reflects on the whole research process stating that qualitative studies should: “(a) achieve their stated purpose; (b) accomplish what they espouse to be about; (c) use methods and representation practices that partner well with espoused theories and paradigms; and (d) attentively interconnect literature reviewed with research foci, methods, and findings” (tracy, 2010, p. 848). although the labels used for describing good quality research in qualitative studies clearly proliferate, there seems to be more common ground and agreement with regard to the steps or procedures that can be used to ensure that these ideals are met. triangulation, thick description, member checks, peer debriefing, inter-coder reliability, audit trail, and ethical issues feature very frequently in the majority of works discussing quality control issues in qualitative research (see e.g., creswell, 2018; dörnyei, 2007; guba, 1981; mirhosseini, 2020; patton, 2015; rallies & rossman, 2009; tracy, 2019). therefore, we would like to briefly explain what each of these concepts covers. triangulation is a concept that originates from navigational and land surveying techniques; it can be used to “determine a single point in space with the convergence of measurements taken from two other distinct points” (rothbauer, 2008, p. 892). it is frequently used in social sciences, and usually four different types of triangulation are differentiated: triangulation of the methods of data collection, triangulation of data sources, investigator triangulation, and theory triangulation (denzin, 1989). although the original purpose of triangulation was the verification of the research findings by relying on data originating from different sources, it is now increasingly understood as a strategy that allows researchers to strengthen their findings and enrich their interpretations via the exploration of different perspectives, as the philosophical stance associated with qualitative research emphasizes uniqueness, which seems incompatible with the idea of establishing one objective truth. thick description is a procedure that can be used to provide rich detail about the different aspects of the research which is needed for more profound understanding of the context of the study and draws attention to the contextágnes albert, kata csizér 310 embedded nature of qualitative research. member checks, or member reflections, as tracy (2019) chooses to refer to this procedure, are needed to ensure that the participants’ viewpoints are represented in the study, which can be achieved by sharing the research data with the participants and asking their feedback on it. both peer debriefing and inter-coder reliability mean involving fellow researchers in the research process either for the purpose of receiving overall feedback or for specifically ensuring the reliability of the coding process. establishing an audit trail requires that different steps of the research process can be traced back later on, as these were documented throughout the study. finally, careful consideration of ethical issues is expected to be present throughout the research process, and references to all of these need to appear to some extent in the write-up. at an even more specific level, carrying out empirical research is not possible without data; therefore, regardless of the fact whether the study is quantitative or qualitative, data need to be collected. in some cases, researchers work with naturalistic data, some sort of artefacts that exist independently of researchers’ endeavors; thus, they only need to be located and not created for the purpose of the research. such data in our field is usually understood as some kind of text: books, diaries, blogs, lesson plans and so on. in the majority of cases, however, data are collected specifically for the purpose of the study; in these cases data collection tools are employed, which can be interviews, tasks, and tests, to name just a few. observations occupy a middle ground here since the event observed might be external to the research (e.g., english lessons in a high school); nevertheless, the presence of a researcher or even just a recording device might alter the phenomenon under scrutiny. although there are some data collection tools that are more clearly linked with the qualitative research tradition and are referred to as qualitative data collection tools, such as observations or interviews (see e.g., dörnyei, 2007), the method of data analysis chosen is also determinant: for example, interviews can be analyzed quantitatively as well using content analysis (fraenkel, et al., 2012). quality control considerations, which are present from the moment researchers start to plan their investigation to the point of write-up, are also relevant with regard to the use and the reported use ‒ these are clearly different issues ‒ of data collection tools. although papers devoted to broader conceptual matters related to quality control considerations rarely address issues of this specificity, discussions aimed at the use of specific data collection tools might give us hints as to their proper application. likewise, papers sharing guidelines on writeup might offer certain recommendations as to what needs to be reported or supplied in the form of supplementary materials (see e.g., howitt, 2016). with regard to interviews (dörnyei, 2007; fraenkel, et al., 2012; howitt, 2016; patton, 2015; richards, 2009), it seems useful to indicate what type of interview investigating individual differences with qualitative research methods: results of a meta-analysis of . . . 311 was used. moreover, by sharing some details about the interview guide’s content, the reader can be presented with a more informed picture about the topics discussed: including the interview guide in the appendix or some supplementary material, if space permits, would be a preferable solution here. although interviews are expected to be recorded, information about this fact should also be given besides indicating the language of the interview, as the common assumption of conducting the interviews in the respondents’ l1 might not always be fulfilled (welch & piekkari, 2006). indicating the length of recordings or shedding light on the size of the resulting text corpus may give insights to the reader about the breadth and depth with which the topic might have been covered. finally, in cases where several interviews are conducted, piloting the instrument is also an expected quality control step, as this could provide information about potential problems with the instrument before its application. as regards observations (dörnyei, 2007; fraenkel, et al., 2012; patton, 2015), recording the phenomenon observed may or may not make sense depending on circumstances. moreover, the recording of events can render traditionally used data collection tools of observation like field notes, researcher diaries or observation grids unnecessary, as the event can be replayed countless times making finegrained analyses possible. of course, in the case of complex events involving many participants, like a language class, recording everything that happens in its entirety is close to impossible, so a combination of recordings and field notes might be a sensible choice. data collection tools used in observations range from unstructured field notes to structured observation grids. in the case of the latter, a description of the main points to be observed or providing access to the instrument itself besides details about piloting are expected as quality control steps. indicating the length of observation or the size of the resulting text corpus in some form is also helpful for the reader in judging the volume of the data. despite their growing popularity as data collection tools, tasks are less established instruments than interviews or observations, which is evident from that fact that while research methodology handbooks all contain chapters on interviews and observation, tasks are hardly ever mentioned although they probably fit the broad category of elicited learner language (mirhosseini, 2020). nevertheless, recording and piloting as well as providing a brief description of content or even sample tasks in the text or supplementary materials seem to be justifiable expectations in connection with them as well. 3. research questions since the number of qualitative research articles seems to be on the rise when it comes to investigating ids in language learning, providing a systematic review ágnes albert, kata csizér 312 of such articles that have appeared in leading journals of our field is timely. we have intentionally selected top-tier journals as they present the leading voices and often cited articles, thus creating and maintaining quality-control-related expectations. a systematic review allows offering insights into the distribution of qualitative and quantitative articles across the journals and the main topics investigated in them. it can also shed light on the most popular data collection instruments and those quality control steps that were applied in connection with them to ensure that they meet the high standards set by these journals. in order to achieve these aims, we formulated the following research questions: 1. what are the distributional characteristics of research studies on individual differences reported in top-tier journals of applied linguistics in recent years? (rq1) 2. what are the main topics of qualitative studies on individual differences reported in top-tier journals of applied linguistics in recent years? (rq2) 3. what data collection tools are employed in qualitative studies on individual differences reported in top-tier journals of applied linguistics in recent years? (rq3) 4. what is reported in terms of quality control in connection with three frequently used data collection tools (interviews, observations, and tasks) in qualitative studies on individual differences published in toptier journals of applied linguistics in recent years? (rq4) 4. research methods 4.1. criteria for inclusion: the journals as we had planned to investigate quality-control issues, we decided to focus on top-tier journals in our study to indetify selective and high-quality publishing policies. the selection of journals to be included in our analysis was based on the following process. first, the scientific journal ranking (sjr) of the journals in the category of “language and linguistics” was downloaded from the scimago institution’s homepage https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?category= 1203. subsequently, for the first 20 journals on the list, two further indices were looked up. the 2019 impact factor of the journals was copied from the 2020 edition of the journal citation reports® (jcr) published by clarivate analytics https://www.annualreviews.org/page/librarians/impact-factors and they were rank ordered based on this index as well. finally, the so-called snip (source normalized impact per publication) score of the journals was also established based on the cwts website https://www.journalindicators.com/indicators, and a third investigating individual differences with qualitative research methods: results of a meta-analysis of . . . 313 rank order was prepared for the journals based on this. the three rank orders were then added up, creating a final order for the journals (see table 1). before creating the final list of journals, those not dealing with topics related to second or foreign language learning or teaching were eliminated from the list, along with those journals where all three indices described above were not available. we then arrived at the following list of journals: 1. applied linguistics, 2. modern language journal, 3. studies in second language acquisition, 4. language teaching research, 5. language learning, 6. journal of second language writing, 7. language teaching, 8. language learning and technology, 9. computer assisted language learning, and 10. tesol quarterly. in our search, we decided to start looking for relevant articles in the first five journals, including the past 5 years, ranging from 2016-2020. table 1 the list of journals with the final rank order indicated by roman numbers title sjr (rank) snip source normalized impact per publication (rank) 2019 impact factor (rank) ranks added final rank order modern language journal 3.966 (1) 3.43 (2) 3.538 (7) 10 ii. journal of communication 3.259 (2) 2.88 (7) 4.842 (1) 10 studies in second language acquisition 3.238 (3) 2.76 (9) 2.838 (11) 23 iii. applied linguistics 3.148 (4) 4.36 (1) 4.286 (2) 7 i. journal of memory and language 3.093 (5) 2.19 (13) 3.893 (3) 21 language teaching research 2.596 (6) 3.11 (5) 2.647 (13) 24 iv. communication research 2.410 (7) 2.69 (10) 3.758 (5) 22 language learning 2.404 (8) 2.38 (11) 3.408 (8) 27 v. cognition 2.330 (9) 1.82 (17) 3.294 (9) 35 communication theory 2.185 (10) 2.91 (6) 1.905 (18) 34 journal of experimental psychology 2.158 (11) 1.52 (19) 2.832 (12) 42 language learning and technology 2.011 (12) 2.09 (15) 2.473 (15) 42 viii. annual review of applied linguistics 1.979 (13) 1.679 (19) 32+ communication monographs 1.979 (14) 3.12 (4) 3.843 (4) 22 journal of second language writing 1.963 (15) 3.31 (3) 3.077 (10) 28 vi. language teaching 1.867 (16) 2.80 (8) 3.714 (6) 30 vii. computer assisted language learning 1.848 (17) 2.31 (12) 2.642 (14) 43 ix. calico journal 1.827 (18) 1.72 (18) 36+ journal of literacy research 1.813 (19) 1.91 (16) 2.255 (16) 51 tesol quarterly 1.725 (20) 2.16 (14) 2.071 (17) 51 x. 4.2. criteria for inclusion: the articles in this phase of our study, we independently selected articles from the journals by first including those that investigated issues in individual differences research between the years 2016 and 2020. we decided to cover a five-year span in order to have a fairly large number but relatively recent studies to analyze. we approached individual difference variables in the broadest sense and defined them for the purpose of the selection as any variable aiming to measure differences ágnes albert, kata csizér 314 among learners that might impact learning processes or outcomes. once we agreed on the final number of articles (n = 371), the articles were categorized into five groups: quantitative, monoor multi-methods qualitative, mixed methods with qualitative parts and finally studies using other methods (e.g., metaor theoretical analysis). we included articles from special issues but excluded short communications. in the analysis, we worked with studies containing monoor multimethods qualitative methods and mixed methods with qualitative parts. thus, our final sample consisted of 93 research articles. 4.3. coding and analysis when coding the information in the selected articles, we employed a cyclical coding process. first, basic information about the selected articles was recorded, such as the author(s)’ name, the title of the article and the year of publication. with regard to the publication date, we used the volumes from the journals’ websites and checked volumes published between 2016 and 2020, disregarding information about online-first publications. in this round, we also recorded the main id topic of the articles along with the data collection instruments applied in them (rq1, rq2). this enabled us to further divide our 93 qualitative or partially qualitative articles into the following three categories: (1) monomethod qualitative studies, (2) multi-method qualitative studies, and (3) mixed methods studies containing a qualitative part rq 3. in the next round of coding, the data collection tools used in the selected qualitative articles were recorded. finally, we examined quality control steps in connection with two popular qualitative instruments, interviews and observations, and a fairly frequently used third instrument, language tasks (rq4). the coding in this case was based on the following five common categories: (1) mentioning audio or video recording, (2) reference to length or corpus size, (3) description about the content of the instrument used, (4) whether the instrument (or a sample of it) was provided either in the text or in the appendix, and (5) mention of any attempt at piloting, that is, trying out the instrument. in the case of observations, we also recorded whether a tool (e.g., field notes or an observation grid) was used for data collection as well; in this case, the description of content and piloting obviously referred to this instrument. in the case of interviews, we noted if the language of the interview was mentioned, while in the case of tasks we recorded whether the task was a receptive or productive one. for productive tasks we indicated the modality (oral or written) and took note of the task type as well. in order to enhance the quality of our study, both of us coded all the articles, results were compared and differences discussed and agreed upon (for the coding schemes applied in various phases of the research see appendix). investigating individual differences with qualitative research methods: results of a meta-analysis of . . . 315 5. results and discussion in this part of the article, we will present and discuss our research results according to our research questions. we start with the distributional characteristics of the articles in the sample. next, the topical and methodological analyses are presented. finally, we deal with the issues pertaining to quality control in the articles. 5.1. distributional characteristics of research studies on individual differences reported in top-tier journals of applied linguistics in recent years table 2 displays the distributional results across the five journals and information about the chosen research approach in the articles. the results show great variation among the journals and there is a clear rank order concerning the number of articles focusing on individual differences research with studies in second language acquisition having the top position, while applied linguistics containing the fewest articles on the topic. if we take a look at the research approach of the journals, it is clear that the majority of the id research studies employed quantitative research methods and only a small proportion of empirical investigations employed exclusively qualitative methods or mixed approaches with qualitative parts. there are only two journals, modern language journal and language teaching research, in which the proportions of quantitative and qualitative studies were comparable. these results are somewhat in contrast with the encouraging tendency to rely more and more often on qualitative studies in one particular id field, that is, l2 motivation (dörnyei & ryan, 2015). moreover, mixed methods studies clearly dominate our sample, as 47 out of the 93 articles, that is, over 50%, were mixed methods studies containing a quantitative component as well. the remaining 46 articles were equally divided between mono-method qualitative (23 articles) and multi-methods qualitative (23 articles) studies, suggesting that around 25% of all the studies included in our database relied on a single data source. table 2 information on the articles in the database (2016-2020) journal (n) id theme research approach quantitative1 mono method qualitative multi method qualitative mixed methods study other2 studies in second language acquisition (n = 171) 100 85 1 0 6 8 language learning (n = 195) 93 81 0 0 1 11 modern language journal (n = 183) 84 35 15 10 15 9 language teaching research (n = 148) 55 27 2 6 20 0 applied linguistics (n = 174) 46 26 5 7 5 3 note. 1 quantitative study using either one or multiple data collection instruments. 2 theoretical or meta-analytic studies ágnes albert, kata csizér 316 5.2. main topics in qualitative studies and mixed methods studies it is clear from table 3 that there are a number of topics that are probably more likely to be targeted from a qualitative perspective or by using at least partially qualitative methods. these topics are motivation, various cognitive processes influencing language acquisition, identity, language learning experiences, beliefs about language learning, and strategies. since motivation and strategies are constructs that have been extensively researched with the help of quantitative methods in the past, in their case the use of qualitative methods represents a novel approach with hopefully new insights. by contrast, identity, language learning experiences and beliefs are fairly complex issues whose investigation has involved qualitative methods for quite some time. the relatively large number of studies devoted to analyzing different cognitive processes, such as attention, noticing, explicit and implicit learning, and awareness, involved in language acquisition might represent the broadening of the research agenda through a closer examination of cognitive processes, where qualitative measures are typically used to explain findings derived from traditional, quantitative ones. as table 3 only contains the main topics identified, it is also important to point out that only a minority of the articles (n = 16) focused on more than one topic. some examples of studies addressing multiple ids include identities and experiences (anderson, 2019; brown, 2016), motivation, emotions and beliefs (e.g., csizér & kontra, 2020; poupore, 2018) as well as perceptions, beliefs and emotions (e.g., jung & révész, 2018; kormos & préfontaine, 2017). it seems that the common perception that qualitative studies target multiple ids within the same research design cannot be supported with these results. table 3 main topics identified in the articles between 2016 and 2020 main topics number of articles (%) motivation 24 (26) cognitive processes involved in language acquisition (attention, noticing, explicit and implicit learning, awareness, etc.) 21 (23) identity 12 (13) language learning experiences (e.g. study/work abroad, in the classroom) 11 (12) beliefs about language learning 9 (10) strategies 6 (6) willingness to communicate/communication style 3 (3) self-efficacy 2 (2) age 2 (2) group dynamics 1 (1) personality 1 (1) emotions 1 (1) total 93 (100%) investigating individual differences with qualitative research methods: results of a meta-analysis of . . . 317 5.3. data collection tools used in qualitative and mixed methods studies the 93 articles in our database used 223 data collection instruments in total (see table 4), which reflects a trend that the majority of the studies reported in the articles used more than one data collection tool. when we coded the different data collection tools used in qualitative and partially qualitative mixed methods studies, we took all data collection tools appearing in the articles into consideration. the reason for this decision is that sometimes it is quite hard to establish whether a certain data collection instrument was only employed to collect data for the qualitative part of the study or not, as is the case when biographical data are collected with the help of questionnaires and then are also used when interpreting data collected for the qualitative phase. this is the background against which our results should be interpreted. table 4 data collection tools found in the articles between 2016 and 2020 type of data collected no. of occurrences data collection tool no. of occurrences spoken or written language produced in response to some prompt or question 99 (44%) interview 55 (25%) focus group interview 9 (4%) stimulated recall 13 (6%) think aloud protocol 4 (2%) reflection 5 (2%) diary or journal 4 (2%) other type of spoken or written language produced in response to some prompt or question (e.g., narrative, verbal report, identity memo, etc.) 9 (4%) non-elicited, naturalistic spoken data 35 (16%) observation/recording 35 (16%) spoken or written quantifiable data 76 (34%) language tasks 20 (9%) language tests 12 (5%) questionnaires 33 (15%) other measurements, ratings, scores or logs 11 (5%) non-elicited, naturalistic written data (no data collection tool) 13 (6%) naturally occurring texts (e.g., emails, books, blogs, etc.) 5 (2%) teaching materials (e.g., lesson plans, syllabus, course book, etc.) 8 (3%) total 223 (100%) 223 (100%) in light of the above, the relatively high percentage of questionnaires (15%), language tests (5%) and measurement data (5%) is perhaps not surprising. as expected, the largest proportion of data collection tools comprised interviews (25%) which, together with other data collection tools aimed at eliciting spoken or written language in response to some question or prompt, made up almost half of all the data collection tools (44%) found in the articles. a relatively smaller proportion of data were collected with the help of observations, accounting for 16% of the instruments, while naturalistic written data were only collected in 6% of the studies in question. language tasks which often lead to ágnes albert, kata csizér 318 numerically quantifiable measures made up 9% of all the data collection instruments identified, which raises the question as to why this type of instrument is not discussed more prominently in publications concerned with conducting research in applied linguistics. 5.4. quality control measures reported in connection with interviews, observations and language tasks in terms of the six quality control measures we investigated in relation to the qualitative interview guides used in the studies (1 – recording, 2 – length, 3 – content, 4 – sample instrument, 5 – piloting, and 6 – language), we can report a mixed picture. as for the actual content of the interviews, we used three codes depending on the amount of information included in the article, appendix or as supplementary information. out of the 55 articles, 14 contained hardly any information on the content of the interview, while 10 included the instrument as an attachment (nine as appendix, one in the supplementary information package) or detailed information was given in the article. the majority of the remaining articles contained some information about questions or prompts used in the study; thus, the reader could form an impressionistic view of the data collected. concerning the piloting of the instrument, only four studies included some insight into this process either by stating that the instrument was tried out before use or by commenting on some elements of the pilot process. this piece of information is difficult to process because piloting instruments before use seems to be a generally advocated guideline (dörnyei, 2007; howitt, 2016; richards, 2009). another important issue is the language of the data collection. according to welch and piekkari (2006), this issue is rarely discussed explicitly in interview studies probably due to the fact that, based on common assumptions, interviews are conducted in the participants’ l1. in the articles analyzed, we found a roughly equal number of studies that reported information on the language used (n = 27) and those that did not (n = 28). when the information was not given, we very often had the impression that the language of the data collection was in fact the l1 of the participants, which was probably the intention of the researchers. however, for obvious reasons, we cannot be sure of this without the authors explicitly reporting this piece of information. in view of these considerations, when the focus of a piece of research is on some aspect of language learning, and participants are typically learners who can be considered bilingual to some extent, providing information about whether they were proficient enough in the language of the interview to be able to express their views clearly appears quite crucial. the last two categories coded concerned the length of the interview, which provides information about the volume of data collected, as well as whether the interviews were recorded. based investigating individual differences with qualitative research methods: results of a meta-analysis of . . . 319 on our analysis, 30 articles contained satisfactory information about the lengths of the interviews and thus gave the reader an understanding about the volume of data collected, while 25 articles reported no such information. as for data recording, we did not find the information in 11 articles. again, this does not mean that the data was not recorded but simply that it was not reported explicitly. data recording was a very popular option in the observation studied reviewed: 26 out of the 34 studies used either video or audio recording or a combination of the two. field or observation notes, however, appeared to be less popular as they were only used in 13 articles, while structured observation instruments were employed even less frequently. they were only mentioned in four articles along with research journals used in two studies. in seven out of the eight articles where no audio or video recording was used, the application of some form of note taking was mentioned, leaving one study where no data recording was reported whatsoever. quite understandably, providing information about the content of the data recording tool was only meaningful in the case of structured instruments; in three out of the four cases such information or the instrument itself was made available for the readers. piloting would have only made sense in connection with these four instruments; however, no reference to piloting could be found in any of the articles. the fact the three out of the four instruments were based on either colt (spada & frolich, 1995) or molt (guilloteaux & dörnyei, 2008) might be responsible for this finding, as the authors might have considered the piloting process unnecessary. the length of observation either per occasion or in total was recorded in 26 cases while no such information was provided in eight studies. as regards tasks, it was possible to establish for all 20 articles whether they used productive/output tasks (n = 15), receptive/input tasks (n = 3) or a combination of the two (n = 2). out of the 17 articles containing output tasks, three required written production, 13 oral production and one both. out of the 14 cases when oral production tasks were used, either the audio or video recording of the data was clearly indicated in 11 cases, it could be implied in two, and there was only one article where it was unclear whether oral performance was recorded or not. task descriptions were in some detail provided in 18 out of the 20 articles; in those two where such information was not given, the authors reported using a variety of different tasks. in eight cases out of the 18, sample tasks or task instructions were provided either in the article itself or in some form of supplementary material. reference to the piloting of the tasks, however, was only made in three cases. the length of individual tasks or of the whole corpus was provided in 11 cases. a label for the task type was provided in all 20 articles; nevertheless, the great variety of existing task types (cf. ellis, 2018) makes such labels moderately useful. the most popular task types were narratives used in five cases, opinion gap tasks used in three and description, argumentation, and information gap tasks, each used in two cases. ágnes albert, kata csizér 320 6. conclusion based on our systematic review of the 93 fully or partially qualitative research articles dealing with the topics of id factors appearing in top tier journals of applied linguistics in the past 5 years, the following answers can be provided to our research questions. as regards the distribution of articles across these journals, certain tendencies can be identified. as far as the investigation of id variables is concerned, studies in second language acquisition and language learning mostly tend to publish numerous, mainly quantitative articles on this topic, while in modern language journal and language teaching research we found a larger proportion of studies taking at least a partially qualitative approach in this respect. with regard to the most popular topics, a few, well-established id variables such as motivation, beliefs and strategies seem to be the dominant theme in many articles, with research on emerging topics such as identity and learning experiences also gaining ground. we also identified a diverse group of articles dealing with information processing involved in language acquisition. these studies mainly adopted mixed methods designs, which might indicate a shift of focus in the field of research on ids. the most frequently used data collection tools reported in the articles turned out to be interviews, followed by observations, questionnaires and various language tasks. as the large number of data collection tools indicate, monomethod studies were relatively rare among the articles reviewed while the heavy reliance on questionnaires can probably be ascribed to the overrepresentation of mixed methods studies in the corpus. quality control issues were investigated in connection with the data collection instruments, and we found that in certain cases important quality control steps were ether ignored or simply not reported. the most shocking finding in this regard was the low number of articles reporting previous piloting of their data collection tools. as for the overall quality control issues presented in the literature review, we think that it is not only the quality of data collection instruments that should be considered but also overarching issues such as triangulation, thick description, member checks, peer debriefing, inter-coder reliability, audit trail, and ethical issues. unfortunately, including all of these issues in this article would have been impossible. our systematic review has certain limitations primarily linked to the depth of analysis concerning quality control issues. since we firmly believe that quality control should be present from the start of the design until the point of writeup, we feel that there are a number of other relevant issues that should have been checked in the papers; however, space limitations prevented us from carrying out a more in-depth review in this respect. therefore, investigating a larger number of potential quality control issues in this corpus will be a task for future investigating individual differences with qualitative research methods: results of a meta-analysis of . . . 321 researchers. another limitation is that we selected top-tier journals in order to include the highest quality research in this study. we understand that our sampling presents an inflated view of the quality of the studies in the field, but this was done on purpose to see what the highest-level publications have to offer in terms of quality control. future studies, though, need to consider other journals, monographs as well as unpublished sources, such as phd dissertations. acknowledgments this study 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(2020). tracking the evolution of chinese learners’ multilingual motivation through a longitudinal q methodology. modern language journal, 104(4), 781-803. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12672 ágnes albert, kata csizér 334 appendix coding schemes used in the three rounds of analysis coding scheme used in first round of data analysis title of the article source author, journal, volume, issue topic main id topic as defined by authors research approach of the article quantitative mono-method qualitative multi-method qualitative mixed methods with qualitative part other coding scheme used in the second round of data analysis for the selected qualitative articles title of the article type of data collection tools applied interview focus group interview stimulated recall think aloud protocol reflection diary or journal narrative verbal report identity memo other type of spoken or written language produced in response to some prompt or question observation/recording language tasks language tests questionnaires ratings scores logs other measurements emails books blogs other naturally occurring texts lesson plans syllabi course books other types of teaching materials investigating individual differences with qualitative research methods: results of a meta-analysis of . . . 335 coding scheme used in the third round of data analysis for articles reporting the use of interviews, observations, or tasks title of the article quality control for interviews audio or video recording mentioned reference to length or corpus size description about the content interview guide or a sample of it provided in the appendix or in additional materials piloting mentioned language of interview mentioned quality control for observations audio or video recording mentioned reference to length or corpus size presence of an observation tool (field notes or observation grid) mentioned description about the content of the observation tool (if present) instrument or a sample of it provided in the appendix or in additional materials (if present) piloting mentioned quality control for tasks audio or video recording mentioned reference to length or corpus size description about the content task or a sample of it provided in the appendix or in additional materials piloting mentioned task type receptive or productive modality if productive task oral or written task type explicitly mentioned 745 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (4). 2022. 745-749 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.4.10 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt reviewers for volume 12/2022 the editors would like to express their gratitude to the following scholars who have kindly consented to review one or more submissions to volume 12/2022 of studies in second language learning and teaching. their insightful and thorough comments and suggestions have without doubt greatly enhanced the quality of the papers included in the 2022 volume: shima ahmadi-azad islamic azad university, bonab, iran ágnes albert eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary ali al-hoorie royal commission for jubail and yanbu, saudi arabia mutahar al-murtadha university of otago, dunedin, new zealand abdullah alamer king faisal university, saudi arabia assim s. alrajhi qassim university, buraydah, saudi arabia diana c. arroyo university of indiana, bloomington, usa zainab alsuhaibani al imam mohammad ibn saud islamic university, riyadh, saudi arabia scott aubrey the chinese university of hong kong, china barry bai the chinese university of hong kong, china florence baills pompeu fabra university, barcelona, spain dario luis banegas university of edinburgh, uk małgorzata baran-łucarz university of wrocław, poland taylor anne barriuso iowa state university, ames, usa maria amor barros-del río university of burgos, spain jessie saraza barrot national university, manila, philippines mireille besson aix-mairseille university, france adriana biedroń pomeranian university, słupsk, poland jakub bielak adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland jill boggs swansea university, uk griet boone ghent university, belgium katy borodkin tel aviv university, israel elouise botes university of vienna, austria alex bounton university of cambridge, uk melissa bowles university of illinois at urbana-champaign, usa camino bueno-alastuey university of navarra, pamplona, spain jack burston cyprus university of technology, limassol, cyprus yuyang cai shanghai university of international business and economics, china 746 laia canals universitat oberta de catalunya, barcelona, spain katherine cao trinity college, university of melbourne, victoria, australia eduardo castro kanda university of international studies, japan carly rae carver augusta university, usa lourdes cerezo university of murcia, spain xi chen university of central lancashire, preston, uk xinjie chen stanford university, usa xuemei chen university of electronic science and technology of china, chengdu, china irina chereseva university of birmingham, uk eun seon chung hankuk university of foreign studies, seoul, south korea marion coumel university of warwick, coventry, uk jessica g. cox franklin & marshall college, lancaster, usa yaqiong cui university of chinese academy of sciences, beijing, china danielle maria daidone university of north carolina, wilmington, usa robert dekeyser university of maryland, college park, usa ali derakshahn golestan university, gorgan, iran jean-marc dewaele birkbeck, university of london, uk nathan ducker miyazaki municipal university, japan derya duran university of jyväskylä, finland emily dux iowa state university, ames, usa esra eguz trinity college dublin, ireland majid elahi shirvan university of bojnord, iran fan fang shantou university, china jalil fathi university of kurdistan, erbil, iran césar félix-brasdefer indiana university, bloomington, usa mark freiermuth gunma prefectural women's university, japan anca daniela frumuselu university of lleida, spain ann bainbridge frymier ohio university, athens, usa mengxia fu university of auckland, new zealand xuesong (andy) gao university of new south wales, sydney, australia aitor garcés university of murcia, spain julia goetze university of wisconsin, usa marta gonzález lloret university of hawaii at manoa, usa suzanne graham university of reading, uk vincent greenier university of aberdeen, uk izabelle grenon tokyo university, japan yan guo huazhong university of science and technology, china laura gurzynski-weiss university of indiana, bloomington, usa fatih güngör afyon kocatepe university, turkey xuan ha macquarie university, sydney, australia ye han harbin institute of technology, shenzhen, china david ian hanauer indiana university of pennsylvania, usa alice henderson university of grenoble-alps, saint-martin-d'hères, france nick henry university of texas at austin, usa todd hernández marquette university, milwaukee, wisconsin ghanbar hessamedin islamic azad university, iran vincent j. van heuven university of groningen, the netherlands roz hirch iowa state university, ames, usa phil v. hiver florida state university, tallahassee, usa marlise horst university of concordia, montreal, canada alex housen vrije universiteit brussel, belgium 747 wenhua hsu i-shou university, kaohsiung city, taiwan takehiro iizuka university of maryland, college park, usa jesús izquierdo universidad juárez autónoma de tabasco, mexico eun hee jeon university of north carolina at pembroke, usa zhouhan jin university of western ontario, london, canada csaba kálmán eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary nobuhiro kamiya gunma prefectural women's university, japan olena karpenko university of strathclyde, glasgow, uk eva kartchava carleton university, ottawa, canada martha karunakar ssn college of engineering, tamil nadu, india matthew kessler university of south florida, tampa, usa gholam hassan khajavy university of bojnord, iran maria masha kostromitina northern arizona university, flagstaff, usa olga kushch university pompeu fabra, spain monica heejung kwon kanazawa university, japan richard labontee gothenburg university, sweden martin lamb university of leeds, uk david lasagabaster university of the basque country, vitoria-gasteiz, spain batia laufer university of haifa, israel ildikó lázár eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary icy lee the chinese university of hong kong, china sungyoon lee middle tennessee state university, murfreesboro, usa lei lei shanghai international studies university, china adrian paul leis miyagi university of education, japan ronald leow georgetown university, washington, dc, usa shaofeng li florida state university, tallahassee, usa wendy li duke kunshan university, suzhou, china zixuan li university of cambridge, uk fang-yu liao feng chia university, taichung city, taiwan yen-liang lin national taipei university of technology, taiwan dilin liu university of alabama, tuscaloosa, usa meihua liu tsinghua university, beijing, china sonia lópez-serrano complutense university of madrid, spain quing ma the hong kong institute of education, china nigel mantou lou university of victoria, canada xiaojun lu university of nottingham, ningbo, china boning lyu xiamen university, china ernesto macaro university of oxford, uk ayumi matsuo kobe college, japan joshua matthews university of new england, bideford, usa anne mccabe saint louis university, usa kim mcdonough concordia university, montreal, canada paul meara cardiff university, uk sarah mercer university of graz, austria elizabeth r. miller university of north carolina at charlotte, usa kouider mokhtari university of texas at tyler, usa maria mos tilburg university, netherlands carmen muñoz university of barcelona, spain anna mystkowska-wiertelak university of wrocław, poland sachiko nakamura tamagawa university, thailand ayşegül nergis istanbul university, turkey 748 ryo nitta nagoya gakuin university, japan saeed nourzadeh damghan university, iran ana oskoz university of maryland, baltimore county, usa mark pacheco university of florida, gainesville, usa ane palma universidade federal do paraná, brazil mostafa papi florida state university, tallahassee, usa sun hee park ewha womans university, seoul, south korea alyssa parr university of minnesota, minneapolis, usa víctor pavón vázquez university of córdoba, spain hongying peng guangdong university of foreign studies, china jian-e peng shantou university, china javier pérez-guerra university of vigo, spain jacob petersen iwate university, japan simone pfenninger university of zurich, switzerland linh phung chatham university, usa françois pichette téluq university, quebec, canada luke plonsky university of northern arizona, flagstaff, usa charlene polio michigan state university, usa jie qin south china agricultural university, guangzhou, china xuyan qiu hong kong metropolitan university, china muhammad rahimi qilu university of technology, china anabela rato university of toronto, canada wei ren beihang university, beijing, china julio roca de larios university of murcia, spain barry lee reynolds university of macau, china xavier martin rubió university of lleida, spain marianna ryshina-pankova georgetown university, eashington, dc, usa karim sadeghi urmia university, iran pilar safont universitat jaume i, castelló, spain giuliana salvato university of windsor, canada raquel serrano university of barcelona, spain kaiqi shao hangzhou dianzi university, china mohsen shirazizadeh alzahra university, tehran, iran tony silva purdue university, west lafayette, usa yvette slaughter melbourne graduate school of education, australia tammy slater university of british columbia, vancouver, canada dávid smid eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary sarah sok university of california, irvine, usa jayoung song pennsylvania state university, state college, usa boglárka spissich eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary ryan spring tohoku university, japan neomy storch melbourne university, australia yunwen su university of utah, salt lake city, usa ekaterina sudina east carolina university, greenville, usa shungo suzuki lancaster university, uk yuichi suzuki kanagawa university, japan liss kerstin sylvén university of gothenburg, sweden paweł szudarski university of nottingham, uk osama takeuchi kansai university, osaka, japan shuxin tan pai chai university, south korea annela teemant indiana university, bloomington, usa 749 yasser teimouri boğaziçi university, istanbul, turkey amy thompson west virginia university, morgantown, usa nicole tracy-ventura university of southampton, uk elsa tragant university of barcelona, spain pavel trofimovich concordia university, montreal, canada shu-chiao tsai national kaohsiung university of science and technology, taiwan kimiko tsukada macquarie university, sydney, australia takumi uchihara waseda university, tokyo, japan olena vasylets university of barcelona, spain joseph p. vitta queen’s university, belfast, uk robert walldén malmö university, sweden hui wang university of kansas, lawrence, usa yabing wang guangdong university of foreign studies, china yongliang wang henan university, china stuart webb university of western ontario, london, canada rining wei department of english, xi'an jiaotong-liverpool university xiaobao wei east china university of science and technology, shanghai, china zhisheng edward wen macao polytechnic university, china vanessa de wilde ghent university, belgium dorota werbińska pomeranian university, słupsk, poland katerin wismiewski otto-friedrich-universität bamberg, germany magdalena wrembel adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland xue wu huazhong university of science and technology, china mark wyatt khalifa university, abu dhabi, united arab emirates hao xu beijing foreign studies university, china mengzhu yan huazhong university of science and technology, china akifumi yanagisawa university of western ontario, london, canada shanshan yang fudan university, china yucel yilmaz indiana university, bloomington, usa hanjing yu dalian university of technology, china dogan yuksel kocaeli university, turkey sara zahler state university of new york at albany, usa lawrence zhang university of auckland, new zealand yiran zhang university of macau, china xian zhang university of north texas, denton, usa xuan zheng peking university, beijing, china anna zólyomi eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary 423 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (3). 2021. 423-444 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.3.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt innovating teacher feedback with writing activities aimed at raising secondary school students’ awareness of collocation errors barry lee reynolds university of macau, macau sar, china https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3984-2059 barryreynolds@um.edu.mo mark feng teng university of macau, macau sar, china https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5134-8504 markteng@um.edu.mo abstract the study examined the types of written corrective feedback given by second language writing teachers on taiwanese secondary school students’ collocation errors. first, the written corrective feedback that teachers provided on learners’ word choice errors was examined to uncover the types of feedback provided. then, analysis focused on verb–noun collocations to draw attention to how students had been receiving different types of written corrective feedback from teachers on a single collocation error type. results showed that some sentences tagged as including word choice errors only contained rulebased errors. furthermore, for verb-noun collocation errors, teachers chose to provide indirect and direct feedback almost equally at the expense of metalinguistic feedback. based on the results, we suggested options for second language writing teachers when providing feedback on word choice errors. keywords: l2 feedback; word choice errors; l2 writing activities; written corrective feedback; feedback corpus barry lee reynolds, mark feng teng 424 1. introduction the potential of written corrective feedback for second language (l2) writing improvement has long been acknowledged (e.g., ferris, 2002; hyland & hyland, 2006; sarré et al., 2019). despite its potential, writing specialists and theorists have debated and disagreed upon the role of teachers’ written corrective feedback in facilitating students’ english writing (see lee, 2016, 2017 for discussion). the elements and characteristics of teacher feedback determine its quality and effect on students’ english writing. one of these is the level of explicitness required for teacher feedback when its aim is to correct students’ writing errors. for example, when teachers mark students’ writing errors, should they directly indicate the type of errors the students have made by providing the correct forms and metalinguistic rules or, instead, should they directly indicate erroneous forms through the use of symbols as a way to lead students to self-diagnose and self-correct errors? another thorny issue is whether teachers are even equipped with the knowledge necessary to provide corrective feedback: they may unknowingly mislabel one error type for another and thereby misinform and misdirect students’ attention. while these and other issues are being debated regarding teacher feedback on student writing, few experts would suggest teachers not to provide any type of feedback on student writing. moreover, students expect teachers to provide feedback on their written errors produced when writing in their l2s (ferris & roberts, 2001). suggestions from researchers as well as the expectations of l2 writing students provide the rationale for the current investigation of teacher feedback practices. although most research on written corrective feedback has focused on rule-based grammatical errors, the actual feedback teachers provide often involves a combination of rule-based and non-rule-based (i.e., word choice) errors (e.g., ferris & roberts, 2001). scholars have noted that word choice errors “often cause serious comprehension problems” in the writing produced by l2 writers; these errors have been considered as largely “untreatable” (ferris & roberts, 2001, p. 173). instead of suggesting written corrective feedback, most researchers recommend that l2 writing teachers encourage their students to use corpus tools or other strategies to assist in self-editing (e.g., reynolds, 2015, 2016; pérez-paredes, 2019); however, there has yet to be a detailed analysis of teachers’ corrective feedback practice through, for example, an analysis of teacher feedback corpus. previous research has indicated that student writers may be able to identify and self-correct word choice errors (ferris & roberts, 2001). however, the outcomes are limited and expecting students to independently use corpus tools to facilitate independent writing may be met with resistance (e.g., reynolds, 2015, 2016). the reality has been that student writers innovating teacher feedback with writing activities aimed at raising secondary school students’. . . 425 have tended to exhibit strong negative reactions when asked to self-edit word choice errors using corpus tools (reynolds, 2016); instead, student writers passively await teachers’ written corrective feedback (kao & reynolds, 2017; lee, 2014). along with the advancement of technology in teaching and learning english writing, corpora have become common tools for learning to write in a l2 (cf. pérez-paredes, 2019). students may consult corpora through an installed application on their computers or through the web via server-based corpora. during the writing process, students may independently search a corpus or use any number of corpus-based tools that can provide additional reference information alongside more conventional learning resources. writing teachers may also harness corpora technology to further assist students in improving l2 writing; teachers may use the corpora as a resource when administering written corrective feedback. however, applying data-driven learning to writing has been underexplored and how corpora can be used to enhance written corrective feedback practices remains under-researched. in the context of the current investigation, pertaining to the taiwanese secondary school efl writing classroom, product-oriented l2 writing instruction dominates and students expect teachers to provide them with written corrective feedback (chen & tsai, 2012; reynolds, 2016). in terms of product-oriented l2 writing instruction, the main focus is on the mechanical aspects of writing, such as providing students with instruction on grammatical and syntactical structures. in recent years, a call for a shift in focus from product to process writing has been made. process-based writing refers to how ideas are developed and how writing is formulated. this is not just a localized occurrence in taiwan but is echoing throughout the world (johnson, 2020). this call for change has caused many teachers to reconsider their practices when implementing writing pedagogy. the teacher’s role in writing shall not become limited to that of a spotter of grammatical errors and reinforcer of a set of grammar rules. instead, students need and deserve teacher written corrective feedback that can help them reflect on how to notice errors and be able to generate and explore ideas in writing. therefore, discussion of these issues should not be focused on whether l2 writing teachers should provide written corrective feedback but how they should do so. this study addressed this issue by providing a practical discussion on how teachers can structure the corrective feedback administered to l2 students’ lexical errors found in their writing. this study, aiming to fill this gap, explored teachers’ written corrective feedback extracted from a corpus of teacher feedback. the following research question was addressed: what type of written corrective feedback do secondary school teachers provide for students’ verb-noun collocation errors? barry lee reynolds, mark feng teng 426 2. literature review 2.1. written corrective feedback when teaching and learning l2 english writing, written corrective feedback refers to written information a teacher provides to l2 writers regarding how their writing can be enhanced (bitchener & ferris, 2012). written corrective feedback has been found to be useful when delivered in a way that helps l2 writers in their personal writing development (bitchener & ferris, 2012). such feedback is often direct (i.e., the teacher supplies the correct form) and focused or selective (i.e., the teacher systematically selects one or a few error types to correct) (ellis, 2009; ferris, 2006, 2010). for example, when providing direct feedback, a teacher would strike through the word “write” in the sentence “*i write homeworks.” and provide the appropriate collocate by writing the word “do” above write. if the teacher was also providing focused or selective feedback for collocation errors, the pluralization of homework would not be corrected as this is not the error type targeted by the teacher. other types of feedback include indirect feedback and metalinguistic feedback. indirect feedback entails the teacher marking the location of an error for l2 writers to correct (ellis, 2009; ferris, 2006, 2010). a teacher providing indirect feedback might circle or underline the word “write” to signal the student to self-correct. metalinguistic feedback occurs when the teacher poses questions, provides comments, or offers information related to the error without providing the correct form (cornillie et al., 2017). traditionally, metalinguistic feedback has been provided in the form of grammar rules; however, for collocation errors such as the one found in the example above, a teacher might give comments in lieu of a grammar rule. for example, these might look like the following: we do not write homework. another verb goes with the noun homework to form a verb-noun collocation. what verb goes with homework? written corrective feedback studies have aimed to determine which type of feedback is most beneficial to l2 writers (kao, 2020). many of these studies have suggested that teachers provide feedback that is both direct and focused instead of indirect and unfocused (bitchener & ferris, 2012). unfortunately, these studies have overwhelmingly been concerned with grammatical errors and not lexical errors (see ekanayaka & ellis, 2020; for an attempt to investigate both). moreover, much of the discussion has been limited to investigating the improvement in the use of the english article system (kao & wible, 2014) and even these studies have been rather limited to one or two functional uses of english articles (kao, 2020). innovating teacher feedback with writing activities aimed at raising secondary school students’. . . 427 2.2. word choice and collocations clarity is key in writing. appropriate word choice, defined as usage of the most suitable words to convey a writer’s message to readers, is essential in ensuring clarity. one area of word choice with which l2 writers tend to struggle, especially those developing proficiency in the target language, is the selection of appropriate collocates for node words (e.g., take medicine rather than *eat medicine). this problem has been widely discussed in the literature, in which english language teaching (elt) scholars have observed that word choice errors or miscollocations occur due to incongruence between the first and second language (l1–l2) (agustín llach, 2015). for example, l1 chinese writers may produce the english word combination *eat medicine because the verb eat cannot be translated directly from chinese into english, yet learners assume semantic and pragmatic equivalence. collocation errors are an unavoidable issue for l2 writers, as corpus research has shown that collocations are present in all written texts and thus must be accurately produced by l2 writers to convey intended meaning (lewis, 2000; vedder & benigno, 2016). it may be possible to reduce grammatical rule-based errors in l2 writers’ subsequent writing when l2 writing teachers provide metalinguistic rule-based explanations as written corrective feedback. however, it may be difficult to explain miscollocations with the help of rules. this is because the use of one particular collocate instead of another is arbitrary and idiomatic (e.g., do homework and not *write homework). verb-noun collocations, which refer to phrases containing a verb and a noun that frequently occur together, are important in l2 writing as they can make the language clear and natural (lewis, 2000). an example is the use of the verb sit with the noun test to form the collocation sit a test.1 l2 writers that are unaware of this verb-noun collocation may opt to select a more “general” verb such as make or do but they run the risk of producing language that may not be clear and natural. furthermore, it could lead to possible misunderstandings in that a reader may interpret make a test as constructing a test or designing a test. to the best of our knowledge, only two previous studies have investigated the difference in the effectiveness of direct and indirect teacher feedback on collocation errors, both of which used discrete task conditions rather than l2 compositions to elicit the targeted collocations. furthermore, both used rather loose definitions of what constituted indirect feedback. ting and lin (2015) compared direct and indirect feedback through the use of a cloze task targeting 16 adjective-noun and verb-noun collocations. students that received direct feedback had their incorrect answers marked and the correct answers provided. students 1 this example was provided by per snoder (p. snoder, personal communication, september 22, 2016). barry lee reynolds, mark feng teng 428 that benefited from indirect feedback had their incorrect answers marked but they had to refer to a handout to locate the correct answers that were accompanied by a picture illustrating the collocating word pairs. the results showed that the students who received the indirect feedback outperformed those who received direct feedback on both a posttest and a delayed posttest. it should be noted, however, that the indirect feedback still provided the correct answers, albeit in a different manner than what usually occurs in direct feedback studies. zarei and mousavi (2016) compared direct and indirect feedback through the use of ten l1 to l2 sentence translation tasks targeting a total of 150 lexical collocations (i.e., combinations of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs). students that received direct feedback had their incorrectly translated collocations underlined and then the corrected collocations were written on the board for the students to note down. by contrast, students that received indirect feedback had their incorrectly translated collocations underlined and were told to correct them at home; however, if on the next day the collocations were still found to be incorrect, the teacher wrote the correct collocations on the board. as shown in early feedback research (e.g., lalande, 1982), student writers in zarei and mousavi (2016) who received indirect feedback made more improvement than those who received direct feedback. however, as is clear from the extant literature, more methodologically sound studies are needed to make claims regarding the effectiveness of indirect and direct feedback on collocation errors. written corrective feedback regarding english verb-noun collocations was targeted for scrutiny in the current investigation because such collocations appear frequently in l2 writing and are challenging for learners to master (laufer & waldman, 2011). as few useful guidelines are available for elt practitioners in providing written corrective feedback for collocation errors found in l2 learners’ writing, this study aimed to examine teachers’ written corrective feedback extracted from the english taiwan learner corpus (etlc) and provide l2 writing teachers with advice for giving accurate, complete, and appropriate feedback. 3. methods 3.1. etlc data extraction the data analyzed in the current study were extracted from the etlc (shih, 2000), which is the largest annotated learner corpus of english in taiwan; the etlc contains local taiwanese secondary school students’ writing and accompanying feedback provided by students’ l2 english writing teachers. students use the intelligent web-based interactive language learning (iwill) system (wible innovating teacher feedback with writing activities aimed at raising secondary school students’. . . 429 et al., 2001) to compose and submit description/narration and exposition/argumentation essays that are automatically compiled into the etlc. subsequently, teachers retrieve the assignments and attach error tags with comments as electronic written corrective feedback to specific highlighted text, which in turn is automatically compiled into the etlc before the writing is returned to students (with the attached teacher feedback) for review and further revision if necessary. the error tags are not preset by the system; instead, teachers have the freedom to create unique error tags. after creation, the error tags are saved in a teacher’s profile for future access. 4. results in this study, 518 students’ written sentences and their teachers’ feedback for one academic year were extracted from the corpus by searching for any tags teachers used that included word and/or form. this parameter allowed us to target teacher feedback regarding word choice errors, resulting in the extraction of 309 feedback comments indicating word-choice errors (see figure 1). although there could have been more word-choice errors made by the students, this study focused only on the feedback that l2 writing teachers provided for word-choice errors. relevant tags created by teachers included word choice (n = 183), word form (n = 80), 字詞不當 improper wording (n = 23), change this word (n = 16), improper usage or words (n = 4), wrong form (n = 1), wrong word (n = 1), and 字詞不當 word choice improper wording (n = 1). figure 1 examples extracted from student writing with word choice error tags and l2 writing teacher feedback barry lee reynolds, mark feng teng 430 figure 2 schematic of corpus data extraction process after feedback extraction, the second author and a research assistant independently coded 309 students’ written sentences given these tags according to whether the sentences contained or did not contain a collocation error (i.e., yes or no). cohen’s κ was run to determine inter-rater agreement, indicating acceptable agreement between the two raters (κ = .886, p < .0005).2 sentences on which the raters did not come to a consensus were discussed by the two raters and the first author until an agreement was reached. results of this round of coding culminated in 171 sentences containing a collocation error. then, the second author and a research assistant further independently coded the 171 sentences containing a 2 the kappa results were interpreted as follows: values ≤ 0 indicate no agreement, 0.01-0.20 as none to slight, 0.21-0.40 as fair, 0.41-0.60 as moderate, 0.61-0.80 as substantial, and 0.811.00 as almost perfect (cohen, 1960). corpus search for lexical error feedback tags and data extraction searched for feedback tags that contained “word” and/or “form” (n = 309) remaining sentences (n = 171) coded student writers’ sentences by whether they contained collocation errors remaining sentences (n = 50) coded student writers’ sentences by whether they contained verb-noun collocation errors direct feedback (n = 20) indirect feedback (n = 27) metalinguistic feedback (n = 2) indirect and metalinguistic feedback (n = 1) coded the teacher feedback provided to student writers’ sentences that contained verb-noun collocation errors by feedback type (i.e., indirect, direct, metalinguistic) innovating teacher feedback with writing activities aimed at raising secondary school students’. . . 431 collocation error by collocation error type (e.g., verb–noun, adjective–noun, verb–adverb, and so on). cohen’s κ indicated high agreement between the two raters (κ = .918, p < .0005). sentences on which the raters did not come to an agreement were discussed by the two raters and the first author until an agreement was reached. out of the 171 sentences containing collocation errors, 50 sentences contained a verb-noun collocation error. finally, the second author and a research assistant independently coded the 50 teacher feedback comments on verb-noun collocation errors (i.e., direct, indirect, and metalinguistic) (see table 1, for examples). cohen’s κ indicated nearly complete agreement between the two raters (κ = .963, p < .0005). the only feedback comment on which the two raters did not agree involved a teacher providing a combination of indirect and metalinguistic feedback. among the other 49 teacher feedback comments on verb-noun collocation errors, 20 involved direct feedback, 27 involved indirect feedback, two involved metalinguistic feedback, and one involved a combination of indirect and metalinguistic feedback. a schematic diagram of the data extraction process is provided in figure 2. table 1 examples of different feedback types given by teachers on verb-noun collocation errors feedback type sample teacher feedback indirect this is not the right word here. use a different word. direct this is not the right word here. use a different word – set a good example. metalinguistic these two words do not go together. we don’t do contributions. what verb goes here instead of do? a chi-square one-way goodness-of-fit test was conducted to determine whether writing teachers chose feedback types for verb-noun collocation errors equally (see table 2). results indicated that the secondary school writing teachers provided direct and indirect feedback more often and metalinguistic feedback less often than predicted on verb-noun collocation errors (߯2 = 20.367, df = 2, p < .0001). table 2 writing teachers’ choice of feedback types for verb-noun collocation errors feedback type direct feedback indirect feedback metalinguistic feedback observed n 20 27 2 expected n 16.3 16.3 16.3 5. discussion overall, the research findings can shed light on teaching and learning l2 writing. in the current study, l2 writing teachers provided more direct and indirect feedback for verb-noun collocation errors than metalinguistic feedback. the teachers’ barry lee reynolds, mark feng teng 432 limited linguistic resources, as evidenced by multiple occurrences of inappropriate feedback, may have predisposed them to provide ill-formed or incomplete written feedback on word choice errors in an unobtrusive manner. however, these results should not be interpreted as suggesting that the l2 writing teacher’s role is that of an editor who simply provides direct focused corrective feedback on all word choice errors. instead, with regard to word choice errors, the teacher should attend to the types of formulaic language with which their learners appear to be struggling, decide on appropriate consciousness-raising activities that can help learners to practice producing these troublesome formulaic language types, and reinforce learners’ awareness by providing direct corrective feedback on the targeted formulaic language upon activity completion (reynolds & teng, 2019). we discuss the findings based on different types of feedback, that is, inaccurate feedback, direct and indirect feedback, metalinguistic feedback, and mixed feedback. 5.1. inaccurate feedback l2 writing teachers’ feedback was somewhat inaccurate: some sentences tagged with word choice errors did not always contain such errors. for example, in the first round of coding when word choice error tagged sentences were scrutinized, sentences such as i learned so much*3 different things at his class and only i can do is studying and studying* were tagged by teachers with word choice error tags. one of the main arguments against the effectiveness of corrective feedback is that teachers provide inconsistent or inaccurate feedback on writing errors (truscott, 1996). this claim was empirically investigated by lee (2004), who demonstrated that only three percent of hong kong secondary teachers surveyed had administered inaccurate corrective feedback on grammar errors: the errors were accurately located but inaccurately corrected or the errors were accurately located but inaccurately coded. still, nearly half of the feedback analyzed in lee’s study was found to be unnecessary. the accuracy of secondary school english teachers’ feedback practices deserves consideration. even though this previous research indicated that teachers might be more accurate in their feedback on grammatical errors, less is known about teachers’ feedback on lexical errors. while the data from the current study provided by secondary school teachers show that appropriate feedback on verb-noun collocation errors was provided, the same cannot be said for all lexical errors. empirical studies are needed that aim at investigating the accuracy of the feedback teachers provide on a range of lexical errors. although ferris (2001) found that esl writers could 3 highlights indicate teachers’ highlights for the word-choice error tag. innovating teacher feedback with writing activities aimed at raising secondary school students’. . . 433 self-correct word choice errors more accurately compared to rule-based errors, reynolds (2016) found efl writers to be unwilling to take the initiative to self-correct verbnoun collocations. so, it is not just the role of teachers but also the attitude of the students that must be considered when measuring feedback effectiveness. 5.2. direct and indirect feedback teacher feedback extracted from the corpus shows that teachers provided indirect and direct feedback on student writers’ verb-noun collocation errors significantly more frequently than metalinguistic feedback (see table 2). moreover, they supplied indirect feedback more often than direct feedback on student writers’ verb-noun collocation errors. in the current study, teacher feedback that was indirect, indicated only with a feedback tag, showed to learners that a word choice error had been made. however, teacher feedback that was direct not only indicated that a word choice error had been made but also provided the corrected collocation for the student writers to incorporate into their revised draft. the earliest distinction between teacher feedback types was the comparison between direct and indirect feedback (ellis, 2009; ferris, 2010). while some early researchers did not find a difference in grammar improvement for learners that received indirect or direct feedback (e.g., robb et al., 1986), more recent research, including meta-analytic studies, has shown that regardless of whether direct or indirect feedback is administered by teachers, both feedback types were effective and resulted in a positive long-term learning effect on students’ linguistic accuracy (van beuningen et al., 2008; kang & han, 2015). it then seems that the secondary school teachers’ feedback examined in the current study was appropriate and would have led to improvements in their students’ l2 writing. 5.3. metalinguistic feedback when scrutinizing the feedback given on verb-noun collocation errors, we found that teachers provided relatively little metalinguistic feedback. providing metalinguistic feedback may help to increase l2 writers’ awareness of the errors and has been shown to be effective in reducing occurrences of targeted errors in subsequent writings (bitchener, 2008; bitchener & knoch, 2010). while it could be argued that metalinguistic feedback is not possible as the mutual relationship between a collocate and a node cannot be explained with a rule, providing this sort of explanation in itself could be considered as a type of metalinguistic feedback. the teacher could, for example, probe a student to consider which verb goes together with a particular noun while also reminding the student to draw upon their knowledge of such combinations that are used in their l1 (butzkamm, 2001; barry lee reynolds, mark feng teng 434 house, 2009). research has yet to be undertaken that could investigate whether this sort of feedback on lexical errors such as collocation errors would or would not be more or less effective than providing direct feedback. moreover, sarré et al. (2019) hold the view that written corrective feedback represents an explicitness continuum where underlining an error would be considered the least explicit form of written corrective feedback and providing the corrected form alongside additional explanation of the error would be the most explicit. we feel that the explicitness of this kind of feedback can impact learner noticing, which, in turn, can affect the likelihood of the written corrective feedback as input becoming intake. it could have been the raising of language awareness and the explicitness of the feedback that led to the more robust results for the indirect feedback, as supported in previous studies (ting & lin, 2015; zarei & mousavi, 2016). 5.4. mixed feedback among instances of teacher feedback on verb-noun collocations examined in the current study, only one occurrence was found to represent a mixed-feedback type. this involved combining metalinguistic and direct feedback or combining metalinguistic and indirect feedback. instead, teachers tended to choose between providing indirect or direct feedback. indirect feedback only required teachers to indicate a word choice error had been made, while direct feedback entailed teachers knowing which collocate the student intended to use and then providing the student with the intended collocate as feedback. these results could be interpreted as indicating that l2 writing teachers did not possess equal levels of knowledge and therefore reverted to providing indirect feedback on word choice errors. if this was the case, this finding indicates that l2 secondary school writing teachers in taiwan who use iwill and similar systems to provide feedback may require training to help them make effective choices in differentiating word choice and rule-based errors. for example, feedback tags can be color coded so that students are made aware that feedback is targeting word choice errors or rule-based grammatical errors. another interpretation could be that the teachers felt that providing direct feedback might misinterpret students’ meaning (ferris, 2002) or that it was inappropriate as the errors might have been considered untreatable as they were related to word choice (lee, 2003). 6. limitations and implications 6.1. limitations while the study succeeded in uncovering both appropriate and problematic teacher feedback practices, it also suffers from some limitations. first, the data innovating teacher feedback with writing activities aimed at raising secondary school students’. . . 435 were only extracted from the etlc, making it impossible to generalize findings to all l2 writing teachers and learning contexts. second, while the focus was placed on teachers’ practices involved in providing written corrective feedback, students’ attitudes towards such feedback or the feedback process were not analyzed. third, teacher feedback on only one type of word choice errors, namely verb-noun collocation, was analyzed. 6.2. implications for teacher education the results of this investigation suggest that there may be a gap between what teachers should provide as corrective feedback and what they actually do. as previous research has shown that the most significant predictor of the pedagogical beliefs held by in-service teachers can be attributed to the learning that occurred in their teacher education programs (levin et al., 2013), addressing the issue of teacher feedback efficacy in pre-service teacher programs is clearly a priority. although instruction on how to provide effective feedback on student writing often occurs in tesol training programs, liu (1998) reported that preservice non-native english teachers’ training about formulaic language may be insufficient. in addition, it was also suggested (cf. liu, 1998) that tesol trainers should encourage non-native pre-service teachers to complete class projects, term papers, and short-term research studies focusing on areas in which the trainees consider themselves to be weak, which could help them build their collocational competence. we feel that the affordances provided by iwill and similar systems such as turnitin (http://www.turnitin.com) have the potential to facilitate teacher feedback practice because these online systems streamline creating a teacher feedback bank (chen, 2014; guichon et al., 2012; sarré et al., 2019). if the teacher aiming to provide direct feedback on miscollocations and other types of formulaic language does not possess the required word knowledge, then one of many published collocation dictionaries or other online word reference tools (e.g., compleat lexical tutor; https://www.lextutor.ca) could be consulted when creating feedback tags. creating an electronic feedback bank will result in many returns on the initial time invested. once a teacher adds a feedback tag to a database, it can be retrieved an unlimited number of times. 6.3. implications for classroom practice the data analyzed in the current study showed that l2 writing teachers tended to provide more direct and indirect feedback and less metalinguistic feedback on verb–noun collocation errors. word choice errors may not be easily explained through metalinguistic feedback, as no grammar rules can be provided. barry lee reynolds, mark feng teng 436 however, writing teachers could also use metalinguistic explanations to illustrate that verb-noun collocation errors cannot be explained with a grammar rule and that the errors in question were due to selecting incorrect collocates (kao, 2015, 2019). although teachers may have provided direct feedback in class after offering indirect feedback on word choice errors via iwill, this scenario is unlikely; the teaching of l2 english writing in taiwan is generally product-oriented with little to no emphasis on the writing process (chen & tsai, 2012). providing direct feedback requires l2 writing teachers to know which particular collocate matches the node word. by contrast, offering indirect feedback only requires that l2 writing teachers indicate there is an error and leave it up to the learner to correct. we tend to agree with ferris and roberts’s (2001) recommendation that direct feedback should be provided for word choice errors, with the caveat that writing teachers do not assume that l2 writers are either able or willing to self-correct verb–noun collocation errors (reynolds, 2015). furthermore, learners that are accustomed to analyzing language from a grammatical point-of-view may require several rounds of awareness raising classroom activities to aid in noticing newly encountered word patterns and assimilating fixed phrases into their l2 word repertoires (willis & willis, 1996). available literature has offered little advice on how learners can improve their collocation competence other than suggesting they try to notice collocations independently when encountering such structures in texts (see lewis, 2000). other researchers have recommended that teachers focus collocation-related lessons on incongruent collocations (bahns, 1993). furthermore, noticing collocations in a text and having the wherewithal to recall and produce collocations in l2 writing represent challenges for l2 learners (laufer, 1998; laufer & paribakht, 1998). instead of simply asking learners to notice collocations in input and hoping they will eventually be able to produce such collocations as output, we suggest an l2 writing activity that systematically combines noticing targeted collocations in input and then requires learners to produce the same targeted collocations as output. we acknowledge that there is the possibility that l2 writing teachers may not possess the linguistic knowledge to provide appropriate written corrective feedback on their students’ word choice errors; however, as discussed earlier, there are digital tagging systems that have been developed that can facilitate teacher feedback in terms of both word choice and rule-based errors (pérez-paredes, 2019; kılıçkaya, 2019). furthermore, teachers that are unsure of whether an error is a word choice or rule-based error can reference any number of widely available collocation reference dictionaries prior to administering feedback. nevertheless, we argue that both l2 writing teachers’ written corrective feedback on word choice errors and their students’ word choice competence can be better facilitated by the execution of focused l2 writing activities exemplified in this article. innovating teacher feedback with writing activities aimed at raising secondary school students’. . . 437 skehan (1998) claimed that “what is needed is to consider approaches which, in the context of meaningful communication, draw attention to form in more inductive ways, or raise consciousness” (p. 41). studies focusing on what learners do when they read l2 texts and how this process affects productive use of collocations have indicated that drawing learners’ attention to collocations in input will result in an increase in written productive use of targeted collocations. for example, wible et al. (2011) found collocation acquisition to occur as a result of focusing learners’ attention on highlighted collocations. lee (2003) noted that increasing exposure to targeted vocabulary during prewriting encouraged written productive use of those targeted words. schmitt (2000) further suggested that grammar-based correction may not help remedy the appearance of word choice errors as word choice errors could be the result of faulty acquisition of formulaic sequences. his recommendation is for teachers to “draw students’ attention to the variable expressions” and to provide them examples using concordance data (p. 112). this type of noticing falls more in line with the interpretation of godfroid et al. (2013), who observed that the more time learners spent processing unknown words in input, the more likely they were to recognize the words in an unannounced post-reading vocabulary test. the noticing of unknown collocations in language input or the noticing of corrective feedback on the misuse of collocations in teachers’ written corrective feedback cannot be equated with the type of noticing that truscott (1998) criticized when discussing the noticing of metalinguistic knowledge. the effect of processing on learning outcomes does not seem to hinge on whether learners have become consciously aware of a metalinguistic rule. instead, eye-tracking has provided “a measure of the amount of attention that participants allocate to target forms in the input” (godfroid et al., 2013). the amount of on-line processing time spent on the language input is correlated with the performance measured on off-line measurements. building upon the results and suggestions from previous studies, researchers have successfully incorporated pre-activity noticing of formulaic language to encourage productive use in subsequent l2 writing activity execution. lindstromberg et al. (2016) found that using a modified dictogloss in which learners first read isolated formulaic sequences on a pre-activity worksheet (i.e., priming) allowed students to produce more formulaic sequences as intact wholes during the written reconstruction phase of the dictogloss. snoder and reynolds (2019) also found students’ review of an l1-l2 glossed list of verbnoun collocations during a pre-activity to have a substantial effect on whether learners could produce the targeted collocations as intact wholes in spoken and written output. although these studies did not provide feedback on word choice errors, results from recent research have implied that when l2 writers’ verb–noun collocation errors receive direct focused corrective feedback from teachers, the barry lee reynolds, mark feng teng 438 learners produce significantly fewer verb-noun collocation errors in subsequent writing (kao, 2015, 2019). in addition, learners who realized that the teacher’s feedback was intended to correct verb-noun collocation errors required fewer errors to be corrected before demonstrating progress in verb-noun collocation accuracy in subsequent writing. lastly, drawing learners’ attention to the relationship between collocates and node words by drawing an arrow between a collocating noun and verb was found to enhance acquisition when combined with direct focused written corrective feedback (kao, 2015, 2019). taken together, the literature has indicated that awareness-raising pre-activities combined with writing activities in which learners receive and review teacher-provided direct focused corrective feedback could result in improvements in formulaic language production. in the classroom, however, l2 writing teachers in taiwan have grown accustomed to providing unfocused written corrective feedback that encompasses all errors in students’ writing, whether word choice or rule-based (reynolds, 2016). although this approach may be suitable for advanced learners (bitchener & ferris, 2012), a different method may be needed for more novice writers such as the taiwanese secondary school students who received teacher feedback in the current study. when dealing with word choice errors, l2 writing teachers may need to dedicate time and activities to addressing learners’ problems in producing accurate formulaic language in l2 writing by targeting specific word choice error types. as an added benefit, l2 writing teachers that focus on specific word choice error types will afford themselves opportunities for practice in providing feedback. as the targets for said feedback will be selected beforehand, there is a decrease in the chance that the feedback provided by the teachers will be inappropriate. for example, in the case of providing feedback on verb-noun collocation errors, the teachers will already know which collocates match the node words. 6.4. a sample activity we argue that the most meaningful contexts for encouraging productive collocation competence in l2 writing involve implementing instructional approaches that include three steps: 1) providing l2 writing practice through activities intended to draw learners’ attention to targeted formulaic language (i.e., receptive knowledge) through a pre-activity; 2) providing opportunities for learners to produce the targeted formulaic language (i.e., productive knowledge) in l2 writing during activity execution; and 3) providing learners with direct focused teacher feedback on the written production of targeted formulaic language in l2 writing. this approach is informed by nation’s (2007) four strands principle that calls for language learning course activities to balance opportunities for meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning, innovating teacher feedback with writing activities aimed at raising secondary school students’. . . 439 and fluency development. an example of such an activity targeting the practice of verb-noun collocations is illustrated in figure 3 and discussed below. figure 3 incorporating focused written corrective feedback in an l2 writing activity this sample activity is accomplished first through execution of consciousnessraising, which is part of the language-focused learning strand (nation, 2007). through instruction, learners can be guided by the teacher to focus on and deliberately learn targeted verb-noun collocations. during this first step, learners give deliberate attention to understanding the linguistic phenomenon of collocation and then give spaced repeated attention to the targeted verb-noun collocations. the aim of this step is to facilitate the noticing of the target language structures consciously and subconsciously in order to internalize the input so that it becomes intake (schmidt, 1990). this is a very important step as noticing is the essential starting point for second language acquisition. it is thus necessary for l2 writing teachers to manipulate their learners’ attention so that they are focused and aware of collocations in language input. this increased attention and awareness has been identified as two cognitive processes that mediate language input and intake (robinson, 2003). subsequently, during step two, a modified dictogloss as discussed in lindstromberg et al. (2016) or a dicto-comp (ilson, 1962), can be executed by the teacher. while completing the dictogloss activity, learners first receive meaning-focused input as the teacher reads out a short text containing targeted verb-noun collocations. since teachers should select texts for the activity that do not contain many unknown words, learners’ listening fluency is further developed as they take notes to prepare for text reconstruction. the dictogloss or dicto-comp ends with text reconstruction that provides opportunities for meaning-focused output of l2 writing. if the text is co-reconstructed in dyads, learners’ opportunities for meaning-focused input and output are also increased. this step favors disadvantaged learners who may experience different types and levels of noticing during feedback interaction (mackey, 2006). one justification for this step is that input for language learning is something objective in • collocation as linguistic phenomenon • targeted collocations awareness raising • dictogloss • dicto-comp productive writing activity • focused • direct • collocate & node relationship teacher feedback • further awareness raising student review barry lee reynolds, mark feng teng 440 the environment, whereas in practice the stuff of acquisition (e.g., word choice errors) consists of mental constructs that exist in the mind and not in the environment at all. hence, in this step, the modified dictogloss groups teachers’ exemplars together that form categories representing both fixed and open slots, leading to explicit (aware) and implicit (unaware) processes of generalization as the constructions acquire more abstract meaning. in other words, in an activity that focuses on verb-noun collocations, it allows learners to not only focus on individual verb-noun collocations but also begin to generalize verb-noun collocations as a type or unit of formulaic language. finally, during the last step, the written direct corrective feedback provided by the teacher aims to again draw learners’ attention to the targeted verbnoun collocations through an additional round of language-focused learning. this step can be concluded as the strengthening stage, wherein learners’ awareness of and attention to feedback is further raised (leow, 2001). the strengthened role of awareness and attention is crucial to learners’ subsequent processing of feedback on word choice, which results in an enhanced ability to recognize and produce the targeted verb-noun collocations. 7. conclusion although our discussion has focused on verb-noun collocations as a single word choice error type, l2 writing teachers should target the type(s) of word choice error(s) most relevant to their learners (e.g., other types of collocations, multi-word/phrasal verbs, idioms, binomials, discourse markers, and so on). l2 writing teachers should also be aware that the activities we have suggested will enhance targeted formulaic language as well as encourage the integration and practice of listening, speaking, reading, and writing (nation, 1991). in addition, preparation of such activities takes relatively little time apart from selecting a topic and pre-activity appropriate for the targeted learners, locating a short text approximately 150 words in length, and targeting the formulaic language in the text (snoder & reynolds, 2019). lastly, this activity encourages learners to participate in peer and self-editing because execution of such activities requires learners to attempt to reconstruct a dictated text, thus involving repeated reading and revision cycles to complete the activity. acknowledgements this work was supported by the university of macau under grant number myrg2018-00008-fed. innovating teacher feedback with writing activities aimed at raising secondary school students’. . . 441 references agustín llach, m. p. 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(2016). the effects of feedback types on learners’ recognition of lexical collocations. international journal of applied linguistics & english literature, 5(2), 150-158. 9 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (1). 9-43 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl a critical review of research on strategies in learning chinese as both a second and foreign language xiaoli jiang renmin university, china xiaoli.jiang@gmail.com andrew d. cohen university of minnesota, usa adcohen@umn.edu abstract this article critically reviews strategy research on learning chinese both as a second and foreign language. through a careful examination of major data bases in both the chinese and english languages, the article summarizes research in the field and the principal research methods used in the studies reviewed. moreover, key limitations in research designs, inconsistencies in reported findings, inappropriate use of research methods, and weaknesses in both chineseand english-language publications are discussed. the article concludes by calling for future research paying more attention to current language learning strategy theories and practices. keywords: strategy research, learning chinese, second language, foreign language over the last three decades, the number of chinese language learners as a second/foreign language (csl/cfl) has dramatically increased. according to the official news release by hanban,1 the total estimated number of learners 1 retrieved from http://www. hanban.edu.cn xiaoli jiang, andrew d. cohen 10 of chinese as a non-native language had reached 40 million as of 2011. a language enrollment survey conducted in the united states by the modern language association (furman, goldberg, & lusin, 2010) indicated a total of 60,976 learners, constituting an increase of over 18% compared with statistics in 2006. commensurate with this increase in students of the language, empirical research on csl/cfl is expanding as well, with an increasing number of publications in journals, books, dissertations, and conference proceedings. many of the works attempt to describe practices in csl/cfl teaching and learning and the variables that are involved, consistent with the language learning strategy (lls) research already available for a host of other languages. hence, now is a propitious moment to conduct a critical review of strategy research in this field, paying special attention to strategies that have proven effective for csl/cfl learners in their efforts to master the language. in addition, it is a good time to look to updating the guiding theories about lls that have been adopted by csl/cfl researchers. it would be an understatement to say that llss have been defined in numerous ways over the years. our own working definition would be as follows: “[t]houghts and actions, consciously chosen and operationalized by language learners, to assist them in carrying out a multiplicity of tasks from the very onset of learning to the most advanced levels of target-language performance” (cohen, 2011, p. 7). dörnyei (2009: 183) minimizes the value of looking at llss altogether since what learners do is better viewed as “idiosyncratic self-regulated behavior, and a particular learning behavior can be strategic for one learner and non-strategic for another.” similarly, oxford (2011) embraces a self-regulation model for l2 learning, but unlike dörnyei’s approach, in oxford’s model, learners actively and constructively use strategies to manage their own learning. so, a compromise position might be to include selfregulation as perhaps an umbrella notion when referring to language learners and to also include the strategies that they use for both learning and performing in an l2. a recent article by rose (2012), however, argues that dörnyei’s reconceptualization might be a matter of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, in that it throws out a problematic taxonomy and replaces it with another one, which is also problematic since it includes the same definitional fuzziness for which previous taxonomies have been criticized. so, for the purposes of this review of csl/cfl strategies, we will stick to the more “traditional” approach to viewing llss, without involving the concept of self-regulation. the article has as its main goal to ascertain the directions that current csl/cfl strategy research has taken and to identify major issues through a review of academic publications both in chinese and english. studies were identified through electronic searches of major databases in the field, for example, a critical review of research on strategies in learning chinese as both a second and foreign language 11 the china national knowledge infrastructure (cnki),2 science direct, jstor, and eric. in addition to major journals and ma and doctoral dissertations in china, which are all included in cnki, core journals in english that were not found in those databases – such as the journal of the chinese language teachers association (jclta), monographs published by the chinese language teachers association3 and digital dissertations in the united states – were also investigated in this article. notwithstanding the fact that publications in other parts of the world are missing from this review, the studies included provide numerous insights regarding research and practices in the csl/cfl field. this article starts with a general description of strategy research in csl/cfl, then focuses on areas of keen interest to csl/cfl strategy researchers (namely, chinese character learning, reading, listening, speaking, and other strategy-related areas), looks at research methods used in strategy studies in csl/cfl, highlights key issues arising from this review of existing literature, and then closes with implications and conclusions. history of strategy research in csl/cfl general description of strategy research in csl/cfl table 1 csl/cfl strategy research in journals and unpublished dissertations data source journal dissertation 1980s 1990s 2000s 1980s 1990s 2000s chinese cnki 4 31 26 english jstor, science direct, jclta, digital dissertations (united states) 1 5 8 2 6 4 strategy research in csl/cfl dates back to the late 1980s. as can be seen from table 1, only 87 publications on csl/cfl strategy research had appeared as of 2011, with 49 journal articles and 37 dissertations. it is interesting to compare publications by date and language. first, relevant research has gone through three chronological stages: 1980-89 (phase 1), 1990-99 (phase 2), and the 21st century (phase 3). in phase 1, publications in chinese were absent and there appeared to be only one journal article (hayes, 1988) and two doctoral dissertations written in english (everson, 1986; yu, 1987). hayes (1988) examined chi 2 china national knowledge infrastructure, also known as cnki, is one of the world’s largest full-text databases and the most comprehensive resource for chinese academic journals. it is available at http://www.cnki.net. 3 the chinese language teachers association, founded in 1962, is the oldest chinese language association in the united states. xiaoli jiang, andrew d. cohen 12 nese character learning strategies, yu (1987) worked on mnemonic strategies used by english-speaking learners of chinese, and everson (1986) examined english-speaking learners’ chinese reading strategies. in phase 2, there were slightly more publications, including four in chinese-language journals (luo, 1998; wu, 1999; xu, 1999; yang, 1998), five in english-language journals (everson, 1998; everson & ke, 1997; ke, 1998; mcginnis, 1999; sergent & everson, 1992), and six doctoral dissertations (chen, 1995; good, 1998; lee, 1998; li, 1998; sergent, 1990; zhou, 1999). during this period, chinese-language publications seemed to be random: yang (1998) investigated csl learners’ strategy use and chinese achievement; luo (1998) focused on csl learners’ avoidance strategies in their efforts to learn chinese; xu (1999) attempted to identify types of strategy use from cognitive and psychological perspectives; and wu (1999) described how chinese language learning strategies could inform writing instruction. in contrast, english publications tended to focus on strategies for chinese character learning, except for a few doctoral dissertations which dealt with general strategies (chen, 1995), reading strategies (lee, 1998; li, 1998), writing strategies (good, 1998), or specific types of strategies, such as processing strategies in short-term memory (zhou, 1999). in phase 3, the number of strategy studies written in chinese increased markedly and for the first time surpassed the number of publications in english. in addition, strategy research in chinese publications covered major aspects of chinese language learning, for example, character learning (jiang & zhao, 2001; qiang, 2005; yan, 2004; zhao & jiang, 2002), reading (qian, 2006), speaking (li, 2007; lu, 2005; na, 2007; wu, 2008), and listening (bai, 2007; di, 2007; zhang, 2007; zhou, 2004). in english publications, strategies for chinese character learning appear to be the main focus of research, both in journals (kuo & hooper, 2004; shen, 2005; 2010; yin, 2003) and in doctoral dissertations (arrow, 2004; fu, 2005; kuo, 2000). at the same time, reading strategies (chang, lan, chang, & sung, 2010; thompson, 2008) and factors related to strategy use (sung, 2009; wang, spencer, & xing, 2009) have also been prime topics for research. descriptions of strategies identified by csl/cfl researchers this review found that researchers have described csl/cfl strategies in two ways, either through empirical research aimed at describing the strategies observed to be used by learners of chinese (see table 2) or according to the terminology popularized by second language acquisition (sla) theorists or by lls experts working with other (mostly western) languages (see table 3). a critical review of research on strategies in learning chinese as both a second and foreign language 13 table 2 strategy types defined by csl/cfl researchers strategy descriptions researcher phonological strategies using pronunciation and the tone of a character hayes (1988, p. 188) graphic strategies relying on the visual graphics, the physical resemblance of a character semantic strategies using its meaning to understand a character character networking strategies guessing unknown combinations by either knowing what one of the characters means separately, or by knowing other combinations where the individual characters occur everson & ke (1997, p. 13) unit identification strategies text-based or low-level processing strategies, including previewing, scanning for unfamiliar words, marking the text, using textual resources, using pinyin and/or the english equivalent, applying linguistic knowledge, or using context lee (1998, p. 195) unit assemblage strategies meaning-integration or higher-level processing strategies, including paraphrasing, using background knowledge and personal experience, anticipating, hypothesizing, formulating questions, identifying the main ideas, taking notes, or making a summary graphic and substitution strategies partial graphic cues, radicals and substitution with existing characters in spoken language li (1998, p. 141) syntactic strategies finding out sentence components and word order slowing down, re-reading, skipping strategies comprehending unknown words by reducing reading speed, repeated reading silently/aloud (to cultivate meaning from sound), or ignoring the unknown words. recall-based character writing memory strategies that combine reading, writing, thinking, and revision of characters liu & jiang (2003, p. 61) rote character learning repeated copying of characters elaborate rehearsal strategies self-generated meaningful rehearsal of characters, resulting in deeper processing in memory shen (2004, p. 168) non-elaborate rehearsal strategies rote and repetitive rehearsal of characters, resulting in shallow processing in memory orthographic knowledgebased cognitive strategies making use of the three elements of radical knowledge (graphemics, semantics, and phonetics) as cues to encoding the characters shen (2005, p. 61) table 2 shows descriptions of strategy types provided by researchers who conducted research in a csl/cfl environment. notably, naming of strategies is closely linked with two obvious research foci: chinese character learning and reading. different from alphabetic-based languages, a chinese character consists of sound (phonetics), shape (graphics), and meaning, and lacks an obvious sound-script correspondence. early strategy research either associated strategy descriptions with these three aspects (e.g., hayes, 1988; li, 1998; liu & jiang, 2003; shen, 2005), or reported whatever behaviors were identified xiaoli jiang, andrew d. cohen 14 in studies, such as observable behaviors in ke’s (1998) study or invisible but articulated cognitive processes by participants in studies by everson and ke (1997) and by shen (2004). at the same time, attention to chinese reading also yielded descriptions of certain strategy types. for example, learners’ specific microand macro-level strategies for dealing with actual problems in reading chinese were documented (li, 1998). these labels of strategy categories presented by csl/cfl researchers are not without problems. when shi (2005) referred to orthographic knowledgebased strategies, she indeed meant phonological, graphic, and semantic strategies as first indicated by hayes (1988). similarly, low-level and higher-level processing strategies in lee’s (1998) study were the same as those used in shen’s (2004) study, except that lee focused on reading strategies in general and shen was looking specifically at character memorization. in fact, due to a paucity of research literature in this area, it is difficult to determine the extent to which the strategy types displayed in table 2 constitute an established set of terms that future csl/cfl researchers would employ. in contrast to the work which has focused on strategies emerging from csl/cfl studies, the bulk of the studies have relied for their strategy terminology on the work of sla theorists and that of lls experts. as illustrated by table 3, the most frequently-cited scholars are bialystok (1978), cohen (1998), oxford (1990), o’malley and chamot (1990), rubin (1975; 1981), and wenden (1987). table 3 strategy terms based on the work of sla theorists and lls experts strategy definition researchers quoted csl/cfl researchers formal practice referring to grammar books and dictionaries to help acquire the knowledge bialystok (1978, p. 71) yang (1998) functional practice using the language in communicative situations cognitive using steps or operations in learning or problem-solving requiring direct analysis, transformation, or synthesis of learning materials rubin (1981, p. 119) xu (1999) direct involving direct manipulation of the target language oxford (1990, p. 37) jiang (2000, p. 63) indirect supporting and managing learning without direct manipulation of language metacognitive planning for learning, thinking about the learning process as it is taking place, monitoring of comprehension and production, and evaluating learning after an activity is completed o’malley & chamot (1990, p. 8) yan (2004, p. 6) cognitive focusing on specific learning tasks and more direct manipulation of the learning material itself lu (2005, p. 15) a critical review of research on strategies in learning chinese as both a second and foreign language 15 socioaffective using social-mediated activities and interaction with others language learning identifying the material that needs to be learned, distinguishing it from other material if need be, having repeated contact with the material, and formally committing to memory whatever material is not acquired naturally through exposure cohen (1998, p. 2) li (2005, p. 7) language use involving four subsets of strategies: retrieval strategies, rehearsal strategies, coping strategies, and communication strategies strategies of successful learners use of clarification and verification, monitoring, memorization, guessing/inductive inferencing, deductive reasoning, practice, creating opportunities for practice, and production tasks related to communication rubin (1975, p. 124) qiang (2005, p. 10) the work by lls experts has stimulated csl/cfl research from linguistic, psychological, and socio-cultural perspectives. the linguistic perspective has entailed looking at strategies for chinese language acquisition as viewed from the skill areas: chinese character learning, reading, listening, speaking, and writing. the psychological perspective has focused on patterns of cognitive and metacognitive processing of the chinese language, as well as on affective variables related to chinese language learning. the socio-cultural perspective has looked at the role played by the learners’ background characteristics and how these affect their csl/cfl results. thus, summing up, it would appear that the majority of csl/cfl studies either describe strategies used by csl/cfl learners across the skill areas or introduce theories in llss and/or their implications for csl/cfl work (see table 4). table 4 strategy research in csl/cfl strategy research focus chinese publications english publications journal dissertation journal dissertation other general descriptions of csl/cfl strategies 13 6 3 character learning 7 5 8 3 1 reading 3 1 3 5 1 speaking 1 6 listening 1 5 factors relating to strategy use 5 3 1 1 introduction of strategy theory 5 xiaoli jiang, andrew d. cohen 16 focus of strategy research in csl/cfl the remainder of the article will focus exclusively on empirical research involving strategies for learning chinese. we will consider strategy research on chinese character learning, reading, speaking, listening, and factors relating to strategy use. since vocabulary is strongly associated with character learning, relevant research in this area will be integrated into the chinese character learning section. chinese character learning strategy research. the csl/cfl strategy research focusing on character learning suggests that lexical development is a major concern among researchers. early studies tended to investigate cfl learners’ strategies for character recognition (hayes, 1988; shen, 2004). more recent research presents a diverse profile including the investigation of: general strategies that students use for character learning (chen, 2009; ma, 2007; mcginnis, 1999; shen, 2005; yin, 2003), specific strategies for character learning (kuo, 2000; liu & jiang, 2003; shen, 2010), character learning strategies employed by students from characterbased vs. alphabetic-based languages (arrow, 2004; jiang & zhao, 2001), the effects of csl/cfl learners’ strategy use in character learning (ke, 1998; kuo & hooper, 2004; shen, 2004; zhao & jiang, 2002), strategy instruction and character learning (chen, 2011). the often-quoted hayes’ (1988) study perhaps is the earliest one to investigate students’ strategies in recognizing chinese characters. starting with the premise that the dominant processing strategies would be revealed by the types of errors that the learners made, hayes (1988) designed two tasks to determine whether beginners would be able to correctly recognize the target character that was mixed with phonological, graphic, and semantic distracters. on both tasks, students were briefly presented the target characters. the first task grouped the target character with random individual characters, while the second task wove the target character into a complete sentence. the study found that students used a mixture of visual and graphic strategies in encoding the individual characters, whereas they used the graphic strategies more to identify the target character in sentence contexts. this line of research has continued to be taken by later researchers (e.g., shen, 2010), with a few studies shifting their attention to more general strategy use by csl/cfl learners. notably, mcginnis (1999), yin (2003), and shen (2005) all worked on describing the general strategies used by english-speaking learners in order to a critical review of research on strategies in learning chinese as both a second and foreign language 17 learn chinese characters. mcginnis (1999) conducted a study with 29 first-year college learners of cfl who self-reported their character learning strategies in a 5-week summer immersion program. it was found that students used a range of strategies, including rote repetition, creating personal stories as to how the characters looked or sounded, and the use of radicals and phonetic components to memorize characters. moreover, the first two types of strategies were favored most by students in the study. shen (2005) not only investigated the strategies that were common to 95 english-speaking learners of chinese, but also explored the underlying variables for students’ strategy use. the findings from a questionnaire survey indicated that students used as many as 30 types of strategies for character learning, which were further grouped into two categories: “orthographic knowledge-based cognitive strategies and metacognitive strategies” (shen, 2005, p. 61). finally, yin (2003) conducted a longitudinal investigation of beginning cfl students’ learning difficulties and coping strategies over a 3-year period. it was found that 91% of the participants used the strategy of writing characters repeatedly, 77% memorized character components (radical and phonetic components) or repeatedly read characters aloud with reference to pinyin,4 65% used phonetic components if available in characters, and 62% used flashcards to learn the chinese characters. a further study was conducted among 65 beginning american students as to their chinese character learning strategies, and it was found that their use of graphic strategies (table 2) and memory strategies (focusing on learned graphic components or associating characters with similar radicals) ranked as the top two categories (chen, 2009). in contrast to these larger-scale studies, ma (2007) developed a longitudinal design to investigate the chinese character learning strategies used by one particular csl learner. it was found that the learner’s written errors declined significantly when the number of his written chinese characters reached 4,000. after careful analysis, the author found that except for a stable use of summarizing strategies (e.g., summarizing characters with similar pronunciation, meaning, or graphic features), certain patterns of strategy use emerged: more whole-word strategies than graphic-component cues, pinyin was used to assist in the memorization of characters, at the onset of learning english translation was used, characters were written in words and sentences rather than in isolation, pinyin was used exclusively just at the beginning, giving way to a mixture of pinyin and characters, and then ultimately written characters alone, the manner of reviewing characters developed from an unplanned ap 4 the official system to transcribe chinese characters into the roman alphabet. xiaoli jiang, andrew d. cohen 18 proach to one of careful planning, for example, determining numbers of characters to review, time intervals for revision, and summarizing learned characters with similar pronunciation, meaning, or graphic features, character learning shifted from simply completing homework with the characters to actively copying words and texts. the studies described above indicated that chinese character learning involves considerable use of memorization – a finding which stimulated further study to describe the specific strategies used to enhance character memorization and retention. another assumption affecting the research effort was that learners whose first language (l1) was character-based would possibly have an advantage over those with an alphabet-based system when learning chinese characters. one study that compared american and japanese students’ chinese character learning strategies (arrow, 2004) found that both sets of learners deployed a variety of strategies. nevertheless, the american students in the study favored using flashcards and character association, whereas japanese students preferred to write the characters repeatedly. a similar comparative study (jiang & zhao, 2001) found that while both groups of learners favored whole-word memorization along with the mechanical repetition of the characters, learners from a character-based, mother-tongue background tended to adopt more phonetic-meaning strategies in dealing with chinese. in contrast, those from an alphabet-based l1 background were more likely to use graphic strategies, as well as strategies for reviewing the learned characters regularly. in addition to simply labeling the csl/cfl learners’ strategy use in chinese character learning, a few researchers went further and examined the effectiveness of their strategy use. in ke’s (1998) study, for example, students were asked to compare 11 pairs of character learning strategies. the author found that although the majority of students valued learning and using character components, only 50% thought that the strategy of focusing on the structure of the character structure (radical and phonetic components) was effective. in addition, most students held that memorizing characters as a whole was more effective than identifying recurring parts of the characters. kuo and hooper (2004) investigated the effects of five different character learning strategies employed by five different groups of participants: 1. a translation group given characters with english translations, 2. a verbal coding group given both english translation and a brief verbal description of characters’ etymological origins regarding their components, 3. a visual group given an english translation of the characters and pictures of the concepts, 4. a visual and verbal coding group combining the strategies of the two a critical review of research on strategies in learning chinese as both a second and foreign language 19 previous groups, 5. a self-generated mnemonics group encouraged to create their own memory aids. the researchers found that students in the self-generated mnemonics treatment group performed better than those in the visual coding, verbal coding, and translation strategy groups. at the same time, those in the visual and verbal coding groups outperformed those in the translation strategies group. another study of the effectiveness of strategy use in character learning was carried out by zhao and jiang (2002), who investigated the effect of chinese character learning strategies on 124 nonnative chinese speaking learners. it was found that chinese language use, including making use of the learned chinese characters in conversations or in writing, and summarizing learned characters with similar pronunciation, meaning, or graphic features, appeared to be the most effective. a recent study designed a program of strategy instruction and explored the subsequent effects (chen, 2011). the study revealed that the students’ knowledge of semantic, phonetic, and positional components was potentially important in enhancing their character learning achievement. chinese reading strategy research. early interest in csl/cfl learners’ reading strategies focused on strategies for perceiving and processing of text. since chinese written text has no natural parsing between words, researchers were curious to find out how learners were able to process a text despite the lack of segmentation into word units. for example, everson (1986) examined the effects of artificial word-unit spacing by nonnative readers of chinese at different levels based on the frequency and duration of their eye fixations. it was found that artificial word-unit spacing did not affect cfl beginner readers, but did have an impact on advanced readers. beginning readers were unable to take advantage of the added word-unit segmentation due to lack of lexical knowledge. those advanced readers who had developed perceptual strategies for reading a chinese text without word segmentation actually found this artificial parsing to be somewhat of a hindrance. furthermore, it has been found that parsing of word units is less of an issue for cfl readers than their knowledge of vocabulary. the challenge of vocabulary size has informed a number of studies investigating reading strategies used by cfl learners at different proficiency levels. one study dealing with the reading behaviors of 20 advanced and highly advanced cfl learners found that both reader groups used graphophonic, syntactic, and semantic cues to comprehend the text (sergent, 1990). in addition, as proficiency level increased, the strategy of omitting the unknown parts of the text was seen to xiaoli jiang, andrew d. cohen 20 decrease and substituting the unknown text with something close in meaning increased. a follow-up study (li, 1998) confirmed the findings by sergent (1990) and added the finding that beginner cfl learners also shared similar reading strategies such as using graphophonic, syntactic, and semantic cues to understand the chinese texts. a distinctive difference in the reading strategy use of intermediate as compared to advanced cfl readers was revealed through a study using verbal report (everson & ke, 1997). in this study, seven english-speaking learners of chinese were asked to read a short news article silently and to verbalize those thoughts that might reflect their comprehension of the text. afterwards, they were asked to read the article silently again and then to provide a written recall of the text. the researchers identified the participants’ reading strategies through careful analysis of the verbal protocols. advanced learners were found to use auditory strategies with frequency – for example, reading aloud and under their breath, subvocalization, and focus on pronunciation and remediation of the sounds to assist their reading comprehension. in addition, advanced-level students considered recalling details of the original text a desirable skill and demonstrated their ability to infer the meanings of what were referred to as multi-characters through the use of a “character network strategy” (see table 2). the intermediate-level learners on the other hand were often bothered by unknown characters and uncertain segmentation of word units. further work comparing students at three levels of cfl reading proficiency in chinese was conducted by chang (2010), who also found advanced readers desired to recall everything in writing, which indicated that they were aware of the types of strategies used in order to complete the recall task. another type of study focused on the genre of text. arguing that text genre might influence cfl readers’ strategy use, lee (1998) examined the reading strategies of eight american cfl learners with two different text genres: argumentation and narrative respectively. two broad strategy categories were found through analyzing participants’ think-aloud protocols: unit identification and unit assemblage strategies (see table 2). the study found participants predominantly used unit identification strategies that helped them solve problems encountered at the vocabulary, orthography, and grammatical levels when they were reading. moreover, the more efficient readers did not show a significant difference in either reading strategy types or frequency when compared with less efficient readers. a similar finding was also seen in two different text genres. yet, with their stronger word recognition base and more lexical and syntactic knowledge, more efficient readers demonstrated greater confidence in their decision-making while reading. a critical review of research on strategies in learning chinese as both a second and foreign language 21 whereas the research reviewed with regard to reading strategies generally involved small numbers of participants, qian (2006) designed a questionnaire survey of chinese reading strategies and distributed it to 118 korean intermediate-level learners in china. she reported her participants’ most frequently used strategies to be the following: prediction, use of context, marking the problematic area and skipping, skimming, and browsing the text title and pictures to determine the content. these strategies were in line with findings revealed by lee’s (1998) study of strategies for dealing with text genre. chinese speaking strategy research. it would appear that chinese speaking strategy research is rather limited and only found in chinese publications and concentrated on comparative studies, either comparing students who study in cfl and csl environments (lu, 2005; wu, 2008) or those with different l1 backgrounds (li, 2007; na, 2007). in addition, oxford’s strategy inventory for language learning (sill) seems to be the instrument of choice for all of these studies. using an adapted version of the sill, for instance, lu (2005) investigated 24 american exchange students who joined a 4-week summer program, focusing on their speaking strategies both while in the united states and while in china. the study found that participants reported using l1 avoidance strategies, compensation strategies, accuracy strategies, and metacognitive strategies most frequently in the united states. in china, strategizing about fluency by prioritizing the flow of their speaking, using their l1 to express meanings when necessary, and using other meaning-focused strategies apparently increased, whereas accuracy strategies declined. according to learner report, the reason for this increased use of l1 in china was the increasing difficulty encountered when engaging in oral tasks. similarly, wu (2008) conducted retrospective interviews with four italian students who started chinese language learning in italy and studied in china for three months as exchange students. he found that in the cfl context (italy), the students tended to use prepared dialogues to communicate, whereas in the csl context, they often asked the interlocutor to repeat or explain what they had said, or simply guessed the meaning from context. wu’s conclusion was that in the csl context these students took advantage of the target-language environment and tried to speak more chinese. also employing an adapted version of the sill, both li (2007) and na (2007) compared chinese speaking strategy use by students from asian and western backgrounds. li (2007) investigated 84 beginner csl students’ speakxiaoli jiang, andrew d. cohen 22 ing strategies and found the most frequent strategies to be the social, compensatory, and cognitive strategies. the four strategies that were reported to be the most effective were “trying to notice the oral chinese errors,” “using a dictionary to help understand or speak chinese,” “attending out-of-class events where chinese is spoken,” and “applying grammar to new situations when speaking chinese.” students from a western background reported using more cognitive and fewer affective strategies than those from an asian background. na (2007) compared speaking strategy use by 106 korean, american, and european csl learners, and found that the strategies reported to be used most frequently by all participants were social and metacognitive strategies. korean students reported using more cognitive and affective strategies but fewer memory strategies than their american and european counterparts. it is interesting to note that the speaking strategy research has helped to give prominence to interactions between speakers and their interlocutors, and especially to the dynamics involved when learners are at different proficiency levels (nakatani & goh, 2007). given that csl/cfl research on speaking remains limited to date, it is difficult to make generalizations with regard to the research outcomes. what would be of particular benefit at this point would be more studies that look at the csl/cfl strategies of learners engaged in taskbased interactions. chinese listening strategy research. strategy research on chinese listening appears to be limited to six ma theses done in china and all using the sill to explore three areas: (a) the comparison of listening strategies use reported by cfl and csl learners (h. zhang, 2007) or description of the strategies of csl learners at different proficiency levels (bai, 2007; di, 2007), (b) the relationship between listening strategy use and listening achievement (l. zhang, 2007; zhou, 2004), and (c) listening strategy instruction (yuan, 2005). in an investigation of the listening strategies used by korean cfl learners (in korea) and csl learners (in china), h. zhang (2007) found that the korean csl students reported more of all three types of strategies (metacognitive, cognitive, and social/affective) and with greater frequency than participants in the cfl environment. in both environments, social/affective strategies appeared to be reported most frequently and metacognitive strategies least frequently. data analysis showed that participants in the csl environment reported a higher frequency of use for strategies such as “deduction,” “association,” “prediction,” and “the use of grammatical knowledge” in listening activities than those in the cfl environment. two other studies both investigated csl learners’ metacognitive strategy use in listening among various a critical review of research on strategies in learning chinese as both a second and foreign language 23 levels of csl students and reported that frequency of metacognitive strategy use correlated positively with learners’ proficiency level (bai, 2007; di, 2007). two of the ma studies examined the relationship between csl learners’ general listening strategy use and listening achievement (l. zhang, 2007; zhou, 2004). both studies used a listening test to determine participants’ listening proficiency and grouped them into high achievers and low achievers. in the earlier study, zhou (2004) found that the korean students under investigation reported using social/affective strategies most frequently, followed by metacognitive and cognitive strategies. in addition, there was a significant difference in strategy use between high and low achievers: the high achievers reported using more strategies for analyzing grammar in chinese l2 and the low achievers more l1 strategies (e. g., translating the sentences that were heard into the l1). in the later study by l. zhang (2007), 69 japanese csl students from four chinese universities were reported to have used more cognitive strategies than social/affective and metacognitive strategies. moreover, high achievers on the listening test reported using more monitoring, evaluation, prediction, and questioning strategies, whereas low test achievers reported using more strategies for dealing with new vocabulary. in contrast to the other ma studies, there was one which looked at whether strategy instruction could influence beginnerand intermediate-level csl learners’ listening strategy use (yuan, 2005). the content for strategy instruction consisted of three types of strategies: basic listening strategies, cognitive strategies, and metacognitive strategies. instruction relating to these three types of strategies was delivered in a chronological order for a total of three months. after each strategy instruction session, a posttest was administered to evaluate the strategy instruction by comparing results with those in the pretest. the results were reported as favoring the intervention. while the sill served as a convenient benchmark for comparing listening strategies across the different studies, the fact that different studies used differing criteria in determining their learners’ listening achievement makes it difficult to compare the findings across the studies. individual learner variables relating to lls. the role of individual learner variables has been investigated in csl/cfl strategy research. for example, strategy use has been related to language achievement (lin & lü, 2007; wang et al., 2009), motivation (shen, 2009), cultural patterns (zhang, 2008), and to gender, age, and learner’s l1 as well (li, yao, & liu, 2011; xiang, 2010; yao, 2009). various studies have related reported frequency of language strategy use to language achievement measures. for example, lin and lü (2007) investigated the relationship between students’ strategy use and learning achievexiaoli jiang, andrew d. cohen 24 ment among 120 vietnamese students, using oxford’s sill (1990) and the chinese language test (hsk). they reported that participants in their study demonstrated ineffective use of strategies and no obvious correlations were identified between the two variables. there was some indication, however, that those with higher hsk scores also tended to use memory strategies less frequently and to study independently. another study looked at the relationship between metacognitive beliefs and strategies on the one hand and language achievement on the other (wang et al., 2009). the study took as its point of departure shen’s (2005) chinese character learning strategy questionnaire and added metacognitive beliefs and strategies to the design. the revised survey instrument was administered to 45 english-speaking beginning learners of chinese. the results of the survey were correlated with students’ end-of-term achievement scores in chinese. the researchers found that students’ metacognitive strategies (e.g., setting realistic goals, perseverance at tasks, and monitoring the process) related positively to language achievement. according to wang et al. (2009), higher frequency of metacognitive strategy use was an indicator that the learners were actively engaged in self-regulated learning behaviors. this interpretation of the findings would be consistent with lin and lü’s (2007) finding that those learners achieving higher test scores appeared to be more engaged in independent learning. since the sill was constructed largely with the interest of relating perceived strategy use to other individual variables, it is of little wonder that it became a popular tool for csl/cfl researchers to examine individual variables or clusters of variables relating to learners’ strategy use. shen (2009) integrated motivational items into the sill and investigated 132 cfl learners at three different proficiency levels. it was found that all participants reported that they tended to use social and metacognitive strategies. as the proficiency level increased, both affective and social strategy use were also higher. in addition, integrative motivation was positively related to affective strategy use, and instrumental motivation was positively related to metacognitive and cognitive strategies, but negatively associated with social strategies. another study, also using the sill but with minor adaptations, was conducted in order to investigate csl learners’ strategy use in relation to a number of individual variables such as gender, age, length of time learning chinese, proficiency level, and l1 (li et al., 2011). the researchers administered a survey to 109 csl students and found female participants reported using more direct strategies and strategies associated with the style preference of fielddependence than male participants. they also found that 20-to-30-year-old students (as opposed to those younger than 20 or older than 30) and lowerlevel students reported using more memory and social strategies. in addition, a critical review of research on strategies in learning chinese as both a second and foreign language 25 participants from different l1 backgrounds showed differences in reported use of metacognitive strategies and social strategies. those studying chinese for less than a year reported a tendency to use more indirect strategies. another study found that korean students’ age, gender, length of time learning chinese, and personality were all related to strategy use (xiang, 2010). for instance, being between 18 and 30 years of age, being female, and being a student of chinese for less than 2 years were all variables found to relate to greater communication strategy use. nevertheless, no significant difference in strategy use in terms of gender difference was reported by sung (2009). research methods used questionnaire survey a questionnaire survey appears to be the prevailing instrument used in csl/cfl strategy research. as noted in this review, there have been two approaches to conducting a survey: to use an established, existing questionnaire, such as oxford’s (1990) sill (chen, 2008; gao, 2009; jiang, 2000; li, 2007; lin & lü, 2007; lu, 2005; na, 2007; tao, 2002; wang, 2006; wu & chen, 2006; h. zhang, 2007;) or gu and johnson’s (1996) strategy inventory for vocabulary learning (yan, 2007); or to use a self-designed questionnaire appropriated for the specific research focus (jiang & zhao, 2001; shen, 2005; yin, 2003). as a well-known structured, general strategy questionnaire, the sill was actually constructed in the 1980s, and set out to cover what were then seen as six broad types of strategies: metacognitive, cognitive, memory, compensation, affective, and social. although the sill is in many ways out of date and even out of sync with current thinking (e.g., oxford stopped referring to memory strategies and compensation strategies 20 years ago), the measure has been widely used in csl/cfl research, either directly or with modifications. most studies have used the original 80-item version, with the intention of gaining an overall picture of csl/cfl learners’ strategy use. for example, jiang (2000) simply translated that version into chinese and made minor changes about wording for some statements to avoid misunderstanding. in her study, chen (2008) administered the 50-item version. alternatively, some studies have adapted the sill to investigate specific language skills such as chinese listening (bai, 2007; di, 2007; h. zhang, 2007; zhou, 2004) and speaking (lu, 2005; na, 2007). similarly, yan (2004) found gu and johnson’s (1996) strategy inventory for vocabulary learning to be particularly relevant to her study, but also felt the need to delete or edit some items that were inappropriate for chinese vocabulary strategy research. xiaoli jiang, andrew d. cohen 26 as to the second approach to strategy questionnaires, a small number of researchers have developed their own questionnaire instrument (jiang & zhao, 2001; shen, 2005; yin, 2003). jiang and zhao (2001) designed a chinese character learning strategy inventory, based on classroom observation, interviews with beginner csl students and course instructors, existing literature on language learning strategy research instruments such as the sill, and findings from research on chinese characters (ke, 1998; mcginnis, 1995). the inventory had two broad categories: cognitive strategies (e.g., using strokes, making phonetic-meaning connections, graphics strategies, summarizing strategies, revision strategies, and strategies for using the learned characters in writing and as an aid to speaking correctly5), and metacognitive strategies (planning and monitoring). according to the authors, this was the first quantitative inventory of strategies for chinese character learning. another study of cfl learners’ chinese character learning strategies was conducted by shen (2005). she first used a 12-item, open-ended questionnaire survey to identify the character learning strategies that students reported using on a daily basis. then, based on the 176 responses that she obtained, she constructed a structured, 59-item questionnaire survey that was intended to parallel the regular character learning process and included: questions about strategies for dealing with the introduction of new characters, questions about strategies for enhancing understanding, and questions about strategies for memorizing, practicing, and reviewing characters. it has been observed that chinese character learning is the biggest challenge for beginning cfl learners because it involves considerable memorization (yin, 2003). a questionnaire survey was constructed by yin (2003), focusing on the three elements involved, namely, sound, shape, and meaning. so, along with the major penchant among researchers to use the sill (either original or adapted) as the preferred instrument for obtaining a general profile of csl/cfl students’ llss, there has also been some tendency, albeit limited, to design inventories, especially with regard to the focus on chinese character learning strategies. verbal report verbal report has been used extensively in chinese reading strategy research (everson & ke, 1997; lee-caroline, 1998; li, 1998; thompson, 2008). in 5 for example, students learn (ben) as a quantifier for ‘books’ and use it both in writing and for proper oral communication as well. a critical review of research on strategies in learning chinese as both a second and foreign language 27 everson and ke’s (1997) study, students were asked to read silently a short news article at their proficiency level. then they were asked to provide verbal report about the strategies that they used to comprehend the article. their verbal report data were tape-recorded and analyzed by the two researchers. another study of cfl strategies provided subjects with an orientation to verbal report before the data were collected (lee-caroline, 1998). then, in the process of providing verbal report, participants were free to stop for a break when necessary and use a dictionary whenever they wanted. the researcher herself operated the video camera and took observational notes. if participants remained silent for up to 30 seconds, she would prompt them with questions such as “what are you thinking?” if participants did not verbalize much during the verbal report activity, the researcher would, at the end of a paragraph, ask questions such as “what else did you think?” occasionally other questions were asked at the end of a paragraph or when participants were verbalizing their thoughts, in order to elicit more information (e.g., “how did you guess that?” or “where did you learn this?”). another study used verbal report in a reading and retelling activity in order to identify participants’ cfl reading strategies and their reading difficulties (thompson, 2008). the study included substantial orientation to subjects regarding how to provide the verbal report data. the orientation included instruction, demonstration, and practice before the collection of the data, similar to the procedure in the lee-caroline (1998) study. in contrast to the other verbal report studies, li (1998) asked her participants to read aloud and to provide verbal report at four different times, with an interval of 7-10 days between sessions. as in the other studies, li (1998) held an orientation session before the actual verbal report activity and also allowed participants to use a dictionary or a vocabulary list during their verbal report session. the researcher noted that the subjects’ familiarity with verbal report procedures enhanced the validity of this research method. while in all cases, verbal report sessions were audio/video taperecorded and analyzed, the report of findings from the verbal report data differed from study to study. for example, in the everson and ke (1997) study, after the verbal report protocols were transcribed, two researchers worked independently to identify the reading strategies in the data, and then discussed their findings in order to reach agreement. following a similar procedure, lee-thompson (2008) referred to existing literature on reading strategies to inform the elicitation of reading strategy schemes and categorization. lee-caroline’s (1998) data analysis was more elaborately documented, with provision, for example, for the transcription procedure. after transcribing the protocols, she replayed the video-tapes, checking participants’ actions such as xiaoli jiang, andrew d. cohen 28 consulting a dictionary. afterwards, the transcription was further examined by another colleague. unlike the other researchers, li (1998) used miscue analysis to analyze the participants’ reading strategy use in the verbal report protocols. the data were also analyzed by a colleague to enhance reliability. case studies the case study approach was believed to be effective in documenting individual csl/cfl strategy use from a developmental perspective and therefore was used by some researchers (arrow, 2004; ma, 2007; wu, 2008). for example, to gain richer and deeper information on participants’ unique experiences in the use of strategies for learning chinese characters, the case study approach was adopted in arrow’s (2004) research. descriptive data were gathered through interviews, participants’ study blogs, and the researchers’ own observations. interviews were utilized to gather information on participants’ chinese language learning experiences, their perceived difficulties in the four main language skills, and their reported strategies use in character learning. students were asked to maintain a study blog for a 4-week period. participants were asked to record in writing their reactions, feelings, and thoughts about new characters, as well as to record the strategies that they used in chinese character learning. in addition, the researcher observed the learners’ behavioral responses when new characters were introduced or when they were asked to do tasks involving chinese characters. in another case study focusing on chinese character learning strategies, ma (2007) examined one particular learner’s chinese character learning experience. data were collected using the learner’s notebook, the subject’s character exercise book over 9 months, a chinese character test, and the use of a chinese character learning inventory designed by jiang and zhao (2001). all written characters in a participant’s repertoire were carefully examined to identify character learning patterns, and the ratio of errors occurring per thousand characters in these written characters was considered as a criterion for determining the participant’s stage of development. moreover, a character test involving recognition and naming was administered. the recognition part was based on the material learned in the subject’s textbook and on performance in recognizing 15 new words which contained previously-learned character information. in addition, the subjects responded to the chinese character learning inventory mentioned above. from the researcher’s perspective, the vocabulary test and the questionnaire survey were to further verify the findings based on analyzing the written characters appearing in the students’ notebook. a critical review of research on strategies in learning chinese as both a second and foreign language 29 another approach to case study work involved the investigation of italian students’ csl speaking strategies. drawing from the results of a questionnaire survey administered to 46 italian students who joined a 3-month exchange program in china, wu (2008) focused on four successful learners and used classroom observation, homework, analysis of test data, and interviews as the source for the lls data. the researcher noted that all interviews were conducted by two interviewers, with one questioning while the other took notes and made observations. experiments experimental research was employed by some researchers (shen, 2010; yuan, 2005) to examine the effect of a treatment on students’ strategy use. in order to explore vocabulary learning strategies, shen (2010) designed two treatments, the first involving the use of verbal strategies alone, and the second involving the use of both verbal and imagery strategies. in addition, the first treatment involved the use of concrete words and the second the use of abstract words. after each experiment, students took two vocabulary tests, one immediately after the instruction, the other administered one day later. the first test required students to choose the correct shape of a word (in a set of three similar-looking words) for which an english definition was given. the second test required the students to write out the pinyin and english meanings for a given chinese word. another, earlier example of experimental research with llss was the design of a study to determine the impact of strategy instruction on csl students at two proficiency levels: beginning and intermediate (yuan, 2005). the researcher incorporated three levels of listening strategy instruction into the treatment: basic listening instruction, cognitive strategy instruction, and metacognitive strategy instruction. basic listening instruction consisted of identification of pronunciation and tones, as well as a grammatical components analysis. cognitive strategy instruction included guessing, selective attention, and summarizing strategies. metacognitive strategy instruction involved evaluation and planning. each strategy instruction session lasted for 50-60 minutes, during which time the intended strategies were demonstrated by the instructor, practiced by the participants, and used in new tasks by the participants. when each stage of strategy instruction was finished, a test designed for that stage of the treatment was administered. participants were asked not only to answer the test items, but also to describe the strategies that they had used in order to answer the test items. xiaoli jiang, andrew d. cohen 30 in closing this section, we note that interviews and classroom observation were used as supporting methods in a number of the csl/cfl strategy studies. typically, interviews were combined with questionnaire surveys (e.g., cao, 2010) to clarify and/or elaborate answers to the surveys. alternatively, interviews were used to inform questionnaire design (e.g., li, 2004). at times, classroom observation was used (e.g., li, 1998) to document both teaching and learning activities in order to enhance the researchers’ understanding of participants’ strategy use. overall, while different research methods were used in csl/cfl strategy research, emphasis was given to questionnaire surveys. although some efforts were made to use verbal report, case studies, and quasiexperimental interventions, there appears to be considerable room to include more of these approaches in future csl/cfl research. issues with csl/cfl strategy research lack of research on chinese language learning in general, strategy research in csl/cfl is still in its infancy and only rarely do such studies undergo rigorous scrutiny. clear roots in the lls literature can be seen, especially with regard to the following: the somewhat simplistic classification into cognitive, metacognitive, social, and affective strategy distinctions (cohen, 1998, 2011; o’malley & chamot, 1990; oxford, 1990, 2011; wenden, 1987); the correlation of strategy use with learner characteristics (green & oxford, 1995); the correlation of strategy use with cultural background and strategy use (oxford & nyikos, 1989); the correlation of strategy use with language proficiency and language achievement (hsiao & oxford, 2002); determination as to the effectiveness of strategy instruction (ellis & sinclair, 1989; wenden, 1991, 1999). although csl/cfl strategy research dealing with the above issues has revealed useful findings, nonetheless the majority of the studies seem to rehash the same kinds of findings, rather than yielding new insights into the field. taking listening strategies in lls research as an example, prominence is given to the elicitation of listening strategies using think-aloud protocols, the identification of relationships between strategy use and other variables such as successful listening comprehension and group differences, the examination of how prior knowledge can influence listeners’ strategy use, and the effects of strategy instruction (macaro, graham, & vanderplank, 2007). furthermore, descriptions of a critical review of research on strategies in learning chinese as both a second and foreign language 31 listening strategies tend to be based on “the role they play to facilitate listening comprehension and overall listening development” rather than the common notion of cognitive and metacognitive categorization (vandergrift & goh, 2012, p. 90). nonetheless, research in csl/csl still tends to be focused almost exclusively on reporting students’ use of research categories or confirming students’ strategy use in relation to learner proficiency. it is worth noting, however, three studies that significantly contributed to csl/cfl strategy research. everson and ke’s (1997) proposal of adding an orthographic dimension to bernhardt’s constructivist model (1991) of the reading process has shed light on difficulties in segmenting word units as encountered by csl/cfl learners when reading chinese text. similarly, both jiang and zhao (2001) and shen (2005) developed comprehensive descriptions of chinese character learning strategies, which paved the way for further research. nevertheless, how csl/cfl learners deal with orthographic problems in reading has not been examined. in addition, it would be helpful in future studies to determine the reliability and validity of the two current chinese character learning strategy inventories. although csl/cfl might share some features with other second/foreign language learning, some of the key features of the chinese language distinctively differ from other languages. to name but a few, there are the following: the convergence of graphics, phonetics, and meaning within one character; the complex relationships between stroke, radical, and character; the variation in pitch and tones, with slight differences resulting in a change of meaning; and the lack of natural parsing between words in written text. existing research has just begun systematic examination of the difficulties that csl/cfl learners encounter and the language strategies that they use in an effort to deal with these difficulties. the claim that chinese character learning is the most difficult problem that csl/cfl learners encounter is more an assumption voiced by researchers in the field than a reality validated by empirical study of the learners themselves. csl/cfl strategy research lagging behind general developments in llss while csl/cfl strategy research is seen as an outgrowth of lls, it lags behind in the field of lls because it is not well-informed about the latest theoretical developments in llss. for example, csl/cfl strategy researchers have adopted certain features of the lls theories from the 1980s and early 1990s without checking to determine whether they reflect current thinking. ever since the early strategy research in the 1970s that started with the good lanxiaoli jiang, andrew d. cohen 32 guage learner studies (naiman, fröhlich, stern, & todesco, 1978; rubin, 1975; stern, 1975), research has passed through three stages based on understandings of the term strategy: strategies as a universal tool for all language learners (1970s), strategies as diversified and individualized (1990s), and strategies as situated in certain language learning contexts (2000s). in a comprehensive review of llss, grenfell and macaro (2007, p. 27) concluded that there are three major developments in the field: (a) the focus on “specific examples of strategic behavior in the context of specific tasks and skills,” (b) a shift from the “quantity” of strategy types to the “quality” of strategy use, and (c) careful disentanglement of independent variables such as “stage of learning” and “time of beginning learning” before correlating strategy use and achievement. relating these developments to csl/cfl strategy research, it would appear that most of the studies of learners of chinese do not reflect the distinctions being made in more recent strategy research in the world. except for a few studies (everson & ke, 1997; lee, 1998; thompson, 2008) that have attempted to reveal and explain participants’ strategy use in actual reading tasks, most of the studies have still been focused primarily on descriptions of the frequency of csl/cfl learners’ strategy use in particular language skill areas or general chinese language learning. attention is yet to be given to the most recent advancements in llss. for example, more recent lls volumes (e.g., cohen, 2011; cohen & macaro, 2007; oxford, 2011) have not only summarized lls from different perspectives over the past four decades, but have also proposed new directions. excluding these works disadvantages csl/cfl strategy research in its own development. second, lack of familiarity with existing issues in the lls field has obviated the possibility for csl/cfl strategy researchers of advancing their research to a higher standard. in general, csl/cfl strategy research has not paid heed to the criticisms about following certain research assumptions. for example, “the more types of strategy use the better” claim has already been rejected in lls, which instead has appeared as an interpretation of research findings in csl/cfl research (e.g., l. zhang, 2007). at the same time, the ongoing debate about unresolved issues such as definitions of the term strategy, the accessibility of the construct, and the sophisticated deployment of strategies by successful learners, has not seemed to be of concern to csl/cfl strategy researchers. thus, csl/cfl strategy research still has a way to go in order to advance the field. current issues of debate in llss can serve to provide directions for future research. a critical review of research on strategies in learning chinese as both a second and foreign language 33 issues in research methodology the methodology employed in csl/cfl strategy research has been seen to have weaknesses. the first and most notable potential shortcoming is the overwhelming use of questionnaire instruments, primarily in the form of oxford’s (1990) sill. the problem is that the sole use of large-scale inventories in lls research has been resoundingly criticized. for example, concern has been voiced about the inappropriateness of transferring general lls inventories to another setting or even translating them into another language (cohen, 2011, p. 73; locastro, 1994). similarly, macaro (2001) pointed out that the sill is essentially a tool to check respondents’ frequency of strategy use, but that it is sometimes difficult for respondents to quantify their responses (macaro, 2001). white, schramm, and chamot (2007, p. 95) added their concerns about the limitations of questionnaire instruments. they noted that from the respondents’ point of view, for example, there were difficulties in understanding questionnaire items which deal with reported as opposed to actual strategy use, and that respondents may have problems recalling the actual strategies that they used. these issues obviously need to be addressed in lls in general, and so also in csl/cfl strategy research as well. second, while verbal report has clearly been a significant tool for conducting research on reading strategies of learners of chinese, the way that various researchers have operationalized this tool has varied. this is not so surprising in that verbal report is simply a general approach that can be operationalized in a number of different ways (see cohen, in press). one issue that arises, then, is the extent to which there is consistency across studies in terms of whether and how subjects are oriented as to the process of providing verbal report before the data collection takes place. moreover, caution should be paid to the requirements of tasks and the language used in verbal reports since both may affect participants’ strategy use (macaro, 2001). the directions given to subjects and other aspects of the verbal report tasks (such as the context for the tasks and the goals for learning) need to be explicitly documented (white et al., 2007). moreover, even details such as where to stop and prompt students raises validity questions (white et al., 2007). in addition, a few csl/cfl strategy researchers have engaged in case study research (e.g., arrow, 2004; ma, 2007; wu, 2008) or quasi-experiments (e.g., she, 2010; yuan, 2005). however, good depictions of a case or cases need “thick description” that enables the reader to have a holistic picture of the context where research takes place (gall, borg, & gall, 1996, p. 459). in the studies outlined above, rigorous case procedures were not necessarily followed with sufficient caution. for example, while both arrow (2004) and wu xiaoli jiang, andrew d. cohen 34 (2008) mentioned the use of classroom observations, important elements such as time length, frequency, and an observational guide were not found in their description, which may raise questions as to the reliability and validity of their case study findings. likewise, in ma’s (2007) study, no information was provided as to how the participant’s instructor taught in class, and as to whether the participant had other ways to learn chinese characters aside from the use of the notebook and the exercise book. furthermore, the participant’s own evaluation of the character learning experience was excluded from the write up. it would seem that csl/cfl researchers need to tailor their research designs and methodologies to be more consistent with the significant advances in the field of lls. chineseand english-language publications when comparing chineseand english-language publications on strategy research in csl/cfl, both have their strengths and weakness. chineselanguage publications call attention to a large number of studies in areas relating to language skills. for example, there has been more publication of csl research on learners’ strategy use in listening and speaking in the chineselanguage publications than in english-language publications. nevertheless, a few chinese-language publications are seen to be replications of previous studies rather than creative, original work, and descriptions of the research methods used in these studies are often lacking in detail. according to wu (2004), relevant research done in china has three main drawbacks: (a) there has yet to emerge a study of csl deemed to be seminal in nature; (b) previous studies have been of limited scale, diminishing their status in the field; (c) as of yet there have been no systematic studies investigating strategies csl learners employ in their language learning. the english-language publications have called attention to the quality of research, as reflected in efforts to provide solid theoretical foundations for research initiatives, lengthy descriptions of data collection procedures, and sophisticated analysis of data. unfortunately, most of the strategy research in these publications has focused primarily on chinese character learning and reading strategy use. a lack of strategy research in areas relating to other language skills, learner variables, and the impact of different contexts is evident. moreover, the existing publications are still somewhat limited in number, which would speak for the planning and execution of future studies to fill the gap. another interesting finding is that chineseand english-language publications on strategy research in csl/cfl show that the two sets of scholars remain relatively isolated from one another. chinese scholars primarily cite a critical review of research on strategies in learning chinese as both a second and foreign language 35 publications in chinese and refer only on a limited basis to english-language lls resources. it is possible that many csl researchers have little access to the relevant english-language books and journals. at the same time, englishlanguage publications pay more attention to theories specific to the given research focus rather than to theories that apply to the field of lls as a whole. ke and li (2011) tentatively explained that this was because english-language publications were in the areas with which they were more familiar. implications and conclusions this article has reviewed selected empirical studies on learning chinese that have been published both in english and chinese in an effort to identify major issues in csl/cfl strategy research and suggestions for future research. a brief history of csl/cfl strategy research has been outlined, the research foci presented, methodological issues discussed, major english and chinese publications compared, and future research suggested. over its three decades of development as a field, csl/cfl strategy research has increasingly caught the attention of researchers, and relevant studies have indeed enriched our understanding of the field. yet there is considerable room for further development of this work. first, more work could be done in the area of how encounter with new vocabulary affects csl/cfl readers’ strategy use. it would be helpful, for example, for future research to describe the strategies that both csl and cfl learners use to cope with different types of unknown vocabulary. second, it would be beneficial to revisit the different research methods used in csl/cfl strategy research, paying attention to the potential risks of using them that have been flagged in the general lls literature. for example, self-designed inventories would need to be administered more widely in order to confirm their reliability and validity. third, more than ever the findings from given strategy studies need to be published both in englishand chinese-language publications in order to lend strength to each other rather than appearing in separate venues, read by separate readerships. while existing csl/cfl strategy research has undoubtedly provided insights into non-native speakers’ chinese language learning process, future csl/cfl strategy research could nonetheless draw more attention to current lls theories and practices. a holistic understanding of issues and trends of lls can facilitate relevant csl/cfl strategy research, both in terms of the standards employed and the potential impact of the studies. for example, future research could provide detail as to the specific difficulties that csl/cfl learners encounter at different proficiency levels and the strategies that successful csl/cfl learners use to cope with these encountered difficulties. xiaoli jiang, andrew d. cohen 36 references arrow, j. 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(1999). processing strategies used in short-term memory by japanese and american learning chinese as a second language (unpublished doctoral dissertation). boston university, usa. 93 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (1). 93-109 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl efl learners’ metaphors and images about foreign language learning hadi farjami semnan university, iran zzmhadi@yahoo.com abstract in this paper, i will argue that awareness of images and metaphors held by foreign language learners about the nature of the target language and its learning can be of substantial value and provide teaching practitioners with useful insights about how to deal with various language learning problems. to elicit images which learners hold about foreign language learning, a questionnaire was given to 350 learners of english in different places in iran. the questionnaire asked the respondents to provide images about learning a foreign language by using a sentence completion task: “learning a foreign language is like . . .” the responses gained in 200 questionnaires were content-analyzed and the identified images and metaphors were summarized under more broad-ranging categories. the information that the metaphors and the resulting metaphorical categories provide and the theoretical interpretations which can plausibly be made are discussed in some detail and put in a cognitive-psychological perspective. keywords: conceptual metaphor, foreign language learning, language learners’ images, language learners’ metaphors, learners’ beliefs, metaphor analysis the study of language learners’ beliefs and thought processes has been of interest to researchers for several decades and has recently gathered increased momentum (e.g., berry, 2004; cotterall, 1999; finkbeiner, 2003; fortune, 2005; hawkins, 1999; liao, 2006; svalberg, 2005). direct questionnaires tapping into learners’ beliefs about different dimensions of language learning (e.g., horwitz, hadi farjami 94 1988) have been one of the ways in which learner-internal processes could be explored. another way of exploring the substantive content of learners’ thinking processes is to elicit and look into the images and metaphors which learners construct about language learning. in this elicitation mode, instead of directly asking learners about their beliefs, the researcher asks for concrete comparisons which closely match those beliefs. the advantage of enquiring into learners’ thoughts and beliefs through less explicit means is that the findings are more likely to be authentic and genuinely reveal beliefs and values learners cherish (block, 1992; mcgrath, 2006). when teachers are aware of learners’ beliefs and subjective impressions related to foreign language learning, they can adjust the instructional materials and activities accordingly and bring about more learnercentered teaching. a taste of metaphor studies the inspiration for this study comes from conceptual metaphor theory, which assumes that the underlying nature of our thought processes is metaphorical and we think and act in terms of metaphors (lakoff & johnson, 1980). concerning the role of metaphors in structuring cognition and behavior, lakoff and johnson (1980) contend: in all aspect of life, we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. we draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphors. (p.158) so, in this framework, metaphors are not primarily literary devices but are claimed to permeate almost all domains of discourse and communication (deignan, 2005). gibbs (2011), evaluating 30 years of conceptual metaphor theory, insists that our common figurative verbalizations are instantiations of specific metaphorical entailments arising from a small closed set of conceptual metaphors shared by many people in a speech community. this is basically a reendorsement of the earlier work by lakoff and johnson (1980), who specify a list of such basic metaphors. for example, the conceptual metaphor argument is war 1 can be deduced from linguistic metaphors such as i am sure this position will come under fire from the opposition, and the neighbors agreed to a cease 1 following the norm in the literature for conceptual metaphor studies, this paper uses small capitals to designate conceptual metaphors and categories and italics to indicate metaphorical linguistic expressions. efl learners’ metaphors and images about foreign language learning 95 fire over their lawn ornament argument (lakoff & johnson, 1980, p. 4). or, the conceptual metaphor theories are buildings motivates such expressions as the theory needs to be buttressed or the foundation of the theory is shaky. some studies provide empirical and psychological support for the claim that metaphorical linguistic expressions are fuelled by preexisting patterns of thought or conceptual metaphors (gibbs, 2011; gibbs & o’brian, 1990; nayakk & gibbs, 1990). gibbs, lima, & francozo (2004, p. 1189) take the argument one step further and, through a survey of some american english and brazilian portuguese speakers, offer evidence that conceptual metaphors are, in turn, “fundamentally rooted in embodied action,” as exemplified by the metaphorical conceptualization of desire in terms of huger (i am starved for his affection). while these observations have vast implications beyond the scope of the present study and involve causal and interactive relationships of metaphor, language, and behavior, they also encourage studies of limited scope with the goal of getting insights into the current thinking and behavior of individuals through their metaphors. metaphor studies in language teaching and learning metaphors now constitute a well-recognized area of inquiry in applied linguistics. ellis and barkhuizen (2005) dedicate a whole chapter to “metaphor analysis” (ma) in their seminal book, which details “the main methods of analyzing samples of learner language” (ellis & barkhuizen, p. ix). therein, they review three areas of research in which ma has featured: (a) sla researchers’ conceptualization of their field of study, (b) teachers’ cognitions, and (c) l2 learners’ accounts of their own learning. they justify an agenda for the analysis of language learners’ metaphors as follows: the analysis of the metaphors that l2 learners use to talk about their learning can shed light on how they conceptualize the language they are learning, the process of learning itself and, in particular, the problems and obstacles they experience on the 'learning journey'. metaphors provide 'widows' for examining the cognitions and feelings of learners. because they are usually employed without consciousness on the part of learners they are arguably less subject to false-representation than learners' direct comments about learning (ellis & barkhuizen, 2005, p. 313). some studies have looked at how language teachers conceptualize their practice. a study by briscoe (1991) shows that the metaphors which teachers depend on to make sense of their teaching have a substantial effect on their classroom practice. block (1997), implying a causal role for metaphors teachers hold about their practice, also reports differences in the metaphors teachers use to conceptualize what language learning involves and what their roles as lanhadi farjami 96 guage teachers are. likewise, de guerrero and villamil (2002) elicited and reported metaphors from 22 puerto rican teachers about teachers’ and learners’ roles and called attention to the merits of such information in the professional development of language teachers and the enhancement of their practice. cook-sather (2003) posited that two metaphors dominated the formal educational system in the united states, that is, “education as production” and “education as cure.” in the field of foreign language teaching, herron (1982) identified two basic metaphors driving curriculum theories in foreign language education: “the mind-body metaphor,” in which language learning is viewed as mental gymnastics aimed to strengthen and discipline the learner’s mind and “the production metaphor,” where the aim of language learning was to produce a marketable and skillful workforce. the fact that the metaphors people use reflect their mental worlds and influence the way they see the world and the recognition of the importance of learners’ naïve theories or implicit models about learning (schaw & bruning, 1996) have surprisingly failed to merge in the theoretical thinking of researchers to produce a notable research strand of learner metaphor studies. a few researchers have, however, paid heed to the research potential of learners’ metaphors. one is oxford (2001), who studied the personal narratives of 473 foreign language learners and identified the metaphors they used about three teaching approaches. she reports that these learners varied both quantitatively and qualitatively in the content of the metaphors they employed about teachers and teaching. more process-focused and learning-centered is ellis’s (2002) examination of metaphors in the diaries of six beginner learners of german as a second language. he reports five conceptual metaphors and their entailments, giving examples for the key words related to each metaphor. they are: learning is a journey (e.g., i got hopelessly lost), learning is a puzzle, learning is work, learning is suffering, and learning is a struggle. he suggests these metaphors reveal two main points: learning german was problematic for these learners for cognitive and affective reasons and they constructed themselves as both agents of their learning and patients of experiences they could not control. oxford’s (2001) metaphor study was confined to teaching approaches and ellis’s (2002) study was done with a limited number of participants. moreover, one may wonder how the open-ended diary entries in ellis’s study gave rise to only five conceptual metaphors unless they were selected because of, say, prominence or frequency. these observations, coupled with the fact that similar research is scarce, shows that the study of metaphorical perceptions of foreign language learning is well motivated. efl learners’ metaphors and images about foreign language learning 97 the study2 since metaphors play a significant role in shaping people’s thinking and learning, i set out to study the metaphors language learners hold about the processes involved in their learning, that is, the images they have uppermost in their minds about language learning. according to martinez, sauleda, and huber (2001), mental images and metaphors, as “blue prints of thinking,” have a powerful influence on the perception, the learning process, and mental restructuring of the instructional input. it was hoped that feedback based on learners’ images and metaphors would shed light on the actual processes of learning that take place in the learners’ minds and reveal their conceptualization of the product they are working toward. teachers equipped with some awareness of those images might be in a better position to help in improving learners’ strategies and study skills. in fact, this study is a response to finkbeiner’s (2003) call for teachers’ awareness of language learners’ thought processes and andrew's (2007) advocacy of teachers' increased awareness of language and language related issues. in this study, due to the exploratory nature of its design, the learners of one foreign language, english, were prompted to think of and report the metaphors they held about foreign language learning in general. as different foreign languages may enjoy different status in particular settings and their learning may produce different impressions in learners, the results obtained in this study may be primarily applicable to learning english. however, one cannot rule out that they may also prove very informative about other foreign languages. the instrument the instrument for collecting information about learners’ images and metaphors depicting their conception of learning english was a questionnaire. the questionnaire started with some clarification concerning the purpose of the study and an example of a likely metaphor about learning a foreign language. after requesting some demographic information, the questionnaire asked the respondents to provide images or metaphors about the nature of learning a foreign language by finishing this prompt: “learning a foreign language (for example english) is like . . .” all parts of the questionnaire were in 2 this is a report of a part of a larger study. in addition to what is reported here, the study explored the metaphors and images of english language learners about the four skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing, and the three components of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. hadi farjami 98 persian, the mother tongue of the respondents, except the incomplete sentence. however, it was indicated in the questionnaire that the participants could write their responses in any language they felt more comfortable with. this resulted in answers either in persian or english. the reason the learners were not limited to english was that such restriction could have prevented the free flow of their mental images; otherwise, some learners might have refrained from expressing their images because of embarrassment over the quality of their writing, in spite of being anonymous. participants the researcher and his assistants turned to their own students as reliable participants, the only requirement set for participation being that they should be adult learners of english with at least one year of english learning experience and able to understand the english-medium prompt. responses were requested of more than 350 learners of english and 200 completed questionnaire forms were returned by intermediate and advanced learners of english in private institutes and universities, in seven cities in iran. the age of the participants ranged from 18 to 35, with the majority in their lower 20s, as most of them came from senior ba courses. when it comes to gender, 150 respondents were female and 50 were male. data collection although the written instructions were clearly worded in persian, they were also explained orally when the questionnaire was given to each respondent so that there was a clear understanding as to what s/he was expected to do. practically in all cases the questionnaire was handed to individual respondents in person, either by the researcher or his assistants. the forms were also returned individually. this introduced a bias into this study as the submitted images and metaphors were likely to come from those participants who were relatively enthusiastic about language learning and the images of those with less enthusiasm and less positive attitudes are presumably underrepresented. data handling the output of the questionnaire consisted of responses including images and metaphors about learning a foreign language. most respondents provided only one comparison, but if more than one image or metaphor were provided, they were all taken into account. the responses were read and translated into efl learners’ metaphors and images about foreign language learning 99 english, if in persian, or clear english, if clarification was needed. this review also acted as a familiarization stage and gave the researcher a vantage point over the responses. then, the researcher reviewed the responses to identify images and metaphors. first, specific linguistic metaphors were identified and grouped under descriptive rubrics; next, the specific images were examined and more inclusive and conceptually-oriented categories were identified. because of space limitations only the categories which emerged and descriptive key words from the responses are reported in the results section.3 as these stages of the study were unavoidably highly interpretive, the researcher discussed his interpretations of the remarks and comparisons offered by the participants with applied linguistics colleagues and consulted them about the identified images and metaphors, and the categories which were derived. differences in interpretation were few and a consensus was reached in all cases. the results the researcher and his assistants examined the responses of 200 participants and derived 229 metaphors. however, instead of reporting a rather long list, further analysis was carried out on the identified metaphors to extract more inclusive metaphorical themes, which are displayed in table 1. each cell in table 1 includes a metaphorical theme, the frequency of each theme in the full pool of comparisons, and key words which may elucidate the themes. in spite of abstracting from the collected metaphors, the diversity of the responses is also visible in the metaphorical themes. in the same way that the images in the responses vary from “language is a dish and learners are cooks” and “language is a vehicle and learners are drivers” to “language is artwork and learners are artists,” the metaphorical concepts and categories vary from food, cooking, eating to arts and aesthetics. some images are vivid and concrete: “learning a foreign language is like eating spaghetti” or “learning language is like climbing a ladder;” some are less so: “learning a language is like attaining a more meaningful life.” table 1 themes emerging from learners’ images and metaphors about learning a foreign language in order of frequency 1. exploration (56) new, strange, new lands, new window, visiting another plan2. sports and physical activity (28) play football, diving, flying, wish to fly, mountain 3. journey (22) unknown rough road, foreign land, travelling in a ship, travel4. food, cooking, eating (19) how to cook, tasting new foods, sweet, 3 interested readers and researchers are warmly invited to contact the author for the full list of linguistic metaphors and their entailments. hadi farjami 100 et/heaven, wandering, palace with many rooms, strange city, new horizons, opening a door/window to a new world, new people, touring unexplored area, roald dhal's giant peach, landing on the moon/a planet, inside a volcano climbing (hard but pleasant), swimming in the sea, climbing up a hill/ladder/peak/knotted rope, diving into shallow water (hard and painful), climbing a log (easy), bike race, increasingly heavier weights, monkey bars ing abroad, winding path, planning a trip, (never ending) travel/voyage sugar, bitter poison, eating a red/delicious apple/ice-cream/, drinking sweet cool lemon/fruit juice, water, quench, sweet as candy, cooking a dish, chef 5. personal growth, identity renewal (15) becoming a new person, rebirth, new personality, born again, metamorphosis, from worm to butterfly, new character/new identity/life 6. fun and entertainment (12) flying in the sky, cool exercise, pleasure trip, scuba diving, ecstasy feelings, computer game, roller coaster, blowing bubbles, sugar cubes 7. communication bridge (10) bridge between islands/cultures, link, communication gadget, new code, talking to aliens, satellite dish 8. music (9) learning to play guitar/piano, strange music, listening to good new music, new musical instrument 9. problem solving (10) unlock doors, key, doing/solving a puzzle/mysteries, tracing a maze 10. object, machine (7) soft silk; tough/hard steel, using a tool, clock moving in stages 11. friendship and emotional satisfaction (7) making (new) friends, finding old friends, joining a club 12. advantage and opportunity (6) spare tire, key to success, craft for survival, trump card 13. light (6) a bridge to a light source, rays of sun, opening eyes to light, candlelight, turning up a dimmer 14. quest for knowledge (4) drink [thirst for knowledge], quenching thirst, water, large library waiting for readers 15. arts, aesthetics (5) arranging flowers, learning a craft, decoration 17. baby experience (5) baby enjoying talking, child learning to speak, curious baby 18. search for meaning in life (3) shedding new light on life, larger/meaningful world 19. driving (4) learning to drive (first slow, then fast; first appalling, then pleasing), traffic rules 20. school subject (3) harder than math/physics, learning math 21. awe and wonder (3) vast ocean, strange 22. fight/battleground (2) strong weapon, defense/fighting tool 23. construction work (2) building a skyscraper, toy house of sugar cubes respondents: 200 total images: 229 note. the numbers within parentheses refer to the frequency of the respective themes in the total identified images of 229. some respondents provided more than one image and, in a few cases, some images were placed in two categories. however, the majority of the respondents provided only one metaphor. the words listed under each theme are primarily meant to make that theme more meaningful by revealing the original comparisons in the fewest words possible. efl learners’ metaphors and images about foreign language learning 101 exploration tops the list of metaphorical themes which were derived from the images and comparisons the learners offered as a description of foreign language learning. this theme is evident in images such as “language is a strange land” or “language is a window or door to new space.” other themes to which the participants frequently referred include sports and physical activity, journey, food, cooking, eating, and personal growth. as is briefly discussed below, these metaphors may encourage speculation about certain educationally important tendencies in the cognitive and affective domains. it is also worth noting that some learners might have given only one of several alternative visual and metaphorical clues to their conceptualization of language learning. discussion: a journey into the minds of a group of foreign language learners as gerjets and hesse (2004) argue, learners’ activities are largely governed by their conceptions and theories of learning, an important part of which are metaphors. likewise, the images and metaphors learners provide about learning a foreign language and the themes that emerge can be revealing about various aspects of the endeavor they are coping with. among other things, they can show the level and type of motivation that drives learners, the attitude they take to language learning and/or the learning strategies they may prefer. this insight has the potential to enhance language teaching practice because the informed teachers can advise learners who hold images symptomatic of misunderstandings about language skills and components and encourage images which are in line with efficient language acquisition. teachers will also know when it is necessary to work for a perspective change in learners to help sustain learning effort. the benefits of this awareness can be both “instrumental” and “transformative,” to use a dichotomy by mezirow (as cited in johnson & nelson, 2010, p. 36). according to johnson and nelson (2010), learning in the context of a foreign language classroom can happen on two levels: students may learn the content and skills; they may also critically reflect on their own assumptions about learning and try to make sense of information in relationship to the real world and themselves, a process which may lead to “perspective transformation.” the aim of this research was to explore the images and consequently conceptualizations english language learners hold about the nature of learning a foreign language. this was based on the conviction that learners’ metaphors and images, because they both construct and constrain thought, can function as a window to view their belief systems. the analysis of their visualizations reveals that some learners are very naïve in their personal theories, while some seem to have a well-wrought system of beliefs about language learning hadi farjami 102 and its entailments. in what follows these images are discussed in terms of findings about the cognitive and affective processes in language learning. although it is hard to separate the metaphors and concepts they yielded into two distinct groups based on affect-cognition dimensions, as most concepts and images include both, one may think that these are two valid forces behind the images and concepts. for example, music, fun and entertainment and friendship and emotional satisfaction images, especially as they are realized in these learners' metaphors, tend to point to the affective significance of learning a foreign language; while those subsumed under exploration, and food, cooking and eating and problem solving tend to mirror cognition, and light and personal growth metaphors (“language learning is expanding our living space”) may be said to represent something of both aspects of foreign language learning. a striking point about the images these learners hold is that they have a very positive attitude toward learning a foreign language and, as they are all students of english, one can safely say, toward learning english. some seem to express direct endorsement and interest; that is, the images which fall in the categories of friendship and emotional satisfaction, advantage and opportunity, and many images in food, cooking and eating, sports and physical activity, personal growth, fun and entertainment, and light. some are more pragmatic and, although they do not praise directly, imply a dynamic route of learning. for example, a student who regards language learning as exploration is likely to adopt an active role and be autonomous as a language learner. what is more interesting and promising is that the majority of the images seem to point to some noninstrumental drives in the learners. many of them show integrative tendencies, for example when they consider foreign language learning a journey or a link to other cultures or when they compare the language learner to a baby learning to speak. but most of the metaphor sets and images of these learners seem to have other intrinsic and more personal forces behind them. among the images which support this conclusion are those included in sports and physical activity, music, problem solving, and advantage and opportunity. of course, these are only general tendencies; many images and categories include both instrumental and integrative elements, their common denominator being an unspecific positive attitude. on the other hand, there are a few images of “hardship” or “suffering,” which may not be beneficial to learning. for example, such comparisons as “learning a foreign language is like bitter poison” or “pain” show either a strong aversion or considerable difficulty perceived by the learners expressing them. a first impression of the researcher was that some of the responses to the sentence completion task and the images they conveyed were focused on the process of learning, some on its end product, and a few others were hard efl learners’ metaphors and images about foreign language learning 103 to interpret in this regard. however, the point is that many learners may have metaphors for both language and learning. moreover, it is difficult to categorically judge an image to be process-focused or product-focused. nevertheless, looking at the images subsumed under the themes in table 1, one can still be inclined to conclude that the two orientations exist in some measure because some learners had the product foregrounded in their imagery while others foregrounded the process. however, regardless of the question of identification and dichotomizing, encouraging imagery with a process dimension, that is, “learning is like climbing up a hill” or “learning a language is like learning to use a tool,” should be a concern of teachers interested in bringing about language awareness in learners and using meta-cognitive awareness to enhance learning. this seems of great import and, as svalberg (2007) reports, a number of studies support the notion that awareness directs attention and noticing and hence memory and learning. to this end, a mental image with a process dimension might serve as a road map or a guiding principle which affects the actions and strategies learners take when they think of the objectives of learning. in other words, the images and metaphors learners hold might heuristically inform their actions and give them a sense of orientation. different learners may have different process images and it certainly matters whether or not those images are attuned to how people learn; but, probably, even more important than correspondence of learners' comparisons to brain mechanisms is that process images might help learners make personal sense of their effort and help them see a rationale for it. top among the conceptual metaphors generalized from specific comparisons is that of exploration. out of 229 images, 56 depict foreign language learning as an exploratory endeavor. related to exploration, journey metaphors also rank high (n = 22) in the elicited imagery of these learners. many images under exploration and journey seem to express, among other things, learners' sense of agency and the accumulative nature of learning a language and are, therefore, worth encouragement. as a journey, learning does not happen in one go or overnight. when one wants to go on a journey or expedition, one should brace for different situations, which may be sometimes exacting and tough and it is, therefore, very unlikely that holders of journey metaphors would expect to learn a foreign language by memorizing a set of rules and a number of vocabulary items. as with making any serious journey, holders of and believers in such images would do, or are currently doing the spadework, gear themselves up for the language learning voyage, expect to occasionally cross rough lands and move on bumpy and winding roads, sometimes in foul and not so agreeable weather, even in terrible gales. in addition to the cumulative nature of journey and exploration, the fact that the travelerhadi farjami 104 explorer learner is dynamically situated at the center of learning also supports the constructivist nature of thinking behind these sets of metaphors, a point which can also be made about some other images, particularly those under personal growth and search for meaning. personal growth and identity renewal metaphors can be discussed as humanistic conceptualizations of language learning. the development of a subidentity as a foreign language learner and the enhancement of his/her selfimage in that role may be the main thrust of and a favorable condition for learning grammar, vocabulary and other components (see mercer, 2011). hence, teachers might consider strengthening and spreading images related to personal growth and search for meaning, which are infrequent in the responses here. to bring the discussion section to a close, we should recognize how difficult it is to interpret the data and results obtained in this study. on the one hand, it does not sound advisable to try to fit the themes which emerged or even the specific images into sweeping interpretations. for one thing, subjectivity is a prominent feature of these data from their very conception and development in the learners, to their expression on paper and their interpretation and categorization by the researcher. on the other hand, one cannot help identifying several strands and tendencies. one is an affective strand. many of these images about language learning may imply positive or negative attitudes and the expression of ease or difficulty, fear or attraction or pleasure or pain as seen by those who offered them. another observation may be that the images and metaphors reveal different beliefs about the interpersonal and interactive nature of language learning and use. related to this is the impression that some images make us think that their authors probably follow an instrumental and utilitarian interest rather than an integrative one. one may also ponder the degree to which the metaphors expressed by these participants tend to reflect a constructivist view of language learning. although many are hard to interpret in this regard, we may suspect the absence of a strong constructivist element running through the images. these or similar impressions, of course, must be supported by further probe of the learners and considered in the light of more circumstantial evidence before specific decisions about practice could be taken. when the language teaching practitioners have a clear situated understanding of the imagery of the learners, they can capitalize on it by attuning their teaching, that is, their presentation, examples, explanation, and so forth, to learners’ metaphors and prove to be more down-toearth. or, in case they see there is more to what they want to teach than what the current learners’ images allow, they can engage the learners in reflection on learning by challenging their images and offering and fostering alternative ones. for example, encouraging images with a strong constructivist element, efl learners’ metaphors and images about foreign language learning 105 such as the one in “learning a vocabulary item is like the growth of a plant” or “the development of an embryo,” can make a difference in shaping the way learners tackle different challenges involved in vocabulary learning. conclusion and practical implications this study can be a step in raising awareness about pictures or comparisons which learners develop for foreign language learning. even if we make light of the idea that thinking is highly visual and learning and conceptualization rely on mental images (solso, maclin, & maclin, 2008), the metacognitive consequences of the pictures which learners construct are significant. there is a growing sense among many applied linguists that learners’ beliefs about learning and what they learn can have serious emotional, attitudinal and cognitive consequences (e.g., aragao, 2011; arnold, 1999; cotterall, 1999; kalaja & barcelos, 2003). teachers’ awareness of these pictures is necessary because they are the usual initiators and facilitators of change in learners. learners’ awareness of these pictures is also valuable because they are the most important agents in the learning process. identifying, evaluating and critiquing these pictures according to established ideas about foreign language learning can offer educational rewards. a major reason can be the fact that the conceptual metaphors of learners affect, among other things, their learning and problem-solving strategies in the respective domains (mcewan, 2007; paavola & hakkarainen, 2005). although at very elementary levels the learners may react reflexively and limit themselves to external input provided by the instructors, they soon advance to a reflective mode and begin to think about what they are exposed to. this is because, in all the areas of their mental world, they conceive mental embryos and start growing intellectual seeds of their own. in other words, they do not just absorb teacher's knowledge and keep it for a long time. rather, they soon begin appropriating external knowledge and then interpret everything in terms of that appropriated internalized knowledge. if, for any reason, personal conceptualizations of learners do not match the reality of the subject of study, their learning will be adversely affected. with metaphors and mental images as guiding signposts for learners’ thinking and conceptualization, the learning process can be understood as a process of metaphor or image change; in a pedagogy giving such a pivotal role to images, one important task of the teacher would certainly consist in facilitating the development of images that generate new learning or correct the existing learning. a useful application of this study is for teachers to probe the foreign-language-related imagery of learners and then provide positive or negative feedback according to the results of their probes. one technique for eliciting hadi farjami 106 metaphors and images can be the one employed in this study; the teacher can ask the learners to compare the subject s/he wants to raise their awareness of with concrete and familiar objects or concepts. forming a pool of studentgenerated images and metaphors, they can then evaluate them as well as those suggested by the teacher for “goodness of fit” and come wiser out of the discussion. the teacher can be more prescriptive and set his mind on a particular metaphor and present it in the form of an illustration, photo or even short story and then relate it to the subject or concept he wants to teach or to teach about. eliciting and offering metaphors and building on the sense of excitement that probably emerges can be a useful strategy, especially during the opening sessions, for different skills courses, so that the learners have a better understanding of the nature and goals of those courses and remove their likely false beliefs and expectations about them. this teaching strategy can also be given a place in teacher training courses, not only for establishing the right conceptualization about the ways language skills and components may be taught but also for making sure the trainees themselves are not misconceived about language skills and components and their learning entailments. material designers’ efforts might also be enhanced by taking learners’ metaphors into account and having image formation on the instructional agenda. they can design language awareness lessons and exercises using a host of images for learners to analyze and connect the features of the images to the objectives of the lessons, for example, developing skimming skill. they can also provide examples of skimpy or misleading images so that the learners correct themselves if they are holding similar ones. authors of grammar or vocabulary course books as well as teachers can be more effective by resorting to this awareness-raising strategy at the orientation stages of their output. for example, they can compare a vocabulary item or a grammar rule to plants and embryos, which do not come into being overnight but develop gradually, and thus discourage rote learning and list memorization. of course, the speculation that teachers and other practitioners can change the metaphors learners hold and by doing so make the learners more effective remains to be substantiated by research. further research this study explored images and metaphors about learning a foreign language in a specific cultural context. certainly, there is a lot of room for further research beyond this small set of metaphors elicited from a limited number of learners in rather similar settings. interested researchers may like to obtain more generalized metaphors and images which are stable across different learners and settings, a goal which requires a much larger number of particiefl learners’ metaphors and images about foreign language learning 107 pants. they may want to seek images from different age groups and explore the similarities and differences and look for reasons behind the variation. they may also like to extend the comparisons to different cultural or linguistic contexts. for example, the present researcher aspires to elicit metaphors and mental images learners of arabic as a foreign language hold about the arabic language and the skills and elements they are learning and juxtapose them with those provided by learners of english as a foreign language. exploring and understanding the metaphors of struggling language learners and empirically testing the effect of intervention to guide learners' metaphorical metacognition can also be a valuable contribution. another interesting project could be exploring the imagery of good, successful language learners. the cognition and/or motivation of successful people might be characteristically picturebased, in the same way that, according to nhk world (japanese public broadcaster) documentary aired on october 15, 2010, the visual motto “tall oak trees grow from little acorns” helped herbert c. brown and akira suzuki win the nobel prizes for chemistry in 1979 and 2010, respectively. hadi farjami 108 references andrews, s. 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(2007). language awareness and language learning. language teaching, 40(4), 287-308. 607 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (4). 2021. 607-627 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.4.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt accuracy order in l2 grammatical morphemes: corpus evidence from different proficiency levels of turkish learners of english erdem akbaş erciyes university, kayseri, turkey https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2204-3119 erdemakbas@erciyes.edu.tr zeynep ölçü dinçer hakkari university, turkey https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3680-3986 zeynepdincer@hakkari.edu.tr abstract the present study empirically scrutinizes the fixed natural order of grammatical morphemes relying on a manual analysis of an efl learner corpus. specifically, we test whether the accuracy order of l2 grammatical morphemes in the case of l1 turkish speakers of english deviates from krashen’s (1977) natural order and whether proficiency levels play a role in the order of acquisition of these morphemes. with this in mind, we focus on the (in)accuracy of nine english grammatical morphemes with 2883 cases manually tagged by the uam corpus tool in the written exam scripts of turkish learners of english. the results based on target-like use scores provide evidence for deviation from what is widely believed to be a set order of acquisition of these grammatical morphemes by second language learners. in light of such findings, we challenge the view that the internally driven processes of mastering grammatical morphemes in english for interlanguage users are largely independent of their l1. regardless of l2 grammar proficiency in our data, the observed accuracy of some morphemes ranked low in comparison with the so-called natural order. these grammatical morphemes were almost exclusively non-existent features in participants’ mother erdem akbaş, zeynep ölçü dinçer 608 tongue (e.g., third person singular –s, articles and the irregular past tense forms), thus suggesting the influence of l1 in this respect. keywords: grammatical morpheme; second language acquisition; natural order; learner corpus; english as a foreign language 1. introduction the focus of second language acquisition (sla) research involves scrutinizing and gaining an understanding of the development of learners’ linguistic competence in the target language (tl). as stated by goldschneider and dekeyser (2001), researchers also strive to establish how similar these processes are in the first and second language (l1 and l2, respectively). exploring the developing interlanguage systems with respect to grammatical morphemes (such as –s added to nouns to mark plurality or –ing added to the main verb to mark the progressive aspect), morpheme order studies have received considerable attention from sla specialists (goldschneider & dekeyser, 2001; luk & shirai, 2009). even though there has been a body of research supporting the assumption that l2 grammatical morpheme acquisition in english by different l1 learners is bound to a universal order minimizing the influence of the mother tongue, the universality of a natural order for grammatical morphemes in l2 nevertheless appears to be insufficient to explain the development of these grammatical features for some l1 learners of english (e.g., for l1 spanish, demarta dabove, 2014; for l1 japanese, nomura, 2012; for l1 korean, seog, 2015). for instance, in a recent study, murakami and alexopoulou (2016) reported that the accuracy order of grammatical morphemes in the exam scripts of learners from miscellaneous l1 backgrounds (i.e., spanish, french, japanese, russian, korean, german and turkish) with different proficiency levels manifested a striking similarity within the same l1 but varied across various l1 backgrounds. as empirical evidence in many studies has suggested (e.g., haznedar, 2007; jia & fuse, 2007; luk & shirai, 2009; nomura, 2012; seog, 2015), variation in accuracy across different l1s could be linked to the challenge of mastering particular grammatical morphemes for some l1 backgrounds. for example, learners from a -article l1, such as japanese or turkish, might have difficulty in acquiring a +article l2 such as english. moreover, the dichotomous categorization of languages such as +/article could lead researchers to make overgeneralizations about languages and prevent them from noticing potential differences between languages of the same type, such as japanese and turkish. although turkish lacks an explicit article system, such as that used in english, it is different from japanese as well. accuracy order in l2 grammatical morphemes: corpus evidence from different proficiency levels of. . . 609 more specifically, indefinite articles are not obligatorily marked in turkish. in addition, while turkish has an indefinite article which is not always used for genericity, japanese has no articles at all (snape et al., 2013). keeping all of these points in mind, it is necessary to undertake research focusing on individual languages in order to learn more about the morpheme order in l2 acquisition. thus, the present study was conducted to identify the accuracy order of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in l2 english by turkish learners and to determine whether this order is identical to the natural order (no) as proposed by krashen (1977) and subsequently supported by many other researchers (e.g., mitchell & myles, 2004; saville-troike, 2006). in doing so, we hope to contribute to both sla research and the sparse literature exploring how turkish speakers of english employ grammatical morphemes, also taking into account different proficiency levels. 2. literature review grammatical morpheme studies are empirical investigations which focus on the acquisition and development of grammatical morphemes by native and non-native speakers. by doing so, they substantiate and support the arguments about the existence of the no of acquisition followed by l1 and l2 speakers. the groundwork in this field was laid by brown (1973), who was the first to scrutinize the existence of such an order in l1 learning. this line of inquiry was then expanded through similar studies conducted with l2 learners. the main idea was to determine whether the order of grammatical morphemes remains similar to that of l1 english speakers irrespective of learners’ l1 backgrounds. dulay and burt (1973), for instance, explored the order of acquisition of eight grammatical morphemes, ranging from the present progressive –ing to the auxiliary be, among l2 english learners with different l1s. their assumption was that the order of morpheme mastery would be universal in l2 english as well. relying on the accuracy with which the grammatical morphemes were used, they found that the acquisition order was similar among l2 learners but it differed to some extent from that originally proposed by brown (1973) for l1 speakers of english. the findings triggered the idea that there could be a universal order in the acquisition of the english grammatical morphemes by l2 learners. in line with this view, krashen (1977) reviewed the related literature on grammatical morpheme acquisition in english by l2 learners and proposed a model which he called the natural order by combining and grouping some grammatical morphemes as shown in figure 1. this model was further elaborated in the work of many other researchers (see luk & shirai, 2009). bailey et al. (1974) explored the natural order of acquisition in adult interlanguage by examining erdem akbaş, zeynep ölçü dinçer 610 the use of grammatical morphemes by adult spanish (n = 33) and non-spanish (n = 40) learners of l2 english. the non-spanish learners were a cohort of participants from eleven l1 backgrounds, such as afghan, arabic, chinese, greek, hebrew, italian, japanese, persian, turkish, thai and vietnamese. the data were elicited by means of the bilingual syntax measure, which was originally used with children by burt et al. (1973). the results showed that both the spanish and the non-spanish learners followed the same order of acquisition of english grammatical morphemes, which was as follows: (1) progressive –ing, (2) copula be, (3) plural –s, (4) articles, (5) auxiliary be, (6) past irregular forms, (7) third person singular –s, and (8) possessive –s. this order was claimed to be quite similar to the pattern followed by l1 english-speaking children. it was highlighted that the mother tongue does not have a significant effect on the acquisition order for grammatical morphemes. in addition, it was suggested that the effects of classroom learning in the case of adult learners could be improved by following a natural syllabus. figure 1 clusters of grammatical morphemes in l2 proposed by krashen (1977) this idea has been challenged by various researchers examining data from different l1 backgrounds. for instance, murakami and alexopoulou (2016) tested whether the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes in l2 english is stable or varies depending on the l1 background or proficiency level. one of the aims of their study was to establish whether the lack of a grammatical morpheme in l1 could result in a lower level of accuracy in the tl. taking into consideration six most commonly studied grammatical morphemes (i.e., articles, past tense –ed, plural –s, possessive –s, progressive –ing and third person singular –s), they investigated the accuracy of their use in the exam scripts of seven different groups of english l2 speakers (japanese, korean, spanish, russian, turkish, german and french) taken from the cambridge learner corpus. they clustered the morphemes within each l1 background and found that they did not seem to be in harmony with the no hypothesis put forward by krashen (1977). they also made a range of valuable observations with respect to the order of acquisition of specific morphemes across various l1 groups. as an example, articles appeared to be ranked consistently low in the texts of japanese, turkish, korean and russian learners of english, whereas the other groups had a higher accuracy rank. another deviation from the no concerned the past tense –ing plural –s copula be auxiliary be articles irregular past regular past –ed third person singular –s possessive –s accuracy order in l2 grammatical morphemes: corpus evidence from different proficiency levels of. . . 611 –ed ending, which korean and turkish learners used quite consistently in the highest cluster in contrast to those with other l1 backgrounds. this indicates that the mastery of particular morphemes appears to vary depending on the mother tongue of the learner, which casts doubt on the results of bailey et al. (1974). although comparative studies concerned with learners having different l1 backgrounds provide insights into the effect of an l1 on the order of acquisition, focused research investigating the no of learners with a specific l1 background is required to scrutinize the potential effects of the linguistic features of an l1 on no in an l2. recently, such research has investigated the no in the case of l2 learners of english with such l1s as spanish (demarta dabove, 2014), korean (seog, 2015) and persian (ghonchepour et al., 2020). however, so far no such study has been carried out with l1 turkish learners of english to shed light on the factors that might cause deviation from krashen’s (1977) no and the findings of empirical investigations conducted in specific contexts. table 1 comparison of three recent l1-specific grammatical morpheme order studies with krashen’s no krashen’s (1977): no for l2 acquisition demarta dabove (2014): spanish efl learners seog (2015): korean efl learners ghonchepour et al. (2020): persian efl learners progressive –ing plural –s copula be auxiliary be articles irregular past regular past –ed 3rd person singular –s possessive –s articles copula be plural –s progressive –ing possessive –s auxiliary be irregular past regular past –ed 3rd person singular –s copula be plural –s irregular past regular past –ed progressive –ing possessive –s auxiliary be 3rd person singular –s regular past –ed auxiliary be copula be progressive –ing articles plural –s possessive –s irregular past 3rd person singular –s note. no = natural order table 1 shows a comparison of the results of studies which have explored grammatical morphemes included in krashen’s (1977) no, focusing on specific l1 backgrounds, with the exception of seog’s (2015) study, in which articles were left out. the order of grammatical morphemes based on their target-like usage (tlu) scores and accuracy orders by l1 spanish, l1 korean and l1 persian speakers of english did not provide full support for the universality of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes. this is also supported by the spearman rank order correlations performed to see how much the order of morphemes in these studies deviates from that proposed by krashen (1977). the correlation coefficients were respectively .58 (p > .05) between krashen (1977) and demarta dabove (2014); .50 (p > .05) between krashen (1977) and seog (2015); and .38 (p erdem akbaş, zeynep ölçü dinçer 612 > .05) between krashen (1977) and ghonchepour et al. (2020), the last of which showed no significant relationships. we also computed spearman’s rank order correlations between the orders of demarta dabove (2014) versus seog (2015) (r = 0.64, p > .05); demarta dabove (2014) versus ghonchepour et al. (2020) (r = 0.20, p > .05), and seog versus ghonchepour (r = 0.23, p > .05), but this did not yield any statistically significant correlation, either. the study by seog (2015) evidenced that the acquisition order can be violated within the same group, even though the participants shared the l1. similarly, demarta dabove (2014) found that learners at different levels of proficiency follow different patterns regarding accuracy in the use of english grammatical morphemes. therefore, we attempt to challenge the idea of “a predictable series of benchmarks” (kwon, 2005, p. 2) by seeking to understand how these morphemes emerge in a particular group of learners from the same l1 background, that is, turkish. to the best of our knowledge, not much is known about the extent to which l1 turkish learners produce grammatical morphemes in line with the no. in view of the lack of research specifically focusing on the acquisition of grammatical morphemes by turkish efl learners, the researchers, as l1 turkish speakers of english, have decided to shed more light on this issue. the current exploratory study therefore focuses on depicting the observed accuracy-based acquisition order of grammatical morphemes of l1 turkish learners of english, who constitute one of the least represented populations in l2 grammatical morpheme studies. with this purpose in mind, the research project adopted a corpus approach and examined the written tl production of l1 turkish learners of english. the scarcity of comprehensive studies focusing on the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in english by l1 turkish learners was the central motivation for the present research, which has the potential to contribute to the existing empirical evidence, also taking into account variable tl proficiency levels. 3. the study in line with the purpose of the study, the acquisition of english grammatical morphemes, which are copula be, progressive –ing, auxiliary be, plural –s, possessive –s, 3rd person singular –s, articles, regular past –ed and irregular past, is examined by addressing the following research questions: 1. how accurate are l1 turkish learners of l2 english in employing these grammatical morphemes in their written production? 2. what is the accuracy order of the acquisition of these grammatical morphems in the case of l1 turkish learners of english? 3. to what extent does the identified order align with krashen’s no for l2 english? accuracy order in l2 grammatical morphemes: corpus evidence from different proficiency levels of. . . 613 4. are there any differences in the order when different tl proficiency levels (high/low achievers) are considered? 3.1. corpus the data set of the present exploratory study came from the exam scripts of freshman students in an english language teaching department at a state university in turkey, who intended to teach english after their four-year university education. before entering the department, they were required to take a four-skills proficiency exam developed by the local testing office of the university or achieve at least the b2 level of the cefr in an internationally accepted exam (such as toefl, ibt, pte academic). if this condition was not met, they had to study english in the university’s preparatory school for at least a year and take the same exams yet again until they could get the required score. on the basis of their level of success in this exam, they can be categorized as upper-intermediate independent users of english at the b2 level. the first version of the corpus of turkish english exam scripts (tees) was compiled by the present authors in 2019 from written exams in one of the core classes, that is, advanced reading and writing i (available from akbaş & ölçü dinçer, 2021). each student responded to two timed argumentative writing tasks in two different exams (midterm and final exams) in their first term in the department. the specialized learner corpus included 136 exam scripts, totaling just over 20,000 words. although the corpus was relatively small, it provided rich data for investigating the observed accuracy level of grammatical morphemes ranging from plural –s to past tense regular –ed. 3.2. procedures, tools and analysis the errors made by learners in the use of english grammatical morphemes were investigated to determine the observed accuracy level of participants in exam scripts. in line with seog (2015), we followed the formula employed by pica (1983) and calculated target-like use (tlu) for each grammatical morpheme. the formula is as follows: tlu = number of correct suppliance in obligatory contexts number of obligatory contexts + number of suppliance in non-obligatory contexts the reason why we opted for tlu was related to our desire to gain a better understanding of interlanguage users’ mastery of grammatical morphemes by taking the underuse, misuse and overuse of a given morpheme into account in a non-obligatory context as well. in addition, pica’s formula offers an opportunity erdem akbaş, zeynep ölçü dinçer 614 to take into account possible cases of morpheme overuse, which could help to provide a comprehensive picture of the use of grammatical morphemes in context. in order to investigate the grammatical morpheme accuracy of turkish speakers of english based on their observed proficiency, we first grouped the exam scripts by taking the grammar proficiency of the same learners into account. to do this, we divided the writers into high and low achievers depending on their scores in another core class within the program, that is, advanced grammar i. table 2 shows how participants were grouped based on their academic achievement and the quality of the texts within the groups. a cohort of 20 students who got the highest final grades in the advanced grammar i module were grouped as high achievers. their final grades in this module ranged from 79 to 91, with a mean of 84. the group of low achievers consisted of the 20 students who had the lowest final grades in the grammar class, ranging from 29 to 65, with a mean of 58. finally, the remaining students (n = 28) whose final grades in the grammar class were between 66 and 78, with a mean of 71, constituted mid achievers. it should be noted that the scripts of mid achievers were only considered in overall calculations but they were excluded from the comparison of high and low proficiency levels. table 2 categorization of participants and details concerning their data achievement groups number of students mean (range) of the exam scores in advanced grammar i number of texts total number of words average number of words per text high 20 84 (79-91) 40 6264 156.6 mid 28 71 (66-78) 56 8460 151.0 low 20 58 (29-65) 40 5695 142.3 total 68 n/a 136 20419 150.1 figure 2 overview of the annotation scheme all of the scripts were annotated and analyzed manually by two researchers using uam corpus tool 3.3. figure 2 shows the annotation scheme employed in the present study with the purpose of calculating the tlu (pica, 1983) scores for the grammatical morphemes in question. to be more precise, when annotating an a case of grammatical morpheme confirmed tlu not confirmed tlu annotating the type of grammatical morpheme1. underuse 2. misuse 3. overuse accuracy order in l2 grammatical morphemes: corpus evidence from different proficiency levels of. . . 615 instance of a grammatical morpheme, we followed the same sequence of actions, regardless of whether it represented a target-like use or a non-target-like use (including underuse, misuse and overuse) in obligatory and non-obligatory contexts. as figure 2 shows, if a grammatical morpheme was employed correctly, or, to use an alternative label, if it represented a target-like use, only the type of morpheme was annotated. however, when the use of a grammatical morpheme was found to be grammatically incorrect or non-target-like use was detected, the annotators provided an explanation of this case in terms of underuse, misuse and overuse (pica, 1993) in order to be able to evaluate the concept of suppliance in an obligatory context (soc). if a grammatical morpheme was not used in an obligatory context, the underuse of a particular morpheme was selected. when an incorrect form of a grammatical morpheme was supplied in an obligatory context, the misuse of this morpheme was indicated. the overuse of a morpheme was selected when the correct form of this morpheme was supplied in a non-obligatory context. it should be pointed out here that the orthographic errors by learners were not considered and they were not counted as non-target-like uses. the three sentences below exemplify the concept of target-like and non-target-like uses as well as annotations with respect to underuse, misuse and overuse in the case of a non-tlu. (1) i think, it is (?) problematic situation. (m_ma_062)1 in example 1, the italicized case of the grammatical morpheme is (copula be) was coded as a target-like use as it was supplied correctly in an obligatory context, whereas there was a non-target-like use of an article since the noun phrase problematic situation requires an article (definite or indefinite depending on the context) where the question mark stands. thus, this case was coded as underuse of articles as no obligatory form was supplied in the context. (2) it’s history comes from the very beginning of (?) industrial revolution. (m_la_033) example 2 provides two target-like and two non-target-like cases. the target-like use forms supplied in obligatory contexts are in italics; they were the third person singular –s and the definite article the. nevertheless, one of the non-targetlike use cases contained a misuse of possessive –s indicated in bold since the incorrect form was supplied in an obligatory context. in addition, the other nontarget-like use concerned underuse of the definite article the, which was expected to appear before industrial revolution, indicated by the question mark. 1 the codes in parentheses provide information about the position of the extract in the corpus. erdem akbaş, zeynep ölçü dinçer 616 (3) these three main topics shows that how being engaged in work at a young age affects children’s whole life. (m_ma_058) example 3 illustrates three cases of target-like uses (plural –s, article, possessive –s) in contrast to the non-target-like use of the third person singular –s (in bold), annotated as overuse. the writer overused the grammatical morpheme in a situation where the correct form was supplied in a non-obligatory context. in general, context was used as a clue to determine the role of grammatical morphemes in ambiguous cases. for example, in order to evaluate the use of a morpheme, as in the case of brothers where the inclusion of plural –s could be regarded as an overuse or targetlike use depending on the author’s intended meaning, the whole text was taken into consideration to figure out the message and understand the type of use. having annotated approximately 30% of the corpus individually by considering the same randomly selected texts and using the same annotation scheme, we discussed our decisions concerning the grammatical morphemes to become familiar with the data coding process and check the consistency of the annotation. through this initial individual annotation and follow-up discussions, we were able to reflect on our decisions and eliminate the potential effects of disparate coding on the rest of the data. the remaining texts were coded by both researchers, followed by thorough discussions to reach an agreement concerning any specific case. most of the disagreements were resolved by either asking another researcher or reaching consensus, but in the case of considerable disagreement and ambiguity concerning a grammatical morpheme, that particular case was simply excluded from the analysis. by using an iterative annotation procedure, we attempted to ensure the reliability of our coding process for any grammatical morpheme. 4. results the manual analysis of the corpus yielded a total of 2,883 cases of grammatical morphemes and a range of results concerning their target-like and non-target-like uses. table 3 summarizes the overall results in regard to each grammatical morpheme under investigation. a macro-average was used to compute the overall performance of the participants, which yielded an average tlu score of 0.85. predictably, the accuracy level differed across the morphemes. 2,440 out of the 2,883 cases of grammatical morphemes represented target-like use (84.6% accuracy), and almost 15% of the cases (n = 443) turned out to represent non-target-like use. interestingly, we found either an overwhelming underuse or overuse in all the non-target-like instances of a given morpheme. to be more specific, the participants omitted a grammatical morpheme which should appear in an obligatory context (n = 185, 41% of all non-target-like uses) or provided a grammatical morpheme in a non-obligatory context (n = 190, 43% of all non-target-like uses). accuracy order in l2 grammatical morphemes: corpus evidence from different proficiency levels of. . . 617 table 3 target-like uses and non-target-like uses of grammatical morphemes in the corpus grammatical morphemes obligatory & non-obligatory cases target-like uses non-target-like uses tlu underuse misuse overuse f f % f % f % 1. present progressive –ing 21 19 0 0.0 0 0.0 2 9.5 0.90 2. plural –s 993 859 79 8.0 11 1.1 44 4.4 0.87 3. irregular past 73 55 2 2.7 2 2.7 14 19.2 0.75 4. possessive –s 70 59 7 10.0 2 2.9 2 2.9 0.84 5. copula be 400 367 11 2.8 15 3.8 7 1.8 0.92 6. articles 874 692 63 7.2 21 2.4 98 11.2 0.79 7. regular past –ed 62 50 8 1.,9 0 0.0 4 6.5 0.80 8. third person singular –s 148 120 10 6.8 5 3.4 13 8.8 0.81 9. auxiliary be 242 219 5 2.1 12 5.0 6 2.5 0.90 total 2883 2440 185 6.4 68 2.4 190 6.9 443 0.85 note. tlu = target-like use since the learners were free to respond to essay questions in any way they wished and they were not encouraged to supply particular types of grammatical morphemes, the number of cases for each morpheme emerged naturally and we were only interested in the number and type of correctly and incorrectly supplied grammatical forms. as can be seen in table 3, the copula be had the highest level of accuracy (tlu: 0.92), whereas the participants supplied irregular past forms the least correctly (tlu: 0.75). the grammatical morphemes of the present progressive –ing (tlu: 0.90), plural –s (tlu: 0.87) and possessive –s (tlu: 0.84) were used with greater accuracy. what may potentially explain these findings is the fact that very similar morphemes exist in turkish (–iyor for marking progression in time, –lar for plural marking and –in for denoting possession), which could increase the likelihood of producing the correct form of corresponding grammatical morphemes in english. as shown by luk and shirai (2009), l1 could have a pivotal influence on the acquisition of a particular grammatical morpheme in the l2 in the case of an absence or presence of an l1 equivalent. this assumption also finds support in the lower accuracy level of third person –s, which does not exist or have a close equivalent in turkish (hamamcı & hamamcı, 2018). similarly, non-existence of an explicit article system in turkish can account for the relatively less accurate use of articles (tlu: 0.79), which was evident in the fact that more than one in five occurrences of an article represented a non-targetlike use. this said, compared with the findings of nomura (2012), who found that japanese learners of english with no article system in their l1 displayed a tendency to underuse articles, turkish learners were found to overuse them, with cases of such overuse exceeding instances of underuse and misuse combined. erdem akbaş, zeynep ölçü dinçer 618 table 4 accuracy of using grammatical morphemes among high and low achievers grammatical morphemes high achievers low achievers high vs. low achievers targetlike use non-targetlike use tlu targetlike use non-targetlike use tlu χ2 p 1. present progressive –ing 8 0 1.00 2 2 0.50 4.80* 0.03 2. plural –s 298 24 0.93 193 47 0.80 18.30* 0.01 3. irregular past 19 2 0.90 16 7 0.70 2.95 0.09 4. possessive –s 14 2 0.88 17 5 0.77 0.64 0.42 5. copula be 105 4 0.96 110 8 0.93 1.09 0.30 6. articles 208 57 0.78 187 45 0.81 0.34 0.56 7. regular past –ed 19 1 0.95 23 7 0.77 3.00 0.08 8. third person singular –s 36 10 0.78 19 7 0.73 0.24 0.61 9. auxiliary be 76 3 0.96 58 10 0.85 5.39* 0.02 total 783 103 0.88 625 138 0.82 13.70* 0.01 note. *p < .05 in view of the complexity of the acquisition and processing of l2 morphemes (larsen-freeman, 2010), we also set out to determine whether learners with higher proficiency in l2 grammar achieved better tlu scores compared to those with lower proficiency. in order to do so, we compared high and low achievers with respect to instances of accurately and inaccurately used grammatical morphemes in the texts they produced. as can be seen in table 4, proficiency level surely played a role in the overall success in processing and using the grammatical morphemes under investigation. the high achievers in l2 grammar produced those morphemes with almost 90% accuracy (tlu: 0.88). in contrast, the low achievers used the grammatical morphemes less correctly, with the tlu score of 0.82. a chi-square test showed that the difference was statistically significant (χ2 = 13.70, p < .05). both groups were able to supply copula forms correctly to a considerable extent, which was also the morpheme that was used with highest accuracy across the corpus. apart from the gap between high and low achievers with respect to present progressive –ing, there was an observable discrepancy between the two groups in the use of irregular past forms (tlu: 0.90 vs. 0.70) and regular past –ed (tlu: 0.95 vs. 0.77). however, the results of chi-square tests showed that the differences were not statistically significant in either case (χ2 = 2.95, p > .05 for irregular past forms and (χ2= 3.00, p > .05 for regular past –ed). in this study, we relied on tlu scores for grammatical morphemes under investigation and ranked them accordingly. in doing so, we were able to observe instances where the accuracy order in our data deviated from the no proposed by krashen (1977). as shown in table 5, this was particularly true about forms having equivalents in turkish such as possessive –s since these forms manifested a relatively higher rank. although there is considerable support for the universality of the order of acquisition of english grammatical morphemes in the literature accuracy order in l2 grammatical morphemes: corpus evidence from different proficiency levels of. . . 619 (e.g., saville-troike, 2006), our findings suggest that, on the whole, the accuracy orders of turkish learners of english do not closely match the no suggested by krashen (1977). however, when we calculated spearman’s rank correlations, we found a positive, statistically significant correlation between the order proposed by krashen and that of high achievers (r = .72, p < .05). this could suggest that the similarity of the morpheme acquisition order in l2 and the proposed universal order might be related to learners’ proficiency level. table 5 accuracy order of grammatical morphemes and comparison with krashen (1977) krashen (1977) current study overall tlu high achievers tlu low achievers tlu progressive –ing plural –s copula be auxiliary be articles irregular past regular past –ed 3rd person singular –s possessive –s copula be progressive –ing auxiliary be plural –s possessive –s 3rd person singular –s regular past –ed articles irregular past 0.92 0.90 0.90 0.87 0.84 0.81 0.80 0.79 0.75 progressive –ing copula be auxiliary be regular past –ed plural –s irregular past possessive –s articles 3rd person singular –s 1.00 0.96 0.96 0.95 0.93 0.90 0.88 0.78 0.78 copula be auxiliary be articles plural –s possessive –s regular past –ed 3rd person singular –s irregular past progressive –ing 0.93 0.85 0.81 0.80 0.77 0.77 0.73 0.70 0.50 spearman’s rank correlation krashen (1977) vs. overall krashen (1977) vs. high achievers krashen (1977) vs. low achievers r = .60, p > .05 r = .72*, p < .05 r = .15, p >.05 note. *p < .05 with respect to the accuracy order presented in table 5, it is clear that the overall order of grammatical morphemes in the present research aligns to some extent with krashen’s (1977) no. the similarities are as follows: · copula be and progressive –ing ranked high in the tees corpus and krashen (1977); · auxiliary be was proximately placed after copula be, indicating similar development in l2 use for these free-standing morphemes; the accuracy rates for copula be and auxiliary be were similar in the corpus, thus mirroring krashen’s (1977) no. · compared with other morphemes, irregular past, regular past –ed and third person singular –s were placed relatively late in the order both in krashen’s (1977) proposal and in the tees corpus. on the other hand, the analysis revealed some differences between the orders of acquisition in the present study and the widely-held view that l2 learners are driven by “internal principles that are largely independent of their first language” (mitchell & myles, 2004, p. 43), resulting in the no for l2 english learners. the most important deviations are the following: erdem akbaş, zeynep ölçü dinçer 620 · in contrast to krashen (1977) and the findings of murakami (2013) and murakami and alexopoulou (2016) for l1 turkish, possessive –s was ranked relatively high in the tees corpus; · while, according to krashen (1977), irregular past forms are acquired before the regular past tense marker –ed, the analysis of the tees revealed exactly the opposite accuracy order for turkish learners of english, irrespective of their l2 grammar proficiency. in addition to showing the accuracy order of grammatical morphemes in our corpus with respect to deviations from the no, the data in table 5 also illustrate the effect of proficiency level. in particular, we found that greater mastery of l2 grammar translates into more accurate use of almost all the morphemes, with the exception of articles. specifically, all morphemes serving as tense and aspect markers, such as regular past –ed, third person singular –s, irregular past forms and progressive –ing, ranked lower for low achievers, whereas only third person singular –s was placed lower in the order for high achievers (although it still represented higher tlu compared with low achievers). the hierarchy of plural –s, possessive –s and third person singular –s remained the same across the corpus of turkish participants despite variations in the correct use of these three morphemes. 5. discussion the purpose of this study was to investigate the extent of accuracy in supplying grammatical morphemes in a written corpus of l1 turkish learners of l2 english. with respect to the first research question, we found on the basis of data from the tees corpus that turkish speakers of english used grammatical morphemes with an average tlu score of 0.85 (see table 3). in order to answer the other research questions, we first checked whether the order of grammatical morphemes aligned with the acquisition order suggested by krashen (1977). further analyses compared the accuracy-based orders of these morphemes for high and low achievers. in line with murakami (2013), who demonstrated that learners from different l1 backgrounds might follow different accuracy orders for english grammatical morphemes, we revealed that turkish learners of english also took a different path which did not mirror the acquisition order that was proposed by krashen (1977) and later accepted by other specialists (e.g., ortega, 2009; saville-troike, 2006). thus, the findings of the present study support the results of previous research (e.g., izumi & isahara, 2004; luk & shirai, 2009; murakami, 2013; murakami & alexopoulou, 2016) and provide further evidence against the universality of the acquisition order of english grammatical morphemes. accuracy order in l2 grammatical morphemes: corpus evidence from different proficiency levels of. . . 621 murakami and alexopoulou (2016) proposed that the grammatical morphemes which exist in l1 are likely to be used accurately by english learners compared with those which do not. the overall findings of the present study corroborate this argument. to be more specific, the overall accuracy in the use of copula be, present progressive –ing, auxiliary be, plural –s and possessive –s manifested by turkish learners in their exam scripts can be explained by the existence of these structures in turkish. in contrast, third person –s, articles and irregular past are not explicitly present in turkish, with the effect that these morphemes were ordered after the first group comprising morphemes which do exist in turkish. although turkish does inflect verbs to mark the past tense by using –di, surprisingly, the past tense –ed morpheme was one of the least accurately supplied morphemes, especially by low achievers (see table 5). this could be partly attributed to the completely different system for marking past tense meaning in english. figure 3 shows the predictability and variation of the simple past tense (affirmative only) for turkish speakers of english to show how difficult it is for them to adapt to the l2 norms and supply correct forms. figure 3 clearly demonstrates the dichotomous choice between deciding whether the verb is regular or irregular in order to process its conjugation in the english simple past tense. it should also be mentioned that while many of the irregular past tense markers in english cluster into prototypes (cf. bybee & slobin, 1982) and thus have a kind of predictable form, they may still be a source of difficulty for turkish learners whose l1 does not include irregular past markers. the whole system for providing simple past meaning in turkish is based on the grammatical morpheme -d(i,ı,u,ü) and therefore it is a considerable challenge for turkish learners to acquire the whole system in english. it is warranted to assume that things might get even more intricate when negative and interrogative forms in the simple past tense are considered (see example 4 below). the following cases from high and low achievers illustrate the non-target-like use of regular and irregular past forms in their texts. (4) so in my opinion underaged children who didn’t completed mental and physical development should not work and should be allowed to enjoy with their childhood. (m_la_005) (5) after mankind settle up the factories, they needed small and agile hands for their machines to operate. (m_la_033) (6) to illustrate that, people said that a broken mirror may bring bad luck; it is said that house where mirror was broken cannot get well for a period of seven years. (f_ha_007) examples 4 and 6 clearly reflect an overuse of regular past –ed and the irregular past form in which the learners supplied extra functors in a non-obligatory context. example 5 shows a case of an underuse of the regular past –ed morpheme which is supposed to be present in this obligatory context. taking this into account and interpreting the results for regular and irregular past morphemes, it is erdem akbaş, zeynep ölçü dinçer 622 possible to shed light on why they are the two least accurately produced grammatical morphemes. interestingly, however, with the help of figure 3 it is also possible to interpret the difference between the observed accuracy order of regular past –ed and irregular past forms in our study and in some other studies (e.g., demarta dabove, 2014; seog, 2015). in krashen (1977) as well the order of acquisition with irregular past tense forms first and the regular past –ed form next is included among the less clear cases (p. 148). with respect to the results of regular and irregular past morphemes, past tense –ed preceded irregular past forms in our corpus. this difference might be explained by the similarity in the inflections of the turkish past tense –di and past tense –ed in english. this could therefore provide evidence for the effect of learners’ l1 on the observed accuracy orders (luk & shirai, 2009). in addition, according to the markedness differential hypothesis (eckman, 1977), while unmarked language components of l1s are more likely to be transferred to l2s, marked features of l2s can be expected to be harder to learn. thus, compared to its unmarked counterpart past tense –ed, the marked irregular past form could be acquired by l1 turkish learners at a later time. figure 3 comparison of predictability and variation of the forms of the simple past tense in turkish and english when it comes to the hierarchy of plural –s, possessive –s and third person singular –s, the same order appears to have been observed in some of the previous studies (demarta dabove, 2014; ghonchepour et al., 2020; seog, 2015), on the basis of which an argument could be made for the universality of the order of accuracy of grammatical morphemes at the micro level. similarly to the accuracy order in l2 grammatical morphemes: corpus evidence from different proficiency levels of. . . 623 proposal made by krashen (1977) for l2 english, we also found that third person singular –s tended to represent a considerable difficulty for turkish speakers of english, which translated into low accuracy levels (in fact, this was the least accurately used morpheme) and is in line with the observations of murakami and alexopoulou (2016) for l1 turkish. slobin (1996) proposes that form-related features such as articles or progressive –ing are susceptible to l1 influence, while semantic features such as plurality are less likely to be affected by the mother tongue. the observed order of acquisition of plural –s, followed by possessive – s, followed by third person singular –s could be accounted for in terms of slobin’s (1996) claim in the sense that the form-related third person singular –s was placed later in the order than the forms with semantic features such as plural –s and possessive –s. another possible explanation can be based on the cross-linguistic comparisons of turkish and english. when grammatical morphemes do not have an equivalent form in turkish (third person singular –s, articles, irregular past), they seem to rank rather low. on the other hand, the ones with equivalent forms (e.g., possessive –s in english and turkish possessive suffix –in’; plural –s in english and –lar in turkish) are located relatively high in the order established on the basis of the tees data. this study also contributes to discussion of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in a set order by comparing the observed accuracy order of learners with different proficiency levels in l2 grammar. when the cases produced by highand low-proficiency learners were taken into consideration, it turned out that the accuracy patterns of the two cohorts deviated from each other. moreover, spearman’s rank correlation tests indicated that the rank order of the higher-proficiency group was more similar to krashen’s (1977) proposed order than that of the lower-proficiency participants. this may indicate that interlanguage characteristics of lower-proficiency learners are different from those with a high proficiency. all in all, findings of this kind cast further doubt on the existence of the universal order showing that such patterns might differ as a function of both l1 background and tl proficiency. specifically, the rank of articles in the two proficiency groups deserves special attention. accuracy of article use in the low-proficiency group was third in order, whereas it was one of the last morphemes in the accuracy order observed for the high-proficiency group. in addition, low achievers’ tlu score for articles (tlu: 0.81) was slightly higher than that of high achievers (tlu: 0.78). interestingly, such a situation was the case only with respect to this particular morpheme; all other grammatical morphemes used by high achievers tended to have higher tlu scores than those used by low achievers. this deviance is probably due to the fact that turkish lacks an explicit article system such as that used in english. in fact, such an interpretation finds support in snape et al. (2013), erdem akbaş, zeynep ölçü dinçer 624 who found that l1 turkish learners have problems with the use of definite articles even at advanced levels. thus, even for high-proficiency learners, more attention and practice might be needed to master this feature. the lack of an explicit article system in turkish could account for relatively low accuracy in article use in the two groups of learners with different proficiency levels. in other words, in line with murakami (2013), grammatical morphemes which do not exist in l1 could pose a considerable difficulty for l2 learners. in his often cited paper, krashen (1977) mentions the potential effects of an l1 on the order of grammatical morphemes in l2 learning. however, he claims that if an l1 has an impact on the order of morphemes, this is “an indication of low acquisition” and “un-natural” (p. 156). recent studies, however, such as those by luk and shirai (2009) or murakami and alexopoulou (2016) have reported findings that support the role of an l1 in the morpheme order studies. this indicates that cross-linguistic comparisons of an l1 and l2 can offer interesting insights into the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes in l2. however, differences between l1 and l2 should not be limited to the +/linguistic feature dichotomy but rather be carefully conceived to tease out the details which might affect the overall explanations for interlanguage processes. for example, both japanese and turkish are considered to be -article languages. however, the explanation for the article acquisition of an l1 turkish learner could be different from an l1 japanese learner in the sense that the former operates with a kind of indefinite article, while the latter does not have any grammatical form that would resemble articles (snape et al., 2013) in their l1. therefore, we need language-specific studies, such as the present investigation focusing on l1 turkish learners, to gain a deeper understanding of such issues. 6. conclusion before offering concluding remarks, we first need to state that we do not take the concept of acquisition in the narrow sense (naturalistic, largely implicit learning); instead, we consider instructed explicit efl learning as a type of l2 acquisition as well. the universality of a natural order in the acquisition of grammatical morphemes has been challenged by recent research in the field of sla. data from learners with different l1 backgrounds have indicated that there might be an influence of l1 on the acquisition of english grammatical morphemes in the sense that when the morphemes do not exist in l1, they are likely to be acquired at a later time. the analysis of written production of l1 turkish learners of english in the tees corpus can serve as a basis for contradicting the arguments about the existence of a natural order for grammatical morphemes and support claims about the influence of l1 on this process. we observed that accuracy order in l2 grammatical morphemes: corpus evidence from different proficiency levels of. . . 625 the article system, which does not exist in turkish, is placed towards the end of the ranking based on the observed accuracy order. in addition, our results indicate that not only the l1 but also overall grammatical proficiency may have an effect on the accuracy order of grammatical morphemes. an interesting finding is that high achievers overall gained higher tlu scores than low achievers except for articles. this deviation could be interpreted as a consequence of the l1 influence in the case of turkish speakers of english in that structures which are present in learners’ l1 continue to pose a difficulty even at more advanced levels. although the existence of a fixed pattern for the acquisition of grammatical morphemes has been refuted by recent research as well as by our findings to some extent, it is clear that some clear patterns exist at the micro level. it was pointed out by luk and shirai (2009) that, rather than a universal order, there could be some universal features across l2 speakers of english in terms of grammatical morpheme acquisition. in fact, this study corroborated some the results of previous research (e.g., demarta dabove, 2014; krashen, 1977; seog, 2015): (a) copula be always precedes auxiliary be in the accuracy order, (b) regular past –ed and irregular past forms are located proximately, and (c) plural –s always precedes third person singular –s and possessive –s in the order. on the basis of these observations, we propose the universality of morphemes at the micro level. further research could therefore take a micro-level perspective on morpheme order, which might further our understanding of how grammatical morpheme acquisition in l2 english occurs. however, it should be kept in mind that it may not be easy to explicate the complex nature of the acquisition of morphemes in some cases since, as pointed out by larsen-freeman (2010), along with learners’ l1 background and proficiency levels, there are also some other factors to consider, such as frequency and quality of tl input, which depend on the characteristics of linguistic environment, as well as the impact of individual differences. erdem akbaş, zeynep ölçü dinçer 626 references akbaş, e., & ölçü dinçer, z. 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(1996). from “thought to language” to “thinking for speaking.” in j. j. gumperz & s. c. levinson (eds.), rethinking linguistic relativity (pp. 70-96). cambridge university press. snape, n., garcía mayo, m. del p., & gürel, a. (2013). l1 transfer in article selection for generic reference by spanish, turkish and japanese l2 learners. international journal of english studies, 13(1), 1-28. https://doi.org/10.6018/ijes/2013/1/138701 283 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (2). 2020. 283-305 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.2.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt content and language integrated learning in latin america 2008-2018: ten years of research and practice dario luis banegas university of strathclyde, uk ministry of education in chubut, argentina https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0225-0866 dario.banegas@strath.ac.uk paige michael poole universidad del norte, colombia https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0137-8801 ppoole@uninorte.edu.co kathleen a. corrales universidad del norte, colombia https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6778-3925 kwade@uninorte.edu.co abstract bilingual education, usually a community’s l1 and english continues spreading geographically and across educational systems worldwide. with this expansion, the development of bilingual education approaches is under constant scrutiny. one recent approach is content and language integrated learning (clil). european in origin, clil can be viewed as an educational or language teaching approach and it refers to the teaching of curricular content and l2 in an integrated manner. this approach has received international attention, yet, how clil unfolds in settings outside europe appears underrepresented in international publications. the aim of this article is to provide a critical review of clil in latin america between 2008 and 2018. we surveyed 64 items (articles, book chapters, and dissertations) published in regional and international outlets: 41 empirical studies, 19 practice-oriented publications, and four reviews. it begins by dario luis banegas, paige michael poole, kathleen a. corrales 284 summarizing the clil continuum with a focus on contentand language-driven clil and clil frameworks. it then provides a synthesis of empirical studies and practiceoriented publications about clil in different latin american settings. the corpus is analyzed following these unifying themes: pedagogy, perceptions and beliefs, teacher education, global citizenship, and language development. from this review, it transpires that latin american clil is mostly implemented and examined from a language-driven perspective in private primary, secondary and higher education. suggestions and implications for further research and practice are included. keywords: clil; bilingual education; latin america; teacher education 1. introduction content and language integrated learning (clil) has emerged in the european (language) education arena as an approach to offer socio-economic mobility, internationalization of higher education, and plurilingualism within the european union by integrating l2 learning and curriculum content (coyle, hood, & marsh, 2010; marsh, maljers, & hartiala, 2001; nikula, dafouz, moore, & smit, 2016). concerning the evolution of clil, cenoz (2013) suggests that “clil is part of regular education. within this context, a clear distinction can be made between conceptualizing clil as a language teaching approach or as an educational approach” (p. 390). these two conceptualizations can be subsumed under a clil continuum offering content-driven clil models (i.e., teaching a content subject through the medium of an l2) and language-driven clil models (i.e., teaching english as an additional language through topics derived from the school curriculum) (gallardo del puerto, basterrechea, & martínez adrián, 2020). however, european clil is established towards the content-end of the continuum in the quest for narrowing down the scope of clil as an umbrella term (ball, kelly, & clegg, 2015), a term criticized for unclear boundaries (cenoz, genesee, & gorter, 2014). whatever the model, clil, according to coyle et al. (2010), is anchored in sociocultural theory, cognitive engagement following the revised version of bloom’s taxonomy (anderson & krathwohl, 2001; roussel, joulia, tricot, & sweller, 2017), a systemic functional view of language, and genre-based pedagogy (llinares & morton, 2017; llinares, morton, & whittaker, 2012). language is the vehicle for education; therefore, l2 learning must be supported in either contentor language-driven models. the language triptych developed by coyle et al. (2010) is usually employed to help teachers organize the interface between language and content-knowledge education. the language triptych consists of: (1) language of learning (subject-specific terminology, general academic language), (2) language for learning (language structures and speech acts needed content and language integrated learning in latin america 2008-2018: ten years of research and. . . 285 to complete the learning tasks), and (3) language through learning (emergent language needed by learners during the learning process). furthermore, the need to strengthen content and language systematic integration is channeled through coyle et al.’s (2010) 4cs framework. the framework consists of four contextually related blocks: content (subject matter), communication (language), cognition (thinking skills), and culture (intercultural and global citizenship). due to the expansion and ramification of bilingual education in general (macedo, 2019) and clil in particular, it becomes necessary to understand how clil is operationalized internationally. publications on clil often examine teachers’ and learners’ beliefs on clil (e.g., doiz & lasagabaster, 2017), clil pedagogies and teacher education (e.g., ikeda, 2019; sylvén, 2019; tsuchiya & pérez-murillo, 2020), global citizenship (coyle et al., 2010), and language development (e.g., llinares & morton, 2017). through these foci, researchers present a picture that addresses the different facets that contribute to successful and organic clil provision. nevertheless, there is a lacuna in terms of clil in other contexts, particularly in latin america. in the international landscape, how clil is enacted and theorized in latin america remains underrepresented in high-impact journals. hence, the aim of this review article is to conduct a comprehensive discussion of clil in latin america in the 2008-2018 period to enhance local knowledge production and knowledge democratization (feldman & bradley, 2019). in this review, we have refrained from comparing clil in latin america with europe and other contexts since our aim is to discuss clil in latin america in its own right, in this way allowing a lesser heard voice in the clil arena to be considered. in this review, the year 2008 is our point of departure for two major academic events: (1) the launch of the laclil journal in colombia, and (2) the clilthemed annual faapi (spanish for federación argentina de asociaciones de profesores de inglés) conference held in argentina (fernández, 2008). 2. methodology we formulated the following criteria to determine which publications would be reviewed. the publications had to (1) be in the public domain, (2) be available online and set in the 2008-2018 period, (3) be contextualized in latin america, regardless of level (e.g., primary or secondary) or type (e.g., formal, state, private) of education or authors’ nationality and affiliation, (4) be empirically grounded or informed clil implementation accounts (including reviews), and (5) focus on english as the additional language in clil due to our background in english language teaching. with these criteria, we surveyed the public domain in the following order: dario luis banegas, paige michael poole, kathleen a. corrales 286 1. journal articles published in regional journals such as laclil journal, profile, ajal (argentinian journal of applied linguistics), colombian applied linguistics journal, gist education and learning research journal, mextesol. these journals were manually examined. 2. journal articles published in international journals such as esp journal, or language learning journal, using key words such as “clil + (a latin american country, latin america, central america, south america).” 3. repositories from latin american universities: we concentrated on bachelors, masters, and doctoral dissertations. 4. conference proceedings from the region (e.g., faapi conference selected papers). 5. book chapters in local, regional, and international volumes. last, we took the broadest possible road by googling “clil + (a latin american country, latin america, central america, south america).” table 1 summarizes the 64 publications reviewed categorizing them according to publication type and country as described in this paragraph. upon examination of geographical distribution, argentina (24 publications) and colombia (19) lead the number of contributions to the clil literature. however, it should be noted that in the case of argentina, eight belong to one author in particular. table 1 clil outputs according to country and publication type country journal articles book chapters dissertations argentina 20 3 1 brazil 5 0 1 chile 1 0 2 colombia 18 0 1 costa rica 1 0 1 cuba 1 1 1 ecuador 1 0 0 honduras 0 0 1 mexico 2 0 1 panama 0 0 1 peru 0 0 1 total 49 4 11 the items were classified to show the extent to which clil publications in latin america have a tendency towards empirical studies, reviews, or reflective/practice accounts. we identified the following contributions: 40 empirical studies, 19 practice-driven outputs, and four reviews. regarding the latter, we found reviews on: clil in argentina (banegas, 2011), clil in brazil (coelho liberali & megale, 2016; pimentel siqueira, landau, & albuquerque paraná, 2018), content and language integrated learning in latin america 2008-2018: ten years of research and. . . 287 and clil in colombia (mcdougald, 2009). they trace clil research and practice, discuss benefits and challenges from a descriptive stance and do not engage in critiquing research methods or pedagogies. in this article we concentrate on the 41 empirical studies and the 19 practice/ reflective accounts. the remainder of the review is organized as follows: (1) empirical studies, (2) reflective and practice accounts, and (3) common themes, and implications across empirical and practice outputs. the common themes emerged from content analysis (selvi, 2020). this method contributed to summarizing and synthesizing the corpus as we identified recurrences in themes, contexts, findings, and research methods. 3. empirical studies the 41 empirical studies were analyzed to identify their focus, context, and research methodology, as shown in table 2. in some cases (e.g., curtis, 2012a, b), publications have been combined as they report on the same study. table 2 summary of clil empirical studies country author and date focus context research methods argentina banegas (2013a, 2013b) language-driven clil implementation: motivation, collaboration, and language learning gains 3 groups of learners and 4 teachers at a state secondary school collaborative action research (three cycles); interviews, surveys, classroom observations, analysis of teaching materials argentina banegas (2014a) negotiation of topics, skills development, and materials secondary school learners and one teacher in an efl class at a state school action research (three cycles), learner interviews, survey, teacher’s journal argentina banegas (2014b) inclusion of clil in general efl coursebooks efl coursebooks used in secondary state education in argentina content analysis of selected coursebooks argentina banegas (2015) how student-teachers plan language-driven clil lessons a group of studentteachers completing an initial english language teacher education program in southern argentina mixed-methods; survey, content analysis of lesson plans (corpus) argentina banegas (2016) teachers’ clil lesson planning and materials development a workshop on clil pedagogies completed by secondary efl teachers content analysis of teachers’ lesson plans and materials argentina banegas (2018) clil pedagogies applied to an english for specific purposes (esp) course to increase motivation and explore authenticity an esp class at an initial geography teacher education program in southern argentina action research (four cycles); questionnaire and interviews with studentteachers, author’s journal dario luis banegas, paige michael poole, kathleen a. corrales 288 argentina castellani, dabove and colucci (2009) language-driven clil implementation for addressing art in the efl and french lessons through project work groups of secondary school learners and their teachers collaborative action research; interviews, analysis of teaching and learning artefacts argentina pistorio (2010) language-driven clil implementation to enhance cooperative learning and social constructivism groups of private secondary school learners interested in social studies action research; grade comparison, document analysis, learner journals argentina tavella and banegas (2016) language-driven clil implementation from lesson planning to assessment 2 teachers at a private secondary school case study; classroom observations and interviews argentina porto (2016) implementation of an online intercultural and ecological citizenship experience in the primary english classroom between argentina and denmark year 5, 6, 7 learners from state schools in argentina and denmark and their teachers case study; conversation analysis of skype conversations, chats in wikis, class discussion, group interviews; document analysis of collaborative posters, student productions (songs, videos and drawings), reflection logs argentina porto (2018) clil and intercultural citizenship undergraduate students from argentina and the uk case study; class discussions, interviews, student productions brazil costa-rau (2016) clil needs analysis 155 learners and 5 teachers at a private bilingual school quantitative; questionnaires, language proficiency tests brazil finardi, silveira and de alencar (2016) content-driven clil implementation 70 adult learners in a navy boarding school action research; questionnaire, classroom observations and research diaries brazil finardi, leão and pinheiro (2016) pre-service teachers’ beliefs on the use of clil in brazil a group of students and their teachers at a university english teaching degree course qualitative; interviews and classroom observations chile de la barra, veloso and maluenda (2018) making students more aware of their oral language production through assessment within a content course student-teachers at a university english language teacher education (elte) program action research; rubrics for oral assessment, questionnaires chile pueblas miranda and pérez (2012) a comparison of bilingual skills and methodology of a national volunteer centre initiative with results from 2 bilingual and 1 traditional school (efl) learners and teachers from an nvc program, 2 bilingual schools and 1 private school mixed methods; classroom observations, interviews and questionnaires colombia anderson (2011) implementing clil for improving adult learners’ cognitive academic language proficiency (calp) adult learners in higher education qualitative; interviews colombia bryan and habte-gabr (2008) content-driven clil implementation in a geography course undergraduate learners at a geography program action research; surveys colombia castillo (2008) reading comprehension skills and strategies in a french-medium content lesson 19 teachers of english attending a workshop quasi-experiment; reading tests content and language integrated learning in latin america 2008-2018: ten years of research and. . . 289 colombia correa guzmán (2017) teachers’ perceptions and practices in clil for teaching math and science to young learners 7 bilingual teachers at a private primary bilingual school qualitative; surveys, interviews, classroom observations, analysis of lesson plans colombia corzo zambrano and robles noriega (2011) english language scaffolding by a math teacher 1 teacher and his class at a private primary bilingual school qualitative; classroom observations and interviews colombia curtis (2012a, 2012b) teachers’ perceptions of clil and concerns about preparation 80 efl teachers enrolled in a masters program qualitative; questionnaire colombia garzón-díaz (2018) using content-driven clil to incorporate a cultural component into science classes through environmental science projects 1 group of teenage learners and their science teachers at a state secondary school action research; questionnaires, teacher journals, teaching and learning artefacts and interviews colombia keogh (2017) using whatsapp in language-driven clil as an extension of the classroom to continue practicing language and discussing topics covered in the class 19 undergraduate students and their teacher of english action research; student reflections, analysis of whatsapp conversations colombia leal (2016) examination of test items from an assessment grid that integrates content, at different knowledge levels, calp functions and cognitive skills 3rd grade learners at a private bilingual primary school quantitative; assessment item analysis colombia mariño avila (2014) how some of the characteristics of a contentbased english class can be taken into account to implement clil 15 5th grade learners and their teacher at a primary school case study; questionnaires, classroom observation, teaching and learning artefacts colombia mcdougald (2015) an understanding of the perspectives of teaching content classes in english at different educational levels 140 content teachers from primary, secondary and higher education in colombia mixed methods; surveys and interviews colombia zhyrun (2016) design and implementation of videos for listening and cultural content 15 students and their english teacher at an international relations english course quantitative; survey costa rica castro garcía (2017, 2018) learner development of receptive and productive vocabulary comparing two schools and approaches (clil-efl) 185 secondary school learners from a private and a state school quantitative and comparative; vocabulary and reading tests, writing tasks and questionnaires cuba fisher, herrera ochoa and díaz moreno (2013) relationships between attitudes, behaviors and teaching competencies of foreign language teachers in clil a group of university undergraduates and their tutors qualitative; interviews and focus groups cuba gil felipe (2017) design and implementation of a handbook for teachers of sociocultural content integrated with teaching english university courses qualitative; student survey, document analysis, teachers’ diaries, tests, interview with teachers ecuador argudo, abad, fajardo-dack and cabrera (2018) understanding the alignment of an initial elte 121 student-teachers at an elte university program quantitative; language proficiency tests, surveys dario luis banegas, paige michael poole, kathleen a. corrales 290 program with clil pedagogies; correlation between language proficiency, higher-order thinking skills and content learning honduras bettney (2015) analysis of teaching strategies and student and teacher characteristics of clil-immersion courses 239 students and 18 teachers at a bilingual private school qualitative; focus groups, interviews, classroom observations mexico gamero calderón (2017) teaching biology following clil to enhance authenticity, motivation, and language proficiency 34 7th graders at a bilingual secondary school and their teacher action research; questionnaires, analysis of teaching and learning artefacts mexico lara herrera (2015) analysis of students’ perceptions and feelings towards learning mexican history in english primary and secondary school students in mexico and the us qualitative /phenomenological approach; interviews mexico núñez asomoza (2015) analysis of students’ perceptions of learning through clil 11 student-teachers completing a bachelors in foreign languages qualitative; interviews panama barrios núñez (2017) assessing the effectiveness of combining clil and tbl (task-based learning) 35 primary school learners and their teachers mixed methods; interviews, classroom observations, and analysis of teaching and learning artefacts peru amado valdivia (2012) the effectiveness of a clil course and the interwoven development of the 4cs through tbl in students’ interlanguage 3 groups of teenage and adult learners at a private language school quasi-experiment (pilot, control, and experimental groups); language proficiency tests a critical analysis of the empirical studies summarized in table 2 reveals that these studies have been mostly carried out by teacher-researchers implementing language-driven clil in their own teaching contexts (e.g., mariño avila, 2014). other studies have been conducted by researchers involved in clil implementation through broader projects (e.g., amado valdivia, 2012; porto, 2016). from a critical perspective, latin american clil research tends to be qualitative, case-study based (e.g., tavella & banegas, 2016), and descriptive-exploratory of wider benefits and drawbacks in clil implementation (e.g., corzo zambrano & robles noriega, 2011). the studies included the following data collection instruments: questionnaires and surveys (20), interviews (20), classroom observations (10), teaching and learning artefacts (17), including lesson plans, coursebooks and interactions as evidence of learning as in keogh (2017), journals (6), and tests (6). the data collected through these instruments was subjected to thematic analysis (e.g., lara herrera, 2015), content analysis (e.g., banegas, 2014b), and descriptive statistics (e.g., castillo, 2008). while clil research is expected to report on linguistic and content/cognitive gains, latin american clil has so far reported on learners’ general progress in l2 language development without rigorous analysis of specific content and language integrated learning in latin america 2008-2018: ten years of research and. . . 291 linguistic performance. in this sense, latin american clil research is at an embryonic stage and it calls for the inclusion of researchers to help teacher-researchers refine their methodological frameworks and to enhance collaboration. 4. reflective and practice accounts similarly to the empirical studies, the foci and contexts of the 19 reflective and practice accounts were identified, as presented in table 3. like the empirical studies, the reflective and pedagogical accounts also concentrate on language-driven clil as it related directly to their context. we identified: (1) reflections on how clil is defined (e.g., rodríguez bonces, 2012), (2) suggestions for how it can be implemented (e.g., ravelo, 2014), (3) descriptions of clil within program curricula (e.g., fernández, 2009), (4) descriptions of implementations of clil in specific classrooms (e.g., pistorio, 2010) or materials, lesson plans, or pedagogical sequences for future implementations (e.g., czischke alvarez, 2013), and (5) frameworks for including clil in teacher education (hillyard, 2011; pistorio, 2009). table 3 summary of clil reflective and practice accounts country author and date focus context argentina banegas (2012) reflection on the challenges of clil that includes a description of clil teacher development opportunities and suggestions for including clil as a module in teacher education in argentina clil teacher education in the uk and argentina argentina cendoya and di bin (2010) description of a teaching sequence combining reading and writing genre instruction with taskbased learning and language-clil to develop linguistic competence and content knowledge 20 3rd grade students of a bilingual primary school argentina fernández (2009) description and justification of curriculum decisions within a business english program (languagedriven clil) technical english for school of economics university students argentina helver (2015) description of a pedagogical proposal with twelve lessons combining content-driven clil with english, art, and citizenship education 15 to 16-year old students at a secondary school argentina hillyard (2011) theoretical account of teacher training to prepare teachers to implement clil in their classrooms in argentina as a response to government decisions to use clil teacher training courses in europe, asia, and latin america argentina liendo (2012) curricular reflection with practical ideas on the incorporation of intercultural competence training in an english course advanced english course for translators and teachers argentina pistorio (2009) proposal for teacher training program to certify ability to teach english and content teacher training courses in argentina argentina pistorio (2010) pedagogical account of implementing course combining content-driven clil and cooperative learning 36, 5th-year students of social studies in a private school argentina ravelo (2013) pedagogical account of implementing comic strips in a content-driven clil history class 5 students in private english conversation course argentina ravelo (2014) reflection on solutions to address the challenges of implementing clil primary and secondary schools in buenos aires, argentina argentina tavella and fernández (2017) curricular reflection on an esp course based on languagedriven clil and fostering intercultural communication esp course for university tourism students dario luis banegas, paige michael poole, kathleen a. corrales 292 brazil finardi, silveira, lima, and mendes, (2016) pedagogical account that presents a set of activities and pedagogical sequence for an english for academic purposes (eal) course on sustainability that combines an inverted clil approach in a massive open online course (mooc) no specified context: applicable to intermediate level students and related to topics covered at federal institutes in brazil chile czischke alvarez (2013) undergraduate thesis focused on developing a unit of material for teaching the conquest of the aztecs in a history class (content-driven clil) secondary school history class colombia garcía-herreros machado (2017) curricular reflection on the use of an immersion model for foreign language teaching and learning and development of 21st century skills primary and secondary bilingual school colombia gardner (2009) classroom account describing the integration of vocabulary and business communication university business english program colombia montoya and salamanca (2017) pedagogical account that presents and analyzes the use of clil as a tool for internationalization at a university level 210 university teachers (undergraduate and graduate) colombia otálora (2009) descriptive account of past and future research to be carried out regarding the identification of effective instructional strategies for teaching english at the university level foreign language department faculty colombia rodríguez bonces (2012) reflection on the characteristics of clil and suggestions about how it can be implemented colombian education system (primary to university and professional) cuba rojas gonzáles, and liviero (2014) conference proceeding describing the theoretical and methodological framework for an english for medical purposes (emp) program at a medical university 4th and 5th year medical students overall, within the 2008-2018 timeframe, the reflective and pedagogical accounts are essentially descriptive, anecdotal at times, with little critical comparison to how these experiences relate to those occurring within (and outside) the region. they also lack a critical review of how clil research and theoretical underpinnings may be challenged in practice or how practice could be theorized from context-responsive pedagogies. 5. common themes in this section, we offer a critical review of latin american clil under five broad themes: (1) clil pedagogy, (2) clil perceptions and beliefs, (3) teacher education, (4) global citizenship, and (5) language development. these themes emerged from the literature search and analysis of commonalities in terms of the publications’ foci. 5.1. clil pedagogy under this theme we conflate clil rationale and design, including projects, ideas, lesson plans and materials, and clil implementation, that is, experiences actually put into practice including lesson plans, materials, teaching and learning strategies, and assessment practices. content and language integrated learning in latin america 2008-2018: ten years of research and. . . 293 a critical examination of the conceptual framework underpinning all publications reviewed shows that the works of eu-based experts (e.g., coyle et al., 2010; marsh et al., 2001) are used for clil definitions and pedagogical frameworks such as the 4c’s in, for example, garzón-díaz (2018). this feature reveals that latin american clil acknowledges the european origin of clil and selects those early definitions which understand clil as an umbrella term for different models of integrating content and l2 learning. this feature is found not only in studies between 2008-2010 (e.g., pistorio 2009) but also in more recent studies (e.g., keogh, 2017), which may signal that while european clil has narrowed down the scope of clil to learning content through an l2 (ball et al., 2015), latin american clil gravitates between the language-driven and, to a lesser extent, content-driven approaches. upon scrutiny of the focus of each publication, we identified 37 studies which explore clil as a language-driven approach for teaching english as a foreign language (e.g., czischke alvarez, 2013), and 20 studies which examine clil implementation for the teaching of content such as history (e.g., lara herrera, 2015; ravelo, 2013), science (e.g., gamero-calderón, 2017, garzón-díaz, 2018; leal, 2016), geography (e.g., costa-rau, 2016), math (e.g., corzo zambrano & robles noriega, 2011), first aid (e.g., finardi, silveira, & alencar, 2016), business (e.g., gardner, 2009) or elt methodologies (e.g., de la barra et al., 2018). as mentioned above, latin american clil has been envisaged as a meaningful and innovative bilingual education approach in different contexts and with different learners, sometimes in connection with other l2 learning approaches, such as task-based learning (e.g., castro garcía; 2017; cendoya & di bin, 2010), immersion (e.g., garcía-herreros machado, 2017), or esp (e.g., banegas, 2018; rojas gonzáles & liviero, 2014). thus, clil, as implemented in latin america, seems to be compatible with different approaches that highlight the need to provide learners at different levels with authentic, purposeful and engaging learning experiences which connect l2 learning with the curriculum and broader social imperatives such as global citizenship (see section 5.4). in complying with such needs, there are publications which offer details around clil lesson planning (e.g., banegas, 2016; helver, 2015), materials development (e.g., bettney, 2015; zhyrun, 2016), and rubric-supported assessment (e.g., de la barra et al., 2018; leal, 2016) as an integral part of the learning process. these publications share the criteria that these aspects of clil need to be driven by (1) authenticity of tasks and multimedia input (e.g., banegas, 2018, porto, 2016) and (2) language scaffolding (e.g., castillo, 2008; keogh, 2017). the lesson plans and materials particularly feature the use of graphic organizers and visuals such as pictures or photographs and collaborative tasks that lead to a major project (e.g., castellani et al., 2009). dario luis banegas, paige michael poole, kathleen a. corrales 294 according to the publications reviewed, clil has been explored in different settings and educational levels. in the state sector, we identified one instance in primary education in argentina (porto, 2016) and seven in secondary education (e.g., helver, 2015). in the private sector, we found 10 experiences in primary (e.g., pueblas miranda & pérez, 2012), and five in secondary education (e.g., costa-rau, 2016). there are 15 instances set in higher education, all of them linked to esp courses (e.g., montoya & salamanca, 2017; tavella & fernández, 2017), and five instances of clil implementation in english language teacher education (e.g., argudo et al., 2018). last, two publications draw on private language schools (e.g., ravelo, 2013). according to the articles reviewed, clil is thus implemented in private education due to learners’ daily in-school exposure to english and advanced l2 language level. such practice may reinforce the view of clil and bilingual education as elitist (coelho liberali & megale, 2016) and the view that clil success, and bilingual education in general, depends on learners’ high english language proficiency in order not to oversimplify content (ball et al., 2015). even when clil finds traction as a language learning approach, its preeminence lies in private bilingual education learners’ advanced english language proficiency. 5.2. clil perceptions and beliefs content and l2 teachers’ and learners’ beliefs on clil have been examined in seven empirical studies. in four studies (costa-rau, 2016; curtis, 2012a, 2012b; mcdougald, 2015) teachers believe that clil can be a meaningful approach for learners’ development of language skills and subject-matter knowledge. additionally, finardi et al.’s (2016) study has similar findings but warns about challenges related to context and materials. in tavella and banegas (2016), the teachers view clil as an opportunity for language recycling (i.e., practicing previous language through different topics and tasks) provided the content is selected by the learners. teachers across the latin american region are concerned with their lack of content knowledge and overall preparation thus favoring language-driven clil. they signal that even when clil can become a source of professional development given the opportunity to develop materials, they need specialized training and support in scaffolding content and language. regarding learners, studies with primary (barrios núñez, 2017), secondary (lara herrera, 2015), and higher education students (núñez asomoza, 2015) show that they believe that clil can help them improve their calp (cognitive academic language proficiency) and operate in english across a wide range of contexts. notwithstanding, they have reported struggling with understanding content due to their limited language proficiency, academic writing and vocabulary, content and language integrated learning in latin america 2008-2018: ten years of research and. . . 295 and feel that teacher preparation and materials are critical elements that need further attention within clil implementation. in sum, clil is perceived as a meaningful language learning approach for improving l2 proficiency and for recycling prior language knowledge rather than incorporating new language; however, its success depends on teacher preparation, context-responsive materials, and learners’ english language proficiency. 5.3. teacher education several empirical and practice-based articles focus on clil within teacher education. banegas (2012) argues that teacher education programs, especially in argentina, should be re-evaluated to include clil modules that promote critical clil practice and which should be created through input from all stakeholders (educators, administrators, etc.). two studies which focus on clil modules within existing teacher education programs are banegas (2018) and argudo et al. (2018). banegas (2018) finds that clil can increase motivation of pre-service subject teachers who need to improve their english while learning their subject content. at the end of a clil-esp module, teachers had not only improved their language skills but also their content knowledge demonstrating that clil-esp modules could be a valuable component of pre-service teacher education programs. likewise, argudo et al. (2018) evaluates whether a particular efl program for pre-service teachers truly complies with the principles of clil, finding that teachers do not develop enough language proficiency to actually learn the content they will teach in english. concerning, practice-based contributions, hillyard (2011) and pistorio (2009) review teacher development models and necessary competences for teachers to successfully implement clil and call for the creation of stronger preand in-service teacher development opportunities in various parts of the world, including latin america. banegas (2016) presents one idea for teacher development through the designing of clil materials by teachers who may not have been originally prepared for teaching with clil. based on this experience, the author suggests allowing teachers to participate in materials design as a way of decreasing top-down policy and allowing teachers to become “agents of change” by creating more context-responsive materials. in colombia, montoya and salamanca (2017) describe the implementation of a clil training program as an internationalization tool for university professors of different disciplines. this program included a component of english language development, training in clil methodologies and the design of activities, and an implementation in the classroom. similarly to the conclusions from teacher perceptions and beliefs, in general, for clil to be implemented successfully, teachers must be exposed to training and dario luis banegas, paige michael poole, kathleen a. corrales 296 professional development through which they learn how to adequately combine content and language teaching and learning in the classroom in a way that is specific to their teaching-learning context. the need for professional development in clil is not exclusive to latin america; it is a frequently cited challenge around the world (mahan, brevik, & ødegaard, 2018; pérez cañado, 2018; yi lo, 2020). 5.4. global citizenship four empirical studies (garzón-diaz, 2018; porto, 2016, 2018; zhyrun, 2016) and three reflective and practice accounts (helver, 2015; liendo, 2012; rojas gonzáles & liviero, 2013) were analyzed for their focus on some facet of global citizenship in relation to clil. in general, there are two articles that explore ways of incorporating local culture(s) into the english classroom (helver, 2015; zhyrun, 2016) through different activities and the creation of context-specific material. there is also one study that presents examples of pedagogical tasks for incorporating a multicultural focus in an english for medical purposes course with the goal of students using english as a lingua franca to communicate with and attend to patients from cultures different from students’ own (rojas gonzález & liviero, 2014). in the same way, liendo (2012) presents suggestions for developing intercultural communicative competence in pre-service teachers and translators in their efl courses. two articles present projects carried out with secondary school students, helver (2015) to incorporate intercultural competence through efl lessons focused on linguistic rights of minority groups and garzón-diaz (2018) to develop scientific citizenship by using clil as a tool for raising students’ cultural awareness in science class. similarly, porto (2016) presents data collected from a virtual intercultural project with primary school students in argentina and denmark aimed at developing ecological citizenship in the efl classroom. finally, at a more general level, porto (2018) argues the case for michael byram’s (2008) theory of intercultural citizenship in language education as a way to expand clil both theoretically and pedagogically through the example of an intercultural telecollaboration project between argentinian and uk undergraduate language students. overall, it is clear that clil is being used as a vehicle not only to develop content and language knowledge but also to develop learners’ global citizenship competences through a variety of materials, curricula, and project models. 5.5. language development language development has been particularly observed in five empirical studies and two reflective and practice accounts. one area that has been predominantly content and language integrated learning in latin america 2008-2018: ten years of research and. . . 297 reviewed is vocabulary development. castro garcía’s (2017, 2018) studies found that students’ receptive vocabulary knowledge was stronger and more uniform in content-driven clil courses as compared with those of traditional efl courses. this positive result was also tied to students’ motivation for learning english (castro garcía, 2018). gardner (2009) describes the process of designing vocabulary lists for four clil business english courses and suggests the best way to determine the words is to look at students’ needs. other studies look at english development in general. banegas (2013b) highlights the connection between motivation and language learning in language-driven clil, finding that students perceived they developed their language skills (speaking, reading, listening, and writing) because they found the topics and materials relevant. in a similar study, banegas (2014a) demonstrates that using learners’ suggestions systematically and coherently to develop lessons and materials allows for improved language learning because the teacherlearner negotiation stimulates discussion on learners’ motivations, needs, and interests. additionally, garcía herreros machado (2017) describes an adapted immersion model found to take advantage of the content of different areas in order to support student foreign language development in english. a final article analyzed content-driven clil as a way to develop pre-service teachers’ oral competences. de la barra (2018) concludes that the use of clil-based assessment tools helps to raise teachers’ content and language awareness in a content class. overall, research related to language gains in clil in latin america relies heavily upon teacher and student perceptions, with the exception of vocabulary, and has been tied to other sociocultural aspects such as motivation and relevance of content. as discussed above, latin american clil research still needs to provide robust evidence of language development at the level of language systems (e.g., syntax) and skills (e.g., writing). 6. conclusion in this article, we conducted an extensive review of clil in latin america between 2008 and 2018. for an entire region, the overall corpus size is relatively small. based on our experiences, we believe there is much more clil being done in latin america. however, much of this work is not published and, as seen in this review, the empirical research is limited. despite this shortcoming, drawing on the publications scrutinized, we conclude that clil is predominantly language-driven in latin america, and it is predominantly found in private education institutions with learners with advanced proficiency in english. when it is implemented in other settings, learners’ english proficiency is highlighted as an issue. additionally, more teacher preparation is necessary for clil success. dario luis banegas, paige michael poole, kathleen a. corrales 298 we believe that our review is an example of chapman and ainscow’s (2019) call for research that promotes equity, social learning, and local knowledge creation within specific settings. through this review, it may be concluded that clil in latin america has adopted a broader pedagogical perspective; nonetheless, we observed a tendency for clil research to be carried out through action research or mixed methods usually by teacher researchers focused on their own practices. thus, the studies tend to be small-scale and connected to contextspecific pedagogical implementation. on the other hand, practice-based accounts are generally descriptive and lack an analytical and critical stance. in this regard, both latin american clil research and practice should strive for rigorous frameworks that connect the region with global conversations about clil. america to engage in more sophisticated and finely tuned studies that examine language and content gains not only through case studies but also through studies with larger samples and triangulated data collection and analysis that examine specific language skills or language systems (e.g., syntax). in this way, latin american clil researchers can better contribute to the global conversation on clil and highlight the unique applications occurring in the region and create a path for stronger future research. while latin american clil is still in its infancy, we envisage sustained expansion as a default approach for bilingual or english-medium education. nevertheless, its growth depends on concerted efforts for a clear and unequivocal agenda built on robust research capacity and teacher preparation. content and language integrated 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(2016). culture through comparison: creating audio-visual listening materials for a clil course. latin american journal of content and language integrated learning, 9(2), 345-373. http://doi.org/10.5294/laclil.2016.9.2.5 179 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (1). 2023. 179-217 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.31677 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine cailing lu shanghai jiao tong university, shanghai, china https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9911-2824 luca@sjtu.edu.cn averil coxhead victoria university of wellington, wellington, new zealand https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3392-6961 averil.coxhead@vuw.ac.nz abstract this paper reports on the creation of specialized word lists in traditional chinese medicine (tcm), which is a discipline using vocabulary across languages (i.e., chinese and english) and involves learners with different l1 backgrounds. first, a tcm word list of 2,778 specialized words was established from corpora of tcm textbooks and journal articles. selection criteria included specialized meaning, keyness in a corpus of general written english compared to the tcm corpora, and frequency. the resulting tcm list covered 36.65% of the tcm corpora but had low coverage over corpora of general written english and medical english. the tcm word list was then divided into three sub-lists based on frequency, and graded into three levels. level 1 contains high-frequency lexical items in english (e.g., organ, coating); level 2 contains items that are mid-, low-frequency, or beyond any frequency levels (e.g., pericarpium, metabolism); and level 3 contains chinese loan words (e.g., qi, yang). last, there is an overlap of 309 word families between this list and an earlier tcm list by hsu (2018), which excludes words from the 1st-3rd 1,000 word families in english. suggestions for teachers and future research are provided. keywords: corpus analysis; keyword analysis; specialized vocabulary; word lists; traditional chinese medicine cailing lu, averil coxhead 180 1. introduction demand for skills in health professions accelerates at an unforeseen rate. more knowledge in medical areas such as traditional chinese medicine (tcm) could probably provide us with more solutions for global wellness. tcm has an extensive history of over five millennia. in order to promote its international development, china introduced the concept of internationalization of tcm in 1996 (lin et al., 2018). as a result, the tcm international trade and market share has been promoted and its legal status has been established internationally. with such development, a growing body of research in traditional chinese medicine is being published in english, and a number of institutions in english-speaking countries (e.g., aotearoa new zealand, australia) offer tcm as a degree course at the tertiary level. at the same time, the demand for tcm in chinese universities has increased from both first language chinese speakers and learners from countries such as the u.k., vietnam, and malaysia. the medium of instruction is usually english for non-chinese speakers and mandarin for native chinese speakers. all learners need to develop their knowledge of tcm vocabulary in english as they progress through their studies. some tcm university programs in china combine english and tcm majors, whereby students spend their first two years in english major before undertaking their tcm study. this means english-medium communication and instruction is of essential importance in this discipline. similar to western medical education, students start with learning theory and then move on to clinical training (wette & hawken, 2016). once working, tcm practitioners in countries such as new zealand also have to communicate with patients in english (patel & toossi, 2016). vocabulary is often perceived as an area of need by english for academic purposes (eap) learners and teachers (evans & morrison, 2011; flowerdew & miller, 1992). insufficient specialized vocabulary knowledge is cited as being particularly important but also difficult (ardasheva & tretter, 2015; evans & morrison, 2011; flowerdew & miller, 1992). one reason why this vocabulary poses problems for traditional chinese medicine students is that, like in the case of students in other scientific disciplines, it is important for them to understand complex relationships among various scientific phenomena. at the same time, they need to develop an ability to express these relationships in spoken and written english (ardasheva & tretter, 2015). secondly, tcm texts have a high vocabulary load (lu & coxhead, 2020), which means learners need a large vocabulary to deal with reading in this subject area. this vocabulary can be high-, midor low-frequency (lu & coxhead, 2020; see also nation, 2016a). last but not least, tcm is a discipline which uses vocabulary across languages (i.e., chinese and english). this means vocabulary in this field is quite complex. hsu (2018) specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine 181 found that over 10% of the vocabulary in a tcm textbook corpus were borrowed from chinese (e.g., qi). she referred to these words as transliterated and noted that they illustrate the lexical and cultural origin of tcm from china (hsu, 2018). tcm texts also contain words with graeco-latin origins (e.g., astragali membranacei) and high-frequency words with specialized meanings, such as heart and gall bladder. for example, heart controls mind in chinese culture (hu & fong, 2010; maciocia, 2005), whereas head and mind overlap more in other cultures. learners from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds may find such conceptual differences challenging over the course of their studies. the present study is part of a larger investigation of technical vocabulary in tcm (lu, 2018). part of that study included investigating knowledge of technical words in tcm possessed by students from different cultural backgrounds. lu et al. (2021) found that english l1 speakers encountered difficulty in understanding loan words, while chinese l1 speakers found specialized vocabulary from low-frequency levels challenging. their findings suggested that variation in learners’ linguistic backgrounds should be taken into account in word list development to better target specialized vocabulary development, but until now, research into tcm vocabulary has not delineated vocabulary in this way. the current study intends to fill part of this gap by grouping the words in the list according to their linguistic backgrounds to make the list user-friendly for learners with different first languages. specifically, this study has three goals. the primary aim is to identify specialized vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine and develop a specialized word list from scratch, that is including high-, midand low-frequency vocabulary to support the learning of specialized vocabulary in this discipline. the second is to explore a way to divide the long list of specialized vocabulary into smaller sets of vocabulary to accommodate the needs of learners with various l1 backgrounds and vocabulary levels. finally, this list is compared to hsu’s (2018) tcm english word list to bring to light overlaps and differences between the two tcm word lists to highlight the values of each list for learners. 2. literature review 2.1. vocabulary in english-medium tcm texts research into vocabulary in written medical english texts has found that they contain a wide range of vocabulary. hsu (2013) developed a medical textbook corpus (15,016,553 running words) and found that it contained a large number of medical terms (3,474), proper nouns (5,952), and abbreviations (1,427). another feature of medical textbooks is that they contain fewer high-frequency words than other kinds of texts (quero & coxhead, 2018), which is important cailing lu, averil coxhead 182 when considering the needs of language learners who might have a small vocabulary size and have not had much exposure to long, complex medical texts prior to taking up medical studies in english. this is also important when we consider nation’s (2016a) point that words can be both technical and high-, midor lowfrequency. this means that high-frequency words might also be technical words in a particular subject area. in traditional chinese medicine, this issue is exacerbated because the meanings of high-frequency words such as warm and cold are central to the field, but quite different to their meanings in english. another feature of medical texts is that they have a high vocabulary load, which means students need to possess a large vocabulary to read english-medium texts in this field. hsu (2018) found that learners need to know the most frequent 7,000 word families in english to reach 95% coverage of tcm textbooks, and a vocabulary size of 10,000 to reach 98%.1 lu and coxhead (2020) also found that 7,000-8,000 word families plus proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds, and abbreviations (four supplementary lists), and tcm-specific words were needed to reach 95% coverage in tcm textbooks and journal articles. to reach 98% of tcm journal articles, 12,000 word families plus supplementary and tcm lists were needed compared to a vocabulary size of 13,000 for textbooks. these figures are important because vocabulary researchers suggest that english as a foreign language (efl) learners tend to have a limited vocabulary (e.g., henriksen & danelund, 2015; lu & dang, 2022). one way to help learners and teachers develop the vocabulary needed for a discipline is to develop lists of specialized words (nation, 2016a). such a list in tcm might be of great help to its learners as well as teachers and practitioners. 2.2. two approaches to making specialized word lists the first approach to developing specialized word lists uses a common core approach, meaning the specialized lists are built on top of general high-frequency word lists. this approach was adopted for the development of the academic word list (coxhead, 2000), which excluded the first 2,000 word families of west’s (1953) general service list (gsl). this approach assumes that learners would have mastered the first 2,000 word families of english. table 1 shows some examples of word lists that use the common core approach for building medical word lists of various kinds, including general medical english, nursing, 1 laufer and ravenhorst-kalovski (2010) suggested 95% text coverage as the minimal reading comprehension threshold, while 98% as the optimal reading comprehension threshold. the former referred to the coverage point at which most readers can reasonably comprehend a text, while the latter was the possible coverage point at which a majority of learners can adequately comprehend the text. specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine 183 and traditional chinese medicine (e.g., hsu, 2018; yang, 2015). the final column shows the coverage of each list over its source corpora; in this case more than 10% for all the lists. note that the word lists are all fairly small, at around 600 or more families, which makes their coverage fairly impressive overall. smaller lists make for easier adaptation to classrooms. these specialized lists inherit the limitations of the high-frequency lists they are based on. by excluding high-frequency vocabulary, the lists potentially have not included lexical items that have a technical meaning. table 1 medicine-related word lists using the common core approach study corpus size word list list size coverage over source corpora yang (2015) 1,006,934 nursing academic list 676 word families 13.64% wang et al. (2008) 1,093,011 medical academic word list 623 word families 12.24% hsu (2018) 13 million tcm english word list 605 word families 11.42% hsu (2013) 15 million medical word list 595 word families 10.72% the second approach builds word lists “from scratch” and includes highfrequency words (e.g., the academic vocabulary list, gardner & davies, 2014). this approach considers specialized vocabulary as a separate set of words which cut across frequency bands in general english (e.g., dang, 2019b; lei & liu, 2016). table 2 shows examples of such word lists. it is worth noting that the specialized word lists in this table are larger than those in table 1, and in all cases, their coverage over their source corpora is much higher. this point is important, because it illustrates the powerful role of high-frequency vocabulary in the specialized corpora. table 2 stand-alone medicine-related word lists study corpus size word list list size coverage over source corpora fraser (2009) 360,000 pharmacology word list 2,000 word families 89.1% lei and liu (2016) 6.2 million new medical academic word list 965 lemmas over 19.44% dang (2019b) 556,074 medical spoken word list 895 word types 13.44% word lists based on the discipline-specific core approach are at risk of repeating words which have been mastered by the learners (dang et al., 2017). further, the medically-related word lists in tables 1 and 2 are mainly based on western medicine and may be of limited help to tcm learners because of its different lexical profile from that of western medicine (lu & coxhead, 2020). one exception is the tcm english word list of hsu (2018), which is the focus of section 2.3. cailing lu, averil coxhead 184 2.3. hsu’s (2018) tcm english word list hsu (2018) developed a tcm english word list by identifying the most frequent and evenly distributed word families in a tcm textbook corpus that occur in the midand low-frequency bands based on the british national corpus (bnc) and corpus of contemporary american english (coca) and developed by paul nation (2012). hsu selected 605 items for the list based on principles of frequency, dispersion, range, and expert and learner review. it is important to note the common core approach taken here: the most frequent 3,000 word families from the bnc/coca lists were excluded from this list with the assumption that those words have been acquired by the efl medical learners. there is, quite possibly, a considerable number of words in those high-frequency lists that could be technical. quero and coxhead (2018) found that more than 15% of the items in the first 1,000 of west’s (1953) gsl and 17% in coxhead’s (2000) awl had a medical meaning. such figures make high frequency vocabulary difficult to ignore in studies of specialized vocabulary. the present study sets out to identify specialized vocabulary in a tcm corpus for a list which is developed from scratch and compare it with hsu’s (2018) headword list. it also aims to examine the coverage of this new list over journal articles, which the students in tcm need to read for their studies, and two types of textbooks. to achieve these goals, this study is guided by the research questions listed below: 1. which specialized words in the tcm corpora meet the criteria for inclusion for a tcm word list? 2. what coverage is provided by levels 1, 2, and 3 of the tcm word list, respectively? 3. does the tcm word list coverage differ over journal articles and textbooks in the corpus? 4. what coverage does the tcm word list provide over a second tcm corpus, general english texts, and other medical texts? 5. how does the tcm word list compare with hsu’s (2018) tcm headword list? 3. methodology 3.1. developing the corpora three corpora2 of traditional chinese medicine were developed for this study as shown in table 3: (1) a theory-based textbook corpus, (2) a practice-based 2 the tcm word list was developed, validated, and reported in a ph.d thesis by the first author (lu, 2018) under the supervision of the second author. for this article, the comparison with hsu (2018) was carried out and the conceptualization of the research was extended throughout specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine 185 textbook corpus, and (3) a journal article corpus. the total corpus size is 3,478,267 words. the textbook corpora represent textbooks used at two different stages of medical education. the theoretical stage (alternatively, pre-clinical stage) comes first, and is followed by the clinical practice stage. textbooks used at those two stages are different in nature. because textbooks are typically longer than journal articles, far more articles are needed to make up a similar-sized corpus. table 3 overview of the tcm corpora corpus size number of texts theory-based textbooks 1,171,625 6 practice-based textbooks 1,109,701 5 tcm journal articles 1,196,941 342 total 3,478,267 353 a corpus of fiction, magazines and newspapers was developed to serve as a comparison corpus to help identify specialized tcm lexis (see table 4). it was made up of a roughly equal number of fiction, magazine and newspaper texts, which were not related to medicine. these texts came from the corpus of contemporary american english (coca) (davies, 2008). table 4 overview of the comparison corpora genres running words fiction 5,980,535 magazines 5,745,610 newspapers 5,624,990 total 17,351,135 to validate the tcm word list, one validating tcm corpus and one western medical corpus were developed. as shown in table 5, both corpora contain textbooks and journal articles for comparison with the tcm corpora. in principle, the structure of the validating tcm corpus should mirror that of the source corpora from which the word list was built (dang et al., 2017). because materials in this discipline are hard to come by, the validating tcm corpus (table 5) was relatively small. in relation to the western medical corpus, the textbook section consists of 3,059,332 tokens in total. these textbooks were obtained from dr. betsy quero (2015), who compiled the corpus for her own research on medical vocabulary. journal articles were sourced from the coca medical corpus (davies, 2008-). the writing process. the same target tcm corpora were used in lu and coxhead (2020) to examine the vocabulary load of these texts and this article appeared in the ilt-international journal of applied linguistics. the tcm specialized list was used as a source for target items in an article in studies in second language learning and teaching (lu et al., 2021). cailing lu, averil coxhead 186 table 5 overview of the validation corpora corpus materials running words tcm validating corpus textbooks (54,757) 464,752 journal articles (409,995) western medical corpus textbooks (3,059,332) 4,157,483 journal articles (1,098,151) 3.2. developing the tcm word list we used word types for the development of tcm word list because members of word families may not all carry a technical or specialized meaning (nation, 2016a). to be included in this list, a lexical item had to satisfy criteria of keyness, meaning, and frequency as described in the following paragraphs. 1. keyness: more frequent in the tcm corpus than in the comparison corpus which is much larger (scott, 1997). wordsmith tools 6.0 (scott, 2012) was used to compute the keyness using chi-square statistics with a p-value of p < .000001. 2. meaning: linked semantically to tcm. based on a study of chung and nation (2004, p. 254), a tcm semantic scale was developed to gauge that connection (table 6). 3. frequency: occur 60 times or more in the tcm corpora. a comparison of frequency cut-offs at 33, 40, 50, 55, 60 occurrences showed that fewer types at the cut-off point of 60 did not undermine coverage of this list. this process also led to a more manageable word list. table 6 the semantic rating scale with tcm examples (adapted from chung & nation, 2004, p. 254) scales description examples non-specialized no tcm-related meaning due, summary, box, chapter specialized 1. loan word with tcm-related meaning wan, yin, chai, fu 2. tcm-related meaning but the same or almost the same as general meaning pain, sweating, efficacy 3. tcm-related meaning but different from the general meaning tissue, liver, back 4. tcm-related meaning and only found in tcm or general medical science acupuncture, apoptosis, moxibustion the items which satisfied the above criteria were included in the tcm word list. then, range (heatley et al., 2002) was used to calculate the coverage figures of this list over the tcm corpora, the validating tcm corpus, and the western medical corpus. the tcm word list was then divided into three subspecialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine 187 lists based on frequency in the tcm corpora. each sub-list was divided into three levels based on the work by dang et al. (2017), who graded their academic spoken word list into four levels to benefit eap students with different proficiency levels. this approach was adopted because of the unique features of tcm vocabulary and variations in knowledge and language backgrounds among learners. to compare the tcm word list with hsu’s (2018) tcm headword list, range was used to create word families. this step resulted in a reduction of our list to a total of 1,958 word families. 4. results 4.1. the tcm word list a total of 2,778 word types met the selection criteria for inclusion in the tcm word list. it covers 36.64% of the tcm corpora. table 7 shows the top 20 specialized words arranged by alphabet and their frequency in the tcm corpora. the table also illustrates features and origins of tcm vocabulary. the loan words (e.g., qi, yang) are in bold to make them more visible. they appear with extremely high frequency in the tcm texts and are thus key to all learners. additionally, some obviously general words such as group and used also appear in the list because they show a degree of technicality when they appear as part of highly specialized multiword units in the tcm corpora. for example, group is a node word in common collocations such as treatment group, acupoint group, and acupuncture group, whereas used is often found in combinations with acupoints and herbal medicine such as sp-9 were used, as well as other collocational patterns such as widely used, and formula(herb) used. table 7 the most frequent 20 items by alphabet in the tcm word list specialized words occurrences specialized words occurrences acupuncture 8,484 pain 10,252 blood 13,924 patients 7,627 cold 6,415 points 6,229 deficiency 8,956 qi 21,866 group 7,311 radix 7,294 heart 6,760 spleen 6,878 heat 12,039 treatment 13,433 kidney 6,945 used 7,749 liver 9,976 yang 9,800 medicine 6,276 yin 10,453 the full tcm word list was then divided by their frequency of occurrences in the tcm corpora into three sub-lists to make the list more manageable from a cailing lu, averil coxhead 188 pedagogical perspective. table 8 shows that sub-list 1 with the first 1,000 items has much greater coverage of the tcm corpus (29.97%) than sub-list 2 with the next most frequent 1,000 types at nearly 5% coverage. such a coverage pattern is typical of word lists in the target corpora which they represented (coxhead, 2000; nation, 2016a). unsurprisingly, sub-list 3 has the lowest coverage because it contains only 778 items which are less frequent overall. these coverage figures illustrate the power of high-frequency specialized vocabulary in tcm. table 8 the sub-lists of the tcm word list sub-list word types coverage examples 1 1,000 29.97% qi, blood, treatment 2 1,000 4.89% detected, laboratory, geng (根) 3 778 1.78% ultrasound, vein, fuling (茯苓) note. sub-lists 1, 2, 3 contain the most frequently-occurring 1-1000, 1001-2000, and 2001-2778 word types in the tcm corpora, respectively. 4.2. levels of the tcm word list table 9 presents the number and coverage of specialized vocabulary in each level of the sub-lists. the sub-lists of the tcm word list were divided into three levels primarily according to their frequency in the bnc/coca lists by nation (2012). level 1 contains items from the 1st-3rd 1,000 word families of the bnc/coca; level 2 contains those which fell outside the 1st-3rd 1,000; and level 3 is for loan words from chinese. it is important to mention that some loan words (e.g., yin, chai) appear at level 2 because of semiotic coincidences3 between english and romanized chinese (see lu & coxhead, 2020 for more details). although a considerable number of items (1,325 word types out of 2,778) in the tcm word list are at level 1 from the first 3,000 bnc/coca word families, the other 1,245 words fell outside the first 3,000 bnc/coca word families at level 2, and the remaining 218 items are loan words at level 3. this result means that nearly half (47.7%) of the items from the list developed from the present study also occur in general high-frequency vocabulary. dividing the list into sub-lists and levels means that frequency is taken into account both in terms of tcm specialized vocabulary and general english vocabulary. loan words are also taken into account in the levels. the top ten chinese specialized lexical items at level 3 by frequency are geng, bei, xuehai, waiguan, mingmen, deqi, bian, shenmen, yue and shou. the tcm specialized words in 3 3 semiotic coincidences refer to items (e.g., tang, ling) which can either be regarded as an english word or a loan word borrowed from chinese, depending on the context of use (lu & coxhead, 2020). specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine 189 each sub-list and level are presented in appendices a to i. it means the list can be adaptable to learners from different l1 backgrounds (e.g., english l1 speakers and chinese l1 speakers) or at different vocabulary levels. table 9 number and coverage of specialized words at each level of tcm sub-lists level level 1 level 2 level 3 number coverage number coverage number coverage sub-list 1 643 19.39% 289 8.13% 68 2.45% sub-list 2 465 2.33% 468 2.23% 67 0.33% sub-list 3 217 0.49% 478 1.1% 83 0.19% total 1,325 22.21% 1,235 11.46% 218 2.97% note. number refers to number of word types 4.3. coverage of the tcm word list in the theoryand practice-based textbooks, and journal articles the tcm word list provides the highest coverage over the two sets of textbooks in the corpora: 40.06% over practice-based and 38.54% over theory-based ones. its coverage over the journal articles is somewhat lower at 31.43%. these patterns are consistent with the findings of lu and coxhead (2020), using the same corpora, who found that the journal articles were less demanding than the textbooks and had more high-frequency vocabulary. it is important to note that the tcm word list in the three types of tcm texts is all over 30%, which is similar to findings of technical vocabulary coverage by chung and nation (2003) in an anatomy textbook and coxhead et al. (2016) in pedagogical written carpentry texts. 4.4. coverage of the tcm word list in other corpora the tcm word list covers exactly the same percentage over the tcm validating corpus (31.43%) as it does over the tcm journal article corpus. its coverage over the western medical texts is 25.32%, which is largely achieved by frequentlyoccurring words such as antibiotics, diagnoses, and cell. its coverage over the corpus of general english (fiction, newspapers and magazines) is 4.11%, and items such as brain, arm and chest are largely responsible for that coverage. 4.5. comparison with hsu’s (2018) headword list in total, 309 words overlap between hsu’s (2018) tcm headword list (605 items) and our tcm word list. acupoint, damp, and evil are examples of words which are not in hsu’s list; along with high-frequency items such as warm and wind. hsu’s tcm headwords account for 4.87% and 3.71% of the tokens in the tcm cailing lu, averil coxhead 190 corpora and the tcm validating corpus, respectively. a total of 579 and 480 out of 605 headwords occur in the tcm corpora and validating corpus. its coverage over the tcm textbook corpora from our study is slightly higher at 5.71% (570 out of 605). for interest, we also checked coverage of hsu’s tcm headword list over the western medical corpora (3.81%), and the general written english corpora (0.23%). note that the coverage of hsu’s (2018) list is lower in the corpora of our study because we only have the headword list rather than the whole list. these coverage figures do not undermine the value of hsu’s (2018) list in any way. appendix j presents a common core tcm list of shared items between hsu’s (2018) headword list and the tcm word list. this list is of paramount importance to all learners in this discipline. 5. discussion in response to research question 1, the findings in this study showed that there is a large amount of specialized vocabulary (2,778 word types) in traditional chinese medicine texts, and the lists discussed here did not include lexical items that are technical but did not meet the selection criteria for the final word list. especially, the development of specialized word lists using either a common core or discipline-specific approach is important to discuss here. this study shows that starting from scratch for selecting items for a tcm word list results in, firstly, a much larger word list, and secondly, much higher coverage than a word list that does not include high-frequency technical items. further, the tcm word list presented in this article took a wide view of specialized words, including chinese loan words as well as high-, midand low-frequency words that met the criteria for inclusion in the list. discipline-specific word lists can provide a short-cut to the most useful words in various disciplines by identifying and ranking lexical items to help with academic reading texts that usually have heavy vocabulary loads (nation, 2013, 2016b). the findings of this article provide strong support for this approach. tcm students can be motivated to learn words from such specialized lists because they can clearly see the relationship between what they can learn from this list and their subject courses, which is particularly important for english for specific purposes (esp) learners (coxhead & hirsh, 2007; hyland, 2016). these findings thus provide more solid evidence for how specialized word lists can better serve esp learners’ needs (durrant, 2013, 2016; hyland & tse, 2007). in answer to research question 2, the coverage figures of the three levels of tcm word list can be found in table 9. there are several points that are worth attention. first, high-frequency vocabulary which has a technical meaning in tcm (sub-list 1, level 1 of the tcm list) is vital for learners. the coverage of the tcm source corpus at just over 19% by 643 types (see table 9) demonstrates specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine 191 this point. creating the tcm specialized list from scratch resulted in (1) a much larger list than hsu’s (2018) list, and (2) quite different coverage figures. our tcm word list covers more than one third of the tcm corpora in this study, compared to nearly 5% of hsu’s (2018). the corpora used in the current study, however, is not large and the validation corpus could be better balanced to make it more similar to the source corpora from which the tcm word list was developed. second, the tcm word list illustrates how different l1 backgrounds and vocabulary knowledge can be taken into account through dividing the list into levels and sub-lists. the chinese loan words are at their own level and can be the target of the non-chinese speakers, in particular the most frequent loan words. last, the division also makes the longer word list more manageable for teachers and learners (coxhead, 2000; dang & webb, 2016), and may help encourage learners to study so as to progress from items in their current vocabulary knowledge to items beyond it (webb & chang, 2012). with regard to research question 3, the present study showed that the tcm word list covers 36.64% of its source corpus, and over 30% of the individual corpora of journal articles, practice, and theory textbooks in tcm. this means the learners will encounter tcm word list items frequently in these texts. as already noted, these findings resonate with other studies which use different approaches to identifying discipline-specific vocabulary for word lists (chung & nation, 2004; coxhead & demecheleer, 2018; coxhead et al., 2016). in answer to research question 4, this study revealed that the coverage of the tcm word list in the tcm validating corpus and the tcm journal article corpus is the same. this is possibly because the validating corpus contains mostly journal articles. this finding demonstrates that this list captures the most useful specialized words in this field. in addition, the tcm word list provides higher coverage over the tcm corpora than the western medical corpus. it suggests that this list better represents specialized vocabulary in tcm rather than in western medicine. further, the lower coverage of the list over the general written english corpus indicates that this list contains words which are relatively rare in general written english. again, these results are consistent with results of other specialized word lists over validating corpora (e.g., coxhead, 2000; dang et al., 2017; gardner & davies, 2014). concerning research question 5, the tcm word list developed from this study has a number of advantages over that of hsu (2018). first, it included highfrequency vocabulary. this is of paramount importance as recent studies have consistently reported that efl learners are unlikely to have mastery of high-frequency vocabulary in various efl contexts (e.g., china, iran, denmark, vietnam) at secondary school (e.g., laufer, 1998; nguyen, 2020; olmos, 2009; stæhr, 2008; sun & dang, 2020), and university levels (e.g., lu & dang, 2022; nguyen & webb, 2017; nurweni & read, 1999). in particular, those studies have shown that efl cailing lu, averil coxhead 192 university students have not mastered the first 2,000 word families in english (e.g., akbarian, 2010; dang, 2019a; matthews & cheng, 2015). moreover, lu et al. (2021) revealed that some tcm learners have difficulty understanding technical meanings of the 1st-3rd 1,000 word families (e.g., channel). the tcm word list can help address this issue by ensuring that high-frequency items are included in level 1. second, level 2 of this list also includes items which fell outside the high-, mid-, and low-frequency bnc/coca levels. such items are important in tcm but are not so frequent, meaning learners might not meet them often in general language use (ardasheva & tretter, 2015; nation, 2013). last, the inclusion of the loan words at level 3 makes this unique set of vocabulary salient to learners from different linguistic backgrounds. their relative value in this discipline is now more visible in comparison to other specialized words. overall, this study is among the few word list studies which systematically investigated specialized vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine, including vocabulary across the chinese and english languages. it also provides insights into the possible ways in which the specialized word list can be adapted to tcm students from different l1 backgrounds and existing vocabulary levels. 6. pedagogical implications this study has several implications for a range of possible users of the frequencybased tcm word list, including materials writers, teachers, and learners. for example, the list can guide the setting of goals for teachers, learners and course designers over short and long terms (nation, 2013). working with any list has to be more than recitation and rote learning, although such memorization activities can be useful. a principled approach is needed to take into account the features of the vocabulary in the tcm word list and the learners’ lexical knowledge and language backgrounds. first, the current tcm word list contains high-frequency specialized words that were not included by hsu’s (2018) list, meaning the current list may be more useful for learners at the initial stages of study. at the beginning of a tcm course, the teachers can establish the learning goals depending on their students’ l1 backgrounds or existing levels of general vocabulary. new learners to this field could begin, for example, with sub-list 1, level 1 and identify words and the tcm meanings they already know. importantly, all learners would need to ensure that they understand and are able to express the tcm meaning of high-frequency words, rather than relying on the everyday meaning of these words. examples of such kind of high-frequency items with specialized meanings are fire, water, and flow. second, speakers of languages other than chinese might want to focus on learning to recognize and understand the chinese loan words in particular, since they would need to learn both the specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine 193 word form and tcm-related concept. examples of such words include shenshu, zao and xuan. as suggested by one of the reviewers, chinese loan words in relation to acupoints and herbs may be better learnt when they are accompanied by pictures, video, or realia to non-chinese native speakers. another way to group the learning of the specialized items would be through the main subfields, such as herbal medicine (e.g., wallichii, moxa), acupuncture (e.g., acupressure, needle) and chinese massage (e.g., qi, manipulation). third, the tcm word list includes specialized words that are shared with western medicine. english as l1 speakers, l2 learners, and efl learners who are learning tcm would need help with learning these words because they might not have had much exposure to these long, graeco-latin items previously. there are clearly several such categories or groups of items in the list, such as organs and parts of the body (e.g., kidney, heart, knees) and adjectives (e.g., empty, fried, choppy), that many people might already recognize in general english or from exposure to medical english. these lexical items would require checking to ensure that the discipline-specific meaning is also known. medical terms that are shared with western medicine, such as anti-inflammatory, cardiovascular, and analgesic, could be learned through developing knowledge of roots and affixes (nation, 2013), because these words are often made up of word parts which learners need to learn to recognize and use. for example, the root cardi(o)(meaning heart), the affix -vascul (meaning vessel), and the affix -ar (meaning pertaining to) make up cardiovascular. cardi(o)can also combine with -tocography to form cardiotocography (hutton, 2006). knowing the meaning of roots and affixes and being able to identify them in longer medical words is important for word recognition skills. learners can use this knowledge to guess the meaning of an unfamiliar word from context, and then check whether the meaning of this word has been successfully inferred (nation, 2013). the tcm word list provides a point of reference for teachers. this is important in esp for teachers who might not have expertise in tcm but are required to teach it. these practitioners can use the list to identify specialized words in texts according to the levels, design materials so that they contain and repeat specialized words to help with learning, and organize learning activities in relation to specialized words. this can help the learners to develop and consolidate tcm specialized vocabulary knowledge in meaningful ways. they can highlight specialized words in the tcm texts, thereby causing the words to stand out. such technique will likely draw the attention of the learners. it is important to ensure that learners work on developing their tcm vocabulary across nation’s (2007) four strands of meaning-focused input (reading and listening), language-focused learning, meaning-focused output (writing and speaking), and fluency development. the list and the strands can provide a framework for esp cailing lu, averil coxhead 194 courses for activities, course design and instruction (see hirsh & coxhead, 2009; nation & yamamoto, 2012 for more). last, items in the tcm word list can act as a guide in the assessment and testing of specialized vocabulary knowledge (nation, 2016a). for instance, test developers could sample items from each sub-list and level to write the lexical components of a test. the testing and assessment, however, should be aligned with the overall learning goals as well as the actual activities in teaching and learning specialized vocabulary (malmström et al., 2018). for example, if the teaching activities only involve receptive learning (e.g., form-meaning recognition) of certain specialized words, the testing should reflect such receptive aspects of knowing the target words. 7. limitations and directions for future research limitations of this study include the relatively small corpora and the focus on single words over multiword units. future studies could use larger corpora to further validate the list. there are several possible directions for future research, including analyzing technical abbreviations in various academic disciplines, and looking into the vocabulary used in other types of specialized language, including class handouts and multimodal texts. similarly, studies in medical contexts could also investigate vocabulary in spoken discourse (see dang, 2018 and lessard-clouston, 2010 for examples). these types of discourse are of great importance to the development of disciplinary literacy. in addition, it is equally important to explore specialized multiword units in esp contexts, which might provide some new insights into the nature of specialized vocabulary. finally, research that looks into the learning and testing of specialized vocabulary would be valuable. 8. conclusion this study reported on the development and validation of a specialized word list using a discipline-specific approach in traditional chinese medicine, which draws on vocabulary across languages (i.e., chinese and english). the tcm word list is large, with 2,778 items, but has been classified into various sub-lists and levels to make it more manageable. it has similar coverage over a second tcm corpus and low coverage over a corpus of general english, which suggests that it captures items that are specific to this discipline. by comparison with hsu’s (2018) tcm headword list, 309 common core headwords were identified. this study illustrates the large amount of specialized vocabulary, and suggests ways in which that teachers and learners might work with a specialized word list to help with learning this essential vocabulary in that discipline. further, the approach specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine 195 used to develop and divide a discipline-specific word list provides a possible direction for future work on specialized vocabulary which targets at learners from various linguistic backgrounds and with different vocabulary levels. acknowledgements 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(2015). a nursing academic word list. english for specific purposes, 37, 27-38. cailing lu, averil coxhead 200 appendix a sub-list 1 of the tcm word list at level 1 note. the word types were arranged according to their frequency in the tcm corpora. the concordance lines of word types falling into a single lemma (e.g., point, points) were checked to see if they had similar meanings and patterns of use in the tcm corpora. if so, they were combined into a single entry in the word list as point(s). 1. blood 2. treatment 3. heat 4. pain 5. use(d)/using 6. patient(s) 7. group(s) 8. heart 9. cold 10. medicine(s) 11. point(s) 12. symptom(s) 13. study 14. body 15. wind 16. tongue 17. stomach 18. clinical 19. channel(s) 20. low(er) 21. damp 22. formula(s/e) 23. effect(s) 24. disease(s) 25. dampness 26. fire 27. result 28. pattern(s) 29. control(led/s) 30. case(s) 31. chest 32. clear(s/ing) 33. vessel(s) 34. add(ed) 35. related 36. water 37. trail(s) 38. mind 39. red 40. data 41. method(s) 42. significant 43. function(s) 44. western 45. main 46. dry 47. skin 48. condition(s) 49. cause(s/d/ing) 50. level(s) 51. treat(ed/ing/s) 52. organ(s) 53. cell(s) 54. feeling 55. factor(s) 56. compared 57. participants 58. severe 59. excess 60. therapy/therapies 61. medical 62. significantly 63. manifestation(s) 64. flow 65. coating 66. health 67. painful 68. system(s) 69. internal 70. food(s) 71. include(d/ing) 72. women 73. depression 74. effective 75. normal 76. quality(ies) 77. principle(s) 78. indicate(d/s/ing) 79. traditional 80. yellow 81. activity/activities 82. disorder(s) 83. weak 84. empty 85. associated 86. shan 87. cough(ing) 88. model(s) 89. middle 90. age 91. bleeding 92. burner(s) 93. practice 94. addition(s) 95. primary 96. throat 97. signs 98. excessive 99. rat(s) 100. area(s) 101. expression(s) 102. swelling 103. full 104. test(s) 105. sweat(ing/s) 106. mental 107. upper 108. brain 109. mouth 110. powder 111. pale 112. difference(s) 113.increase(d/s/ing) 114. location 115. stage(s) 116. changes 117. indication(s) 118. emotional 119. warm(ing) 120. movement 121. thin 122. combined 123. descend(ing/s) 124. rate 125. combination(s) 126. fullness 127. deep 128. rapid 129. min 130. muscle(s) 131. root 132. risk 133. problems 134. external 135. criterion(a) 136. region 137. cancer 138. physical 139. period(s) 140. nature 141. pressure 142. form(s) 143. poor 144. difficult 145. stimulation 146. loss 147. lead(ing/s) 148. interior 149. performed 150.practitioner(s) 151. action(s) 152. mean 153. lack 154. relationship(s) 155. intervention(s) 156. transformation 157. thirst 158. development(s) 159. outcome(s) 160. resolve(s/d) 161. invasion 162. process(es) 163. neck 164. score(s) 165.supplement(ing) 166. soul 167. hot 168. evidence 169. connecting 170. strong 171. decrease(d/s) 172. protein(s) 173. drug(s) 174. similar 175. reduce(d/ing/s) 176. sleep 177. spirit 178. theory 179. major 180. source 181. statistical 182. stroke 183. energy(ies) 184. injury specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine 201 185. modern 186. pregnancy 187. eye 188. affect(ed/s/ing) 189. observed 190. characteristics 191. ye 192. cycle 193. stress 194. tissue(s) 195. ban 196. applied 197. follow 198. improvement(s) 199. response(s) 200. drain(ing) 201. influence(s) 202. weight 203. frequent 204. standard(s) 205. anxiety 206. diet 207. dryness 208. involved 209. mice 210. conducted 211. positive 212. transform(ing) 213. surface 214. benefit(s) 215. inability 216. phase(s) 217. hospital(s) 218. sample(s) 219. subjects 220. potential 221. temperature 222. dose(s) 223.improve(d/ing/s) 224. arm 225. healthy 226. size(s) 227. mechanism(s) 228. receive(d/ing/s) 229. shoulder 230. intension 231. governing 232. defensive 233. sea 234. infection(s) 235. taste 236. value(s) 237. frequency(ies) 238.promote(s/ing) 239.regulate(s/ing/d) 240. vision 241. knee(s) 242. difficulty 243. eating 244. original 245. weakness 246. bitter 247. comparison(s) 248. characteriz(s)ed 249. ability 250. discharge(s) 251. damage(s) 252. leg(s) 253. resulting 254. rising 255. aspect(s) 256. moves 257.randomiz(s)ed 258. events 259. measure(d/s) 260.preparation(s) 261. sexual 262. bone(s) 263. memory 264. ear(s) 265. position 266. exercise 267.identify(ied/ing) 268. scale(s) 269. variation 270. animal(s) 271. swollen 272. individual 273. occur(s) 274. calm(s) 275. rebellious 276. nose 277. experimental 278. illness 279. provide(d/s) 280. infertility 281. conventional 282. circulation 283. joint(s) 284. stiffness 285. current 286. sudden 287. obtained 288. strengthen(s) 289. active 290. thick 291. eliminate(s/ed) 292. heaviness 293. functional 294. tiredness 295. spiritual 296. breath(ing) 297. develop(ed) 298. breast 299. loose 300.demonstrate(d/s) 301. strength(s) 302. approach 303. injection(s) 304. doctors 305. anger 306. assess(ed/ing) 307. located 308. defined 309. mild 310. oral 311. ingredients 312. reduction 313. desire 314. average 315. floating 316. prevent(s) 317. balance 318. directly 319. evaluation 320. stops 321. production 322. reinforcing 323. application 324. accompanied 325. administration 326. remedy 327. basis 328. growth 329. safety 330. fur 331. breathlessness 332. strategies 333. direct(ing) 334. provide(d/s) 335. consumption 336. daily 337. alternative 338. purple 339. nerve(s) 340. irregular 341. effectiveness 342. intensity 343. relatively 344. restlessness 345. evaluate(ing) 346. objective 347. central 348. emotion(s) 349. useful 350. index 351. negative 352. presence 353. element(s) 354. surgery 355. modifications 356. uncooked 357. complex 358. identification 359. restore(s/ing) 360. tip 361. failure 362. products 363. formation 364. sang 365. female(s) 366. divided 367. experienced 368. collected 369. immune 370. male(s) 371. determine(d) 372. examination 373. relieve 374. heaven 375. relevant 376. scientific 377. enters(ing) 378. colour 379. dependent 380. release(s) 381. gene(s) 382. mainly 383. produce(d) 384. significance 385. underlying 386. centre 387. limited 388. suffering 389. concentration 390. drink 391. absence 392. network 393. redness 394. opens 395. shortness 396. management 397. presented 398. branch 399. marked 400. specifically 401. population 402. origin 403. pronounced 404. expressed cailing lu, averil coxhead 202 405. sadness 406. conception 407. constitution 408. random 409. severity 410. ache(s) 411. moderate 412. containing 413. burning 414. extract(s/ed) 415. alcohol 416. selection 417. mental 418. aged 419. importance 420. compounds 421. extraordinary 422. visual 423. carried 424. components 425. relative 426. chills 427. classical 428. inner 429. degree 430. randomly 431. technique 432. variable(s) 433. excluded 434. proper 435. smooth 436. modified 437. core 438. fried 439. status 440. gate 441. understanding 442. chemical 443. distribution 444. downward(s) 445. clinic(s) 446. dosage(s) 447. fright 448. signaling 449. unable 450. reflect(s/ing) 451. helps 452. establish(ed) 453. regulation 454. masses 455. suitable 456. observation(s) 457. depth 458. examine(d) 459. transporting 460. medicinal 461. insufficient 462. responsible 463. birth 464. correlation(s) 465. consciousness 466. corresponding 467. prevention 468. revealed 469. nervous 470. stepping 471. chosen 472. recovery 473. exhaustion 474. structure(s) 475. fixed 476. procedure(s) 477. repeated 478. protective 479. sequence 480. manifest 481. complications 482. relation 483. users 484. agents 485. linking 486. correspond(s) 487.measurement(s) 488. psychological 489. reaction 490. substances 491. sensitivity 492. confirmed 493. extreme 494. blinding 495. contrast 496. investigate(d) 497. sore 498. consistent 499. superior 500. typical 501. clinically 502. biological 503. guidelines 504. wasting 505. interaction(s) 506. initial 507. tendency specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine 203 appendix b sub-list 1 of the tcm word list at level 2 1. yin 2. liver 3. deficiency(ies) 4. acupuncture 5. radix 6. kidney(s) 7. spleen 8. phlegm 9. pulse(s) 10. decoction(s) 11. lung(s) 12. herb(s) 13. syndrome(s) 14. tang 15. rhizoma 16. chronic 17. stagnation 18. fluid(s) 19. fu 20. herbal 21. stasis 22. fructus 23. abdominal 24. bladder 25. pathogenic 26. tonify(ies/ing) 27. exterior 28. urine 29. ling 30. obstruction(s) 31. intestine(s) 32. prescription(s) 33. deficient 34. essence(s) 35. acute 36. diagnosis 37. fever 38. urination 39. pill(s) 40. nourish(es/ing) 41. semen 42. urinary 43. vomiting 44. dizziness 45. gallbladder 46. wan 47. diabetes 48. needle(s) 49. dang 50. abdomen 51. induced 52. needling 53. moxibustion 54. cortex 55. limb(s) 56. herba 57. moxa 58. sensation(s) 59. constipation 60. efficacy 61. stool(s) 62. uterus 63. nausea 64. penetrating 65. lateral 66. insomnia 67. acupoint(s) 68. glucose 69. pathology(ies) 70. adverse 71. pathological 72. vacuity 73. differentiation 74. dong 75. sham 76. hypertension 77. therapeutic 78. mucus 79. tian 80. retention 81. serum 82. asthma 83. placebo 84. fang 85. distension 86. sticky 87. wiry 88. diagnostic 89. fatigue 90. rehmanniae 91. distention 92. pericardium 93. headaches 94. tinnitus 95. expel(s) 96. diarrh(o)ea 97. yuan 98. acupressure 99. scanty 100. slippery 101. sclerotium 102. duration 103. menstrual 104. acid(s) 105. glycyrrhizae 106. appetite 107. lumbar 108. disharmony(ies) 109. angelicae 110. cocos 111. officinalis 112. chinensis 113. poriae 114. citri 115. oedema 116. distil 117. palpitation(s) 118. complexion 119. atractylodis 120. numbness 121. median(s) 122. ethereal 123. sinensis 124. oedema 125. ginseng 126. aversion 127. sinew(s) 128. paeoniae 129. insulin 130. administered 131. medicinals 132. uralensis 133. greasy 134. orifice(s) 135. diabetic 136. flos 137. inflammatory 138. turbid 139. backache 140. menstruation 141. onset 142. dysfunction 143. tong 144. chai 145. gen 146. inflammation 147. massage 148. irritability 149. bowel(s) 150. ascending 151. protocol(s) 152. upward(s) 153. marrow 154. activation 155. nasal 156. physiological 157. ovulation 158. chemotherapy 159. diagnosed 160. spine 161. sperm 162. subtractions 163. agitation 164. astragali 165. bi 166. prescribe(d) 167.macrocephalae 168. oppression 169. physician(s) 170. pericarpium 171. ascend(s) 172. pathogen(s) 173. pathways 174. epilepsy 175. tuber 176. nutritive 177. metabolism 178. ramulus 179. blurred 180. cerebral 181. wheezing 182. febrile 183. medication(s) 184. seu 185. apoptosis 186. cinnamomi 187. elbow 188. contraction 189. uterine 190. inclusion 191.invigorate(s/ing) 192. itching 193. needled 194. anterior 195. parameters 196. dull 197. respiratory 198. praeparata 199. toxicity 200. heterogeneity cailing lu, averil coxhead 204 201. profuse 202.complementary 203. toxin(s) 204. superficial 205. medication 206. obstructing 207. costal 208. radicis 209. deviation 210. aetiology 211. epigastrium 212. spinal 213. artery(ies) 214. tumor(s) 215. caulis 216. beneficial 217. facial 218. reticulatae 219. toxic 220. cassiae 221. ophiopogonis 222. miscarriage(s) 223. midline 224. tonification 225. perpendicular 226. stagnant 227. diaphragm 228. discomfort 229. poria 230. atrophy 231.acupuncturist(s) 232. dampness 233. dioscoreae 234. medial 235. renal 236. cardiac 237. corporeal 238. incidence 239. disperse(s) 240. subdues 241. gong 242.harmonize(s/ing) 243. intake 244. allergic 245. oppositae 246. auricular 247.gastrointestinal 248. glutinosae 249. proliferation 250. spontaneous 251. fen 252. moutan 253. upright 254. oblique 255. fibrosis 256. japonici 257. pinelliae 258. intestinal 259. lactiflorae 260. obstructed 261.miltiorrhizae 262. impairment 263. wrist specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine 205 appendix c sub-list 1 of the tcm word list at level 3 1. qi 18. sanyinjiao 35. sha 52. lieque 2. yang 19. zusanli 36. gou 53. qihai 3. zi 20. xiao 37. luo 54. zhishi 4. shen 21. xie 38. xiong 55. cang 5. zhi 22. xia 39. xuan 56. baihui 6. cao 23. zhong 40. neiguan 57. yanglingquan 7. pi 24. zao 41. taixi 58. gua 8. jiao 25. qin 42. po 59. hou 9. mu 26. huo 43. quchi 60. dou 10. shi 27. hegu 44. niu 61. qiao 11. sheng 28. shenshu 45. pishu 62. xian 12. jing 29. jie 46. zhen 63. zhaohai 13. ji 30. zheng 47. xue 64. fengchi 14. shu 31. xing 48. xin 65. zangfu 15. cun 32. taichong 49. rou 66. fenglong 16. xiang 33. guanyuan 50. zang 67. feishu 17. lian 34. zhongwan 51. yinlingquan 68. zhongji cailing lu, averil coxhead 206 appendix d sub-list 2 of the tcm word list at level 1 1. detected 2. survival 3. difficulties 4. independent 5. laboratory 6. techniques 7. exposure 8. ancient 9. allocation 10. childhood 11. flows 12. modification 13. passage(s) 14. requires 15. variety 16. attacks 17. properties 18. reactions 19. characteristic 20. connect(s/ed) 21. pregnant 22. normally 23.generate(d/ing) 24. component 25. content(s) 26. stimulate(s/d) 27. limitation(s) 28. increases 29. internally 30. presentation 31. articles 32. contain(s/ed) 33. tested 34. context 35. correct 36. unclear 37. experiment(s) 38.manifest(s/ing/ed) 39. resistance 40. transportation 41. individuals 42. solution 43. variations 44. depend(s/ing) 45. suffer(ed/s) 46. adopted 47. stiff 48. sinking 49. watery 50. participant 51. soreness 52. detection 53. locate 54. tension 55. occur(red/ring) 56. formed 57. dietary 58. functioning 59. movements 60. environment 61. extremities 62. sessions 63. referred 64. supplements 65.derive(d/ing/s) 66. fall(s/ing) 67. gathering 68. illnesses 69. integrated 70. minor 71. simultaneously 72. density 73. concept(s) 74. fertility 75. capacity 76. imbalance(s) 77. continuous 78. methodological 79. portion 80. complicated 81. infant(s) 82. intense 83. signal 84. randomization 85. substance 86. achieve(d) 87. enter 88. transform(ed/s) 89. positions 90. perspective(s) 91. practices 92. regions 93. describe 94. shock 95. appearance 96. develop(ing/s) 97. stronger 98. compound 99. elderly 100. binding 101. cycles 102. electrical 103. nan 104. contribute(s) 105. coupled 106. similarity 107. labour 108. manipulation 109. aim(s/ed) 110. controlling 111. recruited 112. boost(s) 113.eliminating 114. extraction 115. progression 116. tube(s) 117. virus(es) 118. exercises 119. raw 120. stable 121. accuracy 122. emission 123. experiences 124. involve(s/ing) 125. molecular 126. employed 127. produce(s/ing) 128. quantitative 129. enhance(d) 130. manual 131. inserted 132. removes 133. assigned 134. compare(ing) 135. effectively 136. situations 137. vital 138. thirsting 139. blind 140. explore(d) 141. linked 142. persistent 143. blockage 144. curative 145. motor 146. transport 147. calming 148. collapse 149. injure(s) 150. produces 151. reflected 152. stored 153. behaviour 154. elevated 155. manner 156. peak 157. resulted 158. sufficient 159. blocked 160. depressive 161. examinations 162. substantial 163. ingredient 164. strengthening 165. cure(d) 166. percentage 167. resolving 168. disturbance(s) 169. angle 170. gender 171.maintain(ed/ing) 172. composed 173. relieve(ing/s/d) 174. energetic 175. present(s) 176. approaches 177. prevent(ing/s) 178. counter 179. concentrations 180. cool(s/ing) 181. distinguish 182. markedly 183. strain 184. aching 185. drains 186. principal 187. invasions 188. stimulate(ing) 189. constant 190. healing 191. outer 192. remedies 193. obtain 194. warmth 195. damaged 196. exhibited 197. fundamental 198. strain(ing/ed) 199. bacterial 200. evil(s) specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine 207 201. participate(ing) 202. restless 203. variance 204.accumulate(d/s/ing) 205. mortality 206. reverse 207. regulatory 208. emphasis 209. injected 210. adjusted 211. disturbed 212. rapidly 213. constitutional 214. theories 215. validity 216. decline 217. blind 218. correlated 219. orally 220. tightness 221. courses 222. stopping 223. quicken(s) 224. treasures 225. respondents 226.correspodence(s) 227. inadequate 228. occurrence 229. standardized 230. arise(s) 231. simultaneous 232. tenderness 233. proportion 234. flowing 235. assist(ed) 236. removing 237. fatty 238. focuses 239. helpful 240. unblock 241. hardness 242. integration 243. collecting 244. excellent 245. marker(s) 246. influenced 247. separation 248. bacteria 249. presents 250. involvement 251. profiles 252. separated 253. statistics 254. chemicals 255. reaches 256. stones 257.accompanying 258. allocated 259. equivalent 260. warms 261. balanced 262. representative 263. rises 264. scatter(s/ing) 265. perceived 266. successfully 267. ya 268. attributed 269. frustration 270. confusion 271. thickness 272. expert 273. sided 274. distinct 275. fertile 276. mode 277. preference 278. quantity 279. cloudy 280. depressed 281. presenting 282. psychiatric 283. toes 284. generalized 285. weaken(s) 286. definition 287.prescription(s) 288. sores 289. consequence 290. implies 291. paired 292. radiating 293. screening 294. subgroup 295. respective 296. sighing 297. damaging 298. differ(ed) 299. distributed 300. oils 301. rebellion 302. reinforce(d) 303. varied 304. benefiting 305. lifting 306. disability 307. drying 308. flavors 309. mouse 310. retained 311. curve 312. hypothesis 313. radical 314. recruitment 315. coldness 316. documented 317. emerges 318. processing 319. confirm(s) 320. govern(s) 321. imaging 322. incomplete 323. specificity 324. sympathetic 325. circulate(s/ing) 326. interpreted 327. pretreatment 328. classics 329. mechanical 330. observe 331. formulation(s) 332. heavenly 333. indicator(s) 334. stained 335. delayed 336. processed 337. steaming 338. frontal 339. isolated 340. partially 341. symptomatic 342. taxation 343. emptiness 344. participation 345. bluish 346. lowering 347. determination 348. discrimination 349. guiding 350. relaxation 351. cools 352. selective 353. vary(ies) 354. combining 355. instrument(s) 356. integrative 357. partial 358. reactive 359. acquisition 360. cultured 361. habits 362. combines 363. decreasing 364. disruption 365. palms 366. behavioral 367. comparable 368. disc 369. inappropriate 370. parallel 371. situated 372. transferred 373. withdrawal 374. consultation 375. evident 376. indices 377. infectious 378. measuring 379.phenomenon(a) 380. spreads cailing lu, averil coxhead 208 appendix e sub-list 2 of the tcm word list at level 2 1. salviae 2. wen 3. tan 4. zingiberis 5. importance 6. induce(s) 7. membranacei 8. abnormal 9. cardiovascular 10. patent 11. tract 12. receptor(s) 13. impaired 14. alismatis 15. vertigo 16. inhibition 17. membrane(s) 18. vaginal 19. digestive 20. enuresis 21. cholesterol 22. concomitant 23. prevalence 24.activate(d/s/ing) 25. tendon(s) 26. trichosanthis 27. dementia 28. lipid(s) 29. sour 30. cognitive 31. sputum 32. arthritis 33. hui 34. paralysis 35. coronary 35. rhei 36. saline 36. curcumae 37. vascular 37. defecation 38. classified 39. peripheral 40. rehmannia 41. expel(ling/led/s) 42. pulmonary 43. cavity(ies) 44. collaterals 45. posterior 46. subdue(s) 47. turbidity 48. ulcer(s) 49. corni 50. scutellariae 51.electroacupuncture 52. lycii 53. palpation 54. pungent 55. incontinence 56. metabolic 57. exiting 58. manic 59. rhinitis 60. cytokine(s) 61. bile 62. prolapse 63. jaundice 64. obesity 65. ischemic 66. ligustici 67. median 68. schisandrae 69. exogenous 70. recurrent 71. caution 72. neurons 73. angina 74. myocardial 75. pruni 76. mania 77. pharmacological 78. amenorrhoea 79. fasting 80. genital(s) 81. hepatitis 82. pivot 83. subjective 84. ternatae 85. motility 86. antibiotics 87. granule(s) 88. obstruct(s) 89. prolonged 90. hao 91. applicable 92. coptidis 93. invading 94. lesion(s) 95. divergent 96. viral 97. alleviate(s/d) 98. antibody(ies) 99. ischemia 100.itching 101. wallichii 102. choppy 103.inhibit(ed/ing/s) 104. analgesic 105. nourishment 106. phellodendri 107. saliva 108. umbilicus 109. cum 110. insufficiency 111. kit 112. overwork 113. infarction 114. incubated 115. prostate 116. antioxidant 117. dispersing 118. fibromyalgia 119. atractylodes 120. cornu 121. psoriasis 122. embryo(s) 123. gardeniae 124. plasma 125. propensity 126. spasm(s) 127. residual 128. fetus 129. diameter 130. accordance 131. hormone(s) 132. malaria 133. secretion(s) 134. forhead 138. intercostal 139. proximal 140. threshold(s) 141.anti-inflammatory 142. gall 143. kirlowii 144. excretion 145.inferior 146. gypsum 147. physiology 148. tonic(s) 149. pilosulae 150. ankle 151. nocturnal 152. eczema 153. seminal 154. carthami 155. abscess 156. moisten(s/ing) 157. p53 158. premature 159. penetrate(s) 160. scrophulariae 161. ziziphi 162. polygoni 163. coicis 164. predominant 165. biochemical 166. matrix 167. ding 168. extinguish(es) 169. gastric 170. recurrence 171. codonopsis 172. qualitative 173. oxidative 174. recens 175. transverse 176. empirical 177. prone 178. wristbands 179. tremor(s) 180. aggravate(d) 181. anus 182. diagnose(s/d) 183. magnoliae 184. analgesia 185. neurological 186. platelet 187. sensory 188. grief 189. systemic 190. abnormalities 191. endometriosis 192. trauma 193. jasminoidis 194. caspase 195. implantation 196. buffer 197. cellular 198. colon 199. enrich(es) 200. inhibitory specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine 209 201. rheumatoid 202. concealment 203. endothelial 204. ningpoensis 205. pediatric 206. preproductive 207. hippocampus 208. hypochondrium 209. osteoarthritis 210. persicae 211. pus 212. regurgitation 213. stabbing 214. haemorrhoids 215. occipital 216. overflowing 217. synthesis 218. focal 219. gums 220. influenza 221. jujubae 222. progestrone 223. vivo 224. axilla 225. biomedical 226. carmichaeli 227. sprain 228. grind 229. pancreatic 230. ping 231. mellitus 232. rna 233. sneezing 234. achyranthis 235. coefficient 236. originate(s) 237. undigested 238. amomi 239. carcinoma 240. hypertensive 241. moist 242. neuropathy 243. vulgaris 244. arterial 245. armeniacae 246. bidentatae 247. blot 248. carotid 249. cyrus 250. latent 251. bcl2 252. perimenstrual 253. demographic 254. fibroids 255. interval(s) 256. knotted 257. luteal 258. pituitary 259. tinctorii 260. astragalus 261. descent 262. ode 263. ovary(ies) 264. rigidity 265. tenuifoliae 266. tingling 267. diminished 268. immaturus 269. thready 270. transcription 271. unilateral 272. convulsions 273. thigh 274. ccl4 275. copious 276. decoct(ed) 277. eligible 278. eucommiae 279. minimal 280. contraindicated 281. harmony 282. hyperactivity 283. invade(s/d) 284. prostatitis 285. cervi 286. postoperative 287. perparata 288. sedate 289. enzyme(s) 290. induction 291. lassitude 292. mitochondrial 293. spinosae 294. cirrhosis 295. depletion 296.differentiate(d/ing) 297. endogenous 298. rash(es) 299. systolic 300. colic 301. dribbling 302. inhibitor(s) 303. coptis 304. distending 305. invigorating 306. scapula 307. jobi 308. precursor(s) 309. coma 310. irritable 311. laser 312. migraine 313. pancreas 314. pensiveness 315. pores 316. aggregation 317. girdle 318. intermittent 319. rehabilitation 320. sciatica 321. consolidate 322. lachryma 323. pelvic 324. vertebra€ 325. canthus 326. cyperi 327. hypogastric 328. hypoglycemic 329. mmhg 330. opioid 331. tablet(s) 332. collagen 333. plantaginis 334. rotation 335. soggy 336. terminal 337. ventricular 338. anatomical 339. aspheloidis 340. gel 341. radial 342. modalities 343. muscular 344. ostreae 345. pneumonia 346. upregulated 347. autonomic 348. emaciation 349. engender(s) 350. thermal 351. adjacent 352. atherosclerosis 353. bulbus 354. latency 355. platycoid 356. vaccine 357. capsule(s) 358. endometrial 359. gynaecological 360. mast 361. oriental 362. puerariae 363.antihypertensive 364. multiflori 365. obese 366. delirium 367. diffuse(ing) 368. leucorrhoea 369. mediators 370. necrosis 371. nephropathy 372. polygalae 373. scrofula 374. surgical 375. ting 376. ulmoidis 377. amplitude 378. crude 379. exertion 380. fragrant 381. horizontal 382. japonicae 383. puncture 384. cleft 385. epithelial 386. fibrosum 387. fluoxetine 388. hippocampal 389. notoginseng 390. placenta 391. simulation 392. tolerance 393. foul 394. haemorrhage 395. pernicious cailing lu, averil coxhead 210 appendix f sub-list 2 of the tcm word list at level 3 1. geng 18. ququan 35. zhigou 52. qiang 2. bei 19. geshu 36. zhe 53. zulinqi 3. xuehai 20. xinshu 37. qigong 54. lue 4. waiguan 21. suo 38. zha 55. jianyu 5. mingmen 22. weizhong 39. tianshu 56. shenting 6. deqi 23. gongsun 40. jue 57. tongli 7. bian 24. xingjian 41. duan 58. huantiao 8. shenmen 25. ganshu 42. jiu 59. pangguangshu 9. yue 26. sanjiaoshu 43. taiyang 60. shuidao 10. shou 27. taichi 44. zong 61. neiting 11. sanjiao 28. shenmai 45. qimen 62. huan 12. shuifen 29. weishu 46. taiyuan 63. jiuwei 13. suan 30. fengfu 47. pian 64. tiao 14. dazhui 31. kunlun 48. renzhong 65. danggui 15. lun 32. shanzhong 49. taibai 66. shangjuxu 16. fuliu 33. rong 50. yangming 67. rangu 17. houxi 34. daling 51. chize specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine 211 appendix g sub-list 3 of the tcm word list at level 1 1. constitute 26. sciences 51. generates 76. immunity 2. redder 27. varying 52. tidal 77. positively 3. urgency 28. climatic 53. virtue 78. preventative 4. coping 29. dreaming 54. externally 79. altered 5. molecules 30. ineffective 55. fats 80. construct 6. concentrated 31. interiorly 56. radiates 81. energizer 7. connective 32.recommendations 57. heating 82. predictive 8. diseased 33. separates 58. progressive 83. urgent 9. extending 34. bodily 59. theoretical 84. advantages 10. lumps 35. constituents 60. untreated 85. arising 11. professionals 36. derive 61. antidepressant 86. completion 12. balancing 37. determining 62. evidenced 87. dominant 13. cupping 38. relies 63. gentle 88. enhancing 14. posttreatment 39. travels 64. indicative 89. episodes 15. translate(d) 40. applying 65. lacking 90. implications 16. nonspecific 41. binds 66. removal 91. radicals 17. probability 42. gradual 67. supportive 92. shivering 18. runny 43. reddish 68. swallowing 93. intensive 19. assessments 44. structural 69. complaint 94. participating 20. facilitate 45. conducting 70. formulated 95. poststroke 21. monitored 46. inspection 71. intention 96. prospective 22. mutually 47. transmitted 72. consumed 97. selecting 23. phenomenon 48. variability 73. developmental 98. correlated 24. settles 49. composition 74. continuously 99. undergoing 25. rabbit 50. extending 75. clinicians 100. dries 101. migration 120. screened 139. contracted 158. accurately 102. relaxes 121. applies 140. extremity 159. expenditure 103. rooted 122. output 141. implemented 160. liquids 104. underwent 123. rebelling 142. improper 161. referral 105. comprised 124. separating 143. interfere 162. segment 106. fainting 125. bleed 144. standardization 163. clustering 107. grouping 126. excessively 145. encountered 164. connectivity 108. gentlemen 127. resistant 146. gathers 165. essentials 109. institutional 128. absorption 147. localized 166. rootless 110. interact 129. colds 148. reproduction 167. yielded 111. anticancer 130. demonstrates 149. resides 168. emphasised 112. barriers 131. exception 150. sampling 169. institutes 113. brightens 132. restricted 151. uncontrolled 170. interference 114. fibers 133. grouped 152. worsening 171. normalized 115. immature 134. mindfulness 153. clarify 172. plots 116. injuring 135. outward 154. correction 173. powered 117. maturation 136. smelling 155. dislike 118. references 137. associations 156. drainage 119. salty 138. ceaseless 157. piglet cailing lu, averil coxhead 212 appendix h sub-list 3 of the tcm word list at level 2 1. ultrasound 2. vein 3. vitality 4. zedoary 5. borborygmus(i) 6. grandiflori 7. indirectly 8. lateralis 9. linear 10. cervix 11. formalin 12. ginsenoside 13. polygonati 14. rhodiola 15. cones 16. dipsaci 17. kinase 18. orientalis 19. perillae 20. refined 21. sigma 22. cuscutae 23. ejaculation 24. hiccup(s) 25. intellect 26. reperfusion 27. expectoration 28. itchy 29. nodules 30. pertain(s/ing) 31. respiration 32. sallow 33. temporal 34. urticaria 35. alpha 36. bax 37. conjunction 38. dyspnea 39. erection 40. etiology 41. graminei 42. malleolus 43. pathophysiology 44. spatholobi 45. congenital 46. corydalis 47. dilution 48. gland(s) 49. holistic 50. retinopathy 51. rotundi 52. slimy 53. validated 54. blazing 55. cortical 56. cystitis 57. dispel(s) 58. ephedra 59. fossa 60. frutescentis 61. macrophages 62. outpatient 63. panacis 64. vitamin 65. diastolic 66. guan 67. hypothalamus 68. rectum 69. appendix 70. calcium 71. distress 72. exteriorly 73. inducing 74. lacrimation 75. lucidi 76. potent 77. salvia 78. somnolence 79. albus 80. ethanol 81. follicle(s) 82. phellodendron 83. pinellia 84. prostatic 85. rib 86. scraping 87. bupleurum 88. dioscorea 89. hypogastrium 90. rubrus 91. stagnate(s) 92. aggravate 93. anemarrhena 94. clots 95. downregulated 96. gentiana 97. optimal 98. alternating 99. disinhibit 100. hypochondriac 101. lethargy 102. magnolia 103. polydipsia 104. amelioration 105. endocrine 106. fallopian 107. forsythiae 108. metabolites 109. penetration 110. seizures 111. static 112. zizyphi 113. adjunctive 114. algorithm 115. apoptotic 116. bowels 117. cannabis 118. conquitae 119. fetal 120. flush 121. junction 122. menopause 123.pneumothorax 124. sclerosis 125. thoracic 126. bland 127. bronchitis 128. flaccidity 129. flaring 130. goitre 131. malignant 132. resentment 133. umbilical 134. vagina 135. airway 136. cramps 137. dysentery 138. ion 139. licorice 140. mucosa 141. neural 142. rubra 143.transplantation 144. vertex 145. alternation 146.cerebrovascular 147. fortify(ies) 148.proinflammatory 149. stifling 150. validation 151. aconite 152. aphasia 153. codonopsitis 154. colitis 155. fracture 156. incubation 157. pectoris 158. rectify 159. spinous 160. stimuli 161. acoustic 162. autophagy 163. chrysanthemi 164. dysenteric 165. expulsion 166.interrogation 167. lonicerae 168. regimen 169. turmoil 170. basel 171. cyathulae 172. differential 173. ephedrae 174. gastritis 175. identical 176. murky 177. proteinuria 178. susceptible 179. visceral 180. dependence 181. dissolved 182. draconis 183. enlarged 184. ingestion 185. nodes 186. relapse 187. sepsis 188. benign 189. diuresis 190. dopamine 191. rectal 192. traumatic 193. urethra 194. artemisiae 195. cohort 196. follicular 197. funnel 198. hyperplasia 199. myopia 200. phosphate specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine 213 201. sui 202. ulceration 203. viability 204. absent 205. actin 206.neuroprotective 207. peritoneal 208. saussureae 209. skeletal 210. subjected 211. acrid 212. cholinergic 213. eruptions 214. menses 215. perineum 216. polyuria 217. rigorous 218. sequelae 219. thyriod 220. compliance 221. contrary 222. crataegi 223. dermatomes 224. frankincense 225. malar 226. pancreatitis 227. postpartum 228. sandalwood 229. artemisia 230. ascites 231. bambusae 232. centrifuged 233. cocaine 234. congealed 235. fritillariae 236. guinea 237. insulting 238. mitochondria 239. p38 240. testicles 241. augument(ed) 242. denotes 243. duct 244. gentianae 245. ledebouriellae 246. logistic 247. menthae 248. phosphorylation 249. prevalent 250. suspensae 251. aetiological 252. anemia 253. anesthetized 254. bilaterally 255. colorectal 256. flabby 257. indirect 258. morifolii 259. stubborn 260. treatise 261. autoimmune 262. elucidated 263. glehniae 264. hemoglobin 265. histamine 266. noninvasive 267. occiput 268. palpable 269. prenatal 270. quantified 271. ascent 272. astringe 273. corpus 274. distilled 275. impair(s) 276. ovarian 277. pon2 278. sacrum 279. subcutaneous 280. throbbing 281. tuberculosis 282. clonic 283. dysmenorrhoea 284. eligibility 285. ginkgo 286. inhalation 287. lignum 288. nelumbinis 289. opisthotonos 290. overweight 291. sterile 292. viscera 293. adjuvant 294. affinity 295. ancestral 296.chromatography 297. dysmenorrhea 298. elicited 299. interleukin 300. location 301. lobe 302. metformin 303. mucous 304. otitis 305. polymerase 306. postnatal 307. anatomy 308. carbohydrates 309. cimicifugae 310. electrophoresis 311. extracellular 312. genitalia 313. histone 314. littoralis 315. measles 316. nitrogen 317. nocturia 318. psoriatic 319. simulated 320. suppressed(ed) 321. afferent 322. biomedicine 323. fibroblasts 324. intraperitoneal 325. modulation 326. obstructive 327. oxalate 328. regent(s) 329. vexation 330. follicle(s) 331. harmonious 332. morbidity 333. morphine 334. resonance 335. retrieved 336. sacral 337. uncariae 338. verified 339. adherence 340. attenuated 341. cartilage 342. crease 343. degeneration 344. ectopic 345. harmonized 346. impair(s) 347. infantile 348. multiflorum 349. pediatrics 350. prominence 351.pseudostellariae 352. sinusitis 353. anesthesia 354. cuscatae 355. exert 356. interstitial 357. popliteal 358. purulent 359. serotonin 360. suppression 361. susceptibility 362. testudinis 363. apparatus 364. asthmatic 365. constriction 366. cumulative 367. infract 368. inherent 369. ligustri 370. lipoprotein 371. metastasis 372. microarray 373. morindae 374. multivariate 375.pharmacotherapy 376. podocyte 377. polarity 378. pubic 379. utilization 380. x-ray 381. asari 382. clonic 383. comparative 384. erectile 385. glycyrrhiza 386. microscope 387. muzziness 388. nucleus 389. pacify 390. usage 391. antiarrhythmic 392. antibiotic 393. ca1 394. cytosolic 395. electro 396. ligand 397. massa 398. plantago 399. pollen 400. purging 401. soles 402. soothe 403. transient 404. creatinine 405. dorsal 406. macrocephala 407. oxide 408. sedation 409. spatial 410. twitching 411. amino 412. appendicitis 413. bloating 414. bouts 415. consolidation 416. gradient 417. immunoistochemistry 418. intercourse 419. kaempferol 420. notopterygii cailing lu, averil coxhead 214 421. nutrients 423. sesloidis 425. stuffiness 422. parching 424. sphere 426. supraclavicular specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine 215 appendix i sub-list 3 of the tcm word list at level 3 1. fuling 22. chengshan 43. touwei 64. lidui 2. shanghuo 23. ciliao 44. weiyang 65. qiwei 3. zhangmen 24. laogong 45. yanhusuo 66. renying 4. zhongfu 25. qiuxu 46. yinbai 67. shenque 5. liang 26. shousanli 47. tianzhu 68. shenzhu 6. mang 27. yingu 48. xiaxi 69. jinmen 7. fengmen 28. dadun 49. yintang 70. shangwan 8. chuanxiong 29. jianjing 50. changqiang 71. tui 9. jiexi 30. yangxi 51. tou 72. yingxiang 10. dachangshu 31. guo 52. siman 73. daheng 11. yongquan 32. huai 53. tianjing 74. dashu 12. shangxing 33. shaoyang 54. miao 75. lao 13. wangu 34. tiantu 55. shimen 76. yangfu 14. dao 35. guizhi 56. zhengs 77. shaoze 15. guasha 36. jingming 57. guanchong 78. ao 16. ligou 37. bufei 58. shangyang 79. tuina 17. qichong 38. xiajuxu 59. shaoshang 80. ahshi 18. xuanzhong 39. yanggu 60. feiyang 81. jueyinshu 19. zhongzhu 40. jianshi 61. sanjian 82. shaohai 20. shangqiu 41. zuo 62. fengshi 83. yamen 21. juque 42. dazhong 63. huiyin cailing lu, averil coxhead 216 appendix j the common core tcm list (arranged by alphabet) note. this list includes shared headwords between hsu’s (2018) and the present study. 1 abdomen 2 abnormal 3 abscess 4 absent 5 acid 6 acrid 7 activate 8 acupuncture 9 acute 10 adverse 11 affinity 12 aggravate 13 alleviate 14 amenorrhoea 15 analgesia 16 anatomy 17 angina 18 ankle 19 anterior 20 antibiotic 21 anus 22 appendix 23 appetite 24 artery 25 arthritis 26 ascend 27 ascend 28 asthma 29 atrophy 30 augment 31 beneficial 32 bilateral 33 bile 34 bladder 35 bland 36 bowel 37 bronchitis 38 calcium 39 cardiac 40 cartilage 41 caution 42 cavity 43 cerebral 44 cervix 45 chronic 46 cleft 47 colic 48 coma 49 comparative 50 complexion 51 concomitant 52 congenital 53 conjunction 54 consolidate 55 contraction 56 cord 57 coronary 58 cortex 59 decoct 60 deficiency 61 delirium 62 dementia 63 diabetes 64 diagnosis 65 diameter 66 diaphragm 67 diarrhoea 68 differential 69 differentiate 70 diffuse 71 discomfort 72 disharmony 73 dispel 74 disperse 75 distal 76 distress 77 diuresis 78 dorsal 79 dorsum 80 duct 81 dull 82 duration 83 dynamic 84 dysentery 85 dysfunction 86 dyspnea 87 eczema 88 efficacy 89 elbow 90 emperor 91 endocrine 92 endogenous 93 enuresis 94 enzyme 95 epigastric 96 epilepsy 97 epistaxis 98 essence 99 ethanol 100 etiology 101 exert 102 exogenous 103 expel 104 exterior 105 extinguish 106 facial 107 fang 108 fatigue 109 febrile 110 fetal 111 fever 112 fluid 113 flush 114 fossa 115 foul 116 fracture 117 gallbladder 118 gastrointestinal 119 gel 120 genital 121 ginkgo 122 ginseng 123 gland 124 glucose 125 grind 126 haemorrhage 127 hemiplegia 128 hepatic 129 hepatitis 130 herb 131 hiccup 132 holistic 133 horizontal 134 hormone 135 hypertension 136 impair 137 impotence 138 induce 139 infantile 140 inferior 141 influenza 142 inhibit 143 insomnia 144 intake specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine 217 145 intermittent 146 interval 147 intestine 148 invade 149 invigorate 150 jaundice 151 junction 152 kidney 153 lassitude 154 lateral 155 lesion 156 limb 157 liver 158 lobe 159 lumbar 160 lung 161 malaria 162 malleolus 163 marrow 164 massage 165 medial 166 medication 167 membrane 168 menopause 169 meridian 170 metabolism 171 metastasis 172 midline 173 migraine 174 minimal 175 moist 176 mucus 177 muscular 178 nasal 179 nausea 180 necrosis 181 needle 182 nourish 183 obese 184 oblique 185 obstruct 186 occipital 187 oedema 188 onset 189 optimal 190 orifice 191 originate 192 ovary 193 pancreas 194 paralysis 195 pathogenic 196 pathology 197 penetrate 198 pericardium 199 perpendicular 200 pertain 201 pharmaceutical 202 phlegm 203 physician 204 physiological 205 pill 206 placebo 207 pneumonia 208 posterior 209 potent 210 predominant 211 premature 212 prenatal 213 prescribe 214 prescription 215 prevalent 216 prognosis 217 prolapse 218 prone 219 prostate 220 proximal 221 pulmonary 222 pulse 223 puncture 224 pungent 225 purulent 226 pus 227 qualitative 228 radial 229 rash 230 relapse 231 renal 232 reproductive 233 respiration 234 retention 235 rheumatoid 236 rhinitis 237 rib 238 sacral 239 saliva 240 salvia 241 sclerosis 242 scrofula 243 sedate 244 sensation 245 sensory 246 serum 247 sinew 248 slippery 249 soothe 250 sour 251 spasm 252 spine 253 spleen 254 spontaneous 255 sprain 256 sputum 257 stagnate 258 stasis 259 static 260 sterile 261 sticky 262 stool 263 subcutaneous 264 subjective 265 superficial 266 suppress 267 surgical 268 susceptible 269 syndrome 270 synthesis 271 systemic 272 tablet 273 temporal 274 tendon 275 therapeutic 276 thigh 277 thoracic 278 threshold 279 tinnitus 280 tolerance 281 tong 282 tonic 283 toxic 284 toxin 285 tract 286 transverse 287 trauma 288 tuberculosis 289 turbid 290 ulcer 291 urethra 292 urine 293 urticaria 294 uterine 295 uterus 296 vagina 297 vascular 298 vein 299 vertebra 300 vertex 301 vertigo 302 visceral 303 vitality 304 vitamin 305 vitro 306 wan 307 wen 308 wrist 309 yin 541 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (4). 2022. 541-550 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.4.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial: introduction to the special issue on l2 writing and feedback processing and use in pen and paper and digital environments: advancing research and practice 1. introduction the present special issue (si) is a collection of position papers and empirical studies intended to advance disciplinary conversations on the learning and teaching of second or foreign language (l2) writing in instructed second language acquisition (isla) contexts. it does so by analyzing critically past research, providing new empirical insights obtained in controlled and classroom-based studies conducted in various educational settings with diverse populations, suggesting worthy avenues to be pursued in future research agendas, and drawing implications for practice. several distinctive features of the si are worth emphasizing. first, the contributions to the si provide novel theoretical perspectives and empirical insights on l2 written texts, writing processes, and written corrective feedback processing and use. this focus on writing as well as feedback is relevant given key developments in isla-oriented l2 writing research. thus, although initial formulations of the connection between l2 writing and l2 learning primarily conceptualized the language learning potential of the very act of writing (e.g., cumming, 1990; harklau, 2002; manchón & roca de larios, 2008; see also manchón & williams, 2016; williams, 2012), the study of the way in which engaging with feedback may advance language competences has more recently been added to research on feedback in l2 writing and, consequently, to isla-oriented l2 writing research agendas (e.g., bitchener, 2019, 2021; kang & han, 2022; leow, 2020; roca de larios & coyle, 2022). the contributions to the si hence add to these numerous past initiatives that have so far attempted to provide theoretical rationales 542 and empirical evidence for the predicted language learning affordances of the act of writing, on the one hand, and of the engagement with the feedback provided on one’s own writing, on the other. a second distinctive feature of the si is its focus on both paper-based and screen-based writing. this is the logical result of acknowledging the gradual increase of the digital and multimodal nature of writing in a variety of learning and academic (as well as in workplace) environments (see reviews in aubrey & shintani, 2022; çiftçi & aslan, 2019; elola & oskoz, 2020; godwin-jones, 2018; see also elola & oskoz’s contribution to this si). it follows that generalizability of research insights on writing and feedback in instructed settings requires more nuanced understandings of the nature of l2 writing across writing environments. additionally, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first collective volume that includes studies in which both writing environments are compared, as done in the theoretical contribution by lee, and in the empirical studies by vasylets et al., and gonzález-cruz et al. 2. structure and contents the si is divided into two parts. the first part includes two review articles that discuss writing (by lee) and feedback (by elola & oskoz) respectively. in both cases, the researchers synthesize and critically analyze research trends and findings, and subsequently draw implications for research and practice. these two theoretical papers set the scene for the six empirical studies that follow in the second part, which collectively address theoretically and pedagogically relevant questions related to writing itself in pen and paper and/or digital environments (roca de larios et al; vasylets et al.), and the provision and processing of feedback (bowles & castañaga; criado et al.; gonzález cruz et al.; leow et al.). 2.1. theoretical papers in the opening paper (“developments in classroom-based research on l2 writing”), icy lee reviews and critically reflects on developments in classroom-based research on l2 writing on the basis of 75 studies published in the journal of second language writing between 2001 and 2020, which are grouped into 3 strands: (1) students and the learning of writing; (2) teachers and the teaching of writing; and (3) classroom assessment and feedback. lee’s analysis of the theoretical basis and methodological approaches in the classroom-based studies under review leads to the identification of key issues (i.e., corresponding theoretical foundations and appropriate methodological approaches) for future classroom-based l2 writing research agendas, and to the formulation of practical implications for 543 learning, teaching, and assessing writing. of special relevance are her conclusions about pedagogical implications aimed at promoting digital writing in l2 classrooms, which include teachers’ encouragement of online collaboration (both collaboration with peers “from other regions in digital spaces,” p. 564), and teachers’ actions to help students develop their multimodal resources as well as their digital interactional skills. the second paper in the si (“reexamining feedback on l2 digital writing”) by idoia elola and ana oskoz complements lee’s paper with its focus on digital multimodal composing and, more precisely, on feedback on multimodal texts (i.e., feedback being the third strand in the classroom-based research reviewed in lee’s contribution). elola and oskoz argue for a reconsideration of approaches to feedback in digital multimodal composing (dmc) environments, drawing attention to the imperative to expand the scope of feedback to target both the linguistic aspects and the non-linguistic elements of multimodal texts. the article not only identifies a gap in multimodal teaching and research regarding the role and focus on feedback in dmc, but also contributes an assessment rubric offered as a basis for formative feedback (which the researchers connect to assessment) that addresses linguistic and non-linguistic elements in students’ multimodal texts. the article makes a case for the need “to move towards a more multifaceted, comprehensive, and modern feedback method” that takes into consideration multimodal issues related to identity, agency, and voice. as done by lee in her contribution, elola and oskoz also provide suggestions for future research agendas on the role and impact of feedback, both in the development of multimodal texts and in the creation of multimodal tasks. the paper ultimately invites the field to reconsider and redefine prevalent notions of feedback in l2 writing. 2.2. empirical contributions the six empirical studies in the si expand the lens through which l2 writing and feedback processing are inspected in the various populations and acquisitional contexts under study. we are concerned with research investigating l2 users of different ages and backgrounds (younger and older; students with and without a background in linguistics; l2, l3 – third language, and heritage users) in diverse educational settings (i.e., primary school, secondary school, and university) and educational programs (i.e., clil classrooms and l2 classrooms). this dual expansion of populations and contexts attends recent calls for needed developments in the field, which, it has been argued, will be severely limited “if target populations continue to be primarily university students with a background in language and linguistics. similarly, studies with younger populations are still under-represented” (manchón, 2023, p. 410). 544 the empirical part includes three classroom-based studies (one on writing, by roca et al., and two on feedback, by gonzález cruz et al., and leow et al.) and three laboratory-type studies (one on writing, by vasylets et al. and two on feedback, by bowles & gastañaga, and criado et al.). the next two sections provide additional details of these two groups of studies. 2.2.1. advances in classroom-based research: curriculum-oriented studies on learning to write in clil settings and learning from feedback processing the si issue attends calls for research to investigate writing and feedback processing and use as part of the instructional sequence, which in effect means adopting the longer-term, curricular perspective that several voices (e.g., byrnes, 2020; leow, 2020; leow & manchón, 2022; manchón, 2020; manchón & leow, 2020) have strongly and convincingly advocated. taken together, the three classroom-based studies cover diverse populations in terms of age (i.e., children, adolescents and young adults), in all cases in early stages of learning their l2. roca de larios, coyle and garcía contribute a novel study on children’s l2 writing given its framing in systemic functional linguistics, genre pedagogy, and cognitive discourse functions, conceptual frameworks that have not previously been used in conjunction to elucidate l2 learners’ literacy development. the study is also a relevant addition to previous studies on young learners’ writing because, as the authors explain, “the relationship between instruction, subject knowledge and l2 writing continues to be overlooked in clil primary school contexts” (p. 599), hence “the need to address clil science teaching from a literacy-oriented perspective” (p. 599). to this end, the researchers designed and implemented a teaching sequence (delivered by one of the authors, the classroom teacher) on the curricular topic of levers with forty-eight 9-10-year-olds over three weeks in a clil science class. the main aim of the study was to explore the effects of the instructional scaffolding of children’s writing as evidenced in the analysis of the functional and linguistic features of the reports written by the children throughout the instructional sequence. in the authors’ view, their study provides “novel evidence to suggest that writing instruction combining attention to genre and disciplinary language by means of cognitive discourse functions can scaffold children’s integration of language, content and literacy knowledge in a clil context” (p. 615). the two additional classroom-based studies in the si are longitudinal studies that targeted feedback, in one case in digital writing conditions (leow et al.), and in the other case comparing digital and pen and paper writing (gonzález-cruz et al.). the populations in these studies were beginner secondary school students of l2 english (gonzález-cruz et al.), and beginner, university students of l2 spanish (leow et al.). 545 adding to the instructional sequence reported in roca de larios et al.’s contribution, gonzález-cruz et al.’s study reports a pedagogical treatment with 32 low proficiency secondary school students in two authentic efl classrooms (one of them taught by one of the researchers). the participants wrote two descriptive texts collaboratively either on the computer or on paper, received in-class training in the identification and correction of errors, were subsequently provided with error correction, and finally invited to rewrite their original texts on the basis of their engagement with the feedback received. although the researchers did not find an effect of the writing environment on the participants’ feedback processing (operationalized as noticing of the corrections provided in the feedback received), the data distinctively pointed to an advantage of the digital condition for increased grammatical and lexical accuracy. the researchers were nevertheless careful to note that evidence of fewer grammatical or lexical errors in the texts written by the participants with access to the internet in the digital condition should not be equated with evidence of “learning.” they therefore suggest investigating further the language learning affordances of digital writing. based on their partially unexpected feedback processing results, the researchers additionally make methodological suggestions for future research related to the use of “concurrent data such as audio or video recordings to capture the interaction taking place in collaborative dialogues while writing and processing wcf and thus better understand the motivations behind some decisions taken by the learners as well as the actual products resulting from those decisions” (p. 638). think-aloud data was precisely the methodological procedure used in the third classroom-based study in the si: leow et al.’s processand curriculum-oriented, quasi-experimental study exploring direct and metalinguistic feedback processing (and effects on morphological and syntactic errors) by ten adult beginner l2 writers. the participants wrote three compositions on the computer in the natural writing conditions of a foreign language curriculum (taught by one of the researchers) while thinking aloud, and were subsequently provided with feedback that targeted one morphological and one syntactic linguistic item in spanish (the participants’ l2). the think aloud-data were transcribed, coded for depth of processing (dop), and correlated with subsequent performances on the target items. it was found that dop varied as a function of feedback type (with metalinguistic feedback unsurprisingly resulting in higher dop), and the nature of the linguistic item targeted in the feedback. dop did not vary over time, and, importantly, dop positively influenced subsequent performance on tests and rewritten compositions. the authors finish with recommendations for future research, crucially drawing attention to “the importance of acknowledging variables within the instructed setting that may impact a pure effect of wcf on l2 development” (p. 652), which poses key empirical problems, with crucial methodological implications for future work. in the authors’ own words: 546 the methodological or ecological question may be whether we attempt to tease out the role of wcf . . . , or simply acknowledge the authentic classroom setting, together with several other variables (e.g., individual differences, curricular differences, etc.) that potentially may impact the pure effect of wcf on subsequent l2 development. (p. 666) 2.2.2. advances in research agendas on the role of ids in writing, the nature of writing processes, and role of language background in feedback processing and use the rest of the contributions to the si address additional relevant pending empirical questions, or additional dimensions of the questions addressed in some of the classroom-based studies. thus, bowles and gastañaga investigated feedback processing (as done in leow et al.’s study), their ultimate aim being to shed light on whether language background (second language, third language, and heritage language users in the study) mediates how l2 writers engage with the feedback provided on their writing. criado et al. investigated fluency in the writing produced by children (a population hardly featured in previous studies of writing processes) in an attempt to answer pending questions as to whether, as originally predicted by truscott (1996, 2004), engagement with feedback negatively influences writing fluency. finally, vasylets et al. investigated whether the purported (and partially attested) effects of cognitive individual differences (ids) on text characteristics is moderated by the environment of writing (i.e., whether potential ids effects vary in pen and paper versus digital writing). along the lines of the procedure followed in leow et al.’s study, bowles and gastañaga used think-aloud data to compare dop of processing of three different types of wcf (direct, coding, or underlining) by heritage, second, and third language (spanish) users, who wrote three essays on the computer, were subsequently provided with feedback, and finally revised their original texts. the researchers investigated whether dop was mediated by feedback type, error type, and language background. the findings coincide with those in leow et al.’s study in showing the moderating role of feedback type and linguistic item in how deeply participants processed feedback. the third predictor variable in their study, language background, was also found to interact with dop. these findings led the researchers to ascertain their relevance for potential “evidencebased pedagogical decisions” when teaching writing to language users with diverse language backgrounds. criado et al. examined writing fluency in the digital texts written by eighteen 10-11-year-old l2 english children. all the children wrote their texts and were subsequently divided into two groups: one group compared their initial texts with a model text, and the other group engaged in self editing. both groups 547 were then asked to rewrite their original texts. fluency of the original and rewritten texts (recorded via inputlog 8.0) was analyzed via five product/offline and five process/online measures. the results partially support truscott’s claims because, although the feedback group improved their fluency in all the ten measures, the self-editing group showed higher fluency than the feedback group in seven of the ten measures. the study is relevant not only for the light shed on writing fluency with data on an underrepresented population, but also for the methodological contribution it may make to future fluency studies. in this sense, the authors argue for the adoption of “a multidimensional approach to understand the complex and multi-faceted nature of fluency” in writing. vasylets et al.’s study is a notable addition to the growing research interest on the role of ids in writing, as attested by recent overviews of this research (ahmadian & vasylets, 2022; papi et al., 2022) and the forthcoming publication of a si on the topic (manchón & sanz, 2023). their intended contribution to the extant research in this strand was to shed light on whether aptitude and working memory effects on text characteristics are moderated by writing environments, a predictor variable that has not been part of previous work on ids and writing, although the relevance of this research focus can be theoretically motivated, as vasylets et al. convincingly argue in the framing of their paper in the relevant literature (see also kormos, 2023). they invited 42 spanish learners of l2 english to perform a problem-solving task either digitally or on paper. the participants’ working memory was assessed via an n-back test, and their language aptitude via the llama tests. their texts were analyzed in terms of complexity, accuracy and fluency (caf) measures. findings pointed to a differential effect of cognitive individual differences in l2 writing as a function of the writing environment (paper vs. digital). the authors explain this moderating effect on account of differences in paper-based and screen-based writing, especially in terms of “the haptickinesthetic experiences (richer experiences on paper versus less embodied and detached in digital writing), visual text presentation (stable and tangible on paper versus shifting and dynamic on the screen), as well as the way writing processes are implemented (easy revision/editing on the computer versus complicated revision/editing on paper)” (p. 736). given the exploratory nature of their investigation, the researchers call for more controlled experiments that can shed further light on “the mechanisms which account for the variability in the effects of cognitive resources in different environments of l2 writing” (p. 736). 3. conclusion collectively, this si offers new insights into the vibrant and continuously evolving domain of l2 writing and wcf. the two opening papers lead up to the following 548 empirical studies by first looking back at key issues and themes that have concerned researchers over the last two decades before looking to the future and exciting new developments taking place in digital l2 writing and feedback. the expansion of the field is then clearly embodied in the broad analytical lens adopted by the empirical contributions to the si, all of which reflect the diverse and multifaceted nature of ongoing research in a number of areas. among the insights offered in this si, special mention should be made of the examination of l2 writing and wcf processing as part of language-learning and contentlearning curricula in elementary, secondary and higher education contexts. the findings obtained from these interventional studies in authentic classrooms, whether addressing the acquisition of specific grammatical structures and lexis, conceptual content, or the affordances of different feedback techniques, are valuable not only for their ecological validity, but also for the interest they hold for pedagogy in fl and clil contexts. equally relevant is the focus on the role of cognitive differences in l2 writing, a clear reminder that within every learning community there are individuals with differing aptitudes and skills, whose reactions to writing tasks and modalities will necessarily impact their l2 writing performance. drawing our attention to how these variables might affect print and screen-based writing makes an insightful contribution to an area that is still very much work in progress. methodologically too, the si advances our knowledge of concurrent data collection procedures, whether through introspective thinkaloud protocols or external keystroke logging data, and their capacity to shed light on different dimensions of learners’ thinking and l2 writing competence. taken together, the si offers a comprehensive collection of state-of-the-art papers on l2 writing and wcf. the focus on writers of different ages, proficiency levels and language backgrounds in both pen and paper and digital environments showcases ongoing scholarship in a complex and multidimensional area of inquiry. in short, it is hoped that the theory and research reported in the si contributes to advancing current understandings of writing and feedback in classroom settings from empirical and applied perspectives. rosa m. manchón university of murcia, spain manchon@um.es yvette coyle university of murcia, spain ycoyle@um.es 549 references ahmadian, m., & vasylets, o. (2022). the role of cognitive individual differences in writing performance and written corrective feedback processing and use. in r. m. manchón & c. polio (eds.), handbook of second language acquisition and writing (pp. 139-151). routledge. aubrey, s. & shintani, n. (2022). l2 writing and language learning in electronic environments. in r. m. manchón & c. polio (eds), the routledge handbook of sla and writing (pp. 282-296). routledge. bitchener, j. (2019). the interaction between sla and feedback research. in k. hyland & f. hyland (eds.), feedback in second language writing: contexts and issues (pp. 85-105). cambridge university press. bitchener, j. (2021). written corrective feedback. in h. nassaji & e. kartchava (eds.), the cambridge handbook of corrective feedback in language learning and teaching (pp. 207-225). cambridge university press. byrnes, h. (2020). toward an agenda for researching l2 writing and language learning. the educational context of development. in r. m. manchón (ed.), the language learning potential of l2 writing: moving forward in theory and research (pp. 73-94). john benjamins. çiftçi, h., & aslan, e. (2019). computer-mediated communication in the l2 writing process: a review of studies between 2000 and 2017. international journal of computer assisted language learning and teaching, 9(2), 1936. https://doi.org/10.4018/ijcallt.2019040102 cumming, a. (1990). metalinguistic and ideational thinking in second language composing. written communication, 7(4), 483-511. elola, i., & oskoz, a. (2020). digital l2 writing literacies: directions for classroom practice. equinox. godwin-jones, r. (2018). second language writing online: an update. language learning & technology, 22(1), 1-15. https://doi.org/10125/44574 harklau l. (2002). the role of writing in classroom second language acquisition. journal of second language writing, 11(4), 329-350. kang, e. y., & han, z. (2022). written corrective feedback: short-term and longterm effects on language learning. in r. m. manchón & c. polio (eds.), the routledge handbook of second language acquisition and writing (pp. 213225). routledge. kormos, j. (2023). the role of cognitive factors in second language writing and writing to learn a second language. studies in second language acquisition. leow, r. p. (2020). l2 writing-to-learn: theory, research and a curricular approach. in r. m. manchón (ed.). writing and language learning: advancing research agendas (pp. 95-117). john benjamins. 550 leow, r., & manchón, r. m. (2022). expanding research agendas: directions for future research agendas on writing, wcf, language learning, and isla. in r. m. manchón & c. polio (eds.), the routledge handbook second language acquisition and writing (pp. 299-311). routledge. manchón, r. m. (ed.) (2020). writing and language learning: advancing research agendas. john benjamins. manchón, r. m. (2023). the psycholinguistics of second language writing. in a. godfroid & h. hopp (eds.), the handbook of second language acquisition and psycholinguistics (pp. 400-412). routledge. manchón, r. m., & leow, r. p. (2020). an isla perspective on l2 learning through writing. implications for future research agendas. in r. m. manchón (ed.), writing and language learning: advancing research agendas (pp. 335-355). john benjamins. manchón, r. m., & roca de larios, j. (2008). writing-to-learn in instructed language learning contexts. in e. alcón & p. safont (eds.) intercultural language use and language learning (pp. 101-121). springer. manchón, r. m., & sanz, c. (eds.) (2023). individual differences and l2 writing: expanding sla research. special issue to be published in studies in second language acquisition. manchón, r. m., & williams, j. (2016). l2 writing and sla studies. in r. m. manchón & p. k. matsuda (eds.), the handbook of second and foreign language writing (pp. 567-586). de gruyter mouton. papi, m., vasylets, o., & ahmadian, m. (2022). individual difference factors for second language writing. in m. papi & s. li (eds.), handbook of second language acquisition and individual differences (pp. 381-395). routledge. roca de larios, j., & coyle, y. (2022). learners’ engagement with written corrective feedback in individual and collaborative writing conditions. in r. m. manchón & c. polio (eds.), the routledge handbook of sla and writing (pp. 81-93). routledge. truscott, j. (1996). the case against grammar correction in l2 writing classes. language learning, 46(2), 327-369. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-1770. 1996.tb01238.x truscott, j. (2004). evidence and conjecture on the effects of correction: a response to chandler. journal of second language writing, 13, 337-343. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2004.05.002 williams, j. (2012). the potential role(s) of writing in second language development. journal of second language writing, 21(4), 321-331. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.jslw.2012.09.007 261 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (2). 261-292 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl discrimination of arabic contrasts by american learners mahmoud s. al mahmoud imam university, riyadh, saudi arabia mssaam@hotmail.com abstract this article reports on second language perception of non-native contrasts. the study specifically tests the perceptual assimilation model (pam) by examining american learners’ ability to discriminate arabic contrasts. twenty two native american speakers enrolled in a university level arabic language program took part in a forced choice axb discrimination task. results of the study provide partial evidence for pam. only two-category contrasts followed straightforwardly from pam; discrimination results of category-goodness difference and both uncategorizable contrasts yielded partial support, while results of uncategorized versus categorized contrast discrimination provided counter-evidence to pam. keywords: discrimination of sound contrasts, arabic consonant contrasts, perceptual assimilation model it has long been recognized that second language (l2) speakers perceive and produce non-native sounds under the influence of their first language (l1) sound systems. polivanov (1931) and trubetzkoy (1939) were among the earliest to view the native language phonological system as a filter through which l2 sounds are perceived and produced. lado (1957) formalized this approach in his contrastive analysis hypothesis, which predicts l2 learning difficulty only in sounds and structures different from those in the l1. the poor discrimination of english mahmoud s. al mahmoud 262 and by japanese speakers of english (e.g., best & strange, 1992; yamada, 1995) is a classic example of how learners show perceptual difficulty with new contrasts. however, it soon became clear that a simple contrastive comparison between l1 and l2 sounds is inadequate (eckman, 1987; gass & selinker, 2001) as it falls short of explaining why some l1-l2 differences are easy to learn and why, on the other hand, some l1-l2 similarities still pose a great amount of difficulty for l2 learners (towell & hawkins, 1994). flege (1987) showed, for example, how english speakers of french produce l1-similar french with second formant values significantly different from native french norms while their production of l1-different french is native-like (similar findings in flege, 1995; flege, bohn, & jang, 1997). in perceiving non-native segments, english listeners demonstrate excellent discrimination of novel zulu click contrasts which do not exist phonemically or phonetically in english (best, mcroberts, & sithole, 1988), but poor discrimination of zulu plosive versus implosive bilabial stops , even though exists in english. consequently, several models of speech perception and production have been formulated to better predict areas of difficulty in learning a foreign language sound system. flege’s (1987, 1995) psychoacoustic speech learning model claims that the ability to perceive and produce l2 sounds in a nativelike manner is contingent upon the establishment of l2-separate abstract phonetic categories,1 the forming of which is regulated by the similarity relationship between l1 and l2 sounds: “the greater the perceived distance of an l2 sound from its closest l1 sound, the more likely it is that a separate category will be established for the l2 sound” (flege, 1987, p. 264). the speech learning model predicts, contra a classical contrastive analysis, that similar nonnative sounds will be problematic for learners, whereas new sounds, different from any existing l1 sound, will be easily acquired. the perceptual assimilation model (pam) advanced by best et al. (1988) and best (1995) claims that contrast discrimination varies gradiently as a function of the similarity between native and non-native sounds. in this study i test the predictions of pam as they relate to the perception of arabic consonants by american english (ae) speakers. the paper is organized as follows. first, i lay out some of the basic tenets and claims of the model. after discussing the relationship between arabic and english phonemes, the predictions of pam with regard to 9 arabic consonant contrasts are outlined and their testing in a perceptual experiment involving ae learners 1 flege (1995, p. 239) defines phonetic categories as “language specific aspects of speech sounds [which] are specified in long term memory representations.” discrimination of arabic contrasts by american learners 263 of arabic is reported. an appraisal of the results in light of the model follows. the paper concludes with a summary of the main findings. the perceptual assimilation model the perceptual assimilation model assumes that listeners have direct access to relevant information in the speech signal without the need for intermediate representations. it maintains that auditorily listeners perceive speech sounds in terms of the gestures necessary to articulate them (best, 1995; fowler, 1989). the model has undergone a number of revisions since it was first developed to account for english speakers’ rather unexpected excellent discrimination of non-native zulu clicks in best et al. (1988). most of the discussion that ensues is mainly based on best (1995). the perceptual assimilation model seeks to explain the gradient success listeners demonstrate in perceiving and discriminating non-native segments and contrasts. according to pam, the ability to discriminate various non-native contrasts follows from implicit or explicit assimilation of each contrasting segment to a native category. a regulating factor in determining assimilability is the degree of phonetic closeness or discrepancy which native and nonnative sounds share, as stated in best (1995): the fundamental premise of the perceptual assimilation model of cross-language speech perception is that non-native segments, nonetheless, tend to be perceived according to their similarities to, and discrepancies from, the native segmental constellations that are in closest proximity to them in native phonological space. (p. 139) the degree of similarity between native and non-native phonemes is defined by “the spatial proximity of constriction locations and active articulators and by similarities in constriction degree and gestural phasing” (p. 194). a nonnative phoneme is more likely to be assimilated to a native one when it is perceived as a good exemplar of its native equivalent. a non-native phoneme can be assimilated as (a) an existing native speech sound perceived as being identical, acceptable or deviant exemplar of the native category, (b) a speech sound within the phonological space, but not representative of any particular native category, or can be heard as (c) a non-speech sound and therefore outside of the native phonological space. given that contrast discriminability in pam is predictable from the assimilation of each segment in the contrast, the different combinations of (a)(c) result in the following pairwise assimilation types, each with its predicted level of discriminatory accuracy (best, 1995, p. 195): mahmoud s. al mahmoud 264 1. two-category assimilation (tc type): each non-native segment is assimilated to a different native category, and discrimination is expected to be excellent. an example of this type is the tigrinya ejective contrast between the voiceless alveolar and bilabial , assimilated to the english alveolar-bilabial contrast , respectively (best, 1993). 2. category-goodness difference (cg type): both non-native sounds are assimilated to the same native category, but they differ in discrepancy from the native “ideal” (e.g., one is acceptable, the other is deviant). discrimination is expected to be moderate to very good, depending on the magnitude of difference in category goodness for each of the nonnative sounds. the voiceless ejective and non-ejective velars in zulu are likely to be treated as voiceless velar in english, with zulu as the good exemplar and ejective as the deviant (best, 1994). 3. single-category assimilation (sc type): both non-native sounds are assimilated to the same native category, but are equally discrepant from the native “ideal;” that is, both are equally acceptable or both equally deviant. discrimination is expected to be poor (although it may be somewhat above chance level). best (1994) gives the thompson salish contrast in ejective velar and uvular as a sc assimilation type where both sounds are likely to be perceived as deviant exemplars of prototypical english velar . 4. both uncategorizable (uu type): both non-native sounds fall within phonetic space, but outside of any particular native category, and can vary in their discriminability as uncategorizable speech sounds. discrimination is expected to range from poor to very good, depending upon their proximity to each other and to native categories within native phonological space. the well-known difficulty in distinguishing the english contrast by japanese speakers reported in best and strange (1992) and yamada and tohkura (1992) can be an example of this type; neither liquid is assimilated to a good japanese equivalent. 5. uncategorized versus categorized (uc type): one non-native sound is assimilated to a native category, and the other falls in phonetic space, outside native categories. discrimination is expected to be very good. the english distinction for japanese listeners fits this type where, unlike english , which is assimilated as japanese , english is not assimilable to any japanese category (guion, flege, yamada, & pruitt, 2000). 6. nonassimilable (na type): both non-native categories fall outside of speech domain being heard as non-speech sounds, and the pair can vary in their discriminability as non-speech sounds; discrimination is discrimination of arabic contrasts by american learners 265 expected to be good to very good. english speakers’ discrimination of the zulu clicks which, for an english listener, do not resemble any speech sound, falls into this category of assimilation (best et al., 1988). the assimilation types just listed describe how non-native contrasts can vary in their discriminability as a function of the gestural (dis)similarity each member of the contrast bears to a native segment. interference from the native phonological system can lead to a clear perceptual benefit in distinguishing contrasts when the contrast involves two separate, clearly defined categories in the native language (tc). it can cause, however, a perceptual detriment when the contrast elements correspond to one native phoneme (sc). or it can be irrelevant as in the na type. the assimilation types tc, cg, and sc refer to nonnative contrasts which can be assimilated to the native phonological space, and therefore follow from degree-of-similarity type (a). uu is concerned with contrasts that fall outside of the native domain but are still speech-like as stated in (b). uc is characterized by both (a) and (b), whereas a contrast of the na type is solely based on (c). the different predictions made by pam on the three assimilation types that occur within the native phonological domain suggest the following hierarchy of difficulty in the discrimination of non-native contrasts, where tc is easiest: tc > cg > sc. several hypotheses of pam have been tested. in one of the earliest studies that have led to the development of pam, best et al. (1988) examined the discrimination of zulu (a bantu language) place and voicing click contrasts by native speakers of american english. despite the fact that clicks do not exist phonemically or phonetically in english, an axb task showed that english listeners had little difficulty in discriminating the zulu click consonant contrasts, even when amplitude differences (a crucial acoustic cue for clicks) were leveled in a subsequent experiment. in both experiments adult english native speakers’ success on the discrimination tasks, which amounted to 80% correctness in the natural condition and 78% in the modified one, is predictable as an na assimilation type. best et al. (1988) argue that since clicks are gesturally very distant from, and therefore cannot assimilate to, any english phoneme as their articulation involves ingressive suction followed by loud release, they were most likely perceived by english listeners as non-speech sounds that do not belong to any native category, in which case listeners were more reliant on the auditory and phonetic properties of clicks, which make them highly discriminable. more recently, best, mcroberts, and goodell (2001) evaluated the predictions of pam on the tc, cg and sc assimilation types by examining english listeners’ perception of zulu and tigrinya consonant contrasts. for native english listeners the contrasts between the voiceless and voiced zulu lateral fricatives as mahmoud s. al mahmoud 266 well as the ejective bilabial and alveolar stops in tigrinya were expected to fit a tc assimilation type,2 in which case zulu fricatives would be equated with english voiceless versus voiced apical fricatives and tigrinya with nonejective bilabial versus alveolar stops. moreover, english listeners were predicted to show a cg type in their assimilation of zulu voiceless aspirated and ejective velar stops to american english finally, a discrimination pattern consistent with sc was believed to emerge in the zulu contrast between plosive and implosive voiced bilabial stops , given that both sounds would most likely be perceived as english . an axb test showed all english listeners had more difficulty discriminating the zulu aspirated-ejective contrast in velar stops than the voiceless-voiced contrast in lateral fricatives (89.4% vs. 95% correct discrimination). even worse, though not generalizeable to all subjects, was their ability to distinguish the plosive-implosive contrast in bilabial stops (65.9%). the advantage of best et al.’s study is that it clearly shows how the pam predictions for these three assimilation types were upheld within the same language and by the same group of listeners, eliminating the possibility that the observed pattern of discrimination was the result of different languages and/or subject populations. a second experiment using the same axb paradigm revealed that english listeners’ discrimination of the tigrinya bilabialalveolar place contrast was consistent with the zulu voicing contrast: both tc types. in general, english listeners’ performance on the non-native zulu and tigrinya contrasts followed straightforwardly from the patterns outlined in 13, along with their predicted discrimination levels, confirming the tc > cg > sc discriminability ranking suggested by pam. further evidence for pam is found in guion et al.’s (2000) assessment of the uu and uc types. guion et al. hypothesize that the distinction between english and would fall into the uu type (both uncategorizable) for japanese listeners, given that the only liquid japanese has is the alveolar retroflex tap , which is phonetically deviant from its english equivalent. further, two more contrasts, english and , were evaluated and assumed to follow the uc assimilation type based on the fact that japanese and are good exemplars of their english equivalents. the findings of guion et al. are generally in line with pam; japanese listeners were more successful in distinguishing english from in contrast to the poorly discriminated liquids. an exception was listeners’ 2 in determining what sound contrasts belong to which assimilation types, gestural similarities and differences among english, zulu, and tigrinya sounds were discussed in best et al. (2001, pp. 778-779). discrimination of arabic contrasts by american learners 267 discrimination of , which contrary to a uc type prediction, was rather difficult, arguably due to the phonetic proximity of the segments in the pair. an earlier study by best and strange (1992) involving japanese speakers yields results that are different from those of guion et al. (2000), yet consistent with the pam predictions. in best and strange (1992), japanese listeners perceived and discriminated english and as sc and cg contrasts, respectively. however, it should be noted that in both studies the contrast between and , classified as either uc or cg, was consistently differentiated better than the liquid contrast, classified as uu or sc. other crosslanguage speech perception studies also report findings that are supportive of pam (e.g., tigrinya ejective contrasts for english speakers in best, 1990; english for french speakers in hallé, best, & levitt, 1999; english final obstruent voicing contrasts for malay speakers in pilus, 2002; and hindi dentalretroflex for english speakers in polka, 1991). given the need for further evaluation of pam on novel languages as asserted by best (1995, p. 198), the present study tests ae listeners’ ability to successfully discriminate a number of diverse contrasts in l2 arabic, a language not yet examined in light of pam. language background consonant inventories of arabic and english modern standard arabic (or arabic) is the official language of instruction, media and science in the arab world, and the target language for the majority of l2 arabic learners in the us and elsewhere. for comparison purposes, the consonant inventories of arabic and english are both outlined.3 the phonemic inventory of arabic consonants is represented by a wide range of sounds, among which are the universally less frequent uvular, pharyngeal and glottal places of articulation. there are 28 consonant phonemes as shown in table 1, adopted from al-ani (1970) and ingham (1971) with modification. english, on the other hand, has 24 consonant phonemes as illustrated in table 2. 3 the vowels of modern standard arabic include and their long counterparts and . mahmoud s. al mahmoud 268 table 1 consonant inventory of arabic stop affricate nasal fricative trill approximant bilabial labiodental interdental dental alveolar palatoalveolar palatal velar uvular pharyngeal glottal note. underlining represents emphatic consonants. phonemes to the left in pairs are voiceless. table 2 consonant inventory of english (ladefoged, 2001) stop affricate nasal fricative central approximant lateral approximant bilabial labiodental dental alveolar palatoalveolar retroflex palatal velar glottal note. phonemes to the left in pairs are voiceless. comparing the inventories of the two languages, there are a number of phonemes that are found in arabic only but not in ae. these include the (pharyngealized) emphatics , , , ; the uvulars , , ; the pharyngeals , and the glottal . the phoneme is realized as the retroflex approximant by many american speakers of english (ladefoged, 2001), but it is an alveolar (or sometimes dental) trill for the majority of arabic speakers (al-ani, 1970; amayreh, 2003). much controversy surrounds the pharyngeal sound . although traditionally described as a voiced fricative, al-ani (1970, p. 62) has concluded on acoustical basis that it is best characterized as a voiceless stop visible on the spectrogram in the form of a 40-50 ms burst accompanied by noise. similarly, thelwall (1990) argues that the pharyngeal pho discrimination of arabic contrasts by american learners 269 neme is realized in many arabic dialects as a pharyngealized glottal stop. however, ladefoged and maddieson (1996) consider an epiglottal fricative. the rest of the arabic consonant phonemes exist in english although their phonetic realizations in each language may differ slightly. because , , , , , , , , , , , and are the only subset of arabic consonants examined in this study, the discussion below will be limited to how each of these consonants is realized phonetically, if any, in each language; their similarity to and discrepancies from english should aid in predicting how native speakers of english would assimilate them, when possible, to their native phonological categories. similarity between arabic and english consonants in determining if and how arabic consonant contrasts would be perceived and assimilated to the english sound system the first step is to examine the native phonetic realization of each individual phoneme in each language, before even discussing what contrasts are to be tested. while this study acknowledges the similarity measure set forth by best (1995), in which gestural specifications necessary for the proper articulation of each segment have to be assessed for the language pair in question, a detailed gestural account of arabic consonants is not possible for a small scale study. the comparison below is based on the articulatory and acoustic measurements of arabic consonants provided by al-ani (1970) as well as on other descriptive work in arabic linguistics (e.g., al-karouri, 1996; bateson, 1967). for english most of the discussion is based on ladefoged (2001, 2005). a first glance at the arabic consonants examined in this study renders the following unequivocal classification, according to their phonemic status in the english inventory: those that exist as separate phonemes in english: , , , , ; those that do not exist in english as phonemes: , , , , and . among those that exist in english, arabic and are often produced with the tip of the tongue touching the posterior part of the front teeth (i.e., the dental place of articulation; al-ani, 1970; bateson, 1967), but according to ladefoged (2001) their articulation in english involves a fully alveolar gesture. the stop is aspirated initially in both languages, but only in arabic is it often released in final position. when aspirated the burst intensity for is concentrated in the 3 khz range for arabic (al-ani, 1970, p. 45), but in english the mahmoud s. al mahmoud 270 energy is in the higher 3-5 khz (ladefoged, 2005, p. 53) or 3.9 khz (o’shagaussey, 2000, p. 66) frequencies. in arabic the fricatives and are always described as being interdental sounds, produced with the tip of the tongue placed between the upper and lower front teeth (al-ani, 1970; al-karouri, 1996; bateson, 1967). in english, however, many native speakers produce them with the tongue tip placed at the back of the upper front incisors (dental), although for some american speakers they are produced interdentally (ladefoged, 2005, pp. 119-120). for the velar , the most common realization in both languages is the voiceless aspirated stop made by bringing the tongue into contact with the velum although a palatalized or fronted variant occurs in arabic when next to high front vowels. the energy associated with the velar aspiration has its intensity in the 2-3 khz range for both languages (al-ani, 1970, p. 32; ladefoged, 2005, p. 52). the stop is often released initially in english, but in arabic, like other plosives, it is released both in initial and final positions. the voiceless fricative is characterized by random noise that is “caused by the movement of the air across the edges of the open vocal folds and other surfaces of the vocal tract” (ladefoged, 2005, p. 58). the noise is most intense in the 3 khz level for english, and is slightly lower for arabic, around 2.7 khz. among the phonemes that do not exist in english are the arabic (pharyngealized) emphatics and , for which the most common allophones are a voiceless unaspirated post-dental stop and a voiced interdental fricative. the emphatic is the pharyngealized counterpart of , but unlike it is often articulated with the tongue tip positioned further back, is unaspirated, and has a shorter burst duration (20-30 ms vs. 40-60 ms) concentrated usually at a slightly lower frequency range (1500-2400 hz) than that of (1600-2700 hz). when next to , the second formant values are approximately 1500-1550 hz for , but drop to the 1150-1250 hz range for . the emphatic , on the other hand, is more similar to its non-pharyngealized counterpart : both are produced interdentally and have the same noise duration (100-160 ms) with similar first and third formant resonances at around 275 and 2350 hz, respectively. however, the second formant noise resonances for are between 900-1000 hz, compared to ’s 1500 hz. a dampening effect is also observed for the pharyngealized fricative , but not for , evident in the second formant onset values for an adjacent (1150-1200 hz vs. 1500-1600 hz). the rest of the phonemes which do not exist in english consist of the gutturals, which are in fact entirely new to english. the uvular surfaces as a voiceless unaspirated stop acoustically resembling a typical stop accompanied discrimination of arabic contrasts by american learners 271 by a robust release burst spectrally visible around 3000 hz followed by a period of silence with a duration of 30-40 ms. the most common allophone of is a voiceless uvular fricative which appears spectrally as random noise averaging 100-160 ms. when next to , the fricative noise condenses around the 1500 hz baseline and is almost undetectable below 1000 hz. a fronted velarized variant also exists when next to the high front vowels or : . the fricative is the voiced counterpart of and is realized either as uvular with , : , and : , or as a fronted velar sound when next to the vowels and : . this sound is similar to in duration, but has its noise concentrated at a lower frequency range (1300 hz). the pharyngeal is realized as a voiceless constricted fricative with an average duration of 100-150 ms. it is set off from by its somewhat constricted articulation which shows more intense noise often at lower third formant frequencies (klatt & stevens, 1969). the constriction involved in producing is formed by bringing “the dorsum of the tongue against the posterior wall of the pharynx where the movements of the pharyngeal muscles play an important role” (al-ani, 1970, p. 60). when intervocalic, , as , tends to be voiced. in general, as peterson and shoup (as cited in al-ani, 1970) say, pharyngeal (and glottal) sounds are distinguished from other sounds by their “vertical” places of articulation (i.e., along the back of the throat from the palate to the glottis), as opposed to horizontal places of articulation which extend from the lips to the uvula. testing pam determining l2 arabic contrasts and their assimilability to english table 3 includes 9 arabic consonant contrasts that were examined.4 the pairs in the table are distinguished either by voicing (1-3), manner of articulation (4-6), or place of articulation (7-9). the manner contrasts are differentiated either by the feature [emphatic] (pharyngealized) as in 4-5 or [continuant] as in 6; the place contrasts differentiate the pharyngeal either from the glottal as in 7 or from the uvular as in 9, and the velar from the uvular as in 8. 4 initially some 20 pairs were tested, but since all involved the same contrasts tested here (i.e., the same place, manner or voicing), only a subset is reported on. mahmoud s. al mahmoud 272 table 3 tested arabic consonant contrasts no. contrast type of contrast description 1 voicing voiceless vs. voiced 2 voicing voiceless vs. voiced 3 voicing voiceless vs. voiced 4 manner emphatic vs. non-emphatic 5 manner emphatic vs. non-emphatic 6 manner plosive vs. continuant 7 place pharyngeal vs. glottal 8 place velar vs. uvular 9 place uvular vs. pharyngeal based on the previous discussion of the similarities and discrepancies between arabic and english in the realization of these sounds, i make the predictions shown in table 4 with regard to the plausible assimilability of each arabic consonant to its closest english counterpart. given that no two sounds are exactly identical in different languages (as is well known, but see e.g., rochet, 1995), the assimilability shown in table 4 is both approximate and predictive. it is hypothesized on the basis of the acoustic and articulatory phonetic subtleties between arabic and english discussed in the previous section, as well as on the author’s own observations (teacher’s observations) of ae speakers’ substitution patterns when learning (perceiving and producing) these sounds of arabic as a second language. in learning arabic, the majority of english speakers show a clear and consistent tendency to replace the emphatics and with their non-emphatic counterparts, namely and . in addition, though less consistently, they substitute the velar for the uvular , and the glottal for the pharyngeal .5 table 4 assimilability of arabic consonants to english arabic assimilable to english goodness of fit excellent exemplar excellent exemplar excellent exemplar excellent exemplar good exemplar good exemplar poor exemplar poor exemplar very poor exemplar very poor exemplar extremely poor exemplar extremely poor exemplar 5 sometimes and are substituted for and , respectively. discrimination of arabic contrasts by american learners 273 perceptually, arabic and are expected to represent good exemplars of english and , since in each language only slight discrepancies exist in the canonical articulation of both. still, the two sounds are predicted to assimilate to two separate corresponding categories in english. the sounds , , and are predicted to be perceived by ae listeners as excellent instances of their english equivalents (closest to being perceived as identical), as there are minimal to no differences between their realization in each language. the emphatics and are expected to sound close to non-emphatic and , just as the pharyngeal most likely resembles its unconstricted glottalized counterpart, .6 the arabic voiceless uvular is predicted to be heard by ae listeners as a very poor exemplar of english . this prediction is based not only on the relative acoustical similarity discussed earlier, but also on the fact that in the speech of many english learners of arabic is fronted to , as mentioned above. even in some non-standard arabic dialects, the voiceless uvular is almost always substituted for the voiced velar as in gulf arabic (e.g., spoken in saudi arabia, kuwait, uae, qatar, etc.). the uvular fricatives and , although in rare cases produced as and by beginner ae learners of arabic, bear no clear resemblance to any particular category of the english phonological system and are deemed, therefore, perceptually non-assimilable to any particular category in english; nonetheless, the guttural gesture (which subsumes uvulars) does exist in english in some allophonic environments and must therefore be included within the native phonological space of english (best, 1995). stating the pam predictions considering the arabic contrasts stated in table 3 and based on the predicted assimilability of each contrast member to its closest english equivalent in table 4, four assimilation types associated with pam can be identified in the classification of these contrasts. the first assimilation type that can be discerned in table 3 is the tc type in which both non-native phonemes assimilate to two separate categories in the native language. the arabic voicing contrasts and seem to fall well into this type, as every member in these contrasts is assimilable to a single english phoneme. in other words, the two contrasts exist both in arabic 6 note also that to represent the emphatics and the pharyngeal, ipa uses the symbols and respectively, which are representationally isomorphic to non-emphatic and glottal , perhaps suggestive of their phonetic closeness. mahmoud s. al mahmoud 274 and english. the perceptual assimilation model predicts contrast discrimination in this case to be highly efficient. the second deducible type is cg, according to which the two non-native sounds are perceived by the listener as instances of one native phoneme, but they vary in their goodness of fit: one is acceptable, the other is not. i consider the contrasts between emphatics and non-emphatics in and as examples of the cg assimilation type for which discriminability would be “moderate to very good,” as stated in pam. on the other hand, the pharyngeal-glottal and velar-uvular contrasts appear to fit the uc assimilation type. in either contrast, one member is clearly equatable with english: arabic and are almost identical to english and . the other members and fall within the english phonological space, yet lack clear correspondents, although anecdotal evidence suggests that english speaking learners of arabic poorly realize them as and . accordingly, it is possible to treat the and contrasts as another example of cg assimilation, with arabic and being the acceptable and and the deviant exemplars of english and . however, given the less frequent phonemic substitution of and for and in the speech of american learners (cf. for ), i believe it is more fitting for these two pairs to be classified as uc rather than cg contrasts. this ambiguity in the categorization of and pairs is quite reminiscent of the english contrast for japanese speakers, categorized in best and strange (1992) as a cg type, but as a uc type by guion et al. (2000). needless to say, the suggestion made in this study is more along the lines of guion et al. as far as discriminability is concerned, both assimilation types make similar predictions associated with the contrasts: very good contrast discrimination in uc, and moderate to very good in cg. the last three types of contrasts in table 3, namely the voicing contrast in , the uvular versus pharyngeal in and the plosive versus continuant in , show a uu assimilation type. the contrast discriminability which pam predicts for this type of assimilation depends on how well each segment is assimilable, if any, to the native language as well as on the phonetic closeness between the contrast members, and can range, therefore, from poor to very good. in each of these contrasts neither consonant clearly assimilates to a specific category in the english language. this is especially true for the uvulars and , which do not correspond to any english sound. the sounds and , on the other hand, can be equated with and , although not commonly, as mentioned before. thus, based on their assimilability to the learner’s native discrimination of arabic contrasts by american learners 275 language in this study, it is hypothesized that within the uu assimilation type the contrast would be less discriminable than or table 5 sums up the contrasts tested in this study, their assimilation types, and the predicted discrimination level associated with each type. the perceptual assimilation model predicts that the tc contrasts and will be better discriminated than any of the other contrasts in this study. another prediction that is testable is the increased indiscriminability of relative to the other two uu contrasts, table 5 pam’s predictions for the arabic contrasts contrast assimilation type predicted discriminability tc excellent tc excellent cg moderate to very good cg moderate to very good uc very good uc very good uu poor uu very good uu very good method the relevant predictions of pam stated above were tested in an auditory perception experiment carried out to assess ae learners’ perception of the various arabic phonemic contrasts, summarized in table 3. a perception experiment, as opposed to a production one, is believed to provide a better measure of acquisition or learnability since it involves less conscious knowledge of what is being learned (archibald, 1998; larsen-hall, 2004). participants twenty two american learners of arabic participated in the perception experiment. the participants were all native speakers of american english and their average age was 22. they were year 1 students at a us college enrolled in the university’s arabic program at the time of the study. the majority of the participants had knowledge of a third language, mainly spanish or french. it was hard to find participants who spoke english and arabic only since most had been exposed to a third language in high school. werker (1986) shows that trilinguals discriminate non-native contrasts no better than bilinguals do. mahmoud s. al mahmoud 276 in other words, it is believed that knowledge of a third language does not significantly affect contrast discrimination. participants who received any specialized training in pronunciation or phonetics and those whose length of residence in an arabic-speaking country exceeded 6 months were excluded from the study. in addition, participants for whom arabic was considered a heritage language as well as those reporting any hearing difficulties were precluded.7 all subjects were compensated $10 each for their participation in the experiment. according to self-report, no participant had any hearing difficulties. materials and task initially 20 phonemic consonant contrasts were tested (see the appendix). however, only those mentioned in table 3 are reported on here. in this study, the term phoneme refers to the allophone that is used in isolation and is usually more common than other variants, and which daniel jones (1967, p. 8) considers as the “principal member” or the “norm” of the phoneme. the pairing of phonemic contrasts in table 3 depends on potentially confusable consonants that share major place-of-articulation features (coronal, dorsal, guttural). in addition to the nine contrasts in table 3, four more contrasts were used as distracters: , , , and . with an axb discrimination task, four test items (aab, abb, baa, bba) were generated for each of the 24 contrasts yielding a total of 96 randomly ordered test trials. every test trial was a triad consisting of three disyllabic nonsense words following the template c (where c is consonant), with stress being placed systematically on the second syllable, for example, thus a total of 288 test words were used in the discrimination task (96 x 3 = 288). compared to syllable onsets or codas, the intervocalic position was chosen for its ideal environment in the perception of consonants, especially stops (wright, 1995, p. 35). also, word-final stop contrasts can be difficult for english listeners to detect due to the fact that stops tend to be unreleased in that position (selkirk, 1982). the use of nonsense test tokens, as opposed to real words, was intended to minimize any effects word frequency and familiarity may have on l2 learners’ discriminative ability. a native speaker of arabic trained in linguistics (the present author) produced the test words, which were transcribed in ipa to ensure a more ac 7 initially 24 participants were tested; however, 2 were excluded from the study: one for whom iraqi arabic turned out to be a heritage language (parents’ native language), and the other had stayed in an arabic-speaking country (egypt) for over a year and was married to an arab. discrimination of arabic contrasts by american learners 277 curate pronunciation. the stimuli were digitally recorded in a sound treated lab using audacity (audacity team, 2008) recording and editing software (version 1.2.4) and a clip-on pro 7 electret condenser microphone on a windows vista dell 1420 laptop computer. procedure an axb forced-choice discrimination paradigm was used to elicit american learners’ perception of the different arabic contrasts in this study. an axb discrimination task provides a reference point (i.e., x) against which the similarity of stimuli can be gauged by listeners, as opposed to a simple ax discrimination task where listeners may base their same/different responses on nonlinguistic factors (beddor & gottfried, 1995). in a quiet library room setting, aural stimuli were presented randomly over headphones (koss r80) to each participant individually. each test trial proceeded as follows. the participant listened to all three tokens in each triad (e.g., ) and had to indicate on an answer sheet provided whether the first or third word was the same as the second. an inter-stimulus interval (isi) of 1000 ms followed each token. longer isi is believed to encourage phonemic rather than phonetic perception of non-native contrasts (werker & logan, 1985). a 3000 ms inter-trial interval separated each trial from the following one. the 96 test trials were administered over two sessions (48 trials each). in order to ensure that each subject understood the procedure, a 3-item practice test was administered to each participant prior to the experiment. for each participant, the experiment lasted an average of 20 min. results by contrast discrimination scores from the axb task were collapsed across all 22 subjects and pooled for each of the 9 phonemic contrasts stated in table 3. to determine whether differences in discriminability were significant among the contrasts, discrimination scores were submitted to a repeated measures (within subjects) anova, which tested for the significance of the independent variable, that is, contrast (9 levels). the results indicated a significant effect of contrast, f(8, 168) = 63.80, p < .001, p 2 = .75. to find out which pairwise comparisons are significant, a series of bonferroni post-hoc tests compared discrimination scores across all 9 levels of the contrast variable. table 6 sums up discrimination success rates for each individual contrast as well as the mahmoud s. al mahmoud 278 (in)significance of each pairwise comparison. the leftmost column presents percentages of correctly discriminated contrasts. this is depicted graphically in figure 1. for instance, best discrimination involved the tc contrasts and , for which performance was native or near-native. on the contrary, poorest discriminability belonged to the uu contrast . table 6 also shows whether pairwise comparisons (second column vs. top row) among the different contrasts were significant or not. for example, while the difference between and , both tc types, was not significant, the difference between these and all other contrasts was. in other words, and patterned similarly in being significantly more discriminable than any other contrast. with some exceptions, it appears that discriminability, to a large extent, varied as a function of the assimilation type. table 6 arabic contrast discrimination results by ae listeners discriminability contrast 100 ns * * * * * * * 98.9 * * * * * * * 64.8 ns * ns * ns * 72.7 * ns * * ns 37.5 * ns * * 64.8 * ns * 36.4 * * 54.5 * 82.9 ns = insignificant at the level of .05. * p < .05. figure 1 axb results in the discrimination of arabic contrasts 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 contrast d is cr im in at io n % discrimination of arabic contrasts by american learners 279 by assimilation type next, contrast discrimination rates were tallied up and averaged for each of the four assimilation types tc, cg, uc and uu, given the a priori classification in table 5. a repeated measures anova with the independent variable of assimilation (4 levels) revealed a significant main effect for assimilation, with f(3, 63) = 76.59, p < .001, p 2 = .78. except for the pairing of uc and uu, which turned out to be insignificant, p > .05, post-hoc bonferroni tests indicated significant differences among all pairwise comparisons with a high confidence level (p < .001). this is summarized in table 7 and illustrated in figure 2. averaged discrimination rates show that tc contrasts were significantly more discriminable than other assimilation types. similarly, cg contrasts had higher overall discriminability than uc or uu contrasts. although the lowest discrimination rate was found in the uc type of assimilation, it did not differ significantly from that of uu. table 7 discrimination results of the arabic contrasts by assimilation type contrast discriminability assimilation type cg uc uu 99.4 tc * * * 68.7 cg * * 51 uc ns 57.9 uu ns = insignificant at the level of .05. * p < .05. figure 2 ae listeners’ discriminability of arabic contrasts according to assimilation type 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 tc cg uc uu assimilation type d is cr im in at io n % mahmoud s. al mahmoud 280 discussion a cursory look at table 6 shows that ae listeners’ ability to distinguish non-native contrasts varies significantly as a function of whether or not the two contrasted segments are assimilable to the learner’s native language. with few exceptions to be discussed, contrast discrimination seems to generally follow from the pam predictions stated in table 5, with regard to assimilation type and discriminability. the contrast between the voiceless and voiced dental stops was predicted to follow a tc assimilation type where each segment in the contrast is assimilated to a separate native category, resulting in excellent discriminability. looking at table 6, this prediction is borne out; listeners discriminated correctly 100% of the time, and, as post-hoc tests show, their discrimination was significantly better than any other non-tc contrast. the voicing contrast between interdental and was also predicted to show tc assimilation. results confirm this; subjects were able to discriminate from accurately most of the time (98.9%). as in , this result was significantly better than the rest of the contrasts. tc assimilation as predicted by pam, both arabic and voicing contrasts behaved similarly in conforming to the tc. they both displayed the highest rate of discrimination and were significantly more distinguishable than other contrasts. the insignificant difference in discrimination between these two contrasts suggests that to american listeners was as distinctive as . the success rate averaged for these two contrasts is 99.4%, which is significantly the greatest among other assimilation types. this pattern is in line with the findings of best et al. (2001), for example, who demonstrated excellent (95% correct) tc contrast discrimination between zulu voiceless-voiced fricatives / and tigrinya ejective bilabial-alveolar stops ’ ’ by native listeners of english. discrimination of arabic contrasts by american learners 281 it was predicted that the arabic emphatic contrast would be assimilated as a cg type by native speakers of english where, depending on the goodness of fit, discriminability can range from moderate to very good. results show that listeners had a somehow poor success rate in discriminating from (64.8%). in addition, discrimination here did not differ significantly from that of uc or uu , perhaps due to the unpredictably poor performance of the latter as well, as will be discussed later. in contrast to the distinction between the arabic emphatic and non-emphatic interdental fricatives was perceived better. listeners more successfully distinguished from 72.7% of the time, compared to 64.8% for , although the difference between the two emphatic contrasts did not reach significance. however, discriminability for was significantly better than other contrasts except for , for which discrimination was, as mentioned earlier, counter-predictably low, and , a uc type for which pam makes a similar prediction of very good discrimination. cg assimilation the pattern of perception for the emphatic contrast appears to fit the discriminatory level hypothesized for cg assimilation. listeners’ diminished ability to differentiate compared to , however, could have resulted from being perceived as a better fit for than for . in other words, to listeners was perceptually closer to than to , leading to greater confusability in the pair , and thus to lesser discriminability. when combined, discrimination averages 68.7% for the two cg contrasts. this rate is much lower than what is reported in best et al. (2001) for english listeners who showed a much higher success rate (89.4%) in discriminating the zulu cg voiceless aspirated and ejective velar stop contrast ’ . it seems, therefore, that the predictions of pam concerning cg assimilation are partially supported by the emphatic contrast between the interdental fricatives and . mahmoud s. al mahmoud 282 it was hypothesized that the pharyngeal-glottal contrast would exemplify a uc assimilation for which discrimination should be very good. this prediction did not transpire, however, as ae listeners had great difficulty in distinguishing these two sounds with only 37.5% of the contrasts being correctly discriminated. except for , discrimination of was significantly worse than all other contrasts, particularly uc . the velar-uvular contrast was also hypothesized to show very good discrimination, typical of uc assimilation. although performance significantly improved on this contrast compared to the pharyngeal-glottal, still discrimination was unpredictably poor hovering around the 64.8% range. uc assimilation the manner in which ae listeners discriminated the pharyngeal-glottal as well as the velar-uvular contrasts did not conform to the pam predictions for uc assimilation; that is, neither contrast showed very good discrimination although for discriminability was poorer but considerably better for . further, discrimination of the two contrasts added up to 51%, which is rather poor and counter-predictive. it is possible that the phonetic proximity of the segments, as evidenced by the phonemic substitution of and for and , respectively, has led to the poor discrimination of these uc contrasts. guion et al. (2000), for example, report similar results for japanese listeners, who, although successful in discriminating english , were not able to differentiate the english uc contrast accurately. the voiceless-voiced uvular contrast was predicted to be a uu assimilation, in which, according to pam, discriminability can range from poor to very good depending on how well each segment is assimilated, if at all, to the native language, as well as on phonetic similarity between members of the contrast. recall that within the uu contrasts examined was predicted to be the least discriminable. this was borne out; native ae listeners experi discrimination of arabic contrasts by american learners 283 enced great difficulty in telling these two sounds apart. they successfully discriminated only 36.4% of the stimuli, the worst of all contrasts. pam predicted the uvular-pharyngeal contrast to be a welldiscriminated uu assimilation, since at least one segment (i.e., / /) is remotely assimilable to english . results show this was not the case, however, with ae listeners discriminating poorly, just above the chance level (54. 5%). the uvular plosive-continuant contrast was predicted to be a uu assimilation as well. because english can be representative, although poorly, of arabic , the contrast was expected to be differentiated rather well. this prediction was borne out. american listeners demonstrated very good, 82.9%, discrimination of the contrast. uu assimilation of the three uu contrasts investigated in this study, and support the pam predictions. averaged discriminability across all three contrasts is 57.9%, significantly lower than tc and cg assimilation types, but not uc, for which discriminability was even worse. as for cg contrasts, it is hard to assess the overall success rate of uu contrasts because of the range of variance in discriminability set by pam (moderate to very good in cg, poor to very good in uu). therefore, it is best to examine each contrast individually, as done so far, in order to evaluate the relevant pam predictions. the results for the uu assimilation type as a whole in this study corroborate those of guion et al. (2000), whose japanese subjects, consistent with uu assimilation, failed to perceive the distinction between english and . in general, the data support the hypothesis that l2 arabic contrasts are perceived by ae listeners within the confines of their native language phonological system. their ability to discriminate the arabic contrasts in this study relied crucially on how similar or different (assimilable or not) the contrastive sounds are to the listeners’ native language. l2 arabic contrasts involving sounds that are identical or similar to english tended to be perceptually much more discriminative as in and . other contrasts varied in their discriminability from poor (uc , uu and ) to good (cg mahmoud s. al mahmoud 284 , uc ) to very good (cg , uu ) as an apparent function of their assimilability to the listener’s native language as well as the phonetic proximity of the contrasted segments to each other. such effects of the native language sound system on contrast discrimination and more generally speech perception have been well established. the loss of sensitivity to foreign contrasts has been attributed to interference from the ambient (native) language and thus, to use kuhl’s (1993) terminology, the once “citizen of the world” becomes a “culture-bound” perceiver. for adults, continued exposure to the native language, while rendering their auditory system more attuned, and thus confined, to the native language sounds, costs them the ability to detect minor phonetic differences that subsequently arise in learning a second language sound system. strange (1995) summarizes the l2 perception experience as follows: between early infancy and adulthood, then, children’s interactions with their linguistic environment while acquiring their first languages produce significant changes in the perception of speech sounds. there is a “loss” in the ability to differentiate phonetic categories perceptually that are not phonologically distinctive in the native language, while native contrasts may become more highly differentiated. (p. 19) table 8 sums up the findings of this study for each of the 9 arabic contrasts tested. it is clear that discrimination results for five of the contrasts in this study are in line with their relevant pam predictions. the rest, however, contradict pam, with discrimination in each case being less than expected, especially in the uc contrast . table 8 pam predictions vs. ae listeners’ discrimination of arabic contrasts contrast assimilation type predicted discriminability attested discrimination level tc excellent 100 tc excellent 98.9 cg moderate to very good 64.8* cg moderate to very good 72.7 uc very good 37.5* uc very good 64.8* uu poor 36.4 uu very good 54.5* uu very good 82.9 note. asterisks (*) mark discrimination contradicting pam. discrimination of arabic contrasts by american learners 285 that the uu contrast was significantly better discriminated than and is not surprising if within-contrast confusability is taken into account, as recognized by pam, although it is not entirely clear how this “proximity” or lack of it factors into the whole process of contrast discrimination. presumably, the less similar two segments in a new contrast are to each other, the less confusable they become making it easy for listeners to tell which is which. it is possible that non-native contrasts involving manner of articulation are more distinctive perceptually than place or voicing contrasts: of the three uu contrasts, is the only one that distinguishes manner of articulation. perhaps another reason why listeners were biased to poorly discriminate and compared to is the orthographic similarity which the segments share. in arabic, is typically written as (when isolated) or (when connected), as or , and / / as or . on the other hand, arabic is written or . table 9 illustrates the orthographic differences for these pairs. the first column shows the arabic graphemes as letters written in isolation. the next three columns show how each of these graphemes is transcribed in connected writing according to its position in the word. phonemes in word initial and medial positions are orthographically more similar to each other than in final position, which in turn is very similar to the phoneme in isolation. the last column presents the ipa symbols often used to transcribe the phoneme. as can be seen in table 9, the phonemicorthographic relation between these graphemes is clear: the uvular fricatives , and the pharyngeal all resemble each other orthographically in initial, medial, and final positions, whereas the distinctive style in which is written sets it apart from others. it is possible, therefore, that the orthographic disparity between and and lack of it in and may have played a role in how learners perceived the contrast in these pairs. table 9 orthographic representation of the arabic phonemes: and isolated connected ipa initial middle final research has shown that orthography is not an unlikely factor in nonnative acquisition. atkey (2001), for example, maintains that the orthographic conventions of the czech writing system influence the reading ability of early czech learners. others have reported effects of orthography on speech permahmoud s. al mahmoud 286 ception (e.g., dijkstra, roelofs, & fieuws, 1995; taft & hambly, 1985; ziegler & ferrand, 1998), and speech production (lupker, 1982). as for cg and uc and , each consisting of one consonant present in the listeners’ native language phonology paired up with another new (unfamiliar) albeit distantly related consonant, lesser discriminability or confusability between the consonants may have arisen primarily due to the new consonant being well assimilated to an already familiarly known segment. the pattern in which listeners incorrectly responded on the axb task suggests that they significantly settled the contrast in each of these pairs in favor of respectively. that is, they overwhelmingly judged the english-like sound as the more similar one. this aural penchant for the native segment varied, however, from one contrast to another. it was strongest for the pharyngeal-glottal pair , with being chosen almost 89% out of the 55 incorrect responses reported (49/55). next was the emphatic with adding up to 77.4% (24/31), and last was the velar-uvular contrast for which was selected 64.5% of the time (20/31). as such, this bias may have contributed to ae listeners’ unexpectedly poor performance in the discrimination of these contrasts. to conclude, findings of this study suggest the following discriminability hierarchy: tc > cg > uc, uu. the tc type contrasts significantly emerged as more highly discriminative than the cg, uc, or uu contrasts corroborating the tc > cg discriminability ranking introduced by pam (best, 1995) and reported in best, mcroberts, and goodell’s (2001) examination of english listeners’ perception of zulu and tigrinya consonant contrasts. the results of this study are also in line with the pam predictions for the perception of nasal consonants in malayam marathi and oriya by malayalam, marathi, punjabi, tamil, oriya, bengali and american english speakers (harnsberger, 2001), non-native syllable structure and voicing contrast perception by japanese learners of english (nagao, lim, & de jong, 2003), and perception of obstruent word-final voicing contrasts by malay speakers of english (pilus, 2002). although pam makes no explicit claims regarding the relative difficulty in the discriminability of cg, uc and uu types, which ranges from poor to moderate to very good, it states that discrimination for contrasts of the uc type should always be “very good.” however, ae listeners in this study treated uc contrasts no better than cg or uu contrasts. in fact, there was new evidence suggesting better discrimination of cg contrasts compared to uc and uu types. finally, the study has failed to maintain the distinction between uc and uu assimilation types, reported in guion et al. (2000) for the discrimination of english and , respectively, by japanese listeners. discrimination of arabic contrasts by american learners 287 conclusion this small study tested the predictions of best’s (1995) pam in the perception of arabic consonant contrasts by american learners. with some exceptions, the pattern in which the different arabic contrasts examined in this study were discriminated followed straightforwardly from pam: tc > cg > uc, uu. in general, excellent discrimination was significantly associated with tc contrasts. interestingly, cg contrasts were also significantly more distinctive than uc or uu contrasts. no distinction between uc and uu types emerged, however; both were poorly discriminated by ae listeners. the perceptual assimilation model provides a useful tool in classifying non-native contrasts, and predicting the differential success non-native listeners achieve in discriminating them. the issue of assessing similarity between native and non-native phonemes remains a perennial one, not only to pam but to any model of non-native speech acquisition. one measure of similarity that appears to be overlooked by pam is the orthographic conventions of the target language. evidence from this study suggests a role of orthography in the perception of l2 contrasts. compared to , the voiceless-voiced contrast in and the uvular-pharyngeal contrast in were highly indistinguishable to ae listeners presumably due to the orthographic similarity between these phonemes in the arabic writing system. however, this remains a hypothesis that needs to be examined further. given the implementation of orthography in the second language teaching curriculum and its importance as a factor in the perception of non-native phonemes, revisions to have it incorporated into models of second language perception ought to be made. mahmoud s. al mahmoud 288 references al-ani, s. h. 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(1998). orthography shapes the perception of speech: the consistency effect in auditory word recognition. psychonomic bulletin & review, 5, 683-689. mahmoud s. al mahmoud 292 appendix list of the arabic contrasts used in the experiment contrast stimuli 509 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (3). 2022. 509-513 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.3.8 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review crosslinguistic influence and second language learning author: kevin mcmanus publisher: routledge, 2022 isbn: 978-0-367-35782-5 (pbk) pages: 163 as a prevalent phenomenon in second language acquisition (sla), crosslinguistic influence (cli) has attracted ever-lasting attention, as reflected by the publication of several monographs (e.g., cai, 2021; jarvis & pavlenko, 2008; odlin, 1989; ringbom, 2007), many edited volumes (e.g., alonso, 2016; gass & selinker, 1983), and numerous research articles. in these books and papers, mounting evidence for cli has been accumulated in various areas of languages. in particular, cli may occur between first language (l1) and second language (l2) in lexicon, grammar, phonology, discourse, and pragmatics, with its effects being both positive and negative. besides, it has been shown that the occurrence of cli is constrained by a variety of factors, such as linguistic and psycholinguistic factors and those related to learning environment and language use (jarvis & pavlenko, 2008). cli has been addressed from diverse theoretical perspectives including universal grammar, functional linguistics, and psycholinguistics (see cai, 2021 for a review). previous publications on cli tend to approach this phenomenon as part of language learning and use, failing to pay adequate attention to the ways of overcoming the difficulties rooted in negative cli. it is with the publication of 510 crosslinguistic influence and second language learning (mcmanus, 2022) that this situation has started to change. by focusing on the relationship between cli and l2 learning, this monograph successfully integrates relevant theoretical models, empirical studies verifying cli, and instructional studies in the hope of reducing negative effects of cli in l2 learning. the book intentionally focuses on four theoretical models sharing a similar idea and three linguistic areas in which crosslinguistic differences are evident. the models include the unified competition model (macwhinney, 2005), the associate-cognitive creed (ellis, 2006), processing determinism (o’grady, 2015), and inhibitory control model (green, 1998), all of which ascribe a critical role to prior knowledge and experience in language learning. the areas chosen for demonstrating cli are morphosyntax, vocabulary, and phonology, where cli has not only been widely documented but has also been subject to pedagogical intervention. within this scope, this book delineates a clear picture of cli including its theoretical accounts, manifestations, and possible instructional interventions. the book consists of five chapters. chapter 1 lays the foundation for the subsequent chapters by clarifying mcmanus’ functional view of language and experience-driven view of language learning as well as explaining some basic issues concerning cli. among these issues, the distinction between transfer and cli deserves special attention. in this book, transfer refers to a learning process drawing on prior language knowledge and experience, whereas cli emphasizes an outcome or product of that learning process. this distinction diverges from the common interpretation of these concepts in previous publications (e.g., cai, 2021; jarvis & pavlenko, 2008; odlin, 1989), where transfer and cli are used interchangeably. the following three chapters constitute the main body of the monograph. chapter 2 reviews the above four models of l2 learning including their theoretical basics and predictions for l2 learning. it should be noted that some of the predictions of these models are later tested in the studies reviewed in the next two chapters. additionally, chapter 2 also discusses these models in terms of language knowledge and experience, inhibition, and transfer to demonstrate their similarities and differences and prepare readers for the following two chapters. chapters 3 and 4 are both devoted to the presentation of empirical studies but with different foci and goals. more specifically, the former reviews studies evidencing the role of cli in l2 learning and the latter concentrates on instructional studies that have validated the effectiveness of pedagogical interventions drawing on l1 knowledge and experience. chapter 3 synthesizes cli studies in morphosyntax, vocabulary, and phonology, where l1 and l2 often differ considerably, which potentially leads to negative cli. each of these areas concerns four lines of research, among which the first three examine cli from l1 to l2 and the fourth focuses on cli from l2 to l1. for example, in the case of 511 morphosyntax, the effects of l1 on l2 have been captured by studies on learned attention and blocking, remapping meaning to form, and comparing l2 performance online and offline; the effects of l2 on l1 in turn have been manifested by empirical investigations that have found converging representations in l1 and l2. when illustrating these lines of inquiry with representative studies, mcmanus usually reports their objectives, methodology, and findings, followed by the discussions of their limitations and prospects for future studies. finally, mcmanus summarizes this chapter by identifying some common themes shared by the studies with respect to the above three areas (morphosyntax, vocabulary, and phonology), such as how a learner’s l1 and l2 are connected and the influence of inhibitory control on cli and sla. chapter 4 is a unique contribution to the field of cli and sla, as no previous monographs have included a similar chapter. it begins with the argument for applying explicit instruction to l2 learning in general and to cli in particular. the main body of this chapter reviews typical evidence-based instructional studies on morphosyntax, vocabulary, and phonology to suggest that incorporating l1 knowledge and experience into l2 pedagogy is effective in overcoming learning difficulties caused by l1-l2 differences. besides, mcmanus also discusses the limitations of previous studies and advocates ensuring methodological rigor in the design of instructional treatments, adopting multiple measures of l2 performance, and incorporating a delayed posttest. in the concluding chapter, mcmanus revisits the three key ideas of experience, transfer, and competition, discusses how these ideas shape l2 knowledge, use, and cognition, and finally, theorizes cli by distinguishing process from product in l2 learning. another contribution of this chapter is that it suggests three avenues for future research, such as incorporating l1 knowledge and use in studies on l2 learning, conducting more longitudinal studies, and exploring the relationship between aspects of cognitive processing (i.e., working memory, inhibitory control, and categorization) and l2 learning and use. taken together, this monograph has two strengths that will appeal to researchers and teachers. on the one hand, three aspects of cli concerning theoretical models, empirical evidence, and instructional studies are consecutively outlined in a well-planned order. theoretical models are reviewed first in chapter 2 as they respectively propose clear claims and predictions on cli, which may be tested by empirical studies reported in chapter 3. after compelling evidence of cli is documented in chapter 3, the necessity of reducing negative cli is further substantiated, thus highlighting the value of conducting instructional studies in chapter 4. on the other hand, it is constructive to combine the state of the art with critical comments. after summarizing the theoretical models in chapter 2 and reporting empirical studies in chapters 3 and 4, mcmanus usually provides 512 inspiring critiques. this is extremely valuable because understanding the earlier theories and studies helps to consolidate our knowledge base, and the comments point to gaps in existing research that need to be filled in the future. thanks to the two advantages outlined above, researchers and teachers can benefit greatly from reading the book. in particular, researchers can address the limitations of earlier studies with rigorous methodology, or undertake further studies along the directions suggested in the last chapter. teachers, encouraged by the findings of the instructional studies, may apply some of these intervention techniques in their l2 classrooms to enhance the effectiveness of learning a new language. such characteristics make the book an invaluable resource for understanding theoretical and empirical explorations of the role of cli in l2 learning. yet, it should be kept in mind that all the cli mentioned in the book is linguistic in nature, thus neglecting conceptual transfer. as research into conceptual transfer has gained momentum in recent years (cai & chang, 2021; jarvis, 2016; jarvis & pavlenko, 2008), this issue should have been addressed in the book or the author should have explained his decision not to include it. overall, this monograph is a timely contribution to cli and sla due to its integration of theories with empirical studies validating and manipulating cli, its critical comments on representative studies, and its reader-friendly writing style. thus, it will surely benefit learners, teachers, and researchers who are interested in cli and l2 learning. acknowledgements we are deeply grateful to mirosław pawlak for his valuable comments and suggestions. this paper was supported by a grant from the national social science foundation of china (grant number: 19ayy008) awarded to jinting cai. reviewed by lixia zhu university of shanghai for science and technology, shanghai, china bdzhlx@usst.edu.cn jinting cai shanghai university of finance and economics, shanghai, china caijinting@mail. shufe.edu.cn 513 references alonso, r. a. (ed.). (2016). crosslinguistic influence in second language acquisition. multilingual matters. cai, j. (2021). language transfer. foreign language teaching and research press. cai, j., & chang, h. (2021). theoretical and methodological frameworks for conceptual transfer research. foreign language teaching and research, 53(5), https://doi.org/709-717. 10.19923/j.cnki.fltr.2021.05.006 ellis, n. c. (2006). cognitive perspectives on sla: the associative-cognitive creed. aila review, 19(1), 100-121. https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.19.08ell gass, s., & selinker, l. (eds.). (1983). language transfer in language learning. newbury house publishers. green, d. (1998). mental control of the bilingual lexicosemantic system. bilingualism: language and cognition, 1(2), 67-81. https://doi.org/10.1017/ s1366728998000133. jarvis, s. (2016). clarifying the scope of conceptual transfer. language learning, 66(3), 608-635. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12154 jarvis, s., & pavlenko, a. (2008). crosslinguistic influence in language and cognition. routledge. macwhinney, b. (2005). a unified model of language acquisition. in j. f. kroll & a. m. b. de groot (eds.), handbook of bilingualism: psycholinguistic approaches (pp. 49-67). oxford university press. odlin, t. (1989). language transfer: crosslinguistic influence in language learning. cambridge university press. o’grady, w. (2015). processing determinism. language learning, 65(1), 6-32. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/ lang.12091. ringbom, h. (2007). crosslinguistic similarities in foreign language teaching. multilingual matters. 487 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (4). 2021. 487-489 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.4.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial the present issue of studies in second language learning and teaching is the last in the 2021 volume and concludes the eleventh year of the existence of the journal. looking back, it has been an exceptionally good year for ssllt. first, we have been receiving a constantly increasing number of submissions and, what is of paramount importance for any journal, most of these submissions have been of very high quality. second, we are very happy with the scope and quality of the papers that have been published, including those comprising the special issue on teaching english reading and writing to young learners, which was guest-edited by barry lee reynolds and mark feng teng. third, and perhaps most importantly, not only has ssllt been finally indexed in the web od science, but it is also listed among the 20 best journals in linguistics (18/193), with the impact factor of 3.036 (q1) (jcr). achieving this status has been a long and arduous process but at the same time an extremely rewarding journey. obviously, this undeniable success would not have been possible without all of those who have lent their support to the development of ssllt from the get-go. my sincere thanks go to associate editors, all the guest editors of special issues, members of the editorial board, the many hundreds of reviewers and, first and foremost, to all the amazing authors who have chosen ssllt as a venue for their work. i can assure all of you that we will not be resting on our laurels and will do everything in our power to keep up the good work to further enhance the position of ssllt in the field. we are also hoping to be able to celebrate its success with a face-to-face conference to be held in kalisz, poland in october 2022. we are currently working on the call for papers and we are planning to send it out in the next month or so. the current issue brings together five original research papers and two book reviews. it opens with the contribution by lanxi wang and peter d. macintyre, who investigated the relationships among listening anxiety, listening enjoyment, listening comprehension performance and listening metacognitive awareness in the case of 410 international students in a canadian university. 488 mirroring the findings of previous research (e.g., dewaele & macintyre, 2014), they found, among other things, that although listening anxiety and enjoyment were negatively correlated, they in fact constituted independent emotions, and that both of them were positively, if only weakly, related to the use of listening strategies. in the second paper, safoura jahedizadeh and ali h. al-hoorie report the outcomes of a systematic review of 21 empirical studies focusing on directed motivational currents (dmcs), or brief motivational surges directed at the attainment of a specific goal (dörnyei et al., 2015; muir & dörnyei, 2013). they make the point that existing empirical evidence concerning the key characteristics of the construct is inconclusive and emphasize the need for further research that should take the form of comparative studies, be longitudinal in nature, and take into account potentially negative effects of dmcs. they also present the rationale for renaming the construct as sustained flow as a concept that is more reflective of the nature of this phenomenon (ibrahim & al-hoorie, 2019). the role of motivation is also the focus of the study by jelena bobkina, maría-josé gómez-ortiz, maría cristina núñez del río, and susana sastre-merino, who explored motivational orientations through the lens of the motivational l2 self system (dörnyei, 2005) with the help of questionnaire data collected from 196 spanish learners of english as a foreign language studying sports science at the university. using various statistical procedures (e.g., exploratory factor analysis, anova, multiple linear regression), the researchers provided evidence for the dominant role of the ideal l2 self in driving students’ motivation and predicting target language (tl) proficiency. they also found that the ought-to l2 self mainly characterized students with medium proficiency whereas the rebellious l2 self was the most pronounced for most advanced participants. in another empirical study, raees calafato investigated the extent to which 21 foreign language teachers in norwegian and russian upper-secondary schools fell back upon multilingual teaching practices (mtps) as well as factors which underpinned their decisions in this respect. qualitative analysis of unstructured interview data showed that the implementation of such practices hinged upon the mastery of the tl, particularly with respect to metalinguistic knowledge, teachers’ positioning as language learners and the amount of external support they received. while, on the whole, reliance on mpts was not a function of the language taught, differences were uncovered between the two groups in relation to teaching english. in the last contribution, erdem akbaş and zeynep ölçü dinçer report a study which was aimed to determine whether the natural order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes in l2 english proposed by krashen (1977) held for turkish university students. the analysis of 136 exam scripts totaling 20,000 words demonstrated the existence of differences between the two accuracy orders, which the researchers accounted for in terms of the influence of 489 the mother tongue as well as overall mastery of tl grammar. the present issue also includes reviews of two books which were contributed by mengyao ma and xuesong (andy) gao, and breno silva. the first publication deals with individual differences in l2 learning and the other is devoted to incidental vocabulary acquisition from reading. i am quite confident that all the contributions in this issue will be a source of inspiration to scholars in our field and will pave the way for innovative research that will expand our understanding of the processes of second and foreign language learning and teaching and serve as a basis for pedagogical recommendations. mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references dewaele, j.-m., & macintyre, p. d. (2014). the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom. studies in second language learning and teaching, 4(2), 237-274. https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.2.5 dörnyei, z. (2005). the psychology of the language learner: individual differences in second language acquisition. lawrence erlbaum. dörnyei, z., ibrahim, z., & muir, c. (2015). “directed motivational currents”: regulating complex dynamic systems through motivational surges. in z. dörnyei, p. macintyre, & a. henry (eds.), motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 95-105). multilingual matters. ibrahim, z., & al-hoorie, a. h. (2019). shared, sustained flow: triggering motivation with collaborative projects. elt journal, 73(1), 51-60. https://doi.org/ 10.1093/elt/ccy025 krashen, s. (1977). some issues relating to the monitor model. h. d. brown, c. a. yorio, & r. h. crymes (eds.), on tesol’77 – teaching and learning english as a second language: trends in research and practice (pp. 144-158). tesol. muir, c., & dörnyei, z. (2013). directed motivational currents: using vision to create effective motivational pathways. studies in second language learning and teaching, 3(3), 357-375. https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2013.3.3.3 257 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (2). 2022. 257-269 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.38274 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial: introduction to the special issue on english medium instruction: areas of research needing urgent attention 1. introduc on english medium instruction (emi), both in higher and secondary education, is now a well-established field of education research and, indeed, many applied linguistics journals are publishing regularly on a variety of emi topics. recently, a new journal, journal of english-medium instruction, has been established that is dedicated entirely to this area of academic enquiry. recent years have also seen several special issues emerge on topics within emi in journals such as applied linguistics review (published advanced online), system (in 2023), and tesol quarterly (in 2018). 2. defining emi in our introduc on to this special issue, we adopt the following defini on taken from macaro et al. (2018) in their systema c review of the subject: “the use of the english language to teach academic subjects (other than english itself) in countries or jurisdic ons where the first language of the majority of the popula on is not english” (p. 37). there has been some useful discussion in the literature about the suitability of the term emi itself, about the above defini on and about the cons tuency that the defini on represents. for example, dafouz and smit (2014) prefer the term ememus (english-medium educa on in mul lingual university se ngs) because it “is seman cally wider,” and “does not specify any par cular pedagogical approach or research agenda” (p. 399). likewise, the british council o en refers to english medium educa on, to emphasize “teaching, learning, research and administra ve dimensions” (curle et al., p. 12). there is 258 also the widely used term clil (content and language integrated learning) which, although tending to be reserved for the pre-tertiary phases of education, has nevertheless found its way into publications examining the use of english (instead of the majority language of the population) to teach content subjects in universities. models of higher education (he), where language support courses are given a more prominent place in the curriculum, have been referred to as clil-ized emi (moncada-comas & block, 2022). a few authors (e.g., pecorari & malmström, 2018) have proposed that the term emi should represent a wider constituency than that of non-anglophone countries by arguing that similar challenges are faced by students whose first language (l1) is not english when they opt to study in higher education institutions in countries such as the usa, the uk or australia. despite these useful and indeed necessary debates, the term emi appears to date to have stood the test of time, it has been used in preference to clil for he, and it has overwhelmingly been applied to countries where a policy decision has been made at some level to allow (or impose) the use of english instead of the local language to teach academic subjects (e.g., sciences, social sciences, and to a lesser extent the humanities). it is these policy decisions, made at whatever level (and their consequences), that provide the overwhelming interest of researchers in the emi field, as illustrated in several systematic reviews on the topic (graham et al., 2018; rubio-alcalá et al., 2019; macaro et al., 2018; williams, 2015). 3. areas of research needing urgent a en on despite this rapidly growing research interest in emi we felt, as prospective editors of this special issue, that there remain a number of areas for which there is an urgent need for further high quality research. in our call for papers we therefore stated that we particularly welcomed submissions on five areas (whilst not excluding others). the first of these areas is the impact of emi on content learning (i.e., the learning in the intended subject or discipline) with a particular focus on objective measurements of student outcomes. to date, this particular research question has been answered somewhat remotely, that is, eliciting opinions from emi teachers and students about how the medium of instruction has affected content learning outcomes (hua, 2020; kamaşak et al., 2021; wang et al., 2018) rather than by directly measuring those outcomes themselves, notable exceptions being dafouz and camacho-miñano (2016), and rose et al. (2020), although both of these studies lack a comparative reference point. clearly one of the major questions that all stakeholders should be asking themselves is to what extent content learning is affected (positively or negatively) by learning a subject through a second language (l2; see macaro, 2018, for a discussion about the extent to which a slowing down 259 in content learning can be tolerated). those stakeholders need to be informed by high quality and carefully targeted research. the second area that we felt needed further explora on was the impact of emi on student english language proficiency, with a par cular focus on what kind of proficiency (or linguis c knowledge) was likely to improve. as suggested above, stakeholders would want to balance any rigorously measured improvement in english language skills with any poten al deleterious impact on content learning. but a ques on arises what skills and linguis c knowledge are improved by emi versus, for example, general english learning (e.g., english as a foreign language). in other words, where is the true language impact, if any, and what academic purpose does it serve? the third area is in relation to the challenges posed by transition from secondary education (k12) to higher education. in a forthcoming chapter (macaro et al., forthcoming), we have argued that the following may all have an impact on the success of transi on between these phases and in rela on to emi: the differences in physical, pedagogical and cultural environment of schools and universi es (remoteness from home, class sizes, homogeneity of student groups, etc.); the rela onships between teachers and students; the extent to which both phases adhere to the concept of integra ng language learning into content learning; differences in the actual language of instruc on (e.g., l1 medium of instruc on in secondary to emi in ter ary). the fourth area that we felt needed more in-depth research was the extent to which emi students in ter ary educa on were themselves taking responsibility for their learning. put differently, there is a need to shed light on the strategies that students deploy in order to meet the challenges of emi and/or make their learning more effec ve. some ini al a empts have been made to probe this area (macaro et al., 2019; soruç & griffiths, 2018; zhou & rose, 2021) but, given the wealth of research on language learner strategies in efl/mfl contexts, we believed more research was necessary when the claimed major objecve of emi in ter ary educa on was content learning. the fi h area that we felt was an important emerging one was emi and gender (macaro & akincioglu, 2018). we felt it important to explore whether emi contributes to a re-equilibra on of those subjects which have tradi onally been regarded as “gendered,” such as, for example, stem (i.e., science, technology, engineering and mathema cs) subjects, or whether emi further contributes to gender disparity. lastly, in our call for papers we stated that we par cularly welcomed submissions from research carried out in those countries which to date have not featured prominently in emi research. 260 4. papers in the special issue this special issue includes nine papers of empirical work on emi contexts around the world. the papers cover seven national contexts: morocco, sri lanka, vietnam, korea, spain, turkey and china. five of the papers cover secondary school education, four cover higher education (three cover both). these papers can broadly be grouped into three categories: 1) papers on teacher and student perceptions in under-researched emi contexts; 2) studies of the effect of emi on language learning and academic outcomes; and 3) research into teacher and student strategies in emi. 4.1. teacher and student percep ons: emi in under-researched contexts the first paper in the issue is by salah ben hammou and abdelaziz kesbi on the topic of emi in moroccan secondary schools. it explores the perspec ves of 18 secondary math and science teachers’ in regard to new policies promo ng emi in moroccan educa on. the study used grounded theory methodology to code interview data to reveal a tapestry of perspec ves of the increasing use of english against a background of french-medium and arabic-medium educa on. results revealed the greatest barriers of emi policy implementa on to be teachers’ low english proficiency. rather than curtailing the trend towards emi, the authors call for extending emi even further into moroccan primary and middle school educa on, buoyed by teachers’ calls for a switch to english as first foreign language, instead of french, in all levels of schooling. the case of morocco speaks to the growing trend of francophone post-colonial contexts which are switching from french-medium instruc on to english-medium instruc on. research emerging out of other parts of africa, such as rwanda and cameroon, has suggested that the switch to emi can cause injus ces for children’s basic educa on (milligan, 2022), and is accompanied by complexi es and challenges in mul lingual countries (kuchah, 2016). thus, it will be important to monitor the long-term impact of policy shi s such as that outlined in the moroccan study. in our second empirical paper, nadee mahawa ha and romola rassool explored the challenges posed to students during the important transi on from l1 medium secondary educa on to emi higher educa on in sri lanka. their study explored the experiences of 30 students and 18 lecturers at three universi es to unveil damaging sub-cultures under-pinning the use of english in sri lankan educa on. these included “ragging” prac ces, which undermine emi policies by explicitly discouraging students to use english in class due to the socio-political and privileged status of english. the case of sri lanka sheds light on the complexities associated with the use of english language when tied to postcolonial legacies, which are still intertwined with a contested element of privilege 261 and power in society. this paper suggests that, in order for the transi on to emi to be successful, not only do universi es need to focus on improving academic literacies, but they must also tackle structural and ins tu onal barriers that may prevent students from fully embracing the medium of instruc on. 4.2. measured impact of emi effec veness in our third paper, jang ho lee, hansol lee, and yuen yi lo present a meta-analysis of the effects of emi-clil on secondary-level students’ english learning. this important paper directly answers our special issue call for research on the effecveness of emi on english language development. their study synthesized data from 7,434 learners from 38 different studies. it revealed complexi es surrounding several moderator variables that may influence emi effec veness, including the linguis c closeness of learners’ l1s to english, the homogeneity of the comparison groups in the studies, whether produc ve or recep ve dimensions of english learning are measured, and whether outcome measures focus on vocabulary. the study has important implica ons to improve emi research as well as to enhance our current understanding of the complexi es surrounding measuring language gain. up un l this point in me, we have seen several systema c reviews and rapid evidence assessments on the effect of emi-clil on language gain (e.g., graham et al., 2018; murphy et al., 2020), but very few meta-analyses. this paper fills this important gap. in our fourth paper, an nguyen explored student english proficiency as a predictor of success in emi in vietnamese higher educa on. in her study, she drew on data from 111 students majoring in interna onal business, and used the duolingo test as a direct measure of proficiency. on the surface, she concludes that emi students exhibited higher levels of english language proficiency than their counterparts who were taught the same curriculum in vietnamese. however, further analysis of student differences showed the rela onship between student english proficiency and medium of instruc on was not equally distributed across sub-groups of learners, with females and students from lower income families benefi ng more from emi. the paper suggests that research into the rela onship between medium of instruc on and language development is complex, and needs to take into account the myriad of individual and sociolinguis c factors that students bring to the metaphorical learning table, which might inhibit or assist in language acquisi on. in the fi h paper, maría del mar sánchez-pérez inves gated the impact of emi on english writing proficiency within the context of a spanish undergraduate engineering program. this paper embodies a pre-test post-test research design comparing the wri ng development of emi engineering students to a group of 262 english as a foreign language (efl) learners in order to explore the effec veness of emi to improve wri ng as compared to tradi onal foreign language curricula. results of both quan ta ve and qualita ve wri ng measures indicated a posive influence of emi on students’ wri ng proficiency in terms of lexical accuracy and vocabulary, but no discernible impact on syntax, grammar, organiza on or fluency. based on these findings, the author challenges the o -cited assump on that emi by itself can enhance students’ english language, and thus is a subs tute for tradi onal language instruc on. this study provides a basis for the conclusion that exposure to language via emi alone is not sufficient to improve students’ wri en english proficiency beyond their lexical development. the author lobbies for emi programs (at least those which embody clil-ized formats) to include language support to ensure the dual aims of content and language learning are being met. in the sixth contribution, the final one in this group of papers, dogan yuksel, adem soruç, barıs horzum, and jim mckinley present the results of a study in turkey which explored the interplay of english language proficiency, language learning anxiety, and self-regulation with academic success. data in the study were drawn from 705 emi students across two disciplines (i.e., social sciences and engineering) via psychometric measures of anxiety and self-regula on, and direct measures of language proficiency and emi course performance. the study design adds to a growing body of research which explores the role of non-linguis c factors in determining emi success (e.g., lasagabaster, 2016; rose et al., 2020; thompson et al., 2019; xie & curle, 2022). findings revealed that anxiety and selfregulation impact emi students’ proficiency across both academic disciplines. both self-regulation and proficiency were found to impact emi students’ academic success in engineering, but proficiency was only a significant predictor in and of itself for academic success in the social sciences. this paper adds to findings of disciplinary differences in linguis c demands of emi. 4.3. research into teacher and student strategies and prac ces in emi in the seventh paper, sihan zhou and gene thompson report on their empirical investigation of students’ self-regulated listening during their first semester of transition to an english-medium transnational university in china. the authors propose listening to be one of the most crucial skills when adjusting to emi in higher education, as much as content at university is delivered through lectures. they collected data from 316 students at three points in time during the students’ first semester and revealed significant variability in the participants’ use of listening strategies throughout the transition period. they observed a “watershed” moment at the midterm, where students have to adjust their strategic learning to grapple with new 263 realities of listening to academic content at university which is revealed to be very different from their prior listening experiences in high school. they drew several implications from the research, such as for the emi curriculum to structure topical knowledge and to incorporate emi strategy training in the language support programs during the first year of study. other papers drawing on this larger-scale study can be found in zhou and rose (2021) as well as zhou and thompson (2023). in the eighth paper, jiye hong con nues her recent work on language related episodes in emi classrooms in korea (see also hong, 2022; hong & basturkmen, 2020). in this new study, she explored content teachers’ and lecturers’ use of correc ve feedback in english-medium high school and university classrooms. the study specifically explored moments when emi teachers focus on correc ng students’ language use. data were drawn from classroom observa ons of six different emi classes in high school and university se ngs and compared the frequency and types of correc ve feedback across the two se ngs (i.e., high school vs. university) as well as across disciplines. findings indicated that the schoolteachers provided correc ve feedback more frequently and in more varied forms than university lecturers. the findings are intended to raise awareness of various ways to provide emi students with correc ve feedback, which has implica ons for emi teacher training and professional development. rounding out the special issue, we have a paper from jiangshan an and ann childs, which explores classroom interaction in emi science classes, with a particular focus on teacher questions, wait time, and student output. the study sought to address the reasons behind an observed lack of student output in emi (see lo & macaro, 2012). analyses was carried out on measures of wait time and teacher higher order thinking questions (see chin, 2007), on classroom interactions in 30 emi science lessons from seven emi high school programs in china. findings indicate that use of teacher higher-order thinking questions is not associated with increased student output. however, wait time does seem to lead to greater student output. the findings have implications for emi teacher professional development to train instructors to use wait time as an effective approach to prompt greater students’ productive involvement in the classroom. further work on this larger project can be found in an et al. (2021) as well as an and thomas (2021). 5. reflec ons: mee ng the aims of our special issue reflec ng upon the numerous aims of the special issue, some were met and others require further research a en on. we now have a growing body of research on the rela onship between emi and language learning, which joins the extant literature on clil. we would nevertheless argue that further research is needed that measures poten al gains in discipline-specific language. that is, 264 general english language proficiency tests such as the cambridge preliminary english test in yuksel et al. (this issue) or duolingo in nguyen (this issue) might skew findings in favour of tradi onal efl rather than the types of discipline-specific and genre-specific gains in academic literacy which may be occurring as a consequence of emi. we would stress that further research is needed to build on the results of this special issue, and those reported elsewhere. in terms of the effects of emi of content learning, only one paper in our special issue (i.e., yuksel et al.) broached this area. while there have been several studies exploring the effects of clil on content learning in schools, very few emi studies have inves gated this issue with appropriate comparison groups of l1 medium of instruc on. this is perhaps due to the nature of self-selec on in emi programs in higher educa on, crea ng methodological difficul es in establishing equitable benchmarks for l1 medium of instruc on. nonetheless, in order to fully evaluate whether emi is having a deleterious effect on subject learning (see macaro, 2018), more research into this area is s ll needed. the third aim of the special issue, which was to explore the period of transi on from l1 medium high school to emi higher educa on, has been broadly met by several papers. hong (this issue) provides a compara ve explora on of language use by teachers and instructors in each context to be er understand how language related episodes were constructed. zhou and thompson (this issue) explored the adjustment to listening in the crucial first term of an emi program in china. mahawa ha and rassool (this issue) speak to the sociolinguis c complexi es surrounding students’ linguis c iden es when moving into an emi environment which is laden with postcolonial legacies. these studies, while important, either explore different students in high school and university, or only inves gate students upon entry into emi. what is needed in future research is a longitudinal inves ga on that tracks the same students from high school into higher educa on to gather a complete picture of the emi transi on process. the fourth area of students’ and teachers’ strategic behaviors seems to be one domain where current research is flourishing, as we are seeing more papers that focus on constructs such as self-regula on, learning strategies, and teaching strategies in emi. given that the boom in emi in much of the world is contextualized by a lack of language support (see galloway & rose, 2021) and a lack of emi teacher professional development (see macaro et al., 2021), teacher and student agency in ensuring successful implementa on of emi is paramount. we hope to see further research in this area in the future, which can lead to be er professional development programs for emi teachers, and be er support programs for students so they can take control over their own learning processes. the fifth area we had hoped to cover in the special issue, the role of gender in emi, has gone largely unaddressed, despite it being a critical area of empirical 265 inquiry. upadhaya and sah (2019) have argued that “access to english is a strong indicator of socio-economic success for girls” (p. 111) in many developing countries, and clear disparities can be seen in male and female students’ access to english-medium education. uworwabayeho, milligan and kuchah (2021) have found that there are significant disparities in girls’ english results compared with boys in lower secondary education in rwanda. the importance of higher education in terms of improving employment opportunities has been documented across countries, particularly in terms of women’s participation in the job market (e.g., barone & assirelli, 2020; chang, 2018). we need to better understand the complexities surrounding gender and emi in terms of restricting or potentially widening access to education across various disciplines and national contexts. with the inclusion of several different nations, the final aim of our special issue, that is, to shed light on emi contexts that have thus far been under-represented in published research, has been partially met, but we want to stress that more research is needed. as emi continues to have an impact on local education systems, research from scholars working within these systems is needed to better understand local challenges that may have global relevance. our current understanding of emi is skewed towards western educational systems (with research from and on european universities). we have also seen a proliferation of research within nations that exhibit strong or growing research cultures in higher education, such as china, japan and turkey. what we now need is more research in underrepresented and under-resourced areas, such as south asia and sub-saharan africa. in our special issue, some papers on important contexts did not get through our review process, ultimately rejected by reviewers due to a lack of methodological rigor or a lack of contextualization within current research literature. this is an unfortunate result of an inherent bias in academic publishing that favors researchers working in high-resourced centers of research knowledge. there is also inequity in the socio-political contexts in which many researchers in under-represented contexts work. the contributors from sri lanka in this special issue, for example, had to write and revise their papers to a deadline in a context of intense political upheaval and daily power cuts which limited computer and internet access to a few hours per day. these are clearly not equitable platforms from which to build research, and from which to judge academic merit. we call for future researchers of emi to forge ties with researchers in under-represented contexts to engage in collaborative research to address inequities and shed light on these important and relatively unknown contexts. we also encourage reviewers and journal editors to evaluate research from under-represented areas not only on their methods and knowledge of the literature, but on their important contribu ons to knowledge in terms of their unique perspec ves and contexts. only then will 266 we start to develop a knowledge of the full extent of emi policies and prac ces on a truly global scale. ernesto macaro university of oxford, uk ernesto.macaro@educa on.ox.ac.uk heath rose university of oxford, uk heath.rose@educa on.ox.ac.uk references an, j., macaro, e., & childs, a. 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(2021). self-regulated listening of students at transition from high school to an english medium instruction (emi) transnational university in china. system, 103, 102644. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2021.102644 zhou, s., & thompson, g. (2023). exploring role of english proficiency, self-efficacy, and mo va on in listening for learners transi oning to an englishmedium transnational university in china. system, 113, 102998. h ps://doi. org/10.1016/j.system.2023.102998 xie, w., & curle, s. (2022). success in english medium instruc on in china: significant indicators and implica ons. interna onal journal of bilingual educa on and bilingualism, 25(2), 585-597. h ps://doi.org/10.1080/13670 050.2019.1703898 213 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (2). 2021. 213-234 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.2.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the underlying factors of foreign language reading anxiety: their effects on strategy use and orientation toward reading hyang-il kim sahmyook university, south korea https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4340-0173 hyangil@syu.ac.kr abstract both positive and negative emotions have been the focus of a wealth of language learning research in recent years. this can mostly be attributed to the established links between an individual’s psychological responses, existing and emerging from learning, the learning processes they engage in, and the outcomes they achieve. a look at advanced research on language anxiety, a negative emotion that appears to be strongly involved in learning, has shown that specific information about reading anxiety is comparatively insufficient. this study, therefore, examines the underlying factors of reading anxiety in korean university students, using the foreign language reading anxiety scale. subsequently, it explores how these anxiety factors are related to strategy use (i.e., metacognitive, cognitive, and support strategies) and orientation toward reading, which demonstrates a reader’s active involvement while reading. three sub-factors of reading anxiety were found: anxiety experienced during the process of reading english, confidence in reading, and anxiety when reading english characters. interestingly, confidence or positive emotion was found to be a far more powerful positive contributor to korean efl university readers’ use of metacognitive strategies and the degree of orientation to reading than was anxiety experienced while reading. pedagogical implications are discussed. keywords: reading anxiety; reading strategy use; orientation to reading; reading confidence hyang-il kim 214 1. introduction language anxiety has been researched widely over four decades since the first leading studies (e.g., chastain, 1975; scovel, 1978) and related studies have offered information as to what individuals bring to the process of learning a target language and how they are involved in it. compared to language learning anxiety, reading anxiety has only gained attention relatively recently and has been researched to examine its predictive power in reading performance and its impact on reading processes (lien, 2011; sellers, 2000; shi & liu, 2006; tsai & lee, 2018; zhao et al., 2013). sellers (2000) argues that successful reading, with the aim of adequate comprehension, requires a great deal of cognitive endeavors, such as orchestrating attention, memory, or problem-solving processes. her findings suggest that anxiety while reading may limit cognitive processes by causing a distraction. it is not surprising, then, that reading anxiety affects some cognitive processes, such as readers’ strategy use or an orientation to reading, which are required for effective and successful comprehension. a few studies provide some important findings about the relationships between anxiety and strategy use (lien, 2011, 2016; tsai & lee, 2018); however, the results of these studies still seem cursory and appear to fall short of forming a comprehensive view of the impact of reading anxiety. in other words, such information needs to be explored further and a more systematic approach needs to be adopted. extensive research in foreign language anxiety (e.g., aida, 1994; huang et al., 2010; thompson & lee, 2012, 2014) suggests that it is worth describing the nature of reading anxiety and then examining how it may potentially affect reading processes. to fill the gap evident in the current literature, this study first attempts to explore the underlying factors of reading anxiety using the scale constructed by saito et al. (1999). it then examines how these uncovered factors are related to readers’ strategy use and orientation to reading. 2. literature review 2.1. saito et al.’s (1999) foreign language reading anxiety scale anxiety appears as a pervasive emotional response in several language learning areas, with reading being no exception. more than three decades ago, horwitz et al. (1986) set out to describe language learning anxiety in such a way as to distinguish it from general anxiety, and constructed the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas) based on its definition “as a distinct complex of selfperceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors related to classroom language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process” (p. 128). the underlying factors of foreign language reading anxiety: their effects on strategy use and. . . 215 given that the flcas addresses anxiety mostly related to skills such as speaking and listening, saito et al. (1990) developed an anxiety questionnaire centered heavily on reading, called the foreign language reading anxiety scale (flras), related to language anxiety, but also being a distinct construct. reading anxiety is viewed as specific psychological responses obtaining in and emerging from the learning environment unique to reading a foreign language, based on the definition of foreign language classroom anxiety by horwitz et al. (1986). by analyzing the data collected from american university students who were studying french, russian, and japanese, saito et al. (1999) demonstrated that the flras has a relatively good level of internal consistency (α = .86), supporting its reliability as a measuring tool to gauge reading anxiety. they suggested that the two aspects of reading, that is, familiarity with the writing systems and cultural concepts of the target language, would be the main factors that result in arousing anxiety. the findings suggest that reading anxiety is likely to be caused by dealing with relatively unfamiliar writing systems and the background knowledge needed to learn the target language, and that anxiety levels may vary depending on the target language. in addition, they found that students’ subjective difficulty in reading is positively related to the level of reading anxiety, and that there exists a negative correlation between the levels of reading anxiety and students’ reading performances. 2.2. studies in reading anxiety negative relationships between reading anxiety and reading proficiency are supported by many other studies (e.g., saito et al., 1999; sellers, 2000; shi & liu, 2006; zhao et al., 2013). there is, however, some contradicting evidence. for example, mills et al. (2006) did not find any significant correlations between reading anxiety and reading performance in 95 english speaking university students who were learning french. they interpreted the insignificant link as probably stemming from the simplicity of the task in their study. in addition, zhao et al. (2013) partly failed to relate the level of reading anxiety to reading performance. among the 114 english speaking students learning chinese, zhao and his colleagues found that elementary level 1 and intermediate level 1 students exhibited a significantly negative relationship between reading anxiety and their performance, but an insignificant relationship was found in elementary level 2 students. they inferred that this finding might be related to the vast amount of new words or text styles that have to be learned when first starting a new level, while the participants in elementary level 2 would have been used to a continuous stream of information. although some inconsistent findings still exist in the literature, when keeping such variables (e.g., kinds of tasks or levels of students) hyang-il kim 216 in mind, there seems to exist a general consensus on the negative role of reading anxiety in reading performance. in search of explicating the nature of anxiety and exploring its role as an important variable in the foreign language context, a few instruments have been developed and used, such as the foreign language classroom anxiety inventory (walker & panayides, 2014) and most notably the flcas. there have also been some attempts to examine the underlying factors of anxiety through the use of the flcas, although it appears there is no such research in the area of reading. for example, aida (1994) found four factors: speech anxiety and fear of negative evaluation, fear of failing the class, comfortableness in speaking with japanese people, and negative attitudes toward the japanese class. similarly, huang et al. (2010) offer four factors based on data collected from taiwanese students. the study by thompson and lee (2012) that examined the responses of korean university students also resulted in an indication of anxiety factors, that is, english class performance anxiety, lack of self-confidence in english, confidence with native speakers of english, and fear of ambiguity in english, and compared their characteristics with those of the previous studies. further studies using these underlying factors in conjunction with other important variables have shed light on the impact of anxiety on language learning. on the other hand, knowledge about the nature of anxiety in foreign language reading still appears to be superficial, without such exploration. this would seem to be a vital step in the investigation of the underlying characteristics of reading anxiety before examining the relationships with other important reading-related variables. the current study is, therefore, motivated by the need to fill such a gap in the previous literature. it aims to uncover the underlying factors of reading anxiety using the flras developed by saito et al. (1999) and examine their impact on the two following important reading constructs. 2.3. reading strategy use and reading orientation reading, or learning to read in a foreign language, offers readers plenty of opportunities for engagement and interaction with reading texts in an attempt to derive meaning. in particular, a reader’s involvement in reading processes, as an active agent, is well depicted by their use of reading strategies to improve comprehension. not surprisingly, previous studies generally support the idea that skillful and unskillful readers exhibit different patterns of strategy use while reading. according to their findings, proficient, strategic reading requires metacognitive awareness that can be reflected by the readers’ behavior, like planning and implementing based on a conscious awareness of the appropriate actions to take so as to reach a certain reading goal (auerbach & paxton, 1997; malcolm, the underlying factors of foreign language reading anxiety: their effects on strategy use and. . . 217 2009; sheorey & mokhtari, 2001; zhang, 2010; zhang & zhang, 2013). these studies commonly indicate that the use of metacognitive strategies may reflect such metacognitive awareness and have a positive relationship with reading performance (malcolm, 2009; zhang & zhang, 2013; wang et al., 2009). in general, reading strategies are divided into three categories: metacognitive, cognitive, and support strategies (malcolm, 2009; phakiti, 2008; sheorey & mokhtari, 2001). following the definitions of reading strategies offered by sheorey and mokhtari (2001, p. 436), metacognitive strategies are purposeful and carefully planned actions aimed to monitor or evaluate reading, such as “taking an overall view of a text,” or “critically evaluating the information.” cognitive strategies are those actions and procedures that readers employ directly when working with a reading text, such as “adjusting reading speed,” or “guessing the meaning of unknown words.” support strategies are related to the actions that readers can take to support comprehension such as “using a dictionary” or “taking notes.” among these three strategy categories, metacognitive strategies have been recognized to play the most significant role in proficient reading, as mentioned above. in order to gain a deeper insight into the patterns of efl (english as a foreign language) readers’ reading processes, some recent studies have examined how their reading strategy use has been related to levels of reading anxiety. lien (2011) reported a negative correlation between reading anxiety and reading strategy use using the data collected from 108 taiwanese university students responding to the flras and the survey of reading strategies (sors). in her later study using a path analysis, lien (2016) found that 372 taiwanese college students’ efl reading anxiety had a negative effect on their metacognitive strategy use, with a few other variables such as self-perceived english proficiency and satisfaction over their proficiency. in addition, the study by tsai and lee (2018) also produced similar results with 202 taiwanese university students responding to the flras and the sors. using strategy use as a predictor variable, they found that students’ employment of such strategies had a negative influence on reading anxiety. this indicates that the more frequently students use reading strategies, the less anxiety they tend to experience. while such studies do describe the relationships between anxiety and strategy use shown in reading processes, they seem to lack in the detailed specifications that describe the relationships between these two variables. students’ attention while reading affords another potentially rewarding avenue for the exploration of their engagement in the reading process. a few studies have attempted to examine how students pay attention to their learning (e.g., guilloteaux & dörnyei, 2008; sellers, 2000); however, upon careful examination of the previous literature, there appears to exist some confusion in the use of the term attention (see ellis, 2008). tomlin and villa (1994) describe attention from a cognitive and neuroscientific perspective. in their model, attention hyang-il kim 218 is divided into three processes, namely, alertness, orientation, and detection. alertness indicates an overall readiness to handle incoming stimuli. orientation involves an attentional process that works to focus the various modes of attention on certain categories of sensory information while simultaneously excluding others. detection refers to the cognitive registration of sensory information. tomlin and villa (1994) argue that the importance of attention in language learning increases from the first (alertness) to the third (detection) and claim that the three states can possibly exist as separate attentional processes in learning. this study is based on the assumption that the term orientation, derived from the model mentioned above, is sufficient to index students’ attentional process. in reading, orientation can be defined as the state in which students direct their attention to certain types or classes of information in order to construct meaning from text, and maintaining a state that allows a focus on the target information to the point that other sensory input is, to a large extent, excluded. this includes not being interrupted by trains of thought or external stimuli perceived to be unrelated to the goal of the reading at hand. in other words, reading orientation in this study indicates the state where students concentrate on reading to make meaning out of texts without inner or outer distraction. in studies of young learners, kaderavek et al. (2014) use the term orientation to describe a degree of interest, persistence, and attention while reading. they found that orientation is correlated with attention and effortful control that a child shows during reading activities. although orientation appears to be a relatively new concept in language learning for adult learners, this finding by kaderavek et al. (2014) supports the definition of orientation as attentional processes while reading used in this study. orientation also appears susceptible to a reader’s emotional states. negative emotions, such as anxiety, fear, sadness, or disappointment are likely to overload a brain engaged in controlling cognitive processes, which results in a reduced ability to pay attention to and handle new information (jalongo & hirsh, 2010). in other words, experiencing reading anxiety may decrease reading orientation. the scarcity of empirical evidence in this area in the existing literature warrants further exploration into the relationship between reading anxiety and orientation toward reading. given the lack of research mentioned above, it seems that there is a critical need to establish links between these important variables in reading, and this study aims to fill in the current gaps by seeking answers to the following research questions (rqs): rq1. what are the underlying factors of reading anxiety as described by the flras? rq2. how is reading anxiety related to reading performance? rq3. what is the relationship between reading anxiety and reading strategy use? rq4. does reading anxiety affect efl students’ orientation to reading? the underlying factors of foreign language reading anxiety: their effects on strategy use and. . . 219 3. method this study employs exploratory factor analysis and hierarchical multiple regression analyses of data from 256 korean efl university students to investigate the interactions between the aforementioned variables. 3.1. participants the data were collected using the convenience sampling method based on availability and willingness to join the study. participants were drawn from students studying english-related courses at one university in seoul, south korea at the time of study. 256 students, 122 males and 134 females, took part in the study voluntarily after its purpose was introduced. their ages ranged from 18 to 26 years (m = 21.4, sd = 1.92). they were majors in various fields such as the humanities, languages, technology, and science. the average time they spent learning english as a foreign language was 11.6 years. the participants in these courses were required to have mid-term and final exams, and their grades were evaluated on a curve, meaning that many of them had to compete to be in the distributions they aimed for (e.g., getting an a or b). 3.2. instruments to measure anxiety and strategy use in reading, the following two questionnaires were used. · the flras, developed by saito et al. (1999): 20 items were employed to gauge the participants’ anxiety when reading english. the internal consistency of the 20 items was found to have an acceptable level (cronbach’s α = .84). · the sors by mokhtari and sheorey (2002): 30 items were used to explore strategy use. they are categorized into three subsets: global/metacognitive strategies (13 items), problem-solving/cognitive strategies (8 items), and support strategies (9 items). each item of these questionnaires was translated into korean before being administrated, and the translations were checked by a colleague who has had expertise in english education for more than seven years. the participants were advised to mark their answers on a 6-point likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree) in both surveys. the internal consistencies of the first two categories (global/metacognitive strategies and problem-solving/cognitive strategies) were found to have acceptable levels hyang-il kim 220 (cronbach’s α = .83 and .80, respectively) and the last one (support strategies) was close to an acceptable level (cronbach’s α = .60). · reading orientation: based on the participants’ subjective judgements toward the degree of orientation to reading – being engaged in the attentional process that focuses on certain types or classes of information related to the reading text with no distraction, they were asked to score on the 6-point likert scale ranging from 1 (unengaged) to 6 (fully engaged). the descriptive statistics for the categories of reading strategies and reading orientation are illustrated in table 1. the participants’ answers to the items belonging to each category were averaged and the mean scores were employed as dependent variables (rq3 and rq4). · reading proficiency: for this study, toeic1 reading scores were used. after data collection, the participants were asked to present their official toeic scores which were valid at the time of data collection. among 256 participants, only 120 students provided the scores. for this study, only their reading scores were used (m = 368.30, sd = 76.99). according to ets (2015), 385 or above is considered equivalent to “independent user – vantage” (b2) in the cefr levels. the average toeic reading scores that these participants submitted was slightly lower than the minimum score of the b2 band in the cefr, which means their english reading level can be considered as high-intermediate. table 1 descriptive statistics for the categories of reading strategies and reading orientation (n = 256) variables m sd global/metacognitive strategies 4.03 0.69 problem-solving/cognitive strategies 4.52 0.71 support strategies 4.00 0.64 reading orientation 3.10 0.97 3.3. data analysis in order to answer rq1, investigation of the underlying factors in the flras, all the 256 korean students’ responses to the 20 items of the flras were put into spss (version 23.0) and analyzed using exploratory factor analysis. maximum likelihood extraction method and a direct oblimin rotation method were employed. 1 toeic or test of english for international communication is an authorized test that examines two parts of english competence, that is, listening and reading. the total score of each part is 495. the reading section with 100 questions consists of three major tasks: sentence completion, text completion, and reading comprehension. the underlying factors of foreign language reading anxiety: their effects on strategy use and. . . 221 the factor solutions’ eigenvalues and a scree plot were examined to extract the number of factors. factors with eigenvalues greater than 1.0 were retained (hair et al., 2010; kaiser, 1960). for rq2, a simple regression analysis was employed with reading anxiety as an independent variable and reading scores as a dependent variable to examine the effect of reading anxiety on reading proficiency. to address rq3 and rq4, this study employed a hierarchical multiple regression analyses. the averages of the three subset strategy scores and reading orientation scores were used as dependent variables for each question, and the averages of the three anxiety factor scores were used as independent variables (see tables 1 and 3). 4. findings for rq1 relating to identifying the underlying factors of reading anxiety, exploratory factor analysis was conducted. the first trial with 20 items resulted in a four-factor solution that accounts for 46.38% of the total variance (α = .81). the four items were loaded below the value of 0.4 (items no. 9, 16, 17, and 19). the second attempt after removing these four items yielded a three-factor structure, accounting for 49.59%. this time, it was found that only one item did not have the loading value of more than 0.4 (item no. 20) and it was removed. the final solution of the three-factor structure with 14 items (item no. 4 was deleted for having a lower loading value than 0.4) accounts for 51.87% of the total variance2 and cronbach’s alpha is slightly improved (α = .84). the first factor (f1), labeled “anxiety experienced during the process of reading english,” includes six items that indicate the anxiety felt by efl students while reading that arises from experiencing confusion, nervousness, and getting upset based on the difficulty of the reading and explains 30.20% of the variance (α = .85). the second factor (f2) includes four items and was labeled “confidence in reading” since the items address enjoyment, satisfaction, and confidence in reading english. with reversed coding, this factor could be termed a lack of confidence in reading, but to facilitate the examination of its natural relationship it was labeled as confidence. f2 explains 14.57% of the variance (α = .83). the last factor (f3) includes four items and was named “anxiety when reading english characters” since the items mainly indicate anxiety when reading what is written in english characters. f3 explains 7.10% of the variance (α = .67). table 2 shows the factor loadings for each factor. 2 the meta-analysis conducted by peterson (2000) indicates that the average of explanatory value is about 56.6%. the explanatory value in this study was approximately 52% of the total variance, which is near the reported average. therefore, it was decided to use this result of the factor analysis for the further analysis. hyang-il kim 222 table 2 factor loadings for foreign language reading anxiety factor 1 2 3 factor 1: anxiety experienced during the process of reading english 1. i get upset when i’m not sure whether i understand what i am reading in english. .796 3. when i’m reading english, i get so confused i can’t remember what i’m reading. .795 2. when reading english, i often understand the words but still can’t quite understand what the author is saying. .703 5. i am nervous when i am reading a passage in english when i am not familiar with the topic. .627 7. when reading english, i get nervous and confused when i don’t understand every word. .550 6. i get upset whenever i encounter unknown grammar when reading english. .533 factor 2: confidence in reading 12. i enjoy reading english. .832 13. i feel confident when i am reading in english. .792 14. once you get used to it, reading english is not so difficult. .723 18. i am satisfied with the level of reading ability in english that i have achieved so far. .666 factor 3: anxiety when reading english characters 11. i am worried about all the new symbols i have to learn in order to read english. .724 10. by the time you get past the funny letters and symbols in english, it’s hard to remember what you’re reading about. .541 15. the hardest part of learning english is learning to read. .518 8. it bothers me to encounter words i can’t pronounce while reading english. .417 the descriptive statistics for the three-factor scores are presented in table 3. based on the three-factor structure revealed in the factor analysis, the participants’ responses to the items that belong to each factor were averaged and the mean scores were used as independent variables to address the other research questions (rq3 and rq4). table 3 descriptive statistics for the three underlying factors of the flras (n = 256) variables mean sd fa1 4.32 0.91 fa2 3.54 1.05 fa3 3.36 0.93 note. fa1 = anxiety experienced during the process of reading english; fa2 = confidence in reading; fa3 = anxiety when reading english characters rq2 addresses the impact of reading anxiety on performance. among the 256 participants, 120 students presented the official toeic reading scores (m = 368.30, sd = 76.99). their anxiety (using the total scores of the 14 flrs items – the four items under f2 were reverse coded this time) was shown to be slightly more than the median (m = 3.81, sd =.68). a regression analysis indicated that reading anxiety was a significant predictor of the toeic reading scores (f(1,118) = 15.15, p = .0001), explaining 11% of total variance (ß = -.34). this regression model indicates a significant reverse relationship between the two variables. in other words, the more the students exhibit anxiety toward reading, the lower their proficiency. the underlying factors of foreign language reading anxiety: their effects on strategy use and. . . 223 rq3 was concerned with the relationship between reading anxiety and reading strategy use. in order to explore the roles of the three anxiety factors, f2 – confidence in reading – was used without being reverse coded. first, the way the three anxiety factors influence metacognitive strategy use (msu) was examined. a hierarchical multiple regression analysis indicates that model 2 with f1 and f2 as predictor variables (r = .51, r2 = .26) accounts for approximately 21% of the total variance, more than model 1 with f1 as a single predictor (r = .23, r2 = .05), as shown in table 4. the r square change from model 1 to model 2 was significant (p = .0001). between the two predictors in model 2, f2 (ß = .46) is found a more significant predictor of msu than f1 (ß = .31). on the other hand, model 3, which includes f1, f2, and f3 as predictor variables, explained the same total variance as model 2, and the r square change from model 2 to model 3 was insignificant (p = .39). table 4 regression models with msu as a dependent variable unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients b std. error beta t-value p-value r2 model 1 (constant) 3.27 .21 15.93 .00 .05 fa1 .18 .05 .23 3.81 .00 model 2 (constant) 1.94 .24 8.04 .00 .26fa1 .24 .04 .31 5.63 .00 fa2 .30 .04 .46 8.36 .00 model 3 (constant) 1.89 .25 7.55 .00 .26 fa1 .22 .05 .28 4.54 .00 fa2 .31 .04 .46 8.38 .00 fa3 .04 .05 .05 .86 .39 note. fa1 = anxiety experienced during the process of reading english; fa2 = confidence in reading; fa3 = anxiety when reading english characters secondly, how the three anxiety factors influence cognitive strategy use (csu) was investigated. a hierarchical multiple regression analysis indicated that model 5 with f1 and f2 as predictor variables (r = .50, r2 = .25) accounts for approximately 14% more of the total variance than model 4 with f1 as a single predictor (r = .33, r2 = .11). the r square change from model 4 to model 5 was significant (p = .0001). as illustrated in table 5, f1 (ß = .39) was found to be as significant a predictor of csu as f2 (ß = .39), with the same values. on the other hand, model 6 that includes f1, f2, and f3 as predictor variables explains approximately 1% of the total variance more than model 5, and the r square change from model 5 to model 6 was insignificant (p = .10). hyang-il kim 224 table 5 regression models with csu as a dependent variable unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients b std. error beta t-value p-value r2 model 4 (constant) 3.42 .20 16.79 .00 .11 fa1 .25 .05 .33 5.52 .00 model 5 (constant) 2.28 .25 9.19 .00 .25fa1 .30 .04 .39 7.10 .00 fa2 .26 .04 .39 7.00 .00 model 6 (constant) 2.39 .26 9.34 .00 .26 fa1 .34 .05 .44 7.05 .00 fa2 .26 .04 .38 6.94 .00 fa3 -.08 .05 -.10 -1.65 .10 note. fa1 = anxiety experienced during the process of reading english; fa2 = confidence in reading; fa3 = anxiety when reading english characters with the third subcategory, support strategy use (ssu) with the three anxiety factors, a hierarchical multiple regression analysis shows that model 9 with all three anxiety factors as independent variables (r = .47, r2 = .22) explains approximately 2% more of the total variance when compared to model 8 with f1 and f2 as predictors (r = .45, r2 = .20). the r square change from model 8 to model 9 was significant (p = .02). model 8 accounts for approximately 4% more of the total variance when compared to model 7 with a single factor of f1 (r = .40, r2 = .16), showing a significant r change from model 7 to model 8 (p = .0001). among the three anxiety factors, it was found that f1 is the strongest contributor (ß = .36), followed by f2 (ß = .22), and f3 (ß = .15), as shown in table 6. table 6 regression models with ssu as a dependent variable unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients b std. error beta t-value p-value r2 model 7 (constant) 2.80 .18 15.63 .00 .16 fa1 .28 .04 .39 6.84 .00 model 8 (constant) 2.23 .23 9.62 .00 .20fa1 .30 .04 .43 7.54 .00 fa2 .13 .03 .21 3.74 .00 model 9 (constant) 2.09 .24 8.79 .00 .22 fa1 .25 .05 .36 5.60 .00 fa2 .13 .03 .22 3.87 .00 fa3 .10 .04 .15 2.28 .02 note. fa1 = anxiety experienced during the process of reading english; fa2 = confidence in reading; fa3 = anxiety when reading english characters rq4 addresses the relationship between reading anxiety and the degree of efl students’ orientation during the reading process. to address the question, the underlying factors of foreign language reading anxiety: their effects on strategy use and. . . 225 the averages of the three anxiety factor scores were used as predictor variables and the average of the orientation scores was used as dependent variables. when examining model 10, which has f1 as a single factor, it was found to approach a significant value (p = .055). however, when f2 was put together with f1 as predictor variables, the regression model became significant (p = .0001), accounting for 27% of the total variance. it is interesting to note that the nearly significant value of f1 becomes insignificant (p = .52) when f2 is considered together in model 11 (see table 7). model 12 with all three anxiety factors as independent variables (r = .53, r2 = .28) explained approximately only 1% more of the total variance than model 11 (r = .52, r2 = .27), but saw a significant r change from model 11 to model 12 (p = .02). when examining the values of f2 and f3 in model 12, f2 is a stronger contributor (ß = .50) to the degree of orientation than f3 (ß = -.14). table 7 regression models with orientation to reading as a dependent variable unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients b std. error beta t-value p-value r2 model 10 (constant) 3.65 .29 12.48 .00 .01 fa1 -.13 .07 -.12 -1.93 .055 model 11 (constant) 1.60 .34 4.76 .00 .27fa1 -.04 .06 -.04 -.65 .52 fa2 .47 .05 .51 9.30 .00 model 12 (constant) 1.81 .34 5.25 .00 .28 fa1 .04 .07 .03 .55 .58 fa2 .46 .05 .50 9.26 .00 fa3 -.15 .06 -.14 -2.36 .02 note. fa1 = anxiety experienced during the process of reading english; fa2 = confidence in reading; fa3 = anxiety when reading english characters 5. discussion the current study attempted to tap into the complexity of the relationships between crucial variables involved in reading processes which cannot be easily noticed. the relevance of the study lies in the fact that it sought to use factor analysis to explore the flras, which has been only superficially investigated thus far. in addition, it complements previous research by revealing more details about the nature of the relationship between reading anxiety and other major cognitive aspects of reading, such as the use of reading strategies. further, it indicates the effect of these anxiety factors on the degree of students’ orientation toward reading. rq1 was addressed by examining the underlying factors of the flras with data collected from korean university students. the flras was originally hyang-il kim 226 constructed on two potential anxiety yielding concepts found in a study by saito et al. (1999): students’ awareness of the writing systems of a target language and the awareness of its cultural norms. the chief norms of the original flras construct were partially supported by the factor solution of the present study. interestingly, the english writing system (i.e., symbols and characters) was found to be an anxiety provoking factor among korean university students. the anxiety that arises from unfamiliarity with writing systems – named anxiety when reading english characters (f3) in this study – was evidenced to be one of the components of the flras, accounting for 7.10% of the total variance. this means that korean efl students, despite decades of exposure to english in an academic setting, may still experience a significant level of unfamiliarity with the writing system, or individuals who studied english for years can still be anxious about reading texts merely because of the letters and symbols. this may be caused by the fact that the two languages have completely different writing systems. this finding is in line with many previous studies that indicate that students may experience reading anxiety in cases when there are differences in writing systems between their native language and a target language (e.g., saito et al., 1999; zhang, 2002; zhao et al., 2013). however, a closer examination of the students’ motivation may be warranted due to the strong possibility of their reason for learning the target language playing an impactful role in the level of anxiety felt. this study did not, however, support saito et al.’s (1999) claim that unfamiliarity with target language culture may elicit reading anxiety. items 19 and 20 of the flras, directly dealing with culture concepts, failed to load on any factors. for native speakers of english in the study by saito et al. (1999) who were learning french, japanese, and russian, the lack of cultural background knowledge about these target languages was shown to raise anxiety when reading. on the other hand, for the korean university students who were learning english at the time of data collection, it was not found as an anxiety provoking factor. the possible cause of such contradicting findings is likely a result of the differences in the degree of background cultural knowledge of the target languages in the two studies. for example, in the study by saito et al. (1999), the majority of the participants had no experience learning their target languages in high school and more than 60% of the total number of participants were freshmen and sophomores, which indicates that these participants’ experience of learning and their exposure to the target languages were relatively low. many scholars support the claim that the amount of cultural knowledge significantly influences readers’ reading comprehension (see abu-rabia, 1996; hudson, 2007; pritchard, 1990) and seemingly determines the level of anxiety when reading. the duration of the participants’ english learning experience in this study is much longer than in the study by saito et al. (1999). most korean university participants the underlying factors of foreign language reading anxiety: their effects on strategy use and. . . 227 start learning english officially from the third grade of elementary school (korean ministry of education, 2019). their background information suggests that the average time they spent learning english was 11.6 years. in addition, due to trends in globalization and korea’s special relationship with the united states, english itself serves not only as a tool of communication for koreans but is also relatively important as a powerful tool for obtaining social opportunities (shin & park, 2015). it is likely that most korean university students have become reasonably familiar with the culture of prominent english speaking counties, by activities such as investing time in a target language context, participating in exchange learning programs, or traveling; or indirectly by watching movies, actively engaging in social networking sites, and reading international news with the help of current sophisticated technologies. therefore, it appears that the familiarity with the target language culture was not a significant anxiety yielding factor for the current participants. the other two underlying factors of the flras are anxiety experienced during the process of reading english (f1) and confidence in reading (f2). f1 can be defined as negative emotional responses like confusion, nervousness, uneasiness, or getting upset that arise when a reader is engaged in the reading process. not surprisingly, this factor was found to be a major component of reading anxiety, explaining more than 30% of the total variance, for efl korean university students when engaged in reading processes. f2 is directed at efl readers’ confidence as it addresses reading enjoyment, satisfaction, and self-belief. reversely interpreted, the finding also suggests that korean efl readers have anxiety caused by a lack of confidence in reading english texts. rq2 addressed the relationship between reading anxiety and reading performance. although this result was obtained from less than half of the total number of participants (n = 120) who submitted the official toeic scores by the time of this research, the finding shows consistency with most previous studies (saito et al., 1999; sellers, 2000; shi & liu, 2006; zhao et al., 2013), that is, a negative relationship was found. this result may indicate that reading anxiety is likely to hamper reading skills. more specifically, the issues that are likely to lower korean students’ achievements in reading are: (a) encountering anxiety during reading processes, (b) not possessing enough confidence or lacking positive emotional feelings toward english reading, and (c) having anxiety when encountering unfamiliar english characters or combinations. it may be reasonable to infer that the impact of reading anxiety on reading processes may result in less reading achievement. in particular, this study has examined the impact of efl readers’ strategy use, which is one of the important variables that has been shown to greatly influence reading performance in previous literature, on reading processes while under the influence of anxiety. specifically, rq3 examined how these three factors of reading anxiety and the three subhyang-il kim 228 categories of reading strategy use are inter-related. first, regression models were run that include f1, f2, and f3 as independent variables and msu as a dependent variable. model 2 with f1 and f2 as predictors were identified to have five times more explanatory value (26% of the variance) than model 1 with f1 as a single predictor (5% of the variance). the r square change from model 1 to model 2 was significant. in other words, to understand how msu is influenced by anxiety that arises while reading english, it is crucial to also consider the amount of confidence in reading that an individual brings in. based on this result, both f1 and f2 need to be considered together when examining how metacognitive strategies are used, but it should also be noted that f2 (confidence) has a stronger predictor value than f1 (anxiety) (see table 4). it suggests that the more anxious students become while reading english texts, the more msu they use, but students who have confidence in reading are likely to use far more msu, that is, strategies related to planning, monitoring, and evaluating, than when they become anxious. according to fredrickson (2013), positive emotions may help an individual broaden his or her awareness in perceptual, semantic, social, and physical areas. to be more precise, when an individual is experiencing positive emotions, he or she has the tendency to recognize more resources visually and react in a wider variety of ways as compared to when experiencing negative emotions (macintyre & vincze, 2017). likewise, an individual with confidence in reading, that is, one of the positive emotions, may engage in more diverse reading processes and confidently employ global strategies. in other words, confidence may help efl readers to more actively employ reading strategies reflecting metacognitive awareness. therefore, it is necessary to examine both variables in order to understand students’ use of metacognitive strategies while keeping in mind that confidence in reading is a more effective drive for efl readers to more actively engage in reading processes than is anxiety. concerning the impact of the three anxiety factors on csu, model 5, containing f1 and f2 as predictor variables, exhibits more explanatory value (25% of the variance) than model 4 (11% of the variance). as shown in table 5, the r square change from model 5 to model 6 was insignificant. in other words, much like msu, the csu in korean university students was not affected by f3, anxiety when reading english characters. this finding is predictable since the two kinds of strategies are not directly related to reading english symbols and letters (i.e., msu is related to purposeful and carefully planned actions deployed to monitor or evaluate reading, while csu describes procedures that readers employ directly when working with a reading text). anxiety related to unfamiliar writing systems, therefore, may not affect the level of their use of metacognitive and cognitive strategies to aid comprehension. however, unlike the patterns of the independent variables’ predictor values for msu, those of csu were shown to be the underlying factors of foreign language reading anxiety: their effects on strategy use and. . . 229 the same (ß = .39 each). given that cognitive strategies are the ones that help directly solve problems encountered while reading, such as when failing to identify an author’s intention or not properly comprehending the text, the anxiety caused by such nervousness and confusion in reading processes may lead students to use cognitive strategies as frequently as when they have confidence in reading. unlike the relationships of anxiety factors with msu and csu, the results suggest that all three anxiety factors influence ssu. model 9 in table 6 explains approximately 22% of the variance and the r square change from model 8 to model 9 was significant (p = .02), although this model has only 2% more explanatory value than model 8. as seen in model 9, f1 has the strongest predictor value of ssu among the three anxiety factors, even more than that of confidence in reading. unlike with the other subsets of strategies, when students become anxious due to encountering difficult english words that are hard to pronounce or not being able to remember what they are reading due to unfamiliar letters, they are likely to employ basic helping mechanisms or support strategies, such as underlying or highlighting a certain area, using a dictionary, or translating from english into korean. lastly, this study revealed how anxiety provoking factors influence the degree of reading orientation. when examining table 6, f1 alone was at a nearly significant level (p = .055). however, when f2 was included in model 11, f1 lost its significance, leaving confidence in reading as the most powerful predictor of the level of reading orientation. model 12 with all three anxiety factors as independent variables had approximately only 1% more explanatory value than model 11, of which the r change was significant (p = .02). this result indicates that the more confidence students have in reading english texts, the more likely they are to manifest reading orientation, or an attentional state of not being distracted by stimuli irrelevant to the goal of understanding the reading at hand. on the other hand, anxiety experienced during the reading process did not affect reading orientation. in a similar way, the predictor value of anxiety stemming from trouble with the english writing system is quite marginal as compared to that of confidence in reading, although it seems to be inversely proportional to the level of orientation. this finding does not support the assertion by jalongo and hirsh (2010) that negative emotions may play a detrimental role in the ability to control cognitive processes. rather, positive emotions such as confidence possibly enhance such controls over reading orientation. a study by mcgeown et al. (2015) provides evidence that confidence is an important factor which leads to reading success. although the scope of the current study does not allow to shed light on any links between reading orientation and reading performance, it seems plausible that orientation to reading may serve as one of the factors that help strongly connect confidence to reading success, and this needs to be studied in the future. hyang-il kim 230 while this study started by examining the relationship between anxiety and other factors, what emerges from the findings partly reflects the importance of positive psychology (e.g., dewaele et al., 2018; dewaele & macintyre, 2014; mcintyre & gregersen, 2012). according to macintyre and gregersen (2012), positive emotions help build learning resources because such emotions are likely to widen an individual’s perspective. in turn, this facilitates the individuals’ learning of the target language. this study shows that an individual’s confidence or positive emotion is a far more powerful contributor to the enhancement of korean efl university readers’ exercise of metacognitive strategies and their reading orientation than anxiety while reading. there are a few limitations to the present study. first, the student data were collected using self-reported questionnaires that ask for the participants’ subjective judgements. there exists a possibility that the participants provided answers to the survey items reflecting external expectations. therefore, for more insight, similar studies conducted in the future should also take into account qualitative data. since this study focused on the korean efl context specifically, future research may investigate whether these data are transferable to other contexts as well. second, the reliability and validity of reading orientation could be more strongly established. the findings suggest that orientation toward reading is worthy of receiving more focus in future research and needs to be developed into a more reliable construct, the exploration of which is likely to bear fruit in literature if investigated more thoroughly. in addition, the current scope of the study has limitations when investigating the students’ growth patterns and their relationships with these variables. it is worth documenting the changes in these relationships in further studies. 6. conclusions since the 1970s, a great deal of academic interest has been paid to learner anxiety, and its impact on other important variables has been actively studied, providing considerable and informative findings. this study was motivated to gain a clearer picture of the relationship between anxiety and strategy use in reading, particularly the inner-complexity of their relationships. indeed, the results of this study indicate that anxiety has a negative impact on reading performance and it influences other cognitive variables for the sample of korean university students. along with such research findings, however, certain important roles that positive emotions play have been revealed, reflecting a current focus on positive psychology (macintyre & gregersen, 2012; macintyre & mercer, 2014; macintyre & vincze, 2017). the results of this study indicate where teachers should focus to lead students to increase the efficiency of their reading process. in particular, it would seem to be more effective for teachers to pay more attention to enhancing positive the underlying factors of foreign language reading anxiety: their effects on strategy use and. . . 231 emotions such as enjoyment, satisfaction, or confidence, rather than struggling to reduce anxiety. it is also advisable for teachers to implement reading strategy instruction so that students can build more mastery experiences through successfully performing reading tasks and thus have a more positive learning experience. acknowledgements i am grateful to the editor in chief and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback and comments. hyang-il kim 232 references abu-rabia, s. 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(2009). metacognitive beliefs and strategies in learning chinese as a foreign language. system, 37(1), 46-56. 351 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (3). 2022. 351-353 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.3.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial the current issue of studies in second language learning and teaching includes six papers, the first two of which offer syntheses of existing research and the remaining four are reports of original empirical investigations. in the first contribution, raquel serrano provides a state-of-the-art overview of studies that have investigated the effect of time distribution of practice on second and foreign language (l2) attainment. following the examination of the requisite empirical evidence with respect to teaching different target language (tl) subsystems, l2 speech production, individual differences and spacing at the program level, she suggests a number of pedagogical implications and makes tangible recommendations for future research. subsequently, jie qin and lei lei report a bibliometric analysis of the trends in research into task-based language teaching (tblt) conducted between 1985 and 2020. based on their search of the web of science core collection, they focused on dominant publication trends, the main venues for publication, the most productive authors, the most highly cited articles and references, as well as the most frequently explored tblt-related topics and their developmental patterns, using the results as a point of reference for discussing directions for future research, issues in research methodology and pedagogical implications. the following two papers shift the focus to the teaching and learning of tl subsystems. jinfen xu and changying li explored the effect of differences in the timing of form-focused instruction (ffi) on the acquisition of the english passive voice by 169 chinese middle school learners. using a picture writing test and a written error correction test, they showed that while the treatment was beneficial for all the three experimental groups, learning gains were the greatest in the before-isolated group, where ffi preceded communicative activities, on both immediate and delayed posttests. jang ho lee, joung joo ahn and hansol lee, in turn, investigated the role of motivation and vocabulary learning strategies (vls) in influencing l2 vocabulary knowledge (vk) within the framework of self-regulated learning (zimmerman, 2002). the data 352 were collected from 185 korean learners of english as a foreign language and analyzed through structural equation modeling (sem). the researchers found that motivation directly predicted both vls use and vk, also indirectly predicting vk via vls. in addition, intrinsic motivation proved to be a stronger predictor than extrinsic motivation. emphasis is then placed on the affective dimension of l2 learning in the study by zhipeng zhang, xuesong (andy) gao, ting liu and chwee beng lee, who explored emotion regulation and enjoyment in collaborative performance of writing tasks with the help of the social media application wechat. the data were collected from 336 chinese students majoring in english and analyzed through principle component analysis, correlation analysis and structural equation modeling. this allowed identification of two types of emotion regulation (i.e., peer regulation and group regulation) and one factor underlying enjoyment (i.e., enjoyment of online collaboration) as well as intricate relationships among these variables. in the final paper, jian xu and xuyan qiu focus on the concept of oracy (goh, 2014) by jointly exploring psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness in relation to speaking and listening in the case of 863 chinese university students learning english as a foreign language. they developed two scales tapping into these three needs in relation to the two skills and demonstrated that the speaking and listening needs were correlated. the results of t-tests and anova revealed varying patterns of autonomy, competence and relatedness as a function of gender, major, geographical context, stage in the program and study-abroad experiences. the present issue also carries two book reviews. the first, by lixia zhu and jinting cai, focuses on a publication devoted to crosslinguistic influence in l2 learning, while the second, written by zixuan li, zooms in on a book on research into l2 motivation. all in all, i believe that all the contributions to this issue will further our understanding of the process of l2 learning and teaching, and inspire future empirical investigations of this fascinating field. this editorial also presents a great opportunity to share information about the conference that will be held to celebrate the success of studies in second language learning and teaching and will also offer an excellent forum for sharing the findings of cutting-edge research in the field. the event is planned to take place in kalisz, poland, on may 15th-17th, 2023. the venue will be the beautiful seat of the faculty of pedagogy and fine arts of adam mickiewicz university which is home to the department of english studies where the journal has been published from its inception. the conference is long overdue as it was initially supposed to have taken place in 2020 and then early 2021 to mark ten years of existence of ssllt. this proved to be impossible due to the pandemic, the transition to online education and all the restrictions in place across the world. i am confident that nothing will thwart our plans this time and that we will be able to get together for a face-to-face event in may next year, such an amazing time 353 of year in poland. the first call for papers is included at the end of the present issue. i invite all of our contributors, readers and reviewers to submit a proposal or simply to take part in what is shaping up to be an unforgettable conference. see all of you in kalisz in 2023!!! mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references goh, c. c. (2014). reconceptualizing second language oracy instruction: metacognitive engagement and direct teaching in listening and speaking. asian journal of english language and pedagogy, 2(1), 1-31. zimmerman, b. j. (2002). becoming a self-regulated learner: an overview. theory into practice, 41(2), 64-70. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_2 235 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (2). 2021. 235-264 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.2.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt high school efl students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback: the role of gender, motivation and extraversion xuan van ha macquarie university, sydney, australia ha tinh university, ha tinh, vietnam https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7538-0659 xuan.ha@mq.edu.au jill c. murray macquarie university, sydney, australia https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8970-2241 jill.murray@mq.edu.au a. mehdi riazi hamad bin khalifa university, doha, qatar https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7648-8116 ariazi@hbku.edu.qa abstract this study employed an explanatory sequential mixed-methods research design to examine the beliefs of vietnamese efl students concerning oral corrective feedback (cf) and the role of some individual differences in these beliefs. the data consisted of questionnaires completed by 250 vietnamese high school students and follow-up interviews with 15 of them. exploratory factor analysis revealed six latent factors underlying students’ beliefs about cf, namely, (1) output-prompting cf and eliciting recasts, (2) desire for cf, (3) non-verbal cues, (4) important errors, (5) input-providing cf, and (6) less important errors. descriptive statistics and thematic analysis of the interviews showed that students were positive about cf. they liked both input-providing cf and output-prompting cf for all error types. metalinguistic feedback was the most strongly preferred, while clarification request was the least preferred. xuan van ha, jill c. murray, a. mehdi riazi 236 further statistical analyses revealed some interesting relationships between students’ beliefs about cf and their gender, english learning motivation, and self-rated introversion/extraversion. females were more positive about cf than males, and extraverted females were more positive about input-providing cf than introverted females. also, students learning english for exams were more positive about cf than those learning english for communication. pedagogical implications for effective feedback provision in efl contexts are discussed. keywords: oral corrective feedback; learner beliefs; gender; extraversion; motivation; vietnamese secondary school 1. introduction studies of learner beliefs are essential in second language (l2) research. like other individual differences (e.g., motivation, working memory and language aptitude), learner beliefs are significant learner individual differences which can influence both the process and outcome of language learning (dörnyei, 2005; ellis, 2008). beliefs about oral corrective feedback (cf)1 (responses to learners’ erroneous utterances) merit increased research attention because such research can shed light on belief in/congruence between students and teachers, and can thus help us to understand and to enhance the effectiveness of cf. as noted by pawlak (2014), learner beliefs, expectations and preferences regarding the provision of cf “should indubitably be taken into account if foreign language pedagogy aspires to be learner-centered and the guidelines furnished by scholars are to stand the chance of being transformed into actual instructional practices” (p. 69). among various aspects of cf research, cf beliefs have received the least research attention (akiyama, 2017; ha & murray, 2020). most of the research concerning learners’ cf beliefs has included only a few questions probing students’ opinions about the usefulness and necessity of cf as part of larger studies investigating other topics, predominantly beliefs about grammar instruction (jean & simard, 2011; loewen et al., 2009; schulz, 2001). research looking extensively at learners’ cf beliefs is limited (akiyama, 2017; li, 2017), but understanding the phenomenon is very important (kim & mostafa, 2021). firstly, learners’ cf beliefs can impact the noticeability of cf (kartchava & ammar, 2014) as well as its effectiveness (sheen, 2007). secondly, it has been noted that learners view cf and grammar instruction as two distinct categories (loewen et 1 cf has both oral forms and written forms, but only oral cf is investigated in this study. accordingly, any mention of cf in this study refers to oral cf. high school efl students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback: the role of gender, motivation and . . . 237 al., 2009), suggesting that investigating learners’ cf beliefs as a separate construct is necessary. thirdly, learners’ cf beliefs have been found to be contextspecific (loewen et al., 2009; pawlak, 2011; schulz, 2001), dynamic and complex (akiyama, 2017; leontjev, 2016), and trainable (sato, 2013). moreover, as noted by ellis (2009, 2017), both second language acquisition (sla) researchers and language educators have frequently disagreed about whether to correct errors, the choice of errors, cf types, and cf timing. understanding learners’ beliefs about these aspects of cf, and the individual and contextual factors that influence them may help to resolve such disagreements and enable a more nuanced and tailored approach to classroom practice. therefore, there is a pressing need for more research on learners’ cf beliefs in various contexts. the present study contributes to cf research in several ways. firstly, while learner cf beliefs have been found to be influenced by contexts (schulz, 2001), no studies have been conducted in any asian high school efl contexts, which involve a vast population of language learners. in order to provide one missing piece to complete this puzzle, this study aims to provide insights into students’ beliefs about cf in vietnamese high school efl classrooms, a hitherto unexplored context. secondly, while it is well established that understanding learner individual differences is important, questions remain about the interactions among those variables, particularly in the field of cf research. learner individual differences such as gender, extraversion, and motivation for learning english may play a role in learner cf beliefs. this study is the first attempt to investigate some possible relationships between students’ cf beliefs and these three variables. 2. literature review 2.1. students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback as mentioned earlier, most previous research on students’ cf beliefs has included cf as part of broader research agenda concerning grammar instruction. thus, these studies usually included several questions pertaining to cf in a more general questionnaire about grammar instruction. they have, however, provided some useful insights. overall, students were found to be positive about cf (brown, 2009; davis, 2003; jean & simard, 2011; li, 2017; loewen et al., 2009; schulz, 1996, 2001), but the extent to which students desired to receive cf varied in accordance with the learning context and the prior language learning experience (loewen et al., 2009). for example, in schulz’s (2001) large-scale study with post-secondary students, foreign language (fl) students in columbia tended to be more positive about cf than fl students in the us. jean and simard (2011), in a large-scale survey with canadian high school students, found that a xuan van ha, jill c. murray, a. mehdi riazi 238 higher percentage of english as a second language (esl) students felt that grammar errors should be corrected all the time during speaking lessons than did french as a second language students. they ascribed this discrepancy to the students’ first language learning experience in their language arts classes. agudo (2015) replicated loewen et al.’s (2009) large-scale study with 173 spanish high school efl students, revealing that spanish high school efl students were more positive about cf than undergraduate fl students in the us in loewen et al.’s (2009) study. he suggested the efl high school students in his study expected and wished to be corrected regularly in the classrooms. several studies compared the beliefs held by students and teachers regarding the role of cf, revealing that students were much more positive about cf than teachers (brown, 2009; jean & simard, 2011; li, 2017; roothooft & breeze, 2016; schulz, 2001). students were willing to receive immediate and explicit correction, while teachers were concerned about the possible detrimental effects of cf on students’ emotional states (li, 2017; roothooft & breeze, 2016). students’ beliefs about the importance of cf have been found to mediate their noticing of the corrective nature of the teachers’ feedback (kartchava & ammar, 2014), and students’ preferences for particular cf types could mediate the rate of immediate uptake following cf (akiyama, 2017). as research in sla has demonstrated the importance of cf provision (ellis, 2017), the critical pedagogical questions of how, when, whom and what to best correct in l2 classrooms are worthy of further research (ellis, 2017; ha, 2017; ha & murray, 2020, 2021; lyster et al., 2013). as for investigations into students’ preferences for cf types, the limited literature reveals some mixed findings. in a study with 60 advanced graduate students in the us who were training to be teaching assistants in a spoken esl course, lee (2013) found that the students rated explicit correction as the most preferred cf type and metalinguistic feedback as the least preferred one. in a study with spanish efl students (282 secondary school students and 113 adults), roothooft and breeze (2016) found that students were positive about explicit correction and metalinguistic feedback. interestingly, adult learners rated recasts much more positively than secondary school students. however, the study did not offer any reasons for this discrepancy. in a study of the relationship between iranian undergraduate efl students’ anxiety levels and cf beliefs, zhang and rahimi (2014) found that their students (80 high anxiety and 80 low anxiety students) rated explicit correction and metalinguistic feedback as the most effective type, and elicitation, recast, repetition and clarification request as equal second most effective type, regardless of their anxiety levels. this mirrors the findings of an early study with esl students in singaporean high school and university contexts by oladejo (1993), who found that metalinguistic feedback received the highest rating score. in a recent study high school efl students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback: the role of gender, motivation and . . . 239 with undergraduate efl students in china, zhu and wang (2019) found that their students preferred to receive output-prompting cf (e.g., repetition, metalinguistic feedback) more than input-providing cf (explicit correction). it appears from these studies that contexts influence students’ preferences for cf types, and efl students in some contexts like to receive metalinguistic feedback more than us esl students. however, little is known about students’ preferences for cf types in such contexts as asian efl high schools, including vietnam. as for the timing of cf, davis (2003) reported that 86% of the 97 undergraduate efl students agreed that cf should be provided as soon as possible to avoid bad habit formation. brown (2009), in a large survey of 1,600 fl students in a us university, reported that his students expressed moderate agreement that effective teachers should correct errors immediately. zhang and rahimi (2014) found that their undergraduate efl students, regardless of their anxiety level, preferred immediate cf to delayed cf, while the students in zhu and wang’s (2019) study held a negative view of delayed cf. these studies suggest a tentative conclusion that students generally prefer immediate cf to delayed cf, but the conflicting views between sla researchers and l2 educators regarding optimal cf timing (ellis, 2017; ha & murray, 2021) warrant further research for a more nuanced understanding of students’ beliefs and more persuasive pedagogical implications in this regard (quinn & nakata, 2017). concerning cf targets, students in zhang and rahimi’s (2014) study felt that errors that should be corrected the most were those hindering communication, followed by frequent errors. advanced esl students in lee’s (2013) study also indicated that they would like errors occurring the most often in their speaking to be corrected. zhu and wang’s (2019) students wanted their errors to be corrected even when the errors were not serious. in oladejo’s (1993, p. 78) study, students believed that “comprehensive, not selective” errors should be corrected to improve their language accuracy. the secondary school student group expected cf for grammar errors, while university students expected more cf for issues with organization of ideas. as no consistent pattern can be derived from the limited literature, more research is needed to draw meaningful conclusions about students’ preferences for error types. 2.2. oral corrective feedback and extraversion, english learning motivation and gender as the role of extraversion, motivation, and gender in learner cf beliefs has not been empirically investigated, it makes sense to review studies exploring the role of these differences in the engagement in, occurrence and effectiveness of cf. extraversion appears to be consistent over time, and it can influence one’s xuan van ha, jill c. murray, a. mehdi riazi 240 behavior (matthews et al., 2003). kim and nassaji (2018) looked at the influence of extraversion on the occurrences and effectiveness of cf techniques in two esl classrooms. they found that more extraverted learners were more likely to engage in more cf episodes, but more introverted learners demonstrated more successful uptake. however, there has not been adequate empirical evidence to draw firm conclusions regarding the role of extraversion in cf engagement. kim and nassaji (2018) call for more research investigating the relationship between learner extraversion and their participation in cf. motivation has been found to be a critical variable influencing l2 learning. according to dörnyei (2005), motivation “provides the primary impetus to initiate l2 learning and later the driving force to sustain the long and often tedious learning process; indeed all other factors involved in sla presuppose motivation to some extent” (p. 65). numerous studies have investigated learners’ reasons for language learning and its role in learning process and outcome (dörnyei, 2020). regarding the role of motivation in cf, it is not clear whether learners’ motivation influences their noticing of cf, which might in turn influences their learning outcome. as highlighted earlier, learners’ cf beliefs were found to influence their noticing of cf (kartchava & ammar, 2014) and cf effectiveness (akiyama, 2017; sheen, 2007), but it is not known whether motivation has any relationship with learners’ cf beliefs. regarding the role of gender in the occurrence and effectiveness of cf, in a study looking at the negotiation of meaning in child interactions, oliver (2002) did not find any impact of gender on the occurrence of negotiation for meaning, but it played a role in some other studies. ross-feldman (2007) found that in a picture story task, either female-female or male-female dyads engaged in more language related episodes and resolved them better than male-male dyads. pawlak (2020) found a mediating role of gender in the occurrence and outcome of cf in communicative tasks. same gender arrangements produced the majority of instances of negotiated interaction (90%) and output modification (75%). he concluded the study with an urgent call for more research investigating the role of gender, among other variables, on the process and product of interaction, including cf. nakatsukasa (2017) found that gender did not influence the effectiveness of verbal recasts during two communicative tasks, but females benefited from gesture-enhanced recasts more than males in the long run. due to the limited research investigating the role of gender in cf and the mixed findings, more studies are needed to investigate the role of gender in the beliefs about, occurrence and effectiveness of cf. in conclusion, previous research has shown that students are positive about the importance of cf, but further research is necessary for a more nuanced understanding of students’ beliefs about other pedagogical aspects of cf high school efl students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback: the role of gender, motivation and . . . 241 such as cf types, timing and targets. within the available literature, little is known about students in asian efl high schools, although students’ cf beliefs have been found to be context-dependent (schulz, 2001). moreover, learner individual differences such as gender, extraversion, and english learning motivation may influence students’ cf beliefs, but there is a lack of empirical evidence. there is, therefore, a need for more studies investigating students’ cf beliefs in a broader range of contexts, and investigating the impact of the learner individual differences on their cf beliefs. the present study is thus timely in addressing the following research questions (rqs): 1. what are vietnamese high school efl students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback? (rq1) 2. are there any relationships between vietnamese high school efl students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback and their gender, extraversion, and english learning motivation? (rq2) 3. method this study adopted an explanatory sequential mixed-methods research design. ethics approval and consent for both questionnaires and interviews in both the pilot study and the main study were obtained prior to conducting the research. the following sections present the context, the participants, and the data collection instruments, procedures and analysis. 3.1. context the main study took part in a typical public high school in a central province of vietnam. the school consisted of 39 classes in all three grades: 10, 11 and 12. english is taught by vietnamese teachers with university qualifications in efl teaching. english is a compulsory foreign language subject, which is taught in three 45-minute lessons per week. in vietnam there has long existed a conflict between the macro-level curriculum objectives and the approach to testing. the national english language education curriculum aims to help students to obtain a preliminary level of english upon graduation (level b1, common european framework), but the actual teaching and learning remains highly test-driven (ha & murray, 2021). all the students are required to take a final national exam as part of their graduation requirements. this exam is in a written multiple-choice question format, with most questions focusing on assessing students’ grammar and vocabulary knowledge. there is no oral assessment. xuan van ha, jill c. murray, a. mehdi riazi 242 3.2. participants based on the convenience sampling method (dörnyei, 2007), 250 students, aged from 15 to 17, in grades 10 and 11 at a typical public high school in vietnam, were invited to complete a paper-based questionnaire and express interest in a follow-up interview. in order to ensure the feasibility of the study, the first 15 volunteers, including seven males and eight females, resulting in an appropriate gender balance, were invited to take part in follow-up semi-structured interviews. students of grade 12 were not invited because they were busy preparing for their exams, and the highly exam-oriented focus may have influenced their beliefs about cf. most of the students had started learning english in grade 6, some in grade 3. the classroom was the main place for most of the students to interact in english. some students chose english as one of the main subjects, with the final exam result considered for admission to universities. generally, these were students who spent more time learning english outside of the classroom, which involved engaging in self-study at home or taking extra classes at school (after mainstream class time), at their teachers’ own home, or at private language centers. regarding students’ proficiency, while considered by teachers to be pre-intermediate in reading, grammar and vocabulary (speaking, listening and writing may be at a lower level), the annual national graduation exam reports indicate that the students’ level of english proficiency varies considerably among individuals at the same level. 3.3. instruments the data were collected via a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. the questionnaire was developed by the researchers based on the synthesis of literature investigating learner cf beliefs (e.g., kartchava & ammar, 2014; loewen et al., 2009; schulz, 1996), following basic guidelines for questionnaire construction (e.g., dörnyei & taguchi, 2009). all the items were original. the questionnaire was initially developed in english by the authors. after the authors polished and revised the items through various rounds of meetings and discussion, the questionnaire was translated into vietnamese by the first author in consultation with two colleagues who were bilingual (vietnamese and english). then, content validation was conducted via group discussions with three teachers and five students from one of the two schools where the pilot study was conducted. the validation was conducted with the teachers before trialing with the students. the teachers and the students were asked to read the questionnaire items carefully and complete the questionnaire in the presence of the first author. they were asked to exchange their ideas with the researcher regarding the high school efl students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback: the role of gender, motivation and . . . 243 content and the wording of the items. they were encouraged to openly discuss any issues or hesitations they experienced while completing the questionnaire. amendments to some items were made based on the comments of both the teachers and the students. a pilot study was then undertaken with 100 students in two high schools that were not used for recruiting participants for the main study but were comparable to them in terms of age, proficiency and learning contexts. analysis of the pilot study helped identify several flawed items, which were then excluded to improve scale reliability. the time range for the completion of the questionnaire was estimated (15-23 minutes), and a satisfactory reliability was achieved (α =.83). the final version of the questionnaire (see appendix a for the english translation)2 comprised two main parts. the first part included ten demographic questions eliciting students’ age, gender, self-rating in terms of one key personality trait (extraversion/introversion), english learning motivations, satisfaction with their teachers’ english proficiency, and teaching methods. accordingly, the participants’ beliefs about their level of extraversion were elicited via one item (item 3), asking them whether they described their personality as more introverted or more extraverted. we allowed the participants to rate their extraversion and introversion, so the construct was assessed in terms of the students’ beliefs about their personality rather than through a psychological questionnaire. similarly, their purposes in learning english were elicited via one item (item 4) asking them to select one of the five options describing their main motivation. in the data analysis, these options were grouped into three broader categories, namely, motivation for (1) communication in english, (2) future career, and (3) other reasons (including exams and compulsory requirements). the first of these could be classified as intrinsic (ryan & deci, 2000) or integrative (gardner, 2010) in that it relates to a desire to use the language for purposes of connection and interaction with others rather than practical gain or obligation. it should be noted that in the context in question, where language study is compulsory, the application of more complex motivational models becomes less appropriate because of the absence of learner choice. as there were no sensitive or intrusive questions, this section was placed at the beginning of the questionnaire. the main part of the questionnaire, the students’ beliefs part, consisted of 44 likert scale items. the questionnaire was to elicit students’ beliefs about various aspects of cf: importance, types, targets, timing, providers/sources, and possible affective aspects. the questionnaire was administered in vietnamese to eliminate any language issues on the part of the participants. the interview questions were developed based on both the synthesis of the literature and the preliminary analysis of the students’ completed questionnaires. 2 the questionnaire was designed for a larger project of which the study reported in this paper is a part. the scope of this article did not allow for the analysis of the entirety of the questionnaire data. xuan van ha, jill c. murray, a. mehdi riazi 244 the purpose of the interviews was to elaborate on the quantitative findings. the final interview protocol included questions eliciting additional information about students’ biography and students’ beliefs about cf. seventeen guiding questions were used to ask students to elaborate on their beliefs about cf importance, cf source, cf targets, cf timing and possible affective responses to cf (see appendix b for the english translation of the interview guide). 3.4. procedures two hundred and fifty students received the questionnaire to complete at their convenience. after one week, 247 questionnaires were returned. however, 11 were incomplete, leaving 236 for analysis. regarding the robustness of the sample size for factor analysis, although some researchers recommended ten times as many participants per variable, more recently researchers have considered five to be adequate (cutillo, 2019; pallant, 2016). therefore, this sample size (236 participants for 44 items) can be deemed sufficient for factor analysis. the interviews were conducted individually in vietnamese by the lead author three weeks after the completion of the questionnaires. each interview lasted approximately 22 minutes on average. all interviews were audio-recorded for data transcription and analysis. 3.5. data analysis firstly, an exploratory factor analysis (efa) was conducted following rigorous procedures using spss version 24. before performing the efa, the suitability of the data and sample for efa was assessed. cronbach’s alpha (α) for the questionnaire was .85, indicating excellent reliability (pallant, 2016) for the scale. most communalities were above .50, indicating that the sample size (n = 236) was adequate (field, 2013). the correlation matrix showed many coefficients of .3 and above. the kaiser-meyer-olkin value was .742, and bartlett’s test of sphericity reached statistical significance (χ2 = 2,921.257, p < .001), supporting the factorability of the correlation matrix (field, 2013; pallant, 2016). an oblique rotation method (direct oblimin) was initially used, showing a low degree of correlation between the extracted factors (no correlations reached .3). therefore, an orthogonal rotation method (varimax) was employed to help the interpretation of the results. after the efa, the descriptive statistics for each extracted factor were calculated. to explore the relationship between the students’ beliefs and their gender, extraversion, and english learning motivation (rq2), a multivariate analysis of variance was initially deemed appropriate, but the assumptions for running it could not be met. as a result, separate general linear models were fitted. high school efl students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback: the role of gender, motivation and . . . 245 the interview recordings, transcribed verbatim by the first author who shares the first language with the participants, were analyzed thematically with the support of the nvivo software. a theory-driven, deductive approach (gilgun, 2011) was used for this study. the data were analyzed according to predetermined macro themes derived from the literature, including students’ views about the importance and the necessity of cf, cf types, timing, targets, and possible affective responses to cf. the qualitative data were used to support and elaborate on the findings of the efa and descriptive statistics to address rq1. 4. results 4.1. exploratory factor analysis the principal components analysis revealed 14 factors with eigenvalues over 1.0, explaining 62.5% of the total variance. a parallel analysis (using monte carlo pca) was used to determine the number of significant factors (pallant, 2016). it showed seven factors with eigenvalues exceeding the corresponding criterion values for a randomly generated data matrix of the same sample size (44 variables x 236 participants x 100 replications). to support the parallel analysis, an investigation of the scree plot also showed a break after the seventh factor. therefore, the first seven factors, explaining a total of 43% of the variance of students’ cf beliefs, were retained for further analyses. the scale reliability was investigated for the seven factors, and the α values were .684, .694, .755, .659, .608, .729 and .532 respectively. factor 7 had the lowest α value (.532), so it was decided to omit it. therefore, the first six factors, including 20 items and explaining a total of 39.5% of the students’ cf beliefs variance, were finally retained for interpretation (see table 1). table 1 rotated factor loadings for students’ beliefs about cf factors 1 2 3 4 5 6 43. if i make an error, i want my teacher to reformulate the erroneous utterance and put it in the form of a confirmation check or a question (e.g., where did you say you went yesterday?). .722 38. if i make an error, i want my teacher to ask me to say the utterance again such as ‘what?/ what did you say?/ can you say it again?’ .616 42. if i make an error, i want my teacher to give me the correct form by reformulating the erroneous part and ask me another short question (e.g., you went to the train station yesterday. did you meet someone there?) .596 37. if i make an error, i want my teacher to give me comments or language rules so that i can correct it by myself or my friends can correct it (e.g., you need the past tense). .563 36. if i make an error, i want my teacher to repeat my erroneous utterance with a change in intonation so that i can recognize the error and correct it by myself, or my friends can correct it (e.g., i go?). .559 5. if i make an error when i am presenting something in english to the whole class, i want my teacher to correct it. .830 4. if i make an error when i am answering my teacher’s question, i want my teacher to correct it. .797 6. if i make an error when i am talking in a group-work activity, i want my teacher to correct it. .597 xuan van ha, jill c. murray, a. mehdi riazi 246 3. if i make an error, i want my teacher to correct it. .581 9. i have noticed my teacher using body language and gestures to indicate my errors. .823 10. my teacher’s use of body language and gestures to signal my errors can help me pay attention to the errors. .772 8. body language and gestures are very useful in giving feedback. .741 31. the errors that students make frequently are the most important and worth correcting. .766 32. the errors related to the focus of the lesson are the most important and worth correcting. .675 29. the errors that impede communication are the most important and worth correcting. .644 40. if i make an error, i want my teacher to give the correct form by repeating the whole utterance and reformulating the erroneous part (e.g., i went to the train station yesterday). .793 41. if i make an error, i want my teacher to give me the correct form by reformulating and repeating only the erroneous part of the utterance (e.g., i went). .743 44. if i make an error, i want my teacher to tell me explicitly that there is an error and give me the correct form (e.g., no, not ‘go’, you should say ‘went’). .643 34. some errors are not related to the focus of the lesson, but they need to be corrected. .866 33. some errors are not common in the class, but when they occur, they need to be corrected. .792 as shown in table 1, factor 1 consists of five items. three of them are about students’ preferences for metalinguistic feedback, clarification requests and repetitions. the two remaining items are about preferences for integrated recasts (i.e., the reformulation of the erroneous utterance is integrated into additional discourse that continues the topic of conversation; e.g., item 42) and interrogative recasts (i.e., the reformulation of the erroneous utterance is made in an interrogative form; e.g., item 43), respectively. although these two subtypes of recasts provide the correct forms, they are formulated in a way that encourages the learners to continue the topic of conversation. therefore, factor 1 was labeled “output-prompting cf and eliciting recasts.” factor 2, labeled “desire for cf,” consists of four items addressing learners’ desire and expectation for cf in response to their oral errors. factor 3, labeled “non-verbal cues,” contains three items addressing learners’ noticing of and the role of non-verbal cues as a form of feedback. factor 4 contains three items addressing the need to correct errors which are perceived to be highly significant, and so this factor was labeled “important errors.” factor 5, which contains three items about full recasts, isolated recasts and explicit corrections, was labeled “input-providing cf.” the last factor containing two items addressing the need to correct less significant errors was labeled “less important errors.” 4.2. descriptive statistics and qualitative findings regarding students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback this section reports selected interesting findings revealed in the descriptive statistics which show the extent to which the students agreed with the items related to the six factors extracted above (out of a 5-point likert scale). these beliefs were then elaborated based on the evidence from the follow-up interviews. high school efl students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback: the role of gender, motivation and . . . 247 regarding items probing students’ desire for cf (factor 2), students’ responses to the general question about their desire for cf (item 3) resulted in the highest mean (4.42), indicating that students were highly desirous of feedback. the students also liked to receive feedback when they were presenting in front of the class (item 5; 4.12). however, students’ expectations for cf when doing group-work activities (item 6) was the lowest (3.89). in the interviews, all the students stated that cf was important and necessary for learning. ten of the students wished to be corrected as much as possible. they said that cf helped them understand errors, memorize the target language features, and avoid bad habits, and cf could improve accuracy (more important than fluency), which improved exam scores consequently. for example, student 1 stated: teachers’ provision of corrective feedback is definitely useful because correcting an error means that we can avoid an error in our exam. the more errors we can reduce in exams, the better, which helps us achieve higher marks in exams. regarding output-prompting cf and eliciting recasts (factor 1), metalinguistic feedback (item 37) received the highest rate of approval (4.12), whereas clarification requests (item 38) received the lowest rate (3.46). the two question-form recasts (items 42, 43) also received high rates of agreement. in the interviews, twelve of the students said that they liked metalinguistic feedback and elicitations because they could have a chance to self-correct, and self-correction helped them to think and memorize correct forms. they also said that their teachers used metalinguistic feedback often and it was effective, and teachers sometimes used l1 to explain language rules. three of the fifteen students said clarification requests were not effective because they would not know what their errors were. they felt confused, uncomfortable, and worried if the teacher used clarification requests. regarding input-providing cf (factor 5), explicit corrections (item 44) received a higher rate of approval (3.95) than isolated recasts (item 41) and full recasts (item 40). these recasts received the same rate of approval, which was relatively low (3.7). in the interviews, eight students said explicit corrections were the most effective cf type because they were easy to understand and suitable for weak students. interestingly, five students considered metalinguistic feedback similar to explicit corrections, saying that metalinguistic feedback “is a direct strategy as the teacher informs me directly of the error and helps me to correct my error” (student 2). eleven students said recasts were sometimes not salient enough and they would easily forget the correction as they did not really think about their errors and did not try to self-correct. when interviewed about cf timing, an aspect that might influence students’ choice of cf types, 13 of the students appreciated immediate correction because it xuan van ha, jill c. murray, a. mehdi riazi 248 would provide them with opportunities to repeat the correct forms (i.e., uptake), which in turn made them memorize the correct forms better. in response to how immediate errors should be corrected, they said it was best for their teachers to correct their errors as soon as they finished a sentence rather than correcting them while they were speaking (i.e., in the middle of the sentence). it minimized the possibility of interruptions, and it increased the chance to remember the errors and the correct forms. ten students said that correcting errors after the speaking activity or by the end of the lesson was not effective because they might have forgotten what they said and what mistakes they made. four students said cf timing should depend on the error types, as illustrated by the following excerpt: when i mispronounced a word, my teacher should correct it directly [i.e., immediately] so that i can repeat it because after that i do not know what error i have just made. when i make a mistake about a grammar structure, my teacher should say ‘i . . .’ [elicitation], for example, so that i can think about my error. (student 3) when asked about the possible negative effects of cf, which might also influence students’ preferences for cf types, all the students felt comfortable receiving teacher cf because cf provision was a very frequent practice and they expected cf to improve their speaking. four students said cf had some possible negative effects. interestingly, they said teachers’ correction strategies were not the main cause of negative affective responses (except that three students mentioned clarification requests above), but they considered that teachers’ negative attitudes to students’ errors may have some negative effects on students’ feelings. three items explored students’ noticing and evaluation of the usefulness of non-verbal cues as cf (factor 3). students showed slight agreement that non-verbal cues (items 8, 10) are a useful method of cf (around 3.73). this may be influenced by the fact that their teachers did not frequently use non-verbal cues along with cf. as shown in the mean score of item 9 (3.48), the students did not frequently notice their teachers use non-verbal cues in their cf provision. similarly, in the interviews, all the students said they did not have a strong impression about their teachers’ use of gestures in identifying their errors and said non-verbal cues were not effective because they did not help them locate or correct their errors. regarding beliefs about error types (factor 4), students were positive about receiving cf for important errors. interestingly, all three error types (items 29, 31, 32) which are important in their different ways (most frequent errors, errors impeding communication, and errors related to the lesson foci) received a similar rate of agreement (around 4.08). in the interviews, all students stated that frequent errors, and errors pertaining to the lesson focus were the most severe and worth correcting, as reflected in the following comment: high school efl students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback: the role of gender, motivation and . . . 249 frequent errors (committed by many people) are the most important. correcting these errors is useful for many people at the same time. also, we study english mostly for exams, therefore, correcting errors related to the foci of the lessons . . . will help us to do better in our exams and get high marks. (student 4) five students said pronunciation errors were the most important because they influenced communication. errors influencing communication were said to be important, but not for everyone because some students learned english for communication while others learned english to pass exams only. they considered correcting grammar errors the most important because grammar errors could influence exam results and correcting grammar errors was part of the teachers’ main job. surprisingly, students also showed a similarly high level of approval of cf for less important errors (items 33, 34; around 4.02; factor 6). in the interviews, 12 students said that simple errors, such as subject-verb agreement errors, plural use errors and articles are worth correcting because they helped improve accuracy and exam results. 4.3. relationships between students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback and their gender, english learning motivation, and extraversion. in order to explore possible relationships between students’ cf beliefs and their gender, extraversion, and english learning motivation, statistical tests of significance were applied. firstly, the assumptions for parametric tests were checked. descriptive statistics (through histograms and the skewness values) suggested that the distributions of the factor scores were relatively normal. the homogeneity of variance was checked as part of the general linear model fitting, and results of levene’s test of equality of error variances showed non-significant values for all six dependent variables (the six factors underlying students’ cf beliefs), indicating the fulfillment of the assumption. a pearson correlation test showed that the correlation values among the six dependent variables were non-significant, indicating the suitability for fitting general linear models (pallant, 2016). separate general linear models were fitted to find out if there were any significant differences among the participants as related to the underlying factors of their cf beliefs and the demographic variables of gender, extraversion and english learning motivation. categories of students’ motivations included motivation for (1) communication in english, (2) future career, and (3) other reasons (including exams and compulsory requirement). the results3 showed some statistically significant relationships, although the effect sizes were small. 3 due to space limitations, only statistically significant results are reported. xuan van ha, jill c. murray, a. mehdi riazi 250 there was a statistically significant main effect for gender (f(1, 224) = 9.037, p = .003) in students’ desire to receive cf (partial eta square = .039). the estimated marginal means (grand mean: .016, male: -.227, female: .259) showed that female students desired to receive cf more than males did. also related to students’ desire for cf, there was a statistically significant main effect for the motivation type (f(2, 224) = 3.484, p = .032; partial eta square = .030). the estimated marginal means (grand mean = .016, mean for communication = -.263, mean for future career = -.03, mean for other reasons = .313) showed that students learning english for exams or other reasons were the most positively disposed to receiving cf. students who learned english for communication purposes were more negative about receiving cf. regarding beliefs about non-verbal cues, there was a statistically significant main effect for the motivation type (f(2, 224), p = .024; partial eta square = .033). the estimated marginal means (communication = .163, future career = -.151, other reasons: = .336) showed that students learning english for exams or other reasons were the most positive about non-verbal cues as a cf strategy, while students learning english for future career were the most negative. post hoc tests (tukey hsd) showed a statistically significant difference between the communication-motivation learners and future-career-motivation learners, and between future-career-motivation learners and other-reasons-motivation learners. regarding beliefs about input-providing cf, there was a statistically significant interaction effect for gender*extraversion (f(1, 224), p = .026; partial eta square = .022). this indicates that there is a significant difference in the effect of self-rated introversion/extraversion on beliefs about input-providing cf for males and females. to interpret this interactional effect further, an analysis of simple effects was performed using pairwise comparisons with a bonferroni adjustment (.05/2 = .025), showing that the introverted females were less positive about receiving input providing cf than their extraverted counterparts (mean difference = .471, p = .02). 5. discussion the efa resulted in six factors underlying students’ beliefs about cf. these factors represent six important themes of cf beliefs in the literature (lyster et al., 2013; nassaji, 2015). this finding partially corroborates the findings of a recent study conducted by zhu and wang (2019) looking at beliefs of chinese undergraduate learners of english, sharing three factors, namely, desire for cf, inputproviding cf, and cf for less important errors. students’ views separating the input-providing cf from output-prompting cf support the necessity of further investigations of the effectiveness of the two cf categories (lyster & saito, 2010; high school efl students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback: the role of gender, motivation and . . . 251 zhu & wang, 2019). interestingly, in our study, students viewed the four subtypes of recasts differently while researchers usually view them as one united construct – input-providing cf. isolated recasts and full recasts were grouped with explicit correction as one category (factor 5). on the other hand, interrogative recasts and integrated recasts, the two recasts consisting of questions inviting students to contribute further to the interaction, were grouped with repetition, metalinguistic feedback and clarification requests (factor 1). this distinction suggests that students’ perceptions of the corrective functions of different subtypes of recasts need further investigation. similarly to cf types, there was a distinction between students’ beliefs about more important error types (factor 4) and beliefs about less important error types (factor 6). however, the descriptive statistics showed that students desired to receive cf for both error types at a similar level. this might help to partially resolve the disagreements between l2 teacher educators and sla researchers regarding which errors should be corrected, as discussed by ellis (2017). based on their own experience, l2 teacher educators (e.g., harmer, 2007) suggest correcting global errors (e.g., errors influencing communication) rather than local errors (e.g., morphological errors), and correcting errors (due to lack of knowledge) rather than mistakes (e.g., a slip of the tongue). sla researchers (e.g., lyster & saito, 2010), however, have focused on investigating the effectiveness of cf on errors which are more likely to function as local errors such as articles or past tense verb forms. students’ eagerness to receive cf on all types of errors might suggest that teachers should not be too concerned about how to distinguish errors from mistakes or global from local errors, which might not in any case be a feasible task. another interesting finding in our study is that three items pertaining to non-verbal cues formulated one separate factor (factor 3) of students’ cf beliefs. this suggests the necessity for further research looking at the role and occurrences of non-verbal cues as a type of cf in various classroom settings, responding to the call of ellis (2017). descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis of the interviews also revealed some interesting findings. regarding students’ desire for cf, students in this study were very positive about receiving cf, which corroborates the findings in the literature (e.g., zhang & rahimi, 2014; zhu & wang, 2019). qualitative data revealed that the students desired to receive cf to improve their accuracy, especially for their exams which were generally in written form and tested accuracy in vocabulary and grammar use. regarding preferences for cf types, metalinguistic feedback was the most strongly preferred. this is different from findings by lee (2013), but it is similar to zhang and rahimi’s (2014) and zhu and wang’s (2019) findings. this may suggest that students in efl contexts prefer metalinguistic feedback to those in esl xuan van ha, jill c. murray, a. mehdi riazi 252 contexts, where real-world communication in english is a more pressing objective. another possible explanation for this preference in the current study conducted in vietnam, and perhaps other asian efl contexts, may be the influence of the test-driven nature of english curricula. another possible interesting explanation for this preference in the present study is that the teachers gave feedback in their l1, which increased the level of comfort for the students. the interviews also showed that five students considered metalinguistic feedback as a direct and explicit feedback type, effective in helping students to locate their errors and self-correct. students’ self-correction may contribute to feelings of pride and satisfaction as well as enhancing their status, which is of considerable importance in the vietnamese classroom culture. this may also explain why students preferred interrogative recasts and integrated recasts, where they have a chance to self-repair their errors, rather than isolated and regular recasts. students also preferred explicit correction, which corroborates some of the earlier findings (lee, 2013; zhang & rahimi, 2014) but is different from the findings of zhu and wang (2019). it is surprising that chinese undergraduate students in zhu and wang’s study rated explicit corrections as the lowest among various cf types; unfortunately, no explanations for such an observation were offered. the students in the current study liked to receive explicit corrections because, as revealed in the interviews, this cf type was straight-forward, easy to understand, and familiar to them. interestingly, clarification requests received the lowest rate of approval (3.42/5). the interviews revealed that this cf-type was less preferred because of its unclear corrective intention, which was claimed to be the main cause of students’ confusion and discomfort. this is also reported in lee’s (2013) study. similar findings from both the questionnaire and interview data were also observed for non-verbal cues. students commented that they did not notice their teachers frequently using non-verbal cues to identify their errors, and that they did not feel that non-verbal cues were an effective way of giving cf. the students’ cf preferences and their comments that their teachers used explicit correction and metalinguistic feedback the most frequently but rarely made use of non-verbal cues in giving cf may indicate that students preferred cf types which are more familiar to them. further statistical analyses showed some interesting relationships between students’ cf beliefs and their gender, self-rated extraversion, and selected types of english learning motivation. firstly, female students were more positive about cf than their male counterparts were. one speculation based on our subjective observation is that this difference may be because female students in our context are more successful students than males. in a large-scale survey study looking at the gender gap of adult learners of dutch as an l2, females were found to outperform males in speaking and writing tests (van der high school efl students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback: the role of gender, motivation and . . . 253 slik et al., 2015). there were some comments in our interviews that those who had stronger english proficiency and who were more confident about their english tend to be more positive about cf than their weaker peers. this suggests that english proficiency may be a moderator of learner cf beliefs, and that further research investigating the role of gender in learner beliefs should consider controlling for the variable of language proficiency. secondly, it is interesting that extraversion-identifying females were more positive about input-providing cf than introverted females. it is not clear why this pattern was found with the female students in the current study. in the only earlier study looking at the role of extraversion in cf, kim and nassaji (2018) found that their extraverted students were more likely to engage in cf episodes, which may partially explain our findings. further research is warranted to investigate whether and why this relationship exists in different contexts. in regard to the relationship between learning motivations and desire for cf, students learning english for exams are more positive about cf than those learning english for communication or for future career. this is not surprising because students learning english for exams may want to be corrected more often to improve their accuracy. this was also reflected in the interviews, where some students commented that accuracy was more important for them than fluency and that they would like their teachers to correct both global errors and local errors to improve their exam results. this is also a possible explanation for the finding that students learning english for exams are the most positive about non-verbal cues as a cf type. the short-term objective of accuracy in an assessment context may drive their receptiveness to all kinds of cf. another possible explanation for this preference for non-verbal cues as a cf strategy is that non-verbal cues are less face-threatening, so they may particularly attract these exam-oriented students who might be sensitive to teachers’ evaluation and grade. 6. limitations and directions for future research despite the contributions discussed above, there are several limitations that should be noted. firstly, the students’ extraversion and english learning motivation were self-rated with the help of single items. however, the information we requested about these variables was quite straightforward, so we have reason to believe that our participants were unlikely to have had difficulty in understanding what was required. future research may be able to investigate these relationships further, using a more comprehensive tool to investigate a wider range of students’ personality traits, and comparing the results of a comprehensive psychological test battery with a self-rating score of beliefs. secondly, the 6component solution from the efa explained only 39.5% of the variance, which xuan van ha, jill c. murray, a. mehdi riazi 254 may not be an ideal amount. given the complex nature of the explored phenomenon, learner beliefs about cf, this can be deemed acceptable. yet, further research to validate the questionnaire in other contexts would be helpful. thirdly, there is a possibility that the inclusion of the first 15 volunteers in the follow-up interview may not provide a representative sample. another possible limitation of the study is related to the fact that learner beliefs are dynamic, complex and situated (ellis, 2008; leontjev, 2016). this dynamic complexity is unlikely to be revealed in a cross-sectional, one-shot questionnaire-and-interview study. therefore, the readers should take this caveat in interpreting the findings of the current study. future research investigating learner beliefs can take an ethnographic and longitudinal approach to uncover the dynamic and complex nature of learner beliefs. for example, there could be a series of followup interviews at different points in time within one or two semesters following the questionnaire. alternatively, asking the learners to keep a diary to track their beliefs over time may be valuable. 7. conclusion and pedagogical implications the present study adds to the limited literature on students’ beliefs about various aspects of cf. the efa identified six factors underlying high school efl students’ cf beliefs, which were corroborated and elaborated by the qualitative data. the descriptive statistics and thematic analysis of the interview data indicate that high school efl students in vietnam were positive about cf and they desired to receive cf in both input-providing and output-prompting forms. the exam-oriented teaching context may explain the students’ desire to receive explicit correction and metalinguistic feedback. the study has made some attempts to investigate some relationships between students’ cf beliefs and their gender, self-rated extraversion, and english learning motivation, and the statistical analyses revealed some interesting findings. this study offers some pedagogical implications. firstly, it opens up the possibility of a dialog within the profession about how teachers can respond to students’ beliefs and preferences. for example, students desired to receive cf regardless of error types, which suggests that vietnamese efl teachers who chose to accommodate student wishes might select errors to correct without having to be concerned about distinguishing global errors from local errors, or errors from mistakes. secondly, there is some evidence in the literature that teachers tend to use recasts due to their concern about students’ affective responses (roothooft, 2014). however, in this study, students’ desire for both explicit correction and metalinguistic feedback (which five of the 15 students interviewed considered to be direct and explicit), and their comments that cf high school efl students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback: the role of gender, motivation and . . . 255 strategies were not a major source of anxiety and embarrassment, suggest that vietnamese efl 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(2019). investigating english language learners’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback at chinese universities: a large-scale survey. language awareness, 28(2), 1-29. xuan van ha, jill c. murray, a. mehdi riazi 260 appendix a questionnaire (english translation) students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback thank you very much for taking your time to answer our questionnaire. you will be helping us to understand more about your views regarding oral corrective feedback. oral corrective feedback means any teacher or peer responses to your erroneous utterances. it can be an explicit correction; for example: student: i go to the train station yesterday. teacher: not go, you should say went. it can just be a signal that there is an error in your utterance, and you need to rephrase it. for example: student: i go to the train station yesterday. teacher: i go? please answer the following questions as honestly as possible. there are no right or wrong answers to these questions. notes: this questionnaire is only about oral errors and oral corrective feedback, not about written errors or written corrective feedback. part 1. demographics 1. how old are you? …………; 2. what is your gender: …….. 3. how would you describe your personality: a. more extraverted b. more introverted 4. what is your main motivation to learn english? choose only one option by circling a letter a, b, c, d or e. if you choose option ‘e’, please give more specific information. a. it’s a compulsory subject b. i want to communicate effectively in english c. i want to take english as an entrance exam into university d. i want to use english effectively for my career in the future e. other: …………………………………………………………………. please tick one box in each row to assess your level of satisfaction with the following aspects of your english learning very dissatisfied dissatisfied neutral satisfied very satisfied 5 your teacher’s error correction method 6 the amount of correction you receive from your teacher 7 your teachers’ english 8 your teachers’ teaching method 9 your english proficiency compared to the requirement of your school/teacher 10 your english proficiency compared to your classmates high school efl students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback: the role of gender, motivation and . . . 261 part 2. beliefs questionnaire what is your opinion about the following statements? please show your opinion by writing the numbers (1, 2, 3, 4 or 5) into the boxes on the right of the statements (statements 1-44). 1: strongly disagree; 2: disagree; 3: neither agree nor disagree; 4: agree; 5: strongly agree 1. teachers’ corrective feedback (teachers’ response to students’ spoken errors) is important for students’ english learning. 2. teachers’ corrective feedback helps students to consolidate their english speaking. 3. if i make an error, i want my teacher to correct it. 4. if i make an error when i am answering my teacher’s question, i want my teacher to correct it. 5. if i make an error when i am presenting something in english to the whole class, i want my teacher to correct it. 6. if i make an error when i am talking in a group-work activity, i want my teacher to correct it. 7. if i make an error which is related to the focus of the lesson, my teacher should correct it. 8. body language and gestures are very useful in giving feedback. 9. i have noticed my teacher using body language and gestures to indicate my errors. 10. my teacher’s use of body language and gestures to signal my errors can help me pay attention to the errors. 11. i want my teacher to correct me as soon as i make an error. 12. my teacher should wait and correct my error after i have finished speaking. 13. my teacher should note my error down or remember it, and then correct it in front of the class at the end of the lesson. 14. my teacher should wait till the end of the activity that i am involved in to correct my error. 15. if i make an error which can interfere with my teacher’s or peers’ understanding, my teacher should correct it immediately. 16. if i make an error related to the grammar focus or the new vocabulary of the lesson, my teacher should correct it immediately. 17. if i make an error which is not important, my teacher should leave it and correct it later. 18. my teacher should be the one who gives me feedback on my errors. 19. my teacher should be the one who gives me the correct forms of my errors. 20. my teacher should point out my errors so that i can correct them by myself. 21. my teacher should encourage students’ self-correction because it is helpful for them. 22. my teacher should point out my errors so that my classmate can correct them. 23. i want my classmate to point out my errors. 24. i want my classmate to correct my errors without my teacher’s pointing them out. 25. if i correct my errors by myself, it will be useful for my learning. 26. self-correction or peer correction is more beneficial than teacher correction. 27. i want my teacher to train me and my classmates to provide feedback to each other. 28. all errors should be corrected. 29. the errors that impede communication are the most important and worth correcting. 30. some errors do not impede communication, but it is necessary to correct them. 31. the errors that students make frequently are the most important and worth correcting. 32. the errors related to the focus of the lesson are the most important and worth correcting. 33. some errors are not common in class, but when they occur, they need to be corrected. 34. some errors are not related to the focus of the lesson, but they need to be corrected. 35. if i make an error, i want my teacher to say my utterance again and pause before the error so that i can correct it by myself (e.g., i…). xuan van ha, jill c. murray, a. mehdi riazi 262 36. if i make an error, i want my teacher to repeat my erroneous utterance with a change in intonation so that i can recognize the error and correct it by myself, or my friends can correct it (e.g., i go?). 37. if i make an error, i want my teacher to give me comments or language rules so that i can correct it by myself or my friends can correct it (e.g., you need the past tense). 38. if i make an error, i want my teacher to ask me to say the utterance again such as ‘what?/ what did you say?/ can you say it again?’ 39. if i make an error, i want my teacher to use his/her body language or gestures to signal that there is an error so that i can correct it by myself, or my friends can correct it. 40. if i make an error, i want my teacher to give the correct form by repeating the whole utterance and reformulating the erroneous part (e.g., i went to the train station yesterday). 41. if i make an error, i want my teacher to give me the correct form by reformulating and repeating only the erroneous part of the utterance (e.g., i went). 42. if i make an error, i want my teacher to give me the correct form by reformulating the erroneous part and ask me another short question (e.g., you went to the train station yesterday. did you meet someone there?) 43. if i make an error, i want my teacher to reformulate the erroneous utterance and put it in the form of a confirmation check or a question (e.g., where did you say you went yesterday?). 44. if i make an error, i want my teacher to tell me explicitly that there is an error and give me the correct form (e.g., no, not ‘go’, you should say ‘went’). 45. ranking please rank the following four error types (a-d) in the order of necessity for teachers’ corrective feedback, with 1 being the most necessary and 4 being the least necessary: (a) grammar, (b) vocabulary, (c) pronunciation, and (d) appropriateness of language use 1: ……………………….. 3: ……………………….. 2: ……………………….. 4: ……………………….. 46-48. please tick one box in each row to assess your feeling in the following situations very uncomfortable uncomfortable ok comfortable very comfortable 46 your teacher corrects your error. 47 your teacher points out your error, and your classmate corrects it. 48 your teacher points out your error, and you correct it by yourself. notes: if you would like to attend the follow-up interview, please leave your name and contact details below: name: …………………………… class: ……………................. school: …………..……….………………………. phone number: ……………………………. email address: ………………………………………….….. thank you for your cooperation high school efl students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback: the role of gender, motivation and . . . 263 appendix b guiding interview questions (english translation) students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback part 1. background questions 1. tell me about your english learning experiences. 2. tell me about your goal of learning english. what do you do to reach that goal? part 2. cf beliefs 1. is cf beneficial? how and why (not)? 2. how much cf should your teacher provide? why? how much cf does your teacher usually provide in response to your errors? are you satisfied with that amount? 3. in what situations does your teacher not provide cf in response to your errors? 4. in what situations do you want your teacher to correct your errors the most? why? 5. among the following common cf types, in general, what is the most effective cf type? why? what cf type is not effective, why not? (1) explicit correction (e.g., no, not ‘go’, say ‘went’); (2) recasts (e.g., i went/ i went to the train station yesterday); (3) elicitation (e.g., i…?); (4) clarification requests (e.g., what/ what did you say/ can you say it again?); (5) repetition (e.g., i go?); (6) metalinguistic comments (e.g., you need the past tense here); (7) non-verbal cues (e.g., body language, gestures, facial expressions). 6. please comment on the benefits and drawbacks of the cf types given above. 7. please rank the cf types given in the order of effectiveness. 8. when do you want your teacher to correct you? why? 9. who should be the corrector? why? 10. what are the benefits and drawbacks of teacher correction, self-correction, and peer correction? 11. do students in your class often provide peer cf? do you like to be corrected by your friends? why or why not? 12. what are the difficulties of peer correction in your class? 13. what are your most frequent errors? what errors do you want your teacher to correct? 14. which of the following errors should or should not be corrected? why or why not? b) errors that are likely to influence communication c) errors that are not likely to influence communication d) errors that are likely to influence the overall meaning of the utterance e) specific errors that are not important for understanding the overall meaning f) errors that occur frequently with many students g) errors that do not occur very often h) errors that are related to the focus of the lesson i) errors that are not related to the focus of the lesson xuan van ha, jill c. murray, a. mehdi riazi 264 15. regarding errors related to grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, and the appropriate use of language, what error types are important and worth correcting? why? 16. how do you feel when you are corrected by your teacher? why? 17. do you think teacher cf can negatively influence students’ confidence, performance and learning? why or why not? 179 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (2). 179-191 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl material culture of multilingualism and affectivity larissa aronin oranim academic college of education, tivon, israel larisa@research.haifa.ac.il abstract affectivity is an important dimension in humans’ social and individual lives. it is either a stimulating or hindering aspect of language learning. this article aims to draw attention to material culture as a powerful, but mostly neglected source of data on the use and acquisition of languages, and demonstrates the close and intricate links between affectivity and material culture. it is hoped that revealing these interrelationships will assist in understanding and managing language diversity. it will allow practitioners and teachers to carry out social and private encounters, events and language teaching with more care, understanding and expertise. researchers will be encouraged to join the investigation of yet one more important facet of multilingualism – material culture. keywords: material culture, multilingualism, affectivity, language use, language teaching affectivity, a concept including “the state of being susceptible to emotional stimuli; a complex and usually strong subjective response, such as love or hate” (affectivity, n.d.), has been discussed in relation to language teaching and learning, and studied as an important factor in the use of languages in society. it is a popular matter of research in psychology and sociology. less frequently, researchers interest themselves in the connection of emotions, feelings and affective states to spaces and materialities. but those who do interest themlarissa aronin 180 selves in links between emotions and materialities investigate fascinating matters such as affective objects (see e.g., schreirer & picard, 2000), relational artefacts and evocative objects (turkle, 2007, 2011). using hartmann’s approach and his hierarchy of effectivity (see e.g., zaborowsky, 2011) researchers strive to understand emotive energies discharged by properties and objects, based on an approach which combines language and materiality with theories of affect and subjectivity (navaro-yashin, 2009) or how the affective capacity of some objects is sustained over time (börjesson, n.d.). affectivity includes an appraisal system (gabry -barker, 2011). lazarus and smith (as cited in gabry -barker, 2011) explain that “each positive emotion is said to be produced by a particular kind of appraised benefit, and each negative emotion by a particular kind of appraised harm” (p. 82). of great importance is the finding that “affective objects have the capability to change the way that people communicate” (schreirer & picard, 2000, p. 18), and of course it is important to investigate how objects and devices evoking affectivity of all kinds impact on language use and language acquisition. emotions in reference to language acquisition and use have been investigated from a variety of angles, covering the emotional states and anxiety of bilingual learners and users (see e.g., aronin, 2004; dewaele, 2010; pavlenko, 2005). multilingual practices are carried out directly or indirectly, thorough material culture. material culture provides the physical, historical, and emotional background for communication; among other things, it maintains, conveys and transmits affective aspects into the multilingual reality of a community. the relationship of affectivity factors, material culture and language acquisition and use has not yet been explored, to my knowledge. demonstrating this important relationship constitutes the purpose of this article. the material culture of multilingualism research on material culture is a novel development in multilingualism. while material culture has been a subject of study in ethnography and sociology, it is only recently that materialities have been introduced as a subject of interest in multilingual studies (aronin & ó laoire, 2007, 2011). the rationale and theoretical premises for the study of material culture of multilingualism, as well as the main directions and priorities of such research have been suggested in the works of aronin and ó laoire (2012a, 2012b) and aronin and singleton (2012). drawing on the basic research on material culture accumulated by ethnographers and sociologists, we can use the basic points about material culture as the foundation of materialities research in multilingualism. marshall (1981) defined material culture as “the array of artefacts and cultural landmaterial culture of multilingualism and affectivity 181 scapes that people create according to traditional, patterned and often tacit concept of value and utility that have been developed over time through use and experiments” (p. 17). he noted that “these artefacts and landscapes objectively represent a group’s subjective vision of custom and order” (p. 17). in contemporary multilingual and diverse social settings where at least several groups with their subjective visions of custom and order intersect, the concept of material culture seems to be essential. the more so as artefacts have been long recognized as “a mirror to culture, a code from which the researcher can infer beliefs, attitudes and values” (bronner, 1985, p. 131). the realm of material culture which permeates human life and is its core and ineluctable constituent includes materialities that are found in homes and work places, public spaces and technological sites. it embraces furniture and home utensils, keepsakes, cosmetics and medications, food and books, monuments, stellas and buildings, roads and events, cityscapes and other spaces. phenomena which are not tangible and may not immediately be thought of as material are also included in material culture rubrics – these are sound waves, smells, events and procedures involving temporal ordering. material culture research goes beyond the interest of linguistic landscape in the static public signage and embraces a wider scope of phenomena: objects and spaces, complemented by music and rhythm, smells, and time patterns. materialities are dynamic, changeable, movable, portable and modifiable. they can be used habitually or rarely, with reverence or neglect, in private or public spaces. they may be hidden or on display, changed, modified, or carefully kept as they originally were, created, bought or collected, given as gifts or sold – all these characteristics, are the variables which are measurable in principle. therefore material culture data in studies of multilingualism can be of use to researchers as “solid,” unambiguous evidence. the essential importance of studying material culture is seen in its evidential function (see e.g., schlereth, 1985). in fact, the potential of materialities as a research tool seems to be extraordinary. studies in material culture can help us to understand how materialities create and modify multilingual reality, being instrumental in shaping and reshaping identities of both individuals and communities. with this in mind, the material objects relevant for multilingual investigation and their types were identified (aronin & ó laoire 2012a, 2012b; aronin & singleton, 2012). multilingual artefacts are those which have inscriptions or language signs on them, and meaningfully relate to an individual’s identity and surrounding social reality. the crucial property of such objects is the relationship between verbal and material components. this relationship is not always noticed, as human perception of artefacts of multilingual material culture blends their “thing” qualities such as form, size, substances they are larissa aronin 182 made of, and their functions with the language constituent. therefore we described a language-defined object as “a meaningful wholeness of material and verbal components considered as a representation of its user or users, exclusively in relation to its linguistic environment” (aronin & ó laoire, 2012a). linguistically defined objects differ from other cultural objects in that they include a linguistic component. the linguistic component merges with the quality of an object, transforming it and defining its complex nature. words or signs in the linguistically defined object make it more focused, exact and specific than any cultural object without the linguistic component. at the same time, by virtue of the interplay of font and texture, material, shades of colour and everything that makes a material object different from an isolated inscription and what is written or inscribed, a linguistically defined object always bears a specific and often unique meaning. material culture of a multilingual society can be defined as a specific blend of materialities, originating from many cultures which constitute a multilingual society (aronin & ó laoire, 2012b). it comprises materialities relating to a multilingual way of existence, whether by individuals or the societies. material culture research has a vast potential in terms of theoretical basis. research on materialities of multilingualism has a rich pool of knowledge on which to draw, since it brings into play a host of linguistic disciplines. it can be based on a solid theoretical foundation of any one of numerous disciplines, such as archeology, sociology, ethnography, linguistics, globalization studies, applied linguistics, history and philosophy. the sources and the insight could be many, among them, semiotics by ferdinand de saussure (saussure, [1916] 1974), “cultural semiotics” or “semiotics of culture” by yuri lotman (1990), the vision of commodities in cultural perspective by arjun appadurai (1988), the object value system as presented by jean baudrillard ([1968] 1996, [1970] 1998) and many others depending on the choice of direction and particular interest of a researcher. the above very brief enumeration of sources also points to a number of possible directions and subfields in exploring the material culture of multilingualism. table 1 possible directions/aspects in exploring material culture of multilingualism processes, events, traditions in multilingual contexts objects and artefacts in multilingual settings public spaces: cityscapes landscapes roads, squares material culture of multilingualism in private spheres e.g., apartments, houses, personal belongings group controlled spaces: closed clubs,professional/institutional buildings and spaces e.g., university campus, hospital premises material culture of mobility: what (objects, traditions) survives geographical and identity transitions in an individual and in a group historical study of material culture of multilingualism interpretation of changes or lack of change in material culture through time and space linguistic landscape material culture of multilingualism and affectivity 183 the table is not comprehensive and categorization of aspects of material culture can be conceived differently. rather, this table is food for thought inviting researchers to consider how to study the material culture of multilingualism systematically. the material culture items and spaces of language learning should be probably the first choice for those interested in education and didactics. the classroom research includes interest in material culture in teaching materials, academic text-books, student reports, boxes, book shelves, correspondence to parents, locally produced items, students certificates, official school papers, charts and posters, flags, and visual aids (see e.g., coady, 2003; escamilla, 1994). johnson in 1980 looked into the material culture of public school classrooms for the purpose of studying the symbolic integration of local schools and national culture (johnson, 1980). in addition, investigations into material culture would contribute to the existing debates on authentic materials and authenticity in foreign language learning (gilmore, 2007). the common premise of the research on materialities, be it in its social aspect or educational and didactic sphere, is the existence of interaction, interrelationship between objects and beliefs, objects and ways of life, objects and human behaviour, objects and identity. these inevitably spark emotions, feelings and all kinds of affectivity. material objects can invoke images and memories, music and rhythm. they possess immeasurable expressive power and influence. material culture lends itself to both qualitative and quantitative research. the affective aspects evoked through the use and display of material culture can be studied in case studies and qualitative research. in the next section i will discuss and illustrate how linguistically defined objects of material culture maintain and modify the affective dimensions of a community and individuals in connection with language use and acquisition. affectivity and material culture this section contains examples and a discussion of how linguistically defined objects concern and maintain individual and community memory, attitudes towards historical events that bear affective connotations (pride, sorrow and hope), self-perception and the image of a community. i will consider some artefacts of the circassian community in israel. the community numbers about 4000 people who live in two villages: kfar kama and rehaneya. the people of the community are multilingual and deploy circassian, arabic, hebrew, russian, and english in their daily life. there are other languages which are familiar to circassians in israel, such as turkish, emerging from the historical past, and crystallized in books and documents, which are cherished and held in homes and in libraries. these, inscribed on larissa aronin 184 material artefacts figuring in the daily life of the whole community and each individual, remind them about their complicated past, and accompany them through a variety of countries and encounters with other peoples. the municipal emblems and community flags represent this complexity and diversity of the past and present of the circassian community (see figure 1). figure 1 emblem of the village council (adapted from gutterman, n.d.) the emblem was adopted on 17 november 1974. it combines the words in three languages: adiga, russian and hebrew, executed in two scripts: cyrillic and roman. the lower inscription in this flag reads: : adyge qase : kfar kama the first inscription word is in circassian, in cyrillic alphabet, the first word, ,” is the self-designated name for this ethnic group (endonym) and the second one means ‘council.’ the second line contains the name of the village in russian and in english. let us look inside the village of kfar kama for emotionally charged, evocative, and linguistically defined artefacts. the village of kfar kama in the lower galilee is inhabited by muslim circassians, and was founded in 1876. the artefacts are submitted and described by a mother of a circassian family, lousianne hatukai (2012). out of the language constellation a circassian family and community share, different languages may be dominant with different community members. for example, though her mother’s language is circassian, lousianne reads and writes very little in circassian. in fact, lousianne’s dominant language is arabic, due to the fact that she lived and studied in nazareth, where her father used to work as a district officer in the material culture of multilingualism and affectivity 185 ministry of the interior. lousianne started learning hebrew and english in primary school in the third and the fourth grades respectively. lousianne’s husband is also a circassian; his dominant language is hebrew, next to circassian, because he studied in afula high school. the family’s eldest son has finished his mandatory service in the israeli defense forces, and their second son is in kadoori high school (therefore both are fluent in hebrew). the youngest child is ten years old, he learns hebrew and arabic in school. at home, the parents speak to him in circassian. his mother notes that the boy is outstandingly gifted in english, and that although the language of education in the village is hebrew, his dominant language is english. lousianne reports that the boy writes stories, poems and word definitions in english, which she attributes to his giftedness and long exposure to tv and internet. luisianne’s home contains multiple artefacts, which are languagedefined objects meaningful for the whole family, and each of the family members as an individual. these include books, furniture, utensils, souvenirs, handcraft objects, stickers and framed pictures. in her list of meaningful material culture luisianne also included cultural landscapes from the village. the first object, a door, is literally on the border of the public and the individual domains (see figure 2) figure 2a the hatukai’s door. general view figure 2b the hatukai’s door. bas relief (adapted from hatukai, 2012) (adapted from hatukai, 2012) there are humorous stickers in hebrew: a non-smoking sign and a sticker in hebrew asking: who is there? above the door handle on the left side of the larissa aronin 186 door, there is a little bas relief made of copper. in the enlarged image on the right is an embossed print in russian. the bas relief portrays the glory of the circassian warrior. the war was lost more than two hundred years ago. another artefact with an inscription relating to the same war is a sticker of a mourning lady full of sorrow (see figure 3), praying for a cease to all wars, with a message to remember massacres of the russian-circassian war that took place in 1864. the sticker is on lousianne’s bedroom door. unlike in linguistic landscape which is mostly limited to largely static public places, the material culture enquiry investigates objects that are portable. the place and time-space trajectories of artefacts speak volumes to a researcher. the place where the sticker is attached – the bedroom door, testifies to the importance and closeness of these memories to an individual. it is often the case that in communities, people commemorate wars and events of the same magnitude mostly through public ceremonies, unless they are very active participants in events. and here the object, by its existence, and by its location, demonstrates the depth of sadness and the memories in the heart of this israeli circassian woman. figure 3 a sticker to remember massacres of the russian-circassian war of 1864 (adapted from hatukai, 2012) the above artefacts transmit to a careful observer the importance of faraway history for the circassians, as well as their perception of their present and their hopes. “here we are in another place of the world building our future,” says lousianne. the next artefact communicates a more recent and acute sorrow. the object, a small memorial table-stella “yezkor” (memorial) with the information in hebrew about a circassian young man, stands, as we can see in the background of a plate with arabic inscriptions. the positioning of the table-stella material culture of multilingualism and affectivity 187 inside the home, but within the zone of public display, conveys the feeling of loss and sadness of this family, also shared by the community. the feeling of pride for their community emerges through the bulk of artefacts and variety of material objects with inscriptions in different languages which are used, or were used, by the circassians. along with frequently showing the traditional male outfit of circassian dancers or warriors, these objects very often have the word adiga on them. these items are available in the local shops in the village or are brought from other circassian communities. a wooden souvenir plate with inscriptions in russian was brought by lousianne from the second international conference held in the republic of adygea in russia in 1993, where representatives of circassian people from the diaspora and the homeland in caucasia gathered to discuss the maintenance of language, culture, folklore and history. these and multiple other artefacts, both those produced as souvenirs, and those used in daily life, whether made in israel or in russia, include the endonym, self-name adige ( ) in roman, hebrew or cyrillic script. not less significant is that it is an endonym, and not the exonyms circassians or cherkess which the wider world applies to them that is reproduced in the souvenirs and goods in daily use. we can infer that material culture cries out, insists we call this people as they wish to be called: adiga. adiga is the name circassians have chosen to call themselves since ancient times, and it means ‘the striving to be perfect,’ as opposed to cherkess, the name other people have chosen to call them. this is the message we would have received, if we had paid careful attention to the material culture. circassian, arabic, hebrew, russian, english, turkish – the material objects in use and on display in this home embody the complexity and specificity of linguistic, cultural, religious and historical threads so tightly woven, which represent the life of this small and proud community. material cultural objects make all this complex information visual and tangible for any perceptive observer. just look at the materialities from one family house. the first historical comprehensive encyclopedia about the circassians was published in 2009 in arabic, authored by muhammed kheir mamser batsej from amman, jordan, and the koran was published in a variety of translations, languages and scripts. multilingual artefacts of kfar kama villagers show the active multilingualism of its inhabitants. it projects to the outer world the villagers’ integration into the wider israeli society, and at the same time their strong wish to be their own people, adiga, with their own language, ways of life, traditions, values, their own vision of their future and history. larissa aronin 188 let us now move on to a representative of another minority in israel, namely the so-called russian-speakers who at the same time represents the culture of the young. the russian-speaking young restaurant waiter wears his t-shirt in israel where hebrew, arabic, russian, english and other languages are in use. at his job he not only makes public his identity, but he also represents the hotel and israelis for the tourists from other countries. the material object he wears, a shirt with an inscription in english “i’m too sexy for my shirt,” arouses emotions from both those familiar with the source of this quotation, and from those who are not. it turnes out that the sentence is a quotation from a dance song “i'm too sexy” (fairbrass, fairbrass, & manzoli, 1991) a hit in the united kingdom and a number of other countries, released in 1991 by a popular english pop band right said fred. this material culture artefact, a t-shirt, carries out a dialogue with the “audience;” it performs the communicative functions of identification, it conveys a cultural message, and also signals the common grounds of this global trend for those with similarly inclined taste in music. materialities, attitudes to them and ways of dealing with them may be shared by subcommunities of a bigger community or society, or indeed may indicate the differences between them. for example, trilingual keyboards of the public computers in the classes and halls at the universities and colleges of israel – hebrew, arabic and english – allow for societal discourse in three languages, which is common in israel. the foreigners or citizens who are not fluent in hebrew will be at ease in this public sphere by having the opportunity to e-mail, or write a document in english. the keyboard at my home is trilingual too, but, according to my needs it is in hebrew, english and russian, which affords communication and dialogue with overlapping different communities that i deal with, on a daily basis. artefacts are active voices which represent our attitudes and behaviour; in a multilingual, heterogeneous community, they convey the particular linguistic and cultural group voice, and of course individual voices within a certain public sphere. material culture underlies oral linguistic communication, because through it the interlocutors may perceive the clues for each other’s points of view, beliefs, origins, and values and shows what the sensibilities of the interlocutor are. conclusion material culture constitutes an indispensable part of multilingual reality. materialities carry out innumerable social functions; among them arousing, maintaining and sustaining emotions, attitudes and affectivity of various kinds. material culture of multilingualism and affectivity 189 language-defined materialities are sensory, embodied, and mobile elements of human practice, enriched by the linguistic element. material artefacts with linguistic component originate and maintain attachment, sorrow, love, irony, apprehension or adverse feelings. both in a multilingual and monolingual environments, affective feelings or memory-laden material objects, modify and enhance the use of particular languages, maintain the use of language and attachment to it and to a particular culture through generations. in addition to psychological and social dimensions, material culture of multilingualism serves language teaching and language learning in a number of ways. material culture, and in particular linguistically determined objects, play a role in supplying affective dimension which is either conducive to, or hinders language acquisition and use. materialities may stimulate or initiate interest for learning a language through adding an affective nuance to the situation. material artefacts cause a range of emotions and feelings; some cause patriotic feelings and awareness of one’s origins; others foster attachment to other countries. souvenirs influence may be limited to just reminding a devoted traveler of his visited places and mark his pride. keepsakes and memorabilia embody attachments from various countries. some artefacts, cityscapes and events raise interest and curiosity, others enhance and speed language learning, still others produce long-standing bonds with a nonnative language and culture. all of them may bring understanding of how cultures and communities become “blended,” or dominant, and what it means for an individual to speak several languages. special attention should be paid to the evocative, emotionally charged materialities if we wish to modify language attitudes for the languages multilinguals use and stimulate motivation for language learning. larissa aronin 190 references appadurai, a. 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(2011). alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. new york: basic books. zaborowsky, r. (2011). nicolai hartmann’s approach to affectivity and its relevance for the current debate over feelings. in r. poli, c. scognamiglio, & f. tremblay (eds.), the philosophy of nicolai hartmann (pp. 159-176). berlin: mouton de gruyter. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: chengchen li (huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan, china) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) editor: joanna zawodniak (university of zielona góra, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (silesian university of technology, gliwice, poland) vol. 11 no. 1 march 2021 editorial board: ali al-hoorie (royal commission for jubail and yanbu, jubail, saudi arabia) larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) maria dakowska (university of warsaw, poland) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) tammy gregersen (american university of sharjah, united arab emirates) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2021 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: jakub bielak mariusz kruk chengchen li aleksandra wach joanna zawodniak © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: jakub bielak, melanie ellis, mariusz kruk, chengchen li, aleksandra wach, joanna zawodniak cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 61 829 64 20 fax +48 61 829 64 21 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · social sciences citation index (wos core collection) · journal citation reports social sciences (wos) · scopus · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) · current contents – social and behavioral sciences (wos) · essential science indicators (wos) studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 11, number 1, march 2021 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ....................................................................... 7 editorial ........................................................................................... 11 articles: mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, joanna zawodniak – another look at boredom in language instruction: the role of the predictable and the unexpected ................................................................................................. 15 xiaowan yang, mark wyatt – english for specific purposes teachers’ beliefs about their motivational practices and student motivation at a chinese university ....................................................................... 41 cailing lu, frank boers, averil coxhead – exploring learners’ understanding of technical vocabulary in traditional chinese medicine .................. 71 agnieszka bryła-cruz – the gender factor in the perception of english segments by non-native speakers ......................................................... 103 jesús izquierdo, silvia patricia aquino zúñiga, verónica garcía martínez – foreign language education in rural schools: struggles and initiatives among generalist teachers teaching english in mexico .................. 133 book reviews: jarosław krajka – review of english language proficiency assessments for young learners edited by mikyung kim wolf, yuko goto butler .......157 mirosław pawlak – review of complexity perspectives on researching language learner and teacher psychology edited by richard j. sampson and richard s. pinner..............................................................................165 notes to contributors ......................................................................171 7 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors frank boers is professor of applied linguistics and tesol at the university of western ontario, canada. his initial research interests (in the 1990s) were the areas of semantics and lexicology, with a special focus on metaphor and figurative language. his more recent research interests, however, were sparked by his extensive experience as an efl teacher and teacher trainer, and since the 2000s he has published mostly on issues of instructed second language acquisition. his latest book is evaluating second language vocabulary and grammar instruction: a synthesis of the research on teaching words, phrases, and patterns (2021, routledge). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7552-4931 contact details: university of western ontario, faculty of education, 1137 western road, on, canada, n6g 1g7 (fboers@uwo.ca) agnieszka bryła-cruz is assistant professor at maria curie-skłodowska university in lublin, poland. her main research interests concern the role of linguistic and sociolinguistic factors in second language acquisition, particularly pronunciation, and the perception of non-native accents by english native speakers and non-native speakers. recently she has been conducting empirical studies on the role of phonetics in listening comprehension with a special focus on hesitation phenomena. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3256-3185 contact details: maria curie-skłodowska university, ul. plac marii curieskłodowskiej 4a, 20-031 lublin, poland (agnieszka.bryla@poczta.umcs.lublin.pl) professor averil coxhead teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in applied linguistics and tesol in the school of linguistics and applied language studies, victoria university of wellington, aotearoa/new zealand. she is the author of vocabulary and english for specific purposes research (2018, routledge) and co-author of english for vocational purposes: language use in trades education (2020, routledge). 8 orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3392-6961 contact details: vz 403, von zedlitz building, 26/28 kelburn parade, wellington, new zealand, po box 600 (averil.coxhead@vuw.ac.nz) jesús izquierdo, phd, is professor at universidad juárez autónoma de tabasco, mexico. his research interests include computer-assisted language learning, l2 teacher education and the acquisition of l2 grammar in classroom contexts. he has conducted funded research in canada, france and mexico. his previous publications have appeared in journals including canadian modern language review, journal of immersion and content-based language education, language learning, modern language journal and system. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5605-2318 contact details: universidad juárez autónoma de tabasco, villahermosa, tabasco, mexico 86040 (jesus.izquierdo@ujat.mx) jarosław krajka, phd, is head of department of applied linguistics and doctoral studies director at maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin, poland. he is the author of monographs, articles and reviews related to call, foreign language teaching methodology and language teacher education. he is also editor-in-chief of teaching english with technology, an international electronic journal (scopus). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4172-9960 contact details: uniwersytet marii curie-skłodowskiej, katedra lingwistyki stosowanej, pl. m. c. skłodowskiej 4a, 20-031 lublin, poland (jarek.krajka@gmail.com) mariusz kruk, phd, works at the university of zielona góra, poland. his main research interests include learner autonomy, motivation, willingness to communicate, language anxiety, grit and boredom in the l2 classroom as well as the application of new technologies in foreign language learning and teaching. he is the author of the monograph investigating dynamic relationships among individual difference variables in learning english as a foreign language in a virtual world (2021, springer). he co-authored boredom in the foreign language classroom: a micro-perspective with mirosław pawlak and joanna zawodniak (2020, springer) and co-edited new technological applications for foreign and second language learning and teaching with mark peterson (2020, igi global). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5297-1966 contact details: university of zielona góra, institute of modern languages, al. wojska polskiego 71a, 65-762 zielona góra, poland (mkruk@uz.zgora.pl) 9 cailing lu is lecturer at zhejiang university of technology, china. she obtained her phd degree from victoria university of wellington. her research interests include vocabulary in english for specific and academic purposes. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9911-2824 contact details: room 509, yulin building, zhejiang university of technology, no. 288 liuhe road, xihu district, hangzhou, zhejiang province, hangzhou 310000, china (lucailing68@126.com) verónica garcía martínez, phd, is professor at universidad juárez autónoma de tabasco, mexico. her research interests include educational technology and inclusive education. she has conducted research that has been funded by mexican agencies such as conacyt and comexus. her previous publications have appeared in journals including sinéctica, comunicar and apertura. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5299-3540 contact details: universidad juárez autónoma de tabasco, villahermosa, tabasco, mexico 86040 (verónica.garcia@ujat.mx) mirosław pawlak is professor of english in the english department, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland, and department of research on language and communication, faculty of humanities and social sciences, state university of applied sciences, konin, poland. his main areas of interest are form-focused instruction, corrective feedback, pronunciation teaching, classroom interaction, learner autonomy, learning strategies, motivation, willingness to communicate, boredom and study abroad. his most recent publications include error correction in the foreign language classroom: reconsidering the issues (2015, springer), willingness to communicate in instructed second language acquisition: combining a macroand micro-perspective (with anna mystkowska-wiertelak, 2017, multilingual matters), and boredom in the foreign language classroom: a micro-perspective (with joanna zawodniak and mariusz kruk, 2020, springer). he is editor of the journals studies in second language learning and teaching and konin language studies, as well as the book series second language learning and teaching, published by springer. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7448-355x contact details: adam mickiewicz university, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, ul. nowy śwait 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl) mark wyatt is associate professor of english at khalifa university in the uae. he previously worked for the universities of leeds (on a ba tesol project in oman) 10 and portsmouth. his research into language teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs has appeared most recently in language learning journal, system and tesol quarterly. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8647-8280 contact details: department of english, khalifa university, united arab emirates (dr.markwyatt@gmail.com) xiaowan yang is associate professor of english education at guangdong university of foreign studies in china. her research interests include language teacher development, l2 motivation and english for specific purposes. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4104-6534 contact details: school of english education, guangdong university of foreign studies, china (xiaowan.yang@gdufs.edu.cn) joanna zawodniak, phd, is associate professor and head of the institute of modern languages at the university of zielona góra, poland. her major research interests involve individual learner differences (especially boredom, motivation, anxiety, grit), metaphorical competence, metalinguistic awareness, print awareness, codeswitching, socio-historical psychology in relation to l2 education and young learner sla. she is the author of two monographs devoted to the child-friendly lexically driven syllabus and l2 writing instruction, and co-author (with mirosław pawlak and mariusz kruk) of the book focused on boredom in the foreign language classroom. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3219-145x contact details: university of zielona góra, institute of modern languages, al. wojska polskiego 71a, 65-762 zielona góra, poland (j.zawodniak@in.uz.zgora.pl) silvia patricia aquino zúñiga, phd, is professor at universidad juárez autónoma de tabasco, mexico. her research interests include inclusive education, research competence development and institutional evaluation. she has conducted research that has been funded by mexican agencies such as conacyt-inee and sined. her previous publications have appeared in journals including revista electrónica de investigación educativa, sinéctica, comunicar and apertura. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7223-8582 contact details: universidad juárez autónoma de tabasco, villahermosa, tabasco, mexico 86040 (saquinozuniga@gmail.com) 205 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (2). 2022. 205-232 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.2.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt taking stock: a meta-analysis of the effects of foreign language enjoyment elouise botes university of vienna, austria https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4952-8386 elouise.botes@univie.ac.at jean-marc dewaele birkbeck college, university of london, uk https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8480-0977 j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk samuel greiff university of luxembourg, luxembourg https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2900-3734 samuel.greiff@uni.lu abstract studies examining the positive emotion of foreign language enjoyment (fle) have recently increased exponentially, as researchers are applying the tenets of positive psychology in applied linguistics. it is therefore an appropriate time to take stock of the current literature and conduct a preliminary meta-analysis. the relationships between fle and four variables, namely, foreign language anxiety (fla), willingness to communicate (wtc), academic achievement, and self-perceived achievement were examined. a total of k = 96 effect sizes were analyzed with an overall sample size of n = 28,166 in random-effects models with correlation coefficients. there was a moderate negative correlation between fle and fla. in turn, moderate positive correlations were found between fle and wtc, fle and academic achievement, and fle and self-perceived achievement. these positive associations confirm the value of elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele, samuel greiff 206 fle in fl learning and further affirm the need for researchers to examine positive psychology constructs in the foreign language classroom. keywords: foreign language enjoyment; meta-analysis; foreign language anxiety; willingness to communicate; academic achievement; self-perceived achievement 1. introduction foreign language enjoyment (fle) has been the cornerstone of the recent positive psychology in foreign language (fl) learning movement (dewaele & macintyre, 2014; macintyre et al., 2019; mercer & macintyre, 2014). introduced by dewaele and macintyre (2014), fle can be defined as a broad positive emotion experienced by fl learners when their psychological needs are met in the fl classroom (botes et al., 2020a). fle represents the first foray into quantifying positive emotions in fl research (dewaele & macintyre, 2014) and has been an increasingly popular variable to examine since it was introduced in 2014. increased research scrutiny has established the nomological network of fle, which demonstrates the positive interrelations of fle. greater fle in the fl class has been associated with lower foreign language anxiety (fla; dewaele & macintyre, 2016), greater willingness to communicate (wtc) in the target language (tl; khajavy et al., 2018), higher academic achievement in the fl classroom (jin & zhang, 2021), and higher self-perceived competence in the tl (zhang et al., 2020). the research attention on fle has been such that it has rendered a meta-analytical study of fle and these four individual difference variables (fla, wtc, academic achievement, and selfperceived achievement) a viable research endeavor. with this increased research momentum, now would be a prudent time to take stock and examine the research trends that can be identified for the first variable of the movement, namely, fle. with this study, we thus endeavored to conduct a meta-analysis of fle and its associations with fla, wtc, academic achievement, and self-perceived achievement. these four individual difference variables were chosen as they are all established constructs in the fl learning literature and have all been examined in conjunction with fle in numerous studies, thus rendering a meta-analysis of the variables practically feasible. two other issues helped us decide which variables to focus on in our study. first, other variables have also been examined alongside fle, such as grit (wei et al., 2019), emotional intelligence (resnik & dewaele, 2020), and motivation (dewaele & proietti ergün, 2020). however, these other variables have not been explored to the extent that the four variables included in this study. second, a meta-analysis can be conducted with as few as two effect sizes (valentine et al., taking stock: a meta-analysis of the effects of foreign language enjoyment 207 2010), and some other variables met this criterion (e.g., we found five effect sizes for grit and three effect sizes for emotional intelligence), but we decided to focus on the four variables that went beyond this minimum criterion and thus presented the greatest opportunity for adding to the research dialogue. the results of this meta-analysis will provide a practical demonstration of the power of positive emotions in the fl classroom and further strengthen the positive psychology movement in fl learning. 2. literature review 2.1. positive psychology and fle the positive associations between fle and other fl individual difference variables can be seen as a practical embodiment of the tenets of positive psychology in an applied setting. positive psychology has been defined as the “scientific study of what goes right in life” (peterson, 2006, p. 4), and, as such, positive psychology in the context of fl learning can be redefined as what goes right in the language classroom. fle embodies key aspects of two seminal theories in positive psychology research. firstly, seligman (2018) identified the building blocks of well-being in his perma model (positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement), which posits that each element contributes – both individually and in conjunction with the other variables – to overall happiness and flourishing. fle can be seen as an applied embodiment of the positive emotion element in seligman’s (2018) model. secondly, fredrickson (2001, 2013) touted the broadening-and-building capacity of positive emotions, where positive emotions constitute an individual’s psychological resources, which, in turn, broaden the person’s scope of awareness and perception. in the applied setting of the fl classroom, fle therefore constitutes the psychological resources of the fl learner to endure the unique challenges that fl learning poses and allows students to broaden their learning in the fl classroom by taking in additional information (macintyre, 2016). both the theories proposed by seligman (2018) and frederickson (2001, 2013) would therefore imply a positive outcome should the tenets of perma and broaden-and-build be strengthened. in terms of the applied setting of fl learning, this would imply that the positive emotion of fle should be associated with positive outcomes in the fl classroom. the nomological network of fle has thus far supported this notion as fle is associated with positive outcomes such as academic achievement and perceived proficiency in the tl. elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele, samuel greiff 208 2.2. the nomological network of fle fle has been linked to demographic variables, personal characteristic variables, and applied linguistic variables. as fle can be a considered a relatively “new” variable, its nomological network is still expanding, yet preliminary findings are promising for researchers in the field of positive psychology in applied linguistics. the demographic variables of age, gender, and multilingualism have all been associated with fle. older fl learners have been found to exhibit higher levels of fle than their younger counterparts (dewaele et al., 2018; dewaele & macintyre, 2014), with university students displaying greater fle than secondary school students (dewaele & macintyre, 2014). there is only a limited number of studies that have examined fle and age comparisons, and thus a definitive conclusion cannot yet be drawn. the verdict regarding gender and fle is also unclear. several studies have found that female fl learners indicated higher levels of fle than their male counterparts (dewaele & macintyre, 2014; dewaele et al., 2016), with others reporting no significant differences regarding gender and fle (alezeni, 2020; mierzwa, 2018). contrasting evidence has also been found in terms of the level of multilingualism and fle, with some studies reporting a higher degree of multilingualism linked to greater fle (dewaele & macintyre, 2014; dewaele, özdemir et al., 2022), and others reporting no statistically significant association (dewaele et al., 2018). as fle has only been in the applied linguistics research sphere for a mere six years, it is not surprising that conclusions about demographic differences cannot yet be made. considerable future research is therefore needed. other antecedents that have been linked to fle are personality traits, emotional intelligence, and grit. the personality traits of social initiative (β = -0.09, p < .001) and cultural empathy (β = 0.20, p < .001) have both been found to predict fle (dewaele & macintyre, 2019). large positive correlations have also been found between fle and curiosity in fl learning (mahmoodzadeh & khajavy, 2018). in addition, need for cognition has been found to predict fle (β = 0.31, p < .001; rezazadeh & zarrinabadi, 2020), and emotional intelligence has been found to be moderately positively correlated with fle (li, 2020; li & xu, 2019; resnik & dewaele, 2020). lastly, grit in fl learners has also shown moderate to large positive correlations with fle (lee, 2020; wei et al., 2019). the findings from these studies further confirm the underlying positive psychology theories on which fle was built in that fle is clearly associated with positive traits in the nomological network. however, as only a few studies have examined these positive characteristics and fle (k ≤ 3), it was not viable to include personality, grit, or emotional intelligence in the meta-analysis. beyond its antecedents, fle is most often examined alongside fla. fle was first introduced into the applied linguistics lexicon by dewaele and macintyre (2014) taking stock: a meta-analysis of the effects of foreign language enjoyment 209 in a study in which they compared and contrasted the negative emotion of fla with the newly introduced fle. fla is an established and popular variable in applied linguistics research with a well-known and often researched nomological network (see horwitz, 2010; macintyre, 2017). as fle debuted as the positive emotion counterpart to fla, it comes as no surprise that the majority of research on fle has thus far examined the association between fle and fla. a prevailing trend of moderate negative correlations between fle and fla seems to have emerged (see hung, 2020; resnik & dewaele, 2020; uzun, 2017), but some deviations still occur. studies have found small positive correlations (dewaele, özdemir et al., 2022), small negative correlations (dewaele & alfawzan, 2018), and nonsignificant results (dewaele & dewaele, 2017). as there is an abundance of research on fle and fla, we decided to investigate the relationship between the two variables in this meta-analytical study. fla is often researched in conjunction with the fl classroom variables of wtc, academic achievement, and self-perceived achievement, and as such, these variables can be considered to function within the same nomological network. with the increase in research that has focused on the associations between fle and fla, it not surprising that fle research was extended to examine wtc, academic achievement, and self-perceived achievement. wtc in the fl learning context can be defined as “the probability that a person will choose to communicate, given the opportunity” (macintyre & ayersglassey, 2021, p. 187) in the tl. wtc has long since been a popular outcome variable in applied linguistics (see zhang et al., 2018) and has recently been examined alongside fle in a handful of studies (see dewaele, 2019; dewaele & dewaele, 2018; mahmoodzadeh & khajavy, 2018). these studies have overwhelmingly found large positive correlations between fle and wtc (dewaele & dewaele, 2018; khajavy et al., 2018), leading dewaele (2019) to conclude that teachers may boost wtc in the fl classroom by creating a positive environment in which fle may flourish. this hypothesis will be tested in the meta-analysis in order to examine the extent to which the positive relationship between fle and wtc is confirmed across the literature. similar to wtc, the outcome variables of “real” and self-perceived proficiency in the tl have been at the center of applied linguistics studies for decades (see sparks et al., 1997; sparks et al., 2006). indeed, surmising that the ultimate outcome of language learning should be to gain proficiency in the language, the variables of real and perceived proficiency in the tl can be seen as the ultimate outcome variables in the nomological network. as such, identifying variables that are associated with proficiency in the tl may provide opportunities to improve fl teaching and benefit fl learners in their ultimate goal of learning a language. “real” proficiency in the tl is often measured through academic achievement in the elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele, samuel greiff 210 fl class, through either grades or scores on tests and exams (see botes et al., 2020b). the relationship between fle and academic achievement has been examined in numerous studies over the past six years in order to determine whether positive emotion might be associated with proficiency in the tl, should academic achievement in the fl class be accepted as a proxy for “real” proficiency. these studies have mostly found moderate positive correlations between fle and academic achievement (see dewaele, 2019; jin & zhang, 2021), but nonsignificant results have also been reported (dewaele & proietti ergün, 2020). similarly, self-perceived achievement in the tl has also been found to be positively correlated with fle, however with varying effect sizes ranging from small (r = .09, p < .001; botes et al., 2020a), to moderate (r = .25, p < .001; dewaele & macintyre, 2014), to large (r = .43, p < .05; piechurska-kuciel, 2017). both academic achievement and self-perceived achievement are undoubtedly positively associated with fle, but the strength of the association is unclear. both academic achievement and self-perceived achievement and their associations with fle were therefore included in the meta-analysis in an attempt to derive an indication of the effect sizes of the relations between the variables. in light of the considerations presented above, we examined the following hypotheses in the meta-analysis of fle: hypothesis 1: there is an overall moderate negative correlation between foreign language enjoyment and foreign language anxiety. hypothesis 2: there is an overall moderate positive correlation between foreign language enjoyment and willingness to communicate. hypothesis 3: there is an overall moderate positive correlation between foreign language enjoyment and academic achievement. hypothesis 4: there is an overall moderate positive correlation between foreign language enjoyment and self-perceived achievement. 3. method 3.1. search strategy in october 2021,1 the following four databases were searched: eric, google scholar, psychinfo, and psycharticles. an additional hand-search of four journals where research on emotions in language learning is often published were 1 it should be noted that the study was originally planned and registered in september 2020. a search of the literature was made and results coded and analyzed. however, due to the low number of effect sizes and studies found in the initial search, the decision was made to wait an additional year for more studies regarding fle to be published in order to make a taking stock: a meta-analysis of the effects of foreign language enjoyment 211 carried out on 1 november 2021.2 articles published in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, and doctoral dissertations were examined for inclusion in the meta-analysis. only studies published in english were considered. a single key phrase was used in the search, namely, foreign language enjoyment, and all studies examining fle in relation to fla, wtc, academic achievement, and self-perceived achievement were considered for inclusion. the project was pre-registered at the centre for open science (https://osf.io/fjusz/?view_only=ec5236f4641f4ca1a06c0dea394f4148). figure 1 database search flowchart the database search yielded 762 results, of which 96 were duplicates or non-english-language results (see figure 1). the titles and abstracts of 666 studies were examined, and 469 of these were excluded because they were not applicable to the meta-analysis at hand. the full texts of 197 studies were considered, with 53 retained in the meta-analysis. an additional call for unpublished research was made, with authors reaching out to known scholars in the emotions in language learning research field. this resulted in the addition of an unpublished data set and two manuscripts that were in press. a total of 56 studies were therefore included in this meta-analysis. of the 56 studies, seven (12.5%) could be considered meta-analysis a worthwhile endeavor. results from the initial search was published at the centre for open science for the sake of transparency, and can be found at: https://osf.io/fjusz/? view_only=ec5236f4641f4ca1a06c0dea394f4148. the number of studies found in the initial search increased from n = 354 to n = 762, and the number of studies included in the metaanalysis increased from n = 30 to n = 56. we therefore believe that a fruitful decision was in delaying the meta-analysis for a year, as the number of effect sizes increased considerably and thus resulted in more robust analyses (huedo-medina et al., 2006). 2 modern language journal, studies in second language learning and teaching, system, language learning. elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele, samuel greiff 212 “grey literature” because they consisted of three unpublished doctoral dissertations, one conference proceeding, two unpublished manuscripts, and an unpublished data set. the full list of studies included in the meta-analysis can be found in the supplementary material as well as the registered data folder on the osf (https://osf.io/fjusz/?view_only=ec5236f4641f4ca1a06c0dea394f4148). 3.2. review strategy a total of 96 effect sizes were included in the meta-analysis from the 56 studies that were identified in the database search. the following inclusion criteria were applied: 1. quantitative data requirements: only studies reporting correlations between fle and fla/wtc/academic achievement/self-perceived achievement were included. the authors were contacted when data were missing. of the 13 authors who were contacted, eight responded with the necessary information. a summary of the number of available effect sizes per variable can be found in figure 2. 2. measures: no study was excluded on the basis of the measurement instrument that was used. the scale or questionnaire used for each variable was noted. 3. study designs: no specific designs were excluded from the study. in the case of experimental studies with a pretest and a posttest, pretest data were used in the meta-analysis. in the case of group-difference studies, separate groups were entered into the database and specifically noted. 4. moderators: several possible moderators were coded, including average age, gender, linguistic distance between the first language and the target language, and nationality. however, no study was excluded on the basis of the presence or absence of moderators. figure 2 effect sizes per hypothesized relationship taking stock: a meta-analysis of the effects of foreign language enjoyment 213 3.3. coding strategy publication characteristics such as authors, full title, year of publication, and publication medium were recorded. the demographic characteristics of each study (i.e., the sample size, gender distribution, average age, country, home language, and target language) were noted. the specific measure used to capture each variable was also recorded in addition to the means, standard deviations, and internal reliabilities as measured with cronbach’s alpha (see tables s1-s5 in the supplementary materials). the average internal consistency reported was at an acceptable cronbach’s α = .86. the effect sizes were recorded in the form of pearson’s correlation coefficient (r). an attempt was made to record several moderating factors; however, only three moderators were sufficiently represented in the data to be included in the study (i.e., average age, percentage of female participants in the sample and linguistic distance). as the majority of the participants were either first or foreign language learners and users of english, linguistic distance was coded via the quantitative linguistic distance measure provided by chiswick and miller (2005). linguistic distance was measured on a scale from zero to one, with one representing the widest possible linguistic distance (chiswick & miller, 2005). 3.4. data-analysis strategy the hypothesized relationships between fle and fla/wtc/academic achievement/self-perceived achievement were examined by converting the correlation coefficients (r) into fisher’s z-scores. the conversion allows for the stabilization of the variance of the results, with a summary of the fisher z scale retransformed into a summary correlation coefficient between each of the hypothesized relationships with fle (hedges & olkin, 1985). for each of the four hypothesized relationships with fle, a random effects model with maximum likelihood estimation was used, with heterogeneity assumed across studies. the degree of heterogeneity in the meta-analysis was quantified via the i2 index, which “can be interpreted as the percentage of total variability in a set of effect sizes due to true heterogeneity” (huedo-medina et al., 2006, p. 194). a rule-of-thumb interpretation of the i2 index indicates that around 25% is a low amount of heterogeneity across studies, with 50% and 75% in turn interpreted as medium and high amounts of heterogeneity, respectively (higgins & thompson, 2002). beyond the i2 index, heterogeneity was also examined through τ2, which estimates between-studies variance. the τ2 and i2 are “directly comparable,” with an increase in one index resulting in an increase in the other (huedomedina et al. 2006, p. 194). the i2 index further provides a useful indication as elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele, samuel greiff 214 to whether or not moderating factors are likely to be present in the relationships between variables. the effects of the three moderator variables (i.e., average age, percentage of female participants, and linguistic distance) on the effect sizes were examined via a random-effects meta-regression with a restricted maximum likelihood estimator. publication bias was investigated by applying the trim and fill method, where effect sizes are recalculated to adjust for supposed publication biases (duval & tweedie, 2000). all analyses were conducted in r with the metafor package (viechtbauer, 2010), with the figures generated by the jamovi interface in r (love et al., 2018). 4. results 4.1. descriptive results a total of 56 studies with k = 96 effect sizes were analyzed. publication dates ranged from 2014 to 2022 (m = 2019.7). a total of n = 28,166 (m = 512.11, sd = 555.86) participants were included across the 56 studies, with 16,360 female participants and 10,960 male participants. the average age of participants was 19.45 years (sd = 4.46). a large majority of the participants were school pupils, learning languages in an fl class (n = 11,978). the remaining participants were learning an fl through university courses (n = 9100) or independent language schools (n = 991). a large majority of participants (81.7% of the total participants) were learning english (n = 23,013), followed by turkish (n = 592), arabic (n = 188) and french (n = 130). 4.2. hypothesis 1: fle and fla the hypothesized relationship between fle and fla was examined via k = 46 effect sizes (see figure 3). fle and fla shared an overall moderate negative correlation of r = -.31 (k = 46; n = 20,946), with a 95% confidence interval of r = .36 to r = -.26. the results were statistically significant (z = -12.26, p < .001). results further indicated a significant amount of heterogeneity across studies, q(45) = 482.29, p < .001, i2 = 91.54%, with a moderate amount of variance across true effect sizes (τ2 = .024). taking stock: a meta-analysis of the effects of foreign language enjoyment 215 figure 3 forest plot of fle and fla fle and fla therefore had a moderate negative relationship, in support of hypothesis 1. individuals with higher levels of enjoyment in fl learning are thus more likely to have lower levels of anxiety during the fl learning process. elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele, samuel greiff 216 4.3. hypothesis 2: fle and wtc fle and wtc had a large positive correlation of r = .48 (k = 13, n = 5,466) with a 95% confidence interval of r = .38 to r = .58 (see figure 4). the results were statistically significant (z = 9.30, p < .001). the results further indicated a large amount of heterogeneity, q(12) = 252,12, p < .001, i2 = 92.11%, with an equally large variance across studies (τ2 = .03). figure 4 forest plot of fle and wtc a moderate to large positive correlation was therefore found between fle and wtc, in support of hypothesis 2. fl learners experiencing enjoyment in language learning are therefore more likely to be willing to communicate in the target language. 4.4. hypothesis 3: fle and academic achievement the meta-analysis of the 28 effect sizes that represented the relation between fle and academic achievement resulted in a moderate positive correlation of r = .30 (k = 28, n = 8,899) with a 95% confidence interval of r = .24 to r = .37 (see figure 5). results were statistically significant (z = 9.02, p < .001). a large amount of heterogeneity was present in the data, q(27) = 206.66, p < .001, i2 = 87.5%, with a large amount of variance across studies (τ2 = .023). botes et al. (2020c) bensalem (2022) lee (2020) (2) barrios & acosta-manzano (2021) (2) barrios & acosta-manzano (2021) (1) dewaele (2019) lee (2020) (3) dewaele & dewaele (2018) lee (2020) (1) khajavy et al. (2018) mahmoodzadeh & khajavy (2018) kun et al. (2020) lee et al. (2021) 0.20 [0.10, 0.30] 0.31 [0.20, 0.41] 0.32 [0.21, 0.43] 0.33 [0.15, 0.51] 0.40 [0.29, 0.51] 0.46 [0.32, 0.60] 0.46 [0.32, 0.60] 0.48 [0.33, 0.62] 0.50 [0.33, 0.67] 0.54 [0.49, 0.59] 0.62 [0.51, 0.72] 0.74 [0.57, 0.92] 0.89 [0.83, 0.94] re model 0.48 [0.38, 0.58] 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 taking stock: a meta-analysis of the effects of foreign language enjoyment 217 figure 5 forest plot of fle and academic achievement hypothesis 3 was therefore supported in that fle and academic achievement showed a moderate positive correlation. fl learners who experience higher levels of enjoyment in the fl class are therefore more likely to have higher levels of academic achievement. 4.5. hypothesis 4: fle and self-perceived achievement a moderate positive correlation r = .27 (k = 9, n = 4,556) was found between fle and self-perceived achievement (see figure 6). the results were statistically significant (z = 5.67, p < .001) with a 95% confidence interval of r = .18 to r = .37. a moderate amount of heterogeneity was present in the data, q(8) = 52.76, p < .001, i2 = 83.25%, with a moderate amount of variance across studies (τ2 = .012). elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele, samuel greiff 218 figure 6 forest plot of fle and self-perceived achievement hypothesis 4 was therefore supported such that language learners with higher enjoyment in fl learning were more likely to have a higher self-perception of their achievement. 4.6. moderator analyses the meta-analysis of all four of the hypothesized relationships with fle indicated high levels of heterogeneity (i2 > 80%). in an attempt to uncover the possible causes of such heterogeneity, moderator analyses were carried out with the potential moderators of average age, percentage of female participants in the sample, and linguistic distance (see table 1). the numeric value given to the linguistic distance between the target language and the first language of the fl learner was provided by chiswick and miller (2005). unfortunately, only one statistically significant moderator effect was found. average age was shown to moderate the relationship between fle and self-perceived achievement (slope = -.026, z = -3.74, p < .001). thus, the correlation between fle and self-perceived achievement was also stronger in the case of younger fl learners than older language learners. however, the small number of studies included in this random-effects meta-regression (k = 8) may have resulted in a type i error (guolo & varin, 2017). therefore, the moderator analyses are presented here as a point of interest, but definitive conclusions cannot be drawn. taking stock: a meta-analysis of the effects of foreign language enjoyment 219 table 1 moderator analyses k n slope z p-value 1. fle and fla average age 40 20 172 .005 1.51 .13 percentage of female participants 42 22 080 .002 1.21 .23 linguistic distance 29 15 317 -.202 -.76 .44 2. fle and wtc average age 11 4989 -.009 -1.60 .11 percentage of female participants 13 5466 -.001 -.21 .83 linguistic distance 8 2897 -.13 -.40 .69 3. fle and academic achievement average age 18 7362 -.009 -.81 .41 percentage of female participants 17 7882 -.002 -.49 .63 linguistic distance 21 7757 .779 1.73 .08 4. fle and self-perceived achievement average age 8 4221 -.026 -3.74 < .001 percentage of female participants 9 4810 .003 .78 .44 linguistic distance 4 2401 -.179 -.82 .41 4.7. publication bias analysis the results of the trim and fill random effects model for each of the hypothesized relationships with fle can be found in table 2. the trim and fill analysis seemed to indicate a minimal impact of publication bias affecting the meta-analysis of the relationships between fle and fla (r = -.31 vs. r = -.37), fle and academic achievement (r = .30 vs. r = .33), and fle and self-perceived achievement (r = .27 vs. r = .27). however, some publication bias appeared to be present in the analysis of fle and wtc such that the trim and fill estimate (r = .56) was slightly larger than the summary estimate (r = .48). table 2 publication bias analyses k summary estimate [95% ci] trim and fill estimate [95% ci] fle and fla 46 -.31 [-.36; -.26] -.37 [-.41; -.31] fle and wtc 13 .48 [.38; .58] .56 [.47; .66] fle and academic achievement 28 .30 [.24; .37] .33 [.26; .39] fle and self-perceived achievement 9 .27 [.18; .37] .27 [.17; .36] 4.8. summary of results the meta-analysis found support for all four hypotheses presented in this study (see table 3 for an overview). elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele, samuel greiff 220 table 3 summary of meta-analytic results k n r [95% ci] i2 τ2 fle and fla 46 20 946 -.31 [-.36; -.26] 91.54 .024 fle and wtc 13 4556 .48 [.38; .58] 92.11 .031 fle and academic achievement 28 8899 .30 [.24; .37] 87.50 .023 fle and self-perceived achievement 9 4810 .27 [.18; .37] 83.25 .012 5. discussion this meta-analysis of fle and four associated individual difference variables demonstrated the position of fle as a positive psychology variable with broad potential in the fl classroom. enjoyment in the fl classroom was associated with lower anxiety, greater willingness to communicate in the tl, higher academic achievement, and higher self-perception of achievement for fl learners. the results confirmed a moderate negative correlation between fle and fla (r = -.31, k = 46, n = 20,946). a higher level of fle was therefore associated with a lower level of anxiety. as the debilitating effects of anxiety have been demonstrated in the literature (see macintyre, 2017), this moderately negative summary estimate may have practical implications for the fl classroom. however, correlations were used in the meta-analysis, and as such, no directionality can be assumed. indeed, we have argued in previous publications that the relationship between fle and fla is most likely circular, as the lessening of anxiety can lead to greater enjoyment in the fl classroom, which in turn reduces anxiety (botes et al., 2020a). should this circularity argument hold, then the moderately negative summary estimate between fle and fla does have practical implications for fl teachers. there are several known strategies for decreasing fla in the fl classroom, such as applying self-driven learning (dupuy, 1997), using multimedia technologies (oxford, 2017), practicing positive thinking (kondo & ying-ling, 2004), and de-emphasizing grammar and pronunciation (young, 1991). fl teachers who employ these strategies for lowering fla may therefore reasonably expect a subsequent increase in fle, which may, in turn, yield an additional decrease in fla. further research is needed to confirm the circular relationship between fla and fle, yet on a speculative level, it does seem that either an increase in fle or a decrease in fla may result in a positive spiral in the fl classroom. in turn, the meta-analysis of fle and wtc yielded a large positive correlation (r = .48, k = 13, n = 4,556). high levels of enjoyment in the fl classroom were therefore strongly associated with a greater willingness to communicate in the tl. as wtc has been linked to proficiency in the fl and as some theories (e.g., the pushed output hypothesis) maintain that the only effective means of acquiring a language is through active communication (robson, 2015; sato, 2020; swain, 1995; zhang et al., 2018), this large correlation between fle and taking stock: a meta-analysis of the effects of foreign language enjoyment 221 wtc has practical implications, particularly for fl teachers. again, it should be noted that no directionality can be assumed as correlations were used in this meta-analysis, although wtc is generally utilized as an outcome variable in individual difference models in applied linguistics (see karimi & abaszadeh, 2017; yashima et al., 2004). therefore, teachers who aim to have students who are more prepared to speak in the tl may utilize classroom strategies that have been found to increase enjoyment, such as encouraging students to prepare for fl class and taking time to relax when learning a fl (kondo & ying-ling, 2004). fle and academic achievement were found to have a moderate positive correlation (r = .30, k = 28, n = 8,899). in turn, fle and self-perceived achievement had a similar moderate positive correlation (r = .27, k = 9, n = 4,810). thus, higher fle is associated with higher academic achievement in the fl classroom as well as a higher self-perception of that achievement. no moderators were found to affect the relationship between fle and academic achievement, although average age was found to moderate the relationship between fle and self-perceived achievement. younger language learners manifested a stronger association between fle and self-perceived achievement than their older fl learning counterparts. fl teachers of children or adolescents can therefore take particular care to create an enjoyable fl class as the enjoyment of young fl learners is especially likely to be associated with good grades or exam scores. the results of all four variables (fla, wtc, academic achievement, and self-perceived achievement) and their relationships with fle spoke of the positive associations enjoyment may have in the fl classroom. 6. limitations the majority of studies included in the meta-analysis examined fle within the context of learning english as a foreign language (efl). given the popularity of emotions as a topic of research in the efl studies, this is somewhat unsurprising. however, the overwhelming number of efl studies may have possibly skewed the results of the meta-analysis towards the context of efl learning. additionally, the number of efl studies included may also have been impacted by the fact that we included only studies that were published in english. this may have resulted in unreported studies and effect sizes, but the lack of publication bias we found does somewhat mitigate this concern. lastly, the use of fisher’s zscores and correlations implies that no conclusions can be drawn with respect to directionality. although some relationships can be argued to be circular (e.g., fle and fla), this study cannot provide evidence as to such directionality. lastly, the small number of effect sizes included in the moderator analyses can be seen as a limitation as such analyses may be considered under-powered (valentine et elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele, samuel greiff 222 al., 2010). as such, the possibilities of type i and type ii errors in the results of the moderator analyses cannot be ruled out. 7. future research suggestions fle has only been examined as defined by dewaele and macintyre (2014) for the past eight years. therefore, it should come as no surprise that our first research suggestions would be to further expand the research on fle. as discussed in the literature review, current findings with regard to antecedents are at times contradictory, with some studies reporting significant differences in fle with regard to gender, age, and multilingualism (dewaele & macintyre, 2014; dewaele et al., 2016) and yet others reporting no differences (alezeni, 2020; dewaele et al., 2018). considerable research is therefore needed to establish research trends regarding the antecedents of fle. the nomological network of fle should also be further extended. only a handful of studies have examined personality, cognition, or classroom variables in relation to fle (see dewaele & macintyre, 2019; wei et al., 2019). in addition, the expansion of the nomological network – and specifically the antecedents of fle – may provide additional insights into the variability of fle. the majority of summary estimates calculated in this study displayed high levels of heterogeneity (i2 > .80), indicating that the relationships with fle examined in this study were likely exacerbated or impeded by other factors. it is only through additional research into fle that these factors can be identified. secondly, research is needed to provide clarity regarding the directionality of the hypothesized relationships between variables. as previously noted, the relationship between fle and fla can be theoretically argued to be circular or spiral, but empirical results are needed. the directionality of the relationship between fle and wtc, academic achievement, and self-perceived achievement also ought to be investigated. it is often assumed that wtc, academic achievement, and self-perceived proficiency are outcome variables (see botes et al., 2020a, 2020b; yashima et al., 2004), but the possibility of a feedback loop or an even entirely opposite causal direction cannot be disregarded. lastly, fle has become the personification of positive psychology in emotions in foreign language learning research (see macintyre, 2016). with the positive psychology movement currently blooming in the field of applied linguistics (dewaele, chen, et al., 2019; macintyre et al., 2019), researchers ought to consider expanding positive emotion research to include variables other than fle. after all, one swallow does not make a summer, and other positive emotions such as hope, optimism, and pride may hold considerable promise in fl learning research, as they do in the fields of general educational psychology (tetzner & becker, 2018; ciarrochi et al., 2007), and specifically mathematics learning (lackaye & margalit, 2008; yates, 2002). taking stock: a meta-analysis of the effects of foreign language enjoyment 223 8. conclusion in this study, we set out to examine the current state of the literature regarding fle and to conduct a meta-analysis of fle and four individual difference variables (fla, wtc, academic achievement, and self-perceived achievement). the meta-analysis confirmed the positive associations of fle in the fl classroom, as fle was linked to lower fla, a greater wtc, higher academic achievement, and higher self-perceived achievement. these positive associations confirmed the basic tenet of positive psychology, in that positive emotions such as fle have a broadening power that can provide fl learners with the resources they need to meet the unique challenges of fl learning. elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele, samuel greiff 224 references3 *albert, á., piniel, k., & lajtai, á. 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(2021). efl students’ preferences for written corrective feedback: do error types, language proficiency, and foreign language enjoyment matter? frontiers in psychology, 12. https://doi.org/ 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.660564 651 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (4). 2022. 651-673 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.4.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt wcf processing in the l2 curriculum: a look at type of wcf, type of linguistic item, and l2 performance ronald p. leow georgetown university, washington, dc, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2990-3540 leowr@georgetown.edu anne thinglum georgetown university, washington, dc, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0007-1365 amc254@georgetown.edu stephanie a. leow arizona state university, tempe, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9459-9346 sleow@asu.edu abstract whether type of written corrective feedback (wcf) impacts l2 learning has been investigated for decades. while many product-oriented studies report conflicting findings, the paucity of studies adopting both a process-oriented and curricular approach (e.g., caras, 2019) underscores the call for further research on: a) the processing dimension of l2 writers’ engagement with wcf in this instructed setting (manchón & leow, 2020), b) from an isla applied perspective (leow, 2019a; leow & manchón, 2022), and c) any potential relationship with subsequent performances. also, whether type of linguistic item (e.g., morphological vs. syntactic) plays a role in the processing dimension also warrants further probing. this preliminary quasi-experimental study explored the cognitive processes of 10 adult l2 writers with minimal previous exposure to spanish interacting with wcf (both direct and metalinguistic) on morphological and syntactic errors. think aloud data gathered from three ronald p. leow, anne thinglum, stephanie a. leow 652 compositions written within the natural writing conditions of a foreign language curriculum were transcribed, coded for depth of processing (dop) (leow, 2015), and correlated with subsequent performances on the target items. the results revealed: 1) a higher dop for metalinguistic wcf, 2) differences in processing of linguistic items, 3) similar dop over time, and 4) a beneficial relationship between dop and subsequent performances. recommendations for future research underscore the importance of acknowledging variables within the instructed setting that may impact a pure effect of wcf on l2 development. keywords: wcf processing; type of linguistic item; isla applied; think aloud protocols; depth of processing 1. introduction writing comprises an important component in many language curricula in which composing is not only promoted as an outside classroom assignment but also formally evaluated within a testing condition. writing in the second/foreign language (l2) classroom is also closely linked to the provision of written corrective feedback (wcf), which typically forms an integral part of such written production. wcf can be viewed as “any external manipulation of l2 writers’ product by the teacher or the researcher designed to minimally draw their attention to some grammatical, lexical, structural, and/or content error committed by the l2 writers” (leow, 2020, p. 99). the effects of type and amount of wcf on l2 development have permeated the writing strand of research for many decades (see leow, 2020, for a recent review), while the relative paucity of studies addressing type of linguistic item (e.g., lexical, morphological, syntactic) has also been targeted as a potential variable warranting further investigation (manchón & leow, 2020). it can also be observed that the majority of wcf studies have approached the role of wcf from a product-oriented (versus process-oriented) and non-curricular (lacking any association with the language curriculum) perspective (leow, 2020). a product-oriented approach relies on the product of revised compositions (after the process of revising) while a process-oriented approach gathers concurrent data to first establish the cognitive processes and strategies employed during the revision phase before addressing any potential effect of wcf on subsequent l2 development. the few studies adopting both a process-oriented and curricular approach (e.g., caras, 2019; coyle et al., 2018) underscore the need for further research on the processing dimension of the l2 writer’s engagement with wcf in this instructed setting (leow, 2020) and, more specifically, from an instructed second language acquisition (isla) applied perspective (leow & manchón, wcf processing in the l2 curriculum: a look at type of wcf, type of linguistic item, and l2 performance 653 2022; manchón & leow, 2020). according to leow (2019a), applied isla comprises studies that investigate the potential effects of many variables in the instructed setting (e.g., the role of wcf in l2 development in a laboratory setting) but are usually not situated within the language curriculum. isla applied seeks to inform practical pedagogical practices by situating this same provision of wcf within the syllabus or language curriculum. in an effort to better understand how l2 writers process type of wcf, this preliminary quasi-experimental study explored the cognitive processes and depth of processing (dop) of adult l2 writers interacting with both direct and metalinguistic wcf on morphological and syntactic errors gathered within the natural writing conditions of a foreign language curriculum and semester-long syllabus. dop was defined as “the relative amount of cognitive effort, level of analysis, and elaboration of intake, together with the usage of prior knowledge, hypothesis testing, and rule formation employed in decoding and encoding some grammatical or lexical item in the input” (leow 2015, p. 204). whether this processing varied according to type of linguistic item and over time and any relationship between dop during rewrites and potential l2 performance were also investigated. 2. theoretical underpinnings there are several theoretical underpinnings in isla wcf literature that may account for the role of wcf during the revision phase of the l2 writing process (see leow & suh, 2022 for a recent review). leow’s (2020) feedback processing framework was selected for this study based on its cognitive explanation for the role of corrective feedback in l2 development premised on how l2 writers process such feedback. according to the framework, feedback on l2 writers’ output comprises the l2 information to which l2 writers need to minimally pay attention in order for feedback intake to enter into their working memory. feedback processing is the stage that addresses how l2 writers cognitively process the feedback (if at all) and is related to their current knowledge (whether accurate or inaccurate). if further processed at this stage, and regardless of levels of dop or awareness, the framework predicts that information in the feedback allows for: 1) reinforcement of accurate prior knowledge or 2) potential restructuring of previously learned inaccurate knowledge stored in the l2 writers’ internal system. new restructured information, irrespective of accuracy, replaces or joins the original prior knowledge in the internal system, which is then available for the knowledge processing stage. of importance is the postulation that l2 writers may still retain the previous inaccurate l2 data and now possess both (accurate and inaccurate) options in the system. at the output stage, old (or inaccurate) output may indicate a potential absence or low depth of prior processing of the ronald p. leow, anne thinglum, stephanie a. leow 654 wcf provided or not much confidence in the newly restructured knowledge if the feedback information was internalized. new or modified output represents l2 writers’ production of the restructured l2, thus representing the l2 knowledge currently in their internal system. this current knowledge may be a result of item learning (a chunk of language or a simple repetition of the feedback) that may be temporary or immediate. it may also be systemized learning (available to be generated to different but similar outputs) indicating that accurate restructuring did take place. evidence of l2 writers retaining their accurate restructuring of the feedback in future production reflects systemized learning while l2 writers reverting back to their previous inaccurate interlanguage reflects item learning. other variables that may play a role in feedback processing include “depth of processing, levels of awareness, activation of appropriate prior knowledge, hypothesis testing, rule formulation, and/or metacognition” (leow, 2020, p. 105). 3. review of the literature 3.1. the revelations of wcf research a recent review of wcf studies (leow, 2020) reveals: 1) inconclusive findings regarding the benefits of type of wcf, 2) a higher focus on a product-oriented approach to the effect of wcf than a process-oriented one (how such wcf was processed), 3) assumptions made on wcf processing (e.g., indirect wcf promotes deeper processing while direct wcf reduces cognitive load), 4) an overall belief that type of linguistic item may play a role during the provision of wcf although there is a dearth of unfocused studies beyond english grammatical items aligned with an authentic classroom setting, 5) overall global measures to address specifically what l2 writers “learned” from wcf, and 6) experimental designs not aligned with the language curriculum and typically of a one-shot laboratory-based design offering minimal pedagogical extrapolations. however, leow (2020) also reported an increase in wcf studies adopting 1) a writing-to-learn perspective of wcf provision (e.g., manchón, 2011), 2) a process-oriented research perspective (e.g., leow & manchón, 2022; manchón & leow, 2020) evidenced by using concurrent data elicitation procedures (e.g., caras, 2019 for online verbal reports and manchón et al., 2020 for offline written languaging), 3) a curricular approach (e.g., caras, 2019), and 4) an isla applied approach (leow & manchón, 2022; manchón & leow, 2020). given that wcf is external l2 data, whether l2 writers adequately process provided feedback or even understand it remains to be robustly established. to better understand the role wcf plays in subsequent restructuring and potential learning warrants a full investigation into how l2 writers process wcf. to this end, concurrent data gathered during the revision phase are essential to provide wcf processing in the l2 curriculum: a look at type of wcf, type of linguistic item, and l2 performance 655 relevant insights into the potential connection between the writing processes during revision and l2 learning. 3.2. motivation for the present study situating the writing-to-learn strand of research within a process-oriented and curricular approach is important if researchers wish to extrapolate empirical findings to the instructed setting (isla applied). this approach allows researchers to address the dearth of concurrent data on the cognitive processes employed by l2 writers during the revision phases of the l2 writing process. a better understanding of how l2 writers interact with or process wcf on different types of linguistic items together with any potential relationship with subsequent l2 development will: 1) elucidate the writing-to-learn process and 2) allow researchers to avoid making assumptions on how l2 writers process wcf. concurrent data will also provide insights into, for example, how l2 writers process linguistic items, perhaps based on the type (e.g., morphological vs. syntactic) and characteristics (e.g., saliency, complexity, etc.) of the error produced, and the role of dop during the revision process. such rich data can only lead to pedagogical implications aimed at promoting robust learning from the isla applied strand of research (leow & manchón, 2022; manchón & leow, 2020). to this end, the research design of this study followed the one employed in caras (2019). data collection occurred at one level (first-semester) of the language curriculum, curriculum-based compositions were carefully designed to elicit, via prompts, target linguistic items, feedback was unfocused due to ecological validity while the two target items were selected for investigation. furthermore, to adhere more closely to the exemplar of an isla applied research design (leow & manchón, 2022), several modifications were implemented: 1) compositions were written at home and not in the language laboratory, 2) no time limit was set, 3) data were gathered over three compositions with different topics during the semester, and 4) a within-subject design was employed in which participants received both types of wcf. the following research questions guided the present study: rq1: how do adult l2 writers process type of feedback (i.e., direct vs. metalinguistic) during the revision phases? rq2: does this processing vary: (a) according to type of linguistic item (i.e., morphological vs. syntactic) and (b) over time? rq3: is there any relationship between depth of processing during rewrites and l2 performances as measured on subsequent compositions, curricular tests, and final exam? ronald p. leow, anne thinglum, stephanie a. leow 656 4. research design 4.1. participants ten beginning english-speaking learners of spanish (1st of 4 semesters to fulfill a college-level language requirement) with minimal previous exposure to spanish were drawn from the larger population of the writing research project study in progress targeting several linguistic items across different proficiency levels in the language curriculum. participants comprised three males and seven females with an average age of 19 years. inclusion was based on fulfilling the criteria of having minimal previous knowledge of spanish and submitting the first three compositions assigned during the semester together with associated think aloud (ta) protocols. together with eight other students with some previous high school knowledge of spanish, they attended three 50-minute weekly sessions for 14 weeks (approximately 35 hours of formal exposure). spanish was spoken almost exclusively in class after the first day and the methodology was communicative with a focus on all four skills. participants/students were informed early in the semester about the concept of dop and its potential contribution to any type of learning and subsequent retention.1 they were also encouraged to follow the curricular policy of preparing the syllabus activities before attending class. instruction was virtual (zoom) due to the covid pandemic. 4.2. target linguistic items two target linguistic items, known for being problematic for early-stage englishspeaking learners of spanish as a foreign language, were selected. the morphological target linguistic item comprised the spanish agreement between noun and adjective (e.g., la casa blanca “the house white” where the masculine adjective blanco changes to blanca to agree with the feminine noun casa). the syntactic target linguistic item was two levels of the gustar structure. as stated by cerezo et al. (2016), referencing housen and simoens (2016), “spanish gustar structures pose multiple problems for l1 english speakers from a developmental, psycholinguistic, linguistic, and pedagogical perspective, all of which add to their overall learning difficulty” (p. 273). they reported four levels of gustar [level 1: me/te gusta(n) “i/you like (something)” > level 2: le/les gusta(n) “he/she/you/they like (something)” > level 3: a juan le gusta(n) “juan likes (something)” > level 4: a juan y a marisol les gusta(n) “juan and marisol like (something)”] based on the number of steps l2 learners need to take to either process or produce each level (see cerezo et al., 2016 for further elaboration). the current study investigated levels 1 and 3. 1 being a research institution, students and the teaching staff in this department are usually kept informed of theoretically-driven and empirically-supported research findings that promote more robust learning. wcf processing in the l2 curriculum: a look at type of wcf, type of linguistic item, and l2 performance 657 4.3. type of wcf the two types of wcf were direct and metalinguistic, which was accompanied by a metalinguistic sheet titled abbreviations and correction symbols with grammatical information (see appendix a for a sample of the abbreviations and symbols). for direct wcf, the incorrect agreement was crossed out and replaced by either the correct adjectival or verbal bolded form as seen below: agreement: mi compañera de clase es muy serio seria. gustar: me gusta gustan mis clases este semestre. for metalinguistic wcf, the incorrect agreement was bolded and accompanied by a symbol (e.g., agr = agreement) related to the metalinguistic sheet. agreement: mi compañera de clase es muy serio agr. gustar: me gusta agr mis clases de español. 4.4. data the data to address research questions 1 and 2a comprised two of the three curriculum-based compositions in which the two target linguistic items (in addition to others) were embedded in the prompts. these compositions were assigned during the regular semester based on the chapter topic, vocabulary, and grammar recently covered. the required length was approximately 300 words. composition 1 (yo mismo/a y mis clases “myself and my classes” in week 3 after 5 hours of formal exposure) provides a sample of the prompts designed to elicit the target linguistic items while adhering to the curricular learning objectives of the course up to that point in the semester (see appendix b). composition 2 (la información personal y el horario de mis amigos “personal information and my friends’ schedules” in week 7 after 13 hours of formal exposure) provides an example of embedded previous target items (agreement and gustar) in subsequent compositions to address potential retention of wcf information (see also appendix b). composition 3 (mis actividades (pasadas y actuales) durante el año pasado y este semestre “my activities (past and present) during the last year and this semester) was assigned in week 12. to address whether there was a relationship between dop and potential l2 learning as measured within the language curriculum learning outcomes, performances were scored on the participants’ responses to the wcf provided on the rewrites and also on items embedded in test 1 (administered after composition 1) and test 2 (administered after composition 2) and also in the final exam. in test 1, test 2, and the final exam, similar prompts from the previous compositions were included in the written production section. ronald p. leow, anne thinglum, stephanie a. leow 658 4.5. procedure participants followed the current procedure of composition writing in the language curriculum. they received a topic with several prompts to address, a set of guidelines and grammatical points to be covered, and a specific length. subsequently, using the computer at home, they wrote and rewrote (after type of feedback was provided alternatingly, for example, metalinguistic on composition 1, direct on composition 2, etc.) their compositions. they were also given a document with instructions on the preparation (e.g., use of voice memos, garage band (ios), voice recorder, audacity, samsung voice recordings, or easy voice recorder) and procedure that included ta practice (see appendix c), and instructions to upload their files to a server using their participant numbers. at the end of the semester, participants completed an online questionnaire (see appendix d) addressing their preference of wcf, the reason for their selection, and their opinion of thinking aloud. 4.6. coding participants’ ta protocols were coded for dop of the target linguistic items during the revision phase. leow’s (2015) coding scheme, premised on leow’s (2012) correlations between levels of processing and levels of awareness, was adopted for this study. more specifically, low dop was correlated with awareness at the level of noticing (i.e., minimally mentioning the correction), medium dop correlated with awareness at the level of reporting (i.e., making some comments), and high dop correlated with awareness at the level of understanding of the underlying rule (schmidt, 1990). however, leow (2015) indicated that while high dop may be evidenced in the ta protocol, this does not suggest that the l2 learner understood the underlying rule present in the wcf. therefore, high dop may be associated with either plus or minus awareness at the level of understanding. interrater reliability among three raters was 93%, which was raised to 100% after discussion between the raters. samples of dop for the gustar structure are presented in table 1. table 1 samples of dop for the gustar structure depth of processing example +h (high dop/+(awareness at the level of) understanding . . . a mi madre . . . a personal . . . a mi madre . . . so she likes, so it’s pleasing to her . . . i’m going to use le gustó, or she liked . . . so le gustó. [metalinguistic] +h (high dop/-(awareness at the level of) understanding . . . i forgot the “a” in the next sentence . . . so the next sentence should be a jacqueline le gusta su clase de literatura . . . so, then i forgot the le gusta . . . [direct] +m (medium dop/+(awareness at the level of) reporting . . . y sus amigos . . . uh, les gusta . . . i feel like i should be doing les gustan . . . but i’m not sure about that . . . i’ll check that later [metalinguistic] +l (low dop)/+(awareness at the level of) noticing . . . se gusta su profesor (did not address the direct wcf provided) [direct] wcf processing in the l2 curriculum: a look at type of wcf, type of linguistic item, and l2 performance 659 4.7. scoring participants’ responses to the wcf provided on the rewrites and on items embedded in test 1, test 2, and the final exam were scored 1 correct or 0 incorrect for agreement between nouns and adjectives while for gustar 1 (totally correct), .5 (partial, viewed globally, for example, me gusta las clases, manuel le gustan las clases = .5), or zero (e.g., yo gusto) were assigned. 5. results to address rq1 that sought to investigate how adult l2 writers process type of feedback (direct vs. metalinguistic) during the revision phases, the percentages of instances of dop coded on the ta protocols for participants in each wcf condition on table 2 revealed that, while the overall level of dop was high for both wcf conditions, it was higher at this level for metalinguistic wcf (100% for +h) when compared to direct wcf (60% for +h). in addition, both types of wcf elicited relatively similar +h/+understanding (50% and 40% for the metalinguistic and direct, respectively). table 2 depth of processing in direct and metalinguistic wcf conditions dop direct % metalinguistic % +h/+understanding 40 50 +h/-understanding 20 50 +m/+reporting 20 0 +l/+noticing 20 0 the questionnaire (see appendix d) revealed a split 50% for either type of wcf. this result was unexpected given: 1) the assumed low dop or cognitive effort required for direct wcf and 2) the low level of proficiency that arguably lacks a sophisticated repertoire of grammatical knowledge. for direct wcf, responses mainly focused on the ease of processing and identifying errors while critiquing the metalinguistic sheet (see appendix a) for its complexity. participants opting for metalinguistic wcf expressed that this type of wcf prompted them to think more and deeper in order to learn from mistakes. interestingly, on thinking aloud, 90% reported that it allowed them to “talk” their way through the composing and rewrites and helped them to identify problem areas. to address rq2a, that is, whether the level of processing varied according to type of linguistic item (morphological vs. syntactic), the data revealed that participants processed both the morphological (agreement) and syntactic (level 1 of gustar) linguistic items relatively equally but processed agreement substantially more than the higher level of gustar (level 3). in addition, several participants mentioned ronald p. leow, anne thinglum, stephanie a. leow 660 the agreement rule during both the composing and rewrite stages of the second and third compositions, indicating high awareness of this phenomenon in spanish. regarding whether the level of processing wcf was maintained over the semester (rq2b), the amount of time participants spent during the revision phases and the dop data over the three compositions were examined. participants spent a relatively similar average of 30, 21, and 26 minutes during the three revision phases while the dop data indicated that they continued to report a relatively high level of processing for both linguistic items (agreement and level 1 of gustar). a further analysis of the number of words and time spent on the original compositions together with their respective dop data appeared to support participants’ relatively high dop. the range of words written from composition 1 to composition 3 was as follows: 139-436, 341-758, and 378-505 words, respectively. almost all participants met the word requirements in all compositions, and yet the average amount of minutes spent on the original compositions was reduced substantially from 95 minutes on composition 1 to 68 and 60 minutes on the second and third compositions, respectively. the dop data revealed several instances of reactivation of the target linguistic rules as participants composed compositions 2 and 3. for example, on the second composition: “la clase de historia es muy intensivo. ok so here “intensivo” is adjective which is modifying “clase,” so i am going to change that to “intensiva” and on the third composition: “so, the classes i like . . . so “me gustan” because i am doing multiple classes . . . .” the reduction of time in spite of longer compositions, together with the dop data, appeared to indicate a substantial reduction of cognitive effort during composing and processing the wcf as the semester progressed. crucially, agreement was practiced or embedded in much of the course materials and compositions, level 1 of gustar was less practiced or embedded when compared to agreement and level 3 of gustar even less so during the semester. table 3 levels of gustar investigated in the current study level of gustar example level 1 me/te gusta(n) “i/you like (something)” i really do not like zoom so i can use “gustar” here . . . so i want to say i don’t like zoom so i start with “no” “no me gusta zoom.” so “no me gusta” . . . hmmm . . . “me gusta” and zoom is doing the pleasing . . . so i’m going to conjugate it “gustar” with an “a” and not “gusto” so, “no me gusta zoom” hmm . . . so, the classes i like . . . so “me gustan” because i am doing multiple classes, so “me gustan las clases” . . . [participant c] level 3 a juan le gusta(n) “juan likes (something)” a mi madre . . . a personal . . . a mi madre . . . so she likes, so it’s pleasing to her . . . i’m going to use le gustó, or she liked . . . so le gustó. [participant g] to address rq3 that sought to address whether there was a relationship between dop and subsequent performances on the tests and final exam, data revealed that participants (70%) who demonstrated +high dop/+understanding wcf processing in the l2 curriculum: a look at type of wcf, type of linguistic item, and l2 performance 661 showed over 95% agreement accuracy on test 1, test 2, and the final written and oral exams, in which agreement items were embedded. for the gustar structure, accurate performance required a high dop plus awareness at the level of understanding, as reported in table 3. participants (60%) demonstrating a high level of dop, indicating awareness of the underlying rule, were 90% accurate on the tests and final exam for level 1 while only two participants who were +h/+understanding for level 3 were accurate on similar structures on the final exam. at the same time, lower levels of dop revealed uncertainty with the gustar rule, which led to inaccurate production on the tests and final exam. . . . yo gusto . . . so, that would be . . . change that to me gusto . . . i believe that’s correct [+m dop] comp. #2: se gusta su profesor (did not address the direct wcf provided) [+l dop] comp. #3: mi padre se gusta hacer una camineta even when the wcf led to accuracy during the rewrite phase, robust internalization of the structure rule was apparently not achieved as observed in this protocol in which participant b received metalinguistic feedback on his original composition: . . . me gusta agr mis clases de . . . no me gusta mis clases de . . . during the wcf stage: . . . me uh agreement uh oh me gustan mis clases de español. no me gustan um my classes . . . yet he was inaccurate on the final exam, indicating a lack of processing at a level indicative of restructuring and understanding of the structural rule. 6. discussion the current study aimed to adopt a process-oriented isla research design (leow & manchón, 2022; manchón & leow, 2020) that followed an isla applied perspective (leow, 2019a) by embedding the design within a language curriculum to gather concurrent data on l2 writers’ cognitive engagement with wcf in this authentic instructed setting. the data revealed that while the overall dop for both wcf conditions was relatively high, the provision of metalinguistic wcf led to higher dop as compared to that observed when processing direct wcf (100% vs. 60%, respectively). this overall higher dop for metalinguistic wcf over direct wcf supports similar reports on different spanish linguistic items (e.g., ser vs. estar and preterit vs. imperfect, see caras, 2019), but also differs substantially from those reports with respect to the percentages of l2 writers processing at a high dop. caras (2019) reported that while some of her metalinguistic wcf participants processed at a medium dop, most in both metalinguistic and direct wcf conditions demonstrated an overall low dop. in this study, 60% (direct) and ronald p. leow, anne thinglum, stephanie a. leow 662 100% (metalinguistic) of the l2 writers demonstrated a high dop (+h) but remarkably 40% (direct) and 50% (metalinguistic) also processed at the highest level of dop (+h/+awareness at the level of understanding). given that both populations – caras’s (2019) and the current study’s – were drawn from the same level of language proficiency in the same language curriculum, several plausible explanations can account for these discrepancies in the dop data. first, the target linguistic items were different: adjectival agreement and the gustar structure versus the copulas ser and estar and the preterit and imperfect tenses, which underscores that different types of linguistic items may be processed differentially. second, the context in which empirical data are gathered may be highly relevant (leow, 2022). while caras’s participants wrote during their regular class sessions with a time limit of 50-55 minutes, in the current study, writing was performed out of class and there was no time limit. there were several instances of ta protocols lasting over 90 minutes, clearly contributing to the higher dop observed in this study. third, while data were gathered on one composition with one topic in caras’s study, the current study collected data from three compositions with different topics that also embedded previously target linguistic items in the requested topic content to address the issue of retention. the opportunity to continue to process the target items in subsequent compositions did appear to have raised the level of processing as exemplified in the overall high dop coded in the tas protocols on the second and third compositions. fourth, while participants in caras’s study were not true beginners (as evidenced on their high pretest scores), those in the current study had minimal high school prior knowledge. this plausibly explains, in addition to the time limit, the difference in dop between the two studies given that prior knowledge tends to lead to lower levels of cognitive effort (e.g., bergsleithner, 2019) while highlighting the role of prior knowledge or language proficiency in the wcf strand of research. fifth, the sample population of this study comprised one intact class versus that of caras’s, which included participants from several sections at the same level. sixth, participants in this study were taught by one of the researchers, which could have led to a potential hawthorne effect.2 with regard to type of linguistic items (morphological vs. syntactic), the data revealed that processing the noun/adjective agreement with +h dop/+understanding together with ample practice and exposure appeared to have led to a high level of accuracy by almost all participants. processing the me gusta/n structure (level 1) with a similar high dop, even without ample practice or exposure, also appeared 2 teachers across all levels who have taken part in the writing project have reported a noticeable improvement in students’ performances on both at-home compositions and those produced within a testing condition. wcf processing in the l2 curriculum: a look at type of wcf, type of linguistic item, and l2 performance 663 to have produced similar results. however, these l2 writers demonstrated difficulty achieving +dop/+understanding for the higher level of gustar [level 3: a juan le gusta(n)]; this was captured in the ta protocols that revealed some level of confusion regarding a full understanding of the complex structure. two plausible explanations can be provided. first, as postulated by cerezo et al. (2016), the higher level of this syntactic structure is problematic based on the greater number of steps necessary to take to either process or produce these levels. second, this higher level was introduced late in the semester when compared to the lower level that was introduced earlier. hence, these l2 writers did not have the amount of exposure to and practice with level 3 when compared to level 1. the two l2 writers who did process level 3 at +h dop/+understanding also demonstrated accuracy in the final exam. the link between +h dop/+understanding and subsequent accuracy appears to support similar findings of previous wcf research (e.g., kim & bowles, 2019; park & kim, 2019) and other strands of research (see leow, 2019b), including the role of awareness in l2 development (see leow & donatelli, 2017 for a recent review). the data also revealed that while dop of the target linguistic items remained relatively high during all the rewrites (including the writing of the original compositions) across the semester, the amount of cognitive effort displayed was substantially lower when compared to the first composition (both original and rewrite). indeed, the speed of activation and appropriateness of knowledge observed in these l2 writers’ accuracy of their l2 production on their second and third compositions lend empirical support for the knowledge processing stage of leow’s (2015) model of the l2 learning process in isla (see also bergsleithner, 2019 for similar empirical support) that underlies his feedback processing framework (leow, 2020). finally, the beneficial relationship evidenced between high dop and subsequent l2 learning lends further empirical evidence to several previous studies that have reported a similar type of relationship (see leow, 2019b for several studies that have reported similar beneficial relationships). one unique feature of the current study was the participation of one of the researchers as the teacher of the sample population. this participation arguably leads to more insights into participants’ performance given the direct knowledge of the classroom setting (format or procedure, structure, type of interaction, etc.), curriculum (textbook, methodology, learning outcomes, homework, test structures, etc.), and the relationships established between the teacher and students during the semester. these are variables all external to the role of wcf that are usually not controlled or even mentioned by previous wcf studies. however, knowing participants can clearly offer insights into their behavioral performances. participant c was analytic and always highly prepared ronald p. leow, anne thinglum, stephanie a. leow 664 for class; he also verbalized the full underlying rules for levels 1 and 3 of gustar, typically processed at the highest level during both composing and revising, and reported several instances of metacognition while composing his compositions (e.g., “i can show my knowledge of time here! tengo la clase (la clase es femenina), tengo la clase de español a las diez de la mañana”). he wrote 320, 528, and 523 words on his three compositions and spent an average of 90 and 47 minutes on the original compositions and rewrites, respectively. compared to participant c, which may raise the potential issue of individual differences in terms of attitude, self-efficacy, and self-confidence, participant b wrote 267, 367, and 335 words on his three compositions and spent an average of 80 and 26 minutes on his original and rewrites (with more errors), respectively. he claimed around mid-semester in an office meeting that he not only found studying spanish difficult but also studying in general, wrote in one composition soy un poco tonto “i am not smart,” and overall demonstrated low self-esteem. while his original compositions revealed much cognitive effort, he demonstrated an overall medium dop while addressing the wcf during his rewrites. indeed, as the protocol reported above for this participant revealed, his immediate accuracy on the rewrite, clearly based on addressing the issue of verbal agreement and not as part of the gustar structure, did not translate into retention, as measured on the final exam. this processing behavior exemplifies one of the postulations of leow’s (2020) feedback processing framework that explains this immediate performance, typically demonstrated after the provision of feedback but not sustained at a later date. in addition, the level of accuracy of many of these ten l2 writers on the target linguistic items clearly did not originate solely from the wcf provided on their compositions. perhaps the wcf could have raised their awareness of their errors but the data appear to indicate that how they processed such grammatical information might have played a more important role. participants also submitted written homework that focused on the target linguistic items covered in the textbook, listened to and read l2 data with the target items, and also practiced them orally (e.g., showing a photo of their family members and describing their characteristics and personalities – agreement), sharing their likes or dislikes (gustar) during breakout room sessions or whole class activities. perhaps more crucially, when viewed from an isla applied perspective with curricular and pedagogical ramifications, were two observations, namely, the previous composition format, and the methodology employed in the course. first, the typical composition employed previously in the language curriculum was shorter (e.g., a minimum of 10 lines or 150 words) with a more global composition topic (e.g., “include a description of yourself, place of origin, year and major, and a description of your courses and professors”), which lent itself to open-ended responses that might not have allowed adequate written practice wcf processing in the l2 curriculum: a look at type of wcf, type of linguistic item, and l2 performance 665 with recently covered target linguistic items. in the current study, participants/students were guided carefully via the use of specific prompts to address required information that necessitated the use of these items (see appendix b). this format led students to write more detailed and controlled compositions that, ultimately, provided more focused practice and opportunities for deeper processing of the target items across all compositions at this proficiency level. second, recall that students were informed early in the semester about the concept of dop and cognitive engagement and their potential contributions to any type of learning and subsequent retention. their overall cognitive engagement, welldocumented in their preparation for and active participation in all class sessions throughout the semester, may provide a plausible explanation not only for the relatively high use of reactivation of prior linguistic knowledge during the second and third compositions but also for the relatively high level of accuracy (with the exception of level 3 of gustar) when compared to the relatively low increase of accuracy or correction rates reported in previous wcf studies over a shorter period of time (e.g., caras, 2019; shintani & ellis, 2013). these findings have led to a curricular change in the writing component of the language curriculum, not only at the beginning level but across the entire curriculum. 7. conclusion, implications, and directions for future research this preliminary quasi-experimental study sought to add to and advance the process-oriented isla research agenda for the writing-to-learn wcf strand of research (leow, 2020; manchón & leow, 2020) together with an isla applied perspective (leow, 2019a; leow & manchón, 2022) that situates the research design within an authentic syllabus and language curriculum. the data revealed, for this small sample, that while an overall high dop was observed in the ta protocols, the metalinguistic wcf condition demonstrated a higher level of dop when compared to direct wcf, an unsurprising result. what was notable was the +high dop/+understanding reported in the ta protocols in both wcf conditions (40% and 50% for direct and metalinguistic wcf, respectively). however, it was also observed that the preferred type of wcf was split evenly by these l2 writers who were exposed to both types during the semester. the link between dop and performances on related linguistic items on the tests and final exam also appeared to indicate that it may not be the type of wcf l2 writers receive from their teachers that plays an important role in subsequent l2 development but how they process such wcf. at the same time, it was also noted that, in a quasi-experimental study embedded within the language curriculum across the entire semester, the role of wcf is arguably not the only variable that may contribute to subsequent l2 development. the writing component is not separate ronald p. leow, anne thinglum, stephanie a. leow 666 from other skill components in the curriculum, given that other activities and assignments do include practice with target linguistic items during the course of the semester, and there is repeated but differential exposure to target items in the content of the pedagogical materials throughout the semester. in other words, the methodological or ecological question may be whether we attempt to tease out the role of wcf, quite challenging if adhering to an isla applied perspective, or simply acknowledge the authentic classroom setting, together with several other variables (e.g., individual differences, curricular differences, etc.) that potentially may impact the pure effect of wcf on subsequent l2 development. the data also revealed that type of linguistic item (i.e., noun-adjectival agreement vs. two levels of the gustar structure) may play a role in how l2 writers process wcf. however, given that types of linguistic items do vary in levels of complexity/difficulty and saliency, in addition to the amount or frequency of exposure and classroom practice, this variable clearly warrants future research. in addition, while this small sample of l2 writers continued to demonstrate a relatively high level of dop during both the original composing and rewrites of the second and third compositions, the amount of cognitive effort was observed to be reduced when compared to the first composition (both original and rewrite). situating the present study within an isla applied perspective does have major pedagogical and curricular implications. as pointed out in leow (2020), 1) the data (both online and offline) are authentic as related to the language curriculum (versus a laboratory-based setting), 2) they are gathered longitudinally (versus a one-shot design) within a given syllabus and over the course of a language course, 3) there is ecological validity in the findings, and 4) teachers can easily associate the findings as pertinent to curricular learning outcomes. two additional pedagogical extrapolations derived from this study may be: 1) the potential value of underscoring the importance of cognitive engagement while composing and revising l2 compositions, which may support the promotion of robust learning from the isla applied writing-to-learn strand of research (leow & manchón, 2022; manchón & leow, 2020) and 2) the suggestion to provide students with pertinent topics accompanied by well-designed prompts to promote deeper processing of problematic l2 items. future wcf studies framed within this process-oriented isla applied research design are indeed warranted to address, with larger samples, variables that include similar or other types of wcf and linguistic items, level of language proficiency, individual differences, length of compositions, the potential of transfer of modality, different educational levels, etc. together with much needed comparative probing of l2 writers’ processing dimensions during both their original and rewrite stages. wcf processing in the l2 curriculum: a look at type of wcf, type of linguistic item, and l2 performance 667 references bergsleithner, j. m. 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(1990). the role of consciousness in second language learning. applied linguistics, 11, 129-158. shintani, n., & ellis, r. (2013). the comparative effect of direct written corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation on learners’ explicit and implicit knowledge of the english indefinite article. journal of second language writing, 22, 286-306. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2013.03.011 wcf processing in the l2 curriculum: a look at type of wcf, type of linguistic item, and l2 performance 669 appendix a sample of abbreviations and correction symbols sheet (metalinguistic wcf) a personal a todavía no he conocido ̂ tu noviaàtodavía no he conocido a tu novia adj adjective ella es bien estudianteàella es buena estudiante es importaàes importante agr agreement el casa blanco > la casa blanca cons construction mi hermano y yo nos gustaba...àa mi hermano y a mí nos gustaba... g gender la temaàel tema él es una persona buenoàél es una persona buena ronald p. leow, anne thinglum, stephanie a. leow 670 appendix b composition prompts composición 1: yo mismo/a y mis clases write a composition about yourself and your classes. answer each point to guide your composition. [only pertinent prompts are provided.] párrafo (paragraph) #1: introduce yourself including the personal information requested below. 1. presentación de ti mismo/a (your name and your personal characteristics and personality. you must use at least 2 of the personal characteristic adjectives and 2 of the personality characteristic adjectives provided below plus any others if so desired). [características personales: alto, bajo, mediano, guapo, bonito, delgado, gordo] [personalidad: simpático, introvertido, extrovertido, sincero, cómico, divertido, gregario] 2.-4. párrafo #2: 1. 2. descripción de tus clases y tu estado temporal (describe each class that you are taking and how you are (you feel) in each class. for each class you describe, use adjectives from clases below to describe the class and adjectives from estado temporal below to describe your emotional state, plus any others if so desired.) [clases: bueno, aburrido, intensivo, favorito, malo, espantoso, largo (long)] [estado temporal: tonto, perdido, serio, interesado, contento, aburrido] 3. 4. the classes you like 5. the classes you don’t like 6. the one class you like the best (más) 7. the one class you like least (menos) puntos de gramática para incluir en la escritura de la composición: artículos; número y género (concordancia); verbos ser y estar; los números 0-30; gustar extensión: aproximadamente 300 palabras. composición 2: la información personal y el horario de mis amigos write the personal information and daily schedule (morning, afternoon, and evening) of two friends, one male and the other female. answer each point to guide your composition. [only pertinent prompts are provided.] párrafo #1: 1. la información de tu compañero y compañera (their names and physical characteristics and personalities. (you must use at least 2 of the personal characteristic adjectives and 2 of the personality characteristic adjectives provided below plus any others if so desired). [características: alto, bajo, mediano, guapo, bonito, delgado, gordo] wcf processing in the l2 curriculum: a look at type of wcf, type of linguistic item, and l2 performance 671 [personalidad: simpático, discreto, tímido, creativo, decidido, divertido, metódico] 2.-7. 8. the classes each one of your friends likes 9. the classes each one doesn’t like 10. the class each one likes the most 11. the class each one likes the least párrafo #2: puntos de gramática: el número y género (concordancia); verbos ser y estar; el tiempo presente, la hora, la frecuencia (siempre, nunca, a veces etc.), gustar extensión: aproximadamente 300 palabras. ronald p. leow, anne thinglum, stephanie a. leow 672 appendix c ta practice instruction solve the following math word problem by thinking your thoughts aloud while the audio recording app is recording your voice. “thinking your thoughts aloud” is like talking to yourself aloud or, literally, saying aloud whatever is going through your head at that moment. you may speak in whatever language you prefer, but please be sure to speak in a loud, clear voice so that the audio recording app can pick up your voice. please note that the purpose of this math word problem is for you to practice thinking your thoughts aloud, not to have your math skills assessed. math word problem: theodore went to the supermarket. he bought two dozen eggs for $2.50/dozen, organic milk for $5.49, laundry detergent for $12, and eight cartons of yogurt at 80 cents each. how much did theodore spend? wcf processing in the l2 curriculum: a look at type of wcf, type of linguistic item, and l2 performance 673 appendix d participant questionnaire 1. your instructor used two different types of feedback methods listed below this semester. which composition feedback do you believe was more beneficial to the development of your spanish writing? [options: direct feedback (instructor corrects your errors by providing the correct wording), metalinguistic feedback (instructor writes correction symbols and you figure out how to correct your error] 2. why do you think the method you chose helped you improve more than the other method? 3. if you spoke your thoughts aloud while writing, what did you think of that experience? 547 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (3). 2020. 547-578 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.3.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context yuko goto butler university of pennsylvania, philadelphia, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9531-3469 ybutler@upenn.edu abstract this study examines young english readers’ ability to infer word meanings in context and to use metacognitive knowledge for constructing word meanings in relation to their reading performance. the participants were 61 fourth-grade students in the united states, comprising 24 monolingual english-speaking (me) students and 37 english-as-a-second-language (l2) students; each group was also divided into strong and emergent readers in english. participants were asked to read aloud paragraphs containing words unfamiliar to them in two different contextual conditions (i.e., explicit and implicit conditions), to guess the unfamiliar word meanings, and to tell a teacher how they arrived at the inferred meanings. quantitative analyses found significant differences between strong and emergent readers in their oral fluency as well as in their ability to infer word meanings and articulate their use of metacognitive knowledge. although significant differences were found in the ability to infer word meanings and the use of metacognitive reasoning between me and l2 students, such differences disappeared after controlling for the size of students’ receptive vocabulary. qualitative analyses also revealed differences in the kinds of knowledge and strategies that strong and emergent readers relied on when constructing the meaning of unknown words in both explicit and implicit contexts. keywords: young learners; vocabulary; strategies; meaning construction; context yuko goto butler 548 1. introduction it is well known that vocabulary plays a critical role in reading comprehension (marulis & neuman, 2010; moghadam, zainal, & ghaderpour, 2012; takanishi & menestrel, 2017), although the precise mechanism linking learners’ vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension is not totally clear (cain, oakhill, & lemmon, 2004). many studies have reported positive relationships between learners’ vocabulary size (i.e., how many words they know, also referred to as vocabulary breadth) and their reading comprehension (duke & carlisle, 2011; national institute of health, 2000; tannenbaum, torgesen, & wagner, 2006), but vocabulary size is only one aspect of learners’ vocabulary knowledge (nation, 2013). to better understand the relationship between young readers’ vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, their depth of vocabulary knowledge, or “richness of word understandings” (proctor, silverman, harring, & montecillo, 2012, p. 1636) and their ability to construct word meanings in a given context (duke & carlisle, 2011; walters, 2004) must be examined as well. unfortunately, however, there is a paucity of research looking into young readers’ depth of vocabulary, their ability to infer meanings in context, and how such lexical abilities relate to reading comprehension. research in this area is particularly limited when it comes to young learners of a second language (l2). this study, therefore, focuses on young english readers (both monolingual students and l2 learners at the upper-elementary school level) and aims to provide insights into: (a) their ability to infer meaning and define words in context, (b) their use of metacognitive knowledge for constructing word meanings, and, finally, (c) how such ability and knowledge relate to their reading performance. information gained from this study is likely to be useful for developing effective strategy instruction for young l2 readers as well for emergent readers. in this paper, “young learners” and “young readers” are used synonymously and are defined as school-age children (both monolingual and l2learning children) up to the age of 12. 2. literature review 2.1. knowledge and strategies to infer and construct word meaning in context vocabulary size, receptive vocabulary size in particular, is often reported to be highly correlated with reading comprehension among both l1 and l2 readers. for example, it is well known that adult english l2 learners need to be familiar with at least 95% to 98% of the words in a text in order to comprehend the text independently (without getting help from teachers, dictionaries, and other means; e.g., laufer, 1997; schmitt, jiang, & grabe, 2011). recent studies on adult l2 readers, however, the ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context 549 have uncovered complex relationships between vocabulary size and reading comprehension. for example, masrai (2019) found that among high-proficient adult english l2 readers, vocabulary size of mid-frequent words contributed most to their reading comprehension, rather than vocabulary size of most-frequent words or lowfrequent words. simply counting the number of known words, therefore, tells us only a partial story of the mechanism of reading comprehension. vocabulary depth is a complex notion, and researchers have proposed numerous ways to conceptualize it (schmitt, 2014). some researchers have looked at word depth on a continuum from partial to precise knowledge, proceeding from never having seen a word, through the middle stages of having a general sense of the meaning, to knowing it well (dale, 1965). cronbach (1942) discussed vocabulary depth in relation to ability levels, ranging from generalization (the ability to define a word) to availability (the ability to use a word in production). other researchers have proposed a receptive-productive knowledge continuum, although it is not easy to determine where on the continuum a word becomes available for productive use (read, 2000). still others have conceptualized vocabulary depth as a composition of multiple elements, such as knowledge of spoken form (e.g., pronunciation), written form (e.g., spelling), meaning, grammar, collocation, register, frequency, and associations (for detailed discussions, refer to nation, 2013, and schmitt, 2014). because young readers are in the midst of rapid development of word knowledge, the ability to infer and construct word meaning in context appears to be critical for their reading comprehension. indeed, average young readers have to deal with many unfamiliar words when they read. nagy and herman (1987) estimated that the average english-speaking fifth grader encounters at least 10,000 different unknown words in a year. because words “often have more than one meaning,” even if young readers “know” the word, they still need to identify the most suitable meaning for a given context (nagy & scott, 2000, p. 72). in reality, while young readers may have clearer representations of certain words, they may only have partial knowledge of others, and as such they must constantly revise or add meanings to their vocabulary knowledge to make sense of texts. to successfully infer word meanings in context, what kind of knowledge is necessary? nagy (1995) proposed that three types of knowledge influence readers’ contextual inferencing: linguistic knowledge, world knowledge, and strategic knowledge. linguistic knowledge includes readers’ vocabulary size, knowledge about possible word meanings (what nagy called “word schemas”), and syntactic knowledge. world knowledge refers to readers’ concepts about the world. strategic knowledge is readers’ metacognitive control over their cognitive resources when reading. with respect to linguistic knowledge, l2 researchers have found that internal lexical representations (i.e., readers’ knowledge about phonological, orthographical and morphological information about the word in question), as well as yuko goto butler 550 knowledge of syntactical and semantic relations among words and discourse knowledge, play a significant role in the inference of word meaning (e.g., de bot, paribakht, & wesche, 1997; haynes, 1993; ke & koda, 2019; paribakht & wesche, 1999). decoding accuracy appears to be associated with word meaning inference in l2 as well (prior et al., 2014). in l1 research, it is well documented that children as young as two, if not younger, are able to rely on parts of speech and other syntactic information to arrive at the meanings of new words (westermann & mani, 2018). the roles of world knowledge and strategic knowledge in inferring word meanings in context are much less understood. nassaji (2003) found that adult l2 readers relied most heavily on world knowledge when making lexical inferences in reading. in an l1 context, diakidoy (1998) found that us sixth graders’ prior knowledge about the content of passages predicted their comprehension, which in turn influenced their learning of unknown words in the passages. the value of strategic knowledge is thought to be important from an instructional point of view. nassaji also reported that, among adult english learners, repeating the word or sections of the text was the most popular strategy for lexical inference, followed by analogy (i.e., guessing based on other phonologically or orthographically similar words), and verifying (i.e., checking appropriateness against the wider textual context). huckin and block (1993) proposed a cognitive processing model of l2 lexical inference that involves cognitive and metalinguistic control processing. cognitive processing is a quick and dynamic process that takes place in various components, or what they referred to as modules, including vocabulary knowledge, morphosyntax knowledge, world knowledge, knowledge about textual discourse patterns, and so forth. metalinguistic processing is both a linear and parallel process in which hypotheses about word meanings are generated and tested in context. the model predicts that, with these two processes activating together, a reader can infer meaning by strategically deciding how to use various knowledge types while interacting with contextual sources. 2.2. the role of context in constructing word meaning constructing meaning in context may not always happen effortlessly, but conscious and strategic use of textual context facilitates students’ ability to infer the meaning of unknown words. researchers have conceptualized context differently (walters, 2004). some have classified it based on the explicitness or implicitness of cues, others have paid attention to the location of cues for inference (i.e., local vs. global cues), and still others have focused on the types of knowledge required for making inferences. for example, carton (1971) argues that context is composed of intralingual context (arising from knowledge about the target language), interlingual context (cues from other languages, including loan the ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context 551 words and cognates), and extralingual context (arising from world knowledge and the target culture). similarly, but somewhat more simply, pressley, levin, and mcdaniel (1987) distinguished external context from internal context, defining external context as “surrounding sentence and paragraph cues” and internal context as “inspection of word parts” (p. 121). this distinction is worth noting because the influence of internal context has often been neglected or underestimated in studies due to the use of pseudowords as test stimuli. even in the absence of many external cues, lexical/morphological knowledge (internal context) could provide enough cues to help readers guess the meaning of some words. beck, mckeown, and mcgaslin (1983) distinguished pedagogical contexts from natural contexts. pedagogical contexts are specially designed for instructional purposes, and they contain explicit information to help students guess the meaning of unknown words. in contrast, natural contexts do not contain such explicit cues. importantly, the majority of words in authentic texts appear without explicit contextual information. there are very few empirical studies investigating the role of context in inferring word meaning among young learners. in cain, oakhill, and lemmon (2004), l1 readers aged 9-10 with less developed reading comprehension skills found it more challenging than their more skilled counterparts to infer the meaning of unknown words (pseudowords were used) in contexts that required more processing demands (i.e., the cues for the word meaning did not appear in the immediate context). from a different perspective, cain and oakhill (2014) examined the impact of young l1 readers’ word knowledge (both size and depth) on two types of inferences: local cohesion inferences (i.e., making connections between propositions by relying on synonyms or mapping related lexical items) and global coherence inferences (i.e., using vocabulary knowledge or general world knowledge to fill in gaps). both types of inferences were associated with reading comprehension, but the students’ vocabulary knowledge, their depth of knowledge in particular (measured by defining word meaning and judging similarities in the meaning of pairs of words), was more important for global coherence inferences than for local cohesion inferences. 2.3. variables associated with young learners’ reading comprehension in addition to word-meaning inference abilities, many other possible variables influence reading comprehension. concerning young l1 readers, research consistently reports strong relationships among word recognition (including phonological awareness), reading fluency, and reading comprehension (e.g., national institute of health, 2000). interestingly, various oral language abilities (e.g., listening comprehension, syntactic complexity in spoken language, etc.) show increasingly yuko goto butler 552 stronger associations with reading comprehension from the early to later elementary school years, perhaps at least in part because the growing complexity of texts for upper-grade students requires more sophisticated language knowledge in general (duke & carlisle, 2011). toward the middle and upper elementary school years, some children start exhibiting difficulties in reading, a phenomenon known as the fourth-grade slump (chall, 1987). importantly, the major challenges experienced by students going through the fourth-grade slump appear to differ from the major challenges experienced by students who start having reading difficulties at earlier grades. rather than struggling with word recognition, students who face challenges at upper primary grades seem to have difficulties with texts that contain increasingly more unfamiliar and abstract words and that pose heavier conceptual demands (kucan & palincsar, 2011). working memory also influences their performance (cain et al., 2004). the timing of the onset of these challenges coincides with the drastic development of their metacognitive abilities, including metalinguistic knowledge such as knowledge of morphosyntax (anglin, miller, & wakefield, 1993). in addition, various home factors, such as the frequency of storybook reading at home, are found to influence reading comprehension throughout kindergarten to upper elementary school (sénéchal, 2006). importantly, such home factors interact with school factors. various instructional approaches and techniques (e.g., types of questions students are asked, teachers’ interactive styles of engagement, the amount of time spent on reading tasks, etc.) all appear to influence reading comprehension (duke & carlisle, 2011). 2.4. reading among young l2 readers compared with the large body of research on young l1 readers, empirical information on young l2 readers is relatively limited. the variables addressed in the previous section, such as oral language proficiency, reading fluency, decoding skills, word recognition in the target language, as well as working memory, socioeconomic status (ses), and literacy environment at home, also by and large apply to young l2 readers (e.g., august & shanahan, 2006). however, research has also shown that, compared with monolingual children, young l2 readers have different types of linguistic knowledge (including vocabulary knowledge), background knowledge, and metacognitive reading strategies, depending on their unique bilingual experiences (e.g., garcía, 1991; jimenez, garcía, & pearson, 1996; peregoy & boyle, 2000; verhoeven, 2011). young l2 readers’ l1 decoding skills and vocabulary knowledge can have some positive effects on their l2 reading, but the effects appear to depend on their l1-l2 typological combination and their chance of receiving high-quality l1 instruction (e.g., proctor et the ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context 553 al., 2012). while the importance of bilingualism is increasingly recognized in education, language-minority children worldwide are often denied access to reading instruction (and schooling) in their home language. identifying unique characteristics of young l2 readers can offer useful information for improving instruction, but comparative studies of l1 and l2 readers need to be conducted with careful consideration since researchers can easily overlook l2 readers’ home language resources and unique bilingual experiences. for example, it is frequently reported that young l2 learners have smaller vocabulary sizes both in their l1 and l2 compared with their respective monolingual counterparts (e.g., bialystok, luk, peets, & yang, 2010; carlo et al., 2004; mancilla-martinez & lesaux, 2011). however, l2 learners are usually exposed to l1 and l2 words in different contexts with different purposes, and their l1 and l2 vocabularies largely do not overlap (e.g., peña, bedore, & zlatic-giunta, 2002). in studies where l2 readers’ vocabulary in their home language was taken into account, their overall vocabulary size (l1 and l2 combined) was compatible with that of their monolingual peers (e.g., butler, 2019; de houwer, 2009; goodrich & lonigan, 2018). 3. research questions unfortunately, many young l2 learners around the world receive school instruction only in their target language. improving our understanding of the relationship between young readers’ – particularly young l2 readers’ – ability to construct word meaning in context and their reading comprehension, has great potential to inform the development of useful strategy instruction for young readers in need. therefore, the present study, as part of a larger study investigating the role of lexical abilities in young learners’ reading comprehension, explores the following questions related to english reading: · rq1: among fourth-grade students (both monolingual and bilingual) who have received academic instruction only in english, are there any differences in their performance, in relation to their reading comprehension levels (reading – strong readers vs. emergent readers) and language backgrounds (language – monolingual english-speaking students vs. l2 students), in the following areas? vocabulary size (receptive domain); oral reading fluency; inference of meaning of unfamiliar words; metacognitive reasoning to arrive at meaning. yuko goto butler 554 · rq2: does context (explicit context vs. implicit context) influence the students’ performance, in relation to their reading levels and language backgrounds, when inferring/constructing the meaning of unfamiliar words? · rq3: how does context influence the kinds of knowledge and strategies the students use when inferring/constructing the meaning of unfamiliar words? the study focuses on fourth graders because this grade is a critical time for children’s reading development (recall the fourth-grade slump, chall, 1987) and because it is when children start drastically improving their metacognitive skills (anglin et al., 1993). with respect to context, this study adopts the conceptualizations of pressley et al. (1987) and beck et al. (1983) mentioned above, and compares two context conditions: explicit and implicit contexts. the former contains more external information “surrounding sentence and paragraph cues” (pressley et al., 1987, p. 121), while the latter has very little such external information. thus, learners must rely more on “inspection of word parts” (p. 121). the explicit context is designed to be more pedagogically friendly because it provides learners with more information that they can use for making lexical inferences. it should be emphasized that this study focuses on how students infer and explain word meanings for reading comprehension rather than for vocabulary learning (a distinction suggested by nation, 2013). even if a reader can successfully infer word meanings in a given context, it does not necessarily mean that the same individual could learn such words from the context. moreover, in examining learners’ abilities to infer word meaning, some researchers make a distinction between source of knowledge (e.g., linguistic knowledge, world knowledge, etc.) and strategies (e.g., analyzing, monitoring, etc.; e.g., nassaji, 2003). however, our data among children did not always allow us to make such a distinction reliably; consequently, the present study combines these elements and refers to them as inference knowledge and strategies hereafter. 4. method 4.1. participants the participants were 61 fourth-grade students (aged 9-10) in the united states from a single school district. twenty-four of them were monolingual englishspeaking students (me students), and 37 were l2 learners of english from either spanishor vietnamese-speaking homes.1 in an effort to minimize variations in the amount and type of formal english instruction participants had previously 1 there were 14 spanish-speaking students and 23 vietnamese-speaking students in the study. the ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context 555 received, we included only participants (both me and l2 students) who had been enrolled in the same schools since kindergarten.2 the l2 students all received english language development (eld) instruction (i.e., they were pulled out of regular classes and received individual or small group eld instruction) but had received no special support in their home language at school. all participants came from title i schools, meaning that they came from middle to lower socioeconomic status (ses) backgrounds. responses to questionnaires distributed to the participants’ parents as part of this study also indicated that there were no major differences in ses (measured by parental educational levels and occupation, the number of books at home, habits of reading to children, etc.) across groups.3 both me and l2 students were further categorized as either strong or emergent readers based on their reading levels in english. the reading level for l2 students was gauged by the following measurements: (a) a standardized reading test (reading performance on the stanford achievement test; using normal curve equivalent [nce] scores, students scoring 40 and lower were grouped as emergent readers and students scoring 60 and higher were grouped as strong readers); (b) san diego quick (a reading diagnostic test); (c) a district-administered running record (a teacher-based assessment in which miscues and self-corrections during oral reading were examined by teachers), and a recommendation from district eld teachers. the stanford achievement test was the only measurement used to determine reading levels for me students. the same criterion based on nce described above was used to group me students into strong and emergent readers. the average nces for stanford achievement test reading scores were 70.5 for strong me readers (me+), 25.3 for emergent me readers (me–), 70.2 for strong l2 readers (l2+), and 30.7 for emergent l2 readers (l2–).4 all the l2 participants were originally judged as english-language learners (ells) who needed special eld assistance when they entered kindergarten. at the time of their participation in this study (while they were enrolled in the fourth 2 the precise age of first intensive exposure to english among l2 students was not known, but it was earlier than 5 years of age. 3 there was no statistically significant difference in the years of schooling among parents with different l1: 14.4, 13.0, and 11.5 years for english, vietnamese, and spanish speakers, respectively. all the l2 students’ parents indicated that both english and the students’ home language (either vietnamese or spanish) were used at home, except one vietnamese family who reported that vietnamese was almost exclusively used at home. 4 for l2 students, there was no significant difference in the average scores of stanford achievement test by their home languages. for the l2+ students, the average scores were 70.3 and 69.9 for vietnamese and spanish groups, respectively. for the l2students, the average scores were 27.8 and 32.6 for vietnamese and spanish, respectively. because the numbers of each language group were small and there was no home language support at school among the l2 students, systematic analyses by home language were not performed in this study. yuko goto butler 556 grade), all l2+ readers were classified as fluent english proficient (fep) students and were no longer classified as ells by the district, while all l2-readers were still classified as ells. however, all l2 students from both reading groups had acquired sufficient oral skills in english based on a standardized test (the idea oral language proficiency test, ipt), which was also used by the district as a redesignation criterion. namely, l2-students in the study were still classified as ells because they had not yet met the districts’ criteria in reading and writing for redesignation, even though they had already acquired sufficient oral skills in english. participants were randomly selected from the students at the participating schools who met the preceding criteria. 4.2. instruments and procedures two vocabulary assessments were employed in this study. first, to assess the size of students’ english receptive vocabularies, the peabody picture vocabulary testrevised (ppvt-r, dunn & dunn, 1981, referred to as ppvt hereafter) was individually administered. second, in order to assess students’ ability to infer and explain word meanings in context, a vocabulary assessment (referred to as the inference assessment hereafter) was developed and administered. this assessment had two components. first, students were asked to read aloud short paragraphs that contained words that were unfamiliar to them, and then they were asked to guess the meanings of the unfamiliar words in question. this was designed to assess their reading fluency and ability to infer and explain the meaning of specified words in context. the students were allowed to read the paragraphs silently after reading them aloud if they wished to do so. they were also allowed to ask the administrator the meanings of any unfamiliar words (if any) besides the words in question. second, immediately after inferring the meaning of each word, students were asked to explain how they arrived at the meanings of the words as they defined them. this question was designed to elicit their use of metacognitive reasoning for determining the meanings of the words in question. the inference assessment consisted of 20 items that were assumed to be unfamiliar5 to fourth graders, and two versions of this test (each version with the same set of 20 items) were prepared. half of the words in each version were presented with explicit external contextual information and the other half were presented 5 unfamiliarity was originally judged by two eld specialists and one fourth-grade teacher at one of the participating schools. the words identified by the teachers as being potentially “unfamiliar” were pilot tested with fourth graders at a nonparticipating school within the same district. six me students and 10 l2 students who were considered to be strong readers were tested in the pilot study. the final words used in the inference assessment were composed of words that none of the pilot study participants had known. the ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context 557 with implicit contextual information. as is evident from the following example, the paragraphs were short, and every effort was made to keep the syntax simple: explicit context the teacher left ricardo to watch the class while she went to make copies. she told him to be responsible and make sure we kept working on our project. she wanted him to oversee us. implicit context the teacher left ricardo with the class while she went to make copies. she wanted him to oversee us. the items were counterbalanced, with half of the students in each group taking version 1 and the other half taking version 2 of the test. the items were selected from a larger pool of items for which four research assistants with eld teaching experience had graded the explicitness of contextual information on a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being least explicit and 5 being most explicit. only the pairs whose difference in average rating was more than 2.5 scores apart were selected as final test items. the average score for items with explicit context was 4.3; for items with implicit context the average score was 1.3. note that we controlled only for external contextual information; the degree of explicitness was judged based on the availability of external contextual cues (e.g., restatements of the word meaning, examples, and synonyms) but not on the availability of internal contextual cues (e.g., affixes and compounds). all the words in question were actual nouns, verbs, and adjectives; we did not use pseudowords (see the appendix for the list of words used in the inference assessment). the assessment was conducted individually by a district eld coordinator with more than 10 years of teaching experience. she was blind to the backgrounds of the participating students. 4.3. data analyses all of the students’ responses as well as their interactions with the teacher during the inference assessment were audio-recorded and transcribed. several different coding systems were employed to analyze the data, as explained below. for each coding system, 12 students (three students from each group) were randomly chosen, and their responses were independently coded by two researchers. the disagreements were discussed (accounting for approximately 15% to 20% of the items for each coding system), and the rest of the data were independently coded again. intraclass correlation coefficients between the two raters for the entire data set were calculated for each coding system, as reported below. the transcribed data were also analyzed qualitatively in order to understand the students’ use of metacognitive knowledge. yuko goto butler 558 first, overall fluency was judged based on students’ performance when they read the item paragraphs aloud, and it was coded once for each student. overall fluency was intended to holistically capture the level of speed and accuracy in oral text reading and was judged using a scale from 0 to 3 (where 0 indicated “not fluent” and 3 indicated “very fluent”). in other words, it was a gross measurement of students’ ease in oral reading processing. the intraclass correlation coefficient was .91. second, students’ ability to infer and define words in context (defining words, considered a kind of depth of word knowledge in previous research) was coded for each of the students’ responses. a 4-point scale was employed (where 0 was “mentioned completely irrelevant meaning in the given context or no response” and 3 was “could clearly define a relevant meaning in context”). even if an answer did not exactly match the conventional meaning but the definition perfectly made sense in the given context, students could score a 3 (although such cases were rare). admittedly, this coding could not unpack students’ abilities to construct word meaning and to articulate ideas. what this coding captured, therefore, was their ability to articulate constructed meanings. the intraclass correlation coefficient was .92. in addition, word category identification was also coded for each response. this coding aimed to capture to what extent students’ explanations of word meanings matched the lexical categories of the target words, such as nouns, verbs, and so forth. this is considered a kind of vocabulary knowledge (depth) that gives us additional information on the accuracy of their inference. a 3-point scale (where 0 was “did not match the target lexical category” and 2 was “perfectly matches”) was employed. the intraclass correlation coefficient was .88. finally, students’ use of metacognitive knowledge was analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. for the quantitative analysis, first, the degree of metacognitive reasoning was judged holistically using a 4-point scale (0 was “no sign of metacognitive reasoning” and 3 indicated “extensive metacognitive reasoning”) for each response. this measure captures how well students could articulate their reasoning in meaning making. to receive a 3 for this measure, for example, students needed to provide an involved explanation or theory for why they gave a particular definition, such as identifying one or more specific sources of cues in context. the intraclass correlation coefficient was .85. to further examine the source of inferencing knowledge and strategies, the following coding scheme was developed inductively while consulting with previous studies of strategies employed by adult learners (e.g., nassaji, 2003; paribakht & wesche, 1999): (a) phonological cues; (b) lexical cues (e.g., use of knowledge of compound and root words, morphological knowledge such as prefixes and suffixes, and use of first language lexical knowledge or cognates); (c) world knowledge; (d) external contextual information (use of contextual cues available in the text); (e) partial memory/knowledge (use the ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context 559 of partial knowledge of the word in question); and (f) unspecified or no response.6 the first two categories (phonological and lexical cues) concern internal information residing in the target words, whereas the next three (world knowledge, external contextual information, and the partial memory/knowledge) concern information external to the targeted words. thus, for example, identifying a synonym of the target word in a given paragraph is categorized as the use of external contextual information. multiple entries were possible for this coding, although it hardly happened.7 the intraclass correlation coefficient was .91. 5. results before answering the research questions, it was necessary to confirm that the two versions of the inference assessment were indeed compatible. first, the reliabilities of the two versions of the assessment were checked. the reliability coefficients (cronbach’s alpha) were .85 for version 1 and .76 for version 2. second, the mean scores of defining words of the two versions were compared. the means for versions 1 and 2 were 1.92 and 1.76, respectively, and a one-way anova failed to find a significant difference (f(1, 38) = .59, p > .1, ηp2 = .03). thus, the scores from both versions were combined for the analyses described below. 5.1. students’ ability to infer and define words in context and other related abilities by group first, the students’ performance on the ppvt (receptive vocabulary size) and the inference assessment (overall reading fluency, defining words, word category identification, and metacognitive reasoning) was examined. the descriptive results (means and standard deviations) are indicated in table 1. with respect to the ppvt, students’ performance was normalized with a mean (m) of 50 and a standard deviation (sd) of 21.06.8 a two-way anova indicated significant differences 6 one can argue that reading texts silently after the read-aloud (an option given to the students) can be a strategy. in the current study, it was not coded as a strategy. this is because when the students made a pause before responding and it was not clear whether they were reading the text silently or thinking about the meaning of the target word. a systematic analysis on the potential impact of this strategy can be a topic of future investigation. 7 out of 10 items for each contextual condition, the average numbers of coding per child were 10.20 (for the explicit context condition) and 10.24 (for the implicit context condition). it was very unlikely that the multiple coding significantly inflated the frequencies of each category of metacognitive knowledge and strategies for inferring word meaning. 8 the normed scores were used for the ppvt because the normalization was based on a large, nationwide representative sample in the usa, and all the participating students in this yuko goto butler 560 between strong and emergent readers (f(1, 57) = 41.22, p < .001, ηp2 = .42) and me and l2 readers (f(1, 57) = 19.25, p < .001, ηp2 = .25). it failed to find a significant interaction effect, however (f(1, 57) = .83, p =.37, ηp2 = .01). note that for l2 students, only their l2 (english) vocabulary size was assessed, without taking their l1 vocabulary knowledge into account; as discussed in the literature review section, because this could be a potential bias towards l2 students, ppvt is used as a covariate in the analyses below. in comparing the mean scores across groups for the rest of the measures, a series of two-factor anovas were employed, first without controlling for ppvt and then controlling for ppvt (ppvt was used as a covariate). as shown in table 2, when no covariate was used, significant differences between strong and emergent readers were found in all these measures, and differences between me and l2 readers were found only for defining words and metacognitive reasoning. none of the variables showed interaction effects. after controlling for ppvt, a significant main effect for reading level was found for all the measures (overall fluency, defining words, word category identification, and metacognitive reasoning) while the main effect for language in defining words and metacognitive reasoning disappeared. in other words, when we controlled for students’ receptive vocabulary size, all the other measures examined in the inference assessment showed differences in performance between strong and emergent readers (strong readers having higher scores) but failed to show any difference in performance between me and l2 students. table 1 means and standard deviations for overall fluency, defining word meaning, word category identification, and metacognitive reasoning monolingual english-speaking (me) readers english as a second language (l2) readers strong (me+) (n = 12) emergent (me–) (n = 12) strong (l2+) (n = 18) emergent (l2–) (n = 19) ppvta 66.92 (15.30) 38.67 (13.05) 46.50 (14.83) 25.26 (15.15) overall fluency (0-3) 2.83 (.58) 1.25 (.87) 2.83 (.38) 1.37 (.68) defining words (0-3) 2.33 (.39) 1.61 (.33) 2.07 (.33) 1.45 (.40) word category (0-2) 1.86 (.13) 1.56 (.34) 1.79 (.14) 1.50 (.15) metacognitive reasoning (0-3) 2.48 (.23) 1.90 (.30) 2.25 (.25)b 1.69 (.34) notes. word category identification scores were based on a 3-point scale (from 0 to 2), and the others were based on a 4-point scale (from 0 to 3). standard deviations are indicated in parentheses. anormalized scores. bn = 17 (one student could not offer any reasoning and was thus was excluded from the metacognitive reasoning analysis). study received schooling only in english. although the ppvt has been used extensively among l2 learners as well, problems with using it with l2 learners have been raised, and potential influence in performance from the students’ l1 was reported (e.g., goriot et al., 2018). the ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context 561 table 2 comparison of mean scores across groups no covariate ppvt controlled main effect reading main effect language interaction main effect reading main effect language interaction strong vs. emergent me vs. l2 reading vs. language strong vs. emergent me vs. l2 reading vs. language overall fluency f(1, 57) = 84.38** (ηp = .60) f(1, 57) = .13 (ηp2 = .002) f(1, 57) = .13 (ηp2 = .002) f(1, 56) = 39.39** (ηp2 = .35) f(1, 56) = 3.48 (ηp2 = .06) f(1, 56) < .001 (ηp2 < .001) defining words f(1, 57) = 50.41** (ηp2 = .47) f(1, 57) = 5.00* (ηp2 = .08) f(1, 57) = .29 (ηp2 = .01) f(1, 56) = 10.82* (ηp2 = .16) f(1, 56) = .01 (ηp2 < .001) f(1, 56) < .001 (ηp2 < .001) word category f(1, 57) = 33.43** (ηp2 = .37) f(1, 57) = 1.62 (ηp2 = .03) f(1, 57) = .001 (ηp2 < .001) f(1, 56) = 9.74* (ηp2 = .15) f(1, 56) < .001 (ηp2 < .001) f(1, 56) = .05 (ηp2 < .001) metacognitive reasoning f(1, 56) = 55.96** (ηp2 = .5) f(1, 56) = 8.39** (ηp2 = .13) f(1, 56) = .042 (ηp2 = .84) f(1, 55) = 13.52** (ηp2 = .20) f(1, 55) = .42 (ηp2 = .01) f(1, 55) = .09 (ηp2 < .001) notes. ** p < .001, * p < .05. effect sizes (partial eta-squared, ηp2) are indicated in parentheses. 5.2. the role of context in inferring word meaning when examining students’ performance in defining words in context, we also compared performance in explicit and implicit contextual conditions across groups (figure 1). a two-factor anova with a repeated measure (context being a within-subject measure) indicated that there were main effects in reading level (f(1, 57) = 50.00, p < .001, ηp2 = .47), language (f(1, 57) = 5.08, p = .028, ηp2 = .08), and context (f(1, 57) = 78.51, p < .001, ηp2 = .58). there was no interaction effect.9 after controlling for ppvt, there were main effects in reading level (f(1, 56) = 10.62, p = .002, ηp2 = .16) and context (f(1, 56) = 21.11, p < .001, ηp2 = .27), whereas the main effect for language disappeared (f(1, 56) = .01, p = .94, ηp2 = .00). an interaction effect was found between language and context (f(1, 56) = 5.19, p = .027, ηp2 = .09) when controlling for ppvt (although the effect size was small).10 next, students’ degree of metacognitive reasoning in explicit and implicit contexts was compared (figure 2). as explained above, this measure captures how well students can articulate their reasoning for arriving at the meaning of words in context. a two-factor anova with repeated measures showed that there were main effects in reading level (f(1, 56) = 52.83, p < .001, ηp2 = .49), language (f(1, 56) = 7.84, p = .007, ηp2 = .12), and context (f(1, 56) = 16.88, p < .001, ηp2 =.23). 9 the results of the interactions were as follows: context and language (f(1, 57) = 2.30, p = .14, ηp2 = .04); context and reading (f(1, 57) = 3.06, p = .09, ηp2 = .05); and context, language, and reading (f(1, 57) = 1.52, p = .22, ηp2 = .03). 10 other interactions were not significant: context and reading (f(1, 56) = .02, p = .88, ηp2 = .00); and context, language, and reading (f(1, 56) = 1.06, p = .31, ηp2 = .02). yuko goto butler 562 there was no interaction effect.11 after controlling for ppvt, only the main effect in reading level was significant (f(1, 55) = 12.05, p < .001, ηp2 = .18).12 figure 1 defining words by context (means and sds; the black lines indicate sds for each group). figure 2 metacognitive reasoning by context (means and sds; the black lines indicate sds for each group). 11 the results of other interactions were as follows: context and language (f(1, 56) = .14, p = .72, ηp2 = .002); context and reading (f(1, 56) = 3.10, p = .08, ηp2 = .05); and context, language, and reading (f(1, 56) = .43, p = .52, ηp2 = .008). 12 the results of others were as follows: language (f(1, 55) = .28, p = .60, ηp2 = .005); context (f(1, 55) = 1.77, p = .14, ηp2 = .03); context and language (f(1, 55) = .12, p = .73, ηp2 = .002); context and reading (f(1, 55) = 1.66, p = .20, ηp2 = .03); and context, language, and reading (f(1, 55) = .41, p = .53, ηp2 = .007). 0 0,5 1 1,5 2 2,5 3 me+ me– l2+ l2–d ef in in g w o rd -m ea n in g (m ea n ) group explicit context implicit context 0 0,5 1 1,5 2 2,5 3 me+ me– l2+ l2– m et a co g n it iv e re a so n in g (m ea n ) group explicit context implicit context the ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context 563 in sum, after controlling for students’ vocabulary size, students across groups defined words and used metacognitive reasoning better in explicit contexts than in implicit contexts, and stronger readers outperformed emergent readers irrespective of me and l2 status. 5.3. knowledge and strategies for inferring word meaning by context students’ source of knowledge and strategies are shown in figures 3 (explicit context) and 4 (implicit context). the figures indicate the average frequencies that the students used for each category and the standard deviations. in order to get a general picture of their use of knowledge and strategies, a series of twoway anovas with repeated measures were conducted while context was included as the between-subject factor. because multiple comparisons were made, p-value was adjusted to .008. the phonological category was excluded from the anova analyses because the distributions of the residuals were heavily skewed. it turned out the overwhelmingly majority of the students did not use the phonological strategy; only a handful of students repeatedly used it. for the rest of the categories, the results indicated that there were significant differences in the average mean frequencies between the explicit and implicit contexts in external information (f(1, 56) = 10.56, p = .002, ηp2 = .16), partial memory/knowledge (f(1, 56) = 8.77, p = .004, ηp2 = .14), and unspecified/no-response categories (f(1, 56) = 21.37, p < .001, ηp2 = .28).13 for lexical information, a significant difference was found in reading (f(1, 56) = 11.96, p < .001, ηp2 = .18). for partial memory/knowledge, in addition to context, main effects were found both in reading (f(1, 56) = 11.30, p < .001, ηp2 = .17) and language (f(1, 56) = 10.80, p = .002, ηp2 = .16). namely, strong readers on average used the internal lexical information more than emergent readers. strong readers and me readers made more use of partial memory and knowledge. although it did not reach the adjusted significant level, there was an approaching level in the main effect of reading for unspecified/non-response (emergent readers being higher) (f(1, 56) = 6.30, p = .01, ηp2 = .10). no interaction effect was found in any of the categories. note, however, that the frequencies for each category were small and the standard deviations were relatively large, suggesting that there were substantial individual differences. thus, we interpreted the statistical results only for a gross tendency, and then examined the data qualitatively for more detail. 13 statistical results for other strategies were: f(1, 56) = 5.33, p = .025, ηp2 = .09 for lexical knowledge; and f(1, 56) = 5.42, p = .024, ηp2 = .09 for world knowledge. yuko goto butler 564 figure 3 knowledge and strategies to infer word meaning by group in the explicit context figure 4 knowledge and strategies to infer word meaning by group in the implicit context 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 me+ me– l2+ l2– a v er a g e fr eq u en cy pe r st u d en t group phonological lexical world knowledge external partial memory unspecified/ no response 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 me+ me– l2+ l2– a v er a g e fr eq u en cy pe r st u d en t group phonological lexical world knowledge external partial memory unspecified/ no response the ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context 565 in the explicit context, as expected, students frequently relied on external contextual information as a cue, but the sources used often appeared to differ between students who could and could not successfully construct meaning. a close look at the transcription showed that the students who succeeded in constructing meaning in context were usually better at using multiple sources of contextual information available in the entire paragraph. they also tended to monitor and clearly articulate their meaning-construction process, as exemplified by the following case of a strong reader: excerpt 1 student: (reading aloud) i haven’t eaten anything for three days. i am famished.14 i’m very hungry. i think i will go to the store and buy some food. um, he’s amazed? i don’t know, he’s [?] teacher: what do you think? student: i am hungry. he’s really starving. teacher: okay. why do you think it means hungry or starving? student: because it goes, i haven’t eaten anything for three days. that’s a clue that he’s really hungry… and it says right here, i’m very hungry. and he said, i think i’ll go to the store and buy some food, like starving. teacher: good job, and you’re right. famished means starving or hungry. good. by contrast, when the students could not infer the word meaning successfully, they tended to pay attention only to the immediate context of the word in question and guess the meaning by relying on their own knowledge associated with the limited information that they focused on. they also often missed syntactic or cohesion cues such as conjunctions, determiners, and pronouns that would provide readers with relational information among propositions and ultimately help them make suitable inferences in context. below is an example from an emergent reader: excerpt 2 student: (reading aloud) anthony had been working hard for several months, and he was feeling very tired. he decided to take a trip to hawaii. the getaway was just what he needed to relax. teacher: good. what do you think getaway means? student: a jacuzzi? teacher: a jacuzzi? why do you think it means a jacuzzi? student: ‘cause he wants to relax. 14 in the excerpts, the underlined words are the target words. the teacher’s utterances are indicated in capital letters. yuko goto butler 566 “a jacuzzi” was a creative guess, and one can imagine why this student associated this idea with “relaxing.” however, the definite article “the” in front of “getaway” indicates that “the getaway” is supposed to be mutual knowledge between the reader and the writer. thus, introducing a new piece of information (in this case, “a jacuzzi”) is not the most natural reading in this particular context. another notable characteristic of the students’ inference knowledge/strategies in the explicit context condition was relatively high frequencies of the partial memory/knowledge category. the contextual information provided in the explicit condition seemed to help students improve or modify their partially acquired knowledge of the word in question. some students retrieved incidences of encountering the target word somewhere else and used contextual information associated with the previous encounters as well as contextual information in the task at hand to construct the word meaning. for example, when asked what “pending” means after reading “the school board decided to build a new gym at the school last year. but this plan is pending because they don’t have enough money. we don’t have a gym yet,” a student remembered her mother, who was trying to sell a house, saying to her neighbor that “the sale is pending.” another student, after being asked the meaning of “aviator,” realized that he had heard of “aviation” on tv recently and guessed the meaning of “aviator” to be a pilot. students with larger vocabularies seemed to have more advantage in using partial word knowledge/memory (the frequency was the highest among the me+ group, as shown in figure 3), and extra contextual information given in the paragraph helped them refine the meaning of the word in context. this mechanism may in turn assist them in further developing their vocabulary. in the implicit context condition, we can expect that students need to rely more on internal word knowledge and their own world knowledge, given that there is relatively less contextual information available in the paragraphs themselves. this assumption is not necessarily supported in our data. but strong readers, regardless of me and l2 backgrounds, used lexical knowledge more frequently than emergent readers, irrespective of the contexts. for example: excerpt 3 student: (reading aloud) ken really wanted to wear a new suit to the party, but he couldn’t because his new penn-i-less. teacher: because he was. student: . . . he was penni… teacher: penniless. student: . . . penniless. teacher: can you guess what the word penniless means? student: broke. the ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context 567 teacher: and what makes you think that? student: because, uh, i know that penny means and what less means, so i thought he probably doesn’t have any money. teacher: okay. good. penniless means being poor or having no money. other students seemed to use internal word knowledge to ensure that the meaning they constructed based on (limited) external contextual information was appropriate. excerpt 4 student: (reading aloud) at first, the doctor worried about john. then, the new medicine prolonged john’s life. teacher: so, what do you think prolonged means? student: i think it made it longer, it made his life longer. teacher: okay, why? student: well, if, at first the doctor worried about john. then the new medicine . . john’s life. john, that, the last sentence actually gives me a hint. teacher: hmm, okay. and is there anything in the word that also gave you a hint or… student: yes, long! teacher: there’s the word long in there; right. student: yes. teacher: good, and you’re right. prolong means to make longer, to stretch, anything that happens to… student: even bigger. teacher: um-hmm, to extend, right, good. as regards lexical knowledge, students, strong readers in particular, could use knowledge of suffixes and prefixes appropriately in context, when such information was available. in contrast, students’ efforts to use compound word knowledge did not work well on occasion despite their rather creative attempts. students’ difficulty constructing the meaning of compound words reflects the complexity of compound word meanings in english. for instance, one student reasoned that “outgoing girl” means “she goes out a lot,” while another reasoned that “to oversee” means “to double-check” because “over means to do it over, to do it again.” the next example, from an emergent reader, illustrates that segmenting a word is not always easy for students. excerpt 5 student: (reading aloud) the school board decided to build a new gym. but the plan is pending. teacher: the plan is pending. what does pending mean? yuko goto butler 568 student: the plan is pending. um, pending means, like, the plan is working? teacher: um-hmm. what makes you think it means working? student: because they’re using a pen. across different groups, students did not frequently rely on phonological sources of knowledge, but when students used this source, they usually arrived at inappropriate or confusing meanings. those students tended to simply guess the meaning of words based on phonologically similar words, which were completely irrelevant to the context. examples include “bending” and “depending” for the meaning of “pending,” “nice” for the meaning of “durable” (based on the association that this was related to the word “adorable”), and “to show” for the meaning of “apparel” because of its phonological similarity to “appear.” relying on phonologically similar words often resulted in the misidentification of lexical categories as well (e.g., “apparel” is a noun but “appear” is a verb). finally, it is important to note that the frequency of “unspecifiable or no response” was higher among participants in the implicit context (more authentic contexts) than in the explicit contexts (more pedagogically oriented contexts). this finding can serve as a basis for implications for the use of explicit pedagogical texts in vocabulary learning for young readers, emergent readers in particular. 6. discussion this study investigated fourth-grade students’ abilities to infer the meaning of words in context as well as their abilities to employ metacognitive knowledge/strategies to do so. it examined how such abilities differ between strong and emergent readers and between me and l2 readers. it also explored how the explicitness of contextual information influenced the ability to construct meaning among students with different reading proficiency and language backgrounds. how students employ metacognitive sources in two contextual conditions was also investigated. quantitative analyses indicate significant differences between strong and emergent readers in performance in overall fluency, reading aloud, defining words, identifying word categories, and metacognitive reasoning. although performance in defining words and metacognitive reasoning was initially significantly different between me and l2 readers, such differences disappeared after controlling for their receptive vocabulary size. as discussed above, reporting on l2 learners’ vocabulary in the target language only can seriously mislead their “true” lexical knowledge, which is assumed to be spread across languages (e.g., de houwer, 2009). in the present study, after controlling for students’ vocabulary size in english, in addition to other potentially confounding variables (e.g., basic oral proficiency levels in english, ses backgrounds, and the ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context 569 the amount and types of instruction previously received at school), the performances of me and l2 students were found to be compatible. in contrast, differences between strong and emergent readers were unaffected even after controlling for their vocabulary size. the challenges that emergent readers faced, regardless of me and l2 backgrounds, went beyond the need to increase their vocabulary size, including abilities for allocating sufficient mental resources (e.g., memory), making a good use of external information, and enhancing various types of lexical knowledge (i.e., vocabulary depth) in order to process texts for comprehension and articulate responses based on higher order reasoning. all students, irrespective of their backgrounds, were better at defining words and using metacognitive reasoning to construct word meanings in explicit contexts (more pedagogically oriented texts) than in implicit contexts (more authentic texts). providing more explicit contextual information, such as restating the meaning of the target words and offering synonyms and concrete examples, certainly helped all participants construct word meaning; the pedagogical benefits of having explicit information were evident. although all students relied heavily on such external contextual information, readers who successfully could infer the word meaning seemed to be better at fully taking advantage of multiple sources of contextual information in the entire paragraph. by contrast, unsuccessful inference often came from paying insufficient attention to cohesive devices (e.g., conjunctions and determiners) across sentences and focusing on a certain word or phrase that appeared immediately before or after the target word within the same sentence. this finding is consistent with the study conducted by can (2016) among l1 secondary school students which showed that their understanding of cohesive relations, conjunctions in particular, was associated with their reading comprehension levels. the finding in the present study suggests that young readers would also benefit from receiving instructional assistance on how to effectively use more global contextual cues and cohesive devices in meaning construction when they read. explicit contextual information also helped students evoke their partially acquired word knowledge and refine the word meaning in context. as noted previously, word knowledge is multifaceted and gradual (schmitt, 2014). as children are exposed to new words, they refine and modify the meanings every time they encounter them in different contexts. offering explicit contextual information seems to facilitate such a process. it is well known that over time, children with larger vocabulary size tend to develop their vocabulary size more rapidly than their peers with smaller vocabulary size. this phenomenon of cumulative advantage is called the matthew effect (duff, tomblin, & catts, 2015). indeed, students with larger vocabularies in this study appeared to benefit more from the above-mentioned mechanism of refining word meaning, and this mechanism may partially explain why gaps in vocabulary size among students increase over time. yuko goto butler 570 with respect to internal word information, strong readers, regardless of me and l2 backgrounds, used such sources more frequently than emergent readers, irrespective of the textual context conditions. students used knowledge of prefixes and suffixes strategically, when they used such knowledge at all. a study among l1-learning students in grades 4 and 7, as well as high school undertaken by nagy, diakidoy, and anderson (1993) indicated that the participants’ knowledge of suffixes was so influential over their reading comprehension that it can be used as a diagnostic tool. the researchers also found that knowledge of suffixes developed substantially between the fourthand seventh-grade levels. moreover, individual differences in their morphological knowledge grew during the same time period. considering that fourth graders who were strong readers in our study already seemed to benefit from using morphological knowledge to construct meaning in context, it may be a good idea to introduce explicit instruction on morphology to emergent readers at this grade level, if not earlier, before gaps in knowledge between strong and emergent readers become even more substantial. unlike participants’ experiences with morphology, as exemplified in the “outgoing” and “oversee” cases reported above, the students appeared to find it challenging to identify the meaning of compound words regardless of their background. indeed, syntactic and semantic relations within compounds in english are not straightforward. for example, “a magnifying glass” is a glass that magnifies, but “a looking glass” is not a glass that looks. moreover, the meaning of a compound is not necessarily a combination of the meanings of each root. complicated internal structures of english compounds are language specific. in english, there is no limit to the number of words that are allowed to be put together. various types of combinations of lexical categories are possible, and determining the lexical category of compounds can be confusing for young learners. the lexical category of compounds usually follows the lexical category of the final root. for example, headstrong (noun + adjective) is an adjective and cellphone (noun + noun) is a noun. there are exceptions, however. hands-on (noun + preposition) is not a preposition but an adjective, whereas higher-up (adjective + preposition) is a noun. children need to understand such complexity associated with compounds. again, it may be beneficial to have occasional explicit instruction on word formation in english as part of reading instruction in order to raise students’ awareness of complex internal structures of compounds, as addressed above. curiously, there was hardly any instance of l2 students relying on cognates or their l1 knowledge in this study. this may be related to the fact that the l2 students in this study did not receive formal academic instruction in their l1 at school; they were not taught how to make use of their l1 resources at school. the lack of explicit reliance on l1 knowledge may also be due to the fact that vietnamese was the l1 of the majority of the l2 students in this study, and vietnamese the ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context 571 is not related to english and thus has no cognates. small sample sizes and an unbalanced number of students with vietnamese and spanish backgrounds did not allow us to conduct any systematic analyses of the influence of their l1 over their performance in the inference assessment. for a future study, it would be worthwhile to systematically investigate the role of l1 in students’ meaning-making processes and strategies during their l2 reading (and ideally in their l1 reading as well). in implicit contexts, namely more authentic texts, young readers had greater frequencies of unspecified and no responses than in the explicit context (a more pedagogical condition). it seems that less authentic texts more effectively support young readers (emergent readers in particular) in constructing word meaning in context with their more explicit cues. until young readers have developed a certain level of ability to use both external and internal information to make sense of word meaning in context, providing them with authentic texts without any assistance (independent reading) may have a limited effect on improving their reading comprehension. there are a few limitations in this study. first, because paragraphs in the inference assessment were rather short, we were able to examine students’ ability to use relatively local cohesion relationships but had limited capacity to thoroughly examine the role of global contextual information – information that goes beyond a single lexical or phrasal cue that connects propositions. global coherence inference requires readers to construct relevant lexical and mental networks in order to fill gaps in concepts that are not directly stated in the text. it would be interesting to investigate the role of global contexts in children’s meaning-making processes. second, only the students’ receptive vocabulary size in english was obtained in this study. for l2 readers, it would have been better if their vocabulary knowledge in their l1 had been taken into account (even though the participants in this study had academic instruction exclusively in english). moreover, information on participants’ expressive vocabulary would have been useful, even though all the participants were identified as orally proficient by a standardized measure (i.e., ipt). this is because one could argue that expressive vocabulary might be a better indicator of children’s ability to define word meanings and express their metacognitive reasoning. having information on students’ expressive vocabulary size would be particularly helpful for l2 readers because larger gaps between receptive and productive vocabulary are often found among bilingual children (e.g., gibson, jarmulowicz, & oller, 2018). furthermore, in this study we focused on understanding how young students construct the meaning of unknown words but not on their actual learning of such words. research examining how the meaning-making process relates to the learning of words would be of great value. yuko goto butler 572 7. conclusion although there is substantial research on young learners’ vocabulary size and its relation to reading comprehension, students’ ability to construct meaning in context is not well understood. this study investigated fourth-grade students’ ability to infer and define meanings of unknown words in context and how they use metacognitive knowledge and strategies to arrive at meanings in two different contexts (i.e., explicit and implicit contexts). the study found that such abilities differed between strong and emergent readers as well as between me and l2 readers. importantly, however, after controlling for the students’ english receptive vocabulary size, me and l2 readers were compatible in their performance. the study also found that the students used more strategies in the explicit context and used different strategies depending on context. given these results, the present study can provide a few practical implications for pedagogy. the first suggestion is to recognize the potential merit of using texts with explicit contexts to provide instruction on strategies for inferring word meaning. second, it would be pedagogically useful to provide emergent readers with explicit instruction on how to use external information. metacognitive knowledge used by strong readers can be viewed as an important source of information when designing instruction to assist emergent readers. useful strategies can include paying attention to syntactic or cohesive information and using wider contexts rather than focusing on the immediate local contexts of the words in question. similarly, it would be helpful to give students explicit instruction on how to use internal lexical information by relying on morphological knowledge, compounds, and so forth. fostering such knowledge in emergent readers would strengthen their reading skills. the ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context 573 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(2018). early word learning. london: routledge. yuko goto butler 578 appendix target words (in alphabetical order) apparel aviator confirm disadvantage dishonesty durable envy famish getaway loiter malicious masterpiece navigate outgoing oversee pending penniless prolong trustworthy unicycle 17 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (1). 2023. 17-38 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.32358 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt let’s get positive: how foreign language teaching enjoyment can create a positive feedback loop shanshan yang fudan university, china https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5335-9736 shanshanyang@fudan.edu.cn mostafa azari noughabi hakim sabzevari university, sabzevar, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7052-4753 mostafaazari2015@gmail.com elouise botes university of vienna, austria https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4952-8386 elouise.botes@univie.ac.at jean-marc dewaele birkbeck college, university of london, united kingdom https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8480-0977 j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk abstract research on learners’ foreign language emotions has revealed the existence of a positive feedback loop where increased enjoyment leads to better performance which, in turn, strengthens learners’ enjoyment and boosts overall happiness. the current study follows this avenue focusing on teachers’ foreign language teaching enjoyment (flte) and its relationships with engagement, mindfulness, and burnout. the participants, who were 496 english as a foreign language (efl) teachers from iran, completed four electronic surveys. the proposed mediation model based on data collected from efl teachers indicated shanshan yang, mostafa azari noughabi, elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele 18 that flte partially mediated the relationship between mindfulness and engagement as well as their burnout. the results revealed that mindful efl teachers who enjoy the profession are more likely to experience higher levels of work engagement and job satisfaction, thus creating a positive feedback loop. in addition, the findings suggest the importance of positive emotions in efl teachers’ psychological flourishing based on the tenets of positive psychology. finally, implications and suggestions for further research are offered. keywords: foreign language teaching enjoyment (flte); mindfulness; engagement; burnout; efl teachers 1. introduction since the introduction of positive psychology into applied linguistics in the early 2010s, the field has witnessed an explosion of interest in the effects of positive and negative emotions on both language learners and their teachers (dewaele et al., 2019). negative emotions such as anxiety have a dampening effect on learners’ motivation, performance and progress in learning a foreign language (fl; botes, dewaele et al., 2020). on the other hand, positive emotions like enjoyment have a positive effect on learners’ willingness to communicate in the fl and on their achievement in fl learning (botes et al., 2022). overall, previous research has found that emotions tend to affect behavior and performance, which in turn tend to affect emotions. in other words, causality has tended to be bi-directional (botes, greiff et al., 2020). interestingly, emotions have been linked to both learner-internal and learner-external variables which, depending on the context, were both affected by and actively affecting learner emotions (li, 2020). as a result, feedback loops have emerged which could be negative, where boredom and anxiety silenced students and led to poor performance, which further exacerbated boredom and anxiety and could lead to disengagement, demotivation and even poorer performance over time. the feedback loop has also been to run the other way, with enjoyment neutralizing the deleterious effects of negative emotions, leading to better performance, which in turn triggers higher enjoyment, increased engagement, stronger motivation and even better performance over time (dewaele et al., 2022; dewaele & li, 2021; dewaele & proietti ergün, 2020; yang, azari noughabi et al., 2022). fl teachers are also in the grip of positive and negative emotions standing in front of their students. the difference between teachers’ emotions and those of students is that teacher emotions can affect the whole class through a process of emotional contagion: happy and enthusiastic teachers will have students who enjoy themselves, are happier, more engaged and more motivated, while unhappy, disengaged teachers let’s get positive: how foreign language teaching enjoyment can create a positive feedback loop 19 will have to resort to emotional labor strategies which are effortful, not necessarily successful and will lead to teacher burnout (dewaele & li, 2021; dewaele & wu, 2021; gkonou et al., 2020; moskowitz & dewaele, 2021). it is thus crucial for teachers to initiate a positive feedback loop, in which we expect teacher enjoyment to be a potential trigger. we also know that positive emotions predict and reinforce prosocial behavior (which would be beneficial for fl learners), which in turn leads to more positive emotions (aknin et al., 2018). it could be argued that teachers’ positive emotions are linked with positive personality traits coupled with working in positive institutions (budzińska & majchrzak, 2021) and ultimately shape their well-being and flourishing (budzińska & majchrzak, 2021; seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2014). therefore, it is of vital importance to boost teachers’ positive emotions at work to develop their psychological health and the ability to radiate positivity in the classroom. mindfulness, conceptualized as the dynamic process of regulating emotions to help concentrate on the present while ignoring the past or future concerns (li, 2021), can support teachers’ psychological flourishing and professional engagement (moyano et al., 2021; ramasubramanian, 2017). previous research has indicated that teachers’ mindfulness buffers against the negative stressors such as burnout (skinner & beers, 2016). additionally, mindfulness has been shown to protect teachers against the negative influence of stress on their classroom supportiveness (molloy elreda et al., 2019). mindful teachers can cope with professional hurdles resiliently and achieve higher levels of well-being, satisfaction, and engagement (skinner & beers, 2016). moreover, mindfulness increases teachers’ emotional competence (garner et al., 2018), suggesting that mindful teachers are more likely to experience positive emotions. concurrently, teachers with high levels of foreign language teaching enjoyment (flte), conceptualized as an important positive emotion including social and personal enjoyment coupled with students’ appreciation, are associated with more resilience and well-being (proietti ergün & dewaele, 2021). a recent study by derakhshan et al. (2022) also showed that gritty, resilient, and happy iranian efl teachers were more likely to report high levels of flte. therefore, two possible outcomes of mindfulness can be higher work engagement and lower burnout (moyano et al., 2021; skinner & beers, 2016). in addition, it is hypothesized that the influence of mindfulness on engagement and satisfaction might be mediated by positive emotions (garland et al., 2015). despite the significance of mindfulness in the positive psychology of teachers, it has been studied to a lesser extent within the domain of fl education compared to other positive psychological variables (li, 2021). it remains unclear, to the best knowledge of the researchers, whether mindfulness might be connected with flte. therefore, the present study aims to investigate the role shanshan yang, mostafa azari noughabi, elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele 20 of flte in mediating the associations between mindfulness, engagement, and burnout among efl teachers. 2. literature review 2.1. teacher mindfulness interest in mindfulness and possible pedagogical interventions to boost it has grown exponentially in recent years (brown et al., 2007; zeilhofer, 2020). mindfulness, commonly defined as the ability to pay attention to the present moment intentionally without judging experiences (kabat-zinn, 1994), represents a promising avenue for human flourishing (seligman, 2011). according to taylor et al. (2021), attentive awareness, receptive attitude, and intentionality are the primary tenets of mindfulness. however, such domain-general measurement of mindfulness has notable limitations with respect to the study of teacher mindfulness because the act of teaching inherently involves interactions with students (rickert et al., 2020). in response, frank et al. (2016) proposed that, in addition to intrapersonal mindfulness, teacher mindfulness should also include interpersonal mindfulness, referring to an open inclination and attitude with acceptance and receptiveness in teacher-student interactions (moyano et al., 2021). morgan and katz (2021) distinguished between trait mindfulness and state mindfulness. while the former stands for “what a person carries with them throughout their life, regardless of knowing about mindfulness or not,” the latter is “the feeling of mindfulness in the moment” (p. 4). in this study, teacher mindfulness is operationalized as efl teachers’ trait of regulating emotions with respect to both intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions to concentrate on the present while ignoring the past or future concerns (frank et al., 2016; li, 2021). several studies have demonstrated the role of mindfulness in reducing negative functioning and enhancing positive outcomes in several important life domains (e.g., brown et al., 2007). in fl education, empirical evidence has linked mindfulness and its practices to students’ academic achievement (zeilhofer, 2020) and learning mindset as well as mental health (morgan & katz, 2021). mindfulness-based interventions for teachers have also shown promise in enhancing mindfulness skills to decrease teacher stress and burnout (taylor et al., 2021), promoting teachers’ social-emotional competencies (de carvalho et al., 2021), and enhancing teacher well-being and performance (hwang et al., 2017). however, existing research on mindfulness in educational settings has focused on students, leaving teacher mindfulness, particularly fl teachers’ mindfulness underrepresented (moyano et al., 2021). overall, the evidence for the presumed positive contributions of mindfulness in pedagogical contexts is limited let’s get positive: how foreign language teaching enjoyment can create a positive feedback loop 21 (malinowski & lim, 2015). to address this gap in the literature, the current study investigated the relationship between trait mindfulness, teacher burnout, and work engagement as well as the potential mediating effect of the positive emotion of flte on this relationship. 2.2. linking to burnout and work engagement teacher burnout, which refers to teachers’ experiences of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment, is an issue of global concern. as teaching requires immense personal and emotional investment, the prevalence of teacher burnout is high in the profession (moyano et al., 2021). burnout usually is accompanied by a diminution of one’s emotional resources to cope with stressors, cynical, irritable feelings, negative attitudes toward work, and decreased self-efficacy and/or productivity (maslach & jackson, 1981; taylor et al., 2021). therefore, teacher burnout might not only adversely affect teacher well-being and teaching effectiveness but also student engagement and learning (roeser et al., 2013). in this context, research on malleable factors that can reduce teacher burnout is desirable and much needed. in tune with positive psychology, recent years have witnessed a shift of research focus from what is wrong to what goes right in life. hence, attention has been extended beyond teacher burnout to include the more desirable dimensions of work-related health outcomes, that is, work engagement (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2014). work engagement refers to teachers’ cognitive, emotional, and social involvement in teaching and students’ learning processes (klassen et al., 2013). high levels of work engagement potentially bring about varied favorable outcomes for both individuals and organizations (azari noughabi, amirian et al., 2022; azari noughabi, ghonsooly et al., 2022; yang, shu et al., 2022). the burnout-engagement continuum has been extensively studied in organizational psychology (maslach & leiter, 1997), and the negative connection between burnout and engagement also extends to fl education (faskhodi & siyyari, 2018). it is hence vital to understand what leads to an increase in work engagement and a decrease in teacher burnout in fl education. recent research examining individual differences in trait mindfulness suggests that mindfulness is associated with lower levels of emotional burnout (skinner & beers, 2016) and higher levels of engagement (moyano et al., 2021; roeser et al., 2013). the construct is therefore of immediate relevance to our concern with enhancing engagement and reducing burnout. the role of mindfulness can be explained by the job demands-resources model (bakker & demerouti, 2007). when teachers perceive that the quality and quantity of the demands in the workplace exceed the quality and quantity of available resources, teacher shanshan yang, mostafa azari noughabi, elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele 22 burnout emerges. job or personal resources are accordingly needed to alleviate teacher burnout in the highly demanding teaching contexts. mindfulness has been suggested as one of these personal resources (moyano et al., 2021; taylor & millear, 2016). when job and personal resources become more prominent and gain their motivational potential, work engagement is likely to be enhanced as teachers become motivated to actively learn and develop their skills. as high work engagement in itself can have detrimental effects, for example affecting work-life balance or teacher health, we considered it in conjunction with positive emotions, which have been implicated in promoting work engagement and well-being (azari noughabi, yang et al., 2022; greenier et al., 2021; malinowski & lim, 2015; yang, shu et al., 2022). 2.3. positive emotions as a mediator to elucidate the hypothesized relationship between mindfulness, teacher burnout, and work engagement, it is important to consider other variables that potentially contribute to this relationship. brown et al. (2007) presented clear evidence that mindfulness related to positive emotional experiences. likewise, garland et al. (2015) argued that in taxing contexts mindfulness potentially augments eudaimonic meaning making to elicit positive emotions. malinowski and lim (2015) further illustrated that mindfulness wielded its positive effect on work engagement by increasing positive emotions, which on their own and in combination with mindfulness enhanced work engagement. fredrickson (2009) notes that experiencing positive emotions in a 3-to-1 ratio to negative emotions can help an individual gain higher levels of resilience and well-being. rusu and colomeischi (2020) believe that teachers with a higher ratio of positive to negative emotions are more likely to have higher levels of engagement and subjective well-being. according to the broaden-and-build theory (fredrickson, 2001), the increase in positive emotions would lead to the broadening of one’s thought-action repertoire which, in turn, would trigger the application of increased personal resources such as those needed by fl teachers to cope with demands. as such, teachers’ mindfulness triggers positive emotions which help them bounce back quickly from and adapt to the challenging contextual demands (ramasubramanian, 2017), which is likely to protect teachers from burnout. taken together, positive emotions can be conceptualized as an important construct in mediating the relationship between mindfulness, work engagement and burnout (gloria & steinhardt, 2017). enjoyment is considered as the most salient positive emotion in the teaching context (frenzel et al., 2016), which can be reciprocally transmitted among the teacher and students (dewaele & li, 2021; moskowitz & dewaele, 2021). learners’ let’s get positive: how foreign language teaching enjoyment can create a positive feedback loop 23 foreign language enjoyment (fle) has been compared to the fuel of the fl learning process (botes et al., 2021; dewaele & li, 2021; dewaele & macintyre, 2014). fle has been found to be positively linked to personality traits such as cultural empathy (dewaele & macintyre, 2019), grit (macintyre & khajavy, 2021), and emotional intelligence. li (2020) found that trait emotional intelligence was partially mediated by fle to have a positive effect on fl achievement. fl learners with high trait emotional intelligence have been shown to report higher enjoyment both in the l1 class and the fl class (resnik & dewaele, 2020, 2021). trait emotional intelligence of efl teachers has also been found to be positively linked to more positive attitudes towards students (dewaele & mercer, 2018) and to higher levels of self-reported creativity, classroom management, and pedagogical skills and lower levels of predictability (dewaele et al., 2018). teachers’ flte has only recently begun to draw the attention of researchers (azari noughabi, yang, shu et al., 2022; proietti ergün & dewaele, 2021). proietti ergün & dewaele (2021) adapted the 9-item short fle scale by botes et al. (2021) to reflect teacher enjoyment instead of learner enjoyment. the items in the first two subdimensions, personal and social enjoyment, did not need any change but the word “teacher” was substituted with “students” in the items of the third subdimension, teacher appreciation. the authors found that two positive personality traits, resilience and well-being, were significant positive predictors of flte, with small-to-medium effect sizes. using the newly developed flte scale, derakhshan et al. (2022) focused on the effects of resilience, well-being, and l2 grit on the flte of 450 iranian efl teachers. structural equation modeling (sem) revealed that teachers’ l2 grit, resilience and well-being significantly shaped their flte. the authors concluded that gritty, resilient, and happy teachers are more likely to enjoy the emotional rollercoaster in the fl classroom. given the recent appearance of the concept of flte, its relationship with individuals’ burnout and engagement has not yet been investigated. according to slišković et al. (2019), the relations of positive emotions to teacher burnout and engagement need to be further explored. as language teaching is particularly emotionally demanding due to its strong emphasis on interpersonal relations and the integration of identities (talbot & mercer, 2018), it is significant to explore whether mindfulness could be linked to enjoyment and -by extensionto work engagement (azari noughabi, yang, shu et al., 2022) and teacher burnout (frenzel et al., 2016). based on the studies discussed above and theoretical considerations, we hypothesize that trait mindfulness will be negatively related to teacher burnout and positively linked to work engagement. furthermore, we predict that this relationship is mediated by flte and fits in a positive feedback loop. higher mindfulness would be related to more enjoyment, a broadened thought-action repertoire, and shanshan yang, mostafa azari noughabi, elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele 24 consequently more personal resources for enhanced work engagement and reduced burnout. using sem, we explored the following two research questions: 1. to what extent, if any, does flte mediate the relationship between mindfulness and teacher engagement? 2. to what extent, if any, does flte mediate the relationship between mindfulness and teacher burnout? 3. method 3.1. participants a total of 496 efl teachers in iran were recruited using snowball sampling and authors’ contacts. teachers were asked to complete an online questionnaire in december 2021, with a total of n = 496 teachers completing the survey. a total of n = 321 female and n = 175 male teachers participated. the average age of participants was 26.94 years (sd = 7.18) with an average of 5.06 years (sd = 5.07) of teaching experience. the majority of participants were teaching high school students (n = 163), followed by secondary school students (n = 112), elementary school students (n = 95), higher education students (n = 73), and other students (n = 53). all teachers were iranian citizens and were teaching english as a foreign language. the majority of participants were employed by private language institutes (n = 351), followed by public schools (n = 97), and universities (n = 48). all teachers had a tertiary degree, with the majority holding a bachelor of arts (n = 260), followed by a graduate-level degree (n = 190).1 3.2. instruments 3.2.1. mindfulness mindfulness of efl teachers was measured by the mindfulness in teaching scale (frank et al., 2016), a two-dimensional measure examining intrapersonal mindfulness (“when i am teaching, i find myself doing things without paying attention” – reverse scored; α = .89; ω = .89) and interpersonal mindfulness (“i am aware of how my moods affect the way i treat my students;” α = .78; ω = .78). fourteen items were measured on a 5-point likert scale ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” the total scale demonstrated an acceptable internal consistency of cronbach’s α = .88 and mcdonald’s ω = .88. 1 n = 46 teachers indicated that they had an additional ‘other’ qualification beyond a bachelor’s degree. let’s get positive: how foreign language teaching enjoyment can create a positive feedback loop 25 3.2.2. foreign language teaching enjoyment the foreign language teaching enjoyment scale (proietti ergün & dewaele, 2021), which was adapted from the student-oriented short-form foreign language enjoyment scale (botes et al., 2021), was used. the nine-item scale measured flte through three factors, namely personal enjoyment (“i enjoy it;” α = .74; ω = .74), student appreciation in the fl classroom (“the students in the efl class are stimulating;” α = .75; ω = .75), and social enjoyment (“we form a tight group in the efl class;” α = .74; ω = .74). items were measured on a five-point likert scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” the total scale had an acceptable internal consistency (α = .88; ω = .87). 3.2.3. teacher engagement teaching engagement was measured by the multidimensional engaged teacher scale (klassen et al., 2013). the scale measures teacher engagement through four subscales, namely cognitive engagement (α = .83; ω = .83), emotional engagement (α = .88; ω = .87), social engagement with students (α = .81; ω = .81), and social engagement with colleagues (α = .86; ω = .86). a total of 16 items were measured on a seven-point likert scale from “never” to “always.” internal consistency of the total scale was high (α = .85; ω = .85). 3.2.4. teacher burnout the teacher burnout subscale of the greater teacher immunity scale (hiver, 2017) was used. the five items were responded to on a 6-point likert scale ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree,” with items such as “at school, i feel burned out from my work.” the scale had an acceptable internal consistency (α = .85; ω = .85). 3.3. data analysis descriptive analysis, pearson’s correlation coefficients, and scale internal consistencies (cronbach’s alpha and mcdonald’s omega) were calculated in jasp version 0.16 (jasp team, 2022). average scores were calculated for each measurement instrument in order to create a single observed score per variable.2 as 2 therefore, even though some of the variables utilized in this study are designed as having subscales (e.g., flte, which has three subscales), we utilized a single average score representing the variable. in doing so, we assume a higher-order factor overarching the subscales (see botes et al., 2021), which we then capture as an observed variable. as such, no subscales are individually included in the analyses, but only an average score of the total measure. shanshan yang, mostafa azari noughabi, elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele 26 mediation can be considered part of the structural equation modeling family (kline, 2015), the mediation model was analyzed in r as a path analysis model via the lavaan package (rosseel, 2012). a mediation model was fitted with mindfulness as the predictor variable, flte as the mediator, and both teacher engagement and teacher burnout as outcome variables. the mediation model was estimated with a maximum likelihood estimator and a bias-corrected bootstrap (biesanz et al., 2010). the theoretical mediation model is depicted in figure 1. for mediation to occur, the following requirements needed to be met: 1. the predictor (mindfulness) had a statistically significant effect on the outcome variables of teacher engagement and teacher burnout. 2. the predictor (mindfulness) had a statistically significant effect on the mediator (flte) – thus path a is not zero. 3. the mediator (flte) had a statistically significant effect on the outcome variables of teacher engagement and teacher burnout – thus paths b1 and b2 are not zero. 4. full mediation occurs if the mediator (flte) is completely responsible for the relationships between the predictor (mindfulness) and outcome variables (teacher engagement and burnout) – thus paths c1 and c2 are zero. mindfulness flte teacher engagement teacher burnout c1 c2 a b1 b2 figure 1 theoretical mediation model the direct (c1; c2), indirect (a + b1; a + b2), and total effects were examined. mediation occurred if the indirect effect estimate was statistically significant. in addition, the 95% confidence interval of the indirect effect estimate needed to not contain zero (baron & kenny, 1986). the additional threshold regarding the confidence interval was added as small coefficients can be statistically significant in small samples (kline, 2015). furthermore, if the direct effects (c1; c1) were reduced to zero when the mediator was taken into account, the model was let’s get positive: how foreign language teaching enjoyment can create a positive feedback loop 27 determined to be fully mediated by the mediator (flte). if both the direct and indirect effects were statistically significant, a partial mediation was declared.3 4. results 4.1. descriptive statistics and correlation coefficients the descriptive statistics of each of the four variables can be found in table 1, along with the skewness and kurtosis of each variable. teacher engagement was found to be skewed left, with a heavy-tailed distribution (field, 2013). the distribution of the data of teacher engagement may hint at possible ceiling effects in the measure. table 1 descriptive statistics and normality distribution variable m sd min max skewness kurtosis flte 4.14 .61 1.56 5.00 -1.105 1.001 burnout 2.60 1.03 1.00 5.80 .676 .370 engagement 5.89 .84 1.88 7.00 -1.44 2.527 mindfulness 3.95 .61 2.09 5.00 -.702 -.425 the pearson correlation coefficients between all variables are presented in correlation matrix in table 2. all correlations were moderate to large; however, no correlation was large enough to generate multicollinearity concerns (r > .80; field, 2013). this was an especially encouraging finding, as collinearity between variables in the mediation model can reduce the power of the coefficient tests (kline, 2015). table 2 correlation matrix variable 1 2 3 4 1. flte -.451** .608** .488** 2. burnout -.328** -.621** 3. engagement .542** 4. mindfulness note. **p < .001 4.2. mediation model due to the non-normal distribution of teacher engagement, a bias-corrected bootstrap was applied to the mediation model (biesanz et al., 2010). 3 it should be noted that even though the mediation was examined through a path analysis, no model fit was analyzed or reported. the partial mediation model tested is saturated (df = 0), and as such model fit cannot be interpreted (kline, 2015). as such, only the path coefficients, direct effects, indirect effects, and total effects are interpreted in order to determine if a partial mediation has occurred. shanshan yang, mostafa azari noughabi, elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele 28 the indirect effects of the mediation model were found to be statistically significant (see table 3). flte therefore mediated the relationship between mindfulness and teacher engagement (β = .304; p < .001) and teacher burnout (β = -.161; p < .001). as shown in table 3, the 95% confidence interval of the indirect effects did not contain zero for both teacher engagement (ci [.214; .403]) and teacher burnout (ci [-.254; -.082]), further confirming the presence of a mediation effect. table 3 mediation model results estimate se z-value p-value 95% confidence interval lower higher direct effects mindfulness → burnout -.893 .067 -13.39 <.001 -1.060 -.726 mindfulness → engagement .446 .053 8.43 <.001 .324 .581 indirect effects mindfulness → flte → burnout -.161 .035 -4.6 <.001 -.254 -.082 mindfulness → flte → engagement .304 .036 8.56 <.001 .214 .403 total effects mindfulness → burnout -1.054 .060 -17.67 <.001 -1.171 -.932 mindfulness → engagement .750 .052 14.36 <.001 .605 .882 note. se = standard error furthermore, large direct effects were found between mindfulness and teacher engagement (β =.446; p < .001) and between mindfulness and teacher burnout (β =-.893; p < .001). as direct effects were still statistically significant, flte only partially mediated the relationship between mindfulness and teacher engagement and burnout. the full mediation model is visually depicted in figure 2. mindfulness flte teacher engagement teacher burnout .45** -.89** .49** .61** -.33** .06* figure 2 mediation model (**p < .001 *p < .01) 5. discussion we started the introduction by pointing out that there was every reason to believe that flte fitted in the positive feedback loop for teachers just as fle is let’s get positive: how foreign language teaching enjoyment can create a positive feedback loop 29 prominent in positive feedback loops for fl learners (botes, dewaele et al., 2020). assuming that flte would be influenced by positive personality traits (in this case trait mindfulness) and ultimately directly or indirectly shape fl teachers’ well-being and flourishing (in this case teacher burnout and work engagement), we adopted a mediation model, using sem to find out if flte mediated the relationship between mindfulness and teacher engagement, and if flte mediated the relationship between mindfulness and teacher burnout. both hypotheses were confirmed. flte emerged as the central element in the positive feedback loop. in line with previous studies (e.g., de carvalho et al., 2021), the findings revealed that teachers with higher levels of mindfulness, in other words, those who regulated their emotions on both intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions really well, were more likely to focus on the moment and enjoy their time in the classroom. their open inclination, accepting attitudes and receptiveness towards students allowed them to deal efficiently with challenges (frank et al., 2016; li, 2021; moyano et al., 2021). king et al. (2020) explained that the ability to control one’s emotions and read the emotions of others is one of the requirements for obtaining a black belt in martial arts. similarly, mindful teachers can read the emotional temperature of the classroom and intervene without hesitation if the temperature drops too far or goes too high. being mindful also means having the emotional resources to engage in decisive prosocial behavior, such as spotting students in distress and coming to their rescue, or countering students trying to sabotage the class and undermine the teacher’s authority (aknin et al., 2018). mindful teachers can also suppress occasional feelings of anger and frustration but stand their ground with calm authority and a straight face. this feeling of being in emotional control is required to actually enjoy the experience of teaching. it also has beneficial longer-term consequences as the repeated enjoyment in the classroom is likely to lead to increased work engagement (klassen et al., 2013; azari noughabi, amirian et al., 2022). this could include reading up on teaching methods, attendance of training seminars or professional conferences, interactions with colleagues about best classroom practices, and attempts to introduce novel methods and tasks in the classroom. this investment is likely to bear fruit with higher quality teaching delivered with an authentic smile, resulting in happier and higher-performing students (dewaele & li, 2021; moskowitz & dewaele, 2021; roeser et al., 2013; zeilhofer, 2020). this could have a positive ripple effect across the institution allowing everybody to flourish (budzińska & majchrzak, 2021; azari noughabi, amirian et al., 2022; seligman, 2011). moreover, higher levels of both mindfulness and flte are likely to broaden teachers’ thought-action repertoire, enriching their personal resources to cope with multiple professional demands (fredrickson, 2001; ramasubramanian, 2017). this is in line with previous studies which indicated the ties between flte and efl teachers’ shanshan yang, mostafa azari noughabi, elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele 30 resilience (derakhshan et al., 2022). mindfulness, combined with high flte and increased engagement, boosts teachers’ social-emotional competencies, resilience, grit, well-being and performance and is the best antidote against burnout (de carvalho et al., 2021; derakhshan et al., 2022; hwang et al., 2017; kazemkhah hasankiadeh & azari noughabi, 2022; proietti ergün & dewaele, 2021; taylor et al., 2016, 2021). rather than engaging in draining emotional labor strategies to keep smiling despite not feeling happy (gkonou et al., 2020), mindful teachers can be bold, playful, humorous and supportive: the very things that boost fl learners’ fle (dewaele & macintyre, 2019) and by extension their performance (botes et al., 2022). this study is not without limitations. mediation rests on the assumption that all directionality stipulated in the model is correct (kline, 2015). as such, the present mediation model does not preclude the possibility of some relationships being reciprocal amongst the variables. for example, it is entirely possible that feedback loops or bidirectionality exist between flte and burnout. accordingly, there is a need for longitudinal studies to establish this. also, the present study is cross-sectional and as such no temporal design elements required for true causal results were included in the study (kline, 2015). therefore, despite the theoretical literature on positive psychology, engagement, and burnout, this study does not provide definitive evidence regarding the causality between the predictor and outcome variables. 6. conclusion the current study provided much needed evidence for the positive effect of mindfulness in pedagogical contexts and more specifically in fl contexts. it showed that mindfulness, like emotional intelligence, is a desirable personality trait for teachers. mindful teachers experience more enjoyment in their fl classroom because of their ability to regulate their own emotions and, by extension, those of their students. it means that mindful teachers are probably also more relaxed, alert and positive, which allows them to initiate a positive feedback loop in themselves and their students. teachers who feel good about their own performance will radiate positivity which students will pick up, boosting their own enjoyment and motivation, resulting in better performance which will further increase their enjoyment. our analyses also revealed that teachers’ flte has longer-term consequences for their behavior and well-being. teachers who notice students’ positive mood, increased effort and quick progress increase the engagement in their work. they may reflect on ways to raise the challenge in the classroom while keeping it in balance with the students’ increasing skills. finally, awareness of their professional success can act as a shield against the inevitable stressors and thus stave off the dreaded burnout. to conclude, research suggests that teacher training can boost both mindfulness and emotional intelligence let’s get positive: how foreign language teaching enjoyment can create a positive feedback loop 31 (e.g., de carvalho et al., 2021; 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(2020). mindfulness in the foreign language classroom: influence on academic achievement and awareness. language teaching research, 27(1), 96-114. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168820934624 401 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (3). 2021. 401-422 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.3.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt creative writing for publication: an action research study of motivation, engagement, and language development in argentinian secondary schools darío luis banegas university of strathclyde, glasgow, uk https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0225-0866 dario.banegas@strath.ac.uk robert j. lowe tokyo kasei university, itabashi, japan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2411-0330 robert-l@tokyo-kasei.ac.jp abstract there has been much research on the connections between second language (l2) writing and learner motivation. however, few studies have focused on contexts in which l2 learning is mandatory, rather than elective. this technical action research-based study evaluated a project in which teenage learners in argentina were engaged in creative writing tasks, with the goal of including their final written pieces in a formal publication. through focus group interviews and group discussions, it was found that the project had increased the motivation not only of the learners, but also of the teachers. further, the study highlights the importance of making such writing tasks student-centered, and calls attention to the role played by the teachers in motivating and engaging students. the study suggests that effort should be made to develop more initiatives in formal education settings in order to motivate and engage learners involved in mandatory language study. keywords: motivation; engagement; creative writing; l2 learning experience darío luis banegas, robert j. lowe 402 1. introduction current research on second language (l2) writing education shows that learners usually develop writing skills in english through guided and free writing in various genres (burns & siegel, 2018; seloni & henderson-lee, 2020; silva et al., 2019). in the case of teenage learners, maley and bolitho (2015) suggest that creative writing tasks which involve learners’ imagination may lead to an increase in motivation, engagement, and consequently, authentic opportunities for language practice and development. while teachers are provided with guidance on how to navigate creative writing with teenage learners for motivation and language development (e.g., rich, 2014), there is little evidence about the relationship among these three constructs, particularly when creative writing is employed as an intervening strategy to improve authenticity of audience and learning conditions. in this study, creative writing is understood as a form of personal expression. as a pedagogical task, creative writing offers an authentic purpose of writing since learners can express something in their own words. authenticity of audience can be incorporated into l2 instruction if, for example, learners’ writing is socialized beyond the context of the classroom (banegas et al., 2020). in this regard, this study aligns with the writer-oriented approach, which explores writing in situated practices (hyland, 2016). this approach may help us understand writing as personal expression in l2 education and its effects on motivation and language learning experience (ortmeier-hooper & enright, 2011). in this technical-action-research-based paper, we examined whether engaging secondary school learners in creative writing for publication exerted a positive influence on their language learning motivation and language development in a setting (argentina) where english language learning is mandatory, a circumstance which may affect learner motivation (lamb, 2012). we believe that in such contexts, studies on the relationship among creative writing for publication, motivation, engagement and l2 learning can provide practitioners with teaching strategies conducive to meaningful and engaging l2 learning. 2. theoretical background 2.1. language learning motivation in english language teaching (elt), motivation is often defined as a complex, dynamic, and context-dependent construct that seeks to describe and explain a person’s drive to act (dörnyei, 2020; dörnyei et al., 2015; lamb, 2017; ushioda, 2018). according to ushioda (2013), motivation “is perhaps one of the key variables that distinguishes first language acquisition from second language acquisition” (p. creative writing for publication: an action research study of motivation, engagement, and . . . 403 1). however, dörnyei (2019) contends that while motivation is a powerful construct to understand the potential behavior of an l2 learner, the notion of engagement is a potent concept to explain a learner’s actual participation in the language learning classroom (see also darvin & norton, 2021). in this study, we draw on dörnyei’s (2009) l2 motivational self system. this model is built on three dimensions: (1) the ideal l2 self, (2) the ought-to l2 self, and (3) the l2 learning experience. while the first two dimensions are closer to future-self guides about imagined and expected identities in the l2 classroom, the third dimension refers to “the perceived quality of the learner’s engagement with various aspects of the learning process” (dörnyei, 2019, p. 20). this study concentrates on teenage learners’ current experiences with learning english as a foreign language in argentinian secondary education. we wish to understand the extent to which their language learning motivation is translated into engagement in formal education. the journey from motivation to engagement might be influenced by multiple social, contextual, and relational factors (ushioda, 2013), teachers’ practices and support (pavelescu, 2019), teacher-student relationships (henry & thorsten, 2018), imagined identities, peer collaboration, and learners’ investment in the learning processes and outcomes (darvin & norton, 2021; norton, 2020). studies on language learning motivation have usually been contextualized in higher education and situations where language learning was voluntary. motivational dissonances might create tensions in the english as a foreign language (efl) classroom when english study is mandatory, as is usually the case of teenagers in secondary education. lamb (2017) calls for research projects which investigate language learning motivation in contexts where english is a mandatory school subject and where it is not socially used in daily activities, and this call has been met in recent publications (e.g., banegas, 2019; pavelescu, 2019). while these studies provide insights into teenage learners’ needs for authentic topics, tasks, and materials, they do not address how specific language skills such as creative writing can be supported by engaging learners in motivating activities. 2.2. language learning motivation and creative writing henry and thorsten (2018) underline that creative writing activities such as writing a short story, a comic or a poem may enable learners to use the target language for personal expression and engender higher levels of motivation, investment, and engagement in l2 learning. creative writing activities can empower learners to become self-reflective (rosenhan & galloway, 2019), and help teachers gain insights about their identities as learners. however, zhao (2014) suggests that for learners to thrive in creative writing processes, instructions need to avoid becoming overly prescriptive. darío luis banegas, robert j. lowe 404 a few studies are of particular interest since they concentrate on young learners and creativity, usually represented in creative writing activities. ahlquist (2013) investigated the impact that a storyline approach had on a class of swedish 11-13-year-olds. the approach consisted of engaging the learners in creating a story through group work. drawing on questionnaire findings, the author highlights that this creative approach had a positive effect on learner motivation. the learners viewed the experience as motivating as it allowed them to use their imagination and work collaboratively with a clear purpose. using the same storyline approach and group work, ahlquist (2019) investigated three classes of 15and 16-year-olds in sweden to see whether teenagers’ reticence to speak english in class could be reduced. questionnaire data showed that the learners’ accuracy and willingness to communicate improved as they found the creative tasks motivating and authentic. in an action research project aimed at enhancing a group of 15-17-yearolds’ writing skills at a rural secondary school in colombia, guzmán gámez and moreno cuellar (2019) engaged learners in creative and collaborative writing through the use of plotagon, a software that enables learners to create interactive digital stories collaboratively. through surveys, direct observation, and the analysis of learners’ digital stories, the authors concluded that the learners displayed improvement in the length of production, syntactic and lexical complexity, and accuracy of writing. in addition, the pedagogical intervention enhanced learners’ motivation, as they could write on topics of personal interest. a study by terada (2019) in japan examined teacher-student interactions during expressive writing tasks. in this study, students wrote about topics of personal interest, and teachers gave continuous feedback on both the form and meaning of the students’ writing. terada found that the feedback from the teachers acted as a motivating factor, which pushed the students to work harder and find enjoyment in expressing their ideas. the study also showed how the personal nature of the assignments made the students more engaged in their writing. the aforementioned studies show creative writing as an authentic and engaging activity. according to pinner (2016), authenticity plays a pivotal role in language learning motivation. as an authentic task, creative writing can boost learner motivation as learners can express their identities (real and/or imagined, past, present, and/or future). to support this view, rojas alvarez (2011) engaged her teenage learners in writing and interacting through digital blogs. the experience proved successful as the learners felt that both their motivation to write and english language proficiency improved because the blogs entailed being in contact with genuine readers. hence, creative writing for publication may contribute to maximizing the authenticity of audience dimension that writing entails when it is viewed as social practice (hyland, 2016). creative writing for publication: an action research study of motivation, engagement, and . . . 405 the studies reviewed above illustrate the pedagogical potential of creative writing when it is used in the efl classroom with teenage learners. nonetheless, few studies have investigated the relationship among teenage student creative writing for publication, motivation, and english language development. against this backdrop, two research questions guided this technical action research study: 1. can creative writing for publication enhance teenagers’ language learning motivation and engagement? 2. what aspects of the l2 learning experience act as motivation and engagement factors in a writing for publication experience? 3. research methodology this study adopted a technical action research approach (burns, 2005). in this type of action research, university-based educators work with teachers to address a pre-defined, classroom-based issue with the aim of introducing changes and examining them to improve specific teaching and learning experiences (cain & harris, 2013). as it is a joint project, teacher participation was voluntary. in addition, the tailoring of the project to meet contextual demands and learner needs was in the participating teachers’ hands. as part of a larger initiative, the technical action research project was implemented in the province of chubut, southern argentina, in 2018 and 2019, amid teacher strikes and social unrest. it should be noted that the school year in argentina starts in march and finishes in early december, with a two-week break in july. in early 2018, the ministry of education carried out a series of teacher meetings to discuss an internal report which revealed that english was the subject that most secondary school learners failed as they found the subject demotivating (banegas, 2019). according to the learners’ answers included in the report, the main demotivating factor was the lack of genuine, meaningful and communicative practices in the english lesson. in his capacity as a curriculum developer, the first author of this article suggested that a writing for publication project may increase learners’ motivation, and, consequently, their grades. with learner demotivation as the main concern, the elt team launched an initiative called chubut escribe en inglés (chubut writes in english). the initiative included a call for contributions, with the aim of promoting creative writing for an authentic audience within and beyond schools. the call was distributed online among state secondary schools and invited efl teachers to encourage their teenage learners to submit individually or collaboratively authored written pieces. the call for contributions clarified that the project entailed expert review and that the accepted versions would be compiled in a digital volume for use by darío luis banegas, robert j. lowe 406 other efl teachers and learners in 2019. the volume released in 2019 was used by 142 teachers in argentina during the 2019 school year. together with the call, efl teachers received a set of guidelines which (1) summarized the main features of process writing, (2) offered practical tips on how to design and implement pre-, while-, and post-reading and writing activities including clear linguistic aims (e.g., using a story to recycle passive voice or adjectives to describe feelings), and (3) suggested volumes to support their practices such as maley (2018) and spiro (2004, 2006). teachers were required to express interest in the project before being invited to submit their learners’ creative pieces between august and november 2018. of the 34 teachers who expressed interest and submitted work, 17 agreed to carry out the technical action research phase of the project. in this paper, three from this latter group became the participating teachers. the action research (ar) was divided into two cycles (table 1). in this paper, we report the outcomes of the evaluation stages. table 1 technical action research cycles cycle stage activities cy cle 1 au gu st -n ov em be r 20 18 initial investigation school meetings between ministerial authorities and efl teachers. agreement to engage in a creative writing initiative. action teachers planned creative writing lessons individually or in collaboration with other teachers. the first author provided feedback on the lesson plans. implementation (pedagogical intervention) each teacher implemented the lessons with one class of their choice between august and november 2018. evaluation discussion with the learners. meetings with the first author to discuss the outcomes of the project. cy cle 2 m ar ch -o ct ob er 20 19 action teachers designed creative writing lessons which included readings from the digital volume described above. implementation (pedagogical intervention) teachers implemented the lessons with the same group of learners. evaluation discussion with the learners. meetings with the first author to discuss the outcomes of the project. 3.1. participants as a means of illustrating the impact of the overall project, in this paper, we rely on data from three efl teachers: andrea, beatriz, and cecilia (pseudonyms) and three year 3 classes (89 learners) from one school. andrea had 30 students in her class, beatriz taught 27, and cecilia had 32. selecting all the participants from one institution may allow others to see the collaborative nature underpinning both pedagogical and research undertakings framed in larger schemes of work. the three teachers had between 10 and 12 years of professional experience. andrea and beatriz had graduated from a local initial english language creative writing for publication: an action research study of motivation, engagement, and . . . 407 teacher education program. cecilia did not have any formal training except for short courses, but given the shortage of efl teachers in chubut, she accepted teaching posts in secondary schools. they agreed to engage in the initiative and ar project as they also felt that learner demotivation was a serious issue. the 89 learners, aged between 15-16, had expressed that they did not find language learning motivating, particularly because the lessons were not context-responsive or built on authentic experiences (banegas, 2019). according to the three participating teachers, most learners’ level of english was between a1-a2, according to the common european framework of reference. nonetheless, 10% of them were at a b2 level as they were also enrolled in private language institutes. some learners were preparing to take the first certificate exam. 3.2. implementation this section summarizes the pedagogical interventions carried out in both cycles by the three participating teachers. in cycle 1 (2018), each teacher delivered between six and eight writing lessons. while the lessons followed a communicative approach (cooze, 2017) from a broadly sociocultural perspective (lantolf & poehner, 2014), the writing component was specifically informed by genre-based l2 writing instruction (hammond & derewianka, 2001; han & hiver, 2018) and process writing (hyland, 2016) in order to help learners develop awareness of the distinctive features of creative or fictional writing. they did so by designing pre-, while-, and post-reading, listening, and speaking tasks based on pedagogically modified texts. by performing the tasks, learners developed not only comprehension skills, creative thinking skills, and awareness of creative writing features, but also grammatical and lexical awareness. it should be clarified that the lessons also contained clear language aims and opportunities for recycling language and learning new language items and functions. process writing, with systematic attention to language awareness, was embedded in the writing tasks. after the speaking or listening tasks, the learners were asked to write a narrative text, a poem, or a comic. whatever the genre, the texts were in response to a topic (e.g., pollution in patagonia), a previous text (e.g., legends from argentina), a photograph, or a title or setting used as a trigger to promote creativity. writing was both carried out in class and as homework, and the students worked on different drafts following teacher feedback. teacher feedback was direct and formative and it included providing the correct form, or asking questions to help the students revisit their work. in november 2018, the students were invited to submit to their teacher their final piece for publication. in cycle 2 (2019), the pedagogical intervention followed the same principles as in 2018. however, the major change and innovation was that in 2019, darío luis banegas, robert j. lowe 408 the volume containing the works of those learners who decided to submit a piece in response to the chubut escribe en inglés call became reading input for different language development tasks. the learners submitted new pieces for publication in 2020. due to the effects of the covid-19 pandemic and lockdown imposed on argentina, the project was severely affected; hence, this paper does not include a discussion of the 2020 data. 3.3. data collection instruments and analysis the data were collected by means of several instruments. all of them are described in some detail below: · reflective journal: each participating teacher kept a journal of their experiences, perceptions, and concerns. they were particularly asked to be systematic about learners’ motivation and english language improvement because of the project. they also agreed to provide the first author with journal extracts to illustrate the themes identified. · individual interviews with the teachers: each teacher was interviewed twice in cycle 1 and twice in cycle 2. the interviews were carried out in spanish and lasted between 30-40 minutes. the teachers were asked to refer to their journals during their interviews and reflect on the ongoing benefits and challenges of the project in relation to learner motivation and english language development. · group interviews with the teachers: at the end of each cycle the three teachers were interviewed together. carried out in spanish, the interviews sought to evaluate each cycle of the project, paying special attention to learners’ motivation and english language development. both of these points were gauged on the basis of the teachers’ perceptions. · whole class discussions: there were two class discussions, one at the end of each cycle, with each of the three classes. they were carried out in spanish and led by each participating teacher and the first author. each discussion included between 27 and 32 students, depending on the size of the class and the number of student absences. discussions centered on the effect of the project on learners’ motivation and english language development. the students had equal opportunities to express their views. they would either express them verbally or they would raise their hands to answer a question (e.g., did the lesson become less coursebook-dependent?) in the individual and group interviews as well as the whole class discussions, there were no preset questions as they emerged in the interaction. nevertheless, the focus was always on assessing the experience in terms of motivation and language creative writing for publication: an action research study of motivation, engagement, and . . . 409 learning. the interviews and discussions were audio-recorded and transcribed. all the participating teachers and learners signed a consent form in which the research was described. it was agreed that data would only be obtained through self-reporting and that we would not have access to the learners’ work for analysis. they also received assurances of confidentiality and anonymity and were informed that withdrawal from the study would not affect their rights. data were examined through thematic analysis (clarke & braun, 2016; silverman, 2020). this was an iterative process which entailed reading and rereading the transcriptions to identify initial codes. once the findings were synthesized by means of axial coding and unifying themes, we reanalyzed the data to ensure consistency, confirmability, and transparency. a colleague not involved in the project acted as a second analyst of 40% of the data collected. discrepancies between the coders were solved through revisiting the data and codes until we reached an inter-rater agreement of 90%, a figure we considered acceptable. 4. findings this section is organized following the evaluation stages of cycles 1 and 2 respectively. figure 1 shows the axial codes (small circles) and their links to the overarching and interconnected themes (large circle). in describing the findings, all the data sources from the teachers and their learners were employed. figure 1 emerging themes motivation engagement english language development selfexpression identity participation authenticity feedback attention agency creativity darío luis banegas, robert j. lowe 410 4.1. cycle 1 evaluation since motivation and engagement are at the core of this paper, four themes were identified: (1) increase in attention and participation, (2) learner-focused teachers’ practices, (3) creative writing for publication as an authentic activity for self-expression, and (4) language development in terms of cohesion and coherence. both the teachers and the learners perceived an increase in each other’s attention and participation. this is particularly revealing for the teachers as they realized that everyone had undergone similar changes in attitude and engagement. the teachers expressed: this has been quite something. the learners slowly moved from not caring much about anything and minding their own business to actually listening to me. imagine my happiness. by the end of the term i could see that most of them were showing with their bodies that they were listening, that they were paying attention when i’d explain something about the features of a short story or a poem. (beatriz, extract 1) they became more participatory in class. like more engaged in the lesson. of course, this doesn’t include everyone in the classroom. but you could mostly see students paying attention or actually participating by raising their hands to answer a question, or just volunteering to come to the board or read something out they had written themselves. before, they wouldn’t dare to say a thing for fear of being ridiculed, but then they started to participate as they found that almost everyone found the activities “cool.” (cecilia, extract 2) in-class participation also increased among most of the learners. however, the teachers stressed the procedural nature of the change, explaining that learners moved from indifference to attention to participation. the latter, in the teachers’ eyes, entailed learners challenging negative peer pressure as the creative writing activities began to be accepted. learners’ appreciation of the teachers’ increasing attention and participation could be observed through learners’ observations of improvement in teachers’ practices. the extracts below, coming from one learner from each class, show that their l2 learning experiences were enhanced. hence, l2 learning experiences became a source of motivation and engagement due to changes in their teachers’ practices. in andrea’s class, when the first author asked whether her lessons had become less coursebook-driven, 25 learners raised their hands. thus, it seems that she moved from being a coursebook deliverer to a teacher who could exercise creativity and feel motivated by her own practices. for example, a learner explained: she didn’t follow the coursebook so much when we started with this project. as we wrote about what we liked, she paid more attention to our questions and she taught creative writing for publication: an action research study of motivation, engagement, and . . . 411 in a way that was more original. like she would bring so many activities to read poems or comics, or she would bring us a comic with blank speech bubbles and that was wonderful. she seemed enthused in her own teaching. (mariano, extract 3) it should also be noted that attention was connected to andrea listening actively and adapting her lessons to meet the learners’ needs. in the case of beatriz and cecilia, 49 learners out of 59 raised their hands to indicate that their teachers’ feedback practices changed. the learners elaborated that feedback was more detailed, and focused on meaning, form, and style. as one learner put it, cecilia’s feedback is different now and i like it. i like it because she walks around the classroom more often providing feedback. and she reads the paragraphs with us and she gives us suggestions for meaning, so that it’s clearer what we want to say. she still corrects if something is wrong but it’s like i understand more, like i pay more attention because what she tells me is to improve my own writing. (renata, extract 4) in extract 4, the relationship between teacher feedback and learner attention is explicit as the teacher’s suggestions are meant to strengthen the learner’s own creative process. lastly, when asked whether the lessons had become learner-centered, 71 learners out of 89 confirmed this change. for example, one of cecilia’s students said: you could tell that she was enjoying the lesson. she seemed engaged in the activities she had designed. and it wasn’t her talking all the time. we had more time for individual or pair work, or even group work, and we had more room for participation, for thinking and for answering a question or sharing a comment. it wasn’t her teaching all the time. it was us learning. (karina, extract 5) through this unique experience, the teachers seemed to have shifted from a teacher-centered to a learner-centered approach. two additional changes were observed: a reduction in teacher talking time and an increase in learner talking time, and the provision of learners’ thinking time. in cycle 1, the l2 learning experience was influenced by how the teachers adjusted their practices to accommodate the creative writing for publication project. in line with the literature (e.g., ahlquist, 2019; terada, 2019), the learners highlighted changes in agency, creativity, feedback, engagement, and a focus on learners and learning as opposed to teacher-fronted lesson delivery. the theme of creative writing for publication as an authentic activity for self-expression was appealing to the three classes. in total, 78 learners out of 89 agreed with this, as it mirrored what some of them would do in spanish (l1): darío luis banegas, robert j. lowe 412 i like these activities and the chance that we can write a poem or a story about what matters to me as a person, my feelings, or my concerns about the environment, for example. it’s what i sometimes do in spanish. i write things i don’t show to anyone, or things i post on instagram. (julieta, extract 6) to a lesser extent, the publication potential of the project enabled 29 learners out of 89 to see creative writing as an authentic activity. of those learners, 21 confirmed that they would share their own creative writing pieces or reflections (both instances of self-expression) in spanish on social media, a space for sharing aspects of the self with a genuine audience. however, the possibility of having their pieces included in an e-book became a serious endeavor. for example, one learner said: i feel driven to write these stories i’ve got in my head and even think of some illustrations to go with them because they might be published for real. it’s not like i post a story myself on twitter. now it’s authentic because it might be included in an official e-book. so there are other people involved taking care of our texts. (ignacio, extract 7) thus, extracts 6 and 7 confirm that creative writing for publication was an authentic activity because the learners could express themselves about topics, feelings, and ideas that derived from their selves. the last theme, language development in terms of cohesion and coherence, is solely based on self-reported responses and did not include our analysis of learners’ drafts. in this regard, we trusted the learners’ perceptions and the teachers’ professional judgment and agency in assessing their learners’ work. data from the teachers and the learners reveal that they perceived progress at the levels of cohesion and coherence. for example, beatriz explained: with every draft or activity the students paid more attention to coming across as clear and orderly. it’s also true that my feedback also pointed out issues with coherence and cohesion, how to reorganize phrases or sentences to make the text easier to understand. it’s also true that they improved in cohesion and coherence because of the genre approach we used. we worked with different texts and they had to identify features. i think that making them aware of a whole text and the writer’s intention and the potential presence of a genuine reader made them pay more attention to those aspects. (beatriz, extract 8) beatriz’s explanation also shows that teacher feedback and a genre-based approach were the factors that enhanced coherence and cohesion in learners’ writing. extract 8 illustrates that because creative writing became a genuine and authentic activity, priority was given to meaning and form at textual level. despite perceived development in coherence and cohesion, accuracy or lexical growth were not enhanced. for example, in the group interview, andrea noted: creative writing for publication: an action research study of motivation, engagement, and . . . 413 yes, they got better at textual organization but they still had problems with simple past, or sentence structure, or spelling, let alone punctuation! and even when they learnt new words or phrases, they wouldn’t use them in later drafts. (andrea, extract 9) one potential reason for this might be learners’ concern with expressing their ideas rather than accuracy. during the whole class discussions, 67 learners out of 89 self-perceived improvement in their english language development. they confirmed progress in textual organization but acknowledged they still made grammatical errors and failed to enlarge their lexicon. a learner explained: in my case, i think i improved at writing longer sentences with more phrases. i think i could do this because, compared to other writing tasks we’ve done, now i had something meaningful to say. these lines talk about who i am. and so, i also became more organized, like i paid attention to writing longer sentences and arranging them in a way that was clear. and i also took every comment made by the teacher because i wanted to be a strong lourdes through my writing. (lourdes, extract 10) lourdes’ explanation for her self-perceived english language development is the result of creative writing being considered an activity for personal expression and identity construction. her interest in english language proficiency at textual and sentence levels was driven by the realization that self-perception and others’ perception of her was connected not only to the content of her creative pieces but also to her performance as an l2 writer. in this case, the project empowered lourdes to resignify her l2 learning experience concomitant with her l2 writing self. in conclusion, cycle 1 shows that the experience proved to activate motivation and engagement among learners and teachers. as in previous studies (e.g., henry & thorsten, 2018), the learners found creative writing motivating as it was primarily constructed through personal expression and meaning. it should be clarified that even when authencity of audience was viewed as a distinctive and motivating factor, it did not feature strongly across the data sets. however, this theme was to undergo a major change in cycle 2. 4.2. cycle 2 evaluation although cycle 2 unfolded over almost a whole school year, there were fewer lessons than in cycle 1 as schools were closed due to social unrest. data collected before june 2019 did not show any changes as compared to cycle 1. nevertheless, the publication and free distribution of the first volume of chubut escribe en inglés1 at 1 the e-book can be downloaded from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-tq6paskobbyew kghisbpni1usoxvd8e/view?usp=sharing darío luis banegas, robert j. lowe 414 the end of june 2019 marked a significant shift. as part of the project, the three teachers developed activities based on the creative pieces written by learners other than their own. during the evaluation stage, three themes were identified: (1) writing for publication as a drive for language learning engagement, (2) developing a new identity as l2 creative writers, and (3) development of language awareness, accuracy, and lexical repertoire. it should be clarified that the theme of teachers’ practices was also identified but the data did not reveal new insights in comparison to cycle 1. unlike cycle 1, by raising their hands, 70 learners out of 89 confirmed that writing for publication was an authentic activity that drove them to engage in english language learning. they then explained that seeing creative pieces authored by themselves, peers, and other teenage learners from the province increased their participation in class. one learner said: when we first answered questions reflecting on a comic about water pollution written by a learner from another city, i couldn’t believe the whole project was true. it was real, writing our stories became so real, they were here published! so i felt like i wanted to participate in class. i did participate a lot more. i wanted to read and learn with these stories because they had been written by kids like us, about topics i could relate to. the writer was real, the text was real, and i was real too learning with these stories too. (francisco, extract 11) in extract 11, language learning engagement, which francisco saw as different from motivation, was the result of several dimensions connected to authenticity (pinner, 2019): authenticity of task (reflective questions), authenticity of input (the comic strip), authenticity of content (water pollution), authenticity of author (a teenage writer based in another city), and authenticity of audience (francisco himself). these dimensions cemented the positive effects of the l2 learning experience. however, five learners pointed out that even though the activities based on the e-book were motivating and engaging, they still felt that the texts were not genuine as they had been written by other english language learners. for example, martina explained: it’s great we read stories from people like us. but they’re not stories written by american or english teeanagers. i mean, the e-book is ok, but it’s not truly real. i think i prefer stories as we did last year because the english there was real as they had been written by people who speak english as we do spanish. (martina, extract 12) martina’s comment reflects concerns about the value and genuineness of stories written by peers. in her words, traces of the tensions between those categorized as native and non-native speakers are present. according to martina, only creative creative writing for publication: an action research study of motivation, engagement, and . . . 415 pieces authored by so-called native speakers provide natural and high-quality instantiations of english use. albeit critical, this theme (see martínez agudo, 2017) exceeds the scope of this paper. the second theme, that is, developing new identities as l2 creative writers, emerged among those learners who had either identified themselves as interested in writing creatively in spanish (n = 21) or those who found creative writing engaging. they agreed that the project framed those involved in the ebook not just as l2 learners, but also as l2 creative writers. for example, a learner whose poem had been included in the e-book explained: seeing my own poem published is just epic. i am part of a collection that other learners might be reading today. the experience has shown me that we can also be writers in english. of course, we need to learn english more and avoid making mistakes. so now, i feel like i can write poems both in english and spanish. (antonio, extract 13) antonio’s words indicate that the learners may have found themselves developing a self they had not necessarily imagined. they also reveal that writing for publication may enable learners to develop different related writing selves as they can also develop an identity as l1 creative writers due to the experience of writing in an l2. last, the theme of development of language awareness, accuracy, and lexical repertoire was identified in self-reported responses. the teachers and learners agreed that seeing and working with the e-book enabled many learners to develop their english language proficiency to different extents. for example, andrea said: across the three classes we have noted that they now pay attention to language use and ask us questions about when or how a phrase is used. and because they are more aware of their own language use, they invest more time in proofreading, and editing, and finding and using new words to be more acute about what they want to mean. we’re sure they notice their improvement, and because they’re aware of their better performance, they feel motivated to sustain that performance. (andrea, extract 14) in sum, cycle 2, particularly after the e-book had been incorporated as a learning material, enhanced language learning motivation, engagement, and english development as both writers and readers were perceived as genuine and influential in the l2 learning experience (dörnyei, 2019; rojas alvarez, 2011). 5. discussion the first research question sought to determine whether creative writing for publication could enhance secondary school teenage learners’ language learning motivation and engagement. as illustrated in the findings, the experience of darío luis banegas, robert j. lowe 416 involving teenage learners as authors of english-medium creative pieces exerted a positive influence on their language learning motivation and experience. in the context of the study, from a relational view of motivation (ushioda, 2013), the initiative proved to be an influential motivating factor. as noted by the learners and teachers, the learners moved from demotivation to motivation, observable through learner attention (extract 1), and from motivation to, as dörnyei (2019) and norton (2020) discuss, engagement, observable through active in-class participation (extracts 2 and 11). however, the novelty of the creative writing for publication initiative did not only become motivating and engaging for the learners. the teachers also experienced a surge in their motivation and engagement in the classroom and with their learners as they developed learner-centered pedagogies and created a conducive learning environment. thus, a positive change in the learners’ l2 self system (dörnyei, 2009) benefited both learners and teachers in synergy (pinner, 2019). the overall initiative ignited motivation and engagement among the learners as they valued three elements contained in it (e.g., extracts 6, 7, and 12): (1) authenticity of task, content, and audience (pinner, 2016; rojas alvarez, 2011), (2) opportunity for self-expression (guzmán gámez & moreno cuellar, 2019; henry & thorsten, 2018) and identity (zhao, 2014), and (3) imagination (ahlquist, 2013, 2019). the initiative occurred within english as a mandatory subject in argentinian secondary education, and therefore it had a positive impact on the overall learners’ l2 learning experience. the second research question aimed at examining what aspects of the l2 learning experience contributed to learner motivation and engagement. as mentioned above, the initiative itself became a source of motivation and engagement. drawing on dörnyei’s (2019) definition of the l2 learning experience as part of the l2 motivational self system, the creative writing for publication project provided english language learning in secondary education with learner-centered and authentic tasks, topics, and audience. this was possible due to the teachers’ commitment. the project provided learners with an l2 learning experience where the teachers developed agency to create original lessons centered on the learners’ interests and needs. teachers’ changing practices translated into allowing learners to become the center of the lesson and to be given time to think and work individually and collaboratively. the teachers also engaged in feedback practices which concentrated on meaning, form, and style. in addition, the teaching and learning processes became not only less coursebook-dependent but also driven by creative writing pieces either written by international authors or the learners. the teaching approach employed for the project, that is, a combination of genre theory and process writing, enabled the learners to improve their english language proficiency in terms of form (textual and sentential) and meaning as creative writing for publication: an action research study of motivation, engagement, and . . . 417 in previous studies in affluent contexts (ahlquist, 2019). we therefore understand the experience as a case of synergy where the project-enhanced l2 learning experience brought about learner motivation and engagement, which in turn, had a positive effect on their linguistic performance. as the learners became aware of their progress, self-perceived english language development contributed to the motivation and engagement underpinned by the l2 learning experience. thus, the aspects that made the l2 learning experience both a source of motivation and engagement could be summarized as follows: (1) authentic and learner-responsive initiative, (2) teacher agency, (3) teacher feedback, (4) genre-based and process writing-based approach, and (5) learners’ english language development. these features not only confirm the findings reviewed in the literature, but also help understand the relationship among motivation, engagement, and authenticity by enabling learners to assume agency as l2 materials developers in the l2 learning experience. 6. pedagogical implications in action research projects, the main aim is to identify pedagogical innovations which can be drawn from the results (burns, 2005). therefore, we would like to highlight these briefly in the case of the present investigation. the first major implication of cycle 1 was the importance of teachers providing formative feedback on the students’ writing, offering more personalized support, and individually reviewing the written drafts with the students in class. the data from cycle 1 clearly showed that the process of teachers providing support and meaning-focused feedback was motivating for the students, as they indicated that the class had become more learner-centered, and that their level of attention and understanding increased. rather than focusing on grammatical accuracy, the teachers allowed the students to write their stories, and then provided feedback on the content first and on the form next. this meaningfocused approach appears to have resonated with the students’ motivational selves (dörnyei, 2009), as they were able to express their ideas clearly, and thus presented an authentic self through their writing. the second major implication was the creative focus of the writing, and the possibility of the work being published. these points were cited by significant numbers of students as being motivating and making them feel committed to expressing their ideas. in cycle 2, the main pedagogical innovation concerned the use of the e-book produced at the end of cycle 1. the learners were able to use this as a motivational goal, and this encouraged them to express their ideas through their writing. alongside the continuation of the interventions implemented in cycle 1, this external motivating factor in cycle 2 appears to have darío luis banegas, robert j. lowe 418 acted as a catalyst for the students to engage with creative writing on a deeper and more personal level (guzmán & moreno cuellar, 2019; norton, 2020). for educators in other contexts, the two key takeaways for the implementation of similar projects would seem to be that teachers may wish to focus primarily on meaning in their feedback, with form coming later, and secondly that some kind of external motivating factor (such as the e-book publication in this project) can be utilized to engage and motivate learners to express themselves. 7. conclusion inspired by lamb’s (2017) call for studies based in contexts where english as a foreign language is mandatory, the study lends support to the necessity of imbuing l2 learning experiences with authentic, learner-centered, and context-responsive initiatives. both learners and teachers played a pivotal role in making the experience a success. nevertheless, the study has some limitations. the ar project did not involve classroom observations and individual interviews with the learners. therefore, triangulation is an issue in the research methodology. second, the whole class discussions were led by the first author and the teachers. thus, the teachers’ presence may have inhibited learners from making negative comments about teachers’ practices. similarly, the fact that the first author, in his dual identity as researcher and curriculum developer, carried out the interviews with the teachers may have discouraged them from making negative comments about the overall initiative. last, learners’ english language development was solely understood from the perspective of learners’ self-reporting and teachers’ report of learners’ work. the study did not include our own analysis of learners’ drafts over both cycles. despite these reservations, the article may be regarded as a fair response to the gaps mentioned in the introduction and to dörnyei’s (2019) call for studies which shed light on the l2 learning experience of the l2 motivational self system, in our case, among learners taking mandatory classes. future research may examine the effect that learners writing for publication may have on teachers’ continuing professional development. research should also examine the initiative from the teachers’ perspective to understand the affordances and challenges they may face. last, as noted in extract 12, studies could also examine teachers’ and learners’ views of native and non-native writers of english as authors and their pieces as pedagogical input. creative writing for publication: an action research study of motivation, engagement, and . . . 419 references banegas, d. l. 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(2014). l2 creative writers’ identities: their cognitive writing processes and sense of empowerment. new writing, 11(3), 452-466. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/14790726.2014.956124 187 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (2). 187-212 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl exploring self-perceived communication competence in foreign language learning thomas lockley nihon university college of law in tokyo, japan lockleyta@gmail.com abstract speaking self-perceived communication competence (spcc) is a construct with many potential implications for foreign language learning, but one that has been little studied. spcc itself is a major predictive factor in willingness to communicate, a construct which has been widely conceptualised and researched. this study (n = 103) used a repeated measures anova to investigate spcc and its correlation with actual l2 speaking proficiency over the course of a year; there was no significant correlation. qualitative data was then treated with grounded theory to establish why spcc was inaccurate and to provide pointers as to how spcc accuracy might be improved. the findings are discussed with reference to the literature in an attempt to establish a deeper understanding of spcc, particularly in the japanese context, its formulation and its implications for foreign language learning. keywords: self-perceived communication competence, willingness to communicate, learner self-perceptions, learner self-evaluations, foreign language anxiety communication competence is defined as “adequate ability to pass along or give information; the ability to make known by talking or writing” (mccroskey, 1984, p. 261). speaking self-perceived communication competence (spcc), the subject of this article, is how an individual perceives their own competence at spoken communication. although much of the research thomas lockley 188 on spcc has been done for the l1, this study will concentrate on spcc in foreign language learning (fll), a crucial component in willingness to communicate (wtc) (mccroskey & baer, 1985; yu, li, & gao, 2011), which in turn is instrumental in the success or failure of fll (macintyre, clément, dörnyei, & noels, 1998). self-perceived communication competence, particularly its accuracy, could be an important area for fll as accurate and inaccurate self-beliefs can help or hinder approaches to learning (mercer, 2011); however, being cognisant of strengths and weaknesses allows students to “adjust their own cognition and thinking to be more adaptive to diverse tasks and, thus, facilitate learning” (pintrich, 2002, p. 222). this article will argue that if a student of foreign languages is able to gauge their spcc accurately, l2 speaking will improve through a greater willingness to speak rendering more l2 experience and therefore higher proficiency. through reviewing the existing literature and discussing new data it will attempt to find pedagogical ways to facilitate this. literature review self-perceived communication competence in willingness to communicate wtc, like spcc, is a concept that originates in the l1 communication field (mccroskey & baer, 1985) and was conceptualised for fll by macintyre et al. (1998). wtc “is the main cause of second language use” (yu, li, & gou, 2011, p. 253), as language learners with a higher degree of wtc will be more active in the l2. developing wtc in learners is therefore a desirable goal for language teaching (macintyre et al., 1998; mercer, 2011) as greater l2 experience is likely to lead to greater proficiency. wtc in fll has many contributing constructs, self-evaluative, motivational, contextual, personality-based and situational, and is commonly presented as a heuristic pyramid (macintyre et al., 1998, p. 547), representing a person’s state of mind as they decide whether to utilize their l2 or not. yashima’s (2002) study is one of the best known studies on wtc in the japanese context, where this study also took place. she carried out a comparison of wtc in canada and japan and found that in most cases the original canadian wtc model was also applicable to the japanese context. among other similarities, international posture and international communication interest contributed to wtc in both contexts and l2 self-confidence was more predictive of wtc than actual proficiency. however, where japan did differ was on the matter of motivation and wtc; motivation was only directly correlated to wtc when coupled with self-confidence. hence, it is suggested that self-confidence may have particular weight in the japanese context. exploring self-perceived communication competence in foreign language learning 189 it is the self-confidence construct in wtc that is key for this study as yu, li, and gou (2011, p. 256), in their study on the personality-based variables and the correlations underlying wtc, identified speaking self-confidence as being the same construct as spcc; this study will do the same. the construct has two contributory factors: self-evaluation of l2 proficiency and foreign language anxiety (macintyre et al., 1998). self-evaluation self-evaluative “beliefs are quite vital in deciding human activity especially [given that] humans tend to regulate the level and the distribution of effort spent vis-à-vis the effects expected from their actions” (anyadubalu, 2010, p. 194); “people must feel sufficiently competent at the instrumental activities to achieve their desired outcomes” (deci, 1995, p. 64). anyadubalu (2010) found that higher self-evaluative feeling equalled lower anxiety and better performance and hashimoto (2002, p. 57) found that an “increased perceived competence will lead to increased motivation which in turn affects frequency of l2 use in the classroom.” the role of culture and self-system in self-evaluation is an important one (mercer, 2011) as it is “instrumental in . . . , motivation and in the regulation of interpersonal processes such as person perception, social comparison, and the seeking and shaping of social interaction” (markus & kitayama, 1991, p. 230). there are two self-views; the independent, which is characteristic of north american and some other european cultures, and the interdependent, characteristic of japanese, but also many asian, african, south american and southern european cultures (markus & kitayama, 1991). independent selves view the self as a distinct entity and seek to “discover and express [their] unique attributes” (markus & kitayama, 1991, p. 226). interdependent selves “insist on the fundamental connectedness of human beings to each other [and recognize that] one’s behaviour is determined, contingent on, and, to a large extent organised by what the actor perceives to be the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others in the relationship” (markus & kitayama, 1991, p. 227). while linked by self-view similarities, however, these geographically widespread cultures are clearly each unique; forming, maintaining and perpetuating their interdependent self-view in differing ways. in japan selfevaluation is characterised “not by seeking positive self-regard but rather by maintaining a chronic self-critical view” (heine, lehman, markus, & kitayama, 1999, p. 767) and “possessing, let alone enhancing or maintaining, a positive evaluation of the self disconnected from the social context is not a primary concern for japanese” (p. 770). self-evaluative characteristics include “selfthomas lockley 190 criticism, self-discipline, effort, perseverance, the importance of others, shame and apologies, balance and emotional restraint” (p. 769); this leads to a concern and awareness of one’s weaknesses as opposed to one’s strengths. in education, this manifests itself as a hesitancy to assume superior proficiency than classmates (heine, takata, & lehman, 2000) and a student awareness and concentration upon what is not yet known rather than knowledge already acquired (aspinall, 2006). it is in fact “considered immature and bad manners for the learner to ‘show off’ something they have learned, or be ostentatious in any way” (aspinall, 2006, p. 263). these cultural tendencies to self-critical and humble behaviour clearly have great implications for self-evaluation and classroom behaviour as they contribute to spcc in japan. anxiety horwitz, horwitz, & cope, (1986, p. 125) defined anxiety as “the subjective feeling of tension, apprehension, nervousness, and worry associated with an arousal of the autonomic nervous system.” it may in part be caused by low self-evaluation (anyadubalu, 2010; pellegrino, 2005;). “the special communication apprehension permeating [fll] derives from the personal knowledge that one will almost certainly have difficulty understanding others and making oneself understood” (horwitz et al., 1986, p. 127). horwitz et al. (1986) named this “foreign language anxiety” and described it as a “distinct complex of selfperceptions, beliefs, feelings and behaviours related to classroom language learning” (p. 128). it is particularly focussed on speaking as the most active and public of the language skills. anxiety can refer to both context specific anxiety, and also to trait anxiety, a personality-based construct; either kind can be debilitating in fll (dörnyei, 2005). anxious students seem to speak less and due to lack of experience become more anxious; they then self-evaluate themselves as less competent (dörnyei, 2005; kitano, 2001; yu, li, & gou, 2011). anyadubalu (2010) found that high levels of anxiety adversely affected acquisition and performance while andrade and williams (2009) found that “higher levels of anxiety tended to indicate lower levels of proficiency” (p. 5); anxiety was related to fear of being negatively evaluated while conversing with others. context specific anxiety is a temporary state influenced by immediate environment (ushioda, 2003) and “may be increased by many factors such as unpleasant prior experiences, intergroup tension, increased fear of assimilation or, an increased number of people listening” (macintyre et al., 1998, p. 549). this commonly occurs in stressful situations like tests, or when put on the spot in conversations (horwitz et al., 1986). however, conversely there are exploring self-perceived communication competence in foreign language learning 191 times when context specific anxiety can be facilitative due to performance pressure and adrenalin (horwitz et al., 1986). andrade and williams (2009) actually found that many students expect anxiety provoking situations in the fll classroom and are mentally prepared beforehand. for this reason, “the majority of students do not feel an intense, persistent, hindering anxiety” (p. 11) that only affects a small minority and in differing degrees. culture can also play a role here, especially in an fll situation if a person is out of their own cultural milieu, for example learning their l2 abroad or from a foreign teacher; such multicultural settings possibly generate a “complex construct that combines language anxiety, self-perceptions of l2 proficiency, and attitudinal/motivational components” (dörnyei, 2005, p. 200). jamshidnejad (2010) reported that in some such situations, and also when interlocutors’ proficiency and social status were perceived as higher, some language learners simply give up speaking through anxiety. ways to promote accurate spcc in the classroom accurate spcc seems to be facilitated through lessened anxiety and better self-evaluation, therefore educational methods to lessen the former and promote the latter seem particularly important. the literature points to two main contributory areas; firstly the educational environment, classroom and teaching method, as in “language acquisition, the person cannot be meaningfully separated from the social environment within which he/she operates” (ushioda, 2010a, p. 16). secondly, educator attitude and approach, which has perhaps the most significant bearing on a learning situation (horwitz, 2001). educational environment. to construct an educational environment conducive to spcc’s contributory factors, palacios (1998) recommended that curricula should encompass clear goals so that students are aware of the purpose and potential outcomes, both short and long term, of their study. learner logs and reflection journals can provide a powerful tool for students to compare their progress with curriculum goals and therefore feel their proficiency gains (kitano, 2001). many authorities recommend using student centred methodologies in supportive learning environments (deci, 1995; dörnyei, 2005). anxiety can be lessened through the initial use of pair and group work rather than whole class activities (anyadubalu, 2010), and this could be particularly beneficial for lower level learners (andrade & williams, 2009). scaffolding learners’ involvement in discussions from pairs to small groups and finally to whole class discussions increases student confidence and enables better self-evaluation (de saint léger & storch, 2009). thomas lockley 192 learner autonomy also provides a powerful tool to increase feelings of empowerment, well-being and self-evaluation (deci, 1995; kitano, 2001; mills, pajares, & herron, 2007). “synthesis occurs when there is enough support in the social context so that the natural, proactive tendencies are able to flourish. however in the absence of adequate support, not only will intrinsic motivation be undermined, but so too will the development of a more integrated or coherent sense of self” (deci, 1995, p. 83). to this end, using supportive, scaffolded classroom tasks with effective language learning strategies and peer tutoring embedded in lesson materials to motivate learners to think for themselves (kitano, 2001; mills et al., 2007; ushioda, 2010a) should lead to an increase in intrinsic motivation as autonomy increases (fukuda, sakata, & takeuchi, 2011). ushioda (2010b) recommends a vygotskian approach, stimulating students at an individually appropriate level. feelings of competence occur not when someone has done something “trivially easy, [but] when one has worked toward accomplishment” (deci, 1995, p. 66), suggesting that differentiation and teaching to the top not the middle, particularly in mixed proficiency classes, would contribute to maintaining this stimulating level for as many learners as possible. encouraging students to cooperate rather than compete and enabling stronger students to use their l2 skills to support weaker students should also benefit spcc accuracy through more practical usage and improved interpersonal and social skills. many of the methodologies mentioned here were conceived of and developed in cultures characterized by the independent self-view and may experience challenges in other contexts, such as japan one (goto butler, 2011), due to educational culture such as teacher-centred traditions (aspinall, 2006; goto butler, 2011; rohlen & letendre, 1995). however, educators who acknowledge local cultural norms and work with them sensitively and adaptively rather than assume that all self-views will react in the same way are likely to be able over time to enact the methods they aspire to (aspinall, 2006; goto butler, 2011). educator approach. there has been little scientific work done on educator factors in motivation (dörnyei, 2005), but the literature affords some pointers stemming mainly from the basis that if learning does not take place or is hindered, self-evaluation will fall, anxiety will rise and therefore spcc accuracy will suffer. dweck’s (2006) concepts of fixed and growth mindset seem to have a strong bearing on educator approach. a growth mindset represents the belief that abilities and outcomes result from the individual’s own effort, that a person’s true potential is unknown. a fixed mindset on the other hand is characteristic of people who believe their personal qualities are unchangeable, they would rather not challenge themselves or leave themselves open to the possibilexploring self-perceived communication competence in foreign language learning 193 ity of failure. therefore, promoting growth mindset would seem to be one way of improving self-evaluation and lessening anxiety through more meaningful learning and feelings of achievement; this centres on praise techniques as unwarranted praise encourages the attitude that if you are already brilliant, why try harder? (dweck, 2006). most importantly, praising intelligence and talent rather than effort “implies that we’re proud of [the student/child] for their intelligence or talent rather than for the work they put in” (dweck, 2006, p. 177). mercer and ryan (2010, p. 442) in their study of mindset in efl wrote that praise should be limited to the growth-orientated process, focussing “feedback on learners’ efforts, the process of learning, and beliefs about developing one’s ability through hard work.” interestingly, the attitude that anyone can do anything if they try hard enough is a strong characteristic of the japanese educational context (aspinall, 2006) along with a tendency to not lavish praise on learners (rohlen & letendre, 1995); perhaps the growth mindset factor could be one of the reasons the japanese education system performs so well in international comparisons? supportive and understanding teachers may be the biggest factor in reducing anxiety (horwitz, 2001) as “problematic” students probably have some kind of anxiety at the root of their problems (horwitz et al., 1986). knowing students well as individuals, being flexible (horwitz, 2001) and exhibiting interest in them for their own sake can contribute to lessened anxiety. error correction techniques should therefore focus on reducing defensive reactions in students as well as improving l2 proficiency but not by correcting every little mistake (horwitz et al., 1986). horwitz (2001) also recommended against teaching the foreign language as a massive memory exercise; realistic, context specific and appropriately paced curriculums seem to work best. the role of cultural and ethnic differences in teacher-student relations and anxiety caused by it is mentioned by horwitz (2001). in japan the number of non-japanese language educators is large due to government policy and the commercial profitability of the efl industry. these teachers are overwhelmingly native speakers of english, normally from independent-self cultures, in contrast to their students from an interdependent-self culture. there can be deep misunderstandings between people of differing self-views (heine et al., 1999) and it seems unlikely that these would not manifest themselves in fll. interdependent self-view could have a major bearing on educator approach in the classroom, for example in group and discussion work where students may be less anxious and perform more effectively in groups established over time rather than constructing new groups for each activity. it may also be that to ask a student’s opinion on a subject suddenly without giving time for the student to study the social context may produce silence. this may not mean that the student has no opinion, or that they cannot speak the l2 thomas lockley 194 (jamshidnejad, 2010), but simply that for the interdependent self, opinion and expression will depend on subtle variations in the social context so the student may be unsure what to say. it would seem sensible to ask complex questions to the whole class instead of individuals, giving students time to formulate their opinion in contextual relation first. emotions and expressions could also be an area where self-view misunderstandings may flourish. for “independent selves, emotional expressions may literally ‘express’ or reveal the inner feelings such as anger, sadness, and fear . . . for interdependent selves however, an emotional expression may be more often regarded as a public instrumental action that may or may not be related directly to the inner feeling” (markus & kitayama, 1991, p. 236). this suggests that educators need to become adept at reading the situation to judge whether a student has misunderstood or is simply waiting to read the social context before acting. this will also be relevant when offering choice. in japan it is the responsibility of the teacher to establish what is correct in a given situation rather than offer a choice (markus & kitayama, 1991); if offered a choice therefore a student may well act baffled, thereby giving the non-japanese teacher the impression that the student cannot react linguistically rather than culturally. similar cases are reported in jamshidnejad’s (2010) iranian study. it is suggested that putting students under pressure in these way is likely to cause anxiety and negative self-evaluation. finally, due to interdependent self-view, it is a marked characteristic of the japanese educational system that discipline and class harmony are kept not through what might be termed overt behaviour control techniques, but through the forming of groups and relationships which bind students and educator together (rohlen & letendre, 1995). therefore, the group membership is another area of potential misunderstanding; if a non-japanese teacher is not aware of the key role of groups and group membership, they may not be able to formulate their own position in the class in relation to it. this could cause discomfort for all concerned, and non-japanese teachers will need to be sensitive to this fact and work with it. self-perceived communication competence is a construct highly significant for wtc and therefore the success or failure of fll; it contains two factors, self-evaluation and anxiety. both can fluctuate depending on cultural and environmental variables, but both have a strong effect on each other. there may be many ways language educators can promote accurate spcc through reducing anxiety and improving self-evaluation; primarily however it seems to depend on a culturally sensitive, supportive, clearly structured, studentcentred approach which promotes autonomy and growth mindset and retains learner awareness of progress. exploring self-perceived communication competence in foreign language learning 195 research questions the aim of this study is to establish further how spcc can be made more accurate; to this end the research questions to be addressed are: 1. did this research population have an accurate spcc? 2. what reasons can be determined for the answer to research question 1? 3. what can the data tell us about further ways to foster accurate spcc in fll? method setting and participants the participants (n = 103) were first year university students (18 or 19 years old), all unknown to the researcher and enrolled in the english department at a private foreign language university near tokyo. the university employs a high number of non-japanese educators and markets the institution very successfully as a place where “communicative” english taught by native speakers “will” facilitate effective language learning; the inference is that contact with native speakers is the key to this. many students choose the university precisely for this reason and are often recommended to do so by their high school teachers and parents. the “english communication” classes that the participants were members of put a heavy emphasis on speaking and were mandated to be conducted in english by both teachers and students. participants average toefl scores were: listening 47.3, writing 43.7 and reading 46.4, classing them as a2-b1 (elementary, independent users), on the common european framework of reference for languages (cefr). instrument this study used a questionnaire (see appendix a) to measure participant self-confidence in speaking as well as the other three language skills and grammar. it was created from data collected in two focus groups (n = 9) and was used previously in lockley and farrell (2011). its cronbach’s reliability was .94 for the speaking component on that occasion. for this research, the questionnaire was administered at the beginning of semester one in march 2010 and again to the same participants at the end of semester two in february 2011. it collected numerical data to establish self-confidence values and also non-compulsory written qualitative data which sought to obtain reasons thomas lockley 196 for the numerical data given. the scores for self-confidence were obtained by asking three virtually identical but differently worded questions; a single scale with three items for each skill. participants indicated their self-confidence on a 5-point likert scale which allowed a score of 15 points for each skill when the three question scores were combined. this article was restricted to selfconfidence in speaking; spcc (yu, li, & gou, 2011). other data were not used. to establish actual proficiency, the kanda english proficiency test (kept) speaking examination was used. the students took the exam shortly before the first semester and shortly after the second semester, coinciding closely with the questionnaire administration. kept requires three or four examinees to hold an impromptu conversation for seven minutes after reading a short topic prompt. the two independent assessors grade fluency, lexis/grammar, pronunciation, and conversation skill (see appendix b) out of 4 (for a possible total of 16). bonk and ockey (2003) found that the rasch model enables examinees to be reliably separated by ability and van moere (2006) found that the test was a reliable measure of a candidate’s ability in l2 speaking. a repeated measures analysis of variance (anova) investigated the relationship between kept and spcc, both in march 2010 and february 2011 and then the correlation between the two kept and the two spcc values. although the number of participants and the size of the scale were relatively small, the repeated measures strengthened the study by rendering more data per subject and more power. for descriptive statistics see table 1. table 1 descriptive statistics (n = 103) variable m sd cronbach’s kept march 2010 6.89 2.22 .94 spcc march 2010 6.05 2.59 .93 kept february 2011 7.93 2.12 .91 spcc february 2011 7.28 2.67 .92 given the exploratory nature of the study and the importance of ensuring that findings were grounded in the actual experience of learners (pellegrino, 2005), grounded theory following dörnyei’s (2007) method was used for the qualitative data. dörnyei advocated a 3-stage process, firstly open coding, secondly axial coding and finally selective coding. dey (2007), described this process as allowing “comparison and contrast, links and connections” (p. 173) to emerge, enabling construction of a coherent narrative and informed discussion. exploring self-perceived communication competence in foreign language learning 197 findings quantitative data the descriptive statistics (table 1) show that in march 2010 the average spcc score achieved by participants was only 6.05 from a possible 15 (37.81%); this had increased slightly to 7.28 (45.5%), in february 2011. participant kept scores were 6.89 (45.93%) of the total possible, during the first data collection and 7.93 (52.87%), during the second. this shows that the spcc was in fact lower percentage-wise than actual proficiency although both spcc and proficiency did rise over the year table 2 shows the anova results for spcc and kept and the correlation between the two. the rise in the spcc speaking and kept test scores were both individually statistically significant, p < .05 but there was no correlation between them, p > .05. this means that statistically students did improve both their spcc and their actual proficiency, but that the two had no significant effect on each other. higher actual proficiency did not lead to higher spcc, or vice versa, and spcc was neither accurate at the beginning or the end of the year. the answer to research question 1 is that this research population did not have an accurate spcc. table 2 spcc and speaking proficiency f r p kept 11.25 .001 spcc 36.69 .000 kept/spcc .31 .58 qualitative data the qualitative data brings a deeper and more faceted picture to the study. three categories emerged from the coding of the first data set, each with several subcategories: (a) negative self-evaluation of speaking, (b) positive self-evaluation of speaking and, (c) anxiety. these categories emerged organically but correspond to the formulation of spcc in the literature. negative self-evaluation was the most numerous (n = 72) and there were six subcategories, firstly (n = 19) attribution to lack of experience; this included comments like “i've never talk to native english speaker. so i don't experience to use english.” the second subcategory showed that many (n = 18) had difficulty expressing themselves; frustratingly their language level did not match what thomas lockley 198 they wanted to say. this was represented by comments such as “i have a lot of things i want to talk, but i can't make a sentence.” the third subcategory included unattributed statements of poor proficiency (n = 15) such as “i am not good at speaking.” the fourth attributed poor speaking to issues with specific language skills (n = 8); for example, “it takes time to translate into english. my pronunciation is not good.” the fifth (n = 8) represented concern about lack of speed when taking part in conversation and included comments such as “i can't find right english words in an instant.” the final subcategory (n = 4) represented overly high expectations of what language learners at their level of l2 proficiency should be able to do; for example “i can't speak fluency.” the second largest category (n = 15) was positive self-evaluation of speaking. there were four subcategories of which the largest (n = 7) attributed positive self-evaluation to experience; a representative comment was “i have traveled to some foreign countries and i speaked foreigners there.” the second subcategory (n = 5) was personal attribution, for example, “i like to talk and try to use words or phrases that i have learnt.” the third subcategory (n = 2) was unattributed confidence such as “because i am confident that i say my opinion in english.” the final subcategory included only one comment attributing confidence to success on a test, “my ability of speaking is just above passing the exam, eiken second grade [cefr b1/2]” which is a good level to have reached for learners of this stage. the third main category was anxiety (n = 10) with three subcategories. the first was grammar anxiety, for example, “i cannot speak english smoothly when i care too much about grammar.” the second was context specific anxiety hindering speaking performance, for instance, “when i speak to someone in english, i am always very nervous.” the third comprised two identical comments of trait anxiety: “i am shy.” in february 2011 four main categories emerged. they were again (a) negative self-evaluation, (b) positive self-evaluation and, (c) anxiety. however, this time a new category (d) both positive and negative self-evaluative comments, also appeared. it is worth noting that the comments in general were noticeably longer and more facetted than they had been the previous year. the largest main category was again negative self-evaluation (n = 65), and once more comprised six subcategories of which the largest (n = 24) attributed poor speaking to specific language skill deficiencies. a representative comment was “recently, i want to speak english more properly, follow grammar. but this made can't speak english because i have to think before i speak.” the second subcategory (n = 13) was unattributed poor proficiency, for example “i cannot come up with phrases smoothly when talking with someone.” a third subcategory (n = 11) was again frustration over not being able to explain exploring self-perceived communication competence in foreign language learning 199 ideas that students were cognitively able to conceive, for example “i like to communicate with many people, but often i cannot tell what i want to say.” the fourth subcategory (n = 7) represented overly high expectations for students of their proficiency; all comments were virtually identical: “i cannot speak english fluently.” the fifth subcategory (n = 5) was to do with native speakers with comments like “it is difficult to explain my feeling in english. recently i hesitate to talk with [native speakers].” the final subcategory (n = 5) was again to do with speed of conversation, for example, “it takes much time for me to speak english because i often stop to think what to say next.” the second main category was positive self-evaluation (n = 15) comprising four subcategories, firstly unattributed proficiency (n = 7); an example comment was “i can speak exactly what i want to say.” the second subcategory was experience as attribution (n = 4), “because i like to speak english and i lived in america.” the third subcategory was confidence through test results (n = 2), for example, “i get good score of listening test” and the final subcategory (n = 2) was again to do with native speakers, this time a sense of confidence through being able to understand, for example, “i can understand what [native speaker] teacher said.” the third main category was anxiety (n = 10) with four subcategories. this time anxiety appeared to be both facilitative and debilitative, particularly in relation to the first subcategory, grammar anxiety (n = 3). issues with grammar also appeared in the negative self-evaluation category, but were only included in the anxiety category where anxiety, or lack of it, seemed to be the main focus. for two participants, lack of anxiety about grammar was facilitative: “i don’t think about grammar much when i speak, but i think speak naturally is more important than grammar,” but for one other it was still debilitative: “i’m worried whether i make a grammar mistake or not when i'm speaking.” a second subcategory was anxiety about native speakers (n = 3), and one comment was “i am good enough at speaking english with my friends but i cannot speak english well when talking with [native speakers] because i get nervous.” the third subcategory concerned lack of confidence (n = 2): “i am not confident about my ability to speak english.” the final subcategory was possible context anxiety (n = 2), represented by “when i feel nervous, i cannot speak even very simple english.” this time there was one other main category, so there were no distinct subcategories. this main category comprised both positive and negative selfevaluations (n = 6); two examples of this category are “i can speak one to one, but it is hard to speak to whole class” and, “my english is not enough but i can talk with native speakers without problems.” thomas lockley 200 selective coding this section will attempt to interpret the data to answer research question 2, which was why was spcc inaccurate? the most noticeable factor on both data sets was the overwhelming instance of negative self-evaluation. perhaps however this was to be expected given the above noted propensity of japanese people to be self-critical (heine et al., 1999), conclude that they are performing worse than they actually are (heine et al., 2000) and be modest about achievements (aspinall, 2006). horwitz et al. (1986) also suggested that lower self-evaluation may be a common characteristic of all language learners. a perhaps significant trend was for the subcategories from february 2011 to show a more attributed tendency and better awareness of deficiencies in specific language skills; there was also the appearance of the new category of both positive and negative self-evaluations. these could perhaps point to greater skill-level internal comparisons which may develop with language proficiency in some learners (mercer, 2011; mercer & ryan, 2010); others however “may simply tend towards global self-descriptors” (mercer, 2011, p. 103) perhaps therefore accounting for the continuing presence of some unattributed comments. it is possible that this greater awareness of the construction of the l2 actually caused increased anxiety through the realization of how much hard work and time it takes to learn a foreign language. a minor subcategory indicated that grammar anxiety may have become a facilitative rather than debilitative factor for some participants by february 2011, with students actively attempting to suppress anxiety to speak smoothly. furthermore, there were also a small number of comments that performance on a test had contributed to positive self-evaluations. horwitz et al. (1986) mentioned that knowledge of errors made on tests can contribute to anxiety which in turn can lead to more errors being made on tests in the future and it appears that the opposite may also be possible. the number of comments to do with learner frustration and inability to express themselves in english had fallen somewhat too, and comments about difficulties with the speed of conversation had also lessened. this could show that a small number of participants had become less anxious through greater proficiency during the year but anxiety about limited expression may in fact be characteristic of fll as the awareness that “range of communicative choice and authenticity is restricted” (horwitz et al., 1986, p. 128) in itself causes anxiety and lower self-evaluation. the words native speaker occurred repeatedly in both data sets and in multiple categories; it is possible that these could be representative of the complicated construct forged in multi-cultural settings (dörnyei, 2005) but it could also represent instances of the so-called “native speakerism” (holliday, 2006). native speakerism exploring self-perceived communication competence in foreign language learning 201 refers to the idealizing, even idolizing, of the native speaker and the variety of language they speak, almost always, and certainly in this context, a native speaker of english. “the ‘native speaker’ ideal plays a widespread and complex iconic role . . . an underlying theme is the ‘othering’ of students and colleagues from outside the english-speaking west according to essentialist regional or religious cultural stereotypes” (holliday, 2006, p. 385). in japan native speakers and english proficiency are connected with not only linguistic idealism, but also social capital, inclusion in an imagined global community, and romance (kubota, 2011). even current government policy assumes that involving native speaking teachers and assistants will automatically increase english proficiency despite the previous government finding this was a waste of money (mie, 2013). the amount of negative self-evaluation comments concerning lack of experience with native speakers on the first data set and the institutional native speaker emphasis attest to the likely presence of some kind of native speakerism among these participants. by the second data set lack of experience, the largest attribution in the first data, had disappeared; instead a small number of comments about hesitating to talk to native speakers from feelings of linguistic inadequacy and talking to native speakers causing anxiety had appeared. on the other hand, the ability to understand and communicate with native speakers lead to positive selfevaluations for two students; it seems perhaps that native speaker related beliefs had worked for a small minority who felt they were reaching their ideal, but had had a debilitative effect for many. perhaps the experience of having native speaker teachers in itself actually caused anxiety and low self-evaluation in some students; comparison against a more proficient and honestly speaking linguistically privileged (due to having the desired language as a mother tongue) other may have caused anxiety, and unrealistic judgments (horwitz et al., 1986), about their own potential proficiency at this stage of language learning. it may also be that even if comments did not explicitly mention native speakers, the drop in attributions of positive self-evaluation to experience, the overly high expectations, and some negative self-evaluations (against a native speaker ideal) may represent instances of latent native speakerism. discussion the first research question concerned how spcc and actual l2 speaking proficiency (kept) correlated in this population; although all participants’ spcc and proficiency had improved over the year, the spcc was inaccurate. the answer to research question 2, why was the spcc inaccurate, seems to lie in a multitude of factors that took place over the course of the academic year to ensure continued anxiety and lower self-evaluation tendencies. these factors thomas lockley 202 may have included continued frustration at limited communication ability; the realization that learning a foreign language, even intensively in a dedicated institution is challenging; and context specific anxiety connected to native speakerism, which may also have contributed to a variety of other selfevaluation lowering instances. positive self-evaluation and lessened anxiety were perhaps contributed to by an affirmation of proficiency through test results, a liberation from grammar anxiety, and native speakerism beliefs and expectations being seemingly affirmed and fulfilled. the third research question concerns deriving pointers from the data and literature as to what can be done to foster a more accurate spcc. an important point is that much of the negative self-evaluation may be culturally and perhaps also subject specific, which could therefore mean that the japanese self-view may admit more negative self-evaluation than some other contexts to obtain an accurate spcc. promoting a greater educator awareness of both context specific self-evaluatory tendencies and spcc in general would seem a good idea so that lesson and curriculum planning can take them into account. the rest of the pointers will only be useful when educators become more cognizant of these issues. one of the major trends was a dissonance between communication ability and desired linguistic expression. one possible remedy for this may lie in an increased offering of content and language integrated learning (clil), to create “a climate which fosters continuous language growth” (mehisto, marsh, & frigols, 2008, p. 32) and facilitate the learning of language of interest and relevance to students’ lives. clil can also improve critical thinking skills, higher level vocabulary and real life speaking experiences (mehisto at al., 2008). another issue seemed to be overly high expectations for this proficiency level. kitano (2001) urges educators to “watch for learners who immediately set their goals as high as the level of native speakers, because this unrealistic expectation inevitably makes them perceive their ability as insufficient and causes them anxiety” (p. 559). kitano (2001) suggested that such students should be counselled in realistic “standards or short-term goals in language learning and incorporate standards of evaluation that encourage this” (p. 559). these assessments could be formative, acting as bridge to further learning by showing students where they went wrong and how to improve at the next attempt. this has been shown to aid large improvement in learner achievement (black & wiliam, 1998). combined with scaffolded learning and embedded reflection (mills et al., 2007), it is suggested that students would be better able to understand their level of language and its potential uses. many students also seemed to have a lack of understanding about the system of language itself, perhaps evident in the amount of unattributed comments exploring self-perceived communication competence in foreign language learning 203 on both data sets and lack of skill-level introspection for the majority of participants. although this may be normal in lower level learners (mercer, 2011), there is still no reason why educators should not try teaching more about languages and their formulation or focus learning strategies on fostering more attributed thinking. foreign language learning curriculums could include an “introduction to the l2” course, describing the makeup of a language and providing a rationale for why learning the language is important. brooks-lewis (2010) for example taught elements of the history of english to her students, helping to provide “a foundation for the constructing of learning” (p. 148). native speakerism was an unanticipated finding of this study although perhaps not surprising in an institution which puts such a weight on its native speaker educators; many of the students were attracted to the university by this fact and their expectations will have been shaped by it. perhaps then when these students realized that in fact simply having a native speaker teacher was not a panacea for fll, disillusionment with previously held native speakerism beliefs set in. this could have contributed to feelings of inadequacy and “otherness”, as well as alienation from target cultures (holliday, 2006), which in turn could have led to lower self-evaluation (mercer, 2011). native speakerism is not confined to this institution nor to japan (holliday, 2006), it is a widespread social problem and is difficult to combat. however, if educators were more aware of the phenomenon and willing to manage it constructively in their own contexts on an individual basis, it is possible that it may become less of an issue for students in those educators’ classes. it would require a good deal of introspection by teachers as to how they might be promoting it, if at all, and a willingness to then enact specific and individualized strategies to confront it. this could well be a difficult prospect, as, of course, one of the groups who benefit consciously or unconsciously from the phenomenon most, in social standing, employment prospects, sometimes even sexually (appleby, 2013), are the educators themselves and there must be an acknowledgement of complicity by some educators in the situation. given the feelings of otherness that native speakerism renders, promoting a greater sense of connection and “identity with the target [language] community” (mercer, 2011, p. 27) may aid self-evaluation. this could perhaps be done through clil lessons in the history, society and geography of target language countries, which can be powerful tools to promote connectivity (mehisto et al., 2008). in efl contexts, such as the one where this study took place, it could also be emphasised that in this day and age english is used as much to talk to non-native speakers as an international lingua franca rather than purely as a tool to speak to native speakers. thomas lockley 204 the final issue, which may also have implications for the othering of students and educators, is that of culture and differing self-view. in this context the native speaker teachers were overwhelmingly from cultures characteristic of the independent self-view and the students from the interdependent. the findings of this study suggest that it seems important for educators to be as sensitive as possible to cultural differences (see also horwitz, 2001) and not to judge classroom occurrences by their own cultural expectations. this may be a worthy but challenging proposition as attempting to understand differences in self-evaluation practices “can evoke puzzlement, disbelief and pejorative assessments of the other world” (heine et al., 1999, p. 769). so in what way could educators from different national and ethnic groups (this does not only refer to those from english speaking countries, it may be also equally applicable to japanese people teaching in the uk, for example) achieve greater familiarity and cultural expertise? it would be unrealistic in the short term to expect widespread educator retraining, although perhaps language teacher training programs might put more emphasis on this in the future. instead perhaps institutions might include cultural familiarization training for new staff and encourage educators to read more widely during service. this would benefit all stakeholders through increased student satisfaction and potential spcc increases leading to increased experience, proficiency and therefore student satisfaction. educators themselves could also enact simple in-class actions such as consulting students as to their past language learning experiences (sampson, 2010). limitations this was a small-scale study in a japanese university, is not globally generalizable and its findings need be seen through culture tinted lenses; what is right in one context may not be right for another. furthermore, it should be remembered that cultural distinctions are “general tendencies that emerge when the members of a culture are considered as a whole” (markus & kitayama, 1991, p. 225), and not necessarily characteristics of specific individuals. it must also be acknowledged that although a considerable time (11 months) passed between the two questionnaire administrations, there is the possibility that the two may have affected each other. a further limitation is that participants needed to be identified to match up the first data collection with the second, and it is possible that this lack of anonymity could have affected the data. exploring self-perceived communication competence in foreign language learning 205 conclusion this article presents a review of the factors involved in l2 speaking spcc and refers to the literature and new data for ways that accurate spcc might be promoted in the classroom by educators. it is suggested, with reference to the literature, that this may lead to rises in linguistic awareness, self-evaluation and ultimately to more effective language learning. the study established that spcc was inaccurate in this population and suggested that generally low self-evaluation and anxiety, formed through unrealistic expectations, frustration at limited proficiency, native speakerism and perhaps a japanese tendency to self-criticism, contributed to this. it suggested that educators should employ scaffolded curriculums with embedded learning strategies and reflection, put more emphasis on what a language is and where it comes from, and consider teaching higher level clil type lessons to improve vocabulary and familiarity with cognitively challenging subjects and target culture. furthermore it suggested that in contexts where native speakerism may be an issue, educators should try to manage student expectations and assumptions. finally, where student and educator are of different background, educators should be encouraged to adapt or at least become more familiar with student cultural norms, in particular when they pertain to students’ self-views and educational culture. acknowledgements firstly, thank you to the two blind reviewers whose comments and expertise were absolutely instrumental in shaping this final version of the article. thanks also to stephanie farrell, now tuncay (congratulations), for helping to conceive of this project, i am sorry she could not continue with it. dr. gary ockey’s help with instrument design and advice on data handling was invaluable and thank you finally to all the students and teachers who contributed their time to collect the data. thomas lockley 206 references andrade, m., & williams, k. 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(2011). the personality-based variables and their correlations underlying willingness to communicate. asian social sciences, 7(3), 253-257. exploring self-perceived communication competence in foreign language learning 209 appendix a questionnaire for the following items, circle the number (from 1 = strong disagree to 5 = strongly agree) that best describes you. 1) what is your name? 2) my high school english class met with a native speaker of english. 1 2 3 4 5 3) i can read well in english. 1 2 3 4 5 4) i think about grammar before i speak. 1 2 3 4 5 5) i am confident that i know how to use who, which, that, what, whatever, whoever, whichever 1 2 3 4 5 6) i am good at listening to english. 1 2 3 4 5 7) i am confident that i know how to make comparisons in english. 1 2 3 4 5 8a) i feel confident in my ability to read english. 1 2 3 4 5 8b) please explain your answer. 9a) i feel confident in my ability to write english. 1 2 3 4 5 9b) please explain your answer. 10a) i feel confident in my ability to listen to english. 1 2 3 4 5 10b) please explain your answer. 11a) i feel confident in my ability to speak english. 1 2 3 4 5 11b) please explain your answer. 12) i am confident that i know how to form the present tense. 1 2 3 4 5 13) i am confident that i know how to use the conditional. 1 2 3 4 5 14) i can listen well in english. 1 2 3 4 5 15) i am confident that i know how to use the future perfect continuous tense. (i’ll have finished reading this book by the end of this month.) 1 2 3 4 5 16) i can speak well in english. 1 2 3 4 5 17) i am good at writing in english. 1 2 3 4 5 18) i am confident that i know how to use the passive voice. 1 2 3 4 5 thomas lockley 210 19) i am good at speaking in english. 1 2 3 4 5 20) i am confident that i know how to use the past perfect tense. 1 2 3 4 5 21) i feel nervous when talking in english to eli teachers? 1 2 3 4 5 22) i feel nervous when talking to native speakers besides eli teachers, for example exchange students or when on holiday? 1 2 3 4 5 23) i am good at reading in english 1 2 3 4 5 24) i can write well in english. 1 2 3 4 5 25) i am confident that i know how to form the past tense. (“he walked home.”) 1 2 3 4 5 26) i am confident that i know how to use modals. (may, must, could, should, would, have to, be able to) 1 2 3 4 5 appendix b kept oral rating bands pronunciation think about: word level sentence level: ability to ‘blend’ or link sound within or between words. stress, rhythm, and intonation accent fluency think about: automatization: ability to formulate utterances quickly and speak smoothly speaking speed hesitations and pausing lexis / grammar think about: correct grammatical form suitability of vocabulary displaying ability to use (or attempting to use) different grammatical structures and vocabulary suitably in context. collocations and correct word choice conversational skill think about: participation and smoothness of interaction (turn-taking, responding to others, asking questions and introducing new gambits, paraphrasing, hedging) exploring self-perceived communication competence in foreign language learning 211 0 ~ 0.5 unacceptable pronunciation very heavy accent, that would lead to a breakdown in communication only uses katakana-like phonology and rhythm; words not blended together unacceptable fluency fragments of speech halting, often incomprehensible communication nearly impossible unacceptable lexical & grammatical usage no evidence of grammar knowledge knows few words, and uses them in isolation unable to share simple ideas communication not possible unacceptable conversational interaction shows no awareness of other speakers; may speak, but not in a conversation-like way communication not possible 1.0 ~ 1.5 poor pronunciation uses somewhat katakana-like pronunciation; does not blend words likely to have comprehension difficulties with interlocutors poor fluency slow strained, unnatural speech frequent unnatural groping for words long unnatural pauses communication difficult poor lexical & grammatical usage some very limited grammar knowledge evident limited vocabulary but inexpert usage little or no attempt at complex vocabulary or grammar ideas can be shared, but with likely comprehension difficulties poor conversational interaction does not initiate interaction uses mostly a monologue style may show some basic turn-taking but does not relate ideas well, or give much explanation 2.0 ~ 2.5 fair pronunciation has not mastered some difficult sounds of english, but should be mostly understandable to interlocutors makes regular attempts to blend words but may still stress words incorrectly fair fluency speech is hesitant; somewhat unnatural unnatural groping for words and unfilled spaces may persist, but it does not completely impede communication may overuse fillers, or demonstrate other unnatural usages fair lexical & grammatical usage overly reliant on a small range of simple grammar and vocabulary to express ideas shows little or no evidence of ability to control difficult grammar or vocabulary fair conversational interaction consciousness of turn taking maintains interaction by responding to others without unnatural gaps or pauses shows meaningful agreement or disagreement to others’ opinions (assent / dissent, etc) thomas lockley 212 3.0 ~ 3.5 very good pronunciation may not have mastered all the sounds of english, but has good control of sentence stress and intonation. accent does not interfere with comprehension; can blend words consistently very good fluency occasional misuse of fillers, groping and frequent repair may still be evident, but is not overly distracting to listeners. very good lexical & grammatical usage shows evidence of ability to control difficult grammar or vocabulary and attempts to use a range of forms. may continue to make mistakes, but should be comprehensible. very good conversational interaction appears confident responds appropriately to others may direct conversation shows ability to negotiate meaning quickly and naturally may begin to use paraphrase or clarification as a means to scaffold for lower level interlocutors 4 ~ ? excellent pronunciation appears to have mastered much of the sound system of english accent does not impede communication excellent fluency conversation should proceed smoothly, with little impediment. uses fillers, markers, lexical chunks effectively. groping may occur, but seems natural & fluent. excellent grammar & vocabulary usage demonstrates excellent control of a range of grammar and vocabulary mistakes may still occur, but these should not impede meaning chunked lexical items, such as idioms and collocations may be present and used correctly excellent conversational interaction very confident and natural may ask others to expand on views negotiates, holds and relinquishes turns appropriately explains how own and others’ ideas are related, interacts smoothly 473 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (3). 2020. 473-500 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.3.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the interface between task-modality and the use of previously known languages in young clil english learners maría martínez-adrián universidad del país vasco (upv/ehu), spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0324-0443 maria.martineza@ehu.eus izaskun arratibel-irazusta universidad del país vasco (upv/ehu), spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2274-6423 izaskun.arratibel@ehu.eus abstract this article contributes to the scarcity of research on the interface between task-modality and the use of previously known languages (pkl) in young learners. it examines the use of basque/spanish by clil learners (aged 10-11) during oral interaction while completing two collaborative tasks in english: a speaking task and a speaking + writing task. findings indicate that these learners are extensive users of their pkl. task-modality is particularly evident in the case of amount of pkl use, as a higher number of pkl turns are obtained in the speaking + writing task. however, task-modality has a limited effect on the functions of pkl, which contrasts with previous studies with adults. despite the extensive use of their pkl, these young and low-proficient learners employ them as cognitive tools that facilitate the organization of the tasks, the co-construction of meaning and the attention to formal aspects of language such as mechanics. keywords: clil; task-modality; use of previously known languages; task-based interaction maría martínez-adrián, izaskun arratibel-irazusta 474 1. introduction the use of previously known languages (henceforth pkl) during task-based interaction has been the focus of attention of numerous english as a second language (esl) and english as a foreign language (efl) investigations, predominantly with adult learners. these studies have tackled the effect of factors such as proficiency, onset age, gender, task-type (alegría de la colina & garcía mayo, 2009; cenoz, 2001; muñoz, 2007), and to a lesser extent, task-modality effects (azkarai & garcía mayo, 2015, 2017; payant & kim, 2019). in this last respect, when comparing collaborative speaking tasks to tasks that include oral and written components, learners tend to resort to their pkl to a higher extent in the latter. in terms of functions, while learners have been found to use their pkl mainly for vocabulary searches in speaking tasks, in speaking + writing tasks, grammar talk is more common. recent years have witnessed the implementation of content and language integrated learning (clil) programs all over europe, and with their inception, an explosion of research examining the effect of the more natural, meaningful and intense input provided in these learning contexts. specifically, clil studies on the use of pkl have mainly concentrated on secondary-school learners (arratibel-irazusta & martínez-adrián, 2018, 2019; lázaro-ibarrola, 2016; lázaro-ibarrola & garcía mayo, 2012; martínez-adrián & gutiérrez-mangado, 2015), but a growing bulk of research exists with primary-school learners (azkarai & imaz agirre, 2017; gallardo-delpuerto, 2015; garcía mayo & hidalgo, 2017; garcía mayo & lázaro-ibarrola, 2015; gutiérrez-mangado, 2015; martínez-adrián, 2020a). however, unlike research with adults in esl and efl settings, clil research has mainly analyzed the variable proficiency and there is a need to examine a wider range of variables such as task-type or task-modality, particularly with young learners. this paper will try to fill these gaps by examining the use of pkl (basque and spanish) during the oral interaction of young clil learners (aged 10-11) while performing two collaborative tasks: a speaking task and a speaking + writing task. section 2 reviews the main empirical findings concerning the use of pkl during dyadic interaction and task-modality effects. in section 3, the research questions are formulated and the study is described. section 4 presents the results. the paper finishes with the discussion of the results and the main conclusions drawn from the study. 2. literature review 2.1. the use of pkl when performing communicative tasks in english the use of pkl when performing communicative tasks in english has been the focus of attention of numerous investigations in esl and efl contexts, particularly with the interface between task-modality and the use of previously known languages in young clil. . . 475 adult learners. these investigations have tackled the effects of factors such as proficiency, onset age, gender and task-type (alegría de la colina & garcía mayo, 2009; cenoz, 2001; muñoz, 2007). as for proficiency, low-proficiency learners have been found to make use of pkl to a higher extent (di camilla & antón, 2012; storch & aldosari, 2010; swain & lapkin, 2000). in terms of functions, low-proficient learners use their pkl for task management and high-proficient learners to discuss vocabulary searches (di camilla & antón, 2012). regarding onset age, older learners have been reported to make a greater use of pkl during interaction (cenoz, 2001, 2003). with respect to gender effects, while ross-feldman (2005) did not observe differences between males and females in terms of amount of pkl use, azkarai (2015) reported a higher use of the first language (l1) by females. when functions were explored, females used the l1 mainly for a phatic function (i.e., to overcome communication breakdowns), while males employed their l1 mainly for off-task and vocabulary issues. task-type has also been claimed to affect the use and functions of the l1 (alegría de la colina & garcía mayo, 2009; lasito & storch, 2013; rayati, yaqubi, & harsejsani, 2012; storch & aldosari, 2010; storch & wigglesworth, 2003; swain & lapkin, 2000). the participants in these investigations did not make an excessive use of pkl, which has led researchers to claim that pkl should not be banned during pair-work, as its use might aid in the language learning process. in terms of amount of pkl, tasks with a written component generate a higher use of pkl. in the case of functions, learners employ their pkl for a variety of purposes such as task management, vocabulary and grammar discussions, off-task and phatics, among others, and they differ from task to task. for example, while the use of pkl for vocabulary discussions is more common in tasks that focus on oral communication (lasito & storch, 2013), grammar talk and mechanics are more frequent in editing tasks (rayati et al., 2012; storch & aldosari, 2010). recent years have witnessed a growing body of research with young learners (enever, 2011, garcía mayo, 2017, 2018; haselgreen, drew, & sørheim, 2012; nikolov, 2009). however, studies examining the use of pkl by younger learners in esl and efl contexts (pinter, 2007; shintani, 2012; tognini & oliver, 2012) do not examine the functions of pkl in detail like studies conducted with adult learners (see azkarai & garcía mayo, 2017 for a review of these studies in this respect), and a call for more research with younger learners has been made. children are unique and engage in the language learning process in ways that are distinct from their older counterparts, which reinforces the specificity of second language acquisition (sla) research with this population (mackey & gass, 2005 as cited in oliver & azkarai, 2017). following piaget’s theory (1929), “cognitive development is gradual, initially localized (see, e.g., gombert, 1992), maría martínez-adrián, izaskun arratibel-irazusta 476 and involves the construction of increasingly sophisticated mental representations (see, e.g., bialystok, 1994, 2001; bialystok & ryan, 1985)” (roehr-brackin, 2018, p. 10). likewise, “language is an integrated part of general cognition that develops from localized, item-based to more abstract and general representations” (roehr-brackin, 2018, p. 10). the need for more research with young learners has been particularly manifested in efl contexts, usually considered low input contexts (pinter, 2011), where learners are not exposed to large amounts of input as in esl settings. the programs introducing foreign languages at an early age have proliferated in recent years, in particular clil programs in which in addition to english as a school subject, different subjects are taught through a foreign language. despite the great diversity of clil programs, all of them are characterized by the provision of more natural, meaningful and intense input than in mainstream efl classrooms (coyle, 2007; lázaro-ibarrola & garcía mayo, 2012; marsh, 2002; muñoz, 2007). taking into account that clil programs are the norm more than the exception in the case of young learners in some european countries such as spain, several researchers have pointed out the need to do research in these settings so as to provide learners with the best learning conditions (garcía mayo, 2018). most research in clil contexts on the use of pkl during oral production has concentrated on secondary education (arratibel-irazusta & martínezadrián, 2018, 2019; lázaro-ibarrola, 2016; lázaro-ibarrola & garcía mayo, 2012; martínez-adrián & gutiérrez-mangado, 2015), even though a growing interest in the study of primary-school learners has been observed in recent years (e.g., azkarai & imaz agirre, 2017; gallardo-del-puerto, 2015; garcía mayo & hidalgo, 2017; garcía mayo & lázaro-ibarrola, 2015; gutiérrez-mangado, 2015; martínez-adrián, 2020a). the general finding that emerges from these studies is that clil learners do not rely so much on their pkl since the exposure to more intense and meaningful input provided in clil lessons leads them to a greater command of the target language (tl) and in turn to a decrease in the use of the pkl. these studies also confirm the facilitative role of pkl for task completion (garcía mayo & hidalgo, 2017; martínez-adrián, 2020a). unlike research with adults in esl and efl contexts that has examined a wide range of factors (alegría de la colina & garcía mayo, 2009; cenoz, 2001; muñoz, 2007), clil studies have mainly addressed the effect of proficiency (arratibel-irazusta & martínez-adrián, 2018, 2019; lázaro-ibarrola & garcía mayo, 2012; martínez-adrián, 2020b; pladevall-ballester & vraciu, 2017, this issue). task and gender effects have been looked into in a few studies (azkarai & garcía mayo, 2017; azkarai & imaz agirre, 2017). as for proficiency effects, results are somewhat contradictory. while lázaro-ibarrola and garcía mayo (2012) found that in secondary school learners the interface between task-modality and the use of previously known languages in young clil. . . 477 the use of the pkl in appeals for assistance and discourse markers significantly decreased with proficiency growth, other studies with similar age learners such as arratibel-irazusta and martínez-adrián (2018, 2019) revealed not only the inexistence of a significant decrease of pkl use (interactional strategies, transfer lapses – that is, borrowings and foreignizings – code-switching and discourse markers), but also of tl-based strategies (i.e., analytic and holistic). other investigations conducted with primary school learners that offer a comparison of clil and mainstream efl learner groups (matched for hours of exposure) following a longitudinal perspective attested a decreasing tendency in the use of categories such as borrowings and code-switching in both groups (pladevall-ballester & vraciu, 2017), a finding contrasting with other investigations in which a lower use of pkl was found on the part of clil learners. more recent studies conducted with young learners have examined the use of pkl together with tl use in appeals for assistance, clarification requests, metacomments, discourse markers and private speech in different age/proficiency groups (martínezadrián, 2020b). while a greater use of pkl was revealed in the group of older and more proficient learners, especially in the case of those strategies that were less cooperative and more external to the task itself, both age/proficiency groups performed similarly in the case of tl use, except for metacomments, where a slightly higher use was observed in younger learners. intragroup analyses also showed that learners in both age/proficiency groups resorted to their pkl more frequently than to english, except for metacomments. in terms of types, metacomments, followed by discourse markers and appeals for assistance, were the most common manifestations of pkl in both groups. metacomments were also most commonly served by the use of tl english. other studies have investigated the effect of task-repetition and gender in young learners. azkarai and garcía mayo (2017) explored the effect of two types of task repetition (exact and procedural) at two testing times. l1 use decreased at the second testing time in both repetition conditions. appeals, borrowings and metacognitive uses were the most common functions including l1 use of the learners at both testing times. azkarai and imaz agirre (2017) examined the effect of gender on l1 use in two age groups of primary-school learners while completing a spot-the-difference task. boys were reported to employ the l1 more often than girls, especially the older ones, and mainly to overcome communication breakdowns. in contrast, girls used the l1 only on occasions where they considered it necessary. the overview of research carried out with clil learners has revealed that the vast majority of studies have explored the effect of proficiency and has uncovered the need to examine other variables, especially with young learners. the present study will try to add to the literature in this respect. maría martínez-adrián, izaskun arratibel-irazusta 478 2.2. task-modality effects and the use of pkl research on dyadic task-based interaction has shown that more immediate tasks such as collaborative speaking tasks draw learners’ attention to meaning while tasks that incorporate a written component promote more attention to formal linguistic aspects and demand higher levels of accuracy because of the greater planning time and more opportunities for editing they offer to the learner (adams, 2006; adams & ross-feldman, 2008; garcía mayo & azkarai, 2016). in other words, a modality effect has been obtained in several investigations as learners have been shown to produce and resolve more language related episodes (lres)1 when comparing speaking to speaking + writing tasks. nevertheless, the vast majority of these studies have been conducted with adults in esl contexts (adams, 2006; adams & rossfeldman, 2008; ross-feldman, 2007) and efl settings (azkarai & garcía mayo, 2012; garcía mayo & azkarai, 2016; niu, 2009; payant & kim, 2019), and research carried out with younger learners, particularly in efl settings, is in its infancy (garcía mayo & imaz agirre, 2019). in line with research conducted with adults, more lres were produced by 6th year primary-school learners in the speaking + writing modality in garcía mayo and imaz agirre (2019). as for the nature of lres, lexical lres were more frequent than form in both the speaking and the speaking + writing task. it seems as if children were in the need of producing more lexical lres to move both tasks along. in terms of outcome, a higher percentage of resolved lres was found in the speaking + writing task, supporting previous research with adults. as regards the interface between task-modality and the use of pkl, to the knowledge of the authors, just two studies with adult learners in an efl setting have been conducted in this respect (cf. azkarai & garcía mayo, 2015; payant & kim, 2019). azkarai and garcía mayo (2015) gathered data from 44 efl spanish learners at university. participants paired up in same-proficiency dyads to perform four different tasks: picture placement and picture differences constituted the speaking modality tasks and dictogloss together with text editing the speaking + writing modality tasks. all l1 turns were codified according to l1 or second language (l2) predominance2 and the functions that the l1 served on the basis of the categorization adopted by alegría de la colina and garcía mayo (2009), and storch and aldosari (2010): off-task, metacognitive talk, grammar talk, vocabulary, and phatics. the analysis of the results indicated that learners made minimal use of the l1, as also reported in other investigations with adult learners 1 lres are defined as “any part of the dialogue in which students talk about the language they are producing, question their language use, or otheror self-correct” (swain, 1998, p. 70). 2 predominant l1 turns include more l1 words than l2 words, while minor l1 turns contain fewer l1 words than l2 words. the interface between task-modality and the use of previously known languages in young clil. . . 479 (storch & aldosari, 2010; swain & lapkin, 2000), which supports the claim that pair work provides learners with many opportunities to use their l2. in terms of the nature of turns, this study showed a greater production of minor l1 turns, which contrasts with storch and aldosari (2010). in particular, minor turns were more common in the functions of vocabulary and phatics, while predominant l1 turns were more frequent in off-task, metacognitive and grammar talk. as for task-modality effects in l1 use and its functions, more l1 turns were produced in speaking + writing tasks than in speaking tasks. when learners worked in the speaking + writing tasks, offtask, metacognitive talk, grammar talk and phatics were more common. in speaking tasks, learners employed the l1 for vocabulary searches. thus, these results align with previous findings in which l1 use was task dependent (alegría de la colina & garcía mayo, 2009; storch & aldosari, 2010; storch & wigglesworth, 2003). azkarai and garcía mayo (2015) also compared same-modality tasks. greater reliance on the l1 was observed in text editing and picture placement than in their modality counterparts. the authors ascribed greater use of the l1 in these tasks to the complexity of these tasks. as regards the functions of l1 use, off-task and metacognitive talk were more frequent in dictogloss and picture placement tasks than in their modality counterparts, while grammar talk and vocabulary searches were more frequent in the text edition and picture differences than same modality tasks. payant and kim (2019) examined the impact of task modality on learners’ use of the l1 during the production of lres. to this end, five dyads of l1 spanish-l2 english bilingual learners of l3 french performed two decision-making tasks, both of them including oral and written components. form-based and lexis-based lres were codified for each language pattern and for each modality. as in azkarai and garcía mayo (2015), a greater number of lres produced in the l1 was obtained in the written modality. however, learners preferred to use the tl french in the oral modality. the same language pattern applied to the types of lres produced. given the scarcity of research along these lines, a call has been made for more studies with young learners and in other instructional settings such as clil (azkarai & garcía mayo, 2015; azkarai & garcía mayo, 2017). thus, this article will try to fill these gaps by examining the use of pkl (basque and spanish) by young clil learners (aged 10-11) during oral interaction while completing two collaborative tasks: a speaking task and a speaking + writing task. 3. the study 3.1. research questions based on previous findings regarding the use of pkl in young clil learners, the present study analyzes the nature of pkl turns and the existence of task-modality maría martínez-adrián, izaskun arratibel-irazusta 480 effects (speaking vs. speaking + writing task). more specifically, we address the following research questions: 1. are there any differences in terms of amount between predominant and minor pkl-based turns? 2. which functions do pkl-based predominant and minor turns serve? 3. are there any differences between tasks (speaking vs. speaking + writing) with respect to the production of pkl turns and their functions? 4. what functions are more commonly served by pkl in each task? 3.2. participants the present study, which is part of a larger project, was conducted in a state school in the basque country in northern spain. the participants in the study are 50 (15 females and 35 males) learners of third language (l3) english in the 5th and 6th year (ages 10-11) of primary education immersed in a clil program. the vast majority of the students come from spanish-speaking families as this language is the majority language in the area where these learners live. nevertheless, all of them are enrolled at school in model d, in which the vast majority of subjects are taught in basque except for the spanish language and its literature, which is taught in spanish, english as a language subject, and content subjects such as science, arts and crafts or physical education, which are taught in english. as lasagabaster (2007) mentions, this model can be seen as an early total immersion program which allows students from spanish-speaking families to obtain a high command in l2 basque, so that they are considered spanish/basque bilinguals (cenoz, 2009). the context in which the participants live has been defined as additive trilingualism where basque, the language of instruction, is a minority language of spain, spanish is the majority language, and english is the main foreign language (cenoz & valencia, 1994). all the participants started learning english in pre-primary education as a school subject. since the 3rd year, english is also used as a vehicular language for some content subjects as mentioned above. in the 5th and 6th years, in which learners in the present study are enrolled, students receive 3 hours a week of instruction in efl and 2 to 4 hours a week of clil instruction. therefore, learners receive 5 to 7 weekly hours of instruction in the tl. at the moment of data gathering, 5th year learners had received from 777 hours of exposure to english, and 6th graders 962 hours. as far as their english proficiency is concerned, all the students were considered beginner (a1-a2)3 3 basic users according to the common european framework of reference for languages http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/source/framework_en.pdf the interface between task-modality and the use of previously known languages in young clil. . . 481 learners according to the scores they obtained in the key english test (ket), administered at the outset of the study (ucles, 2014).4 3.3. instruments and data analysis data were collected by means of four different instruments which are part of a wider project on the use of collaborative tasks among primary-school children. participants were first tested on general proficiency by means of the ket, which was completed during classtime. subsequently, they were matched in pairs on the basis of their proficiency scores so as to perform a speaking and a speaking + writing task. previous studies analyzing task-modality effects both on the production of lres and on pkl use have employed similar tasks (adams & ross-feldman, 2008; azkarai & garcía mayo, 2015; garcía mayo & azkarai, 2016; garcía mayo & imaz agirre, 2019; niu, 2009; payant & kim, 2019). nevertheless, taking into account that the framing of the task could overrule its inherent focus (philp, walter, & basturkmen, 2010), we decided to ask participants in both tasks to pay special attention to accuracy. likewise, they were asked to carry out the task naturally by employing all their resources at hand. if doubts or difficulties concerning vocabulary issues emerged during task completion, they could always seek their partner’s help but not the investigator’s help. in each of these tasks, and prior to their completion, participants were individually asked to grade their motivation using a motivation thermometer. specifically, they were requested to tell from 0 to 10 how they felt before and after doing each of the tasks and to select one of the reasons provided by the investigator to justify their motivation grade. with respect to the speaking task, each dyad had to order a set of 6 pictures taken from the book sparks 1 (house & scott, 2009)5 and then, in turns, they had to narrate the episodes depicted in them in story mode. the vignettes showed a girl who was provided with the picture of a rag-doll she had to sew out of the set of pieces given. the girl starts sewing but the rag-doll does not match the one shown in the picture, as the legs were sewn where the arms should be and the arms where the legs should be. when she looks at the result, she starts crying. her friend, the fairy, sees that the girl is very upset and decides to help her by sprinkling some magic dust on the doll. suddenly, the arms and the legs are sewn in the right positions, which makes the girl really happy. this type of task has been widely employed in several investigations with both children 4 the fact that they are still beginner learners despite the additional exposure received since grade 3 aligns with the research findings reported in other clil studies that have claimed that a later start in clil could optimize resources (see muñoz, 2015, for a review of these findings). 5 note that this book is not used in this school. maría martínez-adrián, izaskun arratibel-irazusta 482 and adults for similar research purposes in both non-clil and clil settings (e.g., alegría de la colina & garcía mayo, 2009; arratibel-irazusta & martínez-adrián, 2018, 2019; garcía mayo & hidalgo, 2017; garcía mayo & lázaro-ibarrola, 2015; martínez-adrián, 2020a; storch & aldosari, 2010). for the speaking + writing task, learners had to examine some pictures provided by the investigator in which a boy in a park had found a lost dog. with the help of some clues, they had to decide who the owner of the dog was and why they thought so. then, they had to write down a short note for the boy explaining who the owner of the dog was, why they thought so, and also giving instructions on how to take the dog back to its owner. similar tasks have been administered in previous studies with efl adults (azkarai & garcía mayo, 2015) and more recently with child clil learners (garcía mayo & imaz agirre, 2019).6 7 even if similar tasks have been used already with child learners in other investigations, the researchers held several meetings with the school teachers so as to ensure that the task was appropriate for the learners tested and to discuss possible adaptations. it was also pilot-tested with similar-age children so as to detect potential problems that could emerge during the administration of the tasks. all the tasks were audio and videotaped, transcribed and codified into childes (mcwhinney, 2000). all turns that included the use of pkl (i.e., basque and spanish) were identified. these turns were classified according to language predominance, that is, whether they were predominant (¿esto es una chica o un chico? – “is this a girl or a boy”) or minor (the owner is jack smith the vet punto – “the owner is jack smith the vet, full stop”) pkl-based turns. subsequently, they were subdivided according to the different functions they served on the basis of azkarai and garcía mayo (2015) and storch and aldosari (2010), namely off-task, metacognitive talk, grammar talk, vocabulary, phatics, and mechanics. the description provided below contains examples of our database: 6 as azkarai and garcía mayo (2015) indicate, even if the interface between task-based language teaching and clil is still in its infancy, we can observe the use of similar tasks to the ones employed in efl in recent studies with clil children (garcía mayo & hidalgo, 2017; garcía mayo & lázaro ibarrola, 2015). 7 we are aware, as pointed out by one of the reviewers, that the tasks used in the speaking and in the speaking + writing modality also differ in type. the speaking task is a storytelling task, while the speaking + writing task is an opinion gap task. ideally, both conditions should have kept constant the level of complexity between tasks. however, this study is part of a bigger project on task-modality in which we have extended prior research with adults to children by designing similar tasks (see garcía mayo & azkarai, 2016 with adults and garcía mayo & imaz agirre, 2019 with children). but so as to solve the limitation of previous studies as regards the lack of control of accuracy that both modalities demand, we kept instructions constant by asking learners to attend to accuracy in both modalities. the interface between task-modality and the use of previously known languages in young clil. . . 483 off-task off-task refers to those situations in which participants use their pkl as casual talk that is not related to the task (alegría de la colina & garcía mayo, 2009; azkarai & garcía mayo, 2015), as illustrated in (1): (1) chi1: que feo, mira que cara tiene el perro, parece un animatronic. [how ugly, look at the dog’s face, it looks like an ‘animatronic’] metacognitive talk metacognitive talk, as can be observed in (2), includes instances in which the students use their pkl to talk about the task itself in order to plan, organize and monitor the activity, among other functions (alegría de la colina & garcía mayo, 2009; azkarai & garcía mayo, 2015). (2) chi1: yo creo que esta es la segunda. [i think this is the second] chi2: y luego le sigue esto. [and then this follows] grammar talk grammar talk involves cases in which learners use their pkl to discuss issues related to grammar such as morphosyntax and text structure (azkarai & garcía mayo, 2015; storch & aldosari, 2010), as showed in (3): (3) chi1: his o her? [his or her?] chi2: es his. [it is his] vocabulary vocabulary includes the use of students’ pkl in deliberations over word/sentence meaning, word searches and word choice (azkarai & garcía mayo, 2015; storch & aldosari, 2010), as observed in (4): (4) chi1: cómo se dice enfadada? [how do you say angry?] chi2: cross? phatics phatics, as illustrated in (5), refers to expressions such as ok, well, so produced in basque and spanish to establish social contact and to express sociability rather than specific meaning (azkarai & garcía mayo, 2015): (5) chi1: and friend is very o sea girl is very happy because the doll is pretty. [and friend is very i mean girl is very happy because the doll is pretty] maría martínez-adrián, izaskun arratibel-irazusta 484 mechanics mechanics involves instances in which participants use their pkl to discuss punctuation, spelling and pronunciation (storch & aldosari, 2010), as in (6): (6) chi1: his con hache. [his with ‘h’] with respect to statistical analyses, results were analyzed by means of spss 24 (imb corp., 2010). both descriptive and inferential analyses were computed. in the case of descriptive analyses, means, medians, standard deviations, minimum and maximum scores were calculated. kolmogorov-smirnov tests were run to verify the normality of distribution of the samples. as the data did not meet the criteria for normal distribution, wilcoxon’s signed rank tests and friedman tests were performed for intertask and intratask comparisons. 4. results so as to answer the first research question, all turns were tallied and those that included the use of pkl were identified. subsequently, they were subdivided into predominant and minor turns. in addition, so as to enrich the analysis, the total number of words produced were calculated and the number of pkl words subtracted from this word count (see table 1). this analysis indicated that from the total count of turns (3453 turns), 37.91% (1309 turns) included use of students’ pkl. focusing on the total number of words produced by the participants (13511 words), the same trend that was observed for turns was found as 37.63% of those words (5084 words) were uttered in basque and/or in spanish. when subdividing the turns that presented use of pkl into predominant or minor turns, 87.39% of those turns (1144 turns) were predominant whereas only 12.61% of the turns (165 turns) were minor. a wilcoxon’s signed rank test revealed that the difference between predominant and minor pkl turns was statistically significant (z = -4.061, p = .001). table 1 production of pkl turns and words in all tasks total mean median sd min. max. turns 3453 149.26 155.00 53.046 53 248 pkl turns 1309 (37.91%) 56.35 53.00 40.642 1 163 predominant pkl turns 1144 (87.39%) 49.26 39.00 38.118 1 148 minor pkl turns 165 (12.61%) 7.09 6.00 5.401 0 19 words 13511 580.96 569.00 220.905 286 1175 pkl words 5084 (37.63%) 216.30 188.00 175.348 3 750 the interface between task-modality and the use of previously known languages in young clil. . . 485 the second question inquired into the main functions that predominant and minor turns served. when examining the mean number of turns in table 2, predominant turns were significantly more frequent in off-task, metacognitive talk, mechanics and vocabulary. no statistically significant differences emerged in grammar talk and in phatics. table 2 functions and wilcoxon’s signed rank test for pkl turns in all tasks type of turn total mean median sd min. max. z sig. off-task pred. 43 (3.76%) 1.87 .00 4.475 0 19 -2.536 .011 minor 0 (0%) .00 .00 .000 0 0 metacognitive talk pred. 686 (59.97%) 29.35 24.00 24.487 0 81 -4.016 .001 minor 28 (16.97%) 1.17 1.00 1.723 0 6 grammar talk pred. 4 (0.35%) .17 .00 .388 0 1 -1.732 .083 minor 1 (0.61%) .04 .00 .209 0 1 vocabulary pred. 328 (28.67%) 14.26 8.00 13.616 0 55 -3.432 .001 minor 107 (64.85%) 4.65 4.00 3.892 0 15 phatics pred. 10 (0.87%) .43 .00 .590 0 2 -1.934 .053 minor 21 (12.73%) .87 1.00 .968 0 3 mechanics pred. 73 (6.38%) 3.17 2.00 3.128 0 11 -3.434 .001 minor 8 (4.85%) .35 .00 .573 0 2 in order to analyze these results in more detail, the main functions that predominant and minor turns served in each of the tasks were examined. for the speaking task, as can be observed by looking at the means in table 3, predominant turns were significantly more frequently used in off-task, metacognitive talk and vocabulary. no statistically significant differences were revealed between predominant and minor turns in grammar talk, phatics and mechanics. table 3 functions and wilcoxon’s signed rank test for pkl turns in the speaking task type of turn total mean median sd min. max. z sig. off-task pred. 7 (1.73%) .29 .00 .690 0 3 -2.121 .034 minor 0 (0%) .00 .00 .000 0 0 metacognitive talk pred. 228 (56.44%) 9.50 3.50 10.726 0 30 -3.644 .001 minor 9 (8.49%) .38 .00 .770 0 3 grammar talk pred. 0 (0%) .00 .00 .000 0 0 .000 1.000 minor 0 (0%) .00 .00 .000 0 0 vocabulary pred. 162 (40.10%) 6.75 4.50 6.668 0 22 -2.192 .028 minor 83 (78.30%) 3.46 3.00 2.797 0 12 phatics pred. 7 (1.73%) .29 .00 .550 0 2 -1.706 .088 minor 14 (13.21%) .58 .00 .717 0 2 mechanics pred. 0 (0%) .00 .00 .000 0 0 .000 1.000 minor 0 (0%) .00 .00 .000 0 0 maría martínez-adrián, izaskun arratibel-irazusta 486 in the speaking + writing task, as can be observed in table 4, predominant turns were significantly more common in off-task, metacognitive talk, vocabulary and mechanics. however, the comparison between predominant and minor turns did not yield statistically significant differences in grammar talk and phatics. table 4 functions and wilcoxon’s signed rank test for pkl turns in the speaking + writing task type of turn total mean median sd min. max. z sig. off-task pred. 36 (4.86%) 1.57 .00 4.450 0 19 -2.214 .027 minor 0 (0%) .00 .00 .000 0 0 metacognitive talk pred. 458 (61.89%) 19.91 23.00 16.121 0 56 -3.921 .001 minor 19 (32.2%) .83 .00 1.527 0 6 grammar talk pred. 4 (0.54%) .17 .00 .388 0 1 -1.732 .083 minor 1 (1.69%) .04 .00 .209 0 1 vocabulary pred. 166 (22.43%) 7.22 4.00 8.101 0 34 -3.533 .001 minor 24 (40.68%) 1.04 .00 1.492 0 4 phatics pred. 3 (0.41%) .13 .00 .344 0 1 -1.414 .157 minor 7 (11.86%) .30 .00 .559 0 2 mechanics pred. 73 (9.86%) 3.17 2.00 3.128 0 11 -3.434 .001 minor 8 (13.56%) .35 .00 .573 0 2 with respect to the third research question that looked into task modality effects, differences between the speaking and the speaking + writing tasks regarding the production of pkl turns and their functions were examined. as in the case of the first research question, the total number of words produced as well as the words produced in their pkl have been considered. table 5 production of pkl turns, words, and wilcoxon’s signed rank test in both tasks task total mean median sd min. max. z sig. turns speaking 1217 50.71 49.50 21.068 20 97 -4.198 .001speaking + writing 2236 97.22 91.00 36.835 33 164 pkl turns speaking 510 (41.91%) 21.25 16.00 16.791 1 61 -3.225 .001speaking + writing 799 (35.73%) 34.74 37.00 25.673 0 102 pred. pkl turns speaking 404 (79.22%) 16.83 11.00 15.650 0 51 -3.573 .001speaking + writing 740 (92.62%) 32.17 31.00 24.563 0 97 minor pkl turns speaking 106 (20.78%) 4.42 4.00 3.092 0 13 -3.008 .003speaking + writing 59 (7.38%) 2.57 1.00 2.873 0 10 words speaking 5625 234.38 234.00 80.385 108 419 -3.209 .001speaking + writing 7886 342.87 297.00 162.688 119 756 pkl words speaking 1949 (34.65%) 81.21 58.00 72.399 3 247 -3.087 .002speaking + writing 3135 (39.75%) 136.30 141.00 113.511 0 503 the interface between task-modality and the use of previously known languages in young clil. . . 487 when analyzing the turns, as can be observed in table 5, the speaking + writing task yielded a greater number of turns and words when compared to the speaking task. participants also produced significantly more turns and words in their pkl in the speaking + writing task than in the speaking task. in addition, predominant pkl turns were significantly more frequent in the speaking + writing task, and minor pkl turns in the speaking task. when comparing tasks in terms of amount of pkl in each function (see table 6), metacognitive talk and mechanics were significantly more frequent in the speaking + writing task. in contrast, off-task, grammar talk, vocabulary and phatics were equally served by participants’ pkl in both tasks, as no statistically significant differences were observed. table 6 functions and wilcoxon’s signed rank test for pkl turns in both tasks task total mean median sd min. max. z sig. off-task speaking 7 (1.37%) .29 .00 .690 0 3 -.954 .340speaking + writing 36 (4.51%) 1.57 .00 4.450 0 19 metacognitive talk speaking 237 (46.47%) 9.88 3.50 10.674 0 30 -3.398 .001speaking + writing 477 (59.7%) 20.74 24.00 16.501 0 56 grammar talk speaking 0 (0%) .00 .00 .000 0 0 -1.890 .059speaking + writing 5 (0.63%) .22 .00 .518 0 2 vocabulary speaking 245 (48.04%) 10.21 8.50 8.377 0 28 -1.729 .084speaking + writing 190 (23.78%) 8.26 6.00 8.708 0 37 phatics speaking 21 (4.12%) .88 1.00 .992 0 4 -1.707 .088speaking + writing 10 (1.25%) .43 .00 .728 0 3 mechanics speaking 0 (0%) .00 .00 .000 0 0 -3.832 .001speaking + writing 81 (10.14%) 3.52 3.00 3.102 0 11 when considering the nature of pkl turns and their functions between tasks, predominant pkl turns serving the function of metacognitive talk, grammar talk and mechanics yielded a statistically significant difference in favor of the speaking + writing task, as illustrated in table 7. on the other hand, no differences were obtained in off-task, vocabulary and phatics predominant turns. maría martínez-adrián, izaskun arratibel-irazusta 488 table 7 functions and wilcoxon’s signed rank test for predominant pkl turns in both tasks task total mean median sd min. max. z sig. predominant off-task speaking 7 (1.73%) .29 .00 .690 0 3 -.954 .340speaking + writing 36 (4.86%) 1.57 .00 4.450 0 19 predominant metacognitive talk speaking 228 (56.44%) 9.50 3.50 10.726 0 30 -3.462 .001speaking + writing 458 (61.89%) 19.91 23.00 16.121 0 56 predominant grammar talk speaking 0 (0%) .00 .00 .000 0 0 -2.000 .046speaking + writing 4 (0.54%) .17 .00 .388 0 1 predominant vocabulary speaking 162 (40.10%) 6.75 4.50 6.668 0 22 -.175 .861speaking + writing 166 (22.43%) 7.22 4.00 8.101 0 34 predominant phatics speaking 7 (1.73%) .29 .00 .550 0 2 -1.155 .248speaking + writing 3 (0.41%) .13 .00 .344 0 1 predominant mechanics speaking 0 (0%) .00 .00 .000 0 0 -3.629 .001speaking + writing 73 (9.86%) 3.17 2.00 3.128 0 11 in the case of minor pkl turns, as shown in table 8, vocabulary was significantly more frequently used in the speaking task. in contrast, mechanics presented statistically significant differences in favor of the speaking + writing task. in the case of off-task, metacognitive talk, grammar talk, and phatics no differences were obtained. table 8 functions and wilcoxon’s signed rank test for minor pkl turns in both tasks task total mean median sd min. max. z sig. minor off-task speaking 0 (0%) .00 .00 .000 0 0 .000 1.000speaking + writing 0 (0%) .00 .00 .000 0 0 minor metacognitive talk speaking 9 (8.49%) .38 .00 .770 0 3 -1.124 .261speaking + writing 19 (32.2%) .83 .00 1.527 0 6 minor grammar talk speaking 0 (0%) .00 .00 .000 0 0 -1.000 .317speaking + writing 1 (1.69%) .04 .00 .209 0 1 minor vocabulary speaking 83 (78.30%) 3.46 3.00 2.797 0 12 -3.876 .001speaking + writing 24 (40.68%) 1.04 .00 1.492 0 4 minor phatics speaking 14 (13.21%) .58 .00 .717 0 2 -1.350 .177speaking + writing 7 (11.86%) .30 .00 .559 0 2 minor mechanics speaking 0 (0%) .00 .00 .000 0 0 -2.530 .011speaking + writing 8 (13.56%) .35 .00 .573 0 2 the interface between task-modality and the use of previously known languages in young clil. . . 489 finally, the last research question pertained to the functions more commonly served by participants’ pkl in each task. figure 1 depicts the descriptive comparison of the use of spanish/basque in the different categories in the speaking task. figure 1 functions more commonly served by participants’ pkl in the speaking task table 9 wilcoxon’s signed rank test for the functions of pkl turns in the speaking task z sig. metacognitive talk – off-task -3.828 .001 grammar talk – off-task -2.121 .034 vocabulary – off-task -4.109 .001 phatics – off-task -3.116 .002 mechanics – off-task -2.121 .034 grammar talk – metacognitive talk -3.923 .001 vocabulary – metacognitive talk -.777 .437 phatics – metacognitive talk -3.725 .001 mechanics – metacognitive talk -3.923 .001 vocabulary – grammar talk -4.108 .001 phatics – grammar talk -3.407 .001 mechanics – grammar talk .000 1.000 phatics – vocabulary -4.146 .001 mechanics – vocabulary -4.108 .001 mechanics – phatics -3.407 .001 as shown in figure 1, vocabulary and metacognitive talk were more commonly served by the use of basque/spanish, followed by phatics and off-task. in contrast, no instances of grammar and mechanics were found in this task. the friedman test performed reported the existence of statistically significant differences (chi-square = 85.572, p = .001). consequently, post-hoc analyses were conducted. the wilcoxon’s signed rank test (see table 9) confirmed the inexistence 10,21 9,88 0,88 0,29 0 0 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 maría martínez-adrián, izaskun arratibel-irazusta 490 of significant differences between vocabulary and metacognitive talk. but the differences between these two and the rest of the categories examined reached significance. statistically significant differences also emerged among off-task, grammar talk, phatics, and mechanics, except for the contrast between mechanics and grammar. figure 2 shows the results for the speaking + writing task. metacognitive talk was the most common manifestation of basque/spanish use, followed by vocabulary and mechanics. grammar talk, even if it is present in this task, is the least common category. figure 2 functions more commonly served by participants’ pkl in the speaking + writing task table 10 wilcoxon’s signed rank test for the functions of pkl turns in the speaking + writing task z sig. metacognitive talk – off-task -4.017 .001 grammar talk – off-task -1.292 .196 vocabulary – off-task -3.270 .001 phatics – off-task -.574 .566 mechanics – off-task -2.381 .017 grammar talk – metacognitive talk -4.016 .001 vocabulary – metacognitive talk -3.717 .001 phatics – metacognitive talk -4.016 .001 mechanics – metacognitive talk -3.683 .001 vocabulary – grammar talk -3.923 .001 phatics – grammar talk -1.026 .305 mechanics – grammar talk -3.833 .001 phatics – vocabulary -3.826 .001 mechanics – vocabulary -2.641 .008 mechanics – phatics -3.633 .001 the friedman test conducted revealed the existence of statistically significant differences among the categories (chi-square = 80.857, p = .001). post-hoc analyses (see table 10) indicated that metacognitive talk significantly differed from 20,74 8,26 3,52 1,57 0,43 0,22 0 5 10 15 20 25 the interface between task-modality and the use of previously known languages in young clil. . . 491 the rest of the categories. similarly, vocabulary and mechanics presented significant differences with respect to off-task, grammar talk and phatics. no differences were reported for the contrast between grammar talk, phatics and off-task. 5. discussion and conclusion in this section the four research questions of the study will be answered. as regards the first research question (are there any differences in terms of amount between predominant and minor turns?), unlike other investigations with adults (azkarai & garcía mayo, 2015; storch & aldosari, 2010), the child learners of the present study made greater use of their pkl. according to storch and aldosari (2010), they could be considered extensive users of their pkl as pkl words accounted for 37.63% of the total number of words, and over 37% of the turns were in the pkl. their low proficiency probably explains the widespread use of predominant pkl turns, even though other factors could also be explored. one of these potential factors is related to the instructions. learners were asked to perform these tasks naturally by using all their resources at hand. therefore, when they used their pkl during task performance, they were not instructed to switch into english. in addition, learners were not so familiar with this type of tasks, which could have prompted them to rely more on their pkl. likewise, pair dynamics or personality traits, which are beyond the scope of the present paper, could also have impacted the results. with respect to the second research question (which functions do predominant and minor turns serve?), when considering all tasks, predominant pkl turns were significantly more frequent in off-task, metacognitive talk, mechanics, and vocabulary. this applies to each individual task, with the exception of mechanics, which was inexistent in the speaking task. learners tend to perform these functions by means of turns entirely produced in their pkl as in (7-10). in off-task (7), learners feel free to talk in their pkl about issues unrelated to the task. in metacognitive talk (8), learners mainly employed their pkl when they did not understand the instructions of the tasks well, and also to meet task requirements or to organize themselves. likewise, when discussing vocabulary (9) or mechanics issues (10), they employed much more predominant turns to clear up their doubts or to make their decisions as regards word meaning/choice more effectively so as to prevent communication breakdowns: (7) *chi1: pregunta si nos regalan el lápiz. [ask if they can give us the pencil] (8) *chi1: primero hay que poner una nota del chico. [first we have to write a note to the boy] maría martínez-adrián, izaskun arratibel-irazusta 492 (9) *chi2: eh (.) boy (…) eh (…) como se dice impresionado? [how do you say impressed?] *chi1: eh im (.) impressing? *chi2: impressing the toy. (10) *chi2: works (.) erre ka ese. [works, ‘r’, ‘k’, ‘s’] this result partially aligns with azkarai and garcía mayo (2015) as they also found that predominant turns were more frequent in off-task and metacognitive talk. however, in their study, vocabulary searches were more common in the case of minor turns. in those turns, according to azkarai and garcía mayo (2015), the university learners in their study just referred to the word they needed in english. in the current study, the fact that the participants were even lower proficiency learners than in azkarai and garcía mayo (2015) and that they were child learners could explain the use of predominant turns for vocabulary deliberations. these learners were primarily making use of appeals for assistance during vocabulary deliberations, which they were producing entirely in spanish most of the time. appeals for assistance are strategies widely used by young learners in recent investigations carried out with children and oral production (azkarai & garcía mayo, 2017; garcía mayo & hidalgo, 2017; martínezadrián, 2020a), and also with children and self-reported opinions (martínezadrián, gallardo-del-puerto, & basterrechea, 2019). as an answer to the third research question (are there any differences between tasks [speaking vs. speaking + writing] with respect to the production of pkl turns and their functions?), task-modality effects were evident in the case of the production of pkl turns. a greater number of pkl turns were produced in the speaking + writing task, as well as a higher number of pkl words. these findings align with previous research on task-modality effects conducted with adults (azkarai & garcía mayo, 2015; payant & kim, 2019) as well as those studies analyzing the effect of task-type (alegría de la colina & garcía mayo, 2009; storch & aldosari, 2010; storch & wigglesworth, 2003), according to which the addition of a writing component generates more use of pkl than oral communicative tasks. as for the effect of task-modality on the functions of pkl, the demands of pkl for the different functions are similar in both tasks, except for metacognitive talk and mechanics, which yielded significant differences in favor of the speaking + writing task. this could be explained by the demands of the speaking + writing task. the fact that in this task learners talked to each other during task completion and also had to submit a written product could entail a greater investment of time in talking about task procedures. in addition, this finding could be due to the differences between tasks in terms of task-complexity reported in the the interface between task-modality and the use of previously known languages in young clil. . . 493 methodology. unlike the speaking task, in which they simply had to order the pictures, in the speaking + writing task they had to decide not only the owner of the dog but also the best way to take it to its owner. these very low-proficient learners, when confronted with a more complex task, could have spent more time talking about the focus of the task and reaching a joint understanding of task requirements. we acknowledge that this limitation in task design could have impacted the results and that future interventions should consider keeping the same level of complexity between tasks constant. similarly, mechanics was inexistent in the speaking task as no episodes emerged in the speaking task during which learners could have talked about pronunciation issues. however, this category was productive in the speaking + writing task when discussing spelling and punctuation. that is, unlike in the speaking + writing task, in the more immediate task, they did not spend time on employing the pkl to discuss more language related issues in spite of having been requested to attend to accuracy as well as to content. they were more interested in meeting the communicative demands of the speaking task (niu, 2009; payant & kim, 2019). this result is in line with storch and aldosari (2010), who found that mechanics was more common in the low-low proficiency pairs, particularly in the editing task. these results are in contrast to azkarai and garcía mayo (2015) in that greater differences were observed in their study. for example, in their study, learners resorted to the l1 to a higher extent to discuss grammar issues in the speaking + writing task. in the present study, grammar talk in the pkl was practically non-existent in the data. however, the same child learners have been found to produce more grammar lres in the speaking + writing task in other studies that are being currently conducted (martínez-adrián, gallardo-delpuerto, & arratibel-irazusta, 2019). however, when examining these grammar episodes in detail, the tendency in these learners is to resolve them by simply providing the relevant form without further elaborations in the form of justifications for the choice made (see niu, 2009, for the classification of lres in terms of elaborations). the fact that they are young and beginner learners could explain the low number of metalinguistic explanations either in the pkl or in the tl. cognitive and personal traits are already fully developed in the case of adults. in contrast, young learners’ metalanguage awareness skills are developing, and scaffolding each other’s language might be challenging and costly, which could account for their difficulties in verbalizing rules (muñoz, 2017; tellier & roehr-bracking, 2017). likewise, primary education in spain is marked by a strong oral component and a special emphasis on vocabulary (muñoz, 2017). in addition, unlike azkarai and garcía mayo (2015), who found a greater reliance on the l1 for vocabulary purposes in the speaking task, in the present study, the younger learners employed the pkl to a similar extent for this function maría martínez-adrián, izaskun arratibel-irazusta 494 in both tasks. note that in studies on lres currently conducted with the same learners as well as in previous studies with similar-age learners (garcía mayo & imaz agirre, 2019), vocabulary is key in both speaking and speaking + writing tasks. these young learners need vocabulary to move the tasks along and, the use of pkl to avoid communication breakdowns. more specifically, pkl mediated the discussion of vocabulary issues in the form of predominant turns in similar proportions in both tasks, while minor turns were more frequently used in the speaking task than in the speaking + writing task. as regards the fourth research question (what functions are more commonly served by pkl in each task?), vocabulary and metacognitive talk were the most common functions, followed by phatics in the speaking task. these are the functions with greater use of the pkl in previous investigations with both children (azkarai & garcía mayo, 2017; garcía mayo & hidalgo, 2017; martínez-adrián, 2020a, 2020b) and adults (alegría de la colina & garcía mayo, 2009; arratibelirazusta & martínez-adrián, 2018; azkarai & garcía mayo, 2015; storch & aldosari, 2010). grammar and mechanics were inexistent in this task, as also attested in other studies that have examined oral tasks (lasito & storch, 2013). in the case of the speaking + writing task, metacognitive talk was the most common function followed by vocabulary and mechanics. these findings contrast with studies conducted with adults in which pkl mediated grammar talk to a greater extent (alegría de la colina & garcía mayo, 2009; azkarai & garcía mayo, 2015; rayati et al., 2012; payant & kim, 2019). but even if pkl did not intervene in grammar talk, these young learners do employ them when attending to other formal aspects such as mechanics. in fact, previous studies carried out with adolescents on collaborative writing have concluded that vocabulary and spelling attract a lot of attention from young learners (kim & mcdonough, 2011). this paper has contributed to the scarcity of studies examining the interface between task-modality and the use of pkl (azkarai & garcía mayo, 2015; payant & kim, 2019), particularly in the case of young learners. the analysis of the data has revealed that these learners are extensive users of pkl, most of the times in the form of predominant turns. however, we cannot dismiss the fact that they are young and low-proficient learners, and the use of pkl in this case acts as a cognitive tool, facilitating the organization of the tasks, the co-construction of meaning and the attention to formal aspects of language such as mechanics. given their young age and their low proficiency, had we banned the use of their pkl during interaction, these learners could not have moved the tasks forward. as regards task-modality, it had an effect on the amount of pkl use, as a higher number of pkl turns and pkl words in the speaking + writing task were obtained. nevertheless, task-modality had a limited effect on functions of pkl use, which contrasts with previous studies conducted with adults. in the present the interface between task-modality and the use of previously known languages in young clil. . . 495 study, higher use of pkl was observed in metacognitive talk and mechanics in the speaking + writing task, while no differences emerged between tasks in the other categories. unlike previous research with adults, vocabulary was key in both tasks to move them forward and grammar talk mediated by pkl was nearly inexistent in the database, a finding that was ascribed to the low number of elaborations in the form of metalinguistic explanations. if these learners were capable of discussing grammar issues more extensively, they could have resorted to their pkl to verbalize their thoughts. perhaps a more structured task such as an editing task could have prompted the provision of further grammar explanations and in turn a higher use of pkl. overall, the findings indicate the benefits of these tasks in contributing to the promotion of learning opportunities for young clil learners. these collaborative tasks offer young learners opportunities to question their language use. in particular, these tasks lead learners to notice holes in their interlanguage systems and to receive assistance by their peers, with their pkl playing a major role as mediators. however, even if the speaking + writing task is associated with more grammar discussions, they are not so elaborated, which seems to indicate that formal aspects of language should be particularly enhanced in clil contexts. perhaps more focused tasks could bring about more extensive discussions about form, and in turn, greater noticing of gaps. in addition, by examining the use of their pkl in these discussions, we will be especially contributing to the effect of translanguaging practices in the learning of grammar (see pawlak, 2019) and to the call made by some researchers for the exploration of the status of learners’ pkl as regards the interface task-based language teaching and content-based instruction (ortega, 2015). future research should shed more light on the effect of more and less structured tasks as regards the functions of both pkl use and tl use. similarly, future studies should consider a larger number of participants and different types of pairings (pairs vs. small groups; 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(2014). key english test for schools. cambridge: cambridge university press. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: chengchen li (huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan, china) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) editor: joanna zawodniak (university of zielona góra, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (silesian university of technology, gliwice, poland) vol. 12 no. 4 december 2022 editorial board: ali al-hoorie (royal commission for jubail and yanbu, jubail, saudi arabia) larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) ali derakhshan (golestan university, gorgan, iran) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) majid elahi shirvan (university of bojnord, iran) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) tammy gregersen (american university of sharjah, united arab emirates) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) laura gurzynski-weiss (indiana university bloomington, usa) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) amy thompson (west virginia university, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2022 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: kata csizér mariusz kruk chengchen li aleksandra wach joanna zawodniak © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: kata csizér, melanie ellis, mariusz kruk, chengchen li, aleksandra wach, joanna zawodniak cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 61 829 64 20 fax +48 61 829 64 21 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · social sciences citation index (wos core collection) · journal citation reports social sciences (wos) · scopus · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) · current contents – social and behavioral sciences (wos) · essential science indicators (wos) special issue: l2 writing and feedback processing and use in pen and paper and digital environments: advancing research and practice guest editors: rosa m. manchón yvette coyle studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 12, number 4, december 2022 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors .....................................................................535 editorial: introduction to the special issue on l2 writing and feedback processing and use in pen and paper and digital environments: advancing research and practice.................................................................541 articles: icy lee – developments in classroom-based research on l2 writing ......551 idoia elola, ana oskoz – reexamining feedback on l2 digital writing ....575 julio roca de larios, yvette coyle, vanessa garcía – the effects of using cognitive discourse functions to instruct 4th-year children on report writing in a clil science class ...................................................................... 597 belén gonzález-cruz, lourdes cerezo, florentina nicolás-conesa – a classroom-based study on the effects of wcf on accuracy in pen-and-paper versus computer-mediated collaborative writing ........................... 623 ronald p. leow, anne thinglum, stephanie a. leow – wcf processing in the l2 curriculum: a look at type of wcf, type of linguistic item, and l2 performance ................................................................................................651 melissa a. bowles, kacie gastañaga – heritage, second and third language learner processing of written corrective feedback: evidence from think-alouds .................................................................................... 675 raquel criado, aitor garcés-manzanera, luke plonsky – models as written corrective feedback: effects on young l2 learners’ fluency in digital writing from product and process perspectives ....................................................697 olena vasylets, m. dolores mellado, luke plonsky – the role of cognitive individual differences in digital versus pen-and-paper writing......... 721 reviewers for volume 12/2022 ........................................................ 745 notes to contributors ...................................................................... 751 535 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors melissa bowles is professor of spanish, linguistics, second language acquisition and teacher education (slate) and educational psychology at the university of illinois at urbana-champaign, usa. she conducts research on language testing/assessment, research methods, and instructed secondand heritage-language acquisition. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1896-8813 contact details: department of spanish and portuguese, university of illinois at urbana-champaign, 707. s. mathews ave., urbana, il 61801 (bowlesm@illinois.edu) lourdes cerezo is associate professor in the department of english, university of murcia, spain. her research focuses on the language learning potential of diverse forms of written corrective feedback provision, processing, and use. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5345-7934 contact details: departamento de filología inglesa, facultad de letras, campus de la merced, universidad de murcia, murcia 30071, spain (lourdesc@um.es) yvette coyle is associate professor in the department of didáctica de la lengua y la literatura in the faculty of education at the university of murcia, spain. her research interests include teaching english to young learners, second language writing, written corrective feedback processing and content and language integrated learning (clil) with school-age children. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3961-6131 contact details: departamento de didáctica de la lengua y la literatura, facultad de educación, campus de espinardo, universidad de murcia, 30100 murcia, spain (ycoyle@um.es) raquel criado is associate professor in the department of english at the university of murcia, spain. her research interests focus on the cognitive processes underlying second language writing performance in digital environments, formfocused instruction, and teacher education. 536 orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0444-3901 contact details: departamento de filología inglesa, facultad de letras, campus de la merced, universidad de murcia, 30071 murcia, spain (rcriado@um.es) aitor garcés is assistant lecturer in english at the department of english language and literature teaching, faculty of education, university of murcia, spain. his main research interests include l2 digital writing. he is particularly interested in the use of keystroke logging tools to observe and analyze writing processes, and the potential effect of written corrective feedback on these processes. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1789-9046 contact details: departamento de didáctica de la lengua y la literatura, facultad de educación, campus de espinardo, universidad de murcia, 30100 murcia, spain (aitor.garces@um.es) idoia elola is professor of spanish and applied linguistics in the department of classical and modern languages and literatures at texas tech university, lubbock, usa. her research focuses primarily on (digital) second language and heritage language writing, specifically on areas such as collaborative and individual writing using social tools, digital literacies, feedback, and the use of multimodal texts (digital stories, story maps, blogs) from cognitive and sociocultural perspectives. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0722-0332 contact details: barrio olazabal #1-a, 48291 axpe-marzana, atxondo, bizkaia, españa (idoia.elola@ttu.edu) vanessa garcia is a part-time instructor in tefl and innovative clil methodologies at the ucam and also teaches courses in english for specific purposes at the university of murcia, spain. she is also a full-time primary school english teacher. her research interests include content-based teaching, genre pedagogy and teaching children with specific learning differences. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2603-1991 contact details: c/ hiedra, 18, urb. torre guil, 30834 sangonera la verde, murcia, spain (vanessa.garcia@um.es) kacie gastañaga is a phd student in the department of spanish and portuguese at the university of illinois at urbana-champaign, usa. her research interests center on empirical studies that drive evidence-based pedagogy in l2 and heritage language classrooms, particularly the ways in which feedback impacts learning outcomes. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8756-2687 537 contact details: 707 s mathews ave, 4080 foreign languages building, m/c 176, urbana, il 61801, usa (kacielg2@illinois.edu) belén gonzález-cruz is a phd student in applied linguistics at the university of murcia, spain. the focus of her phd dissertation is on collaborative writing and collaborative feedback processing in real classroom contexts. currently, she is also a secondary school english teacher. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5345-7934 contact details: plaza bandera paracaidista ortiz de zárate, 4, 8ºg, 30007 murcia. spain (belen.gonzalez@um.es) icy lee is professor in the faculty of education of the chinese university of hong kong, china. her main research interests are second language writing and second language teacher education. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0749-3234 contact details: 317 ho tim building, faculty of education, the chinese university of hong kong, shatin, hong kong (icylee@cuhk.edu.hk) ronald p. leow is professor of applied linguistics in the department of spanish and portuguese at georgetown university, washington, dc, usa. his interests include language curriculum development, teacher education, instructed language learning, cognitive processes in language learning, research methodology, (written) corrective feedback, and call. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2990-3540 contact details: 1802 post oak trail, reston, va 20191, usa (leowr@georgetown.edu) stephanie leow is an english (writing, rhetoric, and literacies) phd student and graduate teaching assistant at arizona state university. her research interests include instructor and peer feedback, multilingual writing, and digital literacy. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9459-9346. contact details: 590 w westchester ave, tempe, az 85283, usa (sal121@georgetown.edu) rosa m. manchón is professor of applied linguistics in the department of english at the university of murcia, spain. her research interests include research methods and l2 writing processes and strategies, especially from the perspective of the connection between l2 writing and l2 learning. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8458-168x 538 contact details: departamento de filología inglesa, facultad de letras, campus de la merced, universidad de murcia, 30071 murcia, spain (manchon@um.es) maría dolores mellado is a phd student in the department of english at the university of murcia, spain. her phd research explores the effect of the interaction of cognitive and affective/motivational individual differences and task complexity factors on the characteristics of the written texts produced by english l2 users of diverse linguistic proficiency. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9089-0152 contact details: avenida los escolares, nº 137. pulpí, 04640, almería, spain (maría dolores.mellado@um.es) florentina nicolás-conesa is associate professor in the faculty of education at the university of murcia, spain. her research interests focus on written corrective feedback (wcf) and the language learning potential of writing through wcf processing. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8472-0811 contact details: departamento de didáctica de la lengua y la literatura, facultad de educación, campus de espinardo, universidad de murcia, 30100 murcia, spain (florinc@um.es) ana oskoz is professor in the department of modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication at the university of maryland baltimore county (umbc), usa. her research focuses on the potential of social digital tools to contribute to learners’ l2 writing. she has examined collaborative and individual writing using social tools, digital literacies, feedback, and the use of multimodal texts (digital stories, blogs) from cognitive and sociocultural perspectives. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2770-4844 contact details: university of maryland, baltimore county (umbc), fine arts, 439, 1000 hilltop circle, baltimore, md 21250, usa (aoskoz@umbc.edu) luke plonsky, phd from michigan state university, usa, is associate professor of applied linguistics at northern arizona university. his work focuses primarily on sla and research methods and has appeared in over 100 articles, book chapters, and books. luke currently serves as editor of ssla and managing editor of foreign language annals. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5791-1839 contact details: 705 s. beaver st., flagstaff, az 86011, usa (lukeplonsky@gmail.com) 539 julio roca de larios is associate professor in the department of didáctica de la lengua y la literatura (inglés) in the faculty of education at the university of murcia, spain. his research interests include l2 text generation processes, written feedback processing, and the analysis of interaction and learning processes in clil-oriented classrooms. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6046-1093 contact details: departamento de didáctica de la lengua y la literatura, facultad de educación, campus de espinardo, universidad de murcia, 30100 murcia, spain (jrl@um.es) anne thinglum is assistant professor of teaching in the department of spanish and portuguese at georgetown university, washinton, dc, usa. she specializes in second language acquisition and her several publications have addressed cognitive processes employing both eye-tracking and think-aloud procedures to measure l2 learners’ depth of processing and potential levels of awareness in addition to learner proficiency. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0007-1365 contact details: department of spanish and portuguese, georgetown university, 3700 o st. nwicc 400, washington, dc 20057, usa (amc254@georgetown.edu) olena vasylets is assistant professor of applied linguistics at university of barcelona and autonomous university of barcelona, spain. her main research interests lie in the areas of l2 writing, individual differences in sla, and language teaching with technology. she is also interested in the cognitive processes underlying second language performance and development. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0241-1279 contact details: department of modern languages, faculty of philology and communication, gran vía de les corts catalanes, 585, 08007 barcelona, spain (vasylets@ub.edu) 641 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (4). 2021. 641-646 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.4.9 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt reviewers for volume 11/2021 the editors would like to express their gratitude to the following scholars who have kindly consented to review one or more submissions to volume 11/2021 of studies in second language learning and teaching. their insightful and thorough comments and suggestions have without doubt greatly enhanced the quality of the papers included in the 2021 volume: shima ahmadi-azad islamic azad university, bonab, iran abdullah alamer al imam mohammad ibn saud islamic university, riyadh, saudi arabia is’haaq akbarian university of qom, iran erdem akbas erciyes üniversitesi, turkey m. camino bueno alastuey public university of navarre, spain ágnes albert eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary ali al-hoorie royal commission for jubail and yanbu, jubail, saudi arabia elissa allaw concordia university, montreal, canada zainab alsuhaibani al imam mohammad ibn saud islamic university, riyadh, saudi arabia alberto andujar university of almería, spain elisabet arnó-macià polytechnic university of catalonia, barcelona, spain scott aubrey the chinese university of hong kong, china barry bai the chinese university of hong kong, china ann bainbridge frymier ohio university, athens, usa darío luis banegas university of strathclyde, glasgow, uk jayanti banerjee trinity college london, uk taylor anne barriuso iowa state university, ames, usa jessie saraza barrot national university, manilla, philippines r. kirk belnap brigham young university, provo, usa raymond bertram university of turku, finland mireille besson aix-marseille université, france yves bestgen université catholique de louvain, louvain-la-neuve, belgium frank boers western university, london, canada elouise boets university of vienna, austria jill boggs swansea university, uk alex boulton university of lorraine, france neil bowen thammasat university, bangkok, thailand dale brown kanazawa university, japan 642 dan brown grand valley state university, allendale, usa marc brysbaert ghent university, belgium yiqian katherine cao university of melbourne, australia nigel caplan university of delaware, newark, usa carly rae carver augusta university, usa rosa maría jiménez catalán university of la rioja, spain servet çelik trabzon university, turkey fang-chi chang national chiayi university, taiwan meilin chen hong kong baptist university, china xinjie chen stanford university, usa xuemei chen university of electronic science and technology of china, chengdu, china angus cheng the city university of hong kong, china edsoulla chung the open university of hong kong, china anna b. cieślicka texas a&m international university, laredo, usa jon clenton hiroshima university, japan william crawford northern arizona university, flagstaff, usa russell cross university of melbourne, australia kata csizér eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary danielle maria daidone university of north carolina, wilmington, usa jennifer daily-o’can university of alberta, edmonton, canada thi ngoc yen dang university of leeds, uk phung dao manchester metropolitan university, uk emilie destruel the university of iowa, iowa city, usa robert dekeyser university of maryland, usa vanessa de wilde ghent university, the netherlands ali derakhshan golestan university, gorgan, iran marek derenowski adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland jean-marc dewaele birkbeck college, university of london, uk helen donaghue sheffield hallam university, uk ana maria ducasse rmit university, melbourne jean-paul duquette university of macau, china bronwen dyson the university of sydney, australia majid elahi shirvan university of bojnord, iran mostafa janebi enayat university of maragheh, iran elizabeth enkin university of nebraska at lincoln, usa jason fan university of melbourne, australia fan fang shantou university, china j. césar félix-brasdefer indiana university, bloomington, usa julieta fernandez the university of arizona, tucson, usa anca daniela frumuselu rovira i virgili university, tarragona, spain xuesong (andy) gao university of new south wales, sydney, australia paula garrett-rucks georgia state university, atlanta, usa mohammad reza ghorbani university of bojnord, iran nicolas glasson university of cambridge, uk julia goetze pennsylvania state university, state college, usa shu-ping gong national chiayi university, taiwan łukasz grabowski opole university, poland suzanne graham university of reading, uk tammy gregersen american university of sharjah, united arab emirates izabelle grenon tokyo university, japan helmut gruber university of vienna, austria 643 peter gu victoria university of wellington, new zealand yan guo huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan, china fatih güngör afyon kocatepe university, turkey laura gurzynski-weiss indiana university, bloomington, indiana, usa akira hamada meikai university, japan ye han harbin institute of technology, shenzhen, china ruth harman university of georgia, athens, usa monica heejung kwon kanazawa university, japan nick henry university of texas at austin, usa todd anthony hernández marquette university, milwaukee, usa roz hirch iowa state university, ames, usa marlise horst concordia university, montreal, usa katarzyna hryniuk university of warsaw, poland jun scott chen hsieh asia university, taiwan yanhong hu huazhong university of science and technology, china jian huang central university of finance and economics, beijing, china shu-chen huang national chengchi university, taiwan sunny hyon california state university, los angeles, usa naoki ikeda university of melbourne, australia yasuhiro imai sophia university, tokyo, japan tania ionin university of illinois at urbana-champaign, usa mark a. james arizona state university, tempe, usa alireza jamshidnejad rustaq college of applied sciences, oman yan jiang renmin university of china lianjiang jiang university of macau, china yinxing jin hainan normal university, haikou, china nayef jomaa jomaa karabuk university, turkey nobuhiro kamiya gunma prefectural women’s university, japan chian-wen kao chihlee university of technology, taiwan eva kartchava carleton university, ottawa, canada sihui (echo) ke university of kentucky, usa stephanie kelly north carolina a&t state university, greensboro, usa matt kessler university of south florida, tampa, usa gholam hassan khajavy university of bojnord, iran blanka klimova university of hradec králové, czechia kaishan kong university of wisconsin-eau claire, usa marta kopinska universidad del país vasco/euskal herriko unibertsitatea (upv/ehu), spain nektaria efstathia kourtali university of liverpool, uk anna krulatz norwegian university of science and technology, trondheim, norway kendon kurzer university of san francisco, sacramento, usa richard labontee gothenburg university, sweden ursula lanvers university of york, uk melissa larsen-walker university of south florida, tampa, usa david lasagabaster university of the basque country, spain batia laufer university of haifa, israel keith john lay cyprus international university hansol lee korea military academy, seoul, south korea jun lei ningbo university, china lei lei shanghai jiao tong university, china dmitri leontjev university of jyväskylä, finland agnieszka leńko-szymańska warsaw university, poland 644 roland p. leow georgetown university, washington dc, usa banban li university of science and technology, beijing, china shuai li georgetown state university, usa wendy li michigan state university, east lansing, usa jianling liao arizona state university, tempe, usa agnieszka lijewska adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland po-han lin national taipei university of education, taiwan christina linfquist university of gothenburg, sweden dillin liu alabama state university, montgomery, usa honggang (shawn) liu northeast normal university, changchun, china meihua liu tsinghua university, beijing, china yeu-ting liu national taiwan normal university, taipei, taiwan reyes llopis-garcía columbia university, new york, usa hanneke loerts university of groningen, the netherlands lucilla lopriore roma tre university, italy pernelle lorette universität mannheim, germany xiaofei lu pennsylvania state university xiaojun lu university of nottingham ningbo china xiuchuan lu fudan university, china na luo wuhan university of science and technology, china shaoqian luo beijing normal university, china qing ma the hong kong institute of education, china ernesto macaro university of oxford, uk karina rose mahan norwegian university of science and technology, trondheim, norway soheil mansouri webster university, webster groves, usa zhicheng mao the chinese university of hong kong, china cláudia susana nunes martins the polytechnic institute of bragança, portugal joshua matthews school of education, university of new england, australia mark mcandrews western kentucky university, usa kim mcdonough concordia university, montreal, canada paul meara cardiff university, uk sarah mercer university of graz, austria kouider mokhtari university of texas at tyler, usa charles m. mueller fuji women’s university, japan gerrard mugford university of guadalajara, mexico christine muir university of nottingham, uk anna mystkowska-wiertelak university of wrocław, poland yoshiyuki nakata doshisha university, japan mei-le ng the education university of hong kong, china thi thuy loan nguyen kalasin university, thailand maria nilsson university of stockholm, sweden ruiying niu guangdong university of foreign studies, china saeed nourzadeh damghan university, china juliana othman university of malaya, malaysia agnieszka otwinowska-kasztelanic university of warsaw, poland chunmei pan guangdong university of foreign studies, china hae in (lauren) park state university of new york at albany, usa alyssa parr university of minnesota, twin cities, usa zoe pei-sui luk the education university of hong kong, china hongying peng university of groningen, netherlands jian-e peng shantou university, china 645 jenefer philp lancaster university, uk linh phung chatham university, usa françois pichette téluq university, quebec, canada katalin piniel eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary elisabet pladevall-ballester universitat autònoma de barcelona, spain luke plonsky northern arizona university, flagstaff, usa glen poupore minnesota state university, mankato, usa matthew t. prior arizona state university, tempe, usa xie qin the education university of hong kong, china xuyan qiu the open university of hong kong, china muhammad rahimi university of auckland, new zealand anabela rato university of toronto, canada pia resnik university college of teacher education vienna/krems, austria barry lee reynolds university of macau, macau sar, china alina reznitskaya montclair state university, usa jack c. richards university of sydney, australia jeffrey m. ringer university of tennessee, knoxville, usa jeanne rolin-ianziti the university of queensland, brisbane, australia hanne roothooft university of navarra, spain vanessa natale rukholm university of tampa, usa stephen ryan waseda university, tokyo, japan marianna ryshina-pankova georgetown university, usa pilar safont universitat jaume i, castelló, spain akihiro saito tokyo university of science, japan veronica sardegna university of pittsburgh, usa masatoshi sato andrés bello national university, santiago, chile meral seker alanya alaaddin keykubat university, turkey ali shehadeh united arab emirates university, abu dhabi, united arab emirates breno silva university of warsaw, poland yvette slaughter the university of melbourne, australia ute smit university of vienna, austria neal snape gunma prefectural women’s university, japan sarah sok university of california, irvine, usa jayoung song pennsylvania state university, state college, usa aldona sopata adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland adem soruç university of bath, uk ryan spring tohoku university, japan rasmus steinkrauss university of groningen, the netherlands antonella strambi university of south australia, adelaide, australia brian strong carleton university, ottawa, canada he sun nanyang technological university, singapore peijian paul sun zhejiang university, hangzhou, china shungo suzuki lancaster university, uk yuichi suzuki kanagawa university, japan abdul syahid institut agama islam negeri palangka raya, indonesia osamu takeuchi kansai university, japan jian tao shanghai university of finance and economics, china dietmar tatzl fh joanneum university of applied sciences, graz, austria lynda taylor university of bedfordshire, uk yasser teimouri georgetown university, washington dc, usa martha isabel tejada sánchez los andes university, bogotá, colombia 646 mark feng teng beijing normal university, china pavel trofimovich concordia university, montreal, canada francis john troyan the ohio state university, columbus, usa wai lan tsang the university of hong kong, china keiko tsuchiya yokohama city university, japan takumi uchihara university of western ontario, london, canada bert vandenberghe katholieke universiteit leuven, belgium vincent j. van heuven leiden university, the netherlands izaskun villarreal public university of navarre, spain joseph p. vitta queen’s university belfast, uk sonca vo university of danang, vietnam erik voss columbia university, usa danping wang the university of auckland, new zealand yongliang wang henan university, china rining tony wei xi’an jiaotong-liverpool university, suzhou, china katrin wisniewski leipzig university, germany kevin m. wong pepperdine university, usa junjie wu shenzhen technology university, china xue wu huazhong university of science and technology, china manfred man-fat wu the open university of hong kong, hong kong mark wyatt khalifa university, united arab emirates saihua xia murray state university, usa feng xiao pomona college, california, usa jianping xie guangdong university of foreign studies, china hao xu beijing foreign studies university, china jinfen xu huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan, china akifumi yanagisawa tokyo university of science, japan yucel yilmaz indiana university, bloomingotn, uk sarah zahler university at albany, suny, usa nourollah zarrinabadi university of isfahan, iran zhini zeng the university of mississippi, usa jiayi zhang beijing normal university, china lawrence jun zhang the university of auckland, new zealand peixin zhang xiamen university, china tiefu zhang university of electronic science and technology of china, chengdu, china xuan zheng peking university, china yao zheng chongqing university, china yongyan zheng fudan university, shanghai, china jianhua zhou northwest normal university, china haoran zhu huazhong university of science and technology, china 515 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (3). 2022. 515-520 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.3.9 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review researching language learning motivation: a concise guide authors: ali h. al-hoorie, fruzsina szabó publisher: bloomsbury academic, 2022 isbn: 978-1-3501-6689-9 pages: 304 in the context of buoyant research on second language acquisition (sla), language learning motivation has remained one of the most active fields of inquiry for more than 60 years (al-hoorie & macintyre, 2019; ushioda, 2019). several books have approached this topic from a range of perspectives (e.g., dörnyei & ushioda, 2021; lamb et al., 2019; macintyre & al-hoorie, 2020). however, the seemingly unceasing theoretical and methodological innovation in motivation research can be confusing, and it has become increasingly overwhelming to keep abreast of all the latest advancements in this burgeoning field. in response to this “promising” yet “perplexing” situation, ali h. al-hoorie and fruzsina szabó have edited the volume researching language learning motivation: a concise guide, presenting a timely guidebook for both students and novice researchers to navigate their way through the journey of language learning motivation. contributed by both established and emerging experts in the realm of second language (l2) motivation, the volume consists of 21 chapters subsumed under five 516 sections. each section, with three to six chapters, is organized under one overarching theme, discussing not only prominent l2 motivation theories (e.g., self approaches) but also cutting-edge topics (e.g., engagement and emotion). following a brief introduction by the editors, which pays homage to zoltán dörnyei for his profound contributions to l2 motivation research, part 1 includes three chapters, providing general reflections on the field of language learning motivation. in chapter 1, ema ushioda emphasizes the ethical issues involved in the use of motivational strategies. while teachers’ professional responsibilities in guiding students to meet educational goals are widely acknowledged, careful consideration should be given to the extent to which the teacher can influence students’ autonomy. in chapter 2, matthew e. poehner adopts a sociocultural theory (sct) perspective to account for the dynamism of l2 learner development. underpinned by the notion of perezhivanie, this chapter sheds more light on the dynamic person-environment dialectic and discusses how this contributes to the understanding of l2 motivation. in a similar vein, ofelia garcía in chapter 3 also highlights the necessity to go beyond the psychological paradigm of motivation and incorporate social theories such as the sociology of language to move the research agenda forward. part 2, titled “engagement and self-regulation,” consists of four chapters, centering on the critical construct of engagement within the remit of sla and l2 motivation research. first, sarah mercer explicates the rationale for conceptualizing engagement in the domain of language learning and outlines promising future research directions in this area. the next chapter, authored by phil hiver, takes a further step by linking teaching practices to learners’ engagement with a prime focus on its temporality and dynamicity. chapter 6, by alastair henry, shifts the focus to the role of goal-setting and highlights how quality goals can sustain long-term motivation. finally, in chapter 7, w. l. oga-baldwin and emiko hirosawa elaborate on the fundamental concepts of self-determination theory and how it could be applied in motivational practice. part 3 (chapter 8-11) provides a critical review of the dominant “selves approaches.” first, peter macintyre voices a series of concerns about the application of the l2 motivational self system including its problematic conceptualization and troublesome proliferation in the sla literature. because of these concerns, he argues that the selves-related concepts should be treated with great caution when conducting l2 motivation research. in chapter 9, mostafa papi shifts the focus to practice and explores how the future selves predict motivation and behavior in the classrooms, offering corresponding pedagogical implications. chapter 10, penned by amy s. thompson, extends the research landscape to learning languages other than english (lotes) in rural america, exemplifying the feasibility of constructing an ideal self in rural contexts where contact 517 with additional languages is limited. in a similar line of research, flordelis gonzález-mujico (chapter 11) scrutinizes how to cultivate and activate l2 selves through technology-enhanced language learning (tell), concentrating on the effects of digital visualization. part 4 contains four studies that link the concept of motivation to emotions, a fledging but burgeoning branch of research in sla (dewaele, 2019; dewaele & li, 2018; pawlak et al., 2022). as a trend-setter in this field, jean-marc dewaele starts with chapter 12 by tracing the historical evolution of emotion research in mainstream applied linguistics and how it could be well integrated into sla research. in the next chapter, kate maher and jim king draw on a cognitive-behavioral theory (cbt) approach (king & harumi, 2020) to identify emotional distractions in the language classroom and suggest activities to facilitate emotional and social engagement in speaking tasks. with a similar focus on classroom practice, tammy gregersen and ahmed al khateeb (chapter 14) investigate the phenomenon of “motivation contagion” between language learners and teachers, highlighting its dynamicity and interconnectedness. this part concludes with christine muir’s (chapter 15) discussion of the group-level emotional experience and how it can contribute to directed motivational currents and long-term motivation. the last section of the edited collection, part 5, brings together six chapters (chapter 16-21), each presenting an emerging topic that holds particular promise for the research agenda on l2 motivation. from a methodological angle, in chapter 16, ali h. al-hoorie and phil hiver point to the limitations of the qualitative-only approach and make a case for the need to adopt quantitative approaches in research on motivation grounded in complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) (larsen-freeman, 2012). this is followed by chapter 17, in which martin lamb delves into the motivation of indonesian learners of english via a critical discourse analysis of an english language product leaflet they made. in chapter 18, vera busse addresses the monolingual bias in sla and extends the research scope to include students’ l2 motivation in multi-ethnic school settings. chapter 19, by zana ibrahim, expounds on the definition of “success in l2 learning” in an english as a lingua franca (elf) context, and how such success could be used to motivate learners through establishing a realistic goal. the last two chapters (20-21) concomitantly touch upon motivational practice in language classrooms. robert s. murphy in chapter 20 recapitulates seven neuroelt maxims to sustain student motivation in classrooms. finally, in chapter 21, yoshifumi fukada and colleagues highlight the significant role of group dynamics, and how it promotes learners’ psychological wellbeing and l2 motivation. overall, featuring concise and accessible overviews of contemporary concepts and directions of l2 motivation research, this impressive book serves as an informative and invaluable guide for both graduate students and novice researchers. 518 compared to traditional motivation books with lengthy chapters dwelling on complex conceptualizations, the current volume is likely to reach a wider readership by its succinct (in terms of length) and all-inclusive (in terms of the range of topics) nature. anyone seeking an up-to-date overview of motivation research will benefit from reading this combined expertise. another strength of this book resides in its balance between reviewing established theories and introducing emerging or underappreciated themes in l2 motivation research. specifically, the authors provide a critical discussion of the widely applied theoretical frameworks such as self-determination theory (chapter 7), and l2 motivational selfsystem (chapter 8), specifying in which context these theories could be appropriately used, which can surely help novice researchers avoid potential pitfalls. in addition, the volume brings to the fore underrepresented yet cutting-edge themes in l2 motivation. chapters in the last two parts, for instance, discuss an array of topics including emotions in sla, classroom engagement, motivation contagion, and lotes motivation, thereby providing an excellent springboard for setting a new research agenda. while this volume manages to weave a tapestry of ideas centering around l2 motivation, two shortcomings should be noted. firstly, similar to other edited volumes contributed by a team of experts, it seems inevitable that various chapters are rather fragmented without a unifying theoretical thread that is consistently followed. for this reason, certain chapters overlap and might better fit better into other sections. for instance, if chapter 21 in part 5, which explores the role of group dynamics, appeared in part 4, it could constitute a good complement to chapter 15 in this part, which also scrutinizes the group-level interaction and emotion in the l2 classroom. furthermore, given that this volume is framed as a guidebook for researching motivation, due attention should be given to discussing motivation-pertinent findings in a more direct manner. admittedly, the topics covered in the book mirror the general trend in sla, manifesting recent “social turn” (block, 2003), “emotional turn” (white, 2018), and “multilingual turn” (may, 2019). however, these state-of-the-art concepts may steal the show and divert attention away from the issues of crucial importance to motivation. for instance, the first two chapters in part 2 are devoted to the conceptualization of engagement with little mention of its link with motivational development. issues can also be discerned in part 4, in which too much emphasis is placed on emotions in its own right whereas only one chapter explicitly discusses its relationship with motivation contagion in the classroom. this being said, the chapters still offer a detailed account of the current conceptualizations, making it an informative learning resource for newcomers. overall, this expertly curated volume sets itself from those previously published ones by its succinctness, accessibility and a balance between hindsight 519 and foresight. specifically, the book aptly describes the fundamental role of motivation in the burgeoning field of psychology and language learning and constitutes a fitting tribute to zoltán dörnyei’s field-shaping influences. bringing together both established theories and emerging topics, it is undoubtfully a concise guide for not only postgraduates to continue in-depth research, but also for academics who are eager to break new ground in researching l2 motivation. reviewed by zixuan li university of cambridge, cambridge, uk zl421@cam.ac.uk references al-hoorie, a. h., & macintyre, p. d. (2019). integrative motivation: 60 years and counting. in a. h. al-hoorie & p. d. macintyre (eds.), contemporary language motivation theory (pp. 1-4). multilingual matters. https://doi.org/ 10.21832/9781788925204-004 block, d. (2003). the social turn in second language acquisition. edinburgh university press. dewaele, j.-m. (2019). when elephants fly: the lift-off of emotion research in applied linguistics. modern language journal, 103(2), 533-536. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/modl.12576 dewaele, j.-m., & li, c. (2018). editorial. studies in second language learning and teaching, 8(1), 15-19. https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.1.1 dörnyei, z., & ushioda, e. (2021). teaching and researching motivation (third edition). routledge. lamb, m., csizér, k., henry, a., & ryan, s. (eds.). (2019). the palgrave handbook of motivation for language learning. springer international publishing. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28380-3 larsen-freeman, d. (2012). complex, dynamic systems: a new transdisciplinary theme for applied linguistics? language teaching, 45(2), 202-214. https:// doi.org/10.1017/s0261444811000061 maher, k. (2020). examining l2 learners’ silent behaviour and anxiety in the classroom using an approach based on cognitive-behavioural theory. in j. king & s. hurami (eds.), east asian perspectives on silence in english language education (pp. 80-104). multilingual matters. macintyre, p. d., & al-hoorie, a. h. (eds.). (2020). contemporary language motivation theory: 60 years since gardner and lambert (1959). multilingual matters. 520 may, s. (2019). negotiating the multilingual turn in sla. modern language journal, 103, 122-129. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12531 pawlak, m., kruk, m., zawodniak, j., & pasikowski, s. (2022). examining the underlying structure of after-class boredom experienced by english majors. system, 106, 102769. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2022.102769 ushioda, e. (2019). researching l2 motivation: past, present and future. in m. lamb, k. csizér, a. henry, & s. ryan (eds.), the palgrave handbook of motivation for language learning (pp. 661-682). springer. https://doi.org/10. 1007/978-3-030-28380-3_32 white, c. j. (2018). the emotional turn in applied linguistics and tesol: significance, challenges and prospects. in j. de d. martínez agudo (ed.), emotions in second language teaching (pp. 19-34). springer. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-3-319-75438-3_2 813 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (4). 2020. 813-818 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.4.8 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review engaging language learners in contemporary classrooms authors: sarah mercer, zoltán dörnyei publisher: cambridge university press, 2020 isbn: 9781108445924 pages: 208 learner engagement is key to successful learning experiences in general education and language learning is no exception. when students are engaged, they are focusing on the task at hand, paying attention and enjoying their language learning (aubrey et al., 2020; ellis, 2018; mercer, 2019; oga-baldwin, 2019). yet, as mercer and dörnyei affirm in their introduction to the book, “discussions of engagement . . . have been largely absent from the literature of l2 [second language] learning and teaching” (p. 4). engaging language learners in contemporary classrooms addresses this gap directly and in great depth, thus making it a ground-breaking contribution to the growing body of second language (l2) literature on learner engagement. this book opens with a brief “foreword,” followed by “introduction,” in which the authors provide their conceptualization of engagement, the importance of the topic in language learning and teaching, and the structure of the book. the authors perceive the construct of engagement “to be always associated with action, ideally combined with internal dimensions of cognitive and affective involvement” (p. 3, [emphasis in original]). the remainder of the book 814 is then divided into six chapters that are easy to follow. for example, all chapters begin with an introduction followed by a set of theoretical principles and conclude with a concise summary. in addition to the recommended up-to-date reading section, each chapter offers several helpful sections entitled “reflection task” that are pertinent and interesting. the reflection tasks introduced in each chapter are excellent in combining theory and pedagogy by asking language teachers to critically reflect on the presented principles in light of their own teaching experiences. chapter 1, “the contexts of learner engagement,” focuses on contextual principles that affect learner engagement beyond the language classroom at different levels, including the level of language and society, the school, and the learner’s family settings. this serves as an excellent opening chapter for two main reasons. firstly, the discussion of the contextual factors is central to understanding learner engagement. as such, presenting this facet in the first chapter makes it essential reading for language teachers and anyone with an interest in learner engagement. secondly, the discussion of contextual factors in the opening chapter reminds language practitioners who work in different contexts of the complexity of engagement so that they can address the dynamics of the wider social environments relating to this construct. i find great value in the conclusion of this chapter, in which mercer and dörnyei assert that, “our language classrooms are embedded in a wider ecology, and much of what is communicated to learners there about their autonomy, relatedness and competence, as well as the value of languages, will impact on what happened within actual l2 classes” (p. 27). the next chapters are somewhat different from chapter 1 in that they discuss more concrete principles that teachers can adapt to positively and actively engage their learners. chapters 2-4 address three major factors that can enhance learner engaged behaviors, including the learner’s psychological state, their relationship to the teacher and their relationship with their peers. chapter 2, “the facilitative learner mindset,” discusses learners’ beliefs and feelings that can impact their engagement. facilitative mindset is a term used by the authors to refer to learner-internal factors that can facilitate engagement. the assumption behind this chapter is that in order for learners to be willing to engage, it is vitally important for them to possess “an optimal facilitative psychological frame of mind” (p. 49). a wide range of principles are touched upon, including a sense of competence, a growth mindset, a sense of ownership and control over the learning process and confidence. the authors then discuss different action areas that can be pursued by teachers, such as emphasizing a coaching mindset. adopting a coaching mindset means “thinking of the learner as a person with psychological needs and drives that can be supported through teaching and interaction” (p. 40). mercer and dörnyei also explain the importance of discussing learner mindset beliefs explicitly by using, for example, 815 “texts, quotes, films and literature in which learners can identify role models who exemplify growth mindsets” (p. 45). in chapter 3, “teacher-student rapport,” the authors offer a coherent discussion on six main principles underlying quality teacher-student relationships, focusing on the attitudes and behaviors of the teacher. these guiding principles include being approachable, empathetic, and responsive to learner individuality, manifesting belief in learners’ potential to improve, seeking to support learner autonomy, and remaining passionate about teaching. mercer and dörnyei then propose concrete actions for teachers to pursue, such as giving students sufficient opportunities to speak about personally meaningful topics and providing learners with thoughtful, clear and purposeful feedback. chapter 4, “positive classroom dynamics and culture,” reviews the role of group dynamics in engaging learners, focusing on peer relationships and culture. in this chapter, the authors argue that it is teachers’ responsibility to create a psychologically safe classroom environment for the learner group to feel a strong sense of belonging characterized by cohesiveness and collaboration. just like in other chapters, mercer and dörnyei suggest specific actions that teachers could adopt in their classrooms to facilitate positive group groundwork for engagement. these include, for example, mixing up learners to ensure that all of them have some kind of relationship with each other, developing a sense of “we” and “us” in the classroom, and preparing learners for groupwork through building relevant linguistic, interpersonal and collaborative skills, setting cooperative norms and assigning appropriate roles within groups. in chapters 5 and 6, mercer and dörnyei present overarching design principles of initiating and maintaining task engagement from the field of psychology that could guide l2 teachers’ planning of their own classroom tasks (e.g., antonetti & garver, 2015; bjork & bjork, 2011; csikszentmihalyi, 2002). chapters 5 and 6 are quite beneficial for teachers and researchers new to the topic of task engagement in language classrooms. chapter 5, “initiating engagement with learning tasks,” focuses on creating learner initial task engagement by providing several task design principles. these include, for example, understanding learners’ needs and abilities, the need to get all learners emotionally invested during tasks, and creating curiosity. the authors also explain that the start-up of a task in which the teacher clarifies what is expected from learners is vitally important in capturing and sustaining engagement. mercer and dörnyei remind the reader that keeping learners active by, for example, asking them to move things around or physically engaging with something is vital for initiating task engagement. their discussion of task design is followed by suggestions of a number of useful teacher actions, such as grabbing the learners’ attention and triggering their curiosity through tasks that 816 are novel in some way (e.g., using a colored paper for a reading task and cutting it into paragraphs that students have to then reconstruct). in addition, the authors suggest a second way of promoting curiosity by adopting strategies that provoke puzzlement, uncertainty, mystery or confusion. for example, puzzlement can be promoted by employing traditional puzzle formats such as jigsaws. this well-constructed chapter provides a thorough overview of task engagement as an important and yet an underexplored area of research. chapter 6, “sustaining engagement on learning tasks,” is a natural followup to chapter 5, and a fitting finale to the book. mercer and dörnyei propose interesting, engaging principles that go beyond keeping students merely active. for example, providing learners with an appropriate level of task challenge compatible with their level of l2 attainment, ensuring positive emotions in the task, attention, and interest are crucial factors in sustaining task engagement. the authors move on to suggest that reducing levels of predictability and ensuring a sense of progress or accomplishment among learners are crucial principles for maintaining learner engagement during tasks. the chapter closes with relevant practical points that teachers could implement in combination with the action points proposed in previous chapters. among different action points, mercer and dörnyei introduce what they called “clara” principles which are central to task engagement. clara approaches include fostering challenge, learner-centeredness, active learning, real-world relevance and autonomy-richness. the last component of this book, “conclusion,” offers an informative summary of the chapters in a table format, recapitulating the main principles and actions points proposed in the book. the authors then identify three recurrent themes central to learner engagement, including the power of positive emotions, empowering learners as partners in their education and active participation. in their final words, mercer and dörnyei leave readers with a very thoughtful reminder that, “the learners themselves do not like to be bored or passive; they would usually prefer to be engaged. so, our job is to engage learners in their learning by designing language learning experiences that provide learners with the opportunity and encouragement to engage” (p. 162). among the many positive aspects of this book, i applaud the publication of mercer and dörnyei’s book for the following reasons. first of all, the publication is a teacher-friendly resource that offers a theoretically grounded and empirically rich window into learner engagement within language classrooms. it provides readers with practical approaches and guiding principles to involve today’s generation of learners. the authors offer a set of comprehensive principles that are eminently feasible and require no special equipment in the classroom. most importantly, the proposed action points can be adopted in different teaching contexts and for learners of all levels. many of these principles can also be 817 easily integrated into what teachers currently do with no special expertise. on the other hand, novice teachers might feel overwhelmed by the number of principles needed to engage their students. i also have to admit that, at times, i found myself thinking that implementing some of the engagement principles proposed in the book might seem overly ambitious, but, on each occasion, mercer and dörnyei managed to skillfully relate idealism to practical realties that can be simply achieved through small adjustments to teachers’ current practices. it is, indeed, the flexibility and accessibility that make this book a welcome addition to the l2 literature. overall, maintaining harmony between theory and practice, mercer and dörnyei’s publication is a valuable contribution to the l2 literature, especially at a time where teachers must work with increasingly distracted students. it weaves together fields such as psychology, language education and motivation studies in order to make engagement a useful construct for a variety of audiences. this is a very thought-provoking read for language teachers, postgraduates in language education, l2 researchers and for anyone with an interest in engagement in l2 teaching and learning. language teachers can use this book as a practical guide to design engaging classroom learning lessons and tasks by, for example, falling back upon some of the task design principles introduced in chapter 5 and chapter 6. it is a horizon-broadening read not only for novice teachers but also for more experienced practitioners. as for postgraduates and l2 researchers, the book can be an informative guide for designing empirical studies. importantly, this work should be seen as a clarion call for further l2 research in the area of engagement. reviewed by haydab almukhaild university of leicester, uk haaa6@leicester.ac.uk references antonetti, j. v, & garver, j. r. (2015). 17,000 classroom visits can’t be wrong: strategies that engage students, promote active learning, and boost achievement. alexandria, va: ascd. aubrey, s., king, j., & almukhaild, h. (2020). language learner engagement during speaking tasks: a longitudinal study. relc journal. http://doi.org/10. 1177%2f0033688220945418 818 bjork, e. l., & bjork, r. a. (2011). making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. in m. a. gernsbacher, r. w. pew, l. m. hough, & j. r. pomerantz (eds.), psychology and the real world: essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society (pp. 59-64). new york: worth publishers. csikszentmihalyi, m. (2002). flow: the classic work on how to achieve happiness. london: rider. ellis, r. (2018). reflections on task-based language teaching. bristol: multilingual matters. mercer, s. (2019). language learner engagement: setting the scene. in x. gao (ed.), second handbook of english language teaching (pp. 1-19). cham: springer. oga-baldwin, w. l. q. (2019). acting, thinking, feeling, making, collaborating: the engagement process in foreign language learning. system, 86, 102-128. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: chengchen li (huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan, china) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) editor: joanna zawodniak (university of zielona góra, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (silesian university of technology, gliwice, poland) vol. 12 no. 3 september 2022 editorial board: ali al-hoorie (royal commission for jubail and yanbu, jubail, saudi arabia) larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) ali derakhshan (golestan university, gorgan, iran) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) majid elahi shirvan (university of bojnord, iran) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) tammy gregersen (american university of sharjah, united arab emirates) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) laura gurzynski-weiss (indiana university bloomington, usa) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) amy thompson (west virginia university, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2022 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: kata csizér mariusz kruk chengchen li aleksandra wach joanna zawodniak © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: kata csizér, melanie ellis, mariusz kruk, chengchen li, aleksandra wach, joanna zawodniak cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 61 829 64 20 fax +48 61 829 64 21 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · social sciences citation index (wos core collection) · journal citation reports social sciences (wos) · scopus · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) · current contents – social and behavioral sciences (wos) · essential science indicators (wos) studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 12, number 3, september 2022 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors .....................................................................345 editorial ...........................................................................................351 articles: raquel serrano – a state-of-the-art review of distribution-of-practice effects on l2 learning .............................................................................355 jie qin, lei lei – research trends in task-based language teaching: a bibliometric analysis from 1985 to 2020 ......................................... 381 jinfen xu, changying li – timing of form-focused instruction: effects on efl learners’ grammar learning ................................................. 405 jang ho lee, joung joo ahn, hansol lee – the role of motivation and vocabulary learning strategies in l2 vocabulary knowledge: a structural equation modeling analysis............................................................. 435 zhipeng zhang, xuesong (andy) gao, ting liu, chwee beng lee – language learners’ emotion regulation and enjoyment in an online collaborative writing program ...............................................................................................459 jian xu, xuyan qiu – second language psychological speaking and listening needs: scale development, symbiosis, and demographic differences.....483 book reviews: lixia zhu, jinting cai – review of crosslinguistic influence and second language learning by kevin mcmanus............................................. 509 zixuan li – review of researching language learning motivation: a concise guide by ali h. al-hoorie and fruzsina szabó ..................... 515 call for papers for the 2023 ssllt conference.................................. 521 notes to contributors ...................................................................... 525 345 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors joung joo ahn is part-time lecturer in the department of child english at the cyber university of korea, republic of korea. she is a researcher, material developer, and teacher trainer. her areas of interest are storytelling, literacy skills, early english education, teacher development and e-learning. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8923-8098 contact details: department of child english, the cyber university of korea, 106 bukchon-ro, jongno-gu, seoul, 03051 republic of korea (storygranny@naver.com) jinting cai is professor in the school of foreign studies at shanghai university of finance and economics, china, and holds a phd in second language acquisition. his research interests include crosslinguistic influence, interlanguage, and individual differences in second language acquisition with a focus on crosslinguistic influence in chinese students’ learning and use of foreign languages. currently, he chairs a key national project on crosslinguistic influence in chinese students’ learning of english and japanese. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3902-9121 contact details: school of foreign studies, shanghai university of finance and economics, no. 777, guoding road, shanghai, china (caijinting@mail.shufe.edu.cn) xuesong (andy) gao is professor in the school of education, the university of new south wales (unsw), australia. his research interests include computerassisted language learning, language learner autonomy, language education policy, and language teacher education. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3426-8721 contact details: school of education, faculty of arts, design and architecture, university of new south wales, sydney, nsw 2052, australia (xuesong.gao@unsw.edu.au) 346 hansol lee received his doctoral degree in education from the university of california, irvine, usa, and is associate professor of english at korea military academy, republic of korea. his research interests include methods and statistics, education, and literacy. his work has been published in education research review, child development, applied measurement in education, applied linguistics, language learning, modern language journal, language learning & technology, journal of language and social psychology and annual review of applied linguistics, among others. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6912-7128 contact details: department of english, korea military academy, 574, hwarangro, nowon-gu, seoul, 01805 republic of korea (hansol6461@gmail.com) chwee beng lee is currently associate professor and hdr director of school of education at western sydney university (wsu), australia. her research interests include language learning technology, problem solving, and learner autonomy. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3419-5283 contact details: school of education, western sydney university, sydney, nsw 2751, australia (chwee.lee@westernsydney.edu.au) jang ho lee received his phd in education from the university of oxford, uk, and is presently professor at the department of english education, chung-ang university, republic of korea. his areas of interest are the bilingual approach to l2 teaching, vocabulary acquisition, and ai-based language learning. his work has been published in education research review, applied linguistics, language learning, language teaching research, language learning & technology, tesol quarterly, modern language journal, recall, system and oxford review of education, among others. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2767-3881 contact details: department of english education, chung-ang university, 84 heukseok-ro, dongjak-gu, seoul, 06974 republic of korea (jangholee@cau.ac.kr) lei lei is professor of applied linguistics at the institute of corpus studies and applications, shanghai international studies university, china. his research interests include second language acquisition, academic english, and corpus linguistics. he has published extensively, and his articles have appeared in international journals, such as applied linguistics, language teaching, journal of english for academic purposes, international journal of corpus linguistics, lingua, and system. 347 orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3366-1855 contact details: institute of corpus studies and applications, shanghai international studies university, 1550 wenxiang road, songjian, shanghai,201306, p.r of china (leileicn@126.com; leileicn@shisu.edu.cn) changying li is lecturer at the school of foreign languages, huazhong university of science and technology, china. her research interests include foreign language education and instructed second language acquisition. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6280-6817 contact details: huazhong university of science and technology, school of foreign languages, no. 1037 luoyu road, wuhan, 430074, hubei province, p. r. china (lichangying@hust.edu.cn) zixuan li is a phd student at the faculty of education, university of cambridge. she also holds an mphil degree in research in second language education in the faculty. her main interests lie in language learning motivation, multilingualism, and positive psychology. she is particularly interested in the motivational profiles of lotes learners across various contexts. her current phd project aims to apply positive psychology principles to understand lote learners’ language learning experience and motivation. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9058-8634 contact details: faculty of education, university of cambridge,184 hills road, cb2 8pq, cambridge, uk (zl421@cam.ac.uk) ting liu is a phd candidate at the university of new south wales (unsw), sydney, australia. she holds university international postgraduate award (uipa) scholarship granted by unsw sydney. her current areas of research are teaching english as a foreign language, language teacher education, and language learning technology. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3452-1838 contact details: school of education, faculty of arts, design and architecture, university of new south wales, sydney, nsw 2052, australia (ting.liu1@student. unsw.edu.au) jie qin is assistant professor at the school of foreign languages studies at south china agricultural university, guangzhou, china and holds a phd in applied linguistics. her research interests include instructed second language acquisition with a focus on task-based language teaching and cognitive linguistics-inspired 348 instruction. she has published articles in language teaching, language teaching research, international review of applied linguistics in language teaching (iral), and system. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1678-9195 contact details: school of foreign languages studies, south china agricultural university, 483 wushan road guangzhou, china (qinjie@scau.edu.cn) xuyan qiu is assistant professor in the department of english and communication at the hong kong polytechnic university, china. her research interests include second language acquisition, task-based language teaching, academic english, and english medium instruction. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4368-8039 contact details: department of english and communication, the hong kong polytechnic university, hung hom, kowloon, hong kong sar, china (christyxyq@hotmail.com) raquel serrano is associate professor in the department of modern languages and literatures and english studies at the university of barcelona, spain. her research has focused on the acquisition of english as an l2 and her main areas of interest include the effect of time distribution, study abroad, and the potential of reading to promote l2 vocabulary learning. some of her recent publications have appeared in applied psycholinguistics, language teaching, language awareness and system. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9335-4702 contact details: university of barcelona, department of modern languages and literatures and english studies, gran via corts catalanes, 585, 08007, barcelona, spain (raquelserrano@ub.edu) jian xu is assistant professor at sichuan international studies university, china. he obtained his phd degree from department of curriculum and instruction, the chinese university of hong kong. his research interests include second language writing and listening, and teacher identity. his work has appeared in several journals, such as applied linguistics review, assessing writing, journal of multilingual and multicultural development, higher education research & development, educational studies, and asia-pacific education researcher. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2275-6197 contact details: school of business english, sichuan international studies university, no. 33, zhuangzhi road, lieshimu, shapingba district, 400031, chongqing, china (xujian@link.cuhk.edu.hk) 349 jinfen xu is professor and phd supervisor of the school of foreign languages, huazhong university of science and technology, china. her research interests include foreign language education, instructed second language acquisition, learner autonomy, classroom interaction and teacher development. her articles (more than 190 in total) on instructed sla, classroom interaction, and teacher reflection have appeared in many key academic journals in china and foreign journals (such as language teaching research, language policy, system, tesol quarterly). her work also includes 8 books on second language teaching and learning, 21 textbooks, and 28 projects at both national and provincial levels. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0515-0887 contact details: huazhong university of science and technology, school of foreign languages, no. 1037 luoyu road, wuhan, 430074, hubei province, p. r. china (xujinfen@hust.edu.cn) zhipeng zhang is a phd candidate at the western sydney university (wsu), sydney, australia. his study has received generous support by postgraduate research scholarship from wsu. he is also an english lecturer at taiyuan normal university, china. his research interests cover second language acquisition, emotions in language learning, and language learning technology. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5783-5648 contact details: school of education, western sydney university, sydney, nsw 2751, australia (zhipeng.zhang@tynu.edu.cn) lixia zhu is professor in the college of foreign languages at the university of shanghai for science and technology, china, and holds a phd in linguistics. her research interests include cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, and second language acquisition with a focus on comparative research on chinese and japanese from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. currently, she is a member of a research team investigating crosslinguistic influence in chinese students’ learning of english and japanese. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0170-4475 contact details: college of foreign languages, university of shanghai for science and technology, no. 334 jungong road, shanghai, china (bdzhlx@usst.edu.cn) studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (silesian university of technology, gliwice, poland) vol. 10 no. 3 september 2020 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) maria dakowska (university of warsaw, poland) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2020 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: jakub bielak mariusz kruk aleksandra wach © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: jakub bielak, melanie ellis, mariusz kruk, aleksandra wach cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · social sciences citation index (wos core collection) · journal citation reports social sciences (wos) · scopus · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) · current contents – social and behavioral sciences (wos) · essential science indicators (wos) special issue: english language learning in primary schools: variables at play guest editors: maría del pilar garcía mayo m. juncal gutierrez-mangado studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 10, number 3, september 2020 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ....................................................................407 editorial: introduction to the special issue on english language learning in primary schools ....................................................................415 articles: maría basterrechea, francisco gallardo-del-puerto – language-related episodes and pair dynamics in primary school clil learners: a comparison between proficiency-matched and student-selected pairs .............. 423 elisabet pladevall-ballester, alexandra vraciu – efl child peer interaction: measuring the effect of time, proficiency pairing and language of interaction ............................................................................... 449 maría martínez-adrián, izaskun arratibel-irazusta – the interface between task-modality and the use of previously known languages in young clil english learners ............................................................. 473 maría ángeles hidalgo, amparo lázaro-ibarrola – task repetition and collaborative writing by efl children: beyond caf measures ......... 501 søren w. eskildsen, teresa cadierno – oral english performance in danish primary school children: an interactional usage-based approach .......523 yuko goto butler – the ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context .......................................................................... 547 rachel t. y. kan, victoria a. murphy – effects of frequency and idiomaticity on second language reading comprehension in children with english as an additional language ............................................................... 579 marta kopinska, agurtzane azkarai – exploring young efl learners’ motivation: individual versus pair work on dictogloss tasks ........... 607 eva wilden, raphaela porsch – teachers’ self-reported l1 and l2 use and self-assessed l2 proficiency in primary efl education ............. 631 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 657 407 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors izaskun arratibel-irazusta is a phd student and research assistant at the university of the basque country. apart from that, she is a teacher at a vocational training school where she teaches technical english in different areas. her research mainly focuses on cross-linguistic influence and the use of communication strategies in clil settings. she has presented her work at different international conferences such as the international conference on multilingualism and third language acquisition and the international conference of the spanish society for applied linguistics, among others. her work has appeared in journals such as the european journal of applied linguistics. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2274-6423 contact details: facultad de letras, universidad del país vasco (upv/ehu), paseo de la universidad 5, 01006 vitoria-gasteiz, spain (izaskun.arratibel@ehu.eus) agurtzane azkarai, phd, is assistant professor at the department of english and german and translation and interpreting studies at the university of the basque country (upv/ehu), and a member of the language and speech (laslab) research group at the upv/ehu. her research interests include collaborative work and task-based interaction in esl and efl settings, and also focuses on different factors such as age, gender, or motivation that might affect the learning opportunities of l2 learners. she has published her work in several well-known journals and presented her work at national and international conferences. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3011-344x contact details: universidad del país vasco/euskal herriko unibertsitatea (upv/ehu) facultad de letras, dpto. de filología inglesa y alemana y traducción e interpretación paseo de la universidad 5, 01006 vitoria-gasteiz, spain (agurtzane. azcaray@ehu.eus) 408 maría basterrechea, phd, is assistant professor at the university of the basque country (upv/ehu) where she teaches courses on syllabus design, spoken english or english language. her research focuses on focus on form and interaction in content-and-language-integrated-learning contexts. she has recently published articles in language awareness (2019), international journal of applied linguistics (2020), language teaching research (2019), tesol quarterly (2017), and elia: estudios de lingüística inglesa aplicada (2017). she has also published chapters in edited volumes such as second language interaction in diverse educational contexts (2013, john benjamins) and applied linguistics perspectives on clil (2017, john benjamins), among others. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7993-445x contact details: universidad del país vasco (upv/ehu), facultad de letras. dpto. de filología inglesa/ingeles filologia saila. paseo de la universidad 5, 01006 vitoria-gasteiz, spain (maria.basterrechea@ehu.eus) yuko goto butler, phd, is professor of educational linguistics at the graduate school of education at the university of pennsylvania. she is also the director of teaching english to speakers of other languages (tesol) program at penn. her research interests are primarily focused on the improvement of second/foreign language education among young learners in the usa and asia in response to the diverse needs of an increasingly globalizing world. her work has also focused on identifying effective esl/efl teaching and learning strategies and assessment methods that take into account the relevant linguistic and cultural contexts in which instruction takes place. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9531-3469 contact details: 3700 walnut street, philadelphia, pa 19104-6216, usa (ybutler@ upenn.edu) teresa cadierno, phd, is professor of second language acquisition and director of the center for language learning at the university of southern denmark. her research interests include instructed second language acquisition, with special focus on the acquisition of grammar by l2 learners, the role of formal instruction in l2 learning and more recently, the role of age in foreign language learning; and the investigation of l2 acquisition from cognitive/usage-based perspectives, with special focus on the development of thinking-for-speaking patterns in second languages. she has co-edited linguistic relativity in sla: thinking for speaking (2010, multilingual matters), usage-based perspectives on second language learning (2016, mouton de gruyter) and lingüística cognitiva y español le/l2 (2019, routledge). in 1996 she received the american council on the teaching 409 of foreign languages – modern language journal (actfl – mlj) paul pimsleur award for research in foreign language education. her research has been financed by funding bodies such as the velux foundation, the danish research council for independent research and the marie curie multi-partner itn program. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8305-1027 contact details: department of language and communication, university of southern denmark, campusvej 55, dk 5230 odense m, denmark (cadierno@sdu.dk) søren wind eskildsen, phd, is associate professor of second language (l2) acquisition at the university of southern denmark in sønderborg. his primary research interest concerns the usage-based processes and practices in l2 learning, in situ and over time, as seen through the lenses of usage-based models of language and conversation analysis. other interests include the role of gestures and other embodied conduct in l2 learning and interaction. he works with both inand out-of-class l2 data and with both adult and child l2 learning. his recent publications include the coedited volume conversation analytic research on learning-in-action: the complex ecology of second language interaction ‘in the wild’ (2019, springer). he is the founding co-editor of the book-series routledge advances in second language studies. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2432-9161 contact details: university of southern denmark, department of design and communication, alsion 2, 6400 sønderborg, denmark (swe@sdu.dk) francisco gallardo-del-puerto, phd, is associate professor at the university of cantabria, spain. he has co-edited content and foreign language integrated learning: contributions to multilingualism in european contexts (2011, peter lang), l1 use in content-based and clil settings (2019, international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, special issue) and crosslinguistic influence: from empirical evidence to classroom practice (2019, springer). his work has appeared in books published by john benjamins, multilingual matters, peter lang and springer, as well as in journals such as international journal of applied linguistics, itl international journal of applied linguistics, language teaching research and the canadian modern language review, among others. at present, he is the director for language policy of the university of cantabria, spain. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8578-9861 contact details: departamento de filología, edificio de filología, universidad de cantabria, avenida de los castros s/n 39005 santander, spain (francisco.gallardo@unican.es) 410 maría del pilar garcía mayo, phd, is full professor of english language and linguistics at the university of the basque country. she is the director of the research group language and speech and the ma program language acquisition in multilingual settings. she has published widely on the l2/l3 acquisition of english morphosyntax and the study of conversational interaction in efl. she has been an invited speaker to universities in europe, asia and north america and is an honorary consultant for the shanghai center for research in english language education. she is the editor of language teaching research and belongs to the editorial board of numerous journals, among others language teaching for young learners. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1987-4889 contact details: departamento de filología inglesa, universidad del país vasco (upv/ehu), paseo de la universidad 5, 01006 vitoria-gasteiz, spain (mariapilar. garciamayo@ehu.eus) m. juncal gutierrez-mangado, phd, is aggregate professor at the university of the basque country upv/ehu, where she received her phd in english philology in 2005. her current teaching involves both undergraduate courses in english language as well as postgraduate courses in the masters’ programmes in language acquisition in multilingual settings and theoretical and experimental linguistics in which she supervises ma and phd theses. at present she is also the director of mobility of the university of the basque country. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4390-2106 contact details: letren fakultatea, uniberstitateko ibilbidea 5, 01006 vitoriagasteiz, spain (junkal.gutierrez@ehu.eus) maría ángeles hidalgo received her phd from the university of the basque country and is a lecturer and researcher at the public university of navarre, spain. her main research focus is on young learners’ foreign language acquisition. she is particularly interested in the effect of age and peer-peer interaction, focusing on aspects such as negotiation of meaning and the influence of task-type on learners’ oral and written performance. she belongs to the language and speech (laslab) research group. her most recent publications include research on negotiation strategies and the effect of learners’ collaboration on written tasks. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7131-1880 contact details: departamento de ciencias humanas y de la educación, edificio los acebos, universidad pública de navarra, 31006 pamplona, spain (mangeles. hidalgo@unavarra.es) 411 rachel kan, phd, is a postdoctoral fellow at the department of chinese and bilingual studies, the hong kong polytechnic university. she received her phd in linguistics from the university of essex, uk for a thesis on heritage language acquisition of cantonese in the united states. she researches bilingual development, including the development and attrition of heritage languages and first languages and the factors that impact these processes. she is now studying narrative and lexical development in children with and without developmental language disorders. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3893-4549 contact details: department of chinese and bilingual studies, the hong kong polytechnic university, hung hom, kowloon, hong kong (rachel.kanty@gmail.com) marta kopinska, phd, is assistant professor in the department of english and german philology and translation and interpreting studies at the university of the basque country (upv/ehu), and a member of the language and speech (laslab) research group. she holds a ba in ethnolinguistics from adam mickiewicz university of poznan (amu, poland) and obtained her ma (2011) and phd (2017) within the language acquisition in multilingual settings program under the supervision of prof. david lasagabaster (upv/ehu). in 2008-2011 she taught polish at the upv/ehu and english in the primary education degree at mondragon university (2016-2017). her research interests include multilingual education, attitudes and motivation. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3382-384x contact details: universidad del país vasco/euskal herriko unibertsitatea (upv/ehu), facultad de letras, dpto. de filología inglesa y alemana y traducción e interpretación paseo de la universidad 5, 01006 vitoria-gasteiz, spain (marta.kopinska@ehu.eus) amparo lázaro-ibarrola, phd, is associate professor at the public university of navarra, spain in the department of human sciences and education, where she teaches in efl teacher training programs. she is specialized in the field of applied linguistics and education, and her research focuses on the processes of second language learning (english) in school contexts. she is part of the research group language and speech (laslab). in her research, she makes an effort to connect theoretically grounded studies to teaching practices and pedagogical implications. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3016-5901 contact details: departamento de ciencias humanas y de la educación, edificio los magnolios, universidad pública de navarra, 31006 pamplona, spain (amparo.lazaro@ unavarra.es) 412 maría martínez-adrián, phd, is associate professor at the upv/ehu and a member of the language and speech (laslab) group. she has co-edited the volumes contemporary approaches to second language acquisition (2013, john benjamins; spanish association of applied linguistics award 2014), crosslinguistic influence: from empirical evidence to classroom practice (2019, springer) and a special issue of international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism on l1 use in clil/cbi settings. her work has appeared in books published by springer and multilingual matters, and in journals such as resla, ijes, itl, jicb, ltr, eujal, iral and injal, among others. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0324-0443 contact details: facultad de letras, universidad del país vasco (upv/ehu), paseo de la universidad 5, 01006 vitoria-gasteiz, spain (maria.martineza@ehu.eus) victoria murphy, phd, is professor of applied linguistics and the deputy director of the department of education, university of oxford. she is the research group convener of the applied linguistics and the r.e.a.l. (research in english as an additional language) research groups. her research focuses on understanding the inter-relationships between child l2/fl learning, vocabulary and literacy development. her work focuses on examining cross-linguistic relationships across linguistic systems in the emergent bilingual child and how foreign language learning in primary school can influence developing first language literacy. she has published in a wide range of applied linguistics journals in the area of young language learners and is the author of two books. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9399-0653 contact details: department of education, university of oxford, 15 norham gardens, oxford ox2 6py, uk (victoria.murphy@education.ox.ac.uk) elisabet pladevall-ballester, phd, holds an ma in linguistics from university college london and a phd in english linguistics from universitat autònoma de barcelona. she is associate professor in the departament de filologia anglesa i germanística at universitat autònoma de barcelona. her research interests include child and adult second language acquisition in bilingual immersion and instructed classroom contexts and also in clil primary education contexts. she is currently leading the research group eflic (2017sgr752; english as a foreign language in instruction contexts) and teaches english syntax and teaching methodology at the undergraduate level and instructed sla and clil at the postgraduate level. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2793-9179 contact details: departament de filologia anglesa i germanística, facultat de filosofia i lletres, carrer de la fortuna, edifici b, universitat autònoma de barcelona, 08193 cerdanyola del vallès, barcelona, spain (elisabet.pladevall@uab.cat) 413 raphaela porsch, phd, is professor of education at the university of magdeburg, germany. her research interests include teacher education, teaching out-offield/teaching across specialisations, academic emotions, transition after primary school, and (early) foreign language teaching. together with eva wilden she directs the teps project (teaching english in primary schools), which has been published in various international journals such as language teaching for young learners or aila review. she has worked in national large-scale assessment as well as projects on school development and is the editor of several anthologies on educational topics such as transition after primary school and teaching out-of-field. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1548-3776 contact details: university of magdeburg, institut i: bildung, beruf und medien/ erziehungswissenschaft, zschokkestr. 32, 39104 magdeburg, germany (raphaela. porsch@ovgu.de) alexandra vraciu, phd, is serra húnter lecturer in foreign language didactics at the faculty of education, universitat de lleida, spain. she holds a phd in english language and linguistics from universitat autònoma de barcelona and universíté paris ouest nanterre la défense, france. her research interests include the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology, advanced learner varieties, child peer interaction and content-basd instruction (clil and emi). she is a member of the research group eflic (2017sgr752; english as a foreign language in instruction contexts) and teaches efl didactics for (pre-)primary education at the undergraduate level and clil and educational research methods at the postgraduate level. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2239-2039 contact details: departament de didàctiques específiques, facultat d’educació, psicologia i treball social, universitat de lleida, av. de l’estudi general 4, 25001 lleida, spain (alexandra.vraciu@udl.cat) eva wilden, phd, is professor of efl education at the university of duisburgessen, germany. her research interests include primary efl education, inclusive l2 education and teacher qualification. together with raphaela porsch she directs the teps project (teaching english in primary schools), which has been published in various international journals such as language teaching for young learners or aila review. eva has co-edited the anthology the professional development of primary efl teachers (2017, waxmann). she co-edits a special issue of the european journal of applied linguistics and tefl on teaching english to young learners. eva is member of the aila research network in early language learning established by janet enever. 414 orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0885-1542 contact details: university of duisburg-essen, department of anglophone studies, universitaetsstrasse 12, 45141 essen, germany (eva.wilden@uni-due.de) 15 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (1). 2022. 15-36 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.1.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt shifting focus through a small lens: discursive and introspective perspectives on the emergence of l2 study emotions richard j. sampson rikkyo university, tokyo, japan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9068-317x rjsampson@rikkyo.ac.jp abstract while perennial in the research landscape, empirical work investigating second language (l2) study emotions has proliferated in the past ten years (dewaele, 2019). nevertheless, this article argues there is space for more holistic yet detailed, social yet individual perspectives when conducting such research. as one avenue, the paper explores the potential of a “small lens” approach (ushioda, 2016) to delve into particular emotional events in situ from learner-internal and learner-external points of view. it details an example of such an approach put into practice, in which the author examined the emergence of emotionally significant episodes for english as a foreign language undergraduates in japan during short conversation sessions. the research explored data from discursive (video-recordings and transcripts of short conversations) and introspective (learner journals) angles. as a result, it was possible to observe the ways in which students’ emotional moves were both afforded by and acted on those of the other through their social interactions, and through interactions with additional aspects of their ongoing psychologies and relationships. the article thus aims to promote further situated l2 emotion research examining the dynamic interplay between various aspects of learners’ psychologies and the co-formed social context. keywords: l2 study emotions; person-in-context relational view; small lens research approach; discursive and introspective tools richard j. sampson 16 1. introduction there seems to be a growing emotional charge to our additional, second or foreign, language (l2) classrooms and research, with a sharp spike in published outcomes in the past ten years (dewaele, 2019). this research has witnessed a remarkable blossoming: dewaele, macintyre and colleagues (e.g., boudreau et al., 2018; dewaele & alfawzan, 2018; dewaele & macintyre, 2016) have expanded their focus to examine relationships between language anxiety and l2 learning enjoyment. şimşek and dörnyei (2017) present an intriguing look at anxiety through the lens of an ecological model of personality and other specific emotions such as boredom (pawlak et al., 2020) are also gaining attention. a handful of studies offer more situated, qualitative interpretations in classroom (garrett & young, 2009; gkonou, 2017; imai, 2010; sampson, 2019) and online social contexts (sampson & yoshida, 2020). additionally, there are moves to furnish a dynamic view of l2 study emotions via idiodynamic case studies (gregersen et al., 2014), as well as research illuminating the “veritable rainbow of feelings perceived by learners” (sampson, 2020, p. 207; sampson & yoshida, 2021). notwithstanding, the current paper advances an argument for taking a more holistic yet detailed, social yet individual view of l2 study emotions through a “small lens” (ushioda, 2016). in line with this stance, i present an overview of one way in which i conducted such a study. in response to calls for more practitioner research (e.g., ushioda, 2021), i provide a detailed description of my exploration into emotionally significant or critical episodes (finch, 2010; ushioda, 2016) by drawing on introspective and discursive data collected from my own classroom setting. in order to illustrate the usefulness of combining such different perspectives, the paper offers an example of one case focusing on the surprising development of enjoyment from a starting point of disappointment during a short conversation session between two l2 learners. as such, the paper aims to promote additional research into the complexity of l2 study emotions. in particular, it is expected to encourage empirical work examining the dynamic interplay between multifarious aspects of learners’ psychologies and the social context which they co-form. 2. literature review 2.1. the complexity of l2 study emotions emotions are responses to interactions with the world around us. they are episodes which occur via stimuli from the present (as in the case of anxiety during a presentation), from our memories of past events (such as embarrassment shifting focus through a small lens: discursive and introspective perspectives on the emergence of l2 . . . 17 upon remembering a social failure), or from those imagined (e.g., in anticipation of meeting a cherished friend) (shuman & scherer, 2014). emotions comprise different components, the most often considered of which are perhaps our subjective feelings, “the perception of a certain state of the body along with the perception of a certain mode of thinking and of thoughts with certain themes” (damasio, 2003, p. 86; emphasis added). they also involve physiological reactions (such as blushing in embarrassment), expressive behaviors (most commonly witnessed in facial expressions), and tendencies towards action (cahour, 2013; damasio, 2003; shuman & scherer, 2014). in this sense, emotions are integrally intertwined with motivations through orienting our actions, thinking, and ways of being (cahour, 2013). in social terms, emotions are shared through emotional intersubjectivity (denzin, 1984). this process involves “an interactional appropriation of another’s emotionality such that one feels one’s way into the feelings and intentional feeling states of the other,” joining “persons into a common, or shared, emotional field of experience” (denzin, 1984, p. 130). as such a ubiquitous dimension of the sociality of human life, it goes without saying that emotions will play some role in l2 learning. as one way to interpret the complexity of l2 learner psychology, ushioda (2009) has proposed a person-in-context relational view. such an approach calls for a focus on l2 learners as real persons – as thinking, feeling human beings nested within the system of social relations, activities, experiences, and contexts that they form and through which they are formed. ushioda’s concern with “real persons” with unique psychologies takes a critical stance, arguing that much past research has dissociated the psychological focus of interest from other aspects of the day-to-day lives of research participants and cast them as purely “l2 learners.” drawing on zimmerman’s (1998) and richards’ (2006) explorations of discoursal and social identities, ushioda argues for the expansion of both research and pedagogy to establish the connections between learners’ l2 studies and their “transportable identities.” zimmerman (1998) defines these as “latent identities that ‘tag along’ with individuals as they move through their daily routines” (p. 90). these are identities held through perceived belonging to a group or being a certain type of person (such as a football fan, music lover, or someone hesitant in talking with unknown others), and remaining with us even when not overtly expressed in a particular context. that is, ushioda (2009) encourages a consideration of the people in our learning spaces as rounded human beings with numerous identities, only one of which may be their l2 identity. the people in our classrooms will naturally feel something in their l2 studies. these emotions emerge through expressions of (or constraints on) their personalities, identities, motivations, and so on (whether directly related to l2 studies or not). their emotions will also play a part in co-forming the (social) context richard j. sampson 18 for interactions, just as they will feed back into understandings of experiences in social context and their evolving psychology (lemke, 2000; prior, 2019). in this sense, “which emotion surfaces is neither determined solely by the context nor by an individual’s psychological tendencies, but by the organismic interplay of the two” (boiger & mesquita, 2015, p. 383). 2.2. investigating the emergence of l2 study emotions in social context one pertinent tool for unearthing the socially-grounded emergence of l2 study emotions through language might be a form of discourse analysis known as discursive psychology (dp). as wiggins (2017) describes, dp is “a theoretical and analytical approach to discourse which treats talk and text as an object of study in itself, and psychological concepts as socially managed and consequential in interaction” (p. 4). through a detailed, line-by-line analysis of interaction transcripts which include additional contextual information such as prosody, facial expressions, and particulars of the evolving situation, such approaches aim to demonstrate that interlocutors orient themselves to some features of a conversation as emotional (ruusuvuori, 2012). arguing the benefits for l2 research, prior (2019) urges that: [t]aking up emotions in this way makes visible, as publicly observably and analytically available conduct, the forms they take, the communicative resources they require, the functions they serve, and the social practices they support. what emotion ‘is’ and ‘means’ therefore depends on how it is socially shared and grounded in situ. (p. 519) divisively perhaps, dp takes a strong position in considering psychology to only be “visible” through social interactions: it does not “try to ‘get inside’ people’s minds” but instead interprets people’s psychologies “by their practices and social interactions rather than their individual thoughts or experiences” (wiggins, 2017, pp. 4-5). as such, dp has also been criticized for being too focused on the direct social context, and thus neglecting other aspects of people’s experiences, cognitions, cultures, and so on (turner & stets, 2005; see also prior, 2016). taking somewhat of a middle ground, in our own field, ushioda (2016) has recently suggested a small lens approach. in alignment with the situatedness of dp, ushioda (2016) argues the necessity of “a more sharply focused or contextualized angle of inquiry . . . in relation to particular classroom events or to evolving situated interactions” (p. 564). as such, the small lens approach zooms in on significant or critical episodes in learning (however these are defined – see the analysis section for further discussion). yet, a small lens approach does not confine itself purely to the examination of interactions with others in social context during such significant events, but concurrently strives for insights into the senseshifting focus through a small lens: discursive and introspective perspectives on the emergence of l2 . . . 19 making of each unique person (ushioda, 2021). as phelps (2005) adds, no-one is better positioned to reflect upon the complex significance of certain experiences than the individual. in practice then, a small lens approach to research would suggest combinations of introspective (such as interview and reflective tools) and external observatory methods (such as analysis of video-recordings and conversation transcripts in a fashion similar to dp). indeed, in outlining research in general education, reisenzein et al. (2014) contend that such blending of tools might ideally illuminate from different angles the complexity of emotions, which straddle intrapsychic and social contexts. in other words, “we shuttle between learner-external and learner-internal contextual processes, as our analytical lens shifts from looking globally at particular learners engaging with the surrounding environment, to homing in on particular psychological or behavioral processes within the person” (ushioda, 2015, p. 53). a handful of research projects examining l2 study emotions have been carried out in a way consistent with the small lens approach (ushioda, 2016). imai (2010) concentrated on the collaborative preparation of three japanese undergraduates towards a group presentation for their english as a foreign language (efl) class. data were collected during sessions outside of lesson time by numerous means including video recordings of the discussions (which were conducted in japanese), emotion logs and questionnaires, and stimulated recall of participants’ own interpretations. the analysis converged on a particular event in one of these discussions, drawing on denzin’s (1984) conceptualization of emotional intersubjectivity. during the event of interest, participants’ initial understandings of the pedagogical task were adapted via emotional intersubjectivities embedded in verbal cues. through a detailed analysis of predominantly the discourse of the discussion, imai showed that these co-formed, emotional understandings prompted group members to renegotiate their goal for the presentation and shun the teacher-intended pedagogical outcome. imai (2010) concluded that there is a need to consider the ways in which the social emergence of emotions mediates learning and language development. another study with echoes of the small lens approach is that conducted by sampson and yoshida (2020) in the context of an online l2 text chat exchange. the research was carried out with undergraduate efl students in japan and their japanese as a foreign language peers in australia. the study collected introspective reflections and text-chat dialogical data to explore perceptions of feelings over seven chat sessions. out of a total of 21 pairs, the researchers used a narrative approach to center on the feeling trajectories of one particular chat dyad, chosen as their highly divergent feelings across sessions appeared to be an outlier among the experiences of other participants. the combination of data in a narrative form uniquely illuminated the emergence of the participants’ varied richard j. sampson 20 emotional trajectories over time – the introspective data allowed glimpses of emotional sense-making from (sometimes mistaken) perceptions of seemingly trivial occurrences evident in the dialogic data. the findings showed that the individual chatters’ feelings were heavily impacted by their interactions in social context that in turn was co-formed via their perceptions of each other and other ongoing psychological processes (sampson & yoshida, 2020). 3. the study 3.1. research question few studies of l2 learner psychology take interpersonal interactions over time as their focus (prior, 2019; ushioda, 2009), despite the manifestly social environments in which l2 learning and use occur. the current paper thus draws on a selection of data from wider practitioner research in an efl classroom setting to investigate the following question: in what ways does a “small lens” focus on the perceptions and interactions of learners in classroom groupwork provide insight into the dynamic emergence of l2 study emotions? 3.2. participants and context one class of japanese undergraduates (n = 28) participated in the study. these students were first-year science and technology majors at a small university north of tokyo. participants consisted of 22 male and six female learners, with an average age of 19 years (five students turned 20 over the course of the semester; the remainder were all 19). students’ english levels oscillated between high basic and low independent according to the common european framework of reference for languages (council of europe, 2001). their test of english for international communication (toeic) listening/reading scores averaged 518, (minimum 370, maximum 620, sd = 71). around one third of the class (10 students) had visited english-speaking countries for travel (none for extended living experiences). all of the participants had attended public schools in japan, at which they commenced formal efl study from junior-high school (12 to 13 years old). hence they had six years of formal study before entering university. unfortunately, other detailed data regarding individuals’ previous efl (study) experiences were not collected. all participants were members of the same class, studying a compulsory efl listening/speaking course (one semester, 14 weeks, one 90-minute lesson shifting focus through a small lens: discursive and introspective perspectives on the emergence of l2 . . . 21 per week). i was the facilitator of this course. lessons were conducted in a communicative fashion, with a mix of skill-based exercises from a set listening textbook alongside interactive discussions and tasks. students were randomly grouped to work together for two to three lessons, then reassigned to new groups. while data were collected about lessons in their entirety, the current paper centers on students’ emotions during short conversation sessions held each week. at the start of the semester, i distributed a sheet to students with a selection of 12 different conversation prompts. students were given time to confirm the content of each prompt in pairs, before checking with myself as the teacher. over the semester, groups chose from the prompts and continued increasingly longer conversations. 3.3. data collection data were collected from multiple sources, although the present paper draws primarily on two tools. in the required curriculum, students had to submit reflective journals after each lesson. the journal was introduced as a reflective pedagogical task: after each lesson segment (including the short conversation sessions), learners were encouraged to take notes about their perceptions of feelings and then collate them as a reflective journal entry emailed to me directly following each lesson. part of student assessment was based on how many entries they submitted, and whether entries were over a minimum of 100 words. hence i asked students to allow me to use their journal entries as data. as journal-writing was required anyway, i judged that this form of data-collection would not overburden participants nor would it overly interrupt normal classroom action, yet it would have the capacity to furnish contextualized, dynamic, personal and candid perceptions of learning experiences (gilmore, 2016). learners wrote in english, although occasionally using some japanese expressions (see also the conclusion of the article for a discussion of the limitations due to such an approach). overall, 343 entries were obtained (an average of 26 per lesson), with a total corpus amounting to just over 38,000 words. videorecording of small-group activities was additionally used to supply dialogical and observational data. student interactions were recorded using 360-degree video cameras placed in the middle of each group. the short conversation sessions were recorded on seven occasions across the semester, coming to around 270 minutes of footage. rather than initially transcribing all recorded data, after each lesson i watched the video recordings and wrote basic notes with regard to student behaviors, interactions, and first impressions of what i interpreted as visible aspects of an individual’s emotions and “emotional climate” in groups (cahour, 2013). richard j. sampson 22 3.4. analysis analysis worked in a dialectical fashion between data sources, as i focused my analytical lens over several stages on only the transcripts and learner journal references to short conversations: 1. learner journals were initially subjected to thematic content analysis following saldaña (2016), through which both overt and implied references were used to uncover the variety of emotions, foci, and action tendencies of learners. in other words, as i read participants’ entries, i asked myself what particular emotions were represented or could be understood from their writing; how these instances were connected to some focus (past, present, future or imagined); and what actional function the emotion suggested. as i developed these codes, i compared instances across students to refine my understandings, sometimes resulting in amalgamation or further division of codes. 2. taking my cue from imai’s (2010) entreaty to look at “the sense that each learner interactively constructs, negotiates, and appropriates regarding an emotional experience” (p. 288), this first pass through the data drew my attention to the writing of certain students. through reference to specific incidents during the short conversations, these entries seemed to suggest emotional significance. as finch (2010) describes, “critical events cannot be objectively identified, measured, or predicted, but are dependent on the awareness and willingness-to-observe of the observer” (p. 423). numerous researchers from our own field (e.g., pinner & sampson, 2021; ushioda, 2021) have argued that classroom practitioners are uniquely placed to note such events. although unaware of it at the time, my own selection criteria for these critical episodes were similar to those expounded by halquist and musanti (2010), in that each held some degree of conflict and surprised me in some way – they piqued my interest to further explore. at this stage, incidents involved such diverse experiences as feelings of resilience and growth in the face of a partner’s denigration and anger, nervousness to speak giving way to enjoyment, and seemingly sudden proclamations of progress in a personality goal. 3. while these occurrences were intriguing by themselves, i needed to understand more about the interactive, relational context (boiger & mesquita, 2015; ushioda, 2009, 2016). hence i examined the journal entries for all group members involved in what had been marked as significant episodes on the days in question. through looking at the emotional qualities of the entries of all interlocutors, certain events shifted further shifting focus through a small lens: discursive and introspective perspectives on the emergence of l2 . . . 23 into focus from these different perspectives. at other times, due to a lack of reference to the focal incidents, these cases were set aside. through this process, i reduced the number of potential focal cases in consideration of the quality of data of all group members. 4. in light of my aim of investigating the usefulness of the small lens approach to “shuttle between learner-external and learner-internal contextual processes” (ushioda, 2015, p. 53), i next consulted the video recordings and notes i had made about interactions for these particular cases, and transcribed the participants’ conversations. although not applying a strict dp process, i used wiggins’ (2017) three steps in transcription: (1) creating a rough orthographic, time-stamped transcript; (2) adding more detail about the ways that things were said through an adapted form of jefferson transcription (jefferson, 2004; see appendix for transcription conventions); (3) adding extralinguistic and contextual details in a column to the right of utterances. a number of more precise comments are perhaps necessary here. first, conversation analytic approaches typically stringently follow standards for transcription, such as the use of line numbers instead of times, a large quantity of notations, and no use of standard punctuation. however, as a practitioner i wanted my representations to be accessible to other practitioners – such standards at times make transcripts look more like computer code than conversations between real people at real times. second, while dp does not admit the inference of emotion (prior, 2016; wiggins, 2017), a key aspect of my adding extralinguistic and contextual details involved observations about the visible dimensions of emotions. in doing so, i utilized the intuitive judgment method, which makes use of people’s folk-psychological competence to construe emotions from behavior and context (reisenzein et al., 2014). such a system of observation has been found as reliable as formal emotional coding systems for it allows observers “to use any available cue (facial, vocal, situational context, etc.) or cue combination,” which “maximally exploits the available information and best approximates the process of multicue emotion inference in everyday life” (reisenzein et al., 2014, p. 595). this stage thus involved watching the video-recording multiple times whilst transcribing, then reading and re-reading the transcription to add extra details. 5. reminding myself of the significant episodes identified from the introspective data, i next took notes about different parts of the transcriptions as i worked to show “what actions were accomplished through discursive practices, how they were accomplished, and how psychological business was managed in the process of doing these actions” (wiggins, richard j. sampson 24 2017, p. 121). i endeavored to interpret the ways in which what students said and how they said it in the context of the ongoing conversation, along with what i interpreted as their observable emotional orientations to each other, came together in the emergence of the event of interest. as i zoomed in on certain micro-events in the course of the conversation, i also connected them with particular dimensions from the journal writing of focal participants. through this discursive process, i was able to notice the interplay of not only interlocutors’ emotions, but also their identities, personalities, motivations, and beliefs as they interacted over the course of short conversation sessions. 4. interpretations and discussion in what follows, i look at one specific example of the value of using a small lens approach to research l2 study emotions. the “particular classroom event” (ushioda, 2016, p. 564) upon which i focus revolves around the conversation session of two male students in the seventh lesson of the semester. ryoto and tomohiko (both pseudonyms; data excerpts are presented uncorrected) had elected to discuss a conversation prompt regarding “something which disappointed you recently.” despite the unpleasant emotional valence attached to this topic, what caught my attention in their journals was what i interpreted as expressions of extremely pleasant emotions: ryoto: i talked with a new partner. he has a high communication skills, so i talked with him pleasantly. we talked about why you are late for school. i said to him “i watched a youtube, especially virtual youtube, and stayed overnight.” he sympathize with me. probably, we have a good chemistry. . . . i enjoyed english class so much. tomohiko: in today’s class, we changed the partner. it wasn’t the first time to talk with today’s partner for me. so i could do the pair work with relaxing. today’s my partner is always friendly and earnestly. therefore we could do the pair works very smooth. he knows many english words so i thought i should study hard english. and i should emulate his attitude to english class. recent research has unearthed both the variety of emotions and a predominance of pleasant over unpleasant experiences in classroom settings (garrett & young, 2009; macintyre & vincze, 2017; sampson, 2020). agreeing with such findings, although the prompt for these learners dealt with “disappointment,” their reflections in fact give little sense of such an unpleasant emotion. that said, there are points of seeming tension. both members of the dyad commence by focusing on the change of partner. notably, tomohiko’s writing hints at his personality and the potential for anxiety in such a situation when he explicitly shifting focus through a small lens: discursive and introspective perspectives on the emergence of l2 . . . 25 mentions that despite this new arrangement of pairs, “i could do the pair work with relaxing.” boiger and mesquita (2012) draw on a variety of past research to argue that “established relationship patterns and meanings . . . may render certain appraisals more salient in a given event . . . and afford particular emotional qualia” (p. 222). while this was the first time for ryoto and tomohiko to work together in this english class, these students had an ongoing relationship brought in from other classes at the university. the introspective data suggest that this relationship formed part of the playing field for the emergence of l2 study emotions in this situation. that is, tomohiko’s feeling of relief is afforded via interactions between past experiences in the form of his developing relationship with ryoto and the current social context. further, the journal entries imply that feelings of pleasant affect for ryoto and tomohiko emerge through impressions of the other and their beliefs. intersections between built-up understandings of their partner’s personality as “always friendly and earnestly” and of their “high communication skills” as well as beliefs of what is important for effective classroom learning to enable this dyad to “do the pair works very smooth.” congruent with my own past research (sampson, 2019), the learners’ emotional experience involved a mix of “sense-making emergent from the here-and-now as well as longer timescale processes of individualized life experiences, identities, personalities, and beliefs transported into the learning context” (p. 22). in support of ushioda’s (2009) push to consider learners as “persons-incontext” participating in and writing about an efl class, the reflections of these people render the impression that their l2 identities are not foremost in their thinking. they are rounded individuals who happen to be in a (compulsory) additional language classroom. however, as taylor’s (2013) study of over 1,000 l2 english learners in romania led her to conclude, “unless students are allowed to be themselves . . . and appreciated for what they are as real people, they are unlikely to engage genuinely in class and develop as language learners and social persons” (p. 126 – emphasis added). in the case of the focal participants, the only overt references to l2 identity arrive at the conclusion to their entries, yet this writing reminds of the interplay with other identities and students “allowed to be themselves” (taylor, 2013, p. 130). it appears that ryoto used the topic of “disappointment” to introduce an instance of tardiness due to staying up late watching youtube. intimating the development of emotional intersubjectivities (denzin, 1984; imai, 2010), the shared understandings he felt at this juncture (“he sympathize with me”) come together as his emergent feeling toward the lesson as a whole: “probably, we have a good chemistry. . . . i enjoyed english class so much.” that is, we can understand that this overall experience of a connection with his partner and pleasant affect toward the english lesson (l2 identity) is grounded in a sharing of transportable identities (zimmerman, 1998) and richard j. sampson 26 the responses he perceives. tomohiko’s entry closes with more direct reflections on language learning. he observes that ryoto “knows many english words,” suggesting that his own motivation is invigorated through such perceptions: “so i thought i should study hard english. and i should emulate his attitude to english class.” it is tempting to consider questions of l2 identity as front and center in such writing. however, the combination of introspective with dialogical data further illuminates the ways in which emotions emerged through interactions with wider psychological context. this interplay between data sources also opens a window on emotional processes involved in the co-constructed discursive context. by this point in the semester, short conversation sessions had lengthened to around four minutes. after some small talk, ryoto and tomohiko settled to discuss the topic of the conversation prompt. ryoto began (see tbale 1). table 1 transcript of the conversation between ryoto and tomohiko time name speech context/emotion 1:14 r: etto (umm) (2.7) i was late for university, recently, because of staying overnight. 1:24 t: o:::h. smiling (sympathizing) 1:27 r: etto, i saw, i watched a youtube, which channel is, etto, which channel is hikaru.1 t laughs in sympathy at ‘youtube’ 1:36 t: ya::: really? hikaru? looks surprised 1:40 r: ichi=jikan=michatta. (i watched it for one hour) looks embarrassed 1:40 t: ((laughing)) 1:42 r: for one hour, and (1.0) virtual youtube. 1:46 t: was it interesting, about hikaru? looks slightly incredulous 1:51 r: hikaru? (2.3) eh, talked with kajisakku. 1:56 r: [kajiwara.2] 1:56 t: [a::::h, i see] i see. looks interested, nodding (can appreciate choice) 1:56 r: i saw it for one hour. looks confident (relieved?) 2:02 t: ah, kajigesturing to self (has also seen?) 2:05 r: because, i stay overnight. 2:06 t: oh. nodding 2:07 r: it’s so funny for me 2:10 t: o::h. smiling 2:11 r: to hear it. 2:13 t: eh, i (1.0), i was late for classes (0.5) recently, (0.7) because (0.5) i, i stayed overnight, too. pointing to self, laughs when introducing the same situation as r 2:28 r: o::h. smiles 2:29 t: i watched (1.2) nogizaka forty-six.3 looks a little embarrassed 2:34 r: oh, great. looks interested (can appreciate choice) 2:35 t: so, i (0.6) recently, i like read (0.5) about nogizaka. very recently, very recently, recently. looks at r hesitantly, emphasizes ‘recently’ with gesture 2:42 r: recently, oh, ah. 2:48 t: mmm= 2:49 r: what kind of song do you like in nogizaka? 2:52 t: a:::h (1.4) e:::h (1.0) because it is, er, not common, but, poppypappappa. looks relieved at question, smiles, looking into air thinking 3:02 r: oh. smiles 3:04 t: ((laughing)) do you know it? gestures to r. smiling 3:08 r: eh… moves head to show mystified. smiling 3:10 t: it is not famous. t makes a japanese hand gesture for ‘don’t worry’ shifting focus through a small lens: discursive and introspective perspectives on the emergence of l2 . . . 27 3:12 r: ah, i don’t know so much. 3:15 t: i like influencer? tilts head in a questioning fashion 3:17 r: ah=influencer smiles in recognition. t looks relieved 3:18 t: too. 3:19 r: i know a little. 3:21 t: oh, really? 3:22 t: (2.3) mmm. do you, do you think= 3:28 r: mm? tilts head to side, seems surprised 3:29 t: do you think, kajisakku can, kajisakku can, can kajisakku= 3:33 r: can reach to one million subscribers? nods appreciation of question 3:35 t: reach to…un (yes). shows a kind of realization and being impressed 3:40 r: he wanna achieve it, he wanna achieve it so much. 3:44 t: un. (1.1) i think he cannot= 3:51 r: a::h. seems to be thinking, deciding if he agrees 3:52 t: he can’t. makes a waving sign with his hands signaling ‘no way’ 3:52 r: he reached, almost, (0.6) eto, (0.5) four-hundred thousand subscribers. four-hundred thousand? looking up and thinking; t counting in air 4:03 t: oh. i don’t know. i don’t know? ((laughing)) 4:08 chime sounds to mark end of conversation time 4:12 r: ah, but i, demo (but), but (0.5) i think he reach one million subscribers. 4:18 t: h:::e (oh). by? seems surprised 4:24 r: because of korabo (collaboration) with many youtubers and many comedians. t nods realization note. 1hikaru is a popular japanese youtuber who was somewhat controversial at the time of this conversation 2kajisakku is a former japanese television comedian who became a youtuber. his real name is kajiwara 3nogizaka46 is a japanese female idol group consisting of, unsurprisingly, 46 members as mesquita (2010) emphasizes, emotions are “afforded by interactions with others or, more precisely, interactions with others as rendered meaningful by cultural meanings and practices” (p. 89). one vital way in which such cultural practices impact the conversation and resultant emotions is through the students’ choice to share stories of disappointment related to the ‘small culture’ of undergraduate life. ryoto’s introduction of a disappointing event at 1:14 (“i was late for university, recently, because of staying overnight”) is met with expressions of sympathetic understanding from tomohiko, shown through his elongated “o:::h” and smile (1:24). moreover, this aspect of the shared culture of being a university student is so relatable for tomohiko that he reports a similar experience (2:13). in addition, recollecting ryoto’s remark in his journal, the conversation has meaning and develops its emotional value for these people through their shared understandings of another ‘small culture’ – current popular culture. indeed, ryoto’s introduction of the cause of the tardiness (watching youtube featuring hikaru) rather than focusing on the result (the consequences of being late for university classes) seems to play a large role in edging the conversation away from overt discussion of disappointment. tomohiko’s surprised reaction (1:36) and query about the content of the youtube (1:46), instead of focusing on the effects of being late, is based in his own understandings of this small culture, and also works to consolidate this conversational direction. richard j. sampson 28 another clear example of shared sociocultural understandings occurs at 3:22, as tomohiko changes the topic by attempting to ask a question. while ryoto at first expresses his surprise at what was indeed a sudden shift in direction through murmuring “mm?” and tilting his head to one side in a look of puzzlement (3:28), as tomohiko tries to verbalize, ryoto predicts and finishes the question (3:33). that is, the continuation of the conversation and resultant emotions are found in the members’ shared understandings of current youtube culture in japan. this incident further reminds of tomohiko’s journal reference to his impression that ryoto “knows many english words.” tomohiko’s numerous false starts – “do you think, kajisakku can, kajisakku can, can kajisakku” (3:29) – prompt ryoto to quickly furnish the missing verb for which it seems his partner was grasping: “can reach to one million subscribers?” as machi (2020) has shown, such co-construction is commonplace in japanese casual conversation, and enhances bonding. tomohiko then both verbally – “reach to…un (yes)” – and physically – through facial expression – shows his realization and being impressed. in the context of the journal data, it is possible to understand that this is one moment that has clear l2 learning motivational significance for tomohiko. yet, it is through their interactions, grounded in the shared understandings of youtube culture, that this motivation emerges. despite the pleasant emotional tone of both the conversation in general and the participants’ reflections, it is also possible to understand the hesitancy with which various transportable identities (zimmerman, 1998) are interpolated into the conversation. nevertheless, in congruence with imai’s (2010) study, the trepidation is mitigated as the pair regularly express emotional intersubjectivities, altering the trajectory of both their emotions and the conversation away from explicit discussion of disappointment. it seems that they build a particular kind of intersubjectivity known as ‘emotional embracement’ (denzin, 1984), in which “the meanings of their sensible feelings . . . are understood and even vicariously felt by each other” (p. 153). their observable behaviors and verbalizations show appreciation of the ideas and described actions of their partner. even from a very early point in the conversation, such an interaction occurs as tomohiko laughs in sympathetic understanding of the dangers of losing track of time watching youtube (1:27). interestingly, similar patterns of hesitancy giving way to relief are evident as both ryoto and later tomohiko share the specific detail of their pop-culture-related transportable identities. first, when ryoto mentions the youtuber hikaru, tomohiko conveys surprise quite overtly through verbalizing, “ya::: really? hikaru?” with rising intonation (1:36). in fact, ryoto’s awareness that hikaru may be a potentially problematic topic is apparent in the previous line, when he falteringly describes, “. . . which channel is, etto, which channel is hikaru” (1:27). his initial embarrassment (witnessed shifting focus through a small lens: discursive and introspective perspectives on the emergence of l2 . . . 29 through facial expressions and use of the ‘-chatta’ verb form in very quick, latched japanese) upon perceiving incredulity (1:40) gives way to relief as tomohiko shows appreciation for youtube involving another popular youtuber, kajisakku (1:51). such a pattern is repeated later in the conversation. tomohiko also shows embarrassment as he introduces his interest in the female idol group nogizaka46 (2:29), in particular through his hedged stressing and repeating of the word “recently” (2:35). this hesitancy changes to relief when it seems he understands a sanctioning of the topic by ryoto asking a question (2:49), and then again as ryoto expresses recognition of one of the songs of the idol group (3:17). as a point of contrast, denzin (1984) argues that emotional embracement “can occur only when a recurring, common emotional field of experience is produced and shared” (p. 153), such as through long-lasting friendships and marriages. despite not having such a depth of shared history, the analysis suggests that the emotions of these two students both support and are supported by the discursive context, in constant interaction with aspects of their ongoing identities. it may be in the context of such relief, especially when connected with personally important identities, that pleasant feelings of relatedness (ryoto’s reference to “good chemistry” with his partner) and enjoyment emerge. 5. conclusions, limitations and implications in the current paper, i have attempted to demonstrate one way of “shifting focus” via a small lens (ushioda, 2016), which naturally has some limitations. concerning data collection, in line with calls for the meshing of research with teaching (ushioda, 2021), i asked my learners to allow me to use the assessed reflective journals as part of the research data. i did explain to students that i would not assess these items based on their content, but purely their length and number (in line with the department policy). nevertheless, it is certainly conceivable that some students may have been influenced in what they wrote by knowledge that their teacher would be reading the reflections, perhaps biasing them away from discussing unpleasant emotions. in addition (again, as a pedagogical tool), the journals were written in participants’ l2, which entails questions about their capacity to express themselves fully. i would, however, argue that the english level of students was reasonable (as measured by a standardized test), and that the example extracts presented in this article illustrate that they were quite able to detail their emotionality. regarding the conversation data, as my first attempt at using a small lens, questions may be raised in particular by those who follow a stricter conversation analytical or discursive psychological approach (e.g., prior, 2016; wiggins, 2017). here too, rather than my interpretations, i could have asked participants to watch the videos and interpret their own emotions, richard j. sampson 30 such as in idiodynamic approaches (e.g., gregersen et al., 2014). while such an activity could also have served a pedagogical purpose, as a classroom teacher familiar with how busy my students are, i did not feel it appropriate to add this extra burden to their already overloaded schedules. concerning analysis, then, the interpretations of both forms of data are entirely my own, and i did not compare these by employing a second coder. in this i concur with saldaña (2016), in understanding that qualitative research is always subjective and interpretive, and ideas that additional coders can somehow make analysis more objective are claims towards a “false god” (p. 41). so, what does the approach described in this paper offer? as illustrated in this article, what is insightful in taking a small lens approach is the understandings we might gain about the processes through which emotions evolve in real time. the merging of perspectives on a single event brings us closer to a more phenomenological understanding of l2 learner psychology. in the current article, analysis of discursive data shone a light on the ways in which students’ emotional moves during a short conversation session were both afforded by and acted on those of the other through their social interactions. yet, combination with introspective data offered insights into the ways in which their emotions were not only latched onto the here-and-now context of the classroom but emerged and were understood through interactions with other aspects of their ongoing psychologies, relationships, and shared understandings. some may wonder as to the significance of any findings generated or implications emergent from centering on only specific, emotionally significant events for particular dyads. the small lens approach is not supposed to be representative of all cases but gives insight into emergent processes in particular cases that might resonate to others (ushioda, 2016). through shifting our focus on different angles in a particular case, we might foster a more fine-grained perspective on the emergence of emotions transferrable to other cases. the current paper highlights interactions between l2 study emotions and other aspects of people’s psychologies lost in the lion’s share of past research, such as their transportable identities (zimmerman, 1998), ongoing, dynamic relationships (boiger & mesquita, 2012), and the socially-afforded dimensions of l2 motivation. the analysis moreover adds to imai’s (2010) findings regarding the vital role of emotional intersubjectivities in evolving the sense that learners take from interactive pedagogical activities and their actions therein. importantly for pedagogy, a small lens approach can add valuable qualitative detail to the emergence, content, and functions of learners’ emotions. for example, in the case included in the current paper, the introspective and dialogical data analysis revealed little sense in the participants being “l2 learners” with only l2-specific emotions. they are young people discussing what has meaning shifting focus through a small lens: discursive and introspective perspectives on the emergence of l2 . . . 31 for them and they happen to be doing it through an additional language. as richards (2006) has cautioned, however, drawing on such transportable identities will also “involve an investment of self, with all the emotional, relational, and moral considerations that this invokes” (p. 72). in the current analysis, students naturally expressed emotional intersubjectivities (denzin, 1984) that relieved anxiety and hesitancy in broaching personally important identities. however, such a process may not occur spontaneously in all cases. there is clearly a need for caution in encouraging other teachers to create opportunities for learners to draw on transportable identities without discretion. teachers may be advised to prompt learners to explore their l2 emotions and (social) emotion regulation strategies through means such as the managing your emotions questionnaire (see oxford & gkonou, 2021). moreover, a future direction for research utilizing the approach described in the current paper that may prove especially informative for pedagogical practice is to focus our lens on significant cases construed by learners themselves as emotionally constructive or unconstructive. in doing so, we may gain not only a better understanding of fundamental processes in the emergence of l2 study emotions in social context, but also the aspects of activities, materials, and social interactions facilitative in affording shared emotions that learners experience as constructive or unconstructive. considering the recent expansion of research into various l2 study emotions such as enjoyment and boredom (e.g., dewaele & macintyre, 2016; pawlak et al., 2020), the small lens approach could also offer insights into key qualities to the emergence of such emotions via a detailed examination of a targeted, emotion-specific collection of significant cases. i believe the future for such small lens research conducted by practitioners can contribute not only more contextualized understandings to theory about l2 study emotions, but also suggestions for practice grounded in particular classroom contexts. richard j. sampson 32 references boiger, m., & mesquita, b. 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(2021). l2 feelings through interaction in a japaneseenglish online chat exchange. innovation in language learning and teaching, 15(2), 131-142. https://doi.org/10.1080/17501229.2019.1710514 shuman, v., & scherer, k. r. (2014). concepts and structures of emotions. in international handbook of emotions in education (pp. 13-35). routledge. şimşek, e., & dörnyei, z. (2017). anxiety and l2 self-images: the “anxious self.” in c. gkonou, m. daubney, & j.-m. dewaele (eds.), new insights into language anxiety: theory, research and educational implications (pp. 51-69). multilingual matters. taylor, f. (2013). self and identity in adolescent foreign language learning. multilingual matters. turner, j. h., & stets, j. e. (2005). the sociology of emotions. cambridge university press. ushioda, e. (2009). a person-in-context relational view of emergent motivation, self and identity. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 215-228). multilingual matters. ushioda, e. (2015). context and complex dynamic systems theory. in z. dörnyei, p. d. macintyre, & a. henry (eds.), motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 47-54). multilingual matters. ushioda, e. (2016). language learning motivation through a small lens: a research agenda. language teaching, 49(4), 564-577. ushioda, e. (2021). doing complexity research in the language classroom: a commentary. in r. j. sampson & r. s. pinner (eds.), complexity perspectives on researching language learner and teacher psychology (pp. 269-283). multilingual matters. shifting focus through a small lens: discursive and introspective perspectives on the emergence of l2 . . . 35 wiggins, s. (2017). discursive psychology: theory, method and applications. sage publications. zimmerman, d. h. (1998). discoursal identities and social identities. in c. antaki & s. widdicombe (eds.), identities in talk (pp. 87-106). sage. richard j. sampson 36 appendix transcription conventions (adapted and abridged from jefferson, 2004, and prior, 2016) (1.2) a pause or silence, measured in seconds and tenths of seconds = latched talk, during which there is no hearable gap between words :: prolonged sounds – the more colons, the longer the sound word emphasized words or parts of words ? rising intonation (may be a question, but not necessarily) ((description)) details about additional descriptions tango japanese word (followed on first occurrence by translation in parenthesis) [ ] start and end of overlapping talk 853 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (4). 2018. 853-856 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.4.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt reviewers for volume 8/2018 the editors would like to express their gratitude to the following scholars who have kindly consented to review one or more submissions to volume 8/2018 of studies in second language learning and teaching. their insightful and thorough comments and suggestions have without doubt greatly enhanced the quality of the papers included in the 2018 volume: alireza ahmadi shiraz university, iran mohammad ahmadian university of leeds, uk ghazi algethami taif university, saudi arabia ali al-hoorie university of nottingham, uk carmen m. amerstorfer university of klagenfurt, austria jane audring university of leiden, the netherlands isabel balteiro university of alicante, spain dario luis banegas university of warwick, uk małgorzata baran-łucarz university of wrocław, poland anna maria barcelos federal university of viçosa, brasil helen basturkmen university of auckland, new zealand ana maria gabriela beaven university of bologna, italy cylcia bolinbaugh university of york, uk jessica grace briggs university of oxford, uk joanne carlisle university of michigan, usa christine pearson casanave temple university, japan letty chan hong kong institute of education, china lilian ya-hui chang wenzao ursuline university of languages, taiwan monika chavez university of wisconsin–madison, usa yuh-show cheng national taiwan normal university, taiwan alice chik macquarie university, australia anna cieślicka a&m international university, texas, usa andrew a. cohen university of minnesota, usa kata csizér eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary joseph cunningham georgetown university, usa anita d’anselmo gabriele d’annunzio university, chieti, italy jean-marc dewaele birkbeck college, university of london, uk dan dewey brigham young university, utah, usa 854 ali dincer erzincan university, turkey mercedes durham cardiff university, uk dina el-dakhs prince sultan university, riyadh, saudi arabia zeynep erdil-moody university of south florida, usa june eyckmans ghent university, belgium john flowerdew university of lancaster, uk angelica galante university of toronto, canada christina gkonou university of essex, uk christine c. m. goh nanyang technological university, singapore talip gonulal erzincan university, turkey tammy gregersen university of northern iowa, usa peter yongqi gu victoria university of wellington, new zealand alireza memari hanjani islamic azad university, iran nigel harwood sheffield university, uk timothy hassall australian national university, canberra, australia åsta haukås university of bergen, norway alastair henry högskolan väst/university west, sweden todd hernandez marquette university, milwaukee, usa gianna hessel university of oxford, uk phil hiver florida state university, usa chia-fang (sandy) hsu university of wyoming, usa kristina hultgren open university, uk kay irie gakushuin university, japan eun hee jeon university of north carolina at pembroke, usa nayef jomaa karabuk university, turkey jay jordan university of utah, usa soomin jwa boston university, usa paula kalaja university of jyväskylä, finland sara kennedy concordia university, canada gholam hassan khajavy university of bojnord, iran edit h. kontra eötvös loránd university, hungary stefania kordia hellenic open university, greece achilleas kostoulas university of graz, austria jarosław krajka marie curie-skłodowska university, lublin, poland irena kuzborska university of york, uk deny arnos kwary airlangga university, indonesia richard labontee university of gothenburg, sweden ryan m. labrozzi bridgewater state university, usa martin lamb university of leeds, uk tove larsson uppsala university, sweden elaine lau university of hawai’i at manoa, usa batia laufer university of haifa, israel dmitri leontjev university of jyväskylä, finland chengchen li xiamen university, xiamen, china shuai li georgetown state university, usa lin lin xi’an international studies university, china stephanie lindemann georgia state university, usa christina lindqvist university of gothenburg, sweden meihua liu tsinghua university, china thomas lockley nihon university, japan hanneke loerts university of groningen, the netherlands 855 nigel lou university of alberta, canada michael lynch university of edinburgh, uk ernesto macaro university of oxford, uk peter d. macintyre cape breton university, canada rosa m. manchón university of murcia, spain anna martinović university of zadar, croatia sarah mercer university of graz, austria jelena mihaljević djigunović university of zagreb, croatia nicole mills harvard university, usa rosamond mitchell university of southampton, uk atushi mizumoto kansai university, japan kouider mokhtari university of texas at taylor, usa tim murphy kanda university of international studies, japan takayuki nakanishi tokiwa university, ibaraki, japan rebecca l. oxford university of alabama at birmingham, usa åsa palviainen university of jyväskylä, finland lynn pearson bowling green state university, usa jian-e peng shantou university, china katerina petchko national graduate institute for policy studies, tokyo, japan liliana piasecka university of opole, poland françois pichette téluq university of quebec, canada ewa piechurska-kuciel university of opole, poland katalin piniel eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary berry lee reynolds university of macau, china saeed rezaei sharif university of technology, iran andrew ross southern cross university, australia rosa maria manchón ruiz university of murcia, spain richard sampson gunma university, japan veronica sardegna university of pittsburgh, usa farzad scharifian monash university, australia paweł scheffler adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland elke schneider winthrop university, usa meral seker cukurova university, turkey audrey de smet catholic university of leuven, belgium ute smit university of vienna, austria anja k. steinlen university of erlangen-nuremberg, germany kirk p. h. sullivan umeå university, sweden jill surmont vrije universiteit brussel, belgium julie m. sykes university of oregon, usa paweł szudarski university of nottingham, uk višnja pavičić takač osip juraj strossmayer university of osijek, croatia mitsuko tanaka osaka university, japan dietmar tatzl fh joanneum university of applied sciences, austria katja težak university of maribor, slovenia amy s. thomson university of south florida, usa pavel trofimovich concordia university, canada ema ushioda university of warwick, uk ineke vedder university of amsterdam, the netherlands leandro veliz deakin university, australia mary lou vercellotti ball state university, usa paola vettorel university of verona, italy 856 oksana vorobel city university of new york, usa katerina vourdanou hellenic open university, greece aleksandra wach adam mickiewicz university, poland ye wang columbia university, usa frea waninge university of nottingham, uk michael wei university of missouri-kansas city, usa dorota werbińska pomeranian university, słupsk, poland daniel williams university of potsdam, germany fuyun wu shanghai jiao tong university, china mark wyatt university of portsmouth, uk feng xiao pomona college, california, usa junko yamashita university of nagoya, japan jackie xiu yan city university of hong kong, hong kong juan yang shanghai international studies university, china tomoko yashima kansai university, suita, japan shulin yu university of macau, china nourollah zarrinabadi university of isfahan, iran yalun zhou rensselaer polytechnic institute, usa 575 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (4). 2022. 575-595 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.4.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt reexamining feedback on l2 digital writing idoia elola texas tech university, lubbock, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0722-0332 idoia.elola@ttu.edu ana oskoz university of maryland, baltimore county, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2770-4844 aoskoz@umbc.edu abstract the integration of digital multimodal composing (dmc) in the second language (l2) and heritage language (hl) classrooms has expanded our notion of writing, shifting from a focus on the written mode to include other modes of expression (e.g., visual, textual, or aural). notwithstanding the increasing presence of l2 multimodal learning tasks, which combine different semiotic resources (e.g., language and visual components such as images or videos) as intrinsic elements used to generate meaning, instructors have not yet modified the way in which they provide feedback. that is, despite the increasing integration of different modes in a multimodal task, instructors still focus exclusively on language development – replicating the feedback behaviors modeled by non-digital writing assignments – rather than on all the components of multimodal texts. in digitally influenced environments and societies, however, there is a need to reconsider our approaches to feedback to pay greater attention to the linguistic and nonlinguistic elements of dmc. with the scarcity of research on feedback in dmc, this article first identifies a gap in multimodal teaching and research regarding the role and focus on feedback in dmc, and, second, provides an assessment rubric from which to base formative feedback that addresses both linguistic and nonlinguistic elements to help students develop their multimodal texts. keywords: digital multimodal composing; digital feedback for multimodal texts; nonlinguistic feedback; assessment rubrics; literacies idoia elola, ana oskoz 576 1. introduction the increasing inclusion of digital multimodal composing (dmc) in the second language (l2) and heritage language (hl) classroom, which expands traditional written forms to include other modes of expression (e.g., visual, textual, or aural), has brought new concerns to instructors and researchers alike. in recent years, l2 and hl learners have frequently explored and created multimodal texts, such as blogs and digital stories, in which the integration of semiotic resources (e.g., language and visual components, such as images or videos) are intrinsic elements used to generate meaning. yet, the goal of creating synaesthetic texts (kress, 2003), in which each component depends on the others for meaning creation, is often ignored during feedback provision (oskoz & elola, 2020). regardless of the inclusion of dmc in upper-level (fornara & lomicka, 2019; nelson, 2006; mina, 2014; oskoz & elola, 2014, 2016b) or lower-level (ruiz pérez, 2022; see also zhang et al., 2021) courses, the questions instructors are faced with and challenged by concern what the role and focus of feedback should be when covering both linguistic and nonlinguistic features. in l2 learning environments, the provision of feedback, a familiar, wellestablished practice, generally concentrates on writing conventions (i.e., global issues, such as organization) and error correction (i.e., local issues, such as grammar) with the aim of learning to write or writing to learn (manchón, 2011). feedback, that is, stating a problem (e.g., an error or structural issue) and then inviting learners to try to fix it, is a traditional technique used to foster linguistic development that offers learners the opportunity to notice differences between their interlanguage and the target language. despite the increasing prevalence of multimodal tasks in the l2 classroom and in dmc research (caws & heift, 2016; oskoz & elola, 2020), the emphasis of feedback provision continues to focus on the linguistic aspects of multimodal texts and often ignores nonlinguistic elements. this almost sole linguistic focus on feedback in multimodal tasks and genres may be the result of l2 instructors’ lack of guidelines to assess multimodal texts, insecurity with the use and affordances of the digital tools, avoidance of nonlinguistic elements that seem to be learners’ personal choices, or lack of curricular objectives that include the reason for using multimodal texts (oskoz & elola, 2020). however, echoing caws and heift (2016), the roles of instructors and peers as (digital) feedback providers in a digital context should be “radically changing while, at the same time, becoming more critical,” with the goal of helping learners become “progressively digital[ly] literate” (p. 133). feedback should “not only take into account the learner but, ideally, also the tool, the interactions as well as the outcomes” (caws & heift, 2016, p. 131). in line with these pressing changes, dmc demands a change in our feedback practices and reexamining feedback on l2 digital writing 577 focus. thus, adapting feedback practices for multimodal texts raises important questions: what type of feedback and on which elements of multimodal composing should we provide feedback to our learners in dmc environments, and why is this important in current educational settings? how do we provide feedback on the interrelationships between language and the interconnection of modes that have traditionally not been considered part of the act of writing? in this article, we address the importance of the largely unexplored role of feedback in the l2 dmc domain. first, by examining new definitions of literacies, theoretical and pedagogical frameworks, and digital genres, we argue that there is a need to maintain the traditional focuses of feedback (e.g., language, content, structure, and organization) but also to move towards a more multifaceted, comprehensive, and modern feedback method (e.g., multimodal issues related to identity, agency, and voice). second, following lamb’s (2018) emphasis on formative feedback or “feedforward” (as he prefers to say), “where students are provided with correctional advice and guidance during the process of composition, rather than [after] the submission of coursework” (p. 6), we connect formative feedback to assessment. whether coming from the instructor or their peers, providing formative feedback allows learners to focus on linguistic and nonlinguistic issues throughout the development of a multimodal text. third, considering the purpose of multimodal compositions and the need to focus on both linguistic (e.g., orthography, verb tenses) and nonlinguistic issues (e.g., images, sounds), we address the different components that ought to be considered when providing feedback on multimodal texts and suggest criteria that instructors can use when offering feedback on multimodal tasks. finally, acknowledging the limited research on feedback in digital contexts, we conclude by offering ideas for potential future studies that examine the role and impact of feedback in the development of multimodal texts and the creation of multimodal tasks. 2. factors that shape feedback: literacies and frameworks 2.1. a new understanding of literacy there is no question, as hafner and ho (2020) point out, that even with relatively standard practices, like the writing of traditional argumentative and expository essays, for example, there is an increasing proliferation of multimodal texts. these include, among others, video methods articles in the life sciences (hafner, 2018), visual abstracts in academic articles (sancho guinda, 2015), crowd-funding proposals for educational projects (mehlenbacher, 2017), scholarly blogs engaging a wide audience (luzón, 2013), and digital storytelling (oskoz & elola, 2014, 2016a, 2016b). these multimodal practices are the result of idoia elola, ana oskoz 578 expanded definitions of literacies. it makes sense that, because of the internet revolution and the spread of social digital tools, literacies today are considered “social practices that are fluid, sociocultural, multimodal, and dynamic” (chen, 2013, p. 143), which are implemented “by individuals as parts of larger groups” (reinhardt & thorne, 2011, p. 259) and that consider the goals of writers and audiences as well as the social relationships between them (hafner et al., 2013). the term digital literacy, which pertains to internetand technology-mediated learning (chen, 2013, p. 143), converges with other literacies linked to communication skills; fits well within broader social, institutional, and historical domains; and may be described in the context of user practices – media, in particular (barton, 2007). as a result of the expanded view of literacies, the inclusion of multimodality in meaning-making responds to the technological advances of society (matthewman et al., 2004). the call for including multiliteracies in our curricula is not new. as previous work has already pointed out, to effectively shift into current literacies, it is crucial for learners, instructors, and researchers to acknowledge the need to align instruction and research with learners’ complex and multifaceted literacy skills (carpenter, 2009), to assist learners with meeting the challenges of a global economy (johnson & kress, 2003), to equip learners with the creativity required in the workplace (kimber & wyatt-smith, 2010), and to act in response to the current digital and multimodal nature of teaching (jewitt, 2008). in terms of literacies instruction, lamb (2018) identifies the close and important relationships that exist between multimodality, feedforward and assessment. in fact, if we want to understand the orchestration between the integration of diverse modes and semiotic resources (as a result of evolving tools and their affordances, the genres being produced, and the potential outcomes of multimodal tasks) as well as how multimodal texts will be assessed, the role of feedback becomes more relevant than ever. what is crucial, based on the expanded definition of digital literacies and the inclusion of dmc, is that the notion of what feedback needs to cover in this domain has changed and expanded to encompass the integration of different modes. 2.2. feedback in connection to frameworks feedback for dmc is directly or indirectly shaped by the theoretical or pedagogical perspectives in which multimodal tasks are framed. multimodal texts in the l2 classroom have been investigated from different theoretical perspectives, such as social semiotics (oskoz & elola, 2016a, 2016b) and multiliteracies (ruiz pérez, 2022). each perspective triggers and provides a unique analysis of the different components of dmc, impacting the manner in which feedback provision is thought out and implemented. reexamining feedback on l2 digital writing 579 social semiotic theory, for instance, helps explain the affordances of different modes (e.g., visual, textual, or aural) and how those modes separately or collectively contribute to multimodal ensembles such as a digital story or an infographic (bezemer & kress, 2008; kress, 2003). social semiotics investigates how writers (re)design their texts by arranging “available meaning-making resources into a multimodal whole, making authorial decisions appropriately for specific audiences and purposes” (shin et al., 2020, p. 2). the relationship between used modes and intended meanings is known as “synaesthetic semiosis:” the inclusion of oral, aural, and written modes, often combined, when composing multimodal ensembles (kress, 2003, 2010). this synaesthetic semiosis can occur in two forms during the construction of a multimodal text (kress, 2003, 2009): first, there is transformation, the actions that reorder and reposition semiotic resources within a particular mode, and, second, there is transduction, the reorganization of semiotic resources across modes. for instance, when developing a digital story through transformation, learners reconstruct “the syntax or structural complexity of sentences from a narrative (written) story into a digital story script,” and through transduction, learners convert “written narration into spoken language and incorporat[e] images, music, and sound” (elola & oskoz, 2017, p. 55). from this perspective, feedback primarily emphasizes the content created within each mode, but it is also important to the interconnectivity between and across modes. from a pedagogical perspective, the concept of multiliteracies in education (new london group, 1996) is built upon the intersection of a broader definition of literacy, the evolution of technological tools, and diverse social, historical, and cultural contexts. the new london group (1996) based its framework on the concept of design (i.e., schematic knowledge, the process of designing a text) and the idea that the redesigned text is the contribution to the world by the meaning-maker, who is engaged in an active, dynamic, transformative process of meaning-making. therefore, multiliteracies position the learner at the center of the learning process, able to accept the critical role of agency in it with the objective of “creating a kind of person, an active designer of meaning, with a sensibility open to differences, problem-solving, change, and innovation” (kalantzis et al., 2016, p. 226). to accomplish these literacies, learners must consider the form and function of design (i.e., the different meanings and purposes of a text) and how these meanings and purposes are impacted and altered by the designer and the audience (mills, 2006; kalantzis et al., 2016). from this perspective, digital feedback underscores the importance of the meaning-making process associated with writing and the learner as an agent in the process, thus, also validating kress’s (2003) notion of the learner as designer. idoia elola, ana oskoz 580 as l2 instructors and researchers, therefore, we see the need to expand our feedback repertoire beyond the focus on global (i.e., content, structure, organization) and local (i.e., grammar, vocabulary, editing) aspects of the language. as a way to expand feedback, we could consider research grounded in social semiotics (oskoz & elola, 2016a, 2020) and the perspectives of multiliteracies (ruiz pérez, 2022) that have illustrated how l2 learners shift fluidly across modes (e.g., language and visual images) and have also taken into account the development of coherent multimodal designs. it is therefore essential to include an assessment framework based on curricular objectives that considers multimodal texts by focusing on both linguistic features elicited, whether in the written or oral language modality, as well as in additional modes (e.g., visual), and the agency of the designer and the audience. 3. new genres, new tasks the inclusion of digital multimodal texts in the l2 classroom is, without doubt, the result of the increasing presence of digital genres in learners’ professional and personal lives. as heyd (2016) reminds us, some digital genres are not totally new and have gone through a process of remediation in moving from print to a digital environment, resulting in genres that “can be aptly described as ‘hybrids’ that incorporate both old and new aspects” (p. 95). these hybrid genres include entries in wikipedia, for example. other genres, however, are truly new or emergent. tweeting, for instance, necessitates fully utilized technological advances to create communicative environments that do not have an equivalent in face-to-face communication (heyd, 2016). therefore, the inclusion of digital genres and resulting multimodal texts challenges past feedback practices. what was considered appropriate just a few decades ago might not be enough when focusing on current digital multimodal genres; that is, digital genres, such as blogging and tweeting, call for modified conceptions of feedback. the development of a blog entry requires an understanding of the rhetorical and linguistic characteristics of the digital genre, while the composition of a tweet assumes knowledge of particular linguistic conventions and semantic connections, including the value of the hashtag. in these cases, balancing the development of l2 learners’ writing skills, while addressing the evolving multimodal composing conventions through the provision of effective feedback, could be taxing for the instructor. it is for this reason that guiding instructors and helping them develop a multimodal metalanguage can help them and their learners tackle multimodal texts that are still less familiar in l2 contexts. when providing feedback on multimodal texts, there is also a need to understand that not all of them present the same degree of multimodality. following reexamining feedback on l2 digital writing 581 lim and polio (2020), we can distinguish between a strong version of multimodal composing – for example, when “linguistic and nonlinguistic modes of expression contribute equally to building communication” (p. 2) – and a weak version, “in which nonlinguistic modes serve supporting roles for language development” (p. 2). digital stories and infographics, for instance, could be considered examples of strong versions since visual, aural, or oral elements (among others) are needed to create meaning, whereas wikipedia entries or blog posts, in which the images might support the written text, could be considered weak versions of multimodal texts. rather than thinking of strong versions as better and weak versions as worse, instructors need to keep in mind that, when employed in the academic context, the integration of different semiotic resources in multimodal texts varies based on their instructional goal (lim & polio, 2020). therefore, the feedback provided needs to consider the degree to which linguistic and nonlinguistic resources work together in the development of multimodal texts. 4. feedback interplay with assessment the aim of digital feedback provision is to help learners become efficient composers in a variety of dmc contexts. thus, depending on the purpose of the digital multimodal text, feedback might also touch upon diverse components of the composition. these components include the goals of the task and the expected outcomes while considering the audience’s expectations, the learner’s choice of semiotic resources, as well as authorship – the individual and/or collaborative intellectual contributions, and ownership – the fair use and acknowledgement of external sources (e.g., ideas, images, and other semiotic resources). it is because of the inherent social nature of the texts created in l2 dmc classrooms that learners interact with each other, the instructor, and the wider community, providing a natural and conducive space for the use of feedback through, for example, the use of comments in a blog post, the feedback provided by other authors while developing a wikipedia entry, or likes and dislikes in a digital story uploaded to youtube. for a better appreciation of the use of digital feedback, we need to understand that a digital multimodal dialogue that makes explicit the connection between technology, multimodality, feedback, and assessment is essential in dmc (lamb, 2018). in the case of assessment, hafner and ho (2020) suggest that its design needs to run parallel with the tools used (e.g., blogs, infographics software) as well as with formative and summative rubrics. moreover, they suggest that feedback on dmc requires an understanding of the goals of the task through assessment processes. similarly, kalantzis and cope (2008) propose a model for assessment that includes identity and social cognition (the understanding that idoia elola, ana oskoz 582 knowledge is the result of social interaction), provides formative assessment, fosters learning, and encompasses multimodal texts. there seems to be a growing consensus that feedback can and should be close to assessment procedures as learners create their multimodal texts through the scaffolding of instructors or peers. that is, feedback provided at various times (i.e., formative feedback) in the development process may draw attention to learners’ semiotic selections (e.g., linguistic, musical, pictorial) and thus help them heighten semiotic awareness (towndrow et al., 2013). to move beyond the sole emphasis on linguistic components and focus on the complete integration of modes and corresponding semiotic resources, yi et al. (2017) call for assessment procedures that are tailored to l2 writers’ needs to master language in combination with other modes. hung et al. (2013) further note that a rubric that focuses on the use of different modes may help learners understand the way in which the combination of these modes in the multimodal ensemble support meaning-making. the assessment criteria, as hicks (2015) suggests, must be flexible enough to reflect the evolving nature of communication tools and technologies, which may initially call for generic criteria that can be adjusted to a range of different types of multimodal composition. as instructors become more at ease with newer digital tools and genres, and begin to understand the impact that both linguistic and nonlinguistic elements have on the l2 composition process, they need to move away from feedback comments targeted purely at academic written genres and begin to use feedback aligned with semiotic resources or multimedia, to comment on, for example, the development of a digital story. following kress’s (2003) notion of synesthesia with digital storytelling, instructors may provide feedback on whether the chosen images correspond to the topic of the digital story, whether there are too many literal (rather than implicit) images, whether the sound/music enhances or obstructs the story, whether the music volume overpowers the voice of the narrator, and other aspects related to a digital multimodal text (jiang et al., 2022; oskoz & elola, 2016a, 2016b; yang, 2012). using an assessment rubric (see table 1) as a starting point for feedback provision can guide learners through consequent revisions (see maqueda, 2020; for rubrics on composition as well as complexity and fluidity of semiotic resources; jiang et al.’s (2022) rubric for a genre-based model). these types of rubrics help instructors and learners reflect critically and equip them with the metalanguage of multimodality, as well as with an understanding of the affordances of the modes and the media to produce different (digital) genres and texts. for instance, hafner and ho (2020) point out that although instructors seem to understand intermodal relations when assessing multimodal compositions, they do not explicitly acknowledge the notion of semiotic harmony, that is, the orchestration reexamining feedback on l2 digital writing 583 (or best fit) of the selection of resources from different modes that indicates that the form has the requisite features to be the carrier of the meaning (hafner & ho, 2020) when developing a multimodal ensemble. developing and explaining a rubric that considers traditional linguistics issues (e.g., grammar, vocabulary) but also audience expectations, choice of semiotic resources, authorship, and ownership helps l2 composers make informed selections of multimodal semiotic resources to support the overall meaning required for a specific genre and medium. the rubric will also help with the appropriate design of feedback. table 1 digital story rubric (summative and formative assessment) category 4 points* 3 points 2 points 1 point audience engagement the pace fits the storyline and engages the audience. the pace is occasionally too fast or too slow. an attempt is made at pacing, but the audience is not fully engaged. no attempt at pacing is made, and the audience is lost. semiotic resources oral narration narration is clear and well edited. narration is fairly clear. narration is often hard to follow. narration is missing. music/sound effects (aural) soundtrack complements and does not overwhelm narration. soundtrack often overwhelms the narration. soundtrack is distracting. there is no soundtrack. visuals all images are clear (and/or original), and there is a good mix of literal and symbolic imagery. a few images are unclear, and few of them are used symbolically. many images are unclear, and there is no symbolism. all images are unclear, literal, and/or inappropriate. grammar wide range of l2 grammatical structures with few or minor errors. adequate range of l2 grammatical structures; overuse of simple constructions; several minor errors. limited range of l2 structures; poor control of grammar; frequent errors. frequent, persistent l2 grammatical errors; text is difficult to understand. vocabulary makes full use of the l2 vocabulary about the topic presented. l2 vocabulary accurate but somewhat limited. l2 vocabulary limited, with overuse of imprecise and vague terms. very limited l2 vocabulary; overuse of imprecise and vague terms. multilingual and translingual practices (if applicable) makes excellent use of several linguistic repertoires in a coherent manner. makes fair use of several linguistic repertoires in a coherent manner. makes poor use of several linguistic repertoires. makes confusing use of several linguistic repertoires. genre characteristics storytelling structure presents the rhetorical question to be answered. either the rhetorical question or the answer is missing. rhetorical question and the answer are both missing. there is no clear narrative in the story. motion and transitions (organization) used at least 4 motion effects; transitions are effective. used at least 3 motion effects; transitions are mostly effective. used at least 1 motion effect; some transitions are distracting. used no motion effects; used no transitions. mechanics the title appears at the beginning and the final credits at the end. part of the title and/or some of the final credits are missing. either the title or the final credits are missing. both the title and the final credits are missing. authorship collaboration (if applicable) author communicated well and participated in a discussion of ideas that led to a jointly created product. author communicated and participated in a discussion of ideas that led to the created product. communication with the authors was limited, but they contributed to some extent. author either rarely communicated or tried to impose ideas without listening to others in the group. ownership credits and citations all original and non-original images and sounds are credited and cited. some citations and credits are missing. many citations and credits are missing. there are no citations or credits. voice and identity choice of semiotic resources the choice of language, images, sounds, and tone carefully represent the author’s voice. the choice of language, images, sounds, and tone mostly represent the author’s voice. the choice of language, images, sounds, and tone vaguely represent the author’s voice. the choice of language, images, sounds, and tone do not represent the author’s voice. idoia elola, ana oskoz 584 overall digital story the digital story provides a complete account of the author’s message. the digital story provides an adequate account of the author’s message. the digital story vaguely represents an account of the author’s message. the digital story provides a superficial account of the author’s message. multimodal ensemble transduction combining the different modes in a harmonic orchestration, the story is told with exactly the right amount of detail and is not too long or too short. although combining different modes, the story is sometimes vague or includes unnecessary detail; it seems to drag sometimes. despite combining modes, meaning is only duplicated (not enhanced). the story needs more editing and is noticeably too long or too short. the story needs extensive editing to make the most of using different modes. transformation the author maximizes each mode’s potential to tell the story with images (e.g., size, color), sound (e.g., volume), and oral narrative (e.g., pauses, tone). the author generally uses each mode’s potential to tell the story with images (e.g., size, color), sound (e.g., volume), and oral narrative (e.g., pauses, tone). the author minimally uses each mode’s potential to tell the story with images (e.g., size, color), sound (e.g., volume), and oral narrative (e.g., pauses, tone). the author does not use each mode’s potential to tell the story with images (e.g., size, color), sound (e.g., volume), and oral narrative (e.g., pauses, tone). task completion multimodal task completion; following the prompt learner has followed the prompt, and the task addresses all multimodal requirements. learner has followed the prompt, and the task addresses some of the multimodal requirements. learner did not follow the prompt closely, and the task addresses few of the multimodal requirements. learner did not follow the prompt, and the task does not address the multimodal requirements. note. *points in the rubric are subject to change depending on the objectives and goals of the exercise providing comments on learners’ multimodal work during the formative stages (i.e., formative feedback) can also result in prompt revisions. this effect, as campbell and feldman (2017) have observed, is much more suggestive of learning than assigning a grade or circling an achieved outcome on an assessment rubric (lamb, 2018). lamb’s (2018) emphasis on feedforward means that the instructor’s comments are timelier, enabling learners to take corrective action to improve the quality of the assignment being submitted for a grade. the provision of feedforward can be more effectively provided through the use of formative assessment exercises, in which learners are able to gauge their progress and understanding in a low-stakes setting (hounsell et al., 2007). if formative feedback is considered an evolving digital conversation between learners and instructors, as well as between learners and other learners, it can promote regular opportunities for encouragement and discussion around dmc production and assessment. furthermore, the social dimension of emergent technologies, such as wikis and blogs, presents greater opportunities for rich dialogue, facilitating students’ participation, and student-focused interventions that can support ongoing feedback and formative assessment (hatzipanagos & warburton, 2009). the rubric in table 1 (adapted from oskoz & elola, 2020), for instance, was designed to assess a digital story, a storyline that integrates text, images, and sounds in an online environment, and which is often conceived as a personal narrative (e.g., intercultural experiences when studying abroad; identity awareness as heritage speakers). given that the digital story is a multimodal text, the rubric needs to cover linguistic issues, such as grammar, vocabulary, and rhetoric (e.g., content, structure, and organization), as well as additional semiotic resources and the processes of transformation and transduction. engagement with the audience, as well as learner voice and authorship, are also included. the criteria proposed are by no means exclusive or exhaustive of what can be assessed in different types of multimodal compositions. reexamining feedback on l2 digital writing 585 5. feedback in multimodal tasks using the digital story assessment rubric provided above as an example, the question that remains is what shape and focus the formative feedback will have when l2 learners develop their multimodal compositions. following oskoz and elola (2020), we propose a series of questions that address the criteria for digital stories identified in table 1 and include rhetorical, linguistic, and nonlinguistic elements, as well as focus on the process of the multimodal ensemble (i.e., transformation and transduction), learner voice, and authorship. let us keep in mind that as with any other task that we teach in the l2 classroom, we are using the rubric as a guideline that instructors could provide to students to compose the digital story, which include the linguistic and nonlinguistic elements as well as considerations of audience and issues of authorship and ownership, among others. using this guideline for formative feedback purposes, instructors could reinforce and call students’ attention to, for example, the extent to which they have acknowledged the audience, how successfully they have used semiotic resources, or whether they have followed the genre characteristics. thus, below we present the main seven components of the guidelines with some example questions to direct instructors in the provision of feedback in multimodal texts. audience today, composers develop and re-develop content for social networking sites such as instagram and blogs, either for a real or imaginary audience, with the purpose of creating text that will encourage responses. taking an audience into account, feedback might include questions such as the following: • who is your audience? for whom are you writing? • what semiotic resources are you employing to attract your audience? how are you using them? • how do you react to and engage with your audience’s feedback? • what changes will you make based on your audience’s feedback (or lack thereof)? semiotic resources the multimodal character of digital texts requires learners to integrate different semiotic resources in a meaningful manner. as mcgrail and behizadeh (2017) pointed out, l2 learners must understand “the unique conventions for creating such divergent multimodal compositions” (p. 34) and learn what elements are pertinent to the multimodal genre or their interests. l2 learners also need to learn how to apply “these particular elements and procedures in their own multimodal idoia elola, ana oskoz 586 designs” (oskoz & elola, 2020, p. 174). feedback, therefore, needs to go beyond the local and global aspects of the language and encompass the additional semiotic resources included in a multimodal composition, such as images or sounds. feedback regarding different semiotic resources employed in, for example, a digital story might include some or all of the following questions. oral • does clear articulation and pronunciation from the narrator help the audience follow the story? • does the author use meaningful repetitions or pauses in telling the story? • does the oral narration facilitate the telling of an engaging story? • does the oral narration have an emotional effect on the audience? aural (music, sounds) • to what extent does the music tie in with the theme or the emotional atmosphere of the story? • does the volume of the music (e.g., soft, loud) or interludes of silence help express the meaning of the story? • do the sound effects, if any, complement the narrative flow of pictures and words throughout the story? • how do music and sounds reflect and augment the purpose of the story? visual • do the selected images correlate with the story being told, and are they integrated meaningfully throughout the story? • to what extent does the quality of the images interfere with or support the message conveyed? • do images support the theme of the story and help the audience see the story’s main points? • to what extent do the images add to the story rather than merely repeat the written or oral text? textual • what is the purpose of including written text (e.g., subtitles, words)? • to what extent does the text support or clarify the author’s meaning? reexamining feedback on l2 digital writing 587 does the text suit the still or moving pictorial elements that come before, after, or during it? • how does the positioning, font, style, color, and content of the text support the message the author wants to convey? • if text is necessary, is it shown on screen long enough for the viewer to read it? language • is the story told with an appropriate amount of detail; that is, is it not too long or too short? • is a range of (multi)linguistic structures (e.g., verb tenses, subordination, or lack of subordination) evident in the narration of the story? • to what extent does the author use varied vocabulary to enhance and enrich the story? genre characteristics multimodal texts have their own idiosyncrasies and diverse practice criteria, which often do not correspond to those of the printed text. when providing feedback for digital genres, there is a need to define the characteristics that make, for example, a good wikipedia entry or an interesting travel blog, or the rhetorical characteristics of an engaging tweet. if these characteristics are clearly defined in the curriculum, we can then provide feedback for the development of different multimodal genres. following mcgrail and behizadeh’s (2017) set of questions for creating and evaluating multimodal composition, we propose the following feedback questions for a digital story: · how do you determine what constitutes a good digital story? · how do you effectively integrate different semiotic sources (e.g., visual, textual, aural, gestural) to develop a storytelling genre? authorship while not always the case, multimodal digital projects tend to be collaborative endeavors that “[call] into question the dimension of content production” (lotherington & ronda, 2014, p. 22). this expanded concept of authorship implies the need to include feedback practices that foster and value the achievements and contributions of collective authorship. providing feedback implies considering both individual and joint contributions. this is perhaps best achieved by combining peer feedback with traditional instructor feedback. questions that can help instructors or peers provide feedback on authorship might include the following: · to what extent does this project reflect your equal intellectual contribution? idoia elola, ana oskoz 588 · how has the collective group integrated the voices of all members? · how has communication among all group members resulted in a respectful discussion of different ideas and led to a jointly produced product? · to what extent have you played to your own strengths (e.g., linguistic, visual, or aural knowledge) to enhance the quality of the product? ownership not to be confused with authorship, it is crucial to acknowledge digital writing ownership through the reuse and remix of semiotic resources. ownership thus refers to the fair use of external sources by acknowledging and crediting ideas, images, and the eclectic range of semiotic resources that might be included in l2 learners’ multimodal projects. providing feedback on the ownership of the resources provided is of relevance given that “many young people today consider what exists on the internet as freely available raw material to be used however they see fit” (chun et al., 2016, p. 69). as chun et al. (2016) point out, borrowing content from others is not the problem per se but “rather the sense that borrowing does not require any acknowledgment” (p. 69). questions we might ask that focus on intellectual property, copyright, and fair use could include the following: · have you properly cited sources and credited those whose ideas you have included in your work? · did you include websites to confirm that the source material was publicly available? · what steps did you follow to obtain permission to use copyrighted material? voice and identity another goal of multimodality in the l2 classroom is to provide a space for learners’ authorial voices and identities (cimasko & shin, 2017). instructor feedback can help learners find their voices and express their identities by asking them to reflect on their choices of, for example, images, language(s), and colors. when looking at semiotic resources and the role of synesthesia, research has examined the essential role of multimodality in shaping a learner’s authorial voice and identity (e.g., cimasko & shin, 2017; jiang, 2018; smith et al., 2017). when a learner is trying to find their voice, the feedback we provide can help them reflect on whether their choice of semiotic resource is appropriate. questions that we might ask include the following: · why have you chosen these images as representative of your story? · how does the music you selected represent your feelings and mood? · how does the digital story represent who you are? reexamining feedback on l2 digital writing 589 · to what extent does this digital story express your voice based on language choice (e.g., vocabulary), images, sounds, and/or tone? multimodal ensemble to help learners develop a multimodal ensemble, we need to consider how we provide feedback on multimodal texts and be aware that the process of synaesthetic semiosis occurs in two forms during the construction of such a text (kress, 2003, 2009). transformation consists of actions that reorder and reposition semiotic resources within a particular mode, whereas transduction involves the reorganization of semiotic resources across modes. in essence, we need to consider whether there is semiotic harmony; as we address below, it is important to obtain an orchestration of the diversity of resources from different modes, verifying that the form has the features needed to be the transferor of meaning. transduction when developing a digital story, users combine, for example, visual (images), aural (sounds, spoken words, music), and textual (subtitles) modes. in general, learners start with a narrative of the story they want to tell. once they have written the story, or as they are writing it, they think of how different modes (e.g., aural, textual) will help create the meaning they want to convey. the feedback provided upon completing the first draft focuses on how the composer can combine different semiotic resources to convey their intended meaning. because the goal of a multimodal text is to create synaesthetic harmony, it is important that the learner understand that the integration of modes is directed at meaning and not at enhancing or describing the story. in this case, the composer reorganizes semiotic resources (text, images, sounds) across modes (textual, visual, aural) through transduction. • are your pauses, sounds, or special effects used judiciously to convey meaning in to your story? • how are you combining different semiotic resources to reflect a digital story? • is the merging of modes relevant to the meaning of the story? are the modes balanced with each other? transformation in addition to combining the different semiotic resources, l2 learners also reorder and reposition them within a particular mode (visual, aural, oral, or textual). learners might reconstruct the syntax or structural complexity of sentences idoia elola, ana oskoz 590 from a written narrative into a digital story script or play with the size and colors of an image to express their intended meaning. questions that might help learners maximize the use of the different modes include the following: • how do you play with the size and color of images to express your intended meaning? • how are you using changes in the volume of your soundtrack to reflect your mood? • how does the use of pauses and changes in tone in your oral narrative convey meaning in your story? • does the transformation from narrative to script work? it is worth clarifying that feedback on multimodal texts is not, by definition, richly multimodal; on the contrary, many examples of peer and instructor feedback predominantly or entirely depend on comments or guidance expressed through words in isolation. when multimodal feedback is provided, however, it is not restricted to the digital form either; such an idea is immediately dispelled by watching how classroom teachers offer correctional advice or guidance through a varied assemblage of spoken language, silence, gestures, eye contact, and more (lamb, 2018). 6. what is next? this article has first identified a gap in multimodal teaching and research regarding the role and focus of feedback in dmc and, second, has provided an assessment rubric and examples of formative feedback that addresses both linguistic and nonlinguistic elements to help students develop their multimodal texts. the truth is that the digital world we inhabit calls for the expansion of the role of feedback in response to the affordances of moods, tools, and task outcomes. reasons why we might have not broadened our feedback type and form might be due to the following: that our view of multimodal composing is still limited to written texts; that the provision of feedback for multimodal texts is challenging; that we lack familiarity with producing multimodal ensembles; or that dmc is not always aligned with curricular learning outcomes. we argue that feedback for dmc needs to be modeled following theoretical and pedagogical frameworks, genres, and tasks. most importantly, feedback must be articulated in conjunction with multimodal assessment rubrics that guide the way for feedback (re)design. it is important, then, to align feedback with the particular assessments, learning contexts, and knowledge that the learner is attempting to convey. thus, based on these multimodal ensemble rubrics, feedback can be more clearly tailored to the goals of the multimodal task. overall, without disregarding print-based approaches to feedback, there is a need in digitally influenced learning environments and society to consider when, reexamining feedback on l2 digital writing 591 where, and how our approaches to formative feedback should enhance the l2 multimodal representation of academic knowledge (lamb, 2018). although we traditionally use print-based or digital feedback for linguistic elements of multimodal composition, this article advocates for the expansion of our notions of feedback, which should be formative and include nonlinguistic elements, and, more importantly, should cover the multimodal ensemble as a whole. the main questions that remain are how formative feedback on multimodal texts can help learners utilize semiotic modes to advance their multimodal writing abilities and whether feedback on multimodality can help l2 language development (manchón, 2017). in oskoz and elola (2014, 2016a), we saw linguistic improvement as a result of the use of digital stories in the l2 writing class, but this was likely fostered by the task-based approach of the digital story assignment (i.e., the phased instruction that involved the change from an academic narrative to an oral script populated with images and sounds that helped create meaning). although some feedback guidelines have been proposed here, there is an urgent need for empirical evidence on how to tailor productive formative feedback to multimodal texts. there is also a need for research on the impact of feedback on linguistic and nonlinguistic development as well as on multimodal ensembles as a whole. without a doubt, digital multimodal texts are here to stay and will increasingly populate diverse academic contexts. it is not far-fetched to affirm that research about feedback on dmc is nonexistent. in the l2 classroom, formative feedback is included because it is part of the learners’ scaffolding and revision processes when writing compositions (oskoz & elola, 2014, 2016a), but there is no evidence of the impact of having used instructor or peer feedback on dmc. furthermore, although feedback in general is not necessarily multimodal, there has been an effort to investigate whether different stages of the composing process and/or final product can be better addressed by multimodal feedback (ducate & arnold, 2012; elola & oskoz, 2016). it is also imperative to create a research agenda that explores and provides guidelines that are specific to the feedback type (e.g., explicit or less explicit multimodal feedback for different stages of the composing process, such as drafting the script, choosing images and sounds, integrating different semiotic resources, rehearsing the oral narrative, and polishing the final product). the current scarcity of knowledge regarding dmc feedback may be discouraging; however, the potential for l2 multimodal research and teaching exploration is vast. pursuing this line of inquiry is exciting not just because of the relevance of these multimodal texts but, more importantly, because of their intrinsic evolutionary nature, which calls for new ways to visualize feedback for multimodal texts and encourages us to redefine the notion of feedback as we know it. idoia elola, ana oskoz 592 references barton, d. 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(2021). digital multimodal composing in postsecondary l2 settings: a review of the empirical landscape. computer assisted language learning, 1-28. 293 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (2). 293-319 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl quantitative and qualitative aspects of l1 (swedish) and l2 (english) idiom comprehension monica karlsson halmstad university, sweden mica.karlsson@glocalnet.net abstract in the present investigation, 15 first term university students were faced with 80 context-based idioms in english (l2) and swedish (l1) respectively, 30 of which were in the source domain of animals, commonly used in both languages, and asked to explain their meaning. the idioms were of varying frequency and transparency. three main research questions were thus addressed: 1. how well do students master idioms in their l2 as compared to their l1? 2. how do (a) degrees of transparency, (b) idiom frequency and (c) the choice of source domain affect students’ l1 and l2 comprehension? 3. to what extent is context used when interpreting l1 and l2 idioms? results show that while the frequency of an idiom does not appear to play a part in whether it is comprehended or not in either language, the degree of transparency is of great importance in students’ l2. also, students make extensive use of context in their l2. keywords: l1/l2, idiom comprehension, transparency, source domain, frequency, context many teachers consider idioms to be comparatively infrequent items of vocabulary and because of this believe that they do not warrant much time in the l2 classroom. admittedly, idioms may not be as frequently used as other vocabulary items. in moon (1997), for example, studying the frequency of monica karlsson 294 6,700 fixed phrases in the oxford hector pilot corpus, a corpus of british english consisting of 18 million words, it is shown that the number of occurrences of idioms is indeed quite low. in fact, only slightly more than 11% of the idioms included in the study (1,657 items considered) occurred 1-5 times per one million words (8% 1-2 times; 3% 2-5 times; 1% 5-50 times). these findings are also substantiated by biber, johansson, leech, conrad, and finegan (1999) in their analysis of the longman spoken and written english corpus consisting of 40 million words. in their study, idioms occurred on average fewer than five times per one million words. in order to get a more hands-on perspective on the matter, the present author decided to write down all the idiomatic expressions heard when watching tv for a few weeks. the lasting impression after these weeks was not that idiomatic expressions are highly infrequent vocabulary items, but rather that they are comparatively omnipresent elements. the main reason for these diametrically different perceptions of idiom frequency is that idiom use is highly register sensitive. generally speaking, it seems that idioms are more common in informal discourse than in more formal settings, but it even varies according to the type of informal situation (liu, 2008). when choosing vocabulary for the teaching syllabus, the question we as teachers therefore need to ask is: how native-like do i want my students to become? as the results of the present study will show, native speakers of swedish understand a great number of idioms in their first language. thus, if students want to become equally advanced in their l2, idiomatic expressions form an area of the lexicon that cannot be neglected. the aim of the present study is therefore to explore the extent of advanced students’ mastery of l2 idioms in contrast to their l1 knowledge, quantitatively as well as qualitatively. theoretical background idioms defined the type of idioms in focus in the present investigation, such as wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve, pass the buck, have bats in the belfry (see also tables 4 and 5 for more examples), all adhere to the following definition, which suggests that these items of vocabulary are “multi-word items which are not the sum of their parts: they have holistic meanings which cannot be retrieved from the individual meanings of the component words” (moon, 1997, p. 46). this definition considers idioms along three separate continuums, none of which are absolute but vary in accordance with each and every item. the three continuums deal with (a) compositionality, which has to do with the degree to which a quantitative and qualitative aspects of l1 (swedish) and l2 (english) idiom comprehension 295 literal reading of an idiom can help in interpreting its figurative meaning, (b) institutionalization (or lexicalization), which focuses on the degree to which an idiom is conventionalized in a language based on its frequency and (c) fixedness, which describes the degree to which an idiom is frozen in a specific form. idioms, which are considered to be lexically fossilized items since they most typically cannot be interpreted on a word-by-word basis, are normally seen to be highly noncompositional items having a unitary semantic meaning. furthermore, even though, as discussed above, idiomatic expressions are comparatively infrequent items in certain registers, there is usually great consensus in a language community about what phrases should be interpreted as whole units of meaning, thus idioms rate highly on the institutionalization continuum, too. finally, idioms have long been regarded as relatively frozen units of meaning. this means that they are usually also rated highly on the fixedness continuum. more recent research on the fixedness of idioms has, however, shown that these kinds of expressions are perhaps not as frozen as previously suggested (moon, 1997, 1998). in liu (2008, p. 36), for instance, quite a few examples are given of different types of idiom variation such as set/start the ball rolling, a skeleton in the closet/cupboard or a bad/rotten apple. the processing and comprehension of l1 and l2 idioms over the last few decades, there have been several approaches to the processing and comprehension of idiomatic expressions. the present subsection aims to describe the development of theoretical thinking behind some of the major approaches and to offer an overview of some of the most important strategies used by l2 learners when encountering unknown idioms. two of the first processing hypotheses that were proposed, the literal first hypothesis (also referred to as the idiom list hypothesis) (bobrow & bell, 1973) and the figurative first hypothesis (also direct access hypothesis) (gibbs, 1980), both believed that the meaning of an idiom was stored in a separate mental idiom list. based on a number of experiments, bobrow and bell could show that the literal meaning appeared to always be accessed first and it was not until the literal interpretation had been rejected that learners started to think in a figurative way. this in turn meant, according to bobrow and bell, that literal meanings are always understood more quickly than idiomatic meanings. gibbs, although still believing that idiomatic expressions were stored in a separate idiom list, could show in another set of experiments that literal meanings were not retrieved faster than figurative meanings. gibbs thus claimed that native speakers rarely attempt literal readings of idiomatic expressions for the simple reason that they recognise an idiom when they see it and so they can bypass the literal route and acmonica karlsson 296 cess its figurative meaning directly. other studies at this time also showed that idiomatic expressions were processed faster than literal ones (e.g., ortony, schallert, reynolds, & antos, 1978). in contrast to the literal first hypothesis and the figurative first hypothesis discussed above, the simultaneous processing hypothesis (also the lexical representation hypothesis) proposed by swinney and cutler in 1979 suggested that literal and figurative expressions are accessed simultaneously and it is not until the context disambiguates their meaning that the learner lets go of one of the interpretations. based on yet another set of experiments, swinney and cutler (1979) claimed that in contrast to idiomatic expressions that are seen as units and therefore do not warrant further analysis, ordinary vocabulary items are, in addition to being analysed lexically, also analysed syntactically and semantically. thus idiomatic expressions have an advantage in terms of processing speed since the whole phrase is treated as a single unit. other studies, however, have shown that literal readings of idiomatic expressions appear to be activated and stay activated during the whole interpretation process. this is what is suggested by, for example, the idiom key hypothesis (also the point of idiom uniqueness hypothesis or the point of idiom recognition hypothesis), in which the strict separation between literal and figurative meanings of idioms as seen in the three models described above is absent (cacciari & tabossi, 1988; flores d’arcais, 1993; tabossi & zardon, 1993, 1995). in accordance with this hypothesis, the processing of an idiomatic string of words begins literally until the string, at one specific point, that is, the key point, becomes recognized as an idiomatic expression. the concept is an important one since there are fundamental differences between the key point of an idiom and the corresponding points of recognition of individual words (tabossi & zardon, 1993) and whole sentences. in contrast to the four processing theories discussed so far, that is, the literal first hypothesis, the figurative first hypothesis, the simultaneous processing hypothesis and the idiom key hypothesis, a more recent theory referred to as the idiom decomposition hypothesis (also the compositional analysis hypothesis), claims that the processing and comprehension of idiomatic expressions do not only involve normal language processing, but that this processing occurs together with a pragmatic interpretation of the use of the idiom in its discourse context. this model was first proposed by gibbs, nayak and cutting (1989) based on an experiment in which subjects were faced with idiomatic strings of words that were either semantically decomposable or totally nondecomposable. the results of the gibbs et al. study were quite straightforward, showing that the subjects needed significantly less time to process decomposable idiomatic expressions than idiomatic expressions that could not be decomposed. this clearly suggests that learners first try to make quantitative and qualitative aspects of l1 (swedish) and l2 (english) idiom comprehension 297 sense of the individual parts and not until they fail doing so, do they consider the expression an unanalysable unit. the models described so far are all limited to the mental lexicon of native speakers. one theory that does not only deal with the processing and comprehension of l1 idioms, but also with idioms in an l2 is the model of dual idiom representation. thus this theory is highly relevant to the present investigation. it has its basis in the work of titone and connine (1994) and was developed further by abel (2003). the model of dual idiom representation is based on four assumptions, the first two dealing with lexical representation only. firstly, the model suggests that it is the degree of decomposability of an idiom that decides how the idiom is represented in a learner’s mental lexicon. whereas an idiom which is nondecomposable requires a special idiom entry, an idiom which can be decomposed is represented via the entries of the constituents of which the idiom is made up. the evidence on which this assumption is based comes from research on compound words. just like idiomatic expressions, compound words can be divided into those that are decomposable and those that are not. studies focusing on two-part compounds (e.g., sandra, 1990) show that for semantically transparent ones both constituents are accessed, while for semantically opaque compounds only the first constituent is accessed, indicating that the latter but not the former type must have a separate lexical representation. the same result was seen in a study by zwitserlood (1994). secondly, the model also suggests that it is the frequency of an idiom that decides whether an idiom entry is developed or not so that the more frequent an idiom is, the more likely it is that an idiom entry will be formed. in addition, the model holds that this does not only occur with nondecomposable idioms but also with decomposable ones. evidence of the existence of the frequency effect (and transparency) comes from research on morphology. caramazza, laudanna, and romani (1988), for example, detected a major difference between frequent derivatives and inflected words on the one hand and those that were highly infrequent on the other hand. whereas the frequent forms were approached as unseparated wholes, less frequent items were decomposed into stem and affix. in another study by frauenfelder and schreuder (1992), it was noticed that morphologically complex words were represented both via their constituent parts and their full entries, the frequency and transparency of the word in question determining which was made use of first. if an item was comparatively infrequent, the stem and affix entries were quite consistently shown to be accessed first. if, on the other hand, an item was comparatively frequent, the full entry was accessed first, bypassing the stem and affix entries. the third assumption the model of dual idiom representation is based on is that if there are no lexical entries at the lexical level, which is very often monica karlsson 298 the case for nonnative speakers in their early stages of l2 learning, the processing and comprehension of idioms instead occur at a conceptual level. this is also suggested in, for example, kecskes (2000). these conceptual representations are nonlinguistic in character and instead involve pragmatic knowledge, that is, they occur at a more general cognitive level. this means that, if no lexical information is available at the time of processing, learners will resort to conceptual metaphors, such as anger is fire, which would help learners understand idioms like smoke was coming out of his ears, she was spitting fire and he was fuming (lakoff & johnson, 1980). the fourth assumption deals with differences between l1/l2 processing and comprehension and it posits that because l2 learners have not been exposed to l2 idioms to the same extent as native speakers, there are not as many idiom entries in their mental lexicon. second language learners therefore have to rely on literal readings of decomposable as well as nondecomposable idioms to a higher degree than native speakers do (see also kecskes, 2000), that is, put differently, nonnative speakers have to rely to a greater extent than l1 speakers on constituent entries and, if there are none of these, conceptual representations of idioms have to be relied on. a connection can here be made to the work of matlock and heredia (2002), who claim that it is the proficiency-level of learners that decides to what extent they have to rely on literal readings of idiomatic expressions. second language learner reliance on literal interpretations of idiom constituents is also explored in cie licka (2006a) in her literal-salience resonant model of l2 idiom comprehension. this fourth assumption of the model of dual idiom representation is based on two studies, one dealing with native speakers and the other one dealing with l2 learners. in titone and connine’s (1994) study mentioned above, native speakers of english were asked to judge whether a number of idioms were decomposable or not. the same subjects were also asked to rate the familiarity of the idioms on a 7-point scale on which 1 was the lowest value. it was found that the native speakers judged 41.9% of the idioms to be decomposable in character and 58.1% to be nondecomposable. it was also found that the mean value for the familiarity of the decomposable idioms was 5.92, while the corresponding mean value for the nondecomposable idioms was 5.76, that is, decomposable idiomatic expressions were rated as being more familiar than nondecomposable ones. abel’s study (2003), also mentioned above, includes two experiments performed in almost exactly the same way, only her subjects were l2 students whose first language was german. in abel’s first experiment, the subjects judged 56.6% of the idioms to be decomposable and 43.5% to be nondecomposable. in her second experiment, the percentages were 55.2% versus 44.8%; thus, the results of the second experi quantitative and qualitative aspects of l1 (swedish) and l2 (english) idiom comprehension 299 ment tally well with the results of the first one. as for familiarity in abel’s study, the mean value for the decomposable idioms was 4.90 and for the nondecomposable idioms 2.99, that is, just as the native speakers, the nonnative speakers rated decomposable idioms as more familiar than nondecomposable idioms. when a comparison is made between titone and connine’s study (native speakers) and abel’s study (nonnative speakers), it can be seen that the native speakers judged fewer idioms to be decomposable than did the nonnative speakers, that is, it seems that many more idioms had received idiom entries in the mental lexicon of the native speakers than in the mental lexicon of the german students studying english as an l2. this indicates that nonnative speakers have a greater tendency to try to decompose idioms than do native speakers, who simply activate their many idiom entries. in abel’s study, contextual and conceptual factors were noticed to play especially important roles when l2 decomposition occurred. lastly, when the mean values for familiarity are compared, it can be seen that for native speakers as well as nonnative speakers the more familiar an idiom is, the more likely it is that it is decomposed, that is, familiarity appears to go hand in hand with decomposability whether one is a native speaker or not. in liu (2008), an attempt is made to sum up the differences between l1 and l2 idiom processing and comprehension. he writes that l2 idiom comprehension appears to be a slower and much more complex process than that for l1. it involves the use of more strategies in terms of both type and quantity. the process does not seem to conform to any of the major l1 idiom comprehension models. instead, it takes the form of a heuristic approach, a process in which l2 learners approach an unknown idiom as a problem and try to solve it on a trial and error basis by using a variety of strategies. (p. 74) several strategies are discussed in great detail in liu. the most frequent one used by l2 learners when accessing an idiom appears to be making use of the context in which the idiom is placed. this does not only seem to be the most frequently used strategy, but also the most effective one. in cooper (1999), for example, making use of contextual information made up 28% of all the strategies considered, accounting for 57% of all the correctly guessed idioms, which was followed by discussing and analysing (24%) and using literal meaning (19%). a second strategy employed by l2 learners when processing an idiom is to make use of their native language. this is naturally especially beneficial if the learner’s l1 has a counterpart that is highly similar to the l2 idiom. several studies report such results. in irujo (1986), for example, it was found that the performance (comprehension, recall and production) of venezuelan learners of english was considerably better with l2 idioms that had direct counterparts in monica karlsson 300 their l1 than those that did not (see also cie licka, 2006b and piasecka, 2006 for similar results with polish learners of english). the same was also seen in abdullah and jackson (1998), investigating syrian college students’ comprehension and translation of english idioms. in addition, they could also show that the students achieved very low scores with the so-called false cognate idioms, that is, idioms that are identical in form but differ as to their meaning. finally, abdullah and jackson also noticed that whereas the students were comparatively good at translating cognate l2 idioms into their native language, they were hesitant about translating these same idioms, when offered in their l1, into english. this led the researchers to draw the conclusion that learners appear to believe that idioms are culture-specific and therefore often avoid translating identical idioms into the l2, even in those cases where it is fully possible. this means that making use of one’s first language when processing idioms does not only achieve positive results, but may also induce interference. moreover, making use of l1 knowledge does not only mean making use of linguistic knowledge, but could also mean making use of more general l1 cultural knowledge. research has shown that if a learner’s native language tends to make use of idioms in a certain area of life, say food or animals, and the same area is prolific in the language the student is trying to learn, this helps in the comprehension and production of such idioms (boers, demecheleer, & eyckmans, 2004). this is especially interesting in the present study since quite a few idioms in use in swedish today have been borrowed from the english language. examples of such english idioms are the ball is in your court, back to square one, put somebody/something on the map, be caught with the trousers/pants down and get/have cold feet (moberg, 1996, p. 216). this borrowing, according to moberg (1996, p. 216), has been made possible primarily due to the shared outlook on life in general. the reverse is of course also true, that is, idioms that are culturespecific, such as carry coals to newcastle and kiss the blarney stone, are generally difficult for l2 learners to understand and remember. still another strategy often employed by l2 learners is to make use of even more general knowledge, that is, pragmatic knowledge or knowledge of the world (compare with the third assumption of the model of dual idiom representation discussed above). in the abdullah and jackson (1998) study already mentioned above, for instance, it was shown that their subjects could draw conclusions about the meaning of the idiom to give someone the cold shoulder as they interpreted cold to mean unwelcome since cold is the opposite of warm (a warm welcome). similarly, the same informants used their knowledge of the world when they interpreted the idiom to skate on thin ice to mean that the person doing this was doing something very risky. research in this area has also shown that world knowledge is a more useful tool when quantitative and qualitative aspects of l1 (swedish) and l2 (english) idiom comprehension 301 interpreting decomposable idioms than when dealing with idioms that cannot be analysed on a word-by-word basis (abdullah & jackson, 1998). as can be seen from the discussion above, l2 learners have a well of different strategies at their disposal when encountering unknown l2 idiomatic expressions. yet, when encountering known l2 idioms this heuristic approach does not seem to apply . . ., for when a person, be it a native speaker or l2 speaker, encounters a known idiom, a normal linguistic analysis may not be activated or may soon lead to a direct memory retrieval. thus, a complete l2 idiom comprehension model needs to be a dual-process one, with the heuristic approach in charge of unknown idioms and direct memory retrieval being used for known idioms in most cases (liu 2008, p. 74) making l2 idiom processing and comprehension, as realised by the model of dual idiom representation, a much more complex phenomenon than the processing and interpretation of idioms in a native language. the present study in the present investigation, 15 first term university students were faced with 80 context-based idioms in english (l2) and the same number in swedish (l1) (30 of which focused on the source domain of animals, which is commonly used in both languages) and asked to explain their meaning. there were 12 female and 3 male students, 10 of whom were in their late teens or early 20s, 4 in their late 20s and one 49-year-old. the idioms were of varying frequency and transparency. three main research questions were thus addressed. 1. how well do students master idioms of approximately the same total frequency in their l2 as compared to their l1? 2. how do (a) degrees of transparency (full transparency, semitransparency, opaqueness), (b) idiom frequency and (c) the choice of source domain affect students’ l1 and l2 comprehension? 3. to what extent is context used when interpreting l1 and l2 idioms? one native speaker of english, a 33-year-old male studying within the swedish educational system to become an upper secondary school teacher of english, was used as a point of reference for the l2 test. monica karlsson 302 the tests the english and swedish tests were both divided into two parts, part a testing the students’ knowledge of general idiomatic expressions (50 items) and part b focusing on idioms which include animals as part of their metaphor (30 test items). the source domain of animals was chosen since idioms in this area appear to be incredibly prolific in both english (british and american) and swedish. furthermore, so as to achieve a situation which would correspond to what students experience in real life, all of the english idioms were randomly chosen from a list put together by the present author based on idioms heard while watching tv, reading fiction and listening to audio books. the swedish idioms were picked randomly from various books which all include extensive lists of swedish idiomatic expressions and their usage. also, all the test items were offered to the subjects in context, in which the idioms themselves were written in bold and the students were asked to translate the english idioms into swedish, either by giving a direct swedish counterpart or by explaining its meaning in their own words, the latter of which was the case for the corresponding swedish test, which was constructed in exactly the same way as the english one. each correct answer received one point. example 1 is from part a and example 2 is from part b. example 1 to pass the buck you are responsible for the child at school and not the parents so don’t be tempted to pass the buck. = ______________________________ example 2 there are no flies on her i know there are no flies on her but i wonder how she found that out. = ______________________________ on both tests the students were also requested to give information about the degree to which they thought they knew the idioms according to the following continuum: i don’t know this idiom. i’m guessing the meaning of the idiom from the context of the sentence. i recognize this idiom, but i don’t know what it means. quantitative and qualitative aspects of l1 (swedish) and l2 (english) idiom comprehension 303 i recognize this idiom and i’m guessing its meaning from the context of the sentence. i recognize this idiom and i think i know what it means. i am sure i know what the idiom means. furthermore, all the idioms were presented in order of frequency in their respective parts, starting with the most frequent item in each case. the frequencies for the english items were based on the british national corpus (bnc) and collins cobuild idioms dictionary (2002); the swedish items on språkbanken (2013). the total frequency of the test items was also considered. here the swedish idioms were seen to be slightly more frequent than those included in the english test. thus, in this respect, the swedish test may be regarded as somewhat easier than the english test. before analysing the students’ results, the idioms were also divided into three categories: transparent items, semitransparent items and opaque items. in addition to taking the students’ knowledge of the world into account, the degree of transparency of the english items was considered from a swedish l2 learner perspective and based on two main criteria. firstly, the idioms for which exact literal and semantic translations could be given, that is, items for which cultural sameness was detected, were generally categorized as transparent items. just a few idioms were of this type. however, more items could be seen for which either an exact literal translation or an exact semantic translation could be given. these were categorized as transparent or semitransparent items. this criterion was for obvious reasons not considered when the degree of transparency of the swedish test items was analysed. secondly, the idioms for which literal readings helped to understand their figurative meaning to various degrees were generally classified as either transparent or semitransparent items. this criterion was of course also considered for the categorization of the swedish test items. however, here another factor comes into play for the english idioms: certain key words may make the meaning of an expression more diffuse or totally opaque for an l2 learner than for a native speaker, that is, due to certain key words being either highly infrequent or obsolete or both, the idioms containing these types of items become more difficult to comprehend for an l2 learner than for an l1 learner. items containing such key words were thus categorized as either semitransparent or opaque. although considered, this key word effect, for obvious reasons, did not have an equally great impact when categorizing the swedish test items. for example then, wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve and all his geese are swans were both categorized as fully transparent items since, in addition to not containing any infrequent and/or obsolete key words, and the swedish counterparts for geese and swan being quite similar-looking/sounding (gäss monica karlsson 304 and svan), literal readings of these idioms offer great help in explaining their figurative meaning. he mints gold (money) and a fly in the ointment were both categorized as semitransparent items. in both there are key words, namely mints and ointment, which are either infrequent and/or obsolete, thus preventing the expressions from becoming fully transparent. tongue in cheek and a red herring are both examples of test items that were judged to be opaque to the l2 learners since neither exact translations are possible nor do literal readings help the students to any great extent. tables 1 and 2 show the distribution of transparent, semitransparent and opaque items in the two tests used in the present study. table 1 the number of transparent, semitransparent and opaque idioms in the english test transparent semitransparent opaque general idioms (50 items) 3 20 27 idioms with animals (30 items) 7 6 17 total 10 26 44 table 2 the number of transparent, semitransparent and opaque idioms in the swedish test transparent semitransparent opaque general idioms (50 items) 8 24 18 idioms with animals (30 items) 3 13 14 total 11 37 32 finally, the context offered in connection with the items tested was not considered when the idioms were categorized, since context is not part of the idiom itself. this does not mean, however, that context will not be considered at all. as will be shown, context played indeed a significant role in the comprehension of the l2 idioms tested and its impact will be discussed in the result section. results and discussion table 3 offers the students’ results for both tests for the two test parts separately and the tests as a whole. it also includes the native speaker’s results. as can be seen, the native speaker surpassed the swedish students on both parts of the english test and thus on the test as a whole (native speaker 67.0; swedish learners 37.5). this agrees well with the model of dual idiom representation, which claims that fewer idiom entries will have had time to develop for the l2 learners due to less exposure to the l2. furthermore, unsurprisingly, the swedish students performed significantly better on the swed quantitative and qualitative aspects of l1 (swedish) and l2 (english) idiom comprehension 305 ish test as a whole (69.7) than on the english test (37.5), again agreeing with the model of dual idiom representation. also, if the separate test parts are considered, the swedish students did better on both parts on the swedish test (part a, 43.2; part b, 26.4) than on the corresponding parts on the english test, 22.2 and 15.4 respectively. this is also substantiated by the difference between the sds for the two tests/test parts. in trulsson (2007), a study focusing on swedish learners’ mastery of idioms of varying transparency in their mother tongue, results show that the informants tested chose the right definition (out of four) in 70% of the cases, and that when age was considered, older speakers, mostly between 50 and 65 years of age, achieved 87% correct answers and younger speakers, between the ages of 13 and 16, only 54% correct answers. considering the ages of the learners in the present study, trulsson’s results seem to tally well with the results seen here. table 3 the students’ results on the idiom tests test takers part a, general idioms (50 items) part b, idioms with animals (30 items) parts a and b (80 items) m sd standardized scores m sd standardized scores m sd standardized scores native speaker of english 44.0 23.0 67.0 swedish students, english test 22.2 7,6644 highest: 1.2786 lowest: -2.2441 15.4 6.2541 highest: 1.5350 lowest: -1.8228 37.5 13.6375 highest: 1.3590 lowest: -2.0874 swedish students, swedish test 43.2 5.0455 highest: 0.9513 lowest: -2.0216 26.4 3.0190 highest: 1.1924 lowest: -2.4511 69.7 7.7956 highest: 1.0599 lowest: -2.2748 the swedish students also appear to have done slightly better on the idioms containing animals, 15.4 out of 30 possible (51.3%), than on the idioms containing a mix of different source domains, 22.2 out of 50 possible (44.4%), even though the percentage of opaque idioms is slightly higher in the former category, 17 out of 30 (56.7%), than in the latter, 27 out of 50 (54%). the difference between the standardized scores points in this direction too. this may be due to the fact that animals form a domain which the swedish learners are used to dealing with since, as pointed out before, it is not only a prolific domain in the english language but in swedish, too. this result may, however, be also simply due to the fact that there is a difference between the number of items tested in these two test parts. it is also worth noticing that the score achieved by the native speaker on the english test on the one hand and the swedish speakers’ result on the swedish test on the other hand are remarkably similar on the two test parts separately and thus on the test as a whole. it may be that comprehension of monica karlsson 306 idioms in english and that of idioms in swedish develop in a very similar fashion due to the cognate nature of the two languages. tables 4 and 5 present the students’ results on parts a (general idioms) and b (idioms with animals) for each idiomatic expression on the english and swedish tests respectively, that is, parts a and b have been merged into one table for each language. in both tables the idioms are presented according to the number of correct answers, with the highest-scoring item placed first. when two or more items received the exact same score, the item for which the students showed the greatest accuracy in their evaluation of their knowledge is placed first. in table 4, representing the english test items, the numbers of the idioms indicating how frequent an item is in relation to the others according to the bnc (the first column) are coded so that idioms deemed to be frequent by collins cobuild idioms dictionary (2002) are in bold, idioms included in the dictionary but not judged to be frequent are in italics, and those not included in the dictionary at all, deemed to be infrequent items by the present author, remain in standard text. the idioms themselves (the second column) are also coded. those that were judged to be of a transparent nature according to the criteria discussed earlier are in bold, those that were categorised as semitransparent are in italics and those that were considered to be opaque in character remain in standard text. the students’ evaluation of their knowledge of the idioms is also included in the two tables. for example, idiom b30 (they are birds of a feather), the b indicating that it belongs to part b (idioms with animals) and the number 30 indicating that it was found to be the least frequent of the idioms with animals (there was a total of 30 such idioms), is the idiom which received the second highest score (14 out of 15 students offered the correct meaning of this idiom). it is included in collins cobuild idioms dictionary, but not judged to be frequent, thus b30 is given in italics. the idiom was also categorized as a transparent idiom by the present author and so the idiom itself is therefore in bold. furthermore, 2 students indicated that they knew the idiom (the column headed kn), 1 that the idiom was recognized and thought to be known (tkr), 3 that the item was recognized and that they had used the context to guess its meaning (rc) and, finally, 8 students wrote that they did not know the idiom but that they had used the context to guess its meaning, 7 of whom were successful (nkc). also, since the majority of the students indicated that they did not know the item tested but tried to guess its meaning from the context given, this figure is in bold. the nkr and nk columns indicate items that were either recognized but not known (nkr) or simply not known (nk). quantitative and qualitative aspects of l1 (swedish) and l2 (english) idiom comprehension 307 table 4 the students’ results on and evaluation of part a (general idioms) and part b (idioms with animals) of the english test no. english idiom given in context kn tkr rc nkr nkc nk b13 look like something the cat dragged in (15) 7 3 2 2 b30 they are birds of a feather (14) 2 1 3 8 (1) a25 paint the town red (13) 4 2 2 1 5 1 a33 he’ll get an earful from me (13) 1 3 4 7 (2) b6 let the cat out of the bag (13) 1 3 3 1 5 1 a13 get a word in edgeways (13) 1 3 2 6 2 b12 he wouldn’t say boo to a goose (13) 1 3 8 (1) 1 b4 let sleeping dogs lie (13) 1 1 5 (1) 8 (1) a19 as mad as a hatter (12) 4 3 (1) 3 3 (1) 1 a9 turn the tables on a person (12) 2 8 (1) 2 2 (1) 1 a50 wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve (12) 4 (2) 4 2 4 (1) a37 he is a square peg in a round hole (12) 1 4 (1) 2 5 2 b7 count one’s chickens before they are hatched (12) 1 3 2 (1) 6 2 a39 a busman’s holiday (12) 1 2 9 2 a38 hurt a person to the quick (12) 1 2 9 (1) 2 b10 put a bee in a person’s bonnet (12) 1 (1) 1 3 (1) 8 1 b28 sell a person a pup (12) 1 11 (1) 2 a45 he mints gold (money) (11) 2 1 10 (3) 1 a5 pass the buck (11) 2 (1) 2 2 1 6 2 a18 bring down the house (the house down) (10) 2 4 (1) 6 (2) 1 1 1 b14 a fat cat (10) 1 1 3 (1) 4 (1) 4 (1) a16 through the grapevine (10) 6 3 3 (2) 2 b15 it’s raining cats and dogs (9) 4 4 2 (1) 1 2 (2) 2 a20 every cloud has a silver lining (9) 3 4 (1) 2 1 3 (2) 2 a30 be a turncoat (9) 1 4 (1) 3 (1) 5 (2) 2 b9 gone to the dogs (9) 1 2 3 (1) 6 (2) 3 b16 birds of a feather flock together (9) 1 2 1 1 6 (2) 2 a23 as safe as houses (9) 1 1 (1) 3 (1) 7 (2) 2 b24 he thinks he’s the bee’s knees (9) 1 1 7 (1) 4 a10 when the chips are down (9) 2 (1) 2 (1) 7 (1) 3 b17 fine feathers make fine birds (9) 3 2 8 (5) 1 b29 that cat won’t jump (9) 2 2 (2) 6 3 a12 run (make) rings round a person (9) 1 3 1 5 (2) 3 a22 not on your nelly! (9) 1 4 (1) 6 (2) 3 a42 get in dutch with (9) 1 2 (1) 1 6 4 (1) b26 play the giddy goat (9) 1 10 (3) 3 a26 put a person’s nose out of joint (9) 1 (1) 1 7 (1) 4 a32 get one’s comeuppance (8) 1 1 2 (1) 5 6 b22 get a person’s goat (8) 1 1 5 (1) 6 (1) a24 cross one’s t’s and dot one’s i’s (8) 1 1 (1) 1 6 (1) 3 a44 has it at his fingers’ ends (7) 1 3 8 (5) 2 a43 give it a double take (7) 3 (1) 7 (2) 5 b20 all his geese are swans (7) 1 (1) 2 (1) 1 6 (3) 3 a8 be the worse for wear (6) 1 1 2 2 (1) 8 a14 take the mickey out of a person (6) 2 (1) 1 (1) 1 8 (4) 2 b18 have bats in the belfry (6) 1 4 (3) 7 (4) 2 a29 the pot is calling the kettle black (6) 1 1 (1) 7 (2) 6 monica karlsson 308 a4 it sets my teeth on edge (6) 2 (2) 2 (1) 8 (3) 2 a1 put paid to a thing (6) 1 (1) 11 (6) 2 a7 a flash in the pan (5) 1 (1) 4 (2) 5 (2) 5 b23 get one’s monkey up (5) 1 1 2 6 (4) 4 a11 he is a chip off (of) the old block (5) 2 (1) 2 (1) 2 (1) 3 (1) 5 b27 raise snakes (5) 1 (1) 9 (5) 4 a15 sit (be) on the fence (4) 2 4 (3) 7 (6) 2 b1 a red herring (4) 1 2 (2) 2 (1) 2 4 (3) 4 (1) b5 send a person away with a flea in his ear (4) 1 2 4 (3) 7 (1) a41 don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs (4) 1 9 (7) 4 b21 dressed up like a dog’s dinner (4) 2 (2) 2 (1) 6 (4) 3 b2 a fly in the ointment (4) 1 (1) 1 (1) 8 (5) 4 a34 pushing up (the) daisies (3) 3 1 (1) 2 1 (1) 8 a48 look as if butter would not melt in one’s mouth (3) 1 2 (2) 1 9 (8) 1 a28 he blows hot and cold (3) 1 (1) 2 (1) 9 (7) 2 a46 he’s seventy (years of age) if he’s a day (3) 2 (2) 1 (1) 1 3 8 a6 pay (give) lip service to (3) 1 (1) 1 6 (4) 5 (1) a31 be quids in (3) 1 (1) 1 (1) 1 10 (1) a40 …and bob’s your uncle! (2) 1 1 2 (2) 4 (4) 7 a3 tongue in cheek (2) 2 (2) 2 1 (1) 6 3 a49 play gooseberry (2) 2 (1) 2 4 (4) 5 a36 he has kissed the blarney stone (2) 2 (2) 2 4 (4) 5 b11 go to see a man about a dog (2) 1 (1) 1 2 4 (3) 6 b19 the bulldog breed (2) 2 (1) 2 (2) 11 (1) a27 as keen as mustard (2) 4 (4) 2 (1) 7 (7) 1 b8 there are no flies on her (1) 1 6 (6) 7 (1) a47 it’s all in a day’s work (1) 4 (4) 3 (3) 1 2 (2) 5 (1) b25 it’s a dog’s breakfast (dinner) (1) 2 (2) 6 (5) 6 b3 have a bee in one’s bonnet (1) 1 (1) 2 (2) 7 (6) 3 a2 give tit for tat (1) 2 (2) 1 (1) 7 (7) 4 a17 give a thing (person) a wide berth (0) 1 (1) 1 1 (1) 11 a35 do a double take (0) 1 (1) 1 6 (6) 6 a21 go dutch (0) 2 (2) 1 6 (6) 5 note. test items are listed in order of the number of correct answers starting with the item that received the highest score. kn = the item is known, tkr = the item is recognized and thought to be known, rc = the item is recognized and its meaning guessed based on the context given, nkr = the item is recognized but its meaning is not known, nkc = the item is not known but its meaning is guessed based on the context given, nk = the item is not known table 5 the students’ results on and evaluation of part a (general idioms) and part b (idioms with animals) of the swedish test no. swedish idiom given in context english translation kn tkr rc nkr nkc nk b3 ha fjärilar i magen (15) have butterflies in one’s stomach 14 1 b12 en hund begraven (15) something fishy 12 2 1 a35 bli tagen på sängen (15) become very surprised 11 4 a48 vara bakom flötet (15) be daft 11 4 a10 ta sig i kragen (15) get a grip on oneself 11 3 1 a13 ingen dans på rosor (15) not be all beer and skittles 11 3 1 a21 lägga på ett kol (15) get a move on 11 3 1 quantitative and qualitative aspects of l1 (swedish) and l2 (english) idiom comprehension 309 a24 gå åt som smör i solsken (15) sell like hot cakes 11 3 1 a1 kronan på verket (15) the icing on the cake 10 4 1 a19 sopa under mattan (15) sweep under the carpet 10 3 2 b11 vara spindeln i nätet (15) be the one in charge, behind something 10 3 1 1 b27 göra en groda (15) make a blunder/howler 9 5 1 a22 lägga på is (15) put on ice 9 5 a32 så (att) det visslar om det (15) very energetically 9 4 2 b2 en ulv i fårakläder (15) a wolf in sheep’s clothing 8 6 1 a29 inte för allt smör i småland (15) not for anything in the world 8 6 1 (1) b24 sitta och uggla (15) sit up late and do nothing 8 5 2 a45 inte vara född i farstun (15) not be born yesterday 8 5 2 a50 veta hur landet ligger (15) understand the situation 7 2 2 3 a17 gå på knäna (15) be totally exhausted 6 5 3 1 a11 ligga någon i fatet (15) be handicapped by the fact that . . . 6 4 2 3 b23 hälla vatten på en gås) (15) like water off a duck’s back 5 5 2 2 b14 få bära hundhuvudet (15) be made the scapegoat 5 4 3 3 b25 stå som en åsna mellan hötappar (15) stand like a donkey between two bundles of hay 4 4 1 5 a3 kasta in handduken (14) throw in the towel 14 1 b7 ana ugglor i mossen (14) there is something brewing 12 (1) 3 a30 lägga benen på ryggen (14) run as fast as one can 12 (1) 3 a33 ta något med en klackspark (14) not take a thing too seriously 11 2 2 (1) a28 ha tummen mitt i handen (14) be all fingers and thumbs 10 4 (1) 1 a9 rinna ut i sanden (14) come to nothing 10 2 2 (1) b21 ge sig katten på (14) be absolutely certain about 9 5 1 a16 slå näven i bordet (14) bring one’s fist down on the table 9 6 (1) a47 sitta med skägget i brevlådan (14) be in trouble 9 4 1 1 a5 bära frukt (14) bear fruit 10 (1) 4 1 a34 barka åt skogen (14) go to rack and ruin 8 3 2 (1) 1 (1) 1 b17 gå som katten kring het gröt (14) beat about the bush 7 6 1 1 b10 köpa grisen i säcken (14) buy a pig in a poke 8 (1) 6 1 (1) a15 göra slag i saken (14) go right ahead 8 (1) 5 2 b30 sätta sig på sina höga hästar (14) get on one’s high horse 8 (1) 4 3 b20 få sina fiskar varma (14) get a reprimand 6 4 2 2 1 b18 ha en räv bakom örat (14) be a sly fox 5 5 3 1 b15 sätta myror i huvudet på någon (14) to give a person something to think about 5 6 (1) 2 1 a49 vara i gasen (14) be in high spirits; be tipsy 5 4 2 2 1 b28 kasta ett getöga på (14) take a quick look at 3 6 2 1 (1) 2 1 b9 ta tjuren vid hornen (13) take the bull by the horns 12 (2) 3 a40 stå på näsan (13) fall on one’s face 11 (1) 3 (1) 1 a6 ha is i magen (13) keep one’s cool 10 (1) 4 (1) 1 a8 sitta med armarna i kors (13) not do anything 9 3 1 (1) 2 (1) a37 få blodad tand (13) one’s appetite has been whetted 7 6 (1) 1 1 a7 krypa till korset (13) eat humble pie 7 (1) 6 (1) 2 a31 spotta i nävarna (13) roll up one’s sleeves 7 6 (1) 1 1 a42 bli eld och lågor (13) become very enthusiastic 8 (1) 5 1 (1) a46 salta räkningen (13) salt the bill 6 2 1 4 2 b1 något i hästväg (13) something quite extraordinary 6 (1) 8 1 (1) b22 ha en gås oplockad med någon (13) to have a bone to pick 5 6 3 (1) 1 b26 det osar katt (13) you smell a rat 5 7 (1) 2 1 a36 fika efter (13) hanker after 6 (1) 6 (1) 2 1 monica karlsson 310 b4 det fina i kråksången (13) the beauty of it 4 7 2 2 a20 väcka ont blod (13) stir up bad blood 4 7 (1) 2 (1) 2 b19 kasta pärlor för svin (12) cast pearls before swine 8 4 (1) 1 1 a12 plocka russinen ur kakan (12) take the best plums 7 4 (2) 1 (1) 3 a38 hamna på glasberget (12) be left on the shelf 4 6 1 1 1 2 b29 lägga lök på laxen (12) make matters worse 2 4 3 1 2 2 a26 det är hugget som stucket (11) it comes to the same thing 10 3 (2) 1 (1) 1 a14 måla fan på väggen (11) make things worse than they are 7 4 (1) 2 (1) 1 1 a44 göra en tavla (11) put one’s foot in it 6 4 1 2 (2) 2 a27 få kalla handen (11) be turned down flat 8 (2) 5 (1) 2 (1) b6 ingen ko på isen (11) there’s no great hurry 5 4 (1) 1 1 2 1 a43 bli lång i ansiktet (10) pull a long face 8 (1) 3 3 (3) 1 (1) a41 bita ihop tänderna (10) keep a stiff upper lip 8 (1) 5 (3) 2 (1) a2 bekänna färg (10) confess 8 (3) 2 (1) 3 (1) 1 a18 lägga rabarber på (10) take, walk away with 3 6 (1) 1 1 4 b8 sila mygg och svälja kameler (10) strain a gnat and swallow a camel 1 (1) 4 5 (2) 4 (1) 1 a23 sista skriket (9) the latest fashion 7 2 (1) 2 (1) 3 (3) 1 b16 gå kräftgång (9) move backwards 1 4 (1) 3 4 (2) 3 b13 en gökunge i boet (9) a cuckoo in the nest 1 1 3 4 (1) 4 a25 suga på karamellen (8) enjoy as long as possible 8 (5) 4 2 (1) 1 (1) b5 göra någon en björntjänst (7) do a person a disservice 10 (4 ) 4 (3) 1 (1) a4 en het potatis (7) a hot potato 7 (3) 5 (2) 3 (3) a39 i bara mässingen (7) in one’s birthday suit, naked 6 (2) 4 (2) 2 (1) 2 (2) 1 note. test items are listed in order of the number of correct answers starting with the item that received the highest score. kn = the item is known, tkr = the item is recognized and thought to be known, rc = the item is recognized and its meaning guessed based on the context given, nkr = the item is recognized but its meaning is not known, nkc = the item is not known but its meaning is guessed based on the context given, nk = the item is not known firstly, no frequency effect can be discerned in the students’ results, that is, frequency on its own appears to be a poor predictor of whether a student will know the meaning of an idiom or not. this holds true for both languages. the result thus contradicts the hypothesis put forth by the model of dual idiom representation implying that the frequency of an idioms plays an important role in whether an idiom is known or not. also, as indicated clearly by the results presented in table 3, the students, as expected, did considerably better on the idioms in their native language than in their l2. this result is of course also mirrored in the scores for the individual idioms. whereas in the english material only 8 expressions out of 80 received the top three scores (15-13; see table 4), 59 of the swedish expressions, also 80 in total, received the same top three scores (see table 5). similarly, whereas 15 idioms received 0, 1 or 2 correct answers on the english test, none of the idioms on the swedish test received the same low scores, the lowest score here being 7. furthermore, and more importantly, while there is no obvious concentration of comparatively frequent items in the upper part of table 4, that is, quantitative and qualitative aspects of l1 (swedish) and l2 (english) idiom comprehension 311 frequency appears to have little or no effect on the students’ l2 idiom comprehension, there is a clear concentration of transparent and semitransparent items (items in bold and italics in the second column) in the same part of the table. in fact, whereas none of the 8 english items that received the top three scores (15-13) were opaque in character, 3 items were fully transparent (look like something the cat dragged in, they are birds of a feather and let sleeping dogs lie) and the remaining 5 were semitransparent (paint the town red, he’ll get an earful from me, let the cat out of the bag, get a word in edgeways and he wouldn’t say boo to a goose). the reverse is also true, that is, at the bottom of table 4 there is a clear concentration of idioms that are opaque in nature. of the 15 idioms that received the three lowest scores (0-3), none are fully transparent and only 3 are semitransparent (it’s all in a day’s work, give tit for tat and give a thing (person) a wide berth). also, it is not the case that the transparent/semitransparent items in the upper half, on the one hand, and the opaque items in the bottom half, on the other hand, are of the same type. for example, while let sleeping dogs lie was categorized as a fully transparent item due to the fact that there is a direct semantic counterpart in swedish: väck inte den björn som sover (in which bear is the proverbial animal, not dog), the idiom he is a square peg in a round hole was classified as an equally fully transparent item because of its decomposability. paint the town red and get a word in edgeways were both considered to be semitransparent idioms, but, again, for different reasons. for the former, there is a semantic counterpart in swedish: göra stan osäker, but this is considerably more literal in character than the english one, using the adjective uncertain instead of the colour palette to describe the situation. nevertheless, it was deemed that since the colour red often signals some kind of danger, the students would, with the help of the swedish counterpart, be able to figure out the meaning of the english idiom. get a word in edgeways on the other hand was, in spite of its decomposable nature, categorized as a semitransparent idiom due to the infrequency of the key word edgeways. along the same lines, dressed up like a dog’s dinner, play gooseberry, as keen as mustard and go dutch were all judged to be opaque idioms for different reasons. dressed up like a dog’s dinner was considered to be diffuse for several reasons. first, there is neither a literal nor a semantic counterpart to this idiom in swedish. secondly, it was thought to be a false friend in that the first meaning that comes to mind is not that you are dressed very smartly, but rather the opposite. this was indeed the most common belief among those students who produced an incorrect answer for this expression. play gooseberry was categorized as an opaque item due to its nondecomposability and because the swedish counterpart, vara tredje/femte hjulet under vagnen, is only semantic in character and has monica karlsson 312 no literal similarity. as keen as mustard, for which there is neither a direct literal nor a direct semantic counterpart, can really only be interpreted in one of three ways. either you are very keen or not keen at all or somewhere in between, but there is, as a result of decomposing it, really nothing that tells the learner which of these is the correct one. lastly, go dutch, just like as keen as mustard, does not have a counterpart in swedish (literal or semantic) and its constituent parts, unless its etymology is explained, do not help at all. furthermore, the effect of transparency can also be seen with the errors made by the native speaker. of the 13 incorrect answers given, almost half (6) involved items that were categorized as opaque (sell a person a pup, when the chips are down, that cat won’t jump, get in dutch with, play the giddy goat and do a double take), 4 that were considered to be semitransparent (hurt a person to the quick, give it a double take, raise snakes and a fly in the ointment) and only 3 involved idioms that were classified as fully transparent (be a turncoat, fine feathers make fine birds and all his geese are swans). when the students’ results on the swedish test are considered, a slightly different picture emerges. whereas there is some concentration of fully transparent idioms (items in bold, the second column) in the upper half of table 5, there is no such concentration of semitransparent items (items in italics, also the second column). instead the semitransparent idioms appear to be almost equally common among those expressions that received high scores as among those that received comparatively low scores. the fact that transparency appears to have less an impact on the students’ mother tongue than in their l2 tallies well with trulsson (2007), discussed earlier in connection with the students’ means. it needs to be pointed out here that even though many of the students offered correct translations for quite a few of the english idioms, this does not entail that they knew the meaning of these expressions before taking the test. as the reader can see, in quite a few cases the students primarily made use of the context in which the idioms were presented in order to be able to offer a correct translation (the nkc column). as many as 358 out 619 context-based inferences were successful (57.8%) on the english test. this result can be compared to cooper (1999), discussed in the theoretical background section, in which 57% of all the correctly guessed idioms were due to successful inferencing. in fact, for only two idioms in the present study: look like something the cat dragged in and as mad as a hatter, the majority of the students indicated that they actually knew them. thus the students’ evaluation of their knowledge of the english idioms, which reflects their results to a high degree, can be divided into two parts. for those items receiving 15-6 correct answers, of which, as discussed above, a majority of the idioms are fully transparent or semitransparent, most of the students indicated in most cases that they used the context when quantitative and qualitative aspects of l1 (swedish) and l2 (english) idiom comprehension 313 interpreting the expressions. for those idioms receiving the lowest scores (5-0), on the other hand, of which a majority are totally opaque in nature, the students indicated that they simply did not know the idiom in question (the nk column). this stands in stark contrast to the students’ evaluation and result with the swedish idioms. in table 5, it can be seen that for two thirds of the expressions, the majority of the students are in most cases absolutely sure that they know the meaning of the idiom in question. it is not until at the very bottom of the table that the students’ uncertainty of the meaning of the idioms starts to emerge. even here, with the idioms that received comparatively low scores, the students’ hesitation is not very great, simply indicating that they think they know the meaning (the second column) rather than be sure. the results described above tally well with the model of dual idiom representation. according to the studies forming the basis of this theory, since l2 learners have to rely heavily on their mother tongue when trying to interpret l2 idioms, not having created as many idiom entries in their l2 as in their l1, they are also more inclined to try to decompose l2 idioms than native speakers are. unsurprisingly, this technique, as seen in table 4, works well with expression that are transparent and semitransparent, but not with opaque ones, hence the concentration of the former two types in the upper part of the table and the corresponding concentration of the latter type in the bottom part. the reverse is of course true for the students’ results with the swedish idioms for which they already have a lot of idiom entries and therefore do not have to resort to literal readings of the idiom constituents. these advanced students are thus not as dependent on transparency in their mother tongue as they are in their l2. tables 6-11 present the students’ individual scores on the two test parts separately and on the test as a whole in english and swedish respectively. for 10 of the 15 students there is a clear correlation between their knowledge of idioms in their l1 and the number of idioms they understand in the language they are in the process of learning. as many as 6 of these 10 students (indicated in bold), namely students 2, 5, 8, 9, 11 and 14, have consistently high scores on both test parts in both languages, all displaying results above the mean on both test parts and thus on the tests as a whole. in contrast, the other four students (indicated in italics), namely students 1, 4, 10 and 13, achieved only low scores on both test parts in both languages, all displaying results below the mean on all parts. it may be that learners who are good at processing idiomatic expressions in their mother tongue, that is, students who have developed successful strategies and thus created a great number of idiom entries in their l1, are subconsciously able to transfer their techniques to an l2. as discussed in connection with table 4, one of the techniques proven to be used excessively by the students included in the present study was to make use of the context in which the monica karlsson 314 expressions were offered. this may thus be a technique already acquired in their l1 and now made use of when faced with idioms in an l2. table 6 the students’ individual scores on part a (general idioms) of the english test (50 items) student no. score 14 32 2 31 11 29 5 28 8 28 9 27 15 26 3 23 4 22 13 20 7 18 10 17 12 14 1 13 6 5 table 8 the students’ individual scores on part b (idioms with animals) of the english test (30 items ) student no. score 2 25 5 22 3 21 8 21 9 20 14 20 11 18 15 17 12 13 4 12 10 11 13 11 1 9 7 7 6 4 table 7 the students’ individual scores on part a (general idioms) of the swedish test (50 items) student no. score 8 48 11 48 14 48 9 47 12 47 2 46 6 46 5 44 7 44 3 43 10 42 13 41 15 38 1 33 4 33 table 9 the students’ individual scores on part b (idioms with animals) of the swedish test (30 items) student no. score 9 30 11 30 14 30 5 29 2 27 7 27 8 27 12 27 15 27 6 26 3 25 10 25 13 25 1 22 4 19 quantitative and qualitative aspects of l1 (swedish) and l2 (english) idiom comprehension 315 table 10 the students’ individual scores on parts a and b on the english test (80 items) student no. total score 2 56 14 52 5 50 8 49 9 47 11 47 3 44 15 43 4 34 13 31 10 28 7 25 12 25 1 22 6 9 table 11 the students’ individual scores on parts a and b on the swedish test (80 items) student no. total score 11 78 14 78 9 77 8 75 12 74 2 73 5 73 7 73 6 72 3 68 10 67 13 66 15 65 1 55 4 52 there are also a few students who did consistently well in their native language only, but poorly in their l2. student 12, for example, who is the oldest of the subjects included in the investigation (49 years old), did consistently well on the two swedish test parts, which agrees with trulsson’s study (2007) discussed in connection with table 3, but achieved only mediocre or low scores on the english test parts. this student had not studied english for quite some time before taking these vocabulary tests and his english (spoken as well as written) was indeed very poor. conclusions and implications since idiomatic expressions form a natural part of the lexicon of native speakers and, as the present study has shown, advanced native speakers usually have a good command of the meaning of these types of expressions, idioms should be an integral part of all courses aiming to teach l2 vocabulary. the main goal when teaching idiomatic expressions is to find a strong enough incentive for the l2 learners, since they very often perceive these expressions to be infrequent and thus not very important to learn. as discussed in the introduction, while idioms occur quite infrequently in some registers, they are comparatively common in others. based on dictionaries like collins cobuild idioms dictionary (2002), which makes a distinction between frequently used items and less frequently used items, teachers could start with the most common idioms illustrating their use with examples from, for instance, the world of sitcoms or other types of programmes that are seen to produce a monica karlsson 316 range of idiomatic expressions, thus making the idioms even more accessible by contextualising them. based on the present author’s experience, this would make the students aware of the prolific nature of certain idioms and as a result increase their eagerness to learn. this approach should not only be taken with l2 idioms, but also with idioms in a learners’ l1 since, as shown in the present investigation, for many learners, l1 idiom knowledge appears to tally with their mastery of idioms in their l2. put differently, learners who know a large number of idioms in their native language, that is, learners that have created a great many idiom entries in their l1, have most likely developed, during the process of acquiring this knowledge, idiom comprehension techniques that may be transferred and made use of when encountering idioms in an l2. collaboration between instructors teaching students’ mother tongue and instructors teaching l2s therefore seems very important. furthermore, since students seem to approach idioms in terms of whether they are transparent or not, teachers should perhaps start with idioms for which literal readings will help the students understand their figurative meaning and then move on to idiomatic expressions that are more opaque in character. discussing source domains and offering etymological elaboration of idioms seem to be beneficial roads to take when explaining the meaning of idiomatic expressions to students (boers, demecheleer, & eyckmans, 2004). quantitative and qualitative aspects of l1 (swedish) and l2 (english) idiom comprehension 317 references abdullah, k., & jackson, h. 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(1994). the role of semantic transparency in the processing and representation of dutch compounds. language and cognitive processes, 9, 341-368. 495 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (3). 2015. 495-499 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.3.8 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book reviews teacher development in action author: magdalena kubanyiova publisher: palgrave macmillan, 2012 isbn: 9780230232587 pages: 220 in teacher development in action, magdalena kubanyiova addresses the complexity of language teachers’ conceptual change by analyzing the “failure” of a teacher development (td) course. with its solid theoretical foundations, this book might be of prime interest to researchers, especially those who acknowledge the immense complexity of teacher development. at the same time, it also holds relevance for a broader readership including teacher educators, policy makers, school administrators, and even language teachers themselves, seeking to gain insights into the problems they face in their own areas of work. as the author admits, this book does not offer nice, easy solutions; what it offers instead as a takeaway for everyone is a heavy sense of recognition of the empirical messiness of education, human learning, and human change. as a reader who primarily belongs to the first category, that of language teaching researchers, i was particularly intrigued by the process whereby the author rigorously and deliberately attempted to approach this very messiness to account for her participant teachers’ failure to experience fundamental conceptual change as a result of td input. framed within a bigger picture, her inquiry 496 into the psychology of these teachers contributes greatly to the growing body of research that posits the centrality of psychological factors in the study of language education and stresses the importance of approaching such factors in a nuanced, holistic, situated manner. the book consists of ten chapters. chapter 1 convincingly presents the author’s rationale for writing a book on failure. as soon as we open the book, we are invited to share the author’s genuine question. why did this td course fail to inspire real conceptual change in spite of all of its “right” conditions for success: conscientious, hard-working and highly qualified teachers; course content informed by the latest developments in applied linguistics as well as developed with a recognition of the teachers’ experiential knowledge; and delivery of such input in a caring and supportive environment? to answer this question, kubanyiova decided not to settle on easy explanations such as individual differences in teacher learning, the unfavorable sociocultural context or an ineffective course design; instead, she chose to conduct an in-depth anatomy of the failure with the belief that it would open up a new space for exploration into the complexity of the issue. this rationale well resonates with hattie (2009), who pointed out the absence of any real impact of “so many published articles, so many reports providing directions, so many professional development sessions advocating this or that method” (p. 3; this is also cited by kubanyiova on p. 3). as readers, we immediately recognize the potential value of this endeavor because we can probably identify in our own lives at least a few—in my case a great many—examples of failure of this kind. the next three chapters are dedicated to legitimately situating this book in academic research. we explore in chapter 2 the concept of teacher conceptual change as the author guides us through the general education and education psychology literatures. among some key notions we come across in this chapter is the difference between assimilation and accommodation. the former is regarded as rather superficial change where new information is simply added to the teacher’s existing knowledge, whereas the latter is more “significant and worthwhile” in that it involves the restructuring of the teacher’s conceptual system. it is specifically the latter that kubanyiova calls conceptual change, and this book is all about her investigation into why it is so difficult to make this happen. with a good grasp of the concept in question, we then move on to chapter 3 to see comprehensive reviews of three theories of learning and change in psychology: attitude change, conceptual change, and possible selves. those with a research-oriented motivation in choosing this book might be interested to see how kubanyiova synthesizes these frameworks to develop a theoretical model of language teacher conceptual change (ltcc), whose full explanation is provided in chapter 4. ltcc draws mainly on the cognitive-affective model of conceptual 497 change (camcc; gregoire, 2003), which, according to kubanyiova, is the most comprehensive theoretical model for teacher conceptual change currently available. ltcc complements camcc with some additional constructs such as the process of reform input appraisal (i.e., whether input leads to the teacher’s systematic cognitive scrutiny), the self-implication mechanism (i.e., whether reform input induces compatible future self images), and the dynamic and cyclical nature of the concept change process (i.e., whether the initial accommodation state is sustained overtime). in chapter 5, we see a thorough description of the research methods used in the study on which this book is based, and i believe this makes an informative methodological resource for qualitative researchers. then we finally reach the results section in chapters 6 to 9. the author employs ltcc to fully analyze some cases where the td course brought about no true conceptual change (i.e., accommodation) in her eight research participants. chapters 6 to 8 present three prototypical paths to “failure,” and the essence of each of these routes is neatly captured in their metaphorical labels, “nice-but-not-for-me,” “couldn’t-agree-more,” and “nice-but-too-scary.” these three chapters demonstrate the explanatory power of ltcc as a theoretical model, proving with empirical evidence its potential transferability to other teacher education settings. however, we realize a true strength of this model in the next chapter, where kubanyiova uses ltcc to illuminate the evolving, dynamic, multifarious nature of two participant teachers’ developmental paths. here we witness “messy” life-size pictures of teachers who start engaging with new ideas to make deep connections among the reform input, their future visions, and their teaching contexts. kubanyiova shows us how ltcc can accommodate this messiness and allow us better, if not full, understandings of the complex phenomenon of teacher change. to conclude the book, chapter 10 introduces complexity theory as a helpful conceptual framework for further inquiry into language teachers’ conceptual change. one of the most impressive features of this book for me was the fact that it challenges the complexity of teacher development deliberately (in the sense that the author joins this battle armed with solid theoretical foundations and rich empirical data), and at the same time humbly (in the sense that she consistently acknowledges her inability to win the battle completely). on the humble side, the depth of her discussions in chapter 9 about the cyclical and dynamic process of teacher conceptual change made me reconsider my own definition of the “success” of teacher education courses. if change is an inherent part of life, then the effects of any td input might need to be evaluated for the span of teachers’ career and lifetime trajectories. not only that, we should also keep in mind the microas well as the macrocontexts of the classroom which influence teachers’ minute-by-minute practice. given these, it seems indeed 498 impossible to claim any concrete conceptual change after any particular td input. a great contribution of this book relating to this point is that it offers us an empirically validated theoretical tool, ltcc, not to help us find clear-cut answers to all the emerging questions in our inquiry, but to guide us in our sustained wondering. this is in no sense a surrender to the tremendous complexity of the object of our inquiry. modest as it is, it is also a courageous attitude for a researcher to take, and it is this balance between humbleness and boldness (both based on the wealth of her academic expertise) she maintains from cover to cover that makes this book so rich, deep, and convincing. this book also has a lot to offer to those who are not particularly interested in the psychology of language teachers. for one, it provides an opportunity to learn about the social, historical and cultural macrostructures of english education in slovakia. what is depicted in the book was quite different from what i have experienced as an english teacher (and as a researcher of english teachers) in my own country. anyone engaged in the language teaching profession would be interested to get a glimpse of this socially and historically unique setting to be reminded of the immense diversity of language teachers’ experience, which resonates well with the author’s call to expand the geographical scope in language teacher research. in addition, i must not forget to emphasize that the richness of the empirical data of the eight participant teachers is the most fundamental constituent of this book. their interview excerpts especially amazed me with their openness about their self images, their perceptions of the td course, and the issues in their teaching contexts. the author skillfully weaves these teachers’ voices (and also her own voice as a researcher and teacher educator) into her analyses of their development. like many other wellwritten in-depth case studies, the mid-chapters of this book fascinate us with engaging stories of real teachers—their careers, life goals, motivations, struggles, and aspirations. these lively images helped me make connections with those teachers, like myself, who live on the other side of the globe but still engage in the same teaching profession and struggle every day with similar issues. the images have also encouraged me to wonder how they are evolving as teachers today even after the end of this research project, and i find myself doing this with a sense of hope. dealing initially with stories of “failure,” teacher development in action is not a book on defeat, but as kubanyiova herself claims, is one on hope. it is a steady step forward toward success. reviewed by masako kumazawa j. f. oberlin university, tokyo, japan kumazawa@obirin.ac.jp 499 references gregoire, m. (2003). is it a challenge or a threat? a dual-process model of teachers’ cognition and appraisal processes during conceptual change. educational psychology review, 15(2), 147-179. hattie, j. (2009). visible learning: a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. london: routledge. 591 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (4). 2014. 591-592 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.4.1 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial the present issue of studies in second language learning and teaching closes the fourth year of its existence, a year that can be regarded as extremely successful in bearing witness to further rise of the journal in the field. on the one hand, this success is primarily evident to the editors since it manifests itself in a greater number of submissions, a dramatic increase in the quality of papers considered for publication, the visibly greater ease with which we have been able to find suitable reviewers, many of whom are renowned figures in applied linguistics and second and foreign language acquisition and, last but not least, on a more practical note, the ability to stick to the publication schedule. on the other hand, this success is also evident to the readers, not only because of the value of the papers that appear in the journal, but also the fact that two special issues have been published this year, one on positive psychology and the other on the role of age in language learning. i would like to express my sincere gratitude to the guest editors, tammy gregersen and peter macintyre, and david singleton, not only for taking the time and effort to put together the two excellent issues, but also for their unfailing support for the journal in the capacity of both authors and reviewers. it looks like the next year will be equally, if not more, successful, not least because we expect another round of high-quality, state-of-the-art special issues and an array of excellent papers. the editorial team will surely do their best to ensure that this will in fact be the case and that ssllt will continue on the path to securing its place as an influential journal in our field. the present issue brings together five papers, all of which report the results of original empirical studies. in the first of them, rebecca oxford demonstrates that heralding the demise of research into learning strategies is at best premature and, grounding her study in well-being theory (seligman, 2011), drawn from positive psychology, she discusses two cases of chinese learners of english, who differ in the extent to which their approach to language learning can be described as strategic. analyzing their narrative learner histories, she shows that positive emotions, as op592 posed to negatives ones, are likely to drive the process forward and that the theoretical framework selected can not only aid our understanding of successes and failures in second language learning but provide as well a basis for pedagogic interventions. in the next paper, danuta główka focuses on the impact of gender on attainment in language learning for a large sample of polish learners of english at the secondary and tertiary level. in line with the results of previous research, she offers evidence that females are likely to be more successful, even though the role of this factor is downplayed by both teachers and learners, and provides on this basis a handful of guidelines for language policy makers as well as teachers. colleen neary-sundquist, in turn, directs our attention to the realm of pragmatics by reporting the findings of a study which investigated the use of pragmatic markers in english as a foreign language by chinese and korean university-level students, both with respect to the frequency of this use and the variety of expressions employed. the analysis of speech samples from a computer-delivered test of oral proficiency revealed that the rate of use of pragmatic markers increases gradually together with proficiency, with a dramatic rise at highest levels, leading to almost native-like performance, a pattern that was mirrored to some extent in the case of the range of expressions used. in the subsequent paper, sasha s. euler sets out to determine the effectiveness of a connected speech-based approach to pronunciation instruction, focusing on raising students’ awareness of the role of prosodic features, and provides evidence that such pedagogic intervention can positively affect the mastery of connected speech and prosody. in the last contribution, rupert walsh and mark wyatt discuss the findings of a case study of three teachers of english as a foreign language in adult education in the united kingdom, showing that harmony between methodological principles, teacher cognitions and classroom practices cannot be taken for granted due to the influence of a range of contextual variables. i am confident that the papers will provide an inspiration for researchers to further pursue the issues touched upon, thus contributing to our greater understanding of how second and foreign languages are learnt, as well as how they can more beneficially be taught. mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references seligman, m. e. p. (2011). flourish: a visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. new york: atria/simon & schuster. 451 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (2). 2023. 451-469 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.38282 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt content teachers’ and lecturers’ corrective feedback in emi classes in high school and university settings jiye hong sungkyunkwan university, seoul, south korea https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8035-3065 jhon860@skku.edu abstract to date, very limited research interest has been given to the strategies englishmedium instruction (emi) teachers or lecturers deploy to provide corrective feedback (cf) on the language use to their students during class interaction. in other words, when emi teachers incidentally focus on students’ problematic language use, how do they correct it – providing explicit correction or using recast or elicitation? this article reports on a study that examined cf types emi teachers and lecturers used during classroom discourse, drawing on data collected from classroom observations and recordings of six different emi classes in high school and university settings in korea. the frequency and types of cf used in reactive language-related episodes (lres) were identified in the emi classes and compared between the two settings and across disciplines (social science, mathematics, and computer science). findings showed that all the emi teachers and lecturers offered cf to their students but with different frequency; the schoolteachers offered cf more frequently than the university lecturers. also, the schoolteachers used more various types of cf than the lecturers. in both settings, cf occurred most frequently in mathematics compared to the other two disciplines. this article ends with suggestions for ways the findings of this study can be used to raise emi teachers’ awareness of various options for providing cf on students’ linguistic errors during their incidental teaching practices. keywords: emi; corrective feedback; language-related episodes; second language acquisition; disciplinary literacy mailto:jhon860@skku.edu jiye hong 452 1. introduction research on english-medium instruction (emi) has reported that emi teachers or lecturers do not consider teaching or correcting english as a part of their role (aguilar, 2017; airey, 2012; margic & vodopija-krstanovic, 2017). recent classroom-based studies, however, provide empirical evidence that emi teachers or lecturers in various disciplines support their students with language by taking quick moments to offer information about linguistic items or correct students’ linguistic errors in class interaction in emi settings (an et al., 2019; basturkmen & shackleford, 2015; costa, 2012; hong, 2022; hong & basturkmen, 2020; martinez et al., 2021). in second language acquisition (sla) literature, such moments have been termed language-related episodes (lres), which are defined as “instances when teachers and learners talk about the language they are producing, question their language use, or correct themselves or others” (basturkmen & shackleford, 2015, p. 89). lres are divided into two types: pre-emptive lres and reactive lres. the former occur “regardless of any perceived linguistic errors or linguistic questions” (hong & basturkmen, 2020, p. 5). according to ellis et al. (2002), pre-emptive lres address a gap in students’ knowledge about linguistic items. the latter refers to lres that “arise in response to perceived linguistic errors or because a participant fails to comprehend something that another has said” (hong & basturkmen, 2020, p. 5). previous studies on lres in emi settings have found that emi teachers or lecturers used both pre-emptive and reactive lres as a means to integrate the focus on language into their content teaching seamlessly and smoothly (basturkmen & shackleford, 2015; costa, 2012; doiz & lasagabaster, 2021). also, these studies have shown somewhat similar findings that the teachers or lecturers initiated lres far more frequently than their students. they also initiated lres mostly pre-emptively rather than reactively. the lower frequency of reactive lres in the emi classrooms reported in the previous studies is not surprising. as the explicit focus of emi classes is on disciplinary content education, emi teachers or lecturers would not pay much attention to students’ linguistic errors that incidentally occur during classroom interaction. also, emi teachers or lecturers are usually not trained to correct students’ linguistic errors. thus, they may be confused by whether and how they should address linguistic errors that unexpectedly arise during classroom interaction (jacobson, 2015) or unsure about the effects of providing a correction. they may also be concerned about the possibility that their correction of students’ linguistic errors would demotivate or put a burden on their students. however, williams (2001) argues that students can profit considerably from teachers’ feedback on their linguistic errors in reactive lres. a recent study (hong, 2021b) in the south korean context examined the effects of lres on students’ learning of language items in high school and university settings by administering content teachers’ and lecturers’ corrective feedback in emi classes in high school and university settings 453 a tailor-made language test. it has been confirmed that student-initiated, pre-emptive lres were the most effective in students’ learning of the target language items; however, reactive lres initiated by the teachers were also effective. that is, despite the transient nature of lres, the students were able to learn the correct forms or ways of using the language items that had been previously corrected by the teachers in reactive lres. hong (2021a) suggests that emi teachers’ corrective feedback (cf) does not necessarily impede the flow of classroom discourse in emi classrooms and that lres with cf can be of benefit to students who thus notice a gap in their knowledge about a language item and learn their second language (l2) in a meaningful way. to date, however, very limited research interest has been given to the ways emi teachers or lecturers correct their students’ language use in classroom interactions. before making any claims about the effects of emi, it is crucial to observe what actually happens in emi classrooms. given that lres provide meaningful opportunities for students in emi settings to learn how language is used in a discipline (basturkmen & shackleford, 2015; martinez et al., 2021), it is crucial to examine the strategies that emi teachers with various discipline backgrounds deploy to provide their students with cf in their classes. the current study aimed to provide an illustration of the cf types used in six emi classes, three in high school (economics, politics, and mathematics) and three in university settings (accounting, computer science, and mathematics). it examined the frequency and types of cf that occurred during class interaction in emi settings and compared the types of cf across the disciplines. 2. literature review 2.1. oral cf in english as a second language (esl) classrooms corrective feedback has been defined as responses that “learners receive on the linguistic errors they make in their oral or written production in l2” (sheen & ellis, 2011, p. 593). cognitive theories, including the interactional hypothesis (long, 1996), the output hypothesis (swain, 1995), and the noticing hypothesis (schmidt, 2001), have emphasized that cf facilitates the process of l2 acquisition by providing learners with an opportunity to notice the gap and to repair or correct the linguistic errors they have made. sla research that investigated strategies teachers used to correct learners’ oral linguistic errors arising during classroom interactions has consistently shown that recasts were the most frequently used cf type in the esl context (e.g., loewen, 2002; lyster & ranta, 1997; zhao & bitchener, 2007), supporting seedhouse’s (2001) claim that teachers prefer recasts because of its non-threatening jiye hong 454 and unobtrusive nature. also, previous studies in the esl context examined the effects of various cf types in esl classrooms, using uptake and repair as measures. uptake refers to “an optional student move that occurs in episodes where learners have demonstrated a gap in their knowledge,” in reaction to the teacher’s implicit or explicit provision of information about linguistic features (ellis et al., 2001, p. 286). an influential study by lyster and ranta (1997) examined the frequency of the oral cf type used in french immersion classrooms. they identified six types of oral cf, including explicit correction, clarification requests, recasts, elicitation, metalinguistic feedback, and repetition, and found that recasts were used the most often despite the finding that they were the least likely to lead to students’ uptake. the study also showed that three types of cf, that is, metalinguistic feedback, clarification requests, and repetition, led to students’ successful uptake the most. many researchers have classified cf types in terms of the degree of implicitness and explicitness. sheen and ellis (2011) have developed a taxonomy of oral cf types in classroom discourse, which includes the distinction between input-providing (correct form provision) and output-prompting (attempt to elicit learners’ self-correction) cf and the distinction between implicit and explicit cf. implicit cf occurs “when the teacher simply requests clarification in response to the learner’s erroneous utterance,” and explicit cf occurs “when the teacher directly corrects the learner and/or provides some kind of metalinguistic explanation of the error” (sheen & ellis, 2011, p. 593). milla and mayo (2014) have also classified cf types in accordance with the explicitness of correction. figure 1 illustrates the continuum of the cf strategies in order of the degree of explicitness, with recasts being the most implicit and explicit correction being the most explicit. the present study draws on lyster and ranta’s (1997) and milla and mayo’s (2014) classification of cf types and definitions of each type. figure 1 continuum of cf types (milla & mayo, 2014, p. 4) loewen (2002) explored the effects of form-focused episodes (ffes) on l2 learners’ subsequent learning of the targeted language items in l2 communicative esl classrooms, using tailor-made language tests. he found that in this setting, the two most commonly used cf types were recasts and informs (51.4% and 36.8%, respectively), distantly followed by prompts, clarification requests, and repeats. loewen (2002) also found that elicitation of responses was significantly content teachers’ and lecturers’ corrective feedback in emi classes in high school and university settings 455 more effective in leading to students’ successful uptake than the provision of the language information. sheen (2004) compared teachers’ use of cf and learners’ uptake arising in four different l2 communicative classroom contexts, that is, french immersion, canada esl, new zealand esl, and korean esl, drawing on lyster and ranta’s (1997) cf type taxonomy. similar to the findings of the previous studies, sheen found that recasts were the most dominant cf type, which accounted for over 50% in all four classes. despite the high frequency, however, recasts led to the lowest rate of learner uptake, and explicit correction also resulted in a lower rate of learner uptake. in contrast, the other less frequent cf types, including elicitation, clarification requests, metalinguistic feedback, and repetition, led to a high rate of learner uptake. the study also found that the effectiveness measured by learner uptake or repair and the nature of recasts significantly differed according to the instructional settings. a study by panova and lyster (2002) investigated the types of cf and the relationship between cf types and learner uptake in adult esl classes in canada. the teachers in the study used recasts the most frequently; however, other cf types, such as elicitation, repetitions, clarification requests, and metalinguistic feedback, were more effective for learner uptake or repair. the researchers explain that because recasts involve the reformulation of learners’ erroneous utterances with correct linguistic forms, they are not necessarily followed by learners’ responses. lyster and mori (2006) compared cf in french immersion and japanese immersion classrooms in the elementary school setting. they found that the proportion of linguistic errors the teachers corrected was similar in both classrooms. also, the predominant cf type was recasts, and the explicit correction was infrequently used in both settings. however, the patterns of students’ uptake and repair in relation to cf types varied between the classes; in the french immersion classroom, it was prompts that resulted in the highest frequency of repair, whereas in the japanese immersion classroom, it was recasts. the authors suggested the counterbalance hypothesis, which argues that in the meaning-focused french classroom, the teacher’s use of prompts, a form-focused strategy, led to more students’ uptake. on the other hand, in the formfocused japanese classroom, an implicit or more meaning-focused strategy such as recasts led to more student uptake and repair. the authors further assert a need for the balanced use of different cf strategies in accordance with the focus of classes to help students notice their linguistic gaps. in a recent study on oral cf in chinese as a second language (csl) classrooms in a chinese university, bao (2019) examined and compared csl teachers’ practices and beliefs regarding cf. bao found that the csl teachers in a chinese university corrected most of the linguistic errors (71.6%) using recasts most frequently (52.8%). in the interview all the csl teachers agreed on the importance of jiye hong 456 cf provision and consideration of student factors (e.g., personality, preferences) when providing cf for students’ l2 development and ability to communicate accurately and appropriately. in terms of the thoughts about the frequency of cf, some teachers in the study reported providing cf infrequently because of the possibility of interruption of the flow of class, while the others reported their frequent use of cf. the study also reported some discordance between csl teachers’ beliefs about cf and their actual practices; the teachers thought elicitation and repetition to be preferred by students, which they rarely used in practice. also, the frequency of cf that the teachers perceived was much higher than the actual frequency of cf. yüksel et al. (2021) investigated the oral cf beliefs and actual practices of 20 esl teachers in an intensive esl program in a turkish university. the data were collected from the transcripts of the video recordings of the classes and stimulated recall interviews with the teachers and the results of a tailor-made task for the teachers. the study found that the teachers’ perceived effectiveness of oral cf was approximately 65%. also, teachers’ stated cf percentage and actual practices showed a similar ratio (63% and 68% respectively). in terms of linguistic focus of oral cf, the teachers were found to provide more cf for vocabulary errors (69%) followed by pronunciation errors (68.5%) and grammatical errors (50.5%). incongruence was found between the teachers’ beliefs and practices regarding the timing of cf provision; they provided far more immediate cf in practice than they had believed (79.6% and 48% respectively) and less delayed cf in practice than was their expectation (20.4% and 52% respectively). the teachers’ beliefs and practices were similar regarding recasts and elicitations as the types of cf that they favored the most. previous studies using meta-analysis have reported that oral cf is an effective means by which teachers provide language learners with scaffolding to support their l2 learning in esl classrooms (e.g., li, 2010; lyster & saito, 2010; norris & ortega, 2000). a study by li (2010) found that explicit cf had greater immediate effects on l2 acquisition; however, it was implicit cf whose effects were more sustainable. a meta-analysis by lyster and saito (2010) has shown that prompts were more effective for l2 learning than recasts in esl classroom settings, a different finding from the ones reported in previous studies (e.g., lyster & ranta, 1997; sheen, 2004), and that cf was more beneficial for younger learners than older learners. li (2014) found that explicit cf was more effective for learners with low l2 proficiency level, while both explicit and implicit cf was equally beneficial for advanced proficiency level learners. 2.2. oral cf in content classrooms recent research has compared cf strategies used in esl and content classrooms. schuitemaker-king (2013) compared the frequency and types of cf arising in content teachers’ and lecturers’ corrective feedback in emi classes in high school and university settings 457 content-language integrated learning (clil) classes, bilingual esl classes, and non-bilingual esl classes in the netherlands. overall, nine different types of cf strategies were identified in the data. the study found that the cf strategies were most frequent in bilingual esl classes, followed by clil classes and nonbilingual esl classes. also, the frequently used cf strategies differed between the classes. in the clil classes, three cf strategies, modification and addition to an answer, recasts, and clarification requests, occurred most frequently. in both bilingual and non-bilingual esl classes, metalinguistic comment in the l2 was most commonly used, whereas it was the least used strategy in the clil classes. a study by milla and mayo (2014) investigated cf episodes in classroom interaction in esl and clil (business) classes in a spanish high school. the study found that while the esl teacher used various cf types, the clil teacher mainly used recasts. the cf strategies the esl teacher used were more explicit than those used by the clil teacher. also, the findings of the study indicated that cf had a significant effect on students’ uptake in the esl classes but not in the clil classes. there is an sla context that has scarcely been researched, namely, the emi context. emi is expected to provide esl students with opportunities for natural acquisition of academic english. many studies have shown that content teachers in emi settings had a role of facilitating their students’ academic english development even though they did not have sufficient knowledge about l2 teaching and learning (e.g., martinez et al., 2021). moreover, findings from the previous emi studies (e.g., doiz & lasagabaster, 2021) have shown differences in terms of the frequency and types of lres across disciplines. it is possible that the ways emi teachers correct students’ linguistic errors vary according to their disciplinary backgrounds. thus, there is a need for research that examines the strategies emi teachers use to correct students’ linguistic errors during their content teaching practices and compares them with those adopted by esl teachers or specialists. a limited amount of information about cf used in emi settings led to the present study. it was part of a broader investigation into classroom discourse in emi classes across disciplines, which aimed to examine whether emi teachers and students initiate lres during content classes, and if so, how these lres occurred. the present study examined the extent to which emi teachers and lecturers corrected their students’ linguistic errors and the types of cf they used to address linguistic errors during their incidental teaching. also, this study compared the use of cf between two settings and across disciplines. this study was guided by the following research questions: 1. to what extent do emi teachers/lecturers correct students’ linguistic errors during teacher-student interaction in high school and university settings? 2. what types of cf do emi teachers/lecturers use to address students’ linguistic errors in teacher-student interaction in these settings? jiye hong 458 3. what are the similarities and differences regarding the frequency and types of cf between the two settings? 3. methodology 3.1. setting and participants this study was conducted in three different emi classes in two high schools, one public and one private, and three different emi classes in a university in south korea (see table 1). the high schools taught all content subjects except languages and korean history through english with the aim of preparing korean l1 students’ transition to he overseas. all the students in this study were korean l1 speakers except 19 international students in the accounting class in the university who had neither korean nor english as their l1. table 1 information on research settings subject l1 of teacher/ lecturer years of teaching number of students length of recordings (minutes) a high school (public) economics korean 8 years 27 214 mathematics english 7 years 23 203 b high school (private) politics english 11 years 25 256 c university accounting chinese 6 years 42 480 mathematics english 7 years 31 357 computer science vietnamese 4 years 35 245 1,755 3.2. data collection and analysis the data for the present study comprise reactive lres identified in the recordings of the six emi classes, part of the data collected in hong and basturkmen (2020) and hong (2021a, 2021b). this study used different research questions and data analysis methods from the ones used in hong and basturkmen (2020) and hong (2021a, 2021b). the data were collected using classroom observation and audio recordings. four lessons of each emi class were observed and audiorecorded. the researcher was present during the observation in order to take field notes. class recordings were verbatim transcribed by the researcher, and lres were identified in the transcriptions of the class recording. the first analysis was carried out to examine to what extent the teachers or lecturers corrected students’ linguistic errors during teacher-student interaction. students’ linguistic errors were identified in the transcriptions of class recordings and coded for either corrected (reactive lre) or not corrected. example content teachers’ and lecturers’ corrective feedback in emi classes in high school and university settings 459 1 shows a student’s linguistic error (y is same as) that the mathematics teacher did not pay attention to. example 1 (mathematics) t: then, how about d? what’s the answer for d? s: uh . . . y is same as one over x minus three plus one. t: okay, so what we are gonna do is to translate two units to the right and . . . then, for the reactive lres in which students’ linguistic errors were corrected, the second analysis was conducted. reactive lres refer to episodes that “arise in response to perceived linguistic errors or because a participant fails to comprehend something that another has said” during classroom discourse (hong & basturkmen, 2020, p. 5). this study used only the reactive lres that the teachers or lecturers initiate in response to students’ linguistic errors, providing cf. in this study, any reactive lres initiated by students were excluded. thus, the data set comprises 107 reactive lres initiated by the teachers or lecturers in classroom interaction in the emi classes (see table 2). table 2 number of reactive lres subjects number of teacher-initiated reactive lres a high school economics 23 mathematics 42 b high school politics 26 c university accounting 4 mathematics 9 computer science 3 total 107 reactive lres were coded for six cf types, explicit correction (ec), metalinguistic clues (mc), elicitations (el), repetitions (rp), clarification requests (cr), and recasts (rc), drawing on milla and mayo (2014). a translation that follows a student’s unsolicited use of the l1 was coded as recasts, following lyster and ranta (1997). example 2 (economics) t: so, what kind of function is this? s: um . . . combined function? t: com . . .? s: combined function? t: composition function. we don’t have the exact amount of output, yet, but . . . jiye hong 460 reactive lres often involved multiple cf types, as seen in example 2 above. in this example, the economics teacher attended to a student’s mistaken use of ‘combined’ and used two cf types, elicitation (com…?) and recast (composition function) to address the linguistic error. drawing on lyster and ranta’s (1997) conventions, multiple cf types used in a single lre were counted separately. to check the reliability of the coding of the cf types used in the lres, a randomly selected sample of 10% of the reactive lres was coded independently by a second coder. in terms of the inter-reliability, the results of cohen’s kappa analysis showed substantial agreement between the researcher and the second coder (k = .933). 4. findings overall, of the students’ linguistic errors that occurred during teacher-student interactions, 79.9% were corrected by the teachers or lecturers. as shown in table 3, most of the linguistic errors were corrected in all the emi classes (range from 76.7% to 100%) except in the computer science class in the university setting (37.5%). when comparing the two settings, more students’ linguistic errors were corrected in the school setting than in the university setting (81.3% and 72.7%, respectively). table 3 distribution of students’ linguistic errors in teacher-student interaction subjects corrected not corrected total high school economics 23 (76.7%) 7 (23.3%) 30 mathematics 42 (79.2%) 11 (20.8%) 53 politics 26 (89.7%) 3 (10.3%) 29 91 (81.3%) 21(18.7%) 112 university accounting 4 (80%) 1 (20%) 5 mathematics 9 (100%) 0 9 computer science 3 (37.5%) 5 (62.5%) 8 16 (72.7%) 6 (27.3%) 22 total 107 (79.9%) 27 (20.1%) 134 table 4 shows the frequency of each cf type in the two settings. in the high school setting, all the types of cf were observed, and in the university setting, four types were observed. in both settings, emi teachers and lecturers used recasts the most frequently (78.1% and 73.7%, respectively). a different pattern was seen regarding the other cf types in these two settings. in the school setting, elicitation was the second most frequent cf type, while it was infrequent in the university setting (8.8% and 5.3%, respectively). in the university setting, explicit correction was the second most frequent type, but it was far less frequent in the school setting (15.8% and 2.6%, respectively). content teachers’ and lecturers’ corrective feedback in emi classes in high school and university settings 461 table 4 cf strategy in two different settings high school university explicit correction (ec) 3 (2.6%) 3 (15.8%) metalinguistic clues (mc) 6 (5.3%) elicitations (el) 10 (8.8%) 1 (5.3%) repetitions (rp) 1 (0.8%) 1 (5.3%) clarification requests (cr) 5 (4.4%) recasts (rc) 89 (78.1%) 14 (73.7%) total 114 19 as shown in table 5, in the high school settings, the most frequently used cf type was recasts (78.1%), followed distantly by elicitations (8.8%) and metalinguistic clues (5.3%). the least frequently used cf type was repetitions (0.8%). in the high school emi classes, the teachers provided all the cf in a way the students had no chances for uptake or repair. when looking at each discipline, the mathematics teacher provided cf more frequently and used a more comprehensive range of cf types than the other two teachers. in the economics class, five cf types were observed, and only three types of cf were identified in the politics class. table 5 distribution of cf type in the high school settings economics mathematics politics total explicit correction (ec) 2 (6.7%) 1 (2.2%) 3 (2.6%) metalinguistic clues (mc) 2 (6.7%) 2 (4.4%) 2 (5.2%) 6 (5.3%) elicitations (el) 5 (16.7%) 3 (6.7%) 2 (5.2%) 10 (8.8%) repetitions (rp) 1 (2.2%) 1 (0.8%) clarification requests (cr) 2 (6.7%) 3 (6.7%) 5 (4.4%) recasts (rc) 19 (63.3%) 36 (77.8%) 34 (89.5%) 89 (78.1%) total 30 46 38 114 in the school settings, the teachers occasionally provided a combination of cf types for the same linguistic errors in some lres analyzed. a combination of elicitation and recasts (el-rc) was commonly used in these classes. in the economics class, five types of combined cf, ec-el, ec-mc, el-rc-mc, el-rc, and cr-rc, were observed. excerpt 1 shows an lre in the economics class, which involves a combination of elicitation, recast, and metalinguistic clues. in response to a student’s use of korean, the economics teacher elicits the translation from the student by using a question. then, he provides a recast to the student’s linguistic error and immediately offers a metalinguistic clue. excerpt 1 (el1-rc2-mc3) t: and ultimately, the companies will? jiye hong 462 s: 규모의 경제를 실현한다? t: can you say that in english?1 s: . . . in english? t: yes. s: ah, companies can . . . get economic scale2? t: good. companies can achieve economies of scale2 by lowering costs. alternately you can say, economies of scale occur in the companies. don’t forget this, this preposition3 (of) here. and what happens after these (companies) lower costs . . . in the mathematics class, five types of combined strategies, cr-ec-rc, mc-rc, el-rc, el-cr, and rp-rc, were observed. in excerpt 2, the mathematics teacher has to use two additional cf types, elicitation and recast, as clarification request is inefficient. excerpt 2 (cr-ec-rc) s: x equal to and bigger than minus two or the same. t: sorry? say that again?1 s: x plus two is larger2 or the same as3 zero. t: yes. well, x plus two is g [ɡ] . . .?2 s: greater. t: yes. or equal to3 zero. in the politics class, two types of combined cf, mc-rc and el-rc, were identified. excerpt 3 shows an episode in which the politics teacher used metalinguistic clues and recast to correct a student’s linguistic error. excerpt 3 (mc1-rc2) t: what’s this then? what kind of system, yes, **? s: hierarchy2. t: yeah, it’s hie–, it should be adjective1, so, hierarchical2 system. it’s related to what? in the university setting, the mathematics lecturer offered cf more frequently than the other two lecturers (see table 3). in this setting, four different cf strategies were observed, with recasts being the most frequently and commonly used (73.7%) in all the classes. two types of cf, metalinguistic clues and clarification requests, were not observed in this setting (see table 6). when looking at each discipline, three cf types, including recasts, repetitions and explicit correction, were identified in accounting. two cf types (recasts and elicitation) in mathematics and two cf types (recasts and explicit correction) in computer science were identified. content teachers’ and lecturers’ corrective feedback in emi classes in high school and university settings 463 table 6 distribution of cf strategy in the university setting accounting mathematics computer science total explicit correction 1 (20%) 2 (50%) 3 (15.8%) metalinguistic clues elicitations 1 (10%) 1 (5.3%) repetitions 1 (20%) 1 (5.3%) clarification requests recasts 3 (60%) 9 (90%)* 2 (50%) 14 (73.7%) total 5 10 4 19 note. *one student uptake occurred in the university setting, none of the reactive lres involved student uptake or repair except one episode observed in the mathematics class, as illustrated in excerpt 4 below. excerpt 4 (rc followed by a student uptake) s: . . . and the, and to take the derivative of this formula with response to . . . l: with respect to. s: ah, i see. with respect to x, it comes out to be . . . a combination of cf strategies for the same linguistic errors was observed only in the accounting class. in excerpt 5, the accounting lecturer first repeats a student’s linguistic error, raising his intonation. he then offers the correct form (recast), after noticing the student cannot repair the error by herself. excerpt 5 (rp-rc) l: so, again, how can we calculate retained earning? s: uh, it’s equal net income minus dividence? l: dividence1? s: dividences? l: dividends2. yes, so, net income minus dividends. 5. discussion this article reported on a study into the frequency and types of cf that content teachers and lecturers provide to their students during content teaching in the different emi settings, two high schools and a university, in south korea. classroom-based research in various emi settings has shown that emi teachers or lecturers often dealt with language issues to offer information about linguistic items or correct students’ linguistic errors during classroom interaction focused on disciplinary content (an et al., 2019; basturkmen & shackleford, 2015; martinez et al., 2021). applied linguists have consistently argued that language has a crucial jiye hong 464 role in content classrooms and content teachers are responsible for facilitating students’ disciplinary literacy development, especially in emi classrooms (doiz & lasagabaster, 2021; hong, 2022; macaro, 2018). however, little information has been available on strategies content teachers or lecturers deploy to provide cf on students’ linguistic errors and how the strategies might compare in different disciplines or educational levels. this study examined emi teachers’ and lecturers’ use of cf during their teaching in six different emi classrooms in south korean high school and university settings. the findings indicated that the emi teachers or lecturers corrected more than 70% of the students’ linguistic errors in all the emi classes except the computer science class in the university setting, where only 37.5% of the linguistic errors were corrected. the emi teachers and lecturers in this study appeared to perceive the prevision of cf on students’ linguistic errors as a part of their emi teaching practices even though the focus of their classes was content knowledge development. in terms of the frequency of cf, there was a difference between the high school and university settings; cf was provided far more frequently in the school settings (one cf every 7.40 min) than in the university setting (one cf every 67.2 min) despite the shorter length of class time in the schools. this can be explained by the size of each emi class; because of the relatively small class size, the high school students may have had more opportunities to make more linguistic errors during teacher-student interaction than the students in the university emi classes in which they did not talk much. also, possibly, the importance of the cf provision perceived by the schoolteachers may have been higher than that perceived by the university lecturers. in both high school and university settings, the mathematics teacher and lecturer corrected students’ linguistic errors more often than those in the other disciplines. this could be due to the finding reported in hong and basturkmen (2020) and hong (2021a) that the reactive lres identified in the mathematics classes occurred to correct students’ errors in using “the conventional way of articulating ideas using language patterns associated with mathematical terms” (hong, 2021a, p. 111) during class activities such as solving mathematics questions, while the reactive lres in the other classes mostly focused on vocabulary. had there been more class activities in the other classes, there would have been more chances for students to make linguistic errors on which the emi teachers and lecturers provide cf. another interesting finding was that like the esl teachers in previous studies (e.g., lyster & mori, 2006), the emi teachers in the school setting in this study used a wide range of cf types. however, in the university setting, the emi lecturers used only four types of cf. this could be explained with the finding that all the schoolteachers used multiple cf types to deal with the same linguistic error more often than the university lecturers. as milla and mayo (2014) argue, using content teachers’ and lecturers’ corrective feedback in emi classes in high school and university settings 465 multiple cf types is much richer and more effective than a single cf type as it enables teachers to draw students’ attention to the linguistic errors in various ways. considering that the schoolteachers shared a goal of supporting their students’ transition to universities abroad, they may have felt more accountable for students’ academic english development and learning of correct, accurate linguistic forms. in addition, they may have believed that the effects of each cf type can vary according to students’ individual differences (english proficiency, l1 backgrounds, personalities) and tried to use as various cf types as possible to support students’ learning. this study revealed that regardless of disciplines and educational levels, recasts were the most predominant cf type in all the emi classes, reflecting the findings of previous studies into the esl context (e.g., loewen, 2002) and the clil context (e.g., milla & mayo, 2014; llinares & lyster, 2014). as lyster (2007) argues, recasts enable teachers to keep the flow of classroom communication and retain the attention of students focused on disciplinary content. because these emi classes were disciplinary content-oriented (coyle, 2007), the content teachers and lecturers may not have wanted to interrupt the flow of discussion of disciplinary content and preferred to provide cf implicitly rather than explicitly maintaining the focus of their classes on content. also, it is possible that the emi teachers and lecturers in these settings were unsure of the effects of correcting students’ linguistic errors and concerned about the possibility that their cf provision would demotivate their students. in terms of the frequency of the other cf types, different patterns were found between the settings; in the school setting, elicitation was the second most often used, while in the university setting, it was explicit correction. this could be because the schoolteachers may have felt more responsibility to give students more chances for them to come up with the correct form themselves and to check their learning of it. unlike the findings that teachers’ cf was followed by students’ uptake or repair reported in the previous study in the clil context (llinares & lyster, 2014), this study found scant student uptake or repair in these emi settings. this could be explained by the length of the emi classes in this study. in the school settings, the classes lasted 50 minutes, and in the university setting, the classes lasted between 60 and 90 minutes, the same class length as classes taught in korean. because of the limited class time, it is possible that the emi teachers and lecturers tried to avoid spending much time focusing on linguistic issues. also, they may have preferred providing students with the correct linguistic forms immediately so that they could quickly return to discussing the disciplinary topic. for example, the length of emi classes in the high school settings was the same as that of classes taught in korean in other high schools. also, the classroom interaction in these settings was mainly teacher-dominated, which an et al. (2021) criticized for limiting the quantity and quality of student participation. had the jiye hong 466 length of class time been longer, the teachers and lecturers would have given more opportunities to their students to talk and taken more time to address students’ linguistic errors even during their content teaching. thus, when implementing emi, institutions may need to consider ideal class length for emi classes. in addition, as these were content teachers and lecturers, they may not have been aware of the importance of students’ uptake or repair in l2 development. one suggestion this study would propose is to provide language teachingrelated information to emi teachers or lecturers so that they can apply it when planning and teaching their emi classes. esl teachers or language specialists may collaborate with emi teachers or lecturers in this process. emi teachers could observe esl classes to understand how esl teachers provide students with cf to address linguistic errors and facilitate l2 learning. 6. conclusion this study examined content teachers’ and lecturers’ corrective feedback (cf) that occurred during six different emi classes in high school and university settings in south korea. it can be concluded that the provision of cf was a usual part of incidental emi teaching practices in both school and university settings. in all emi classes, recasts were the most frequent cf type; however, for the frequency of other cf types, different patterns were revealed in the two settings. the schoolteachers provided cf far more frequently than the university lecturers. also, the schoolteachers used more various types of cf than the lecturers. in terms of the differences between the disciplines, it was mathematics that involved more frequent cf than other disciplines (social science and computer science). in order to discuss the potential benefit of emi, detailed classroom observation must take place. the present study contributes to our better understanding of the ways emi teachers and lecturers deal with students’ linguistic errors in their content teaching, which has scarcely been studied. however, this study has some limitations that are worth noting. due to the small number of emi classes in the south korean context, the findings should not be generalized to other geographical contexts. this study involved highly experienced emi teachers and lecturers; novice emi teachers may provide more or less oral cf during their teaching than the teachers and lecturers in this study. also, the relationship between the types of cf and students’ acquisition of language items targeted in reactive lres was not examined in this study. it is hoped that future research will examine this issue so as to confirm the effects of cf on students’ english acquisition in emi settings. content teachers’ and lecturers’ corrective feedback in emi classes in high school and university settings 467 references aguilar, m. 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(2007). incidental focus on form in teacher–learner and learner-learner interactions. system, 35(4), 431-447. 521 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (3). 2022. 521-524 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt call for papers for the 2023 ssllt conference department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland second language learning and teaching: taking stock and looking ahead celebrating the success of the journal studies in second language learning and teaching ssllt 2023 kalisz, 15-17 may, 2023 call for papers theme the main aim of the event is to celebrate the success of the journal studies in second language learning and teaching (https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt), which was launched little over a decade ago but has still managed to be ranked among the best journals in the field. the event will also provide a forum for presenting cutting-edge research related to different facets of l2 learning and teaching in a wide range of contexts and demonstrating how the results of such research can inform everyday classroom 522 practices. the conference will be of high relevance to academics, researchers, teacher educators and materials writers, as well as language teachers at different educational levels wishing to enhance their instructional practices. organizers the event will be organized by the department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland. the chair of the organizing committee is professor mirosław pawlak, editor in chief of ssllt (pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl). plenary speakers the following scholars have agreed to participate in the conference and deliver plenary talks: · kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) · jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck, university of london, london, uk) · sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) · agnieszka otwinowska-kasztelanic (university of warsaw, poland) · simone pfenninger (university of zurich, switzerland) · luke plonsky (northern arizona university, flagstaff, usa) abstract submission we welcome contributions in the form of papers (20 minutes + 10 minutes for discussion) and posters focusing on, but not limited to, the following areas: · theoretical foundations of research into l2 learning and teaching; · teaching target language skills and subsystems; · developing intercultural competence in the language classroom; · individual differences in language learning and teaching; · learner autonomy and language learning strategies; · content and language integrated learning (e.g., emi); · classroom interaction and management; · teacher cognition and identity; · teacher education; · coursebooks and materials; · syllabus design; · assessing second language knowledge; · methodology of research into l2 learning and teaching; · disseminating the findings of research into l2 learning and teaching. 523 abstracts of papers and posters in the range of 250-300 words should be submitted by filling out the abstract submission form (https://forms.gle/ewkeur2zhurvkksqa) by february 28th, 2023. notifications of acceptance will be sent by march 15th, 2023. publication of papers after the conference selected papers will be published in one or more peer-reviewed volumes (e.g., springer) or the journal konin language studies. some papers will also be chosen for a special issue of studies in second language learning and teaching. further information about the publication as well as the submission guidelines will be sent after the conference. venue the venue for the event will be the building of the faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland, ul. nowy świat 28-30, where all the plenary and parallel sessions will be held, and meals and refreshments will be served. registration and conference fee all participants are requested to return the registration form (the same as for abstract submission – see the link above) and pay the conference fee by april 15th, 2023. the fee, which covers organization costs, conference materials, conference dinner, lunches and refreshments is 600 pln for participants from poland and 170 euro for participants from abroad. we will be able to refund 50% of the fee before april 30th, 2023. detailed information about the payment of the conference fee and accommodation as well as other updates can be found on the conference website: https://sites.google.com/view/ssllt2023 for further information participants are requested to contact the conference secretary: jagoda mikołajewska, ma faculty of pedagogy and fine arts adam mickiewicz university ul. nowy świat 28-30 62-800 kalisz, poland e-mail: ssllt2023@gmail.com 524 conference organizers prof. mirosław pawlak (amu, kalisz) (pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl) – chair prof. mariusz kruk prof. artur skweres prof. joanna zawodniak dr. jakub bielak dr. marek derenowski anna bryłowska, ma jagoda mikołajewska, ma katarzyna podsadna-pietrzak, ma 405 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (3). 2022. 405-433 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.3.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt timing of form-focused instruction: effects on efl learners’ grammar learning jinfen xu huazhong university of science and technology, china https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0515-0887 xujinfen@hust.edu.cn changying li huazhong university of science and technology, china https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6280-6817 lichangying@hust.edu.cn abstract this study investigates how different form-focused instruction (ffi) timing impacts english as a foreign language (efl) learners’ grammar development. a total of 169 chinese middle school learners were assigned to four conditions randomly: control, before-isolated ffi, integrated ffi, and after-isolated ffi. the three experimental groups received treatments which combined form and meaning with the english passive voice as the teaching target, but learners’ attention was drawn to the passive voice with different timing. the before-isolated and after-isolated groups received the treatment before and after communicative activities, respectively. for the integrated ffi group, intervention occurred during communicative activities. a picture writing test and a written error correction test were employed to measure students’ performance. the results indicated that the three experimental groups manifested significant improvement. before-isolated ffi produced the best immediate and delayed effects, and integrated ffi produced better immediate effect than after-isolated ffi, while afterisolated ffi produced better delayed effect than integrated ffi. the findings indicated that pedagogical sequences in ffi are important, and teachers might need to guide adolescent learners to focus on form explicitly before communicative activities. keywords: timing; form-focused instruction; isolated ffi; integrated ffi; passive voice jinfen xu, changying li 406 1. introduction for second language (l2) learning, form-focused instruction (ffi) has been recognized by both researchers and teachers as necessary and valuable. ffi involves “any pedagogical effort which is used to draw the learners’ attention to language form either implicitly or explicitly . . . within meaning-based approaches to l2 instruction and in which a focus on language is provided in either spontaneous or predetermined ways” (spada, 1997, p. 73). there is ample evidence that ffi can facilitate l2 learning (broszkiewicz, 2011; kang et al., 2019; norris & ortega, 2000; spada & tomita, 2010). there is also growing consensus that it is effective to combine language forms and meaning (spada & lightbown, 2008). at the same time, a range of studies have provided increasing evidence for the effectiveness of explicit ffi (norris & ortega, 2000; spada, 2011). the essential question concerning l2 pedagogy is no longer whether language forms should be included in meaning-based instruction, but how and when ffi can be most effectively implemented. various instructional options have been proposed to help learners use grammar structures in communication (pawlak, 2021). however, limited research has investigated when ffi can be most effectively carried out in instruction. for the timing issue, spada and lightbown (2008) made a distinction between integrated ffi and isolated ffi. these two kinds of ffi are both provided in lessons which primarily focus on meaning. they are different with respect to when learners’ attention is directed at target language forms. in isolated ffi, students focus on forms separately from communicative practice, meaning they focus on forms before or after they have finished communicative activities. by contrast, students focus on forms during communicative activities in integrated ffi. while several empirical studies have examined these two kinds of ffi, extant research was conducted largely among adult english as a second language (esl) learners and has only examined isolated ffi before communicative activities (i.e., before-isolated ffi) (elgün-gündüz et al., 2012; file & adams, 2010; spada et al., 2014). limited empirical studies have examined isolated ffi in which learners learn forms after they have finished communicative activities (i.e., after-isolated ffi) (shintani, 2017). the current study aims to add more evidence in this field by comparing before-isolated, after-isolated, and integrated ffi for chinese adolescent learners’ grammar learning. 2. literature review based on spada and lightbown’s (2008) definition, both integrated and isolated ffi include explicit instruction and feedback. despite the fact that isolated ffi is separated from communicative practice and learners’ attention to form can be timing of form-focused instruction: effects on efl learners’ grammar learning 407 drawn before or after communicative activities, learners’ attention to language forms is strongly associated with communicative activities. it is thus not the same as traditional teaching approach in which learners focus on forms with little attention paid to meaning. by contrast, integrated ffi adopts an approach whereby learners focus on language forms during a communicative activity where the focused form can be planned in advance or occur incidentally during communication. integrated ffi involves both proactive (i.e., teachers plan in advance to guarantee that learners will notice the forms) and reactive (i.e., teachers react to learners’ need when they have problems) attention to form (doughty & williams, 1998). teachers can guide students to focus on language forms through input enhancement, explanations, and corrective feedback. these two kinds of ffi are different in that students attend to language forms during communicative activities in integrated ffi, while they attend to forms separately from communicative activities in isolated ffi (spada & lightbown, 2008). limited research has compared these two kinds of ffi. file and adams (2010) investigated integrated ffi and isolated ffi for learners’ vocabulary learning in an esl reading lesson. two groups of adult esl learners participated in the study. both groups received two experimental treatments. each treatment, including the instructional treatment and the posttest, lasted about 55 minutes. in integrated ffi, the teacher read the text orally and drew learners’ attention to the target word when reading one sentence that involved that particular word. in isolated ffi, the teacher first taught vocabulary and then read the text. learners’ progress was measured through a vocabulary knowledge test. in the test, learners self-reported their knowledge about the target words. the results suggested that both kinds of ffi could promote learners’ vocabulary learning, and their effects were not significantly different. elgün-gündüz et al. (2012) investigated these two kinds of ffi by observing two classes in turkey. one class adopted integrated ffi, while the other one adopted isolated ffi. in isolated ffi, students first learned about new forms through explicit instruction and exercises and then engaged in content-based activities. in integrated ffi, all the activities such as reading comprehension, discussion and writing in groups were meaning-oriented but integrated particular forms. the researchers observed the two classes for 64 hours. the learners’ vocabulary and grammar development were measured by a key english test (i.e., a first-level cambridge test designed to assess learners’ general proficiency), and their writing development was measured through essays. the results indicated that students in the integrated class outperformed those in the isolated class in grammar, vocabulary and writing. additional interviews and questionnaires also indicated preferences for integrated ffi among students. spada et al. (2014) investigated these two kinds of ffi for learners’ l2 grammatical development. a total of 109 esl adult learners were assigned to two groups jinfen xu, changying li 408 receiving integrated or isolated ffi. in isolated ffi, learners first learned about passive voice through explicit instruction and practice and then engaged in contentbased activities including comprehension and discussion about an article. in integrated ffi, learners were engaged in a series of activities, and they learned about the passive within the content of each activity. a written error correction test was employed to measure explicit knowledge which is declarative, conscious, verbalizable and accessible in controlled processing, and an oral production test was employed to measure students’ implicit knowledge which is unconscious, not verbalizable, but available through automatic processing (dekeyser, 2017; ellis, 2009; pawlak, 2021). the results indicated that these two kinds of ffi were not significantly different over time, but isolated ffi can better develop learners’ explicit knowledge and integrated ffi can better develop their implicit knowledge. the results of the studies overviewed above vary, which may be due to the different target structures examined, as spada et al.’s (2014) study referred to grammar, file and adams’ (2010) study focused on vocabulary, and elgün-gündüz et al.’s (2012) study looked into writing, grammar and vocabulary. for vocabulary learning and writing, integrated ffi might be superior since it connects meaning and form within specific context (file & adams, 2010). for grammar such as the passive, isolated ffi may be superior because it makes targeted feature salient for students to notice (spada & lightbown, 2008). in addition, the measurements adopted in previous studies vary, which may also have a potential influence. for example, file and adams (2010) used vocabulary knowledge scale, spada et al. (2014) used two measures to investigate participants’ implicit and explicit knowledge, while elgün-gündüz et al. (2012) used general language proficiency tests. spada et al. (2014) pointed out that more studies are needed to investigate ffi timing. this study partially replicates the study of spada et al. (2014) to examine how different ffi timing impacts chinese middle school students, focusing on the passive voice. in all those studies which compared integrated and isolated ffi, only one type of isolated ffi was examined, that is, before-isolated ffi. the other type, that is, after-isolated ffi, discussed by spada and lightbown (2008), has not yet received due attention. the limited research on after-isolated ffi has mainly targeted reactive focus on form through students’ transcription of their recordings (lynch, 2007; stillwell et al., 2010). however, transcription is a difficult task for junior middle school students aged 12 to 15 because they have limited language proficiency, and it is not the only way to guide students to notice forms after they complete communicative activities. there are other ways to draw students’ attention to specific target feature on completion of communicative tasks, such as explicit instruction (spada & lightbown, 2008). research in cognitive psychology, such as mathews et al. (1989), danks and gans (1975), and reber et al. (1980), timing of form-focused instruction: effects on efl learners’ grammar learning 409 as well as in second language acquisition (sla) (shintani, 2017) has suggested that the effects of isolated explicit instruction can vary when conducted before or after implicit instruction. it is beneficial to draw students’ attention to forms after they have finished communicative activities because: (1) previous communicative activities provide contexts for students to notice forms, (2) students can concentrate on form without undermining the meaning-primary principle, and (3) after encountering difficulties in using specific linguistic feature in communicative activities, learners might have higher motivation to learn it (li, 2020). teachers should therefore be encouraged to carry out ffi after communicative activities (carless, 2012; willis, 1996), and it is also pedagogically necessary to investigate after-isolated ffi (li et al., 2016a). besides, the review of previous studies (e.g., file & adams, 2010; spada et al., 2014) showed that researchers mostly focused on adult learners or young learners from primary schools (e.g., elgün-gündüz et al., 2012), while only xu and li (2021) examined adolescent learners. hartshorne et al. (2018) found that learners’ ability to learn grammar changes with age: it is preserved until late adolescence (17.4 years old) and then declines rapidly. although this finding is based on naturalistic acquisition, it still provides implications for instructed grammar learning. in most secondary schools, grammar is an integral part of the curriculum. in china, grammar teaching occupies an important position in middle school, which focuses on the basic knowledge of this subsystem and covers most of the english grammar. therefore, it is of great significance to investigate adolescent learners’ grammar learning. the recent study by xu and li (2021) compared the effects of focusing on form before, during, and after meaning-focused activities. three classes comprising 50-60 students each were divided into three groups receiving instructional treatments on one difficult (the comparative) and one easy (the simple future) grammatical feature. for the group that received integrated ffi, teachers taught the grammatical features during communicative activities. for the before-isolated and after-isolated groups, teachers taught the grammatical features before or after students have finished communicative activities. results showed that before-isolated ffi worked better for difficult structure and afterisolated ffi was more useful for learning easy structure. the findings of this study demonstrated that for difficult grammatical feature teachers may need to teach the form explicitly and in an isolated manner at the beginning of a class. the present study attempts to verify and provide further empirical evidence about the effects of different timing of ffi on difficult grammatical feature by examining learners’ learning of another difficult grammatical structure, that is, the english passive voice. our research questions are: jinfen xu, changying li 410 1. do integrated ffi, before-isolated ffi and after-isolated ffi facilitate efl learners’ learning of the passive voice? 2. are there differences among the effects of integrated ffi, before-isolated ffi and after-isolated ffi concerning learners’ learning of the passive voice? 3. method 3.1. participants the participants were 169 students attending a chinese middle school. they came from four classes which were randomly chosen among 12 eighth-grade classes. each class had 40-50 students. the learners were aged between 13 and 14, and they had learned english for nearly six years. they attended five english lessons on a weekly basis with each lesson lasting 45 minutes. all participants were native chinese speakers with limited exposure to english. three classes were treated as experimental groups and received integrated, before-isolated or after-isolated ffi, respectively. the fourth class was treated as a control group. the four classes were at a similar level, with no significant differences among the scores of their midterm examination: f(3, 165) = 1.975, p = .120; error correction pretest, f(3, 165) = 1.883, p = .134 and picture writing pretest, f(3, 165) = 1.594, p = .193. to avoid different results caused by different teachers’ teaching styles, all experimental treatments were conducted by one teacher who had 14 years’ teaching experience. she had not taught these students before. all the students and the teacher agreed to participate in the study, and the instructional treatments were conducted during their regularly scheduled english lessons. 3.2. design the research design is presented in figure 1. all the four groups first took the pretests. one week later, instructional treatments were carried out for the three experimental groups. based on our previous classroom observation, it usually took two class hours (i.e., 90 minutes) for the teachers to teach one grammar point. therefore, instructional treatment for each experimental group was designed to last two consecutive class hours, with a 10-minute break in between. considering that recency effect may occur in the after-isolated group, the posttests were administered three hours after instructional treatment. two weeks later, all groups finished the delayed posttests. the control group finished all tests without any treatment. all experimental treatments were conducted in a multimedia classroom with video recording equipment. to ensure that the duration timing of form-focused instruction: effects on efl learners’ grammar learning 411 and intensity of ffi were the same in each group, all the instructional treatments were planned and scripted and the teacher was asked to strictly follow the predetermined teaching procedure. all the experimental classes were video-recorded. the video of the instruction was viewed by the researchers and the teacher, and it showed that the instruction matched the designed instructional treatments. figure 1 research design 3.3. target feature the english passive voice was selected as the target feature because the students had not learned it before this study. the school’s english curriculum shows that the passive voice is scheduled as a teaching target in the ninth grade. since the students had learned the present and past tense, both present and past passive voice were included as the target structure. besides, the passive voice is complex and is not easy to teach as explicit knowledge because its form, meaning and use are not transparent and straightforward. developing learners’ implicit knowledge about the passive voice may be more difficult since it may be already difficult for learners to learn the passive consciously and declaratively; hence the goal of integrating this structure into their implicit system must necessarily be a lengthy and gradual week 1 pretest error correction test (ect) picture writing test (pwt) all the four groups week 2 treatment integrated ffi before-isolated ffi after-isolated ffi the three experimental groups immediate posttest error correction test (ect) picture writing test (pwt) all the four groups week 4 delayed posttest error correction test (ect) picture writing test (pwt) all the four groups jinfen xu, changying li 412 process (pawlak, 2006). for chinese efl learners, the passive voice has been identified as difficult with the differences in the formation of the passive voice between english and chinese (qin, 2008; zhou, 1991). our interview with five middle school english teachers before the study further confirmed that english passive voice is challenging for students. finally, for the passive voice, previous research such as studies by williams and evans (1998) or zhou (1991) showed different results concerning the effect of explicit instruction. 3.4. materials and instructional treatments one reading passage about the invention of basketball and communicative activity about different inventions, which were adapted from the ninth-grade textbook, were chosen as teaching materials. the passage, which included three present and three past passive structures, was revised at length and the vocabulary was controlled to cater to the students’ proficiency level (see appendix a). appendix b provides teaching excerpts for each group following those of spada et al. (2014). the three experimental groups received instructions on the same topic of inventions through communicative activities and form-based activities. as for the former, the students were engaged in content-based activities including reading comprehension and discussion about inventions. in the latter, the teacher guided the students to notice the passive voice through metalinguistic explanation, corrective feedback and exercises such as changing an active sentence into a passive one. the three experimental groups differed as to when students’ attention was directed at the passive voice in the instruction. for the before-isolated group, attention to passive voice was provided before the communicative activities. for the integrated group, students’ attention to passive voice was drawn during the communicative activities. for the after-isolated group, students’ attention to the passive voice was drawn after they had finished the communicative activities. specifically, in teaching the integrated group, the teacher first interacted with the students and introduced herself, during the interaction the teacher briefly pointed out the passive voice used in her self-introduction. the teacher then conducted a communicative activity about different inventions and explained the function of passive voice within the activity. the teacher further guided the students to talk about the creators of these inventions, and the students’ attention was further focused on the differences between active and passive sentences during the interaction and an explicit explanation of the rules of passive voice was provided briefly. next, the students were given an article about the invention of basketball and were asked to finish reading comprehension activities in group. when the students were doing the activities, the teacher made a timing of form-focused instruction: effects on efl learners’ grammar learning 413 brief intervention to draw their attention to passive sentences in the article. the teacher then moved on to the discussion of the development of basketball with the students’ attention drawn to the passive voice during the activities. in before-isolated ffi, the lesson also began with the teacher’s self-introduction and passive voice was introduced as the learning goal of the lesson. the students were then involved in a series of form-based activities in which they focused on passive voice with corrective feedback like recasts and clarification requests. next, communicative activities about various inventions and the development of basketball were conducted, such as reading comprehension activities and group discussion about different inventions. the passive voice was embedded in communicative activities, but the teacher did not provide attention to it explicitly. in after-isolated ffi, the teacher did not draw students’ attention to passive voice in her self-introduction. communicative activities about various inventions and the development of basketball were conducted first. after that, the teacher guided the students to notice passive voice through form-based activities. the control group received no treatment. materials and activities used in the treatments were validated by two researchers and three efl teachers based on the following criteria: ffi was incorporated into communicative activities in integrated ffi; ffi and communicative activities were conducted separately in before-isolated and after-isolated ffi; the duration and intensity of ffi and communicative activities were consistent throughout all instructional treatments; and the materials and activities were suitable for the learners. a comparison of the five analyzers’ results revealed a high level of agreement, indicating that the materials and activities matched the required criteria. 3.5. language measures explicit knowledge is declarative, conscious, unrestricted by age and developmental stage, and verbalizable. explicit knowledge is accessible in controlled processing. implicit knowledge is tacit, intuitive, procedural, constrained by age and developmental stage, and it cannot be verbalized (dekeyser, 2017; ellis, 2009; pawlak, 2019, 2021). for learners who have little exposure to the target language and who are usually taught grammatical rules first, developing their pure implicit knowledge is difficult. therefore, the concept of highly automatized explicit knowledge has been proposed. it entails attention to target language form but is unintentional and unconscious (dekeyser, 2017). it is not easy to distinguish and operationalize different types of knowledge. the distinction of explicit and implicit knowledge is important when a study aims to develop or verify sla theories but is unnecessary and unreasonable if the study sets out to investigate effects of different instructions (pawlak, 2019). in addition, developing jinfen xu, changying li 414 learners’ implicit knowledge of the passive is a lengthy and gradual process (pawlak, 2006), and brief contact with a language feature may not be sufficient to develop learners’ implicit knowledge (kachinske et al., 2015). therefore, the present study focused on measuring students’ explicit knowledge. the findings are triangulated through two tests (cohen et al., 2017): picture writing test (pwt) and error correction test (ect) (see appendix c). the ect included different versions for pretest, immediate and delayed posttests. the test contained 30 sentences, of which 24 sentences examined the passive voice and six sentences were distractors concerning features such as the present and past tense. the sentences were randomly scrambled in the three versions. the 24 target items were equally distributed in terms of tenses and verbs (see appendix c for more details). following lee (2007) and li et al. (2016b) as well as the pilot study with ten students of similar proficiency level from another eighth-grade class, the target items were also equally distributed among three types of errors: (a) there is no auxiliary verb “be,” such as “anxi and hangzhou widely known for their tea.”; (b) using bare form of verbs, such as “the big game was win finally”; (c) using present participle rather than past participle, such as “he must be sending to the hospital.” in scoring the ect, students were given one point if they detected the error and corrected it for one target sentence. cronbach’s alpha showed that the internal reliability amounted to .88, .89 and .92 for ect pretest, immediate and delayed posttests, respectively. the pwt also had three versions that were used for pretest and posttests. the test contained eight pictures with eight keywords (e.g., send, return) presented on each picture (the keywords did not appear during the instructional treatment). the pictures showed a girl’s shopping experience through the internet. the girl lily bought a book through the internet, but it was mistakenly sent to the boy jack’s home, the book was finally received by lily. another two different items (i.e., coat, dress) were used for the posttests to avoid test repetition effects. students were required to describe the situation of the object in each picture. among all eight pictures, five were target pictures requiring students to use passive voice and three required the students to use active voice. students got one point if they provided a correct passive sentence for one target picture. no point was given if an incorrect passive form or active form was produced for the target pictures. cronbach’s alpha amounted to .78 for pwt pretest, .82 and .88 for pwt immediate and delayed posttests, respectively. 3.6. analysis firstly, descriptive statistics of all four groups in pwt and ect pretests and posttests were analyzed. instead of using raw scores, gain scores were used to avoid possible timing of form-focused instruction: effects on efl learners’ grammar learning 415 interference caused by different pretest scores. gain score was obtained by subtracting score of the pretest from the posttests (file & adams, 2010). all data were normally distributed (skewness < 1, kurtosis < 1), satisfied the homogeneity of variance (p > .05 in levene test) and the spherical hypothesis (p > .05 according to mauchly’s test of sphericity). therefore, mixed design anovas were employed to investigate whether students’ scores were different because of times of tests and types of ffi they received. once the mixed design repeated measure anova found any significant main effect or interaction effect, one-way anova was carried out to detect statistical significance of differences among groups, following post hoc comparison which used tamhane’s t2 if the variances were equal or lsd if the variances were not equal. the p value was used to assess significance of differences between groups. in addition, cohen’s d was employed for effect size, illustrating the magnitude of the differences. based on cohen (1988), the effect sizes were considered to be small when d is .2, medium when it is .5 and large for .8. 4. results 4.1. results for the error correction test table 1 presents descriptive statistics of the ect and figure 2 illustrates the mean scores of each group. it can be found that: (a) all groups had low pretest scores, and the control group and the integrated group obtained higher pretest scores than the isolated groups; (b) all four groups obtained higher scores in posttests than in pretest; (c) the before-isolated group scored higher in posttests than other groups; (d) while the before-isolated and integrated groups gained higher in immediate posttest, their scores declined in delayed posttest, and scores of afterisolated and control groups kept rising in immediate and delayed posttests. table 1 descriptive statistics for the ect (maximum score = 24) group time m sd minimum maximum before-isolated group (n = 42) pretest 1.29 2.990 0 15 posttest 12.36 4.113 0 21 delayed posttest 11.60 6.533 0 23 after-isolated group (n = 43) pretest 0.72 1.804 0 8 posttest 6.49 6.427 0 19 delayed posttest 7.09 4.942 0 17 integrated group (n = 42) pretest 2.12 3.248 0 12 posttest 10.45 5.865 0 20 delayed posttest 6.36 5.922 0 19 control group (n = 42) pretest 2.05 4.173 0 15 posttest 3.33 6.253 0 23 delayed posttest 4.29 6.356 0 23 jinfen xu, changying li 416 figure 2 means for each group on the ect all groups’ gain scores in the ect immediate posttest and delayed posttest were then calculated. table 2 displays descriptive statistics for gain scores. results of the mixed design anovas revealed significant effects for group f(3, 165) = 32.374, p = .000, time f(1, 165) = 4.719, p = .031, and time × group interaction f(3, 165) = 9.162, p = .000. the one-way anova revealed that all groups’ gain scores were significantly different for both immediate and delayed posttests f(3,165) = 33.110, p = .000; f(3,165) = 20.276, p = .000. for the immediate posttest, post hoc comparison of tamhane’s t2 (table 3) indicated that all experimental groups gained significantly higher than the control group, effect sizes were large, the gain score of the before-isolated group was significantly higher than after-isolated and integrated groups’ gain scores with large and medium effect sizes. integrated and after-isolated groups’ gain scores were not significantly different. for the delayed posttest, post hoc comparison of tamhane’s t2 (table 3) revealed that before-isolated group’s gain score was significantly higher than integrated and control groups’ gain score with large effect sizes and the after-isolated group’s gain score with medium effect size. gain scores of after-isolated and integrated groups were not significantly different, but the after-isolated group’s gain score was significantly higher than the control group’s gain score with large effect sizes while integrated group gained no significantly different scores from control group. table 2 gain scores on ect group ect posttest ect delayed m sd m sd before-isolated (n = 42) 11.07 3.879 10.31 6.075 after-isolated (n = 43) 5.77 6.384 6.37 4.761 integrated (n = 42) 8.33 4.589 4.24 4.792 control (n = 42) 1.29 3.248 2.24 4.047 0 5 10 15 pretest posttest delayed before-isolated after-isolated integrated control timing of form-focused instruction: effects on efl learners’ grammar learning 417 table 3 results of statistical significance, 95% confidence interval, and effect size for ect gain scores groups ect posttest ect delayed p [95%ci] d p [95%ci] d before-isolated vs. after-isolated .000*[2.21-8.40] 1.01 .008*[.74-7.14] 0.73 before-isolated vs. integrated .025*[.24-5.24] 0.65 .000*[2.85-9.29] 1.12 before-isolated vs. control .000*[7.68-11.89] 2.77 .000*[5.02-11.12] 1.58 after-isolated vs. integrated .199[-5.82-.69] -0.47 .230[-.66-4.93] 0.45 after-isolated vs. control .001*[1.51-7.46] 0.89 .000*[1.55-6.72] 0.94 integrated vs. control .000*[4.70-9.39] 1.79 .227[-.61-4.61] 0.46 note. *p < .05. 4.2. results for the picture writing test table 4 and figure 3 displayed the descriptive and graphical statistics for the pwt. the data again showed that the students had limited knowledge about the passive voice before the treatment. contrary to that for the ect, students in the two isolated groups earned higher pretest scores than those in integrated and control groups. all groups performed better in immediate posttest, with beforeisolated group and integrated group getting the same mean scores. scores of before-isolated group and after-isolated group kept rising in delayed posttest, while scores of integrated and control groups declined in delayed posttest. table 4 descriptive statistics for the pwt (maximum score = 5) group time m sd minimum maximum before-isolated group (n = 42) pretest 0.12 .772 0 5 posttest 1.24 1.679 0 5 delayed posttest 1.81 2.003 0 5 after-isolated group (n = 43) pretest 0.21 .709 0 4 posttest 0.37 1.070 0 5 delayed posttest 1.35 1.703 0 5 integrated group (n = 42) pretest 0.00 .000 0 0 posttest 1.24 1.885 0 5 delayed posttest 0.62 1.378 0 5 control group (n = 42) pretest 0.00 .000 0 0 posttest 0.14 1.346 0 5 delayed posttest 0.26 0.989 0 5 jinfen xu, changying li 418 figure 3 means for each group on the pwt table 5 displays descriptive statistics of gain scores on pwt. results of the mixed design anovas revealed significant effects for group f(3, 165) = 7.050, p = .000, time f(1, 165) = 4.698, p = .032, and time × group interaction f(3, 165) = 8.022, p = .000. the one-way anova indicated that all groups’ gain scores were significantly different in both immediate and delayed posttests f(3,165) = 8.069, p = .000; f(3,165) = 6.767, p = .000. results of the post hoc comparison of tamhane’s t2 (table 6) showed that in immediate posttest, before-isolated group and integrated group scored significantly higher than after-isolated group. there were no significant differences between integrated and before-isolated group nor between control and after-isolated group. in delayed posttest, before-isolated group scored significantly higher than integrated group. no significant differences were found between before-isolated and after-isolated groups nor between after-isolated and integrated groups. besides, integrated and control groups’ gain scores were not significantly different. table 5 gain scores on pwt group pwt posttest pwt delayed m sd m sd before-isolated (n = 42) 1.12 1.580 1.69 1.957 after-isolated (n = 43) .16 1.045 1.14 1.712 integrated (n = 42) 1.24 1.885 .62 1.378 control (n = 42) .14 1.346 .26 .989 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 pretest posttest delayed before-isolated after-isolated integrated control timing of form-focused instruction: effects on efl learners’ grammar learning 419 table 6 results of statistical significance, 95% confidence interval, and effect size for pwt gain scores groups pwt posttest pwt delayed p [95%ci] d p [95%ci] d before-isolated vs. after-isolated .010*[.17-1.74] 0.73 .676[-.53-1.63] 0.30 before-isolated vs. integrated 1.000[-1.14-.90] -0.07 .029*[.07-2.07] 0.64 before-isolated vs. control .002*[.27-1.68] 0.38 .000*[.51-2.35] 0.93 after-isolated vs. integrated .011*[-1.98--.17] -0.72 .555[-.39-1.43] 0.34 after-isolated vs. control 1.00[-.47-.51] -0.34 .030*[.06-1.70] 0.64 integrated vs. control .004* [.27-1.92] 0.41 .688[-.35-1.06] .030 5. discussion the current study compared three kinds of timing of ffi, namely integrated ffi, before-isolated ffi, and after-isolated ffi. our first research question addressed the issue as to whether these three types of timing of ffi can facilitate learners’ learning of the passive voice as a new grammatical structure. on the ect immediate posttest, all experimental groups gained higher score than the control group with large effect sizes. in pwt immediate posttest, the three experimental groups scored higher than the control group, though after-isolated group did not reach statistical difference with the control group. in ect and pwt delayed posttests, the three experimental groups scored higher than the control group, though gain score was not significantly greater than the control group’s. it can be found that, overall, the three kinds of timing of ffi can facilitate students’ learning of the passive voice. in other words, regardless of the timing, ffi could facilitate the development of learners’ grammatical knowledge. this finding adds to existing research by showing that ffi contributes to l2 development (lightbown & spada, 2006; spada et al., 2014). however, the ffi effect was limited considering that the highest mean score on the ect posttests was 12.36 (i.e., only 51.5% of the maximum possible total score of 24), and 1.81 for the pwt posttests (i.e., only 36.2% of the maximum possible total score of 5). nevertheless, the relatively brief instruction conducted in the experiment still produced significant measurable outcomes, with ffi potentially more effective over time because the effect of instruction is cumulative and gradual (dekeyser, 2003). our second research question examined differences among these three types of timing of ffi. what needs to be emphasized is that in previous research isolated ffi usually referred to before-isolated ffi, while in this study, isolated ffi was subdivided into before-isolated and after-isolated. to make comparisons with previous research, let us first consider integrated and before-isolated ffi. results of ect immediate and delayed posttests revealed that before-isolated ffi had significant advantages over integrated ffi. in pwt immediate posttest, jinfen xu, changying li 420 before-isolated and integrated groups’ gain scores were not significantly different. however, in pwt delayed posttest, before-isolated group gained significantly higher score than integrated group. these slightly different results of the ect and the pwt may be related to the different features of the tests, although both were intended to measure students’ explicit knowledge. for the ect, the students got enough time to turn to the rules they had learned, and they primarily focused on form, their answers varied, and they were not certain about the correctness of their responses, thus they mainly drew on their explicit knowledge. in the pwt, the students primarily focused on the content of the writing, and they might have used their intuitive or automatized explicit knowledge. knowledge gained through isolated instruction may be easier to retrieve in tests that draw students’ attention to forms separately from communication such as grammar tests, while knowledge learned through integrated instruction may be easier to retrieve in tests that draw leaners’ attention to meaning and forms simultaneously (spada & lightbown, 2008). that might explain why before-isolated instruction was more efficient than integrated instruction for learners to finish decontextualized error correction task, while integrated ffi and before-isolated ffi were equally effective for learners to use knowledge of the passive immediately in contextualized picture writing test. in general, it seemed that for these chinese middle school learners, before-isolated instruction was more effective than integrated instruction. this finding is inconsistent with elgün-gündüz et al.’s (2012) finding which showed that integrated instruction worked better than isolated instruction. it is also somewhat different from spada et al. (2014) and file and adams (2010) who found no significant differences between integrated and isolated instructions. several possible explanations can be provided for such differences. first, we adopted an experimental design with relatively short duration of instructional treatment, while elgün-gündüz et al. (2012) conducted observations over eight months. shorter treatment may be more conducive to the effectiveness of isolated and explicit instruction, while the effect of integrated ffi may be gradual and accumulative (li et al., 2016a). isolated instruction can take effect in a short period, whereas integrated instruction might take longer, and this may be one reason why before-isolated instruction had better effect than integrated instruction in this study. second, the learners in elgün-gündüz et al.’s (2012) study were from primary schools, and the participants in the study of both spada et al. (2014) and file and adams (2010) were adult esl learners of different ages, that is, 19-42 in the former and 18-65 in the latter, and with different first language (l1) backgrounds. however, participants in this study were all chinese adolescent efl learners of similar age. compared to learners in primary schools, adolescents are more receptive to isolated grammar teaching, and they are better than children at figuring out language structures explicitly because they have timing of form-focused instruction: effects on efl learners’ grammar learning 421 higher level of general cognitive maturity, thus they depend on instruction more than children (dekeyser, 2000). while compared with adult learners who can take in feedback on form in integrated instruction, adolescents might not be sensitive enough to notice form during integrated instruction (ellis et al., 2001). third, file and adams (2010) focused on vocabulary development in a reading lesson and elgün-gündüz et al. (2012) examined students’ development of grammar, vocabulary, and writing, while our study focused on students’ learning of a new grammatical feature. for language forms where errors are more likely to cause communication to break down, integrated instruction might work better. however, if the error does not interfere with communication, isolated instruction might be needed if learners are to notice the target form (spada & lightbown, 2008). in learning vocabulary and in writing, learners may need to use the right lexical items to achieve their communicative needs and integrated ffi may be more beneficial because it links meaning and form in context. however, in learning grammar such as the passive, learners may resort to other ways like using active voice to communicate successfully, and errors like subject-verb disagreement, incorrect grammatical tense or incorrect form of past participle do not interfere with meaning (pawlak, 2006), therefore, isolated ffi may be needed to focus learners’ attention on the rules. as for the three types of timing of ffi in the present study, results indicated that there were differences among integrated, before-isolated, and after-isolated ffi. the before-isolated group had the highest learning and retention scores on both ect and pwt posttests. the after-isolated group gained the least on both the ect and pwt immediate posttests but had better retention scores than the integrated group in ect and pwt delayed posttests. on ect posttests and pwt delayed posttest, the integrated group’s gain scores were not significantly different from the after-isolated group’s gain scores. however, the fact that the instructional gain of the integrated group was not significantly greater than the control group’s in ect and pwt delayed posttests suggested that delayed effect of integrated ffi was limited. what is more, in the after-isolated group, the immediate posttest followed the isolated form-focused instruction, and this may be expected to positively influence the test results as the immediate posttest may have been experienced as an opportunity for extra practice by these learners to consolidate the explicit knowledge gained from the instruction. however, learners receiving after-isolated ffi did not perform better than learners receiving integrated and before-isolated ffi in both ect and pwt immediate posttests. the conclusion we can draw here is that before-isolated ffi proved to be the most beneficial in terms of immediate and delayed effects for these adolescent efl learners in learning the passive voice, and integrated ffi had better immediate effect than after-isolated ffi, while after-isolated ffi had better delayed effect than integrated ffi. the finding that jinfen xu, changying li 422 before-isolated ffi was the most beneficial for learners corroborates the results of a previous study (xu & li, 2021). such findings also support dekeyser’s (1998, 2007) claim that the teacher should first teach grammar explicitly to help students understand it. then students’ grammatical knowledge should be consolidated through exercises so that they can easily recall it during communication. several reasons may account for the differences among the three types of timing. first, the explicitness of the learning goal was different under different ffi timing. in before-isolated ffi, the passive voice was taught in isolation at the beginning of the class and it was clear to the students that the target of the lesson was the passive voice. then the rules about the passive voice were explained explicitly to them. the following form-focused activities further anchored the students’ knowledge about the passive voice and even helped them achieve maximum understanding (dekeyser, 1998). the students had a clear and definite learning goal throughout the lesson, and they may have referred to the goal to guide their following physical and mental actions (locke & latham, 2006). besides, with a clear form focus in their mind, the students might have retrieved the form during the communicative activities consciously or unconsciously. the teacher taught passive voice during communicative activities in integrated ffi without explicitly stating that passive voice was the learning goal. however, adolescent learners were cognitively immature, and their language proficiency and vocabulary were limited. therefore, they may not be able to learn the form implicitly (murray & christison, 2011). the passive voice was not stated explicitly as the learning goal of the lesson in integrated ffi. therefore, the goal of learning may be vague to the students. however, compared with vague goals, clear goals have been shown to produce better results (locke & latham, 2006). in after-isolated ffi, the grammatical rules were explicitly explained after communicative activities, and during the communicative activities the students were not pushed to notice or to produce the passive form, meaning that they might not have noticed the form during the communicative activities. although metalinguistic explanation and form-based activities were also conducted in the after-isolated group, the connection between the ffi and the communicative activities was much weaker than that of the other two groups. second, different ffi timing imposed different cognitive loads on the students. the before-isolated ffi imposed lower cognitive load on the students since they only focused on passive voice in form-based activities, meaning their attentional resources were more likely to be concentrated primarily on the form. in integrated ffi, learners attended to meaning and forms simultaneously, but adolescent learners’ brain processes that support cognitive control of behavior are immature (murray & christison, 2011). therefore, the students might not be able to process forms and meaning simultaneously and it can be hypothesized that early stage learners struggled timing of form-focused instruction: effects on efl learners’ grammar learning 423 more with meaning to begin with and their attention to form is probably not continuous (vanpatten, 1990). file and adams (2010) pointed out that integrated instruction can facilitate l2 learning since it connects forms and meaning, but it may also undermine learning effects since it weakens students’ attention to form. students had higher scores in after-isolated ffi than in integrated ffi in the delayed posttest but the difference did not reach statistical significance. various studies revealed that students’ attention levels are high at the beginning 10 to 15 minutes of the class, and their attention tends to decrease after 10 to 30 minutes of the class (frederick, 1986; horgan, 2003). therefore, students’ attention to form was probably weaker in after-isolated ffi than in before-isolated ffi. such an assumption is supported by the analysis of the classroom videos which revealed that students receiving before-isolated ffi were more concentrated in the isolated part of passive voice instruction, while some students in the after-isolated group talked to each other during the second section of isolated instruction of passive voice and the teacher had to keep order in class. 6. conclusion this study examined effects of ffi timing concerning chinese secondary school learners in learning passive voice. we began with the question of whether integrated ffi, before-isolated ffi, and after-isolated ffi can facilitate efl learners’ grammar learning. we found that all the three types of ffi had positive effects regardless of timing, which provided further empirical support for the role of ffi (kang et al., 2019; spada & tomita, 2010). this finding added empirical evidence to the theoretical and pedagogical arguments for these three types of ffi. for example, form should be focused on during communicative interaction (long, 1991), form should be taught before communicative interaction, and isolated instruction can be conducted after communicative activities (spada & lightbown, 2008). then we compared these three kinds of ffi. the findings suggested that beforeisolated ffi produced the best immediate and delayed effects, and integrated ffi produced better immediate effect than after-isolated ffi, while after-isolated ffi produced better delayed effect than integrated ffi. the results indicated that the timing of ffi is important (spada, 2011). these three kinds of ffi timing might play different roles in promoting acquisition, depending on the targeted features, learners’ characteristics and learning conditions (spada & lightbown, 2008). before-isolated ffi may be essential in promoting young efl learners’ acquisition of some difficult language features. teachers should guide adolescent students to learn grammar explicitly, and grammar might be best taught before communicative activities. besides, apart from the initial explanations, teachers should provide students with corrective feedback and sufficient practice opportunities (bielak jinfen xu, changying li 424 et al., 2013). integrated ffi may be beneficial for learners by connecting form and meaning, and after-isolated ffi may strengthen learners’ attention to form after communicative activities, but learners’ attention may need to be more focused on the target form to achieve better performance (file & adams, 2010; shintani, 2017). since the effects of different ffi timing are different for different language forms, teachers should choose a diversity of techniques and procedures considering classroom realities (pawlak, 2021). nevertheless, this study has several limitations. first and foremost, the instructional treatment for each experimental group is relatively short, which may be biased in favor of isolated ffi. different instructional treatment hours might produce different results, and this should be investigated in future research. second, only explicit knowledge and one grammatical feature were investigated. future research should use multiple validated measurements such as oral elicited imitation tests (kim & nam, 2017) or self-paced reading task (vafaee et al., 2017) to explore effects of ffi timing on students’ implicit or highly automatized knowledge. besides, as the effects of ffi timing are different for different grammatical structures (xu & li, 2021), future research should examine different grammatical features such as those that have different difficulty or familiarity to the learners. since there are a lot of factors affecting the effect of ffi, and those factors are dynamic, intertwined, and changing (spada & lightbown, 2008), more empirical research on the timing of ffi is needed to examine its effects on different language forms (e.g., vocabulary, grammar, pragmatics), on different learners (e.g., learning strategy, working memory, age), and in different contexts (e.g., esl or efl). acknowledgment this work was supported by moe (ministry of education in china) project of humanities and social sciences under 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(1991). the effect of explicit instruction on the acquisition of english grammatical structures by chinese learners. in c. james & p. garret (eds.), language awareness in the classroom (pp. 254-277). longman. timing of form-focused instruction: effects on efl learners’ grammar learning 429 appendix a the reading passage do you know when basketball was invented? basketball is a much-loved and active sport that is enjoyed by many for fun and exercise. it is over 100 years old and is played by more than 100 million people in over 200 countries. it is believed that the first basketball game in history was played on december 21, 1891. then in 1936 in berlin, it became an event at the olympics. basketball was invented by a canadian doctor named james naismith, who was born in 1861. when he was a college teacher, he was asked to think of a game that could be played in the winter. dr. naismith created a game to be played inside on a hard floor. dr. naismith divided the men in his class into two teams and taught them to play his new game. today, basketball is popular all over the world. in china, you can sometimes see people playing basketball in parks, schools and even factories. jinfen xu, changying li 430 appendix b excerpts of the translated versions of the treatment procedures activity treatment procedure (the ffi part in bold) before-isolated ffi (ffi before the communicative activities) 1 (45 mins) self-introduction to the students, writing down the active sentence “my students call me jenny” and the passive version “i am called jenny by my students” on board. ask students to identify the differences between the two sentences and lead the english passive voice as the topic of the lesson. explain the function of passive voice and explain why and when passive voice or active voice should be used. display another pair of sentences about inventions “bell invented the telephone” and “the telephone was invented by bell.” ask learners to identify the similarity and difference between this pair of sentences and the sentences in self-introduction (passive voice in simple present and simple past tense) ask students about the ways to change an active sentence into a passive one. present the rules of changing active sentences into passive voice. emphasize the important part that students should pay attention to and emphasize when to use or not use the passive. distribute the article on the invention of basketball “do you know when basketball was invented?” and ask students to read and identify the active and passive sentences in the passage. ask the students to find out the tense used in the article, and again lead their attention to the rules of passive voice in different tenses. pick out the passive sentences and ask the students to rewrite them by replacing the main verbs in the sentences with other verbs. 2 (45 mins) ask the students to read the article again. list out new words and provide explanations briefly. read the words together. distribute activity sheet of reading comprehension. ask the students to work in their groups to finish the reading comprehension activities (main idea of each paragraph, details finding, true or false). for each reading activity, the teacher first interacts with the class and guides the students to complete their working sheet by themselves, the students then discuss their answers in their group and the teacher interacts with the class to present answers. ask students to work in their groups to discuss the development of basketball and list a timeline of basketball history. check students’ responses as a class. display four pictures of different inventions (telephone, car, television, computer) on the ppt. ask students to have a group discussion and guess the time order of those inventions.ask some students to talk about their guesses in pairs in front of the class. play an audio conversation about the time order of those inventions, check the answer as a class. after-isolated ffi (ffi after the communicative activities) 1 (45 mins) self-introduction to the students, writing down the sentences “my students call me jenny” and “i am called jenny by my students.” display four pictures of different inventions (telephone, car, television, computer) on the ppt. ask students to have a group discussion and guess the time order of those inventions. ask some students to talk about their guesses in pairs in front of the class. play an audio conversation about the time order of those inventions, check the answer as a class. ask students about their favorite sports. show pictures of some famous basketball players and lead in the topic of basketball invention. distribute the article on the invention of basketball “do you know when basketball was invented?” ask the students to read the article and list out new words and provide explanations briefly. read the words together. distribute activity sheet of reading comprehension. ask the students to work in their groups to finish the reading comprehension activities (main idea of each paragraph, details finding, true or false). for each reading activity, the teacher first interacts with the class and guides the students to complete their working sheet by themselves, the students then discuss their answers in their group and the teacher interacts with the class to present answers. ask students to work in their groups to discuss the development of basketball and list a timeline of basketball history. check students’ responses as a class. 2 (45min) show two sentences from the article “it is played by more than 100 million people in over 200 countries,” “basketball was invented by a canadian doctor named james naismith” on the ppt. ask the students to find out the similarities and differences between these two sentences (passive voice in simple present and simple past tense). explain the function of passive voice and explain why and when passive voice or active voice should be used. timing of form-focused instruction: effects on efl learners’ grammar learning 431 ask learners to compare the sentences “my students call me jenny” and “i am called jenny by my students” on the blackboard. ask learners about the ways to change an active sentence into a passive one. present the rules of changing active sentences into passive voice. emphasize the important part that students should pay attention to and emphasize when to use or not use the passive. ask students to read the article on basketball invention again and ask students to read and identify the active and passive sentences in the passage. ask students to find out the tense used in the article, and again lead their attention to the rules of passive voice in different tense. pick out the passive sentences and ask students to rewrite them by replacing the main verbs in the sentences with other verbs. integrated ffi (ffi during the communicative activities) 1 (45 mins) interact with the students and introduce the teacher’s name. write active sentence “my students call me jenny” and the passive version “i am called jenny by my students” on board and repeat. ask students about the meaning of the two sentences and ask the students to have a discussion. briefly point out that the sentence is in passive voice. interact with the students about their names. display four pictures of different inventions (telephone, car, television, computer) on the ppt. ask students to have a group discussion and guess the time order of those inventions. ask some students to talk about their guesses in pairs in front of the class. briefly explain the function of passive voice and explain why and when passive voice or active voice should be used. play an audio conversation about the time order of those inventions, check the answer as a class. display pictures and four active sentences about the inventors of those inventions (e.g. “bell invented the telephone,” “karl benz invented the car”) on the ppt. ask students to change the sentences into passive voice through questions like “who was the telephone invented by?” repeat the passive sentences as a class. interact with the student about those inventions. ask learners to find out the differences between the active and passive sentences and ask them about the ways to change an active sentence into a passive one. interact with the student about those inventors.present the rules of changing active sentences into passive ones. emphasize important part that students should pay attention to and emphasize when to use or not use the passive. summarize discussions about those inventions. 2 (45 mins) introduce the topic of basketball invention by showing pictures of some famous basketball players. distribute the article on the invention of basketball “do you know when basketball was invented?” list out new words and provide explanations briefly. read the words together. ask the students to find out the main idea of each paragraph and discuss their answers in their groups. interact with the class and draw students’ attention to the passive sentences in the article during the interaction and present answers. interact with the class and ask the students to find out more details about the invention of basketball, and during the interaction ask students to find out the passive sentences in the article, and to distinguish passive voice in the present and past tense. ask the students to finish the true or false reading activity and check their answers in their group. interact with the class and pick out the passive sentences and ask the students to rewrite them by replacing the main verbs in the sentences with other verbs during the interaction and present answers. ask students to work in their groups to discuss the development of basketball and list a timeline of basketball history. draw their attention to the form during their communication. wrap up the discussion. jinfen xu, changying li 432 appendix c 1. test items in the error correction test (24 target items + 6 distractors) items tense verbs errors present past regular verb irregular verb -ing verb form no ‘be’ bare verb form 1. laws are making (made) by the government. √ √ √ 2. several trees (were) planted last summer. √ √ √ 3. some files were delete (d) from the computer. √ √ √ 4. the tires on the car were changing (-ed) yesterday. √ √ √ 5. many bridges (were) built in the 1950s. √ √ √ 6. several job applications (were) received yesterday. √ √ √ 7. the lost boy (was) helped by the policeman finally. √ √ √ 8. the best student is choose (chosen) for the prize. √ √ √ 9. the food was bringing (brought) to the table. √ √ √ 10. that window was breaking (broken) by jim this week. √ √ √ 11. the big game was win (won) finally. √ √ √ 12. lei feng’s name was remember (remembered) by all chinese people． √ √ √ 13. which language is the most widely speak (spoken) in the world √ √ √ 14. children under 18 are not allow (allowed) to watch this show without their parents. √ √ √ 15. last year a large number of trees (were) cut down √ √ √ 16. the old man is ill. he must be sending (sent) to the hospital. √ √ √ 17. vegetables, eggs and fruits are selling (sold) in this shop. √ √ √ 18. the stars can’t (be) seen in the daytime. √ √ √ 19. anxi and hangzhou (are) widely known for their tea. √ √ √ 20. the room is cleaning (cleaned) every day. √ √ √ 21. apples (are) picked in the autumn. √ √ √ 22. the game is call (called) “lianliankan” by us. √ √ √ 23. metal is using (used) for making machines. √ √ √ 24. basketball was invent (invented) by a canadian doctor named james naismith. √ √ √ occurrence 12 12 12 12 8 8 8 25. she is watch (watching) cctv news with her parents 26. i plan go (to go) camping with my classmates by the river. 27. excuse me, can i have anything (something) to eat? 28. she is 35 years old. she is older of (than) mary 29. max often tells funny stories and makes us happily (happy). 30. this morning i show (showed) my friend a new wallet. timing of form-focused instruction: effects on efl learners’ grammar learning 433 2. sample items in the picture writing test 45 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (1). 45-66 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl ego boundaries and attainments in fl pronunciation ma gorzata baranucarz university of wroc aw, poland mbaran-lucarz@ifa.uni.wroc.pl abstract the paper reports on a study designed to examine the relationship between the thickness of ego boundaries and attainments in fl pronunciation after a clearly structured form-focused practical course of phonetics. the research involved 45 first-year students of the institute of english studies in wroclaw, poland, who had attended around thirty 90-minute classes in phonetics. to measure the thickness of their ego boundaries, the hartmann boundary questionnaire (hbq) was administered. this permitted an examination of which particular types of ego boundaries are related to accuracy in foreign language (fl) pronunciation. the basis for comparing the pronunciation levels of the participants was the pronunciation attainment test consisting of three parts: reading a passage and two vocabulary lists. a t test demonstrated that the differences between the pronunciation levels of the thick and thin ego boundary learners were nonsignificant. however, further statistical analysis (pearson correlation) showed a positive weak correlation between 3 types of boundaries (represented by categories 7, 8 and 12 of the hbq) and attainments in pronunciation. more specifically, the less organized the direct environment (e.g., the working place) of the subjects was and the more preference the participants showed for perceiving and accepting blurred borders between constructs, the better their pronunciation was. a closer look at particular students revealed the importance of boundaries between thoughts and feelings, and boundaries related to defensive mechanisms and to sensitivity in fl pronunciation learning. keywords: thickness of ego boundaries, types of ego boundaries, clearly structured course of phonetics, pronunciation attainments ma gorzata baranucarz 46 ego boundaries and attainments in fl pronunciation although usually foreign language (fl) learners aim for communicativeness and fluency, there are many who try to reach the highest levels in all aspects, native-like pronunciation being one of them. among these learners are future fl teachers and translators studying at the tertiary level, majoring in particular fls. the goal of the practical phonetics course is to help learners reach the highest level in pronunciation. to raise the effectiveness of the course, which at some institutes in poland is limited to thirty or even fifteen 90-minute meetings, adjusting the treatment to the needs of the participants should be considered. these accommodations, in turn, are shaped by the individual differences between the students. when learning fl pronunciation – the most emotionally loaded language aspect – is concerned, it is the affective and personality factors that seem to be the most powerful predictors of success (celce-murcia, brinton, & goodwin, 2000; guiora, 1972). one of the dimensions of personality that can help explain the phenomenon of fl pronunciation learning is the thickness of ego boundaries. it is this concept that the paper focuses on, relating it to success in learning of fl pronunciation. before introducing the construct of anxiety, a brief discussion of the importance of personality in fl acquisition and pronunciation learning in particular is offered. the theoretical introduction is followed by a report on an empirical study aimed at examining the relationship between ego boundaries and pronunciation attainments. importance of personality for fl pronunciation acquisition and learning in the history of second language acquisition (sla) there have been times when personality was in the shadow of cognitive variables, that is, when the main areas of research were methods, contents and techniques of instruction. interest in personality and affective factors as significant determinants of successful fl learning started to flourish in the mid-1970s (shams, 2005). the importance of personality was stressed by stevick (1976, p. 18), who posited the following: “we need to go beyond language aptitude and educational or personal experience to see how individuals and their personalities affect the learning process.” according to schumann (1986), ego permeability is the heart of sla. as his earlier observations show, affective factors and personality, particularly firm ego boundaries, may block one’s innate cognitive potentials, debilitating the whole fl learning process. the constraints are most vivid in the case of adult learners (schumann, 1975). additionally, it has been recognized that personality can help understand not only the learners’ attitudes ego boundaries and attainments in fl pronunciation 47 towards the target language and its speakers, but also the intensity and type of motivations to master it (celce-murcia et al., 2000). the influence of personality on fl acquisition is best seen in the example of pronunciation. a strong defender of this claim is guiora (e.g., guiora, beithallahmi, brannon, dull, & scovel, 1972), who explains that personality or, as he calls it, “language ego,” constitutes the basis for the process of language learning, particularly when pronunciation is concerned. guiora considers pronunciation to have a peculiar role in fl acquisition. he emphasizes the fact that significant discrepancies are often observed between individuals’ attainments in pronunciation and other fl areas, with the former being usually at a lower level than the latter. consequently, it is postulated by the researcher that pronunciation “is the key to the extent to which the individual is psychologically capable of stepping into a new system of communication” (guiora 1972, p. 144). he further explains that the way we sound is a fundamental component of our identity, which we are forced to modify when speaking a fl. as guiora and acton (1979, p. 199) stress, a fl learner feels like a different person when speaking a second language.” the same observation is made by more contemporary researchers, for instance, spielmann and radnofsky (2001). the participants of their study acknowledge that learning an l2 indeed requires developing a new identity. this change of identity may be accepted in varying degrees depending on our personality. furthermore, it is the critical period for fl pronunciation that guiora (1975) relates with the concept of ego boundaries. according to the researcher, the problems of post-puberty learners acquiring native-like pronunciation are due to them losing or reducing their ego permeability and flexibility with age. the conclusions forwarded by guiora are based on observations carried out mainly among immigrants acquiring the target language in naturalistic contexts. is the role of ego boundaries equally important for pronunciation learning in the classroom setting? the results of the research described in this paper will hopefully shed some light on this matter. the concept of ego boundaries the boundary construct has been captivating the attention of several thinkers for over a century (e.g., freud, 1923; james, 1907; lewin, 1935). a more contemporary model of the concept has been offered by hartmann (1991) – a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and sleep disorder specialist and therapist – on the basis of his thorough analysis of the personalities of people suffering from nightmares. as the researcher explains, “we became intrigued by the concept of boundaries, since it appeared to represent at the very least a ma gorzata baranucarz 48 personality dimension that had been neglected” and “one that can help us understand aspects of our lives that no other measure can explain” (hartmann, 1991, pp. 17, 21). while ego refers to the system of cognitive and affective operations that form an individual’s perceived sense of self, the thickness of ego boundaries relates to the tendency to keep several aspects of one’s experience apart, or, in other words, the degree to which individuals compartmentalize their experience (ehrman, 1999). in one of hartmann’s general descriptions of people with thick boundaries (those who could hardly remember any dreams) he stated: “some people are solid, well-organized; they keep everything in its place. they are well defended. they seem armored. we sometimes think of them as ‘thick-skinned’” (hartmann, 1991, p. 3). at the other end of the continuum are individuals revealing thin ego boundaries (nightmare sufferers), who are characterized as “especially sensitive, open, or vulnerable. in their minds things are relatively fluid. they experience thoughts and feelings – often many different feelings – at the same time” (hartmann, 1991, p. 3). usually people mediate between the extreme ends, revealing different levels of fluidity and tendencies to make clear separations among several internal states and among many categories of everyday life. according to hartmann (1991), the concept of ego boundaries is very broad and entails several personality dimensions and traits that, at first glance, may appear to be unrelated to each other. the types of boundaries can be traced when analyzing the instrument designed to measure the extent of thickness of ego boundaries, that is, the the hartmann boundary questionnaire (hbq), which encompasses 12 subscales. the scores on the first eight provide the so-called personal total, related with internal boundaries among states in the mind or those referring directly to the individual, his/her identity, and relations with others (i.e., boundaries between states of wakefulness, sleeping and dreaming; between feeling and thinking; between the present and memories from the past; unusual experiences; sensitivity; interpersonal boundaries; preference for neat surroundings and precision; preference for sharp or fuzzy lines). the outcomes on the remaining four types of boundaries show the testees’ world total, which reflects their views about relations and boundaries observable outside the individual and ways in which they perceive the world (i.e., opinions about different age groups, organizations, nations and groups, truth and beauty). although few studies have been carried out to examine the relationship between the concept of ego boundaries and other personality dimensions, the data at our disposal show that the construct is distinguishable and divergent from commonly known personality traits. for example, when compared to ego boundaries and attainments in fl pronunciation 49 carl jung’s psychological types measured with the myers-briggs personality type indicator, low to moderate correlations were found, with thin boundaries relating to intuition, perceiving and feeling, and thick boundaries to sensing, judging and feeling (barbuto & plummer, 1998; myers & mccaulley, 1985). additionally, the eysenck personality inventory demonstrates a significant positive correlation between neuroticism and the degree of thickness of boundaries (r = .50, p < .01; sand & levin, 1996). ego boundaries and fl acquisition and learning where fl learning is concerned, it is usually the thin boundary people who are believed to be more effective. this, however, is an oversimplification, resulting from the concept of ego boundaries being either treated only as identity and group flexibility or as a general construct, encompassing all 12 subtypes of boundaries. when considered in the former manner, thin boundary individuals may indeed outperform the thick ego boundary people in the case of language acquisition in naturalistic settings, which is heavily determined by one’s ability and desire to acculturate. according to ehrman’s observations (1993, 1996), it is again thin boundary students (those who scored from one to two standard deviations above the mean of hartmann’s general population) who are more effective than thick boundary individuals and hence are reported to show “advantages for communicative second language acquisition.” although ehrman refers to the general thickness of ego boundaries (the sumbound score on hbq), she adds a crucial disclaimer, that is, they indeed are better, but only when they “have means to impose cognitive structure on [their] experience” (ehrman, 1999, p. 70). since this ability is connected to one of the specific categories of ego boundaries (boundaries related to the preference for neat and organized environment), we may forward the claim that next to examining the general thickness of ego boundaries, it is necessary to look more carefully at how particular types of boundaries may relate to the process and success in l2 acquisition. some of the categories of boundaries suggested by hartmann in his model of personality may be particularly important for fl learning and/or acquisition. it seems that thin boundaries in the case of some types (e.g., interpersonal boundaries, group boundaries, boundaries related to identity) and thick in the case of others (boundaries related to thoughts and feelings) can facilitate the process of mastering a fl. a similar view is held by ehrman (1999, p. 74), who explains that individuals revealing thin “external boundaries” (categories 7-12) and “average to thick internal boundaries” (categories 1-4) “suggest a learner who does well, at least in fsi classroom, with a minimum of anxiety.” it seems that the criteria according to which ehrman considers a learner to “do well” is ma gorzata baranucarz 50 the level of communication skills and the amount of experienced anxiety. are the same combinations of ego boundaries beneficial in accuracy-oriented classrooms with form-focused instruction? does thickness in particular ego boundaries have different effects on success in learning different language aspects and skills? answers to these questions require further investigation. the direction worth following when researching the relationship between ego boundaries and fl learning is indicated by ehrman (1993), who postulates that success of learners revealing a different extent of flexibility in ego boundaries is related to the complexity level of the learning task and the amount of structure present in the fl course. ehrman (1993) further claims that the extent of thickness of ego boundaries determines several capacities, such as the capacity to take in new information, to store data contradictory with our expectations and previous experience without rejecting or changing any, to maintain interest in incomplete information, and, finally, to restructure the intellectual, emotional and social schemata already existing in the longterm memory when confronted with novel data. all the capabilities are strongly related to the construct of ambiguity tolerance. profiles of thick and thin ego boundary fl learners on the basis of objective observations and the declarations of the learners themselves, several learning preferences of thin and thick ego boundary1 people can be identified. they have been gathered and displayed in the table below. table 1 fl learning preferences of thin and thick ego boundary people (based on ehrman, 1993, 1996, 1999; hartmann, 1991; leaver et al., 2005) thin ego boundary learners thick ego boundary learners rely on intuition prefer content-based learning curricula treat form and structure as of secondary importance favor non-linear approaches to learning prefer to get all the information at once; like to see the ‘big picture’ do not like and have difficulties with segmenting data are less analytic in their approach to learning like diversity of materials and tasks requiring using imagination prefer learning through exposure and experience try to compartmentalize and organize their learning process like order, clear rules, explicit objectives prefer well-planned, clearly structured courses and classes dislike unexpected events in the teaching/learning process favor an analytic approach do not like role-plays, simulations, where spontaneous reaction and changing identity is needed like drills usually hard working perfectionists 1 any time the term thick or thin ego boundary is used, without any reference to a particular type of boundary, it concerns the general level of thickness revealed by the sumbound score of hbq. ego boundaries and attainments in fl pronunciation 51 interestingly, almost all the classroom learning preferences are related not to identity or group boundaries, but boundaries connected with preferred manners of perception, preferences in the organization of one’s direct environment, preferences for sharp or fuzzy lines, or with boundaries connected with viewing truth. next to learning preferences, several other features of thin and thick ego boundary students have been observed. the former have been found to have higher language aptitude, to be good risk-takers (ehrman, 1993) and to use compensation and affective strategies more often (ehrman & oxford, 1995). as stated earlier, they prove to be better at oral skills and interactive comprehension (e.g., ehrman, 1993, 1994). although they do not give up when faced with obstacles and failures, they are more effective when they experience early successes (ehrman, 1999). however, there are a few features that may debilitate the fl progress of these learners. first of all, thin boundary people are generally said to be more anxious learners. secondly, wanting to learn everything at once, they may become overloaded after some time. thirdly, their learning of fls may be more difficult if they prove to be too tolerant of ambiguity. if this is the case at the intake level, they can be overwhelmed with new material and information. their too high “ambiguity tolerance proper” (ehrman, 1999, p. 75) can result in problems with separating the relevant data from the ocean of information taken in and with deciding what to internalize. finally, difficulties can appear during the process of accommodation, when trying to organize the knowledge to accommodate the new information and reconstruct one’s prior cognitions. all in all, despite the declared preference of thin ego boundary individuals for learning by osmosis, in a nonlinear manner, and to focus on content rather than form, they may find scaffolding offered by the teacher during the fl course particularly helpful. where thick boundary individuals are concerned, it is important to stress the fact that they are more resistant to stress, both long-term and short-term, than their thin boundary counterparts, and generally reveal lower levels of anxiety (ehrman, 1993). moreover, they have been reported to use metacognitive and memory strategies more often and effectively (ehrman & oxford, 1995). although they indeed do not feel comfortable in situations demanding from them a change of identity, they can learn to “thin down” their boundaries (ehrman, 1999, p. 72). what constitutes the biggest challenge for them is perceiving and taking in new ambiguous (i.e., incomplete, unstructured, contradictory) information, which is related to their intolerance of ambiguity at the intake level. ambiguous stimuli may be perceived by them only superficially, without any attempt to associate them with earlier knowledge. however, once new ambiguous linguistic data are finally taken in successfully ma gorzata baranucarz 52 and accepted cognitively and emotionally, their organization among prior cognitive constructs, demanding restructuring of the earlier schemata, does not usually constitute a problem for these learners (ehrman, 1999). ego boundaries and fl pronunciation learning preferences for thick or thin ego boundaries in some of the specific types mentioned above may be particularly important for learning and acquisition of fl pronunciation. for example, thin perceptual boundaries (a type of boundary classified by hartmann among unusual experiences), which encompass the tendency to focus on many things at a time, may be considered disadvantageous in the case of pronunciation acquisition, since it may not only result in the feeling of being overwhelmed by the massive amount of language input, but also not allow to perceive accurately properties of individual segments. moreover, we can hypothesize that thin ego boundary learners might find fl pronunciation learning more difficult due to their tendency to link and filter thoughts through feelings. many of the feelings may be unpleasant, being caused by prior negative experience or the fear of being evaluated poorly by others, because they consider themselves to look and sound silly or childish, for example, when articulating sounds differently than the l1 counterpart segments. at the same time, when taking into account the fact that thin boundary people are more “undefended” (hartmann, 1999, p. 3), that is, they use defense mechanisms less often, consistently and consciously, and are more sensitive to other people’s opinions, we may risk stating that indeed they are more prone to be anxious than learners revealing thick boundaries. however, thin ego boundary people may be considered to be in an advantageous position when taking into account their thin interpersonal and group boundaries. their ability to change identities with ease and to get involved with others, for example, treating the teacher or native speakers as models with whom they can easily identify, their lack of firm group distinction and capability to see themselves as members of various groups not only allow them to acculturate more successfully in natural settings than individuals with thick ego boundaries in these categories, but can also positively influence their pronunciation learning in formal contexts. however, as observations on competence-based and identity-based anxiety in the fl classroom (stroud & wee, 2006) seem to imply, learners with thin identity boundaries may be in a disadvantageous position if they strongly identify themselves not with the target language community but with their classmates, whose level of pronunciation may be low. despite having the potential for speaking with pronunciation lacking l1 features, their worries about appearing different than the rest of the ego boundaries and attainments in fl pronunciation 53 group by being better than the others, and about their friends rejecting them due to being praised by the teacher, they might consciously resign from achieving higher levels in pronunciation than most of their classmates. this phenomenon can be observed particularly in the case of adolescents, when the need for identifying with and being accepted by the peers is strong. finally, it is also boundaries in opinions and judgments, connected with the degree of ambiguity tolerance, that can be vital in the case of learning particular fl aspects. in some cases, for example, when learning grammatical exceptions, the thin boundary students are found to outperform those revealing thick ego boundaries, due to their ease in accepting contradictions and ambiguities. the situation may be analogous when learning the phonetic form of words that one has been pronouncing incorrectly for a long time or when memorizing the stress in cognates that is differently placed than in l1. however, when accuracy in pronunciation at the segmental level is concerned, we may assume that it is better to perceive the borders sharply and to classify features of pronunciation in black or white categories, which thick boundary people are more prone to do. reports on studies examining the relationship between flexibility of ego boundaries and accuracy in pronunciation resulting from formal instruction seem to be scarce. ehrman (1999) described two approaches to pronunciation learning. according to her, there are students who like and expect conscious focus on this aspect and rely heavily on clear explanations and drills. among them are mainly thick ego boundary learners. others feel overburdened with focus on form and would rather allow pronunciation to take care of itself, while they get involved in performing content-based tasks. these are the likes of people revealing thin ego boundaries. however, the question of whether the preferences of these learners lead to accuracy, and which of these types of learners achieve a higher level of attainment in pronunciation is neither addressed nor answered. the problem was touched on by waniek-klimczak (2011), whose main aim was to examine the relationship between the level of speaking skills and pronunciation of university students majoring in english after one semester of practical courses in english, and to observe how different dimensions of personality affect the learning of the two. one of the affective variables whose influence on accuracy in pronunciation and speaking skills was investigated was ego permeability. interestingly, correlation analysis proved no significant relationship between the extent of ego permeability and the level of pronunciation. the results in this area, however, ought to be viewed with caution, since a simplified instrument to measure the thickness of ego boundaries was used (i.e., the language learning attitudes questionnaire available online from the summer institute of linguistics), whose validity and reliability is not reported. ma gorzata baranucarz 54 the study research questions and hypotheses my interest in why some students are more reserved and stressed during the practical phonetic classes and why some reach higher levels than others in pronunciation after being offered formal instruction and systematic practice in this fl aspect led to a study aimed at providing answers to the following research questions: are attainments in fl pronunciation determined by the general level of thickness of ego boundaries? which type of learner – with thick or thin ego boundaries – shows a higher level of accuracy in fl pronunciation after attending a course in phonetics? are any particular types of boundaries more important than others for learning fl pronunciation? what level of thickness of these types of boundaries is beneficial in the case of fl pronunciation learning? hypotheses adjusted to the statistical analyses utilized in the further course of the study can be formulated in the following manner: h01. there is no significant difference between the attainments in fl pronunciation of thick ego boundary learners and thin ego boundary learners. ha1a. there is a significant difference between the attainments in fl pronunciation of thick ego boundary learners and thin ego boundary learners. ha1b. the attainments in fl pronunciation of thick ego boundary learners are higher than those of thin ego boundary learners. ha1c. the attainments in fl pronunciation of thin ego boundary learners are higher than those of thick ego boundary learners. h02. there is a no systematic relationship between the attainments in fl pronunciation and thickness of ego boundaries. ha2a. there is a systematic relationship between the attainments in fl pronunciation and thickness of ego boundaries. ha2b. there are systematic relationships between the thickness of particular types of ego boundaries and attainments in fl pronunciation. participants the subjects of the study were 45 students of the institute of english studies at the university of wroc aw, poland.2 the data for the research, that 2 i wish to express my gratitude to the students for participating in the research. ego boundaries and attainments in fl pronunciation 55 is, profiles of the participants in terms of their thickness of ego boundaries and their attainments in english pronunciation, were gathered at the end of their first year of study, when they had completed, among many others, the course in practical phonetics. they belonged to one of three groups – one full-time and two extramural groups, all of whom were taught pronunciation with the use of the same approach, techniques and materials, having attended the course in phonetics run by the same teacher, that is, the author of this paper. as is usually the case at language institutes in poland, the majority of the subjects were females (n = 32). although no standardized battery measuring the type and intensity of motivation and attitudes was applied, information about their desire to speak with a native-like accent (either rp or ga) was gathered with a short introductory questionnaire. the testees, among many others, were asked to disagree/agree with the following statement: “i would like my pronunciation of english to be as close to native-like as possible” by circling a digit from 1 (i very strongly disagree) to 5 (i very strongly agree). most of the students agreed with the statement strongly or very strongly. four subjects seemed to show little concern for their pronunciation, having marked a 3. the intensity of the participants’ motivation was further verified during an informal interview carried out with each of the students during the first recording session, which always took place at the beginning of the course of phonetics. despite the fact that initially there were 56 participants, the eventual number was lower. some were excluded due to having spent a few years in an english-speaking country; others did not complete the whole questionnaire measuring the extent of ego boundaries. the phonetics course before the actual course began, the pronunciation level of each student was diagnosed and aspects requiring improvement were pointed out. in most cases it appeared that the subjects were not aware of their problems in pronunciation, which proves that little attention had been paid to this language aspect during their prior education. each student was provided with a syllabus and informed about the purpose and content of the course, the order in which sounds were to be practised, the form and times of oral and written tests, materials that would be used, and criteria according to which they would be evaluated on tests and at the end of each semester. during the course, segmental phonetics was taught with the use of the analytic-linguistic approach. each time a new sound was introduced, its place and manner of articulation were provided by means of various techniques ma gorzata baranucarz 56 appealing to different modalities and senses of the students. in the theoretical part of the class the inductive approach was used, that is, the learners tried to observe and come up with their own hypotheses about how particular segments in english are pronounced and how they differ from their polish counterparts. it was only after such a theoretical introduction that practical phonetics began. it took the form of reading and repeating single words, sentences, and dialogues in which a particular segment was of major concern, and thus appeared several times in various contexts. the exercises were conducted individually, in pairs, groups and lockstep. the controlled tasks were supplemented with game-like activities from various sources, songs, and presentations of students. while the students were practising reading dialogues in pairs, the teacher monitored their work, offering help if needed. any time a particular aspect of pronunciation deviated significantly from the correct version, the instructor modeled the proper form and encouraged repetition. when the learner showed discomfort and reluctance to articulate the segment or word after the teacher, he/she was encouraged to see the instructor after the class, so as to practise the difficult area of pronunciation individually, without the presence of other students. additionally, about 15 minutes of each lesson was devoted to transcribing difficult vocabulary items, which the learners were required to know for the written tests taken approximately once a month. it seems worth adding that the students were allowed to choose either rp or ga as their goal. consequently, the features of the two norms were presented in a detailed manner in the first semester, and consistency in using one of them was required both in articulation and in written transcription tests. instruments introductory questionnaire. to gather basic information about the individuals taking part in the study, a questionnaire was distributed to them at the very beginning of the course. while some items were based on a 5-point likert scale, others had the form of open questions. the instrument gathered data about the subjects’ strength of motivation to achieve native-like pronunciation, about the accent they wished to learn (rp or ga), prior experience in pronunciation learning, and visits to english-speaking countries. hartmann boundary questionnaire. the extent of thickness of ego boundaries was measured with the use of the hartmann boundary questionnaire (1991). it consists of 145 statements, referring to 12 types of boundaries, which subjects respond to on a 5-point likert scale, reporting the extent to which the statements are true of them. when distributed by hartmann among the first 866 ego boundaries and attainments in fl pronunciation 57 people, the instrument showed a high level of internal reliability (cronbach alpha = .93). as already stated above, each testee receives an overall score (sumbound), a personal total (for categories 1-8) and world total (categories 9-12). the more points the students score, the thinner their ego boundaries. although the subjects of this study represented an advanced or upperintermediate level of english, in case some questions were misunderstood, the instrument was translated into polish. the polish version showed an acceptable level of reliability (cronbach alpha = .89). before the questionnaire was administered to the subjects, it was filled out by a group of 10 students from a different first-year group, which resulted in rewording a few statements and eliminating one of them from the scoring (the question concerning reactions to marijuana, which the majority had never tried). so as to reduce the danger of the subjects being discouraged, getting tired and/or bored by filling out the questionnaire and, consequently, of not giving true responses, it was divided into two parts (part i – questions 1-71, part ii – questions 72-146) and administered on two occasions (during the last two classes of phonetics), before the pronunciation measurement. pronunciation attainment test. after the whole academic year of studying phonetics (about thirty 90-minute lessons), the subjects’ pronunciation was recorded and assessed with the use of three tests. the first one (test 1) consisted in reading aloud a text (borrowed from mortimer, 1989), on the basis of which the pronunciation of various aspects could be assessed. due to the fact that the text was not known to the learners and that no time was allowed for preparation and rehearsal of the reading, the task can be considered the most difficult of the three and to reveal pronunciation habits with minimum control and monitoring. when evaluating the pronunciation of the subjects in test 1 an atomistic approach was used. each student could attain from 0 to 4 points for the majority of segments that were practised during the course (9 consonants and 10 vowels). the points were distributed depending on how frequently the subjects pronounced particular segments properly. although the main area of evaluation was pronunciation at sound level, the subjects could lose some points (up to 4 points) for major errors produced in other areas than segments, such as word stress or lack of linking and fluency in reading, which might have been caused by too much focus on accuracy. finally, consistency in using rp or ga was evaluated. its absence in particular areas of pronunciation (e.g., articulating [r] in all contexts in rp) resulted in taking away some points. eventually, each subject had two sets of scores for test 1 – one for correctness at segmental level (vs + cs) and one for consistency in using one of the accents (rp/ga cons). ma gorzata baranucarz 58 in tests 2 and 3 the subjects’ pronunciation at word level was evaluated. test 2 consisted in reading a list of 36 words commonly mispronounced by poles (list 1). since it was not the first time the learners were assessed for reading this list (it was read by the students before the course and at the end of the first semester) and since the students were informed about this part of the assessment, this test can be considered the easiest of the three. in test 3 the participants read another list of 36 words. this time the test consisted of difficult vocabulary items that were practised during the second semester and that appeared on the written transcription test. in the case of both tests the students were credited with 1 point for each word properly pronounced. since the tests were the basis for crediting each learner at the end of the academic year for the course of phonetics, the raw scores for each component of the pronunciation attainment test were converted into one of the following 10 grades from 2 to 5 (i.e., 2, 2.5, 2.7, 3, 3.5, 3.7, 4, 4.5, 4.7, 5) where 2 meant very poor and 5 very good. finally, the grades were added up, giving each subject a total score (total), with a maximum of 20 points. these sets of credits and the total outcome were used for further statistical analyses. presentation and discussion of results. table 2 shows the descriptive statistics for the results of the pronunciation attainment test. while the scores for test 1 (vs + cs) and test 3 do not considerably violate the normal distribution assumption, the total score, scores for consistency in using one of the norms and for test 2 are negatively skewed, showing that after the course the majority of the learners pronounced the words commonly mispronounced by poles properly and were highly consistent in using either rp or ga. consequently, it is the results for segmental accuracy (test 1; vs + cs) and for list 2 (test 3) that should be taken into account in further statistical analyses. table 2 descriptive statistics for the results of the pronunciation attainment test test 1 test 2 test 3 total (max 20) vs + cs rp/ga cons mean 3.97 4.26 4.37 3.21 15.81 sd 0.66 0.67 0.62 0.80 2.16 median 4.00 4.50 4.50 3.00 16.40 l-h 2.7-5 2-5 2-5 2-5 9.5-19.2 note: vs – vowels, cs – consonants, cons – consistency the descriptive statistics for outcomes on the hartmann boundary questionnaire are displayed in table 3. this time the scores are normally distributed. although not displayed in the table, normal distribution can be ego boundaries and attainments in fl pronunciation 59 traced also in the case of all 12 categories of ego boundaries that the hbq measures. the mean of the sumbound (284.29) is close to that achieved by the 866 subjects involved in hartmann’s research (273.00), though generally the students majoring in english proved to have thinner ego boundaries than the participants of hartmann’s study. table 3 descriptive statistics for results of the hbq personal total word total sumbound mean 191.42 92.87 284.29 sd 35.37 14.73 44.08 median 193.00 90.00 286.00 l-h 127-282 71-126 198-408 so as to verify hypotheses h01-ha1c, the subjects were classified as thick or thin ego boundary learners, depending on whether they scored below or above the group mean for the sumbound. as table 4 shows, in the case of each test the thin ego boundary learners outperformed the thick ego boundary individuals. however, an independent t test proved the discrepancies between the pronunciation attainments of thin and thick ego boundary subjects to be nonsignificant. table 4 descriptive statistics for scores on the pronunciation attainment test achieved by thick and thin ego boundary learners group mean/sd test 1 test 2 test 3 total vs + cs rp/ga cons thin (n = 23) m 4.03 4.32 4.47 3.26 16.09 sd 0.70 0.62 0.39 0.65 1.73 thick (n = 22) m 3.91 4.18 4.26 3.16 15.51 sd 0.62 0.73 0.78 0.94 2.54 note: vs – vowels, cs – consonants, cons – consistency to check hypotheses h02-ha2b the pearson correlation coefficients were computed among all types of ego boundaries and parts of the pronunciation attainment test. the results are gathered in table 5. ma gorzata baranucarz 60 table 5 pearson product-moment correlation coefficients between results of the pronunciation attainment test and scores on hbq test 1 test 2 test 3 total (max 20) vs + cs rp/ga cons personal total -.007 -.047 .031 .063 .015 world total -.069 .022 .105 -.005 .014 sumbound -.029 -.031 .060 .049 .017 category 7 .048 -.074 .204 .274* .151 category 8 -.040 -.025 .092 .292* .114 category 12 .066 .051 .260* .041 .125 rcrit = 0,2573, *p < 0.10, df = 43 note: vs – vowels, cs – consonants, cons – consistency the correlation proved nonsignificant not only for the sumbound, personal total and world total, but also for the majority of specific boundary categories. however, three types of boundaries were positively correlated with accuracy in pronunciation at word level (test 3), though only weakly and at a low probability level (p < .10). one of them is category 7, labeled by hartmann (1991, p. 94) “neat, exact, precise" (r = .27). it refers to the extent to which one keeps his/her direct environment, work and working place organized and tidy. among the statements in this subscale, which the subjects were to agree/disagree with, were the following ones: “i like to pigeonhole things as much as possible,” “i keep my desk and worktable neat and well organized” or “i get my appointments right on time” (hartmann, 1991, pp. 8092). interestingly, the significant positive correlation implies that the less organized the subjects considered themselves to be (the thinner ego boundaries they had in this category), the higher their level of pronunciation was. the second type of boundary which correlated positively with the pronunciation attainments (r = .29) was category 8, representing the subjects’ attitudes towards accepting objects, concepts and situations that lack clear borders. though many statements in this subscale refer to visual images, furniture, and clothing, such as “good solid frames are very important for a picture or a painting,” others are more general, for example, “i like clear, precise borders,” and “i like fuzzy borders” (hartmann, 1991, pp. 80-92). interestingly, the same types of boundaries (categories 7 and 8 on hbq) were found to be positively correlated with “communicative language learning success” by ehrman (1999, p. 74), which can be explained by the thick ego boundary individuals being less effective and feeling less comfortable and confident performing tasks that lack clear structure and contain unexpected elements. finally, the third boundary type that correlated positively with pronunciation accuracy (r = .26) was category 12, concerning opinions about truth and beauty, ego boundaries and attainments in fl pronunciation 61 which seem to be related with categories 7 and 8. among the statements in this subscale were the following: “there is a place for everything, and everything should be in its place,” “either you are telling the truth or you are lying: that’s all there is to it” or “there are definite rules and standards, which one can learn, about what is and is not beautiful” (hartmann, 1991, pp. 80-92). the outcomes imply that the more prone the subjects were to see truth and beauty in shades of grey rather than as black or white categories, the better their pronunciation after the course of phonetics was. however, caution is needed when interpreting the results on test 1, since the normal distribution assumption has been violated. all three types of boundaries that showed a systematic relationship with pronunciation attainments are connected with the concept of ambiguity tolerance, that is, with the easiness to perceive, accept, take in and retain ambiguities, and with the tendency to organize one’s learning, and structuralize one’s knowledge. the outcomes might suggest that thin ego boundary learners, that is, those who are frequently too tolerant of ambiguity and have difficulties with imposing structure on the new information and with organizing their learning benefitted from the course of phonetics being form-focused, clearly structured and helping in perceiving and accepting ambiguities (e.g., by referring to references, such as dictionaries) more than the thick ego boundary students. there is a possibility that the level of pronunciation of the thin ego boundary subjects, who are said to prefer content-based curricula and to favor learning through exposure and experience, was influenced more significantly by other practical courses of english (e.g., conversation classes) or any other content-based course in which they were exposed to english and in which there was no focus on the phonetic form, than by the course of phonetics. however, if this was the case, then a systematic relationship should appear in the case of task 1 and 2, where pronunciation of general features of the english phonetic system and of the frequently used words were assessed, rather than in task 3, strictly connected with the content of the course, that is, pronunciation of lexical items whose probability of appearing during other classes was much smaller. what is the justification for the lack of significant correlation between pronunciation attainments and boundaries connected to identity? one of the possible explanations for this phenomenon may lie in the fact that many learners reporting thick identity and group boundaries, who were assumed to show less accurate pronunciation in this study, might have learnt to thin down their boundaries during the course of phonetics or for the sake of the testing tasks. this may have enabled them to catch up with the level of thin ego boundary individuals and resulted in leveling the differences. why has no negative relationship been found between pronunciation accuracy and the thickness of ego boundaries in thoughts and feelings or the ma gorzata baranucarz 62 boundaries related to the use of defense mechanisms? the outcomes might have been affected by external factors, such as the friendly atmosphere during the course, good classroom dynamics and rapport with the instructor, the students being provided with a lot of positive feedback, being given the right to pass when being reluctant to repeat new words individually, by offering students with a low level of pronunciation guidance and corrective feedback on an individual basis. moreover, it is again possible that with time the thin boundary students could have developed several strategies allowing them to cope successfully during the course of phonetics and to feel more comfortable, such as several anxiety-lowering strategies. consequently, we may conclude that many students who reach an advanced or upper intermediate level, particularly those majoring in fls, learn to adopt coping strategies and, therefore, may not behave typically for the reported thick or thin ego boundary style. however, some learners, especially those revealing a very high level of thickness or thinness of ego boundaries will act according to their style, and reveal difficulties with overcoming their limitations. this would explain why, as ehrman (1999) claims, there are many thick ego boundary learners who are very good at fls, and several thin boundary individuals for whom both learning and testing are difficult. profiles of interesting students. what sheds more light on the relationship between ego boundaries and fl pronunciation learning is a careful look at profiles of a few subjects, based on a deeper analysis of their responses on the hbq, information gathered with the introductory questionnaire, observations of their behavior during the phonetics course, and opinions of other university teachers having classes with them. characteristics of two students are presented below. subject a is a male learner, highly motivated to speak with a good accent, who is now (two years after the data have been gathered) majoring in american literature, writing his ma thesis in this area. his supervisor considers him a very good, creative and imaginative student. at the same time, he is said to be very sensitive, open and likeable. he is known to have his own music band, in which he sings and plays the guitar. looking at all the information above, we may risk stating that student a has strong thin ego boundaries. indeed, with his highest score among all the participants of the research (over three sds above the group mean on the sumbound) he is reported to have extremely thin ego boundaries. in the case of most types of boundaries he achieves a score of 2, 2.5 or 3 sds above the mean. when his level of pronunciation after the course of phonetics is concerned, it has not changed much when compared with the level before the course, despite him gaining phonetic competence (good written test grades) and his high motivation. during class, when ego boundaries and attainments in fl pronunciation 63 doing pronunciation exercises he seemed more tense than others and sometimes distracted by his thoughts. what could have helped him progress in pronunciation are his very thin interpersonal boundaries, which should have allowed him to accept a new fl identity easily. however, he scored very high on categories 7 and 8, demonstrating problems with deciding what to consider irrelevant, what to take in from the input, and how to organize and structure his knowledge. the difficulties in this area are further supported by his high level of ambiguity tolerance, measured in the course of an earlier study (i.e., baranucarz, 2010). the problems, however, could be expected to have been reduced by the clearly structured format of the phonetics class. what seems to impede the student’s progress in pronunciation are his very thin boundaries between thoughts and feelings, and high sensitivity revealed by poor defensive mechanisms. in other words, we may risk stating that he has not developed coping strategies that would allow him to protect his ego. student b is a female, majoring in translation, declaring a very high motivation to achieve native-like pronunciation. as is the case of subject a, she can be considered musically talented, having attended primaryand secondary-level music schools. her scores on the pronunciation attainment test were among the highest. at the same time she was found to have moderately thick ego boundaries (the sumbound being 1.5 sds below the group average), but she could have learnt to thin down. interestingly, her identity boundaries were thick (2 sds below the mean). reporting only a moderate (0.5 sd below the mean) preference for organized and clearly structuralized learning, and high tolerance of ambiguity, she might have found the course helpful in organizing her knowledge, just as student a did. what clearly differentiates her from the previous learner and might have facilitated her progress in pronunciation are her much higher abilities to delineate thoughts from feelings (1.5 sds below the group mean) and her lower level of sensitivity (1.5 sds below the mean in category 6). conclusions on the basis of the quantitative data gathered in the research reported in this paper, we can conclude that there is no systematic relationship between the general level of thickness of ego boundaries measured by hbq and attainments in fl pronunciation after a course in phonetics. although a tendency for thin ego boundary learners to outperform the thick ego boundary individuals in pronunciation accuracy was observed, the differences proved nonsignificant when verified with a t test. unlike in the case of acquisition taking place in natural contexts, the extent of thickness of ego boundaries connected with identity (interpersonal and group boundaries) did not determine the level of pronunciation. ma gorzata baranucarz 64 however, a more detailed analysis of data consisting in observing whether particular types of ego boundaries are important for fl pronunciation learning showed that categories 7, 8 and 12 of hbq are positively correlated with the level of pronunciation, though at a low level (r = .27, r = .29 and r = .26, respectively). more specifically, the less organization, precision and tidiness the subjects reported in their direct environment (among others in the work place), the more correct their pronunciation was. the attainments in the subskills were also systematically higher in the case of those individuals who revealed a tendency to perceive borders as blurred and fuzzy, and to consider concepts related to truth and beauty in shades of grey rather than as clearly delineated black and white categories. all in all, what most probably affected the positive relationship between pronunciation attainments and the thickness (more precisely, thinness) of ego boundaries in categories 7, 8 and 12 is the fact that the course of phonetics was highly structured and form-focused, helping to disembed the relevant phonetic information from the input, accept the ambiguities and reorganize one’s previous knowledge of the phonetic system of english. it is imperative that the results of the quantitative analysis be viewed with caution, due to several limitations of the study, such as the scarce number of learners involved in the research, the absence of randomization in participant selection, and the absence of reliability and validity data on the pronunciation attainment test. the outcomes of statistical tests are complemented with a more thorough examination of the profiles of two subjects. they seem to imply that an individual reporting highly thin ego boundaries in categories 7, 8 and 12 will not benefit from a clearly organized course of phonetics if he/she reveals high ego boundaries between thoughts and feelings, high sensitivity and poor defensive mechanisms. it is only when one learns to adopt coping strategies allowing him/her to thicken boundaries in these areas that pronunciation learning can be more successful. new behaviors have to be acquired also by thick ego boundary learners. their pronunciation can be facilitated if they learn to thin down their ego boundaries connected with personal and group identity, in particular. there is, however, no doubt that learning to behave and think in a way different from our natural preference is an ability that only some people can master. the relationship between pronunciation accuracy and the extent of thickness of ego boundaries can be expected to be different if the learners are not provided with a course of phonetics, or if the course lacks clear organization and form-focused formal instruction. additionally, discrepancies in outcomes may appear at lower proficiency levels and among people who are 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(2011). ‘i am good at speaking, but i failed my phonetics class’ – pronunciation and speaking in advanced learners of english. in m. pawlak, e. waniek-klimczak, & j. majer (eds.), speaking and instructed foreign language acquisition (pp. 117-130). bristol: multilingual matters. 347 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (2). 2023. 347-371 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.38278 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt unraveling emi as a predictor of english proficiency in vietnamese higher education: exploring learners’ backgrounds as a variable an nguyen the open university, milton keynes, uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1335-4890 an.nguyen@open.ac.uk abstract one key objective of english medium instruction (emi) programs in non-anglophone countries is to improve students’ english skills in both academic and professional environments. despite the high cost and the popularity of the program policy, there remains a lack of empirical studies on the link between attending an emi program and students’ english proficiency. this paper employs data from 111 students majoring in international business from a top vietnamese university to compare english competency, measured by the duolingo test, between students enrolled in an emi program and their counterparts who are taught the same curriculum but in the native language, through vietnamese medium instruction (vmi). controlling for different social backgrounds, the study shows that participation in emi is associated with better english test performance. analysis using multiple interaction terms shows that male emi participants, or students coming from lowerincome households, having lower english scores in high school, and attending more english private tutoring would benefit more from emi. the analysis sheds light on potential socioeconomic obstacles to accessing emi and english skill development. follow-up interviews similarly show the relevance of demographic backgrounds to the students’ perceptions of emi and their english proficiency. the study provides clear evidence of substantial associations between emi and english skills. further studies are needed to establish the causality of the results. keywords: emi policy; english proficiency; social stratification; emi impact; duolingo english test mailto:an.nguyen@open.ac.uk an nguyen 348 1. introduction english as a medium of instruction (emi) has emerged as a major asset for internationalizing universities in non-anglophone countries in recent years (dearden, 2014; macaro, 2015). since most emi students are l2 english speakers, improving students’ english proficiency is one of the program’s top priorities (aizawa & rose, 2019; byun et al., 2011; cho, 2012; hamid et al., 2013; hu & lei, 2014). debates around the effectiveness of highly expensive programs with english as the medium of instruction in terms of english development and, more generally, academic attainment have been increasingly popular (aizawa et al., 2020; curle et al., 2020; rose, curle et al., 2020; xie & curle, 2020; yuksel et al., 2023). yet, the conclusion remains elusive and little has been done when it comes to using data from an emerging context such as vietnam. this study sets out to fill the gap by exploring the extent to which emi learning could predict student english proficiency when compared to a non-emi cohort. section 2 discusses the current literature on emi and related emi studies on language outcomes. section 3 describes the vietnamese student data and the survey. methodological issues are presented in section 4 before discussing the results and policy implications in section 5. section 6 concludes with potential research avenues. 2. literature review 2.1. language proficiency outcomes in emi the ability of a language user to effectively apply language knowledge and linguistic competence in both general and specific contexts can be understood as second language (l2) competency (hulstijn, 2011). the topic of whether emi can increase student english competence continues to spark a great deal of scholarly interest because language learning remains one of the core goals of emi. rogier (2012) conducted one of the first studies in this field at an emi university in the united arab emirates. overall, the findings demonstrated that there was only a relative minimum increase for such a long period as a four-year program. however, there was no direct non-emi group during that time to use as a reference point for comparison. the main question of whether emi students genuinely improved their english abilities more than those without emi, and if so, by how much, remains unresolved. at most, the data can only give insight into the score discrepancies among students who get the same emi lessons. lei and hu (2014) conducted a comparative study on english proficiency among emi and chinese medium instruction (cmi) students in a chinese higher education context. regression results showed that prior english competence was the best indicator of future unraveling emi as a predictor of english proficiency in vietnamese higher education: exploring . . . 349 english exam results, which reiterated the critical need to take into consideration students’ educational and linguistic backgrounds when evaluating the results. however, as lei and hu (2014) opted for using the national high-stakes english test which was only used in china as a measure of english proficiency, more details about the test validity and reliability should have been included to support the interpretations of the findings. an account from an emi university in turkey was presented by yuksel et al. (2023). this study, which concentrated on the last years of study, can complement lei and hu (2014) and other studies that only focus on the initial stages of emi involvement. at this turkish university, emi is taught via a hybrid delivery system, and students are required to take both turkish medium instruction (tmi) and emi courses over their four years of study. the results showed a statistically significant improvement in english proficiency, which serves as the best predictor of academic achievements over four years. the analysis would have been more complete if the impacts of tmi had also been taken into consideration in terms of language and academic score alterations, given the multilingual nature of emi in the context of the study. a mixedmethods study conducted at a croatian university with emi and non-emi students was contributed by čakarun and drljača margić (2021). after two years of study, both groups displayed an equally significant improvement in their business english. however, there were 264 non-emi students and only 58 emi students in the study, underrepresenting emi students in the participant sample as a whole. 2.2. growth of emi in vietnam since the first officially recognized emi program was started in 1998, there have been more than 300 emi programs offered in 84 of vietnam’s 237 higher education institutions as of 2017 (vied, 2017, as cited in ngo, 2019). the development of emi in vietnam continues to be contentious and dynamic (galloway et al., 2020; hoang et al., 2018; tran & nguyen, 2018). from a policy-making perspective, there has been significant pressure on emi to improve individual competency and national competitiveness in a globalized context (nguyen et al., 2017; noorashid, 2020). as a result, a growing number of higher education institutions in vietnam are now offering emi programs to vietnamese undergraduate students. parallel to this, the majority of university students in vietnam enroll in vietnamese medium instruction (vmi) programs, where all courses are taught in vietnamese, the only official language, while english or a second foreign language is taught as a course in addition to the students’ majors. the tuition charged for english-mediated programs is more than twice as much as that for vietnamese-mediated programs, which constitutes the primary distinction between emi and vmi (nguyen et al., 2017). because of this, the english-mediated option is primarily available and an nguyen 350 affordable for the more affluent groups, raising concerns about a growing social division in vietnamese higher education (tri & moskovsky, 2019). tri and moskovsky (2019) observed an upsurge in emi programs, particularly for business-related subjects because students from the developing middle class found it more affordable than studying abroad. since emi programs are offered locally, those students can still receive an education in english without having to pay the exorbitant living expenses associated with studying abroad. one of the fundamental assumptions behind joining emi in vietnam is that students’ english ability would inevitably increase as a result of extensive exposure to an english-speaking environment (noorashid, 2020; pham & ba-ngoc, 2020). however, several researchers have cautioned that emi cannot always ensure language learning gains (chapple, 2015; lei & hu, 2014; taguchi, 2014; yang, 2015). although there has been much research on emi-driven proficiency around the world, this study is one of the first attempts to take into consideration the confounding factors that contribute to emi success when compared to an equivalent non-emi group.1 as indicated in the literature, it is hypothesized that in vietnam participating in emi is positively associated with higher english proficiency. the first research question is as follows: rq1: does english medium instruction predict student english proficiency? another understudied area of research concerns the significance of learners’ background characteristics in predicting and explaining the effectiveness of emi (see macaro, 2018; macaro et al., 2018). because of the costly nature of attending an emi program, questions have been posed to the policymakers on whether and how to bridge the gaps between the english skill improvement for different social groups, classified by the student’s household income, gender, pre-university english ability, and on-going private tutoring expenses. these questions are addressed using an interaction variable regression analysis. it is hypothesized that the predictability of emi with respect to english proficiency is differentially distributed across sub-groups of learners, classified above. the question is of considerable interest to policymakers for their resource allocations in helping different social groups to access and benefit from emi learning. the second research question is formulated as follows: rq2: how does the predictive effect of emi on english proficiency vary across the socioeconomic backgrounds of the students? finally, this study aims to complement the wider literature on promoting a student-centered active learning pedagogy in emi (dimova et al., 2015; dimova & kling, 2020). in particular, it explores how students perceive themselves and their experiences 1 some of the findings reported in this study have been previously presented in nguyen (2021). unraveling emi as a predictor of english proficiency in vietnamese higher education: exploring . . . 351 of each respective medium of instruction stream through a qualitative analysis using in-depth interviews with the participants. the third question is as follows: rq3: how is the relationship between the medium of instruction and english proficiency perceived by students? together with quantitative relating to in the previous questions, qualitative analysis would shed light on the effectiveness of the emi policy and on how students from different backgrounds would benefit from access to emi. without claiming to establish causality in the results, the study shows that in the sample selected for the analysis, emi students have on average higher english proficiency, measured by the duolingo test. using regression analysis with different interaction terms, there is evidence that emi students from disadvantaged backgrounds, such as those having fewer english private tutoring hours or lower english pre-university grades, on average have lower english proficiency scores than their counterparts. male emi students on average perform better than female emi students in the duolingo test, while there is no statistical difference in english proficiency between students from higher-income households and those from lower-income households. the thematic content analysis further supports the quantitative results. 3. method 3.1. setting in the vietnamese public school system, grade 12 students are required to sit the national high school graduation examination. english, mathematics, and vietnamese literature are the three mandatory exam papers in this national assessment. test-takers will then use the results to apply for admission to vietnamese public universities and colleges (duong, 2019). this study was conducted at a public university in hochiminh city, vietnam. prospective students must meet the same threshold requirement for the aggregate score of the three test papers to be admitted to the international business program. around 450 students are enrolled in the international business (ib) program across every academic year, while there are 160 students for the emi route and 290 for the vmi route. it is important to note that students are self-selected into the emi and the vmi route for the same degree program. because admission to the program is based on the aggregate test score and admission to each instructional route is through self-selection, there is no guarantee that emi and vmi students are homogenous in relation to their pre-course english background. on this premise, this study seeks to examine the english proficiency outcomes of students from both academic streams. an nguyen 352 3.2. participants data for this study were gathered in may 2021 from 111 third-year students (50 emi and 61 vmi) who had all been immersed in their respective instructional studies for at least three years. in terms of gender composition, there were 45 male and 66 female students. all participants were vietnamese, therefore the first language noise issue can be removed. furthermore, none of them were exposed to any previous formal emi learning as they were all enrolled in vietnamese medium high schools across vietnam. in principle, the emi ib students take all the chosen subjects in english and the vmi ib students are taught academic content in vietnamese. at university, students complete exams in the same language as their respective instructional medium. one exception is that both vmi and emi students must complete the marxist-leninist philosophy and national security courses in vietnamese during the first term of their studies. 3.3. data collection first, students filled out a questionnaire requesting demographic data such as age, gender, household income, number of hours per week spent receiving private english instruction, and entry english test scores. an open-ended question at the end of the survey allowed students to elaborate anonymously on how they perceived their choice of educational medium and progress in their english ability related. the second task required participants to complete the online duolingo english test. the test contains both discrete-point tasks which assess language components such as vocabulary items, grammar points, and sentence structures, and integrative tasks which measure the incorporation of multiple skills such as dictation, an oral interview, and essay writing (bézy & settles, 2015; isbell & kremmel, 2020; wagner, 2020; ye, 2014). in terms of the test structure, duolingo comprises two parts, namely, the computer-adaptive part for shortresponse items and the examinee’s extended speaking and writing performances for stakeholders’ in-depth review (isbell & kremmel, 2020). the overall scores are presented on a 10-160 scale with a sub-scale for literacy, conversation, comprehension, and production that tap into users’ general english proficiency (isbell & kremmel, 2020). duolingo is one of the most popular english learning platforms and it offers a free version of the english proficiency test. the paid version of the test, which consists of a series of questions to evaluate english skills in 45 minutes, is widely accepted by thousands of universities.2 the free test version provides a shorter list of questions and should be taken within 15 2 https://englishtest.duolingo.com/institutions unraveling emi as a predictor of english proficiency in vietnamese higher education: exploring . . . 353 minutes. because of the cost and time effectiveness, this study adopted the free version for flexibility and higher probability of retaining interviewee participation. the participants then reported their duolingo results, together with a screenshot of their confirmation page for verification purposes. 3.4. data operationalization armed with the individual surveys, the present author collated the information and constructed the following list of variables. outcome variable: the individual duolingo test result for each participant is used as a proxy measure of english proficiency, coded as 𝐷𝑢𝑜𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑜𝑖. main explanatory variable: the key variable of interest is the medium of instruction (𝑀𝑂𝐼𝑖 ) which was coded as 1 if the participant enrolled in the emi route, and as 0 for vmi students. amongst 111 participants, 61 enrolled in vmi and 50 enrolled in emi. in the regression analysis, the estimates associated with this variable are of our interest. because the admission decision to the emi/vmi route relies entirely on the self-selection of the applicant, a rudimentary comparison of the outcome variable between emi and vmi students would be subject to selection bias: there are fundamental differences between vmi and emi students, and emi students elected themselves to take the emi route as they were already more capable in english. to address this concern, information on an array of variables was collected to capture the potential socioeconomic differences between the students that may explain the self-selection into the emi stream. admittedly, the control variables only provide a setting in which the outcomes of the vmi and emi participants are compared while only a few socioeconomic background factors are taken into account. control variables: first, the author collected the entry english grade (𝐸𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑦𝐸𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑖𝑠ℎ𝑖) for each student, which included the test scores from the national high school graduation examination on a 1-10 scale as a measure of prior english background. following the official classification of the ministry of education, eeq was coded as 0 if the grade was lower than 8.0 (less than good), and as 0 if the grade was at least 8.0 (good and excellent). students in the sample scored from 5.0 to 9.8 and were classified into two levels with the 8.0 cut-off point, as usually used in the official classification. second, the socio-economic background was captured by using a self-reported household income (𝐻𝐼𝑛𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑖) variable, which recorded the monthly household income of the participants. the statista country report on the categorization of the average monthly income in vietnam in 2021 (nguyen, 2022) was followed to code the variable as an ordinal variable, in which level 1 (low) is assigned to families earning less than (equivalently) £313 per month, an nguyen 354 and level 2 (high) to those earning more than £313 a month. third, information on gender (𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑖) was collected, a binary variable for the student gender, equal to 1 if female, and 0 if male. finally, private english tuition (𝐸𝑛𝑔𝑇𝑢𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑖) was used, which indicated the weekly hours of attending after-class english lessons as a proxy measure of supplementary language support and students’ effort to learn english. the variable was coded on a binary scale, with level 1 (low) to indicate fewer than three hours of private tuition per week, and level 2 (high) for more than three hours per week. the binary structure of the control variables was used to preserve the classification of the pre-test performance of the participants and to avoid any subjective bias in a more granular classification. having binary measures also offers simplicity for differential effect analysis in section 5.2, and consistency when discussing and comparing the results with other studies. the author will further discuss how the control variables can help address the selection bias concern in section 5.1. table 1 presents the summary statistics for the study participants. according to the descriptive statistics, the highest duolingo score was 145, which is equivalent to an 8.5 score in the ielts, and the lowest was 45, which is equivalent to a 3.5 ielts. given that all participants had to meet the same grade requirements to be admitted to both instructional programs at the beginning of their course, the disparity in duolingo scores is striking. this gap in duolingo scores among participants after three years of exposure to the respective instructional program reinforces the study’s goal of determining the predictive role of emi with regard to student english proficiency. the skewness was -0.223, which was within the acceptable range of -1 to +1. table 1 descriptive statistics of variables in this study 4. data analysis rq1: does english medium instruction predict student english proficiency? to explore the extent to which the medium of instruction (moi) could predict english proficiency (rq1), a multivariate regression analysis was employed, using control variables to account for potential self-selection into emi. statistical analysis of the estimates, together with hypothesis testing, shed light on the statistical variable min max m sd skewness 𝑀𝑂𝐼𝑖 0 1 .45 .49 .19 𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑖 0 1 .59 .49 -.39 𝐸𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑦𝐸𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑖𝑠ℎ𝑖 0 1 .61 .49 .67 𝐻𝐼𝑛𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑖 0 1 .34 .48 -.47 𝐸𝑛𝑔𝑇𝑢𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑖 0 1 .38 .49 .51 duolingoi 45.0 145.0 104.36 23.42 -.22 unraveling emi as a predictor of english proficiency in vietnamese higher education: exploring . . . 355 significance of the association. due to the data limitation and the non-randomization of the moi selection, even with the inclusion of the control variables, the results should be viewed as an exploratory analysis of the relationship between the medium of instruction and english outcome, holding several important socioeconomic characteristics constant. instead of claiming to show a causal effect of moi, the analysis was more modest and focused on the different factors that could predict english proficiency in one of the top vietnamese universities. to evaluate how well the medium of instruction, moii, can explain or predict the differences in the student english proficiency, measured by the duolingo test (duolingoi), two regression models were employed. first, a simple univariate regression between the two variables was used to directly compare the english proficiency between vmi and emi students, regardless of their socioeconomic background. the estimated coefficient, β1, in equation (1), was of interest, showing the strength of the association between moi and english proficiency. duolingo𝑖 = 𝛼 + 𝛽1𝑀𝑂𝐼𝑖 + 𝑒1𝑖 (1) where e1i is the error term, that captures unobserved factors that can affect the performance in the duolingo test. a pertinent concern is the self-selection into emi by the students: students with already better english preparation would likely self-select themselves to choose english as their main language of learning. the direct comparison in (1) is then likely to be biased and entirely reflect the pre-test differences in the students’ english ability. because it is not possible to observe the true english ability of the students before taking the university course, four variables were used to capture the pre-test factors: the english entry grade before university, the household income, gender, and private tuition hours. even though these variables will not fully capture all unobserved factors that influence self-selection, they do give us a fairer and more nuanced comparison. the regression equation is described in equation (2), with e2i being the error term, and β1 remains our estimate of interest. duolingo𝑖 = 𝛼 + 𝛽1𝑀𝑂𝐼𝑖 + 𝛽2𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑖 + 𝛽3𝐻𝐼𝑛𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑖 + 𝛽4𝐸𝑛𝑔𝑇𝑢𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑖 +𝛽5𝐸𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑦𝐸𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑖𝑠ℎ𝑖 + 𝑒2𝑖 (2) besides the concern of self-selection bias, other linear regression model assumptions are worth discussing. first, it is posited that the control variables are not highly correlated with the main variable of interest moi. when checking for multicollinearity, the vif coefficients for all predictors are all less than 3, indicating that there is no violation of multicollinearity. heteroskedasticity is also not present in the analysis, and robust standard errors were checked for any concern an nguyen 356 of its violation. the residuals reasonably resembled a normal distribution with a sample size of 111 (following tabachnick & fidell, 2013, the formula of n > 50 + 8m where m = number of exploratory variables). rq2: are there any differential effects of emi between different social groups? within the wider methodological literature of social sciences, the use of multiplicative interaction terms in multiple regression analysis, also known as interaction term analysis, is a well-validated technique to assess differential effects of predictors on outcomes (bauer, 2011; cohen et al., 1983; jaccard et al., 1990, 2003). the rationale for this analysis is clear. it was expected that students from a more favorable social background would be able to benefit from having english as the main medium of instruction differently from students coming from less privileged backgrounds. such heterogeneity across the sub-groups will be the focus of this section. without overclaiming obtained results as representing the differential causal effect of moi, they should be viewed as shedding light on the heterogeneity of the relationship between moi and english proficiency in terms of four social factors: household income, gender, pre-university english ability, and extra-curricular english learning in the form of private tuition. there are several potential socio-economic factors of interest. first, it was hypothesized that students from high-income families attending emi would perform differently compared to their low-income counterparts. to do so, the present author used the household income (hi) variable, coded already as a binary variable, and added its interaction with moi. second, the moi and english proficiency relationship was explored in terms of gender, hypothesizing that male students attending emi would perform on the test differently from their female counterparts. following the same logic, in alternating order, the author included in the regression equation (2) interactions between moi with gender, with engtuition, and finally with 𝐸𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑦𝐸𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑖𝑠ℎ𝑖. the engtuition and entryenglish variables were already coded as binary variables, with 0 representing less favorable social backgrounds (lower english entry grade or less private tuition), and 1 the other way around. equation (3) describes these regressions with interaction terms in a more general form: duolingo𝑖 = 𝛼 + 𝛽1𝑀𝑂𝐼𝑖 + 𝛽2𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑖 + 𝛽3𝐻𝐼𝑛𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑖 + 𝛽4𝐸𝑛𝑔𝑇𝑢𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑖 +𝛽5𝐸𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑦𝐸𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑖𝑠ℎ𝑖 + 𝛾interactioni + 𝑒3𝑖 (3) where interactioni denotes the interaction term between 𝑀𝑂𝐼𝑖 and one of the following: (i) 𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑖 , (ii) 𝐻𝐼𝑛𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑖 , (iii) 𝐸𝑛𝑔𝑇𝑢𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑖 , (iv) 𝐸𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑦𝐸𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑖𝑠ℎ𝑖 . 𝛾 now captures the differences in the relationship between the medium of instruction moi and english proficiency within the social groups defined by the binary unraveling emi as a predictor of english proficiency in vietnamese higher education: exploring . . . 357 variable used in the interaction term analysis. the next section discusses the results of these regressions. rq3: how do students perceive the relationship between the medium of instruction and english proficiency? to further understand the experience of different moi at the individual level, in particular, students’ self-perception of their proficiency (rq 3), the regression analysis was complemented with in-depth interviews. fifteen participants, six from the emi strand and nine from the vmi course, were randomly selected and agreed to take part in a 45-minute interview. the interviewees were asked to share their perceived impact of the language of instruction on their english learning and proficiency development, in response to open-ended and followup questions. the interview scripts were transcribed and translated, and a thematic content analysis (using nvivo 12) was performed. table 2 describes the backgrounds of the interview participants. table 2 interview participants (cf. nguyen, 2021) id moi gender income entry english english tuition duolingo student 1 vmi female < £313 > 8.0 > 3 hours 102 student 2 vmi female < £313 < 8.0 <3 hours 100 student 3 emi female > £313 > 8.0 <3 hours 140 student 4 emi female < £313 > 8.0 <3 hours 145 student 5 emi male > £313 > 8.0 <3 hours 137 student 6 vmi male < £313 > 8.0 <3 hours 100 student 7 vmi male < £313 > 8.0 <3 hours 95 student 8 vmi female < £313 > 8.0 <3 hours 95 student 9 emi male > £313 > 8.0 <3 hours 120 student 10 vmi male > £313 < 8.0 > 3 hours 92 student 11 vmi female > £313 < 8.0 <3 hours 90 student 12 vmi female < £313 > 8.0 <3 hours 86 student 13 emi female > £313 > 8.0 <3 hours 125 student 14 emi female > £313 > 8.0 <3 hours 122 student 15 vmi male < £313 < 8.0 > 3 hours 85 5. findings 5.1. english medium instruction as a predictor of student english proficiency table 3 presents obtained results from both models. column (1) shows the direct comparison of vmi and emi students, without any control variables. having english as the moi at university was on average associated with nearly 17 points higher in the duolingo test for the participants. given the standard deviation of the duolingo variable is 23.42, the difference of 17 points is qualitatively large an nguyen 358 and statistically significant (p = .002). the predictability of model 1 is relatively high with an r2 of .131, suggesting that 13.1 % of the variance in the student english proficiency scores can be explained by a model containing only the medium of instruction as the dependent variable. when the control variables for socioeconomic backgrounds were included in model 2, its predictability increased substantially (r2 = 22.8%). the moi remains a statistically significant predictor – emi students on average got nearly 14 points higher in the duolingo test, nearly half of the standard deviation of the duolingo variable. consistently with our expectation, students with a higher english entry grade also did statistically better in the duolingo test, with a difference of 6 points. male students seemed to perform worse on the test, even though the estimate (4.62) was not statistically significant. coming from a richer household or having more intensive private tutoring were also positively correlated with a higher duolingo test score, even though the difference was small (around 1 point) and statistically insignificant. the f-statistics in both models were high, indicating that all the variables included were jointly significant in predicting and explaining the duolingo test performance. table 3 regression results of emi effects on english proficiency scores dependent variable: duolingo model 1 model 2 medium of instruction 16.930*** (p = .0001) 13.791*** (p = .002) course entry english grades 6.012*** (p = .002) gender -4.621 (p = .265) household income 1.338 (p = .431) private english tuition 1.016 (p = .685) constant 96.730*** (p = .000) 46.791** (p = .011) observations 111 111 r2 0.131 0.228 adjusted r2 0.123 0.191 residual std. error 21.932 (df = 109) 21.061 (df = 105) f statistic 16.374*** (df = 1; 109) 6.193*** (df = 5; 105) note. *p**p***p < .01 5.2. predictive effects of emi across students’ backgrounds having shown that moi is a statistically significant predictor of students’ english proficiency, as measured by the duolingo test performance, the paper now turns to explore how different social backgrounds are related to the predictability of moi (rq 2). unraveling emi as a predictor of english proficiency in vietnamese higher education: exploring . . . 359 5.2.1. the differential effect of medium of instruction by gender table 4 presents the results from the interaction terms analysis. column (i) shows a statistically significant difference in how male and female students in the emi and vmi programs performed in the duolingo test. as table 4 suggests, male students in general performed better in the duolingo test. yet, per column (i), a female students attending the emi program had a higher duolingo test score than their male counterparts. without any claims for of causal effects, this result suggests that without considering the moi, females tended to do worse in the english test, but once we consider the medium of instruction, female students seemed to benefit more from emi than their male counterparts. the differential effect, the 𝛾 estimate, was large (20 points, nearly equal to the standard deviation), and statistically significant at the 5% significance level (p = .022). female students seem to be facing certain barriers to accessing emi and thus, improving their english proficiency. however, having gained access to an emi program, the female students would tend to significantly benefit more from the emi than their male counterparts. table 4 interaction term analysis between medium of instruction and other predictors (nguyen, 2021) dependent variable: duolingo (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) medium of instruction (moi) (vmi = 0, emi = 1) 4.726 (p = .462) 18.733*** (p = .0003) -0.067 (p = .993) 59.529* (p = .055) gender (g) (m = 0, f=1) 14.936** (p = .012) interaction of moi and g 19.571** (p = .022) household income (hi) (<£313 = 0, >£313= 1) 7.678 (p = .109) interaction of moi and hi -5.356 (p = .429) private english hours (peh) (<3 hours = 0, >3 hours =1) -17.289*** (p = .005) interaction of moi and peh 25.305*** (p = .004) entry english grades (eeg) (<8 = 0, > 8 = 1) 8.270*** (p = .001) interaction of moi and eeg -5.500 (p = .141) constant 106.524*** (p = .000) 91.695*** (p = .000) 108.917*** (p = .000) 30.951 (p = .101) note. *p**p***p < .01 5.2.2. the differential effect of medium of instruction by household income column (ii) in table 4 indicates that students from higher-income households benefited less from attending emi than students from lower-income households. the difference was, however, small and amounted to only 5 points on the duolingo score. the differential effect was also not statistically significant (p = .429), perhaps due to the small sample size. regardless of the insignificance, the score an nguyen 360 difference should be of interest to policymakers. one plausible explanation for this finding is that the high-income students could have started with higher english proficiency so english medium teaching would not result in significant improvement without any causal implication, as compared to what emi would bring for students from low-income households. this result suggests clear opportunities for policymakers to bridge the english skills gap between less advantaged students and their more affluent counterparts. 5.2.3. the differential effect of medium of instruction by english private tuition column (iii) in table 4 shows that conditional on attending emi, students with more private english tuition performed better than students with less private english tuition. this differential effect was considerable (nearly 25 points, higher than the differential effect by gender) and statistically significant (p = .004). since private english tuition is seen as a common practice for university students in vietnam, the substantial differential effect of having more than three hours of private tutoring is practically meaningful and important to address. one implication is that formal english teaching in university courses alone seemingly is not sufficient for emi students to improve their english skills. private tutoring is an effective alternative to their english training progress. as it is expensive to have private tutoring, this result further accentuates the differential impact of economic background on student english performance. whilst emi students are on average more proficient in english than their vmi peers, this gap is attributed to the fact that emi students also attend extra english tutorials for more than three hours a week. the detected interaction effect between emi and private english tuition implies that the positive effect of english proficiency might have not come entirely from being enrolled in the emi program. 5.2.4. the differential effect of medium of instruction by entry english grades column (iv) in table 4 shows that students who previously performed better in english at the national entrance examination seemed to benefit less from emi than lower achievers. whilst students with higher pre-university english test scores are significantly more likely to have higher proficiency scores, as shown in regression results in table 3, the negative interaction term effect indicates that once entering university, emi students improve their english proficiency less than their lower achieving counterparts. the effect of emi on high school achievers was lower than that on students with lower-entry english results. for low-achievers, attending an emi course was associated with a 59 points higher score (p = .06) in the duolingo test on average. for high-achievers, the difference was small (5.5 points) and statistically insignificant. the unraveling emi as a predictor of english proficiency in vietnamese higher education: exploring . . . 361 results support the importance of having english as the moi at university for students who do not do well in national entrance examinations. 5.3. students’ perceptions of the relationship between medium of instruction and language learning the third research question pertained to how students perceive the connection between the medium of instruction and language learning. to investigate this issue, information from interviews and open-ended questionnaire responses was utilized. through thorough thematic analysis, two prominent themes were identified: initial expectations before the course and the actual learning experience during the course. the subsequent analysis is structured around these two themes. 5.3.1. pre-course expectations and motivations students provided diverse explanations for their selection of a particular instructional medium. among those in the emi group, the primary motive for investing additional resources in english-based instruction was the desire to enhance their english skills, both in general and in an academic context. as explained by student 3: i chose to study emi program because i hope it will equip me with a good foundation in business english and general english, which will enable me to communicate better and understand materials in english for my jobs in the future. student 5 also concurred with this view by saying: i chose emi because i realize the growing importance of having good english skills for my future job prospects. i believe that by learning through english medium of instruction i will have more opportunities to improve my english skills. it is observed that emi students emphasized their shared expectations to develop english proficiency within the span of the emi program. furthermore, it seems that the students were also aware of the instrumental role of having good command of english for future job opportunities. this reflects the students’ awareness of the high demand for proficient english skills in the current job market. unsurprisingly, we found that the high cost of the emi program remains the main differentiator between high-income and low-income students. vmi student 12 (household income level 1 < £156/month) reported: i chose the vmi program because its flexible structure can allow me to take classes in the afternoon and evenings so that i can take up part-time work in the daytime to an nguyen 362 cover my living expenses. the fee for the vmi program is much lower than the emi so it is more affordable for me and my family. besides the key linguistic and economic reasons, students sporadically cited peer pressure, parental guidance, personal academic interest, and prestige as factors that made them decide to opt for their chosen instructional medium program. 5.3.2. language learning experience within each medium program all six interviewed emi students expressed a positive language learning experience with emi thus far. this finding confirms the detected significant effect of emi on duolingo scores in our previous analysis. the one common aspect that was mentioned by all six students was that since they had exposure to the english language in both general and academic contexts, they experienced less anxiety and gradually grew confident in using the language for different purposes. to summarize the experience within the emi context, student 5 (duolingo score = 137/ielts 8.0) confided: i have grown to learn more vocabulary especially related to international business. using english for class discussions, homework assignments, and even for exams has trained me in the ability to think and work in english as my second language. my general english has also improved through my frequent contact with classmates and lecturers during group work and lectures. i also had a lot of chances to improve my academic english through written assignments and end-of-term exams. in contrast, vmi students revealed mixed views about their english language learning during their courses. it was found that the majority of vmi students reported mixed experiences with english learning within their program, which is also complementary to the knowledge thus far. vmi student 12 (duolingo score = 86/ielts 5.5) mentioned: i had very limited exposure to english as there was only one english as foreign language (efl) subject to take every term. even so, this module is mostly taught in a grammartranslation approach and there were not many opportunities for me to practice english within my classroom context. i noticed there was a decline in my english test scores after two terms in vmi programs. i also got nervous when speaking english and i usually could not articulate well because i forgot the words that i did not use frequently. there remained a few exceptional cases where vmi students perceived a trade-off between content learning and language learning across two instructional programs. vmi student 15 (duolingo score = 85/ielts 5.5) commented: unraveling emi as a predictor of english proficiency in vietnamese higher education: exploring . . . 363 i believe i could have had more chance to improve my english if i went with the emi option but at the same time, i do not want to trade off my understanding of my major in international business as i think it would be easier for me to study content in my mother tongue. this finding points to another important yet often overlooked problem in the emi program, which is comprehension of disciplinary knowledge. it seems that delivering content knowledge in learners’ second language given their limited proficiency, may potentially hamper their academic understanding of the subject. this realization has led vmi student 15 to decide not to take the risk and keep studying in their preferred mode of delivery, that is, vietnamese. 6. discussion 6.1. the relationship between attending emi and student english proficiency the regression analysis shows that attending the emi program is a significant positive predictor of english proficiency in the vietnamese higher education context. participation in emi, along with entry english grades, was found to account for 13% of the variance in english proficiency as measured by the duolingo score. when combined, these factors can explain up to 22% of the variance in english proficiency. the positive association between emi and english proficiency detected in this study is in line with existing studies in other emerging countries (hu, 2008; hu & lei, 2014). altogether, evidence to date seems to confirm the time-on-task theory in l2 learning: intensive exposure to the l2 target language is a key determinant of language proficiency among l2 learners (rossell & baker, 1996). it is worth noting, however, that the term “proficiency” in this study refers to general english, which was measured by the duolingo test, rather than academic english especially required for the major of the participants (international business). in other words, the evidence from this study can only confirm the outcomes related to the learners’ ability to use four domains of english skills in a common communicative situation, which may or may not apply to more formal, targeted learning contexts. furthermore, the use of the duolingo english test also extends the existing collection of testing instruments in which only the ielts, toeic, and otp tests have been used by current studies to obtain proficiency data (aizawa et al., 2020; čakarun & drljača margić, 2021; curle et al., 2020; rogier, 2012; yuksel et al., 2023). similar to previous research findings, this study does not claim to establish causality but, rather, provide a regression analysis with a set of control variables that are relevant to the pre-university (and pre-test) characteristics of the participants. there are potentially unobserved characteristics, such as motivation and intrinsic ability, that remain unaccounted for in the analysis. an nguyen 364 6.2. interaction effect of emi across sub-groups of learners besides the main predictive effect of emi learning, this study also recognized the complexity underlying the relationship between instructional medium and students’ individual and social variations. as a result, the study hypothesized that the detected positive relationship between emi and student english proficiency is not equally distributed across sub-groups of its learners. within the wider social science field, the interaction term analysis has been widely employed to identify the heterogenous effect of outcomes across respondents (allison, 1977; jaccard et al., 1990, 2003). methodologically, this study extended the use of this well-validated statistical approach to explore which groups benefitted the most and the least from emi participation. it was found that male emi students did have a higher average duolingo score than females under the same emi program, pointing to great potential gains for female learners if they were granted access to emi. the result adds to the literature on gender-related effects in emi participation and attainment evidenced in macaro and akincioglu (2018) and sahan et al. (2021) where females were found to be more motivated yet under-represented in emi. inequalities are perceived to exist in the current sociological perspectives of emi learners because relative english proficiency can be used to advance emi learners ahead of non-emi learners (lueg & lueg, 2015). notwithstanding, this study found that if lower-income individuals were given access to emi, they could potentially improve their academic record and english proficiency more than their affluent peers. as tuition for emi remains prohibitively expensive for most students, more scholarships and financial aid could be channeled to bridge the education gap between the two groups. this is in line with current studies on the sociology and social justice of emi education in asian contexts (hoang et al., 2018; nghia et al., 2019; nguyen & tran, 2018; sah, 2022; tran & nguyen, 2018). at the same time, there is evidence that the current language teaching quality within the emi program is insufficient, leading students to seek private english tutoring to supplement their l2 learning. as a policy recommendation, university administrators should urgently consider implementing an english preparation program or providing institutional assistance for teacher training. this is in line with the wider research on language support and training for both emi students and teachers (aizawa et al., 2020; aizawa & rose, 2019; dearden & macaro, 2016; kamaşak et al., 2021; sert, 2008; tamtam et al., 2012). 6.3. perceptions of learners on language learning in emi the qualitative findings of this study support the view that language proficiency gains remain the primary goal of the emi program (dewi, 2017; kim et al., 2017; macaro & unraveling emi as a predictor of english proficiency in vietnamese higher education: exploring . . . 365 akincioglu, 2018; rose, mckinley et al., 2020). emi students, however, shared the belief that having a high english proficiency would help them secure better job opportunities and enhance their employability, rather than simply seeing language development as the ultimate goal of emi. this is linked with the emerging research body on graduate employment and emi (ekoç, 2020; huang & curle, 2021; seitzhanova et al., 2015; selvaratnam, 2019; shmidt, 2018; tran & nguyen, 2018; villares, 2021). finally, while content learning was not the original focus of this study, there was evidence to suggest that there is an interaction effect between content learning and language development in emi. this result is related to ongoing debates about the nature of emi as a language development or content delivery program (macaro, 2018). more research is required to investigate the interactive effect of emi on both language proficiency and subject understanding. 7. conclusion in this study, emi was found to be a strong positive explanatory factor in student english proficiency at a vietnamese university. however, the interaction of emi and english proficiency scores was disproportionately distributed across subgroups of its learners with females and participants with lower income benefitting more from emi than the rest. we acknowledge several limitations of this research. first, the sample size could have been expanded for more statistical power. second, the sampling was based on students’ willingness to participate; therefore, selection bias is unavoidable. third, whilst an attempt was made to account for control variables, this study does not provide evidence for a true causal relationship between emi and english proficiency. as regards future research directions, studies that include longitudinal data collection to track changes in proficiency scores, and consider the inter-relationship between language proficiency and content knowledge are recommended. funding this work was supported by the open university through a three-year phd studentship at the faculty of wellbeing, education and language studies (2020-2023). acknowledgments the author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their patience and extremely helpful suggestions. the author also appreciates prithvi shrestha, kristina hultgren, sarah mukherjee, and canh thien dang for their advice and encouragement throughout the process. an nguyen 366 references aizawa, i., & rose, h. 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(2023). a longitudinal study at an english medium instruction university in turkey: the interplay between english language improvement and academic success. applied linguistics review, 14(3), 533-552. https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2020-0097 131 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (1). 131-145 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the simpsons: translation and language teaching in an efl class elisabetta pavan ca’ foscari university of venice, italy university of primorska, koper, slovenia pavan.elisabetta@gmail.com abstract my point of departure for this paper is that translation, so long neglected in foreign language teaching, can not only improve students’ linguistic competences in both a foreign language and their mother tongue, but also their awareness of cultural and intercultural elements. it is a widespread popular assumption, among those not involved in language teaching, that linguistic competences are the key to learning a language and to communicating in a foreign language; consequently, they assume that translation ought to play a major role in the study of a foreign language. indeed, late 20th century theories of language teaching, apart from the grammar-translation method, have largely ignored or criticized the role of translation. i will focus on a translation course i taught to a class of a year three italian undergraduate students studying foreign languages, and discuss the advantages of using translation to improve students’ linguistic competences, in their mother tongue and in the foreign language, and to develop their intercultural communicative competences and their cultural (bassnett, 2002, 2007) and intercultural awareness (kramsch, 1993, 1998). the translated text was taken from the simpsons, season 21, episode 16. keywords: translation, foreign language teaching, intercultural communicative competence, intercultural awareness elisabetta pavan 132 in the ancient world people spoke languages, and being bior multilingual was common. the romans could speak latin in their vast empire, but studied greek as they felt it was the “educated” language, and they did it with what we would call the direct method or total immersion. in the middle ages people did not travel as much as they had done under the roman empire: people did not move but texts did; as a consequence, there were fewer native-speaker teachers and more translations. the foreign language teaching approach which was adopted was that related to the translation of ancient greek and latin, languages that had almost no orality, and people thought that any language had an unchangeable grammar, as is the case with greek, latin, and hebrew (for translation in foreign language teaching see balboni 2010; borello 2007; di sabato, 2007; mazzotta, 2006). until the end of the 19th century, learning a language mostly meant learning the grammar of a language; for those who were lucky it consisted in interlinear translation of original texts into the source language, for others it consisted in working with highly artificial sentences which by ignoring spoken language, encouraged false notions of equivalence, with sentences divorced from purpose, context and actual use. at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the direct method definitively rejected translation, criticizing the fact that it ignored spoken language and encouraged false notions of equivalence by presenting isolated sentences rather than connected texts. almost all 20th century methodologies are reflections of the direct method, which aimed to teach a foreign language using that language as a means of instruction. after the 1950s, thanks initially to structuralism and, in the 1960s and 1970s, to the communicative approach, teachers began to introduce not written but spoken language into their classrooms, using oral texts and audiovisual materials which had to be understood rather than translated. nonetheless, grammar-translation continued to be used (and still is), especially in secondary schools and universities in many parts of the world, also because it is one of the few methods which can be adopted in very large classes. in the 20th century most criticism of translation was based on the use of translation in the grammar-translation method and overlooked the fact that translation can be used in many other ways. berlitz, who, from the end of the 19th century onwards, made the direct method available to a large number of language learners in europe and america through his schools, gave very clear and straightforward directions to his teachers: no translation under any circumstances, a strong emphasis on oral work, avoidance of grammatical explanations until late in the course, and the maximum use of question-and-answer techniques. and in “the berlitz method of teaching languages”, he gave three reasons for avoiding translations: “(i) translation wastes valuable learning time which should be devoted enthe simpsons: translation and language teaching in an efl class 133 tirely to the foreign language; (ii) translation encourages mother-tongue interference; and (iii) all languages are different (‘every language has its peculiarities, its idiomatic expressions and turns, which cannot possibly be rendered by translation’)” (as cited in howatt & widdowson, 2004, p. 224). thus, translation (with dictation and pattern-drills) became the worst of all evils, something to be absolutely avoided, firstly, because relying on translation and, consequently, on dictionaries, inevitably leads to often hilarious blunders, and secondly, because according to second language acquisition theory, which in the early days referred to children’s first language acquisition, translation plays no role in language acquisition. translation for language teaching has been harshly criticized (howatt, 1984) for ignoring spoken language, for encouraging false notions of equivalence, and for presenting highly artificial and isolated sentences which often demotivate (stern, 1992), rather than longer, coherent texts. subsequently, translation has also been further demonized, not only as a language teaching technique, but also as a linguistic ability (malakoff & hakuta, 1991); nonetheless, according to howatt (1984), the grammar-translation method is still widely used today. translation as a didactic tool there are still occasional dissenting voices that argue that translation is primarily about language, not culture, and that the proper business of translation studies is to focus on the linguistic aspects of the translation process (bassnett, 2007). translation scholars must focus on language, for it is undeniable that translation is, after all, about transferring a text from one language to another. however, separating language from culture is impossible: language is embedded in culture, linguistic acts take place in a context that is determined by culture, and texts are created by people who have different identities and belong to different cocultures. translation is about language, but translation is also about culture, for the two are inseparable. conversely, in this paper translation is considered a technique, a process, which aims to develop competence and metacompetence. following balboni (2010) and carroll (1980), i highlight eight parameters which can be used to assess a technique and i relate them to translation to demonstrate its validity as a technique. 1. relevance as the real objective of the technique. carroll defined relevance and affirmed that traditionally translation referred to applying morphosyntactic rules and exploring lexicon (as cited in balboni, 2010). it is demonstrated that, with this technique, we could achieve much more sophisticated objectives. elisabetta pavan 134 2. acceptability by and for the students and, subsequently, translation’s role in supporting or destroying their motivation, and raising their affective filter (as defined by krashen, 1982). translating is a difficult task, and, for it to be accepted, the student must consider it as a personal challenge, related to his/her own competence and sensitivity, and not as a challenge set by and with the teacher. 3. comparison of results. for a long time translation has been a means of assessment (and it still is, in certain universities); nonetheless, since the 1970s, language testing scholars have had difficulty defining what the objective of the assessment is and with the subjectivity of the corrections (porcelli, 2007). 4. balance between time spent organizing and preparing the activities, and doing and correcting them. translation is a time consuming and difficult activity for the student, and the teacher must focus on specific learning aims. 5. flexibility in administration, the possibility of introducing variables. translation is flexible and permits many different applications: students alone, or in groups or pairs, via email, with or without a dictionary. flexibility makes it possible to adapt to physical constraints (such as time or space in the classroom) and also to psychological constraints, such as motivating students with variety. translation is flexible and it can easily be adapted to the diverse relational or communicative habits that always exist in a group of students. the teacher can choose between competitivity or collaboration, that is, working or correcting alone, or in groups. 6. it can easily be adapted to the different kinds of intelligences. 7. it enhances or facilitates student autonomy. 8. translation activates processes that are executed, as pattern drills did, in a quasiautomatic or semiautomatic way, but also processes that imply metacognition, encouraging the students to reflect on the process before thinking about the quality of the product. translation could thus be considered a valid metacognitive, metalinguistic and metacultural technique to be used in the teaching of foreign languages. the objectives of the translation process as stated above, the objective of the course is developing students’ communicative competence, and translation is suggested as a means to achieve it. in class, i conducted language activities related to the practical use of language that are not presented in this paper, since the focus here is on using translation as a technique and the way it improves students’ linguistic the simpsons: translation and language teaching in an efl class 135 competence and their cultural and intercultural awareness. i adopted the three objectives and considered the aim of the use of translation in teaching foreign languages, listed in balboni (2010): the production of linguistic and metacultural competences, of controlled rather than automatic processes, and the development of the ability to inductively discover a foreign language. to begin with, translation aims to produce linguistic and cultural metacompetences. competence can be achieved with many other teaching techniques which will help the student in the production and use of a target language. nonetheless, translation can be effectively used in teaching how to use a language, and it helps students to reflect on both languages, the foreign language and the mother tongue. students will be made aware of how different visions of the world are always present in language itself: the process is illustrated in the search for an appropriate cultural translation of the italian expressions amare and volersi/volere bene: both refer to the aristotelic filia, that is, the love for the beautiful things (piacere), being close as friends, and to eros, a connotation of pathos, which refers to feeling and passion. in english we have love, like and to be fond of, in french aimer (that also means piacere in the sense of liking), in spanish querer, which means ‘love’ but also ‘want’ (balboni, 2010); we can say amare il bel canto but we also use amiamo with respect to our partner. indeed, eco (2010) in the title of his books states that “translating is saying more or less the same thing.” the english call me liz corresponds to the italian diamoci del tu, a sociolinguistic formal/informal variation, while the italian mi stai prendendo in giro (literally ‘you’re just pulling my nose’) corresponds to the english ‘you’re just pulling my leg.’ according to eco (2010), difficulties are not due to the lack of linguistic equivalences, but rather to the lack of cultural equivalences. secondly, translation aims to produce controlled rather than automatic processes. according to krashen (1982), the difference lies in acquisition and learning. the aim of acquisition is to train the individual to act spontaneously and automatically in social situations, producing and understanding the language; the aim of learning is to activate an output filter, which allows for proper choice in terms of lexical, and sociolinguistic appropriateness, as well as pragmalinguistics and/or intercultural communication. translation must then be considered a means of analysis and socio-pragma-cultural comparison, abandoning the concept of equivalence and moving from “text” to “culture” (bassnett & lefevere, 1988; snell-hornby, 2006; kramsch, 2004). thirdly, translation helps to develop the ability to inductively discover a foreign language. in the renaissance, classical texts (in latin) with an interlinear translation in vulgate were used to teach latin. nowadays, when people move easily and cheaply, and can experience different languages and cultures elisabetta pavan 136 even in their homes, the same process can be reproduced with the translation offered by subtitles on tv and dvds, or by buying the translation of a certain book and comparing it with the original text, or by using texts that can easily be found on the net and are or can be translated into different languages. these are good techniques to use from the perspective of lifelong language learning, especially when the languages are closely related. the actors of the translation process moving from translation as a process and technique to students, who are the actors of the process, the key to all learning is motivation. motivating students to carry out a complex activity such as translation means explaining to students why they are doing it; ensuring separation between the activity of translation and evaluation; choosing psychologically relevant texts; thus making the translation a feasible task which can be carried out so as to satisfy schuman’s (1997) motivational models; presenting the translation as a complex and sophisticated challenge, a challenge in which pleasure comes from participation rather than from winning (balboni 2010); allowing students to discover the pleasure of reflecting on their own competencies and the pleasure of achieving a conclusive text which all agree is the best possible translation both by competing with others and by cooperating with them; not overemphasizing the activity of translation per se, which is a complex endeavour; changing the approach so that the cognitive and linguistic process which underlies translation, which is constant but can be activated in various ways, is perceived not as “the” translation but as many different translations (balboni, 1998, 2010). screen translation the importance of screen translation lies in its highly motivating impact on students, its products and its relevance for language pedagogy and linguistic and cultural metacompetences. various researchers (danan, 1992; d'ydewalle & pavakanum, 1997; vanderplank, 1999) have conducted studies on the exploitation of subtitled material for the purposes of developing foreign language learning skills. in this regard, screen translation also has much to offer the field of language pedagogy: it improves students’ linguistic competence both in the foreign language and in their mother tongue, increases their intercultural awareness and encourages them to make choices. before starting the activity with students, it is important to describe the different kinds of screen translation and the different techniques they require. from a didactic point of view it is of paramount importance to make the stuthe simpsons: translation and language teaching in an efl class 137 dents aware of the pros and cons of dubbing and subtitling. translating for the screen is fairly different from translating printed items since books, newspapers and other written products are only meant to be read. to begin with, the best-known and most common forms of audiovisual translation are dubbing and subtitling. revoicing is the term used to refer to the use of translated voice tracks in the target language, such as dubbing and voice over. dubbing involves replacing original speech with a voice track which attempts to follow, as closely as possible, the timing, phrasing and lip movements of the original dialogue; thus, it involves lip synchronization. voice over refers to voice narration and free commentary, it is often used to translate monologues and interviews; however, in some countries it is used as a cheap alternative to dubbing (it is common for voice over to retain the original voice, at a reduced volume). subtitling is visual, involving the superimposition of a condensed written text onto the screen. the written, subtitled text is usually shorter than the audio because the viewer needs some time to read the captions and at the same time should be unaware that he or she is actually reading. there are two different kinds of subtitling: intralingual and interlingual. intralingual subtitling, in the original (source) language, is normally associated with television subtitling for the deaf or hard of hearing; it may be accessed as an option and can also benefit foreign students and people with literacy problems, such as immigrants, who may wish to improve their language skills taking advantage of the audio and visual input. intralingual subtitling includes explanatory information such as “telephone rings” or “footsteps on the porch outside”; consequently, it tends to rely on summary, while interlingual subtitles tend to be more faithful to the words uttered. interlingual translation is used when foreign language films are shown, in cinemas or on television, with the original soundtrack. interlingual subtitles are widespread in those countries where dubbing is not the norm especially because it is a much cheaper option than dubbing. according to gottlieb (1998), this type of translation is diagonal, that is, the subtitler crosses over from speech in one language to writing in another, thus changing mode and language, while intralingual subtitling is vertical, in the sense that it involves taking speech down in writing, that is, changing mode, but not language. danan (1991) claims that interlingual subtitling “indirectly promotes the use of a foreign language as an everyday function in addition to creating an interest in a foreign culture” (p. 613). there are countries where dubbing is the norm, such as italy, and there are others, such as the scandinavian countries, denmark, the netherlands, where it is not. in the latter, defined as subtitling countries, the standard of english as a foreign language is much higher. among the advantages of dubbing are: less textual reduction than in subtitling, more homogeneous discourse, wider audience, no interference with images, and being unnoticed by the public that is elisabetta pavan 138 used to this modality. on the other side, the disadvantages include the cost and time factor, the fact that dubbing denies the audience the opportunity to hear the original voices of the actors on the screen, that it means the lack of access to the source text, and that it causes the loss of authenticity, which is also due to the presence of visual reminders. in the clip analysed below, for example, there are numerous signs and written elements or acronyms not always transparent in meaning, which needed to be translated with subtitles. in addition, sociolinguistic markers such as accent, variety and slang tend to disappear in screen translation (chiaro, 2009), even though other solutions can be adopted, such as connoting the characters in term of their geographic, ethnic or social origin. on the other hand, if a decision is to be taken to make the text closer to the target language and culture for political, ideological or commercial reasons, changes may be introduced at various levels to help maintain the illusion of authenticity, such as changing the names of characters, places, and the soundtrack. dubbing is then closely related to some cultural constraints, such as dialect, sociolect and specific cultural elements such as names, places, the soundtrack itself, and to the loss of the importance of the accent: in the uk for example for many people accent still indicates social/economic class and is not only associated with region, as it is, for example, in italy. in the simpsons some characters speak a dialect or use a specific accent: willie speaks with a scottish accent, montgomery burns with a british accent, mayor quimby has a kennedy accent, apu has an indian accent, fat tony has an italian accent, and the main characters speak standard american english. the treatment of such culture-specific material can pose serious problems and a decision must be taken as far as translation is concerned, for example, with respect to proper names (the original apu becomes abu in the italian version, to imitate indian pronunciation, and fat tony turns into tony il ciccione, which sounds llike a mafia nickname) or to dialects and sociolects. translation as a technique for language education in this paper i focus on translation as a technique for language education in a class with a group of 80 undergraduate year three students doing a bachelor’s degree in foreign languages, not in translation. i will not deal with the development of translation skills but with translation as a class activity with foreign language learning objectives. thus, i will mainly refer to translation as a process, partly neglecting the product of translation, since i trust processes, not products, as a means of developing competence and metacompetence in foreign language learners (balboni, 2010; di sabato, 2007; salmon & mariani 2008). the simpsons: translation and language teaching in an efl class 139 the task was carried out in three lessons, translation theory, english language and translation practice, 45 minutes each, and in addition the students worked autonomously at home. the prerequisites for the project are: students need to possess the linguistic competence level necessary to guarantee a good understanding of the foreign language. translation must be felt as a challenge between the student and the text, the teacher must be a facilitator, not a judge. translation is motivating only if the text is motivating. the translation objectives are (meta) linguistic and (inter) cultural. to fully accomplish the task and participate in the course, the students were asked to translate for gist, to seek pragmatic and stylistic equivalence, to consider the features of the genre (cartoon), to produce different translations according to the needs of the audience (young or adult, or deaf), and to produce different translations depending on the way in which they were to be used (dubbing, subtitling). it is thanks to the translation process that students become aware of the quantity of culture, world vision, and cultural values that are intrinsic in every word. only when the students really understand how complex a linguistic system is, how inextricably and inexplicably every language is closely linked to the people who speak it, and how it struggles, fights, refuses to be translated, and when the same students experience their inadequacy and feel that any translation would be a betrayal, we can say that translation, as a pedagogical language technique, has been successful. translating the episode: the simpsons, season 21, episode 16 before assigning students the task, i did a short research to find a video that everybody would like. the simpsons was widely appreciated, so i decided to use a six minute clip of one episode. i asked the students to translate the dialogue from english into italian, emphasising that it was an oral text. i asked them to translate it in two (actually three, as will be presently apparent) ways, to make them aware that translations can have different ends: the first translation was for dubbing, where lip-sync is necessary; the second and third task required translation for subtitling, where division into subtitles for the general public and for the deaf public reflected the interlingual and intralingual subtitling. for translating the episode students had to practice written and oral translation; focus on connected texts rather than isolated sentences; realise that translation may be judged by criteria other than formal lexical and grammatical equivalence (for example the promptness with which a group delivers the transelisabetta pavan 140 lation and its accuracy); develop their sociolinguistic competence, that is, their awareness of the relation of language to different social situations; and the use of dialects, that is, the language spoken in a specific geographical area, or of an idiolect, that is, the language spoken by a social group, with or without cultural functions or connotations. the students were encouraged to translate for gist, to seek for pragmatic or stylistic equivalence, to consider the features of the genre and to produce different translations according to the needs of the audience and depending on the way in which a translation has to be used (dubbing or subtitling). as stated above, screen translation improves students’ linguistic competence in both their foreign language and mother tongue. the italian linguistic landscape is varied, not only for geographical reasons (we have regional, that is, diatopic, variations). it may be that a person from the northern part of italy does not understand a person from the south, and that is why some of troisi’s films (a famous italian actor and director) had to be subtitled for the “wider” italian audience. what is considered to be standard italian is mainly the written language, and it is perceived as a formal language when spoken off stage or out of a dubbing studio. foreigners think that the tuscan regional variation is that which carries the most prestige: in reality it is a regional variation and has no special social connotation for an italian audience. linguistic prestige may be represented by the use of standard italian and formal language. in the simpsons the main characters speak standard us english. secondary characters may speak dialects (defined according to the english meaning of dialect as a regional variation), or have a foreign accent. willie, the school caretaker, speaks with a scottish accent and sometimes wears a kilt. in the italian dubbed version he speaks with a sardinian accent. the choice may be due to the popularly perceived characteristics of scottish and sardinian people: rude, strong, and impulsive. students decided that the choice to keep a regional accent and to refer to a regional stereotype was the best, even though the character wears a kilt in some episodes. translating an episode of a series forced the students to consider the translation as a whole (a thing they hardly ever do) if they wanted to be sure that the characters spoke “the same language” in all the episodes. as far as characters are concerned, students had to recreate an idiolect, which refers to those character’s linguistic qualities which differentiated them from the others’ character. they had to choose among variations, either diastratic, such as reverend lovejoy speaking standard italian in a deep tone, or diatopic and regional as in willie’s speech and in apu’s speech, and also those using specific expressions, like ned flanders with his linguistic idiosyncrasies that are kept in the translations (e.g., okey-dokey-neighbour = salve, salvino-vicino), or both, the simpsons: translation and language teaching in an efl class 141 like the jewish guide and his nephew in this specific episode, speaking quite an illiterate english, full of often wrongly used informal expressions or slang. students also discussed homer’s speech and his expression d’oh, which matt groening, the series’ script writer, defines in the script as an annoyed grunt. students agreed to keep it as it is in english, using a specific pragmatic tone in italian. he is not a “clever” character, and this is made clear by making him speak slowly in coordinated, rather than subordinated, constructions. students’ linguistic sensitivity was enhanced and developed, for example, with the translation of pejoratives such as schmuck: it may be translated with a wide range of adjectives, from stupido (less offensive) to cretino, to cazzone (very offensive and vulgar, close to the way an educated british audience could perceive it). the guide addresses the us american tourists as if he assumed they are stupid, and his nephew does the same but uses the expression goim ‘non-jew.’ the first was translated as stupidi, the latter with gregge. the choice was dictated by the fact that gregge is the typical word with which jesus refers to his followers, a flock, given the image of the shepherd and his flock, but it is the word we also use for a group of sheep, which is the animal connotation, which, according to the talmud, the word would have for jews. another good point we discussed was in the first scene. we decided to rephrase the sentences with the homophones but and butt. ned’s sentence (“i sense a but coming…”) is translated with the italian “sento arrivare un finale” that in english could be: “i feel a final part is coming,” instead of “sento arrivare un ma,” closer to the original but not linked to what homer said immediately afterwards. homer’s sentence (“… heeere comes the buutt” ) is translated with: “ecco che arriva il fondo!”, where fondo means ‘end’ but it also is the first part of fondoschiena, a polite word to refer to one’s butt. dubbing and subtitling for interlingual translation does not mean translating subtitles used in an intralingual translation, for the reason we saw before. a transcript of the spoken text was made and it was used as the basis for the translation, both linguistic and cultural, wherever possible. many decisions had to be taken as far as “language” and culture were concerned, and this increased the students’ intercultural awareness. in dubbing scnhell, we decided that it may be left like that, since in italian we have exactly the same word, used mainly during winter sports competitions; nonetheless, we suggested adding the sound of cow-bells to make it clearer, omitting it in the inter-lingual subtitling and omitting it or translating it with svelto ‘quick’ for the subtitling to be used by a deaf audience. the students had to be aware of the strong tendency to use quotation, allusion, connotations and hints in this series. the title of the first episode, broadcast on the 17th of december 1989, was the simpsons roasting on an elisabetta pavan 142 open fire, reflecting the christmas song chestnuts roasting on an open fire, translated in italian with vita da cani ‘it’s a dog’s life,’ because in the episode the main character is a dog. this is crucial if we wish to fully understand who the man playing the violin on the roof is: the tune evokes fiddler on the roof, a clear cultural reference to a famous musical but also to the jewish tradition, something quite impossible to have in italian, both because we do not know the musical (the italian translations of musicals such as grease and mamma mia have only been done recently), but also because italians are less aware of jewish cultural traditions. other cultural elements are the following: food: pancake and latkes, the latter being potato pancakes, products known only at the north-eastern border of italy; rituals, such as the breaking of the glass when the simpsons’ plane lands and lahyem, that is, a jewish toast before drinking, especially at wedding receptions. we decided to translate it with cin cin when we only wanted to refer to the toast, or evviva gli sposi when we wanted to keep both meanings. for the dubbing we also suggested salute, pronounced with a very ironic tone, as a toast by jews to the us tourists who have just arrived; stereotypes: the jewish guide is referring to his british accent (typical of hollywood bad guys or movie villains, but he is not speaking with a british accent) and the jews being skilled businessmen, speaking about the fact that he is taking them to his cousin’s jewellery shop and the need to bargain once there. the students had to make technical choices too. suprasegmental elements, such as marge’s hoarse voice in the original, is kept in the dubbing; homer’s nasal voice and slower pace to denote his stupidity is reproduced in the dubbing and lost in the subtitling; lisa’s character is represented in her idiolect: a slightly milanese accent, slow pace and open vowels. the students had to deal with macrotextual choices, when, for example, they had to decide whether to use, or not to use, a regional accent to define a character, and microtextual choices, when they faced specific translation problems such as translating a toast or an incitement, or a colloquial expression. conclusion translation has long been stigmatised because of its past use in the grammar-translation method and it has been banished, considered old, obsolete and wrong because it is too far from the “direct method.” this paper suggests that translation can be used more imaginatively, as a complement rather than as an alternative to other teaching methods, as a theothe simpsons: translation and language teaching in an efl class 143 retically justified activity aiding not only language acquisition but also acquisition of intercultural awareness and competence. furthermore, translation techniques should be evaluated solely in terms of the parameters of efficacy/inefficacy in achieving its objectives and coherence/noncoherence with the theoretical assumptions of the pedagogic approach and the method used by the teacher. recently, the role of translation in language learning has begun to be reappraised, and a number of writers have expressed doubts about it being completely eliminated from the classroom. using a translation course from english into italian to improve students’ mother tongue competences may sound strange, but they in fact rarely critically reflect on their own language. i chose to use an episode from the popular series the simpsons not only because it was highly motivating for the students, but also because audio elements improve exposition to authentic language. another reason was the episode’s constituting authentic cultural visual material (despite the cartoon form), which helps students understand whenever the linguistic component proves difficult. dubbing and subtitles mainly involve linguistic competences, but also improve the linguistic components of students’ communicative competences both in their mother-tongue and in the foreign language. the results of the simpsons activity were positive: students were constrained by the original text and thus denied resort to the usual avoidance strategies and where obliged to confront areas of the foreign language system which they may find difficult, and they also had to focus their attention upon the often subtle differences between the mother tongue and foreign language and to abandon the naïve view that every expression has an exact equivalent. furthermore, the activities satisfied the cultural requirements highlighted by the most recent translation studies and growing intercultural awareness in other disciplines, which is an inevitable result of the need for greater intercultural awareness in the world today, due to the rapidly changing patterns of cultural meeting, mixing and interaction in the world we inhabit. thus, the transmission of cultural values in screen translation motivated the students, and both their linguistic and cultural awareness have been raised as well. translation here becomes an act of intercultural communication rather than a skill of transferring minimal linguistic units across language boundaries, and it can no longer be taught/learnt on the basis of linguistic exercises. i do not deny that linguistic skills are necessary as a starting point, such as a good competence in both languages, but these skills must be considered as part of a more basic cultural competence and must seek to handle source and target communicative contexts. elisabetta pavan 144 references balboni, p. e. 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(2009). issues in audiovisual translation. in j. munday (ed.), the routledge companion to translation studies (pp. 141-165). london: routledge. chomsky, n. (1980). rules and representations. new york: columbia university press. danan, m. (1991). dubbing as an expression of nationalism. meta, 36, 606-614. danan, m. (1992). reversed subtitling and dual-coding theory: new directions for foreign language instruction. language learning, 42, 497-527. de giovanni, f., & di sabato, b. (eds.). (2010). tradurre in pratica. riflessioni, esperienze, testimonianze. napoli: edizioni scientifiche italiane. di sabato b. (2007). la traduzione e l’apprendimento/insegnamento delle lingue. studi di glottodidattica, 1, 1-9. d’ydewalle, g., & pavakanum, u. (1997). could enjoying a movie lead to language acquisition? in p. winterhoff-spurk & t. van der voort (eds.), new horizons in media pedagogy (pp. 145-155). opladen: westdeutscher verlag. eco, u. (2010). dire quasi la stessa cosa. milano: bompiani. gottlieb, h. (1998). subtitling. in m. baker (ed.), routledge encyclopedia of translation studies (pp. 244-248). london: routledge. howatt, a. p. r. (1984). a history of english language teaching. oxford: oxford university press. howatt, a. p. r., & widdowson, h. g. (2004). a history of english language teaching (2nd ed.). oxford: oxford university press. kramsch, c. (1993). context and culture in language teaching. oxford: oxford university press. the simpsons: translation and language teaching in an efl class 145 kramsch, c. (1998). the privilege of the intercultural speaker. in m. byram & m. fleming (eds.), language learning in intercultural perspective: approaches through drama and ethnography (pp. 16-31). cambridge: cambridge university press. kramsch, c. (2004). language, thought, and culture. in a. davies & c. elder (eds.), the handbook of applied linguistics, (pp. 235-261). oxford: blackwell. krashen, s. (1982). principles and practice in second language acquisition. new york: pergamon press. malakoff, m., & hakuta, k. (1991). translation skill and metalinguistic awareness in bilinguals. in e. bialystok (ed.), language processing in bilingual children (pp. 141-166). cambridge: cambridge university press. mazzotta, p. (2006). il ruolo della reading comprehension in un approccio didattico alla traduzione microlinguistica. in s. petrilli (ed.), comunicazione, interpretazione, traduzione (pp. 139-149). milano: mimesis. o’connell, e. (2007). screen translation. in p. kuhiwczak & k. littau (eds.), a companion to translation studies (pp. 120-133). clevedon: multilingual matters. porcelli, g. (2007). la traduzione nelle verifiche di l2: usi e abusi. in conference acts, dopo babele: la traduzione (pp. 68-76), torino: liceo gioberti. salmon, l., & mariani, m. (2008). bilinguismo e traduzione. dalla neurolinguistica alla didattica delle lingue. milano: franco angeli. schuman, j. (1997). the neurobiology of affect in language. oxford: blackwell. snell-hornby, m. (2006). the turns of translation studies: new paradigms or shifting viewpoints? amsterdam: john benjamins. stern, h. h. (1992). issues and options in language teaching. oxford: oxford university press. vanderplank, r. (1999). global medium: global resource? perspectives and paradoxes in using authentic broadcast material for teaching and learning english. in c. gnutzmann (ed.), teaching and learning english as a global language: native and non-native perspectives (pp. 253-266). tubingen: stauffenberg. 109 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (1). 2015. 109-133 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.1.6 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl msl in the digital ages: effects and effectiveness of computer-mediated intervention for fl learners with dyslexia simone e. pfenninger university of zurich simone.pfenninger@es.uzh.ch abstract the longitudinal intervention study reported here is the first to investigate the efficiency of computer learning software specifically designed for dyslexic swiss german learners of standard german as a second language (l2) and english as a third language (l3). a total of 40 subjects (20 of them dyslexics and 20 of them nondyslexics; 10 students from each group participated in interventions and the other 10 from each group served as control groups) were assessed with a battery of verbal and written preand posttests involving phonological/orthographic and semantic measures of their l2 and l3 before and after three months of daily intervention with the software. the results show that computer-based training in the l3 is potentially an important tool of intervention for dyslexic students as it has a positive effect on the components of l3 as well as l2 learning. as a consequence of their progress in acquiring the relationships between l3 graphemes and phonemes, the experimental groups, but not the control groups, made significant gains on l2 naming accuracy and speed, l2 and l3 word reading, l2 and l3 phonological awareness, and l2 and l3 receptive and productive vocabulary and comprehension tasks. keywords: dyslexia, l3 acquisition, multisensory instruction, intervention, literacy skills simone e. pfenninger 110 1. introduction an accumulating body of evidence indicates that students with dyslexia (henceforth dyslexic readers) require assistance and special training in the first language (l1) and particularly in any foreign language (fl) from an early stage (e.g., ganschow & sparks, 2000; kormos, sarkadi, & csizér, 2009; nijakowska, 2010). in many european countries, such assistance has traditionally taken the form of special instruction classes taught by a teacher-therapist or specialist at school or at a psychological-pedagogical clinic. however, in light of general consent among researchers that weak students better be provided with tutoring assistance (ganschow, sparks, & javorsky, 1998; nijakowska 2008, 2010; sparks, ganschow, & patton, 2008; sparks, humbach, & javorsky, 2008) there is an increasing need for research such as this on the effects of training methods and intervention tools that can be used by individuals in their private time. this study analyses the effects and efficiency of learning software which aims to transfer the multisensory techniques that were found to facilitate the learning of basic literacy skills of school-age struggling readers into the field of fl learning. the software was specifically designed for at risk native speakers of swiss german who were learning standard german as a second language (l2) and english as a third language (l3). the purpose was to (a) equip children, teachers, tutors and parents with supplementary language training tools to help students with dyslexia and (b) allow for activities that children with dyslexia are typically in need of to be further continued by parents and children at home. the paper presents a longitudinal intervention study of 40 elementary school students (20 nondyslexic readers and 20 learners with dyslexia) in two mainstream schools in the swiss state school system which are not specialized in learning disabilities. half of the participants underwent daily training with the software for a period of three months. this study is novel in several respects. despite the abundance of literature on the most effective types of intervention in the classroom, there are no studies to date that have examined the usefulness of a computer-based learning support for an fl outside the classroom. with an increasing number of european countries introducing policies to accelerate the exposure to multiple fls of school children, there is a great need for controlled evaluations of different types of interventions for struggling readers (see lovett et al., 2008, p. 335). moreover, there is a multilingual component to this study, as the participants are followed over three months of intensive intervention in the l3 and their oral and written proficiency in the l2 and l3 is measured. finally, my research aims to bridge the research-practice gap that has so often been described in the literature (e.g., kormos et al., 2009; nijakowska, 2010) by providing further evidence for the msl in the digital ages: effects and effectiveness of computer-mediated intervention for fl learners. . . 111 effectiveness of multisensory instruction while also making research-based and verified techniques available to parents as well as fl teachers and tutors. 2. definitions dyslexia is defined as a life-long genetically and neurologically based language processing disorder that displays weaknesses in phoneme-grapheme awareness (phonics), short term and working memory, or perception of short or rapidly varying sounds, which generally persists through life (e.g., helland & kaasa, 2005; nijakowska, 2010; vellutino, fletcher, snowling, & scanlon, 2004). this leads to varying degrees of reading, spelling and writing difficulties (e.g., hulme & snowling, 2009; snowling, 2001). secondary consequences include poor motivation, anxiety and behavioral issues (see e.g., sparks and ganschow 1995). research has unequivocally shown that there is an interrelation between dyslexics’ difficulties in their language of literacy and their difficulties in their native language and their problems in fl learning; specifically in the areas of phonological processing and phonics students’ processing problems transfer from l1 to a fl. sparks and ganschow’s often-cited and empirically supported linguistic coding deficits hypothesis (lcdh) is built upon the following assumptions (ganschow et al., 1998; ganschow & sparks, 1995; sparks, 1995): 1. both l1 and fl learning depend on basic language skills; poor foreign language learners have a common significant weakness in phonological, syntactic and/or semantic coding, all of which are fundamental to language acquisition. 2. the l1 difficulties of dyslexic fl learners may only be apparent in one language “code” (phonological/orthographic, syntactic, or semantic); weak phoneme/grapheme processing skills have been identified as the most common problem area. 3. l1 skills serve as the foundation for fl learning; l1 reading, listening and speaking difficulties, be they subtle or overt, are likely to be responsible for similar difficulties in fl learning. 4. the strength of the l1 language codes will determine the extent to which a student will be able to learn, or become proficient in, an fl. the impact of poor abilities to make phoneme-grapheme correspondences has been found to be stronger in languages with so-called deep orthographies, in which the mapping between letters, speech sounds, and whole-word sounds is ambiguous and a high number of irregular or exceptional spellings cannot be decoded via grapheme-phoneme translation (landerl, 2003; landerl, simone e. pfenninger 112 wimmer, & frith, 1997; snowling, 2000). consequently, the rather inconsistent, complex english orthography poses a particular challenge for dyslexic learners. the many different spelling and pronunciation options present an almost insurmountable challenge for correct reading, writing, spelling and pronunciation (see chen, 2001 for chinese; ferrari & palladino, 2007 for italian; helland & kaasa, 2005 for norwegian; miller-guron & lundberg, 2000 for swedish, nijakowska, 2008 for l1 polish, and oren & breznitz, 2005 for l1 hebrew). even though there are no studies to date that have analyzed l1 swiss german learners with reading impairments, efl has been found to cause problems for dyslexic learners with l1 (standard) german (e.g., ganschow, schneider, & evers, 2000; landerl, 2003; landerl et al., 1997), which is the language of literacy in switzerland (see below for a description of the linguistic and curricular landscape in switzerland). for example, as to orthography, there are different degrees of orthographic consistency in (swiss/standard) german and english, which leads to different reading acquisition processes (to be discussed in the next session). german does not have perfect one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correspondences either but is much more on the shallow side of the continuum of orthographic consistency (landerl, 2003, p. 15). it has to be kept in mind, however, that even dyslexic speakers of languages with more consistent orthographies, such as german, can compensate their phonological-orthographic impairment only to a certain extent as the coactivation of orthographic and phonological representations is less effective in dyslexics than in nondyslexics (landerl, frith, & wimmer, 1996; landerl et al., 1997; landerl, 2003). in other words, due to the weak link between the orthographic and phonological facility in dyslexics, the sound of a word does not automatically evoke the inner orthographic image necessary for fluent reading and spelling, meaning the letters and the letter clusters do not become connected with the phonemes and the larger segments of the phonological word representation (landerl et. al., 1997, p. 330). finally, there is general consent in the literature (e.g., nijakowska, 2010; paulesu et. al., 2001) that the clinical picture of dyslexia is quite individual and dynamic. symptoms can change due to differing social/academic expectations and the individual development of coping mechanisms due to appropriate remedial instruction. this will be discussed next. 3. the role and impact of instruction and intervention a solid body of research provides evidence for effective intervention approaches to address significant reading/spelling difficulties. these findings show that a lack of explicit instruction of the structure, forms and rules of a language, the almost exclusive use of the new fl or l2 and the frequent demand for inferring msl in the digital ages: effects and effectiveness of computer-mediated intervention for fl learners. . . 113 language rules implicitly from context cues stand in conflict with the learning support needs of students with dyslexia (nijakowska, 2008, 2010). ganschow and sparks (2000) also point to the importance of explicit instruction about similarities and differences between languages for students who have difficulties learning an fl. in switzerland, l2 german (i.e., the primary literary and written language) is conveyed both explicitly and implicitly to school children, as they encounter the german language daily through media such as tv, computer programs, and public discourse, in addition to being taught in school. by contrast, english as an l3 is mainly taught through implicit approaches in elementary school, in accordance with content and language integrated learning (clil) approach, as described in schneider (1999). as the students have already been taught to read and write at this point, they usually learn l3 english through the whole-word method, in which explicit teaching of the phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules is not a central component. this complicates particularly the development of phonological awareness for dyslexic learners (helland & kaasa, 2005). as opposed to such nonexplicit fl teaching approaches, research has shown that so-called multisensory structured learning (msl) approaches are effective ways to meet native, fl and sl learning needs of dyslexics (ganschow et al., 1998; miller & bussman gillis, 2000; nijakowska, 2008; schneider, 1999, 2009; sparks et al., 1998). these studies represent consistent results regarding the effect of msl instruction. the msl approach involves methods that teach phonological awareness and letter-sound correspondences explicitly while utilizing the simultaneous engagement of several sensory learning channels in carefully structured ways. there have been consistent results from these studies; the msl approach yields successful results in teaching reading and spelling skills to learners with dyslexia, not only in their l1, but also in an fl. unfortunately, such special methods of teaching fls are currently not offered during regular fl teaching hours in most european countries because fl teacher training programs do not focus on how to best address struggling fl learner needs through explicit instruction. this confines highly recommended, specialized learning support to after school hours only (see ganschow et al., 2000; lovett et al., 2000, 2008; torgesen, 2004, 2005; scanlon, vellutino, small, fanuele, & sweeney, 2005). to address this dire need for after school learning support for dyslexics, commercial software programs have been developed recently to address the l1/fl-based problems of students with dyslexia early on. the one discussed in this paper follows the msl approach by supporting simultaneous input in oral, written, and visual forms and incorporates an intervention component (daily one-to-one tutoring), as discussed in the following section. simone e. pfenninger 114 4. the computer-based learning software (cls) based on the guidelines outlined in the previous section, the computer-based learning software lesikus (henceforth cls) assessed in this study focuses on the direct and explicit teaching of the phonology/orthography (spelling-sound relations) and morphology (meaning units) systems of the l3 (english) (baumann, 2012; baumann & scherling, 2011).1 learning how to read and spell words is realized by the integration of visual and auditory stimuli and involves simultaneous presentation of information coming from various senses (see nijakowska, 2010, p. vii). to be more specific, the teaching of new pronunciation, spelling and vocabulary rules is conducted in a structured, linear, step-by-step fashion. it follows a carefully planned scope and sequence that moves from less to more complex rules, focusing on the differences in phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules between standard german and english (see reid, 1998). every new rule is practiced in four modes. the first mode concerns reading: the learner has to read out loud a sequence of words that appear on the screen, while a training partner (in this case the experimenter and/or the parents) decides whether the pronunciation is correct or incorrect and clicks on the respective symbol. to facilitate reading, individual phonemes and morphemes are systematically color-coded and related to their written representations. likewise, words are separated into color-coded syllables or prefixes, roots and suffixes (for a discussion of this, see hodge, 1998; schneider, 1999; schneider & crombie, 2003). the remaining modes concern spelling, that is, copying words that appear on the screen, and word dictation. these tasks do not necessarily require the presence of a training partner, since learners can check their answers on their own by clicking on the relevant correction symbols. specific and immediate feedback is provided in that the learner earns a point for every word that is spelt or pronounced correctly. if learners produce a spelling mistake, they are encouraged to correct it (“please try again”). the vocabulary is taken from major efl course books used in swiss elementary schools and is frequently recapitulated and reviewed. note that for every word, cls provides german translations and pronunciation sound files in standard british english. finally, the learner can choose between different types of exercises that can be completed at any desired pace of presentation and work. the program is interactive and therefore motivating and inspiring, making learning a pleasant experience. since the literacy problems of dyslexic learners can only be minimized by automatizing their skills over a long period of time (see nicolson & fawcett, 2001), cls is designed as a long-term training program. the use of a 1 this computer program is commercially available from http://www.lesikus.com/ msl in the digital ages: effects and effectiveness of computer-mediated intervention for fl learners. . . 115 computer for editing, note-taking, and writing is also of great help inasmuch as poor handwriting does not disqualify children’s work along with poor spelling (see nijakowka, 2010, p. 148). 5. the study 5.1. research questions and design this control study included 20 classified dyslexic and 20 successful, nondyslexic readers and spellers. both the test group receiving cls intervention and the control group without intervention consisted of 10 randomly selected dyslexic students (labeled test dyslexic group) and 10 nondyslexic students (test nondyslexic group). the purpose of this design was to ascertain that gains over time in the test dyslexic group stem from exposure to the cls training. the study investigated the following research questions (rqs): 1. to what extent do phonological, morphological and semantic abilities in the l2 and l3 of the experimental groups change as a function of a 3month individualized training with cls, relative to the control groups (as measured by pre-post test comparisons)? 2. to what extent do the dyslexic learners (test dyslexic) benefit from the training with respect to phonological, morphological and semantic abilities, relative to the nondyslexic students (test nondyslexic)? 3. to what extent does the training in the l3 english phonological/orthographic abilities influence the l2 phonological and morphological abilities of the subjects? based on previous findings (see the literature review above), it is hypothesized that: 1. there will be significant between-group differences favoring the two nondyslexic groups (test nondyslexic and control nondyslexic) on the pretest as well as the posttest measures in the battery (see vellutino et al., 2004). 2. the experimental groups (test dyslexic and test nondyslexic) will show greater preand posttest gains than the control groups with regard to the level of posttest gain between groups. 3. the test nondyslexic group is expected to show the greatest preand posttest gains (see lovett et al., 2008). taking sparks and ganschow’s lcdh one step further, it is also of interest to see whether improved l3 skills have a positive effect (facilitation) on some components simone e. pfenninger 116 of both l2 and l3 learning (see rq 3). since standard german represents both the l2 and language of literacy for the participants in this study, we can hypothesize that the improvement of l3 (english) skills might have a positive effect on l2 german as well. 5.2. participants forty male students from two public elementary schools in one of the major cities in switzerland were recruited (mean age 9;7, range 9;0-11;1). the 20 dyslexics were randomly assigned to either the test dyslexic group or the control dyslexic group; the 20 nondyslexic students were randomly assigned to either the test nondyslexic group or the control nondyslexic group. all participants were in third grade and their socioeconomic background was middle class. they had completed at least 2.5 years of l2 standard german (approximately 285 hours of direct german language instruction)2 and 1.5 years of l3 english (approximately 114 hours of instruction).3 three subtests of the wechsler intelligence scale for children (wisc iv, see petermann & petermann, 2010) were used to evaluate children’s nonverbal reasoning ability (vocabulary, block design and digit span forwards and backwards). all the participants had iq scores within or near the average range. while 15 of the 20 dyslexic learners had been identified as dyslexic by the school, a private psychologist or a speech therapist, the five remaining students had not been identified with any type of dyslexia until they were referred to us. they were categorized as dyslexic in this study because they were described by their parents and teachers as having severe deficits in l2 and l3 production (problems with grapheme-phoneme correspondences, word segmentation, capitalization, omission of letters). their reading fluency scores revealed a considerably slower speed of learning and reading than that of the nondyslexic groups (see tables 3 and 4 below). at least one of their relatives had been diagnosed as dyslexic by speech and language therapists or specially trained educators. like the readers exhibiting average abilities, all the dyslexic students were integrated 2 note, however, that in switzerland, all school subjects, and thus all participants in this study, are taught in standard german, which increases their exposure to the l2 substantially. 3 note that while swiss german is a high alemannic variety of german, it is hardly understandable to someone who knows only standard german, as the two languages differ to some extent in lexicon, phonology and syntax (for a discussion of this, see, e.g., berthele, 2010). according to lüdi (2007), most swiss citizens are monolingual during their childhood, but they usually become bilingual in the early primary grades at the latest when they receive formal literacy training in l2 german from 1st grade on (age 7). this means that german-speaking swiss children have to learn to read, write, and use a relatively unknown language all at once. msl in the digital ages: effects and effectiveness of computer-mediated intervention for fl learners. . . 117 in mainstream classes. however, five of the 15 officially classified dyslexic subjects had to repeat second grade, which indicates significant delays in the development of language skills early on, at a time when letter-sound awareness skills are typically developing. however, they did not have any accommodations because of their disabilities. 5.3. method and procedure all 20 students received traditional l2 and l3 instruction; additionally, the experimental groups received the specialized training with cls outside of school. the contact sessions took place over a period of three months (five times a week for 20 minutes) in separate, distraction-free rooms at the children’s homes. three sessions per week were supervised by trained research assistants, while the parents had been previously trained to assist the subjects in the remaining two sessions. before the introduction of the computerized learning support in the experimental group, all 40 subjects participated in a battery of pretests. each subject was tested separately by the experimenter in a school room. the test battery lasted approximately four hours per subject. there was no difference between the subjects regarding the time allotted for testing nor were any time limits set. immediately after the treatment ended, the posttest was administered to the 40 students. analogous procedure to that used during pretest administration was applied. following ganschow and sparks (1995), preand posttest comparisons within groups and preand posttest comparisons between groups (dyslexic vs. non-dyslexic; cls vs. non-cls) were conducted. the data were analyzed in accordance with their properties by t tests, wilcoxon tests, mann-whitney u-tests, and chi-square tests. in order to account for the gains made by participants, multivariate analyses of covariance (mancova) were applied, taking the scores of the participants on the posttest as the dependent variables, their scores on the pretest as the covariates, and treatment and reading ability as the independent variables. in the (m)ancova approach, the whole focus is on whether one group has a higher mean after the treatment. mancova also allows us to see whether each of the main factors, treatment and reading ability, as well as interaction between them, are statistically significant, while at the same time we can account for variation around the posttest means that comes from the variation in where the participants started at pretest. 5.4. measures a full battery of tests was administered in the participants’ l2 (standard german, the language of literacy) and l3 (english). the preand posttest battery included simone e. pfenninger 118 four continuous rapid automatized naming tests of numbers and objects in pictures in l2 and l3; two phoneme deletion tasks in l2 and l3, respectively; three standardized measures for l2 word and pseudoword reading fluency using the salzburg reading and orthography test (salzburger leseund rechtschreibtest slrt-i and slrt-ii, see landerl, wimmer, & moser, 2006) and the salzburg reading test (salzburger lese-screening sls, see mayringer & wimmer, 2005); one measure of l3 word and pseudoword reading efficiency/reading speed using the word reading subtest of the test of word reading efficiency (towre-2, form a, see torgesen, wagner, & rashotte, 2012); one standardized l2 spelling test (salzburg reading and orthography test [slrt-ii], see moll & landerl, 2010); one measure of l3 controlled receptive vocabulary (see read, 2007); and two measures of l3 productive vocabulary, that is, a picture-naming task and a stimulated vocabulary retrieval task to capture size, depths, and richness of vocabulary knowledge (see chen, 2012; milton, 2009; read, 2007). according to several authors (e.g., orosz, 2009, p. 182), vocabulary size is closely related to other language skills and it is the foundation on which later learning can be built. the tasks are in line with the characteristic indicators of phonological deficits that may underlie reading impairments and the typical symptoms of dyslexia in the transition from l1 to fl. they are aligned to the schools, the course book, and the age of the participants. the assessed problem areas covered in the pre and posttests were the same as those covered by cls. all tests had been successfully pilot-tested with four members of the relevant population (one of each group described above), but not with those who will form part of the final sample (gamper, 2013). 5.5. results in the presentation of the results, first an overall picture of the participants’ reading speed will be discussed. table 1 gives the preand posttest results of the rapid automatized (digit/picture) naming tasks (digran and picran) in the l2 and l3. in general, there were significant between-group differences favoring the two nondyslexic groups on all pretest and posttest rapid naming measures (in all cases p < .05). while the test dyslexic group was able to make significant gains over time on the digran-l2 test (z = 2.42, p = .02), the digran-l3 test (z = 2.78, p = .005) and the picran-l3 test (z = 2.68, p = .007), the control dyslexic group showed the opposite pattern, scoring significantly lower on the post-picran-l2 test (z = -2.78, p = .005) and the post-picran-l3 test (z = -2.78, p = .005) than on the corresponding pretests. neither of the two nondyslexic groups (test nondyslexic and control nondyslexic) made any significant gains. msl in the digital ages: effects and effectiveness of computer-mediated intervention for fl learners. . . 119 table 1 naming speed means (seconds) in the ran preand posttests test test dyslexic test nondyslexic control dyslexic control nondyslexic pre-digran-l2 47.5 22.8 41.6 26.2 pre-digran-l3 70.5 47.7 62.3 47.7 pre-picran-l2 56.6 40.6 59.1 48.8 pre-picran-l3 71.8 55.3 61.8 50.8 post-digran-l2 41.8 25.6 41.4 28.0 post-digran-l3 57.5 41.7 62.5 44.2 post-picran-l2 53.3 42.4 78.5 46.8 post-picran-l3 65.5 47.6 77.7 47.7 in the l2/l3 phoneme deletion tasks, the two dyslexic groups performed better on all measures than the control groups without dyslexia, as table 2 illustrates. none of the dyslexic children produced any errors on the regular digraph conditions (german schaf, english ship, german theater, english thunder). by contrast, the learners with average reading abilities showed signs of orthographic intrusion, such as in responding to ship with hip (rather than ip), which corroborates previous findings (e.g., landerl et al., 1996). there were statistically significant preand posttest differences for the test dyslexic group (z = -2.78, p = .005) and the test nondyslexic group (z = -2.78, p = .005), in contrast to the two control groups (in all cases p > .05). while statistically significant differences were observed between the results of the pre-phon-l3, with the test nondyslexic group outscoring the test dyslexic group (u = 76, p = .053), the results of the post-phon-l3 indicated no more differences between the two experimental groups. table 2 mean scores (mean %) on the phoneme deletion tasks (maximum = 7) test test dyslexic test nondyslexic control dyslexic control nondyslexic pre-phon-l2 7 (100%) 5.9 (84.29%) 6.9 (98.57%) 4.6 (65.71%) pre-phon-l3 4.2 (60%) 4.8 (68.57%) 5.2 (74.29%) 4 (57.14%) post-phon-l2 7 (100%) 6.1 (87.14%) 6.4 (91.43%) 4.9 (70%) post-phon-l3 6.2 (88.57%) 6 (85.71%) 5.8 (82.86%) 4.2 (60%) table 3 displays the results of the slrt-i test series. the slrt-i task targets single word and compound reading in the l2, reading of short and long text passages, and reading of pseudowords with regular and irregular graphemephoneme correspondences. as illustrated in table 3, all 20 learners without dyslexia had significantly higher reading speed than the 20 dyslexic learners on all preand posttest measures. the reading speed of the dyslexic learners was particularly slow for the regular and irregular pseudowords. no significant differences were found within or between the test nondyslexic group and the control nondyslexic group. likewise, there were no significant differences between simone e. pfenninger 120 the 10 test dyslexic group and the 10 control dyslexic group participants. finally, no significant within-group differences emerged between any preand posttest; in other words, the reading speed underwent no improvement as a function of the intervention. table 3 mean reading times (seconds) on l2 word and pseudoword reading fluency measures (reading speed) (slrt-i) test test dyslexic test nondyslexic control dyslexic control nondyslexic t p pre-slrt-l2 words 64.20 23.86 58.62 21.17 39.2 > .001 pre-slrt-l2 pseudowords 102.61 32.26 99.12 33.71 57.04 > .001 post-slrt-l2 words 64.85 22.08 58.43 20.93 34.77 > .001 post-slrt-l2 pseudowords 106.57 32.71 102.30 31.30 48.12 > .001 it is also noteworthy that all four groups had very high accuracy scores (number of real words and pseudowords read correctly) on all measures in the slrt-i test series. statistically significant between-group differences emerged in the preand posttests of the reading of regular and irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondences, as the test dyslexic group (u = 76, p = .05) and the control dyslexic group (u = 79.5, p = .03) had significantly lower values with the regular pseudowords in the pretest than the respective nondyslexic groups. their scores were also significantly lower for the corresponding posttests (u = 76, p = .053 and u = 79.5, p = .029, respectively). the results of the pre-slt-l2 irregular pseudowords also indicated significantly lower values for the test dyslexic group (u = 91, p = .002) and the control dyslexic group (u = 99.5, p < .001), relative to the non-dyslexic readers. for the 20 non-dyslexic learners, the difference between words and pseudowords (95.1% s vs. 98.9%) was significantly smaller than for the 20 dyslexic learners (91.6% s vs. 82.6%; c2 = 62.6, df = 1, p < .001), which confirms previous findings on effects of lexicality (word vs. pseudowords) (e.g., landerl et al., 1996, 1997a). as to preand post-comparisons within groups, the only statistically significant differences concerning accuracy were found between the results of the slrt-i (irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondences) preand posttest, on which the test dyslexic group made significant gains over time (z = -2.78, p = .005). they were even able to reach the performance level of the non-dyslexic groups, in contrast to the control dyslexic group, who still achieved significantly lower scores than the two non-dyslexic groups (in both cases u = 95, p < .001). as table 4 shows, the within-group differences in the slrt-ii test also indicated some enhancement in l3 decoding and word reading efficiency as a result of the training. the test dyslexic group showed significant preand posttest differences on pseudowords (z = -1.96, p = 0.05), while the test nondyslexic msl in the digital ages: effects and effectiveness of computer-mediated intervention for fl learners. . . 121 group made significant gains with real words over time (z = -2.78, p = .005). there were no statistically significant differences within the two control groups. however, the test dyslexic group was not able to reach the performance level of either the test nondyslexic group or the control nondyslexic group (in all posttests u = 100, p < .001). the dyslexic learners had particular difficulty reading pseudowords, with an error pattern similar to that in the slrt-ii test (see table 4). table 4 l2 word and pseudoword reading fluency measures (mean accuracy scores within 1 minute) (slrt-ii) test test dyslexic test nondyslexic control dyslexic control nondyslexic pre-slrt-l2 words 23.2 63.2 24.8 75.0 pre-slrt-l2 pseudowords 18.2 44.9 17.5 44.8 post-slrt-l2 words 23.9 75.7 21 79.2 post-slrt-l2 pseudowords 24.8 41.6 18.8 46.0 note. because of the generally low error scores, the errors for all three syllable lengths were combined (see landerl et al., 1997a, p. 324). finally, in the sls test, where the learners had three minutes to judge the truth content of a number of sentences, statistically significant results emerged between groups but not within groups. table 5 presents these results. almost all the performances on sentence reading fluency decreased slightly (but not significantly) with time for all subgroups. the non-dyslexic groups significantly outscored the dyslexic learners on the pretest as well as the posttest (in all cases t = -21.2, p < .001). table 5 mean scores on l2 sentence reading fluency within 3 minutes (sls) test test dyslexic test nondyslexic control dyslexic control nondyslexic pre-sls-l2 23.9 49.2 26.6 54.9 post-sls-l2 22.9 45.2 25.7 56.8 table 6 shows that, similarly, overall the dyslexic learners produced significantly fewer correct l3 forms than the non-dyslexic readers and at the same time skipped a high number of words. however, the test dyslexic group (z = 2.78, p = .005) and the test nondyslexic group (z = -2.62, p = .009) improved significantly on the towre, in contrast to the control groups. while there were no significant differences between the test dyslexic group and the control dyslexic group on the pretest (u = 65.5, p = .23), the test dyslexic group significantly outperformed the control dyslexic group on the posttest measures (u = 2, p < .001). despite gains, however, the test dyslexic group did not catch up with the test nondyslexic group or even the control nondyslexic group (in both cases u = 100, p < .001). furthermore, while the number of skipped words decreased simone e. pfenninger 122 significantly over time in the test dyslexic group (z = 2.78, p = .005), it remained relatively high in the corresponding control dyslexic group, with no pretestposttest difference (z = -0.74, p = .46). table 6 mean scores (mean %) on l3 word decoding in the towre (sight word efficiency part) within 45 seconds test accuracy test dyslexic test nondyslexic control dyslexic control nondyslexic pre-towre-l3 correct 5.3 (19.2%) 37.1 (85.89%) 6.2 (26.98%) 39.9 (88.69%) error 6.9 (25%) 5.9 (14.11%) 10 (39.68%) 5.1 (11.33%) skipped 15.4 (55.8%) 0 (0%) 8.9 (34.13%) 0 (0%) post-towre-l3 correct 17.8 (75.11%) 51.1 (86.9%) 7.6 (29.57%) 41.2 (85.65%) error 4.9 (20.68%) 7.7 (13.1%) 8.5 (33.07%) 6.9 (14.35%) skipped 1 (4.22%) 0 (0%) 9.6 (37.35%) 0 (0%) in the l2 spelling test, the spelling of 48 monosyllabic and polysyllabic words was measured. table 7 summarizes the results of orthographic errors, phonological errors, and capitalization errors. none of the groups made significant gains over time in l2 spelling. the differences in the total number of errors and the total number of misspelled words between the dyslexic learners and the non-dyslexic learners was significant on the pretest as well as the posttest (in all cases u = 0.0, p < .001), mainly because the dyslexic learners produced significantly more orthographic errors than the non-dyslexic readers on all measures (pre-spell-l2 orthographic: u = 0.0, p < .001; post-spell-l2 orthographic: u = 0.0, p < .001). table 7 mean numbers (mean %) of error types in the slrt-ii-l2 spelling (maximum = 48) test test dyslexic test nondyslexic control dyslexic control nondyslexic pre-spell-l2 orthographic errors 29.6 (61.67%) 4 (8.33%) 26.4 (55%) 2.4 (5%) pre-spell-l2 phonological errors 1.2 (2.5%) 0 (0%) 1.9 (3.96%) 0 (0%) pre-spell-l2 capitalization errors 8.9 (18.54%) 3.1 (6.46%) 7.9 (16.46%) 1.2 (2.5%) pre-spell-l2 total errors 39.7 (82.71%) 7.1 (14.79%) 36.2 (75.42%) 3.6 (7.5%) pre-spell-l2 total misspelled words 32.7 (68.13%) 9.1 (18.96%) 30.6 (63.75%) 2.6 (5.42%) post-spell-l2 orthographic errors 27.8 (57.92%) 1.9 (3.96%) 23.2 (48.33%) 3.1 (6.46%) post-spell-l2 phonological errors 1.3 (2.71%) 3.2 (6.67%) 3 (6.25%) 1.3 (2.71%) post-spell-l2 capitalization errors 7.9 (16.46%) 4 (8.3%) 8.8 (18.33%) 4.5 (9.38%) post-spell-l2 total errors 37 (77.08%) 9.1 (18.96%) 35 (72.92%) 8.9 (18.54%) post-spell-l2 total misspelled words 29.3 (61.04%) 5.5 (11.46%) 31.4 (65.42%) 6.7 (13.96%) note. a distinction was made between total errors and total misspelled words because some words contained more than one error. table 8 summarizes the main results of the l3 receptive vocabulary task. the non-dyslexic groups exhibited ceiling-level performance on both the preand msl in the digital ages: effects and effectiveness of computer-mediated intervention for fl learners. . . 123 posttest. the test dyslexic group made significant gains over time (pre-listen-l3 vs. post-listen-l3: z = -2.78, p = .005), to the extent that they caught up with the non-dyslexic readers. the control dyslexic group scored significantly lower than the two non-dyslexic groups on the pretest as well as the posttest (in all cases u = 100, p < .001). table 8 mean error scores (mean error %) on l3 word comprehension in sentence context (maximum = 6) test test dyslexic test nondyslexic control dyslexic control nondyslexic pre-listen-l3 4.1 (68.33%) 6 (100%) 4 (66.67%) 6 (100%) post-listen-l3 6 (100%) 6 (100%) 4.3 (71.67%) 6 (100%) finally, as table 9 shows, in the first test of productive vocabulary, the l3 picture naming task, the test dyslexic group was the only group to have significantly higher scores on the post-picnam-l3 than on the pre-picnam-l3 (z = 2.52, p = .012). however, the differences in performance between the test dyslexic group and the two non-dyslexic groups were still significant on the posttest (u = 86, p = .007 and u = 81, p = .021, respectively). table 9 mean scores (mean %) on the l3 picture naming task (maximum = 25) test test dyslexic test nondyslexic control dyslexic control nondyslexic pre-picnam-l3 13.8 (55.2%) 18.4 (73.2%) 12.4 (49.6%) 18.9 (75.6%) post-picnam-l3 18 (72%) 21.8 (87.2%) 11.2 (44.8%) 20.9 (83.6%) as to the second test of productive vocabulary, the stimulated vocabulary retrieval task, the results of the correct words, number of switches, number of clusters, mean cluster size (excluding single words), overlapping items, and phonological clusters are shown in table 10 for l2 german and table 11 for l3 english.4 while there were no significant differences between the test dyslexic group and the control dyslexic group, or between the test nondyslexic group and the control nondyslexic group, the nondyslexic learners performed significantly better than the dyslexic learners on all measures (in all cases p < .001). in other words, the non-dyslexic learners had higher levels of associative knowledge than the dyslexic learners. in general, the learners who had higher scores on the l2 stimulated vocabulary retrieval task achieved higher scores on the corresponding l3 test (pre-retrieve: r = .86, p < .0001; post-retrieve: r = .87, p < .0001). similarly, the number of overlapping items significantly correlated 4 for ease of exposition, the results of the two semantic categories for each language ( sports and professions for german and animals and body parts for english) were collapsed. simone e. pfenninger 124 with the number of correct words (pre-retrieve-l2: r = .38, p = .017; post-retrieve-l2: r = .58, p < .0001; pre-retrieve-l3: r = .48, p = .002; post-retrievel3: r = .63, p < .0001). while the size and depth of lexicon of the test dyslexic group (z = -2.57, p = .01) and the test nondyslexic group (z = -2.62, p = .009) increased significantly on the retrieve-l3 correct words, the gains of the control dyslexic group on the post-retrieve-l3 task (see table 11) were not significant. table 10 mean scores on l2 stimulated vocabulary retrieval tasks within 30 seconds test test dyslexic test nondyslexic control dyslexic control nondyslexic pre-retrieve-l2 total words correct 4.95 9.35 6 9.95 pre-retrieve-l2 switches 1.95 3.6 2.45 3.85 pre-retrieve-l2 no. of clusters 1.2 2.15 1.2 2.2 pre-retrieve-l2 mean cluster size 2.46 2.96 1.95 3.15 pre-retrieve-l2 overlapping items 0 0.55 0.05 0.25 post-retrieve-l2 total words correct 4.15 9.45 5.9 9.5 post-retrieve-l2 switches 1.7 3.85 2.1 3.6 post-retrieve-l2 no. of clusters 1 2.05 1.25 2.15 post-retrieve-l2 mean cluster size 1.95 2.58 1.95 3.02 post-retrieve-l2 overlapping items 0 0.59 0 0.2 table 11 mean scores on l3 stimulated vocabulary retrieval task within 30 seconds test test dyslexic test nondyslexic control dyslexic control nondyslexic pre-retrieve-l3 total words correct 4.75 9.5 5.45 12.65 pre-retrieve-l3 switches 1.95 3.35 1.9 5.1 pre-retrieve-l3 no. of clusters 1.15 2.3 1.35 3.05 pre-retrieve-l3 mean cluster size 2.025 3.57 2.54 3.78 pre-retrieve-l3 overlapping items 0.05 0.30 0 0.45 post-retrieve-l3 total words correct 5.3 11.75 7.1 11.9 post-retrieve-l3 switches 2.35 5 2.8 5 post-retrieve-l3 no. of clusters 1.4 2.95 1.75 2.8 post-retrieve-l3 mean cluster size 2.53 3.4 2.92 3.6 post-retrieve-l3 overlapping items 0 0.45 0 0.35 finally, further analyses were conducted in order to examine the effects of the treatment (test vs. non-test) and the participants’ reading skills (dyslexic vs. nondyslexic) on their scores as well as the interaction between the two independent variables. the mancova analysis clearly reveals that both the intervention as well as l2 reading skills influenced the learners’ performance on the 15 dependent measures. while the impact of the participants’ reading skills is hardly surprising, table 12 shows that there were significant results for 11 of the 15 measures and consistently high effect sizes for the treatment variable. as mentioned above, rapid automatized digit naming in german (digran-l2), l2 reading speed (slrt-i), l2 spelling (slrt-ii-s), and stimulated vocabulary retrieval in english (retrieve-l3) did not change as a function of the intervention. msl in the digital ages: effects and effectiveness of computer-mediated intervention for fl learners. . . 125 table 12 mancova follow-up test results for all dependent measures (df = 1) effects of treatment task f p h2 digran-l2 1.85 = .183 .030 digran-l3 8.20 < .001* .112 picran-l2 32.45 < .001* .163 picran-l3 36.34 < .001* .243 phon-l2 30.51 < .001* .353 phon-l3 39.64 < .001* .285 slrt-i 2.38 = .143 .002 slrt-ii-r 38.31 < .001* .333 sls 7.95 < .001* .139 towre 57.19 < .001* .436 slrt-ii-s 0.93 = .342 .024 listen 145.92 < .001* .440 picnam 15.60 < .001* .200 retrieve-l2 38.32 < .001* .152 retrieve-l3 1.74 = .197 .019 effects of reading ability task f p h2 digran-l2 23.67 < .001* .387 digran-l3 29.7 < .001* .407 picran-l2 98.56 < .001* .495 picran-l3 71.97 < .001* .482 phon-l2 4.46 = .042 .052 phon-l3 36.29 < .001* .261 slrt-i 12.21 < .001* .320 slrt-ii-r 40.43 < .001* .352 sls 4.05 = .052 .071 towre 38.88 < .001* .297 slrt-ii-s 1.78 = .190 .047 listen 4.13 = .050 .012 picnam 18.37 < .001* .235 retrieve-l2 178.98 < .001* .708 retrieve-l3 55.42 < .001* .594 interaction of treatment and reading ability task f p h2 digran-l2 0.61 = .441 .001 digran-l3 0.14 = .713 .002 picran-l2 33.10 < .001* .167 picran-l3 6.14 = .018* .041 phon-l2 16.56 < .001* .191 phon-l3 28.23 < .001* .203 slrt-i 0.34 = .214 .005 slrt-ii-r 1.22 = .276 .012 sls 10.47 = .003* .181 towre 0.06 = .809 .000 slrt-ii-s 0.25 = .621 .006 listen 148.76 < .001* .446 picnam 9.04 < .001* .116 retrieve-l2 0.43 = .516 .002 retrieve-l3 1.16 = .289 .013 note. *statistically significant at α < .05. simone e. pfenninger 126 5.6. discussion the current results are in line with multiple non-computerized intervention studies (e.g., sparks et al., 1998; vellutino et al., 2004) that indicate that learners without dyslexia achieve significantly higher scores on tasks that require phonemic differentiation, a challenge for individuals with dyslexia. the entrylevel l2 literacy skills were uniformly deficient in the group of the impaired readers (the test dyslexic group and control dyslexic group), relative to the nondyslexic readers, which supports hypothesis 1. as a consequence of their poor entry-level literacy skills, the dyslexic learners had a weaker foundation for l3 learning than the non-dyslexic readers; it was found that l2 abilities at entry were highly predictive of final outcomes and of reading growth during intervention. students with stronger l2 skills demonstrated higher l3 proficiency and achievement (e.g., in the l3 towre word decoding task) than students with weaker l2 skills. in the vocabulary retrieval task, the learners who had higher scores on the l2 tests, the nondyslexic groups, achieved higher scores on the l3 tests. since the vocabulary retrieval task works as an indicator of development because it requires online retrieval and monitoring responses and therefore captures many aspects of language that develop with time (chen, 2012), the low scores of the dyslexic learners indicate an underdevelopment of the size and depth of german and english vocabulary. also, the more frequent use of overlapping clusters by nondyslexic learners indicates richer semantic knowledge because in order to produce overlapping clusters, learners have to know at least two features of the item that belongs to two consecutive clusters (chen, 2012). hypothesis 2 was also supported. in contrast to the control groups, significant differences were revealed for learners with or without reading difficulties (test dyslexic and test nondyslexic) in intervention outcomes or growth on the following measures: l2 and l3 phoneme deletion task, l2 (regular) pseudoword decoding (slrt), and l3 word decoding (towre). the test dyslexic group made even greater gains than the test nondyslexic group on the l2 and l3 rapid automatized digit/picture naming as well as the l3 receptive vocabulary test and the l3 picture naming task, to the extent that they were able to catch up to the performance of the control nondyslexic group and/or the test nondyslexic group (see hypothesis 3). for the l2 word decoding and l2 sentence reading fluency tasks (slrt-i, slrt-ii, and sls), there was relatively little difference between the pretests and the posttests. however, the percentage of correct readings for pseudowords (irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondences) by the test nondyslexic group climbed significantly across most tests. certain readingrelated cognitive deficits, such as l2 reading speed and l2 spelling, were found to be difficult to remediate within such a short period of time. what is more, all msl in the digital ages: effects and effectiveness of computer-mediated intervention for fl learners. . . 127 groups made significant gains over time on the stimulated vocabulary retrieval task regardless of training method. in sum, the research-based intervention proved superior to the traditional education control on a wide variety of task outcomes and rate of growth: concerning the impacts of the treatment and the participants’ reading skills, mancova indicated that treatment effects were significant for 11 of the 15 dependent variables, with large effect sizes. thus, there seemed to be some facilitation effect of the msl training, which answers my third and last research question. 5.7. conclusion this study examined the effect of three months of computer-mediated msl instruction in the phonology/orthography of english as an l3 offered to elementary school students identified as being at-risk (n = 20) and not at-risk (n = 20) of struggling with language acquisition. the training that the test dyslexic group and the test nondyslexic group underwent proved effective irrespective of the reading ability of the learners, which is in line with many previous noncomputerized intervention studies. what is more, the training tested here was more effective for the test dyslexic group than for the test nondyslexic group, which corroborates lovett et al.’s (2008) finding that lower language-ability learners improve at a faster rate than their higher language-ability peers in intervention programs. the results of this study provide a contribution to the literature of fl interventions with msl computerized language training for dyslexic language learners. due to self-dependent, systematic multisensory and highly repetitive phonics practice in l3, dyslexic learners learn to map print onto speech, develop quite competent decoding abilities and phonemic awareness, and accordingly can catch up in both l2 and l3 acquisition to the non-dyslexic learners. this training has a positive impact not only on l3 but also l2 decoding skills. it has to be noted, however, that despite considerable progress and gain, the test dyslexic group still lagged behind the nondyslexic readers in some of the phonological/ orthographic abilities measured, which confirms previous observations (e.g., ganschow & sparks, 1995) that at-risk learners are not likely to catch up with their not-at-risk peers in fl learning. it goes without saying that the small sample sizes limit the power of the statistical analyses. thus, the results must be regarded as tentative until more rigorous, controlled evaluations are undertaken. moreover, it remains to be seen if the test dyslexic group is able to maintain their gains over time because the duration of the intervention effects is unclear. without further training, the test dyslexic group might not be able to maintain or increase their initially achieved gains. additional research is also needed regarding general task effects simone e. pfenninger 128 as well as differences in motivational dispositions that might influence, or emerge as a result of, the intervention (see pfenninger, 2014). concerning the task effects, we cannot rule out the possibility that the same results would have been obtained with any other intervention task. nevertheless, the data offers preliminary support for the value of a computer-based learning aid outside the classroom and its influence on the l2 and l3 skills of young learners. given the increasing number of fl programs, the absence of special help available to students with specific learning difficulties, and the reluctance of fl educators to accept the importance of explicit multisensory instruction in phonology and grammar (see, e.g., nijakowska, 2008, p. 144), longitudinal research on the effects of after-school learning support is essential. acknowledgments i am deeply indebted to urs maurer, aleksandra eberhard-moscicka and lea jost at the department of cognitive neuroscience (university of zurich), who have collaborated with me over the past years. many thanks also to all the children and parents who invested their time and effort in participating in this study. msl in the digital ages: effects and effectiveness of computer-mediated intervention for fl learners. . . 129 references baumann, x. 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(1998). benefits of multisensory structured instruction for at-risk foreign language learners: a comparison study of high school spanish students. annals of dyslexia, 48, 239-270. sparks, r., & ganschow, l. (1995). a strong inference approach to causal factors in foreign language learning: a response to macintyre. modern language journal, 79, 235-244. sparks, r., ganschow, l., & patton, j. (2008a). l1 and l2 literacy, aptitude and affective variables as discriminators among highand low-achieving l2 learners with special needs. in j. kormos & e. h. kontra (eds.), language learners with special needs (pp. 11-35). bristol: multilingual matters. sparks, r., humbach, n., & javorsky, j. (2008b). individual and longitudinal differences among highand low-achieving, ld and adhd l2 learners. learning and individual differences 8, 29-43. torgesen, j. k. (2004). lessons learned from the last 20 years of research on interventions for students who experience difficulty learning to read. in p. mccardle & v. chhabra (eds.), the voice of evidence in reading research (pp. 225-229). baltimore: brookes. torgesen, j. k. (2005). recent discoveries from research on remedial interventions for children with dyslexia. in m. snowling & c. hulme (eds.), the science of reading (pp. 521-537). oxford: blackwell. msl in the digital ages: effects and effectiveness of computer-mediated intervention for fl learners. . . 133 torgesen, j. k., wagner, r. k., & rashotte, c. a. (2012). test of word reading efficiency (towre-2) (2nd ed.). austin, tx: pro-ed. vellutino, f. r., fletcher, j. m., snowling, m. j., & scanlon, d. m. (2004). specific reading disability (dyslexia): what have we learned in the past four decades? journal of child psychology and psychiatry, 45(1), 2-40. doi:10.1046/j.00219630.2003.00305.x. 367 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (3). 2015. 367-369 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.3.1 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial this is the second of two special issues of studies in second language learning and teaching emerging from the first psychology in language learning (pll) conference, which took place in may 2014 at the university of graz, austria. in the first special issue, we observed how much research into the psychology of language learning and teaching is expanding both thematically and methodologically. in this second special issue, we hone in on some of the core issues that we believe are likely to feature prominently on the future research agenda, namely, emotions, the self, and contexts. in the first paper in this collection, rebecca oxford presents a powerful case for the relevance of theories of emotion to the study of language learning. in her paper, she describes several theories of emotion, eclectically drawing from the fields of psychology, sociology, and philosophy to explain how those theories may apply to language learning. in fact, oxford goes beyond merely suggesting a greater role for understanding emotion in accounts of language learning; her scholarly and eloquently argued paper implies that discussions of language learner psychology that exclude emotions are inherently deficient. oxford’s call is echoed by anne chateau and peggy candas, who investigate the connections between emotions and autonomy. autonomy is one of the most established and widely discussed psychological constructs in language learning, yet chateau and candas identify an absence of an emotional component in discussions of autonomy. their analysis of the logbooks of learners of english at a french university explores how traces of emotion affect processes of autonomization in those learners. remaining in the area of autonomy, leena karlsson investigates the identity development of learners on an autonomous learning programme at a finnish university, focusing on one student’s search for an english-using self. through an analysis of the learner’s diary, the study highlights a range of interconnections between learner autonomy, learner identity, and the construction of an l2-using self. the next two papers are very much concerned 368 with the development of the self in context. virag csillagh’s study looks at learners of english in the multilingual swiss learning context. in addition to a highly informative account of the swiss learning context, her paper offers a thoughtprovoking sub-narrative that almost represents a separate ethnographic study in its own right; in her study, csillagh starts out by following a relatively conventional path using established concepts and methods, yet these prove not to be sufficiently sensitive for the specific demands of the swiss context and she ends her paper by calling for fresh approaches to research and methodological innovation. joanna rokita-jaśkow’s paper moves away from the university learning context to provide a much needed consideration of young language learners. in particular, the study examines the family context and the role of parental aspirations in the identity formation of these young learners. in the final empirical paper, carol griffiths and gökhan cansiz offer a timely historical perspective. using the 40th anniversary of joan rubin’s influential ‘good language learner’ article as a reference point, they provide a real sense of just how much things have changed over the past forty years, while at the same time, revealing how we are still battling with many of the same fundamental issues. their paper examines the complex and sometimes controversial issue of language learners’ use of strategies, which is seen as representing a key interface between the inner mental world of learners and actual behaviour. in their study, they first look, from a quantitative perspective, at the strategy use of a number of proficient users of english from around the world, and follow this with a qualitative investigation of the strategy use of one particular individual. their paper ends with a call for greater methodological plurality in future strategies research. all of the empirical papers in this special issue focus on the psychology of the learner, so we are delighted that the final paper in this collection, masako kumazawa’s review of magdalena kubanyiova’s teacher development in action turns the spotlight on to the psychology of teachers, and in particular conceptual change within language teachers. the review serves as an important reminder that if we wish to explore ‘psychology in language learning’, this must include the psychology of the teachers and not just that of the learners. a key theme running through the graz conference was the recognition that even the best designed materials and pedagogical practices will fail if we do not bear in mind the inherently social, emotional and very human dimensions to language learning. we hope that the various papers in this special issue and the proceeding one have remained true to the spirit of the conference and have expanded on some of the key emerging themes. we also very much hope that these papers will stimulate interest in the second pll conference scheduled to take place in finland in august 2016 (https://www.jyu.fi/en/congress/pll2016). we believe this conference will provide an exciting opportunity to be a part of 369 a major shift in how we think about language learning, the central role of psychology in language learning, and the methodological challenges and options available for the task of understanding those processes. we hope to see many of you there and look forward to hearing about your own experiences and ideas about research. sarah mercer university of graz, austria sarah.mercer@uni-graz.at stephen ryan senshu university, tokyo, japan ryan@isc.senshu-u.ac.jp 321 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (2). 321-324 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book reviews the strategy factor in successful language learning author: carol griffiths publisher: multilingual matters, 2013 isbn: 978-1-84769-940-4 pages: 220 the book by carol griffiths, titled the strategy factor in successful language learning, is without doubt a valuable addition to research into the field of language learning strategies in the sense that, on the one hand, it may provide a source of inspiration for further studies, and, on the other, it may constitute a useful point of reference for second and foreign language teachers. the volume is divided into five main parts in which the author, having clarified the reasons for her own interest in this area, addresses key issues related to our understanding of learning strategies, the findings of her own research in this domain, as well as the ways in which strategy training can be incorporated into language pedagogy. the first part, “a conceptual perspective,” touches upon a number of controversial issues connected with the field of language learning strategies, such as the terminology employed, the definition of the construct, factors impinging on the efficacy of strategy use, theoretical underpinnings, difficulties involved in the classification of strategies, as well as the challenges that are likely to be encountered in empirical investigations focusing on this area. in the second part, titled “a quantitative perspective,” carol griffiths reports the results of her research endeavors with the 322 aim of providing insights into such crucial issues as the relationship between the frequency and quantity of strategy use and successful language learning, the utility of specific strategy types, the impact of individual, situational and learning target related variables, the stability of strategy use over time, and the question whether modifications in the application of strategies lead to success as well as the issue as to whether strategies are the cause of progress in language learning or the effect of such progress. the third part, “a qualitative perspective,” is based on data obtained from semi-structured interviews with ten learners, complemented with information about strategy use, individual variation and achievement, which allows the author to construct the individual profiles of these learners and offer further insights into the use of language learning strategies as well as factors impacting this use. the fourth part, entitled “a pedagogical perspective,” is intended to demonstrate how the study of learning strategies can translate into classroom practice and does so by elucidating the place of strategic learning in theories of language teaching, providing a rationale for strategies-based instruction, giving an account of programs that can be used for this purpose, offering guidelines on how such training should be conducted and elucidating the impact of teachers’ perceptions and learner variables in this respect. finally, the fifth part, “overview,” highlights the main points brought up throughout the book and it is followed by appendices containing the data collection instruments used in the studies described earlier and a glossary including key terms related to the realm of language learning strategies. my overall evaluation of the volume is very positive and i am deeply convinced that is it a much-needed, valuable addition to existing literature on language learning strategies. this is because, on the one hand, it attempts to impose some order on a field that is afflicted by numerous controversies, one of the most crucial of which is tied to the question whether the concept of strategy should be replaced with a more general construct such as self-regulation (dörnyei, 2005), and, on the other, it does a superb job of reconciling theory and practice by demonstrating at every step the relevance of the issues discussed to language teachers. in fact, it is possible to point to a number of reasons why the book makes a worthwhile reading for wide audiences, not only scholars or researchers, but also practitioners as well as graduate and postgraduate students. for one thing, the author addresses some of the current controversies, related, among others, to the definition, distinctive features and characteristics of language learning strategies, offering reasonable solutions to at least some of them. of particular interest, for example, is her attempt to define strategies according to their distinctive characteristics (section 1.3. in part 1), or to classify them according to the frequency of their application by more and less successful students (i.e., base, core, and plus strategies; section 2.4. in part 2). second, in addition to offering a 323 thorough overview of the key issues involved in the classification, description and strategy training, the author draws upon her own research to illustrate many of these points as well as providing directions for future empirical investigations in this area. third, she manages to combine quite successfully the quantitative (part 2) and qualitative (part 3) paradigms, which is, by her own admission, a recognition of the fact that numbers and statistics cannot tell the whole story, and which allows her to gain much more insight into strategies that different learners use and the factors that may affect their employment in a particular situation. fourth, she looks, if only somewhat superficially, into the dynamics of strategy use by tracing changes in this respect over time (section 2.9 in part 2), an area that has thus far been largely neglected by researchers. fifth, she seeks to account for strategy use and in particular its relationship to attainment in terms of complex systems theories (e.g., larsen-freeman and cameron, 2007; section 2.10 in part 2), although it would clearly be an overstatement to suggest that this is the theoretical perspective guiding her study of language learning strategies. sixth, it is commendable that the volume offers a number of pedagogical implications for practitioners and that this is done in part 4 on the basis of the quantitative and qualitative findings discussed in parts 2 and 3. in a word, the book is in many ways original and it sheds new light on key issues involved in the study of language learning strategies. having said this, i would now like to focus on areas that, to my mind, can be viewed to some extent as weaknesses of the book. even though i understand the intentions of the author when it comes to dividing the text into chapters and sections, reservations can be expressed about mixing theoretical considerations with research findings throughout the volume. one striking example concerns the discussion of variables impacting strategy selection, which is perhaps justified given their focus, but it is hard to see why the relevant theoretical issues (e.g., regarding aptitude, motivation, sex, affect, context) are discussed alongside the research findings in parts 2, 3 and 4. it might be a better idea to include these in part 1, which is intended as a theoretical background anyway and thus includes references to these factors, perhaps together with an overview of the results of studies of their influence on strategy use. another problem is the fact that the theoretical issues relating to factors affecting strategy use are often discussed somewhat superficially, which is surely warranted given the main focus of the book but only as long as the discussion is confined to the role of a particular variable in shaping the application of learning strategies rather than attempting to provide a state-ofthe-art overview of research on a given variable. more specifically, there are problems with the interpretation of the motives given by learners, which is visible, for instance, in the following sentence on page 70: “given that educational/employment goals might be considered extrinsic to the learner, something the 324 student uses as an instrument to reach some further target, these findings might suggest that extrinsic/instrumental motivation types are more productive than the intrinsic/integrative types of motivation which drive those who want to travel or form friendships for their own personal satisfaction.” the problem here is that the desire to get a good job or better education can be intrinsic as well if the learner feels that such goals are important to him or her, a comment which should alert us to the fact that instrumental and integrative motivational orientations can each be intrinsic or extrinsic, depending on whether the desire to learn comes from the learner, significant others or simply an attempt to ward off adverse consequences. finally, although the author combines the quantitative and qualitative perspectives on the study of learning strategies, the research findings that she presents are still representative of what could be referred to as a macro perspective on strategy use, or such that aims to capture rather general, contextneutral patterns, rather than a micro perspective that taps into the application of strategies as they are employed in the performance of a specific task. obviously, this can hardly be considered a weakness in the light of the fact that both of these approaches can be regarded as equally valuable, and this point is raised at this juncture only because combining these two approaches can be expected to offer the most valuable insights into strategy use. these shortcomings notwithstanding, the book by carol griffiths is definitely worth reading as it considerably extends our knowledge about language learning strategies, it succeeds in addressing some of the most controversial issues, points to important directions for future research, and offers a number of feasible guidelines for practitioners. as a consequence, the book will be of relevance to wide audiences, ranging from theorists and researchers, through materials writers and teacher trainers, to classroom teachers and students enrolled in graduate and postgraduate courses. reviewed by miros aw pawlak adam mickiewicz university in pozna , kalisz, poland state school of higher professional education, konin, poland pawlakmi@amiu.edu.pl references dörnyei, z. (2005). the psychology of the language learner: individual differences in second language acquisition. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. larsen-freeman, d., & cameron, l. (2008). complex systems and applied linguistics. oxford: oxford university press. 445 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (3). 2021. 445-472 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.3.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt chinese secondary school teachers’ conceptions of l2 assessment: a mixed-methods study maggie ma the hang seng university of hong kong, china https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9805-5100 maggiema@hsu.edu.hk gavin bui the hang seng university of hong kong, china https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1567-9074 gavinbui@hsu.edu.hk abstract teacher conceptions of assessment influence their implementation of learning-focused assessment initiatives as advocated in many educational policy documents. this mixed-methods study investigated chinese secondary school teachers’ conceptions of l2 assessment in the context of an exam-oriented educational system which emphasizes english grammar, vocabulary and reading comprehension skills. for the quantitative part of the study, survey data were collected to gauge the conceptions of assessment held by 66 senior secondary efl teachers from six schools in eastern china. for the qualitative part, case studies of two teachers from schools with different rankings were conducted. quantitative results showed that the teacher participants as a group agreed most with the view that assessment is to help learning. however, there was a strong association between two factors, that is, the assessment as accurate for examination and teacher/school control factor, and the assessment as accurate for student development factor. the strong association indicated that it may be less likely for the group of teachers to adopt the formative assessment initiatives emphasizing student development as promoted in the english curriculum reform. qualitative findings further revealed individual differences in the two case study teachers’ conceptions and practices of maggie ma, gavin bui 446 assessment as well as the interplay among meso-level (e.g., school factor), micro-level (e.g., student factor), and macro-level (e.g., sociocultural and policy contexts) factors in shaping the teachers’ different conceptions and practices of assessment. a situated approach has been proposed to enhance teachers’ assessment literacy. keywords: chinese efl teachers; teachers’ conceptions of assessment; assessment practices 1. introduction assessment plays an important role in affecting students’ learning. in recent years, many countries, including china, have witnessed the promotion of formative assessment (berry & adamson, 2011; kennedy & lee, 2008), which originated from england in response to the negative influence of high-stakes national testing (stobart, 2006). the success of assessment innovation such as formative assessment relies much on teachers, who are the key agents in educational assessment (xu & brown, 2016). in particular, teacher beliefs regarding assessment may influence how they respond to learning-focused assessment and the success of its implementation (brown et al., 2011). a lack of teacher beliefs in the proposed assessment innovation may constitute an obstacle to its success and calls for extensive assessment training. in countries where there is an exam-oriented educational system, it is thus crucial to understand teachers’ views of assessment both for the success of policy initiatives and teachers’ professional development. this paper explores chinese secondary efl teachers’ conceptions of assessment, defined as “a teachers’ understanding of the nature and purpose of how students’ learning is examined, tested, evaluated or assessed” (brown & gao, 2015, p.4). this is because teacher conceptions exert a major influence on how teachers perceive, respond to and interact with their teaching environment (marton, 1981). acknowledging that teacher conceptions of assessment are ecologically rational, previous research has investigated these conceptions in different contexts and resorted to macro-level factors (i.e., social and cultural factors) for an explanation (e.g., brown et al., 2011; brown & michaelides, 2011; teng & bui, 2020). despite such research, there is limited research on the influence of meso-level (e.g., school factors) and micro-level (e.g., characteristics of individual teachers) factors on teacher conceptions of assessment and their interplay with macro-level factors, particularly in the case of nationally advocated formative assessment innovation in exam-oriented educational contexts. given that different levels of factors may shape teachers’ assessment knowledge, beliefs, chinese secondary school teachers’ conceptions of l2 assessment: a mixed-methods study 447 and practices (fulmer et al., 2015), it is important to explore how these factors affect teacher conceptions of assessment to shed light on the successful implementation of formative assessment and assessment training. to address the research gap, this study adopted a mixed-methods approach to examining chinese secondary efl teachers’ conceptions of assessment and different layers of factors that shaped such conceptions when the recent english language curriculum reform has foregrounded the importance of formative assessment in the context of an exam-oriented educational system, which emphasizes english grammar, vocabulary and reading comprehension skills (hao & otani, 2016). the findings of the research may provide insights into the facilitation of the implementation of english education assessment initiatives and efl teachers’ professional development. 2. literature review 2.1. teachers’ conceptions of assessment teachers hold beliefs about particular things (pajares, 1992) and use their beliefs to filter new information, frame problem spaces, and guide actions (fives & buehl, 2012). in the context of assessment, teachers’ beliefs about the nature and purposes of assessment, that is, their conceptions of assessment, may influence their assessment practices and create a lens through which they respond to curriculum and assessment reforms. for example, in societies with an exam-oriented educational system, teachers may hold the belief that a powerful way to improve student learning is to examine them, and they may be less likely to adopt formative assessment initiatives in educational reforms (brown et al., 2011). research on teachers’ conceptions of assessment, conducted extensively by brown and his colleagues, has identified four major purposes of assessment based on the teacher conceptions of assessment (tcoa) inventory (brown, 2004, 2011; brown et al., 2011; brown & michaelides, 2011). these purposes include: (1) assessment as improvement of teaching and learning (improvement); (2) assessment as making schools and teachers accountable for their effectiveness (school accountability); (3) assessment as making students accountable for their learning (student accountability); and (4) assessment as fundamentally irrelevant to the work and life of teachers and students (irrelevance). the first three are categorized as “purposes” while the last one is termed an “anti-purpose.” when the school and student accountability views of assessment are grouped together, it seems that there are two major purposes of assessment in society, that is, accountability and improvement (brown & gao, 2015). this illustrates the dual functions of assessment and the potential tension that may arise from these two functions (brown et al., 2011). on the one hand, assessments are utilized to maggie ma, gavin bui 448 evaluate the effectiveness of teachers and schools and to certify the learning of students (i.e., the measuring and evaluative functions of assessment), but on the other hand, assessments are employed to inform different stakeholders (e.g., parents, teachers, students, governments, administrators) of learning progress and to enhance teaching and learning (i.e., the formative function of assessment). survey research using the tcoa has been conducted to explore teacher conceptions of assessment. teachers strongly endorsed the notion of using assessment to improve teaching and learning. for example, secondary school teachers in new zealand and teachers in cyprus agreed most strongly with the view that assessment is used to improve learning (brown, 2011; brown & michaelides, 2011). while they still agreed with using assessment to evaluate students, they viewed assessment as evaluating schools in a relatively negative light (brown, 2011; brown & michaelides, 2011). teachers rejected the conception that assessment is irrelevant. assessment is important no matter whether it is used for improving teaching and learning or for evaluation (brown & gao, 2015). research has also shown that for primary and secondary school teachers in new zealand, there was a negative correlation between improvement and irrelevance, and a weak correlation between improvement and using assessment to evaluate students (brown, 2004, 2011). new zealand primary school teachers tended to associate improvement with school accountability and to moderately relate student accountability with irrelevance (brown, 2004). in short, the aforementioned studies explored both the strength of agreement for the main conceptions of assessment held by teacher participants and the interrelation between them, which provided insights into teachers’ conceptions of assessment. the current study also investigated these two issues related to chinese efl teachers’ conceptions of assessment. 2.2. chinese teachers’ conceptions of assessment the tcoa inventory has been applied to gauge chinese teachers’ conceptions of assessment. since the four-factor framework could not capture the various conceptions held by chinese teachers, brown et al. (2011) created a tcoa inventory for chinese contexts (c-tcoa) based on data collected from 1,014 primary and secondary school teachers in hong kong and 898 primary and secondary school teachers in guangzhou. three major interrelated factors have been identified based on teacher responses to a 6-point positively packed agreement rating scale (i.e., two negative and four positive rating points for each survey item to elicit variance in response to socially accepted statements, including strongly disagree, mostly disagree, slightly agree, moderately agree, mostly agree, and strongly agree). these three major factors include improvement, accountability, and irrelevance. chinese secondary school teachers’ conceptions of l2 assessment: a mixed-methods study 449 the improvement factor encompasses three sub-factors, that is, assessment is for student development, assessment is for helping students learn, and assessment results should be accurate. the accountability factor also consists of three subfactors, that is, taking into account measurement errors in assessment use, using assessment to control teachers and evaluate schools, and utilizing examination as assessment. the irrelevance factor refers to the negative aspects of assessment. brown and gao (2015) proposed a model of chinese conceptions of assessment based on collaborative research between them and graduate student theses written under the supervision of gao. the model includes six major conceptions, ranging from a more external management and control perspective to a more individualistic developmental view of assessment, in addition to a more negative view of assessment. these conceptions include management and inspection (i.e., using assessment to inspect and control schools, teachers, and students for better teaching and achievement); institutional targets (i.e., using assessment to check if students have achieved pre-set learning standards as instantiated in public examinations); facilitation and diagnosis (i.e., using assessment to provide valid information for the diagnosis and facilitation of teaching effectiveness); ability development (i.e., using assessment to increase students’ motivation and learning abilities); personal quality (i.e., using assessment to enhance the overall quality of students); and negativity (i.e., assessment exerts a negative influence on teaching and learning). research on the c-tcoa has shown that chinese teachers agreed most with the conception that assessment is needed for improvement (brown et al., 2011; chen & brown, 2015). in chen and brown’s (2015) study involving 1,500 chinese teachers from primary, middle, and high schools, after “assessment as teacher improvement,” “assessment is for student development” was the most endorsed view. a strong positive association was identified between assessment as improvement and assessment as accountability (brown et al., 2011), indicating that teachers considered that examining students facilitated their learning. in brown et al.’s (2011) study, a positive correlation was also found between assessment for accountability and irrelevance. in chen and brown’s (2015) study, a moderately strong connection was found between school accountability and student development. despite the research on chinese teachers’ conceptions of assessment mentioned earlier (brown et al., 2011; chen & brown, 2015), there is limited research on chinese efl (english as a foreign language) teachers’ conceptions of assessment in the context of nationally mandated formative assessment innovation. using the c-tcoa and assessment practices inventory (zhang & burry-stock, 2003), gan et al. (2018) probed into 107 chinese secondary efl teachers’ conceptions and practices of assessment. four main conceptions of assessment were identified, including “help learning,” “student development,” “teacher/student accountability,” and maggie ma, gavin bui 450 “examination and school accountability.” like the teachers in other studies (brown, 2011; brown & michaelides, 2011), the chinese efl teachers agreed most with the view that assessment helps students improve their learning. the second most endorsed view was “assessment as examination and school accountability.” a moderately strong correlation was identified between the “help learning” factor and the “student development” factor, and between the “teacher/student accountability” factor and the “examination and school accountability” factor. the “teacher/student accountability” factor was found to be weakly correlated to the “help learning” factor and the “student development” factor, respectively. a weak correlation was also identified between the “examination and school accountability” factor and the “student development” factor, while a medium level of correlation was found between the “examination and school accountability” factor and the “help learning” factor. gan et al.’s (2018) research also examined chinese secondary efl teachers’ assessment practices. the teachers reported using different assessment practices frequently, including aligning teaching and assessment (e.g., matching assessment with instruction), using assessments for improvement (e.g., using assessment results when planning teaching), using traditional assessments (e.g., using multiple choice questions to assess students), sharing assessment criteria (e.g., communicating assessment criteria to students in advance), and providing oral feedback. however, the teachers seemed to only occasionally use student-centered assessments, such as self or peer assessment, a phenomenon also identified in other efl contexts (e.g., bui & kong, 2019). the most frequently adopted assessment practice, aligning teaching and assessment, was associated with both the “help learning” factor and the “student development” factor, but not the “teacher/student accountability” factor, indicating that the teacher participants somehow implemented assessment-for-learning principles. student-centered assessments were the only type of assessment that had no systematic relationship with the four main conceptions of assessment identified in gan et al.’s (2018) study. 2.3. factors affecting chinese teachers’ conceptions of assessment previous research utilizing c-tcoa has explained the teacher participants’ conceptions of assessment through the influence of sociocultural and policy contexts. chinese sociocultural values attach great importance to performance in public examinations, which informs decision-making regarding the selection of students for opportunities for better education (he et al., 2011). public examination results are used to evaluate not only students, but also teachers and schools (brown et al., 2011). at the same time, a person’s academic achievement is also chinese secondary school teachers’ conceptions of l2 assessment: a mixed-methods study 451 associated with beliefs about personal worth and virtue (china civilization centre, 2007). therefore, helping students achieve higher scores in public examinations not only contributes to their knowledge and performance, but also makes them better people (brown et al., 2011). at the policy level, the current curriculum reform in china emphasizes an assessment reform, advocating the use of formative assessment in english language education to promote students’ holistic development (chinese ministry of education, 2017). according to brown and gao (2015), the assessment context seems to pull teachers towards different ends, that is, summative assessment emphasizing performance, and formative assessment emphasizing learning improvement. research has also shown that teacher characteristics (i.e., sex and teaching experience) may influence chinese teachers’ conceptions of assessment. for example, probably because more males assume the role of school leaders in chinese schools (brown & gao, 2015), male teachers agreed more strongly with the management and inspection conception and the institutional targets conception (south china normal university team, 2010). highly experienced teachers were found to agree more strongly with the management and inspection conception and the institutional targets conception, and to agree less with the personal quality conception and the facilitation and diagnosis conception (brown & gao, 2015). work environments constitute another source of influence. teachers in senior secondary schools, who face the greatest pressure to prepare students to perform well in public examinations, agreed most with the irrelevance, management and inspection, as well as institutional targets conceptions, but agreed least with the personal quality conception (wang, 2010). teachers in the final year of senior secondary school agreed most with personal quality conception and those in higher ranking/banding schools agreed more with personal quality conception as well (shang, 2007). as can be seen from the literature review, research employing the tcoa has mainly adopted a quantitative approach to investigating conceptions of assessment held by teachers in different regions and countries (e.g., brown, 2004, 2011; brown & michaelides, 2011; chen & brown, 2015; gan et al., 2018), with the results being explained by sociocultural and policy contexts. quantitative studies on factors affecting chinese teachers’ conceptions of assessment have also focused on particular categories of factors such as teacher characteristics and work environments (shang, 2007; south china normal university team, 2010; wang, 2010). the aforementioned research has contributed greatly to the understanding of teachers’ views of assessment and factors affecting them. however, quantitative research can only reveal a general picture of teachers’ conceptions of assessment without providing an in-depth understanding of the interaction among global and local factors in shaping individual teachers’ views maggie ma, gavin bui 452 and related practices of assessment. from an ecological perspective, teachers’ assessment views and practices are influenced by three distinct but interacting levels of contextual factors, including macro-level factors (e.g., national and cultural influences), meso-level factors (e.g., school factors and expectations of parents and the immediate community), and micro-level factors (e.g., factors related to the classroom, students, and teachers), among which meso-level factors deserve more attention (fulmer et al., 2015). to understand teachers’ conceptions and practices of assessment in detail and in context, it seems that qualitative data should be utilized as well. this study utilized both quantitative and qualitative data for a more refined and contextualized understanding of chinese teachers’ conceptions of assessment in the context of the recent english language curriculum reform, which emphasizes formative assessment initiatives. if teachers do not endorse the view that assessment can be used to promote teaching and learning, as advocated in the education reform, then the proposed new form of assessment is unlikely to be successful. sustainable assessment training programs are also needed to keep in-service teachers informed of assessment principles (xu & brown, 2017). however, attempting to change teachers’ behaviors only (e.g., increasing formative assessment practices) without taking into consideration their existing beliefs is likely to fail (brown & gao, 2015). it is thus crucial to understand how chinese efl teachers conceive of assessment and factors affecting their conceptions both for the success of policy initiatives and teachers’ professional development. inspired by the research gaps identified in the literature review, this paper seeks to answer the following research questions: rq1. what were the overall conceptions of assessment among the chinese efl teachers in the study, and what, if any, relations emerged among those conceptions? rq2. what was the impact of teaching experience and school banding on the teacher participants’ conceptions of assessment? rq3. what were the individual teacher participants’ conceptions and practices of assessment and what were the factors affecting them? 3. methods 3.1. research design this study adopted a mixed-methods approach that involved both quantitative and qualitative data. an explanatory sequential mixed methods design (creswell, 2014) was utilized. quantitative data were collected first, followed by a qualitative phase of the study. the quantitative results informed the selection chinese secondary school teachers’ conceptions of l2 assessment: a mixed-methods study 453 of participants in the qualitative phase, with the qualitative data expecting to provide more depth and insights into the quantitative results of the study. to answer rq1, the 31-item chinese teachers’ conceptions of assessment (c-tcoa) questionnaire was used to collect quantitative data to obtain a general picture of the teacher participants’ views of assessment. as previous research identified the interrelationship among chinese teachers’ different conceptions of assessment (brown et al., 2011; gan et al., 2018), this study also aimed to examine whether the teacher participants’ various views of assessment were potentially interrelated. to answer rq2, the same set of quantitative data were utilized to ascertain the potential influence of teaching experience and school banding on the participants’ conceptions of assessment, given that research has identified the influence of teacher characteristics (i.e., sex and teaching experience) and work environment (e.g., school banding) (brown & gao, 2015; shang, 2007; wang, 2010). we thus focused particularly on the two variables of teaching experience and school banding to identify their potential influence. due to the very small number of male teachers in the study (i.e., 7 out of 66), the influence of sex on teacher conceptions of assessment was not investigated. although the answer to rq2 can shed light on the potential influence of micro-level factors (i.e., teaching experience as one teacher factor) and of meso-level factors (i.e., school banding as one school factor) on teachers’ conceptions of assessment, in-depth qualitative data were needed to add to the quantitative data by exemplifying the potential interaction among macro-level, meso-level, and microlevel factors. therefore, based on the findings of the first two research questions (i.e., the influence of school banding on the teacher participants’ conceptions of using assessment to promote learning—see the section on results), two teachers from schools with different bandings were selected. case studies of these teachers were conducted for rq3 to understand their conceptions and practices of assessment in context and the different layers of shaping influences on them. in short, the mixed-methods approach allowed the investigation of a general tendency among a particular group of teachers and a contextualized understanding of individual teachers’ assessment conceptions and practices. 3.2. participants for the quantitative part of the study, a purposive sample of 66 chinese efl teachers from six senior secondary schools in a city in eastern china participated in the c-tcoa survey. these six schools were purposively selected based on two criteria. first, the schools represented different school bandings, including municipal-level key schools, district-level key schools, and general high schools. secondary schools in china are categorized into those that enjoy higher banding or maggie ma, gavin bui 454 reputation (i.e., key schools) and those that are not as reputable (i.e., non-key schools or general high schools) (yu et al., 2016). among the key schools, there is also a distinction between municipal-level key schools and district-level key schools, with the former being more prestigious than the latter. second, the schools were known to the researchers. in this study, schools known to the researchers tended to be more supportive of the research project compared with those schools to be recruited from random sampling. random sampling may be a relatively ineffective sampling strategy in chinese school contexts (brown et al., 2011). table 1 shows the background information of the teacher participants. table 1 background information of the teacher participants participants’ background number (%) sex female 59 (89.4%) male 7 (10.6%) educational background bachelor’s degree 41 (62.1%) master’s degree 22 (33.3%) not given 3 (4.6%) teaching experience 1-4 years 15 (22.7%) 5-18 years 18 (27.3%) 19-23 years 13 (19.7%) over 24 years 13 (19.7%) not given 7 (10.6%) school banding general high schools 21 (31.8%) district-level key schools 19 (28.8%) municipal-level key schools 25 (37.9%) not given 1 (1.5%) the qualitative part of the study involved case studies of two purposefully selected teacher participants. a strength of case study is its capacity to provide an in-depth and contextualized understanding of contemporary real-life phenomena (creswell, 2013). the teachers were chosen based on the following criteria: (1) they worked in schools with different bandings; (2) they were enthusiastic about and supportive of the research. as the quantitative analysis revealed that school banding (i.e., municipal-level key school vs. district-level key school) exerted an influence on teachers’ conception of using assessment to promote learning (see the section on results), school banding was used as one of the criteria for case selection. teacher a, a female teacher with 29 years of teaching experience, came from a municipal-level key school. teacher b, a female teacher with 15 years of teaching experience at the time of study, came from a district-level key school. chinese secondary school teachers’ conceptions of l2 assessment: a mixed-methods study 455 3.3. data collection and analysis the quantitative data were mainly collected through the 31-item chinese teachers’ conceptions of assessment (c-tcoa) questionnaire (brown et al., 2011), which helped to gauge the efl teacher participants’ conceptions of assessment. the c-tcoa elicited teachers’ self-ratings for the following conceptions of assessment: (1) assessment helps teaching and learning; (2) assessment promotes students’ development; (3) assessments are accurate; (4) assessment involves examinations; (5) measurement errors should be taken into consideration in assessment use; (6) assessment is used to control teachers and evaluate schools; and (7) assessments are irrelevant. confirmatory factor analysis was employed to determine if the efl teacher participants’ responses fitted the factor model identified by brown et al. (2011) (χ²/df = 1.70, rmsea = 0.10, rmr = 0.11, cfi = 0.94). as rmsea1 and rmr were greater than .08 and .05 respectively, exploratory factor analysis (efa) was utilized to develop an alternative model. prior to performing efa, the suitability of data for factor analysis was assessed. the kaiser-meyer-olkin value was .68 and bartlett’s test of sphericity reached statistical significance (approximate χ2 = 725.27, df = 231, p = .00), supporting the factorability of the correlation matrix. varimax rotation was used for efa. after efa, inter-factor correlations were calculated to explore the potential relationships among the factors. as the data were not normally distributed, the kruskal-wallis test was used to examine the influence of: (a) teaching experience (1 to 4 years n = 15, 5 to 18 years n = 18, 19-23 years n = 13, over 24 years n = 13) and (b) school banding (general high school n = 21, district-level key school n = 19, municipal-level key school n = 25). bonferroni correction was applied given that we ran two kruskalwallis tests. therefore, the threshold for the p value was set at 0.05/2 = 0.025. for the qualitative part of the study, two semi-structured interviews were conducted with two purposefully selected teachers to obtain a contextualized understanding of their conceptions and practices of assessment. the interviews were conducted in chinese, the teachers’ native language, but they were allowed to switch between chinese and english whenever necessary for the sake of a clear expression of meaning. each interview was audio recorded and lasted for about 45 minutes. to analyze the interview data, we employed a qualitative data analysis scheme including data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing and verification (miles 1 we decided to follow the guidelines endorsed in brown (2015). that is, rmsea values less than 0.05 suggest a good model fit; rmsea values less than 0.08 suggest adequate model fit; rmseas in the range of 0.08-0.1 suggest a mediocre fit; and models with rmsea value >= 0.1 should be rejected. therefore, the rmsea value of 0.10 in this study suggests an unsatisfactory model fit. the full results of rmsea with the 90% ci statistics will be provided upon reader request. maggie ma, gavin bui 456 et al., 2014). the interview data were transcribed verbatim and checked for accuracy. data reduction was performed by treating a paragraph as a unit of coding and focusing on information reflecting the interviewees’ conceptions and practices of assessment and factors affecting them. we used brown and gao’s (2015) model of chinese teachers’ conceptions of assessment (i.e., management and inspection, institutional targets, facilitation and diagnosis, ability development, personal quality, and negativity) to code information related to conceptions of assessment. for example, the code “institutional targets” was assigned to the following data: “in my school, we mainly use tests to measure students’ performance. the final grade is based on the average of students’ test results.” regarding the coding of assessment practices, we utilized the six types of classroom assessment practices adopted by chinese efl teachers (gan et al., 2018) as an analytical framework, which included aligning teaching and assessment, using assessments for improvement, using traditional assessments, sharing assessment criteria, providing oral feedback, and student-centered assessments. for instance, the code “using traditional assessments” was assigned to the following data: “tests are conducted weekly, monthly, midand final-term. after test-taking drills and my explanation of the answers to the test, there is not much time left.” we also coded information regarding the factors affecting the participants’ conceptions or practices of assessment. for example, the code “influence of college entrance examination” was assigned to the following data: “if the college entrance examination is still used and if the english test paper is still so difficult, it is quite impossible to change the current situation.” during data analysis, we were also open to new codes as well. the relationships between different codes were examined to develop emerging themes, such as the influence of college entrance examination on the use of traditional assessments. case narratives were also developed for the teachers. cross-case comparisons were conducted, with similarities and differences between cases identified and analyzed using matrixes. conclusions about the teacher participants’ conceptions and practices of assessment as well as factors affecting them were drawn and verified through member-checking. to ensure the reliability and trustworthiness of data analysis, the two authors independently coded all the qualitative data and the inter-coder reliability reached 85%. they then discussed to resolve disagreements in coding. after a second round of coding, the inter-coder reliability reached 92%. member-check interviews were also conducted to elicit the teachers’ opinions on our interpretations of interview data. chinese secondary school teachers’ conceptions of l2 assessment: a mixed-methods study 457 4. results 4.1. teachers’ conceptions of assessment: a general picture rq1 addressed the chinese efl teachers’ conceptions of assessment and the interrelationship, if any, among the assessment conceptions. the revised c-tcoa model contained five inter-correlated factors (table 2). factor 1 (i.e., help learning), comprising 3 items, showed that assessment helps students to learn. factor 2 (i.e., student/teacher accountability), containing 4 items, showed that teachers and students should be held accountable for teaching and learning. factor 3 (i.e., assessment as accurate for student development), containing 5 items, identified assessment for student development. factor 4 (i.e., assessment as accurate for examination and teacher/school control), containing 6 items, showed that assessment is used to prepare students for examinations and to control teacher and schools. factor 5 (i.e., irrelevance), comprising 4 items, showed that assessment is irrelevant. two of the factors identified by brown et al. (2011) (i.e., help learning and irrelevance) were confirmed in the study. table 2 c-tcoa factors, items, and factor loadings based on exploratory factor analysis scale and items factor loading help learning 1. assessment helps students improve their learning. .89 2. assessment determines if students meet qualification standards. .88 3. assessment information modifies ongoing teaching of students. .86 student/teacher accountability 22. assessment sets the schedule or timetable for classes. .62 23. assessment helps students gain good scores in examinations. .82 24. assessment selects students for future education or employment opportunities. .80 25. assessment results contribute to teachers’ appraisals. .71 assessment as accurate for student development 4. assessment results are sufficiently accurate. .51 9. assessment helps students succeed in authentic/real-world experiences. .74 10. assessment is used to provoke students to be interested in learning. .77 11. assessment cultivates students’ positive attitudes towards life. .67 13. assessment stimulates students to think. .67 assessment as accurate for examinations and teacher/school control 8. assessment results can be depended on. .56 14. assessment is assigning a grade or level to student work. .67 19. assessment teaches examination-taking techniques. .68 26. assessment helps students avoid failures on examinations. .61 6. assessment is used by school leaders to police what teachers do. .68 30. assessment is an accurate indicator of a school’s quality. .45 irrelevance 12. assessment results are filed and ignored. .61 15. assessment is an imprecise process. .71 18. assessment interferes with teaching. .68 27. assessment forces teachers to teach in a way against their beliefs. .75 maggie ma, gavin bui 458 table 3 c-tcoa factor means, sds, and cronbach’s α factors number of items scale example cronbach’s α m sd 1. help learning 3 assessment helps students improve their learning. .90 4.93 1.27 2. student/teacher accountability 4 assessment selects students for future education or employment opportunities. .82 3.66 1.04 3. assessment as accurate for student development 5 assessment cultivates students’ positive attitudes towards life. .81 4.20 0.85 4. assessment as accurate for examination and teacher/school control 6 assessment teaches examination-taking techniques. .76 3.80 0.87 5. irrelevance 4 assessment forces teachers to teach in a way against their beliefs. .71 3.12 1.13 table 3 shows the mean score for each factor. the teacher participants tended to agree most with the conception that assessment is used to help learning. there was moderate agreement with the idea that assessment is for student development on condition that it is accurate. the teacher participants also tended to moderately agree that as long as assessment is accurate, it may be used to prepare students for exams and to control teacher/school and that students and teachers should be held accountable for assessment. the teachers slightly agreed that assessment is irrelevant. table 4 the inter-correlation between efl teachers’ assessment conception factors teacher assessment conceptions 1 2 3 4 5 1. help learning 1.36** 2. student/teacher accountability -.12** 1.36** 3. assessment as accurate for student development .36** .28** 1.36** 4. assessment as accurate for examination and teacher/school control -.02** .48** .55** 1.36* 5. irrelevance -.083** .45** .05** .27* 1.36** *p < .05, **p < .01 as indicated by table 4, there was high inter-factor correlation between the “assessment as accurate for examination and teacher/school control” factor and the “assessment as accurate for student development” factor (r = .55). there was medium correlation between the “assessment as accurate for examination and teacher/school control” factor and the “student/teacher accountability” factor (r = .48), between the student/teacher accountability factor and the irrelevance factor (r = .45), and between the “help learning” factor and the “assessment as accurate for student development” factor (r = .36). rq2 investigated the influence of teaching experience and school banding on the teacher participants’ conceptions of assessment. regarding the influence of teaching experience, no statistically significant differences have been found across the four groups of teachers with different years of teaching experience. chinese secondary school teachers’ conceptions of l2 assessment: a mixed-methods study 459 concerning the influence of school banding, a kruskal-wallis test revealed a statistically significant difference in the “help learning” factor across teachers from three types of schools with different bandings (municipal-level key schools, n = 25; districtlevel key schools, n = 19; general high schools, n = 21), x2 (2, n = 65) = 8.124, p = .017. the teachers from municipal-level key schools and general high schools both recorded median values of 6. the teachers from district-level key schools recorded a median value of 4. mann-whitney u tests further revealed a significant difference between the teachers from municipal-level key schools (md = 6, n = 25) and those from districtlevel key schools (md = 4, n = 19), u = 128.5, z = -2.70, p = .007, r = .41. in other words, teachers from municipal-level key schools seemed to agree more strongly than those from district-level key schools that assessment is for enhancing student learning. 4.2. teachers’ conceptions and practices of assessment: two cases rq3 probed into two individual teachers’ conceptions and practices of assessment and factors affecting them. interviews with the two teachers revealed individual differences in assessment conceptions and practices despite similarities. the two teachers’ conceptions and practices of assessment are reported first, followed by a summary of factors affecting them. both teacher participants acknowledged that assessment may serve multiple purposes, but each highlighted different priorities. for example, teacher a stated: “in my school, we mainly use tests to measure students’ performance. the final grade is based on the average of students’ test results.” this quote reflected the conception that assessment is used as a mechanism to evaluate students. she added: “assessment is mainly about giving tests to students, especially senior three students. as our school is a high-banding school, our school leaders want students to achieve high scores in external examinations, and teachers are forced to teach to the test. we don’t have time to think about better ways to teach and to assess.” this quote indicates that the teacher conceived assessment not only as administering tests to prepare students for external examinations such as the college entrance examination, but also as a mechanism by the school and school leaders to constrain what teachers do to raise students’ examination scores, as can be seen from the use of the phrase “forced to teach to the test.” teacher a expressed a sense of exhaustion by comparing the past and current situation: “in the past i could still decide what to teach in my class and i enjoyed teaching quite a lot, but in recent years the college entrance examination for the english subject has become more and more difficult, and i start to feel exhausted and i just want to retire. the examination has constrained what we have to teach.” it seemed that teacher a became less motivated to teach because the college entrance examination constrained what she could teach in class. maggie ma, gavin bui 460 concerning the most frequently used assessment practices, teacher a thought that it was difficult to rank the different types of assessment practices as identified in gan et al. (2018) because she stated that tests were used the most frequently in her english class, while student-centered assessment such as peeror self-assessment was seldom used. she mentioned: “tests are conducted weekly, monthly, midand finalterm. after test-taking drills and my explanation of the answers to the test, there is not much time left.” although she was aware that peerand selfassessment was promoted in the new senior secondary english language curriculum, she talked about the difficulty in implementing change: “if the college entrance examination is still used and if the english test paper is still so difficult, it is quite impossible to change the current situation.” the quote indicated that from teacher a’s perspective the current examination system creates limited space for using formative assessment practices such as peeror selfassessment. in short, teacher a regarded assessment as giving students, especially senior three students, tests to measure their performance and preparing them for the college entrance examination to achieve high scores and to fulfill school leaders’ expectations. her case suggested the influence of macro-level factor (i.e., the college entrance examination), meso-level factor (i.e., a high banding school with high expectations from school leaders), and micro-level factor (i.e., senior three students in a high banding school). notably, although not explicitly mentioned by teacher a, the students in her school were high achieving students compared with those from district-level key schools and general high schools (a point mentioned by teacher b). they were thus expected to perform excellently in the college entrance examination. different from teacher a, teacher b talked about the formative assessment initiatives in the english education reform and highlighted the use of assessment for promoting learning and student development. to her, assessment meant the kind of classroom tasks students do and receive feedback on. she stated: “we create tasks for students to do in class, such as a group task for students to discuss themes in a piece of reading. i may provide feedback on different dimensions of the task such as verbal delivery, correctness of ideas, task fulfillment, and so on. i talk about the strengths and weaknesses, but more feedback is usually given to the weak group.” teacher b added: “we also have a combination of teacher-, selfand peerassessment. for example, we may ask one group of students to peer assess another group. although most of the time students only give marks, the more capable ones can provide comments too.” these quotes suggested that the teacher conceived of the purpose of assessment as eliciting evidence that is subject to different sources of feedback, that is, the formative dimension of assessment. chinese secondary school teachers’ conceptions of l2 assessment: a mixed-methods study 461 teacher b also commented on the affective aspect of teacher feedback: “positive and accurate feedback can stimulate our students’ interest in learning, which is an essential student quality. encouragement and guidance help students make progress not only in their academic study, but also in their life.” this suggested that the teacher considered assessment to promote students’ development through positive and to-the-point teacher feedback. she explained: “the students need a teacher who can guide not only their academic study, but also their views of the world and life.” regarding the most frequently used assessment practices, teacher oral feedback and student-centered assessment (e.g., peerand self-assessment) were regarded as the top two most frequently used practices in teacher b’s english classes. using traditional assessment methods such as tests was ranked as the least used type. teacher b explained: “school leaders in reputable schools may have high expectations on their teachers regarding the admission of students into prestigious universities, and this may give teachers great pressure to prepare students for external examinations. they are in a cycle of giving students tests and then explaining test answers. in our school, the most important task is to raise our students’ interest in english and foster positive learning attitudes, particularly in the first two years of senior high school. this is because our students are not as good as those in reputable schools.” teacher b explained that although she came from a district-level key school, the students in her school were similar to those from general high schools in terms of academic performance. overall, teacher b regarded assessment as a means of promoting student learning and development. in particular, she underscored the importance of providing feedback on students’ task performance and using it to encourage and guide her students, particularly for senior one and two students. despite the fact that she worked in a district-level key school, her students resembled those from general high schools academically. therefore, her top priority seemed to be the use of feedback to motivate and promote students’ learning during their senior one and two study, with the awareness that her practices were consistent with the formative view of assessment as advocated in the english curriculum reform. teacher b’s case reflected the influence of meso-level (i.e., school banding), micro-level (i.e., average performing students studying in senior one and two in a less prestigious school), and macro-level factors (i.e., the formative assessment initiatives in the english education reform) on her views of assessment, although the other macro-level factor (i.e., the college entrance examination) remained the same for her school. table 5 summarizes the two teacher participants’ conceptions of assessment with reference to brown and gao’s (2015) framework. maggie ma, gavin bui 462 table 5 a comparison between the two teachers’ conceptions of assessment brown and gao’s (2015) framework teacher a teacher b management and inspection p institutional targets p facilitation and diagnosis p ability development p personal quality p negativity 5. discussion this study has sought to answer three research questions related to chinese secondary efl teachers’ conceptions of assessment. regarding rq1, the study has identified five major conceptions of assessment among the chinese efl teachers based on the chinese teachers’ conceptions of assessment inventory (brown et al., 2011). the “help learning” factor referred to using assessment to improve learning and teaching and determine if students meet qualification standards. the “assessment as accurate for student development” factor indicated that as long as assessment results are sufficiently accurate, assessment helps students succeed in real-life experiences, stimulates their thinking and interest in learning, and cultivates their positive attitudes toward life. the “assessment as accurate for examination and teacher/school control” factor suggested that as long as assessment results are reliable, it can be used to prepare students for examinations, control what teachers do, and indicate a school’s quality. the “student/teacher accountability” factor suggested that assessment selects students for future education or employment opportunities and assessment results contribute to teachers’ appraisals. the “irrelevance” factor meant that assessment is an imprecise process, interferes with teaching, forces teachers to teach in a way against their beliefs, and assessment results are ignored. the “help learning” factor and the “student/teacher accountability” factor were consistent with gan et al.’s (2018) research on chinese efl teachers. the “assessment as accurate for student development” factor and the “assessment as accurate for examination and teacher/school control” factor were different from their study. this group of teacher participants bundled the notion that assessment is accurate and reliable with both “student development and examination” and “teacher/school control.” it seemed that to the teacher participants, judgments about student development as well as examination preparation and the control of teacher/school depend on whether assessment is accurate and reliable. the “irrelevance” factor identified in the study was not found in gan et al.’s (2018) study. in the study, the most endorsed conception was that assessment is used to help learning. in this sense, this group of teachers held similar chinese secondary school teachers’ conceptions of l2 assessment: a mixed-methods study 463 views to those in previous research investigating chinese secondary efl teachers (gan et al., 2018), new zealand secondary school teachers (brown, 2011), and cypriot teachers (brown & michaelides, 2011). however, the teacher participants were different from the chinese teachers in brown et al.’s (2011) research where the same inventory was used. there was strong inter-correlation between the “assessment as accurate for examinations and teacher/school control” factor and the “assessment as accurate for student development” factor (r = .55). in other words, as long as assessment is accurate, using assessment to prepare students for examinations and to control teachers/schools may also facilitate students’ development. such an association can probably be explained by the chinese idea that excellent assessment results reflect a more valuable person (brown et al., 2011). in the chinese context, one who achieves good scores in examinations is regarded as a good person because examination results indicate the quality and worth of the individual (china civilization centre, 2007). there was medium correlation between the “assessment as accurate for examinations and teacher/school control” factor and the “student/teacher accountability” factor (r = .48) in the teachers’ conceptions of assessment. this indicated that those teachers who regarded assessment as a mechanism to evaluate teachers and students also considered it to be a way to prepare students for examinations and to control teachers and schools on condition that it is accurate. the chinese society attaches great importance to public examination results because they are utilized to select students and evaluate teachers and schools (brown et al., 2011). therefore, schools, teachers, and learners face great pressure to ensure that students perform well in external high-stakes examinations. more often than not, drilling test-taking skills is employed for that purpose. for example, as mentioned by teacher a, her lesson was dominated by the practice of test-taking skills because she was under school pressure to produce high-achievers in the english test of the college entrance examination. there was also medium correlation between the “student/teacher accountability” factor and the “irrelevance” factor (r = .45). this suggested that when it is connected to student/teacher accountability, assessment is likely to be irrelevant. while this finding was not reported in gan et al.’s (2018) study, it was somewhat similar to the finding in brown’s (2004) research on new zealand primary school teachers. it should be noted that only student accountability was moderately related to irrelevance in brown’s (2004) study, while in this study both teacher and student accountability was associated with irrelevance. the teacher participants questioned the validity of assessment as teacher and student accountability probably because they were less convinced that public examination results alone can account for either students’ quality of learning or maggie ma, gavin bui 464 teachers’ quality of teaching. for example, as mentioned by teacher b: “examination results cannot fully reflect teaching or learning quality.” a medium-strength correlation was also found between the “help learning” factor and the “assessment as accurate for student development” factor (r = .36). the finding indicated that assessment, perceived to contribute to learning, is also considered to facilitate student development if it is accurate. teacher beliefs may be subject to the influence of historical, social, cultural, and policy contexts (brown et al., 2019). chinese teachers adhere to the cultural value that being a teacher involves educating students in not only the academic dimension, but also attitudinal and behavioral dimensions. this cultural value is reflected by the meaning of “cultivating” in chinese (gao & watkins, 2001) and the chinese expression “jiao shu yu ren,” which means imparting knowledge and educating students to be good people in the society. just as teacher b pointed out: “the students need a teacher who can guide not only their academic study, but also their views of the world and life.” the current educational policy in china emphasizing students’ holistic development, including linguistic development, cultural awareness, moral development, and thinking and learning skills (chinese ministry of education, 2017), may be another reason for the connection between the “help learning” conception and the “assessment as accurate for student development” conception. regarding rq2, this study has identified the influence of school banding on teachers’ conception of assessment as helping with learning. teachers from municipal-level key schools agreed more strongly with the idea that assessment is to promote learning compared with those from district-level key schools. while previous research showed that chinese teachers in high-status/banding secondary schools agreed more with personal quality factors (shang, 2007), this study further revealed that work environment such as school banding may influence chinese teachers’ conceptions of assessment related to using assessment to enhance learning. such an influence indicated the need to take into consideration the meso-level factor of school environment (i.e., school banding) in relation to the implementation of formative assessment initiatives and teacher assessment training. to sum up, the quantitative data revealed a general picture of the chinese secondary efl teachers’ conceptions of assessment. macro-level factors (sociocultural and policy contexts) were used to explain the connection between their different conceptions of assessment. the quantitative data also demonstrated the impact of one meso-level factor (i.e., school banding) on the teachers’ conceptions of assessment. regarding rq3, the qualitative data further identified the differences in two individual teachers’ conceptions and practices of assessment. it seemed that the conceptions of teachers a and b represented opposite points in the continuum chinese secondary school teachers’ conceptions of l2 assessment: a mixed-methods study 465 describing chinese teachers’ thinking of assessment (brown & gao, 2015). that is, teacher a’s views indicated the management and inspection (e.g., using assessment to control teachers so as to urge better achievement) and institutional target (e.g., using assessment to measure students’ performance and to prepare them for examinations) parts of the continuum. teacher b’s views, on the other hand, suggested the facilitation and diagnosis (e.g., providing oral feedback on students’ performance), ability development (e.g., using positive teacher feedback to motivate students), and personal equality (e.g., using teacher feedback to guide students’ views of the world and life) parts of the continuum. in general, teacher a’s and teacher b’s conceptions of assessment reflected the summative (e.g., summative examination and judgment of learner outcomes) and formative (e.g., feedback provision, improved learning and learning motivation) dimensions of assessment, respectively. in accordance with the different conceptions of assessment, the two teachers prioritized either summative or formative assessment practices in their english classes. the aforementioned differences can largely be attributed to the role of a meso-level factor (i.e., school factor) and related to it, a micro-level factor (i.e., student factors) in mediating the influence of macro-level factors (sociocultural and policy contexts) to shape teachers’ different conceptions of assessment towards either the summative or formative end of the continuum. the assessment context in china may push teachers towards two different ends of the assessment continuum (i.e., the summative or formative ends) (brown & gao, 2015). as high-stakes test may stimulate intensive test preparation in the classroom (qi, 2004), teacher a’s assessment conceptions and practices can be said to be derived from the washback effect of the college entrance examination. however, in the study it was the interplay of various contextual factors that contributed to her conceptions and practices of assessment. teacher a’s school context (i.e., reputable school, school leaders’ high expectations of teachers and students) and the high achieving senior three students studying in it reinforced summative views of assessment predominant in sociocultural values (i.e., the importance of the college entrance examination). teacher b’s school context (i.e., a school with a lesser reputation, less pressure from leaders) and its average-performing senior one and two students seemed to be more conducive to fostering her learning-focused views of assessment as advocated in the english curriculum reform document (chinese ministry of education, 2017), despite the importance of the college entrance examination. according to fulmer et al. (2015), meso level factors and their connection with macroor micro-level factors are worth attention in research on teachers’ assessment conceptions, knowledge, or practices. as demonstrated by the quantitative part of the study, a meso-level factor (i.e., school banding) exerted maggie ma, gavin bui 466 an influence on chinese secondary efl school teachers’ conceptions of assessment. the qualitative part of the study further identified the role of a meso-level factor (e.g., school banding) and a micro-level factor (e.g., the kind of students in schools with different bandings) in mediating macro-level factors (e.g., the college entrance examination). the qualitative findings showed the interaction among the meso-level, micro-level and macro-level factors in explaining individual chinese secondary efl teachers’ conceptions of assessment. notably, while the quantitative data showed that teachers in municipal-level key schools agreed more than those in district-level key schools that assessment is for promoting learning, the qualitative data showed a different pattern in the two individual teachers’ conceptions. this contrast between the quantitative and qualitative findings was probably due to the fact that the former reflected the general tendency of teachers as groups (i.e., groups of teachers from municipal-level or district-level key schools), while the latter revealed the conceptions of assessment held by teachers as individuals because of the interplay among macro-, meso-, and micro-level factors. such a contrast highlighted the importance of using qualitative data to add to quantitative data for an in-depth understanding of teachers’ conceptions of assessment, which is subject to various layers of contextual factors. concerning the implications of the study, the chinese secondary efl teachers as a group associated examination and teacher/school control with student development, which makes it less likely for the teachers to adopt formative assessment initiatives that aim to foster students’ holistic development as mandated by the english curriculum reform (chinese ministry of education, 2017). as pointed out by brown et al. (2011), if a relevant accountability authority places much less emphasis on employing high-stakes examinations to evaluate students, then changes in teacher beliefs and practices are much more likely. this point has also been echoed by teacher a. in china (e.g., zhejiang and jiangsu provinces) there has been a recent attempt to reform the college entrance examination by including more criteria for university admission (e.g., personal growth portfolios) in addition to examination scores (gan et al., 2018). however, at the current stage, public examinations still dominate the educational context, and there may be difficulties for the chinese efl teachers in the study to embrace formative assessment emphasizing students’ holistic development. although the teachers in the municipal-level key schools as a group tended to endorse the view that assessment is used to enhance learning, teacher a’s case indicated that in the same high banding school there may be individual teachers like her who believed less in the idea of using assessment for learning due to the interactional impact of meso-level factors (e.g., school banding), micro-level factors (e.g., student factors) and macro-level factors (e.g., the college entrance examination). her case suggested that a situated approach chinese secondary school teachers’ conceptions of l2 assessment: a mixed-methods study 467 should be adopted to introduce changes into the assessment beliefs and practices of teachers such as her. such an approach is a complex endeavor which involves the consideration of the three layers of factors as mentioned earlier. for example, although limited changes can be made to macro-level factors (e.g., the college entrance examination) currently, meso-level factors can be manipulated to influence the assessment conceptions and practices of teachers like teacher a. as the opportunities for reflective practices and participation in learning communities represent two main ways of teacher learning to enhance teachers’ assessment literacy (xu & brown, 2016), school leaders may establish a community of practice (wenger-trayner & wenger-trayner, 2015) comprising leaders and teachers who share the same visions regarding the learning purposes of assessment. such a community may then promote a formative view of assessment to teachers such as teacher a and gradually involve them in participating reflectively in the community of practice. notably, in an attempt to create such a facilitative school environment, school leaders themselves need to first reflect on their views of assessment and obtain more knowledge about formative assessment. since the aforementioned meso-level factor will also interact with micro-level factors (e.g., the summative views of assessment already held by teacher a), it is important to promote a form of formative assessment that teachers may find contextually appropriate (e.g., formative use of summative assessment in teacher a’s case) to influence their conceptions of assessment towards the formative end of the continuum. compared with their counterparts in municipal-level key schools, the teachers in the district-level key schools overall endorsed less the view of using assessment for learning purposes. however, teacher b’s case suggested that a formative view of assessment can be fostered due to an interplay of macro-, mesoand micro-level factors. in schools such as the one where teacher b worked, a situated approach to shaping teachers’ assessment conceptions and practices can also be adopted. despite the fact that few changes can be made to the macro-level factors (e.g., the college entrance examination), at the school level (i.e., meso-level), a community of practice involving teachers such as teacher b as key members can be built and opportunities should be given to these teachers to share with their colleagues the formative views and practices of assessment, with the aim of involving the reflective participation of more teachers in the community. to improve the effectiveness of such sharing activities, it is important to pay attention to not only the key members’ assessment conceptions, but also their assessment knowledge (i.e., micro-level factors). in this way, adequate suggestions on different types of contextually appropriate formative assessment can be provided to different kinds of teachers according to their micro-level factors (e.g., those teaching senior one and two versus those teaching senior three). maggie ma, gavin bui 468 in this sense, teachers such as teacher b need to further enhance their knowledge of formative assessment, despite the formative view of assessment and awareness of its cognitive and affective benefits. for example, teacher b believed that formative assessment was reserved for average-performing students like those in her school who needed more teacher scaffolding and encouragement, and that high achieving students in teacher a’s school did not need it. formative assessment is powerful in improving weak students’ performance (black & wiliam, 1998), but it does not mean that it should only be reserved for average or weak students. in addition, teacher b seemed to attach less importance to using assessment results to inform instruction, despite her use of teacher oral feedback and student-centered assessment practices. this lack of connection between assessment and instruction has also been identified in lam’s (2019) research on hong kong secondary english teachers. teacher b’s case showed that demonstrating formative conceptions of assessment does not necessarily mean that the teacher has sophisticated and sufficient knowledge of formative assessment. if teachers like her have to play a key role in sharing their formative conceptions and practices of assessment and encouraging colleagues to participate in the community of practice, it is necessary to ensure that they possess appropriate conceptions as well as knowledge of formative assessment. 6. conclusion this study has sought to explore chinese secondary efl teachers’ conceptions of assessment and the shaping influences on it based on both quantitative and qualitative data. as a group, the teacher participants agreed most strongly with the view that assessment is used to promote learning. however, the strong association they made between the “assessment as accurate for examination and teacher/school control” factor and the “assessment as accurate for student development” factor suggested that the formative assessment initiatives focusing on students’ holistic development as promoted in the english curriculum reform are less likely to be adopted by the teachers as a group at the current stage. the quantitative analysis also identified the influence of one meso-level factor (i.e., school banding) on the teachers’ conception of assessment as helping with learning. qualitative data further demonstrated how a meso-level factor (e.g., school factors such as school banding) and a micro-level factor (e.g., student factors) interacted with each other to mediate the macro-level factor (e.g., the college entrance examination) in shaping teacher a’s and teacher b’s conceptions of assessment, representing the summative and formative dimensions of assessment, respectively. this study has demonstrated the importance of utilizing both quantitative and qualitative data to provide the general pattern and contextualized understanding of chinese secondary school teachers’ conceptions of l2 assessment: a mixed-methods study 469 chinese secondary efl teachers’ conceptions of assessment. in particular, the qualitative data added to the quantitative data by demonstrating the situated nature of teacher conceptions of assessment, which are subject to the interaction of various contextual factors. accordingly, a situated approach paying special attention to the interacting impact of meso-level (i.e., school factor) and micro-level factors (e.g., teacher and student factors) should be adopted to shape the teachers’ views and knowledge of assessment and to facilitate the implementation of formative assessment as advocated in english curriculum reform in china. this study only involved a purposive sample of 66 teachers from six secondary schools in eastern china, so its findings can only be generalized to similar contexts. nevertheless, the investigation has shown the importance of considering the interplay of macro-, mesoand micro-level factors in exploring teachers’ conceptions of assessment through a mixed-methods approach and proposed a situated approach to developing teachers’ assessment literacy. future research may involve a more representative sample with the use of both perception and classroom observation data to explore efl teachers’ conceptions of assessment. research may also investigate effective ways to implement formative assessment at the classroom and school levels based on a situated approach. maggie ma, gavin bui 470 references berry, r., & adamson, b. 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(2003). classroom assessment practices and teachers’ self-perceived assessment skills. applied measurement in education, 16(4), 323-342. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15324818ame1604_4 271 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (2). 2023. 271-292 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.38275 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt english medium instruction (emi) in moroccan secondary schools: science teachers’ perception salah ben hammou hassan ii university of casablanca, morocco h ps://orcid.org/0000-0001-8002-4288 salahbenhammou937@gmail.com salah.benhammou-etu@etu.univh2c.ma abdelaziz kesbi hassan ii university of casablanca, morocco h ps://orcid.org/0000-0002-5957-6739 aabd.kesbi@gmail.com abstract the present study explored a small-scale english medium instruction (emi) initiative in moroccan secondary schools, which is part of a top-down multilingual policy based on teaching science subjects through foreign languages, namely french, english, and spanish. 18 secondary emi teachers of math, physics and life and earth sciences were interviewed in order to understand the new policy. following grounded theory (gt) methodology, the findings show positive attitudes towards the implementation of emi in moroccan education, but the teachers seemed unsatisfied with the way it has been implemented. they thought science teachers were not prepared for such a new tendency. the study also revealed that teachers’ low english proficiency was considered the major challenge to the successful implementation of emi in moroccan secondary schools and the essential reason behind using the first language in the emi classroom. to prepare future generations for extending emi in the moroccan education, the teachers called for a switch to english as the first foreign language, instead of french, in all levels of schooling, and suggested gradual introduction of emi in primary and middle schools. the study ends with some implications for overcoming the challenges of the new policy. salah ben hammou, abdelaziz kesbi 272 keywords: emi; french medium instruction; language of instruction; grounded theory methodology 1. introduc on 1.1. the growth of emi worldwide english medium instruc on (emi) is a form of bilingual educa on that is increasingly growing in all levels of schooling, especially in contexts where english is not the majority language (dearden, 2015; macaro et al., 2018). macaro et al. (2018, p. 37) defines emi as “the use of the english language to teach academic subjects (other than english itself) in countries or jurisdic ons where the first language of the majority of the popula on is not english.” unlike other similar forms of bilingual educa on which were ini ated in par cular contexts, such as content and language integrated learning (clil) in europe, content-based instruc on (cbi) in north america and french immersion in canada (wesche, 2010), emi is prac ced across the globe and is not associated with any specific context (dearden & macaro, 2016). although the growth of emi is more widespread in higher educa on (dearden, 2015; macaro et al., 2018, 2020), pre-ter ary emi is also a growing phenomenon in many parts of the world, especially in post-colonial contexts such as singapore (bolton & botha, 2017), south africa (probyn, 2006, 2015), india (mohanty, 2013) and hong kong (xu & harfitt, 2019), where english is dominant as a second or foreign language (l2, dearden, 2018). for instance, in singapore, english is a major language of instruction in all levels of schooling including pretertiary and tertiary education (bolton & botha, 2017). yet, it is important to note that pre-tertiary emi may be confused with other forms of bilingual educa on, which are more common at this level, such as clil. for instance, karabassova (2018, 2020), inves ga ng emi in kazakh secondary schools, pointed out that the emi policy in the kazakh context was based on the principles of clil, mainly the integra on of content and language. however, she found that teachers were not aware of this methodology and did not think they were responsible for students’ english proficiency. in terms of the emi objec ves, although pre-ter ary and ter ary emi are based on the same principle of teaching content subjects through english as a second or foreign language, the objectives are not the same. in higher education, the implementation of emi is usually driven by reasons associated with internationalization, increasing graduate employability, and attracting fee-paying international english medium instruction (emi) in moroccan secondary schools: science teachers’ perception 273 students (dearden, 2018, macaro et al., 2018; tamtam et al., 2012). in pre-ter ary educa on, the implementa on of bilingual educa on, including emi, is primarily driven by a desire to level up students’ english proficiency. in this regard, macaro et al. (2018, p. 39) point out that emi in pre-tertiary phases is “motivated by a desire to trial a new approach to language teaching.” 1.2. emi in science educa on the use of emi to teach science subjects is increasingly becoming popular in several parts of the world (pun et al., 2022). this growth has been documented in several studies worldwide (lin & he, 2017; lin & lo, 2017; lo & macaro, 2012; probyn, 2006, 2015; pun & tai, 2021; tsui, 2004, among others). topics explored include: translanguaging, interac on in the emi science classrooms, the impact of emi on students’ english proficiency and conceptual development, teachers’ and students’ a tudes towards emi. as a case in point, pun and tai (2021) investigated the benefits of translanguaging in science classrooms, that is, the use of languages other than the official medium of instruction for classroom interactions. based on their findings, they considered translanguaging an asset in science lab classrooms as it offered a space for both teachers and students to construct knowledge and negotiate meaning. previously, in hong kong, tsui (2004) reported that both teachers and students needed to use the first language (l1), cantonese, in emi classrooms, especially when dealing with complex and difficult concepts. similarly, probyn (2006), investigating a context in south africa, where students and teachers share the same home language, xhosa, found that codeswitching was one of the major strategies used by teachers to mediate students’ understanding. the par cipa ng science teachers admi ed to using xhosa when teaching new concepts, when students did not understand english explana ons and for classroom management. by contrast, macaro et al. (2020), inves ga ng prac ces of five emi teachers in chinese universi es, found that these teachers rarely resorted to the l1 in their instruc on. one major reason for resor ng to translanguaging and codeswitching in science classrooms is the students’ and teachers’ limited english proficiency (othman & saat, 2009; probyn, 2015; pun & tai, 2021). for instance, in othman and saat’s (2009) study, the par cipa ng teachers considered the use of malay along with english in science classrooms as necessary due to the teachers’ and students’ language difficul es. byun at al. (2011) found that both teachers and students were facing challenges due to the language barrier. similarly, karabassova (2018, 2020) found that science teachers’ limited english proficiency was considered one of the major challenges for the emi implementation in kazakhstani secondary schools. another reported reason for the use of other languages in the emi salah ben hammou, abdelaziz kesbi 274 science classrooms is science teachers’ widely held perception that they are not responsible for their students’ language development, given that they are not language experts. in probyn’s (2006, 2015) studies, for instance, the participating science teachers considered students’ conceptual development as their major focus in their classrooms and denied any responsibility for integrating content and language. besides, science teachers often complain about lack of training in the new emi methodology (dearden, 2015). probyn (2006) found that teachers had not received any training to teach their subjects through english as an l2. she argued that science teachers needed training to understand the role of language in learning, develop students’ english l2 abilities and use the l1 as a scaffolding device for conceptual and language development. this was also documented in othman and saat’s (2009) study in the malay context and by ben hammou and kesbi (2021a), in the moroccan context. in ben hammou and kesbi’s (2021a) study, science teachers blamed the ministry of education for not preparing them to teach through an additional language. similar results were also reported elsewhere (coonan, 2007). despite these challenges, attitudes towards emi implementation are generally positive. galloway and rose (2021) maintained that the major purported advantage of emi is that it provides a space for both linguistic and conceptual development, “killing two birds with one stone.” similar positive attitudes were confirmed in several other studies (e.g., galloway & ruegg, 2020; munoz de prat, 2020). although the increasing research on emi has explored several emi practices in science education worldwide, the emi phenomenon is still new, and several contexts are still under-represented in the existing literature, especially in africa and south america (macaro et al., 2018). for instance, in north africa, these authors reported only two studies in secondary education (egypt and libya). in higher education, no study has been reported in africa. besides, most of the previous studies pertained to countries or jurisdictions, where english is the dominant second or foreign language. the researchers were not able to locate any emi study in secondary education which explores science teachers’ perceptions of the emi phenomenon in contexts, where other foreign languages are more dominant than english. seeking to fill this gap in the existing literature, the current study explores perceptions of moroccan science teachers who volunteered to teach through english despite having been trained through french. in the moroccan context, the emi program is part of a large-scale and topdown mul lingual program, known as language alterna on (la). the la policy is recommended in the strategic vision (2015-2030) and framework law (2019) educa onal reforms, which were conceptualized and planned by central agents (appointed by the king) and implemented by the ministry of educa on (ben hammou & kesbi, 2021a). the policy is based on the idea of teaching science subjects in foreign languages, mainly french, english and spanish, instead of the english medium instruction (emi) in moroccan secondary schools: science teachers’ perception 275 arabic language. however, given its pres gious status in moroccan life, french has become the dominant language in this new policy. in nearly all secondary schools, french has become a compulsory language of instruc on for the teaching of science subjects. emi is a small-scale ini a ve, implemented as a pilot in selec ve emi classes in a few secondary schools, in some big ci es, namely, rabat (abu dar el ghifari high school), casablanca (moulay abdellah high school), tangiers (allah elfassi high school), tetouan (hassan ii high school and elmahdy bennouna high school). the major explana on for the limited use of emi is the lack of teachers who can teach through english, given that french is also the major language of instruc on in higher educa on (ben hammou & kesbi, 2021a). the program enacted is highly selec ve and it a racts students whose english is good enough to cope with as a medium of instruc on. although instruction in a second language (arabic) and or a foreign language (french) is an old practice in moroccan education, the researchers were able to locate only a few relevant studies, two in secondary education and two in higher education. at secondary level, ben hammou and kesbi (2021a, 2012b) investigated the teaching of science subjects, life and earth sciences, math and physics through foreign languages, mainly french, by delving into science teachers’ perceptions and experiences. the findings revealed positive attitudes towards the switch in the language of instruction from arabic to french despite the negative attitudes towards french, which bears colonial connotations. many teachers justified their choice by the fact that french is the language of instruction in higher education. in higher education, r’boul (2022) investigated the spread of emi from a multilingual, and postcolonial perspective. 24 university professors, who participated in this study, held positive attitudes towards the spread of emi and emphasized its beneficial effects for both faculty and students. yet, r’boul seemed critical of these findings, which he attributed to the fact that english has no colonial connotations in the moroccan contexts. he warned that the spread of emi in the south, including morocco, would perpetuate linguistic, cultural and epistemic dependency. similar positive attitudes have recently been reported in ben hammou and kesbi’s (2023) study of graduate students’ attitudes toward the possibility to switch to emi, instead of french-medium instruction in moroccan science universities. unlike r’boul (2022), the majority of participating graduate students emphasized the potential advantages of emi for moroccan education and for the economy. that said, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the current study is the first to investigate the emi phenomenon in moroccan secondary schools through the perspective of emi science teachers. the study seeks to provide answers to the following research questions: what are science teachers’ a tudes towards the small-scale and top-down implementa on of emi in moroccan educa on? salah ben hammou, abdelaziz kesbi 276 a) does emi enhance students’ and teachers’ english proficiency? b) does emi have any detrimental effects on students’ subject-ma er knowledge? c) what are the major challenges that science teachers encounter in their emi classes? d) what are their strategies to cope with these challenges? 2. methodology grounded theory methodology (gt), which is a branch of the qualitative approach (auerbach & silverstein, 2003), was used in this study for data collection and analysis. in gt methodology, researchers follow an exploratory and inductive approach to data analysis. they investigate the phenomenon of interest without imposing any prior expectations, allowing themes of analysis to appear through the data. they form their hypotheses based on the data collected and the participants’ reports (auerbach & silverstein, 2003). data collection and analysis are conducted in parallel to find out emergent themes, which are used as a guide for the future gathering of data (strauss & corbin, 1998). participants are considered experts in the studied phenomenon, given their experience as practicing teachers of science subjects through english. hence, they have a crucial role in defining the benefits and challenges of the small-scale emi program in moroccan secondary schools. 2.1. par cipants the participants of this study were teachers of science, physics, and math who had volunteered to participate in the emi pilot program implemented in a few secondary schools in the cities of rabat, casablanca, tangier and tetouan. unlike the french medium instruction program, which is widely implemented in virtually all secondary schools across the country, the emi program is confined to a few highly selective classes. hence, the number of the practicing emi teachers is very limited (26). no criteria were needed for the selection of the emi teachers. out of 18 teachers, available for this study, five were females, while 13 were males. all the participating teachers had received their tertiary education in moroccan universities. eight teachers hold a bachelor’s degree, while ten hold a master’s degree. two of those holding a master’s degree are currently involved in a doctoral program. twelve teachers speak moroccan colloquial arabic as their native language, while six others are native speakers of amazigh (the indigenous language of morocco). in addition to their native languages, teachers know standard arabic and french. two of the participating teachers described english medium instruction (emi) in moroccan secondary schools: science teachers’ perception 277 their english as sufficient. table 1 provides demographic information about the participating teachers. pseudonyms are used for the sake of confidentiality. table 1 demographic information about the participating teachers interview id pseudonym age subject teaching experience self-attributed english proficiency level 1 karim 34 science 8 not good enough 2 jamal 35 physics 70 quite medium 3 faruk 40 science 13 medium 4 amisra 32 science 7 insufficient 5 hakima 29 math 5 medium 6 kamal 33 science 9 sufficient 7 rayan 33 math 7 quite medium 8 adam 47 physics 16 medium 9 samir 44 physics 17 medium 10 haytam 31 math 6 quite medium 11 samira 35 physics 10 medium 12 adil 38 physics 12 insufficient 13 mounir 40 science 14 quite medium 14 abdelsalam 36 math 10 medium 15 hicham 32 science 8 quite good 16 hakim 43 physics 15 medium 17 manal 31 physics 6 not well developed 18 hayat 34 math 8 sufficient 2.2. procedures this study used semi-structured interviews to explore science teachers’ perceptions of the small-scale emi program in moroccan secondary education. the decision to opt for the semi-structured interviews was dictated by two reasons: (1) the number of the science teachers who are teaching through english is very limited (26), given that the small-scale emi program is available in a few secondary schools across the country; (2) the interviews allow the researcher to collect in-depth and open-ended data about the emi experiment in moroccan education by carefully exploring the thoughts and feelings of the participants. due to the pandemic conditions, the interviews were conducted in two phases. the first phase was in january 2021, during which the researchers interviewed eight science and physics teachers, using moroccan colloquial arabic. the transcripts of these interviews were translated to identify major codes. in the second phase, which was in april 2021, ten math, physics and science teachers were interviewed. as is the case with the first phase, the researchers translated the transcripts of the interviews and identified the recurrent codes. ten interviews were face-to-face, while eight others were conducted through phone calls. the shortest interview lasted 35 minutes, while the longest one lasted 46 minutes. salah ben hammou, abdelaziz kesbi 278 in each phase, the researchers worked individually to identify the recurrent codes and then met to compare the codes. we used the percentage agreement formula, 2*m/(n1+n2), to measure the inter-coder reliability (allen, 2017), where m represents the number of identical codes and n1 and n2 are the total number of codes identified by coder 1 and coder 2. the measurement yielded a satisfactory similarity rate (.801). the different codes were discussed and resolved before the researchers combined them into major themes in relation to the interview questions (see appendix for the interview protocol). we could not opt for cohen’s kappa indicator for two reasons: (1) it is difficult to measure this indicator when there are different numbers of codes in each category (cheung & tai, 2021, p. 2); (2) we think the percentage agreement formula used in this study is sufficient since the study involves a simple coding activity (feng, 2015). the interpretations were sent to a colleague, who confirmed the results. after determining the themes, the researchers worked together to choose the excerpts that better illustrate each theme. 3. results rereading and analysis of the scripts of the interviews, following strauss and corbin’s (1998) model of grounded theory methodology, enabled identification of several codes, which were combined into major themes. 3.1. integra on of content and language in emi prac ce the interviews showed that science teachers held very posi ve a tudes towards the use of emi for the teaching of science subjects in secondary educa on. they were enthusias c about teaching their subjects in english. they thought emi was beneficial for both teachers and students. yet, they seemed to disagree with the concept of integra ng language and content learning. they did not think language and content could be explicitly taught equally in the same classroom. as science teachers, they thought they should be mainly concerned with students’ content acquisi on: the problem with this new policy is that it favors foreign language learning (english) at the expense of content. for me . . ., what i care about is students’ achievement in my subject. (jamal, a teacher of physics) when asked about whether they took into considera on the language component when planning their lessons, most par cipants (16) admi ed that they never planned any language-oriented activities. they did not think they needed english medium instruction (emi) in moroccan secondary schools: science teachers’ perception 279 such ac vi es in their classes since there were english teachers whose job was to improve students’ language skills. some teachers complained that even if they were willing to include language in their teaching, they did not have me because the science curriculum was overloaded to the extent that they found it difficult to finish it in me. besides, they did not think they were qualified enough to teach english language forms because they were trained in french: i only focus on content goals. i never include any language ac vi es because it is not my job. (faruk, a teacher of science) hayat, a teacher of physics, expressed a different view. she thought integra on of english learning and content was possible provided that teachers received con nuous training in the medium of instruc on by experts in englishmedium instruc on. she added that although science teachers were not english language teachers, they o en found themselves obliged to explain science vocabulary, which students found difficult to understand: i think emi is very beneficial for both students and teachers. students learn two things at the same me, english and content . . . it is also a good opportunity for teachers to improve their english proficiency. (hayat, a teacher of math) 3.2. teachers’ english proficiency the findings showed that science teachers’ limited english proficiency was considered the major challenge to the teaching of science subjects through english in moroccan secondary schools. the majority of the participants considered their language abilities inadequate (16 participants) to cope successfully with english as a vehicular language in their fields. however, they all showed willingness to improve their english and contribute to the success of emi in moroccan education. for instance, karim, a teacher of science, said that he volunteered to engage in the new policy despite his limited english proficiency. he preferred engaging in the emi program although he could have chosen to teach french-medium classes. his preference can be a ributed to the hegemonizing status of english in the world. in fact, the increasing interest in english all over the world and its hegemony in most areas of life seem to affect the par cipants’ choice: although my english is not good enough, i prefer teaching through emi . . . if my students and i improve our english, we will keep up with the advance in science and technology. (karim, a teacher of science). salah ben hammou, abdelaziz kesbi 280 in contrast to the majority of par cipants, hayat, a teacher of math, and kamal, a teacher of science, described their english as sufficient to manage their teaching through this language. they explained that their enrollment in a doctoral program at university had enabled them to improve their english. indeed, although french is the major language of instruc on at university, hayat argued that english was the working language in doctoral studies. hence, graduate students are required to work on their english proficiency so that they can develop their research and publish their scientific articles. kamal elaborated that, without english, students would not be able to accomplish their phd projects as they were required to publish at least two ar cles in scopus-indexed journals: thanks to my phd project, i managed to improve my level of english. i needed english to read and understand previous scientific articles. (kamal, a teacher of science) despite differences in english proficiency among the participants, they all seemed confident that their use of english as a language of teaching would enhance their proficiency in this language. hakima, a teacher of math, explained that although science teachers were more accustomed to teaching through arabic or french, they could overcome the language barrier over time, especially given that french and english share a lot of scientific vocabulary. in addition, the teachers benefitted from continuous professional training offered by the ministry of education in collaboration with the british council in morocco. this training, according to the teachers, focused mainly on language skills and forms and sought to promote teachers’ english proficiency. however, not all teachers were satisfied with the training. some participants expected to learn about some useful strategies to cope with their subject through english and facilitate students’ understanding, but most of the trainers were language experts and had little knowledge about emi methodology: at the beginning of the program, i was not confident about my english proficiency, but a er a while i started to gain confidence. (hakima, a teacher of math) 3.3. students’ ini al language abili es unlike the teachers’ english proficiency, which was considered a major challenge to the emi program in moroccan educa on, the teachers’ self-reports were more posi ve about their students’ ini al english proficiency. according to the majority of the par cipa ng teachers, the students had good oral and wri ng english skills. the teachers thought that emi was less challenging for students for two reasons. first, the emi program is limited to a few secondary schools in some big ci es, which makes it very selec ve. students are selected based on their english proficiency. they are required to pass an entrance exam, which is english medium instruction (emi) in moroccan secondary schools: science teachers’ perception 281 focused on language skills and forms before they can enroll in the program. second, according to the participating teachers, most of the students who joined the emi classes come from private schools, where they have been exposed to english since their early schooling years: the students i teach speak english fluently. they use it be er than i do. this is because most of them come from private schools. (rayan, a teacher of math) although the teachers agreed with the selection process, they considered it unfair as it indirectly favors students coming from private schools. unlike private schools, students in public schools have limited exposure to the english language. they start the learning of english at 9th grade with an average of two hours a week, while the emi program starts in 10th grade. hence, public students do not have an equal opportunity to enroll in emi as do their private school fellow students who spend nine years learning english before their enrollment in the program. 3.4. the effect of emi on students’ language development the findings revealed positive outcomes regarding the effect of the emi practice on students’ language development. nearly all participants (17 teachers) agreed the teaching of math, science and physics through english provided a favorable environment for the development of students’ english proficiency. although students had good initial english proficiency, the teachers noticed that their students’ vocabulary repertoire, which was limited at the beginning of the program, had extended thanks to the acquisition of subject-matter knowledge. mounir, a teacher of science, explained that at the beginning of 10th grade, when the program was launched, some students were less confident to participate or make presentations due to their limited science vocabulary, but as students accumulated adequate vocabulary and science knowledge, they became more active in the classroom and they themselves suggested making presentations: of course, it has a posi ve impact on students’ english. they learn a lot of vocabulary and ideas in english. (mounir, a teacher of science) similarly, samir, a teacher of physics pointed out that students in 11th and 12th grades became more fluent in english. they rarely used their l1 in the classroom. even in groupwork, the teacher noticed that students preferred discussing in english: the language gain in emi is very significant, especially in 11th and 12th grades. students face some learning difficul es at the beginning but as they develop their language, they get more fluent. (samir, a teacher of physics) salah ben hammou, abdelaziz kesbi 282 by contrast, haytam, a teacher of math, argued that the effect of emi on language development was not apparent in the moroccan context, given that the emi program was highly selec ve. he explained that the students selected were high-achieving and passionate about english learning. they have developed good english fluency before their enrollment in the emi, which indicates their ability to sharpen their linguis c poten al without the need for emi. yet, he acknowledged that students’ science vocabulary had immensely developed thanks to their immersion in the emi: i’m not sure if emi has any significant effect on students’ english proficiency because they already had good proficiency when they first started the program. (haytam, a teacher of math) regarding the teachers’ language benefits in the emi program, the findings showed that teachers’ immersion in emi had also positively affected their english proficiency which was initially limited for most of them. yet, their daily exposure to the english language in emi enabled them to advance their language skills and fluency. for instance, hicham, a teacher of science, despite being not well satisfied with his english, maintained that after one year of using english for teaching his subject, he had broadened his english vocabulary repertoire and become more confident to teach through english. similarly, samira, a teacher of physics, confirmed that her fears gradually disappeared as she gained more language fluency and confidence. she explained that her students’ good english proficiency had encouraged her to work on her language skills and develop her fluency: yes . . . thanks to my students and the daily use of english to teach my subject, i have overcome my fears and gained more confidence to speak english. (samira, a teacher of physics) 3.5. the effect of emi on content learning the views of the participating teachers regarding the impact of emi on content learning were also positive. although most of them agreed that the l1 was better in content learning (14 participants), they did not think the use of english had any significant negative impact on students’ ability to understand and learn content. some teachers explained that students’ initial english proficiency was sufficient to overcome the learning difficulties. besides, most teachers resorted to the students’ l1 when they found difficulty explaining complex concepts. even those few teachers who thought that their students’ achievement might be affected by the compulsory use of english in exams agreed that this effect was less significant in subsequent years as students and teachers acquired more advanced language skills: english medium instruction (emi) in moroccan secondary schools: science teachers’ perception 283 there might be a slight effect (nega ve) at the beginning, but students have the ability to overcome this effect. (abdelsalam, a teacher of math) however, the majority of the par cipa ng teachers (15 par cipants) acknowledged that emi exerted a nega ve effect on the quality of their teaching due to their limited language proficiency. to overcome this effect, the teachers found themselves obliged to use students’ l1 to facilitate their teaching. hamid confirmed that he sometimes found it insufficient to explain and elaborate on complex concepts through english due to a lack of required fluency. yet, nearly, all participants agreed that after years of experience in emi, the quality of their teaching through english had improved as they managed to overcome the language barrier which they had experienced at the beginning of the program: i found it hard to explain my lessons clearly enough in english, at the beginning. today, although my english is s ll not well developed, i do not use moroccan arabic very o en. (manal, a teacher of physics) 3.6. the use of the l1 in the emi class although emi students were selected based on their english proficiency, nearly all the teacher par cipants (17) admi ed to using students’ l1 as a means of explana on to facilitate their teaching and secure students’ understanding. yet, it seems that the major reason for resor ng to students’ l1 is not the students’ english proficiency, but rather the teachers’ inability to explain difficult concepts using english. although the textbooks and lessons are wri en in english, the use of the l1, according to the teachers, is a necessity to ensure that students learn content and prepare for the exams: i try to use english, but most o en i find it necessary to switch back to the moroccan colloquial arabic because it is not easy to explain difficult concepts in english. (adil, a teacher of physics) when asked if their students preferred the use of english or moroccan colloquial arabic, they responded that students some mes asked for explanaons in moroccan arabic, especially in their first year. one of the teachers explained that students some mes had difficulty understanding their teachers’ explana ons in english due mispronuncia on and lack of fluency. like teachers, students were concerned about content learning because they needed to get ready for the exams. therefore, they preferred understanding through their l1 and wri ng the lessons in english: salah ben hammou, abdelaziz kesbi 284 although most students are good at english, i think they also prefer explana on through moroccan arabic, especially when it comes to difficult concepts. (adam, a teacher of physics) unlike the majority of participants, who found the use of the l1 along with english useful to facilitate content learning, kamal, a teacher of science, disagreed with the use of moroccan arabic in the emi class. he argued that the use of the l1 would have negative effects on students’ performance. given that students are required to answer exam questions solely in english, he thought teachers should make their students accustomed to the use of english by avoiding the use of the l1: i think the use of moroccan arabic in the emi class is detrimental to the students’ language development. it should be avoided because if students get used to it, they would make less effort to improve their english. (kamal, a teacher of science) 4. discussion the present study inves gated a small-scale and top-down emi program in moroccan secondary schools, which is part of the la policy. the study explored the percep ons and experiences of in-service science teachers, who were engaged in the emi program, using gt methodology. the findings of the study provide interesting outcomes about emi practices in the moroccan education. first, the study confirms the purported view that emi is primarily oriented towards content learning (airey, 2016; lo & macaro, 2012; probyn, 2006, 2015; pun & tai, 2021; tsui, 2004). although the participating teachers held posi ve a tudes towards teaching their subjects through english, they rejected the idea of explicit language learning in emi science classes, sugges ng a kind of dichotomy between language teaching and content teaching. they denied responsibility for language teaching because they considered themselves content experts (pun et al., 2022). this dichotomy is not specific to emi but is also reported in other forms of integra on of content and language which are more common in secondary educa on, especially clil (karabassova, 2018; mehisto, 2008). as a case in point, mehisto (2008) found that language support in content classrooms was limited to unneeded transla ons. teachers were reluctant to integrate language-oriented materials, indica ng that they were unaware of the clil methodology. in the case of this study, the par cipants did not think there was a need for explicit language learning in emi classes as students had good ini al english proficiency and could unconsciously and independently develop their language skills while focusing on content learning. this finding seems to resonate with the input hypothesis (krashen, 1982) in second language acquisi on, which claims that we acquire the target language when we focus on english medium instruction (emi) in moroccan secondary schools: science teachers’ perception 285 meaning/messages, not the structure of the message. for science teachers, the main concern is to provide a “science input” that students can understand. according to krashen (1982), it is the students’ understanding of the input, “roughly tuned,” that ultimately results in the acquisition of the target language. unlike krashen (1982), long (1996) considers comprehensible input, input+1, insufficient for language acquisition, and emphasizes “negotiation of meaning” during interactions as necessary for acquisition to take place. in the science classroom, when students do not understand a concept, they usually seek clarification and negotiate meaning through interaction with the teacher or other students. however, negotiation of meaning requires a native speaker or a competent interlocutor, who can make linguistic and semantic adjustments to the input to achieve individualized comprehension (long, 1996). in the moroccan context, science teachers are trained through french, the first foreign language in the country. hence, although the participating teachers had some exposure to english as a foreign language in secondary education, the majority were not confident about their english proficiency, which might affect their ability to modify and simplify the input in the target language. in this regard, the teachers mentioned three main language difficulties, namely, pronunciation, limited vocabulary repertoire and the inability to maintain communication with students. these language difficulties suggest that teachers may not often be able to provide necessary “scaffolding” in english, which might affect students’ progress in “the zone of proximal development” (vygotsky, 1978). to put it simply, it seems that while students have the necessary “threshold level” (cummins, 1976) in english, the majority of the teachers are struggling with english. as a result, teachers admitted to often resorting to students’ l1 to facilitate instruction, especially at the beginning of their experience. indeed, the use of the l1 has been reported as a common practice in emi (probyn, 2015; pun &tai, 2021; tsui, 2004). one of the major declared objec ves for the implementa on of the language alterna on policy in moroccan educa on is the mastery of foreign languages (ben hammou & kesbi, 2021a, 2021b). in the case of the emi program, the interviews showed that the teaching of science subjects through english had significant effects on both teachers’ and students’ english proficiency. the teachers pointed out that although students had good ini al english proficiency, their immersion in the emi program had extended their vocabulary repertoire and boosted their fluency to the extent that they could prepare and make presenta ons in english about any topic in the curriculum. however, it is not easy to conclude whether this posi ve outcome is caused by the use of english as a medium of instruc on or by other factors such as mo va on and language skills, given that the program is pres gious and highly selec ve. some of the interviewed teachers explained that the kind of students involved in the emi salah ben hammou, abdelaziz kesbi 286 were likely able to improve their language skills without the need for emi. those students have good english skills, and they are high performing in science subjects. this tallies with some studies in the clil context, where english is the major language of instruc on. for instance, verspoor et al. (2015) tested the effect of clil instruc on on vocabulary learning comparing three groups, clil, nonclil and gymnasium classes. clil and gymnasium classes were described as pres gious classes since they a racted high-performing students with good inial language proficiency, whereas the non-clil cohort had lower language proficiency. the study revealed differences in terms of language development between the clil and the non-clil groups, but the gymnasium cohort was found to have similar outcomes as the clil group. the authors concluded that clil instruc on had no significant effect on students’ language development. yet, in the moroccan context, the teachers interviewed in ben hammou and kesbi’s (2021b) study claimed that teaching physics through a foreign language, french, led to language gains even for low-achieving students. in addi on to students, the study showed that the emi prac ce also had posi ve effects on teachers’ english proficiency. the teachers admi ed having ini al medium english proficiency at the beginning of their experience, but they found their emi experience very beneficial in terms of their l2 development. they managed to broaden their vocabulary repertoire, which posi vely affected their confidence and language fluency. the teachers reported that the use of moroccan arabic had gradually decreased in their classes as they progressed in their experience. in the kazakhstani context, karabassova (2020) reported that teachers’ english proficiency was considered the major challenge in the enacted emi program, but she did not explain whether the teachers’ involvement in the program had any effects on their language development. regarding the effect on content learning, the interviews showed that the nega ve effect of emi on students’ subject-ma er knowledge was insignificant. although most of the par cipa ng teachers considered the use of the l1 as better when it comes to the teaching of content learning, they were not much concerned about the effect of english use on students’ academic achievement. they acknowledged that the quality of teaching and learning was affected at the beginning of the program, but they explained that the detrimental effect seemed to vanish over me as teachers and students got more proficient and fluent. this echoes the findings reported by joe and lee (2013). to alleviate the nega ve effects of teachers’ low english proficiency on students’ performance, it is recommended to take advantage of students’ language abili es by encouraging them to take more ac ve roles in the science classroom. the teachers can assign lessons to groups of students to prepare and present in front of other students, followed by a question-answer session. this english medium instruction (emi) in moroccan secondary schools: science teachers’ perception 287 will give more space for student-student interactions to negotiate meaning using the target language. yet, this requires flexibility on the part of teachers to give up their traditional role, as the sole provider of science knowledge in the classroom and adopt more engaging and facilitating strategies to help students take the lead in and responsibility for their learning. besides, findings support a systematic and purposeful use of students’ l1 as a “scaffolding” device to help learners construct knowledge and share it in the classroom (mohanty, 2013; probyn, 2015). to prepare faculty better qualified to teach through english, it is recommended to recruit science teachers with a minimum threshold level in english. an english proficiency test should be part of the exams that new teachers take to join the science teaching profession. in the pre-service stage, teachers should be prepared to engage successfully in the emi program by being equipped with the necessary strategies to cope with the challenges of emi classrooms. in-service professional meetings of the emi science community teachers should be regularly held to give teachers the opportunity to share their classroom experiences and discuss possible solutions to the challenges they or their students face. 5. conclusion this study explored science teachers’ attitudes towards the teaching of their subjects through english in some moroccan secondary schools. using gt methodology, the data analysis yielded some insights into the emi phenomenon in the moroccan context, which can be further investigated in future research. first, science teachers seemed to hold positive attitudes towards the use of english as a medium of instruction instead of the official language and the first foreign language, french. this finding seems to have one major explanation, which is the hegemony of english as a lingua franca in the world in nearly all areas of life. second, the emi program offers a favorable environment for language development not only for students but also for teachers. although teachers acknowledged that they had limited english proficiency at the beginning of their experience, they managed to overcome the language challenge over time thanks to their daily use of english as a medium of instruction. as for students, in addition to their enrollment in the emi program, other factors might also have contributed to the development of their language abilities, especially their vocabulary repertoire and language fluency. these are good initial english proficiency, high performance in subject-matter knowledge, and motivation. more interestingly, although english is a second foreign language in the moroccan context, the use of emi for the teaching of science subjects seems not to have significant detrimental effects on the learning of content. salah ben hammou, abdelaziz kesbi 288 references airey, j. 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(2019). teacher language awareness and scaffolded interaction in clil science classrooms. journal of immersion and content-based language educa on, 7(2), 212-232. salah ben hammou, abdelaziz kesbi 292 appendix teachers’ interview protocol a. foreign language ques ons: 1. how would you characterize your english proficiency? 2. how would you characterize your students’ english proficiency level? 3. do you agree with english as the first foreign language in morocco, instead of french? why? 4. do you think english as fl should be taught at all levels of schooling? why? b. foreign language as the language of instruc on: 1. what do you think about the experimental implementa on of english-medium instruc on in some secondary schools? do you think moroccan educa on is ready for emi implementa on? why is that? 2. do you think emi should be generalized to other secondary schools as french-medium instruc on? 3. do you think you are well prepared to teach in english? what do you think you need to improve your performance? 4. what strategies do you use to overcome the language difficul es while teaching through english? 5. do you have anything to add? 111 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (1). 111-136 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl integrating content and language in english language teaching in secondary education: models, benefits, and challenges darío luis banegas university of warwick, uk ministerio de educación del chubut, argentina d.l.banegas@warwick.ac.uk abstract in the last decade, there has been a major interest in content-based instruction (cbi) and content and language integrated learning (clil). these are similar approaches which integrate content and foreign/second language learning through various methodologies and models as a result of different implementations around the world. in this paper, i first offer a sociocultural view of cbi-clil. secondly, i define language and content as vital components in cbi-clil. thirdly, i review the origins of cbi and the continuum perspective, and clil definitions and models featured in the literature. fourth, i summarise current aspects around research in programme evaluation. last, i review the benefits and challenges of this innovative approach so as to encourage critically context-responsive endeavours. keywords: cbi, clil, cbi continuum, clil models over the last two decades the integration of english language learning together with subject-matter content in formal education has received great interest in europe and other parts of the world (banegas, 2011; coyle, hood, & marsh, 2010, p. 1; dalton-puffer, 2007, p. 1; lyster & ballinger, 2011; moate, 2010, 2011; navés, 2009, p. 22-23). this integration has given rise to two darío luis banegas 112 broad approaches: (a) cbi (content-based instruction), and (b) clil (content and language integrated learning) (dalton-puffer & smit, 2007, p. 7-24). in this paper, i examine the central features of cbi and clil by looking at their components, definitions, models, underpinning rationale and implementation outcomes found in the literature under the light of sociocultural theory. i review the benefits and challenges of this so-called innovative approach (kiely, 2011) so as to encourage critically context-responsive endeavours. sociocultural underpinnings in cbi-clil a sociocultural theory perspective is usually developed to understand the relationship between learning, language, and content. language is the mediating tool through which content and language are co-constructed in a learning environment (moate, 2010). this integration could also become more complex when learners focus on language-focused talk as well as contentfocused talk. it is through these interrelations that learners begin to engage in tasks which require complex language derived from curricular complex relations (kong, 2009, p. 239-248). however, a word of caution is advanced by pica (2002). in a wellgrounded empirical research study, the author sought to identify ways in which teachers modified interaction about content. although integration may become successful when it responds to learners’ interests, pica states that a strong focus on meaning and function, an activity which may presuppose the overlook of form, could deprive learners of improving their language proficiency. what pica (2002) fears is that language learning will be incidental and errors may never be corrected. in turn, this may affect learners as they will acquire new curricular content without receiving language feedback and support so that both components of the integration benefit from each other. if this does not happen, at some point, poor language development will block content learning. when considering the links between sociocultural theory and second language acquisition, authors such as lantolf (2000), lantolf and thorne (2006), and warford (2010) assert that the human mind is mediated through physical and symbolic tools, such as language, which mediate the relationship between us and the objects of our experience. one example of mediation is teacher talk in interaction (kong, 2009; moate, 2010, p. 40-41; short, 2002; tasker, johnson, & davis, 2010, p. 130), which scaffolds the appropriation of scientific concepts, cultural knowledge, and linguistic knowledge (barranco pérez, 2007; mohan, 1986, p. 2; mohan & slater, 2005). gibbons (2002, p. 10) defines scaffolding as a special kind of help by which the teacher temporarily assists learners while they perform different tasks so that, in the future, they integrating content and language in english language teaching in secondary education: models . . . 113 can become autonomous and work on their own. scaffolding can take the form of asking questions, activating prior knowledge, creating a motivating context, encouraging participation, offering hints, and feedback. it may also include adapting materials to respond to learners’ needs (guerrini, 2009, p. 74; reiss, 2005, p. 6-8) while fostering students’ higher order mental capacities and cognitive content engagement (hall, 2010, p. 213; kong & hoare, 2011, p. 310; lyster & ballinger, 2011, p. 283). within cbi-clil, for example, llinares & whittaker (2009, p. 78-85) suggest that content could be scaffolded when it is linked to students’ personal experiences, previous content taught in their l1, or through skills work in tasks (mehisto, marsh, & frigols, 2008, p. 139-140). along these lines, clil and cbi are examples of reversing the focus on language to urging teachers to attend to the role of content in scaffolding second language learning (bailey, burkett, & freeman, 2010, p. 615). this assistance occurs in what is known as the zone of proximal development or zpd (de guerrero & villamil, 2000, pp. 51-52; mehisto, 2008, p. 109; ohta, 2005, pp. 505-506). however, i believe that teachers need to ensure that scaffolding only acts as a safe net for the introduction of new content (coyle, hood, & marsh, 2010). if the clil lesson is only reduced to the repetition of the l1 curriculum in another language, motivation and cognitive engagement may be threatened. last, richards and rodgers (2001, p. 204-215) agree with larsenfreeman (2000, p. 140) on the fact that people learn another language more successfully when they acquire information through it. richards and rodgers (2001, p. 215) also point out that cbi has two major goals: autonomous learning (cf. wolff, 2003, p. 211-215), and the adoption of different roles by learners such as interpreter, explorer, source of content, and joint participant in content and activity selection. by advancing these aims, the idea that learning and teaching content and language should be seen as collaborative work between educators and learners is once again established on solid ground. defining language in cbi-clil in this section i outline what is usually meant by language and content, an enterprise which could be rather difficult (davidson, 2005, pp. 220-221; hermann, 2008). on the language side and illuminated by sociocultural theory, most researchers (cammarata, 2009, p. 561-562; coyle, hood, & marsh, 2010, p. 37; creese, 2005, p. 190; kong, 2009, p. 234; mohan & slater, 2005, pp. 153155) agree that language plays a functional role in cbi-clil because it serves as a medium to learn a school subject embedded in formal education. in effect, language is seen as a conduit for communication and for learning (coyle, darío luis banegas 114 hood, & marsh, 2010, p. 54). this functional view of language is associated with the concept of communicative competence (hymes, 1972), which has been further developed in relation to clil by several authors (brown, 2007, p. 218-222; dalton-puffer, 2009; davidson, 2005, p. 220; lotherington, 2004, p. 707; nunan, 2004, p. 212; savignon, 2007). it entails the learning of new discourses, such as mathematical discourse (hofmannová, novotná, & pípalová, 2008, p. 23). bentley (2010, p. 11) proposes that learners should know content-obligatory language and content-compatible language to cater for the difference between subject-specific and general discourse. in my view, such a suggestion seems to respond to content-driven approaches (see pp. 119-121) as students’ content knowledge will be prioritised in their assessment. in connection with discourses and a functional view of language, coyle (2007b, p. 53) developed a language triptych to represent how language may be progressively learnt and used through interrelated perspectives. one perspective is language of learning, that is, the learning of key words and phrases to access content. secondly, language for learning focuses on the language students will need to carry out classroom tasks such as debating, or organising and presenting information. last, language through learning makes room for unpredictable language learning as it is concerned with new language emerging from the cognitive process students are engaged in. all in all, the triptych offers both a focus on form (cf. spada, 2010) and a focus on meaning. this means that a lesson can be enriched if students not only identify tenses and how grammar patterns work but, simultaneously, put those grammatical items to meaningful use by learning content about other school subjects, for instance. grammar may still be taught incidentally and explicitly depending on contextual circumstances and also recycled and assigned true meaning by inviting students to embed content into words. however, teachers and students sometimes suspect that language learning may only benefit those students who have received efl instruction or private lessons through a more grammar-oriented or coursebook-driven approach (banegas, in press). in this sense, clil may be seen as elitist as it only benefits those who already know the language to some extent. defining content in cbi-clil content may be identified with nonlanguage subjects or scientific disciplines (wolff, 2010, p. 103) “packaged in some way” (morton, 2010, p. 98). such a feature, however, may be hard to achieve. for example, rogers (2000) criticises content-basics adherents for not defining the type and quantity of content to be explored. this position demands active and independent inintegrating content and language in english language teaching in secondary education: models . . . 115 volvement of teachers and school authorities interested in developing an adaptable curriculum for the integration of content and language (wolff, 2010, p. 104-107). after all, the essential feature of cbi-clil should be that the content addressed truly emerges from students’ l1 school curriculum. barwell (2005, pp. 143-144) suggests the use of subject area instead of content since the latter could be merely seen as the product of contextualised teacher-learner interaction. his view is that content may be perceived as an external entity detached from the language which may lead to no language exploration. he also argues that if language is only the medium of instruction, not only is its status diminished in the integration, but also a rather false message can be conveyed: that language is devoid of content. if this view is strengthened, then language learning will be merely incidental (langman, 2003, p. 4). paz and quinterno (2009, p. 28) assert that language is content and its content is grammar, phonology, semantics, and skills development. perhaps these fears could be minimised by the discursification of language in the sense that language, even when it plays a functional role, could be taught by looking at how specific discourses are constructed. in a similar vein, mohan and slater (2005, p. 155) admit that defining content and language from the point of view of integration is debatable. they solve this intricacy by resorting to a functional view of language as it offers a broader perspective where meaning, functions and context are considered. the authors add that while content is the meaning of a discourse, such as science discourse, language is the wording of a discourse. this view requires that learners need to understand what is being meant, a school subject or curricular content, and on the other hand, how that meaning is worded in language, thus offering learners the possibility of paying close attention to how a language works. last, coyle, hood, & marsh (2010, p. 42, 53) stress that language learning with its focus on form and meaning should not be reduced to incidental or unplanned grammar. with this position in mind they stress that content, initially related to a discrete curriculum discipline, needs to be seen as beyond knowledge acquisition. for these authors, content is related to cognition, thus, we should also see it as skills development and understanding which leads to student-generated knowledge. in sum, language may be viewed as a scaffolding tool, with its own content as a system, which can be used to express functional meanings, such as narrating, describing a process, comparing sources, expressing opinions, or exchanging information. conversely, content is an abbreviation of curricular content from subjects such as history, geography, biology, or economics among others. however, content should also include language as a system of subsystems, as an object of study positioned in systemic functional linguistics. cbi and darío luis banegas 116 clil feature different combinations of these two components. what may link both language and content is discourse in the sense that this latter will dictate what will be learnt and through which specific subject-related discourse. however, what specific contents may be used is not clear-cut (see pp. 123-126). content-based instruction cbi is distinguished by its dual commitment to language and content learning objectives (stoller, 2004, p. 261). in general terms, the roots of this dual commitment to language and curricular content take us back to the canadian immersion programmes in the 1960s (ramos, 2009, p. 172). at the time and even during the 1970s and 1980s, canada implemented a french immersion project throughout schooling so that english-speaking learners could learn french by studying curricular subjects in french. stryke & leaver (1997, p. 270) define cbi as an approach in which language proficiency is achieved by focusing on learning curricular subject-matter through the language to be learnt. following this same stance but broadening the scope, brinton, snow, and wesche (2003, p. ix) view cbi as the concurrent study of both language and subject matter, where the content material will dictate how language will be sequenced and therefore presented. in countries such as canada and the usa, cbi has gained popularity as the demographics of second language student populations are changing dramatically due to the arrival of non-english-speaking migrants into englishspeaking communities thus putting pressure on educational systems (daltonpuffer, 2007, pp. 1-2). this phenomenon of transnationalism is impinged upon by socio-political circumstances such as the seeking of job opportunities, political asylum, or living standards (ramos, 2009, pp. 169-170). therefore, these new learners are placed in mainstream classrooms where subject-matter is instructed in english so that they learn both simultaneously (cammarata, 2009, p. 561; crandall, 1993; stoller, 2004, p. 262; wesche, 2001). cbi has been implemented throughout the whole canadian educational system as newcomers are found in primary, secondary, as well as university education (swain & johnson, 1997, p. 1). content and language integrated learning originated and developed in europe, (dafouz & guerrini, 2009; lorenzo, casal, & moore, 2010, p. 436; wolff, 2007, p. 15-16), clil can be traced to the german-franco programmes’ interest in bilingualism and supranational education (lorenzo, casal, & moore, 2010, p. 419). in 1994 david marsh introintegrating content and language in english language teaching in secondary education: models . . . 117 duced the acronym clil (eurydice 2006, p. 8; lucietto, 2008, p. 29). clil is an approach in which various methodologies are used to achieve a dual-focused form of instruction in language and content. furthermore, clil researchers use the term umbrella and several definitions (costa & d’angelo, 2011; haataja, 2007a, p. 9) to refer to the curricular variations prescribed in europe (bentley, 2010, p. 5-7; dalton-puffer, nikula, & smit, 2010; lorenzo, casal, & moore, 2010, p. 419; marsh & wolff, 2007). marsh’s generic concept was welcomed by the european union. the council of europe has included clil projects in its medium-term programmes due to the interest in developing the plurilingual competence of their citizens (dalton-puffer, 2007, pp. 1-2; marsh, 2002) through intercomprehension, interculturalism, and plurilingualism (de carlo, 2009; sudhoff, 2010). this plurilingual competence may be developed through a framework which facilitates the interrelationship between subject-matter knowledge and language knowledge through communication, culture and cognition (coyle, 2006; pérezvidal, 2009, pp. 8-9); or as coyle (2007a, p. 551, 2007b, p. 51) puts it, through a philosophical stance which has given rise to her practical and overarching 4cs framework integrated by content, communication, cognition and culture where these four are holistically considered in various models. however, dalton-puffer (2011) argues that most international implementations are in english and therefore it would be better to speak of ceil (content and english integrated learning) instead of clil. cbi-clil as a continuum of models both cbi and clil offer multiple models and approaches which could be seen as a continuum which goes from a focus on foreign or second language learning, at one end, to a greater interest in curricular instruction through an l2, at the other end. the proposal of a continuum (table 1) was initially suggested by met (1999) and then expanded by brinton, snow, and wesche (2003; see also hernández herrero, 2005; wesche & skehan, 2002, pp. 207-228). the cbi-clil continuum signals that there is no single pedagogy or model for integrating content and language (coyle, hood, & marsh, 2010, p. 86; ruiz-garrido & fortanet-gómez, 2009, pp. 180-181). coyle, hood, and marsh (2010, p. 14-26), for example, paint a clear and concise picture of general curricular models across educational levels and countries. in secondary education in particular, these authors suggest five models: dual-school education, bilingual education, interdisciplinary module approach, language based projects, and specific-domain vocational clil. while the former models stress the content side, language-based projects are different as it is the language teacher darío luis banegas 118 who teaches new content in the efl lesson. they all testify that we may shape clil according to contextual needs, resources and aims (marsh, 2008, p. 236). furthermore, they all confirm that to expect an approach to deal with content and language on equal terms is simply an illusion. table 1 continuum of language-content integration (adapted from met, 1999) content-driven language-driven content is taught in l2. content learning is priority. language learning is secondary. content objectives determined by course goals or curriculum. teachers must select language objectives. students evaluated on content mastery. content is used to learn l2. language learning is priority. content learning is incidental. language objectives determined by l2 course goals or curriculum. students evaluated on content to be integrated. students evaluated on language skills/proficiency. this continuum has proved useful as it covers all the different curricular models used for language-content integration in countries such as canada, china, england, japan, spain, or the usa (ballman, 1997, p. 174-175; butler, 2005, p. 229; cammarata, 2009, p. 561; johnson, 2008, p. 172-173; kong, 2009, p. 234; rodgers, 2006; ruiz de zarobe, 2008, p. 61-62). met’s continuum has been used to describe the range of settings that cbi, clil or cblt (content-based language teaching) entail (lyster & ballinger, 2011, p. 280). this encompassing view has impacted on several countries due to the fact that its broadening scope has attracted an international interest (banegas, 2011; bebenroth & redfield, 2004; stoller, 2004, p. 293) in implementing content-language integration projects such as globe (kennedy, 2006) at all educational levels. following a sociocultural perspective, it may be suggested that in language-driven approaches, content may be seen as a mediating tool for language learning. brinton, snow, and wesche (2003, pp. 14-15) place themebased instruction as one curricular model which could be implemented in educational contexts where nonlanguage teachers are not in a position to teach in the l2. theme-based instruction then occurs within the esl/efl or any other target language course and though the context is given by specific content areas, the focus of assessment is on language skills and functions (lorenzo, casal, & moore, 2010, p. 421; navés, 2009; yassin, tek, alimon, baharom, & ying, 2010, pp. 47-48). a theme-based course is structured around unrelated topics which provide the context for language instruction. this model bears some resemblances to cross-curricular projects (harris, 2008; savage, 2011, pp. 404-442) and also to english across the curriculum, where language teachers may work together with a content teacher on a particular topic. in east integrating content and language in english language teaching in secondary education: models . . . 119 asia and south america, for example, the purpose of theme-based instruction is to provide students with meaningful input so that they can develop a more encompassing use of their english through cognitive engagement (banegas, 2011; butler, 2005, p. 234; kong & hoare, 2011). nevertheless, one of its drawbacks is that teachers do not generally follow a set of themes derived from one curricular subject. instead, they address themes from biology, history, culture, and geography among others, thus offering small content blocks (rogers, 2000). furthermore, this may create confusion as the boundaries between a traditional topic-based approach and a clil approach appear unclear and teachers may believe that clil is another buzz term for something they have done before (banegas, in press). other language-driven approaches may include the adjunct model and language for specific purposes. the adjunct model (met, 1999) combines a language course with a content course. both courses share the same content base and the aim is to help learners at university level master academic content, materials, as well as language skills. a similar stance is evidenced in the language for specific purposes models (ruiz-garrido & fortanet-gómez, 2009). conversely, content-driven approaches may be said to utilise language as a mediating tool for content learning. content-driven approaches may include single or dual, semi or total immersion (dalton-puffer, 2007; grabe & stoller, 1997, p. 80), bilingual education, and translanguaging, that is, the ability of multilingual students to shuttle between languages while treating them as an integrated system (canagarajah, 2011, p. 401; creese & blackledge, 2010). the sheltered-content approach also belongs to this group as it consists of a content course taught by a content area specialist in the target language using authentic materials (rodgers, 2006, p. 373-375). secondary schools in the basque country have implemented clil in order to promote bilingual education, a content-driven approach, par excellence. as part of a longitudinal project seeking to investigate whether clil leads to faster foreign language learning among teenage learners in secondary education in the basque country, ruiz de zarobe (2008, p. 63) describes three linguistic models to ensure that spanish and/or basque are learnt in those schools which adopt clil: 1. model a: all subjects, apart from the basque language and literature and modern languages, are taught in spanish. 2. model b: both spanish and basque are used to teach all subjects. 3. model c: all subjects, except spanish language and literature and modern languages, are taught in basque. the models outlined by ruiz de zarobe (2008, p. 63; also lasagabaster & ruiz de zarobe, 2010) could be compared to three models proposed in poland darío luis banegas 120 which may be instantiations of the interdisciplinary and language-based project models. according to uczywek (2009, pp. 45-47), schools can choose from: 1. a monodisciplinary model: teachers work together to choose a topic to be addressed by the foreign language teacher in her class. even though all teachers cooperate, the language teacher explicitly integrates foreign language and subject-matter. 2. a multidisciplinary model: teachers choose a topic which will be addressed by each subject teacher including the foreign language teacher. although this model provides a broader view of the content chosen, it requires good team teaching work. 3. an interdisciplinary model: it requires more planning as it is thought as a set of lessons started by one subject which introduces the chosen topic. as lessons progress, each teacher builds up on what learners already know to provide them with a holistic understanding of the topic in focus. conversely, vázquez (2007, pp. 99-100) seems to blur the boundaries between bilingual education and clil and outlines five different bilingual/clil models currently found in german secondary schools. first, the classic model or full clil is a continuing bilingual programme through subjects such as history and geography which are taught in english. its aim is related to the job market and bilingualism through an emphasis on subject-matter instruction. this model may be compared to its counterpart in the netherlands where a maximum of 50% of the total number of lessons may be taught in english or any other target language (roza, 2009, p. 130). the short-term clil model, on the other hand, is carried out during a specific period of time through certain subjects. thirdly, the bilingual models and the bilingual projects models can be placed close to the language end of the continuum since language classes adopt theme-based units of work in which subjects and topics vary and, in fact, attempt to integrate more than two curriculum areas. last, and perhaps the most innovative in terms of how languages are used, the foreign language integrated model seeks to integrate l1 and l2 through nonlanguage classes which are taught in german but whose preferably authentic texts and materials are in the foreign language. one more explicit model which falls under the first model found in germany is the three-directional model proposed by ramos (2009, pp. 174-179). this model is closely linked to the german classic model as it is addressed to teachers who teach their nonlanguage subjects in english. therefore it is curriculum-driven and text-based, which could be associated with bilingual education or interdisciplinary models (coyle, hood, & marsh, 2010). the model suggests three directions: horizontality, verticality, and diagonality. the first direction is concerned with how the lesson is structured. verticality, the second diintegrating content and language in english language teaching in secondary education: models . . . 121 rection, is realised by the task of including in each stage the vocabulary, grammatical patterns and learning strategies the teacher has set as objectives. in other words, the model emphasises the importance of cohesion as each aspect of the lesson is recaptured and revitalised in a dynamic process. the last direction ramos’ model proposes is that of diagonality. this direction is intimately linked with the teaching discourse of explicitly telling learners what goals have been achieved at the end of each stage and the goals to be pursued in the coming stage. in conclusion, this model may be similar to any other model or approach within the communicative language teaching realm. while clil in the basque country and germany appears to be closely attached to the school curriculum, poland offers, on the other hand, models which aim at a more complex integration through projects. while the first two countries mentioned offer a more systematic and organised approach which favours the instruction of content through a foreign language, poland, in contrast, presents a less structured approach which is more concerned with language, thus subtly implying that content is an excuse for collaboration and projects across the school curriculum. whatever the model, they are all based on a sociocultural perspective as the view that content will motivate learners to learn another language is paramount. however, this whole array of models which seem to stress the perception that clil is a suit for all seasons (costa & d’angelo, 2011) may also be a shortcoming for cbi-clil education. it may give the impression that anything that deals with a certain type of content may be called clil (marsh, 2008, p. 244). this perception may be clarified if we agree that the content involved should match the students’ l1 curriculum rather than a random selection of topics which may bear distant or false connections with curricular content in a given educational system. cbi-clil research in programme evaluation cbi-clil multiple models have given rise to a growing interest which can be found across countries. according to the eurydice report (2006, p. 20), most countries offer clil in secondary education. this report shows that between the years 2004 and 2005, most countries offered clil in mainstream secondary and, in second place, primary education as a result of imposed educational policies. dalton-puffer and nikula (2006) observe that clil has become a common practice in many european countries as primarily reported by practitioners describing or researching their own classroom experiences in an experimental quantitative paradigm in countries such as austria (dalton-puffer, 2007; dalton-puffer, hüttner, schindelegger, & smit, 2009; gierlinger, 2007), darío luis banegas 122 finland (haataja, 2007b; nikula, 2007; seikkula-leino, 2007), italy (favilla, 2009; lucietto, 2008), belgium (chopey-paquet & amory-bya, 2007), hungary (várkuti, 2010), poland (loranc-paszylk, 2009), portugal (costa & godinho, 2007, p. 70), spain (halbach, 2009; lasagabaster & sierra, 2010; lasagabaster & ruiz de zarobe, 2010; llinares & whittaker, 2009; lorenzo, casal, & moore, 2010; monte & roza, 2007) and sweden (airey, 2009) among others. in the year 2010, lorenzo, casal, and moore (2010) published a largescale evaluative study from a curriculum perspective which took place between 2007 and 2008. the authors were concerned with clil and its potential for positive cognitive gains, especially to what extent clil learners could increase their linguistic and competence levels compared to their mainstream peers, their use of l2, and the effects of clil in the wider educational context. data were collected through questionnaires to given 2,300 participating learners and parents, recorded structured interviews of coordinators, and tests administered to bilingual and control learners so as to assess language competences. results showed that the clil learners outperformed the control groups in all four language skills in the four foreign languages under consideration. according to the authors, this may also be due to the motivational processes behind clil classes as compared to the mainstream. as regards how input was made comprehensible, teacher questionnaires showed that while content teachers tended to use the l2 for content, language teachers would use it for feedback and evaluation. however, both types of teachers coincided in the use of the l1 when dealing with problems or for the telling of anecdotes. nonetheless, the study was criticised by bruton (2011a, p. 240), who accused the authors of wanting “to demonstrate that clil is necessarily a positive route” to raise foreign language learning curriculum standards. according to bruton (2011a), the study failed to provide valid results between clil and nonclil groups as pretests, extra clil support and differences in status were not disinterestedly addressed. this is not the first time that bruton becomes critical of research articles on clil and suggests that clil programmes are elitist. in bruton (2011b), the author also warns that clil research and results are presented in such a way that they appear positive and encouraging when, in fact, researchers may select only those data which demonstrate the hypothesis that clil is more effective than regular efl lessons. in my view, bruton’s observations are correct as lorenzo, casal, and moore’s (2010) limited consideration of participants’ exposure to english, and student and teacher motivation in synergy as a result of advertised curriculum innovation may be the underlying drive. despite these research shortcomings, lorenzo, casal, and moore’s (2010) study could still be considered foundational since it provides a picture of what teachers do in their classrooms when policies are implemented. integrating content and language in english language teaching in secondary education: models . . . 123 challenges behind cbi-clil when clil models, for example, are the result of top-down policies and curriculum initiatives, we need to accept that they carry benefits as well as challenges which may emerge from research interested in clil programme evaluation. based on mehisto and asser (2007), mehisto (2008, pp. 99-100) notes that one of the issues to address is the lack of knowledge stakeholders have as regards aims. in order for administrators to implement clil programmes and multiple models, there must be serious needs analysis (butler, 2005, pp. 233-236; ruiz-garrido & fortanet-gómez, 2009) to be carried out before all actions actually begin. in my view, all models need to be inductively implemented as it may be the best way to ensure that implementations are the product of contextual conditions. context-responsive clil pedagogies entail that stakeholders are aware of the conditions offered and required in each educational setting. lack of awareness or knowledge among administrators can also be found among those who are in charge of implementing clil: teachers. teachers sometimes do not know what is expected from them especially when clil means putting content and language teachers working together. in effect, teachers need to come to terms with the models outlined above but only as a framework from which they can develop their own initiatives depending on their level of institutional autonomy. for instance, mehisto (2008) found out that those clil classes which were only taught by content teachers featured second language support mostly through unnecessary translation. this also led to the discovery that teachers saw themselves as either content or language teachers, a view which affected team teaching or a full integration of components. this reticence was found even in teachers’ unwillingness to incorporate materials coming from content or language classes. overall, the author suggests that team teaching is one of the major drawbacks in clil (see also cammarata, 2009, pp. 569-574; coonan, 2007; coyle, 2007b; coyle, hood, & marsh, 2010, p. 44; feryok, 2008; mehisto, marsh, & frigols, 2008; yassin, tek, alimon, baharom, & ying, 2010). what i put forward is that in those situations where team teaching is still expected, this may occur between efl teachers by strengthening collaborative planning and materials development within the efl teaching staff. more teacher-related concerns are reported in pena díaz & porto requejo (2008) as part of a research project following the implementation of bilingual-clil programmes in 150 primary schools in madrid. in order to understand the factors which impinge on clil teachers’ practices in this setting, an unspecified number of teachers were interviewed following structured questionnaires. results showed that teachers believed their practices could be enhanced should they develop a more proficient command of english, a condarío luis banegas 124 cern also reported in pavón vázquez and rubio (2010, p. 51) and in butler’s (2005, p. 236) study, which adds that teachers’ lack of content and language knowledge affects clil success. in other words, teachers may equate clil success with their own level of english and curricular content understanding. surprisingly, given the fact that the participants in pena díaz and porto requejo (2008) lacked formal training on bilingual education methodologies, they considered they did not need that type of theoretical training. they expressed their reliance on working with content teachers and the practical knowledge, not defined in the article, of their subjects. put simply, another concern which is recurrent across contexts is how to organise pre-service and in-service teacher education programmes which could also contemplate clil settings as possible sources of employment for future teachers. mehisto’s (2008) article also includes a review of interviews with teachers who were asked about what factors helped achieve clil programme success. among the factors mentioned, training opportunities, support by immersion centres, and teaching materials were ranked in that order as regards their central importance in clil programmes. addressing such factors is paramount for quality assurance in clil (coyle, 2007). however, when school managers were interviewed, they admitted that these factors were rarely met. such inaction caused distress as well as further resistance to innovation among teachers. this fact should remind us of what happens when implementations occur from the centre to the periphery where the implementers, that is, the teachers, are not fully equipped by adopters and suppliers (waters, 2009, p. 437). nor is there development of clil teacher training programmes, content materials or instructional resources (ruiz de zarobe, 2008, p. 62; lyster & ballinger, 2011, p. 286). however, in germany, universities have started to offer an additional clil teaching qualification, a trend which could be imitated by other countries (vázquez, 2007, pp. 102-103). nonetheless, i sense that most of the concerns outlined above stem from the fact that it may not be clear what cbi-clil models entail and how they differ from task-based learning, a topic-based syllabus, or international coursebooks which usually feature reading topics or sections about general knowledge or culture. as i have suggested above, it is my view that the broad scope of cbi-clil models may act to the detriment of the models themselves as teachers may come to the conclusion that as long as there is ‘some content’ involved, they can call whatever they do cbi or clil within a language-driven perspective. thus, it may be necessary for cbi-clil proponents to redefine what contents are expected to be used. in my own opinion, i suggest that the content component of cbi-clil should be closely connected to the school curriculum whatever the model. integrating content and language in english language teaching in secondary education: models . . . 125 with reference to materials, ballman (1997, p. 183-184) claims that publishers need to produce coursebooks which are related to learners’ lives in their contexts. nonetheless, this suggestion is incompatible with cbi-clil spirit as contents should match the context and curriculum of implementation and, therefore, i suspect that publishers, especially in this era of the global coursebook, may not be interested to localise their international coursebooks to match the national curricula in every setting. this would call for an extreme diversification which implies huge investment and little profits. it has also been suggested that teachers engaged in content-driven models may use textbooks for native speakers to teach subjects such as history. the drawback of these materials is that they will not match other curricula than those of the native student. it cannot be expected that a history book produced for british students could possibly respond to the argentinian school curriculum, for example. british history is studied by british students. argentinian history is studied by argentinian students. this lack of cbi-clil materials implies greater workload for teachers (alonso, grisaleña, & campo 2008, p. 46; cammarata, 2009, p. 562; coonan, 2007, p. 628; maley, 2011, p. 391; moore & lorenzo, 2007, pp. 28-35; mehisto, marsh, & frigols, 2008, p. 22; ricci garotti, 2007, pp. 134-135; vázquez, 2007, p. 103). however, it is teachers in argentina, spain, or poland who truly know what their school curricula contain and, therefore, they are in the best position to develop curriculum-responsive materials which could supplement other international materials. what i observe is that this challenge is, in fact, an opportunity for teachers to become autonomous, less market-dependent, and developers of their own cbi-clil materials. i suggest that teachers may produce their own materials in collaboration even with their students to ensure that topics, sources, and activities are relevant and motivating in both students (huang, 2011) and teachers’ eyes and in response to the l1 curriculum. another cause of disjuncture among teachers is the issue of examinations (serragiotto, 2007). while clil, in theory, looks at language and content holistically, national exams are solely focused on content, creating a fracture in the system. in other words, while the educational process has one set of aims, examinations are guided by a different agenda, as it were. with reference to this concern, to my knowledge, there are no research studies which investigate complete teaching and learning processes so as to see what principles and decisions are to be found in classrooms. the point i am advancing here is that there is a timely need to investigate classroom practices which evidence what teachers do from introducing new content and language topics until assessment is carried out and what materials scaffold these processes. darío luis banegas 126 lack of knowledge of what cbi-clil entails can also be found among students. for example, mehisto (2008) observed that out of 37 classes only a few featured what the aims, outcomes and themes were, thus affecting learners’ achievement as they did not know what was really expected from them and how this programme actually differed from a more traditional approach. however, this side of clil has not been further explored. in fact, international clil research journal has several examples of reports and quasi-experiments in which learners voice their happiness but seldom their less happy experiences. another negative aspect or, as vázquez (2007, p. 106) puts it, less positive point, is parents’ resistance to accept english as the first language. given its dominance in the clil scene, this feeling may be provoked by the tendency to explore clil through english only (dalton-puffer, 2007, p. 1), which in turn reveals that all the so-called plurilingual initiatives have been nothing but plans and intentions. from a research perspective, the lack of rigor may affect how clil is overall evaluated. because of the design of some research, clil education may be perceived as elitist since, sometimes, the best learners from mainstream classes are placed in clil classes. this, needless to say, may skew possible research results, for learners have achieved good levels of performance both content and language-wise before starting clil. this fact also reveals a need to study classrooms in which learners have not been placed according to their foreign language performance or overall academic grades. as mehisto (2008) rightly claims above, stakeholders, especially school managers, must exercise a prominent role when clil is adopted as a result of a top-down process. in that case, one of the challenges which school managers are not ready to explore is faculty development which assists both subject and language teachers so that they collaboratively teach subject-matter they have not been initially trained for. if this is not achieved, content teachers, who usually lack linguistic expertise (vázquez, 2007, p. 106), may tend to stress content and neglect both language learning and the language teacher (kong, 2009, p. 236; creese, 2005, p. 194). in these situations, a clil coordinator can act as a liaison among learners, parents and content and language teachers (pavón vázquez & rubio, 2010, p. 54). i believe that a cbi-clil coordinator may be in charge of ensuring the proper balance in content and language supported by methodologies and materials which help construct this integration, especially when teachers may find it difficult to team teach. conclusion approaches which promote the integration of curricular content and foreign/second language learning offer a sound theoretical background comintegrating content and language in english language teaching in secondary education: models . . . 127 ing from varied disciplines and academic spheres. in addition, cbi-clil offers models, curricular variations and a continuum which highlights the fact that institutions may opt for content-driven as well as language-driven implementations. however, we should stress that several of the implementations and innovative explorations within cbi-clil tend to be imposed on teachers as part of large-scale educational policies. reports, in addition, solely focus on the benefits of these approaches thus creating a rather incomplete picture of how these realisations operate in practice without deeply voicing all stakeholders’ views. this calls for an agenda which truly integrates policy and curriculum perspectives as well as top-down and bottom-up explorations. these aspects appear to point towards the need for contextualised practices. although cbi and clil were originally the result of context-responsive answers to emerging situations in canada, the usa or europe, other countries have started to embrace cbi-clil as an innovative approach in their quest for a revitalisation of the communicative approach. what is needed then is the creation of spaces in which cbi-clil is examined within a particular context of culture where teachers play a significant role as they are crucial in any educational change. cbi-clil offers new avenues for exploration, but these avenues have to be based on thorough needs analysis in which all stakeholders are involved and in strict response to students’ l1 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(2010). teaching science through english: engaging pupils cognitively. international clil research journal, 1(3), 46-59. 13 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (1). 2015. 13-40 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.1.2 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl neurology of foreign language aptitude adriana biedroń pomeranian university, słupsk, poland adriana.biedron@apsl.edu.pl abstract this state-of-the art paper focuses on the poorly explored issue of foreign language aptitude, attempting to present the latest developments in this field and reconceptualizations of the construct from the perspective of neuroscience. in accordance with this goal, it first discusses general directions in neurolinguistic research on foreign language aptitude, starting with the earliest attempts to define the neurological substrate for talent, sources of difficulties in the neurolinguistic research on foreign language aptitude and modern research methods. this is followed by the discussion of the research on the phonology of foreign language aptitude with emphasis on functional and structural studies as well as their consequences for the knowledge of the concept. the subsequent section presents the studies which focus on lexical and morphosyntactic aspects of foreign language aptitude. the paper ends with a discussion of the limitations of contemporary research, the future directions of such research and selected methodological issues. keywords: foreign language aptitude, neurology, neurolinguistics, individual differences 1. introduction in the research on individual differences, foreign language aptitude (fl aptitude) has recently become one of the most often debated topics among scholars not adriana biedroń 14 only in the field of sla and language education but also neurolinguistics. the research on the construct has always been considerably inspired by the sciences of cognitive psychology, genetics and neurology; however, only in the recent twenty years have the developments in neurology allowed genuine progress in the field (cf. long, 2013, p. 33). as early as the 1980s, researchers trying to find the source of exceptional linguistic abilities concentrated on the neurological basis underlying talent for learning languages (fein & obler, 1988; novoa, fein, & obler, 1988; obler, 1989; schneiderman & desmarais, 1988a, 1988b). in their classic study of gifted foreign language learners, schneiderman and desmarais (1988a, 1988b) suggested that linguistic talent denotes greater neurocognitive flexibility as well as bilateral processing of the brain. currently, the first part of this intuitive hypothesis referring to brain flexibility has been confirmed by experimental research conducted by susanne reiterer and her coworkers (reiterer, hu, sumathi, & singh, 2013), who, as a result of functional neuroimaging, provided evidence that phonetically talented subjects are more neurocognitively flexible than less gifted individuals. recently, the knowledge of human cognitive abilities has greatly expanded owing to new discoveries in related science fields such as psychology of individual differences, cognitive science, neuroscience and genetics, with the effect that the construct has been updated and reconceptualized. fl aptitude is now defined as a conglomerate of various cognitive abilities (carroll, 1993; dörnyei, 2010), subject to the same biological, that is, genetic and neurological, principles as all other abilities, such as mathematical or musical ones. the functioning of the neural system is a basis for individual differences in cognitive abilities. in this respect, there are three sources of ability differentiation: neural conduction velocity, neural efficiency, and gray and white matter volumes. as jensen (1997, 2002), a major proponent of the hereditarian position, argues, all the variation in mental performance has a biological basis. he explains that there is a negative correlation between the intelligence quotient (iq), which is a measure of general cognitive ability, and the reaction time of a person. according to this correlation, the higher the iq level of a person is, the less time he or she needs to solve a problem or to learn something. his arguments rest on interdependencies between the results obtained using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri), electroencephalogram (eeg), event related potential (erp), emission tomography (pet), and studies of nerve conduction velocity and iq scores. thanks to these neuroscientific methods of analysis, it has been well evidenced that intelligence is related to both brain functioning and structure. for example, an fmri study demonstrated that the general cognitive factor appears to be based on the volume and location of gray matter tissue in the brain (haier, jung, yeo, head, & alkire, 2004). many studies have converged on the view that the frontal neurology of foreign language aptitude 15 lobes are essential for fluid intelligence, a distinctive role being attributed to the lateral prefrontal cortex (schoenemann, sheehan, & glotzer, 2005). consequently, at the moment there is no academic discussion about individual differences, especially cognitive factors, without neuroscientific research. applied linguists and language educators cannot fail to include these breakthroughs from neuroscience into fl aptitude research. 2. neurolinguistic research on foreign language aptitude neurolinguistics has become the most informative and ground-breaking source of knowledge about sla, complementing earlier dependence on behavioral records (cf. long, 2013, p. 33). the number of studies on neurological substrates of fl aptitude is growing and the data obtained from them are becoming more consistent and replicable (cf. chee, soon, lee, & pallier, 2004; díaz, mitterer, broersma, & sebastián-gallés, 2012; golestani, price, & scott, 2011; hu et al., 2013; pereda, reiterer, & bhattacharya, 2011; reiterer et al., 2011a; reiterer, pereda, & bhattacharya, 2011b; sebastián-gallés et al., 2012). nevertheless, there are many neglected or poorly investigated areas and, generally, the redefinition of the construct is far from complete. this situation originates from a variety of sources. the most important are the following: the heterogeneity and extension of the fl aptitude construct, the high level of individualization of the brain, and, last but not least, a small number of researchers interested in fl aptitude and specialized in neurolinguistics. one of the most important obstacles in examining fl aptitude is the heterogeneity of the construct. to start with carroll’s (1959) classic model of fl aptitude, which conceptualized the construct as comprising four distinct and relatively independent abilities: phonetic coding ability, grammatical sensitivity, inductive language learning ability and rote memorization ability, all the successive models (grigorenko, sternberg, & ehrman, 2000; robinson, 2002; skehan, 2002; sparks, javorsky, patton, & ganschow, 1998) have attached extra aptitudes reflecting current views and advances in the domain of sla. skehan’s (2002) aptitude model underscores the importance of incorporating developments in sla research to update fl aptitude theory, while robinson’s (2002) aptitude complexes framework highlights the dynamic interactions between fl aptitude profiles, task features and their implications for l2 instruction. moreover, both models lay emphasis on the role of the memory factor in language acquisition. grigorenko et al.’s (2000, see also sternberg & grigorenko, 2000) canal-f theory stresses the ability to cope with novelty and ambiguity when learning a foreign language, whereas sparks et al.’s (1998) linguistic coding differences hypothesis (lcdh) emphasizes the dynamic nature of fl aptitude and adriana biedroń 16 postulates that native language (l1) skills are essential for predicting foreign language (l2) learning. besides, such constructs as working memory (wm), phonological short-term memory and noticing ability have been incorporated in all the contemporary models of fl aptitude (robinson, 2002; skehan, 2002), which extends the fl aptitude research to the fields usually associated with psychology. particularly, the proposal to include wm in the array of fl aptitudes seems to have gained increasing attention among sla researchers in recent years (dekeyser & koeth, 2011; doughty, 2013; juffs & harrington, 2011; wen & skehan, 2011; williams, 2012). overall, the whole construct of fl aptitude is highly complex and multifaceted, which is reflected by dörnyei’s (2005, p. 33) statement that it has become an umbrella-term for a number of cognitive factors creating a composite gauge regarded as the general capacity to master a foreign language. this has effects on the research on the neurology of fl aptitude, where some mechanisms which serve language learning behavior are better investigated than others. for example, neural mechanisms for procedural and declarative memory, memory consolidation and attention (schumann, 2004a, p. 1), phonological abilities (reiterer et al., 2013), and the congenital nature of l1 and l2 aptitude (díaz et al., 2012) are often investigated. others, for example analytic aptitude required for grammar processing, the ability to learn vocabulary, noticing ability, wm as fl aptitude, pragmatic ability and semantic fluency, remain neglected. it seems that these disproportions largely reflect weak areas in the theory of fl aptitude. another major problem that complicates the foundation of a unified neurological picture of fl aptitude is a high level of the individualization of the brain. according to schumann (2004b, p. 7), “all brains are different—as different as faces . . . and these differences have consequences for learning.” some differences result from genetic inheritance; for example, greater brain plasticity (cf. díaz et al., 2012; golestani, 2012; sebastián-gallés & díaz, 2012; sebastiángallés et al., 2012). some others are considered adaptive changes in the brain occurring in response to experience (golestani, molko, dehaene, lebihan, & pallier, 2007; green, crinion, & price, 2006). accordingly, high fl aptitude might be a consequence of both inborn functional and structural/ anatomical characteristics as well as an individual brain response to an idiosyncratic experience of learning a language. de bot (2006) expresses his opinion on this interrelationship in the following way: there are individuals who will have both exceptional language skills and deviant brain structures. . . . it is likely that learning might have an impact on brain structures, although it is unclear how plastic the brain is and to what extent specific teaching and learning methods might enhance plasticity or make optimal use of it. (p. 130) neurology of foreign language aptitude 17 according to schumann (2004b), there are five sources of variation among brains, which result in differences in fl aptitude, namely genetic, developmental, experiential, degeneracy and individual appraisal system. his claim is in most part based on classic theories of heritability (cf. jensen, 1997; plomin, 1997), ascribing significant genetic contributions to cognitive abilities. genetic variance in a child attributable to parental genes accounts for about 50% of correlation between siblings and is higher for monozygotic twins (about .86) and lower for fraternal twins (.60) and for regular siblings (.48), which means that genes are the most influential factor in the development of cognitive ability. the second source is the specific chemical environment during the embryonic stage of development. as a result, human brains are similarly constructed but differ significantly at the microstructural level. the third source of variation are the interactions with the environment, with the effect that they channel the brain’s anatomy, that is, the increase of neurons and connections among them. because each individual has idiosyncratic environmental experience, these influences contribute to additional microstructural variation in the neural structure. the fourth process which contributes to variation between brains is called degeneracy. this term describes a situation when two or more different neural systems subserve the same goal, that is to say, when the same behavior can be achieved by different underlying processes. these alternate systems discriminate individual brains (indefrey & gullberg, 2006; schumann, 2004b). the fifth source of variance are idiosyncratic preferences and aversions, that is, an individual appraisal system (scherer, 1984). individual experiences and affective reactions are stored in memory and used to evaluate future experiences, and consequently affect individual choices. moreover, people seek environments fitting their genotype, which in turn influences their abilities (jensen, 1997). jensen (1997) also points to the fact that randomness or luck should be considered another source of variation. the development of fl aptitude might be a consequence of evolutionary selection processes (schumann, 2004b), which means that individuals can be differently prepared to respond to environmental changes, and, consequently, to survive and to transmit their genes. adaptation to the environment can generate a hypertrophy, which is a structural (anatomical) abnormality in the brain (van den noort, nordby, bosch, & hugdahl, 2005), which, in turn, can result in a specific ability. the brain of a talented individual with a particular hypertrophy responds to the learning process strengthening certain neural connections or creating new neural pathways. this, in sequence, facilitates learning, and, consequently, the talented individual might achieve high expertise in the field of study (cf. golestani et al., 2011; perani, 2005; reiterer et al., 2013). generally, neurological differences between foreign language learners, which might be assigned to different domains of fl aptitude, are divided into adriana biedroń 18 functional (i.e., those connected with brain activation) and structural (i.e., those connected with brain anatomy). these differences are associated with distinct aspects and levels of language processing starting with simple perceptual/cognitive functions such as nonnative sound learning and articulation, and phonetic expertise, through more complex ones such as wm for verbal and lexical information, to the most compound processes including reading, syntax, bilingual functioning and executive control over linguistic fluency. most of the research in the domain of language has focused on brain functioning using such methods as fmri, eeg, and magnetoencephalography (meg). however, over the last 17 years the number of studies examining brain structure or a change over time, that is, plasticity, has grown significantly thanks to the development of very advanced technologies such as anatomical magnetic resonance imaging (amri) and diffusion tensor imaging (dti; golestani, 2012, p. 2). neuroimaging techniques are described in table 1. table 1 neuroimaging techniques technique definition pet (positron emission tomography) used for localization of different neural functions by means of injection of radioactive tracers. more active brain areas have higher levels of blood flow and, consequently, of the tracer. by creating pictures of the tracer distribution, a neuroscientist can obtain a pattern of brain functioning. pet has high spatial resolution (goswami, 2004: 5-6). fmri (functional magnetic resonance imaging) gives similar results to pet, but relies on measuring the magnetic resonance signal generated by the protons of water molecules in neurons. fmri has high spatial resolution (goswami, 2004: 5-6). erp (event related potential) erp is, unlike pet and fmri, based not on localization of neural activity, but on the timing of neural events. erp has high temporal resolution. electrodes placed on the skin of the scalp record activity of the brain. this experimental technique is based on eeg (encephalography) (goswami, 2004: 5-6). meg (magnetoencephalography) a diagnostic technique which measures the level of magnetic signals as a result of electrical activity in the brain. meg has high temporal resolution. (http://psychologydictionary.org/magnetoencephalography-imegl/) amri (anatomical magnetic resonance imaging) a high resolution technique which can be used to describe the shape, size and integrity of grey and white matter structures in the brain. (http://fmri.ucsd.edu/research/whatisfmri.html) dti (diffusion tensor imaging) it can be used to map white matter fibre tracks (http://fmri.ucsd.edu/research/whatisfmri.html) traditionally, it is believed that changes in brain functioning are rapid whereas those in brain structure take longer. however, these new methods of brain investigation have revealed that also structural changes can occur rapidly, basically within hours (golestani, 2012). another important discovery is that, generally, the same regions which functionally subserve cognitive processes involved neurology of foreign language aptitude 19 in language processing also structurally correlate with these processes. as a result, a number of anatomical differences have been found in more versus less proficient foreign language learners. for example, mechelli et al. (2004) discovered that the acquisition of multiple languages results in an expansion of grey matter in the left parietal cortex. green et al. (2006) studied anatomical changes implicated in processing a language among simultaneous interpreters as compared to monolingual, bilingual and multilingual speakers. what they found was higher grey matter density in interpreters in three regions: bilateral putamen, the inferior and superior colliculi, and the bilateral dorso-medial thalami, a phenomenon ascribed to long-term effects of the acquisition of a very advanced linguistic skill, which, in turn, makes the acquisition of succeeding languages easier. stein and colleagues’ (stein et al., 2012) study provided evidence for brain structural plasticity as a result of second language learning. they conducted a longitudinal study by means of amri on native speakers of english learning german prior to and after five months of learning. as a result, they discovered structural changes over time in the left inferior frontal gyrus and in the left anterior temporal lobe, which positively correlated with individual differences in the increase in second language proficiency during training. generally, the differences in the left inferior parietal cortex and in the left inferior frontal cortex associated with bilingualism are related to the age of acquisition and predict second language proficiency (golestani, 2012, p. 20). interesting as they are, these studies explain differences in proficiency between learners, but proficiency does not equal aptitude. accordingly, reiterer, pereda and bhattacharya (2009, p. 98) point to the fact that “language proficiency” is an ambiguous term involving various factors including aptitude for languages. therefore, most of the studies presented in this review must be interpreted as indirect evidence of differences in fl aptitude. all the above mentioned research provides evidence for brain plasticity as a result of experience. however, many studies offer an alternative interpretation of this phenomenon, tracing the roots of anatomical specificity to genetic factors (cf. golestani, 2012). the example of a polyglot emil krebs (1867-1930), who fluently spoke more than 60 languages, is presented as classic evidence for a peculiar inborn brain architecture that facilitates fl aptitude. apparently, the cell structure in his broca’s area was significantly different from a normal brain cell structure (amunts, schleicher, & zilles, 2004). in contrast, no plausible explanation for talent has been discovered in the brain of a linguistic savant, christopher (smith, tsimpli, morgan, & woll, 2011). the discussion of the origination of hypertrophies will be addressed at greater length in the following section. for the sake of clarity, the following review will present both functional and anatomical studies in the fields of phonology, grammar and lexis with respect to fl aptitude. adriana biedroń 20 3. neurology of phonological aptitude the phonological aspect is the best investigated of all the components of fl aptitude (christiner & reiterer, 2013; díaz et al., 2012; golestani et al., 2011). as far as anatomy is concerned, differences in the phonological cognitive functioning include the auditory cortex, the parietal cortices and the inferior frontal gyrus, all of which are related to such levels of phonetics as auditory processing, the perception of nonnative sounds, the use of tonal information, and the ability to imitate nonnative sounds. differences in auditory processing have been found in left heschl’s gyrus (hg) anatomy, which means that higher gray matter density is associated with better performance (sutherland et al., 2012; warrier et al., 2009). a significant factor related to language aptitude is phonetic perception, which is required for phonetic production, accent imitation, verbal wm, as well as semantic perception and production. many studies have confirmed substantial individual differences among people in the perception, recognition and learning of foreign sounds (golestani et al., 2007; golestani, paus, & zatorre, 2002; golestani et al., 2011; sebastián-gallés et al., 2012). as a result of the examination of brain structure in expert phoneticians, golestani and her team discovered that phonologically talented learners have more grey matter and white matter in parietal regions, in particular in the left hemisphere. their results suggest that this morphological difference is inborn and might have existed before the onset of phonetic training thus affecting career choices of the subjects. as they explain, complementary influences of inborn predispositions and experience-dependent brain pliability interact in determining not only how experience shapes the human brain, but also why some individuals become engaged in certain fields of expertise (golestani et al., 2011, p. 4213). left parietal cortex is pertinent to phonetic tasks and is the location of phonological verbal wm; therefore, the anatomy fundamental for wm in the left auditory cortex also predicts phonological aptitude. the researchers explain the asymmetry in the amount of white matter in more talented learners in terms of greater myelineation, that is, an increase in myelin volume (white matter), which indicates a better isolation of the transport of electric signals, which, in turn, leads to faster and more efficient neural processing vital in learning the phonetics of a language. the researchers conclude that morphological differences in parietal white matter can predict the pace and efficiency of learning new sounds. there is a number of other hypertrophies that differentiate more from less able l2 learners, mostly related to the anatomy of the hg. for example, higher white matter density has been found in the left hg, as well as in a split or a duplicate of the hg, in more able learners. in fact, there can be two or three hg per hemisphere. additionally, the right insula and hg are more superiorly located in slower learners (golestani et al., 2011). what is more, a larger volume of grey neurology of foreign language aptitude 21 matter in the hg has been found in musicians, which positively correlates with musical aptitude (schneider et al., 2002; cf. christiner & reiterer, 2013). generally, a global displacement of components of the language area in the left hemisphere can predict the learning of speech sounds. there is also evidence that variation in perisylvian anatomy is related to oral language ability. abnormalities have been found in children with dyslexia and other language disorders. abnormal asymmetry of the planum temporale has been detected in people with poor verbal ability (golestani et al., 2007). moreover, an increase in grey matter has been observed in the mid-body of the corpus collosum which connects the two hemispheres in highly proficient l2 speakers (coggins, kennedy, & armstrong, 2004; van den noort, bosch, & hugdahl, 2006). interestingly, the differences lie not only in the auditory cortex, but also in the more general language network and even in the right hemisphere. for example, greater white matter density has been observed in certain visual brain regions, which means that those are also engaged in phonological processing (golestani et al., 2007). sebastián-gallés et al. (2012) examined neuroanatomical markers of individual differences in vowel perception. they compared brain morphology in two groups of highly proficient early bilinguals, equally proficient in an l2, but differing in their ability to perceive both native and nonnative vowels. voxel-based morphometry analysis revealed that there is a larger white matter volume in the right insulo/fronto-opercular region in poorer perceptual discriminators of native and nonnative vowels. the higher white matter volumes in poor perceivers indicate a stronger activation of these areas which are used as a compensatory mechanism that enhances auditory discrimination abilities. this conclusion accords with similar results obtained by reiterer et al. (2011a), reiterer et al. (2011b) and wong, perrachione, and parrish (2007), where a more extended or bilateral activation in poorer language learners was observed. another group of studies refers to the use of tonal information linguistically. wong and colleagues (wong, chandrasekaran, garibaldi, & wong, 2011; wong et al., 2007; wong et al., 2008) confirmed larger volume of the left hg in more successful learners using fmri, amri and dti. moreover, wong et al. (2011) found that white matter connectivity in the left temporoparietal region correlated positively with the use of tonal information. summing up, there is a partial dissociation between the structural correlates of phonetic perception and production (golestani, 2012, p. 15). functional studies on phonological processing generally corroborate three hypotheses related to fl aptitude, that is (a) a stronger and bilateral activation of brain areas of less gifted individuals in comparison to those of more gifted ones, (b) the dual genetic/environmental source of aptitude differences, and (c) the common neural basis for l1 and l2 aptitudes (díaz, baus, escera, adriana biedroń 22 costa, & sebastián-gallés, 2008; golestani & zatorre, 2004; reiterer et al., 2011a; reiterer et al., 2011b; wong et al., 2007). one of the earliest questions asked by neurolinguists was whether neural correlates for an l1 and l2 are the same or different. most studies have converged on the view that unlike an l1, which always activates the same areas in the left hemisphere, an l2 activates a very changeable network of both hemispheres (dehaene et al., 1997). this observation is typically not ascribed to differences in aptitude but to the age of onset and level of proficiency. in many studies late-onset, low proficiency l2 learners have demonstrated greater right hemisphere activation, whereas areas of l1 and l2 activation tend to overlap in early-onset, more proficient learners (kim, relkin, lee, & hirsch, 1997). more recently, these results have been replicated by golestani and zatorre (2004), indefrey and gullberg (2006), reiterer et al. (2011a); reiterer et al. (2011b), sebastián-gallés et al. (2012) and wong et al. (2007), all of whom reported a more extended or bilateral activation in the brains of less successful language learners. specifically, more active cortical regions in less proficient learners during l2 processing concentrate in the left posterior inferior frontal gyrus (ifg) (indefrey, 2006; stowe, 2006; van den noort et al., 2005). in indefrey’s (2006, p. 300) interpretation, the ifg is optimized for an l1 and less efficient for an l2. effort increases activation, which means that learners might compensate for lower efficiency in an l2 by driving this region more strongly or activating a bigger number of neurons to perform a task, whereas automatized activities require less effort, and, consequently, less activation. all of this indicates that the efficiency of the neural organization, next to brain anatomy, might establish a neurological basis for fl aptitude. indefrey and gullberg (2006) postulate that with the increase in l2 proficiency, the processing profile in an l2 becomes similar to an l1. what causes higher activation in lower-proficiency l2 speakers is the increased “control effort” (reiterer, 2009; reiterer et al., 2011a). generally, most contemporary researchers choose a moderate view termed partial overlap (reiterer, 2009, p. 160). according to this opinion, there is a basic core overlap for l1 and l2 processing; however, in all probability, the level of proficiency or fluency triggers brain activation in additional areas for an l2. golestani and zatorre (2004) investigated changes in brain activity during phonetic processing by means of fmri. their subjects were ten monolingual english-speaking individuals, who were scanned during performing an identification task of a sound unknown to them: a hindi dental retroflex. the fmri was conducted before and after five sessions of training. as a result, they confirmed that the successful learning of a nonnative phonetic contrast causes the employment of the same areas that are active in the processing of native contrasts. moreover, frontal speech regions are less active in successful learners as compared to neurology of foreign language aptitude 23 poor learners, which indicates that the phonetic processing is more automatized and more efficient in the first group. díaz et al. (2008) compared mismatch negativity (mmn), an electrophysiological brain response, in two groups of bilinguals, extremely good and poor, at various tasks testing their perception ability. they found individual differences between these two groups with respect to phonetic discrimination ability detected in both languages of the subjects, the native and the foreign one. the conclusion was that foreign language phonetic abilities can be predicted from native phonetic abilities; moreover, these abilities belong to language-specific rather than general acoustic abilities. díaz et al. (2012) argue that the large variety among late bilinguals in their mastery of l2 phonology, particularly l2 phonological contrasts, is grounded in their varied discrimination of native phonological contrasts. if the age of onset is controlled for, individual differences in l2 proficiency are caused by a general language mechanism (cf. golestani & zattore, 2004). moreover, both earlyand late-onset bilinguals are able to display a native-like performance on l2 phonological tasks that involve pre-lexical processes, that is, phoneme categorization, but their abilities deteriorate as the task becomes more lexicalized, as, for example, in selecting a word (sebastián-gallés & díaz, 2012). wong et al. (2007) report a study assessing the neural correlates of learning to use pitch patterns in words by english-speaking adults. the use of pitch patterns resulted in changes in a network of brain activation, that is, successful learning was associated with activation in left superior temporal region after training, whereas bilateral auditory cortex activation was discovered in less successful foreign language learners both before and after training. it is worth mentioning that in the less successful learners the regions responsible for nonlinguistic pitch perception as well as those for increased wm and attentional effort were more activated. this means that left auditory cortex is involved in learning pitch patterns in words and that some phonological processes are prewired and independent of practice. a number of studies of phonetically talented l2 learners conducted by reiterer (2009) and her colleagues (cf. christiner & reiterer, 2013; hu et al., 2013; hu & reiterer, 2009; nardo & reiterer, 2009; reiterer, berger, hemmelmann, & rappelsberger, 2005; reiterer et al., 2011a; reiterer et al., 2013; reiterer et al., 2009; reiterer et al., 2011b; rota & reiterer, 2009) have provided remarkable insights into the interdependencies between phonetic abilities, cognitive and personality factors, and brain activation patterns in talented l2 learners. their preliminary results basically confirmed the findings of previous studies, that is, a greater activation of language-related areas in less talented l2 learners. for example, in a neurological study, reiterer et al. (2005) investigated the impact of proficiency level among german students of english on the cortical organization adriana biedroń 24 of foreign language processing. two groups of learners, high and low proficiency, were subjected to eeg coherence analysis during native and foreign language processing. the researchers observed reduced eeg coherence in highly proficient foreign language speakers in both foreign and native language processing. the study corroborated previous research results, namely that less proficient learners activate more brain areas than more proficient ones (cf. chee et al., 2004; haier et al., 1992; perani et al., 2003). the authors suggest that the lower activation of cortical regions during both l1 and l2 processing may result from such factors as extensive training and exposure, a more efficient approach to language learning during the acquisition of l1 or genetically predisposed language aptitude. because brain activation patterns correlated with pronunciation aptitude scores, reiterer (2009, p. 176) suggests that the primary factor of fl aptitude correlates with reduced effort in speech production as well as increased cortical efficiency. the reduced effort is a consequence of higher proficiency; therefore, fl aptitude can be a result of an interaction between inborn aptitudes, early experience and training. the question why some late-onset adult bilinguals display different abilities for imitating foreign accents remains unanswered. a study that addressed this problem was conducted by reiterer et al. (2011a). the subjects were 141 germanspeaking individuals studied for their mimicry capacity, which is a factor indicating their abilities for the imitation of foreign sounds. they displayed significant individual differences in imitating words, sentences and texts in both their l2, english, and in tamil and hindi, natural languages unknown to them. moreover, the late-onset bilinguals revealed large individual differences in the employment of left-hemisphere speech areas, namely the left inferior parietal cortex (supramarginal gyrus) and the left inferior frontal/premotor area (reiterer et al., 2011a), with higher activation in the case of low ability and enhanced gray matter volume in high ability subjects. as in the previous studies of this kind, the conclusion is that increased “control effort” causes higher activation in lower-proficiency l2 speakers. the same rule applied to all the languages tested, that is, the l1 (german), the l2 (english) and the l0 (hindi/tamil), which indicates that there are high similarities between l1 and l2 phonetic processing dependent on either the level of expertise or the inborn abilities of the speaker, with the latter explanation being more plausible as the individuals were not exposed to the l0 before (cf. golestani & zatorre, 2004). this conclusion is valuable because it presents evidence for an inborn character of abilities. hu et al. (2013) investigated behavioral predictors and neural substrates of aptitude for pronunciation in advanced l2 learners. previous research provided evidence for a correlation between phonological wm, as measured by digit span and pseudo-word repetition, and language learning ability in earlystage learners, which declines in more advanced learners. this study confirmed neurology of foreign language aptitude 25 this by demonstrating that there was no association between phonological wm and l2 pronunciation aptitude in advanced learners. one hundred and nine german university students and graduates, who began learning english at the age of ten, participated in the behavioral part of the study. students outside one standard deviation from the mean were classified as high and low aptitude speakers. among those, two subgroups were selected to participate in fmri experiments. behavioral tests included english pronunciation aptitude, phonetic coding ability, phonological wm, musical aptitude, intelligence and personality. it turned out that phonetic coding ability and empathy together, but not the classic measures of phonological wm, predict language pronunciation aptitude in advanced learners. the authors attribute the contribution of empathy to the role of mirror neurons, which can play an important role in sla being responsible for speech comprehension and prosody. when it comes to the neuroimaging study, in the advanced l2 learners enhanced hemodynamic responses were found in the speech-motor neural network and speech-auditory perception areas. the authors conclude that these areas contribute to the talent for l2 pronunciation in advanced learners. unlike in early-stage learners, the areas responsible for phonological wm were not related to the individual differences in l2 pronunciation aptitude, which, together with the lack of phonological wm among the predictors of pronunciation aptitude, leads the authors to conclude that this cognitive factor is not equally crucial at all stages of learning. apparently, aptitude for pronunciation is a dynamic process which requires different neural networks at different phases of learning. another breakthrough study was conducted by reiterer et al. (2013), who maintain that it is possible to predict phonetic talent from purely biometric data. they investigated individual differences in speech-imitation ability in lateonset bilinguals using the neuro-acoustic approach. the researchers tested the imitation ability of an unknown language, hindi, in 138 german-english bilinguals. twenty-six participants with the highest and the lowest scores were further tested using a functional neuroimaging experiment in which they were supposed to imitate sentences in three different conditions. clearly more widespread activations with higher peak activities in the left supramarginal gyrus and postcentral areas were observed for the low ability group. as the left supramarginal gyrus is also a site of the phonological loop of verbal wm, its stronger activation in the poor imitators implicates their weak verbal wm (cf. hu et al., 2013; reiterer et al., 2011a). as reiterer et al. (2013) conclude, this result fits in with behavioral data confirming a strong correlation between wm and both native language processing and foreign language learning success (cf. linck, osthus, koeth, & bunting, 2013). in their experiment, reiterer and her collaborators (2013) used a newly developed analysis termed “articulation space” and adriana biedroń 26 found that the high ability subjects had a larger articulation space allowing access to a wider range of sounds, which, in turn, makes them better sound imitators. the researchers claim that very talented speech imitators have more flexible phonetic categories and are not limited to the mother tongue sound pronunciation schemas. as the authors conclude: “there is higher neuro-cognitive flexibility, reflected by higher articulatory flexibility in the group of the more talented speech imitators” (reiterer et al., 2013, p. 11). for these exceptional learners, there is no interference in phonological learning from the l1. as a result of their study, the researchers refute the critical period for sound learning for some very talented learners; however, they admit that interference from an l1 is rather a norm for the less talented ones. a study examining the link between singing talent and speech imitation ability was done by christiner and reiterer (2013). the research question was whether good singing ability predicts good sound imitation ability. the researchers examined four factors, namely the ability to sing, musical talent, the ability to imitate speech and wm in 41 singers ranging from beginners to advanced. as the authors argue, singing is a better indicator of the ability to imitate speech than playing a musical instrument. as much as 66% of the speech imitation ability can be explained by wm together with singing performance, that is, the singer’s sense of rhythm and quality of voice. according to nardo and reiterer (2009), reiterer et al. (2011a) and hu et al. (2013), 15% of adult or late second language learners can imitate sounds to a high degree. there is a clear connection between musicality in general and articulation ability. the higher the musicality, the better the pronunciation and imitation in a second language, and the ability to sing is the clearest indicator of this. musicians, thanks to their improved auditory wm, remember speech streams longer (nardo & reiterer, 2009). moreover, the processing of verbal material and of music in the brain largely overlap in the areas responsible for short-term memory. the enhanced wm in singers and musicians can be connected with their tendency to rehearse. singers retain perceptual plasticity and are open to new sound combinations. interestingly enough, jordan (2014) suggests that there is a difference between musicians and nonmusicians in wm capacity and that the phonological loop might be enhanced as a result of musical training. summing up, it seems that both the aptitude for singing and for the imitation of unknown sounds rely on common neural networks, vocal and motor flexibility and auditory memory. 4. neurology of lexis and morphosyntax the ability to learn new words is marginally investigated neurologically. this is because most neuroscientific research focuses on the phonological aspect of neurology of foreign language aptitude 27 learning foreign words (cf. hu et al., 2013), overlooking the semantic aspect. the learning of new words and syntax are complex processes based on the functioning of wm, which underlies language learning in general (robinson, 2003). verbal wm, which is crucial for learning languages, is associated with grey matter density in the left posterior superior temporal sulcus (sts; richardson et al., 2011). words in a foreign language are processed in wm and stored in long-term memory. vocabulary knowledge reveals large differences between subjects and is related to many factors such as general intelligence, the number of languages a person knows, education and socio-economic status. there are a few neuroscientific studies of lexical knowledge and semantic memory, which show correlates in the left and right posterior supramarginal gyri and in the posterior sts and temporo-parietal cortex (lee et al., 2007; richardson, thomas, filippi, harth, & price, 2010). grey matter density of the bilateral posterior supramarginal gyri depends on the number of words the subject knows; what is more, this area is connected to the brain areas that process sounds and meanings of words. therefore, the bilateral posterior supramarginal gyri may be places where phonological and semantic information is integrated. de zubicaray, rose and mcmahon (2011), making use of the amri and dti methods, examined the relationship between semantic memory and brain structure in healthy older adults. they found that semantic memory, as assessed by six standardized neuropsychological tests, was correlated with gray matter volumes in a predominantly left lateralized network. with the use of fmri, breitenstein et al. (2005) examined 14 learners acquiring new vocabulary in order to test changes in the activation of the brain and track which of these learning-related activity changes correlate with semantic knowledge. they discovered that the proficiency in the learning of new words depends on correlated amplitude changes between the left hippocampus and neocortical regions and that the learning-related hippocampus activity is an indicator of the ability to acquire both native and foreign vocabulary. analytical aptitude implicated in learning the structure of a language is also poorly investigated. a few studies have addressed the problem of morphosyntactic attainment in late-onset learners (lopez-barroso et al., 2011; wong, morganshort, ettlinger, & zheng, 2012; wood bowden, steinhauer, sanz, & ullman, 2013). lopez-barroso et al. (2011) provided evidence that the phonological component of wm, that is, articulatory rehearsal, influences the learning of syntax. by blocking rehearsal, segmentation and rule learning in an l2 are significantly impaired as compared with a learning condition without interference or interference with the phonological store. moreover, white matter density in the left ventral language pathway was related to learning variability under rehearsal blockage. wong et al. (2012) tapped into the neurogenetic source of variability in learning syntax, in particular the role of the dopaminergic system. it is known adriana biedroń 28 that the genes encoding dopamine receptors and transcriptors have an impact on different types of procedural learning. dopamine is also associated with wm and attention. all of this indicates that dopamine-related genes can contribute to variation in grammar learning, with the effect that individuals with different genetic profiles may have different learning abilities. the research revealed that subjects with an increased impact of dopamine are better at procedural learning, wm capacity and executive function. as a conclusion, the authors suggest that different genotypic profiles can benefit from different types of training. wood bowden et al. (2013) suggest that late-onset university learners are capable of attaining native-like brain processing of syntax as well as native-like syntactic proficiency. the subjects of their study were 32 late learners of spanish, who were divided into two groups: low-intermediate, with little experience; and advanced, with more experience in learning, including immersion. with the use of the erp method, both groups were compared with native speakers of spanish while performing two types of violation tasks: semantic and syntactic. in the semantic violation tasks there were no differences between all the three groups, but in the syntactic violation tasks there was no difference only between the advanced and native groups, which indicates that the syntactic processing in these groups was subserved by the same neurocognitive processing. the authors argue that unlike l2 semantic processing, which always depends on l1 neurocognitive mechanisms, l2 syntactic processing initially differs from l1 processing but can develop into native-like provided there is sufficient proficiency and exposure. syntax processing and artificial grammar learning have been examined in two studies of white matter structural connectivity (flöel, de vries, scholz, breitenstein, & johansen-berg, 2009; nauchi & sakai, 2009). the studies showed correlates in the left pars opercularis and pars triangularis subregions of broca’s area, thus confirming that verbal processing is left-lateralised. finally, language control which engages speech networks as well as a high level, left-lateralized fronto-parieto-subcortical brain network (golestani, 2012, p. 19) affects semantic and phonemic fluency. studies on executive aspects of speech processing show correlations with brain morphology in regions including the caudate nucleus and the superior frontal gyrus. grogan, green, ali, crinion, and price (2009) examined brain structural correlates of semantic and phonemic fluency and found that performance on semantic fluency was linked to gray matter in the left inferior temporal lobe, and on phonemic fluency to the presupplementary motor area and head of the caudate nucleus bilaterally. summing up, the limited knowledge available does not allow any general conclusions, especially in view of the fact that all the above-described studies do not refer to fl aptitude directly. a review of the most important studies is presented in table 2. neurology of foreign language aptitude 29 table 2 review of the most important neurolinguistic studies on fl aptitude presented chronologically study findings phonology golestani and zatorre (2004) successful processing of native and nonnative phonetic contrasts activates the same brain areas. reiterer et al. (2005) less proficient learners activate more brain areas than more proficient ones. van den noort et al. (2006) increase in grey matter in the mid-body of the corpus collosum in highly proficient l2 speakers. golestani et al. (2007) abnormal asymmetry of the planum temporale related to poor verbal ability. wong et al. (2007) bilateral auditory cortex activation in less successful learners both before and after training. díaz et al. (2008; 2012) l2 phonetic abilities can be predicted from l1 phonetic abilities. golestani et al. (2011) phonologically talented learners have more grey matter and white matterin parietal regions, in particular in the left hemisphere. hypertrophies are mostly related to the anatomy of the left hg. reiterer et al. (2011a, 2011b) high similarities between l1 and l2 phonetic processing depend on inborn abilities. more extended activation in poorer learners. wong et al. (2011) larger volume of the left hg in more successful learners. sebastián-gallés et al. (2012) larger white matter volume in the right insulo/fronto-opercular region in poorer perceptual discriminators of native and nonnative vowels. hu et al. (2013) phonetic coding ability and empathy together predict language pronunciation aptitude in advanced learners. reiterer et al. (2013) high ability subjects have larger articulation space allowing access to a wider range of sounds, which, in turn, makes them better sound imitators. christiner & reiterer (2013) 66% of the speech imitation ability can be explained by wm together with singing performance. vocabulary breitenstein et al. (2005) proficiency in learning of new words depends on correlated amplitude changes between the left hippocampus and neocortical regions. the learning-related hippocampus activity is an indicator of the ability to acquire both native and foreign vocabulary. semantic memory de zubicaray et al. (2011) semantic memory is correlated with gray matter volumes in a predominantly left hemisphere. syntax flöel et al. (2009) integrity of white matter fiber tracts arising from broca's area is linked with the ability to extract grammatical rules. nauchi and sakai (2009) inferior frontal gyrus proposed as the grammar center. lopez-barroso et al. (2011) articulatory rehearsal in wm influences the learning of syntax. wong et al. (2012) subjects with an increased impact of dopamine are better at grammar learning. wood bowden et al. (2013) l2 syntactic processing initially differs from l1 processing, but can develop into native-like provided there is sufficient proficiency and exposure. adriana biedroń 30 semantic and phonemic fluency grogan et al. (2009) performance on semantic fluency is linked to gray matter in the left inferior temporal lobe, and on phonemic fluency to the pre-supplementary motor area and head of the caudate nucleus bilaterally. 5. conclusions and suggestions for further research neuroscience is a relatively new field, which includes disciplines such as neurology, psychology and biology. neurological techniques of brain examination have ushered in a new era in research on sla in general and on individual differences in particular. methods such as pet, fmri, amri, erp, and dti, which measure either changes in brain activity or in brain anatomy, help to discover how a foreign language is organized in the brain, how the age of onset, aptitude, proficiency level and training affect this organization, and what functional and structural features differentiate monolinguals from bilinguals at different levels of linguistic proficiency and with different lengths of exposure to a foreign language. nevertheless, neurolinguistic research on fl aptitude is, for the most part, in the commencing stage, with one notable exception, which is phonological abilities. this area of fl aptitude is relatively thoroughly analyzed and research results are reliable, replicable and practically applicable (e.g., golestani et al., 2011; reiterer et al., 2013). other groups of abilities, that is, those involved in learning lexis, syntax, pragmatics and communication skills, remain on the sidelines of neurolinguistics. as has been suggested, the main reason for this disproportion is the lack of a unified definition of the construct of fl aptitude, but also its complexity and extension. for example, the paradigm of wm, although very popular among applied linguists (cf. robinson, 2003), cognitive psychologists (cowan, 2014) and neuroscientists (postle, 2014), and proposed as another fl aptitude (cf. doughty, 2013; wen & skehan, 2011), has attracted relatively little attention in the neuroscientific research on individual differences with respect to sla, which is a major oversight in view of the developments in the field of wm. for instance, baqués, castellà, and bowers (2014) suggest that implicit memory for words does not rely on the phonological loop, whereas explicit memory for words does. many studies have found that individual differences in wm capacity can be partly attributed to differences in attentional processes, especially these involved in inhibiting irrelevant information. both functional and anatomical studies have confirmed that prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia and thalamus perform attentional control over wm in parietal cortex (ekman, fiebach, tittgemeyer, & derrfuss, 2014). also majerus et al. (2014) provided evidence for common neural patterns underlying verbal wm storage and attention. finally, a new interpretation of wm capacity, termed process neurology of foreign language aptitude 31 overlap theory (conway, 2014), which refers to the pattern of positive correlations (the positive manifold) between various cognitive tests accounted for in terms of complex intercorrelations between domain-general and domain-specific processes, seems to be relevant for fl aptitude theory. in the words of its author, “the theory accounts for the hierarchical structure of cognitive ability, the strong relationship between wmc and fluid intelligence, the worst performance rule, and ability different” (conway, 2014, p.3). neurological studies cast some light on very controversial aspects of fl aptitude, for instance, the partial overlap of l1 and l2 aptitude (reiterer et al., 2011a), greater plasticity of the brain of more successful language learners (reiterer et al., 2013), a more bilateral activation in less successful learners (reiterer et al., 2005), particular hypertrophies in the brain of more phonologically gifted individuals (golestani et al., 2011), and, probably the most controversial of all, the contribution of genes and environment to the development of linguistic giftedness (golestani et al., 2011; perani, 2005). golestani (2012), for example, argues that solid grounds exist to believe that certain aptitudes are genetically predisposed: “we found evidence for a potential brain structural ‘intermediate phenotype’ . . . for a domain-specific aptitude which can, with adequate opportunity and training, lead to expertise” (p. 22). in a similar vein, perani (2005) hypothesizes that the diversity between bilingual brains is genetic and might rely on functional differences in processes connected with mirror neurons. she argues for the prewired patterns of functional and anatomical variability, which condition the development of specific talents. from this perspective, these individuals who are born with anatomical differences predisposing specific talents will reach a high level of proficiency. a recurring question in the research on phonology-related regions refers to the impact of training on brain structure. generally, it appears that different parts of the cortex depend on heritable factors to different degrees, that is to say, some are more stable and others more subject to change. genetic studies show that the morphology of broca’s area may be more pliable as a result of experience than the morphology of the hg (peper, brouwer, boomsma, kahn, & poll, as cited in golestani, 2012). to quote golestani (2012): “it is likely that both genetics and the environment play a role in shaping brain structure and cognitive aptitudes, with different relative contributions in different brain areas” (p. 22). this implicates the possibility of an increase in fl aptitude attributable to training and practice. what is more, genetics and the environment interact in accordance with individual choices and interests of people, who tend to select the environment compliant with their genetic predispositions (cf. jensen, 1997). now, after a few decades of the ardent debate, these scientific problems still remain largely unexplored. as far as research methodology is concerned, golestani adriana biedroń 32 (2012) suggests a multiple approach including functional, structural and behavioral analyses of subjects in order to discover the underlying mechanisms of learning languages and language learning aptitudes. thanks to the combined methods, further research could explore the relationship between innate genetically-driven factors and the effects of experience and training, as well as the plasticity of the brain and different language aptitudes (cf. golestani et al., 2011). another aspect worth further investigation is the relationship between musical aptitude and fl aptitude. so far, we have learnt a great deal about the anatomy underlying both abilities. multiple or split transverse gyri in the left auditory cortex predispose individuals to become phoneticians or to work in other domains requiring detailed auditory processing, such as, for example, sound technicians, acousticians, musicians and other language experts (golestani 2012; 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(2013). native-like brain processing of syntax can be attained by university foreign language learners. neuropsychologia, 51, 2492-2511. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2013.09.004. 445 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (2). 2018. 445-469 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.2.12 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt self-directed learning as related to learning strategies, self-regulation, and autonomy in an english language program: a local application with global implications melissa williamson hawkins university of alabama at birmingham (uab), usa melissaw@uab.edu abstract english language tutoring and/or self-access centers are services commonly offered as curricular support to english language program students in educational environments worldwide. this paper argues that the theory of self-directed learning (sdl) from the field of adult education should be considered alongside the equally-important areas of language learning strategies, learner autonomy, and self-regulated learning in the setup of these types of tutoring/self-access academic support centers. the proposition is examined by applying it to a particular case in an english language program of a major research university in the southeastern united states. the paper explicates the commonly-known theory of sdl (grow, 1991) and relates it to models by put forward by nakata (2010) and oxford (2011, 2107). empirical evidence from studies on encouraging sdl for english language study is summarized from a range of research projects conducted worldwide, and the author concludes by offering implications for educators in any institution-based, adult english language program. keywords: self-directed learning; language learning strategies; self-regulation; autonomy; adult education; english language program melissa williamson hawkins 446 1. introduction second and foreign language (l2) learning strategies have been at the center of research and practice for many years now in the field of english language teaching. developments in understanding language learning strategies (lls), as well as areas very closely related to learning strategies, such as self-regulation and autonomy, still have much to offer the second language learner and teacher. there is an important area of theoretical knowledge, research, and practice that is extremely close to language learning strategies, as well as to self-regulation and autonomy, but that has received insufficient attention in our field, that is, self-directed learning (sdl). although it is possible to compare gerald grow’s (1991) sdl model in rigorous detail to various other sdl models, the focus here is primarily on his model, because it is the best-known, the most carefully constructed, the clearest in terms of process, and the most relevant to the l2 field. early in the article i touch on sdl ideas and research by other educational experts besides grow, but this article clearly centers on his work as it might inform the l2 field. for the sake of this special issue on l2 learning strategies, i compare grow’s model to other l2 learning models and related research, with a special concern for conceptual relationships involving strategies, autonomy, and self-regulation. it is time to draw sdl, specifically as embodied in grow’s model, into meaningful conversations among l2 learning theorists. that is one of the purposes of this article. another purpose is to show how these ideas may influence teaching and operations in an english language program, especially within a tutoring or self-access center, and to offer implications for other english programs around the globe. many english language programs housed in institutions worldwide offer some form of a language learning computer lab, tutoring center, or self-access center in which their english-learning students can come and receive additional help via a tutor with a certain skill, or can tackle extra practice with the aid of a computer software program. following this pattern, the english language programs department of the university of alabama at birmingham (uab), a significant, urban, research university in the southeastern united states, has recently added a learning resource center to the profile of services available to its english language students. this learning resource center has been designed to offer three different types of services, which are in line with services available at similar labs/centers worldwide: (1) one-on-one individualized tutoring, in both english skill areas and in undergraduate or graduate coursework areas for specific prematriculation programs; (2) workshops that all students will be able to take that focus on general academic study skill topics, such as library-research skills and various citation requirements in research writing; and (3) computer-assisted language learning (call), using technologies such as software designed for independent self-directed learning as related to learning strategies, self-regulation, and autonomy in an english. . . 447 study, for extra practice. throughout this paper, i will be discussing the applicability of sdl theory and research to this particular situation, but readers are encouraged to keep in mind that this case can be applied to the model of tutoring/selfaccess centers used globally in a wide variety of english language programs. as the english language programs’ leadership team at uab engaged in discussions on the services that will be offered at the learning resource center, the idea of building in opportunities for independent language study kept coming to the surface of planning sessions. without direct teacher leadership, it did not seem to be a realistic possibility. in other words, i wondered if the very notion of studying independently, in a center set aside for the purpose of tutoring, would even make sense. however, as i have been exposed to theories of sdl in the field of adult education, i have considered the possible applicability of the sdl concepts to the learning resource center model. i have also thought about the intersection of sdl with the body of research on l2 learning strategies and learner autonomy, specifically oxford’s model (2011, 2017) of strategic self-regulation (s2r), with which i am most familiar. in this paper, i will explore four ideas. · i will seek to define sdl, with special emphasis on grow’s (1991) model of sdl for use by educators, in an effort to understand how it may apply to the learning resource center plans at my university and elsewhere. · i will explore intersections of grow’s (1991) model with the basic tenets of oxford’s (2011, 2017) strategic self-regulation model, as well as widely-held notions of l2 learning strategy development for english-language learning. · i will investigate how sdl has already been applied and researched in the context of adult english language learners in our field and will determine what can be gained from that for this context. · finally, if sdl does seem to be applicable to a support structure such as the learning resource center, i will articulate what guiding principles i should take to our team and share with others outside of uab. 2. sdl definitions and theories with special emphasis on grow’s (1991) model before continuing, to ensure that terms used throughout this paper are easily understood, i provide their definitions in figure 1. i will then expound on these terms further. it should be noted at the very outset that the definition of self-directed learning mentions strategies and is conceptually close to the other terms, that is, learner autonomy, self-regulation, strategic self-regulation, and l2 learning strategies. grow’s interest in strategies is strong, as evidenced by his 1994 paper, which focuses on cognitively-focused strategic reading. the article traces a major theoretical shift in our comprehension of reading, moving away from the passive reader melissa williamson hawkins 448 and toward the strategic reader, who selects what, when, and how to read, reads interpretively, and understands the organized structure of a given reading passage. in fact, many of the reading strategies mentioned in grow’s (1994) article are included in oxford’s (2017) book on language learning strategies. the article closes with recommendations on how to write for such readers. · self-directed learning is, briefly put, a process in which individuals take the initiative to diagnose learning needs, set goals for meeting those needs, figure out resources and strategies to make learning happen, and evaluate the process (based on knowles, 1975). · learner autonomy means that the learner relies on processes for taking responsibility for his or her learning (oxford, 2016, 2017). · self-regulation means that a learner has the capacity to change his or her actions or goals to achieve desired results (based on zeidner, boekaerts, & pintrich, 2000). · strategic self-regulation is the use of learning strategies as part of self-regulation or for increasing one’s self-regulation (oxford, 2017). · l2 learning strategies are complex, dynamic, purposeful, conscious, mental actions or processes that self-regulated learners use to plan, conduct, and/or evaluate their task performance and enhance l2 proficiency (based on oxford, 2017). figure 1 basic definitions of key terms (more detailed definitions are provided in subsequent parts of the article) 2.1. theoretical definitions of sdl and comments on learner autonomy figure 1 provided a simple definition of sdl, and now i will go more deeply into the topic. well-known definitions and theories of sdl tend to mention learning strategies and autonomy and imply a dynamic process, not a static product. definitions and research on sdl first began emerging in the field of adult education studies, primarily in the 1970s. merriam and bierema (2014) explained that the chief proponent of andragogy (i.e., adult learning), malcolm knowles, felt that adults “become increasingly self-directed” as they mature, and that “sdl is a hallmark of adult learning” (p. 62). in fact, the description of sdl provided by knowles is still considered useful. in self-directed learning: a guide for learners and teachers, knowles (1975) explained that self-directed learners, alone or with assistance, take the initiative to diagnose their learning needs, establish goals, identify resources, choose and implement relevant learning strategies, and evaluate outcomes (cited in merriam & bierema, 2014, p. 63, emphasis added). similarly, tough (1978) described a process that learners move through that begins with deciding what to learn and what resources are needed for that learning, followed by deciding where to study and how they will maintain motivation for studying. tough (1978) explained that the process for learners also includes setting goals, timelines, and the pace of study, figuring out their current level of knowledge compared to what they wanted to learn, and evaluating themselves formatively along the way (merriam & bierema, 2014). self-directed learning as related to learning strategies, self-regulation, and autonomy in an english. . . 449 for students who are already fairly autonomous in their learning, understanding the concept of sdl may help them self-analyze the steps that they undertake and perhaps make changes or introduce enhancements. however, for those who cannot imagine such a process, either because of educational or cultural background, or perhaps because sdl may actually seem to be a personal attribute of some learners, rather than a learning process (it is both; see merriam & bierema, 2014, p. 63), it may be appropriate to consider how to teach students self-direction. merriam and bierema also concluded on the basis of the study of adults in higher education conducted by raidal and volet (2009) that “guiding students towards greater learning autonomy for social and self-directed learning is imperative for continuous lifelong learning post-graduation” (merriam & bierema, 2014, p. 73, emphasis added). thus, it is arguable that a tutoring/self-access resource center at an english language program such as the learning resource center at uab should train students to become learners who are increasingly self-directed. in addition, this aspect may actually be necessary for student success, since the skills for sdl will likely aid students in their english and university studies, especially in many academic environments where learner autonomy reigns as a key characteristic. incidentally, for the purposes of this paper, it is worthwhile to take a moment to discuss the use of the term learner autonomy, which has been mentioned several times so far in this article. as merriam and bierema point out, “autonomy is synonymous with self-directedness” (2014, p. 147). that statement could be parsed further, but it holds true at least for the purposes of this paper. autonomy in language learning refers to the learner’s taking responsibility for his or her own learning (oxford, 2016, 2017). researchers also agree that autonomy is acquired in steps, that there are differing levels of autonomy, that students can be guided along the path towards increased autonomy by the leadership of teachers or coaches, and that there can be both individual and social (group-oriented) autonomy, depending on context (oxford, 2016). therefore, in the rest of this discussion i will consider sdl and learner autonomy to be very close in meaning, and i will use the two terms rather interchangeably moving forward. 2.2. grow’s (1991) process model of sdl stages considering the cultural differences found in english language program students worldwide, and equally considering that not everyone necessarily has a natural propensity for sdl, how would a tutoring/self-access center such as the learning resource center promote the development of learner autonomy in its students? grow’s (1991) model for sdl proves to be an instructive tool for this process. rather than defining sdl, or describing the stages of sdl, grow’s model actually melissa williamson hawkins 450 describes a process for educators to guide students towards being more selfdirected in their learning. grow’s thinking typically emphasizes dynamic processes, no matter what the setting or topic. for instance, one of his articles, “back to school with gerald grow: the principles of design and their shadow” (grow, 2010), critiqued some well-known design principles, which experts had often misrepresented to the public as scientific laws but which were actually rigid, one-sided fears of mass chaos. grow’s critique implied that the principles ignored process, which is a crucial element in his concepts concerning sdl. the development of grow’s staged self-directed learning model (ssdl), which i henceforth refer to as his sdl model for ease of communication, was explicated in his 1991 article for adult education quarterly. the process began with a series of frustrating teaching attempts and observations that grow made with his own students as a journalism professor. grow based his model on the four stages of management, first described by hersey and blanchard, which involves matching management practices to employee ability and willingness to do a certain task (1988, cited in grow, 1991). however, rather than relating to business management, grow’s model is explicitly for teachers, and it matches guidance by the classroom teacher to student ability and willingness to function at a certain level of autonomy. in grow’s model, the instructor must be aware of the level of autonomy of the learner and adjust his or her instruction to meet that level. as grow explained, “what is ‘good teaching’ for one learner in one stage of development may not be ‘good teaching’ for another student . . . at a different stage of development” (1991, p. 140). every stage of learning self-direction must be balanced by the teacher’s relative power in the classroom, according to the learner’s readiness. and since the teacher is the leader in the quest to make students become more self-directed, the responsibility to understand the stages of becoming more selfdirected is on the educator, in order to wisely and sensitively lead (grow, 1991). the model “proposes a way in which teachers can be vigorously influential while empowering students toward greater autonomy” (grow, 1991, p. 128). also noteworthy is that grow directly indicated that although sdl is frequently examined in an informal learning context, his model is purposefully designed for the formal classroom environment. the stages of sdl development are outlined below. stage one grow’s first stage is enacted when the learner is still dependent on an authority. stage one learners are those who, either through lack of motivation or through profound respect for the teacher, are extremely teacher-oriented in learning tasks. they have no, or little, self-direction. with these learners, teachers must self-directed learning as related to learning strategies, self-regulation, and autonomy in an english. . . 451 be coaches. teachers need to be expert leaders in the classroom. stereotypical teacher behaviors such as lecturing, drilling, only giving few choices, and thoroughly providing introductory material to a topic are all part of this role expectation. the focus is on the subject and mastery thereof; however it is the teacher who defines it. grading is objective and clearly spelled out in advance. immediate feedback is helpful. grow said that the aim here should be to “provide clearcut objectives and straightforward techniques for achieving them” (1991, p. 130). he also recommended setting high standards, and then guiding the students to meet those standards, saying that the teacher should “create and reward success” (1991, p. 130). certainly, one could argue that some learners are beyond this stage from the start, but it does likely describe the starting place of a majority of learners from a variety of cultural backgrounds. grow explained that although stage one methodologies are frequently rejected by many educators, they have popular appeal, and many coaches, music teachers, and other teachers where drill-oriented mastery must be gained still regularly use this approach, even if not for the purposes of teaching self-directed learning (grow, 1991). it should also be added that teacher-centered classrooms are the norm in much of the world, and so many students from different educational cultures will come to an educational environment as stage one learners, because it is what a good learner in their culture is supposed to be. this can be respected, while at the same time the benefits of learner autonomy can be forwarded. stage two a stage two learner in grow’s (1991) model brings interest in the subject to the classroom, as well as a measure of confidence. consequently, the teacher of this type of learner “brings enthusiasm and motivation to the class, sweeping learners along with the excitement of learning” (1991, p. 131). learners at this stage will follow the teacher’s direction if they understand why the teacher is leading in a certain way and if the teacher also gives assistance and aid when needed. learners in stage two will also respond if they simply have a positive rapport with the teacher. helping students set and attain goals becomes a primary focus of the teacher, as it sets the stage for the development of autonomous learning perspectives (grow, 1991). teachers can also help students grow in the application of specific learning strategies. as a guide to learning, rather than a coach as in stage one, the teacher inspires the students to apply the basics of the subject in an interesting way (merriam & bierema, 2014). grow (1991) instructs the teacher at this stage to give students praise, but with an intentionality to use it less, instead replacing it with encouragement. this moves the student from working from extrinsic motivation, or working primarily to gain the teacher’s approval, melissa williamson hawkins 452 to intrinsic motivation, arising from an understanding that the student him/herself can handle the work (dörnyei, 2001). examples of techniques that relate to stage two are engaging lectures followed by teacher-led discussion, a demonstration of a new technique followed by guided practice, and structured projects with close supervision by the teacher and considerable feedback. a helpful, specific example of this stage that grow provided is that of a shakespearean literature class: the students are carried along at first by the teacher’s enthusiasm and knowledge of the subject until they have enough skill to try to delve into the texts themselves, which they then do with guidance and encouragement. if the students do not develop the motivation to try to make sense of the text themselves, then the literature teacher will have ultimately failed. thus, the primary characteristic of this stage two can be achieved by balancing “strong personal interaction” together with a “strong focus on subject matter” (grow, 1991, p. 132). stage three the third of grow’s (1991) sdl stages moves the teacher towards being a facilitator of learning, entering a partnership with the learner to assist their efforts towards mastery of a subject. a stage three learner has knowledge and skills, but he or she also lacks the knowledge and/or motivation to go forward independently. for this reason, a learner in this stage is a true partner in the learning process, desiring a partnership and companions on the learning journey. a stage three learner wants to apply what is learned to a real-life problem. for this reason, this is also an ideal stage for group problem-solving projects and collaborative learning. a learner at stage three also wants to negotiate topics, assignments, and assessments, he or she wants to be set up and let go for a time and then to receive feedback, and then he or she wants to be set up again for the next steps, and let out again for more. grow says that students at this stage develop “critical thinking, individual initiative, and a sense of themselves as cocreators of the culture that shapes them” (1991, p. 133). for all of these reasons, at this stage, grow explained that the teacher comes the closest to being a true participant in the learning experience. students and teachers share in making decisions about the learning process. this can be a very rewarding stage for an instructor. students in stage three thrive in structured but open projects that may include “written criteria, learning contracts, and evaluation checklists,” which can help learners “evaluate their own progress” (grow, 1991, p. 133). then, as the students become more competent at self-direction, they can be freed increasingly to set their own goals and pace. at this point, the teacher remembers at all times that the point is to move the student to greater independence. a self-directed learning as related to learning strategies, self-regulation, and autonomy in an english. . . 453 strong example of a stage three assignment would be a group project that is approved by and facilitated by an instructor, moving even to student-developed and student-directed projects by the end of the stage. grow (1991) also mentioned that students at this stage particularly benefit from measures that involve an outside standard, such as accreditation guidelines, rather than internal standards imposed by the instructor. stage four stage four in grow’s (1991) sdl model is that of a highly self-directed learner. students at this stage will use expert, outside resources, or other materials to pursue their learning, but the learners can and will set their own goals and standards. as merriam and bierema (2014) explained, a highly self-directed learner is “able to plan, execute, and evaluate” (p. 70) his or her own learning. simply put, they are able to take responsibility for their own learning. grow (1991) explained that self-directed learners “exercise skills in time management, project management, goal setting, self-evaluation, peer critique, information gathering, and use of educational resources” (p. 134). thus, the role of the teacher in this stage is quite different from earlier; it is that of a consultant, a mentor, or even – in some situations – a delegator. it is not, however, to teach subject matter; it is to “cultivate” the student’s “own personal empowerment” (grow, 1991, p. 135). a teacher in a formal educational environment at this stage may hold meetings to ensure accountability, consult with students to develop criteria or evaluative tools, and encourage cooperation and collaboration between learners. they may offer expertise as needed, or monitor as needed, but at all times they are fostering autonomy. a stage four teacher will help students “focus on both the process and product of learning” (merriam & bierema, 2014, p. 70), so that students will not only accomplish their goals, but will also be further along on the road of understanding their skills in sdl. interestingly, grow mentioned that the relationship between the teacher and learner in this stage is “distinctly not intense,” and that the focus is on the student and the task, or the student and the world, or even the student and other students. of these possible foci, “the learner’s own efforts become the unequivocal focus” (p. 135). examples of stage four learning are easy to imagine in informal contexts. in formal educational contexts, the following are all illustrations of stage four learning projects: cumulative research projects, dissertation research, conference presentations and colloquia, independent studies, serious creation of blogs and websites, contributions to and publication of literary magazines, and journal article publication. graduate professors frequently function in the role of a stage four teacher, as the focus of the learning is the student’s work. grow also mentions, in melissa williamson hawkins 454 a point which is significant to this paper, that mentors, writing coaches, and consultants can function in stage four roles. the key point is that for a stage four teacher, the goal is to become, truly and ultimately, unnecessary (grow, 1991). grow discussed implications of his sdl model for overall curriculum design in his article. he also helpfully described how the approach can organize even one class meeting of a course, in which students develop from a very dependent stage at the beginning, learning a new concept, all the way through to working with the material in a very independent manner. grow explained, “the teacher can demonstrate a skill, coach them through using the skill, facilitate their application of it, and then have them work in groups to create new situations in which to practice the skill on each other” (1991, p. 144). this reminds me of the “presentation, practice, and production” model that is heavily used in many english language programs even now to guide classroom practice and lesson building. in addition, with respect to the issue of having students coming from educational environments where stage one is the norm for learners, grow provided the following encouragement: “even teachers of adults . . . may need to approach certain learners in a directive, even authoritarian style, then gradually equip those learners with the skills, self-concept, and motivation necessary to pursue learning in a more self-directed manner” (1991, p. 140). can grow’s (1991) sdl approach be applied in a real-life situation, considering that students in any given classroom are likely at different self-direction stages when entering a learning environment? grow addressed this situation by indicating that his model can be used in a non-linear and iterative way, or through looping, which is realistic considering the range of differences in any group of students. grow (1991, p. 145) explained that looping may be a more effective way to use the concept than a “sequence of linear stages,” in which a teacher bases lesson design on the stage that he or she feels characterizes the majority of students, and then loops around to earlier or later stages during the lesson, depending on the needs of the students and what the lesson activities are. the following is an example of looping through grow’s (1991) sdl stages, as it might be implemented in an english language classroom during a single lesson. a teacher might start a class with an exploration activity, such as having students examine a certain text’s use of verb tenses to try to deduce the meaning conveyed – a stage three activity. then, the teacher could move back to a stage two demonstration/lecture of the new verb tense under examination, followed by further stage two teacher-led guided practice in analyzing form, meaning, and use of the new tense. at any point that students are uncomfortable or hesitant, the teacher could re-claim teacher-fronted authority for the sake of a detailed and formal explanation (stage one). finally, the teacher could release the students self-directed learning as related to learning strategies, self-regulation, and autonomy in an english. . . 455 with a homework assignment that requires application of the verb tense in real life, with interactive journaling on a class-managed blog afterwards in which students give each other feedback on the use of the new grammar form (stage three, or even stage four, depending on design). of course, the model is flexible enough to implement throughout the course, rather than only in an individual class. in my own work, i have seen evidence that some spirited, intelligent, motivated, and dynamic students seem to skip stage one and, in some cases, even stage two. such exceptional students, rather than their teachers, might be leaders in sdl. they might have surpassed the aims that their teachers hold for them and might occasionally be more autonomous than their teachers. many of these excellent students might rapidly wish to co-lead their own autonomy progression along with their teachers (stage three). grow (1991), who was fully dedicated to addressing the needs of individual learners, would understand this very well. his concern for specific learners was emphasized in another publication (grow, 2006), which conceptualized why certain individual students have particular attention patterns (various forms of “active academic disengagement”) that are not found in some other students and that lead teachers to label the actively disengaged students as difficult to teach. the article offered good ways of responding to individual student differences. grow implied that his way of dealing with students’ attentional differences was more useful than theories of learning styles or cultural styles. i suspect that this kind of thinking about individual differences in attention would be extremely valuable to l2 teachers and would improve l2 classes for students. moving back to the 1991 sdl article, grow’s explanation of his well-known, well-respected model ended with asking multiple questions that could blast holes in the model. he humbly declared that it is simply a model, to be held up to scrutiny, discussed, and interrogated. however, i – along with many others – would say that it is highly useful, flexible, and powerful model, especially if used as a guide for our efforts at uab in an investigation of what would work to promote sdl in the learning resource center. in fact, the model holds promise for many different settings. 3. strategic self-regulation and language learning autonomy for several decades now, there has been a lively conversation surrounding language learning strategies in the general field of english language teaching research. rebecca l. oxford’s groundbreaking text from 1990, language learning strategies: what every teacher should know, paved the way for increasingly lively conversations and much research on how to help learners understand and make use of specific strategies to study a second or foreign language. defining lls, identifying them, categorizing them, assessing their use, figuring out how melissa williamson hawkins 456 to teach students to enhance their use of them – all these and more have been the focus of multiple studies through past years. oxford’s latest strategy books, published in 2011 and 2017 provide assistance in navigating the theoretical waters around the topic. oxford’s (2011, 2017) model of strategic self-regulation (s2r) seeks to condense and clarify the theoretical landscape, including how three primary areas of strategies have emerged in the research (i.e., cognitive, affective, and sociocultural-interactive), how meta-strategies play a guiding role in the use of strategies, and how individual strategies themselves can be linked together in strategy chains. behind all of this are some primary assumptions about the language learner and strategy instruction, which are of import to this paper. first, the use of lls moves ownership of language learning to the learner and is commonly linked to learner autonomy (oxford, 2016). the learner is not a vessel simply dependent on the input of language knowledge from the teacher, but instead is an active, participatory negotiator of his or her own learning, strategically selecting ways in which to control and reinforce learning to maximize impact of the teacher’s efforts and time spent in class. oxford commented that research is consistent in the observation that the strategic language learner has “active control” of strategies, and that the “key for such learners is choosing appropriate strategies for the purpose and situation and evaluating the success of these strategies” (2011, p. 14). to have active control, however, and to make conscious selections of strategies to use, it is beneficial to have overtly learned strategies. even for the student who has benefitted from a rich educational tradition that has implicitly taught strategy use, explicit training in the myriad of strategies available is useful. in addition, since so much of the learning strategy tradition has focused on cognitive strategies, the understanding of the roles of affective and sociocultural-interactive lls can only increase a student’s adept selection of the right strategy for the right situation. the good news is that, as shown by research, strategies are teachable (cf. chamot, 2004; cohen, 2014; plonsky, 2011; zimmerman & schunk, 2011). understanding that a learner can develop autonomy over their range of lls and self-regulate choosing the appropriate strategy for the appropriate time is the “soul of learning strategies” (oxford, 2017, p. 65). indeed, the autonomy that a self-regulated learner possesses is characterized by action – cognitive, emotional, and social, including goal-setting (oxford, 2017). another important pointer from oxford’s s2r model is that research “indicates that the more explicit the strategy instruction, the more successful it is” (2011, p. 181). multiple levels of explicitness exist. the first level is blind strategy instruction, in which the learner merely does the task following the steps noted by the teacher (or just does the task without aid). this teacher might have certain learning strategies in mind but does not name, demonstrate, or explain self-directed learning as related to learning strategies, self-regulation, and autonomy in an english. . . 457 those strategies or foster their use. the highest level, on which i am focusing here, is completely informed strategy instruction, in which the instructor names the strategy, demonstrates it, explains how and when to use it, and then helps students to consciously reflect on, evaluate, and, if needed, transfer the strategy to other tasks (oxford, 2011). between the two extremes are levels that encourage various degrees of strategic consciousness on the part of the learner. naturally, the teacher’s best effort at strategy instruction cannot “cause” strategic consciousness for any given learner, because learners are not all alike. also of relevance to teaching students self-direction is the notion that strategy instruction can be differentiated. oxford (2017) explains that differentiation can occur in several ways, specifically by attending to the following: sensory preferences for learning, cognitive style, strategies that a student already uses, the level of proficiency that a student has with strategy use, as well as interests and goals. while there are certain challenges to completely individualizing strategy instruction in a formal classroom environment, a tutoring center, with its built-in, one-on-one model and the possibility for working with the same student over time, does lend itself to the possibility of strategy use assessment and differentiation on multiple levels. what is the relationship of oxford’s (2011, 2017) s2r model to grow’s (1991) model for sdl? firstly, if i argue that we should teach students to be selfdirected in their l2 learning, then strategy instruction must be part of the training. oxford (2017) offered an interesting explication of how autonomy (i.e., selfgovernance, having self-responsibility), agency (i.e., the sense of being an origin of many of one’s own actions, rather than merely a pawn that gets pushed around), and self-regulation (i.e., the capacity to choose to regulate emotions and thoughts) are interdependent, having great overlap and that there are no contradictions between them. she subsequently explained how each of these three phenomena have direct application to language learning strategies. sdl is characterized by autonomy and self-regulation. in a language-learning environment, therefore, if we are teaching self-direction, it is reasonable to also teach the use of lls as a critical partner in the process. it is also worthwhile to note some specific overlap between the theoretical foundations drawn on by the two scholars, although more ties could certainly be identified. firstly, grow (1991) insisted that the instructor must be aware of the stage of the learner and adjust the level of instruction to self-directedness accordingly. in the same vein, oxford explained that “strategy assistance is useful at levels as long as it is tailored to learners’ needs” (2011, p. 175). we can conclude that assessment of both the level of readiness for sdl and of the awareness or use of lls, would be useful as a precursor to working with a student on these skills. next, grow’s model acknowledged that explicit leadership on the part of an instructor melissa williamson hawkins 458 can play a significant role in helping a student develop self-directedness. research into lls demonstrates the same. as oxford (2011) explained, “classroom strategy instruction can help by identifying ways in which learners already take responsibility for their learning, the strategies they currently use, and ways that an expanded range of strategies – and greater learner responsibility and control – can help them become more confident and proficient” (p. 182). i would add that the knowledgeable leadership of a tutor in a self-access center or a language learning lab could add to what an instructor may be able to accomplish in the classroom. 4. review of research in sdl for adult english language learners grow’s (1991) model provides guidance for educators in a formal classroom environment, but what about the less formal, although still explicitly educational, environment of a tutoring center? research has now been conducted for several decades on incorporating learning strategy instruction into the english language classroom (see, e.g., o’malley & chamot, 1990; oxford, 1990; wenden, 1991), but a question arises what research has been done thus far regarding instruction in sdl for english language students, and specifically sdl that has imparting knowledge of language-learning strategies as an overt goal? what lessons can we learn? it is usually wise to not “reinvent the wheel” and instead try to learn from those who implemented something before us. in that spirit, this section provides an overview of selected research reports on sdl for adult english language learners in a variety of contexts. it is organized to answer a series of questions regarding explicit teaching of sdl, the use of sdl by successful language-learning students, and the use of computer-assisted language learning (call) in sdl. 4.1. empirical research on instruction in sdl we know that research on s2r has provided evidence for the assumption that students benefit from explicit strategy training. does empirical research also support the idea that many english-language learners need to be explicitly taught self-directedness? in a us-based study, grover, miller, swearingen, and wood (2014) found in a survey of over 400 adult esl students that sdl strategies for improving english outside of class were infrequently used, if at all, even among those students who had access to a computer at home. notably, none of these students were currently enrolled in degree-seeking study, although some of them were taking english to prepare for college entry. the research did not seek to see what happened if students were taught to use techniques for sdl, but it did affirm empirically the suspicion that many students do not know how to study english outside of the context of their english classes. self-directed learning as related to learning strategies, self-regulation, and autonomy in an english. . . 459 another insightful study was conducted by yarahmadzehi and bazleh (2012) at their iranian university, in which an experimental group was explicitly taught sdl techniques, following bett’s autonomous learner model (betts & kercher, 1999, cited in yarahmadzehi & bazleh, 2012), parallel to their normal english lessons, while the control group was only taught english. the post-research testing showed a significant increase in english language skills, as well as a significant increase in readiness for sdl as measured by the self-directed learning readiness scale (sdlrs). the researchers concluded that, even though their research was small-scale, explicitly teaching sdl techniques and promoting learner autonomy would be a beneficial change for the iranian educational system overall, especially as space for students at iranian universities becomes increasingly competitive. in a study not related to language learning but relevant to the topic of teaching sdl, bambacas and sanderson (2011) investigated the preferences of groups of distance mba students for their learning activities, and the results showed that the more self-directed aspects of the program, including those not directly supervised by the professor as well as those that were peer-to-peer related, were the least popular. the researchers concluded that the professors, and the mba program itself, have a responsibility to “explain that these arrangements are important in the context of the outcomes of the program to help them to develop skills and dispositions related to independent, critical, and analytical learning” (bambacas & sanderson, 2011, p. 8). in the same way, an english language program should explain why employing sdl techniques is critical for success in many of the academic environments its students may be entering. this is true for the english language programs at uab, especially considering that many of the students are bound for graduate work, which is characterized in most cases by an implicit expectation of high learner autonomy. all of this shows that explicit teaching of sdl is needed, it is helpful for the student in learning english (especially if we add explicit training in lls use), and it may be necessary for the student’s navigation of numerous academic systems around the world. now, a question arises whether we can identify characteristics of successful students who use sdl in an effort to pinpoint the sorts of outcomes that should be established for sdl training? 4.2. empirical research on characteristics of successful students who rely on sdl first, it is worthwhile to consider two studies that link sdl abilities and language learning. a quantitative study in turkey among undergraduate english language learners in two different universities revealed that autonomous learning was a clear predictor of academic success in both institutions, as was intrinsic motivation. furthermore, the two together were shown to be extremely strong predictors of melissa williamson hawkins 460 academic success in language learning (karatas, alci, yurtseven, & yuksel, 2015). in addition, gan’s (2004) quantitative study of 357 chinese university sophomores, which employed questionnaires and english proficiency test scores, found that the students’ self-perception of confidence and sdl abilities were significantly associated with english learning achievement. specifically, sdl strategies related to cognitive learning and to managing effort were seen to be the best predictors of success. we can relate these predictors of success to the s2r model’s meta-strategies in the cognitive and affective dimensions (oxford, 2011). however, the specific self-regulated learning strategies that led to success in this specific context were not delineated. in a separate qualitative study that sought to investigate specifics of successful sdl strategies, gan, humphreys, and hamp-lyons (2004) focused on two groups of university-level students recruited from two separate universities in china. the group of 18 students, representing a small sample size typical of qualitative research, included nine successful and nine unsuccessful language learners, who were identified on the basis of english proficiency test scores. researchers followed their language learning through interviews, journals, and follow-up emails. the researchers found that, among other characteristics, successful english students were able to set specific language-learning objectives for themselves. they also found that these students valued what they called “language sense,” which was being able to use the right language at the right time without having to overthink it. importantly, all of the successful students felt that a person could develop this language sense by reading english newspapers and watching english television news broadcasts, activities done independently of formal instruction (gan et al., 2004, p. 234). these participants also described high motivation coming from intrinsic factors as well as external pressures, while the unsuccessful students only discussed extrinsic motivators. the researchers observed that the successful students employed a much wider range of practice activities and had a deeper understanding and use of learning strategies, which they felt was tied to the “practical command” of english that was the desired outcome of study. conclusions from the study included the important recommendation that teachers should provide “learning strategy training that attempts to teach less successful language learners to use the strategies characterizing their more successful peers” (gan et al., 2004, p. 240). determining overall characteristics and use of lls of successful self-directed english language learners is helpful, as language educators can plan to purposefully promote the teaching of strategies in tandem with training in sdl. however, many tutoring labs/self-access centers also incorporate call through various technologies. thus, it makes sense to offer a brief overview of research focusing on the use of call in sdl, which is the aim of the following subsection. self-directed learning as related to learning strategies, self-regulation, and autonomy in an english. . . 461 4.3. empirical research on technology in sdl one qualitative study undertaken by tse (2012) at a university in malaysia investigated the possibilities of providing an online call lab for students to promote sdl. it was found that a newly-created, online self-access center at an english language institute received very low usage, although tutors were on standby for individual online consultations. however, tse (2012) described no training for the students on the benefits of such sdl through the online english help center, only indicating that it was provided. the researcher concludes that students must be trained on how call can be used for sdl and must be made “conscious of the importance of self-learning” (tse, 2012, p. 165). in contrast, in turkey, a research study by mutlu & eroz-tuga (2013) exposed a group of university students to explicit training in self-directed languagelearning techniques, specifically delivered through call in order to spur the participants’ use of technology to increase opportunity for self-study. the study showed a major increase in the students’ autonomy, an enhanced understanding of lls, and a much higher incidence of self-study using call. as the researchers explained, the findings showed that the students in the sdl group “were highly teacher-dependent before the strategy training; however, the . . . students underwent a gradual change in their behavior from teacher-dependent to teacher-independent during the language learning strategy training process” (mutlu & eroztuga, 2013, p. 118). interestingly, the students reported that the idea of working on sdl in the self-access computer center at the university, after classes, was deeply unappealing because of fatigue; however, the self-study materials available to the students to use at home were satisfying to them. in another relevant and recent study, ramamuruthy and rao (2015) investigated the use of smartphones in developing learner autonomy. the researchers found that the use of such devices assisted the learners’ critical thinking, creative thinking, communication, and collaboration skills, even though this group of students still felt quite reliant on their teachers to learn english completely. while this was a small study with limited impact, it does indeed suggest that considering ways to encourage students to use their smartphones to engage in creative sdl may be a beneficial angle of training as well. 5. a framework for teaching sdl to language students as can be seen from the above, research findings show that explicit teaching of sdl is successful, that successful language learners do use lls aiding sdl, and that call can be used to encourage students to engage in sdl. what should be considered now is how to actually teach sdl techniques. in the qualitative study melissa williamson hawkins 462 by gan et al. (2004) mentioned above, the researchers suggested that a significant issue for teachers to explore is the role of teacher-student interaction in facilitating successful use of sdl. their research, the success with explicit teaching of sdl techniques reported by other studies overviewed in this paper, and the decades of research exploring the benefits of explicit teaching of lls, support the idea that teachers (or tutors, in a tutoring/self-access center) can play an active, significant, and empirically verified role in teaching sdl skills to their students. indeed, in the study by grover et al. (2014) also discussed above, in which it was revealed that the participants did not use sdl techniques on their own frequently or with intention, the researchers declared: “it is incumbent on the instructor to help students make the connection between learning independently and how this ability can enrich their daily life” (p. 17). since this study concerned english language learning, the researchers seem to suggest that autonomous learning would enrich english language use in daily life, as it would do for english language program students as well. we can recognize that our classroom subject, if we follow grow’s (1991) model, could be lls rather than developing students’ autonomy in learning shakespeare or another academic topic. so, how should english language teachers go about teaching self-directed language learning strategies? how do we apply the model to the english language classroom, and then ultimately, to a tutoring center context? nakata (2010) suggests a framework for teaching self-regulation to english language learners. this framework has much in common with grow’s (1991) stages of emergent self-directedness, and, as the model is directly related to learning english, it is worth exploring in more detail, first in general for the language classroom, then with the tutoring/self-access center environment in mind. the first stage in the framework is the preparation stage, in which the teacher comes to understand the students’ backgrounds, is careful to consider the safety of the classroom environment, directs the students in learning activities to help them achieve a basic understanding of the language, and helps provide intrinsic motivation, which can come, for example, from enjoying the class, liking the teacher, or understanding the need for the skill for educational purposes. the preparation stage looks similar to grow’s (1991) stage one in which the teacher takes the role of a coach and the classroom is teacher-centered (grow, 1991). many of our students arrive at our programs as teacher-dependent learners such as these. in the second stage, the developmental stage, the teacher begins helping students set goals, ensuring opportunities for students to work collaboratively, working on techniques for cognitive self-direction, and providing opportunities to experience the satisfaction of actually communicating in english (nakata, 2010). there are many ways in which nakata’s second stage resembles elements of grow’s (1991) stages two and three, some of which are goal-setting, facilitating self-directed learning as related to learning strategies, self-regulation, and autonomy in an english. . . 463 group study, assisting with the development of learning strategies, and applying learning to real problems, to name but a few (merriam & bierema, 2014). the final stage is the self-regulated stage, in which the teacher is more of a languagestudy advisor, providing students with lots of opportunities for varied, challenging, and/or creative tasks as well as for engagement in sdl (nakata, 2010). this stage closely resembles grow’s (1991) stage four, characteristic of highly self-directed learners, in which learning through discovery is promoted, and the teacher offers expertise and monitoring, but only as needed (merriam & bierema, 2014). these are well-articulated guidelines, and as grow (1991) explained, looping back and jumping forward between stages in the classroom will facilitate moving all students, whatever level they may manifest at the time, towards increased self-directedness. in the following section, i will try to show how this model can be applied to the planning and implementation of a tutoring or self-access center. 6. application for the learning resource center at uab firstly, i believe that the emphasis on the teacher’s active role in helping students acquire sdl skills and lls, which has been continuously re-emphasized in this paper, is important for the learning resource center at uab. we need to explicitly train two groups in two distinct ways at the beginning of each semester: first the tutors and then the students. at the beginning of each semester in each tutor-training workshop, held before new tutors are allowed to begin working with students, the importance of leading students towards more autonomous study, and the tutor’s crucial role in that process must be highlighted. the curriculum that is used for our tutor training does have an emphasis on helping students become independent learners, but i believe that the tutors should also be provided with the models proposed by grow (1991) and nakama (2010). this is because grow’s (1991) is a standard for sdl theorists and nakama’s (2010) is a very recent explication of a similar approach that is explicitly geared to the english language learning environment. not only must tutors be trained, but students must also become aware of what a tutoring center is, of the role that academic support often plays in universities, and of the benefits of going to the tutoring center. in addition, they must be convinced that taking advantage of the center will help them become more autonomous in their learning, which is a major characteristic of successful academic study in many university systems – certainly, it is needed for meeting the expectations of the american academic environment in which uab is situated. in her presentation devoted to a successful tutoring center given at tesol 2016, zastezhko (2016) stressed the importance of orienting the students to the role of tutoring and self-directed study upon arrival at an english language program. we melissa williamson hawkins 464 are planning to include this component in our initial orientation for all english language students at uab, as well as in ongoing orientation classes. furthermore, students in the pre-matriculation program will be required to attend a certain number of formal workshops in the learning resource center, so we can also cover strategies for sdl explicitly. the workshop can also help provide motivation to try to use these strategies by explaining that studies, such as those discussed in this paper, show a direct link between active implementation of sdl strategies and successful l2 learning. in addition, we can consider administering the language style survey (cohen, oxford, & chi, 2002) or similar self-assessment tools to all students. secondly, tutors need to implement the model of cognitive apprenticeship explained by oxford (2016), which involves a more knowledgeable person helping a novice move towards increased autonomy. this can happen by sharing specific learning strategies with the novice, helping the novice set goals, scaffolding for the novice, and in general guiding the novice in the area of learning until the student is able to proceed autonomously. this sort of social learning, as oxford (2016) acknowledges, is closely related to vygotsky’s (1978) foundational work on self-regulation and social learning, helping the student transverse the zone of proximal development, or the “distance that can be covered with assistance and cannot be traversed by the learner alone” (vygotsky, 1978, cited in oxford, 2016, pp. 33-34). learning resource center tutors can be deliberate in helping their students manage the growth needed to move towards increased self-directedness in their english language learning. they can also work one-on-one to help students identify the lls that they do use, suggesting how they can transfer those strategies to different situations but also pointing to new and potentially useful strategies that they may want to learn and apply. finally, i believe that the learning resource center needs to be full of resources that are not only physically accessible to students, but also accessible remotely. if we want to promote sdl among this population of learners, we must fully consider the likelihood that tired students may not choose to come and work on english in our tutoring center on their own. instead, we need to purposefully present to students suggestions for autonomous learning which resemble the ways in which they enjoy using technology on their own, in addition to specific training on lls that would help them make the most of a call environment. 7. conclusions and implications as the writer of the book of ecclesiastes once said, “of making many books there is no end” (ecc. 12:12b english standard version). in a similar vein, i am keenly aware that the present paper has not at all exhausted the examination of possible models that apply sdl to the language learning classroom, the vast body of research on lls, self-regulation, and autonomy in language learning, the specifics of which lls should self-directed learning as related to learning strategies, self-regulation, and autonomy in an english. . . 465 be taught to students, the best practices for strategy instruction, or research that could further illuminate the ways we can use technology in a tutoring/self-access center. therefore, more questions for further research and implementation concerning this particular case of implementation of a learning research center will be identified. we obviously still have much to accomplish in order to continue to build the best possible resource for students. however, this paper does give us two strong models (grow, 1991; nakata, 2010) for use in implementing sdl training in a tutoring/selfaccess center, it provides empirical evidence to back up the idea that tutors can play a strong, purposeful role in training students to become self-directed, and shows that all of this does tie in strongly with decades of research in the field of language teaching, and strategic, self-regulated language learning in particular (oxford, 2011, 2017). the uab english language programs can offer a learning resource center that encourages students to study independently, as long as we plan to actively train students how to analyze tasks, creatively identify and implement strategies to meet task requirements, and evaluate the utility of specific strategies in context. while tutors do not necessarily have to learn the nuances about how these concepts fit together, training students in sdl can only happen if we also train tutors on the basics of how to enable learners to become self-directed, self-regulated, autonomous, strategic learners. additionally, we must also build a center that promotes language study through careful use of technology and resources that allow the student to learn not only on-site but also while physically removed from class and the learning resource center itself. by including these elements in our center’s activities and design, students can be empowered to demonstrate autonomy and self-regulation as they independently implement principles of self-direction and strategic language learning. this article has presented interlocking theories and practices and has applied them to a tutoring and self-access center in an urban university in southeastern united states. how does this information relate to other english language programs elsewhere? what implications exist for institutions of adult english language education in other places, where cultural belief systems, customs, and expectations are different from those in the university that served as the case in point for this article? fortunately, since much of the empirical research reviewed derives from a wide variety of global english language teaching environments, we can project that this issue is indeed relevant and applicable to an equally wide variety of english language programs. thus, below i provide five key implications of this discussion: 1. empirical research validates that english language learners worldwide can greatly benefit from being explicitly taught strategies for self-directed learning. 2. in order to teach students to be self-directed in their l2 learning, language learning strategy instruction must be an integral part of the training. melissa williamson hawkins 466 3. assessment of both the level of readiness for sdl and awareness or use of lls would be useful as a precursor to working with a student on these skills. 4. teachers can play a role in this, but because of the one-on-one nature of tutoring services, trained english language program tutors can play a truly impactful role in helping students’ development in this area. in addition, self-access services available to students will be most useful if students are first trained in principles of sdl, and if the self-access services are designed to make use of technology that students find relevant and that may be accessed both onand off-site of the english language program. 5. grow’s (1991) model of strategic self-directed learning, nakata’s (2010) framework for self-regulated language learning, and oxford’s (2011, 2017) model for strategic self-regulation together provide excellent resources for outlining the steps and imagining the processes that students take towards developing autonomy in using strategies for language learning. the models can be applied to a wide variety of teaching and learning environments, since they offer frameworks that can be flexible and iterative, and since each of them attempts to describe a process rather than implying that l2 learning is unchangeably linear. in summary, it is time for sdl to be increasingly included in our research and conversations in relation to language learning strategies, learner autonomy, and self-regulation. widely recognized in major theories of adult education, the role sdl can play in shaping the language learning experiences of our students should be fully embraced. in addition, if programs consider adding new tutoring or self-access centers to their slate of curricular support options, or if they are considering the efficacy of the tutoring/self-access centers they already fund, the deep impact that including explicit training on self-direction, especially in relation to language learning strategy use, is of great significance. as we seek to support language learning success in a myriad of english language teaching environments available worldwide, let us further consider the implementation of these ideas in an effort to help our students become increasingly self-directed as well as truly and deeply strategic. self-directed learning as related to learning strategies, self-regulation, and autonomy in an english. . . 467 references bambacas, m., & sanderson, g. b. 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(2016). beyond classroom borders: successes and challenges of iep tutoring. paper presented at the international convention for teachers of english to speakers of other languages, baltimore, md. zeidner, m., boekaerts, m., & pintrich, p. r. (2000). self-regulation: directions and challenges for future research. in m. boekaerts., p. r. pintrich, & m. zeidner (eds.), handbook of self-regulation (pp. 750-768). san diego, ca: academic press. zimmerman, b. j., & schunk, d. h. (2011). self-regulated learning and performance: an introduction and an overview. in b. j. zimmerman & d. h. schunk (eds.), handbook of self-regulation of learning and performance (pp. 1-12). new york: routledge. 675 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (4). 2022. 675-696 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.4.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt heritage, second and third language learner processing of written corrective feedback: evidence from think-alouds melissa a. bowles university of illinois at urbana-champaign, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1896-8813 bowlesm@illinois.edu kacie gastañaga university of illinois at urbana-champaign, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8756-2687 kacielg2@illinois.edu abstract this study compares the processing of three different types of written corrective feedback (wcf) by heritage language (hl), second language (l2), and third language (l3) learners who wrote and revised three short essays and received a different type of wcf for each essay (i.e., direct, coding, or underlining). comparison of preand post-feedback texts and analysis of thinkalouds served as the basis for determining whether one type of feedback promoted higher depth of processing (dop) and whether this processing was mediated by error type and language background. the findings indicate that feedback type did interact with dop, and that this interaction was in some ways mediated by learner background and error type. this research serves as a first step toward understanding how these three learner groups are impacted by these commonly used feedback types and is therefore important to drive evidence-based pedagogical decisions. keywords: written corrective feedback; depth of processing; think-alouds; heritage language learners; third language learners melissa a. bowles, kacie gastañaga 676 1. introduction written corrective feedback (wcf) is “any explicit attempt to draw a learner’s attention to a morphosyntactic or lexical error” (polio, 2012, p. 375) in writing. the focus of wcf research has traditionally been on the accuracy of the final written product, but in recent years the processes learners engage in when they receive feedback have begun to receive empirical attention based on the recognition that without information about how wcf was processed, it is difficult to ascertain anything more than whether a revision was made (see roca de larios & coyle, 2022, for a recent review). leow’s (2020) feedback processing framework is the most recent account of how engaging with wcf may (or may not) lead to changes in learners’ linguistic systems. specifically, the framework explains that once learners have received feedback, they must minimally pay attention to it for it to potentially be converted into intake. feedback processing pertains to how the learner cognitively processes the feedback in relation to current linguistic knowledge. if the feedback is further processed, whether with a low or high dop, there is potential for previously learned knowledge to be restructured. the new restructured information (which might or might not be fully accurate at this point) can then replace or combine with the original knowledge in the learner’s internal system. leow notes that it is possible for the learner to retain both accurate and inaccurate items in the system, and only measures of delayed performance can indicate whether a complete, accurate restructuring has taken place (resulting in system learning), or whether such restructuring was fleeting, as evidenced by accuracy immediately after feedback provision but regression to previous inaccurate knowledge at a later time. our research is couched in leow’s (2020) framework and investigates the processing and impact of wcf on three different learner populations – second language (l2) learners, third language (l3) learners, and heritage language (hl) learners of spanish in a university-level spanish course in which composition is one component of the four-skills curriculum. these three populations are theoretically interesting, with heritage language learners understudied in wcf and l3 learners never having been the focus of prior wcf processing studies. furthermore, examining the three populations is an ecologically valid choice since all of them are enrolled in the same classes. in what follows we first review different types of wcf and then move on to describing previous research findings on feedback processing and learner profiles as the necessary background to situate our study. heritage, second and third language learner processing of written corrective feedback: evidence . . . 677 2. literature review 2.1. types of wcf wcf differs along several dimensions, including its focus (i.e., limited to a restricted set of linguistic elements or comprehensive), its timing (i.e., synchronous or asynchronous with writing), and its explicitness (i.e., direct or indirect). for our study we chose asynchronous, comprehensive feedback because of ecological validity considerations in our context and because the potential effectiveness of comprehensive wcf has attracted less empirical attention than focused wcf (cerezo et al., 2019, p. 174). to benefit from implicit (indirect) feedback, learners need to have enough proficiency in the language to be able to understand the nature of their errors, whereas explicit (direct) correction can be suitable for beginners as the feedback provides correction (kang & han, 2022). we chose to include both direct wcf and two types of indirect wcf – underlining and metalinguistic coding – as they are commonly used in language classrooms (zhang et al., 2021) and for their theoretical suitability for learners of intermediate proficiency. in terms of processing, as kang and han (2022) explain, “explicit wcf places the processing responsibility in the hands of the feedback giver (i.e., the teacher), while implicit wcf shifts the responsibility to the feedback receiver (i.e., the learner)” (p. 221). we therefore anticipated that direct feedback might be processed less deeply than indirect feedback. 2.2. findings of previous studies on the processing of wcf previous research has used two main introspective methods to examine how learners process feedback – written languaging (cerezo et al., 2019; manchón et al., 2020; manchón & roca de larios, 2011; suzuki, 2012, 2017) and thinkalouds (caras, 2019; derobles, 2019; kim & bowles, 2019; park & kim, 2019; qi & lapkin, 2001; sachs & polio, 2007; suh, 2010). leow and manchón (2022) have convincingly argued for the affordances of think-alouds, stating that “thinkaloud protocols, although a time-consuming undertaking mostly due to transcription, segmentation, and coding, arguably elicit the richest data on cognitive processes employed during task performance” (p. 306). our study therefore adopted think-alouds for this purpose and we turn now to reviewing existing process research that has used this data collection procedure. the earliest studies to examine wcf processing using think-alouds are qi and lapkin (2001) and sachs and polio (2007), both of which involved esl learners who received reformulations. although neither used the metric of dop per se, in qi and lapkin (2001) “substantive” rather than “perfunctory” comments melissa a. bowles, kacie gastañaga 678 were related to an improved written product and in sachs and polio (2007) errors accompanied by metalanguage or a hypothesis were more likely to be corrected in the revision. park and kim (2019), who examined processing of indirect feedback, similarly found that deeper processing resulted in better ability to self-correct marked errors. where think-aloud studies comparing the processing of multiple types of wcf are concerned, direct feedback has been associated with lower levels of processing than reformulations and indirect feedback (caras, 2019; kim & bowles, 2019). suh (2010), however, found in her study that the intermediatelevel esl learners who received direct feedback manifested higher levels of awareness and showed significantly greater learning gains than those who received indirect feedback (metalinguistic coding) on the past counterfactual conditional. it seems that the relationship between feedback and its processing may depend on a number of factors, including the l2 writer’s proficiency level, the nature of the errors, and the extent to which the indirect feedback provides clues as to the nature of the error. for instance, caras (2019) found that for preterit/imperfect errors, but not for ser/estar errors, most l2 spanish participants who received metalinguistic feedback processed at a high level. looking further into the relationship between error types and dop, kim and bowles (2019) found that errors related to sentence structure and organization were associated with high dop, whereas punctuation, word choice, and tense (surface level errors) were associated more often with low dop. for caras’ beginning-level learners, the indirect feedback type that provided the fewest clues as to the nature of the error (crossing it out) generally led to low level processing, most likely because learners did not have enough target language knowledge to understand what was incorrect about their writing. in contrast, the indirect, metalinguistic coding feedback generally led to high level processing, presumably because learners relied on the code to identify the source of the error. as this brief review shows, our understanding of the factors that impact wcf processing for l2 learners is just beginning to emerge and further research is needed to disentangle the roles learners play. all of the aforementioned studies examined how l2 learners of different languages, contexts, and proficiencies processed wcf. other populations have featured less prominently in research. for instance, just one study (derobles, 2019) investigated how heritage learners process wcf. this study compared how high and “very high” proficiency learners processed direct and indirect (metalinguistic coding) feedback. deeper processing was associated with greater accuracy between drafts, particularly for the metalinguistic coding group. again, relationships were not straightforward, as direct feedback led to improved accuracy for some lower proficiency learners on certain error types, and proficiency seemed to mediate the relationship between wcf and dop. heritage, second and third language learner processing of written corrective feedback: evidence . . . 679 as studies of wcf processing are still scarce for hl learners and, to our knowledge, nonexistent for l3 learners, it is important to compare the feedback processing behavior of those learners who so often coexist in the foreign or second language classroom yet have diverse abilities and needs due to their unique linguistic backgrounds, which we discuss next. this expansion of the populations under study will likely contribute not only to expanding the empirical basis, but also to assessing whether available research findings can be generalized across populations and contexts. 2.3. hl, l2, and l3 learners us college and university language classrooms are more diverse than ever (association of american colleges and universities, 2019), with spanish classes particularly so because it is the most widely taught language other than english in the country (looney & lusin, 2019). in many classrooms, l2 learners of spanish who were raised monolingually in english coexist with heritage learners of spanish, defined by valdés (2000) as learners that grew up hearing and using the language at home. at the institution where this study was carried out, there is also a growing number of l3 learners of spanish, who were raised speaking a heritage language such as russian or urdu at home, are dominant in english (the majority language), and choose to learn spanish in a classroom setting for professional or personal reasons. previous research tells us that these learner types have different strengths and needs when it comes to language learning (e.g., bowles & montrul, 2017; cenoz, 2013; gatti & o’neill, 2017; gurzynski-weiss, 2010). hl learners often have limited knowledge of grammar rules and metalinguistic terminology since they acquire the language naturalistically at home and rarely receive literacy instruction in spanish at school in the u.s. however, they often have stronger pronunciation skills, greater oral fluency, and higher oral comprehension skills than l2 or l3 learners (carreira & kagan, 2011; mrak, 2020). past research has shown that hl learners tend to rely on their “ear” even when completing written tasks, often reading their writing and any feedback aloud to determine whether it “sounds right” (yanguas & lado, 2012; zamora, 2022). furthermore, their relative lack of familiarity with metalinguistic labels suggests they might be less able to benefit from indirect feedback (and especially coding feedback) than their peers who learned spanish primarily in a classroom setting. l2 learners are mainly exposed to the target language in the classroom, and therefore usually have stronger explicit knowledge of grammar rules than hl learners, but weaker comprehension skills and oral fluency (carreira & kagan, 2011). they tend to be quite used to metalinguistic terms and are often very accurate at using them to melissa a. bowles, kacie gastañaga 680 describe the spanish language (bowles, 2011). this tendency could make them more adept at using indirect feedback (especially metalinguistic error coding feedback) than their hl peers. l3 learners have the advantage of coming to the spanish language classroom with two languages already under their belt, which, as past research has shown, contributes to higher overall metalinguistic awareness (bialystok, 2001). this tendency, combined with their classroom exposure to spanish, may predispose them to benefit the most of the three groups from indirect feedback. given their profiles, hl, l2 and l3 learners might be expected to process feedback differently and in empirically and pedagogically relevant ways. from the latter perspective, empirical findings could usefully inform our decisions about feedback provision, and in view of a limited number of studies with all but l2 learners, research is essential to drive evidence-based pedagogy for the three learner groups. in an attempt to add to previous research on feedback processing and gain new pedagogically relevant knowledge, the following research questions guided our study: 1. is there a relationship between type of written corrective feedback (error coding, underlining, or direct correction) and dop for hl, l2, or l3 learners? 2. is there a relationship between dop and error type for hl, l2, or l3 learners? 3. is there a relationship between dop and accurate error revision for hl, l2, or l3 learners? 3. method 3.1. participants the participants in this study were 35 students of spanish from a large public university in the us midwest. they ranged from lowto high-intermediate proficiency in spanish as determined by an abridged version of the diploma de español como lengua extranjera (dele), a spanish proficiency test frequently used in linguistics research (e.g., montrul 2004; montrul & slabakova 2003). the dele contains 30 multiple-choice vocabulary questions and a 20-question cloze test of grammar and vocabulary. test-takers can score 0-50 points, with scores from 0-29 regarded as low proficiency, 30-39 as intermediate and 40-50 as advanced. the learners also completed the bilingual language profile (blp) (birdsong et al., 2012), which was used to gather information about their language backgrounds and to identify them as hl, l2, or l3 learners. according to self-reports from the blp, on average participants in the hl group began learning spanish at birth and english at three years old and reported using spanish with their families 55% of the time, and with their friends 10% of the time. the l3 learners spoke heritage, second and third language learner processing of written corrective feedback: evidence . . . 681 a wide variety of home languages including mandarin chinese, hindi, amharic, japanese, polish, punjabi, and ukrainian. like the hl group, they reported learning english at three years old on average and using their home languages with family more than half of the time (68%) and with their friends about 30% of the time. l2 learners reported having been exposed only to english until learning spanish in a classroom setting in adolescence, and they indicated they infrequently used spanish outside of class. the learners were drawn from a range of university spanish courses, with hl learners reporting having studied spanish for an average of four years, l3 learners for 4.3 years, and l2 learners for an average of 5.5 years. in total, there were 7 hl learners of spanish, 9 l3 learners, and 19 l2 learners. table 1 reports average dele scores for each group. there were no statistically significant differences in proficiency between groups. table 1 dele scores by group group n dele avg. (sd) range hl 7 26.86 (6.5) 16-33 l2 19 26 (7.4) 15-36 l3 9 28.67 (6.73) 19-37 3.2. task each participant wrote and revised three 200-250-word essays in response to prompts about spanish in the us (see appendix). these prompts were chosen because they covered topics participants would have had personal experience with, were accessible to learners at this proficiency level, and related to topics covered in the curriculum. participants were given a week to write each essay in their own time. while writing, they recorded their screens using zoom to ensure they were only using microsoft word spellcheck, linguee.com and wordreference.com. these websites were allowed as resources because they provide translations of individual words or phrases like “get ready” rather than full sentences with context and examples. participants submitted their screen recordings with each essay; essays without screen recordings were not accepted. after submitting every single essay, each participant met with the researcher or a research assistant approximately one week later via zoom to revise their initial texts. during each session, the participant received their marked-up essay with one of three wcf types (error coding, direct feedback, underlining) and shared their screen while they edited and thought aloud. the next prompt was sent 1-2 days after each revision session and the process was repeated a melissa a. bowles, kacie gastañaga 682 total of three times for each participant, with the order of prompts and wcf counterbalanced to ensure that any differences were not due to order effects or prompt attributes. for each revision session, one-third of the participants received each prompt and feedback type. due to attrition, the final counts are not perfectly balanced. table 2 below illustrates the number of participants for each prompt and feedback condition during each writing session. table 2 counterbalancing of participants for each writing session prompt number of participants error coding direct feedback underlining writing session 1 teaching of spanish 10 4 3 3 resources 17 7 5 5 signage 8 3 1 4 writing session 2 teaching of spanish 15 3 5 7 resources 8 3 4 1 signage 12 4 4 4 writing session 3 teaching of spanish 10 1 4 5 resources 10 4 4 2 signage 15 6 5 4 3.3. feedback types the three feedback types that were chosen – direct corrective feedback, metalinguistic error coding, and underlining – were used because they are the main types of feedback that are given in the classroom and because they have been the focus of many previous studies (zhang et al., 2021). table 3 shows the same sentence marked with each feedback type. table 3 feedback types direct muchas personas saben que aprendiendoaprender un lenguaje cuándocuando ellos son jóvenes es más fácil que aprendiendoaprender una lengua en la escuela secundariosecundaria. (many people know that learning a language when they are young is easier than learning a language in high school.) coding muchas personas saben que aprendiendo(vt) un lenguaje(wc) cuándo(sp) ellos son jóvenes es más fácil que aprendiendo(=) una lengua en la escuela secundario(agr). (vt) verb tense, (wc)= word choice, (sp)= spelling, (=) = same as previous error, (agr)= agreement underlining muchas personas saben que aprendiendo un lenguaje cuándo ellos son jóvenes es más fácil que aprendiendo una lengua en la escuela secundario. following caras’ (2019) claim that comprehensive wcf is ecologically valid since it reflects the way instructors tend to revise compositions in the classroom (p. 186), we elected to provide this type of feedback. the errors that were marked were article errors (including missing articles and issues with definite/indefinite articles), inflectional morphology, such as gender and subject verb agreement, mood, punctuation, prepositions, spelling errors, and sentence structure errors such as incomplete sentences, verb tense, and word choice. these error types were chosen because they encompass the majority of errors that language learners at this level make when writing. heritage, second and third language learner processing of written corrective feedback: evidence . . . 683 to ensure the essays were being coded reliably, both authors provided feedback on 10% of the essays, divided equally among the three types of wcf. interrater agreement on these essays was 94%, which was considered high enough that one author then coded the remaining essays. 3.4. think-aloud protocols the think-aloud protocol was designed following bowles (2010), beginning with instructions and think-aloud practice for participants before they moved on to the revision task. the instructions asked learners to think aloud in english, spanish, or a combination of the two as was most natural while they revised, saying what went through their mind as they reviewed their feedback. next, the participants completed a brief think-aloud practice activity made up of three sentences with grammatical errors in english that had been marked with the type of feedback that corresponded to that day’s session. examples of each are included in table 4. table 4 think-aloud practice example sentence (underlining feedback) they’re wasn’t any students i knew at the school event. example think-aloud comments ok, so i have an issue with “they’re.” maybe i spelled it wrong since there are many ways to spell it. and a problem with wasn’t, too. maybe it is supposed to be “weren’t” since there is more than one student? practice sentence he didn’t went to the game yesterday. after the think-aloud practice session, participants received their markedup essay, shared their screen, and began to revise. the researcher started recording the zoom session, turned off her video and muted her microphone, only speaking to remind the participants to continue to think aloud if they fell silent for more than a few seconds. this prompting was rarely necessary. participants spent on average 15-20 minutes revising each essay. 3.5. coding for dop the think-aloud recordings were transcribed verbatim. participants’ comments for each error were classified as high, medium, or low dop, adopting the coding scheme used by caras (2019), an adaptation of leow’s (2015) coding system. table 5 provides descriptors for each category in the coding system and table 6 contains examples of each type of dop in each feedback condition. melissa a. bowles, kacie gastañaga 684 table 5 dop coding system description low dop medium dop high dop descriptors shows no potential for processing target comments on target in relation to meaning arrives at an inaccurate, partially, or fully accurate underlying rule repeats target or their production in the composition spends a bit more time processing target makes hypotheses regarding target translates the phrase into english makes comments that indicate some processing of target provides an inaccurate, accurate and/or partially accurate rule says what they mean in english refers to a previous instance with the same target corrects previous translation repeats target or their production in the composition some level of cognitive effort to process target spends much time processing target says they aren’t sure what is wrong high level of cognitive effort to process target comments on the target but does not indicate any further processing avoids the correction does not spend much time processing target low level of cognitive effort to process target table 6 dop coding examples high dop umm . . . pero . . . “vt” . . ., verb tense. okay . . . oh, that’s because . . . i believe it’s . . . paré? conjugations (looks up on wordreference.com) . . . umm paré, sí (coding). and then. americana. yeah, porque i was talking in the the feminine primera generación cause generación is feminine, so i have to change this to an “a.” ooh (direct). aquellos que son bilingües están mejor enfocan. (pause). están . . . then this one probably too. okay, they practice. wait and so, those who are bilingual are better at concentrating because they practice. that should be practican. pra-ti-can. conjugate that. because they practice. i think that’s right, okay. mejor . . . están . . . aquellos que son bilingües están mejor enfocan (underlining). medium dop no es tan bueno, “agr,” agreement. buena. (“it’s not as good (feminine). agr. agreement. good (masculine)”) (coding). lenguaje again . . . guess you can’t use that word (direct). muchas investigaciones creen que los hispanos . . . sería. oh. serían. (“many studies believe that hispanics . . . would be (singular). oh. would be (plural)”) (underlining). low dop tenido más práctica hablando (“had more practice speaking”) (coding). a los . . . ugh ohh (“to the . . . ugh ohh”) (direct). encanencantar (“lolove”) (underlining). each researcher coded 10% of the transcripts separately and interrater agreement for dop was 94%. the two authors discussed the disagreements and further elaborated the coding scheme accordingly, then one author coded the rest of the data. each think-aloud comment was coded for high, medium, or low dop, error type, and whether the revision was correct, incorrect (but changed from the original), or unchanged. in total, there were 1,910 comments across all three feedback conditions. each participant provided an average of 54 thinkaloud comments (sd = 27). descriptive statistics were used to answer the research questions in the following section. heritage, second and third language learner processing of written corrective feedback: evidence . . . 685 4. results the first research question asked about the relationship between the type of written corrective feedback and dop for hl, l2, and l3 learners. tables 7-9 illustrate each group’s percentage of high, medium, and low dop in each feedback condition. for all three learner groups, direct feedback was most often processed with low dop (in 60% of cases). error coding and underlining feedback, on the other hand, were processed with medium or high dop approximately 60% of the time by hl and l2 learners. l3 learners also processed underlining feedback with medium or high dop at this rate, but not error coding. these findings echo previous work which has found that indirect feedback leads l2 and hl learners to process more deeply than its direct counterpart (caras, 2019; derobles, 2019; kim & bowles, 2019) and provide the first measures of l3 feedback processing. the two indirect feedback types were processed with similar rates of low (over 40%), medium (around 30%), and high dop (around 30%) by hl and l2 learners. the l3 learners differed from the other groups in their processing of coding feedback. they had the lowest rates of high dop for coding (17%) of the three groups, as compared to hl learners (26%) and l2 learners (32%). in addition, the l3 learners processed the most implicit type of feedback, underlining, with medium or high dop 63% of the time, 7% more often than the l2 group and 15% more often than hl learners. table 7 hl dop by feedback type dop code direct underline totals low 53 (45%) 92 (66%) 45 (42%) 190 (52%) med 35 (29%) 13 (9%) 32 (30%) 80 (22%) high 31 (26%) 35 (25%) 30 (28%) 96 (26%) totals 119 140 107 366 table 8 l2 dop by feedback type dop code direct underline totals low 146 (42%) 203 (62%) 13 (44%) 480 (49%) med 89 (26%) 53 (16%) 85 (29%) 227 (23%) high 112 (32%) 74 (22%) 80 (27%) 266 (27%) totals 347 330 296 973 table 9 l3 dop by feedback type dop code direct underline totals low 92 (48%) 108 (57%) 69 (37%) 269 (47%) med 66 (35%) 32 (17%) 53 (28%) 151 (27%) high 32 (17%) 49 (26%) 67 (35%) 148 (26%) totals 190 189 189 568 melissa a. bowles, kacie gastañaga 686 table 10 hl dop by error type feedback type dop art im m p pr s ss t wc code low 6 (46%) 9 (45%) 1 (33%) 4 (50%) 5 (56%) 15 (38%) 1 (50%) 4 (80%) 8 (42%) med 4 (31%) 7 (35%) 1 (33%) 3 (37%) 2 (22%) 13 (33%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 5 (26%) high 3 (23%) 4 (20%) 1 (33%) 1 (12%) 2 (22%) 11 (28%) 1 (50%) 1 (20%) 6 (32%) direct low 9 (69%) 5 (63%) 2 (50%) 1 (20%) 13 (93%) 35 (70%) 4 (80%) 6 (60%) 17 (55%) med 2 (15%) 0 (0%) 2 (50%) 2 (40%) 1 (7%) 2 (4%) 0 (0%) 1 (10%) 3 (10%) high 2 (15%) 3 (37%) 0 (0%) 2 (40%) 0 (0%) 13 (26%) 1 (20%) 3 (30%) 11 (35%) underline low 2 (22%) 5 (38%) 2 (33%) 4 (57%) 5 (42%) 12 (37%) 1 (50%) 5 (71%) 9 (47%) med 4 (44%) 3 (23%) 4 (66%) 2 (29%) 4 (33%) 8 (25%) 0 (0%) 1 (14%) 6 (32%) high 3 (33%) 5 (38%) 0 (0%) 1 (14%) 3 (25%) 12 (37%) 1 (50%) 1 (14%) 4 (21%) note. art = article, im = inflectional morphology, m = mood, p = punctuation, pr = preposition, s = spelling, ss = sentence structure, t = tense, wc = word choice table 11 l2 dop by error type feedback type dop art im m p pr s ss t wc code low 17 (50%) 17 (32%) 5 (38%) 6 (60%) 19 (59%) 21 (51%) 9 (53%) 13 (46%) 39 (33%) med 8 (24%) 19 (36%) 3 (23%) 2 (20%) 7 (22%) 8 (20%) 4 (23%) 4 (14%) 34 (28%) high 9 (26%) 17 (32%) 5 (38%) 2 (20%) 6 (19%) 12 (29%) 4 (23%) 11 (39%) 46 (39%) direct low 22 (50%) 35 (59%) 8 (57%) 7 (87%) 21 (55%) 28 (76%) 13 (68%) 14 (54%) 55 (65%) med 7 (16%) 6 (10%) 5 (38%) 0 (0%) 10 (26%) 5 (13%) 3 (16%) 3 (11%) 14 (16%) high 15 (34%) 18 (31%) 1 (7%) 1 (12%) 7 (18%) 4 (11%) 3 (16%) 9 (35%) 16 (19%) underline low 16 (50%) 13 (32%) 2 (25%) 8 (73%) 11 (52%) 23 (38%) 13 (54%) 10 (38%) 35 (47%) med 13 (41%) 12 (30%) 2 (25%) 2 (18%) 5 (24%) 19 (32%) 6 (25%) 9 (35%) 17 (23%) high 3 (9%) 15 (37%) 4 (50%) 1 (9%) 5 (24%) 18 (30%) 5 (21%) 7 (27%) 22 (30%) note. art = article, im = inflectional morphology, m = mood, p = punctuation, pr = preposition, s = spelling, ss = sentence structure, t = tense, wc = word choice table 12 l3 dop by error type feedback type dop art im m p pr s ss t wc code low 13 (59%) 19 (50%) 2 (25%) 1 (100%) 5 (38%) 20 (55%) 2 (100%) 2 (13%) 28 (52%) med 3 (14%) 18 (47%) 5 (62%) 0 (0%) 8 (61%) 8 (22%) 0 (0%) 8 (53%) 16 (30%) high 6 (27%) 1 (3%) 1 (12%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 8 (22%) 0 (0%) 5 (33%) 10 (18%) direct low 22 (76%) 13 (42%) 3 (43%) 3 (100%) 14 (82%) 19 (63%) 4 (50%) 4 (33%) 26 (50%) med 2 (7%) 6 (19%) 4 (57%) 0 (0%) 2 (12%) 4 (13%) 1 (12%) 4 (33%) 9 (17%) high 5 (17%) 12 (39%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 1 (6%) 7 (23%) 3 (38%) 4 (33%) 17 (33%) underline low 14 (67%) 12 (36%) 3 (25%) 0 (0%) 8 (40%) 20 (45%) 1 (14%) 3 (19%) 8 (22%) med 4 (19%) 7 (21%) 5 (42%) 0 (0%) 6 (30%) 13 (29%) 2 (29%) 4 (25%) 12 (33%) high 3 (14%) 14 (42%) 4 (33%) 0 (0%) 6 (30%) 11 (25%) 4 (57%) 9 (56%) 16 (44%) note. art = article, im = inflectional morphology, m = mood, p= punctuation, pr = preposition, s = spelling, ss = sentence structure, t = tense, wc = word choice the second research question asked if there was a relationship between dop and error type for the three groups. tables 10-12 include detailed data for each learner group. direct corrective feedback led to the lowest dop for most error types for all groups. that said, the hl group processed the few punctuation errors they made most deeply in the direct feedback condition, often spending considerable time reading and re-reading the sentence aloud to see if the corrected punctuation sounded right. the l2 learners processed article and preposition heritage, second and third language learner processing of written corrective feedback: evidence . . . 687 errors with equally low dop in every condition, most often editing them by simply saying the correction aloud (e.g., “el país” instead of just “país,” or “por” instead of “para”). underlining feedback promoted the highest dop for the majority of error types for all groups, followed closely by coding feedback for l2 learners. specifically, l3 learners processed underlining feedback with the highest dop for eight of the nine error types, the only exception being article errors, which were processed most deeply with coding feedback. l2 and hl learners demonstrated the most medium and high dop for inflectional morphology, mood, preposition, and spelling errors when they received underlining feedback. the l2 learners seemed to benefit from the error coding feedback more than the other groups for punctuation, sentence structure, tense, and word choice errors as this feedback type promoted the highest dop for these error types, most likely because it indicates the source of the error, something that might not be clear from underlining for these errors, especially to l2 learners whose knowledge is more rule-based than intuitive and who do not have heightened metalinguistic awareness like the l3 learners. table 13 hl dop and error revision dop accurately corrected unchanged not accurately corrected code direct under-line code direct under-line code direct under-line low 40 (42%) 82 (63%) 21 (33%) 4 (80%) 0 (0%) 6 (67%) 9 (50%) 10 (91%) 18 (53%) med 29 (30%) 13 (10%) 18 (28%) 1 (20%) 0 (0%) 2 (22%) 5 (28%) 0 (0%) 12 (35%) high 26 (27%) 34 (26%) 25 (39%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 1 (11%) 4 (22%) 1 (9%) 4 (12%) totals 95 129 64 5 0 9 18 11 34 overall totals 288/365 (79%) 14/365 (4%) 63/365 (17%) table 14 l2 dop and error revision dop accurately corrected unchanged not accurately corrected code direct under-line code direct under-line code direct under-line low 85 (35%) 198 (62%) 68 (38%) 20 (77%) 2 (67%) 21 (60%) 41 (52%) 4 (57%) 42 (50%) med 67 (27%) 50 (15%) 49 (27%) 2 (8%) 1 (33%) 11 (31%) 20 (26%) 2 (26%) 25 (30%) high 91 (37%) 73 (23%) 61 (34%) 4 (15%) 0 (0%) 3 (8%) 17 (22%) 1 (22%) 16 (19%) totals 243 321 178 26 3 35 78 7 83 overall totals 742/974 (76%) 64/974 (7%) 168/974 (17%) table 15 l3 dop and error revision dop accurately corrected unchanged not accurately corrected code direct under-line code direct under-line code direct under-line low 67 (47%) 105 (62%) 46 (34%) 9 (75%) 3 (50%) 8 (73%) 16 (43%) 0 (0%) 15 (34%) med 46 (33%) 20 (12%) 37 (28%) 2 (17%) 2 (33%) 2 (18%) 18 (49%) 0 (0%) 14 (32%) high 28 (20%) 45 (26%) 51 (38%) 1 (8%) 1 (17%) 1 (9%) 3 (8%) 3 (100%) 15 (34%) totals 141 170 134 12 6 11 37 3 44 overall totals 445/588 (80%) 29/558 (5%) 84/558 (15%) the third research question concerned the relationship between dop and error revision for each group. tables 13-15 include the percentages of accurately melissa a. bowles, kacie gastañaga 688 corrected, unchanged, and inaccurately revised errors in each group by feedback condition. learners from all three groups were able to accurately revise approximately 80% of their errors, regardless of dop or feedback type and rarely left errors unchanged. unsurprisingly, the direct feedback condition allowed learners in each group to revise many errors correctly with low dop. when errors were left unchanged, they were most often processed with low dop, either because the learner simply skipped the error or took a quick look and decided they did not know how to correct it. few errors were left unchanged by any group in the direct feedback condition since it provided learners with the correct revision. in each group roughly 15% of errors were incorrectly revised. this mostly occurred when the learners demonstrated low or medium dop and happened most often in the underlining and coding feedback conditions. notably, there were some instances in each group of high dop leading to inaccurate revisions, meaning that higher dop did not always lead to accurate revision and conversely, medium or high dop was not always required for accurate revision. correct revision accompanied by high dop occurred most often in the underlining feedback condition for hl and l3 learners and in the error coding condition for l2 learners. based on leow (2020) and past research on the relationship between high dop and subsequent learning outcomes (leow, 2015), these are instances that have the greatest potential for leading to learning gains. while high dop does not always lead to correct revision and correct revision does not necessarily require high dop, in general deeper processing has been found to be associated with more correct revision (park & kim, 2019). since direct feedback provides learners with the correct answer, when we focus only on the error coding and underlining conditions, we see that higher dop does appear to be linked more with accurate revisions and lower dop is associated with unchanged or incorrectly revised errors. this pattern was clear for all three groups, where between 57-67% of the correctly revised errors were processed with medium or high dop, 60-80% of the unchanged errors were processed with low dop, and approximately 50% of the inaccurately revised errors in each group were processed with low dop. only the l3 learners in the underlining feedback condition broke this pattern as they were equally likely to process their incorrectly revised errors with low, medium, or high dop. 5. discussion in this study we set out to explore the processing of three different types of written corrective feedback by hl, l2, and l3 learners with the ultimate aim of contributing new data on feedback processing from diverse learners of spanish that could be useful empirically (in terms of the generalizability of findings on feedback heritage, second and third language learner processing of written corrective feedback: evidence . . . 689 processing across populations and contexts) and pedagogically (especially in terms of pedagogical decision-making related to the provision of feedback). our first research question asked if there was a relationship between type of wcf and dop for learners. our results confirm that feedback type and depth of processing do interact. across all groups, direct corrective feedback, the most transparent feedback type, led to the lowest dop. error coding and underlining feedback promoted medium or high dop more than half the time for every learner group. these findings echo previous research which has found that indirect feedback tends to promote higher dop so long as the learners have sufficient proficiency to understand the feedback (caras, 2019; kim & bowles, 2019). the hl and l2 learners in this study had similar rates of high, medium, and low dop for each feedback type, while the l3 data present very distinct patterns. that is, the l3 learners processed the error coding feedback much more shallowly than the other groups, only ever processing it with high dop 17% of the time as opposed to 26% for hl learners and 32% for the l2 group. conversely, they processed the underlining feedback more deeply than any other group. from our observations, the l3 learners were often able to resolve their errors very quickly upon seeing the error code, often simply stating the correct answer. researchers have indicated that l3 learners have advanced metalinguistic skills due to their exposure to multiple languages (bialystok, 2001), and it seems that the learners in this study may have been able to use such skills to their advantage with this feedback type. that said, due to the small sample size in this study, more data should be collected to determine the generalizability of this finding. similarly, a larger sample size would be needed to confirm the general trend in our data that feedback type and depth of processing interact, and that this interaction is mediated by learner-related characteristics and background. our second research question concerned the relationship between dop and error type. overall, we found that error type interacted with dop for these learner groups. underlining feedback promoted the highest dop for many error types including inflectional morphology, mood, prepositions, and spelling for all three learner groups, again echoing findings that indirect feedback promotes higher dop and providing evidence of the way this can be mediated by error type for these learner groups. the l2 group demonstrated the highest dop when they received error coding feedback for punctuation, sentence structure, tense, and word choice errors. since l2 learners’ linguistic knowledge is often more explicit and rule-based than that of hl learners, which is more implicit and intuitive, they may have benefited more from the direct metalinguistic guidance provided to them via the error coding system. the hl learners had the highest dop for punctuation, tense, and word choice errors in the direct feedback condition. hl learners are known to use a “sound it out” approach when revising melissa a. bowles, kacie gastañaga 690 written work (yanguas & lado, 2012; zamora, 2022), and that is what we saw happening in this case. many hl learners dedicated significant amounts of time to reading and rereading what they had written, making sure the added punctuation or suggested new word sounded right, whereas other groups were more likely to simply add a punctuation mark or change the word and move on. what this would mean in terms of learning outcomes is unclear and should be studied in future research. these data provide evidence of interaction between error type and dop, yet it is still difficult to draw clear conclusions from these results due to small sample sizes for some error types. overall, it seems that feedback type and learner background mediated dop to a greater extent than error type. our third and final research question asked about the relationship between dop and error revision. we found that dop and error revision did interact, with higher dop leading to more accurate error revision for all groups in the underlining and error coding feedback conditions, which aligns with previous findings about more substantive processing and error revision (park & kim, 2019; qi & lapkin, 2001; sachs & polio, 2007). underlining feedback promoted the highest dop and correct revision for the hl and l3 groups, while error coding best achieved this for l2 learners. the l3 group was able to revise correctly with low dop more often than the hl or l2 groups. again, this often occurred because they were able to quickly identify their mistakes and fix them without deliberating. that said, accurate revision and high dop did not always go hand in hand. there were examples in every group and under every feedback condition of low dop leading to accurate revisions and medium or high dop leading to inaccurate revisions. these findings further reinforce the idea that writers’ background and education experience are key variables to be considered when investigating feedback processing and its potential effects on the revised text produced. these insights also point to the necessary caution in generalizing findings across educational contexts and populations. 6. conclusions and pedagogical implications this exploratory study provides a first look at l3 processing of wcf and bolsters the amount of data we have on hl learners, a group that has been understudied to date. the analyses showed that dop was mediated by feedback type for hl, l2, and l3 learners. direct corrective feedback promoted the lowest average dop for all three groups, while error coding and underlining promoted medium and high dop more often. the hl and l2 learners demonstrated similar dop patterns under each feedback condition, with coding and underlining promoting similar amounts of low, medium, and high dop for each group, whereas the l3 group was unique in processing error coding with much lower dop than the heritage, second and third language learner processing of written corrective feedback: evidence . . . 691 other two groups and underlining with high dop more often. it seems that these learners, potentially due to their increased metalinguistic awareness, found it easier to understand their errors marked with error coding than the other groups and also had an advantage when it came to interpreting and applying the implicit underlining feedback. along with feedback type, error type played a role in dop for each learner group. overall, underlining led to the highest dop for most error types for l3 learners. inflectional morphology, mood, prepositions, and spelling were processed most deeply in the underlining condition by all learners, but the l2 learners processed punctuation, sentence structure, tense, and word choice errors most deeply in the error coding condition and the hl group processed punctuation, tense, and word choice errors most deeply upon receiving direct corrective feedback, often sounding out the suggestion to see if they agreed with it before editing. finally, higher dop was associated with correct revision and lower dop tended to be related to leaving errors unchanged or revising them incorrectly, at least with coding and underlining feedback types. direct corrective feedback led all three learner groups to correctly revise their errors with low dop far more often than the other two types of wcf due to its transparent nature. while this investigation was primarily exploratory in nature due to the small sample size, a few pedagogical implications can be drawn. when it comes to feedback processing, underlining feedback promoted the highest dop for the majority of error types in all learner groups. the l3 learners especially processed this feedback type more deeply than the other learner groups, indicating that this feedback type is likely ideal for them if the goal is to promote deep processing. the l2 group benefited more than the other two groups from the metalinguistic clues provided via the error coding feedback, most likely because their linguistic knowledge is primarily explicit and rule-based. that said, the hl and l2 groups had similar rates of dop in the error coding and underlining conditions, so both feedback types could be beneficial for them. direct corrective feedback promoted the lowest dop for all groups across most error types. however, hl learners often spent significant amounts of time sounding out the direct feedback to make sure they agreed with it, something that the other two groups did not do. some limitations that should be considered are the small number of participants in the hl and l3 groups and the lack of a measure of learning. our data shed light on how learners process wcf and what they do when they revise under different conditions, but we cannot speak to what impact the wcf had on their learning. leow (2020) explains that higher dop can potentially lead learners to restructure their inaccurate linguistic knowledge, and it is important to include long-term measures of learning to be able to make conclusions about the impact of wcf on language acquisition. melissa a. bowles, kacie gastañaga 692 future studies of feedback processing should continue to compare these three learner groups. descriptions of observed learner revision behavior would also be beneficial. in this study 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(2022). the secret is in the processing: categorizing how heritage learners of spanish process. in m. a. bowles (ed.), outcomes of university spanish heritage language instruction in the united states (pp. 81-102). georgetown university press. zhang, t., chen, x., hu, j., & ketwan, p. (2021). efl students’ preferences for written corrective feedback: do error types, language proficiency, and foreign language enjoyment matter? frontiers in psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.660564 melissa a. bowles, kacie gastañaga 696 appendix prompts los recursos para los estudiantes ● ¿crees que las universidades en los estados unidos deberían tener recursos y programas específicamente para el apoyo de los estudiantes hispanos? ¿por qué o por qué no? ¿qué tipo de recursos serían ideales? (do you think universities in the u.s. should have resources and programs specifically to support hispanic students? why or why not? what types of resources would be ideal?) la enseñanza de español ● ¿crees que en las escuelas públicas en los estados unidos se debería enseñar el español a todos los estudiantes desde el kínder, así como se enseña el inglés en otros países? ¿por qué? ¿te gustaría haber tenido esa oportunidad? (do you think in public schools in the u.s. spanish should be taught to all students starting in kindergarten the way english is taught in other countries? why? would you have liked to have that opportunity?) las señales ● ¿crees que todas las señales de tránsito y los letreros en lugares públicos en los estados unidos deberían ser traducidos al español? ¿por qué? ¿hay excepciones? (do you think all the traffic signs and other signs in public spaces in the u.s. should be translated into spanish? why? are there exceptions?) 213 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (2). 213-243 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl enhancing learners’ emotions in an l2 context through emotionalized dynamic assessment parisa abdolrezapour university of isfahan, iran abdolrezapour@gmail.com mansoor tavakoli university of isfahan, iran mr.tavakoli14@gmail.com saeed ketabi university of isfahan, iran s.ketabi@yahoo.com abstract the aim of this study was to gain more in-depth understanding of students’ emotions in an efl context by applying dynamic assessment (da) procedures to the development of learners’ emotional intelligence. the study with 50 intermediate learners aged 12-15 used three modalities: a control group, which was taught under institute’s normal procedures; a comparison group, which received da; and an experimental group, which received emotionalized dynamic assessment (eda) procedures, in the form of an intervention focusing on emotional characteristics of goleman's emotional intelligence framework with the express purpose of inducing them to work with their emotions. the study shows the potential of eda for increasing one’s emotional intelligence and affords practical guidelines to language teachers as to how to incorporate behaviors relating to emotional intelligence into assessment procedures. keywords: dynamic assessment, emotion, emotional intelligence, language learning, motivation, reading performance parisa abdolrezapour, mansoor tavakoli, saeed ketabi 214 previous studies have demonstrated that emotions have a pivotal role in cognitive processes and more particularly in foreign language learning, which involves mutual interactions between cognition and emotion (arnold, 1999; dewaele, 2005, 2011; macintyre & gregersen, 2012; swain, 2013). the roles of emotional factors in foreign/second language learning contexts have also been addressed with reference to a number of methodologies such as suggestopedia and some models such as krashen’s monitor model. in the input hypothesis, krashen proposed the existence of an affective filter. “positive emotions were related to a low affective filter, thereby letting in more input, meaning that more learning would occur; negative emotions were related to a high affective filter, thereby keeping out input, meaning that less learning would occur” (swain, 2013, p. 198). following salovey and mayer's (1990) proposal of emotional intelligence (ei), who defined it as “the ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth” (mayer, salovey, & caruso, 2004, p. 197), a number of studies made an attempt to find its relationship with academic performance (song et al., 2010; stottlemayer, 2002) but few investigated its concordance with foreign language learning (abdolrezapour & tavakoli, 2012; dewaele, petrides, & furnham, 2008). knowing that the emotional state of the learner would affect his/her performance in an academic setting, it is apposite to devise intervention programs to improve the learner’s ei so as to set him/her under the best emotional conditions of learning. in the current ei studies, a variety of theoretical frameworks and assessment tools with only partial overlap among them exist. nevertheless, the problem with most is the observed mismatch between the theory and the applied assessment process in that they have been characterized as static, neglecting the reciprocal functional intertwinedness of the learner and environment (dowson & mcinerney, 2003; lewin, 1954). vygotsky’s (1987) proposal of the link between cognition and emotion has been confirmed by neurobiological and brain research (e.g., damasio, 1999), psycholinguistic research (rommtveit, 1998) and research on second language acquisition (swain, 2013). moreover, from a lewinian perspective (lewin, 1954), there is a reciprocal functional intertwinedness between an individual and his/her surrounding environment. therefore, the ability of a person cannot be defined without relating to the relevant elements of his or her immediate environment or psychological situation. in spite of repeated reference to the effect of emotion in learning and more specifically second language learning and in one’s zone of proximal development, previous atenhancing learner’s emotion in an l2 context through emotionalized dynamic assessment 215 tempts on using dynamic assessment (da) paid little attention to the emotional states of learners and the possibility of integrating it with da procedures. this study aims to address such problems by introducing an emotionallyloaded da which intends to capture the dynamic nature of one’s ei and its interaction with the context. dynamic assessment is an assessment approach which is basically grounded in socio-cultural theory and specifically in vygotsky’s notion of zone of proximal development (zpd) whereby instruction leads development. the main reason for using the da approach in assessing one’s ei is the importance given by da proponents to learner-environment interactions and the incorporation of the students’ cognitive, emotional and motivational states into instructional activities in order to keep students engaged, increase their interest, and presumably maximize their learning (goldstein, 1999; holzman, 2009). therefore, the major objective of this study is to assess the learner’s ei in the second language (l2) context applying da processes and examine the effects of an emotionally-based da as compared to pure da (assessment with no emphasis on emotions) on boosting the learner’s ei. this article first provides an overview of ei in the l2 classroom. then, we describe the emotional mediation program used in this study. finally, the results of the present study are reported and discussed. review of literature emotional intelligence since the initial introduction of the popular phrase emotional intelligence by salovey and mayer (1990), which was firmly rooted in past psychological thinking, research and practice, numerous studies have been conducted to understand how ei is related to valued social outcomes and functions. it was daniel goleman who brought it into the academic performance mainstream with the publication of his 1995 book (emotional intelligence: why it can matter more than iq). following goleman (1995), a number of studies showed that social and emotional skills play a central role in one’s academic, social and personal life above and beyond one’s general intelligence (downey, mountstephen, lloyd, hansen, & stough, 2008; parker, summerfeldt, hogan, & majeski, 2004; song et al., 2010; stottlemayer, 2002). also, in academic domains there has been an increasing movement toward a specific niche in psychology, namely positive psychology, which explores the sources of happiness, satisfaction, hope, optimism, and well-being which ultimately allow individuals to flourish (e.g., fredrickson & losasda, 2005; seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000). seligman and csikszentmihalyi (2000) argued parisa abdolrezapour, mansoor tavakoli, saeed ketabi 216 that people need positive emotional experiences, autonomy, and self-regulation in pursing personally important goals and that educational and workplace interventions can help them satisfy their needs. in fact, they are echoing goleman’s (1995) view that raising one’s ei will ultimately improve one’s condition. nevertheless, it should be pointed that devising ei programs needs more than giving positive feelings; such programs should let learners know how to overcome negative feelings and barriers in life. in addition, such interventions should be based on a theoretical and methodological rationale. currently, a number of attempts have been designed to improve ei and except for some (e.g., nelis, quoidbach, mikolajczak, & hansenne, 2009) which are based on mayer and salovey’s (1997) four branches model, they have either targeted only some dimensions of ei (e.g., topping, holmes, & bremmer, 2000) or lacked a solid theoretical background (e.g., matthews, zeidner, & roberts, 2007). mayer and salovey (1997), who have been trying to find a psychometric test, enhanced the skill-based model, that is, a theoretical model according to which ei consists of emotional abilities. the skill model was later contrasted with trait-based models, suggesting that ei encompasses a variety of emotional skills, including aspects of personality, which can be measured by self-report inventories (petrides & furnham, 2001). the trait model conceives ei as a multifaceted construct entailing between 13 and 15 (depending on the model) emotionrelated behavioral dispositions which are thought to affect the ways in which an individual would cope with demands and pressures. the ei programs proposed in this study are anchored in goleman's ei framework. it is a distinct model encompassing both traits and characteristics, and it can be subsumed under the trait ei model. in this framework ei is a combination of five characteristics: (a) knowing one’s emotion, (b) managing one’s emotion (i.e., handling fear, anxiety, etc.), (c) motivating oneself (emotional control, the ability to delay gratification), (d) recognizing emotions in others, and (e) handling relationships. applied linguists have recently sought to understand the impact of emotion in learning a second/foreign language (abdolrezapour & tavakoli, 2012; dewaele, 2005, 2011; dewaele, petrides, & furnham, 2008) and the possibility of flourishing one’s ei through emotional activities in english as a foreign language (efl) context has been investigated by abdolrezapour and tavakoli (2012). however, the efficacy of the intervention, in their study, was assessed through standard statistical procedures and the dynamic nature of emotion and its interaction with environment was neglected. the present study intends to fill this gap by using da procedures which are emotionally loaded in exploring l2 learners’ emotional state. enhancing learner’s emotion in an l2 context through emotionalized dynamic assessment 217 dynamic assessment in an l2 context dynamic assessment is basically grounded in vygotsky’s innovative insight that in the zdp instruction leads development (lantolf & thorn, 2006). the critical point which distinguishes da from other forms of assessment is firstly that the process of learning is elicited by the specific way of assessment. moreover, the outcome of the assessment provides not only an insight of an individual’s abilities, but also reveals which types of assistance elicit those abilities through mediation (lantolf & poehner, 2004). generally speaking, conventional forms of assessment, when administered in an unassisted manner, only give an understanding of what the individual has already mastered, while, as sternberg and grigorenko (2002) argued, one's true abilities or potential level is better captured in assisted, scaffolded assessment. three distinct understandings of zpd feature in the insightful discussion offered by holzman (2009). first, it may be viewed as a characteristic or property of an individual learner. holzman (2009) says that those who have interpreted zpd in terms of assessment and try to devise alternative means of evaluation (allal & pelgrims, 2000; lantolf, 2000) subscribe to this understanding. second, zdp may be an approach to offering social support to learners, usually in dyadic interactions. in this view, psychologists conceptualize "zpd as some form of aid" from "a single, more capable individual, most often an adult" (holzman, 2009, p. 28). third, zdp may be seen as a collective transformative activity of development undertaken with learners. however, as goldstein (1999) and holzman (2009) rightly put forth, the interpretations of vygotsky just mentioned are limited to strictly cognitive aspects (berk & winsler, 1995; dean, 1994; stone, 1993). in these collective activities which are mainly based on the interaction between individuals, emotions cannot be fully ignored. while taking into account that “understanding happens between people; it can’t be attributed to one individual or the other” (rogoff, 1990, p. 67), we find that the process of cognitive growth is deeply relational. moreover, there is “a high degree of interpersonal connection between the individuals working together in the process” (goldstein, 1999, p. 648). the focus on interpersonal interactions brings affective factors to one’s mind. in other words, in the learning-leading-development groupings, an “emotional zone” is created in which the instructor and each individual member supposedly are encouraged to develop “the group’s level of emotional development” (holzman, 2009, p. 35). studies on da in specific academic domains have proliferated since the late 1980’s pioneering work of campione and brown (1987); nevertheless, its pedagogical applications in applied linguistics have only recently been examined by a number of researchers (ableeva, 2010; antón, 2003, 2009; kozulin & garb, parisa abdolrezapour, mansoor tavakoli, saeed ketabi 218 2002; lantolf & poehner, 2004; poehner, 2005). previous studies in the realm of l2s have focused on such skills as listening (ableeva, 2010), speaking (hill & sabet, 2009) and reading (cioffi & carney, 1983; guterman, 2002). while all previous studies rely on a pretest-mediation-posttest paradigm, none, to our knowledge, put explicit emphasis on the learner’s emotional state while learning potential is elicited, which is the focus of the investigation described below. given the inextricable link between emotion and cognition, it is reasonable to hypothesize that an emotionally loaded da procedure that is sensitive to both cognitive and affective states of l2 learners would positively affect their learning. the study presented below is a significant departure from previous ei and da research in that it investigates whether and how emotions may function as an auxiliary tool in da procedures. research questions in order to examine the efficacy of emotionally-loaded da activities on l2 learners' ei, the following research question and the corresponding hypothesis are posed: does exposing learners to emotionalized dynamic assessment (eda) procedures have a significant effect on their ei scores? based on the theoretical and empirical evidence discussed in the literature that supported the positive effect of exposing learners to emotional activities on one’s ei (abdolrezapour & tavakoli, 2012; nelis et al., 2009), it is predicted that eda procedures will positively affect learners' emotional state. method as shown in table 1, the study employed a quasi-experimental pretesttreatment-posttest design involving three intact efl classes, one serving as the experimental group which received emotionally-loaded da (n = 14). the second group was the comparison group which received pure da (n = 17). the third group served as control condition (n = 19) and it underwent the normal procedures. the treatment for experimental and comparison groups involved an interactionist da approach. enhancing learner’s emotion in an l2 context through emotionalized dynamic assessment 219 table 1 design of the study pretest treatment (8 weeks) posttest experimental group (eda) (n = 14) test of reading comprehension + teique-asf exposing subjects to emotionally-loaded da procedures and inducing them to talk about their emotions teique-asf comparison group (da) (n = 17) test of reading comprehension + teique-asf exposing subjects to da procedures with no emphasis on emotional content or words teique-asf control group (cg) (n = 19) test of reading comprehension + teique-asf exposing subjects to reading texts with no emphasis on emotional content or words teique-asf participants the respondents included efl learners who enrolled in a language center in iran. a total of 50 students studying interchange 2 (richards, hull, & proctor, 2005) participated in this study. learners were native speakers of farsi and they had taken english courses for 1 to 2 years. their level of english proficiency was intermediate; that is, all participants were currently taking the intermediate efl course offered by the institution. none of these participants had additional exposure to the english language, apart from the regular tv programs and the internet. only 6 participants had ever been to a country where english was spoken as a native language, and they reported a length of residence ranging from 4 days to 1 month. the participants were in three intact classes taught by the same instructor. one class was taken as the experimental condition with 14 students; the comparison condition involved 17 students; and the control condition had 19 students. all participants were female and they varied in age from 12 to 15. to make sure of the homogeneity of the three classes in terms of level of proficiency prior to the experiment, all participants took the grammar part of the oxford placement test 2 (allan, 1992) and their responses were scored on a scale of 100 points. results revealed that participants in all three groups had a range of scores between 45 and 51. participants agreed to be videotaped and audiotaped while studying. two camcorders were used to record participants’ activities: one to capture the individual who was performing the task and the other to capture the larger scene, including the participant and the peers as well as the instructor. an external microphone connected to the main camcorder was used to capture low-volume sounds made by participants. parisa abdolrezapour, mansoor tavakoli, saeed ketabi 220 instruments for the purpose of the present study, a number of instruments were used, which will be described in this section. trait emotional intelligence questionnaire-adolescent short form (teique-asf). as it was mentioned before, this study focuses on trait ei. trait ei, assessed by self-report, is regarded as an emotion-related dispositional trait which is a lower-level component of personality (petrides, pita, & kokkinaki, 2007). in this study, the short form of the teique (petrides, sangareau, furnham, & frederickson, 2006) comprised of 30 items was used to measure the students’ ei prior to the experiment to ascertain their initial comparability. teique-asf is a simplified version, in terms of wording and syntactic complexity, of the adult short form of the teique developed for use with adolescents aged 12-18 years. all items are sampled from the 15 subscales of the adult trait ei sampling domain (two items per subscale). the test yields scores on four factors, namely well-being (covering self-esteem, happiness, and optimism), selfcontrol (covering low impulsiveness, stress management, and emotion regulation), emotionality (covering emotion expression, relationships, empathy, and emotion perception), and sociability (covering assertiveness, emotion management, and social awareness) in addition to global trait ei. example items include “i can control my anger when i want to,” “i’m happy with my life,” and “i’m good at getting along with my classmates.” higher scores on the teique-asf indicate higher levels of trait ei. we opted for the short version with 10-minute completion time, because we had time limitation and there was a concern that the participants might not be able to complete the longer version (e.g., due to reading difficulties). subjects were offered help whenever they had difficulty understanding the wording of an item. they responded on a 7-point likert scale continuum from completely disagree (number 1) to completely agree (number 7). cooper and petrides (2010) provided evidence about the validity of the teique-asf through item response theory. in their two studies, the psychometric properties of the teique-asf were examined and results showed that most items had good discrimination parameters, indicating that they were effective at discriminating individuals across the range of the latent trait. in this study the reliability of the test was found to be relatively high (cronbach’s = .89). factor analyses also provide support for the construct validity of the questionnaire; in this sample, confirmatory factor analysis provided evidence for the four factors underlying teique-asf, i.e., well-being, self-control, emotionality, and sociability. enhancing learner’s emotion in an l2 context through emotionalized dynamic assessment 221 reading comprehension test. to assess the subjects’ reading comprehension ability prior to the experiment, researchers (one of whom was the instructor of the three classes) built and administered a reading comprehension test comprised of 30 items. the reading test included several passages each followed by a few questions assessing reading ability in various forms, for example, multiple choice, short answer, and true/false. the students scored 1 point for each correct answer. a pilot test on 42 intermediate learners yielded the reliability (cronbach’s ) of .86 and the criterion-related validity using learners’ reading scores of previous term as the criterion was .82. in addition, the tests gained professional-judgment-based content validity (from a group of five colleagues). design a test of reading comprehension and the teique-asf (petrides et al., 2006) were administered to check the equality of the three conditions in terms of trait ei and reading comprehension prior to the experiment. then learners went through the 8-week treatment. participants had about 10 hours of english per week: 3 hours for reading activities, and 7 hours for speaking, listening and writing. there were 24 lessons between the pre and posttests. the subjects of the three conditions were exposed to instructional activities; those in the experimental group had eda intervention, the ones in the comparison group received da, whereas the control group went through the normal institution procedures with texts of the same level as the ones used with the other groups. however, in selecting the readings for these two groups every attempt was made to select reading passages that included no emotional words or content. then, the teique-asf was administered to the three conditions for posttest measures. experimental conditions dynamic assessment intervention. on the whole, we administered the reading test six times consecutively between the pretest and the posttest. the first time, there was no intervention after the test, which helped the instructor to have an understanding of the individual’s baseline performance. the test was administered five more times, with five different reading passages, and after each test we had the intervention procedure, which was designed to give learners elaborated feedback about their performance on the reading test (e.g., what aspects were correct or not) and aimed at focusing their attention on the task; in addition, some guiding questions were posed to help learners find the correct answer. here, some reading passages were provided for learnparisa abdolrezapour, mansoor tavakoli, saeed ketabi 222 ers followed by some items in which they were asked to work collaboratively or individually to find answers which were mainly without a focus on emotional aspects (similar to the texts used for the control group). these passages were all short. a sample reading given is provided in appendix a. emotionalized dynamic assessment intervention. the difference between eda and da lies in the type of intervention provided to the learners and reading passages given. after each test (similarly to the da group we had six tests and the first was used to gain some information about learners’ current level), we had the emotional intervention procedures, which were designed to give learners elaborated feedback about performance in the preceding section, pose guiding questions, encourage task involvement, make intrinsic motivation, regulate examinee’s behavior and was aimed at focusing their attention on the emotional aspects of the task. meanwhile, the instructor gave some information about goleman's ei framework and tried to focus the questions on characteristics of ei. here, some reading passages, which mainly had emotional background, were provided to learners followed by some texts in which they were asked to work collaboratively or individually to find answers. a sample reading given to the eda group is provided in appendix b. given that the questions had multiple-choice format, we predicted that learners would sometimes guess the correct answer or reach it applying testtaking strategies rather than text comprehension. so, occasionally, after providing the answer (whether the choice was correct or incorrect), they were asked to give reasons for choosing a given answer. the design of the mediation process is outlined in table 2; as can be seen, we had six dynamic sessions shown as da1, da2, da3, da4, da5 and da6. table 2 mediation design assessment task description eda mediation da mediation test 1: pretest 1. reading a text in l2; 2. independent completion of test items none none test 2: da1 1. reading a text in l2; 2. independent completion of test items; 3. answering the same questions after mediation 1. introduction to goleman’s ei framework; 2. providing explicit and implicit feedback, posing guiding questions providing explicit and implicit feedback and posing guiding questions to help learners find the correct answer test 3: da2 1. reading a text in l2; 2. independent completion of test items; 3. revising the same quesproviding explicit and implicit feedback, posing guiding questions, encouraging task involveproviding explicit and implicit feedback and posing guiding questions to enhancing learner’s emotion in an l2 context through emotionalized dynamic assessment 223 tions after mediation ment help learners find the correct answer test 4: da3 1. reading a text in l2; 2. independent completion of test items; 3. revising the same questions after mediation providing explicit and implicit feedback, posing guiding questions, encouraging task involvement, making intrinsic motivation providing explicit and implicit feedback and posing guiding questions to help learners find the correct answer test 5: da4 1. reading a text in l2; 2. independent completion of test items; 3. revising the same questions after mediation providing explicit and implicit feedback, posing guiding questions, encouraging task involvement, making intrinsic motivation, regulating examinee’s behavior providing explicit and implicit feedback and posing guiding questions to help learners find the correct answer test 6: da5 1. reading a text in l2; 2. independent completion of test items; 3. revising the same questions after mediation providing explicit and implicit feedback, posing guiding questions, encouraging task involvement, making intrinsic motivation, regulating examinee’s behavior providing explicit and implicit feedback and posing guiding questions to help learners find the correct answer goleman's ei framework was used in the assessment tasks as follows: 1. knowing one’s emotions: to make learners aware of their emotions, there were some questions which asked learners to think about the way the character was feeling and find its cause. then, the teacher asked learners to think about similar situations and their feelings. in this way, they improved their self-understanding. then, they were asked to talk about different emotions and their causes. 2. recognizing emotions in others: to improve learners’ level of empathy, the teacher encouraged them to pay attention to the body language of characters depicted in the text. in the final stage, parts of the text which could help them gain a better understanding of others' emotions were read again. 3. managing one’s emotions: to help learners learn how to manage their emotions, the teacher read a part of the text where the character felt an emotion (e.g., sadness or anger) and then asked the students to find the cause of that emotion (i.e., what triggered it). then, they were asked to read the rest of the text and find how that emotion was dealt with and how that strategy influenced their friends and people around them. when the text ended, the teacher asked the students to discuss the possible ways of managing that emotion more effectively. parisa abdolrezapour, mansoor tavakoli, saeed ketabi 224 4. handling relationships: to make students aware of the fourth characteristic of goleman's theory, learners were invited to read the parts of the text which showed interactions between characters again. then, they were asked to think about themselves in characters’ positions and to say what their friends would have done to make them feel better? 5. motivating oneself: to raise learners’ level of self-motivation, some parts of the text in which characters experienced a positive feeling were read again and learners were asked to talk about the ways characters could change their negative feelings into positive ones. subsequently, participants were asked to think about their feelings in the classroom, what they wanted to accomplish and the good reasons they had for learning the language. during these communicative activities, there was very little instructional conversation. the teacher tried to step out of her position of authority and act as a non-knower co-participant in the interactions who is seeking further information from her students. when there were some signs of boredom, she tried to attract learners' attention by saying "this question might be kind of boring. let's get through it together," or "let's keep going, we will move on to something more interesting." the important thing was that the teacher never blamed the students for being bored with doing the tasks; rather, she pretended that the materials were blamable or sometimes she blamed herself by saying, "i know i am not always good at conveying things clearly and i would be happy to repeat myself if you ask." in addition, she encouraged them to complete a difficult task by saying,"i know this question is a bit difficult, but i'm sure we can get through it together." text selection criteria the texts chosen for this study were checked along the following criteria: 1. the maximum length of each text should be maximally 350 words. the word-limitation assured us that learners were able to read the whole text and could recall it. 2. though all texts used in this study were similar in terms of length and difficulty level, those used for eda had an emotional theme, while those used for the other two conditions (da and control) were void of emotional content. enhancing learner’s emotion in an l2 context through emotionalized dynamic assessment 225 reading comprehension tasks and emotional state evaluation criteria first, learners were asked to read the text. the reading test and tasks were modeled after other widely available standardized tests of reading (e.g., toefl), and they consisted of texts of one to three paragraphs in length followed by multiple-choice comprehension items. subjects in the da and eda groups were told that their teacher would give them support and feedback whenever they needed it. learners' emotional state was determined by watching the video data and observing each learner's performance independently as they managed their emotions. managing emotions includes dealing with a conflict with another peer or the instructor, getting upset over an assignment or activity, or appearing overtly excited for some reason. to ensure inter-coder reliability, audioand video-recorded data were meticulously transcribed and coded by the instructor and two expert colleagues who were provided with sufficient information regarding the ei framework and were interested in its potential relevance to their own practice as efl teachers. using goleman's five skills as an ei framework to view students' performance, they were asked to pay attention to the learners' emotional reactions and rate each learner's emotional state based on a number of criteria provided in appendix c. data collection and coding procedure the teacher-learner interactions during classroom activities were transcribed and coded by two trained raters and the instructor. six learners were randomly selected from each group (da and eda), and then using goleman's ei framework, the coders independently coded all emotional responses given by learners and gave each leaner a score out of 20, which resulted in an intercoder reliability rate of .86. discrepancies between coders were resolved through discussion and consensus was reached. then, in order to see whether learners' scores differed between the da and eda conditions in the mediation process, the graph of the group performances was drawn. the results of the quantitative analysis carried out by means of descriptive and inferential statistical measures are provided in the following section. this analysis gauges the learners' teique-asf scores in the pretest and posttest assessment sessions of the study, and one-way analyses of variance (anovas) were run to ensure the comparability of the three groups prior to the study and to find the effect of the intervention on learners' ei in the posttest stage. in addition, a qualitative analysis of the mediation process stage is described along three extracts: two extracts show how reading tests were performed collaboratively through teacher-learner interactions, one for the parisa abdolrezapour, mansoor tavakoli, saeed ketabi 226 da condition and the other for the eda condition. the third excerpt is concerned with eda learners’ emotional responses during these interactions. results the main hypothesis of the study was that eda is more effective than da, that is, that the eda group would show higher pre to postteaching gains than the da group and that the da group in turn would score higher than the control group on teique-asf. the results of the pretest, mediation process stage, and posttest are provided in this section. first stage: pretest a one-way anova was performed on participants’ reading ability scores and their teique-asf scores prior to the study. as shown in table 3, the analysis produced no significant differences among the three conditions: the eda, da and control conditions were similar in terms of both measures prior to the treatment. this test proved the initial comparability of the three groups. table 3 descriptive and inferential statistics for the pretests variables group n m sd f p teique-asf cg 19 114.78 7.67 .157 .855 da 17 116.17 8.07 eda 14 117.05 6.90 reading comprehension cg 19 17.64 2.43 .134 .875 da 17 18.05 1.98 eda 14 17.84 2.29 note. level of significance is .05 second stage: the mediation process stage as said before, eda and da conditions went through mediation processes. during the mediation process, participants read the text twice and they were offered mediation in the form of some questions, feedback, hints and prompts. since instruction and assessment are inseparable in a da approach, some information about word meaning and different reading strategies were provided whenever required. here, three examples of the mediation provided (one for the da condition and two for the eda condition) are described. the transcription1 in the first ex 1 transcription conventions are as follows: enhancing learner’s emotion in an l2 context through emotionalized dynamic assessment 227 tract is for the da condition and occurred immediately after the student named sarah had completed answering the items (the reading passage and test items are provided in appendix a). the mediator (m) was asking some questions about the learner’s (s) performance and then stopped to comment on her answers. extract 1 1. s: (sarah finishes reading the text and responding the items) 2. m: look at question 2 once more; what is the right answer? 3. s: isn’t it choice a? 4. m: no, that is not the right answer. look at the sentence once more. you need to read the whole clause. 5. --(sarah thinks) 6. m: maybe student life is similar, but the system of higher education (. . .) 7. s: i found it, d? 8. m: what about b and c? 9. s: mhm, --it is not c because it doesn’t say about differences in teaching and learning styles and – it is not b because -- 10. m: (the mediator points to the text) the system is different in some countries of asia or middle east, like iran . 11. s: yeah , so d is the right answer. as sarah finished reading the text and answered the items, the intervention started. the mediator asked her to go to the second question once more (turn 2). sarah indicated her doubt by asking “isn’t it choice a?” with a slightly falling intonation (turn 3). in the following turns (4-6), the mediator prompted sarah to pay more attention to the text and when she could not find the answer (after a long pause), the mediator oriented her to the clues provided in the text. this helped sarah to find the right answer, but to make sure that she was not guessing it, the mediator did not confirm that she had chosen the right answer and asked her to comment on the other options. following a relatively long pause (turn 9), sarah said that option c was not correct, but she was uncertain about the other choice. once more, the mediator oriented sa short pause -long pause very long pause shows slightly falling intona on shows slightly rising intona on parentheses contain researcher's comments (. . .) indicates that a section of the transcript has been omitted parisa abdolrezapour, mansoor tavakoli, saeed ketabi 228 rah’s attention to the text with rising intonation, which helped her find the reason why b was not the right answer (turn 10). the following extract occurred about half-way through the eda program. prior to giving the reading passage to learners, the instructor provided them with a short description of how to control one’s feelings and manage emotions. this extract was designed to enable learners to foster a better understanding of their emotions and help them manage their emotions. students had just finished reading the passage. three learners and the instructor took part in the conversation. the learners’ names were arina (a), pani (p) and negin (n). arina started talking about the story. the conversation then turned to a discussion of emotional states of characters and learners’ experiences of similar circumstances, instigated by the instructor: extract 2 1. m: tell me more about the characters of the story? 2. a: there was a father and a son. 3. m: ok, continue. i haven’t read the story. tell me more. 4. a: well, it was the son’s graduation party and he --thought his father would buy a car for him but - his father bought a bible. he, he became angry and leaved no, left his father. 5. m: ok, arina. let me ask you a question (turns to other students). everybody, think about this question: what would you do if you were instead of that young man? 6. a: i become angry but i do not leave the house. 7. m: why do you become angry? 8. a: because, -because i was waiting for a car. 9. m: arina, think about your father. 10. a: (quickly) no, no -i won’t become angry with my father but i was waiting for a car . 11. m: uhuh. what about others (turning to other students) 12. n: i don’t become angry. but i would just say thank you (she made a gesture of disappointment). 13. m: well now it is better. what about you pani? 14. p: i would ask him. 15. m: what would you tell him? 16. p: i wanted a car, daddy. where is my car? 17. m: i liked it. be frank with your father ask him. it gives both of you a better feeling. put yourself in your father’s shoes then decide what the best reaction to show is. thanks everyone. let's go to the rest of the story. enhancing learner’s emotion in an l2 context through emotionalized dynamic assessment 229 in extract 2, it is the mediator who initiates the discussion and asks one of the learners (arina) to narrate the story. in order to encourage her to give further information, the mediator pretends that she is unaware of the story and seeks further information from her (turn 3). in the following turn (5), the mediator, going round the class, encourages the learners to think about the character's feelings. then, students start talking about their feelings while the mediator is trying to teach them how to manage their emotions and at the same time handle their relationships. by asking them to think about the young man and put themselves in his shoes, she tries to teach them that it is better to understand one's own feelings (self-awareness) and practice managing one’s emotions to become ready for interaction with others. in turn 10, arina shows that she is concerned about her father's feelings (“i won't become angry with my father”), while simultaneously she appears to be aware of her own feelings (“but i was waiting for a car”). negin's statement (turn 12) shows that she is able to manage her emotions and is considerate of others' feelings. pani (turns 14-16) uses a better strategy; by asking her father about the car and being frank with him she satisfies her own feelings as well as her father's. consequently, the mediator's statements in turn 17 aim to encourage the learners to change the emotional lens of anger into a sympathetic reaction in such a challenging situation. the conversation in the following extract took place immediately after that in extract 2. in extract 3, which is for the eda condition, a student named maryam (ma) had completed answering the items (the reading passage and test items are provided in appendix b). the mediator was asking some questions about her maryam’s performance and then stopped to comment on her answers. extract 3 1. m: i just want to ask you to think about the answer of the second question once more. 2. ma: storm doesn’t mean shout? 3. m: well -what do you think? did you choose it because of “raised his voice”? 4. ma: mhm (she thinks). 5. m: what do you do when you are angry? 6. ma: i - shout, mhm (searching for a word) - shout (she reads the text once more) no, is it make furious? 7. m: what does furious mean maryam? 8. ma: angry . 9. m: yeah. but, make furious? did he make someone furious? 10. ma: no, no, no -(she thinks). is it move angrily? parisa abdolrezapour, mansoor tavakoli, saeed ketabi 230 11. m: mhm. what about choice d? 12. ma: making delighted? no, it is not correct. 13. m: why? 14. ma: -delighted means something like -happy ---. but he was -angry. 15. m: yep, that’s it. excellent. when maryam finished reading the text and the questions, the mediator asked her to go to one of the questions, for which she had chosen the incorrect answer. by prompting her to have another attempt, she indirectly informed her that the answer was not correct. it should be mentioned that in these interactions most often a second attempt was offered rather than say directly that the answer was correct (when there was the probability of guessing) or incorrect. maryam showed her uncertainty by asking “storm doesn’t mean shout?” (turn 2). the mediator, knowing that the previous sentence had misguided the student, asked her to think more (turn 3). her next response (“make furious”) and the following turns (6-8) provided evidence that she had understood the text, but was not familiar with the exact meaning of the term and tried to guess the meaning from the context. after providing the correct response (turn 10), the mediator asked her to think about the last option to make sure that she was familiar with the meaning of the term delighted. maryam’s response in turn 14 made the mediator sure that she knew the meaning. the learners in the eda condition clearly showed their enthusiasm and interest in performing the reading comprehension activities and attempts to find the meaning of other emotional words. in addition, they were all ready to discuss the passage and its content after doing the reading activities. what one of the learners named sahar (sa) said in extract 4 as she commented on her experience of having learning support illustrates the learners’ attitudes. extract 4 1. sa: i had a very, very good feeling. 2. m: tell me why you had such feeling. 3. sa: you know, it is like as if i can go and have an exam without being anxious anymore. i mean,-i don't say that i will answer all questions but i’m sure that i will remember all the things i've been through and negative emotions will not hamper my performance. enhancing learner’s emotion in an l2 context through emotionalized dynamic assessment 231 third stage: posttest to provide a plausible answer to our research question, the teique-asf scores of the three conditions were tested by anovas and the findings, presented in table 4, revealed that the performance in terms of the ei scores of each condition differed significantly. the sidak test for multiple post-hoc comparisons was used to determine which of the mean scores differed significantly from the others. as table 5 shows, the eda condition was found to be significantly different from the other conditions, with eda > da, eda > cg. the da condition differed significantly from the cg, with da > cg. thus, subjects’ engagement in the eda procedures, which was used as the treatment given to the experimental group, positively impacted their ei scores on the posttest. furthermore, there is good evidence to suggest that exposing learners to da procedures had a positive effect on the emotional state of efl learners. table 4 descriptive and inferential statistics for posttest variable condition n m sd f p teique-asf eda 14 137.21 7.77 13.742 .000* da 17 128.59 8.43 cg 19 120.53 10.36 *p < .05 table 5 multiple comparisons (i) condition (j) condition mean difference (i-j) se p 95% confidence interval lower bound upper bound eda da 8.62605* 3.26949 .033 .5314 16.7207 cg 16.68797* 3.19083 .000 8.7881 24.5879 da eda -8.62605* 3.26949 .033 -16.7207 -.5314 cg 8.06192* 3.02439 .031 .5741 15.5498 cg eda -16.68797* 3.19083 .000 -24.5879 -8.7881 da -8.06192* 3.02439 .031 -15.5498 -.5741 * p < .05 next, emotional responses provided by the randomly selected informants during mediation procedures were analyzed to find their emotional states (scores were given out of 20) and then their performance graph was drawn. the mean scores in figure 1 appear to point to an improvement in ei level of both conditions. as can be seen, the lines for the two conditions (eda and da) are rather close in the beginning sessions but become diverge considerably in parisa abdolrezapour, mansoor tavakoli, saeed ketabi 232 the following tests.2 what is particularly interesting about the quantitative data obtained in the mediation process is that it shows an up-and-down pattern in means and sd values. in addition, examination of the sds shows that there was more variation among da learners. this, in our view, indicates that the development of ei was anything but linear. figure 1 mean ei scores during intervention sessions for the eda and da conditions discussion and conclusion the major hypothesis of this study was that learners in the eda condition would show higher levels of achievement in ei than learners in the da condition or the control condition. the findings confirmed the hypothesis by showing that the eda condition increased its performance from pre to postteaching more than the other two conditions. furthermore, the results of the anova pointed to the positive effects of da on learners’ ei in comparison to the control condition. the increase observed in the ei scores of the da condition can be explained by the fact that when learners become aware of the learning goals and assessment procedures, they can determine their expectations of success, which in turn enhance their motivation and help them “regulate how they learn with more certainty” (wlodkowski, 2008, p. 202). in the da procedures, learners were asked to comment about assessment and give their suggestions. 2 we cannot have the control group in this graph as there was no record of their performance during the experiment; we have only their pre/posttest scores. enhancing learner’s emotion in an l2 context through emotionalized dynamic assessment 233 they were provided with some models of successful task completion and in this way the mysteries about assessment criteria were decreased and they were able to self-assess more easily. in addition, the observed significant differences between the scores of eda and da conditions could be attributed to the influence of the eda procedures with their numerous opportunities for direct exposure to emotional activities. this finding is consistent with our prediction and provides further empirical support for abdolrezapour and tavakoli’s (2012) findings, which pointed to the possibility of enhancing one’s ei through extensive exposure to emotional activities. nevertheless, a question may arise as to why the participants’ ei, which is part of their personalities, had risen so much in such a short period of time. this question, however, may be answered if one considers two important issues. first, although the treatment period was relatively short, participants had quite an intensive exposure to eda procedures and emotional texts that raised ei. second, despite the commonsensical belief that personality traits do not change over time, there is now ample evidence in support of the fact that many traits could be changed if the individual is motivated enough (haslam, bastian, fox, & whelan, 2007; helson, kwan, john, & jones, 2002). despite the role of emotion in many educational settings, and its potential to both support and damage learning, understanding emotion remains a minority interest. what is more, the research that is undertaken tends to be correlational in nature rather than experimental. our findings add a new dimension to the available empirical literature (e.g., nelis et al., 2009; nelis et al., 2011) on the possibility of enhancing one’s ei through some kinds of interventions and on applicability of da to gain better understanding of learners’ emotions (e.g., holzman, 2009). considering the documented empirical and theoretical evidence in support of the positive relationships between ei and l2 performance (abdolrezapour & tavakoli, 2012; dewaele, 2005, 2008; dewaele et al., 2008), the improvement observed in learners’ ei states would possibly lead to an enhancement of their performance in language learning. the results of this study lay a path between emotion, cognition and assessing learner’s performance and establish a solid basis for the integration of ei within teaching and assessment tasks and using them to improve one’s performance. some steps have been taken in the current attempt that need backing from institutions’ principals, parents and teachers for a significant leap forward. the activities proposed here are teacher-friendly and they can be easily incorporated into any l2 instructional setting with learners from different age groups. of course, it should be pointed that the intervention of eda involves far more than promoting one’s ei; in effect, it has the potential to help learners become more socially competent and offers them access to a parisa abdolrezapour, mansoor tavakoli, saeed ketabi 234 range of knowledge and abilities which might enable them to achieve better performance in the academic context and in their social life. as for the pedagogical implications, this study provides evidence that emotions can be successfully integrated into da procedures in efl classrooms for young beginners and are at least as moderately effective as far as learners’ reading comprehension is concerned. hence, one implication of this study is that mediations designed for efl classrooms might address the needs and preferences of certain students taking into account learners’ individual differences and more importantly their emotions, resulting in more motivating tasks. implications for future studies this study is an example of an initial and promising attempt that leaves ample room for future research to probe or refine its findings. first, the participant sample was a small group of intermediate learners and it was composed only of females, which might delimit the generalizability scope of this study. it is obvious that studies with esl and efl learners of lower proficiency of english are likely to show different results. in this light, future work would benefit from replicating the research with learner groups of different levels of proficiency, different age groups and including both sexes. second, the study was conducted over a 2-month period during which participants were exposed to intensive emotional activities and language input and instruction from various sources. this being the case, the internal validity of the study might be questioned; however, given the existence of a control condition, similar to the da condition in many ways (the same instructor, the same amount of time devoted to reading activities, etc.) this criticism may be in part overcome. nevertheless, there is a need for future extended and methodologically rigorous investigations to further explore and (re)examine the role of ei in da procedures and its effect on various language skills. although every attempt was made to avoid some of the design, measurement, and analytical flaws, there were some limitations that need to be taken into account in future research. first, one may object to the reliability of the study considering the exact amount and type of intervention in the eda and da conditions. while the type, intensity and frequency of intervention provided to the eda group might have been more than what learners needed, in the case of the da condition, it might have been less than what they needed. in consequence, this imbalance might have caused the difference in scores. in order to address this issue, the instructor tried to limit her intervention to what was actually needed for learners to achieve improved performance, but it still remains a challenge for the outcomes of the study. secondly, the transfer of these reenhancing learner’s emotion in an l2 context through emotionalized dynamic assessment 235 sults to learners’ long-term gains in performance might be questioned. in order to tackle this objection, there is a need to introduce both static and dynamic assessments as well as other sources of information rather than gauge achievement on a number of limited tests. in addition, there is a need for further studies to address the direct effect of eda intervention on learners’ reading comprehension and l2 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(2002). a conceptual framework for emotional intelligence in education: factors affecting student achievement (unpublished doctoral dissertation). texas a&m university, kingsville. swain, m. (2013). the inseparability of cognition and emotion in second language learning. language teaching, 46(2), 195-207. topping, k., holmes, e. a., & bremmer, w. (2000). the effectiveness of schoolbased programs for the promotion of social competence. in r. bar-on & j. d. parker (eds.), the handbook of emotional intelligence: theory, development, assessment, and application at home, school, and in the workplace (pp. 411-432). san francisco: jossey-bass. wlodkowski, r. j. (2008). enhancing adult motivation to learn: a comprehensive guide for teaching all adults (3rd ed.). san francisco: jossey-bass. parisa abdolrezapour, mansoor tavakoli, saeed ketabi 240 appendix a reading passage of the eda group the reading passage that you are about to read is about a young man and his father. read the text and answer the following questions. a young man was getting ready to graduate college. for many months he had admired a beautiful sports car in a dealer’s showroom, and knowing his father could well afford it, he told him that was all he wanted. as graduation day approached, the young man awaited signs that his father had purchased the car. finally, on the morning of his graduation his father called him into his private study. his father told him how proud he was to have such a fine son, and told him how much he loved him. he handed his son a beautiful wrapped gift box. curious, but somewhat disappointed the young man opened the box and found a lovely, leather-bound bible. angrily, he raised his voice at his father and said, “with all your money you give me a bible?” and stormed out of the house, leaving the holy book. many years passed and the young man was very successful in business. he had a beautiful home and wonderful family, but realized his father was very old, and thought perhaps he should go to him. he had not seen him since that graduation day. before he could make arrangements, he received a telegram telling him his father had passed away, and willed all of his possessions to his son. he needed to come home immediately and take care of things. when he arrived at his father’s house, sudden sadness and regret filled his heart. he began to search his father’s important papers and saw the still new bible, just as he had left it years ago. with tears, he opened the bible and began to turn the pages. as he read those words, a car key dropped from an envelope taped behind the bible. it had a tag with the dealer’s name, the same dealer who had the sports car he had desired. on the tag was the date of his graduation, and the words…paid in full. (from http://www.alonelylife.com/thread-emotional-stories?page=2) now, it is time to answer the following questions about the text you just read. 1. which of the following sentences is true about the first paragraph? a) his father couldn’t afford buying the car. b) the young man was a college graduate. c) his father gave the gift in the graduation party. d) his father gave him the car. 2. the term “storm” in line 9 is closest in meaning to a) shout b) make furious c) move angrily d) become delighted 3. how was he informed about his father’s death? a) he went to his house. enhancing learner’s emotion in an l2 context through emotionalized dynamic assessment 241 b) he received a telegram. c) someone called him. d) none of the above. 4. what is the main idea of the last paragraph? a) do not judge soon. b) you will get whatever you want. c) pay attention to your parents more. d) the car did not worth making his father sad. appendix b reading passage of the da group at colleges and universities around the world, students from other places live in student housing, apartments, or private homes of other people. they walk to school or get there by bicycle or by car or with public transportation like the bus or subway. they take courses and attend classes. they study and take quizzes or tests or exams. they complete requirements. after years of study, they get certificates or college degrees. outside school, they have other interests and family and social lives. in some ways, life on the campuses of institutions of higher learning is the same everywhere in the world. maybe student life is similar, but the system of higher education differs in countries around the world. for example, in the united states, postsecondary students can live at home or go to community colleges for two years or more. or they can choose four-year state or private colleges or universities. they can get financial aid, like scholarships, grants, or loans. with undergraduate degrees, they can attend graduate school. the system is different in some countries of asia or middle east, like iran. there students take an exit exam in their last year of high school. the people with the highest scores attend the best universities in the country. other students can go to other kinds of colleges or get jobs. there is another system in germany. in that country, most graduates of academic high schools go to public universities or technical colleges. these schools don’t charge high tuition or educational fees, and students can stay in school for many years. (from interactions 1, kirn & hartmann, 2002) 1. what is the main idea of the first paragraph? a) at colleges and universities around the world, students from other places live in student housing, apartments, or the private homes of other people. b) in some ways, life on the campuses of institutions of higher learning is the same everywhere in the world. parisa abdolrezapour, mansoor tavakoli, saeed ketabi 242 c) around the world, outside school, students have other interests and family and social lives. d) at colleges and universities around the world, students take courses and attend classes; they study and take quizzes or tests or exams. 2. choose the best topic for the second paragraph. a) similarities in student life b) campus facilities and services c) differences in teaching and learning styles d) systems of higher education 3. the term “postsecondary” in line 8 is closest in meaning to a) high school b) university c) after high school d) after university 4. which of the following terms is closest in meaning to the money you pay at university? a) tuition b) award c) loan d) finance 5. which of the following sentences is true about students in the united states? a) they should go to public universities or technical colleges. b) they should take an exit exam in their last year of high school. c) they can stay in school for many years. d) they can go to community colleges for two years or more. 6. financial aid doesn’t include ………. a) scholarships b) grants c) jobs d) loans appendix c dear colleague, please rate each learner’s emotional intelligence based on the following questions and based on the five characteristics of goleman’s ei framework: how did the student’s emotions get expressed? how did these emotions affect her interactions at school and her capacity to do productive academic work? do you think the student was able to deal with this emotional episode in a positive way? in what ways was she supported by her teacher or peers? how would you describe this student emotionally? enhancing learner’s emotion in an l2 context through emotionalized dynamic assessment 243 how comfortable and skilled is she with displaying, identifying, and/or managing her feelings? what kinds of issues or concerns might she bring to the classroom? how might these issues affect her academic progress? what types of skills or strategies might be helpful for this student? 71 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (1). 2023. 71-100 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.31733 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the effects of instructor clarity and non-verbal immediacy on chinese and iranian efl students’ affective learning: the mediating role of instructor understanding ali derakhshan golestan university, gorgan, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6639-9339 a.derakhshan@gu.ac.ir lawrence jun zhang the university of auckland, auckland, new zealand https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1025-1746 lj.zhang@auckland.ac.nz kiyana zhaleh allameh tabataba’i university, tehran, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0918-5246 k_zhaleh97@atu.ac.ir abstract drawing on the rhetorical/relational goal theory, this study examined the role of instructor clarity and non-verbal immediacy in affective learning through the mediation of instructor understanding. data were gathered through closeended questionnaires from 756 chinese and 715 iranian english as a foreign language (efl) students, the factor structure and cross-cultural validity of which were supported via confirmatory factor analysis and testing measurement invariance, respectively. path analysis results indicated that clarity and non-verbal immediacy positively predicted instructor understanding and affective learning; instructor understanding positively predicted affective learning; and understanding was a significant positive mediator in the relationship of non-verbal immediacy and clarity with affective learning. except for the positive association of non-verbal immediacy with understanding which was significantly higher ali derakhshan, lawrence jun zhang, kiyana zhaleh 72 for the iranian group, no significant difference was found between the chinese and iranian groups in all other associations, providing empirical support for the role of efl teachers’ positive interpersonal communication behaviors in efl students’ affective learning, irrespective of the cultural context. keywords: affective learning; cross-cultural comparison; non-verbal immediacy; rhetorical/relational goal theory; teacher clarity; teacher understanding 1. introduction emotion is one of the factors that can play a role in the process of second/foreign language (fl) learning. fl students might experience numerous positive and negative emotions (dai & wang, 2023; derakhshan, 2022b; derakhshan, dewaele, et al., 2022; derakhshan, doliński, et al., 2022; derakhshan, kruk, et al., 2021a, 2021b; gao et al., 2020; kruk et al., 2022; li et al., 2021; li & wei, 2022; pawlak et al., 2021; pishghadam et al., 2021; teo et al., 2022; wang, 2023; wang et al., 2021; wang et al., 2022; zare et al., 2023). while negative emotions hinder students’ fl learning, willingness to communicate, and willingness to attend english as a foreign language (efl) classes (macintyre & gregersen, 2012; wang & derakhshan, 2023; zhang et al., 2022), their positive counterparts increase fl learning enjoyment and motivation (jin & zhang, 2021; li, 2020; li et al., 2020; zhang & tsung, 2021). despite their importance, emotions were regarded for a long time as “the elephants in the room” in fl research (swain, 2013, p. 195), metaphorically referring to the fact that they were largely ignored or misunderstood for decades (dewaele, 2010). however, rather recently, the field of second language acquisition (sla) has experienced an affective turn, attempting to rectify the universal disregard of emotion and its inferior position in cognition (dewaele & li, 2021; prior, 2019). sla researchers are now endeavoring to study emotions in order not to disregard the elephant anymore (douglas fir group, 2016). following this timely paradigm shift, there has been an increasing acknowledgment that affective factors are as indispensable – if not more significant – as cognitive factors (derakhshan & nazari, 2022; miller & godfroid, 2020; richards, 2020). one important affective variable with direct effects on students’ academic accomplishments is affective learning (bolkan, 2014). affective learning refers to positive/negative attitudes that students have toward the instructor, content, and behaviors recommended in the course (kearney et al., 1985). while affective learning is a well-established variable in general education (myers & goodboy, 2015), it is completely under-represented in sla. thereby, now that “the elephant is no longer invisible” (dewaele, 2019b, p. 535), it seems incumbent on sla researchers to have a more holistic look at the effects of instructor clarity and non-verbal immediacy on chinese and iranian efl students’ . . . 73 how students affectively respond to fl classes, by exploring not only behavioral and cognitive factors but also students’ affective learning gains (dewaele, 2019a). previous studies on affective learning have revealed that it is a by-product of an amalgam of factors. although contextual and student-related factors influence affective learning, they are subordinate to perceived teacher positive interpersonal communication behaviors, which foster the creation of a positive classroom climate (derakhshan et al., 2022; derakhshan, fathi, et al., 2022; finn & schrodt, 2012; gabryśbarker, 2016). this is because teacher communication behaviors play a major role in conveying affect in language classrooms (gabryś-barker, 2018; gregersen, 2010). this is supported by the tenets of the rhetorical/relational goal theory, which argues for the indispensable role of teacher positive interpersonal communication behaviors in meeting students’ relational and academic goals and wants including affective learning (mottet et al., 2006). in this respect, non-verbal immediacy – teacher communication behaviors increasing non-verbal interaction and closeness between the teacher and students (gregersen, 2005; mehrabian, 1969) – and clarity – verbal and non-verbal cues employed by a teacher to facilitate understanding and learning of course processes and content (violanti et al., 2018) – are among the most indispensable teacher interpersonal communication instances found to be positively impacting students’ learning, in general (bolkan, 2015; violanti et al., 2018) and affective learning, in particular (titsworth et al., 2015; zhang, 2011). it is also posited that fl learning entails instructors’ interpersonal, cognitive, and emotional understanding of students (king & ng, 2018). in this regard, by drawing on the rhetorical/relational goal theory, schrodt and finn (2011) posited that students’ perceptions of instructors’ understanding of them function as a conceptual mechanism associating teacher communication behaviors with students’ educational outcomes and attitudes. consequently, it seems that perceived instructor understanding plays a mediating role in the relationship of teacher non-verbal immediacy and teacher clarity with students’ academic attitudes including affective learning. while evidence-based studies in education and instructional communication have substantiated these relationships (e.g., finn & schrodt, 2012, 2016), there is a dearth of empirical investigations in this respect in fl education. furthermore, it remains to be seen how the role of clarity and non-verbal immediacy in affective learning through the mediation of teacher understanding converges or diverges across similar or dissimilar cultural contexts. therefore, to address these gaps, in the current study, we replicate these previous studies on the role of teacher communication behaviors in students’ attitudes through the mediation of perceived understanding (e.g., finn & schrodt, 2012, 2016; schrodt & finn, 2011) in the efl context. more specifically, we drew on the tenets of the rhetorical/relational goal theory to investigate the degree to which teacher clarity and non-verbal immediacy, as two instances of teacher communication behaviors, ali derakhshan, lawrence jun zhang, kiyana zhaleh 74 influence chinese and iranian efl students’ affective learning through the mediation of perceived understanding. 2. literature review 2.1. the rhetorical/relational goal theory the present study is theoretically underpinned by the rhetorical/relational goal theory (mottet et al., 2006) in instructional communication, which presents a practical point of reference for explaining how perceptions of non-verbal immediacy and clarity join perceptions of teacher understanding to impact students’ affective learning. accordingly, when learners’ relational and academic wants are fulfilled through teachers’ employment of a set of appropriate relational and rhetorical communication cues, students are more engaged, motivated, satisfied, and as a result, achieve and learn more. thus, successful instruction happens when instructors set rhetorical and relational objectives and employ appropriate interpersonal communication behaviors to achieve those objectives (houser & hosek, 2018). the rhetorical/relational goal theory is worthy of attention in fl education because fl education “is inherently relational” (mercer & dörnyei, 2020, p. 72). based on this theory, instructors employ communication behaviors like non-verbal immediacy and clarity to accomplish different goals and wants, including increasing perceived understanding and communicating learning. while non-verbal immediacy supports relational goals, clarity supports rhetorical goals (finn & schrodt, 2012). thus, like the two wings of a bird, they complement each other to accomplish educational outcomes like affective learning (derakhshan, 2022a). 2.2. affective learning as a significant indicator of instructional effectiveness, affective learning involves students’ attitudes toward (1) behaviors recommended in the course, (2) course instructor, and (3) course content (goldman et al., 2014), showing whether students like or dislike what they are learning and appreciate or disapprove of their teachers (myers & goodboy, 2015). affective learning attitudes are formed when students have such positive feelings as contentment, liking, valuing, and satisfaction (bolkan, 2015; goldman et al., 2014). teachers can promote students’ positive affective experiences by creating a positive learning environment, which increases their willingness to learn and ultimate success in the course (bolkan & goodboy, 2015). in the domain of language education research, many studies have investigated students’ positive/negative attitudes toward learning the target language, language teachers, and language teachers’ pedagogical practices the effects of instructor clarity and non-verbal immediacy on chinese and iranian efl students’ . . . 75 (e.g., getie & popescu, 2020; tavassoli & kasraeean, 2014; ziaee et al., 2021). for instance, research has already examined language learners’ learning attitudes and their attitudes towards different types of language teachers (native speakers vs. non-native speakers) (e.g., ling & braine, 2007). inspired by the rhetorical/relational goal theory (mottet et al., 2006), previous empirical studies have consistently indicated that teachers’ employment of positive teacher interpersonal communication behaviors fosters the creation of a positive classroom climate and through satisfying students’ academic and relational wants, bring about students’ positive/negative attitudes like affective learning (frymier et al., 2019). in fact, as stated by bolkan (2015), instructional communication researchers have been mainly concerned with studying the communication-learning interface. accordingly, as instances of teacher communication behaviors well established in the domain of instructional communication research, teacher immediacy and clarity have been empirically found to be positively influencing students’ affective learning (e.g., enskat et al., 2017; frymier et al., 2019; myers & goodboy, 2015; violanti et al., 2018; zhang, 2011). in this empirical investigation, we replicate these previous studies on the role of teacher clarity and immediacy in affective learning in the particular domain of l2 education. 2.3. teacher clarity teacher clarity is a high-inference variable referring to students’ perceptions of the teacher’s employment of verbal and non-verbal communication signals to make instruction more transparent and facilitate understanding and learning of course processes and content (violanti et al., 2018). such clarity cues include repeating points, using visuals, reviewing and previewing materials, highlighting main ideas, bringing examples, and paraphrasing ideas (limperos et al., 2015). by using such devices, instructors make information more comprehensible to students and deliver a clearer instruction (segabutla & evans, 2019). thus, teacher clarity is conceived as a process where both learners and teachers shape understanding (titsworth et al., 2015). clarity behaviors can reduce learners’ cognitive load and thus ease the learning process (bolkan, 2015). in fl education, clarity plays a major role as teachers can employ prosodic modifications when modeling language intonation and pronunciation, for example, to give clearer instructions and create a more understandable message, which facilitates creating students’ positive affective responses (gabryś-barker, 2018). two theories inform teacher clarity: the first is information processing, which regards teachers as providers of information and learners as processors of information (violanti et al., 2018). accordingly, teacher input received by students goes to the short-term memory where some mental operations are performed on ali derakhshan, lawrence jun zhang, kiyana zhaleh 76 it, and, the information is prepared for transference to the long-term memory. teachers’ enactment of clarity cues assists in more effective processing, retaining, and retrieving of information (titsworth et al., 2015). the second theory is adaptive instruction, propounding that teachers are required to constantly adjust their teaching practice while imparting information to learners (titsworth et al., 2010). studies on clarity have been mainly concerned with exploring its associative or causal link to students’ cognitive and affective learning. the results pertaining to affective learning have been constantly positive: increased teacher clarity is related to increased affect toward the behaviors in the course, teacher, and course content (i.e., affective learning) (e.g., comadena et al., 2007; titsworth et al., 2015; zhang, 2011). 2.4. non-verbal immediacy another teacher communication factor under investigation in this study is nonverbal immediacy. as a type of teacher non-verbal affective signal (gabryś-barker, 2018), it refers to those teacher communication behaviors increasing non-verbal interaction and closeness between the teacher and students (frymier et al., 2019; mehrabian, 1969) and mitigate their psychological and physical distance (gregersen, 2010). according to the rhetorical/relational goal theory, teacher immediacy can satisfy students’ academic and relational needs (frymier et al., 2019). non-verbal immediacy cues include leaning forward, relaxed body posture, movements, smiling, eye contact, appropriate touching, and nodding (derakhshan, 2021; gregersen, 2006). gregerson (2010) has posited that the employment of such non-verbal immediacy cues is effective for developing teacher-student relations and positive attitudes in fl classrooms. non-verbal immediacy is operationalized as high inference perception, acting as an affective arousal cue, potentially influencing students’ psychological reactions (frymier et al., 2019). immediacy behaviors can also encourage efficient teaching and positive attitudes toward instruction (gabryś-barker, 2018). such immediacy behaviors increase positive interpersonal teacherstudent relationships, promoting learners to learn more efficiently and achieve better academic gains (gkonou & mercer, 2018; gregersen, 2005). numerous studies have confirmed the positive link between immediacy and students’ affective learning (e.g., enskat et al., 2017; frymier et al., 2019; violanti et al., 2018). based on the rhetorical/relational goal theory (mottet et al., 2006), researchers have provided evidence mainly in support of the main effects of clarity and non-verbal immediacy on students’ learning goals. moreover, some other researchers have found their interaction effects (kelly & gaytan, 2019) by drawing on the additivity hypothesis (comadena et al., 2007), which posits that “the positive main effects of immediacy and clarity will combine to create an ideal learning situation for students” (titsworth et al., 2015, p. 391). thus, instructor the effects of instructor clarity and non-verbal immediacy on chinese and iranian efl students’ . . . 77 non-verbal immediacy complements clarity to increase affective learning (violanti et al., 2018; zhang, 2011). in this research conducted in the efl contexts of china and iran and foregrounded in the rhetorical/relational goal theory (mottet et al., 2006), we replicated previous communication studies which examined the interaction effects of clarity and immediacy on students’ affective learning by considering the mediating role of perceived understanding. perceived understanding was added to this relationship based on previous conceptualizations of finn and schrodt (2012, 2016) and schrodt and finn (2011) about the mediating role of teacher perceived understanding in the linkage of teacher communication behaviors and student attitudes. 2.5. instructor perceived understanding according to schrodt and finn (2011), based on the rhetorical/relational goal theory, a potential way of accomplishing relational and rhetorical goals is teachers’ employment of (non)verbal behaviors, such as clarity and non-verbal immediacy, which communicate to learners whether they are understood by the teacher or not. perceived understanding refers to a person’s evaluation of his/her failure or success in effective communication with others. to communicate understanding, teachers can explicitly mention that they understand learners, employ follow-up inquiries, summarize the information that students provide, and approve emotions accompanying learners’ messages. through these communication behaviors, learners perceive being understood by their instructors (finn & schrodt, 2012). by drawing on the rhetorical/relational goal theory (mottet et al., 2006), schrodt and finn (2011) conceptualized that students’ perceptions of instructor understanding function as a conceptual mechanism associating teacher communication behaviors like clarity and non-verbal immediacy with students’ educational outcomes and attitudes like affective learning. this conceptualization was empirically substantiated by finn and schrodt (2012, 2016) in later evidence-based studies. consequently, it seems that instructor understanding plays a mediating role in the linkages of teacher nonverbal immediacy, teacher clarity, and students’ affective learning. in the fl education context, gabryś-barker (2018) asserted that when teachers employ verbal and nonverbal affective communication behaviors to facilitate understanding and comprehension of messages, more positive students’ attitudes toward the learning process (i.e., affective learning) happen. that is, teachers who impart class lectures, assignments, and objectives through employing both non-verbal immediacy and verbal clarity signals may be more capable of employing behaviors enhancing understanding, which can ultimately promote students’ positive attitudes toward the course instructor, behaviors, and content (schrodt & finn, 2011). in the present study, we sought to investigate this relationship in chinese and iranian fl education contexts. ali derakhshan, lawrence jun zhang, kiyana zhaleh 78 2.6. culture-centered instructional communication research mccroskey and mccroskey (2006) recommended that researchers worldwide participate in culture-centered instructional communication studies and extend communication research originated in the west to other less investigated non-western cultures. thus, the justification for undertaking this cross-cultural study is mccroskey and mccroskey’s (2006) claim that an “overwhelming proportion of instructional communication research has been conducted by researchers representing the anglo culture of the united states and has involved participants who were also representing the predominant culture” (p. 42). therefore, there is a need to identify “the extent to which effective teaching practices found in the united states translate to classrooms from other cultures” (goldman et al., 2014, p. 46). in addressing this call, the association of teacher clarity and immediacy in relation to affective learning in chinese classrooms has been tested in some studies. in line with previous findings in the us classrooms, zhang and zhang (2005), and zhang (2011) found a significant positive association between clarity, immediacy, and affective learning in the chinese culture. this finding supported the assumption that clear instruction seems to influence students’ affect toward the course content and teacher, disregarding culture. similarly, in a cross-cultural study of japanese, german, chinese, and united states classrooms, zhang and huang (2008) investigated the influence of clarity on student learning. the results revealed the mediating role of motivation and affective learning in the relationship of clarity with cognitive learning. they noted that there is a need for more cross-cultural studies to accurately identify the influence of instructor communication behaviors on learning gains across cultures. in the present study, we explored the influence of teacher communication behaviors on affective learning in china and iran to extend the originally western line of communication research into our non-western educational contexts. as two cases of asian nations, china and iran might be culturally similar in some respects. however, they are distinct regarding some cultural norms and values according to hofstede’s (2001) 6-d model depicted in figure 1. figure 1 cross-cultural comparison of china (in blue) and iran (in purple) on hofstede’s (2001) 6-d model (https://www.hofstede-insights.com/product/compare-countries/) the effects of instructor clarity and non-verbal immediacy on chinese and iranian efl students’ . . . 79 according to figure 1, the scores of both nations on individualism are below 50, showing that both are collectivist cultures, which typically include people who care about solidarity and group membership as well as the well-being of others, try to develop interdependent identities, and care about maintaining good interpersonal relationships. the scores on power distance for both countries are above the cut-off point of 50, with the chinese country being outstandingly more hierarchical. on the other hand, while china is a more masculine nation, iran is more feminine where people deem solidarity and equity in social, work-related, and personal aspects of life important. regarding uncertainty avoidance, chinese people are more flexible in the face of dynamic and unpredictable situations while iranian people, with a score of 59, tend to favor fixed and static circumstances and environments. moreover, compared to chinese people, iranians tend to be more indulgent, which is also in line with the scores of both countries on long-term orientation. accordingly, while iranians are remarkably focused on fulfilling immediate goals in life, chinese people are highly perseverant and focused on reaching long-term goals. altogether, based on the similarities and differences delineated between chinese and iranian cultures, in the present study, we set out to determine if their cultural divergences and convergences could bring about differences in their perceptions of the role of teacher clarity and non-vernal immediacy in their affective learning when mediated through perceived teacher understanding. accordingly, the following research questions were formulated: 1. do chinese and iranian efl students’ perceptions of instructor understanding mediate the effects of teacher clarity and nonverbal immediacy on their affective learning? 2. are there any significant differences between chinese and iranian efl groups regarding the relationship between teacher clarity, non-verbal immediacy, instructor understanding, and affective learning? 3. methodology 3.1. participants a total number of 1,471 (756 chinese and 715 iranians) participants were targeted to participate in this study. after the initial screening (i.e., checking for missing data, constant patterns within each scale, standard deviation, and increasing/decreasing patterns within each scale), the problematic data were excluded, which resulted in a finalized sample of 1,190 (584 chinese and 606 iranian) respondents. to maximize variation within the sample with the likelihood of enhancing sample-to-population generalizability of findings (miles et al., 2014), ali derakhshan, lawrence jun zhang, kiyana zhaleh 80 the participants were intentionally chosen from different genders, levels of education (i.e., ba, ma, phd, or post-doctoral), age groups (detailed demographic information is presented in table 1), and english-related majors (i.e., teaching english as a second/foreign language, english translation, applied linguistics, english language and literature, philology, and tesol). table 1 demographic information of the participants chinese iranian age 17-19 116 80 20-24 268 419 25-29 17 52 30-more 183 55 gender male 115 155 female 459 436 others 2 2 not mentioned 8 13 academic degree ba 423 446 ma 93 111 phd 57 47 pd 11 2 3.2. instruments 3.2.1. teacher clarity short inventory (tcsi) this scale was designed and validated by chesebro and mccroskey (1998) in the american higher education context. it includes 10 items which assess teacher clarity from the perspective of students (e.g., “my teacher is explicit in her or his instruction” or “my teacher’s answers to student questions are unclear”). students’ responses could range on a five-point likert scale, ranging from (1) “strongly disagree” to (5) “strongly agree.” reverse scoring was applied for items 2, 4, 7, and 9. reliability and construct validity of this scale were supported by previous studies (chesebro & mccroskey, 1998; finn & schrodt, 2012). a composite reliability of .81 was reported for the scale in the present study. furthermore, construct validity (see figure 2) and discriminant validity (see table 3) of the scale were confirmed in this study as well. 3.2.2. non-verbal immediacy scale (nis) this scale, originally developed by richmond et al. (1987) in the american higher education context, includes 14 likert-scale items assessing teachers’ non-verbal immediacy the effects of instructor clarity and non-verbal immediacy on chinese and iranian efl students’ . . . 81 behaviors from students’ perspectives (e.g., “my teacher gestures while talking to class” or “my teacher uses a variety of vocal expressions while talking to the class”). the responses to the items could range from (0) “never” to (4) “very often.” in their study, after removing items 1 and 9 due to low factor loading, derakhshan, eslami, et al. (2022) confirmed the construct validity of the scale in the iranian university efl context. in the present study, another item (i.e., item 27: “my teacher touches students in the class”) was omitted because of the socio-cultural values of the population in this research. thus, in the present study, the nonverbal immediacy scale, with 11 items, was used. reverse scoring was applied for the non-immediate items (i.e., items 2, 5, 7, and 8). acceptable reliability (α = .70 or higher) was reported for the scale by previous studies (derakhshan, eslami, et al., 2022; richmond et al., 1987). in the current study, a composite reliability of .72 was reported for the scale, and its construct validity (see figure 2) and discriminant validity (see table 3) were confirmed. 3.2.3. student perceptions of instructor understanding scale (spius) this scale was developed and validated by schrodt and finn (2011) in the american higher education context. it includes 15 items measuring students’ perceptions of instructor understanding (piu) (e.g., “my teacher’s tone of voice indicates understanding” or “my teacher makes follow-up comments which reflect understanding”), and 15 items measuring students’ perceptions of instructor misunderstanding (pim) (e.g., “my teacher fails to maintain direct eye contact with me” or “my teacher answers my questions incorrectly”). the responses to the items could vary from (1) “never” to (5) “very often.” the reliability as well as discriminant and concurrent validity of the scale were confirmed by previous studies (finn & schrodt, 2012; schrodt & finn, 2011). it should be noted that multicollinearity is one of the primary assumptions of multiple regression, which happens when any predictor variable of a regression model is highly associated with other predictor variables (r = .90 or higher). it is assumed that as multicollinearity extremely decreases the predictive power of predictor variables of a regression model, it should not be present (plonsky & ghanbar, 2018). in the present study, through employing squared multiple correlations, multicollinearity was detected between pim and tcsi (r = -0.798). therefore, the 15 items pertaining to pim were omitted from the spius scale. in the current study, a composite reliability of .91 was reported for the scale, and its construct validity (see figure 2) and discriminant validity (see table 3) were confirmed. 3.2.4. affective learning scale (als) this scale was developed by kearney et al. (1985), in order to measure students’ attitudes toward behaviors recommended in the course (abrc), attitudes toward ali derakhshan, lawrence jun zhang, kiyana zhaleh 82 course content (acc), and attitudes toward course instructor (aci) through eight seven-point bipolar adjective subscales (i.e., worthless-valuable, positive-negative, good-bad, fair-unfair, likely-unlikely, possible-impossible, probable-improbable, and would-would not). previous studies have confirmed the strong reliability and construct validity of the scale (hsu, 2012; kearney et al., 1985). similarly, a composite reliability of .97 was reported for the scale in the present study, and its construct validity (see figure 2) and discriminant validity (see table 3) were confirmed. 3.3. procedure to follow the ethical standards in doing educational research, the participants signed a consent letter, showing that they voluntarily participated in the study and were informed of their rights as participants. the researchers took necessary actions to protect the participants’ identities and ensure data confidentiality. as data collection happened during the covid-19 pandemic, in line with the covid-19 safety and health compliance protocol, all the data were collected online. all four scales were prepared through google forms and kwiksurveys for iranian and chinese participants, respectively. the links to the scales were distributed among the participants through email or whatsapp. answering the scales required participants at most 30 minutes. at the time of data collection, all the participants were enrolled in efl classes. the participants were instructed to consistently complete the teacher clarity, non-verbal immediacy, and perceived understanding scales by thinking only of the instructor they had at the time of data collection for their efl class. data collection lasted for two months (i.e., from january 2021 to february 2021). in fact, data were collected at the end of the semester so that students could become acquainted with their efl teachers before making an accurate report of their teachers’ communication behaviors. moreover, the scales were presented in english since all the participants were university students of different efl-related majors who were participating in both efl classes (i.e., receiving english instruction) and content classes in english (i.e., english as a medium of instruction, emi). thus, they were regarded to be able to understand and respond to the scales in english. 3.4. data analyses for analyzing the data, amos (version 24) was run. before conducting the main statistical analyses, the researchers took into account some pre-processes (i.e., checking for missing data, constant patterns within each scale, standard deviation, and increasing/decreasing patterns within each scale) to exclude the problematic data. confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) with the maximum likelihood the effects of instructor clarity and non-verbal immediacy on chinese and iranian efl students’ . . . 83 method was performed to validate the factor structure of the four scales in the university efl context. furthermore, to check measurement invariance (i.e., configural, metric, and scalar invariance), being essential when making meaningful comparisons of the hypothesized models between two groups (meredith, 1993), multiple group cfa was conducted. according to hu and bentler’s (1999) recommendation, the fit indices of chi-square (cmin), degrees of freedom (df), minimum discrepancy per degree of freedom (cmin/df), the root mean square error of approximation (rmsea), root mean squared residual (srmr), parsimony-adjusted normed fit index (pnfi), goodness-of-fit index (gfi), the comparative fit index (cfi), and incremental fit index (ifi) were checked. the composite reliability and discriminant validity for each factor was checked. subsequently, regression imputation, descriptive statistics, multiple correlations, and path analysis were done on the data. 4. results 4.1. pre-processing of the data before starting the analysis, data went through some pre-processes to exclude the problematic data. as mentioned above, 1,471 solid answers (756 by chinese and 715 by iranians) were recorded. after the initial screening, no more than 5% missing answers were inspected for each respondent. the missing values were replaced with the median of the two nearby answers for the questionnaires as they made less than one percent of the values in each variable. then, the data were inspected for constant patterns within each scale. this resulted in the exclusion of 97 cases from the chinese and 58 cases from the iranian respondents’ answers. next, the standard deviation for each participant’s answers to each of the questionnaires was calculated, and those answers with a standard deviation below 0.3 in each scale were excluded as they were considered unengaged respondents (75 chinese and 51 iranian). finally, the answers were inspected for increasing/decreasing patterns within each scale. no such cases were found in the remaining answers. therefore, the remaining 1,190 (584 chinese and 606 iranian) respondents’ answers were used to answer the research questions. regarding the adequacy of the sample for path analysis (sem), various rules-of-thumb have been proposed: boomsma (1982) recommended the use of at least 150 observations; bentler and chou (1987) set the rule of 5 to 10 observations per estimated parameter; kline (2016) recommended 20 observations per estimated parameter, and nunnally (1967) proposed 10 cases per variable. considering the number of variables and parameters in our study, based on the above-mentioned recommendations, a sample from 150 to 750 was required. having 1190 observations, the sample seemed large enough. ali derakhshan, lawrence jun zhang, kiyana zhaleh 84 4.2. confirmatory factor analysis to validate the scales in this study, cfa with the maximum likelihood method was performed using ibm amos. initially, we opted for running first-order cfa with all components of the constructs included. however, the results of htmt showed that the three components of the als are nearly indistinguishable as the correlations between abrc on the one hand, and acc and aci, on the other hand, were above 0.9. therefore, second-order cfa was run. to make sure of the convergent validity, two measures were tested. first, items with non-significant loadings in unstandardized estimation were excluded. then, items with standardized loadings estimates below 0.5 were omitted. moreover, two items (s02 from piu and t01 from tcsi) were removed to improve convergent validity. figure 2 shows the results of the analysis with standardized estimates. for detailed values of both standardized and unstandardized estimations in the initial cfa model (see supplementary materials). then, the modifications suggested by software with the threshold of 10 were considered, and those with no conflict with the literature and positive par change in the model were applied. figure 2 the cfa model (nis: nonverbal-immediacy scale; tcsi: teacher clarity short inventory; piu: perceived instructor understanding; abrc: attitudes toward behavior recommended in the course; als: affective learning scale; aci: attitudes towards course instructor; acc: attitude toward course content) the effects of instructor clarity and non-verbal immediacy on chinese and iranian efl students’ . . . 85 4.3. checking the model-to-data fit after applying the modifications, the model’s goodness of fit was examined. according to hu and bentler (1999), for the model to have a goodness of fit, a number of criteria have to be met. these criteria, alongside the values obtained from the data, are reported in table 2. table 2 evaluation of the cfa goodness of fit criteria observed values threshold evaluation chinese iranian overall cmin 1908.139 1874.768 3025.002 df 645 645 645 cmin/df 2.958 2.907 4.690 between 3 and 5 acceptable rmsea .059 .056 .056 < .06 excellent srmr .055 .049 .046 <.08 excellent pnfi .746 .755 .770 > .5 excellent gfi .847 .843 .875 > .85 excellent cfi .901 .908 .907 > .9 acceptable ifi .902 .902 .907 > .9 acceptable the above results show that the model fits our context. moreover, the difference in rmsea (0.003) and cfi (0.007) of the two groups were very low, indicating configural invariance. to further make sure of the invariance, multigroup comparison was made. the results showed that the constrained (χ2 (1386) = 6419) and unconstrained (χ2 (1431) = 6453.1) models were not significantly different (δχ2 = 34.1, p = 0.693), showing that the identical constructs of the four scales used in this study are confirmed in both chinese and iranian data. the composite reliability and discriminant validity for each factor are reported in table 3. as reported, all of the variables had values above 0.7, which shows acceptable reliability. moreover, the square root of ave (the bold values in the table) was above inter-correlations of the factors, indicating discriminant validity according to fornell and larcker (1981). table 3 composite reliability and discriminant validity of the factors cr fornell larcker criterion nis tcsi piu als nis 0.721 0.615 tcsi 0.812 0.217 0.657 piu 0.911 0.588 0.541 0.680 als 0.979 0.408 0.582 0.643 0.969 note. nis: nonverbal-immediacy scale; tcsi: teacher clarity inventory; piu: perceived instructor understanding; als: affective learning scale ali derakhshan, lawrence jun zhang, kiyana zhaleh 86 4.4. descriptive statistics and correlation after making sure of the validity and reliability of the factors in the constructs, they were imputed using regression imputation. data imputation gives an aggregated mean for each factor, and its advantage over the simple calculation of average is that the share of each item and error in the construct is built in the computation. the descriptive statistics of each factor and the correlation matrix is presented in table 4. table 4 descriptive statistics and correlation matrix mean sd nis tcsi piu als nis chinese 2.6869 .51505 1.000 iranian 2.5469 .49263 1.000 total 2.6156 .50839 1.000 tcsi chinese 4.0253 .72500 .250** 1.000 iranian 3.9809 .78436 .309** 1.000 total 4.0027 .75582 .281** 1.000 piu chinese 3.9127 .55309 .664** .592** 1.000 iranian 3.8351 .57323 .702** .609** 1.000 total 2.6782 .39727 .689** .600** 1.000 als chinese 5.4042 .90243 .466** .624** .664** 1.000 iranian 5.2296 .95056 .492** .656** .703** 1.000 total 5.3153 .93097 .485** .641** .688** 1.000 note. ** correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed); correlations indicate effect sizes via their absolute values (cohen, 1992); nis: nonverbal-immediacy scale; tcsi: teacher clarity inventory; piu: perceived instructor understanding; als: affective learning scale as reported in table 4, all factors in the model were significantly inter-related (p < .01). the relationship between one of the independent variables, clarity, and the dependent variable, affective learning, was relatively high (r = .64), while non-verbal immediacy and affective learning showed a moderate relationship (r = .49). the mediating variable, piu, had relatively high correlations with both independent variables of non-verbal immediacy (r = .69) and clarity (r = .60), and the dependent variable (r = .69). the inter-correlations of the items were very close for both contexts. although few high correlations (above 0.7) were observed, they were both minor and not endangering the discriminant validity as already confirmed by forenell and larckers’ (1981) criterion (see table 2). 4.5. path analysis results to answer the first research question, initially, a path analysis was done. figure 3 depicts the results of the direct effects. the effects of instructor clarity and non-verbal immediacy on chinese and iranian efl students’ . . . 87 figure 3 the measurement model (nis: nonverbal-immediacy scale; tcsi: teacher clarity inventory; piu: perceived instructor understanding; abrc: attitudes toward behavior recommended in the course; als: affective learning scale; aci: attitudes towards course instructor; acc: attitude toward course content) the model fit results showed excellent indices (cmin/df = 20.738/ 12 = 1.728, rmsea = 0.025, srmr = 0.004, cfi = 0.999, gfi = 0.994; tli = 0.998). the multi-group analysis also indicated invariance across the two groups (unconstrained χ2 (12) = 20.738; constrained χ2 (14) = 24.873, p = 0.17). the results of the direct path analysis are reported in table 5. table 5 direct effects direct path group regression weight s.e. c.r. p β difference (z-score) piu <--nis chinese .591 .028 21.302 .000 .550 -1.999**iranian .672 .029 22.876 .000 .568 total .636 .020 31.706 .000 .564 piu <--tcsi chinese .347 .020 17.603 .000 .455 0.926iranian .322 .018 17.456 .000 .433 total .334 .014 24.767 .000 .441 als <--nis chinese .257 .071 3.621 .000 .144 0.852iranian .168 .076 2.222 .026 .086 total .217 .052 4.199 .000 .117 als <--tcsi chinese .485 .047 10.359 .000 .383 0.427iranian .458 .043 10.694 .000 .373 total .469 .032 14.862 .000 .375 als <--piu chinese .550 .079 6.927 .000 .331 1.072iranian .668 .077 8.693 .000 .405 total .614 .055 11.162 .000 .372 note. ** difference is significant at α = 0.01; nis: nonverbal-immediacy scale; tcsi: teacher clarity inventory; piu: perceived instructor understanding; als: affective learning scale as evident in table 5, all of the paths showed significant results for both groups. the lowest relationship was between non-verbal immediacy and affective learning, while the highest one existed between non-verbal immediacy and piu. the indirect effects are presented in table 6. ali derakhshan, lawrence jun zhang, kiyana zhaleh 88 table 6 indirect effects indirect path group regression weight lower upper p β nis --> piu --> als chinese .325 .244 .428 .000 .182** iranian .449 .338 .575 .001 .230** total .391 .321 .473 .001 .210** tcsi --> piu --> als chinese .191 .143 .249 .001 .151** iranian .215 .164 .272 .001 .175** total .205 .169 .243 .001 .164** note. ** significant at α = 0.01; nis: nonverbal-immediacy scale; tcsi: teacher clarity inventory; piu: perceived instructor understanding; als: affective learning scale as reported in table 6, both indirect paths were significant, and piu worked as a significant mediator for both non-verbal immediacy and clarity in relation to affective learning. moreover, in response to the second research question, it should be noted that the positive relationship between non-verbal immediacy and piu was significantly higher for the iranian group. in all other cases, no significant difference was found between the two groups. 5. discussion following the recent call for the need to immediately attend to teacher positive interpersonal communication behaviors in fl education (xie & derakhshan, 2021), in this replication study, by drawing on the rhetorical/relational goal theory in communication research (mottet et al., 2006), we engaged in a cross-cultural comparison of the effects of instructor clarity and non-verbal immediacy on chinese and iranian efl students’ affective learning through the mediation of instructor understanding. initially, before responding to the research questions, we examined the factor structure and reliability of the tcsi, nis, spius, and als. although validity and reliability of these scales were confirmed by previous researchers (finn & schrodt, 2012; hsu, 2012; richmond et al., 1987; schrodt & finn, 2011), all of them were originally developed in the american educational context, meaning that in order to use them across other contexts, their validity and reliability indices needed to be reexamined. besides, none of them was originally developed in fl education. in this study, the results of cfa, composite reliability, and discriminant validity analyses confirmed that the four scales enjoyed good psychometric properties in chinese and iranian efl contexts. with regard to the first research question, the results of the direct effects in the measurement model of the path analysis indicated that both teacher clarity and non-verbal immediacy positively, significantly predicted instructor understanding as well as affective learning, and instructor understanding positively, the effects of instructor clarity and non-verbal immediacy on chinese and iranian efl students’ . . . 89 significantly predicted affective learning. these results provide support for the theoretical and empirical backgrounds of the study. first, these results empirically support the rhetorical/relational goal theory positing that when students’ academic and relational needs are satisfied by instructors’ employment of positive rhetorical and relational resources (e.g., teacher immediacy, clarity, and understanding), students will attain more desirable educational outcomes and attitudes (e.g., affective learning) (houser & hosek, 2018). furthermore, the positive predictability of affective learning through clarity in this study was in line with previous empirical findings (comadena et al., 2007; titsworth et al., 2015; zhang, 2011). similarly, the positive influence of non-verbal immediacy on affective learning was in concomitance with the extant literature (enskat et al., 2017; frymier et al., 2019; violanti et al., 2018). the positive causal role of clarity and immediacy in understanding, on the one hand, and the positive predictive role of understanding in affective learning, on the other hand, supports mercer and dörnyei’s (2020) argument regarding the importance of teacher positive interpersonal behaviors toward students in the fl learning and teaching context because of its inherently relational nature. this finding is also in line with the derakhshan’s (2022a) statement that attainment of fl learning gains in efl classes requires successful teacher-student interpersonal relationships and interactions, facilitated through fl instructors’ emotional and interpersonal understanding of students. the results of the indirect effects in the path analysis model illuminated that instructor understanding was a significant positive mediator in the relationship of non-verbal immediacy and clarity with affective learning. schrodt and finn (2011) proposed a conceptual model of the role of positive teacher interpersonal communication behaviors like clarity and non-verbal immediacy in students’ educational outcomes and attitudes through the mediation of perceived instructor understanding, and previous studies found evidence-based support for this relationship in communication education (finn & schrodt, 2012, 2016). as the results of the present study revealed, we also substantiated the credibility of this model in fl education. concerning the second research question, it was found that, except for the positive association of non-verbal immediacy with instructor understanding which was significantly higher for the iranian group, no significant difference was found between the two groups in all other cases. this finding addressed mccroskey and mccroskey’s (2006) and derakhshan’s (2022a) call for increasing engagement in culture-centered instructional communication research as in this study we extended this line of research to the chinese and iranian efl contexts. the insignificance of the differences in the relationships among the variables in both cultures supported previous researchers’ (zhang, 2011; zhang & huang, ali derakhshan, lawrence jun zhang, kiyana zhaleh 90 2008; zhang & zhang, 2005) assertion that positive teacher interpersonal communication behaviors seem to increase students’ affective learning, disregarding the cultural context. this result is justifiable by considering the fact that due to the unique nature of fl education, where a good interpersonal relationship between the teacher and students is a key to successful language instruction and learning (mercer & gkonou, 2020), teachers’ interpersonally good and effective treatment of students is important to fl teachers and students in any cultural context. how well instructors and learners make harmonious and friendly relationships can determine learners’ learning experiences (mercer & dörnyei, 2020). thus, as the results of the present study showed, when teachers employ more positive interpersonal communication behaviors, students’ affective learning will be similarly facilitated in both chinese and iranian efl classes. these results can be also justified by considering the remarkably collectivist nature of both chinese and iranian societies as presented in hofstede’s (2001) model (see figure 1). tending to be more collectivist, people within both societies typically regard maintaining interpersonal relationships important, deem group membership significant, and highly value the well-being and comfort of others. thus, it is justifiable that chinese and iranian efl teachers care about satisfying their students’ academic and relational wants through employing positive interpersonal communication behaviors, resulting in more understanding between them and students, which in turn, increases students’ affective learning. 6. conclusion this study highlights that communication behaviors have fruitful implications for both fl research and instruction. thus, fl researchers are urged to give verbal and non-verbal channels of communication a place of prominence in their research agendas, and similarly, fl instructors are suggested to integrate them into their classroom practices. fl instructors are recommended to increase their verbal clarity by taking such actions as planning and organizing instructional materials before teaching them, presenting a transparent preview of what learners will learn, reviewing what learners have learned, presenting transparent directions of learners’ learning attitudes, employing illustrations and visuals as well as using intentional explanations and examples to enhance or supplement ideas. it is also advocated that teachers show adaptability and flexibility concerning instructional messages by, for example, evaluating content and changing behaviors during a lesson or simultaneously employing several clarity behaviors, which ensures the highest clarity level for students. in the same vein, as non-verbal immediacy was found a significant predictor of students’ affective learning, it is beneficial for fl instructors to be trained to employ subtle non-verbal immediacy behaviors such as nodding, eye contact, the effects of instructor clarity and non-verbal immediacy on chinese and iranian efl students’ . . . 91 appropriate touching, open body positions and gestures, and smiling. it is also incumbent on fl teacher educators to hold ongoing teacher professional development programs, where preand in-service fl teachers can learn about clarity and non-verbal immediacy for increasing students’ affect toward the course elements. teacher educators can provide teacher trainees with practical strategies for increasing teacher-student immediacy and teacher verbal clarity so that they can facilitate teachers’ understanding of students and create more engaging and fulfilling learning environments for students. moreover, the results of this cross-cultural study can provide significant insights to its readers as they become aware of whether immediacy, clarity, and perceived understanding predict efl students’ affective learning similarly or dissimilarly in chinese and iranian cultural contexts. nevertheless, the study is not without its limitations. first, the findings may be influenced to some extent by halo effects, as students who like their teachers may be more prone to feel understood by them and perceive them as being non-verbally immediate and clear. moreover, efl students from two countries were targeted as the sample for checking the factor structure and measurement invariance of the scales. future research gathering data from other cultures would be beneficial for confirming the cross-cultural validity of these scales in efl education. the present study employed a quantitative approach to investigate the relationships between its variables and answer its research questions by collecting numerical data from a rather large sample. future researchers can employ mixed methods research and purely qualitative approaches as they potentially allow researchers to collect textual or auditory data from participants in order to answer “what,” “how,” “in what ways,” or “to what extent” research questions and consequently reach a more in-depth understanding of these relationships. future studies can also study the impacts of particular pedagogical interventions, delivered by teacher educators well-versed in instructional communication research, to see if such interventions can enhance teachers’ employment of clarity and non-verbal immediacy. the present study focused only on immediacy and clarity behaviors. future studies should examine additional teacher communication cues like teacher confirmation, care, classroom justice, support, and humor as potential contributors to fl students’ affective learning. lastly, the findings of this replication study lent further empirical support to an explanatory mechanism (i.e., teacher understanding) that associates teacher verbal clarity and non-verbal immediacy perceptions to language students’ affective learning. future studies can extend these attempts by investigating teacher understanding as a potential mediator of other educational outcomes in the fl classroom, such as willingness to attend classes/communicate, engagement, attainment, or success. ali derakhshan, lawrence jun zhang, kiyana zhaleh 92 acknowledgments this work was supported by golestan university under grant number 1459. the authors wish to thank golestan university for its support. they are also grateful for the insightful comments suggested by the editor and the anonymous reviewers. the effects of instructor clarity and 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self-concepts will directly affect learners’ outcome attributions in a particular academic setting. current research in the english as a foreign language (efl) context has increasingly analyzed learners’ attributions and self-concepts on a task-specific construct level. nevertheless, there still exist certain research gaps in the field, particularly concerning learners’ grammar self-concept and attributions. therefore, the present study aimed at analyzing longitudinal relations of prior performance and self-concept with subsequent attributions of grammar success and failure in a sample of preadolescent efl learners. findings demonstrated that attributional patterns mostly but not entirely depended on learners’ grammar self-concept. poor performing learners holding a low self-concept displayed a maladaptive attribution pattern for explaining both grammar success and failure. though not with respect to all causal factors, these findings largely confirm the crucial role of task-specific self-concept in longitudinally explaining related control beliefs in the efl context. keywords: causal attributions; self-concept; grammar performance; gender; grade level günter faber 634 1. introduction from the perspective of social-cognitive theories, the development of scholastic achievement is considered to be essentially regulated by learners’ individually emerging competence and control beliefs (schunk & zimmerman, 2006). competence beliefs refer to learners’ perceived capabilities to succeed or to fail in a given academic activity or task. they will be closely associated with corresponding control beliefs which represent learners’ perceived likelihood of accomplishing desired academic outcomes by means of own behavioral attempts. in the long term, competence and control beliefs will not only operate in a mutually reinforcing manner. rather, competence beliefs will directly determine learners’ control beliefs in a certain academic setting which must be seen as an important personal resource to cope with academic requirements in a given educational environment (you, hong, & ho, 2011). academic control beliefs broadly manifest as causal attributions and concern learners’ perceived causes of individually experienced success and failure. they can refer to causes within or outside the individual which can also be seen as more or less consistent over time. hence, each outcome attribution will reflect a certain cause being internal (or external) and stable (or variable) which furthermore appears more or less controllable (weiner, 2005). empirical research substantiated typically occurring patterns in learners’ attributions. poor performing learners tend to explain failure with a lack of academic ability but own success with external factors whereas moderately or highly performing learners tend to explain success with their ability and failure with a lack of effort or environmental constraints (faber, 2012a). thus, poor performers who perpetually attribute failure to internal and stable causes are at risk to develop increasing feelings of uncontrollability and helplessness (abramson, garber, & seligman, 1980). likewise, they are prone to display reduced engagement in critical or demanding tasks (stipek & mason, 1987). thus, learners’ preferred attributions should contribute to generating an adaptive or maladaptive learning approach (schunk, 2008). furthermore, learners’ attributions should be domainor subject-specific in nature. accordingly, internal explanations turned out to correlate highest with matched achievement or self-belief scores. with regard to learners’ external explanations, research provided only partial support to their domain or subject-specificity (boekaerts, otten, & voeten, 2003; bong, 2004; marsh, 1984; vispoel & austin, 1995). the formation of causal attributions turns out to be dependent upon learners’ processing of individually relevant information, in particular with regard to the perceived consistency, consensus, and distinctiveness of an academic outcome (kelley & michela, 1980). for the most part, reference information of this nature should be already represented in learners’ domainor subject-specific selfconcepts (marsh & o’mara, 2008). in line with this assumption, the studies having longitudinal effects of task performance and self-concept on preadolescent efl learners’ causal. . . 635 concurrently analyzed the relations of self-concept and achievement measures with causal attributions revealed clear evidence for attributions being most profoundly explained by corresponding self-concept rather than by achievement (bandalos, yates, & thorndike-christ, 1995; marsh, 1984; watkins & gutierrez, 1989). against this conceptual and empirical background, learners’ causal attributions should claim a crucial role in analyzing and understanding academic development in the efl context. consequently, learners’ explanations of own success and failure in learning a foreign language should be best explained by their corresponding self-concept. empirical research on the relation between learners’ control and competence beliefs should warrant most important insights into the cognitive-motivational processing of foreign language learning and reveal important references to implement adequate instructional settings. 2. attribution research in the efl context 2.1. relevant research findings the issue of learners’ competence and control beliefs has gained increasing attention in the efl context (gabillon, 2005). conceptual perspectives on the motivational processing of learning english as a foreign language had directly or indirectly all focused upon learners’ competence and control beliefs (dörnyei, 2005; williams & burden, 1997). however, though being assumed to constitute an important component of foreign language learners’ motivational orientations (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011; mercer, 2011; lamb, 2017), their causal attributions had been analyzed less intensely than other constructs. only in the last decade, empirical efl research had increasingly considered learners’ causal attributions (hsieh, 2012). mostly, efl attribution research took place at the university level. relevant studies found differing attribution patterns. in most, but not in all cases, learners assigned success to internal and controllable causes whereas they explained failure in some cases by internal and controllable, in other cases by external and uncontrollable causes (demir, 2017; gobel & mori, 2007; mori, 2008; peacock, 2010; yaghoubi & rasouli, 2015; yilmaz, 2012). however, when considering learners’ competence level, analyses produced a more conclusive response pattern. learners with low proficiency scores reported heightened levels of internal failure attributions whereas learners with high proficiency scores attributed success more strongly to internal causes and failure to external factors (mori, ming, nor, suppiah, & imm, 2011). qualitative studies with participants from higher education tracks produced similar results (gonzalez, 2016; graham, 2006; taşkiran & aydin, 2017). seemingly fewer studies analyzed efl learners’ attributions at the school level. here again, findings revealed differing attribution patterns. high language günter faber 636 achievers reported more internal and stable causes than their low achieving classmates (sorić & ančić, 2008), and both high and low achieving learners attributed language outcome most strongly to internal, primarily uncontrollable causes (erten, 2015a; erten & burden, 2014). likewise, learners’ language achievement was negatively related to external attributions. therefore, they felt not responsible for a failure outcome (hsieh & kang, 2010). moreover, qualitative research showed learners’ attributions for both success and failure mostly referring to internal causes (sahinkarakas, 2011; williams, burden, poulet, & maun, 2004). some studies also examined the role of l2 self-concepts. in particular, phothongsunan (2015) showed university efl learners with high competence beliefs reporting stronger effort attributions than their counterparts with low competence beliefs. moreover, mori and colleagues (2011) demonstrated learners with high competence beliefs to trace back language success to internal and failure to external factors. analyses with school samples demonstrated the foreign language self-concept to significantly explain learners’ attribution tendencies (erten, 2015a; erten & burden, 2014). most notably, in the study of hsieh and kang (2010) learners with lowered competence beliefs tended to attribute test outcomes more strongly to external factors. to some extent, the study of luo, hogan, yeung, sheng and aye (2014) lent support to this finding. furthermore, at all educational tracks efl research revealed certain gender effects. in particular, some studies reported females to attribute language success more strongly to internal causes than males (erten, 2015a; lian, 2012; peacock, 2010; tulu, 2013; yilmaz, 2012). there was also evidence for male learners to explain success more strongly with reference to effort (mori, 2012). compared with this, male learners attributed failure primarily to external factors whereas female learners mostly referred to internal factors (genç, 2016; mori, 2012; tulu, 2013; yilmaz, 2012; zhori, 2011). even so, other studies did not find any significant differences between female and male learners (luo et al., 2014; yördem, 2016). as the strength and direction of differences appeared to considerably vary across studies, research findings do not allow for accurately clarifying gender differences in causal attributions. in sum, empirical research on efl learners’ attributions yielded mixed results. there is evidence for both self-serving and self-blaming attribution patterns (marsh, 1986), each of them producing rather specific consequences in learners’ emotional responses and learning approach (graham, 1991). unarguably, this inconsistency of findings essentially reflects the diversity of learner samples and educational or cultural contexts relevant studies considered as well as the attribution measures they used. notwithstanding, in one way or another, all relevant studies substantiated learners’ domainor subject-specific self-concepts to significantly determine their attribution responses. longitudinal effects of task performance and self-concept on preadolescent efl learners’ causal. . . 637 2.2. current research gaps admittedly, research on efl learners’ attributions still suffers from certain conceptual, methodological, and empirical limitations. first of all, with regard to the developmental importance of early language learning, there is a lack of attribution research in school settings. furthermore, from the perspective of self-belief research, there is a considerable need for further clarifying the role of learners’ self-concepts. not least, most studies in the efl context analyzed learners’ attributions on a subject-specific level but did not test for concurrent performance and self-concept effects. only few studies had already investigated foreign language attributions with respect to specific language outcomes – for example, in reading, speaking, and listening comprehension (demir, 2017; gobel & mori, 2007; graham, 2006; lian, 2012; yilmaz, 2012). however, following empirical findings on learners’ self-concepts (arens & jansen, 2016; faber, 2012b; holder, 2005; lau, yeung, jin, & low, 1999), further research in the field should more intensely explore task-specific attributions,and also scrutinize relevant instruments’ validity, in order to gain more differentiated access to learners’ beliefs to control their outcomes in foreign language vocabulary, listening, reading, writing, or grammar. most remarkably, there are no appropriate research activities to be found for the issue of efl grammar learning. this gap must be all the more surprising as the learning of forms is commonly considered to play an important and needful role in the foreign language learning classroom (nassaj & fotos, 2004). correspondingly, relevant survey results pointed out the majority of efl learners perceived the mastering of grammar as an important and useful, albeit rather demanding and not always enjoyable part of their language learning (jean & simard, 2011; kang, 2017; loewen et al., 2009; schulz, 1996; simon & taverniers, 2011). moreover, grammar was perceived even as a demotivating factor in efl instruction (sakai & kiuchi, 2009). therefore, in the course of efl instruction learners will incrementally develop specific competence and control beliefs concerning their grammar learning in the target language. accordingly, there is a remarkable backlog to analyze their causal attributions to explain grammar outcomes. 3. conceptual framework and research questions with regard to these research gaps, the present study aimed at analyzing preadolescent efl learners’ causal explanation of grammar success and failure. in particular, it should challenge findings from previously run analyses of cross-sectional data (faber, 2017b) and examine the longitudinal effects of learners’ performance and self-concept on subsequent attributions. günter faber 638 the present study was based on a cognitive-motivational modeling of construct relations which considered learners’ causal attributions as dependent variables. as recent research findings considerably varied across attribution measures each including different numbers, types, and levels of causal categories, their findings could always reflect a certain method bias. in order to evade this problem, the present study narrowed down the causal categories to explain learners’ grammar success and failure and only referred to the basically proposed causal factors of ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck (weiner, 2005). they had been thoroughly substantiated in all relevant studies and evidently represent the causal dimensions of locus of control, variability, and controllability (hau & salili, 1993). though this limitation restricted the potentially existing causal space of outcome explanations, it was meant to be temporary for the purpose of the present study. of course, it did not principally rule out an extension of causal factors. rather, it should warrant an empirical starting point to further refine the framework of relations among grammar performance, selfconcept, and attribution variables. figure 1 modeling longitudinal relations of prior performance and self-concept with subsequent attribution variables concerning longitudinal relations among constructs across three measurement times, learners’ grammar self-concept at measurement time 2 was expected to operate as most powerful predictor to explain their attributions at measurement time 3 (figure 1) and, thus, it should strongly mediate the relationship between their task-specific performance experiences and their causal beliefs. following previous findings (faber, 2017b), high self-concept scores to predict internal success and external failure attributions, and low self-concept scores were expected to predict external success and internal failure attributions. longitudinal effects of task performance and self-concept on preadolescent efl learners’ causal. . . 639 hence, learners’ grammar task performance at measurement time 1 should not directly affect their causal attributions at measurement time 3. even though previously run analyses of cross-sectional data demonstrated the grammar self-concept not being different between female and male learners (faber, 2017a), the present study precautionally controlled longitudinal relations among constructs for potentially operating gender effects (figure 1). the same applied to learners’ grade level. as the present study took place in efl fifth and sixth grade classrooms, learners’ performance and self-beliefs were just emerging at grade 5 and developing at grade 6. therefore, it was worthwhile to compare their performance and self-belief variables across both grade levels in order to test for possible moderator effects. accordingly, the present study aimed at clarifying the following research questions (rq): rq 1: will attributions of grammar success and failure be substantially affected by learners’ gender? rq 2: will attributions of grammar success and failure be substantially affected by learners’ grade level? rq 3: will learners’ prior self-concept but not their task performance substantially explain their attributions of grammar success and failure? 4. method 4.1. participants the study was conducted with a sample of n = 119 preadolescent learners at secondary grade level 5 (31 female, 34 male) and 6 (42 female, 12 male) from a german grammar school. in the german tripartite system of strongly selective educational tracks this school type (“gymnasium”) is the highest track. the female-male ratio significantly differed between both grade levels (χ2 = 11.359, df = 1, p < .001), as there were more female learners at grade level 6. however, this gender ratio appeared to be representative for the educational track (blossfeldt et al., 2009). at measurement time 1, learners’ average age was 11.1 years (sd = 0.4) at grade 5 and 12.1 years (sd = 0.5) at grade 6. at measurement time 1, fifth-graders had experienced formal efl instruction for about 6 months, and sixth-graders for about 17 months. their participation was on a voluntary basis and only with explicit parental consent. 4.2. procedure following the longitudinal modeling approach of construct relations (figure 1), learners’ grammar task performance was assessed in calendar week 6 (at measurement günter faber 640 time 1). in calendar week 11 (at measurement time 2), their grammar self-concept and in calendar week 19 (at measurement time 3), their causal attributions of grammar success and failure were assessed. all data were gathered in the course of two class periods by two (advanced collegiate) test supervisors who had been instructed in detail. this took place class for class and in the absence of the teaching staff. 4.3. instruments for assessing learners’ grammar performance, at measurement time 1 a cloze test was administered (jensen, 2013). it consisted of ten tasks dealing with the correct use of possessive pronouns (at grade level 5) and the correct use of comparative adjectives (at grade level 6). for both tests, a sum score of correctly solved tasks was used. as the results did not significantly differ between grade levels (independent samples test: t = 0.018, df = 210, p = .985), they could be considered to truly provide comparable performance measures for further analyses. learners’ grammar self-concept was measured by means of a newly developed scale that consisted of nine 4-point likert items (ranging from never to always). scale items referred to learners’ perceived competencies to understand and apply l2 grammar forms or rules, respectively, their perceived mastery of grammar tasks in the classroom and their motivational tendency to avoid grammar tasks (faber, 2017a). the following is a sample item: “during english lesson i manage to catch the grammar rules.” for data from measurement time 2, a principal component analysis showed all scale items to substantially load on one common factor (with factor loadings ranging from amin = .564 to amax = .802). the scale’s internal consistency (cronbach’s coefficient alpha) turned out to be sufficient (α = .85). high scale scores indicate learners’ strong beliefs in own grammar competencies. as the scale’s sum scores strongly correlated with the english but not with the mathematics self-concept variable, instrument should partially claim subject-specific validity (faber, 2017a). at measurement times 1 and 3, causal attributions were tapped by means of 4-point likert scale items – four of them concerning a success and four of them concerning a failure outcome in grammar. they all referred to the classical weiner categories of ability, effort, difficulty, and luck (weiner, 2005). learners were asked to rate the importance of each cause to explain the favorable and unfavorable outcome. the following is a sample item: “if i am successful in english grammar, it is because i have practiced hard” (jensen, 2013). high item scores indicate a certain cause being perceived to strongly affect the grammar outcome. these attribution ratings should absolutely represent most distinguishable information. accordingly, they should correlate only in a moderate manner, at most. therefore, separate principal component analyses were run for the success and failure outcome longitudinal effects of task performance and self-concept on preadolescent efl learners’ causal. . . 641 with measurement time 3 data. their results demonstrated all items revealing sufficiently independent information (see table 1). finally, learners’ grade level and gender (as dummy variable) were included in the analyses. table 1 principal component analyses (pca) of attribution items at measurement time 3 f1 f2 f3 f4 success attributions ability .990 .031 -.064 -.118 effort .031 .992 .080 -.096 difficulty -.064 .080 .994 .041 luck -.119 -.096 .042 .987 failure attributions ability .979 .126 .152 .055 effort .123 .987 .098 -.018 difficulty .157 .104 .968 .168 luck .054 -.018 .159 .986 note. f = factor 4.4. data analyses in order to clarify possible grade level and gender effects, a series of univariate analyses of variance (anova) with repeated measures for dependent attribution variables was initially conducted – including grade level and gender as independent factor variables. this particular step was most important for verifying the longitudinal approach of data analyses as well as determining subsequent analyses to run with the total sample or with grade level and gender subsamples, respectively. furthermore, for all performance and self-belief variables overall descriptive statistics were calculated. for detecting significant deviations from normal distribution, z-standardized skewness and kurtosis scores were used. to clarify learners’ attribution patterns for grammar success and failure, mean differences of attribution responses were analyzed – namely, whether and how strongly they could be explained by significant effects of learners’ prior grammar self-concept and task performance. accordingly, for each causal factor a 2í2 anova with the grammar self-concept and task performance as factor variables was conducted. in view of sample size, both the self-concept and the performance variable were factorized by median split, thus leading to the identification of low and high level subgroups in each case. for all main or interaction effects, partial eta squared (ηp2) as an effect size was calculated. due to sample size and lack of variance homogeneity, the robust brown-forsythe test was used for post hoc comparison (tomarken & serlin, 1986). günter faber 642 among all variables, there were missing data to a certain extent. for the grammar self-concept items and the grammar task performance, the amount of incomplete data ranged from 0 to 2.4%; in the attribution variables, they ranged from 0.9 to 2.8%. as these missing values did not produce any systematic pattern (little, 1988), they could still be treated as “missing completely at random” (mcar test: χ2 = 228.695, df = 224, p = .401). all missing data were estimated by means of the two-step iterative em algorithm (enders, 2010). 5. results 5.1. measurement time, grade level, and gender effects initially driven analyses of variance did not substantiate any grade level and gender effects. neither was there a significant difference between attribution responses at measurement times 1 and 3 (see table 2). furthermore, no significant grade level and gender effects could be found for learners’ grammar task performance (grade level: f = 1.261, df = 1,118, p > .05; gender: f = 3.215, df = 1,118, p > .05) and their grammar self-concept (grade level: f = 2.064, df = 1,118, p > .05; gender: f = 1.660, df = 1,118, p > .05). consequently, subsequent analyses included learner data from the total sample. table 2 measurement time, grade level, and gender effects on causal attributions of grammar success and failure causal factor wilks λ f df p ηp2 success ability mt .999 0.137 1,115 .712 .001 mtígender .999 0.081 1,115 .777 .001 mtígrade level .993 0.765 1,115 .384 .007 success effort mt .998 0.249 1,115 .619 .002 mtígender .995 0.615 1,115 .435 .005 mtígender level .999 0.121 1,115 .728 .001 success difficulty mt .999 0.066 1,115 .797 .001 mtígender .999 0.146 1,115 .703 .001 mtígrade level .996 0.511 1,115 .476 .004 success luck mt 1.000 0.019 1,115 .892 .000 mtígender .999 0.074 1,115 .786 .001 mtígrade level .992 0.911 1,115 .342 .008 failure ability mt .997 0.313 1,115 .577 .003 mtígender 1.000 0.005 1,115 .947 .000 mtígrade level 1.000 0.017 1,115 .895 .000 longitudinal effects of task performance and self-concept on preadolescent efl learners’ causal. . . 643 failure effort mt 0.999 .136 1,115 .713 .001 mtígender 0.986 1.616 1,115 .206 .014 mtígrade level 0.984 1.815 1,115 .181 .016 failure difficulty mt 0.988 1.428 1,115 .235 .012 mtígender 0.985 1.802 1,115 .182 .015 mtígrade level 0.986 1.656 1,115 .201 .014 failure luck mt 0.999 .082 1,115 .775 .001 mtígender 0.998 .268 1,115 .606 .002 mtígrade level 0.997 .354 1,115 .553 .003 note. mt = measurement time 1 vs. 3, ηp2 = partial eta squared 5.2. descriptive results descriptive analyses showed learners’ grammar task performance and self-concept to be negatively skewed (see table 3) indicating that most learners achieved higher task scores and held positive competence beliefs. developmentally, this particular result should be most plausible as younger learners still tend to have an optimistic view on own competencies (helmke, 1999). luck attributions of success as well as ability and luck attributions of failure showed a significant positive skew. hence, most learners manifested distinct rejection of item content. they tendentially perveived grammar success not being dependent on luck and grammar failure not being dependent on a lack of own ability or bad luck. correspondingly, success attributions on luck showed a strong positive kurtosis indicating their distribution to be heavy-tailed on the (left) side of lower response categories. table 3 descriptive statistics of grammar performance, self-concept, and attribution variables mt am sd z skewness z kurtosis grammar task performance 1 6.57 2.36 -2.55*** -0.95*** grammar self-concept 2 26.68 4.99 -2.57*** 0.92*** causal attributions success ability 3 2.87 1.01 -1.11*** -1.13*** success effort 3 2.22 1.01 -1.75*** -2.31*** success difficulty 3 2.72 0.92 -0.57*** -2.04*** success luck 3 2.22 1.13 9.19*** 22.02*** failure ability 3 2.03 0.99 2.68*** -1.61*** failure effort 3 2.34 1.03 0.53*** -2.58*** failure difficulty 3 2.22 0.88 1.02*** -1.59*** failure luck 3 2.11 0.97 2.04*** -1.83*** note. mt = measurement time, significance: *p ≤ .05, **p ≤ .01, ***p ≤ .001 günter faber 644 5.3. longitudinal relations as anova results showed, only learners’ ability and luck attributions of grammar success appeared to be significantly explained by their grammar self-concept (see table 4). table 4 mean causal attribution of grammar success and failure depending on prior task performance and self-concept causal factor mt f df p ηp2 success ability grammar task performance 3 2.511 1,118 .116 .021 grammar self-concept 1 14.580 1,118 .000 .113 performanceíself-concept 2 1.411 1,118 .237 .012 success effort grammar task performance 3 0.000 1,118 .999 .000 grammar self-concept 1 0.467 1,118 .496 .004 performanceíself-concept 2 0.314 1,118 .576 .003 success difficulty grammar task performance 3 0.042 1,118 .839 .000 grammar self-concept 1 0.029 1,118 .864 .000 performanceíself-concept 2 0.012 1,118 .913 .000 success luck grammar task performance 3 7.157 1,118 .009 .059 grammar self-concept 1 8.393 1,118 .005 .068 performanceíself-concept 2 1.959 1,118 .164 .017 failure ability grammar task performance 3 10.005 1,118 .002 .080 grammar self-concept 1 23.903 1,118 .000 .172 performanceíself-concept 2 0.693 1,118 .407 .006 failure effort grammar task performance 3 2.733 1,118 .101 .023 grammar self-concept 1 9.941 1,1187 .002 .080 performanceíself-concept 2 2.157 1,118 .145 .018 failure difficulty grammar task performance 3 0.496 1,118 .483 .004 grammar self-concept 1 2.101 1,118 .150 .018 performanceíself-concept 2 4.067 1,118 .046 .034 failure luck grammar task performance 3 1.036 1,118 .311 .009 grammar self-concept 1 0.053 1,118 .818 .000 performanceíself-concept 2 0.442 1,118 .507 .004 note. mt = measurement time, ηp2 = partial eta squared mean ability attributions were strongly dependent on a significant selfconcept effect. the effect of the performance factor remained nonsignificant. across all performance levels, the high self-concept group explained subsequent grammar success more strongly with own ability than the low self-concept group (see figure 2). in comparison, mean effort and difficulty attributions depended longitudinal effects of task performance and self-concept on preadolescent efl learners’ causal. . . 645 figure 2 mean success attributions depending on prior grammar performance and self-concept neither on prior performance nor on prior self-concept differences. in turn, mean luck attributions appeared to be affected by a significant self-concept and performance effect. in the poor performing subgroup, learners holding a low self-concept explained grammar success more strongly with good luck than their classmates with a high self-concept. this difference was statistically significant (f = 8.952, df 1 = 1, df 2 = 61, p < .01). in contrast, in the well-performing subgroup, both learners with a low and a high self-concept rejected good luck as a cause of grammar success (see figure 3). the apparently existing difference between self-concept groups was nonsignificant (f = 1.780, df 1 = 1, df 2 = 40, p > .05). taken altogether, learners with a high self-concept more strongly explained success with internal and thus controllable causes whereas they emphasized an external cause to a lesser extent or rejected it. learners with a low self-concept less strongly explained a task-specific success outcome with internal causes whereas they emphasized an external cause only in the case of experiencing poor grammar performance. hence, learners in the high selfgünter faber 646 concept group apparently felt more responsible for grammar success than their counterparts in the low self-concept group. the low self-concept group appeared to be at risk of discounting potential grammar success by tracing it back to good luck. figure 3 mean failure attributions depending on prior grammar performance and self-concept similarly, learners’ failure attributions were mostly affected by their grammar self-concept (see table 4). in particular, the mean level of ability attributions appeared to be dependent on both a significant effect of the self-concept and the performance factor. accordingly, across all performance levels it was the low self-concept group explaining an unfavorable outcome most strongly with a lack of own ability (see figure 3). in comparison, the high self-concept group considerably rejected this cause whereby poor performing learners with a high self-concept rejected lack of ability as possible failure cause to a lesser extent. with respect to learners’ effort attributions, again a significant effect of the self-concept longitudinal effects of task performance and self-concept on preadolescent efl learners’ causal. . . 647 variable occurred. across both performance levels, learners of the high self-concept group denied the role of lack of own effort. remarkably, poor performing learners holding a low self-concept explained a failure outcome with a lack of own ability as well as with a lack of own effort. those learners who more strongly attributed failure to a lack of effort preferred a lack of ability as another internal cause to a significantly stronger extent (f = 5.155, df 1 = 1, df 2 = 70, p < .05). furthermore, learners’ difficulty attributions appeared to be significantly dependent on an interaction effect. within the poor performance group, learners with a low self-concept substantially explained failure with task difficulty whereas learners with a high self-concept did not. this difference appeared to be statistically significant (f = 6.307, df 1 = 1, df 2 = 61, p < .05). however, in the well-performing group this difference was statistically nonsignificant (f = 0.160, df 1 = 1, df = 45, p > .05). concerning learners’ luck attributions for failure, neither the prior performance nor the self-concept variable explained interindividually existing differences. across all performance and self-concept levels, bad luck as a possible cause of grammar failure did not play a significant role (see figure 3). taken altogether, learners with a low self-concept of grammar competencies and poor grammar performance more strongly explained task-specific failure with lack of own ability and effort, to some extent also with the task’s difficulty. thus, they attributed failure to both internal and external causes which they may principally control in the case of effort, at least. in contrast, learners with a high self-concept of grammar competencies apparently could not identify any particular cause to reasonably explain a task-specific failure outcome. instead, across all performance levels they perceived internal as well as external causes as less important. obviously, due to their belief of having appropriate competencies or skills available, they could not really imagine expecting or even experiencing an unfavorable grammar outcome. 6. discussion and conclusions the main objective of the present study concerned the potentially mediating role of preadolescent efl learners’ task-specific self-concept to predict their causal attributions of grammar success and failure. using longitudinal data from two grade levels, learners’ prior grammar self-concept was expected to significantly predict subsequent attribution differences. additionally, the impact of gender and grade level on learners’ attributions were analyzed in order to detect possible moderator effects. günter faber 648 6.1. gender and grade level effects the present study did not substantiate learners’ gender to significantly moderate their attribution responses. contrary to relevant research findings neither did females attribute grammar success more strongly to internal causes (erten, 2015a; sorić & ančić, 2008; yeung, lau, & nie, 2011) nor did males explain grammar failure more strongly to external causes (genç, 2016; mori, 2012; yilmaz, 2012; zhori, 2011). conceivably, gender differences in efl attributions will yet emerge over time – after learners will have experienced a longer history of success or failure and, accordingly, will have possibly developed gender-dependent self-beliefs on own strengths and difficulties (pomerantz, altermatt, & saxon, 2002). moreover, subtle gender effects do not necessarily have to operate at all proficiency levels in the same way (faber, 2013, 2017b). further analyses should, therefore, examine differential gender effects in the long term. likewise, the present study found learners’ attribution responses not to be dependent on grade level. here again, it should be assumed relevant grade level effects may manifest yet in the longitudinal course of advancing efl experiences (erten, 2015a; sorić & ančić, 2008; yeung et al., 2011). 6.2. the predictive role of grammar self-concept concerning the study’s main objective, learners’ attributions were best predicted by prior self-concept differences, in some cases also by additional or interactive effects of prior performance. in particular, learners with high competence beliefs felt responsible for success whereas they could not really explain an unfavorable grammar outcome. compared with this, learners with low competence beliefs traced back grammar success to external luck and grammar failure to both internal and external causes. especially the poor performing subgroup with a low selfconcept referred to success and failure causes which must be seen as not or not easily controlled. thus, their attribution responses should potentially induce a sense of personal helplessness (butkowsky & willows, 1980; diener & dweck, 1978). altogether, these attribution patterns indicate a self-congruent rather than a self-serving or counterdefensive response type (marsh, 1986). with all that, neither learners’ prior performance nor self-concept explained their effort and difficulty attributions of grammar success. likewise, their ability, effort, and difficulty but not their luck attributions of grammar failure were predicted by prior self-concept and, partially, by performance differences. learners might have processed individually available consistency information to explain both favorable and unfavorable grammar outcomes and primarily focused on the locus of control dimension (kelley & michela, 1980). longitudinal effects of task performance and self-concept on preadolescent efl learners’ causal. . . 649 though these findings largely lend support to the explanatory power of task-specific competence beliefs and corresponding competence experiences, not all assumptions of the conceptual modeling perspective (figure 1) were verified. contrary to theoretical perspectives (weiner, 2005), preadolescent efl learners did not consider causal factors in the most exhaustive way. in particular, they appeared to perceive grammar success rather as a result of own ability than of own effort. obviously, they did not distinguish between both internal causes. instead, they might have perceived personal causation as a matter of own ability (nicholls & miller, 1983). similarly, in the case of grammar failure poor performing learners with low competence beliefs considered ability and effort in the same way. therefore, they did not yet realize the causal dimension of variability. here again, they might have focused on the locus of control dimension. developmentally, a more differentiated understanding of effort will still emerge in the course of ongoing efl instruction. further analyses should clarify this issue. in particular, they should explore the attributional role of feedback practice in the efl classroom (schunk, 2008). possibly, poor performing language learners’ effort attributions merely reflect their teachers’ commentaries without them being aware of the controllability perspective. in respect thereof, further research should also analyze the role of learners’ mindsets and, thus, clarify their perceived malleability of foreign language competencies or abilities (ryan & mercer, 2012). 6.3. strengths and limitations methodologically, a strength of the present study was the analysis of longitudinal performance and self-belief data. therefore, relations among constructs should be interpreted in terms of their causal ordering across three measurement times. however, a methodological limitation should have been the analysis of learners’ data from one particular school. further analyses should necessarily try to replicate the findings in other educational settings. another methodological limitation was the restricted use of causal factors. against the background of present findings, further analyses should extend the range of causal factors learners would use to explain grammar success and failure – in essence, as they might tap other internal reasons such as study method or learning strategies as well as external reasons such as teacher grading and instructional support (gobel & mori, 2007; hsieh, 2004). most of all, the effort cause appears to be highly inferent and, thus, is principally at risk of confounding different information (stables, murakami, mcintosh, & martin, 2014). accordingly, it should be absolutely unfolded by more proximal operationalizations and differentiated into distinct facets. these effort facets should represent effort experience in a more task-specific manner and address concrete task requirements, learning, and classroom situations learners typically might encounter in the efl context. günter faber 650 notwithstanding, the present study revealed empirical findings which emphasize the explanative role of task-specific self-concepts in efl attribution research. in line with relevant research findings (erten, 2015a; erten & burden, 2014; genç, 2016; mori et al., 2011), it was not grammar performance per se but learners’ cognitive-motivational processing of grammar success or failure which substantially predicted their attribution responses. consequently, to more strongly implement an adequate research line, relevant studies should concurrently analyze the relations between self-concept and attribution measures in different areas – that is, not just in grammar but also in reading, spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, and listening. 6.4. practical implications though the present findings must be seen as preliminary in nature, they immediately suggest certain educational implications. in particular, as poor performing learners with low competence beliefs attributed both grammar success and failure mostly to uncontrollable causes, in the case of failure to some extent also to lack of own effort, they are prone to develop expectations of uncontrollability – and, thus, potentially to lessen their engagement, to stagnate with an inadequate learning approach, and to achieve unfavorable performance outcomes (hsieh, 2012). therefore, it would be appropriate to implement teaching strategies and learning opportunities in the efl classroom which should strive for reducing maladaptive and strengthening adaptive attributions of grammar success and failure (erten, 2015b). accordingly, relevant intervention should be expected to yield most effective results inasmuch as it will apply a combination of direct attribution feedback procedures and task-specific strategy training (robertson, 2000) whilst teacher effort feedback should heavily refer to acquisition and practice procedures priorly introduced and systematically applied in the efl classroom (chan & moore, 2006). in particular, this approach should warrant learners to experience both realistic learning success and control-oriented dealing with failure – especially by supporting and modeling effort attributions. that way, learners should gradually develop adequate competence or efficacy beliefs which, in turn, should facilitate their use of adaptive outcome attributions (raoofi, tan, & chan, 2012). longitudinal effects of task performance and self-concept on preadolescent efl learners’ causal. . . 651 references abramson, l. y., 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(2011). longitudinal effects of perceived control on academic achievement. journal of educational research, 104, 253-266. zohri, a. (2011). causal attributions for failure and the effect of gender among morroccan efl university learners. english language teaching, 4, 130-137. 429 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (2). 2019. 429-432 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ ssllt.2019.9.2.9 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review english-medium instruction and pronunciation: exposure and skills development author: karin richter publisher: multilingual matters, 2019 isbn: 9781788922456 pages: 202 english-medium instruction (emi) has evidently become extremely popular in the last several decades. while its impact has been the most pronounced in primary and secondary schools, mainly within the framework of content and language integrated learning (cli) (dalton-puffer & smit, 2007), its influence is also becoming more and more visible in institutions of higher education, which is related to the growing emphasis on internationalization. therefore, there is an urgent need for empirical investigations into the nature and effectiveness of emi at this level. this is because the findings of available studies are far from conclusive, these studies do not focus sufficiently on actual instructional practices used in the classroom or how these practices translate into learning outcomes, and such research is fraught with methodological weaknesses (macaro, curle, pun, an, & dearden, 2018). karin richter’s book english-medium instruction and pronunciation: exposure and skills development makes an important contribution to this line of inquiry by exploring the development of pronunciation skills of 430 students enrolled in a bilingual program in a university of applied sciences in austria, where up to 50% of content courses are taught in english, mainly by native speakers of the target language (tl). the book is divided into six chapters. chapter 1, which serves as an introduction, presents the research background, spells out the aims and objectives of the study undertaken by the author, and offers an outline of the volume. chapter 2 focuses on the phenomenon of emi in tertiary education in europe, with an emphasis on disentangling terminological issues, shedding light on the reasons for the rapid spread of emi programs and depicting the situation in the institution in which the study was conducted (university of applied sciences vienna or uas vienna). chapter 3 provides an overview of the theoretical positions which are viewed as providing support for emi (i.e., input hypothesis, output hypothesis, interaction hypothesis and sociocultural theory), key issues involved in learning tl phonology, in particular with respect to the development of foreign accent, and research that has examined the outcomes of emi programs, in terms of both linguistic and phonological gains. the chapter also includes the discussion of the methodology as well as the results of the research project related to the gains in pronunciation by the focus group, which benefitted from emi, and the control group, which received instruction in german. the data were collected in the first and sixth semester of a 3-year ba program. on both occasions, the students were requested to read a text and then tell a story based on a picture cartoon, with the resulting audio recordings being rated by seven phonetically trained judges with the help of a visual analogue scale. chapter 4 shifts emphasis to individual factors that affect the development of pronunciation, that is, attitude and identity, motivation, anxiety, formal pronunciation instruction, gender, musicality, and exposure to the tl. it also reports the part of the study which investigated the impact of these variables on gains in pronunciation learning, both at the group level and with respect to two individuals who achieved the greatest and lowest progress over the course of six semesters. the first part of chapter 5 is concerned with a comparison of aspects of german and english phonology as well as a synthesis of research that has focused on the occurrence of austrian accent in learning english. the second part of the chapter focuses on the part of the research project which investigated the development of the segmental and suprasegmental features in the recordings of the text by ten students judged by the raters as those whose pronunciation had improved the most. finally, chapter 6, which is a conclusion, provides a brief synopsis of the main findings of the study, as well as discussing its limitations, considering the directions for future research and offering pedagogical implications. apart from providing yet another important piece of the puzzle concerning the role of emi in higher education, the book offers valuable insights into the 431 development of tl pronunciation in this context. such a focus can hardly be overestimated given the fact that this subsystem is more and more often relegated to the sidelines of instruction at all educational levels, perhaps with the exception of degree programs focusing on specific foreign languages (henderson et al., 2015; szpyra-kozłowska, 2015). in this connection, the findings of the study show quite convincingly that an improvement in pronunciation is possible in the case of adults, even when instruction is mainly focused on content rather than form, let alone specific phonological features. while i initially had doubts about the structure of the book because of a lack of a clear separation between the theoretical and empirical parts, the decision to include the results in relevant chapters seems to work pretty well in this case. i would also like to highlight several strengths of the study for which the author certainly deserves credit. first, the research project involved a longitudinal design spanning six semesters, a phenomenon that is definitely not the norm in the field of second language acquisition. second, both controlled and spontaneous production was taken into consideration, a true control group was included, and care was taken to ensure that the ratings of foreign accent were valid and reliable. third, the investigation of individual factors that mediate pronunciation learning was not confined to group patterns but also involved detailed investigation of the progress and individual profiles of the most and least successful participants. fourth, the analysis of the acquisition of specific pronunciation features allowed identification of those that may be the most resistant to change for native speakers of austrian german despite lengthy exposure, a finding that brings with it important pedagogical implications. these merits of the book are undeniable, but there are also some shortcomings that i will mention here only because the comments may benefit similar investigations conducted in the future. while the longitudinal nature of the study is its obvious strength, it may also be a liability since factors other than emi could have affected the development of pronunciation over the duration of the three years. for example, the participants’ beliefs could have been altered, their motivation could have fluctuated, or they may have become more adept in the use of language learning strategies. obviously, these issues cannot be verified in the face of an absence of pertinent data. incidentally, the discussion of individual factors affecting tl pronunciation learning in chapter 2 would have been considerably enhanced if such variables as aptitude, working memory, learning strategies or beliefs had been given much more careful consideration even if they were not the focus of the study. i also find it difficult to concur with richter that “the difference in the degree of development of the two groups is highly significant as the emi students decidedly outperformed their peers . . .” (p. 81). after all, the participants in the focus group were better from the outset and the differences in 432 gains on the two tasks were not significant. in fact, it might as well be argued that the emi group was composed of more proficient and motivated students and therefore their superior performance could have been anticipated. problems of this kind, however, do not in the least diminish the value of the book and its contribution to research on the effectiveness of emi or the development of pronunciation in an additional language. in fact, i am deeply convinced that the study will pave the way for similar empirical investigations in the future and will set standards for how similar research should be executed. after all, it is longitudinal studies that take into account the individual profiles of learners which are likely to reveal the most about the efficacy of specific instructional approaches and procedures, the variables mediating this efficacy, and the ways in which these can be related to learning outcomes. this applies in particular to emi whose effectiveness on different levels should be verified so that its widespread implementation is not taken on faith but rather grounded in convincing empirical evidence. reviewed by mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references dalton-puffer, c., & smit, u. (2007). intriduction. in c. dalton-puffer & u. smit (eds.), empirical perspectives on clil classroom discourse (pp. 7-23). vienna: peter lang. henderson, a., curnick, l., frost, d., kautzsch, a., kirkova-naskova, a., levey, d., . . . waniek-klimczak, e. (2015). the english pronunciation teaching in europe survey: factors inside and outside the classroom. in j. a. mompean & j. fouz-gonzález (eds.), investigating english pronunciation (pp. 260291). london: palgrave macmillan. macaro, e., curle, s., pun, j., an, j., & dearden, j. (2018). a systematic review of english medium instruction in higher education. language teaching, 51(1), 36-76. szpyra-kozłowska, j. (2015). pronunciation in efl instruction: a research-based approach. bristol: multilingual matters. 39 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (1). 2023. 39-69 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.37174 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt when time matters: mechanisms of change in a mediational model of foreign language playfulness and l2 learners’ emotions using latent change score mediation models mariusz kruk university of zielona góra, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5297-1966 mkruk@uz.zgora.pl mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland university of applied sciences, konin, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7448-355x pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl tahereh taherian yazd university, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2583-8224 taherian87@yahoo.com erkan yüce aksaray university, turkey https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2716-5668 erkanyuce@aksaray.edu.tr majid elahi shirvan university of bojnord, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3363-8273 elahishmajid@gmail.com; m.elahi@ub.ac.ir mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, tahereh taherian, erkan yüce, majid elahi shirvan, elyas . . . 40 elyas barabadi university of bojnord, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8457-3046 elyas.ba1364@gmail.com abstract in a dynamic system, time-dependent links between affective factors can provide more information than the level of response within a single isolated system. in the present study, influenced by the positive psychology movement and the complex dynamic systems theory in the domain of second language acquisition, first, we dealt with change in terms of short-term dynamics and long-term trajectories of foreign language enjoyment (fle), foreign language boredom (flb), and foreign language playfulness (flp) in a sample of 636 learners of english as a foreign language (efl) using univariant latent change score (lcs) models. then, we explored the developmental processes involved in how changes in fle and flp were associated with changes in flb. in particular, we tested mediation models to see whether the growth of flp acts as a mediator between fle and flb changes in a multivariant lcs mediation (lcsm) model. the findings showed that (a) in a multivariant lcs model, fle and flp increases independently predicted decreases in flb over time and (b) the growth of flp acted as a mediator between variation in fle and flb. participants showed interindividual and intraindividual divergences in their l2 emotions, not just on the first time of measurement, but also in short-term dynamics and long-term trajectories. the findings facilitate understanding of the complicated mechanism of variation in l2 emotions, thus potentially contributing to enhancement of pedagogical practices and learning outcomes. keywords: cdst; foreign language boredom; foreign language enjoyment; foreign language playfulness; latent change score mediation model 1. introduction positive psychology (pp) serves to help individual communities and societies flourish through encouraging a shift away from the obsession with human weaknesses to understanding, developing, and building human strengths (derakhshan, 2022; seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000). when pp found its way into the field of second language acquisition (sla), it was followed by a line of innovative research on learners’ emotions (e.g., derakhshan, dewaele et al., 2022; dewaele, botes et al., 2022; elahi shirvan & taherian, 2020; wang et al., 2021). scholars working on second and foreign language (l2) learners’ affective factors found the time ripe for a more holistic approach and concluded that, rather than concentrating primarily on negative emotions, it was when time matters: mechanisms of change in a mediational model of foreign language . . . 41 essential to set their sights on positive emotions as well (derakhshan, dewaele et al., 2022; dewaele & macintyre, 2014). it was also soon uncovered that teachers can increase l2 enjoyment more easily than reduce anxiety. furthermore, longitudinal studies suggest that students who experience positive emotions demonstrate greater psychological and cognitive involvement and accomplish greater l2 gains (dewaele, botes et al., 2022; elahi shirvan et al., 2020, 2021). as a result, both negative emotions, such as foreign language boredom (flb) and positive emotions, such as foreign language enjoyment (fle), are currently the foci of empirical investigations. the association of flb and fle has been investigated both in one-shot, crosssectional studies and in longitudinal perspective (dewaele, saito, et al., 2022; kruk et al., 2022c). what limits previous studies which have mainly focused on the relationship between the two emotions is the lack of research on the role of mediators as mechanisms of change in this relationship. one such potentially important mediator is foreign language playfulness (flp) because it can serve as a means of (re-)framing a boring condition into an enjoyable, inspiring and amusing one by, for example, employing cognitive reconstruction or imagination (cf. barnett, 2012). importantly, the investigation of the dynamic changes within and among l2 emotions requires longitudinal models that can incorporate constant and dynamic variation. latent change score (lcs) models (mcardle, 2009) are flexible enough to address such variation together with linear or exponential variation of variables. lcs models are structural equation models which facilitate exploration of latent constructs which undergo fluctuations in the short and long run. these models can also be extended to shed light on the role of mediators in the dynamic association of emotion-related variables. such expanded models are called latent change score mediation (lcsm) models. the present study aims to illuminate the mechanisms of variation (e.g., both shortand long-term dynamics) of fle, flb, and flp. it is also intended to analyze the bivariate lcs models of fle and flb, and the directionality of variation between these two variables, taking into consideration the way in which flp mediates the relationship between these two emotions. the findings enhance our understanding of the complex processes underpinning l2 learning emotions, demonstrating how they interact with and affect each other over time. 2. literature review 2.1. theoretical foundations of cdst investigating emotions in sla has been significantly influenced by complex dynamic systems theory (cdst). scholars following this approach commonly assume that affective constructs that are seemingly constant for a long period of mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, tahereh taherian, erkan yüce, majid elahi shirvan, elyas . . . 42 time (e.g., weeks, months) can be subject to considerable change in the short run (i.e., seconds, minutes, days) and that such change may happen at the individual rather than group level (elahi shirvan et al. 2020, 2021). variability, although appearing randomly and being as frequent as “apple pie,” offers a rich source of information (verspoor et al. 2021, p. 1). according to cdst, it is assumed that dependent and independent variables are continuously interacting with each other and are influenced by the context and settings. thus, a variety of factors interact with each other to create specific patterns that vary through time. this applies in equal measure to the emotions that l2 learners experience in their efforts to master the target language (tl) (elahi shirvan et al., 2020). 2.2. foreign language boredom boredom is an affective construct marked by dissatisfaction, attention deficit, disengagement, altered time perception and limited liveliness (fahlman, 2009). it is often regarded as one of the most prevalently experienced and strongest learner emotions (pekrun et al., 2010), marked by a loss of interest and reduced involvement in and commitment to learning (chen & kent, 2019). a number of theories have been proposed in educational psychology to explain the causes of boredom and these theories have also provided a point of reference for sla researchers. the under-stimulation theory (larson & richards, 1991) emphasizes the boredom-inducing effect of inadequately engaging class activities (e.g., recurrent uninteresting tasks, unchallenging activities). the forced-effort theory (hill & perkins, 1985) traces the roots of boredom to limited choices and chances for one’s own communicating opinions, resulting from excessive teacher control. the attention deficit theory (eastwood et al., 2012) attributes the main causes of boredom to reduced attentional control, low degrees of self-awareness and memory lapses. the perceived control and value theory (tulis & fulmer, 2013) ascribes the major reasons for boredom to learners’ awareness of reduced control over tasks and limited value attached to those tasks. the menton theory (davies & fortney, 2012) posits that students are bored as they tend to misuse mental energy units (i.e., mentons). lastly, the dimensional approach (pekrun et al., 2010) implies that boredom can have both facilitative and debilitative effects. the literature has revealed a wide array of variables that influence flb such as too much teacher control, unchallenging activities, a general tendency to get bored, unsuitable organization and presentation of class activities, problematic goal-setting, and unappealing topics (e.g., derakhshan et al., 2021a; pawlak et al., 2020). as a result of the adoption of cdst, emphasis has shifted to changes in the intensity of flb and its relationship with other variables. several studies have shown that flb is a complex, developmental, and multi-dimensional when time matters: mechanisms of change in a mediational model of foreign language . . . 43 construct (elahi shirvan et al., 2021; kruk et al., 2021, 2022a, b, c). individual developmental processes (kruk et al., 2022a; yazdanmehr et al., 2021) as well as the potential causes of flb (kruk et al., 2022b) have been explored via an individual-oriented method, also referred to as the idiographic position. on the other hand, the variable-oriented method, known as the nomothetic approach, has allowed exploration of the dynamic nature of flb (kruk et al., 2021), the longitudinal validity of its measurement scale (derakhshan et al., 2021b; elahi shirvan et al., 2021), and its parallel development with other constructs such as fle and grit (derakhshan, fathi, et al., 2022; kruk et al., 2022c; solhi et al., 2023). 2.3. foreign language enjoyment the notion of fle as conceptualized by dewaele and macintyre (2014) is based on pp and the study published by csíkszentmihályi (1990). dewaele and macintyre (2016) approached fle as an intricate affective variable that entails the interaction of several aspects of challenge and perceived ability to represent the individual to strive for achievement when confronted with challenging activities. enjoyment is experienced when individuals find their needs met and go a step further to achieve something new or even unprecedented, thus extending beyond the simple feeling of pleasure (dewaele & macintyre, 2016). enjoyment is described in terms of valance, ranging from mid-way (small to average fle) to maximum, positive end of the continuum where fle turns into an experience of flow. more specifically, fle can appear both in moderate-arousal tasks including silent reading or writing and high-arousal activities like discussions or oral presentations in class. based on cdst (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008), a number of recent studies have investigated the causes, growth and co-development of l2 fle in the long run using different statistical procedures (kruk et al., 2022a, c). the causes and within-individual developmental quality of fle have been explored via the idiographic approach (elahi shirvan & taherian, 2020). the co-development of between-individual variation in fle trajectories has been investigated via the nomothetic position (de ruiter et al., 2019; dewaele & dewaele, 2020). some scholars have also used a mixed-methods approach for the exploration of dynamics of fle (dewaele & macintyre, 2019). 2.4. foreign language playfulness flp is an individual difference factor that helps individuals frame and reframe everyday routine events so that they can find them amusing, intellectually interesting, and/or individually stimulating (proyer, 2017). research has supported a positive association between playfulness in general education and several other mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, tahereh taherian, erkan yüce, majid elahi shirvan, elyas . . . 44 pp variables including satisfaction, creativity, well-being, self-evaluation, and self-esteem (barnett, 2012; proyer et al., 2020). proyer et al. (2020) used modifications of tasks created in online pp intervention research to implement a set of strategies designed to increase playfulness and investigate its influence on self-reported happiness and depressive symptoms. the results of both the immediate and delayed post-tests suggested that all treatments might improve not only various facets of playfulness but also enhance well-being in the short term. when it comes to playfulness in the sla domain, barabadi et al. (2022) investigated the playfulness among efl learners within the context of iran. the participants were interviewed about the perceived functions of flp in their l2 learning. qualitative content analysis resulted in the derivation of two components of flp: other-directed playfulness (e.g., a tendency to communicate with others playfully by, for instance, minimizing anxiety with the help of humor) and intellectual playfulness (e.g., indicating an inclination to play with opinions and to get engaged in complicated and demanding activities, thus prioritizing complexity over simplicity). while this study is an important step in examining flp in l2 learning and teaching, it is also important to determine how this attribute can be enhanced in the classroom perhaps with the help of the tasks that proyer et al. (2020) used in the hope of assisting l2 students in regulating their emotions and invigorating their learning experience. before this can be done, however, it seems warranted to shed more light on how flp interacts with emotions, a goal that is pursued in the present paper. 2.5. the link between flb, fle, and flp since it is hypothesized that emotions mutually affect learning in an academic context, researchers are interested in not only examining l2 emotions alone but also their associations. as for the interaction between fle and flb, previous research has substantiated a negative two-directional link between these two emotions. more specifically, li and han (2022) addressed the association among foreign language classroom anxiety (flca), fle and flb. they uncovered a meaningful negative association between chinese efl learners’ fle and flca, their fle and flb, and a statistically meaningful positive association between flca and flb. comparable trends with a substantial negative association between fle and flb, and a strong positive association between flca and flb were reported by li and wei (2022). dewaele, botes et al. (2022) looked into the relationship among fle, flca, and flb, the way they were related to several learner-internal and learner-external factors, and their influence on students’ fl achievement. the results showed that instructor behaviors positively influenced fle, with no significant effect on flb or flca. only flca proved to exert a (negative) when time matters: mechanisms of change in a mediational model of foreign language . . . 45 impact on learning outcomes. investigating the longitudinal dynamics of students’ fle and flb, kruk et al. (2022a) used lgcm to show the two emotions interactively developed in an online classroom context. the results indicated a strong correlation between the two emotions’ rates of development throughout time. the correlation between fle and flb was stronger at the developmental level (i.e., slope level) than their initial correlation (i.e., intercept level). the findings also showed a strong relationship between reduced boredom in an l2 online program and emotional involvement (i.e., enjoyment). though prior research has examined the correlation between fle and flb, there is a shortage of empirical research data that would allow constructing and testing a comprehensive dynamic model to illuminate why and how enjoyment may affect flb in l2 learning. flp could act as an important mediator in the relationship between these two emotions as it has the potential to help l2 learners (re-)frame everyday events or boring classroom conditions in such a way that they become enjoyable, motivating and/or appealing experiences (barnett, 2012). this is because research findings show that individuals who enjoy a high level of playfulness recognize opportunities for leisure and may tend to experience less boredom in comparison to less playful counterparts (barnett, 2012). besides, greater playfulness in adults has been correlated with positive emotions and better emotion regulation (barabadi et al., 2022) as well as the tendency to experience flow (proyer, 2017). thus, the present study is motivated by the assumption that more complete understanding of the complex, dynamic interplay of l2 emotions may improve pedagogical efforts and translate into better learning outcomes. in addition, this investigation expands this line of inquiry by employing the lcs method which is characterized in more detail in the following section. 3. the latent change score method several researchers have recently started to use the dynamic longitudinal analytic method to trace the dynamic mechanism of different affective factors in and their co-development within language courses in a variety of settings (e.g., dewaele, saito, et al., 2022; kruk et al., 2022a). examples are cross-lagged panel analyses and growth curve body of research. although the former present many advantages, such as the capability of evaluating reciprocal and directional effects on variations among variables and controlling for autoregressive effects at the same time, they neglect growth over time as only covariances, and not mean structures, are included in the models (hamaker et al., 2015). the latter studies have investigated temporal changes of l2 affective constructs (elahi shirvan, yazdanmehr, et al., 2021; kruk et al., 2022c). despite the advantages of growth modeling processes, these models fail to explain the effect of prior conditions on further mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, tahereh taherian, erkan yüce, majid elahi shirvan, elyas . . . 46 development (i.e., autoregressive impacts) within or between systems. therefore, such models are still not capable of answering main questions about relevant forms of mutual growth over time (e.g., decrease or increase of growth). in other words, the existing research on l2 affective variables has addressed the quantity or degree of growth of l2 affective variables; yet, there is still a need for evaluating the quality or pattern of growth of these variables to fully describe their development. lcs models represent a common means of investigating dynamics in longitudinal studies. such models describe mechanisms through which short-term development has explicit and implicit effects on the patterns of the system in the long run (mcardle, 2009). lcs models mix several dimensions of autoregressive and latent growth models (lgms; mcardle, 2009). the lcs approach facilitates the measurement of within-individual variation between two or more points of time as the target outcome by developing latent constructs that reflect the variation in true scores between the two measurement times, t – 1 and t (hilley & o’rourke, 2022). the intercept in lcs models displays the initial true scores, which indicate each person’s starting point for the desired longitudinal construct. an lcs model consists of components for change (grimm et al., 2006). the constant change component, also called the slope or additive component parameter, is best understood when variation is linear and stable across time. the latent variable with stable change may function as a predictor or outcome in more complicated models (cancer et al., 2021). the proportional change component, or self-feedback parameter, is the second variation component which reflects acceleration across time (grimm et al., 2006). the lcs model’s major advantage is related to the proportional variation component, which enables the investigation of nonlinear variation by examining how the past values of a construct affect the impending change (grimm et al., 2006). due to the incorporation of both constant change and proportional change components, lcs models are called dual change score models (grimm et al., 2006). by employing dual change parameters, it is feasible to concentrate on both the quality or pattern of growth and the quantity or degree of growth. lcs models can be categorized into two types (grimm et al., 2006). the first type is the univariate lcs model. here only one construct is evaluated and modeled repeatedly throughout time (hilley & o’rourke, 2022). the second type is the multivariate lcs model, which is an extension of the univariate model and may account for changes in more than one construct over time. one benefit of the multivariate model is the incorporation of change parameters from each univariate model to be an outcome or a predictor. as a result, it is feasible to incorporate pathways between the t – 1 latent levels of one construct and the latent change between t – 1 and t of another construct. this effect is described as the coupling effect (mcardle, 2009) and it provides an estimate of the extent when time matters: mechanisms of change in a mediational model of foreign language . . . 47 to which a change in one variable’s trajectory on a prior occasion is influenced by a change in that variable’s level on a later occasion. in sum, by incorporating the benefits of autoregressive cross-lagged panel analyses and growth models, lcs models offer a holistic foundation to model both withinand between-person variability in development (grimm et al., 2006). specifically, lcs models incorporate constant and proportional change parameters that might be crucial for grasping the overarching rate of change and variations in the rate of change across the parallel developments, respectively (cancer et al., 2021). this allows modeling complex patterns of change. using lcsm, we scrutinized the dynamic mechanisms through which fle and flp are associated with flb. 4. current study to evaluate the dynamic developmental interrelationship of fle, flb and flp, this research used multivariant lcsm models to assess the dynamic parallel growth of flb and fle at four times of measurement while also explaining the mediational effect of the development of flp over time. in particular, we measured whether the growth of fle acted as a mediator between variation in flp and flb, or, alternatively, whether flp growth acted as a mediator between variation in fle and flb. therefore, we addressed the following research questions: 1. what are the degrees (decelerating or accelerating) and patterns (decreasing or increasing) of trajectories for fle, flb and flp within latent processes? 2. what are the short-term dynamics and long-term developmental trajectories for fle, flb and flp within latent processes? 3. what are the short-term dynamics and long-term developmental trajectories between latent processes? 4. how do the trajectories of fle and flp influence trajectories of flb via longitudinal mediation analysis? 4.1. methodology 4.1.1. participants and setting 661 (412 females and 249 males) university students, foreign language learners, in general english courses from three turkish universities in two major turkish cities (n = 151) and three iranian universities in three major iranian cities (n = 510) participated in this study via convenience sampling. the general english mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, tahereh taherian, erkan yüce, majid elahi shirvan, elyas . . . 48 course was a three-credit unit including 24 sessions which began in february 2022 and ended in may 2022. participants’ language proficiency, as determined by the oxford placement test, varied from lower-intermediate to upper-intermediate, and their age was in the range of 18 to 32. in accordance with hair et al. (2010), we used the mean values to impute the missing data for the participants on four measurement occasions with a response rate of at least 90%. the responses of 16 participants were disregarded because they had missed two of the four rounds of data collection. we employed the boxplot approach to identify outliers and extreme values. any number that deviated significantly from the norm by more than three interquartile ranges was regarded as an extreme outlier (hoaglin & iglewicz, 1987). after screening the data on four measurement occasions, we detected three participants with outliers for fle, four with outliers for flp and two with outliers for flb and eliminated them for final analysis. as a result, the analysis was done on data from 636 respondents (398 females and 238 males). the final sample size for the current study was deemed adequate to reach 0.80 power to identify a large effect size using longitudinal mediation analysis (see pan et al., 2018). due to the nesting of learners within universities and classrooms, an analysis of intraclass correlations (icc) revealed a minimal degree of class-level dependency of data (0.02-0.06). hence, multilevel analysis was not necessary. 4.1.2. instrumentation 4.1.2.1. boredom in practical english classes-revised (bpelc-r) scale the scale was developed by pawlak et al. (2020). it consists of 23 items on a 7point likert scale (1 = “i totally disagree” and 7 = “i totally agree”) representing two sub-factors, disengagement, monotony and repetitiveness (14 items, e.g., “it would be very hard for me to find an exciting task in language classes”) and lack of satisfaction and challenge (9 items, e.g., “i often have to do repetitive or monotonous things in my language classes”). 4.1.2.2. short form foreign language enjoyment scale the 9-item scale was developed by botes et al. (2021) and is an abridged version of the initial 21-item tool constructed by dewaele and macintyre (2014). the constituent factor structure of the questionnaire involves a global fle factor and three subfactors, including personal enjoyment (three items, e.g., “i enjoy my fl class”), social enjoyment (three items, e.g., “there is a good atmosphere in my fl classroom”), and teacher appreciation (three items, e.g., “my fl teacher is when time matters: mechanisms of change in a mediational model of foreign language . . . 49 encouraging”). items were rated on a five-point likert scale ranging from “totally disagree” to “totally agree.” 4.1.2.3. foreign language playfulness scale this 10-item scale was originally developed by shao et al. (2022) to assess l2 flp (see appendix). this scale was evaluated by three applied linguists and one emotion psychologist. they were asked to (1) ascertain whether each item measures playfulness in the context of l2 learning, (2) judge whether each item is suitably worded, and (3) select one of the factors to which an item belongs. the scale is comprised of two constituent constructs of playfulness: other-directed playfulness (five items, e.g., “i can use my playfulness to do something nice for my language classmates”) and intellectual playfulness (five items, e.g., “i can always think of delightful things to do in the language class”). a seven-point likert type scale varying from “totally agree” to “totally disagree” was employed to rate the items. in order to verify the flp’s factor structure in the current study, we initially used confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) with mplus 7.4. (muthen & muthen, 2013). we evaluated different cfa models for subjects at time 1 (n = 661). because the main concern of this study was the global factor of flp, as opposed to specific factors, it was crucial to consider the global levels of flp while correspondingly considering the dimensionality of the construct. hence, we assessed three cfa models: · model 1: unidimensional cfa model of global flp (see figure1a in supplementary materials) · model 2: correlated two first-order cfa model including other-directed playfulness and intellectual playfulness (see figure 1b in supplementary materials) · model 3: bifactor cfa model of global flp (see figure 1c in supplementary materials). the standardized factor loadings and standard errors were used to assess the degree of reliability for the various factorial models. additionally, the average variance extracted (ave >.50, kline, 2015) and mcdonald’s omega coefficient of composite reliability (ꞷ > .70, morin et al., 2020) were employed to evaluate factor level reliability for the best fitting model of the construct of flp. furthermore, item representation of the linked factor was estimated using the corrected itemtotal correlations (citc), which reflects each item’s unique association with the general factor. according to zijlmans et al. (2019), an item properly represents the overall factor on which it was described if the citc score is more than 0.30. in addition, explained common variance (ecv) and the item level ecv (iecv) were supplied to assess the item level reliability (dueber, 2017). ecv is a mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, tahereh taherian, erkan yüce, majid elahi shirvan, elyas . . . 50 measure of statistical reliability that provides information on the proportion of the common variance that can be described by the global latent component. furthermore, iecv serves as a measure of unidimensionality at the individual item level by indicating the extent to which an item’s responses can be described exclusively by changes on the latent global construct (stucky et al., 2013, p. 51). iecv values greater than .80 indicate a unidimensional general factor. thus, iecvs smaller than .80 were interpreted as providing support for the multidimensionality of the flp scale. the results indicated that first-order and unidimensional cfa models did not adequately fit the data but a bi-factor structure model with a global flp component and two specific factors (i.e., other-directed playfulness and intellectual playfulness) was supported to be the best model fit (see table 3 in supplementary materials). also, the findings showed a well-defined bifactor cfa of flp with meaningful factor loadings (λ >.35). moreover, item uniqueness met expectations (δ > 0.10 but .9). table 1 provides the reliability information of the three scales in the current study. table 1 reliability of the scales in four time-occasions scales/subscales number of items ꞷ α t1 t2 t3 t4 t1 t2 t3 t4 bpelc-r 23 .93 .92 .92 .94 .91 .89 .89 .91 fleshort form 9 .89 .90 .90 .90 .87 .88 .87 .88 foreign language playfulness 10 .88 .89 .89 .88 .86 .87 .87 .86 4.1.3. data collection the first round of data collection took place at the start of the course in february 2022. the second, third, and fourth administration of the questionnaires occurred in march, april, and may of 2022, respectively. the participants expressed their agreement to take part in the study and received assurances about the confidentiality of the information they gave. 4.1.4. data analysis 4.1.4.1. lcs analyses mplus 7.4. was used to run all lcs analyses (muthen & muthen, 2013). both univariate and multivariate normality tests were run for the data. the dynamic codevelopment of the three variables was examined using multivariate lcsm models, which assisted in modeling the dynamic trajectories of the variables taking into account within-person variation and between-person variation over time. when time matters: mechanisms of change in a mediational model of foreign language . . . 51 4.1.4.2. model fit model fit was tested sequentially according to grimm et al. (2006). given the fact that the χ2 evaluation is highly sensitive to the sample size (browne & cudeck, 1992), other fit metrics were also used. these include tucker lewis index (tli; tucker & lewis, 1973), comparative fit index (cfi; bentler, 1990), and root mean square error of approximation (rmsea; maccallum et al., 1996). an adequate model fit was represented by tli and cfi values > .90, and rmsea < .08 (hu & bentler, 1999). to compare different nested models, we evaluated overall model fit criteria, using δχ2 and δcfi. if the p values of δχ2 are significant and the value of δcfi is more than .010, we can conclude that the differences is statistically meaningful. the following lcs models for fle, flb and flp were separately tested to compare fit among the possible models: · model 1: a no change model. it assumed no change over time. · model 2: a constant change model. it assumed a linear change over time (similar to the slope factor in growth curve analysis). · model 3: a proportional change model. development was assumed as a function of the prior levels of the variables under investigation. it was intended to capture how variations in the system between adjacent measurements were determined by the variable level at the preceding phase. · model 4: a dual-change model. it included a combination of constant and proportional change parameters to identify the extent to which linear change was accelerated or decelerated by the same or another construct’s level at the preceding phase. the analyses provided support for the dual change model as the best univariate model for ele, flp, and flb compared to their constant change model and proportional change model. thus, it could be concluded that proportional and constant models could better represent variation of three variables over time. after testing different univariate models for fle, flp, and flb separately, a bivariate model assessed the coupling impacts in the fle and flb co-development over time: · model 1: no coupling model. it restricted all fle and flb coupling parameters to zero and acted as a baseline with no cross-variable or timesequential relationships. · model 2: unidirectional fle model. it assumed that variation in fle predicted variation in flb in a unidirectional way. · model 3: unidirectional flb model. it assumed that variation in flb predicted variation in fle in a unidirectional way. mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, tahereh taherian, erkan yüce, majid elahi shirvan, elyas . . . 52 · model 4: full coupling model. it jointly estimated fle and flb variation to assess whether fle and flb each anticipated change in the other variable in a bi-directional way. model fit comparison showed a statistically meaningful improvement in fit indices from the uncoupled to the bidirectional coupled model. in other words, variations in fle through time caused subsequent variations in flb and vice versa. lastly, after evaluating the bivariant model, the mediation model was tested in two ways: first, with fle as a mediator in the relations between variation in flp and flb, and, second, with flp as a mediator in the relations between variation in fle and flb. comparing model indices showed a significant rise in fit from fle as a mediator for flp→flb to flp as a mediator for fle→flb (δꭓ2(1) = 350.772, p < .001; δcfi = .151). thus, the findings of the mediation models clearly showed that flp is a mediating mechanism for the longitudinal correlation between fle and flb, while fle is not a mediating mechanism for the longitudinal relationship between flp and flb. 4.1.4.3. measurement invariance over time to ensure that comparisons of latent variables are reliable over time, it is crucial to verify the invariance of measurement models (wickrama et al., 2021). thus, we evaluated the latent variables’ configural, weak and strong invariance in unidimensional and mediational lcs models across the four measurement points. the results indicated that weak and strong invariance models did not significantly change the fit for unidimensional and mediational lcs models. differences in cfi, tli, rmsea, and srmr were smaller than proposed cutoff ranges (δcfi ≤ 0.010, δrmsea ≤ 0.015, and δsrmr ≤ 0.030, cheung & rensvold, 2002). in other words, the findings provide support for measurement invariance for all models across time. 4.1.4.4. test of mediation we generated confidence intervals for the ab, as the product of the a [coupling fle→flp], and b [coupling flp→flb] paths to assess mediation. because the product of a and b has a nonnormal distribution, asymmetric confidence intervals were developed using monte carlo methods including bootstrapping (see mackinnon et al., 2007). according to latest studies, the percentile bootstrap approach to developing confidence intervals for mediation with structural equation models considers the possible correlation between a and b and has a desirable balance of power and type i error (valente et al., 2016). we used these confidence intervals for the indirect effect ab alongside the joint significance assessment in the current study. when time matters: mechanisms of change in a mediational model of foreign language . . . 53 4.2. results 4.2.1. univariant latent change score models regarding the first and second research questions, estimations of different parameters from the fle multivariate dual change model are illustrated in figure 1. the initial fle showed a positive trend through the passage of time (i.e., the mean initial true score of fle was 1.478 and the mean constant change for fle was .292). a significant change was found in initial mean values showing learner variations in initial states for fle (σi-fle = .252, p < .001). besides, there was a significant between-person change in growth of fle over time (σs-fle = .009, p < .001). the initial true score and constant variation of fle covaried significantly and negatively (σs-fle/i-fle = -.608, p < .001). this means that learners with higher fle initial true scores were predicted to have lower continuous variation in fle over time and significant individual differences were found in these patterns. self-feedback parameter proved to be negative and significant (β fle = -.252, p < .001), which points to a deceleration of fle over time. to summarize, fle increased through time but this increase decelerated at each respective wave. as for flb, a decreasing pattern through time (i.e., the mean initial flb true score was 3.633, and the mean constant change in flb was –.246) was identified. significant variation was found in the initial mean values of flb, pointing to the impact of individual differences in relation to this construct (σi-flb = .135, p < .001). besides, significant between-person variation was revealed in the growth of flb through time (σs-flb = 005, p < .001). more specifically, the initial true score and constant change of flb positively and significantly covaried (σs-flb/i-flb = .594, p < .001). that is to say, learners with lower initial true flb scores were also expected to have lower constant flb change, and significant individual differences were found in these patterns. self-feedback parameter was negative and significant (βflb = −.271, p < .001), which shows the slowing of flb deceleration through four times of measurements. the positive proportional change parameter alongside the negative slope mean showed that flb decreased over time, and this decrease tended to decelerate. as regards flp, the mean initial true score was 2.184, and the mean constant change was .215, which indicates a positive trend in flp through time. there was a significant change in initial mean values pointing to intraindividual variation in flb initial values (σi-flp = .113, p < .001). besides, there was significant between-person variation in the growth of flp over time (σs-flp = .005, p < .001). moreover, the covariance between the initial true score and constant change was significant and positive (σs-flp/i-flp = -.473, p < .001); those with higher flp initial true scores were also expected to have a higher constant variation in flp. self-feedback parameter was negative and significant (βflp = -.158, p < .001), mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, tahereh taherian, erkan yüce, majid elahi shirvan, elyas . . . 54 showing a reduced speed of flp throughout the term. flp was predicted to rise over time, with this increase decelerating at each measurement point. lfle 1 flp 1 flp 2 flp 3 flp 4 fle 1 fle 2 fle 3 fle 4 flb 1 flb 2 flb 3 flb 4 lfle 2 lfle 3 lfle 4 δfle 1 δfle 2 δfle 3 lflb 4 lflb 3 lflb 2 lflb 1 δflb 1 δflb 2 δflb 3 iflp 1 iflp 2 iflp 3 iflp 4 δflp 1 δflp 2 δflp 3 -.15***-.15*** -.15*** -.27*** -.27*** -.27*** -.25*** -.25*** -.25*** i-flp s-flp i-flb s-flb s-fle i-fle -.47*** .59*** -.60*** .37** .37** .37** -.20** -.20** -.20** -.28** -.28** -.28** figure 1 lcsm model of fle predicting flb, mediated by flp. unlabeled paths are set at 1. fle: foreign language enjoyment, flp: foreign language playfulness, flb: foreign language boredom, i: intercept, s: slope. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001 4.2.2. latent change score mediation analysis coupling parameters were utilized to describe each of the mediation pathways, including a, b, and c’. findings (see table 2 and figure 1) indicated that earlier levels of fle positively anticipated a subsequent increase in flp (i.e., coupling from fle to flp; a =.373, p = .001), and they significantly predicted further decrease in change in flb over time (i.e., coupling from fle to flb; c’ = -.207, p = .001). earlier flp levels had a substantial impact on the prediction of the subsequent decrease in flb (coupling between flp and flb; b = -.288, p = .001). in other words, utilizing joint significance analysis, earlier levels of fle significantly predicted subsequent development in flp, and earlier states of flp significantly predicted subsequent dynamic trajectories in flb. the 95% percentile bootstrap confidence interval of the product of the coupling parameters ab likewise did not include zero, 95% ci = [0.03, 0.05], showing the existence of mediation and verifying the findings of the joint significance analysis. when time matters: mechanisms of change in a mediational model of foreign language . . . 55 table 2 estimates from the lcsm model with flp as mediator parameter estimate se 95% ci univariate information for fle mean μi-fle 1.478*** .038 [1.384 – 1.551] μs-fle .292*** .091 [.276 – .322] variance σ 2i-fle .252*** .041 [.241 –.273] σ 2s-fle .009*** .005 [.004 –.011] constant change σs-fle/i-fle -.608*** .029 [(-.594) – (-.621)] proportional change ꞵfle -.252*** .034 [(-.256) – (-.302)] univariate information for flp mean μi-flp 2.184*** .041 [2.071 – 2.314] μs-flp .215*** .164 [.207 – .234] variance σ 2i-flp .113*** .036 [.108 – .129] σ 2s-flp .005*** .004 [.004 – .007] constant change σs-flp/i-flp -.473*** .051 [(-.456) – (-.482)] proportional change ꞵflp -.158*** .043 [(-.139) – (-.212)] univariate information for flb mean μi-flb 3.633*** .032 [3.358 – 3.868] μs-flb -.249*** 0.152 [(-.212) – (-.277)] variance σ 2i-flb .135*** .026 [.112 – .143] σ 2s-flb .005*** .004 [.003 – .007] constant change σs-flb/i-flb .594*** .033 [.577 –.612] proportional change ꞵflb -.271*** .023 [(-.244) – (-.311)] mediation portion a [coupling fle → flp], (constrained to be equal through time) .373** .038 [.341 – .395] b [coupling flp → flb], (constrained to be equal through time) -.288** .011 [(-.233– (-.296] c’ [coupling fle → flb], (constrained to be equal through time) -.207** .012 [(-.297) – (-.322)] ab (product of a and b) .18*** .005 [(.101) – (.227)] note. lcsm: latent change score mediation, 95% ci: bootstrap confidence interval, se: standard error, fle: foreign language enjoyment, flp: foreign language playfulness, flb: foreign language boredom, i: intercept, s: slope. **p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001 5. discussion with respect to the first and the second research questions, the analysis allowed identification of several mechanisms of change in long-term associations of flb, fle and flp. one such mechanism was the between-person variability within latent processes of the three variables. the results indicated two sources of between-individual variability: (1) the initial level, which encompasses the mean mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, tahereh taherian, erkan yüce, majid elahi shirvan, elyas . . . 56 and variance in the latent level at t1 and (2) the additive component, with mean and variance in the subsequent waves. specifically, we considered the variances of the initial level and additive component in the models, permitting learners to start from different baselines and trend toward variation (see figure 2). as for fle and flp, the results indicated general growth over time. the variation (see figure 2, a and b) of fle and flp decreased over time as it was continually multiplied by the negative self-feedback component. as regards flb, the results indicated a general reducing trend over time. also, the variation of flb decreased over time (see figure 2, c) as it was continually multiplied by the negative selffeedback component, meaning that individual trajectories converged over time. thus, it can be concluded that initially, the levels of fle, flp, and flb differed substantially among participants, but eventually they tended to converge. figure 2 inter-individual trajectories for the variance of additive component for fle(a), flp (b) and flb (c) univariate lcs models embedded in the response to the first and second research questions, the convergence of inter-individual variation of the three variables over time can be discussed in relation to the concept of emotion contagion according to which students receive feelings from each other (hatfield et al., 1994). investigations of emotion contagion have shown that exposure to positive and negative emotional expressions can induce changes in the observer’s emotional state. such emotional states appear unconsciously and are stimulated by contextual cues which exert distinctive effects on an individual’s mood (berntsen, 2007). with respect to the present findings, it can be when time matters: mechanisms of change in a mediational model of foreign language . . . 57 postulated that l2 emotions are noticed and transferred from one learner to another through verbal and nonverbal signals (e.g., gestures, facial expression, postures, and vocalics) over time. this assumption is also supported by the findings of elahi shirvan and talebzadeh (2020), which indicate that the emotional states in learning a foreign language are automatically conveyed to other learners via their facial expressions, posture, movement, and vocalization in their l2 interactions. another mechanism of change in long-term associations of flb, flp, and fle was within-person variability within latent processes of the three variables. this variability was reflected in the covariance between intercepts and slopes of fle, flp, and flb. participants with lower initial fle and flp levels were more likely to undergo change than those with higher initial fle and flp levels. on the other hand, participants with lower initial flb level manifested less change than those with higher initial levels of flb. as can be seen in figure 3 showing intraindividual variation in the trajectories of the three variables over time, the self-feedback parameters of these variables were negative. this indicates that participants with higher fle, flp and flb at t 1 manifested smaller variation at time t compared to participants with lower fle, flp and flb. since this trend was stable over time, it can be interpreted that all learners exhibited smaller developmental variation with the passage of time. this resulted in long-term fluctuations, where rapid progress in fle, flp and flb in the initial language course was accompanied by a gradual deceleration. in this study, more negative self-feedback values for flb, compared to those of fle and flp, is interpreted as a faster rate of decline in flb. figure 3 within-individual trajectories for the mean additive component of fle(a), flp (b) and flb(c) univariate lcs models mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, tahereh taherian, erkan yüce, majid elahi shirvan, elyas . . . 58 in light of cdst, these interand intra-individual variations imply a noticeable feature of the dynamic system of these variables from a developmental point of view (van dijk & van geert, 2023). in particular, they represent a prominent indicator of their complexity under the influence of their multi-causal nature. such findings underscore the importance of applying a modeling framework that allows for individual variation in developmental trajectories. by using the lcsm models, we revealed that, on average, participants were changing in a systematic manner. at the same time, however, there was interindividual variation around the mean score of change. specifically, the intraindividual variations within interindividual differences of the variables over time show that the early condition of an affective construct such as boredom, playfulness, or enjoyment does not predict the extent of variation of the construct over time. therefore, it can be argued that no matter what the level of affective states is at each time point, the growth levels of these states can change in different directions at other time points. one major factor contributing to the development of learners’ affective states is the teacher’s behavior (dewaele & dewaele, 2020; elahi shirvan et al., 2020). in fact, such teacher behaviors as interest, approachability, and supportive manner have been revealed to be positively associated with learners’ positive affective variables such as enjoyment and negatively with negative emotions like boredom (elahi shirvan et al., 2020; goetz et al., 2014). in addition, dewaele and li (2022) demonstrated through a mediation analysis that teacher enthusiasm was positively associated with fle and negatively with flb. with respect to the third research question, the mechanisms of change in the three variables incorporated their short-term and long-term between-latent processes. the short-term between-latent processes of the three variables were reflected in the coupling parameters (a, b, and c). it should be noted that, like the selffeedback parameters, positive (or negative) couplings implied that higher levels in one construct resulted in greater (or slighter) changes occurring subsequently in other constructs. that is, the positive coupling between flp and fle showed that larger values in fle resulted in more subsequent variation in flp. on the other hand, the negative coupling between fle and flb as well as flp and flb showed that larger values in the fle and flp led to lower subsequent changes in flb. concerning the long-term between-latent processes of the three variables, as measured by the constant interaction between self-feedback parameters (ꞵ) and the couplings parameters (a, b, and c), the long-term trajectory patterns of the link between fle and flp were revealed to manifest a decelerated growth pattern (see figure 4). furthermore, the long-term trajectory patterns of the association between fle and flb and the relationship between flp and flb turned out to be decelerated decline patterns (see figure 4). besides, the present results showed that both mechanisms of development in fle and flb affected each other through time. this indicates a bidirectional as when time matters: mechanisms of change in a mediational model of foreign language . . . 59 well as mutually reinforcing relationship and nonlinear interactions between the developmental processes of the two variables over time. this finding can be regarded as confirmation for the conceptualization of the two emotions in terms of complex dynamic systems. this is quite consistent with cdst principles as researchers are invited to conceptualize varying developmental relationships among variables in terms of dynamic procedures rather than investigating unidirectional and/or linear influences from predictors to outcomes. importantly, the negative association of fle and flb over time is in line with the findings of a study of the link between the two variables over time conducted by kruk et al. (2022a). figure 4 trajectories from a multivariate lcs model for the relationship between fle and flp, between fle and flb, and between flp and flb finally, regarding the fourth research question, the results of mediation analysis showed that flp explained the statistically significant total effect of fle on flb. this indirect mediation needs special attention as it sheds light on resources enabling l2 learners to change their negative emotions to positive ones. based on the findings, a main resource for promoting fle and, at the same time, mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, tahereh taherian, erkan yüce, majid elahi shirvan, elyas . . . 60 lowering flb is playfulness (barabadi et al., 2022). according to the attention deficit theory (eastwood et al., 2012), the primary sources of boredom can be associated with poor attentional control and lapses in memory. given the salient role of playfulness as a mindset allowing a change of boring situations into enjoyable ones, it would seem that providing a playful context for l2 learning can be an important tool for increasing learners’ attentional control over the task in hand. after all, as indicated by dewaele, saito, et al. (2022), constructing a positive emotional classroom climate plays a pivotal role for heightening fle and lowering flb. in this study, the ability to actualize their playfulness with respect to its intellectual and other-directed dimensions over time allowed participants to enhance the emotional climate of the classroom by making it more positive. flp seems to have played a salient mediating role in accounting for the relations between fle and flb, possibly because the participants tended to experience less flb and more fle as their flp level increased. as pointed out by barabadi et al. (2022), the provision of a playful learning environment can be specifically needed for providing l2 learners with more chances of positive emotional experiences. the long-term moderate negative association between fle and flb mediated by flp can also be discussed in light of the control-value theory (pekrun, 2006), which posits that the major reasons for boredom are learners’ low appraisals of control over tasks and value attributed to those tasks. the learners’ experience of boredom over time can be interpreted in terms of these two factors. it can thus be conjectured that the increase in participants’ playfulness might have provided them with more perceived control over the classroom tasks and activities and resulted in more positive values attached to them. put differently, students who displayed positive attitudes toward classroom tasks via the increase in their other-directed and intellectual playfulness were more successful in gaining more control over these tasks. in effect, they experienced a decrease in flb and a rise in their flb. 6. conclusion in cdst, dynamicity is approached in terms of constant interlinks among all constituent parts of a system as it unwraps over time (hiver & al-hoorie, 2019; verspoor et al., 2021) and the observed variations are reflected as contingent on the prior conditions of the system (hiver & al-hoorie, 2019; verspoor et al., 2021). considering l2 affective development in language classes, the multivariate repeated measures used for the participants can be perceived as dynamic systems wherein variations are at least partly specified by the previous states of the systems (lowie & verspoor, 2019). to explore the developmental and multivariate quality of dynamic processes of l2 affective variables, appropriate statistical models are required to represent the process in which previous phenomena when time matters: mechanisms of change in a mediational model of foreign language . . . 61 have prospective outcomes and the processes of variation can be constantly influenced by external and internal factors. lcs models used in the current study are flexible and adaptable enough to examine developments in longitudinal investigations (cancer et al., 2021; hilley & o’rourke, 2022). on the whole, the findings showed that the quantity (i.e., the decreasing and increasing trend) and quality (i.e., the acceleration and deceleration of rate of change) of one l2 affective variable can increase the patterns of change of other related affective variables over time. these results confirm the importance of adopting a holistic perspective on the mechanisms of change in the exploration of the co-development of l2 affective variables since both the constant and proportional change in one variable influences change in other variables over time. this study can serve as a basis for pedagogical implications as it provided evidence for the importance of fle and flp developmental trajectories in reducing flb. this might sensitize l2 practitioners to the need for providing different playful recourses in classroom environment (e.g., games, puzzles, problem-solving communicative tasks). the study is also theoretically informative in two ways. first, it offers implications for theorizing intraand inter-individual differences in the developmental processes of fle, flp and flb as well as shortand long-term consequences of these differences. second, findings from the lcsm model based on the incorporation of flp changes in the explanation of the codevelopment relationship between fle and flb can lead to theory development based on illuminating mechanisms of change in these emotions. the study is not free from limitations. first, the one-month-interval design did not permit us to explore the impact of changes in fle, flp and fle over longer periods of time (e.g., years). future research should consider such timescales in the investigation of the betweenand within-latent processes of these variables. second, the coupling a, b, and c pathways as well as self-feedback parameters used in the lcs models were fixed to be equal in four waves. it should be noted, however, that these pathways could be freely estimated. in this case, the models would then offer different estimations of the mediation paths. this approach might not be representative in some circumstances, and various recent methods allow the consideration of the free estimations for the coupling and self-feedback parameters. based on the lcsm models, further empirical investigations in the domain of positive psychology in sla can explore mechanisms of change in other variables. for example, in line with previous research (elahi shirvan et al., 2020), future empirical investigations should evaluate the extent to which l2 learners’ emotions are influenced by teacher-related factors such as emotional intelligence, supportive behaviors or feedback. moreover, future studies using lcsm could include other learner-related variables such as the learner’s growth mindset, grit, and need satisfaction. mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, tahereh taherian, erkan yüce, majid elahi shirvan, elyas . . . 62 acknowledgement the study reported in this paper represents a contribution to the research project no. 2022/45/b/hs2/00187 (2023-2025) funded by the national science centre, poland. when time matters: mechanisms of change in a mediational model of foreign language . . . 63 references barabadi, e., elahi shirvan, m., shahnama, m., & proyer, r. t. 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(2019). item-score reliability as a selection tool in test construction. frontiers in psychology, 9, 2298. when time matters: mechanisms of change in a mediational model of foreign language . . . 69 appendix foreign language playfulness scale f1: intellectual playfulness 1. classroom discussion should involve an exchange of delightful ideas. 2. if i want to develop a new language idea, i like to do it in a playful manner. 3. if i have to learn new things under time pressure, i try to find a playful learning approach. 4. i can always think of delightful things to do in the language class. 5. i enjoy language learning activities when the rules allow for something curious, unpredictable, playful, or surprising to happen. f2: other-directed playfulness 6. i have language classmates with whom i can just fool around and be silly. 7. i like to play good natured, funny tricks on my language classmates. 8. i can use my playfulness to do something nice for my language classmates. 9. i enjoy re-enacting things i have experienced with my close classmates (e.g., a funny incident that we like to remember). 10. i can use english to express myself to my classmates in a playful way (for example, by cracking a joke). . 579 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (3). 2020. 579-605 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.3.8 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt effects of frequency and idiomaticity on second language reading comprehension in children with english as an additional language rachel t. y. kan the hong kong polytechnic university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3893-4549 rachel.kan@polyu.edu.hk victoria a. murphy university of oxford, uk https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9399-0653 victoria.murphy@education.ox.ac.uk abstract vocabulary plays an important role in reading comprehension in both the l1 and the l2 (murphy, 2018). in measuring vocabulary knowledge, however, researchers typically focus on mono-lexical units where vocabulary assessments tend not to take into account multi-word expressions which include phrasal verbs, collocations, and idioms. omitting these multi-word lexical items can lead to an over-estimation of comprehension skills, particularly in reading. indeed, adult learners of english comprehend texts containing a larger number of multi-word expressions less well compared to texts containing fewer of these expressions, even when the same words are used in each text (martinez & murphy, 2011). to investigate whether children learning english as an additional language (eal) face a similar challenge, two reading comprehension tests were administered to eal and monolingual (non-eal) english-speaking children in primary school. both tests contained the same common words, but whereas in one test some of the words occurred in multi-word expressions, in the other test they did not. reading comprehension was significantly reduced for both groups of children when multi-word expressions were included. monolingual rachel t. y. kan, victoria a. murphy 580 participants generally performed better than children with eal on both tests further suggesting that children with eal may face a particular disadvantage in english reading comprehension. these results are discussed within the context of the importance of developing rich vocabulary knowledge in all children, and especially emergent bilingual children, within primary school and beyond. keywords: reading comprehension; vocabulary; english as an additional language; idioms; bilingual language development 1. introduction good reading skills are crucial for formal education as children need to be able to extract meaning from text in order to access the curriculum. reading skill also supports linguistic development as readers receive input from texts, which subsequently offers them exposure to potentially rich linguistic environments. this, among other things, can have an important positive influence on vocabulary development (joseph & nation, 2018). consequently, reading is in large part responsible for the significant growth in vocabulary knowledge in the primary school years and beyond. there is a reciprocal relationship here because vocabulary knowledge is equally important for reading as text is understood through the meaning of its words (e.g., vermeer, 1992). not surprisingly, therefore, vocabulary knowledge has been repeatedly shown to predict reading comprehension in young children, in both the first (l1) and second language (l2) (babayiğit & stainthorp, 2014; murphy, 2018). in considering the type and amount of vocabulary needed for reading, common methods include vocabulary size and coverage estimates. however, research on vocabulary is dominated by a focus on monolexical units or word families, overlooking the fact that many words are often used in phrases that have different meanings compared to the individual words (nattinger & decarrico, 1992). some combinations of words have meanings that have little to no relation to the individual meanings of the constituent items, which can pose difficulties for readers. therefore, comprehensive and informative measurements of vocabulary knowledge, especially in relation to reading comprehension, should take into account knowledge of multi-word phrases. in the uk, a significant proportion of students in mainstream schools speak english as an additional language (eal), where current estimates suggest over 21% of the primary school population are eal (dfe, 2018). eal children speak a home language that is not the language of the wider society or the language of formal education. the eal population is highly diverse across numerous dimensions, including english proficiency. research has repeatedly shown that eal children’s proficiency in english is a powerful predictor of their overall academic effects of frequency and idiomaticity on second language reading comprehension in children with. . . 581 achievement (strand & demie, 2005; strand & hessel, 2018; whiteside, gooch & norbury, 2016). children with lower english proficiency are more likely to experience a disadvantage in school because the curriculum is taught in english, and it is necessary that they be supported by an adequate level of ability in english reading comprehension to ensure that they do not fall behind (dfe, 2013). it is important to recognize, however, that merely being designated eal does not in and of itself lead to underperformance either linguistically or academically. recent research has demonstrated that eal children are overall the top of the academic league table as they leave with their general certificate of secondary education (gcse) qualifications from english secondary schools (hutchinson, 2018). equally, however, the same report (hutchinson, 2018) identifies that within the population of eal there is significant heterogeneity where many sub-groups have considerable difficulties in academic achievement. given the importance of literacy in academic attainment, the importance of vocabulary in literacy, and the general research finding that children with eal tend to have lower scores on vocabulary assessments relative to non-eal peers (cameron, 2002; murphy, 2018), understanding more deeply the range of vocabulary knowledge needed for good reading comprehension skills in the majority language is a key empirical and educational concern. the present study, therefore, investigated the effect of multiword expressions on reading comprehension in children, by comparing the comprehension of formulaic texts with non-formulaic texts and the performance of children with eal with monolingual, english-speaking children in the uk. 2. literature review 2.1. reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge since the meaning of a text is largely constructed through the meaning of its words, knowing more words leads to a higher chance of understanding a text (anderson & freebody, 1979; laufer & ravenhorst-kalovski, 2010). vocabulary knowledge is crucial for developing literacy in general, but vocabulary knowledge is connected to reading comprehension as a concurrent correlate (laufer, 1992; nation, 2001), and it also predicts future reading achievement (goswami, 2001). the same strong relationship is also found in l2 learners (e.g., alderson, 2000; smith & murphy, 2015). to explore the connection between vocabulary and reading, some studies have investigated how much vocabulary l2 learners need, through measuring vocabulary breadth, or size, for adequate comprehension: for example, laufer (1992) suggested that knowing 3000 word families would enable adequate comprehension. vocabulary size can be used to derive lexical coverage, which is the proportion rachel t. y. kan, victoria a. murphy 582 of words in a text that are known and indicates how large a vocabulary is needed for “adequate” comprehension. figures ranging from 95%-98% have been proposed (hirsh & nation, 1992; hu & nation, 2000). however, in actual language use, many frequently used words occur in combination with other words, forming multiword expressions that can have a different meaning (martinez & murphy, 2011). therefore, equating vocabulary size with overall vocabulary knowledge can be misleading if the vocabulary size measures test only single word items. 2.2. comprehending multi-word expressions formulaic language refers to words or combinations of words whose meaning often extends beyond the literal meanings of its components (pawley & syder, 1983; siyanova-chanturia & martinez, 2015); it is thus figurative, as opposed to compositional (siyanova-chanturia & van lancker sidtis, 2018). much of formulaic language exists as multi-word units or sequences that constitute one semantic unit, which recur in language and are recognized as such by l1 speakers (carrol & conklin, 2019; siyanova-chanturia & pellicer-sánchez, 2018). some multiword units are expressions comprised of fixed combinations of words (wray, 2002), such as idioms. they range from phrases to sentences (e.g., come to terms with, it’s raining cats and dogs) whose meaning is unrelated to the individual meaning of their components. the contexts for the original formation of these expressions are often lost, with only the form-meaning relationship remaining (nattinger & decarrico, 1992). idioms can be further sub-categorized according to the degree of idiomaticity (transparency of meaning) (grant & bauer, 2004). other types of multi-word expressions, such as phrasal words and collocations, are also formulaic in the sense that they are combinations of words that occur together to signify a meaning beyond that of their components, but their meanings are usually more transparent compared to idioms. since the meaning of multi-word expressions may not be apparent through word-by-word analysis, their presence in a text can lower comprehension, and analyses based on mono-lexical units may overestimate actual understanding. this was clearly demonstrated by martinez and murphy (2011), who assessed the influence of idiomaticity on the reading comprehension of adult l2 learners using two reading tests. the texts in both tests were similar in terms of total word count and clause count. the individual words were identical in both tests and the words were all high frequency. the key difference was that the formulaic test contained a larger number of idioms compared to the non-formulaic test. adult learners of english achieved better comprehension on the nonformulaic test and completed it more quickly. these results, later replicated by özoflu (2012), showed that texts containing (more) idiomatic expressions are effects of frequency and idiomaticity on second language reading comprehension in children with. . . 583 more difficult to comprehend for l2 learners. consequently, the influence of multiword expressions on reading comprehension may be underestimated by vocabulary assessments focusing on single lexical items. the participants in martinez and murphy (2011) also significantly overestimated their comprehension of the formulaic texts, as shown through comparing their self-rated comprehension to actual scores. since the target multiword phrases were composed of highly frequent words, participants may have been led towards a literal interpretation of the more formulaic texts, and thus appeared to not notice their idiomatic nature (bishop, 2004). the failure of learners to understand multi-word expressions could be due to a lack of awareness of such language (martinez & murphy, 2011; spottl & mccarthy, 2004). without noticing that certain words in a text form a sequence that maps onto one meaning there may be no attempt to find the meaning of that sequence (bishop, 2004; paribakht & wesche, 1999). therefore, noticing formulaic expressions may be a first step towards comprehension of formulaic language. 2.3. reading comprehension in students with eal eal children with lower english proficiency can have difficulties developing adequate literacy skills (murphy, 2014, 2018). research on reading skills with eal children (i.e., minority language children in english-speaking contexts) has consistently demonstrated that eal children tend to have matched, or sometimes even superior skills in decoding, yet often have problems with reading comprehension. in other words, they have good single word reading accuracy but struggle to extract meaning from text, likely due to smaller english vocabulary (e.g., bialystok, luk, peets, & yang, 2010; burgoyne, kelly, whiteley, & spooner, 2009; cameron, 2002; hessel & murphy, 2018; hutchinson, whiteley, smith, & connors, 2003; mahon & crutchley, 2006; pearson, fernandez, & oller, 1993; smith & murphy, 2015). this body of research in general indicates that many children with eal require greater support in english vocabulary which would likely improve their reading comprehension. indeed, a review of intervention studies aimed at improving eal children’s language and literacy has shown that vocabulary interventions can indeed improve children’s reading comprehension skills (see murphy & unthiah, 2015; oxley & de cat, 2018). these interventions demonstrate then, that it is possible to support the development of vocabulary knowledge in children with eal through appropriate pedagogy, which, in turn, can have a positive impact on reading comprehension. what has not yet been adequately investigated, however, is the role that multi-word vocabulary plays in this respect, although multi-word vocabulary may be especially difficult to children with eal. bilinguals hear and use words in their two languages less frequently compared rachel t. y. kan, victoria a. murphy 584 to monolinguals speaking either language, and multi-word expressions form only part of the vocabulary that children are exposed to. this leads to poorer links between the meanings and phonological representations of vocabulary items (weaker links hypothesis; gollan & silverberg, 2001; gollan, montoya, & werner, 2002). multi-word expressions can be interpreted literally while the figurative, intended meanings are less/not activated (cieślicka, 2006), leading to further weaknesses in this particular area. the interventions reviewed in murphy and unthiah (2015) and oxley and de cat (2018) did not include multi-word units. indeed, little research has been carried out examining the multi-word vocabulary knowledge of children with eal apart from a few notable exceptions. smith and murphy (2015) examined children’s collocational knowledge in english and found that eal children performed differently on a measure of collocations relative to non-eal and appeared to develop their collocational knowledge along a different developmental trajectory. furthermore, they also demonstrated that children’s scores on the collocational measure predicted 25% of the variance in a reading comprehension measure even after controlling for contributions of nonverbal iq and expressive and receptive vocabulary. this finding demonstrates that multi-word vocabulary is likely to develop differently in children with eal and make important contributions to reading comprehension skills. hessel and murphy (2018) examined children’s metaphor comprehension, and in particular compared young eal and non-eal children on a novel metaphor comprehension task. they found that the older children (aged 6-7) had higher scores on metaphor comprehension than younger children (aged 56) and that eal children generally had lower scores on the metaphor comprehension task than non-eal children, particularly on a metaphor reasoning subtest. this research lends further support to the idea that eal children’s multiword vocabulary is an area that requires greater support in educational settings, as it may lag behind that of non-eal pupils, which can lead to not only weaker vocabulary knowledge, but weaker reading comprehension skills. in summary, weaker vocabulary knowledge is related to poorer reading comprehension in many children with eal. since knowing the component words does not necessarily entail comprehension of the multi-word expressions, the high frequency of some multi-word phrases could cause vocabulary difficulties for young learners. however, little (to no) research has directly examined the impact of including multi-word vocabulary in reading comprehension tests and whether children with eal will be disadvantaged on such a measure. therefore, this study aims to replicate martinez and murphy (2011) in investigating the influence of frequently used words and multi-word expressions on english reading comprehension in children with eal. the research questions are: effects of frequency and idiomaticity on second language reading comprehension in children with. . . 585 1. do children with eal and monolingual english-speaking peers perform similarly in comprehending two sets of texts composed of the same, frequent words but different in terms of the number of multi-word vocabulary items? 2. do these speakers report their comprehension of the two sets of texts similarly, and does their reported comprehension reflect a similar awareness of multi-word expressions? 3. methodology 3.1. design the variables of interest in our study were language status (eal vs non-eal), a between-subjects variable, and whether the text was formulaic or not – a withinsubjects variable. hence the study adheres to a 2 x 2 mixed design. the study received ethics clearance from the university of oxford and all children’s parents/legal guardians provided their informed consent prior to carrying out this research. analyses conducted included a repeated measures ancova to compare the scores of the two groups on the two comprehension tests; a one-way anova to compare scores of year groups; and repeated measures anovas to check possible test order effects, as well as to compare the groups in terms of accuracy of self-reported comprehension and time taken on tests. 3.2. participants 25 monolingual children (14 female, 11 male) and 22 children (8 male, 14 female) with eal were recruited from three schools in a county in south east england. in the year of testing, these schools were comparable in terms of percentage of pupils eligible for free school meals (22%, 22%, and 10% respectively) but were more different in number of pupils (400, 600, and 600 respectively) and percentage of pupils with eal (30%, 60%, and 90% respectively) (dfe, 2016; figures are rounded off to protect schools’ anonymity). monolingual children were defined as those not speaking any language other than english1 and whose parents spoke only english to them. children with eal were defined as those who had learned another language (other than english) from birth and whose parents always or mostly used a non-english language at home. they spoke 14 different 1 while in general completely monolingual children are increasingly difficult to find, it is still (unfortunately) possible to find english-speaking children in england with little to no knowledge of another language apart from a few foreign language vocabulary items they might have learned at school. rachel t. y. kan, victoria a. murphy 586 l1s, including urdu (n = 9), mandarin, tamil, arabic, punjabi (all n = 2), malawi, italian, nepalese, swahili, hindi, polish, sri lankan, french, and portuguese (all n = 1). whether the children met our criteria for inclusion was determined through the administration of a language background questionnaire (lbq) described below in the instruments sub-section. this questionnaire enabled us to identify the relative degree of home language/english exposure for each child. this study focuses on children in key stage 2 (ks2). from year 4 (age 8) onwards, the focus of literacy instruction and assessment shifts from reading skills to comprehending texts (burgoyne, whiteley, & hutchinson, 2011). testing children at this age range can reveal whether reading skills are in place for further development in comprehension. therefore, invitations to participate were distributed evenly across years 3-6 (age 7-11). the number of participants in each year group is shown in table 1. table 1 number of participants in each year group monolingual group eal group year 3 (age 7/8) 2 0 year 4 (age 8/9) 6 5 year 5 (age 9/10) 7 6 year 6 (age 10/11) 10 11 3.3. instruments a reading comprehension test with two versions – one with multi-word items, one without – developed by martinez and murphy (2011) was used in this study. each version of the test contained four texts. the texts imitated personal profiles on social networking websites. texts in the more formulaic version contained multi-word expressions, and those in the non-formulaic test contained either none or very few such expressions. the 24 multi-word expressions targeted in the formulaic version were phrases composed of multiple words that are recognized as having a meaning unrelated to the meaning of component words individually, including idioms, collocations, and phrasal verbs (e.g., cost an arm and a leg, every so often, grow on you). otherwise the tests and corresponding texts had similar word counts, clause counts, and t-unit counts. the two tests had the same proportion of high frequency words in the top 1,000 words and top 1,000-2,000 words of the british national corpus (95.7% and 2.77%, respectively) (martinez, 2008). the same individual words were used in a formulaic text and the corresponding non-formulaic text, but they appeared frequently as part of multi-word expressions in the formulaic version. in this way, differences in performance across the two versions of the test could be attributed to the presence of multi-word items. effects of frequency and idiomaticity on second language reading comprehension in children with. . . 587 after each text, participants answered seven true or false questions by ticking the boxes next to all the statements they considered true. these questions tested readers’ comprehension of the text. each formulaic expression was tested with one statement, except over the hill, which was targeted in four statements. participants then indicated how much of each text they thought they understood, using a likert-scale with 5 choices available: 5%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%. they had a limit of 20 minutes to complete each test. the start and end time of both tests were recorded. each version of the test together with their questions can be found in the appendix. the british picture vocabulary scale (3rd ed.) (bpvs) (dunn, dunn, & nfer, 2009) was administered to measure receptive vocabulary, and was included due to the importance of vocabulary knowledge for reading comprehension. this is a widely used test in the literature on vocabulary learning and reading. the mean bpvs (standardized) score was 88.27 for the monolingual group and 92.17 for the eal group. no differences were found between the bpvs scores of the two groups (p = .37). the matrix reasoning (mr) sub-test of the wechsler abbreviated scale of intelligence (2nd ed.) (wasi) (wechsler, 2011) was used to obtain an estimate of nonverbal iq, to ascertain whether the participants differed in terms of cognitive functioning, which could affect reading comprehension. the mr sub-test of the wasi also enabled us to ensure all children were functioning within the normal range. a comparison of eal and non-eal children’s scores on this subtest indicated that children with eal scored higher on wasi than the monolingual children (t(45) = .013, p < .05). a language background questionnaire (lbq), adapted from beech and keys (1997), was used to confirm language group status. this adapted lbq has been used in a number of our studies (e.g., hessel & murphy, 2018; mckendry & murphy, 2011; smith & murphy, 2015) and has been a reliable index of children’s eal status in the absence of administering an independent, objective measure of their home language proficiency. this would of course be the ideal but given the significant linguistic diversity in the eal population in england, developing, finding and/or implementing tests of home language proficiency remains a serious challenge. 3.4. procedure a small pilot study was conducted with two monolingual and three eal participants, who were not included in the main study to ensure all assessments were appropriate for our sample. no changes were made to the texts or the questions of the reading comprehension tests following from this pilot. in the main study the children were first administered the lbq. the questions on the lbq were read out loud to the participant (in english) and the experimenter rachel t. y. kan, victoria a. murphy 588 recorded the responses, after which the reading comprehension test was administered. an example text was used to explain the test format. when it was clear that the children understood what they were required to do, both versions (formulaic and non-formulaic) were administered in counterbalanced order within each language group. following martinez (2008), the four texts a-d were presented in alphabetical order in the non-formulaic test and in the order a-d-b-c in the formulaic test to reduce order effects. finally, the bpvs and wasi were administered according to their respective requirements as specified in the testing manual. each participant was tested in one single session, lasting between 1h to 1h 30 min. 4. results reading comprehension scores and self-reported scores for each test were calculated as percentages. the time taken on each test was derived from the recorded start and end times. standardized bpvs scores were obtained using the bpvs manual. spss (ibm corp., 2017) was used for statistical analysis. 4.1. effects of language group and receptive vocabulary on reading comprehension table 2 shows the mean reading comprehension scores (with standard deviations) of the two groups together with the difference between scores on the two tests, as well as the bpvs scores. table 2 mean reading comprehension scores (%) for each group, the difference between mean scores on the two tests, and bpvs scores non-formulaic (sd) formulaic (sd) difference between non-formulaic and formulaic scores (sd) bpvs score (sd) monolingual 78.29 (13.48) 48.14 (9.17) 30.14 (19.26) 87.80 (11.20) eal 76.93 (14.43) 42.56 (10.29) 34 (19.31) 91.45 (16.17) a repeated measures ancova was conducted to evaluate the influence of the covariate bpvs (standardized) score on reading comprehension scores. the between-subjects factor was group with two levels (monolingual, eal), and the repeated measure was test type at two levels (non-formulaic, formulaic). bpvs score was a significant covariate of reading comprehension scores (f(1, 44) = 11.44, p < .01, ௣ଶߟ = .21). there was also a significant effect of group on reading comprehension scores after controlling for bpvs scores (f(1, 44) = 5.20, p < .05, ௣ଶߟ = .11) where the monolingual participants had higher scores than the eal children. there was also a significant interaction between test type effects of frequency and idiomaticity on second language reading comprehension in children with. . . 589 and bpvs score (f(1, 46) = 5.34, p < .05, ௣ଶߟ = .10). parameter estimates showed that bpvs score had a significant effect on reading comprehension only at the non-formulaic level (b = .48 (.13), p < .01) and not at the formulaic level (p = .89), suggesting that idiomaticity modulates the effect of vocabulary size on reading comprehension. there was no significant interaction between test type and language group (p = .66). given we had a range of year groups (ages) reflected in our sample and that older participants might reasonably be expected to have higher reading comprehension and bpvs scores than the younger groups, we carried out a oneway anova with one between-subjects factor (year) at three levels (years 4, 5, and 6), and overall reading comprehension score (non-formulaic test and formulaic test combined) as the dependent variable. year 3 participants were excluded as there were only two participants in this group. there was no significant effect of year (p = .13). therefore, children did not seem to be performing differently on our task as a function of their age/year group. we note, however, that our sample size within each year group is very small and consequently this result should be treated with caution. these analyses indicate that monolingual children outperformed children with eal on both tests after accounting for variation in receptive vocabulary size, and that both groups scored higher on the non-formulaic test than on the formulaic test. 4.2. order effects the order of administering the formulaic and non-formulaic tests was counterbalanced within each language group. across all participants, the mean scores (%) for the non-formulaic and formulaic tests were 84.09 (sd = 9.15) and 44.64 (sd = 8.63) respectively for those who completed the non-formulaic test first, and 72.88 (sd = 14.84) and 46.18 (sd = 11.03) for those who completed the formulaic test first. a repeated measures anova on order and test type examined whether the order of taking the two tests influenced the scores. main effects were found for order (f(1, 45) = 5.55, p < .05, ௣ଶߟ = .11) and test type (f(1, 45) = 150.51, p < .001, ௣ଶߟ = .77). there was also a test type × order interaction (f(1, 45) = 5.57, p < .05, ௣ଶߟ = .11). scores on the non-formulaic test were higher if that test was completed first compared to if it was completed second. the same result applied to the formulaic test, but the advantage was smaller compared to the advantage found for the non-formulaic test. rachel t. y. kan, victoria a. murphy 590 4.3. self-reported comprehension and awareness of multi-word expressions table 3 and figure 1 show the mean self-reported reading comprehension rating of the two groups and the difference between self-reported ratings of the two tests. table 3 mean self-reported reading comprehension scores (%) and the mean difference between self-reported scores on the two tests non-formulaic (sd) formulaic (sd) difference between non-formulaic and formulaic scores (sd) monolingual 68.70 (25.44) 58.57 (23.79) 10.13 (22.02) eal 78.97 (15.01) 62.20 (22.58) 16.77 (17.94) a repeated measures anova was used to test the effect of group and test type on self-reported comprehension ratings. there was a significant effect of test type (f(1, 45) = 20.72, p < .001, ௣ଶߟ = .32) but no effect of group (p = .24) and no test type × group interaction (p = .27). both groups rated themselves higher on the comprehension of non-formulaic tests. figure 1 presents the selfreport ratings against the actual scores illustrating that both groups over-estimate their comprehension and have lower comprehension scores on the formulaic texts. this pattern demonstrates that the presence of multi-word expressions has an impact on both actual and reported understanding of text. figure 1 mean actual and reported comprehension scores (%) on the non-formulaic and formulaic tests effects of frequency and idiomaticity on second language reading comprehension in children with. . . 591 as there was no significant group difference in self-reported comprehension but monolingual children had obtained higher (actual) reading comprehension scores, awareness of formulaic multi-word expressions was further compared by analyzing accuracy of reporting scores and time spent on each test. accuracy in this analysis was calculated as the difference between actual and self-reported scores on each test (table 4). a negative difference indicates overestimated comprehension, and vice versa. table 4 mean difference between actual and self-reported scores (%) on the two reading comprehension tests non-formulaic test (sd) formulaic test (sd) monolingual 9.58 (27.28) -10.42 (24.76) eal -2.04 (20.14) -19.65 (22.35) a repeated measures anova examined whether the two groups differed in their accuracy of self-report on the two tests. there was a significant effect of test type on accuracy (f(1, 45) = 23.56, p < .001, ௣ଶ =.34) but no effect of groupߟ (p = .08) and no test type × group interaction (p = .76). these findings demonstrate that participants were significantly less accurate in estimating their formulaic test scores, but the accuracy of the two groups was not different overall. 4.4. comparing time taken to complete the test since the words making up the texts were identical on the two tests, it may be expected that the same amount of time would be needed to complete each version. were children to spend longer on one test, this could be an indication of more complex processing of formulaic language (as in martinez & murphy, 2011).2 to explore this possibility, table 5 presents the mean time taken to complete each test. on average, monolingual and eal participants spent 1.20 minutes (sd = 2.83) and 1.14 minutes (sd = 3.72) longer on the formulaic test respectively. table 5 mean time taken to complete each test (min) non-formulaic test (sd) formulaic test (sd) monolingual 6.12 (1.86) 7.32 (2.56) eal 6.27 (2.03) 7.41 (2.74) a repeated measures anova with group and test type (as above) showed that while there were no effects of group (p = .06), and no test type × group 2 clearly other factors such as fatigue or impatience could also lead to more time being taken. rachel t. y. kan, victoria a. murphy 592 interaction (p = .95), there was main effect of test type where (f(1, 45) = 5.96, p < .05, ௣ଶ =.12). both groups, therefore, spent more time on the formulaic thanߟ the non-formulaic test (monolingual group: by 19.61%; eal group: by 18.18%). 5. discussion 5.1. effects of idiomaticity two reading comprehension tests, one non-formulaic (few multi-word units) and one formulaic (more multi-word units), were administered to children with eal and their monolingual english-speaking peers. the texts in these tests were composed of the same frequently used words, but nonetheless both groups scored higher on the non-formulaic tests, by 30% and 34% for the monolingual and eal groups, respectively. this finding shows that idiomaticity in a text leads to poorer comprehension and both groups face considerable difficulty in comprehending texts containing multi-word expressions. when words appear as part of multi-word expressions, they contribute a meaning beyond the meaning of the individual words, and if readers do not understand the meaning of these expressions as a whole, they will necessarily have poor comprehension of the whole text. therefore, while the participants may have reasonably good knowledge of the individual words used to compose the texts, they showed a weaker grasp of formulaic language. this finding also replicated the pattern found in adult l2 learners (martinez & murphy, 2011; özoflu, 2012), suggesting that when determining the difficulty of texts, whether for young children or older language learners, it may not be appropriate to only include single word units. there was also a significant order effect, although the advantage of completing a test first is larger for the non-formulaic test (11%) than for the formulaic test (2%), again suggesting difficulties for young children generally with regards to multi-word expressions. comprehension of multi-word expressions requires first the ability to notice them in sentences (bishop, 2004; spottl & mccarthy, 2004). the reader has to have some understanding that some combinations of words form one semantic unit rather than contributing individual meanings, at which point, they can successfully retrieve the intended meaning. without this awareness, the reader will seek to process the individual meaning of each word, potentially leading to poor comprehension. in this study, both groups reported higher comprehension on the non-formulaic test compared to the formulaic test. however, they also significantly over-estimated their comprehension of the formulaic test, but not on the non-formulaic test, with the eal group overestimating their formulaic test scores by as much as 20% (see figure 1). in other words, the participants effects of frequency and idiomaticity on second language reading comprehension in children with. . . 593 may have been aware they comprehended the formulaic test less well, but only to an extent. future research could add in a more qualitative component where participants are interviewed after completing the comprehension test to help identify their degree of awareness of the presence of these items. as the target expressions were all composed of common words, the participants may have been even less open to the possibility of alternative (formulaic) meanings of the words (or combination of words) and may have been led to believe that they had understood the formulaic texts correctly. it should be noted that while the options on the self-rating scale for comprehension were given at 20% or 25% intervals, the average difference between actual and self-rated comprehension was smaller than 20%, for both groups on both tests. therefore, the scale itself could have affected the precision of self-comprehension scores. nevertheless, the results indicate that the participants were not fully able to recognize the presence of the multi-word expressions in the formulaic texts, and so were less accurate in their actual as well as reported comprehension. time taken was also examined as a possible indicator of awareness of idiomaticity, with the hypothesis that if participants were aware of multi-word expressions, or if they found them challenging, they might require more time to process their meanings, and hence spend longer on the formulaic version. the analyses did not reveal any observable relationship between time taken and awareness. both groups spent about 1 minute longer (around 20% more time) on the formulaic version, which may indicate difficulty in processing texts with more formulaic (multi-word items). however, it is important to note that there could be many reasons for this, beyond just the presence of multi-word units. whereas time taken to complete the test does not appear to be related to performance here, it is also true that this is a relatively crude measure and is not likely to accurately tap into processing. in order to more reliably address processing, tracking online processes such as eye movements with eye-tracking equipment would be a valuable contribution to the literature in terms of understanding children’s processing skills. some current research is indeed using eyetracking methodology with children with eal to tap into their online processing when reading and encountering specific types of vocabulary (hessel, nation, & murphy, in press; joseph & nation, 2018). thus far this research has investigated the incidental learning of vocabulary in semantically diverse (or not) texts (joseph & nation, 2018), and comprehension monitoring while reading. future research using eye-tracking methodology could examine how participants cope with multi-word units when encountered in texts to identify the processing costs of such lexical items. rachel t. y. kan, victoria a. murphy 594 5.2. differences between monolingual participants and participants with eal the monolingual group outperformed the eal group on both tests after controlling for bpvs scores, showing that even though both groups were affected by idiomaticity, monolingual children had an overall advantage in reading comprehension, even when variability due to receptive vocabulary was factored in. granted, an overall raw score difference between groups of 1% and 6% for the non-formulaic and formulaic tests respectively is relatively small (although statistically significant) given there were only 24 questions in each test. reading comprehension plays an important part in the accessing curricular content. therefore, children with eal with more limited reading comprehension and lower vocabulary knowledge are disadvantaged in english and other areas of academic learning. although bilingual children have the potential to reach native-like competence in both languages (genesee, 2009), this is not always observed in children from eal backgrounds. they often come to school with less well-developed english and then undergo a language shift (see murphy, 2014), where they transition from dominance in the home language, to dominance in the majority language (english). eal children’s linguistic skills (across all of their languages) are not well understood, and very few majority language educational settings in the uk acknowledge or support eal children’s l1 skills, or take their home language proficiency into account during teaching activities or communication with the child (bailey & marsden, 2017). consequently, for many children with eal, and indeed minority language children with other linguistic profiles (non-english), they are likely to experience real challenges in developing adequate skills in the majority language at the same time as learning content. not surprisingly, therefore, many children from ethnic minority backgrounds underperform on international achievement studies (oecd, 2012). 5.3. the role of vocabulary knowledge in reading comprehension bpvs score was a significant covariate of reading comprehension scores. this is consistent with findings on the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension (laufer, 1992; nation, 2001), and shows that any comparisons concerning reading comprehension should take into account potential differences in receptive vocabulary. from a pedagogical perspective our results reinforce the concern that adequate support is offered to primary school children in vocabulary learning. vocabulary knowledge, or lack thereof, is a prominent issue in educational spheres3 at present, which is welcomed. as previously 3 see a recent report by the oxford university press as an example: effects of frequency and idiomaticity on second language reading comprehension in children with. . . 595 mentioned, there is some evidence that vocabulary-based interventions can lead to improvements on literacy measures (murphy & unthiah, 2015; oxley & de cat, 2018). however, these studies will not have included multi-word units in their measures and interventions and we argue here that they should also be included as our research is clearly indicative of their importance. in our study, we did not find a difference between the eal and monolingual children on the bpvs scores, unlike previous studies (e.g., bialystok et al., 2010; cameron, 2002; pearson et al., 1993). we did not sample for children with any kind of language problem or developmental language disorder, nor did we try to recruit children at the lower end of the vocabulary scale. in other words, our sample, while being small is ecologically valid and likely to reasonably represent the range of eal skill and vocabulary knowledge in english primary schools. that is, some eal children have matched or superior linguistic skills. in our sample, the eal children had similar scores on the bpvs and they also had higher nonverbal iq (mr sub-test of wasi). one might have predicted, then, that their scores on the reading comprehension test would be higher, or that they would be less affected by the multi-word units within the texts. this is not what we found. despite matched receptive vocabulary, and higher nonverbal iq, our eal sample still had lower scores on the reading comprehension measure than our non-eal sample. this finding underscores the importance of examining multiple measures that lead to successful reading (not just vocabulary) taking an individual differences approach (cf., hessel et al., in press). it is also possible that whereas the bpvs only estimates vocabulary knowledge of single word units, a test that included multi-word lexical items could distinguish the eal from the non-eal children and explain why the eal participants had lower scores on the reading comprehension measure. 6. conclusions formulaic expressions are used frequently in languages and in english in particular. our study demonstrated that children face difficulties in comprehending texts which include formulaic language. importantly too, children may not be very aware of their lack of comprehension, as evidenced by their over-estimation of their perceived comprehension. if the learner is not aware of an impediment to either their language or reading comprehension skills, they are very unlikely to be in a position to do anything about it. hence it is vital to support children’s vocabulary knowledge within educational settings, and particularly children from linguistically diverse backgrounds who may have more limited exposure and/or experience with the language that functions as the medium of instruction. https://global.oup.com/education/content/dictionaries/key-issues/word-gap/?region=uk rachel t. y. kan, victoria a. murphy 596 given the growing proportion of children with eal in schools in the uk, and the growing number of minority language children internationally, this study contributes to a better understanding of the differences in english language knowledge between monolingual and children with eal. there is a complex relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension in children, and the substantial role of formulaic, multi-word expressions in comprehension is one factor that warrants more attention in research and teaching. effects of frequency and idiomaticity on second language reading comprehension in children with. . . 597 references alderson, j. c. 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(2002). formulaic language and the lexicon. cambridge: cambridge university press. rachel t. y. kan, victoria a. murphy 602 appendix reading comprehension test (non-formulaic version) name: _______________________ year: _________ what is the time now? _______________________ a. let me tell you about my home. it’s on this little hill out in the country. but i’m not too far from the city (i don’t like the city – do you?) – not much time to get here. i can’t wait to show you a photo… or you can call me to come over to see in person! 07786 237 679 1. ☐ his home is not in the city. 2. ☐ he lives near the city. 3. ☐ he seems proud of his home. 4. ☐ his home probably has a view. 5. ☐ he wants people to visit his home. 6. ☐ he prefers the city. 7. ☐ he doesn’t have pictures of the home. my comprehension of this text: 5% 25% 50% 75% 100% b. people say there’s nothing like a good book to warm your heart. it is true. a good book can be everything. i read every night, about a book a week. (and sometimes as many as five!) i read for hours and hours. in my town i go down to this nice book shop just on the corner and they have everything. there’s a nice soft spot there by the fire that i like, and then i may spend nine hours there before i get out – all day! but i want someone to read with. so do call me now – i’m in the book! 8. ☐ she thinks that a book can help someone feel good. 9. ☐ she reads frequently. 10. ☐ she usually reads a maximum of five books per week. 11. ☐ she doesn’t like to read outside the home. 12. ☐ the book shop is near her home. 13. ☐ the book shop is not very comfortable. 14. ☐ she would like to have company while she reads. my comprehension of this text: 5% 25% 50% 75% 100% effects of frequency and idiomaticity on second language reading comprehension in children with. . . 603 c. the good part about living here is nature. i need to be free in the world. as i like to make and grow things, i don’t live by any large cities. the grounds here on my block are fairly good (and they are pretty). i’ve been across the country and around the whole world a few times, but i think that here is better than any place i know on earth. i don’t ever need to go to the city to buy things – i don’t like it there, actually. that’s the good thing about living here, i feel: it’s neither the country nor the city. i like to show it off. call me to come down and see it if you like. i like company! (and i’m nice – really!) 15. ☐ she lives in a densely populated area. 16. ☐ she has traveled a lot before. 17. ☐ she enjoys having visitors. 18. ☐ she likes to garden. 19. ☐ she thinks the place where she lives is inconvenient. 20. ☐ she likes nature. 21. ☐ she lives in the country. my comprehension of this text: 5% 25% 50% 75% 100% d. i go out so often with my two kids. but i don’t mind spending all my time with my kids. it’s worth it. especially playing football: it’s an all day thing. it doesn’t cost much: all you need is to have a ball for football – not a special occasion or even to be on a real team. it’s not hard. my kids don’t even need me. you see, i’m not a real player, myself – i have flat feet. i lose every time. one time i broke my arm and left leg and had to be carried away! now what i do is get a ball and watch my kids having a good time all the day through. others like to drink, i like looking at my kids. 22. ☐ he seems to love his children. 23. ☐ he thinks football is expensive. 24. ☐ he has never played football. 25. ☐ he once hurt himself playing football. 26. ☐ his children do not play football without him. 27. ☐ he can’t use his feet at all. 28. ☐ he likes to drink. my comprehension of this text: 5% 25% 50% 75% 100% what is the time now? _______________________ rachel t. y. kan, victoria a. murphy 604 (formulaic version) name: _______________________ year: _________ what is the time now? _______________________ a. i don’t get out much – it’s about time i do. i’m not from here – this country or city (but i like this country.) i’m far from home. i’m a little over the hill, let me tell you, but you can’t tell! (i can show you my photo, or wait to come see me in person!) call me on 07786 554 0978. 1. ☐ he wants to go out but has a problem with time. 2. ☐ he is foreign. 3. ☐ he lives in a remote area. 4. ☐ he wants to keep his location a secret. 5 ☐ he thinks he looks younger than his age. 6. ☐ he probably lives in an area with hills. 7. ☐ he lives on the hill, but not on top of it. my comprehension of this text: 5% 25% 50% 75% 100% b. about me? i’m living large in the city, better than ever. actually, i’ve been around the block a few times and i think i make a pretty good living on the whole, but that’s neither here nor there. if you don’t know any better, i come across as a show off. the thing is, my nature is to be fairly down to earth, by and large, on the grounds that i call it like i see it. i know my place in the world. if things are down and i need to part company with the world, i go to the country. i don’t really need to buy nice things to feel better. but i live off cities – they grow on you. feel free to call me. 8. ☐ he says he is experienced and honest. 9. ☐ he thinks he makes a decent salary. 10. ☐ he thinks his past and occupation are irrelevant. 11. ☐ some people might think he likes to show what he has. 12. ☐ he cares about the earth and the environment. 13. ☐ he lives in the city but wants to live in the country. 14. ☐ he thinks cities tend to grow too big. my comprehension of this text: 5% 25% 50% 75% 100% effects of frequency and idiomaticity on second language reading comprehension in children with. . . 605 c. i don’t like to go out much, myself. the thing is, i have two left feet and i need to watch my spending. (mind you, i’m not flat broke!) now, for what it’s worth, i do have a ball, playing football with my kids every so often and even having one drink on occasion. (and not two at a time!) but i don’t get carried away or lose it. having a good time doesn’t have to be hard or cost you an arm and a leg. i’m a real team player, looking out for others all the time – especially my special kids. my kids see me through the day. with my kids, a good time is to be had every time. 15. ☐ she does not know how to dance well. 16. ☐ she thinks football and drinks are worth the money. 17. ☐ she plays football with her children frequently. 18. ☐ her children are with her most of the day. 19. ☐ she drinks only when it is a special occasion. 20. ☐ she says it can be cheap to have a good time. 21. ☐ she is looking for more players for the football team. my comprehension of this text: 5% 25% 50% 75% 100% d. many people say i’m all about my nine to five, and they say i do everything by the book. be that as it may, i do have a soft spot for a warm heart to heart and there’s nothing like a good night (and day) on the town with someone sometimes. i do have a fire for my shop and i spend hours and hours there, but every now and then i get down and out, so it is nice to just have someone in your corner to go to. i want someone i can read like a book, someone true. call me this week (before nine)! 22. ☐ he likes to go out and have fun. 23. ☐ people think that he is obsessed with work. 24. ☐ he has a special place in his house for romantic occasions. 25. ☐ he likes to have tender and honest conversations. 26. ☐ he sometimes feels quite sad. 27. ☐ he likes to have someone who lives close to him to go out with. 28. ☐ some people think he is too ‘correct’ and proper. my comprehension of this text: 5% 25% 50% 75% 100% what is the time now? _______________________ 579 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (4). 2021. 579-606 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.4.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt “i feel like it’s giving me a lot as a language teacher to be a learner myself”: factors affecting the implementation of a multilingual pedagogy as reported by teachers of diverse languages raees calafato university of bergen, norway https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8222-6772 raees.calafato@uib.no abstract to boost the foreign language learning process, language teachers need to know how to implement a multilingual pedagogy, that is, they should be able to draw on their and their students’ knowledge of other languages during lessons. this qualitative study explored the extent to which 21 foreign language teachers in norwegian and russian upper-secondary schools were willing and able to implement multilingual teaching practices and the factors that they thought affected this implementation. the findings revealed three main factors, namely, their language knowledge, their positioning as language learners, and the level of support they received, which the participants reported as strongly influencing the extent to which they were able and willing to draw on their and their students’ multilingualism as a pedagogical resource. the findings also indicated that participants did not implement multilingual teaching practices differently based on the languages they taught, although there were differences between the participants from norway and russia concerning the teaching of english. the study has important implications for research on language teaching and learning in multilingual environments, educational institutions, and teacher development programs. keywords: multilingualism; teacher development; foreign languages; metalinguistic knowledge; teaching practices; teacher identity raees calafato 580 1. introduction governments around the world are implementing initiatives in schools and universities that encourage younger generations to learn multiple foreign languages (fls) so that individuals can develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of the cultural and linguistic diversity that surrounds them and acquire the skills to secure themselves professionally and personally in a globalized world (calafato, 2021a; 2021b; gao & zheng, 2019). as part of these initiatives, the ministry of education in some countries, such as in norway (udir, 2013), for example, encourage fl teachers, most of whom know multiple languages (i.e., they are multilingual) (calafato, 2019), to implement multilingual teaching practices (mtps) during lessons. mtps are an umbrella term for practices where teachers systematically draw on their and their students’ whole language repertoire as a pedagogical resource (gopalakrishnan, 2020). mtps can include translanguaging, where students and teachers use their languages integratively and interconnectedly (see garcía et al., 2017), activities that combine receptive skills (e.g., reading) in one language with productive skills (e.g., speaking) in another (calafato, 2019; 2020a), and the awakening to languages approach, where teachers seek to raise their students’ general awareness of linguistic diversity (candelier, 2004). the use of mtps has been shown to boost student performance across all skill levels when compared to the use of a target language-only approach (brown, 2021) and finds support among both students and parents (de figueiredo, 2011; moody et al., 2019). mtps also emphasize the dynamic, interconnected, and compounding nature of language learning (cook, 2016; jessner, 2008), signaling a shift away from the fractional view of multilingualism that sees languages as disconnected entities in the mind (i.e., multiple monolinguals in one person) (grosjean, 1989). in light of the multilingual initiatives promoted by governments and the emphasis on using mtps in fl teaching, it becomes important to understand the extent to which fl teachers can implement these initiatives, what they think about the use of mtps, and the extent to which they are able and willing to implement them. thus far few studies have explored fl teachers’ reported or observed implementation of mtps (calafato, 2019; lorenz et al., 2021), and fewer still (aslan, 2015; calafato, 2021b) have explicitly investigated the factors that may affect their use of such practices. a review of studies by calafato (2019) on multilingual fl teachers and their identity, including their beliefs and practices, found that many studies had explored what teachers specifically thought about their students’ multilingualism and whether they would be willing to use their students’ home languages during lessons. fewer studies had investigated what fl teachers thought about their own multilingualism, how they related to the “i feel like it’s giving me a lot as a language teacher to be a learner myself”: factors affecting the. . . 581 languages they taught, the extent to which they reported (or were observed) using mtps during lessons, and what activities they implemented when doing so. in this latter group of studies, it was discovered that the implementation of mtps by fl teachers was unsystematic and they often avoided using mtps due to beliefs in the chomskyan ideal of the native speaker (lee, 2016), lack of teaching experience and maladaptive training (vaish, 2012; zheng, 2017), and inability to reflect on and verbalize language form, function, and meaning (i.e., metalinguistic knowledge) (aslan, 2015). specific examples of mtps used by the participants in the reviewed studies included translation, translanguaging, drawing cross-cultural contrasts, and language comparison (e.g., concerning cognates, grammar, utterances, etc.). the findings from the review have been borne out in subsequent studies, with fl teachers being found to implement mtps in an ad hoc manner and, at times, appearing to subscribe to a fractional view of multilingualism (gopalakrishnan, 2020; lorenz et al., 2021). at the same time, what has remained somewhat constant in most studies is that the focus continues to be, as already mentioned, on what fl teachers think about specifically their students’ multilingualism rather than how they see themselves as multilingual language users and teachers, and how their own needs, experiences, and competences affect their teaching. indeed, while an exploration of what fl teachers think about their students’ multilingualism can provide some insights into their beliefs about language learning and use, it alone may ultimately reveal little about factors that influence their implementation of mtps. this is because such practices might be more strongly linked to how they see themselves rather than how they see their students. this is implied in several studies where the fl teacher participants were found to implement mtps only after reflecting on their own identity as multilingual language users (ng, 2018; park, 2012) and not that of their students. it is also worth emphasizing here that the multilingual initiatives launched by governments around the world, whether in asia (calafato, 2021a; gao & zheng, 2019), europe (calafato, 2020a; european council, 2019), or the middle east (tang & calafato, 2021), encourage students to learn multiple fls as part of their school or university education, often two or more simultaneously. yet, studies on the implementation of mtps by fl teachers have seldom explored this multiplicity of languages, focusing instead purely on one language, mostly english (calafato, 2019), with less attention paid to languages other than english (lotes) (aslan, 2015; calafato, 2020a; 2021b; brown, 2021; haukås, 2019; tang & calafato, 2021). the result is that we have an incomplete picture of the use of mtps in fl teaching, one that does not accurately reflect the compound state of fl education in schools and universities, where students are encouraged to not only draw on their whole language repertoire but also to do so while learning multiple fls. raees calafato 582 a few studies have also revealed variation in teachers’ implementation of mtps depending on the languages they teach, with those teaching english implementing mtps to a statistically significantly lesser extent than those teaching lotes (calafato, 2021b). however, we know little for certain regarding why such disparities exist given the very limited number of studies that have compared teaching practices across languages (e.g., aslan, 2015; calafato, 2021b; jiang et al., 2014). meanwhile, the greater emphasis placed by governments on the learning of multiple fls in schools and universities has led to instances where teachers teach two or more fls. the teaching of two or more fls may affect fl teachers in different, more complex ways than if they only taught one fl given how dynamically languages interact in the mind (jessner, 2008), with far-reaching implications for teachers’ cognition and teaching practices. for example, studies on monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual students indicate that they process and learn new languages differently in terms of speed and strategies (festman, 2021; jordà, 2017). one could hypothesize, therefore, that teachers who teach more than one fl may not only implement mtps more frequently but may also teach each language in their repertoire using different strategies. much like in their multilingual students, there could manifest considerable variation in how they relate to the languages they teach. since only a handful of studies have reported on how the teaching of multiple fls can affect teachers (aslan, 2015; wernicke, 2018), there is little empirical data to draw on to provide conclusive evidence in support of these claims. this article reports on a study that sought to address the above-mentioned gaps in our knowledge concerning fl teacher multilingualism. the study investigated the factors that fl teachers in norwegian and russian upper-secondary schools reported as influencing their implementation of mtps and how they, as multilingual language users, related to the languages in their teaching repertoire. the participants were teachers of chinese, english, french, german, and spanish, and many taught two fls concurrently. in investigating their implementation of mtps, the study also explored the participants’ language backgrounds, their rapport with their students and colleagues, their thoughts concerning the school fl curriculum in their respective countries, and their approach to teaching languages. 2. language teachers and the multilingual turn 2.1. shining the spotlight back on language teachers to ensure the success of multilingual initiatives, such as the ones formulated by the education ministries in norway and russia (minobr, 2018; udir, 2013), “i feel like it’s giving me a lot as a language teacher to be a learner myself”: factors affecting the. . . 583 where students can learn two fls in schools and the fl curriculum stresses the importance of being multilingual to navigate a globalized world, policymakers should first obtain a holistic understanding of the fl teachers that are tasked with implementing them. this means understanding how they see themselves in relation to the languages they teach, as well as how their multilingualism and other micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors (e.g., government and school support for multilingualism) affect their views about multilingualism and approach to teaching. signaling a reorientation of language learning and teaching research, the transdisciplinary and identity frameworks proposed by the douglas fir group (2016) and gee (2001) encourage researchers to consider the multifaceted nature of language learning and teaching at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels, where belief systems, cognitive capacities, and identities, among myriad other elements, intermingle. the douglas fir group (2016), for instance, stresses that the “competence of multilingual speakers is the holistic sum of their multiple-language capacities” (p. 26) and that the “languages and cultural schemata of a multilingual interact” (p. 30) in complex ways as new languages are learned. this interaction of various language and cultural schemata has been explored by researchers mostly in students and not in teachers, yet it is just as likely that multilingualism influences teachers in equally, if not more complex ways than the students they teach. in adopting a more holistic approach to exploring teacher multilingualism, especially as this concerns their ability and willingness to implement mtps, it is also important to understand how teachers position themselves vis-à-vis the languages they teach and their multilingualism. positioning can be described as “situating oneself or others with particular rights and obligations through conversation,” and has largely been studied in relation to language learners rather than teachers (kayı-aydar, 2019, p. 5). according to deppermann (2015, p. 372), positioning provides a window into an individual’s “practical, emotional, and epistemic commitment to identity-categories and associated discursive practices.” regarding the implementation of mtps, for example, fl teachers might position themselves as lacking competence or experience in implementing these in one or more languages. they may, as already mentioned, subscribe to the nativespeaker ideal that views the monolingual native speaker as the ideal speaker hearer of a given language and behave accordingly when teaching (lee, 2016). if they teach multiple fls, they may position themselves differently per language (aslan, 2015), something which has rarely been explored. by investigating how teachers position themselves and the extent to which various micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors impact their ability and willingness to implement mtps, we can obtain deeper insights into how they make pedagogical decisions and how they relate to the languages they teach. such insights are of vital importance to raees calafato 584 policymakers, teacher educators, and educational institutions (as well as for teachers and students) in light of the initiatives taken by governments around the world to promote multilingualism among the populace through fl education in schools and universities, where greater emphasis is placed on the need to validate and harness the multilingualism of both students and teachers through mtps. 2.2. multilingualism, multicompetence, and affordances in this study, multilingualism is defined as an individual’s use of more than one language (for a discussion of variations in multilingualism, see cenoz, 2013), without a lower limit being set on their linguistic competence (lehmann, 2007). to better conceptualize how languages can interact in the mind of fl teachers and how they may draw on these to implement mtps, one can turn to the theories of multicompetence (cook, 2016) and affordances (aronin, 2014). multicompetence represents the overall state of a multilingual individual’s mind (cook, 2016), including how their languages interact with each other and the extent to which they use their languages integratively or separately. in fl teachers, their level of multicompetence could determine the extent to which they implement mtps during lessons in that some might use only the target language, thereby opting to teach monolingually, whereas others could use additional languages to varying degrees of activation. as for affordances theory, it posits that each language in a multilingual individual’s repertoire provides certain possibilities for action when engaging with their environment so that the more languages one knows, the more possibilities to act one has (aronin, 2014). for example, a language learner who knows english, italian and spanish may learn portuguese more rapidly than one who knows only english. this is because the former’s knowledge of additional languages furnishes them with insights and skills unavailable to the latter, including a larger resource pool of morphosyntactic, social, pragmatic, and lexical competences linked to multiple languages. multilingualism may provide fl teachers, much like their students, with access to a similar resource pool to draw on when teaching, which may result in their implementation of activities that are more creative, multilingual, and effective. at present, few studies have explored fl teacher multilingualism and their teaching practices through the lens of multicompetence or affordances theory, which lies in stark contrast to the amount of language learner research carried out using these or similar theories. these latter studies indicate that higher levels of linguistic competence in multiple languages can lead learners to draw more frequently on their multicompetence during interactions (chang, 2020; dewaele & wei, 2012). it is likely, therefore, that fl teachers who have advanced linguistic competence in the languages they teach could draw on their multicompetence “i feel like it’s giving me a lot as a language teacher to be a learner myself”: factors affecting the. . . 585 more freely during lessons than those who possess weak linguistic competence. linguistic competence comprises language skills (e.g., reading, writing, etc.), fluency (i.e., how effortlessly one can deploy one’s language skills), as well as metalinguistic (i.e., language knowledge) and pragmatic knowledge, among other abilities (lehmann, 2007), but also covers the many ways in which an individual can use a given language. among these components, metalinguistic knowledge (i.e., the ability to verbalize language form, function, and meaning) and crosslinguistic awareness, that is, “the awareness (tacit and explicit) of the interaction” between languages (jessner, 2008, p. 279), including their similarities and differences, are “instrumental for teachers if they are to help learners develop individual multilingualism and to promote plurilingual approaches to teaching languages” (otwinowska, 2014, p. 101). otherwise, fl teachers can neither use mtps systematically nor do they have access to a metalanguage they can teach their students to help them organize and draw on their knowledge of multiple languages. however, only a few studies have explored metalinguistic knowledge and cross-linguistic awareness in fl teachers, with the emphasis being mostly placed on their non-nativeness rather than their multilingualism (for a brief review, see erlam et al., 2009). 2.3. foreign language education in norway and russia the reasons to focus on norway and russia in the study are threefold. first, there is a need for more contrastive analysis within and between countries (e.g., de angelis, 2011) when it comes to researching fl teachers’ implementation of mtps so that we may obtain a better understanding of how macro-level factors like language policy, language ideologies, and nationality affect this implementation (douglas fir group, 2016; gee, 2001). secondly, research on fl teacher multilingualism and the implementation of mtps is mostly non-existent in the russian context (calafato, 2020b, 2021b) and remains understudied in the norwegian one (exceptions to this include haukås, 2019; lorenz et al., 2021). norway and russia also make for an interesting comparison in that they are neighbors, yet the former is firmly situated in europe, geographically and culturally, while the latter has a more hybrid identity (davydova, 2019; protassova, 2010). third, the fl curriculum for schools in both norway and russia emphasizes the importance of learning multiple fls and using these languages to boost one’s knowledge in other fields. in norway, the curriculum stresses the need for students to draw on their knowledge of other languages and previous language learning experiences to learn new languages (udir, 2013). in russia, the curriculum highlights the importance of learning languages to navigate a multicultural and multilingual world, one where students must apply their knowledge of languages raees calafato 586 across subjects and disciplines (minobr, 2018; pirao, 2017). the two countries are also similar in that students have the option to learn two fls at school (the first one usually being english), choosing their second fl from among french, german, and spanish (haukås & speitz, 2018; ustinova, 2005). a large number of russian schools now also offer chinese, whereas other foreign languages like arabic, italian, and japanese are offered by a very limited number of schools in both countries. students in russia start learning their first fl in grade 2, followed by a second fl in lower-secondary school (minobr, 2018). in norway, students start learning english in grade 1 and they can learn an additional fl in grade 8 (speitz & lindemann, 2002). by the time students in norway and russia enter uppersecondary education, that is, the final years of school before they begin university, their proficiency in multiple fls is likely at its highest level when compared to any other period from their school years. in theory, this could allow uppersecondary school fl teachers to implement a wider range of mtps with their students than fl teachers in lower grades due to upper-secondary school students having attained comparatively greater competence in the fls taught (see hofer & jessner, 2019; for a discussion of the link between aspects of linguistic competence and multicompetence and affordances, see section 2.2.). 2.4. research questions to shed more light on the implementation of mtps by teachers of one or more fls in upper-secondary schools in norway and russia, this study explored the following research questions: 1. what factors do the participants consistently report as influencing their implementation of mtps? 2. are there differences in the participants’ reported implementation of mtps based on the languages they teach? 3. are there country-specific differences in the way the participants report implementing mtps? 3. methods and instruments 3.1. participants twenty-one fl teachers participated in the study (10 from norway and 11 from russia), which comprised the concluding phase of a larger project on teacher multilingualism and multilingual teaching practices. the previous phases of the project explored the beliefs and practices of multilingual fl teachers in norway “i feel like it’s giving me a lot as a language teacher to be a learner myself”: factors affecting the. . . 587 and russia through quantitative means that provided insights into general trends in both countries (calafato, 2020a, 2020b, 2021b); however, they lacked the exploratory power and fine-grained analysis afforded by qualitative research methods. as a qualitative component, while this study explored the implementation of mtps in a small sample of teachers (n = 21), it did so in a way that revealed the specific factors that fl teachers reported as influencing their implementation of mtps, how they related to the languages they taught, and how they viewed their multilingualism, something that was not explored during the project’s quantitative phase. all the participants reported studying at least two fls in secondary and tertiary education and were non-native speakers of the languages they taught. ten participants reported teaching only one fl while the rest reported teaching two fls. the participants were teaching at upper-secondary schools in norway or russia at the time of the study. table 1 provides additional biographical information about those teachers. all names have been anonymized. table 1 the profiles of the teacher participants name (gender) city teaching experience (years) languages studied vibeke (f) vestland, no english, german 10+ english, french, german siri (f) oslo, no english, spanish 10+ english, french, spanish astrid (f) oslo, no english, spanish 10+ english, spanish frida (f) akershus, no french 10+ english, french, german rebecca (f) vestland, no english 3-4 english, french pia (f) oslo, no english 10+ english, french johanna (f) vestland, no english 10+ english, french julia (f) vestland, no german, spanish 10+ english, french, german, spanish elsa (f) rogaland, no german 10+ english, german marte (f) trøndelag, no french, spanish 10+ english, french, spanish vladimir (m) moscow, ru english, german 10+ english, german roman (m) moscow, ru english 5-9 english, french kirill (m) moscow, ru french 5-9 english, french irina (f) moscow, ru english, spanish 5-9 english, spanish anya (f) petersburg, ru chinese 1-2 english, chinese filippa (f) moscow, ru english, chinese 5-9 english, german, chinese svetlana (f) novosibirsk, ru english 10+ english, german ekaterina (f) moscow, ru chinese 10+ english, french, chinese vera (f) moscow, ru english, german 1-2 english, french, german nadezhda (f) moscow, ru french, spanish 10+ french, spanish yevgeniya (m) nizhny, ru french, german 10+ french, german note. nizhny = nizhny novgorod; no = norway; ru = russia; f = female; m = male. during this phase of the project, voluntary response sampling was used to recruit participants and drew from the pool of 517 fl teachers that had participated in the earlier phases. these teachers had been recruited through emails sent to upper-secondary schools in the largest cities and counties in norway (i.e., raees calafato 588 oslo, viken, vestland, rogaland, etc.) and russia (i.e., moscow, st. petersburg, ekaterinburg, etc.) via their listings on official online portals. the emails contained an invitation letter to participate in the study and a questionnaire for potential teacher participants to complete. the teachers were asked to include their contact details at the end of the questionnaire if they wanted to contribute further to the project by participating in interviews. the invitation letter also included details about the project, a description of the participants’ rights should they choose to contribute, as well as the contact details of those responsible for the study. eighty-eight language teachers out of the 517 that completed the questionnaire sent in their email addresses and were subsequently contacted to finalize interview times and dates. of these, 21 teachers followed through with the interviews, with the others withdrawing from the study due to work constraints brought about by the covid-19 pandemic. 3.2. data collection and analysis the study used two rounds of interviews, organized in an open-discussion, mostly unstructured format, to collect data from the participants. the second round of interviews was needed because a preliminary analysis of the data obtained during the first interview round revealed certain themes like the cross-linguistic effects of teaching two fls that required deeper exploration. in the second round, the interviews were more structured and were held six weeks after the first round. the open-ended discussion format used in the interviews ensured that the participants could talk freely (patton, 2014), and it created a more conducive atmosphere for exploring how they positioned themselves (kayı-aydar, 2019) regarding the languages they taught, their multilingualism, and their ability and willingness to implement mtps. specifically, the participants were asked about their identity as teachers who knew and taught multiple languages, their teaching practices in light of this multiplicity of languages, their language learning experiences, their relationship with their students, colleagues, and the school administration, the fl curriculum, and their experiences teaching in norway and russia. the aim in asking these questions was to obtain a more holistic understanding of the extent to which certain micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors (douglas fir group, 2016; gee, 2001) affected their ability and willingness to implement mtps while also accounting for their whole language repertoire and relationship with each of the languages therein. in addition, the participants were asked about their years of teaching experience and other biographical information (see table 1). when conceptualizing the participants’ ability and willingness to implement mtps, including how the languages they knew interacted in their minds and the extent to which they harnessed their multilingualism “i feel like it’s giving me a lot as a language teacher to be a learner myself”: factors affecting the. . . 589 when teaching, the study drew on multicompetence (cook, 2016) and affordances theory (aronin, 2014). it was therefore hypothesized that the more languages the participants knew, the more frequent their reported implementation of mtps would be and the more diverse their range of activities in this regard. the interviews were conducted in english, norwegian, and russian over skype, with only one participant being interviewed in person. each interview lasted around 50 minutes. the interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed (excluding hesitations and pauses), following which each interview transcript was read in detail and broken up into fragments of varying length using an inductive approach that identified recurring themes and ideas through the generation of codes (braun & clarke, 2006). the transcripts of the interviews that were conducted in norwegian and russian were not translated into english before coding (coding, however, was done in english) and were processed in the original alongside the interviews conducted in english. data were analyzed using the atlas.ti software. following the generation of an initial set of codes, these codes were used in cross-case analysis (miles & huberman, 1994) to identify similarities and differences between the participants concerning how they related to the languages they taught and the factors they reported as affecting their ability and willingness to implement mtps, including their views about their and their students’ multilingualism. this led to a process of refining codes and generating initial themes. the codes and themes generated during this process were subsequently checked against all the interviews until the process reached saturation and a final set of themes and, ultimately, categories, based on micro-, meso-, and macro-level variables, was created. 4. findings the interview data provided notable insights into how the participants felt about their multilingualism, the factors they reported as affecting their ability to implement mtps, as well as some meso-level differences between the teachers from norway and russia regarding their reported implementation of mtps. the first section contains the findings concerning the factors the participants reported as affecting their implementation of mtps, while the second section covers the languageand country-related differences in the participants’ implementation of mtps that were discovered during data analysis. 4.1. factors affecting the participants’ implementation of mtps an analysis of the interview data led to the discovery of three overarching themes (see figure 1) that were repeated across the interviews, regardless of raees calafato 590 how many (or which) languages the participants reported teaching, their age, gender, or any other variable. these themes were referenced consistently during the interviews and the participants came back to them often when reflecting on their ability and willingness to implement mtps. language knowledge encompasses the nature and extent of the participants’ knowledge of the languages they taught, specifically, their metalinguistic knowledge and cross-linguistic awareness, and how they felt this knowledge affected their implementation of mtps. language learner represents how the participants positioned themselves as multilingual language learners, as well as their activities in support of this positioning, whereas support covers the help they reported receiving from various sources to implement mtps. these three themes are described in detail in the following subsections. figure 1 the main themes and sub-elements linked to the participants’ implementation of mtps 4.1.1. language knowledge seventeen participants (excluding frida, irina, johanna, and pia) referred to their language knowledge concerning the languages they taught when asked whether they drew on languages other than the target language during lessons. except for filippa and vladimir, who reported possessing a high level of linguistic competence overall in each of the languages they taught, the other participants indicated shortcomings in their ability to verbalize language form, function, and meaning. indeed, the data revealed that the participants’ metalinguistic knowledge, more than any other aspect of their linguistic competence, played a “i feel like it’s giving me a lot as a language teacher to be a learner myself”: factors affecting the. . . 591 role in determining the extent to which they implemented mtps, which in many instances consisted of the participants drawing cross-linguistic comparisons (e.g., cognates) between languages and translating from one language to another. the shortcomings reported by the participants with respect to the languages they taught were present regardless of whether they taught one or two fls. for example, siri, referring to her knowledge of the languages she taught, described herself as a teacher of english and an advanced learner of spanish. she said that english was a much stronger aspect of her teacher identity and she regularly spoke english with her children. in contrast, she used spanish primarily at school. she said she continued to learn spanish in her free time to make sure that she could offer accurate feedback to students when called upon, although she added that her knowledge of spanish sometimes failed her. however, despite her lower overall reported proficiency in spanish when compared to english, siri noted that her ability to verbalize language structure in spanish was much stronger than it was in english. she reported regularly implementing mtps in her spanish lessons by pointing out cognates in english and spanish (she said that both languages were strongly influenced by latin), whereas she could not do the same in her english lessons: maybe my biggest weakness as an english teacher is that i don’t know enough of the technical names of the different grammar features because i don’t use them that much while in spanish, i use them a whole lot and i know more of the names and i know how to describe things better because i have had to learn them myself in the recent past and i use them every week in the classroom. (siri) filippa and vladimir, in contrast to siri and the other participants, expressed high confidence in their overall linguistic competence vis-à-vis the languages they taught, including in their metalinguistic knowledge of these. their high levels of competence, especially their ability to verbalize language form, function, and meaning, led to them implementing mtps across languages. for example, vladimir reported that he had many of the same students in both his english and german lessons and that this allowed him to improve their knowledge of both languages simultaneously. he reported using a combination of english, russian, and german in his lessons. providing an example of how he drew on multiple languages, he explained that he taught his students how to guess the past tense of irregular verbs in both german and english by organizing activities that showed his students how both languages shared the same germanic roots. he pointed out to them how english verbs like think, seek, and bring all adopted the ending -ought when conjugated in the past and how this was similar to their german counterparts denke (dachte), bringe (brachte), and suche (suchte), with the ght in english replaced by cht in german. the ght in raees calafato 592 english words like night and daughter similarly became cht (nacht and tochter) in german. he noted that the system was not perfect, working for some students while not for others, even though he considered it a useful strategy overall for predicting words and verb forms in both german and english. he also said that he drew his students’ attention to the similarities between phrasal verbs in english and the german partikelverb (e.g., aufgeben ‘give up,’ aufheben ‘pick up;’ auf = up). he stated that his advanced knowledge of multiple languages had given him insights into how the languages were structured and used so that his english and german native speaker friends would turn to him with questions about their respective languages even though he was a non-native speaker: my german friends, when they want to know why a certain thing is the way it is in german, they ask me about it and, when i explain it, they are like . . . wow . . . we didn’t even think about that. and it is almost the same with english. (vladimir) as for filippa, despite the significant differences between chinese, english, and russian, she felt that her knowledge of multiple languages allowed her to use a large range of teaching strategies to help her students learn more effectively. for instance, she reported translating from chinese to russian when teaching, as well as using her students’ knowledge of word stress in russian to help them master the various tones in chinese. she said that most russian words had specific stress patterns that she found useful when developing her students’ chinese pronunciation. she also reported drawing her students’ attention to differences between chinese and russian regarding verb placement and the use of prepositions in sentences. 4.1.2. the teacher as language learner thirteen participants (excluding anya, elsa, frida, irina, johanna, pia, rebecca, and roman) explicitly positioned themselves as language learners when discussing their teaching practices. they stated that they were either learning new languages or working on improving their knowledge of the languages they taught, or a combination of the two, and acknowledged that these experiences had strengthened their implementation of mtps and boosted their awareness of the effects of multilingualism on the language learning process. the participants provided various reasons for learning new languages, with these reasons covering their love of languages, european identity, interest in a particular region of the world, and desire to understand and engage with their students more deeply. for instance, kirill, a teacher of french from moscow, revealed that he was learning german and, to a lesser extent, turkish. he was learning turkish because he was interested in the middle east (he also stated “i feel like it’s giving me a lot as a language teacher to be a learner myself”: factors affecting the. . . 593 that he had traveled to tunisia to learn arabic over two months in the summer a few years ago) while he felt that german complemented his knowledge of french and formed part of his european identity. he said that learning new languages had helped him hone his language learning strategies, which he had passed on to his students. these strategies included translanguaging, something that he saw as beneficial when learning new languages. he noted that he often consciously switched between languages outside of lessons when interacting with his friends, many of whom, he said, knew two or more languages. learning german and turkish had boosted his cross-linguistic awareness vis-à-vis french, and he added that he wanted to explore the connections between these languages more deeply. siri, who drew on english to teach spanish, said that she was learning italian for personal reasons and that this, likewise, had had a positive impact on her teaching: “like right now, as a grown-up, i learned spanish and i am learning italian and i feel like it’s giving me a lot as a language teacher to be a learner myself” (siri). as for learning languages to understand their students better, the participants cited their interest in studying how language learning was enhanced through certain language combinations, as well as their wish to serve as a good multilingual model for students navigating multilingual, multidenominational, and multicultural environments. for instance, astrid discussed her efforts to learn arabic and chinese as a way of understanding how her multilingual students used their knowledge of the other languages they knew to learn new languages: i have always liked languages and i’ve tried to learn chinese several times because i have chinese students. i also try to learn arabic, and here it was more phonetics because i notice that my students who speak arabic, they speak spanish quite fast. they learn the phonetics pretty good. and so, i tried to learn arabic to see how this happened. they also have a little bit of greek [in arabic]. so, they have something in the mix that helps to jump from one language to another. it is quite interesting. (astrid) as was the case with the other participants, the learning of additional languages complemented astrid’s implementation of mtps, which consisted of trying to understand how her students drew on their knowledge of norwegian when making sense of spanish and showing them how to translate between the two languages more effectively. in contrast to her spanish lessons, she rarely used mtps when teaching english (see section 4.2.). meanwhile, svetlana, who compared english and russian syntax during lessons and implemented translanguaging activities with her students, including translation, said that she was learning arabic and swahili to engage with her students more effectively and build rapport. she felt that it was important for teachers and students to understand one another given the increasingly multilingual and multicultural raees calafato 594 nature of language instruction, as well as for teachers to set an example for multilingual interactions: i want to learn arabic as much as possible. i have students from syria and when i open their notebooks, i see some arabic writing and i like to communicate with them because we have some stereotypes and, to my mind, it helps us be more tolerant of other people. now when we enter a classroom and see children of different nationalities, religions, we should give them, how to say, an example of how to behave and how to communicate to each other. (svetlana) 4.1.3. support seven participants (astrid, julia, marte, vladimir, filippa, svetlana, and yevgeniya), all of whom had emphasized their language learning experiences during their interviews (see section 4.1.2.), reported that they had received support regarding the implementation of mtps when asked about their teaching practices. such support, which was not systematic, occasionally came in the form of speaking with a colleague or mentor who made the participants more aware of the benefits of implementing mtps, although most participants referenced their reading of research as having helped them become more aware of multilingualism as a pedagogical resource. for example, vladimir, who taught english and german, reported reading up extensively on teaching cross-linguistically and credited the faculty at his university for giving him a sound foundation in both english and german pedagogy. he said he discussed cross-linguistic teaching strategies with his colleagues and felt that these exchanges had allowed them to share ideas and experiment with new teaching approaches. similarly, julia said that she had begun to implement mtps more regularly during lessons thanks to a certain colleague who had helped her reflect more deeply on using her and her students’ multilingualism as a resource when teaching. she also reported reading research on multilingualism in education. asked if she thought her school environment encouraged her to implement mtps, she noted that she was different from other teachers, whom she felt were sometimes not well-informed about the potential benefits of drawing on multilingualism as a pedagogical resource: it makes me a little frustrated to see all the levels of consciousness between the language teachers. i see a lot of problems and reflect on them. i think one thing might be that we don’t talk. my advice to people is also to read, teachers need to work with some level of didactics in languages. (julia) on occasion, she had organized joint lessons with a few other language teachers at her school, with the goal being to expose students to multiple fls simultaneously. she felt that such a format was interesting and useful for boosting their language awareness. “i feel like it’s giving me a lot as a language teacher to be a learner myself”: factors affecting the. . . 595 like julia, several other participants also cited a lack of awareness among their teacher colleagues regarding the benefits of implementing mtps, as well as an absence of support from their school administration. svetlana revealed that she did not receive any support from the school administration, nor was there a systematic procedure at school through which teachers could discuss experimenting with and refining their teaching approaches and practices. she felt that she was motivated to implement mtps due to having read a lot, as well as due to the diversity in her classroom and her professional identity as an fl teacher: “i can’t say i have always been interested. i read a lot and partly because of my profession and partly because i want to, i am really interested in differences. it is just, teachers should teach how to communicate.” marte, referring to the situation in her school, said that she did not generally discuss her implementation of mtps with her colleagues because she felt that they did not know the languages they taught well enough, which affected their willingness to collaborate and reach out. 4.2. countryand language-specific differences in the implementation of mtps before presenting the findings concerning the countryand language-specific differences that were identified during data analysis, it is important to note that all 21 participants felt that being multilingual was an asset, even if three participants (frida, irina, and pia) linked multilingualism to having a more positive multicultural outlook and did not see it as being essentially desirable when learning new languages. as for the language curriculum, this was described by several participants, especially julia, as a guiding document that did not play a decisive role in how fl teachers taught day to day. moreover, the participants, regardless of whether they taught in norway or russia, reported that their schools neither hindered nor encouraged them in their efforts to implement mtps. these similarities between the participants notwithstanding, there was one area where the participants from norway and russia differed in their implementation of mtps: the teaching of english. here, the differences between the norwegian and russian participants appeared to stem from the way english was taught in norwegian and russian schools. twelve participants in total taught english (six from norway and six from russia). all the six norwegian participants reported facing difficulties with the implementation of mtps when teaching english, stating that they struggled to explain how the language was put together. for instance, when asked how confident she felt in her knowledge of english, rebecca, one of the participants from norway, responded that she found it lacking at times, especially when teaching immigrant students. raees calafato 596 in middle school and especially in high school, you teach english, sort of politics, history, literature, and you don’t teach the language anymore. and so, when people come in from south of europe or the middle east, then you have to teach them the language and you’re not prepared to teach anyone the actual language. i don’t feel as good at explaining why things are the way they are in english because i don’t know the grammar well enough. (rebecca) even those participants that taught another fl alongside english reported possessing weak metalinguistic knowledge regarding the latter. for example, siri could not implement mtps in her english lessons as much as she reported doing in her spanish lessons because she did not have access to a metalanguage in english that could help her accomplish this (see section 4.1.1.). astrid, another participant from norway also reported drawing on norwegian during her spanish lessons to raise her students’ cross-linguistic awareness, whereas she taught english mostly without implementing mtps. in contrast, the russian participants who taught english reported using translanguaging and drawing on cross-linguistic comparisons regularly during lessons. for example, svetlana revealed that she used russian with her students in english lessons not only to translate words but also to compare grammar concepts between the two languages. she explained that engaging in such explicit discussion of the differences between languages was normal for her and her students and that students in russia studied russian in schools with a similarly strong focus on one’s explicit knowledge of the language: i think it is positive to use other languages because we may show some similarities and some differences. in my lessons, we often compare russian and english. it is normal to compare different languages to see how they work and how people communicate. (svetlana) only irina from the russian group reported not using any mtps during her lessons. she, along with frida, was ambiguous about the benefits of using other languages in the classroom and supported an immersive approach where she only used the target language. according to frida, using exclusively the target language allowed her students to use it more often in the classroom. she emphasized that their goal was to speak french in the classroom, not other languages. 5. discussion this study explored: (a) the factors that the participants consistently reported as influencing their implementation of mtps and whether there were (b) languageor (c) country-specific differences in this respect. in terms of the first research question (“what factors do the participants consistently report as influencing their implementation of mtps?”), the findings revealed three factors that “i feel like it’s giving me a lot as a language teacher to be a learner myself”: factors affecting the. . . 597 the participants reported as influencing their implementation of mtps: their language knowledge, the language learner aspect of being an fl teacher, and the support they had obtained to implement mtps. regarding their language knowledge, those participants who possessed advanced metalinguistic knowledge in the languages they taught reported facing few difficulties when implementing mtps, regardless of their overall linguistic competence (for a discussion of linguistic competence, see lehmann, 2007). in contrast, those participants, who reported shortcomings in their metalinguistic knowledge in a particular language, found it difficult to implement mtps in that language. several researchers have emphasized the importance of possessing advanced metalinguistic knowledge for teachers to successfully implement mtps (hofer & jessner, 2019; otwinowska, 2014), and so the findings regarding the participants’ metalinguistic knowledge affecting their implementation of mtps are not unexpected. nevertheless, this study represents one of the few instances where fl teachers’ metalinguistic knowledge has been explored as part of their ability to implement mtps, and the findings help us pinpoint specific areas of fl teachers’ linguistic competence that might require greater attention in teacher education programs if they are to successfully implement mtps. in addition, the findings add greater depth to those reported in the study by calafato (2021b), where statistically significant, positive correlations between fl teachers’ implementation of mtps and their self-assessed ability to teach diverse language aspects and skills were found, even though metalinguistic knowledge was not explicitly explored. what is new in this study is that the findings indicated that, in the case of the participants who taught two fls, metalinguistic knowledge in one fl did not always contribute to the ability to implement mtps in the other fl. for instance, siri implemented mtps when teaching spanish but could not transfer such practices over to her english lessons. as already mentioned, since most studies on fl teachers’ implementation of mtps have not investigated those teaching more than one fl, it is difficult to determine why some of the participants could not benefit from metalinguistic transfer between their languages. one possible explanation for the lack of transfer could be that they had a level of multicompetence where their languages were interconnected in their minds in such a way as to allow unidirectional metalinguistic transfer (i.e., only from one language to another) but not bidirectional transfer. unidirectional transfer has been reported in studies on multilingual language learners concerning, for example, their morphological awareness (ke & xiao, 2015). another possibility is that certain aspects of their languages had not been integrated, creating difficulties for the participants when it came to implementing mtps. cook (2016), in discussing variation in an individual’s multicompetence, notes that all multilingual language users are on a continuum between a complete separation of languages raees calafato 598 and a complete integration of languages in the mind and that this separation or integration may vary from language aspect to language aspect. this study’s findings suggest that, at a minimum, the metalinguistic aspect of their languages had not fully integrated for some participants, preventing them from carrying their implementation of mtps in one fl over to the other fl. these dynamics highlight the complexity and diversity of interactions that occur between languages in the minds of fl teachers tasked with teaching two fls and underscore the need for more studies that explore the cognitive aspects of their multilingualism. at the same time, in this study, two teachers, vladimir and filippa, stood out in terms of their reported implementation of mtps in the fls they taught, and the findings suggested that they had advanced metalinguistic knowledge in these and a high degree of integration vis-à-vis their languages that allowed them to draw on their multilingual affordances (aronin, 2014) in creative ways. for instance, vladimir reported how he developed his students’ cross-linguistic awareness and metalinguistic knowledge by teaching them strategies to identify patterns when conjugating the past tense of irregular verbs in english and german. he also reported carrying content taught in english lessons over to his german lessons and vice versa, which is similar to the strategy employed by mr. guo, the teacher of english and chinese investigated by jiang et al. (2014), who similarly integrated the content he taught in his chinese and english lessons. filippa, in contrast to vladimir, reported teaching chinese and english, languages that are much more distant from each other than are english and german. yet, despite this distance, she reported implementing mtps in both languages. this was evident in how she reported drawing on russian, a language that she did not teach, to help her students learn the various tones in chinese and sought to raise their awareness of the differences between chinese and russian regarding verb placement and the use of prepositions. these practices indicate that her multilingualism provided her with several possibilities for action so that she drew on additional (albeit distant) languages in creative ways to focus on language syntax and phonology cross-linguistically. in addition to language knowledge, the findings also revealed that a majority of the participants positioned themselves as, and benefitted from being, language learners when discussing their implementation of mtps. they reported learning new languages, further developing their language skills in the languages they taught, and even learning the languages their students spoke. as mcdonough (2002) has noted, there have been few studies that have focused on teachers as learners, yet the learner aspect might be critical in obtaining a more holistic understanding of fl teachers, their relationship with the languages they teach, and their overall identity as multilingual language users. this is because fl teachers may not subscribe to the view of teaching as coming “from the “i feel like it’s giving me a lot as a language teacher to be a learner myself”: factors affecting the. . . 599 ‘top down,’ as knowledgeable or skilled individuals seek to impart knowledge or skills” to their learners, the “ignorant or unskilled individuals” who “seek to become more knowledgeable or skilled” (tomasello, 1999, p. 523). rather, they may see benefits in being, and identifying as, language learners themselves, especially in terms of their ability and willingness to implement mtps and teach more effectively. several participants in this study considered being a language learner an integral part of their teaching and professional development, and as boosting their engagement with their students. the findings, like the ones concerning their language knowledge discussed above, call for a more nuanced look at fl teachers and underline the importance of exploring how they position themselves in relation to the languages they teach. the findings also underscore the need to look at teacher identity through a multi-faceted approach that takes into account how various micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors may influence their thoughts and actions (douglas fir group, 2016; gee, 2001). support, meanwhile, mostly consisted of the participants reading research and, more rarely, collaborating with a colleague or mentor. the participants indicated that support was not systematically provided by their schools and, instead, depended on their individual efforts, which might explain why only a small number of them reported receiving it. the lack of systematic support from schools reported by the participants in this study echoes the findings from calafato (2021b), where a majority of the fl teacher participants surveyed stated that their schools had not organized anything to promote multilingualism. the findings also reflect the studies reviewed in calafato (2019), where schools either did not support the implementation of mtps or actively opposed it in favor of a monolingual teaching approach. moreover, some participants noted that many of their colleagues did not have a good understanding of how they could draw on their and their students’ multilingualism as a pedagogical resource, and that collaboration did not occur because teachers did not talk to each other. another reason reported by the participants for the lack of collaboration was that some teachers felt anxious about their knowledge of the fls they taught and chose not to engage with their colleagues as a result. for teacher educators and educational institutions, these findings provide insights into fl teacher interactions and their potential to collaborate with each other. they also highlight the importance of developing teachers’ language ability alongside their pedagogical knowledge since the former was found to not only influence their implementation of mtps but also affect their willingness to collaborate with each other, this being an important component of multilingual pedagogy (haukås, 2016). finally, with regard to the second (“are there differences in the participants’ reported implementation of mtps based on the languages they teach?”) and third research questions (“are there country-specific differences in the way raees calafato 600 the participants report implementing mtps?”), the findings did not indicate any notable differences between the teachers based on the languages they reported teaching, although differences were found between the participants from norway and russia concerning the teaching of english. the lack of language-specific differences in the participants’ implementation of mtps should be considered in light of the three factors that they consistently reported as affecting their ability and willingness to implement mtps (especially the language knowledge factor). in other words, it appears that language knowledge, and not language type, affected their implementation of mtps. the findings, in some ways, differ from those reported in calafato (2021b), where statistically significant differences in mtp implementation were found based on what languages the participants taught. at the same time, it is worth keeping in mind that not all fls were equally represented in this study. for example, more participants taught english than chinese. in addition, a small number of participants overall were interviewed in the study, and the findings were based on teachers’ self-reports and not classroom observation. as for the third research question, participants from norway, without exception, reported possessing weak metalinguistic knowledge in english and found it difficult to implement mtps in their english lessons. studies indicate that students in norway learn english mostly implicitly, without a strong focus on metalinguistic learning strategies (haukås, 2016), something that was corroborated in this study. consequently, the participants from norway who taught english might not have sufficiently developed their metalinguistic knowledge in the language as language learners, and their enrollment in teacher education programs as adults may have failed to offset these years of implicit learning. the participants from russia who taught english, in contrast, did not report issues with their metalinguistic knowledge in the language and stated that this was how languages were generally taught in schools in russia, including russian. the findings imply that, with respect to the participants from russia, their metalinguistic skills were being developed in both an fl and the country’s official language (i.e., russian) already from a young age, whereas this was not the case with the participants from norway, who would have waited until they started learning their second fl at school to begin developing their metalinguistic knowledge (see haukås, 2016). 6. conclusion and implications this study is one of the very few to have investigated the factors that fl teachers report as influencing their implementation of mtps across multiple fls (i.e., chinese, english, french, german, and spanish), including in instances where they taught more than one fl. the study’s findings revealed that the participants’ metalinguistic knowledge, more than their overall linguistic competence, affected the “i feel like it’s giving me a lot as a language teacher to be a learner myself”: factors affecting the. . . 601 extent to which they implemented mtps. moreover, such metalinguistic knowledge did not always transfer between languages, likely as a result of participants possessing a level of multicompetence where, at the very least, the metalinguistic aspect of their languages had not been integrated. a majority of the participants also positioned themselves as language learners, which they felt had a positive effect on their teaching practices, notably their implementation of mtps. at the same time, a limited number of participants reported receiving support for implementing mtps. this support was not systematic and mostly involved reading research reports. collaboration with colleagues and access to mentors occurred more rarely. the findings contribute to our understanding of the factors that fl teachers report as influencing their implementation of mtps, with strong implications for teacher educators, teacher education programs, and future research on multilingualism as a pedagogical resource. first, they underline the need for educational institutions and teacher educators to ensure that teacher education programs place sufficient emphasis on assessing and developing fl teachers’ language knowledge, in much the same way as they do for their pedagogical knowledge and general awareness of multilingualism in the language classroom. indeed, a focus on pedagogical knowledge and awareness of multilingualism alone will likely prove insufficient in getting fl teachers to implement mtps if they feel that their language knowledge is inadequate for the task. specific measures that teacher educators can use to develop teachers’ language knowledge include requiring them to take courses that cover the pedagogical applications of metalinguistic knowledge and cross-linguistic awareness, as well as the activities that they can devise to develop these in their students through the use of an appropriate metalanguage. this might require teachers to become familiar with linguistic terms in a way that connects these terms more explicitly to their teaching. teacher educators can also encourage their students to reflect more deeply on their multicompetence and affordances, especially the extent to which various language aspects are integrated across the languages they know and/or will teach. such reflection would help them pinpoint specific areas for improvement and could ultimately lead to more effective mtp implementation. second, the focus on developing fl teachers’ language knowledge should form part of a larger push towards a reconceptualization of fl teachers, one that takes into account that they often view themselves as, and see benefits in being, language learners. what this means is that educational institutions should provide fl teachers with avenues through which they can nurture the language learner aspect of their identity. for instance, teacher education programs could require fl teachers to learn a new language to a certain level of competence or conduct research on a language that is spoken by a large number of students (but which the teachers know little about) as part of their studies. in many ways, raees calafato 602 the mtps that fl teachers are encouraged to use with their students could be employed by teacher educators to train pre-service teachers. educational institutions could also organize regular workshops and seminars where fl teachers would be able to reflect on their language learning experiences, engage in pair and group tasks to pool together the lessons they learned from these experiences, and find ways of incorporating them more effectively into their teaching. third, teacher education programs and educational institutions should stress the importance to fl teachers of building a support network of colleagues with whom they can discuss their approaches to teaching fls and the possibilities of implementing mtps. in this respect, schools and universities could organize tandem teaching programs, where they would pair up novice fl teachers with more senior teacher colleagues who have experience implementing mtps. the tandem could last a semester, an academic year, or several years, and involve the pair discussing and planning lessons together, mentorship sessions, and lesson observations, among other activities. the tandem would end with the pair writing a reflective report on their experiences, the improvements they made to their teaching as a result of the program, and the areas that they felt still required improvement. fourth, the findings underscore the need for additional studies on teachers of multiple fls, specifically, observation studies that would explore differences in their teaching practices per fl and the reasons for these differences, including the planning that goes into preparing lessons per fl. in this study, the findings derived from the participants’ reported practices and it is possible that what they reported doing differed notably from what they actually did in the classroom. future studies should also cover diverse language combinations, that is, teachers of languages from the same group (e.g., english and german), as well as those teaching languages from distant groups (e.g., chinese and spanish), ideally using a large participant sample. fifth, as this study has shown, it is important to differentiate between various types of multilingualism, between fl teachers who might be multilingual but teach one fl and those who are multilingual yet teach two or more fls. in addition to such differentiation, the findings highlight the importance of exploring a range of micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors (not just classroom teaching experiences) when seeking to understand how fl teachers relate to their multilingualism and the extent to which they are willing and able to implement mtps. these factors can include the attitudes of the school administration, the perceived importance of the curriculum, and interactions with colleagues and students. finally, researchers could look into how the teaching of fls alongside non-language subjects affects teachers’ implementation of mtps, including if they carry the mtps they use in their language lessons over to the non-language subjects they teach and whether the teaching of language and non-language subjects side by side leads to changes in how they conceive of language as an epistemic tool. “i feel like it’s giving me a lot as a language teacher to be a learner myself”: factors affecting the. . . 603 references aronin, l. 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(2012). teacher beliefs regarding bilingualism in an english medium reading program. international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, 15(1), 53-69. wernicke, m. (2018). plurilingualism as agentive resource in l2 teacher identity. system, 79, 91-102. zheng, x. (2017). translingual identity as pedagogy: international teaching assistants of english in college composition classrooms. modern language journal, 101(51), 29-44. 723 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (4). 2020. 723-749 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.4.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt exploring the relationships between l2 vocabulary knowledge, lexical segmentation, and l2 listening comprehension kriss lange university of shimane matsue campus, japan https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7201-1751 k-lange@u-shimane.ac.jp joshua matthews school of education, university of new england, australia https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2260-2331 joshua.matthews@une.edu.au abstract the capacity to perceive and meaningfully process foreign or second language (l2) words from the aural modality is a fundamentally important aspect of successful l2 listening. despite this, the relationships between l2 listening and learners’ capacity to process aural input at the lexical level has received relatively little research focus. this study explores the relationships between measures of aural vocabulary, lexical segmentation and two measures of l2 listening comprehension (i.e., toeic & eiken pre-2) among a cohort of 130 tertiary level english as a foreign language (efl) japanese learners. multiple regression modelling indicated that in combination, aural knowledge of vocabulary at the first 1,000-word level and lexical segmentation ability could predict 34% and 38% of total variance observed in toeic listening and eiken pre-2 listening scores respectively. the findings are used to provide some preliminary recommendations for building the capacity of efl learners to process aural input at the lexical level. keywords: second language listening; aural vocabulary; lexical segmentation; listening comprehension kriss lange, joshua matthews 724 1. introduction for some time there has been a general acknowledgement of a robust relationship between foreign or second language (l2) vocabulary breadth and l2 listening (stæhr, 2009). more recent examinations of this relationship have improved our understanding of its strength and specificity. indeed, recent research examining the relative strength of the link between l2 listening and multiple variables of assumed importance, such as auditory discrimination, working memory, metacognitive awareness, l1 vocabulary knowledge and l2 vocabulary knowledge have presented l2 vocabulary knowledge as arguably the most important (vandergrift & baker, 2015; wallace, 2020). furthermore, there is a growing appreciation of the specific relationship between l2 listening and aural vocabulary knowledge. recent research has demonstrated that aural vocabulary knowledge is more predictive of l2 listening than is word knowledge measured in the written form alone (cheng & matthews, 2018) and should therefore be utilized more in listening research. recognizing and knowing the meaning of individual words from speech is an essential foundation for listening, but so too is lexical segmentation. here we define lexical segmentation as the ability to identify multiple consecutive words in connected speech (andringa, olsthoorn, van beuningen, schoonen, & hulstijn, 2012; field, 2003). although it is dependent upon adequate levels of single word knowledge, it is arguably just as important. this is because lexical segmentation entails accurately recognizing the boundaries between single words and the resultant capacity to map recognized words onto existing representations in the listener’s mental lexicon, known as decoding (field, 2008a). lexical segmentation is especially challenging for l2 learners as authentic spoken language is typically not produced as discrete phonological word forms, but mostly as streams of connected, phonologically modified lexis. words within fluent speech become co-articulated, with adjacent phonemes influencing each word’s phonological form (field, 2008a). additionally, the speech signal is transient making it necessary for the listener to segment words rapidly, with an average rate of native speech reaching over six syllables per second (pellegrino, coupé, & marsico, 2011). lexical segmentation is a complex skill, “which requires a context-sensitive representation of phonemes and phoneme clusters both within and across word boundaries” (hulstijn, 2003, p. 420). considering these challenges, it is unsurprising that lexical segmentation of connected speech causes considerable difficulty for l2 listeners (field, 2008b; lange, 2018). it is assumed here that aural vocabulary knowledge and lexical segmentation ability are both important in supporting successful l2 listening. however, the relationship between these constructs and multiple measures of l2 listening performance has not thus far been adequately explored. the study reported in exploring the relationships between l2 vocabulary knowledge, lexical segmentation, and l2. . . 725 this paper seeks to begin filling this gap in the literature by examining these relationships among a group of tertiary level japanese efl learners. 2. literature review 2.1. l2 vocabulary knowledge and l2 listening measures from written, receptive vocabulary tests have been shown to possess a relatively strong and consistent relationship with measures of l2 listening comprehension across a range of learning contexts. for example, stæhr (2009) investigated the strength of association between advanced danish efl students’ l2 listening and vocabulary size (vocabulary levels test; schmitt, schmitt, & clapham, 2001) and vocabulary depth (word associates test; read 1993, 1998), and determined that these correlated strongly and significantly (r = .70 and r = .65, respectively). the generalizability of the strength of association between receptive l2 vocabulary size and l2 listening comprehension was further demonstrated by andringa et al. (2012). while investigating the determinants of l2 listening comprehension among 113 non-native dutch speakers with 35 different first language groups, they found that scores from a 60-item receptive l2 vocabulary test correlated strongly with l2 listening comprehension (r = .69). the depth and size of receptive l2 vocabulary knowledge, measured orthographically in various contexts, appears to have a moderate to strong relationship with l2 listening comprehension. 2.2. l2 aural vocabulary knowledge and l2 listening the robust relationship between l2 listening comprehension and receptive l2 vocabulary knowledge, as measured with written receptive vocabulary tests, is relatively well established. however, researchers engaged in previous related studies have tended not to use measures of aural vocabulary knowledge (stæhr, 2009). this is likely because most vocabulary tests have been solely delivered through the medium of writing (milton, 2013). this tendency is a significant limitation (stæhr, 2009; vandergrift & baker, 2015) as scores from l2 aural vocabulary tests are more strongly associated with l2 listening comprehension than equivalent written measures of receptive l2 vocabulary knowledge. in a study undertaken within the chinese tertiary efl context among 250 participants, cheng and matthews (2018) demonstrated that scores from vocabulary tests that required testtakers to process aural stimulus were more strongly correlated with listening (r = .71) than scores from comparable written vocabulary tests (r = .55). other research that has explored links between l2 listening comprehension and l2 aural vocabulary knowledge has also demonstrated a strong link between kriss lange, joshua matthews 726 these constructs. for example, vandergrift and baker (2015) investigated the learner variables that predicted l2 listening comprehension among 157 learners of french. they tapped into a number of factors including receptive aural l2 (french) and l1 (english) vocabulary knowledge, l1 and l2 listening ability, auditory discrimination ability, working memory and metacognition. l2 vocabulary knowledge proved to be the strongest correlate of l2 listening. the mean magnitude of correlation between l2 listening comprehension and l2 vocabulary knowledge (r = .51) across three cohorts of learners was more than double that of all other variables that reached a statistically significant level (l1 vocabulary, r = .23; metacognition, r = .23; and auditory discrimination, r = .22). matthews and cheng (2015) demonstrated that partial dictation test scores measuring knowledge of high-frequency words correlated strongly with ielts listening test scores among a cohort of 167 tertiary level chinese efl learners (r = .73). mclean, kramer, and beglar (2015) demonstrated that their listening vocabulary levels test, which requires test-takers to process aural stimulus material, correlated strongly (r = .54) with parts one and two of the listening component of the test of english for international communication (toeic). finally, in the japanese efl context, wallace (2020) examined the relationship between various factors, such as aural l2 vocabulary knowledge, metacognitive awareness, memory, attentional control, self-reported topical knowledge, and l2 listening. results of structural equation modelling analysis indicated that vocabulary knowledge accounted for the most variability in l2 listening performance. these studies have helped to demonstrate the significant relationship that aural receptive l2 vocabulary knowledge has with l2 listening comprehension ability. 2.3. lexical segmentation and l2 listening the research reviewed above demonstrates that there is a relatively strong relationship between aural vocabulary knowledge and l2 listening comprehension across a range of contexts. however, a limitation of previous studies is that they have only measured individual words and not the capacity to segment multiple words in connected speech. this gap is important to address as spoken language is almost always delivered in concatenated intonation units (rost, 2002). connected words are often acoustically very different from their discrete citation form due to phonological modification (e.g., reduction, assimilation, elision, etc.). for this reason, being able to accurately segment strings of connected lexis is an important objective for l2 listeners, and is indicative of high levels of listening proficiency (field, 2008b). investigations of l2 learners’ capacities to segment and extract meaning from samples of connected speech suggest that phonological modification is exploring the relationships between l2 vocabulary knowledge, lexical segmentation, and l2. . . 727 strongly associated with listening ability (field, 2008a; lange, 2018). for example, sheppard and butler (2017) used paused transcription tasks to investigate the capacity of 77 l2 learners to segment strings of four or five words in connected speech. results indicated that only 67% of the words were correctly transcribed. other research by wong et al. (2017) showed that reduced forms dictation (i.e., lexical segmentation with attributes of phonological modification) was the strongest correlate with listening (r = .63) from among several others measured such as receptive knowledge of written vocabulary (r = .50) and minimal pairs discrimination (r = .32). these studies suggest that the ability to segment words in connected speech and specifically to mitigate the effects of phonological modification plays an important role in l2 listening. as previously mentioned, andringa et al. (2012) explicitly addressed the relationship between lexical segmentation and l2 listening and demonstrated that segmentation accuracy and l2 listening comprehension were strongly correlated (r = .64). however, segmentation was assessed by the test-takers’ ability to accurately count the number of words in a string of target speech. therefore, the method did not directly measure the recognition of specific word forms in connected speech, which is an important factor in l2 listening. in contrast, test formats such as paused transcription can be used to measure a learner’s capacity to segment sequences of multiple words presented in connected speech (field, 2008c). importantly, such tests can cast light on practical questions, such as which test-takers perceive “attracts investment” as “a tax investment” (matthews & o’toole, 2015, p. 371) and which recognize “don’t always notice” as “don’t always know this” (sheppard & butler, 2017, p. 92). this information is not provided by tests that measure knowledge of single target vocabulary items. for this reason, data gathered from tests that measure knowledge of both single and multiple vocabulary items are likely to offer useful insight into the lexical capabilities of l2 listeners, and how these relate to listening comprehension success. 3. the study 3.1. purpose and research questions this study seeks to address some of the many questions that still remain around the relationship between l2 learners’ capacity to handle lexical input and l2 listening comprehension. firstly, it seeks to measure aural receptive l2 vocabulary knowledge and lexical segmentation ability among a single cohort of l2 language learners. this will allow us to determine the relative strength of association, as well as the predictive capacities, of these two measures with respect to l2 listening comprehension. further, unlike previous investigations of the relationship kriss lange, joshua matthews 728 between vocabulary knowledge and a single criterion measure of listening comprehension (e.g., andringa et al., 2012; stæhr, 2009; vandergrift & baker, 2015), the current study uses two different measures of l2 listening comprehension. the listening tests that have been chosen for this study, the toeic and eiken, are both relevant to the study’s context, namely tertiary level efl in japan. the eiken test is not well-known outside of the japanese efl context and therefore further information about the test will be provided in section 3.3.4. gathering participant scores on multiple criterion measures of l2 listening comprehension and examining the relationship of these with the lexical capacities mentioned above might provide a more generalizable picture of these relationships. this may then inform testing and teaching practice in the context of the study. in an effort to do so, the following research questions will be addressed: 1. what is the relative strength of association between aural receptive vocabulary knowledge, lexical segmentation ability and the two criterion measures of l2 listening among the study cohort? 2. to what degree does aural receptive vocabulary knowledge and lexical segmentation ability predict the two criterion measures of l2 listening? 3.2. participants all of the 130 participants (70% females, 30% males) in this study were first-year japanese university students enrolled in a general english course at a university in western japan. the participants generally had six years of english education before entering university. an analysis of the participants’ average toeic listening (229.71, sd = 46.14) and reading (151.27, sd = 44.11) scores indicated their level of english ability was a2 (basic user, waystage) in terms of the common european framework of reference for languages (cefr) (educational testing service, 2015). 3.3. instruments 3.3.1. measure of listening vocabulary level aural receptive vocabulary knowledge was measured with the listening vocabulary levels test (mclean et al., 2015). this test contains 150 items and was designed to measure japanese learners’ lexical knowledge of the first five 1,000word frequency levels of the british national corpus/corpus of contemporary american english (bnc/coca) (nation, n.d.) and the academic word list (coxhead, 2000). each of the sections from the first 1,000-word frequency level to the fifth 1,000-word frequency level contains 24 items and the final section exploring the relationships between l2 vocabulary knowledge, lexical segmentation, and l2. . . 729 measuring academic word knowledge contains 30 items. the test uses a multiple-choice format which was based on the vocabulary size test (nation & beglar, 2007). each item consists of the target vocabulary, a non-defining sentence containing the target word and four answer choices (written in japanese). the target word and non-defining sentence are presented once aurally but are not written on the test paper. test-takers choose the word, which best represents the meaning of the english target word, from among four options, as shown in the example below (english translations added here for clarity): 1. (test-taker hears: “waited: i waited for a bus.”) a. 食べた (ate) b. 待った (waited) c. 見た (saw) d. 寝た (slept) there is a five-second pause between each item and a 15-second pause between test sections (for turning the page). the last section, testing the academic word list, contains 30 items and all sections can be completed in about 30 minutes. the audio files were recorded by a native speaker of american english, which was appropriate for the cohort of the current study as this is the dialect of english most commonly taught in japanese efl. as a demonstration of the validity of the test, a correlation of .54 was reported between the listening vocabulary levels test and parts 1 and 2 of the toeic listening section (mclean et al., 2015).1 3.3.2. paused transcription tests lexical segmentation ability was assessed using a paused transcription test with five sections produced in-house by the authors. the paused transcription test format utilizes a listening text in which pauses have been inserted at irregular intervals. the pause is placed directly following a target item and the test-taker attempts to recall the last three to five words before the pause and transcribe them on the answer sheet. after the paused interval, the recording resumes playback and the test-taker continues listening until another pause is heard during which the preceding phrase is transcribed and this continues for all of the test items. a unique aspect of the paused transcription testing format is that it allows the testtaker to utilize comprehension of the aural co-text and background knowledge to assist in transcribing the target items (field, 2008c). other types of listening tests relying on transcription, such as standard dictation tests or partial dictation tests, 1 see the iris database for the test (https://www.iris-database.org/iris/app/home/detail?id= york%3a937862&ref=search). kriss lange, joshua matthews 730 generally require the listener to transcribe target items using limited co-text or contextual information that could facilitate the application of top-down knowledge. the audio for each of the five sections of the paused transcription test was recorded in a question-answer format between a japanese native speaker asking the questions and a north american english native speaker answering them. the audio for each section of the paused transcription test was between 10 to 12 minutes. each section of the test contained 12 target phrases of three words each for a total of 180 items. following the intonation unit containing each target phrase, a 15-second pause was inserted in the audio text. in order to standardize the acoustic features of the target phrases, all pauses were inserted in the speech of the english native speaker. the content of the dialogues included personalized anecdotes as well as many topics related to japan that would be familiar to the study cohort. a partial sample of the dialogue used in the first section of the paused transcription test is provided in appendix a. note that test-takers were not reading the transcript and filling in blanks while listening to the dialogues; the dialogues were only heard and the test-takers wrote their transcriptions onto a numbered answer sheet. for example, the listeners heard the following question and answer followed by a beep and a 15-second pause during which they attempted to transcribe the target phrase immediately preceding the beep, we could play: speaker 1: what was it like? speaker 2: so growing up in st louis was fun i lived in a neighborhood with a few kids so we could play (beep) when designing the test dialogues, the use of high-frequency vocabulary was prioritized in order to reduce the number of potential errors in lexical segmentation caused by inadequate vocabulary knowledge. frequency data for all vocabulary used in the test was analyzed using the online computer program compleat web vp (cobb, 2018) based on the combined coca/bnc 1-25k corpus. results determined that 94.8% of the 5,278 tokens used in the test were within the first 1,000word frequency band, 3.30% were in the second, 0.60% in the third, 0.30% in the fourth, 0.50% in the fifth, and 0.10% in the sixth 1,000-word frequency band with the remaining 0.44% of words not within the corpus (i.e., offlist). in a separate frequency analysis of only the words contained in the 60 target phrases, 97.2% of the 180 target words were within the first 1,000-word frequency band, 1.70% were in the second and 0.60% in the third. only five target words were beyond the first 1,000-word frequency band. all 60 target phrases are listed in appendix b. in order to ensure that the target phrases were representative of authentic language in connected speech, each phrase was designed to contain one of exploring the relationships between l2 vocabulary knowledge, lexical segmentation, and l2. . . 731 three types of phonological modification: reduced function words, transitions between words (i.e., assimilation and elision) or linking (i.e., liaison). these categories of co-articulation are known to be problematic for l2 learners (sheppard & butler, 2017; wong et al., 2017). the target item length was set at three words to reduce the difficulty of the transcription task while adequately representing phonological modification occurring between words.2 3.3.3. toeic listening the test of english for international communication (toeic) listening and reading test is used widely in japan with approximately 3,400 organizations and educational institutions administering the test in 2017 (institute for international business communication, 2018). the toeic listening section takes about 45 minutes to complete and contains four parts with 100 multiple-choice items. part 1 contains 10 items in which the test-taker selects the most accurate description of a photograph. part 2 contains 30 items which assess the listener’s ability to select the best response to a question. part 3 contains 10 dialogues with three questions each and part 4 consists of 10 monologues with 3 questions each to assess listening comprehension. there are 495 points possible for the toeic listening section. 3.3.4. eiken pre-2 listening the eiken test is an english proficiency test developed in japan and widely used in japanese secondary schools. there are 7 grades of difficulty from grade 5 (easiest) to grade 1 (most difficult). this makes it possible, in contrast to toeic, for a test level to be selected that aligns with the known proficiency level of a given cohort. the listening section of the eiken pre-2 grade, used in the current study, is ranked between grade 3 and grade 2 and adequate achievement on the test positions a test-taker at roughly an a2 level on the cefr (eiken foundation of japan, 2016), which was the estimated proficiency level of most of the participants in this study. the listening section consists of three parts, each containing 10 multiple-choice questions. in part 1, the test-taker listens to short conversations and chooses the best response from three options. in part 2, the test-taker hears longer conversations and selects the correct answer to questions. finally in part 3, the test-taker hears a monologue and selects the best answers to questions about it. the listening section takes approximately 20 minutes to complete. 2 the audio files and materials for the paused transcription test developed for this study are available online in the mendeley data repository (https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/ g278w62zpg/1; lange & matthews, 2020). kriss lange, joshua matthews 732 3.4. procedures this study involved the administration of four test instruments: two listening comprehension tests and two lexical measures. for the purposes of analysis, measures of listening comprehension (toeic & eiken pre-2) were identified as outcome variables, and the two lexical measures were identified as predictor variables. the listening vocabulary levels test was used to measure aural vocabulary knowledge, and the paused transcription test was used to measure lexical segmentation ability. tests were administered in the order of eiken pre-2, toeic and listening vocabulary levels test. the five sections of the paused transcription test were administered approximately once every two weeks over the course of the 15week semester. all tests, except for the toeic were administered during class and necessarily spaced to reduce the cognitive burden on students and allow time for other teaching activities. table 1 lists the instruments, their purposes and time of administration. formal approval from the university ethics committee was obtained for this study. table 1 procedure summary test construct administration timing eiken pre-2 l2 listening comprehension week 2 toeic listening l2 listening comprehension week 12 (outside of class) listening vocab levels test aural vocabulary knowledge week 13 paused transcription test lexical segmentation ability weeks 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 the directions for all tests, besides the toeic, were provided in japanese with clear examples to illustrate the listening task as well as time to ask any questions about the test. the toeic was administered following the standardized rule booklet provided by the testing company and only english instructions for each part of the listening section were supplied in the test booklet and spoken aloud on the test cd. the audio for all tests was administered by audio file or cd to the whole class through high-quality speakers in a quiet classroom environment. the criterion listening tests and two vocabulary tests used multiple-choice formats so scoring was unambiguous. however, the three-word target item transcriptions for the paused transcription test required the development of a scoring protocol to ensure a standard scoring method. a scoring protocol, based on principles described in matthews, o’toole, and chen (2017, pp. 42-43), was devised to facilitate consistent scoring (see appendix c). this was not a test of spelling, and so correctly spelled target words and words with minor spelling errors which clearly reflected the phonological form of the target word (e.g., uniek for unique) received one point each. a score of 0.50 was given to recognizable exploring the relationships between l2 vocabulary knowledge, lexical segmentation, and l2. . . 733 but more ambiguous representations of the target word (e.g., unik for unique). a deduction of 0.25 was applied if one of the three target words was transcribed out of order or if additional words were added within the target phrase. other incorrect words or blanks received zero points. the first author scored the paused transcription test and the second author scored a subset of 10%. the correlation between the two authors’ scores was very high (r = .997), demonstrating strong levels of inter-rater agreement. the final scores provided by the toeic testing institution, rather than raw scores, were used in this study with a possible score range of 5 to 495. the other three assessments utilized raw scores and their possible range of scores are listed as follows: eiken pre-2 listening section 0 to 30, listening vocabulary levels test 0 to 150 and paused transcription test 0 to 180. 3.5. analysis correlation and multiple regression were the two statistical techniques applied in the current study. the necessary assumptions associated with linearity, multivariate normality, multicollinearity, and homoscedasticity for regression analysis were confirmed to be unviolated for this data (tabachnick & fidell, 2007). the sample size of 130 exceeds the rule of thumb for regression analysis stated by green (1991) in which n should be greater than 104 + m (where m is the number of predictors) and thus satisfies recommendations for the number of cases-to-independent variables. 4. results table 2 shows the minimum, maximum, mean and standard deviation of scores obtained from each test used in the analyses. all instruments had an adequate cronbach’s alpha level of 0.70 or above (cortina, 1993). table 2 descriptive statistics for test variables test construct n min max mean sd mean % α toeic listening l2 listening comprehension 122 115 350 229.71 46.14 45.12 .72 eiken pre-2 l2 listening comprehension 130 7 29 18.18 4.88 60.60 .70 listening vocab levels test aural vocabulary knowledge 123 68 126 101.84 11.24 67.90 .75 paused transcription test lexical segmentation ability 113 1 139 82.66 25.32 46.00 .86 kriss lange, joshua matthews 734 table 3 shows that z-skewness values for each test fall below 3.29, which indicates normal distribution for medium-sized samples (50 < n < 300) and therefore suitable for further statistical analysis (kim, 2013). table 3 skewness and kurtosis statistics for test variables test n skewness se skewness z-skewness kurtosis se kurtosis z-kurtosis toeic listening 122 -.20 .22 -.91 .04 .44 .10 eiken pre-2 130 -.07 .21 -.33 -.57 .42 -1.36 listening vocab levels test 123 -.62 .22 -2.84 .22 .43 .50 paused transcription test 113 -.54 .23 -2.35 .39 .45 .87 4.1. research question 1: what is the strength of association between the variables that were measured? the correlations between all four measures are presented in table 4. to standardize descriptions of the magnitude of these correlations, cohen’s (1992, p. 157) interpretation of small (r = .10), medium (r = .30) and large (r = .50) effects was used. firstly, the two measures of listening comprehension were strongly correlated (r = .52). despite aural vocabulary knowledge and lexical segmentation ability each being measures dependent upon processing stimulus through the aural modality, a small (r = .18) but significant correlation was observed between them. correlations between aural vocabulary knowledge and measures of l2 listening were small and significant (r = .15 and r = .12). correlations between lexical segmentation ability and l2 listening were medium to strong and significant (r = .39 and r = .51). the trend in the magnitude of the correlation coefficients between the two lexical measures and both measures of l2 listening was the same: lexical segmentation ability (stronger) and then aural vocabulary knowledge (weaker). table 4 summary of intercorrelations between measures from each test instrument used in analyses test 1 2 3 4 1. toeic listening test 2. eiken pre-2 listening test .52** 3. listening vocabulary levels test .15** .12** 4. paused transcription test .39** .51** .18** note. *p < .05, ** p < .01 correlations between the listening vocabulary levels test and the tests of listening comprehension were too small to warrant further investigation with regression analysis. however, as previous research has shown that high-frequency exploring the relationships between l2 vocabulary knowledge, lexical segmentation, and l2. . . 735 aural vocabulary test scores correlate strongly with scores from standardized l2 listening tests (matthews, 2018), the strength of correlation between each level of the listening vocabulary levels test and listening test scores was investigated. table 5 shows that scores from the first 1,000, second 1,000 and third 1,000word frequency levels of the listening vocabulary levels test correlated significantly at a medium level with scores from the toeic listening test and the eiken pre-2 listening test. for both listening tests, smaller non-significant correlations were found for the fourth 1,000, fifth 1,000 and academic levels of the test. table 5 summary of correlations between l2 listening tests and word frequency level sections (1k-5k and academic) of the listening vocabulary levels test (measuring aural vocabulary knowledge) listening vocab levels test frequency level sections toeic l eiken pre-2 1k .48** .42** 2k .47** .44** 3k .33** .30** 4k .11** .25** 5k .03** .20** academic .08** .21** note. 1k to 5k refers to sections of the listening vocabulary levels test which assess knowledge of the first 1,000-word frequency level up to the fifth 1,000-word frequency. the section labelled academic assesses knowledge of vocabulary included in the academic word list. 4.2. research question 2: to what degree do the variables measured predict l2 listening? as presented in table 5, a medium to strong relationship was found between aural vocabulary knowledge of the first 1,000, second 1,000 and third 1,000word levels (as measured by the listening vocabulary levels test) and l2 listening ability (as measured by toeic listening section and eiken pre-2 listening section). to provide a clearer picture of the relationships and relative predictive capacities these variables have on listening, hierarchical multiple regression analysis was used. the regression modelling used listening vocabulary levels test scores (1k, 2k and 3k) and paused transcription test scores as predictor variables, to predict the outcome variables, toeic listening and eiken pre-2 scores. all analyses entailed entering the listening vocabulary levels test scores before the paused transcription test scores. the underlying logic of this order entry was that knowledge of single words (as measured by the listening vocabulary levels test) is fundamental to lexical segmentation ability for multi-word chunks (as measured by the paused transcription test). in essence, the listening vocabulary levels test assesses both knowledge of the target words’ phonology as well as their semantics, while the paused transcription test is focused on phonological (i.e., kriss lange, joshua matthews 736 segmental and suprasegmental) issues and arguably does not directly measure semantic knowledge. when constructing each of the regression models, the entry order of the listening vocabulary levels test scores was as follows: first 1,000-word level, second 1,000-word level, and then the third 1,000-word level. the underlying logic for this decision was that knowledge of higher frequency vocabulary is likely to be more fundamental to l2 listening than knowledge of lower frequency words (adolphs & schmitt, 2003). the first model (see table 6) sought to determine the degree to which aural vocabulary knowledge of the first 1,000, second 1,000 and third 1,000word levels and lexical segmentation ability predicted variance in toeic listening scores. aural vocabulary knowledge of the first 1,000-word level and lexical segmentation ability were the only two statistically significant variables in the model. the first 1,000-word level could account for 22% and lexical segmentation ability accounted for an additional 12% of variance in the toeic. table 6 hierarchical multiple regression model 1 aural vocabulary knowledge for first, second, and third 1,000-word level (avk) and lexical segmentation ability and as predictors of toeic listening predictor r r2 r2 change 1: first 1,000-word level avk .47** .22** .22** 2: second 1,000-word level avk .53** .28** .06** 3: third 1,000-word level avk .54** .29** .004** 4: lexical segmentation ability .63** .40** .12** note. * p < .01. ** p < .001 in the second model (see table 7) again aural vocabulary knowledge of the first, second and the third 1,000-word levels and lexical segmentation ability, were used to predict the outcome variable eiken pre-2 listening scores. similar to model 1, the first 1,000-word level of the listening vocabulary levels test accounted for 21% and lexical segmentation ability accounted for an additional 17% of the variance in the eiken pre2 scores, with both predictive contributions being statistically significant. table 7 hierarchical multiple regression model 2 – aural vocabulary knowledge for first, second, and third 1,000-word level (avk) and lexical segmentation ability and as predictors of eiken pre-2 listening predictor r r2 r2 change 1: 1st 1,000-word level avk .46* .21* .21* 2: 2nd 1,000-word level avk .48* .23* .02* 3: 3rd 1,000-word level avk .48* .23* .001* 4: lexical segmentation ability .63* .40* .17* note. * p < .01. ** p < .001 exploring the relationships between l2 vocabulary knowledge, lexical segmentation, and l2. . . 737 results from model 1 (see table 6) indicated that the first 1,000-word level aural vocabulary knowledge scores, and not the second or third, achieved statistical significance in the model and could predict 22% of the variance in toeic scores. in addition, paused transcription test scores could predict an additional 12% of the variance in toeic scores, with the two lexical measures offering a combined predictive capacity of 34% to the model. results from model 2 (see table 7) also revealed similar results in that the first 1,000-word level aural vocabulary knowledge scores and lexical segmentation ability could predict 38% of variance observed within eiken pre-2 scores. in summary, aural vocabulary knowledge of 2k, 3k, 4k, 5k and academic word levels added no predictive capacity in regression models for predicting the variance in toeic and eiken pre-2 listening scores. however, a combination of the first 1,000-word level of the listening vocabulary levels test and the paused transcription test significantly predicted variance observed in toeic listening scores and eiken pre-2 listening scores. 5. discussion perhaps the most notable finding from this study was the significant predictive capacity that high-frequency aural vocabulary knowledge at the first 1,000-word level contributed to regression models for two tests of listening. scores from the first 1,000-word level of the listening vocabulary test could independently predict 22% of variance in toeic listening scores and 21% of variance in eiken pre-2 listening scores. aural vocabulary knowledge at the 1,000-word level had more predictive power than any other predictor variable used in the models. this finding is surprising because the listening vocabulary levels test is not a test of listening comprehension and was designed to assess phonological recognition and semantic knowledge of individual words. correlations between total scores for the listening vocabulary levels test and the two tests of listening used in this study were weak in magnitude (i.e., r = .15 and r = .12). however, when correlations were investigated separately by 1,000-word frequency level the first 1,000, second 1,000 and third 1,000-word levels of the listening vocabulary levels test had medium to large correlations with the listening tests (see table 5). upon further investigation with hierarchical multiple regression analysis, it was determined that only scores from the first 1,000-word level of the test contributed significant predictive capacity to both models. this finding highlights the important association that aural knowledge of high-frequency vocabulary has with listening ability. in addition, the consistency in the predictive capacity for the two different standardized tests of listening used in the regression models supports the validity of the claim that aural vocabulary knowledge of the first 1,000-word level is associated with listening ability. furthermore, these results corroborate previous research kriss lange, joshua matthews 738 demonstrating that knowledge of high-frequency vocabulary is an important foundation for comprehending authentic listening texts and performance on l2 listening tests (matthews, 2018; matthews & cheng, 2015; webb & rodgers, 2009). another notable finding of the current study was the strength of association between lexical segmentation ability and l2 listening. firstly, this association was evident from correlations between paused transcription tests and the two listening tests (r = .39 and r = .51 respectively). secondly, and potentially more importantly, this strength of association was also observed in the regression analyses. in each instance, lexical segmentation ability added a significant predictive capacity beyond that offered by aural vocabulary knowledge at the first 1,000word level (i.e., an additional 12% and 17%, see table 6 and table 7). this is important as, although it is clear that knowledge of the 1,000 most frequent words in the aural modality provides a foundation for l2 listening, the capacity to segment clusters of words in the aural modality adds something extra. the current study also speaks to the relative additional importance of the learners’ lexical segmentation ability in the prediction of their l2 listening scores. stronger correlations were found between lexical segmentation ability and l2 listening scores as compared to those found between l2 listening and aural vocabulary knowledge. this result is likely due to the format of the paused transcription test which measures lexical segmentation ability and more closely resembles listening processes by utilizing both bottom-up and top-down processing. it is also important to recall that the target items and contextual language used for the paused transcription test consisted of very high-frequency words (0-1k). this in turn emphasizes the importance of the capacity to segment words in the first 1,000-word frequency range, which cover approximately 89% of spoken discourse (adolphs & schmitt, 2003). this suggests that a learner’s capacity to fluently process the highest frequency words in connected speech is likely to be strongly facilitative of l2 listening comprehension. this investigation demonstrates that better listeners had a stronger capacity to recognize the phonological form of high-frequency words and could associate these forms with an appropriate semantic representation. further, better listeners could also more effectively segment clusters of three very high-frequency words that were presented in connected speech. 6. pedagogical implications this study found that aural vocabulary knowledge of the first 1,000-word level and lexical segmentation ability together could predict approximately 30% of the variance in scores for two of the most widely used tests of listening ability in japan. these findings suggest that developing aural knowledge of high-frequency exploring the relationships between l2 vocabulary knowledge, lexical segmentation, and l2. . . 739 vocabulary as well as lexical segmentation ability may be effective for improving listening performance. in terms of recommendations for classroom practice, pedagogical activities that build the capacity to aurally recognize and understand high-frequency vocabulary should be prioritized. although there is a need to be somewhat speculative due to the limitations of the correlational research paradigm used here, a general rule of thumb based on the evidence at hand would be to ensure learners have a solid grounding in high-frequency aural vocabulary before explicitly addressing vocabulary beyond the second 1,000-word range. as almost 90% of the vocabulary used in typical spoken discourse is from the first 1,000-word level (adolphs & schmitt, 2003) it seems very important that l2 listeners develop fluent recognition of these most frequently occurring words. these findings also support the assertion that helping learners build knowledge of words as they occur in speech is an important strand of vocabulary knowledge development, and that such endeavors are likely to result in positive language learning outcomes (siegel, 2016). here we hypothesize that such interventions are likely to be especially impactful in learning contexts within which vocabulary knowledge development has been traditionally addressed through reading and writing largely without also presenting the target words in contextualized speech. rather than only judging vocabulary to be “known” when a learner can establish a form-meaning link for written words, educators are encouraged to reexamine vocabulary learning in terms of learners’ aural recognition and comprehension of words in connected speech as well. limited development of aural vocabulary knowledge and lexical segmentation ability could result in poorer listening ability for even high-frequency words (carney, 2020). in addition, instructional approaches should be developed that improve learners’ familiarity with the phonological form of words as they occur in connected speech and which also enhance learners’ ability to comprehend chunks of lexis under time constraints. regular use of test formats that require the learner to process lexis through the aural modality is suggested, especially those that target the highest frequency words (e.g., matthews, 2018; mclean et al., 2015). as shown by the results of this study, combining semantic assessment of high-frequency vocabulary via the listening vocabulary levels test with assessment of form recognition via the paused transcription test may be more predictive of actual listening ability. such testing is likely to be useful in enabling teachers to stay abreast of the aural vocabulary knowledge status of their students and their ability to comprehend and segment that vocabulary in connected speech. if used as a diagnostic tool, as recommended by field (2003), such testing will provide data that can be used to inform pedagogical decisions aimed at developing learners’ capacity to better handle lexis mediated through the aural modality. keeping records on the types of segmentation errors that occur amongst learners is also kriss lange, joshua matthews 740 suggested, and regular use of paused transcription tests such as those used in this study is likely to be a valuable way of doing this. such data may be used to assess and facilitate the development of aural vocabulary knowledge and lexical segmentation skills necessary for listening development. these pedagogical recommendations are particularly important in the japanese efl educational context (and others like it) as an inordinate amount of effort from students and teachers is focused on learning increasingly lower frequency vocabulary in preparation for university entrance exams (kobayashi, 2001). however, this can result in a substantial difference between aural and written vocabulary sizes for learners (mizumoto & shimamoto, 2008). an increased focus on evaluating aural vocabulary knowledge and lexical segmentation ability through formats such as the paused transcription test and listening vocabulary levels tests could help to emphasize the importance of these skills as well as to diagnose listening difficulties for learners. such a focus on the development of skills for listening proficiency is needed to promote more balanced aural/oral english skills for japanese learners. further, such a focus may encourage a cultural change within efl pedagogy in japan towards assessment for learning (davison & leung, 2009), namely increased use of assessment modes that inform ongoing teaching and learning decisions. additionally, finding time to facilitate verbalized introspection, especially in the student’s l1, immediately after individual learners engage with paused transcription tests can provide an even deeper insight into the origins of segmentation errors. such information could help to inform other bespoke classroom-based interventions aimed at promoting lexical segmentation (e.g., field, 2003; siegel & siegel, 2015). 7. limitations and future research one possible limitation is that the relatively low proficiency level of the participants indicates they may have been unfamiliar with much of the low-frequency vocabulary from the 1,000 word-level and above. possible floor effects for sections of the listening vocabulary levels test containing low-frequency vocabulary may have diluted the value of the aural vocabulary knowledge data. however, the participants’ mean score for the test overall was roughly 67.8% and therefore did not indicate excessively low scores. a central objective of this study was to provide a preliminary snapshot of the relationships between scores from test instruments measuring lexical capacities and l2 listening among a cohort of japanese efl learners. an important area for future research will be to expand the scope of similar studies both within larger cohorts of japanese efl students, as well as with learners with different l1 backgrounds and linguistic proficiency levels. of interest in this regard exploring the relationships between l2 vocabulary knowledge, lexical segmentation, and l2. . . 741 is to determine the degree to which the generalized trends observed as part of the current study are mirrored or contrasted among other cohorts of learners. a further suggestion for future research is to investigate the efficacy of interventions aimed at enhancing learners’ capacity to handle lexis from the aural modality. longitudinal studies that involve tracking the development of aural vocabulary knowledge and lexical segmentation ability as targeted pedagogical interventions are of particular interest. further, verifying the validity of the assertion that improvements in lexical segmentation ability and aural vocabulary knowledge can directly improve l2 listening comprehension is key. confirming or refuting such assertions will require the implementation of quasi-experimental research paradigms. the development of a broader array of tests that measure lexical capacities mediated through the aural modality is another important future research direction. in particular, the development of tests that measure the capacity to handle multiple sequential words is warranted. this seems especially important in light of the specific and robust relationship between l2 listening comprehension and the capacity to segment, recognize and understand lexis mediated through the aural modality. 8. conclusion overall, our findings suggest that greater learner familiarity with high-frequency vocabulary, at the first 1,000-word level in particular, may contribute more to overall listening proficiency than aural knowledge of lower frequency words. further, it seems clear that lexical segmentation ability is significantly associated with l2 listening ability. measurements of lexical 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(2015). learner variables in second language listening comprehension: an exploratory path analysis. language learning, 65(2), 390-416. http://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12105 wallace, m. p. (2020). individual differences in second language listening: examining the role of knowledge, metacognitive awareness, memory, and attention. language learning. advance online publication. http://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12424 exploring the relationships between l2 vocabulary knowledge, lexical segmentation, and l2. . . 745 webb, s., & rodgers, p. (2009). the lexical coverage of movies. applied linguistics, 30(3), 407-427. http://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amp010 wong, s. w. l., mok, p. p. k., chung, k. k., leung, v. w. h., bishop, d. v. m., & chow, b. w. (2017). perception of native english reduced forms in chinese learners: its role in listening comprehension and its phonological correlates. tesol quarterly, 51(1), 7-31. http://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.273 kriss lange, joshua matthews 746 appendix a a partial sample of the dialogue used for the first two target phrases for paused transcription test 1 where did you grow up? i grew up in st louis missouri it’s in the center of the united states and it’s on the mississippi river it’s a fairly big city. what was it like? so growing up in st louis was fun i lived in a neighborhood with a few kids so we could play. we usually just played sports or rode our bicycles, it was… it was a good childhood. what were your parents like? my parents were a little strict i guess. i couldn’t stay out very late i guess you know i had to come home when the … when it began to get dark … dinner time but they didn’t pressure me to do homework. on the weekends i usually had to do a lot of housework and there was always washing the dishes or vacuuming or cleaning something so my friend said my parents were strict. (note: partial sample only) exploring the relationships between l2 vocabulary knowledge, lexical segmentation, and l2. . . 747 appendix b target words used in each section of the paused transcription test item # ptt 1 ptt 2 ptt 3 ptt 4 ptt 5 1 we could play lots of pictures a few weeks sort of thing how important listening 2 me to do interested in japanese walk to work know them as skill that helps 3 we had together she made sure still in a the hard part be able to 4 quite happy for to learn more some books about i grew up you go on 5 she got out for learning another why did you in the evenings not just yourself 6 when we were interesting for me i can do would be fun you can get 7 like to play what it was things to learn get off the found out later 8 visit those natural eat my favorite can learn about helped him get had to be 9 what i like which is exciting first you’re don’t steal near the castle 10 do a lot it looked like seasons are really was turned away when you walk 11 which are both at the store aren’t allowed most of the kinds of unique 12 that’s all wash your hands as a good comes to mind thousand years old kriss lange, joshua matthews 748 appendix c ptt scoring rubric with rationale and examples general instructions for scoring individual words in target phrases score principle comments example answer → corect target word 1.0 the word is spelled correctly. this answer is easy to score because there is no subjectivity involved. unique → unique evenings → evenings favorite → favorite 1.0 the word is spelled incorrectly but its phonological form is acceptable according to english phonology. subjectivity involved. the test construct is aural decoding therefore slight spelling errors are accepted as long as the spelling approximates the phonological form of the target word. uniqe/uniek/unieque → unique wosh → wash wark → work natral → natural heands → hands pictuer → picture turnd → turned thousan → thousand cathle/casltel/castl/casle/catsle → castle lestening/lisning → listening wuld → would allowd → allowed 0.75 a homophone of the target word is decoded instead of the target word although the target word was accurately decoded phonetically, the spelling of the word indicates the wrong word was decoded indicating difficulty with understanding the meaning of the input. steel → steal witch → which aloud → allowed 0.5 the word is spelled incorrectly and has more ambiguity in the interpretation of its phonological form. subjectivity involved. the incorrect spelling results in an incorrect phonological form that does not approximate the target word. however, there is partial evidence of correct phonological recognition depending on the interpretation of the word’s spelling. unik/unic/unice/uniece/unecue→ unique larn/laurn → learn laurning → learning alaud/aroud → allowed youself → yourself gat → got leastening/listeing → listening thousant → thousand exaciting → exciting watsh → wash seson → season reary → really rater → later wark → walk 0.5 incorrect conjugation/ incorrect form of verb but clear evidence that the root word is recognized. the core element of the target word is recognized correctly but there is an error in inflection or word form, such as tense or plurality. played → play visiting → visit interesting → interested look → looked was → is make → made will → would can → could a → the can’t → can come → comes are → aren’t exploring the relationships between l2 vocabulary knowledge, lexical segmentation, and l2. . . 749 0 significant spelling mistakes make interpretation of the phonological form difficult and its association with the target word tenuous. the phonological form of the spelling represents a clearly different word from the target word. (two or more incongruencies with phonological form.) leran → learn leauning → learning sousend/thouthont/sousond → thousand unirk → unique araude/arowd → allowed 0 a different word, which may be phonologically similar is decoded. the orthographic form represents a clearly different word from the target word. despite the phonological similarities, the accurate spelling of the transcribed word demonstrates that a separate word from the target word was decoded. quit/quiet → quite way → away national → natural pray → play a → are leaning → learning fan → fun mine → mind listing → listening waking → walking latter → later 0 no target word provided general instructions regarding deducting points for errors in the target phrases score principle comments example target word → example answer 0.25 0.25 points are deducted for mistakes of word order in the target phrase. one of the words in the three-word target phrase is transcribed in an incorrect order relative to the other two target words. to me do → me to do you hushed hands → wash your hands to walk → walk to you my why → why did you can i do → i can do the most → most of the important how listening → how important listening listening is important → how important listening helps skills → skill that helps 0.25 0.25 points are deducted for every extra word in the target phrase transcription. an extra word is contained within the target phrase. it must come between two of the words in the target phrase. we have time together → we had together a few day on weeks → a few weeks comes to the mind → comes to mind comes to my mind → comes to mind grow them up → i grew up of the thing → sort of thing kind of the unique → kinds of unique you are going → you go on 233 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (2). 2022. 233-259 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.2.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt is learning really just believing? a meta-analysis of self-efficacy and achievement in sla julia goetze pennsylvania state university, state college, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4856-760x jzg5860@psu.edu meagan driver michigan state university, lansing, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6712-4521 driverme@msu.edu abstract the positive psychology movement (seligman, 1998) has contributed to the proclamation of a positive turn in second language acquisition (sla) (macintyre et al., 2016). within the context of individual differences, self-efficacy (bandura, 1997), an individual’s judgment of their capability to achieve goals, has gained particular interest in language learning (e.g., lake, 2013). the present study meta-analyzes a body of research that has investigated the relationship between second language (l2) self-efficacy and l2 achievement by exploring 1) reporting practices in this domain, 2) the strength and direction of the relationship, and 3) the effects of moderator variables on the self-efficacy-achievement link. a comprehensive literature search uncovered 37 studies, which contributed to a total of 40 independent samples (n = 23,050). the average observed effect in the sample was r = .46. a moderator analysis showed systematic variations in the effect size for learners’ first language, target language, proficiency level, and both self-efficacy and achievement type. we discuss our findings with respect to theoretical constructs and methodological practices and suggest implications for l2 pedagogy and future research into self-efficacy in sla. keywords: positive psychology; individual differences; l2 achievement; self-efficacy julia goetze, meagan driver 234 1. introduction for nearly three decades, self-efficacy has seen a steady line of interest in sla. in fact, since the positive turn in the field (macintyre et al., 2016; macintyre & mercer, 2014), studies addressing positive affect in the foreign language (fl) classroom, including enjoyment (e.g., dewaele & macintyre, 2014; jin & zhang, 2018; zhang & tsung, 2021), motivation (e.g., dörnyei, 2020; le-thi et al., 2020) and second or foreign language (l2) grit (e.g., alamer, 2021; teimouri et al., 2020), have flourished and garnered increased attention with respect to language learning outcomes. as one of the most influential variables in positive psychology, self-efficacy has been explored across a range of contexts (e.g., target languages and proficiency levels), age groups (e.g., children, adolescents, and adults), language skills (e.g., reading, writing, listening and speaking), and classroom participants (e.g., students and teachers). encouragingly, findings have shown the benefits of self-efficacy with respect to learners’ l2 achievement (e.g., ghonsooly & elahi, 2010; hetthong & teo, 2013), learning strategies (e.g., balci, 2017; gahunga, 2009; jee, 2015; ma et al., 2018; mizumoto, 2013; wang et al., 2012), and attitudes towards l2 learning (e.g., bai et al., 2020; murad sani & zain, 2011). bandura’s (1997) and pajares’s (1997) seminal works on self-efficacy proved to be powerful driving forces for scholars in sla and have sparked an abundance of research into the relationship between self-efficacy and achievement. still, the only research synthesis to date investigates self-efficacy and english proficiency only (wang & sun, 2020), leaving the broader contributions of research across all languages unexamined. given the theoretical implications of self-efficacy for individual tasks (bandura, 1997), the various linguistic contexts and learner populations that have been addressed, the plethora of existing selfefficacy and achievement instruments, and the often inconsistent reporting standards of psychometric properties of instruments in sla (larson-hall & plonsky, 2015), a comprehensive meta-analysis of the overall effect of self-efficacy on l2 achievement would be beneficial for furthering our understanding of selfefficacy as well as for developing theory and practice within the framework of positive psychology in sla. the present study addresses this gap by means of a systematic meta-analysis in accordance with now commonly accepted methodologies in sla (e.g., norris & ortega, 2006; oswald & plonsky, 2010; plonsky & oswald, 2012), including a moderator analysis of variables, such as study contexts, learner characteristics, and instrumentation. is learning really just believing? a meta-analysis of self-efficacy and achievement in sla 235 2. literature review 2.1. positive psychology in sla positive psychology investigates the traits and processes that allow people to grow and flourish (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000) and has encouraged scholars to explore positive emotions and experiences, such as flow (csikszentmihalyi, 2000) and resilience (pan & chan, 2007), which support people in leading full, happy, and emotionally stable lives. many scholars in education have adopted methods from positive psychology to investigate a range of positive emotions with respect to learning processes and achievement (e.g., pekrun et al., 2002), a trend that has produced a number of meta-analyses (e.g., lei & cui, 2016; marques et al., 2017; möller et al., 2009; möller et al., 2020; petscher, 2010). for example, in a series of path meta-analyses of 118 studies (n = 213,121), möller and colleagues (2020) found strong effects for the relationship between self-concept – “a self-description judgement that includes an evaluation of competence and the feelings of self-worth associated with the judgement in question” in a specific field (pajares & schunk, 2005, p. 105) – and k-12 achievement in mathematics (β = .57) and first language (l1) (β = .46), respectively. in another study, marques et al. (2017) explored the relationship between hope and academic achievement through a meta-analysis of 45 studies (n = 9,250) carried out with k-12, undergraduate and graduate students. their findings revealed a moderate, positive relationship (k = 24, mean ρ = .24, sd = .10) (95% ci [.20, .26]), with a stronger link for k-12 students (k = 8, mean ρ = .28, sd = .10) (95% ci [.24, .32]) than for undergraduate and graduate students (k = 16, mean ρ = .19, sd = .06) (95% ci [.14, .23]). these suggested links between positive affect and academic achievement lay the foundation for exploring the association in content-specific contexts, such as the world language classroom (i.e., including but not limited to english as second and foreign language classrooms). the positive turn in second language acquisition (sla) (macintyre et al., 2016; macintyre & mercer, 2014) has acknowledged the relevance of positive psychology for improving the fl learning experience by supporting learners’ l2 motivation, perseverance, and resilience as well as by fostering meaningful communication and interaction between learners and teachers. as a result, this area of inquiry has seen an influx of research on enjoyment (e.g., dewaele & alfawzan, 2018), l2 grit (e.g., alamer, 2021; teimouri et al., 2020), and self-efficacy, as detailed in the following section. notably, l2 motivation has probably garnered the most attention (e.g., lake, 2013; papi et al., 2019). as an example, alhoorie (2018) explored the relationship between the l2 motivational self system (l2mss; dörnyei, 2005, 2009) – specifically the ideal l2 self, the ought-to l2 julia goetze, meagan driver 236 self, and the l2 learning experience – and l2 achievement through a meta-analysis of 39 samples (n = 32,078). the findings revealed that all three components of the l2mss were significant predictors of intended effort (rs = .61, .38, and .41, respectively), the measure for subjective learning outcomes, though weaker correlations were found between motivation and l2 achievement (rs = .20, -.05, and .17). this study highlighted the need for meta-analyses that examine the effects of other positive affective variables on l2 achievement and how certain moderators might explain variability of findings. 2.2. self-efficacy and language achievement in perhaps one of the most cited definitions of the term, bandura (1986) describes self-efficacy as “people’s judgements of their capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performances” (p. 391). simply put, it refers to individuals’ beliefs that they hold the necessary skills to complete a particular task (chao et al., 2019). these ability-related beliefs regulate achievement by influencing the goals a learner sets out to reach and the amount of effort dedicated to their performance (bandura, 1986, 1997; pajares, 1997). beyond the regulation of achievement-related cognitive processes, self-efficacy has also been found to regulate types of affective feeling states in sla. for example, multiple studies have shown that a perceived lack of competence was related to both weak self-efficacy beliefs and the presence of negative emotions, such as anxiety (e.g., hiver, 2013; song, 2016). in contrast, cheng and associates (cheng et al., 1999) found that perceived competence was related to strong self-efficacy beliefs and the presence of positive emotions, such as self-confidence. worth noting is wyatt’s (2018) recent argument that self-confidence should not be treated as an emotional variable. instead, selfconfidence is characterized as a “lay term” (p. 122) for self-efficacy beliefs, thereby calling into question the nature of self-confidence and its relation to self-efficacy. indeed, the majority of existing studies in sla have adopted an emotional understanding of self-confidence and clearly differentiate it from cognitive self-efficacy beliefs. thus, the present work addresses self-efficacy, specifically, and does not treat self-confidence as a synonymous term. numerous studies have shown a positive correlation between l2 self-efficacy and l2 achievement (e.g., bai & wang, 2020; golparvar & khafi, 2021; karbakhsh & safa, 2020), suggesting that learners with high levels of self-efficacy are more likely to persevere even during the most challenging tasks, thus achieving higher levels of language learning success (duckworth, 2013). many scholars in sla have also explored skill-specific self-efficacy, including reading (e.g., al khamisi et al., 2016; balci, 2017; chuang et al., 2018; kitikanan & sasimonton, is learning really just believing? a meta-analysis of self-efficacy and achievement in sla 237 2017), writing (e.g., raoofi & maroofi, 2017; sahril & weda, 2018), speaking (e.g., asakereh & dehghannezhad, 2015; kitikanan & sasimonton, 2017) and listening (e.g., kitikanan & sasimonton, 2017; phakiti et al., 2013), as well as content-specific self-efficacy for grammar (e.g., mustapha et al., 2013) and vocabulary learning (e.g., wu et al., 2012; wu et al., 2013). for example, al khamisi et al. (2016) explored the relationship between reading self-efficacy and reading achievement for 636 primary and secondary english as a foreign language (efl) students. correlations showed that learners with higher self-efficacy had greater success on reading tests at both academic levels (elementary: r = .541, p < .001; secondary: r = .518, p < .001). similarly, kitikanan and sasimonton (2017) investigated skill-specific self-efficacy (i.e., listening, speaking, reading, and writing) and achievement for 32 thai efl university students, finding strong positive correlations between self-efficacy for each skill and overall achievement (raverage = .615; 95% ci [.34; .79]). the authors thus proposed that developing self-efficacy in even just one skill might improve learners’ overall l2 achievement. despite this general positive trend, some researchers of skill-specific selfefficacy and l2 achievement have observed merely weak relationships between the two variables. for example, sahril and weda (2018) examined writing selfefficacy and achievement with 50 indonesian efl university students and found a weak positive correlation (r = .057, p < .001). similarly, liem and associates (2008) found a small positive correlation (r = .180, p < .001) when investigating general l2 self-efficacy and achievement in a group of 1,475 high school efl learners in singapore. in a study of general self-efficacy and speaking achievement, oliver et al. (2005) also reported a very small positive correlation (r = .09, p >.05) for 275 australian elementary school students studying a range of foreign languages. while all of these studies provide important insights, the variation of effect sizes across studies is noteworthy and motivates the current study, which aims to contribute to a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the relationship between l2 self-efficacy and l2 achievement in sla. 3. the current study the current study is motivated by three goals. first, we perform a thorough and systematic literature search and analysis to examine existing trends in reporting practices in the l2 self-efficacy and achievement domain. second, we report on both the direction and size of the relationship between learner self-efficacy and achievement. lastly, we examine our sample for systematic variation of effects and investigate a number of moderator variables. in order to meet these goals, the present meta-analysis addresses the following research questions: julia goetze, meagan driver 238 1) what reporting practices are used in studies exploring l2 self-efficacy and l2 achievement? (rq1) 2) what is the direction and magnitude of the relationship between l2 selfefficacy and l2 achievement? (rq2) 3) what is the moderating effect of l1/l2 proficiency level, learner age, institutional context (e.g., primary school, university), self-efficacy type (e.g., general, skill-specific), and achievement measure on the relationship between l2 self-efficacy and l2 achievement? (rq3) 4. methods 4.1. study identification and inclusion criteria in order to identify relevant studies to answer our research questions, a set of inclusion criteria was applied. to be eligible, a study had to (1) present a measure of both l2 self-efficacy and l2 achievement, (2) report quantitative results, either as a pearson correlation or a statistic that can be converted into an r index (e.g., t or f), and (3) be published in or after 1997, to include the studies published since both bandura’s (1997) and pajares’s (1997) influential works and the emergence of positive psychology. using the defined parameters and combinations of defined keywords in english: (1) self-efficacy, beliefs, self-esteem, mindset, self-concept, talent; (2) performance, achievement, outcomes; and (3) language learning, second language learning, foreign language learning, heritage language learning, we conducted a comprehensive search in two library-housed databases (eric, llba), and one public database (google scholar). we also conducted an ancestry search by reviewing the bibliographies of relevant studies and the publication lists of prominent researchers in self-efficacy and positive psychology in sla, identifying a total of 640 publications. some studies were later excluded due to: (1) an absence of our target variables, (2) research designs that included neither l2 self-efficacy nor achievement instruments, (3) a qualitative methods or case study design, (4) missing data, such as correlations, means, and standard deviations, and (5) a self-efficacy construct unrelated to language learning, such as computer self-efficacy (ale et al., 2017) or technological self-efficacy (abdallah & mansour, 2015), which measure beliefs regarding one’s capability to use technology or digital tools in order to achieve one’s goal. after applying all eligibility criteria, 37 studies published between 1999 and 2019 in 15 different countries were included in the final analysis, with a total n of 23,050 and sample sizes ranging from 32 to 11,036 (m = 581.9; sd = 1770.8). is learning really just believing? a meta-analysis of self-efficacy and achievement in sla 239 4.2. coding procedures each study was coded for a number of features according to a systematic coding scheme, which was adapted from an existing coding scheme of a recent meta-analysis of l2 anxiety (teimouri et al., 2019). specifically, we recorded study features according to five categories: (1) bibliographic details (e.g., authors), (2) study design (e.g., methods), (3) participant sample (e.g., target language), (4) instruments (e.g., self-efficacy scale), and (5) quantitative findings (e.g., effect sizes). to pilot the coding scheme, we each rated five studies from the sample and resolved any ambiguities in our results and coding scheme. the final coding scheme can be found in appendix a. next, each author coded half of the studies. twenty percent of the sample was coded by both authors, establishing high inter-rater reliability (100%). 4.3. analysis to answer rq1, we first identified all self-efficacy and achievement instruments. next, we conducted frequency counts and examined the reporting tendencies for reliability and validity of instruments for each variable. by examining the psychometric properties, we followed the foundational principle of the methodological reform movement (marsden & plonsky, 2018), which aims for more rigorous reporting practices in the field of sla through robust description and evaluation procedures. to calculate the magnitude and direction of the relationship between selfefficacy and achievement (rq2), we employed a fixed-effect model. that is, we assumed the existence of one common effect size across all studies in our sample and calculated both the weighted overall mean according to each study’s sample size, and the 95% confidence intervals for each effect. the fixed-effect model was chosen a priori due to our small sample size. more specifically, after visually inspecting our coded studies, we assumed only a moderate amount of heterogeneity across our sample. that is, while the studies were not identical with regards to design features, such as their use of data collection instrument or participant recruitment procedure, we deemed them moderately homogenous in terms of participant characteristics, such as target language and institutional context. this assumption was later confirmed (i2 = 68.647, p < .001), and we investigated the systematic variation of effect sizes within our model (borenstein et al., 2010) in our moderator analysis (rq3). to address our last research question, we used the categorical variables in our coding scheme to form and analyze subsamples. before running the analyses, we examined our data set for heterogeneity, calculating the goodness-offit statistic (q) and checking for the existence of systematic variation among the observed effects in the sample (i2). all analyses were performed using comprehensive meta-analysis (cma) version 3 (borenstein et al., 2013). julia goetze, meagan driver 240 5. results the results concerning our first research question, which aimed to explore reporting practices, are summarized in tables 1 and 2. self-efficacy was measured by a total of 33 unique instruments, with two studies that did not provide details on their instrument. the most commonly referenced questionnaires were the motivated strategies for learning questionnaire (mslq; pintrich et al., 1991), the questionnaire of english self-efficacy (qese; wang, 2004; wang et al., 2013), and the self-efficacy questionnaire (seq; sedighi et al., 2004). however, only a minority of our sample (k = 14; 36%) adapted any of these three instruments. fifteen studies uniquely adapted instruments from other sources, and eight studies designed new instruments. of the 39 times that studies reported on a measurement for l2 self-efficacy, reliability was reported 37 times (95%) in the form of cronbach’s alpha coefficients, with the exception of two studies that, respectively, conducted a test-retest correlation and split-half test of internal consistency. with respect to language achievement measures, our analysis found 39 different measures representing three main methods for assessing l2 achievement: language tests (k = 22), course grades (k = 7), and grade point average (gpa) (k = 3). seven samples implemented a range of other methods, including student self-reported exam grades, teacher ratings of student achievement, and task-based assessment (table 2). as shown in table 2, 28 samples (72%) reported means, and 26 studies (66%) reported both the means and standard deviation for their instrument. of the 22 samples implementing a language test, reliability coefficients were reported only eight times (36%): five reported cronbach’s alpha, one reported kr-20, one reported inter-rater reliability, and one reported test-retest correlation. the five samples reporting cronbach’s alpha yielded an average reliability of .93 (sd = .03). table 1 reliability analyses (cronbach’s alpha) of l2 self-efficacy instruments instrument k # reporting reliability # not reporting reliability min. max. mean sd mslq 6 6 0 .85 .97 .91 .05 qese 5 4 1 .84 .96 .92 .06 seq 3 3 0 .74 .87 .82 .07 novel instrument 8 8 0 .78 .95 .89 .06 other 15 15 0 .63 .96 .86 .09 all se instruments 39 37 2 .63 .97 .88 .08 note. mslq – motivated strategies for learning questionnaire (pintrich et al., 1991); qese – questionnaire of english self-efficacy (wang, 2004; wang et al., 2013); seq – self-efficacy questionnaire (sedighi et al., 2004) is learning really just believing? a meta-analysis of self-efficacy and achievement in sla 241 table 2 reporting practices for l2 achievement assessments assessment type k # reporting mean # reporting sd # reporting reliability cronbach’s alpha mean sd language test 22 17 16 8 .93 .03 course grade 7 7 7 0 gpa 3 3 3 0 other 7 3 1 0 all achievement measures 39 28 26 8 .93 .03 the second research question targeted the magnitude and direction of the relationship between self-efficacy and achievement. we first computed the weighted average mean of all 40 effects in our sample: r = .464 (95% ci [.454, .474]; p < .001), and then examined their distribution for outliers, which we define as any result with a standardized residual larger than 3 in absolute value. this resulted in the exclusion of 13 values, which increased our result slightly to r = .475 (95% ci [.464, .486]; p < .001). additionally, the q statistic changed from 1303.27 to 82.93, and the i2 statistic changed from 97.01 to 68.65. this indicated a reduction of sampling error and a sizeable amount of real and systematic variation in the data, thus justifying a moderator analysis. table 3 provides a summary of our statistical model. an overview of all effects can be found in appendix b. table 3 overall correlation between l2 self-efficacy and l2 achievement k n mr 95% ci q i2 lower upper l2 achievement 27 18,265 .475 .464 .486 82.927* 68.647* note. * = p < .001 additionally, a funnel plot of the relationship between effect size and standard error (figure 1) was created to examine the presence of publication bias in our sample. the plot includes both actual (i.e., hollow) and imputed (i.e., solid black) data points and suggests a slight publication bias in favor of studies that report strong, positive correlations between l2 self-efficacy and achievement. the moderator analysis (table 4) was conducted with 27 independent samples and calculated subgroup effects based on seven categories: age, learner l1, target language, institutional context, proficiency level, self-efficacy type, and achievement measure. the analysis for age showed weaker correlations for high-school age teenagers (16-18) and learners over 20 than for early high-school (15) and early college age students (19-20). however, the majority of primary studies did not report age as a learner characteristic, leading to small subsamples that warrant cautious interpretation. julia goetze, meagan driver 242 note. solid black point represents imputed data figure 1 funnel plot of effect sizes and sampling errors with respect to the learners’ l1 and proficiency level, a similar pattern of underreporting was found. regarding learners’ l1, some languages, such as thai (r = .68), showed stronger relationships between l2 self-efficacy and achievement than others, for example japanese (r = .31). in terms of proficiency level, the analysis indicated a gradual increase in relationship strength when moving from beginner (r = .44) to advanced levels (r = .62). the analysis of self-efficacy type revealed the strongest relationship for speaking self-efficacy (r = .56) and the weakest relationship for vocabulary selfefficacy (r = .33). other skill-specific types (i.e., reading and writing self-efficacy), as well as general l2 self-efficacy (i.e., no skill or content-specific subtype), all showed findings similar to the overall mean effect of r = .475. regarding achievement measure, learners’ gpa yielded a stronger correlation (r = .62) than course grades or language tests, which both returned the same effect (r = .47). the analyses for other moderators did not indicate such ranges in effect sizes. for example, findings for target language revealed only a slightly higher effect for english (r = .53) than for non-english languages (r = .47), and institutional contexts showed similar effects across all subgroups (r = .47-.50). st an da rd er ro r funnel plot of standard error by fisher’s z fisher’s z is learning really just believing? a meta-analysis of self-efficacy and achievement in sla 243 table 4 results of the moderator analysis k n mr 95% ci lower upper age 15 2 2,184 .501 .468 .531 16 1 200 .290 .158 .412 18 1 78 .440 .241 .603 19 1 53 .530 .303 .700 20 2 349 .582 .507 .647 21 6 1,594 .408 .366 .448 not reported 14 13,807 .477 .465 .490 l1 arabic 3 857 .533 .483 .580 chinese 2 1,212 .457 .411 .501 english 1 128 .530 .393 .644 japanese 2 171 .307 .163 .438 malaysian 2 320 .401 .304 .489 persian 1 100 .560 .409 .681 thai 2 83 .678 .539 .781 multiple 1 304 .530 .444 .606 not reported 13 15,090 .473 .460 .485 target language english 23 17,296 .472 .460 .483 non-english 4 969 .525 .478 .570 institutional context secondary 7 13,806 .474 .461 .487 post-secondary 17 3,583 .471 .447 .495 language institute 3 876 .500 .449 .548 proficiency level beginner 1 78 .440 .241 .603 intermediate 4 696 .518 .461 .570 advanced 1 32 .615 .339 .794 multiple 5 842 .487 .433 .537 not reported 16 16,617 .472 .461 .484 self-efficacy type general 17 15,943 .474 .462 .486 skill – vocabulary 1 120 .330 .160 .481 skill – reading 4 889 .479 .427 .529 skill – speaking 1 100 .560 .409 .681 skill – writing 4 1,213 .483 .439 .525 achievement measure language test 17 16,677 .473 .461 .485 course grade 5 783 .473 .417 .526 gpa 1 32 .615 .339 .794 other 2 220 .442 .328 .543 multiple 2 553 .530 .467 .588 julia goetze, meagan driver 244 6. discussion rq1 explored reporting practices in l2 self-efficacy and achievement research. the majority of studies reported both basic descriptive statistics and reliability coefficients of their self-efficacy instruments, which all align with or exceed the average reliability estimates for instruments designed for sla research (plonsky & derrick, 2016). thus, we see rigorous reporting practices within this domain of research. with respect to language achievement measures, we found a weaker tradition of reporting practices. only approximately one-third of the studies provided the reliability coefficient of their language achievement test. in terms of basic descriptives, only two-thirds reported both the mean and standard deviation for their sample. as noted in previous meta-analyses (e.g., teimouri et al., 2019) and reviews of sla research practices (e.g., larson-hall & plonsky, 2015; plonsky, 2013, 2017), this lack of reporting is a common limitation of sla research. furthermore, nearly half of the studies used instructoror institutiondeveloped achievement tools, which often lack the psychometric properties that are essential for robust quantitative analysis in sla (brown et al., 2018). altogether, these results highlight the need for greater validation of instruments and more rigorous reporting practices on language achievement measures in sla (marsden & plonsky, 2018). rq2 investigated the direction and magnitude of the relationship between learners’ self-efficacy and their l2 achievement. the mean correlation between these variables was r = .475, and self-efficacy accounted for approximately 22% of the variance in learners’ achievement, signifying a medium effect in sla (plonsky & oswald, 2014). within the context of the positive turn in sla, it is insightful to interpret our result in comparison to meta-analytical findings of other prominent psychological constructs, such as motivation, which has been paradigmatically categorized as playing a positive role in student learning. somewhat surprisingly, al-hoorie’s (2018) recent meta-analysis of the l2 motivational self system and l2 achievement found smaller mean correlations between learners’ l2 achievement and their l2 ideal self (r = .20), ought-to self (r = -.05), and learning experience (r = .17). considering the close relationship between learners’ ideal selves and self-efficacy beliefs (lake, 2013), one might have expected a similar effect size for both variables. instead, finding a larger positive effect for learner beliefs raises questions about the complexity of the relationship between learner beliefs and motivations in the context of l2 achievement. while studies in the positive psychology paradigm in sla have predominantly examined a host of emotional variables (driver, 2021), our findings furthermore highlight the potential of examining the role of cognitive variables and their interaction in student thriving and learning success in future studies. is learning really just believing? a meta-analysis of self-efficacy and achievement in sla 245 it is also helpful to interpret our result in comparison to meta-analytic findings in neighboring disciplines. in psychology, multon and associates (1991) found a more moderate effect of r = .38 (95% ci [.36, .41]) through their metaanalysis of self-efficacy beliefs and general academic outcomes, while huang’s (2016) findings in education regarding the effect of self-efficacy on general achievement goals align more closely with our result (r = .48; 95% ci [.38, .46]). the similarity of huang’s finding raises questions regarding the underlying theoretical assumptions of the self-efficacy and achievement relationship in sla (wyatt, 2018), considering huang’s conceptualization of achievement goals as beliefs about achievement objectives rather than as a measurable performance outcome. put differently, huang’s study examined the relationship between two separate beliefs, rather than between a belief (e.g., self-efficacy) and an outcome (e.g., achievement measure), arguably capturing more accurately bandura’s (1977) theorization of the relationship between self-efficacy and achievement (figure 2). in contrast, most studies in our sample employed self-efficacy definitions by bandura (1986, 1997) but used correlational designs to investigate the link to outcomes, thereby conflating multiple cognitive and behavioral constructs into one variable. therefore, our estimate of the mean effect must be interpreted with caution, as neither the different types of beliefs nor the behaviors of participants were controlled for in the primary studies. learner behavior outcome figure 2 representation of the self-efficacy and achievement relationship (bandura, 1977) rq3 examined the effects of moderating variables. the results of this analysis showed a number of differences in effects sizes with respect to learner characteristics, language, and target skill (e.g., speaking vs. writing). however, considering the overall small sample size of this moderator analysis (n = 27) and the resulting limited number of studies in each analytical subcategory, caution should be taken when interpreting these findings. perhaps most notable were the findings for l2 proficiency, which showed strongest effects for advanced students and weakest for beginners. for self-efficacy to positively impact l2 achievement, learners must not only believe in their abilities, but these beliefs must also have a direct effect on how learners engage with a task, that is, through increased levels of attention and awareness, implementation of task-appropriate learning strategies, or stronger feelings of l2 grit, self-efficacy beliefs outcome beliefs julia goetze, meagan driver 246 all of which have been seen to result in better learning outcomes (e.g., teimouri et al., 2020). higher proficiency learners likely have more experience with how positive beliefs can motivate learning processes that lead to greater l2 achievement, as well as the linguistic resources to bridge the gap between simply believing in the ability to complete a task and actually successfully accomplishing the task. results also revealed differences across learners’ l1, which may be related to questions around l2 accessibility and the relative “prestige” and utility of the l1 in global settings. self-efficacy effects were strongest for l1 thai speakers and weakest for l1 japanese speakers. given the value of japanese in the worldwide business market and the socioeconomic developments in japan (terasawa, 2017) that have increased access to the l2 (i.e., english), l1 japanese speakers may be motivated by factors other than self-efficacy and have less urgency to meet achievement objectives than other l1 speakers. in contrast, l1 thai speakers encounter fewer opportunities and encouragement to use l2 english in thailand (anyadubalu, 2010) but, at the same time, may also be more dependent on an l2 in order to enter into global discussions, economics, and business partnerships. thus, some l1 speakers in regions with less access to l2 resources are likely to rely more heavily on their self-efficacy for affecting achievement, which aligns with the relative effects and l1 profiles in our findings (e.g., arabic; aljaffery, 2015). similarly, given the “prestige” of english as a global language, l1 english speakers may also receive less support for learning an l2 and rely more heavily on their own self-beliefs for realizing l2 achievement goals. in addition, we found slightly weaker effects for l2 learners of english than for non-english languages, which strengthens our argument. l2 learners of english likely find primary motivations (e.g., ought-to l2 self; ushioda & dörnyei, 2011) from outside sources based on the global instrumentality of the english language. in contrast, learners of other languages likely see fewer motivations and obligations from their society to learn the l2, resulting in a stronger connection between self-efficacy and achievement. interestingly, results also indicated weaker effects for learners’ beliefs about their l2 vocabulary knowledge than general or skill-specific self-efficacy (e.g., reading, writing, or speaking), suggesting that learners’ beliefs in their ability to complete open-ended rather than narrowly focused tasks (i.e., on vocabulary or grammar) may have a greater impact on achievement. the strongest effect was found for speaking self-efficacy. because speaking requires learners to produce language without the opportunity to review and revise before the final product (as is the case with both reading and writing), self-efficacy in this area suggests that learners have a strong belief in their ability to spontaneously and accurately organize and communicate their thoughts. thus, speaking selfefficacy may encompass self-beliefs in a wider number of task-related abilities, leading to stronger effects for ultimate l2 achievement. is learning really just believing? a meta-analysis of self-efficacy and achievement in sla 247 finally, the positive effects of self-efficacy were uniform in relation to language tests and course grades, which suggests both as acceptable metrics of achievement in this domain. however, the much larger effect for gpa raises concerns about the weak ecological validity of gpa as a measure of achievement. still, the subsample for this moderator was small and this finding should be taken with caution. other moderators revealed either no differences (i.e., institutional context) or no clear variation patterns (i.e., age). though a smaller effect size was seen for the 16-year-old age group, the self-efficacy-achievement connection for 15-year-olds was similar to the average effect size for collegeaged learners (i.e., ages 18-21), and, due to underreporting of this learner characteristic, it is not clear if studies explored other age groups within the secondary or primary school context. the question whether or not the effects of l2 selfefficacy may be more beneficial for adults in comparison to younger learners, or perhaps for contextually younger students compared to older students, who tend to be closer to a graduation and perhaps reap fewer benefits of believing in their abilities, will require more research exploring a wider range of age groups, as well as robust reporting practices. 7. limitations, directions for further research, and pedagogical implications some important limitations need to be considered when interpreting the findings of our study. first, small subsamples in our moderator analysis can only provide scant evidence for the role that our selected variables play in the systematic variation of the effect size. second, we did not include unpublished studies or those published in languages other than english in our final sample, which may have introduced multiple biases into our analysis that possibly resulted in an overestimation of the strength of the observed relationship (cooper, 2016). lastly, we also excluded two studies that implemented advanced statistical methods, such as βcoefficients in structural equation modeling (sem) to report on the relationship for self-efficacy and achievement. as a result, we are not able to provide evidence for existing trends or effect size variation for different analytical approaches. we encourage future studies to carefully examine the theoretical underpinnings of the self-efficacy and achievement relationship. bandura’s (1986) frequently used definition distinguishes self-efficacy beliefs from beliefs about outcomes, which some scholars have defined as self-confidence (e.g., karademas, 2006), thereby adding not only a behavioral, but also an emotional component to the theoretical conceptualization of the relationship. the use of conceptual frameworks that allow for the holistic examination of self-efficacy in relation to other psychological dimensions, such as emotions, behaviors, and motivations, simultaneously within cultural, societal, and institutional contexts (e.g., ushioda, julia goetze, meagan driver 248 2014) would move future studies away from cross-sectional bivariate analyses of variables toward system modeling that is able to capture variable change over time. the moderator analysis also revealed the need for research with populations learning other second or foreign languages than english and with k-12 learners. additionally, our findings suggest that sla would benefit from future studies that focus specifically on skill-specific self-efficacy beliefs. lastly, we recommend more rigorous reporting practices in line with field-specific standards and reaffirm calls to improve the reporting of statistical and psychometric features of measurement tools, especially for l2 achievement. in terms of fl pedagogy, the findings suggest that increased self-efficacy in the target language is beneficial for language learning, regardless of age or context. given this positive relationship, educators might consider using methods that have been shown to promote self-efficacy, such as the flipped classroom model (namaziandost & çakmak, 2020), and project-based learning (shin, 2018). both of these methods have shown positive effects on learners’ self-efficacy and motivation, and may have a positive influence on their future achievement objectives. educators should consider preparing classroom activities, particularly relating to speaking, that feed into students’ self-efficacy and nurture students’ beliefs about their abilities to complete tasks in the l2, which will depend on learners’ experiences with the language and their existing knowledge and skills. as our findings suggest, practitioners may find that materials designed to raise l2 self-efficacy are particularly beneficial for students at higher l2 levels. importantly, the methods used in a majority of studies in our sample were not intended to replicate the classroom learning experience, and pedagogical implications should be considered with other well-founded pedagogical methods from sla. 8. conclusion the goal of this meta-analysis was to systematically examine the relationship between l2 self-efficacy and achievement. the findings indicate that self-efficacy has a medium-sized, positive relationship with l2 achievement, and suggest that learning success may indeed be a question of believing in one’s abilities during the learning process. furthermore, the findings raise important questions about the theoretical nature of self-efficacy and the role of learner characteristics and contexts, and highlight the need for greater methodological rigor, all of which can serve as starting points for forthcoming empirical research into self-efficacy and achievement in the field of sla, particularly within the framework of positive psychology. is learning really just believing? a meta-analysis of self-efficacy and achievement in sla 249 references1 abdallah, m., & mansour, m. m. 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(2021). learning chinese as a second language in china: positive emotions and enjoyment. system, 96, 102410. https://doi.org/10. 1016/j.system.2020.102410 julia goetze, meagan driver 258 appendix a descriptions of variables used in the coding scheme (adapted from teimouri et al., 2019) variable description bibliographic information author(s) name(s) of researchers who conducted and published the study publication year year in which the study was published publication title title of the article or chapter publication venue title of the journal or volume in which the study was published participant sample sample size number of participants age average age or age range of participants nationality nationality of participants l1 l1 of participants target language language of interest for self-efficacy and achievement measures academic level educational level (elementary, middle, or high school, university, language institute, tutoring/private lessons) of participants proficiency level proficiency level (beginner, intermediate, advanced, multiple) of participants language learning experience average number of months/years of experience that participants had with learning the language study design design experimental or observational methodology quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods context target language context (l2, fl, heritage, combined l2/fl, study abroad) setting setting in which the research took place (classroom, lab, combined classroom/lab, computeror mobile-assisted learning, distance learning) country country in which the research took place self-efficacy instrument terminology terminology used to refer to self-efficacy (e.g., l2 self-efficacy) type general or skill-specific definition definition used for self-efficacy and whether the definition was adapted from previous work or newly-formulated variable role dependent or independent variable, or not applicable instrument type whether the instrument was adapted from previous work or newly-developed; if adapted, original publication from which the instrument was adapted n of items number of items in the instrument items type whether or not the instrument was a likert-scale questionnaire and, if so, the range of the likert scale mean reported mean for the self-efficacy measure standard deviation standard deviation for the self-efficacy measure reliability whether or not a reliability measure was reported reliability index reported reliability index (e.g., cronbach’s alpha) reliability estimate observed reliability coefficient l2 achievement instrument type type of achievement measure (e.g., language test, course grade, self-perceived competence, gpa) mean reported mean for the achievement measure standard deviation standard deviation for the achievement measure reliability whether or not a reliability measure was reported reliability index reported reliability index (e.g., cronbach’s alpha) reliability estimate observed reliability coefficient results type of analysis type of analysis run between self-efficacy and l2 achievement (e.g., pearson correlation, regression) effect size (r) observed correlation between self-efficacy and l2 achievement is learning really just believing? a meta-analysis of self-efficacy and achievement in sla 259 appendix b effect sizes in the studies under review primary study n m 95% ci lower upper alrabai (2018) 221 .549* .450 .635 asakereh & dehghannezhad (2015) 100 .560* .409 .681 bai et al. (2019) 1092 .530* .486 .571 balci (2017) 78 .440* .241 .603 chao et al. (2019) 1092 .470* .422 .515 fukuda (2018) 97 .304** .111 .475 hetthong & teo (2013) 51 .712* .543 .826 hsieh (2008) 249 .590* .503 .666 hsieh & kang (2010) 192 .468* .350 .572 hsieh & schallert (2008) 500 .530* .464 .590 jee (2015) 92 .272** .071 .452 khodadad & kaur (2016) 240 .423* .313 .522 kitikanan & sasimonton (2017) 32 .615* .339 .794 ma et al. (2018) 11,036 .472* .457 .486 mccollum (2003) 128 .530* .393 .644 mizumoto (2013) 303 .570* .489 .641 al khamisi et al. (2016) – study 1 260 .541* .449 .622 al khamisi et al. (2016) – study 2 376 .518* .440 .588 raoofi & maroofi (2017) 304 .530* .444 .606 shah et al. (2011) 120 .563* .427 .674 shang (2010) 53 .530* .303 .700 templin (1999) 74 .310** .088 .503 wang et al. (2012) – study 1 474 .380* .300 .455 wang et al. – study 3 476 .360* .279 .436 woodrow (2011) 738 .430* .369 .487 wu et al. (2013) 120 .330* .160 .481 weighted average*** 18,265 .475* .464 .486 note. * p < .001; ** p < .01; *** weighted means with 95% confidence intervals of final sample (k = 27) studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: marek derenowski (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) language editor: melanie ellis (language teacher training college, zabrze) vol. 5 no. 3 september 2015 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, university of new south wales, sydney) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo) kata csizér (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) robert dekeyser (university of maryland) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) carol griffiths (fatih university, istanbul) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) sarah mercer (university of graz) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) bonny norton (university of british columbia) terrence odlin (ohio state university) rebecca oxford (university of maryland) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (university of pannonia, trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto) elaine tarone (university of minnesota) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2015 editor: mirosław pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak marek derenowski anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · infobaseindex · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the thomson reuters master journal list. special issue: psychology in language learning 2 guest editors: sarah mercer stephen ryan studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 5, number 3, semptember 2015 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors ....................................................................363 editorial .........................................................................................367 articles: rebecca l. oxford – emotion as the amplifier and the primary motive: some theories of emotion with relevance to language learning .... 371 anne chateau, peggy candas – tracking students’ autonomization through emotion traces in logbooks ............................................... 395 leena karlsson – searching for an english self through writing .......409 virág csillagh – global trends and local realities: lessons about economic benefits, selves and identity from a swiss context ......... 431 joanna rokita-jaśkow – parental visions of their children’s future as a motivator for an early start in a foreign language ...................... 455 carol griffiths, gökhan cansiz – language learning strategies: an holistic view ................................................................................................. 473 book reviews ................................................................................. 495 notes to contributors .....................................................................501 363 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors coeditors sarah mercer is professor of foreign language teaching at the university of graz, austria. her research interests include all aspects of the psychology surrounding the foreign language learning experience, focusing in particular on issues of self and identity. she is the author, coauthor and coeditor of several books in this area including towards an understanding of language learner self-concept (2011, springer), psychology for language learning (2012, palgrave), multiple perspectives on the self in sla (2014, multilingual matters) and exploring psychology for language teachers (2015, oxford university press). contact data: institute für anglistik, heinrichstr. 36/ii, a8010 graz, austria (sarah.mercer@uni-graz.at) stephen ryan is a professor in the school of economics at senshu university, tokyo, japan. his research covers various aspects of psychology in language learning, with a particular interest in learner motivation, mindsets, and the role of the imagination. his most recent publication is the psychology of the language learner revisited (2015, routledge), coauthored with zoltán dörnyei. contact data: school of economics, senshu university, higashi mita 2-1-1, tama ku, kawasaki shi, kanagawa ken, 214-8580, japan (ryan@isc.senshu-u.ac.jp) contributors peggy candas is a senior lecturer in english for specific purposes at lorraine university, france and teaches to nonspecialist students. she is the director of the lrc department of the ufr lansad (langues pour spécialistes d'autres disciplines) and is a counsellor in its language resource centres. her research at crapel revolves around learner autonomy: its definition via the study of learning trajectories and its development thanks to specific learning systems and tools. 364 contact data: ufr lansad equipe crapel atilf université de lorraine & cnrs (umr 7118), université de lorraine campus lettres et sciences humaines, 23 boulevard albert 1er b.p. 3397 54015 nancy cedex france (peggy.candas@univ-lorraine.fr) gökhan cansiz is a lecturer in the elt department at fatih university, istanbul, turkey. he has a ba in elt and an ma in english language and literature and is now working on a phd in elt. he has taught english to adult learners for 20 years. contact data: fatih üniversitesi, eğitim fakültesi, 34500 büyükçekmece, i̇stanbul, turkey (gokhancansiz@gmail.com) anne chateau has been a senior lecturer in english for specific purposes (esp) at lorraine university, france for more than ten years. she teaches to nonspecialist students and is the director of the newly created ufr lansad (langues pour spécialistes d'autres disciplines, http://www.univ-lorraine.fr/content/ufrlangues-pour-specialistes-dautres-disciplines-lansad). besides esp, her research interests at crapel include autonomy, blended learning systems, the impact of emotions on learning as well as language learning with ict. contact data: ufr lansad equipe crapel atilf université de lorraine & cnrs (umr 7118), université de lorraine campus lettres et sciences humaines, 23 boulevard albert 1er b.p. 3397 54015 nancy cedex france (anne.chateau@univ-lorraine.fr) virág csillagh is a teaching and research assistant at the university of geneva, switzerland where she teaches linguistics and research methodology as part of ma programs and teacher training. her phd research focuses on the dynamics of language learning motivation in the social and economic context of multilingual geneva. her research interests include psycholinguistics, language education policy, learner identity and plurilingualism. contact data: department of english language and literature, university of geneva, 5 rue de candolle, 1211 geneva, switzerland (virag.csillagh@unige.ch) carol griffiths, phd, has been a teacher, manager and teacher trainer of elt for many years. she has taught in many places around the world, including new zealand, indonesia, japan, china, north korea and uk. she currently works as associate professor in the elt department at fatih university, istanbul, turkey. she has presented at numerous conferences and published widely. learner issues, teacher education, and using literature to teach language are her major areas of research interest. contact data: fatih üniversitesi, eğitim fakültesi, 34500 büyükçekmece, i̇stanbul, turkey (carolgriffiths5@gmail.com) 365 leena karlsson is university lecturer in english at the university of helsinki language centre, finland. her research and publications focus on language advising/counselling, learner/teacher autonomy, learner diversity, and narrative inquiry and stories in educational settings. contact data: language centre, vuorikatu 5, 00014 helsinki university, finland (leena.karlsson@helsinki.fi) masako kumazawa, edd, is an associate professor at the college of cornerstone education at j. f. oberlin university, tokyo, japan. her primary research interests are in the psychology of language teachers including teacher motivation, teacher identity, and teacher development. she is also interested in the use of qualitative methods for language education research. contact data: j. f. oberlin university, college of cornerstone education, 3758 tokiwa-machi, machida-shi, tokyo 194-0294 japan (kumazawa@obirin.ac.jp) rebecca l. oxford is professor emerita and distinguished scholar-teacher, university of maryland, usa and is currently an adjunct professor of psychology and language teaching at two branches of the university of alabama, usa. she has published more than 250 articles and chapters; published a dozen books; and edited or coedited six journal special issues. she is currently coediting two book series, “transforming education for the future” (lin and oxford for information age publishing) and “spirituality, religion, and education” (lin, oxford, edwards, and brantmeier for palgrave macmillan). additionally, she has coedited a language textbook series, “tapestry” (heinle), which consists of separate subseries for many parts of the world. she received a lifetime achievement award for research and has presented keynote addresses in 42 countries. she holds two degrees in russian and two in educational psychology. contact data: 7608 saxon dr. sw, huntsville, al 35802, usa (rebeccaoxford@gmail.com) joanna rokita-jaśkow is associate professor in the department of english studies, pedagogical university of cracow, poland. her main research interests concern psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic processes of child foreign and second language acquisition. she has recently published a monograph, foreign language learning at pre-primary level: parental aspirations and educational practice (2013, pedagogical university press) and several other articles on related issues. contact data: department of english studies, pedagogical university of cracow, ul. podchorążych 2, 30-084 kraków, poland (jrokita@up.krakow.pl) studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (pedagogical university of kraków, poland) vol. 9 no. 3 september 2019 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) maria dakowska (university of warsaw, poland) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2019 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: jakub bielak mariusz kruk aleksandra wach © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: jakub bielak, melanie ellis, mariusz kruk, aleksandra wach cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · scopus · web of science emerging sources citation index (esci) · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the clarivate analytics (formerly thomson reuters) master journal list. special issue: border crossing in language education guest editors: anita lämmerer sarah mercer studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 9, number 3, september 2019 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ....................................................................443 editorial .........................................................................................447 articles: kashmir kaur – crossing borders . . . shifting sands: an investigation of chinese students’ study experiences in the uk and china............... 451 harumi kimura, brenda hayashi – identity development through study abroad experiences: storied accounts .................................................. 473 gianna hessel – the role of international student interactions in english as a lingua franca in l2 acquisition, l2 motivational development and intercultural learning during study abroad ..................................... 495 christiane lütge, thorsten merse, claudia owczarek, michelle stannard – crossovers: digitalization and literature in foreign language education .......519 pia resnik, christine schallmoser – enjoyment as a key to success? links between e-tandem language learning and tertiary students’ foreign language enjoyment ........................................................................ 541 notes to contributors .....................................................................565 443 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors guest editors anita lämmerer is a teaching and research assistant at the department of english studies at the university of graz, austria, where she teaches clil methodology as part of the teacher-training program. she also works as an efl teacher at a secondary school. she initiated and coordinates a school-university partnership program and pursues her phd focusing on clil teacher education and aspects of teacher psychology. her main research interests include teacher education, clil and the psychology of language teaching. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8128-0419 contact details: elt research and methodology section, department of english studies, university of graz, heinrichstraße 36, 8010 graz, austria (anita.laemmerer@uni-graz.at) sarah mercer is the head of the elt research and methodology unit at the university of graz. she is interested in all aspects of language learning psychology, in particular self-related constructs, well-being and mindsets. in her research, she prefers to employ qualitatively-oriented approaches. currently, she is engaged in considering aspects of language learner psychology through a complexity lens and exploring a diverse range of methodological approaches for this purpose. she has authored, co-authored and co-edited several books in the area of language learning psychology. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2558-8149 contact details: elt research and methodology section, department of english studies, university of graz, heinrichstraße 36, 8010 graz, austria (sarah.mercer@uni-graz.at) 444 contributors brenda hayashi teaches at miyagi gakuin women’s university, sendai, japan. she has studied at ucla and macquarie university. her academic interests include intercultural communication issues (english and japanese), cognitive linguistics, and english language education. she coauthored a book entitled learn the basics of teaching english as a foreign language (2015, shohakusha). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8008-2514 contact details: miyagi gakuin women’s university, 9-1-1 sakuragaoka, aobaku, sendai, japan 981-8557 (bhayashi@mgu.ac.jp) gianna hessel completed her post-graduate and doctoral degrees in applied linguistics and second language acquisition at the department of education, university of oxford, england. she is now a postdoctoral-research fellow at the english language teaching research and methodology section at the university of graz, austria, where she currently conducts research on student learning and development during the post-return phase of study abroad. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5228-9577 contact details: elt research and methodology section, department of english studies, university of graz, heinrichstraße 36, 8010 graz, austria (gianna.hessel@uni-graz.at) kashmir kaur is a lecturer in english for academic purposes at the university of leeds, uk, where she teaches both undergraduate and postgraduate students. her scholarship interests intersect student identity, engagement and internationalization. this includes critical eap, audio formative feedback, digital literacies and selfdirected learning. she is also involved in developing and delivering modules on sustainability, which include the united nations 2030 sustainable development goals. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2152-7931 contact details: school of languages, cultures and societies, university of leeds, parkinson building, leeds ls2 9jt, united kingdom (k.kaur@leeds.ac.uk) harumi kimura teaches at miyagi gakuin women’s university, sendai, japan. she earned her doctorate from temple university. she studied l2 listening anxiety in her doctoral research and her academic interests include second language acquisition, learner development, learner psychology, multilingualism, and cooperative learning. she coauthored a book with dr. g. m. jacobs, cooperative learning and teaching (the english language teacher development series; 2013, tesol press). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5671-1854 445 contact details: miyagi gakuin women’s university, 9-1-1 sakuragaoka, aobaku, sendai, japan 981-8557 (kharumi@mgu.ac.jp) christiane lütge holds the chair for teaching english as a foreign language at the ludwig-maximilians-universität (lmu), munich, germany. previously she was professor of foreign language education at the universities of münster, mainz and hildesheim. her main research interests include digital literacy and literary learning, children’s literature in foreign language education, transcultural learning and global education, media and film literacy as well as standards and competences in foreign language learning. she is co-editor of an international peerreviewed online journal, the clelejournal on children’s literature, and co-editor of the journal praxis fremdsprachenunterricht. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5182-9992 contact details: university of munich, lmu, schellingstr. 3, 80799 munich, germany (luetge@anglistik.uni-muenchen.de) thorsten merse is a postdoc researcher in the field of teaching english as a foreign language (tefl) at the ludwig-maximilians-universität (lmu), munich, germany. from 2011 to 2016, he taught and researched at the university of münster. in his phd project titled other others, different differences: queer perspectives on teaching english as a foreign language, he has researched conceptual renegotiations of cultural and literary learning from the perspective of queer theory and the resulting implications for the teaching practice in tefl classrooms. his other research and teaching interests include diversity pedagogy and critical theory, gender-informed approaches to tefl, media education and global learning. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0774-1672 contact details: university of munich, lmu, schellingstr. 3, 80799 munich, germany (t.merse@anglistik.uni-muenchen.de) claudia owczarek studied at the university of göttingen and the paris-sorbonne university. she holds a master’s degree in teaching english as a foreign language (tefl), in teaching french as a foreign language and in philosophy. in september 2016, claudia owczarek joined the chair of tefl at the ludwig-maximilians-universität (lmu), munich, germany as a doctoral research associate. in her phd project, she researches the role of teacher beliefs and practices with regard to multimodal literature in the foreign language classroom. her further research interests include digital learning and the use of literature in the english classroom. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3603-0637 446 contact details: university of munich, lmu, schellingstr. 3, 80799 munich, germany (owczarek@anglistik.uni-muenchen.de) pia resnik is professor in elt research and methodology at the university college of teacher education, vienna/krems, austria and teaches courses in linguistics and language competence at the english department of the university of vienna. her research interests include all aspects surrounding lx users of english, with a particular focus on emotions in multilingual contexts. she is the author of the book multilinguals’ verbalization and perception of emotions (2018, multilingual matters). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0948-9546 contact details: university college of teacher education, mayerweckstrasse 1kph vienna 1210, austria (pia.resnik@kphvie.ac.at) christine schallmoser is a lecturer in german language education and language coordinator in the german department at king’s college london, uk where she develops, manages and teaches language modules across all levels, with a focus on culture, linguistics and politics. her research interest lies in foreign language acquisition and learning, with a particular focus on learner autonomy, motivation and emotions in foreign language learning. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7745-9133 contact details: king’s college london, university of london, strand, london wc2r 2ls, united kingdom (christine.schallmoser@kcl.ac.uk) michelle stannard is a doctoral research associate in teaching english as a foreign language (tefl) at the ludwig-maximilians-universität (lmu), munich, germany. her research centres around facets of digital culture in foreign language education, particularly as regards narrative media and digital games. originally from canada, she holds degrees from the university of alberta in edmonton as well as the lmu. before joining the tefl research team, she worked for several years as an english teacher in the private sector. additional research interests include (critical) media literacies, mobile learning, and cultural/textual approaches in language education. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0036-6937 contact details: university of munich, lmu, schellingstr. 3, 80799 munich, germany (stannard@anglistik.uni-muenchen.de) 159 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (2). 159-160 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial the present issue of studies in second language learning and teaching brings together six papers, all of which report the findings of original research related to different aspects of learning and teaching foreign languages. in the first contribution, sarah mercer discusses the value of language learner histories for teachers, learners themselves and researchers as well as demonstrating the potential of such learner-generated narratives basing on the data obtained from first year university students in austria attending a general english course. in the next paper, thomas lockley reports the results of a study which tapped the relationship between speaking self-perceived communication competence and actual speaking proficiency over the course of an academic year in the case of university level japanese learners of english, illuminates factors that might be responsible for the inaccuracy of the participants’ selfevaluation and offers guidelines on how such self-assessment could be improved. subsequently, parisa abdolrezapour, mansoor tavakoli and saeed ketabi make an attempt to introduce changes to iranian learners’ emotional intelligence through the application of what is referred to as emotionalized dynamic assessment and provide evidence that such an intervention results in an increase in reading comprehension ability as well as the growth of emotional intelligence as such. in the next paper, emphasis is shifted to the use of communication strategies, with stuart benson, danielle fischer, joe geluso and lucius von joo showing that training japanese university level students in the use of clarifying/confirming and extending a conversation led to more frequent reliance on such strategies but failed to produce an increase in conversation skills, a finding that is attributed to the specificity of the educational context in which the study was conducted. the last two contributions to this issue are devoted to empirical investigations of the use of target language subsystems. first, mahmoud s. al mahmoud reports the findings of a study which explored american learners’ ability to discriminate consonant contrasts 160 in arabic, providing partial support for best’s (1995) perceptual assimilation model. second, monica karlsson examines quantitative and qualitative aspects of the comprehension of idioms in the mother tongue (swedish) and a second language (english), offering evidence that the frequency of occurrence of idiomatic expressions in the input is less important that the degree of transparency or the context in which a particular idiomatic phrase is used. i believe that all of these papers will be of interest to wide audiences and provide inspiration for future research endeavors in the learning and teaching of second and foreign languages in a variety of contexts. miros aw pawlak adam mickiewicz university, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references best, c. t. (1995). a direct realist view on cross-language speech perception. in w. strange (ed.), speech perception and linguistic experience (pp. 171204). timonium, md: york. 137 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (1). 137-141 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book review sally meets harry: practical primer to english pronunciation and spelling author: marta nowacka, piotr cymbalista and grzegorz a. kleparski publisher: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu rzeszowskiego isbn: 978-837-33867-3-0 pages: 208 ’how much wood would a woodchuck chuck?’ english pronunciation practice book author: anna ma kowska, marta nowacka and magdalena k oczowska publisher: konsorcjum akademickie isbn: 978-839-28763-2-8 pages: 200 138 a comparative review of two english pronunciation workbooks the books under consideration in the present review were written by two teams of university researchers involved in teaching english phonetics. as practising phoneticians, all the authors have the intention of improving the teaching-learning process in the field of english pronunciation. both workbooks are addressed to english philology students, who are relatively unfamiliar with the rudiments of english phonetics, and intermediate secondary school pupils, as well as to all those willing to learn english. the specific arrangement of the material in how much wood . . . imposes some restrictions on potential readership: the intended students are polish learners, since polish commentary is used, and english-polish glossary of phonetic terms is introduced. emphasizing the areas of english phonetics which are of interest to polish learners and removing from the book sounds considered to be either identical or almost identical with regard to the place of articulation in polish and english determines its purpose even more narrowly. the sounds which were omitted for their similarity in how much wood . . . are: (a) fricatives: /f/, /v/, /h/, / /, / /, (b) affricates: /t /, /d /, (c) nasals: /m/, /n/, and (d) semivowels: /w/, /j/. taking into consideration the fact that common pronunciation difficulties will differ depending on the learner’s native language, it has to be noted that polish learners of english encounter different pronunciation problems than, for example, german or spanish students. in this respect, how much wood . . . constitutes an excellent supplement to english phonetics for poles by sobkowiak (1996). depicting common english pronunciation problems for poles, english phonetics for poles is a resource book which gives polish learners of english a possibility to compare and practise sounds that entail articulation difficulties. it includes examples which emphasise the problems, for example: “confronted with such words as food and foot, polish learners tend to pronounce them identically, with polish /u/ and a completely devoiced /d/” (sobkowiak, 1996, p. 123). in how much wood . . . the learners can practice /u/ and /u:/ in minimal pairs (p. 70), and /d/ as a partly devoiced /d / (p. 138) or in minimal pairs to see the difference between a voiced /d/ and a voiceless /t/ (p. 141). another english phonetic aspect which causes problems for poles is connected speech. according to sobkowiak (1996), “[a]ssimilations, deletions and simplifications of all kinds make natural connected speech blurred to the extent where it ceases to be readily decodable by nonnative listeners. . . . in confrontation with connected speech the model of pronunciation acquired in english lessons turns out to be hopelessly inadequate . . . it should be clear that no theoretical exposition can replace actual practice, both in listening and speaking” (p. 235). how much wood . . . 139 enables practice of this kind through exercises with selected speech processes, including, among others, assimilation and elision. sally meets harry . . . can be used as a phonetic workbook by students of english of any nationality. its main asset is the fact that it gives them the opportunity to practise all the english monophthongs. additionally, the book is accompanied by a list of phonetic symbols and diacritics and a dictionary of phonetic terms explained in english. sally meets harry . . . and how much wood . . . contain a collection of english language phonetic exercises which are divided into three main parts: the first is devoted to vowels, the second to consonants, and the third to suprasegmental phonetics, within which the first of the practice books takes into account only the weak forms with the highest frequency of use, and the second is extended by stress shift, assimilation and elision. both books contain eight units consisting of exercises practising english diphthongs: /e /, /a /, / /, /au/, / u/, / /, /e / and /u /, but only how much wood . . . additionally offers one unit tackling the triphthongs: /a /, /e / and /au /. apart from the exclusion of the sounds mentioned above, there are some differences in the organization of the units. for example, in sally meets harry . . . short and long vowels are dealt with in two separate subunits, while in how much wood . . . they appear alternately, which actually does not interfere with the convenience of use in either case. however, the tasks within the units are organized in a very similar way in both books. each subsection starts with a short description of the sound practised in it. the description consists of information concerning the articulation of the sound. in the case of vowels, the information in sally meets harry . . . relates to their height, backness, roundness and length. a subsection connected with /u:/, for example, is provided with the following description: close, back, round, long vowel. in how much wood . . . the description of the sound is devoid of the category of length, and roundness is expressed in a more descriptive way; instead of the term round there is a description of how to shape one’s mouth: “lips rounded”. consonantal features are characterized in the same way in both books, containing the following information: the place of articulation, voicing value and the manner of articulation. for example, the subsection including / / has the following description: velar, voiced, plosive. the features of diphthongs are characterized with regard to the process of articulation; for example, a subsection practising /u / has the following description: centring diphthong. although the tasks are organized in a very similar way in both workbooks, they differ in number and regularity. in sally meets harry . . . each chapter includes systematic exercises focusing on each sound according to a sequenced arrangement of tasks. the first exercise consists of isolated words grouped in the alphabetical order according to the way they are spelt. in the 140 second, the target sound appears in utterances, and in the third the target sound can be found in short poems and limericks, on both primary and secondary level, composed in such a way that the sound occurs with higher frequency. in how much wood . . . each unit providing a separate sound consists of 5 to 11 exercises of various sorts: alternation between isolated words, proverbs, sentences, rhymes and limericks selected according to the frequency of occurrence of the target sound. the distinct graphical representations add extra clarity to the exercises in sally . . . interesting is the authors’ idea of giving the subsections the titles in the form of names in which the sound practised in a given subsection occurs. for example, cindy & philip /,s ndi n’f p/ (p. 11) is the title of a section in which the sound / / is practised. these distinctions do not appear in the other book, but for a change, the animal names represent the practised sounds and become the unit names (accompanied by funny illustrations of these animals); for example, / / squirrel /’skw l/ (p. 31). in both cases, a lot of importance is attached to diversifying the tasks. the variety of tasks, including minimal pairs, correcting mistakes and the selection of poems and limericks in sally meets harry . . . and proper names, proverbs, sentences, rhymes and limericks for repetitions, minimal pairs, deceptive spelling, clipping and tongue twisters in how much wood . . . prevents monotony. in how much wood . . . the vast majority of exercises contain phonetic transcription of words and sentences for practice, while in sally meets harry . . . exercises involving matching the transcribed sequences to their graphical records or matching the sounds (phonetic symbols) to the letters highlighted in the words appear only in the revision and self-test units. in this book there are five revision chapters and seven self-tests with answer keys, which facilitates self-guided control of the acquired knowledge. it should be pointed out that how much wood . . . does not possess such sections at all. out of concern for satisfying the learners’ needs, the authors prepared cd recordings of the exercises. a cd is attached to sally meets harry . . . which contains 207 mp3 files comprising the sound and revision units exercises and most exercises from the self-test units (apart from those requiring reading the sentences and poems from phonetic transcription and writing them) as well as phonic realization of the phonetic symbols. the recordings are made by native speakers and they last 8 hours and 19 minutes including the time needed for repetitions of particular words and phrases. thanks to its design, the cd can be used both during classroom activities and for the purpose of self-practice. how much wood . . . is accompanied by 4 cds, which contain 311 mp3 recordings of exercises included in the book. however, what deserves special attention is the fact that, although it comprises 104 more recordings than the other workbook 141 reviewed here, the length of the cds’ soundtrack is significantly shorter in how much wood . . . : it is only 3 hours long (cd a consists of 94 elements and lasts 56 minutes, cd b 93 elements lasting 56 minutes, cd c 62 elements of 26 minutes recording, and cd d with 67 elements lasting 42 minutes). this results from the method used to record the exercises on the cds. the authors decided not to leave time for repetitions, even where needed, after words and utterances for practice. to be used in the classroom, the activities will thus require additional manipulations involving pausing after each word or pair of words, or sentences, which diminishes the convenience of their use. the two workbooks are remarkable primers. apart from a short description of sounds at the beginning of each subsection and the glossary of the phonetic terms, they are devoid of theoretical explanations, which makes them useful for pronunciation practice at different levels of efl proficiency. the critical remark connected with the recording of the cds is not meant to undermine the great value of how much wood . . . as it is still a valuable resource book of english phonetic exercises. references: sobkowiak, w. (1996). english phonetics for poles. pozna : wydawnictwo bene nati. reviewed by agnieszka szefer adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland agnieszka-szefer@wp.pl 103 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (1). 2021. 103-131 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.1.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the gender factor in the perception of english segments by non-native speakers agnieszka bryła-cruz maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3256-3185 agnieszka.bryla@poczta.umcs.lublin.pl abstract the aim of the paper is to present the findings of an empirical study which contributes to the ongoing research into gender effects on second language acquisition by exploring a biological influence on l2 pronunciation learning. one of the most frequent arguments used to vindicate single-sex education is that there are substantial sensory and perceptual differences between males and females which rationalize gender-specific teaching methods and gendersegregation at schools. the present study provides some preliminary insights into the perception of selected phonetic contrasts by polish secondary school learners with the aim of investigating gender-based similarities and differences in the accuracy of sound recognition by males and females. the findings suggest that a commonly cited female advantage in acquiring l2 pronunciation cannot be attributed to their superior phonetic perception, as male participants performed equally well and identified the same number of english segments correctly. keywords: gender; sex; perception; single-sex education; foreign language learning; pronunciation agnieszka bryła-cruz 104 1. introduction the gender1 factor in foreign language learning (hence fll) has been explored extensively over the past few decades. previous research has discussed series of neurological, cognitive, and entwined individual differences, such as language aptitude, learning strategies (gass & varonis, 1986; green & oxford, 1995; oxford & nyikos, 1989), personality (nyikos, 1990), attitude (field, 2000), motivation (dörnyei et al., 2006; mori & gobel, 2006; sung & padilla, 1998; williams et al., 2002) and long-term attainment (główka, 2014; michońska-stadnik, 2004; murphy, 2010), which may operate differently for men and women. one of the most relevant findings is the acknowledgement of the interaction of gender with other social factors, such as ethnicity, identity and social class (ellis, 1994), which, in their turn, have an impact on the above personal factors relevant for fll. hansen edwards (2008, p. 255) concludes that when gender is framed and investigated as a social and not merely biological construct, “it does appear to impact the level of access learners have to l2 use opportunities and therefore the ability to get l2 input and negotiate meaning, which appear to affect l2 development.” such realizations have triggered a shift from biological essentialism to social constructivism, for example differences in foreign language performance are no longer attributed only to inherent and fixed biological qualities of the two sexes, but they are viewed as shaped by gendered social activities and culture-specific language ideologies (ehrlich, 1997; pavlenko & piller, 2008). while the socio-constructivist approach provides a more in-depth understanding and explanation of individual variation in language achievement even within the same gender group depending on the context, the essentialist approach should not be abandoned, as many educators still refer to “brain-based” learning to emphasize the brain and hormonal (testosterone and estrogen in particular) effects on cognitive development (crossland, 2008; liben, 2015). one of the most frequent arguments to vindicate single-sex education is that there are substantial sensory and perceptual differences between males and females which rationalize gender-specific teaching methods and gender-segregation at schools (holthouse, 2010). irrespective of a large body of research, and despite the fact that ample evidence points to a female advantage in mastering pronunciation (lower degree of foreign accent reported in diaz-campos, 2004; moyer, 2010, as cited in moyer, 2016; tahta et al., 1981; thompson, 1991; better oral fluency in a study on chinese immigrants by jiang et al., 2009), “gender has received scant attention in 1 in this paper, sex (biological category) and gender (social or cognitive construct) are used interchangeably to refer to both biological and cultural aspects of sex. the gender factor in the perception of english segments by non-native speakers 105 l2 phonology studies” (moyer, 2016, p. 8). therefore, it is still not fully understood to what extent the existing differences between the two sexes should be attributed to anatomical and functional properties of the brain or whether they pertain to socially conditioned factors (or both). the present empirical study contributes to the ongoing research into gender effects on second language acquisition by exploring a biological influence (including differences in the auditory system and phonological processing) on l2 pronunciation learning. it provides some preliminary insights into the perception of selected phonetic contrasts by polish secondary school learners with the aim of investigating gender-based similarities and differences in the accuracy of sound recognition by males and females. the rationale for undertaking the study is twofold. firstly, there is a body of evidence that men and women differ with respect to the properties of their auditory systems and phonological processing (krizman et al., 2012; mcfadden, 1998). on the other hand, it has been noted that previous research has been carried out mainly with adults and newborns so there is a need to compare boys’ and girls’ auditory perception in their natural environment, such as the classroom (eliot, 2011). secondly, perception has been found crucial for adequate production in many studies on fll (almbark, 2014; bent 2005; flege 1991, 1995). even though the issue of whether perception precedes production or vice versa is far from settled, the role of perception in pronunciation teaching should not be underestimated and it has often been claimed that the two speech modalities complement each other and should be treated in an integrated way (couper, 2011; escudero, 2009). despite the fact that many researchers have explored the perception of l2 sounds by foreign language learners, including poles (balas, 2018; bogacka, 2004; nowacka, 2008; rojczyk, 2010), gender has not been addressed as a variable. providing data on this issue could, therefore, add to the discussion of whether single-sex education is justified in terms of foreign language pronunciation learning. 2. literature review 2.1. the gender factor in language processing neurolinguistic research points to anatomical and functional differences between male and female brains (ruigrok et al., 2014; sacher et al., 2013; stevens & hamann, 2012). the two cerebral regions, most strongly associated with language processing, broca’s and wernicke’s areas, are 20% and 30% larger in women than in men, respectively (kurth et al., 2017). the human auditory system is also characterized by physiological and psychophysical differences between the two sexes (de lima xavier et al., 2019). on the whole, heads, external agnieszka bryła-cruz 106 ear canals and middle ear volumes are relatively larger in men than in women (bowman et al., 2000; cahill, 2014). females exhibit better hearing sensitivity and have greater susceptibility to noise, while males excel at sound localization and signal detection in complex masking tasks (mcfadden, 1998; mcfadden et al., 2009). some studies report that sex-based differences in processing auditory cues during speech production and the prevalence of speech and developmental phonological disorders in the male population (keating et al., 2001; corazzi et al., 2020) may be associated with structural brain differences between the two sexes, that is greater cortical thickness in left heschl’s gyrus in females than males (de lima xavier et al., 2019). also, men display greater hearing loss related to age (pedersen et al., 1989). using non-invasive methods such as functional magnetic resonance imagery (fmri), it is possible to trace real-time lateralization patterns in speaking and listening tasks. there is neurological and neuropsychological evidence that women rely on both hemispheres in language processing to a greater extent than males do (de lima xavier et al., 2019). left hemisphere dominance of language functions in men has been confirmed in behavioral observations that speech pathologies (stuttering), dyslexia and severe aphasia symptoms are more frequent among males with left hemisphere damage (48% in males vs. 13% in females) (clements et al., 2006; reber & tranel, 2017; voyer & voyer, 2015). less lateralization for language functions in women could (at least in part) explain why they outperform members of the opposite sex in verbal skills (christova et al., 2008; kansaku et al., 2000; obleser et al., 2001; ruigrok et al., 2014). burman et al. (2008) showed sex differences in children (aged 9-15) when performing two linguistic tasks presented in two sensory modalities (visual and auditory). the female participants were found to rely on a broader neural network during processing tasks, while males had a less efficient (sensory rather than abstract) processing mode. shaywitz et al. (1995) also found sex differences in the functional brain organization for language in a study that used echo-planar functional magnetic resonance imaging across three different tasks, that is, orthographic, semantic and phonological (rhyme). during phonological processing, males exhibited leftlateralized brain activity, while in females more widely-distributed neural systems were engaged. the same finding of cerebral laterality emerged in a study which focused on both language (a timed rhyme-matching task) and visuo-spatial processing (clements et al., 2006). the evidence pointed to lateralization differences between the two sexes, that is men were more left lateralized when performing the phonological task, but bilateral in the visuo-spatial task, while female brains showed activity in both hemispheres for phonological processing and were more right lateralized for the visuo-spatial task. the gender differences in the phonological processing capabilities of the right and left hemispheres evident in the abovementioned neuroimaging data the gender factor in the perception of english segments by non-native speakers 107 were put to the test and corroborated in behavioral studies (i.e., using a visual half-field paradigm, a behavioral technique for drawing inferences about hemispheric activity). lindell and lum (2008) conducted two experiments in which phonological activation was measured implicitly (masked homophone priming) and explicitly (rhyme judgements). the pairs of words used in the two experiments differed with respect to spelling pronunciation overlap, that is, they shared 1) high orthographic and phonological similarity (e.g., knot ~ not), 2) high orthographic and low phonological similarity (e.g., pint ~ hint), 3) low orthographic and high phonological similarity (e.g., use ~ ewes) and 4) low orthographic and low phonological similarity (e.g., kind ~ done). the participants were asked to make decisions (word/nonword and rhyme/nonrhyme) with reference to the target words displayed after primes in the right and left visual field of the screen. women had consistently faster response latencies than men and turned out to be less sensitive to visual field stimulation during both implicit and explicit phonological tasks, which implies bilateral phonological processing. males showed left hemisphere dominance especially when asked to differentiate between homophones with low orthographic similarity. the study provided behavioral evidence indicating that, despite the fact that both hemispheres possess the capacity for orthographic analysis, phonological processing is left-lateralized in males but has a more diffuse representation in females (lindell & lum, 2008). this finding is consistent with an earlier behavioral study (coney, 2002) which used rhyme-matching and pseudohomophone tasks. in both, women were unaffected by a lateral presentation of the stimuli, and their phonological processing was more efficient than that of males who relied only on the left hemisphere to activate phonology. since female brains process language bilaterally and because the right hemisphere is considered a primary location for prosodic and emotional decoding (pell & baum, 1997), it has been speculated that women have an advantage over men in interpreting prosody, specifically paralinguistic cues which convey emotions (besson et al., 2002). in a study by schirmer et al. (2002), women outperformed men in identifying emotional prosody, and when processing words they relied on emotional-prosodic contexts more automatically than men. similarly, men showed longer reaction times in a later study by imaizumi et al. (2004). the results suggested that “emotional prosody modulates perceptual word processing” (2004, p. 122) and such modulations may vary between the two genders with women making earlier usage of emotional prosody and men needing more time to integrate linguistic semantics and emotional information. since the activation of the right frontomedian cortex was significantly stronger in the male than in the female participants, it was concluded that men needed to make more conscious inferences about the emotional intent of the speaker. rymarczyk and grabowska (2007) were also interested in whether the ability to understand agnieszka bryła-cruz 108 prosody is influenced by the listener’s gender. they focused on two types of prosodic utterances, that is, affective/emotional and non-affective/linguistic. the results demonstrated that different parts of the right hemisphere were involved depending on different emotional intonations (as opposed to non-affective ones) and the brain organization of prosodic functions varied depending on the listeners’ sex. the anatomical and functional brain differences reported above are usually presented as “hard wiring” (chadwell, 2010, p. 8) and have stimulated a heated and highly politicized debate on sex segregation in education, because it has been argued that “built-in gender differences in hearing have real consequences” (sax, 2005, p. 17) for, among other things, classroom strategies. studies by holthouse (2010) and hughes (2006) confirmed that males prefer direct and competitive teaching methods (with more space and movement that enhance the processing of information), while females obtain better results under a more cooperative and nurturing approach. advocates of single-sex education argue that mixed environments can inhibit females’ academic performance and achievement in maths and science (sax et al., 2009). many authors believe that same-sex schools promote gender equity as well as encourage students to expand their horizons and pursue interests without being constrained by gender stereotypes (james, 2009; salomone, 2003). riordan (2015) reports that recently there has been a resurgence of interest in single-sex schools in modern societies worldwide, both in the public and private sectors, and argues that they are one of the ways of raising the effectiveness of schools. it must be stressed that even though the literature on gender differences in language processing is extensive, there is no consensus as to whether an actual difference exists or not. according to some researchers, sex-based differences are significant only during childhood and manifest themselves in girls’ earlier language acquisition, as well as their better performance on language tests during early education (bauer et al., 2002; lange et al., 2016), but fade away with age (beltz et al., 2013). on the other hand, there are claims that for certain skills, including writing (coley, 2001) and verbal performance, male-female differences are negligible at an early age and only appear during adolescence and early adulthood. it is also important to note that recent meta-analytical reviews have shown that gender differences in verbal abilities cannot be substantiated by evidence and have pointed to “no consistent differences between males and females in language-related cortical regions” (wallentin, 2009, p. 175). a metaanalysis of 24 studies measuring brain lateralization with functional imaging in a large sample of 377 men and 442 women found no significant difference between the two sexes with reference to language functions. this suggests that language lateralization is unlikely to account for sex differences in cognitive performance (sommer et al., 2004). nevertheless, one of the most recent studies the gender factor in the perception of english segments by non-native speakers 109 encompassing 109 participants and using high resolution mri and speech-production fmri provided evidence for the existence of sex-specific structural dimorphisms within the speech production circuitry (de lima xavier et al., 2019). as a result, sex emerged as an important biological variable to be considered in research on neural correlates of speech control. to conclude, females may have a learning benefit as a result of hemispheric integration during language processing and more effective memory strategies relevant to phonology (moyer, 2016). as a result, they may be better equipped to notice fine phonetic and prosodic distinctions, “thereby benefitting perception and/or production of new sounds, and by extension, long term acquisition” (moyer, 2016, p. 23). this statement needs to be tested empirically to vindicate the claim that the oft-reported anatomical and functional differences in male and female brains and auditory systems result in a different perception of non-native sounds. 2.2. l2 sound perception because of its relevance to the successful acquisition of an l2 sound system, the perception of non-native sounds by language learners has been studied within a number of theoretical models. they were developed to explain the patterns whereby l2 speakers perceive and categorize phonological contrasts in a foreign language as well as to account for the difficulties inherent in establishing new phonetic categories. in flege’s (1995) speech learning model (slm), perception is defined as the discrimination of phonetic features in the signal in order to identify phonetic categories stored in long-term memory. the systems of l1 and l2 share a common “phonological space” (1995, p. 242) and already-established l1 phonetic categories act as a point of reference for l2 sounds. the more similar an l2 sound is to that in l1, the higher the probability that “equivalence classification” will prevent the formation of a new category (flege, 2002, p. 224). in such cases a single phonetic category will process perceptually linked l1 and l2 sounds, and merged categories (socalled diaphones), containing input from both languages, will be formed. the perceptual assimilation model (pam; best, 1994), originally based on naïve non-native listeners, was later extended to include foreign language learners (best & tyler, 2007). pam-l2 postulates that non-native phonetic segments are perceptually assimilated to the most articulatorily similar native phonemes, and, rather than relying on mental representations, the listener uses articulatory cues to identify sounds. different assimilation patterns can be detected, that is, single category (sc), category goodness (cg), two category (tc) and uncategorized-categorized (uc) assimilation. sc assimilation takes place when two l2 phones are equally good or poor instances of the same native phoneme and their discrimination and identification is therefore deficient. the situation in which agnieszka bryła-cruz 110 two non-native phones are mapped to the same l1 phonological category with one of them being considered as phonetically more suitable than the other is referred to as cg assimilation and means good discrimination. for the tc and uc assimilation patterns discrimination is predicted to be very good. in the former case two non-native phones are assimilated to two distinct l1 phones and in the latter only one l2 phone is ascribed to an already existing l1 category. according to the more recent linguistic perception model (lp), speech perception is governed by cognitive linguistic (phonological) knowledge (escudero, 2005), which comprises a linguistic and grammatical processor and perceptual representations. in its l2 version (l2lp), the “optimal perception hypothesis” is formulated, according to which the optimal listener will rely on auditory cues that distinctly differentiate the sounds in the production of the l2. it is assumed that learners can form new categories along non-previously categorized dimensions using distributional learning the way it is done in the l1. l2 learners automatically create a copy of the l1 perception grammar and the l1 representations. from the very outset, l2 phones are processed by a separate perceptual system which not only leaves that of the l1 intact, but also evolves with experience. two hypotheses which deserve to be mentioned refer to the acquisition and perception of features not present in the l1. according to the feature hypothesis (fh; mcallister et al., 2002), l2 features not employed in the l1 to signal phonological contrasts will be difficult for l2 users to perceive and, consequently, to produce. contrary to fh, bohn’s (1995) desensitization hypothesis emphasizes the importance of language-independent auditory-based strategies in l2 perception, concluding that “duration cues in vowel perception are easy to access whether or not listeners have had experience with them [in their native language]” (bohn, 1995, p. 294). there is empirical evidence that, instead of relying on spectral properties like native speakers do, l2 learners use and exaggerate durational cues to differentiate between english /i/ and /i:/. this has been reported for mandarin, japanese, spanish, portuguese, catalan, russian and polish, speakers even though none of these languages uses vowel duration contrastively (escudero et al., 2009). several studies have documented that l2 learners need to perceive the differences between l2 sounds and similar l2 or/and l1 sounds before being able to produce them accurately (flege, 1995; underbakke, 1993). grasseger (1991) reported that learners with properly established perceptual categories were also able to articulate l2 sounds properly, suggesting that accurate perception is a pre-requisite for accurate production and that perceptual tests can predict problematic areas in l2 production. moreover, there is empirical evidence that perceptual identification training leads to an improvement in both speech perception and production (bradlow et al., 1999; rochet, 1995; wang et al., 2003). nevertheless, derwing and the gender factor in the perception of english segments by non-native speakers 111 munro (2015) point out that perception does not automatically lead to production; for example, english speakers easily perceive the difference between spanish “trill” and “tap,” but many never succeed at producing the distinction. importantly, studies often demonstrate the opposite, that is, that production may precede perception (kosky & boothroyd, 2003; parsloe, 1998) and also that some learners can produce contrasts between l2 sounds without being able to perceive them accurately; for example, japanese learners were able to maintain a contrast between english /r/ and /l/ in articulation, but failed to distinguish the two phonemes auditorily (smith, 2001). such conflicting results indicate that the relationship between perception and production is complex and a number of individual variables (learners’ age at the point when l2 learning begins, the length of l2 experience, and, notably, listeners’ perception of their own speech) may underlie the development of l2 perception and production (baker & trofimovich, 2006). even though the link between the two modalities has been a matter of dispute, the mechanism of speech perception and production seems to form an integrated system and empirical evidence suggests that practice in one speech dimension benefits the other (gómez lacabex et al., 2005; leather & james, 1991; mcallister, 1997). 3. the study 3.1. aims and research questions the aim of the present experiment is to study the perception of english sounds in its standard southern british english (hence ssbe) variety by polish learners of english in order to investigate whether there exist statistically significant differences between females and males with respect to identifying minimal pairs. because rejecting the null hypothesis is not enough to make more specific judgements about practical significance of the findings (plonsky & oswald, 2014), effect sizes will be calculated and interpreted. i set out to compile a hierarchy of perceptual difficulty for each gender group and compare the accuracy of the identification of selected phonetic contrasts. by doing so, it will be possible to establish whether the gender-based differences in hearing and phonological processing reported in the literature result in actual differences in performance (better perception that can lead to better production), giving an advantage to either males or females. the following research questions are addressed: 1. is there a difference in the perception of segmental contrasts depending on the listeners’ gender? 2. is the hierarchy of perceptual difficulty similar for the two gender groups? agnieszka bryła-cruz 112 regarding the first research question, it is hypothesized that, if there is a difference, female participants will identify properly more segmental contrasts than males (h1). as refers to the second question, the hierarchy of perceptual difficulty is expected to be arranged similarly for the two gender groups and reflect the interplay between their l1 and l2 (h2). it is predicted that the more english vowels are mapped to a given polish vowel, the less adequate their identification, for example, /{/, /v/ and /a:/ are mapped to polish /a/ and, therefore, their identification is more problematic than that of, for example, /e/ and /i/ assimilated to polish /e/ and /i/, respectively. also, contrasts which have a higher functional load and receive more focus during phonetic instruction (e.g., /i/~/i:/, /t/~/t/, /t/~/s/, /z/~/d/) are easier to identify than those of lesser frequency and typically assimilated to one vowel (/q/~/o:/, /u/~/u:/). it needs to be stressed from the outset that our main aim is to compare the accuracy of performance across the two gender groups and not to study the perception of particular contrasts in different phonetic contexts and draw definite conclusions as to which minimal pairs pose difficulty for polish learners and which do not. 3.2. participants eighty polish listeners (40 female and 40 male) participated in the experiment. they were secondary school students, aged 16-18 (mo = 17) and all right-handed. their participation was voluntary and anonymous; they were all drawn from the same school and shared the same english teacher, who administered the questionnaires during one of the lessons. none of them reported any prior history of hearing or speech impairment. the participants were requested to provide some personal data in a brief questionnaire, whereby it is known that at the moment of the study their average learning experience of english ranged from 8 to 14 years (mo = 10.2, sd = 1.1 for females, and mo = 10.5, sd = 1.4 for males). there were no statistically significant differences between the two groups regarding this variable: z = 0.8, p = .4. a large majority of the informants (68%) had never stayed in an english speaking country, the rest (32%) reported short (up to 3 weeks) visits therein. this experience with english abroad did not introduce statistically significant differences between the tested groups (chi2 = 0.952, p = .329). it can, therefore, be concluded that the participants constituted a fairly homogenous group with respect to biographical factors (years of learning and l2 exposure in an english speaking environment). 3.3. procedure and stimuli the participants were administered paper-and-pencil questionnaires (see appendix) and listened to 20 unrelated sentences containing minimal pairs and were the gender factor in the perception of english segments by non-native speakers 113 asked to circle/underline the word they heard. the context and semantics allowed for either of the two in each stimulus, as in, have you seen my cap/cup?, which means that the facilitative potential of the context was played down to the maximum (the context makes sense without being too predictable; the proper decoding of the token is essential for adequate comprehension). each sentence was reproduced twice and was preceded with a question referring to a concrete minimal pair, thus making it explicit to the listeners which part of the sentence they should focus on in each case, that is, cap or cup. all the examples and the audio material were taken from coursebook “english pronunciation in use intermediate” by hancock (2003). they were selected from various units and merged into a list of 20 sentences which contained the phonetic contrasts most problematic to polish learners of english. the preparation of the speech sample was made with the use of an online sound editing tool mp3 cutter joiner. the motivation behind using the coursebook material was to give the respondents a typical task they might be presented with during ear-training sessions in the classroom, as exercises targeting auditory memory are provided in most pronunciation coursebooks. it should be noted that, even though the respondents were familiar with the task of minimal pair identification itself, they had not worked with hancock’s coursebook in the classroom, and, thus, the stimuli used in the experiment were completely novel for them. furthermore, extracting the diagnostic material from one source meant the features of the spoken text remained constant. this refers to the variety used, the speaker’s voice characteristics (male), and the type of the text itself (read out). also, the lexical frequency of the items was, on the whole, controlled, namely all the tokens (with the exception of robin and robbing) were high frequency words, according to the longman vocabulary checker (http://global.long mandictionaries.com/vocabulary_checker). ssbe was used as a point of reference, because it is one of the two main varieties taught in poland and a lot of pedagogical materials used in polish secondary schools keep it as a model. my own analysis of audio materials used for listening comprehension tasks at the national exam for secondary school leavers revealed that the main variety used there was ssbe (bryła-cruz, 2017). before i present the stimuli used in the study, it is worthwhile comparing the sound systems of polish and ssbe to justify the choice of the tokens by indicating the areas of phonetic interference. the two languages do not have the same number of consonants (25 in english compared to 29 in polish). in addition to 11 that are identical in both languages, in a few consonants the place of articulation differs, namely /t, d, s, z, n/ are alveolar in english but (post)dental in polish, /h/ is glottal in english, but velar in polish, and the counterparts of the palato-alveolar english /s/, /z/, /ts/, /dz/ are post-alveolar in polish (/´, à, t´, agnieszka bryła-cruz 114 dà/). the approximant /r/ is articulated as a post-alveolar frictionless continuant in english, while in polish it is a post-alveolar trill. additionally, some phonemes of the english language are not found in polish. the improper rendition of the interdental fricatives /t, d/ (as /t, f, s/ and /d, v, z/, respectively) constitutes one of the most persistent and the most difficult to eradicate errors made by polish learners. the velar nasal is found in polish as an allophone of /n/ before /k, g/ and not as a separate phoneme. as a result, its distribution remains problematic and polish speakers of english are able to pronounce /n/ in isolation or in a familiar context, but have difficulty suppressing the velar stop in word-final or pre-vocalic positions. the vocalic inventories of polish and english differ to the extent that not a single vowel is identical in the two languages. polish has only 6 vowels /a, e, i, 1, o, u/ which is a very limited set compared to the 12 monophthongs /i:, i, e, {, v, @, 3:, q, o:, u, u:, a:/ and 8 diphthongs /oi, ai, ei, @u, au, i@, u@, e@/ in english. english vowels are divided into short and long and differ in duration depending on the context. vowel duration is a cue to the voicing of the following consonant and is correlated with word-stress. polish vowels are characterized by durational invariability, meaning that inherent and relative vowel length, as well as vowel reduction are very difficult for polish learners to acquire. in general, since polish has fewer vowels than english, poles typically employ one vowel as a substitute for two, three or even four target vowels (e.g., /u/ for /u:/ and /u/; /a/ for /v/, /a:/ and /{/; /e/ for /e/, /{/, /@/ and /3:/), thereby neutralizing a number of contrasts. moreover, one english vowel can be mapped to two polish vowels, for example, /{/ is substituted with /a/ or /e/ and the choice of either depends on two main factors, namely general proficiency of english and the place of articulation of the following consonant. additionally, polish has no diphthongs so learners of english replace them either with a vowel and a glide, or with a vowel followed by a glide and a vowel. some diphthongs may also be realized as monophthongs, for example, /@u/ is substituted with /o/, for example, poland */polant/, and /e@/ with /e/, for example, hair */he/ or /her/. table 1 presents the list of phonetic contrasts under investigation, the minimal pairs used as tokens and the carrier sentences in which they were embedded. the last column specifies which of the two stimulus words was the target item. as can be observed, the stimuli encompassed 13 vocalic contrasts /{/~/v/, /{/~/e/, /{/~/a:/, /q/~/@u/, /v/~/a:/, /i/~/i:/ (twice, one occurrence before the dark /5/), /i/~/e/, /v/~/q/, /3:/~/e@/, /o:/~/q/, /u:/~/u/, /3:/~/e/, the opposition between “schwa” and silence (/@/~2), four consonantal contrasts /z/~/d/, /t/~/s/, /t/~/t/, /n/~/n/ (in a word-final and word-medial position), and /s/~/z/ (word-final fortis / lenis distinction). the gender factor in the perception of english segments by non-native speakers 115 table 1 a list of stimuli used in the study phonetic contrast tokens carrier sentence the correct answer 1. /{/~/v/ cap/cup have you seen my cap/cup? cup 2. /z/~/d/ closed/clothed they weren’t fully closed/clothed. clothed 3. /q/~/@u/ cost/coast what’s the cost/coast like? coast 4. /v/~/a:/ come/calm she told me to come/calm down. come 5. /@/~2 dress/address where is kate’s dress/address? address 6. /i/~/i:/ fill/feel can you fill/feel it? feel 7. /v/~/q/ gun/gone he’s taken his dog and gun/gone. gun 8. /3:/~/e@/ her/hair is that her/hair? her 9. /{/~/a:/ hat/heart she put her hand on her hat/heart. heart 10. /i/~/e/ lift/left you should take the lift/left. lift 11. /i/~/i:/ leave/live i don’t want to live/leave here. live 12. /{/~/e/ man/men did you see the man/men? man 13. /o:/~/q/ port/pot there’s coffee in the port/pot. pot 14. /s/~/z/ word-final fortis ~ lenis distinction price/prize i got a good price/prize for that painting. prize 15. /u:/~/u/ pool/pull it said ‘pool’/’pull’ on the door. pool 16. /n/~/n/ word-finally ran/rang tom ran/rang yesterday. rang 17. /n/~/n/ intermedially robin banks/robbing banks my friend likes robin banks/ robbing banks. robin 18. /t/~/t/ thought/taught i don’t know what she thought/taught. taught 19. /3:/~/e/ worst/west it’s on the worst/west coast. west 20. /t/~/s/ youth/use there’s no youth/use talking about that. use two criteria were adopted while selecting the stimuli. firstly, a number of comparative analyses between polish and english phonetics (e.g., gonet et al., 2013a, 2013b; sobkowiak, 1996) were taken into account. they all provide extensive descriptions of the most recurrent mispronunciations made by polish speakers of english. secondly, previous empirical research provided insight as to which contrasts should be incorporated in the present study because their deviant renditions might impair intelligibility in communication with english native speakers and contribute significantly to the impression of a foreign accent in english as well as may evoke english native speakers’ irritation (bryła-cruz, 2016; van den doel, 2006). as a result, all the phonetic features included in the experiment should be pedagogically prioritized. 3.4. data analysis the obtained results were submitted to a statistical analysis. the chi-square test was used to check the correlation between particular variables and the number agnieszka bryła-cruz 116 of correctly marked answers; yates’ correction was applied when at least one of the expected numerical values was smaller than 10. the normality of data was established by means of the shapiro-wilk test. in order to determine differences between the two gender groups, the student’s t-test was performed, and, where necessary, its non-parametric equivalent, the mann-whitney u test, was used. the threshold of statistical significance for all differences and correlations was set at p < .05. effect sizes, measuring the magnitude of the observed relationships and their practical significance, were calculated using a phi coefficient for t-test and cohen’s d for mann-whitney u test. 4. results table 2 presents the descriptive statistics for the two gender groups with respect to the number of correctly identified items. the calculations were performed with the exclusion of the pair robin-robbing because, as mentioned earlier, this minimal pair was different from the rest (did not belong to high frequency words). the mean number of correctly identified words overlaps in the two groups (13) and the same holds true for the range of accurate answers which are roughly the same, that is 8-18 and 9-17 for males and females, respectively. the mann-whitney u-test revealed that the observed slight inter-group differences were not statistically significant (z = 0.112, p = .911, p > .05). table 2 descriptive statistics referring to the number of correctly identified items n m med min. max. sd gender males 40 13.4 13.5 8 18 2.49 females 40 13.4 14.0 9 17 2.12 table 3 juxtaposes the hierarchy of perceptual difficulty for each gender group. the first and the second columns contain the contrasts and the targets, respectively, and in the third column the percentage of correct scores is included (incorrect answers and instances of no answer were merged into one group). the data enable us to spot similarities and differences between the two gender groups. both males and females were most successful in recognizing the contrast between /i/ and /e/ (100% of accurate answers) as well as /t/~/s/ and /{/~/e/ (over 90% of correct answers). more than half (60-87.5%) of men and women identified the following contrasts accurately: /i:/~/i/ (also before the dark /5/), /q/~/@u/, /o:/~/q/, /3:/~/e/, /{/~/a:/, /n/~/n/ (word-medially), /z/~/d/ and /t/~/t/. the sounds that posed most difficulty (less than 60% of accurate answers) to the listeners were /n/~/n/ (word-finally), /s/~/z/ (word-final fortis / lenis distinction), /v/~/a:/, /u:/~/u/ and /{/~/v/. the lowest score of all was 20% for women and 37.5% for men. the gender factor in the perception of english segments by non-native speakers 117 table 3 the hierarchy of perceptual difficulty for male and female respondents males females contrast target accuracy contrast target accuracy /i/~/e/ /i/ 100% /i/~/e/ /i/ 100% /t/~/s/ /s/ 100% /t/~/s/ /s/ 95% /{/~/e/ /{/ 90% /{/~/e/ /3:/~/e@/ /{/ /3:/ 92.5% 92.5% /@/~ 2 /i/~/i:/ (before /ɫ/) /@/ /i:/ 87.5% 87.5% /i:/~/i/ /i/ 87.5% /z/~/d/ /q/~/@u/ /{/~/aː/ /d/ /@u/ /a:/ 85% 85% 85% /i/~/i:/ (before /ɫ/) /q/~/@u/ /i:/ /@u/ 80% 80% /n/~/n/ (intermedially) /t/~/t/ /n/ /t/ 82% 82% /n/~/n/ (intermedially) /z/~/d/ /t/~/t/ /n/ /d/ /t/ 77.5% 77.5% 77.5% /i:/~/i/ /i/ 77% /{/~/a:/ /a:/ 75% /3:/~/e/ /e/ 67% /3:/~/e/ /e/ 70% /oː/~/ q/ /q/ 62.5% /v/~/q/ /v/ 67% /3:/~/e@/ /3:/ 60% /v/~/aː/ /v/ 55% /o:/~/q/ /q/ 65% /v/~/q/ /s/~/z/ word-final fortis ~ lenis distinction /v/ /z/ 47% 47% /@/~2 /@/ 60% /n/~/n/ (word-finally) /n/ 42% /v/~/a:/ /v/ 55% /{/~/v/ /u:/~/u/ /v/ /u:/ 37.5% /u:/~/u/ /n/~/ŋ/ (word-finally) /u:/ /n/ 50% 50% /s/~/z/ word-final fortis ~ lenis distinction /z/ 47% /{/~/v/ /v/ 20% apart from the above similarities, it can be seen that the contrast /v/~/q/ was identified properly by 47% of males as compared to 67% of females. however, this difference was not statistically significant (chi2 = 3.274, p = .07), neither was it of any practical significance (phi = 0.18). the two contrasts which occupied a distinctively different place in the above hierarchy depending on the listeners’ gender were /@/~ 2 and /3:/~/e@/. the former was identified properly by 60% of women and 87% of men, while the latter by 92.5% of females as opposed to 60% of males. these differences were statistically significant (chi2 = 9.028, p = .003 and chi2yates = 8.674, p = .003, respectively). the effect size was similar in both cases, namely phi = 0.33 and phi = 0.36, and it was moderate. as a result, it can be concluded that the observed differences were rather small. figure 1 and figure 2 depict a detailed distribution of correct and incorrect answers for each gender group. agnieszka bryła-cruz 118 figure 1 the identification of “address” by male and female listeners figure 2 the identification of “her” by male and female listeners as can be seen in figure 1, the contrast /@/~2 turned out to be easier to identify for males, who had 87.5% of accurate answers (compared to 60% provided by females). figure 2 shows that females were better at recognizing the contrast between /3:/~/e@/ and gave 92.5% of correct answers (the success rate for males was 60%). 5. discussion as regards the first research question, males and females performed equally well in the recognition task. as a result, our h1 about women’s advantage in the accuracy of segmental identification has not been confirmed. statistically significant 87.5% 12.5% 60.% 40% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% address dress male female 40.0% 92.5% 7.5% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% her hair male female 60% the gender factor in the perception of english segments by non-native speakers 119 differences in perception were traced only for two contrasts (/3:/~/e@/ and /@/~2), with women outperforming men in the former case and men outperforming women in the latter. while it is rather hard to provide an explanation as to why these two contrasts were perceived differently by the two groups, it needs to be noted that these statistically significant differences entail small practical significance. the outcome of our study does not suggest that oft-cited female advantage in learning l2 pronunciation (moyer, 2016) can be ascribed to their superior phonological perception. with reference to the second research question, the hierarchy of perceptual difficulty is arranged similarly for the two gender groups, whereby our h2 is supported. the interplay between the listeners’ l1 and l2 largely determined the accuracy of perception. as far as consonants are concerned, the best results were obtained for /t/~/s/, /t/~/t/ and /z/~/d/, which was also the case in an extensive study conducted among polish university students by nowacka (2008). this could be explained by the emphasis that the dental fricatives are given in phonetic instruction in the classroom. the contrast between /s/~/z/ proved difficult in recognition. it must be stressed that this opposition appeared word-finally, so the main difference between the two sounds lay in the force of articulation which modified the relative length of the diphthong. as shown empirically by rojczyk (2010), polish learners distinguish between voiced and voiceless obstruents on the basis of voicing and do not pay attention to vowel duration as a temporal parameter cueing the voicing contrast. moreover, it was found that in english word-final fricatives the amount of voicing depends on the perceptual strength of the sound (gonet, 2010). therefore, the most strident /z/ is voiced only through 50% of its duration as compared to the less conspicuous interdental or labio-dental fricative (80% and 60% of voicing, respectively). in the present study prize was understood as price by 47% of the listeners confirming that the issue of partial voicing word-finally is problematic for polish learners, whose native language uses either voiced or voiceless obstruents (with only the voiceless permitted word-finally). with respect to the identification of the vowel contrasts, the findings echo to some extent those of balas (2018) and bogacka (2004) since the main factor influencing the perception of vowels was the interplay between the polish and english vocalic inventories. the adequate identification of the target vowels was negatively correlated with the number of corresponding vowels between the two languages meaning that the greater the number, the less accurate the perception. therefore, the least accurate recognition occurred for vowels usually mapped to polish /e/ and /a/, such as /e, {, 3:/ and /{, v, a:/, respectively. the lowest position in the hierarchy is occupied by /{/~/v/. because of their perceptual similarity, these two vowels are mapped to one polish vowel /a/, resulting in poor agnieszka bryła-cruz 120 discrimination, which is in line with flege’s (2002) “equivalence classification” and best’s (1994) sc assimilation pattern. the two vowels are perceived as too similar for distinct categories to be formed. similarly, for /u:/ and /u/, both of which are mapped to polish /u/, identification turned out to be poor. on the basis of her empirical study, bogacka (2004) concludes that polish learners are unlikely to distinguish between /u:/~/u/ and when they need to, they rely heavily on temporal cues neglecting spectral properties, meaning that, for polish learners, the primary difference between this pair is duration and not the position of the tongue or lip rounding. in the study by balas (2018), these two contrasts (/{/~/v/ and /u:/~/u/) were also poorly discriminated and judged to be the most similar. the easiest in terms of perception were the following four pairs: /i/~/e/, /{/~/e/, /q/~/@u/ and /i:/~/i/. for both male and female participants, the identification of the /i/~/e/ contrast proved the least problematic (100% of correct answers) and was followed by /{/~/e/ (90% and 92% for males and females, respectively). these two contrasts proved the easiest to recognize most probably because they follow the tc assimilation pattern; each member of the pair is assimilated to two distinct categories in the learners’ native inventory for /i/~/e/ it is /i/ and /e/ and for /{/~/e/ it is /a/ and /e/, which predicts discrimination to be excellent. moreover, the tongue position turned out to influence the perception, so that front vowels were slightly easier to recognize than back/central vowels. also, the functional load may have contributed to the fact that the accuracy of recognition was better for /i:/~/i/ than for either /u:/~/u/ or /o:/~/q/. during english instruction, more emphasis is placed on the contrast between the front pair than between the back pairs and this is dictated by lexical frequency. a good identification of /i:/~/i/ shows that polish learners are able to distinguish well between two phonemes not found in their native inventory and that they can become sensitive to features not used in their l1 (duration). this is in line with bohn’s desensitization hypothesis and lpm. it can be observed that the contrast between gun~gone was more perceptually salient than in cup~cap which is in line with pam’s predictions. since /v/ and /q/ are typically assimilated to two separate polish vowels (/a/ and /o/, respectively), the identification of the contrast was less problematic than in the case of /{/~/v/, which are perceptually more similar and often substituted with polish /a/. even though this is also the case with /v/~/aː/ (both tend to be ascribed to one polish vowel), this pair had a better recognition rate as, in addition to height and advancement, the vowels differed in duration and tenseness. since, as corroborated by bogacka (2004), polish learners are more sensitive to temporal characteristics than spectral ones, the identification of /{/~/v/ was poorer than that of /v/~/aː/, which implies that tongue advancement turned the gender factor in the perception of english segments by non-native speakers 121 out to be an insufficiently conspicuous feature to distinguish the two vowels. this behavior is congruent with bohn’s desensitization hypothesis, according to which “whenever spectral properties are insufficient to differentiate vowel contrast because previous experience did not sensitize listeners to those spectral differences, duration differences will be used to differentiate the non-native contrast” (bohn, 1995, p. 294). in other words, duration is psychoacoustically salient for l2 learners and they are able to create a contrasting mechanism along this dimension, even if duration is not used contrastively in their l1 (escudero, 2005; escudero & boersma, 2004). the present study had several limitations that need to be considered when interpreting the results and designing similar experiments in the future. firstly, only two vowels were tested in different contexts (/v/ before a fortis plosive and before two nasals; /i:/ before a lenis fricative and the dark /5/). because the identification of sounds can be influenced by the phonological context, future studies should ensure more diversification in this respect. secondly, the scope of the present study was restricted to segmental aspects, but l2 prosodic perception in the classroom environment deserves further inquiry as well. additionally, the diagnostic material was based on ssbe and it would be interesting to compare the results for general american. needless to say, the conclusions drawn here are tentative and more research is needed to verify my claims and shed more light onto the gender factor in foreign language perception. 6. conclusion the paper reported on an empirical investigation into the perception of english segmentals by 80 polish secondary school learners. the goal of the study was to establish whether there exist gender-based differences in identifying selected vocalic and consonantal contrasts particularly problematic for polish learners, and, thus, prioritized pedagogically. the existence of such perceptual dissimilarities could have implications for pronunciation instruction since biological endowment, including differences in the auditory system and phonological processing, has often been cited by advocates of single-sex education. in light of our data, it cannot be claimed that males and females differed considerably with respect to the perception of l2 segmental contrasts, because neither group performed the identification task better than the other. the results pointed to no statistically significant differences with the exception of the following two cases: /3:/~/e@/ and /@/~/2/. yet, the magnitude of the observed relationship between the listeners’ gender and their perception was small and thus had little practical significance. the hierarchy of perceptual difficulty was not identical for the two gender groups, but it was marked with numerous similarities. for agnieszka bryła-cruz 122 example, the easiest contrasts overlapped across males and females (/i/~/e/, /t/~/s/ and /{/~/e/), and also /n/~/n/ was identified more accurately in a wordmedial than word-final position. the identification of these l2 vowels proved unproblematic, because they are typically mapped to distinct categories in the listeners’ l1. while the very bottom of the list included the same pairs (/v/~/q/, wordfinal fortis lenis distinction, /n/~/n/ word-finally, /{/~/v/ and /u:/~/u/), they were ordered differently in each gender’s column. yet, in both groups the identification was worse for the contrasts which are perceived as too similar for separate categories to be formed and those with low functional load. this all suggests that perception was influenced by the interplay between l1 and l2 rather than the listener’s sex. despite various 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(2002). french is the language of love and stuff: student perceptions of issues related to motivation in learning a foreign language. british research journal, 28(4), 503-508. the gender factor in the perception of english segments by non-native speakers 131 appendix the tool used in the experiment please listen to the following sentences and decide which word is said (underline it). 1. cap or cup? have you seen my cap / cup? 2. closed or clothed? they weren’t fully closed / clothed. 3. cost or coast? what’s the cost / coast like? 4. come or calm? she told me to come / calm down. 5. dress or address? where is kate’s dress / address? 6. fill or feel? can you fill / feel it? 7. gun or gone? he’s taken his dog and gun / gone. 8. her or hair? is that her / hair? 9. hat or heart? she put her hand on her hat / heart. 10. lift or left? you should take the lift / left. 11. live or leave? i don’t want to live / leave here. 12. man or men? did you see the man / men? 13. port or pot? there’s coffee in the port / pot. 14. price or prize? i got a good price / prize for that painting. 15. pool or pull? it said ‘pool’/ ‘pull’ on the door. 16. ran or rang? tom ran / rang yesterday. 17. robin or robbing? my friend likes robin banks / robbing banks. 18. thought or taught? i don’t know what she thought / taught. 19. worst or west? it’s on the worst / west coast. 20. youth or use? there’s no youth / use talking about that. provide your personal information in the following questionnaire: 1. age: 2. sex: f / m 3. i’m right handed / left handed 4. i’ve been learning english for ………………………….. years 5. have you ever stayed in any english speaking countries? if so, where and for how long? …………………………………………………………………………………….. 173 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (2). 2022. 173-203 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.2.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt gender differences in foreign language classroom anxiety: results of a meta-analysis katalin piniel eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9225-3301 brozik-piniel.katalin@btk.elte.hu anna zólyomi eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9280-5775 zolyomi.anna@btk.elte.hu abstract exploring language learners’ anxiety is not a neglected area of inquiry in applied linguistics research, which can primarily be attributed to the publication of the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas), an influential instrument developed by horwitz et al. (1986) to measure language anxiety. an ever-growing array of studies has employed the flcas and analyzed the underlying relationship between the focal construct and foreign language achievement, various individual difference variables and a variety of demographic variables, such as learning experiences, age, and gender. despite the considerable number of publications, studies focusing on biographical variables and language anxiety have not been conclusive. the aim of the present meta-analysis is to analyze 48 studies that employed the flcas to look at the potential gender differences with respect to language anxiety. although there is great variation in the methodological and reporting practices in the studies included, and findings show a tendency for females to experience higher foreign language anxiety, gender-related differences are not statistically significant. the results of moderator analyses showed that neither age nor target language, regional context, or, in the case of university students, their majors, influence this relationship. keywords: language anxiety; gender; foreign language classroom anxiety scale; meta-analysis katalin piniel, anna zólyomi 174 1. introduction foreign language anxiety has been one of the most perplexing individual variables in language learning, and as such it has been the topic of abundant research since the 1970s. research interest has gained momentum after the publication of the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas) developed by horwitz et al. (1986), a tool that was designed to measure language learners’ levels of foreign language anxiety in the classroom context, with an emphasis on speaking (x. zhang, 2019). an increasing number of studies have used the flcas to uncover the relationship between anxiety and other individual differences, such as willingness to communicate, foreign language achievement and proficiency, selfefficacy beliefs, and demographic variables, such as experiences, age, and gender. nonetheless, very few straightforward conclusions have been drawn about these learner variables and their link to language anxiety. one of the key issues that remains to be resolved is the role of gender (botes et al., 2020). in the present study, our aim was to investigate the relationship of language anxiety and gender by conducting a meta-analysis of already published works that have used the flcas and also looked at the gender of the participants. the rationale behind opting for a meta-analytic approach was that by scrutinizing existing empirical findings, it enables the researcher to draw overarching conclusions concerning a given research problem, in the present case about whether males or females tend to experience higher levels of anxiety. in what follows, we will provide a brief overview of language anxiety research, a description of the flcas and a narrative summary of studies on language anxiety and gender, and to justify our method of research, we will also refer to meta-analytical studies on language anxiety. then, the methods of our meta-analysis will be described, followed by the results and discussion of our findings. 2. literature review 2.1. overview of foreign language anxiety research macintyre (2017) synthesized literature on language anxiety along the lines of three approaches that chronologically follow one another: the confounded phase, the specialized approach, and the dynamic approach. the first two phases provide the theoretical and empirical data for our research synthesis; therefore, we will briefly summarize those phases here. that is not to say, however, that the third, dynamic phase should be neglected in terms of a concise narrative literature review on language anxiety but rather that publications subscribing to a dynamic perspective would merit a systematic synthesis of their gender differences in foreign language classroom anxiety: results of a meta-analysis 175 own due to the special nature of their approach. for this reason, we will not consider them in this paper. according to macintyre (2017), the beginnings of language anxiety research can be characterized by what he called a confounded phase, where “the ideas about anxiety and their effect on language learning were adopted from a mixture of various sources without detailed consideration of the meaning of the anxiety concept for language learners” (p. 11), leading to confusion about the relationship and effect of anxiety on language learning. mainly the works by scovel (1978) and kleinmann (1977), who suggested that anxiety, a construct adapted from psychology, is a quite diverse phenomenon, with complex influences on language learning, are cited from this period. it was during this era of research that scholars distinguished between debilitating and facilitating anxiety as well as trait and state anxiety. drawing on these two lines of thought, macintyre (2017) claimed that the trait-state divide (spielberger, 1966, 1983) provided more fruitful ground for applied linguists to pursue research on language anxiety. indeed, the definition of the construct that anxiety researchers fall back on in second language acquisition studies also comes from spielberger (1983), according to whom anxiety is “the subjective feeling of tension, apprehension, nervousness, and worry associated with an arousal of the autonomic nervous system” (p. 1), which is “a disproportionately intense reaction” to stress (levitt, 1980, p. 30). trait anxiety is thought of as a personality characteristic, while state anxiety is a momentary experience of inhibition (eysenck, 1979). once the event is appraised as potentially threatening, the person may experience state anxiety. the end of the confounding phase and the beginning of the specialized approach in language anxiety research (macintyre, 2017) is marked by the inclusion of the language anxiety construct in the socio-educational model of language learning (macintyre & gardner, 1991) and horwitz et al.’s (1986) work on foreign language classroom anxiety (flca). horwitz and her colleagues (1986) defined flca as “a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors related to classroom language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process” (p. 31). thus, language anxiety, foreign language anxiety or flca (generally used interchangeably in the literature) have come to be viewed as situation-specific anxiety, comprising cumulative, repeated, momentary experiences of anxiety (state anxiety) particularly linked to the context of language learning (dewaele, 2002, 2005; horwitz et al., 1986; macintyre, 1999; macintyre & gardner, 1989, 1991). one of the main outcomes of the specialized approach phase has been the development and widespread use of the flcas (horwitz et al., 1986), which has been adapted across the globe to investigate the relationship between learners’ language anxiety and achievement as well as other individual difference variables katalin piniel, anna zólyomi 176 as well as more general background learner characteristics such as personality, level of proficiency, age, and gender. since a considerable number of studies have been published in this phase using the flcas as a data collection tool, the present meta-analysis focuses on those that have probed into the relationship between language anxiety and gender. in the following sections, we will turn to describing the flcas in more detail as well as summarizing some of the key studies that fall within the specialized approach and look at the relationship between language anxiety and gender. 2.2. measuring foreign language classroom anxiety although various instruments have been used in the literature for measuring language anxiety, to date, the flcas, developed by horwitz et al. (1986), has probably been the most widely adapted tool across a large variety of language learning contexts. the questionnaire comprises 33 5-point likert-scale items, with the anchors of strongly disagree (1) and strongly agree (5). although horwitz (2017) explicitly stated that the questionnaire was not originally intended to comprise the subscales of communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation, and test anxiety, many studies since the publication of the flcas have referred to these constructs. generally speaking, communication apprehension refers to the inhibition experienced when conversing in the foreign language, fear of negative evaluation has to do with potentially being negatively judged by the instructor or peers, and test anxiety refers to the apprehension associated with classroom assessment of learners’ foreign language performance. the flcas includes nine negatively worded items (items 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, 18, 22, 28, 32), which are normally reversed before calculating an overall score to describe respondents’ anxiety levels. horwitz and her colleagues (hortwitz et al., 1986) have demonstrated the reliability of the questionnaire, reporting cronbach’s alpha (α = .93 in their 1986 study) and a correlation coefficient (r = .83, p < .001) based on scores obtained from a test and a re-test using the same tool on the same sample eight weeks apart (n = 78). the flcas has been used in many applied linguistics studies; thus, in the past few decades, quite a lot of information has become available on language anxiety and its link to other learner characteristics. however, to date, there has been a limited number of meta-analytic studies synthesizing the results of this research in a more systematic manner, as opposed to the abundant number of narrative literature reviews that have been published as part of empirical papers or as theoretical overviews summarizing work that has been done on flca. therefore, the aim of this paper is to present a meta-analytic study involving the empirical findings generated by research using the full version of the flcas as a gender differences in foreign language classroom anxiety: results of a meta-analysis 177 tool to collect data on language learners’ foreign language anxiety. an additional benefit of limiting the scope of our meta-analysis to studies on flca as measured by the flcas is that in this way we can avoid drawing on the “associations among imperfect measures of these constructs reported in primary studies” (card, 2012, p. 147) and reduce the necessity to correct for such artifacts. 2.3. foreign language anxiety and gender as already mentioned, a growing body of research has examined whether learner characteristics have an impact on foreign language learning anxiety; however, the results tend to be mixed based on gender differences across various contexts including second and foreign language learning contexts. it must be noted that throughout the present study, we refer to gender as the binary-coded biographical variable (i.e., male/female), following the positivist interpretation of the construct as appearing in quantitative studies on participants’ gender and language anxiety. specifically, a wealth of studies have found no significant gender-related differences with respect to foreign language anxiety (e.g., aida, 1994; dewaele, 2007, 2013a; dewaele et al., 2008; matsuda & gobel, 2004; woodrow, 2006, yan, 1998), whereas other research endeavors have come to the conclusion that females manifest higher levels of anxiety (e.g., arnaiz & guillén, 2012; briesmaster & briesmaster-paredes, 2015; cheng, 2002; dewaele et al., 2016; donovan & macintyre, 2004; öztürk & gürbüz, 2013; park & french, 2013). the repertoire of contradictory evidence is further endorsed by campbell and shaw (1994), kitano (2001), mejías et al. (1991), and l. j. zhang (2001) because based on their results, males experienced higher levels of anxiety. another intriguing aspect of this issue is when conflicting results seem to be apparent even within one specific study. for example, elkhafaifi (2005) found no significant gender differences in listening anxiety but found significant differences in learning anxiety with females having a higher mean as compared to males. similarly, campbell’s (1999) results indicated no significant gender differences in anxiety levels, but after two weeks of instruction males reported higher levels of anxiety. dewaele (2013b) divided the participants of his study into two groups, and, based on the results of the first group, female students had higher anxiety scores in their third language (l3), but not in their second language (l2) and fourth language (l4). the second group, however, showed gender-related differences related to their l3 as well as l4. it is due to the contradicting evidence concerning the link between gender and language anxiety that a meta-analysis seems to be indispensable in this domain. what is agreed upon by most researchers, however, is the undoubted complexity of foreign language anxiety. as has been concluded by park (2013), among others, gender, language anxiety, and l2 performance exhibit an intricate katalin piniel, anna zólyomi 178 relationship with one another. thus, the rationale for analyzing gender differences concerning foreign language anxiety lies in its multifaceted nature since “proficiency might not be the only or even the primary factor that determines the rise or decline of language anxiety” (cheng, 2002, p. 653). in addition, the inconclusive evidence on the relationship between gender and language anxiety suggests that other variables, such as age and the learning context (including the target language, regional context and the major; cf. horwitz, 2017) may play a determinant role in explaining the variability in the link between gender and language anxiety. for this reason, the modulating influence of these biographical characteristics should also be investigated in a meta-analysis on language anxiety and gender. 2.4. meta-analyses on language anxiety in order to be able to identify trends in empirical research findings, there has been a call for some years now to conduct more systematic syntheses of research in applied linguistics (li et al., 2012; plonsky & oswald, 2012). norris and ortega (2006) in their pioneering work refer to systematic reviews as research syntheses. they make the following comment in this respect: “research synthesis pursues systematic (i.e., exhaustive, trustworthy, and replicable) understandings of the state of knowledge that has accumulated about a given problem across primary research studies” (p. xi). according to the authors, such research can take on a variety of forms, including qualitative and quantitative research syntheses, depending on the methods and the field of study whose results are being synthesized. since numerous papers have been published thus far on foreign language anxiety where quantitative data was gathered, a few publications have already followed suit, and presented syntheses of quantitative studies using quantitative methods. these research syntheses have been labeled as meta-analyses. one such meta-analysis, conducted by teimouri et al. (2019), involved 97 studies and focused on the link between language anxiety and achievement. the researchers found an overall moderate negative correlation between these two factors. the researchers also looked at whether the effect sizes differed in the case of a variety of moderator variables, such as language achievement, level of education, target languages, and types of anxiety. they found that the negative link between l2 anxiety and achievement is influenced by these variables. x. zhang (2019) also conducted a research synthesis on language anxiety and performance; however, the author focused on performance measures that were not based on participants’ self-perceptions but rather on language course grades and language test scores. apart from the correlation between language anxiety and performance, x. zhang (2019) also looked at the moderating effect of other variables, such as the type of anxiety, proficiency, age, and l1-l2 distance. gender differences in foreign language classroom anxiety: results of a meta-analysis 179 this study found a moderate negative correlation between performance and language anxiety, with anxiety type, age, lexical similarity of l1 and l2 but not learners’ proficiency levels, moderating this relationship. finally, a third study, conducted by botes et al. (2020), also investigated the link between language anxiety and achievement but considered only those studies in their meta-analysis that used the flcas or a translated/adapted version of it. similarly to the previous two meta-analyses, the authors found negative correlations between achievement and flca. as for the moderators, neither age, nor female proportion, nor institution type were found to modulate the link between language anxiety and achievement. nonetheless, the authors acknowledge as a limitation the fact that they have included the effect size from studies employing various adaptations (shortened versions) of the measurement tool (flcas), which may have influenced the outcome of the moderator analyses. despite the above papers presenting research syntheses, there are still very few publications that have attempted to summarize the trends emerging from the results of quantitative studies on foreign language anxiety, more specifically, what research results show us in terms of the link between language anxiety and gender. in order to fill this gap, we conducted a meta-analysis to investigate the possible connection between these two variables based on the results of quantitative studies that employed the full version of the flcas as a data collection instrument. based on these aims and to fill the niche pertaining to the lack of metaanalyses concentrating on the possible relationship between language anxiety and gender, the research questions that guided our study were the following: 1. what are the methodological and reporting practices in studies of the relationship between foreign language classroom anxiety as measured by the flcas and gender? 2. what characterizes the foreign language classroom anxiety level of male and female language learners as measured by the flcas? 3. what biographical variables moderate the possible relationship between foreign language classroom anxiety and gender? for our purposes, we chose to conduct a meta-analysis because, as already elaborated on above, it is considered to be a research technique that enables the researcher to identify trends in research outcomes by scrutinizing the results of primary empirical studies in a more objective manner. since a few publications (e.g., li et al., 2012; norris & ortega, 2006) have also started to pave the way by setting standards to be followed when conducting such studies, we intended to follow their guidelines. li et al. (2012) views meta-analyses as parallel to conducting empirical research; hence, they claim that much of the quality of any katalin piniel, anna zólyomi 180 research synthesis depends on the systematicity in the methods used for collecting and analyzing the literature (norris & ortega, 2006). therefore, in the next sections, we will describe how we went about identifying the studies to be included, the coding process, and the steps of our data analysis. 3. methods 3.1. inclusion criteria published empirical research papers that used the full (33-item) flcas as a data collection tool constituted the data for our meta-analysis. journal articles published in english were collected through google scholar and various academic databases (i.e., ebsco host, web of science, sciencedirect, and jstor) accessible for the researchers. it is important to note here that we did not limit our search to high profile publications in order to minimize sampling bias (norris & ortega, 2006; plonsky & oswald, 2012). in each database, a search was conducted for the expression “foreign language classroom anxiety scale” and the acronym “flcas.” the publications had to be more recent than 1986 (the year the flcas was published; see horwitz et al., 1986) and available by may 2020 (the time of the search); the paper had to present a study using the flcas as a data collection tool in its complete form, in english or translated (but not abbreviated or altered in any way); the papers had to be published in english (for practical comprehensibility); and full text records had to be available to the researchers. as the final eligibility criterion, the study had to include explicit information on language anxiety in light of the gender distribution of the participants. keeping these inclusion criteria in mind and removing duplicates, we continued to work with 44 articles. since two reports included more than one independent sample, as customary in such cases in meta-analyses, we decided to refer to each independent sample separately. this way, our final sample comprised k = 48 studies. unfortunately, as we began coding the studies in terms of reporting practices, we realized that not all of the studies included information on the instruments’ reliability in the particular context, nor did all of them mention an effect size or sufficient information necessary to estimate an effect size. as a result, for the various analyses we conducted, we used subsamples of the k = 48. this is not unusual, since it has been noted by other scholars that inadequate or insufficient information in publications tends to pose a general problem for researchers conducting meta-analyses (larsen-hall & plonsky, 2015). according to larsen-hall and plonsky (2015), the lack of adequate information limits the number of empirical studies that can be included in a quantitative research gender differences in foreign language classroom anxiety: results of a meta-analysis 181 synthesis on a given topic, which consequently reduces the strength of conclusions that can be drawn from meta-analyses. 3.2. coding procedure we devised a coding scheme in order to systematize the various characteristics of the studies that comprised our sample. for our purposes, we adapted and complemented the scheme developed by teimouri et al. (2019) because the focus of the present study was very similar. this means that we included information related to the publication of the report (i.e., author, title, journal, abstract, topic, research questions), the sample (i.e., number of participants, country, groups of participants, that is, university, high school students or adult learners, subsamples of males and females), and results (i.e., reliability of the flcas, reliability of the flcas subscales, the way anxiety levels were interpreted, means for the flcas, for the subscales and for the genders, t-test results for the comparison of the two genders, beta values from the regression analysis where gender was an independent variable, and any other analyses where gender appeared). the final coding scheme can be found in table 1. in order to ensure trustworthiness and credibility, the coding of the studies happened in a recursive fashion, through several rounds. we coded all the data, constantly discussing and revising the codes before resolving problematic points. once the codes were finalized, the data was ready for analysis. table 1 coding scheme used to identify the main features of the papers included in the sample main category feature definition features of the report author the researchers who conducted the study and published it. title the title of the paper. journal the journal in which the article was published. abstract the abstract of the article. topic the topic to which the article belongs. research question(s) the research question(s) the authors proposed. participants number the sample size of the study. nationality the nationality of the participants. target language the foreign language (l2) of the participants. academic status the educational level of the participants (primary school, secondary school, college/university). proficiency the proficiency level of the participants (beginning, intermediate, advanced or not specified). number of males the number of male participants. number of females the number of female participants. flcas language of the questionnaire the language in which the flcas was conducted. reliability index the internal consistency measure used for the flcas (e.g., cronbach’s alpha, test-retest, split-half method). reliability estimate the reported reliability coefficient for the flcas. katalin piniel, anna zólyomi 182 interpretation of anxiety level the way the authors interpreted anxiety levels and made categories (e.g., high-anxiety, low-anxiety). mean scores for the whole flcas the reported mean for the flcas. standard deviation of the flcas scores the reported standard deviation for the flcas. subscales of the flcas number of the subscales the reported number of underlying scales with factor analysis. subscale labels the labels assigned to the factors. reliability index for the subscales the internal consistency measure used for the subscales (e.g., cronbach’s alpha, test-retest, split-half method). reliability estimates for the subscales the reported reliability coefficient for the subscales. mean of each subscale the reported mean values for the subscales. standard deviation for each subscale the reported standard deviation of the subscales. descriptive statistics for language anxiety and gender mean for the flcas the reported mean for males’ and females’ scores on the subscales of the flcas. mean for the subscales the reported mean for males’ and females’ scores on the subscales of the flcas. standard deviation of the flcas scores the reported standard deviation of males’ and females’ scores on the flcas. standard deviation of the subscales the reported standard deviation of males’ and females’ scores on the subscales of the flcas. inferential statistics for the analysis of the link between gender and anxiety/effect size t-test (t statistic) the t statistical value reported for paired samples t tests or independent samples t tests that are calculated to analyze gender differences in flcas scores. regression analysis (beta) the reported beta (β) value of regression analyses involving gender differences in flcas scores. correlation (r) the reported correlation coefficient (r statistic) with regard to gender differences in flcas scores. 3.3. data analysis for our investigation, for the descriptive statistics and reliability analysis needed to answer our first research question, we used the statistical package for social sciences (spss) version 26 software. for the computer-assisted meta-analysis necessitated by the second and third research questions, we ran the analyses with the help of the comprehensive meta-analysis software, version 3 (cma; borenstein et al., 2005). to address the first research question, we computed the overall sample size, looked at minimum and maximum values, means and standard deviations of reliability coefficients reported for the flcas and its subscales. for the second research question, based on the data available for each study, effect sizes (hedges’ g) and their associated standard residuals were calculated, and outlier diagnosis was performed. in order to calculate effect sizes (hedges’ g) for the gender differences, we used reported sample sizes, sd values, as well as t and p values. in instances where the authors only alluded to the non-significance in the differences between the anxiety levels of males and females, based on card’s (2012) recommendation, hedges’ g was recorded as 0. gender differences in foreign language classroom anxiety: results of a meta-analysis 183 where the study reported a significant difference but without providing an exact p value, following card’s (2012) guidelines, p was recorded as p = .05. tests for heterogeneity of effect sizes were run using a q test (lipsey & wilson, 2001) and the degree of true heterogeneity between studies using the i2 statistic (borenstein et al., 2010) to see whether the variation in individual effect sizes can be attributed to between-study differences. based on the assumption that there were between-study differences, we used a random-effects model and an aggregated effect size to check the overall relationship of language anxiety and gender. a funnel plot with a trim-and-fill test as well as the fail-safe n test served as the basis of determining publication bias. finally, for the moderator analysis necessary to target the third research question, the categorical moderators of age group, target language, regional context and major were investigated for their modulating effect on the relationship of overall language anxiety as measured by the complete flcas and gender. moderator analyses were also run for the anxiety subscales where it was possible with a minimum of k = 10 studies, as recommended by higgins and green (2008). 4. results the reports included in our meta-analysis ultimately comprised 48 samples with altogether n = 10,526 participants, where females were slightly overrepresented (nmales = 4,523; nfemales = 5,989), and there was no information on participants’ gender regarding 14 participants, either because they did not indicate their gender or because the empirical study did not provide clear-cut information about it. the studies were conducted between 1994 and 2019, and the total sample sizes were between 30 and 948 (m = 219.29; sd = 185.10). the sample consisted of participants from various countries, mostly from the middle east, but other continents were also included, namely europe, asia, north america, south america, and africa. for the final analysis, we included four regions to categorize the individual studies, of which 23 were from the middle east, 12 from the far east, eight from europe, and five from america. one study from ethiopia (africa) was included in the middle east group due to its geographical proximity to this region as well as the fact that no other studies from the middle or southern parts of africa appeared in our sample; in this way, we avoided one study constituting a group on its own. half the reports analyzed the foreign language anxiety of the participants with regard to the english language (k = 24). other studies focused on japanese, spanish, french, german, and arabic language classroom anxiety. with a similar ratio, a considerable number of the studies included university students (k = 25), and a smaller proportion involved high school students and adult learners. from katalin piniel, anna zólyomi 184 the university context, 10 studies selected participants majoring in the language for which the researchers obtained flcas scores, while the other studies involved various programs even from non-language specialties. the proficiency of the participants was reported only in a few instances by way of grade point averages or self-reported levels of proficiency; this varied on a considerably large scale from beginner to more advanced learners. 4.1. the methodological features and reporting practices in studies on foreign language classroom anxiety and gender the first research question focused on the methodological and reporting practices in the studies scrutinizing the relationship between language anxiety and gender as measured by the flcas. overall, in terms of the data analyses and the respective reported results, the sample studies showed great variation, perhaps due to the disparity range in the publication standards of the different journals. this fragmented picture is also apparent in the presentation of our results. first and foremost, for the k = 48 studies, reliability was reported 28 times (58.33%) for the whole flcas by the cronbach’s alpha internal consistency measure (see table 2), while five papers (10.41%) referred to the reliability of the flcas subscales, and one study (2.08%) calculated alpha values for each item. it must be noted here that horwitz et al. (1986) did not explicitly refer to the instrument consisting of these subscales. they claimed that communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation and test anxiety were closely linked to flca rather than being components of it. nonetheless, in our sample, 16 papers referred to the subscale of communication apprehension and fear of negative evaluation, while 15 studies reported data about test anxiety. out of these, only five indicated the reliability of these subscales. five studies reported other subscales emerging from the items referring to a kind of general (speaking/language classroom) anxiety component, which the authors most frequently labeled as “general english class anxiety.” other types of reliability measures, albeit extremely rare, also appeared in the works synthesized, including one study with a split-half method, and another with a test-retest reliability analysis for the complete instrument. table 2 reliability indices (cronbach’s α) of the flcas and its subscales scales number of studies reporting cronbach’s α min. max. m sd complete flcas 28 .75 .96 0.88 0.06 subscale: communication apprehension 5 .72 .89 0.81 0.07 subscale: fear of negative evaluation 5 .62 .81 0.73 0.07 subscale: test anxiety 5 .71 .84 0.80 0.06 gender differences in foreign language classroom anxiety: results of a meta-analysis 185 the sample studies included in the meta-analysis provided data on the overall foreign language classroom anxiety of the participating male and female subgroups, as well as the various components associated with flca, namely, communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation and test anxiety. the reported language anxiety scores themselves, however, appeared on a variety of scales. that is to say, some studies interpreted the mean scores on a 1 to 5 scale, whereas others simply added up the numerical values associated with the likert-scale responses from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5). altogether, 24 studies included the overall means for the flcas for both males and females, while 12 reported the mean scores for the two genders respective to the subscales of the flcas, namely, communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation and test anxiety, and in a few instances the emerging scale of “general english class anxiety.” in regard to the relationship of gender and flca, 26 studies used t tests, 17 used anova, nine regression analyses with gender as one of the predictors, and in one study (despite the fact that gender is not a continuous variable), researcher(s) ran correlational analyses. for the relationship between gender and language anxiety, the effect size was only calculated in five studies, where either cohen’s d or the partial eta squared (η2) was reported. unfortunately, no studies out of the 48 reported hedges’ g, which is considered to be an unbiased effect size measure (cooper et al., 2019), though for studies with a larger sample size, cohen’s d is very similar to hedges’ g (card, 2012). we find it puzzling that the wealth of the studies failed to report the effect size which would otherwise be of crucial practical importance. in fact, while statistical significance shows that the difference between groups is not due to chance, effect size gives a lot more; it shows whether the results are practically significant (plonsky & oswald, 2014). this shortcoming may have become apparent due to the fact that, as an attempt to avoid publication bias in our meta-analysis, our sample was not restricted only to the top publications in the field. 4.2. language classroom anxiety level of male and female language learners as measured by the foreign language classroom anxiety scale as regards our second research question about the foreign language classroom anxiety levels of male and female language learners as measured by the flcas, we again had a variety of data to work with; hence the results are also manifold. first of all, we looked at the relationship of the overall flcas scores and gender. based on the data available, we were able to calculate the standard difference in means (cf. hedges’ g) for 32 studies (out of which 15.63% were assigned a g value of 0 due to reporting only the fact that non-significant differences were found, and 3.13% reported only that significant differences were found without katalin piniel, anna zólyomi 186 providing any additional information; hence, p = .05 was assigned to these studies). effect sizes and the associated standard residuals were inspected to identify outliers. because all standard residuals were below the threshold of 2.5 (teimouri et al., 2019), we proceeded with the analysis by keeping our subsample intact. after this, we checked the test of heterogeneity, and upon inspecting the results, we could state that, by rejecting the null hypothesis of homogeneity, heterogeneity was present amongst the selected studies (q(31) = 295.94, p < .001). this means that the observed variability in the selected 32 studies was higher than what would be expected based solely on sampling fluctuation (card, 2012). in other words, the dispersion of the effect sizes was not only due to chance and random error, but there seemed to be real differences in the studies’ effects; there appeared to be between-study differences most probably linked to the variety of contexts (regional, linguistic, age, etc.) in which the studies were conducted. a forest plot is presented to visualize the overall dispersion of effect sizes of the selected studies (see the appendix), where the diamond shows the summary effect in light of the confidence interval (borenstein et al., 2009). however, as the cochran’s q value was applied for testing the null hypothesis, it was necessary to check whether the proportion of the observed variance reflected true heterogeneity in the effect sizes (borenstein et al., 2016) using higgins’ i2 and t2 values. the i-squared value (i2) was 89.53, which means that nearly 90% of the observed variance was probably true variance and was not due to sampling error. true heterogeneity or, in other words, the variance of true effects (t2), was 0.18, and the standard deviation of true effects (t) was 0.43. because the test of heterogeneity was statistically significant, we opted for the random-effects model as it concentrates on the population distribution of the effect sizes as opposed to the fixed-effects model which focuses on a single effect size (card, 2012). according to card (2012), the random-effects model takes the standard deviation as well as the central tendency into consideration. therefore, we analyzed the central tendencies of the effect sizes by running a random-effects model to see whether the studies in our sample provided evidence for any significant differences between the two genders’ foreign language classroom anxiety level. our results showed a negative mean effect size -0.119 with an associated statistical significance value of p = .152 for the random-effects model with 95% confidence interval (ci) [-0.282, 0.044]. this means that although the results of the pooled studies showed a tendency for females to have slightly higher overall scores on the flcas, this result was not statistically significant. following this, we also investigated the results of studies that looked at language learners’ gender and the scores on the most frequently reported subscales of the flcas. for the communication apprehension scale, we were able to calculate hedges’ g for k = 14 studies, where 24.55% were assigned the g value of 0 due to gender differences in foreign language classroom anxiety: results of a meta-analysis 187 reporting only the fact that non-significant differences were found. the mean effect size was -0.096, 95% ci [-0.314, 0.121], p = .385. the mean effect sizes for the fear of negative evaluation scale (k = 14) (out of all effect sizes 24.55% were assigned the g value of 0 due to reporting only the fact that non-significant differences were found) were -0.134, 95% ci [-0.349, 0.081], p = .221. in the case of the test anxiety scale (k = 13) (out of all effect sizes, 15.38% were assigned the g value of 0 due to reporting only the fact that non-significant differences were found) the effect sizes were -0.046, 95% ci [-0.166, 0.075], p = .457. in each case, although the direction of the relationship seemed to indicate a higher level of anxiety in the case of female learners, once again, these results were not significant. finally, we have to note that in order to detect possible publication bias we created a funnel plot (i.e., a scatterplot of effect sizes). as the funnel plot output is used primarily to detect possible publication bias and not to “correct” or adjust them, we used duval and tweedie’s (2000) trim-and-fill method to estimate the number of missing studies (duval, 2005). under the random-effects model for the combined studies, the point estimate was -0.119 with 95% ci [-0.282, 0.043] and, using the trim-and-fill procedure, these values were unchanged. as depicted in the funnel plot (see figure 1), our analysis showed a slight bias towards studies with positive small effects. following borenstein et al.’s (2009) guidelines, we also computed rosenthal’s fail-safe n in order to deal with this slight bias and to see how many missing studies would be needed for the p value to exceed .05. the fail-safe n was 94, which means that we would need 94 studies to nullify the effect. in the light of our analysis subsuming 48 samples, we interpreted this as meaning that there was no reason to assume that the true effect was zero. figure 1 the funnel plot used to detect possible publication bias by the standard difference in means katalin piniel, anna zólyomi 188 4.3. moderating influences of biographical variables on the relationship of language anxiety and gender as for the third research question, we investigated what biographical variables moderated the relationship between language anxiety and gender. for the analysis, we looked at four possible moderators: the age group of the learners based on their school levels, the language being studied, the geographical region where the foreign language was being learnt and, in the case of university samples, the major of the participants. for each of these moderators, subgroups of effect sizes were calculated (see table 3). table 3 the results of the moderator analyses with random-effects models for the complete flcas k n m se 95% ci z p ll ul age level elementary 1 260 0.170 0.479 -0.769 1.110 0.356 .722 high school 2 505 -0.100 0.345 -0.776 0.576 -0.291 .771 university 24 5,439 -0.138 0.103 -0.339 0.064 -1.338 .181 high school and university 1 355 0.000 0.476 -0.934 0.934 0.000 1.000 adult learners 4 296 -0.142 0.267 -0.665 0.382 -0.530 .596 total 32 6,855 -0.120 0.089 -0.295 0.055 -1.346 .178 target language english 24 6,097 -0.148 0.097 -0.339 0.043 -1.520 .128 arabic 1 233 -0.274 0.459 -1.175 0.626 -0.597 .550 japanese 1 96 0.085 0.486 -0.868 0.038 0.175 .861 blank 6 429 0.009 0.211 -0.404 0.422 0.043 .966 total 32 6,855 -0.119 0.085 -0.287 0.048 -1.397 .162 regional context middle east 18 3,536 -0.195 0.116 -0.422 0.033 -1.673 .094 far east 6 2,298 0.084 0.193 -0.294 0.461 0.435 .663 europe 6 692 -0.124 0.211 -0.538 0.290 -0.586 .558 america 2 329 -0.105 0.340 -0.771 0.562 -0.307 .758 total 32 6,855 -0.110 0.100 -0.306 0.086 -1.100 .271 major english 10 3,874 0.004 0.172 -0.333 0.341 0.024 .981 other 11 1,204 -0.213 0.155 -0.516 0.091 -1.373 .170 blank 3 361 -0.310 0.314 -0.926 0.306 -0.987 .324 total 24 5,439 -0.139 0.116 -0.366 0.087 -1.206 .228 note. ci = confidence interval, ll = lower limit, ul = upper limit based on our analyses, we could not establish that any of the variables under scrutiny moderate the relationship of language anxiety and gender. this gender differences in foreign language classroom anxiety: results of a meta-analysis 189 means that the link between gender and learners’ levels of language anxiety did not depend on their age, the target language, the regional context, or the major studied at university. as seen from table 3, in our sample of studies, there were clearly underrepresented groups in terms of the learners’ age group, the target language, the regional context, and university students’ majors as most studies were conducted in the university context with english as a target language. from our analyses, it appears that the european and american continents were also underrepresented. we also looked at studies’ results reporting participants’ data on language anxiety based on the three subscales (i.e., communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation and test anxiety) in order to determine the modulating influences of the biographical variables. although the samples for these were not very large, the number of total studies were above the recommended minimum of k = 10 (higgins & green, 2008). tables 4-6 summarize the results of the moderator analyses for these subscales. table 4 the results of the moderator analyses with random-effects models for the subscale of communication apprehension k n m se 95% ci z p ll ul age elementary 1 260 0.192 0.431 -0.652 1.036 0.446 .656 high school 3 1,065 -0.100 0.251 -0.591 0.391 -0.398 .690 university 10 2,219 -0.126 0.144 -0.409 0.156 -0.877 .381 total 14 3,544 -0.096 0.120 -0.331 0.140 -0.796 .426 regional context middle east 7 1,437 -0.021 0.166 -0.347 0.305 -0.128 .898 far east 4 1,644 -0.108 0.210 -0.520 0.304 -0.512 .609 europe 3 463 -0.271 0.269 -0.799 0.257 -1.006 .314 total 14 3,544 -0.096 0.117 -0.326 0.134 -0.815 .415 major english 3 274 0.135 0.275 -0.405 0.674 0.489 .625 other 6 1,904 -0.227 0.183 -0.586 0.132 -1.240 .215 blank 1 41 -0.253 0.544 -1.319 0.814 -0.464 .642 total 10 2,219 -0.117 0.164 -0.438 0.204 -0.717 .473 note. ci = confidence interval, ll = lower limit, ul = upper limit katalin piniel, anna zólyomi 190 table 5 the results of the moderator analyses with random-effects models for the subscale of fear of negative evaluation k n m se 95% ci z p ll ul age elementary 1 260 0.287 0.381 -0.459 1.032 0.753 .451 high school 3 1,065 0.10 0.222 -0.425 0.444 0.043 .966 university 10 2,219 -0.231 0.129 -0.483 0.021 -1.794 .073 total 14 3,544 -0.081 0.158 -0.390 0.229 -0.511 .609 regional context middle east 7 1,437 -0.148 0.169 -0.480 0.183 -0.877 .381 far east 4 1,644 -0.162 0.214 -0.582 0.258 -0.756 .450 europe 3 463 -0.051 0.274 -0.588 0.485 -0.187 .852 total 14 3,544 -0.134 0.120 -0.368 0.100 -1.122 .262 major english 3 274 0.011 0.273 -0.524 0.545 0.039 .969 other 6 1,904 -0.339 0.182 -0.696 0.017 -1.864 .062 blank 1 41 -0.196 0.541 -1.257 0.865 -0.362 .717 total 10 2,219 -0.222 0.156 -0.527 0.083 -1.429 .153 note. ci = confidence interval, ll = lower limit, ul = upper limit table 6 the results of the moderator analyses with random-effects models for the subscale of test anxiety k n m se 95% ci z p ll ul age elementary 1 260 0.033 0.215 -0.388 0.453 0.153 .878 high school 3 1,065 0.064 0.125 -0.181 0.308 0.511 .609 university 9 2,062 -0.104 0.083 -0.267 0.058 -1.258 .209 total 13 3,387 -0.036 0.076 -0.186 0.114 -0.472 .637 regional context middle east 6 1,280 -0.067 0.104 -0.272 0.137 -0.647 .518 far east 4 1,644 -0.021 0.110 -0.237 0.194 -0.192 .848 europe 3 463 -0.038 0.163 -0.357 0.281 -0.233 .816 total 13 3,387 -0.044 0.069 -0.179 0.090 -0.644 .520 major english 3 274 0.040 0.172 -0.297 0.376 0.230 .818 other 5 1,747 -0.153 0.111 -0.370 0.063 -1.387 .166 blank 1 41 -0.220 0.399 -1.003 0.563 -0.550 .582 total 9 2,062 -0.103 0.091 -0.281 0.074 -1.139 .255 note. ci = confidence interval, ll = lower limit, ul = upper limit gender differences in foreign language classroom anxiety: results of a meta-analysis 191 based on our findings, we cannot claim that the biographical variables included in our study modulated the relationship of gender and language anxiety as measured by the subscales of the flcas. although most of the time the data suggested that females tended to have higher levels of anxiety, the differences failed to reach significance. more importantly, gender may denote a more complex construct than researchers following the positivist paradigm originally thought and it may thus be an oversimplification to investigate the differences (or lack thereof) in language anxiety by merely comparing females’ and males’ flcas scores. 5. discussion although there are recent meta-analyses that have examined the relationship between flca and language achievement (e.g., botes et al., 2020; teimouri et al., 2019; x. zhang, 2019), our research synthesis aimed at examining a relatively neglected area of systematic review, namely, the possible connection between foreign language anxiety, measured by the flcas and an important demographic variable, that is, gender. as for our first research question, the results of our systematic review showed considerable variation with respect to the methodological practices as well as reporting the results in studies focusing on the relationship between foreign language classroom anxiety, as measured by the flcas and gender. this raises many issues in terms of research quality assurance. based on our inclusion criteria, all the studies we looked at employed the complete version of the flcas as a data collection instrument; unfortunately, however, many authors seemed to have taken the tool and its psychometric qualities (especially its consistency) for granted and almost half of them failed to report the results of reliability checks for the given contexts. it is important that, when translating or using an instrument, even if it is a wellestablished one, the reliability of that particular version in a particular context should be ensured and accounted for (derrick, 2015; larsen-hall & plonsky, 2015). when the authors did check the reliability of the instrument, it was most often done by relying on the cronbach’s alpha internal consistency measure, while other reliability analyses were scarcely used (e.g., split-half method, test-retest reliability check) (cf. derrick, 2015). the main issue with only reporting cronbach’s alpha is that it does not address unidimensionality and misunderstandings around its interpretation also abound (hoekstra et al., 2018). when it comes to the instrument, it was also interesting to see that some authors referred to the complete instrument and used it as an overall measure of foreign language classroom anxiety, while others looked at the (supposed) underlying factors, either by using other researchers’ previous groupings or referring to the misconceived notion that the questionnaire purports to measure these distinct constructs of communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation, katalin piniel, anna zólyomi 192 and test anxiety (horwitz, 2017). instead, for the validity argument and in order to justify the interpretation of the responses indicating learners’ language anxiety levels, statistical analyses (e.g., factor analysis) of the data from a given sample would have been more useful (park, 2014). we also found that researchers applied a vast array of statistical procedures involving paired and independent samples t-tests or analyses of variance (anovas). however, quite surprisingly, no studies used hierarchical cluster analysis to group participants and shed light on foreign language anxiety patterns, which would add more to our understanding with respect to learner profiles (as suggested by horwitz, 2017) and to analyzing specific learner types (csizér & dörnyei, 2005). another noteworthy aspect is that little attention has been devoted to reporting the p value appropriately to indicate statistical significance (or the lack thereof). according to the american psychological association (2020), researchers ought to report the exact p value unless p < .001 (pp. 180, 204). many studies in our investigation failed to report the p value, and this practice is not at all beneficial for meta-analysts because the researchers may have to leave out complete studies which would otherwise be important for the analysis, or they would have to work with the least favorable level of significance (card, 2012). unfortunately, none of the 48 samples relied on an associated hedges’ g as the unbiased effect size measure, and cohen’s d was reported only in a handful of studies; what is more, only 32 mentioned data that could be used to calculate hedges’ g. it is important to note that statistical significance only tells us that we can reject the null hypothesis, while the effect size shows us practical importance (card, 2012; plonsky & oswald, 2014). therefore, reporting the effect size is indispensable in understanding the practical significance of the results. overall, we can say that our findings are in line with teimouri et al.’s (2019) conclusions, who claimed that “we can see a lopsided approach toward assessing and reporting the measurement characteristics of instruments in anxiety research” (p. 376). as a less important issue, reporting practices also showed inconsistency in terms of referring to learners’ language anxiety levels. although the same measure was used, the scores were difficult to compare directly because in some cases the average of the responses on the likert-scale items was given, whereas in others the authors provided a sum of the responses to individual items. with respect to our second research question about what characterizes the flca level of male and female language learners as measured by the flcas, we can state that despite the tendency for females to manifest slightly higher anxiety, this result was not statistically significant, both with respect to the whole instrument and its suggested subscales. in a previous meta-analysis, botes et al. (2020) arrived at similar results, reporting that the link between language anxiety and achievement was not moderated significantly by the proportion of female learners. gender differences in foreign language classroom anxiety: results of a meta-analysis 193 it must also be mentioned that the construct of gender nowadays is increasingly interpreted in its social context rather than as a binary biographical variable (e.g., dewaele et al., 2016). therefore, dewaele et al. (2016) forewarned researchers that “before speculating on possible reasons for differences between women and men (or the absence of them), there is reason to investigate how large the differences between . . . men and women really are, especially when it comes to language learning” (p. 42). naturally, as the data in the studies included in this meta-analysis was based on the binary-coded gender variable (male/female), we cannot make conclusions about flca and gender as a social variable. this points to the inherent complexity of the construct and to the importance of its cautious interpretation. although the binary interpretation of gender has been dominant for centuries, this construct may be more complex than it appears at first sight. finally, to see what biographical variables seem to moderate the relationship between foreign language classroom anxiety and gender, we relied on the most frequently reported demographic variables, namely, the age group of the learners, the language being studied, the geographical region where the l2 is being learnt, and the major of the university participants. based on the results of the analyses run on our sample, we could not conclude any modulating influence of these variables on the link between gender and foreign language anxiety. therefore, we cannot say that age, target language, regional context, or, in the case of university students, their majors play a discernible role concerning the relationship between flca and gender. 6. conclusions in the present study, we set out to examine the association between foreign language classroom anxiety and gender by conducting a meta-analysis on research utilizing the full 33-item version of the flcas and tapping into the link between language anxiety levels and gender. more precisely, we looked at the reporting practices of these studies, the magnitude of the link between language anxiety and gender, and various biographical variables that may modulate this relationship. first of all, we found that great variation exists in the methodological and reporting practices of the studies despite the relatively small number of eligible research endeavors. the authors of these papers generally relied on cronbach’s alpha internal consistency measure to check the reliability of the instrument, but a considerable number of them failed to report effect sizes. we saw various statistical procedures being employed to analyze foreign language anxiety differences, as measured by the flcas, albeit multivariate statistical methods were katalin piniel, anna zólyomi 194 scarcely used. the results of our research synthesis indicate that while females showed a tendency to manifest slightly more foreign language classroom anxiety, this result was not statistically significant; therefore, based on the present meta-analysis, we can say that gender does not seem to be linked to differences in flca levels as measured by the flcas. additionally, based on moderator analyses, we could not draw any conclusions as to the variables of age, regional context, target language, and study major influencing the link between language anxiety and gender. moving on to the limitations of our meta-analysis, we must highlight that the number of studies involved in the final analysis was rather small. this, however, might be accounted for by the fact that, unfortunately, many studies reported missing data or focused on analyzing the responses to individual items rather than scales (i.e., dimensions) subsuming more items. the issue of missing data when conducting fairly large-scale meta-analyses is also highlighted by larsen-hall and plonsky (2015), who state that “omitted statistics – or, more precisely, the authors who omitted them – are responsible in some cases for rendering massive amounts of data un-meta-analyzable and therefore unavailable to contribute to already limited efforts to aggregate findings across studies” (p. 133). while we acknowledge that educators should ultimately raise learners’ awareness of foreign language anxiety and assist them in combating this negative emotion rather than worrying about measurement issues and statistical procedures (horwitz, 2017), we believe that the role of researchers is to provide evidence and backing concerning the language learning-related phenomenon under investigation. in order for this information to be interpreted in a valid and reliable fashion (which in turn would allow us to draw overarching and valid conclusions by way of meta-analytic studies), we think that it is important to ensure quality in not only high profile publications but at the level of individual empirical studies as well. apart from quality control, we find it noteworthy to mention that more meta-analytic studies should be conducted on the role that language anxiety plays in the process of language learning, perhaps by focusing on other biographical and contextual variables. acnkowledgement the first author was supported by the nkfih – 129149 research grant. the second author is a member of the mta-elte foreign language teaching research group and was supported by the research program for public education development of the hungarian academy of sciences. gender differences in foreign language classroom anxiety: results of a meta-analysis 195 references1 *abood, m. h., & abu-melhim, a-r. h. 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(2019). an empirical study on foreign language classroom anxiety of college students. sino-us english teaching, 16(9), 376-386. https://doi.org/ 10.17265/1539-8072/2019.09.003 gender differences in foreign language classroom anxiety: results of a meta-analysis 203 appendix the forest plot for the random effects model of flcas based on the standard difference in means 549 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (3). 2018. 549-551 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.3.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial following two special issues of the journal, one dedicated to emotions in second language learning and the other to language learning strategies, the present issue of studies in second language learning and teaching is a regular one, bringing together six empirical studies dealing with different aspects of learning and using second and foreign languages (l2). the first two contributions are focused on the role of individual difference factors, both in the case of learners and prospective language teachers. the first study, undertaken by sachiko nakamura, explored the attributions of 42 japanese adult learners of english concerning changes in their attitudes and motivations in a 10-week toeic preparation program, as well as the emotions that accompanied these attributions. the analysis of responses to open-ended questions allowed identification of eight attributional categories (i.e., perceived l2 improvement, enjoyment, positive feelings, increased l2 exposure, realization of l2 needs and importance, effective l2 instruction, praise from the teacher and perceived inefficient l2 skills). while the data yielded evidence of enjoyment irrespective of proficiency, beginner learners were more likely to express joy, happiness and disappointment. in the second paper, kay irie, stephen ryan and sarah mercer report a study that used q methodology with a view to exploring the mindsets of 51 pre-service teachers of english at an austrian university, focusing in particular on their beliefs about their teaching competencies. the most important finding was that mindsets tend to be multidimensional, with the participants being convinced that while purely technical aspects of teaching, such as classroom management, are amenable to instruction, interpersonal skills are attributable to talent, thereby being stable within an individual and relatively impervious to pedagogical intervention. the next two papers included in this issue deal with the acquisition of pragmatics and the use of the skill of writing in the process of composing academic texts. specifically, todd a. hernández reports the results of a study which 550 explored the acquisition of apologies by 18 american learners of spanish during a 4-week study abroad stay in madrid. using a discourse completion task reflecting social and situational variation with respect to social status, social distance and seriousness of offence, administered prior to the study abroad period and towards the end, the researcher showed that even though the participants advanced to some extent in their command of the pragmatic features under investigation, their l2 production deviated from native-speaker norms and even became less target-like. katarzyna hryniuk investigated writer identity, operationalized as the use of self-reference (i.e., the frequency of use as well as functions of first person pronouns and determiners) and nominal lexical items referring to the authors, as well as the position of these two elements in the text in a corpus of 40 research papers in applied linguistics written by scholars from polish and anglo-american cultural backgrounds. she found that the polish writers tended to make their writing more impersonal than native-speakers of english, particularly in their description of research methodology, which prompted her to offer implications both for authors of academic papers and for journal editors and reviewers. the present issue closes with two studies which examined different aspects of content-based instruction. dietmar tatzl reports the results of a longitudinal empirical investigation which aimed to assess the effectiveness of a teaching module integrating content and language in an english for specific purposes course taught to aeronautical engineering students at a university in austria. on the basis of the data obtained from specifically designed evaluation surveys, teacher-assessed assignments and a corpus of online recruitment advertisements, tatzl demonstrated that the teaching module was successful not only in developing requisite language skills but also in raising participants’ awareness of what their future professions might involve. finally, jessica g. briggs, julie dearden and ernesto macaro conducted a study which compared the beliefs about english medium instruction (emi) held by 167 secondary and tertiary education teachers from 27 countries, focusing on such areas as the goals pursued, emi policies, the benefits and drawbacks for students as well as the challenges that emi teachers have to face. the analysis of the responses to an online survey showed that although emi is viewed more favorably at the secondary school level, at both phases there is concern for the learning of content, the need for coherent institutional policies and the importance of stronger links between different educational levels. all the six papers not only represent excellent scholarship but also pave the way for new lines of inquiry in the study of second language learning and teaching, as well as indicating the pedagogical implications of the findings. therefore i am confident that, on the one hand, they will be a source of inspiration to numerous 551 researchers, and, on the other, spur reflection on how additional languages can most beneficially be taught and learned. mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl 31 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (1). 2019. 31-53 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.1.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt weaving webs of connection: empathy, perspective taking, and students’ motivation alastair henry university west, trollhättan, sweden https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7789-9032 alastair.henry@hv.se cecilia thorsen university west, trollhättan, sweden https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7751-3942 cecilia.thorsen@hv.se abstract l2 motivation is a relational phenomenon, shaped by teacher responsiveness (lamb, 2017; ushioda, 2009). little, however, is known about the practices in which responsiveness is manifested. drawing on research from the culturally responsive teaching paradigm (petrone, 2013), and highlighting the role of empathy and perspective taking (warren, 2018), the aim of this ethnographic case study of two lessons with a focus on poetry is to develop a relational understanding of the evolution of motivation. analyses reveal how perspective taking has instructional and interactional dimensions, and how connections between lesson content and funds of knowledge with origins in students’ interactions with popular culture bring additional layers of meaning to learning. it is suggested that while connections that arise through perspective taking practices shape students’ in-the-moment motivational responses, they also accumulate in ways that lead to enduring motivational dispositions. keywords: l2 motivation; teacher-student relationships; culturally responsive teaching; funds of knowledge; empathy; perspective taking; connected learning alastair henry, cecilia thorsen 32 1. introduction learning to make meaning with language is an inherently social process that involves interaction with others (byrnes, 2013). however, despite the fundamentally relational nature of learning/using a language, and the recognition that success “depends less on materials, techniques and linguistic analyses, and more on what goes on inside and between the people in the classroom” (stevick, 1980, p. 4), the “relationality” of teacher–student relationships has not been systematically researched (mercer, 2016, p. 107). as applied linguistics moves into a social era (benson, 2017), focus on relationships between teachers and students has become of greater importance (mercer, 2015, 2016). not only are psychological constructs such as motivation, willingness to communicate and language anxiety being reframed as relational phenomena (see e.g., de costa, 2015; gkonou & miller, 2017; macintyre, barker, & sparling, 2017), but motivational influences stemming from the teacher–student relationship are also beginning to be explored (henry & thorsen, 2018a, 2018b). in social interactions in language classrooms, connections between teachers and students are central in shaping learning behaviors (arnold & murphey, 2013). connecting with students involves the capacity for empathy (mercer, 2016). empathy is foundational in the development of learner-centered and facilitative classroom environments. skilled language teachers are empathetic. they are able to recognize and understand “the needs and emotional states of their students” (oxford, 2016, p. 18). in a state-of-the-art review of the motivational dimension of language teaching, lamb (2017) identifies empathy as the defining characteristic of teachers successful in creating engaging learning activities and motivational environments. it is a capacity for “responsiveness” founded on “the personal quality of empathy” and developed over years of practice, which lamb argues “defines the successful motivator” (p. 312). if motivation in l2 classrooms is a relational phenomenon shaped by teachers’ responsiveness, there is value in studying how empathy is manifested in teacher–student interactions. while surveys of teachers’ social and emotional intelligence and their beliefs about empathic relationships are now providing empirically-based insights into the importance of empathy in the social environment of language classrooms (gkonou & mercer, 2018; mercer & gkonou, 2017), ethnographic approaches can shed light on the ways in which empathy plays out in interactions between teachers and students and, as a relational practice, how it can influence students’ engagement and motivation. while it is at the “very localized level of students’ learning experience that the real potential for engaging (or disengaging) their motivation may lie” (ushioda, 2013, p. 236), research examining motivational phenomena in the classroom weaving webs of connection: empathy, perspective taking, and students’ motivation 33 contexts in which they emerge is thin on the ground. taking up ushioda’s (2016) call for a “richer and sharper focus” (p. 574) on local and particular phenomena, and with the aim of generating situated understandings of language teachers’ responsiveness (lamb, 2017), the aim of this ethnographic case study is to explore language teacher empathy in teacher–student interactions. specifically, we want to consider a particular type of empathy that involves attunement to the perspectives and experiences students gain in social interaction outside the classroom, and, in the design and delivery of learning opportunities, orientations to these cultural frames of reference. before outlining the purpose of the study and the methodology, we first review research on culturally responsive pedagogies. 2. literature review 2.1. culturally responsive pedagogies in literacy education a growing body of work is investigating the intersections between young people’s interactions with popular culture and the development of academic skills. in this work, funds of knowledge (moll, amanti, neff, & gonzalez, 1992) is a central concept. developed in pedagogies designed to support the teaching of minority children, funds of knowledge (hereafter fok) refer to the cultural frames and linguistic resources that young people bring to classrooms. in pedagogies aimed at improving the life situations and opportunities of disadvantaged youth, a primary aim is to forge strategic connections between academic knowledge and communityand culturally-based ways of knowing (gonzalez, moll, & amanti, 2005; moll et al., 1992). attracting the attention of mainstream education research, the content domain of fok has been extended to additionally encompass experiences gained in social interactions outside of home and community environments (esteban-guitart, 2016). in these emerging understandings, popular culture practices and networked communities are identified as sites of identity development with particular importance for fok (esteban-guitart & moll, 2014; subero, vujasinović, & esteban-guitart, 2017). popular culture is central in young people’s lives, and contemporary pedagogies need to engage with students’ out-of-school experiences. with a focus on connections between academic knowledge and young people’s “popular culture funds of knowledge” (petrone, 2013, p. 250), research has investigated how intersections between institutional and informal ways of knowing can foster engagement and enhance academic achievement (hall, burns, & edwards, 2011; moje & hinchman, 2004; petrone, 2013). as this research shows, when teachers are responsive to students’ lives beyond the classroom, and when popular culture fok are activated as a part of learning, cultural experiences that are otherwise alastair henry, cecilia thorsen 34 marginalized in school become a resource for knowledge-development. when instruction is designed and carried out with the aim of integrating ways of knowing common in popular cultural practices with those that are academically framed and educationally determined, points of contact are created (morrell & duncan-andrade, 2004; vasudevan, 2008). such intersections are important, and can function “as a way of helping students to connect more effectively to new ideas [and] as a way of engaging and motivating students” (moje & hinchman, 2004, p. 326). examples of ways in which intersections between students’ popular culture fok and academic content have a positive influence on motivation is to be found in work by morrell and duncan-andrade (2002, 2004). here, in an urban high-school setting in the us, the fok of hip-hop lyrics functioned as a resource for interpreting canonical poetry. as students took part in the critical comparison of genres, positive effects on engagement were observed. these included increased participation in discussions, and greater effort expended on assignments. these authors also describe observing examples of deep engagement with analytical work. students were “excited about the juxtaposition of rap and canonical texts,” and classrooms were abuzz with energy (morrell & duncan-andrade, 2004, p. 265). fok are generated in social activities in onand off-line settings (estebanguitart, 2016; subero et al., 2017). thus, in addition to cultural knowledge gained in local practices, the fok of contemporary youth also encompass digital literacy skills, and knowledge generated through digitally-mediated communication (schwartz, 2015). for many twenty-first century youth, fok comprise semiotic resources that are distributed across time, space, activities and artefacts, and evolve through the social use of digital media. as subero and colleagues (2017) explain, when activated in contemporary educational contexts, these semiotic resources “can be materialized into transferable elements that can help to connect school practice to the learning contexts and practices that take place at home, with peers and with those practices mediated by digital devices” (p. 260). in the context of activities that involve examining, circulating, valuing and appropriating students’ fok, possibilities for meaningful self-expression can be further enhanced when text-creation becomes a multidiscursive, multimodal social practice (schwartz, 2015). while culturally responsive pedagogies involve the creation of “explicit curricular bridges” between academic imperatives and students’ fok (petrone, 2013, p. 252; schwartz, 2015), another approach designed to facilitate interactions is the creation of what dyson (2003) calls a permeable curriculum. unlike elements of instructional design aimed at creating clearly delineated spaces within which connections between cultural knowledge and academic understanding can take place, in a permeable curriculum connections are allowed to occur organically. in a pedagogy characterized by permeability, teachers are receptive to students’ weaving webs of connection: empathy, perspective taking, and students’ motivation 35 experiences, and work in ways that facilitate the dynamic interplay of knowledge developed in the classroom, and knowledge originating outside school. at its core, permeability involves openness. as dyson (1993) explains, openness . . . is not easy if curricular mainroads have rigid boundaries within which children must respond. in such a curriculum, the “sense” of each task may be to please the teacher, a kind of sense that is differentially meaningful to children. in contrast, a permeable curriculum assumes and, indeed, exploits children’s susceptibility to the appeal of meaningful activity and their sensitivity to situational context. further, it acknowledges the complexity of children’s social worlds and cultural materials. and it attempts not only to create bridges between worlds, but to support children’s own naming and manipulating of the dynamic relationships among worlds. (p. 217) for teachers whose professional practice has the characteristics of permeability, there is a heightened sensitivity to opportunities to support students’ agency. they are accommodating of the experiences students bring to learning, and receptive to knowledge genres, cultural practices and modes of participation that are highly familiar to students, yet rarely made meaningful in classroom learning. in classrooms characterized by permeability, where teaching is centered on “meaningful activity” (cf. stevick’s [1998] notion of meaningful action), and where teachers promote students’ agency and meaning-making capacities, conditions conducive for motivation and engagement are generated (dyson, 1993). 2.2. teacher empathy: empathic concern and perspective taking the openness that is central to culturally responsive teaching is founded on the teacher’s capacity for empathy (mcallister & irvine, 2002). empathy has an emotional dimension (empathic concern) and a cognitive dimension (perspective taking) (davis, 1994). while empathic concern involves the capacity to experience feelings of sympathy, compassion and understanding, perspective taking is the tendency to “adopt the psychological point of view of others in everyday life” (davis, 1994, p. 57). teacher empathy can be understood as a refined element of the moral responsibility of caring for students (empathic concern) and “the teacher’s ability to understand the classroom from her students’ perspectives” (perspective taking) (rychly & graves, 2012, p. 45). teaching that is culturally responsive builds on empathic concern and perspective taking (warren, 2018). because perspective taking is needed in order to develop empathic concern, it can be understood as the “anchoring dimension” of the exercise of empathy in social interactions (davis, 1994; warren, 2018). at root, perspective taking involves the ability to solicit information and to make inferences. it is the driver of decision-making, and the tool by which teachers gain insights into the alastair henry, cecilia thorsen 36 lives and concerns of students as unique individuals. most importantly, it is the means by which teachers are able to create opportunities for students to engage with new forms of knowledge on their terms. as warren (2018) explains, “simply playing a popular song during a lesson is not evidence of a teacher’s cultural responsiveness” (p. 172). rather, culturally responsive teaching involves perspective taking that manifests itself in engaging personally with students’ experiences, and teaching and interacting through students’ cultural filters. because perspective taking leads to a “pedagogy of listening” (cf. low & sonntag, 2013), it enables teachers to become aware of and gain access to students’ fok (warren, 2018). it functions as a means of knowing who students are and “translates pragmatically into any number of routine instructional or interactional [emphasis added] habits that allow teachers to enter the life worlds of their students” (p. 7). most essentially, perspective taking means “responding flexibly” to students “moment-by-moment” (warren, 2018, p. 175). 3. study and purpose in language teaching, responsiveness is the defining professional characteristic of successful motivators (lamb, 2017). empathy is the foundation upon which responsiveness is developed, and it lies at the heart of responsive teaching (rychly & graves, 2012; warren, 2018). in line with the view that perspective taking is the “anchoring dimension” in the exercise of empathy (davis, 1994; warren, 2018), and with the aim of contributing to the development of a theoretically-informed account of the motivational influences of language teacher responsiveness (lamb, 2017), the purpose of this exploratory case study is to examine perspective taking in teacher–student interactions. 4. method in applied linguistics, case study research involves the close-up examination of an individual entity in a manner and context interesting both theoretically and descriptively (duff, 2008). case studies are carried out against “the backdrop of existing theory and research,” and aim to generate insights into the phenomenon in focus (duff, 2014, p. 237). to develop an understanding of the responsiveness theorized to be characteristic of successful motivators (lamb, 2017), classrooms where relationships are positive, where students are motivated, and where teachers are aware of and interested in students’ lives and experiences outside school provide suitable sites for research. here we draw on data collected in a 9th grade class as part of the motivational teaching in swedish secondary english (motisse) project (henry, 2018; henry, korp, sundqvist, & thorsen, 2018; weaving webs of connection: empathy, perspective taking, and students’ motivation 37 henry & thorsen, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c; henry, sundqvist, & thorsen, 2019). ethnographic research was conducted in the classrooms of 16 teachers identified from a randomly-drawn sample (n = 252) as being knowledgeable about and interested in students’ out-of-school activities involving english, possessing a professional practice informed by these insights, and having students who were generally motivated. a detailed account of the recruitment procedures is provided in henry and thorsen (2018a, 2018b). 4.1. data in the motisse project, ethnographic observations of 258 individual lessons were carried out. examples of responsive teaching involving orientations to students’ “popular culture funds of knowledge” (petrone, 2013, p. 250) were numerous. these orientations were evident in activity design, and in teacher–student interactions. in the current study, we focus on two lessons observed by the first author. with the aim of developing students’ understandings of literary genres, in these lessons exploration of poetic form took place through the fok of online media practices. the data consists of fieldnotes and semi-structured interviews with the teacher and the students. the teacher interview and the student interviews were conducted in english. 4.2. analytical procedures analyses were carried out using a multi-stage, holistic approach. in a first stage, repeated close readings were made of the fieldnotes and interview transcripts. next, these were re-read and coded. here, the aim was to identify specific examples of practice that could be understood as involving a form of responsiveness. in a third stage, theoretical perspectives gained from readings of the literature on culturally responsive pedagogy (described in the review of the literature) were brought in. from this point onwards, the analyses proceeded in an iterative manner. from the descriptions of situated interactions, broader and increasingly abstract understandings of responsiveness were developed. to enhance interpretive validity, these analyses were discussed between the authors over a period of months, and drafts of the paper were sent to the teacher for comments and feedback. 4.3. ethics the teacher and the students were informed in writing about the study, its procedures, and the ethical guidelines. written informed consent to participate was obtained. alastair henry, cecilia thorsen 38 5. results to provide a broader relational context within which classroom interactions can be understood, the analyses are framed by extracts from interviews with the teacher (noomi, a self-chosen pseudonym) and her students. 5.1. the teacher: responsiveness as an aspect of identity while all of the teachers in the motisse project expressed awareness of the need to create connections between target content and students’ cultural experiences, and designed learning opportunities in which students could explore popular culture domains and use skills and knowledge gained in popular cultural practices, the degree to which practice was systematically informed by these insights differed. as golombek (2017) writes, “what teachers do in the classroom is intricately tied to how they perceive themselves as teachers” (p. 19). for noomi, her interest in the students as young adults, and her desire to connect subject content with experiences from life beyond school were the lodestars of her teaching. perceiving awareness and responsiveness to be the personal and professional qualities defining of who she was as a teacher, noomi emphasized the importance of not monopolizing knowledge, and of creating opportunities for students to express knowledge that is particularly theirs: and when it comes to the subject, i need to update myself. i think it’s important for you as a teacher to update your content. i think you need to study and always be a step ahead. but also to allow yourself to not to know everything, and to let the students inform you, and teach you, and help you. and i will always try to teach and bring up subjects or examples out of their life and their reality, and then connect that to other subjects and so on and so forth. the perception that learning is bi-directional, that she also learns from her students, is a recurring theme in the interview. for example, she talks about how knowledge gained in interaction with one student can be subsequently used in interactions with others: for example, like there is these tv-series like gossip girl and vampire diaries and all these things that they are watching. if i would ask the question, for example if i sit and talk to them, and i ask them, “so what do you do?” and they say “i watch this series.” “and what is it called?” “vampire diaries,” then the conversation doesn’t end there just because i don’t know anything about it. for it’s more like, “oh tell me, what is it about?” because i’m thinking that if there is something that i don’t know, and they are spending all this time understanding it, then maybe they can teach me something. and if i learn something, even if i just remember a little bit of it, that would be probably useful for me when i’m building a relationship with another student that is watching that. weaving webs of connection: empathy, perspective taking, and students’ motivation 39 noomi’s concern with students’ cultural experiences, and the need to acknowledge everyday knowledge, is particularly apparent with regard to technology: i think you have to use this kind of things as tools, you know, and you have to use chatgroups as something in school. you have to use the stuff that they use every day. you have to use it. you cannot continue and try to …1 i mean, sure, i want them to read like physical books as well. but then i need to introduce it so that they will accept it and they will think it’s exciting and they will make a big deal out of it, you know? it’s like with poetry. none of the kids like poetry, so i have to try to introduce it and make it exciting so that they will love poetry. i want, my goal is that in the end of this course, i want them to continue writing on the blog, so even when they’re finished, i want the kids to continue writing. as she indicates, the activation of students’ fok – here practices of online communication – can add an additional dimension to working with subject content and has the potential to generate engagement of a more enduring nature. 5.2. the students: having a teacher who is responsive to needs and concerns for the students, noomi is a teacher who is involved and non-judgmental: “well, there is real sense of togetherness in our group, i think, and she has enabled us to feel safe with all the others in the class. so we can talk absolutely anything without being afraid of being wrong” (boy). in addition to the security and openness in english classes, students talk of noomi’s ability to connect with them as individuals and as a group: she has the class with her. she is like a friend, but also an adult. so she’s not … not in the sense that she just wants to be a part of the group, and will just play around, but rather that she is very … a person who you can look up to. (girl 1) for another student, noomi is a teacher with the capacity to adapt, and someone who acts at the intersection between the concerns of education and the concerns of youth: “she is very young at heart. but at the same time very adult. i mean, i can’t explain it, she is somewhere in between, and she … yes, she adapts to the students” (girl 2). a third student describes how, in being present and open, noomi is able to take their perspective: she is not a teacher who you just ... she is here in the present. so we can bring up things in conversation that i couldn’t bring up with for example [name], but you can with noomi. … she makes it so that we are comfortable with her, and she takes up everything, all of our questions. which most of the other teachers wouldn’t do, because they think such things are uncomfortable or don’t belong here. (girl 3) 1 unspaced elipses like this one indicate pauses. alastair henry, cecilia thorsen 40 throughout the interviews, students talk about how they are motivated during lessons, and how english is a class they enjoy and look forward to: for me, noomi’s lessons are a little special compared to the others. the others are like more of a burden, if you can call it that. noomi’s are more a good thing, something you want to go to. (girl 2) for me, i am very motivated. and i think it has a lot to do with what i said before, that we really have fun, it is really enjoyable. togetherness, a feeling of togetherness. (boy) in noomi’s classes students consistently demonstrated engagement and participated enthusiastically in class discussions (see also henry & thorsen, 2018b). 5.3. practice categories perspective taking is theorized as a disposition that is manifested in both instructional and interactional practices (warren, 2018). these practice categories provide the framing for our analyses. first, in the lesson where the poetry project was introduced, perspective taking is examined as an instructional practice. then, in the immediately subsequent lesson, it is explored as an interactional practice. in the sections that follow, the fieldnotes are presented in their original form, all of the interaction taking place in english. 5.3.1. perspective taking as an instructional practice excerpt 1 “ok guys, so what’s poetry?” noomi asks. immediately the students respond, putting up hands and being invited to speak, and, as they come up with ideas, noomi writes these up on the board. “it is art in text form” “it has a rhythm” “expressing thoughts and feelings” “it is usually short” “ok,” says noomi “so what are your feelings towards poetry?” it is quiet. then come some responses: “i feel like it is something i have to process for a long time” “a poem can give new impressions and perspectives” noomi then goes around and asks specific students for their feelings are about poetry. the students’ feelings are mixed. although the students do not appear as negative as noomi seems to believe (“none of the kids like poetry”), their responses are nevertheless cautious (“i feel like it is something i have to process for a long time”). the students’ ambivalence weaving webs of connection: empathy, perspective taking, and students’ motivation 41 confirms noomi’s assumption of needing to proceed in a way that will “make it exciting.” she continues by explaining that they will look at the stylistic conventions of poetry and that students can draw on this knowledge in creating their own poetic work: excerpt 2 “what i want us to do is to create a blog where you can publish your piece of art, where you can share and where we can all see all of your ideas, your feelings, and your thoughts, and then i also want us to have a facebook group where we can discuss the poems and give more critical feedback on your thinking. so the blog will start off closed, while we are working on the poems, and then will become open, so that anyone anywhere can read them. but closed first while we are working on them. and then open. and facebook is where we can be critical. where we analyse the poems that you write. so the blog is for publishing and the facebook group is for discussion.” she continues, “and you know we will be connecting to things we have been doing before, the analysis of literature, critique, and there are of course links to genre.” … “could you luke, create a facebook group. and then invite us. and you can create a name. and you can create the layout. it can be as you like.” luke and two students next to him get out their phones and immediately start creating the group. “but nobody uses facebook any more” says luke. (i ask luke about the social media that he and others use. well, we used to use facebook, but now it is like instagram and periscope, he says. but facebook is ok. we know it and it is cool that we are using it in class.) as recounted in the interviews, the students experience a sense of “togetherness” in noomi’s classroom. drawing on the social cohesion in the class, noomi proposes that the work with poetry should take place in a networked form. here, social media platforms (a blog and a facebook page) provide representational spaces within which the students’ work can circulate. in the context of a genre that students can experience as intimidating, the integration of social media into the instructional design can be understood as a form of perspective taking. by drawing on fok comprising digital literacy skills (schwartz, 2015), engagement with an unfamiliar genre takes place in an everyday discourse context. specifically, because the production and analysis of texts is carried out in a networked environment, and because these digital spaces are student-generated (“and you can create a name. and you can create the layout. it can be as you like”)2, the design involves a bridging between the discourse domains of classroom learning and the cultural practices of social media interaction (schwartz, 2015; subero, vujasinović, & esteban-guitart, 2017). 2 given the focus of the unit and the teacher’s approach to the topic, it is perhaps no coincidence that the students elected to call the blog dead poets society. alastair henry, cecilia thorsen 42 having transferred responsibility for the creation of the blog and the facebook group to the students, noomi shifts focus and begins to explore poetic conventions: excerpt 3 “rhythm” says noomi. “what is rhythm?” she then produces a pair of bongos. “bongos. does anybody play these?” she then says “rhyming” she goes around the class eliciting single syllable words that rhyme. each pair of words she then sounds out on the drum. (one word on each bongo drum, and with emphasis on the stress.) “um um” … everyone laughs when someone can’t immediately come up with a word pair, noomi bangs the drums faster and faster, creating a sense of tension … everyone laughs as they go round and round the class the drumming gets louder and faster, as do the responses. “now let’s do two syllable words.” and noomi bangs out two syllables on the drums ‘da, da; da, da.’ for each pair, noomi sounds out the sounds on the drums: snowing, blowing raining, shaming “now sentences” she says. “roses are red, violets are blue, i am ugly and so are you.” “so now you have to find something that rhymes with blue!” “now everyone stand up.” the students stand up and noomi goes around with the ‘roses are red, violets are blue, i am ugly and so are you’ line and elicits responses, lines that follow on and rhyme. there is laughter at some of the crazy things that the students come up with: “give me something and i will come home with you” “you are a monkey and belong in a zoo” “i am in love and you don’t have a clue” “no, no, no, no, two two two two” “you are so ugly but i still love you” there is lots and lots of laughter, as students say strange things. embarrassment, smiles, laughter. noomi keeps going on and on, and finally finishes, the students sitting down again with relief. noomi then asks everyone to check that they have received email invites to the blog and the facebook group. the students have the phones out and are checking. it seems that everyone got the invites and are into the group and the blog. “so everyone is in? good!” noomi now gets the students to go to her webpage. now, noomi says, the students should post a “roses are red violets are blue” poem. the students are writing, as nomi goes around checking to see that everyone is in and that the blog is working. when they are finished they start looking at and commenting on other students’ poems, laughing, talking across the class, reading out loud, laughing, sniggering. “ok, now you can comment on these ‘roses are red’ poems!” weaving webs of connection: empathy, perspective taking, and students’ motivation 43 “there are some awesome ones here!” says luke. “jenny, i like the one you wrote” everyone is smiling, sharing posts, laughing, reading all the poems that have now appeared on the site. and commenting on them too. while this is happening noomi is checking on her tablet, checking to see that everyone is in and is active. within a short time after the start of the lesson, and the students’ caution and initial ambivalence, the atmosphere changes to one of joy and amusement. exploring the nature of rhyme, noomi goes round the class inviting each student to participate, first in sounding out intonation patterns, and then in creating rhyming word-pairs. increasing the complexity, they move to the sentence level. this noomi does by using the “roses are red . . .” couplet, and inviting students to complete the second line. like the use of social media, this too is an aspect of instructional design informed by perspective taking. for the students, the “roses are red . . .” couplet is immediately recognizable. not (of course) as a derivation from spencer’s the faeire queene (“she bath’d with roses red, and violets blew”), but rather as a high-circulation internet meme. internet memes are forms of cultural information spread between people – often very rapidly – and which scale into a shared social phenomenon. that is, while memes are spread at a micro level, they can have a macro-level impact in shaping the thinking and consciousness of social groups (shifman, 2013). in this case, the (at the time) widespread popularity of the “roses are red . . .” meme derives from antihumor in the parodying of the poem’s original romantic sentiments (gi97ol, 2012). since the students are immersed daily in flows of networked media, the “roses are red . . .” couplet immediately triggers associations with online discourse practices. by drawing on fok that comprise understandings of online humor, the in-the-moment creation of the next line is facilitated. students are quickly able to come up with rhyming lines. this maintains momentum and sustains continued engagement with the activity. in the next stage of the instructional design, knowledge of social media use and online humor are combined when students are invited to create “roses are red . . .” poems on the blog, and to comment on them on facebook. as the activity unfolds, the students’ initial hesitation about engaging with poetry appears to subside. 5.3.2. perspective taking as an interactional practice in the following lesson, the exploration of poetry continues: excerpt 4 noomi arrives. “sorry i was late i got called into the principal’s office.” “ohhhh” chorus the pupils, “what did you do?” noomi smiles, jokes and then says to the class generally, “did you have a good day? are you still grumpy today? is it hormones? what alastair henry, cecilia thorsen 44 would you do if you went home? sleep?” then she says “i saw what you wrote online, but let’s look at it together. let’s look at the blog and the facebook group together, ok?” noomi begins the lesson in playful mood, her description of a meeting with the school’s principal framed in a manner that enacts a leveling-off of the teacherstudent relationship. continuing, she jokes with the students, hinting that sleep might be an alternative (and possibly more attractive) option compared to the next ninety minutes of class. while lighthearted and seemingly superficial, these interactions also involve perspective taking. framing the meeting with the principal as a summons, and presenting sleep as a legitimate (?) alternative to work, the institutional constraints of school are represented from the students’ perspective. this is not inconsequential; rather, these momentary renegotiations of the teacher-student relationship are instrumental in creating the climate of “togetherness” within which the work with poetry takes place. once the students have accessed the websites, noomi begins by reading the poems. giving positive comments, she then asks students to read out their verses. as they read, she starts snapping her fingers to the rhythm. the students follow her lead, and this continues for a while. then, she introduces another poetic form, the nursery rhyme. she begins by reciting the rhyme, “hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle:” excerpt 5 “so what does it mean?” noomi then elicits responses about different words, getting students to rephrase the lines to make sense of them. the word fiddle is difficult. noomi asks. a girl comes up with a suggestion. “great, she looked it up! great” noomi says (giving positive acknowledgment to the fact that this girl had used her phone to find out the meaning of the word). after the final line (“the dish ran away with the spoon”) noomi says: “ok, so give me a shakespeare play where people ran away!” romeo and juliet, some students say. “ok, give me another play!” now they do the “hey diddle diddle” rhyme together, clicking their fingers and identifying the stress markers. everyone is getting into this, doing it again and again, themselves. some decide to do this to different types of rhyme (rapping) and accents (i hear both us and rp). (interestingly, noomi has not asked for these raps, and the students have just started doing them). now, noomi asks half of the pupils to do the fingers, and half to mark the stress with a pen “i am taking carlo’s idea here” (when they were practicing, carlo had been clicking his pen on the table to the rhythm, instead of clicking his fingers). “now i want first fingers and then half way through pens!” “and now i want the rhyme too.” there is a mass of sound as the whole class are involved in making the rhyme come to life. “it’s creating music” says noomi. as an interactional practice, perspective taking involves in-the-moment flexibility in responding to unfolding events, and to the ideas, concerns, interpretations and expressions of personhood to which students give voice. at the beginning of weaving webs of connection: empathy, perspective taking, and students’ motivation 45 the extract, and in the context of the invitation to decode and make sense of the rhyme by deconstructing it line-by-line, noomi applauds the initiative of a girl who circumvents this process by using her phone. rather than framing this as an act of spoiling, she casts the use of the phone as a legitimate and valuable strategy. later, when the students subvert the traditional rhyming pattern of the “hey diddle, diddle” rhyme and transform it into a rap, noomi gives no indication that this is not what was intended. on the contrary, it appears neither noteworthy nor remarkable. by letting the situation pass uncommented, her response not only flags the possibilities that arise when genres are mixed but also legitimates the use of students’ popular culture fok in the development of a broader understanding and appreciation of poetic form. a third example of perspective taking occurs at the end of the extract when noomi introduces a new tool for marking rhythm. asking half of the class to continue snapping their fingers, she invites the other half to mark the stress by clicking their pens on the table. this, she says, is an idea gained from seeing a boy doing this instead of snapping his fingers. like the use of the phone and the rap, the boy’s decision to click his pen is a deviation, albeit slight, from noomi’s original design. sensitive to the boy’s chosen way of participating, by incorporating his method of marking poetic meter into her design, noomi’s actions are supportive of his agency. like with the girl who uses the phone, and those who rap, she recognizes and legitimizes students’ self-initiated attempts to bridge between different domains of experience. when students’ agency and meaning-making capacities are supported through in-the-moment reflexivity, and when perspective taking as an interactional practice is systematic, teaching bears the characteristics of a permeable curriculum and positively influences students’ motivational dispositions (dyson, 2003; warren, 2018). 6. discussion as observed at the beginning of the first lesson, the students were not immediately enthusiastic about the unit. as noomi herself comments, “none of the kids like poetry.” however, by the second lesson, the students had become fully absorbed in the exploration of poetic form. in fact, the motivational energy generated was such that when the ninety-minute lesson ended, only two students left the room, the others continuing with their work. twenty minutes after the lesson’s end, several were still engaged writing verse. eventually, noomi had to ask them to pack up, telling them jokingly to “go and get a life.” l2 motivation emerges in and through social relations; complex interactions of situational parameters influence the motivational responses of individuals and groups (dörnyei, henry, & muir, 2016; ushioda, 2009). here, in attempting to alastair henry, cecilia thorsen 46 understand the evolution of motivation during these two lessons, it is clear that teacher-student relationships (henry & thorsen, 2018a) and group dynamics (dörnyei & murphey, 2003) play important roles in shaping engagement. however, in working with the deconstruction and creation of poetry, something more appears to be taking place. in an attempt to understand observed behaviors, and with the aim of generating theoretically-anchored conceptualizations of motivation that arises when students engage with forms of expression characteristic of online genres, we draw on recent developments in the culturally responsive teaching paradigm emphasizing the importance of fok that originate in the social worlds of online interaction (petrone, 2013; schwartz, 2015; subero et al., 2017). through the analysis of two focal lessons, and based on warren’s (2018) assertions that: (a) empathy is operationalized through perspective taking, (b) perspective taking constitutes the central cognitive anchor in culturally responsive teaching, and (c) perspective taking translates into particular instructional and interactional practices, we have attempted to explain how language teacher responsiveness (lamb, 2017) can be understood as a motivational influence. in the design of the lesson, the use of everyday social media constitutes an instructional practice that provides students with a familiar medium within which poetic form can be explored. through the activation of fok comprising digital literacy skills (subero et al., 2017), representational spaces in rich discursive contexts are created (schwartz, 2015). as ito et al. (2013) have argued, in overcoming the gap between in-school and out-of-school experiences of learning in a digital age, contemporary education has a need for “connected learning.” this involves the connection of activities, identities and digitally mediated knowledge (henry, 2018). as a form of perspective taking, the strategy of connecting something decidedly unfamiliar (poetry) with something highly relevant to everyday life (discourse practices in social media) creates positive motivational preconditions for the students’ work (henry et al., 2019). within this discursive framework, the use of a high-circulation internet meme functions as a platform from which explorations of poetic conventions can proceed, thus constituting an additional layer of perspective taking. not only is the “roses are red . . .” meme instantly recognizable, but it is also encountered in ironic forms and associated with subversive and irreverent genres of humor. as a consequence, the task of constructing innovative continuations generates a positive response as students create verse that is amusing, quirky and deliberately warped. further, because engagement becomes possible from a position of knowledge (of online humor), this contributes in generating an enduring motivational influence. as well as an instructional practice, where bridging between the familiar and the unfamiliar is accomplished through the activation of fok originating in students’ social worlds, perspective taking is also a hallmark of this teacher’s weaving webs of connection: empathy, perspective taking, and students’ motivation 47 interactional practice. in the open and inclusive environment in which interaction takes place, opportunities for negotiation, adaptation, play and resistance can increase experiences of autonomy; just as it is permissible to play with language and to recast the rhyme as a rap, so too is the choice of an alternative method of participation (clicking a pen) and the use of an unsanctioned resource (a phone). not only do the teacher’s responses to these renegotiations of the activity reveal a space for individual agency (see also henry & thorsen, 2018c), but as the penclicking example reveals, perspective taking also enables students’ initiatives to be seamlessly incorporated into an intentionally permeable design. reflecting on these two forms of responsiveness, it is perhaps easier to understand how, as an instructional practice, perspective taking can influence students’ motivation. indeed, the motivational affordances of pedagogies that draw on fok comprising digital literacy skills, and which “attend to the virtual spaces that young people may be exploring via the internet” (moje & hinchman, 2004, p. 66), have been previously recognized (henry, 2013). however, while the motivational influences of perspective taking as an interactional practice might not be as apparent, they should not to be underestimated. as ushioda (2011) explains, “it is through social participation in opportunities, negotiations and activities” that motivation emerges, and it is in classroom practices where there is space for adaptation and compromise that “motivational dispositions and identities evolve and are given expression” (p. 21). in line with these ideas, the empiricallygrounded insights gained in the present study suggest that in classrooms where teachers are responsive to fok originating in students’ social and cultural practices, perspective taking functions to legitimize alternative ways of knowing and to encourage alternative forms of expression. this extended scope for agency enables students to participate in the learning process as knowledgeable partners. to reference one of stevick’s (1998) many telling observations on effective learning in l2 classrooms, in both its instructional and interactional forms, perspective taking can be understood as providing students with the experience of being “an object of primary value in a world of meaningful action” (p. 20). in instructed settings, motivation is highly dependent on the relational climate. in classrooms where teacher-student relationships are positive, where teachers are open about who they are, and where empathic capacity translates into forms of perspective taking, influences on students’ motivation are likely to operate both within and outside of conscious awareness. in classrooms where a teacher’s empathic concern is manifested in the design of learning activities (instructional perspective taking), and in moment-to-moment communication (interactional perspective taking), students can develop a “relational stance” that mediates a perception of being psychologically connected with the teacher (rodgers & raider-roth, 2006, p. 274). in such situations, the mere presence of alastair henry, cecilia thorsen 48 the teacher, or the simple act of crossing the classroom threshold, can generate positive emotions. over time, these accumulate to form positive motivational dispositions (henry & thorsen, 2018a, 2018b). it is the effects of these accumulated perceptions of connectedness, we contend, that are reflected in the wealth of l2 motivation research highlighting the centrality of teacher responsiveness for students’ motivation (lamb, 2017). 7. conclusion given recent developments in l2 motivation research demonstrating the importance of the classroom social climate (joe, hiver, & al-hoorie, 2017; park & hiver, 2017) and emerging insights into the role of well-being and enjoyment in the l2 learning process (macintyre, gregersen, & mercer, 2016), it is somewhat paradoxical that like other aspects of the l2 learning experience, the influence of the teacher remains a relatively neglected area of inquiry (csizér & kálmán, this issue; dörnyei, this issue). while the papers in this special issue evidence a range of objectives and methodologies currently being used to explore motivation at the learning interface, our aim has been to employ a narrow focus and to investigate motivation “in relation to particular classroom events [and in] situated interactions among teachers and learners” (ushioda, 2016, p. 564). here, as in other case studies carried out in the motisse project, we find that small and sometimes almost imperceptible interactions between teachers and students can be of significance for motivation and engagement. although the interests of our research have been diverse, the investigation of the practice of successful motivators has led to the insight that while engagement can ebb and flow during a lesson or activity, and while motivation is influenced by any number of learner-internal and learner-external contingencies, students’ motivational dispositions are best conceptualized as the cumulative outcomes of innumerable micro-level interactions. in the complex worlds of language classrooms, it is the “small, positive ripples” that teachers make in the lives of students (gregersen, macintyre, & mercer, 2016, p. 9) that, over time, accumulate and result in more enduring motivational dispositions. not only off the radar of research seeking to understand the effects on l2 motivation of the classroom social climate in a more general sense, but often passing unnoticed by teachers and students themselves, these ripple-like moments of connectivity can be decisive in shaping responses that develop into established patterns of behavior. if motivational teaching is indeed about the weaving of complex webs of connections (arnold & murphey, 2013), then connection-making needs to be understood and investigated as a situated practice. focusing on the “relationality” of teacher-student interactions (mercer 2016, p. 107), and examining perspective taking as an instructional and weaving webs of connection: empathy, perspective taking, and students’ motivation 49 an interactional practice (warren, 2018), this study constitutes a step towards understanding how these webs are woven. acknowledgements we would like to express our heartfelt thanks not just to noomi and her students, but to all of the teachers and students who took part in the motisse project. the research reported on is part of the motivational teaching in swedish secondary english (motisse) project funded by the swedish research council (vetenskapsrådet) [grant number 2013-785]. alastair henry, cecilia thorsen 50 references arnold, j., & murphey, t. 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(2018). empathy, teacher dispositions, and preparation for culturally responsive pedagogy. journal of teacher education, 69(2), 169-183. 673 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (4). 2020. 673-696 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.4.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt comparing self-determination theory and the l2 motivational self system and their relationships to l2 proficiency chika takahashi ehime university, matsuyama, japan https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0719-2167 takahashi.chika.qr@ehime-u.ac.jp seongah im university of hawai’i at mānoa, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8447-6484 seongahi@hawaii.edu abstract this study empirically compares two often-utilized motivation theories in l2 studies: self-determination theory and the l2 motivational self system. it also examines the relationships among their motivational constructs, learners’ intended l2 learning effort, and l2 proficiency. while a number of studies have utilized these models in order to examine second language learners’ motivation, there has not been a thorough comparison of the two. furthermore, while many studies have demonstrated the structural relationships between the motivational constructs of the two theories and the learner’s self-reported amount of effort, fewer studies have examined their l2 achievement. the results of this study indicated that the constituents in the two theories are correlated as predicted. furthermore, while internalized types of motivation in self-determination theory predicted intended learning effort, which then led to l2 proficiency, the strength of the ideal l2 self was much weaker than the l2 learning experience, unlike what is argued in the theory. keywords: l2 motivation; self-determination theory; l2 motivational self system; l2 proficiency; structural equation modeling chika takahashi, seongah im 674 1. introduction learning a second language (hereafter l2) is a complex and arduous process involving various factors. even individuals with a high aptitude for learning who benefit from having an excellent teacher are not guaranteed achievement because their individual difference factors play a role in how hard and how persistently they study, thus influencing the rate of attainment and its ultimate level. among these factors, l2 motivation has consistently been shown to be related to learning effort (e.g., kormos & csizér, 2008; taguchi, magid, & papi, 2009), and in some studies, it has been demonstrated to be related to l2 achievement/l2 proficiency (e.g., yashima, nishida, & mizumoto, 2017). the definition of l2 motivation varies among researchers, but they seem to agree that it is about the purposes or reasons for studying an l2 (directions) and how intensely we do so (magnitude) (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, p. 4). to capture this multifaceted construct, researchers have proposed various models. the most frequently utilized ones include self-determination theory (sdt; deci & ryan, 2002; ryan & deci, 2017), which originated in psychology and has been applied in l2 studies, and the l2 motivational self system (l2mss; dörnyei, 2009), which was proposed specifically for l2 learning. although independently these theories have been extensively employed in past research, few studies have attempted to systematically compare them (e.g., konno, 2011; yashima, 2009). furthermore, in l2 motivation studies drawing on questionnaires, many researchers have employed intended learning effort as the criterion measure without including l2 proficiency/achievement (e.g., kormos & csizér, 2014; ryan, 2009; taguchi et al., 2009; you, dörnyei, & csizér, 2016). thus, although the role of l2 motivation has been emphasized in the field, researchers have not always clarified the relationships between l2 motivation and l2 achievement. we certainly need a fuller understanding of what is captured (and what is not) by the constructs of the two theories, their similarities and unique characteristics, and how the constructs relate to learners’ achievement. this can be achieved by comparing the two major theories. thus, the present study aims to fill the research gap by empirically comparing sdt and l2mss, and examining their relationships to l2 proficiency as measured by the global test of english communication (gtec), a standardized english test, with a sample of first-year japanese university students. 2. literature review 2.1. self-determination theory as described above, sdt originated in psychology and has been applied in various fields such as education, sports, and health (self-determination theory, comparing self-determination theory and the l2 motivational self system and their relationships. . . 675 2020). what is unique in the theory is that distinct types of motivation are postulated to lie along a continuum depending on the degree of self-determination or the perceived locus of causality. when an action is self-determined, the locus of causality is perceived to be internal to ourselves, whereas when it is not self-determined, it is external to ourselves. motivation is postulated to be self-determined by satisfying the three basic psychological needs “that are inherent in human life” (deci, vallerand, pelletier, & ryan, 1991, p. 327): autonomy, competence, and relatedness. the most self-determined of the types is intrinsic motivation, which is considered “the prototype of motivation” (deci et al., 1991, p. 328). when human beings are intrinsically motivated, they engage in an activity because it is inherently enjoyable. the purpose of devoting one’s effort to an activity lies inside the activity itself; hence, it is “intrinsic.” in contrast, when we are extrinsically motivated, we engage in an activity because of some outcomes that are contingent upon it. extrinsic motivation is further categorized from the least self-determined (i.e., external regulation) to the most self-determined (i.e., integrated and identified regulations), with one in between (i.e., introjected regulation). in addition to these two types of motivation, amotivation is postulated in the theory, referring to the lack of intentionality and motivation. however, in this study, it is not further dealt with because it is not a form of intentional action (ryan & deci, 2017, p. 16). when we have external regulation in l2 learning, we study the l2 “to satisfy an external demand or a socially constructed contingency” (deci & ryan, 2002, p. 17). for example, some might study the l2 only because they do not want to fail a course. they might start to internalize their motivation and begin to feel that they need to study this language because not doing so will make them feel ashamed or guilty (i.e., introjected regulation). at this point, the pressure comes not from outside sources but from within. a more self-determined learner will study the l2 in order to achieve a goal that is personally important to him/her (i.e., identified regulation). at this point, although the purpose of studying the l2 lies outside the activity, it is more a part of himself or herself (i.e., internal perceived locus of causality). lastly, integrated regulation is the most autonomous form of extrinsically motivated behavior. it shares some features with intrinsic motivation, but the action is still driven by a personally important goal that is separable from the action itself. it should be noted that in past studies it has not always been “easily discernable from identified regulation” (noels, 2001, p. 111) and that in many questionnaire studies, the variable of integrated regulation is omitted (e.g., hiromori, 2006; noels, 2001). 2.2. l2 motivational self system this model was developed specifically for l2 learning (dörnyei, 2009) and is currently one of the most influential in the field. it is based on the theories of the chika takahashi, seongah im 676 possible selves (markus & nurius, 1986) and self-discrepancy theory (higgins, 1987). it is comprised of three dimensions: the ideal l2 self, the ought-to l2 self, and the l2 learning experience. the first constituent is the ideal l2 self, which is defined by dörnyei (2009) as “the l2-specific facet of one’s ideal self” (p. 29). it is one’s idealized future self-image regarding an l2, and it corresponds to “traditional integrative and internalized instrumental motives” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 29). it is concerned with “hopes, aspirations, advancements, growth and accomplishments” (2009, p. 28) and is about what we want to become (i.e., promotion focus). the model postulates that when we perceive a gap between our current l2 self with limited l2 competence and our ideal l2 self as a proficient speaker of an l2, we try to close the gap between the two self-images and make an effort to study the l2. the second constituent, the ought-to l2 self, is an instrumental type of motivation with a prevention focus. when we have a strong ought-to l2 self, we study an l2 because we try to avoid the negative consequence of not becoming a proficient l2 speaker (trying to avoid what we do not want to become). it is the attributes that l2 learners believe they ought to possess “to meet expectations and to avoid possible negative outcomes” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 29, emphasis in the original). learners might study an l2 out of fear of not meeting societal pressure or expectations from others, for example. it is described by dörnyei (2009) as less internalized types of instrumental motives than the ideal l2 self. in addition to these future-oriented constituents, the l2 learning experience is included in the model, representing a more situated motive related to the immediate learning context, such as one’s teachers, peers, and learning materials (see dörnyei, 2019). 2.3. overview of studies applying sdt and l2mss there have been numerous studies that have employed sdt and lsmss as theoretical frameworks. quantitative studies have persistently demonstrated that internalized types of motivation in sdt (i.e., intrinsic motivation and/or identified regulation) are related to intended learning effort (e.g., konno, 2011; noels, clément, & pelletier, 1999; noels, pelletier, clément, & vallerand, 2000) and persistence (e.g., noels et al., 2000; vallerand & bissonnette, 1992). those utilizing the l2mss have also shown that the ideal l2 self and/or the l2 learning experience are related to the criterion measure of intended learning effort (e.g., kong et al., 2018; papi, 2010; ryan, 2009; taguchi et al., 2009; ueki & takeuchi, 2012; you et al., 2016). fewer studies have examined the relationships between the constructs in the two theories and l2 achievement/l2 proficiency. these studies have demonstrated that the motivational constructs in the two theories might comparing self-determination theory and the l2 motivational self system and their relationships. . . 677 lead to l2 proficiency, in some cases via intended learning effort (e.g., pae, 2008; shaikholeslami & khayyer, 2006; wong, 2018; yashima et al., 2017). one of the conflicting results from the past studies concerns the relationships between the ought-to l2 self and intended learning effort. in some studies, the ought-to l2 self variable had low reliability, as shown by cronbach alpha coefficients (e.g., csizér & lukács, 2010; kormos & csizér, 2008), and its relationship to intended learning effort was negligible (e.g., kormos & csizér, 2008; kormos, kiddle, & csizér, 2011). in other studies, however, the ought-to l2 self did have motivational power, particularly in asian contexts (e.g., taguchi et al., 2009; ueki & takeuchi, 2012; yashima et al., 2017). an example in the asian context is yashima et al. (2017), in which the researchers examined the relationships not only between the l2 motivational construct within the l2mss framework and intended effort, but also between intended effort and l2 proficiency through the test of english as a foreign language (toefl), in addition to the l2 learning experience, as measured by l2 learner beliefs. the results indicated that both the ideal l2 self and the ought-to l2 self predicted intended effort (standardized coefficient = .55 and .38, respectively), which then predicted l2 proficiency (.15). the authors described “what appears to be context-driven differences” (p. 701), explaining that the ought-to l2 self might play motivational roles in asian contexts because of “exam-related, otheror self-imposed pressure to do well” (p. 701) in such contexts. given the conflicting results, there have recently been proposals to overcome the conceptual difficulties of the ought-to l2 self (e.g., papi, bondarenko, mansouri, feng, & jiang, 2019; teimouri, 2017). for example, teimouri (2017) proposed that, depending on the degree of internalization, the ought-to l2 self might be differentiated into two types: the ought-to l2 self/own and the ought-to l2 self/others. the ought-to l2 self/own reflects “externally imposed obligations and duties by significant others for learning an l2 that are ultimately internalized or shared by the learners for their personal meaning and value” (2017, p. 700), and it represents the “shared l2 self” (p. 701). the ought-to l2 self/others is less internalized and reflects such factors as parental pressures or course requirements “projected on the learners for learning a second language” (2017, p. 700), thus representing the “projected l2 self” (p. 701). the study empirically showed that the constructs can indeed be differentiated into two types and that these variables were positively correlated with prevention-focused motivational orientations. regarding the two theories, there have only been partial comparisons between their constructs (e.g., konno, 2011; nishida, 2013; sugita mceown, noels, & chaffee, 2014; yashima, 2009). theoretically speaking, dörnyei (2009) argued that the l2 learning experience is “a close match” for intrinsic motivation (p. 30) and the ought-to l2 self for extrinsic motivation. however, as described above, chika takahashi, seongah im 678 extrinsic motivation is further categorized depending on the degree of self-determination. thus, considering the degree of internalization, the ideal l2 self seems to match identified regulation. they both include promotion-focused instrumentality, and learners with strong ideal l2 self/identified regulation arduously study an l2 because it is needed for a future purpose that is personally important to them. in contrast, the ought-to l2 self might be closely related to introjected regulation since sugita mceown et al. (2014) argue that “the ought-to l2 self and introjected regulation would seem to be definitionally congruent” (p. 26). if we consider the degree of internalization of the newly proposed constructs of the ought-to l2 self/own and the ought-to l2 self/others (teimouri, 2017), the ought-to l2 self/own might correspond to introjected regulation and the ought-to l2 self/others to external regulation. the ought-to l2 self/own represents the “shared l2 self” (teimouri, 2017, p. 701), which resembles “internal coercion” (deci et al., 1991, p. 329) in introjected regulation. in contrast, when learners have a strong ought-to l2 self/others, they study an l2 because of external factors such as pressure from parents or requirements of a specific course (cf. teimouri, 2017). they feel that the locus of causality is external to themselves, which corresponds to external regulation. although the ought-to l2 self/others and external regulation share some similarities, they also seem to differ in one important respect. learners who have a strong ought-to l2 self/others are prevention-focused. in contrast, external regulation includes both promotion and prevention foci, as indicated by deci et al.’s (1991) example of “a student who does an assignment for teacher’s praise or to avoid parental confrontation” (p. 329). in this sense, the defining characteristic of the ought-to l2 self/others, the prevention focus, may represent only part of external regulation. empirical studies, as explained above, have been limited thus far. for example, yashima (2009) demonstrated that the ideal l2 self is more closely related to identified regulation (r = .47) than to intrinsic motivation (r = .44). nishida (2013) also investigated the relationships between the ideal l2 self and the ought-to l2 self, on the one hand, and subtypes of motivation within sdt, on the other. it is noteworthy that the ought-to l2 self showed the highest positive correlation (r = .41) with introjected regulation and the second-highest positive correlation with external regulation (r = .28), although the distinction between the ought-to l2 self/own and the ought-to l2 self/others was not addressed. the correlations of the ideal l2 self with subtypes of sdt motivation are difficult to interpret, however, because they correlated as highly as .63 with intrinsic motivation, .54 with identified regulation, and .55 with external regulation. in their exploratory factor analysis that included scales from sdt, l2mss, and the socio-educational model (gardner, 1985), sugita mceown et al. (2014) demonstrated that intrinsic motivation, identified regulation, integrated regulation, and the ideal l2 self were included in one comparing self-determination theory and the l2 motivational self system and their relationships. . . 679 component, whereas introjected regulation, external regulation, and the ought-to l2 self were part of another component. none of these studies, however, has made a distinction between the ought-to l2 self/own and the ought-to l2 self/others, although this distinction might help clarify inconsistent results in past research (e.g., kormos & csizér, 2008; yashima et al., 2017). given the partial empirical results, a more thorough comparison of the two theories is surely warranted because it might help clarify the theoretical nature of each construct. 3. the present study 3.1. aims and research questions taken together, the past studies point to the importance of the motivational constructs of sdt and l2mss, because they have been shown to predict important variables such as learning effort and persistence in learning. however, these constructs have not been thoroughly compared, and their relationships to l2 proficiency remain unclear. therefore, the purpose of the study is twofold: (1) to empirically investigate the relationships among the constructs of sdt and the l2mss, and (2) to examine their causal relationships, including both intended learning effort and l2 proficiency. for that purpose, the following two research questions (rqs) were posed: 1. how are the constructs in self-determination theory and the l2 motivational self system related? 2. do internalized types of motivation in self-determination theory and the three constituents in the l2 motivational self system predict learners’ effort. does this effort in turn predict l2 proficiency as measured by gtec? 3.2. participants a total of 545 (323 males and 222 females) first-year japanese university students took part in the study. the university was located in a small city in western japan, where students do not have daily opportunities to communicate in english. furthermore, because they were all freshman students who had just finished entrance examinations, their ought-to l2 selves might have had some motivational power in a society where “socio-educational factors put a great pressure on students’ achievement and where foreign language education is highly exam-oriented” (kormos, kiddle, & csizér, 2011, p. 508). the participants came from various departments, including education, law and letters, agriculture, engineering, and medical science. their gtec scores varied from 87 to 315, with 500 being the full score (see more descriptions below). chika takahashi, seongah im 680 3.3. materials an online questionnaire was administered using survey monkey (www.surveymonkey.com). three types of questions were asked. first, there were the background questions inquiring about their major, gender, and whether they had any experience staying overseas for more than three months. second, the participants were asked for their student id number in order to obtain their gtec scores through the university. gtec is an english proficiency test administered by the benesse corporation in japan. there are several editions of the test, and the participants in the present study took part in the college test edition (gtec cte), which measured their listening and reading skills. the scores for each skill vary from 0 to 250. table 1 scale descriptions scale descriptions intrinsic motivation captures the inherent enjoyment in the learning of english identified regulation measures the extent to which learners are studying english for a purpose that is personally important to them introjected regulation focuses on the internal coercion a learner feels when studying english, such as feeling guilty for not studying, etc. external regulation captures non-internalized external contingencies for studying english l2 learning experience focuses on situation-specific motives that are related to immediate learning environment and experience ideal l2 self captures the english-related ideal self image that one envisions in future ought-to l2 self captures the english-related ought-to self image that one envisions in future ought-to l2 self/own focuses on english-related prevention-focused instrumentality involving external factors that learners have managed to internalize ought-to l2 self/others focuses on english-related prevention-focused instrumentality involving external factors that are projected on learners intended learning effort measures learners’ intended learning effort for studying english third, items intended to measure the four constructs within sdt (i.e., intrinsic motivation, identified regulation, introjected regulation, and external regulation) were included, as well as the three constructs within the l2mss (i.e., the ideal l2 self, the ought-to l2 self, and the l2 learning experience), the newly proposed ought-to l2 self/own and ought-to l2 self/others, and intended learning effort. it should be noted that in the present study, external regulation items mainly touched on prevention-focused instrumentality so that a systematic comparison between the two theories would be possible. the items were adapted from past studies focusing on these theories (hiromori, 2006; noels et al., 2000; ryan, 2009; taguchi et al., 2009; teimouri, 2017). this questionnaire was first piloted with 136 university students who did not participate in the main study. after analyzing the data with principal component analyses and checking for reliability, eight items were revised/replaced. each likert-type question was comparing self-determination theory and the l2 motivational self system and their relationships. . . 681 on a 6-point scale, with 1 being strongly disagree and 6 being strongly agree. for each construct, five items were asked, totaling 50 questions. descriptions of the scales are presented in table 1 (also see appendix for all questionnaire items). 3.4. procedures first, instructors of first-year learners of english were invited to cooperate in the administration of the questionnaire. those who agreed extended the invitation to their students just after they entered the university; the instructors distributed a paper flyer that contained a qr code, which granted the consenting students access to the online questionnaire. then, the participants accessed the web page that informed them of their anonymity, the questionnaire’s non-relationship to their grades, and the fact that their gtec scores would be included in the analyses. those who agreed to participate were instructed to click on the button that confirmed their consent, which then took them to the main questionnaire page. at the end of the questionnaire, their intent to participate was re-confirmed so that only those who agreed to allow their data to be used for analyses could complete the questionnaire. these procedures were also approved by the research ethics committee of the university where the study took place. it took approximately ten minutes to complete the questionnaire. to examine the relationships between the participants’ l2 motivation and their l2 proficiency, their gtec scores were obtained through the english education center of the university using their student id numbers. both the questionnaire and the gtec were administered in april/may, which was right after the participants entered the university. 3.5. hypothesized models to investigate the causal relationships among motivational variables, intended learning effort, and l2 proficiency, three models were tested, as shown in figure 1. as the less internalized types of motivational constructs were weaker predictors of intended effort in past studies, (e.g., papi et al., 2018), external regulation and the ought-to l2 self/others were excluded from the models. on the other hand, introjected regulation, the ought-to l2 self, and the ought-to l2 self/own were included in addition to the most internalized types of motivation. this is because, in a context like japan, where the social pressures on students’ achievements are strongly felt and students generally have exam-oriented attitudes, these types of motivation were considered to exert motivational power, as shown in past studies in this context (e.g., yashima et al., 2017). together, these types of motivation were hypothesized to predict intended learning effort. intended learning effort was then hypothesized to predict l2 proficiency as measured by gtec. chika takahashi, seongah im 682 furthermore, two models were tested utilizing the l2mss: one with the original ought-to l2 self scale, which did not distinguish between its own and other perspectives, and the other, which only included the ought-to l2 self/own. model 1: self-determination theory model 2: l2 motivational self system with ought-to l2 self model 3: l2 motivational self system with ought-to l2 self/own figure 1 hypothesized models to be tested intrinsic motivation identified regulation introjected regulation intended effort proficiency l2 learning ideal l2 self ought-to l2 self intended effort proficiency l2 learning ideal l2 self ought-to l2 self/own intended effort proficiency comparing self-determination theory and the l2 motivational self system and their relationships. . . 683 3.6. data analysis the pearson bivariate correlation coefficients among the ten subscale scores and the cronbach’s alpha coefficients for each of the scales were calculated using spss version 23. for confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling, the latent variable modeling program amos version 22 (arbuckle, 2014) was employed to investigate the constructs of l2 motivation based on the two theoretical frameworks in relation to their l2 proficiency using the maximum likelihood estimation. as the item data composed of 50 polytomous item responses presented a slight non-normality, the bootstrap method was adopted to correct for p-values of the χ2 test and the standard errors of the parameter estimates (arbuckle, 2014; bollen & stine, 1993). several goodness-of-fit statistics were used to specify how well the hypothesized models fit the data. the goodness of fit of the models includes the (a) χ2 test, (b) normed χ2, (c) comparative fit index (cfi), (d) standardized root mean square residual (srmr), and (e) root mean square error of approximation (rmsea). a model typically provides a good fit with the data when the p-value associated with a chi-square test is non-significant. however, the χ2 statistic may lead to rejection of the model in large samples even when the actual fit is regarded as good (bentler & bonett, 1980). thus, the normed χ2 value adjusted for the degrees of freedom (χ2/df) was additionally reported. a normed value of less than 5 can be considered a reasonable fit (marsh & hocevar, 1985). a cfi value greater than 0.92 indicates an adequate fit, and values greater than 0.95 indicate a good fit. srmr and rmsea values of less than 0.06 indicate a satisfactory fit, and values of less than 0.08 indicate an acceptable fit (hu & bentler, 1999). 4. results 4.1. descriptive statistics, reliability and validity of the scales of the 545 students who completed the questionnaire, those who did not provide a valid id number or did not take the gtec were eliminated from the analyses. furthermore, those who answered that they had stayed overseas for longer than three months were also removed, for this might have had some influence on their gtec scores. this left 532 participants. table 2 presents descriptive statistics of the scales. prior to the main data analysis, both univariate and multivariate outliers were checked and deleted, leaving 511 participants in the final data set. as the questionnaire site did not allow participants to skip questions, there was no missing value. then, cronbach alpha coefficients were checked for reliability of chika takahashi, seongah im 684 the scales. as seen in table 3, most of the scales except for external regulation had acceptable cronbach alpha coefficients. then, confirmatory factor analyses (cfas) were performed in order to investigate the validity of the scales. the first item in introjected regulation (q5) and the first and the fourth items in external regulation (q1 and q28, see appendix) that had standardized coefficients lower than .40 were deleted, and then the cronbach alpha coefficients were checked again with the remaining items. after deleting two items in external regulation, the remaining three external regulation items had an acceptable cronbach alpha coefficient of .71. table 2 descriptive statistics of scales m sd 95% ci skw kur im 3.61 1.12 [3.51, 3.70] -.21 .06 idr 4.24 .94 [4.16, 4.32] -.32 .04 itj 3.24 .89 [3.17, 3.32] -.36 .24 ext 3.68 .75 [3.61, 3.74] -.36 .64 l2le 3.59 1.06 [3.50, 3.68] -.29 .29 ils 3.16 .97 [3.08, 3.24] .23 .12 ols 2.81 .88 [2.73, 2.88] .04 -.41 olsw 4.03 .84 [3.95, 4.10] -.38 .62 olst 2.55 .96 [2.47, 2.63] .22 -.25 effort 3.40 .86 [3.33, 3.48] -.08 .73 gtec listening 107.74 22.57 [105.82, 109.66] -.21 1.09 gtec reading 101.66 22.15 [99.78, 103.55] -.31 .39 note. im = intrinsic motivation; idr = identified regulation; itj = introjected regulation; ext = external regulation; l2le = l2 learning experience; ils = ideal l2 self; ols = ought-to l2 self; olsw = ought-to l2 self/own; olst = ought-to l2 self/others table 3 cronbach alpha coefficients before and after item deletion variables before deletion after deletion no. of items cronbach alpha no. of items cronbach alpha im 5 .94 5 .94 idr 5 .88 5 .88 itj 5 .80 4 .82 ext 5 .62 3 .71 l2le 5 .92 5 .92 ils 5 .84 5 .84 ols 5 .75 5 .75 ols-own 5 .79 5 .79 ols-others 5 .86 5 .86 effort 5 .84 5 .84 note. im = intrinsic motivation; idr = identified regulation; itj = introjected regulation; ext = external regulation; l2le = l2 learning experience; ils = ideal l2 self; ols = ought-to l2 self; olsw = ought-to l2 self/own; olst = ought-to l2 self/others comparing self-determination theory and the l2 motivational self system and their relationships. . . 685 4.2. relationships between sdt and l2mss variables to examine the relationships between sdt and l2mss variables, their inter-correlations were checked. as seen in table 4, in general, the variables were correlated in accordance with the theories. for example, in sdt, those that are closer in nature have higher correlations than those that are farther apart (e.g., .75 between intrinsic motivation and identified regulation, and .37 between intrinsic motivation and introjected regulation). these results confirm the simplex pattern postulated by the theory in that “the kinds of motivation that are more self-determined would be inversely related to those that are less self-determined” (noels et al., 2000, p. 71), and that “correlations among adjacent scales would be positive and higher than those with the more theoretically distant scales” (p. 71). an exception is the relationship between introjected regulation and external regulation, which were not correlated. with regard to the l2mss variables, the relationships were similar, that is, the ideal l2 self correlated highly with the l2 learning experience, it correlated to a lesser degree with the ought-to l2 self/own, and it did not significantly correlate with the ought-to l2 self/others. furthermore, when comparing the two theories, the l2 learning experience and intrinsic motivation strongly correlated, as did the ideal l2 self and identified regulation. the ought-to l2 self/own was more closely related to introjected regulation than to external regulation. regarding the relationship between introjected regulation and the l2mss variables, the highest correlation coefficient was revealed for the ought-to l2 self/own, as expected, rather than with other variables in the l2mss. lastly, an unexpected pattern is the relationship between identified regulation and the l2 learning experience: identified regulation correlated with the l2 learning experience as strongly as with the ideal l2 self (r = .75). table 4 inter-correlations among sdt and l2mss scales im idr itj ext l2le ils ols olsw olst im 1.00 .75** .37** -.41** .94** .65** .16** .23** -.10** idr 1.00** .55** -.30** .75** .75** .26** .48** -.02** itj 1.00** .07** .37** .50** .63** .69** .54** ext 1.00** -.41** -.30** .18** .13** .31** l2le 1.00** .66** .15** .24** -.09** ils 1.00** .31** .37** .08** ols 1.00** .51** .75** olsw 1.00** .42** olst 1.00** note. im = intrinsic motivation; idr = identified regulation; itj = introjected regulation; ext = external regulation; l2le = l2 learning experience; ils = ideal l2 self; ols = ought-to l2 self; olsw = ought-to l2 self/own; olst = ought-to l2 self/others; *p < .05, **p < .01 chika takahashi, seongah im 686 4.3. structural equation modeling finally, in order to investigate the causal relationships among motivational variables, intended learning effort, and l2 proficiency, structural equation modeling (sem) was performed for each of the theories. as the data were not normally distrubuted, we fit the model using the maximum likelihood and bootstrap methods to estimate the model parameters and correct for p-values and standard errors of the parameter estimates. the models showed an acceptable fit to the data, as shown by the fit indices in table 5. the results of the sem analyses are presented in figures 2, 3, and 4. all path coefficients were significant. in addition to the originally hypothesized paths, covariances between some errors were added following the modification index. table 5 structural equation modeling analyses model fit model χ² df normed χ² cfi srmr rmsea sdt 615.20 180 3.48 .94 .05 .07 l2mss 683.50 198 3.45 .92 .06 .07 l2mss-o 718.41 199 3.61 .92 .06 .07 note. sdt = self-determination theory; l2mss = l2 motivational self system; l2mss-o = l2 motivational self system with ought-to l2 self/own; cfi = comparative fit index; srmr = standardized root mean square residual; rmsea = root mean square error of approximation figure 2 results of structural equation modeling: standardized sdt model (im = intrinsic motivation; idr = identified regulation; itj = introjected regulation; all path coefficients are statistically significant [p < .01]) comparing self-determination theory and the l2 motivational self system and their relationships. . . 687 figure 3 results of structural equation modeling: standardized l2mss model (l2le = l2 learning experience; ils = ideal l2 self; ols = ought-to l2 self; all path coefficients are statistically significant [p < .01]) figure 4 results of structural equation modeling: standardized l2mss with oughtto l2 self/own model (l2le = l2 learning experience; ils = ideal l2 self; olsw = ought-to l2 self/own; all path coefficients are statistically significant [p < .01]) the analyses showed that internalized types of motivational variables predicted intended learning effort, which in turn predicted l2 proficiency. the chika takahashi, seongah im 688 strength varied in accordance with the theories. for example, for the sdt model, intrinsic motivation predicted intended effort most strongly (standardized coefficient = .58), followed by identified regulation (.33) and, to a much lesser extent, introjected regulation (.13). as for the l2mss, the l2 learning experience predicted intended effort most strongly (.71). the ideal l2 self predicted intended effort, but the strength was weaker than expected (.25). the relationship was even weaker for the ought-to l2 self (.13). the trends were similar for the l2mss model that includes the ought-to l2 self/own. for these models, intended learning effort led to l2 proficiency (.20). the value of this coefficient is understandable because, in addition to l2 motivation, various other factors play a role in predicting l2 proficiency. 5. discussion regarding rq 1, the constructs in self-determination theory and the l2 motivational self system were shown to correlate to different degrees in accordance with the theories. in this study, as in past investigations, the following constructs were demonstrated to be related to each other: intrinsic motivation and the l2 learning experience, identified regulation and the ideal l2 self (e.g., yashima, 2009), and introjected regulation and the ought-to l2 self (e.g., nishida, 2013). as expected, for the relationships among the constructs in sdt and those proposed in teimouri (2017), introjected regulation correlated most strongly with the ought-to l2 self/own (r = .69), followed by the ought-to l2 self (r = .63) and the ought-to l2 self/others (r = .54). in contrast, external regulation correlated with the ought-to l2 self/others most strongly (r = .31), followed by the oughtto l2 self (r = .18) and the ought-to l2 self/own (r = .13). in the present study identified regulation correlated with the l2 learning experience as strongly as with the ideal l2 self (r = .75). this might have been because those who had “successful engagement with the actual language learning process, for example, because they discover that they are good at it” (i.e., aspects of the l2 learning experience; dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, p. 86) also understood the personal importance of studying english (i.e., aspects of identified regulation). another possibility is that, because they felt that their english studies were personally important (i.e., aspects of identified regulation), they invested effort in studying the l2 and received positive feedback, which helped them accumulate positive learning experiences (i.e., aspects of the l2 learning experience). the relationship between these two variables should be further examined in future research. as for rq 2, although their strengths varied, motivational constructs postulated in the two theories predicted intended effort, which in turn led to l2 proficiency. this confirms the findings of past studies (e.g., kong et al., 2018; comparing self-determination theory and the l2 motivational self system and their relationships. . . 689 yashima et al., 2017) and adds further validation to the two theories. first, internalized types of motivation in sdt led to learners’ intended effort, which then predicted l2 proficiency. relative motivational powers varied in accordance with the theory: intrinsic motivation played the most substantial role leading to effort, followed by identified regulation. the strong motivational powers of intrinsic motivation and identified regulation are in accordance with past studies that demonstrated motivational powers of not only intrinsic motivation but also of identified regulation (e.g., noels et al., 1999; noels et al., 2000). introjected regulation significantly predicted intended learning effort, but rather weakly. this points to the importance of the internalization of the activity in that a less internalized type of motivation, that is, introjected regulation, only plays a weak role in predicting motivated behavior. second, with regard to the l2 motivational self system, the three constituents predicted intended learning effort, but again, to different degrees. it is not surprising that the l2 learning experience accounted for effort, but perhaps more surprising is a weak motivational power of the ideal l2 self (standardized coefficient = .25). past studies have demonstrated substantial motivational power of this construct (e.g., yashima et al., 2017), but in the present study, it was the l2 learning experience that played a substantial role. the results of the present study resemble those of you et al. (2016) with regard to the predictive power of the l2 learning experience and the ideal l2 self. possible reasons for the weak predictive power of the ideal l2 self are discussed later. furthermore, the ought-to l2 self played a significant role, although not strongly. it was expected that, in a society like japan, the ought-to l2 self might have motivational power, but it had much weaker motivational power than in some past studies (e.g., yashima et al., 2017). because the ought-to l2 self items were intended to capture the participants’ possible negative future consequences of not studying english, they might have been felt as too distant to exert motivational power. models 2 and 3 were both concerned with l2mss, with one including the construct of the ought-to l2 self and the other including the ought-to l2 self/own. both models showed similar fit indices. their motivational powers were similarly weaker than those of the l2 learning experience or the ideal l2 self, although the paths were both significant. this indicates that, whether the focus is on only the shared l2 self (i.e., the ought-to l2 self/own) or on both the shared l2 self and the projected l2 self (i.e., the ought-to l2 self/others), these types of motivation need to be more internalized in order to exert stronger motivational power. when we compare results across the two theories, we can observe that the patterns are similar. it was the participants’ the l2 learning experience/enjoyment in learning the l2 that predicted intended learning effort most strongly. compared to this factor, the ideal l2 self in particular played a less substantial role. furthermore, the ought-to l2 self had an even weaker predictive power. chika takahashi, seongah im 690 although learners in japan are characterized as being sensitive to societal pressure and thus their the ought-to l2 selves in some studies played a role in predicting effort (e.g., yashima et al., 2017; taguchi et al., 2009), this was not the case in the present study. as sdt postulates, the degree of internalization of l2 learning seems to play a powerful role in predicting behavior. one of the puzzling results is the weak predictive power of the ideal l2 self. why did the ideal l2 self not play a more significant role, and why was the strength of relationship between the ideal l2 self and intended learning effort much weaker than those between intrinsic motivation/the l2 learning experience and intended learning effort? whereas the items intended to measure intrinsic motivation and the l2 learning experience were phrased so as to gauge the participants’ current english learning experiences, the items measuring the ideal l2 self focused on future images as english users. what mattered for this sample might have been aspects of their current english studies (i.e., intrinsic motivation and the l2 learning experience) rather than possible future consequences of their english studies (i.e., the ideal l2 self). this also explains the strong predictive powers of intrinsic motivation and the l2 learning experience. given that the participants took part in the study just after entering university, their visions of the future regarding english might still be distant and therefore might play a more important role in their later academic lives as they start to envision their future careerand other-related english selves. this study has several limitations that should be mentioned. first, it is a questionnaire study that gauged learners’ motivation to study english at one point in time. given the current trends to capture the dynamic nature of l2 motivation, the present investigation could have been supplemented by more qualitative and longitudinal data, which would allow explaining the weak relationship between the ideal l2 self and l2 proficiency. also, the differences between the l2mss models, including the ought-to l2 self on the one hand and the ought-to l2 self/own and the ought-to l2 self/others on the other, were not made empirically clear because both models fit the data. it will thus be necessary to further validate the two models. next, the questionnaire items used in the present study did not include the recent development of the ideal l2 self/own and the ideal l2 self/others (papi et al., 2018). relationships between the ideal l2 self/own and the ideal l2 self/others and the constructs in sdt should further be explored. 6. conclusions the present study empirically compared the two frequently utilized motivational theories, that is sdt and l2mss, and investigated the relationships among the constructs included in the two. it demonstrated that internalized types of comparing self-determination theory and the l2 motivational self system and their relationships. . . 691 motivation in the theories predict intended learning effort, which then leads to l2 proficiency. this adds further validation to the theories. in future research, it will be fruitful to track changes in l2 proficiency and examine whether these changes are related to the participants’ future visions of english, for example, over the period of one year. furthermore, explorations of the relationships between types of l2 motivation in the two theories and l2 proficiency, as well as more thorough investigations including mediating variables such as l2 anxiety, might add more insights into the role of l2 motivation. from a pedagogical perspective, the strong motivational powers of intrinsic motivation and the l2 learning experience indicate that learners’ accumulated l2 learning experience and their enjoyment in l2 learning are crucial in motivating themselves. teachers should be reminded of the importance of their students’ own power in this regard. acknowledgements we would like to thank the participants and the english instructors who cooperated with us in conducting the study, as well as the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their constructive feedback. chika takahashi, seongah im 692 references arbuckle, j. l. 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(2016). motivation, vision, and gender: a survey of learners of english in china. language learning, 66(1), 94-123. comparing self-determination theory and the l2 motivational self system and their relationships. . . 695 appendix questionnaire items (*items marked with an asterisk are the ones deleted after confirmatory factor analysis). intrinsic motivation 1. i study english because i enjoy having more knowledge about english. 2. i study english because i get the satisfied feeling when i find out new things when studying english. 3. i study english because studying english is fun. 4. i study english because studying english is interesting. 5. i study english because i enjoy english classes. identified regulation 1. i study english because it is necessary for me. 2. i study english because i would like to gain skills in english that i could use in the future. 3. i study english because i think acquiring english is important. 4. i study english because i think it is good for my personal development. 5. i study english because being able to speak it is related to my personally important goal. introjected regulation 1. *i study english because i think i would feel guilty if i didn’t study english. 2. i study english because i think i would look absurd if i didn’t speak english in the future. 3. i study english because i think i would feel ashamed if i didn’t speak english in the future. 4. i study english because i would feel anxious if i didn’t study english. 5. i study english because i think i would regret it if i didn’t study english later on. external regulation 1. *i study english so that adults around me will not tell me to. 2. i study english because i would be in trouble if i did not get a good grade. 3. i study english reluctantly because it is a required course. 4. *i study english because i do not want to end up with a job with low salary later on. 5. i study english so that i will not fail a course. l2 learning experience 1. i find learning english really interesting. 2. i always look forward to english classes. 3. i really enjoy learning english. 4. i think time passes faster while studying english. 5. i enjoy gaining more knowledge of english. ideal l2 self 1. i can imagine myself speaking english with international friends or colleagues. 2. whenever i think of my future career, i imagine myself using english. 3. the things i want to do in the future require me to use/speak english. 4. i often imagine myself as someone who is able to speak english. 5. if i make more effort, i will use english effectively in future jobs. chika takahashi, seongah im 696 ought-to l2 self 1. i study english because close friends of mine think it is important. 2. i have to study english, because, if i do not study it, i think my parents will be disappointed with me. 3. learning english is necessary because people surrounding me expect me to do so. 4. my parents believe that i must study english to be an educated person. 5. it will have a negative impact on my life if i don’t learn english. ought-to l2 self/own 1. i must learn english to avoid problems or difficulties that i may face in the future for not knowing english. 2. i must learn english; otherwise i will encounter difficulties in my education (school or university) for not having knowledge of english. 3. i must learn english; otherwise i will have difficulties finding a job in the future. 4. i must learn english; otherwise i will be an illiterate. 5. i must learn english; otherwise i will be in trouble in the future. ought-to l2 self/others 1. i must learn english; otherwise people around me will have a negative image of me. 2. i must learn english; otherwise i will be reprimanded by my parents or teachers. 3. i must learn english; otherwise my parents/friends will be disappointed in me. 4. i must learn english; otherwise the others will think of me as a weak student. 5. i must learn english; otherwise people around me will tell me to. intended learning effort 1. if an english course was offered at university or somewhere else in the future, i would like to take it. 2. i am working hard at learning english. 3. i am prepared to expend a lot of effort in learning english. 4. i think that i am doing my best to learn english. 5. i would like to concentrate on studying english more than any other topic. 755 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (4). 2019. 755-760 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.4.10 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt reviewers for volume 9/2019 the editors would like to express their gratitude to the following scholars who have kindly consented to review one or more submissions to volume 9/2019 of studies in second language learning and teaching. their insightful and thorough comments and suggestions have without doubt greatly enhanced the quality of the papers included in the 2019 volume: rebecca adams university of memphis, usa ágnes albert eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary ali al-hoorie jubail industrial college, saudi arabia khaled al masaeed carnegie mellon university, pittsburgh, usa taghreed alsaraj university of california, berkeley, usa hesham suleiman alyousef shahrekord university, saudi arabia tanja angelovska university of salzburg, austria elena antonova-ünlü hacettepe university, ankara, turkey christine appel universitat oberta de catalunya, spain erhan aslan university of reading, uk fraibet aveledo university of reading, uk agurtzane azkarai university of the basque country, spain dario luis banegas university of warwick, uk anna maria barcelos federal university of viçosa, brasil gary barkhuizen university of auckland, new zealand luisa bavieri university of bologna, italy ana maria gabriela beaven university of bologna, italy nadin beckmann durham university, uk david beglar temple university, japan nurettin beltekin mardin artuklu university, turkey alessandro benati american university of sharjah, united arab emirates yves bestgen universite catholique de louvain, louvain-la-neuve, belgium marie-josee bisson de montfort university, leicester, uk jelena bobkina complutense university of madrid, spain frank boers university of western ontario, london, canada jill boggs swansea university, uk hossein bozorgian university of mazandaran, iran jack burston cyprus university of technology, cyprus 756 laia canals open university of catalonia, barcelona, spain niki canham university of innsbruck, austria angelica carlet international university of catalonya, barcelona, spain susana pérez castillejo university of st. thomas, st. paul, usa luis s. villacañas de castro university of valencia, spain mable chan the hong kong polytechnic university, china fei-wen cheng national chiayi university, taiwan anna cieślicka a&m international university, texas, usa kata csizér eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary anita d’anselmo gabriele d’annunzio university, chieti, italy jennifer dailey-o’cain university of alberta, canada maria dakowska university of warsaw, poland rhadika m. de silva open university of sri lanka, sri lanka robert dekeyser university of maryland, usa werner delanoy university of klagenfurt, austria anne dahl norwegian university of science and technology, trondheim, norway ali dincer erzincan university, turkey dacian dolean babeș-bolyai university, cluj-napoca, romania jihua dong northwest a&f university, china xujia du shanghai university of finance and economics, china irina elgort victoria university of wellington, new zealand neil england university of technology sydney, sydney, australia soeren wind eskildsen university of southern denmark, odense, norway doreen ewert san francisco university, usa june eyckmans ghent university, belgium fang (gabriel) fang university of southampton, uk dianne forbes the university of waikato, new zealand monika ford international business school, budapest, hungary stefan frazier san josé state university, usa angelica galante university of toronto, canada xuesong gao university of new south wales, sydney, australia monika geist ludwig-maximilians university, munich, germany debra giambo florida gulf coast university, fort myers, usa rachel adams goertel roberts wesleyan college, rochester, usa christine c. m. goh nanyang technological university, singapore manuela gonzález-bueno university of kansas, lawrence, usa tammy gregersen american university of sharjah, uae carol griffiths university of leeds, uk peter yongqi gu victoria university of wellington, new zealand ye han harbin institute of technology, shenzhen, china osamu hanaoka tokyo international university, japan judith hanks university of leeds, uk alastair henry högskolan väst/university west, sweden todd anthony hernandez marquette university, milwaukee, usa gianna hessel university of graz, austria franz holzknecht university of innsbruck, austria elaine horwitz university of texas at austin, usa katarzyna hryniuk university of warsaw, poland zana ibrahim university of kurdistan, heulwer, iraq éva illés eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary lindsey ives embry-riddle aeronautical university, daytona beach, florida, usa 757 janina iwaniec university of bath, uk teppo jakonen university of jyväskylä, finland saša jazbec university of maribor, slovenia gladys jean university of quebec, montreal jingyang jiang zhejiang university, hangzhou, china jun jin university of graz, austria yinxing jin university of groningen, the netherlands mark d. johnson east carolina university, greenville, usa nayef jomaa jomaa karabuk university, turkey paula kalaja university of jyväskylä, finland csaba kálmán eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary eva kartchava carleton university, ottawa, canada brent allan kelsen national taipei university, taiwan gholam hassan khajavy university of bojnord, iran soo hyon kim university of new hampshire, durham, usa friederike klippel ludwig-maximilians-universität münchen, germany yasemin kırkgöz çukurova university, turkey yuichiro kobayashi nihon university, japan janne kontio stockholm university, sweden edit h. kontra eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary noémi korányi danube institute, hungary benjamin kremmel university of innsbruck, austria anna krulatz norwegian university of science and technology, trondheim, norway yihsiang kuo national defense university, taoyuan city, taiwan monika kusiak jagiellonian university, cracow, poland geoff laflair university of hawai’i at mānoa, usa terry lamb university of westminster, london julio roca de larios university of murcia, spain batia laufer university of haifa, israel minjin lee university college london, uk icy lee the chinese university of hong kong, china jun lei nanyang technological university, singapore dmitri leontjev university of jyväskylä, finland john m. levis iowa state university, usa catherine little university of connecticut, usa meihua liu tsinghua university, china ana llinares universidad autónoma de madrid, spain thomas lockley nihon university, japan laura loder-büchel zurich university of teacher education, switzerland xiaofei lu pennsylvania state university, state college, usa ernesto macaro university of oxford, uk peter d. macintyre cape breton university, sydney, canada wojciech malec the john paul ii catholic university of lublin, poland behzad mansouri university of alabama, usa susan marandi alzahra university, tehran, iran anna martinović university of zadar, croatia joshua matthews university of new england, armidale, usa aslihan mccarthy ret international, ankara, turkey kim mcdonough concordia university, canada alireza memari hanjani university of exeter, uk sarah mercer university of graz, austria 758 ryan t. miller kent state university, usa nicole mills harvard university, cambridge, usa azizullah mirzaei shahrekord university, iran rosamond mitchell university of southampton, uk atushi mizumoto kansai university, japan kouider mokhtari university of texas at taylor, usa ian moodie mokpo national university, south korea gary motteram university of manchester, uk christine muir nottingham university, uk john murphy georgia state university, usa anna mystkowska-wiertelak wrocław university, poland sachiko nakamura anaheim university, usa toshiyuki nakamura nagasaki university of foreign studies, japan takayuki nakanishi tokiwa university, ibaraki, japan colleen neary-sundquist purdue university, usa david newby eclm/university of graz, austria joanna nijakowska university of łódź, poland katharina nimz bielefeld university, germany william ludwell quint oga-baldwin waseda university, tokyo, japan gabriela olivares university of northern iowa, cedar falls, usa jo oranje university of otago, dunedin, new zealand rebecca l. oxford university of alabama at birmingham, usa caroline payant the university of idaho, moscow, id, usa katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia university of bielsko-biala, poland amos paran ucl institute of education, london, uk liana m. pavelescu guildford college, uk pauliina peltonen university of turku, finland jian-e peng shantou university, china heleen pennings utrecht university, holland susana pérez castillejo university of st. thomas, st. paul, usa liliana piasecka university of opole, poland françois pichette téluq university of quebec, canada ewa piechurska-kuciel university of opole, poland katalin piniel eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary richard pinner sophia university, tokyo, japan glen poupore minnesota state university, mankato, usa danijela prosic-santovac university of novi sad, serbia haio reinders unitec institute of technology, new zealand saeed rezaei sharif university of technology, iran berry lee reynolds university of macau, china julio roca de larios university of murcia, spain alberto rodriguez-lifante university of alicante, spain karen roehr-brackin university of essex, uk arkadiusz rojczyk university of silesia, katowice, poland jeanne rolin-ianziti university of queensland, australia hanne roothooft university of navarra, spain morteza rostamian yazd university, iran stephen ryan waseda university, tokyo, japan murad saeed university of malaya, kuala lumpur, malaysia masatoshi sato andrés bello national university, santiago, chile adelina sánchez centeno national university of rio cuarto, argentina 759 milica savic university of stavanger, norway paweł scheffler adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland elke schneider winthrop university, usa theresa schenker yale university, new haven, usa olcay sert mälardalen university, sweden ali shehadeh united arab emirates university, united arab emirates joseph siegel meiji gakuin university, tokyo, japan nestor singer university of santiago de chile, chile ute smit university of vienna, austria svetlana stefanova international university of la rioja, madrid, spain ursula stickler the open university, uk jill surmont vrije universiteit brussel, belgium liss kerstin sylvén university of gothenburg, sweden tetyana sydorenko portland state university, usa fahrad tabandeh sharif university of technology, iran etsuo taguchi daito bunka university, japan dina tsagari oslomet, norway višnja pavičić takač osip juraj strossmayer university of osijek, croatia osamu takeuchi kansai university, japan mitsuko tanaka osaka university, japan mengmeng tang university of york, uk dietmar tatzl fh joanneum university of applied sciences, graz, austria lin sophie teng university of auckland, new zealand amy s. thomson university of south florida, usa tan bee tin university of auckland, new zealand gregory thompson birgham young university, usa zsuzsa tóth pázmány péter catholic university, budapest, hungary etsuko toyoda university of melbourne, australia ernesto treviño university of chile, santiago, chile pavel trofimovich concordia university, canada yea-ru tsai i-shou university, taiwan blake turnbull kyoto university, japan ineke vedder university of amsterdam, the netherlands mary lou vercellotti ball state university, usa marjolijn h. verspoor university of groningen, the netherlands marilyn vihman university of york, uk ye wang columbia university, usa kaihui wang university of graz, austria beata webb bond university, gold coast, australia stuart webb western university, london, canada dorota werbińska pomeranian university, słupsk, poland, pamela wesely university of iowa, usa katrin wisniewski university of leipzig, germany danuta wiśniewska adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland jane woodin university of sheffield, uk mark wyatt khalifa university, abu dhabi, united arab emirates feng xiao pomona college, california, usa jackie xiu yan city university of hong kong, china sachiko yasuda kobe university, japan shulin yu university of macau, china nourollah zarrinabadi university of isfahan, iran 760 xian zhang university of north texas, denton, usa paulina zydorowicz adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: chengchen li (huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan, china) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) editor: joanna zawodniak (university of zielona góra, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (silesian university of technology, gliwice, poland) vol. 12 no. 1 march 2022 editorial board: ali al-hoorie (royal commission for jubail and yanbu, jubail, saudi arabia) larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) ali derakhshan (golestan university, gorgan, iran) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) majid elahi shirvan (university of bojnord, iran) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) tammy gregersen (american university of sharjah, united arab emirates) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2022 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: jakub bielak mariusz kruk chengchen li aleksandra wach joanna zawodniak © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: jakub bielak, melanie ellis, mariusz kruk, chengchen li, aleksandra wach, joanna zawodniak cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 61 829 64 20 fax +48 61 829 64 21 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · social sciences citation index (wos core collection) · journal citation reports social sciences (wos) · scopus · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) · current contents – social and behavioral sciences (wos) · essential science indicators (wos) studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 12, number 1, march 2022 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ........................................................................ 7 editorial ........................................................................................... 13 articles: richard j. sampson – shifting focus through a small lens: discursive and introspective perspectives on the emergence of l2 study emotions ......15 mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, majid elahi shirvan, tahereh taherian, elham yazdanmehr – potential sources of foreign language learning boredom: a q methodology study .................................................... 37 scott aubrey – dynamic engagement in second language computer-mediated collaborative writing tasks: does communication mode matter? .... 59 ali derakhshan, zohreh r. eslami, samantha curle, kiyana zhaleh – exploring the predictive role of teacher immediacy and stroke behaviors in english as a foreign language university students’ academic burnout ........ 87 mehmet altay, samantha curle, dogan yuksel, adem soruç – investigating academic achievement of english medium instruction courses in turkey ....117 notes to contributors ......................................................................143 7 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors mehmet altay is assistant professor of english language teaching in the faculty of education at kocaeli university, turkey. his research interests include strategic selfregulation, lexical competence, corpus linguistics, dynamic assessment, and emi. he has 13 years of work experience as an efl instructor at two well-established emi universities in turkey. he has several publications including book chapters, coursebooks for efl learners, and research papers in academic journals such as system, applied linguistics review, novitas royal, and participatory educational research. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7227-5685 contact details: kabaoğlu, baki komsuoğlu bulvarı no. 515, umuttepe, 41001 i̇zmit/kocaeli, turkey (mehmet.altay@kocaeli.edu.tr) scott aubrey is assistant professor in the department of curriculum and instruction, faculty of education, the chinese university of hong kong, china. his main research areas include second language motivation, learner engagement, and task-based language teaching. he is particularly interested in the intersection of learner psychology and instructed second language acquisition, with much of his research involving attempts to capture how learners feel, think, and behave during second language task performances. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4365-0516 contact details: room 313, ho tim building, cuhk, shatin, nt, hong kong, china (scaubrey@cuhk.edu.hk) samantha curle is assistant professor of applied linguistics in the department of education at the university of bath, uk. her main research interest lies in factors affecting academic achievement in english medium instruction. her research has been published in journals such as language teaching, applied linguistics review, system, language teaching research, studies in higher education, and international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism. 8 orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3790-8656 contact details: department of education, university of bath, building 1 west north, office 3.17b, bath, ba2 7ay, united kingdom (samanthamcurle@gmail.com) ali derakhshan is associate professor of applied linguistics at the english language and literature department, golestan university, gorgan, iran. he has published in both accredited international journals (computers and education, language teaching research, system, elt journal, current psychology, etc.) and various local journals. his research interests are interlanguage pragmatics, intercultural communication, teacher education, learner individual differences, and cross-cultural interpersonal factors in educational psychology. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6639-9339 contact details: faculty of humanities and social sciences, shahid beheshti campus, golestan university, shahid beheshti st, gorgan, golestan, iran, 49138 15759, po box: 155 (a.derakhshan@gu.ac.ir) majid elahi shirvan is associate professor of foreign language education at the university of bojnord, iran. his main research interest is the ecology of foreign language learning and teaching. he has published in different international journals such as ecological psychology, international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, foreign language annals, and studies in second language acquisition. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3363-8273 contact details: university of bojnord, department of foreign languages, bojnord, north khorasan province, iran (elahishmajid@gmail.com; m.elahi@ub.ac.ir) zohreh r. eslami is professor of bilingual/esl education in the educational psychology department at texas a&m university in college station, usa. she has published more than 130 articles and book chapters related to instructional and intercultural pragmatics, linguistically and culturally diverse students and their academic and social needs, diversity in english language users and teacher education, l2 content literacy development, and language teacher education. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2969-5056 contact details: phd program coordinator, bilingual/esl education division department of educational psychology college of education and human development texas a&m university, college station, tx 77843-4225 (zeslami@tamu.edu) mariusz kruk, phd, works at the university of zielona góra, poland. his main areas of interest include individual difference variables (e.g., boredom, motivation, 9 anxiety) and the application of technology in foreign language learning and teaching. his publications have appeared in various journals including applied linguistics review, computer assisted language learning, elt journal, journal of multilingual and multicultural development, language teaching research, studies in second language learning and teaching and system. he is the author of the monograph investigating dynamic relationships among individual difference variables in learning english as a foreign language in a virtual world (2021, springer). he co-authored understanding emotions in english language learning in virtual worlds with mirosław pawlak (2022, routledge) and boredom in the foreign language classroom: a micro-perspective with mirosław pawlak and joanna zawodniak (2020, springer). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5297-1966 contact details: university of zielona góra, institute of modern languages, al. wojska polskiego 71a, 65-762 zielona góra, poland (mkruk@uz.zgora.pl) mirosław pawlak is professor of english in the english department, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland, and department of research on language and communication, faculty of humanities and social sciences, state university of applied sciences, konin, poland. his main areas of interest are form-focused instruction, corrective feedback, pronunciation teaching, classroom interaction, learner autonomy, learning strategies, motivation, willingness to communicate, boredom and study abroad. his most recent publications include error correction in the foreign language classroom: reconsidering the issues (2015, springer), willingness to communicate in instructed second language acquisition: combining a macroand micro-perspective (with anna mystkowska-wiertelak, 2017, multilingual matters), boredom in the foreign language classroom: a micro-perspective (with joanna zawodniak and mariusz kruk, 2020, springer), and exploring the interface between individual difference variables and the knowledge of second language grammar (2021, springer nature). he is editor of the journals studies in second language learning and teaching and konin language studies, as well as the book series second language learning and teaching, published by springer. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7448-355x contact details: adam mickiewicz university, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, ul. nowy świat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl) richard j. sampson (phd, griffith university) has been working in the japanese education context for over 20 years. he is currently associate professor at rikkyo university, tokyo, japan. he teaches courses in english communication and language learning psychology. his research interests include considering various aspects 10 of language learner and teacher psychology from a complexity perspective. he uses action research approaches to explore experiences of classroom language learning from the angles of students and teachers. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9068-317x contact details: center for foreign language education and research, building 6, rikkyo university, 3 chome-34-1 nishi-ikebukuro, toshima ward, tokyo, japan 171-8501 (rjsampson@rikkyo.ac.jp) adem soruç is assistant professor of applied linguistics in the department of education at the university of bath, uk. he is carrying out research on emi, english as a lingua franca, and individual learner differences. he has published articles in reputable journals such as system, elt journal, tesl canada, eurasian journal of applied linguistics as well as book chapters in books from cambridge university press. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4165-6260 contact details: department of education, university of bath, building 1 west north | office 3.17b, bath, ba2 7ay, united kingdom (a.soruc@bath.ac.uk) tahereh taherian is a phd candidate of tefl at yazd university, iran. her main research interest is the psychology of language learning and teaching. she has published in several leading journals such as studies in second language acquisition, journal of multilingual and multicultural development, and applied linguistics review. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6338-5054 contact details: yazd university, department of english language, yazd, yazd province, iran (taherian87@yahoo.com) elham yazdanmehr is assistant professor of tefl at attar institute of higher education, iran. her main research interest is the psychology of language learning and teaching. she has published in several international journals including foreign language annals. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9414-7251 contact details: attar institute of higher education, department of english language, mashhad, razavi khorasan province, iran (yazdanmehr@attar.ac.ir) dogan yuksel is associate professor of english language teaching at kocaeli university’s faculty of education, turkey. his research areas of interest include classroom discourse, english medium instruction, and vygotskyan dynamic assessment. his work has been published in such journals as international journal of educational research, international journal of applied linguistics, applied linguistics 11 review, linguistics and education, international review of applied linguistics in language teaching (iral), system, recall, and language teaching research. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9131-3907 contact details: kabaoğlu, baki komsuoğlu bulvarı no:515, umuttepe, 41001 i̇zmit/ kocaeli, turkey (doganyuksel@gmail.com) kiyana zhaleh earned her phd in tefl from allameh tabataba’i university, tehran, iran (atu). she has been a lecturer at allameh tabataba’i university, khatam university, sharif university of technology, golestan university, and gonbad kavous university in iran for the past three years. she has published in such journals as current psychology, frontiers in psychology, polish psychological bulletin, language related research, tesl-ej, and journal of research in applied linguistics. her research interests are teacher education, cross-cultural communication, and applied linguistics. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0918-5246 contact details: department of english language and literature, faculty of persian literature and foreign languages, allameh tabataba’i university, tehran, iran (k_zhaleh97@atu.ac.ir) studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (pedagogical university of kraków, poland) vol. 9 no. 4 december 2019 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) maria dakowska (university of warsaw, poland) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2019 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: jakub bielak mariusz kruk aleksandra wach © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: jakub bielak, melanie ellis, mariusz kruk, aleksandra wach cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · scopus · web of science emerging sources citation index (esci) · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the clarivate analytics (formerly thomson reuters) master journal list. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 9, number 4, december 2019 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ....................................................................573 editorial .........................................................................................577 articles: marco octavio cancino avila – exploring teachers’ and learners’ overlapped turns in the language classroom: implications for classroom interactional competence ..................................................................................... 581 reza shirani – patterns of uptake and repair following recasts and prompts in an efl context: does feedback explicitness play a role? ............. 607 günter faber – longitudinal effects of task performance and self-concept on preadolescent efl learners’ causal attributions of grammar success and failure ....................................................................................... 633 alireza mohammadzadeh mohammadabadi, saeed ketabi, dariush nejadansari – factors influencing language teacher cognition: an ecological systems study .................................................................................. 657 paweł sobkowiak – the impact of studying abroad on students’ intercultural competence: an interview study ..................................................... 681 zarina marie krystle m. abenoja, matthew decoursey – using drama activities to teach beginner’s french to chinese students at a tertiary institution in hong kong: an exploratory case study ...................... 711 book reviews: paweł scheffler – review of early instructed second language acquisition: pathways to competence edited by joanna rokita-jaśkow and melanie ellis................................................................................................... 737 olga trendak – review of learning strategy instruction in the language classroom: issues and implementation edited by anna uhl chamot and vee harris ........................................................................................ 745 reviewers for volume 9/2019.......................................................... 755 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 761 573 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors zarina marie krystle m. abenoja received her phd from the education university of hong kong and is lecturer in the school of arts and humanities of tung wah college in hong kong. she teaches an array of english enhancement courses as well as academic english skills. she specializes in using drama to teach english to second language learners and has conducted research in this area for the partial fulfilment of her phd at the education university of hong kong. her research interests comprise of drama education, second language learning and l2 motivation. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9276-5697 contact details: 20 floor, 90a shantung street, mong kok, kowloon, hong kong (zarinaabenoja@twc.edu.hk) marco octavio cancino avila is interested in understanding how classroom interaction (with an emphasis on teacher talk) influences opportunities for participation and learning. his publications have addressed particular aspects of classroom interactional competence and the benefits of creating teacher awareness towards the interactional features they use in the classroom. he is currently supervising undergraduate and postgraduate thesis work at his institution on a variety of topics applied linguistics, from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2450-8197 contact details: universidad andres bello. facultad de educación y ciencias sociales. fernandez concha 700, las condes. santiago, chile (marco.cancino@unab.cl) matthew decoursey has been assistant professor in the department of literature and cultural studies of the education university of hong kong since 2004. he holds a doctoral degree in comparative literature from the university of toronto, canada. he has published in cahiers élisabéthains, early modern literary studies, reformation, renaissance papers, and the oxford dictionary of literary 574 biography. he has directed or co-directed six plays including macbeth, midsummer night's dream, aladdin and living with lady macbeth. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5250-306x contact details: department of literature and cultural studies (lcs), 10 lo ping road, tai po, new territories, hong kong (matthew@eduhk.hk) günter faber holds a phd in education from leibniz university hannover, germany, where he has been working in the capacity of lecturer in the institute of psychology since 2007. he has considerable experience in the field of remedial education and instruction of children, youths and young adults as well as in teaching educational psychology and quantitative research methods at university level. his research interests include the determinants of academic development, mainly learners’ cognitive-motivational self-beliefs, also in the efl context. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7099-415x contact details: institute of psychology, leibniz university hannover, schloßwender straße 1, 30159 hannover, germany (faber@psychologie.uni-hannover.de) saeed ketabi is associate professor at the university of isfahan, iran. his areas of interest include curriculum and materials development, teacher education, and psychology of language learning and teaching. he has published several articles in different national and international journals. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7784-2754 contact details: university of isfahan, faculty of foreign language, english language and literature department, hezar jarib st., isfahan, iran (ketabi@fgn.ui.ac.ir) alireza mohammadzadeh mohammadabadi is a phd candidate at the university of isfahan, iran. his research interests include teacher education, language teacher cognition, the role of corrective feedback in writing development, and ecological systems theory. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6189-4568 contact details: university of isfahan, faculty of foreign languages, english language and literature department, hezar jarib st., isfahan, iran (ali.mohammadzadeh61@ gmail.com) dariush nejadansari is assistant professor at the university of isfahan, iran. his areas of interest include theories of language teaching, discourse analysis, and psychology of language learning and teaching. he has published several articles in different national and international journals. 575 orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9145-6008 contact details: university of isfahan, faculty of foreign language, english language and literature department, hezar jarib st., isfahan, iran (nejadansari@gmail.com) paweł scheffler is head of the department of applied english linguistics and language teaching at the faculty of english, adam mickiewicz university in poznań, poland. his research interests are second language acquisition, classroom instruction, and modern english grammar. he has published papers in numerous journals both in poland and abroad. he also writes language teaching materials for polish learners of english. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8130-8095 contact details: adam mickiewicz university, faculty of english, ul. grunwaldzka 6, 60-780 poznań, poland (spawel@wa.amu.edu.pl) reza shirani is a graduate student of applied linguistics at the university of victoria, canada. he has taught english as a foreign language to students of different ages and levels for several years. he is interested in classroom interaction, corrective feedback, and collaborative language learning. orcid id: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4746-7719 contact details: office of linguistics, university of victoria, po box 1700 stn csc, victoria bc, v8w 2y2, canada (rezashirani70@gmail.com) paweł sobkowiak, phd, is senior lecturer at the school of law and administration, adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland, where he teaches business english and business communication to students of management and law in business. his main research interests include foreign language acquisition, different aspects of teaching english for specific purposes, mainly business english, professional development of language teachers, as well as the development of learners’ intercultural competence, and intercultural teaching and learning. his recent publications include the monograph intercultural language education (adam mickiewicz university press, 2015). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4717-3956 contact details: school of law and administration, adam mickiewicz university, aleja niepodległości 53, 61-714 poznań, poland (pawelsob@amu.edu.pl) olga trendak, phd, is research assistant at the institute of english studies, university of łódź, poland. her main research interests include, among others, second language acquisition, learner autonomy, language learning strategies, form576 focused instruction and new technologies in the foreign language classroom. her doctoral dissertation was devoted to language learning strategies, their role in the process of foreign language learning and the impact of strategic intervention on learners’ linguistic development. she is also director of studies collaborating with polish and english language schools. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6488-7956 contact details: university of łódź, ul. pomorska 171/173, 90-236 łódź, poland (filolog@uni.lodz.pl) 845 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (4). 2018. 845-851 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.4.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review third age learners of foreign languages editor: danuta gabryś-barker publisher: multilingual matters, 2018 isbn: 9781783099405 pages: 256 danuta barker-gabryś has made an important contribution to tesol with her edited volume on language teaching and the third-age learner. older learners, though visible demographically, have been somewhat overlooked as language learners since the focus in the teaching of foreign and second languages has largely been on younger learners. with the growing acknowledgement that senior learners now constitute a considerable proportion of those attending foreign language courses, this collection provides an excellent and timely overview of the current state of knowledge on issues related to the process of third-age language learning. the selection of the contributors is international, as one would expect in the second language acquisition book series, and includes authors from austria, ireland, the netherlands, poland, the uk, and the usa. the book starts with the editor’s introduction. in it, danuta gabryś-barker clearly sets out the aim of the book, which is to “to introduce the topic of seniors who can find a purpose in life by going back in time and becoming learners once again, third-age learners of foreign languages (fl)” (p. 16). she enumerates the reasons why senior language learners should be studied, introduces adult learning 846 principles, devotes a section to third-age universities, sheds some light on the values of learning and the improvement of teaching languages to seniors, and presents several recent research contributions on this topic. the overview in the introduction sets the scene for the two parts that follow: “foreign language learning in the third age” (seven chapters), and “foreign language pedagogy in the third age” (four chapters). both parts are sufficiently distinct. the book closes with the editor’s conclusion in which she, once again, discusses all the contributions and points to further research directions. opening the first part, the chapter by rebecca oxford examines the third age from a developmental perspective. the chapter introduces the key concepts of age grading and then goes on to discuss the physical, cognitive, emotional and cultural changes that affect this age group, as well as three approaches that could be useful for encouraging and helping older learners with language learning. this chapter provides a theoretical basis for the rest of the book and is thus of central importance. oxford’s post-scriptum in which she shares her dream of learning a foreign language at the age of 70 and how she would like this to be accomplished provides a refreshing personal note in a book of this kind. that said, and considering the contemporary focus on elf-awareness (e.g., matsuda, 2017; sifakis & tsantila, 2018), i find it intriguing that rebecca oxford should practice talking on skype only with a “native” german speaker. in chapter 2, david singleton reports on the latest theoretical findings on age in the context of language learning, including the current consensus on the critical period hypothesis, the contribution of older learners to the language learning process, and the practicalities of teaching really late learners. singleton reminds the reader that in language learning younger does not always mean better and dispels a few language learning myths, such as the belief that late learners prefer learning grammar via explicit feedback or that senior learners enjoy learning in the company of other late learners. in several parts of the text, the author underscores the need for more research on third-age learners’ capacity, and, contrary to popular beliefs, argues that old age has less to do with a decline in capacity as such but more with the slowing down of processing speed. in chapter 3, david w. green offers a neurolinguistic discussion of the interactional fluency and neurophysiological and psychological mechanisms of age-related deterioration of abilities in elderly language learners. after a comprehensive discussion of the intricacies of l2 interactional proficiency among the elderly, the author indicates the benefits of exercise interventions, including physical exercises and action video games, which may reduce age-related brain decline. he believes that senior language learners can benefit from individually tailored l2 learning programs which would reflect their personal interests (e.g., cooking and gardening) and exploit opportunities offered by the virtual world 847 (mobile phone interactions with actual speakers). he also calls for more studies that would investigate the neuroprotective influence of using two languages and result in tracking brain changes that would provide information about impairment in brain regions. the contribution by maria kliesch, nathalie giroud, simone e. pfenninger and martin meyer (chapter 4) belongs to a group of articles which take issue with the focus on age as the main factor affecting language learning. the authors claim that age is only one of many factors to be considered in foreign language geragogy. their research project, which focused on 10 older adults learning english for 4 hours a day over a period of three weeks, aimed at verifying two hypotheses: whether there is significant growth in older language learners, and whether the cognitive fitness of particular learners predicts successful l2 learning. following their study, the authors claim that cognitive factors and motivation play a decisive role in l2 development, while age only explains a small part of inter-individual variance. in addition, the study provides several methodological tips related to the intensity of training, the choice of materials (classroom activities vs. software), and immediate feedback that could be used by practitioners to foster older learners’ motivation to learn a language. the study rounds off with suggestions for investigating older learners in the future, especially those that apply to the manner of conducting valid and reliable research. in chapter 5, mirosław pawlak, marek derenowski and anna mystkowskawiertelak pick up the theme of the use of language learning strategies by elderly learners. they hypothesize that the success of language learning in this age group may not depend so much on how old learners are but on their learning strategies and study objectives. in the results of an open-ended questionnaire on the application of metacognitive, affective and social strategies, the researchers paint a picture of participants (n = 13) who are driven by general motives of learning english, who treat the learning experience as a way of offsetting old age, who understand planning as revising material, who are afflicted by (mostly) negative emotions and who lack autonomy and are over-reliant on their teacher. it would be interesting to speculate whether these characteristics are typical of the polish context or are related to their memories of language learning from the past. perhaps a sentence or two with a possible explanation why the results are like this could have illuminated the participants’ learning approach, especially given the fact that the findings, as the contributors stress several times in the text, differ from those of a study conducted by ohly (2007). the article is eloquently written, and many teachers of mature learners will undoubtedly find it interesting. the study by monika grotek and agnieszka ślęzak-świat (chapter 6) is based on elderly language learners’ choice of reading strategies when doing an l2 reading comprehension task. the authors argue for the implementation of 848 therapeutic intervention (a balance exercise) in the reading programs for senior language learners in order to free their visual capacity. the study is original and interesting but, perhaps, its findings should be treated with caution. the fact that the subjects adopted various strategies for their reading texts, regardless of the problems induced by their gaze control, leads to the conclusion that more research is needed before definite answers are proposed. ewa piechurska-kuciel and magdalena szyszka’s text (chapter 7) is concerned with compensatory strategies (language learning and communication strategies) used by the elderly. the chapter presents baltes’s (1987) selective optimization with compensation (soc) model of aging, followed by a concise review of the main taxonomies of compensatory strategies, and then a description of a questionnaire study. the study was directed at 4 late adult learners who, in 12 open questionnaire sentences, described their language learning behaviors related to compensatory strategies. the findings reveal that, contrary to pawlak et al.’s study, the role of compensatory strategies in senior language learners is important. the authors conclude that foreign language learning in late learners can be a vital experience that contributes to their sage-ing (oxford, chapter 1) and cognitive fitness (singleton, chapter 2; kliesch et al., chapter 4). the second part of the book comprises four chapters. the first two articles are reports of studies carried out at two universities of the third age in poland and deal with older learners’ expectations towards their foreign language teachers. the narrative study described by monika grotek (chapter 8) was conducted with a group of 87 students. its outcome is a profile of an effective foreign language teacher at a university of the third age which is divided into five general categories: catering for the development of students’ linguistic and communicative skills in the fl; helping students function in a group of other learners; organizing classroom procedures to make them interesting, practical and suitable for senior learners; enhancing students’ memory; and providing adequate feedback. this study is definitely aimed at language teachers, and all the areas mentioned here would be worth focusing on when organizing a language course for older learners. the author is fully aware that her profile is limited to the narratives of a particular group of students learning a language in a particular context, and therefore she encourages others to undertake analogous quantitative studies. without dismissing the author’s caution for generalizability, i would venture the opinion that the guidelines relating to the characteristics of a teacher of older learners are capacious enough to state with confidence that the organization of a language course according to the generated profile will be well received by senior language learners. another chapter (chapter 9) on the expectations towards language teachers in the eyes of senior students is contributed by marek derenowski. in his 849 qualitative small-scale study based on interviews with 15 participants, he comes up with such desirable teacher qualities as being compassionate, showing understanding, creating a friendly atmosphere, encouraging, being enthusiastic, self-confident, energetic, patient, and flexible, giving more time for completing tasks, giving advice, being fair, explaining clearly, being well prepared, and providing a friendly learning context. this text could also be interesting to senior language learners who might confront their ideas of a good teacher with those provided by the author. that said, i wonder to what extent the participants were affected by their language teachers’ characteristics, especially the one who seemed to be more popular of the two. chapter 10 by anna niżegorodcew is a description of the impact of an english as a foreign language course taught to senior students on english studies teacher trainees. i found it extremely interesting, innovative and inspiring thanks to its experiential learning paradigm. a course on teaching a language to senior learners is already a novelty in the polish context of language teacher education, but the inclusion of the components of observation and individual tutorials is worth disseminating as good practice. as the outcomes of the course were so positive, i suggest the text serve as inspiration to many language teacher educators. the last chapter (chapter 11) in the second part by anna pot, merel keijzer and kees de bot is slightly different if viewed from the perspective of its context. the contributors believe that the struggles with language learning by late learners are largely influenced by the social and psychological environment in which it takes place. the authors focus on a special group, third-age first-generation migrants in the netherlands, poorly-educated and sometimes illiterate in their first language, who have failed to learn dutch despite living and working in the country for many years. the authors discuss the relationships between the knowledge of language and the late-learner adults’ cognitive and social wellbeing and go on to present the most prominent language learning programs for social participation in dutch society. the article is important in calling attention to an overlooked but timely topic. what is more, the authors change emphasis from focusing on l2 proficiency to focusing on language as “a tool to promote social interaction and integration” (p. 233). interesting, yet of a secondary nature, is the point raised in the text about the lack of formal evaluation of language programs and materials that have been implemented over many years. i shall now consider three issues that seem crucial in evaluating any sla book on senior language learners. firstly, the question of who the monograph is addressed to? to my mind, different chapters of the book will appeal to different readers. those with research interests might like to focus particularly on chapters 2, 3, 4, 6, and 11. teachers of late adult learners may value the studies described in chapters 5, 7, 8, 9, and 10. older learners themselves, if proficient in english, may consider chapters 1, 6, 7, and 9 useful. l2 syllabus and materials 850 designers will learn much of relevance from chapter 11, while teacher educators may want to read the book in its entirety. this brings us to the second issue: the clarity of presenting the content to the international readers of this book. obviously, the writing styles of the contributors differ, and some of the chapters are always easier to comprehend for some readers while others require more background knowledge to grasp the author’s intention, or simply more familiarity with the scholarly writing style. most content discussed in the chapters of this monograph is accessibly presented, and some of it, like chapter 1, is particularly reader-friendly. the third issue relates to the opportunities the book provides for exploiting the notion with which it is concerned. in this book, the notion of third-age language learners comprises: viewing third age from a developmental perspective, up-to-date reports of research on age-related language acquisition, challenges with learning and using an additional language, the application of language learning strategies by older learners, student expectations of third-age teachers, teacher training, migrants’ third-age problems, and future research directions. in my opinion, one of the greatest values of the book lies in the message expressed by several authors that “the picture is not nearly as bleak as some perceive it to be” (p. 241), and that getting older involves only the slowing down of the learning process. such an approach to ageing treats the process as one of change or difference rather than decline. another reflection that emerges from the book is that third age language learners cannot be regarded as a homogeneous group. in other words, biological age is not enough to let us take for granted how successful or unsuccessful in language learning learners will turn out to be. as a good case in point we could mention the contradictory findings of the studies of older adults’ use of compensatory strategies (pawlak et. al.; piechurska-kuciel & szyszka). finally, it is important to mention that there are different reasons why late learners attend foreign language classes, and mastering the language may not be their top priority. it could be more important for these learners to establish social contacts, improve self-esteem, or look for new intellectual challenges. i would also like to point out that the editor of the collection, danuta gabryś-barker, has done her work well. her “introduction” and “concluding comments and a way forward” provide a useful bridge to the theme of the whole collection. like her contributors, gabryś-barker stresses the need for more research on third-age learners, which means that this aspect of language acquisition is still at an early stage of its development. this is a well-produced book despite some slight problems with language editing. an initial search has revealed problems with polish surnames: “niżsegorodcew” for niżegorodcew (p. 205) and “śle¸zak-świat” for ślęzak-świat (p. 131). these small reservations apart, i am convinced that third age learners of foreign 851 languages makes an important contribution to our developing understanding of older language learners. its wider significance has still to be assessed, but it would definitely seem to move us forward. reviewed by dorota werbińska pomeranian university in słupsk, poland dorota.werbinska@apsl.edu.pl references baltes, p. b. (1987). theoretical propositions of life-span developmental psychology: on the dynamics between growth and decline. developmental psychology, 23(5), 611-626. matsuda, a. (2017). preparing teachers to teach english as an international language. bristol: multilingual matters. ohly, k. (2007). older learners of german and their use of language learning strategies. in. c. gabrielatos, r. slessor, & j. w. unger (eds.), papers from lael pg 2006: volume 1 (pp. 86-102). lancaster: lancaster university. sifakis, n. c., & tsantila, n. (2018). english as a lingua franca for efl contexts. bristol: multilingual matters. 593 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (4). 2014. 593-615 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.4.2 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl what we can learn about strategies, language learning, and life from two extreme cases: the role of well-being theory rebecca l. oxford oxford associates, huntsville, al, usa rebeccaoxford@gmail.com abstract this article presents two foreign or second language (l2) learner histories representing the extreme ends of the spectrum of learner well-being. one story reflects the very positive learning experiences of a highly strategic learner, while the other story focuses on a less strategic learner’s negative, long-lasting responses to a single traumatic episode. the theoretical framework comes from the concept of well-being in positive psychology (with significant adaptations). in addition to contrasting the two cases through the grounded theory approach, the study suggests that the adapted well-being framework is useful for understanding l2 learning experiences, even when the experiences are negative. keywords: well-being theory, positive psychology, language learning experiences, positive and negative emotions, learner histories 1. introduction second or foreign language (l2) learners sometimes react in extremely different ways as they acquire a new language. this article presents two cases, one very positive (mark) and the other very negative (wanda), represented in personal rebecca l. oxford 594 histories written by the learners themselves. both were native chinese speakers learning english, and yet they took two distinctly different pathways to learning their new language. the goal of this investigation is to examine these two extreme cases of l2 learning and to assess whether an adapted theoretical framework of well-being, drawn from positive psychology, is relevant to these cases. the assumption, which i consider logically justified, is that if the adapted wellbeing framework is relevant to these two very different cases, it will be relevant to other cases that are not as extreme. this article is organized as follows: the theoretical framework and literature review, the methodology, the results, and the discussion and conclusion. 2. theoretical framework and literature review the goal of well-being theory is to “increase flourishing by increasing positive emotion, engagement, meaning, positive relationships, and accomplishment” (seligman, 2011, p. 12). the theory uses the acronym perma to reflect five elements: positive emotion (p), engagement (e), relationships (r), meaning (m), and accomplishment (a). underpinning the five elements are 24 character strengths (via institute of character, 2014). these strengths include creativity, curiosity, judgment or critical thinking, love of learning, perspective or wisdom, bravery or valor, perseverance, honesty or authenticity, zest or vitality, love, kindness, social intelligence (emotional and personal intelligence), teamwork, fairness, leadership, forgiveness, humility, prudence, self-regulation, appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor, and spirituality. the precise relationship of the character strengths to perma’s dimensions is not spelled out by seligman (2011). however, in my view these strengths can be mapped onto perma in logical ways. for example, love, hope, and gratitude are clearly positive emotions; curiosity, perseverance, and zest are associated with engagement; honesty, kindness, social intelligence, teamwork, fairness, leadership, and (interpersonal) forgiveness are linked with relationships; perspective, appreciation of beauty and excellence, and spirituality are yoked to meaning; and creativity, judgment, bravery, love of learning, self-regulation, prudence, humor, humility, and once again perseverance and zest are tied to accomplishment. we might even say that all of the virtues contribute to accomplishment to varying degrees. my suggested mapping of the character strengths against the perma components deserves further study. the via institute of character (2014) has already showed how the strengths relate to six virtues: wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. well-being theory holds that each element must fit three criteria: (a) “it contributes to well-being.” (b) “many people pursue it for its own sake . . .” (c) what we can learn about strategies, language learning, and life from two extreme cases. . . 595 “it is defined and measured independently of the other elements (exclusivity)” (seligman, 2011, p. 16). i question whether all five perma elements are truly independently definable and measurable; for instance, i repeatedly find that engagement and meaning are virtually inextricable, and i see that other dimensions, such as relationships, emotions, and accomplishment, are mutually influential. i also do not believe that perma pays enough attention to the negative emotions that occur in normal learning, as will be explained. see my comments on positive and negative emotions in the first bullet point below. for these reasons, i decided to modify the perma framework somewhat. the modified framework, which reflects a complex dynamic system (dörnyei, 2009; mercer, 2011), is shown below. i discuss my reasons for altering seligman’s (2011) theory. · positive and negative emotions are both present in learning. seligman’s (2011) well-being theory focuses only on positive emotions, the p in perma. seligman endorsed frederickson’s (2001, 2003, 2004) “broadenand-build” hypothesis, which states that positive emotions, such as joy, interest, love, contentment, and pride, broaden the individual’s options and build greater skills and competence, while negative emotions narrow the person’s possibilities and often focus on survival. however, emotional realities in l2 learning are more complex than frederickson’s broadening and narrowing metaphor might lead us to think. although negative emotions, such as anxiety, are particularly prevalent among less successful learners (horwitz, 2001, 2007; horwitz & young, 1991), even effective learners occasionally experience negative emotions during their learning. individuals do not always experience an ecstatic “high” while involved with learning the l2. their feelings of happiness, contentment, and gratitude often come after they have attained some desirable goal, not necessarily during the process. before accomplishing a given aim, individuals sometimes slog through particular activities and experience an element of boredom. at other times, some individuals experience anxiety or feel sadness or even selfretribution after failure. the master cognitive psychologist, jean piaget, explained that in learning, “[s]tates of pleasure, disappointment, eagerness, as well as feelings of fatigue, effort, boredom, etc., come into play. . . . [f]eelings of success or failure may occur . . .” (piaget, 1981, p. 3). all of these are normal emotions and can be expected. occasionally a negative emotion will serve as a helpful wake-up call to change something, particularly in resilient learners (oxford, meng, zhou, sung, & jain, 2007; see also benard, 1991; luthar, sawyer, & brown, 2006; truebridge, 2014 for resilience in general). in addition, rebecca l. oxford 596 anxiety can sometimes have positive uses when it stimulates learners (marcos-llinas & juan garau, 2009); anticipatory tension can keep individuals on their toes. unlike positive psychology, which centers on positive emotions, l2 research has a long tradition of focusing on negative emotions at the expense of positive emotions. it pays to look at both positive and negative emotions. as dewaele and macintyre (2014) stated, “examining both positive and negative emotions in the same study is an advisable practice” (p. 242). dewaele and macintyre did just that. they examined foreign language anxiety and foreign language enjoyment in a very large sample of individuals and found that (a) participants reported significantly more enjoyment than anxiety in their language classes and (b) there was a significant negative, moderate (-.36) correlation between foreign language anxiety and foreign language enjoyment. · instead of separating engagement and meaning, as in seligman’s (2011) standard theory of well-being, i put the two together as meaningful engagement. my reasoning is that people become engaged in that which they consider meaningful. o engagement embraces intrinsic motivation, flow, self-determination, and investment. the first three are part of the standard theory of well-being, and i have added the fourth. intrinsic motivation is the desire to do something for its own sake because it is interesting, novel, and challenging (deci & ryan, 2000). two manifestations of intrinsic motivation are (a) flow, or the state of being stretched to one’s limits while experiencing complete engagement in an activity that balances challenge with skills (csíkszentmihályi, 1998, 2008, 2013) and (b) self-determination, in which inner influences outweigh external ones (deci & ryan, 2000; ryan & deci, 2001). investment, not discussed in the standard well-being theory, is the socially constructed relationship of the learner to the target language (norton, 2010); when learners invest in a language, they understand that doing so will offer cultural capital (ushioda, 2008). i concur with ushioda (2008), but i add that social capital, in the form of power, interpersonal acceptance, and control, can also be gained when learners invest in a language, depending on the circumstances. whether individuals decide to invest in learning the target language depends on sociocultural power issues in the environment (norton, 2010). if individuals already feel oppressed or left out by the social system, they might have one of two reactions, in my view: to what we can learn about strategies, language learning, and life from two extreme cases. . . 597 try to be accepted by working harder in learning the language or instead to reject the system, avoid participating when possible, and refuse to try hard to learn the language (norton, 2010). though nonparticipation has been studied in the l2 field (norton, 2001), i do not think the other option, working ever harder at l2 learning to gain social acceptance, has been sufficiently explored. o seligman (2011) stated that meaning is gained through affiliating with something larger than oneself. i add that meaning can also be gained through solitary activities, such as meditation (zajonc, 2009), reading, or looking at artwork. at its greatest point, i contend that meaning results in peak experiences (maslow, 1970, 1971) and inspired consciousness (silo, 2006). · the term relationships refers to interpersonal relationships. healthy interpersonal relationships are part of well-being, according to the basic theory (seligman, 2011). the closest seligman (2011) came to highlighting the sociocultural context of relationships was to mention that the u.s. military mounted a campaign to promote resiliency, which is associated with well-being and relationships. thus, under some circumstances, “institutions . . . enable people to flourish” (macintyre & mercer, 2014, p. 154). compared with the basic theory of well-being (seligman, 2011), my adapted theory more strongly emphasizes the importance of the sociocultural environments in which interpersonal relationships occur (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011; ushioda, 2009). the adapted theory adds that identity, defined as the self-definition of one’s own character, abilities, and attitudes, is born in relation to people and things outside oneself within the sociocultural context (burke, 1991; pavlenko, 2006; pavlenko & blackledge, 2004; pavlenko & lantolf, 2000; ushioda, 2009). · accomplishment can refer to achievements of any kind (seligman, 2011). as i apply it in the l2 setting, it includes (a) the development of general proficiency in the l2, (b) achievement in a particular curriculum or course, (c) effective use of the language, (d) self-regulated behavior, or (e) any other attainment related to l2 learning. these accomplishments are aided by the use of l2 learning strategies (oxford, 2011b). learning strategies are the behaviors or steps learners use to make language learning more self-regulated and effective. examples of categories of learning strategies are cognitive (e.g., outlining, highlighting, and reasoning), affective (e.g., relaxing, using humor, and maintaining motivation), sociocultural-interactive (e.g., asking for help, learning about the culture, staying in a conversation despite difficulties), and metacognitive (e.g., planning, organizing, evaluating, and monitoring). rebecca l. oxford 598 certain aspects of these positive psychology dimensions, such as resilience, relationships, and learning strategies, were found in my prior work with l2 learner histories, for example, oxford (1996, 2011a, 2013), oxford, massey, and anand (2005), and oxford, meng, zhou, sung, and jain (2007). i have only recently begun using positive psychology overtly as a theoretical framework (see, e.g., oxford & cuéllar, 2014), and i have done so by adapting the standard theory of well-being. the aim of the present study, as suggested earlier, is to look at two extreme cases of language learning and determine whether the adapted positive psychology framework is relevant. as assumed, if it is relevant to these extreme cases, then it will have relevance to many other cases that are not as extreme. i now turn to the methodology of the current study. 3. methodology for the purpose of the study, i decided to look at two l2 learner histories, those of mark and wanda. i chose them because they seemed to represent opposite poles in terms of l2 learning experiences and personality. 3.1. participants and setting mark and wanda (both names are pseudonyms) were graduate students in the same department in a large university in the mid-atlantic region of the united states. mark was in a doctoral program in second language education, while wanda was enrolled in a master’s program in teaching english to speakers of other languages (tesol). mark was born and raised in the people’s republic of china and immigrated to the united states as an adult. wanda was born in hong kong and immigrated to the united states at the age of ten. 3.2. data gathering mark and wanda, along with 12 other graduate students (master’s and doctoral) in their department at the time, were invited to write their l2 learner histories at home. this was an optional activity, not intended for a grade or mark. the graduate students voluntarily chose to participate in order to gain deeper understanding of their learning process. they received the following guidelines: · participants could write as much or as little as they wished, as long as they portrayed the aspects of l2 learning that were most important to them. (most participants chose to write between four and ten doublespaced pages.) what we can learn about strategies, language learning, and life from two extreme cases. . . 599 · participants could write about anything they desired, such as actions, events, positive and/or negative emotions, struggles, and achievements. · participants could write about institutions that fostered or hindered their l2 learning, as well as teachers, family members, or others who influenced them. · participants could write about learning styles and strategies. in their graduate classes they had already learned about learning styles, for example, visual, auditory, and kinesthetic; extraverted and introverted; closure-oriented and open; and learning strategies, for example, cognitive, metacognitive, affective, and social (oxford, 2001). · participants could pinpoint any questions they had about their own l2 learning and any lessons or answers they personally found to those questions. mark and wanda, as well as most other participants, gave permission for their stories to be shared. because the stories of mark and wanda represented the far ends of the l2 learning continuum in terms of emotions, strategies, and self-perceptions of identity, i highlighted those stories in this article. 3.3. data analysis procedures the first two stages and the fourth stage of data analysis used a grounded theory approach (corbin & strauss, 2007; strauss & corbin, 1998), in which the explanatory theories arose from the data rather than being pre-planned. a grounded theory approach means that theories or themes should be developed in intimate relation to the data, with researchers being aware of themselves as instruments for interpretation. at the open coding stage, the researcher identifies as many detailed elements as possible. the next stage, axial coding, makes connections between thematic categories and allows condensation into broader thematic categories. at the third stage, i compared the themes that arose from the data with the dimensions of the adapted theory of well-being—positive and negative emotions, meaningful engagement, relationships, and accomplishment—and found a close fit. this was an added stage which is not ordinarily part of the grounded theory approach. the final stage, selective coding, identifies one theme as the most important and encompassing (corbin & strauss, 2007). threats to reliability could be diminished through using more than one coder. since i was the only coder available, i made a point of coding the data several times (over a period of years, in fact) to ensure reliability. the issue of validity is even more crucial. the constant comparison technique is the most commonly used means of ensuring validity throughout the grounded-theory coding process. the themes are continually compared with rebecca l. oxford 600 the data to make sure that the best fit is accomplished. if a piece of data, for example, a learner’s description of an event or an emotion, does not fit the theme, then the theme has to be adjusted. if a theme is too large or two small, it needs to be reshaped. 4. results at the open coding stage, i identified detailed but significant elements, such as mark’s gratitude toward his brothers, his letters to grammar experts, wanda’s anger at her teacher, and her feelings about children. i roughly categorized them into preliminary themes (e.g., family, academic, and other influences and the learner’s outreach to others). at the axial coding stage, i found connections between thematic categories and condensed those categories into broader categories. for example, i grouped certain themes into emotional responses, motivation/meaning/commitment, relationships, and achievement/strategies. results of third stage of analysis, which compared themes from the data with the dimensions of the adapted theory of well-being, are presented next. again, this third stage is not typical in the grounded theory approach, but it is crucial for the research at hand. the findings of the fourth stage, selective coding, are presented immediately before the end of the results section. 4.1. mark’s learner history in the third stage of analysis i will provide a synopsis of the story and then analyze it according to the categories in the adapted well-being framework. 4.1.1. synopsis of mark’s story mark came from an underdeveloped province in china. his first exposure to english was with a middle-school english teacher who had little knowledge of english. later mark had a very good teacher, but this situation was short lived, and he was left without a teacher. he decided to study english on his own and devised strategies to do so. mark asked one of his brothers for help, and the brother bought him a precious tape recorder so he could study english. another brother urged him to keep studying and to talk to english-speaking tourists. in high school and at university mark strategically became close to his teachers and was treated well because of his english talents. when a delegation from thailand invited him to teach english and chinese at a thai university, mark accepted, and later he went to the united states for his phd in teaching english. what we can learn about strategies, language learning, and life from two extreme cases. . . 601 4.1.2. positive and negative emotions mark noted sadly that his first english teacher in middle school “had studied english for only one or two years . . . [and] taught incorrect pronunciations of most english words. . . . you can imagine what that kind of english sounded like!” when some of his classmates transferred to better schools in another province, mark was envious and upset. “i started to complain how bad my school was.” his complaints were useful, because his parents helped him to transfer to a better school in a different district. he was very happy, stating, “that was the first time in my life that i had met an english teacher who indeed possessed the ability to teach correct english pronunciation. . . . i realized how wonderful this new teacher’s english pronunciation was.” he became sad when, after that year, “the teacher was not able to teach me again.” he felt bereft; “i had only my english textbook no. 4 and an english dictionary.” his emotions became passionate at this point. mark loved english and desperately needed help. i talked to my brother, who left school when he was only 15 in order to find a job to feed himself. i explained to him how much i loved learning english. i told him how desperate i felt about the possibility that i might not be able to continue my english education unless i could get a tape recorder and some tapes to go with the textbook. soon my brother bought me a tape recorder and some tapes from the institute at a price for which he needed to save for years. as a result, mark felt very encouraged. he also made every effort to speak with english speaking tourists visiting the province (see section 4.1.4), and this made him feel pleased. he was happy in high school and university and while teaching and studying in thailand (see section 4.1.4). his advisor in thailand recognized his happiness but challenged him to achieve still more by going to the united states. the advisor said, “you feel happy in thailand, but you’ll feel proud in the states!” after arriving in the united states, becoming still more proficient, and starting to earn another degree, mark emphasized his feelings about english: “i love it.” he showed significant resilience throughout the story, transforming desperation (due to lack of a teacher and of resources) into hope and success. his strategic problem-solving skills and dedication were linked with positive emotions to propel him onward. the results of his positive emotions matched the broaden-and-build description proposed by frederickson (2001, 2003, 2004). rebecca l. oxford 602 4.1.3. meaningful engagement mark’s intrinsic motivation was already present for learning english, but his brothers stirred his extrinsic motivation as well: i was constantly and strongly encouraged by my brother to study english. he always reminded me that if i did not earn good scores in school, i would end up like him. another brother of mine once pointed out a group of three people, two foreigners and one chinese interpreter, walking out of a car and said, “you would have such a life if your english is good enough.” this image was engraved on my mind from that moment in my life. . . . my attitudes were very positive. mark threw himself into learning english, which was the most meaningful thing in his life. i encountered countless difficulties in studying english by myself. however, whenever i had difficulties, my brother would tell stories of those who didn’t have enough education. at that time, those stories would not be difficult to find. my strong interest in english motivated me, too. i was like a sponge whenever i got a chance to learn english from others. he continued to learn like a sponge in high school and university. his appraisal of the importance of education and of english never wavered. he wrote the following in his learner history: “confucius once said, ‘everything is inferior to education.’ for me, english was the most important thing to learn: i love it. it became the most reliable ticket i could have to a better future.” mark appeared to have a number of peak experiences, such as talking to tourists, working as an interpreter in china and the united states, and receiving answers to the letters he sent to grammar experts. all of these were linked with relationships, discussed next. 4.1.4. relationships mark’s learning trajectory was sparked by relationships in sociocultural contexts. he started with a poor english teacher but, after shifting to another district, he had an english teacher who was skilled in pronunciation. mark received help and motivation for english learning from brothers, tourists, teachers, grammar experts, professors, employers, an advisor, and his own wife. he inspired others to help him. his identity or self-definition as a high-achieving english learner was strongly influenced by relationships with others. he was highly extraverted, gaining energy from people and things around him. what we can learn about strategies, language learning, and life from two extreme cases. . . 603 his relationships with his brothers have already been mentioned. as a teenager he spent time talking with foreign tourists, and this brought him closer to realizing his dreams of learning english. this was one of his most effective learning strategies. since 1984, more and more foreign tourists came to visit my hometown, which is located in the biggest rainforest in china. my home was only half an hour’s bike ride from one of the tourist destinations. every weekend i waited there and talked with many people from different countries and got chances to know a different outside world. i believed that if i worked hard enough, i could realize my dreams. mark constantly asked english-related questions of other people. most of the questions were about english grammar. “in china, i first asked my english teacher in middle school, then high school. when they could not answer my questions, i sent letters 600 to 2,000 miles away to ask questions.” asking questions was a significant learning strategy for mark. building relationships with teachers in high school and university was a great social learning strategy for mark. it led to many new opportunities. in high school, english teachers treated me very friendly. they asked me to lead student morning english teaching every day in my class. in return, they let me read my own books in english class and let me use their office at that time. . . . some of my university english teachers treated me the same way as my high school teachers. i could go audit classes in another university, and i got more and more chances to talk with native speakers who came to visit us in my university. another social learning strategy was relying on others when he needed to chat personally about his english-learning process. i talked to someone i trusted about my attitudes and feelings concerning the language learning process. the person i trusted about this topic was always the one who would not retell what i said to others. in high school, it was my chinese teacher. in my university in china, it was my wife. she was my classmate then. his thai academic advisor played a pivotal role in mark’s life by advising him to go to the united states for a doctorate (see section 4.1.5). 4.1.5. accomplishment mark was highly achievement-oriented. he had high aims, and he developed learning strategies to meet those aims. many of his learning strategies have already been mentioned. here is another example from his high school days: rebecca l. oxford 604 i set a goal for myself. i should recite english textbooks. i then spent a lot of time listening to tapes during my dinnertime and when i went to bed or anytime i felt free. at the end of my high school, i took the national college entrance examination. i didn’t score high enough on the written part; however, i scored 96.5% on the oral test. he performed very well in university english courses. “then, after university graduation, i worked as an english interpreter for five years in the foreign affairs office of my university. during those years, i translated for a lot of people who came from different countries.” he used his translation work as a learning strategy to keep improving his english. while working as an interpreter, mark met a group of thai visitors and was invited to teach in thailand. this led to another series of accomplishments. one of the delegations came from thailand and they would like to invite me to be an english and chinese teacher at their university. my responsibility was to teach oral english practice, sometimes english conversation, english for journalism, essay and report writing, and grammar and writing. since i only taught 6 hours per week in thailand, three days a week, i used my spare time to get my m.ed. in english. for me, thailand was the beginning of my different strategies toward formal instruction in classrooms. almost every professor of mine was a ph.d. holder. . . . i focused my close attention on their instructions and did whatever they required me to do. notice that he talked about using different strategies during formal instruction. one of these strategies was to pay close attention. “i got a straight a average for my master degree and was encouraged by many professors to pursue my doctoral degree in the states.” additional strategic achievement was yet to come. mark arrived in the states to earn his phd in second language education. in my first year i got the chance to translate in the state department and the supreme court of the u.s. i worked as an english interpreter for the institute of global chinese affairs at that time. . . . later i taught an advanced course in english grammar to native english speakers at the master’s level [in my u.s. university]. again, he strategically used his work to gain more opportunities to improve his english, and he was well recognized for his efforts. 4.1.6. further comments mark was at an extremely high level of strategic functioning throughout his l2 learning career, and he continues to learn. after he wrote his story, mark earned what we can learn about strategies, language learning, and life from two extreme cases. . . 605 his phd and received a position as an assistant professor and head of a university tesol program at a new institution. he is now a tenured professor there. 4.2. wanda’s learner history in the third stage of analysis just as with mark’s story, i will offer a synopsis of wanda’s story and then analyze her story according to the adapted framework for well-being. 4.2.1. synopsis of wanda’s story wanda was ten years old when she emigrated with her family from hong kong to the united states. she encountered a domineering, autocratic, and terrifying teacher in a church sunday school. the teacher’s insistence on oral reading for all children was insensitive at best. wanda thought the teacher was intentionally cruel. her experience with this teacher over several weeks made a permanent mark on the young girl’s life and harmed her self-confidence for many years. while most students might have been able to shrug off the feelings of persecution, wanda still carried them in her heart. 4.2.2. positive and negative emotions wanda mentioned only negative emotions when describing her first experiences in the united states. her feelings seemed to support the narrowing effects of negative emotions described by frederickson (2001, 2003, 2004) with one exception: those emotions helped her to develop an instructional philosophy (see section 4.2.3). she began her learner history this way: among many things in life, reading english aloud has been the most painful experience for me. this has been a huge baggage that i have been carrying for a long time, thinking that i am dumb because i wasn’t able to read competently and have a good grasp on the english language. embarrassment, fear, and anger were among wanda’s earliest emotions in the united states. she felt like a victim. i struggled a lot with the language when i came. it did not help that a certain lady at church, knowing full well that i was only in the country for one week, made me read aloud in sunday school. i remembered crying as i was reading because i was so embarrassed. she did not intervene even as i was half-reading, half-sobbing. she also did not come over to speak to me afterwards or even acknowledge the fact that i was rebecca l. oxford 606 hurt because she made me read. the other kids knew i was clearly upset but didn't know what to do. next week, the same thing happened. and the next. i thought a lot about this, and i thought of an analogy that fits this experience. what she did was like throwing someone into water where their feet couldn't even touch the ground/floor, expecting them to figure out how to swim. oh, better yet, the victim cried for help, but she just looked at the victim and did nothing. wanda’s social and emotional status was undermined. she said: because she forced a skill onto me without any regard to my feelings, i emotionally crumbled. i became even shyer. i developed an immense fear of reading during that time and for the next 5 years. whenever people asked me to read, i started sweating and was always on the verge of crying. even in 10th grade in high school, i asked for special help with reading from a specialist who informed me that somehow along the way, i have seemed to have lost my confidence – but that i was a fluent reader to her. those weeks with this woman as the sunday school teacher became the most traumatic experience of my life. i don't know if i could ever forgive her. it was not the fact that she made me read that made me angry. it was the fact that she ignored my expression of feelings that i resent her for. time after time. . . . even as an adult, wanda was not able to let go of the emotions from her interaction with the sunday school teacher. to this day, i still have not been able to understand her motive for doing what she did to me. . . . no matter how hard i try, i cannot fathom a reason for why she did what she did to me and why she totally disregarded my feelings. 4.2.3. meaningful engagement because wanda felt traumatized when the sunday school teacher forced her to read aloud, she gained compassion for young children, decided to become a teacher, and developed an instructional philosophy. the participant guidelines did not mention writing one’s instructional philosophy, so this was strictly wanda’s own addition. excerpts from her instructional philosophy are as follows. if there is one thing that i am to learn from this experience – it is to attend to emotional needs and learning style of the child. what happened to me should not have happened to anyone. children are very fragile. especially between the ages 9-16 when they are developing a concept of themselves. . . . when a child is down, my first priority is to somehow acknowledge their sadness and show concern. then, only if they are ready, i would remind them gently that class work is very important too. . . . if what we can learn about strategies, language learning, and life from two extreme cases. . . 607 a child shows constant sadness or anger or both on a regular basis, i would need to inquire by calling the parents and even contacting the school counselor/psychologist for psychiatric evaluation. . . . in scanning for warning signs, i almost have to be like an owl, ever so watchful and alert. children come to school with a lot of baggage besides their backpacks. it is my utmost priority to help them not let their baggage get in the way of their learning. i am also an avid proponent of the movement to incorporate various cultures and learning styles into my class. 4.2.4. relationships wanda seems to have been an introverted learner, gaining energy from her inner world of feelings and concepts. the only relationship she described was the one with the sunday school teacher, who created the “most traumatic” time in her life as a young girl. she ruminated about the teacher’s motives but could find no answer. her powerlessness in relationship to the teacher was influenced by her own inability to say “no.” you might be wondering why i did not just say “no, i can’t read” to the sunday school teacher. well, the answer lies in my culture. before coming to america, i have been attending school where the teacher’s authority is not to be questioned. it was deviant to disagree with the teacher and unthinkable to disobey him/her. what the sunday school teacher did was that she disregarded my culture and circumstances entirely. thus, an important teacher-student relationship had an immense influence on wanda’s identity. she defined herself in terms suggesting that she felt nearly hopeless and helpless in a major area of life. 4.2.5. accomplishment remarkably, wanda’s learner history did not mention any of her accomplishments or strategies in learning english, only her fears in that process. by the time she wrote her learner history, she had managed to graduate successfully from high school and university and was a full-time graduate student, suggesting that she had real talents and accomplishments, but she did not mention them. the only light in the darkness was the goal of teaching children, something she had not yet done. 4.2.6. further comments wanda was among the “walking wounded,” feeling constantly traumatized by an early episode in life. a year after she wrote this learner history, she experienced rebecca l. oxford 608 stress in her graduate program and was reconsidering whether she would become a teacher and even whether she would continue in graduate school. 4.3. selective coding: the overarching theme the overarching theme is as follows. for a vulnerable student, particularly one who has few stores of resiliency to draw upon, a single traumatic episode can permanently mar (though not completely block) the path to english proficiency. in contrast, a resilient learner can flourish even in the face of multiple difficulties and does not interpret those difficulties as traumas or as permanent barriers. 5. discussion as we have seen, for mark, the path to english proficiency was much smoother, more strategic, more positively charged, and ultimately more profitable. he faced numerous difficulties, but he was resilient enough to move forward. for wanda, the path to english proficiency was hindered by one traumatic episode, with few or no emotional, social, or cognitive strategies to provide assistance. she eventually attained proficiency but with great effort, after being scarred early in the process. memories of her dreaded relationship with the sunday school teacher never mellowed into a deeper, richer understanding. the following statement might fit wanda: “. . . individuals who generally find it difficult to derive anything positive from unpleasant situations adjust more poorly after traumatic events than people who are generally resilient and who typically find value in negative events” (comer, 2014, p. 164). 5.1. relationship of the perma categories to the two cases how well did the categories in the adapted framework of well-being fit these two extreme cases? were the categories, namely positive and negative emotions, meaningful engagement, relationships, and accomplishment, helpful in understanding the well-being of mark and wanda? quite clearly, the categories in the adapted well-being framework worked effectively for analyzing mark’s story. all the well-being elements operated synergistically to help him achieve his goals and become a flourishing, strategic, dynamic person. he showed many more positive emotions than negative ones. when he experienced negative emotions (e.g., sadness or desperation), he used them to spur himself further or to gain help. engagement and meaning were completely interlocked in his story, and the statement from confucius what we can learn about strategies, language learning, and life from two extreme cases. . . 609 seemed to capture this. in terms of relationships, mark was a true extravert, gaining energy from interacting with others in his quest to learn english. his repeated accomplishments involved meeting very high goals from an early age with the help of well-crafted, task-relevant learning strategies. based on his learner history, as well as my own observations over years, i would describe him as nearly the epitome of well-being. at first i thought that the dimensions in the adapted framework of wellbeing did not work as well for analyzing wanda’s story as they did for analyzing mark’s. however, in thinking further, i realized that the framework was actually very helpful for revealing the serious gaps in wanda’s social, emotional, and cognitive well-being. her negative emotions came through loud and clear, but she did not mention any positive emotions about her own life and learning. she described no meaningful engagement in her own educational process, though she hoped to be a good teacher for others. the only relationship she chose to describe was with the inflexible, frightening sunday school teacher, and she felt she never got past the emotions involved in that relationship. she described no particular accomplishment in l2 learning, although she obviously developed a high enough level of english proficiency to enter graduate school, take courses, and write a learner history. she mentioned no learning strategies. her articulately stated instructional philosophy, which was included in her learner history without any suggestion from the researcher, contained several positive elements, but those elements were oriented more toward helping prevent future trauma for children than toward providing a sparkling, motivating educational environment. in short, the adapted framework of well-being was just as useful for analyzing wanda’s story as for analyzing mark’s, but the picture that ultimately emerged for her was the opposite of well-being. she never learned how to thrive, become strategic, or be happy. much of her life was stunted because of her responses to a traumatic episode. 5.2. positive psychology interventions wanda’s well-being might be aided by positive psychology interventions, such as those described by cohn and frederickson (2010), peterson (2006), seligman (2006, 2011), and vaillant (2000). for instance, the abcde technique helps the individual learn to recognize that beliefs about adversity cause consequent (negative) feelings, but disputation, that is, presenting counter-evidence to negative beliefs, results in energization, or positive mood and behavior change (seligman, 2006). the abcde technique could combat wanda’s pessimistic explanatory style (see peterson, seligman, & vaillant, 1988). rebecca l. oxford 610 seligman’s five-step pattern of post-traumatic growth might also help wanda. the steps are: (a) understanding that a normal response to trauma is shattered beliefs about the self, others, and the future; (b) reducing anxiety through controlling intrusive thoughts and images; (c) doing constructive selfdisclosure (telling the story of the trauma in safe ways); (d) creating a guided trauma narrative that includes paradox (trauma as a fork in the road that has both gain and loss, strength and vulnerability, gratitude and grief); and (e) articulating overarching life principles and stances that are robust to challenges (e.g., crafting a new identity as a trauma survivor or a more compassionate person). i am working on adapting positive psychology interventions specifically for the l2 field (oxford, 2014). 5.3. complex dynamic systems in considering these two learner histories, it is helpful to be aware of the complexity and dynamism of the entire language learning process. in any complex dynamic system, such as language learning, “high-level mental attributes and functions are determined by a complex set of interconnected components that continuously evolve over time” (dörnyei, 2009, pp. 195-196) in an organic, holistic, nonlinear, interactive fashion (mercer, 2011). language learning thus involves many interacting variables. for any of these variables, small tilts in one direction or another at various points can help to create lifelong attitudes. the poor teacher mark had early in his learning perhaps gave him a greater appreciation when, thanks to his parents’ willingness to move him to a school in a different district, he encountered a much better teacher. when that good teacher was removed from his life after a year, mark had to use creative strategies to keep learning. he took advantage of the help and support offered by his brothers and his teachers in high school, college, and graduate school. mark’s story is filled with interactions of people, events, places, institutions, movement, and emotions. wanda, in contrast, had a negative experience that set her on a very different path. in her learner history, she kept me, like any other interested reader, at bay; she did not allow me to understand the full complexity of her language learning process. she focused on one trauma and the main people (herself and the sunday school teacher), and the emotions related to that trauma. she thereby implicitly discounted any other individuals, institutions, happenings, changes, and feelings during her process of learning english. though i know she was in the midst of a complex dynamic system (every learner is), her single-minded focus on the trauma hid most of the details about that system as a whole. the worst thing is that the monofocal view hid crucial information from wanda herself, information about potential support and caring in her environment. what we can learn about strategies, language learning, and life from two extreme cases. . . 611 6. conclusion i conclude that the adapted theory of well-being in this article has proven its worth with these two learner histories and that positive psychology, particularly the concept of well-being, might be of significant value for enhancing l2 learning. the degree of well-being not only plays an immense role in the development of proficiency but also shapes lifelong attitudes. the narrative turn in l2 research is profoundly evident (barkhuisen, 2011; barkuisen, bensen, & chik, 2014; kalaja, menenzes, & barcelos, 2008), and there will be increasing opportunities to consider the adapted well-being theory as we study l2 learner histories, diaries, and other narratives. in the meantime, let us remember the learners at both ends of the spectrum: those (like mark) who shine, thrive, and learn strategically no matter what the circumstances; and those (like wanda) whose learning experiences are marked by trauma and seemingly untouched by strategies that would offer selfregulation or solace. let us remember, too, the learners in between. we need to understand and have compassion for all students, and positive psychology might provide some useful tools. rebecca l. oxford 612 references barkhuisen, g. 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(2009). meditation as contemplative inquiry: when knowing becomes love. great barrington, ma: lindisfarne. 597 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (4). 2022. 597-622 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.4.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the effects of using cognitive discourse functions to instruct 4th-year children on report writing in a clil science class julio roca de larios university of murcia, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6046-1093 jrl@um.es yvette coyle university of murcia, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3961-6131 ycoyle@um.es vanessa garcía university of murcia, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2603-1991 vanessa.garcia@murciaeduca.es abstract the present study analyzed how a group of young spanish-speaking english as a foreign language (efl) learners in a content and language integrated learning (clil) science class responded to an instructional unit integrating attention to functional language and an inquiry-oriented approach to science. working in cooperation with the researchers, a year 4 primary school teacher implemented a teaching sequence on levers with 48 9-10-year-olds over three weeks. the sequence, which was intended to raise the children’s awareness of the demands involved in understanding (content goals) and expressing as written reports (rhetorical goals) how levers work, scaffolded their activity from item-based writing to the production of full texts. on completing the unit, each child independently wrote a report on levers, all of which were analyzed from the perspective of cognitive discourse functions and ideational julio roca de larios, yvette coyle, vanessa garcía 598 meaning. the results of these analyses are discussed in terms of their significance for clil writing with young learners. keywords: school genres; cognitive discourse functions; writing; clil; children 1. introduction in the last fifteen years, content and language integrated learning (clil), that is, the teaching in the foreign language (fl) of subjects other than the fl itself, has been introduced in different european countries, spain among them, as an alternative or supplement to traditional fl programs (e.g., coyle et al., 2010). teaching science, mathematics or history in clil contexts is regarded as an educationally desirable goal on the grounds that the cognitive discourse functions (cdfs) involved in learning this type of content (e.g., define, classify, evaluate) offer students opportunities to access powerful knowledge (morton, 2020). these functions, which lie at the interface between thinking and language, structure academic discourse and are thought to provide learners with lexical, grammatical and rhetorical resources for dealing with the construction and communication of subject knowledge (dalton-puffer, 2013). they are thus essential learning goals to be incorporated into the curriculum. however, the way clil programs are currently implemented in some contexts represents a lack of commitment to these goals. clil has been found to result in “functional illiteracy” (meyer et al., 2015, p. 41), with learners showing a poor command of basic discourse functions (dalton-puffer, 2004) or failing to articulate subject-specific concepts appropriately (vollmer, 2008). these findings are an indication that many clil teachers still follow traditional, input-based, transmissional approaches in their instructional practices, conceptualize content and language as separate entities and, as a result, fail to understand that progress in the acquisition of knowledge cannot occur without the appropriate use of discipline-specific discourse (meyer et al., 2015). the adoption of a different perspective on clil is therefore needed in which the links between content and language are strengthened through appropriate theoretical and pedagogical proposals. a relevant approach in this direction is represented by systemic functional linguistics (sfl henceforth), a social semiotic theory of language where learning is understood as “learning to mean and to expand one’s meaning potential” (halliday, 1993, p. 113), and language as “the essential condition of knowing, the process by which experience becomes knowledge” (1993, p. 94). when applied to subject-specific writing at the elementary school level, sfl has proved useful in helping teachers in australian and north american contexts make explicit the effects of using cognitive discourse functions to instruct 4th-year children on report writing in . . . 599 to students the relationship between the communicative purposes and discourse functions of texts (santiago schwarz & hamman-ortiz, 2020; schleppegrell, 2004). comparatively, the impact of clil on learners’ production of cognitive discourse functions has hardly been analyzed, as clil research has largely been limited to contrastive studies with non-clil programs on the quality of texts produced by students (e.g., artieda et al., 2017; lahuerta, 2020). two recent studies, however, have attempted to shed light on the academic language competence of grade 6 primary and grade 8 secondary school learners by analyzing their oral production of classification and comparison functions in l2 english and l1 spanish in science and history (evnitskaya & dalton-puffer, 2020) and their written definitions in history (nashaat-soby & llinares, 2020). both studies, informed by an sfl theory of learning, further our understanding of how clil learners express subject knowledge through their lexico-grammatical choices. however, neither of these studies was classroom-based and the corpus data they used was obtained by means of prompts designed specifically to elicit the targeted discourse functions. as a result, the relationship between instruction, subject knowledge and l2 writing continues to be overlooked in clil primary school contexts. the present study attempts to fill this gap by focusing on the teaching and learning of primary-school clil science. specifically, it is intended as an sfl-informed study of the impact of instructional scaffolding on children’s l2 written production of reports, a school genre where defining and classifying are the main cognitive discourse functions. 2. theoretical framework the decision to look at children’s l2 writing of reports on levers was motivated by the need to address clil science teaching from a literacy-oriented perspective. this decision was based on a theoretical assumption that conceptualizes school subjects as examples of social/community knowledge that can be more fully understood with the sfl-informed notions of genre and register. as discussed below, this interpretive framework can be complemented with the notion of cognitive discourse functions propounded by dalton-puffer (2013). 2.1. an sfl-informed view of school subjects sfl provides a framework to understand the social view of subject-specific discourse through one of its basic tenets, which holds that the construction of meaning is facilitated when we flexibly adhere to the discursive conventions prevailing in the community (coetzee-lachmann, 2007). these conventions, related both to the content to be expressed and to the different ways of expressing content, are known as “genres,” defined in sfl as “staged, goal-oriented social processes julio roca de larios, yvette coyle, vanessa garcía 600 which enact recurrent configurations of meaning and social practices in a given culture or community” (martin & rose, 2008, p. 6). as “goal-oriented” processes, genres point to the social functions of texts and, as “staged,” they are taken to involve different steps that must be followed to achieve particular social purposes (martin & rose, 2008). genres are thought to materialize when people make choices from their lexico-grammatical and discursive repertoires, as well as from other semiotic resources (e.g., images, actions, gestures), to construct three types of functional meaning: ideational meaning, related to the representation of immediate or abstract experience; interpersonal meaning, oriented towards interaction with others; and textual meaning, focused on the potential of language for organizing meanings into texts (schleppegrell, 2004). the specific realizations of these meta-functions, which occur simultaneously in any instance of language, are respectively affected by three situational variables, namely the field of the discourse (the topic), the tenor (the relations between participants) and the mode (the role played by language in the situation). together, these variables constitute the “register” of texts, characterized as “a set of meanings that is appropriate to a particular function of language, together with the words and structures which express these meanings” (halliday, 1978, p. 195). when school subjects have been contemplated through the lens of these sfl core constructs, an increasing number of school genres have been identified (martin & rose, 2008; rose & martin, 2012), and their characteristic lexico-grammatical features highlighted (christie & derewianka, 2008; moore, 2019). two basic tenets of this approach are that (i) each subject seems to involve its own genres in which knowledge is “packed,” such as, for example, reports and explanations in science or historical recounts in history (morton, 2020); and (ii) the language used to construct knowledge and understanding in different subject areas, such as history, science, or mathematics, unfolds in different ways (rose & martin, 2012). learning a subject from this perspective, therefore, means “being able to comprehend and produce the types of texts or genres (both oral and written) through which knowledge in the subject is communicated” (morton, 2020, p. 9). in consonance with these assumptions, learners’ construction of scientific knowledge has been operationalized as consisting of several steps in an idealized knowledge path they are expected to traverse in their guided efforts to become familiar with the conventions of the school subject concerned (veel, 1997). each step in that path is taken to involve different genres that, in the case of science learning, have been conceptualized as four major activity domains, ranging from “doing things scientifically” and “organizing the world scientifically” to “explaining phenomena scientifically” and “arguing scientifically” (polias, 2016). the effects of using cognitive discourse functions to instruct 4th-year children on report writing in . . . 601 children’s development in the first three domains has respectively been addressed in three emblematic studies where school teachers in the usa worked in collaboration with university researchers to guide and support english language learners’ (ells) writing of procedural recounts (de oliveira & lan, 2014), reports (brisk et al., 2011) and explanations (accurso et al., 2016). de oliveira and lan (2014) analyzed the texts produced by a focal 4th-grade child after receiving staged instruction on writing procedural recounts. the child showed an increased ability to signal essential genre features and use more field-specific lexico-grammatical elements and temporal connectors to record events with more precision. in their evaluation of children’s appropriation of the report genre after receiving sfl-informed instruction, brisk et al. (2011) documented the performance of selected individual learners from pre-kindergarten to fifth grade and found that these learners generally understood that the main purpose of the report was to give information and organize the texts by topic rather than chronologically. finally, accurso et al. (2016) reported on a 4th-grade child who, at the end of the teaching unit, was able to use genre stages typical of school-based explanations, articulate specific lexical resources on the topic, construct herself as a knowledgeable student, and write more precisely and with greater cohesion. 2.2. clil science learning: the role of cognitive discourse functions taken as a whole, these studies have shown that ells, with the help of sfl-based pedagogies, were able to interpret the world in increasingly scientific ways by engaging in relevant school genres. similarly, children’s development of scientific knowledge in clil contexts can be interpreted as their ability to construct meaning in the specific genres and registers of school science, which they must gradually differentiate from everyday language use (coetzee-lachmann, 2007; forey, 2020). however, the attested functional illiteracy of learners in clil contexts which, as suggested in the introduction, derives from instructional practices focused separately on content and language, demands that attention is paid not only to genre stages and associated linguistic features (as has been the case with the studies on ells discussed above) but also to the cognitive operations that, together with their corresponding linguistic realizations, students activate to remember, analyze, apply and communicate content knowledge. these operations, which have been regarded as organizing frames or building blocks for learners to develop subject literacy, are taken to give clil teachers the opportunity of clarifying learning and teaching goals and, therefore, provide a “focused and principled integration of content, literacy and language” (morton, 2020, p. 11). although cognitive operations have been classified in many different ways in the world of education, dalton-puffer (2013) has reduced them to seven types julio roca de larios, yvette coyle, vanessa garcía 602 of cognitive discourse functions in the context of clil (i.e., classifying, defining, describing, evaluating, explaining, exploring and reporting). situated at an intermediate level of granularity as compared to the higher levels of genres and registers, cdfs are taken to represent those classroom discourse patterns that “make (disciplinary) thought processes intersubjectively accessible and thus available for learning” (dalton-puffer, 2013, p. 230). they provide learners with schemata (discoursal, lexical and grammatical) for the task of “handling and acting upon curricular concepts, content and facts” (p. 231), although their generic and non-essentialist nature means that their meanings are not unitary and stable. rather, they should be understood as networks that show wide variability in the ways they are realized and/or specified in local contexts. bearing these considerations in mind, we have focused our study on the design, implementation and analysis of a teaching unit on the report genre in a specific clil context by drawing on sfl-informed approaches to literacy and turning to cdfs as another conceptual framework. an immediate consequence of this approach is that, in order to instruct learners to engage in cdfs and ameliorate functional illiteracy in clil contexts as a result, teachers must be helped to move from transmission modes of teaching content to other modes progressively oriented to students’ guided and autonomous production of integrated content and language (meyer et al., 2015). one important means to this end is the teaching-learning cycle (tlc), a recursive pedagogical process consisting of a series of stages that provide a model for teachers to implement literacy instruction (accurso et al., 2016). through these stages, students are gradually guided from initial teacher-led analyses of mentor texts in the target genre (deconstruction) and collaboration with the teacher in the production of joint texts (joint construction) to their autonomous control of text writing (independent construction). students are expected to build their content knowledge through each of these stages with the guidance and feedback received from the teacher (humphrey & mcnaught, 2015). the efficacy of the tlc as an instructional approach in primary school contexts has been shown in both qualitative (e.g., de oliveira & lan, 2014, de oliveira et al., 2020) and interventionist (e.g., parkin, 2014) research. in the present study, an adaptation of the tlc is employed as an essential methodological procedure. 2.3. the present study the present study builds on the above suggestions in a project where university researchers and a clil primary school teacher collaborated in the planning and implementation of literacy activities informed by sfl and cdfs, which were intended to support efl children’s learning of science language and content. we the effects of using cognitive discourse functions to instruct 4th-year children on report writing in . . . 603 designed a unit of instruction in which the lessons provided the children with opportunities and support for writing reports on levers, a central topic within the spanish science curriculum in primary education. the main aim of the study was, therefore, to determine the usefulness of this instructional approach by describing the functional and linguistic features of the reports written by the children after instruction. 2.4. the report genre the main purpose of the report genre is to present meanings constructed by others (usually experts) who have done some kind of research on a topic (polias, 2010). reports are expected to provide information by describing attributes, properties or behaviors of an entity or class (fang & wang, 2011), and organizing data clearly and succinctly (schleppegrell, 2004). in consonance, reports usually present a relatively static organization which is considered essential to help learners describe and classify the phenomena studied. as a school genre, reports consist of three main stages: a general opening statement, followed by modules of factual information grouped by topic, and concluded with an optional general statement (brisk et al., 2011; christie & derewianka, 2008). defined in this way, reports may be thought of as having classifying and defining as their main cdfs (dalton-puffer, 2013). according to evnitskaya and dalton-puffer (2020), classifications may vary around three basic parameters which include direction (whether the member to be classified is introduced before the class it belongs to or vice versa), basis (the criteria on which the similarities and differences between members constituting the classification are established), and completeness (whether all three previous elements, that is, member, class and basis of classification, are present or one of them is absent). definitions, in turn, are usually realized by including class membership and specifying those features (qualities, circumstances, etc.) that distinguish the target term from other terms (nashaat-sobhy & llinares, 2020), although the writer may also provide additional information by means of expansions, which include examples, clarifications, extensions or explanations (nashaat-sobhy & llinares, 2020). as shown below, we have used this description of classifications and definitions to characterize children’s reports on levers from a functional perspective. when viewed from a register perspective, reports are seen to involve four types of meaning (fang & wang, 2011) which are presented in table 1 (adapted to fit the topic of levers). julio roca de larios, yvette coyle, vanessa garcía 604 table 1 functional features of reports (adapted from fang & wang, 2011) types of meaning definition lexico-grammatical choices to express meaning experiential meaning the content being defined and classified. it consists of processes (what is going on), participants (who or what is involved), and circumstances (where, when, how, with whom, etc.). processes: mainly relational verbs (to be, to have, there is, etc.), and occasional action verbs (push, etc.). participants: mainly technical vocabulary (fulcrum, effort, etc.) and complex noun phrases (three types of levers, a type of simple machine, etc.). circumstances: adverbials and prepositional phrases (in the middle, on a fixed point, etc.). logical meaning the logical and dependency relations between clauses. simple clauses (the load is the heavy part of the lever, etc.). complex clauses (e.g., we need to look at what is in the middle, the effort is where a thing or a man put the effort, etc.). non-finite clauses (to identify levers, etc.). logical connectors (because, but, etc.). the combination of experiential and logical meaning forms the ideational meta-function of the report which, in turn, determines the scientific value of clauses, that is, whether or not the student displays knowledge of levers that is acceptable to the scientific community. interpersonal meaning the way the relationship between the writer and the reader is established. predominance of the declarative mood, with low modality and absence of appraisal features, which means: (i) use of objective, formal language, (ii) consideration of the writer as somebody who “knows” about the topic reported. textual meaning how textual coherence is achieved. mechanisms of thematic progression and referential ties (pronouns, lexical cohesion, etc.). given that the weight of what gets defined, classified or compared in reports lies in the ideational meta-function in its double consideration of experiential and logical meaning-making, we focused on children’s knowledge construction of levers by looking at how they functionally developed that knowledge through the clauses they produced in their written texts. accordingly, the following research questions were formulated: rq1: how do 4th-year children engage in defining and classifying when writing reports on levers in a clil science class after receiving instruction on the development of these cdfs? rq2: what ideational meaning-making resources are used by these children to express those functions? 3. method 3.1. context and participants the study was conducted in a state primary school in a middle-class area located in southeast spain. the participants were 48 4th-year children, aged from nine to ten, divided into two mixed-ability classes taught by the same teacher. as participants the effects of using cognitive discourse functions to instruct 4th-year children on report writing in . . . 605 in a clil program, the children had been receiving five english sessions and two clil science sessions every week from their 1st year of primary education. the teacher had been teaching english and clil at a primary-school level for more than ten years, held an ma in bilingual education and had taken inservice courses on teaching clil. in one of these courses, promoted by the local education authority, she was introduced to sfl principles and related empirical research and became highly interested in the application of this methodology to her own teaching. to that end, she contacted two researchers, former professors of hers (the first two authors of the paper), with the purpose of collaborating in the design and implementation of a project on clil science teaching. after deliberating on the chronology, methodology and content to be taught, a series of decisions was jointly taken (see below). 3.2. instructional sequence in line with the science curriculum, the decision to focus on levers was based on the content the teacher was expected to cover at the time of the study. this content included the characterization of levers as simple machines, the description of their parts, and their classification into different types. the teacher, in collaboration with the researchers, divided the instructional intervention into two main parts. the first part was intended to build the field by drawing on children’s knowledge of levers and gradually familiarizing them with their characteristics and types (four one-hour sessions), while the second part was focused on teaching the writing of reports (another four one-hour sessions). throughout this two-stage process, the children’s written production was scaffolded from initial item-based writing to the autonomous production of texts. along the way, the teacher made use of talk as a propaedeutic for writing (e.g., christie & derewianka, 2008) through “dialogic inquiry,” which involved the use of appropriate questions (valverde caravaca, 2019), and “class discussions,” that is, exchanges of meanings and ideas with the children (dawes et al., 2010). 3.2.1. building the field initially, the children were given several sets of pictures representing different objects (levers) and were asked to identify their similarities. the aim of this initial activity was to encourage them to use criteria to classify the objects and allow the teacher to elicit their scientific knowledge of levers, which turned out to be inexistent. in fact, the children did not use the term lever in any case but relied mostly on their l2 and l1 to describe the objects presented (e.g., crowbars, oars and scissors), suggest what they were used for, or claim that they did not resemble one another (see the example in figure 1). julio roca de larios, yvette coyle, vanessa garcía 606 figure 1 identification of similarities between different objects having collected this information, the teacher’s aim was to help the children understand the characteristics and types of levers through activities that included (i) analyzing video presentations and texts; (ii) building bridges between familiar everyday knowledge and unfamiliar scientific content by asking children to identify levers in their nearby environment; (iii) encouraging children to produce appropriate scientific terms to identify parts and types of levers, such as the position of effort, fulcrum or load; and (iv) making sure children were not distracted by the size and appearance of levers in their attempts to classify them. to check their knowledge after completing these activities in the four onehour sessions (see above), the children were given (one one-hour session) the initial set of pictures again, as well as a problem-solving activity in which they were asked to classify pictures of levers and give reasons for their choices (see figure 2). while the outcomes of these activities were checked in class, the teacher elicited examples of levers that, despite differences in size and appearance, belonged to the same group. figure 2 classification of levers and reasons for the choice although specific sfl terminology was not explicitly introduced, its implicit use in the abovementioned activities (e.g., “fulcrum,” “effort,” “load,” as instances of participants; “is,” “have,” as instances of processes; or “in the middle,” the effects of using cognitive discourse functions to instruct 4th-year children on report writing in . . . 607 “on one end,” “between . . . and . . .” as instances of circumstances) allowed the teacher to make sure that the children were reasonably familiar with the concepts and terms involved in the definition and classification of levers. 3.2.2. focusing on reports once the field had been built to a reasonable extent, writing instruction began. the teaching sequence employed was largely inspired by the teaching-learning cycle (martin & rose, 2008), although an initial model text was not used in this case (see de oliveira & lan, 2014 for alternative procedures to initiate the tlc). the children had analyzed two model reports and used a graphic organizer for guided writing in a previous unit on states of matter, and the teacher expected them to have some prior knowledge of the way descriptions and classifications are expressed in this genre. with those assumptions in mind, the children’s transition from supported to autonomous writing was scaffolded with a series of activities that included the use of graphic organizers, guided writing, teacher feedback and autonomous writing (see figure 3). figure 3 scaffolding stages in teaching report writing in the first session of writing instruction (see figure 3), the teacher presented a graphic organizer intended to adapt the defining and classifying cdfs involved in the report genre (see above) to the specifics of the field previously built (levers) and the children’s levels of knowledge and l2 proficiency. the organizer, therefore, consisted of a series of prompts and blanks related to a number of functional subcategories which included the definition of levers and their parts as the basis for their classification in types, the definition of each type, and the comparison of levers in terms of size and appearance by way of conclusion. expansions in the form of examples were also julio roca de larios, yvette coyle, vanessa garcía 608 included in various sections (see figure 4). after explaining the meaning and functions of the prompts and suggesting alternatives through sentence modeling on how the blanks might be filled in, the children were asked to complete a draft in pairs using the organizer as a resource. the texts produced were collected by the teacher to identify those aspects in need of feedback. definition: levers are …………………………………………………………………………………… main parts or levers. there are three parts in ………………………….………….…………………… definition of each part. the fulcrum is ………………………………………………………………… announcing types of levers. there are …………………………………………………………………. criteria to classify levers. the identification of each type depends on ………………………...……….. characteristics of 1st type levers ………………….……… examples …………………….. characteristics of 2nd type levers .………………………… examples …………………….. characteristics of 3rd type levers ………………………….. examples …………………….. conclusion. many levers are different in size and appearance, but they belong to the same group. for example, the ……………, the ……………….., and the ………………… different, but they ………………………… group, because …………………………………………………………… the ………………….., the ……………………, and the ……………………. also look different, but ………………………………….……………, because ……………….………………………………… figure 4 textual graphic organizer for writing a report on levers in the following session, each pair was given back their text so that they could compare it with the feedback now provided by the teacher to the whole class. the teacher alternatively showed on the whiteboard three of the 24 texts produced by the pairs and used them as input sources to elicit information from the children on: 1) the different functional subcategories covered, as in: t: in this text, have levers been classified in three classes? s: yes, class 1, class 2 and class 3 t: and the last paragraph comparing levers on their size and appearance, has it been included? ss: no, no t: remember that you have to include all the information on the different parts of the diagram (graphic organizer) 2) the scientific validity of certain clauses regardless of the linguistic problems they might involve, as in: t: and this text says that “in class two, the load is in the middle.” is it correct? s: no, because “middle” has only one “d” t: right, but one thing is the definition, which is correct, is true, isn’t it? s: yes the effects of using cognitive discourse functions to instruct 4th-year children on report writing in . . . 609 t: why is it true? s: because the load is in the middle t: and another thing is that there is a spelling mistake here (points to the word *midle on the wb). do you understand? s: yes 3) the separation of ideas with appropriate paragraphing and/or punctuation, as in: t. have these children written a full stop after the definition of levers? ss: no, no t: and do you think that they have to write one? s: yes, because the definition is different, different that the types of levers, is different t: yes, it is a different idea. so, first “a lever is a type of simple machine,” then a full stop, and then, starting with a capital letter, “there are different types of levers” when needed, the teacher also suggested occasional lexico-grammatical alternatives to be used in the appropriate places. in the next session, each child was given the same graphic organizer and asked to individually write a draft based on it. once completed, the teacher provided written feedback in the form of comments on each individual text. the feedback provided mostly consisted of (i) focusing children’s attention on the functional categories they had not addressed in their texts (e.g., “you have not included the criteria used to classify levers”) and (ii) showing them how to formulate full clauses as an alternative to writing in note form (e.g., “some examples of first type levers are the seesaw . . .” rather than “examples 1st type: seesaw . . .”). less frequently, the teacher evaluated the scientific validity of some examples (e.g., “a wheelbarrow is not an example of a first-class lever”), corrected spelling mistakes (“which” rather than “with;” “between” rather than “behind;” “stick” rather than “stich”) and reminded a few children to follow the textual structure in the graphic organizer rather than writing in bulleted points (e.g., “you have to follow the diagram”). in the fourth and final session, the annotated texts were returned to the children, who individually rewrote their reports incorporating the feedback provided by the teacher as far as possible. three weeks after rewriting their guided texts, the teacher spent one session refreshing the children’s knowledge of levers and the textual structure of reports. in the next session, each child was asked to independently write a report, following this prompt: write a composition on levers in which you have to: – give a definition of levers (and their parts). – describe the different types of levers and give examples of each type. – say that levers with different size and appearance may be of the same type, and give examples. julio roca de larios, yvette coyle, vanessa garcía 610 the prompt was based on the belief that the three content goals it included might facilitate the children’s retrieval of information from their long-term memory (klein et al., 2017). 3.3. data analysis the texts produced by the children in this final session (n = 48) were collected for the analysis of their functional structure and ideational meaning. in consonance with the way report writing had been scaffolded by the teacher, the following functional subcategories of defining and classifying cdfs were analyzed: – definition of levers: 1) defining. – parts of levers: 2) naming parts; 3) defining parts. – types of levers: 4) announcing types; 5) giving classification criteria; 6) defining each type; 7) giving examples of each type. – conclusion: 8) providing a claim; 9) giving contrasting examples. the clause was used as the basic unit in which (i) these functional subcategories were embodied, and (ii) the different lexico-grammatical resources used by the children to express ideational meaning became apparent (see table 1). we did not take into account accuracy, punctuation or spelling mistakes in the analyses of clauses because, together with brisk et al. (2011), we considered these dimensions to be part of learners’ general writing development rather than specific to the report genre. on the basis of these decisions, we identified a number of variations in the clauses produced by the children which ranged from simple and complex clauses (including coordinate and subordinate clauses) to a few cases in which translanguaging was used. these variations, together with the lexico-grammatical resources used in each case, their scientific value and the functional subcategories concerned, are illustrated in the examples below. example 1: a lever is a type of simple machine. logical meaning: simple clause. experiential meaning: (i) process expressed with a relational verb (“is”); (ii) participants expressed with an expanded noun including a prepositional group (“type of simple machine”) plus technical vocabulary (“lever,” “simple machine”). correct scientific value. one functional subcategory involved: defining levers. example 2: levers are simple machines and have three elements: fulcrum, load and effort. logical meaning: coordinate complex clause, consisting of two main clauses (“levers are simple machines,” “have three elements: fulcrum, load and effort”) and a connector (“and”). experiential meaning: (ii) processes expressed with relational verbs (“are,” the effects of using cognitive discourse functions to instruct 4th-year children on report writing in . . . 611 “have”); (iii) participants expressed with technical vocabulary (“levers,” “simple machines,” “fulcrum,” “load,” effort”) and an expanded nominal group in which fulcrum, load and effort are the specifications of elements (“elements: fulcrum, load and effort”). correct scientific value. two functional subcategories involved: defining levers and naming their parts. example 3: a scissors is class 1 because the fulcrum is in the middle. logical meaning: subordinate complex clause including a main clause (“a scissors is class1”), a subordinate clause of reason (“because the fulcrum is in the middle”) and a connector (“because”). experiential meaning: (ii) processes expressed with relational verbs (“is,” “is”); (iii) participants expressed with technical vocabulary (“scissors,” “class 1,” “fulcrum;” and (iii) circumstances expressed with a prepositional phrase (“in the middle”). correct scientific value. functional subcategory involved: giving examples of each type of levers. example 4: a low (load) is the part you are empujar (push) this cosa (thing). logical meaning: subordinate complex clause including a main clause (“a low is the part”) and a subordinate defining clause with an elliptical relative pronoun (“(that) you are empujar this cosa”). experiential meaning: (ii) processes expressed with a relational (“is”) and an action verb (“empujar”); (iii) participants expressed with everyday terms in l2 (“low”) and l1 (“empujar,” “cosa”). incorrect scientific value. functional subcategory involved: defining parts of levers. with these variations in mind, the analysis of all the texts produced by the children was conducted by the two researchers under the principles of collaborative coding (smagorinsky, 2008). this involved the use of a systematic comparison and contrast approach intended to refine, if needed, the categories previously established with the aim of capturing the nature of the individually produced texts. discrepancies between the two coders were resolved through discussion until complete agreement was achieved. eventually, 449 clauses were identified in the aggregate of all texts. the specifics of this global figure are reported in the next section. 4. results in response to the first research question, the analysis of the functional subcategories covered by the children showed that four main learner profiles could be distinguished. as shown in table 2, individual learners within each profile included different information in their texts: from up to three subcategories by each child in profile one (p1, henceforth) and five in p2, to up to seven subcategories in p3 and nine (the maximum) in p 4. in line with these individual results, the number of functional subcategories covered by each profile as a group also increased gradually from four by p1 as a group, and seven by p2, to eight by p3, and nine subcategories by p9. julio roca de larios, yvette coyle, vanessa garcía 612 table 2 children’s profiles in coverage of subcategories profiles (n = number of children) subcategories covered by each child subcategories covered by each profile as a group profile 1 (n = 11) up to 3 subcategories defining levers, announcing types of levers, defining types and giving examples of types (4 subcategories) profile 2 (n = 15) up to 5 subcategories all of the above plus naming parts of levers, criteria for classification in types and claim in conclusion (7 subcategories) profile 3 (n = 15) up to 7 subcategories all of the above plus giving examples in the conclusion (8 subcategories) profile 4 (n = 7) up to 9 subcategories all the above plus defining parts of levers (9 subcategories) two examples are provided below as an illustration of the different subcategories (in brackets) covered by children in profiles 1 and 4. example 5: profile 1 a lever is a type of machine examples: sisors, hammer and sisaw. (defining with examples) has three types: class 1, class 2 and class 3. (announcing types of levers) class 1: is the fulcrum is between the effort and the load. class 2: is the load between the effort and the fulcrum. class 3: is the effort in the middle. (defining each type) example 6: profile 4 levers are simple machines (defining) and they have three parts: the fulcrum, the load and the efford. (naming parts of levers) the fulcrum is the part that is stil, the part that doesn’t move. the efford is where a person do things with an object. the load is the wight of an object. (defining each part) there are three tipes of levers. (announcing types of levers) to identify the class we need to look what is in the middle. (providing a criterium to classify levers) class 1: in class one the fulcrum is in the middle and the load and efford are in the sizes. some examples are: the seesaaw, a botele oupener, some scissors… class 2: in class tow the load is in the middle and the efford and the fulcrum are in thye sizes. some examples are: a schoolbag, a weel barrow… class 3; in class three the efford is in the middle and tye fulcrum and the load are in the sizes. some examples are: a broom, a hockey stick… (describing and giving examples of each type) simple machines can be very different but some of them are levers and they can be of the same class. (providing a conclusion claim) some examples are: a seesaw and a botele opener of class 1, a schoolbag and a weel barrow of class 2, a broom and a hockey stick of class 3. (giving examples of the claim) the effects of using cognitive discourse functions to instruct 4th-year children on report writing in . . . 613 the answer to the second research question, which inquired about the ideational meaning-making resources used by the children to write their reports, was addressed by taking the clause as the unit of analysis. on this premise, we sought to identify if there were quantitative differences between the profiles identified above in the (i) scientific value of their clauses, the number of (ii) simple and (iii) complex clauses produced, and (iv) the use of complex clauses. for the analyses of (i), (ii) and (iii), kruskall-wallis and mann-whitney non-parametric tests were used. as shown in figure 5, the percentage of scientifically correct clauses produced by profile 1 (m = 79.73, sd = 3.22) was noticeably inferior to the percentages of the other groups (profile 2: m = 92.07, sd = 2.46; profile 3: m = 92.47, sd = 2.03; profile 4: m = 93.29, sd = 2.28). these differences were confirmed by a kruskall-wallis test showing overall significant differences among the groups (χ² = 25.82, p = .00). a subsequent mann-whitney test identified this significance in the differences between profiles 1 and 2 (u = .00, z = -4.28, p = .00), 1 and 3 (u = .00, z = -4.29, p = .00), and 1 and 4 (u = .00, z = -3.49; p = .01). no significant differences between other profiles were found. figure 5 percentages of conceptually correct clauses by profile as shown in figure 6, the average number of simple clauses produced by profile 1 (m = 4.27, sd = 1.61) was almost doubled by the other three profiles, in which the children produced around eight simple clauses each (profile 2: m = 7.73, sd = 1.71; profile 3: m = 8.27, sd = 3.01; profile 4: m = 8.29, sd = 3.03). these differences were confirmed by a kruskall-wallis test which showed overall significant differences among the groups (χ² = 15.86, p = .00). a subsequent mann-whitney test identified this significance in the differences between profiles 1 and 2 (u = 12.00, z = -3.71, p = .00), 1 and 3 (u = 23.50, z = -3.09, p = .01), and 1 and 4 (u = 11, z = -2.54; p = .01). no other significant differences between other profiles were found. 70 75 80 85 90 95 profile 1 profile 2 profile 3 profile 4 julio roca de larios, yvette coyle, vanessa garcía 614 figure 6 average number of simple clauses across profiles a gradual and significant increase in children’s performance was apparent when their complex clauses were analyzed. as shown in figure 7, the average production of these clauses steadily increased from m = 0.27 (sd = 0.64) and m = 1.40 (sd = 1.24) by children in p1 and p2, respectively, to m = 2.60 (sd = 1.64) by p3, and was almost doubled (m = 5.14, sd = 2.19) by the children in p4. these descriptive patterns were globally confirmed by a kruskall-wallis test indicating overall significant differences among groups (χ² = 27.98; p = .00), and subsequently corroborated by a mann-whitney test which found significant differences between p1 and p2 (u = 31.50, z = -2.83; p = .01), p1 and p3 (u = 8.500, z = -3.96, p = .00), p1 and p4 (u = .00, z = -3.72, p = .00), p2 and p4 (u = 5.00, z = -3.41, p = .00), and between p3 and p4 (u = 15.50, z = -2.67, p = .01). therefore, the only groups that did not show significant differences in the production of complex sentences were p2 and p3 when they were compared to each other. figure 7 average number of complex clauses across profiles given these differences, we wondered how these complex clauses were used by the children across the different functional subcategories covered in their texts. table 3 shows the five subcategories in which complex clauses (together with unreported simple clauses) were differentially used by the groups. table 3 also shows the remaining four categories, which were only addressed by means of simple clauses. 0 2 4 6 8 10 profile 1 profile 2 profile 3 profile 4 0 2 4 6 profile 1 profile 2 profile 3 profile 4 the effects of using cognitive discourse functions to instruct 4th-year children on report writing in . . . 615 table 3 use of complex clause by functional subcategory functional subcategories use of complex clauses (together with unreported simple clauses) profiles defining levers yes all profiles naming parts defining parts yes profile 4 announcing types giving a criterium yes profiles 2, 3 & 4 defining types giving examples of types giving a conclusion claim yes profiles 2, 3 & 4 giving examples yes profiles 3 & 4 5. discussion the present study analyzed the effects of a teaching unit intended to raise 4thyear primary-school clil learners’ awareness of the demands involved in understanding and expressing in writing the main characteristics of levers. the data showed that around 75% of the children (profiles 2, 3 and 4 together) managed to develop their knowledge of the subject matter and to communicate that knowledge following the conventions of the report genre. these results were greatly dependent on the sfl-informed nature of the unit and the fact that children’s attention was drawn to the cdfs of defining and classifying as building blocks they could use to develop their subject literacy skills (see morton, 2020). crucial pedagogical strategies in this development were the transition from graphic organizers to guided writing and the provision of feedback by the teacher on the texts produced by the children. as shown in the examples above, this feedback revolved around the integration of content and language, since it was mostly focused on the functional subcategories to be covered, the distinction between scientific validity and the formal characteristics of clauses, the textual value of paragraphing and punctuation, and the need to write full clauses rather than notes. the convergence of all these instructional elements eventually allowed the children to express, with varying degrees of success, their knowledge of the topic through subject-specific language, that is, define, classify and exemplify different parts and types of levers by means of simple and complex clauses. these findings indicate that a focus on the ideational function of language to make meaning may enable young learners to express their science knowledge in writing (hodgson-drysdale, 2014; schleppegrell, 2004). more generally, the study provides novel evidence to suggest that writing instruction combining attention to genre and disciplinary language by means of cognitive discourse functions can scaffold children’s integration of language, content and literacy knowledge in a clil context. this integration was achieved julio roca de larios, yvette coyle, vanessa garcía 616 through the implementation of adequate pedagogical procedures, and may be interpreted as an alternative to the “functional illiteracy” issue (meyer et al., 2015). as suggested in the introduction, functional illiteracy has been associated with the prioritization of content over language in clil contexts on the assumption that learning general lexico-grammatical features and discipline-related language occurs naturally when content is taught through the target language (hu & gao, 2021). these findings also complement research in elementary-school contexts in the us, where a growing number of studies have shown that raising children’s awareness of the linguistic and structural features of school genres can help them express their disciplinary content knowledge by producing increasingly complex genre-specific texts (see santiago schwarz & hamman-ortiz, 2020). however, as a counterpoint to this positive effect of instruction, the data also showed that profile 1 children, as compared to the other groups, addressed fewer functional subcategories (not more than four as a group), produced significantly fewer simple and complex clauses, and displayed less content knowledge. as a possible explanation for these findings, the teacher suggested that these children generally showed low levels of l2 oral comprehension in class and that some had important reasoning and memorization problems. they appeared to have little interest in any stimulus that required cognitive effort and had to be assiduously required to pay attention. similar negative findings have also been reported by hermansson et al. (2019) in an sfl-informed study intended to assess the effects of the joint construction stage of the tlc on the quality of l1 narrative texts produced by swedish primary-school children. the low achievers in this study showed very little improvement in the quality of their texts, and the authors speculated that this might have been due to their limited working memory capacity, which did not allow them to process and update the information continuously delivered by the teacher and other class members while engaged in interactive metacognitive talk. a similar difficulty in processing information might have been experienced by profile 1 children in our study in the different episodes of dialogic inquiry and discussion occurring in the teaching sequence (see the method section). as a result, they benefitted very little from the scaffolding provided in class when faced with writing their reports independently. these variable effects of clil instruction should be viewed in connection with the need to ensure that overand under-achievers alike may benefit from clil programs, especially after claims about their lack of equity have been voiced (e.g., bruton, 2013). different european studies on stakeholders’ perceptions of clil programs have stressed that attention to diversity is a key challenge for practitioners and administrators to address (e.g., pérez cañado, 2016). despite the infancy of the field, both general and specific lines of action have been suggested for this purpose, such as the provision of instruction through flexible the effects of using cognitive discourse functions to instruct 4th-year children on report writing in . . . 617 groupings, the negotiation of joint intervention strategies with parents as a function of students’ attitudes and capabilities, or the use of continuous feedback (madrid & pérez cañado, 2018). other proposals include the implementation of specific teacher education programs that incorporate theoretical frameworks and evidence-based practice especially geared to cope with student diversity (more et al., 2016). 6. concluding remarks given the promising results of our exploratory study with young efl learners, we suggest that a similar approach to writing instruction might be usefully adopted in clil primary school science classes to strengthen children’s knowledge of the associations between content and language. this seems important, given the mixed findings so far reported about the impact of clil science programs on learning outcomes in comparison to l1 programs (fernández-sanjurjo et al., 2017), the limited attention paid to language in clil classes as opposed to the concerns shown by teachers to ensure that children cover the vast amount of content included in science curricula (lópez-ramón, 2015), and the fact that children’s writing is undervalued as a site for language learning (coyle & cánovas guirao, 2019). yet, available scholarship on clil writing in secondary-school contexts has afforded detailed longitudinal data documenting the gradual emergence of ideational, interpersonal and textual features in high-school learners’ history essays (mccabe & whittaker, 2016; whittaker & mccabe, 2020). although these studies, as noted above, did not include an instructional intervention explicitly aimed at teaching disciplinary language or genre-specific writing, the authors have acknowledged the importance of “making explicit the language for subject literacy” (whittaker & mccabe, 2020, p. 327). in this sense, the present study offers encouraging results for the application of such an instructional approach in clil education with younger learners. in this application, different avenues for further research might be contemplated. the effects of the present intervention have only been explored in terms of outcome, that is, the final texts produced by the children. a more process-oriented approach might analyze how children transition between each stage of the tlc cycle not only in terms of experiential and logical meanings but also of interpersonal and textual features. this set of functional categories, in their double dimension of teaching and analytical tools, could be shared with teachers and spark further studies on other genres, for more extended periods of time and bearing in mind children’s cognitive processes and individual characteristics. the categories could also be used to understand how multimodal resources are used in clil classes to achieve the highest degree of “pedagogical julio roca de larios, yvette coyle, vanessa garcía 618 resonance” (polias, 2010). finally, sfl-informed professional development programs aimed to integrate the implementation of curricular genres with attention to student diversity might be enacted and explored through universityschool partnerships involving iterative cycles of exploration, research design and reflection (santiago schwarz & hamman-ortiz, 2020). acknowledgements this study was funded by the spanish ministerio de ciencia e innovación (research grant pid2019-104353gb-i00). the effects of using cognitive discourse functions to instruct 4th-year children on report writing in . . . 619 references accurso, k., gebhard, m., & selden, c. 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(2020). writing on history in a content and language integrated learning (clil) context: development of grammatical metaphor as evidence of language learning. in r. manchón, (ed.) writing and language learning: advancing research agendas (pp. 309-332). john benjamins. 355 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (3). 2022. 355-379 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.3.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt a state-of-the-art review of distribution-of-practice effects on l2 learning raquel serrano university of barcelona, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9335-4702 raquelserrano@ub.edu abstract the purpose of this state-of-the-art review is to provide a general overview of recent research on time distribution and second language (l2) learning with special implications for classroom settings. several studies have been performed to examine how to best distribute the hours of l2 practice to maximize learning by comparing conditions that promote intensive exposure versus others in which l2 input or instruction is more widely spaced. findings from these studies are relevant not only for practical purposes but also for theory development. this review provides a summary of recent studies as well as suggestions for pedagogical practice. additionally, it identifies areas for future research concerning the effect of time distribution on l2 learning. keywords: time distribution; spacing; intensive instruction; distributed practice 1. introduction according to dekeyser (2017), one of the key issues that needs to be addressed in instructed second language acquisition (isla) is how to distribute the available instructional time to promote high levels of l2 proficiency. this applies to the school curriculum as well as l2 learning programs for adults in higher education. the topic of time distribution, or input spacing, has attracted the attention raquel serrano 356 of cognitive psychologists for many years (see ebbinghaus, 1885/1913) and research on this topic has important pedagogical implications, apart from having an unquestionable theoretical value. in sla, publications examining the effect of time distribution have drastically increased in the last few years, especially among researchers interested in the role of l2 practice in isla (e.g., dekeyser, 2017; suzuki et al., 2019). the spacing effect, according to which learning is optimized when repetitions of target material are spaced rather than massed, is one of the most robust findings in cognitive psychology. the evidence shows that including time or other intervening items between repetitions of target items (e.g., target-distractor-distractor-distractor-target, etc.) facilitates learning more than subsequent repetitions (e.g., target-target-target). the positive effect of spaced as opposed to massed schedules has been found on a variety of tasks and for different population types, even though a lot of research has focused on verbal learning in the case of university students. a related phenomenon is that of the lag effect, which suggests that longer intervals between repetitions are more beneficial than shorter ones. the results of previous studies in cognitive psychology indicate that, while the spacing effect is ubiquitous, the lag effect is less consistent (toppino & gerbier, 2014). a recent meta-analysis that focuses on the effects of spacing on l2 learning by kim and webb (2022) examines quantitatively the effects of spacing as reported in 37 experimental studies and further confirms the positive role of spacing in general, but points to different effects for different types of l2 areas, learners, or practice activities. although some of the findings are inconclusive due to the low number of studies and participants in some of the analyses, the meta-analysis confirms the important role of spacing in l2 practice, as well as the need to conduct more research in the area. the present paper complements kim and webb’s (2022) quantitative meta-analysis in presenting a qualitative narrative review of studies dealing with distribution-of-practice effects and considers not only experimental studies on the learning of a specific target feature, but also studies that have a broader aim and examine the role of spacing at the program level. the current review will provide details on 47 studies on the topic as well as a comprehensive picture of how the distribution of instructional hours has been shown to affect l2 learning. this review is organized in the following way. section 2 includes experimental studies and it is further subdivided into four sections: the spacing effect, the lag effect, blocked versus interleaved practice, and individual differences. the next section reviews research at the program level. section 4 provides a summary of research findings as well as pedagogical implications. the paper concludes with ideas for further research. the appendix contains details about each of the studies under review (marked with * in the reference list), which will a state-of-the-art review of distribution-of-practice effects on l2 learning 357 be useful for the reader, as, due to space limitations, full details cannot be provided for all the studies in the main text. 2. experimental studies 2.1. spacing effect this section reviews the studies that have examined massed versus spaced interstimulus spacing when learning occurs in one session, as well as studies that have analyzed learning outcomes of training/teaching in one (massed) versus several sessions (spaced). the first part includes studies on l2 vocabulary, while the second one concerns grammar learning. 2.1.1. vocabulary most research on the spacing effect comes from the cognitive psychology literature, in which, typically, psychology students acquire new vocabulary through paired-associate learning. there are also some studies aiming to contribute to the sla literature and typically targeting l2 learners, which also use the same methodology. many of these studies were performed with japanese english as a foreign language (efl) university students by nakata and colleagues and their findings also confirm the spacing effect. nakata (2015) compared different types of inter-stimulus spacing for the learning of english-japanese word pairs repeated five times. the results showed that immediate repetitions (massed) promoted less learning than spaced repetitions. nakata and suzuki (2019a) provided further support for the spacing effect with english-japanese translation pairs, which were included in sets of semantically related (e.g., baboon, badger, otter, etc.) and semantically unrelated words (e.g., alcove, pail, pigment, etc.). the results showed that, although massed repetitions of sets facilitated performance during training, the massed distribution led to significantly fewer vocabulary gains than the spaced one, both on the immediate and delayed posttests. further evidence for the spacing effect was provided by nakata and elgort (2021) regarding contextual word learning of pseudo-words inserted in english sentences. when the repetition of target items appeared in immediate succession, the participants’ performance on the vocabulary tests was worse than when the repetitions were spaced. interestingly, the authors did not find any differences between conditions in a semantic priming task, supposedly assessing tacit vocabulary knowledge. koval (2019) used eye-tracking to examine english speakers’ processing of finnish words appearing in english sentences that were repeated consecutively (massed) or with 25 intervening sentences in raquel serrano 358 between (spaced). the results showed significantly better vocabulary learning results for the spaced condition, for which the decrease in attention as shown by participants’ eye movements was not so drastic. in a later study involving finnish-english paired associates, koval (2022) found additional evidence for the spacing effect. her results also showed that massed practice was not significantly different from the no-practice control condition for long-term learning. finally, findings from classroom-based studies on l2 english vocabulary learning by l1 farsi students in primary school suggest that vocabulary practice over two sessions is more conducive to vocabulary learning than one single “massed” session (lotfolahi & salehi, 2017). apart from the above-mentioned studies focusing on single words, there is research including multi-word units which also provides evidence for the spacing effect. yamagata et al. (2022) found that spaced repetitions of verb-noun collocations led to more learning not only of the practiced collocations, but also of other collocations with the same target nodes. similarly, macis et al. (2021) found a significant advantage for spaced over massed practice for adjective-noun collocations when the training involved deliberate learning. however, the authors found a significant advantage for massed practice in the case of incidental learning. 2.1.2. grammar although there is very little research comparing massed versus spaced grammar instruction, the existing evidence suggests that it is better to use distributed rather than massed practice for long-term learning. miles (2014) compared massed and widely spaced (average spacing of 2.5 weeks) practice of challenging english grammar structures for korean university students. the treatment included different classroom activities and the testing consisted of a grammaticality judgment test (gjt) and an l1-l2 translation task. the results showed no differences between conditions on an immediate posttest. on a delayed posttest, however, the spaced group outperformed the massed group on the gjt. 2.2. lag effects this section includes the studies that have compared short versus long inter-stimulus spacing in one-session experiments, as well as those analyzing inter-session spacing where learning is distributed over two or more sessions. as rogers (2017) claims, research on inter-session lags is more relevant for sla, as learning l2 features typically requires more than one session. the first sub-section focuses on vocabulary, while the next two review the findings concerning grammar learning and speech production. a state-of-the-art review of distribution-of-practice effects on l2 learning 359 2.2.1. vocabulary while the findings from studies examining the spacing effect in the case of vocabulary learning are quite consistent, the evidence regarding the lag effect is not so uniform. nakata (2015) found no differences between short (5 items), medium (10 items) and long (30 items) inter-stimulus spacing, while nakata and webb (2016) reported that longer inter-repetition lags of 19 items were more beneficial for long-term learning of vocabulary than shorter lags of 3 items. koval (2022) found that long spacing (71-119 trials within a block) was more beneficial than short spacing (17-38) for long-term learning of finnish-english paired associates. as can be observed, “short” and “long” spacing were differently operationalized, which might partly explain the inconsistent results. on the other hand, research on inter-session spacing in classroom settings has generally not provided support for the lag effect. küpper-tetzel et al. (2014a) compared the learning of german-english word pairs by german grade 6 learners under a massed schedule and two spaced schedules (1-day and 10-day lags). the results of a 7-day delayed test showed that the 1-day lag was more beneficial than the other two. five weeks later, the two spaced conditions proved more advantageous than the massed condition, with no significant differences between the short and long lags. these results support previous claims that the optimal inter-session interval depends on the retention interval (cepeda et al., 2006). rogers and cheung (2020, 2021) examined lag effects for vocabulary learning in a primary school in hong kong. in the first study, the target words that were learned over a short 1-day lag were better remembered 28 days later than those learned over a longer 8-day lag. however, the second study, which was a replication of the first, found no differences between lags. in contrast to the previous studies examining the learning of l2 words in isolation, the studies by serrano and huang (2018, 2021) focused on contextual word learning through repeated reading in the case of secondary-school students in taiwan. the results similarly failed to provide support for the lag effect. in both studies, the intensive condition (1-day inter-session interval) led to higher vocabulary gains on the immediate posttest than the long-spaced condition (7 days). performance on the delayed posttest differed when learning was incidental, with no differences between conditions (serrano & huang, 2018), or intentional, in which case higher gains were reported for the intensive condition (serrano & huang, 2021). finally, there are some studies that have analyzed whether changing the intervals between lags during the treatment is more or less beneficial than equal or uniform spacing. nakata (2015) found an advantage of expanding (gradually increasing interrepetition intervals) over equal spacing in learning performed in one session. studies examining learning over multiple sessions have reported conflicting results. for raquel serrano 360 example, küpper-tetzel et al. (2014b) found no significant differences between contracting (from 5-day to 1-day lags), equal (3-day lag) and expanding (from 1to 5day lags) on an immediate posttest. on a test performed 7 days later, the contracting schedule was better than the equal and the expanding ones, while the opposite was found 35 days after training, with the equal and expanding schedules outperforming the contracting schedule. these results contrast with the findings from schuetze and weimer-stuckmann (2011), which showed no differences between equal and expanding schedules for short-term learning but better retention in the uniform condition. in another study comparing uniform and expanding schedules for the learning of english-german word pairs, schuetze (2015) did not find any significant differences between the two. similarly, snoder (2017) did not find any significant differences in the learning of verb-noun collocations between an expanding schedule (day 1, 7, and 16) and an intensive schedule (day 1, 2, 4). 2.2.2. grammar the first studies examining the effect of inter-session spacing in sla concerned grammar learning in classroom settings and provided support for the lag effect. bird (2010) focused on the acquisition of the simple past, present perfect and past perfect by adult efl learners in malaysia, over five different class sessions, spaced either over a 3-day or a 14-day interval. the results of a 7-day delayed gjt showed no differences between groups. however, the longer lag proved more helpful for long-term retention after 60 days. rogers (2015) provided further evidence for the benefit of spacing grammar instruction over longer lags (2.25 vs. 7 days) for the incidental acquisition of challenging english grammar structures by a group of university students in the middle east. in contrast, the study by kasprowicz et al. (2019), which examined the acquisition of french morphology by l1 english learners of french in grades 4-6, did not find any differences between short (3.5 days) and long (7 days) lags either on an immediate or delayed posttest. research by suzuki and colleagues on productive grammar skills also failed to support the lag effect. what is more, their findings suggested that short lags might be more beneficial than longer lags. suzuki and dekeyser (2017a) compared 1versus 7day inter-session intervals for shortand long-term learning of japanese morphology by adult english speakers. learning was assessed through accuracy and speed of performance in a rule application and a sentence completion test. the results showed no differences between lags for accuracy; however, the short-lag condition led to significantly faster performance 28 days after the instruction. in a conceptual replication and extension of that study, suzuki (2017) provided more evidence in favor of short lags (3.3 vs. 7 days), but concerning accuracy and not speed in the production a state-of-the-art review of distribution-of-practice effects on l2 learning 361 of morphology in a novel miniature language (supurango) by l1 japanese university students. in a follow-up study (suzuki, 2018), it was found that the short-lag condition was also more conducive to automatization, as evidenced by participants’ scores in the cv (coefficient of variation) (segalowitz & segalowitz, 1993). 2.2.3. l2 speech production two different aspects of students’ l2 speech production have been examined regarding lag effects, one being pronunciation and the other oral fluency. li and dekeyser (2019) examined the acquisition of tonal word production in chinese. the training involved the presentation of target words as well as practice that was meant to promote different types of knowledge: declarative (knowing “what,” such as knowing about different tones in mandarin) and procedural (knowing “how;” e.g., how to use the right tone in oral speech production). the authors reported that declarative knowledge decreased significantly when tested 28 days later. in addition, when the lags between training sessions were longer (7 days), this declarative knowledge was better retained than when there was only a 1-day lag. however, it was observed that for the production of new words, involving procedural knowledge, short spacing was more beneficial. in the case of oral fluency, bui et al. (2019) examined the effect of task repetition under different schedules for the development of l2 oral complexity, accuracy, and fluency. the same task was repeated twice either immediately (massed) or 1, 3, 7, or 15 days after the first performance. whereas no differences were found in terms of complexity and accuracy, immediate task repetition led to significantly higher fluency than its spaced counterpart, while no other differences were found between other lags. in a more thorough investigation of oral fluency, suzuki and hanzawa (2022) examined the effect of spacing six repetitions of the same task, and compared massed (immediate) short (45 minutes) and long (7 days) spacing. the authors found massed repetitions to be a “double-edged sword,” because they were helpful in significantly reducing students’ pauses but also led to slower articulation rate and more verbatim repetitions. 2.3. blocking versus interleaving also related to time distribution, some other studies in the sla literature have focused on whether it is more effective to learn similar forms in blocks, in which repetitions of target items or examples of target rules appear subsequently (i.e., massed), or whether interleaved practice (alternating between repetition types, i.e., spaced) is more beneficial for l2 learning. raquel serrano 362 nakata and suzuki (2019b) examined the learning of three categories: english simple past, present perfect, and the conditionals by japanese university students. under the blocked condition, the activity included structures from each category consecutively. the interleaved condition alternated sentences from different categories, while in the increasing condition five sentences from each category were practiced first in blocks, while the other five were interleaved. the results of an immediate gjt showed no differences between conditions; however, the results of a delayed posttest 7 days later were significantly higher under interleaved than under blocked practice. suzuki and sunada (2020) also compared these three types of schedules but, in contrast to the previous study, found the hybrid schedule (first blocked and then interleaved) to be more beneficial for the acquisition of relative pronouns. in another study also examining the learning of english relative clauses by japanese learners but only under two schedules (blocked vs. interleaved), suzuki et al. (2022b) showed that interleaving was more helpful for fast and accurate oral production of relative clauses on an immediate posttest, while no differences between conditions were found on a 7-day delayed posttest. in the case of oral fluency, suzuki (2021) found that repeating the same task three times in blocks (aaa bbb ccc) led to more fluent speech than interleaving different tasks (abc abc abc). additionally, the learners doing blocked practice were more likely to reuse the same constructions (suzuki et al., 2022a). carpenter and mueller (2013) also compared blocked and interleaved practice for the learning of eight french-pronunciation rules by l1 english speakers. the authors found that blocking (presenting example words for each rule subsequently – bateau, carreau, fardeau, etc.) was more helpful for learning pronunciation than interleaved practice, in which the presentation sequence alternated words following different rules (bateau, genou, tandis, etc.). 2.4. lag effects and individual differences several studies have investigated whether certain cognitive capacities differentially affect learning under more or less concentrated schedules. most of this research has been done by suzuki and colleagues within the aptitude-treatment interaction framework (robinson, 2002). suzuki (2018) examined the role of procedural learning ability, related to the acquisition of fast and automatized knowledge, and found that it plays a clearer role when learning l2 grammar under short (3.3 days) rather than long (7 days) inter-session lags. several studies have focused on the role of working memory (wm), which refers to a limited-capacity complex cognitive system that allows for the storage and processing of information while performing cognitive tasks (baddeley, 2003). different instruments have been used to measure wm; for instance, suzuki and dekeyser a state-of-the-art review of distribution-of-practice effects on l2 learning 363 (2017b), and suzuki (2019) used an operation span task; suzuki (2021a) a trail-making task, while suzuki et al. (2022a) measured wm through a listening span task. the role of wm in learning under different schedules is still unclear, although most of the evidence suggests that wm plays a more notable role in learning under concentrated schedules. suzuki and dekeyser (2017b) found that wm predicted learning of japanese morphosyntax when inter-session spacing included short (1 day) but not long (7 days) lags. in a similar vein, learners’ wm has been shown to affect their oral fluency development (suzuki, 2021a), as well as their learning of relative clauses (suzuki et al., 2022b) under blocked but not under interleaved practice schedules. in contrast, suzuki (2019) found no effect of wm for the learning of supurango under short (3.3 days) versus long (7 days) lags, even though the study also included an operation span task as in suzuki and dekeyser (2017b). as for language-analytic or grammar-inferencing abilities, suzuki and dekeyser (2017b) and suzuki (2019) reported that these skills had a clearer role when participants were learning l2 grammar in long-spaced sessions (7 days). under this type of spaced schedule, the participants who were better able to infer grammar rules in an unknown language or memorize new form-meaning mappings (as measured by llama-f and llama-b, meara, 2005) were more successful in learning the target l2 grammar. using the desirable difficulties framework (bjork, 1994; suzuki et al., 2019), serfaty and serrano (2022) examined how learners’ individual characteristics regarding language proficiency, age, and time on task during training predicted grammar learning through digital flashcards. the authors found no overall lag effects (1-day vs. 7-day lags) when the data from all the students were analyzed together, but crucially, their analyses showed that the longer lag was more beneficial for learners of higher proficiency and shorter times on task during the learning phase, while the opposite was true for learners experiencing more difficulty during training. in other words, the longer lag was a desirable difficulty only when no additional difficulties existed on the part of the learner. 3. spacing and program evaluation the final set of studies in this review includes those focusing on the effect of time distribution at the program level, comparing programs in which the hours of instruction were differently distributed. research in this area is scarce, with many of these studies being performed in primary schools in canada, where a change was implemented in the 1980s to promote intensive english instruction in quebec. in order to extend the findings from an earlier large-scale study involving thousands of students in quebec by spada and lightbown (1989) showing significant advantages in favor of learners receiving intensive english instruction, white raquel serrano 364 and turner (2005) performed an exhaustive analysis of students’ oral production. this study compared the oral performance of learners receiving intensive (400 hrs in one year) versus regular (±60 h) instruction on a variety of oral tasks. their results showed that the oral communicative abilities of the learners in the intensive program were significantly more advanced than their peers’ receiving regular instruction. more recently, french et al. (2020) examined the long-term effects of intensive instruction on speech production in terms of perceived fluency, comprehensibility and accentedness. the authors found that four years after the end of their respective programs the students that had been enrolled in intensive english were perceived to be more fluent and comprehensible in this language than those who had only received regular instruction. no differences were found in accentedness, according to the raters’ perceptions. the authors controlled for students’ academic and language skills and, although there might be other intervening variables that were not controlled for, the results of this study provide evidence for the positive effect of intensive instruction. other studies were also performed in canada in which the amount of exposure was held constant, focusing on different implementations of intensive english, referred to as massed (300-400 hrs over five months) and distributed (same hours over ten months). collins et al. (1999) compared the learning outcomes of a group of students (n = 700) enrolled in these two programs as well as in a massed plus program, which promoted out-of-class l2 use in the school. the students performed different tests that tapped different l2 skills at the end of their respective program, which showed that the learners in the massed programs significantly outperformed those in the distributed program in most measures. however, the authors caution about attributing the difference exclusively to the distribution of instructional hours, as the students in the massed programs also ended up receiving a few more hours of instruction. collins and white (2011) replicated these results. the authors performed a longitudinal study and assessed learners’ l2 skills at four different 100-hour intervals. although the authors suggest that the differences were not large and some of them might be due to instructional practice, several statistically significant differences were found, especially at time 3 and 4, in favor of the concentrated program. in the spanish context, studies by serrano and colleagues (serrano, 2011; serrano & muñoz, 2007; serrano et al., 2015) analyzed l2 development in english courses that offered the same number of hours of instruction but distributed differently (110 hrs in 1 month vs. 3-4 vs. 7 months) in the case of adult efl learners in a university setting. apart from performing a general proficiency test, the participants did an oral narrative and a written essay before and after their respective course. the results showed some advantages to the more intensive program, but only at a state-of-the-art review of distribution-of-practice effects on l2 learning 365 the beginner or intermediate level and for a few measures, mostly related to grammar and lexical richness and use of formulaic language in oral production. alcaraz-mármol (2015) examined vocabulary learning after a 2-month intensive (6 hrs/week) and 6-month extensive (2 hrs/week) course, also in the case of adult spanish efl learners. the intensive program promoted more significant vocabulary gains and, although the learners also experienced more losses on a delayed posttest 10 weeks later, their performance was still significantly superior to their peers’ in the extensive program. these results contrast with the findings from xu et al. (2012) for a group of high school learners of mandarin in the us. in this study, although most comparisons showed no difference between a summer intensive program and a semester-long program offering the same number of hours of instruction, the learners in the latter program became more fluent. 4. summary of findings and implications for l2 teaching as can be seen from the overview presented above, the results of the studies conducted so far present some conflicting evidence for the role of spacing in different areas of l2 learning in experimental studies. the findings from these studies also contrast with those analyzing the role of intensity at the program level. concerning experimental studies, there is one robust finding: when learning vocabulary items from lists in one session (either including l2-l1 pairs or in sentences), it is better to space repetitions than studying them in massed sequences (e.g., koval, 2019, 2022; nakata, 2015; nakata & suzuki, 2019a). considering this finding, l2 learners should not engage in repetitive blocked/massed practice of each individual item when they are revising/learning new vocabulary from lists, but instead go through the whole list before doing repeated practice of individual words. the results comparing vocabulary learning in one session versus several sessions show better learning outcomes under the latter schedule. this evidence suggests that teachers should encourage their learners to revise their vocabulary periodically on different days and not just one day before a test. as nakata et al. (2021) suggest, cumulative testing might be a good way to promote vocabulary learning over different sessions, at the same time as it increases the amount of learning opportunities. however, it is not clear yet how long inter-session lags should be in spaced vocabulary practice, as some studies have found an advantage to shorter lags (rogers & cheung, 2020; serrano & huang, 2021) and others have found little difference (rogers & cheung, 2021). there is some indication, however, that longer lags might be more favorable when knowledge is assessed after a long period, suggesting, again, that spacing repeated exposures to novel words in the classroom is positive if longterm knowledge is the goal (küpper-tetzel et al., 2022a). raquel serrano 366 if we now turn to grammar learning, the results comparing massed and spaced schedules go in the same direction as for vocabulary. interleaved or hybrid grammar practice, in which exemplars of target rules do not appear subsequently but are interspersed, promote better long-term results than blocked practice, with learning taking place in one session (nakata & suzuki, 2019b; suzuki & sunada, 2020; suzuki et al., 2022b). one pedagogical recommendation following these findings would be for teachers to focus on contrasting different structures in one session (for instance, simple past and present perfect), rather than devoting the whole session to one single structure. similarly, following miles (2014), it is advisable to devote more than one session to the teaching of l2 grammar forms, which probably represents typical classroom practice in most contexts. concerning the lag effect in grammar learning over multiple sessions, there is conflicting evidence. on the one hand, some classroom-based studies support the lag effect for long-term learning, mostly for receptive grammar knowledge assessed through gjts (bird, 2010; rogers, 2015), while, on the other hand, experimental studies examining productive skills either report no differences between lags (serfaty & serrano, 2022) or an advantage to shorter lags (suzuki, 2017; suzuki & dekeyser, 2017a). one teaching implication would be that, if receptive declarative knowledge is the goal, it might be better to include longer lags between practice sessions, while for the proceduralization of grammar rules, shorter lags might be more beneficial. the conflicting results obtained for lag effects for grammar might be due to the type of training and testing (receptive vs. productive skills) used in the different studies, or to learners’ individual differences that were not controlled for. as some studies have shown (see section 2.4), certain types of learner profiles might benefit more from shorter or longer lags. according to suzuki et al. (2019) and as shown in research by serfaty and serrano (2022), longer lags are a source of difficulty that might not be desirable when there are additional sources of difficulty on the part of the learner (e.g., low proficiency or challenges during the learning phase). it might be advisable for teachers to consider the characteristics of their learners when deciding how to space grammar practice and include longer lags in advanced groups and shorter when the group’s proficiency is low. however, adapting to individual learners within a group might be challenging in classes where learners’ characteristics are very diverse. research on l2 speech fluency suggests that massed or blocked practice could be more beneficial for the proceduralization of oral production skills (bui et al., 2019; suzuki, 2021b). however, when there are too many repetitions, massed practice might no longer be optimal (suzuki & hanzawa, 2022). regarding pronunciation rules, the evidence suggests that more concentrated practice (blocked, if done in one session or under short lags if done over several sessions) a state-of-the-art review of distribution-of-practice effects on l2 learning 367 might be more helpful for learning l2 pronunciation (carpenter & mueller, 2013; li & dekeyser, 2019). according to these findings, l2 classes should offer students the possibility of repeating oral fluency tasks or doing repeated productive or receptive practice of pronunciation rules under short-spaced schedules. at the program level, the findings from the canadian studies on intensive english in primary education provide clear support for intensive instruction, especially when it involves more contact hours (e.g., white & turner, 2005) or when it is concentrated under shorter time periods. although the differences between concentrated versus distributed intensive programs are not large, when they exist, they are in favor of the more concentrated schedule (collins et al., 1999; collins & white, 2011). the results of the comparison between intensive versus regular programs for adult learners are not conclusive, but, along the same lines, there appear to be more advantages for intensive l2 learning (e.g., serrano, 2011). as lightbown (2014) claims, drip-feed l2 instruction including very few hours per week (often 1-2), which is the typical schedule in most educational contexts, does not lead to advanced l2 skills or high communicative competence (stern, 1985). instead, l2 programs should offer full-flow (or intensive) exposure to the target language (see also muñoz, 2012). lightbown and spada (2020) claim that it is beneficial to concentrate l2 instructional hours at the curricular level, even when there is no time increase. the authors suggest that increasing and concentrating the amount of l2 instruction when the students are more cognitively mature results in better l2 learning outcomes than an earlier start. the provision of intensive english in schools in quebec required some restructuring of schedules for other subjects in the school curriculum, which might be challenging in many contexts. however, the promising results obtained in canada could encourage the implementation of equivalent programs in other contexts. it must be emphasized that the way “intensity” is conceptualized at the program level is different from the experimental studies, as it refers to intensity of total time devoted to l2 learning and not the (repetitive) practice of a specific target form (see serrano, 2012). 5. conclusion and further research the results of the studies included in this review show that the findings on the spacing effect from cognitive psychology apply to the sla literature for learning that takes place under similar conditions, typically rote learning of l2 vocabulary from lists. for the development of declarative knowledge (e.g., knowledge about rules), it is more beneficial to learn/practice in more than one session. it is not clear, however, whether adding more space between learning sessions is always more beneficial for l2 learning, and, in some cases, there is evidence to the raquel serrano 368 contrary, as in the case of fluent (or proceduralized) l2 production, or when learning difficulties exist on the part of the learner. further research is needed in order to know more about what l2 areas might benefit from longer spacing and for what type of learners. recent studies on individual differences are throwing some new light on the spacing literature; however, this research is still scarce. considering the program-evaluation literature, long spacing of small “l2 doses” is probably not recommended. it seems reasonable to assume that l2 learning, as l1 learning, should also require high doses of the target language or a full-flow approach (lightbown, 2014; stern, 1985). however, we need more studies that investigate how time distribution affects learning at the program level, or the development of general l2 skills both in the case of children and adults, especially considering long-term retention, which has been under-analyzed in previous research. moreover, future research at the program level should control more the actual teaching practice, although this might be challenging considering the amount of hours of instruction that are usually involved in this type of research. one point that needs to be mentioned is that, with the exception of the canadian programs, most studies in this review have analyzed data from small samples and, in some cases, only around 15 learners in some conditions. these small sample sizes might be responsible for the conflicting results that are sometimes reported. although gathering data from large samples is always a challenge in sla research, future studies should try to obtain data from larger groups. there are currently some replication studies (e.g., rogers & cheung, 2021; serrano & huang, 2021; suzuki, 2017); however, more replication or close replication studies would be desirable to check whether previous findings are generalizable to other participants under equivalent methodological conditions or to different age groups. while there are some experimental studies with primary or secondary school students, most studies target adults. additionally, areas other than vocabulary and grammar should be given priority in future studies, as most of the evidence we now have comes from research examining these two areas. more research is also necessary investigating different types of knowledge in the same study to confirm previous claims that they might be differentially affected by spacing (e.g., declarative vs. procedural; intentional vs. incidental, etc.) finally, although it is important to have information about learning outcomes under different practice schedules, more research should be performed also examining learning processes, for instance by using eye-tracking (as in koval, 2019) or analyzing learners’ performance during the learning phase (e.g., nakata & suzuki, 2019a), as this research throws more light on how spacing affects l2 learning and also contributes to theoretical explanations of the spacing/lag effects. in summary, the findings reported in this state-of-the-art review point to the need for more research on the effect of time distribution. the field needs a state-of-the-art review of distribution-of-practice effects on l2 learning 369 more conclusive evidence in order to offer both practitioners and policy makers concrete and scientifically supported advice about how to organize the often limited available time for l2 learning. acknowledgements this work was supported by grant pid2019-110536gb-i00. i would like to thank the editor and reviewers for their invaluable feedback and also radha chandy for her help organizing the data. raquel serrano 370 references1 *alcaraz-mármol, g. 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(2017a). effects of distributed practice on the proceduralization of morphology. language teaching research, 21(2), 166188. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168815617334 *suzuki, y., & dekeyser, r. m. (2017b). exploratory research on second language practice distribution: an aptitude × treatment interaction. applied psycholinguistics, 38(1), 27-56. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0142716416000084 *suzuki, y., & hanzawa, k. (2022). massed task repetition is a double-edged sword for fluency development: an efl classroom study. studies in second language acquisition, 44(2), 536-561. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0272263121000358 *suzuki, y., & sunada, m. (2020). dynamic interplay between practice type and practice schedule in a second language. studies in second language acquisition, 42(1), 169-197. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0272263119000470 *suzuki, y., eguchi, m., & de jong, n. (2022a). does the reuse of constructions promote fluency development in task repetition? a usage-based perspective. tesol quarterly. advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3103 suzuki, y., nakata, t., & dekeyser, r. m. (2019). the desirable difficulty framework as a theoretical foundation for optimizing and researching second language practice. modern language journal, 103(3), 713-720. https://doi.org/10.11 11/modl.12585 *suzuki, y., yokosawa, s., aline, d. (2022b). the role of working memory in blocked and interleaved grammar practice: proceduralization of l2 syntax. language teaching research, 26(4), 671-695. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168820913985 toppino, t. c., & gerbier, e. (2014). about practice: repetition, spacing, and abstraction. in b. h. ross (ed.), the psychology of learning and motivation: volume 60: the psychology of learning and motivation (pp. 113-189). elsevier academic press. *white, j., & turner, c. (2005). comparing children’s oral ability in two esl programs. canadian modern language review, 61(4), 491-517. https://doi.org /10.3138/cmlr.61.4.491 *xu, x., padilla, a. m., & silva, d. (2012). the time factor in mandarin language learning: the four-week intensive versus the regular high school semester. the language learning journal, 42(1), 55-66. https://doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2012.677054 *yamagata, s., nakata, t., & rogers, j. (2022). effects of distributed practice on the acquisition of verb-noun collocations. studies in second language acquisition. advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0272263122000225 a state-of-the-art review of distribution-of-practice effects on l2 learning 375 appendix list of studies included in the review (see list of abbreviations in alphabetical order at the end) study sp lag b/intprog l2 area participants age, context training tests/ instruments n. of sessions/ hours spacing retention in days (unless specified) results alcaraz-mármol (2015) prog vocabulary (96 words) 60 l1 spa, l2 english university classroom instruction l1-l2 translation, l2-l1 translation 48 hrs int.: 6h/week over 2 months extensive: 2h/week over 6 months immediate ri-10 weeks intensive > extensive both immediate and delayed bird (2010) lag grammar (simple past, present perf., past perf.) 38 l1 malay, l2 english university sentence correction exercises gjt 160 sp-pp 160 pp-pp test 2 sets of 20 28 hrs 10 sessions isi-3 isi-14 ri-7 ri-60 no sig. diff. at 7-day ri; distributed > concentrated at 60-day ri bui et al. (2019) sp lag oral complexity, accuracy, fluency (caf) 71 l1 cantonese, l2 english university oral picturebased task oral picturebased task 2 repetitions massed isi-1 isi-3 isi-7 isi-14 days immediate only diff.: speech rate: immediate > isi-1, isi-7, isi-14 reduction of repetitions: isi-1 best carpenter & mueller (2013) b/int pronunciation 19 l1 english, l2 french reading and listening to 64 words (8 x 8 pron. rules) multiple choice pronunciation test 1 session blocked: 4 example words x rule (bateau, fardeau, rameau, etc.) interleaved: 1 word x rule (bateau, chacal, tandis, etc.) immediate blocked practice better recognition of correct pronunciation collins et al. (1999) prog general l2 skills 700 l1 french, l2 english grade 6 (11-12) classroom instruction y/n vocab. recognition, meq (main emphasis listening), written picture narrative 400 hrs massed: 5 months massed plus: (+exposure) distributed: 10 months immediate massed/massed plus > distributed collins & white (2011) prog general l2 skills 230 l1 french, l2 english grade 6 (11-12) classroom instruction vocabulary, narrative writing, listening skills, oral interaction 300-400 h massed: 5 months distributed: 10 months immediate massed > distributed in 6/20 comparisons distributed > massed in 1/20 french et al. (2020) prog fluency, comprehensibility, accentedness 81 l1 french, l2 english high school (grade 10) classroom instruction picture-cue oral narrative task one academic year intensive: 400 hrs in grade 6 regular: 60 hrs 4 years intensive > regular, sig. more fluent and comprehensible speech four years after end of program no sig. diff. in accent kasprowicz et al. (2019) lag ind morphology (verb inflections number and tense) 113 l1 english, l2 french grades 4-6 (8-11) digital app with mini-games focused on inflections sentence-picture matching, gjt lang. analytic ability (laa) long-spaced 3 of 60 mins shortspaced 6 of 30 mins isi-3.5 isi-7 ri-3.5 (for isi3.5) ri-7 (for isi-7) ri-42 no sig. differences laa predicted more learning in short lags koval (2019) sp vocabulary (24 finnish words in english sentences) 40 l1 english target words inserted in english sentences (reading) online processing, form recognition, form-meaning mapping 1 session (4 rep.) 2 hrs massed: subsequent rep. spaced: 25 intervening sentences 48-72 hrs processing time: spaced > massed vocab learning: spaced > massed koval (2022) lag/sp vocabulary (72 finnish-english word pairs) 52 l1 english l2-l1 retrieval of finnish-english translation pairs form recognition l2-l1 translation form-meaning matching 1 session (6 rep.) 3-4 hrs massed short-spaced (17-38 trials) long-spaced immediate delayed (1-2 weeks) spaced > massed long> short-spaced delayed meaning posttest raquel serrano 376 (71-119 trials) küpper-tetzel, erdfelder & dickhäuser (2014a) lag /sp vocabulary (26 german– english vocabulary pairs) 65 l1 german, l2 english grade 6 (1113 ) words presented via projector and read aloud (classroom) l1-l2 cued-recall 2 sessions massed isi-1 isi-10 ri-7 ri-35 ri-7: isi-1 > massed or isi10 ri-35: isi-1 and isi-10> massed küpper-tetzel, kapler & wiseheart (2014b) lag vocabulary (28 word pairs) 210, l1 english university word pairs presented on a screen (individual) free recall 3 sessions contracting: isi5, isi-1 equal: isi-3 expanding: isi-1, isi-5 (days) immediate ri-1 ri-7 ri-35 immediate: no sig. diff. ri-1 & ri-7: contracting > equal & expanding ri-35: equal & expanding > contracting. li & dekeyser (2019) lag tonal word production (20 disyllabic words) 68 l1 english, l2 mandarin university 1) presentation 2) declarative knowledge: meaning-spelling mapping 3) “procedural” oral prod 1) oral picture naming task 2) written picture-naming task 3) oral word-naming task 3 sessions cond a: isi-1 cond b: isi-1 cond c: isi-7 cond d: isi-7 cond a: ri-7 cond b: ri-28 cond c: ri-7 cond d: ri-28 ri: strong effect retention of declarative knowledge (longer ri worse) ri-28: isi-7 better than isi-1 procedural knowledge of new words: isi important (isi-1 better). isi: 1-day better at presession performance btw sessions loftohali & salehi (2017) sp vocabulary (20 eng.-farsi word pairs) 28 l1 farsi, l2 english, primary school classroom instruction l1-l2 translation 40 mins 1 or 2 sessions massed: 1session spaced: 2 sessions ri-7 ri-35 spaced > massed, both ris macis et al. (2021) sp vocabulary (25 adjective + noun english collocations) 105 l1 arabic l2 english (55 incidental; 50 deliberate) collocations inserted in a text (exp. 1: incidental learning; exp. 2: deliberate) cued form-recall test 5 sessions (15 min./ session) massed: 5 words x 5 times per session spaced: 25 words per session, isi-7 ri-21 (for all words in spaced, but not for massed) incidental: massed > spaced > control deliberate: spaced > massed > control miles (2014) sp grammar (frequency adverb-verb word order; the word almost) 32 l1 korean, l2 english university classroom instruction gjt (20 sentences), l1-l2 translation (19 sentences) 60 mins 1 session (massed) 3 sessions (spaced) massed spaced: isi-7, isi28 (average isi17) immediate ri-35 (5 weeks) gjt: immediate: no sig. diff.; delayed: sig. advantage spaced translation: no sig. diff. immediate or delayed nakata (2015) sp/ lag vocabulary (33 english-japanese word pairs: 20 target +13 filler) 128 l1 japanese, l2 english university paired-associate learning productive (l1l2 translation) receptive (l2l1 translation) 1 session (4 rep.) massed short-spaced (5item) medium-spaced (10-item) long-spaced (30-item) immediate ri-7 spaced > massed no diff. short, medium, long lags nakata & elgort (2021) sp vocabulary 48 pseudowords 66 l1 japanese, l2 english university target pseudowords in eng sentences (reading) meaning recall, meaning-form matching, semantic priming 1 session (96 mins) (3 rep.) massed spaced: 47 items (25 min.) immediate delayed: ri-2 meaning recall and meaning-form matching: spaced > massed semantic priming: no sig. diff. nakata & suzuki (2019a) sp vocabulary (48 english-japanese pairs in 8 sets) 133 l1 japanese, l2 english university paired-associate learning l2-l1 translation 1 session, (4 rep.) massed by set spaced immediate ri-7 spaced > massed at both ris and especially for unrelated sets nakata & suzuki (2019b) b/int grammar (simple past, present perf., conditionals) 115 l1 japanese, l2 english university 50 multiple choice fill-in-theblank questions gjt: 40 sentences 1 session sets repeated 4 times blocked: 10a, 10b, 10c, 10d, 10e interleaved (e.g.: a, b, c, d, e) increasing: first 25 questions blocked; next 25 interleaved immediate ri-7 immediate: no sig. diff. delayed: interleaved > blocked blocking more effective with low prior knowledge; interleaving more effective with high prior knowledge. a state-of-the-art review of distribution-of-practice effects on l2 learning 377 nakata & webb (2016) lag vocabulary (23 low-freq english words, incl. 3 fillers) 95 l1 japanese, l2 english university paired-associate learning productive (l1l2 translation) receptive (l2l1 translation) 1 session spaced: 3-item 19-item immediate ri-7 long lags > short lags at ri-7 rogers (2015) lag grammar (complex syntax / cleft sentences) 37 l1 arabic? l2 english university 100 stimulus sentences, each followed by y/n comprehen. questions 20 gjt, english l2 grammar learning 5 sessions 15 mins each isi-2.25 isi-7 ri-42 sig. advantage for the long-spaced group rogers & cheung (2020) lag vocabulary (20 adjectives) 52 l1 cantonese, l2 english grade 3 teacher used pictures multiple choice meaning recognition 3 sessions 10 mins isi-1 isi-8 ri-28 spaced-short items learned sig. better than spaced-long rogers & cheung (2021) lag vocabulary (20 words) 66 l1 cantonese, l2 english grade 4 teacher used ppts, pictures and crossword puzzles crossword puzzle production test (form recall) 3 sessions 10 mins isi-1 isi-8 ri-28 no sig. differences between conditions schuetze (2015) lag vocabulary (39 english-german word pairs) 76 l1 english, l2 german university intentional learning of individual words presented on screen with audio l1-l2 translation exp.1: 4 days exp. 2: 5 days exp. 1: uniform: isi 3-43 expanding: isi 13-4 exp. 2: uniform: isi 3-4-3-4 expanding isi 1-2-4-7 immediate ri-28 ri-56 no sig. diff. schuetze & weimer-stuckmann (2011) lag vocabulary (40 words per textbook chapter) 117 l1 english, l2 german university typing and rehearsing words in online vocab. program online vivo quiz + print retention test 6-8 days uniform: isi-2 expanding: isi 02-3 short: ri 2-4 long: diff. ris (9-5 months) short ri: no sig. diff. long ri: uniform > expanding serfaty & serrano (2022) lag ind grammar (conditional and future perfect) linguistic and learner-related difficulty 129 l1 khmer l2 english, secondary school (10-18) online flashcards, 16 sentences (8/structure) productive cued recall as in training with 16 novel sentences proficiency test 2 sessions per structure isi-1 isi-7 ri-7 ri-28 no lag effects isi*proficiency: longer isi better for higher prof. learners isi*time-on-task: longer isi better for faster learners serrano (2011) prog general l2 skills (listening, grammar, reading, vocabulary, written and oral production) 152 l1 spanish/ catalan, l2 english university classroom instruction proficiency test, written and oral narrative 80 hrs extensive: 2h/week, 7 months intensive: 5h/day, 4 weeks immediate intermediate: intensive > extensive (few measures) advanced.: no sig. diff. serrano & huang (2018) lag vocabulary (36 words) 71 l1 mandarin l2 english high school (15-16) repeated reading promoting incidental vocab learning meaningrecognition l2l1 matching test 7 days intensive: isi-1 spaced: isi-7 immediate isi/ri = 25% immediate: intensive > spaced delayed: no diff. serrano & huang (2021) lag vocabulary (36 words) 72 l1 mandarin l2 english high school (15-16) repeated reading promoting intentional vocab learning meaningrecognition l2l1 matching test 7 days intensive: isi-1 spaced: isi-7 immediate isi/ri = 25% immediate: intensive > spaced delayed: intensive > spaced serrano & muñoz (2007) prog general l2 skills (listening, grammar, reading) 76 l1 spanish/ catalan, l2 english university classroom instruction fill-in-blanks, transformation, written and oral narrative 65 hrs extensive: 2 hrs/week, 7 months semi-intensive: 2-2.5 hrs/week 11-15 weeks intensive: 5h/week, 5 weeks immediate no btw-group differences within group analyses: semi-int. & intensive > extensive serrano et al. (2015) prog formulaic sequences 124 l1 spanish/ catalan, l2 english university classroom instruction oral picturebased narrative 80 hrs extensive: 2h/week, 7 months intensive: 5h/day, 4 weeks immediate beginner and intermediate: intensive > extensive advanced: no sig. diff. snoder (2017) lag grammar 45 l1 swedish, l2 english reading & writing tasks focused on productive recall (translation) 3 sessions spaced: isi-6; isi9 immediate no sig. diff. raquel serrano 378 (verb-noun collocations) age: 16 target items intensive: isi-1; isi-2 ri-21 suzuki (2017) lag morphology (supurango, novel miniature language) 24 verbs 60 l1 japanese, l2 english university computerized training tasks in 3 steps: 1) vocabulary learning 2) explicit grammatical explanation 3) oral practice 1) vocab test 2) rule application test 3) present prog. test 4 sessions isi-3.3 isi-7 ri-7 ri-28 short lag >long lag in accuracy at both ris. no sig. diff. in speed suzuki (2018) (re-analysis of suzuki, 2017) lag ind morphology procedural knowledge 60 l1 japanese, l2 english university computerized training tasks in 3 steps: 1) vocabulary learning 2) explicit grammatical explanation 3) oral practice 1) rule application test 2) present prog. test 3) tower of london task 4 sessions isi-3.3 isi-7 ri-7 ri-28 procedural ability related to faster rt isi-3.3 > isi-7 in terms of cv suzuki (2019) (re-analysis of suzuki, 2017) lag ind morphology aptitude and wm 60 l1 japanese, l2 english university computerized training tasks in 3 steps: 1) vocabulary learning 2) explicit grammatical explanation 3) oral practice l2 ability: 1) rule application test 2) present prog. (pp) test llama-f, ospan task, llama-b & labj-pa 4 sessions isi-3.3 isi-7 ri-7 ri-28 7-day isi: mrra predicted 7 out of 9 rule-application test outcomes, and all pp test outcomes. 3.3-day isi: mmra predicted immediate pp posttests outcomes no sig. effects of wm suzuki (2021b) b/int oral fluency 50 l1 japanese, l2 english university 3 narrative oral tasks 2 diff. oral tasks 3 sessions blocked: aaa, bbb, ccc interleaved: abc, abc, abc ri-1 blocked practice aaa more sig. development of oral fluency: blocked sig. superior for 6 out of 9 measures on at least 2 of the 3 days. suzuki (2021a) (re-analysis suzuki, 2021a) b/int ind fluency individual differences 68 l1 japanese, l2 english university 3 narrative oral tasks 2 diff. oral tasks non-word repetition (nwr) trail making (tmt) llama_b 3 sessions blocked: aaa, bbb, ccc interleaved: abc, abc, abc ri-1 scores in nwr and llama_b better predictors under blocked practice. scores in tmt related to improvement under interleaved practice. suzuki & dekeyser (2017a) lag morphology (japanese -te present perf. verb form) 18 target verbs 51 l1 english, l2 japanese university 1) vocabulary learning 2) explicit grammar 3) sentence comprehension 4) picture description 5) narrative task 1) rule application test 2) sentence completion accuracy and rt 2 sessions isi-1 isi-7 ri-7 ri-28 accuracy: no sig. diff. speed: isi-1> isi-7 long ri suzuki & dekeyser (2017b) (re-analysis of 2017a) lag ind morphology aptitude 40 l1 english, l2 japanese university computerized training tasks (aural and visual) l2 ability: 1) rule application test: 18 action verbs 2) sentence completion (using 18 target vs) aptitude: llama_f, ospan task 4 sessions isi-1 isi-7 ri-7 ri-28 no correlation btw rule application & aptitude wm related to effectiveness of massed practice laa related to effectiveness of distributed practice suzuki, eguchi & de jong (2022a) (re-analysis of suzuki, 2021a) b/int fluency and use of constructions 50 l1 japanese, l2 english university 3 narrative oral tasks 2 diff. oral tasks 3 sessions blocked: aaa, bbb, ccc interleaved: abc, abc, abc ri-1 blocked practice higher reuse of constructions. suzuki & hanzawa (2022) sp/ lag oral fluency 70 l1 japanese, l2 english university one narrative picture prompted oral fluency task 3 diff. narrative picture prompted tasks 6 repetitions 1 or 2 sessions massed short-spaced (45 min.) long-spaced immediate ri-7 training: no diff. at the end but massed more repetitions ri-7 immediate post: massed positive for breakdown a state-of-the-art review of distribution-of-practice effects on l2 learning 379 (isi-7) fluency but negative for speed and repair. delayed post: no diff. suzuki & sunada (2020) b/int grammar (relative clause construction) compreh. and production 129 l1 japanese, l2 english university 64 items in 2 formats: a) output-practice (oral picture description) b) input-practice (aural comprehension picture selection) 16 items/test accuracy and speed (same format as training materials) 1 session blocked: 16a, 16b, 16c, 16d interleaved: c, b, d, a, c, etc hybrid: 8a, 8b, 8c, 8d, then b, c, d, a, d, c...etc immediate ri-7 immediate: hybrid > blocked & interleaved (comprehension speed and production accuracy) ri-7: hybrid > blocked & interleaved (comprehension speed) input-practice > outputpractice in interleaved & hybrid conditions suzuki, yokosawa, & aline (2022b) b/int ind grammar (english relative clauses, rc, 5 types: rc1, rc2, etc.) 60 l1 japanese, l2 english university oral picture description 50 instances of 5 types of rc + feedback same as training with novel sentences (20 items) listening span task 1 session blocked (rc1rc1-rc1…. rc2-rc2, rc2…) interleaved (rc1-rc2-rc3…) immediate ri-7 immediate (accuracy and speed): interleaved > blocked delayed (accuracy and speed): no diff. wm affects blocked but not interleaved practice. white & turner (2005) prog oral proficiency 152 l1 french, l2 english grade 6 (11-12) classroom instruction self recording, video story retell, info-gap picture description one academic year intensive: 5 months (300400 h) regular: 1 academic yr. (±60 h) immediate intensive > regular xu et al. (2014) prog oral proficiency 28 l1 english, l2 mandarin high school (15-17) classroom instruction sopi (simulated oral proficiency interview) 85-88 hrs intensive: 4 weeks in summer regular: 1 semester (22 weeks) immediate regular > intensive only in oral fluency yamagata et al. (2022) sp verb-noun collocations 96 l1 japanese, l2 english high school (15-16) presentation and production practice of target collocations in 7 stages collocation filling test verb filling test 9 sessions, 3 sessions x 3 weeks (5-10 min./ session) node massed collocation massed collocation spaced immediate ri-14 spaced schedule better for learned and unlearned collocations abbreviations in alphabetical order: b/int: blocked/interleaved practice ind: individual differences isi: inter-session interval lag: lag effects prog: program ri: retention interval sp: spacing effect 233 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (1). 2023. 233-239 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.37417 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review lessons from exceptional language learners who have achieved nativelike proficiency: motivation, cognition and identity authors: zoltán dörnyei, katarina mentzelopoulos publisher: multilingual matters, 2023 isbn: 9781800412446 pages: 196 let me start this review by saying that it is a huge privilege to be able to review the book co-authored by the late zoltán dörnyei, a scholar who not only managed to put the countries of eastern and central europe on the map of research into individual difference (id) factors in the realm of second language acquisition (sla) but in many ways shaped and spearheaded the development of such research. it is only fitting that, together with katarina mentzelopoulos, he should have embarked on a research project that sought to shed light on why some second and foreign language (l2) learners succeed in the evidently formidable task of becoming nativelike in the target language (tl). after all, most of his numerous, influential, one could even say monumental, publications attempted to solve the immensely complex puzzle of how individual variation, with a particular emphasis on different facets of motivation, influences the process and product of l2 learning and teaching (e.g., dörnyei, 2005, 2020; dörnyei & ryan, 2015; 234 dörnyei & ushioda, 2021). the book lessons from exceptional language learners who have achieved nativelike proficiency: motivation, cognition and identity fits perfectly into this line of inquiry. it could even be seen as the pinnacle of zoltán’s theoretical and empirical endeavors because it provides invaluable insights into how different id factors need to interact with each other and form distinctive constellations, in a way that is unique to each individual, to ensure exceptionally high levels of success in l2 learning, understood as passing for a native speaker. as such, the volume represents a major extension of good language learner studies which were pioneered by rubin (1975) and invariably continue to attract scholarly attention of researchers (e.g., griffiths, 2008). it also builds on studies of exceptional language learners, or polyglots, touching more broadly on the fascinating issue of linguistic giftedness (cf. biedroń & pawlak, 2016), as well as empirical investigations into attainment of nativelike proficiency driven by the critical period hypothesis (cph, cf. hyltenstam et al., 2018), taking these lines of inquiry forward by inspecting the paths that take some l2 learners to the level when they are regarded as indistinguishable from native speakers in everyday situations. in fact, the interested readers have the opportunity to examine these trajectories in depth by delving into the intact success stories of the 30 participants of the study in the companion volume stories from exceptional language learners who have achieved nativelike proficiency (katarina mentzelopoulos & zoltán dörnyei, 2023). the book under review starts with the introduction, where the authors comment on their motivation and rationale for undertaking what they describe as a “heart project,” also candidly explaining what they set out to achieve and why they wish to bypass the heated debates about the use of such apparently controversial terms as native speaker and l2. this is followed by 12 chapters that constitute the core of the volume. chapter 1 provides a brief but admirably wellsuited theoretical background to the research project, including an overview of research that has investigated different aspects of linguistic giftedness or examined issues related to ultimate tl attainment, typically in connection to the tenets of the cph. in offering this overview, the authors convincingly show that their study is different from much of the previous research in that it primarily zooms in on the process underpinning achievement of nativelike proficiency rather than its product. chapter 2 is devoted to the presentation of the methodology of the research project which involved 30 exceptional learners from different national backgrounds and walks of like, passing for native speakers of different l2s with no heritage links to the tl or serious opportunities for immersion prior to the age of 18. the data were collected through interviews accompanied by a checklist with specific points of interest which yielded a corpus in excess of 460,000 words that was subjected to several rounds of thematic analysis (braun 235 & clark, 2006). although it includes excerpts from participants’ narratives, chapter 3, defining nativelikeness, does not in reality report findings related to the factors leading to an exceptional degree of success in l2 learning but, rather, is mainly intended as an argument for the choice of the term native speaker in describing this success, engaging with views that this label should not be used as a yardstick for measuring tl attainment. dörnyei and mentzelopoulos (2023) embrace what they describe as a phenomenological approach and point out that “… one may argue that most language learners, even high-functioning ones, know perfectly well when they are speaking an l2 that is different from using their l1, which indirectly validates the two categories, regardless of the terminology we use to refer to them” (p. 40). the remaining nine chapters are dedicated to the main themes that emerged from the data. specifically, chapters 46 focus on initial conditions necessary for success, that is, a favorable set-up for l2 learning (chapter 4), a unique bond with the tl and the different guises this bond can assume (chapter 5) and a facilitative constellation of id factors embracing cognition, motivation and personality (chapter 6). chapters 7-10 shift the focus to different aspects of the l2 learning process as such and sustaining commitment to this process, covering such issues as attention to pronunciation (chapter 7), intensive effort and the employment of language learning strategies (chapter 8), the importance of various relationships and social expectations (chapter 9), and different facets of persistence in pursuing nativelike proficiency (chapter 10). the last two chapters focus on participants’ psychological states on reaching their intended destination, that is, becoming indistinguishable from native speakers, touching upon l2 confidence, comfort and ownership (chapter 11), and the nature of l2 identity (chapter 12). finally, in the conclusion to the volume, dörnyei and mentzelopoulos highlight selected points yielded by the analysis which they consider to be the “most memorable and forward-facing” (p. 170). these include: the absence of one-fit-all solutions, the dynamicity of the pathways to success and the factors shaping them, constant interaction between motivation and cognition, the motivating potential of the unique bond with the tl, the significance of mimicry ability and musicality, the importance of the emphasis on l2 pronunciation, a comfortable voice in the l2 and its ownership, and the link between first and second language identities. on reading this book one is left with the overwhelming impression that it is as unique and exceptional as the participants of the research project and the individual trajectories which emerge from the narratives offered during the interviews. there are indeed numerous things for which zoltán dörnyei and katarina mentzelopoulos could be commended but, due to space limitations, i will confine my praise to issues which, in my subjective opinion, stand out as the most significant and have the potential to, on the one hand, move research on 236 ids in sla in new, promising directions and, on the other hand, serve as a sobering reminder to specialists that such research should accommodate a variety of views and approaches rather than leaning towards extremes of one kind or another. first and foremost, it is evident from the analysis of the participants’ stories that there is no “silver bullet” or “magic key” that guarantees success in achieving nativelike proficiency. in other words, no single individual characteristic is in and of itself sufficient to achieve high levels of success but, rather, propitious constellations of such factors are needed, different for each learner and adjusted to the evolving circumstances of the process of l2 learning. as dörnyei and mentzelopoulos elucidate “. . . the synergy of factors often displayed patterns that deviated considerably from each other, thereby evidencing that there are multiple pathways to accomplishing exceptional l2 learning success” (p. 170, the emphasis in original). while this by no means indicates that research into specific id factors should be abandoned, it surely alerts us to the fact that the pedagogical implications based on such studies are limited and at the end of the day serious effort will need to be exerted to try to identify complexes of id factors that could possibly help us identify largely similar groups of learners as a basis for better tailoring instructional practices to their needs. an equally important contribution of the book is the identification of factors that may contribute to successful learning but have been given no or very limited attention in existing research, such as, for example, the motivating potential of attraction towards specific aspects of the tl, the intriguing link between motivation and cognition, the emphasis that the participants placed on nativelike pronunciation, cosmopolitan orientation, role models (muir et al., 2019), motivational pulls in the workplace, or the potential malleability of persistence or grit, perhaps as a function of the l2 being learnt (pawlak et al., 2022). in addition, i truly appreciate the decision to go against some growing but also limiting trends in the field and the willingness to confront the criticism that this might bring about. one area where this is visible is the use of the term native speaker despite the claims that it might be discriminatory or even toxic and therefore it should best be abandoned (e.g., dewaele et al., 2021). hopefully, the following quote will give the proponents of such extreme views food for thought: “since teaching nativelikeness is a common objective for many, in this book we strive to illuminate both the journey towards this goal as well as what learners can expect at the end of this journey, while maintaining a sense of reality about the fact that climbing this linguistic mount everest is not an option for most learners” (p. 42). another example of divergence from what is currently in vogue is the fact that although the authors stress the dynamicity of various factors that “wax and wane” on the pathway to success, they do not even once make an explicit reference to complex dynamic systems theory (hiver et al, 2021) 237 which has started to be used to account for basically all processes involved in l2 learning and teaching, and there is no sign of the related terminological apparatus. i find this stance laudable for the simple reason that dynamicity can be explained in different ways, the fact that it is an obvious part of life does not automatically indicate that some methodological choices are superior to others, and it is perhaps pointless to convince anybody of the fact that l2 learning and teaching are complex without providing feasible advice on how to tackle such complexity. the final merit of the book that i would like to emphasize is that it is highly readable, a quality that stems from the fact that the authors know how to talk about difficult things in an accessible way. this is indeed a crucial skill that many researchers either do not possess or are reluctant to display perhaps for fear of not sounding academic enough. while i wholeheartedly subscribe to the belief that reviews should not simply be puff pieces but present a balanced evaluation of any academic work, it is a tough call to find fault with this excellent publication. when i started reading it, i initially had the impression that it is not adequately grounded in sla literature and that perhaps more space should be devoted to the presentation of relevant theories and empirical studies. as i started to dig deeper into the book, i quickly realized that such an approach represents one of its most important strengths. this is because the decision to first present the main themes illustrated with relevant excerpts and only later to interpret the findings in the light of existing empirical evidence piques readers’ interest and makes the book highly approachable not only to theorists and researchers but also to students in ba, ma and phd programs as well as in-service teachers. a more valid criticism is related to the marginal attention given to language learning strategies which may be logically assumed to play a pivotal role in attaining success but are summarized on little over three pages. while i am aware that this comment is reflective of my own research interests and the authors may have chosen to prioritize other aspects of the learning trajectories, i still believe that more examples of actions and thoughts that the participants drew upon to make the learning process more effective would have been invaluable for anyone involved in l2 learning and teaching. obviously, this shortcoming, if it can even be described in such a way, is subjective and pales in comparison to all the merits of the book which offers invaluable insights into the intricate processes that allow l2 learners to achieve nativelike proficiency in different conditions. in my view, the volume constitutes an enduring legacy that zoltán dörnyei leaves with us, a legacy that will surely be carried on by his amazing co-author katarina mentzelopoulos and other sla researchers who wish to unveil the profound mystery of highly successful l2 learning. indeed, it is incumbent upon us to carry on with empirical investigations in this area not only to further advance our understanding 238 of this process but also to make l2 instruction in different contexts more effective. this need is so aptly expressed by the authors in the conclusion to the volume: “while this is yet a first foray into the psychological experiences of exceptional language learners, we believe that we have at least begun to pull back the curtain on advanced ultimate attainment for the benefit of learners, teachers, and researchers alike, and we hope to have sparked enough curiosity in the topic to inspire further research” (p. 173). i am sanguine that the sla community will rise to the challenge and we will soon see many more forays into this still littleknown territory and the paths to success in l2 learning as well as signposts along these paths will become more fully illuminated in the near future. reviewed by mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl 239 references aronin, l., & singleton, d. (2008). multilingualism as a new linguistic dispensation. international journal of multilingualism, 5(1), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.2167/ijm072.0 biedroń, a., & pawlak, m. (2016). new conceptualizations of linguistic giftedness. language teaching, 49, 467-489. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261444815000439 braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 33, 77-101. dewaele, j.-m., bak, t.-h., & ortega, l. (2019). why the typical “native speaker” has mud on its face. in n. slavkov, s. m. pfeifer, & n. kerschhofer-puhalo (eds.), changing face of the “native speaker”: perspectives from multilingualism and globalization. de gruyter. dörnyei, z. (2005). the psychology of the language learner: individual differences in second language acquisition. lawrence erlbaum. dörnyei, z. (2020). innovations and challenges in language learning motivation. routledge. dörnyei, z., & ryan, s. (2015). the psychology of the language learner revisited. routledge. dörnyei, z., & ushioda, e. (2021). teaching and researching motivation (3rd ed.). routledge. griffiths, c. (ed.). (2008). lessons from good language learners. cambridge university press. hiver, p., al-hoorie, a., & evans, r. (2022). complex dynamic systems theory in language learning: a scoping review of 25 years of research. studies in second language acquisition, 44(4), 913-941. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0272263121000553 hyltenstam, k, bartning, i., & fant, l. (eds.). (2018). high-level language proficiency in second language and multilingual contexts. cambridge university press. mentzelopoulos, k., & dörnyei, z. (2023). stories from exceptional language learners who have achieved nativelike proficiency. multilingual matters. muir, c., dörnyei, z., & adolphs, s. (2019). role models in language learning: results of a large-scale international survey. applied linguistics, 42, 1-23. pawlak, m., csizér, k., zawodniak, j., & kruk, m. (2022). investigating grit in second language learning: the role of individual difference factors and background variables. language teaching research. https://doi.org/10.1177/13621688221105775 rubin, j. (1975). what the “good language learner” can teach us. tesol quarterly, 9, 41-51. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: marek derenowski (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) language editor: melanie ellis (language teacher training college, zabrze) vol. 4 no. 4 december 2014 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham/university of new south wales, sydney) piotr cap (university of łódź) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, adam mickiewicz university, poznań) kata csizer (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) terrence odlin (ohio state university) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (university of toronto) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2014 editor: mirosław pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak marek derenowski anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · linguistic abstracts · ebsco efforts are being made to include studies in second language learning and teaching in the index of journals published by the polish ministry of science and higher education, and to have it listed by the european reference index for the humanities (erih) and the thomson reuters master journal list. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 4, number 4, december 2014 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors ....................................................................587 editorial .........................................................................................591 articles: rebecca oxford – what we can learn about strategies, language learning, and life from two extreme cases: the role of well-being theory ......... 593 danuta główka – the impact of gender on attainment in learning english as a foreign language ...................................................................... 617 colleen neary-sundquist – the use of pragmatic markers across proficiency levels in second language speech ................................. 637 sasha s. euler – assessing instructional effects of proficiency-level efl pronunciation teaching under a connected speech-based approach .....665 rupert walsh, mark wyatt – contextual factors, methodological principles and teacher cognition ..................................................................... 693 book reviews ................................................................................. 719 reviewers for volume 4/2014 ......................................................... 725 notes to contributors .....................................................................727 587 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors sasha s. euler is a teacher of english and ethics, teacher trainer and author. he holds degrees and certificates in tefl, english linguistics, philosophical ethics and pedagogical psychology. his publications are predominantly centered on pronunciation pedagogy and classroom psychology. contact data: university of trier, universitätsring 15, 54286 trier (eulers@hotmail.co.uk) danuta główka, phd, is a senior lecturer at the higher vocational state school in leszno, poland. she teaches introduction to linguistics, the history of the english language and efl grammar. her main areas of interest are sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, and applied linguistics with primary focus on individual differences in second language acquisition. contact data: państwowa wyższa szkoła zawodowa im. jana amosa komeńskiego w lesznie, ul. adama mickiewicza 5, 64-100 leszno (danuta.glowka@pwsz.edu.pl) rebecca oxford is professor emerita and distinguished scholar-teacher, university of maryland, and is currently an adjunct professor of psychology and language teaching at two campuses of the university of alabama, usa. she has published more than 200 articles and chapters, a dozen books, and six journal special issues on learning strategies, individual differences, culture, teaching methods, and peace, as well as co-editing two book series, “tapestry” (heinle) and “transforming education for the future” (information age publishing). her lifetime achievement award states, “rebecca oxford's research on learning strategies changed the way the world teaches languages.” she has presented research in 42 countries. contact data: rebeccaoxford@gmail.com mirosław pawlak is professor of english in the english department at the faculty of pedagogy and fine arts of adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland. his main areas of interest are sla theory and research, form-focused instruction, 588 classroom discourse, learner autonomy, communication and learning strategies, individual learner differences and pronunciation teaching. his recent publications include error correction in the foreign language classroom. reconsidering the issues (2012, adam mickiewicz university press) and several edited collections on learner autonomy, language policies of the council of europe, form-focused instruction, speaking in a foreign language and individual learner differences. contact details: department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, ul. nowy świat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl) rupert walsh has been teaching efl and eap in the uk and portugal since 2000. currently based at the university of portsmouth, he tutors on english language elements of degree courses for large cohorts of international students. he has also championed individual eap tutorial support within the university and writes academic english reference materials. rupert’s research interests include teacher cognition and the role of contextual factors in shaping teachers’ instructional practices. he received his ma (distinction) in applied linguistics and tesol from the university of portsmouth in 2012. contact data: university tutor in efl, school of languages and area studies, university of portsmouth, park building 4.06 (rupert.walsh@port.ac.uk) mark wyatt has worked in thailand, nepal, oman and the uk, teaching, teacher training and managing teachers. projects he has worked on include a bed tesl for malaysian pre-service teachers; he recently visited malaysia to moderate the practicum. currently a senior lecturer in english language and linguistics at the university of portsmouth, mark teaches research skills, linguistics and communication, supervises ma and phd students, and co-convenes a language education research group. his research interests include investigating teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs from a qualitative perspective, and exploratory action research. he has a phd in education from the university of leeds. contact data: senior lecturer in ell, school of languages and area studies, university of portsmouth, park building 2.04 (mark.wyatt@port.ac.uk) colleen neary-sundquist, phd is an assistant professor of applied linguistics in the school of languages and cultures at purdue university, west lafayette, usa. her research interests include the use of corpora in language teaching and research, task-based language teaching, the development of complexity in learner language, and materials development for language teaching. she has taught both german and english as second languages and regularly teaches graduate courses 589 on language pedagogy and theories of second language acquisition. contact data: purdue university, school of languages and cultures, 640 oval drive, west lafayette, in 47907, usa (e-mail: cnearysu@purdue.edu) 55 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (1). 2019. 55-82 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.1.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt motivation and emotion in the efl learning experience of romanian adolescent students: two contrasting cases liana maria pavelescu guildford college, guildford, uk https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1564-9139 lpavelescu@guildford.ac.uk abstract the aim of this study was to investigate the language learning motivation of two efl teenage students in romania and the link between motivation and the emotional dimensions of these adolescents’ learning experiences. while language learning motivation has been widely researched, its relationship with emotion in the learning experience has not been examined in depth thus far. to gain deep insight into this relationship, the present study used various qualitative methods: a written task, multiple semi-structured interviews with the students and their teachers, and prolonged lesson observation. the findings showed that the learners’ motivation and emotions were closely intertwined in their learning experiences in idiosyncratic ways. mika (pseudonym) experienced the prevalent emotion of love of english and was a highly motivated learner. in her out-of-class learning experience, her motivation was linked to her emotions towards her favorite singer. in her classroom learning experience, her motivation was shaped by her teacher’s encouragement and support. kate (pseudonym) did not reportedly experience a dominant emotion towards english and had a rather weak motivation. the absence of an expressed dominant emotion towards english was linked to her classroom learning experience before high school, namely to her teacher’s lack of encouragement, which hindered her motivation. by focusing on two contrasting cases of learners, this study has foregrounded the role of the emotional aspects of the language learning experience in shaping motivation, showing how strong positive emotions enhance and sustain motivation and how the lack of such emotions hinders motivation. keywords: adolescent students; efl; emotions; learning experience; motivation liana maria pavelescu 56 1. introduction motivation, defined as “a complex of processes shaping and sustaining learner involvement in learning” (ushioda, 2001, p. 121), offers the main stimulus to start learning a language and acts as “the driving force” that moves the language learning process forward (dörnyei, 2005, p. 65). the importance of motivation in language learning has been emphasized by numerous researchers (e.g., dörnyei & ushioda, 2011; ferrari, 2013; ushioda, 2001; ushioda & chen, 2011). ferrari (2013), for instance, investigated the factors which shaped and maintained the motivation of learners of italian during a beginner’s course and found that the learners’ motivation was essentially sustained by their positive learning experience and the classroom interpersonal dynamics. since these learners’ reasons for learning italian included “a love affair with italy, its culture and language” (p. 122), ferrari’s study points to a relationship between emotions and motivation in the learning experience, igniting interest in a more in-depth understanding of this relationship. alongside motivation, emotions, defined as “short-lived, feeling-arousalpurposive-expressive phenomena that help us adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events” (reeve, 2009, p. 301), have been shown to play a vital role in the language learning experience (see aragão, 2011; dewaele, 2015; imai, 2010; mercer, 2014; swain, 2013). for example, aragão (2011), in his study of the relationship between emotions, beliefs and actions in students enrolled in a language teacher education course at a brazilian university, found that emotions are closely related to beliefs, that is, beliefs in the students’ self-concept and beliefs about classmates and the teacher, and this interplay is linked to actions, to how students behave in their learning environment. such findings highlight the importance of emotions in learners’ decision to engage or not to engage in language learning. despite the importance of emotions in the learning experience, classroom language learning often views emotional expression as an unnecessary or nonessential aspect, which leaves learners unable to express their emotions in the foreign language, vulnerable to emotion talk and thus unprepared for the real world (pavlenko, 2005). as learners’ emotions are aspects which tend to be neglected in the foreign language classroom and which are not only present but also crucial in students’ in-class and out-of-class experiences, this study aims to gain richer insight into the emotional dimension of students’ language learning experience. the need for research to investigate the relationship between emotions and motivation has been repeatedly pointed out (e.g., gregersen & macintyre, 2014; macintyre & gregersen, 2012). macintyre and gregersen (2012) and gregersen and macintyre (2014) note that emotion has a motivating force since motivation and emotion in the efl learning experience of romanian adolescent students: two. . . 57 it produces an impetus to act. drawing on work on emotion in positive psychology (see fredrickson, 2001, 2003, 2006), the authors describe positive emotions as broadening an individual’s perspective and negative emotions as narrowing an individual’s focus. while negative emotions such as anxiety have been the focus of much language learning research (e.g., gkonou, 2011, 2015; gkonou, daubney, & dewaele, 2017; horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986), there have not been many studies on positive emotions in the language learning experience. this study will reveal more insight into the role of positive emotions in the learning experience. given the link between emotions and motivation in the language learning experience and the fact that adolescence is characterized by emotional turmoil as learners are challenged to (re)construct themselves and find their identity as well as appropriate ways of expressing these new selves (legutke, 2012), this study aims to investigate how motivation is shaped by emotions in adolescents’ foreign language learning experience. 2. literature review since emotions and motivation are viewed as being socially mediated, the literature review will present sociocultural theory and a view of emotions and motivation within this theoretical framework. it will focus on motivation as conceptualized from a self system perspective (dörnyei, 2009; lamb, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2012), the relationship between emotions and the self system (miyahara, 2014), and efl motivation as situated within the romanian context (taylor, 2010, 2013). sociocultural theory is a theory of mind, of higher mental functions which are mediated by culturally constructed artifacts and social relationships (lantolf & thorne, 2006). the language learner is thus seen as a “person-in-context” (ushioda, 2009). the person-in-context relational approach to motivation places an emphasis on a mutual relationship between people and context. not only does the context shape the person, but the person also shapes their context through their role as a “self-reflective intentional agent” (ushioda, 2009, p. 218). as ushioda (2007) notes, “sociocultural theory seems to offer a particularly rich and valuable framework that can accommodate current perspectives on motivation, and that can illuminate . . . the interaction between individual and social forces” (p. 15). emotion has been included by authors such as mahn and john-steiner (2002) to expand sociocultural theory. they argue that an understanding of students’ perezhivanie, defined as “lived or emotional experience” (p. 49), can lead to a transformative classroom environment through engaging, meaningful learning. interpersonal relationships in the classroom are shown to constitute a fundamental part of students’ perezhivanie. the crucial role of social relationships in the construction of emotions has also been emphasized by imai (2010). in his study of efl language liana maria pavelescu 58 learners’ emotions in collaborative work, imai found that “emotions . . . are socially constructed through people’s intersubjective encounters” (p. 283). in addition to emotion, motivation is another aspect of interest in this study since motivation “moves a person to make certain choices, to engage in action, to expend effort and persist in action” (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, p. 3). motivation has been conceptualized from an l2 self system perspective by dörnyei (2009). the l2 motivational self system has three components: the ideal l2 self, which represents “the person we would like to become” (p. 29), the ought-to l2 self, which refers to “the attributes that one believes one ought to possess to meet expectations and to avoid possible negative outcomes” (p. 29), and the l2 learning experience, which refers to “situated . . . motives related to the immediate learning environment and experience” (p. 29). imagery is the crucial element of possible selves theory (dörnyei, 2009). as dörnyei explains, mental imagery, the image of a desired future, plays an important role since it has motivating power. imagery is thus a valuable asset, and the relationship between mental images and emotions can provide students with powerful motivation to learn (arnold, 1999). the present study looks at motivation through the lens of dörnyei’s (2009) l2 motivational self system. there is a growing body of research on motivation as framed within dörnyei’s l2 self system. among such research are lamb’s (2007, 2009, 2011, 2012) studies, which highlight the link between future l2 selves, autonomy/agency and motivation in an efl context. in his research with junior high school students and older teenagers in indonesia, lamb found that more motivated learners had more internalized, vivid, elaborated and clearly shaped visions of their future l2 selves. the studies reported pointed out that ideal l2 selves had a stronger motivational power in the long term than ought-to l2 selves. learners with strong ideal l2 selves saw the possibilities available to them through knowledge of english, while students with strong ought-to l2 selves were more concerned with the possible negative consequences of not mastering english. despite the rich insight gained into motivation, the above-mentioned studies do not reveal insights into the emotions experienced by learners and their relationship with motivation in the language learning experience. as for emotions and future selves, miyahara’s (2014) study is among the few to examine this relationship. drawing on dörnyei’s (2009) concept of the ideal l2 self, miyahara investigates how learners construct their identity through visions of their future selves participating in the community of english users and how emotions are engaged in this process. the findings suggest that positive emotions enable students to become proactive learners and exhibit flexibility in responding to their social environment. while the study reveals that emotions and the experiential are intertwined in the transformative and developmental motivation and emotion in the efl learning experience of romanian adolescent students: two. . . 59 process which constitutes learners’ ideal l2 self, the role of emotions in students’ language learning experiences and the link between emotion and the future l2 self are not explored in depth. miyahara’s study points to a research gap that the present study is attempting to fill. while motivation has been investigated in various efl contexts (see lamb’s above-mentioned studies), adolescents’ motivation to learn english as a foreign language in romania has not been widely explored. among the few researchers who have investigated motivation within the romanian context is taylor (2010, 2013). taylor (2013) reports on the qualitative results of two mixed-method studies conducted with teenagers, with ages ranging between 14 and 19, who were studying in several secondary schools. the findings of the semi-structured interviews revealed a relationship between the students’ motivation and the teacher’s motivation: the pupils stated that their motivation to learn english depended on their teacher’s motivation. in her study of 1,045 adolescents learning efl in five secondary schools, taylor (2010) found that the teachers were the main motivators in the students’ classrooms: teachers’ awareness of the students’ interests and passions, of what made them feel “themselves” in and outside the classroom, was linked to the teenagers’ meaningful engagement in learning. while the present study also investigates adolescents’ motivation, it adds the emotional dimension of their english learning experience, exploring its relationship with motivation. the study has been guided by the following research questions: 1. is language learning motivation linked to the emotional dimension of adolescent students’ efl learning experience? 2. if so, what kind of emotions is motivation linked to and in what ways is motivation shaped by emotions in teenagers’ efl learning experience? 3. research methods the methodological approach used in the present research is a multiple case study. since the study aimed at providing a rich description and at using multiple data sources and methods, the case study approach was deemed suitable. although the case is at the core of such studies, the goal is “to gain a thorough understanding of the phenomenon being studied” (duff, 2014, p. 237). 3.1. research context and participants the focus of the study was on two female teenagers learning english as a foreign language in a state high school in a town located in the southern part of romania. in addition to regular classes, there are four bilingual classes offered at this liana maria pavelescu 60 high school: english, french, german and spanish. the participating learners’ background information is shown in table 1. table 1 participants’ background information participant pseudonym age foreign languages known grade / type of class 1 mika 18 english, french, spanish, italian eleventh / english bilingual1 2 kate 16 english, french tenth / philology2 3.2. data collection in the present study, a range of data sources were used: a written task, semistructured student and teacher interviews and lesson observations. such measures were applied to allow for the triangulation of methods and data sources as well as for deep engagement. 3.2.1. the written language learning history task the language learning history is the written task completed by the participants. this task was included in the study since language learning histories “can provide valuable information about who the learners are,” which “can be instrumental in understanding a number of language learning issues, including motivation, affect . . .” (murray, 2009, p. 48). language learners’ perspectives on their learning experiences are viewed as being particularly important since the language learner is “a crucial witness of his or her own learning process” (dewaele, 2005, p. 369). the language learning history task was intended to offer a holistic picture of the participants’ language learning experience while at the same time providing an opportunity to explore the most salient aspects of the students’ learning experience during the first interview. the learners who agreed to participate in the study received the written task by email and, once they completed it, they sent it to the researcher. the language learning history task was written in english. before data collection, the author wrote her own language learning history as an efl learner in romania. the history was not written with specific 1 the english bilingual class is the only course in the romanian education system where students are divided into two groups in the english class, each group working with a different teacher. in the english bilingual class, students have five integrated skills english classes a week and a sixth class, taught in english, whose focus is on anglo-american culture and civilization. bilingual students also have all the other subjects that pupils in regular classes have, taught in romanian. 2 the philology class is a humanities-focused class: the focus is on the romanian language and literature and foreign languages (two compulsory foreign languages). the learners have three integrated skills english classes a week. motivation and emotion in the efl learning experience of romanian adolescent students: two. . . 61 guidelines in mind. by reading it once completed, the author noticed that the narrative revealed vivid memories of people, experiences, and events. several guiding questions emerged from the researcher’s written language learning history. these questions were used in the instructions as guidelines although the students were encouraged to write in as much detail as possible (see appendix for a full list of the instructions and guidelines of the written task). 3.2.2. interviews three semi-structured interviews with each participating student were conducted throughout the school semester. i chose semi-structured interviews to help me maintain the focus on the research topic, and at the same time to give me the freedom to address issues emerging during the interviews. the questions of the first interview guide arose from the reading of the literature. the first interview was conducted between the end of february and the first half of march 2014. the main areas explored in the first interview were: the language learning history, feelings towards learning english, autonomy, contextual factors and motivation (for the full interview guide, see pavelescu, 2017). the second interview was conducted in april and may, and the third interview took place in june 2014. the second and third interviews were mainly focused on the lesson observations, being conducted to gain a more in-depth understanding of the participants’ classroom behavior and richer insight into their learning experience. they contained questions which focused on the types of activities the students did in the classroom, on how they felt about these activities and on how the students participated in these activities during the lessons. the questions were designed by carefully reading the lesson observation notes. moreover, the third interview also contained questions related to the students’ reasons for learning english at the end of the semester to see if there were any changes in their motivation to learn english at the end of the semester compared to the beginning of the semester. the third interview also included questions on what the students had liked and disliked about learning english that semester to elicit their emotions towards their in-class learning experience that semester. all the interviews with the participating students were conducted in english, but the interviewees were made aware that they could resort to their native language at any time. the decision to conduct the interviews in english was based on the belief that the participating students should benefit from the research project not only through an increased self-awareness that they as language learners might gain but also by having more opportunities for out-of-class speaking practice in a context where such opportunities are limited. such a pragmatic and ethical consideration was thus viewed as being particularly important in a study which involved foreign language learners. liana maria pavelescu 62 in addition to the learners, teachers are also viewed as significant witnesses to the students’ english learning. since the student interviews are based on self-reports, the teacher interviews were intended to be used to gain richer insight into the pupils’ english-related emotions and motivation by adding another perspective. the teacher interviews were guided by three key questions, whose focus was on a description of the participants as english learners, what they liked in the english class and what motivated them in learning english. one interview was conducted to provide information about mika and one about kate. the interviews with the teachers were conducted in romanian. pseudonyms were employed: mrs. mitchell is the pseudonym used for mika’s teacher, while mrs. vaughn is the pseudonym used for kate’s teacher. both were experienced efl teachers whose teaching experience was 28 and 24 years, respectively. in the recruitment of participants, the teachers were approached first. with their help, i recruited the participating learners by going to these teachers’ classrooms and talking to their students. 3.2.3. lesson observations the lesson observations focused on the learners’ classroom behavior: how they participated in the english lessons and how they interacted with their classmates and teacher. lesson observations were used as it was believed that “the classroom becomes a focal point where the creativity unleashed by . . . adolescence can inspire learning, but where also the ambiguities and the turbulence of these phases can render learning quite difficult or even problematic” (legutke, 2012, p. 112). the relational dynamics between the participating learners and their teacher and between the participants and their classmates, or what dörnyei and murphey (2003) refer to as group dynamics in the language classroom, was viewed as important since, as a community of practice, the classroom can “empower language learner agency by reinforcing pupil identities as current or future l2 speakers” (lamb, 2013, p. 41). the participating students were observed during 14 lessons between february and june 2014 (during the second school semester). the lesson observations were open and unstructured. their focus was on what the participating students were doing during the lessons (description) and on the researcher’s immediate interpretation of the students’ behavior. therefore, the observation sheet consisted of two columns: “what the s is doing” and “comments.” 3.3. data analysis the qualitative analysis software nvivo 10 was employed to code the data. furthermore, the procedure of inter-rater coding was carried out. the kappa unweighted motivation and emotion in the efl learning experience of romanian adolescent students: two. . . 63 average for all codes and sources used was 0.78, revealing an acceptable level of agreement between the two coders. the data were coded keeping the sociocultural theory in mind: close attention was paid to how emotions and motivation were shaped by social relationships and artifacts in the learners’ sociocultural context. in addition, the coding was also data-driven: no theoretical construct was imposed on the data (see ratner, 2013), and the coding was done “in a way that is faithful to the words spoken,” “grounding all conclusions in coded responses” (ratner, 2013, p. 315). codes were grouped under categories. the first category, core positive emotions, was comprised of the main codes love and liking (for a full list of codes, see pavelescu, 2017). it was based on the researcher’s interpretation of what was central for each learner in terms of english language learning emotions. one of the subcodes of the main code love was love: motivation, which showed the link between this positive emotion and motivation in the learning experience. the following extract from an interview with mika is an example of a text segment coded at the love-motivation code (i – interviewer, m – mika): “i: ok. what are your reasons for learning english? why, why do you learn english? m: “ahm …3 i love, i love english, actually.” the distinction between love and liking was made according to the criterion of whether or not the emotion was related to contextual factors. love was used to mark instances where the verbal expression of this strong positive emotion was not tied to specific contextual factors but, rather, referred to more general accounts which place love at the center of learners’ experiences. liking was used in cases where love was linked to contextual factors. the liking code had several subcodes, such as liking: classroom, liking: culture-related aspects of english, and liking: english use outside the classroom. the second category was projections and consisted of codes such as future goals. this category was essentially based on the analysis of the ways the participating learners talked about their future. future goals was further divided into subcodes, such as future goals: interaction foreigners, future goals: career, future goals: university, and the like. the following is an example of a segment of text which is part of future goals: university: i want to study there [in the uk] because it has ”countless” educational institutions with great reviews, every single international student had the opportunity to study there and the diploma from that university is good for cv when you want to find a well-paid job. (kate’s language learning history) the third category, willingness to communicate (wtc),4 a term borrowed from the literature (see gregersen & macintyre, 2014; kang, 2005; yashima, 3 unspaced elipses like this one indicate pauses. 4 this concept was one of the main aspects investigated by the author in a larger study (see pavelescu, 2017). liana maria pavelescu 64 2012), is composed of codes such as english use outside the classroom, speaking, shyness and motivation. these codes were further divided into other codes. for instance, motivation was divided into subcodes such as motivation: determination and motivation: people. in turn, these subcodes were divided into sub-subcodes. for example, motivation: people had subcodes such as motivation: general school teacher and motivation: high school teacher. the following excerpt from an interview with kate is an example of motivation: general school teacher: i: in your language learning history you said that before high school you didn’t really feel that you were learning english. can you tell me more about that? why did you feel that way? k: because before high school our teacher always tell us, told us that we are stupid, we don’t know nothing, but she never learned us english. while some of the main codes that comprise the categories such as future goals, speaking and english use outside the classroom are self-explanatory, others are not straightforward and were selected based on connections made between the different pieces of data from the different sources through immersion in the data. such links could be made only through numerous readings of the data and an in-depth reflection on them. for instance, for willingness to communicate, it was observed that learners’ willingness to communicate in english was closely intertwined with motivation. the motivation code was thus included in the willingness to communicate category. certain segments of text, which had several interpretations, were coded at more than one code so as not to restrict their meanings. for instance, the following segment of text, which was part of mika’s written language learning history, was coded at four codes (liking, imagination, future goals and motivation): “i imagined myself and michael having a deep conversation where i used to tell him that someday i'd be a good english speaker and he does not need to learn romanian to keep our relationship going.” 4. results in describing the findings, all the data sources will be used: the written language learning history task, the student interviews, the teacher interviews and the lesson observations. mika experienced the prevalent emotion of love of english, which was closely linked to her emotions towards her role model and which enhanced her motivation to study english. as for kate, she did not reportedly experience a prevalent emotion towards english, and her motivation appeared to be hindered by the lack of an expressed dominant emotion towards english. motivation and emotion in the efl learning experience of romanian adolescent students: two. . . 65 4.1. mika’s prevalent emotion towards english, love, and its link to motivation mika’s account revealed that her motivation to learn english was closely linked to her dominant positive emotion towards english, love, which was reportedly more intense than her prevalent emotion towards her native language: i: . . . what are your reasons for learning english? why, why do you learn english? m: ahm … i love, i love english, actually. (first interview) i: . . . why are you learning english? what are your reasons for learning english, besides the fact that it is a school subject? m: well, i, i don’t have reasons or any new reasons to learn english because it is going to help me somehow. i like, i learn english and i’m learning english because i feel that way. i: you feel like … m: i feel that i like it more than i like my native language, seriously. (third interview) moreover, mika reported that she could express her feelings more easily in english than in her native language, romanian. her love for the english language emerged when she was about nine years old by listening to one of michael jackson’s songs, remember the time. she had vivid memories of the day when she had first heard the song: i was at home, i was with my mother, and i remember michael had long hair, and i said: “mum, is that a man or a woman?” and said: “is a man, is the king of pop, is michael jackson.” and it really amazed me. “wow, is michael jackson!” . . . it was a song broadcasted on mtv. (first interview) mika stated that he had made such a strong impression on her that she became a michael jackson fan that day. throughout mika’s account, it is implied that it was her love for michael jackson and his music that mediated her love of english and her motivation: what i have not said so far is where i got the motivation to learn english from. well, it's all thanks to michael jackson. (language learning history) i think it’s called pure love. i, i can never love somebody like, like i love him. (first interview) i imagined myself and michael having a deep conversation where i used to tell him that someday i'd be a good english speaker and he does not need to learn romanian to keep our relationship going. (language learning history) i: . . . and i thought it was also very interesting when you mentioned that you, you used to imagine yourself having a conversation m: yes. i: with him [michael jackson]. liana maria pavelescu 66 m: yes. and i would say: “michael, i promise that i will learn english and i will talk to you in english and you don’t need to know romanian to speak to me.” . . . m: i really wanted to, to have a conversation with him, like, you know, tell him why i love him, tell him what role, what major role he plays in my life. (first interview) the constant interweaving of her emotions towards the singer and her love of english as well as her motivation to learn the language was evident in mika’s account. the classroom activities that she liked most that semester and during the previous high school years were related to michael jackson. mika remembered that her favorite english lesson in high school had been a speaking activity during which one of her classmates had asked her what michael jackson meant to her. she stated: “so i . . . i never thought what does michael actually mean to me, but that was a really interesting question. like . . . what could he mean to me? like everything” (first interview). another instance showing how mika’s love of english was mediated by her emotional attachment to her favorite singer was revealed in her statement that her favorite text during the semester had been about michael jackson. her liking of the text was linked to her feelings for the singer since mika reportedly felt as if the text had been written especially for her. her desire to make the singer proud of her seemed to have had a great motivational force in her english learning process: “i am sure he [michael jackson] has done a great work with me and all i want is to make him proud” (language learning history). the fact that mika’s motivation to learn english was shaped by her positive emotions for the singer was also evident in her english-related experiences outside the classroom. she reported an encounter with other michael jackson fans from various countries while traveling abroad, which was perceived as a positive experience as it allowed her the opportunity to talk about her role model. mika vividly remembered the experience of meeting other michael jackson fans at a party that had been organized in italy on 29 august, the day michael jackson was born: m: there were many people from different parts of the world. i really became friends, friend with some italian girls. . . . m: they, they were speaking english as well. we also keep in touch even, even now. . . . m: there were some … ladies, i think, from america, and one of them was from england. i: yes? m: and the other one from germany, i don’t think so, i don’t, i don’t remember very well. i: did you have the opportunity to interact with them as well in english? m: yes, yes. because we have, we had the, the mm same thing to talk about. and that was michael. (first interview) motivation and emotion in the efl learning experience of romanian adolescent students: two. . . 67 her emotions towards michael jackson were also known and pointed out by her high school teacher, who mentioned mika’s admiration for the celebrity figure. the teacher remembered that she initially felt that, for mika, the passion for michael jackson represented a means of escape from her family problems: at a given moment in the ninth grade, i had the feeling that the passion for michael jackson meant rejection, an escape from the environment in which she has grown up and from the hard times that she has had to go through. i think that is what it was in the beginning . . . (interview with mrs. mitchell) earlier in her interview account, mrs. mitchell had revealed something about mika’s family background, namely that her parents got separated when mika was a child, and how she had been emotionally affected by the event. the teacher had added that mika’s mother worked abroad at the time of the interview, being the breadwinner in the family, and that mika had been raised by her grandmother. this account illuminated something that mika had written in her language learning narrative: “he [michael jackson] has been my . . . protector through everything i have been through.” the description of the singer as her protector confirmed the teacher’s opinion that mika’s passion for michael jackson had constituted a refuge at a difficult time in her life. the fact that her parents’ divorce emotionally affected mika to a great extent was also confirmed by a classroom episode captured during one of the lesson observations. mika suddenly contributed to a speaking activity, picture-based and cambridge type, while another student was talking. the pictures were of newlyweds going on their honeymoon and of students graduating from college. when one of mika’s classmates said that she believed that the wedding was a more important event than university graduation and that she would remember the wedding most, mika asked her: “but what if you get divorced, if you end up divorcing your husband? would you still remember marriage most?” (lesson observation 9). in the interview, mika was asked why she had suddenly decided to participate in the speaking activity after having been quiet initially. she suggested that she had felt a strong impetus to express her opinion as it diverged from her classmate’s: m: i don’t know. i felt like i had to do something about that because, in my opinion, the other picture with the students graduating from school. i: yes. m: was the most memorable event in someone’s life. i: mhm. m: and they’re like, no, dreamers, wow, getting married is everything one can do in life and that is, you know, so happy and, but i didn’t think so, and i don’t think so. and i asked her: “what if you end up getting a divorce?” i: yes. liana maria pavelescu 68 m: “would it still be memorable?” the divorce would be [laughs] memorable, but what about the, you know, wedding? (third interview) mika’s sudden, strong urge to contribute to the speaking activity, her emotional outburst, can be explained by her personal history, namely by her family background. a belief that mika’s family environment had affected her both emotionally and socially was expressed by her teacher during the interview. mika’s teacher stated that mika had a strong desire for achievement in order to overcome her social condition, which, in the teacher’s opinion, motivated her the most in learning english: her desire to make a future for herself although she knows very well that she will not have much material support from her parents and that probably motivates her more than in the case of a kid with both parents, with normal material possibilities, not necessarily extraordinary, to become accomplished, to fight by herself in order to overcome her condition. (interview with mrs. mitchell) at school, mika began to learn english in the fifth grade. the episode mika told in her language learning history revealed how her motivation to learn english was enhanced when she got the highest mark in her class on a test paper, and the teacher rewarded her with “tons of nice words.” mika reportedly experienced intense happiness and became determined to continue to study english. that crucial moment in her english language learning experience in the classroom and its powerful impact on her motivation were emphasized by the following comment: “i said to myself ‘i need to do it. i must do it. i can't stop here’” (language learning history). the role of the teacher she had before high school in her motivation to learn english was further stressed: m: because i think the, the teacher played a major role in my motivation in learning english because she had so much faith in me. . . . i: so, your fifth grade teacher. m: my fifth grade teacher, yeah. . . . m: she said: “you could do it, you can do it, you must do it.” (first interview) her account shows that the positive emotions of pride and happiness in having obtained the highest mark in the class and the teacher’s praise and encouragement had played a very important role in mika’s motivation to learn english in the classroom before high school. the prevalent positive emotion experienced towards english also appeared to have shaped mika’s vision of herself in ten years’ time and her mental image of britain: she imagined herself living in the uk or the us in the future motivation and emotion in the efl learning experience of romanian adolescent students: two. . . 69 and described england as “a dream place where one can spend their entire life in” (first interview). she had a clearly shaped vision of herself working as the manager of a cruise ship. her strong motivation, her determination to succeed in her english learning process was captured in the following comment: “if you want to do something, you can do something, and nobody can stand in your way. so, i’m going to do this [learn english]” (third interview). 4.2. kate’s lack of an expressed prevalent emotion towards english and its link to motivation as far as kate is concerned, there was a lack of an expressed prevalent emotion towards english in her account. moreover, in her teacher’s interview comments, there was an absence of references to a dominant emotion towards english. there was nothing in the teacher’s account that pointed to a specific prevalent emotion experienced by kate towards english. furthermore, the teacher could not remember a specific lesson that kate particularly enjoyed in her english classroom during high school, which further stresses the lack of a prevalent positive emotion experienced by kate towards english. although she started studying english when she was 11 years old, in an intensive english class, kate felt that she had not learnt any english before high school because of her teacher: i started to learn english five years ago, but before college [high school] i hadn't learnt english for real at school, because of my teacher who wasn't keen to teach us any low level of knowledge in english, so when i went to college [high school] i had to do meditations [take private tutoring classes] every week to recover the english skills that i had never heard of them till then. (language learning history) her interview account revealed how her teacher used to discourage and offend kate and her classmates, calling them “stupid” and telling them that they did not know anything. kate implied that it did not bother her that they did not do anything at school with regard to english but that it was so hard in high school that she needed to take private tutoring lessons. kate’s account suggests that her interactions with her teacher before high school played a very important role in her emotions and attitude towards english and her english learning experience since her teacher seemed to have inhibited kate’s self-esteem as a learner. the fact that this low self-esteem followed her in high school was suggested by her high school teacher (t) in her description of kate: t: she is withdrawn, but, still, she participates in class when she is called upon, but she doesn’t take the initiative in participating very often. liana maria pavelescu 70 i: yes. t: she waits to be invited to participate (interview with mrs. vaughn). kate reported that her english teacher before high school had been her form master, and she was using all class time during the english classes, that is four classes a week, to talk about the students’ discipline-related problems. english appears to have been absent from kate’s school life before high school. this absence of english in her classroom also seemed to be linked to an absence of agency as far as english was concerned since her self-reports revealed no attempts to learn english outside school during that time. the powerful negative impact of the teacher she had before high school on her emotions towards english and her learning process was emphasized later in kate’s account: she stated that lack of encouragement, for instance from teachers and relatives (her grandmother), constituted the main obstacle in her english learning. her comment implied that such a lack of encouragement hindered her motivation in learning english. moreover, kate reported that the learning process was difficult, a perception which also seemed to have been linked to the teacher kate had had before high school. a lack of confidence related to the english teacher she had had before high school also seemed to manifest itself in kate’s language learning experiences outside the classroom. one of kate’s most vivid memories regarding her english learning experiences outside the classroom, the first time she talked to native speakers of english, had not been a positive experience. when asked how she felt during that communicative situation, kate reported: “i, i feel shy and i can’t say nothing . . .” (first interview). moreover, her skype communication in english with her father was not reported as being a positive out-of-class learning experience but rather as an anxiety-provoking experience: i: . . . in your language learning history, you say that your father has played an important role in your learning process. k: yeah. i: and you also say that he usually talks to you in english. k: yeah. i: for you to practice. . . . k: yeah. and we, we usually talk on skype. i: on skype? k: yeah. and there he try to… talk to me in english. . . . k: not all the time he … reuseste [succeeds]. i: he succeeds. k: to, to… motivation and emotion in the efl learning experience of romanian adolescent students: two. . . 71 i: to make you speak? k: yeah. . . . k: but she, he, but he try to. i: . . . so . . . why are there times when you don’t want to speak to him in english? . . . k: when i don’t know the words or i’m not sure about something. (first interview) kate’s nervousness, her lack of self-confidence also emerged in the english classroom, during the lessons observations. for instance, during a picture-based speaking activity which focused on different forms of entertainment, kate’s speech involved pauses and hesitations when the teacher called on her to talk about the pictures (lesson observation 11). kate’s father worked as a doctor in the uk, and kate saw herself at her father’s at university. she essentially viewed english as providing her with access to a university in england, which seemed to have been her main reason for studying english. although she said that there were numerous universities with excellent reviews in the uk, she did not have a clear image of herself studying at a particular university: i want to study there because it has “countless” educational institutions with great reviews, every single international student had the opportunity to study there and the diploma from that university is good for cv when you want to find a well-paid job. (language learning history) kate did not seem to have her own, personal, internalized vision for the future with regard to english. rather, she had a more general, widespread vision of finding a well-paid job faster after having obtained a diploma from a university in the uk and adding that diploma to her cv. this was stressed later in her account: she stated that she saw english as still playing a role in her life in ten years’ time because her future employer would require knowledge of a foreign language. she expressed her belief that knowing a foreign language was necessary at the workplace, placing emphasis on the pragmatic benefits of knowing english. kate reported that she had not pictured herself living in the uk after graduating from university, her main reason being that her mother did not want to live there. there seemed to be fluctuations in kate’s motivation to learn that school year compared to the previous year. kate’s lower motivation during the year when the study was conducted was implied by the teacher’s comments that kate was less enthusiastic about learning english compared with the previous school year. in the ninth grade, kate seemed to be mainly motivated by her desire to participate in english contests such as the olympiad: liana maria pavelescu 72 t: . . . although last year she really wanted to … prove that she knows, that she … she wanted to participate in the olympiad. she insisted very much that i help her to prepare for the olympiad. i helped her, she went to the olympiad, but she didn’t … i don’t remember, she didn’t win a prize or something. but she wanted to participate. (interview with mrs. vaughn) t: . . . this year, i don’t know, she hasn’t manifested herself much, but last year, yes, she enjoyed participating much more. she really put her hand up all the time. i: yes. t: at least during the second semester she had driven me crazy, at a certain point she wanted to participate all the time. and now, i don’t know, she has changed a little compared to last year. . . . i: yes. was it last year that she participated in the olympiad? t: mhm. (interview with mrs. vaughn) kate’s low motivation that school year was further emphasized by the teacher in her comments that, although kate was going to take the cambridge exam the following year, she had not practiced enough for the exam. in the teacher’s own words: t: . . . i’ve heard her saying that she intends to take the cambridge exam next year, that she would like to take the cambridge exam. but … for example this year it doesn’t seem to me that she has practiced enough for her to … be able to take it. i mean, the cambridge exam involves hard work and a lot of effort channeled in a certain direction. i mean, you need to know very well how to do those exercises typical for cambridge. i: yes. . . . t: and i haven’t seen her going in that direction. (interview with mrs. vaughn) as can be seen from these accounts, there was a close interplay between these two adolescent learners’ motivation to learn english and their prevalent emotion, or lack of an expressed dominant emotion towards english in their language learning experiences. mika reportedly experienced a strong positive emotion towards english, love, which was closely linked to her emotions towards her favorite celebrity figure and which enhanced and maintained her motivation in her english language learning experience. furthermore, her motivation was linked to the teacher she had had before high school and strongly shaped her vision of her future l2 self. as for kate, her account revealed the lack of an expressed dominant emotion towards english, essentially linked to the teacher she had had before high school, and the presence of a weaker motivation in her english learning experience and a less internalized english-related vision of herself in the future. motivation and emotion in the efl learning experience of romanian adolescent students: two. . . 73 5. discussion in response to the research questions, which asked if there is a relationship between emotion and motivation in the teenagers’ efl learning experience, the present study has found that the learners’ motivation to learn english and their emotions towards english were closely interconnected. emotion shaped motivation in complex, idiosyncratic ways. mika’s dominant positive emotion towards english was love. this strong positive emotion supported her motivation in her learning experience in the long term. her case has shown that love constructs and brings vividness to imagery of interactions with speakers of the target language, which in turn exerts a motivational force in the language learning experience. such findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the connection between emotion, imagery and motivation in the learning experience. in contrast, kate’s case has revealed that the lack of a prevalent positive emotion towards the language studied can hinder motivation. exploring the relationship between emotions and motivation has enabled a more in-depth understanding of teenagers’ motivational and emotional dimensions of their language learning experience within their sociocultural context. the relationship between the ideal l2 self, imagery, emotion and motivation clearly emerged from mika’s data. her vision of her ideal l2 self, that of becoming a good learner and speaker of english, appears to have been powerfully shaped by the mental projections of herself communicating with her role model, michael jackson. her account reveals the motivational force of the desire to talk to her favorite singer, the powerful role of imagination and emotion in reducing the discrepancy between mika’s initial english-related self and her wished-for english-using self. it was the interlocutor in an imaginary communicative interaction, her emotions towards him and the desire to express these emotions that seemed to have played a crucial role in her strong positive emotion towards english, love, and her reported preference for english for emotional expression. mika’s case shows that “imagination is a powerful route with which to influence emotions,” which “are central to energizing a reduction of the discrepancies between students’ present and future selves” (macintyre & gregersen, 2012, p. 200). mika’s ideal l2 self, her vision of an l2 self engaged in communication with her role model, thus enhanced her prevalent positive emotion, love of english, which in turn fueled her motivation to learn the language. this converges with miyahara’s (2014) study, which has shown that positive emotions enable students to become proactive in their language learning experience and that emotional experiences are part of students’ ideal l2 selves. for mika, the l2, english, may have also been a language of detachment from a painful experience (pavlenko, 2005), namely from her parents’ divorce. in liana maria pavelescu 74 other words, english empowered her to construct a more detached self, to detach herself from an emotionally difficult experience since her imaginary interactions with michael jackson involved the use of another language, english. such findings support wilson’s (2013) argument that the foreign language can act as a mask. this view of the foreign language as a refuge from a painful event could also explain mika’s preference for english when it comes to emotional expression. such an interpretation seems to find support in the fact that mika never mentioned her parents’ separation and talked very little about them. in addition, english was also the language linked to the imaginary intimacy between mika and her favorite singer. this learner’s case converges with pavlenko’s (2005) argument that languages of power and desire are vested with particular emotional values. these findings emerging from mika’s case also reinforce fredrickson’s (2001) argument that positive emotions such as love build not only intellectual resources but also psychological resources in the form of improved well-being over time. the complex interaction between the ought-to l2 self and contextual factors in the language learning experience was pointed out by the findings in kate’s case. for this learner, the ought-to l2 self was also strongly shaped by the motivation to meet parental and societal expectations. kate’s ought-to l2 self, studying at a university in britain, was shaped by the sense that she ought to meet her parents’ expectations but also broader expectations, such as english teachers’ or employers’ expectations of students to get a university degree in an english-speaking country. a rather strong ought-to l2 self clearly emerged in kate’s english learning. her comment that she would not be able to study in the uk if she did not know english suggests a fear of negative outcomes, in particular inability to go to university abroad if she did not know english well enough. this ought-to self may also be linked to meeting her parents’ expectations, to the pressure for her to do well in english in order to be a successful university student in england since failure would mean disappointing her parents. it emphasizes her parents’ role in shaping her future goals. kate’s case partially converges with gkonou’s (2015) findings. while it supports gkonou’s argument that noticing a gap between self-perceived competence and the accomplishment of future goals can accentuate language learners’ fear of failure, it does not seem to be in line with the author’s finding that the awareness of such a gap motivates learners to act to narrow the gap. the findings from mika’s and kate’s cases have revealed that highly motivated learners such as mika have a more internalized and vivid vision of their future l2 selves, while less motivated learners such as kate lack an internalized image of future l2 selves. such results confirm lamb’s (2007, 2009, 2011, 2012) finding that that ideal l2 selves have a stronger motivational power in the long term than ought-to l2 selves. motivation and emotion in the efl learning experience of romanian adolescent students: two. . . 75 another factor in the participating students’ motivation to learn english is related to the relationship between them and their teachers. the findings have shown that mika’s classroom interactions with her english teacher before high school and the support provided by the teacher gave rise to positive emotions such as pride and happiness, which nurtured her motivation. the data in mika’s case converge with mahn and john-steiner’s (2002) findings that caring support can enhance students’ confidence and promote learning. in contrast, kate’s case has shown that teachers can also hinder the emergence of positive emotions, which in turn weakens motivation in the language learning experience. the findings from mika’s and kate’s cases confirm the existence of a relationship between students’ motivation and their teachers’ motivation, which was also found in taylor’s (2010; 2013) research. the motivation of the teacher mika had before high school seemed to be manifested in this teacher’s interest in her students and in the encouragement she offered in the classroom, which enhanced mika’s motivation and supported her learning. in contrast, the lack of motivation of the teacher kate had before high school appeared to have manifested itself in this teacher’s lack of encouragement and learning support in her relationship with her students, which hindered kate’s self-esteem and motivation to learn english. 6. limitations and recommendations for future research given that no research is without limitations, the present study is not an exception. one of its limitations is that, since it was conducted over a school semester, it was not possible to capture numerous changes in motivation in the participants’ english learning experience. for instance, fluctuations in motivation at the end of the school year compared to the beginning of the school year were not possible to record. longitudinal case studies should thus be conducted for the dynamism of learners’ motivation to be more fully captured. such studies could offer insight into fluctuations in motivation from one semester to another or from one school year to another. another limitation is that, in the present study, the participants were in humanities-oriented classrooms, which implies an affinity towards subjects such as foreign languages. future research should consider including participants who are in classrooms with various specializations and who experience a wider range of emotions towards the foreign language studied. moreover, only female students participated. research has shown that there are gender differences in language learning motivation. for instance, it has been found that british male secondary school pupils tend not to choose to study languages they associate with emotions (see williams, burden, & lanvers, 2002). future studies liana maria pavelescu 76 should thus include both male and female teenage learners when investigating emotions and motivation in their language learning experience. 7. implications the present study has important implications for language learning and teaching. it stresses the need for teachers to view their adolescent learners not only as rational beings but also as complex emotional beings whose positive emotions towards the language studied need to be enhanced and cultivated for their motivation to be fueled in their language learning experience. the findings imply that romanian teenagers like their teachers to treat them “like real people” (taylor, 2013, p. 53). learners should thus be provided with as many opportunities as possible for their agency to emerge as they internalize knowledge and extend it to contexts that matter to them in the outside world (lantolf, 2013). as has been noted, “the quite extensive individual engagement with english outside school is not perceived in terms of learning at all, but rather as english finding its way to teenagers’ repertoires as if automatically and without conscious effort” (pitkänen-huhta & nikula, 2013, p. 118). treating language learners as real people and thus recognizing not only their cognitive but also their emotional side can be achieved through the use of humanistic activities, which “deal with enhancing self-esteem, becoming aware of one’s strengths, seeing the good in others, gaining insights into oneself, developing closer and more satisfying relationships, becoming conscious of one’s feelings and values and having a positive outlook on life” (moskowitz, 1999, p. 178). such activities are likely to make students feel good about themselves both as individuals and language learners and thus enhance positive emotions, motivation and engagement in the language learning experience. by creating opportunities for learners to share their hopes and dreams, teachers can enhance love in the language classroom (barcelos & coelho, 2016) and, with it, imagery and motivation. as dörnyei (2009) points out, teachers should include classroom activities that “can . . . serve as potent ideal self reminders” (p. 37). given the finding that imagery has motivating power in the learning experience, teachers should offer guidance for the imagery component of their students’ possible l2 selves to be developed. just like athletes use guided imagery during their training in sports performance (dörnyei, 2009, 2014), language learners need guidance in the classroom for the imagery component of their possible l2 selves to have motivational power. teachers should thus design classroom activities intended to help learners generate, strengthen and maintain such a vision of possible l2 selves in order to enhance their students’ motivation in the learning experience. as has been argued, “by invoking the imagination and using the power of motivation and emotion in the efl learning experience of romanian adolescent students: two. . . 77 positive emotion, teachers can provoke learners to respond to the dissonance found within their possible selves” (macintyre & gregersen, 2012, p. 211). 8. conclusion this study explored the interplay between language learning emotions and motivation in romanian adolescents, namely the ways in which motivation is shaped by the emotional dimensions of adolescent students’ english language learning experience. love of english was the dominant emotion which emerged in one of the participating students’ learning experience. the intense positive emotion of love was powerfully shaped by imagery and fueled motivation to learn english in the long term. in contrast, no prevalent positive emotion was found in the other student’s case. moreover, the data revealed a weaker motivation in the case of the learner who did not reportedly experience a dominant emotion towards english. the study has shown that strong 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(2012). willingness to communicate: momentary volition that results in l2 behaviour. in s. mercer, s. ryan, & m. williams (eds.), psychology for language learning: insights from research, theory and practice (pp. 119-135). basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. liana maria pavelescu 82 appendix instruction sheet for the language learning history task write your own story about your english learning experiences from the moment you began learning english until now. focus on what you consider to be more important and try to give as many details as possible. when reflecting upon your experiences, make sure you include answers to the following questions: when and where did you start learning english? how have you learned english? what is your most vivid memory regarding your english learning experiences? what opportunities have you had to use english until now? who played a particularly important role in your english learning process? in what way(s)? keep in mind that your language learning history should look like a story (the story of your english learning experiences) rather than answers to a questionnaire. 225 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (1). 2019. 225-246 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.1.10 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt a study of retrospective and concurrent foreign language learning experiences: a comparative interview study in hungary kata csizér eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1755-8142 weinkata@yahoo.com csaba kálmán eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4798-8637 csabakalman73@gmail.com abstract despite the fact that the influence of learning experiences on foreign language learning motivation has been widely acknowledged and emphasised, there are hardly any studies concentrating on these learning experiences. hence, the aim of this study is to map the language learning experiences of former and current language learners in order to provide a detailed account of the possible components of the foreign language learning experience. data were collected with the help of a qualitative interview schedule involving 22 language learners in two subsamples. ten participants are english language teachers as former foreign language learners, while 12 students, current learners of english, have also been recruited. the most important result of our study is that foreign language learning experience seems to be a complex construct including immediate and present aspects as well as self-related components and attributions. language learning success, the teacher’s personality, contact experiences, as well as attitudes towards the l2 seem to stand out as important components for both groups of learners. apart from discussing the differences and similarities between retrospective and concurrent experiences, we will provide pedagogical and research-related implications as well. keywords: l2 motivation; l2 learning experience; contact experiences; attributions kata csizér, csaba kálmán 226 1. introduction while the ideal second language (l2) self and the ought-to l2 self components of the l2 motivational self system (l2mss, dörnyei, 2005) have been extensively researched recently (boo, dörnyei, & ryan, 2015), the third component of the l2mss model, the l2 learning experience, has received markedly less attention. this might possibly be attributed to the emergence of the self in l2 motivation research around the 2010s, which dörnyei and ushioda (2011) describe as “a major reformation of previous motivational thinking by its explicit utilization of psychological theories of the self” (p. 79). as a consequence of the increased attention devoted to the self, the third component of the model, the l2 learning experience, has undeservedly become marginalized. recent treatment of the l2 learning experience as peripheral is unjustified as ever since the beginnings of l2 motivation research, the influence of the learning experience on motivation has been widely acknowledged and emphasized (dörnyei, 1994, 2009a; gardner, 1985, 2010; lamb, 2012, 2017; noels, pelletier, clément, & vallerand, 2000; ushioda, 1998, 2009; williams & burden, 1997). in dörnyei’s l2mss, the l2 learning experience comprises “situated, ‘executive’ motives related to the immediate learning environment and experience (e.g., the impact of the teacher, the curriculum, the peer group or the experience of success)” (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, p. 86). however, in our conceptualization, the l2 learning experience is a broader concept. on the one hand, it is a concurrent perception of cognitive and emotional processes, as well as external stimuli and circumstances that the learner experiences during the course of learning a foreign language in and outside the classroom. on the other hand, it can also be viewed as a synthesis of retrospective contemplation that may continuously evolve after the actual language learning has taken place. while the influences of both concurrent and retrospective language learning experiences are hypothesized to be salient on motivating learners, little research has been conducted on what similarities and differences there are between them and what kind of underlying components they consist of. in order to investigate the possible effects that concurrent and retrospective learning experiences might have in second language acquisition (sla), we need to have a clear picture of the most important aspects of these learning experiences. therefore, the aim of the study is to investigate the foreign language learning experiences of two groups of research participants: current learners of english and english teachers, as former learners of the language, in order to map the construct of the l2 learning experience (l2le) with a particular focus on phenomena not previously considered including attributions, contact experiences, and self-efficacy. hence, the research question we aim to answer a study of retrospective and concurrent foreign language learning experiences: a comparative. . . 227 is as follows: what characterizes the construct of the l2le of former and present foreign language learners? we use the term foreign language because our study is situated in the hungarian context. we present the results of our interview studies and, subsequently, based on the synthesis of the results, we analyze the findings by employing a transdisciplinary framework proposed by the douglas fir group (2016). this framework encompasses the multi-layered complexity of l2 learning and distinguishes “three levels of mutually dependent influence” (p. 24), the micro, the meso, and the macro levels. 2. background in order to present the background to this study, it is necessary not only to provide a definition of the foreign language learning experience but also to map results from various fields of sla research. first, we detail the role of experiences in l2 motivation research in general and in attribution theory in particular. next, research related to contact experiences is presented. then, cognitive and affective issues will be touched upon: the role of experiences in self-efficacy beliefs and emotional experiences in foreign language learning. finally, we summarize research related to the flow and optimal experience. 2.1. the definition of foreign language learning experience foreign language learning experience can be defined in various ways in sla, depending on which part of the concept we emphasize: language or learning. as the central problem of the field is learning a second or foreign language, learning experience can simply mean language input (dörnyei, 2009b) or, in a broader sense, using the language with other speakers. if learning is in focus, dörnyei’s (2009b) definition seems to be useful, which describes the foreign language learning experience as “situation-specific motives related to the immediate learning environment” (p. 106). in a somewhat more detailed operationalization, “it focuses on the learners’ present – rather than imagined future – experience, covering a range of situated, executive motives related to the immediate learning environment (e.g., the impact of the teacher, the curriculum, the peer group, experience of success)” (you, dörnyei, & csizér, 2016, p. 96). in the current study, as explained in the introduction, we define the foreign language learning experience in the broadest possible sense, including learners’ concurrent and teachers’ retrospective perception about situated classroom experiences as well as experiences beyond the classroom comprising cognitive and emotional processes. kata csizér, csaba kálmán 228 2.2. the foreign language learning experience in l2 motivation it is certainly not a novel idea in l2 motivation research that l2 learning experiences play a prominent role in shaping students’ effort and, possibly, achievements. gardner (1985, 2006) included courseand teacher-related components in his motivational model. moreover, experiencing satisfaction was actually part of his definition of motivation (gardner, 1985, p. 10). williams and burden (1997) wrote about mediated learning experience, indicating the role of significant others in shaping l2 experiences. ushioda (1998) argued that l2 motivation was partly derived from past learning experiences. both crookes and schmidt’s (2001), and dörnyei’s (2001) motivational models contained past experiences at various levels. the model in which l2 learning experience played a really prominent role is called l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2005). this rather parsimonious model contained only three constructs: two self-related ones (the ideal and ought-to l2 selves) and the l2 learning experience. the model quickly gained prominence in the field and inspired a great number of studies (see csizér, in press-a, for details), but the l2 experience remained a somewhat neglected element in many empirical investigations of this model, despite the fact that methodologically diverse studies pointed out that the l2 experience was possibly a decisive predictor of l2 motivation (lamb, 2012; macintyre & serroul, 2015). one of the possible explanations could be the confusion surrounding the operationalization of the concept in various studies, including immediate, situated classroom experiences or simple attitudinal measures (for a summary see you et al., 2016). despite this confusion, it is clear, though, that if l2 motivation should be investigated from a situated point of view, l2 learning experience, whatever way it is measured, should be included in the research. thus, the motivation behind launching the present investigation was to find out to what extent l2 learning experiences involved general positive attitudes to learning english or a more complex measure related to the process of learning. 2.3. attribution theory and foreign language learning experience since both concurrent and retrospective experiences are based on our perceptions, attribution theory (at) is a theoretical framework that we cannot ignore when studying foreign language learning experiences. attributions are individuals’ perceptions of their own successes and failures, and the reason they provide for those successes and failures (williams, mercer, & ryan, 2016). attributions have an effect on future learning as they shape anticipations of future success as well as the learners’ affective state, and as a result, their approach towards learning (mcloughlin, 2007; smith, 2012). the central concept of at lies in the a study of retrospective and concurrent foreign language learning experiences: a comparative. . . 229 fact that individuals invariably try to comprehend the reasons why they succeed or fail and, when they face a similar situation, their attitude will be determined by how they explain the reasons that led to their success and failure. this does not mean that they will interpret these reasons correctly, but their personal interpretation of these reasons will affect their actions (heider, 1944, 1958). at was further developed by weiner (1985, 1986), who classified causes of success and failure into four different categories: ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck. he described these categories from three angles that he labelled “dimensions of causality”: locus (internal or external), stability (stable or unstable) and controllability (controllable or uncontrollable). in the field of sla, studies on attributions are few and have shown conflicting results (chang, windsor, & helwig, 2017). in a survey conducted with undergraduates examining the relationships between attributions and performance, hsieh and schallert (2008) concluded that success was mainly attributed to internal factors, such as ability, while failure was attributed to external factors, such as task difficulty. pishghadam and zabihi (2011) also found that the attribution to effort (another internal factor) is the best predictor of achievement. by contrast, other studies have confirmed the importance of external factors in attributions. gobel and mori (2007) examined relationships between achievement in efl reading and oral classes and the attributions of first year japanese university students. their results suggest that culture may have an impact on the attributions students give for success and failure. similarly, kálmán and gutierrez (2015) found that another external factor, corporate culture, was the best predictor of success in a study measuring adult l2 learners’ attributions in a corporate environment. 2.4. contact experiences another line of research taking into account the type of experiences is the investigation of interethnic contact experiences. informed by social psychological research (for an overview, see pettigrew, 1998; pettigrew & tropp, 2006) as well as by crookes and schmidt’s (1991) theory of motivation, the main tenet of these types of studies is that both sla and l2 motivation might be shaped by the quality and quantity of interethnic contact (see also kormos, csizér, & iwaniec, 2014). these contact experiences could be typified as direct (e.g., personal encounters with l2 speakers) or indirect (e.g., the effects of being exposed to l2 cultural products without any personal encounters) (kormos & csizér, 2007). besides actual contact experiences, the perceived importance attached to these experiences also seemed to be important (csizér & kormos, 2009; kormos & csizér, 2007). apart from the direct impact that contact experience might have on learning and l2 motivation, they could also exert an indirect influence by shaping antecedent kata csizér, csaba kálmán 230 variables that in turn affect motivation and learning. one of the earliest such studies was carried out by clément and a colleague (clément, 1980; clément & kruidenier, 1985), who investigated how contact experiences influenced students’ linguistic self-confidence (a socially constructed image of oneself as a successful learner/user of a foreign language [dörnyei & ushioda, 2009]) and how this increased self-confidence had a positive impact on motivation. dörnyei, csizér, and németh (2006) found that indirect contact impacted students’ attitudes towards l2 speakers, affecting motivated learning behavior. another selfrelated variable linked to motivation which might be shaped by contact experiences could be self-regulation. study abroad research, the par excellence contact experience, showed that self-regulatory processes could also be shaped by direct contact (allen, 2013). finally, the level of communication apprehension could also play a role in shaping learning and motivation through contact or, rather, lack of contact (kormos, csizér, & iwaniec, 2014). 2.5. the role of experience in self-efficacy beliefs another way the l2 learning experience might affect the learning process is through self-efficacy beliefs. self-efficacy beliefs are “people’s judgments of their capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performances” (bandura, 1986, p. 391). these beliefs are formed as a result of students’ learning experiences. based on zimmerman (2000), it can be postulated that self-efficacy beliefs are shaped by enactive experiences (based on the outcome of personal experiences), vicarious experiences (self-comparisons with a model), verbal persuasion (outcomes described by an outsider), and perceived physiological reactions. although self-efficacy beliefs are often investigated in sla contexts (see e.g., mills, 2014), the usual setup is to look at what influence self-efficacy beliefs exert on l2 learning. there are relatively few studies mapping experience-related variables that impact selfefficacy beliefs. one such example is provided by mills (2009), who investigated how experiences related to a project-based curriculum shaped students’ selfefficacy beliefs, and indeed she proved the positive impact of this type of curriculum on self-efficacy beliefs. another example is piniel and csizér’s (2013) study, which found a direct positive relationship between learning experiences and self-efficacy beliefs based on structural equation modelling in a study of hungarian secondary school students. in addition, they tested and verified a cyclical model describing relations between motivation, experience, self-efficacy and emotions (anxiety) that indicate that the role of self-efficacy beliefs in sla and l2 motivation is complex and needs to be investigated along with other variables (piniel & csizér, 2013). a study of retrospective and concurrent foreign language learning experiences: a comparative. . . 231 2.6. emotional experiences emotional experiences that we encounter and later recollect or reconstruct are based on emotions. growing scholarly interest in the role and function that human emotions play in l2 learning has come about as “a shift toward considering the influence of a plethora of sociocognitive variables and antecedents in the development of target language proficiency” (ross & rivers, 2018, p. 104). interestingly, until the 2010s, the only emotion studied in terms of language learning was anxiety (pavlenko, 2013). due to the emergence of positive psychology at the turn of the millennium (seligman & csikszentmihályi, 2000), positive emotions experienced during the course of language learning helped to “broaden the scope of affective studies to include positive emotions experienced in the classroom” (piniel & albert, 2018, p. 128). piniel and albert (2018) pointed out that positive emotions related to sla had become so focal in research recently that two books were published on the topic in 2016 (i.e., gabryś-barker & gałajda, 2016; macintyre, gregersen, & mercer, 2016). according to pekrun (2014), in educational contexts we can distinguish between four categories of emotions. achievement emotions are connected to feelings of success and failure (such as hope and pride related to success, and anxiety related to failure); epistemic emotions are related to cognitive phenomena (such as surprise, curiosity, confusion, and frustration); topic emotions are concerned with the topics that students deal with (when, for instance, students empathize with characters they learn about, or when they are disgusted or anxious or feel enjoyment or interest about certain topics); and, finally, social emotions are related to teachers and peers (such as love, compassion, admiration, contempt, envy, or anger). if we go beyond the classroom, a domain where powerful emotional experiences are likely to occur is that of the study-abroad context (ross & rivers, 2018), as well as online contexts where “social relations, knowledge structures, and webs of power are experienced by many people as highly mobile and interconnected as a result of broad socio-political events and global markets” (the douglas fir, 2016, p. 19). swain (2013) argues that it is in narratives that learner stories and experiences reside and in which the central role of emotion becomes evident. 2.7. flow and optimal experiences flow is defined as “a subjective state that people report when they are completely involved in something to the point of forgetting time, fatigue, and everything else but the activity itself” (csikszentmihályi, abduhamdeh, & nakamura, 2005, p. 600). flow has been researched from various perspectives in a variety of contexts including its connection to learning experiences in educational settings; however, kata csizér, csaba kálmán 232 piniel and albert (2016) argue that its effect on motivation in sla is under-researched. they proposed that investigating the language learning experience from a phenomenological perspective might be productive, as it could provide insight into previously neglected aspects of language learning motivation. studies conducted so far have revealed that the level of challenge and relevance ignited learners’ interest and promoted concentration in academic subjects, whereas in art subjects, learners’ skills, control of the learning environment, and higher activity levels brought about flow experiences (shernoff & csikszentmihályi, 2009). shernoff et al. (2016) likewise highlighted the role of the teacher in promoting engagement, which skinner and pitzer (2012) defined as “constructive, enthusiastic, willing, emotionally positive and cognitively focused participation with learning activities in school” (p. 22). engagement is conducive to flow experiences; however, piniel and albert (in press) emphasize that optimal flow experiences are more likely to emerge when the learners feel in control of their learning situation. studies conducted recently on optimal flow experiences have revealed that the higher the level of motivation, the more likely learners are to experience flow (piniel & albert, 2016), and the right balance between skills and challenges appears to be the most salient prerequisite of an optimal flow experience (aubrey, 2017a, 2017b; czimmermann & piniel, 2016). csikszentmihályi (2014) argued that “flow experiences can result in emergent motivation” (p. 234), owing to the intrinsically rewarding nature of flow and the resulting increase in skill. since flow experiences are enjoyable, they encourage people to repeat them, which in turn results in an ever-increasing mastery accompanied by feelings of competence and higher self-efficacy beliefs. this positive cycle is based on positive attributions which learners ascribe to their previously experienced successes (see as above). 3. methods 3.1. participants the first phase of this study included 10 highly experienced english language teachers in hungary. the gender ratio represents well the hungarian situation: eight female and two male interviewees were recruited. in the selection procedure we made sure to have teachers from various types of schools (primary schools, secondary schools and university) and teaching contexts (corporate, private and state). for more information on participants see csizér (in press-a, in press-b). detailed information about the teacher participants is included in table 1 (all names are pseudonyms). a study of retrospective and concurrent foreign language learning experiences: a comparative. . . 233 table 1 participants of the first phase of the study pseudonym gender age years of teaching experience present teaching context andrás male 44 20+ corporate/university balázs male 46 20+ secondary school anna female 52 20+ private sector barbara female 43 15+ university cili female 46 20 university dalma female 30 5 primary school emese female 54 20+ university fanni female 48 15+ primary school gréta female 46 20+ secondary school hajni female 40 15+ primary/secondary the second phase of study involved 12 l2 learners of english, french, and italian from various contexts. detailed description of the participants can be found in table 2 (the names are pseudonyms). table 2 participants of the second phase of the study pseudonym gender age context language proficiency ádám male 13 primary school english b2 béci male 12 primary school english b2 annamari female 17 secondary school english c1 gergő male 17 secondary school english c1 csenge female 23 university english b2 istván male 22 university english c1 dia female 37 language school french c1 enikő female 52 language school italian b2 fanni female 48 private teacher italian b2 jános male 45 private teacher english c1 kata female 55 corporate english c1 kálmán male 53 corporate english c1 3.2. the instrument the design of the instrument involved several steps. first, the preliminary interview schedule was put together by the first author in hungarian. two experts provided feedback and, subsequently, a pilot interview was carried out in order to finalize the instrument. in addition to the necessary bio questions at the beginning of the interview schedule, the final instrument included 12 main questions with detailed sub-questions to cover a number of main topics. the topics relevant for the present publication include experiences related to foreign language learning, teacher training, and language teaching. based on this instrument, the student interview protocol was prepared by the second author. the steps involved eliminating the questions related to teaching and adapting the kata csizér, csaba kálmán 234 remaining part of the instrument to address l2 learners instead of teachers by reformulating the questions. 3.3. data collection and data analysis the first phase of the study was conducted between november 2016 and april 2017 by the first author. the average length of the interviews was around 60 minutes. the second phase was undertaken between december 2017 and february 2018 by the second author. the average length of the interviews in the second phase was 45 minutes. all the interviews were conducted in hungarian; all english excerpts are the authors’ translations. the teacherinterview part of the study is based on a 70,000-word dataset, whereas interviews with the l2 learners yielded a dataset of 50,000 words. we recorded and transcribed all the interviews. we used atlas.ti for analysis: we followed the steps of coding proposed for grounded theory (dörnyei, 2007) and included open, axial and selective coding before comparing the two sets of data. 4. results 4.1. the components of foreign language learning experiences of teachers: the retrospective perspective based on csizér (in press-a, in press-b), the most important components of retrospective experiences for teachers seem to be success, contact, positive attitudes, self-related issues, and various dispositions towards learning, as well as their teachers’ personality and teaching methods. table 3 contains some illustrative quotes for each component. table 3 the main components of retrospective fl learning experiences success my language learning experiences are very good because for some reason, i really do not know why, it always went well for me and i won several competitions up to national levels. (andrás) it was a real success when i, along with the majority of students, felt that we learnt english in a year. (barbara) when one learns and feels this inner growth and feels the well-being, that is very good. (emese) english lessons opened a new world . . . and i passed the language exam after the third year. (cili) contact experiences: positive/negative then i lived in [name of the country withheld for ensuring anonymity of the participant] and was immersed in an english-speaking school where i had to learn english in a couple of months to be able to learn all the subjects in english. (balázs) a study of retrospective and concurrent foreign language learning experiences: a comparative. . . 235 i was 19 years old when i went to the usa to work for three months. my self-confidence developed there, and i was able to speak english, to communicate in english, to do anything with the english language. (dalma) i taught hungarian through english in hungary . . ., i learnt english a lot this way. (gréta) i: how did contact affect you? a: it did not affect me. i learnt a couple of words during the three months i was in the usa, but it was minimal. i: did the experiences not mean anything? a: no, absolutely not. only the things that had happened before [the contact experience] are defining. (andrás) [learning in the us meant that] learning was a real-life experience for me. (fanni) positive attitudes liked/s fls, liked/s learning fls (anna, cili, fanni, gréta, hajni) interesting tasks (anna) interesting teachers (barbara) i liked pop-music with english lyrics. (gréta) self-related issues: diligence, pride, confidence, curiosity i was very diligent. (barbara) i was very proud of myself. (andrás) i had the confidence to communicate. (dalma) i constantly had this drive to become better and better and better. (emese) i was very curious. (gréta) dispositions towards learning it is very important that i enjoyed those classes most where i could be an active part of the learning process. when the focus was on me and not on the teachers. when something happened, it was not the teacher who wanted it to happen but me. (balázs) i think it [teaching/learning] was catastrophic [in hungary] but [in the us] the acceptance and inclusion was defining for me. (dalma) when it was boring, it had a very bad effect on me and on my learning . . .. similarly, i hated those stressful situations that blocked me and made me forget even things that i had known earlier. (emese) the teacher’s personality i: any teachers apart from marc in the usa who had an impact on you? d: my teacher in the primary school. she had a very positive attitude, always reinforcing us. she had very good attitudes, and i still think of her fondly. (dalma) she had a very empathetic personality . . . and i have a lot of memories how much she listened to us and what a good sense of humour she had. and, basically, her personality somehow got attached to the language. you could see that she really liked the language. she was really enthusiastic about the language; you really got carried away. maybe not for everyone in the group but for me her enthusiasm about the english language created a really lasting experience. (hajni) he [the private tutor] was a university student, and it took us a really short time to find a common voice. the course book was not really exciting with its long listening tasks played on a cassette player, but he was a really colourful person, and he could really encourage me to learn english. (anna) kata csizér, csaba kálmán 236 i really liked him [the english teacher], but not really for her methodology. i do not think that in the 1980s there were so many outstanding english teachers in hungary in terms of teaching methodology, but she simply had a great personality with a very good sense of humour. (fanni) teaching methods i think i did not have very good language teachers. (andrás) when i look back at my english teachers, i think they did everything that could be done with the methodology of the time. but we never understood the overwhelming emphasis on rote learning. knowing what i know now, there should have been much less emphasis on memorizing tasks. we have to face the fact that in english all those expressions with ‘take’ and ‘get’, and all the others, cannot be learnt from a dictionary. you have to learn them in contexts in small chunks. we hated all the memorizing, but we did not resist as much as today’s kids. they could still do it to us. (gréta) interestingly, the first really good language teacher i had was at the university. i have forgotten his/her name, but there were only communicative games at the classes, and i thought how good that was and how good it was that i had already learnt english, therefore, i was not bothered by not being prepared for the language exam. i really liked it and went with it in my career: we have to play a lot. i really had a great time in his/her lessons because it was always about us. this teacher was a really good language teacher, but it was the first time i experienced communicative language teaching. i cannot give such examples from my primary or secondary school experiences: there were no lessons that surprised me, ever. (balázs) 4.2. the components of foreign language learning experiences of l2 learners: the concurrent dimension the most salient components of concurrent experiences for l2 learners independent of age, gender, and the learning context seem to be success, contact with the foreign language, positive attitudes, self-related issues, various dispositions towards learning the l2, the teacher’s personality, as well as (lack of) interaction. table 4 contains some illustrative quotes for each component. table 4 illustrative quotes for the most salient components of the l2 learning experience success i win academic competitions one after the other. if i come first, it’s a great feeling. if i come second, i could kill the winner. (gergő) whenever there is a test or we have to report to the teacher, everybody comes to me for advice, “how to say this?” how to do that?” etc., or whenever there is an in-house competition or any kind of competition, i see the other teams suffer and think hard, but for me it’s easy as pie. (béci) i always have a sense of success because english somehow comes to me naturally and i can speak fluently. i don’t know things like the present perfect or which tense, i just use them. (ádám) i listen to podcasts, i understand them, and it gives me a sense of achievement. (fanni) contact experiences: positive/negative last year i went to england by train and ferry. i spoke english during the whole journey, but when i arrived in dover and saw the wonderful scenery, i felt i had arrived and i felt very very safe. the countryside was exactly as i had seen it in movies and imagined in books, and it made me feel very happy. a study of retrospective and concurrent foreign language learning experiences: a comparative. . . 237 many native speakers praised me for my english, and they were shocked to find out that it was my first time in england, and they started to speak very highly of hungarian language education. (gergő) we were flying to new york with my parents and an american flight attendant asked me something twice and i didn’t understand. i was in pieces, and i thought if i didn’t understand such a presumably simple thing, then i must be a big loser. i felt so ashamed even if i hate american accent. (gergő) one of my husband’s clients is italian. the other day he came into our shop, and i told him that i could speak italian, and he immediately asked whereabouts in italy i had visited, and we’d just returned from florence five days before, and we started telling each other where we’d been, what we’d seen, and i had the courage to talk. (fanni) sometimes we have italian days in the language school. we spend some time with native italians, we cook together, here in the italian institute. after a certain level we only have native teachers, which is very positive as they have to explain everything in italian, and they do. there are club days in the institute when we just chat. there are others coming as well so that we don’t always meet the same natives. we talk about where they come from, what they do, why they came to hungary, what they do at home, informal chatty afternoons once a month. it’s not obligatory, it’s just a great opportunity. (enikő) there are a lot of international students at the university, both native and non-native speakers of english, and naturally, we communicate everything in english. (csenge) positive attitudes i get carried away. i’m happy if i can deal with english. i’m very good at it, and i don’t know why because no one ever told me to learn english. it’s such a good feeling that i feel it in my stomach that english is good for me, and it puts me in a different state of mind. i feel relaxed and happy at the same time, and i feel that i must deal with it. i’m very musical, and i think the two are connected somehow. i go to music school, and i’m the best at harmonics, and i feel the two are connected. (gergő) we were chatting about xmas dishes, and the word ‘buckwheat’ came up. after the lesson i wanted to find out the origin of the word, and i started with how it all began with the nuts of the beech tree, because it looks like that, and you can also call it beech wheat, so i got absorbed by the topic, and i was ready to unravel the history of the word for one and a half hours. (jános) i feel that i’m intrigued by the language (english), and it’s interesting. more interesting than maths or history. there isn’t a subject that’s more interesting than english. (ádám) everybody is so kind in england. they work the same number of hours, still, they don’t speak like this [like hungarian waiters]. (béci) self-related issues: pride, confidence, curiosity simply, i’m curious about what they’re talking about on tv, what’s on the internet. (béci) everybody knows that i’ll be among the winners. in this year’s competition, my teacher was a member of the jury, and i came first. i don’t think i won because she was a member of the jury, and after the competition she told the whole class how surprised she was when i started talking about bitcoins in front of the panel. (gergő) this whole thing about self-confidence is such a good thing. (jános) i’m more confident in english, i feel that i can solve anything on my own in english. (ádám) i’m curious about the background of the stories that come up in our course book because i know that they’re real stories about real people with relevant, everyday topics. (jános) dispositions towards learning it is very important for me to choose the time of my lessons and the teacher i want to work with. (jános) kata csizér, csaba kálmán 238 i always feel in control. i can choose what topics we talk about in the lesson and what kind of listening tasks we do. (fanni) ok, i understand that grammar is important, but it gets boring after a while when you practise the tenses for the nth time. i simply get demotivated. (annamari) it’s a practical thing to speak english, and it’s required as well. (kálmán) i want to learn something that’s relevant to my work. (kata) the teacher’s personality she wants everybody to get the best grade possible. if she sees you need praise or a telling off, she’ll do it. she’s predictable, and she has good manners. you can negotiate with her. (annamari) i’m so happy when she praises me how beautiful my pronunciation is, how beautifully i read; she praises us a lot, she has a sense of humour and she is very tactful. (ádám) he was so ready and open to teach us the way we wanted to learn. (kálmán) (lack of) interaction the lessons are more interactive . . . it’s not like he [the teacher] tells you something and you have to do it or write it, but we have conversations. we can practise using the language. (béci) conversation is very important. you can hear how they say a word, and you can say everything. (csenge) having a good conversation with him [the teacher] is the most enjoyable part. not only because of the common topics we share but also because his french is perfect. (dia) i don’t get the chance to talk, we are so many. (annamari) 5. discussion if we compare the emerging themes of two participating groups, we can observe several similarities and some differences between the findings of retrospective and concurrent experiences. as our data analysis resulted in four broader themes contributing to the l2 learning experience, we present the analogies and contrasts between the two groups along these four themes: (1) the teachers’ personality and teaching practices; (2) various attitudes and dispositions towards learning as part of foreign language learning experiences; (3) contact experiences; and (4) self-related issues including experiencing success and self-confidence. subsequently, we conceptualize a model of our findings in the douglas fir framework. while both groups of participants expressed the importance of their l2 teacher in shaping their experiences, it is important to note that for the learners it was primarily an attitudinal component: attitudes towards the teacher’s personality stood out as having a lasting impact. in pekrun’s (2014) taxonomy, this falls in the category of social emotions. the qualities the participants associated with positive experiences related to their l2 teachers were being generous with praise, kind, predictable, ready to compromise, ready to negotiate, serious, supportive, and tactful. conversely, for the teacher participants, both their former l2 teachers’ personality and teaching method seemed to play a crucial part. in zimmermann’s (2000) taxonomy of experiences, this type of experience is classified a study of retrospective and concurrent foreign language learning experiences: a comparative. . . 239 as vicarious experience, through which one compares oneself to a model. oddly enough, earlier research in the hungarian context revealed that non-native hungarian teachers were uncertain as to how to act as role models for their learners (illés & csizér, 2015), but our results show that they still are. teachers do have a lasting impact on their students’ experiences, primarily not by what they teach but how they teach and what personality they have. the second broader theme that became apparent with both groups of participants was the emergence of attitudes and dispositions towards learning the l2. the similarity between the two groups here is manifested in the fact that interest, curiosity, positive emotions towards, and flow experienced during learning the l2 are prevalent in both retrospective and concurrent accounts. the significance of positive attitudes and dispositions in the data is further evidence of the paramount role of learning experiences expressed by dörnyei’s l2mss model (dörnyei, 2005; dörnyei & ushioda, 2009). the results indicate that attitudes and dispositions do not only act as prerequisites to positive learning experiences, but they are an integral part of both retrospective and concurrent learning experiences, which create a cycle of positive attributions conducive to l2 motivation. interestingly, it is only with the teachers that the dimension of motivated learning behavior towards the l2 (effort, diligence, and persistence) emerged as salient in shaping learning experiences. this dimension was completely missing in the learners’ accounts. this might be explained by the fact that for the teachers, the l2 has become their profession, which is either the direct or indirect consequence of the effort, diligence, and persistence they extended during learning the l2; however, for the learners, at the time of conducting the interview, learning was an optional fun activity. the third broader emerging theme that both teachers and learners shared turned out to be contact experiences in and out of the classroom. our results confirm the findings of earlier studies (clément, 1980; clément & kruidenier, 1985; csizér & kormos, 2009; kormos & csizér, 2007) which link contact experiences to linguistic selfconfidence. the significance that both groups attribute to contact experiences is striking; however, two major differences emerged here in participants’ accounts. on the one hand, the learners reported more negative contact experiences, which interestingly did not discourage them from learning the l2; on the other hand, they emphasized the salience of interaction and conversation, which subtheme was completely missing from the teachers’ data. we can hypothesize that both these discrepancies can be explained by the fact that learners, presumably at an earlier stage of the l2 learning process, lack the proficiency that prospective teachers of the l2 used to have as l2 learners, and are very much aware of the need of practicing their l2. it is also possible that the teachers, owing to the presumably longer time they have been exposed to an l2, have had more positive contact experiences that have overwritten kata csizér, csaba kálmán 240 the negative ones, or, due to the retrospective nature of the interviews, the passing of time has embellished their negative experiences. as for the fourth broader theme, self-related issues, success, pride, and selfconfidence emerged as especially vital for both groups of participants. the results confirm zimmermann’s (2000) model, in as much as enactive experience, which is based on the outcome of personal experience, shapes self-efficacy beliefs. it seems that the connection between success experiences and self-efficacy beliefs is salient not only for current learners of foreign languages, as piniel and csizér (2013) pointed out, but also retrospectively, for current l2 teachers. here again, we must emphasize the role of positive attributions, which, by providing a cyclical positive feedback, fuel the motivation of current l2 learners as much as they shape the retrospective experiences of current l2 teachers. the locus of attributions with both groups of participants was internal; however, we must note that while the learners attributed their successes to their abilities, the teacher participants explained them in terms of their abilities as well as efforts, which confirm hsieh and schallert’s (2008) and pishgadam and zabihi’s (2011) findings. based on the results and discussion described above, we propose to conceptualize the model of the l2 learning experience in the framework of the douglas fir group (2016) as presented in table 5. table 5 the l2 learning experience in the douglas fir framework the douglas fir (2016) emerging themes in the analyses levels components teachers students macro cultural values, economic values music, teaching hungarian through english, real life experience culture, different dialects, practicality, relevance meso schools, families, places of work, agency classroom, teaching method, teachers’ personality, being an active part of learning, tasks, acceptance, inclusion teachers’ personality, autonomy, group, helping others, not being able to help others, parents, workplace micro action and interaction, individuals engaging with others, linguistic and interactional resources success, self-confidence, diligence, effort, persistence, contact, interest, liking learning fl, curiosity success, pride, self-confidence, failure, contact, curiosity, interest, inability to express oneself, interaction, conversation 6. conclusion based on our results, we can answer our research question concerning the construct of the foreign language learning experience by stating that it constitutes a complex conglomerate including several components related to the learning processes at various levels. the most important results indicate that there are more similarities than differences between retrospective and concurrent experiences despite the fact that two markedly different groups were examined, possibly indicating that salient experiences could have long-lasting effects. a study of retrospective and concurrent foreign language learning experiences: a comparative. . . 241 if we take into account the locus of experiences, it has to be noted that experiences are personally situated and have classroom-based, school-related and broader contextual sources as well, cutting across the micro and meso levels of the douglas fir (2016) model. positioning foreign language learning experiences into an increasingly broadening contextual framework encompassing various aspects (from classrooms to a variety of social contexts) is important because the ultimate aim of language learning is to slowly shift language learning experiences into language use experiences. as this study does not allow discussing the relative importance of the various components of the l2 learning experience, we can only hypothesize that experiences which stem from multiple sources could be seen more important. a good example of this is the emerging theme of success: experiencing success in the classroom is a good first step in the learning process, but it is equally important to experience success outside classroom/school contexts as well. similarly, contact experiences can also come from a variety of sources from teacher-induced classroom experiences to contact experiences that are personally initiated outside the classroom/school environment. future research projects should consider the internal structure of the foreign language learning experience, that is, how the various components relate to one another. in addition, this qualitative study admittedly does not offer generalizable results; therefore, larger-scale quantitative studies are needed to map the possible importance of the various components. in addition, further studies should consider investigating the impact of learning experiences on the learning process and how various experiences are internalized and develop into beliefs related to this process. broadening the research of foreign language learning experiences and investigating language use experiences should also be added to our research agenda. finally, we should note that this study is not without limitations. for one, learners’ retrospective experiences and teachers’ identification with concurrent language learning experiences were not examined. second, our results mainly come from successful language learners and might be markedly different from those of less successful learners (cf. nikolov, 2001). in addition, although we have aimed at reaching data saturation in our investigation, it is possible that additional interviews would have yielded more components. last but not least, our study is rooted in one particular learning context; 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(2016). motivation, vision, and gender: a survey of learners of english in china. language learning, 66, 94-123. 471 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (2). 2023. 471-493 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.38283 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt teacher questions, wait time, and student output in classroom interaction in emi science classes: an interdisciplinary view jiangshan an purdue university fort wayne, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4214-4283 anj@pfw.edu ann childs university of oxford, uk https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5918-739x ann.childs@education.ox.ac.uk abstract past research has often shown a lack of student output in english medium instruction (emi) classes (e.g., an et al., 2021; lo & macaro, 2012) and this study seeks to identify possible reasons. guided by literature on wait time (rowe, 1986) and teacher higher-order thinking questions (chin, 2007), this study explores whether these two pedagogical moves have the same impact on classroom interaction in emi science classes. 30 emi science lessons were recorded from seven emi high school programs in china, taught by 15 native speakers of english to homogenous groups of chinese students. correlation tests showed that when there was more wait time after a teacher question, the students produced lengthier responses with more linguistic complexity, took up more talk time, and asked more questions. however, greater use of teacher higher-order thinking questions, coded by chin’s (2007) framework of constructivist questions, did not correlate with any student output measures. this suggests that wait time may be a more effective factor leading to more student output in emi classes than asking higher-order thinking questions. qualitative mailto:anj@pfw.edu jiangshan an, ann childs 472 analysis showed teachers’ follow-up moves may have also played a role in the limited success of higher-order thinking questions. keywords: english medium instruction; classroom interaction; teacher questions; native speaker 1. introduction in recent years, english medium instruction (emi) programs have been rapidly growing across the world from higher education to secondary and primary education (an & murphy, 2018; macaro et al., 2018). these programs adopt english to teach subject matter in contexts where the local population typically do not speak english as their first language (l1, macaro et al., 2018). in europe, they are usually referred to as content and language integrated learning (clil) and elsewhere as emi. research in science education and language education has established that interaction is an important mechanism for learning to take place (long, 1996; mortimer & scott, 2003). although studies in emi have often described the classroom interaction in such classrooms, few have analyzed the impact of specific pedagogical moves on student participation. this study aims to fill this gap by exploring how pedagogical moves such as the use of higher-order thinking questions and wait time influence student output in emi science classes in foreign high school programs in china. 2. literature review 2.1. the role of interaction for learning the significance of interaction in learning can find its roots in sociocultural theory (sct). as vygotsky (1986) states, cognitive development originates from social contexts and proceeds to individual mental activity. during social interaction, a learner can be assisted by a more competent other to accomplish a task which is beyond the learner’s current ability. this process is termed scaffolding (wood et al., 1976). this conceptualization of learning means in classrooms interaction is an important channel for learning to take place. the socio-constructivist view of learning (erdogan & campbell, 2008), consistent with sct, further highlights that students should be given ample opportunities to articulate their thinking (mercer, 2004). in second language acquisition (sla), it is now well accepted that language development needs not only input but also output where learners can test their hypotheses of language forms and notice the gap between their teacher questions, wait time, and student output in classroom interaction in emi science classes . . . 473 interlanguage and the target forms (swain, 1985). long’s (1996) interaction hypothesis argued that the modified input and feedback that occur during negotiation of meaning are particularly beneficial for second or foreign language (l2) development, highlighting again the significance of interaction. 2.2. teacher questions teacher questioning is a key tool to shift classroom discourse to be more interactive. in a science classroom featuring constructivist teaching approaches, teacher questions often aim to encourage students to elaborate on their ideas, discuss various points of view and thus promote higher-order thinking (chin, 2007). such questions can elicit more substantial student responses in full sentences, benefiting science learning (chin, 2006, 2007; van zee & minstrell, 1997). constructivist teaching is often contrasted with teaching by transmission where teacher questions often elicit only restricted student responses consisting of pre-determined “single detached words” (chin, 2006, p. 1317) which typically only require lower-order thinking (van zee & minstrell, 1997). 2.3. wait time the wait time a teacher leaves after asking a question and before a student response is a component of teacher questioning strategy that could also impact student responses (black & wiliam, 1998). rowe’s (1974) influential work identified two types of wait time. wait time i is the period of time which immediately follows a teacher’s question but before a student answers and wait time ii is the time period following a student’s answer before the teacher responds. in this study we are focusing only on wait time i because there was little evidence of wait time ii in our data. rowe’s work found that teachers normally leave an average of less than one second of wait time after asking a question (rowe, 1974). studies later found that an increased wait time, to a threshold of three seconds or more, gives students more time to think about the questions and is associated with positive changes in the classroom interaction patterns, including increased number and length of student utterances (swift & gooding, 1983) and student answers being “supported by evidence and logical argument” (rowe, 1986, p. 44). tobin (1987) further argued that average wait time greater than three seconds led to higher achievement in learning. 2.4. classroom interaction and teacher questioning in emi classes in the emi literature, studies often find limited classroom interaction (e.g., an et al., 2021; lo & macaro, 2012). teacher questioning behavior may be one reason. jiangshan an, ann childs 474 what is commonly found is a pattern of mostly recall questions and rare use of higher-order thinking questions (sopia et al., 2010; yip et al., 2007). as one of the few studies that compared the types of teacher questions and the student output elicited, llinares and pascual peña (2015) found in clil history classes in madrid that 65.84% of teacher questions were recall questions, with questions for eliciting facts producing the simplest and shortest responses. in addition, questions asking for reasons and metacognitive questions generated the most complex responses. in contrast, dalton-puffer (2007) found in clil lessons in austria that while questions for facts were predominant at 89%, short student responses featuring single noun phrases persisted independent of the type of questions. this, as dalton-puffer speculated, could be because students “need more time to think and formulate” (p. 117), signaling a need of more wait time. thus, evidence remains inconclusive as to whether higher-order thinking questions elicit more substantial and complicated student responses in emi classes, as claimed for l1 classes. in addition, there is little research on wait time in emi contexts. given the dual challenges of learning subject knowledge and the l2, one could speculate that wait time is more necessary in emi classes to allow longer student utterances with more complexity. 2.5. teachers in emi classes in emi studies, emi teachers’ own english proficiency has often been called into question and identified as a reason for the prevalent use of closed and lowerorder thinking questions (sopia et al., 2010; yip et al., 2007). thus, one could ask whether emi teachers with a high level of english proficiency would use questions differently and thus elicit more student responses. while acknowledging that the term native speaker teacher (nst) is problematic (see an et al., 2021, for a detailed discussion), we decided to retain it to refer to the teachers in our study as it is the teachers’ high english proficiency that allows for the exploration of the relationship between teacher questions and student output without the restriction of the teachers’ own english language proficiency. the research questions are as follows: 1. what are the patterns of teacher higher-order thinking questions, wait time, and student output in the classroom interaction in emi science classes taught by nsts in foreign high school programs in china? 2. what are the relationships between teacher higher-order thinking questions, wait time and student output in these classrooms? teacher questions, wait time, and student output in classroom interaction in emi science classes . . . 475 3. methods 3.1. research context this study was situated in emi foreign high school programs in china. these programs often adopt an anglophone high school curriculum and have foreign teachers instruct local chinese students through english only. the students are typically aged 16-18 years old, and usually plan to study overseas in englishspeaking countries for their tertiary education. 3.2. sample the data of this study came from seven emi foreign high school programs across china, featuring 15 nsts and 308 chinese students. convenience sampling was adopted due to accessibility issues and only the schools that gave access were recruited. the authors did not have a personal relationship with the participants. consistent efforts were made to ensure a reasonable representation of the target school programs, including geographical location and the type of curriculum taught, as shown in table 1 below. table 1 teacher background province school curriculum t subject gender age nationality province a sch 1 canadian british columbia t1 chemistry f 33 canadian t2 physics m 54 canadian t3 biology f 52 canadian sch 2 uk igcse, as, a2 t4 biology m 29 american sch 3 canadian british columbia t5 physics m 25 canadian t6 chemistry m 59 canadian t7 biology f 24 canadian sch 4 canadian alberta t8 physics m 56 canadian sch 5 american ap t9 biology m 34 american province b sch 6 ib t10 biology m 36 american province c sch 7 canadian british columbia t11 physics m 24 canadian t12 chemistry f 23 canadian t13 biology f 31 canadian t14 biology f 29 canadian uk igcse, as, a2 t15 biology m 32 british as shown in the teacher background questionnaire, all 15 teachers held at least a bachelor’s degree and were certified teachers in their home countries. all of them identified english as their most proficient language, thus confirming their nst status, and stated not having a functioning proficiency of mandarin. the teachers commented in interviews that most of the students had strong science knowledge and an intermediate level of english proficiency. given jiangshan an, ann childs 476 a lack of standard exams in these programs, students’ answers to three items in a student questionnaire were used to understand how students’ english proficiency might impact on the output they produce in class, as shown in table 2. a 5-point likert scale was used, including choices of 1 – strongly disagree, 2 – disagree, 3 – neutral, 4 – agree, and 5 – strongly agree. given the normal distribution of the answers from all three questions in the 15 classes (kolmogorov-smirnov statistic greater than .05) and the assumption of homogeneity of variances met (levene’s test’s static greater than .05), anova was run. results showed no significant differences among the 15 classes for all three questions. this may indicate that any differences in student output was not due to the variation in the students’ english proficiency in different classes. table 2 students’ self-reported impact of english on classroom interaction student questionnaire items – how english proficiency impacts interaction 1) i very often don’t understand the teacher in science classes. 2) in science classes, sometimes i know the answers to teachers’ questions, but i don’t answer because i am afraid of speaking in english. 3) in science classes, sometimes i know the answers to teachers’ questions, but i don’t answer because i don’t know how to phrase it in english. m (sd) 2.13 (0.85) 2.45 (1.04) 2.79 (1.08) anova f (13, 197) = 1.66 p > .05 f (13, 196) = 1.19 p > .05 f (13, 197) = 2.12 p > .05 3.3. data collection video recordings of two consecutive lessons for each teacher were conducted by the first author. a naturalistic non-intervention observation approach was adopted. the 30 lessons observed covered a wide range of topics and each lesson lasted between 45 minutes to one hour. a later screening of the lessons excluded two lessons, including t9’s second lesson where a lengthy student debate activity took place and t10’s second lesson consisting of one teacher monologue followed by group discussion. before the observations, information sheets were given to the participants, and they were debriefed on the purpose and use of the data. all the lessons recorded were from classes where consent was obtained. 3.4. data analysis the video recordings of the lessons were entered into nvivo 11 software, where teacher-whole class interaction in each lesson was transcribed verbatim. teacher questions, wait time, and student output in classroom interaction in emi science classes . . . 477 3.4.1. quantitative analysis the quantitative analysis aimed to identify the overall pattern of wait time, teacher higher-order thinking questions, student output and correlations among the three constructs. wait time was defined as pauses of any length after a teacher’s question and before a student’s response during teacher-whole class interaction. all wait time was coded in nvivo to the 0.00 seconds and the software produced the total length of wait time in each lesson. teacher questions were also coded, which produced the number of teacher questions in each lesson. the average length of wait time per teacher question in each lesson was used to represent the degree that wait time was used in each lesson. teacher questions were further coded using chin’s (2007) framework of constructivist teacher questioning approaches. questions that match these types were considered higher-order thinking questions. chin’s (2007) framework can be found in table 3. table 3 chin’s (2007) framework of constructivist questioning approaches type of constructivist questioning approaches functions sub-type constructivist questioning strategies 1. socratic questioning elicit students’ reasoning based on prior knowledge rather than directly transmitting knowledge to them. pumping – the teacher asks for more information from students to foster students’ talk rather than giving the answer directly. reflective toss – the teacher throws back the responsibility of providing feedback to a student’s response to the same or a different student. constructive challenge – when students provide an incorrect answer, the teacher responds with a question to lead students to realize their own misconceptions. 2. verbal jigsaw consolidate students’ linguistic knowledge of science terminology to form declarative statements association of key words and phrases serves to elicit key scientific vocabulary from students for the formulation of declarative knowledge and build up a mental framework, especially when there is a high number of technical terms involved. verbal cloze – the teacher leaves out blanks in their sentences for students to fill in. 3. semantic tapestry help students connect ideas together and construct cohesive understandings multi-pronged questioning – the teacher asks students to approach one issue from different angles, for example, through processing and producing information in textual descriptions and in drawings. stimulating multimodal thinking – the teacher asks students to switch between a variety of modes of thinking, for example, through visual images, linguistics or symbolic resources or formulas, to solve a problem. framing & zooming – the teacher adjusts the questions depending on the kind of thinking to be elicited, e.g., at the macro /observational level or micro/molecular level. 4. framing use questions to frame a problem to structure the discussion. question-based prelude – an expository preface to help students see the structure of the information introduced subsequently. question-based outlines – the teacher provides a set of outline sub-questions to break down an overarching question into smaller steps. question-based summary – a summary in a brief question-and-answer format to reinforce the key concepts. jiangshan an, ann childs 478 chin’s framework allowed a fine-grained analysis of a wide range of higherorder thinking questions specific to science classes to advance students’ thinking through dialogue. the percentage of higher-order questions to the number of teacher questions in each lesson was calculated to represent the degree to which higher-order thinking questions were used. the number of sub-types of questions was also identified to describe the varieties of higher-order thinking questions. recall questions were also coded. to measure student output in each lesson, four parameters were used: 1) the average turn length of student responses after a teacher question; 2) the noun verb ratio in student responses to teacher questions; 3) the number of student questions asked; 4) the time percentage of student talk to total teacher-whole class interaction time. parameters 1) and 4) were adopted from lo and macaro’s (2012) study on classroom interaction in emi secondary schools in hong kong. parameter 1) reflects the degree the students provide substantial elaborations. parameter 2) was adopted from macaro et al.’s (2016) work and represents the complexity level of the linguistic structure of student responses. in science classes, more verbs indicate more complete descriptions of science processes as they typically involve verbs. parameter 3) represents the degree students initiate dialogue, a particular type of student output. these four measures were obtained through coding student talk in the lessons in nvivo. to ensure the coding was accurate, 10% of the lessons (i.e., three lessons) were randomly selected to be coded again on all measures by another researcher. this resulted in an inter-rater reliability of .78, indicating a reasonable level of reliability (robson, 2002). to answer research question 2 (rq2), correlation tests were run in spss to determine correlations between the use of wait time, teacher higher-order thinking questions, and the four measures of student output in each lesson. 3.4.2. qualitative analysis in answering rq2, qualitative analysis was also conducted through examining the lesson transcripts to understand how the correlation results manifested themselves in the classrooms (borkowska, 2011). in understanding how teacher questions impacted student output, the use of follow-up questions was also analyzed, particularly when the initial questions did not elicit full responses. in addition to chin’s (2007) framework, tang’s (2021) framework of five types of follow-up moves in science classes was also consulted. these moves include extend, probe, paraphrase, reflective toss, and constructive challenge. extend refers to teachers’ follow-up question to push students to move forward their reasoning until a full explanation is given to account teacher questions, wait time, and student output in classroom interaction in emi science classes . . . 479 for a phenomenon. probe refers to moves that push students’ reasoning backwards from an outcome to the cause. the moves reflective toss and constructivist challenge are also identified in chin’s (2007) framework. 4. results 4.1. rq1: patterns of teacher higher order thinking questions, wait time and student output the descriptive statistics of all the measures in the 28 lessons are shown in table 4. table 4 patterns of teacher questions, wait time and student output constructs variables/measurements m sd teacher higher order thinking question percentage of higher order thinking questions to all teacher questions (%) 46.83 24.10 wait time average length of wait time after a teacher question (in secs) 1.01 1.23 student output average turn length of student responses to a teacher question (in secs) 3.30 1.58 noun verb ratio in student responses 5.19: 1 3.45 number of student questions 2.46 3.28 time percentage of student talk to teacher-whole class interaction (%) 10.06 7.55 4.1.1. teacher question types as background information, on average 54.13 questions were asked by the teachers in a lesson and one teacher question occurred every 49.63 seconds during teacher-whole class interaction time. this shows first that the nsts asked questions frequently. almost half, 46.83%, were higher-order thinking questions by chin’s (2007) definition. however, only limited types of higher-order thinking questions were used. the breakdown of each type is shown in table 5. pumping was the most widely used type, accounting for 24.61% of all teacher questions, which is 52.55% of all higher-order thinking questions. other types were rather rare. as shown in table 6, the use of recall questions was low, 9.75%. jiangshan an, ann childs 480 table 5 percentages of different types of higher-order thinking questions question types total number of occurrences percentage to the total number of teacher questions higher-order thinking questions 742 46.83% a. socratic questioning 425 27.45% • pumping 381 24.61% • constructive challenge 10 0.65% • reflective toss 0 0.00% b. verbal jigsaw 221 14.28% • association of key words and phrases 220 14.21% • verbal cloze 1 0.06% c. semantic tapestry 85 5.49% • multi-pronged questioning 29 1.87% • stimulating multi-model thinking 44 2.84% • framing and zooming 12 0.78% d. framing 11 0.71% • question-based prelude 0 0.00% • question-based outline 11 0.71% • question-based summary 0 0.00% table 6 percentage of recall questions questions considered as lower-order thinking total number of occurrences percentage to the total number of teacher questions recall questions 151 9.75% 4.1.2. wait time wait time after teacher questions had a rather short average length of 1.01 seconds per lesson, showing the teachers generally did not leave long wait times. however, there was a wide range of average wait time across the lessons, as shown by the standard deviation of 1.23 seconds, indicating some degree of variation in the teachers’ practices. 4.1.3. student output the average turn length of student responses to teacher questions was rather short, 3.30 seconds. this indicates that the students generally did not provide substantial output answering teacher questions. the noun verb ratio in student responses, 5.19:1, showed a strong noun-oriented nature, indicating limited use of verbs. student questions were overall rare and occurred 2.46 times on average per lesson. the time percentage of student talk averaged 10.06% of teacher whole-class interaction time, showing overall limited student participation. teacher questions, wait time, and student output in classroom interaction in emi science classes . . . 481 4.2. rq2: correlations between wait time, teacher question types and student output based on the scatterplots generated in spss, linearity and homogeneity of variance were met for the bivariate correlation model to be used. based on the kolmogorov-smirnov statistic, all variables had non-normal distribution except two – the percentage of teacher higher-order thinking questions to all questions and the average turn length of student responses, as shown in table 7. table 7 normality of the measures wait time percentage of teacher higherorder thinking questions turn length of student responses noun verb ratio in student responses number of student questions time percentage of student talk kolmogorovsmirnov statistic sig 0.00 0.20 0.07 0.03 0.00 0.03 normal distribution no yes yes no no no results of correlations are shown in table 8 and table 9. spearman’s rho were run except for the correlation between teacher higher-order thinking questions and turn length of student responses, where pearson was used. table 8 correlations between wait time, teacher questions and measures of student output student output turn length of student responses noun verb ratio in student responses number of student questions time percentage of student talk wait time r = .46*, p < .05 r = -.45*, p < .05 r = .42*, p < .05 r = .43*, p < .05 teacher higher-order thinking questions r = -.07, p > .05 (pearson) r = .16, p > .05 r = .18, p > .05 r = -.10, p > .05 table 9 correlation between wait time and teacher questions wait time teacher higher-order thinking questions r = .30, p > .05 the results show that wait time has a significant moderate positive correlation with all four measures of student output while teachers’ higher-order thinking questions did not have a significant correlation with any student output measures. the absence of correlation between teacher higher-order thinking questions and jiangshan an, ann childs 482 wait time shows that when the teachers asked questions that posed a higher cognitive demand, they did not leave more wait time. 4.3. rq2: qualitative results of how teacher questions and wait time impacted student output complementing the quantitative results, the qualitative analysis provided insights into finer details of how wait time and teacher higher-order thinking questions were used and impacted student output. 4.3.1. excerpts 1 & 2: use of extended wait time to elicit more student output while wait time was generally short, when there was more substantial wait time, the students tended to produce more substantial answers to both higher-order thinking and lower-order thinking questions. excerpt 1 from t7’s biology lesson on plant structure demonstrates how extended wait time, after a higher-order thinking question, was followed by an extensive student response: lesson excerpt 1 turn timespan content speaker 37 14:10-14:22 so, the stems grow upwards, and they branch outwards to maximize the total surface area of the leaves. so why would a plant want to grow upwards? t 39 14:22-14:40 [wait time] 40 14:40-14:42 kira? t 41 14:42-14:50 err, err, the more upwards, there is less shadows, so the plant can get more energy from the sun. s 42 14:50-15:00 good. so, the more upwards it grows, the higher it gets, the more access to light it can have, the less shadows. t in introducing “stem,” the teacher asked a pumping question in turn 37: so why would a plant want to grow upwards? to ask students to speculate rather than giving students the information directly, placing a relatively higher cognitive demand on them. then there was a lengthy wait time of eight seconds, which was followed by a rather substantial response from a student with a turn length of eight seconds in full sentences with both agents and verbs (e.g., is, can get). following the student’s answer, in turn 42 the teacher provided a paraphrase of the students’ answer in the target language forms. it could be argued that the substantial student output in this excerpt was a result of both an open-ended pumping question that aims to foster students’ talk and the generous use of wait time. teacher questions, wait time, and student output in classroom interaction in emi science classes . . . 483 excerpt 2 from t13’s biology lesson on continental drift theory demonstrates how extended wait time after a recall question also led to substantial student output with sophisticated linguistic structure: lesson excerpt 2 turn timespan content speaker 62 17:11-17:25 they are made out of, they are made out of plate tectonics. plate tectonics. right? now how does a volcano or an earthquake occur on earth? what happens? t 63 17:26-17:29 [wait time] 64 17:30-17:31 ivy? t 65 17:32-17:43 volcano and um earthquake happen at the age (edge) of the continents which um help to separates (separate) um the continents from each other. s 66 17:43-17:46 help to separate? what do you mean by separate? t 67 17:46-17:49 [wait time] 68 17:49-17:59 um because um the, especially the lava from the volcano uh came out and uh it forms new rock. then uh the. s 69 18:00-18:05 but how does that happen? so, um what happens to the plates? they what? t 70 18:05-18:07 move. ss 71 18:07-18:11 yeah. they move. they get in contact with each other. right? … t this exchange took place at the beginning of this class where the teacher was revising previous content. in turn 62, the teacher asked a recall question about how a volcano or an earthquake occurs in revising tectonic plate theory. although recall questions typically require a lower level of cognitive demand, the teacher still provided three seconds of wait time in turn 63, which might be because this question asked for a complete description of a cause of a phenomenon. in turn 65, a student was able to give an initial response of 11 seconds in a full sentence with both agents and verbs (e.g., happen, help, separate). however, this answer was not a fully correct answer. then the teacher asked a followup question in turn 66: help to separate? what do you mean by separate?, which focuses on the part that needed further thought. this question was followed by another extended wait time of three seconds, given in turn 67. in turn 68, the student provided another lengthy response of 10 seconds, again in full sentences using the verbs came out and forms. however, this answer described the outcome of volcano eruption rather than the cause. in turn 69, the teacher continued the dialogue with another follow-up question to push for the exact cause: but how does that happen? and what happens to the plates?. this seemed to be a probing follow-up move (tang, 2021) as it pushes students to identify the underlying cause for a phenomenon. this elicited the key word move from the jiangshan an, ann childs 484 students in reference to the cause. the teacher then provided feedback confirming the cause being the movement of tectonic plates leading to collision between them. here, the generous use of wait time at different points of this exchange with a chain of follow-up questions appeared to have allowed students the time needed to recall relevant information and organize substantial answers in the l2. 4.3.2. excerpts 3 & 4: challenges of higher-order thinking questions to elicit student output as the quantitative results show, the use of more higher-order thinking teacher questions did not elicit more substantial student output. examination of the lesson excerpts shows often initial higher-order thinking questions received incomplete student answers, and there was a lack of follow-up questions or effective follow-up questions by the teacher to push students to elaborate their answers. this pattern also coincides with the lack of variety of higher-order thinking questions identified in the quantitative results in that the follow-up questions did not seem to make full use of the different higher-order thinking question strategies. excerpt 3 is an example from t15’s biology lesson on genetic modification: lesson excerpt 3 turn timespan content speaker 34 19:03-19:06 debbie, do you think identical twins have the same fingerprints? t 35 19:06-19:07 no. s 36 19:07-19:08 why? t 37 19:08-19:11 er, because it’s just no. s 38 19:11-19:27 just no. well yeah, alright, they don’t. fingerprints are not genetic. you don’t get your thumbprints or your fingerprints from your genes. fingerprints actually arrive when you’re growing inside the womb and it’s just your skin folding randomly. t in turn 34, the teacher asked a pumping question to elicit students’ ideas about whether identical twins have the same fingerprints. after the student’s short answer no in turn 35, the teacher asked a follow-up pumping question: why to invite elaboration from the student. this follow-up question is also a probing move (tang, 2021) as it aimed to elicit the underlying principle of an outcome. however, this probing move did not elicit an elaboration from the student, as shown in turn 37. possible reasons could be that the student was experiencing language difficulties and was only able to essentially repeat the same answer: it’s just no. it could be that she did not know the key word that was needed, genetic, or did not know how to organize her answer with an appropriate sentence structure, such as xx is not genetic or xx is not decided by genes. after this short teacher questions, wait time, and student output in classroom interaction in emi science classes . . . 485 student turn, the teacher in turn 38 immediately provided a full explanation himself: fingerprints are not genetic. here it could be argued that another follow-up probing question that focuses on eliciting the key word, genes or genetic, could be helpful, for example, what decides fingerprints? the teacher may also model the use of key language items as part of the follow-up question. an example is identical twins have the same eye color because eye color is decided by genes. so why do you think identical twins do not have the same fingerprints? the first part serves as a modelling of a possible sentence structure: a is decided by b as well as the key word genes. this may scaffold students’ use of language to provide a full answer. excerpt 4 below is from t11’s first physics lesson on sound waves. in the previous lessons, the concepts and diagrams of sound waves were introduced, as shown in figures 1 and 2, and the teacher conducted an experiment with an open-open tube with two turning forks, one of 512 hertz and one of 256 hertz to demonstrate resonance. in this lesson, the teacher briefly repeated this experiment, where the tuning fork of 512 hertz had resonance, and asked the students if an open-closed tube was used to achieve resonance whether a longer tube or shorter tube would be needed: lesson excerpt 4 turn timespan content speaker 11 13:11-14:17 . . . this is 512 hertz. it works with the open-open tube. now it’s a closed tube, but it doesn’t work. do i need a longer tube or a shorter tube than this? t 12 14:17-14:20 [wait time] 13 14:20-14:23 what is your answer? josephine? t 14 14:23-14:24 shorter maybe. s 15 14:25-14:27 maybe shorter, ok. are you imagining the wave, the wave here? [t pointing to the image of ‘m=1’ in figure 1] t 16 14:27-14:28 yes. s 17 14:28-15:28 yes, you are imagining the wave here, ok, do you remember what the other one looks like? so, the previous one, you can fit in half a wavelength. half wavelength for this l [t pointing to figure 1]. ok? here [t showing figure 2], we can fit in a quarter of the wavelength. t 18 15:28-15:29 er, longer! s 19 15:29-18:57 ok, you are changing your mind now? does it need longer? alright we will test it out here. [t conducted an experiment by pouring water into a graduated cylinder, which served as an open-ended tube, to change the length of the tube.] t jiangshan an, ann childs 486 figure 1 standing sound waves in an open-open tube figure 2 standing sound waves in an open-closed tube in excerpt 4, the teacher asked a pumping question in turn 11 to invite students to make a hypothesis of a new scenario, that is, to obtain resonance with the same tuning fork whether the open-closed tube should be longer or shorter than the open-open tube. then, a lengthy wait time of three seconds was given in turn 12. this led to the student’s one-word answer, shorter. then the teacher repeated back maybe shorter but does not indicate if the student’s answer is correct. he then asked a yes/no follow-up question, which referred to figure 1 to confirm with the student the reason for her answer. his elaboration of teacher questions, wait time, and student output in classroom interaction in emi science classes . . . 487 the difference between figure 1 and figure 2 in turn 17 seemed to be an effort to lead students to think more and possibly point to a contradiction. this led the student to quickly change her answer to longer. the teacher then conducted an experiment, which proved the student’s first answer, shorter, was correct. in this exchange, a number of follow-up questions might have been helpful in eliciting students’ reasoning behind the one-word answers, shorter and longer. first, a why probing follow-up move (tang, 2021) might have been useful to elicit the student’s elaboration of the principle behind her answer. it might also be possible that the student did not know the answer and guessed shorter. then, with no feedback from the teacher about whether her answer was correct, compounded by subsequent questions from the teacher, the student changed it to longer. this indicates that it might be helpful here for the teacher to give feedback, what chin (2006) calls “accepting” the student’s answer and then use questions to elicit the reasoning behind it. if the student does not genuinely know the answer, the teacher could use a reflective toss to elicit other students’ ideas, for example, whether they agree or not and ask them to elaborate further, involving more students in a richer discussion. finally, the teacher also could have invited the student to explain her answers by using sound wave diagrams for open-open tubes and open-end tubes with verbal explanations, thus forming a multi-pronged questioning episode where the student uses different modalities. this case demonstrates possible missed opportunities of follow-up questioning to address the initial higher-order thinking question. 5. discussion this study explored the patterns and relationships of teacher higher-order thinking questions, wait time, and student output in emi science classes taught by nsts in the foreign high school programs in china to understand the pedagogical factors impacting classroom interaction in emi classes. 5.1. rq1: patterns of teacher higher-order thinking questions, wait time, and student output the finding that half of the teacher questions were higher-order thinking questions, with recall questions occupying only a small proportion, clearly contrasts with previous findings featuring low use of higher-order thinking questions and a dominance of recall questions, where the teachers’ low english proficiency was often considered a factor. this shows that when emi teachers possess high english proficiency, they might be more confident in opening up conversations to collectively construct knowledge with students on complicated subject matter and adopt a constructivist teaching approach with a more dialogic nature. jiangshan an, ann childs 488 despite the use of more higher-order thinking questions, however, there was a limited variety. this suggests a possible lack of repertoire of discursive strategies from the teachers to guide students’ thinking through dialogues. one reason could be that pumping, the most commonly used type, by chin’s (2007) definition, is a more straightforward form of constructivist questions. the minimal use of constructive challenge shows when a student gave incorrect answers, the teacher rarely asked him/her or other students to re-think their incorrect answers and led them to work out the answers on their own. the absence of reflective toss means that when a student provided a response, the teachers never asked students to evaluate or comment on this response, thus redirecting such responsibility back to the students. as chin (2007) discussed, each of the questioning approaches possesses a special and meaningful function in contributing to constructivist teaching. thus, this lack of variety means possible missed learning opportunities for students to realize their misconceptions and discuss a range of views. the limited overall use of wait time is similar to what was typically found in l1 science classrooms (rowe, 1974). while we acknowledge that the use of wait time depends on many factors, some of which are cultural (oecd, 2005), the consistent findings across different contexts seem to show that leaving more substantial wait time may be a challenge for most teachers. this is true even in emi classes where wait time may be more needed for students to think about questions and phrase answers about subject knowledge in an l2. the patterns of student output reflect a limited degree of student participation. the short average student turn length and the high noun-verb ratio suggest a prevalent use of short noun-oriented answers and limited degree of articulation of science processes, where verbs would be typically required. the rare incidents of student questions show students seldom initiated interaction. together with the overall low average time percentage of student talk, unfavorable conditions for science learning and language learning were revealed (chin, 2007; long, 1996). 5.2. rq2: relationships between higher-order thinking questions, wait time and student output one of the foremost findings of this study is that wait time seemed to be a stronger factor leading to student output of more quantity and quality whereas the use of higher-order thinking questions did not necessarily achieve the same effect. the moderate positive correlation between wait time and all four student output measures suggests that when the teachers did give more wait time, the students were able to produce lengthier output with more complicated linguistic structures involving verbs instead of single-noun answers, talk more and initiate more questions themselves. this effect was regardless of the type of the teacher questions, wait time, and student output in classroom interaction in emi science classes . . . 489 questions, as excerpts 1 and 2 demonstrate. thus, this finding adds to the existing literature in the l1 classrooms (rowe, 1974; tobin, 1987) that in emi classes more extended wait time can also lead to positive changes to classroom interaction. the moderate level of correlation perhaps indicates a heightened need for wait time for students to think and phrase answers due to the dual cognitive challenges in emi science classes (an & thomas, 2021). given the limited capacity of our working memory (sweller, 1998), students’ working memory may well be overloaded in emi classes. thus, wait time is perhaps critically important in emi classes to allow more substantial responses. this study also shows that more use of wait time in emi classes may create an atmosphere which signals that the teacher values students’ ideas, thus encouraging student questions. this was also observed in l1 classrooms (samiroden, 1983). while wait time was shown to be beneficial, the lack of correlation between it and higher-order thinking questions indicates that the teachers did not seem to coordinate the use of wait time with the types of questions they asked. this means the students were not given sufficient time needed to answer higher-order thinking questions. due to the more complex thinking processes requested, higher-order thinking questions may also place a higher demand on language use. the students may need to create their own language in explaining their reasoning, as compared to likely recycling or reciting the language they received in answering recall questions. thus, from a language perspective, the lack of longer wait time after higher-order thinking questions may also have inhibited the students from producing substantial answers. literature on wait time for lower-order questions shows that, although some authors (e.g., tobin, 1987) question the need for longer wait times for these questions, others (e.g., ingram & elliott, 2016) suggest that, even for low level questions, more wait time may also be needed. the findings of this study reinforce the argument that wait time leads to longer and more complex student responses regardless of the question types. this could be because in emi classes wait time after lower-order thinking questions may be helpful if the language barrier causes challenges to students’ responses, as demonstrated by excerpt 3. while previous literature argued higher-order thinking questions tend to elicit more substantial and complex student responses (chin, 2006; llinares & pascual peña, 2015), it was not the case in this study. apart from the limited use of wait time and the lack of variety of the higher-order thinking questions, another reason could be a lack of effective follow-up questions. the issues of variety and follow-up questions, however, are intertwined. as excerpts 3 and 4 show, initial higher-order thinking questions, typically pumping questions, often did not receive a full answer, and there were often missed opportunities for other varieties of higher-order thinking questions to be asked as follow-up questions. jiangshan an, ann childs 490 in excerpt 4, the single-word answers shorter and longer are not sufficient to demonstrate a good understanding and, as described in the results section, various questioning approaches might have been useful to lead students to provide more explanations. in using follow-up moves to scaffold extended dialogues, this study shows that in emi science classes such moves need to scaffold both the development of science ideas and the use of appropriate language to describe these ideas. while follow-up questions have been well established in l1 science classes as helpful for pushing students to elaborate on their thinking (mortimer & scott, 2003; tang, 2021), the follow-up moves discussed are typically centered around the science content. however, in emi contexts language may well inhibit students’ ability to elaborate. thus, multiple follow-up questions may be needed to help students build both science understanding and language. as demonstrated in excerpt 3, a single why follow-up question may not be sufficient in eliciting a further response, particularly when the student struggles to use the appropriate linguistic structure to describe their reasoning. in this case, the teacher may ask more follow-up questions to elicit key words or model the use of key language items before asking the student to give a full answer, examples of which are given in excerpt 3. this incorporation of the language aspect is another key implication of this study, where we argue that follow-up moves scaffolding the language constitute an additional dimension that needs to be addressed in emi classes. as shown in this study, higherorder thinking questions do not necessarily elicit student output of more quantity and quality. thus, follow-up moves that model or elicit key language items are particularly needed. however, given the intertwined nature of language and content, teachers also need to be cautious about modelling the target language without answering the question themselves, which would defeat the purpose of constructivist 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(2007). evaluation of the effects of the medium of instruction on science learning of hong kong secondary students: instructional activities in science lessons. education journal, 35(2), 78-107. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: chengchen li (huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan, china) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) editor: joanna zawodniak (university of zielona góra, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (silesian university of technology, gliwice, poland) vol. 12 no. 2 june 2022 editorial board: ali al-hoorie (royal commission for jubail and yanbu, jubail, saudi arabia) larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) ali derakhshan (golestan university, gorgan, iran) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) majid elahi shirvan (university of bojnord, iran) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) tammy gregersen (american university of sharjah, united arab emirates) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) amy thompson (west virginia university, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2022 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: kata csizér mariusz kruk chengchen li aleksandra wach joanna zawodniak © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: kata csizér, melanie ellis, mariusz kruk, chengchen li, aleksandra wach, joanna zawodniak cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 61 829 64 20 fax +48 61 829 64 21 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · social sciences citation index (wos core collection) · journal citation reports social sciences (wos) · scopus · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) · current contents – social and behavioral sciences (wos) · essential science indicators (wos) special issue: conducting research syntheses on individual differences in sla guest editors: kata csizér ágnes albert katalin piniel studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 12, number 2, june 2022 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors .....................................................................153 editorial: introduction to the special issue on conducting research syntheses on individual differences in sla ..................................................157 articles: katalin piniel, anna zólyomi – gender differences in foreign language classroom anxiety: results of a meta-analysis ...................................173 elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele, samuel greiff – taking stock: a metaanalysis of the effects of foreign language enjoyment .................... 205 julia goetze, meagan driver – is learning really just believing? – a metaanalysis of self-efficacy and achievement in sla ............................ 233 zia tajeddin, neda khanlarzadeh, hessameddin ghanbar – learner variables in the development of intercultural competence: a synthesis of home and study abroad research ...................................................................................261 ágnes albert, kata csizér – investigating individual differences with qualitative research methods: results of a meta-analysis of leading applied linguistics journals ........................................................................................... 303 notes to contributors ......................................................................337 153 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors ágnes albert is assistant professor at the department of english applied linguistics at eötvös university, budapest and holds a phd in language pedagogy. her research interests include task-based language learning and individual differences with a focus on learner creativity and positive emotions related to foreign language learning. currently, she is a member of a research team investigating the motivation, autonomy, and positive and negative emotions of secondary school learners about their english classes. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8339-7119 contact details: department of english applied linguistics, school of english and american studies, eötvös loránd university, rákóczi út 5, 1088 budapest, hungary (albert.agnes@btk.elte.hu) elouise botes is a post-doc researcher in the department of developmental and educational psychology at the university of vienna. she recently graduated with a phd in psychology from the university of luxembourg and is a registered organizational psychologist in south africa. she has published numerous articles examining the emotions in language learning, individual differences in learning and behavior, and psychometric validation studies. her research interests include emotions in foreign language learning, positive psychology, personality psychology, and individual differences in education. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4952-8386 contact details: university of vienna, university of vienna, department for developmental and educational psychology, nig, universitätsstraße 7, 1010 vienna, austria (elouise.botes@univie.ac.at) kata csizér is associate professor at eötvös loránd university, budapest. her main research interests are the social psychological aspects of l2 learning and teaching as well as foreign language motivation. she has published over 100 academic 154 papers and has co-authored several books, including the recent palgrave macmillan handbook of motivation for language learning with martin lamb, alastair henry, and stephen ryan. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1755-8142 contact details: department of english applied linguistics, school of english and american studies, eötvös loránd university, rákóczi út 5, 1088 budapest, hungary (wein.kata@btk.elte.hu) jean-marc dewaele is professor of applied linguistics and multilingualism. he has published widely on individual differences in classroom emotions. he is former president of the international association of multilingualism and the european second language association and general editor of the journal of multilingual and multicultural development. he won the equality and diversity research award from the british association for counselling and psychotherapy (2013), the robert gardner award for excellence in second language and bilingualism research (2016) from the international association of language and social psychology and the eurosla distinguished scholar award (2022) from the european second language association. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8480-0977 contact details: birkbeck college, university of london, department of languages, cultures, and applied linguistics, malet street, londonwc1e 7hx, united kingdom (j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk) meagan driver is assistant professor in the department of romance and classical studies and a core faculty member in the second language studies (sls) phd program and the center for latin american and caribbean studies. dr. driver is an applied linguist who specializes in mixed-methods approaches to heritage and second language acquisition (sla). within this realm, her research implements cognitive theories and methodologies to explore topics including affect, bilingualism and multilingualism and study abroad, and the relationship with a range of linguistic, psychological, and social factors, including vocabulary learning, moral judgment, and identity. presently, her work explores the relationship between various emotions, including interest and linguistic insecurity, and questions surrounding linguistic and ethnoracial identity, specifically with respect to the acquisition of a heritage or foreign language. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6712-4521 contact details: 3850 tunlaw rd. nw apt. 805 washington, dc 20007 (driverme@ msu.edu) 155 hessameddin ghanbar is assistant professor of applied linguistics at islamic azad university, fereshtegaan international branch, tehran, iran. his areas of interest include meta-analysis and research synthesis in l2 research. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8895-3791 contact details: islamic azad university, fereshtegaan international branch, iran zamin, shahrak gharb, tehran, iran (hessam.ghanbar@gmail.com) julia goetze is assistant teaching professor and the german language coordinator in the department of germanic and slavic languages and literatures, pennsylvania state university, usa. his research focuses on instructed second language acquisition. she specializes in the investigation of the psychology of teachers in the foreign language classroom, such as teacher emotions and their relationship with cognitive processes, their beliefs and belief system formation, how their behaviors influence language teaching and learning. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4856-760x contact details: the pennsylvania state university 442 burrowes building university park, pa 16802 (jzg5860@psu.edu) samuel greiff is full professor of educational assessment and psychology at university of luxembourg. he holds a phd in cognitive and experimental psychology from the university of heidelberg, germany. prof. greiff has been awarded several research funds by diverse funding organizations, was fellow in the luxembourg research program of excellency, and has published articles in national and international scientific journals and books. he serves (or has served) as editor for several journals: editor-in-chief for learning and individual differences and european journal of psychological assessment and associate editor for intelligence and journal of educational psychology. his work mainly focuses on educational and psychological assessment, cognitive and non-cognitive skills, and education in the 21st century. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2900-3734 contact details: university of luxembourg, department of behavioral and cognitive sciences maison des sciences humaines, 11 porte de sciences, 4366 eschsur-alzette, luxembourg (samuel.greiff@uni.lu) neda khanlarzadeh is a phd candidate in applied linguistics at allameh tabataba’i university, tehran, iran. her areas of interest are discourse studies, second language pragmatics, and (intercultural) teacher education. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8369-9467 156 contact details: department of english language and literature, faculty of persian literature and foreign languages, allameh tabataba’i university, south allameh street, saadatabad, tehran, iran (nedakhanlarzadeh@yahoo.ca) katalin piniel, phd, works at the department of english applied linguistics, school of english and american studies, eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary. she is particularly interested in conducting research on the dynamic interrelationship of individual differences in foreign language learning. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9225-3301 contact details: department of english applied linguistics, school of english and american studies, eötvös loránd university, rákóczi út 5, 1088 budapest, hungary (brozik-piniel.katalin@btk.elte.hu) zia tajeddin is professor of applied linguistics at the department of english language teaching, tarbiat modares university, tehran, iran. his research interests center on l2 pragmatics, intercultural education, and teacher education in eil/elf. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0430-6408 contact details: department of english language teaching, faculty of humanities, tarbiat modares university, jalal ale-ahmad highway, tehran, iran (tajeddinz@ modares.ac.ir; zia_tajeddin@yahoo.com) anna zólyomi is a third-year phd student in applied linguistics at eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary. her main areas of research include language aptitude and explicit/implicit learning processes. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9280-5775 contact details: department of english applied linguistics, school of english and american studies, eötvös loránd university, rákóczi út 5, 1088 budapest, hungary (zolyomi.anna@btk.elte.hu) studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: achilleas kostoulas (university of graz, austria) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (pedagogical university of kraków, poland) vol. 8 no. 3 september 2018 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, university of new south wales, sydney) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo) kata csizér (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) robert dekeyser (university of maryland) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (curtin university, perth) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) carol griffiths (fatih university, istanbul) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) sarah mercer (university of graz) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) bonny norton (university of british columbia) terrence odlin (ohio state university) rebecca l. oxford (university of maryland) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (university of pannonia, trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto) elaine tarone (university of minnesota) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) stuart webb (university of western ontario) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2018 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: jakub bielak achilleas kostoulas mariusz kruk aleksandra wach © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: jakub bielak, melanie ellis, achilleas kostoulas, mariusz kruk, aleksandra wach cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · scopus · web of science emerging sources citation index (esci) · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the clarivate analytics (formerly thomson reuters) master journal list. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 8, number 3, september 2018 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ....................................................................545 editorial .........................................................................................549 articles: sachiko nakamura – how i see it: an exploratory study on attributions and emotions in l2 learning ..................................................................553 kay irie, stephen ryan, sarah mercer – using q methodology to investigate pre-service efl teachers’ mindsets about teaching competences ........575 todd a. hernández – l2 spanish apologies development during short-term study abroad ..................................................................................................... 599 katarzyna hryniuk – expressing authorial self in research articles written by polish and english native-speaker writers: a corpus-based study ........621 dietmar tatzl – a higher-education teaching module for integrating industry content and language through online recruitment advertisements ....643 jessica g. briggs, julie dearden, ernesto macaro – english medium instruction: comparing teacher beliefs in secondary and tertiary education .....673 book reviews: jelena mihaljević djigunović – review of branka drljača margić, irena vodopija-krstanović’s uncovering english-medium instruction: glocal issues in higher education ............................................................... 697 ewa waniek-klimczak – review of talia isaacs, pavel trofimovich’s second language pronunciation assessment: interdisciplinary perspectives ....... 701 notes to contributors .....................................................................707 545 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors jessica briggs is departmental lecturer in second language acquisition at the university of oxford. her research interests centre on language learning and use outside of the traditional second language classroom, including in study abroad and english medium instruction (emi) contexts. contact details: department of education, university of oxford, 15 norham gardens, oxford, uk ox2 6py (jess.briggs@education.ox.ac.uk) julie dearden was senior research fellow at emi oxford, centre for research and development in english medium instruction at the university of oxford until 2016. julie is interested in the global phenomenon of emi and the changing roles of english teachers and teachers of other academic disciplines in an emi institution. contact details: department of education, university of oxford, 15 norham gardens, oxford, uk ox2 6py (julie.dearden@education.ox.ac.uk) jelena mihaljević djigunović was professor of sla and tefl at the university of zagreb till she retired in 2014. she is still involved in supervising phd students in zagreb university’s doctoral program on fl education. her main research interests centre around second language acquisition, teaching modern languages to young learners, the role of affective factors in language learning, and foreign language teacher education. she has been involved in a number of large scale national and international research projects, the latest one being early language learning in europe (ellie). her publications include two research books on affective learner factors and over 100 papers. she has co-edited several research volumes. contact details: pijavišće 21e, 10090 zagreb, croatia (jdjigunovic@gmail.com) todd hernández (phd university of kansas) is associate professor of spanish, and the language program coordinator for spanish. he joined marquette university’s department of languages, literatures, and cultures in 2004, where he 546 teaches a wide range of courses in spanish second language acquisition, spanish language, and language teaching methodology. his research focuses on language pedagogy, second language acquisition, and language learning during study abroad. his current research project, which was awarded an american council on the teaching of foreign languages (actfl) research priorities grant, examines the effects of pedagogical intervention on the pragmatic development of spanish language learners during study abroad in spain. contact details: department of languages, literatures, and cultures, marquette university, p.o. box 1881 milwaukee, wisconsin 53201-1881 (todd.hernandez@ marquette.edu) katarzyna hryniuk is assistant professor in the institute of english studies at warsaw university, poland. she teaches in the english teacher training program and supervises ma theses on fl learning and teaching. her main research interests in applied linguistics include efl teacher training, developing academic writing, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, intercultural rhetoric and discourse analysis. her publications have appeared in international journal of applied linguistics, in edited volumes published by peter lang, and most recently in the volume edited by t. ruecker and d. crusan (2018) the politics of english second language writing assessment in global contexts, published by routledge. contact details: university of warsaw, institute of english studies, ul. hoża 69, 00-681 warszawa (k.hryniuk@uw.edu.pl) kay irie is professor at the faculty of international social sciences, gakushuin university, tokyo, where she develops and manages a content-focused bridge program to emi courses. she also teaches in the graduate college of education at temple university japan. her current research interests include clil/emi pedagogy, language learning psychology, learner autonomy, and research methods used in these areas, including q-methodology. contact details: gakushuin university, 1-5-1 mejiro, toshima, tokyo, 171-8588, japan (kay.irie@gakushuin.ac.jp) ernesto macaro is professor of applied linguistics and director of emi oxford, centre for research and development in english medium instruction at the university of oxford. his research focuses on language learning strategies and on interaction between teachers and learners in second language or english medium instruction classrooms. contact details: department of education, university of oxford, 15 norham gardens, oxford, uk ox2 6py (ernesto.macaro@education.ox.ac.uk) 547 sarah mercer is professor of foreign language teaching at the university of graz, austria. she completed her phd at lancaster university and her habilitation in graz. her research interests include all aspects of the psychology surrounding the foreign language learning experience, focusing in particular on the self. she is the author of towards an understanding of language learner self-concept (2011, springer) and is co-editor of psychology for language learning (2012, palgrave), multiple perspectives on the self in sla (2014, multilingual matters), and co-author of exploring psychology in language learning and teaching, co-authored with marion williams and stephen ryan (2016, oxford university press). contact details: university of graz, liebiggasse 9/hp, 8010 graz, austria (sarah.mercer @uni-graz.at) sachiko nakamura holds an ma in tesol from anaheim university and is a doctoral candidate in applied linguistics at king mongkut’s university of technology thonburi, bangkok, thailand. her research areas include affect, self-regulation, and language learning strategies. she is currently co-editing a book on innovation in language learning and teaching in japan with hayo reinders and stephen ryan. contact details: king mongkut’s university of technology thonburi, 126 pracha uthit rd, khwaeng bang mot, khet thung khru, krung thep maha nakhon, bangkok, thailand 10140 (info@sachikonakamura.org) stephen ryan has been involved in language education for over 25 years and is professor of applied linguistics in the school of culture, media and society at waseda university, tokyo. his research and publications cover various aspects of psychology in language learning, with his most recent books being the psychology of the language learner revisited (co-authored with zoltán dörnyei, 2015, routledge) and exploring psychology in language learning and teaching, co-authored with marion williams and sarah mercer (2016, oxford university press). contact details: waseda univeristy, 1-24-1 toyama, shinjuku, tokyo, 162-8644, japan (stephen.ryan@waseda.jp) dietmar tatzl is a faculty member of the institute of aviation, where he has taught english language courses to aeronautical engineering students for 15 years. he received his doctorate in english studies from the university of graz, austria. his research interests include english for academic purposes, english for specific purposes and engineering education. contact details: fh joanneum university of applied sciences, graz, austria (dietmar. tatzl@fh-joanneum.at) 548 ewa waniek-klimczak is professor of english linguitics at the deprtment of english language and applied linguitics, istitute of english, university of lodz, poland. her main interests are in second language pronunciation and sociophonetics. contact details: institute of english, university of łódź, ul. pomorska 171/173, 90-236, poland (ewa.waniek.klimczak@uni.lodz.pl) 519 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (3). 2019. 519-540 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.3.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt crossovers: digitalization and literature in foreign language education christiane lütge university of munich, lmu, germany https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5182-9992 luetge@anglistik.uni-muenchen.de thorsten merse university of munich, lmu, germany https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0774-1672 t.merse@anglistik.uni-muenchen.de claudia owczarek university of munich, lmu, germany https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3603-0637 owczarek@anglistik.uni-muenchen.de michelle stannard university of munich, lmu, germany https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0036-6937 stannard@anglistik.uni-muenchen.de abstract digitalization produces increasingly multimodal and interactive literary forms. a major challenge for foreign language education in adopting such forms lies in deconstructing discursive borders between literary education and digital education (romance of the book vs. euphoric media heavens), thereby crossing over into a perspective in which digital and literary education are intertwined. in engaging with digital literary texts, it is additionally important to consider how different competencies and literary/literacy practices interact and inform each other, including: (1) a receptive perspective: reading digital narratives christiane lütge, thorsten merse, claudia owczarek, michelle stannard 520 and digital literature can become a space for literary aesthetic experience, and (2) a productive perspective: learners can become “produsers” (bruns, 2008) of their own digital narratives by drawing on existing genre conventions and redesigning “available designs” (new london group, 1996). consequently, we propose a typology of digital literatures, incorporating functional, interactive and narrative aspects, as applied to a diverse range of digital texts. to further support our discussion, we draw on a range of international studies in the fields of literacies education and 21st century literatures (e.g., beavis, 2010; hammond, 2016; kalantzis & cope, 2012; ryan, 2015) and, in turn, explore trajectories for using concrete digital literary texts in the foreign language classroom. keywords: digital literature; literary learning; digitalization; foreign language education 1. toward digital literature: crossing borders in foreign language education in the digital age, new media formats such as mobile apps are gradually working their way into the foreign language classroom. although this process might at times be supported with sound pedagogic and purposeful reasoning, such integration is also very often selective and unsystematic. yet, such integration requires a deep understanding and typologization of frequently emerging digital media in view of their learning and teaching potential. apart from when new apps or software “flash up” in an isolated fashion, the digital age also moves whole phenomena and fields of inquiry – such as literature and literature didactics – into focus to call into question and renegotiate their disciplinary and material self-conception (see hammond, 2016; zimmermann, 2015). in this article, we will develop a line of reasoning that centralizes the phenomenon of digital literature and its role in renegotiating what counts as literature in the digital age. in doing so, we incorporate the terminology offered by zimmermann (2015, p. 14) and simanowski (2002), who use the term “digital literature” to demarcate and redefine related terms such as hyperfiction, net literature or electronic text in order to reconfigure significant literary concepts such as the reader role or authorship. this reconfiguration invites a range of new perspectives for the teaching of literature as a distinct field of study within elt and tefl, including: · the role and nature of literature in the curriculum and the classroom (beavis, 2010); · the changing reading preferences of learners (e.g., multimodal and digital texts) and attempts to mirror students’ out-of-school textual experience in the classroom (beavis, 2010; kalantzis, cope, chan, & dalley-trim, 2016); · the changing realities of socializing children and teenagers into becoming “readers,” which encourages a careful reflection upon established practices of “reading” in classrooms. crossovers: digitalization and literature in foreign language education 521 to specify these perspectives, we draw on dawidowski (2013) who elaborates how reading digital literature is often no longer a linear endeavor as with print literature, but, indeed, a discontinuous decoding of textual and multimodal information where contemporary reading practices by readers below the age of 30 are marked by “switching, zapping [and] zooming” (dawidowski, 2013, p. 13). in a similar vein, gralley (2006, p. 36), illustrator of children’s books, argues that – when we are “able to uncouple the idea of the book from paper thinking” – new possibilities for constructing and connecting texts and images in multimodal and digital ways open up that have hitherto been unthinkable with the materiality of print and page-bound books (see also ritter, 2013). this can lead to new dynamics of presenting and interweaving narrative elements in digital literature, thus, creating innovative literary and aesthetic experiences for a “new” readership outside of pure “paper thinking.” in considering language learners as members of this “new” readership, we are concerned with the ways in which digital literature may open language learners to new and relevant discourses as they engage with digital texts, with how meaning is formulated for learners as they encounter the target language alongside a range of semiotic systems within digital literary spaces, and with how new aesthetic experiences offered by digital literature relate to established considerations on the pursuit of literary competence in the foreign language classroom. these considerations are rooted within a larger orientation towards literary learning – or literature didactics, as it is known in germany – in foreign language education (e.g., diehr & surkamp, 2015; küstler, lütge, & wieland, 2015; lütge, 2012). the authors take for granted the valuable role literature can play in the development of communicative competencies and broader literacies as learners interact with authentic texts that offer access to aesthetic literary experiences and opportunities to engage with relevant intercultural insights and social themes. in contrast to the above rather optimistic outlook towards digital literature, one can also retrace public and educational discourses – articulated, for example, by parents or teachers – that at times tend to privilege the analog book as an educational medium and marginalize digital literature (dawidowski, 2013). a certain skepticism towards digital media, in particular towards accepting their alleged, real or assumed “promises of salvation” as absolute, also becomes apparent in discourses of literary didactics. for the teaching of german literature, ritter (2013, p. 1) identifies pendulum swings that characterize digital-literary formats either as innovative border crossings or as superficial sensationalism. for the future of the literature classroom, we argue that it will become necessary to avoid articulating the relationship between the digital and the literary in such purely bipolar oppositions where the pedagogic trajectory is either clearly negative or excessively positive. instead, we propose taking up a more sober and christiane lütge, thorsten merse, claudia owczarek, michelle stannard 522 mediating position to explore the diverse ways in which digital literatures are bound to develop, and to engage with the manifold perspectives and potentials these developments will engender for the theory and practice of literature didactics (lütge, 2018). specifically, it will be interesting to see the conceptualization of new notions of literacies required by practices of digital reading (see harrison, 2009), from which new impulses for discussing the nature of literature and its educative potential can be expected. as our line of argumentation will show, it is a deep understanding of the structure of digital literature and the way such literature is “read” that contributes relevant insights to this discussion – both from the vantage point of literary studies and the pedagogy of teaching literature. we further argue that our crossover of digitalization and literature in the context of efl pedagogy must be accompanied by combining the didactic discourses of using literature and of using media in the classroom, which are currently considered in a fairly separate manner rather than being investigated for productive overlap. this separation must seem ever more surprising when we take seriously what kalantzis et al. (2016, p. 2) observe: meaning is made in ways that are increasingly multimodal – in which written-linguistic modes of meaning interface with oral, visual, audio, gestural, tactile and spatial patterns of meaning . . . we need to extend the range of literacy pedagogy beyond alphabetical communication . . . we need to supplement traditional reading and writing skills with multimodal communications, particularly those typical of the new, digital media. this inextricable entanglement of diverse meaning-making modes and practices of text reception in the context of digital media can also be readily transferred to dealing with digital-literary texts, where literary meaning is constructed in multimodal, interactive and functionally innovative ways. against this backdrop, we seek to legitimize and achieve the combination of teaching digital media with teaching literature in foreign language education, for example, by bringing together concepts of literary literacy or literary competences (e.g., diehr & surkamp, 2015; lütge, 2012; volkmann, 2012, 2015) and media competences and digital literacy (e.g., dudeney, hockly, & pegrum, 2013; volkmann, 2012). apart from a few exceptions (e.g., brunsmeier & kolb, 2018), we wish to emphasize that although the research on teaching with literature in foreign language education is quite robust, particularly within germany (e.g., diehr & surkamp, 2015; küstler et al., 2015; lütge, 2012), this body of work has rarely engaged with digital developments in the world of literature so far. this is surprising not only in view of existing international research in this field, such as in view of kalantzis et al.’s (2016) observation quoted above, but also because the advent of an extended notion of text and a broad understanding of what counts as literature have long been considered established in research and classroom practice crossovers: digitalization and literature in foreign language education 523 (e.g., paran & robinson, 2016). therefore, we conceptualize our engagement with digital literature in this article as a promising case in point for bringing together a literary and digital education that neither cashes in on a euphoric technological “cybertopianism” (page & thomas, 2011, p. 8) nor celebrates uncritically a romance of the print book when the understanding of what counts as literature in the digital age must be deeply expanded. what follows is an exploration of a new field that couples our research on analyzing and typologizing the phenomenon of digital literatures with harnessing the potentials (e.g., interactive, creative-productive, imaginative) for foreign language education. 2. digital literature: modelling a typology in this section, we propose a multidimensional model to describe and typologize the phenomenon of digital literature. such a model, we argue, is crucial groundwork to conceptualize – in a second step pedagogical implications for the efl literature classroom in which digital literature moves into focus. this model is a key outcome of the current research project digitaliterature that has been implemented at the chair of tefl at the ludwig-maximilians-universität (lmu) in munich since 2017. from a theoretical perspective, the articulation of this model integrates research from media and literary studies, pedagogy and impulses from games studies. based on a broad corpus of digital-literary texts stored on digital devices (mainly tablets or laptops), we closely examined a range of digital-literary texts and analyzed their specific characteristics. this allows us to develop a deep understanding of the changing nature of literature in light of the digital and to generate substantial insights into an area hitherto largely unexplored and unknown in foreign language education research. with the advent of new narratives, as page and thomas (2011) show, new practices of reading and conventions of reception will emerge. yet still, the influence of digital literature on literary theory and literature didactics has yet to be systematically explored. for example, what needs to be explored is the degree to which the technological and functional features of a literature app can influence a story’s development and its narrative potential. only then can one reasonably evaluate the possibilities of didactic applications of digital literature – rather than jumping to polemic and hasty conclusions. this discussion is imperative both for identifying which digital literature is valuable for curation into the foreign language education context and in considering which methodological interventions may be developed for working with such digital literature in the classroom. on a further level, what appears relevant to us is the dimension of interactivity which can unfold between a reader, a digital text and potentially other readers. in addition, we also turn to those elements that affect – and often christiane lütge, thorsten merse, claudia owczarek, michelle stannard 524 fundamentally influence – the narrative structure and architecture of a story. therefore, literature in the so-called “brave new digital classroom” (blake, 2013) has to consider a range of parameters which we will detail in the following section. these include what we have identified as aspects of functionality, interactivity and narrativity on the one hand, but also the double bound function of the learner as reader or reader as learner that is relevant both from a literary studies and a literature didactics perspective. by taking up these parameters in an acronymic fashion, we call our model finale to entail aspects of functionality, interactivity, narrativity and learner-reader-role (figure 1). in taking this finale model as a starting point, it will become possible to achieve a systematic exploration and description of digital literature and reflect didactically on the changing nature of what counts as literature. based on this thorough understanding of digital literature and the ensuing implications this has on foreign language education, it becomes increasingly possible to articulate the digital-literary competences necessary to engage more deeply with digital literary texts and their meaning-making through the interplay of functional features, interactivity parameters, narrative architectures and learner-reader-roles. figure 1 the finale model with its aspects of functionality, interactivity, narrativity and the learner-reader-role serve the systematic exploration and description of digital literature and the articulation of digital-literary competences necessary to engage deeply with digital literary texts to introduce the finale model into elt discourse, what will now follow is an explanation and exemplification of the individual parameters this model entails. for each parameter, we offer a few brief examples of existing digital literary crossovers: digitalization and literature in foreign language education 525 texts and a more extensive exploration of example texts in select case studies. in doing so, we draw on a range of existing theory and typologies on digital literature from both inside and outside the fields of general education and foreign language education. by substantiating each theoretical parameter with concrete literary-digital examples, we seek to illustrate the intricate connection – or indeed, the crossover – between digital and literary education. 2.1. functionality to achieve a sound typologization, what needs to be explored are the functions of digital literature that are immediately caused by technological-digital parameters. for this purpose, we consider ruben puentedura’s samr model to be particularly valuable (puentedura, 2015). as an acronym, samr is based on four elementary steps called substitution, augmentation, modification and redefinition. these four elements are helpful for constructing categorizations that capture and characterize the functional structure of digital media and apps at large, and of digital literature in particular. the samr model is didactically relevant in that it shows – and here we follow dudeney et al.’s (2013) evaluation of this model – that “some uses of new technologies lead at most to an enhancement of education, while other uses lead to real transformation” (p. 46). thus, a starting point opens up that allows for differentiating between mere enhancements or true transformations of teaching approaches that rely on digital media (lütge, 2018). according to puentedura (2015), substitution and augmentation are located on the level of enhancement: 1. with substitution, the technological component serves as a direct tool substitute for analog functionalities, but there is no functionally qualitative add-on to traditional applications (e.g., simple e-books that can be read on e-devices where they substitute paper, but do not offer any enhanced functionalities apart from turning the page electronically). 2. on the level of augmentation, technological components work towards substituting analog functionalities and, simultaneously, enhancing possible application options (e.g., more advanced e-books which offer a broader range of functions, such as being able to highlight passages and take notes which can be shared digitally, audio readings of the text which can be toggled on or off, or interactive vocabulary glosses. functionally, these components substitute, for example, bookmarks and sticky notes, paper dictionaries and audiobooks). the level of transformation also distinguishes between two distinct sublevels, modification and redefinition (see puentedura, 2015): christiane lütge, thorsten merse, claudia owczarek, michelle stannard 526 1. modifications introduce technological components that achieve a substantial change in terms of what is possible on the level of task design (for example, the children’s literature app wuwu & co (step in books, 2016) features embedded riddles that need to be solved while reading in order to continue with the storyline). 2. finally, the aspect of redefinition addresses technological components that offer completely new and hitherto unimaginable or unattained possibilities for task design (e.g., the app 80 days (inkle, 2016), a digital adaptation of jules verne’s classical text, generates numerous individual paths for navigating a highly complex storyworld while setting the reader different tasks that are generated depending on how the player interacts with the game world). in evaluating the samr model in view of pedagogy and classroom usage, what becomes clear is that digital literature located on the level of enhancement merely adds to what becomes possible in the classroom. many functionalities offered through e-readers (e.g., digital annotations or embedded dictionaries) are primarily practical, easily accessible and a quick substitute for, say, print dictionaries. however, they do not fundamentally change the process of accessing these texts as, after all, different modes of delivery still serve the same purpose (e.g., retrieving additional information or word explanations). on the level of transformation, the innovative technological components may substantially affect the didactic and methodological possibilities compared to analog approaches, particularly where the relevant media is paired with appropriate tasks that lean into these transformative aspects. in considering concrete examples of literary apps, we see that such texts may offer functional advantages across different levels of puentedura’s scale, as is the case with the tablet app, the tempest, by heuristic shakespeare (2016). within the level of enhancement, the app adopts many established functionalities from e-books and digital informational environments for making shakespeare’s work easier to navigate and understand, including pop-up vocabulary glosses, the ability to highlight, copy and take notes, as well as providing hyperlinks to paratexts and informational articles. within the level of transformation, however, the app includes an eloquent design for layering modal forms (e.g., videos of performers speaking lines are synchronized to the playtext scrolling below) and allows for multiple, novel ways for reconfiguring and re-visualizing the playtext. for instance, the app offers a scene map where users can select scenes and watch as the character icons rearrange themselves to illustrate who is in which setting and with which players at different points in the play. users may additionally see the line density of a particular character’s role, along with a full list of that character’s lines linking back to the core text. while engaging crossovers: digitalization and literature in foreign language education 527 with the core play text, users can tap on the right margin to pull up a timeline of the play, concise summaries, illustrations and curated lines of text that are especially iconic or significant to the play. what makes these features more transformational than enhancement-based is the ways in which they open up tasks that can be engaged in in language education. within the tempest, the reconfigurability of the app could facilitate novel readings of the play (e.g., multimodal readings at the intersection of play text, video performances, and the expressive illustrations provided in the app; or readings that engage with the language of one character, possibly through a gendered or postcolonial lens) that would be prohibitively complex and time consuming within a language learning context relying on analog media alone. 2.2. interactivity in their discussion on interactivity in multimedia learning, domagk, schwartz and plass (2010) emphasize that although “interactivity has been heralded by many as the one feature of technology that holds the strongest promise for educational use” (p. 1024), it is so inconsistently defined across broad fields of inquiry as to lose its applicability in discrete contexts. in this vein, it is imperative to delineate what exactly interactivity might entail in terms of learner engagement with both digital media in general and digital literature more specifically. more generally, we may consider domagk et al. (2010)’s core definition of interactivity as a “reciprocal activity between a learner and a multimedia learning system, in which the [re]action of the learner is dependent upon the [re]action of the system and vice versa” (p. 1032). within their discussion, interactivity entails not just a reciprocal reaction on the part of both learner and machine, but also degrees of responsiveness, where “the (re)actions on both sides are related, relevant, and sustain the continuity of the interaction” (p. 1025). in considering what this responsiveness might look like in the case of narrative media, we draw on ryan’s (2011, 2015) “onion” of interactivity in digital narrative, which describes different layers of interactivity as follows: peripheral interactivity: “here the story is framed by an interactive interface, but this interactivity affects neither the story itself, nor the order of its presentation” (ryan, 2011, p. 37). such interactivity is particularly common with print books that have been adapted to adopt the aesthetics afforded by the digital medium. for instance, in the tablet app, alice in new york (oceanhouse media, 2011), the story is organized in the same manner as any e-book (i.e., linearly, with links to individual pages or chapters) but with expressive illustrations that can be flung across the screen with the swipe of a finger or that move as the user tilts the device. when considered didactically, a question that arises with such texts is christiane lütge, thorsten merse, claudia owczarek, michelle stannard 528 do they implement peripheral interactivity in a way that is either meaningful for the learner (i.e., providing support, such as through interactive vocabulary glosses or audio that reads text out loud) and/or in a way that is meaningful for the text as literature (i.e., adds expressive and interpretive value to the narrative). hilda bewildered is an example of a literary app that integrates peripheral interactivity as an expressive and interpretable element of the narrative. the graphic story centers around a princess and a homeless girl who, depending on your individual reading of the text, may be seen as separate individuals (reminiscent of mark twain’s prince and the pauper) and/or as alter egos. the reader flips between each page by tapping an arrow in the lower-right corner, a feature common to many straightforward e-book apps, but within each page the reader can interact with multiple layers of text, images and frames through different taps and swipes. this layering tends to engage with themes that are central to the narrative, such as the dichotomies of wealth and poverty or privacy and celebrity (stace, 2015). on one page, for example, the reader is confronted with the “pauper” character staring out the foggy window of a bus. when the reader swipes their finger over the window, the city skyline is revealed along with the hazy reflection of the girl in the form of the “princess” (figure 2). this represents a moment of interpretational opportunity for learners engaging with such a text: does the reflection represent the girl imagining herself as a princess? is the girl a princess in disguise? are both true? this example illustrates that even where interactivity in digital literature can be described as “peripheral,” it may be implemented meaningfully to warrant exploration as an element of expressive literary design with implications for how the reader and learner aesthetically experiences the text. figure 2 the reader swipes the window to reveal the pauper’s reflection, which is that of the princess. (screenshot reproduced with permission. copyright: slap happy larry; lynley stace & dan hare) crossovers: digitalization and literature in foreign language education 529 interactivity affecting narrative discourse and the presentation of the story: here users navigate a predetermined story, but the order in which the story is told may vary. perhaps the most well-known examples within this layer are choose your own adventure (cyoa) novels, where the reader is confronted with a fully authored branching story, but has the option of pursuing different story paths with each read-through. ryan (2015) describes the narrative structure of such texts as a tree, where every path branches into further paths, with the end of each branch representing a complete and well-formed story. as ryan attests, however, digital narratives within this layer of interactivity can be built in a wide range of narrative structures, some of which may fold into themselves or even be generated randomly. within the interactive graphic novel, meanwhile, the reader is confronted with decision branches that are similar to a cyoa novel, but several branches either fold back into themselves or fling the reader back to the beginning of the narrative where the reader must use information gleaned from previous read-throughs to access new narrative branches (figure 3). this iterative and maze-like narrative structure plays into the central conceit of the graphic novel, which is to act as a narrative realization of multiple worlds theory as articulated in quantum physics. figure 3 in following a particular branch of the story, the reader is confronted with an access code (left). in later read-throughs, this code can be used to access new narrative branches; (right) the full graphic novel as a maze-like network of frames. (screenshot reproduced with permission. copyright: jason shiga) interactivity creating variations in a predefined story: what distinguishes this layer of interactivity from the previous one is that the user has increasing freedom of action within a “storyworld” and generally involves the user developing or taking on a role, such as when a player inhabits an avatar in a video game (ryan, 2011, 2015). the storyworld offers such a complex array of choices (e.g., which direction to walk in, which object to buy, which character to talk to christiane lütge, thorsten merse, claudia owczarek, michelle stannard 530 in which order) that even when the main story points remain consistent for different users, each individual path for reaching these points can be quite unique. 80 days (inkle, 2016), a literary app which is adapted from jules verne’s around the world in 80 days, features screen upon screen of cyoa-style branching narrative paths. but what distinguishes this text from those in the previous layer of interactivity are the game mechanics that allow the user to configure their progression through the story. the player, who takes on the role of passepartout, phileas fogg’s valet, is enabled to explore towns, to engage or not to engage in conversation, to buy and sell objects, to take out or repay bank loans, to choose how much luggage to carry and, in light of these decisions, to decide on which mode of transport to take between cities. these decisions impact the player’s relationship to phileas fogg, their money, the passage of time and, finally, which narrative paths may or may not be available to the player as they continue through the text. the effect of all of these moving parts is that, unlike with the texts depicted in the previous layer, it would be virtually impossible for a player to recreate a single play through. real-time story generation: within the aforementioned layers of interactivity, stories are first authored and then embedded into digital applications, which impacts how the user interacts with the narrative – meanwhile, the actual story or content of the application remains the same. within real-time story generation, the program is able to generate novel, rather than predefined, story paths in response to a user – a programming feat which relies on artificial intelligence and machine learning systems. while strides are being made in this area of computing, the resulting narratives of story generating programs tend to lack coherence or, as ryan (2011) states, fail to appeal to the sensibilities of “aristotelian form and narrative closure” (p. 55). whether we will one day have story generating apps that will be of literary value to language learners, remains to be seen. meta-interactivity: within this layer, the interactor not only interacts with the program, but is able to generate new content and opportunities for interaction for other users, such as by “designing a new level for a computer game, creating new costumes for the avatar, introducing new objects, associating existent objects with new behaviors, and generally expanding the possibilities of action offered by the storyworld” (ryan, 2011, p. 59). within this layer, the user becomes a producer of digital narrative content, another dimension of digital literature which will be discussed later in this article. 2.3. narrativity the third dimension of our model – narrativity – is crucial and constitutive to understanding the narrative structure and architecture of digital literature. it needs crossovers: digitalization and literature in foreign language education 531 to be stressed though that the aspect of narrativity is not completely separate or different from the aforementioned parameters of functionality or interactivity. rather, this third parameter allows for a literary and narrative exploration of what functional technology and interactive features make possible. to encapsulate the dimension of narrativity, we draw on bode and dietrich’s (2013, p. 1) concept of “future narratives,” abbreviated to fns in their research. they use this concept to encompass narrative forms whose inherent future (i.e., in terms of how the future story develops) is marked by radical openness, indeterminacy and multi-linearity. in departing from “traditional” narratives with a linear, predetermined and closed story development, bode and dietrich (2013) elaborate how these stories are defined by their so-called nodal situations, nodal points, or simply nodes that are embedded in the sequential narrative display of events as the story unfolds. when the reader is traversing the current storyline, they reach a nodal situation that allows for at least two, but normally more, continuations of the story (bode & dietrich, 2013, p. 1). the decisive factor here, however, is that nodal situations are not mentioned en passant, but instead they are centrally presented and “staged” on the medial-textual surface of the text. the reader has to enter the nodal situation (inter)actively and act on or within that node by deciding to choose one of the various storyline options offered to them. thus, nodal situations are: · multi-linear: from a node onwards, a corridor of possible storypaths is opened up from which several runs through the story can be realized and from which the reader chooses one particular run in their individual exploration of the story; · open: the actual run a reader takes is not fully predetermined through the design of the story; what bode and dietrich (2013, p. 29) describe as the “freedom to operate” and as “exploration of possibilities” always leads to a new configuration of how events are connected; theoretically speaking, a digital story with many diverse nodal points can be read in almost endless runs where no run is just like the other. in each nodal situation, the reader has command of their choice and agency. they must decide cleverly and actively which story path might be the best option to pursue for a successful, intriguing or efficient run through the story. this demonstrates the central characteristic of fns: the future is a space of yet unrealized potentiality . . . by allowing the reader/player to enter situations that fork into different branches and to actually experience that ‘what happens next’ may well depend upon us, upon our decisions, our actions, our values and motivations. (bode & dietrich, 2013, p. 1) christiane lütge, thorsten merse, claudia owczarek, michelle stannard 532 from a didactic and literary viewpoint, this openness of a what happens next can primarily be realized through digital forms where technological features are key to presenting fns and staging nodal situations, while the material medium of print and page-bound books is severely limited in its capacity to achieve this (bode & dietrich, 2013, p. 25). this engenders expressive and aesthetic spaces for new and freer forms of narrativity, which in turn inevitably lead to new cultural conventions for dealing with the reception of digital literary media. such new conventions also need to be considered in didactic reflections and pedagogic contexts (such as the efl literature classroom) in order to cater for, and respond to, changing reading habits and innovative possibilities for literary (inter)action (e.g., engaging with new levels of involving readers through choice and agency). to take up a previous example, 80 days features a tremendous number of nodal situations encompassing both concrete story decisions (in a cyoa-manner) as well as in the freedom of action offered to the player as a member of a configurable storyworld (in managing an inventory and resources, such as health, time and money). the resulting narrative openness results in a significant experience gap, not just between one user’s various playthroughs, but in terms of how different users will experience the text. in using such a text in the language classroom, one has to consider the implications of managing this ‘experience gap’ in addition to the ‘interpretation gap’ that is generally exploited in literary learning. on the one hand, this widening gap could represent an insurmountable burden for the language teacher (who themselves will not be able to experience every run or playthrough experienced by their learners). on the other hand, this gap could be meaningfully exploited to encourage further communicative and literary discourse when learners and teachers exchange their divergent experience of exploring the complex storyworld. we assume that the active construction of individual future narratives and the choice and agency enabled through nodal points can not only draw learners/readers into the story but also increase the need to engage in such communication. 2.4. learner-reader-role readers of digital literature are confronted with the dimensions sketched out above, but when these readers are also learners in an educational school context, they are also supposed to develop literary and digital competences. therefore, it is not only the structural characteristics of digital literature that become important in literature didactics. it is also necessary to explore the role a reader or learner assumes when engaging with digital literature. here, mela kocher’s (2004) research on typologies of interaction, which incorporates ryan’s aforementioned work on interactivity, is helpful to systematize digital genres from the crossovers: digitalization and literature in foreign language education 533 perspective of their narrative architecture and their structure of play. in following both kocher (2004) and ryan (2011, 2015), we develop their work further and propose a four-dimensional model to capture the learner-reader-role in digital literary texts and how the learner-reader is situated towards or within the digital literary text. this model is differentiated along the lines of external/internal and exploratory/creative1 (figure 4): figure 4 situating the reader-learner towards and within the digital text along the lines of external and internal as well as exploratory and creative 1. external and exploratory: this dimension can be found in applications where the learner-reader is positioned outside of the fictional world of the story and encounters the characters and events of the narration as an onlooker. there might be options for choosing different pathways of the narrative, but the learner-reader cannot negotiate or influence the story itself, but merely accompanies and explores it (e.g., meanwhile). 2. internal and exploratory: here, the learner-reader has their own role within the events of the story and is involved in the narrative more closely, for example, through their own avatar. similar to the first dimension, however, the reader-learner cannot co-construct or influence the story elements even though there are also options for choosing different 1 kocher (2004) labels the dimensions of her model “external ontological” and “internal ontological.” we expand on and change this terminology and use “creative” instead of “ontological” in our context. christiane lütge, thorsten merse, claudia owczarek, michelle stannard 534 narrative paths (e.g., the cyoa app, ryan north’s to be or not to be, where the player may take on the role of hamlet, ophelia or hamlet sr.). 3. external and creative: within this dimension, the learner-reader is situated outside of the fictional storyworld, yet they can actively influence the plot development, and their agency and choice have immediate consequences on how the narrative unfolds. this dimension offers high degrees of interactivity and space for their own creative contributions to the story (e.g., the popular and long-lived video game, the sims). 4. internal and creative: here, the learner-reader is directly integrated into the events of a story as a protagonist. depending on the interactivity with other readers or players they can directly influence and co-construct the narrative (e.g., 80 days). with this model, it becomes possible to conceptualize what a learnerreader is supposed to be performing when reading and exploring digital literature. the model also shows that the distinction between “reading” and “playing,” or the transition from “reading” into “playing,” is actually fluid. therefore, some digital literary texts are also leaning into so-called ludonarratives, a further variety of genre-crossing formats that are exemplary of the interactive and creative potential of digital texts (aarseth, 2012; hocking, 2007; lütge, merse, & stannard, 2018; stannard & von blanckenburg, 2018). 3. produsing digitaliter@tures: exploring the potential of digital storytelling in the efl classroom having argued for crossing the border between analog and digital literature in the efl classroom, we proceed by making the case for not only reading, but also producing digital texts. jenkins (2006) points out that “as we would not traditionally assume that someone is literate if they can read but not write, we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but not express themselves” (p. 170). this notion can easily be expanded from general media literacy to digital-literary competences. in the same line of thought, hallet (2002) highlights that understanding a text, for example, a digital narrative, means to redesign a given text and to shift from comprehension to processing and production (p. 128). taking up the first dimension of the finale model, i.e., functionality, the reception of digital literature can range from mere enhancements to true transformations of teaching approaches with digital media. the same applies to the production of digital literature: to begin with, on the level of substitution, students could write a story on the computer, for example, using ms word. in this case, technology does not entail any functional improvement, students would crossovers: digitalization and literature in foreign language education 535 simply fulfill the task by typing instead of writing with pen and paper. on the second level, i.e., augmentation, technical tools bring some minor functional enhancement. in the aforementioned example, students might use spellchecking while writing their story. accordingly, the level of modification involves substantial task redesign due to the use of technology. for instance, learners write a text collaboratively using googledocs. on the final level, i.e., redefinition, the integration of technology allows for the creation of new tasks. when thinking about writing texts in the efl classroom, the practice of digital storytelling can be put into this final category as it enables the students to tell a story by combining an increasing range of semiotic modes – a task only feasible thanks to digital tools. digital storytelling describes the fusion of the old art of oral storytelling with a variety of technical tools to tell personal stories intertwining digital images, music, and sound together with the author’s own story voice (porter, 2004). due to their highly multimodal nature, the production of digital stories mirrors contemporary ways of meaning-making. therefore, its integration into the efl classroom appears as a favorable opportunity for the students to communicate in the target language more authentically. not only does digital storytelling reflect the multimodality of today’s communication, but it also takes account of one of the major changes technology brings to contemporary society: the fading distinction between producer and user. to describe this development, axel bruns developed the notion of the “produser” which “highlights that within the communities which engage in the collaborative creation and extension of information and knowledge . . ., users are always already necessarily also producers of the shared knowledge base, regardless of whether they are aware of this role they have become a new hybrid, produser” (bruns, 2008, p. 2). while creating a digital story, students both utilize pre-existing resources, for example, images or sound files they find online (i.e., acting as users), and create new content, for instance by narrating the story with their own voices (i.e., acting as producers). by combining the two to tell their story, they get to practice a central cultural technique of the 21st century in the english classroom and act as produsers. furthermore, the integration of digital storytelling into the efl classroom is also an opportunity to foster multiliteracies. while produsing digital literature, students have to confront both multicontextuality and multimodality. when it comes to the context, the learners have to consider the subject of the story and the corresponding register. at the same time, they must take into account the envisaged audience, their interests, their needs and their prior knowledge. what may be even more demanding is meaning-making with different semiotic modes. in this light, hafner (2014) identifies three different ways of interaction between those modes: christiane lütge, thorsten merse, claudia owczarek, michelle stannard 536 1. concurrence: the meanings of different semiotic modes strengthen each other. 2. complementarity: the meanings of different semiotic modes support each other, but emphasize other aspects. 3. divergence: the meanings of different semiotic modes challenge one another (see hafner, 2015, p. 660). these possible ways of interplay should be introduced in the classroom before the creation of a digital story, otherwise students might not be aware of the ample possibilities at their hands. another essential distinction is made by oskoz and elola (2016) who differentiate between “transformation (the actions that reorder and reposition semiotic resources within a mode) and transduction (the reorganization of semiotic resources across modes)” (p. 328). so, students not only have to keep in mind the interactions between different modes, but they should also be aware of the possibility to shift various meaning-making elements around. concomitantly, the discussion of these design choices while creating digital literature also serves to foster the development of textual competences, as requested by nünning and surkamp (2010). moreover, while creating their digital stories, students learn about the constructed character of literature: they experience how digital texts come into existence and how certain narrative techniques have certain effects (nünning & surkamp, 2010, pp. 67-69). this practice can also be related to the new london group’s idea of design where every meaning-making activity is understood as a creative use and connection of available conventions and resources, i.e., available designs. when creating a digital story, such available designs may include pictures or sound files found online. during the process of designing, available designs are recontextualized and reconstructed, and they become the redesigned. while integrating the pictures or sound files into a new digital story, they are placed in a new context and take on a new meaning. the new product of this process, in our case: the digital story, can be used by others to create new cultural artefacts, i.e., the redesigned is at the same time a new available design. in the english classroom, students might be shown digital stories by older students and use elements from those as an inspiration for their own products. all in all, the integration of digital storytelling is a unique opportunity to foster “the capacity to copy, mash, change, spoof, and in other ways create and share new literary digital texts or paratexts” (beavis, 2013, p. 246) in the english classroom; all of which are “an important affordance of contemporary technologies and central to participatory culture” (beavis, 2013, p. 246). only by recognizing the various forms of literature nowadays and working with them both receptively and productively, can educators cater for “the need for students to be critical, capable and creative users of digital and multimodal forms of literacy, alongside traditional print-based forms” (beavis, 2013, p. 244). crossovers: digitalization and literature in foreign language education 537 4. conclusion all in all, we want to highlight that we feel language education is at an important crossroad, or, to stick to the terminology of digital narratives, a nodal situation. due to digitalization, the practices of reading and writing are inevitably going to change. as educators, we have to decide whether we would like to cling to tried and true print media or to respond to changing reading habits and innovative possibilities for literary (inter)action. for us, the latter path appears to be the better option to prepare our students for a successful run through the 21st century. after all, this does not entail banning the traditional book from the classroom; on the contrary, we want both digital and traditional literature to work alongside one another and complement one another. while the use of traditional literary texts in the language classroom already appears to be fairly well researched, we hope that the finale model serves as a starting point in order to better exploit the potential of digital literature for the foreign language classroom in the future. to fully harness this potential, it seems about time for media didactics and literary didactics to work together more closely and further research and refine the notion of digital-literary competences and its implications for foreign language education. such implications include the design of tasks and classroom methodologies that engage learners in the functional, interactive, and narrative features of digital literature, that allow for a reflection of the changing roles and relationships between readers and texts, and that are suitable for achieving and scaffolding the development of digital-literary competences. christiane lütge, thorsten merse, claudia owczarek, michelle stannard 538 references aarseth, e. 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(2015). autorschaft und digitale literatur. geschichte, medienpraxis und theoriebildung. trier: wissenschaftlicher verlag trier. 13 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (1). 2022. 13-14 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.1.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial the first 2022 issue of studies in studies in second language learning and teaching brings together five papers, all of which constitute reports of original empirical studies. the common thread running through the first two contributions is their focus on the role of emotions in second and foreign language learning. richard j. sampson adopted the “small lens” approach (ushioda, 2016) to examine the emergence of emotionally significant episodes in short conversation sessions conducted by 28 firstyear science and technology majors learning english as a foreign language in japan. discursive data, obtained from video-recordings of these conversations and their transcripts, and introspective data in the form of reflective journals, were collected. zooming in on one communicative event, he was able to shed light on the learnerinternal and learner-external influences on participants’ emotional moves. mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, majid elahi shirvan, tahereh taherian, and elham yazdanmehr applied q methodology, which uses quantitative and qualitative data to explore individuals’ viewpoints in specific contexts (watts & stenner, 2012), to illuminate the sources of foreign language learning boredom from the perspective of 37 learners of english in iran. using a q-set of 40 statements and interviews with selected participants, they identified three factors underpinning the occurrence of this aversive emotion, reflecting, in the order of the amount of variance accounted for, teacher-induced boredom, student-induced boredom, and activity-induced boredom. the researchers argue that, since different learner prototypes experience boredom in distinct ways, teachers should be prepared to vary the strategies that they use to prevent and manage this emotion in their classrooms. in the third paper, scott aubrey shifts the focus to the concept of cognitive-affective engagement. his study investigated differences in engagement, operationalized in terms of focus and interest, as well as its dynamics in two computer-mediated writing tasks performed by eight pairs of students in hong kong, one in text-chat mode and one in video-mode. using self-ratings of interest and focus made at three-minute intervals, and stimulated recall interviews, he found significantly higher engagement in the video-chat, which he accounted for in terms 14 of immediacy of processing multimodal information, triggering higher levels of attention and interest. he also identified distinct patterns in the changes of engagement, attributing them to learner, task design, task process, and task condition factors. subsequently, ali derakhshan, zohreh r. eslami, samantha curle and kiyana zhaleh present the findings of a study that examined the predictive role of teacher immediacy (i.e., psychological and physical proximity) and stroke behaviors (i.e., actions taken to appreciate another person’s worth and presence) in the occurrence of academic burnout in the case of 631 university students in iran. using confirmatory factor analysis, correlational analyses, and structural equation modeling, they found that teacher immediacy and stroke subscales were negatively related to student burnout and that the two constructs and their subcomponents constituted important predictors of this negative phenomenon. these findings lead to the conclusion that effective communication in the classroom, based on positive teacher-student interactions and good rapport, plays a key role in l2 instruction. finally, mehmet altay, samantha curle, dogan yuksel, and adem soruç report an investigation which examined the impact of general english proficiency and academic success in courses taught in turkish on achievement in english medium instruction. the data collected from 716 students were analyzed at the macro (i.e., academic division), meso (i.e., academic department), and micro (i.e., academic program) levels. regression analyses yielded evidence of subtle differences at each of these levels but, on the whole, english language proficiency was consistently a stronger predictor of emi success in the case of social science rather than mathematical, physical and life sciences students. given the innovative nature of all the studies, either in terms of their focus or methodology, i am confident that they will provide an impulse for more empirical inquiry in their areas, thus helping us better understand the intricacies of second language learning and teaching in different contexts. mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references ushioda, e. (2016). language learning motivation through a small lens: a research agenda. language teaching, 49(4), 564-577. watts, s., & stenner, p. (2012). doing q methodological research: theory, method and interpretation. sage. 435 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (3). 2022. 435-458 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.3.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the role of motivation and vocabulary learning strategies in l2 vocabulary knowledge: a structural equation modeling analysis jang ho lee chung-ang university, republic of korea, seoul https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2767-3881 jangholee@cau.ac.kr joung joo ahn cyber university of korea, republic of korea, seoul https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8923-8098 storygranny@naver.com hansol lee korea military academy, republic of korea, seoul https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6912-7128 hansol6461@gmail.com abstract this study explores the complex relationships between language learning motivation, vocabulary learning strategies, and two components of second language vocabulary knowledge (i.e., vocabulary size and depth), within the framework of self-regulated learning. responses to questionnaires were gathered from 185 secondary-level korean adolescent learners of english as a foreign language, regarding their motivation and vocabulary learning strategy use; additionally, the results of their vocabulary size and depth tests were collected. we adopted structural equation modeling for analysis, with vocabulary learning strategies consisting of memory, cognitive, and metacognitive categories, and vocabulary knowledge consisting of vocabulary size and depth. the results showed that motivation directly predicted vocabulary learning strategies jang ho lee, joung joo ahn, hansol lee 436 and vocabulary knowledge, and indirectly predicted vocabulary knowledge via vocabulary learning strategies. when further classified, intrinsic motivation was found to have a stronger influence on the use of vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary knowledge than extrinsic motivation. we discuss the implications of increasing learners’ motivation and repertoire of strategies for improving vocabulary size and depth. keywords: motivation; self-regulated learning; vocabulary depth; vocabulary learning strategies; vocabulary size 1. introduction vocabulary plays a significant role in second language (l2) learning and teaching (nation, 2013; schmitt, 2008). based on empirical evidence in this regard, researchers have focused on identifying ways to improve learners’ l2 vocabulary knowledge by either providing various types of treatment or accommodation (lee et al., 2019; laufer, 2009) or promoting influential learner factors such as motivation and learning strategies (e.g., barcroft, 2009; fontecha & gallego, 2012; gu & johnson, 1996; zhang & lu, 2015). the present study focuses on the latter aspect and explores the complex relationships between l2 learners’ motivation, their use of vocabulary learning strategies (vls), and two components of vocabulary knowledge. previous studies that have examined the relationships between language learning strategies (lls) and different dimensions of l2 skills/knowledge suggest that the former facilitate l2 learning (e.g., bećirović et al., 2021; cáceres-lorenzo, 2015; macaro, 2001; yu, 2019). research on l2 vocabulary has further explored this relationship by investigating the strategies or combinations of strategies that successful learners use to broaden l2 vocabulary (e.g., kojic-sabo & lightbown, 1999; zhang & lu, 2015). the role of motivation in l2 vocabulary learning has also gained researchers’ attention. with motivation being one of the most important factors in l2 learning (csizér, 2019; dörnyei, 2020), a few studies have examined the relationship between motivation and l2 vocabulary knowledge (e.g., alamer, 2022; fontecha & gallego, 2012; lee, 2017). these studies indicate a close relationship between the constructs. however, despite the increasing interest, few attempts have been made to explore the relationships between these two important learner factors and vocabulary knowledge. in addition, previous studies have suffered from limitations. first, they tapped into either vls (e.g., kojic-sabo & lightbown, 1999; zhang & lu, 2015) or motivation (e.g., fontecha & gallego, 2012; zheng, 2012) to explore vocabulary knowledge. however, it may be worthwhile to examine these variables together in view of the proposition that motivated learners are likely to employ more strategies to foster their l2 learning (lou & noels, 2019). the role of motivation and vocabulary learning strategies in l2 vocabulary knowledge: a structural. . . 437 this proposition has gained empirical support in recent studies (lee, 2020; zhang et al., 2017) in l2 vocabulary learning contexts. second, most studies (e.g., gu & johnson, 1996; lee, 2020; zhang & lu, 2015) have primarily recruited undergraduate l2 learners as participants who, arguably, may have already acquired a large l2 vocabulary. finally, most of the existing empirical investigations have only examined one aspect of vocabulary knowledge, that is, vocabulary size (breadth) (e.g., kojic-sabo & lightbown, 1999; zhang et al., 2017). however, in view of the current thinking regarding operationalizing this target knowledge in the field, it seems beneficial to consider both aspects of l2 vocabulary knowledge together (see schmitt, 2014 for an in-depth review of this issue). additionally, certain vls (e.g., paying attention to diverse aspects of a target word) may be associated with the development of depth knowledge; that is, adding the depth aspect of l2 vocabulary knowledge may facilitate better measurement of the relationship between a range of vls and l2 vocabulary knowledge. in view of the aforementioned limitations, the present study aims to examine the structural relationships among different types of l2 motivation, vls, and two components of l2 vocabulary knowledge (i.e., size and depth) of adolescent learners of english as a foreign language (efl) using the structural equation modeling (sem) analysis. this attempt draws on self-regulated learning (srl) as the theoretical framework, assuming that “self-regulated students activate, alter, and sustain specific learning practices” (zimmerman, 2002, p. 70), taking the initiative and responsibility for their own learning. within this framework, we hypothesize that motivated l2 learners would likely employ more vls, which would, in turn, contribute to the expansion of their l2 vocabulary size and depth knowledge. 2. literature review in this section, we first review the literature on the relationships between motivation and l2 vocabulary knowledge, followed by the studies on the relationships between vls and l2 vocabulary knowledge. thereafter, we review the studies on the relationships between two major predictors of this study (i.e., motivation and vls) and outcome variables (i.e., different components of l2 vocabulary knowledge). 2.1. relationships between motivation and l2 vocabulary knowledge the concept of language learning motivation has received considerable attention in the field of l2 learning (e.g., boo et al., 2015; dörnyei, 2009, 2020; ushioda, 2019; wu, 2003). research in this area has drawn on different theoretical frameworks, such as the socio-educational model (gardner, 1985, 2010), the selfdetermination theory (sdt) (ryan & deci, 2000, 2017), and the l2 motivational self jang ho lee, joung joo ahn, hansol lee 438 system (dörnyei, 2005, 2009). we adopted the sdt as our theoretical framework of l2 learning motivation because of its suitability to account for different stages of l2 learning motivation (see next paragraph for details) among secondary-level korean efl learners (jang & kim, 2014; woo, 2007). furthermore, in view of the suggestion that the socio-educational model may be better oriented toward intercultural and community-related phenomena (than learning), and the l2 motivational self system may be suitable for older learner groups who may have developed greater capability of visualizing an ideal self (sugita mceown et al., 2014), the sdt appears to be a better fit for our purpose. the sdt differentiates between “types of motivation” along a continuum, from “controlled to autonomous” (ryan & deci, 2017, p. 3). at the two opposite ends of this continuum there lie amotivation (i.e., lack of motivation) and intrinsic motivation. intrinsically motivated learners study l2 “because of the inherent pleasure in doing so,” whereas amotivation arises “when a learner has no goals … for learning a language” (noels et al., 2001, p. 426). in the middle of the continuum there lies extrinsic motivation, which can be subdivided into external regulation (learning regulated by external rewards or punishments), introjected regulation (learning controlled to some degree by internal feelings or pressure), and identified regulation (learning resulting from a conscious valuing and acceptance of personal goals) (ryan & deci, 2000). learners oriented toward external regulation and introjected regulation will “stop putting effort into l2 learning once the pressure is lifted” (noels et al., 2001, p. 425), whereas those oriented toward intrinsic motivation and identified regulation are relatively more self-determined; hence, they are more persistent in their efforts to learn. a previous finding based on korean efl contexts (jang & kim, 2014) confirmed this assumption, revealing that intrinsic motivation was positively related to secondary-level students’ english proficiency levels. the importance of motivation in language learning has been highlighted in the literature (e.g., csizér, 2019; dörnyei, 2019, 2020; ryan & deci, 2017), and l2 vocabulary acquisition research is no exception in this regard (e.g., laufer & hulstijn, 2001; papi, 2018; zheng, 2012). an important contribution in this regard is tseng and schmitt’s (2008) study, in which they proposed a model of vocabulary learning by taking a process-oriented approach, and operationalizing vocabulary learning as a cyclical process. this model proposed that motivational constructs influence the development of vocabulary knowledge, which is succinctly summarized by the authors as follows: “motivation appears to be involved in all stages of [vocabulary] learning (instigating, sustaining, and evaluating), thus permeating the whole process” (tseng & schmitt, 2008, p. 383). however, extant studies on the relationships between motivation and l2 vocabulary knowledge have produced rather mixed findings (e.g., alamer, 2022; the role of motivation and vocabulary learning strategies in l2 vocabulary knowledge: a structural. . . 439 canga alonso & fontecha, 2014; fontecha & gallego, 2012). for example, fontecha and gallego’s research (2012) measured receptive vocabulary knowledge and motivation to learn english among secondary-level efl spanish students studying in the 8th and 9th grades. they found that the students with higher motivation scored higher on receptive vocabulary tests than those with lower motivation in the 9th grade; however, the same pattern was not found for students in the 8th grade. more recently, alamer’s (2022) study with 366 saudi efl students, based on the sdt framework, revealed that autonomous motivation (i.e., the construct consisting of intrinsic motivation and identified regulation) positively predicted vocabulary size, whereas controlled motivation (i.e., the construct consisting of introjected regulation and external regulations) negatively did so. the review of these studies not only underscores the need to measure the subconstructs of motivation, but also suggests that other variables could be at play, mediating the relationships between motivation and l2 vocabulary knowledge. in this regard, we turn to one of such potential mediating variables: vls. 2.2. relationships between vocabulary learning strategies and l2 vocabulary knowledge influenced by research on language learning strategies (e.g., o’malley & chamot, 1990; oxford, 1990), a few l2 vocabulary studies have presented a domain-specific group of learning strategies (i.e., vls), which refers to “a wide spectrum of strategies used as part of an on-going process of vocabulary learning” (gu & johnson, 1996, p. 669). gu and johnson (1996) distinguished between metacognitive regulation and cognitive strategies, with the former consisting of selective attention and self-initiation, and the latter including guessing, dictionary, notetaking, rehearsal, encoding, and activation. another key work in this area is schmitt’s (1997) inventory of vls. adopting certain major categories from oxford’s (1990) classification, schmitt first classified vls into two broad groups: discovery strategies and consolidation strategies. discovery strategies aim to determine the meaning of new and unfamiliar words. these strategies are subdivided into determination strategies (e.g., guessing the meaning of a new word from its form or contexts, or referring to resources, such as dictionaries) and social strategies (i.e., asking others for the meaning of a new word). by contrast, consolidation strategies are concerned with remembering introduced words, and are subdivided into memory (i.e., learning vocabulary by executing manipulative mental processing), cognitive (e.g., repetition and using mechanical means such as word lists and vocabulary notebooks), metacognitive (i.e., selfregulating one’s own vocabulary learning), and social strategies (e.g., learning or practicing vocabulary with peers). jang ho lee, joung joo ahn, hansol lee 440 based on previous research on the classification of vls, several studies have examined the relationship between vls and vocabulary knowledge using different methodological approaches. one group of such empirical investigations employed cluster analysis as a method of analyzing data, which enables the identification of distinctive clusters with different learner profiles. for example, in the aforementioned study by gu and johnson (1996), 850 non-english-major undergraduate chinese efl learners were asked to respond to a vls questionnaire and take a vocabulary size test (vst). the results revealed that strategies such as semantic encoding, word list learning, and contextual encoding, among vls, were significantly related to vocabulary size. furthermore, the participants could be grouped into five different clusters based on different patterns of vls use, with two of them constituting the majority and the only difference between the two being the use of encoding strategies (i.e., encoders and non-encoders), another two being high achievers (i.e., active strategy users and readers), and the other being low achievers (i.e., passive strategy users). with a similar aim in mind, kojic-sabo and lightbown (1999) conducted a cluster analysis to examine 43 efl and 47 english as a second language (esl) students’ strategic approaches to vocabulary learning and their relationships with vocabulary breadth. the participants’ vls were grouped into five categories, namely “(a) time, (b) learner independence, (c) vocabulary notes, (d) review, and (e) dictionary use” (p. 179). among the eight clusters generated by the cluster analysis, it was found that those clusters with little use of vls had relatively low vocabulary breadth. in contrast, the two clusters which reported greater use of vls had the largest vocabulary breadth, but these two clusters were rather different, in that one selectively used only certain types of vls, and the other used all types of vls to more or less the same degree. based on this result, kojic-sabo and lightbown (1999) suggest that “specific combinations of some of the strategies are as effective as the use of all five [strategies]” (p. 189). some of the more recent studies have employed the sem to investigate the relationships between vls and vocabulary knowledge. it should be noted here that they began to see vocabulary knowledge operationalized as constituting different components, including vocabulary size and depth knowledge, with the former and the latter referring to “how many words are known” in terms of the form-meaning link and “how well those words are known” in terms of diverse aspects of vocabulary (e.g., collocations, multiple senses), respectively (schmitt, 2014, p. 914). as one of such studies, zhang and lu (2015) administered a battery of vocabulary tests as well as a questionnaire on vls to 150 chinese efl undergraduate students. the vls were categorized into five factors: form (i.e., mnemonic strategies based on studying the form of vocabulary), association (i.e., mnemonic strategies based on associating words with semantically or morphologically related the role of motivation and vocabulary learning strategies in l2 vocabulary knowledge: a structural. . . 441 ones), repetition (i.e., cognitive strategies based on repetition), word list (i.e., cognitive strategies based on word lists), and picture/image (i.e., mnemonic strategies based on associating the vocabulary with images or situations). the results revealed that both form and association positively predicted vocabulary size and depth, whereas word list had a negative effect. similarly, fan (2020) employed both vocabulary size and depth tests, as well as the vls questionnaire, using the sem approach, with 419 chinese efl undergraduate students. the results of this study showed that attention (i.e., attending to vocabulary during reading english texts or watching english media) and guessing (i.e., guessing the meaning of words from the textual or situational contexts) positively predicted both types of vocabulary knowledge, whereas socializing (i.e., asking others about the meaning and use of vocabulary) had a negative effect. although the studies mentioned above identified a close relationship between vls and l2 vocabulary knowledge, researchers (e.g., gu & johnson, 1996; kojic-sabo & lightbown, 1999) suggest that future studies should further examine the role of motivation, which may play an important part in such a relationship. in the following section, we review studies that have examined the complex relationships between motivation, vls, and l2 vocabulary knowledge. 2.3. relationships between motivation, vocabulary learning strategies, and l2 vocabulary knowledge in the field of l2 research, a few studies have revealed a close relationship among motivation, language learning strategy use, and achievement operationalized as general proficiency level or knowledge in specific domains (e.g., matsumoto et al., 2013; yamamori et al., 2003). in l2 vocabulary research, zhang et al. (2017) were among the first to explore the relationships between motivation, strategy use, and l2 vocabulary knowledge in a single study. within the srl framework, their study, including 107 10th grade chinese efl learners and using the sem approach, revealed that vls mediated the association between motivation and vocabulary size. however, when motivation was specified as either intrinsic motivation or extrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation did not directly predict vocabulary size (but did so indirectly via vls). intrinsic motivation directly and indirectly predicted vocabulary knowledge and had a greater influence on the use of vls. the authors concluded that “[l]earners need to have autonomous intrinsic motivation to use various learning strategies” and highlighted that intrinsically motivated learners “actively seek out useful resources that could help with their learning” (zhang et al., 2017, p. 69). in another study, this time involving 492 korean undergraduate students registered in an english academic writing class, lee (2020) tested the structural jang ho lee, joung joo ahn, hansol lee 442 model of l2 aptitude, motivation, language processing experience, and two components of l2 vocabulary knowledge (i.e., size and depth). the results of the structural model revealed that motivation directly predicted strategy use, and indirectly predicted both components of vocabulary knowledge via the mediation of language processing experience; by contrast, aptitude directly predicted both components of vocabulary knowledge. interestingly, strategy use was not a significant predictor of vocabulary knowledge. lee attributed this latter finding to the possibility that her participants (more or less advanced ones) could have used a set of strategies selectively (hence, a lack of a significant relationship). she added that this finding “does not imply that using or promoting l2 vocabulary strategies is not relevant for language learning, rather it suggests that when considering the complexity of vocabulary knowledge development, there are individual factors that may not be as pertinent as others” (e.g., age, proficiency) (p. 12). 3. the present study the review of the previous studies on this issue has identified some research gaps (e.g., mostly focusing on vocabulary size, target learner populations largely being adults). accordingly, we include both components of vocabulary knowledge in light of the need for a more comprehensive view of vocabulary knowledge (lee, 2017; schmitt, 2014) and the consideration that certain vls may be more strongly associated with the depth aspect of l2 vocabulary knowledge. additionally, we explore this issue with adolescent efl learners whose profiles connected with the relationships between motivation, vls, and l2 vocabulary knowledge may differ from those of undergraduate l2 learners since this population has been the primary target of previous research (e.g., fan, 2020; lee, 2020; zhang & lu, 2015). in view of these considerations, the present study intends to address the following two research questions: 1. do motivation and vls predict l2 vocabulary size and depth? 2. to what extent do intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation function differently with vls and l2 vocabulary knowledge? 4. method 4.1. participants a total of 185 secondary-level students aged around 14 to 15 years in seoul, republic of korea, participated in this study. among them, 78.4% (n = 145) were 8th graders and 21.6% (n = 40) were 9th graders. as for gender, 71.9% were male the role of motivation and vocabulary learning strategies in l2 vocabulary knowledge: a structural. . . 443 (n = 133) and 28.1% were female (n = 52). at the time of the study, the 8th and 9th graders had been exposed to 506 and 626 hours of instruction in english as a mandatory school subject, respectively (see table 1 for the summary of participants’ demographic information). no participant had more than one month of study abroad experience in english-speaking countries. also, these participants could be considered efl learners in view of their learning context (i.e., little exposure to the target language outside the classroom). table 1 demographic information of the participants (n = 185) categories values numbers percentages previous hours of instruction in english grade 8th grade 145 78.4% 506 hours 9th grade 40 21.6% 626 hours gender male 133 71.9% female 52 28.1% 4.2. instruments 4.2.1. questionnaire on motivation to measure motivation, we adapted the questionnaire used by jang and kim (2014), which was based on hayamizu’s (1997) stepping motivation scale grounded in the framework of the sdt (deci & ryan, 1985). it included motivational concepts, such as intrinsic reasons and external, introjected, and identified regulation. the questionnaire included items related to intrinsic motivation (five items, e.g., “i study english because the process of increasing my english abilities is fun”) and extrinsic motivation (comprising external, introjected, and identified regulation; 12 items, e.g., “my parents get angry if i don’t study english” for external regulation; “i study english because i want my friends to think of me as smart” for introjected regulation; “i think it is necessary to study english as part of my life” for identified regulation). all items were in korean and were measured on a 5-point likert scale. we found that the questionnaire had an acceptable level of reliability (α = .83 for im and α = .77 for em). 4.2.2. questionnaire on vocabulary learning strategies in terms of vls, we adapted park and kim’s (2012) vls questionnaire in korean, which was designed based on schmitt’s (1997) inventory and park’s (2001) questionnaire based on korean efl learners’ vls. the finalized questionnaire comprised 23 items divided into three categories: 11 items related to memory strategies (e.g., “connect the word to personal experience,” “connect the word to jang ho lee, joung joo ahn, hansol lee 444 its synonyms and antonyms”), six to cognitive strategies (e.g., “keep a vocabulary notebook,” “use the vocabulary section in your textbook”), and six to metacognitive strategies (e.g., “continue to study word over time,” “testing oneself with word tests”). all items were in korean and were measured on a 5-point likert scale. we found that the questionnaire had an acceptable level of reliability (α = .85 for memory, α = .76 for cognitive, and α = .70 for metacognitive). 4.2.3. vocabulary size test nation and beglar’s (2007b) bilingual version of the vocabulary size test (vst) was used in consideration of the participants’ level of l2 proficiency (nation, 2013) to measure their vocabulary size. the vst was developed for non-native speakers of english and covers 14,000-word families based on particular frequency levels (nation & beglar, 2007a), of which we used the first three (1,000, 2,000, and 3,000). according to the ministry of education of korea (2015), middle-school students are expected to acquire around 1,250 words, which are mostly below the 2,000 level; however, to prevent any ceiling effect, we added the 3,000 level. the test was given in a multiple-choice format, with each correct answer carrying one point, amounting to a total of 30 points. the vst had a moderate level of reliability (α = .84). 4.2.4. vocabulary depth test we adapted read’s (1993) word association test (wat) to measure the participants’ depth of vocabulary knowledge. the wat contains 40 target adjectives, and for each adjective eight other words are presented in a box format. in the left and right boxes, potential synonyms and collocates of the target adjective are presented (see figure 1 for an example). a test-taker is asked to select four words that are related to the given target adjective, with three different combinations of answers possible (one synonym and three collocates, two synonyms and two collocates, and three synonyms and one collocate). while adapting this test, we compared the testing words in the wat with the english wordlist compiled for middleschool students by the ministry of education of korea (2015) and selected 10 target adjectives from the given 40. each correct answer was given one point, which allowed for a maximum score of 40 points (10 target adjectives x four correct answers per adjective). the wat had an acceptable level of reliability (α = .80). 1. beautiful r enjoyable £ expensive £ free £ loud £ education r face r music r weather figure 1 sample item of word association test the role of motivation and vocabulary learning strategies in l2 vocabulary knowledge: a structural. . . 445 4.3. procedure a battery of questionnaires and vocabulary tests was first piloted with 28 middleschool students, who were similar in terms of their english proficiency level and previous learning experience to the participants of the main study. the questionnaires and tests were revised as per the students’ feedback, mostly in terms of the difficult terms (or expressions) in the questionnaire items. for instance, the terms such as prefix and antonym in the questionnaire items were added with some examples in english. in the main study, the aforementioned questionnaires and vocabulary tests were administered to the participants on two consecutive days. on the first day, the questionnaires on motivation and vls were given to the participants with a time limit of 20 minutes for completion (10 minutes for each). on the second day, the two vocabulary tests were given with a time limit of 30 minutes (20 minutes for vst and 10 minutes for wat). the time limits for the instruments were fixed based on the results of the pilot. the overall procedure was conducted by the participants’ homeroom teachers in their ordinary english lessons. 4.4. data analysis to answer the research questions, we first collected data as following: (a) we measured learners’ intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation using questionnaires; (b) we measured learners’ memory, cognitive, and metacognitive strategies using questionnaires; and (c) we assessed learners’ l2 vocabulary knowledge using two vocabulary tests (vocabulary size and depth tests). to ensure enough statistical power, instead of averaging item scores for a composite score, we decided to compute latent variables for these three constructs, such as l2 motivation, l2 vocabulary learning strategies, and l2 vocabulary knowledge. furthermore, since these constructs were related to each other in both direct and indirect relationships based on complex paths among them (i.e., multiple independent variables and dependent variables in one model at the same time), we decided to simultaneously implement a number of regression analyses. as a combination of computing latent variables and implementing a series of regression analyses at the same time, the sem using stata 16 software (statacorp, 2019) was the primary data analysis method used in the present study. in view of kline’s (2012) suggestion, as well as those of other previous studies (jin & lee, 2022; lee et al., 2020, 2022), we used the following five indices for the sem analysis: the chi-square test (a testing model should not significantly differ from a saturated model, p > .05 for acceptable fit); the root mean square error of approximation (rmsea < .08 for acceptable fit); the comparative fit index (cfi > .90 for acceptable fit); the tucker lewis index (tli > .90 for acceptable fit); and the standardized root mean square residual (srmr < .08 for acceptable fit). jang ho lee, joung joo ahn, hansol lee 446 5. results in this section, we first present the descriptive statistics of the target variables, followed by the results of the sem. 5.1. descriptive statistics table 2 shows the mean, standard deviation, and normality test results for the observed variables, and table 3 shows the correlation matrix. the results indicated that all variables included in the sem models were normally distributed. furthermore, the observed variables were not strongly correlated (i.e., < .60), with the exception of the correlation between vst and wat (r = .63, p < .001), and that between memory and metacognitive strategies (r = .69, p < .001). table 2 mean, standard deviation, and normality test results for the observed variables (n = 185) variable m(sd) shapiro-wilk normality test vocabulary tests vst 20.08 (4.14) passed at 0.1% wat 24.63 (4.13) passed at 5% motivation im 2.85 (0.91) passed at 5% em 2.74 (.059) passed at 5% vls memory 2.95 (0.78) passed at 5% cognitive 2.96 (0.84) passed at 5% metacognitive 2.75 (0.76) passed at 5% note. im = intrinsic motivation, em = extrinsic motivation, vls = vocabulary learning strategies, vst = vocabulary size test, wat = word association test. table 3 correlations among the observed variables variable vst wat im em memory cognitive metacognitive vst 1.00 wat .63*** 1.00 im .44*** .43*** 1.00 em .31*** .39*** .48*** 1.00 memory .52*** .49*** .57*** .46*** 1.00 cognitive .33*** .32*** .46*** .29*** .63*** 1.00 metacognitive .40*** .39*** .49*** .36*** .69*** .58*** 1.00 note. im = intrinsic motivation, em = extrinsic motivation, vst = vocabulary size test, wat = word association test; *** p < .001. before running the full sem model in figure 2, we checked whether all measurement models had been measured by their indicators (variables) to ensure the role of motivation and vocabulary learning strategies in l2 vocabulary knowledge: a structural. . . 447 construct validity. the model comprised three latent variables and seven indicators; no structural relationships were specified between the latent variables. the results indicated that the model had acceptable model fit indices: χ2 (11) = 7.037 (p > .05), rmsea < .08, cfi > .90, tli > .90, and srmr < .08. table 4 shows that all standardized factor loadings were statistically significant (p < .001), ranging from .60 to .90; thus, the three latent variables suggested were sufficiently represented by their indicator variables with enough statistical power (kline, 2012). furthermore, the computed average variance extracted (ave; acceptable if ≥.50) and composite construct reliability (ccr; acceptable if ≥ .70) supported the convergent validity of the latent variables (kline, 2012). vls motivation vocabulary metacognitivecognit ivememory intri nsic extrins ic wat vst .90*** .78***.70*** .36*.80*** .40* .80*** .60*** .80*** .78*** figure 2 structural model of the relationship between motivation, vocabulary learning strategies, and vocabulary knowledge (vls = vocabulary learning strategies, vst = vocabulary size test, wat = word association test; *p < .05; ***p < .001) table 4 assessment of measurement models construct indicator standardized factor loading average variance extracted (ave) composite construct reliability (ccr) motivation im .80*** .50 .70 em .60*** vls memory .90*** .64 .84cognitive .70*** metacognitive .78*** vocabulary vst .80*** .63 .77 wat .78*** note. im = intrinsic motivation, em = extrinsic motivation, vls = vocabulary learning strategies, vst = vocabulary size test, wat = word association test; *** p < .001. jang ho lee, joung joo ahn, hansol lee 448 5.2. contribution of motivation and learning strategies to vocabulary knowledge to examine the role of motivation and vls in l2 vocabulary knowledge, we employed the sem approach with three models as per zhang et al. (2017). figure 2 shows our first model for the role of im, em, and vls. the results indicated that our data had acceptable model fit indices, χ2 (11) = 7.04 (p > .05), rmsea < .08, cfi > .90, tli > .90, srmr < .08, supporting the first sem model. im (β = .80, p < .001) and em (β = .60, p < .001) significantly loaded on the latent variables of motivation; memory (β = .90, p < .001), cognitive (β = .70, p < .001), and metacognitive strategies (β = .78, p < .001) loaded on the latent variables of vls; and vocabulary size (β = .80, p < .001) and vocabulary depth (β = .78, p < .001) loaded on the latent variables of vocabulary knowledge. regarding the relationships between the latent variables, motivation directly influenced vls (β = .80, p < .001) and vocabulary knowledge (β = .40, p < .05), and vls directly influenced vocabulary knowledge (β = .36, p < .05). table 5 effects of motivation and vls on two types of vocabulary knowledge (n = 185) path between independent and dependent variables beta coefficient (se) total effects motivation → vls .80*** (.06) vls → vocabulary knowledge .36* (.18) motivation → vocabulary knowledge .68*** (.07) direct effects motivation → vls .80*** (.06) vls → vocabulary knowledge .36* (.18) motivation → vocabulary knowledge .40* (.18) indirect effects motivation → vocabulary knowledge .29* (.13) note. some total effect values do not add up because of rounding off. vls = vocabulary learning strategies; *p < .05; ***p < .001. table 5 shows the path coefficients of motivation and vls on vocabulary knowledge to assess whether vls mediated the association between motivation and vocabulary knowledge. since we used two vocabulary tests (i.e., vst and wat), the information in table 5 helped determine whether motivation and vls predicted the size and depth of vocabulary knowledge. motivation had a total effect of .68 (p < .001) on vocabulary knowledge, including a direct effect of .40 (p < .05) and an indirect effect of .29 (p < .05), mediated by vls. for different dimensions of vocabulary knowledge, no significant difference was found (p > .05). 5.3. contribution of different types of motivation to vocabulary knowledge to distinguish the different roles that im and em play in the process of vocabulary learning, we employed two additional sem models, as suggested by zhang et al. the role of motivation and vocabulary learning strategies in l2 vocabulary knowledge: a structural. . . 449 (2017). figure 3 presents the second model for the role of im and vls in l2 vocabulary knowledge. the results indicated that our data had acceptable model fit indices, χ2 (7) = 4.85 (p > .05), rmsea < .08, cfi > .90, tli > .90, srmr < .08, supporting the proposed sem model. memory (β = .90, p < .001), cognitive (β = .71, p < .001), and metacognitive strategies (β = .78, p < .001) loaded significantly on the latent variable of vls, and vocabulary size (β = .80, p < .001) and vocabulary depth (β = .78, p < .001) loaded significantly on the latent variable of vocabulary knowledge. im directly influenced vls (β = .64, p < .001) and vocabulary knowledge (β = .20, p < .05), and vls directly influenced vocabulary knowledge (β = .55, p < .001). vls int ri nsic motiva tion vocabulary metacognitivecognit ivememory wat vst .90*** .78***.71*** .55***.64*** .20* .80*** .78*** figure 3 structural model of the relationship between intrinsic motivation, vocabulary learning strategies, and vocabulary knowledge (vls = vocabulary learning strategies, vst = vocabulary size test, wat = word association test; *p < .05; ***p < .001). table 6 effects of intrinsic motivation and vls on two types of vocabulary knowledge (n = 185) path between independent and dependent variables beta coefficient (se) total effects im → vls .64*** (.05) vls → vocabulary knowledge .55*** (.09) im → vocabulary knowledge .55*** (.06) direct effects im → vls .64*** (.05) vls → vocabulary knowledge .55*** (.06) im → vocabulary knowledge .20* (.09) indirect effects im → vocabulary knowledge .35*** (.07) jang ho lee, joung joo ahn, hansol lee 450 note. some total effect values do not add up because of rounding off. im = intrinsic motivation, vls = vocabulary learning strategies; *p < .05; ***p < .001. table 6 shows the path coefficients of im and vls on vocabulary knowledge to assess whether vls mediate the association between the other two. the results indicated that im had a total effect of .55 (p < .001) on vocabulary knowledge, including a direct effect of .20 (p < .05) and an indirect effect of .35 (p < .001), mediated by vls. figure 4 presents the third model for the role of em and vls in l2 vocabulary knowledge. the results indicated that our data had acceptable model fit indices, χ2 (7) = 5.87 (p > .05), rmsea < .08, cfi > .90, tli > .90, srmr < .08, supporting the proposed sem model. memory (β = .91, p < .001), cognitive (β = .70, p < .001), and metacognitive strategies (β = .77, p < .001) loaded significantly on the latent variable of vls, and vocabulary size (β = .80, p < .001) and vocabulary depth (β = .78, p < .001) loaded significantly on the latent variable of vocabulary knowledge. em directly influenced vls (β = .48, p < .001) which in turn directly influenced vocabulary knowledge (β = .62, p < .001). however, no significant direct effect of em on vocabulary knowledge was found (β = .11, p > .05). vls extrins ic motivation voca bulary metacognitivecognitivememory wat vst .91*** .77***.70*** .62***.48*** .11 .80*** .78*** figure 4 structural model of the relationship between extrinsic motivation, vocabulary learning strategies, and vocabulary knowledge (vls = vocabulary learning strategies, vst = vocabulary size test, wat = word association test; ***p < .001). table 7 shows the path coefficients of em and vls on vocabulary knowledge to assess whether vls mediate the association between em and vocabulary knowledge. the results indicated that em had a total effect of .41 (p < .001) on the role of motivation and vocabulary learning strategies in l2 vocabulary knowledge: a structural. . . 451 vocabulary knowledge, including an insignificant direct effect of .11 (p > .05) and a significant indirect effect of .30 (p < .001), mediated by vls. table 7 effects of extrinsic motivation and vls on two types of vocabulary knowledge (n = 185) path between independent and dependent variables beta coefficient (se) total effects em → vls .48*** (.06) vls → vocabulary knowledge .62*** (.07) em → vocabulary knowledge .41*** (.07) direct effects em → vls .48*** (.06) vls → vocabulary knowledge .62*** (.07) em → vocabulary knowledge .11 (.08) indirect effects em → vocabulary knowledge .30*** (.05) note. some total effect values do not add up because of rounding off. em = extrinsic motivation, vls = vocabulary learning strategies; ***p < .001. 6. discussion this section aims to discuss the findings of the present study in light of the research questions stated above, as well as relevant previous studies. the first research question concerned whether motivation and vls predict l2 vocabulary size and depth. the result of our structural model revealed that motivation was a significant moderator for both components of vocabulary knowledge, which is in line with tseng and schmitt’s (2008) proposition that motivational constructs are essential elements for the development of l2 vocabulary knowledge. the employment of the sem further revealed that motivation predicted the l2 vocabulary knowledge both directly and indirectly, in the latter case through the mediation of vls. that is, motivation may have played an important role in l2 vocabulary knowledge by encouraging learners to harness a range of vls (lee, 2020). one possible explanation for this finding is that motivated learners may engage in their learning processes more actively and voluntarily, by searching for and employing available resources at their disposal (lou & noels, 2019; zimmerman, 2002), that is, vls in this context. at the same time, it may also be possible to attribute the mixed findings related to the relationship between motivation and l2 vocabulary knowledge found in previous studies (e.g., canga alonso & fontecha, 2014; fontecha & gallego, 2012) to the fact that the indirect effect of motivation on l2 vocabulary knowledge via vls was not considered in them. along with motivation, vls was also found to predict both components of l2 vocabulary knowledge. this finding is consistent with previous studies on the relationships between vls and l2 vocabulary knowledge (e.g., fan, 2020; gu & jang ho lee, joung joo ahn, hansol lee 452 johnson, 1996; zhang & lu, 2015). however, unlike these studies, we did not observe a pattern of any particular group of strategies (e.g., metacognitive, cognitive) being associated with l2 vocabulary knowledge to a much greater extent than another. indeed, the examination of the descriptive statistics related to vls further revealed that the participants in the present study were not strongly oriented toward using a particular category of vls (as found in table 2). although the lack of qualitative instruments makes it difficult to offer any definite explanation for this finding, it can be suggested that the participants of the present study had relatively limited experience of l2 learning compared to undergraduate l2 learners (e.g., fan, 2020; lee, 2020; zhang & lu, 2015), and may not have yet determined which type of strategy works best for their vocabulary learning. the second research question addressed whether different types of motivation would function differently with vls and l2 vocabulary knowledge. it was found that em only indirectly predicted l2 vocabulary knowledge via vls, corresponding to the results of zhang et al. (2017). this indicated that em could still push efl learners in both zhang et al.’s (2017) study and the present study to employ vls to expand their english vocabulary knowledge; however, it was not powerful enough to predict their vocabulary knowledge directly. by contrast, im predicted both vls and l2 vocabulary knowledge directly, in accordance with the idea that im is a powerful mechanism that drives participants’ l2 learning (noels et al., 2001; tseng & schmitt, 2008). it also appears consistent with the proposition of the srl framework (zimmerman, 2002), meaning that intrinsically motivated learners (who would also be self-regulated ones) would take greater responsibility for their learning and use a range of resources (e.g., learning strategies) to further their knowledge during their learning process. the results related to the second research question can serve as a basis for pedagogical implications, specifically for l2 teachers, who should consider the findings regarding the positive role of im in l2 learning. it has been previously suggested that l2 teachers’ efforts such as offering “a predictable learning environment, moderately challenging tasks, necessary instructional support, and evaluation that emphasizes self-improvement” may lead to increased im (wu, 2003, p. 513). the importance of vls in l2 vocabulary learning is undisputable in view of the results of the present study and previous research. l2 teachers should thus provide vls training to learners by introducing the list of available vls, explaining their value, and demonstrating how to employ each strategy in specific learning situations. such efforts could enhance l2 learners’ vocabulary learning at different stages. for example, learners will be able to use a wider spectrum of strategies when a new l2 word crops up, by guessing its meaning from its structure or sentential context. additionally, they may draw on multiple strategies to store them the role of motivation and vocabulary learning strategies in l2 vocabulary knowledge: a structural. . . 453 in their long-term memory by, for example, studying l2 words with peers, associating them with familiar pictures or morphologically similar words, and recycling previously learned words with materials such as vocabulary notebooks. a few limitations of the present study are worth mentioning. first, we did not administer qualitative instruments, such as participant interviews or classroom observations, which would have provided a richer account of the results related to our sem model. second, the test of vocabulary depth (i.e., wat) was not administered in its full scale; rather, it was tailored to the participants’ english proficiency levels for a logistical reason. although we believe that our decision would not have biased the results as the excluded test items were too difficult for the participants (i.e., no discriminatory power), a full scale test should be conducted in future studies, if possible, for greater accuracy. 7. conclusions the present study explored the relationships between language learning motivation, vls, and two components of l2 vocabulary knowledge (i.e., vocabulary size and depth) within the framework of srl, by employing the sem as the primary data analysis method. our results revealed that motivation directly predicted vls and l2 vocabulary knowledge and indirectly predicted l2 vocabulary knowledge via vls. however, of the two types of motivation, im was a better predictor than em for the use of vls and l2 vocabulary knowledge. we suggest the following considerations for future research. first, l2 vocabulary knowledge must be more comprehensively operationalized, and more l2 vocabulary tests should be used to measure different aspects of l2 vocabulary knowledge. nation’s (2013) framework of l2 vocabulary knowledge, which is based on form, meaning, and use, could be utilized. second, future studies should consider other cognition-related variables (e.g., aptitude, working memory) and their relation to vls and motivation in influencing the level of l2 vocabulary knowledge. lastly, future research on this issue could test the proposed structural model with a more diverse learner population, including students in esl environments in which participant characteristics may differ from those sampled in the present study. jang ho lee, joung joo ahn, hansol lee 454 references alamer, a. 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(2002). becoming a self-regulated learner: an overview. theory into practice, 41(2), 64-70. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_2 381 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (2). 2018. 381-402 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.2.9 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt strategies and interlanguage pragmatics: explicit and comprehensive julie m. sykes university of oregon, usa jsykes@uoregon.edu andrew d. cohen professor emeritus, university of minnesota, usa adcohen@umn.edu abstract explicit instruction in strategies for interlanguage pragmatic learning is fundamental to the development of a comprehensive set of pragmatic abilities in the target language. in this article, we begin by providing an overview of previous work in the area of language learner strategies directed at the teaching and learning of pragmatics. we then offer an extension of cohen’s (2005, 2014) framework of strategies for learning, using, and evaluating the use of interlanguage pragmatics in four domains: knowledge, analysis, subjectivity, and awareness (sykes, malone, forrest, & sadgic, forthcoming). examples from current projects are provided to exemplify the critical importance of a strategies-based approach to the teaching and learning of interlanguage pragmatics. the article concludes with ideas for future research and implementation. keywords: interlanguage pragmatics; learning pragmatics; pragmatics learning strategies; strategy instruction julie m. sykes, andrew d. cohen 382 1. introduction any approach to explicit pragmatic instruction in the world language classroom must address both the patterns and variation in the way humans communicate with one another. this chapter explores an explicit, strategies-based approach to the learning of interlanguage pragmatics (ilp), or the learners’ ability to communicate and interpret meaning in interaction. the paper begins with an overview of a strategies-based approach to ilp development. drawing on learning and use strategies, the paper then addresses a fundamental need for explicit instruction using examples from a variety of languages and offers a synthesis of the various approaches to explicit strategies-based instruction (e.g., by goal, by function, or by skill). finally, it explores ilp strategies through the lens of a comprehensive model that includes pragmatic knowledge, the ability to analyze pragmatic components of language, learner choice (i.e., subjectivity), and emotional awareness. classroom examples are included throughout. 2. an introduction to a strategies-based approach to ilp development explicit instruction is fundamental to the development of a robust ilp repertoire that can be applied across interactional contexts as speakers co-construct a shared meaning. it is a daunting task for a learner to gain control of target language (tl) pragmatics. for starters, the pragmatic components of a given language cannot be reduced to a set of specific semantic formulae to be applied or a set of pre-determined rules to be followed. take, for example, the phrase are you busy tonight? while it could serve as a genuine inquiry into someone’s schedule, it could also serve as a pre-invitation turn, a pre-request for help, or a suggestion. thus, understanding the intended meanings and the factors which may influence pragmatic choices is essential to language learning and language use. learners must learn words and structures, but must also develop the ability to understand the ways in which their intentions may, or may not, be realized in any given interaction, regardless of whether the grammar is correct. of course, at times the grammar is accurate but reflects structures that are seen by native and highly competent nonnative speakers (nns) as less appropriate in a given situation – such as when using a simple present form command for requests, as opposed to the past progressive plus the conditional with a modal (give me. . . as opposed to i was wondering if you might be able to give me. . .). shared meanings vary based on a myriad of factors, including the willingness and ability to dynamically co-construct that meaning with one’s interlocutor(s). explicit strategy instruction (si) produces the conditions under which learners can become nimble intercultural interlocutors capable of adapting to dynamic shifts in communicative interaction. strategies and interlanguage pragmatics: explicit and comprehensive 383 for the purpose of this article, the term communicative scenario will be used. communicative scenarios refer to any general, overarching communicative event, such as responding to an invitation. within each communicative scenario, learners may find themselves having to perform various speech acts, namely, the situationally-appropriate utterances in a given tl situation. the performance of common speech acts usually involves choosing from a set of possible strategies, some of which may involve the use of what could be viewed as other distinct speech acts, and for this reason the term speech act set was introduced some years ago (olshtain & cohen, 1983). for example, in complaining, you could include a threat, which constitutes a speech act distinct from complaining (e.g., ok, then. if you won’t turn your music down, i’ll call the police!), or in apologizing, you could also add criticism (e.g., sorry i bumped into you, but look where you’re standing!). looking closely at speech acts, we see that there are some strategies which are relatively unique to that particular speech act set, such as the offer of repair in an apology. in addition, there are strategies that can be applied to various speech acts, such as an opener consisting of a greeting like hi, serving as an attention getter. this opening might be found in requests, complaints and numerous other speech act sets. in this article, the term speech act will be used to refer to any potential component of a speech act set or a series of components. the following section provides an overview of the ways in which explicit instruction from a strategic perspective enables learners to engage with a variety of communicative scenarios. 3. explicit instruction in ilp pragmatics and in strategies for ilp development 3.1. an explicit approach the dynamic nature of pragmatic behavior, the underlying cultural assumptions, individual preferences, and language variety can all make the learning of appropriate pragmatic behaviors challenging. for example, let us say that in the learner’s first language (l1) the options for greeting someone may be routinely limited to just a few, such as by indicating the time of day. it can then be a pragmatically challenging task to learn how to greet someone in a language that has a myriad of options. the learner may choose the option that is preferred in the l1 or perhaps overgeneralize the use of only one of the various tl options. coming to grips with pragmatic variety in the tl can make performing speech acts a real challenge. in fact, language experts have come to the conclusion that much of tl pragmatics needs to be explicitly taught. the research results on explicit, as opposed to implicit, teaching of pragmatics are, by and large, positive. while one meta-analysis had inconclusive results, attributed to too much variation in julie m. sykes, andrew d. cohen 384 the details of how each study operationalized these two kinds of instruction (jeon & kaya, 2006), two meta-analyses had positive results in favor of explicit teaching of pragmatics (rose, 2005; taguchi, 2015). with regard to individual studies, one case study (riddiford & holmes, 2015) and a host of other studies found explicit teaching of pragmatics to be more effective than implicit teaching (see, e.g., eslami-rasekh, eslami-rasekh, & fatahi, 2004; eslami, mierzaei, & shadi, 2015; fukuya & martínez-flor, 2008; ghobadi & fahim, 2009; haslerbarker, 2016; martínez-flor, 2016; mugford, 2016; nguyen, pham, & pham, 2012; tateyama, 2001; vyatkina & belz, 2006). this article draws from cohen’s (2018) new book on pragmatics (ch. 8, the learning of pragmatics), in an effort to further explore a strategic approach to ilp development. it summarizes the critical components of ilp strategies and integrates this approach with an extended model of interpretation. to help underscore the importance of explicit instruction in ilp pragmatics as a means for shoring up learners’ strategies for ilp development, a good place to start is with basic greetings. language instructors invariably teach greetings in all beginning-level language courses. take, for example, a french class where learners are taught the speech act bonjour (“good morning, good day, hello”) as the greeting. the problem is that it is often not made clear when and how to use bonjour or what other speech act might be part of the set needed to greet in some contexts. for starters, english native speakers (nss) may have difficulty using it late in the afternoon if they assume it mostly means “good morning.” but its use is more complex than that. for example, when asking a railway attendant for the track of a departing train in paris or when requesting a baguette in a bakery shop in a french town, the pragmatics of both situations would call for strategically using a greeting (e.g. bonjour) before launching into the request. given that acquiring a working understanding of the illocutionary force (i.e., the intended function of the speaker) of bonjour in a french-speaking community can be a challenge, a strategic approach for learners would be to get coached on the function of greetings in the given language. it is not enough just to memorize the various greetings for different times of day. it is crucial to know the when, how, and why of using them. 3.2. different ways to classify strategies for ilp development one of the difficulties faced in interpreting an ever-growing language learner strategy (lls) literature is that there are numerous different and sometimes competing systems for classifying language strategies. oxford (2017, p. 48) offers a comprehensive definition intended to provide closure at the definitional level. among other things, she indicates in her definition that strategies are contextually-specific thoughts and actions that can be both mental and physical; strategies and interlanguage pragmatics: explicit and comprehensive 385 that they can be combined in clusters or chains; that they can have cognitive, emotional, and social roles to play as determined by the individual; and that their use in self-regulation is complex in nature. notwithstanding the advent of this comprehensive definition, there nonetheless remain differing approaches to describing strategies. here are seven of these: 1. by goal: strategies for learning the tl – for example, identifying, distinguishing, grouping, and memorizing strategies – and strategies for performing in the tl – that is, performing your knowledge, such as retrieval, rehearsal, communicative, and cover strategies. cover strategies are used by learners to look good, even when they do not have a clue as to what they are hearing, saying, reading, or writing. 2. by function: strategies may assume a metacognitive, cognitive, social, or affective role or function from one moment to the next, depending on the nature of the interaction.1 in other words, the very same strategy of, say, asking a woman passerby on the street for directions in buenos aires in spanish (disculpe. usted podría decirme cómo llegar a la embajada de los estados unidos? “excuse me. could you tell me how to get to the us embassy?”) could take on one of the four functions enumerated above and could fluctuate back and forth from one function to another. for example, if the learners are attending to the age factor in how they make their request for directions to this woman, this strategy has a metacognitive function at the moment they are planning to ask the woman for directions. that same strategy assumes a social function when the learners are determining whether, in fact, it is acceptable to ask this passerby for directions, given the person’s gender and age. the strategy takes on a cognitive function while the language users are searching in their mind for the pragmatically appropriate forms given their relative ages and genders. in this case, the learners would be selecting the appropriate form of you (e.g., whether to use tu, vos, or usted in argentinian spanish). the use of this asking a passerby on the street for directions strategy may take on an affective function if, say, the passerby responds that she is new to the city and is therefore unable to give directions, if the response is too fast or abrupt, or if the request is ignored altogether. in other words, the affective function is activated if 1 see cohen and wang (2018) for a research study undertaken to substantiate the claims that strategies assume one of these four roles or functions from one moment to the next. the study found that there can be fluctuation from one function to the other for the same strategy and across strategies, since strategies are often used in pairs, sequences, or clusters. julie m. sykes, andrew d. cohen 386 the learners feel frustrated (which can happen frequently during efforts at tl use). if the learner is persistent, then this moment of negative affect is likely to activate the metacognitive function in that the learner now plans how to ask a new passerby and may even turn the affect positive. determining which language material to use involves the cognitive function, and the social function may play a brief role if considerations as to gender and status crossed the learners’ mind. 3. by skill: a third way of classifying pragmatic strategies would be by language skill: listening, speaking, reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar, or translation strategies with regard to the tl. the skill approach provides a popular way to classify strategies, especially with regard to the two productive and two receptive skills, plus the skill of vocabulary learning. less attention has been given to how language learners deal with the skill areas of translation and grammar, both of which can benefit greatly from well-placed strategizing (see cohen, 2002, with regard to translation, and cohen & pinilla-herrera, 2010 and pawlak, this issue, with regard to grammar). 4. by age: certain strategies may best be used by younger learners, teenagers, adults, or seniors, or when addressing people at those stages in life. 5. by proficiency level: higherand lower-proficiency learners may use the very same strategies, but may employ them in sometimes subtly different ways with regard to the nature of their use and the quality derived from the use (e.g., subtle differences in intonation or in the timing of the utterance). 6. by tl more generally or a specific variety of the tl: certain languages may have features which call for strategizing, such as marking the gender of verbs in hebrew and arabic tenses. in addition, strategies may vary within a given variety of the tl according to socioeconomic status, occupation, or religious sect. 7. by subculture: there may be strategies that apply in certain tl communities for addressing women or seniors, for example. given such diverse descriptions, to operationalize an explicit approach to si, there needs to be clarity as to the way that the strategies are classified before attempting to include them in any given approach aimed at ilp development. a classification scheme for pragmatics strategies that was published some years ago (cohen, 2005, 2014) used the goal-oriented approach to dealing with strategies, as described in (1) above. this scheme looked first at strategies for learning tl pragmatics, then strategies for using pragmatics, and finally metapragmatic strategies for evaluating how effectively the learners used the pragmatic material. in designing the classification scheme, a decided effort was made to avoid providing vague statements of behavior, but rather to include strategies that strategies and interlanguage pragmatics: explicit and comprehensive 387 would, for example, help learners deal with often subtle pragmatic behaviors. for example, one strategy for learning pragmatics was to conduct a lay crosscultural analysis by identifying the forms to use consistent with the local pragmatic norms (e.g., whether to use the word apologize or sorry in the expression of an apology, and whether to intensify the apology with really, awfully, or so). strategies in this classification included the suggestion that the learners attend to and make use of resources around them, such as asking native speakers (nss) to verify whether the relative age and status of the interlocutors and the given situation have a bearing on how to perform the speech act. for instance, the learner may ask something like: was it because the person asking for directions was younger that she was so polite in her request? or was it just because she was asking a stranger? would it have something to do with her gender or age? (see cohen, 2018, for numerous examples of learners’ strategic partnering with their instructors in an effort to enhance their understanding of tl pragmatics). 4. a goal-oriented, comprehensive approach to strategizing about pragmatics even if instructors are explicitly addressing ilp in the language classroom, learners may not be fully aware of the extent to which they can strategize in order to gain control of more subtle pragmatic elements. since the learning of pragmatics involves so many disparate bits of information, it is helpful to have learners use their own strategies for the initial learning of tl pragmatics, for performing pragmatics, and for evaluating their performance. as indicated above, this classification scheme put the emphasis on the goal (i.e., learning vs. use), rather than on the functions of a given strategy (metacognitive, cognitive, social, or affective) or on specific skills (e.g., listening, speaking, reading, or writing) (cohen, 2005). in this section, we consider this goal-related orientation within a comprehensive approach to ilp development, focusing on pragmatic knowledge, pragmatic analysis, learner subjectivity, and learner awareness. drawing on previous work, both in terms of intercultural communicative competence as well as ilp development, the common dimensions of 54 theoretical models were brought together to emphasize the elements appearing across all models, and, as a result, deemed most critical for ilp competence (sykes, 2016; sykes, malone, forrest, & sadgic, forthcoming). this synthesis of common dimensions across models suggested a framework with four interwoven components of knowledge, language analysis, awareness of emotions, and subjectivity. rather than representing mutually exclusive categories with firm boundaries, these components comprise the four key elements of ilp development found across the literature, all of which need to be taken into consideration when addressing the teaching and learning if tl pragmatics. in addition, the julie m. sykes, andrew d. cohen 388 role that each of these elements plays may not be readily apparent in any given instance of pragmatic performance. for example, when analyzing the language forms that learners select for a given apology, they most likely determine which to use both on the basis of the knowledge that they have regarding the speech act, as well as on the basis of their emotional awareness of the delicate nature of the interaction. the intention of the framework, therefore, is to move beyond an approach which privileges the structural components (knowledge) of ilp, but rather to include in the model learners’ analysis of how to use that knowledge as well as their attention to conscious subjective choices and their awareness of emotions that arise before, during, and after their pragmatic performance. in the section that follows, we further explore each component as they apply to the strategic approach of learning and performance. 4.1. a strategic approach to language knowledge and awareness of emotions the first two components of an extended model of ilp development critical to ilp development are language knowledge and analysis. the first component, language knowledge, focuses on the ways in which semantic formulas and other structural elements such as turn-taking, implicature, syntax, and lexicon are enlisted to arrive at appropriate pragmatic behavior. take, for example, the communicative scenario in which a learner of spanish apologizes to a friend for being late. the knowledge necessary to participate in this speech event would include the grammatical structures and lexicon needed for the various purposes involved. first, there is likely to be a greeting (one speech act). then, the learner extends an apology (another speech act), involving one or more strategies, such as offering a direct expression of apology, giving an excuse for being late, offering repair by paying for the friend’s coffee, and (especially if this has happened before) promising that this will not happen again. finally, the learner may suggest that they go somewhere specific for coffee (yet another speech act, that of suggestion). the second component of the model focuses on analysis skills or, the learner’s ability to determine which speech acts to use (e.g., whether it is appropriate to apologize at all in the given culture), the order in which to use them, the content of those structures, and the determination of the context based on their interlocutor and other contextual relevant factors for making that decision. moreover, the skill of analysis includes, for example, the ability to determine the illocutionary force an utterance might have based on the learners’ pragmatic understanding of the given situation. for example, in the apology scenario above, the analysis component emphasizes the order in which the apology speech act might occur (as well as the ordering of the strategies within the apology), the extent to which detail needs to be included, and the ability to appropriately adjust strategies and interlanguage pragmatics: explicit and comprehensive 389 the intensity of the apology in real time. the components of the model involving awareness of emotions and possible use of subjectivity may then come into play depending on the situation and on the given learner. the majority of research examining strategies for ilp development has focused on these two areas of language knowledge and analysis, with a special emphasis on the former. the following sections further explore the elements of knowledge and analysis (4.1.1.) and learner subjectivity and emotional awareness (4.1.2), as related to strategies for learning pragmatics. 4.1.1. language knowledge, analysis, and strategies for learning pragmatics a strategic approach to applying the elements of knowledge and analysis to their ilp learning could start with having learners: (1) select a communicative scenario in the context in which it is to be performed, and then (2) identify the speech acts to focus on in terms of knowledge and the skills of analysis necessary to fine-tune the strategies appropriate for the given speech act. in doing so, they would deploy the following criteria: a) the frequency of use of the selected speech acts in common situations encountered by the tl speaker in the given speech community (e.g., requesting, refusing, and thanking); b) their potentially high-stakes value in discourse (e.g., apologizing and complaining); and c) their special role in the given community of practice within the speech community or the society, such as in creating solidarity (e.g., the use of cursing for the purpose of bonding, see daly, holmes, newton, & stubbe, 2004). once learners have identified the speech acts of interest, they need strategies for collecting data as to their frequency of use, their role in discourse, and any special role they may have in a given community of practice (e.g., cursing among fellow students at the university or among soldiers in an army unit). learners will also need to strategize regarding the aspects of performance to which they will attend. for example, they need to decide how much they will focus on the comprehension of the given speech act and how much on the production of it, and how much attention (if any) they will give to the speakers’ tone of voice, facial expressions, and gestures in the delivery of the given speech acts? by addressing each of these areas, they are empowered to learn not only what to say, but also the skills needed for when and how to say it. while it is undoubtedly challenging for learners to collect these data on their own, it may give them more ownership of the task, and hence increase their motivation to julie m. sykes, andrew d. cohen 390 do the task, and contribute to the learning process. if they are currently taking a class, the learners can then report back to the class as the experts since they are the ones with the fresh information, perhaps collected from speakers in a certain subculture of interest. if learners have the energy to do so, they could sharpen their pragmatic analysis skills by gathering information (through interviews and observation) on how these speech acts are performed by members of one or more communities of practice within a given speech community (e.g., at the workplace: making requests of age mates, refusing requests made by people of higher status, and thanking people in service, such as cafeteria workers or custodians). in addition, learners could observe what nss do by paying attention to what they say when speaking naturally or when they are prompted to do so, as in an oral discourse completion task (dct), how they say it (e.g., their speed of delivery and tone of voice), and their nonverbal behavior as well (i.e., their facial expressions, body posture, and gestures). still in the interests of collecting basic information on speech acts and increasing their ability to analyze ilp, nss could be asked to model performance of the speech acts as they might be realized under differing conditions, and possibly be asked to answer questions about their performance as well. a key goal of the learner – using whatever strategy set they enlist – would be to see if there is variation in the realization of the speech act(s) according to: · the magnitude or seriousness of the issue prompting the speech act (e.g., apologizing for missing a meeting vs. spilling hot coffee on a friend); · the relative age of the speaker and of the addressee (e.g., making a request to a senior professor or to a young child); · the relative status of the speaker and of the addressee (e.g., making a request to the senior vice president of a firm or to a custodian); · the relative roles of the speaker and of the addressee in the relationship (e.g., making a request to the chair of the board meeting or to a waiter in a restaurant); and · the length of acquaintance of the interlocutors (e.g., making a request to a stranger about switching seats upon boarding an airplane as opposed to making an appeal for assistance to a longtime friend over morning tea). another useful exercise for learners would be to engage in cross-cultural analysis by thinking through and even writing out what the appropriate things to say would be for that speech act (or other pragmatic behavior) in the given scenario within the given context in the l1 speech community of the learners as compared to how it is done in the tl speech community. for example, in the case of invitation refusals, the comparison could involve the following elements: · identifying the cultural norms for the performance of an invitation refusal in the l1 and tl communities, namely, the circumstances under strategies and interlanguage pragmatics: explicit and comprehensive 391 which learners would or would not use the speech act; for example, they need to decide whether to refuse right away and soften that refusal as the invitation progresses, as is often the case in many varieties of spanish, or whether to be more implicit about the refusal throughout, as would be the case in many varieties of english; · identifying the speech-act-specific strategies that tend to be used with the given speech act in that situation (e.g., whether the strategy of offering an explanation is expected to be used in that invitation refusal situation); · obtaining a viable interpretation for the cross-cultural differences by asking members of the tl speech community, which could mean members of a particular community of practice such as a group at the workplace, or social or friendship group (e.g., asking whether it is appropriate for a college student to give an outright refusal to the department chair’s invitation to dinner and whether the refusal could include – even in jest – an informal phrase like no way!); · identifying the language forms to use (e.g., whether to use the expression i can’t in the expression of the refusal or just hago lo que pueda “i’ll do what i can,” whether to repeat the refusal more than once, and whether to intensify with words like really, awfully, or so); · upon establishing similarities and differences between the two cultures, making a mental note or a notebook entry regarding these differences, such as appropriate explanations (e.g., it is acceptable for a formal family event but not for work) or in whether to invoke g_d’s name in the refusal, as might be the case for ns speakers of arabic apologizing in arabic (al-masaeed & waugh, 2017). as this cross-cultural comparison occurs, it also becomes necessary to employ the components of the ilp model presented above that deal with learners’ awareness of their emotions and with their exercise of subjectivity (to be discussed in section 4.2 below). the ultimate goal is to give learners the expertise needed to be competent performers in multilingual discourse. sometimes, this can mean accommodating to ns patterns, and other times, it can mean making choices about which norms may not apply based on their relationship to the discourse community(ies) with which they interact. 4.1.2. learners’ resources for reinforcing their ilp strategies many resources are available to learners as they work with ilp material in the domains of knowledge and analysis, many of which provide a strategic approach with a research base underpinning it. a good source of basic information on key speech acts is the carla speech acts website, which offers an annotated bibliography of research in this area as well as pragmatic examples in nine different languages. these julie m. sykes, andrew d. cohen 392 materials are especially useful for learners interested in languages with a smaller amount of empirical data and minimal curricular resources available in their tl. two websites, also hosted by carla, offer an explicit strategies-based approach to the learning of japanese (cohen & ishihara, 2005) and spanish (sykes & cohen, 2008, 2012). the japanese website includes resources for teachers, students, and researchers, as well as seven instructional modules focused on speech acts in japanese (i.e., an introductory module followed by modules on apologies, compliments, refusals, requests, and thanks, as well as one on being strategic). a semester-long study of 22 intermediate learners of japanese who used the japanese website found that the resource made a contribution to the learners’ ilp pragmatics. the module on requests yielded the most impact, as measured by dcts and email reflective journals (cohen & ishihara, 2005). the spanish website includes ten modules, each targeting a specific speech act (e.g., compliments, requests, and apologies) and uses audio, video, and communicative activities to engage learners in a pedagogical process of observation, analysis, and reflection. a small-scale study found that participating in an introductory session about this website for a few hours provided 10 spanish learners with a sense that they were more adept than previously at using spanish pragmatics strategies from the website (cohen & sykes, 2012). although it does not have a focus on learner strategies, learners can find information on russian in a corpus-based site dedicated to the learning of russian pragmatics (furniss, 2016). 4.2. a strategic approach to learner subjectivity and awareness of emotions as indicated above, the extended framework targeting interwoven areas of ilp development also includes an explicit focus on the ways that learners perceive their experience – such as through their awareness of emotions that come up for them as they plan and perform tl pragmatics. subjectivity is defined by ishihara and tarone (2009) as a dynamic approach to learners’ identity and informed choice-making. from a strategies perspective, subjectivity refers to learners’ making language choices based both on conscious choices to conform to or diverge from the expected pragmatic patterns, as well as on what feels right. learners could be encouraged to explore their stand with regard to agency by reflecting on how they feel about the use of a particular speech act in a given situation. this is because the expression of learner subjectivity may mean the avoidance of certain strategies that nss are most likely to use. in addition, the framework includes the subjective choices that learners make. if deviation from tl normative behavior is the result of subjectivity, the question becomes one of just how aware the learner is that a given norm is strategies and interlanguage pragmatics: explicit and comprehensive 393 being breached. learner affective awareness is what extends subjectivity beyond the micro – to the macro-level – to an understanding on the learner’s part as to the role pragmatic behavior plays more generally in the given language community, or community of practice within that community, and what the consequences of not abiding by the appropriate pragmatic norms might be. the current interest in learners’ subjectivity and their awareness of that subjectivity helps to update cohen’s (2005, 2014) model, which at the time focused on other elements in the affective domain, such as the function of a given strategy, including the affective function. the recent study by cohen and wang (2018) helps to highlight just how often learners may be experiencing the affective domain of language use by having affective moments, such as when the use of a given strategy results in success or failure. their study revealed numerous moments of frustration or annoyance when learners found that their use of a given strategy was unsuccessful. given the complexity of pragmatic behavior, it is likely that learners will experience numerous moments of this kind in their ilp development. the remainder of this section will consider performance strategies which demonstrate not just how learners draw upon their knowledge base when performing their pragmatics and their powers of analysis, but also how this performance utilizes the affective aspects of subjectivity and awareness. 4.2.1. visualization strategies learners could use visualization strategies to retrieve the speech act material that has already been learned and imagine the impact that their language choices might have. a visualization strategy could, for example, entail the learners visualizing their knowledge base about apologies through a continuum of pragmatic options ranging from the most minimal expression of apology in the tl (e.g., slixa “sorry” in hebrew) to the most formally apologetic (ani mitnatzel “i apologize”). bringing in the affective side of visualization, learners could visualize the likely impact of their choice, depending on whether they make a divergent pragmatic choice (providing a minimal apology consistent with their subjective face maintenance whereas the norms call for a more robust one) or a convergent one (more consistent with the local norms). this strategic process would ensure that they not only are aware of their options, but also have agency in the type of pragmatic behaviors which they select. additionally, a mnemonic device could be used to retrieve material not on a continuum, such as the various categories for when the subjunctive would be expected to be used in spanish (e.g., wedding representing “wish,” “emotion,” julie m. sykes, andrew d. cohen 394 “doubt,” “desire,” “impersonal,” “negation,” and “general possibility”).2 while accessing the subjunctive aspect is not in and of itself a pragmatics issue, it could become one since there is a fine line between grammar in its own right and grammar as a vehicle for being pragmatically appropriate. so, pragmatic inappropriateness could result from the use of the indicative which might sound too bossy, as opposed to the subjunctive, which sounds more mitigated (*quiero que lo hace ahora. *“i want you to do it now” rather than quiero que lo haga ahora. “i would like you to do it now”). from the awareness perspective, knowing that there is a significant interface between grammatical structures and pragmatic expression adds depth to ilp development. as learners retrieve semantic formulae, they could also imagine pictures or images which reflect their pragmatic intention with each structure that they choose. 4.2.2. strategic practice strategic practice of those aspects of speech act performance could involve the learners doing mind games, where they engage in imaginary interactions, perhaps focusing on certain pragmalinguistic (i.e., related to the choice of tl forms to realize a given function) aspects of the speech act (e.g., while riding their bikes somewhere or while waiting in line for a latte at a coffee shop). this imaginary play would entail using strategies for operationalizing the skill of visualization, such as by envisioning a continuum of possible apologies from the most minimal (oh, sorry about that) to the most elaborate (i would like to apologize profusely for . . .). the goal would be twofold, that is: greater comfort in using the given speech act and practice to sharpen and elaborate learning. learners could also engage in speech act role play with fellow learners of the tl or with nss playing the other role. similarly, emergent technologies afford the opportunity to engage with strategic practice through simulated immersive environments (sykes, 2012, 2014; taguchi & sykes, 2013; taguchi, li, & tang, 2017), place-based augmented reality (holden & sykes, 2011, 2014), and social networking sites (belz & thorne, 2005; gonzales, 2013, 2012). not only do these play spaces enable the practice of and engagement with pragmatic knowledge and analysis skills, but they also afford learners the opportunity to exercise subjectivity and to be aware that this is happening. a less common but fruitful activity would be for learners to engage in real play with nss in the speech community, where the nss (perhaps the students’ friends or acquaintances) perform their usual roles (e.g., that of a lawyer, a doctor, or a shop clerk), with the added knowledge that the learners are simply practicing 2 see an example in the grammar strategies website. retrieved from http://carla.umn.edu/strate gies/sp_grammar/strategies/form/moods/subjunctive/wedding.html. accessed 22 november 2017. strategies and interlanguage pragmatics: explicit and comprehensive 395 speech act sets and may say things that are contrary to fact (e.g., apologizing for an infraction that, in reality, they did not commit). since professionals may not wish to interrupt their busy work schedule to engage in real play during business hours, it may be necessary to conduct such sessions during off hours or in the evenings. the successful completion of these activities would call for a series of strategies on the part of the learners, with the realization of each strategy potentially activating more than one function (i.e., fluctuating from a metacognitive function to a cognitive one, from a cognitive to an affective and/or a social one, and so forth). of course, another option would be for learners to engage in interactions with nss without the interlocutors being aware that the purpose for the learners is actually for them to practice speech acts. this could be both face-to-face and via digital technologies. synchronous computer-mediated communication (scmc) and telecollaboration (i.e., virtual communication between learners of two languages with multilingual interactions) have long been shown to have meaningful impact, both positive and negative, on learners’ ilp development (see, e.g., sykes, 2005; vyatkina & belz, 2006). in-class reflection on these experiences is highly beneficial for ilp development, both in terms of the knowledge gained, and the ability to make individual choices (i.e., subjectivity) as well as the general awareness of pragmatic issues in the tl. if the conditions are feasible, these reflections could include learners talking about their own ilp choices, using recordings of themselves as they are engaged in the interactions. nowadays it is possible to record a selfie video on a cellphone or log a chat. 4.2.3. using strategies consistent with learning style preferences learners might wish to select strategies that are consistent with their learning style preferences during their efforts to practice performing tl pragmatics. first, learners determine their learning style preferences, ideally through some style preference inventory, such as the generic one available on the spanish grammar strategies website at carla.3 then, they try out an approach to speech act delivery that is consistent with the results. for example, if the learners find themselves having a more reflective style preference, then they may wish to think through the elements in the speech act before performing the speech act; if they are more impulsive in nature, then they may wish to try it out spontaneously it and see what the response is. students who are eager to engage in pre-planning of speech act delivery could track the strategies that they use consistent with this learning style preference. students who prefer to online it could track the strategies that they actually use and the results. 3 retrieved from http://carla.umn.edu/strategies/sp_grammar/pdf_files/cohenoxfordchi-sty lesurvey.pdf. accessed 31 july 2016. julie m. sykes, andrew d. cohen 396 if the learners are currently studying in a class, they could report back to the class or to a small group in the class the strategies that they found themselves using in delivering a given speech act, and how well this use fit with their learning style preferences. perhaps the students could record themselves as they engage with the communicative function and then record their retrospective self-observation as a means of exploring the rationale behind their strategy use. likewise, pairs of students could take turns being the performer or the one collecting the verbal report data such as think aloud protocols where learners explain why they made choices or the application of specific strategies (see cohen, 2013, for more on collecting verbal report data). 4.2.4. using communication strategies to get the message across sometimes communication strategies might be used to help pave the way and to avoid uncomfortable situations and make interlocutors aware the learner know that pragmatic expectations are a key part of interaction. learners could, for instance, use the strategy of alerting the addressee just before the delivery of one or more speech acts that their delivery may not be completely appropriate (e.g., i want to say i’m sorry, but i’m not sure how to say it right . . .). then just afterwards, if the learners have a sense that the performance did not work as intended, they could use a strategy to try to repair the situation (e.g., i have a sense that i didn’t say that right. please help me out here. how would you make this request/apology/complaint? if it is of any help, this is how i would say it in my native language . . .). 4.2.5. expressing agency learners may find it helpful to do an exercise based on their emotions to determine the extent to which they resist being nativelike in their pragmatics. in this activity, learners look for instances when they have the requisite knowledge to perform the speech act appropriately but, as an expression of agency or subjectivity, remain true to their own inclinations in their speech act delivery, rather than being nativelike in their performance (see ishihara, 2009). for example, american learners of japanese may purposely refrain from using honorific verbs in talking about people of higher status (for instance, using taberu “to eat” instead of the honorific verb mesheagaru). if appropriate, the learners could use the strategy of sharing with their interlocutors the fact that they purposely avoid using such honorifics in order to treat everyone equally might cause conflict but might also give learners the opportunity to explain their own choices. the need for this strategy, in combination with communication strategies (see 4.2.4.) will be especially true in instances of divergence based on learner strategies and interlanguage pragmatics: explicit and comprehensive 397 subjectivity. for example, this phenomenon is the well-documented case of female learners of japanese choosing not to adopt the gendered honorific system while studying abroad. adept learners may be able to diverge from the typical ns pattern while remaining successful by using strategies to indicate their awareness of the expected patterns but also their choice to diverge from them. 5. the metapragmatic function in handling of strategies for ilp development as noted in section 3 above, the use of a strategy could activate a metacognitive, cognitive, social, or affective function. if a strategy for learning or performing ilp takes on a metacognitive function (i.e., for planning pragmatic behavior, monitoring some ongoing pragmatic behavior, or evaluating some pragmatic performance), then in this case it could also be considered a metapragmatic function, since the focus is on pragmatics. for example, in an effort to avoid pragmatic failure, learners may monitor for the level of directness or indirectness in the delivery of tl pragmatics (e.g., in making a request of a stranger on an airplane); for the appropriateness of the selected term of address (e.g., referring in the tl to dr. stephen blake as doc, steve, or you); or for tone, facial expressions, and gestures. whereas an actor usually gets coached in such matters, language learners are, in many cases, left to figure it out by themselves, which at times can be a daunting undertaking. 6. conclusions and implications for future research this article has demonstrated how a systemic look at strategies for ilp development applies across an extended framework of ilp which includes language knowledge, analysis, learner subjectivity, and an awareness of emotions. as such, the ilp model constitutes a framework within which learners are better able to understand the pragmatics involved in the co-construction of human language. the aim is to enhance learners’ ability to determine what to say, when to say it, how to say it, and when to diverge from the norm. in sections 2 and 3 we have attempted to synthesize the ways in which learning and performance strategies can extend to all four domains of ilp. section 4 further describes ways in which this strategies-oriented approach might be applied in the future. it is our view that a focus on a strategies-based approach to ilp teaching and learning can play a crucial role in the development of future curricular innovations and assessment measures. as the number of studies which focus on a strategic approach to pragmatics increases, so does the possibility for curricular innovation. in terms of such curricular innovations, a significant one would be to include viable strategies focus in curricular materials being made available for language julie m. sykes, andrew d. cohen 398 classrooms across languages. in the past two years, a website focused on russian pragmatics (furniss, 2016) and a digital simulation focused on chinese pragmatics (taguchi, li, & tang, 2017) have appeared. while neither has an explicit approach to strategy instruction, both are useful for the explicit teaching and learning of interlanguage pragmatic content. most recently, a mobile application has been developed which offers a fully-strategic approach to the teaching and learning of ilp in spanish. the launch of the free mobile application lingrotogo (http://lingrolearning.com) is a notable advance in the availability of on-the-go materials available for the teaching and learning of spanish pragmatics at the novice and intermediate levels. available for ios (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lingrotogo/id1273904866?mt=8) and android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lingrolearning.lingrotogo&hl=en), lingrotogo is a game-based app for the learning of spanish which places communicative functions, language learning strategies, and ilp development at the core of learning. structured around communicative scenarios, the application engages learners in 60 such scenarios. each scenario includes key vocabulary, but, more importantly, is centered around the teaching and learning of pragmatic knowledge, analysis skills, subjectivity, and awareness. as more applications of this type become available, we expect to see an increased presence of explicit strategies instruction in classrooms, as well as a growth in the depth and type of curricular materials available. future research endeavors which take advantage of this increased presence could include, for example, an examination of the role of ilp instruction on learners’ abilities to build knowledge, analyze a variety of tl pragmatic behaviors, make conscious choices about their own behaviors, and recognize the value of ilp in interaction. furthermore, a comparison of a traditional course with pragmatic content to that with an embedded strategic approach to explicit ilp instruction would add empirical value to the models and taxonomies synthesized in this paper. knowing more about how and when to apply a strategic approach would greatly extend this reach. finally, as we move forward, it becomes increasingly important to develop a meaningful assessment which looks at more than just ilp knowledge. this measure should also include analysis skills, subjectivity measures, and a focus on general pragmatic awareness. while previous work has made strides in this area (bardovi-harlig, 2001; félix-brasdefer, 2007; roever, 2013; roever, fraser, & elder, 2014), a comprehensive approach to ilp skills is still missing. digital simulations offer a means of delivering the individualized experience fundamental to ilp development while also providing a 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(2006). a learner corpus-drive intervention for the development of l2 pragmatic competence. in k. bardovi-harlig, j. c. félix-brasdefer, & a. s. omar (eds.), pragmatics & language learning (pp. 315-357). honolulu, hi: national foreign language resource center, university of hawai’i at manoa. 293 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (2). 2023. 293-315 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.38276 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt “a smooth transition or a giant leap?” the challenges posed by the transition from secondary education to higher education in relation to emi in sri lanka nadee mahawa ha sabaragamuwa university of sri lanka h ps://orcid.org/0000-0003-1099-1488 nadi@mgt.sab.ac.lk romola rassool open university of sri lanka h ps://orcid.org/0000-0002-2507-0836 dirpgie@ou.ac.lk abstract although bilingual education has been offered in some schools of sri lanka since 2001, primary and secondary school education has been conducted mainly in the first language (l1), that is, sinhala/tamil. as a result, most students sit for the general certificate of education – advanced level (gce (a/l) examination, which determines university entry, in their l1. thus, the majority of students entering state universities do so after receiving their entire education in their l1. at the tertiary level, where many (if not most) degree programs are conducted in the english medium, students struggle to make the transition from sinhala/tamil medium instruction to english medium instruction (emi).1 this study examines the challenges faced by students and lecturers in three selected state universities due to this language transition. it employs a qualitative research design. data were collected through official documents and semi-structured interviews with forty academics. three focus group interviews were conducted with thirty undergraduates. in addition, eighteen non1 this term is used to iden fy classes in specific subject disciplines, as opposed to language support classes. nadee mahawattha, romola rassool 294 participant lectures were observed in mainstream2 classrooms. the findings indicate several structural, institutional, and linguistic challenges on the way to a successful implementation of emi in state universities and demonstrate that the transition from gce (a/l) to emi in universities is a challenging experience for both students and lecturers. we propose that the concept of academic literacies be used as a productive means of supporting undergraduates through their transition to emi. keywords: challenges; english medium instruction; higher education; school education; sri lanka 1. introduc on research into english medium instruction (emi) has consistently demonstrated that globally there has been an increase in the phenomenon in higher education, and sri lanka has followed this trend. although english was the medium of instruction when the university system was first introduced into sri lanka (then ceylon) in 1942,3 the medium of instruction in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and the performing arts was changed to the vernaculars of sinhala or tamil in the 1960s. however, in more recent years, the university grants commission (ugc) of sri lanka has been promoting emi due to the belief that it will improve the level of employability of graduates as well as the contemporary trend of internationalization. most students enter university a er comple ng their studies in one of the vernaculars – sinhala (78.4%) or tamil (19.4%) (annual school census of sri lanka, 2020, p. 11). therefore, most of those who enter state universi es start their academic careers with a poten al handicap: despite all studies at school level being in the sinhala/tamil medium, as undergraduates, they are expected to transi on to english as their medium of instruc on with, presumably, inadequate support from the system. based on over 35 years of combined experience as providers of english language support in the state university system, the researchers had observed that despite the increase in the number of english medium degree programs (emdps) and the powerful discourse surrounding the need for english in the world of work, it appeared that undergraduates were not being provided with the support they needed to make the transition to emi. therefore, the present authors 2 this term is used to identify classes in specific subject disciplines, as opposed to language support classes. 3 the precursor to the university of ceylon was the ceylon university college, which was established in colombo in 1921 “to prepare students for the external degree examinations of the university of london” (de silva, 2021, p. 3). this establishment was absorbed into the university of ceylon in 1942. “a smooth transition or a giant leap?” the challenges posed by the transition from secondary . . . 295 felt it necessary to investigate more rigorously such challenges and possible ways of suppor ng the various stakeholders. delving into the literature on this issue, the researchers realized that the concept of academic literacies4 could be a produc ve means of suppor ng the transi on from secondary to ter ary educa on. therefore, they undertook this study to explore the challenges faced by undergraduates as they transi on from instruc on in the first language (l1) to emi and the poten al of using the concept of academic literacies to minimize these challenges. our study adopted macaro’s (2018) defini on of english medium instruc on (emi)5 as “the use of the english language to teach academic subjects (other than english itself) in countries or jurisdic ons where the first language of the majority of the popula on is not english” (p. 19). 2. literature review the aims of this sec on are twofold: (i) to present the theore cal perspec ves that inform this study, and (ii) to review the global and sri lankan literature on this area of research. as regards the first of the two aims, this study is informed by the theoretical perspective of new literacy studies (nls). the field of nls paved the way for the development of the notion of academic literacies (lea & street, 2006), which is a particularly useful construct when addressing the challenges of emi. lea and street (2006) further present three models: study skills, academic socialization, and academic literacies as valuable means of examining issues of students’ at higher education level. these three models are summarized below, with an emphasis on the academic literacies model as it is directly relevant to this study: – the study skills model aims to address students’ language/literacy inaccuracies and different language skills which are taught independently of the mainstream curriculum (muhirwe, 2012). – the academic socializa on model directs students to study how the members of an academic community speak, write, think, and use literacy and how to replicate these prac ces themselves. however, this model is cri cized on the grounds that it presumes that the academy is a rela vely homogeneous culture (muhirwe, 2012). 4 the term “academic literacies” implies that two or more literacies that are interrelated operate together to ensure academic success. acknowledging the multi-faceted nature of the concept, the researchers consistently use this term throughout this paper except when they are referring to the work of other authors who have used the term in its singular form. 5 in this paper, we use the acronyms emi (following macaro, 2018) and emdp (english medium degree program) interchangeably to refer to degree programs that include subject content that is taught through the english medium. nadee mahawattha, romola rassool 296 – the academic literacies model views the notion of academic literacies from a wider perspective. it is concerned with “meaning making, identity, power and authority” and highlights the “institutional nature of what ‘counts’ as knowledge in any particular academic context” (lea & street, 2006, p. 227). this model views the process of acquiring the requisite skills as “more complex, dynamic, nuanced, situated, and involving both epistemological issues and social processes including power relations among people and institutions, and social identities” (lea & street, 2006, p. 228). these three models provide this study with a strong theoretical framework which enables one to understand the nature of students’ learning (in terms of both the mainstream and english support programs) in emi in second language higher educa on (slhe). when it comes to emi challenges identified at a global level, aizawa and rose (2020) explored language-related ones faced by students entering a japanese university where the medium of instruction (moi) is english after studying in high schools where the moi was the l1. the findings indicate that even a “soft emi” school experience may facilitate a smooth transition. siddiqui et al. (2021) explored the perspectives of undergraduates on emi in a public university in pakistan, identified the challenges faced by them, and proposed strategies to overcome these challenges. using semi-structured interviews, they found that students viewed emi as advantageous for “higher education, jobs and progressive thought” (p. 10). lecturers’ “english competence, code switching, vocabulary, and receptive and productive abilities” (p. 10) were identified as challenges. further, the participants proposed that “english-skilled teachers, constant english use, and university language support” (p. 10) were necessary to overcome such challenges. the views of lecturers regarding the challenges posed by emi were investigated by tang (2020) in an international college in thailand. the interview data revealed four types of challenges: “linguistic, cultural, structural, and identity-related (institutional)” (p. 97). further, this study emphasizes the importance of four aspects in emi implementation: “language improvement, subject matter learning, career prospects, and internationalization strategy” (p. 97). in many contexts, having studied in the english medium is seen by university managers as adequate prepara on for teaching in english, whereas receiving pedagogical training is not viewed as a necessity (chapple, 2015). however, barnard (2014) claims that merely possessing “the ability to read widely and write at length in a second language does not necessarily transfer to effec vely explaining key concepts to students in such a way as to make the lectures comprehensible” (p. 13). this observa on suggests that lecturers would benefit from con nuous professional development (cpd) that focuses on teaching in “a smooth transition or a giant leap?” the challenges posed by the transition from secondary . . . 297 emi. academics would benefit from cpd that focuses on discipline-specific content (jeschke et al., 2021) and effective integration of discipline-specific content and the medium of instruction (uys et al., 2007). jacobs (2006) and mckenna (2004) point to the importance of developing academic literacies in emi. their findings are vital when iden fying transi onal challenges in emi because they address the issue through a holis c approach. they discuss the challenges from two different perspec ves – curriculum and pedagogy – and state that both perspec ves are equally important to a ain proficiency in academic literacies. mckenna (2004) presents three curriculum cycles: (i) english as a second language (esl), (ii) english for academic purposes (eap), and (iii) academic literacy (al) as a means of providing english language support in emi in universi es, and asserts that the third curriculum cycle (i.e., al) is the most beneficial as it gives “overt instruc on . . . in the norms and expecta ons of the discipline” (p. 67) and helps students write their assignments, projects, or essays with con nuous and clear feedback on their wri ng. the studies conducted in the sri lankan context reveal that the lack of basic english language proficiency (elp) at the entry-level of emi is a major transi onal challenge. in addi on, they discuss the perceived link between emi and employment among both undergraduates and employers. studies on the transi onal challenges faced by undergraduates in sri lanka iden fy the lack of basic elp as their root cause. for instance, sriyalatha (2016) examined the factors affec ng academic performance in a study conducted in the university of sri jayewardenepura, one of the sri lankan state universi es, and asserted that the low level of elp of undergraduates is one of the most cri cal factors which affects academic performance at the university level. navaz (2016) also points out that the many undergraduates in emi whose elp is low at the entry-level find it hard to con nue their studies in state universi es. in this regard, mahawa ha and rassool (2021) emphasize the importance of systema c, addi ve, and gradual support for undergraduates to progress from general english, eap/english for specific purposes (esp) to academic literacies to overcome the transi onal challenges in slhe. a report from the national education commission (nec, 2009) has identified elp as an essential graduate attribute but has not specified what this means in the emi context. the graduand employment census (gec) (ramanayake, 2012) documents the obstacles faced by graduands and the recommendations made by them and claims that the labor market needs of the country “encourage students to study in english medium” (ramanayake et al., 2013, p. 55). undergraduates are faced with two pressures as they seek to complete a degree in order to enter the world of work: on the one hand, they are pressured into obtaining a “class” (firstor second-class honors) in their degree programs and, on the other, they are told that nadee mahawattha, romola rassool 298 they need to improve their elp. those who choose to focus on the former – obtaining a class – sometimes choose the safer option of following the degree in the first language in order to ensure the class. however, according to this report, “graduands said they did regret the fact that they decided to study in sinhala medium” (ramanayake, et al., 2013, p. 57). the possible reason for this regret is that when they start seeking jobs, they find themselves at a disadvantage due to their lack of academic literacies in english and other job-related english skills. the world bank report also recommends the expansion of emdps in universities (aturupane et al., 2009, p. 35). further, this report points out that not only students but also lecturers face elp-related issues with respect to emi when they are not properly trained for the purpose. in this regard, the report states that “vice-chancellors could request all academic staff to strengthen their english and include it as a key criterion in staff selection and appointment . . .” (aturupane et al., 2009, p. 35). the importance of revising the existing english curricula and developing new curricula was another focus of this report. this recommendation is significant because the departments of english language teaching (delts) of sri lankan state universities generally offer the same english support programs for undergraduates of all the degree courses regardless of their moi. however, the literature on supporting emi states that mainstreamed and contextualized english support courses which focus on developing academic literacies are necessary to ensure success in emdps rather than offering elp development-oriented courses or decontextualized study skills programs (mckenna, 2004; wingate, 2006). there is a dearth of studies related to al in emi in sri lanka. however, mahawa ha and rassool (2021) iden fied the lack of al-oriented prac ces in emi as the major transi onal issue for students at state universi es. in par cular, they found that the following aspects were lacking in the sri lankan system: (a) understanding regarding academic literacies, (b) collabora on between the content lecturers and the language lecturers, (c) support from the system for provision of the necessary language support for emi at the entry-level. this review of the theore cal and empirical literature has highlighted that a departure from the conven onal approach to english language enhancement, which takes the form of general english or eap/esp courses, is necessary to minimize the transi onal challenges faced by undergraduates. the literature also recommends academic literacies as an approach that can lead to posi ve outcomes during this transi on. thus, it is evident that there is a gap between this recommended prac ce and the prevailing situa on in the state universi es of sri lanka – a research gap which, as stated earlier, this paper a empts to fill. to reach the above aims the following research ques ons were formulated: “a smooth transition or a giant leap?” the challenges posed by the transition from secondary . . . 299 1. what are the perceived language/medium of instruction-related challenges faced by stakeholders in transitioning from secondary to tertiary education? 2. what solutions are considered as possible for minimizing these challenges? 3. methodology 3.1. context the data for this study were collected from ten facul es (3 facul es of management, 3 facul es of science, 1 faculty of humani es, 1 faculty of social sciences, 1 faculty of social sciences and humani es and 1 faculty of social sciences and languages) of three state universi es. all the students in these facul es were enrolled in emdps from the first year onward. the selec on of the three universi es for this study was based on the need to access as varied a sample as possible. thus, two of the most established, older, urban universi es (university 1 and university 2) and a newer, regional university (university 3) were chosen. 3.2. data collec on this study used a qualita ve approach to arrive at nuanced responses to the research ques ons. therefore, data collec on was done through interviews with lecturers, focus groups with students, lecture observa ons, ques onnaires, field notes, and the study of selected official documenta on on slhe. 3.3. par cipants forty lecturers and thirty undergraduates from the three selected state universi es were the par cipants in this study. all the par cipants were informed of the aims and other details of the study and their informed consent was sought and received prior to the commencement of the data collec on process. semi-structured interviews were conducted with the lecturers who were selected using a purposive sampling method, thus ensuring a range of disciplinary areas and teaching experience. the average length of an interview was 22.21 minutes. in some instances, these interviews were followed by shorter follow-up interviews. of these forty interviews, nineteen were with academics who held administrative positions in universities: deans of faculties and heads of departments. we interviewed ten deans6 from three universities who were all phd qualified and of whom 6 in one university, under the arts stream, there were two separate faculties (faculty of social sciences and faculty of humanities), whereas in other cases, there was just one faculty: nadee mahawattha, romola rassool 300 five were professors. we also conducted interviews with nine heads of departments. all of them were senior lecturers and six had completed their doctorates at the time we interviewed them. our interviews with these academics in administrative positions focused on their views of the administrative challenges in the system. among the forty interviews, thirty-seven were conducted with disciplinary experts. all were senior lecturers and fourteen had phds, while the rest possessed masters’ degrees. we also interviewed three language experts who had completed their masters’ degrees, but none had doctoral degrees. all these academics had over ten years’ experience in higher education. our questions in the case of the disciplinary experts focused on the teaching-learning process in emi and our discussion with them focused on their teaching experience when they were teaching in the english language support courses offered for emi (see table 1). table 1 summary of the demographic informa on about the academics site faculty no. of academics age range in years gender (m/f) highest qualification university 1 faculty of management studies and commerce faculty of applied sciences faculty of humanities and social sciences 13 34-61 m: 8 f: 5 11 phds 2 masters university 2 faculty of commerce and management studies faculty of science faculty of humanities faculty of social sciences 14 37-66 m: 9 f: 5 11 phds 3 masters university 3 faculty of management studies faculty of applied sciences faculty of social sciences and languages 13 35-55 m: 10 f: 3 8 phds 5 masters table 2 summary of the demographic informa on about the undergraduates site no. of undergraduates age range in years gender (m/f) faculty academic year university 1 10 21-25 m: 7 f: 3 faculty of management studies and commerce faculty of applied sciences faculty of humanities and social sciences first year – 2 second year – 3 third year – 4 fourth year – 1 university 2 10 21-25 m: 6 f: 4 faculty of commerce and management studies faculty of science faculty of humanities faculty of social sciences first year – 2 second year – 4 third year – 2 fourth year – 2 university 3 10 21-25 m: 4 f: 6 faculty of management studies faculty of applied sciences faculty of social sciences and languages first year – 3 second year – 3 third year – 3 fourth year – 1 additionally, three focus group interviews were conducted with students. each group comprised ten students from different academic years ranging from faculty of social sciences and humanities/faculty of social sciences and languages. therefore, we interviewed two deans in the former case. “a smooth transition or a giant leap?” the challenges posed by the transition from secondary . . . 301 first year to third year. the members of these groups were randomly selected, and therefore comprised varying numbers of males and females. they were at different levels of fluency both in their mother tongue, that is, sinhala, and english. they expressed themselves either in sinhala, english, or bilingually. the average length of a focus group interview was 26.33 minutes (see table 2). 3.4. lecture observa ons we also observed eighteen lectures from various departments of the three selected universi es. the main purpose of observing lectures was to understand the teaching process of disciplinary lecturers engaged in teaching in emdps. of the eighteen lectures observed, seventeen were conducted for two hours and the dura on of the remaining one was one hour (see table 3). table 3 summary of the lecture observa ons site faculty subject area designation and highest qualification of academic university 1 faculty of management studies marketing senior lecturer (phd) and commerce faculty of applied sciences marketing senior lecturer (phd) food science senior professor (phd) economics senior lecturer (phd) faculty of humanities and social sciences information systems senior lecturer (masters) economics senior lecturer (phd) university 2 faculty of commerce and marketing senior lecturer (masters) management studies accounting senior lecturer (phd) faculty of science statistical physics senior professor (phd) zoology senior professor (phd) faculty of humanities economics senior professor (phd) faculty of social sciences geography senior lecturer (masters) university 3 faculty of management studies management senior lecturer (masters) macro economics senior lecturer (masters) faculty of applied sciences sports sciences senior lecturer (masters) biochemistry senior lecturer (phd) faculty of social sciences and languages statistics senior lecturer (phd) economics senior lecturer (phd) we also collected data from official documenta on related to slhe to understand how emi has been understood, defined, and described in higher educa on. we found that there was no evidence to indicate the existence of a common policy on emi in slhe. at each university, emi operates independently and varies based on the ideologies of the academic staff of that ins tu on and the available resources. further, we studied the sec on on language of the cons tu on of sri lanka (chapter iv), the sri lanka qualifica ons framework (slqf) prepared by the quality assurance council (qac), circulars/acts regarding the nadee mahawattha, romola rassool 302 pedagogical training of lecturers, subject benchmarks, the university test of the english language (utel) (general) benchmarks, utel-a (academic) benchmarks, university ac on plans, faculty prospectuses and department curricula to examine how policy-makers and administrators have ar culated their expecta ons of emdps, especially in terms of academic literacy as a final outcome. 3.5. data analysis the data collected through the above means were triangulated and analyzed through qualitative content analysis and the major themes were identified. the data were analyzed on the basis of the framework suggested by biggam (2008) (see figure 1). qualitative analysis process collect data under specific themes [based on which the interview protocol was developed] describe data group themes and issues perform analysis, i.e., interpret what is happening figure 1 qualita ve data analysis framework (biggam, 2008, p. 118) this study applied qualita ve content analysis (qca) as the primary means of analyzing the data. while mainly focusing on applying summa ve qca, this study also applied conven onal and directed qca (hsieh & shannon, 2005). most of the lecturer interviews were in english but some of the lecturers and students in focus group interviews were bilingual in their responses (sinhala and english). two lecturer interviews were entirely conducted in sinhala. in such instances, the sections in sinhala were translated into english by the researchers. the coding process began after the interviews had been translated into english. in the case of the interviews and focus group discussions which were conducted in english, they had been transcribed verbatim and triangulated before the coding process was embarked on. the initial coding was done based on the literature survey (theoretical “a smooth transition or a giant leap?” the challenges posed by the transition from secondary . . . 303 and empirical) and then the recurring themes were identified. table 4 provides an example of the coding process and the identification of themes. table 4 an example of the coding process and the iden fica on of themes transcript implication/latent view theme this low english proficiency . . . in this regard we are totally helpless . . . that means, we are selected to the campus and we came to the university with a huge pride . . . but . . . since we don’t have sound english knowledge, we face a lot of difficulties . . . low english language proficiency is a barrier to studying in emi. the inability to succeed with academic work due to low english language proficiency affects their ego (because they have received university entrance after facing a highly competitive examination which has already given them huge recognition in society. they faced this exam in their first language). the gap between school education and university education in terms of medium of instruction is a barrier for students to succeed with emi in the university. 4. results 4.1. the sudden transi on from l1 instruc on to emi the undergraduates’ sudden transi on from the secondary to the ter ary education system and the accompanying change in the medium of instruction is idenfied by all study par cipants as an enormous challenge: student 2 (focus group 1) this low english proficiency . . . in this regard we are totally helpless . . . we came to the university with huge pride . . . but . . . since we don’t have sound english knowledge, we face a lot of difficulties . . . we are embarrassed . . . it’s our fault . . . that means from the beginning we didn’t get a good foundation in english from a teacher, we have never got a proper english teacher in our school, right? you can’t now fix it at once in the university . . . now we are in real trouble . . . student 6 (focus group 1) i thought we would be given an english course once we were enrolled, but we were not . . . at least in our orientation, we thought we would have a three-month english course . . . i have one friend in wayamba,7 they had threeor four-month english course at a stretch . . . even in ruhuna8 they had, but we didn’t. i thought . . . i personally thought we too would get one in our university . . . we couldn’t go to an english course after a/ls due to our economic problems at home . . . our parents can’t afford . . . . 7 one of the state universities located in the north-western province. 8 another of the state universities located in the southern province. nadee mahawattha, romola rassool 304 in addi on to the absence of a proper intermediary support system, the lack of coordina on and collabora on between the various state agents responsible for educa on was also iden fied as a structural challenge in the transi on from the school system to the ter ary system: lecturer 21 . . . we don’t see even collabora on between higher educa on ministry and educa on ministry as well as with the department of examina on . . . and also nie [na onal ins tute of educa on]. these are ins tutes who are handling educa on, so no collaboration at all with any. so . . . there now, prepare syllabuses . . . . then examination branch… educa on department they teach their subject separately …. then finally when it comes to evaluation, [the department of] examination takes some other examiner and prepares the papers . . . so totally different things are going on. it was pointed out that the lack of coordination among the state agents of education is not only a problem in the school education system but also within the networks of higher education. a comment made by a lecturer regarding the courses offered by delt emphasizes the issue (see mahawattha & rassool, 2021): lecturer 19 . . . they cater for the common needs. because we have some unique . . . areas. we have some subject specific needs. if the lecturers are attached to our faculty, then we can discuss and then . . . we have some authority to . . . amend [the curriculum and pedagogy]. but when the eltu9 handle then they will come and teach only the grammar and general english. a few academics explained that the existing “sub-cultural,” political and social situation does not allow undergraduates to make progress in english. moreover, fluent speakers find it difficult to continue with their elp mainly due to “ragging” from some fellow-students. ragging is defined as “any act which causes or is likely to cause physical or psychological injury, fear or mental pain in an undergraduate . . .” (university of colombo, 2016). one of the lecturers stated the following: lecturer 6 because the first semester, especially with the ragging, they are totally screwed up. and that culture does not allow them to learn a single word of english. even . . . those who know english are not allowed to talk in english . . . so, english is a tool that you’ve got to be using . . . otherwise, it fades off. they are not allowed to use english for one whole semester, the only exposure they get is when we talk to them. so even at that time they are in a transition state, they don’t [understand] anything we talk. so, you see, the first semester, being ragged [leads to a state of turmoil] . . . we are teaching them in english, nothing goes through. it’s an utter failure. 9 english language teaching unit. delt was identified earlier as eltu. “a smooth transition or a giant leap?” the challenges posed by the transition from secondary . . . 305 4.2. unawareness of academic literacies oriented prac ces this study found that none of the lecturers interviewed was aware of the concept of academic literacies and that therefore they perceived content and language as two different components that operate independently. for instance, lecturer 10 stated the following (see mahawa ha & rassool, 2021): lecturer 10 . . . they should have some knowledge in the grammar and but beyond that in higher level i believe that they should have a good level in logical wri ng and how academically they fit it into the wri ng they should learn . . . the struggle experienced by the students is summed up by one of them: student 4 (focus group 2) the problem i have is, i find wri ng in the exam in english extremely difficult. even though i understand the lecture, i don’t have any confidence that i can write the exam in english and score marks. i thought when i come to university my english will be fine, but it takes such a long me. we take me and get late when we write in the exam . . . the importance of lecturers receiving training in effec ve pedagogy for the delivery of emi was iden fied only by a few lecturers. one of these lecturers, who belonged to a management faculty, stated: lecturer 9 . . . i was teaching in australia, i was teaching there five and a half years to english speaking set of native speakers . . . i have . . . i have my own way of delivering because i keep experimenting things and i did these teaching methodology course at colombo university and also the seda10 qualification, again it was the broader qualification of pedagogical approaches we can adopt and in light of those theories and concepts broader teaching and learning, i experiment things and you know identify things that work, identify things that do not work in the classroom, it’s a continuous reflecting process that i adopt from which i learn . . . 4.3. the impact of ins tute-specific policies the major problem with regard to the low level of english language proficiency was viewed by students from different angles. as pointed out by student 3 (focus group 10 seda refers to the staff and educational development association which operates under the supervision of the education development service (eds) of birmingham city university in the uk. it provides services in selected universities all over the world. nadee mahawattha, romola rassool 306 1), some students have le the university because they were not proficient in english and could not cope with the demands of emi: student 3 (focus group 1) because of english, some give up the degree, there are such students, you know . . . a few of our friends they do give up, that means they already le . . . english is the problem . . . can’t carry on anymore . . . student 7 from focus group 1 also stated that he had transi oned from emi back to l1 instruc on due to his low level of elp and fear that he would not be able to get a first or second class degree. yet, he was disappointed because most of the reading materials were available in english and because the scores of his mandatory english language courses also counted toward his grade point average (gpa). therefore, unfortunately, he thought that he would not be able to obtain first or second class honors in his sinhala medium degree either: student 7 (focus group1) now, even though they say by the fourth-year things will improve, a student who can obtain a class will lose the class because of the system. we selected sinhala medium since we don’t know english, . . . we may lose the class as cell [english support program] course results are also counted for the gpa . . . . student 9 (focus group 2) also pointed to a similar issue, as seen below: student 9 (focus group 2) . . . we are in the dark . . . our gpa is anyway ge ng lower due to this english problem and our workload is too much, have to get english things translated . . . 5. discussion in the following subsec ons, we discuss the above findings and relate them to previous literature. 5.1. the sudden transi on from l1 instruc on to emi the views of student 2 (focus group 1) exemplify how the lack of elp has led to a low level of self-esteem in a student who should be celebrating the fact that she is one of the few selected to a state university. there is self-blame for a situation that is not of her making. school-level english language teaching is undermined by several structural problems and is considered by some to be largely unsuccessful (gunawardana & karunarathna, 2017). the sense of hopelessness she feels as a new “a smooth transition or a giant leap?” the challenges posed by the transition from secondary . . . 307 undergraduate indicates that she does not have much faith in the university system either. students feel unprepared to embark on their emdp. further, they highlight an inability to attend private tuition classes to improve their english – a common phenomenon in sri lanka – due to their family’s economic situation. in addi on to the macro and micro level sociocultural factors that determine access to english, economic circumstances play a crucial role in determining a person’s ability to access the english language in sri lanka (de silva & palihakkara, 2020). in fact, referring to the nexus between economic situa on and language choice, tollefson (1991, p. 14) states: “in general economic disadvantage is associated with constrained linguis c choices . . . .” several students declared to be dissatisfied with the level of support they receive to improve their elp. the department of english language teaching (delt) of each state university is tasked with supporting undergraduates to transition to emi. however, for a wide variety of reasons,11 this support has been patchy. in the 1990s, a program called general english language training (gelt) was implemented at provincial/district level for all the students selected for university entry from that province or district, and it was generally considered a success, but it was a short-lived experiment. since then, the only support provided to new entrants is an “intensive course in english” which is conducted by the delts of the various universities.12 these courses vary in duration, content, approach, and quality. further, lecturer 21’s views indicate that there are concerns regarding the lack of coordina on and collabora on between the various state agents responsible for educa on (the ministry of higher educa on which handles ter ary level educa on, the ministry of educa on which oversees school educa on, the naonal ins tute of educa on which handles teacher training, curriculum, syllabus, and materials design, the department of examina on which oversees tes ng and evalua on at school level), which has also been iden fied as a structural challenge in the transi on from the school system to the ter ary system. this results in a gap between secondary and ter ary educa on, not only in terms of english language learning but in every other respect too. one of the major drawbacks in the system is the absence of a proper mechanism to bridge this gap. as stated earlier, english support programs for the degree programs in universities are most often offered by the delts of the various universities. most delts provide this support in the form of generic elp courses. although a few do offer esp and eap courses, the content is only distantly related to the emi course contents and, as 11 these reasons include inadequacy of academics, lack of training for academics, and lack of understanding of the differences between improving general english proficiency and focusing on specific forms of support for emdps. 12 a new ugc-funded initiative called the pre-university english course has been designed as an online self-access course for students selected for university entry, but it is still at the trial stage. nadee mahawattha, romola rassool 308 we have seen, lecturers highlighted this as a shortcoming. there is a similar sense of frustration among lecturers with the general approach of the delt, with some academics feeling the need for a subject-specific approach to english language teaching. further, some feel it important for students to have their own english language lecturer with whom they can discuss their unique issues and who can be dedicated to addressing their specific language-related needs in their own discipline. students face many social, economic, and cultural challenges as they transition from the secondary education system to the tertiary education system. of these, the most traumatic is the practice of “ragging” which exists in all state universities. this practice is treated as an essential part of initiating the new students (called “freshers”) into the university “sub-culture” and often results in trauma which is caused by physical and mental abuse. the main reason for the prevalence of this practice is imbalance in social class (gamage, 2017). since the majority of students who enter the state university system are from lower socioeconomic classes, there is “class jealousy” that results in them viewing the undergraduates from “well to do families and urban schools or with western outlooks [as seen] in [their] behaviour, i.e., dress, hair style, english language ability, social contacts, etc. as class enemies who needed to be tamed and put in their place” (gamage, 2017, p. 37). as signaled by gamage (2017), the lack of english language proficiency (elp) of students from lower socioeconomic classes and the perception that therefore they cannot access positions of wealth, influence, or social prestige results in discouraging the widespread use of english on university premises and subjecting those who challenge this “sub-culture” to severe ragging. from the very outset, the senior students brainwash the “freshers” into not speaking in english, and, because of the power imbalance, there is little possibility of challenging this ideology. this has negative consequences for freshers’ attempts to learn english at university and even more dire ramifications for students who have to transition from sinhala/tamil medium in school to emi at university. 5.2. unawareness of academic literacies oriented prac ces the lack of awareness of the concept of academic literacies leads to the perception that content and language are two different components that operate independently. however, according to the theorists who view academic literacies as a social approach, these two factors are inextricable (gee, 1992; jacobs, 2006; mckenna, 2004; volbrecht, 2003). this study shows that the entry-level elp is needed to function in emi (jacobs, 2006; mckenna, 2004; volbrecht, 2003); however, to excel in it, students need to go beyond mere elp and gain proficiency in academic literacies (jacobs, 2006; mckenna, 2004). not only the content lecturers but also the language lecturers interviewed in this study overemphasize the importance of the development of elp in emi instead of the development of academic literacies. this overemphasis on elp rather than academic “a smooth transition or a giant leap?” the challenges posed by the transition from secondary . . . 309 literacies is seen in the south african emi context as well (mckenna, 2004). due to this issue, there is a lack of focus on academic literacies-oriented practices. it is clear from the views of lecturer 10 that he expects students to develop logical answers that demonstrate that they are members of that par cular academic community – in his case, the management studies-related community. such expectations or the faculty or individual lecturers’ practices are not clearly articulated to students, especially at the time they enrol in the study program. perhaps such norms are never discussed overtly by the subject lecturers (mckenna, 2004), although they expect the students to adhere to them. further, as is evident from the views of student 4 (focus group 2), students’ academic difficul es are also not clearly communicated to lecturers. this gap between the two groups is possibly due to the power dynamics between them (mckenna, 2004). this is especially evident in the sri lankan culture where, like in most south asian contexts, the lecturers are held in high esteem. as a result, students generally do not complain overtly or even men on academic difficul es directly to their lecturers. perhaps, towards the end of the program, students may gradually become familiar with the individual lecturer’s expectaons, but it might be too late to overcome their academic difficul es and obtain a high gpa by the me they reach the fourth year. our findings underscore the importance of pedagogical training for lecturers. among the eighteen lectures we observed, there were two who demonstrated strategies which were effective for the emi context, and they both had previous teaching experience in australia and the usa. as pointed out by lecturer 9, his teaching experience overseas helped him improve his teaching in emi. as stated in the literature review, there is a need for a two-pronged approach to the pedagogical training that is required for lecturers in emi – one which focuses on teaching content and another which focuses on teaching content in english (uys et al., 2007). however, when the subject lecturers were asked about any pedagogical training that they may have already obtained, they were emphatic that they had not received any such training. the only pedagogy-related training they had received was the certificate of teaching in higher education (cthe) which is a compulsory prerequisite for academics in sri lankan state universities to be confirmed in their permanent positions. however, the cthe is general pedagogical training that does not prepare academics for the challenges of teaching undergraduates in a language that is not the l1 of the teacher or the student. 5.3. the impact of ins tute-specific policies the case of student 7 (focus group 7) is typical of many others. this student thinks he is disadvantaged at all levels. he has chosen to study in the sinhala nadee mahawattha, romola rassool 310 medium due to his perceived lack of elp and the importance he has ascribed to securing a “class” in his degree, but the fact that english is mandatory and that the marks secured in the english language courses count toward his gpa cause him grave concerns. student 9 (focus group 2) reported a similar issue. such perspec ves are linked to aizawa and rose’s view (2020) that students who have been exposed to english during school educa on face a smoother transi on to emi than those who have not. unfortunately, in the sri lankan system, the approach seems to be “sink or swim” and most students seem to be sinking, at least during the early period of their studies in emi. several students mentioned the lack of support for those who struggle due to the shift of medium of instruction in the system and the absence of long-term plans to overcome such difficulties. most academics and students in this study viewed low english language proficiency as a major obstacle to performing optimally in emi. therefore, some lecturers highlighted the importance of re-introducing the gelt program conducted by delts, which, as stated earlier, is viewed as a successful intervention preparing students to embark on their tertiary education in emi. table 5 communica on standards of slqf – level 5/6 (slqf, 2015, p. 26) categories of learning outcomes slqf – level 5 bachelor’s degree slqf – level 6 bachelors honors degree 3. communication present information, ideas, and concepts efficiently and effectively present information, ideas, and concepts efficiently and effectively demonstrate awareness of the current developments in the area of study the cons tu on of sri lanka, in its sec on on language (chapter iv), states that slhe ins tu ons may use a language other than a na onal language for the dissemina on of knowledge (chapter iv, parliament secretariat, 2000). however, the researchers found few explicitly defined official statements or reference points that provide details concerning the level of language proficiency that is expected from a graduate at the end of an english medium degree program. the slqf describes (see table 5) the standard of english language proficiency that is expected from a graduate at the end of their degree (slqf – level 5/6). thus, although the slqf indicates the generic communica on skills expected from a graduate, it does not provide any specific informa on regarding the expecta ons. based on these standards, the qac of the ugc of sri lanka has prepared subject benchmarks which “aimed at improving the capacity of subject communities to regulate their academic standards” (qac, 2015). these statements provide more detailed guidelines for each degree program. however, even the subject benchmark statements of the various degree programs do not articulate the explicit linguistic expectations of graduates of a particular field of “a smooth transition or a giant leap?” the challenges posed by the transition from secondary . . . 311 study. this indicates that in the absence of clear articulation of the linguistic expectations of each discipline, most of the academics implement their degree programs at their own discretion. in many disciplines the “communication” mentioned in the slqf is understood as general english language proficiency and therefore instructors in those fields do not focus on academic communication. the only excep on to this observa on was from the field of food science and technology where the subject benchmarks stated the following: “communica on skills (with special emphasis on scien fic communica on); · receiving, evalua ng and responding to a variety of informa on sources (e.g., electronic, textual, numerical, verbal, graphical); · communica ng accurately, clearly, concisely, confidently, and appropriately to a variety of audiences in wri en, verbal, and graphical forms; · contribu ng construc vely to group discussions; · listening to, apprecia ng and evalua ng the views of others.” (the subject benchmark statement for food science and technology degree program, 2010, p. 8). our research is not without its limita ons. one of the major limita ons is that we have considered only three universi es out of the seventeen in the state system. within these three universi es, we only focused on three facul es (facul es of science, management studies, and arts). 5. conclusion using extensive data gathered through interviews, focus group discussions, and policy documents related to the issue, this study iden fied major structural, ins tu onal, and linguis c challenges that need to be overcome before undergraduates can proceed to achieve their poten al in their emdps. the data reveal that student responses to these challenges range from decline in self-esteem, disappointment that their expecta on of adequate and meaningful english language support is not provided in the first year of undergraduate study to, in extreme cases, actually dropping out of university. the challenges of the subject lecturers include frustra on that they have to deal with the results of the perceived lack of coordina on and communica on that is seen in the ins tu ons that handle school educa on, lack of sa sfac on with the delt’s approach which they perceive as unsuccessful in its a empts to support emi, and the low level of al displayed by the undergraduates. an examina on of the documents related to policy on emi at ter ary level reveals that there are no policies, guidelines, or reference points regarding the level of elp expected of students in emi. nadee mahawattha, romola rassool 312 this is another major drawback of the system as it means that mechanisms are established in an ad-hoc manner. this study suggests that the frequently witnessed overdependence on generic english language enhancement courses which focus on general english or eap/esp (generally seen in the teaching approaches adopted by the delts) is inadequate to prepare students for emi and, ci ng evidence from the literature on al, we argue that the concept of academic literacies provides an alterna ve approach that may yield more posi ve results. the major sociocultural barrier to emi is the “sub-culture” of ragging that prevails in the universi es. the pressure exerted by this outdated and extreme prac ce results in students being discouraged and actually afraid to use the english they know and being unable to seek the support that is provided by the delts during their first year. it also results in stress and anxiety first-year students who do not have the peace of mind and posi ve environment to focus on english (or anything else for that ma er). this, coupled with the other factors such as lack of self-esteem, self-blame, frustra on, and disappointment with the lecturers and the system, leads to students being demo vated and broken in spirit during at least the first three months of their first year, when ragging is at its worst. therefore, it is evident that there is much work to be done at structural, ins tu onal, and linguis c levels before students can overcome their transional challenges and perform to their full poten al. “a smooth transition or a giant leap?” the challenges posed by the transition from secondary . . . 313 references aizawa, i., & rose, h. 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(2020). challenges and importance of teaching english as a medium of instruc on in thailand interna onal college. journal of english as an interna onal language, 15(2), 97-118. tollefson, j. w. (1991). planning language, planning inequality: language policy in the community. longman publishers. university of colombo (2016). ragging and violence. university of colombo. h ps:// cmb.ac.lk/ uys, m., van der walt, j., van den berg, r., & botha, s. (2007). english medium of instruc on: a situa on analysis. south african journal of educa on, 27(1), 69-82. h ps://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1150096.pdf volbrecht, t. (2003). the story of south african academic development in interna onal perspec ve: have we lost the plot? perspec ves on higher educa on. south african journal of higher educa on, 17(2), 110-117. wingate, u. (2006). doing away with “study skills.” teaching in higher educa on, 11(4), 457-469. 421 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (2). 2019. 421-427 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ ssllt.2019.9.2.8 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review policy and politics in global primary english author: janet enever publisher: oxford university press, 2018 isbn: 9780194200547 pages: 196 teaching foreign languages to children, english in particular, has been popular in countries aspiring to benefit from the global economy. with the fall of the iron curtain nearly three decades ago, central-european countries such as poland, croatia and hungary, to name just a few, recognized that competence in foreign languages (fls) could be the key to catching up with the west. from that time on a substantial amount of research on child foreign language learning (fll) has been conducted in those countries (e.g., nikolov, 2009; nikolov & mihaljević djigunović, 2006, 2011). despite the realization that early instruction does not guarantee fl success, early teaching of english is still a widespread global phenomenon, including such diverse contexts as china, chile, slovenia, italy, and columbia, among others. the latest book by janet enever deftly explains the popularity of the early teaching of fls, mostly english at the cost of other languages, by scrutinizing the forces behind the educational policy and politics of those countries which introduce early english instruction. her thesis is that these forces are rooted in the historical and economic past of these countries. as a starting point, she considers 422 the assumption that a decision to introduce early teaching of english depends on governance in education, that is, understanding who possesses the power to make decisions about education. she observes that this governance is nowadays mainly global as it is held by global organizations such as the world bank and the international monetary fund, or pan-continental bodies such as the european union. organizations such as these promote certain policies by sponsoring educational projects and establishing standards for comparison of various educational systems. needless to say, in such a globalized world the knowledge of english, which is the language of global communication, has become an important asset, allowing individuals to compete on the global market for employment opportunities. another influential source of power are the voters in each individual country, whose demands should also be considered when forming the educational policy advocated by the ruling party. the demand for early english instruction comes from ambitious, often middle-class parents who perceive early fl teaching as important capital, necessary to equip their children for a better future. this bottom-up motive is often called “parentocracy.” governmental educational decisions are also political and are meant to show that parental aspirations are being taken into account. enever argues that the introduction of early english instruction should be seen as an outcome of an interplay of global and local politics rather than a research-based educational innovation. the notions of policy and politics and their different manifestations in the contexts of various countries are the recurring theme of this work. the book consists of two parts, each comprising four chapters. in chapter 1 the author presents the interdependence of the state, economy and civil society as a framework for the book. her aim, she clarifies, is to show how educational policy, on the one hand, and parentocracy, on the other, act as forces in different contexts globally, leading to the introduction of english at primary and often pre-primary levels. she introduces the notion of language as human capital. the voices of parents can be heard through the marketization of educational services, that is, the availability of widespread educational offer in the private sector. the key assumption presented in chapter 1 is that stability in any nation state can be maintained if there is a balance of power between the state, society and the economy. as enever argues, “for the stability and survival of the state, there also needs to be broad agreement on the potential of economic policy to secure a legitimate future for civil society within the state” (p. 5). therefore, in shaping a country’s educational policy, the aspirations of civil society should be taken into account, envisioning the potential gains such a policy can bring. this recommendation explains how the decisions to introduce primary or even pre-primary instruction are usually political, taking into account societal aspirations or succumbing to the rules of powerful institutions. in the same chapter, enever observes that 423 globalization has also affected education in the sense that power is possessed by global forces and manifests itself through comparative global measurement, a good example being the pisa studies (https://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/); standardization, as exemplified in the use of the cefr scales; accountability; policy and pedagogical borrowings. having reviewed the linguistic and cognitive gains of early instruction, the author signals that early fl instruction has not escaped the aforementioned processes, a theme which is explored further in chapter 6. chapter 2 presents language learning at the primary level in two different contexts: india and spain. the first example shows the change of attitude towards english in language policy from its being viewed as the symbol of oppression of a former colonial power to its perception as an asset in times of rapid economic growth. this attitude is evident in the promotion of english in education, often at the cost of local indian languages. competence in english as a global language is even one of the issues taken into account when choosing a future spouse. the popularity of english has led to the growth of private elt institutions, which may result in, as enever fears, an increase in discrepancies between children of different socioeconomic status/castes if no policy measures are undertaken to regulate the process. the example of india is juxtaposed with the example of spain, which is shown as a specimen country where a bilingual/english-medium type of education has been successfully introduced in many schools. nowhere else has clil methodology gained such popularity as there, and this was only made possible thanks to clearly supportive educational policy. schools implementing the methodology were founded with the support of the british council. however, the author rightly notes the problems that clil instruction brings, such as a shortage of competent teachers, problems with exam requirements for children learning in clil and non-clil settings, lack of support for children joining clil instruction, or the occurrence of learning difficulties. chapter 3 presents the rationale for the introduction of english at the preprimary level and descriptions of different contexts. in europe, an early start is an outcome of documents issued by the european commission, which lay out the policy of plurilingualism as a means of fostering social cohesion. the countries in focus which aim to pursue this policy at least to some extent, are italy, portugal, and poland. enever observes that despite official guidelines, there are still problems concerning the availability of highly educated and competent language teachers and the implementation of appropriate methodology for teaching the youngest learners. to set an example, she presents vignettes of kindergartens in shanghai, where teaching english at the pre-primary level has been quite successful thanks to the city’s international position as a port and financial hub, which has led to its multilingual landscape. she shows that in this context 424 learning english is successfully conducted without the neglect of minority languages, thanks to well-trained pre-primary teachers. chapter 4 presents three european countries where early english initiatives were introduced via deliberate policy measures, that is, poland, italy, and sweden. each of these countries has a different geopolitical past and serves as an illustration of how global forces responsible for introducing primary english materialize differently in each setting, depending on the historical and material heritage. the second part of the book, chapters 5 to 8, takes a critical look at global policy and its effect on language teaching and assessment in various settings. the dimensions of global impact include regional soft policy, assessment, accountability, transparency, and standardization in education. the analysis of the different ways global policy is implemented raises doubts as to whether standardization leads to equity in english education, and, consequently, whether it increases the life opportunities of individuals. chapter 5 offers an example of regional soft policy, that of the european union. the author points to enhanced cooperation between european countries in the second half of the 20th century as the beginning of a process referred to as “policy borrowing.” cooperation and research networks which started as initiatives of the council of europe, aimed at promoting language learning and mutual understanding, led to european institutions and projects leading governance in education. this is visible in the activities of such institutions as the european center for modern languages, the introduction of the common european framework of reference for languages or the european language portfolio, and the implementation of such programs as action plan 2004-06, eurydice or lifelong learning (2007-2013). the impact of this soft policy can be evaluated using the examples of germany and slovenia. chapter 6 focuses on the common european framework of reference. the author presents it as a marker of standardization of teaching and assessment, of influence not only in europe but also across the whole globe. she critically evaluates its impact on the international exam market and specific exams that are offered to ever younger children, without taking into account the dynamics of children’s learning process or their individual predispositions. she also highlights the negative washback effect that particularly high-stake exams have on children, teachers and curricula. the implementation of the cefr in other contexts is regarded as an instance of policy borrowing. vietnam and uruguay are presented as examples of countries where the cefr was introduced with disregard for the local teaching philosophies. in the case of vietnam “economic imperatives are currently directing the country towards neo-liberal policies” (p. 135); thus setting high educational standards and criterion-referenced assessment are means towards this 425 goal. conversely, in uruguay left-wing arguments of equal opportunity and social inclusion through the provision of english language instruction to all are used. in both cases introduction of english curricula based on the cefr in mandatory instruction was politically motivated, yet investigation of the long-term impact on student outcomes is as yet unavailable. in chapter 7, the author continues discussion of the impact of global measurement and accountability. she observes that standardized exams and cross-national comparative indicators are rooted in global governance in education, that is, powerful organizations such as the world bank and the international monetary fund, which prioritize neo-liberal economic models in their policies. since they often give loans to member countries, they expect similar economic models to be implemented by their beneficiaries and require efficiency to be demonstrated by measures of accountability and performance indicators, which leave little freedom for member countries to decide about the shape of education. the new oecd member or aspiring countries of chile and columbia are presented to show how their historical and geographical conditions shaped early language learning policy. chile is presented as generally conforming to the neoliberal policy in education, as it had been exposed to a similar approach in its economy long before joining the oecd, whereas teachers in columbia are reported to complain about the “growth of an audit culture, which expects [them] to measure and record anything and everything, providing evidence of a quantitative nature for the audit, with possibly less acknowledgement of the quality achieved under difficult circumstance” (p. 155). another prominent consequence of neo-liberal policy is adopting business language to talk about language education. in chapter 8, enever recapitulates the issues discussed in earlier chapters, positing that, too often, early english learning is introduced as a measure of short-term policy aimed at gaining political power (for example, through gaining the votes of parents), and that such moves disregard the role of learning english, or languages in general. language learning should be seen as an important form of capital that requires considerable long-term investment. in conclusion, she enumerates clear criteria that should be met if success in early fll is to be achieved. the factors impacting the efficiency of early language learning are: appropriate pre-service education of teachers with an understanding of early years pedagogy; teachers who are prepared to teach in english and have the ability to speak fluently and confidently at least at the b2-c1 level; and investments in ongoing professional development of teachers. the global view of the phenomenon of early foreign language teaching is the strongest aspect of this book. the presentation of a number of country case studies where the author presents historical and geopolitical data/facts that might have underpinned the decisions to introduce english early is enlightening. 426 in all these contexts, the desire to follow global policies encouraged local governments to introduce early english instruction, which was at times in line with parental aspirations. showing the socio-political context of language acquisition, which is in line with the current poststructuralist approach to the study of language acquisition (główka 2015; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008), deepens the realization that any educational decisions are the result of hidden agendas of those who are in power and can make them, that is, policy makers, and that teachers, teacher educators, researchers, parents and the like are all but agents of global politics. the book is well written. it has a clear framework: each chapter starts with an introduction and finishes with a summary, which help to orient the reader. my only suggestion would be to add a list of abbreviations of global organizations or specialist terms (e.g., wb stands for world bank and afl for assessment for learning) at the beginning of the book. they are usually explained when first mentioned, yet readers who choose to read single chapters or are less knowledgeable about elt methodology or politics may find the abbreviations, which are used densely throughout book, less accessible. despite this small problem, this book should be valued for giving a sound background to understanding the motives behind the introduction of early english instruction globally. it is thought-provoking in the sense that it directly tackles the question whether early instruction is beneficial in all contexts and under all conditions. an important concern that the book raises is the issue of equity, which could guide future policy makers in planning language education in their countries. specifically, the effectiveness of early language learning programs can be seen only when equal quality of education is provided to all children in the long term, irrespective of their background. the book is a must read for all researchers considering conducting a research project on early fll. it helps readers understand reasons behind the introduction of early english teaching, which go far beyond possible linguistic benefits. the conditions which should be met to maximize the benefits are also mentioned, yet, as the author admits, it is not possible to fulfill them due to prohibitive costs and lack of appropriate teacher preparation, which would require serious investment. reviewed by joanna rokita-jaśkow pedagogical university of cracow, poland jrokita@up.krakow.pl 427 references główka, d. (2015). post-structuralist social theories of second language acquisition. konin language studies, 3(3), 239-253. larsen-freeman, d., & cameron, l. (2008). complex systems in applied linguistics. oxford: oxford university press. nikolov, m. (2009). early learning of modern foreign languages: processes and outcomes. clevedon: multilingual matters. nikolov, m., & mihaljević djigunović, j. (2006). recent research on age, second language acquisition and early foreign language learning. annual review of applied linguistics, 26, 234-260. nikolov, m., & mihaljević djigunović, j. (2011). all shades of every colour: an overview of early teaching and learning of foreign languages. annual review of applied linguistics, 31, 95-119. 101 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (1). 2023. 101-124 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.29727 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the impact of input, input repetition, and task repetition on l2 lexical use and fluency in speaking phuong-thao duong ku leuven, belgium http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0900-9357 duongthao204@gmail.com maribel montero perez ghent university, belgium https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0868-588x maribel.monteroperez@ugent.be long quoc nguyen fpt university, vietnam https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4674-7199 quocnl2@fe.edu.vn piet desmet ku leuven & imec, belgium https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9849-0874 piet.desmet@kuleuven.be elke peters ku leuven, belgium https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7273-3850 elke.peters@kuleuven.be abstract the present study investigates the impact of meaningful input on l2 learners’ vocabulary use and their fluency in oral performance (immediate and repeat tasks), as well as whether the effects are mediated by learners’ prior vocabulary phuong-thao duong, maribel montero perez, long quoc nguyen, piet desmet, elke peters 102 knowledge and working memory. ninety university students learning english as a foreign language were randomly assigned to one of three groups: input (n = 29), input repetition (n = 32), and no-input (i.e., baseline group) (n = 29). the input group watched l2 videos prior to performing an immediate oral task, whereas the input repetition group watched the same videos not only before but also after the immediate oral task. the no-input group only performed the oral tasks without watching the videos. the three groups repeated the same oral task after two days. results did not show a significant effect of task repetition, input, and input repetition on learners’ lexical use and fluency. however, the fluency and lexical complexity in learners’ l2 speech can be predicted by their receptive vocabulary knowledge and working memory capacity to some extent. keywords: fluency; input; input repetition; lexical use; speaking; task repetition 1. introduction there is general consensus that input is critical for second or foreign language (l2) learning, including vocabulary learning (webb, 2020). research shows that learners can learn new words while reading, listening, reading-while-listening and watching tv (for a review, see webb, 2020); however, the focus has been mainly on the form-meaning link. very few studies have looked at how l2 learners use vocabulary after being exposed to input. pedagogically, this is surprising as the goal of any vocabulary program is not only to increase learners’ vocabulary knowledge, but also to put learners’ vocabulary knowledge into communicative use (laufer & nation, 1995). research has shown that learners tend to reuse single words and multiword units from input in the follow-up oral task (e.g., duong et al., 2021b; hoang & boers, 2016; nguyen & boers, 2018). however, how input influences learners’ ability to process words from their existing lexical repertoire remains unclear. to fill the gap, the present study aims to investigate the effect of input (i.e., watching l2 captioned videos) and input repetition (i.e., watching the same videos before and after performing an oral task) on l2 learners’ lexical use in immediate and repeat oral tasks. we decided to measure oral fluency as well given the established evidence on the trade-off between lexical complexity and fluency in l2 oral performance (skehan, 2009). furthermore, this study also explored whether working memory and prior vocabulary knowledge influence the impact of input, input repetition, and task repetition on l2 learners’ lexical use and fluency as these two factors have been shown to play a role in l2 oral development (duong & le, 2022; duong et al., 2021b; o’brien et al., 2006). the impact of input, input repetition, and task repetition on l2 lexical use and fluency in speaking 103 2. literature review 2.1. the role of input for l2 lexical use recent research has demonstrated that learners can reuse/mine words from meaningful input, such as pre-task recordings (boston, 2008) and l2 videos (e.g., duong et al., 2021b; hoang & boers, 2016) in their follow-up oral performance as long as the input is relevant to the task. yet, it remains unclear whether input exposure has an effect on aspects of lexical use, such as lexical sophistication and lexical diversity. in light of levelt’s (1989) speech processing model, bygate (1996) and willis (1996) proposed that exposing learners to relevant input could help reduce learners’ cognitive load during task performance. in particular, they argue that being aware in advance of what they will talk or write about through input exposure can help learners shortcut the time needed for building the speech content from scratch and have more time to formulate the language needed to express their ideas. therefore, we assume that input exposure might improve learners’ speech in terms of lexical use. 2.2. the impact of task repetition on l2 lexical use and fluency research shows that task repetition can facilitate lexical use, with task repetition defined as the repetition of either “the same or slightly altered tasks – whether whole tasks or parts of a task” (bygate & samuda, 2005, p. 43). however, the findings are mixed. for instance, it was pointed out that university students who learned spanish as l2 could use more low-frequency words (i.e., beyond k3level) and more diverse words (e.g., gass et al., 1999) after repeating the same narrative tasks twice. fukuta (2016) conducted a study on 28 upper-intermediate japanese learners of english and found that their word choice became more diverse and more accurate in the repeat oral task. wang (2014) used the same narrative task as gass et al. (1999) but did not find an effect of task repetition on lexical diversity. this might have been caused by the discrepancy in the learners’ l2 levels (advanced vs. intermediate) in these two studies. it has been widely found that task repetition is useful for fluency development (for a review, see bygate, 2018). the evidence, however, has been established mainly for generic measures of fluency (e.g., speech rate, frequency/length of pauses). lately, more attention has been paid to finer-grained measures of fluency (e.g., location of pauses). an important study has been conducted by lambert et al. (2017) on a2-c1 japanese learners of english. they found the improvement of speech rate and the declination of between-clause pausing right from the second repetition while within-clause pausing and frequency of repairs only declined from the fourth repetition. this finding indicates that the effect of task phuong-thao duong, maribel montero perez, long quoc nguyen, piet desmet, elke peters 104 repetition can vary depending on the measures and the amount of repetition. however, as the number of studies that have looked at both generic measures and pause location remains scarce, more research is warranted. in particular, an increasing number of studies have been looking into whether task repetition is beneficial for both fluency and lexical use development; however, the findings are mixed. khatib and farahanynia (2020) reported that task repetition promoted l2 learners’ fluency but not their lexical use (i.e., lexical sophistication or diversity). in contrast, fukuta (2016) showed that task repetition had a positive effect on lexical diversity rather than the overall fluency. duong and le (2022) surprisingly did not find an effect of task repetition on either lexical use (lexical diversity and words beyond k3+ level) or fluency. so far, task repetition has often been used in conjunction with other techniques (e.g., pre-task planning, online planning, corrective feedback, post-task transcribing) to foster the concurrent development of accuracy, fluency, and complexity (e.g., for a review see ellis et al., 2020). to the best of our knowledge, no study has looked into whether task repetition combined with meaningful input exposure can aid the development of lexical use and fluency. 2.3. the potential of input repetition nguyen and boers (2018) reported that exposing learners of english as a foreign language to the same input (i.e., a ted talk video) before and after an oral performance (i.e., orally summarize the ted talk) could successfully facilitate vocabulary learning at the level of meaning recall. it was argued that such improvement could be attributed to the fact that the repeated input had triggered learners’ need to make a comparison between their use of target words in the output and how those words were used in the repeated input. while nguyen and boers’s study is the only one that has suggested that the input-output-cycle could foster vocabulary acquisition, we argue that this technique might help learners perform better in lexical use and fluency in the repeat oral performance as its cognitive mechanisms seem useful for prompting learners’ reflection – a fundamental element of l2 oral development (lynch, 2018). however, this hypothesis has yet to be verified empirically. 2.4. individual differences as moderating factors individual differences have been consistently shown to affect how well l2 learners process and produce language (see pawlak, 2021; for a review). among these, working memory capacity and vocabulary knowledge have been demonstrated to play a role in l2 learners’ speaking ability, as shown in the following sections. the impact of input, input repetition, and task repetition on l2 lexical use and fluency in speaking 105 2.4.1. working memory baddeley (2003, p.189) defines working memory (wm) as a cognitive process that entails “temporary storage and manipulation of information activities that is assumed to be necessary for a wide range of complex cognitive activities.” wm has been shown to be useful for regulating learners’ attention while processing l2 input (for a review, see juffs & harrington, 2011). fehringer and fry (2007), using aural wm span test and story retelling test, showed that low wm capacity could result in more hesitations in speaking. in o’brien et al.’s (2006) study wherein learners were tested the ability to recognize the difference between two series of digits, the results indicated that learners having lower wm tended to speak with less accuracy. duong and le (2022) also revealed that l2 learners with higher capacity of storing and processing digits tended to speak faster in a narrative task. this finding, however, should be treated with caution due to the limited scale of the study (i.e., 40 vietnamese l2 university students). given that wm seems to play a significant role in l2 input and output processing, there is reason to expect that wm might influence how input exposure and task repetition affect l2 lexical use and fluency. 2.4.2. vocabulary knowledge latest studies have shown the associations between l2 learners’ vocabulary knowledge (productive and receptive) and their speaking outcome in terms of fluency and lexical use. for example, enayat and derakhshan (2021) demonstrated that l2 university learners’ productive vocabulary knowledge, measured by meara and fitzpatrick’s (2000) lex30, was a good predictor of fluency. they also found a positive relationship between learners’ receptive knowledge and lexical use. yet, the learners’ english proficiency was unclear. also using lex 30 test, clenton et al. (2020) revealed a significant correlation between l2 learners’ productive vocabulary knowledge and fluency (i.e., the number of silent pauses) but did not clarify whether the same correlation was found for lexical use aspects. also, the number of participants was limited (i.e., 30 pre-intermediate japanese learners of english). using nguyen and nation’s (2011) vocabulary size test, duong and le (2022) revealed that l2 learners with higher receptive vocabulary knowledge tended to use more diverse words when they repeated the same narrative. 2.5. research rationales and research questions some research gaps can be identified based on the literature review. first, while input exposure could lead to l2 lexical mining, it is unknown how input exposure affects other aspects of l2 lexical use and fluency. further, how input repetition extends phuong-thao duong, maribel montero perez, long quoc nguyen, piet desmet, elke peters 106 the impact of task repetition on lexical use and fluency in the oral repeat task remains unexplored. second, evidence on the effect of task repetition on l2 lexical use and fluency remains mixed. finally, findings on the link between working memory/prior vocabulary knowledge and l2 lexical use and fluency remain limited. to address these issues, the following research questions were formulated: rq1: to what extent does input exposure affect l2 learners’ lexical use and fluency in an immediate and a repeat oral task? rq2: is there an effect of task repetition on l2 learners’ lexical use and fluency in the repeat oral task? if so, to what extent? rq3: to what extent does input repetition affect l2 learners’ lexical use and fluency in the repeat oral task? rq4: how do l2 learners’ working memory and prior vocabulary knowledge moderate the impact of input, input repetition, and task repetition on their lexical use and fluency? 3. methodology 3.1. research design following duong et al. (2021b), this study employed a between-subjects design which involves two independent variables: input (the between-subjects variable) at three levels (no-input vs. input vs. input repetition) and task repetition (the within-subjects variable). each group received a different treatment: one group was asked to view l2 captioned videos before performing an oral task (i.e., input group), another group was asked to view the same videos before and after performing the oral task (i.e. input repetition group), and one group performed an oral task without watching the videos (i.e., no-input group/baseline group). after two days, all groups performed exactly the same oral task without being informed of their repeat performances. additionally, they took five tests: two prior vocabulary knowledge tests and three working memory tests. the six dependent variables included two measures of lexical use (i.e., lexical diversity and lexical sophistication) and four measures of fluency (i.e., frequency of pauses, between clauses and within clauses, frequency of total repairs, articulation rate). the moderating variables were scores of the receptive and productive vocabulary tests, and scores of the working memory tests (i.e., forward-span, backward-span, and operation-span tasks). 3.2. participants the study included 90 vietnamese undergraduates (50 females and 40 males, 19-21 years old) who studied english as a foreign language in three different universities. the impact of input, input repetition, and task repetition on l2 lexical use and fluency in speaking 107 the participants took part in the study on a voluntary basis. their english proficiency ranged from 340 to 750 points (m = 501.24, sd = 93.16) on the test of english for international communication (toeic), corresponding to a2-b1 level (ets, n.d.). the participants were randomly allocated to one of three groups: an input group (n = 29), an input repetition group (n = 32), and a no-input group (n = 29). 3.3. input we used short english videos (total time = 6 minutes) with captions (i.e., subtitles in english), which were first introduced in duong et al. (2021a). the videos feature speeches by native speakers describing icelandic and cairns tourist attractions. these videos were selected to avoid the effect of contextual knowledge (miller et al., 2006) due to participants’ unfamiliarity with these destinations. the lexical profile of the videos was checked with nation’s range software which showed that the 3,000 most frequent word families (without proper nouns) provided 95% coverage. results of the english-vietnamese vocabulary size test designed by nguyen and nation (2011) revealed that the participants could answer approximately 43 correct questions, indicating that they had a receptive vocabulary knowledge of 8,600 word families on average. as durbahn quinteros et al. (2019) found, good comprehension of audiovisual input could be achieved at the 87% coverage, the participants’ receptive vocabulary test scores indicated that they probably had sufficient comprehension of the videos. 3.4. oral task the present study employed the same picture-prompted narrative task used in duong et al. (2021b). in this task, learners had to manipulate and reorganize the information processed from the videos to create their own story in our study. they were asked to use seventeen images as prompts to describe their (imaginary) trips to iceland and cairns. this task type is used because skehan (2009) proposes that manipulating and organizing information may elicit more complex language. prompts were used to avoid excessive individual variation in story lines. participants were given three minutes of planning time, as this was found to be adequate for learners to prepare what they wanted to say and how to put the pre-verbal messages into appropriate words and structures. 3.5. prior vocabulary knowledge tests we tested two aspects of participants’ prior vocabulary knowledge. receptive vocabulary knowledge was assessed using the english-vietnamese vocabulary phuong-thao duong, maribel montero perez, long quoc nguyen, piet desmet, elke peters 108 size test by nguyen and nation (2011), which gauges test takers’ capability to recall the words’ meanings. the original vst contains 140 sample words drawn from 14 frequency bands (10 words from each band) of 1000 words (1k-14k); however, we decided to use the short version with 70 items as this version was shown reliable and valid by duong et al. (2021a). in the present study, the items were shown internally consistent (cronbach’s alpha = .87, n = 90). to measure learners’ productive vocabulary knowledge, we used laufer and nation’s (1999) productive levels test (plvt) which aims to evaluate test takers’ capability to recall word forms at the 2000, 3000, 5000 and 10,000-frequency levels in a sentence completion task. a high level of internal consistency was found (cronbach’ alpha = .94, n = 90). 3.6. working memory tests following duong et al. (2021b), three non-verbal tests were used to assess wm to facilitate the generalizability. in particular, a forward-digit span task was used to assess learners’ capacity to store phonological information and a backwarddigit span task to evaluate their capability to store and manipulate phonological input. the forward-digit span task had 8 spans, each of which had 2 sets of 3 to 9 digits. the backward-digit span task consisted of 8 spans, ranging from 2 to 8 digits with 2 sets per span. in both tests, participants listened to digit sequences pre-recorded in vietnamese. after listening, participants reported the sequences in the exact (forward-span) and reverse order (backward-span) to the examiner. participants could proceed to the next span only if they could correctly recall at least one sequence of digits. the participants’ score (max = 16) equals the total number of correctly recalled sets. the vietnamese-version ospan task created in duong et al. (2021b) was used to assess learners’ executive and attention-regulated wm functions. participants were required to perform mathematical operations as well as memorize the vietnamese word appearing after each operation. the task consisted of 15 sets, each with 2 to 6 operation-word strings. after each complete set, participants had to write the words down in the presented order on an answer sheet. 3.7. lexical use and fluency measures we focused on lexical sophistication and lexical diversity – the aspects that have received increasing attention in recent research (e.g., duong & le, 2022; kim et al., 2018; wang, 2014). following kyle (2020), we conceptualized lexical sophistication as the number of words that are less frequently used by learners in their oral output. to assess lexical sophistication, we adopted band-based as well as count-based approaches. the band-based approach considers a text lexically sophisticated if it the impact of input, input repetition, and task repetition on l2 lexical use and fluency in speaking 109 contains words that belong to the 3,000 or higher frequency level (k3+ level) (i.e., low-frequency words) (uchihara & clenton, 2018). the count-based approach calculates corpus-based average frequency per text to evaluate its lexical sophistication (crossley et al., 2013). we conceptualized lexical diversity as “the variety of active vocabulary developed by a speaker” (malvern & richards, 2002, p. 87) and used hd-d index to measure lexical diversity. as this index is not influenced by the length of the text (kyle, 2020), it is considered more reliable in reflecting lexical diversity in spoken discourse than other indices (e.g., mtld, vocd). this index “represents the sum of probabilities that each type in a text will occur in a 42-word sample at least once” (kyle, 2020, p. 460). we adopted skehan’s (2003) framework to analyze learners’ fluency. the framework views l2 fluency in terms of three dimensions: speed, breakdown, and repair fluency. specifically, speed fluency was determined by learners’ speed to articulate content words in a speech (lambert et al., 2020). breakdown fluency was determined by studying the frequency of silent and filled pauses between and within clauses. following de jong and bosker (2013), a silent pause refers to any period of silence lasting at least 250 ms. filled pauses were defined as fillers such as um and uh (kang et al., 2010). a clause in speech contains at least one clause element, such as a subject, object, or complement, with a finite or nonfinite verb (foster et al., 2000). the last dimension, repair fluency, reflects the monitoring and repair processes such as self-corrections and repetitions (tavakoli & wright, 2020). 3.8. procedure we collected data in three one-to-one sessions. in the first session, the input and input repetition group were asked to watch the videos twice on a computer screen (without taking notes) and then perform the immediate oral task. before watching the videos, they were briefed on the follow-up oral task of the same topic. participants could not take notes or rewind the videos during the viewing process. they were then given three minutes to prepare for the talk with notetaking allowed. their notes were collected right after they completed the oral task. following the immediate oral task, the input group was dismissed, while the input repetition group was instructed to rewatch the videos one more time without note-taking and tell the teacher which location they preferred. participants in the no-input group completed only the oral task and did not watch any videos. following the speaking activity, each of the three groups took a 15-minute break before taking the forward and backward-digit span tests (about 15 minutes in total). two days later, in the second session, all three groups did not watch the videos but were asked to complete the same oral task in three minutes. before doing the task, they had 15 minutes to note down main ideas. the session ended with all phuong-thao duong, maribel montero perez, long quoc nguyen, piet desmet, elke peters 110 participants doing the ospan task in about 30 minutes. two prior vocabulary knowledge tests were completed in the third session with a 15-minute break in between. 3.9. data analysis each speech was audio-recorded and then transcribed manually by the first author then verified by the third author. the proportion of k3+ in the texts were analyzed using vocab profile in the complete lexical tutor (available at https:// www.lextutor.ca/vp/comp). the transcripts were lemmatized prior to the analysis under the assumption that participants already had knowledge of the verb and noun inflection system. prior to calculation, verbatim repetitions and obvious pronunciation errors (e.g., “the pear” instead of “the spear”) were also fixed. next, we used the tool for the automatic analysis of lexical sophistication (taales; kyle & crossley, 2015) to calculate the logarithm transformed average frequency scores (in reference to the subtlexus corpus) (brysbaert & new, 2009) to minimize zipfian distributions (i.e., disproportional frequency caused by very frequent words) as suggested by kyle (2020). we used the taaled (tool for automatic analysis of lexical diversity) by kyle et al. (2020) to calculate the hd-d index with word types as the lexical units. texts with a lower hd-d value were considered more diverse than those with a higher one (kyle, 2020). we used praat 6.1.42 (boersma & weenink, 2012) and syllable nuclei praat script (de jong & wemp, 2009) to calculate the phonation time, the quantity of syllables, and the number of silent pauses in utterances contributing to the task content. this means utterances at the beginning and the end of performances (e.g., “hello, my name is …” or “that’s all” or “thank you for your listening”) were excluded. we observed that there was a chance that some syllables were missed by the software; thus, we double-checked by listening to the audios while examining the praat spectoram to note down non-recognized syllables on praat grid. the total number of filled pauses was then manually coded. silent and filled pauses were coded as follows: 1) silent pauses within clauses, 2) silent pauses between clauses, 3) filled pauses within clauses, and 4) filled pauses between clauses. the number of repairs was also counted manually. the first and third authors performed independent coding. 20% of the transcripts were coded first. high interrater reliability was established on the five variables: silent pauses within clauses (r = .998), silent pauses between clauses (r = .992), filled pauses within clauses (r = .987), filled pauses between clauses (r = .987), and repairs (r = .994). the remainder of the transcripts was then exclusively coded by the first author. after that, articulation rate equals the total number of syllables divided by the phonation time. the frequency of silent and filled pauses per minute was determined by dividing the number of silent and filled pauses by the impact of input, input repetition, and task repetition on l2 lexical use and fluency in speaking 111 the phonation time multiplied by 60. the frequency of repairs was also calculated in a similar way, ((total number of repairs/phonation time) x 60). the frequency calculation was used to control for the length of performances, which varies across the participants. 3.10. statistical analysis the results were analyzed with spss 27 and r software (version 4.0.1, r core team, 2020). it was found that the hd-d scores, k3+ proportion, and log-transformed average frequency scores were normally distributed. yet, the distribution of pauses frequency and repairs frequency was positively skewed. following lambert et al. (2020), we combined filled and unfilled pauses between and within clauses into composite measures of total pauses between clauses and within clauses. we found that it was possible to normalize the distributions of pauses frequency between clauses, within clauses, and repair frequency with log10 transformation. repeated measures correlation tests using rmcorr function (version 0.4.6) in r software (bakdash & marusich, 2017) revealed a significant correlation, albeit weak,1 between the two measures of lexical sophistication (e.g., average frequency and proportion of k3+ lemmas) and moderate correlations among the four measures of fluency in the immediate task and the repeat task (see appendix for the correlation matrix). therefore, we decided to compute a repeated measures ancova for lexical diversity, a repeated measures mancova for lexical sophistication measures and a repeated measures mancova for fluency measures with bonferroni post-hoc tests. for each model, all participants completed an immediate oral task and a repeat oral task; thus, task repetition (immediate vs. repeat) was a within-subjects factor. input exposure (input vs. input repetition vs. no input) was a between-subjects factor. covariates were scores of the working memory tests and the prior vocabulary knowledge tests. since all covariates displayed pearson correlations below .70, the threshold for multicollinearity effect to occur (e.g., crossley et al., 2011), they were all included in the regression models. other assumptions including outlier bias, homogeneity of variance-covariance were also checked for each model. examination of histograms and boxplots revealed that there were no outliers in all models. levene’s tests for equality of error variance were not significant (p > .05), indicating that the dependent variables’ error variances were equal across the groups. an alpha level of .05 in wilk’s lambda test was taken as the level of statistical significance. 1 cohen’s (1988) interpretation is used for these r values: .1-.3: small effect, .3-.5: medium or intermediate effect, .5 and higher: large or strong effect. phuong-thao duong, maribel montero perez, long quoc nguyen, piet desmet, elke peters 112 4. results 4.1. participants’ individual differences table 1 reveals that participants in all three groups performed similarly in the receptive vocabulary test and productive levels test. an anova showed that the differences were not significant: receptive test (f(2, 87) = .195 , p = .823) and productive test (f(2, 87) = 2.784, p = .067). table 1 descriptive statistics for the receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge tests receptive test (max = 70) productive test (max = 90) mean (sd) 95% ci mean (sd) 95% ci input repetition (n = 32) 41.68 (10.0) 38.04-45.32 28.18 (15.33) 22.60-33.76 input (n = 29) 43.36 (7.93) 40.61-46.11 31.57 (12.01) 27.41-35.73 no input (n = 29) 43.95 (7.79) 41.11-46.79 35.59 (8.55) 32.48-38.70 participants were shown to have good and comparable scores on the working memory tests (see table 2). no significant differences were found amongst the three groups: forward-span (f(2, 89) = . 822, p = .443), backwardspan (f(2, 89) = .249, p = .780), and ospan task (f(2, 89) = 1.43, p = .243). table 2 descriptive statistics for the three working memory tests forward-span (max = 16) mean (sd) 95% ci backward-span (max = 16) mean (sd) 95% ci ospan (max = 60) mean (sd) 95% ci input repetition (n = 32) 14.43 (2.09) 13.67-15.20 14.06 (2.50) 13.15-14.97 50.86 (8.43) 47.79-53.93 input (n = 29) 13.50 (3.45) 12.30-14.70 13.59 (2.78) 12.63-14.55 51.18 (11.13) 47.95-55.67 no input (n = 29) 14.10 (2.90) 13.04-15.16 13.96 (3.05) 12.85-15.07 46.58 (14.76) 41.21-51.95 4.2. the impact of input, input repetition, and task repetition on lexical use and fluency of l2 learners table 3 displays descriptive statistics for all lexical use and fluency measures. the repeated measures ancovas for lexical diversity and repeated measures mancovas for lexical sophistication did not show a main effect of input and task repetition on all measures of lexical use and fluency in the immediate as well as the repeat task. the repeated measures ancova for lexical diversity only revealed an the impact of input, input repetition, and task repetition on l2 lexical use and fluency in speaking 113 interaction effect between input and task repetition with a large effect size2 (f(2, 82) = 5.377, p = .006, ηp2 = .116). specifically, figure 1 shows that while the noinput group’s word choice seemed wider (i.e., lower hd-d index) in the repeat than the immediate task, word choice in the input and input repetition groups seemed narrower. this finding suggests that input exposure, repeated or not, may constrain learners’ ability to use more diverse words as they repeat the oral task. figure 1 interaction effect of input exposure and task repetition on lexical diversity table 3 descriptive statistics of oral performance measures per groups groups immediate task repeat task mean (sd) 95% ci mean (sd) 95% ci hd-d ni i ir 0.75 (0.05) 0.73 (0.02) 0.72 (0.05) 0.73-0.77 0.72-0.74 0.70-0.74 0.73 (0.03) 0.74 (0.03) 0.73 (0.04) 0.72-0.74 0.73-0.75 0.72-0.74 log-transformed average frequency ni i ir 3.85 (0.17) 3.90 (0.15) 3.88 (0.16) 3.79-3.91 3.85-3.95 3.82-3.94 3.95 (0.52) 3.87 (0.13) 3.90 (0.15) 3.76-4.14 3.82-3.92 3.85-3.95 k3+ proportion ni i ir 11.20 (4,08) 12.50 (4.01) 13.50 (2.90) 9.72-12.68 11.11-13.89 12.45-14.56 11.58 (3.56) 12.28 (3.74) 12.84 (3.12) 10.28-12.86 10.92-13.64 11.70-13.98 articulation rate per second ni i ir 3.49 (0.42) 3.37 (0.53) 3.16 (0.42) 3.34-3.64 3.19-3.55 3.01-3.31 3.63 (0.49) 3.21 (0.54) 3.09 (.048) 3.45-3.81 3.01-3.41 2.92-3.26 within-clause pauses per minute ni i ir 20.97 (4.35) 22.71 (3.39) 21.17 (3.84) 17.57-24.37 20.15-25.27 17.95-24.39 20.84 (5.15) 21.70 (3.91) 22.74 (3.10) 16.42-25.26 18.46-24.94 19.43-26.01 between-clause pauses per minute ni i ir 13.52 (4.18) 14.18 (4.09) 13.13 (2.72) 12.00-15.04 12.76-15.60 12.14-14.12 15.38 (4.67) 15.26 (5.04) 14.51 (4.71) 13.68-17.08 13.43-17.09 12.80-16.22 repairs per minute ni i ir 4.93 (3.46) 2.52 (1.63) 2.94 (2.87) 3.67-6.19 1.96-3.08 1.90-3.98 3.78 (2.89) 4.07 (3.94) 3.36 (3.17) 2.73-4.83 2.64-5.50 2.21-4.51 note. ni: no-input, i: input, ir: input repetition 2 note. an effect size (ηp2) of .01, .06 and .14 or above was considered small, medium and large, respectively. 0.7 0.71 0.72 0.73 0.74 0.75 0.76 immediate task repeat task estimated marginal means of hd-d index repeated input input no input phuong-thao duong, maribel montero perez, long quoc nguyen, piet desmet, elke peters 114 the repeated measures mancova revealed a negative effect of input (f(8, 160) = 3.488, p = .001) on overall fluency. repeated measures ancovas for each fluency construct revealed that the effect of input was found only on articulation rate and the effect was only significant in the repeat task (p < .001) (see table 5). post-hoc pairwise comparisons displayed a significant difference between the noinput and input group (p < .001) as well as between the no-input and the input repetition group (p = .005). together with the descriptives, these findings seem to indicate that input exposure had a negative effect on learners’ articulation rate especially in the repeat task. the post hoc comparisons did not show a significant difference between the input and input repetition groups (p = .793), indicating that repeated input did not play a significant role. the impact of task repetition on fluency measures was not found. 4.3. the influence of working memory and vocabulary knowledge to examine the mediating effect of individual differences, particularly prior vocabulary knowledge as well as working memory, we used separate one-way ancovas, with adjusted p-values. for lexical use, no link was found between learners’ prior vocabulary knowledge/working memory and hd-d index as well as average frequency scores. however, ospan task scores seemed to be a good predictor for k3+ proportion in the repeat task (p = .002, β = .273) (see table 4). this finding indicates that learners with greater storage and executive and attentionregulated wm capacity tended to use more low-frequency words in the repeat task, but the predictive power is limited as evidenced by the small β value. table 4 one-way ancovas for k3+ proportion in the immediate and repeat task k3+ proportion df f p η2 power input immediate repeat 2 2 1.038 .055 .359 .946 .025 .001 .226 .058 receptive immediate repeat 1 1 .425 .472 .516 .494 .005 .006 .099 .104 productive immediate repeat 1 1 6.156 1.455 .015 .231 .070 .017 .689 .222 forward-span immediate repeat 1 1 5.825 .436 .018 .511 .066 .005 .665 .100 backward-span immediate repeat 1 1 .732 1.258 .395 .265 .009 .015 .135 .198 ospan immediate repeat 1 1 1.986 10.530 .162 .002 .024 .114 .286 .894 error immediate repeat 82 82 note. p-value was set at 0.0125 the impact of input, input repetition, and task repetition on l2 lexical use and fluency in speaking 115 for fluency measures, the analysis showed a significant relationship between learners’ receptive vocabulary size and the frequency of pauses within the clauses (p = .003, β = -.009) in the repeat task (see table 5). this finding indicates that participants with larger vocabulary size tended to pause less than those with smaller lexicon. in the repeat task, the analyses showed correlations between the backward-span test scores and learners’ articulation rate (p = .001, β = .071) and frequency of pauses between clauses (p = .002, β = .018). this indicates that learners having greater capacity of storing and processing information articulated faster and paused more often at the end of the clauses. no link was found between prior vocabulary knowledge, working memory and repairs fluency. table 5 one-way ancovas of fluency measures in the immediate and repeat task df articulation rate pauses within clauses pauses between clauses repairs f p η2 power f p η2 power f p η2 power f p η2 power input immediate repeat 2 2 4.844 9.619 .010 .000 .106 .190 .787 .978 .613 1.330 .544 .270 .015 .031 .149 .280 .012 .213 .988 .808 .000 .005 .052 .082 3.734 .362 .028 .698 .083 .009 .669 .106 receptive immediate repeat 1 1 2.366 3.219 .128 .076 .028 .038 .330 .426 6.957 9.073 .010 .003 .078 .100 .741 .845 .222 1.587 .639 .211 .003 .019 .075 .238 2.305 1.544 .133 .084 .027 .036 .323 .409 productive immediate repeat 1 1 .196 .011 .660 .918 .002 .000 .072 .051 4.257 3.735 .042 .057 .049 .044 .532 .480 2.894 3.415 .093 .068 .034 .040 .390 .447 1.172 .342 .282 .560 .014 .004 .188 .089 forwardspan immediate repeat 1 1 1.304 .979 .257 .325 .016 .012 .204 .165 1.035 .090 .312 .765 .012 .001 .171 .060 1.808 1.286 .182 .260 .022 .015 .265 .202 .667 .100 .416 .753 .008 .100 .127 .061 backwardspan immediate repeat 1 1 3.326 12.137 .072 .001 .039 .129 .437 .931 .122 1.369 .727 .245 .001 .016 .064 .212 6.770 9.851 .115 .002 .076 .107 .730 .873 .991 1.034 .322 .312 .012 .012 .166 .171 ospan immediate repeat 1 1 .403 .076 .528 .784 .005 .001 .096 .059 .171 1.754 .681 .189 .002 .021 .069 .258 .863 .009 .356 .963 .010 .001 .151 .056 .019 .629 .891 .430 .000 .008 .052 .123 error immediate repeat 82 82 note. p-value was set at 0.00625 5. discussion the current study extends previous research by showing that l2 learners’ lexical use and fluency in speaking can be affected by input exposure, input repetition, and task repetition. the findings will be discussed in more details in section 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3, respectively. 5.1. the impact of input exposure on l2 lexical use and fluency in an immediate and a repeat oral task (rq 1) for the immediate task, we did not find an impact of meaningful input exposure on lexical use and fluency for the immediate task. this indicates that bygate’s (1996) and willis’s (1996) hypotheses, predicting that exposing learners to input relevant to output tasks can lead to improved lexical use and fluency, cannot be confirmed. the absence of the effect of input on the immediate task might be explained by the learners’ low proficiency level. at this level of proficiency (a2-b1), learners’ lexical phuong-thao duong, maribel montero perez, long quoc nguyen, piet desmet, elke peters 116 resources may still be limited to high-frequency words. it is also possible that the small proportion of low-frequency words in the videos (i.e., 3.83%) may have limited learners’ willingness to take a risk of using more low-frequency words in the oral task. another possibility is learners’ processing of words from input, as shown in duong et al. (2021b), may have spared them with less processing time to recall low-frequency words and widen their word choice. therefore, they might have tried to buy time by slowing down the speech rate to alleviate the cognitive burden. for the repeat task, the input group tended to produce words with less variety and speak more slowly than those in the no-input group. we conducted a follow-up analysis which revealed a considerable proportion of verbatim repetition3 (approximately 46%) from the first to the repeat task performance for the no-input group compared to 28.61% for the input repetition group and 27.97% for the input group. these findings indicate that verbatim repetition might have aided participants in the no-input group to speed up their speaking rate, thus providing them with more time to widen their word choice. 5.2. the impact of task repetition and input repetition in l2 lexical use and fluency in a repeat task (rq2 and rq3) we found that the effect of task repetition on l2 learners’ lexical sophistication at the second repetition was not significant. this finding is similar to duong and le (2022). as gass et al. (1999) and kim et al. (2018) only found the significant effect of task repetition after three times of repetition, this might indicate that learners should have more time one time of repetition to improve their lexical use. unlike fukuta (2016), our study did not reveal an impact of task repetition on lexical diversity at the second repetition, which might be due to discrepancies in the measures of lexical diversity (i.e., hd-d index vs. guidraud) and time between tasks (i.e., one week vs. two days). contrary to a widely held belief that task repetition could promote fluency (bygate, 2018), our study did not show an impact of task repetition on learners’ fluency, which is consistent with duong and le (2022). as the participants of both studies are vietnamese efl learners and did not follow a task-based language program, replication studies with different learners’ backgrounds are needed. concerning the effect of input repetition, while exposing learners to the same input before and after performing speaking task was useful for them to learn the meaning of new words from input (nguyen & boers, 2018) and use newly 3 as a follow-up analysis, verbatim repetition was generally calculated by counting the same words across the repetitions of oral task, using text lex compare function at lextutor.ca. it should be noted that previous studies (e.g., thai & boers, 2016) adopted a more fine-grained approach to calculate verbatim repetition. the impact of input, input repetition, and task repetition on l2 lexical use and fluency in speaking 117 learned words in follow-up oral task (duong et al., 2021b), this did not seem to benefit learners’ lexical use and fluency in the repeat speaking task. it is possible that exposing learners to the same input twice might be insufficient to familiarize them with the topic or might not provide them with adequate time to enrich their lexical use or speed up their speaking rate. also, it cannot be excluded that other forms of input repetition (i.e., repeating input before the output task) might result in different findings. this issue warrants further research. 5.3. the influence of prior vocabulary knowledge and working memory (rq 4) the findings suggest that we can somehow predict learners’ fluency and lexical sophistication if we know their receptive vocabulary knowledge and wm, but the predictive power is limited. specifically, learners with larger receptive vocabulary size tended to pause less within the clauses, which is not in line with de jong (2016) and clenton et al. (2020) who found a link between learners’ pausing and productive vocabulary knowledge. further, unlike uchihara and saito (2019) and clenton et al. (2020), we did not find a significant correlation between productive vocabulary and lexical sophistication. we assume that the difference in the test format between our study and others might have played a role in the difference in findings. while we used the productive vocabulary levels test (pvlt) which tests the form recall knowledge, de jong (2016) used a dutch-version sentence completion test and clenton et al. (2020) administered lex30 which measures word associations. also, as suggested by clenton et al. (2020), it is possible that the scores achieved from the pvlt might be more aligned to the ability to use words by participants at the advanced rather than those at low-intermediate proficiency levels such as the learners in our study. our finding is also not in line with duong and le (2022) who reported a positive link between vietnamese learners’ receptive vocabulary knowledge and lexical diversity. as duong and le (2022) employed a more spontaneous oral task without prompts, their participants might have had more room to widen their vocabulary choice while performing the oral task than our participants. concerning wm, the results show that learners with greater ospan task scores used more low-frequency words, while those with greater backward-span task scores spoke slightly faster and paused more often at the end of clauses in the repeat task. these findings indicate that executive and attention-regulated wm can predict not only vocabulary acquisition (e.g., as in french, 2014; montero perez, 2020) but also lexical use and fluency. our study demonstrates that forward digit span scores were not predictors of l2 learners’ lexical use and fluency, which seems to support findings reported in juffs and harrington’s (2011) meta-analysis that phonological wm is often less important for learners beyond low-proficiency level. phuong-thao duong, maribel montero perez, long quoc nguyen, piet desmet, elke peters 118 6. conclusion the present study has investigated the effects of input, input repetition and task repetition on l2 learners’ lexical use and fluency. the study also explored to what extent learners’ lexical use and fluency in the immediate and the repeat oral task is predicted by their prior vocabulary knowledge and working memory. the findings indicate that input, input repetition, and task repetition do not improve learners’ lexical use and fluency in either the immediate or repeat task. working memory and prior vocabulary knowledge can predict l2 learners’ lexical sophistication and fluency in the repeat task, but the association is not strong. the present study has some limitations. first, as the study focused on university students, it is difficult to generalize the findings to participants of other profiles. second, because the repeat task was administered only two days after the initial task, readers should be cautious in generalizing the findings to scenarios where tasks are repeated more than once. third, as our study only focused on picture-prompted oral narrative tasks and input repetition after output, future studies that use other types of output tasks and other forms of input repetition (e.g., repeating input before output) are needed to generalize the findings. from a pedagogical perspective, our findings suggest that the combination of task repetition and input exposure does not seem a judicious option if the sole aim of the activity is to foster immediate improvements in oral fluency and lexical use. remarkably, the predictive role of receptive vocabulary knowledge and working memory for lexical use and fluency indicates that individual differences might need more attention in l2 training programs. for example, learners at low proficiency levels might need extra support from teachers to extend their lexical repertoires before being trained for better fluency and lexical use. also, learners who have difficulties in remembering information (e.g., the elderly learners, busy adult learners) might need to have additional time for task preparation to compensate for their limited capacity of storing and processing information. the impact of input, input repetition, and task repetition on l2 lexical use and fluency in speaking 119 references baddeley, a. 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(1996). a framework for task-based learning. addison-wesley. phuong-thao duong, maribel montero perez, long quoc nguyen, piet desmet, elke peters 124 appendix the correlation matrix of repeated measures correlation coefficiencies hd-d average frequency k3+ proportion articulation rate within-clause pauses betweenclause pauses repairs hd-d -.05 (p = .62) .03 (p =.70) .02 (p = .85) -.15 (p = .14) .04 ( p = .63) .08 (p = .41) average frequency -.05 (p = .62) .27** (p = .009) .12 (p = .25) .09 (p = .38) .25* (p = .016) -.17 (p = .09) k3+ proportion .03 (p .70) .27** (p = .009) -.08 (p = .41) .20 (p = .056) -.11 (p = .27) .19 (p = .06) articulate rate .02 (p = .85) .12 (p = .25) -.08 (p = .41) .43** (p < .001) .53** (p < .001) .09 (p = .37) within-clause pauses -.15 (p = .14) -.09 (p = .38) .20 (p = .056) .43** (p < .001) .40** (p < .001) .10 (p = .32) between-clause pauses .04 (p = .63) .25* (p = .016) -.11 (p = .27) .53** (p < .001) .40** (p < .001) -.08 (p = .41) repairs .08 (p = .41) -.17 (p = .09) .19 (p = .06) .09 (p = .37) .10 (p = .32) -.08 (p = .41) note. ** correlation is significant at the 0.01 level; * correlation is significant at the 0.05 level 373 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (2). 2023. 373-397 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.38279 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the impact of emi on student english writing proficiency in a spanish undergraduate engineering context maría del mar sánchez-pérez university of almería, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6550-9030 mmar.sanchez@ual.es abstract this study analyzes the influence of english medium instruction (emi) on student english writing development in a spanish undergraduate context, a language skill that remains underexplored in emi research at tertiary level. through a longitudinal preand post-test method, it explores the writing progress of emi engineering students as compared to the achievement of a group of english as a foreign language (efl) learners, according to different quantitative and qualitative writing measures. results show a positive impact of emi on student writing development at the levels of lexical accuracy and vocabulary. however, other writing areas, such as syntax, grammar, organization, or fluency, appeared unaffected. these findings challenge, to some extent, the widespread assumption that emi contributes to improving student english language proficiency. this study suggests that sole exposure to the language in emi contexts does not suffice to improve students’ english writing abilities beyond the area of vocabulary. therefore, it argues for the inclusion of language skill support within emi programs to provide students with opportunities to achieve a comprehensive development of their english language and writing competence. keywords: english medium instruction (emi); integrating content and language in higher education (iclhe); language outcomes; writing; proficiency mailto:mmar.sanchez@ual.es maría del mar sánchez-pérez 374 1. introduction the number of english medium instruction (emi) programs has undergone an unprecedented rise in the last two decades as a result of the internationalization process experienced by higher education institutions worldwide. the rationale behind the implementation of emi programs includes the desire to attract international students to enhance the international profile and thus the prestige of the institutions, to increase student and faculty international mobility to foster international collaboration and competitiveness, and to provide future graduates with opportunities to improve their english language skills to help them operate successfully in an increasingly global labor market (briggs et al., 2018; galloway et al., 2017). emi is defined as an educational model in which the english language is used “to teach academic subjects (other than english itself) in countries or jurisdictions where the first language of the majority of the population is not english” (macaro, 2018, p. 1). in emi higher education programs, the primary and virtually exclusive goal is to learn disciplinary content. english language instruction is rarely considered explicitly in emi courses (dafouz & smit, 2020; pecorari & malmstrom, 2018; rose et al., 2021; unterberger, 2018). this differs substantially from other similar educational environments in europe where academic content is taught through the medium of a foreign (fl) or a second language (l2) with an explicit dual focus on content and language acquisition, such as, content and language integrated learning (clil) or integrating content and language in higher education (iclhe). while the pursuits for the implementation and development of emi programs seem to be shared by the majority of emi stakeholders, the actual effectiveness of this educational approach to achieve the aforementioned goals remains unconfirmed in the research literature, in particular, as far as student english language development is concerned (briggs et al., 2018; graham et al., 2018). notwithstanding the increasing number of studies on emi conducted in the last two decades, the swift propagation of emi programs has preceded and outpaced empirical research on the real language skill gains that students achieve in emi environments (galloway et al., 2017). the present study intends to fill this gap by analyzing the impact of emi on students’ english language proficiency in a spanish undergraduate engineering setting. in particular, it focuses on the development of writing, a language skill that has generally received little attention in emi research, especially in southern europe. through a longitudinal preand post-test analysis, this study explores the english writing progress of a group of emi students as compared to the gains achieved by a group of students following a traditional english as a foreign language (efl) course. this study may have potential implications for emi stakeholders, curriculum planners, and university administrators by providing insights into the real effect of emi on student language the impact of emi on student english writing proficiency in a spanish undergraduate engineering . . . 375 skill development, a matter that is often assumed in these contexts (mckinley & rose, 2022; wilkinson, 2018;). 2. literature review the burgeoning of emi programs at tertiary level has triggered a growing number of studies attempting to shed light on a varied range of topics. research into stakeholders’ attitudes toward emi has attracted much scholarly attention (aguilar & rodriguez, 2012; dearden & macaro, 2016; kamaşak et al., 2020; lasagabaster, 2018; tatzl, 2011). by and large, despite the numerous challenges and resistances reported in these studies, most lecturers and students display positive attitudes toward this educational model, and they are confident about its potential for student language development. notwithstanding the lack of provision of explicit language instruction in emi settings (pecorari & malmström, 2018), student english language improvement stands as one of the estimated benefits when it comes to implementing emi programs (galloway et al., 2017; galloway & rose, 2021; graham et al., 2018). indeed, many students and faculty members report this expectation as one of the primary motivations to engage in emi practices (salaberri-ramiro & sánchez-pérez, 2018; tatzl, 2011). the assumption that english language competence improves as an indirect outcome of receiving instruction through english is widespread, especially among learners (kamaşak et al., 2020; wächter & maiworm, 2014). studying through the medium of english is perceived as a valuable opportunity for future graduates to improve their linguistic competence and, thus, to get access to better academic and/or professional opportunities (ament & pérez-vidal, 2015). nevertheless, the dearth of empirical research on language learning outcomes in emi contexts and the contradictory data available to date have not confirmed the actual effectiveness of emi for the development of student english language abilities (graham et al., 2018; macaro et al., 2018). research into specific language abilities is rather limited in the emi literature (graham & eslami, 2020). writing in higher education is an essential skill through which most of the assessment takes place; thus it can be considered a vehicle for academic success (sánchez-pérez, 2021). additionally, unlike other language skills such as reading, speaking and listening, students are less likely to develop academic writing out of the classroom, thus it is an appropriate skill via which to explore gains that can be more closely attributed to emi. notwithstanding the above, writing has generally received scant focus in emi research, especially in southern european countries such as spain, the context of this study, where, unlike many universities from northern europe, academic writing teaching programs are infrequently found within academic curricula, especially in stem areas (dafouz, 2020). maría del mar sánchez-pérez 376 among the studies addressing writing outcomes in emi contexts, most empirical investigations are centered on comparing achievement between writing and other language skills, and they do not offer detailed accounts of the development of this specific language ability. in general, these studies show a tendency toward advantages in the gains of receptive skills over productive skills (aguilar & muñoz, 2014; ament & perez-vidal; 2015, hernández & jiménez; 2017). however, the holistic scores employed in these studies do not allow for capturing students’ specific achievement in the development of their writing skills. studies including different measures to analyze students’ writing ability are, therefore, urgently needed, since learners may not necessarily develop all areas of the writing competence at the same level (hughes, 2003; jexenflicker & dalton-puffer, 2010). studies that examine students’ writing gains according to different areas of writing in emi higher education settings are even scarcer. indeed, most of the research available to date in educational contexts where disciplinary content is taught through the medium of english is found in earlier educational phases, for example, in primary and secondary education, or in clil environments, where some focus on language learning is considered (gené-gil et al., 2015; jexenflicker & dalton-puffer, 2010; lasagabaster, 2008; roquet & pérez vidal, 2015; ruiz de zarobe, 2010; whittaker et al., 2011). overall, these studies report clil advantages for writing development, especially at the levels of grammar and lexicon. as for the studies based on emi higher education settings, only a few are found, yet yielding a variety of results. for example, in a study conducted in thailand with undergraduate students of agriculture, chansri and wasanasomsithi (2016) reported that they improved their writing ability at the levels of vocabulary, language use, and mechanics when completing a one-semester emi course. however, this study used only a one-group preand post-test analysis with a rather small sample size (n = 27), which challenges the reliability of the results. in the cross-sectional studies conducted by salaberri-ramiro and sánchez-pérez (2015) and by sánchezpérez and salaberri-ramiro (2015) with spanish emi undergraduate students, whilst the authors did not explore the evolution over time, they found that participants showed writing deficiencies at the levels of pragmatics and discourse, but performed better as for lexicogrammar. in another study conducted in spain, vidal and jarvis (2020) examined undergraduate students’ english language proficiency and lexical diversity in english-medium writing after three years of instruction. they found higher writing holistic scores, but no significant gains in lexical diversity. however, the sample of this study pursued a degree in english studies; thus there are serious doubts whether this can be considered an emi learning context, since the purpose of the degree is to train future english language specialists and participants might have been influenced by further language-related training amid the course of the three-year investigation. in a more recent study conducted the impact of emi on student english writing proficiency in a spanish undergraduate engineering . . . 377 in china, zhang and pladevall-ballester (2021) found almost no progress in grammar proficiency but identified statistically significant gains in the three writing measures analyzed, namely, task achievement, general english vocabulary, and discipline-specific vocabulary, with higher gains being observed in the latter. as can be observed, evidence about the effect of emi on student writing development is scarce and inconclusive; thus there is a need for further research into the writing outcomes in emi and, more specifically, into the specific writing areas that may be potentially affected by emi instruction at tertiary level (graham & eslami, 2020). the present study aims to fill this gap by analyzing the english writing progress of two groups of undergraduate engineering students following an emi and an efl course, respectively, in a spanish university setting. the differences between both groups’ achievement will allow us to ascertain the impact of the emi treatment on students’ english writing proficiency as compared to another language learning context where development in english language and writing proficiency is expected. for this purpose, different measures of the writing ability are examined both quantitatively (complexity, accuracy, and fluency) and qualitatively (task fulfillment, organization, grammar, and vocabulary), which, to the author’s knowledge, have not been considered jointly in previous research into english writing development in an emi higher education context. with such aim in mind, this study addresses the following research question: are there any differences in the development of the writing competence in english between undergraduate engineering students following an emi and an efl course, respectively, over the course of one semester? 3. method 3.1. setting and participants this study was conducted at a state-run higher education institution in southern spain. within its internationalization strategy, the university runs a multilingualism promotion plan through which different courses from diverse areas of knowledge are taught through the medium of english. alternatively, in some areas, traditional efl courses are offered for those students who do not opt for completing courses taught entirely in english, yet they want to improve their english language competence. the courses involved in this study belong to these two learning contexts, namely an emi chemistry course and an efl course. the emi course was a compulsory1 subject for 1 while the course was compulsory according to the syllabus of the degrees involved, there were different groups taught in spanish (l1) and in english (emi). student enrollment in the maría del mar sánchez-pérez 378 students enrolled in chemical and agricultural engineering, whereas the efl course was an elective module available for students enrolled in any science or engineering-related degree. both were 6-ects courses (60 hours) that were taught during the fall semester of 2018-2019. the emi course was taught by a spanishnative content lecturer with more than 12 years of experience in emi, whereas the efl course was taught by a bilingual (english-spanish) language specialist with more than 15 years of experience in efl teaching. students in the efl group were also enrolled in the same chemistry (compulsory) course, but in a spanishmedium taught group; thus both groups were expected to learn the same disciplinary content throughout the semester. the sample of this study consisted of two groups of non-native englishspeaking undergraduate engineering students following an efl and an emi course, respectively. a total of 129 students (82 males and 47 females) volunteered to participate in the study of a total population of 143 students enrolled officially in the course (92 males and 51 females). they were initially asked to sign a written consent and to complete a preliminary questionnaire about social, academic and language background details (i.e., gender, age, major, nationality, l1, certified english language level and exposure to english outside the classroom). in order to get a homogeneous sample regarding english proficiency level and as for language exposure in both groups, only students with a b1 (independent user) certified english language level according to the cefr who reported not being enrolled in any other emi or english language learning course that semester were selected for analysis. hence, potential distorting results related to differences in language proficiency levels or to the amount of exposure to the language were minimized (rose et al., 2019). this resulted in a final total sample of 98 students (62 males and 36 females), with ages ranging from 20 to 25, split into two independent groups, the efl group (n = 51) and the emi group (n = 47). as the setting of the study was a spanish-speaking monolingual region where english is considered a foreign language (fl), exposure to the language and communication through english in both groups was restricted to the efl and the emi classrooms, respectively. 3.2. data collection to explore and compare the english writing progress achieved by both groups, students’ written samples were elicited and gathered at two different points in time, at the beginning (pre-test) and at the end (post-test) of the respective courses. the writing tasks administered were the same for both groups. compositions were emi group was made on a voluntary basis, as long as they certify a minimum b1 language level according to the common european framework of reference for languages (cefr). the impact of emi on student english writing proficiency in a spanish undergraduate engineering . . . 379 written in a classroom environment in an exam-like situation with a time limit of 30 minutes. in the pre-test, students were asked to describe a picture that showed a man conducting an experiment in a laboratory. in particular, they were asked to (1) describe the picture in as much detail as possible, and (2) explain the possible reason(s) why the man in the picture was carrying out such action. the writing task in the post-test was of a very similar nature, but in that case, the picture showed a team of scientists gathering samples from a crop. the writing tasks were, therefore, of a descriptive and argumentative nature, two genres commonly found in engineering-related areas (parkinson, 2017). the topics were sufficiently general but related to the participants’ area of knowledge to facilitate and inspire students’ writing (foster & skehan, 1996). 3.3. data analysis students’ compositions were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. the quantitative measures included complexity, accuracy, and fluency (caf), three linguistic dimensions that have been largely considered in l2 writing performance (hidalgo & lázaro-ibarrola, 2020; norris & ortega, 2009; wolfe-quintero et al., 1998). regarding complexity, we included both syntactic and lexical complexity. to measure syntactic complexity, we used the coordination index (ci), obtained by dividing the “total number of independent clause coordination by the total number of combined clauses (clauses minus sentences)” (wolfe-quintero et al., 1998, p. 95). a decrease in the ratio of this measure indicates a lower use of coordinate clauses and, therefore, a higher use of subordinate and dependent clauses, which has been considered a signal of successful l2 writing development at the level of complexity in previous research (ortega, 2003; wolfe-quintero et al., 1998). lexical complexity was measured by means of the guiraud’s index (gi) of lexical richness, obtained by dividing the total number of lexical types by the square root of the total number of lexical tokens. as for accuracy, we used the error-per-word ratio. to obtain a comprehensive picture of this domain, different types of errors were considered, namely, grammatical, lexical and mechanical errors. grammatical errors included students’ inaccuracies concerning the choice of verb form and tense, subject-verb agreement, use of gerunds and infinitives, etc. lexical errors included mistakes related to inadequate vocabulary choice, and mechanical errors included issues such as spelling or punctuation. finally, fluency was measured by calculating the total number of words produced per minute, following the concept that more fluent writers produce longer pieces of writing within a certain time limit than less fluent counterparts, who tend to produce shorter and simpler ones (norris & ortega, 2009). maría del mar sánchez-pérez 380 as for the qualitative measures, students’ written texts were analyzed according to a rating scale adapted from friedl and auer (2007) considering four equally weighted aspects of the writing skill, namely, task fulfillment, organization, grammar, and vocabulary. scores ranged according to a six-point likert-type scale, from 0 (not enough to evaluate) to 5 (very good), in each category. regarding task fulfillment, texts were assessed in terms of content relevance, format, length, and register. the dimension of organization focused on text structure, meaningful paragraphing, cohesion and coherence, use of connectives, editing and punctuation. the grammar category addressed morpho-syntax accuracy, variety of grammatical structures, appropriate use of subject-verb agreement, verb tense, word order, pronouns, articles and use of complex structures; and the vocabulary dimension addressed lexical variety, word choice, accurate form and usage, spelling mistakes and clear meaning. 3.4. procedure a total of eight writing measures were selected for analysis (table 1). the measures were identified and coded in each student’s written composition both in the pretest and the post-test, and the indices, ratios, and scores for each measure were calculated. the mean results obtained per group in the pre-test underwent a series of independent-samples t-tests to detect potentially significant differences in the measures analyzed between the efl and the emi groups at the onset. subsequently, the average findings per group in the preand post-tests were compared statistically with a mixed analysis of variance (anova) to identify significant differences between both groups’ achievements after completing their respective table 1 quantitative and qualitative measures of analysis type of analysis measure description quantitative syntactic complexity coordination index (ci) = independent clause coordination/ combined clauses lexical complexity guiraud’s index (gi) = wtypes/√wtokens accuracy total errors per word (e/w); grammatical errors per word (ge/w); lexical errors per word (le/w); mechanical errors per word (me/w) fluency words per minute (w/m) qualitative task fulfillment content relevance, format, length, and register organization text structure, meaningful paragraphing, cohesion and coherence, use of connectives, editing and punctuation grammar accuracy and variety of morpho-syntactic structures, subject-verb agreement, verb tense, word order, pronouns, articles, clear meaning, and complex structures vocabulary lexical variety, word choice, accurate form and usage, spelling mistakes and clear meaning the impact of emi on student english writing proficiency in a spanish undergraduate engineering . . . 381 courses. the measures that showed statistically significant differences between the efl and the emi group in the pre-test were not included in the anova test, since they were not comparable and the differences in the gains between both groups might not be attributable to the treatments (efl or emi) (larson-hall, 2010). all measures were doubly coded and rated by the author of this paper and by an additional language expert, reaching an average inter-rater concordance of 86.9%. inter-rater disagreements were solved by consensus. 4. results the results are structured according to the research question and the types of measures. we first present the findings of the inter-group comparison for the quantitative measures, and then for the qualitative ones. 4.1. inter-group comparison for the quantitative measures: complexity, accuracy and fluency our research question was set out to identify the differences in the development of the writing competence in english between undergraduate engineering students following an emi and an efl course, respectively. for this purpose, we compared the mean values per group in each quantitative measure both in the pre-test and the post-test. table 2 shows the results of the t-test for all the quantitative measures analyzed at the onset. as can be observed, there were no statistically significant differences between the groups in the pre-test (p > .05); thus the progress made by each group in all measures could be safely compared (larson-hall, 2010). table 2 pre-test quantitative results for the efl and emi groups measure efl group (n = 51) emi group (n = 47) t (df) p m (sd) m (sd) syntactic complexity (ci) .42 (1.01) .34 (1.13) 1.16 (96) .248 lexical complexity (gi) 5.87 (1.18) 6.33 (1.26) -1.26 (96) .093 accuracy (e/w) .06 (.06) .07 (.08) -.49 (96) .325 fluency (w/m) 7.72 (.72) 7.96 (1.83) -1.58 (96) .130 the average results of the quantitative measures per group in the pre-test and the post-test were compared by means of a mixed anova to explore whether the differences between the progress achieved by each group were significant (table 3). maría del mar sánchez-pérez 382 table 3 preand post-test quantitative results for the efl and emi groups efl group (n = 51) emi group (n = 47) pre-test m (sd) post-test m (sd) pre-test m (sd) post-test m (sd) syntactic complexity (ci) .42 (1.01) .37 (.14) .34 (1.13) .33 (.91) lexical complexity (gi) 5.87 (1.18) 5.98 (1.01) 6.33 (1.26) 7.01 (1.09) accuracy (e/w) .06 (.06) .05 (.07) .07 (.08) .04 (.05) fluency (w/m) 7.72 (.76) 7.81 (1.31) 7.96 (1.83) 8.17 (1.55) regarding syntactic complexity, results show a tendency towards a decrease in the number of coordinate sentences between the pre-test and the post-test in both groups, indicating a higher use of dependent and subordinate clauses after completing their courses. however, progress was higher in the efl group than in the emi group, in which case, the gains were nearly imperceptible (figure 1). the difference between the achievement of the emi and the efl group was not statistically significant [f (1,96) = 3.83, p = .327]; thus no advantage of emi on student writing proficiency was observed for syntactic complexity. figure 1 efl and emi progress in syntactic complexity (coordination index) regarding lexical complexity, results show a higher improvement of the emi group as compared to the efl group, which indicates that emi students’ written compositions contain richer and more varied vocabulary than the efl ones’ after the treatment (figure 2). the mixed anova revealed an almost significant difference between the efl and the emi group’s gains (f [1,96] = 16.59, p = .061). therefore, although the difference between both groups’ achievement cannot be confirmed, findings show signs of a positive influence of emi on students’ lexical complexity in their writing. 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5 pre-test post-test syntactic complexity (ci) efl the impact of emi on student english writing proficiency in a spanish undergraduate engineering . . . 383 figure 2 efl and emi progress in lexical complexity (guiraud’s index) concerning accuracy, the ratios of the overall measure (i.e., total number of errors per word) showed that, even though the emi group had a higher error ratio than the efl one at the onset, the former showed greater progress after completing the course (figure 3). the difference in the global accuracy measure proved not to be statistically significant (f [1,96] = 4.09, p = .132). nevertheless, the independent analysis per type of error showed statistically significant differences between the efl and the emi group in the sub-category of lexical accuracy (f [1, 96] = 1.46; p = .041), in which the emi group outperformed the efl one (table 4). it is noteworthy that the emi group had a higher lexical error-per-word (le/w) ratio than the efl group at the onset; thus it departed with a lower proficiency level than the efl group for lexical accuracy. however, such initial advantage on the part of the efl group was not paired with greater progress after completing the efl course. on the contrary, the emi group’s gains were greater (figure 4). the sub-domain of grammatical accuracy revealed a smaller progress of the emi group than that of the efl group (figure 5), yet the difference was not statistically significant (f [1, 96] = .97; p = .242). as for mechanical errors (figure 6), the emi group showed slightly higher gains than the efl group, although, again, this difference did not reach a statistically significant value (f [1, 96] = 1.54; p = .193). figure 3 efl and emi progress in accuracy (e/w) 5.5 6 6.5 7 7.5 pre-test post-test lexical complexity (gi) efl emi 0.01 0.03 0.05 0.07 0.09 pre-test post-test accuracy (e/w) efl emi maría del mar sánchez-pérez 384 table 4 preand post-test measures of grammatical, lexical and mechanical accuracy for the efl and emi groups efl group (n = 51) emi group (n = 47) pre-test m (sd) post-test m (sd) pre-test m (sd) post-test m (sd) grammatical accuracy (ge/w) .045 (.08) .023 (.07) .057 (.09) .046 (.08) lexical accuracy (le/w) .063 (.08) .056 (.06) .072 (.07) .031* (.02) mechanical accuracy (me/w) .061 (.03) .044 (.07) .059 (.07) .039 (.04) note. *statistically significant difference between efl and emi group (p < .05) figure 4 efl and emi progress in lexical accuracy (le/w) figure 5 efl and emi progress in grammatical accuracy (ge/w) 0.02 0.04 0.06 0.08 pre-test post-test lexical accuracy (e/w) efl emi 0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04 0.05 0.06 0.07 0.08 pre-test post-test grammatical accuracy (e/w) efl emi the impact of emi on student english writing proficiency in a spanish undergraduate engineering . . . 385 figure 6 efl and emi progress in mechanical accuracy (me/w) finally, regarding fluency, results showed a higher increase in this ratio in the emi group (figure 7), indicating that emi students tend to produce longer pieces of writing, and thus, to be more fluent than their efl counterparts. however, the difference between both groups’ progress was not significant (f [1,96] = 16.59, p = .124). therefore, the advantage of emi for fluency cannot be confirmed. figure 7 efl and emi progress in fluency (w/m) 0.035 0.04 0.045 0.05 0.055 0.06 0.065 0.07 pre-test post-test mechanical accuracy (e/w) efl 7.4 7.6 7.8 8 8.2 8.4 pre-test post-test fluency (w/m) efl emi maría del mar sánchez-pérez 386 4.2. inter-group comparison for the qualitative measures: task fulfillment, organization, grammar and vocabulary as with the quantitative measures, independent-samples t-tests with the average scores obtained in each dimension per group in the pre-test were conducted to identify potentially significant differences between both groups at the onset (table 5). the t-tests detected a significant difference between both groups in task fulfillment (t [96] = -2.68, p = .039). therefore, this measure was not included in the subsequent anova as the two groups departed from significantly different initial levels and the reliability of the data arising from the comparison of the results obtained in this category from the two groups after the treatment would be compromised (larson-hall, 2010). table 5 preand post-test qualitative results for the efl and emi groups measure efl group (n = 51) emi group (n = 47) t (df) p m (sd) m (sd) task fulfillment 2.31 (.82) 2.69 (1.64) -2.68 (96) .039* organization 2.45 (.94) 2.47 (.76) -.34 (96) .152* grammar 2.76 (1.51) 2.68 (1.73) .97 (96) .484* vocabulary 2.64 (1.78) 2.71 (1.61) -.56 (96) .397* note. * p < .05 the qualitative measures which did not show significant differences between the efl and the emi group in the pre-test underwent the mixed anova analysis (table 6). table 6 preand post-test qualitative results for the efl and emi groups measure (code) efl group (n = 51) emi group (n = 47) pre-test m (sd) post-test m (sd) pre-test m (sd) post-test m (sd) organization 2.45 (.94) 2.67 (1.05) 2.47 (.76) 2.49 (1.09) grammar 2.76 (1.51) 3.02 (.97) 2.68 (1.73) 2.79 (1.14) vocabulary 2.64 (1.78) 2.83 (1.42) 2.71 (1.61) 3.39* (1.15) note. *statistically significant difference between efl and emi group (p < .05) with regard to organization, while both groups had a very similar average score at the onset, the results show a tendency towards higher progress in the efl group, with the emi group’s progress remaining virtually unaffected (figure 8). the difference between both groups’ gains was not significant (f [1,96] = 2.987; p = .267). it is noteworthy that, unlike the efl group, the average performance of the emi group hardly reached the minimum passing score (2.50) according to the six-point rating scale (0-5) in the post-test, revealing the emi group’s the impact of emi on student english writing proficiency in a spanish undergraduate engineering . . . 387 low level of writing performance as for text structure, paragraphing, use of connectives, editing and punctuation after the treatment. unlike the efl group, emi students tended to write in a single paragraph and correlation between sentences was made mostly using simple connectives (and, but, also) both in the pre-test and in the post-test. additionally, an overall low level of development regarding punctuation was observed both before and after the emi treatment, as in “they are collecting seeds and controlling size and weight. also[,] they are cleaning the seeds and checking the temperature” (emi_23_post). figure 8 efl and emi progress in organization concerning grammar, our results point toward improvement in both groups after completing their respective courses, though a greater increase of the average score was found in the efl group. while anova did not detect statistically significant differences between both groups’ progress (f [1,96] = .82; p = .361], the efl group’s compositions tended to include more varied and complex structures after the treatment, such as the use of the passive voice, e.g., “a cage with different seeds can be observed” (efl_09_post). in contrast, the emi group tended to use and repeat simpler grammar forms both in the pre-test and in the post-test, as in “the men have a white shirt, and a watch. they also have glasses and a mask” (emi_47_post). additionally, the efl group committed fewer errors of verb tense, subject-verb agreement and word order after completing their course, which were more frequently found in the emi group in the post-test, as in “the girl clean[s] [is cleaning] carefully the seeds with a [piece of] paper” (emi_13_post). 2.2 2.4 2.6 2.8 3 pre-test post-test organization efl emi maría del mar sánchez-pérez 388 figure 9 efl and emi progress in grammar as for vocabulary, results also show signs of improvement in both learning environments. in this case, the progress made by the emi group was remarkably higher than the one achieved by the efl group. this difference turned out to be statistically significant (f [1,96]) = 24.60; p = .022). these findings reveal a positive influence of emi on student writing development as for higher lexical variety, appropriate word choice, accurate form and usage, fewer spelling mistakes and clearer meaning. it is worthy of note that, while the majority of emi students used simpler and less accurate vocabulary, including some spelling mistakes, in the pre-test, as in “there is a man in a laboratory doing an experiment with a buret[t]e and other materials” (emi_24_pre), most of these issues were successfully solved after the treatment, including, in many cases, instances of more complex vocabulary and specialized terms, as in “we can observe some scientists taking samples from a crop . . . . on the table, we can see a pipette and a test tube with 10 ml of h₂o” (emi_39_post). figure 10 efl and emi progress in vocabulary 2.5 2.7 2.9 3.1 pre-test post-test grammar efl 2.5 2.7 2.9 3.1 3.3 3.5 pre-test post-test vocabulary efl the impact of emi on student english writing proficiency in a spanish undergraduate engineering . . . 389 5. discussion according to our research question, this paper set out to explore the differences in the development of the writing competence in english between undergraduate engineering students following an emi and an efl course, respectively, in order to explore the impact of emi on student english writing proficiency. our findings reveal significant advantages of emi in the quantitative accuracy variable at the level of lexicon and in the qualitative category of vocabulary, which indicates a positive influence of emi on student writing proficiency in terms of committing fewer lexical errors, showing greater lexical variety, appropriate word choice, fewer spelling mistakes and clearer meaning. regarding the rest of the measures analyzed, while no statistically significant differences were observed between both groups’ progress, we found interesting trends worthy of mention. first, the emi group achieved higher gains than the efl group in the domain of lexical complexity, where the difference between both groups’ gains almost showed a statistically significant level, thus signaling higher progress than the efl group for lexical richness. additionally, it showed a tendency toward outrating the efl group’s progress for fluency. conversely, the efl group showed higher progress than the emi group for syntactic complexity, organization, and grammar. our findings echo, to a certain extent, previous research conducted in clil contexts, where students’ language advantage was observed at lexical and vocabulary level (jexenflicker & dalton-puffer, 2010; lasagabaster, 2008; ruiz de zarobe, 2010; salaberri-ramiro & sánchez-pérez, 2015; sánchez-pérez & salaberri-ramiro, 2015; whittaker et al., 2011). as for lexical accuracy, our results concur partially with a study conducted by roquet and pérez vidal (2015) in a spanish secondary clil context where writing was assessed by means of quantitative and qualitative measures, as in our study. in their analysis, the authors found significant advantages in the domain of accuracy in a group of learners who received clil plus english language formal instruction (fi) concurrently, as compared to a clil-only group. in our study, significance was only found in the accuracy sub-domain of lexicon. however, we must note that, in the emi context of this study, in contrast to clil environments, students did not receive explicit language instruction. these results could be explained by the fact that emi participants were exposed to reading and/or writing different types of words repeatedly throughout lessons and units, which could have meant that they became more familiar with such words and thus committed fewer errors at the end of the course. graham et al. (2018, p. 31) exemplify this possibility as follows: “in a science classroom, vocabulary such as experiment or mass will likely be used across units, allowing for multiple encounters.” our findings suggest that maría del mar sánchez-pérez 390 emi provides opportunities to practice lexicon repetitiously, thus offering multiple exposures to certain vocabulary input. this is less likely to occur in traditional efl contexts where the teaching and learning scope is generally broader; thus similar vocabulary may not be found across units. additionally, emi students are usually more exposed to a wider range of specialized lexicon and complex words than learners of general english courses (wilkinson, 2013). this could explain the significant outperformance of the emi group on the vocabulary qualitative measure, and the nearly-significance advantage in lexical complexity with respect to the efl group in our study. it is noteworthy that our emi sample showed numerous instances of specialized vocabulary use after completing their course, which was not found in the efl group. the absence of such instances in the written output of the efl group was not surprising, since the efl learning context was not a specialized language course (e.g., english for specific purposes [esp] or english for academic purposes [eap]), but a traditional english language course for general communicative purposes. our results corroborate recent research that argues emi to be a fertile ground for english lexical development, including both general and specialized vocabulary (sánchez-pérez, 2021; zhang & pladevall-ballester, 2021). regarding fluency, our results did not show a significant influence of emi on this measure. while this finding does not concur with some studies conducted in clil environments, in which fluency appears as a clearly developed writing area (gené-gil et al., 2015; ruiz de zarobe, 2010), it should be noted that contradictory findings on this aspect have also been found in other clil contexts (e.g., roquet & pérez-vidal, 2015). in our study, the emi group showed a tendency toward writing longer pieces of texts than efl students. the fact that the difference between both groups did not reach a statistically significant level may be due to the relatively short duration of the study (i.e., one semester) or to the specificities of classroom tasks. further research including longer periods of treatment and further research tools, such as classroom observation, would be necessary to dig deeper into this matter. as for syntactic complexity and grammar, our study did not reveal a significant influence of emi on these measures as compared to efl. indeed, although not to a statistically significant level, the efl group outperformed the emi groups’ gains in the use of subordination, accurate grammar, variety of forms and complex structures. these results diverge from some previous research on writing development in clil contexts which reported clil writing advantages at the level of grammar when compared to efl writers (jexenflicker & dalton-puffer, 2010; lasagabaster, 2008; ruiz de zarobe, 2010). our findings suggest that in emi environments, where there is no language instruction, some language guidance and focus on form are needed in order for grammatical and syntactical progress to be seen in higher education learners (ament & pérez-vidal, 2015). the emi group in our study showed virtually no progress as for syntactic complexity and organization, the impact of emi on student english writing proficiency in a spanish undergraduate engineering . . . 391 which could be interpreted as a form of language “fossilization” (wilkinson, 2013, p. 19) derived from the repeated use of the language in their writing with no feedback or instruction for improvement. as wilkinson (2013) claims, if content is taught through an fl with no focus on language, it is unlikely that students will improve the english language skills they already had before engaging in emi, beyond acquiring new specific vocabulary. this resembles very closely what is observed in this study, where significant gains in emi were only found at the level of lexicon, and other writing domains, such as syntactic complexity and organization, remained hardly affected. regarding the latter, the emi groups’ scores even remained disappointing after the treatment. this finding is not surprising, as similar results are found in previous clil research (jexenflicker & dalton-puffer, 2010). if this outcome is observed in contexts where some form of language instruction is provided, improvement could hardly be expected in an emi setting where language instruction is overlooked. another potential reason for the lack of development at the levels of fluency, syntactic complexity, and grammar may be attributed to the nature of the students’ area of knowledge (i.e., engineering). in contrast to other disciplines, such as social sciences or humanities, where students generally need to produce essays, engineering students may not be greatly involved in composition writing, and thus there might be some aspects of the writing competence that are less likely or may take longer to develop. further empirical research into writing in emi in other disciplines should be conducted to corroborate this issue. in view of these results, this study unveils a positive impact of emi on student writing development at the level of lexical accuracy and vocabulary. however, it suggests that the sole exposure to the language does not suffice to improve other writing areas such as syntax, grammar, or organization. the overall assumption that emi contributes to improving english language proficiency can, therefore, be confirmed, only partially, as far as writing is concerned. 6. conclusions this study has sought to shed some light on the empirically unanswered question concerning the potential of emi for english language development in higher education settings. in particular, it has focused on writing, a language skill that has been notably underexplored in emi research (breeze & dafouz, 2017; dafouz, 2020; graham & eslami, 2020). our findings reveal a positive impact of emi on student writing development at the levels of lexical accuracy and vocabulary, as compared to a traditional english language learning environment. however, other writing areas, such as syntax, grammar, organization, and fluency appear unaffected. these results indicate that simply being exposed to the language in an emi setting may not necessarily lead to an enhancement of students’ writing skills in maría del mar sánchez-pérez 392 english, except for their vocabulary. our results, therefore, confirm, only partially, the widespread belief that emi contributes to enhancing english language proficiency as far as writing is concerned. from a pedagogical standpoint, this study suggests that an approach involving integration of content and language in higher education (iclhe) could be more effective than a uniquely content-focused emi model if language skill achievement, beyond specific vocabulary acquisition, is sought within program outcomes at tertiary level (ament & pérez-vidal, 2015; sánchez-pérez, 2021; wilkinson, 2018). the combination of emi with some form of language skill instruction would allow students to benefit from the emi advantages observed in this study, enriching and improving their lexical repertoire. this is because of the potential of explicit language skill instruction to “de-fossilize” other language and writing areas that appear to be unaffected in emi, such as syntax, grammar, cohesion, coherence, paragraphing, and punctuation. this way, a more comprehensive development of students’ linguistic, communicative, and disciplinary competence could be achieved. in order to attain complete advancement of writing abilities in emi programs, we recommend some pedagogical initiatives, such as implementing efl, eap or esp parallel or in embedded programs (mckinley & rose, 2022; sánchezpérez, 2020; unterberger, 2018). another possibility could be fostering collaborative teaching between content and language specialists (lasagabaster, 2018), attending closely to the specific language and literacy needs of the emi course. additionally, specific l2 academic writing programs addressed both to undergraduate and postgraduate students would be highly beneficial for emi learners, something that is hardly found in universities from southern europe, such as spain (dafouz, 2020). university authorities should, therefore, consider such initiatives within their emi policies if the provision of opportunities for students to improve their english language skills is pursued (wilkinson, 2018). notwithstanding the relevance of this study, we must acknowledge some limitations. first, it was conducted in a particular emi context with students from a specific disciplinary area (i.e., engineering). given the highly context-specific nature of emi (rose et al., 2019), and the specificity of the field of knowledge explored in this study, caution should be used when generalizing our results. different findings could be observed in different contexts and/or disciplines (e.g., in more linguistically demanding areas, such as social sciences or humanities). furthermore, our longitudinal analysis was conducted over a relatively short period (i.e., one semester). while this time sufficed to show significant gains in emi students’ writing competence at the levels of lexical accuracy and vocabulary, it is possible that a more extended period might have yielded significant results in other writing areas that may take longer to develop (pérez-vidal, 2007). finally, whilst the study analyzed different aspects of the writing ability, both quantitatively and the impact of emi on student english writing proficiency in a spanish undergraduate engineering . . . 393 qualitatively, we are aware that the analysis of further quantitative and/or qualitative measures could yield different outcomes. therefore, prospective studies should include other emi contexts, address students from different areas of knowledge, include longer periods of treatment, and consider additional writing measures and/or research tools (e.g., classroom observation) to provide further insights into english writing outcomes in the increasing emi higher education contexts. maría del mar sánchez-pérez 394 references aguilar, m., & muñoz, c. 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(2021). discipline-specific language learning outcomes in emi programs in the people’s republic of china. language and education, 35(4), 357-374. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2021.1895827 577 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (4). 2019. 577-579 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.4.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial this final 2019 issue of studies in second language learning and teaching brings together six original empirical studies and two book reviews. in the first paper, marco octavio cancino avila reports the results of a study that investigated the learning opportunities arising in classroom interactions, placing special emphasis on the contribution of teachers’ and learners’ overlapped turns. using conversational analysis, he analyzed extracts from six classes taught by three teachers to adult learners of english as a foreign language in chile. he found that teachers’ skill in appropriately handling learners’ turns that overlapped or directly followed their own had a positive impact on participation and language learning as long as learners were given adequate interactional space (sert, 2015). the second contribution by reza shirani also focuses upon classroom interaction, with the caveat that the main concern is with the effectiveness of different types of corrective feedback (cf). the study explored the relationship between the level of explicitness of input-providing (i.e., recasts) and output-promoting (i.e., prompts) cf moves, and the occurrence of uptake and repair in a foreign language context in iran. using the model of error treatment proposed by lyster and ranta (1997) to analyze transcripts of 36 hours of classroom interactions in three intact classes, the researcher found that prompts tended to be used more frequently than recasts, which stands in contrast to previous findings, but at the same time produced evidence that greater salience of cf is a crucial factor for the occurrence of self-correction, which is in line with prior research. in the third paper, günter faber shifts the focus to the role of individual differences by investigating how the attributions of success and failure of 119 preadolescent german learners of english were a function of their self-concept with respect to the performance of a grammar task (a cloze test). while these attributions did not prove to be predicted by gender or grade level, they were linked to self-concept as well as prior performance, with high-achievers ascribing success to themselves and not being able to account for failure whereas low578 achievers viewing their performance as an outcome of factors beyond their control. subsequently, paweł sobkowiak reported the findings of an investigation into the impact of study abroad on the development of intercultural competence of 12 polish university students. qualitative analysis of data collected by means of semi-structured interviews showed that participants were eager to take advantage of the opportunities created by a sojourn abroad, interacting with other international students, enhancing their cultural sensitivity and boosting their cross-cultural awareness. in the fourth paper in the current issue, alireza mohammadzadeh mohammadabadi, saeed ketabi and dariush nejadansari adopted the ecological framework to investigate factors impacting language teacher cognition (ltc). the data were collected from 62 participants in iran by means of class observation with the help of the protocol developed by nunan (2001) and semi-structured interviews. qualitative analysis drawing on bronfenbrenner’s (1993) ecological systems theory led to the identification of an array of factors impacting ltc at the micro-, meso-, exo-, and macro levels, which indicates that what teachers believe, know and think is shaped by a dynamic constellation of both proximal and distal influences. in the final paper, zarina marie krystle m. abenoja and matthew decoursey investigate the role of drama activities in the context of learning french as a foreign, third language at the tertiary level in hong kong. the analysis of the data collected from 30 learners through lesson observations, reflection journals, written assignments and interviews over the period of one semester showed that the inclusion of drama activities had a positive effect on learning the target language by helping create a relaxing atmosphere and leading to more real-life interactions. still, some students expressed preference for more explicit instruction in french and their limited command of the target language led to frequent reliance on chinese. the issue closes with two book reviews by paweł scheffler and olga trendak, focusing on edited volumes on early instructed second language acquisition and language learning strategy instruction, areas that are important to researchers and practitioners alike. i am confident that all the contributions to the volume will be of interest to our readers and will provide an impetus for more empirical investigations in the near future. in retrospect, this has been another highly successful year for ssllt, which is evidenced by constantly increasing citation indices in major databases, the constantly growing number of high-quality submissions and the resulting standing of the journal in the field. this success would not have been possible without my co-editors, dr. jakub bielak, dr. mariusz kruk and dr. aleksandra wach, who are sparing no effort to process the tens of papers submitted every week. it would also not have happened without our authors who believe that ssllt is a suitable outlet for sharing the results of their research, editors of special issues 579 who succeed in bringing together top scholars in specific domains, and the hundreds of reviewers who feely dedicate their time to ensuring that the papers we publish represent rigorous scholarship. i could not possibly forget as well about our typesetter piotr bajak who has been with us from the get-go and who ensures that each issue is impeccable in terms of its layout, often alerting us to technical issues that may have escaped our attention. i would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to all these individuals and i am counting on their continued support in the future. the entire editorial team is committed to further enhancing the quality of ssllt and making it an even more influential academic resource in 2020. i am fully confident that we have every chance of achieving these goals. mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references bronfenbrenner, u. (1993). the ecology of cognitive development: research models and fugitive findings. in r. h. wozniak & k. w. fischer (eds.), development in context: acting and thinking in specific environments (pp. 344). hillsdale, nj: erlbaum. lyster, r., & ranta, l. (1997). corrective feedback and learner uptake: negotiation of form in communicative classrooms. studies in second language acquisition, 19, 37-66. nunan, d. (2001). task-based language teaching. cambridge: cambridge university press. sert, o. (2015). social interaction and l2 classroom discourse. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: achilleas kostoulas (university of graz, austria) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (pedagogical university of kraków, poland) vol. 8 no. 4 december 2018 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, university of new south wales, sydney) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo) kata csizér (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) robert dekeyser (university of maryland) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (curtin university, perth) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) carol griffiths (fatih university, istanbul) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) sarah mercer (university of graz) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) bonny norton (university of british columbia) terrence odlin (ohio state university) rebecca l. oxford (university of maryland) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (university of pannonia, trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto) elaine tarone (university of minnesota) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) stuart webb (university of western ontario) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2018 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: jakub bielak achilleas kostoulas mariusz kruk aleksandra wach © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: jakub bielak, melanie ellis, achilleas kostoulas, mariusz kruk, aleksandra wach cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · scopus · web of science emerging sources citation index (esci) · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the clarivate analytics (formerly thomson reuters) master journal list. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 8, number 4, december 2018 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ....................................................................715 editorial .........................................................................................719 articles: ali h. al-hoorie – the l2 motivational self system: a meta-analysis ......721 kristina vujnović malivuk, marijan palmović, lovorka zergollern-miletić – automaticity of lexical access and executive control in croatian-german bilinguals and second language learners ........................................ 755 wen-hsing luo – a study of taiwanese university students’ english use, learning goals and attitudes toward english as a lingua franca ....... 775 luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini – digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project .......................795 book reviews: dorota werbińska – review of danuta gabryś-barker’s third age learners of foreign languages........................................................................ 845 reviewers for volume 8/2018 .......................................................... 853 notes to contributors .....................................................................857 715 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors ali h. al-hoorie is assistant professor at the english language institute, jubail industrial college, saudi arabia. he completed his phd degree at the university of nottingham under the supervision of professors zoltán dörnyei and norbert schmitt. he also holds an ma in social science data analysis from essex university. his research interests include motivation theory, research methodology, and complexity. contact details: jubail industrial college, the english language institute, jubail industrial city 31961, saudi arabia (hoorie_a@jic.edu.sa) luca botturi holds a phd in communication sciences from the university of lugano, switzerland. he worked in field and research projects in educational technologies in switzerland, italy, canada, spain and the united states of america. he is currently professor in media in education at the scuola universitaria professionale della svizzera italiana in locarno, switzerland. with the ngo seed he is active in international cooperation as well: he gained field experience in croatia, macedonia, ecuador, mexico and ghana. luca lives in lugano and is a proud father of 6 children. contact details: dipartimento formazione e apprendimento, scuola universitaria professionale della svizzera italiana (supsi), piazza san francesco 19, ch-6600 locarno, switzerland (luca.botturi@supsi.ch) daniela kappler graduated in 2001 from the university ca’ foscari of venice, italy, in asian languages and literature, with a specialization in modern language didactics. she spent an academic year in china, a volunteering period in russia and she worked for many years at an ngo in italy. daniela kappler grew up bilingual (italian and german) and has two (multilingual) daughters. she has had a long career in language and intercultural education and research, as well as in the development of teaching and learning materials. contact details: dipartimento formazione e apprendimento, scuola universitaria professionale della svizzera italiana (supsi), piazza san francesco 19, ch-6600 locarno, switzerland (daniela.kappler@supsi.ch) 716 lucio negrini holds a bachelor in communication sciences from università della svizzera italiana, lugano, switzerland, and a master and a phd in education from the university of fribourg, switzerland. he was an active researcher at the competence centre for vocation education leading house “qualität der beruflichen bildung” and at the centre for early education at the university of fribourg. lucio negrini is currently senior teacher-researcher at scuola universitaria professionale della svizzera italiana, locarno, switzerland, where he is head of the lab for technologies and media in education. contact details: dipartimento formazione e apprendimento, scuola universitaria professionale della svizzera italiana (supsi), piazza san francesco 19, ch-6600 locarno, switzerland (lucio.negrini@supsi.ch) marijan palmović is associate professor at the department of speech and language pathology at the university of zagreb, croatia. his research interests lie in neurolinguistics and cognitive neuroscience. contact details: laboratory for psycholinguistic research, borongajska cesta 83h, 10000 zagreb, croatia (marijan.palmovic@erf.hr) kristina vujnović malivuk is a phd student in linguistic cognitive neuroscience at the university of zagreb, croatia. her research is related to bilingualism and second language learning. she graduated from the university of zagreb, having completed the studies of psychology, as well as the studies of english and spanish languages and literatures. contact details: ivana gorana kovačića 17a, 10410 velika gorica, croatia (krisvujnov ic@yahoo.com) wen-hsing luo received her phd from ontario institute for studies in education at the university of toronto (oise/u of t), canada. currently, she is associate professor with the department of english instruction at national tsing hua university, taiwan. her research interests include english as a lingua franca, native english-speaking teacher (nest) and non-nest studies, and english teacher education and professional development. contact details: department of english instruction, national tsing hua university (nanda campus), 521 nanda rd. hsinchu city, 30014, taiwan (wluo@mail.nd.nthu.edu.tw) dorota werbińska is associate professor in the institute of modern languages at pomeranian university in słupsk, poland. a former teacher, a teacher trainer, and an in-service teacher educator, she is author of 4 books on modern language teachers and over 60 articles, book chapters, and reviews published nationally and 717 internationally. her main academic interests are within the field of language teacher education, both pre-service and in-service, in particular language teacher identity, teacher professional development, and qualitative research in applied linguistics. contact details: pomeranian university in słupsk, institute of modern languages, ul. słowiańska 8, 76-200 słupsk, poland (dorota.werbinska@apsl.edu.pl) lovorka zergollern-miletić is associate professor at the faculty of teacher education, university of zagreb, croatia. her main interests are language teaching and learning, syntax and cultural studies. contact details: faculty of teacher education, savska 77, 10000 zagreb, croatia (l.zergollern-miletic@ufzg.hr) 347 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (2). 2015. 347-351 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.2.8 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book reviews social dimensions of autonomy in language learning editor: garold murray publisher: palgrave macmillan, 2014 isbn: 9781137290236 pages: 292 “there is only one way to learn,” the alchemist answered, “it’s through action. everything you need to know you have learned through your journey . . .” (coehlo, 2006, p. 120). this quote, taken from the end of the shepherd boy’s journey, reflects the nature of learning and portrays the spirit of social dimensions of autonomy in language learning. just as the shepherd boy in the alchemist learns to realize his dreams both on his own strength and through dependence on others, garold murray and the other contributors illustrate the journey of autonomy in language learning within the interdependence-independence interplay. in this volume, the contributors draw attention to the fact that in the journey towards understanding and mastery, language learning neither occurs at one individual moment (o’leary, chapter 2) nor in one specific location, such as in self-access centers (murray, chapter 5 and palfreyman, chapter 10), but rather encompasses multiple places, people and resources. the journey also involves an affective response towards the language and the learning environment. this holistic, affective, transformative journey from novice to experienced 348 language learner is complex, dynamic and unique to each individual, and it is this complexity that this collection captures. using socially oriented theoretical perspectives, such as ecological, complexity, social constructivist and sociocultural frameworks, the studies contained in this volume bring together theory, research and practice in the field of autonomy in language learning, highlighting its socially situated nature. the aim of social dimensions of autonomy in language learning is to shed light on how learner autonomy is socially mediated. stemming from a symposium with the same name, which took place at the international association of applied linguistics (aila) 2011 world congress in beijing, this collection of papers differs from previous research on autonomy in that it challenges the idea of autonomy being a construct primarily characterized by a set of capacities pertaining to the individual. these papers shift the view from independence of learners to their interdependence with social contexts and other individuals. the book is organized into three distinct sections, each addressing a different dimension of language learner autonomy: the emotional, the spatial, and the political. at first, i was unsure how language learner autonomy could be encapsulated by such categories; however, the theme of autonomy as a socially mediated construct weaves very clearly throughout the diverse studies within these three subdivisions. the seminal definition of autonomy as “taking charge of one’s own learning” (holec, 1981, p. 3) provides the foundation for social dimensions of autonomy in language learning; however, the various researchers in this collection have then added three further important nuances to this definition. firstly, benson (2001, p. 87) suggests that personal control over the cognitive processes may be “the most fundamental level” in measuring and/or assessing autonomy because it precedes observable learning management behavior. he identifies three psychological categories of autonomy, namely: attention, reflection, and metacognitive knowledge. in chapter 2, o’leary modifies benson’s definition further in recognition of the fact that there must also be a willingness from the learner to take responsibility for the emotional aspects of the learning process (ushioda, 1996). secondly, the collection draws attention to the fact that autonomy emerges from the individual’s interaction with other components of the environment (little, 2001). however, this not only refers to environmental factors and affordances but also to other people: “because we are social beings our independence is always balanced by our dependence; our essential condition is one of interdependence” (in the words of little, as cited by murray in the introduction). in this way, autonomy can be thought of as forming a complex system; autonomy emerges from the complex interaction of these multiple components. the contributions argue that autonomy fundamentally exists symbioti349 cally with social interaction. thirdly, paiva in chapter 13 adds layers to the metaphorical onion of autonomy by explaining that a learner is not only in charge of their own learning but rather continues to reevaluate his/her own motivation, abilities, beliefs, as well as the learning surroundings, and proceeds accordingly. paiva (2006) explains that autonomy is a complex socio-cognitive system, subject to internal and external constraints, which manifests itself in different degrees of independence and control of one’s learning process. it involves capacities, abilities, attitudes, willingness, decision-making, choices, planning, actions and assessment either as a language learner or as a communicator inside or outside of the classroom. as a complex system it is dynamic, chaotic, unpredictable, non-linear, open, self-organizing, and sensitive to initial conditions and feedback. (pp. 88-89) in the section addressing the emotional dimension of autonomy, there are three chapters which together show the need for the recognition of emotions, specifically empathy and trust, within language learning. o’leary focuses on learners’ construction of learning, how they view their role in the process and their capacity to control their own learning at the university level (chapter 2). in chapter 3, lewis presents autonomy as a set of competencies regarding human sociality, including empathy, altruism and respect for other language learners, exemplified by messages posted in an online language course. finally, yashima analyzes self-determination theory in respect to intrinsic motivation and joy derived from speaking the foreign language (chapter 4). in their own ways, each chapter demonstrates the roles of freedom and choice in language learning autonomy. in the section addressing the spatial dimension of autonomy, there are four chapters which together show the roles of learning spaces, whether physical or virtual, as the researchers acknowledge that language learning takes place within metaphorical, virtual, as well as physical spaces. communities of practice can form and take place online, through extracurricular programs, or within the classroom itself. murray, fujishima and uzuka draw light to learning experiences within a social learning space dedicated to language learning (chapter 5). both chik and breidback (chapter 6) and murphy (chapter 7) investigate the crosscultural boundaries of virtual spaces and how autonomous learning involves both choosing to participate and not to participate in given tasks. mideros and carter exemplify the usage of a virtual space to enhance the time spent within the classical physical classroom with regards to listening comprehension (chapter 8). in the section addressing the political dimension of autonomy, there are four chapters which together provide the initial framework for interpreting language learning experiences, dealing with nonlinear, dynamic systems, which focus on dynamicity, connection, change, and adaptation. as the circumstances in 350 which the language learner finds him/herself are constantly changing, they can forever be reinterpreted. sade notes that the more interaction of multiple elements, the more complexity, resulting in the emergence of new patterns and the collection being much more than the sum of its parts (chapter 9). learners should be able to speak as themselves, especially when teachers recognize their diversity and unique personal histories. palfreyman acknowledges that the discursive resources, how attitudes and beliefs are proliferated within a community, either promote or demote the importance of language learning within a particular group (chapter 10), which congruently affects the language learner’s choices and opinions about learning progression. in the next chapter, zaragoza illustrates how socioeconomic status also plays a key role in language learning and the value placed upon this learning (chapter 11), which can in turn influence individual learning goals. the way in which one views one’s future self and how the language may be utilized directly influences the motivation and beliefs of the language learner, along with his/her perceived ability to direct his/her own learning. one area of further research is explored by barfield, who considers the role of involvement in local professional development and collaborative teaching communities and how the dominant knowledge base; that is publishing in english, having international researchers and positioning towards a global readership; potentially limit the multi-vocality and voice of others (chapter 12). this topic of written democracy directly relates to the publication of volumes such as social dimensions of autonomy in language learning since many teacher-researchers fear that they have nothing pertinent to contribute. it is, however, through narrative approaches and positioning themselves as a teacher first and a theorist second (nix, barfield, irie, & stewart, 2011) that they can give voice to what they are observing first-hand in the classroom. the principles of social equality apply both to the autonomous language learner and to the language researcher. this volume is suited for tertiary-level courses in autonomy, language teaching and language acquisition, as well as for researchers and practitioners interested in these fields. the book has also been designed to give voice to those who are in the field of teaching and who desire to enable students to envision their future l2 selves, in order that they may directly influence their own learning process. my impression of this volume is that it is very practical for both researchers as well as teaching professionals who are interested in enabling students to set their own goals and implement them. i personally enjoyed reading the volume for three particular reasons. first, i enjoyed reading what teacherresearchers write about their own teaching experiences through narratives, case studies and action research, and about how they relate what they are doing in the classroom to the social mediation of autonomy. second, this volume pro351 vides several methods which, as a teacher, i can employ to meet my goal of encouraging language learning and increasing the autonomy of my language learners so that they can recognize the opportunities (affordances) they have to learn and utilize the language to imagine their future l2 selves using this language. third, the book enabled me, as a researcher, to reflect on how autonomy is conceptualized in theoretical terms ensuring a situated, complex and dynamic view of the construct, which in turn caused me to think more deeply about the diversity of approaches to researching autonomy in this light, as reflected by the multiple theoretical viewpoints employed in this volume. i would highly recommend this collection. it offers a rich overarching history of language learner autonomy and presents a plethora of original and diverse research on the construct from new, fresh perspectives. one is invited along on the journey to uncover socially mediated autonomy, moving from independence to interdependence. in social dimensions of autonomy in language learning, researchers unveil the emotional, spatial and political dimensions, recognizing that language learning, and autonomy, are not bound to a specific location or space and are fundamentally social undertakings. reviewed by michelle k. gilluly university of graz, austria michelle.gilluly@gmail.com references benson, p. (2001). teaching and researching autonomy in language learning. harlow: pearson education. coehlo, p. (2006). the alchemist. london: harper collins holec, h. (1981). autonomy and foreign language learning. oxford: pergamon. little, d. (2001). we’re all in it together: exploring the interdependence of teacher and learner autonomy. in l. karlsson, f. kjisik, & j. nordlund (eds.), all together now (pp. 45-56). helsinki: helsinki university language centre. nix, m., barfield, a., irie, k., & stewart, a. (2011, august). local play global stop autonomy rewind questions write. workshop given at 16th world congress of applied linguistics (aila 2011), beijing, china. paiva, v. l. m. de o. (2006). autonomia e complexidade. linguagem e ensino, 9(1), 77-127. ushioda, e. (1996). learner autonomy 5: the role of motivation. dublin: authentik. 11 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (1). 2015. 11-12 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.1.1 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial with the present issue, studies in second language learning and teaching enters the fifth year of its existence, a year that has already started on a very positive note as the journal has just been included in the european reference index for the humanities (erih plus). this, as well as the fact that ssllt has been indexed or abstracted in other prestigious databases, constitutes tangible proof of the growing recognition that it has been gaining in the field. it is also likely to contribute to a considerable increase in the number of citations, something that we need really badly if we want to have the journal listed by the thomson reuters master journal list. this is certainly a goal that we will be vigorously pursuing and i am confident that we will be able to accomplish it in the near future. obviously, the number of citations depends in the main on the quality of the papers published because only the best ones stand the chance of being referred to by other specialists, particularly those who routinely publish their work in the most prestigious journals in the field. we are doing our best to ensure the highest possible quality of the papers that appear in ssllt and one way to do it is to invite renowned scholars as guest editors of thematic issues. this is exactly what is going to happen this year since sarah mercer and stephen ryan have kindly agreed to put together two issues of the journal which will include papers based on presentations delivered during the first conference on psychology and language learning, which was held in graz in may, 2014. the line-up of contributors to these two issues is really impressive and they will surely be a real treat for our readers. this is by no means to suggest that the papers included in the regular editions are any less valuable or engaging, as amply demonstrated by the present one. this issue of ssllt includes seven papers, four of which are reports of the findings of original empirical studies, and the other three are either theoretical in nature or aim to provide useful guidelines for researchers. it opens with a contribution by adriana biedroń, who offers a state-of-the-art overview of research into foreign language aptitude from the perspective of neuroscience, 12 superbly showing how the latest developments in this area have extended our understanding of linguistic talent with respect to phonology, lexis and morphosyntax as well as outlining the directions for future empirical investigations. the next two papers present the results of studies that have sought to examine the role of anxiety in language learning. in the first of them, yinxing jin, kees de bot and merel keijzer provide evidence for a negative, albeit weak, relationship between anxiety and proficiency in a foreign language, both overall and with respect to specific skills, as well as fluctuations in the level of anxiety, not only over time but also with regard to a specific target language. in the other, zhongshe lu and meihua liu explore the relationships between foreign language reading anxiety, the use of reading strategies and comprehension performance in the case of a respectable sample of tertiary level chinese students, offering insights into the ways in which anxiety mediates attainment and is itself moderated by other factors. in the following contribution, thomas lockley shows that participation in a content and language integrated course in history contributed to an increase in the level of international posture among japanese students as well as enhancing their willingness to communicate in a second language. subsequently, simone e. pfenninger reports the findings of a quasi-experimental study which demonstrated that the use of specifically-designed computer software over the period of three months can have a beneficial effect on the development of phonological, morphological and semantic abilities in a second and third language. for the first time in the history of ssllt, the last two contributions deal with the application of statistics in sla research, with jan vanhove focusing on the analysis of data yielded during randomized controlled interventions, and françois pichette, sébastien béland, shahab jolani and justyna leśniewska offering useful guideless on how to handle missing binary data. these two papers are in my opinion particularly valuable as statistics is not something that many of us feel very comfortable with and sound advice in this area is always more than welcome. all in all, i am convinced that all of these papers will appeal to ssllt readers, who will be able to use them as important points of reference or simply sources of inspiration for their own research. mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl 697 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (4). 2022. 697-719 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.4.8 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt models as written corrective feedback: effects on young l2 learners’ fluency in digital writing from product and process perspectives raquel criado university of murcia, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0444-3901 rcriado@um.es aitor garcés-manzanera university of murcia, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1789-9046 aitor.garces@um.es luke plonsky northern arizona university, flagstaff, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5791-1839 luke.plonsky@nau.edu abstract this study was motivated by truscott’s (1996, 2004) scarcely empirically tested claims that written corrective feedback (wcf) processing hinders fluency in subsequent rewriting owing to learners’ purposeful avoidance of making mistakes by composing shorter texts at a higher speed. it examined the writing fluency of the texts produced by eighteen 10-11-year-old l2 english children in a digital environment. they were divided into a feedback (n = 10) and a self-correction group (n = 8). both groups engaged in a three-stage task: writing, comparison of their texts with a model or self-editing as appropriate, and rewriting. fluency was analyzed via five product/offline and five process/online measures. the texts and writing behaviors were recorded with inputlog 8.0. the results partially support truscott’s claims. the feedback group improved their fluency in all the ten measures. however, the selfraquel criado, aitor garcés-manzanera, luke plonsky 698 editing group showed higher fluency than the feedback group in seven of the ten measures, with the corresponding hedge’s effect sizes between groups ranging from small to large. the study enlightens our knowledge of young learners’ writing fluency and supports adopting a multidimensional approach to understand the complex and multi-faceted nature of fluency as mediated by wcf processing. keywords: written corrective feedback; models; fluency; l2 writing; young learners 1. introduction in 1996, truscott claimed that grammar correction was ineffective and harmful since “students shorten and simplify their writing in order to avoid corrections” (p. 355). to support his controversial claim, he cited semke’s (1984) study, in which fluency was measured as the number of words written in a second language (l2) tenminute timed task. the texts written by the group who were provided with content comments were significantly more fluent than those produced by the groups who received indirect feedback, direct feedback, or direct feedback and content comments. in 2004, truscott criticized chandler’s (2003) work, whose second study revealed that students increased their speed fluency and improved their accuracy in five identical essays after processing direct and indirect written corrective feedback (wcf). truscott claimed again that such results were due to students’ purposeful avoidance of making mistakes. he also asserted that such avoidance resulted in simplified texts written at a higher speed than complex ones. despite the abundant research on wcf (see karim & nassaji, 2020, for a recent review), truscott’s claims about the negative effect of wcf on fluency have virtually gone overlooked (as noted by ekanayaka & ellis, 2020). hence, further investigation is justified due to the theoretical and applied relevance of broadening our understanding of the role of wcf in l2 writing. regarding the study of fluency in writing, over the last two decades there has been an interest in a process-oriented approach to l2 writing research focused on the identification and measurement of online, directly observable behaviors of l2 writers to infer the underlying cognitive processes in writing – planning, translation or linguistic encoding, or revision (e.g., révész et al., 2017). in this context, computer keystroke logging programs such as inputlog unobtrusively record learners’ number, length and location of pauses, deleted and inserted characters, and mouse clicks. yet, the majority of previous digital l2 writing research has been conducted with adults (but see garcés-manzanera, 2021, for a study with children). the present study attempts to contribute empirically and pedagogically to previous work by shedding light on the relationship between wcf and young l2 models as written corrective feedback: effects on young l2 learners’ fluency in digital writing from . . . 699 learners’ fluency in digital writing. fluency was considered within a multidimensional approach (van waes & leijten, 2015), that is, from both perspectives of the product or final text and of the underlying composing processes. as the wcf technique, we selected models, which have often been used with child participants in recent years (coyle et al., 2018; lázaro-ibarrola, 2021). empirically, the evidence obtained about young learners’ fluency in digital writing would aid to develop our understanding of feedback processing by focusing on a population hitherto unexplored. pedagogically, such an understanding would help teachers’ decision making concerning the implementation of models as wcf when teaching young learners. 2. literature review 2.1. conceptualizing writing fluency: product and process perspectives there is theoretical and empirical consensus that complexity, accuracy, and fluency (caf) represent the fundamental dimensions of the constructs of l2 proficiency and performance (housen & kuiken, 2009). in their classical review of written caf measures, wolfe-quintero et al. (1998) contributed three widespread perspectives to the definition of writing fluency, namely: temporal, speed-based, and cognitive. regarding the temporal dimension, they stated that fluency is “a measure of the sheer number of words or structural units a writer is able to include in their writing within a particular period of time” (p. 14). the same authors added speed as a key characteristic of fluency, which they defined as “the rapid production of language” (p. 117). for wolfe quintero et al., fluency is mostly related to the learners’ control in accessing their current language knowledge. thus, as a cognitive construct, fluency entails the “efficient access to a rich linguistic knowledge base and the (equally efficient) retrieval of propositions for utterances” (van gelderen & oostdam, 2002, p. 241) that are necessary in the encoding of ideas that will be converted to linguistic forms. the temporal and speed-based perspectives are helpful to describe fluency in the final written product. however, they do not refer to the writing actions and processes that contribute to the generation of that final text. in this respect, we will draw on kellogg’s model of cognitive processes of l1 writing (kellogg, 1996), similar to most previous studies (e.g., michel et al., 2020; mohsen, 2021; révész et al., 2017). kellogg expanded hayes and flower’s (1980) classical three-process model of: 1) planning ideas, 2) translation of such ideas into written sentences (through grammatical, phonological, and orthographic processing) and 3) the monitoring of ideas and of previously produced text. kellogg subdivided monitoring into reading and editing and added two motor processes: programming and execution. similar to hayes and flower, he conceived raquel criado, aitor garcés-manzanera, luke plonsky 700 the overall process of writing as the sum of recursive and interactive operations of planning, sentence generation, and idea and text monitoring. kellogg’s model also specified the demands of the writing processes on the three components of working memory distinguished by baddeley (1986): the central executive, phonological loop, and visuo-spatial sketchpad. in kellogg’s (1996) model, fluency in writing is affected in different ways (regardless of the time available for the writing task), all of which are mediated by the limited resources of working memory. for example, concerning inexperienced l2 writers, whose profile corresponds to that of the participants in this study, lack of language proficiency is a crucial factor (abdel latif, 2009; palviainen et al., 2012). since they have not sufficiently proceduralized their language knowledge, their attentional resources will tend to focus on local narrow problems (spelling, grammar, etc.) at the expense of higher-level text features (discourse, cohesion, coherence, etc.), speed of production (fluency), and other writing processes such as revision and planning (schoonen et al., 2009). 2.2. analyzing writing fluency: product and process measures the consideration of fluency as one dimension of the caf tripartite framework has resulted in writing fluency measures focused on the final outcome or product. for instance, kellogg’s (1990) pioneering study analyzed fluency by using the total number of words in timed writing, total number of words per minute in composing/execution time (without initial planning time), and total number of words in total writing time (composing/execution time plus initial planning time). in contrast, wolfe-quintero et al. (1998) concluded that the most reliable written caf measures were based on the length of production units: t-unit length, error-free t-unit length, and clause length. however, relying on all these static, offline, text-based product measures to portray fluency has been criticized given that they do not consider the “real-time, on-line production processes” (stevenson, 2005, p. 135) that allow writers to devise a text more fluently (chenoweth & hayes, 2001). thus, a multidimensional approach to studying l2 writing fluency, considering both product and process measures, is preferable (van waes & leijten, 2015). for example, chenoweth and hayes (2001) operationalized fluency in the traditional way, that is, as words per minute. they also included pause and revision bursts, which respectively measure the number of words occurring between pauses and revisions. previous research (chenoweth & hayes, 2001; mohsen, 2021; palviainen et al., 2012; van waes & leijten, 2015, etc.) has characterized fluent writing from process and product perspectives. l1 and l2 fluent writers engage in fewer pauses at linguistic boundaries (words and clauses) and their pausing time is models as written corrective feedback: effects on young l2 learners’ fluency in digital writing from . . . 701 more reduced. fluent writers also make use of fewer large revisions focused on low-order processes (such as lexical selection, grammar or spelling choices), but they deal with more extensive revisions for discourse-based elements. finally, fluent writers also display a higher production rate. in l2 digital writing, fluency has been examined primarily with adults and in relation to text quality and task-related factors. task complexity operationalized as the provision versus no provision of content (ideas) did not involve any significant effects on fluency (révész et al., 2017), with mixed findings in the case of directing learners to include content from source materials (integrated tasks) or making them use their own resources (independent tasks; e.g., barkaoui, 2019; michel et al., 2020). different indices of fluency have been found to be predictors of text quality (burst and fluency during burst in spelman miller et al., 2008; characters per p-burst and p-burst processing time in mohsen, 2021, etc.). also, the effects of two planning techniques (i.e., note-taking versus freewriting) on l1 german and l2 english writing fluency were examined in breuer’s (2019) small-scale study. the descriptive tendencies showed that freewriting enhanced the efficacy of writing fluency for both languages. 2.3. models as wcf: theoretical and empirical support models are native or native-like texts adapted to the learners’ age and proficiency level (coyle et al., 2018). the cognitive rationale for using models as a feedback strategy is linked to schmidt’s noticing hypothesis (2001) and swain’s output hypothesis (1995). when learners produce oral or written output in the target language, they can notice gaps in their interlanguages (a requisite for l2 learning, according to the noticing hypothesis). this noticing acts a “primer” which prepares them to optimize their subsequent use of models. by comparing the model with their own compositions, l2 writers might engage in a deeper cognitive comparison of the vocabulary, grammar, spelling, discursive and content features of both texts than that resulting from reading highlighted and/or errors corrected by their teachers (coyle & roca de larios, 2020). past research with models has examined adults (hanaoka, 2007), adolescents (garcía-mayo & labandibar, 2017; kang, 2020; martínez-esteban & roca de larios, 2010), and children (cánovas guirao, 2018; cánovas guirao et al., 2015; coyle et al., 2018; lázaro-ibarrola, 2021; luquin & garcía-mayo, 2021; roothooft et al., 2022). models have been implemented in a three-stage writing sequence: 1) a writing stage where participants are also pushed to notice the linguistic features they cannot express or have difficulties with (problematic features noticed); 2) a comparison stage of their own texts with a model text; and 3) a rewriting stage where participants try to include the features noticed in the raquel criado, aitor garcés-manzanera, luke plonsky 702 previous stage into their own texts. a general finding from the previous body of work is that participants tend to focus on lexical and content items. they also manage to incorporate a reasonable number of features noticed into their final drafts, which become more accurate and cohesive than their initial ones and those of the learners who self-edited their own texts without the aid of models. several reasons account for selecting models to examine the effects of wcf on fluency in this study. first, as previously seen, recent wcf works using this technique have often focused on children, the same age group as that of our participants. second, as shown in the aforementioned results of past research, models have emerged as a promising, student-centered and discoursebased alternative to traditional, teacher-guided options focused on isolated errors such as direct and indirect wcf (lázaro-ibarrola, 2021). third, from a pedagogical angle, offering a single model text to a whole class is considerably more manageable to handle by a teacher than the time-consuming process of offering individual direct or indirect wcf to each student (coyle & roca de larios, 2020). fourth, from a cognitive perspective, using models to test their effects on fluency could be justified by parallelism with skehan’s (2009) application of levelt’s (1989) model of l1 speech production to l2 caf oral performance. as stated above, contrary to direct and indirect wcf, models offer a large array of lexical-, mechanics-, syntacticand discursive-related alternatives to their own original choices in the initial texts that students are pushed to notice in the comparison or wcf processing phase, and which, ideally, they should incorporate as much as possible in their rewritten texts. the effects of processing models could arguably resemble those established by skehan for a planning stage. basically, it is expected that the priming of the lexical features in the comparison phase would ease the pressure exercised on kellogg’s (1996) translation process, or levelt’s (1989) formulator stage for speaking in the rewriting session. like a planning stage in oral language, such priming would likely allow the lexical forms to be more easily and effectively retrieved from long-term memory to working memory in the rewriting phase. hence, kellogg’s execution process (or levelt’s articulator stage) would seem to benefit too. thus, processing models would tend to enhance or, at least, not harm learners’ fluency, which renders them a potentially suitable wcf technique to be applied in the current study. 2.4. the relationship between wcf and writing fluency: empirical evidence several studies have investigated the effects of wcf on learners’ fluency, viewed from a product perspective in hand-written texts. only two studies explicitly alluded to truscott’s (1996, 2004) claims (chandler, 2003, and ekanayaka & ellis, 2020). young learners were examined in cánovas guirao (2018), lázaro-ibarrola models as written corrective feedback: effects on young l2 learners’ fluency in digital writing from . . . 703 (2021) and roothooft et al. (2022). chandler (2003), ekanayaka and ellis (2020) and kim et al. (2022) studied university students, while martínez-esteban and roca de larios (2010) investigated secondary-school students, and sánchez (2019) examined both university and secondary-school students. individual and collaborative writing were studied in lázaro-ibarrola (2021) as well as martínez-esteban and roca de larios (2010), while collaborative writing alone was analyzed in cánovas guirao (2018) and kim et al. (2022). the remaining studies focused on individual writing. chandler’s (2003) first reported study resorted to indirect wcf, ekanayaka and ellis (2020) used direct, semi-focused wcf, synchronous indirect wcf was selected by kim et al. (2022), while chandler’s (2003) second study and sánchez (2019) drew upon both direct and indirect wcf. cánovas guirao (2018), lázaro-ibarrola (2021) and martínez-esteban and roca de larios (2010) used models, which were also employed by roothooft et al. (2022) together with direct wcf. crucial methodological issues in these studies are worth mentioning: 1. only four works included control or comparison groups (study 1 in chandler, 2003; ekanayaka & ellis, 2020; kim et al., 2022; sánchez, 2019). 2. the sample sizes were generally small, ranging from five individual writers and six pairs in martínez-esteban and roca de larios (2010) to ekanayaka and ellis’ (2020) thirty participants in one wcf group and thirty-one writers in both the control and the second wcf groups. six studies reported inferential statistics (chandler, 2003; ekanayaka & ellis, 2020; kim et al., 2022; lázaro-ibarrola, 2021; roothooft et al., 2022; sánchez, 2019), whose results may not be stable due to the small samples that were used. 3. importantly, the measurement of the fluency of the final text greatly differed: a) frequency counts, either the raw number of words in untimed collaborative writing (cánovas guirao, 2018), or in timed writing such as total number of words in ten minutes (ekanayaka & ellis, 2020), or in twenty minutes (roothooft et al., 2022); also, the number of t-units in 25 minutes (kim et al., 2022) and total number of words, the proportion of t-units and number of clauses per text in 30 and 20 minutes respectively for the collaborative and the individual groups (lázaro-ibarrola, 2021); b) temporal ratios such as words and syllables per minute in untimed writing (sánchez, 2019); c) a speed perspective with minutes per 100 words (chandler, 2003); and d) description of mean writing minutes and of words written (martínez-esteban & roca de larios, 2010). a complex and inconclusive picture of the effects of wcf on fluency from a product perspective emerges from previous studies, which generally seem to support truscott’s (1996) claim for word count regardless of the type of feedback. raquel criado, aitor garcés-manzanera, luke plonsky 704 kim et al.’s (2022) results pointed to a negative effect of synchronous indirect wcf on the number of t-units. conversely, in terms of descriptive statistics, ekanayaka and ellis (2020) reported that the two wcf groups (with and without revision) and the control group augmented their fluency from the first to the second task. a detrimental effect of models was found for text length in lázaroibarrola’s (2021) individually rewritten texts as opposed to the collaborative ones, although without statistically significant differences within groups. the same pattern emerged in the proportion of t-units and number of clauses per text. however, roothooft et al.’s (2022) individually written texts in the model group slightly increased their word count as opposed to the direct wcf texts, without any significant differences between groups. contrary to lázaro-ibarrola’s (2021) results for collaborative writing, the non-model instruction group in cánovas guirao (2018) slightly decreased the length of their rewritten texts. a mixed pattern appears in those studies which examined fluency with the remaining measures previously mentioned in point 3 above. after processing models, martínez-esteban and roca de larios’ (2010) participants displayed higher fluency numbers in their rewritten texts, especially in collaborative writing. sánchez’s (2019) both proficiency level students who did not either receive any direct or indirect wcf or self-corrected their texts and the low-proficiency students in the self-correction group significantly improved their fluency. however, chandler (2003) reported that all the groups in her two studies significantly increased their fluency from their first to their fifth assignments. 3. the study 3.1. research questions the diversity of the previous findings together with the aforementioned methodological differences in the limited number of available studies makes it difficult to reach firm conclusions about potential effects of wcf on fluency. likewise, there are no previous studies which have jointly examined whether truscott’s claims of a negative effect of direct and indirect wcf on fluency regarded as text length (truscott, 1996) and of increased speed fluency in writing after processing the same wcf types (truscott, 2004) are complied with or not when the wcf technique applied is models. finally, to the best of our knowledge, no past studies within a computer-mediated environment have examined l2 children’s composing processes in general and fluency in particular. therefore, further research on the role of wcf in young learners’ writing fluency is justified and it is also warranted to look at these effects from product and process perspectives. in an attempt to fill the gaps in previous research on the effects of wcf on fluency, our study was guided by two research questions: models as written corrective feedback: effects on young l2 learners’ fluency in digital writing from . . . 705 1) to what extent does wcf in the form of a model text affect l2 english children’s writing fluency as measured by product indices? 2) to what extent does wcf in the form of a model text affect l2 english children’s writing fluency as measured by process indices? 3.2. method 3.2.1. participants and context the participants were 18 children who belonged to an intact 5th grade class in spanish primary education. they were aged 10 to 11 (m = 10.10; sd = 0.31). they were attending a spanish semi-private school where they received 3 weekly hours in the efl subject. the teacher rated their proficiency level as not higher than the a1 level following the council of europe (2001). ten children were randomly assigned to the feedback group, and 8 of them to the self-editing group. as verified by the interkey-stroke interval measure provided by inputlog 8.0 (leijten & van waes, 2013), defined as the mean number of milliseconds that happen between two characters of a word, both groups had a similar mean typing speed when composing their initial texts, with a similar high individual variability too: m = 210.67, sd = 40.69 in the feedback group and m = 192.27, sd = 39.15 in the selfediting group. the effect size between groups was small (g = 0.44). 3.2.2. data collection a one-cycle data collection procedure with three stages was implemented. in stage 1, the children received garcía hernández et al.’s (2017, p. 22) six-picture sequential prompt, which these authors had used with young learners too. our participants were asked to type the underlying story (a scientist who tries a new potion and turns into a cat, which is attacked by the scientist’s dog). inputlog 8.0 had been installed on their computers for recording and analyzing their texts, keypresses, pausing time plus characters inserted and deleted in revisions. due to class-time restrictions, they had a maximum of thirty minutes to complete the task. in stage 2, twenty-four hours after stage 1, the feedback group had access to their initial texts on the computer screen and were provided with coyle et al.’s (2018) model text based on the six-picture story task. they were also given a prompt which directed them to write the differences between the model and their own text. the self-editing group accessed their initial texts on the computer screen too. they were given a prompt for self-editing their own compositions without the model and asked to revise their text in order to improve it. the time allotted to stage 2 was sixty minutes, which was deemed to be a reasonable time frame to follow cánovas guirao’s (2018) recommendation of allowing sufficient raquel criado, aitor garcés-manzanera, luke plonsky 706 time to optimize feedback processing. both the task and the two prompts were printed. stage 3 took place four days after stage 2. the two groups were asked to write the same six-picture story under identical conditions to those of stage 1. 3.2.3. fluency measures our approach to fluency was multidimensional (van waes & leijten, 2015), thus covering both product and process perspectives. the selection of the fluency measures that were used in the present study addressed the following considerations: · the wide array of measures used in previous research, with the resulting difficulty in the comparability of findings; · the absence of any standardized criterion to discriminate among each product and process measure and/or to ensure avoidance of multicollinearity; · the absence of any previous studies which had examined fluency from a process-oriented perspective in l2 children. we finally opted for ten fluency measures: five productand five process-oriented ones. we included word-based measures as they are abundant in the literature. however, we also resorted to character-based measures since they take the lengths of words into account (palviainen et al., 2012). out of the ten measures, six were automatically retrieved from inputlog: word count, words per minute, characters per minute, linear fluency i, linear fluency ii and product/process ratio. our product measures of fluency were as follows: · word count. according to wolfe-quintero et al. (1998), although computing the number of words in timed writing (as is our case; see section 3.2.2.) allows the comparison of participants’ fluency within the same study, these authors maintain that “the results are meaningless in comparison with other populations or across different tasks” (p. 10). abdel latif (2009, 2013) adds that text quantity may depend on writers’ pre-task decisions about the number of words, lines or paragraphs their text will comprise or their familiarity with the topic. we understand all these cautionary points but decided to include raw word count to test truscott’s (1996) claim that wcf harms fluency from a text-length perspective (p. 355), by resorting to models as the wcf technique. · words per minute. abdel latif (2009) argues that this traditional measure is not valid given that writing fewer words per minute can be due to writers’ negative attitude towards writing or the reflective nature of a writer rather than lack of fluency. however, the words per minute index allows the homogenization of the measurement of fluency regardless of whether the writing task is timed or untimed and whether the students use the full time models as written corrective feedback: effects on young l2 learners’ fluency in digital writing from . . . 707 they have available. it is calculated by dividing the total number of words produced in the final text (i.e., without including deleted words in revisions) by the total number of minutes spent on composing the written task. · characters per minute. it computes the number of characters written per minute in the final text, including spaces (van waes & leijten, 2015). · minutes per 20 words (also in the final text). we included this measure to test truscott’s (2004) claim derived from chandler’s (2003) results that students write (simpler) texts at a higher speed following the processing of wcf. accordingly, we decided to use a similar speed fluency measure to chandler’s but adapted to young learners’ production. thus, we set the threshold to 20 words (without including deleted words in revisions) after revising the word counts of our own participants, whose lowest figure was 23. · minutes per 100 characters. we set the threshold to 100 characters, since the lowest character count recorded in our data was 103. similar to minutes per 20 words, this measure focused on the final text, including spaces, and it did not include deleted characters in revisions. we drew upon the following process measures of fluency: · linear fluency i: characters per minute (labeled as “fluency (linear)” by palviainen et al., 2012, p. 54). it takes the perspective of the linear (not final) text, which includes deleted and inserted characters plus spaces. · linear fluency ii: words per minute in linear text, included by parallelism with the previous measure and which covers deleted and inserted words. similar to all the product indices, following kellogg (1996), the denominator of the two measures is the total amount of minutes spent on the composing time of the writing task (active writing time + pausing time, both in minutes). · words per p-burst. using burst as a unit of measure for fluency has been widespread, and it has been mostly examined from the perspective of words produced between pauses (see chenoweth & hayes, 2001; mohsen, 2021; révész et al., 2017; stevenson, 2005). its calculation involves the division of the total amount of typed words (including deleted ones in revisions) by the total number of p-bursts. · characters per p-burst. it is calculated by dividing the total amount of typed characters (both deleted and inserted characters plus spaces) by the total number of p-bursts (michel et al., 2020; révész et al., 2017). according to révész et al. (2017), both words and characters per pburst are indices of speed fluency within a process-oriented perspective. in line with the same authors and other previous research (e.g., mohsen, 2021), together with the absence of previous studies with children in l2 digital writing, raquel criado, aitor garcés-manzanera, luke plonsky 708 the pause threshold was set at 2 seconds for the two measures. the number of p-bursts in both indices was automatically obtained from inputlog. · product/process ratio. the product/process ratio is the division between the total number of characters with spaces in the final text plus the addition of the total number of non-character keys divided by the total number of characters produced in the linear text. it provides indirect information concerning how cognitively demanding the amount of revision is. the closer the ratio is to +1, the fewer revisions are undertaken, which in principle involves higher writing speed and, thus, higher fluency. we considered this measure to be relevant given our participants’ age and level, since inexperienced l2 adult writers have been shown to spend considerable time on revisions, particularly of low-level aspects such as spelling and grammar errors (barkaoui, 2007). 3.2.4. statistical analyses when analyzing our data, we chose to focus on descriptive statistics, including effect sizes, rather than running tests of statistical significance. this choice was based on several considerations. first, the small sample size (n = 18) and our interest in avoiding the increased potential for type ii errors associated with small samples. at a more conceptual level, we also chose to focus on descriptives in order to maintain an emphasis on the magnitude of the differences between the two written texts and composing processes within and across groups, as opposed to the presence or absence of such differences. thus, we opted for descriptive statistics based on the mean (m) and standard deviations (sd), along with the effect size expressed with hedges’ g and hedges’ g adjusted. using hedges’ g is justified as this effect size considers the sample size, applying a correction factor for small sample sizes (turner & bernard, 2006). the interpretation of hedges’ g is based on plonsky and oswald’s (2014) benchmarks for the field of l2 research: within-groups (small: .60; medium: 1.0; large: 1.4) and between-groups (small: .40; medium: .70; large: 1.0). 3.3. results1 3.3.1. fluency: product measures our first research question asked to what extent wcf in the form of a model text affects l2 english children’s writing fluency as measured by product indices. 1 a reviewer suggested including correlational analyses among our fluency measures to check if some of them were redundant. we had already looked into this and found that there was a wide range of correlational values among these measures. hence our final recommendation in the concluding section. models as written corrective feedback: effects on young l2 learners’ fluency in digital writing from . . . 709 tables 1 and 2 provide the descriptive statistics for the fluency product measures within and between groups, respectively. table 1 fluency: within-group product measures feedback group: m (sd) self-editing group, m (sd) initial text rewritten text mean difference g initial text rewritten text mean difference g word count 100.3 (84.63) 104.1 (91.99) -3.8 -0.04 46.13 (42.29) 40.75 (16.71) 5.38 0.24 characters/minute 20.66 (14.70) 27.87 (15.29) -7.21 0.46 16.82 (8.33) 37.92 (13.80) -21.1 1.75 words/minute 4.2 (3.17) 5.52 (3.18) -1.32 0.40 3.22 (1.61) 7.14 (2.96) -3.92 1.56 minutes per 100 characters 2.69 (1.78) 2.07 (0.87) 0.62 0.42 2.37 (0.80) 1.37 (0.34) 1.0 1.54 minutes per 20 words 2.77 (1.97) 2.13 (0.89) 0.64 0.40 2.52 (0.97) 1.5 (0.49) 1.02 1.25 as can be seen in table 1, the feedback group improved their fluency in all the five product indices from their initial to their rewritten texts, with small effect sizes except for the trivial one in word count. the self-editing group decreased their word count from their initial to their rewritten texts with a small effect size, while the results of the four remaining measures improved, reflecting medium (minutes per 20 words) and large effect sizes (characters and words per minute and minutes per 100 characters). table 2 fluency: between-group product measures group m (sd) mean difference gadjustedfeedback: rewritten text self-editing: rewritten text word count 104.1 (91.99) 40.75 (16.71) 63.35 0.08 characters/minute 27.87 (15.29) 37.92 (13.80) -10.05 -0.95 words/minute 5.52 (3.18) 7.14 (2.96) -1.62 -0.86 minutes per 100 characters 2.07 (0.87) 1.37 (0.34) 0.7 0.75 minutes per 20 words 2.13 (0.89) 1.5 (0.49) 0.63 0.66 between groups (see table 2), the largest improvements in four product measures were obtained by the self-editing group, whith effect sizes ranging from small (minutes per 20 words) to medium (characters and words per minute and minutes per 100 characters). the only effect size in favor of the feedback group – for word count – yielded a trivial magnitude. 3.3.2. fluency: process measures our second research question asked to what extent wcf in the form of a model text affects l2 english children’s writing fluency as measured by process indices. the descriptive statistics for these measures within and between groups are included in tables 3 and 4, respectively. raquel criado, aitor garcés-manzanera, luke plonsky 710 table 3 fluency: within-group process measures feedback group: m (sd) self-editing group: m (sd) initial text rewritten text mean difference g initial text rewritten text mean difference g linear fluency i (character-based) 30.81 (16.84) 40.44 (17.51) -9.63 -0.54 26 (10.82) 47.17 (18.17) -21.17 -1.34 linear fluency ii (word-based) 5.81 (3.71) 7.03 (3.46) -1.22 -0.33 4.51 (2.02) 8.48 (3.50) -3.97 -1.31 characters/p-burst 6.87 (3.35) 9.81 (4.76) -2.94 -0.68 5.76 (2.24) 8.58 (4.25) -2.82 -0.78 words/p-burst 1.3 (0.78) 1.74 (1.06) -0.44 -0.45 1.01 (0.40) 1.52 (0.75) -0.51 -0.80 product/process ratio .64 (.17) .68 (.15) -0.04 -0.20 .65 (.12) .81 (.05) -0.16 -1.61 as observed in table 3, from their initial to their rewritten texts, both groups increased their fluency in all the five process measures. the feedback group displayed a trivial effect size in the product/process ratio and small ones in the four other process indices. in the self-editing group, small effect sizes were found for characters and words per p-burst, the effect sizes in linear fluency i and ii yielded medium magnitudes and the results of the product/process ratio showed a large effect size. table 4 fluency: between-group process measures group m (sd) mean difference gadjustedfeedback, rewritten text self-editing, rewritten text linear fluency i (character-based) 40.44 (17.51) 47.17 (18.17) -6.73 -0.68 linear fluency ii (word-based) 7.03 (3.46) 8.48 (3.50) -1.45 -0.80 characters/p-burst 9.81 (4.76) 8.58 (4.25) 1.23 -0.10 words/p-burst 1.74 (1.06) 1.52 (0.75) 0.22 -0.21 product/process ratio .68 (.15) .81 (.05) -0.13 -1.08 between groups (see table 4), the self-editing group displayed the largest gains in three process indices: linear fluency i and ii and product/process ratio, whose effect sizes ranged from small to medium and large, respectively. the effect sizes in favor of the feedback group were trivial for characters per p-burst and small for words per p-burst. 4. discussion given truscott’s arguments regarding the detrimental and non-detrimental effects (truscott, 1996 and 2004, respectively) of having access to direct and indirect wcf on fluency in l2 writing, together with the scant research on young learners’ digital writing processes, our study intended to shed light on whether processing wcf has an effect on young efl learners’ fluency behavior in digital writing. to this end, we looked at fluency using a multidimensional approach – including product and process perspectives – in the texts typed by l2 children writers, with and without access to wcf shaped as models. models as written corrective feedback: effects on young l2 learners’ fluency in digital writing from . . . 711 concerning the product measures, the feedback group increased their total word count after rewriting their texts with the help of models as opposed to the decrease in total words written by the self-editing group. thus, our data do not seem to support truscott’s (1996) claim that providing wcf results in writing less text, although it should be remembered that truscott referred to direct and indirect wcf and that the differences here were minimal in raw numbers and in the effect size both within and between groups (see tables 1 and 2). the results of the self-editing group differ from ekanayaka and ellis (2020), whose two direct semi-focused feedback groups increased their text length in the writing of a new text of an identical type to the first one; however, as opposed to our study, the control group increased it too. the trend of our feedback group’s results does not fully coincide with two pen-and-paper studies which used models as wcf. contrary to our own feedback group and to her collaborative group, there was a decrease in the three quantity fluency measures used by lázaro-ibarrola (2021) in young learners’ timed individual writing (word count among them), with an absence of any statistically significant results. the rewritten texts of the two proficiency levels in cánovas guirao’s (2018) non-model-instruction group had similar word counts in untimed collaborative writing after processing models, as opposed to the increase in the modelinstruction group, whose texts were always longer than those of the other group. however, the results of our model group coincide with those of roothooft et al. (2022) in the slight increase of fluency in the texts rewritten by the group who processed models – as opposed to their direct wcf group, whose rewritten texts displayed a slight reduction. certainly, future research with different age groups should aim to contribute empirical evidence to clarify the effects of each wcf technique and self-editing on writing fluency measured as frequency counts (text length among them). moreover, a relevant moderating variable of the effect of wcf as models on word count could be not just proficiency level, but including explicit, teacher/researcher-guided instructions about how to use models before students process the wcf and rewrite their texts. regarding the remaining four product indices, both groups in our study improved their fluency by increasing their characters and words per minute and by reducing the mean of minutes used to type every 100 characters and 20 words. our results concur with sánchez’s (2019) self-editing participants in the low-proficiency group (whose level resembles our own participants’), given that they significantly increased their words and syllables per minute in comparison to the direct and indirect wcf groups. future empirical research in digital writing is warranted to confirm or nuance the aforementioned attested gains in such fluency measures, as mediated by the processing of different wfc techniques and self-editing. likewise, similar to our model group, the mean of minutes per raquel criado, aitor garcés-manzanera, luke plonsky 712 100 words from their first to their new fifth assignment was significantly lower in all chandler’s (2003) direct and indirect feedback adult groups in her two studies. in our own one, the largest improvements between groups for both minutes per 100 characters and 20 words were revealed in the self-editing group, with medium and small effect sizes, respectively (see table 2). the results of the model group, though less beneficial than those of the self-editing group, seem to concur with truscott’s (2004) affirmation that learners improve their speed fluency after processing direct and indirect wcf. thus, future digital writing studies should provide further empirical evidence about both truscott’s (1996, 2004) contentions and analyze the patterns of the length and speed aspects of fluency that emerge from self-correction versus the processing of different wcf techniques (models, direct and indirect feedback): namely, isomorphic or mixed. the results of the process measures offer a more mixed picture than that of the product indices (see tables 3 and 4). the feedback group augmented their fluency in all the five measures, but the self-editing group attained higher mean values than the feedback group for linear fluency i, linear fluency ii (characters and words per minute, respectively) and product/process ratio, with effect sizes ranging from small to large. although the feedback group’s mean values obtained in the rewriting session for characters and words per p-burst were higher than those of the self-editing group, the respective trivial and small effect sizes diminish the impact of such results. again, the descriptive tendencies shown in the present study need to be empirically tested in future digital writing research about the effects of models and other wcf techniques plus self-editing on different fluency process measures. our results seem to confirm the plausibility of drawing on skehan’s (2009) application of levelt’s model (1989) of l1 speech production to second/foreign language caf oral performance in order to study the relationship between models and writing fluency (see section 2.3). processing model texts slightly increased the feedback group’s fluency in all the ten measures. remembering the lexical alternatives from the comparison stage arguably contributed to easing the pressure on the feedback group’s translation process in the rewriting stage, with probable positive effects on their execution too. besides, similar to the case of oral narratives (skehan, 2009), it could be argued that the structured nature of the writing task, as reflected in the six-picture sequential prompt available in the rewriting stage, aided to benefit the feedback group’s fluency too. however, overall, self-edition turned out to be more efficient for the improvement of fluency. the consideration of the rewritten phase as an exact task repetition stage (bygate, 2001) could be useful to jointly explain: 1) the increase of the feedback group’s fluency in their rewritten texts and their composing processes and 2) the generally higher fluency improvements of the self-editing group. certainly, the models as written corrective feedback: effects on young l2 learners’ fluency in digital writing from . . . 713 actual task type and content plus the procedure for rewriting the text were the same as in the initial writing session. from that angle, our results are in line with the revealed tendency that task repetition in the oral and writing modalities appears to impact fluency positively in the repeated task (see sánchez, 2019, for a review), with greater benefits for the children who did not process the models. following kellogg’s (1996) model of writing, the task “rehearsal” of the initial writing and the review of their texts in the second stage allegedly supplied the children with sufficient support or background knowledge, even for the selfediting group (despite their lack of access to the model). these two aspects, coupled with the availability of the six-picture sequential stimulus in the rewriting (task repetition) stage, possibly eased the pressure in the participants’ central executive and visual-spatial sketchpad, since they potentially remembered what and in which order they had to write about, and so they did not need to plan at length. in the case of the self-editing group, the absence of processing the model text might have reduced their inclination to pay focused attention to or remember specific linguistic forms in the rewriting stage. arguably, this factor could have freed up resources in their central executive and phonological loop, thus rendering the linguistic encoding of their preverbal thoughts during the translation process easier and faster. this seems to be supported by their higher reduction of revisions compared to the feedback group (see table 4 for the results of the product/process ratio measure). nevertheless, although the group who did not process the models showed more fluency than the feedback group in seven of the ten measures, it should be considered that the overall higher fluency of the children who self-edited their texts does not necessarily entail more (significant) efficiency in terms of accuracy (see, for instance, sánchez, 2019 and lázaro-ibarrola, 2021). despite being relevant in any wcf study, this aspect, together with the analysis of complexity, was beyond the scope of this article. 5. conclusions the present study was prompted by truscott’s (1996) claim that the provision of direct and indirect wcf involves writing less text, at a higher speed (truscott, 2004), due to the students’ desire to avoid committing mistakes. specifically, it investigated the effects of the provision of models as wcf and self-editing on the fluency of young l2 learners (measured with product and process indices), an age group whose digital writing processes had not been previously studied. the results of this study suggest that using model texts does not fully align with the effects produced by direct and indirect wcf on writing fluency according to truscott’s (1996, 2004) claims, given that our model group increased both raquel criado, aitor garcés-manzanera, luke plonsky 714 their word count (though slightly) and speed fluency in the texts they rewrote following the processing of the models. they also augmented their fluency in the remaining eight measures. between groups, the children who self-edited their texts experienced higher improvements in speed fluency and in six more measures out of the ten indices. our study seems to support the theoretical feasibility of applying skehan’s (2009) psycholinguistic explanation about the effects of task design features on processing demands and oral l2 caf performance to written language. from a pedagogical perspective, an implication of this study is that opting for exact task repetition preceded by processing models as wcf would not be harmful to increase writing fluency. nevertheless, if teachers want to boost their learners’ fluency in rewritten texts, self-correction in general would seem to be the most efficient option. several important limitations of this study, which open some lines for further research, should be acknowledged. first, the small size of our sample restricts the generalizability of our findings. second, we used just one data source and so it would be useful to triangulate the data from keystroke logging programs with the participants’ comments on their internal composing processes as elicited by stimulated recalls. third, we acknowledge that the analysis of accuracy in the initial and final texts before and after processing different techniques of wcf and self-correction would provide valuable information to understand the nature of the relationship between accuracy and fluency in digital texts as mediated by the presence or absence of wcf. fourth, the analysis of complexity in the same aforesaid terms would complement our knowledge about 1) truscott’s (2004) affirmation of an inverse effect between complexity and speed fluency in texts composed after processing wcf, and 2) any other possible trade-off effects in the full caf triadic dimension of l2 performance. importantly, any future research should attempt to control for participants’ typing skills, which might mediate the effects of wcf on fluency (especially speed fluency, as a reviewer noted). finally, our results lead us to advocate a multidimensional approach (van waes & leijten, 2015) to study writing fluency in a deep and comprehensive manner. therefore, we would like to highlight the relevance of conducting a robust psychometric study which discriminates the magnitude and role of different product and process fluency measures, for different age groups, with a view to devising composite variables which would avoid multicollinearity and facilitate comparability of findings. in hindsight, we cannot guarantee that multicollinearity did not affect our own results. overall, given the under-explored domain of young children’s digital writing processes in general and of fluency in particular, either alone or as mediated by wcf, we believe that our study represents a worthy contribution, in terms of uncovering empirical questions worth addressing in future studies. models as written corrective feedback: effects on young l2 learners’ fluency in digital writing from . . . 715 acknowledgements this article is part of the i+d+i grants pid2019-104353gb-i00, funded by mcin/aei/ 10.13039/501100011033, and 20832/pi/18, funded by fundación séneca de la región de murcia, spain. we would also like to express our deep gratefulness to the school which allowed us to carry out our study and to the children themselves. finally, we sincerely thank the two anonymous reviewers and dr. rosa m. manchón for their valuable comments. raquel criado, aitor garcés-manzanera, luke plonsky 716 references abdel latif, m. m. 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(1998). second language development in writing: measures of fluency, accuracy, and complexity. university of hawai’i press. 13 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (1). 2019. 13-17 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.1.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial due to the emergence of the self in foreign/second language (l2) motivation theory and research following the introduction of the l2 motivational self system (l2mss) (dörnyei, 2005, 2009), the past decade has witnessed a surge of attention devoted to the two self dimensions: the ideal l2 self, and the oughtto l2 self of the model (boo, dörnyei, & ryan, 2015). the third core component, however, the l2 learning experience has become undeservedly marginalized. we think that such relative neglect has been brought about by two phenomena. on the one hand, the l2 learning experience, has so far been underconceptualized, and, as such, its intangible, amorphous nature has undermined its applicability in research on a similar scale that a more elaborate theorization of the other two future self-guides has enabled. on the other hand, by incorporating markus and nurius’ (1986) possible selves theory into l2 motivation research, dörnyei was able to import adaptable and novel concepts to the field, which set the course of the research agenda for years to come. in spite of this comparative indifference surrounding the l2 learning experience, similarly to many scholars (e.g., dörnyei, 1994, 2009; gardner, 1985, 2010; lamb, 2012, 2017; noels, pelletier, clément, & vallerand, 2000; ushioda, 1998, 2009; williams & burden, 1997), we are convinced that this component of the l2mss plays an important role in l2 motivation. therefore, we embarked on this project concerning the third core component of the l2mss, and planned this special issue for second language learning and teaching. we invited scholars from around the globe to share the results of their studies on the motivational impact of the l2 learning experience with a view to including as diverse sources of contributions as possible in the current issue. besides demonstrating how the l2 learning experience exerts its influence on l2 motivation in a variety of contexts, by editing this volume we also wanted to provide an up-to-date conceptualization of the l2 learning experience. dörnyei and ryan (2015, p. 88) described the constituent of the l2mss as follows: 14 the third component, the l2 learning experience, is different from the first two in that it focuses on the learner’s present experience, covering a range of situated, ‘executive’ motives related to the immediate learning environment (e.g., the impact of the l2 teacher, the curriculum, the peer group, and the experience of success). however, in this special issue, we would like to argue that the l2 learning experience is a broader concept. the issue starts with a theoretical paper, followed by eight studies presenting the findings of empirical research in the field, conducted in the qualitative and mixed methods paradigms. the first empirical study focuses on primary school pupils whereas the second is set in secondary school contexts. the subsequent four studies center on students studying at tertiary education. the seventh empirical study investigates l2 teachers as l2 learners, while the last study compares the current l2 learning experience of learners across a variety of ages and contexts to the l2 learning experience of l2 teachers. our special issue begins with dörnyei’s theoretical article on the l2 learning experience, which he very aptly called “the cinderella of the l2 motivational self system.” in his article, dörnyei defined the l2 learning experience as “the perceived quality of the learners’ engagement with various aspects of the language learning process,” and he argued that seeing the situated learning experience as part of an engagement-specific framework might facilitate linking it with the other two dimensions of the l2mss. the empirical part of the issue starts with henry and thorsen’s ethnographic case study of two lessons, which drew on research from the culturally responsive teaching paradigm and highlighted the role of empathy and perspective-taking in l2 motivation. the paper investigated, by observing swedish ninth graders, how minuscule interactions between teachers and learners might affect motivation and engagement. henry and thorsen argued that while motivation and engagement fluctuated, motivational dispositions were best conceptualized as the cumulative results of numerous micro-level interactions. pavelescu’s study used various qualitative methods (a written task, multiple interviews, and observation) to investigate the link between motivation and emotion by interviewing and observing two romanian teenage efl learners and two of their l2 teachers. apart from establishing a link between emotions and motivation, the results of her study are evidence to the complexity of the l2 learning experience, in as much as both out-of-class experiences (positive or non-existing) and in-class experiences related to the l2 teacher (positive or negative) exert their influence on l2 motivation. 15 hiver, obando, sang, tahmouresi, a. zhou, and y. zhou investigated the l2 learning experience of eight college students with the help of a newly developed instrument: the language learning story interview. through qualitative comparative analysis, they demonstrated how l2 learners constructed narratives of the l2 learning experience, and what components made up these narratives. they identified prototypical scenes, as well as core specifications and parameters of learners’ narrative accounts of the l2 learning experience. du’s study tracked the english learning motivation of three chinese university students for six months after finishing a semester-long exchange program in an english-speaking country. by using the mixed methods research paradigm, she concluded that study abroad (sa) experiences had a profound impact on the participants’ ideal-self images. while positive sa experiences contributed to an ideal self of students with higher proficiency and international posture, she found that unsatisfactory experiences resulted in lessening the role of the l2 in the participants’ future work and life. using similar research methodology (a questionnaire and multiple interviews), kikuchi studied the motivational trajectory of four japanese university students over a period of two years. he investigated how the learners’ l2 motivation was subject to change over this time period as a result of their learning experiences, and identified unique motivators, demotivators, as well as individual coping mechanisms. his results showed that future self-guides were not strengthened by l2 learning experiences. pigott’s study was also conducted in the japanese context. he investigated how fleeting experiences exerted a disproportionately powerful impact on the l2 motivation of five japanese university students. the study, spanning the course of 18 months, identified two principal consequences of significant incidents: one referred to as anagnorisis, an immediate revelatory change in beliefs about language learning; the other labeled narrative incorporation, a process through which the incident becomes a constituent of self-narratives. gearing’s study investigated the motivation of l1 speakers of english learning korean, the language of their host country where they resided and worked at the time of the interviews. the unique nature of this paper lies in the fact that it addressed demotivation, amotivation, and remotivation in the south korean context, and explored how l2 experiences affected the l2 motivation of 14 english as a foreign language (efl) instructors working in south korean university language education centers (lecs). the main result of this study was that individuals having insufficient internal motivation or vision to acquire korean attributed externally related demotivating experiences to amotivation. finally, as editors, we would like to introduce our own interview study, which mapped the l2 learning experience of 22 former and current language 16 learners in the hungarian context. our results show that the l2 learning experience is a broader and complex construct which includes present and past aspects as well as self-related components. language learning success, the teacher’s personality, contact experiences, and attitudes were amongst the most salient elements in the process of l2 learning. as our study did not discuss the relative importance of the various components, we can only hypothesize that experiences which stem from multiple sources are more determinant. perhaps, it is not surprising that having conducted our empirical research, and read all the contributions, we felt the need to broaden the conceptualization of the l2 learning experience. several of the studies in this special issue emphasized the duality of the l2 learning experiences: on the one hand, its immediate, situation-specific realization; and, on the other, its long-term, life-shaping feature, which exerts its influence on l2 motivation through accumulation and attributions. therefore, we define the l2 learning experience as follows: the l2 learning experience is the perception of internal cognitive and emotional processes, as well as external stimuli and circumstances that the learner experiences during the course of learning a foreign language in and outside the classroom; it is shaped and determined by attributions stemming from past l2 learning and l2 use experiences that continually evolve after the actual language learning and language use has taken place. we think that it is important to position the l2 learning experience in a more complex contextual framework that encompasses various aspects (from classrooms to a variety of social contexts) as the ultimate aim of language learning is to slowly shift language learning experiences into language use experiences. as a consequence, future research projects should consider the complex, internal structure of the l2 learning experience, that is, how the various components relate to one another. both larger-scale quantitative studies and more situated qualitative studies need to be conducted to measure and explore the possible importance of the various components. additionally, further studies should investigate the impact of the l2 learning experience on the learning process and how various experiences are internalized and develop into beliefs related to this process. broadening foreign language learning experiences and investigating language use experiences should also be added to our research agenda. we would like to extend our gratitude to a number of people. first and foremost, mirosław pawlak and his team at ssllt for inviting us to do this project and helping with finishing it. we are also indebted to the contributors who enthusiastically answered our call and helped us with their work. you made this issue really special! last but not least, we could not have done it without the help of our anonymous reviewers (you know who you are!): next time it is our turn. 17 kata csizér eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary weinkata@yahoo.com csaba kálmán eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary csabakalman73@gmail.com references boo, z., dörnyei, z., & ryan, s. 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(1997). psychology for language teachers. cambridge: cambridge university press. 117 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (1). 2019. 117-155 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.1.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation xujia du shanghai university of finance and economics, china https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5485-7283 du.xujia@hotmail.com abstract numerous studies have examined sojourners’ l2 motivation during their stay abroad. much remains unknown about the impact of study abroad (sa) experiences on their l2 motivation after they return to the home environment. this study tracked the english learning motivation of three chinese university students from immediately after their semester-long exchange program in an english-speaking country until six months after the sojourn. the participants were requested to complete a questionnaire and took part in an interview immediately following their re-entry and another interview six months later. the participants’ post-sojourn english learning motivation was influenced by their l2 selves and the context they were situated in. the motivational capacity of sa experiences was manifested in its profound impact on the participants’ ideal l2 self-images. satisfactory sa experiences contributed to an ideal l2 self with higher l2 proficiency and international posture, whereas unsatisfactory experiences led to a lessening role of l2 in the participants’ future work and life. the findings also reveal that the participants’ understandings of both their positive and negative sa experiences became fossilized after the sojourn. some practical implications were discussed for higher education institutions to optimize the post-sojourn motivational impact of sa programs. keywords: l2 motivation; l2 learning experience in study abroad; post-sojourn phase; critical reflection xujia du 118 1. introduction education internationalization in the past decade has enabled an unprecedented number of students to study abroad (sa) for different lengths of time. it is a commonly held belief that sa experiences can foster second language (l2) motivation (serrano, tragant, & llanes, 2012). to acknowledge the motivational impact of various learning experiences, dörnyei (2009) also includes l2 learning experience as a key motivational component in his l2 motivational self system (l2mss). while most existing studies center on how l2 motivation can be influenced by classroom learning experiences (e.g., piniel & csizér, 2015; waninge, dörnyei, & bot, 2014), a growing body of research has investigated the motivational power of l2 learning experiences in sa (e.g., li, 2017). the empirical studies reveal wide individual variation in the impact of sojourn experiences on l2 motivation: some students greatly enhanced their motivation, whereas others became demotivated to learn and use the l2 (allen, 2010; irie & ryan, 2015; kormos, csizér, & iwaniec, 2014). most of these studies, however, followed their participants up until the completion of their sa programs. few studies have explored whether the either positive or negative motivational effect of sa is sustained after learners return to their home environment. this study fills this niche by tracking the english learning motivation of three hong kong-based mainland chinese university students from immediately after their semester abroad in an englishspeaking country until half a year after the sojourn. the study is expected to unravel the longer-term motivational impact of sa experiences and the relationship between l2 learning experiences, context, and learners’ l2 selves. 2. literature review this section begins with an introduction to different sa programs and the complexity of l2 learning in sa. next, a brief summary of the l2mss is provided highlighting the need to extend the scope of the l2 learning experience to sa. the section ends with a review of selected l2 motivation studies that focus on international exchange programs. 2.1. l2 learning in sa with the advent of education internationalization, a wide range of sa programs are available to l2 learners nowadays including: (1) study abroad for a full degree; (2) study as part of an academic partnership within a home degree or a joint degree; and (3) exchange programs (kinginger, 2009). although sa learners may not necessarily take language improvement as their primary goal (collentine & freed, the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation 119 2004), kinginger (2009) observed that all participants in many sa studies “do want and have been enjoined in a serious way to learn languages” (p. 217). scholars hold that sa programs can be regarded as a type of experiential language learning as they provide opportunities for real-world exposure to l2 communities and self-reflections on those sociocultural experiences (kohonen, jaatinen, kaikkonen, & lehtovaara, 2014; lafford, 2013; wilson et al., 2016). while sa has traditionally been believed as a magic experience that would enhance students’ l2 motivation and proficiency, empirical research shows that sa is not a “uniform construct” (taguchi, 2016, p. 7). students’ l2 learning experience in sa is affected by a complex interplay of individual variables and host environment features and receptivity (kinginger, 2011; taguchi, 2016), leading to wide variations in learners’ l2 learning motivation and outcomes (dufon & churchill, 2006; jackson, 2017; kinginger, 2009). 2.2. extending the scope of the l2 learning experience in the l2mss in dörnyei’s (2009) l2mss, three primary sources of motivation are identified: the ideal l2 self, the ought-to l2 self, and the l2 learning experience. the ideal l2 self is “the l2-specific facet of one’s ideal self” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 29). in addition to an integrative orientation toward the l2 community (gardner & lambert, 1972), it also encompasses instrumental motives with a promotion focus, denoting the desire to achieve growth or success. the ought-to l2 self is represented by instrumental motives with a prevention focus, which are usually externally driven to meet expectations and avoid negative consequences (dörnyei, 2009). the l2 learning experience refers to “situation-specific motives related to the immediate learning environment and experience” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 29). compared with the other two self-related constructs, the l2 learning experience remains the least theorized and researched component. ample previous research has investigated the motivational power of learners’ future l2 selfguides (e.g., campbell & storch, 2011; csizér & kormos, 2009; dörnyei & chan, 2013; taguchi, magid, & papi, 2009). some studies have also examined the connections between learners’ ideal l2 selves and ought-to l2 selves (e.g., you & chan, 2015). much less attention has been paid to how l2 motivation can be influenced by l2 learning experiences and how these experiences interact with learners’ l2 selves. moreover, as it was included in the l2mss to acknowledge the motivational impact of various classroom elements, the notion of the l2 learning experience has largely been associated with instructed settings (dörnyei, 2009). collentine and freed (2004) and collentine (2009) identified three contexts for language learning including foreign language classroom, intensive immersion setting, xujia du 120 and sa context. it is expected that different contexts may exert significantly different influences on various aspects of l2 learning (magnan & lafford, 2012). in contrast with classroom settings, l2 learning in sa contexts takes place not only in classrooms, but through exposure to and interaction with the l2 communities in daily life (lafford, 2013). in addition to classroom-related variables, numerous factors outside the classroom can affect learners’ motivation to learn and use an l2. the scope of the l2 learning experience should, therefore, be extended beyond classrooms to encompass more different learning environments. 2.3. l2 motivation in international exchange programs with an increasing number of international exchange programs made available to university students, researchers are paying more attention to learners’ l2 motivational trajectories during their stay abroad. allen (2010) explored the l2 motivational development of six american learners of french during a 6-week exchange program in france. main data sources included questionnaires, semistructured interviews, and learning blogs. the findings show that increase in l2 motivation was evident among participants who joined the sa program to enhance their french skills, but not among those who learned french for more pragmatic reasons and viewed sa as a chance to travel and experience a different culture. many other studies also revealed individual variations in sa learners’ l2 motivation, yet most tracked their participants up to the completion of the sojourn or immediately after the sojourn (isabelli-garcía, 2006). previous research on the post-sojourn phase mainly focused on the longterm impact of various sa programs on students’ linguistic, social, career, and intercultural development (e.g., campbell, 2015; franklin, 2010; jackson, 2015b; steinwidder, 2016). trenchs-parera and juan-garau’s (2014) study is one of the few that examined the long-term impact of a short stay abroad on l2 motivation. the study followed the motivational and belief development of 70 english learners in a spanish university for two and a half years including three months abroad in their second year. data were collected through a questionnaire at the beginning of their university studies, at the end of the first year, immediately after the sa, and 15 months after the sa. the findings show that the participants developed positive motivational stands during their semester abroad. regarding the long-term retention effects, findings show no significant changes in the participants’ motivational stands except for an increasing willingness to participate in class discussions when called upon by teachers. the study was based on a questionnaire and quantitative analysis. much remains unknown about the individual differences in sa learners’ motivational trajectories and how sa experiences affect their motivation following their return home. the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation 121 3. the study this article reports part of the findings of a longitudinal project which tracked the english learning motivation of a group of hong kong-based mainland chinese students from their senior high school in mainland china, through their undergraduate education in hong kong, until half a year after their re-entry to hong kong following a semester-long exchange program in an english-speaking country. the present study aims to understand the longer-term motivational impact of a semester abroad by tracking the motivational trajectories of three participants from their re-entry home until six months after their return. the following research questions are answered: 1) how did the participants describe their sa experiences immediately after their return and six months later? 2) how did the participants describe their english learning motivation from their return until six months after the sojourn? 3) how was their english learning motivation affected by their sa experiences? 4. method the present study adopted a mixed-methods multiple-case study design to explore the participants’ motivational development after their semester abroad. this section provides a detailed description of the selection of the participants, instruments, as well as the data collection and analysis procedures. 4.1. participants the participants of this study were selected based on a pre-sojourn questionnaire which was administered to all 2015/16 outgoing exchange students at a hong kong university during a pre-departure session. the following selection criteria were embedded in the questionnaire: 1) they were mainland chinese students enrolled in a full-time undergraduate program. 2) they had studied english as an academic subject in mainland china. 3) they were accepted to take part in a semester-long exchange program in an english-speaking country in term 2 (january-april) of the 20152016 academic year. 4) they had spent at least one year at the hong kong university prior to their exchange. 5) the exchange program would be their first extended stay in an englishspeaking country. 6) they were willing to participate in the longitudinal study. xujia du 122 in total, 1,040 students joined an outgoing exchange program in 2015/16 at the hong kong university. sixty-eight mainland chinese students who were accepted to go on exchange in term 2 signaled their willingness to be interviewed later. only 10 of them satisfied the other criteria. after initial contact, eight of them agreed to participate in the longitudinal study and signed their informed consent. while the larger study followed all participants’ motivational development from pre-sojourn till six months after the sojourn (du & jackson, 2018), this article zoomed in for a close-up of three participants, gary, maggie, and jasmine (pseudonyms), from the completion of their sojourn till six months later. studying business-related subjects, the three participants had an accumulative gpa (grade point average) of 3.20 (gary), 3.56 (jasmine), and 3.28 (maggie) out of 4.00 respectively. to be included in an international exchange program, the participants were required to provide either toefl or ielts test results. gary’s toefl score was 96 (ielts equivalent 7.0) (educational testing service, 2010). taking the ielts, jasmine received an overall score of 7.0, and maggie got 7.5. gary and maggie chose canada as their exchange destination while jasmine opted for the uk. the three participants were selected as focal case participants mainly because they departed for their exchange destinations with a shared goal to be a proficient english speaker and a global citizen. however, their sa experiences varied and they exhibited different motivational paths after their sa. they were also some of the most forthcoming participants, who unreservedly shared their opinions and feelings. comparing their cases provided deeper insights into the possible impact of a semester abroad on l2 learners’ post-sojourn motivation. 4.2. instruments in addition to the pre-sojourn questionnaire that was used to select participants and establish their profiles, this study made use of a post-sojourn questionnaire and two semi-structured interviews, which were conducted immediately after the participants’ re-entry to hong kong/mainland china (post-sojourn interview) and six months after their return (post post-sojourn interview). the postsojourn questionnaire (see appendix a) consisted of both open and closedended questions (mostly using a likert scale). the purpose of the questionnaire was for students to provide self-assessment of their linguistic, academic, social, and intercultural development at the end of their exchange period (jackson, 2015b). as the main data source for this study, the two interviews aimed to track the participants’ english learning motivation from their return until six months later and understand how their sa and re-entry experiences might have affected their motivation. compared with quantitative methods, in-depth interviews are the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation 123 “in many ways, better suited to explore the internal dynamics of the intricate and multilevel construct of student motivation” (dörnyei, 2001, p. 49). the post-sojourn interview protocol (see appendix b) comprised questions about the participants’ personal, academic, and sociocultural experiences during sa, their immediate re-entry experiences, as well as their perceived impact of these experiences on their english learning motivation (jackson, 2015b). most topic areas in the post post-sojourn interview (see appendix c) overlapped with the post-sojourn interview protocol to capture any shifts in the participants’ motivation and their interpretations of their sa experiences half a year after their sojourn. 4.3. procedures i had followed the participants since they joined the larger study a semester prior to their sojourn. regarding the time phases reported in this article, the post-sojourn questionnaire was administered online to the three participants near the end of their stay abroad. maggie attended the post-sojourn interview in person after she returned to hong kong. gary and jasmine were interviewed via skype as they went back directly to their home cities in mainland china. six months after their re-entry, gary and maggie completed the post post-sojourn interview face-to-face while jasmine was interviewed via skype as she was engaged in an internship in beijing. all three participants responded to the questionnaire items in english but opted to use mandarin in the two interviews. the average length of the postsojourn and post post-sojourn interview was 82 minutes and 62 minutes respectively. the interviews were transcribed and sent to the participants for member check. the transcripts were then translated into english and the translations were reviewed by another chinese-english bilingual. 4.4. data analysis the participants’ responses to closed-ended questionnaire items were coded and processed in microsoft excel for descriptive statistics. textual data including the answers to open-ended questionnaire items and the interview translations were imported into nvivo 11, a qualitative analysis software program. in nvivo 11, each participant had a case file, where all relevant information about them was stored. following an open-coding approach (bazeley & jackson, 2013), the initial categories were generated based on recursive reading of the transcripts. the relationships were analyzed between these descriptive categories. informed by the l2mss and other theoretical concepts discussed in the literature review, higher-order nodes were created from the preliminary data categories (dörnyei, xujia du 124 2007; saldaña, 2016). these coding steps were cyclic until data became saturated (charmaz, 2014). higher-order nodes in this study include l2-mediated academic and social experiences, l2 learning experiences, attitudes toward the l2 and the host, motivational trajectories, and the interactions among motivation, l2-related experiences, l2 selves, and contexts. the final set of nodes not only informed the design of the three research questions, but also the organization of the individual case studies of the participants (yin, 2014). 5. results this section presents the individual case studies of the three participants. in response to the three research questions, each case starts with the participants’ recollections of their sa experiences at the end of the sojourn and six months after the sojourn. this is followed by their depictions of their motivational trajectories during this period. the post-sojourn motivational impact of their sa experiences is then explored by examining the interconnections between sa experiences, self, and context. 5.1. gary’s recollection of his sa experiences and motivational trajectory in term 2 of his fourth year (jan-april 2016), gary went on exchange for a semester in victoria, canada. at the host university, gary enrolled in three majorrelated courses and shared a cluster with other three exchange students from hong kong, italy, and france respectively. after the sojourn, he flew back to his hometown for a short holiday before he embarked on a summer internship in singapore. in september 2016, gary started his fifth year at his home university as he deferred his studies for a year. 5.1.1. recollection of sa experiences immediately after the sojourn gary aimed to enhance his english skills, make some international friends, and learn about the host culture and his area of study at the host university. in both the postsojourn questionnaire and interview, his responses show that he had made use of the resources available in the host environment to accomplish his goals. 5.1.1.1. l2-mediated academic and social experiences gary saw the highly interactive classrooms and the heavy reading and writing workload at the host university as both a challenge and an opportunity to improve his english skills. he described his host academic environment as follows: the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation 125 students there liked to speak up in classes. i was encouraged by their active participation and started to voice my opinions. although participation is assessed in many courses here [home university], few people take it seriously unless each participation is counted. gary felt that the fluency and clarity of his speech improved through contributing ideas in classes where l1 speakers were the majority. he also took advantage of the writing assignments and feedback from the lecturers to improve his writing skills. socially, gary developed close relationships with his flatmates and also made several other international friends in the activities that he joined such as the buddy program and university soccer club. in the post-sojourn questionnaire, he indicated “international students from other cultures” as the group of people with whom he spent most of his time abroad and chose “six or more” for the number of international friends he had at the end of the sojourn. gary considered social engagement an effective way of enhancing his oral english: “my mixed social network in canada gave me a natural environment to speak english, alerted me to my language problems and pushed me to enhance my language skills.” gary’s english learning was intertwined with his academic and social experiences. in the post-sojourn questionnaire, gary rated himself 3/5 (1 = poor to 5 = excellent) on his overall proficiency. this rating was confirmed in the interview: “i remember i gave myself 2/5 before the sojourn. i think i made progress in canada.” he also claimed that he had become more confident and willing to initiate conversations with people from other linguistic backgrounds. 5.1.1.2. integrativeness toward the host and intercultural development with no prior impression of canada, gary developed an emotional attachment to his host country and an integrative orientation (gardner & lambert, 1972) at the end of the sojourn: “i recommended canada to most of my friends. canada is just great!” gary also demonstrated perceptible intercultural development as he had increasing contact with his international friends: “interacting with students from all over the world forced me to consider what stereotypes i held of people from certain countries.” his intercultural awareness is manifested in his response to an open-ended question in the post-sojourn questionnaire, which asked about the most important thing students learned from their exchange experience. gary’s answer was as follows: “don't let your stereotype influence your judgment, especially when it comes to intercultural communication.” 5.1.2. recollection of sa experiences half a year after the sojourn in the post post-sojourn interview half a year later, gary again spoke very positively of his sa experiences and host country. a unique observation from this phase was xujia du 126 that he felt he had more global elements in his self-identity in comparison with some of his friends who had also joined an exchange program. in several conversations, he felt uncomfortable with their ethnocentric attitude when they compared their host countries with china. his opinion is expressed in the following excerpt: they [his friends] bragged about china’s huge land mass, the largest population, and a history spanning five thousand years. my feeling is that china is good in some aspects but not in the things that they are proud of. sometimes i deprecated their views in a humorous manner. but deep down, i disdain their attitudes. gary’s positive view of his sa experiences and his ethnorelative attitude were reinforced through many informal reflective conversations with his friends after the sojourn. he appeared to be keen to jump out of the confinement of his ascribed national identity (jackson, 2014) so that he could view his own and other cultures with a more open mind. 5.1.3. motivational trajectory after the sojourn after the sojourn, gary was a bit worried whether he could retain his linguistic gains from the exchange program. in the post-sojourn questionnaire, he specified “continuing to enhance my second language proficiency” as the most challenging aspect about his return. since he came back to his hometown, gary had been using mandarin all the time. nevertheless, he commented that his english learning motivation remained as high as it was during the sojourn because he made a conscious effort to increase his exposure to english and create opportunities for linguistic enhancement: “there’s no one around speaking english to me, but i speak to myself. i’m keeping updated on the international news and reading some books. i’ll probably also find some time to practice my writing.” in addition to self-learning, gary used social media to stay in touch with the international friends he had made while in canada and practiced his oral skills with his colleagues during his summer internship in singapore. in the post post-sojourn interview, gary stated that there was a further boost in his english learning motivation in the new semester. he became more active in class discussions at the home university. he also chose an international student as his roommate and served as a buddy for incoming exchange students. in preparation for the upcoming job interviews, he watched and learned from model interviews on the internet and participated in several interview skills enhancement workshops. the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation 127 5.1.4. motivational impact of sa experiences while gary attributed his post-sojourn motivational enhancement mainly to his instrumental orientation related to job search, a further investigation into his l2 self reveals a more implicit but probably more powerful motivational impact of his sa experiences. gary described his ideal l2 self as follows: i now clearly know the ideal state i want to work towards. all canadians were my role models. there were also some non-native speakers who spoke english very well. i want to be able to tell a story or explain things in detail and in a more organized way. this is quite difficult. you know many words. but you may not know how to use them properly. when you are telling a story, the ordering of the content may vary in a different cultural setting. it could cause misunderstandings if you are not familiar with the practices of your audience. gary’s intercultural communication experiences during sa consolidated his ideal l2 self-image as a near-native english speaker and highlighted the specific areas he strived to improve. meanwhile, his sa experiences contributed to the expansion of his self-concept: “i think my chinese identity is weaker than a global citizen now. i don’t think it’s necessary to confine myself to the chinese identity.” gary’s self-positioning as a global citizen and his ideal l2 self-image guided his choice of singapore for his summer internship and his goal to work in an international company after graduation and pursue further study in the us after he has gained some work experience. these decisions prescribed an important role of english in his work and life and drove him to proactively seek opportunities to enhance his english skills after the sojourn. 5.2. jasmine’s recollection of sa experiences and motivational trajectory in term 2 of her third year (january-april 2016), jasmine participated in a semester-long exchange program in cardiff, wales. at the host university, jasmine took four courses and only one of them was related to her major. she also signed up for a short oral communication course provided by the language center. jasmine lived in a shared house with other three girls from africa, malaysia, and the uk respectively. in the summer following the sojourn, jasmine did an internship in shanghai. when the new semester started in september 2016, she deferred her studies in order to take part in another full-time internship in beijing. 5.2.1. recollection of sa experiences immediately after the sojourn jasmine wanted to improve her english, learn more about the host culture, and make some international friends through her participation in an exchange program xujia du 128 in the uk. as she revealed in the post-sojourn questionnaire and interview, her sa experiences were overall satisfying. 5.2.1.1. l2-mediated social experiences compared with gary, jasmine had much lower expectations of her academic performance. while she aimed to improve her english, she did not see the interactive host classrooms as a platform where she could hone her english skills: “i was not that eager to participate in their discussions. in the uk, i spent more time traveling and much less time studying.” in contrast with her attitude toward academic learning, jasmine was much more active in her social life and culture learning. she took part in various social events and tours organized by the university for exchange students. in these activities, she met many international students and made friends with some of them. as their friendship grew stronger, they started to do more together and invite each other to private social gatherings. in the post-sojourn questionnaire, jasmine chose ‘international students from other cultures’ as the people with whom she spent most of her time abroad. her answer to “the number of international friends” she had was “four to five.” in the uk, jasmine’s main way of improving her english was through communication with her international friends. to catch up with their conversations, she started to follow videos that they were watching. in addition, jasmine took an english language enhancement course that concentrated on british english pronunciation and the comparison of a few different varieties of english. she commented that this course raised her awareness of her own pronunciation of certain words and helped her better understand the local accent. in the post-sojourn questionnaire, jasmine rated her overall proficiency at 4/5 (1 = poor to 5 = excellent), a one-point increase from the pre-sojourn rating. in the post-sojourn interview, she added that her informal skills had improved more than formal skills as she paid much less attention to her studies. 5.2.1.2. positive attitude toward the host language and culture another important element of jasmine’s sa experiences as she recalled was her attitude change toward the host language and culture. although she looked up to the host people at the beginning of her sojourn, she doubted the sincerity of their politeness and felt that the host language was distant from her. with more observation and interactions with the host people, her opinion of them changed at the end of her sojourn: “at the beginning, i was wondering if they were pretending to be polite. now i think they truly behave quite well compared with people in mainland china.” the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation 129 after using english for daily communication for several months, she also felt much closer to the language: “i don’t think english is high-end anymore. it’s just another language for communication.” throughout the sojourn, jasmine made a conscious effort to fit in the local community and was attentive to language learning resources in daily life situations. 5.2.2. recollection of sa experiences half a year after the sojourn six months after the re-entry, jasmine was doing an internship in a chinese company in beijing. she noticed that most of her colleagues were not willing to share information and knowledge. because of her international experience, jasmine felt that she was different from her mainland peers. she expressed her feelings in the following excerpt: i think it’s because we have been socialized in different cultural environments. when i was communicating with other international students during my exchange, i could tell that they were all very sincere and happy to share their thoughts. i was influenced by them and i’m very happy to share what i know. living in her own home country, jasmine’s appreciation of some of the values and habits that she had acquired abroad were strengthened. speaking chinese all the time, she also divulged that she missed the english-speaking environment in the host country. 5.2.3. motivational trajectory after the sojourn like gary, jasmine also indicated in the questionnaire that “continuing to enhance my second language proficiency” was one of the top three post-sojourn challenges. after the return to her hometown, jasmine exhibited a few symptoms of reverse culture shock (gaw, 2000; young, 2014). although she desired to sustain her linguistic gains from the sojourn, her english learning motivation waned and she did not come up with any strategy for further enhancement at home. her motivation resumed a little when she started her summer internship in an international company in shanghai, where she had some chances to use english in documentation and written communication. she also initiated conversations with her international colleagues in informal settings. in the semester after the sojourn, jasmine revealed that her motivation dipped to a new low when she was working in a chinese company in beijing. she was disappointed that she could not build on her advantage in english in this professional context: “this internship demotivates me to further improve my english because english is the least important skill here.” xujia du 130 5.2.4. motivational impact of sa experiences after the sojourn, jasmine’s motivational development appeared to be heavily influenced by the contexts she had been situated in. she was more motivated when english was needed and used in her environment. she became demotivated when english was not valued or used. while jasmine’s re-entry experiences and internship in beijing negatively affected her motivation, they did not have much impact on her ideal l2 self-image as a global citizen with near-native proficiency, which was formed during her stay in hong kong and reinforced through her sa. in the post post-sojourn interview, jasmine expressed a strong desire to work for multinational companies in the future. i want very much to be offered a position in an international company. english is a bridge that links you to the world. hopefully, english will be the working language of my future job. such companies usually have many mobility schemes that allow the employees to work in overseas branches. having had a taste of the language and culture of a chinese company, jasmine realized that if she found a similar job after graduation, the chance to accomplish her ideal l2 self would be slim. her concern was evident in her comment: “i’m unlikely to reach my goals in a company like this. now i’m soaked in the chinese environment and i don’t pay attention to any english information. i’m not updated at all.” jasmine commented that her intercultural experience in the uk had strengthened her determination to work in an international environment so that she could connect to the most up-to-date things in the world and build on the language and interpersonal skills she had been trying to improve in the past few years. for the coming semester at her home university, jasmine applied to share a dorm with an international student and planned to make better use of the resources at the university to polish her english skills. 5.3. maggie’s recollection of sa experiences and motivational trajectory in term 2 of her fourth year (january-april 2016), maggie took part in a semester-long exchange program in a university located in an outer suburb of toronto, canada. at the host university, maggie took four courses, only one of which was somewhat related to her major. she lived in a house off campus with a 60-yearold female host. when the sojourn came to an end, maggie returned to hong kong for a summer internship. in september 2016, she continued her fifth-year studies at her home university due to a previous deferral arrangement. the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation 131 5.3.1. recollection of sa experiences immediately after the sojourn maggie left hong kong with a high expectation of the sojourn. she hoped to become a proficient english user, develop a diverse social network, and fit in the host culture. to her chagrin, she failed to achieve most of her goals at the end of her stay in canada. 5.3.1.1. minimal l2-mediated academic and social engagement in the post-sojourn interview, maggie divulged that she opted to be “an invisible girl who always sat in the corner” in the host classroom because she felt inferior to other full-time students. being rather withdrawn in her classes, maggie did not make any international friends in the academic community. she blamed the bad weather for her reluctance to join other social activities and meet more people. as evidenced in the following excerpt, maggie lived an isolated life in canada. it was too boring. i’ll never ever live like this. i ate every meal alone. i needed to cook by myself because the food there was just terrible! so my daily routine was cooking, writing assignments, watching tv, and playing with my host’s cat. maggie’s limited social engagement is also evidenced in her questionnaire responses. “0” was her answer to “the total number of extracurricular activities you joined in the host university.” she also indicated that she spent most of her time abroad with chinese students and the number of international friends she had near the end of her sojourn was “one to three.” due to her small social network, maggie did not have many opportunities to use english in an english-speaking environment. she was disappointed that she did not make as much progress in english as she had expected. the excerpt below shows her evaluative feelings about her english skills at different stages of the sojourn. in the beginning, i could communicate with my host smoothly. later, i felt that i couldn’t handle long, in-depth dialogues. opportunities were rare for such interactions. my interaction with humans was basically no more than some greeting exchanges. i thought i would be able to speak fluent american english when i came back. now it seems i speak putonghua better. the drop in maggie’s linguistic confidence is also captured in her self-assessment in the post-sojourn questionnaire, where she rated herself 3/5 (1 = poor to 5 = excellent) in her overall english proficiency, a one-point loss as compared with her pre-sojourn self-rating. xujia du 132 5.3.1.2. negative attitude toward the host maggie’s unsatisfactory academic, social, and l2 learning experiences were accompanied by a negative attitude toward her host. she perceived low host receptivity, and discrimination in the host environment: “discrimination was very bad there, although it was more covert rather than overt. everyone was aware of the discrimination, but they all tried to appear nice and harmonious.” through her observation of a chinese immigrant family, maggie believed that these immigrants constantly suffered from loneliness in canada. she described their lifestyles as follows: many chinese immigrants’ life in canada is not very active. they usually stay at home because they don’t have many friends or relatives there. i felt lonely in canada and they felt the same. if i had been given a chance to choose, i would rather have come back home. the above two excerpts show that maggie sensed host hostility and believed that loneliness and feeling out of place were some of the prices one had to pay for living abroad. while she distanced herself from the host community, her emotional attachment to her homeland became stronger. 5.3.2. recollection of sa experiences half a year after the sojourn six months later, when maggie talked about her sojourn experiences again in the post post-sojourn interview, some of her negative comments about the host country recurred. her impression of the host is exemplified in the following excerpt: i only know a little bit about canada. but that’s enough and i have no intention to know more. i’m so sorry to say that, canadians! i don’t like the culture of the chinese community there. their life is just so boring. the lifestyle of local canadians is not too different. my host worked five days a week and finished very early every day. she came back home and fed her cat. that’s it. maggie’s comment above indicates that her memory of her undesirable sa experiences and her negative attitude toward the host had fossilized after the sojourn. 5.3.3. motivational trajectory after the sojourn while gary and jasmine indicated “continuing to enhance my second language proficiency” as a top challenge in the post-sojourn questionnaire, maggie was not at all worried about how to further enhance her english before she came back home. immediately after her re-entry to hong kong, maggie described her the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation 133 english learning motivation to be lower than it was in canada as there were even fewer opportunities to use english in daily life at home. she did not become more motivated when she started her summer internship, where she could use english with some foreign colleagues. maggie described her job as highly quantitative that relied more on one’s technical skills rather than language skills. as she realized that cantonese was the main communication language in the industry she aspired to enter, she was less concerned about not making progress in english. in the semester following the sojourn, maggie’s english learning motivation remained low. she expressed no interest in having an international roommate or joining any activities that might bring her some new international contacts. although she claimed that job interview was her only motive to improve her english, she had not been actively engaged in any job search process. 5.3.4. motivational impact of sa experiences maggie felt that her sa in canada had little influence on how she perceived and learned english after her return to the home university. nevertheless, she emphasized the profound impact of the sa on her life philosophy and her ideal l2 self. she explained the influence as follows: after my stay in canada, my desire to work and live in a foreign country is not as strong as before. did i say i want to be a global citizen before i left? i have changed now. being a global citizen is no longer my goal. i think it is good to be chinese, an open-minded chinese person who harbors no stereotypes and discrimination against others. hoping to become more international through joining an exchange program, maggie did not achieve the ideal l2 self-image she had envisioned prior to the sojourn. her revised future l2 self-guide emphasized the chinese part of her identity and demonstrated her declining intention to integrate into the host or international community. half a year after the sojourn, maggie revealed in the post post-sojourn interview that her integrative orientation and international posture (yashima, 2009) stayed low. the importance of english in her future life decreased as she realized how much she valued the bond with her friends and family in the chinese environment. in the following excerpt, maggie explained the impact of her reinforced connection with her home culture on her language use. my dominant language is chinese at the moment. in future, it will depend on where i go. i don’t feel like going to a place where i need to speak english every day. my use of english or the effort i expend to improve my english will be mainly determined by the need for it at work. xujia du 134 maggie’s comment above indicates that she tended to build an ideal l2 self that was responsive to the needs arising in the local context. given the social and financial capital of english in hong kong (bolton, 2011), she was not significantly demotivated to learn english due to her negative sa experiences. however, her revised ideal l2 self-image had a great impact on her choices of social network and future location, which in turn influenced her access to english. while gary frequently used english in informal settings with his international friends at the home university, maggie’s complaint about the lack of opportunities to use english signaled her reluctance to seek such opportunities. 6. discussion sharing a very similar academic and social background, the three participants’ l2 learning experiences during sa varied. gary’s l2 learning was intertwined with his academic and social engagement in the host environment. jasmine improved her english mainly through communication with her international friends. due to her lack of belonging to the host university and her small social circle, maggie’s english learning and use was largely confined to the host family setting. the participants’ differing experiences confirmed the multi-dimensional and idiosyncratic nature of sa (coleman, 2013; jackson, 2017; kinginger, 2011). after their return until six months later, few changes were found in the participants’ interpretations of their sa experiences and perceptions of the host country and people. gary and jasmine’s positive views of their experiences in the host country were sustained half a year after their re-entry. so was maggie’s memory of her unsatisfactory sa experiences. scholars have stressed the importance of critical reflection for learners to learn from and build on their linguistic and intercultural gains from the sojourn (savicki & price, 2017; zull, 2012). pagano and roselle (2009) argue that recalling an experience without a shift of perspective does not constitute reflection. following their return, except for recalling their sa experiences in the two interviews, none of the participants were engaged in any systematic reflection sessions, where they were prompted to analyze their previous responses to certain events and construe their sa experiences from a different perspective (bennett, 2012; kohonen et al., 2014; savicki & price, 2017). the lack of opportunities for critical reflection provides an explanation for the fossilization of the participants’ impressions of the host country and people. while not every student may necessarily benefit from reflection sessions, previous research has rendered evidence for the power of theory-inspired, guided reflections in helping sa returnees to rethink their behaviors abroad and their attitudes about their own and the host culture (jackson, 2015a, 2017). the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation 135 regarding the post-sojourn motivational impact of sa experience, gary and jasmine acknowledged that their pleasant social experiences abroad enhanced their willingness to get involved in l2 intercultural communication at home. nevertheless, all participants agreed that their english learning motivation tended to be more responsive to needs arising in the local contexts. gary kept a high level of motivation during his summer internship and his motivation was further enhanced in the new semester when he was preparing for englishmedium job interviews. jasmine’s motivation waned after she came back home and resumed a little during her internship in an international company. it plunged again in the new semester when she started another internship in a chinese company. maggie did not experience a perceptible boost in her english learning motivation while abroad. after the sojourn, there was a small drop in her motivation as english was even less used at home. the participants’ postsojourn motivational trajectories reflected the fluidity of l2 motivation and its interaction with the context in which the learners are situated (ushioda, 2009). while the participants’ post-sojourn motivation appeared to be more directly affected by their current environment and experiences, they were all aware of the profound impact of their sa experiences on their attitudes toward other cultures and their ideal l2 self-images. gary and jasmine’s english and intercultural learning strengthened their goal to achieve near-native proficiency and global citizenship. in contrast, maggie’s sa experience led to her waning international posture (yashima, 2009) and her choice to recoil to her chinese identity. having been validated as a key motivational source, the ideal l2 self exerts its motivational influence by guiding learners’ perceptions of the role of l2 in their future work and life (al-shehri, 2009; dörnyei, 2009). in this study, the participants’ varied ideal l2 self-guides influenced their choices of social networks, preferred locations and future work environment. although jasmine was demotivated by the chinese work environment, this internship experience made her more determined to have her future career with an international company where she would have international mobility and more opportunities to use english. in contrast, taking english-medium courses at a university with many international students, maggie was not active in taking advantage of the linguistic resources as she believed that english would not have a critical role in her future life and career. compared with local contextual factors, the participants’ sa experiences had a more implicit, yet long-lasting effect on their motivation through shaping their idealized l2 self-images. another key observation is the different levels of english learning motivation exhibited by gary and jasmine immediately after their re-entry to their hometown. both participants had an ideal l2 self-image as a global citizen with near-native proficiency upon the completion of their sojourn. while at home, xujia du 136 gary took strategic steps to further improve his english whereas jasmine was very much demotivated after the context switch. compared with gary, jasmine was more easily influenced by contextual elements and she showed less agency in creating opportunities for learning. some researchers have argued that having an ideal l2 self does not ensure motivated behaviors (hessel, 2015; oyserman, bybee, terry, & hart-johnson, 2004). a self-regulatory ideal l2 selfimage has to fulfill a few criteria including being detailed and connected to specific strategies (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011; hessel, 2015; irie & brewster, 2013). the distinction between regulatory and non-regulatory ideal l2 selves may provide some insights into gary and jasmine’s different post-sojourn motivational trajectories. while this study confirmed the relationship between sa experiences and the ideal l2 self, it posed questions about the motivational impact of different types of ideal l2 self-guides. it is worthwhile for future research to examine the regulatory effect of learners’ ideal l2 selves and how they can possibly be affected by their sa experiences. 7. conclusion this study investigated the impact of a semester abroad in an english-speaking country on the english learning motivation of three chinese students immediately after they came back home and six months later. immediately after the sojourn, the participants’ perceptions of their sa experiences varied. some talked positively about their sojourn, whereas others expressed a negative opinion about their host country and their experiences there. this variation was sustained until six months after the sojourn. although the participants mainly attributed their post-sojourn motivational ups and downs to the local contexts at home, the motivational capacity of sa was manifested in its profound impact on the participants’ future l2 selfimages. gary and jasmine’s shared ideal l2 self as a global citizen with near-native proficiency influenced their preference for a more international social circle and work environment. in contrast, with strengthened attachment to chinese culture, maggie aimed to stay in the chinese environment in the future. the study has some practical implications for higher education institutions to sustain and enhance sa returnees’ l2 motivation and intercultural development. the three participants’ understandings of their sa experiences and their attitudes toward the host culture had remained largely the same since their re-entry. to optimize the long-term motivational impact of an sa program, home universities can organize a series of guided reflection sessions, where sa returnees are encouraged to critically re-examine their views of the host environment, reflect upon their inner selves, and seek alternative interpretations of their experiences (mezirow, 1991; savicki & price, 2017). the critical reflection the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation 137 sessions can help learners establish an ideal l2 self that is devoid of the negative impact of unprocessed stereotypes and unhappy experiences. moreover, home universities can create more opportunities for interaction among sa returnees, international students, and students who do not have sa experiences. such interactions can not only facilitate sa returnees’ critical reflection by offering them a platform to experiment with their new assumptions (kohonen et al., 2014), but also provide students who have not participated in a sa program with some 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(2012). the brain, learning, and study abroad. in m. vande berg, r. m. paige, & k. h. lou (eds.), student learning abroad: what our students are learning, what they’re not, and what we can do about it (pp. 162-187). sterling, va: stylus publishing. the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation 143 appendix a post-sojourn questionnaire used in the study as you are nearing the end of your stay abroad, we would appreciate it if you would take a few moments to complete the following questionnaire. the information you provide will help us better prepare future exchange students from cuhk. your responses will be kept strictly confidential. thank you! i. my profile 1. full name: ___________________ 2. cuhk student id number: ________________ 3. nationality___________________ 4. gender: q male q female 5. age: _________ 6. birthplace: q hong kong q mainland china q other: ________ 7. faculty: q arts q medicine q business admin. q science q education q social science q engineering q law 8. year of study while abroad: q ug1stqug 2ndq ug 3rd q ug4thq ug5thq postgraduate 9. major code: ________ 10. minor: __________ 11. my cumulative gpa: _____________ 12. the longest period of time that i had traveled, studied or lived abroad at any one time before this exchange program was: q not applicable q one month or less q more than one month but less than six months q six months to a year q more than one year 13. i now read a newspaper or internet report about international/global affairs ______________. q never q once a month q once a week q 2-3 times a week q daily 14. i now watch tv reports (e.g., newscasts) about international/global affairs __________. q never q once a month q once a week q 2-3 times a week q daily ii. my exchange programme 15. exchange period: q 1st term q 2nd term q summer q academic year at one location q academic year at two locations (term 1 in one country & term 2 in another) 16. host university/campus: __________________ 17. host country: ______________ 18. i have been living in __________ while on exchange. q on-campus housing (not i-house) q a dorm/house with international students q off-campus (not homestay) q homestay 19. i have been sharing a room with _________.q someone from the host countryq someone from my home country q an international student from a different culture q not applicable 20. total number of credits taken while studying abroad: ______. 21. while abroad, the total number of courses i’ve taken about the host country (e.g., history, culture, geography, politics, religion) (not language courses): q none q 1 course q 2 courses q 3 or more courses, please specify: __________ 22. the total number of courses i’ve taken that have focused on perspectives, issues, or events with an international/ global theme: q none q 1 course q 2 courses q 3 or more courses, please specify: ____________ 23. the total number of courses i’ve taken that have focused on intercultural or cross-cultural communication (do not include language courses): q none q 1 course q 2 courses q 3 or more courses, please specify: ________ 24. the total number of extracurricular activities i participated in at my host university: ___. 25. my time abroad has included: q service-learning/volunteering q work placement/internship q both q neither 26. i expect to transfer _______ credits back to cuhk. xujia du 144 iii. my language use/ learning on exchange 27. no. of language enhancement courses i have taken that have focused on the host country language (e.g., finnish in finland): q none q 1 course q 2 courses q more than 2 courses 28. the language-of-instruction in most of my courses has been: q englishq frenchq germanq japaneseq putonghuaq spanish, other, please specify: ____ please rate your proficiency in the language that has been used in most of your courses: 29. listening q excellent q very good q good q fair q poor 30. speaking q excellent q very good q good q fair q poor 31. reading q excellent q very good q good q fair q poor 32. writing q excellent q very good q good q fair q poor 33. overall proficiency q excellent q very good q good q fair q poor estimate how much time you spent doing each of the following activities in the language that was used in most of your courses. (scale: 1 = never, 2 = a few times a year, 3 = monthly, 4 = weekly, 5 = daily) 34. watching television 1 2 3 4 5 35. reading newspapers 1 2 3 4 5 36. reading novels 1 2 3 4 5 37. listening to songs 1 2 3 4 5 38. reading magazines 1 2 3 4 5 39. watching movies or videos 1 2 3 4 5 40. talking with native speakers 1 2 3 4 5 41. e-mailing 1 2 3 4 5 42. volunteering/ service-learning /internships 1 2 3 4 5 43. talking with international students 1 2 3 4 5 44. other activities/ frequency, please specify: 1 2 3 4 5 iv. my exchange experience please complete the following sentences by checking the appropriate box, using this scale: 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. my exchange experience . . . 45. enhanced my knowledge and skills in my discipline (major and/or minor) 1 2 3 4 5 46. helped me become more mature and independent 1 2 3 4 5 47. enabled me to travel and see many new places 1 2 3 4 5 48. enhanced my proficiency in a second or foreign language 1 2 3 4 5 49. was fun 1 2 3 4 5 50. enabled me to experience life in another culture 1 2 3 4 5 51. enhanced my résumé and increased job opportunities 1 2 3 4 5 52. increased my understanding of global/international issues and events 1 2 3 4 5 53. challenged me intellectually/academically 1 2 3 4 5 54. improved my interpersonal skills (ability to relate to others) 1 2 3 4 5 55. enabled me to make friends with people from other cultural backgrounds 1 2 3 4 5 56. increased my understanding of my own culture, identity, and values 1 2 3 4 5 57. increased my ability to interact effectively with people from diverse cultural backgrounds 1 2 3 4 5 the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation 145 58. increased my ability to cope with/ adapt to new situations 1 2 3 4 5 59. helped me develop leadership skills 1 2 3 4 5 60. increased my understanding and appreciation of other peoples and cultures 1 2 3 4 5 61. provided me with valuable experience for my future career 1 2 3 4 5 62. increased my level of comfort with people different from myself 1 2 3 4 5 63. enhanced my critical thinking skills 1 2 3 4 5 64. increased my appreciation for the study of foreign languages 1 2 3 4 5 65. enhanced my intercultural sensitivity (helped me become more open-minded) 1 2 3 4 5 66. added diversity to my academic program (e.g., take courses not offered cuhk) 1 2 3 4 5 67. increased my desire to travel/ work/ study abroad in the future 1 2 3 4 5 68. improved my practical academic skills (e.g., writing essays, doing project work, giving oral reports, etc.) 1 2 3 4 5 69. enabled me to gain exposure to a second/foreign language in daily life 1 2 3 4 5 70. increased my ability to communicate in the language used in the host community 1 2 3 4 5 71. developed my ability to look at problems/situations from different perspectives 1 2 3 4 5 72. helped me become more self-confident 1 2 3 4 5 73. helped me become a more cosmopolitan, global citizen 1 2 3 4 5 74. others, please specify: 1 2 3 4 5 75. i have spent most of my time abroad with ________. q students from my ethnic group (e.g., chinese) q local students from the host culture q international students from other cultures q on my own 76. number of international friends i have now: q none q 1-3 q 4-5 q 6 or more 77. my openness to other cultures is: q excellent q very good q good qfair q poor 78. my ability to communicate appropriately and effectively with someone from another culture is: q excellent q very good q good qfair q poor 79. please rate your degree of global-mindedness (interest in/concern about international issues). q not global-mindedq somewhat global-minded q global-mindedq very global-minded 80. please describe an encounter with cultural difference that went well. _____________ _____________________________________________________________________ 81. please describe an encounter with cultural difference that did not go well. _________ _____________________________________________________________________ 82. what have you gained from this exchange programme that you could not gain at cuhk? (check the 3 most important items) a) diversity in my academic program (e.g., took courses not available at cuhk) b) exposure to a second/ foreign language in daily life c) exposure to courses with an international/ global focus d) increased understanding of my own culture, identity, and values e) increased understanding of other people and cultures f) development as a more well-rounded person g) the skills to communicate more effectively with people from diverse backgrounds h) more self-confidence, maturity, and independence i) field study opportunities (internship, service learning, research) j) firsthand experience with life in another culture k) others, please specify: ___________________ 83. what were the most challenging aspects of your exchange experience? (rank top 5) a) coping with culture shock (adjusting to cultural difference) xujia du 146 b) heavy workload c) language barrier d) homesickness e) making friends across cultures f) personal safety and security g) accommodation problems h) participating in class (e.g., class discussions) i) managing my finances j) interacting with people from other cultures k) racial discrimination l) making the best use of my time m) difficult courses at host university n) unpredictable situations o) others, please specify: ____________ 84. i was__________ for study and residence abroad. q very well prepared q well prepared q somewhat preparedq not well prepared 85. this exchange experience was_________ for my academic life. q very valuable q valuableq somewhat valuable q not valuable 86. this exchange experience was________ for my personal life. q very valuable q valuableq somewhat valuable q not valuable 87. this exchange experience was ________ for my future career. q very valuable q valuableq somewhat valuable q not very valuable 88. have you changed your major or plans for your future career because of your exchange experience? q no q yes if yes, please specify: ____________________________________ 89. do you plan to do postgraduate studies abroad after you graduate? q yes q no 90. do you plan to work or live abroad after you graduate? q yes q no 91. while abroad, i kept a diary, journal or blog. q yes q no 92. the length of my stay abroad was: q too long q just right q too short 93. what is the most important thing you learned from your exchange experience? ______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ 94. were there some aspects of your ‘self’ or ‘identity’ that became especially clear to you as a result of your exchange experience? ______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ 95. what do you think will be the most challenging about your return? (check 3 items) a) reconnecting with friends and family b) missing friends made abroad c) readjusting to the workload at cuhk d) finding someone to talk to about my exchange experience e) dealing with my emotions (e.g., frustration, restlessness, boredom) f) adjusting to less freedom (e.g., living at home) g) feeling out of place h) feeling misunderstood i) continuing to enhance my second language proficiency j) others, please specify________ the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation 147 96. would you recommend an international exchange experience to your friends? q yes q no if not, why not: _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ 97. what advice would you give to cuhk students who are considering going on exchange? _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ 98. what suggestions would you make to improve the pre-departure orientation for exchange students? _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ 99. please feel free to make additional comments about your exchange experience. _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ thank you for your participation! xujia du 148 appendix b post-sojourn interview protocol used in the study overall impression 1. compare your exchange experience with your study/ life at cuhk. what was different? what stood out for you? what was your most memorable experience? 2. what goals did you set for your stay abroad (e.g., linguistic, academic, professional)? did you meet them? what ones did you not achieve? why? 3. what did you gain from studying abroad that you would not have been able to gain if you’d stayed at cuhk for this time period? did you lose anything by studying abroad? 4. did you make the most of your time abroad? if you could do the sojourn again, what would you do differently? would you prepare for it differently? 5. was your stay abroad about the right length or would you have preferred a longer or shorter time abroad? why? academic development 1. what courses did you take while abroad? how did they relate to your major/minor? did the courses meet your expectations? what did you like most about them? dislike the most? 2. did you notice any differences between your classes at cuhk and those at the host institution? how did you feel about these differences? how did your academic experiences in hong kong influence your transition to the academic environment at your host institution? did any of your cuhk courses prepare you for study/life abroad? 3. was the difficulty level of the courses/workload/assignments similar to cuhk? if different, in what ways? did you find it easy or difficult to adjust to the academic environment and expectations for your coursework? 4. how well did you do in your courses? how do your results compare with those at cuhk? 5. what did you gain from the academic program at the host institution? 6. what english skills were most important for your academic success at the host university (listening, reading, speaking and writing)? did this motivate you to improve these skills? what did you do to improve? english learning motivation and usage 1. did you take any english language enhancement or culture courses at the host university? if yes, why? what did you gain from them? 2. have you visited the ilc (or a similar center) in your host university with the aim of improving your english? what ilc-related activities did you join? 3. what language did you use most often (at university/at home/with friends/internet entertainment)? did your language use change over time? if you used english was it challenging? 4. how would you describe your motivation to learn and improve your english in the second half of your exchange period? did your motivation change during your stay abroad? if yes, in what ways? 5. what motivated you to improve your english in the host country? were you motivated by exams like the gre or gmat, academic goals, career (internship) aims or your social life? did the main motivators change over time during your stay abroad? 6. what courses, activities, or experiences in the host country motivated or demotivated you to learn and use english? please provide specific examples. the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation 149 7. how would you describe your language learning efforts in the host country? which english language skills did you expend the most effort trying to improve? did you take any steps to learn or improve english on your own? did your level of effort and focus of your efforts change over time? 8. how would you rate your overall english proficiency before and after your stay abroad? (1 = poor to 5 = like a native speaker). what aspects or skills improved the most (listening, speaking, reading, writing)? the least? did this meet your expectations? would it have been possible to achieve this level of proficiency if you’d stayed in hong kong during this period? 9. did you feel confident or anxious to express your ideas in english in class and talk to english-speaking people? did your oral skills in everyday conversations improve? which improved more, your formal or informal language skills? please explain. 10. did you have any awkward moments because of your language use (e.g., fluency, inappropriate vocab/expressions)? how did that experience influence your motivation? 11. what do you think is the most effective way to enhance your english skills, especially speaking? did spending time with host nationals or other international students help enhance your proficiency in english? did you become more willing to initiate conversations with other english-speaking people? 12. have you ever asked other international students around you about their english learning experiences? if yes, what did they do to improve their english in the host environment? how did that influence your motivation and strategies for english learning? attitudes toward the host language, people, culture and country 1. what’s your attitude toward the host language (english), people and country now? did this change while you were abroad? what stereotypes/expectations of the host culture did you have before you went and how were they confirmed or dispelled? 2. have you ever asked other chinese or international students around you about their attitudes toward the host language, people and culture? if yes, what were their views? did their views influence your attitude? 3. did you watch tv programs/films, listen to music, or read books that are about the host country during your exchange? if yes, why did you do that? what was your impression? 4. in your opinion, how do local and international people in the host country view chinese people who speak good english and those who don’t? how did that influence your motivation to enhance your english? residence abroad 1. did your living situation change in the second half of your exchange period (relationship with your roommates/language use with your roommates/social opportunities with local and international students)? free time and travel 1. please describe a typical day in the host environment. how much free time did you have? how did you spend it? did this change over time? 2. did you join any campus/community organizations or activities while abroad? if yes, which ones? were they new to you? did they bring you into contact with locals? other international students? what did you gain from these activities? xujia du 150 3. what trips did you take in the host country or other countries? who did you travel with? where did you go? how did you travel? how long did you stay? where did you stay? what did you gain from these trips? had you ever travelled like this before? social development 1. did your social circle change in the second half of your exchange period? do you wish you had done anything differently to improve your relationships across cultures? 2. how did your social circle influence your language use? did the people in your social circle encourage you to use and improve your english? intercultural adjustment and learning/intercultural communication skills 1. how well did you adapt to the new environment? did your english skills make you confident and ease your transition to the host environment? 2. please describe an encounter with cultural difference that went well. what did you learn from this experience? how did that influence your language and cultural learning? 3. now describe an encounter with cultural difference that did not go well. how did you respond? what did you learn from this experience? how did that influence your language and cultural learning? 4. to figure out a cultural misunderstanding, what did you do? how did that influence your motivation to improve your language and intercultural communication skills? 5. compared with your first week abroad, how did you feel at the end of your stay? did you fit in? how did you feel about leaving? would you have been happy to stay longer? 6. did your intercultural communication skills improve after studying and living abroad? why or why not? what areas improved? what areas do you wish to improve further? how important are english skills to intercultural communication? 7. what is most interesting or intriguing for you in interacting with people from other cultures? what is most challenging for you when interacting with people from other cultures? identity 1. how do you define your language identity now? do you think you are more of a proficient english user than learner? has this changed because you spent time abroad? has this changed how you see yourself? 2. in your opinion, how did other people in your host environment perceive your language identity? was your language identity contested? if yes, how did that experience influence your motivation to use english? 3. what’s your desired language identity? what can you do to become the person you want to become? 4. to what extent did you want to fit in or even be a member of the local academic and social community in the host country? how did you position yourself? did your positioning change over time? how did your self-positioning influence your motivation to learn and use english in the host environment? 5. have elements of the host country become part of your identity? do you feel more like a global citizen after living abroad? 6. in your opinion, how did other people around you perceive your cultural identity? did their perceptions have an impact on your motivation to use english with them? the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation 151 7. what’s your desired cultural identity? did this change while you were abroad? would you like to possess a bicultural or even a multicultural identity? 8. while abroad did you see yourself as an ambassador of hong kong or china? if yes, how did you feel in that role? 9. did you become more proud of hong kong and/or more attached to china? did you become more nationalistic? if yes, why? how did that influence your motivation to make international friends and your language use? service-learning/volunteering 1. did you take part in any service learning/volunteering? 2. what did you gain from this experience? did it enhance your english skills? did it enhance your knowledge of the host culture? reentry – back to hong kong feelings and personal development 1. how do you feel to be back in hong kong? to be back at cuhk? have your perceptions of hong kong and cuhk changed? if yes, how? 2. what do you miss most about the host culture/your exchange experience? 3. was the exchange experience transformative for you? if yes, how have you changed? 4. do you want to keep your exchange experience alive? if yes, what would you do? academic development 1. have you changed your major or minor after coming back to cuhk? if yes, why? 2. has your exchange experience affected your choice of courses at cuhk? (e.g., are any of your courses related to the country where you studied abroad? are you taking any language enhancement courses?) 3. are your study habits or in-class behaviors different now because of your exchange experience (e.g., are you/do you plan to be more active in class? do you now view students who speak up in class differently)? social life 1. are you keeping in contact with friends you made while abroad? if yes, how? how often? do any plan to visit you here? do you plan to go back to visit them? 2. do you now spend more time with int’l students than you did before you went abroad? 3. which college are you living in now? where is your roommate from? what language do you use to talk with your roommate? current english learning motivation and usage 1. what language do you use most often now? 2. how would you describe your current motivation to learn and use english? what motivates you to learn and improve your english now? 3. how is your reentry experience influencing your english learning motivation? 4. what steps do you plan to take to continue to learn and use english? xujia du 152 future plans 1. what advantages do you think you have compared with cuhk students who have not studied abroad (e.g., in the job market, in your profession, in your personal/social life)? 2. what do you plan to do after you graduate? (e.g., postgraduate studies at home or abroad? work abroad? travel abroad? work for an international company?) 3. have you thought about studying, living in, or even immigrating to your host country later in your life? if yes, why? what’s your parents’ attitude toward this? 4. how has your international experience influenced your future plans? did you change your plans after your international experience? do you think that the international experience will help your future plans? the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation 153 appendix c post post-sojourn interview protocol used in the study goals 1. what do you hope to accomplish in your remaining time at cuhk? what are your personal, linguistic, cultural, academic, and professional goals? 2. what strategies have you been using or are you going to use to accomplish these goals? english learning, use, ability and motivation 1. are you taking any eltu courses this semester? please describe them and tell me what you have gained from them. 2. are you taking any elective english language or culture courses? 3. this semester have you sought language support from relevant cuhk units to improve your english skills for job interviews or graduate programs application? what activities have you joined? 4. are you taking any steps to learn or improve english on your own? 5. what courses, activities, or learning experiences have enhanced your motivation to learn or use english this semester? 6. what language do you now use most of the time (academic/social/internet entertainment)? is your language use different from what it was before your exchange experience? 7. how would you rate your overall proficiency in english (1 = poor to 5 = like a native speaker)? which skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing, sociopragmatic competence) have improved since your return to cuhk? why? 8. do you feel more confident speaking english with native speaker or non-chinese speakers of english as an international language? are you more willing to initiate conversations with them in english? 9. what has motivated you to improve your english since your return to cuhk? (exams? academic? career? social life?) how would you describe your current motivation to learn and use the language as compared with your time abroad? 10. how would you describe your language learning efforts since your return to cuhk? which english language skills have you tried to enhance the most? how? what elements do you still need to improve? academic development 1. what courses are you taking now? have you noticed any differences in your courses at cuhk and at the host institution? how do you feel about these differences? 2. are your study habits or in-class behaviors different now because of your exchange experience (e.g., are you more active in class? do you now view students who speak up in class differently?)? 3. what english skills are most important for your coursework now? are you still motivated to improve your english skills by a desire to achieve academic excellence? if yes, what do you do to improve? if not, why? social network 1. please describe your current social network. where are your friends from? what activities do you do together? what language do you use with them? xujia du 154 2. when you returned to cuhk, to what extent did you want to have a diverse social circle? what have you done to expand your social circle? 3. which college are you living in now? where is your roommate from? what language do you use to talk with your roommate? (did you request an international roommate?) 4. have you kept in contact with the international friends you made during the exchange program? if yes, how? have you visited them (or have they visited you)? or do you have any plans to meet up in the near future? 5. since your exchange experience, have you made any new international friends? how many international friends do you have now? how often do you see them? what do you do together? what language do you use with them? 6. how does your social circle influence your motivation to use english? do the people in your social circle encourage you to use and improve your english? sociocultural experience 1. have you joined any english-medium activities organized by your college/university or outside the university since you came back? if yes, what did you join? why? 2. since your exchange experience, have you travelled, worked, or studied abroad? if yes, please provide details. 3. are your social and cultural experiences after your return to cuhk influencing your motivation to learn and use english? please explain. career development and plans 1. please tell me about your recent internship experience in hong kong. what did you do? what did you gain from the experience? 2. were good english skills essential in your workplace? did the experience encourage you to use and improve your english? 3. what do you plan to do after you graduate? (e.g., postgraduate studies at home or abroad? work abroad? work for an international company?) what concrete plans do you have? 4. how has your international experience influenced your future plans? do you think that it will help your future plans? 5. how important are good english skills for your future plans? attitudes toward english, english-speaking people and countries 1. do you miss your host country from time to time? if yes why? 2. how much do you think you know about your host country, culture and people? how do you view your host country and other english-speaking countries now? 3. do you want to study or work in your host country or another english-speaking country for a longer period of time? if yes, why? do you have any concrete plans? 4. what is your attitude toward english in general, native speakers’ english and other speakers’ english? 5. do you now watch tv programs/films, listen to music, or read news/magazines/books that are about your host country? if yes, why do you do that? identity 1. how do you define your language identity now? do you think you are a more proficient english user because you have experience in an english speaking country? the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation 155 2. in your opinion, how do the people you interact with in hong kong perceive your language identity? 3. has your language identity been challenged in any way in hong kong? (e.g., have you met locals who think your english is not as strong as you perceive it to be?) if yes, how has that experience influenced your motivation to use and learn english? 4. what’s your desired language identity? what can you do to achieve it in hong kong? 5. how do you identify yourself and feel about your cultural identity now? do you see yourself as different from chinese students who do not have overseas experience? if yes, in what ways? 6. in your opinion, how do the people around you perceive your cultural identity? do they see you differently because you have overseas experience? 7. what is your desired cultural identity? has it changed since your re-entry? do you see hong kong, mainland china and the host country differently now? 8. how do your ideal identities influence your motivation to make international friends and enhance your proficiency in english? 41 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (1). 2015. 41-63 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.1.3 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the anxiety-proficiency relationship and the stability of anxiety: the case of chinese university learners of english and japanese yinxing jin university of groningen, the netherlands y.jin@rug.nl kees de bot university of groningen, the netherlands c.l.j.de.bot@rug.nl merel keijzer university of groningen, the netherlands m.c.j.keijzer@rug.nl abstract adopting a longitudinal design, this study investigates the effects of foreign language anxiety on foreign language proficiency over time within english and japanese learning contexts. it also explores the stability of anxiety in english and japanese over time and the stability of anxiety across english and japanese. chinese university students (n = 146), who were simultaneously learning japanese and english, participated in this study. data were collected twice over a 2-month interval, using the foreign language classroom anxiety scale, the english proficiency scale, and the japanese proficiency scale. results showed that anxiety changes had a significantly negative, but weak, correlation with the development of overall proficiency and the proficiency in subskills such as reading or speaking, for both english and japanese, suggesting the interference of anxiety with proficiency levels. anxiety in japanese tended to decrease significantly over time, but no significant change was found for yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 42 english. furthermore, no significant difference between anxiety in japanese and english was found at either testing time. keywords: foreign language anxiety, foreign language proficiency, stability, chinese university students, longitudinal study 1. introduction foreign language (fl) anxiety is a frequently examined affective variable in fl learners. it refers to “a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors related to classroom language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process” (horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986, p. 128). one issue that has received abundant attention is the effect of fl anxiety on fl learning. it is now widely accepted that fl anxiety can interfere with fl learning (e.g., horwitz, 2001; woodrow, 2006). nevertheless, several issues related to such interference deserve more attention and clarification. for one, the construct of fl anxiety would benefit from a better understanding of the mechanisms through which fl anxiety affects fl learning. previous studies in relation to fl anxiety are almost exclusively cross-sectional, making it hard to assess the effects of fl anxiety on fl proficiency over time. indeed, the stability of fl anxiety over time has been almost completely ignored in past work. as for the stability of anxiety across fls, the available research focuses almost exclusively on european multilingual contexts, although there are a few studies addressing a non-european fl learning context. furthermore, some existing research shows methodological problems. for one, in saito, horwitz, and garza (1999), american students learning japanese, french, or russian as fls were recruited from different years. moreover, all fl courses were required for some students but were elective for others. because of this high degree of variability, a comparison of the anxiety levels in japanese, french, and russian cannot directly answer the question of whether fl anxiety varies across fls. in the present study, 146 chinese university students’ anxiety in english and japanese was tested twice, over a 2-month interval. at each of the time points, the students’ english and japanese proficiency was assessed as well. the relationships between fl anxiety changes and the development of overall proficiency and specific skills were examined in english and japanese learning contexts. comparisons between anxiety in english and japanese were performed at each time point and across-time comparisons were done for both. the anxiety-proficiency relationship and the stability of anxiety: the case of chinese. . . 43 2. literature review 2.1. the effects of fl anxiety on fl learning studies on the effects of fl anxiety on fl learning generally fall in one of two categories (macintyre & gardner, 1994). studies in category 1 explore the effects of fl anxiety using broad-based indices of fl learning, such as course grades, standardized proficiency tests, and self-evaluations of proficiency. research across varying instructional contexts and target languages has shown a negative correlation between anxiety and these achievement indicators (e.g., aida, 1994; cheng, horwitz, & schallert, 1999; hewitt & stephenson, 2012; horwitz, 1986; liu & jackson, 2008; saito & samimy, 1996; trylong, 1987). studies in the second category typically address the effects of fl anxiety on subtle aspects of fl learning. steinberg and horwitz (1986) found that anxious students provided less interpretative content than their more relaxed counterparts when orally describing stimulus pictures in a second language. macintyre and gardner (1994) explored the potential effects of anxiety on three stages of fl learning: input, processing, and output. students recruited from a monolingual (english) canadian university (n = 97), who were learning french as a second language, participated in the study. three 6-item scales were developed to measure the anxiety experienced at the three stages of learning french. three tasks assessed the performance at each stage. significant correlations were obtained between stage-specific anxiety and tasks. for one, translation accuracy showed a significantly negative correlation with processing anxiety. in another one of category 2 studies, sellers (2000) probed the anxiety-reading relationship on the basis of 89 american university students of spanish. results showed that fl reading anxiety or general fl anxiety had a significant main effect on the number of pausal units recalled (sellers defined a pausal unit as “one that has a pause at each end during normally paced oral reading” [p. 514]). students with high reading anxiety were found to recall fewer units representing the central ideas of a passage, whereas those with high general anxiety recalled fewer units representing ideas of mid-level importance. in addition, irrespective of anxiety type, highly anxious individuals tended to experience more cognitive interference than their less anxious peers. the aforementioned findings endorse a widely accepted proposition that fl anxiety can impair fl learning (e.g., horwitz, 2001; macintyre & gardner, 1994; woodrow, 2006). nonetheless, this viewpoint is not without dispute. illustrating the linguistic coding differences hypothesis (lcdh), sparks and ganschow, sometimes with others (sparks & ganschow, 1991, 1993a, 1993b, 1995; sparks, ganschow, & javorsky, 2000; sparks, ganschow, & pohlman, 1989; yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 44 sparks, patton, ganschow, & humbach, 2006), argued that phonological, syntactic, and/or semantic coding deficits in native language learning accounted for poor fl achievements. among all deficits, the impact of phonological coding deficits is most pervasive and important. fl anxiety is then seen as a mere consequence of fl learning difficulties. responding to the lcdh, macintyre (1995) described how language anxiety as a social anxiety construct cognitively interfered with fl learning tasks. that is, as best elaborated by eysenck (1979), “highly anxious subjects are effectively in a dual-task or divided attention situation, in contrast to non-anxious subjects who primarily process task-relevant information” (p. 364). macintyre (1995) also emphasized that anxiety arousal could affect learning activities such as shortand long-term memory and functional use of vocabulary items, citing the correlational or experimental studies that exist. the lcdh is incomplete because it “[assigns] mere epiphenomenal status to affective variables in general and language anxiety in particular” (macintyre, 1995, p. 90). horwitz (2000) also responded to the lcdh and argued that fl anxiety could be independent of processing deficits and still interfere with fl learning. a good deal of evidence has pointed to the negative influences of fl anxiety on fl learning, so in any event fl anxiety should not be excluded from the constellation of causal variables of deficient fl learning. after all, “the potential of anxiety to interfere with learning and performance is one of the most accepted phenomena in psychology and education” (horwitz, 2000, p. 256). yet several issues related to the interference need clarification, for example, the precise mechanisms of fl anxiety affecting fl learning (horwitz & young, 1991). another challenge is “to determine the extent to which anxiety is a cause rather than a result of poor language learning” (horwitz, 2001, p. 118). furthermore, the effects of fl anxiety on fl proficiency should be studied as a function of time as previous work in this area has been almost exclusively cross-sectional. 2.2. the stability of fl anxiety the stability of fl anxiety can be approached from two perspectives: stability over time and stability across target languages. inspired by a distinction of synchronic and diachronic linguistics, the present authors conceptualize the stability of anxiety over time as diachronic stability and that across fls as synchronic stability.1 1 for us, diachronic and synchronic stability refer to whether there is a significant change in fl anxiety among a group of learners over a given time span, or whether two or more fl anxieties in the same group of learners significantly differ. we focus on the variability tendency of anxiety in a population from which samples were taken, for three reasons. first, the conclusions regarding the stability of fl anxiety in previous studies were almost uniformly based on inferential tests for group comparisons. a focus on significance testing enables a the anxiety-proficiency relationship and the stability of anxiety: the case of chinese. . . 45 to our knowledge, the diachronic stability of fl anxiety has been underresearched until now. in an early study, gardner, smythe, and clément (1979) found that french classroom anxiety significantly decreased after 6 and 5 weeks for canadian and american students, respectively. it should be noted that the participants in gardner et al. (1979) attended an intensive fl program highly similar to immersion. therefore, the results cannot be generalized to more regular classroom situations where the input is less intensive. more recently, liu, liu, and su’s (2010) study of 934 1st-year chinese students from three universities reported significant decreases in the scores of the full adapted foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas) (horwitz et al., 1986) and of two factors: low self-confidence in speaking english and general english classroom performance anxiety, over a period of one semester. however, the profiles of diachronic anxiety differed between female and male subjects and were quite different among three universities. females showed significant decreases in the scores of the full anxiety scale and the two factors, but males’ anxiety levels significantly decreased only for the factor of low self-confidence in speaking english. the results of paired samples t tests for two of the three universities replicated the findings for males and females. significance levels were not attested for the third university. it should be noted that anxiety levels do not always naturally decrease as a function of time. samimy and tabuse (1992), for instance, reported a significant increase in the level of discomfort experienced within the japanese classroom among 39 university students from the spring to the autumn quarter. furthermore, in a recent study, jee (2014) reported a significant increase in the scores of the full flcas and one of the flcas factors, that is, communication apprehension, from the first to the second semester among 12 korean fl students. saito et al.’s (1999) study is the first to look into the synchronic stability of fl anxiety (rodríguez & abreu, 2003). in their study, 383 american students learning french, japanese, or russian completed the flcas (horwitz et al., 1986) and the foreign language reading anxiety scale (saito et al., 1999). results showed that reading anxiety significantly fluctuated depending on the target languages, but general fl anxiety did not. it should be noted that the participants came from different grades (e.g., freshmen and sophomores). foreign comparison with previous studies. second, data at the level of individuals tend to be chaotic, and this means that it is difficult to draw a conclusion. for instance, the present participants showed an increase, decrease, or no change in anxiety levels in english across surveys. some students showed more of an increase than others. third, pedagogical decisions are more frequently made on the basis of evaluating the general characteristics of learners within an institution, such as a class or a school. the results of significance tests can provide such information. therefore, a focus on significance testing is pedagogically meaningful. yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 46 language courses were required for some students but were elective for others. this high degree of variability thus obscures the findings (sparks et al., 2000). rodríguez and abreu (2003) compared the anxiety experienced by 110 venezuelan students in english and french classes. these students with various proficiencies in the two languages came from two venezuelan universities. their anxiety levels in english and french were not found to significantly differ. kim (2009) criticized rodríguez and abreu’s (2003) study for ignoring contextual factors that contributed to learners’ anxiety and subsequently compared 59 korean college students’ anxiety in english reading and conversation courses. the results showed that learners experienced significantly higher anxiety in the conversation course. rodríguez (2010) responded to kim’s criticism by clarifying that rodríguez and abreu (2003) took contextual factors into account, because the participants were recruited from two schools and were studying two fls, and furthermore identified deficiencies in kim (2009). for example, what kim claimed, that is, that her study paid attention to cross-cultural differences in fl instruction, conflicted with the fact that her subjects were taking two english courses at the same college. moreover, kim omitted some relevant information in the results section, such as homogeneity of regression slopes and effect size. as can be seen, studies of synchronic changes in anxiety levels have provoked many debates between researchers. in a more recent investigation, piniel (2006) examined fl anxiety in 61 9th-year secondary school students at a grammar school in hungary. the students were learning two fls. the one that had been learnt in elementary school was the students’ first fl according to the school’s curriculum. the fl that started being learnt after enrollment in secondary school was labeled the second fl. in the first fl category, there were english and german. languages in the second fl category included french, german, italian, and english. students’ anxiety in the first and second fl was assessed through the flcas and compared. results showed that learning the first and second fl rendered significant effects on the anxiety levels. much work in this area has also been done by dewaele and his colleagues (dewaele, 2002, 2007a, 2007b, 2013; dewaele, petrides, & furnham, 2008). the 2002 and 2007a studies found that pupils in the last year of their secondary school, who were either mostly (2002 study) or all (2007a study) native speakers of dutch, showed a significantly higher communicative anxiety in french than in english. in a follow-up study (dewaele, 2007b), university students (35 bilinguals, 33 trilinguals, and 38 quadrilinguals) were targeted. participants had learned their fls either in instructional settings or under naturalistic conditions. according to the order of acquisition, the languages known by the students were labelled l1, l2, l3, and l4, although the actual languages were very diverse. the anxiety-proficiency relationship and the stability of anxiety: the case of chinese. . . 47 communicative anxiety in the l1, l2, l3, and l4 was measured in three situations, that is, speaking with friends, with strangers, and in public. paired samples t tests revealed that speaking anxiety gradually significantly increased from l1 to l4 in the three situations (with the exception of nonsignificant differences between anxiety in the l3 and l4 when speaking with friends and strangers). dewaele, petrides, and furnham’s (2008) study also pertains to speaking anxiety of multilingual adults across situations where the participants use the known languages to talk with friends, colleagues, and strangers, on the phone and in public. similar to the findings in dewaele (2007b), a significant increase in anxiety levels in the language learnt later was identified. an explanation for the gradually higher speaking anxiety is that the participants may be more proficient in the languages learnt earlier, as noted by dewaele (2007b). in a recent study by dewaele (2013), the flcas was filled out by 86 and 62 university students from london and mallorca, respectively, who were bilinguals, trilinguals, or quadrilinguals. simple correlation analyses suggested that the flcas scores in l2, l3, and l4 were highly related for both the london and mallorca groups. interpreting these findings, dewaele (2013) contended that “strong correlations between flca [foreign language classroom anxiety] values in l2, l3, and l4 suggest that levels of flca are relatively stable across the foreign languages known by the learners/users” (p. 670). dewaele and his colleagues’ studies are important in more ways than one. for one, they compared the anxiety level in the l1 with those of multiple fls. the result that all fl anxiety was significantly greater than l1 anxiety further substantiated the overwhelming task that is fl learning. moreover, their studies are the first ones to compare anxiety levels in more than two fls, which is methodologically inspiring. the finding that anxiety gradually became more intense in the order of acquisition of fls is pedagogically meaningful. it means that instructors who are teaching a fl that is relatively new to learners should pay more attention to the affective state of their students and make more efforts to lessen students’ anxiety. to sum up, research into the stability of fl anxiety is only in its infancy, especially for diachronic stability. longitudinal studies in relation to fl anxiety are rare. william’s (1991) suggestion that “a long-term study that would allow an evaluation of the students’ foreign-language classroom anxiety and their progress in the target language would be a very good one” (p. 26) has not been met by empirical studies. garrett and young (2009) pointed out that previous longitudinal research solely focused on learners’ development of linguistic ability or communicative competence in the target language. hence, the dearth of research into anxiety over time partly roots in a traditional neglect of changes of learners’ inner feelings. not many studies have been conducted to look at yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 48 the synchronic changes of fl anxiety either, however, and the existing research shows methodological shortcomings. the focus of the majority of past work related to synchronic stability has furthermore been on european fl learning contexts. no study has compared asian learners’ anxiety for multiple fls. we designed a longitudinal study involving two surveys at two different time points within the context of learning english and japanese in chinese universities. at the two time points, english and japanese proficiency was assessed using self-reports. anxiety in english and japanese was measured using horwitz et al.’s (1986) flcas. the interconnections of the changes in fl anxiety intensity with the development of overall proficiency and four specific skills were investigated in the two learning contexts. between-surveys comparisons in and withinsurvey comparisons between anxiety in english and japanese were conducted. the aim of the study was to answer the following research questions (rqs): 1. can changes in fl anxiety intensity affect the development of overall fl proficiency? 2. can changes in fl anxiety intensity affect the development of fl subskills, namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing? 3. is anxiety in japanese and english stable over time (diachronic stability)? does anxiety in english and japanese differ in terms of the stability over time? 4. is fl anxiety stable across english and japanese (synchronic stability)? 3. methodology 3.1. participants the participants were 146 chinese students of japanese in the first year of their studies, who were also studying english. they were recruited from six japanese classes at three universities in china, which are representative of a large number of universities in this country. two universities were located in henan province in the central part of china and one in shandong province in east china. all the students were taking more than one japanese course and japanese teachers were not always the same for different classes at the same school. however, the participants at the same university were taking one compulsory english course as a group. hence, the 146 students were sampled from three english classes, and furthermore consisted of 21 males and 125 females, with ages ranging from 17 to 23 (m = 19.57, sd = 1.00). in addition, generally speaking, the students came from less developed places and their parents had not received much education. they had studied english for 4.5 to 13.5 years (m = 9.05, sd = 1.88) until the time 1 survey and almost all the students (n = 145) started learning japanese after university enrollment (m = 0.52, sd = .29). the anxiety-proficiency relationship and the stability of anxiety: the case of chinese. . . 49 3.2. instruments in addition to the demographic information questionnaire (diq) used to collect the participants’ name, age, gender, home location (village, township, county, prefecture city or above), parental education (primary school, junior school, senior school, college), duration of english and japanese learning, three other questionnaires were used, including the flcas (horwitz et al., 1986), the english proficiency scale (eps), and the japanese proficiency scale (jps). the diq, the eps, and the jps were constructed in chinese by the current authors. the flcas, which is originally in english, was translated into chinese. the flcas contains 33 items that all follow a 5-point likert format. responses range from strongly disagree to strongly agree. the lower and upper boundary for the possible flcas scores is 33 and 165, respectively. higher scores indicate more intense fl anxiety. in this study, the flcas was used to assess anxiety in japanese and english. therefore, foreign language in the flcas was altered to japanese and english, which led to the creation of the english classroom anxiety scale (ecas) and the japanese classroom anxiety scale (jcas), respectively. two exemplar items from the ecas and the jcas are: “i tremble when i know that i'm going to be called on in english class” and “i don't feel pressure to prepare very well for japanese class.” the eps and the jps are self-report instruments of english and japanese proficiency. both have four subscales pertaining to listening, speaking, reading, and writing proficiency. each subscale consists of five items in a 4-point likert format. in total, there are 20 items in both the eps and the jps. responses range from probably impossible to easy. the minimum obtainable score on both the eps and the jps is 20 and the maximum is 80, with higher scores representing higher levels of english and japanese proficiency. two sample items from the eps and the jps are: “i can be relatively fluent in answering teachers’ questions related to text contents in japanese” and “i can compose letters, notifications, or invitation letters in english on immediate needs.” the two scales were constructed following different chinese national standards, which clearly spell out requirements for students’ english and japanese proficiency in four subskills: the curriculum standard for senior high school english (experimental) (moe, 2003) for the eps and the curriculum standard for japanese majors at elementary level in higher education (moe, 2001) for the jps. the eps is a measure of intermediate level of english. the jps is a test of elementary level of japanese. as the two scales were newly developed, their effectiveness in measuring english and japanese proficiency was validated in a pilot study by correlating students’ self-reports and teachers’ ratings of students’ listening, speaking, reading, and writing proficiency. the validation process is introduced in the procedures section. teachers’ ratings were given in a 5-point likert format. yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 50 responses ranged from poor to excellent. the score range resulting from this teacher instrument was between 4 (minimum) and 20 (maximum). the results of this validation are reported below, together with the reliability levels. 3.3. procedures data collection followed three steps. step 1 was a pilot study, which was carried out during regular class hours, following the same procedures as outlined below for the full surveys and which itself consisted of two parts. in part 1 of the pilot study, two intact japanese classes with 41 students in total were tested at a university in shaan’xi province in west china. the students were freshmen majoring in japanese and were taking a compulsory english course, similar to those in the two full surveys at different time points. class 1 was tested first. based on the results for class 1, all scales were revised and the resulting scales were tested in class 2. because the jcas and the ecas are identical except for the wording of japanese or english, the pilot study for anxiety scales was only conducted for the jcas. in part 2 of the pilot study, the eps and the jps, which had already demonstrated adequate internal reliability in part 1, were administered to a class of 27 students at another university in shandong province in east china, which is more on a par with the three universities where the 146 participants were recruited than the shaan’xi university in part 1. teachers’ ratings were also collected for these 27 students to validate whether the two scales effectively assessed english and japanese proficiency. there were 26 valid selfreports for each scale. in short, the results of the pilot study (internal reliability) reported in the results section were based on class 2 in part 1 for the jcas, the eps, and the jps. the effectiveness of the eps and the jps in measuring proficiency was validated by correlating the 26 self-evaluations and teacher’s ratings. step 2 of this study’s design involved two full repeated surveys conducted with a 2-month interval on the 146 participants in an out-of-class session with no teacher present. at either time point, all participants attending the same university filled out the full questionnaire at the same time in a classroom. at time 1, research purposes were only partly explained to students before they set to complete the questionnaires, to avoid a situation where the subjects would give answers anticipating the researcher’s predisposition. the students were informed that their participation was voluntary and that the survey had no effects on their course grades. all participants were expected to give their genuine views independently. following the instructions, the full set of questionnaires was administered. the questionnaires were arranged in the following order: the diq, the jps, the eps, the jcas, and the ecas. the time 2 survey followed the same procedure, except that the diq was left out and instructions the anxiety-proficiency relationship and the stability of anxiety: the case of chinese. . . 51 were shortened. questionnaires were immediately and carefully checked after being collected to ensure that no items were left unanswered. in instances where missing items were found, those subjects were traced to complete the missing questions. the third step of the study’s design was data registration. questionnaires were numbered and responses registered for further analyses. 3.4. data analysis for rqs 1 and 2, the differences in anxiety in japanese/english and in japanese/english proficiency were computed, by subtracting the time 1 scores from the time 2 scores. the differences in anxiety and proficiency were subsequently correlated. the diachronic and synchronic stability of fl anxiety (rqs 3 and 4) was investigated by using inferential statistics: paired samples t test or the wilcoxon signed rank test, depending on the results of assumption testing. 4. results 4.1. reliability estimates of the scales the jcas achieved an internal reliability of .95 (cronbach's alpha) in the pilot study. at two time points, internal reliability was .93 and .94 for the jcas, and .92 (twice) for the ecas. the results for the flcas obtained from this sample are comparable with those of other studies, for example, .93 in horwitz (1986) and .94 in aida (1994). the test-retest reliability was .81 for the jcas and .72 for the ecas in the current study. horwitz (1986) obtained a test-retest coefficient of .83 on 78 samples over an 8-week interval. the internal and external reliability coefficients of the eps and the jps are reported in table 1. as shown, all reliability coefficients were adequate. the results of the validation process were also satisfactory. the correlation of students’ self-evaluations and teacher’s ratings was .71 for japanese proficiency and .63 for english proficiency, suggesting that the two scales can effectively measure language proficiency. table 1 reliability levels of the eps and the jps (n = 146) measure internal reliability (α) test-retest reliability (r) epspl eps1 eps2 jpspl jps1 jps2 eps jps listening subscale .86 .79 .78 .76 .76 .80 .59** .63** speaking subscale .90 .83 .83 .69 .79 .79 .64** .57** reading subscale .86 .72 .73 .77 .80 .75 .60** .57** writing subscale .82 .84 .83 .79 .83 .81 .59** .62** overall scale .95 .92 .92 .91 .92 .92 .68** .68** note.pl = pilot study; 1 = the time 1 survey; 2 = the time 2 survey; ** p < .01 yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 52 4.2. the anxiety-proficiency relationship (rqs 1 and 2) in table 2, the descriptive results of self-assessment of english and japanese proficiency, and anxiety in the two fls are reported for the time 1 and time 2 surveys, including mean scores and standard deviations. fl anxiety changes over two months were calculated using the time 2 flcas scores minus the time 1 scores. in the same manner, the between-surveys differences in overall proficiency and the proficiency of subskills were obtained. anxiety changes were then correlated with the differences in the overall and specific proficiency after checking the linear relationship in scatterplots2. the results are reported in tables 3 and 4. table 2 means (and standard deviations) of language proficiency and anxiety (n = 146) measurements time 1 time 2 anxiety in english 91.46 (17.54) 91.60 (16.26) anxiety in japanese 94.23 (18.41) 91.58 (18.34) english listening proficiency 17.44 (2.34) 17.62 (2.07) english speaking proficiency 15.15 (3.19) 15.18 (2.92) english reading proficiency 16.86 (2.43) 17.13 (2.27) english writing proficiency 17.00 (2.58) 17.00 (2.60) overall english proficiency 66.45 (8.96) 66.93 (8.28) japanese listening proficiency 15.79 (2.63) 16.51 (2.45) japanese speaking proficiency 14.69 (3.02) 15.09 (2.83) japanese reading proficiency 15.52 (2.92) 16.05 (2.63) japanese writing proficiency 15.09 (3.30) 15.59 (2.94) overall japanese proficiency 61.08 (9.94) 63.23 (9.33) as shown in tables 3 and 4, the correlations of anxiety in english with the overall and specific english proficiency were all significantly negative. correlation coefficients ranged from -.20 to -.38, indicating 4% to 14.4% variance shared by the variables of anxiety and proficiency. the changes of anxiety in japanese were also significantly negatively associated with the development of overall japanese proficiency and the specific skills. correlations ranged from -.25 to .38 (6.3% to 14.4% shared variance). a small index of shared variance in both cases indicated a weaker relation between the changes of fl anxiety and the development of overall fl proficiency or the specific skills. in addition, a positive correlation was found between the changes of anxiety in english and japanese, suggesting that the decrease or increase of anxiety in english can lead to a similar 2 in this study, we investigated the diachronic and synchronic stability of anxiety on the basis of individual universities. to be consistent in the way of using data, we also correlated the time 2-time 1 differences of anxiety in english/japanese with those of overall proficiency and proficiency in the subskills in english/japanese for each university. a negative relationship between anxiety and overall proficiency or proficiency in the four subskills was found. the anxiety-proficiency relationship and the stability of anxiety: the case of chinese. . . 53 change of anxiety in japanese, and vice versa. the four specific skills were also positively correlated with each other in english and japanese learning contexts. table 3 correlations between fl anxiety and overall proficiency (n = 146) aj-c ae-c jp-d ep-d aj-c 1.00*** ae-c .43*** 1.00*** jp-d -.38*** -.36*** 1.00*** ep-d -.41*** -.38*** .59*** 1.00 note. aj-c = change of anxiety in japanese; ae-c = change of anxiety in english; jp-d = japanese proficiency development; ep-d = english proficiency development; ***p < .001 table 4 correlations between fl anxiety and specific skills (n = 146) anxiety and proficiency in english anxiety and proficiency in japanese ac ld sd rd wd ac ld sd rd wd ac 1.00*** 1.00*** ld -.30*** 1.00*** -.33*** 1.00*** sd -.29*** .58*** 1.00*** -.29*** .47*** 1.00*** rd -.36*** .48*** .43*** 1.00*** -.25*** .39*** .51*** 1.00*** wd -.20*** .39*** .40*** .34*** 1.00 -.29*** .27*** .34*** .51*** 1.00 note. ac = anxiety change; ld, sd, rd, and wd = listening, speaking, reading, and writing development; *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001 4.3. the stability of fl anxiety (rqs 3 and 4) the stability of anxiety was explored based on the full sample and separately for the individual universities. before that, the jcas and the ecas scores were compared across classes (six japanese classes and three english classes, as indicated in the methodology section) at each time point. the kruskal-wallis test was used for anxiety in japanese and a one-way analysis of variance (anova) for anxiety in english, after checking normality and homogeneity of variances. results indicated that anxiety in japanese did not significantly differ across the six classes: x2(5, n = 146) = 4.12, p = .52 at time 1 and x2(5, n = 146) = 3.89, p = .57 at time 2. likewise, significance levels were not identified for anxiety in english across the three classes: f(2, 143) = 0.30, p = .74 (time 1) and f(2, 143) = 0.41, p = .66 (time 2). hence, being in different classes did not significantly influence fl anxiety. the participants were thus found to stem from the same population in terms of anxiety in english or japanese, which warrants amalgamating classes as a larger sample. 4.3.1. the diachronic stability using the full sample as shown in table 2, anxiety in japanese gradually decreased from time 1 to time 2, but anxiety in english stayed virtually the same. paired samples t tests yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 54 confirmed that there was a significant decrease in anxiety level in japanese from time 1 to time 2, with t(145) = 2.81, p < .05 and d = .23; and that the change of anxiety in english was not significant, with t(145) = -.13, p = .90. 4.3.2. the diachronic stability at individual universities in this section, the results of comparisons in the two anxieties across time conducted on the basis of individual universities are reported. before comparisons, descriptive analyses for the three universities were performed, the findings of which are presented in table 5. moreover, the mean jcas and ecas scores for the three universities are plotted in figures 1 and 2 to visualize the differences across the two time points. figure 1 plot of the mean jcas scores for three universities at two times figure 2 plot of the mean ecas scores for three universities at two times table 5 means (and standard deviations) of the ecas and the jcas scores for three universities and two surveys (n = 146) university size time 1 survey time 2 survey ae aj ae aj 1 25 92.32 (19.32) 93.12 (19.31) 92.56 (20.13) 86.84 (18.40) 2 50 89.90 (18.53) 94.78 (19.10) 89.90 (16.11) 90.62 (20.16) 3 71 92.25 (16.31) 94.23 (17.84) 92.45 (14.97) 93.93 (16.78) note. ae = anxiety in english; aj = anxiety in japanese 82 84 86 88 90 92 94 96 1 2 3m ea n an xi et y sc or es university time 1 time 2 82 84 86 88 90 92 94 96 1 2 3 m ea n an xi et y sc or es university time 1 time 2 the anxiety-proficiency relationship and the stability of anxiety: the case of chinese. . . 55 as shown in table 5, anxiety in japanese strikingly decreased in two of the three universities as a function of time. in one university, the mean jcas scores showed almost no change. furthermore, anxiety in english remained virtually unchanged in all the three universities. after checking whether the differences between time 2 and time 1 in the two anxieties were normally distributed in the population, paired samples t tests were performed. results revealed that there was no significant diachronic change in anxiety levels in english for the three universities. with respect to anxiety in japanese, significance levels were identified for two universities. the results of significance testing are presented in table 6. table 6 diachronic stability of anxiety at individual universities university size anxiety in english anxiety in japanese t p cohen’s d t p cohen’s d 1 25 -.08 .94 n/a 2.57 .02 .51 2 50 .00 1.00 n/a 2.26 .03 .32 3 71 -.15 .88 n/a .27 .79 n/a note. n/a = not available 4.3.3. the synchronic stability using the full sample as shown in table 2, the entire sample showed higher anxiety in japanese at time 1. in contrast, the mean jcas and ecas scores were almost the same at time 2. pairedsamples t tests showed that the two anxieties were not significantly different at either time point: t(145) = 1.63, p = .11 at time 1 and t(145) = -.009, p = .99 at time 2. 4.3.4. the synchronic stability at individual universities in the time 1 survey, anxiety in japanese was higher than anxiety in english at all three universities, particularly at university 2, as shown in table 5. at time 2, anxiety in japanese was still higher at universities 2 and 3, but the differences between the two anxieties at the two universities were smaller than those at time 1. anxiety in japanese showed weaker intensity than anxiety in english at university 1. the mean ecas and jcas scores are plotted in figures 3 and 4 to visualize the differences between the two anxieties in these schools. yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 56 figure 3 plot of the mean ecas and jcas scores for three uiversities at time 1 figure 4 plot of the mean ecas and jcas scores for three uiversities at time 2 to check whether there was a significant within-university difference between the two anxieties at both times, a paired-samples t test or wilcoxon signed rank test was used according to the results of assumption testing. it was found that anxiety levels in japanese and english were not significantly different for the three universities. the results of comparing the two anxieties at time 2 mirrored those of time 1. no significance was attested for all comparisons. the results at times 1 and 2 are reported in table 7. it should furthermore be noted that the results of significance testing based on individual universities were consistent with those obtained from the full sample. table 7 synchronic stability at individual universities university size time 1 time 2 t(z) p t p 1 25 -.24 .82 -1.58 .13 2 50 1.64 .11 .27 .79 3 71 .82 .42 .77 .44 note. wilcoxon signed rank test was only performed for university 1 at time 1, z = -.24, p = .82. 82 84 86 88 90 92 94 96 1 2 3 m ea n an xi et y sc or es university anxiety in english anxiety in japanese 82 84 86 88 90 92 94 96 1 2 3 m ea n an xi et y sc or es university anxiety in english anxiety in japanese the anxiety-proficiency relationship and the stability of anxiety: the case of chinese. . . 57 5. discussion one of the purposes of this study was to longitudinally examine the effects of fl anxiety on fl proficiency (rqs 1 and 2). results showed that fl anxiety changes were negatively correlated with the development of overall fl proficiency and the subskills of reading, writing, speaking and listening. the results suggest that the increase or decrease of fl anxiety over time can lead to an inverse change in either overall or specific proficiency. in other words, evidence was found to support the interference of fl anxiety with fl learning. moreover, the findings also suggest the necessity to trace the changes of anxiety at the level of individuals or learner groups as that can help to shed light on proficiency development. it should be noted that the correlations of anxiety changes vis-àvis overall and subskill proficiency development were weak. only 4% to 14.4% shared variance was detected in english and japanese learning contexts, which suggests that the influencing factors of fl learning are rather complex, with fl anxiety being only one of the relevant factors. vice versa, the weak correlation between anxiety changes and overall or subskill proficiency development indicates that fl anxiety itself is also subject to multiple influences. fl proficiency is merely one of the variables, albeit an important one. noteworthy is that the negative anxiety-proficiency correlations found in this study do not mean that fl anxiety and fl learning underachievement always show a straightforward cause-effect relationship, as fl anxiety can interfere with fl learning via other mediums: in a study of 547 chinese efl students, liu and jackson (2008) found that fl anxiety was positively related to two dimensions of unwillingness to communicate, that is, avoidance and reward, and was negatively linked with risk-taking and sociability in class. the results suggest that anxious students are liable to avoid engaging in communication activities in class. the avoidance is disadvantageous to the improvement of their speaking ability, which demands a lot of practice. as a consequence, the learners will continue experiencing communication breakdowns. their interest in fl learning may fade owing to the constant frustration following communication failures. in the end, they may stop devoting energy to learning a fl and become underachievers in fl learning. the present study adds to this line of work. for one, a positive correlation between the changes of anxiety levels in english and japanese was found. the finding bears out the findings of dewaele’s (2007b, 2013) cross-sectional studies: communicative anxiety in multiple fls tends to be highly related. all this suggests that the decrease or increase of anxiety in one fl an individual experiences may similarly influence the anxiety level in another. the current study has also shown that the development in listening, speaking, reading, and writing yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 58 positively interacts in english and japanese learning contexts. the enhancement of one skill facilitates the improvement of others, which demands the balanced development of all four skills in learners. research question 3 was concerned with diachronic changes of anxiety levels in english and japanese. there was virtually no diachronic change in anxiety intensity in english for the full sample and individual universities, but anxiety in japanese had strikingly decreased from time 1 to time 2. in other words, anxiety in japanese exhibited a pattern of decrease, but anxiety in english was relatively stable, and this was confirmed by statistical tests. while anxiety in japanese did significantly decrease over time, anxiety in english did not show a significant change, suggesting stabilization of learners’ anxiety in a fl which has been learned for a long time. alternatively, anxiety hardly changes over time. also noteworthy is that in the current study fl anxiety scores measured at two time points were highly correlated: a test-retest coefficient of .81 was obtained as part of the jcas, but a significant decrease in anxiety in japanese was still attested. therefore, a high correlation between measurements may not be a guarantee of stability over time. regarding the causes of the decrease in anxiety in japanese and stability in anxiety in english as observed in the sample,3 they are difficult to pinpoint as fl anxiety is related in a complex way to a myriad of affective, cognitive, and demographic variables, or interactions among these variables (rodríguez & abreu, 2003). tentative explanations can be given along the lines of language proficiency. in other words, more students (n = 86) showed improvement in their japanese proficiency, as opposed to english proficiency. as a result, the decrease of anxiety in japanese (m = -4.3) among the students of increased japanese proficiency was larger than the decrease of anxiety in english (m = -3.7) for those students who showed an increase in english proficiency. the difference of motivation in learning japanese and english may explain why more students improved their japanese proficiency as opposed to english. that is, the participants were more motivated to learn japanese as they were japanese majors for whom english was only the second fl; they will be engaged in careers that demand more use of japanese and need excellent japanese achievements to succeed in the job market or to pursue graduate education. research question 4 was related to the difference of anxiety levels in english and japanese. at time 1, the subjects as a whole experienced more anxiety 3 anxiety in japanese decreased and increased from the time 1 to time 2 survey respectively in 79 and 59 students. the numbers for anxiety in english were 66 and 72. in both cases, 8 students indicated no change across time. the results further support the conclusion drawn on the basis of the mean jcas and ecas scores that anxiety in japanese exhibited a pattern of decrease, while anxiety in english was relatively stable. the anxiety-proficiency relationship and the stability of anxiety: the case of chinese. . . 59 in japanese learning.4 at all three universities taking part in this study, anxiety in japanese was stronger than anxiety in english. at time 2, anxiety levels in japanese and english were very similar overall. anxiety in japanese was lower than anxiety in english at one university, but was higher at the two other universities. yet, the discrepancies in the intensity between the two anxieties at the two universities displaying higher anxiety in japanese were smaller than those at time 1. inferential tests did not reveal the differences between the two anxieties at the levels of full sample and individual universities to reach significance, supporting saito et al. (1999) and rodríguez and abreu’s (2003) findings that general fl anxiety was stable across target languages, furthermore indicating that learning a familiar fl is not necessarily less anxiety-provoking than learning a fl that is relatively new to students. despite the nonsignificant difference, the fact that learning japanese provoked more anxiety than learning english among the participants at time 1 warrants a closer inspection. it was so probably because the students were faced with a greater challenge in learning new japanese knowledge at the beginning of a new term. however, students could handle the difficulties of english learning more easily due to the fact that they had been learning this language for a longer time. 6. implications the findings of this study have important implications. before illustrating these implications, we must reveal two limitations of the study. first, fl proficiency was assessed by means of self-reports. it is unclear whether the same relationships involving fl proficiency would have been attested if course grades or other explicit measurements had been employed. second, two surveys took place within the interval of a mere 2 months. for a longitudinal study, a 2-month interim is a relatively short time span. the nonsignificant results for the acrosstime comparisons in anxiety in english might be attributed to this. still, measures should be taken to control learners’ anxiety as the increase of anxiety can impair the development of fl proficiency. the necessity of anxiety control is also warranted by a positive relation between the changes in anxiety in japanese and english. controlling one type of fl anxiety helps stabilize other types of anxiety and further facilitates learning other fls. particularly, chinese university students’ anxiety in english should not receive less attention by teachers, despite the fact that the students usually have learned english for a 4 at time 1, anxiety in japanese was higher in 87 students. anxiety in english was higher in 52 students. the results showed that the higher mean jcas scores did not result from extreme values but from the fact that more students scored higher on the jcas. yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer 60 long time before university enrollment, as this study found that anxiety in english had no significant difference from anxiety in learning a new fl (i.e., japanese). moreover, to reduce anxiety in english, much more energy and time is required because anxiety in english tends to be stable over time. in addition, anxiety-reducing measures should be taken after a wide-ranging analysis of extrinsic and intrinsic variables of learners, such as learning difficulties, motivation, classroom climate, and teaching methods. this is because the anxiety-provoking factors are complex, which is underscored by a small portion of shared variance between anxiety and proficiency. care should also be taken to ensure that learners’ listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills develop in parallel. no one facet of language learning should be treated as unimportant and ignored. the implication is particularly relevant for college english courses taught in china, which are usually taught to large groups. we suggest that college english courses should ideally be organized in small classes, with each teacher being responsible for only a small number of classes. that way, teachers can attend to each student, which is especially important in training speaking. in addition, the development of writing ability needs not only a great deal of practice but also teachers’ prompt feedback to students’ written pieces. faced with small numbers of students, teachers may find it easier to offer prompt responses. acknowledgements we thank the three anonymous reviewers for their comments on the earlier versions of this manuscript. we are appreciative of the graduate school for the humanities, university of groningen and china scholarship council for their financial support when we were collecting the data and preparing the manuscript. our gratitude also extends to prof. elaine horwitz at university of texas for her generously permitting us to use the foreign language classroom anxiety scale. we are also grateful towards the chinese students and teachers who provided great collaboration during data collection and those who assisted us with materials translation. the anxiety-proficiency relationship and the stability of anxiety: the case of chinese. . . 61 references aida, y. 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(2006). anxiety and speaking english as a second language. relc journal, 37, 308-328. 171 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (1). 2015. 171-186 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.1.9 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book reviews online communication in a second language: social interaction, language use and learning japanese author: sarah e. pasfield-neofitou publisher: multilingual matters, 2012 isbn: 978-1847698247 pages: 238 the reviewed book aims at examining the processes of undirected language use in computer-mediated communication (cmc) settings. rather than focusing on cmc interactions in tasks designed, monitored and assessed by teachers and integrated with the regular language learning curriculum, pasfield-neofitou decided to investigate unrestricted, unguided, free communication between users of the same language, japanese, in this case. the researcher’s purpose was to observe and analyse “natural” communication, one that is not triggered or stimulated in any way by the teacher, the coursebook or the classroom assignment. it was also interesting to see how natural cmc interaction evolves and in what social settings. another interesting issue is how learners autonomously select cmc modes, given a great variety of dimensions cmc actually encompasses (e.g., synchronous vs. asynchronous, text vs. audio vs. video), and whether there is any correlation between the implementation of particular cmc environments and the languages that are used within these. as the author herself writes in 172 the introduction, “the volume serves to challenge traditional categorizations of ‘synchronous’ and ‘asynchronous’ cmc mediums, assumptions about the ‘placelessness’ of online domains, and previous characterizations of online conversations as ‘haphazard’ and ‘unstructured’” (p. 1) on top of all that, the process of learning japanese is examined, in order to see how learners were using cmc in their l2 and how this communication provided opportunities for language acquisition. this area is particularly worth exploring due to the considerable differences between english and japanese, mainly in terms of script, and the ways of handling the issue of script shift in different ways in a computer format. the particular research questions posed by pasfield-neofitou were as follows: 1. how do learners establish and maintain relationships in which they use a second language online? 2. what is the nature of learners’ cmc and in what combinations are they using cmc in their second language? 3. how does the use of cmc in conjunction with other resources provide opportunities for second language acquisition? it is the aim of the present review to assess whether and to what extent the author has actually managed to accomplish the formidable task she set herself, in particular, whether the book offers “an alternate, sophisticated view of cmc interaction which highlights identity, the skilful management of communication, and user agency in interaction with technology” (p. 1), as claimed in the introduction. this was to be accomplished by researching a body of cmc data collected from 12 students studying japanese at an australian university and their 18 japanese contacts who volunteered to communicate via different cmc modes (email, skype, mixi blogs/videos/comments/profiles, facebook messages/wall/albums/apps/profiles, myspace comments/profiles, world of warcraft profiles, msn convesations, phone emails, ameba blogs/profiles or mind map data). in total, 777 cmc data files were compiled into a corpus of 2,460 naturally occurring instances of communication collected over the period of three years. the book is composed of six chapters (with the first being entitled “introduction” and the last one “conclusion”), a list of references and an index of names. the key chapters reporting upon different aspects of the study are chapters 2-5: “learner backgrounds and online l2 networks,” “social settings of situated cmc use,” “features of cmc use” and “use of contextual resources and sla opportunities.” the first chapter, “introduction,” in fact contains not only a statement of aims and purposes of the researcher that are to be realized throughout the book 173 but also contains the whole theoretical background to the field the author decided to explore. thus, first of all, it contains a brief literature review reporting upon the findings of previous studies in such areas as the language of cmc (learner output produced in spoken vs. written, synchronous vs. asynchronous modes) and characteristic features of digital writing such as multiple punctuation, eccentric spelling, capitalisation, emoticons, rebus writing or nonlinguistic symbols. in particular, the researcher is trying to draw a distinction between spoken versus written and synchronous versus asynchronous communication, challenging the traditional distinctions of synchronicity by showing, for instance, how contemporary cmc applications blur the line by providing versatile forms of online presence (e.g., synchronous instant messengers allowing sending “offline” messages or hybrid tools like google wave and facebook allowing multiple modes of online communication). the review of literature on the language of cmc continues in the areas of cmc genre selection, the way cmc language output is conceptualized and the extent to which the personalized language output allows one to create a personal internet (rather than the global, everyone’s, internet). pasfield-neofitou claims, after miller and slater (2000), that l2 language use in cmc settings allows one to construct a personal online domain, a property of the learner, which is evolving given changing patterns in language use or technology preference. this interesting concept is in close parallel to the notion of interlanguage (see, for instance, selinker, 1972), which emphasizes learner ownership and active authorship of l2 language use. l1 perspectives in terms of development of language proficiency in english and in japanese are also reviewed, with special attention devoted to the notion of identity: how previous studies report upon the performance/construction of online identity in the individual and group dimensions, instructed cmc l2 use as well as the effect of cmc use on intercultural competence development. a separate part of the introductory chapter is a detailed presentation of the theoretical framework that pasfield-neofitou adopted for her study, namely, the social realist approach (see, for instance, sealey & carter, 2004). social realism makes use of a broad definition of applied linguistics which encompasses not only the teaching and learning of additional languages but also aspects of language in use, thus resulting in an overlap of linguistics and sociolinguistics. in this framework, according to belz (2002), the empirical world is viewed as highly complex and multifaceted, where social action is shaped by the interplay of macro (structure) and micro (agency) phenomena, which, in methodological terms, results in the view of the social world as stratified, comprising structure, agency, and culture, with language as a cultural emergent property (sealey & carter, 2004). in particular, pasfield-neofitou presents the stratified social world model, describing the four social domains of situated activity, 174 psycho-biography, social settings and contextual resources as influences constantly shaping language users’ lives, with a complicated network of interrelations between them. the selection of domains as areas for analysis is the backbone of the book, reflected in the titles of the successive chapters. the final part of the introduction contains a discussion of the methodological framework, the research procedure, sampling, data collection and analysis techniques. in particular, the research relies on ethnographic approaches to data collection, including interviews, qualitative surveys, focus groups, as well as such quantitative measures as calculations of post lengths. data collected from 12 students of japanese studying at an australian university and their 18 volunteer japanese contacts amounted to 777 cmc data files of different types resulting in 2,460 naturally occurring instances of communication. the researcher had access to archived text-based communication of the participants, which, however, they were allowed to censor if they did not wish the researcher to view material of sensitive or personal nature. the remaining part of the introduction retells the data analysis framework which sarah pasfield-neofitou uses to draw conclusions about language use and cmc patterns: comparative analysis of interviews and questionnaires, computer-assisted qualitative data analysis backed up by nvivo software and computer-mediated discourse analysis. the decision to cover all the three crucial areas in a single introductory chapter, namely, the statement of aims for the book, literature review and presentation of research methodology does not seem to be the most fortunate. as a result, some areas of l2 cmc do not get sufficient coverage, especially the effect of instructed cmc on l2 acquisition. even though this is beyond the major focus of the book, the body of literature is so immense that it could get a slightly more systematic coverage in the chapter. similarly, given great attention devoted to the social aspects of language development in cmc use, the review of l2 acquisition in telecollaborative cmc settings seems inadequate as well, with only few works of o’dowd and belz acknowledged. finally, greater acknowledgement of previous studies into cmc in tandem settings would have shed better light on how language acquisition patterns observed for japanese in the work under review refer to the already established body of knowledge. chapter 2, entitled “learner backgrounds and online l2 networks,” is an extended description of the participants of this longitudinal study, outlining their selfor psychobiographies with respect to language learning, internet use, and relationships with their japanese-speaking networks. the accounts are given based on the descriptive coding of participants’ attributes from their interview comments and the auto-coding of japanese email interview responses. obviously, much greater emphasis is laid on the australian participants than 175 their japanese counterparts, and the former’s sociocultural backgrounds are thoroughly covered in the chapter. pasfield-neofitou first produces a summary of the learners’ linguistic backgrounds indicating languages, trips to japan, years of japanese study and the like; then, a similar summary is made of their technological backgrounds (type of computer/operating system, total daily computer use, number of computers used, preferred online applications). in a way, the author produces an account similar to the language passport of the european language portfolio in the two areas of language use and computer use. a similar summary is made of japanese contacts, though to a less detailed extent. what follows is a descriptive account of the learners’ biographies, with rich data on their learning context, professional situation, proficiency in japanese, preferred learning habits, contacts with the japanese language and culture and the like. each description is a vivid and in-depth account of one’s psychobiography, which makes the next three chapters a truly interesting read. moreover, thanks to establishing the networks and relationships of cmc use and providing clear data on the nature of the relationships between australian participants and their japanese partners (who are, for instance, a former tutor, a friend from a bar, a myspace friend, a boyfriend or a museum boss), one can fully see and understand the complex nature of foreign language interaction occurring in cmc settings. the description of participants shows at the same time both stronger and weaker sides of the study. on the one hand, the 12 australian participants exhibit an immense range of learner profiles as far as age is concerned (ranging from 18 to 28 years of age), additional languages (ranging from 2 to as many as 6), level of proficiency in japanese (from beginner levels of 1-2 to very advanced levels of 11-12), length of study of japanese (1-17 years) and length of stay in japan (from none to as many as 13 months in total). collecting a rich body of data from participants across such a wide spectrum of sociodemographic and learning variables enabled the researcher to come up with examples of interactions with their corresponding linguistic and technological contexts. on the other hand, the body of data is quite naturally skewed towards the more proficient participants. for instance, out of 777 data samples as many as 294 (more than 37%) were produced by one particularly prolific and proficient participant, while 2 participants out of 12 account for almost 60% of the total number of data samples. some participants contributed very little to the corpus: hyacinth, 7 samples (6 blog entries and 1 blog profile); and noah only 4 (1 blog post, 1 comment, 2 profiles). as a result, it is difficult to make generalisations about the whole group as such; rather, individual cases need to be interpreted in relation to their sociocultural settings. 176 chapter 3, “social settings of situated cmc use,” is the first out of the three chapters recounting the results of the empirical work conducted by sarah pasfield-neofitou in her study. more specifically, the author identifies here the ways in which the participants’ experiences of sociocultural nature shape cmc use in a variety of computer environments. the three focal issues of management of identity, maintenance of interest, and nonuse/lapsing/lurking are discussed in great detail, with example incidents proving particular points. it turned out that there exist languageor nationality-specific online domains, specific places on the internet which are characteristic for particular linguistic/cultural communities. the participants in the study, in their substantial part, were shown to actually shape these japanese-language domains to personalise them. an important part of this chapter is also an attempt at investigating the effect that engagement in cmc interaction with japanese contacts had on the lives of the australian participants in a somewhat broader communicative context. data on, for instance, the increase in the number of facebook contacts, the ratio of actual “active contacts” to “all contacts” and the number of japanese-language environments used for everyday purposes, the characteristics of code-switching and medium-switching, all seem to demonstrate that involvement in cmc interaction does exert an effect on the way that learners use computers for work, study and leisure purposes. it is, thus, an important finding of pasfield-neofitou’s study that the l1-l2 computer use is bi-directional: what we do in digital environments in l2 shapes the way we use computers and the internet in l1. chapter 4, “features of cmc use,” is presumably the most significant part of the book reporting upon research in second language acquisition. this chapter examines the features of participants’ cmc use, focusing on the way in which learners use cmc in their l2, for what purposes and in what combinations. the situated cmc activity is analysed in terms of conversational organisation, language choice, orthography and code-switching and types of language use. as demonstrated with qualitative data, participants’ patterns of turn-taking are related to their language choice in terms of orthography and code-switching. since, as pasfield-neofitou proved in chapter 3, specific online domains are language/culture-specific, language choice analysed in chapter 4 shows how participants identified particular settings as either english or japanese in nature. their language choice was also influenced by interpersonal relationships, interlocutor’s status and learner’s motivations. quite interestingly, the analysis in the chapter touches upon the question of whether text-based communication is “talking” or “writing,” and challenges the notion of synchronicity of online communication. participants proved to distinguish between the two modes in terms of degree of synchronicity, based 177 on use rather than solely on medium choice, and they did not label particular media (such as msn, myspace or email) as clearly synchronous or asynchronous. thus, sealey and carter’s (2004) view of cmc as emergent from speaking, writing, technology and human behaviour is reinforced through the data from two case studies thoroughly described in the chapter. chapter 5, “use of contextual resources and sla opportunities,” is the last chapter reporting upon empirical work. it strives to examine how participation in online communication provides opportunities for language acquisition. the author draws on analytical coding of the interaction and interview data, reflecting upon such aspects as gaining an audience, facing interactional challenges, patterns of dictionary use and the use of other supplementary resources (paper-based printed resources, non-computer-based digital resources such as nintendo ds hand-held game system, software-based and internet-based digital resources). the use of multiple resources proved to be common, with online dictionaries being a popular resource. however, the use of resources appeared to be influenced by participants’ psycho-biographies, the social contexts in which communication with their japanese partners was taking place, as well as the very nature of the situated activity. a major part of chapter 5, though, is a discussion of how situated cmc activity planned in the study makes affordances for discourse repair, peer editing and feedback giving. participants were found to use the linguistic capital of their native-speaker partners to obtain feedback, with some, more proficient ones, engaging in peer editing. repair was rather infrequent and self-correction was more prevalent due to the informal nature of conversations; however, in some cases delayed repair was undertaken even after change of the topic, which testifies to the awareness of learners and their willingness to improve. the final part of the book draws a conclusion concerning the findings presented in chapters 3, 4 and 5. the research questions posed in the introduction are revisited and the most salient points are extracted from analysis. to sum up, the book by sarah e. pasfield-neofitou is a highly interesting and comprehensive monograph on the topic of social interaction in cmc settings, based on the particular example of learning japanese by australian students. the author makes a number of very important claims about participating in online domains and virtual communities, entering cmc networks and maintaining relationships, code-switching and turn-taking, as well as acquisition opportunities in cmc. the book attempts to cover such a vast area that it would be impossible to exhaust the topic completely. in fact, it should be treated as an invitation to undertake further research, in more controlled settings, with more systematic and principled sampling, not only in order to verify the claims made by pasfield-neofitou, but also, perhaps even more importantly, 178 to see to what extent the observations about the nature of learning japanese by australian speakers can be generalisable to foreign language acquisition as such. reviewed by jarosław krajka maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin, poland jarek.krajka@poczta.umcs.lublin.pl references belz, j. a. (2002). social dimensions of telecollaborative foreign language study. language learning and technology, 6(1), 60-81. miller, d., & slater, d. (2000). the internet: an ethnographic approach. oxford: berg. sealey, a., & carter, b. (2004). applied linguistics as a social science. london: continuum. selinker, l. (1972). interlanguage. international review of applied linguistics, 10, 209-241. ssllt 5(1) 171-186 book review 1 ssllt 5(1) 171-186 book review 2 ssllt 5(1) 171-186 book review 3 ssllt 5(1) 171-186 book review 4 ssllt 5(1) 171-186 book review 5 ssllt 5(1) 171-186 book review 6 ssllt 5(1) 171-186 book review 7 ssllt 5(1) 171-186 book review 8 153 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (1). 2015. 153-169 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.1.8 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the handling of missing binary data in language research françois pichette université du québectéluq, canada francois.pichette@teluq.ca sébastien béland université de montréal, canada sebastien.beland@umontreal.ca shahab jolani universiteit utrecht, the netherlands s.jolani@uu.nl justyna leśniewska uniwersytet jagielloński, poland justyna.lesniewska@uj.edu.pl abstract researchers are frequently confronted with unanswered questions or items on their questionnaires and tests, due to factors such as item difficulty, lack of testing time, or participant distraction. this paper first presents results from a poll confirming previous claims (rietveld & van hout, 2006; schafer & graham, 2002) that data replacement and deletion methods are common in research. language researchers declared that when faced with missing answers of the yes/no type (that translate into zero or one in data tables), the three most common solutions they adopt are to exclude the participant’s data from the analyses, to leave the square empty, or to fill in with zero, as for an incorrect answer. this study then examines the impact on cronbach’s α of five types of data insertion, using simulated and actual data with various numbers françois pichette, sébastien béland, shahab jolani, justyna leśniewska 154 of participants and missing percentages. our analyses indicate that the three most common methods we identified among language researchers are the ones with the greatest impact on cronbach's α coefficients; in other words, they are the least desirable solutions to the missing data problem. on the basis of our results, we make recommendations for language researchers concerning the best way to deal with missing data. given that none of the most common simple methods works properly, we suggest that the missing data be replaced either by the item’s mean or by the participants’ overall mean to provide a better, more accurate image of the instrument’s internal consistency. keywords: missing data, cronbach’s alpha, participant exclusion, second language testing 1. introduction language research often involves the use of questionnaires that consist of open-ended as well as multiple-choice or yes-no questions. it is typical for researchers to collect incomplete data, since participants often leave a certain number of items unanswered. several factors can account for such missing data: fatigue (e.g., last items of a long questionnaire), distraction (e.g., the back side of a copy left blank), item difficulty (items skipped or ignored), and so on. there are ways to avoid missing data, a common one being the forcing of answers in computerized tests. however, it may not always be desirable, since we want and expect participants to answer to the best of their knowledge. forcing answers may impact reliability; therefore, as much as we would not include reluctant participants who would perform the whole tasks negligently or carelessly, we may want to avoid forcing unwilling participants to do the same for parts of our tasks. missing data may thus be a necessary evil. how exactly researchers in language studies deal with this necessary evil, however, is unclear. there are no established procedures, and few recommendations exist that could provide guidance to researchers who need to address this problem, despite the fact that a large number of solutions to the problem of missing data have been developed by statisticians (which vary greatly in terms of their complexity). the aim of this paper is twofold. firstly, we try to obtain a picture of the current situation with respect to how missing data are handled by language researchers. secondly, we try to establish which of the available procedures for handling missing data is the best, as well as the most practical and realistic solution for language researchers. the handling of missing binary data in language research 155 2. the handling of missing data in language research: the current situation several solutions are found in the literature for dealing with missing data (see, e.g., schafer & graham, 2002). the following are simple solutions used with items that require scoring (peugh & enders, 2004). the first two are deletion methods: · eliminating from the analyses the participants whose data is missing; · disregarding the missing data with no figure for replacement. the following ones are replacement methods: · replacing the missing data by zero; · replacing by the participant’s mean; · replacing by the mean score for the item; · replacing by the overall mean for the test, and so on. despite missing data being recognized as “a common problem” (blom & unsworth, 2010, p. 3), in a large number of applied linguistics studies the handling of missing data is not addressed, or no rationale is provided for the solution adopted by the researchers. we conducted an analysis of articles published in four journals related to language and linguistics over a period of five years (2007-2011). each journal was in the middle of each of the four quartiles for impact on scimago (2014),1 that is, at or around the rankings of 50, 150, 250 and 350, with respective impact ratings of .68, .20, .11 and .10.2 the total number of articles in the four journals was 278, of which 221 (79.5%) had exclusively theoretical content and did not involve participants. of the remaining 57 studies that involved participants, only two (3.5%) mentioned the exclusion of participants, one article in the first quartile journal and one in the third. in addition, of those 57 studies, which are overwhelmingly qualitative,3 only two alluded to the existence of missing data, both in the first quartile 1 the language and linguistics category was used, comprising around 400 journals. there was an unequal number of items across quartiles, which explains why the ranks of the four journals are not equidistant. in the case of an even number of journals in a quartile, the first of the two journals in the middle of the quartile was selected. we intentionally provide approximate figures for rankings to keep the journals anonymous. 2 the third and fourth journal offer a potentially equal and low impact, but that selection method reflects the actual bulk of publications in the field. selecting leading journals would have misrepresented the field and might have skewed our data toward more statistically inclined researchers and quantitatively sound analyses. a sampling search in bibliographic databases for studies employing particular types of datasets would have prevented us from obtaining a broad view of what is published in the field. 3 more than 90% of studies in language learning are said to be of a qualitative nature (lazaraton, 2000) although this figure is said to be declining (sterling, wolff, & papi, 2012). such a high percentage is also true for social studies in general, reflecting a sudden increase in qualitative research, which more than doubled in the 1990s and continues to predominate (fallon, 2006; shaver, 2001). françois pichette, sébastien béland, shahab jolani, justyna leśniewska 156 journal. one article mentioned that some data were inaudible but could be reconstructed from memory; the other article referred to data that was rejected because of the participants’ poor age-related performance. given that data collection does not always go exactly as planned, and that missing data is a common problem, as was just mentioned, the fact that only two studies out of 57 allude to missing data suggests that in most cases, researchers do not mention how they dealt with their missing data, or when they do so, no rationale is provided for the solution they adopted. four journals do not provide a complete picture of the situation, since each of them may have been heavily influenced by individual editorial policy or statistical reviewing (or lack thereof). while an analysis of a larger number of journals would doubtless provide a more accurate image of data handling in language research, the present analysis seems sufficient to claim that the existence and handling of missing data seems to be avoided by language researchers as a problematic topic. there seem to be no recommendations in the literature which would make it clear to an average researcher in the field of language studies which of the aforementioned deletion and replacement methods to use, and under which circumstances. journal articles do not provide an established standard which researchers could follow. in addition, the avoidance of the topic in studies involving data collection from human participants could be attributed to lack of statistical training. as stated by yang (2010, p. xii), the uk’s social research council “has long recognized the lack of statistics training among the british graduates,” many of whom become language researchers. in a questionnaire recently completed by 380 language researchers (schmidtke, spino, & lavolette, 2012), only about 30% of professors considered their training in statistics to be adequate, 80% of the respondents had never had a statistics class, and 12% do not compute statistics. these figures suggest that little has changed since lazaraton, riggenbach, and ediger’s (1987) study of 121 language researchers, which showed that about half of them had taken either zero or one class in statistics or in research methods. in the course of this study, an invitation to fill out an online questionnaire was sent out to 810 people who conduct research related to languages, whose email addresses were compiled from recent language conference programs. the questionnaire was completed by 99 respondents. none of the respondents was excluded from our analyses. of those respondents, about half were faculty members (n = 50) while the rest were graduate students. all 99 respondents had been presenters at scientific conferences. our survey consisted of four multiple-choice questions, each with an option for addition, plus one open-ended question. two identification questions were asked about the participants’ academic status and research discipline. the handling of missing binary data in language research 157 excluding participants is or has been a solution for about 87 percent of the respondents. the three main answers chosen as reasons for excluding participants are as follows: · their scores or answers were too different from the other participants’ (29%). · they did not answer all questions or items. i want or need each participant to answer all questions (12%). · they had too many answers missing. i want or need a certain number of answers from each participant (14%). of the respondents who excluded participants due to missing answers or to their scores, about half (48%) indicate they have no preset criteria for exclusion, while the other half (52%) say they do. for exclusion based on scores, three respondents require a gap of 2 standard deviations (sd) from the mean, one requires 2.5 sds, and three require 3 sds. another participant sets the cut-off point at 20% from the mean. for exclusion based on the number of missing items, the range is even wider: three respondents exclude participants who reach 5% of missing answers, while another respondent sets the threshold at 50%. however, understandably, most reasons for excluding participants are of a demographic (inappropriate profile) or contextual nature (absence from some tests, dropping out of a longitudinal study, etc.). demographic exclusion is related to unwanted data, while contextual exclusion leads to missing data. among our respondents, 31% claim they never have to perform calculations on matrices with missing data. for the respondents who work with data matrices, the solutions they have adopted are: · leaving the square empty (39%); · inserting that participant’s mean for the rest of the items (12%); · inserting zero (11%); · inserting the mean score obtained by everyone for that item (10%); · inserting the mean on the whole test (1%). in studies with dichotomous data (i.e., when the possible answer is scored as either 0 or 1), some participants are of the opinion that a missing answer can be replaced by a 1 when the researcher has strong reasons to believe the respondent would have obtained this score had he or she answered the question or done the item that was overlooked. the results of the questionnaire show clearly that there is a wide diversity in the way researchers deal with missing data. the results of the survey are also very interesting when contrasted with the findings from the investigation of published journal articles mentioned earlier: while 87% of our respondents admit to excluding participants, only 3.5% of researchers report doing so in published articles. this situation was touched upon by several of our respondents, which is exemplified by the following comment: “my primary concern, at least at the moment, is lack of a françois pichette, sébastien béland, shahab jolani, justyna leśniewska 158 sufficiently detailed description in many published articles of how the data was actually handled and analyzed.” one likely explanation may reside in another comment: “it feels that if you're honest about how you exclude participants, your paper is less likely to be accepted because it raises too many questions.” another obvious gap appears between the high number (52%) of our respondents who collect data, and the 20% of published studies that contain collected data. the reason for this gap, however, is most likely due to the fact that researchers who collect data and who show an interest in statistics may be overrepresented among our respondents. many people who were contacted declined to answer our questionnaire, arguing that they do qualitative research and/or do not collect data for their research. this was made known to us by personal emails sent in response to the request to fill in the questionnaire. the treatment of missing data in language studies is thus a serious issue, to which little attention has been drawn. this ongoing situation is surprising in light of the amount of research on the treatment of missing data in other fields of study such as psychology or sociology, and outside the social research sphere, mostly in natural sciences (e.g., see allison, 2001). table 1 provides examples of such studies for various fields of social sciences. table 1 studies on missing data in social research fields of social science some studies economics florez-lopez (2010); graham (2011); harvey & pierse (1984); horowitz and manski (1998); nicoletti, peracchi, and foliano (2001); philipson (2001) political science king, honaker, joseph, and scheve (2001); tufis (2008) psychology and education finch (2008); peugh and enders (2004); robitzsch and rupp (2009); schafer and graham (2002); zhang and walker (2008) sociology allison (1987); schrapler (2004); winship and mare (1989) 3. in search of a practical solution to the problem of missing data to address the problem of missing data, statisticians have provided dozens of techniques, which range from simple solutions like the deletion or simple replacement methods mentioned above to more advanced statistical procedures such as maximum likelihood or multiple imputation methods (see, e.g., little & rubin, 2002 or schafer & graham, 2002). such techniques may have their advantages; however, since they require advanced statistical knowledge, it would be unrealistic to expect that they can be widely adopted by language researchers. rather, most researchers would benefit more from information about which of the simple, easily accessible options they are familiar with is the best one to use when dealing with missing data. our aim in this paper is to try to provide an answer to this question. the handling of missing binary data in language research 159 researchers traditionally discard missing data because this method is very easy to implement and almost all statistical packages offer it as an option. the most important consequence of removing missing values, however, is reduction in sample size which results in a loss of statistical power. nevertheless, deletion methods have enjoyed widespread use in all disciplines (marsh, 1998; peugh & enders, 2004). it has to be remembered that value replacement adds data points that are not real, which always results in some kind of data fabrication. ideally, all incomplete data sets should be eliminated. realistically, if researchers did so, whole studies would be jeopardized in cases where many of the participants have at least one missing answer. this solution (listwise deletion) also results in the loss of useful information. as was shown by our poll, language researchers will eliminate data sets (i.e., all data for a participant) only beyond a certain threshold of missing answers. below that threshold, the missing values are simply dealt with instead of being discarded. instead of excluding data from participants who did not answer all the questions or items on a test, especially when very few answers are missing, many language researchers opt for filling in each missing value with a replacement value. as opposed to deletion methods, this solution is appealing since the incomplete data sets (i.e., matrices in linguistics) are converted to complete data sets. convenience therefore is the major benefit of using such methods, and any statistical analyses can be applied to the completed data sets. despite these apparent advantages, any replacement method might have potential drawbacks by producing biased results because of uncertainty about which value to insert. this also causes researchers to underestimate variance (little & rubin, 2002, p. 61). even though there has been considerable research on missing data by statisticians and psychometricians, comparisons between imputation (i.e., fillin) methods are normally made using simulated data with very large data sets, and involving complex methods. very few comparisons, if any, have been made between the various simple imputation methods actually used in research, and for a realistic number of participants and items. in order to find out which of the commonly used, realistic methods of dealing with missing data in language research is the best one, we formulated the following more specific research goals: 1. to compare the impact on cronbach’s α of seven common fill-in methods for normal-size matrices, using simulated data. 2. to compare real research data to simulated data. the next sections will explain every step of our procedure. françois pichette, sébastien béland, shahab jolani, justyna leśniewska 160 4. method 4.1. procedure our procedure was based on the collection and analysis of dichotomous data, represented numerically in matrices as either 1s or 0s. this is the type of data collected in language research when questionnaires contain true/false or yes/no questions, for example. we examined the impact on cronbach’s α coefficients of the following five single fill-in methods: replacement of the missing data (a) by 0, (b) by 1, (c) by the participant’s mean on all items, (d) by the item’s mean for all participants, and (e) by the overall mean on the test for all participants. cronbach’s α coefficient (cronbach, 1951) was chosen in this study because it is by far the most commonly used measure for assessing the internal consistency of tests and questionnaires in social language research. for example, sijtsma (2009) writes that “probably no other statistic has been reported more often as a quality indicator of test scores than cronbach’s (1951) α coefficient” (p. 107). furthermore, peterson (1994) states that “not only is coefficient alpha the most widely used estimator of reliability, but also it has been the subject of considerable methodological and analytical attention” (p. 382). it must be noted here that the current widespread use of cronbach’s α does not mean that the measure attracts unanimous approval from statistics experts; indeed, cronbach’s α has lately been the subject of criticism (see sijtsma, 2009). 4.2. instruments 4.2.1. simulated data sets we conducted a comprehensive simulation study to compare different single fill-in methods. to reach our two research goals, we created data sets for 20, 50, 250 and 500 participants and 20, 40 and 60 items. these combinations give matrices with different sizes, which are considered small, medium and large by current standards in language research. in order to reflect the range of α coefficients found in research papers, the binary matrices were generated such that the internal association among the items (cronbach’s α) varies from 0.4 to 0.9. even though higher stakes assessments typically involve alphas upwards of .90, the range we selected is deemed to reflect levels that are encountered in actual research uses. for our study, we also chose percentages of missing answers of 5%, 10% and 20%. for each combination (item x participant x percentage), 1,000 matrices were generated, for a total of 12,000 matrices. the test matrices were generated using r. the handling of missing binary data in language research 161 for the sake of ecological validity, the simulated number of participants corresponded to the figures normally found in actual language research and was much lower than the thousands we usually find in papers published by statisticians. for example, in our review of published language papers mentioned earlier, 51 of the 57 studies that involved participants actually mentioned the number of participants. of those 51 studies, more than half (that is, 26 out of 51) had fewer than 20 participants, and the average number of participants is 36.5, with a range of 1 to 217. 4.2.2. matrices of test scores to reach our second research goal, we retrieved two matrices with dichotomous data that were used in past experiments and that we consider representative of typical data collected in language research or testing. the first matrix (matrix a) contains data that was collected as part of a research project on reading ability. the test consisted of 64 yes-no questions and it was completed by 171 participants. for more information on the psychometric details of the test, see pichette, béland, lafontaine, and de serres (2014). the second matrix (matrix b) is a test that assesses the level of english as a second language of 1,709 students entering college (quebec, canada). this test contains 85 items where the students have either a right or a wrong answer. shohamy, donitsa-schmidt and ferman (1996) defined high-stakes tests as those which have important consequences and in which decisions about “admission, promotion, placement, or graduation are directly dependent on test scores” (p. 300). the test that provided data for matrix b is an example of high stakes assessment because of its impact on students’ academic path; hence its especially high cronbach’s α of .96. see laurier, froio, paero, and fournier (1998) for more information. by pure coincidence, both matrices contained 0.4 percent of missing data. random deletion was performed on those real data to reach the above mentioned percentages of missing answers (5, 10 and 20) to allow comparisons with our simulated data. 5. results in this section the results are presented in light of the two research goals stated earlier. 5.1. first research goal this goal was to compare the impact on cronbach’s α of seven common methods of dealing with missing data for plausible numbers of participants, using françois pichette, sébastien béland, shahab jolani, justyna leśniewska 162 simulated data. the α coefficients yielded by each method are displayed in tables 2 to 4. these tables represent average cronbach’s α coefficients computed over 1,000 iterations. in each table, “true α” represents the cronbach’s α coefficient calculated with a complete matrix, that is, without missing data. this coefficient is followed by the coefficients yielded by each of the five simple replacement methods that we selected, which in turn are followed by the two deletion methods described earlier. table 2 simulated data, 20 items missingness 5% 10% 20% n = 20 n = 50 n = 250 n = 500 n = 20 n = 50 n = 250 n = 500 n = 20 n = 50 n = 250 n = 500 (true α) .45 .48 .49 .50 .42 .47 .49 .49 .43 .47 .49 .49 zero (0) .50 .53 .54 .55 .54 .57 .58 .58 .60 .62 .63 .64 one (1) .50 .53 .54 .55 .53 .57 .58 .58 .59 .62 .63 .64 participant’s mean .48 .50 .52 .52 .48 .53 .55 .55 .54 .57 .59 .59 item’s mean .44 .47 .49 .49 .41 .46 .49 .49 .40 .45 .47 .48 overall mean .44 .47 .49 .49 .41 .46 .49 .49 .40 .45 .47 .48 listwise (cc) .50 .53 .54 .55 .53 .56 .58 .58 .59 .62 .63 .63 pairwise (ac) .50 .53 .54 .55 .53 .56 .58 .58 .59 .62 .63 .63 table 3 simulated data, 40 items missingness 5% 10% 20% n = 20 n = 50 n = 250 n = 500 n = 20 n = 50 n = 250 n = 500 n = 20 n = 50 n = 250 n = 500 (true α) .66 .68 .69 .69 .65 .68 .69 .69 .65 .68 .69 .69 zero (0) .70 .72 .73 .73 .72 .75 .75 .76 .77 .78 .79 .79 one (1) .70 .72 .73 .73 .72 .75 .75 .76 .77 .78 .79 .79 participant’s mean .67 .69 .70 .70 .68 .71 .71 .72 .71 .73 .74 .74 item’s mean .65 .67 .69 .69 .64 .67 .68 .69 .64 .67 .68 .68 overall mean .65 .67 .69 .69 .64 .67 .68 .69 .64 .67 .68 .68 listwise (cc) .70 .72 .73 .73 .72 .75 .75 .76 .77 .78 .79 .79 pairwise (ac) .70 .72 .73 .73 .72 .75 .75 .76 .77 .78 .79 .79 table 4 simulated data, 60 items missingness 5% 10% 20% n = 20 n = 50 n = 250 n = 500 n = 20 n = 50 n = 250 n = 500 n = 20 n = 50 n = 250 n = 500 (true α) .76 .77 .78 .78 .75 .77 .78 .78 .75 .76 .78 .78 zero (0) .79 .80 .81 .81 .81 .82 .83 .83 .84 .85 .85 .85 one (1) .79 .80 .81 .81 .81 .82 .83 .83 .84 .85 .85 .85 participant’s mean .76 .78 .79 .79 .77 .79 .79 .79 .78 .80 .81 .81 item’s mean .75 .77 .77 .78 .74 .76 .77 .77 .73 .75 .77 .77 overall mean .75 .77 .77 .78 .74 .76 .77 .77 .73 .75 .77 .77 listwise (cc) .79 .80 .81 .81 .81 .82 .83 .83 .84 .85 .85 .85 pairwise (ac) .79 .80 .81 .81 .81 .82 .83 .83 .84 .85 .85 .85 the handling of missing binary data in language research 163 it has to be noted that even though in most cases the two types of deletion and replacement by zero yield apparently identical cronbach’s α coefficients, this is due to the rounding up at the second decimal. in most cases, if not all, differences lie in the third or fourth decimal. the following observations can be made from the above tables: 1. in a majority of cases (196 out of 252, or 78%), any bias induced by replacement or deletion leads to higher cronbach’s α coefficients, sometimes by as much as .17. the only methods that yield lower coefficients are the replacement by the item’s mean and by the overall mean, but this decrease is always negligible, being -.01 every time it occurs. 2. for a given number of items, the bias tends to increase proportionally with the percentage of missing data. 3. for a given percentage of missing data, in absolute numbers, the bias tends to be similar no matter the sample size. 4. bias tends to decrease when the number of items increases. the methods that have the least impact on cronbach’s α coefficient are the replacement either by the item’s mean or by the participants’ overall mean on the test. replacement by the participant’s mean on the test induces notable bias on cronbach’s α coefficient. replacing the missing data by zero or by one, or adopting either type of deletion are the methods that yield the strongest bias. given the fourth observation above, these differences of impact between methods are more apparent when looking at matrices based on the smallest number of items (20 items). 5.2. second research goal the results from our two matrices of real data are presented in tables 5 and 6. the true alpha coefficients in the absence of data are provided in table titles. the percentage of missing value of 0.4 was the real one, as mentioned earlier, while the other percentages were generated at random. table 5 matrix a (real data), 64 items, n = 171, true α = .82 missingness 0.4% 5% 10% 20% zero (0) .83 .92 .92 .92 one (1) .80 .84 .86 .88 participant’s mean .81 .84 .84 .86 item’s mean .81 .82 .83 .82 overall mean .81 .82 .82 .82 listwise (cc) .83 .94 .95 .96 pairwise (ac) .84 .94 .94 .95 françois pichette, sébastien béland, shahab jolani, justyna leśniewska 164 table 6 matrix b (real data), 85 items, n = 1709; true α = .96 missingness 0.4% 5% 10% 20% zero (0) .96 .96 .96 .95 one (1) .96 .96 .96 .96 participant’s mean .96 .96 .96 .97 item’s mean .96 .96 .96 .95 overall mean .96 .96 .96 .95 listwise (cc) .96 .97 .97 .97 pairwise (ac) .96 .97 .97 .96 both matrices here have a number of items higher than the matrices with simulated data. the result of matrix a in table 5, however, is to some degree comparable to the simulation results presented earlier in table 4, where the number of items and participants were 60 and 250, respectively. it is clear from table 5 that for missing percentages of 5% and above, except for replacing by the item’s mean and overall mean, the other methods, particularly deletion methods, overestimate cronbach’s α. given our earlier observation to the effect that bias tends to decrease when the number of items increases, it is not surprising to see little or no bias in table 6; no difference of impact between methods can be observed in the second real data (matrix b, table 6) because the number of items is very high (i.e., 85). table 7 matrix a2 (simulated data), 64 items, n = 171, true α = .82 missingness 5% 10% 20% zero (0) .84 .86 .87 one (1) .84 .86 .88 participant’s mean .83 .84 .85 item’s mean .82 .82 .81 overall mean .82 .82 .81 listwise (cc) .84 .86 .87 pairwise (ac) .84 .86 .87 table 8 matrix b2 (simulated data), 85 items, n = 1709, true α = .96 missingness 5% 10% 20% zero (0) .96 .96 .96 one (1) .96 .96 .96 participant’s mean .96 .96 .97 item’s mean .96 .96 .96 overall mean .96 .96 .96 listwise (cc) .96 .96 .96 pairwise (ac) .96 .96 .96 for additional confirmation that the relative impact of replacement methods corresponds to simulation, we have simulated data matrices with the same the handling of missing binary data in language research 165 cronbach’s alpha and the same number of items as for our two real data sets (see tables 7 and 8). the fact that these tables show similar data patterns confirm the conclusions we have reached regarding the relative merits of the replacement methods we are comparing. 6. discussion the most striking observation made in this study is that the three most common ways for language researchers to deal with missing data—replacing by zero, deleting the data or excluding the participant—happen to be the three methods that have the greatest impact on cronbach’s α coefficients. contrary to what our first research goal implied, it is not the matrix size per se that determines the value of various deletion or replacement methods, since the number of participants has little effect on that value, but rather the number of items on the test. for two matrices of the same size, for example one with 30 participants x 60 items and another with 60 participants x 30 items, the latter is more prone to show bias in cronbach’s α coefficients due to its lower number of items. in light of the observations above, it can safely be assumed that because many instruments designed by language researchers for collecting data have a low number of items, prudence is recommended in dealing with missing data, especially if the percentage of missing data is at 5% or above. 7. conclusion the goal of this paper is to inform language research colleagues about the impact that the methods they commonly use for handling missing data has on the index they most commonly use to report on their instrument’s internal consistency. since the most common methods used by researchers for dealing with missing data tend to inflate cronbach’s α coefficients, it is probable that most instruments for which such coefficients are reported in published papers are less, sometimes far less, reliable than what the authors and their readers are led to believe. for language researchers who gather numerical data but who do not have extensive training in statistics and are not provided with help from professional statisticians, our results suggests that missing data be replaced either by the item’s mean or by the participants’ overall mean in data matrices. this solution will provide readers with a better, more accurate image of the instrument’s internal consistency. another solution that was brought to our attention after the experiment and that would be worth investigating in future research is the replacement of the françois pichette, sébastien béland, shahab jolani, justyna leśniewska 166 missing data by the mean of the column plus the mean of the row, divided by two, as suggested by winer (1971). readers interested in the several recent more complex approaches to dealing with missing data of various kinds will find a useful introduction in the article by barladi and enders (2010). the study reported here is not without limitations. firstly, we focus on the popular and widely used cronbach’s α, but it needs to be noted that, while this coefficient is the dominant reliability measure found in language research publications, other measures also exist. secondly, our investigation is limited in scope to dichotomous data. among the more quantitative research carried out in 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(2008). impact of missing data on person model fit and person trait estimation. applied psychological measurement, 32, 466-479. 471 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (2). 2018. 471-495 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.2.13 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt strategies in technology-enhanced language learning yalun zhou rensselaer polytechnic institute, usa zhouy12@rpi.edu michael wei university of missouri-kansas city, usa weiyou@umkc.edu abstract the predominant context for strategy research over the last three decades has focused on language learning situated in a conventional classroom environment. computer technology has brought about many changes in language learning and has become ecological and normalized rather than a supporting tool in the language classroom. consequently, the landscape of language learning has been rapidly and largely changed with the normalization of technologies in people’s daily communication. the pervasive use of mobile technologies and easy access to online resources require that digital language learners understand and employ appropriate learning strategies for learning effectiveness and that their teachers are able and willing to teach these strategies as needed. this article provides an overview of the state-of-the-art research into technology-enhanced language learning strategies. the strategies under review include those for language learning skill areas, language subsystems, and self-regulated learning. at the end, we discuss the pressing issues that digital age language learning has posed to learners, teachers, and researchers and propose considerations for strategy research in digital realms. keywords: language learning strategies; self-regulated language learning; strategy instruction; strategy assessment; technology enhanced language learning yalun zhou, michael wei 472 1. introduction consciously or at least partially consciously, almost all language learners use tools, take actions, or self-regulate their behaviors to make their language learning or language use more effective or more efficient (cohen, 2011; o’malley & chamot, 1990; oxford, 1990). oxford’s (1990) landmark book on language learning strategies (lls) and o’malley and chamot’s (1990) volume on lls in the cognitive information-processing model fostered strategy assessment and strategy instruction, leading to updated theorizations in recent years (e.g., cohen, 2011, 2018; griffiths & oxford, 2014; oxford, 2011, 2017). however, the rapid technological changes of the 21st century (e.g., computer-assisted language learning, data-driven technology, online and blended learning approaches, and emerging technologies such as online games, virtual and augmented reality, immersive classroom, and telepresence) are changing the landscape of second and foreign language (l2) teaching and learning. knowledge and practices of lls are still essential for successful learning, even in the digital age, and strategies relevant to various digital learning challenges do exist (oxford & schramm, 2007). yet we do not fully know how learners and/or teachers can optimally understand and harness strategies in technology-enhanced, innovative language learning (becker, rodriguez, estrada, & davis, 2016). therefore, this article offers an overview of existing research on technologyenhanced lls, following oxford’s (2017) categorization of l2 learning strategies. the sixty-six research reviewed explore language learning strategies, including strategic self-regulation, in technology-enhanced language learning (tell) contexts. we define tell broadly as any language learning activity that uses technological means and/or tools for efficiency, motivation, and learning style flexibility. oxford’s categorization divides l2 learning strategies into a set of interlocking but flexible systems: (1) strategies for language skills area (i.e., reading, writing, listening, speaking, and related aspects) and (2) strategies for language subsystems (e.g., vocabulary and grammar). the strategies under review are arranged in a similar way. we first review strategies for l2 skills learning, then look at strategies for language subsystems, and finally we focus on self-regulated l2 learning. the article concludes with overarching issues in the field of language learning strategies in digital environments, provides recommendations that guide language instruction in technologyenhanced contexts, and highlights questions that still need to be answered (e.g., lack of research) regarding the role of technology in the application of lls. 2. strategies for language learning skill areas in tell lls research in technology-enhanced contests are abundant in three language learning skill areas: listening, reading, and writing. it, however, is scant in speaking. strategies in technology-enhanced language learning 473 literature reviewed here illustrate the richness and/or scarcity of lls research of listening, speaking, reading, and writing in the context of tell. 2.1. listening utilizing the strategy of inventory for language learning (sill) (oxford, 1990) to evaluate students’ self-dictation activities with youtube videos, chang and chang (2014) examined forty-eight taiwanese college students’ english listening comprehension strategies on youtube’s caption manager platform. sill’s metacognitive items assess the use of strategies such as planning, setting goals, organizing, noticing, paying attention, looking for opportunities to make learning effective, monitoring, and evaluating. in an advertising english college course, chang and chang first spent 8 weeks presenting and having students practice top-down strategies (listening for main ideas, prediction, and drawing inferences) and bottom-up strategies (vocabulary, sound patterns, and syntactic patters), then spent another 8 weeks implementing metacognitive strategies. in the second stage, students were required to recall and reflect upon (e.g., what i know, what i want to know, and what i learned) their metacognitive strategy development by answering questions related to: (1) strategies they used to understand the online video, and (2) reasons why they could not answer certain listening comprehension items and the problems they encountered. the results indicated that, after strategy instruction, students consciously incorporated metacognitive listening strategies (e.g., “i notice my english mistakes and use this information to help me do better”; “i pay attention by listening when someone is speaking english in the advertisement videos”) to manage and adjust their english learning when listening youtube videos. students who reported using the metacognitive strategies in the sill performed significantly better on listening comprehension tests. they reinforced their listening comprehension by creating dictation questions, recalling strategy uses, and reflecting on their listening problems. using the metacognitive awareness listening questionnaire to investigate metacognitive listening strategies awareness and podcast-use readiness of 141 tehran college students, rahimi and katal (2012) found the importance of metacognitive listening strategies in technology-based learning environments. strategies such as problem solving, planning-evaluation, directed attention, person knowledge, mental translation, and problem solving are important indicators in effectively using english podcasts. the researchers discovered that metacognitive listening strategy awareness predicts the readiness of using podcast in english language learning. similarly, in a dissertation study investigating 27 adult taiwanese english language learners’ strategy in comprehending authentic short documentary-style news videos, slimon (2012) found that learners with higher listening yalun zhou, michael wei 474 proficiency used significantly more bottom-up (e.g., comprehension of phonemes and single words to build up meaning) and total strategies as well as recalling significantly more audio contents than those who used fewer strategies. 2.2. reading reading strategies in the tell context are mainly scaffolded by platform design or software programming. for example, dalton, proctor, uccelli, mo, and snow (2011) developed a web-based reading prototype to improve reading achievement. the goal of scaffolding is reading digital texts with embedded prompts that ask students to apply reading strategies. the six strategies that pop up for students to consider are: predict, question, clarify, summarize, visualize, and feeling. student participants were75 monolingual english and 31 bilingual fifth-grade students in boston area where the majority non-white student population was composed of latinos. after the teacher introduced reading strategies offline, the students were assigned to one of the three conditions aimed at improving comprehension online (icon) conditions of eight english folktales: reading comprehension strategies, vocabulary, or combined version of comprehension strategies and vocabulary. during the research, the students read eight multimedia folktales and informational texts within their respective icon condition and completed embedded activities. the reading-comprehension instructional actions they utilized in their prototype design were: (1) support strategic learning through prompted reading comprehension strategies, text-specific and generic comprehension strategy hints, models, and think-alouds, (2) provide access to contents through multiple means of representation (e.g., bilingual pedagogical avatar, synchronized, real-time highlighted bilingual texts or vocabulary translation on screen), and (3) support affective learning through age-appropriate and appealing folktales with quality interface and leveled coaching and support. by design, all three conditions shared common set of features such as spanish-english bilingual hints, spanish translation of instructional supports, and text-to-speech read-aloud functionality in english and spanish. as a result, the researchers found that the strategy and vocabulary combination group and vocabulary group outperformed the strategy alone group. one distinctive technology feature of reading online is the interactivity between learners and texts. in their interactive english language learning system (iells), nor, hamat, azman, noor, and bakar (2011) employed interactive tools such as annotation and my notes to teach english reading comprehension to 81 malaysian college students. by design, the system embedded reading strategies that students would not be aware of, thus encouraging them to comprehend. the embedded tool, my notes, encouraged students to reflect on what they read and to share with peers or to comment on peers’ notes, write down questions and notes, get strategies in technology-enhanced language learning 475 notes organized, and list unknown words. the annotation tool allowed students to process the reading materials by applying reading strategies such as highlighting important points or points that they do not understand and by writing comments into the texts. the annotation tool provided the opportunity for students to process and internalize the text at their own pace, leading to development of reflective learning. regarding online reading strategies, ramli, darus, and bakar (2011) found in their study carried out in a malaysian university that 92 esl (english as second language) adult learners preferred metacognitive strategies over taking notes or reading aloud in online reading tasks. metacognitive strategies include advanced planning and comprehension monitoring, such as global reading strategies (e.g., having a purpose in mind when reading online, checking understanding, deciding what to read closely and what to ignore), problem-solving strategies (e.g., trying to visualize information), and support strategies (e.g., seeking tools to aid comprehension). similarly, roy and crabbe’s study (2014) with 75 graduate-level, advanced english learners in a japanese technical university found that the students employed global strategies (e.g., “i have a purpose in mind when reading”) through both online and offline resources to aid their online reading. the researchers recommended that online reading materials developers design structured and compartmentalized questions for broad design queries to make thinking easier and channelized. in a study with seven graduate students from china, south korea, and taiwan at a us university in the midwest, park, yang, and hsieh (2014) utilized pre-reading think aloud before reading online texts to elicit participants’ prior knowledge about the reading passages. they found that prior knowledge in students’ native language and disciplinary background (e.g., business, chemistry, biology, health science, and instructional systems technology) assists their online reading comprehension. as more matured students with higher level of proficiency, the graduate students demonstrated self-regulated reading strategies such as planning, predicting, monitoring, and evaluating. on the basis of their technology-assisted research involving 137 sixth-grade learners of english in western cape south africa, klapwijk and toit (2009) suggested enhancing reading comprehension strategy instruction through a blended approach. the instructional approach was composed of an interactive, multimedia lesson on cd-rom, an online assessment version of the comprehension test, and a booklet to guide the learners through the lesson steps. the interactive multimedia lesson included basic sound, a short video clip and interactive exercises that addressed three reading strategies: activating prior knowledge, summarization, and lookback. according to the researchers, technological advantages such as immediate feedback, self-paced learning, and exposures to a variety of media (audio and video), on the one hand, relieved teacher’s workload, and on the other hand, motivated students to read. yalun zhou, michael wei 476 2.3. writing when four korean college students performed error correction in writing with the help of a free online corpus, lextutor, yoon and jo (2014) found that students utilized four categories of learning strategies: metacognitive (e.g., self-evaluation/monitoring), cognitive (e.g., making use of materials, association, grouping, and translation), affective (e.g., lowering anxiety and self-encouragement), and social (e.g., questioning for clarification). among these, the category of cognitive strategies was used the most and significantly more often than the other three categories. in a german/english tandem project of open university, uk, stickler and lewis (2008) paired 25 english speaking german language students in a higher intermediate german course with native german speaker partners in an adult education institution in german. their intention was to investigate students’ collaborative language learning strategies in an email tandem exchange. they identified six online-specific strategies and seven tandem-specific strategies used by the language learners. the online strategies were: (1) copying the previous message to highlight mistakes or offer corrections, (2) using greetings and social niceties of email writing conventions, (3) planning for the next email by announcing the time, date, or content of next message, (4) signposting in the email to demonstrate that next part will contain correction or switch of language, (5) using symbols (highlight, underline, color-in words) for corrections, and (6) using attachments with a reminder in body of email. the seven tandem-specific strategies were: (1) offering or giving corrections, (2) evaluating partner’s performance, (3) encouraging partner with positive feedback, (4) offering a fair deal exchange, (5) answering explicit questions by directly responding to partner’s previous emails or referring directly back to partner’s statements, (6) planning face-to-face meeting via email to negotiate time and place to meet, and (7) negotiating for error corrections. according to the authors, memory strategies and compensation originally listed in oxford’s (1990) strategy groups were either not found or were very rare in tandem collaborative learning strategies. with the purpose of examining the role of mobile phone technology in language learning strategies, bekleyen and hayta (2015) conducted a study with 75 english language teaching majors in a state university in turkey. they found that the participants used cognitive, memory, compensation, metacognitive, affective, and social strategies with affective strategies being the most frequently employed. social strategies were the least common. in a bilateral tandem moo (multiuser domain, objected-oriented) project between irish (n = 29) and german (n = 22) college students, schwienbhorst (2002) investigated learners’ intended discourse repair strategies in native/nonnative speaker email exchange. discourse repair strategies arose when there was incomplete strategies in technology-enhanced language learning 477 understanding and students used strategies such as negotiation of meaning, compromise overt request for clarification, selfand otherrepetitions (i.e., exact or paraphrasing), complete or partial repetition, code switching, etc. the findings indicate that active strategies or processes of meaning negotiation are prominent in repairing communication. in the case of misunderstandings caused by language barriers, the repair strategies the participants used the most often were asking partners to translate, paraphrase, clarify, guess, and negotiate meaning. in a chinese university, tang, xie, and wang (2011) designed a wiki-based collaborative writing environment for their e-commerce specialty english course. this environment was composed of four types of tools for students to use when completing writing assignments: (1) tag web resources, an online semantic annotator allowing learners to conceptually model semantic relations, (2) peer revision and feedback to assist group members in coordination of collaborative learning process, (3) semantic search that facilitated search and retrieval options, and (4) page histories that recorded every major review version. three learning strategies were identified by the researchers, namely, collaboration and knowledge sharing, peer assessment, and monitoring the stages of the writing process. evaluation results showed that wiki-based collaborative writing can promote student engagement, group work, and audience awareness. 2.4. speaking surprisingly, speaking strategies research in the tell context is scant. this might be because of the constraints of technology available for interactive speaking and also speech recognition technologies. taking advantage of video feedback, hung (2016) conducted a project over the duration of a semester among 60 efl learners in taiwan. the project required students to post a 3-minute video presentation on facebook for questions and discussions occurred in class, then two 2-minutes video-mediated oral feedback. the researcher investigated learners’ strategic behaviors in the process of developing video-mediated peer feedback and explored the strategies employed by learners when giving videomediated oral feedback. hung’s findings revealed that the most frequently used strategy was modifying language for accuracy and constant practices, along with watching others’ oral comments, jotting down comments for future improvements, and discussing with classmates. 3. strategies for language learning subsystems in tell oxford (2011) categorizes lls use into main areas such as the four language learning skill in learning the target language systems and subsystems (grammar yalun zhou, michael wei 478 and vocabulary). research focusing on lls use with respect to the remaining l2 subareas in the tell context (e.g., affective and pragmatics) could not be found in major linguistics databases. we, therefore, focus our review on vocabulary and grammar. 3.1. vocabulary vocabulary learning strategies might be the most productive research area in tell, though grammar learning strategies sometimes accompany vocabulary learning strategies. li (2009) compared vocabulary learning strategies with or without technology support among chinese speaking esl students in canada. 24 high school students were asked to read 10 short aesop’s fables, among which, five in paper format and five in e-lective platform. the e-lective features english-english and english-chinese word definition, an unknown word bank for students to record what they have looked up, a partial and blank word bank for cloze test and comprehension exercise, and a grammar notebook for students to look up parts of speech when inferring meanings of words. the strategies used in the e-lective condition included using online dictionaries, taking notes, guessing and inferring, summarizing and making connections, reading aloud, and discussing. according to the participants, compared to those in printed texts, e-lective allowed them to utilize more strategies in ways summarized in table 1. li pointed out from the results that technology-enhanced scaffolding can effectively assist students in advancing their learning strategies, potentially optimizing their reading-based vocabulary acquisition. overall, students in the e-lective condition used higher levels of cognitive and social strategies (e.g., summarizing and discussing), whereas the in paper condition they employed fewer social strategies (e.g., consulting with the researcher and peers regarding meanings of words). table 1 strategies used with e-lective and associated reading activities (li, 2009, pp. 131-133) strategies used with e-lective associated reading strategies note taking taking more, well-organized notes with e-lective to facilitate memorization and review guessing and inferring using contextual cue-oriented guessing strategies with higher accuracy than in the paper condition summarizing and making connections engaging in the use of higher levels of cognitive strategies that promoted deeper semantic processing and better vocabulary retention, such as summarizing, applying, and manipulating phrases and words reading aloud being able to use the built-in text-to-speech module to read aloud and practice the pronunciation in words, sentences, and whole texts; attention paid to syllables and stress patterns discussing using a wide range of cognitive strategies to process the reading and retain vocabulary (e.g., repeating, quoting, referencing the texts); switching languages to make communication as comprehensive as possible; translating to verify understanding; and reasoning – a higher level of semantic processing of information strategies in technology-enhanced language learning 479 furthermore, gamification of learning so frequent in tell makes it natural to learn vocabulary via computer games. smith, li, drobisz, park, & kim (2013) designed a vocabulary learning game for intermediate level chinese students enrolled in a college english course. fifty-seven students used the interferencebased computer games the researcher designed to learn new vocabulary words and make inferences about a text. the interactive game-like interface forced learners to create sentences through constrained choices. smith et al.’s (2013) experimental study found that inference-based computer games enable students to process the vocabulary more deeply and have better recall. the strategies that the students needed to incorporate with the game-like constrained sentence-writing were making inferences, encoding more effectively, comparing the game to reading lists of words, and answering multiple-choice questions. gallo-crail and zerwekh (2002) researched how l2 learners used different strategies with different web-based tools as they studied new vocabulary and how this affected their success in learning and mastering such vocabulary. the participants in this study were 25 beginning level students of tagalog at northern illinois university. the researchers identified five types of learning strategies supporting online vocabulary learning: memory strategy (e.g., association), cognitive strategy (e.g., translation), compensation (e.g., use of linguistic and other clues), affective (e.g., developing cultural understanding), and metacognitive (e.g., overview and lining with previous learning materials). the more diverse strategies students used to learn vocabulary, they performed in vocabulary tests. some researchers and instructional technologists design and investigate vocabulary learning strategy software or applications. for instance, lan (2013) developed a co-sharing-based strategy learning system, mywordtools, for 61 sixth-grade students in taipei to learn english vocabulary. this application enables students to learn vocabulary by using the available language learning strategies embedded in the design. when an l2 word is chosen, the learner can look up the strategies that have been used by all of the other learners in mywordtools or select one of the strategies that he or she wants to use to aid the process of learning and memorize the word. the choices are: note-taking, contextualization, grouping, imagery, recombination, deduction, analysis, translation, etc. the users have four options (i.e., audio, video, image, and note) to record their learning strategies. once the learners have uploaded their learning strategies, the learning module allows them to look up the strategies used by other peers. the function of embedded strategies sharing is to raise the awareness of learners so that they can self-evaluate their own strategies, make them cognizant of gaps in their knowledge, and enable them to re-construct their strategies or increase their self-confidence. the results of this study indicated that students using mywordtools to practice and share vocabulary learning strategies outperformed yalun zhou, michael wei 480 both those who did not use mywordtools and those who used the platform but without sharing. it was also found that strategy sharing helped l2 learners use more vocabulary learning strategies, and they consequently performed significantly better than those who did not engage in strategy sharing. ou yang and wu (2015) incorporated lls instruction into their e-learning platform called myeva. myeva is a mixed-modality english vocabulary learning strategies system. in this system, they used schmitt’s (1997) division of strategies for learning l2 vocabulary into discovery (i.e., determination strategy and social strategy) and consolidation (i.e., social strategy, memory strategy, cognitive/metacognitive strategy, pictures/imagery, related/unrelated words, grouping, the word’s orthographical and phonological forms). myeva was piloted with nine undergraduate students in northern taiwan. the findings indicate that the vocabulary learning mode that allows learners to pre-determine a preferred learning strategy (e.g., word-card, flashcard, chinese-assonance, synonym, antonym, imagery, grouping, and clipping) before actual learning resulted in greatest vocabulary acquisition and best retention. 3.2. grammar research on the use of grammar strategies by learners has been scant (cohen, pinilla-herrera, thompson, & witzig, 2011; oxford & lee, 2007; see the paper by pawlak in this issue). even more scant is technology-enhanced grammar strategies research. however, an exhaustive search of major databases allowed us to identify several attempts in this area. to strategize the learning and using of spanish grammar, cohen et al. (2011) designed a website to track grammar strategy use by 15 students of spanish. unlike a collection of grammar rules, this website collected 72 strategies that were found to be effective for spanish learners. it contained two sections. one section included strategies for a particular grammar form that students thought were necessary for them to learn. the other section contained strategies for enhancing learners’ use of grammar strategies. in this section, learners can select strategies that match their learning style and their ideas about what they can put into practice. to examine the accessibility and navigation of the website, a small-scale user test was administrated. the research questions were related to strategies that the learners chose, the extent to which these strategies were helpful and the rationale for choosing specific strategies. the results indicated that the learners thought 73% of the grammar strategies were helpful and that found certain strategies helped them improve their spanish grammar performance. in addition, the students reported improvement in class activities, on tests, and on writing assignments during the 6-8 weeks of practicing with the strategies in technology-enhanced language learning 481 grammar strategies website. some participants even reported improvement in their ability and confidence to use grammar forms that they had struggled with before. overall, the learners benefited from use of the grammar strategies website. it can thus be assumed that reliance on the strategies included in the website allowed them to enhance their mastery of grammar. a study that examined the effects of the application of grammar strategies that aided learning of specific grammar forms was conducted by hwu (2007). hwu investigated how different students used a grammar application created by the researcher. the objective of the application was to teach the uses of two spanish past tense forms. he asked learners to watch spanish soap opera clips that contained various pragmatic meanings of the two forms in conversations. each of the 19 clip lessons included in the application consisted of one component that explicitly asked the students to explain how a linguistic form was used in the clip, provide their own explanation of the form in terms of the speaker’s intention, indicate the reference point of the intention, decide whether the other word is acceptable in that context and why/why not, and to explain of the use of the target verb form in the sense of pragmatics. the grammar strategies instruction provided by means of this application was integrated into the syllabus and a preand posttest was administrated to determine whether the students’ understanding had improved over the semester. the results indicated that the experiment group students spent a substantial amount of time with the grammar strategies application, which resulted in significant improvement from pretest to posttest while the control group students remained at the same level. furthermore, hwu (2007) analyzed the correspondence of the strategy preferences expressed in the sill (oxford, 1990) and predominant types of learning styles. the results indicated that intuitive students tended to use cognitive strategies and developed their own understanding of how target language pragmatics works. sensing participants, on the other hand, tended to use memory strategies to memorize grammar explanations. the only cognitive strategies sensing students used were making summaries of the grammar explanations and reasoning grammar explanations deductively. another study focusing on grammar strategies in the context of tell explored the effect of using self-explanation (e.g., infer and reflect) on a webbased chinese sentence-learning system and was conducted by chang, lee, su, and wang (2016). they integrated a self-explanation strategy into a chineselearning system that included self-explanation prompts, instructional feedback, and remedial learning materials. the self-explanation strategy provoked the students to discover, analyze, and overcome their misconceptions about chinese sentences. when the students were inspired to identify and self-explain their errors, they had to infer possible reasons for the errors and to discover what they had misunderstood and if they could revise or correct their mistakes. to yalun zhou, michael wei 482 determine the effect of the use of the self-explanation grammar strategy webbased application, the researchers had the students complete preand posttests, and sentence-structuring exercises. after comparing grammar test scores and cognitive loads of the experiment group and control group, the researchers found greater learning outcomes in the experimental group in terms of grammar and sentence structure, as indicated by the higher means on the posttest. three rounds of comparisons for sentence-structuring exercises between the experiment and control groups indicated that, when in the first round, the numbers of errors made by the experiment and control groups were 67 vs. 86; the results in the second and third round were 29 vs. 49 and 11 vs. 27, respectively. there were, however, no significant differences between the experiment group and control group in terms of the cognitive loads involved in the performance of the grammar tasks. although the self-explanation strategy was effective in learning chinese grammar, the students complained that the process was time consuming and did not always enable them to eliminate their errors. 4. strategic, self-regulated language learning with technology despite different purposes of using strategies to learn the language skills and subsystems of the target language, self-regulation is crucial in the success of language learning. self-regulation is a process in which people organize and manage their learning, including control of their time, thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and environment (cf. zimmerman, 1998). the richness of the technology design and applications available causes teachers to consider integrating technology in and out of language classrooms and makes self-regulated learning strategies a necessary skill set for l2 learners. it should be noted that all learning strategies are aimed at self-regulation, although self-regulation as a specific construct was not linked to language learning strategies until the late twentieth century (see oxford, 1999).1 if learners are motivated, they autonomously select a particular activity, decide how long they are willing to persist in it, and what effort they are going to invest (dörnyei, 2001). in understanding the importance of self-regulated learning strategies for l2 proficiency, oxford (2011) distinguishes three dimensions of strategic self-regulation. the three dimensions are: 1) cognitive strategies for remembering and processing language and metacognitive strategies for planning, organizing, monitoring, and evaluating in the cognitive area; 1 autonomy was first associated with language learning strategies several decades before that (oxford, 1999). strategies in technology-enhanced language learning 483 2) affective strategies linked with emotions, beliefs, attitudes, and motivation and meta-affective strategies for planning, organizing, monitoring, and evaluating in the affective area; 3) sociocultural-interactive strategies for contexts, communication, and culture and meta-social strategies for planning, organizing, monitoring, and evaluating in the sociocultural-interactive area. this section will follow oxford’s three dimensions to look into research findings of strategic, self-regulated language learning enhanced with technologies. 4.1. cognitive/metacognitive dimension self-regulated learning strategies are crucially important in online learning environments. chung’s (2015) questionnaires administered to 441 taiwanese college students taking a massive open online course (mooc) revealed that highlevel english learners utilize more self-regulated strategies in the process of learning, such as cognitive regulation strategies (e.g., rehearsal, elaboration, organization, critical thinking, comprehension, and correction), motivational regulation strategies (e.g., intrinsic, task value, success expectation, and positive affectivity), and resource management strategies (e.g., environment, adjustment, peer cooperation, and seeking assistance). in technology-enhanced language learning classes, researchers found it is effective to include self-regulation strategies in task design. for instance, in an australian university, an (2013) integrated self-regulated tasks into a chinese language course built around the web-based podcasting platform, chinesepod. in her design, pre-tasks exposed the 49 student participants to extensive authentic chinese language use in context through online podcasts. this involved the students’ self-study of the podcast lessons, which included listening to the podcasts and understanding the contents. the major tasks involved students’ creating, writing, re-writing their own dialogues and plays. the report stage was when students acted out their self-created plays or videos in class and received feedback. an (2013) reported that the task design, where self-regulation strategies were embedded, yielded impressive learning outcomes in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and improvement from first to final writing drafts. in another study exploring the effects of a self-monitoring strategy on students’ academic performance and motivational beliefs in web-based instruction, chang (2007) found that the strategy had a significant effect on students in these areas. the instructor required the 99 students in freshman english class to keep a self-monitoring recording form each time they logged into the course site. the form functioned as a record and an alert of time logs, learning modules, yalun zhou, michael wei 484 prediction and real test scores. students who employed self-monitoring strategies outperformed students who did not on both academic performance and motivational beliefs. within the higher-level english proficiency group, students who employed the self-monitoring strategy obtained higher scores than those who did not. chang’s research revealed that self-monitoring treatment in instructional design compensated for the lack of use of metacognitive strategies among the lower-level english proficiency group. self-instruction, self-regulation, and learning autonomy are crucial for distance language learners. in a study involving 37 students learning french (n = 19, of which 4 were in classroom mode) and japanese (n = 18, of which 5 were classroom mode), white (1995) found that distance learners used strategies more often than classroom learners (e.g., 26.6 instances vs. 10.2 of strategy use in self-reports). with respect to metacognitive strategies, distance learners made greater use of the monitoring and evaluation dimensions of metacognition than did classroom learners. distance language learners therefore need to develop an understanding of the nature of language learning as well as an appropriate repertoire of language learning strategies. among the three strategies that distance learners use, the most influential self-regulation strategy is selfmanagement as it fosters learner autonomy. it is important that teachers facilitate or assist the development of learners’ self-regulated strategies in strategic language learning in tell environments. hourigan and murray (2010) pointed out the importance of developing learning strategies in digital times because students of the 21st century are not necessarily “digital natives” (p. 212). similarly, it is necessary to provide opportunities for learners to develop metacognitive awareness and to guide them in improving and expanding their knowledge about learning and becoming autonomous language learners (hauck, 2005). without adequate training or guidance, technology-based language learning outcomes may not be ideal, for instance, for effective english listening learning (zhang & song, 2009). one good example of strategy instruction is what saks and leijen (2015) did in an attempt to find a more efficient way to support learners’ use of cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies. they integrated strategy learning as scaffolding with strategy prompts to improve students’ learning efficiency at various phrases of learning. in their blended tourism english course, 28 estonian students were encouraged to plan, monitor, and selfevaluate their learning activities with the help of learning journals. the evaluation of the course indicated that the most obvious improvement resulting from such scaffolded strategy prompts in course design are active use of language as well as compensation, and social strategies. assignments prompting learners’ use of cognitive and metacognitive lls facilitate the development of content knowledge and language skills, and also support self-expression in english. strategies in technology-enhanced language learning 485 similarly, in spain, pujola (2002) designed a web-based program called impressions, consisting of multimedia news (newspaper, radio, and television) to facilitate the use of reading and listening comprehension strategies in the course of self-study. it was designed in response to garrett’s (1995) assumption that students lack awareness or strategies for help seeking. the design contained four modules: newspaper, radio, television, and expert (note: this module was designed to provide grammar practices for the learners). 22 adult english learners reported that inferring strategies in context was what they used the most in this program. the participants also engaged in analysis of parts of the words, similarities between the target language with their native language, and links to previous news item. examples of prompts that facilitated participants’ thinking about help seeking and learning strategies in the form of a pop-up button ask-the-experts included: what can i do when i do not know a word? what can i guess the meaning of a word? when can i use skimming? how can i improve my reading? what can i do when i cannot follow the speed of the speaker? what can i do when i hear too much unfamiliar information? (pujola, 2002, p. 256). the most frequently consulted listening strategies question was what can be done when students cannot follow the speaker, whereas the most frequently consulted reading strategies question was when they can use skimming and scanning. 4.2. affective/meta-affective dimension technology-enhanced self-regulated l2 learning is related to positive affective learning outcomes and language gains (lai, wang, li, & hu, 2016). affective strategies are linked with emotions, beliefs, attitudes, and motivation, as well as sociocultural-interactive strategies for contexts, communication, and culture (oxford, 2011). self-regulatory strategies are influential in promoting motivation and autonomous learning (kormos & csizér, 2014). kondo, ishikawa, smith, sakamoto, shimomura, & wada (2012) designed a mall (mobile assisted language learning) self-regulated learning module to help improve students’ scores on the toeic listening and reading tests. their goal was to investigate whether certain mall practices can foster an advanced form of self-study and self-regulated learning. their module was composed of five-steps in order to foster, in the initial stage of self-study, and in the long run, to support students’ gradual transition to self-regulated learning. 88 first-year students at kyoto university, japan, participated in this study. in this strategic language learning pedagogical design, students took responsibility for stimulating and sustaining their motivation so that they could formulate, carry out, and evaluate strategic learning plans. results indicated that students in the mall group improved self-study behaviors and spent more time on studying outside yalun zhou, michael wei 486 of class. they increased their scores in both the listening and reading sections (e.g., an increase of 40.83 in the mall group vs. 18.15 in the control group). lai and gu’s (2011) survey study with 279 hong kong college students learning foreign languages (i.e., chinese, english, french, japanese, spanish, and korean) investigated how technology enhanced students’ self-regulated language learning outside the classroom. data analyses indicated that students’ motivations for using technology in self-regulated l2 learning included: regulating emotions and making learning appealing, planning, evaluating, and monitoring learning progress, enhancing social connections and seeking help, making commitment to learning goals, making use of learning resources, and having better cultural understanding. in addition, teachers were found to provide important emotional support in students’ self-directed language learning with technologies outside of classroom. the strategies that students thought were effective in supporting self-regulated language learning with technology included encouraging students to use technological resources and using technology in class (lai, 2015). 4.3. sociocultural-interactive/meta-social dimension informed strategy use is particularly important in the context of online language learning, where learner interaction often takes place in environments that students are either less familiar with or more interested in communication with their peers rather than in educational purposes. in an internet-mediated intercultural foreign language exchange project, hauck and hampel (2008) created a telecollaborative exchange with students from three different countries, france (n = 10 learning english), the uk (n = 5 learning french), and united states (n = 10 learning french). telecollaboration takes place when learners in internationally parallel language classes use internet communication tools such as email, synchronous chat, threaded discussion and so on to support sociocultural interaction. in hauck and hampel’s project, the participants spent 10 weeks taking part in a structured exchange exploring the benefits of synchronous and asynchronous learning environments for partnership language learning. the analysis of the online interactions yielded the most examples of affective strategies (e.g., lowering anxiety, encouraging, and taking emotional temperature) and social strategies (e.g., asking questions, empathizing with others, getting to know others, and facilitating interaction) proposed by oxford (1990). in addition, a new set of strategies, which the researchers termed socio-environmental strategies played a vital role in successful online learning of languages and cultures. the researchers claimed that interactions in online environments require different ways of making and maintaining contact, finding out about common interests, and developing an identify as a group. compared to face-to-face communication, strategies in technology-enhanced language learning 487 affective and social skills cannot simply be transferred but need to tailored to virtual learning environments. due to the nature of online intercultural exchanges, strategy (especially metacognitive strategy) instruction, is an important step in facilitating language learning. the online language learners need continuous support from teachers in terms of lls use. 5. discussion the arrival of the digital age has been a white water change, a metaphor describing the rapid, complex and all-encompassing nature of this technological wave (oxford 2008, p. 191, cited in oxford & lin, 2011). the widespread availability of technology tools brought about new opportunities and challenges in language learning strategy pedagogical design and research, and, consequently, new considerations for instructed second language acquisition. as chapelle (2009) writes, “technology dramatically extends and changes the breadth and depth of exposure that learners can have with the target language and interactive events in which they have the opportunity for language focus” (p. 750). the increased use of technology in language classrooms makes it no longer appropriate to think of it as a supporting tool in face-to-face language classroom (nunan, 2000). technology is far more than this. learners are now challenged to explore strategies for effective language learning in digital realms (oxford & lin, 2011). this new context of language learning calls for new pedagogical designs involving strategy instruction and new methodologies for research into lls. the overview undertaken in this article revealed that although 21st century l2 learners, especially those in technologically developed countries, are digital natives (hourigan & murray, 2010), they are not necessarily experts in learning with technologies. this is especially true in the case of language learning. although a large portion of language learning extends to outside of the classroom due to the pervasive employment of multimodal technologies, learners might not be self-regulating or autonomous unless they have been explicitly taught to use learning strategies. digital age learners who benefit from proper language learning strategy instruction outperform their counterparts who have not received such training both in language learning efficiency and language skills. strategies-based instruction which is enhanced by technology produces impressive outcomes in terms of developing strategic, self-regulated language learners in the digital age (mutlu & eroz-tuga, 2013). we strongly agree with salaberry’s (2001) proposal that the most important challenge posed by tell is the identification of pedagogical objectives that technology-based teaching is to achieve. the diversity and universality of modern technologies available have challenged both language teachers and yalun zhou, michael wei 488 learners. the teacher’s role is crucial in identifying the best technology tools and guiding students to be strategic, self-regulated language learners when using technologies. a teacher without ample knowledge and skill in evaluating and utilizing effective technological tools may not be a good teacher in the digital age. kern (2006) examined how the rapidly changing communication landscape of the 21st century affects the way we learn, use, and teach languages. while technological devices and easy access to them are powerfully transforming how human society communicates, researchers are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of strategy use with technology in the cognitive and affective dimensions of strategic, self-regulated learning. in contrast, research into the use of grammar strategies as well as the sociocultural-interactive dimension of strategic, self-regulated learning seems much less fertile, despite the availability of authentic, interactive materials online and on mobile apps. it is important for 21st century language teachers to have “new understandings of language and communication, critical awareness of the relationships among technology, language, culture, and society, and new trends in research methods” (kern, 2006, p. 183). although communication strategies were originally categorized by oxford (1990) as “tools for active, self-directed involvement” (p. 1) for the development of communicative competence, at this point in history they are also crucial strategies in computer-mediated contexts and may be considered very important in pedagogical designs and research informing synchronous, virtual communication. 6. conclusion and recommendations in this paper, we reviewed existing research on language learning strategies in tell environments, first in relation to specific language skills (i.e., listening, speaking, reading, and writing), then as associated with target language subsystems, such as vocabulary and grammar, and finally, as linked to strategic, self-regulated language learning. the technology-enhanced language learning strategies reviewed demonstrate the specifics of what learners and teachers do with technologies in the digital age, how they embed language learning strategies into games, online platforms, and/or apps, and how they cultivate self-strategically self-regulated learning. if the communicative approach has profoundly changed the components of language classroom, the rapid technological changes and pervasive presence of interactive web 2.0 tools (e.g., voice interactive call, kern & warschauer, 2000) in the 21st century have extended language teaching and learning to any time, at any place, with any device. new thoughts, practices, and research protocols are needed to cope with the rapidly growing new technologies (e.g., smart phones, tablets, 3d glasses, real-time virtual interactive tools) and new learning environments (e.g., virtual reality, mixed reality, and immersive, intelligent strategies in technology-enhanced language learning 489 learning environment). although the unprecedented human-computer interaction formats (e.g., emails, facebook, google hangout, skype, twitter, wechat, qq) have provided more authentic language learning venues, it does not necessarily mean that our learners of the 21st century are born to know how to learn a foreign language effectively with these technologies and how to selfregulate their learning outside the classroom. instead, there is a need to equip learners with strategies for effective human-computer and sociocultural interaction. we therefore make the following recommendations in terms of language learning strategy theory and practice for more effective language learning. first, with the embeddedness of technology in and out of language classrooms, in addition to traditional research protocols, we call for more research instruments to investigate technology-enhanced lls (see e.g., chai, wong, & king, 2016 on learning strategies and strategy instruction in tell contexts). strategies which were not included in traditional frameworks of lls need to be added, such as, for instance, socio-environmental strategies, proposed by hauck and hampel (2008), and human-computer interaction strategies with emerging technologies. in addition, social language leaning strategies, which were seemingly less important in traditional schemes, are now known as collaborative language learning strategies and identified as one of the most important strategy sets in email tandem exchange tasks (stickler & lewis, 2008). furthermore, normalization of technology in language classrooms and the multi-faceted aspects of language learning technologies have altered traditional language learning and teaching approaches. this change calls for new learning strategies, digitalized data collection, and data analysis. it also presents new challenges for research design and instrument-building and requires a new frontier of research methodologies (stickler & shi, 2016) in language learning strategies and self-regulated learning with tell. second, due to specific and ungeneralizable technological infrastructures, most tell-based strategy research has investigated the effectiveness of a technology and/or platform in a laboratory setting, often including only short-term treatments. instruction in language learning strategies and self-regulated learning with tell over longer periods of time (e.g., a semester), taking place in intact classes (e.g., zhou, 2016) seems to be more suitable in digital realms. more research is needed to explore how 21st century l2 teachers and learners handle strategies and self-regulated learning in technology normalized day-to-day classroom operations. third, language learners are challenged by new forms of learning and seek new strategies for learning (oxford & lin, 2011). in addition, the availability of new technologies and language learning tools has grown much faster than the preparation of language teachers. learning strategy instruction should be integrated into the curriculum of technology-enhanced language learning. successful use of new language learning technology tools and new types of learning strategies yalun zhou, michael wei 490 depends on language teachers’ increased knowledge and dedication to help their students gain awareness of and skill in using optimal lls. this calls for a change in the curricula for language teacher education. in addition to knowing about teaching methodologies and assessments of language learning in traditional ways, language teachers in digital realms also need to be equipped with knowledge and skills to: (1) identify technical attributes specific to the new technologies that can be feasibly integrated into and engaged with classroom instruction, and (2) design technologyenhanced pedagogy with lls orientation for their students. finally, emerging technologies (e.g., web 2.0, augmented reality, google glasses) and learning environments (virtual reality, 3d, mixed reality, cognitive immersive), which have been designed in collaboration with artists, programmers, and language educators, have opened up a new era for l2 learning research, including strategy research. there are many unknowns in this new form of research. investigations into language learning strategies and the effectiveness of strategies-based instruction need to be expanded and diversified taking into account new types of human-computer interactions and modes of learning. in conclusion, technology has changed considerably since the incorporation of computers into language learning and teaching in the 1980s. it has shifted from being a tutorial tool to an ecological tool integral to language learning and language teaching. it has transformed from being a concept to a reality. new initiatives have begun to update theory, practices, and research in computer-assisted learning (bush, 2008; garrett, 2009). as for the field of language learning strategies, technology has offered, and continues to offer, research findings and practical insights concerning strategies that make l2 learning more effective (cf. griffiths & oxford, 2014). rapidly growing new technologies and emerging, immersive learning environments call for a quick reaction from theory, research and practice of language learning strategies. it is time for researchers and practitioners to rethink the role of tell and immersive, interactive, learning environments that require reliance on language learning strategies. language learning strategies have to be reconsidered (bekleyen & hayta, 2015) since they must be adapted substantively to new technological devices and learning environments. new initiatives, then, must be brought into the field of language strategy instruction, assessment, and research. strategies in technology-enhanced language learning 491 references an, i. s. 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(1998). academic studying and the development of personal skill: a self-regulatory perspective. educational psychologist, 33(2/3), 73-86. 697 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (4). 2020. 697-721 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.4.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt on the fractal nature of complex syntax and the timescale problem d. reid evans university of massachusetts medical school, worcester, ma, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8341-488x reid.evans@umassmed.edu abstract fundamental to complex dynamic systems theory is the assumption that the recursive behavior of complex systems results in the generation of physical forms and dynamic processes that are self-similar and scale-invariant. such fractal-like structures and the organismic benefit that they engender has been widely noted in physiology, biology, and medicine, yet discussions of the fractal-like nature of language have remained at the level of metaphor in applied linguistics. motivated by the lack of empirical evidence supporting this assumption, the present study examines the extent to which the use and development of complex syntax in a learner of english as a second language demonstrate the characteristics of self-similarity and scale invariance at nested timescales. findings suggest that the use and development of syntactic complexity are governed by fractal scaling as the dynamic relationship among the subconstructs of syntax maintain their complexity and variability across multiple temporal scales. overall, fractal analysis appears to be a fruitful analytic tool when attempting to discern the dynamic relationships among the multiple component parts of complex systems as they interact over time. keywords: complex dynamic systems theory; fractals; syntactic complexity; second language development; variability d. reid evans 698 1. introduction it is no secret that recursive, self-similar patterns abound in the world that surrounds us. from the biological self-similarity evidenced, for example, in the vascular branching of our internal organs, to the self-similar patterning of abiotic structures including mountain ranges, river systems, clouds, and coastlines, the natural world flourishes in recursive iteration. such self-similarity, as we learn from fields such as physics and mathematics, results from the behavior of complex dynamic systems as they iterate over time (brown, gupta, li, milne, & west, 2002). the feedback-sensitive nature of such systems, in which the current state of the system serves as the input for each subsequent state (thelen, 2005), engenders the self-similar patterns so frequently witnessed in nature. to be sure, recognition of the self-similar patterning so common in the natural world is not new; however, it was not until benoit mandelbrot (1982) advanced the notion of fractal geometry that a language emerged capable of examining and describing the traces left by the recursive iteration of complex systems (peitgen, jürgens, & saupe, 1992). across both time and space, complex systems in the natural world commonly generate fractal-like structures, thus upholding their intrinsic complexity at smaller and smaller temporal and physical scales. as mandelbrot articulated, the term fractal refers to a class of geometric figures that, when magnified, reveal increasingly smaller, yet self-similar structures on every scale. fractal scaling is pervasive in nature and has been noted in a myriad of physical and biological processes. language, of course, has not escaped these discussions as scholars have alluded to the fractal nature of language for some time (lyle, 2009; shanon, 1993; youmans & pfeifer, 2005). this discussion, however, has been limited, relying almost exclusively on the fractal as a metaphor to describe and explain language as the requisite characteristics of fractals offer a distinct semblance to many of the defining features of human language (pareyon, 2007). clear reference has been made, for instance, to the oft-cited and widely recognized recursive nature of language. in this way, the iterative combinatorial process of language production results in a branching of structures that, when examined independently, frequently resemble the whole. fruitful as the fractal metaphor may be, the extent to which fractal patterns appear in language use is still uncertain (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). given this uncertainty, if language is to be accepted as fractal-like, there is a clear need for empirical evidence supporting the self-similar, scale-free nature of language use and development. furthermore, as advances in disciplines such as biology and physiology have uncovered the pervasiveness of fractal scaling in living organisms (brown et al., 2002), our understanding of the organismic benefit derived from fractal scaling has continued to grow. if language use and development can on the fractal nature of complex syntax and the timescale problem 699 be demonstrated to exhibit fractal patterning, logically, the biological benefits of fractality may equally be shared by the human language capacity. given the pervasiveness of self-similarity in the physical world, the present paper empirically explores the fractal nature of language, focusing specifically on the temporal self-similarity of complex syntax. to accomplish this task, i draw on longitudinal oral production data of a second language (l2) learner of english to show that complex syntax evidences the defining characteristics of fractal structure – that of self-similarity and scale-invariance, along with a nonlinear distribution of form. in doing so, this study adds to the previous body of literature discussing the nonlinear, zipfian distributions of lexis (larsen-freeman, 1997; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008) and lexical variation (kretzschmar, 2015) by arguing that complex syntax, too, appears to be governed by the principles of scale-free, fractal fluctuation. as arguments for the biological benefit of fractal scaling in human physiology have gained traction in recent years (west, 2006), i advance this conjecture vis-à-vis language use and development in a discussion of the potential benefits of the fractal nature of complex syntax. finally, recent complexity scholarship has affirmed that the components and subcomponents of the complex linguistic system develop at highly differential rates over time (de bot, 2015), yet the true timescales of development remain elusive (ruhland & van geert, 1998). it follows, then, that this imperfectly understood area of language development hints at a broader issue within the field of applied linguistics, one which i term the timescale problem. given that research into fractal scaling in language is in its infancy, i posit the latent potential of fractal analysis to address the timescale problem and our impoverished understanding of the unique timescales of language development. adopting a fractal analytical framework, i will argue, accommodates a view in which language is seen not as an artifact of a single arbitrary timescale, but rather as a dynamic process situated within and across multiple scales of time. 2. theoretical considerations 2.1. complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) since its introduction into the field of applied linguistics (larsen-freeman, 1997), cdst has gained increasing favorability. first understood as a productive metaphor to describe and explain language development and use (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008), in its application, complexity-informed scholarship has demonstrated that language exhibits many of the fundamental properties of complex systems. relating both to the structural and behavioral characteristics of such systems, we now understand language to consist of a multitude of interacting d. reid evans 700 components and subcomponents (van geert, 2008) whose open, feedback-sensitive nature leads to seemingly random, nonlinear trajectories of development over time (e.g., dong, 2016; schmid, kopke, & de bot, 2013). complex systems are comprised of a theoretically limitless set of interrelated component parts which may be both endogenous or exogenous to the system itself (de bot & larsen-freeman, 2011). few would argue the applicability of this notion to the language faculty as both system-internal and system-external factors are recognized to affect language development and use. from within, psychological constructs and language skills such as mental grammars, phonology, and the lexicon all interface with the external linguistic environment through distributed social interaction (lowie & verspoor, 2015). as individuals differ significantly in terms of biological propensity as well as experience, the unique ways in which the components of the complex linguistic system interact lead to highly individualized developmental trajectories. as a result, complexity studies have highlighted such inter-individual variability (baba & nitta, 2014; van dijk & van geert, 2007), thus demonstrating that group means tell us very little about how individual language users develop in their abilities over time (chan, verspoor, & vahtrick, 2015; larsen-freeman, 2006; verspoor, lowie, chan, & vahtrick, 2017). equally relevant to human language, complex systems are said to be open, or dissipative (prigogine & stengers, 1984), in that they find themselves in a constant exchange of energy and information with the external environment (kauffman, 1995). coupled with the curious interplay that results among the manifold components of the system, this continuous exchange gives rise to a complex linguistic system that is inherently mutable, yet atelic as it possesses no discernable end state (de bot, chan, lowie, plat, & verspoor, 2012; larsen-freeman, 2015). external pressures are a driving force in system evolution, yet change also initiates from within. internal pressures exerted on the system motivate the process of self-organization by which the synergistic activity of system-internal components generates novelty in behavior (smith & thelen, 2003), pushing the system toward higher orders of complexity and spontaneous pattern formation (van geert, 2008). as complex systems respond and adapt to internal and external pressures, variability is common as systems evolve over time (van dijk & van geert, 2011). this notion has been demonstrated in both first language (l1; bassano & van geert, 2007) and l2 development (lowie, verspoor, & van dijk, 2018; penris & verspoor, 2017), leading some to suggest that variability not only promotes flexibility within the system but may truly be a prerequisite to development (lowie, verspoor, & van dijk, 2018). the feedback sensitivity of complex systems equally contributes to the variability in system development over time. dissipative systems do not passively exchange information with their surroundings; instead, they actively on the fractal nature of complex syntax and the timescale problem 701 gather information about themselves and their environment (gell-mann, 1994) with each iterative exchange serving as an attempt to further benefit the system (larsen-freeman, 1997). as a consequence, feedback-sensitive systems evolve via an iterative process by which the current state, or iteration, of the system serves as input for the next proximal state (thelen, 2005). this view is highly amenable to emergentist accounts of language use and development which argue that grammatical regularities emerge from the interaction of the components both internal and external to the complex linguistic system itself (ellis, 2011). in real time, the complex linguistic system adapts to the moment-to-moment constraints and affordances of the context in which it is used. in turn, these exchanges reinforce certain stable conditions, or attractor states (hiver, 2015), while equally pushing the system away from others (van geert, 2008). recent complexity scholarship has shaped our understanding of language as an open, feedback-sensitive, nonlinear, complex, adaptive system (beckner et al., 2009). significant questions remain, however, relating to how language development and use uphold additional characteristics of complex systems. we know, for instance, that the self-organization of complex systems as they iterate over time leads to the emergence of novel patterns of form and behavior (evans & larsen-freeman, 2020). fields such as mathematics and physics have demonstrated that this process of iteration frequently generates fractal-like structures, that is, those which mimic themselves on smaller and smaller scales (feldman, 2012). though complexity-informed scholarship in applied linguistics has hinted at the fractal nature of language (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008), the extent to which these forms exist is still uncertain. 2.2. fractals fractals are those geometric forms which, when magnified, reveal increasingly smaller, yet self-similar patterns across all scales of measurement. a product of complex dynamic systems (delignières & marmelat, 2012), geometric fractals result from iterative mathematical equations that, when repeated, are capable of expressing an infinite amount of detail in a seemingly finite space (chávez & ragan, 2016). this process is demonstrated, for example, in the often cited sierpiński triangle. the sierpiński triangle is created via a recursive process in which the central triangle within an equilateral triangle is removed leaving four similar triangles. when this process is repeated iteratively with the remaining triangles, a fractal figure emerges (see figure 1). the sierpiński triangle illustrates two of the defining characteristics of geometric fractals – those of self-similarity and scale-invariance. when a segment of the sierpiński triangle is magnified, the details revealed are identical, or self-similar, to those of the entire figure. as this d. reid evans 702 process may be repeated endlessly with similar results, the sierpiński triangle equally illustrates scale-invariance as each iteration produces equal amounts of complex detail down to the most arbitrarily small scales. figure 1 the sierpiński triangle nature makes use of the efficiency of scale-free self-similarity as the iteration of simple rules makes the generation of fractals relatively “easy” (feldman, 2012). fractal structures found in nature, however, seldom display self-similarity with the same exactitude as their mathematical brethren due, in significant part, to the inherent randomness of natural processes (mcgrath, 2016). while geometric fractals demonstrate limitless scale-invariance, true fractals in this sense do not occur in nature. instead, the stochastic nature of the physical world results in fractal structures that rarely exhibit perfect self-similarity; that is, an isolated segment of an object is most often only an approximation of the whole (peitgen et al., 1992). 2.2.1. distribution of form as demonstrated in the sierpiński triangle, each successive iteration contains further reduced triangles that resemble the whole. in this way, the distribution of form within fractal structures is a function of the scale of measurement – while only a limited number of large triangles can be discerned, countless smaller and smaller triangles are observed as the shape is magnified. this unique relationship, when plotted graphically, results not in a normal, or gaussian distribution of form, but in a probability density function governed by a power-law (see figure 2). indicative of self-similar, fractal processes (west, 2001), power-laws describe scaling relationships in which each successively smaller structure is exponentially more on the fractal nature of complex syntax and the timescale problem 703 frequent than that which precedes it (feldman, 2012). in the case of the sierpiński triangle, a large probability exists of observing a small triangle, yet the probability of observing a large triangle is exponentially diminished. figure 2 the asymptotic, long-tail curve of a power-law distribution the asymptotic, long-tail distribution of power-laws embodies the scale-free nature of fractals as the “average” form depends not on the traditional bell curve, but rather on the degree of resolution used in observation (feldman, 2012). thus, power-law probability density functions challenge the commonly held assumption in science and mathematics that measurement on a single scale results in an appropriate description of a fractal object (liebovitch & shehadeh, 2005). alternatively, investigating fractal forms necessarily warrants measurement across scales as scaling relationships provide significant insight into the patterns found in nature. 2.2.2. self-similar structure versus self-similar dynamics while physical, or geometric, self-similarity is highly prevalent in nature and mathematics, fractal scaling is equally observed in the temporal dynamics, or behavior, of complex systems as they iterate over time. whereas fractal geometry describes selfsimilarity in physical form, in the temporal dimension, self-similarity is an expression of the system’s dynamics (west, 2001) and is suggestive of a process in which fluctuations in behavior appear identical at increasingly smaller moments in time. certainly, all biological processes, including language, exhibit a certain degree of variability in their developmental trajectories. when examined at successively smaller time scales, patterns of variability frequently appear self-similar across temporal scales (rhea et al., 2014). in this way, as geometric fractals maintain their complexity across physical scales, a system’s dynamics do not diminish in complexity as temporal scales are magnified. instead, the moment-to-moment fluctuations of complex systems retain their complexity as the system “dances among the time scales” (west, 2001, p. 397). it is d. reid evans 704 the “dance” among time scales and the emergent patterns that it produces that is of most interest to those seeking to understand the fractal nature of behavior. in sum, power-law scaling relationships and fractal self-similarity are recognized as a robust analytic framework for investigating the emergence and behavior of complex systems (brown et al., 2002). as power-law probability density functions are the “signature” of fractals (feldman, 2012), evidence of these distributions supports the fractal nature of complex biological processes. fields such as physiology and medicine have capitalized on this understanding leading to new perspectives on health (west, 2006), advancing the importance of fractal scaling in the human organism. 2.3. fractal patterns in human physiology the pervasiveness of fractal scaling in human behavior and physiology is widely acknowledged (stephen, arzamarski, & michaels, 2010), and such patterning is now recognized as an important characteristic of a “healthy” biological system. our emerging understanding of fractal scaling now suggests that health is often incorrectly attributed to “order” within the physiological system (varela, ruiz-esteban, & mestre de juan, 2010). on the contrary, living systems are rarely in states of equilibrium, and “most healthy behaviors are highly irregular and pseudo-random” (varela et al., 2010, p. 585). thus, while pathology was once understood as chaos and disorder within a physiological system, in many ways it is now viewed as a decrease in the patterns of self-similarity in aging or diseased systems (delignières & marmelat, 2012; rhea & kuznetsov, 2017). not surprisingly, physiological systems derive benefit from their fractal characteristics, particularly when considering the adaptability and/or flexibility afforded by scale-invariant self-similarity. from an evolutionary perspective, the redundancy of fractal systems at every timescale permits organisms to overcome and adapt to both the stress and unpredictability of environments (mcgrath, 2016) – on the order of milliseconds in cellular functions to the entire lifespan, and perhaps on even greater timescales such as that of phylogeny (potts, 1996). outwardly, self-similarity equates to fluctuations in performance resulting in manifold behavioral assemblies allowing biological systems to be “optimally sensitive” to environmental change (stephen et al., 2010). the flexibility and adaptability of human behavior to the perennial dynamism of our environment has been heralded as perhaps the defining characteristic of the genus homo (potts, 1996). yet the fitness of our phenotypes is hardly the sole beneficiary of fractal scaling as, inwardly, the human cognitive function equally derives benefit from self-similarity. as fractals are constructed via iterative processes in which simple rules engender self-similar structures at various scales, the cognitive load required on the fractal nature of complex syntax and the timescale problem 705 to generate and process multiple hierarchical levels of self-similarity is reduced (fischmeister, martins, beisteiner, & fitch, 2017). representation of multiple hierarchical levels by a single rule may reduce cognitive demands (dias martins, laaha, freiberger, choi, & fitch, 2014) while equally aiding in parsing complex, recursive structures (fischmeister et al., 2017), hierarchical units such as phonemes, syllables, and sentences (ding, melloni, zhang, tiang, & poeppel, 2016), and even lexical processing (plat, lowie, & de bot, 2018). taken further, others have suggested that self-similarity and recursion are more than simply “hallmark traits” of cognitive processing; instead, these may fully equate to the default mode of the human cognitive function (fischmeister et al., 2017). in human physiology and behavior, fractal scaling appears to be the norm and not the exception. 2.4. fractal scaling in the study of language the potential of fractal analysis has not gone unnoticed in the study of language. clearly, the iterative patterning of fractal forms evokes a distinct parallel to the recursive nature of human language (chomsky, 1957). recursion, by definition, is iterative as it “takes a finite set of elements and yields a potentially infinite array of discrete expressions” (hauser, chomsky, & fitch, 2002, p. 1571). iteration in language is evidenced, for example, in the generation of syntactic trees as the hierarchical branching of constituents, when isolated, frequently resembles the tree diagram in its entirety. generally speaking, however, these discussions have stemmed from synchronic representations of recursion at the level of the utterance, that is, at a single temporal scale. this representation, while productive, fails to account for the diachronic iteration of language over temporal scales beyond the utterance and, from a complexity standpoint, for the ways in which such recursion may lead to language development over time. by contrast, scholars attempting to situate the recursive, nested patterns of language use across multiple timescales have drawn on the fractal metaphor to describe phenomena such as the acquisition of french tense and aspect (lyle, 2009) and the “ebb and flow of information” in discourse (youmans, 1991; youmans & pfeifer, 2005). in this way, lyle (2009) argues for a fractal model of l2 development in which learners soft assemble (thelen & smith, 1994) their language resources in response to the constraints of the linguistic environment. this occurs across multiple levels of analysis as a “narrower focus reveals equally complex but perhaps qualitatively different patterns when compared to a wider angle” (lyle, 2009, p. 61), yet the extent to which these patterns occur in the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology at multiple temporal scales is still unclear. others have argued that power-law distributions of lexis (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008) and lexical variation (kretzschmar, 2015) provide the most d. reid evans 706 compelling evidence for language as a complex system. linguist george kingsley zipf (1935) first noted that, given a text of sufficient size, the probability of the most common word occurring in the text is inversely proportional to its rank. thus, language use is characterized by a small number of highly recurrent words, and a reduced number of those which are less common. this phenomenon occurs not just in the distribution of words within a text (i.e., zipf’s law), but equally in lexical variation as the most common semantic and phonological variants of a particular word occur with exponentially greater frequency than the least common variants (kretzschmar, 2015). the longstanding recognition of the nonlinear distribution of the lexicon has motivated larsen-freeman and cameron (2008) to argue that “conceivably there are fractals in other language-using patterns” (p. 111) ostensibly extending beyond just the lexicon. indeed, empirical evidence of power-law distributions in other language patterns would further support the fractal nature of language. perhaps the most credible empirical evidence of the self-similar dynamics of discourse is offered by youmans (1991). in an attempt to discern the distribution of given versus new information within a text, youmans followed a simple algorithm to assign values of 1.0 to words appearing for the first time and 0.0 to repetitions, that is, new versus given information respectively. next, moving averages of the values were plotted, generating vocabulary-management profiles (vmps). as new vocabulary correlates with new information and repeated vocabulary with given information, the increasing and decreasing vmp trendlines illustrate the ebb and flow of information in discourse. upon closer inspection, the vmp profiles revealed fractal patterning as givenness cycles throughout discourse with smaller peaks and valleys of given versus new information at the sentential level nested within larger peaks and valleys across paragraphs, sections, episodes, and so on. the nested dynamics of givenness offered by the vmp profiles offer distinct evidence of a linguistic system in which self-similar patterns of variability retain their complexity regardless of the scale of measurement. in sum, fractal analysis allows us to observe and describe the patterns of complex dynamic systems as they iterate over time across multiple timescales (mcgrath, 2016). as we are still somewhat eluded by the true timescales of linguistic development (de bot, 2015; ruhland & van geert, 1998), viewing emerging patterns in this way holds great potential for research into the human language capacity. this potential, coupled with the relative paucity of empirical studies specifically examining the fractal nature of language, speaks to the urgency of work in this area. as such, the present study responds directly to these issues and was informed by the following research question: on the fractal nature of complex syntax and the timescale problem 707 · in what way(s) do the developmental trajectories of complex syntax exhibit the characteristics of self-similarity and scale invariance typical of fractal scaling over time? 3. the study upholding the preference for process-oriented data collection and analysis in cdst, this study employed a nonlinear time series analytic framework (myers, 2016). time series analyses rely on consecutive, equally spaced observations of a given phenomenon for a specified period of time. once a longitudinal dataset is compiled, time series designs then allow for the full dataset to be represented graphically in a time series plot (hiver & al-hoorie, 2020), or scrutinized via cdst-informed analyses such as min-max graphs, monte carlo simulations, and moving correlations (verspoor, de bot, & lowie, 2011). 3.1. participant the participant, alceste,1 was an adult male learner of english as a second language who worked as an instructor of french for one academic year in a large, public university in the northeastern united states. coming from the francophone region of switzerland, alceste reported only two years of formal education in english at the secondary level and suggested that his linguistic ability in english had developed through interaction with english-speaking friends in switzerland. alceste was 27 years old upon commencement of data collection and his oral proficiency in english was informally assessed at the intermediate low level (actfl, 2012), an assumption affirmed by a colleague with extensive knowledge of l2 assessment. during his time in the united states, alceste frequently sought opportunities to interact with speakers of english and communicated a desire to improve his linguistic abilities, though he did not enroll in any formal instruction in esl. consistent with other literature in sla (e.g., polat & kim, 2014), alceste is considered an untutored learner of english given his lack of exposure to the instructed setting. although he was cognizant that my objective was to study the development in his language proficiency, he remained unaware of any specific focal areas of study. 3.2. data collection dialogic conversations between alceste and myself were audio recorded and transcribed at weekly intervals over the course of one academic year for a total 1 the name is a pseudonym. d. reid evans 708 of 30 conversations. to uphold the most naturalistic setting possible, conversations were not scripted in any way, although i frequently began by asking alceste about his week and inquiring as to the opportunities that he had had to engage in interaction in english. recurrent conversation themes included his position as an instructor of french, his interest in french literature, cultural differences between switzerland and the united states, and the like. weekly conversations were held for a minimum of 20 minutes, although the desire for prolonged conversation was never impeded. to maintain consistency, i limited the analysis of each conversation to the first 20 minutes. 3.3. unit of analysis and syntactic complexity dialogic conversation data were first segmented into analysis of speech units (asunits; foster, tonkyn, & wigglesworth, 2000), defined minimally as any “independent clause, or sub-clausal unit, together with any subordinate clause(s) associated with either” (p. 365). unlike other units of analysis employed in text/discourse studies, the as-unit allows for the inclusion of sub-clausal units in analysis, or those utterances that do not necessarily contain a finite verb (and/or other syntactic elements) yet figure prominently in dialogic oral data (norris & ortega, 2009). a methodological note is warranted, however, as few studies employing the as-unit explicitly discuss the level of application adopted for analysis. in this study, i employed the as-unit at the second level given the highly interactive nature of the dialogic conversation task. at this level, one-word minor utterances (e.g., yeah) and verbatim echoic responses are excluded from analysis. the operational definitions of syntactic complexity were consistent with much of the extant literature (bulté & housen, 2012; norris & ortega, 2009). in this way, complex syntax was viewed at the clausal, supra-clausal, and sentential levels. clausal complexity was calculated as the mean length of clause in words; supra-clausal complexity as the total number of clauses per as-unit via the mechanism of subordination; and sentential complexity was calculated as the mean length of as-unit in words. 3.4. data analysis notably, there is no “cookbook” approach to fractal analysis (mcgrath, 2016) as each distinct field has employed numerous tools to analyze and interpret fractal scaling given the respective data at hand. thus, i sought to determine the fractal-like nature of language in two distinct ways – via the presence of power-law probability density functions and by examining the self-similar temporal dynamics of the system. on the fractal nature of complex syntax and the timescale problem 709 to determine the probability density distribution of complex syntax in conversation, i first calculated the number of clauses per individual as-unit over the 30 weeks of data collection, which allowed me to determine the total number of as-units with a density of one clause (e.g., one independent clause), two clauses (e.g., one independent plus one subordinate clause), three clauses (e.g., one independent plus two subordinate clauses), and so forth. finally, i plotted the results of this analysis graphically with frequency of occurrence on the y axis and clausal density on the x axis to identify the extent to which a power-law probability density function governs the distribution of complex syntax. next, to examine self-similar dynamics, raw data for clausal, supra-clausal, and sentential complexification were standardized and the z-scores were plotted graphically with time in weeks on the x axis. similar to other complexity studies (e.g., larsen-freeman, 2006), plotting the standardized scores in this way allowed the three developmental trajectories to be scrutinized comparatively. to address the potential self-similarity in the dynamic interactions among the subconstructs of complex syntax, the relationships between these measures were plotted and examined at three distinct temporal levels. this included the successive magnification of the conversation data from the level of the entire dataset (30 weeks), to 30 conversation turns within one week, and finally to 28 as-units within a single conversation turn as 28 was the maximum number of contiguous as-units within a single turn. the scaling of this analysis was chosen specifically to reflect the possible adaptations of complex syntax over the various legitimate timescales of language use and development – within one conversation turn, across a single conversation, and finally over one academic year. typical of nonlinear time series analyses, inspection of the phase space plots for each successive temporal level visually indicated self-similar patterns in variability across timescales. to confirm this finding, the percentage of total variance of each of the three constructs of complex syntax (clausal, supra-clausal, and sentential complexification) was calculated in excel at each of the three distinct timescales. if complex syntax is indeed fractal-like, the percentage that each construct accounts for the total variability would ostensibly remain equal across temporal scales. 4. results 4.1. power-law probability density function in total, alceste produced just less than 5,900 clauses during our weekly conservations over the academic year. frequency/density calculations of clausal production were plotted graphically to illustrate the probability density function of their distribution. the results of this analysis across 30 weeks of conversation data d. reid evans 710 is shown in figure 3. clearly, the long-tail, asymptotic curve of a power-law distribution is evident in the visualization. this is suggestive of a rapidly attenuating distribution of clausal density in which, over a prolonged period, a speaker in dialogic interaction demonstrates a preference for single-clause as-units at a rate that is exponentially greater than the preference for two-clause, three-clause, or greater as-units. while longer as-units were indeed produced throughout the academic year (with a 7-clause as-unit occurring just twice in the data), the occurrence of these longer units was rare. figure 3 the frequency/density distribution of clausal density over 30 weeks the distribution in figure 3 points to the constraints and affordances of the external linguistic environment and the way in which these interact with the internal language faculty. clearly permissible are long, dense utterances capable of transmitting vast amounts of information, yet the preference for truncated utterances may be indicative of a desire to minimize processing effort (filipović & hawkins, 2013). when necessary, however, the power-law governing the production of complex syntax engenders the requisite flexibility to respond to the demands of language in use, thus empowering the speaker to convey even the most highly intricate information. 4.2. self-similarity across temporal scales the dynamic self-similarity among the constructs of clausal, supra-clausal, and sentential elaboration across three temporal scales can be seen in figures 4, 5, and 6. on the fractal nature of complex syntax and the timescale problem 711 figure 4 the dynamics of syntactic complexity over 30 weeks (z-scores) figure 4 illustrates the nonlinear nature of alceste’s complex syntax over 30 weeks. although no construct demonstrated a marked increase over one academic year, several observations can be made. to begin, we see that overall sentential elaboration appears highly variable over the period of data collection. at times, a degree of relative consistency can be observed (e.g., weeks 16 through 21), while at others, there are much larger differences between the peaks and valleys of the trajectory (e.g., weeks 11 to 13). next, the dynamic relationship between subordination and clausal elaboration suggests that sentence length is, at times, accounted for by clausal elaboration and subordination rather equally (e.g., weeks 1 through 3), while at other weeks, there is significant disparity between the mechanisms which best account for sentence length (e.g., week 4). figure 5 the dynamics of syntactic complexity over 30 conversation turns (z-scores) d. reid evans 712 figure 6 the dynamics of syntactic complexity over 28 as-units (z-scores) next, to illustrate the dynamic self-similarity and scale-invariance of complex syntax, figures 5 and 6 show the trajectories of these constructs at further reduced temporal scales – that of 30 conversation turns within one week and that of 28 contiguous as-units within a single conversation turn. when viewed together, the variability within the trajectories of subordination, clausal elaboration, and sentential elaboration in the three graphs is strikingly similar at all three time scales. further supporting the fractal nature of complex syntax, table 1 illustrates the self-similarity of the variability among the three constructs. in the same way that a smaller and smaller ruler will return increasingly larger measurements of a coastline, total variance predictably differs across the three distinct periods of measurement, yet the percentage of the total variance that each construct accounts for remains the same independent of temporal scale. in this way, complex syntax demonstrates the fractal characteristic of self-similarity in that it equally accounts for total variance regardless of the scale of measurement. table 1 variance and percentage of total variance of constructs across three temporal scales level 30 weeks 30 conversation turns 28 as-units in one conversation turn clausal 13% (.07) 13% (3.08) 14% (9.22) supra-clausal 2% (.01) 2% (.37) 1% (.67) sentential 85% (.43) 85% (20.07) 85% (55.26) total 100% (σ2 = .51) 100% (σ2 = 23.52) 100% (σ2 = 65.15) across temporal scales, a complex interplay exists between the subconstructs of syntactic complexity. as utterance length varies, the mechanisms by on the fractal nature of complex syntax and the timescale problem 713 which this process occurs vacillate between a reliance on subordination and clausal elaboration. at times, these two constructs function in unison to complexify alceste’s speech; at others, they appear to exist in competition. perhaps most important, however, is the self-similar, scale-free nature of these trajectories as they maintain their nonlinearity at every temporal scale. 5. discussion from a complexity theory perspective, examining the fractal-like nature of linguistic phenomena represents a novel approach to the study of language, a point echoed by larsen-freeman (2012) who writes that “complexity theory inspires us to think differently about language and language development” (p. 202). naturally, different ways of conceptualizing a construct require different ways of approaching that construct both theoretically and methodologically. the fractal analysis detailed herein allows us to do just that. from the data presented above, we see that clausal density in discourse is governed by a powerlaw distribution typical of fractals found in the physical world. in addition, the dynamic patterns of variability of complex syntax appear self-similar across three distinct temporal scales. taken together, the results of this analysis provide support for the fractal nature of language, which is a key assumption in a complexity-informed perspective (larsen-freeman, 1997). what such fractal scaling suggests is that complex syntax, like many human behaviors, demonstrates scale-invariant temporal flexibility (delignières & marmelat, 2012), allowing language to adapt to the needs of the speaker across timescales (see also lyle, 2009; shanon, 1993). within a single conversation turn, the fluctuating variability of sentence length, clause length, and density of subordination permit the speaker to expressly communicate their developing thoughts on a moment-to-moment basis. across an entire conversation, the same flexibility allows for changes in topic and context, dynamic discourse pragmatics including givenness (youmans & pfeifer, 2005), and stylistic choices such as repertoire. the macrogenetic flexibility exhibited at greater timescales (i.e., one academic year or beyond) accommodates the slower dynamics associated with changes in sociolinguistic environment, brain maturation in children, levels of education, interpersonal relationships, and so forth. in sum, it seems that the human language faculty capitalizes on the adaptability and flexibility of fractal scaling in much the same was as many, if not all, living organisms. as a complexity-informed view of language suggests, learners do not progress from one conceptual level of linguistic ability to another in linear fashion (larsen-freeman, 2006). instead, distinct properties of linguistic proficiency develop recursively according to their own subjective timescales. as most will recognize, d. reid evans 714 many systems may demonstrate change on larger timescales (e.g., pragmatic competence), while others (e.g., pronunciation) may demonstrate much more acute, perhaps discontinuous shifts (de bot, 2015). acknowledging the disparate timescales of development is without question a salient contribution of the complexity paradigm, yet developing a more precise understanding of the true timescales of development presents a significant conceptual hurdle (ruhland & van geert, 1998). in this way, applied linguistics is currently faced with a timescale problem. as traditional analysis has relied on measurements of language at single temporal scales, viable methods of tracing the development of linguistic constructs across distinct scales of time have remained elusive. the timescale problem, then, relates to the limitation of these methods and the imperfect understanding of the subjective timescales of development that results. the behavior of complex systems emerges as the result of the synergistic relationship between the components germane to the system. this notion takes the timescale problem a step further. as van geert (1994) prudently outlines, not only do the components of complex systems develop in a stochastic manner, but the synergistic relationships between these components express equal dynamism over time. importantly, as the system progresses through periods of self-organization, the dynamic relationship between some system components may both support and/or hinder the development of others. further still, some relationships may even be precursory in nature given that the emergence of one behavior is predicated on the existence of another (van geert, 1994). this conjecture begs the question as to the ways in which constructs developing on shorter temporal scales may ultimately influence the development of other constructs over longer periods of time. i argue that fractal analysis, in which trajectories of development are plotted and scrutinized at hierarchically temporal scales, may serve as an effective tool capable of providing insight into the timescale problem. examining rates of change (de bot, 2015) in regard to the myriad timescales of development will prove indispensable in pushing our understanding of the complex linguistic system. the importance of timescales reifies the methodological significance of dense data collection over extended periods of time as consistency in measurement permits the magnification of developmental trajectories to further and further reduced moments in time. 6. conclusion the fractal analysis presented here, though rudimentary, clearly supports the transdisciplinary nature of cdst (larsen-freeman, 2012). as this theoretical orientation has hinted at the fractal nature of language (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008), the self-similarity and scale invariance of syntactic complexity illustrated on the fractal nature of complex syntax and the timescale problem 715 herein lends support to this notion. the variability of complex syntax as it dances among the timescales is a reminder of the power of the human language faculty and its ability to adapt to the perpetual dynamism of the linguistic environment over time. in sum, fractal analysis aligns with the goals of complexity research in that we seek to “represent and understand specific complex systems at various scales of description” (hiver & al-hoorie, 2016, p. 752). yet the timescale problem is reflective of the fact that we are still unaware of what scales of description may be most suitable in the study of language development. examining the fractal selfsimilarity and scale-invariance of language use and development across temporally hierarchical scales may yield significant insight into this phenomenon. as discussed above, alceste’s use of complex grammar did not experience growth in the customary sense of a marked increase over time. this may be due to the advanced nature of his language before arrival or, equally, to his status as an untutored learner receiving little to no explicit language instruction during his residency (polat & kim, 2014). thus, from this particular dataset, we are unable to glean how these trajectories may have changed, on various timescales, had he arrived with lower levels of proficiency. as one reviewer rightfully pointed out, the lack of growth in the participant’s use of complex syntax precludes any claims as to the emergence of fractal dynamics in l2 development. instead, emphasizing the exploratory nature of this study, the hope is that the results indicate the promising nature of a fractal analytic framework while equally motivating l2 researchers to further address the timescale problem. had a discontinuous jump, or phase shift (baba & nitta, 2014), occurred in alceste’s data at a certain timescale, say at the level of weeks, this particular transition may have indicated a point at which to zoom in via fractal analysis. when phase shifts are identified in timeseries data, researchers may focus on smaller and smaller temporal scales to potentially identify the mechanics motivating such change. equally, this process may provide indication as to those particular moments that merit further scrutiny from a qualitative perspective. if discontinuity is detected, for example, within a single conversation turn or across multiple turns within a conversation, more detailed qualitative analysis of those moments may be productive as a way to interpret the relationship between micro and macrogenetic development. doing so would allow scholars to make claims regarding the situatedness of micro-levels of development as they relate to development across much broader temporal scales. likewise, as data were collected on a weekly basis, any attempt to view self-similarity could only be completed at one point within one week. though the opportunity never arose, it would have been prudent, at least once, to collect measurements with even greater levels of density within a single week. this could have been as simple as meeting for perhaps three consecutive days to permit a much more in-depth analysis of self-similarity. d. reid evans 716 in other disciplines such as physiology, psychology, and medicine, fractal analyses have relied on dense quantitative measurements of behavior and physiological processes facilitated greatly by advances in technology. these have been extended by complex analytic methods such as detrended fluctuation analysis, the box counting dimension, 1/f scaling (van orden, holden, & turvey, 2003), and so on. as the data and the interpretations presented in this article are exploratory in nature, the application of these tools is suggestive of a logical next step. in applied linguistics, much complexity-informed scholarship has equally relied on dense numerical data analyzed via methods such as monte carlo simulations, moving min-max graphs, moving window correlations, and so on. yet few studies, if any, have generated data points in the tens of thousands necessary for the analytic approaches found in other fields. lastly, as this investigation was exploratory in nature, the fractal features of complex syntax were not compared in terms of their relation to development in other areas of the language faculty. emphasis on the interconnectedness of complex systems points directly to the potential significance of viewing self-similarity in this way. by looking at the dynamic interactions between components across multiple timescales, the changing relationships between constructs may be viewed as both a macro and microgenetic phenomenon. on the fractal nature of complex syntax and the timescale 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(1991). a new tool for discourse analysis: the vocabulary-management profile. language, 67(4), 763-789. youmans, g., & pfeifer, p. (2005). fractal dimensions of discourse. language, 81(2), 297-300. zipf, g. k. (1935). the psycho-biology of language. oxford, uk: houghton mifflin. 701 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (3). 2018. 701-706 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.3.9 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review second language pronunciation assessment: interdisciplinary perspectives editors: talia isaacs, pavel trofimovich publisher: multilingual matters (second language acquisition series), 2017 isbn: 9781783096848 (hbk), 9781783096831 (pbk), 9781783096855 (pdf), 978783096862 (ebuk) pages: 273 as any element of the language system, pronunciation undergoes assessment both in the instructional and naturalistic contexts. unlike grammar and vocabulary, however, it tends to be perceived as more personal and, consequently, its assessment, both in the instructional and real-life settings, carries a strong socio-psychological burden of identity issues. in the case of english, the existence of numerous native-speaker varieties with varied social prestige (or the level of standardedness) is supplemented by a number of standard varieties which differ mostly in pronunciation. for non-native speakers of english, then, the issue of an accent may matter at different levels, beginning with the choice of the target variety, through the assessment of the level of attainment of the target, to the acceptance of “accented” pronunciation, that is, the intelligible version of english affected by previous language experience of the speaker. the key problem in pronunciation assessment in an instructional context can be thus formulated 702 along the lines of the nativeness versus intelligibility dilemma. if viewed from the perspective of a communicative approach to language teaching, it becomes further complicated by the need to incorporate a complex set of socio-psychological and pragmatic aspects relevant for communication. it is the ambitious task to tackle the issue of second language (l2) assessment within a communicative approach that the reviewed book undertakes. and while the editors make reference to the challenges of language assessment in communicative language teaching as formulated by michael canale in the final chapter of the book (p. 259), his statement offers a perfect introductory statement of purpose. throughout the book, it is evident that a multitude of approaches are invited to provide the basis for further discussion of such aspects of pronunciation as sociolinguistic appropriateness rules, testing based on interpersonal interaction in authentic situations and scoring procedures. the book is divided into five parts, each of which approaches the main theme from a different perspective. part one, “introduction,” sets the scene by providing a short state-of-the-art chapter with key concepts and definitions (chapter 1, isaacs and trofimovich) and describing an interesting scale usability study (chapter 2, harding) pointing to two major problems in pronunciation assessment: the confusion in the understanding and usage of the terms accented and intelligible, and the lack of clearly defined criteria of assessment. part two looks for insights from the areas of language assessment in which pronunciation is included as a component, as in the assessment of spoken fluency (chapter 3, browne and fulcher) or listening ability (chapter 5, wagner and toth). chapter 4 (knoch) provides a brief overview of major assessment-related issues identified and explored in l2 writing studies, including the development of rating scales and their validation, the effect of raters and their training, task effect and classroom-based assessment: diagnostic and peer assessment, all of which could inform pronunciation assessment theory and practice. part three employs the perspectives offered by psycholinguistics and speech science, with individual chapters exploring the relationship between successful phonological acquisition and cognitive control in the case of monolingual and bilingual l2 learners (chapter 6, mora and darcy), non-native students’ attitudes towards their nonnative english speaking teachers (chapter 7, ballard and winke), the role of rater experience in comprehensibility assessment in connection with phonological and lexical correlates (chapter 8, saito, trofimovich, isaacs and webb), and a possible connection between the characteristics of the english rhythm of l2 learners and the level of proficiency as defined by the common european framework of reference (cefr). part four includes four chapters bringing sociolinguistic, cross-cultural and lingua franca issues into the picture. the first contribution in this part (chapter 10, davies) brings comments from a distinguished 703 scholar who is no longer with us, but whose insights into the field are invaluable: we are reminded of problems with the model of pronunciation and the lack of clear-cut answers when the reality of language use in a society is considered. chapter 11 (lindemann) continues along similar lines, discussing variability and numerous problems connected with the native speaker in pronunciation assessment, with a clearly stated aim of identifying the sources of unintelligibility and the listener biases. sociolinguistic considerations are followed by approaches to lingua franca, in the case of french in canada (chapter 12, kennedy, blanchet and guenette) and english in hong kong (chapter 13, sewell). finally, chapter 14 (trofimovich and isaacs) rounds up the discussion, offering an overview of current trends as represented by contributions to the volume and formulating a set of questions or research agendas for the future. individual chapters adopt one of two ways of supporting the arguments they put forth: they either report on a study conducted in order to investigate a selected aspect or present an overview of major issues relevant to the topic. the latter include the introductory and concluding chapters, authored by the editors to the volume (chapter 1, isaacs and trofimovich; chapter 14, trofimovich and isaacs), chapter 4 (knoch), which provides insights into the way in which the development of research into l2 writing can inform l2 pronunciation research, chapter 10 (davies), an expert “commentary on the native speaker status in pronunciation research” and chapter 11 (lindemann), which continues the variability theme from the previous chapter by discussing the difference in the attitudes towards native and non-native pronunciation (“variation or ‘error’?” summarizes the main theme). yet another look at native-speaker norm, nativeness versus intelligibility and english as a lingua franca is taken by sewell (chapter 13), who explores the situation of pronunciation assessment in hong kong and wonders whether the lingua franca approach could be introduced in this situated context. finally, the two editor-authored chapters need to be mentioned, the initial and final one, which provide a general frame for the volume. these concise, informative chapters offer an integrated view of l2 pronunciation assessment, in which l2 pronunciation research forms the basis for the development of pronunciation assessment both in terms of research and its practical application. thus, the authors call for research on the processes and outcomes of pronunciation testing, new testing instruments and procedures, the role of holistic constructs, such as intelligibility, in pronunciation assessment on the basis of discrete measures of l2 speech, and, more generally, for “more theory building” (p. 267). the book closes with a list of questions, ideas and guidelines for future work in pronunciation assessment. in fact, several studies presented in the book provide excellent examples of the scope of primary research that can expand the field of pronunciation assessment. most studies adopt rigid methodologies, they are clearly described 704 and, consequently, easy to follow and, if needed, to replicate. this is certainly true in the case of the first study (chapter 2, harding), which aims to uncover problems in the usability of a rating scale: a focus-group discussion methods provides key themes making it possible to discuss and show ways to improve the scale chosen for the study as well as any other scale for which the same methods of the study can be used. the study refers to the phonological control component of the cefr, used and discussed by 9 experienced raters (6 native and 3 non-native speakers of english). the two studies that follow use questionnaires and tests. the study reported in chapter 3 (browne and fulcher) investigates the effect of l2 accent familiarity (l2 english spoken by japanese l1 speakers) on pronunciation test scores and intelligibility success rates. a 3-part test was applied in which raters self-reported their familiarity with japanese-english, completed the gaps in the transcripts of recorded japanese-english speakers and assessed their pronunciation on the basis of a set of descriptors, and finally, commented on the instrument and the tasks. the results show a positive effect of accent familiarity on both pronunciation and intelligibility ratings, and while the analysis is neither comprehensive nor fully convincing, especially in connection with the construct of fluency as confounded with comprehensibility, the study can be certainly inspirational both in methods and findings. chapter 5 (wagner and toth) employs a listening comprehension test and a written questionnaire to investigate the attitudes of l2 learners to scripted versus unscripted (authentic) texts. the results show that, predictably, the scripted text was easier in terms of the listening comprehension test, and the learners could identify the difference between the texts, with the group which listened to the scripted text noticing that it was not natural and had clearly formal pronunciation (the l2 was spanish in this case). the results and implications do not seem in any way surprising; however, an empirical verification of the fact that learners can indeed tell the difference between authentic and modified (scripted) spoken language can be useful. section three of the volume reports on four studies, all of which use advanced methods. the first study in this series (chapter 6, mora and darcy) investigates the relationship between cognitive factors (attention control, phonological short-term memory [pstm] and inhibitory control) and pronunciation measures for l2 english (tense vs. lax high front vowel and palato-alveolar fricative vs. affricate distinction) among native monolingual spanish or bilingual spanish-catalan speakers. a multi-layered analysis reveals a complex system of relationship between variables and no clear patterns in the relationship between individual differences in cognitive control and pronunciation accuracy measure either instrumentally or holistically. a number of interesting implications have been formulated by the authors, but, most importantly, the study offers many further paths to follow. the same is true for the next contribution: 705 in chapter 7, ballard and winke employ an online survey to investigate non-native speaker students’ attitudes to english teachers’ accents. they find a generally positive attitude but conclude that further studies using classroom-based mixed-methods and non-native speaker (nns) adaptation would be needed to clarify a complex issue of “cognitive processes and social beliefs tied to nns accents” (p. 138). the study by saito, trofimovich, isaacs and webb (chapter 8) employs a comprehensibility scalar measure to investigate the relationship between pronunciation features (segmental errors, syllable structure, word stress, intonation, articulation rate) and lexical aspects (frequency, diversity, polysemy, hypernymy, text length, lexical appropriateness and lexical accuracy) among experienced versus inexperienced raters. the main finding that experienced raters tend to be more lenient than inexperienced ones is supplemented by interesting observations referring to the shared tendency for word-stress to be used as a major pronunciation variable predicting comprehensibility score among the raters and the tendency for experienced raters to rely on a larger set of lexical variables in comprehensibility. the key aspect of rater experience and linguistic aspects of speech invite further research, and the operationalisation of linguistic variables found in the study sets a perfect example for this type of investigation. the last study in this section is most technical in the sense of employing acoustically derived rhythm metrics in an attempt to find correspondences between those measures and l2 proficiency levels across speakers with different l1s. the analysis involved 20 speech samples from speakers representing three l1s (german, spanish and korean) at six different cefr levels (only the spanish groups had representatives of all levels [12 participants], with german and korean l1 speakers at b1 and b2 levels only [two speakers in each category]); the results show that the higher the proficiency level, the more stress-timed characteristics of the english rhythm tend to be used, and that the stress-timed characteristics of the l1 facilitate the use of this feature in l2. predictable as the results are, the methodology has been carefully described and the variables precisely operationalized. the final primary research paper in the volume, reported in chapter 12 (kennedy, blanchet and guenette), concentrates on a different l2: this time it is not english but french, which is discussed from the lingua franca perspective (a lingua franca is defined as the language used among speakers whose l1 is other than french). the study is qualitative in nature and explores the teachers’ process of decision making in their rating of students’ pronunciation by analyzing recorded comments teachers made during the assessment. the study uses and interesting procedure, with teachers recording their comments in the presence of the researchers. the results call for more discussion of the assessment process with the teachers and, naturally, for further studies of the same type. 706 the area of study and the interdisciplinary approach represented by the volume are definitely worthy of interest and further exploration; the book addresses issues of major importance for l2 pronunciation and l2 pronunciation assessment research. these two areas, so closely related both in theory and practice, need to continue to integrate and to seek information from related branches and approaches. the approaches followed by individual contributions to the book set a good example of complimentary studies, exploring a complex area of pronunciation assessment in its linguistic, social and psycholinguistic complexity; what is missing are classroom-based studies that would shed more light on the role of pronunciation assessment in everyday teaching practice. the reality of the assessment system calls for more interest in the instructional setting. it is for this reason that i stress the methodology employed in the studies presented in the volume. even when they do not reach expected results or their results are largely predictable on the basis of previous studies (or teaching experience), their merit is in a clear description of the motivation and methodology; both of these factors are certain to make them inspirational and instrumental in the promotion of further studies. naturally, the inspirational role is not limited to the primary research chapters; however, the care taken to reach a high level of precision in the description of the studies and varied methodologies may be treated as an added value and a special feature of the book. as it is freely available online (https://zenodo. org/record/165465#.w0wvd8iyw1s), the book can exert a considerable impact on the development of the field of l2 pronunciation and encourage scholars to design and conduct more studies in l2 pronunciation assessment. reviewed by ewa waniek-klimczak university of łódź, poland ewa.waniek.klimczak@gmail.com studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: anna becker (university of fribourg, switzerland) editor: kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: chengchen li (huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan, china) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) editor: joanna zawodniak (university of zielona góra, poland) vol. 13 no. 1 march 2023 editorial board: ali al-hoorie (royal commission for jubail and yanbu, jubail, saudi arabia) larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) ali derakhshan (golestan university, gorgan, iran) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) majid elahi shirvan (university of bojnord, iran) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) tammy gregersen (american university of sharjah, united arab emirates) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) laura gurzynski-weiss (indiana university bloomington, usa) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) amy thompson (west virginia university, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2023 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: anna becker kata csizér mariusz kruk chengchen li aleksandra wach joanna zawodniak © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: anna becker, kata csizér, mariusz kruk, aleksandra wach, joanna zawodniak language editor: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 61 829 64 20 fax +48 61 829 64 21 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 40 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · social sciences citation index (wos core collection) · journal citation reports social sciences (wos) · scopus · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) · current contents – social and behavioral sciences (wos) · essential science indicators (wos) studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 13, number 1, march 2023 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ........................................................................ 7 articles: shanshan yang, mostafa azari noughabi, elouise botes, jean-marc dewaele – let’s get positive: how foreign language teaching enjoyment can create a positive feedback loop ....................................................... 17 mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, tahereh taherian, erkan yüce, majid elahi shirvan, elyas barabadi – when time matters: mechanisms of change in a mediational model of foreign language playfulness and l2 learners’ emotions using latent change score mediation model ....... 39 ali derakhshan, lawrence jun zhang, kiyana zhaleh – the effects of instructor clarity and non-verbal immediacy on chinese and iranian efl students’ affective learning: the mediating role of instructor understanding .......71 phuong-thao duong, maribel montero perez, long quoc nguyen, piet desmet, elke peters – the impact of input, input repetition, and task repetition on l2 lexical use and fluency in speaking ........................................ 101 abdullah alamer, ahmad alsagoafi – construct validation of the revised metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory (marsi-r) and its relation to learning effort and reading achievement .............125 mateusz jekiel, kamil malarski – musical hearing and the acquisition of foreign-language intonation ....................................................... 151 cailing lu, averil coxhead – specialized vocabulary across languages: the case of traditional chinese medicine ............................................ 179 book reviews: adriana biedroń – review of exploring l1-l2 relationships: the impact of individual differences by richard sparks..................................... 219 danuta gabryś-barker – review of an advanced guide to multilingualism by larissa aronin ............................................................................. 225 mirosław pawlak – review of lessons from exceptional language learners who have achieved nativelike proficiency: motivation, cognition and identity by zoltán dörnyei and katarina mentzelopoulos ............................ 233 notes to contributors ...................................................................... 241 7 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors abdullah alamer is assistant professor of psychology of language learning and holds a phd from the university of new south wales (unsw), sydney, australia, and a master of applied linguistics from monash university, melbourne, australia. his areas of expertise include second language motivation, anxiety, and topics around structural equation modeling (sem). his works appeared in the top journals in the field, including applied linguistics, studies in second language acquisition, language teaching research, computer assisted language learning, and research methods in applied linguistics. he has recently authored a new psychological theory referred to as autonomous single language interest (asli) which has been published in system. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4450-0931 contact details: department of english, college of arts, king faisal university, alhasa, suadi arabia (aa.alamer@kfu.edu.sa, alamer.aaa@gmail.com) ahmad alsagoafi is assistant professor in the department of english language at king faisal university. al hofuf, saudi arabia. he has published a number of papers on language assessment issues in isi and scopus journals. his main research interests include large scale assessment, academic writing, standardized tests, eap, esp & efl, and test washback. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6788-3870 contact details: department of english, college of arts, king faisal university, alhasa, suadi arabia (aalsagoafi@kfu.edu.sa) elyas barabadi is assistant professor of applied linguistics at university of bojnord, iran. he did his ba and ma at ferdowsi university of mashhad. he did his phd in applied linguistics at shiraz university. since 2015, he has been teaching different undergraduate and graduate courses. his research interests include l2 emotions, wtc, playfulness, perfectionism, and l2 achievement goals. 8 orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8457-3046 contact details: university of bojnord, department of foreign languages, bojnord, north khorasan province, iran (elyas.ba1364@gmail.com) adriana biedroń is professor of english at the institute of modern languages, pomeranian university in słupsk, poland. her research focuses on individual differences in sla. she has published 58 articles and chapters on foreign language aptitude, working memory, intelligence, personality factors and linguistic giftedness. she has co-authored or co-edited books on cognitive factors in sla and linguistic giftedness. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4382-0223 contact details: pomeranian university in słupsk, institute of modern languages, ul. słowiańska 8, 76-200 słupsk, poland (adriana.biedron@apsl.edu.pl) elouise botes is a post-doc in emotion and educational psychology at the university of vienna. she graduated with a phd in psychology from the university of luxembourg in 2021. her research interests are emotions in language learning, individual differences, and psychometrics. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4952-8386 contact details: department of developmental and educational psychology, university of vienna, universitätsstraße 7, 1010 vienna, austria (elouise.botes@univie.ac.at) averil coxhead is professor of applied linguistics and tesol in the school of linguistics and applied language studies, victoria university of wellington, aotearoa/new zealand. she teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in applied linguistics. her research interests include vocabulary in english for academic purposes, english for specific purposes and corpus-based approaches. her most recent books include connecting corpora and language teaching (2022; foreign language teaching and research press), measuring the vocabulary size of native speakers (with paul nation; 2021; john benjamins), and english for vocational purposes (coxhead, parkinson, mackay & mclaughlin, routledge, 2020). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3392-6961 contact details: victoria university of wellington, school of linguistics and applied language studies, po box 600, wellington, new zealand (averil.coxhead@vuw.ac.nz) ali derakhshan is associate professor of applied linguistics at the english language and literature department, golestan university, gorgan, iran. he gained his ma in tefl from the university of tehran and his phd in applied linguistics from allameh tabataba’i university. he was selected as a distinguished researcher by the teaching 9 english language and literature society of iran in 2021. his name appeared in the list of the top 2% scientists in the world in 2022. he has been a member of the iranian elites foundation since 2015. he has published in accredited international journals (computers & education, language teaching research, system, studies in second language learning and teaching, journal of multilingual and multicultural development, elt journal, current psychology, asia pacific education researcher, educational studies, etc.) and various local journals. his research interests are positive psychology, teacher education, learner individual differences, cross-cultural interpersonal factors in educational psychology, interlanguage pragmatics, and intercultural communication. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6639-9339 contact details: department of english language and literature, faculty of humanities and social sciences, golestan university, gorgan, iran; postal code: 49138 15759; p. o. box: 155 (a.derakhshan@gu.ac.ir) piet desmet is full professor in french and applied linguistics at ku leuven (belgium) and its kulak kortrijk campus. he is an expert in computer-assisted (language) learning and educational technology. he leads the ku leuven & imec research team itec devoted to impactful digital innovation in education and related fields and is scientific director of the imec smart education research program. he serves as vice-rector ku leuven responsible for educational technology, ku leuven kulak kortrijk campus; ku leuven campus bruges. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9849-0874 contact details: 1 ku leuven, kulak kortrijk campus, faculty of arts, belgium; 2 ku leuven, imec research group itec (piet.desmet@kuleuven.be) jean-marc dewaele is professor of applied linguistics and multilingualism. he is former president of the international association of multilingualism, the european second language association, and is the current president of the international association for the psychology of language learning. he is general editor of the journal of multilingual and multicultural development. he received the equality and diversity research award from the british association for counselling and psychotherapy (2013), the robert gardner award for excellence in second language and bilingualism research (2016) from the international association of language and social psychology, and the eurosla distinguished scholar award (2022). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8480-0977 contact details: birkbeck college, university of london, department of languages, cultures, and applied linguistics, malet st, london wc1e 7hx, united kingdom (j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk) 10 phuong-thao duong holds a phd in applied linguistics from ku leuven (belgium). her dissertation focused on the impact of input and output tasks on second/foreign language vocabulary acquisition and use. she is also reviewer of distinguished international journals in the field of applied linguistics (e.g., language teaching research, iral-international review of applied linguistics in language teaching). her research interests include task-based language learning, vocabulary learning and teaching, technology-supported language teaching/learning, and corrective feedback. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0900-9357 contact details: faculty of arts, ku leuven, belgium (duongthao204@gmail.com) majid elahi shirvan holds a phd in teaching english as a foreign language from ferdowsi university in mashhad, iran. he is currently associate professor at university of bojnord, iran. his main research interest is the dynamics of psychological aspects of foreign language learning and teaching. he has published in different leading international journals such as ecological psychology, foreign language annals, studies in second language acquisition, international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, language teaching research, journal of multilingual and multicultural development, and teaching in higher education. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3363-8273 contact details: university of bojnord, department of foreign languages, bojnord, north khorasan province, iran (elahishmajid@gmail.com, m.elahi@ub.ac.ir) danuta gabryś-barker is professor of applied linguistics and psycholinguistics at the university of silesia, katowice, poland. her research focuses on issues of multilingualism, positive psychology, psychology of teaching as well as teacher education research. she has published a couple of books, edited over twenty monographic volumes and over two hundred articles nationally as well as internationally. prof. gabryś-barker has been the co-editor-in-chief of international journal of multilingualism (taylor & francis/routledge) since 2010 and the co-founder and co-editorin-chief of the journal theory and practice of second language acquisition (university of silesia press) since 2015. she has been an active member of several scholarly associations, among them the international association of multilingualism (iam) since its foundation and a member of the board from 2010 to 2018. she received the award distinguished scholar of multilingualism from iam in 2022. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 contact details: university of silesia, institute of linguistics, ul. gen. grota-roweckiego 5, 41-205 sosnowiec, poland (danuta.gabrys-barker@us.edu.pl, danuta. gabrys@gmail.com) 11 mateusz jekiel works at the department of older germanic languages, faculty of english, adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland. he specializes in pronunciation teaching, acoustic phonetics, and e-learning. he was the principal investigator in his research project focusing on the role of musical hearing in the acquisition of efl pronunciation supported by the polish national science center (2014/15/n/hs2/03865). he is the author of several research papers connected to language and music, efl pronunciation, and l2 pronunciation acquisition. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3906-7793 contact details: adam mickiewicz university, faculty of english, grunwaldzka 6, 60-780 poznań, poland (mjekiel@amu.edu.pl) mariusz kruk, phd, works at the university of zielona góra, poland. his main areas of interest include individual difference variables and the application of technology in foreign language learning and teaching. his publications have appeared in various journals including applied linguistics review, computer assisted language learning, elt journal, journal of multilingual and multicultural development, language teaching research, studies in second language learning and teaching and system. he is the author of the monograph investigating dynamic relationships among individual difference variables in learning english as a foreign language in a virtual world (2021, springer). he co-authored boredom in the foreign language classroom: a micro-perspective with mirosław pawlak and joanna zawodniak (2020, springer), understanding emotions in english language learning in virtual worlds with mirosław pawlak (2022, routledge) and individual differences in computer assisted language learning research with mirosław pawlak (2022, routledge). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5297-1966 contact details: university of zielona góra, institute of modern languages, al. wojska polskiego 71a, 65-762 zielona góra, poland (mkruk@uz.zgora.pl) cailing lu is currently working at shanghai jiao tong university for her postdoctoral research. her main research interests include vocabulary in english for specific purposes and english for academic purposes. her articles have been published in journals such as language learning, studies in second language learning and teaching, studies in second language acquisition, and system. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9911-2824 contact details: shanghai jiao tong university, school of foreign languages, 200000, shanghai, china (luca@sjtu.edu.cn) 12 kamil malarski works at the department of sociolinguistics and discourse studies, faculty of english, adam mickiewicz university, poznan, poland. he defended his phd in dialectology at adam mickiewicz university in poznań, poland, and university of agder in kristiansand, norway. he specializes in sociolinguistics, sociophonetics and multilingualism. he is also a part of the polish-norwegian adim research group where he studies the patterns of accent acquisition in multilingual brains, as well l2 and l3 dialects in polish, english and norwegian. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7826-7213 contact details: adam mickiewicz university, faculty of english, grunwaldzka 6, 60-780 poznań, poland (kamil.malarski@amu.edu.pl) maribel montero perez is assistant professor of second language acquisition and language didactics at ghent university (belgium). her research interests include, amongst others, multimodal input for l2 learning, technologyenhanced listening, and vocabulary learning. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0868-588x contact details: department of linguistics, ghent university, belgium (maribel. monteroperez@ugent.be) long quoc nguyen is currently working as a full-time english lecturer and researcher at fpt university, ho chi minh city, vietnam. aiming at a professional yet friendly working style, he has always tried his best to bring intriguing and authentic lessons with adequate practice to various kinds of learners. his research interests include constructivism, critical thinking, task-based language learning, technology-supported language teaching/learning, and motivation. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4674-7199 contact details: department of english, fpt university, e2a-7, d1 street, long thanh my ward, thu duc city, ho chi minh city, vietnam (quocnl2@fe.edu.vn) mostafa azari noughabi holds a phd in applied linguistics from hakim sabzevari university, iran. he is a member of the editorial board of current psychology. he has published in leading journals such as system, journal of multilingual and multicultural development, current psychology, the asia-pacific education researcher, and porta linguarum. his research interests include emotions in language learning and teaching, individual differences in sla, and educational psychology. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7052-4753 13 contact details: faculty of humanities and social sciences, department of english language and literature, hakim sabzevari university, tohid shahr, sabzevar, iran (mostafaazari2015@gmail.com) mirosław pawlak is professor of english in the english department, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland, and department of research on language and communication, faculty of humanities and social sciences, university of applied sciences, konin, poland. his main areas of interest are form-focused instruction, corrective feedback, pronunciation teaching, classroom interaction, learner autonomy, learning strategies, motivation, willingness to communicate, boredom and study abroad. his most recent publications include error correction in the foreign language classroom: reconsidering the issues (2015, springer), willingness to communicate in instructed second language acquisition: combining a macroand micro-perspective (with anna mystkowska-wiertelak, 2017, multilingual matters), boredom in the foreign language classroom: a micro-perspective (with joanna zawodniak and mariusz kruk, 2020, springer), exploring the interface between individual difference variables and the knowledge of second language grammar (2021, springer nature), understanding emotions in english language learning in virtual worlds (with mariusz kruk, 2022, routledge) and individual differences in computer assisted language learning research (with mariusz kruk, 2022, routledge). he is editor of the journals studies in second language learning and teaching and konin language studies, as well as the book series second language learning and teaching, published by springer. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7448-355x contact details: adam mickiewicz university, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, ul. nowy świat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl) elke peters is associate professor at the ku leuven, belgium, where she coordinates the research group “language, education and society.” her main research interests involve incidental and deliberate vocabulary learning in a foreign language. she is interested in how different types of input can contribute to vocabulary learning. her recent research also focuses on the potential of out-of-school language learning. she has published her research in language learning, studies in second language acquisition, language teaching research, and tesol quarterly. she is also the editor of the journal itl-international journal of applied linguistics. she currently serves as dean of faculty of arts, antwerp campuses, ku leuven. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7273-3850 contact details: faculty of arts, antwerp campuses, ku leuven, belgium (elke. peters@kuleuven.be) 14 tahereh taherian holds a phd in teaching english as a foreign language from yazd university, iran. her main research interest is the psychology of foreign language learning and teaching. she has published in different international journals such as international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, journal of psycholinguistic research and frontiers in psychology. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6338-5054 contact details: yazd university, department of english language, yazd, yazd province, iran (taherian87@yahoo.com) shanshan yang, phd, is lecturer in the college of foreign languages and literatures at fudan university, china. her recent research interests include researcherpractitioner collaboration, language teacher emotion, and individual differences. yang has published in leading journals such as teaching and teacher education, journal of multilingual and multicultural development, and higher education. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5335-9736 contact details: college of foreign languages and literature, fudan university, 220 handan road, yangpu district, shanghai, china (shanshanyang@fudan.edu.cn) erkan yüce is associate professor at the faculty of education of aksaray university, turkey. he received his phd degree in english language teaching from hacettepe university (ankara, turkey), graduate school of educational sciences in 2018. english language teaching, the cefr, curriculum and instruction, language program evaluation, and cbi are among his fields of interest. his recent research appeared in journals such as porta linguarum, pegegog, adult learning, journal on efficiency and responsibility in education and science (eries journal), and novitas-royal journal. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2716-5668 contact details: aksaray university, department of foreign language education, faculty of education, aksaray, türkiye (erkanyuce@aksaray.edu.tr) kiyana zhaleh holds a phd in tefl at allameh tabataba’i university, tehran, iran (atu). she has been a lecturer at allameh tabataba’i university, khatam university, sharif university of technology, golestan university, golestan university of medical sciences, and gonbad kavous university in iran for the past four years. she has published in accredited journals like current psychology, communication quarterly, studies in second language learning and teaching, polish psychological bulletin, language related research, tesl-ej, and journal of research in applied linguistics. her research interests are teacher education, cross-cultural communication, and classroom justice. 15 orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0918-5246 contact details: department of english language and literature, faculty of persian literature and foreign languages, allameh tabataba’i university, tehran, iran (k_zhaleh97@atu.ac.ir) lawrence jun zhang, phd, is professor of applied linguistics/tesol and associate dean of the faculty of education and social work, university of auckland, new zealand. his major interests are in learner metacognition, the psychology of language learning and teaching, and teacher education, with particular reference to efl reading/writing and esp/eap. he has published extensively along these lines in leading international journals, including applied linguistics, modern language journal, applied linguistics review, assessing writing, tesol quarterly, system, british journal of educational psychology, discourse processes, language teaching research, journal of second language writing, journal of multilingual and multicultural development, reading & writing, metacognition & learning, international journal of bilingualism and bilingual education, journal of psycholinguistic research, english for academic purposes, language culture and curriculum, relc journal, and frontiers in psychology. his co-edited and co-authored books include asian englishes: changing perspectives in a globalized world (2012, pearson-education), language teachers and teaching: global perspective, local initiatives (2014, routledge), crossing borders, writing texts, being evaluated: cultural and interdisciplinary norms in academic writing (2021, multilingual matters) and teaching writing in english as a foreign language: teachers’ cognition formation and reformation (2022, springernature). he was the sole recipient of the distinguished research in tesol award in 2011 for his article, “a dynamic metacognitive systems perspective on chinese university efl readers,” published in tesol quarterly, 44(2). a former co-editor of brief research reports of tesol quarterly and current co-editor-in-chief of system, he also serves on the editorial boards of applied linguistics review (de gruyter), journal of second language writing (elsevier), metacognition & learning (springer), relc journal (sage), chinese journal of applied linguistics (de gruyter), australian review of applied linguistics (benjamins), iranian journal of language teaching research (urmia), journal of second language studies (benjamins), and language teaching for young learners (benjamins). in 2016 he was honoured with the recognition by the tesol international association (usa) with the award of 50@50, which acknowledged “50 outstanding leaders” around the globe in the profession of tesol at tesol’s 50th anniversary celebration in baltimore, maryland. in november 2016, he was successfully elected to the international tesol association’s board of directors. in the stanford university rankings 2022, he was listed in the top 2% of scientists in the world in the disciplinary areas of linguistics/applied linguistics. 16 orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1025-1746 contact details: faculty of education and social work, the university of auckland, auckland, 74 epsom ave, auckland 1023, new zealand; phone: +64 9 6238 899x48750 (lj.zhang@auckland.ac.nz) 451 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (3). 2019. 451-472 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.3.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt crossing borders . . . shifting sands: an investigation of chinese students’ study experiences in the uk and china kashmir kaur university of leeds, uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2152-7931 k.kaur@leeds.ac.uk abstract in the current landscape of higher education in the uk, international students play a key role. it is an environment in which they not only cross borders physically but also transition through various identities as they develop their professional and linguistic confidence and skills to fully access and contribute to their programme of study and beyond. the aim of this paper is to outline the results of an empirical investigation into chinese students’ perceptions of their study experiences in the context of student mobility and english-medium instruction in higher education. it reports on a study of two groups of chinese students – one group studying in an english-speaking environment, the other in their home country where instruction is delivered through the medium of english. semi-structured focus group interviews were conducted at each site which focused on the transition of “crossing borders” for educational purposes. the data was analysed using thematic analysis (clarke & braun, 2016). the main finding was that both groups experienced remarkably similar learning issues, despite being located in very different learning environments and crossing different types of borders. keywords: student mobility; chinese students; english for academic purposes (eap); english as a medium of instruction (emi) kashmir kaur 452 1. introduction crossing borders to access higher education (he) is increasingly common. with processes of globalization and internationalization, he is witnessing an ever-expanding number of students travelling outside their home country to access education – be it at undergraduate or postgraduate level. in recent decades, the number of students seeking to study overseas has risen exponentially. according to oecd (2017), the number of international students, defined in this paper as those who left their country of origin and moved to another country for the purpose of study, engaged in tertiary education has risen from 0.8 million in the late 1970s to 4.6 million 45 years later. the he sector plays a vital role in a country’s economy and international students are one of the foundations of universities’ economies. nineteen percent of students in the uk in he were from outside the uk in 2016-2017. of the 442,375 non-uk students, 95,090 were chinese (hesa, 2018). indeed, the main country of origin sending the largest number of students across borders to study is china, primarily to the bana (britain, australasia and north america) countries (ccg, 2017). however, chinese students are not only accessing english for academic purposes (eap) and english as a medium of instruction (emi) courses abroad, but also increasingly in their home country. as this demographic is expanding rapidly, it seems pertinent to explore their experiences in the respective environments and consider what possible challenges and benefits each respectively poses for students. the aim of this article is to investigate chinese students’ study experiences in their first language (l1) and second language (l2) countries. two sets of chinese students – one in the uk and one in china – were interviewed via focus groups to determine their he study experiences and perceptions as they transition through their respective studies in emi in two different settings. at present, there is little literature available comparing these two kinds of settings and sets of experiences. it is hoped that this study will provide valuable insights for researchers but also practitioners of emi and eap in developing a deeper understanding of chinese students, their needs, and their perceptions of their learning experiences in these two types of settings. the article will begin by exploring the literature on student mobility focusing on access to education in the medium of english. then, it will provide detail on the methodology employed and next it will present the findings emerging from the analysis of the data. it concludes with a consideration of possible implications for practice and next steps for empirical investigations. crossing borders . . . shifting sands: an investigation of chinese students’ study experiences in the. . . 453 2. literature review this section outlines eap and emi as avenues of acquiring english in the he landscape. it then introduces the framework of the study in which transition of crossing borders is set and identifies key themes such as identity and communities of practice (cop). 2.1. understanding eap and emi in higher education the current climate of he is profoundly influenced by neo-liberal policies such as financialization, marketization and commodification where business-orientated management practices involve exploiting means of raising revenue (cruickshank, 2016; ding & bruce, 2017). international students’ demand for he has led to a profitable revenue stream for he institutions. for example, to facilitate this demand, programs such as eap have proliferated in he in the uk to service the increasing international student numbers, thereby generating considerable income for the institutions. eap started to emerge as a specialist branch of language education in the 1980s to facilitate the global demand for english-medium university education offered in the main by bana countries (ding & bruce, 2017). the purpose of eap is to integrate knowledge, what bhatia (2004, p. 144) terms “discursive competence,” which includes “social, generic and textual competences,” and skills to enable international students to communicate and participate effectively in their studies. eap is, as flowerdew and peacock (2001, p. 8) assert, “the teaching of english with the specific aim of helping learners to study, conduct research or teach in that language.” hyland and hamp-lyons (2002, p. 2) add that eap means “grounding instruction in an understanding of the cognitive, social and linguistic demands of specific academic disciplines.” the focus of eap is not general language proficiency but language processing and production specifically for academic contexts. it caters for learners of diverse academic experience, including foundation, pre-sessional, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and involves a range of spoken and written genres (hyland, 2006). emi is an increasing global phenomenon. it is defined as “the use of the english language to teach academic subjects in countries or jurisdictions where the first language (l1) of the majority of the population is not english” (dearden, 2014, p. 4). there has been an acceleration of emi programs in non-anglophone settings in recent decades (baker, 2016). in europe, where english is increasingly seen as the lingua franca and the language of higher education, its presence is observed in university lectures and seminars, and institutions are increasingly delivering content in emi (lueg, 2015). for example, the nordic countries (specifically denmark, finland, norway and sweden) have been at the vanguard in implementing emi programs (airey, lauridsen, rasanen, salo, & schwach, 2017). kashmir kaur 454 emi differs from eap as it delivers subject content and not disciplinary language learning or the development of study and research skills. hyland and hamp-lyons (2002) argue it is a necessity for many university students in many countries to master english to access lectures and study materials in emi. in fact, english could be viewed as a system of linguistic gatekeeping to he. moreover, for many graduates, it is imperative that they are able to function in english in the workplace, particularly for countries yet to come into economic prominence and for countries to remain a key player on the world economic stage. both the eap and emi approaches have the basic premise of improving proficiency in english. however, there are some key differences between them, which are important to understand in the context of this study. for example, as mentioned above, eap is the primary vehicle to promulgate disciplinary language and (study and research) skills to enable international students to participate effectively in their university studies. in contrast, the raison d’être of emi is to deliver subject content in english and language learning is not the focus but rather a by-product. in this study, both an eap context and an emi context are compared as the delivery of content in this study differs depending on the space where the students are situated. it should be noted, however, that the format and content in both of these contexts overlap – in reality, both are somewhat of an amalgam of eap and emi at both sites. in he, duff (1997) has posited that l2 may affect learners’ ability to examine abstract concepts. studies have concurred that changing a language from l1 to l2 in tertiary education can impact negatively on content learning (e.g., gerber, engelbrecht, harding, & rogan, 2005; yip, tsang, & cheung, 2003). airey (2016) suggests the majority of l2 courses in he are emi as language learning in emi contexts is often viewed as incidental and not the primary goal – in a university setting, students are expected to have the relevant language skills to complete the course before enrolling. airey (2016) adds that in he there are considerable demands on language as a device to construct knowledge, which could negatively affect content learning. however, he asserts that students generally seem to adapt by adopting strategies to manage the demands of emi, but it is not clear whether this suits all student abilities. 2.2. contexts of learning and using english kachru’s (1985) three concentric circles, which represent the spread of english, can be used to describe the contexts of this research. his model positions the presence of english – the inner circle where english functions as l1 (e.g., the united kingdom and the usa); the outer circle where english occurred due to colonization and functions as a l2 (e.g., india and nigeria), and the expanding crossing borders . . . shifting sands: an investigation of chinese students’ study experiences in the. . . 455 circle where english is studied as a foreign language (e.g., china and brazil). davies (2013) suggests that the english in the expanding circle is fundamentally changing due to its functional range and is now considered a marker of identity in some contexts. the “circles” also indicate the different cultural backgrounds and the intercultural transitions the mobile learners need to engage in as they traverse from one circle into another. the transitions into emi in he also impact on students’ identity. global mobility of learners raises the complex relationship between national identity and l2 learning context (gao, 2011; norton & toohey, 2011; ortaçtepe, 2013). the concentric circles of kachru’s (1985) model provide a useful lens for reflecting on students’ study and linguistic experiences as they transition from one circle to another physically or metaphorically. indeed, student mobility enables the concentric circles of kachru’s (1985) model to become less static. for example, the chinese students who cross borders to study in the uk have relocated and repositioned themselves from the expanding circle to the inner circle where their study experiences will be heterogeneous due to the l2 environment (e.g., more opportunities for interaction in l2). the chinese participants who metaphorically cross borders by having instruction in english will continue to be positioned in the expanding circle where their learning experiences will be slightly less homogenous than their fellow students in the chinese university who will be studying in their l1, due to the l1 environment the participants inhabit. the expectation is that the study experiences of the students in the expanding and inner circles will differ due to their markedly different social, educational, linguistic and cultural contexts. 2.3. communities of practice and identities transitioning into different study spaces can be viewed as processes of socialization into new communities of practice (cop; wenger, 1998). a community of practice can be viewed as “a living context that can give newcomers access to competence and also can invite a personal experience of engagement by which to incorporate that competence into an identity of participation” (wenger, 1998, p. 214). it is a space where participants engage and are able to transition from a “newcomer” to a developed member of “a privileged locus for the creation of knowledge” (wenger, 1998, p. 214). as individuals transition from a peripheral member of a community to a more central position, their identities change and adapt as they negotiate their position within the new community and in relation to their other pre-existing identities. language also plays a key role in the construction of identity, and this role is complex and fluid. kramsch (2009) argues the purpose of “multilingual subjects” is not just about acquiring new words and language for transmitting and kashmir kaur 456 receiving information nor are they just intermediaries between cultures. she claims learners are affected intellectually, emotionally and physically in their identity construction and participation in cop. identity constantly involves negotiation and transformation as each individual negotiates their economic, political and cultural dependency in different ways (hall, 1994). gu’s (2015) research on chinese study abroad students and returnees affirms their learning experiences necessitate identity change which occurs across different settings and through different processes such as socialization and acculturation. she suggests that the crux of identity change is the emotional sense of belonging whether it be as an individual, a member of a professional group or an organization. against this backdrop, it is clear how student mobility and participation in eap and/or emi cop can potentially have a profound effect on the identities that students construct, maintain, form, and negotiate in fluid and dynamic ways that are linked to their past, present and hoped-for selves across the “circles” of english language use. this study investigates chinese students, who represent one of the largest consumers of “english,” in both l1 and l2 settings. the study is based on an assumption that students’ study experiences and their learning environments will impact on their identities differently, depending on the kinds of cop, “circles” of language use they inhabit, and other social, educational, and linguistic conditions they face. the present study aims to answer the following research questions: · what are students’ perceptions of their study experiences in the medium of english? · what are the differences in perceptions of studying in the medium of english in an l1 environment and in an l2 environment? · what is students' sense of identity as they experience study in the medium of english? 3. methodology 3.1. context the research involved two locations in the 2017/18 academic year. the site in the expanding circle is a collaboration between the engineering faculties at a british he institution (bi) in yorkshire and a chinese he institution in chengdu – referred to as joint school – where students are studying an engineering subject in the first (foundation) year of a 4-year undergraduate degree program. students are metaphorically navigating through borders to experience emi via british tutors from the bi, which includes physically crossing from one province to another for he. the students at the inner circle site, the bi, have literally traversed borders to access education to study on the international foundation year crossing borders . . . shifting sands: an investigation of chinese students’ study experiences in the. . . 457 and pre-master’s eap (two terms) programs before embarking on their undergraduate and postgraduate studies in their disciplines at the institution. 3.2. participants chinese participants were recruited from the two he institutions and two focus groups were formed, one each at the respective locations. the sample size of the study was seven participants in each focus group (see table 1 for details). all participants were in their first year of study. the participants at the bi had been in the uk for nearly one year. chengdu (joint school) participants will be referred to as cps and yorkshire participants as yps; the number that follows the initials will indicate the student number from 1-7. convenience sampling was used as participants were recruited from the researcher’s teaching environment by responding to an advertisement. due to the low response, it was not possible to control demographic variables. the low rate could be due to the timing of the research conflicting with various deadlines and/or just a general lack of interest in the research. table 1 participants geographical site nationality age gender level subject chengdu chinese 18-19 2 females 5 males foundation year 3 mechanical engineering 3 civil engineering 1 computer science yorkshire chinese 18-19 1 female 2 males foundation year business finance 22-25 2 females 2 males postgraduate 2 transport planning engineering 2 international law 3.3. ethics this study has been mindful of questions pertaining to both the participants and the researcher with respect to power differentials, motivation, coercion and exploitation (mauthner, birch, jessop, & miller, 2002). ethical procedures of both institutions were followed rigorously. this involved ensuring informed consent, both in english and in chinese, to ensure transparency and avoid any misunderstandings, was obtained from all the participants; data was anonymized and participants were given the option to withdraw their consent at any point during the study without any adverse consequences. the students were made aware that their participation or their non-participation in the study would have no bearing on their grades. kashmir kaur 458 3.4. data collection the research methodology for this study was qualitative as it best enabled the participants’ voices and their experiences to be captured in an as authentic form as possible (mauthner et al., 2002). the data were collected through two focus groups which allowed the participants to be the “experts” and ensure that their subjective experiences informed the research. this technique was the optimum way to collect data from purposely-selected groups, and the participants were in a supportive environment (with fellow students) where it was believed that they would feel at ease and able to speak freely. the researcher facilitated the group discussions by means of open questions similar to a semi-structured interview. this was necessary to enable the discussion to progress in an open way, avoid prolonged silences and yet still ensure the discussion did not stray too far from the topic, while remaining flexible to student lines of interest. the focus group interviews consisted primarily of open-ended questions to provide detail, depth and participants’ perspectives on their experiences of studying in english with particular reference to identity. the following are example questions: · why have you chosen to study at the joint school/ yorkshire university? · how do you perceive yourself at university? · what are your perceptions of studying in english in your home country/ in the uk? · what are your perceptions/views/thoughts of your subject content delivered in the medium of english? · how has studying in english in your home country/in the uk impacted on your language learning/ your subject knowledge? · how does studying in english compare to studying in chinese? they enabled the participants to respond fully using their own words. further expansion of their responses was achieved by means of prompts and follow-up questions. the length of the focus group interviews was approximately one hour each, and the level of the researcher’s participation in the focus group was minimal. the researcher asked the open-ended questions and in each case stepped back to allow the group to respond. the response to each question was a “conversation,” which took place between the focus group participants. the researcher occasionally prompted and asked for exemplification and clarification to the points made. the focus groups were recorded on an mp3 player – audio only – with the consent of the participants. the interviews were conducted in english at both sites by the researcher and the discourse was modified to facilitate comprehension and interaction. even though the participants’ english level in both settings was fairly similar – crossing borders . . . shifting sands: an investigation of chinese students’ study experiences in the. . . 459 approximately b2 according to the common european framework of reference – and they had no difficulty understanding the questions, they generally appeared to find it difficult to articulate detailed, in-depth responses. one reason was thought to be that they had not encountered or considered these types of questions previously in their l1 so they found it problematic to articulate their responses fully in a l2. to mitigate this, the second focus group was forwarded the questions in advance to consider prior to the focus group taking place. however, they also experienced similar challenges. possible reasons for their less detailed responses could be the level of language, perception of peers, and/or simply lack of opinions on the topic. in any follow-up study with such participants, it would be preferable to use individual interviews to see if this generated any more depth in responses. nevertheless, both groups responded to all the questions, and although the data was not as detailed as envisaged, it was still able to provide valuable insights. 3.5. analysis and coding thematic analysis was employed to systematically analyze the data (charmaz, 2014; clarke & braun, 2016). the key themes that emerged were identity, internationalization, and cop. the dataset from each site was analyzed individually and then comparatively across both sites, focusing on the main emergent themes. a mainly inductive approach to analysis appeared to be the most appropriate for understanding diverse and potentially unexpected perspectives, experiences, behavior, motives, views and identities that emerged, and it was also well suited to enabling learner voice to be heard (johnson & onwuegbuzie, 2004). the data were coded by the researcher and the themes emerged directly from the data and lead to the research questions being refined. 4. findings and discussion 4.1. identity the yps strongly identified themselves as chinese or international students and yorkshire student was an afterthought. similarly, the cps also viewed themselves as chinese students first and then joint school students second. in response to the question: “how do you perceive yourself at university?,” both cps and yps found that dealing with their perception of self and identity was generally unproblematic. they could clearly identify who they are even though at times they appeared to be dealing with multiple identities (e.g., their national, cultural, student and potential professional identities) simultaneously. their use kashmir kaur 460 of the term foreign is also imbued in their identity and it is interesting to note that this term is also aligned to all non-chinese (uk and international) students. they view their “foreignness” in relation to all students and concurrently all students are foreigners. however, the fluidity of their identity assists them to adapt as they view their future identities with certainty – currently inhabiting a liminal state (in-between transformative space) (land, rattray, & vivian, 2014). it is the first time i see a lot of foreigners [foreigners here equals non-chinese students including uk nationals] and that i am the foreigner and a student at yorkshire and a chinese student. (yp 1)1 i am a chinese student at yorkshire who will be both a business person and a transport engineer. (yp 2) chinese student because i am from china and i come to yorkshire to pursue my master degree for work. (yp 3) i see myself as a chinese student and a chinese lawyer. (yp 4) the adjective chinese markedly emphasizes the chinese element of their identity. it dominates all of the responses. this use of this “cultural” or “national” marker indicates the yps perceive themselves as chinese first and foremost as well as a student (as opposed to a student aligned to their institution of study) and their sense of self appears to be linked to their future identity (transport engineer/lawyer) in the long-term (economic) as opposed to their future identity in the short-term – a yorkshire student. it suggests that the participants are signaling the different processes of transition in the language they use to describe themselves. they articulate the various transitions they envisage themselves in, are traversing through, or will traverse. in the immediate term, yps are positioned in the inner circle having relocated from the expanding circle where they will return to play a full role embracing their “new” identity/ies. this sojourn into the inner circle is to further develop their language, skills, knowledge and opportunities to be part of a new cop. however, yp 1’s response appears to “problematize” an understanding of self – he seems to use the same term to refer to himself and to the british (or non-chinese) – foreigner. this complicates the understanding of self and other – the other is me, i am the other – we are both foreigners. here “self” is not singular; it indicates two different identities held simultaneously. it is interesting to note that yp 1 referred to himself as a “foreigner” amongst “foreigners,” in which term he stated he included uk nationals too. he perceived himself as a 1 data extracts were chosen for their suitability in most concisely and clearly supporting the point being made in the findings. crossing borders . . . shifting sands: an investigation of chinese students’ study experiences in the. . . 461 “foreigner” and not only chinese in this instance because he labeled himself as how he understands he is perceived by the “others” who are non-chinese. it would seem, with respect to individuals, he views the world as a binary entity – one is either a chinese or a foreigner (or maybe even both). this echoes fong’s (2011) study where her respondents talked about education overseas in a binary language – china versus abroad (abroad generally being favorable). gao (2011) asserts the chinese identity is heightened when they become “the other.” simultaneously, yp 1 is dealing with the challenges of adjustment, change, particularly relocating from a generally homogeneous to a heterogeneous environment, a sense of not belonging and alienation. studies report these experiences and transitions by international students are not uncommon (gu, 2015; wu, garza, & guzman, 2015). nonetheless, the responses show the yps are confident about how they perceive themselves and their cultural identity, which appears to be strong. for them, a positive meaning of identity is constructed through discourse, difference and the relation to the “other” (hall, 1996). participants from chengdu voiced similar sentiments: at this moment we study at the joint school – i am a joint school student. i am a chinese student …2 i am a student with ambition for the future. (cp 1) i’m a chinese college student … who really wants to contribute to my country. (cp 2) i am a chinese student with the ability to confidently communicate with others and i will gain knowledge for the future. (cp 3) a chinese university student and an adult. i want to be a confident engineer in china. (cp 4) as with the yps’ responses, these include the words chinese and student. however, they are very self-centered and do not reflect much awareness or recognition of “others.” their statements also indicate the notion of transition through their language. they are all future-oriented and signal (a) transition(s) that they want to take place to enable them a future where they are able to navigate through social networks adopting identities which are given by society and not created by the individual. kramsch (2009) has documented the complex, multiple and fragmentary nature of language constructing identity. she emphasizes that the “multilingual subject” is not just about learning language and a new culture. it is also about how they position themselves in and through their interactions in their languages, how the new culture is embodied within them and how this influences their identity by them becoming new individuals through the process of learning a new language and culture. the fluidity involves ongoing negotiation and transformation (hall, 1994). identity plays a pivotal role as 2 unspaced ellipses like this one indicate pauses. kashmir kaur 462 international students transition through their time at university, for example, from commencing their studies in a new environment as a pre-sessional eap student to becoming an acculturated student of their program of study. the acculturation of both sets of participants in this study to some extent involves similar situations to become accustomed to, such as the local environment, local conventions, for example, communication, food and language – the local dialect when negotiating daily activities. the cps’ l1 “familiar” environment is perceived as less challenging to steer unlike the yps. here the yorkshire group has other pressures such as being in a non-l1 locale, dealing with the “time difference” element and becoming acculturated into a cultural environment that is alien to the home culture. all these differentials have their own stresses, which need to be managed and negotiated. gu (2015, p. 14) asserts that, in their search for a sense of belonging and understanding as well as being accepted and understood, chinese students “learn to be engaged in a continuous and sustained dialogue.” this takes place by self-reflecting and reflecting with other chinese students about their cultural identities and social behavior and how exposure to the “other” has enhanced their knowledge of self and their values, and produced the ability to transition through their difficulties. this then positions them as both an “insider” and “outsider” as they traverse cultural borders (gu, 2015). they intersect these borders by adopting identities, which can offer advantages and disadvantages, depending on which “field” is entered (bourdieu, 1993). at each stage, the student is undergoing a number of transitions of how they perceive themselves and how they believe “others” perceive them. each of these transitions and perceptions impacts on their identity, sense of self (ickes, park, & johnson, 2012) and how they navigate and interact with the world around them. the challenges with identities are perhaps surprisingly similar for both yps and cps. however, there is an extra dimension with respect to yps’ interactions with the host community in the inner circle where there appear to be tensions (e.g., linguistic and socialization tensions – such as very little interaction with the home students using english) at times. this does not appear to exist in the expanding circle setting to the same extent. nonetheless, according to gu and schweisfurth (2015), chinese returnees found identity transformation a profound experience enabling them to function at home with a new sense resulting in positive outcomes in personal development. this resonates with gu (2015), who claims experiences in the uk developed a transnational outlook enabling chinese cultural traditions and values to be viewed with more appreciation where identity is only transparent when students have returned to and developed their careers at home in the expanding circle. crossing borders . . . shifting sands: an investigation of chinese students’ study experiences in the. . . 463 4.2. internationalization in response to the question: “what are your perceptions/views/thoughts about your content being delivered in the medium of english?,” it was interesting to note, regardless of the learning environment, how the term international and the sense of internationalization was embedded in all participants’ responses. within their understandings of internationalization, the sense of “chinese” is embodied and adds another element to their view of self. however, it suggests these terms (international/internationalization) were viewed in a very narrow focus, as opposed to the general understanding of the term in an educational context. now we communicate with each other in english and i think it lets us feel more international as well as chinese. good for the future. (cp 4) international because we are going to build the belt and road/silk road3 from china we need people with international view and skills. (cp 6) we can in this school [joint school] have both the international view and skills … it is very important for work. (cp 5) the responses here move to the first person plural we. this seems to suggest the identity and transition are more communal as opposed to individualistic. i want to build for my country. i also want to be an international student/engineer. i want to learn more knowledge so i can contribute better for my country. (cp 2) to be international it is not necessary to go abroad. can be international working in a company with foreign people or communicating with foreigners. (cp 3) even though cp 2 and cp 3 do not use we, they articulate sentiments that are community-oriented. they refer to what they could contribute to their country and to a company. the participants in chengdu appear to be connecting “international” to economic improvement – one can be deemed international merely by having contact with a “foreigner.” interestingly, despite the emphasis on “difference,” they seem to have discerned a similarity among all “internationals” – they all speak the same language, english. this would suggest that to participate as an “international,” english is the lingua franca and can be viewed as representing a form of linguistic capital. in the cultural domain, there are other meanings to 3 belt and road initiative (also known as the silk road economic belt) is a development strategy adopted by the chinese government to interconnect infrastructure across eurasian countries to encourage trade and stimulate economic growth across asia and beyond. kashmir kaur 464 international than solely economic. it is not just material improvement. the term international here is also connected to a particular skill set: knowledge, language, views, and skills. communication, sharing and working in partnership is embedded in their use of international, not unlike the uk’s education internationalization strategy (dfes, 2004) and a general need for knowledge-based economies and highly-skilled individuals (unesco, 2013). research shows the “international” communication skills chinese students develop are highly valued and in demand in chinese ventures with foreign companies (gu, 2015). the yps’ view of “international” is similar. i will introduce myself as an international student from yorkshire in china. it is important for self and my work in china. (yp 5) international and chinese lawyer as i have been overseas and will give me advantage as dealing with problems from not just a chinese perspective. (yp 4) interestingly, these participants seem to have moved to a more self-centered way of expressing themselves, with i being the focus, whereas for cps, “international” was more inclusive and community-oriented. the different “markers” taken on by these participants indicate the different guises they allocate themselves and how their identity is multi-dimensional. the use of international in participants’ responses is heavily economicallyfocused and connected to business, employability and acquiring knowledge. it is also aligned to interaction with individuals who are non-chinese even though no overseas travel has been involved. it is an opportunity to present oneself as someone who has had opportunities (experience) to connect with the world beyond china and whose broadened outlook will benefit china. there appears to be much investment in being international as a positive trait and it seems to denote symbolic power too. for example, according to the participants, being viewed as international will enable more advantages in the world of work and personal standing (cebolla-boado, hu, & soysal, 2018; gu, 2015). the participants’ engagement with the notion of internationalization is emulated in their crossings from the expanding circle to the inner circle and from one province in the expanding circle to another where they encounter more of an “international” experience. this interaction with the “foreigner” is viewed as increasing their social capital with respect to their future beyond he in employment. 4.3. communities of practice both yps and cps have set up or been involved in cop (lave & wenger, 1991; wenger, 1998). the data indicate chinese students, particularly in yorkshire, coalesce to crossing borders . . . shifting sands: an investigation of chinese students’ study experiences in the. . . 465 create small cop, for example, according to their discipline or problem for coherent reasons to enable them to navigate successfully through their studies with support from fellow chinese students. the less experienced, confident and knowledgeable students' memberships start as apprentices at the periphery and as their learning, confidence and skill acquisition develop in an interactive participatory framework their membership traverses to the core. the more experienced students with higher levels of expertise (masters of the community) also continue to learn as a direct result of participating within the community as a member (lave & wenger, 1991). as they engage in these communities, it reinforces their identities as chinese students in an international setting (within the inner circle). simultaneously, they use their membership in cop as strategies to adapt into their new environments, to the extent that it impacts on the programs they select. they appear to choose modules, even changing their degree option, once they discover that they will be better positioned to receive “support” if the degree or module they specify contain chinese students (from the expanding circle). actually, it is convenient to choose a similar timetable . . . more efficient otherwise it can be difficult. (yp 2) in fact we work with chinese students. it is easier as we can speak chinese. it is more efficient. (yp 4) i thought i was the only who changed their discipline but there are other students with similar experience as me both chinese and foreign [non-uk] students. (yp 6) yp 2 and yp 4 feel that classes with fellow chinese students are “more efficient.” this seems to suggest that it constitutes good learning practice to have access to cop that have a range of functions beyond the purely academic, as members’ experiences will entail similar challenges (e.g., linguistic and cultural) and will be able to provide mutual support and a social network. no allowances in department for students whose first language is not english. i check with my classmates – mostly chinese and some foreign [non-uk] students. (yp 6) tutor not always clear and makes assumptions we know this knowledge – are familiar with the concepts in english. we [chinese students] spend time checking together. (yp 5) chinese students sit together to help each other as some content of lecture is difficult to understand . . . we speak after the lecture. (yp 2) as a foreigner we have to do much more than uk students. no problem with the subject – it’s the language. after class we [chinese students] work together. (yp 3) chinese students sit together . . . live nearby and it is very convenient after class. (yp 4) kashmir kaur 466 it appears the yps are much more focused on their difference from the uk students and are more community-oriented in their language. they also experience linguistic difficulties and rely on each other for support. this highlights yps’ experiences are similar and there is a sense of solidarity and mutual support which they gain from their cop. this social co-participation where discussions are highly interactive engages students of all levels. learning is a social practice and wenger’s (1998) cop are about learning, knowledge and active engagement in the world, and ultimately this learning produces meaning. they are integral in enabling students to transition and transform as they weave through their various (or may be only one) cop. the finding that chinese students deliberately seek study programs where fellow chinese students are studying is significant. as it is generally understood and observed anecdotally in he, the chinese students’ and the institutions’ views and preferences have been to avoid having a surfeit of students of one nationality in one study program. however, there seems to be contradictory agendas in play suggesting that, even though the participants may be highly individualistic, for example, very competitive, there is a need for supportive cop, particularly while they are operating in the inner circle, as membership enables opportunities to progress from “an apprentice” to “a master” more readily. chen and ross (2015) evince how chinese “enclaves” in an american institution confirm ethnic identity and how through these discourse communities and networks there are opportunities to find support for economic and academic success. paradoxically, they diminish the archetypical narrative that crossing borders for education enables an enriching global and international experience when chinese students spend considerable time together in their national groups trying to cope with their studies. in the chengdu context, cop are more academic in nature – they evolve to enable students to improve their academic skills and/or increase their knowledge; they are mainly concerned with classroom and/or study activities. as in yorkshire, they arose in response to their situation, and the fundamental structural components of participation and individual engagement are contextual and embedded within their social and physical environments. one of the primary problems is that participants appear to have a need of support from fellow chinese students when pedagogical interaction that takes place be it in the classroom, seminar or lecture (johnson, 2008; wang, sun, & liu, 2010). participants have indicated the language that is used by tutors in these interactions is not always easy to follow or understand, which echoes yps’ (see also responses from yp 2, 3, 5 & 6 above) experiences. crossing borders . . . shifting sands: an investigation of chinese students’ study experiences in the. . . 467 learning in chinese is better as i understand teachers. it is an effort to learn in english. (cp 5) we learn concepts not learnt in high school. vocabulary is difficult . . . maybe i don’t know their usage . . . will check with my classmates. (cp 1) linguistic difficulties, particularly the interaction that takes place between the tutor and the class, are typically problematic for international students including intercultural communication anxieties (wang et al., 2010). levels of anxiety can impede successful learning (horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986). both yps and cps rely on affective and social coping strategies such as support from fellow students and over time they are able to transition into confident individuals who are able to deal with these challenging linguistic issues. studies show that these struggles in the classroom can ultimately impact students positively as they become aware of their transition from a student into a professional and develop their autonomy (gu, 2015; wu et al., 2015). 5. discussion after the analysis of data into themes, the general findings that have emerged are surprisingly similar across both the l1 and l2 sites, albeit different in nuance, in contrast to the initial assumption underlying this study. the similarities concern how the yorkshire and chengdu participants’ view their identity as being dominantly chinese with links to internationalization being desirable but not altering their core identity; social groups form to assist adaptation into the emi environment and serve as a valuable support mechanism. the participants in both learning environments perceive their identity to be primarily chinese (national and/or cultural) and they view themselves as purchasing a commodity – he via emi – which will enable them to claim some level of internationalism and to be deployed advantageously in the knowledge-based economy, in both the inner and expanding circles. moreover, they are able to navigate through their he by the support of fellow chinese students, with their skills and knowledge development, through membership in academic cop. they acknowledge as they transition through their studies that their perspectives are becoming more “outward looking” and their cognition is impacted positively by exposure to emi, despite linguistic and cultural tensions. the participants recognize, literally or metaphorically, crossing borders for education is transformative. however, throughout their studies, there is no expectation for these participants that their learning experiences will transition them away from perceiving themselves as chinese or being perceived by the other as anything other than chinese, even though their identities will continue to be fluid and multi-dimensional whichever space they inhabit. kashmir kaur 468 in respect to linguistic difficulties, the cps had particular problems in understanding lectures and communicating with their tutors. conversely, yps encountered language problems interacting not only with their tutors, but also with their fellow students in the host country. in sum, it appears that · the impact of their study experiences on both the yps’ and cps’ perception of self has occurred to some extent; · regardless of the l1 or l2 learning environments, the participants in this small data set are experiencing remarkably similar issues with respect to themes of identity, internationalization and cop; · their sense of identity as they experience eap/emi study is strong and multidimensional as it embodies a heightened sense of being chinese; access to academic discourse cop is requisite to further validate their sense of self. it could be argued that the similarities between their learning experiences and identity are more nuanced. nevertheless, accessing he through emi/eap (regardless where it is positioned – inner or expanding circles) enable chinese students to progress on to the next stage of their lives enabling them to be viewed as an international engineer and operate successfully in the expanding circle as well as in the inner circle, if/when opportunities arise. the ability to operate in both or either of these “circles” in english enhances the students’ linguistic, symbolic and social capital which impacts on their identities as well as social standing in their home communities. 6. conclusion this study investigated two groups of chinese students’ learning experiences in eap/emi in chengdu and yorkshire and showed students adapted to their emi environment despite the barriers they experienced. it highlighted that global learners are complex and nuanced social beings whose identities are multi-dimensional, fluid and dynamic and who engage with cop in unanticipated ways drawing on diverse types of social capital. importantly, the study shows how english represents a vital source of linguistic capital which learners perceive as promising access to global economic resources and opportunities. instead of threatening their national identities, the use of english appears to add an “international identity” which does not appear to challenge their “chinese” identity but is incorporated into their multiple and fluid set of identities. the study has some limitations, particularly its small sample size and issues surrounding the detail and depth of responses. future studies might generate richer data if they are conducted in the participants’ l1 or conducted in individual interview formats. crossing borders . . . shifting sands: an investigation of chinese students’ study experiences in the. . . 469 nevertheless, the study revealed how the participants at the l1 and the l2 sites reported on remarkably similar learning experiences where they also met similar challenges and tensions regarding identity, transition, internationalization, and participation in cop. this has interesting implications on crossing borders for education in the l2 environment when the experiences of emi in the l1 environment are not too dissimilar to learning in a l2 setting. if this is the case, then there would be wider implications, for example financial for both the student and the institution as well as in terms of the kind of preparation and support learners may need to negotiate this transition. while preparation programs for study abroad are relatively widespread, they remain relatively uncommon in respect to emi in he in l2 settings. this study has also indicated that it may not be necessary to physically cross into the inner circle from the expanding circle to experience the notion of having an “international” identity. it could be claimed that the generally held assumption and the archetypal narrative that crossing borders for study enables a more enriching experience with regards to internationalization, global outlook and general overall study experience has been dented. this research has found the overseas study experience is not vastly different from the experience of emi in the home country, despite the different degrees of english language exposure. both learning environments offer generally similar transitions and transformation experiences concerning identity and development of self. perhaps internationalization and the acquisition of linguistic capital can happen for learners in diverse ways, not only through a study abroad experience. kashmir kaur 470 references airey, j. 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(2003). evaluation of the effects of medium of instruction on the science performance of hong kong secondary students: performance on the science achievement test. bilingual research journal, 27, 295-331. 719 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (4). 2018. 719-720 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.4.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial the publication of the last 2018 issue of studies in second language learning and teaching marks the end of the eighth year of existence of the journal. it has been a successful year for a number of reasons. first, we have concluded the transition to our electronic platform, which has made the processing of submissions much more manageable. second, we have published two state-of-the-art special issues, one dedicated to emotions in language learning and the other to language learning strategies. both of them carry papers by leading scholars in the two respective domains and i am positive that they will contribute to further improvement of the standing of the journal in the field. third, we have commissioned special issues guest-edited by well-known scholars for several years to come. fourth, we have seen a major rise in the number of submissions, and, even more importantly, an overall increase in the quality of the manuscripts. fifth, as can be seen from the indices included in scopus, the journal continues to have a considerable impact on the field and this impact is very likely to grow in the future. at the same time, there are many problems that we have to face, such as the delays in handling papers caused by the spike in submissions, the need to strike a balance between special issues and regular issues, or the major difficulty in finding suitable reviewers. we are sure, however, that these difficulties are simply challenges that need to be overcome and we are committed to making the journal grow and become even more influential in the field. the issue contains four contributions, all of which report the findings of empirical investigations, which, however, are quite different in nature, and a book review. in the first paper, ali al-hoorie provides a meta-analysis of 32 research studies dealing with the l2 motivational self-system which involved 39 unique samples of participants and a total of 32,078 learners of mostly english as an additional language. he found that although the three components of the self-system (i.e., ideal self, ought-to self and learning experience) are predictors of intended effort and, to a lesser extent, actual achievement, the strength of the relationships is quite variable. ali al-hoorie points to the weaknesses of the 720 research conducted to date and calls for experimental studies that would allow establishing cause-and-effect relationships so that more reliable recommendations for classroom practice can be formulated. subsequently, kristina vujnović malivuk, marijan palmović, and lovorka zergollern-miletić report the results of a study which investigated the automaticity of word retrieval for three groups of high school students in croatia: early croatian-german bilinguals, learners enrolled in a german immersion program at school, and students who participated in a regular course in german as a foreign language. using a modified stroop task, they showed that lexical access was the slowest in both croatian and german in the case of the bilinguals, which is accounted for in terms of the activation of both languages and the need to involve more cognitive resources to perform the task. in the next paper, wen-hsing luo describes a study that examined taiwanese students’ experiences of using english as a lingua franca (elf) for intercultural communication, their attitudes in this respect and the varieties of english they would like to master for that purpose. the data were collected by means of a questionnaire from 140 participants in a university in taiwan, 15 of whom were also invited to take part in an interview. a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrated that the participants manifested a preference for standard varieties of english but at the same time were aware of the value of elf and in fact used it in many out-of-class situations. finally, luca a. botturi, daniela kappler, and lucio negrini focus on the design, implementation and outcomes of alpconnectar, a project launched in switzerland with the purpose of using digital environments to aid primary school learners in getting to know the languages spoken in different regions, reduce inhibitions in foreign language communication, improve language skills, foster motivation and enhance participants’ understanding of linguistic and cultural diversity. analyzing the data collected from 7 teachers and 133 pupils by means of questionnaires filled out at the beginning and end of the school year, the researchers show that while the project had a positive impact, its contribution was considerably mediated by contextual variables. the issue closes with a review penned by dorota werbińska which focuses on an edited collection devoted to the acquisition of additional languages by third-age learners, an important issue that has been gaining more and more prominence. i am sure that all of these contributions are extremely thought-provoking and will inspire further research into the facets of second and foreign language acquisition with which they are concerned. mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl 657 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (4). 2019. 657-680 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.4.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt factors influencing language teacher cognition: an ecological systems study alireza mohammadzadeh mohammadabadi university of isfahan, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6189-4568 ali.mohammadzadeh61@gmail.com saeed ketabi university of isfahan, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7784-2754 ketabi@fgn.ui.ac.ir dariush nejadansari university of isfahan, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9145-6008 nejadansari@gmail.com abstract learning about language teacher cognition (ltc) is useful for understanding how language teachers act in the classroom. employing an ecological framework, this study aimed to explore the factors influencing language teachers’ ltcs at different levels. to this end, qualitative data using semi-structured interviews and observation were collected from 62 (30 males and 32 females) iranian efl teachers. the results indicated that, at microsystem level, factors such as teaching equipment and facilities, teachers’ mood and feelings, their job satisfaction, and language proficiency influenced ltc. at mesosystem level, ltc was influenced by teachers’ prior learning experience, the collaboration and collegiality among teachers working in the language institute, teachers’ self-efficacy, and critical incidents that happened when teaching or learning. additionally, the results indicated that exosystem level factors including teacher appraisal criteria, the teaching program and curriculum, and alireza mohammadzadeh mohammadabadi, saeed ketabi, dariush nejadansari 658 teacher immunity affected ltc. moreover, ltc was subject to the influence of the government’s attitudes about elt and religious beliefs about self and interaction, and friendliness with students at macrosystem level. more importantly, it was found that the factors influencing ltc were interrelated and interconnected and in several cases, ltc was a product of joint effect of several factors at various ecosystem levels. finally, findings in this study suggest that language teaching programs provide recent educational technology in the classroom, foster collaboration and collegiality among teachers, and clarify teacher appraisal criteria for teachers in order to help create positive language teaching beliefs. keywords: language teacher cognition; ecological perspective; microsystem; exosystem; mesosystem; macrosystem 1. introduction teachers play an integral role in language teaching and learning. researching language teachers’ cognitions (ltc) and the way they form and are being formed by the constant changes to language teaching profession has gained importance for teacher education (borg, 2015; freeman, 2016). in so doing, teachers’ mental propositions including beliefs, attitudes, and world views have been studied under language teacher cognition (borg, 2015). studying ltc is important in that it identifies a diverse range of knowledge and beliefs that language teachers have about various aspects of language teaching (burns, freeman, & edwards, 2015) and elaborates on the ways in which teachers’ cognitions relate to their classroom practices (borg, 2015; kubanyiova & feryok, 2015). while several studies have been done on the conceptualization of teacher cognitions and how curriculum or learner factors influence ltc (borg, 2015; feryok & oranje, 2015; kubanyiova & feryok, 2015; moodie, 2015), little research has been conducted on the potential effect that factors in the environment might have on ltc in the iranian context. this study argues that environment includes factors that have the potential to influence the formation of teachers’ cognition about language teaching. this study, therefore, adopted an ecological systems framework to scrutinize various factors at micro, meso, exo, and macro level which exerted an impact on ltc of iranian english as a foreign language teachers. the ecological perspective is used in this study since it foregrounds “individuals’ processes as inextricably interwoven with their experiences in the physical and social world” (leather & van dam, 2003, p. 13) and considers the totality of the relationships and interactions that a person “entertains with all aspects in the environment” (kramsch, 2002, p. 8). as such, it enables the researcher to consider all factors that might influence the organism and account for all that could go unnoticed (kramsch, 2008). factors influencing language teacher cognition: an ecological systems study 659 2. literature review 2.1. language teacher cognition language teacher cognition (ltc) relates to the area recognized as teacher thinking (crooks, 2015; woods, 1996), defined as hidden dynamics regarding teachers’ practices (kubanyiova, 2015) and “the unobservable cognitive dimension belonging to teaching and what teachers know, believe and think” (borg, 2003, p. 81). cognitions are believed to be complex, related to many inter-related topics (feryok, 2010), and affect teachers’ classroom practices. over the past three decades, several researchers have tried to examine the factors that affect ltcs (see borg, 2003, 2015, 2018). borg (2003), for example, mentioned that factors such as schooling, professional coursework, contextual factors and classroom practice could influence ltcs. additionally, previous research in the field has indicated that variables such as prior language learning experience (johnson, 1996; moodie, 2016; moodie & feryok, 2015), practicum (johnson, 1996), institutional policy (farrell & lim, 2005; ng & farrell, 2003), language teaching policy (farrell & kun, 2008), digital technology (cummings, 2008), facilities (borg, 2015; woods, 1996) exert an impact on ltcs. one key variable that is believed to significantly influence ltc is the context and contextual factors (feryok, 2010; van lier, 2004). feryok (2010) believes that context influences teachers’ cognitions and the ways in which they are expressed in practice. however, analysing context role in ltc research is mainly limited to the variables inside the classroom. one might argue there might be some environmental and contextual factors outside the classroom context that exert an impact on ltc. this study assumes that ltc can be subject to different factors beyond the classroom level and teachers’ cognitions might be a product of the interaction between several factors inside and outside the classroom. using the iranian context as an example, the authors argue that there might be some factors outside the classroom context that might influence teachers’ behaviour in the classroom and their beliefs about language teaching. taking an ecological perspective, this study, therefore, aimed to address this problem and examine the potential factors influencing ltcs at different environmental levels. 2.2. english education and language teacher cognition in iran prior to islamic revolution in 1979, english experienced rapid expansion and was used for both integrative and instrumental functions. after the islamic revolution, however, instrumental purposes were promoted and integrative functions gradually disappeared (zarrinabadi & mahmoudi-gahrouei, 2018). in presentalireza mohammadzadeh mohammadabadi, saeed ketabi, dariush nejadansari 660 day iran, english has regained its popularity within the realms of trade, tourism, media and importantly education (sadeghi & richards, 2015; sharifian, 2010). nowadays, english is the most practical medium in education subsequent to persian (sadeghi & richards, 2015; zarrinabadi & mahmoudi-gahrouei, 2018). in iran, teaching english officially starts from secondary schools and continues until tertiary education, although private institutes also teach english to primary school children (zarrinabadi & mahmoudi-gahrouei, 2018). emphasizing listening and speaking skills in english, the objective behind english language education is to develop communicative competence and problem-solving skills (zarrinabadi & mahmoudi-gahrouei, 2018). the adopted methodology is localized communicative language teaching (in terms of images, names and social situations) wherein language is used for communication and transferring cultural and ideological values. in recent years, ltc in iran has been the centre of diverse studies. ghafar samar and moradkhani (2014), in a qualitative study, examined teachers’ cognitive processes during their classroom code-switching and reported that factors such as knowledge about context and social relations, knowledge about class, time, and learning management, knowledge about research and professional development influenced teachers’ cognitive processes. yunus, salehi and amini (2016) also reported that l2 teachers’ experiences had a complex relationship with teachers’ cognition regarding l2 learners. rahmani doqaruni (2017) further compared experienced and inexperienced teachers’ cognition and reported that experienced teachers used fewer communication strategies as compared to inexperienced teachers. moreover, karimi, and norouzi (in press) found that (re)structuring cognitions was higher in early years in teaching and decreased as teachers gain more experience. these studies, however, examine the links between a limited number of variables and teachers’ ltcs and do not provide a complete picture regarding factors that might influence iranian efl teachers’ cognitions as well as the ways in which these factors might interact in doing so. 2.3. ecological perspective for studying ltc pivotal to ecological theory is the dynamic interaction between the human being (teachers) and the environment (complex systems). bronfenbrenner (1993) argued that such a theory provides a rich holistic account for studying issues related to language learning, being interconnected, interdependent, and interactional. when applied to education, this theory comprises diverse components such as classroom, home, neighborhood, school, parent workplace, and the government defining public policy, as well as the relationships at all stages among such contexts and the cultural and historical structure in which they exist. factors influencing language teacher cognition: an ecological systems study 661 the environment covers a system of nested, interdependent structures stretching from proximal (face to face venue) to the most distant or distal (wider social setting namely classes and culture) (bronfenbrenner, 1993). the framework includes four layers including microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem (see figure 1). the microsystem is “a pattern of activities, roles, and interpersonal relations experienced by the developing person in a given face-to-face setting” (bronfenbrenner, 1993, p. 15). it is the direct influences within teachers’ immediate surroundings. the mesosystem encompasses processes and interconnections occurring between two or more settings containing the developing person (relationships between microsystems). the exosystem encircles connections between two or more social settings wherein the developing person has an indirect role in the immediate surrounding. finally, the macrosystem, which is an umbrella term, includes cultural and subcultural context, going beyond the immediate classroom context to identify belief systems, lifestyles, or social structures. figure1 ecological system levels (adapted from bronfenbrenner, 1993) with respect to language education and applied linguistics, kramsch and steffensen (2007) argue that this perspective presents a rich framework for exploring linguistic phenomena which are interdependent, interconnected and interactional. moreover, van lier (2004) state that the ecological perspective is a coherent and theoretically and practically well-motivated approach that can be macrosystem exosystem mesosystem microsystem alireza mohammadzadeh mohammadabadi, saeed ketabi, dariush nejadansari 662 used to conceptualize, research, and practice language learning. hornberger (2003) the ecological perspective postulates that cognition and learning are explained not only in terms of processes inside a learner’s head, but also with regards to their interaction with the environment. the perspective has recently been used to study diverse topics in applied linguistics such as language maintenance and language policy (muhlhausler, 1996; ricento, 2000) and learner perceptions (bernet, 2008). despite copious research on ltc (borg, 2015; burns, freeman, & edwards, 2015; kubanyiova, 2015; woods, 1996), there are no published accounts, as far as authors know, on different environmental factors in the context of iran that have the potential to influence teachers’ cognitions. also, while several recommendations and interventions based on ltc literature have been proposed (farrell, 2015), their uptake is reported to be limited (tedick, 2009; wright, 2010). as discussed above, one key issue in the previous studies on ltc has highlighted the way environment has been operationalized and the variables that have been analyzed as the factors in the teachers’ environment. the authors argue that taking an ecological perspective toward studying ltc can provide us with a better lens for investigating ltc as it allows us to uncover various elements at different ecosystem levels (i.e., exo, meso, micro, and macro) and provide a more detailed explanation for factors influencing ltc. moreover, we considered that there might be some other factors that influence ltc and restrict the extent to which teachers adapt these interventions and recommendations. furthermore, while several studies have been conducted on various factors influencing ltc, the interrelations between these factors has remained rather understudied. the ecological perspective can also be used to explore possible clashes or tensions between the factors that affect ltc. all in all, theorizing in past research underscores individual, contextual, and institutional effects on ltc which convincingly justifies using an ecological perspective. as such, we employed an ecological perspective to explore the factors that could influence ltc at different ecosystems. to do so, we aimed to answer the following question: what factors influence iranian efl teachers’ cognition development at different ecosystem levels? 3. method 3.1. participants the participants in this study were 62 (30 males and 32 females) iranian efl teachers in isfahan, iran. the first author recruited the teachers while ensuring that informed consent was given. the teachers were from 25 to 32 years old (m = 27.5) and their native language was persian. they were all employed in language institutes and had factors influencing language teacher cognition: an ecological systems study 663 similar socioeconomic status but different educational levels: ba (35, 56.5%), ma (15, 24.2%), and phd (12, 19.3%). their experience ranged from 1 to 10 years (m = 1.5). the teachers participating in this study were similar to other language teachers around the world in several ways. for example, they all had globallyaccepted teaching courses such as celta and tesol (72% celta and 28% tesol). moreover, iranian language institutes employ communicative approaches toward language teaching and internationally recognized textbooks (e.g., interchange, top notch, headway, four corners, and american english file) are used. additionally, some institutes hold in-service courses taught by internationally recognized figures in order to familiarize their teachers with the latest language teaching developments. 3.2. instrumentation this study employed a qualitative methodology, since it allows for detailed and in-depth analysis regarding the factors that might influence teachers’ ltc. as such, the data were collected using observation and semi-structured interviews. the first author observed each teacher’s class three times, using nunan’s (2001) observation protocol. this is a protocol for recording teachers’ behavior, their interaction with students, the physical shape of the class, facilities in the classes, and so on. during observation, the observer also took copious field notes. all classes observed were general english classes. the classes included teaching four language skills with a focus on developing listening and speaking skills. the program also included teaching grammar and vocabulary for everyday communication. also, semi-structured interviews were used to gather more information on teachers’ cognition. an interview protocol was developed based on the research question and previous studies. the teachers were asked about their feelings toward teaching, their opinions related to language teaching in iran, the factors that influenced their feelings and attitudes about teaching in iran, and the extent to which they liked their job. moreover, the researchers formulated probing questions and clarification requests to get a clear meaning and perspective about participants. for example, when teachers referred to facilities, they were asked to elaborate on the type of facilities needed and on how such facilities could influence their beliefs about teaching english in iran. the interviews were conducted in their workplace after scheduled class times. based on the participants’ requests, the interviews were performed in persian, their mother tongue. each teacher was interviewed once and each interview session lasted from 20 to 45 minutes. this resulted in 35 hours of audio data. alireza mohammadzadeh mohammadabadi, saeed ketabi, dariush nejadansari 664 3.3. qualitative data analysis in order to analyze the data, corbin and strauss’s (1996, 2008) grounded theory was applied. in so doing, coding and category development was conducted in three main stages. first, the transcribed interviews were read and labels were assigned to data (open coding). for example, labels such as “school,” “government,” “students,” and “salary” were applied to the margins of the paper. in the second stage (axial coding), similarly-labeled data were grouped into a same file. in this phase, the researchers read and re-read the codes to construct higher-level concepts and categories. for instance, codes such as “textbooks” and “teaching materials” were combined into “teaching materials.” in the third stage, selective coding, the researchers selected the categories developed to answer the research question in the study. in order to ensure both dependability and credibility in the coding stages, several evaluative criteria (saturation, inter-coder reliability, member checking, and external audit) were taken into consideration. the data collection and analysis were continued until the point of saturation when no further data gathering and analysis seemed to add to the understanding of the phenomenon (creswell, 1998; dörnyei, 2007). furthermore, in order to ensure that the coding process had been properly done and that the codes and categories reflect participants’ views, the second author analyzed the data and performed the coding. the second author read the transcripts and performed the three stages of open, axial, and selective coding again. cohen’s kappa was calculated to examine the intercoder reliability between the two coders. the cohen’s kappa (0.91) showed that the coding was rather perfect. also subsequent to both coding and discussion, the first researcher discussed the findings with the participants in some informal member checking sessions (creswell, 1998; dörnyei, 2007). this was performed so as to minimize the researcher’s bias and ensure that participants’ views have been reflected. additionally, an external audit (creswell, 1998) was conducted. an expert familiar with qualitative research was requested to read the report and commented on the soundness of writing report and gave comments. this resulted in some changes in presenting details and descriptions. 4. results and discussion in this section, findings are reported according to bronfenbrenner’s (1993) ecological systems theory. based on the qualitative data, factors influencing iranian english teachers’ cognitions were classified in four interrelated layers including micro, meso, exo, and macro systems. factors influencing language teacher cognition: an ecological systems study 665 4.1. microsystemic level 4.1.1. facilities the data analysis indicated that multiple equipment integrated into immediate classroom context exerted significant influence on the participants’ ltc. factors such as visual appearance and instructional technology had an impact on teachers’ ltcs. the following comments are representations about beliefs in this regard: honestly, the moment i step in, the class, size and space result in a positive attitude. dim and shabby classes make me feel demotivated and already lose my interest in overall picture about teaching. (teacher 3, 14/07/2017) throughout my teaching career, i have realized that physical features in classroom can elevate my mood, personal impression and hence my attitude towards students. you can’t imagine, but in one class, they have put some flowers. this made me feel teaching is a lovely job. (teacher 9, 18/07/2017) also, another teacher noted that bigger classes influenced his thinking and creativity: personally, bigger classes with half circled chair arrangements can create a positive image on my perception about class and teaching and boost creativity. (teacher 14, 22/07/2017) further analysis revealed that computers, films and videos, and audio books significantly affected the participants’ ltcs. the following excerpts reveal some teachers’ ltcs: technology in classes gives me a feeling that teaching english is viewed professionally with global standards. i think technology results in an active learning-teaching mechanism within a multimedia environment. (teacher 18, 29/07/2017) i remember classes in our time were without even the most basic tools. these days, technology helps not only foster our teaching but also plan to create learner autonomy and finally trigger collaborative learning. (teacher 22, 3/08/2017) facilities led to possitive ltc among the participants of the study, and it can be inferred that they enhance quality teaching. the results are in line with previous studies on ltc (berg, benz, lasley, & raisch, 1998; borg, 2003) that equipment positively influences teachers’ attitudes. alireza mohammadzadeh mohammadabadi, saeed ketabi, dariush nejadansari 666 4.1.2. emotionality the data indicated that learners’ positive and negative moods also affect participants’ ltcs. analysing data showed that students’ emotionality influenced teachers’ attitudes toward teaching. this can be seen in the following examples: students’ emotions and feelings play an important role to my creativity and teaching practice. i remember in a class, some students had work shifts, so they came to the class exhausted and even sleepy. unbelievably, i felt that teaching is discouraging and even tiresome activity. after a few sessions, this boredom impeded the pleasurable and fruitful process of teaching thus leading to indifference. (teacher 26, 05/08/2017) i think learners’ emotionality can make me think differently regarding teaching. i feel bad when i see learners come to the class with reluctance and lack of interest. i think this brings dissonance in my thoughts and affects my teaching and attitudes toward the job. (teacher 30, 08/08/ 2017) as demonstrated, participants’ varied emotions created a positive or negative attitude toward teaching and, consequently, since teaching and learning are emotional processes, adapting emotions enables teachers to monitor their reactions and convert negative thoughts into positive emotions. 4.1.3. teacher job satisfaction data from the interviews showed that satisfaction influenced participant teachers’ ltc. as indicated in the following excerpts, the degree to which teachers were satisfied with their profession had an impact on beliefs for teaching: i am not satisfied with my income. although we work hard, we receive inadequate salary and benefits. as such, i think teaching is not the job that can support me and my family. (teacher 35, 14/08/2017) i teach in a language school where we have no insurance, time offs, and even job security. upon repeated absence for medical reasons or a family problem, they easily fire you. this has left me no choice to accept their terms while i am totally dissatisfied. this condition breeds negative perspectives on teaching. (teacher 37, 17/08/2017) we have a social status which is a positive feeling. in private institutes, despite some lacks, the managers are attentive and appreciate our work. on the whole, this perception creates a positive impact on my mentality toward teaching. (teacher 39, 20/08/2017) according to the teachers’ comments, job satisfaction influenced iranian efl teachers’ ltcs. the data revealed that satisfaction could either avert positive attitudes or raise proper insight on teachers’ evaluation of the profession (borg, 2015; soodmand afshar & doosti, 2016). factors influencing language teacher cognition: an ecological systems study 667 4.1.4. linguistic proficiency the teachers’ linguistic proficiency level was also found to influence the ltcs of teachers. as the teachers noted: i think i can speak english fluently and accurately; this has given me confidence to bring the best in grammar, vocabulary, small discussion groups and so on. (teacher 42, 24/08/2017) my english proficiency is not that developed. i have some pronunciation and stress problems insofar as students also criticize and correct some errors which honestly embarrass me and bring fear. this rejection by students leads to annoying beliefs about teaching. (teacher 30, 21/09/ 2017) as reported, teachers’ linguistic knowledge seems to affect ltcs positively and negatively. if the teacher perceived oneself as competent and fluent in english, this would result in creating positive cognitions. however, if the teacher doubted his/her language ability, negative attitudes toward teaching might emerge (borg, 2003, 2015). 4.2. mesosystemic level 4.2.1. prior experience the data clearly indicated that teachers had an amalgam of experiences in their immediate language learning. prior schooling either strengthened or weakened iranian efl teachers’ ltcs. as the participants commented: back in high school, nobody cared much about our english which caused frustration. this matter gave me the incentive to choose english for helping others suffering from the same ambience. i think i should teach and help students find the best learning strategies. (teacher 45, 27/08/2017) my high school teachers profoundly affected my teaching conception and practice. unlike past teachers, tough and dry and somewhat made me demotivated, i try to create a welcoming atmosphere, motivate the low-achievers, remove their weaknesses and create opportunities to break the ice for even a small talk. (teacher 47, 30/08/2017) our school hired proficient teachers with native-like accent. they created a positive image in my mind. now, even after twenty years, i am in love with english classes, my students, and thus do my best for students. (teacher 49, 01/09/2017) i have to admit that university has built up a diverse picture than high school. teacher educators in the university presented a vivid picture and gave us a positive mentality about teaching. i just realized how meaningful teaching is. this phenomenon revolutionized my self-concept to teaching. (teacher 51, 03/09/2017) alireza mohammadzadeh mohammadabadi, saeed ketabi, dariush nejadansari 668 in terms of the findings, prior schooling thwarted or promoted iranian efl teachers’ ltcs within their careers and could create a different effect (moodie, 2015, 2016) or a booster (moodie & feryok, 2015). 4.2.2. collaboration and collegiality the data indicated that collaboration among teachers in instructional settings played a role of a catalyst for classroom innovations and instructional creativity. interestingly, all teachers insisted that collaborative atmosphere maximized student achievement. some of the comments are presented below: fortunately, collaboration is the basic principle. my co-workers have intimate relationship and discuss the classroom incidents during the break times. teachers are experienced with invaluable lessons about teaching and classroom management for me. i should say that capitalizing on colleagues’ skills has fostered positive emotions and created trust among us, thus better teaching career, higher motivation and reinforced teaching techniques. (teacher 53, 10/09/2017) at work, teachers alongside the manager have regular sessions. we share reflective conversations over teaching methodologies, student reticence, the existing syllabus, curriculums and assessment strategies. two participants were instructional coaches (with overseas experience) who opened new teaching gates to us and encouraged us eclectic teaching experience. this has led to higher working commitment and higher face-saving behavior before students. (teacher 55, 19/09/2017) between co-workers and i is a sense of intimacy. i am delighted to teach because we are like a family and this has doubled my motivation to teach. sometimes while working independently, we share experiences to learn more about classroom life. these communicative ties create a positive cognition in teaching. (teacher 56, 21/09/2017) our ambience at work is so congenial that i ask experienced teachers my questions. on top of that, we sometimes carry out joint work like designing questions, etc. which creates an inviting vision and makes teach better than the opposite condition. (teacher 21, 4/09/2017) as indicated in these excerpts, friendly relationship and rapport with other teachers indirectly helped creating positive attitudes toward language teaching (yaghobinejad, zarrinabadi, & nejadansari, 2017). as richards and farrell (2005) noted, collegiality can enhance professionalism among language teachers. in this study, collegiality seemed to positively affect ltcs by creating favorable and positive attitudes. 4.2.3. self-efficacy the data, likewise, indicated that efficacy (i.e., potential and abilities toward achieving goals and overcoming challenges), could alter teachers’ attitudes for teaching. the following are some representative examples: factors influencing language teacher cognition: an ecological systems study 669 i know my potentials and never doubt my capacity. i know myself and try to actualize the same feeling among students. i help them think when there is a will, there is a way. this mentality has a huge impact on my teaching attitudes and practices. (teacher 5, 6/08/2017) i think a teacher should set one’s goals, face the obstacles and address the students’ needs. pursuing this path has given me confidence to teach better and created a positive mindset in teaching. i know that my persistence broadens my teaching self-perceptions. (teacher 27, 6/08/2017) these findings imply that perceiving oneself as efficacious can create attitudes reinforcing feelings about one’s ability to teach. having positive cognitions about one’s teaching could create positive teaching beliefs. 4.2.4. critical incidents data analysis demonstrated that critical incidents or vividly remembered events influenced efl teachers’ ltcs. the following excerpts show the positive impact of critical incidents on teachers’ ltcs. as a novice teacher, my earliest experience occurred in classroom. having introduced myself, i strictly talked about the dos and don’ts in classroom and reminded students of their discipline and perseverance alongside my power as an authority. my reflection was this is how i can make things work. this attitude was wrong, though. it turned into an upheaval and some even decided to change classes. i wanted to cool off the mess, but a bit late. upon this critical incident, my reflections made me think i have no right to impose myself and cause frustration and demotivation. (teacher 57, 30/09/2017) i was teaching in a private institute in which leaners were from 25 to 45. on the 6th week, some conflicts occurred since learners kept comparing me to their ex-teacher. i lost my temper and a fierce confrontation occurred in a way that other co-workers and the manager realized it. this critical occasion shattered my thoughts and led to some self-critical reflections: i must pay attention to the age, level of education, social status and the individual differences among participants and serve flexibility. (teacher 41, 29/08/2017) as in the data, critical incidents deepened teachers’ instructional mentality and prompted continual reconsiderations. critical reflections fostered self-realization and awareness inside and outside classroom, and moved the instructor beyond practice and relations practice more to the broader socio-political in addition to affective/moral issues that impact practice. these periods of strain triggered new understandings and cultivated new teaching beliefs for self-knowledge among teachers and teacher education courses (farrell, 2016). alireza mohammadzadeh mohammadabadi, saeed ketabi, dariush nejadansari 670 4.3. exosystem level 4.3.1. teacher appraisal criteria the results showed that the criteria for evaluating teachers’ performance influenced their ltcs. the teachers said that they knew the criteria and did their best to meet the criteria requirements. as the data showed, the criteria led to forming some cognitions. the teachers provided the following comments. i tried to meet the prescriptions. some criteria were really instructive. honestly, i was not careful about them before they were prescribed as yardsticks for assessing my performance. but after that, i used them in my teaching and found that they were effective. i appreciate using different ways of feedback presentations. let me tell you about the person who observed my class and assessed my teaching ability. he was the supervisor of the institute. he wrote that i should pay more attention to less confident and reticent students. he said only more competent students talked. this led to a positive change and now i believe that teachers should assign turns so that silent students take part in classroom discussions. (teacher 28, 06/08/2017) as seen, supervision affected teachers’ beliefs and their teaching and reactions to students. when the teachers were assessed by others (formally or informally), they paid more attention to some criteria for teaching as they were substantially scored (borg, 2015). 4.3.2. teacher immunity the data indicated that language teacher immunity, an armoring system against undesirable influences, resulted in adaptive and maladaptive effects on iranian english teachers’ ltc. the following excerpts represent this phenomenological concept: you can’t imagine, but i sometimes feel being a teacher is wasting life. why should we dedicate ourselves to those who underestimate us and come here for higher grades than learning? i just give them what they want. (teacher 24, 03/08/2017). frankly, i feel fossilized teaching the same stuff time and again. we should be receptive to novelty and changes in the classroom. unless these are met, i may think of quitting my job. (teacher 2, 13/07/2017) doing all this makes me aversive and reluctant to teaching. why are our instructional duties so heavy; this is unfair causing frustration to teaching. (teacher 38, 18/08/2017) although part of my learning was not satisfactory, i bring out the best for my students considering their needs, learning style, etc. our task is to help students survive and thrive regardless of any influences. we should activate learners’ knowledge, wisdom and curiosity. (teacher 43, 25/08/2017) factors influencing language teacher cognition: an ecological systems study 671 as can be observed, teacher immunity fostered adaptive attitudes, namely openness to changes, high resilience, emotional adjustment and higher retention (hiver, 2017). nonetheless, maladaptive perceptions caused aversion, cynicism and a high attrition creating disequilibrium in teachers’ thought. 4.3.3. curriculum data analysis suggested that curriculum also caused a change in teachers’ ltc. this can be seen in the following excerpts. i think i am teaching an overcrowded curriculum. too much grammar and reading burns students and me . . . how can i teach this bulk with lack of time? my viewpoint is this heavy burden on me and my students result in stress and less optimal teaching. i insist this causes adverse effect on my teaching reflection. (teacher 11, 12/07/2017) honestly, i sacrifice everything to stick to the curriculum. i feel i am a robot and have lost my creativity . . . that said, there are no communicative activities. frankly students practice silence since they can’t adapt themselves to that curriculum, so back to square one. this induces a negative belief in my teaching career. (teacher 4, 15/07/2017) previously, students had no practice in listening and speaking, so they clearly lost communication and authentic practice of english. recently, despite reforms and emphasis on four skills (clt practice), i have to claim that it is even worse since i haven’t learned clt in practice which has gradually given me a negative feeling in teaching. (teacher 16, 23/07/2017) one participant compared his experience at state school with private institutions and noted that flexibility in curriculum created positive beliefs toward teaching in the latter: unlike state schools where we experience lack of control on curriculum, i like curriculum in the private schools. attending three sessions a week, there is time for students to practice english in general and listening and speaking in particular. syllabi are easy to put into practice. comparatively, they are fluent and can have real conversations with others and even the teacher. frankly this has planted a positive energy in my teaching style. (teacher 7, 15/07/2017) furthermore, some other participants referred to the same idea. this can be seen in the following excerpt: teaching in both contexts, i believe curriculum in private schools is handier than state schools. being proficient and confident, i can create a positive image about teaching and trigger students for cooperative learning through authentic tasks. i can teach grammar in context and help students practice english out of context. undoubtedly, this eclectic syllabus creates a positive reflection on dynamism. (teacher 2, 11/07/2017) alireza mohammadzadeh mohammadabadi, saeed ketabi, dariush nejadansari 672 analyzing qualitative data showed that curriculum exerted an exosystemic effect on teachers’ perceptions (borg, 2015; cummins & early, 2015; feryok, 2010). according to the data, overloaded curriculum resulted in burnout and even aversion toward teaching optimally; however, flexible and accessible curriculum may contribute to developing positive ltcs. 4.4. macrosystem level 4.4.1. governmental attitudes about elt the results of qualitative measures indicated that teacher ideas about policy and higher-level political issues influenced their ltcs. the analysis showed that teachers predominantly thought the government does not want english to prevail in the country as it seemed to contradict national and ideological attitudes. this can be seen in the following comment: i think our government does not want english to be extensively learned. that is why only 2 hours weekly are allocated to learning english. i think this is owing to ideological clashes between our government and the u.s. (teacher 31, 09/08/2017) another teacher noted that english is an instrument for spreading western values, some of which are in sharp contrast with ours. he claimed that this perception influenced his beliefs regarding the value of his work and its importance for the society. overall, there were numerous instances of beliefs regarding higher level policies on teacher cognitions about their job and its values. the data confirms the findings of borg (2015) who noted that higher-level policies and societal factors can exert an impact on teachers’ ltcs. teachers in this study related their thoughts to political and governmental policies toward l2 development. 4.4.2. religion the data showed that religious beliefs affected teachers’ beliefs about manners in the classroom. islamic ideology has some decrees related to the way men and women should behave when interacting with each other. the data analysis showed that teachers were careful about such religious beliefs when they talk or interact with their students. teachers in this study told us that they know they should behave properly with other genders as they were living in an islamic country. one participant commented that: some students wear hijab and are very careful about their communication with men. i know that teachers should be more considerate and cautious when teaching such students. you need to teach and respect every person’s ideology at the same time. (teacher 58, 29/07/2017) factors influencing language teacher cognition: an ecological systems study 673 echoing similar ideas, a female teacher mentioned that: i know that religion is an important issue for many students and teachers. sometimes it affects the level of friendliness or proximities in the classroom. when teaching, i think my religious beliefs and others can influence the way i greet, teach and interact. (teacher 61, 07/10/2017) also, it was found that religious beliefs affected female teachers more than male ones. female teachers mentioned that the institute mandated that they wore hijab when they attend the class. one teacher referred to this and believed that the institute’s strictness about clothing and teachers’ behavior has increased a more formal classroom atmosphere and decreased rapport level in the class. as she commented: when you dress like that, you’ll obviously seem very religious and formal. so the students will try to behave formally and keep the distance. we are pressured to wear only black clothes. i’m not a psychologist but i’m sure this has some effects on students’ attitude toward teachers and their teaching. (teacher 41, 08/10/2017) another teacher told us that she did not think that the language institute was that strict about religious issues and this has affected her views about teaching. as she commented: i didn’t think that they were that fussy about religious issues and hijab. i was always careful not to be blamed for the way i clothed. (teacher 37, 09/10/2017) a male teacher noted that the officials closed the school for two days because some teachers in the institute wore ties. as he commented: they said that this is not congruent with the islamic ideology and might westernize the students in terms of culture and behavior. (teacher 12, 12/10/2017) all in all, the teachers’ ideological issues had a role in teaching and teachers’ beliefs, but they were related to distal roles/effects and not of immediate influence on teachers’ ltcs. 4.5. addressing interrelations and interconnections the results of this study indicated that factors at different levels influenced ltc. however, the evidence also suggested that factors affecting ltc were not distinct but interrelated. figure 2 shows the factors that were identified through qualitative data analysis (it should be noted that these factors are not pre-defined in the alireza mohammadzadeh mohammadabadi, saeed ketabi, dariush nejadansari 674 ecological framework, which only provided a broad frame for scaffolding the inductively generated codes). the factors in the inner circles fall within a lager circle at a larger ecosystem level which proves the interrelation among the factors affecting teachers’ ltcs. the results also indicated that a coordination of various individual, contextual and environmental variables involved in shaping teachers’ cognitions. for example, the data indicated that a teacher’s beliefs about his profession were positively influenced by his mood and emotions; collaboration and collegiality also strengthened these positive beliefs. as one participant commented: i really like language teaching and want to become a good teacher. i think my relationship with my colleagues also helps me to like language teaching more and more. my intrinsic interest in teaching and our institute’s atmosphere has heightened the value i attach to teaching. (teacher 3, 02/07/2017) another participant referred to her negative feeling about teaching english and mentioned that her beliefs about language teaching were a product of joint effects of several factors. as she commented: i think there are several factors involved. i am not satisfied with the payment. also, the institute i teach at is not a well-equipped one. however, they are very strict about assessing my teaching efficacy. (teacher 29, 12/09/2017) also, a teacher told us that he used to have positive beliefs about teaching but several elements changed his beliefs. he commented: i am very positive about language teaching. but, my views changed. you know, the government does not regard the language as an important need. you can see this in the educational policy. also, you don’t make much money. the institutes provide you with minimum facilities and the relation with other teachers is competitive. your feelings become more negative if your english is not very good and you don’t pass annual tests such as tkt. (teacher 44, 01/06/2017) the results also revealed that there were cases that tensions occurred between variables found to influence ltcs. for example, a teacher who was in favor of using video equipment and facilities expressed reservations because characters in the videos were inappropriately dressed according to islamic beliefs. of course, such tensions between factors were relatively few. all in all, the above excerpts imply that ltc, on the one hand, could emerge from the joint effect of several interacting factors belonging to different ecosystem levels. on the other hand, it can be understood particularly from the last excerpt that ltc is dynamic and various ecological factors could change ltc positively or negatively. factors influencing language teacher cognition: an ecological systems study 675 figure 2 the results of qualitative analysis of factors influencing ltc at different ecological system levels 7. conclusion this study used an ecological perspective to examine factors which influenced ltc among efl teachers in the iranian context. the analysis of qualitative data indicated that the teachers’ ltc was influenced by various factors at the microsystem (e.g., facilities, learner emotionality, job satisfaction and language proficiency), mesosystem (e.g., prior experience, collaboration and collegiality, self-efficacy, and critical incidents), exosystem (e.g., teacher appraisal criteria, curriculum, and teacher immunity), and macrosystem levels (e.g., government attitudes about elt and religion). the main conclusion which can be drawn from this study is that ltc is subject to different variables at different levels. as the results showed, ltc is not a product of a limited number of factors, but it is a constellation of various distal and proximal factors to the teachers’ classes. the findings also bear witness to the complexity of ltc. the results showed that ltc is not limited to classroom-level factors, and it is a joint effect of interaction between different social, cultural, and contextual factors. moreover, the results in alireza mohammadzadeh mohammadabadi, saeed ketabi, dariush nejadansari 676 this study confirm the conclusion by feryok and oranje (2015) who noted that ltc is a dynamic system. from this study, it can be found that ltc is always subject to change and small variables/changes can lead to changes in teachers' ltcs. future research in the field can examine how ltc influences different learning opportunities which they provide for learners. in other words, future research can be conducted to see how teachers’ ltc influences techniques and strategies used to teach reading, listening, speaking, and writing. furthermore, the obtained findings in this study indicated that learners’ characteristics have an impact on ltc. as such, future research can be conducted to see how ltc affects/is affected by learner variables such as proficiency. next, continued research on ltc can minimize the incongruence between teachers’ practices and beliefs and also uncover the social, psychological and environmental elements impeding teaching practice (borg, 2015). finally, examining the processes in which ltcs are formed may provide some insights into creating positive cognitions and ruling out negative ones. the main implication in this study is that teachers need to be encouraged to involve in selfanalysis of the factors which may affect their cognitions about l2 development. this may result in formulating self-awareness with regard to positive and negative thoughts which can be later reinforced and ruled out if not beneficial. this study has some implications for language teaching programs and language schools and institutes. for example, it showed that teachers’ cognitions are affected by facilities and teacher appraisal criteria. language programs or institutes can provide their teachers with the most recent educational technology equipment so that teachers develop positive ltcs and think of language teaching as a modern and prestigious profession. in regards to teacher appraisal criteria, they can clarify the metrics for their teachers and create the feeling that these assessments are useful for their professional development. also, language institutes can create teaching environments rich in collaboration and collegiality in which teachers work in a friendly atmosphere and help each other to develop their teaching skills. as for elt in iran, the findings of this study may help to understand and address the concerns, needs, and expectations of iranian language teachers, and therefore, create a more efficient environment for language teaching in the country. the study also has some limitations. these relate to the size of the sample and the nature of qualitative research, which limit the generalizability of the findings. while presenting detailed information on participants’ views and stories, triangulation studies including quantitative instruments are needed to present a more complete 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(2018). english in contemporary iran. asian englishes, 20(1), 81-94. http://doi.org/10.1080/13488678.2017.1389147 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: editor: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: edyta olejarczuk (poznań university of technology) language editor: melanie ellis (pedagogical university of kraków) vol. 7 no. 4 december 2017 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, university of new south wales, sydney) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo) kata csizér (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) robert dekeyser (university of maryland) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) carol griffiths (fatih university, istanbul) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) sarah mercer (university of graz) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) bonny norton (university of british columbia) terrence odlin (ohio state university) rebecca oxford (university of maryland) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (university of pannonia, trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto) elaine tarone (university of minnesota) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) stuart webb (university of western ontario) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2017 editor: mirosław pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak edyta olejarczuk © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 100 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · scopus · web of science emerging sources citation index (esci) · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · infobaseindex · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the clarivate analytics (formerly thomson reuters) master journal list. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 7, number 4, december 2017 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ....................................................................565 editorial .........................................................................................569 articles: emily e. scida, jill n. jones – the impact of contemplative practices on foreign language anxiety and learning ................................................573 katarzyna zychowicz, adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak – polish listening span: a new tool for measuring verbal working memory.........................601 fang-yu liao – the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability ................................................ 619 gloria vickov, eva jakupčević – discourse markers in non-native efl teacher talk ...................................................................................... 649 vanessa de wilde, june eyckmans – game on! young learners’ incidental language learning of english prior to instruction ............................ 673 gabriella hild – a case study of a hungarian efl teacher’s assessment practices with her young learners ..................................................... 695 book reviews: jarosław krajka – review of liying cheng, janna fox’s assessment in the language classroom: teachers supporting student learning ........... 715 mirosław pawlak – review of keita kikuchi’s demotivation in second language acquisition: insights from japan ...................................... 721 reviewers for volume 7/2017 .......................................................... 727 notes to contributors .....................................................................731 565 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors adriana biedroń is professor of english at the faculty of philology, pomeranian university in słupsk, poland, and the faculty of philology, koszalin university of technology, koszalin, poland. she received her doctoral and postdoctoral degrees in applied linguistics from adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland. her main areas of interest are sla theory and research, individual differences in sla, in particular, foreign language aptitude, working memory, intelligence, personality factors and linguistic giftedness. her recent publications include “foreign language aptitude: yesterday, today and tomorrow” (co-authored with edward wen and peter skehan, 2016, language teaching) and “new conceptualizations of linguistic giftedness” (co-authored with mirosław pawlak, 2016, language teaching). contact details: faculty of philology, pomeranian university, ul. słowiańska 8, 76-200 słupsk, poland (adriana.biedron@apsl.edu.pl) vanessa de wilde is a phd student and teacher trainer of english at ghent university, belgium and head of the english section in the secondary education department at artevelde university college where she teaches english as a foreign language at various levels of proficiency, is involved in the guidance and coaching of student teachers and works on course development. her research interests are sla of young learners and language teaching methodology. she has given various workshops to teachers of foreign languages and has presented the results of her research at conferences. contact details: groot-brittanniëlaan 45, 9000 gent, belgium (vanessa.dewilde @ugent.be) june eyckmans is associate professor of applied linguistics at the department of translation, interpreting and communication of ghent university, belgium where she teaches courses in applied linguistics, research methodology and efl. her research interests center on second language acquisition research, with a 566 special focus on l2 vocabulary learning. she publishes on cognitive linguistic approaches to vocabulary learning and on assessment methodology in national and international journals, and she currently supervises research projects on individual difference variables, vocabulary learning and incidental language acquisition. she is often consulted by national and international organisations for the improvement of language assessment procedures. contact details: groot-brittanniëlaan 45, 9000 gent, belgium (june.eyckmans@ ugent.be) gabriella hild, phd, is senior lecturer at the department of languages for specific purposes, medical school, university of pécs, hungary. she teaches medical english to undergraduates and postgraduates and medical hungarian to foreign undergraduates. she received her phd degree in 2015. the title of her thesis was the assessment of young efl learners in the hungarian educational context. her research interests include the dynamic and diagnostic assessment of english as a second language. contact details: department of languages for specific purposes, medical school, university of pécs, szigeti út 12, 7624 pécs, hungary (gabriella.hild@aok.pte.hu) eva jakupčević is a phd student of fl education at the university of zagreb, croatia. currently working on her final thesis. she is also a practicing efl teacher working with children and adults. contact details: gunduliceva 50, 21000 split, croatia (ejakupcevic@ffst.hr) jill n. jones is currently a phd candidate in the higher education program at the university of virginia, curry school of education, charlottesville, va, usa and works at hanover research as a survey specialist. her research interests include effective pedagogical practices, student learning outcomes, and student/faculty professional development. contact details: 120 edgeview dr. #5519; broomfield, co, usa 80021 (jnj5ee@ virginia.edu) jarosław krajka is associate professor of applied linguistics and director of the institute of german studies and applied linguistics at maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin, poland. his major interests include computer-assisted language learning, computer-enhanced teacher training and multicultural aspects of language teaching. he has authored three monographs, and numerous articles and reviews. he is the founder and editor-in-chief of poland-based international journal teaching english with technology (http://www.tewtjournal.org/). 567 for more information and publications in english, see the profile page at academia (http://umcs-pl.academia.edu/jkrajka). contact details: plac marii curie-skłodowskiej 4a, 20-031 lublin, poland (jarek. krajka@wp.pl) fang-yu liao is a phd candidate in composition and tesol at indiana university of pennsylvania (iup), usa. she graduated from the ma tesol program at iup in 2012. currently, she is teaching liberal arts english composition courses at iup as a teaching associate while working on her dissertation about professional development in l2 creative writing pedagogy. besides that, her research interests are l2 poetry writing, multilingual writing, and translingual pedagogy. contact details: indiana university of pennsylvania, 22 regency square, indiana, pa 15701, usa (f.liao@iup.edu) mirosław pawlak, professor of english; faculty of philology, state university of applied sciences, konin, poland; department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts in kalisz, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland. he received his doctoral and post-doctoral degrees as well as his full professorship from adam mickiewicz university in poznań. his main areas of interest are sla theory and research, form-focused instruction, corrective feedback, classroom discourse, learner autonomy, learning strategies, grammar learning strategies, motivation, willingness to communicate and pronunciation teaching. his recent publications include the place of form-focused instruction in the foreign language classroom (2006, adam mickiewicz university press), production-oriented and comprehension-based grammar teaching in the foreign language classroom (with anna mystkowska-wiertelak, 2012, springer), error correction in the foreign language classroom: reconsidering the issues (2014, springer), applying cognitive grammar in the foreign language classroom: teaching english tense and aspect (with jakub bielak, 2013, springer), willingness to communicate in instructed second language acquisition: combining a macroand micro-perspective (with anna mystkowskawiertelak, 2017, multilingual matters), as well as several edited collections on learner autonomy, form-focused instruction, speaking and individual learner differences. mirosław pawlak is the editor-in-chief of the journals studies in second language learning and teaching (http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt), konin language studies (http://www.ksj.pwsz.konin.edu.pl/?lang=en), and the book series second language learning and teaching (http://www.springer.com/series/10129). contact details: department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, ul. nowy świat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (pawlakmi@ amu.edu.pl) 568 emily e. scida is professor of spanish and director of the spanish language program in the department of spanish, italian & portuguese at the university of virginia (uva), virginia, usa. her research interests include teacher education, learning technologies, e-portfolios, and contemplative pedagogies. emily has been the recipient of a number of grants and awards, including a 2014 contemplative sciences center grant, the 2011-2014 daniels family neh distinguished teaching professorship, a fall 2012 hybrid course challenge grant, learning technologies incubator grants, and a teaching + technology initiative fellowship. in 2011, she was inducted into the university academy of teaching at uva. contact details: university of virginia; department of spanish, italian, & portuguese; po box 400777; 444 new cabell hall; charlottesville, va, usa 229044777 (ees2n@virginia.edu) gloria vickov is associate professor of second language acquisition at the faculty of humanities and social sciences, university of split, croatia. her research interests include early efl learning, pragmatic and discourse competence in sla, intercultural learning, l1 culture in sla and l2 teacher education. she also lectures in the doctoral programme in fl education at the faculty of humanities and social sciences, university of zagreb, croatia. for more information see gloria’s profile at the website of the croatian scientific bibliography: http://bib.irb.hr/lista-radova?autor =270024&lang=en contact details: templarska 14, 21 000 split, croatia (gvickov@ffst.hr) katarzyna zychowicz is assistant professor in the department of english philology at pomeranian academy in słupsk, poland. her research interests include individual differences in second language acquisition, especially working memory, multiligualism, and interlanguage development. contact details: pomeranian university, ul. arciszewskiego 22a, 76-200 słupsk (katarzyna.zychowicz@apsl.edu.pl) 617 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (4). 2014. 617-635 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.4.3 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the impact of gender on attainment in learning english as a foreign language danuta główka higher vocational state school in leszno, poland danuta.glowka@pwsz.edu.pl abstract this study examined the impact of gender on students’ achievement in learning english as a for-eign language in secondary and higher vocational schools in poland, as well as teachers’ and stu-dents’ opinions concerning the importance of this influence. the collected data provided ample evidence that girls achieved significantly better results than boys. such results support the socio-linguistic finding that female students outperform males as they are more open to new linguistic forms in the target language and eradicate interlanguage forms that deviate from target lan-guage norms more readily than their male counterparts (ellis, 2012). however, these findings were not reflected in the opinions of the student and teacher participants. both parties held a strong conviction that gender played no major role in learning english. the article concludes by outlining some implications for educational policy makers and foreign language teachers. keywords: gender, attainment, learning english as a foreign language 1. introduction research into the relationship between second/foreign language learning and gender has witnessed a considerable change in the past three decades, as it has been informed by emerging conceptualizations of gender in language studies. early research focused on sex-based differences in women’s and men’s danuta główka 618 linguistic repertoire, viewing sex as a fixed, biopolar category which could be correlated with language and language learning. by contrast, later studies investigated the relationship between gender and speech patterns, defining gender as a dynamic characteristic grounded in social activities and contexts (cf. ellis, 2012; norton, 2000). the shift in perspective from dominance (lakoff, 1975) and difference (tannen, 1990) frameworks to social constructivist approaches (ehrlich, 1997; pavlenko & piller, 2008) has prompted alternative accounts of differences in learners’ language gains between the two gender groups. the basic assumption in both the dominance and difference theories is that women and men constitute static and internally-homogeneous groups and the main aim of researchers has been to identify and explain gender-specific features in their linguistic repertoire (cf. ehrlich, 2007; pavlenko & piller, 2008). however, the two models offered different explanations for these differences. in the dominance approach theorized by lakoff (1975), variability characterizing men’s and women’s linguistic practices was argued to reflect women’s subordinate status with respect to men. lakoff (1975) argued that linguistic forms typical of women’s speech such as hedges, hypercorrect grammar, super-polite forms, question intonation in declarative contexts, or question tags exemplify the tentative and powerless nature of women’s language, thus mirroring social hierarchies. popular though lakoff’s (1975) theory was, it found no empirical justification in the studies conducted to test its claims (coates, 1986). yet, it inspired further research into gender differences in language (e.g., coates, 1986; trudgill, 1983). less radical in nature than dominance theory, difference theory stated that women and men belong to different but equal cultures, which develop distinct genderlects as a result of socialization in the same-gender peer-groups (pavlenko & piller, 2008). this framework, popularized by tannen (1990), helped to explain instances of language change spearheaded by women as rooted in their more frequent usage of incoming and standard forms than that of men (labov, 1991; trudgill, 1983). these sociolinguistic conclusions led second/foreign language researchers to posit that women might be better than men at learning languages as they are more open to novel structures in the target language and eradicate the incorrect forms in their interlanguage more readily (ellis, 2012). these hypotheses were confirmed in a longitudinal study conducted by burstall (1975), who examined the overall achievement of 6,000 8-year-old british students of french. the results of the study showed unambiguously that girls outperformed boys. similarly, in boyle’s (1987) study of chinese students in hong kong, females earned significantly higher mean scores on general proficiency tests in english as a foreign language than did males. more recent studies yielded similar results the impact of gender on attainment in learning english as a foreign language 619 (e.g., carr & pauwels, 2006; chavez, 2001; field, 2000; murphy, 2010). for example, murphy (2010, p. 82) carried out a study in second-level irish schools between 2003 and 2007 and reported that girls outperformed boys significantly in the achievement of higher grades (a, b, and c) in the leaving certificate examination (lce) higher level of french (5.4% of girls over boys), german (6.4%), and spanish (4.3%). this consistent trend was also detected at the post-primary level. a possible explanation for the superiority of female learners is that girls show a higher level of attribution than boys. michońska-stadnik (2004) found that female students displayed a consistently higher level of internal attribution (ability, effort), and the girls in the researched group were more successful learners. michońska-stadnik’s (2004) findings echo those of earlier research (e.g., gardner & lambert, 1972; spolsky, 1989), which reported that female learners manifested stronger motivation to learn the target language and were more positively disposed towards it. other studies, however, produced evidence indicating either no significant differences in overall language achievement between female and male learners, or that male learners are better than female learners at specific language skills. bacon’s (1992) study illustrates this point, as its results revealed no significant gender differences in listening tasks. the same results were obtained in boyle’s (1987) study, in which male learners outperformed female learners on listening vocabulary tests. these conflicting outcomes demonstrated that dominance and difference theories failed to provide a satisfactory account of male/female differences in language use and learning. consequently, these essentialised “gender polarities” (ehrlich, 2007) were abandoned in favor of social constructionist approaches to language and gender, which emphasized the emerging and contextspecific nature of the differences. commenting on the shift in the conceptualization of gender, pavlenko and piller (2008, p. 58) convincingly argued that gender is “a socially constructed and dynamic system of power relations and discursive practices, rather than an intrinsic property of particular individuals,” and further explained that women and men are no longer seen as uniform natural categories where all members have common behavioral traits. rather, these labels function as discursive categories imposed by society on individuals through a variety of gendering practices and accompanying ideologies about ‘normative’ ways of being a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’. this resulted in the assumption that if these practices are not fixed characteristics but rather social and cultural constructs indirectly linked with gender, individuals may create their gendered identities in different ways. consequently, gendered danuta główka 620 linguistic behavior may differ within individuals of the same sex in a given context (e.g., community, culture; cf. ehrlich, 2008; pavlenko & piller, 2008). second/foreign language researchers adopted this line of reasoning assuming that there might be differences in learning success within gender groups depending on the particular social situation. therefore, research has concentrated on what individuals do, not on who they are (ehrlich, 2008). some studies (e.g., norton, 2000; norton, harper, & burnaby, 1993), for example, demonstrated that the level of language proficiency among immigrant women learning english in canada was generally poorer than that of men because of women’s restricted access to interactional and educational opportunities. the women came from traditionally patriarchal families and faced a number of gate-keeping practices that often limited their access to english. some women were reported to avoid attending second language courses due to their family responsibilities, lack of prior education, and the fact that their husbands disapproved of their wives being more educated (norton et al., 1993). the study showed that women’s second language linguistic repertoire reflected their engagement in a complex set of social practices rather than their intrinsic properties. apart from community power relations, other factors reported in the literature, such as group ideologies or stereotypical perceptions of some foreign languages, may affect the level of motivation to learn them. the decline in motivation to learn foreign languages among adolescent males as they progressed through the school system was reported by williams, burden, and lavvers (2002), with this common tendency attributed to a general “switching off” from school-based learning. male students were also reported to disrespect french, taught in irish schools as a compulsory foreign language, as it was associated with a feminine subject and learning it clashed with the socio-cultural peer pressure among boys to conform to behaviors defined as masculine (field, 2000). in contrast, the preference to learn german over french among irish male students was related to “masculine” images of war or football they had of that language (field, 2000; williams et al., 2002). the above discussion shows that the attempts to explain the influence of gender on learning a second/foreign language have switched in perspective from essentialism to social constructionism. essentialists attempted to assess the extent to which linguistic differences in gender performance result from the static and fixed character of the two groups. however, research based on this assumption failed to provide data for consistent conclusions. these unsatisfactory results triggered new research based on the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of gender differences. its results have suggested that language-learning trajectories of individuals are shaped by gendered social practices as well as culture-specific language ideologies, rather than the putative essence of femininity the impact of gender on attainment in learning english as a foreign language 621 or masculinity. this reconceptualization seems beneficial as it accounts for the complex nature of the relationship and thus promises more adequate conclusions for second/foreign language theoreticians and practitioners (cf. dörnyei, 2009). however, research based on structuralist views cannot be discarded, for it focuses on learning rather than learning opportunities and emphasizes that learning must involve the utilization of linguistic resources (ellis, 2012). moreover, by focusing on defining linguistic repertoire of the two groups of speakers this approach provides a macro-analytic perspective. another reason why essentialism cannot be neglected is that female and male speakers as social actors themselves use specific linguistic forms to organize their identities. therefore, it would be theoretically naive to assume that some linguistic practices associated by researchers with boys or girls are available to both groups to the same extent. such an assertion would ignore the existence of socially constructed boundaries which assign meaning to linguistic practice. thus, speakers in different social positions have differential access to linguistic resources and therefore some degree of linguistic ownership should be acknowledged (bucholtz & hall, 2004). that said, it is important to remember that research based on essentialism should not be abandoned as it may complement conclusions drawn from social constructivists’ studies. in accord with the view advocating the importance of the traditional perspective, this paper presents the results of a study investigating the impact of gender on students’ achievement in learning english as a foreign language in secondary and higher vocational schools in poland, as well as teachers’ and students’ opinions concerning the importance of this influence. the presented results constitute a part of large-scale research exploring the relationship between students’ social characteristics and attainment in learning english as a foreign language. this account focuses on the statistical rather than qualitative analysis of the study. this perspective was taken due to the relatively little data obtained from the questionnaires and interviews, which resulted from the fact that the respondents viewed gender as a weak predictor of students’ success or failure in learning a foreign language in comparison with the other social factors that were investigated. 2. method 2.1. participants the subject pool comprised 549 students of english from polish state schools and 64 foreign language teachers working in various locations within the country in a range of different teaching contexts. the student group consisted of: (a) 458 learners of english as a foreign language, attending the 0 (language profile), danuta główka 622 first, second, and third (different profiles) grades of state high schools; (b) 66 second year tourism majors from a state higher school of vocational education; and (c) 25 second and third year english majors from a teacher training college. group 1 and 2 provided data analyzed quantitatively, whereas group 3 qualitatively (the interview). it should be noted that the high school and vocation college sample was selected by using random sampling (srs; dörnyei, 2009), which involved choosing members of the population1 in an arbitrary way, whereas the college students were the researcher’s students who had taken part in the pilot questionnaire and expressed their willingness to elaborate on their experience in the form of an interview. the fact that they had taken part in the pilot study was crucial in selecting them for the interviews for two reasons. first, they were familiar with the procedure, which increased their confidence and trust during the interview. second, asking them the same questions at different times (time triangulation) increased the reliability of the research. moreover, as teacher trainees, the students had already had some teaching experience and therefore were requested to supplement their personal accounts with observations as teachers. in the teacher group, 23 participants were the researcher’s colleagues who agreed to fill in the questionnaires and their colleagues whom they asked to take part in the study. it is worth mentioning that all of them expressed interest in or even enthusiasm about the study, which most likely motivated them to provide reliable data. the remaining 41 subjects were participants of an annual national conference for foreign language teachers. this event was selected due to the fact that teachers who take part in conferences are used to sharing their teaching experiences with others; consequently, they were expected to be willing to fill in questionnaires. the data obtained from the teacher questionnaire revealed that among the participating foreign language teachers there were 17 university teachers, 4 vocational college teachers, 25 teacher training college teachers, 11 high school teachers, and 1 junior high school teacher (6 with missing school level data). it should be noted that the average age of the teachers was 37.6, which might be indicative of the fact that they might have had a considerable amount of teaching experience. the teachers’ gender was not considered, as it was of no relevance to the purpose of the present research. as regards the overall language proficiency level of the student group, it was established on the basis of the records of the teacher who had worked with the learners on a regular basis in the form of an end-of-semester-grade added by the teacher to the student questionnaire once it had been completed. judging by the grades, the students were generally good, as indicated by the grade 1 the population of high school learners and vocational college students in poland in the school year 2008/2009 was about 817 thousand (rocznik statystyczny, 2009). the impact of gender on attainment in learning english as a foreign language 623 point average which amounted to 3.93 for high school students and 3.53 for state higher school of vocational education students. it should be noted that the schools differed in the number of instruction hours of english per week. this, however, was not taken into account as it was of no relevance to the purpose of the research. when it comes to the social diversity of the student participants, such was determined on the basis of the data obtained by the student questionnaire. the high school group consisted of 259 female students (56.5%) and 190 male students (41.5%).2 similar in terms of gender breakdown, the state higher school of vocational education group comprised 45 female students (68.2%) and 21 male students (31%). when it comes to age, most of the high school learners were between 16 and 18 years old (163 17-year-olds, 150 16-year-olds, 105 18year-olds, which constituted 29%, 32% and 22.9% of the group, respectively), and 61 learners were 15 years old (13.3%). the youngest learner was 14 (0.2%) and the oldest learner was 20 (0.2%). among the state higher school of vocational education students 29 were 20 years old (43%), 24 were 21 (36.4%), 8 were 22 (12.1%), 2 were 19 (3.0%), and one was 23 (1.3%). 2.2. instruments the instruments used to gather the data included a student self-report questionnaire, a teacher self-report questionnaire, and audio recordings of interviews with teacher trainees. the aim of the student questionnaire was threefold. firstly, it was to reveal information concerning the participants’ social characteristics, such as, for example, age, gender, or family background. secondly, it was to obtain information regarding their opinions about the influence of gender and other characteristics on learning english in the form of 5-point likert scale statements such as this one: “gender has an influence on foreign language learning success.” the respondents were asked to indicate the extent to which they agree or disagree with the statements by circling one of the responses. each response option was assigned a number: 5 = strongly agree, 4 = agree, 3 = no opinion, 2 = disagree, 1 = strongly disagree. this part also consisted of nine rank-ordering items focusing on the importance of gender and other social factors (e.g., place of residence, parents’ education, family income) in language learning. the learners were asked to put them in a sequential arrangement in order to obtain data reflecting their opinion as to what the most and least important social factors in learning 2 if the overall percentage of the data is less than 100, it indicates that the difference results from the missing data. danuta główka 624 a foreign language were. thirdly, the questionnaire was used to determine each participant’s language proficiency level in the form of an end-of-semester grade given by the teacher. it contained a space where the teacher was asked to evaluate the student’s progress in the form of an end-of-semester grade, expressed on a scale from 1 to 6 (1 was the lowest mark, 6 was the highest mark), once the test had been completed. the teacher questionnaire was intended to obtain information concerning the teachers’ opinions about the influence of gender and students’ other social characteristics on learning english. it was composed of four parts. in the first part the teachers were queried regarding their age and the kind of school they worked in. the second and the third part of the teacher questionnaire were the same as the corresponding parts of the student questionnaire. in the fourth part, the subjects were expected to give a short account of an event in their teaching career in which the students’ social factors influenced language teaching outcomes. in this way, they were expected to recall, consider and perhaps evaluate such events on the basis of observation, knowledge of learners and, first of all, teaching experience. as regards the teacher trainee interviews, the participants were asked whether gender and other social factors (e.g., place of residence, parents’ education, family financial status, etc.) influence learning english. it should be mentioned that a semi-structured, single session, and individual interview was selected because of its flexibility. on the one hand, it had a formalized character with a predetermined question to be asked during the interview. on the other hand, the semi-formal character of the event allowed the researcher to ask for explanations or encourage the interviewees to elaborate on some issues to benefit from its exploratory character (dörnyei, 2009, p. 218). the additional questions asked during the interview included, for example: “i do not quite understand what you mean by saying that girls are sometimes better at learning languages, can you explain?” 2.3. data analysis to analyze the data, a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods were used. the numerical data were analyzed in two ways. first, descriptive statistics were calculated to bring into focus general tendencies in the data. second, the analysis of variance (anova) procedure was employed to determine the significance of the differences in means between the groups. anova was selected as the adequate procedure due to the fact that the analysis of gender was part of a larger project involving variables with more than two values (there were more than two groups to compare). it should also be noted that although the impact of gender on attainment in learning english as a foreign language 625 in the case of gender there were only two groups to compare, anova was also applied instead of t-test statistics for practical reasons.3 additionally, the strength of association was indicated by computing the effect size if a result turned out to be statistically significant (dörnyei, 2009, p. 211). to ascertain whether statistically significant differences were present between students’ and teachers’ opinions concerning the influence of gender and the other social characteristics on language proficiency level, anova procedures were performed after descriptive analysis was conducted. in addition, pearson correlation coefficients were calculated to investigate the relationship between student and teacher rank evaluations of the importance of the influence of gender and other social characteristics on language proficiency. the statistical computations were done by means of the software tool spss (the statistical package for the social sciences), version 17. the data which emerged from the teacher trainee interviews and teacher accounts were subjected to qualitative analysis via constant comparison method and the three-level coding system (open, axial, selective) based on grounded theory. to enhance the trustworthiness of the study, both quantitative and qualitative data were subjected to some statistical procedures and methodological strategies. to assure the legitimization of quantitative outcomes, the split-half analyses were used. the reliability of students’ and teachers’ opinion questionnaires used in the research was verified by means of the split-half method (brown & rogers, 2009). when it comes to qualitative data, they were validated by employing triangulation techniques such as methodological triangulation (two data-gathering procedures, questionnaires and interviews, were used) and time triangulation (the conclusions were based on the questionnaires from the pilot study, march 2008, and the interviews, march 2009) 3. results 3.1. quantitative results as demonstrated in table 1, a one-way analysis of variance (one-way anova) indicated that there was a significant difference in achievement between female students (m = 3.99, sd = .97) and male students (m = 3.71, sd = 1.10), f(1, 506) = 9.26, p < .002. the effect size was small (η2 = .02).4 given these results, 3 according to dörnyei (2009, p. 218), anova can be used with two groups, in which case the result will be the same as the corresponding t test. 4 according to dörnyei (2009, p. 217), the accepted interpretation of η2 is: .01 = small effect, .06 = moderate effect, and .14 = large effect. danuta główka 626 the null hypothesis that there is no statistically significant relationship between students’ gender and their progress in foreign language learning was rejected. table 1 descriptive statistics and anova for male versus female students’ achievement in english (grade) descriptive statistics gender m n sd male 3.7115 208 1.10378 female 3.9933 300 .96941 total 3.8780 508 1.03483 anova ss df ms f p grade in english * gender between groups (combined) 9.754 1 9.754 9.257 .002 within groups 533.179 506 1.054 total 542.933 507 measures of association η η2 grade in english * gender .134 .018 when it comes to students’ responses to likert-scale items, as shown in table 2, the average student rating was the highest for language practice in a country where the target language is spoken (m = 4.49, sd =.80) and the lowest for gender (m = 1.69, sd = 1.00), indicating the participants’ strong conviction that language practice abroad has an influence on students’ achievement, whereas gender plays no role in it. the results were further verified by student rank evaluation of the social factors with reference to their influence on foreign language success, as demonstrated in table 3. the numbers show that, in the opinion of most students (60%), language practice in the target language country is the most important social factor in foreign language learning success; and less than 10% of the respondents viewed the other factors as the most important ones. gender is seen by most students (64%) as the least important social factor in language attainment and, in the opinion of less than 11% of the respondents, the remaining factors are the least important in shaping the process. the impact of gender on attainment in learning english as a foreign language 627 table 2 likert scale descriptive statistics for students’ opinions concerning the influence of students’ social characteristics on language attainment social factors m mdn sd place of residence (town/village) 3.3461 4 1.255 living conditions (house/flat) 3.3550 4 1.127 parents’ attitude towards foreign language learning 3.5744 4 1.170 family financial status 3.4218 4 1.147 parents’ occupation 2.3817 2 1.181 parents’ education 2.5201 2 1.215 gender 1.6897 1 .997 access to the internet 3.7252 4 1.096 language practice abroad 4.4943 5 .796 table 3 student rank evaluation of the importance of students’ social characteristics for language attainment social factor % marking the factor as the most important social factor % marking the factor as the least important language practice abroad 60.04 gender 64.47 family financial status 9.85 place of residence 10.87 place of residence 6.95 parents’ occupation 6.60 parents’ attitude 6.37 parents’ education 5.63 access to the internet 5.79 parents’ attitude 3.11 living conditions 3.86 family financial status 2.91 parents’ education 3.09 language practice abroad 2.72 gender 2.12 living conditions 2.33 parents’ occupation 1.93 access to the internet 1.36 table 4 shows descriptive statistics for the likert scale teachers’ opinions concerning the influence of gender and other students’ social characteristics on language attainment. as was the case with the average students rating, the average teacher rating was the highest for language practice in a country where the target language is spoken (m = 4.50, sd = .85) and the lowest for gender (m = 2.46. sd = 1.30), indicating the teachers’ strong conviction that language practice abroad has a strong influence on students’ achievement, whereas gender plays no role in it. danuta główka 628 table 4 likert scale descriptive statistics for teachers’ opinions concerning the influence of students’ social characteristics on language attainment social factors m mdn sd place of residence (town/village) 3.8033 4 1.046 living conditions (house/flat) 3.5833 4 1.062 parents’ attitude towards foreign language learning 4.2131 4 1.018 family financial status 3.9672 4 .983 parents’ occupation 3.2295 3 1.371 parents’ education 3.6557 4 1.237 gender 2.4590 2 1.298 access to the internet 3.5246 4 1.260 language practice abroad 4.5000 5 .854 table 5 teacher rank evaluation of the importance of students’ social characteristics for language attainment social factor % marking the factor as the most important social factor % marking the factor as the least important language practice abroad 32.20 gender 64.47 parents’ attitude 25.42 parents’ occupation 10.87 living conditions 10.17 access to the internet 6.60 parents’ education 8.47 place of residence 5.63 place of residence 8.47 living conditions 3.11 access to the internet 6.78 language practice abroad 2.91 family financial status 6.78 parents’ education 2.72 parents’ occupation 1.69 family financial status 2.33 gender 0.00 parents’ attitude 1.36 the results concerning teachers’ opinions were further verified by teacher rank evaluation of the social factors with reference to their influence on foreign language success, as presented in table 5. the numbers indicate that next to language practice in the target language country (32% of the teachers), parents’ attitude (25% of the teachers) was seen as the most important social factor in foreign language learning success. less than 11% of the respondents saw all the other factors as the most important ones. gender was seen by most teachers (52%) as the least important social factor in language attainment and, in the opinion of less than 11% of the respondents, the remaining factors were the least important in shaping the process. similarly to the student group, the teachers were consistent in their opinions. their answers to both likert-scale items and rank-ordering questions showed that the strongest and the weakest the impact of gender on attainment in learning english as a foreign language 629 predictors of success in learning a foreign language were language practice abroad and gender, respectively. in order to identify significant differences between student and teacher means (sm, student mean; tm, teacher mean), one-way anova tests were performed. significant differences were detected at the p < .05 level in the case of six of the nine factors tested. these factors were: place of residence (sm = 3.35, tm = 3.80), parents’ attitude (sm = 3.57, tm = 4.21), family financial status (sm = 3.42, tm = 3.97), parents’ occupation (sm = 2.38, tm = 3.23), parents’ education (sm = 2.52, tm = 3.66), and gender (sm = 1.69, tm = 2.46). these findings demonstrate that the teacher means concerning family characteristics were higher than the student means, which shows that teachers were significantly more likely to agree that these factors influence language attainment. the differences in student and teacher opinions as to which factors they found most important and least important in learning a foreign language were established on the basis of the rank evaluations presented in tables 3 and 5. for easy comparison the same data are juxtaposed in table 6. the high values of pearson coefficients for student and teacher opinions concerning the most important (.77) and the least important (.98) factors in language attainment confirm that, generally, the groups did not differ significantly in their opinions. table 6 student and teacher rank evaluation of most important and least important student characteristics in language attainment social factor % marking the factor as the most important social factor % marking the factor as the least important students teachers students teachers place of residence 6.95 8.47 place of residence 10.87 8.62 living conditions 3.86 10.17 living conditions 2.33 6.90 parents’ attitude 6.37 25.42 parents’ attitude 3.11 1.72 family financial status 9.85 6.78 family financial status 2.91 3.45 parents’ occupation 1.93 1.69 parents’ occupation 6.60 10.34 parents’ education 3.09 8.47 parents’ education 5.63 3.45 gender 2.12 0.00 gender 64.47 51.72 access to the internet 5.79 6.78 access to the internet 1.36 8.62 language practice abroad 60.04 32.20 language practice abroad 2.72 5.17 pearson’s coefficient .7688 pearson’s coefficient .9822 danuta główka 630 3.2. qualitative results the present subsection demonstrates the results of the data obtained from the student interviews and teacher questionnaires. the data were subjected to qualitative analysis which was executed by constant comparative method and coding so as to provide information concerning students’ and teachers’ opinions on the relationship between gender and learning outcomes. the multiple readings of students’ and teachers’ interview responses and categorization of each meaningful word, sentence or phrase into a unit became the basis for constructing a set of recurring themes representing students’ opinions about the issue investigated. for most student respondents, gender has no impact on learning languages. they ascribe success in foreign language learning to personality, age and intelligence rather than sex differences, as can be seen from the extracts presented below: girls are said to be better at learning foreign languages. i don’t know what makes them better. they might be more open, willing to talk and make friends, speak with foreigners, but apart from that i don’t think there are any other reasons. boys feel the need to learn foreign languages at different age than girls, but i think it [gender] has no major impact. some participants said that girls are more diligent, hard-working and better organized than boys and that is why they often get better results. a few interviewees pointed out that boys are often better at passive language skills, such as listening. the general conclusions were, however, usually quite vague, based on general opinions. they often used expressions like: “it is said,” “it is generally stated,” “it’s hard to say,” or “girls seem to be . . .” all of them were of the opinion that there are more girls in language classes and female language teachers, but the most common explanation for this observation was that “there must be something to it.” the analyses of teachers’ questionnaires revealed that gender was not mentioned in any of the reports of the events showing the influence of students’ social characteristics on attainment. the absence of responses concerning gender might be due to general unwillingness to attribute success or failure in school to sex differences. in the culture that advocates political correctness and favours equal opportunity, teachers may find it difficult to discuss gender differences in learning a foreign language without entering the touchy area of sexism. what is more, they might not want to perpetuate gender-stereotyped attributions to success and failure in achievement and relay gendered expectations to students. this lack of data may also result from the nature of the openended questions, in which the respondents were not directly encouraged to refer to gender, as was the case with the interview. the impact of gender on attainment in learning english as a foreign language 631 4. discussion the statistical analysis of the data presented above revealed that girls achieved significantly better results than boys. this finding is consistent with early research conducted by gardner and lambert (1972), burstall (1975), boyle (1987), spolsky (1989), and murphy (2010), in which girls achieved higher overall means on second /foreign language proficiency tests than did boys. with regard to more recent studies, the quantitative part of the present study generally corroborates the findings of, for example, field (2001), chavez (2001), carr and pauwels (2006), michońska-stadnik (2006), and murphy (2010). all of these studies revealed better performance of female students on tests measuring second/foreign language proficiency. the results of this study can be accounted for by evidence coming from sociolinguistics. it should be noted that, although conclusions drawn by sociolinguists were based on first language data, it is justifiable to draw parallels between first language and second/foreign language acquisition patterns as considerable empirical evidence has shown prominent similarities between the ways the two systems are acquired (ellis, 2012). upon examining gender-based differences in native-speaker speech, sociolinguists (e.g., coates, 1986; labov, 1991; lakoff, 1975; tannen, 1996; trudgill, 1983) concluded that women are more open to new, incoming forms and, at the same time, use a higher frequency of standard or prestigious forms than do men. adapting these conclusions to foreign language learning, it can be hypothesized that female learners reject interlanguage forms that are different from targetlanguage norms, and incorporate new linguistic forms in the foreign/second language input more readily than do men (ellis, 2012). taking into account these gender specific linguistic characteristics, it is evident that the education system is more suited for girls in the way that it approaches teaching in general, as well as in teaching foreign languages (cf. chavez, 2001; murphy, 2010). for example, all official foreign language tests are based on standard varieties, and, in the case of english, for example, it is either standard british english or general american english. this school objective definitely reflects girls’ linguistic preferences and therefore might work to their advantage. moreover, male speakers are more likely to swear or employ slang expressions in their speech. school curricula for foreign languages favor standard languages as the most useful and commonly used varieties of a given language, and therefore they can be said to favor girls. another possible explanation for the fact that female students outperform male students in learning a foreign language might be gender-specific ideologies (cf. murphy, 2010; pavlenko & piller, 2008). men’s macho culture, as reflected in, for example, attaching little value to such skills as personal expression (lakoff, 1975; tannen, 1990), might danuta główka 632 affect boys’ performance in school in that they would be reluctant to take part in oral activities or express their thoughts in writing tasks, and consequently miss a chance to practice their linguistic skills. female culture, on the other hand, seems to lend itself more readily to co-operation and submission (lakoff, 1975; tannen, 1990), which might result in more efficient and effective learning of girls. however, the numerical findings were not reflected in the opinions of the student and teacher participants. both parties held a strong conviction that gender played no major role in learning english. moreover, they did not differ significantly in their opinions in ranking most/least significant social factors in learning the target language. both groups were of the opinion that language practice abroad was the most important factor, whereas gender was the least important. as mentioned earlier, the discrepancy between the quantitalive and qualitative findings of the study may result from the fact that in the qualitative part (the open questions and the interwievs) the respondents either avoided giving definite answers or, as in the case of teachers, refrained from addressing the question altogether. however, more definite conclusions will only be possible if further research is conducted. 5. conclusion the results of the study provide a basis for certain general implications for educational policy-makers and foreign language teachers. with respect to policy makers, the results indicate that there is a need to officially recognize the gendered differences in foreign language learning by, for example, including specific testing procedures which would result in regular monitoring of gender differences in achievement and introducing new teaching and learning styles that would motivate boys to learn languages. this is especially important in the light of the fact that education system should create equal opportunities for each individual (oecd, 2009). as to the potential benefit to foreign language teachers, the results of the study serve to deepen teachers’ understanding of classroom events as looking at them through social lenses makes language educators aware that the behavioral and classroom management problems they face may be related to gender as much as other factors, for example, cognitive abilities. thus, the findings of the study might provide a basis for a critical evaluation of second/foreign language curricula, helping to formulate teaching goals and to select suitable teaching methods. specifically, teachers may diminish the gender gap by employing teaching strategies which would improve the academic performance of boys. moreover, educators may try to increase motivation, confidence and self-esteem among boys, help boys to organize their work more the impact of gender on attainment in learning english as a foreign language 633 effectively, change boys’ perception regarding “feminine” subject such as english, challenge the general anti-learning attitude towards learning among boys, or simply use texts in which sub-standard expressions or examples relevant to boys’ ideologies are used. with regard to second/foreign language research, the outcomes of the research project reported in this article offer a window into the relationship between students’ social characteristics and success in learning a foreign language, illuminating gender as the social factor that significantly influences attainment in language learning. the results show that social variables should not be neglected in exploring individual dimensions in second/foreign language learning. what is more, the conclusions of the study may constitute a basis for addressing additional research questions, such as, for example: how does gender impact achievement? or how does gender influence other learner characteristics, for example, motivation or learning strategies? these are topics for future inquiry. danuta główka 634 references bacon, s. m. 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(pp. 57-69). new york: springer. rocznik statystyczny 2011 [2011 statistical yearbook of the republic of poland] (2011). retrieved from www.stat.gov.pl/gus/roczniki_plk_html.htm spolsky, b. (1989). conditions for second language learning. oxford: oxford university press. tannen, d. (1990). you just don't understand. women and men in conversation. new york: ballantine. trudgill, p. (1983). sociolinguistics. an introduction to language and society (revised edition). harmondsworth: penguin. williams, m., burden, b., & lavvers, u. (2002). french is the language of love and stuff: student perception of issues related to motivation in learning a foreign language. british educational research journal, 28, 503-528. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: achilleas kostoulas (university of manchester, uk) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (pedagogical university of kraków, poland) vol. 9 no. 1 march 2019 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) maria dakowska (university of warsaw, poland) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2019 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: jakub bielak achilleas kostoulas mariusz kruk aleksandra wach © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: jakub bielak, melanie ellis, achilleas kostoulas, mariusz kruk, aleksandra wach cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · scopus · web of science emerging sources citation index (esci) · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the clarivate analytics (formerly thomson reuters) master journal list. special issue: language learning experience: the neglected element in l2 motivation research guest editors: kata csizér csaba kálmán studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 9, number 1, march 2019 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ....................................................................... 9 editorial .......................................................................................... 13 articles: zoltán dörnyei – towards a better understanding of the l2 learning experience, the cinderella of the l2 motivational self system ......... 19 alastair henry, cecilia thorsen – weaving webs of connection: empathy, perspective taking, and students’ motivation ................................... 31 liana maria pavelescu – motivation and emotion in the efl learning experience of romanian adolescent students: two contrasting cases ..... 55 phil hiver, gabriel obando, yuan sang, somayeh tahmouresi, ashlee zhou, yang zhou – reframing the l2 learning experience as narrative reconstructions of classroom learning .............................................. 83 xujia du – the impact of semester-abroad experiences on post-sojourn l2 motivation................................................................................... 117 keita kikuchi – motivation and demotivation over two years: a case study of english language learners in japan ............................................. 157 julian pigott – anagnorisis and narrative incorporation: how significant incidents affect language-learning behavior .................................. 177 nigel gearing – korean language learning demotivation among efl instructors in south korea ............................................................... 199 kata csizér, csaba kálmán – a study of retrospective and concurrent foreign language learning experiences: a comparative interview study in hungary ...225 notes to contributors .....................................................................247 9 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors kata csizér, phd, works at the department of english applied linguistics, school of english and american studies, eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary. her main field of research interest is the socio psychological aspects of second language learning and teaching as well as second and foreign language motivation. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1755-8142 contact details: department of english applied linguistics, school of english and american studies, eötvös loránd university, rákóczi út 5, 1088 budapest, hungary (weinkata@yahoo.com) zoltán dörnyei is professor of psycholinguistics at the school of english, university of nottingham, uk. he has published extensively on various aspects of language learner characteristics and second language acquisition, and he is the author of over 25 books, including the psychology of the language learner revisited (2015, routledge, with s. ryan) and motivational currents in language learning: frameworks for focused interventions (2016, routledge, with a. henry and c. muir). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7820-1254 contact details: school of english, university of nottingham, university park, nottingham, ng7 2rd, united kingdom (zoltan.dornyei@nottingham.ac.uk) xujia du is a researcher in the school of foreign studies at shanghai university of finance and economics. she recently finished her phd studies at the chinese university of hong kong. her research interests include internationalization and study abroad, l2 motivation, identity, complexity theories, qualitative and mixed methods research. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5485-7283 contact details: red tile building 617, shanghai university of finance and economics, no. 777 guoding road, yangpu district, shanghai, pr china (du.xujia@hotmail.com) 10 nigel gearing has a phd in applied linguistics from macquarie university, sydney, australia. his research interests include factors that affect the motivation of individuals to acquire second and additional languages in a globalizing world. he is currently a research assistant at macquarie university, compiling the findings of the research project entitled multilingual sydney: whose sydney? whose multilingualism? orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1520-7461 contact details: department of linguistics, second way, macquarie university, north ryde, sydney, nsw 2109, australia (nigelgear62@gmail.com) alastair henry is professor of language education at university west, sweden. his research focuses on the psychology of language learning and teaching. with zoltán dörnyei and peter macintrye he is the co-editor of motivational dynamics in language learning (2015, multilingual matters), and with martin lamb, kata csizér and stephen ryan, he is a co-editor of the palgrave macmillan handbook of motivation for language learning (2019, palgrave macmillan). with zoltán dörnyei and christine muir, he co-wrote motivational currents in language learning: frameworks for focused interventions (2016, routledge). his work has appeared in journals such as applied linguistics, language learning and modern language journal. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7789-9032 contact details: university west, gustava melins, gata 2, 461 32 trollhättan, sweden (alastair.henry@hv.se) phil hiver holds a phd from the university of nottingham. he is assistant professor of foreign and second language education at florida state university, usa. his published research focuses on psycho-social factors in instructed language learning and language teaching, and on the contribution of complexity theory to second language development and second language research methods. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2004-7960 contact details: g128 stone building, college of education, florida state university, tallahassee, fl, 32306, usa (phiver@fsu.edu) csaba kálmán, phd, works at the department of english applied linguistics, school of english and american studies, at eötvös university, budapest, hungary. his research interests include second and foreign language motivation, adult education, and corporate language education. he has been running his own business offering a variety of corporate language training and skills courses for over two decades, and has extensive experience as a language teacher and trainer in corporate contexts. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4798-8637 11 contact details: department of english applied linguistics, school of english and american studies, eötvös loránd university, rákóczi út 5, 1088 budapest, hungary (csabakalman73@gmail.com) keita kikuchi is professor at kanagawa university, japan. he holds an edd from temple university and an ma in esl from the university of hawai’i at manoa, usa. his research interests include curriculum development and second language acquisition, especially individual differences. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0328-5331 contact details: faculty of foreign languages, kanagawa university, 3-27-1 rokkakubashi, kanagawa-ku, yokohama-shi, kanagawa 221-8686, japan (keita@kan agawa-u.ac.jp) gabriel obando is associate professor at the linguistics and languages department at universidad de nariño, colombia. he is pursuing a phd in foreign and second language education at florida state university, usa. his research interests include tblt from a complexity theory perspective, student wellbeing and learning experiences. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6121-9290 contact details: g128 stone building, college of education, florida state university, tallahassee, fl, 32306, usa (gvo16b@my.fsu.edu) liana maria pavelescu is an esol teacher at guildford college, uk. she holds a phd in language teaching from birkbeck, university of london, uk. her main research interests are emotion and motivation in foreign language learning, the psychology of language learning, and professional development in foreign language teaching. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1564-9139 contact details: guildford college, stoke road, guildford, surrey, gu1 1ez, uk (lpavelescu@guildford.ac.uk) julian pigott received his phd in applied linguistics from the university of warwick, uk in 2016. he lives and teaches in kyoto, japan. his theoretical interests include language learning motivation, educational philosophy and educational policy. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2073-7475 contact details: department of global studies, ryukoku university, 67 tsukamotocho, fukakusa, fushimi-ku, kyoto, japan. 612-8577 (pigott@world.ryukoku.ac.jp) yuan sang is a doctoral student of foreign and second language education at florida state university, usa. his research interests are on the language socialization of 12 chinese students learning english as an l2 and on the contribution of language socialization to l2 instruction and english teacher education. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2889-1223 contact details: g128 stone building, college of education, florida state university, tallahassee, fl, 32306, usa (ys13f@my.fsu.edu) somayeh tahmouresi is a doctoral student in foreign and second language education at florida state university, usa. her areas of research interest include instructed sla, individual differences such as l2 motivation and l2 writing. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4505-6652 contact details: g128 stone building, college of education, florida state university, tallahassee, fl, 32306, usa (st17@my.fsu.edu) cecilia thorsen is senior lecturer in education at university west, sweden. alongside work on language learning psychology, her research focuses on educational attainment, student resilience, and assessment practices. in addition to a number of sla journals, her work has appeared in british journal of educational psychology, educational research and evaluation, and scandinavian journal of educational research. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7751-3942 contact details: university west, gustava melins, gata 2, 461 32 trollhättan, sweden (cecilia.thorsen@hv.se) ashlee zhou is a doctoral student in foreign and second language education at florida state university, usa. her research focuses on individual differences in second language learning and teaching specifically on topics such as self-regulation, engagement, and language learning strategies. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0114-4703 contact details: g128 stone building, college of education, florida state university, tallahassee, fl, 32306, usa (sz16h@my.fsu.edu) yang zhou is a doctoral student in foreign and second language education at florida state university, usa. his research focuses on the role of motivation and personality on different aspects of second language learning, particularly on esl learners’ pronunciation learning performance and strategies. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6793-7330 contact details: g128 stone building, college of education, florida state university, tallahassee, fl, 32306, usa (yz17c@my.fsu.edu) 431 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (3). 2015. 431-453 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.3.5 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl global trends and local realities: lessons about economic benefits, selves and identity from a swiss context virág csillagh university of geneva, switzerland virag.csillagh@unige.ch abstract inspired by the unexpected results of a standardized questionnaire survey of swiss university students’ motivation and attitudes toward english, the paper discusses the influence of global and local contexts on language learners’ motivation and identity. as a result of the unprecedented spread of english as a foreign language (crystal, 2003; graddol, 2006), and, more importantly, the underlying social and economic issues that it reflects, elements of the global context intermingle with local realities to create new learning experiences, unaccounted for by traditional research paradigms. individuals find themselves at the convergence of multiple contexts that affect and are in turn affected by their language attitudes and identity as well as sense of self. the intricate relationships between contexts and individuals continue to gain emphasis in current approaches to language learning motivation (cf. dörnyei, macintyre, & henry, 2015), which position l2 learnin in a new light, questioning the power and relevance of different motivational categories and also these of a generalizable theoretical model. the quantitative study presented in this paper explores interrelationships among key elements of the l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2009) and a number of motivational factors on the one hand, contrasting them against the economic and social background of the swiss context on the other. the findings of the project reveal that such repositioning of the participants in the multicultural, plurilingual environment of geneva and its socioeconomic reality was indeed essential to the interpretation of the results since the extraordinary strength of external and societal factors in participants’ motivational profile gained meaning only in the light of the particularities of the local context. therefore, the paper showcases the potential of a broader perspective on l2 motivation and the importance of learner-context relationships. virág csillagh 432 keywords: complex learning environments, language learning motivation, language learner identity, swiss plurilingualism, multilingualism 1. introduction this paper was borne out of some highly unexpected results emerging from the analysis of a standardized questionnaire. based on established l2 motivation constructs, the survey investigated university students’ attitudes toward english in a multilingual environment and revealed unique trends that were difficult to interpret relying solely on traditional quantitative methodology. situating these figures against the contextual background of the swiss educational system and society, as well as the local setting of multilingual geneva, uncovered intriguing patterns of learner-context relationships. at the time of data collection, swiss language policies were undergoing drastic changes, and the debate over the order in which foreign languages (fls) are to be taught intensified once more in french speaking cantons. for a long time, mutual understanding among citizens and, therefore, learning the language of the other has been a priority in swiss fl education. however, arguments for english, as the pragmatic choice, have become louder in recent years. moreover, some french speakers view english not only as more useful and more relevant to modern life than german but also as a welcome alternative to standard german, the status of which is constantly challenged by local swiss german dialects. all this demonstrates how deeply languages are embedded in their social context, and fl learning is no exception. as ushioda (2009) points out, l2 motivation is “emergent from relations between real persons, with particular social identities, and the unfolding cultural context of activity” (p. 215). therefore, this paper argues that thorough examination of contextual factors is indispensable to the study of l2 motivation processes in modern learning contexts. more importantly, however, it concludes that relationships between individuals and contexts are dynamic and reciprocal, and mapping their mechanics is central to our understanding of sla. perspectives in l2 motivation theory have been shifting toward such complex and dynamic views of language learning, despite prevalent notions of the internal-external divide in earlier frameworks. 2. l2 motivation research: diversity of contexts and individuals in context traditional l2 motivation theories tended to categorize motives based on their origin or direction, in other words, on whether their source can be defined as global trends and local realities: lessons about economic benefits, selves and identity from a swiss. . . 433 external or internal to the learner. therefore, contextual factors have always been viewed as a key element although their role is conceptualized slightly differently. sugita mceown, noels, and chaffee (2014) analyze the differences and convergences between three theoretical strands: gardner’s (2006) socioeducational model (sem), self-determination theory (sdt; ryan & deci, 2000) and dörnyei’s (2009) l2 motivational self system. it is important to note that while these theories show a marked shift toward a learner-centered view of motivation, the language learning context also takes an increasingly central position. in short, it can be concluded that theoretical developments have gradually moved away from the notion of a clear-cut division between internal and external factors in favor of a more complex representation of l2 motivation. although contextual components are an integral part of the two dominant dimensions in sem, they remain situated externally to the learner, either in the form of a target group of native speakers of which learners aspire to become members or as instrumental benefits they wish to access through language proficiency. such approaches pose serious challenges to the investigation of modern l2 learning environments, where target groups are more distant and gains less well defined. moreover, they fail to fully capture the relationship of individual and context. the process of internalization (ryan & deci, 2000) blurs the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motives, placing the two categories at the opposite ends of a more complex scale (sugita mceown et al., 2014) on which learners’ motivation can fluctuate. this aspect of sdt not only demonstrates the changeable nature of motivation but also shows that the membranes separating the individual and the contexts that they participate in can be considered as similarly flexible and hazy. dynamic theories of l2 motivation build on these two assumptions, redefining the construct both as a scene of learner identity construction that is prone to change and as a reflection of the interaction between learner and context(s). moreover, as dörnyei (2009, 2010) and ushioda and dörnyei (2012) point out, the emergence of the global context (in addition to existing local, regional and national backgrounds) as a factor of identity creation (see also lamb 2004, 2009) and l2 learning further enriches the spectrum of motivational influences. dörnyei’s l2 motivational self system (2009) centers on two self-guides, both of which incorporate different aspects of contextual elements. the ideal l2 self measures the strength of learners’ future vision (dörnyei, 2014) of themselves as l2 users, while the ought-to l2 self represents learners’ perceptions of the different expectations they are faced with. both of these facets of learners’ self-concept are contextually constructed and reflect the influence of the learning environment. research investigating the relevance of virág csillagh 434 the two self guides in a range of modern fl contexts (cf. dörnyei & ushioda, 2009) showed the ideal l2 self to be a reliable predictor of motivated learning behavior. although these studies continued to rely on traditional methods of data collection (dörnyei, macintyre, & henry, 2015), they represented a novel approach to language learning. learner identity as a facet of l2 motivation was placed in the foreground, and contextual elements were recognized as powers shaping both. nevertheless, ushioda (2009) warns that “we should not position the central participants in our research simply as language learners, since this is just one aspect of their identity” (p. 290). she also stresses that while models of l2 motivation integrate conceptual factors in the form of independent variables, these remain fixed background influences outside of learners’ control. in other words, it is imperative that sla research regard individuals as active members of multiple contexts who shape their environment as much as they are shaped by it. it is precisely this point of view that dörnyei et al. (2015) take in their introduction to a recent volume exploring the potential of a dynamic systems approach to l2 motivation. ushioda (2015) likens the relationship of individual and context to an ecosystem where interrelated influences act, reciprocally, both within the learner and between the learner and the environment. she also describes this type of research perspective as a shifting lens or a zooming device that can be used to investigate both learner-context interactions and intralearner processes. this metaphor is especially apt since it reflects the multitude of concentric and overlapping contexts learners interact with. in this sense, l2 motivation is affected by not only the global and the immediate learning environment at hand but also by a range of contexts in between. therefore, in my discussion of the context in which the geneva study took place i propose to zoom in on participants step by step and explore some of the most relevant spheres that might impact their learning and attitudes. 3. languages in switzerland 3.1. swiss language learners: individuals in multiple contexts switzerland is often considered a site of widespread multilingualism and successful l2 teaching. however, as regional differences become more pronounced, questions of language use and learning become intricately tied to issues of milieu and identity. swiss language learners thus find themselves at the vortex of multiple contexts, from strict, locally defined cultural settings to broader aspects of national and global identity. in addition, as members of these spheres, individuals themselves actively shape them as much as are shaped by them. therefore, it is not surprising that linguistic practices follow highly diverse patterns in local settings in different parts global trends and local realities: lessons about economic benefits, selves and identity from a swiss. . . 435 of the country. on the other hand, this also means that the particularities of the multiple contexts with which swiss language learners interact need to be discussed before their motivation and attitudes can be fully understood. no examination of contextual influences on modern fl learning can be complete without taking into account the global status of english. the spread of english as a foreign language (efl) is indeed unprecedented and has serious implications for social and economic processes. it is also bound to impact learners’ attitudes not only toward english but toward all other l2s. some view this aspect of efl as empowering (crystal, 2003; graddol, 2006), while others argue that a language that can connect can also separate, leading to the marginalization and subjugation of nonspeakers (phillipson, 2009). a detailed overview of the debate is beyond the scope of this paper and can be found in the works cited above. nevertheless, whether proficiency in english is viewed as a fundamental need or a coveted goal, the motivational power of its status cannot be denied. various motivational concepts reflect aspects of the issue, from the ideal and ought-to l2 selves, which gauge the importance of the language to learners’ self-concept, to yashima’s (2009) international posture or the world citizenship/global village scale used in the present study, which embodies further attitudinal facets related to the spread of efl. in addition, social networks, pop culture and english language media are also often seen as exceptional attractors, as are the world of science and professional communication. these can all be powerful motivators, but their influence hinges on “whether the pursuit of mutual intelligibility and participation in the global community are perceived as somehow a threat to, or an enrichment of, one’s linguistic identity and sense of self” (ushioda, 2006, p. 151). however, since identity is also constructed at several levels and individuals’ self-concept incorporates social as well as personal aspects, the role of the global status of english is bound to be complex. the global context has not only a direct influence on learners’ attitudes but also an indirect one, dependent on both national and local cultural values. in the historically multilingual european context the european language portfolio (elp ; cf. breidbach, 2003; ushioda, 2006) aims to bridge this gap by promoting individual plurilingualism. in contrast with the multilingualism of the community, the elp focuses on the development individual language skills (at any level) in multiple languages. however, as the swiss example testifies, plurilingualism can also be exercised at higher organizational levels. it can even become a symbol of social cohesion and a pillar of national identity. 3.2. the linguistic context: speaking swiss anchored in local and national cultural values, the issue of languages in switzerland is a delicate one. its history goes back to the time of napoleon, who united the three virág csillagh 436 language regions (german, italian and french) by force and thus created the first plurilingual state (elmiger & forster, 2005). today, with four official languages (german, french, italian and romansh), the swiss context remains just as intriguing in terms of fl research but also holds a number of surprises. the first of these surprises is that despite the coordinating role of the national swiss conference of cantonal ministers of education (cdip), regulations on language, culture and education are formulated at the cantonal level. as a result, out of the 22 constitutionally monolingual cantons seventeen are german speaking and are separated from the four french speaking and the single italian speaking cantons by the röstigraben, the mythical border between the two culturally and linguistically different regions (grin, 2010). french and german are both official languages in three bilingual cantons, a duality reflected in documents and road signs. the trilingual canton of grisons (graubünden in german, grischun in written romansh) has been the center of the fight for the preservation of romansh and the initiative to support plurilingualism (cf. grin, 2010). last but far from least, in cantons such as geneva, where multinationals and ngos abound, foreign residents account for a considerable portion of the population, further enriching the linguistic landscape. as regards the linguistic compositions of the population, census results show that 63.7% are german l1 speakers, while 20.4% declared french, 6.5% italian and 0.5% romansh as their mother tongues (lüdi & werlen, 2005). it bears note that despite plurilingual trends participants were allowed only one option, although the question on languages used at home yielded comparable answers with a slight increase in national language use and 4.4% for english. these differences demonstrate the volume of second and third generation immigrants among swiss residents. the german-speaking cantons are also home to a wide range of local swiss german dialects (or the dialect), the use of which is mutually exclusive with that of standard german. in these areas 90.8% of swiss residents speak the dialect but not standard german at home (lüdi & werlen, 2005, p. 36), and while the former has always been a metaphor for the home and everyday life, the latter traditionally represented the professional sphere. however, in the twentieth century schwyzertütsch, as the dialect is called in swiss german, started gaining ground and became an emblem of swiss ideological and economic independence. it gradually replaced standard german in a number of contexts, so much that french speakers have started to question the utility of learning standard german. as opposed to the linguistic duality of the german cantons, french speaking areas are highly multilingual. on average 18.4% of the population are of nonfrench mother tongue and 8% of residents speak another official language (lüdi global trends and local realities: lessons about economic benefits, selves and identity from a swiss. . . 437 & werlen, 2005). nationwide, foreigners constitute one fifth of the population and while most of them use french or italian as a mother tongue, 37.7% speak a language other than the four official languages at home (lüdi & werlen, 2005). such multilingual settings provide a unique background to language learning but also pose challenges to communication. heller (2003) and others speculate that the use of english could offer a solution, but a study of swiss firms’ communicative practices (lüdi, barth, höchle, & yanaprasart, 2009) found the case to be different, revealing that diversity and even linguistic virtuosity play an important role. murray, wegmüller, and khan (2001, p. 13) confirm this, stating that english is rarely used for communication among swiss interlocutors of different mother tongues. in addition, a series of studies (cf. berthoud, grin, & lüdi, 2013) investigating the economic and social impact of such cultural and linguistic diversity concluded that swiss plurilingualism is not only a genuine, living example of successful communication but also highly advantageous. 3.3. the social context: swiss plurilingualism plurilingualism, as proposed by the elp, has become a priority both in communicative practices and language teaching in switzerland (elmiger & forster, 2005). the term covers significantly more than the mere coexistence of the four official languages and many dialects; it promotes equality among languages and raises awareness of their linguistic and social interrelationships (breidbach, 2003). it is an emblem of social cohesion and swiss national identity. four cantons are officially plurilingual, but lüdi and werlen (2005, p. 89) emphasize that this form of bior multilingualism does not necessarily equal true plurilingualism as long as it is restricted to a few official languages however, studies on corporate communication (e.g., lüdi et al., 2009; pfefferli 2008, 2010) highlight the importance of plurilingualism in business dealings across linguistic borders and in multilingual settings. their findings show that while employers rely on special corporate guidelines to enhance communicative efficiency, employers navigate these delicate situations using plurilingual communication techniques (lüdi et al., 2009). the latter seem especially effective in successfully resolving communicative situations where no common language is available, even though the policy relative to these instances recommends the use of standard german (lüdi et al., 2009). corporate multilingualism is an important feature of all three language regions. in french speaking areas, our context of interest, 29.9% of employees use german on a daily basis, whereas english is used by 27.5% and italian by 11.8% (grin, sfreddo, & vaillancourt, 2009). in a similar vein, 13% of all professional communication takes place in english, 10% in german and 2% in italian (grin et al., 2009). virág csillagh 438 in sum, from a professional point of view, plurilingualism is an important asset for employers and employees at the same time. statistics show that should all residents who speak another official language suddenly become monolingual, the loss could amount to as much as 10% of the country’s gdp (grin et al., 2009). on the other hand, plurilingualism also has social roots in switzerland since active cooperation among linguistic regions and even more importantly the willingness to put such cooperation into place is key to national cohesion (grin, 2014). it is also an inherent element of swiss national identity, and therefore issues of fl teaching are always central to education policy. 3.4. the learning context: fl teaching in switzerland cantonal language education policies, based on the recommendation of the cdip to promote understanding among swiss citizens, traditionally favored the other official language, mainly german or french, but also italian. a historical overview (elmiger & forster, 2005), however, clearly demonstrates how the emergence of efl gradually changed this balance. in 1997 the canton of zurich announced its intention to introduce english as the first l2 taught. this change took effect two years later and primary schools in the canton were directed to teach english and another obligatory language as well as offer a third as an option. although one official language was still mandatory, the order of introduction was not specified. the cdip, no longer able to reinstate the balance of language policies, appointed a number of regional conferences to collaborate in redesigning the framework. the new regulations, to be implemented by the 2015 school year, require all cantons to introduce a national language and english by years 3 and 5 at the latest. these are no longer mere recommendations, although the choice of the first fl is left to the regions. while completely in line with these regulations, the recent switch from french to english as the first fl in the cantons of nidwalden and thurgau brought the issue back to the agenda. commenting on the debate, grin (2014) observes that abandoning or even postponing official language instruction might have dire sociological, political and economic consequences. nevertheless, many see english as the pragmatic choice for the first fl in switzerland, despite research findings indicating otherwise. 3.5. the economic context: language skills at the market arguments for the usefulness of english often rely on its global status and the sheer number of its speakers around the world. however, that ever increasing number also suggests that the language will not always remain in high demand, global trends and local realities: lessons about economic benefits, selves and identity from a swiss. . . 439 and the figures cited in this section show that it might not even be so in all contexts at present. in addition, if the strength of english lies in the number of its speakers, other languages are just as important for communicating and doing business with the remaining 70% of the world (grin, 2014). therefore, i suggest that economic considerations should be reevaluated rather than dismissed, especially since fl education constitutes chf 1.5 billion of the annual federal budget (grin & sfreddo, 1997). a more detailed discussion of economic aspects of language learning can be found in grin (2003), and csillagh (in press) explores their relevance to l2 motivation research. nevertheless, let us briefly examine the profitability of english in swiss corporate environments. a recent study of more than 2000 companies revealed that swiss official languages were used more often than english in communication across linguistic borders (andres et al., 2005). grin et al. (2009) also found official languages in higher demand. in the french speaking cantons there was a shortage of german skills at 54% of firms, while english skills were insufficient at 42%. across the language border the figures were 77% for french as opposed to 51% for english. revenue differentials showed a similar pattern as in french speaking switzerland english skills resulted in an average salary increase of 10%, whereas proficiency in german was rewarded by a raise of 14% (grin, 1999). in the german language regions these figures amounted to 12% against 17% for english and french respectively (grin, 1999). thus it can be concluded that in the swiss context official languages are both more powerful communication tools and a greater economic asset than english. consequently, one can argue that if this is reflected in learners’ attitudes and motivation, learning these languages should also correspond to different motivational dynamics. on the other hand, the previous sections showed that motivation is both individually and contextually constructed, based on perceptions and aspirations. it is therefore not merely a reflection of contextual factors but a complex system in which elements of multiple learner identities and contexts interact. from this person-in-context perspective (ushioda, 2009), it is especially interesting to explore the motivational profile of university students in geneva. first, they are close enough to entering the labor market but not yet too far removed from their school learning experience. second, at the interface of a multitude of contextual spheres, the analysis of their motivational profile can shed light on the way these various contexts influence their self-concept and drive to learn english. 4. the study initially designed as a link in a long tradition of research projects on l2 motivation investigating learners’ attitudes in modern l2 contexts (cf. dörnyei & virág csillagh 440 ushioda, 2009), the study aimed at exploring a very special multilingual learning environment. however, it soon became apparent that l2 learning in geneva is not only impacted by local multilingualism but also by a host of linguistic, social and economic issues. the somewhat unexpected results of the survey suggested that various contextual factors influence l2 motivation in intricate ways. a straightforward quantitative study therefore developed into an exploratory project on the interrelationships of motivational and contextual influences, with limitations inherent to such research designs. nevertheless, its conclusions point toward new horizons for the examination of complex learning environments and demonstrate the potential of person-in-context research perspectives. 4.1. method students of four faculties at the university of geneva were solicited to participate in the online survey during the fall of 2013. the link to a questionnaire consisting of 102 items was distributed to students via email. data collection took place exclusively online by means of the web survey tool limesurvey (limesurvey project team, 2012) and was therefore completely anonymous. 4.2. participants a total of 375 students from the faculties of law and medicine, sciences and ses (economic and social sciences, two separate faculties as of january 1 2014) participated in the study. their numbers per faculty, mother tongue and l2 level reported are listed in tables 1 and 2 respectively. students attending several faculties (n = 7) were only taken into account where applicable. table 1 number of participants by gender and faculty gender law medicine science ses total male 27 20 52 23 122 female 67 44 98 37 246 total 94 64 150 60 368 respondents’ reported language skills and language use reflect the multilingual setting of the study. only 24 (6.4%) participants were completely monolingual, while 68 (18.1%) spoke two, 136 (36.3%) three and 106 (28.3%) four languages. 35 participants (9.3%) reported competences in five languages, and 6 students spoke six to eight languages. as shown in table 2, participants’ l1 background was similarly diverse. understandably, the majority of students listed french among their mother tongues, and although 298 (79.5%) global trends and local realities: lessons about economic benefits, selves and identity from a swiss. . . 441 participants had only one l1, 69 (18.4%) reported two, with 6 students having three and 2 reporting four mother tongues. students were also asked to rate their l2 skills on a 6-point scale adapted from the common european framework of reference, and their answers are discussed in detail in the results section. table 2 number of participants per reported l2 level and l1 l2 level german french italian english other a1 (1) 29 1 17 7 n/a a2 (2) 34 3 13 14 n/a b1 (3) 50 3 20 59 n/a b2 (4) 48 10 14 74 n/a c1 (5) 17 23 8 112 n/a c2 (6) 9 62 4 62 n/a means l2 3.09 5.32 2.93 4.39 n/a total l2 187 102 76 328 103 total l1 25 291 25 21 98 note. n/a = nonapplicable nevertheless, one interesting aspect of the language data that should be mentioned here is the discrepancy between mother tongue and l2 learning on the one hand and l2 speaking and l2 learning on the other. the results showed that various l1s were also mentioned in the category of l2s learned at the moment, and, reversely, some l2s were being learned but not spoken by respondents. german was among the most frequent (28) of the latter kind, after the languages categorized as “other” (36). in addition, swiss german dialects were treated in the same category as german throughout the analysis. nationality and citizenship are delicate issues in the geneva context, so participants were asked about the place of their secondary schooling instead. for the purposes of the study, students who indicated switzerland were treated as “swiss.” the largest group was that of swiss students at 256 (68.3%), while the majority of “foreigners” came from france, reflecting the social and economic ties between geneva and the neighboring regions of france. all levels of university education and age groups (16-65) were represented, the average age of participants being 23. 4.3. questionnaire the questionnaire was entirely in french and consisted of three parts. the first section focused on students’ demographic and linguistic background, while the second and third consisted of 11 5-point multiple item scales measuring attitudes toward english. these were developed as part of the author’s ma research in hungary (csillagh, 2010) and later translated and adapted to the virág csillagh 442 geneva context. their sources, reliability scores and the number of items included in the final analysis were as follows: 1. motivated learning behavior (3 items; kormos & csizér, 2008; α = .76) 2. ideal l2 self (4 items; kormos & csizér, 2008; α = .87) 3. ought-to l2 self (3 items; kormos & csizér, 2008; α = .64) 4. attitudes to learning english (3 items; kormos & csizér, 2008; α = .91) 5. attitudes toward traditional target groups (10 items; kormos & csizér, 2008; α = .90) 6. international posture (4 items ; csizér & kormos, 2009; yashima, 2009; α = .74) 7. ethnocentrism (5 items; ryan, 2009; α = .81) 8. global village (4 items; csillagh, 2010; α = .81) 9. willingness to communicate (6 items; mccroskey, n.d.; α = .93). 10. perceived importance of contact (3 items; kormos & csizér, 2008; α = .76) 11. direct contact (21 items; kormos and csizér, 2008; α = .89) 4.4. analysis data was collected through limesurvey (limesurvey project team, 2012), an online survey tool, and exported to microsoft excel (microsoft corporation, 2010), where cleaning and decoding took place. reliability measures were controlled in spss (ibm corp, 2013), and the software was used to compute scales and conduct all further analysis. while an exhaustive overview is beyond the scope of this paper, in the next section i review the most interesting results obtained through descriptive statistics and multivariate analysis. 4.5. results as regards participants’ language portfolio, results show it to be highly multilingual. this is true not only in terms of the proportion of l1s outlined above but also for fls. one in four students (24.3%) reported skills in three l2s, while another 37.1% speak two and 26.7% speak one fl. swiss official languages make up an important part of these (see table 2), and a considerable number of participants (187) speak german as a fl. their average level, b1, corresponds to the official school leaving exam (maturité) requirements. after english, with 53 students, german was also the most popular language currently learned. in addition, 20% of participants spoke italian as an l2, the most frequently reported level being also b1, although lower levels were represented in a higher ratio than in the case of german. in contrast, french l2 speakers (102) rated their proficiency very high, which is unsurprising given the context of a french global trends and local realities: lessons about economic benefits, selves and identity from a swiss. . . 443 language university. nevertheless, english was by far the most popular l2 among participants, whose average level of b2 was the highest after french. altogether 328 students spoke it as an l2, a remarkable one third of them (112) at c1 level. displayed in figure 1, language use in different contexts shows similar patterns although english was a surprisingly frequent means of communication compared to german. figure 1 reported frequency of language use in different contexts on a 5-point likert scale in order to better gauge participants’ l2 skills, l1 speakers and students with no competence were initially excluded from the analysis. with the inclusion of nonspeakers, however, it became apparent that swiss students considerably outperformed their international peers both in french and german, while there was no significant difference in the case of english. students from different faculties also differed significantly regarding their skills in german and italian. competence in french was highest among medical students, but even the lowest averages for the faculties of science and ses reached the c1 level. law students reported the highest level german skills, followed by medicine and the ses. law was also the strongest faculty in terms of english skills (b2) although the results were high throughout all subsamples. these results are summarized in table 3. with the exception of direct contact and ethnocentrism, all the attitudinal scales achieved high results. further analysis of the items measuring the ideal l2 self showed that visions of the future (4.6) and career prospects (4.5) were the strongest aspects of the construct. figure 2 compares the attitudinal scales from the highest to the lowest, also reflecting nonspeakers’ responses where applicable. virág csillagh 444 table 3 l2 levels per faculty and place of secondary education (csillagh, in press) faculty place of secondary education l2 levels (a1-c2) german french italian english law abroad m 1.83 5.57 0.35 4.71 n 23 14 23 21 sd 1.90 0.65 1.11 1.19 switzerland m 1.92 5.58 0.74 4.08 n 66 24 65 65 sd 1.89 1.10 1.54 1.97 medicine abroad m 1.79 6.00 0.07 3.80 n 14 2 15 15 sd 1.67 0.00 0.26 1.78 switzerland m 1.88 5.88 0.98 4.11 n 48 8 48 45 sd 2.01 0.35 1.64 1.63 science abroad m 0.84 4.52 0.47 3.79 n 63 21 60 61 sd 1.52 1.25 1.16 1.87 switzerland m 1.67 5.54 0.62 3.77 n 85 13 79 87 sd 1.78 1.20 1.41 1.70 ses abroad m 0.64 4.83 0.45 3.83 n 11 6 11 12 sd 1.03 0.98 1.51 1.70 switzerland m 2.13 5.33 0.65 4.19 n 40 12 46 47 sd 2.00 0.78 1.32 1.44 figure 2 mean values of the attitudinal scales, from highest to lowest global trends and local realities: lessons about economic benefits, selves and identity from a swiss. . . 445 interestingly, as figure 3 shows, place of secondary education was a significant factor, and the self-guide was stronger in the case of foreign students, whereas the reverse was true regarding traditional target groups. it is unsurprising that foreign participants also had more frequent direct contact with english, both during their studies and while traveling. there were significant differences between students from different faculties as well, and they are shown in figure 4. figure 3 mean values per place of secondary education figure 4 mean values per faculty participants’ attitudes to learning english were the most positive at the faculty of law and medical students’ ought-to l2 self was especially strong at 3.8, though the scale scored remarkably high overall. last but not least, t tests confirmed that students currently engaged in learning german were more virág csillagh 446 motivated to learn english. moreover, correlational analysis revealed further links between the attitudinal variables. the coefficients are summarized in table 4. table 4 correlational coefficients (pearson’s) for the attitudinal scales 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11a 11b 11c 11d 1 motivated learning behavior .58** [ns].39**.40**.33**.26**.32** [ns] .39** [ns] .18**.21** [ns] 2 attitudes to learning english .34** .34**.37**.37**.33**.23**-.15** .55** .28** .26**.38** .22** 3 willingness to communicate .22**.22**.18**.31** [ns]-.14** .25** .45** .30**.33** .22** 4 ideal l2 self .46**.43**.38**.32**-.23** .32** .35** .21**.28** .14** 5 ought-to l2 self .50**.43**.36**-.18** .41** .28** .27**.28** .21** 6 global village .41**.47**-.24** .44** .19** .27**.32** .13** 7 perceived importance of contact .27**-.47** .38** .23** .22**.16** .30** 8 inernational posture -.15** .36** [ns] .14**.14** [ns] 9 ethnocentrism -.26** [ns]-.14** [ns] -.11* 10 attitudes toward traditional target groups .21** .20**.30** .27** 11a read-write (direct contact) .47**.58** .37** 11b travel (direct contact) .42** .30** 11c films-social (direct contact) .31** 11d talk about (direct contact) notes. * significant at the p ≤ .05 level (2-tailed); ** significant at the p ≤ .01 level (2-tailed); ns = nonsignificant. as expected, the strongest correlation was found between motivation and attitudes to learning english. nevertheless, among the rest of the scales, motivated learning behavior was linked first and foremost to students’ ought-to l2 self, while it also had a less strong but still marked connection to the ideal l2 self. in addition, the two self-guides were also strongly related to one another and attitudes to learning english. interestingly, both participants’ positive attitudes to native speakers and their international orientation, represented by international posture and the global village, emerged as factors linked not only to motivation but also the self-guides. the ought-to l2 self maintained especially strong relationships with the scales on the global village and traditional target groups as well as international posture and the perceived importance of language contact. 5. discussion some of these results corresponded to research findings obtained in other learning contexts, whereas others exceeded expectations or even proved difficult to explain relying solely on quantitative techniques. one thing, however, is clear: they all demonstrate the power and influence of contextual factors on language learning and attitudes. moreover, the study underlines the importance of theoretical perspectives that allow for a person-in-context view of l2 motivation and the reciprocal relationships between the individual and the environment. global trends and local realities: lessons about economic benefits, selves and identity from a swiss. . . 447 i argued that swiss language learners live at the confluence of multiple contexts of which they are active members. each of these spheres represents a different influence on their attitudes and self-concept, and therefore manifests in different trends. however, it is important to note that, as members, participants also shape their environment, and the results of the study reflect the complexity of these relationships. first of all, the individual and collective plurilingualism of the respondents clearly shows the relevance of the multilingual environment in which the study took place. nevertheless, this plurilingualism takes peculiar forms, which shed light on the intricate links between individual and context as well as on the complexity of the current debate on swiss language education. official languages are at the heart of the phenomenon, with english playing an important role, although a number of other non-swiss languages are represented as well. this, on the one hand, highlights the success of an educational program promoting languages of local and global importance at the same time, especially since swiss students consistently outperformed foreigners. on the other hand, the study found that university students are conscious decision makers in their language learning. many continue to perfect their skills after secondary school, and some take on new languages, either as heritage languages or simply as additional l2s. moreover, the figures show that participants also used their languages with high versatility in different contexts though questions concerning the dynamics of this plurilingual lifestyle remain unanswered, and we know little about respondents’ individual experiences. interestingly, these trends do not seem to be linked in any way to language policies at the university of geneva, where, with only a few exceptions, french remains the language of instruction. therefore, it can be argued that it is the students who bring plurilingualism to the institution, thus enriching their environment and adding elements to the context. nevertheless, this does not mean that their goals are any less professional. indeed, comparisons between the different faculties are indicative of the impact of the local economic milieu. swiss official languages were most popular among students in professions concerned with local affairs and in fields where skilled labor is in high demand locally. by contrast, science students fell behind on most language scales, despite the international nature of science and the often-cited relevance of english to the field. at the same time, career prospects and future visions were the strongest aspects of students’ self-concept and the most highly ranked among all the items. this orientation was especially prevalent among swiss students, who not only surpassed their international peers in language skills but also showed different trends in their attitudes. in contrast with the results of previous virág csillagh 448 studies, students at the university of geneva had a strong ought-to self, which was also closely linked to their motivation. again, this trend was most distinct in the swiss group, while foreign students reported more “traditional” motivational profiles. but for this one indicator, it could be argued that this emphasis on expectations, responsibilities and social pressure might simply be the outcome of the serious tone of the university environment and participants’ goal orientedness. however, more detailed analysis of the context shows that considerations of career prospects, economic benefits and responsibilities play an important role in swiss society. university students are particularly aware of these values, as at this stage in their life they are considered, first and foremost, students, who are also preparing for the plunge into the real world of work and responsibility. they have strong self-concepts, which are, nevertheless, in continuous flux as students strive to find their place in society and become active members of the community. this also means that they are about to get involved in even more contexts, enriching their personality and the environments they interact with at the same time. it is not difficult to imagine that as the next generation of active swiss citizens, the views and values they bring will be highly important to the future of society. in most cases these new contexts present students with yet unexplored sites of language use and even learning, and, therefore, their continued study is central to person-in-context perspectives of l2 motivation. unfortunately, traditional research methods offer little in terms of tools to faithfully document and present such life-long journeys of l2 learning and identity creation. the strength and key role of the ought-to l2 self also underlines its importance as a motivational measure. since the self-guide acts, by definition, as a gatekeeper between the outside and the inside world, it might be the most intriguing motivational construct to research from a person-in-context view. understandably, its relevance varies from one cultural region to another, but in contexts such as the swiss one, where personal goals are often regarded as secondary to societal concerns, it might prove a stronger predictor of motivated learning behavior. similarly, swiss students’ remarkably favorable attitudes to traditional native speaker target groups as well as the global village show that learners’ orientations are often more complex than sla theory tends to claim. unlike teachers, who are reluctant to accept global varieties (murray, 2003), university students recognize the importance of the global status of english. at the same time, they are also aware of the financial and cultural power of native speaker communities. this way they are representatives of a new generation of language learners who nimbly navigate the currents of constantly merging and separating contexts, all the while adapting and creating their new environment. these complex and flexible relationships between individuals and contexts present modern sla research with new challenges, both theoretical and methodological. the results discussed in this global trends and local realities: lessons about economic benefits, selves and identity from a swiss. . . 449 section indicate that there is a lot more to investigate than traditional research methods allow, highlighting the need for new perspectives in sla. 6. conclusions: from statistics to stories the study this paper reports on was initially designed with a simple goal in mind: to explore swiss university students’ motivational profile. however, thanks to the linguistic and cultural complexity of the geneva context, it soon became apparent that modern language learning is far from simple, and the project took on new objectives. these were manifold, and it is beyond the scope of the present paper to discuss them all. nevertheless, the preliminary results examined here carry two very strong messages. first of all, the results testify to the key role different contextual elements play in university students’ attitudes and motivation. further analysis of the data is needed in order to establish the direction and exact strength of these relationships, but it is already clear that participants’ responses show interesting patterns that can only be analyzed and explained in the light of their contextual background. therefore, the study lends empirical support to ushioda’s (2015) call for more system-sensitive approaches of l2 motivation. moreover, the results are indicative of the ways in which learners actively interact with the contexts they participate in, echoing emerging trends in the field that point toward a broader reinterpretation of l2 learning. secondly, the study demonstrates the limitations of traditional approaches to researching modern learner identities in complex learning environments. until very recently l2 motivation research had little to offer in terms of alternatives, but the number of new techniques is on the rise (cf. macintyre, dörnyei, & henry, 2015). the second point i would like to make is therefore that a new perspective on modern l2 contexts is necessary not only in a theoretical sense but also in the methodological tools employed to investigate them. the quantitative analysis failed to clarify all the issues and raised a number of questions, which will require further investigation of the established factors as well as through fresh methodology. one option certainly lies in emerging methodologies (macintyre et al., 2015). nevertheless, there is a case to be made for complementary research designs (ushioda & dörnyei, 2012) and multifocal qualitative techniques (ushioda, 2015). last but not least, reinterpretations of the traditional quantitative paradigm (e.g., irie & ryan, 2015) help recycle powerful analytical tools to examine more complex structural dynamics. the fact that the questions are more challenging and the techniques of investigation more intricate means that we are closer to the hot core in our understanding of l2 motivation. this theoretical and methodological rethinking of the process of l2 learning opens new horizons for researchers and practitioners alike. virág csillagh 450 references andres, m., korn, k., barjak, f., glas, a., leukens, a., & niederer, r. 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(2009). international posture and the ideal l2 self in the japanese efl context. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 144-163). bristol: multilingual matters. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: anna becker (university of fribourg, switzerland) editor: kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) editor: joanna zawodniak (university of zielona góra, poland) vol. 13 no. 2 june 2023 editorial board: ali al-hoorie (royal commission for jubail and yanbu, jubail, saudi arabia) larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) ali derakhshan (golestan university, gorgan, iran) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) majid elahi shirvan (university of bojnord, iran) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) tammy gregersen (american university of sharjah, united arab emirates) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) laura gurzynski-weiss (indiana university bloomington, usa) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) chengchen li (huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan, china) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) amy thompson (west virginia university, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2023 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: anna becker kata csizér mariusz kruk aleksandra wach joanna zawodniak © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: anna becker, kata csizér, mariusz kruk, aleksandra wach, joanna zawodniak language editor: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 61 829 64 20 fax +48 61 829 64 21 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 40 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · social sciences citation index (wos core collection) · journal citation reports social sciences (wos) · scopus · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) · current contents – social and behavioral sciences (wos) · essential science indicators (wos) special issue: english medium instruction: areas of research needing urgent attention guest editors: ernesto macaro heath rose studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 13, number 2, june 2023 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors .....................................................................251 editorial: introduction to special issue on english medium instruction: areas of research needing urgent attention ................................257 articles: salah ben hammou, abdelaziz kesbi – english medium instruction (emi) in moroccan secondary schools: science teachers’ perceptions ......271 nadee mahawattha, romola rassool – “a smooth transition or a giant leap?” the challenges posed by the transition from secondary education to higher education in relation to emi in sri lanka ............................ 293 jang ho lee, hansol lee, yuen yi lo – effects of emi-clil on secondary-level students’ english learning: a meta-analysis ........................................317 an nguyen – unraveling emi as a predictor of english proficiency in vietnamese higher education: exploring learners’ backgrounds as a variable ..............347 maría del mar sánchez-pérez – the impact of emi on student english writing proficiency in a spanish undergraduate engineering context............373 dogan yuksel, adem soruç, barıs horzum, jim mckinley – examining the role of english language proficiency, language learning anxiety, and self-regulation skills in emi students’ academic success .............399 sihan zhou, gene thompson – a longitudinal study on students’ self-regulated listening during transition at an english-medium transnational university in china ............................................................................................ 427 jiye hong – content teachers’ and lecturers’ corrective feedback in emi classes in high school and university settings ..................................... 451 jiangshan an, ann childs – teacher questions, wait time, and student output in classroom interaction in emi science classes: an interdisciplinary view ........................................................................................................... 471 notes to contributors ...................................................................... 495 251 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors jiangshan an is assistant professor in linguistics at purdue university fort wayne, usa, and an esl teacher trainer in indiana, usa. she obtained her phd at the university of oxford, the uk, and is a certified secondary school english teacher in hong kong. her research interests include classroom interaction, bilingual education, clil pedagogy, and esl teacher training. her work has been published in language teaching, system, language teaching research, linguistics and education, journal of immersion and content-based language education, among others. orcid id: h ps://orcid.org/0000-0003-4214-4283 contact details: department of english and linguis cs, purdue university fort wayne, indiana, usa, in 46805 (anj@pfw.edu) ann childs completed her phd in chemistry at birmingham university in 1982 and then trained to be a science teacher at oxford university, uk. she taught for 11 years in oxfordshire and in sierra leone for voluntary services overseas (vso). during her work as a teacher in oxfordshire she mentored beginning science teachers on the oxford internship scheme. she took up her current post as associate professor in science education in 1997 where she now teaches on the pgce and is director of the masters in teacher education. her research interests have focused on policy and practice in teacher education, nationally and internationally, and the professional development of in-service and pre-service science teachers. she has had the privilege to work in a number of international contexts with colleagues in teacher education, most recently in bhutan and papua new guinea. orcid id: h ps://orcid.org/0000-0001-5918-739x contact details: department of educa on, university of oxford, oxford, ox2 6py, uk (ann.childs@educa on.ox.ac.uk) salah ben hammou is a fourth-year phd student at hassan ii university of casablanca, faculty of arts and humanities, mohammadia, morocco. mr. ben hammou 252 is also a teacher of efl in a public secondary school and a fulbright alumnus. he a ended a five-month professional training program at the faculty of educa on at the college of saint rose in albany, new york. his research focuses on bilingual educa on, content and language integrated learning, language policy and planning, english medium instruc on, sociolinguis cs and efl teaching. orcid id: h ps://orcid.org/0000-0001-8002-4288 contact details: department of english studies, interdisciplinary research in human and social sciences laboratory, faculty of arts and humanities, university of casablanca, mohammadia, casablanca, morocco (salahbenhammou937@gmail.com, salah.benham mou-etu@etu.univh2c.ma) jiye hong is a senior researcher at the ins tute of educa on at sungkyunkwan university, south korea. her research interests include classroom interac on in english medium instruc on and korean medium instruc on se ngs and students’ disciplinary literacy development in the first and second language. orcid id: h ps://orcid.org/0000-0001-8035-3065 contact details: institute of educational research, #516 hoam hall, 25-2 sungkyunkwan-ro, jongno-gu, seoul 03063, south korea (jhon860@skku.edu) barıs horzum is professor at the department of computer education and instructional technologies at sakarya university, turkey. he is interested in carrying out research on computer education and instructional technologies, as well as internationalization of higher education. he has published extensively in journals like computers in human behavior, education and science, technology, pedagogy and education. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3567-0779 contact details: department of computer education and instructional technologies, sakarya university, 54300 hendek/sakarya, turkey (mhorzum@sakarya.edu.tr) abdelaziz kesbi, phd, is senior professor at hassan ii university of casablanca, faculty of arts and human sciences mohammedia, morocco, and teaches efl at the english department, faculty of letters and human sciences. he is a lecturer in sociolinguistics, language studies, linguistics, and intercultural communication. he presents papers at conferences locally and internationally. he has published a number of articles. at the faculty of letters and human sciences in mohammedia, he belongs to the laboratory of interdisciplinary research in humanities and social sciences. professor kesbi was also invited, within the scope of the mevlana exchange programme, to give lectures at adiyaman university in turkey in 2017 and munzur university in tunceli, turkey in 2018. he was also a professor visitor at lusail university doha-qatar in 2021. 253 orcid id: h ps://orcid.org/0000-0002-5957-6739 contact details: department of english studies, interdisciplinary research in human and social sciences laboratory, faculty of arts and humani es, university of casablanca, mohammadia, casablanca, morocco (aabd.kesbi@gmail.com) hansol lee received his doctoral degree in education from the university of california, irvine, usa, and is professor of english at korea military academy, seoul, republic of korea. his research interests include methods and statistics, education, and literacy. his work has been published in education research review, child development, applied measurement in educaɵon, applied linguisɵcs, language learning, modern language journal, language learning & technology, journal of language and social psychology, annual review of applied linguistics, among others. orcid id: h ps://orcid.org/0000-0002-6912-7128 contact details: department of english, korea military academy, nowon-gu, seoul, republic of korea (hansol@kma.ac.kr) jang ho lee received his doctoral degree in educa on from the university of oxford, uk, and is presently a professor at the department of english educa on, chung-ang university, republic of korea. his areas of interest are the bilingual approach to l2 teaching, vocabulary acquisi on, and ai-based language learning. his work has been published in educaɵon research review, applied linguisɵcs, language learning, language teaching research, language learning & technology, tesol quarterly, the modern language journal, recall, system, oxford review of educaɵon, among others. orcid id: h ps://orcid.org/0000-0003-2767-3881 contact details: department of english education, chung-ang university, 84 heukseokro, dongjak-gu, seoul, republic of korea (jangholee@cau.ac.kr) yuen yi lo is associate professor at the faculty of educa on, the university of hong kong. her research interests include bilingual educa on, professional development of teachers in content and language integrated learning (clil) and issues related to clil assessment. her research has been published in review of educaɵonal research, internaɵonal journal of bilingual educaɵon and bilingualism, language teaching research and system. she has recently published her book professional development of clil teachers (springer, 2020). orcid id: h ps://orcid.org/0000-0002-0850-5447 contact details: faculty of educa on, the university of hong kong, meng wah complex, pok fu lam rd, hong kong (yuenyilo@hku.hk) 254 ernesto macaro is emeritus professor of applied linguistics, department of education, university of oxford, uk. for many years his research has focused on second language learning strategies and on the interaction between teachers and learners in second language classrooms. more recently it has centred on classrooms where english is the medium of instruction. he has published widely on these topics. orcid id: h ps://orcid.org/0000-0002-0886-2057 contact details: department of educa on, university of oxford, 15 norham gardens, oxford, ox2 6py, uk (ernesto.macaro@educa on.ox.ac.uk) nadee mahawa ha is senior lecturer in the department of marke ng management, faculty of management studies, sabaragamuwa university of sri lanka. she obtained her phd and mphil in linguis cs from the university of kelaniya, sri lanka and her ba (honors) in english from the university of sri jayewardenepura, sri lanka. before she joined the university system, she worked as an assistant teacher of english in two state schools and as a temporary lecturer in the ruwanpura na onal college of educa on, sri lanka. her research interests are english medium instruc on (emi), content and language integrated learning (clil), and academic literacies. orcid id: h ps://orcid.org/0000-0003-1099-1488 contact details: department of marke ng management faculty of management studies, sabaragamuwa university of sri lanka, po box 02 belihuloya 70140. sri lanka (nadi@mgt.sab.ac.lk) jim mckinley is associate professor of applied linguistics in higher education at university college london (ucl), institute of education, uk. he has taught in higher education for more than 20 years in the uk, japan and australia. his research explores the teaching-research nexus in higher education, and implications of globalisation for second language writing. he currently serves as editorin-chief for the journal system. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9949-8368 contact details: university college london (ucl), institute of education, 20 bedford way london wc1h 0al, uk (j.mckinley@ucl.ac.uk) an nguyen is a phd candidate at the faculty of wellbeing, education and language studies at the open university, uk. her research interests focus on emi, internationalization of higher education, sociology of education, and mixed-methods research. orcid id: h ps://orcid.org/0000-0002-1335-4890 255 contact details: faculty of wellbeing, education and language studies, the open university, walton hall, kents hill, milton keynes, mk7 6a, uk (an.nguyen@open.ac.uk) romola rassool is senior lecturer and currently director of the postgraduate ins tute of english of the open university of sri lanka. she obtained her phd in sociolinguis cs from the university of melbourne, a master’s degree in teaching english to speakers of other languages (tesol) from teachers college, columbia university, new york, and a ba (honors) in english from the university of kelaniya, sri lanka. her research interests include academic literacies, preservaon of lesser-known languages, and minority language rights. orcid id: h ps://orcid.org/0000-0002-2507-0836 contact details: postgraduate ins tute of english, open university of sri lanka, p o box 21, nawala, nugegoda, sri lanka (dirpgie@ou.ac.lk) heath rose is professor of applied linguistics at university of oxford, uk, and the coordinator of the emi oxford research group. his research explores the curriculum implications of the globalization of english. he is author of several books including global englishes for language teaching (cambridge university press, 2020). orcid id: h ps://orcid.org/0000-0002-6434-6663 contact details: department of educa on, university of oxford, 15 norham gardens, oxford, ox2 6py, uk (heath.rose@educa on.ox.ac.uk) maría del mar sánchez-pérez is associate professor at the university of almeria, spain. she holds a phd in applied linguis cs, and her research interests include fl/l2 teaching methodology, english for specific purposes (esp), english for academic purposes (eap), content and language integrated learning (clil), english-medium instruc on (emi), integra ng content and language in higher educa on (iclhe), and interna onaliza on in higher educa on. orcid id: h ps://orcid.org/0000-0002-6550-9030 contact details: department of philology, university of almería, carretera sacramento s/n, 04120 la cañada de san urbano, almería, spain (mmar.sanchez@ual.es) adem soruç is associate professor of applied linguistics at the department of english translation and interpreting, the university of samsun, turkey. he is carrying out research on emi and individual learner differences. he has published a wide range of articles in reputable journals such as system, elt journal, iral, or relc journal. he has also co-authored and published a monograph on individual learner differences with palgrave. 256 orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4165-6260 contact details: department of translation and interpreting, university of samsun, 55000 ondokuzmayıs/samsun, turkey (adem.soruc@samsun.edu.tr) gene thompson is associate professor in the department of global business at rikkyo university, where he serves as the director of the bilingual business leader program. he is a member of the emi oxford research group with a teaching background in content and language integrated learning (clil) for learners preparing to enter emi settings. his emi-related research focuses on the intersection between learner self-beliefs and behavior, appearing in journals such as international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, studies in higher education, system, and language teaching research. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2406-1364 contact details: department of global business, college of business, rikkyo university, 3-34-1 nishi-ikebukuro, toshima-ku, tokyo 171-8501, tokyo, japan (thompson@ rikkyo.ac.jp) dogan yuksel is now working as a researcher at open university, faculty of wellbeing, education & language studies, uk. his research on emi has been published in journals such as applied linguistics review and system. his research on other topics, such as corrective feedback, has appeared in such journals as iral and international journal of applied linguistics. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9131-3907 contact details: faculty of wellbeing, education & language studies, open university, walton hall, kents hill, milton keynes mk7 6a, uk (dogan.yuksel@open.ac.uk) sihan zhou is assistant professor in the department of curriculum and instruction, faculty of education, the chinese university of hong kong. she gained her dphil at the university of oxford, where she also taught on the program of msc in applied linguistics for language teaching. she is a member of the emi oxford research group. her research focuses on students’ self-regulated learning and language support in emi higher education, appearing in journals such as language teaching, system, elt journal, applied linguistics review, and relc journal. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1815-5938 contact details: department of curriculum and instruction, faculty of education, the chinese university of hong kong, shatin, hong kong sar, china (sihanzhou@cuhk.edu.hk) 15 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (1). 2021. 15-40 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.1.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt another look at boredom in language instruction: the role of the predictable and the unexpected mariusz kruk university of zielona góra, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5297-1966 mkruk@uz.zgora.pl mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7448-355x pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl joanna zawodniak university of zielona góra, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3219-145x j.zawodniak@in.uz.zgora.pl abstract although recent years have seen a growing interest in positive emotions in second or foreign language learning and teaching, negative emotions are always present in the classroom and they deserve to be investigated in their own right. the article focuses on boredom, a construct that has been explored in educational psychology but has received only scant attention from second language acquisition researchers. it reports a study which examined the changes in the levels of boredom experienced by 13 english majors in four efl classes and the factors accounting for such changes. using data obtained from a few different sources (i.e., boredom grids, narratives, interviews, class evaluations and lesson plans), it was found that although boredom can be attributed to different constellations of factors, it was mainly traced to repetitiveness, monotony and predictability of what transpired during a particular class. mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, joanna zawodniak 16 keywords: boredom; english as a foreign language; l2 instruction; micro-perspective; negative emotions 1. introduction learning a second or foreign language (l2) is an exceedingly complex process that somewhat inevitably encompasses a range of different affective states or emotions, many of which are negative. a good case in point is anxiety which mostly has a detrimental (debilitative) effect on learners’ behavior inside and outside the classroom, their use of the target language (tl), and, as a consequence, the ultimate level of attainment (e.g., gkonou et al., 2017; gregersen & macintyre, 2015). in view of this, it is perhaps not surprising that research in second language acquisition (sla), mirroring to some extent the dominant trends in educational psychology, has mainly concerned itself with negative facets of emotions, focusing on their pernicious effect on learning outcomes (see e.g., macintyre & mercer, 2014). however, in recent years we can see a backlash against this tendency, as exemplified in the emphasis on positive psychology, which “rather than taking a palliative approach to reducing pain or coping with distressing experience, . . . seeks to develop tools to build positive emotions, greater engagement, and an appreciation of meaning in life and its activities (seligman, 2006)” (macintyre & mercer, 2014, p. 154). although there is clearly merit to exploring the positive aspects of the process of sla, whether this occurs within the perma (i.e., positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment) framework (cf. seligman, 2011) or some other paradigm, we should by no means forget about the negative aspects of l2 learning which constitute part and parcel of all learners’ educational experience. as komorowska (2016) illuminates, positive emotions such as high self-esteem can bring with them their own share of problems, whereas negative emotions such as pessimism, fear or experience of difficulty can generate positive states related to, among others, reduced risk-taking, reliance on problem-focused strategies, or more effective functioning. in a similar vein, dewaele and macintyre (2014) argue that while positive and negative emotions are independent and do not constitute two sides of the same coin, both of them are crucial in l2 learning, with anxiety, for example, “generating focus on the need to take specific action” (p. 262). all of this shows that we should avoid pendulum swings of the kind that have characterized l2 teaching methodology (cf. brown, 2006), and attempt to strike a balance between the investigation of positive and negative emotions in sla. in accordance with this rationale, this article explores the role that boredom plays in the learning of english by advanced students majoring in this language. moreover, in line with another look at boredom in language instruction: the role of the predictable and the unexpected 17 recent tendencies in research on individual differences (see e.g., mystkowskawiertelak & pawlak, 2017), it adopts a micro-perspective, in which boredom is examined in specific contexts, also taking into account its dynamic dimension. 2. literature review 2.1. the challenge of defining the concept of boredom over the past three decades the phenomenon of boredom has been subject to considerable research interest in psychology and educational psychology, but it has remained an ignored and thus unexplored issue in l2 learning and teaching. the main reason for this neglect is that language teachers have a tendency to attribute the behaviors of bored students to laziness, anxiety, general passivity or personal characteristics (e.g., chapman, 2013; macklem, 2015). it is a concept that escapes concise, unambiguous explanations due to its multidimensional and situation-dependent character (gordon et al., 1997). thus, in order to define boredom, it is necessary to delve into its internal complexity with regard to the factors that generate it and the variables that it interacts with. boredom is referred to as an emotional or psychological state associated with an inner sense of emptiness experienced by individuals for whom it is difficult to find purpose and/or meaning in life (goldberg et al., 2011). bored students usually feel apathetic, disappointed, uninterested, annoyed and/or dissatisfied with their surroundings which they perceive as unchallenging and tedious, but at the same time they are reluctant to undertake a constructive effort to alleviate this situation (eastwood et al., 2007). they exhibit impaired vitality, poor concentration skills and difficulty in paying attention (fahlman, 2009). boredom is among the most frequently experienced academic emotions and, as such, it is vividly present in school settings affecting the quality of student learning, achievement and social interactions (pekrun et al., 2009). it is clearly a negative emotion, which, next to anger, anxiety, helplessness and shame, influences various aspects of the learning process to a greater extent than positive emotions such as enjoyment and pride (forgas, 2013; sansone & thoman, 2005). boredom has been seen as having more or less the same impact on school performance and achievement as anxiety (tze et al., 2013). it has also been shown to be related to learners’ impulsivity and risk-taking as well as decreased self-regulated learning and diminished motivation (daschmann et al., 2011; preckel et al., 2010). the motivation of bored students is lower since they are disengaged from school subjects or tasks, which results in their inability to concentrate or simply manifest interest and joy (pekrun & linnenbrink-garcia, 2012). mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, joanna zawodniak 18 there are several theories that can be referred to in order to shed light on the causes of boredom. one of them, the under-stimulation model (larson & richards, 1991), highlights the paucity of challenging incentives to learn as the reason for deactivating students and discouraging them from eager participation in school activities. in the so-called forced-effort model (hill & perkins, 1985), boredom is conceptualized as a consequence of imposing on students tasks into which they have to put excessive cognitive effort, although they perceive these tasks as monotonous and unattractive. the attentional theory of boredom proneness (eastwood et al., 2012; harris, 2000), in turn, posits that the primary cause of boredom is an individual’s inability to self-regulate attention. attentional problems are related to individual differences between learners and can arise as a result of the cognitive demands of a task but can also be traced back to interests, concerns or values (mercer-lynn et al., 2014). it is also worth mentioning the emotion theory (eastwood et. al., 2007, 2012), according to which boredom may stem from difficulty in recognizing, accessing and communicating one’s own feelings, a phenomenon that has been diagnosed as alexithymia. yet another attempt to explain why students get bored has been made within the framework of the control-value theory of achievement emotions (pekrun, 2006; pekrun et al., 2010). in this view, students’ appraisals of control over the task at hand and the value they attribute to this task determine whether they will experience boredom. the final theoretical perspective is the dimensional model (pekrun et al., 2010), which views boredom as both a deactivating and activating emotion. this means that, perhaps quite paradoxically, in certain circumstances the negative state of emotional ennui may bring about arousal behavior aimed at searching for change. seen in this way, boredom assumes the role of a functional negative emotion that may push students into setting new goals or reformulating those they are pursuing (cf. komorowska, 2016). in light of such a variety of approaches to the occurrence of boredom and the reasons which underlie this occurrence, the concept, whether conceived of in the field of psychology or sla, is exceedingly difficult to define. however, as the focus of the present study is on naturally-occurring efl classes, the concept is equated in the present article with some form of disengagement from the classroom activities implemented by the teacher, although adopting such a definition surely runs the risk of oversimplification. at the same time, it has to be noted that the connection between boredom and disengagement is not at all a novel idea since the former is often described as the experience of being disengaged from the task at hand or just as a kind of engagement problem (macklem, 2015). what also deserves attention here is that disengagement is one of the five factors included in the multidimensional state boredom scale (fahlman et al., 2013), the others being high arousal, low arousal, inattention and time perception, another look at boredom in language instruction: the role of the predictable and the unexpected 19 which shows how complex and unobvious the concept of boredom is. in fact, it could as well be argued that boredom is intricately tied to a number of other factors such as motivation, demotivation, engagement, involvement, interest as well as disinterest (ainley, 2012; pekrun et al., 2010), to name but a few. even though this issue will be touched on and illuminated in the discussion section, it must be borne in mind that relationships of this kind can only be successfully teased apart through future research. 2.2. the intensity of boredom numerous manifestations of boredom have been taken into consideration in several typologies attempting to shine a light on its underlying mechanisms and to pinpoint its most distinctive features. however, given the focus of this article, the most noteworthy is the five-subtype taxonomy (see table 1) concerning the intensity of boredom because it tells us more about how this emotional state might change depending on specific circumstances and how it might influence student behavior. in a nutshell, the typology indicates that in some instances the experience of boredom may serve as a motivator enabling students to realize what inhibits the performance of the task at hand, thereby encouraging them to switch goals. table 1 the five-subtype characteristics of boredom (after goetz et al., 2014) subtype intensity characteristic features indifferent boredom pleasant cheerful fatigue and relaxing withdrawal calibrating boredom moderately unpleasant the need for change combined with uncertainty and accompanied by wandering, off-topic thoughts searching boredom unpleasant attempts at getting rid of frustrating weariness and finding interesting things to do reactant boredom particularly aversive eagerness to find out the factors responsible for the experience of boredom (the teacher, the topic, the subject, the setting) apathetic boredom extremely unpleasant a state of helplessness and dissatisfaction stemming from equally low levels of positive and negative emotions 2.3. research on boredom in l2 teaching and learning as mentioned before, research into boredom in the l2 classroom is extremely scant. to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are just five studies directly related to this issue (i.e., chapman, 2013; kruk, 2016a, 2016b; kruk & zawodniak, 2017, 2018). several other publications can be seen as indirectly connected with the concept of boredom, either because they explore its flipside in the form of flow in task performance (aubrey, 2017) or interest and engagement in classroom activities (see e.g., peacock, 1997; tin, 2016), or they focus mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, joanna zawodniak 20 on the broader notion of demotivation (kikuchi, 2015). however, due to space limitations, the discussion in the present section is confined to studies that have specifically addressed the issue of boredom. chapman (2013) investigated the beliefs about this negative emotion manifested by learners of german as a foreign language and their teachers. it turned out that the best predictor of boredom were learners’ feelings towards the teacher which were much more influential than the nature of tasks and activities performed. kruk (2016a), in turn, conducted a study which explored changes in the level of boredom experienced by senior high school students learning english as a foreign language over the period of three weeks. the use of several data collection tools yielding both quantitative and qualitative results allowed the researcher to identify fluctuations in boredom levels both in single classes and sequences of classes. the reasons for such changes were both more general, such as the students’ proneness to boredom, and situational, connected with the nature of the activities. kruk (2016b) also conducted a longitudinal research project in which he examined the changes in the level of boredom, alongside motivation and anxiety, over one semester in a virtual environment constituted by second life. using a mixed-methods approach, he demonstrated that while the levels of boredom changed together with those of motivation and were likely to increase over time, anxiety remained relatively stable. he showed as well that lower levels of boredom could be attributed to participants’ enthusiasm about the opportunity to use second life as a means of practicing the l2, but also as a kind of entertainment. another two studies dealing with the role of boredom in l2 learning were carried out by kruk and zawodniak (2017, 2018), also in the polish educational context. the first (kruk & zawodniak, 2017) examined the relationship between overall boredom experienced by english majors and the boredom they exhibited in efl classes (e.g., speaking, writing, grammar). quantitative analysis revealed a significant, positive correlation between general boredom proneness and boredom proneness specific to efl classes, with the intensity of this negative emotion increasing over time. thanks to qualitative data, it was also possible to pinpoint causes of boredom, the most important of which included activities unadjusted to participants’ l2 proficiency, the repetitive character of these activities, the teacher, and form(s) of work applied. kruk and zawodniak (2018) also investigated the experience of boredom in efl classes, focusing only on a sample of the participants of the previous study (i.e., kruk & zawodniak, 2017) and relying solely upon qualitative procedures. aside from investigating the reasons for student boredom and changes in its intensity over time, the researchers probed into the manner in which students manifested their boredom, the ways they coped with it, and the differences between this kind of experience in english another look at boredom in language instruction: the role of the predictable and the unexpected 21 classes and other academic subjects. the students were more active in their attempts to overcome boredom outside of school compared to in-school situations. participants also proved to be more bored with theoretical subjects (e.g., descriptive grammar) and electives (e.g., lectures) than with efl classes which they simply perceived as more useful, attributing their advantage to small groups and the use of english as the only language of instruction. the common thread running through most of the recent studies is the changing nature of l2 student boredom. based on the empirical evidence collected to date, this variable can be regarded as dynamic as well as temporally and spatially situated, intertwined and constantly interacting with other systems (larsen-freeman, 2016), such as, for example, motivation, anxiety, pedagogical procedures or group dynamics. although the investigations reported before have somewhat illuminated this issue, the insights could only be limited, mainly because of the methodology employed, which did not allow a more in-depth look into fluctuations in levels of boredom as a function of contextual and individual factors. the present study seeks to fill this gap by investigating the evolving nature of boredom in real time, during regularly scheduled efl classes, also aiming to shed light on the complex interplay of factors responsible for such fluctuations. 3. the study 3.1. research questions the study aimed to explore changes in the levels of boredom of advanced learners of english in four efl classes that were taught by one of the present authors. as mentioned before, for the purpose of this study boredom is defined as a state of disengagement caused by lack of interest and involvement. the following research questions were addressed: 1. how do levels of boredom change over the course of a single class and from one class to the next? 2. what factors are responsible for the changes in boredom levels? 3.2. participants participants were 13 polish university students (12 females and 1 male) majoring in english, enrolled in the final year of a three-year ba program. the students were on average 21.92 (sd = 0.76) years of age and their mean experience in learning english, their tl, amounted to 12.92 (sd = 3.52) years. overall, participants’ command of english could be characterized as ranging from b2 to c1 according to mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, joanna zawodniak 22 the common european framework of reference for languages (council of europe, 2001). however, some individual variation could be observed regarding overall mastery and the command of different tl skills and subsystems. the students’ average grade in the end-of-the-year examination in english, typically used for assessment purposes in polish universities, was 3.63 (sd = 0.65) on a scale from 2 (fail) to 5 (very good). such evaluation largely corresponded to participants’ own perception of their tl ability, which is evident in their self-assessment that was only a little higher and stood at 3.73 (sd = 0.63) on the same scale. it should be noted that students gave their consent to take part in the study. 3.3. data collection instruments and procedures the study comprised four naturally occurring efl classes scheduled one per week. they were conducted by one of the present researchers in a group of the 13 participants described before. table 2 provides a short description of the activities included in the four successive classes under investigation, with a focus on the activities applied, the skills practiced, and the modes of class organization employed. table 2 tasks and activities included in the classes under investigation class 1 class 2 class 3 class 4 · organization · speaking: memory; pairwork · reading: memory techniques; individual work · speaking: mnemonic techniques; whole-group discussion · grammar: modal verbs; individual work, pair-work · listening: instructions; individual work · vocabulary: sorting out words; individual work · conclusion · organization · speaking: formal letters; pair-work · reading: matching true/false questions; individual work · vocabulary: classifying words, text completion; individual work · grammar: relative pronouns; individual work · speaking: discussing dangerous sports; pair-work · listening: an interview, completing sentences; individual work · conclusion · organization · vocabulary quiz; individual work · listening: answering questions, completing notes; individual work · grammar: phrasal verbs completing and matching sentences; individual work · vocabulary: collocations; individual work · speaking: work and business; pair-work · reading: answering questions; individual work · conclusion · organization · vocabulary: filling gaps, literal and metaphorical meanings of words; individual work, pair-work · grammar: language of cause and effect, text completion; individual work · reading: answering questions; individual work · listening: answering questions; individual work · conclusion drawing upon previous research on the dynamics of motivation and willingness to communicate (e.g., pawlak, 2012; pawlak et al., 2016), four instruments were used to collect the data on fluctuations in boredom levels: · a background questionnaire was filled out by the students at the start of the study and provided information needed for the description of participants included in section 3.2; another look at boredom in language instruction: the role of the predictable and the unexpected 23 · an in-class boredom questionnaire, which consisted of four parts: (1) part one, filled out at the beginning of each class, where students provided their names and the date of the class; (2) part two, completed during each class, that consisted of a boredom grid in which participants self-rated the level of their boredom on a scale from 1 (minimum) to 7 (maximum) at 5-minute intervals in response to a prerecorded sound; the cronbach alpha value for this instrument was 0.95, which speaks to high internal consistency reliability; (3) part three, completed towards the end of the class, which included seven items (they were chosen on the basis of the relevant literature, for example, pawlak, 2012; peacock, 1997) on a semantic differential scale (i.e., meaningless vs. meaningful; dull vs. exciting; useless vs. useful; unsatisfying vs. satisfying; usual vs. unusual; unappealing vs. appealing and monotonous vs. absorbing); this in fact constituted a 7-point likert scale as the extreme responses were accorded the value from 1 (e.g., dull) to 7 (e.g., exciting); cronbach alpha equaled 0.86 and can also be deemed satisfactory; (4) part four, which required students to write a short paragraph about the experience of boredom during each class (“please write a few sentences related to the experience of boredom during the class”); · a semi-structured interview, which was held immediately after each class; since the interview was held immediately after classes and since all the students who participated in this study had other classes scheduled after the one investigated in the study, the decision was made not to interfere with the participants’ desire to take part in them; thus the interview was conducted with four volunteers who were different individuals each time; the interviews were audio-recorded; interviewees were asked questions regarding reasons for changes in boredom levels depicted in the grid and their overall opinions about a class (e.g., activities performed, materials used); · lesson plans, which provided information related to the conducted classes, their stages and the language activities performed. importantly, polish was used in all the data collection instruments to avoid misunderstanding or misinterpretation, and participants were allowed to use polish or english when responding to open-ended questions. for the same reason, polish was used to conduct the four interviews. 3.4. data analysis depending on the nature of the data, they were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. in the case of the former, descriptive statistics in the form of means mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, joanna zawodniak 24 and standard deviations were calculated for some of the items in the background and in-class questionnaires. as for the latter, it involved transcription of the participants’ narratives (part four of the in-class questionnaire) by means of a computer word processor and partial transcription of the individual interviews (dörnyei, 2007). each of the three researchers went through the transcripts with a view to pinpointing the factors accounting for the experience of boredom. to be more specific, notes and annotations were made to record any immediate observations. next, the themes were identified and labeled (e.g., some themes concerned tasks and some were related to the characteristics of a specific class). this was followed by a discussion during which the dominant themes and tendencies were agreed upon. such data were juxtaposed against the lesson plans to arrive at the factors that may have impacted the levels of boredom experienced during the classes in question. table 3 means and standard deviations for boredom levels (on a 7-point scale) during the four classes min. 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 overall class 1 m 2.36 2.18 2.91 2.91 3.36 3.36 4.00 4.27 4.45 4.00 4.64 4.36 3.64 3.55 3.57 sd 1.57 1.08 1.58 1.45 1.69 1.57 1.67 1.68 1.13 1.18 1.96 1.50 1.91 2.07 0.77 class 2 m 2.29 2.57 2.71 2.71 2.86 3.00 3.43 3.57 4.00 4.29 4.29 3.71 3.86 3.71 3.36 sd 1.38 1.51 1.38 1.38 1.68 1.41 1.62 1.62 1.41 1.80 1.89 1.50 1.35 1.38 0.66 class 3 m 2.18 2.82 2.82 3.27 3.09 3.36 3.36 3.36 3.55 3.27 3.55 4.09 4.09 4.09 3.35 sd 1.25 2.40 1.83 1.85 1.64 1.57 1.57 1.36 1.44 1.10 1.37 1.04 1.04 1.22 0.54 class 4 m 2.08 2.08 2.15 2.46 2.46 3.15 3.38 3.08 3.08 3.31 3.15 3.38 3.38 3.08 2.87 sd 1.55 1.38 1.41 1.51 1.39 1.52 1.71 1.66 1.61 1.75 1.34 1.71 1.80 1.44 0.51 overall m 2.23 2.41 2.65 2.84 2.94 3.22 3.54 3.57 3.77 3.72 3.91 3.89 3.74 3.61 sd 0.12 0.34 0.34 0.34 0.38 0.18 0.31 0.51 0.59 0.51 0.68 0.43 0.30 0.42 4. results 4.1. overall variation across classes as can be seen from table 3, which presents the mean level of boredom in each class, both overall and at 5-minute intervals, the participants experienced the most boredom in class 1 (c1) and the least in class 4 (c4), which is evident in the total means of 3.57 and 2.87, respectively. in addition, overall, the students tended to be the most interested at the start of each class, that is in minute (m) 10 and m15, when the average boredom level stood at 2.23 and 2.42, respectively, and they felt the most boredom towards the end of the class, in m60 and another look at boredom in language instruction: the role of the predictable and the unexpected 25 m65, when its mean levels oscillated around 3.90. it is also clear that the changes in boredom levels were the most pronounced in c1, with the difference between the lowest and the highest mean values equaling 2.46. conversely, the difference between the extreme values was the least prominent in c4, in which it equaled 1.30. the amount of variation in boredom levels may be the corollary of the degree to which individual participants were involved in a particular class, as shown by standard deviation values which proved to be the highest for c1 (sd = 0.77), followed by c2 (sd = 0.66), c3 (sd = 0.54) and c4 (sd = 0.51). 4.2. variation in boredom levels during individual classes now that the overall patterns of change in boredom levels have been described, a more detailed analysis is provided in order to take into account the activities that each of the classes comprised. this is elaborated subsequently with respect to the four classes under investigation. 4.2.1. class 1 when it comes to c1, figure 1 shows that the participants were quite interested in the lesson in its first 15 minutes. this is evident in the fact that the initially reported boredom level equaled 2.36 points and it was even lower in m15 (2.18 points, a difference of 0.18). this was the time when the teacher explained the aims of the class, commented on activities to be included and provided feedback on the homework assignment. the situation started to change during the subsequent speaking activities in which students were requested to ask and answer questions about memory (s1), discuss tips on how to improve it (s2), and talk about techniques they would like to try out (s3), where an increase in boredom levels from 2.18 (m15), first to 2.91 (m20) and then to 3.36 (m30 and m35), could be detected. the level of boredom continued to rise throughout the reading (r) and speaking (s4) activities (4.00 in m40 and 4.27 in m45), in which students were asked to read about mnemonic techniques useful in language learning and discuss them. students’ boredom kept increasing during the next two grammar activities which focused on matching the meaning of the modal verb can with its use (g1) and explaining the difference in meaning between sentences containing modal verbs (g2). somewhere in the middle of the third grammar activity (g3) in which students were instructed to look at pictures and speculate about what might have happened, however, the level of boredom fell to some extent (4.00 in m55), only to rise again at the beginning of a listening activity (l), reaching its maximum in m60 (a difference of 2.46 in comparison to the lowest value in m15). it should be noted, though, that during this listening activity the level of mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, joanna zawodniak 26 boredom decreased a little, with the difference between m60 and m65 equaling 0.28. the experience of this academic emotion kept decreasing in the final stage of the class (a difference of 0.09 from m70 to m75) as a vocabulary activity (v) was assigned in which students grouped vocabulary items. figure 1 changes in the level of boredom together with language activities performed in c1 4.2.2. class 2 as illustrated in figure 2, in c2 the reported level of boredom was on the rise from the beginning until m55 and m50, which was followed by a drop, a slight increase, and a final decrease. a closer look at figure 2 reveals that the students were the least bored with the part of the class devoted to introductory issues and feedback on homework (o+h; 2.29 – the first 15 minutes). the activities related to composing formal letters (i.e., s1 – reading pertinent extracts and discussing their purpose; s2 – discussing the layout) resulted in a slight rise in the feelings of boredom (an increase of 0.11 from m15 to m20) and then a levelingoff at 2.71 (m20 and m25), when participants had to read a text and match headings to the “secrets” of writing business letters (r1). this was followed by an increase in reported levels of boredom, which began to manifest itself in the second half of r2 (i.e., the activity connected with reading a text and answering true/false questions) and was maintained during the subsequent two vocabulary activities (v1 – grouping words under appropriate headings; v2 – completing a text with given words) and two grammar exercises (g1 – working with relative pronouns; g2 – rewriting sentences in a formal style). the change in the levels of boredom from m30 (2.86) to m55 (4.29) was quite substantial and equaled 1.43. the intensity of boredom fell during a speaking activity (s1) in another look at boredom in language instruction: the role of the predictable and the unexpected 27 which students were requested to discuss questions about dangerous sports (a difference of 0.58 between m60 and m65), and then it rose slightly (a change of 0.15 between m65 and m70) in the middle of a listening task (l – an interview with a successful formula one driver) where participants were asked to complete sentences with correct words, only to fall again by 0.15 at the end (m75). figure 2 changes in the level of boredom together with language activities performed in c2 4.2.3. class 3 when it comes to c3, figure 3 shows that, yet again, the students were the least bored during the initial phase devoted to organizational issues (2.18 in m10). then the level of boredom increased by 0.64 during a vocabulary quiz (m15) and remained the same until its completion (m20). this was followed by another increase in boredom levels by 0.45 at the end of a listening activity (l1) in which participants were asked to listen to a short anecdote and answer three questions, followed by a slight decrease of 0.18 and a slight increase of 0.27 in the middle and at the end of another listening task (l2), respectively, which involved listening to phone messages and completing notes. this relatively low level of boredom (i.e., 3.36) was maintained throughout two grammar activities on phrasal verbs (g1 – completing sentences; g2 – matching sentences). a slight increase to the level of 3.55 was subsequently observed at the start of a vocabulary task (v) dealing with collocations (putting words under correct headings and then choosing collocations to complete sentences), which was followed by a speaking activity (s) in which the students discussed in pairs questions related to work and business. while this speaking task inspired more involvement and interest (a drop of 0.28 in m55), these faded away rather quickly, as is evident mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, joanna zawodniak 28 in the fact that average boredom levels bounced back to the previous levels towards the end of the task in m60 (3.55, a change of 0.28). the intensity of boredom was even higher in the first half of the last reading activity (r) (a change of 0.54 from m60 to m65) in which students were asked to read a rather long text and answer four questions. the mean self-ratings then leveled off and remained at 4.09 for the last two consecutive measurements (i.e., m70 and m75). figure 3 changes in the level of boredom together with language activities performed in c3 4.2.4. class 4 figure 4 shows that, as was the case with the remaining classes, the participants’ self-ratings of boredom in c4 were the lowest in its initial stages, dedicated to organization and checking homework (2.08 in m10 and m15). somewhere in the middle of the first vocabulary activity involving filling out gaps in sentences a minor rise in boredom was registered (a change of 0.05 from m15 to m20), followed by a major one at the end of the task (a change of 0.31 from m20 to m25). the boredom levels did not change during the second vocabulary task (v2) dealing with literal and metaphorical meanings of words from the text covered in the previous class (i.e., c3) but rose steeply at the end of the activity, increasing by 0.69 from m30 to m35. boredom continued to rise during the first two grammar activities in which students read a short text and underlined expressions linked with the language of cause and effect (g1), and completed a text with suitable words (g2), reaching the maximum level in m40 (3.38). the third grammar activity (g3) in which participants were requested to listen to an actor and indicate the words and expressions related to cause and effect led to a slight drop in boredom (a change of 0.30 from m40 to m45). its levels did not alter in another look at boredom in language instruction: the role of the predictable and the unexpected 29 the first part of the subsequent task (r) devoted to reading a text about work experience and answering questions related to that text. however, a slight increase was detected in the second part of the task, followed by a minor decrease (a change of 0.16 from m55 to m60) when the understanding of the text was checked. the group then reported a slight increase in boredom (a change of 0.23 from m60 to m65), a stable period between m65 and m70, and a final small drop at the time of the last measurement (a change of 0.30 from m70 to m75). these ups and downs in boredom levels happened during the last activity (l) when students were requested to listen to eight people talking about their jobs and answer related questions. figure 4 changes in the level of boredom together with language activities performed in c4 4.3. students’ evaluation of the four classes as can be seen from table 4, the participants’ overall evaluations of the four classes by means of the semantic differential scale (i.e., meaningless-meaningful, dull-exiting, etc.) changed from one class to the next, with the caveat that, in this case, a higher mean indicates a lower level of boredom. more precisely, they showed that students were less engaged in the first two classes than in the last two, a finding that only partly overlaps with the results presented before, where the overall levels of boredom in c2 and c3 were comparable (3.36 vs. 3.35). the students were the most positive about c4 and the least about c1 (a major difference of 0.83), which corresponds to the lowest and highest overall levels of boredom, respectively (2.87 vs. 3.57) mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, joanna zawodniak 30 table 4 participants’ overall evaluation of the four classes class 1 class 2 class 3 class 4 m 4.23 4.29 4.51 5.03 sd 1.14 1.09 .63 .66 4.4. narratives and interviews apart from juxtaposing the participants’ self-evaluations with what transpired during the four classes, further insights into factors responsible for changes in boredom levels emerged from the qualitative analysis of the narratives, the interviews and the related notes. when it comes to c1, the main factor generating boredom was the reading task. this is because it was not considered “a creative activity” as it dealt with “an uninteresting topic,” involved reading a long text (“boredom was caused by reading a lengthy passage”) and was accompanied by an exercise that was perceived as boring (“monotonous exercises related to checking comprehension of the text”). in addition, the reading task was generally regarded as too demanding, thus evoking the feeling of boredom. another factor responsible for boredom in c1 pertained to the performance of unchallenging language activities, their predictability and repetitiveness. some students were also bored with speaking (“the speaking activities which i don’t like very much and which take a lot of time”) and listening tasks (“an uninteresting listening exercise”). one student mentioned the length of the class and another noted that lack of sleep made her feel tired and bored. when asked about the increase in the self-reported levels of boredom, the student interviewed afterwards said that she always felt bored during speaking tasks because she did not like to talk about “imposed topics” and participate in “artificial conversations.” the student’s level of boredom was also higher during the second grammar activity (g2) in which participants were supposed to explain the difference in meaning between pairs of sentences involving modal verbs. the interviewee was simply confused with it since, as she said: “i didn’t know what to do.” with respect to c2, the students listed the following factors responsible for the experience of boredom: (1) reading a boring text and listening to a boring interview, (2) doing easy grammar exercises, (3) a limited number of speaking tasks, and (4) the recurring pattern of language activities. however, according to the student interviewed after the class, boredom was not caused by the factors just mentioned, but it was related to the length of the class. this is because she became disengaged somewhere in the middle and then boredom increased with time and was the highest towards the end. as she commented: “i spent half an hour and i wasn’t bored at all. then i started to feel a bit bored . . . only after 50 minutes did i start to feel really bored . . . 50 minutes is a long time . . . sitting all the time in one place.” another look at boredom in language instruction: the role of the predictable and the unexpected 31 as regards c3, the factors inducing boredom were similar to those in the previous classes and included reading a text, completing easy and monotonous language activities (“we could do more diverse exercises”) and performing only one speaking activity (“if there had been more discussion, i’d have been bored even less”). it should be noted, however, that some students did not mention any boredom-evoking factors but pointed to the vocabulary quiz conducted during the first part of the class as a positive influence on their engagement. according to two participants, “the unexpected test for sure ‘revived’ the group and made us more motivated” and was “a good way for waking up ‘sleepy’ heads.” the student interviewed after the class said the she felt a little bored during the speaking task performed in pairs, which focused on work and business, since, as she said: “i personally like to discuss a topic with the whole group.” another factor that, in her opinion, contributed to the experience of boredom was external in nature, being related to noise she could hear in one part of the class. she described this as follows: “i heard a chainsaw or something . . . i felt deconcentrated and i wasn’t able to focus for a while . . . [did the noise cause boredom?] yes, to some extent . . . i started thinking about something else and i needed some time to focus again.” finally, the analysis of relevant data in c4 revealed that the reading and listening tasks were the major factors responsible for the lack of involvement for six students. in the case of the former, boredom resulted from the length of the activity while, in the case of the latter, it was triggered by an uninteresting topic. in addition, two students mentioned the absence of a speaking task (e.g., “the only missing task during the lesson was speaking in pairs. in my opinion, such an activity can wake us up and prevent us from becoming bored”). another learner was bored because “the language activities did not differ much from those i did in my high school” and yet another saw c4 and the activities it included as “carried out in the usual manner.” the student who was interviewed also complained about the length and monotony of the listening task and perceived it as a factor generating boredom. this can be seen in the following comment: “also the listening . . . very extensive . . . and because it was not very absorbing, it made me less attentive.” surprisingly, she pointed to “low blood sugar” as another factor which may have had an impact on her boredom in that class. 5. discussion the study was guided by two research questions, one concerning the nature of changes in the intensity of boredom and the second focusing on factors responsible for such dynamics. when it comes to the first issue, the analysis demonstrated that, similar to motivation (e.g., pawlak, 2012) or willingness to communicate mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, joanna zawodniak 32 (e.g., mystkowska-wiertelak & pawlak, 2017; pawlak et al., 2016), the intensity of boredom is subject to major fluctuations over different timescales. for one thing, the students’ average boredom changed considerably over the four classes, being at its height in c1, leveling off in c2 and c3, and reaching the lowest intensity in c4. secondly, ups and downs in its levels were also evident in the four classes under investigation, although the scope and amplitude of such fluctuations varied and so did the overall pattern of the changes. for example, while the general experience of boredom was the highest in c1 and it is here that the greatest amplitude of fluctuations was revealed, the opposite was found for c4, in which disengagement was not only the lowest but also the differences in its levels were the least pronounced. it should also be noted that while all the classes shared similar characteristics with respect to boredom, such as its lowest levels in initial stages, there were also differences related to the frequency of rises and falls as well as the overall tendencies concerning the intensity of this experience. for instance, a relatively steady rising pattern in c2 contrasts to some extent with a more intermittent one in c1, whereas the persistently high level of boredom in c3 at the end of the class stands in contrast to the drops in its intensity in the final stages of the remaining three classes. such findings are more or less in line with the results of previous studies, in particular those involving senior high school students and english majors (kruk, 2016a, 2016b). two crucial observations should be made, however. first, the highest intensity of boredom corresponded with the greatest extent of individual variation, as expressed in sd values (c1), which testifies to a considerable role of learners’ personal agendas, individual profiles, and preferences. second, although students’ post-hoc assessment of the classes mirrored in most cases their self-evaluation of the intensity of boredom, there is a discrepancy in the case of c3, which may indicate a certain degree of ambivalence as to whether it was overall interesting (and thus motivating) or boring. as regards the factors accounting for students’ experience of boredom and changes in this regard, the analysis yielded some interesting insights which, on the one hand, go beyond and expand on the findings of previous studies, and, on the other, can be related to theories referred to earlier in this article. it should be emphasized from the outset that pinpointing the influences that shaped the intensity of boredom in the four classes, let alone ordering them according to the magnitude of their importance, poses a formidable challenge since the role of various factors overlapped, creating clusters of variables which could have played a very different role in each class. to give but one example, at first blush, it would appear that the level of boredom was a function of the skill or subsystem being practiced as both the self-ratings of this academic emotion and participants’ comments in the narratives and interviews indicate that, on another look at boredom in language instruction: the role of the predictable and the unexpected 33 the whole, activities focused on reading or grammar were more boredom-inducing than those involving speaking or vocabulary. on closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the reality is much more complex and the factor that may trump all the other influences is the nature of the activity. in particular, what seemed to matter the most was the challenge posed by the task (e.g., too easy), its duration, its relationship to other activities (e.g., several similar activities in a row were likely to enhance boredom), excessive reliance on the coursebook, and, by far most importantly, the degree of repetitiveness and predictability, or, conversely, the degree of novelty that a specific task entailed. for example, it was not the inclusion of a speaking activity as such that played the decisive role but, rather, the demands it placed on the students and the topics discussed, particularly when they were simply imposed by the teacher rather than negotiated, but also the mode in which a task was performed (i.e., whole class, group, pair). other factors that may have impacted boredom levels were more idiosyncratic and tied to the length of the class, external distractions (e.g., noise) or the beliefs, expectations or preferences of individual students. although the results mirror to some extent those obtained in prior studies (e.g., kruk, 2016a, 2016b; kruk & zawodniak, 2017), conspicuous by its absence is the teacher, who was previously identified as a major influence on the occurrence and intensity of boredom (e.g., chapman, 2013). a possible explanation is that the study took place in classes taught by one of the authors, which may have dissuaded students from commenting on this source of boredom. it is also possible to account for causes of boredom through the lens of some of the theoretical stances mentioned earlier in this article, such as the under-stimulation model (larson & richards, 1991), since the participants clearly lacked the right kind of challenge, the forced-effort model (hill & perkins, 1985), as the monotonous and repetitive activities did not warrant the amount of cognitive effort invested, control-value theory of achievement emotions (pekrun, 2006; pekrun et al., 2010), since the participants had little influence on the choice and implementation of the tasks, but also the dimensional model (pekrun et al., 2010), as on some occasions boredom was overcome by the onset of a new activity, even when it was not appealing as such. as regards the intensity of boredom, using the classification proposed by goetz et al. (2014), the participants seemed to have experienced mainly its calibrating and searching types. this is because, on the one hand, they could not change what transpired in class and thus may have engaged in off-task thoughts and, on the other hand, they wanted to combat their disengagement, thus seeking more interesting things to do. there are several strengths of the study that should be emphasized here: (1) it followed the same group of students during four classes, which allowed minimizing the mediating impact of individual difference variables; (2) multiple mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, joanna zawodniak 34 data collection tools were employed, thus enhancing the validity of the findings; and (3) the data were collected during regularly scheduled classes, which increases the ecological validity of the investigation. this said, the study also suffers from some weakness. first, similarly to other research projects drawing on this methodology (e.g., pawlak, 2012; pawlak et al., 2016), a question arises as to the extent to which indicating the levels of boredom every five minutes may have interfered with cognitive processing and task performance as well as may have caused disruptions or even evoked more boredom. even though this is clearly a valid concern, similar tools have been successfully employed in other studies and it is difficult to see an alternative that would have allowed obtaining requisite real-time data (see e.g., pawlak, 2012 or some of the papers included in the edited collection by dörnyei et al., 2015). second, the analysis focused upon overall levels of boredom, which might have masked students’ individual trajectories, an issue that surely deserves investigation but could not be accommodated in this article for reasons of space. third, the data were collected during classes taught by one of the researchers, which may have impacted the honesty of participants’ responses to some extent. however, the students were reassured that their candid responses would not negatively influence their assessment and the results reveal that most of them did not have second thoughts about indicating their increased boredom or pointing to factors responsible for its occurrence. fourth, and perhaps much more fundamentally, it could be argued that investigating boredom may be superfluous because it constitutes little more than the flip side of motivation. in our view, however, this reasoning is flawed since a lack of motivation (i.e., demotivation or amotivation, see kikuchi, 2015 for a discussion) does not have to involve the presence of boredom and the other way around. for example, a learner who is demotivated may in fact be engaged in some parts of a lesson that he or she finds interesting, and a student who is overall motivated may still get bored with the performance of repetitive and monotonous activities. even if we narrow down the concept of motivation to engagement and involvement in a particular class, as pawlak (2012) did, a lack of such engagement may not be an indicator of boredom but, for example, limited enjoyment, the presence of anxiety or scant willingness to communicate. all of this indicates that boredom is a distinct construct which deserves to be examined in its own right. 6. teaching implications since research on the role of boredom in the l2 classroom is still in its infancy, it is clearly premature to offer concrete pedagogical recommendations, and the results of the present study should also be taken with circumspection. nonetheless, another look at boredom in language instruction: the role of the predictable and the unexpected 35 it is possible to offer a handful of suggestions that might help teachers avoid situations in which learners, especially those more advanced, such as the english majors involved in the present study, experience excessive levels of boredom in the classroom. first and foremost, disengagement from classroom tasks and activities is most likely to take place as a result of monotony, repetitiveness and lack of challenge. therefore, teachers should strive to introduce a modicum of novelty into their classes, which might require abandonment of strict adherence to the coursebook and reliance on materials that originate from other sources, such as the internet. second, teachers must be cognizant of the fact that, at least based on the data collected from the participants of this study, the feeling of boredom is largely an individual issue, which surely testifies to the importance of catering to the needs of particular students, even though this is clearly bound to produce considerable challenges. third, it is essential that activities are sequenced appropriately in the sense that particular components of a lesson proceed progressively from easier towards the ones that may pose some difficulties. fourth, it may be a good idea to encourage students to ask for clarification anytime they find themselves at a loss as to how to cope with a given task. fifth, specifically at more advanced levels, teachers could be advised to offer their students more opportunities for choosing what classes should focus on and make sure that the tasks and activities included represent the right kind of challenge. 7. conclusion the study has without doubt provided valuable insights into the changes in boredom levels in the course of regularly-scheduled english classes taught to advanced learners and has shed light on constellations of factors responsible for these changes, also linking the findings with theoretical perspectives in educational psychology. at the same time, it has to be recognized that, given the overall paucity of research in this area, the findings constitute just one piece of the puzzle concerning the role of boredom in l2 learning. within the micro-perspective that this study represents, it would be instructive, for instance, to examine how boredom affects students with diverse individual profiles (e.g., in terms of motivation, learning styles, learning strategies, personality, beliefs), to what extent it is determined by the composition of a class and group dynamics (e.g., by exploring groups following similar lesson plans), or what kind of pedagogical intervention can be used to handle this problematic emotion and whether it should involve appropriate motivational strategies (see dörnyei, 2001). however, as emphasized by mystkowska-wiertelak and pawlak (2017), the investigation of individual difference factors is the most effective when a micro-perspective is adeptly combined with a macro-perspective, where a variable is investigated by mariusz kruk, mirosław pawlak, joanna zawodniak 36 means of meticulously designed tools with much larger populations. this is also a direction that future research on boredom should take if we seek to provide more global insights on its role in l2 learning and teaching and the forces shaping it. it can only be hoped that future research will provide evidence of not only why boredom 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(2013). canadian and chinese university students’ approaches to coping with academic boredom. learning and individual differences, 23, 32-43. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.lindif.2012.10.015 19 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (1). 2019. 19-30 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.1.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt towards a better understanding of the l2 learning experience, the cinderella of the l2 motivational self system zoltán dörnyei university of nottingham, uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7820-1254 zoltan.dornyei@nottingham.ac.uk abstract the theoretical emphasis within the l2 motivational self system has typically been on the two future self-guides representing possible (ideal and ought-to) selves, leaving the third main dimension of the construct, the l2 learning experience, somewhat undertheorized. yet, this third component is not secondary in importance, as evidenced by empirical studies that consistently indicate that the l2 learning experience is not only a strong predictor of various criterion measures but is often the most powerful predictor of motivated behavior. this paper begins with an analysis of possible reasons for this neglect and then draws on the notion of student engagement in educational psychology to offer a theoretical framework for the concept. it is proposed that the l2 learning experience may be defined as the perceived quality of the learners’ engagement with various aspects of the language learning process. keywords: l2 motivational self system; l2 learning experience; engagement; motivated behavior zoltán dörnyei 20 1. introduction since the introduction of the l2 motivational self system in l2 motivation research over ten years ago (dörnyei, 2005, 2009), the field has shifted towards a self-based approach in trying to understand what energizes learners to initiate and then sustain the long journey of mastering a foreign/second language (l2) (see boo, dörnyei, & ryan, 2015). this shift of perspective is partly due to the fact that two of the model’s three main dimensions – the ideal l2 self and the ought-to l2 self – are conceptualized as future self-guides along the lines of markus and nurius’s (1986) possible selves theory. in addition, besides its three core components, the l2 motivational self system also involves a set of conditions that need to be satisfied to produce motivational power, and here the dominance of a self-based construal is even more noticeable: every single condition is related to the two self-guides. so, where does this leave the third core component of the l2 motivational self system, the l2 learning experience? why has it not featured more prominently in either the theoretical or the research developments of the past decade? in answer to these questions, this paper offers two main reasons for the relative neglect of this motivational component: the first is related to the historical roots of the l2 learning experience that are markedly different from those of the two self-guides, as a result of which this component represents a conceptual tradition that cannot be easily harmonized with the well-established theoretical basis of the possible future selves; the second reason concerns the rather undertheorized nature of the l2 learning experience, which did not aid efforts to build on this notion and to integrate it into broader theories in a way it has been done with the ideal and the ought-to selves (e.g., their incorporation into theories of vision or directed motivational currents; see dörnyei, in press). in order to remedy this shortcoming, the last section of the paper proposes a new direction for conceptualizing the l2 learning experience, defined as the perceived quality of the learner’s engagement with various aspects of the learning process. 2. the origins of the l2 learning experience the l2 motivational self system was partly the outcome of empirical research conducted in hungary and partly of theoretical advances in the fields of applied linguistics and psychology. the empirical basis was presented by csizér and dörnyei (2005), and dörnyei, csizér, and németh (2006, chapter 5), describing how the new theoretical construct emerged from a structural equation modelling (sem) study analyzing data gathered in a large-scale (n > 10,000) longitudinal survey in hungary (for an overview, see csizér, in press). the key move in this towards a better understanding of the l2 learning experience, the cinderella of the l2 motivational. . . 21 process involved the equation of the traditional concept of integrativeness (gardner, 1985) with the ideal l2 self, the latter conceived as a broader construct. extensive subsequent testing of this hypothesis confirmed that the two concepts were indeed interrelated and that the ideal l2 self appeared to do a better job at accounting for variance in different criterion measures than integrativeness (for a summary, see dörnyei, 2010). these outcomes offered justification for developing a new theoretical construct that was centered around the ideal l2 self, with an obvious second component to be included in this construct being the ought-to l2 self. dörnyei (2005) offered a detailed rationale and validation argument for the inclusion of these two components, but the third constituent of the theory, the l2 learning experience, was only discussed in a few lines, stating that it concerns situation-specific motives related to the immediate learning environment and experience. this brevity was partly due to the fact that the study by csizér and dörnyei (2005), which formed the empirical basis of the proposed new construct, included only generalized (i.e., non-situation-specific) motives and thus did not provide relevant information about this dimension. nonetheless, it was argued that past motivation research had offered ample evidence for the significance of situation-specific motives related to the immediate learning environment and experience, thereby justifying the addition of this third component. in other words, the inclusion was explained by the fact that the main lesson of the motivational renaissance of the 1990s – namely, that factors related to classroom events and various characteristics of the learner group significantly affect l2 motivation – warranted a situation-specific constituent in any conceptualization of language learning motivation, similar to how ushioda (2001) and noels (2003) also pursued a situated understanding of motivation theory. thus, a third component was added to the new model under the broad label of l2 learning experience with the intention that it would serve as a comprehensive rubric to cover the whole range of motivational influences associated with the actual process of learning an l2. the brevity of the explanation and the lack of any concern for the somewhat eclectic nature of the l2 motivational self system was due to the fact that the main thrust of the new theory was the extension (rather than consolidation) of our existing knowledge through the addition of the two novel constituents (i.e., the two self-guides), and therefore most effort went into communicating this development. in 2009, i offered a more detailed rationale for the new theory, but, regarding the l2 learning experience, the discussion did not go much further than reiterating the basis for the original inclusion of this component: i also felt that we needed to add a third major constituent, which is associated with the direct impact of the students’ learning environment. after all, one of the main zoltán dörnyei 22 achievements of the new wave of motivational studies in the 1990s was to recognize the motivational impact of the main components of the classroom learning situation, such as the teacher, the curriculum and the learner group. for some language learners the initial motivation to learn a language does not come from internally or externally generated self-images but rather from successful engagement with the actual language learning process (e.g., because they discover that they are good at it). (dörnyei, 2009, p. 29) looking back, i can see that i was aware of the fact that the theoretical justification of the l2 learning experience fell short of the level of detail offered for the other two components, as i added a caveat: “this component is conceptualized at a different level from the two self-guides and future research will hopefully elaborate on the self aspects of this bottom-up process” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 29). unfortunately, no such elaboration has been offered over the past decade, as illustrated, for example, by dörnyei and ryan’s (2015, p. 88) recent summary: the third component, the l2 learning experience, is different from the first two in that it focuses on the learner’s present experience, covering a range of situated, ‘executive’ motives related to the immediate learning environment (e.g., the impact of the l2 teacher, the curriculum, the peer group, and the experience of success). in sum, the l2 learning experience was originally included in the l2 motivational self system in order to do justice to past research on the educational dimension of l2 motivation and to supplement the focal issue of the new constructs, the ideal l2 self, and its inextricable companion, the ought-to l2 self. it was felt right from the beginning that the label l2 learning experience was hardly more than a broad, place-holding umbrella term that would need to be fine-tuned at one point, but it appears that the interest in the potentials of the new self-approach has overshadowed this research need, thereby leaving the l2 learning experience the cinderella of the l2 motivational self system. 3. the undertheorized nature of the l2 learning experience curiously, while the theoretical limelight has been on the future self-guides, empirical findings obtained through the application of the l2 motivational self system have consistently indicated that the l2 learning experience was a strong predictor of various criterion measures such as intended learning effort or l2 learning achievement; in fact, it was not uncommon for it to emerge as the most powerful predictor of motivated behavior (e.g., csizér & kormos, 2009; islam, lamb, & chambers, 2013; kormos & csizér, 2008; lamb, 2012; papi, 2010; papi & teimouri, 2012; taguchi, magid, & papi, 2009). for example, in a large-scale survey in china we found that: towards a better understanding of the l2 learning experience, the cinderella of the l2 motivational. . . 23 the association with intended effort is highest with attitudes to l2 learning (.67 for the whole sample), followed by the ideal l2 self (.51), with the ought-to l2 self considerably lagging behind (.38). of course, correlations cannot indicate cause–effect relations, but it is still important to note that for chinese students the desire to invest time and energy in language learning seems to be associated first and foremost with the evaluation of the learning process. (you & dörnyei, 2016, p. 512) in you, dörnyei, and csizér (2016), we further interrogated the same chinese dataset by breaking it down to many different subsamples that were formed through the permutation of factors such as gender, degree of development of visionary skills and different learning contexts (i.e., secondary students, university english majors and non-english majors), and every single subsample yielded the above pattern of the l2 learning experience considerably exceeding the ideal l2 self. we should note here, though, that the last sentence of the above paragraph needs to be qualified in that the actual variable related to the students’ learning experience in you and dörnyei (2016) and in you et al. (2016) was not labelled l2 learning experience but rather attitudes to l2 learning, and this difference reflects a larger issue concerning the unspecified theoretical nature of the l2 learning experience construct. in you et al. (2016, pp. 96-97) we reflected on this matter as follows: because this component did not originate in possible selves theory, its operationalization in actual research terms has been subject to more variation than that of the two future self-guides. for example, taguchi (2013) and taguchi, magid, and papi (2009) referred to it as “attitudes to learning english,” kormos, kiddle, and csizér (2011) as “l2 learning attitude,” while csizér and kormos (2009) used the term “l2 learning experience” and papi (2010) “english learning experience.” this has been, however, largely terminological variation because the specific questionnaire items that were used to tap into this component were broadly similar across the studies. in other words, while the employed terminology differed across studies, the actual measurement of the concept was more or less the same, typically utilizing a short scale of items assessing the learners’ attitudes towards l2 learning. the prerequisite for being able to move beyond this state was to find a new theoretical organizing principle that would allow for a more specific and elaborate measurement focus. the only relevant idea that i have had in this respect over the past decade was to harmonize the three constituents of the l2 motivational self system by relating each to the notion of experience: “thus, the new approach concerned two future self-guides associated with imagined experience and a third constituent rooted in actual experience” (dörnyei, 2014, p. 9; emphasis added). however, while this formulation made conceptual sense, it did not facilitate the development of any new measurement procedures because of the vagueness of how experience should be understood and operationalized. as a zoltán dörnyei 24 result, while the internal structure of the l2 motivational self system appeared to make sense to a wide audience, the l2 learning experience component within this structure was treated as a broad and rather unspecified attitude factor. even the fact that this factor tended to account for the largest amount of motivational variance in empirical studies did not intensify efforts to make this measure more detailed and specific, because the theoretical discussions concerning the l2 motivational self system tended to be centered around the ideal and the ought-to l2 selves. 4. the l2 learning experience and the quality of learner engagement it was mentioned above that what has held back the refinement of the l2 learning experience component was the uncertainty of how the broad concept of experience could be translated into specific and measurable terms. in the final section of this paper, i would like to propose that adopting an engagement-specific perspective might offer a fruitful direction for future developments in this respect. engagement in educational psychology is understood as active participation and involvement in certain behaviors (cf. fredricks, blumenfeld, & paris, 2004), and student engagement – which refers to engagement in school-related activities and academic tasks – has recently been hailed as “the holy grail of learning” and “one of the hottest research topics in the field of educational psychology” (sinatra, heddy, & lombardi, 2015, p. 1). the reason for the emerging popularity of the notion is easy to understand: it highlights meaningful learning accompanied by active participation in school life at a time when modern educational theories increasingly stipulate such active student involvement in the learning process to be a prerequisite for any instructional success. it requires little justification that student engagement is equally important in the field of sla, because the automatization of l2 skills requires an extended period of practice that involves meaningful learner participation. indeed, the “learning-throughdoing” tenet has been a key principle of communicative language learning in general and task-based language learning in particular. while the essence of the notion of engagement is straightforward, what complicates things is the fact that student involvement has both external and internal dimensions, with the former concerning the amount of actual learning behaviors a student displays through their observable actions, and the latter relating to internal aspects such as the learners’ cognitive and emotional participation (i.e., genuine personal identification with the learning process). indeed, it is possible for someone to merely “go through the motions,” that is, to exhibit seemingly active participation in a task without involving themselves at the level of thought or affect. this realization has led scholars to define student engagement towards a better understanding of the l2 learning experience, the cinderella of the l2 motivational. . . 25 as a multi-faceted concept, typically distinguishing between behavioral, cognitive, affective and social aspects (see e.g., finn & zimmer, 2012; for a detailed recent application of this multidimensional conception to l2 tasks, see philp & duchesne, 2016), but i believe that skinner, furrer, marchand, and kindermann (2008, p. 778) are still right in their argument that the “core construct, most prototypical of engagement, is behavioral participation in the classroom.” this behavioral aspect is, in fact, what distinguishes the notions of engagement and motivation from each other most markedly: motivation only indicates a student’s potential for actively pursuing learning (rather than how this potential is actually realized), and as henry and thorsen (in press) summarize, “since motivation rarely flows completely unhindered into action, it is the behavioral outworkings of various motivational sources that are captured in the engagement construct.” how can the notion of engagement help us to clarify the nature of the l2 learning experience? as mercer and dörnyei (in press) argue, using the verb “to engage” offers a valuable benefit in that it is an active verb that can be followed by a target within the phrase “to engage with target.” in our case, the broad target of engagement involves the students’ language learning process and l2 learning environment, which in turn can be broken down into more specific meaningful facets. common sense suggests including in such a detailed conceptualization the following aspects to engage with: · school context (e.g., various aspects of belonging to the school community, adopting school norms and developing general academic confidence); · syllabus and the teaching materials (e.g., curiosity about and interest in the content; match between the syllabus to the students’ needs; ownership and personalization of the materials); · learning tasks (e.g., utilizing the principles of task-based language teaching; application of project/problem-based learning; goal-setting and progress checks); · one’s peers (e.g., relevant areas of group dynamics/classroom management, particularly social acceptance, group cohesiveness, norms of cooperation and tolerance); · teacher (e.g., student-teacher rapport; utilizing insights from leadership models; conflict resolution). in other words, the application of the verb “to engage” offers a natural way of mapping the most important facets of the learning experience, which in turn allows us to capture the key aspects in measurable terms. in accordance with this approach, the l2 learning experience can be defined as the perceived quality of the learners’ engagement with various aspects of the language learning process. we should also note that the above list is not conclusive and therefore future research is needed to determine which aspects of engagement to focus on. zoltán dörnyei 26 how can we measure engagement? in educational psychology there is a body of literature discussing various forms of engagement assessment, and several self-report instruments have been developed for this purpose. part v of the handbook of research on student engagement (christenson, reschly, & wylie, 2012) specifically addresses “measurement issues, instruments, and approaches,” and the six chapters in it (appleton, 2012; betts, 2012; darr, 2012; fredericks & mccolskey, 2012; samuelsen, 2012; yazzie-mintz & mccormick, 2012) offer a thorough survey of the field. these discussions of course concern general educational engagement, but the flexibility of the targets that can be assigned to the verb “engage” allows for tailoring the measurement to our specific l2 focus. the notion of engagement is also flexible in terms of how widely one throws the net: for one, it can be defined as a multi-dimensional construct, addressing every main aspect of the learning process that we suspect might have a bearing on the learners (as outlined above); alternatively, one can focus only on the commonalities of the various dimensions – for example, the international polling company gallup (2016) has been conducting an ongoing school engagement survey for secondary school students using as few as eight items: “at this school, i get to do what i do best every day,” “my teachers make me feel my schoolwork is important,” “i feel safe in this school. i have fun at school,” “i have a best friend at school,” “in the last seven days, someone has told me i have done good work at school,” “in the last seven days, i have learned something interesting at school,” “the adults at my school care about me,” and “i have at least one teacher who makes me excited about the future.” 5. conclusion there is no doubt that the refinement/reconceptualization of the l2 learning experience component of the l2 motivational self system is a timely task. the challenge of this endeavor is to find an appropriate theoretical framework within which the notion of learning experience can be interpreted. i have argued in this paper that tapping into the domain of engagement in educational psychology might be a fruitful way forward in this respect, as student engagement offers a well-defined and sufficiently specific conceptual area that can be customized for use in l2 motivation research. accordingly, i have proposed a definition of the l2 learning experience as the perceived quality of the learners’ engagement with various aspects of the language learning process. besides offering a theoretical base, the adoption of an engagement-centered approach may also be beneficial for allowing researchers to draw on the relevant measurement resources developed in educational psychology. towards a better understanding of the l2 learning experience, the cinderella of the l2 motivational. . . 27 in a theoretical overview of language learning motivation, self and identity, ushioda (2011) highlighted the fact that currently we lack a sufficiently robust theoretical framework to link the situated processes associated with the l2 learning experience with the future-oriented dimension of possible selves. while the focus in her paper was on developing new, technology-based, situated learner identities that can lead to the development of possible future l2 selves, i believe that understanding the situated learning experience in an active, engagement-specific framework (as outlined earlier) may also establish a platform for creating links between concrete aspects of actual student engagement and concrete aspects of future student aspirations. this could potentially reduce, or even eliminate, the existing theoretical discordancy amongst the three main dimensions of the l2 motivational self system. zoltán dörnyei 28 references appleton, j. j. 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(2016). language learning motivation in china: results of a large-scale stratified survey. applied linguistics, 37(4), 495-516. 569 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (4). 2017. 569-571 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.4.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial the present issue of studies in second language learning and teaching closes the seventh year of the existence of the journal. it is fully warranted to say that 2017 has been yet another successful year for at least three reasons. first, the number of submissions has increased considerably and so has their quality with the effect that ssllt has become even more established in the field. second, and closely related to the previous point, the number of downloads of individual papers has been on the rise as well, which must have translated into in the growing number of citations, a metric that is illustrative of the impact the journal is having in the field. third, we have finally managed to move ssllt to an electronic platform, with the entire process of submitting, reviewing, processing, editing and proofing papers being handled by the pressto publishing system maintained by adam mickiewicz university. the transition could not have come at a better time as dealing with the growing influx of submissions was becoming less and less manageable, which was beginning to constitute a threat to the credibility of the journal. i am hopeful that the move to the new platform, with all of its useful functionalities, will not only result it more speedy and efficient processing of the submissions, but will also make it easier for us to find the most suitable reviewers and even further enhance the visibility of ssllt and its impact in the domain of research in learning and teaching foreign languages. the issue brings together six papers, all of which report the findings of empirical investigations dealing with different aspects of learning foreign and second languages and the instructional practices intended to foster this process. in the first of these, emily e. scida and jill n. jones report the results of a study that sought to determine the influence of contemplative practices on foreign language anxiety, affect, self-efficacy, classroom climate, and language learning outcomes in the case of students enrolled in an advanced intermediate spanish language course at a university in the usa. using questionnaires, interviews with some of the participants and test results, they demonstrated that regular use of 570 such contemplative practices as breath mediation, gratitude writing, or vision-, goaland intention-setting, led to the promotion of more positive affect, better classroom climate and superior learning outcomes, operationalized as course grades. in the second contribution, katarzyna zychowicz, adriana biedroń and mirosław pawlak discuss the process of constructing and validating the polish listening span, intended as a measure of the central executive, one of the components of working memory hypothesized by baddeley and hitch (1974) and baddeley (2000), in the polish context. in the following contribution, fang-yu liao focuses on the role of poetry in the development of writing skills of 18 international students enrolled in tesol programs in the usa. using hierarchical cluster analysis, she categorized the participants into five groups characterized by different writing experiences, also showing that associating writing primarily with grammar and structure led to lower self-evaluation of poetry writing abilities. gloria vickov and eva jakupčević subsequently shift the focus to the teacher, reporting the results of a study that explored the use and distribution of selected discourse markers by six croatian teachers of english at the primary and secondary school levels with the help of audio-recordings and transcripts of two classes that each of them taught. using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, the authors demonstrated that the repertoire of the most frequently used discourse markers is quite limited and they mainly serve the purpose of managing classroom activities and organizing classroom discourse, with no differences being observed between elementary and secondary school. the last two papers are devoted to issues involved in the learning and teaching of foreign languages by young learners. in the first of these, vanessa de wilde and june eyckmans focus on the role of incidental learning of english by 30 flemish children, 11 years of age. the analysis of the data collected by means of the cambridge english test for young learners, tapping all the language skills, the peabody picture vocabulary test (dunn & dunn, 2007), as well as questionnaires filled out by children and their parents, showed that, despite the lack of formal instruction, the majority of the participants represented the a2 level according to the common european framework for languages, a finding that was attributed to abundant contact with the media and in particular computer games. in the second, gabriela hild analyzes the ways in which a hungarian teacher evaluated her five students who were 12-13 years of age. the analysis of the data derived from interviews, class observations and performance on speaking tasks demonstrated that the experienced teacher failed to adjust assessment procedures to the age of her learners with respect to testing procedures and the ways of providing feedback. i am confident that the six papers will serve as an impetus for further empirical investigations and the two reviews also included in the present issue of ssllt will encourage readers 571 to get to know more about assessment techniques and causes of demotivation in the foreign language classroom. mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references baddeley, a. d. (2000). the episodic buffer: a new component of working memory? trends in cognitive sciences, 4, 417-123. baddeley, a. d., & hitch, g. j. (1974). working memory. in g. bower (ed.), the psychology of learning and motivation (vol. 8, pp. 47-90). new york, ny: academic press. dunn, l., & dunn, l. (2007). peabody picture vocabulary test (4th ed.). circle pines, mn: american guidance service. 745 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (4). 2018. 745-753 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.4.9 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review learning strategy instruction in the language classroom: issues and implementation editors: anna uhl chamot, vee harris publisher: multilingual matters, 2019 isbn: 978-1-78892-339-2 pages: 296 the book learning strategy instruction in the language classroom: issues and implementation, edited by anna uhl chamot and vee harris, touches upon crucial issues pertaining to language learning strategies (lls) and language learning strategy instruction (llsi), both from a theoretical and practical perspective. all the contributors to the volume are specialists with considerable expertise in the field of lls and llsi, which makes the book an informative and inspirational read. the authors look at the concept of strategy instruction from different perspectives, meticulously not only investigating various llsi models, taking account of “learner needs and settings and particular language skills,” but also “considering curricula, materials, teachers roles, the ways in which scaffolding is enacted in the classrooms” (p. viii). since the volume adeptly combines research into llsi with its theoretical aspects and complexities, it will prove useful to practitioners and researchers alike. delineating new directions in the field of llsi, the edited collection is undoubtedly a valuable contribution to ongoing discussions about llsi and its implementation in the classroom. 746 the book opens with a foreword where the editors address the most pivotal questions which have garnered researchers’ attention over the past few decades. throughout the volume the authors examine miscellaneous llsi-related areas with great precision and, importantly, respond “to the challenge for more detailed evidence of the exact nature of the intervention, the theoretical and methodological underpinnings, and careful examination of the key features such as the role of teacher feedback” (p. vii). this is followed by a brief introduction in which chamot and harris discuss their motivation behind putting together the edited collection and briefly summarize the content of each of the chapters. as they admit, the volume is not meant to offer conclusive “solutions to the issues raised. instead it hopes to offer possible research agenda for the future” (p. xxv). for this reason all the chapters close with a set of research questions posed by their respective authors. the volume comprises 17 chapters forming four main parts – two theoretical and two more practical ones devoted to different ways of empowering teachers wanting to effectively introduce llsi in their classrooms. part one, “issues: models and contexts,” comprises six chapters. in chapter 1, “language learning strategy instruction: recent research and future directions,” luke plonsky points out that while there have been numerous studies into llsi, there has been considerably less interest in the effectiveness of different methods used to implement it. he expresses his disappointment with the fact that there has been a great number of research projects which resulted from “convenience, intuition and/or some level of idiosyncrasy” (p. 3) rather than from solid theoretical foundations. plonsky also stresses that research into llsi should focus more on investigating the relationship between effective strategy usage and proficiency, the context in which the language is taught, students’ age and specific instructional settings. he also points to the need to explore other factors, such as the rationale for the design of llsi, the type and number of strategies to be taught, students’ needs, the activities used or the duration of the intervention. all of these variables and their impact on llsi need to be investigated if we are “to fully understand the many implications of llsi for both theory and practice” (p. 17). the second chapter, “approaches to learning strategy instruction,” opens with a simple, yet powerful, pronouncement: “strategic learning matters” (p. 22). peter yongqi gu defines the notion of strategic learning as “a dynamic and iterative process for solving a learning problem, boosting the learning speed or making the learning process more efficient, effective and probably more enjoyable” (p. 23). if strategic learning is to take place, the learner needs to possess declarative, procedural and conditional knowledge. while it seems natural for children to develop certain strategies in order to analyze, absorb and memorize new information, “we cannot assume that they will automatically discover and 747 apply all the strategies they need on their own” (p. 22). that is why, if children are to learn more about strategies, they need to be exposed to strategy training. gu also discusses different approaches to strategy instruction (si) in first and second language acquisition as well as examining ways in which research into llsi could inform classroom teaching. vee harris’s chapter “diversity and integration in language learning strategy instruction” explores different factors that exert an impact on learners’ strategy choice and deployment, such as age, gender, personality, but also learners’ socioeconomic and sociocultural environment. in the first part, the author explores the ways in which these variables can be considered to inform llsi. paraphrasing oxford and schramm (2007), harris argues that “it is time for lls research to explore how a sociocultural and psychological perspective can complement each other” (p. 39). the second part focuses on two different models of llsi, that is, the cognitive academic language learning approach (calla) and strategic content learning (scl) as well as the manner in which they can be combined “to make the most of the rich diversity of students’ social backgrounds” (p. 39). in the fourth chapter, titled “designing strategic classrooms: self-assessment in enabling self-regulated learning,” do coyle illustrates ways in which “learners can be effectively and appropriately empowered to engage in developing and adapting their environment and behaviors to become increasingly selfdirectional by planning, supporting, regulating, monitoring and assessing their own learning” (p. 54). this process could be facilitated by creating strategic learning spaces, “where learners and teachers work in partnership to enable successful learning to take place” (p. 55, fullan & langworthy, 2014). the author explores four indispensable elements of such strategic learning spaces: goal-orientation, task-orientation, progression and making connections. throughout the chapter coyle also stresses the role of self-assessment, viewing it as “an integral and interdependent part of self-regulated learning within an ecological framework specifically seeking to foster learner autonomy” (p. 64). effective self-assessment, however, requires close collaboration between the learner and the teacher, which undeniably constitutes a considerable challenge in the classroom. in chapter 5, “language learner strategies and individual differences,” ernesto macaro focuses on the link between lls and individual differences (ids). he is of the opinion that thanks to a meticulous analysis of “the possible interactions between lls and . . . ids, researchers and (especially) teachers can secure a better long-term understanding of how l2 learning takes place over time” (p. 68). while there are numerous ids that merit researchers’ attention, the ones that, according to macaro, seem to be of paramount importance are selfefficacy and attribution. he argues that these two factors “can form an inherent part of a language assessment system” (p. 78), and thus future studies into llsi 748 should investigate the relationship between “these variables and their contribution to language assessment” (p. 78). in the sixth chapter, entitled “learning strategy instruction in content and language integrated learning programs,” marcella menegale examines the relationship between content and language integrated learning (clil) and the deployment of different lls: metacognitive, cognitive and social. the author argues that clil offers “a uniquely favorable environment for developing language learning strategies” (p. 82). this is because clil helps learners to get to know language strategies in “a more significant and authentic learning context compared to l2 classroom” (p. 82). moreover, research has shown that learners participating in clil programs have a wider variety of lls at their disposal than learners who have not been benefitted from this instructional mode. the second part of the edited collection, “issues: less studied and less taught groups of strategies,” brings together three chapters. it opens with the contribution by mirosław pawlak “grammar learning strategies instruction in the foreign language classroom: the case of students in degree programs in english.” the author discusses different factors which need to be taken into account prior to implementing grammar learning strategies instruction (glsi). he also outlines a comprehensive system of categorizing strategies for learning grammar which comprises four groups of lls, namely, metacognitive, affective, social and cognitive. the main thrust of the chapter is the presentation of tentative principles of glsi together with numerous suggestions concerning their implementation. pawlak makes the point that if glsi is to be effective, major changes need to be made with respect to how grammar is taught and tested. these changes seem pivotal since “as previous research has demonstrated (pawlak 2009, 2012), many students have a tendency to approach learning grammar in a way that mirrors instructional practices and testing procedures” (p.119). in chapter 8, “language learning strategy instruction for critical cultural awareness,” anna uhl chamot and vee harris examine one of the key elements of intercultural competence – critical cultural awareness (cca), a concept which surely merits attention “in the current climate of mass migrations of peoples” (p. 124). another reason why the authors zoom in on this particular area is that “although books, newspapers, poems and film can give advanced students considerable insight into cultures, some teachers of beginner students struggle to develop their lessons beyond simply discussing factual information (such as typical meals or the color of taxis)” (p.124). as the authors recognize, there is no research that would investigate the connection between cca and llsi. therefore, the chapter explores a variety of lls that could contribute to the development of cca and offers suggestions as to how such strategies could be incorporated into classroom instruction. 749 in the final chapter in part two, “strategy instruction for learning and performing target language pragmatics,” andrew d. cohen stresses the importance of pragmatic strategies, that is, strategies that “deal specifically with the comprehension and production of language when the underlying sociocultural intentions are not necessarily straightforward” (p. 142). although there have been studies investigating pragmatic strategies in terms of llsi, the existing body of research is still scant compared to other strategy types. moreover, to quote cohen, “there are as yet few teacher development programs or programs of language instruction that give prime attention to pragmatics strategies” (p.142). the author offers a variety of tasks depicting how to explicitly teach “the strategies that more or less match the calla steps or raising awareness, modelling, practicing and evaluating pragmatics strategies” (p. 142). the chapter clearly signals a transition from a more theoretical part of the book to a more practical part which offers a wide range of activities and resources facilitating the implementation of llsi. part three, “implementation: the learners,” opens with the chapter “designing effective strategy instruction: approaches and materials for young language learners.” pamela gunning, joanna white and christine busque explore an area which so far has received relatively limited attention, namely llsi among young language learners (ylls). as they comment, this neglect stems from several factors, such as “a lack of resources, uncertainty about how to adapt abstract, complex concepts to ylls’ level, or concern that children lack the necessary metacognitive awareness” (p. 156). there are also other contentious issues pertaining to llsi directed at ylls which the authors enumerate, that is, the language of instruction, a suitable llsi design or adept use of scaffolding, among others. importantly, gunning, white and busque highlight effective ways of implementing llsi among young language learners, placing emphasis on raising learners’ awareness, identifying their needs, planning, reflection or modelling strategies. the next chapter, “guidelines and materials for integrating language learning strategy instruction into the language lesson” by angeliki psaltou-joycey looks at the different ways of designing classroom materials that could help teachers integrate llsi into their daily practice. the author also emphasizes the role that teachers play in the process of selecting and deploying lls, especially among beginners and young learners. therefore, practitioners need a great deal of support, for instance in the form of easily accessible and ready-to-use materials. the issues that psaltou-joycey believes merit attention while preparing activities to be employed in llsi are “strategy and associated clusters, language skill/skills targeted, learners’ education level or age, language proficiency level, description of the activity, teaching objective, teaching material (created/adjusted/existing)” (p. 173). she also highlights the importance of incorporating into llsi two rather neglected strategy types, namely, compensation and affective lls because they 750 “help increase learner motivation and . . . develop cultural knowledge and understanding which should start from an early age” (p. 176). in chapter 12, “differentiation in language learning strategy instruction,” anna uhl chamot discusses the notion of differentiated instruction (di) and the various ways in which teachers can apply it for llsi. while we may observe differentiation in the classroom, “most frequently carried out in terms of content, process and/or product” (p. 185), it is difficult to find any clear guidelines that would show teachers how to successfully differentiate llsi. chamot also elaborates on the significance of developing learners’ metacognitive knowledge which she describes as “the foundation of learning strategies and their most important component” (p. 185). she also describes a variety of tasks that could help teachers raise learners’ metacognitive awareness. the third part of the book closes with the chapter “teaching language learning strategies using technologies,” where jill robbins looks at the ways of integrating online learning materials and llsi. strategy use in online learning is a relatively new concept which has not generated a great deal of research thus far. however, with the upsurge of online learning opportunities it seems crucial to show learners how to explore strategies that could help them make more rapid progress. robbins argues that “without explicit strategy instruction, learners may struggle if they try to exploit online resources without the necessary strategies” (p. 191). another area which has sadly garnered even less attention from researchers is the employment of lls when using social media to learn additional languages. robbins makes the point that combining llsi and social media use could exert a positive impact on language instruction “by providing models of strategic learning” (p. 208). part four, titled “implementation: the teachers,” lays emphasis on the role of the teacher in developing learners’ strategic competence. as chamot and harris point out, “there is little available guidance on integrating llsi into preand in-service teacher education” (p. 211). however, prior to training learners in strategy selection and use, practitioners themselves need to display strategic awareness and reflect on their own strategy employment. the first chapter in this part, “teacher education: formative assessment, reflection and affective strategy instruction” by christina gkonou and rebecca oxford, stresses the significance of teachers’ selfassessment and reflection in the process of implementing llsi. the authors expound different types of reflection which might be conducive to successful llsi application among language teachers. gkonou and oxford also address the notion of formative assessment in daily teaching practice as well as highlighting its role in learning more about their lls use and the effectiveness of llsi. in the chapter “empowering teachers to promote learner self-management” joan rubin and claudio acero rios focus on language teachers who have tried implementing llsi “but noted that they often fail to integrate it into their lessons in 751 spite of exposure to the extensive literature on its value” (p. 227). the authors describe a teacher education program created to help preand in-service teachers develop self-directed learning (sdl) because they are strongly convinced that introducing learning self-management (lsm) strategies could significantly improve teachers’ work and help them raise strategic awareness among their learners. the two metacognitive strategies that could help teachers gain greater insight into lsm are problem-identification and problem-solving strategies as well as setting smart goals when planning their lessons. by deploying these lls in their daily teaching practice, teachers can set an example for students and “enable them to do the same” (p. 237). in the next chapter, titled “teacher education for language learning strategy instruction: approaches and activities,” anna uhl chamot, vee harris, carol griffiths, pamela gunning, martha nyikos and birsen tutüniș highlight the different hindrances teachers are confronted with when implementing llsi. the authors provide a set of useful llsi principles that preand in-service teachers should take into consideration prior to introducing learners to language learning strategies. the chapter also offers a variety of llsi teacher development tasks that could prove helpful to teachers wishing to introduce lls in their classes. the contribution closes with examples of collaboration between researchers and teachers engaged in llsi. by working closely together and sharing their invaluable experience, researchers and practitioners can gain greater insight into the challenges associated with familiarizing learners with lls and also contribute to meaningful changes in the field of llsi. the final chapter of part four as well as the entire collection by christine goh, titled “what we still need to learn about language learning strategies instruction: research directions and designs,” explores llsi-related areas which are in need of further empirical investigation. in particular, goh argues that there is a need for more research projects that would examine strategic intervention and factors mediating it, such as learners’ age, proficiency, motivation or self-efficacy, to name just a few. the author also stresses the need to base llsi “on a set of sound theoretical principles” (p. 263). however, as she observes, providing a sound theoretical framework for lls “remains one of the challenges in harmonizing the results of llsi research and instructional approaches” (p. 263). goh concludes her chapter by stressing the importance of “a coherent and effective llsi program that teachers can use” (p. 273). finally, the afterword offers a summary of the most salient issues touched upon in the volume. anna uhl chamot and vee harris also talk about their motivation behind the book – the editors wanted to elaborate on the wide array of multifaceted issues pertaining to llsi, such as different models of llsi, the principles underlying its implementation as well as teacher guidance. since there is 752 a shortage of volumes comprehensively addressing the field of llsi, learning strategy instruction in the language classroom: issues and implementation successfully fills the existing gap and will prove to be a valuable resource for anyone wishing to further explore or engage in strategic intervention, be it school educators or experienced researchers. what also makes this book unique are the questions for future research included at the end of each chapter. by adopting this approach, the editors successfully strive to “look into the future, suggesting further avenues to pursue” (p. 279). moreover, being a language teacher myself, i found it refreshing and inspiring to see so many different and stimulating examples of activities that practitioners can easily utilize when attempting to implement llsi. unfortunately, teachers are incessantly pressed for time, trying to cover the required material within a limited amount of time; hence, including engaging, ready-to-use activities that could help them smoothly implement strategy instruction into their classes is surely is a commendable effort. it goes without saying that the edited collection will be of enormous value to practitioners, materials writers, and researchers alike, providing them with comprehensive information on multifarious up-to-date issues in the domain of lls and llsi, the decisions involved in undertaking strategy instruction as well as the areas in this respect that are worthy of exploration. the book skillfully integrates theory and practice, which is why it will appeal not only to novice practitioners who are just about to embark on their journey with lls but also to more experienced teachers who are already familiar with the concept of lls and llsi and wish to broaden their horizons in order to successfully implement strategy instruction in their everyday teaching practice. most importantly, though, as the editors of this long-awaited volume thoughtfully conclude, “the chapters . . . are a testament to how the lls research community continues to be a vibrant, thriving and collaborative enterprise ready to respond to such challenges and well able to take on any new issues emerging in the future” (p. 282). reviewed by olga trendak university of łódź, poland olga.trendak@uni.lodz.pl references oxford, r., & schramm, k. (2007). bridging the gap between psychological and sociocultural perspectives on l2 learner strategies. in a. d. cohen & e. macaro (eds.), language learner strategies: thirty years of research and practice (pp. 47-68). oxford: blackwell. 753 pawlak, m. (2009). grammar learning strategies and language attainment: seeking a relationship. research in language, 7, 43-60. pawlak, m. (2012). grammar learning strategies: state of the art. in l. pedrazzini & a. nava (eds.), learning and teaching english: insights from research (pp. 69-90). monza: polimetrica. 623 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (4). 2022. 623-650 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.4.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt a classroom-based study on the effects of wcf on accuracy in pen-and-paper versus computer-mediated collaborative writing belén gonzález-cruz university of murcia, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5345-7934 belen.gonzalez@um.es lourdes cerezo university of murcia, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5345-7934 lourdesc@um.es florentina nicolás-conesa university of murcia, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8472-0811 florinc@um.es abstract this study compared the effects of computer-mediated (cm) versus pen-andpaper (p&p) writing on written accuracy and feedback processing in tasks written and rewritten collaboratively following a pedagogical treatment in two intact authentic classrooms. the study involved 32 secondary education low-proficiency english-as-a-foreign-language (efl) learners writing two descriptive texts collaboratively and receiving in-class training in the identification and correction of grammatical, lexical, and mechanical errors. participants were provided with unfocused direct error correction (ec). error logs were used to facilitate noticing of teacher corrections (i.e., feedback processing). dyads were required to rewrite their texts for evidence of feedback uptake. results indicate that writing collaboratively on the computer with the belén gonzález-cruz, lourdes cerezo, florentina nicolás-conesa 624 availability of the internet contributes to increased grammatical and lexical accuracy. no differences were found between writing environments regarding feedback processing or accuracy of rewritten texts. keywords: computer-mediated collaborative writing; feedback processing; l2 accuracy; pen-and-paper writing; written corrective feedback 1. introduction research on written corrective feedback (wcf) addressing its effectiveness for second or foreign language (l2) development (e.g., bitchener & storch, 2016) has focused primarily on traditional, pen-and-paper (p&p) writing environments. however, educational technology is transforming the implementation of writing and feedback tasks in l2 classrooms, with learners making increased use of digital devices and internet-based applications to write and revise their texts collaboratively. collaborative writing (cw), defined as the coauthoring of a single text by two or more writers, where the coauthors are involved in all stages of the composing process and have a shared ownership of the text produced (storch, 2013), has been widely implemented in l2 classrooms (e.g., storch, 2013) and substantially researched over the last decades (see elabdali, 2021, for a review). this research has focused on: the collaborative dialogue or languaging (i.e., how learners verbalize linguistic problems; cf. swain, 2006) that student writers engage in while jointly composing their text; the relationships formed in dyads/groups and how these affect the quantity and quality of the language-related episodes (lres)1 identified in collaborative dialogues; and the impact of lres on the overall quality of joint texts. however, the value of teacher feedback as a trigger of attention to form and of noticing processes (e.g., schmidt, 1990, 2001) has been insufficiently explored (see storch, 2018; zhang & plonsky, 2020, for reviews). the study reported in this paper aimed to fill this gap by inspecting effects of wcf in computer-mediated (cm) versus pen-and-paper (p&p) writing on written accuracy and feedback processing in tasks written and rewritten collaboratively following a pedagogical treatment. in what follows, we provide an account of relevant theoretical tenets and empirical findings regarding the pivotal elements of our study: pen-and-paper versus computer-mediated collaborative writing (cmcw) and wcf research. 1 lres are “any part of the dialogue in which the students talk about the language they are producing, question their language use, or otheror self-correct” (swain, 1998, p. 70). a classroom-based study on the effects of wcf on accuracy in pen-and-paper versus computer . . . 625 2. literature review 2.1. pen-and-paper versus computer-mediated cw current developments in educational technology as well as increasing requirements for collaboration in academic contexts across disciplinary areas and education levels are transforming cw tasks into cmcw tasks (storch, 2022). this increase in the use of cm writing tasks in educational settings, especially at university, can be explained by the authenticity currently attached to internet-enabled writing by the education community and specifically in l2 classrooms (e.g., zhi & huang, 2021). in l2 classrooms, writing on the computer fits the well-supported notion of process-oriented writing (as is often the case in the english as a foreign language [efl] curriculum in spain, where our study was conducted) as easier access to text enables writers to proceed towards the final draft (lee, 2004). research comparing p&p and cm l2 writing is rather limited, and inconclusive results have been obtained regarding the differential effects of writing in one or the other environment on writing processes and products, mainly because of methodological differences across studies. part of this research indicates that writing with a word processor fosters global-level revisions to a higher extent than writing on paper (cheung, 2015), including lexical choices. notably, this finding comes from studies conducted before the spread of internet applications such as google docs, which suggests that it is writing in the word processor itself and not the resources offered by the internet that promotes higher-level thinking and linguistic processes. it has also been claimed (cheung, 2015) that although p&p writing is considered superior to digital writing for the retention of language (e.g., grammar rules, word meanings, etc.), writing in google docs and similar software allows students to make use of additional resources (e.g., spellcheckers, online dictionaries, or grammar websites) that may potentially improve the linguistic quality of their texts. another way in which p&p has been considered superior to cm writing is that writers are more careful during linguistic formulation (chan et al., 2017), which may be due to the difficulty in making changes in handwritten texts (vasylets et al., this si). in contrast, internet-supported l2 writing may be less careful because learners know they can more easily make changes to what they write as they write it. this may mean that l2 writers may make more errors in cm than in p&p writing as they draft their texts. yet, it is also possible that l2 writers make use of internet resources to deal with their doubts about grammatical, lexical, or mechanical issues in drafts or revised texts. most research on the use of web 2.0 applications such as wikis or google docs (see zhang et al., 2021 for a review) has investigated university students’ patterns of collaboration while writing (e.g., saeed & al qunayeer, 2020), the belén gonzález-cruz, lourdes cerezo, florentina nicolás-conesa 626 relationship between quality of collaborative single-draft texts and collaborative patterns (e.g., abrams, 2019), or the effects of peer feedback on text revisions (e.g., alharbi, 2019). this research indicates that co-producing an l2 text in cm settings is valuable for l2 development. however, results are still inconclusive (zhang et al., 2021). there is therefore a need to explore whether cmcw has the potential to attract attention to form while writing by examining form-focused writing tasks and different learner profiles including the analysis of non-adult populations in non-university settings. despite potential learning benefits, many schools cannot yet afford sustained access to computer facilities for their students. there are also potential benefits related to p&p writing as handwriting has been associated with increased activation in the brain areas important for memory and learning (vasylets et al., this volume), which could result in language learning gains when writing, processing wcf, and rewriting a text. in this sense, cm wcf also offers affordances for developing writers, such as the clear identification of written errors due to the greater legibility in the cm environment. in view of the above, we may assume that l2 writers may employ their cognitive and linguistic resources differently depending on writing environment. considering the scarce research that compares the effects of teacher wcf in p&p and cm writing (pearson, 2022), especially with non-university students, it may be theoretically and pedagogically relevant to explore whether there are specific l2 benefits associated with writing and processing feedback on p&p or internet-enabled devices. to fill this gap, the current study explored the effects of teacher wcf on the linguistic accuracy of texts written and rewritten collaboratively by adolescent low proficiency efl learners after receiving and processing unfocused direct feedback in cm and p&p environments. in what follows we review relevant studies on wcf. 2.2. research on teacher wcf wcf is needed to help learners pay attention to and notice different features of language as attention to form and noticing are necessary for language learning, regardless of writing environment. following schmidt’s (1990, 2001) noticing hypothesis, attention is what allows learners to attend to and notice the problems in their interlanguage (il), namely, the differences between what they want to produce and what they can produce. noticing must involve at least some level of awareness to result in successful intake (temporal retention of the correct use of language). however, a high level of awareness or understanding is needed to restructure the language system, which can lead to language learning (schmidt, 1990). following leow’s (2020) model of the l2 learning process a classroom-based study on the effects of wcf on accuracy in pen-and-paper versus computer . . . 627 in instructed second language acquisition (isla), wcf, if attended to and noticed, allows learners to make the connection between their prior inaccurate knowledge or output and the correct l2 forms. to date, there is no firm consensus as to the relative effectiveness of different types of wcf (see karim & nassaji, 2019 for a review). research has also explored the factors that mediate its effectiveness, such as the cognitive and linguistic processes in which learners engage while processing (i.e., noticing, understanding, and applying) corrections (see coyle et al., in press, for a review of feedback processing research). with some exceptions (cánovas guirao et al., 2015; coyle & roca de larios, 2014, 2020; wigglesworth & storch, 2012b), most wcf research has been implemented in individual writing, but there is a need of research on cw and collaborative feedback processing, as these may result in more improvements in accuracy than individual writing. this may be so because processing teacher feedback collaboratively may encourage learners to engage more deeply with it (storch, 2022) and facilitate noticing of l2 forms and of the gap between the learners’ il and the target language forms (i.e., the corrections) through collaborative scaffolding that may allow learners to understand wcf (wigglesworth & storch, 2012a). empirical research on the effects of wcf on cw is also limited. wigglesworth and storch (2012b) compared the effectiveness of reformulation and indirect ec with adult english-as-a-second-language (esl) learners. they found that both led to improved accuracy in rewritten texts, with an advantage for the more explicit feedback (i.e., reformulation). in an efl context, coyle and roca de larios (2014) compared the use of models and direct ec with children. they found that students receiving direct ec incorporated more grammatical corrections and produced more acceptable and comprehensible rewritten texts overall, while those receiving models noticed lexical and grammatical features that were partially understood and partially incorporated in their texts, given the difference between the level of language offered in the model and their l2 proficiency. cánovas guirao et al. (2015) found that models were useful for promoting children’s attention to lexis and chunks of language rather than to grammar. coyle and roca de larios (2020) examined the use of models with children writing collaboratively in different instructional settings (efl and clil – content and language integrated learning). their results indicated that all children relied on the identification of surface differences between the model and their own draft. however, the clil pairs incorporated over half of the features noticed, while the efl pairs incorporated only around 20%. it follows from the above that more explicit types of feedback (e.g., direct ec, reformulation) appear to be more effectively noticed than less explicit types (e.g., indirect ec, models) and that, with younger and lower proficiency efl belén gonzález-cruz, lourdes cerezo, florentina nicolás-conesa 628 learners, even explicit corrections are not always noticed and understood. research has also suggested that young learners could be trained to process feedback to notice the difference between their own writing and their teachers’ corrections and thus maximize its effectiveness (e.g., cánovas guirao et al., 2015). one way of drawing learners’ attention to linguistic features is by using consciousness-raising tasks. from a cognitive viewpoint, ellis (2002) explains that these tasks engage learners in linguistic analysis, which may help them develop explicit knowledge. however, this may not be the case with low proficiency learners, who may otherwise benefit from collaborative dialogues. collaborative dialogues can help learners understand feedback through co-constructed scaffolded support and guidance (dicamilla & antón, 1997) and can result in improved accuracy in subsequent rewritten texts (e.g., watanabe & swain, 2007). within this sociocultural approach, adair-hauck et al. (2010) proposed the presentation-attention-coconstruction-extension (pace) instructional sequence for consciousness-raising activities based on guided induction and dialogic rule formulation. the current study included a pedagogical intervention to maximize learners’ noticing of error corrections, potential uptake, and accuracy in cw tasks using a three-stage spot-the-error activity (see method) in which we followed the pace sequence. by guiding learners in the reflection on their own errors we sought to foster higher depth of processing that may lead to awareness at the level of understanding (e.g., leow, 2020), which is in turn supposed to foster il development. this pedagogical intervention addressed roca de larios and coyle’s (2022) recommendation about giving clear guidelines to learners on how they are expected to use feedback to promote their engagement with metalinguistic (ml) awareness-raising activities and thus potentially contribute to language development in real classrooms. 2.3. a focus on authentic l2 classrooms in l2 writing and wcf research most wcf research has been implemented in controlled, laboratory-style conditions. the conclusions drawn from this strand of research have contributed to the maturity of the field, making it clear that one reason why there is no unequivocal conclusion about its effectiveness is that the instructional setting in which the research is implemented is also relevant. in other words, authentic l2 classrooms (with their authentic curricula and language learning, teaching, and assessment goals and criteria) may require a research methodology that differs from that employed in controlled studies. in this sense, leow (2020) stresses the need to situate future wcf studies within the instructed setting. this curricular approach to wcf research needs to address the integration of writing practice about different genres established in the curriculum with a classroom-based study on the effects of wcf on accuracy in pen-and-paper versus computer . . . 629 other types of language practice in relation to error types and proficiency of the learners, among others (leow 2020, p.110). following these suggestions, our classroom-based study sought to inform pedagogical practice by including a metalinguistic awareness task about writing and feedback processing in addition to a pedagogical intervention about the characteristics of descriptive writing to help students improve their compositions in this genre. the study complied with the characteristics of isla applied wcf research proposed by leow (2020) in that the data gathered from l2 writers were produced authentically (in real efl classrooms), within the l2 syllabus, and over a period of time to simulate the language curriculum; in that both the teacher and l2 writers were involved in the process; and in that there was ecological validity to its findings.the following questions thus framed our research: 1. to what extent does the writing environment (cm vs p&p) foster increased accuracy in collaborative writing conditions? 2. to what extent does the writing environment affect the learners’ collaborative processing of teacher wcf? 3. to what extent does the writing environment mediate collaborative uptake of wcf in terms of the learners’ incorporation of error corrections in rewritten texts? 3. method 3.1. context and participants thirty-two efl students from two secondary schools in spain participated in this study (mean age: 13.5). their level of english was a1 according to oxford placement test (opt) results (cm group: m = 40.50, sd = 9.39; p&p group: m = 35.14, sd = 4.28). nine dyads completed the tasks on the computer (google docs) and seven on paper. the two schools shared curricular guidelines for efl writing instruction and their students had similar weekly exposure to english (four 55-minute sessions). the teachers, in conjunction with the research team, designed the instructional materials, implemented them similarly, and formed the dyads considering who the students wanted to collaborate with. they also ensured that the proficiency of dyad members was similar, to promote equal engagement in the tasks. the cm dyads were familiar with the use of google docs. no initial significant differences were found between the cm and p&p dyads, either in l2 proficiency (u = 82.50, z = -1.66, p = .09, r = .42) or in written accuracy belén gonzález-cruz, lourdes cerezo, florentina nicolás-conesa 630 as measured in the percentage of global errors and types of errors (grammar, lexis, and mechanics) made in the pre-test. the pre-test consisted of a text that students wrote prior to intervention to evaluate joint writing ability as well as knowledge of how to write a descriptive text in terms of language, content, and organization. the types of errors of both groups of dyads were similar. the most frequent errors concerned grammar, mechanics, and lexis (see table 1). table 1 pre-test accuracy scores variables cm dyads (n = 9) p&p dyads (n = 7) mann whitney u test m (sd) m (sd) u z p *effect size duration (minutes) 28.11 (7.36) 24.71 (5.88) 26.50 -.53 .59 .13 number of words 169.89 (36.30) 144.43 (34.28) 15.50 -1.69 .09 .42 % of errors 21.35 (6.79) 32.79 (14.16) 14 -1.85 .06 .46 % of grammatical errors 64.44 (9.23) 49.63 (14.88) 14 -1.85 .06 .46 % of lexical errors 13.24 (6.75) 14.17 (7.07) 30.50 -.11 .92 .03 % of mechanical errors 22.32 (12.77) 36.20 (16.02) 15 -1.75 .08 .44 note. * effect size = z/√n 3.2. data collection procedures data were collected in six 55-minute sessions over 21 days (see figure 1). in session 1, dyads wrote the pre-test, a 150-word descriptive paragraph about a place where they usually spend their summer holidays (see appendix a). the cm dyads wrote in google docs but were not allowed to use other internet resources (e.g., bilingual dictionaries) so that writing ability without external assistance could be assessed. however, google docs has a predictive typing engine that could have helped learners to write their texts. in session 2 (instruction 1), the teachers explained the type of language that characterizes descriptive writing (sensory details; feelings; similes and metaphors; third person for descriptions; use of conjunctions) and analyzed two descriptive model texts. in session 3, dyads wrote the draft of a new 150-word text describing their bedroom (see appendix a). the cm dyads were allowed to consult internet resources such as google translate or dictionaries while writing their texts in google docs. in session 4 (instruction 2; see appendix b), students were trained to process (i) feedback using a three-step metalinguistic awareness activity (i.e., spotthe-error) consisting in the teacher’s modeling of error identification, correction, and provision of linguistic reasons; (ii) dyads’ identification, correction, and explanation of errors; and (iii) individual identification, correction, and explanation of errors. the teacher selected the most frequent errors from students’ drafts (e.g., subject-verb agreement, lexical choices, spelling, or punctuation) to train learners to better complete their error logs after receiving teacher feedback (see session 5 below). a classroom-based study on the effects of wcf on accuracy in pen-and-paper versus computer . . . 631 figure 1 data collection overview in session 5, dyads were given instructions to process teacher feedback collaboratively using an error log (see appendix c). the teachers provided unfocused ec as this is the usual pedagogical practice in the spanish education context. additionally, the low proficiency of the participants was determinant in the choice of direct ec, which has been proven more effective for the improvement of accuracy in text revisions than indirect ec with low-level learners (bitchener, 2019). the p&p dyads received the feedback on a photocopied version of their texts, whereas the cm dyads received asynchronous feedback using the track changes functionality of google docs. for the collaborative processing of errors through error logs, dyads were required to read their corrected drafts to notice the errors that had been corrected and explain the corrections collaboratively (see appendix c). the cm participants were granted access to any internet resources, such as online dictionaries. in session 6, dyads were given their “clean” (i.e., uncorrected) drafts and were asked to rewrite them (see appendix a) without having access to internet resources other than google docs. 3.3. data sources and coding there were two main sources of data: written texts (i.e., pre-tests, drafts, and rewritten texts), and error log worksheets (i.e., collaborative feedback processing). to code errors, the more experienced researcher trained one of the authors, a doctoral session 1: pre-test (descriptive paragraph 1) p&p dyads: no resources allowed cm dyads: no internet allowed (other than google docs) 55 min. session 2: instruction 1 (about descriptive writing) 55 min. session 3: draft (descriptive paragraph 2) p&p dyads: no resources allowed cm dyads: internet resources allowed 55 min. session 4: instruction 2 (identification, correction, and mle of errors) p&p dyads: no resources allowed cm dyads: internet resources allowed 55 min. session 5: feedback processing p&p dyads: no resources used cm dyads: no resources used 55 min. session 6: rewriting (descriptive paragraph 2) p&p dyads: no resources allowed cm dyads: no internet allowed (other than google docs) 55 min. 4 days 2 days 7 days 4 days 3 days how? teacher presentation to whole class how? error log completion (collaborative) unfocused direct wcf (on paper & via google docs, respectively) how? spot-the-error activities (whole-class: 25 min; collaborative, 30 min; individual, as homework) 3 weeks & belén gonzález-cruz, lourdes cerezo, florentina nicolás-conesa 632 researcher. the former coded the cm data, and the latter coded the p&p data. problematic instances in the two sets of data were discussed by the two researchers to ensure the coding schemes were applied consistently and as similarly as possible. errors in the written texts were coded using a scheme adapted from nicolás-conesa et al. (2019) (see appendix d). a distinction was made between overall accuracy in terms of the number and percentage of errors made in drafts and rewritten texts, and uptake of wcf in relation to the percentage of incorporations of teacher corrections in rewritten texts. uptake measures entail dyads’ appropriation of the feedback received as evidenced by the changes made in rewritten texts (storch & wigglesworth, 2010). uptake of wcf was coded following the scheme in nicolás-conesa et al. (2019) and manchón et al. (2020). this analysis consisted in the comparison of drafts with rewritten texts to analyze whether errors had been successfully corrected, unsuccessfully corrected, uncorrected, or deleted. as for the error logs, we coded whether each error and its respective teacher correction had been successfully noticed, unsuccessfully noticed, or unnoticed by the two dyad members (see appendix c). 3.4. data analysis a quantitative approach to data analysis was employed to facilitate comparison with previous wcf research. overall accuracy was computed in terms of the error rate percentage for the three pieces of writing: (total number of errors/total number of words) × 100. the evolution of errors across tasks was also computed by subtracting the percentage of errors made in one text from the percentage of errors in the previous text. we also computed the percentage of grammatical, lexical, and mechanical errors (number of grammar, lexical, mechanical errors/total number of errors) × 100 in the pre-tests and in draft texts, as well as the number of specific error types within each of the three categories. for the rewritten texts, the overall percentage of uptake was computed: (number of errors (un)successfully corrected, uncorrected, or deleted/total number of errors) × 100, as well as the uptake of specific error types for grammar, lexis, and mechanics. finally, regarding error logs, the overall noticing percentage was computed: (number of errors (un)successfully noticed, unnoticed/total number of errors) × 100, as well as the percentage of specific error types noticed. mann whitney u tests were conducted to check for significant differences between the cm and p&p dyads in the noticing of errors through error logs, and in the accuracy of texts composed before and after pedagogical interventions (from pre-tests to draft texts and rewritten texts). wilcoxon signed rank tests were run to compare possible differences in the percentage of errors over time within p&p and cm dyads. a classroom-based study on the effects of wcf on accuracy in pen-and-paper versus computer . . . 633 4. results the first research question investigated the extent to which the writing environment (cm vs p&p) fosters increased accuracy in collaborative writing conditions. with this purpose, we compared the pre-test to the draft version of a new text within dyads and between dyads (cm vs p&p). the cm dyads significantly decreased their percentages of global errors (wilcoxon signed rank test: z = -2.66, p = .01, r = .63) and of grammatical and lexical errors (see table 2), although the differences were not significant for each isolated type of error (grammatical errors: z = -1.01, p = .31, r = .24; lexical errors: z = -1.48, p = .14, r = .35). the grammatical errors reduced by the cm dyads were mainly rule-based errors (e.g., tense, verb form, or articles), while the lexical errors were related to the wrong choice of words. finally, these dyads significantly increased their percentage of mechanical errors (z = -2.19, p = .03, r = .52). specifically, punctuation errors increased (34 versus 46) but spelling errors decreased (29 versus 13). in contrast, the p&p dyads did not significantly reduce their percentage of global errors (z = -1.69, p = .09, r = .45), be it grammatical (z = -.34, p = .74, r = .09), lexical (z = -.17, p = .87, r = .05), or mechanical (z = -0, p = .1, r = .0) errors. table 2 evolution of global errors and types of errors from pre-test to draft variables cm (n = 9) p&p (n = 7) pre-test draft evolution pre-test draft evolution m (sd) m (sd) m (sd) m (sd) m (sd) m (sd)) % global errors 21.35 (6.79) 14.18 (3.69) -7.17 (4.24) 32.79 (14.16) 25.70 (6.71) -7.10 (10.15) % grammatical errors 64.44 (9.23) 57.40 (18.78) -7.03 (16.12) 49.63 (14.88) 48.25 (16.81) -1.38 (13.46) % lexical errors 13.24 (6.75) 9.41 (6.16) -3.83 (6.95) 14.17 (7.07) 14.77 (6.64) .61 (9.12) % mechanical errors 22.32 (12.77) 33.18 (15.54) 10.86 (14.46) 36.20 (16.02) 36.98 (10.91) .78 (14.98) from a qualitative angle, we found that after instruction 1 the descriptive texts produced by the cm dyads in their drafts included far more adjectives and that basic word order rules (e.g., adjective + noun) were more correctly implemented as well. there were also qualitative gains for the p&p dyads. whereas their pre-test descriptions basically consisted of lists of the objects, furniture, etc., found in the place described, in the drafts they used more adjectives (albeit not always correctly), and one dyad even included a simile (e.g., “my bed . . . is like sleep in the clouds”), a characteristic of descriptive writing explained during instruction 1. also, the feelings that the place (their bedroom) evoked in the writers were described (adjectives such as “comfortable,” “beautiful,” “calm”). comparing draft texts, in which the cm dyads could use internet resources outside google docs (e.g., online bilingual dictionaries), differences were found in the percentage of global errors. the p&p dyads made significantly more global belén gonzález-cruz, lourdes cerezo, florentina nicolás-conesa 634 errors than the cm dyads despite writing a similar number of words in the same amount of time (see table 3). no significant differences were found between cm and p&p dyads in specific error types. the distribution of the most frequent types of errors was similar. the cm and p&p dyads made more grammatical errors followed by mechanical errors (spelling and punctuation) and lexical errors. table 3 errors in draft texts variables cm draft (n = 9) p&p draft (n = 7) mann whitney u test m (sd) m (sd) u z p effect size duration (minutes) 33.78 (10.94) 27.43 (3.95) 18 -1.43 .15 .36 length (number of words) 158.78 (14.48) 141.86 (25.34) 16 -1.64 .10 .41 % global errors 14.18 (3.69) 25.70 (6.71) 3 -3.02 .00 .76 % grammatical errors 57.40 (18.78) 48.25 (16.81) 24 -.79 .43 .19 % lexical errors 9.41 (6.16) 14.77 (6.64) 18 -1.43 .15 .36 % mechanical errors 33.18 (15.54) 36.98 (10.91) 31.50 0 1 0 the second research question examined whether feedback processing environment had any effect on the dyads’ noticing of the corrections provided by their respective teachers. the cm dyads were granted access to internet resources beyond google docs (see method) to process feedback, but they reported in a questionnaire completed after feedback processing that they had not made use of them. no significant differences were found between processing feedback via google docs and on paper (see table 4). the error logs revealed that the p&p and cm dyads successfully noticed most of the errors they had made in their drafts (i.e., approximately 80%), whereas unsuccessful noticing of errors was practically negligible, meaning that few errors passed unnoticed. table 4 error noticing in error logs variables cm (n = 9) p&p (n = 7) mann whitney u test m (sd) m (sd) u z p effect size % successfully noticed 80.30 (17.68) 80.78 (6.03) 29.50 -.21 .84 .05 % unsuccessfully noticed 2.87 (4.23) 1.23 (2.22) 25 -.79 .54 .19 % unnoticed 16.83 (14.99) 8.64 (6.39) 19.50 -1.27 .21 .32 grammatical errors and corrections were successfully noticed to a much higher extent than lexical and mechanical ones. on the other hand, the unnoticed errors were mechanical errors, particularly in the case of the cm participants (see table 5). a classroom-based study on the effects of wcf on accuracy in pen-and-paper versus computer . . . 635 table 5 errors noticed per category in error logs variables cm (n = 9) p&p (n = 7) m (sd) m (sd) % successfully noticed grammar 67.16 (22.26) 53.56 (20.10) lexis 12.30 (7.77) 14.90 (7.25) mechanics 20.54 (19.76) 31.54 (13.59) % unsuccessfully noticed grammar 44.44 (52.70) 14.29 (37.80) lexis 0 (0) 0 (0) mechanics 0 (0) 14.29 (37.80) % unnoticed grammar 10.19 (24.92) 23.81 (38.32) lexis 0 (0) 8.33 (10.76) mechanics 78.70 (38.44) 53.57 (42.99) the last research question inspected possible differences between both environments in the incorporation of teacher corrections into rewritten texts. in terms of global errors, both the p&p and cm dyads successfully incorporated more than half of the corrections, with no significant differences. however, the p&p dyads incorporated significantly more unsuccessful corrections than the cm ones. about a quarter of the errors were similarly left uncorrected in both groups and only very few errors were deleted in both groups (see table 6). table 6 incorporation of corrections into rewritten texts variables cm (n = 9) p&p (n = 7) mann whitney u test m (sd) m (sd) u z p effect size % successful corrections 62.29 (24.83) 59.43 (15.62) 31.50 0 1 0 % unsuccessful corrections 2.62 (3.55) 11.65 (7.10) 7 -2.64 .01 .66 % uncorrected errors 32.96 (24.23) 25.31 (8.91) 22 -1.01 .31 .25 % deleted errors 2.13 (5.02) 3.61 (4.13) 21.50 -1.22 .22 .31 the cm and the p&p dyads significantly reduced their errors from draft to rewritten texts (wilcoxon signed rank test: cm – z = -3.06, p = .00, r = .72; p&p – z = -2.37, p = .02, r = .63). no significant differences were found in the percentage of errors in rewritten texts (see table 7). table 7 accuracy development across writing tasks variables cm (n = 9) p&p (n = 7) mann whitney u test m (sd) m (sd) u z p effect size % errors in pre-tests 21.35 (6.79) 32.79 (14.16) 14 -1.85 .06 .46 % errors in drafts 14.18 (3.69) 25.70 (6.71) 3 -3.02 .00 .76 % errors in rewritten texts 5.11 (3.64) 9.03 (3.78) 14 -1.85 .06 .46 belén gonzález-cruz, lourdes cerezo, florentina nicolás-conesa 636 regarding the types of errors that learners corrected in the rewritten texts, the p&p and cm dyads incorporated (successfully or unsuccessfully) into their rewritten texts grammatical and, to a lesser extent, mechanical corrections. as for mechanical errors, the p&p dyads incorporated significantly more unsuccessful corrections (u = 18, z = -2.10, p = .04, r = .53) than the cm ones. the p&p dyads also tended to incorporate more successful corrections in relation to mechanics (u = 14, z = -1.85, p = .06, r = .46) (see table 8). table 8 incorporation of corrections per error type in rewritten texts variables cm (n = 9) p&p (n = 7) m (sd) m (sd) % successfully corrected grammar 61.68 (22.83) 42.79 (26.77) lexis 12.60 (11.44) 15.39 (7.98) mechanics 25.71 (20.74) 41.82 (21.47) % unsuccessfully corrected grammar 33.33 (50) 56.87 (31.79) lexis 11.11 (33.33) 28.57 (40.50) mechanics 0 (0) 14.56 (18.46) % uncorrected grammar 33.88 (31.62) 50.80 (15.04) lexis 3.99 (6.58) 11.95 (11.21) mechanics 28.81 (29.49) 37.24 (17.43) % deleted grammar 3.70 (11.11) 35.71 (47.56) lexis 0 (0) 0 (0) mechanics 18.52 (37.68) 21.43 (39.34) 5. discussion our results showed that cmcw (i.e., writing in google docs with the availability of internet resources) led to increased grammatical and lexical accuracy as compared to writing on paper without external resources. however, no difference was found between writing environments (cm and p&p) in terms of feedback processing or accuracy of the rewritten texts. in what follows we discuss our main findings in terms of the evolution of l2 written accuracy as a function of the use of internet resources; the effects of environment on feedback processing; and the incorporation of teacher corrections (i.e., feedback uptake) into rewritten texts. 5.1. evolution of l2 written accuracy and the use of internet resources our results indicate that using internet resources during joint text formulation fostered accuracy and, more specifically, grammatical, and lexical accuracy, better than writing on paper. these findings are in line with those of previous research about the advantages of cm to improve the quality of written texts (cheung, a classroom-based study on the effects of wcf on accuracy in pen-and-paper versus computer . . . 637 2015; li & cumming, 2001). on the other hand, our results stand in contrast with other studies that indicate that cm writing may have negative effects on students’ writing quality because of the difficulty in typing words in a computer (pennington, 1996) or because learners may focus on surface-level features such as spelling (owston et al., 1992). it should be remembered that our participants were low l2 proficiency learners, but they were used to writing in google docs. however, having fewer grammatical or lexical errors while writing using the internet does not necessarily mean that learners who write in a cm environment have actually developed their l2. further research should investigate if this additional advantage of the cm environment is later reflected in better accuracy in l2 production tasks. accuracy improvement in the cm dyads can be explained by the additional support provided by internet resources together with other task-related factors (although these may apply to both p&p and cm writing) and the characteristics of efl instruction. regarding task-related features, content similarity between the pre-test and the draft/rewritten text (see appendix a) together with procedural task repetition (e.g., manchón, 2014) may have driven all learners’ attention to lexical and grammatical features. in addition, efl instruction in spain focuses on grammatical and lexical accuracy over mechanical features, which may have also helped to direct learners’ attention to grammar and lexis. along these lines, our training in descriptive writing also emphasized the importance of using adjectives (lexis) and the third person singular (grammar) in descriptions. accordingly, the cm dyads could have produced more grammatically and lexically accurate texts than the p&p dyads because they could use internet resources to look up words in dictionaries and consult grammar rules on the internet. to be more precise about the specific affordances for written accuracy of different internet resources, it would have been useful to track the internet searches made by these dyads while writing their texts. owing to data protection policies, the research team was not granted access to this potentially sensitive information. on the other hand, we also found that the availability of internet resources was not beneficial for mechanics and, more specifically, for punctuation issues. the cm dyads increased their punctuation errors from the pre-test (f = 34) to the drafts (f = 46). as a result, the frequency of punctuation errors was similar in the p&p and cm drafts despite the latter using internet resources. the cm dyads may not have noticed punctuation errors when writing their texts because google docs highlights spelling errors but not punctuation issues. therefore, cm dyads may not have consulted internet resources to solve potential punctuation problems in their drafts. in a way, it could be suggested that when the cm dyads resembled the p&p dyads the most (in the pre-test), they used more careful text formulation (chan et al., 2017) and committed fewer mechanical errors than when they did have access to the internet. it may be concluded belén gonzález-cruz, lourdes cerezo, florentina nicolás-conesa 638 that the availability (or not) of resources in different writing environments may drive learners’ attention to distinct l2 aspects while composing their texts. finally, the large percentage of mechanical errors of both groups could also reveal a lack of l2 writing practice. the spanish secondary education efl curriculum emphasizes the development of oral over written output and these learners’ prior writing experience was mostly wordor sentence-based. these learners were not used to writing paragraph-long texts, which require higher use of punctuation marks. 5.2. effects of environment on feedback processing our second research question asked about the extent to which the writing environment affects collaborative processing of teacher wcf. the cm dyads were given access to internet resources for the feedback processing stage, but they reported not using them. accordingly, their supposed advantages at this stage were neutralized and an effect of the writing environment on feedback processing was not found. this finding seems to indicate the importance of l2 learners’ agency in writing to make use of available resources (cerezo et al., 2019). likely reasons for not making use of internet resources might be, among others, the explicitness of the feedback (direct ec), insufficient time, or lack of strategic knowledge to use the available resources for feedback processing. from a methodological viewpoint, some questions remain open. for instance, it is unknown whether the cm dyads would have used internet resources to process wcf under different conditions (individual writing, indirect feedback, focused corrections, higher proficiency, or longer time to discuss errors). future research could use concurrent data (e.g., leow, 2020) such as audio or video recordings to capture the interaction taking place in collaborative dialogues while writing and processing wcf and thus better understand the motivations behind some decisions taken by the learners as well as the actual products resulting from those decisions. our training program was based on feedback processing and on the characteristics of descriptive writing, but we did not train students to use the internet specifically for text formulation and feedback processing. the cm dyads were accustomed to using google docs for their day-to-day schoolwork and the teacher confirmed that her students resorted to google translate or word reference in their english lessons. however, this knowledge may not have been sufficient to use internet resources strategically. as indicated by li and cumming (2001), availability of computers on their own cannot result in positive changes in writing without adequate training. regardless of the writing environment, all participants successfully noticed around 80% of the errors in their drafts and the overall percentage of unnoticed a classroom-based study on the effects of wcf on accuracy in pen-and-paper versus computer . . . 639 errors was reduced. these findings can be related to the explicitness of the feedback and of the instrument to process feedback collaboratively (i.e., error log) as well as to the effectiveness of the metalinguistic training. these were common factors to cm and p&p dyads. further research could be conducted to isolate the effects of each variable. processing feedback on the screen of a computer or on paper did not make any difference in the amount of noticing for our low l2 proficiency participants. further research could investigate learners’ depth of processing and if processing feedback on a screen using longer texts and during longer periods of time could be an additional burden. to our knowledge, there are no previous studies on feedback processing in cm writing to compare our findings in this specific environment. the percentage of noticing in our study is higher than that reported by cerezo et al. (2019) and manchón et al. (2020) in relation to upper-intermediate efl learners with a background in linguistics. in these two p&p studies, the participants also received unfocused feedback and processed it using a languaging table in which they wrote errors, corrections, and explanations to those corrections. however, the participants in those studies did not receive training to process feedback and they wrote either a similar number of words to that indicated in the present study, individually and collaboratively (manchón et al., 2020), or longer texts individually (around 300 words in cerezo et al., 2019). it remains an empirical question if the percentage of successful noticing of errors would have been so high if our participants had received unfocused direct feedback in longer texts. our findings may indicate the effectiveness of the metalinguistic awareness-raising activity (instruction 2) in curriculum-based tasks, which are typically short. regarding the types of errors successfully noticed, grammatical errors were noticed the most frequently, followed by mechanical (basically spelling errors) and lexical errors in both groups. this distribution of noticing coincides with the most frequent types of errors made in students’ drafts. on the other hand, the use of direct feedback could have contributed to focusing learners’ attention on grammar, as suggested by previous scholars (suzuki, 2012) as well as the higher presence of grammatical errors over mechanical ones in the ml awareness-raising activity. 5.3. incorporation of corrections into rewritten texts the third research question explored the extent to which the writing environment mediates collaborative uptake of wcf in the rewritten texts. results showed that there was no effect of the writing environment because the potential advantages of the cm dyads were neutralized when they decided not to use the internet to process feedback. the participants in both environments successfully belén gonzález-cruz, lourdes cerezo, florentina nicolás-conesa 640 incorporated more than half of their respective teachers’ corrections into their rewritten texts. some studies with individual upper-intermediate efl writers have reported lower percentages of successful incorporation of corrections after feedback processing in p&p without a training program to notice errors in a narrative task (e.g., cerezo et al., 2019). the participants in manchón et al. (2020) incorporated a slightly higher number of corrections, but the task was a decision-making writing activity, which could have made it more difficult to write the text and could have made the corrections more memorable. our results indicate the effectiveness of training low proficiency efl writers to reflect on errors using unfocused feedback, which could lead to increased accuracy in rewritten texts. we provided unfocused feedback in short texts, which means that the range of error types could be more limited than in longer texts and therefore the processing load may be manageable for errors to be noticed and later incorporated into their rewritten texts by our low proficiency participants, regardless of the writing environment. these findings are in line with hartshorn and evans (2015), who propose that unfocused feedback is effective and ecologically valid, but the number of corrections provided should be manageable for the learners. this can be done if feedback is provided in short texts (around 150 words), as the ones required in this study. the percentage of successful noticing of errors was higher than the percentage of successful correction in rewritten texts in both environments. around 20% of the errors successfully noticed were not incorporated into the rewritten texts, which indicates the lack of total correspondence between the number of errors noticed and corrections introduced into rewritten texts after receiving and processing unfocused feedback (cerezo et al., 2019). further research could investigate if more cycles of writing and training sessions to process feedback could lead to higher levels of noticing and higher percentages of accuracy. this research should be conducted using curriculum-oriented writing tasks in which learners are asked to process and incorporate feedback as part of their writing practice using the available resources in p&p and cm writing. finally, as our p&p and cm dyads rewrote their texts, they incorporated (successfully or unsuccessfully) into their rewritten texts grammatical and, to a lesser extent, mechanical corrections or merely left the errors uncorrected. this finding shows the correspondence between the types of errors noticed (basically, grammar and spelling) and the types of corrections incorporated. in addition, spelling and grammatical errors (rule-based errors) were easier to understand because of the direct feedback received and thus to incorporate, regardless of the writing environment. lexical errors, on the other hand, were not so frequent in the drafts and involved wrong lexical choices whose corrections may be more difficult to understand and remember by low proficiency learners. finally, a classroom-based study on the effects of wcf on accuracy in pen-and-paper versus computer . . . 641 the metalinguistic awareness-raising activity focused mostly on the grammatical issues detected in the drafts, which may have driven these learners’ attention to grammatical errors. 6. conclusion this study aimed to elucidate the effects of writing environment (cm vs p&p) in authentic classrooms on the accuracy of texts rewritten after metalinguistic training and the collaborative processing of teacher wcf. the investigation contributes to the wcf and sla-oriented l2 writing literature in general by analyzing an underrepresented population in a curricular learning context and by expanding research to include cm writing. the study showed (i) the effectiveness of internet resources to improve accuracy when formulating texts; and (ii) the combined effect of unfocused direct feedback, feedback processing, and metalinguistic training to improve the accuracy of low proficiency learners’ rewritten texts using authentic curriculum-based tasks conducted in cm and p&p writing. no significant differences were found between groups in feedback processing and the accuracy of rewritten texts because the cm group decided not to use internet resources beyond google docs. from a methodological viewpoint, we may conclude that processing feedback on a computer does not seem to negatively influence the amount of error noticing and the incorporation of corrections compared to p&p. in addition, giving internet resources to low proficiency learners does not mean that learners will benefit from them if they are not trained how to use them. we suggest that apart from giving clear guidelines about how to use feedback (see roca de larios & coyle 2022), low proficiency learners also need to be instructed how to use and process this feedback in different writing environments (p&p and cm). in this way, these learners could benefit from the additional resources offered in cm writing (e.g., online dictionaries, grammar checks, corpora) to process feedback collaboratively and revise their texts. pedagogically, we suggest that low proficiency learners with little writing experience could write short texts, receive direct corrections and training to notice and explain errors in collaboration (e.g., spot-the-error activities) either in p&p or cm writings so as to increase the likelihood of successfully noticing the errors on which they receive feedback and which they correct in due course. l2 teachers may also want to have their students write their texts on internet-enabled devices to improve accuracy at the formulation stage of the writing process. schools that cannot afford this technology could provide students with external resources at this stage, such as students’ personal smartphones or tablets. further studies could investigate if this sustained writing practice with external resources could lead to language learning over time. belén gonzález-cruz, lourdes cerezo, florentina nicolás-conesa 642 this study was conducted with a small sample size of efl learners, and the use of internet resources could not be tracked. future research should collect data on larger samples in other contexts and make use of concurrent data collection instruments such as screencast technology, audio, or video recordings to better capture collaborative writingand feedback-related processes. despite these limitations, we consider our study ecologically valid and with genuine implications for sla research and thus a worthy contribution to the field of writing to learn the language using wcf in p&p and cm environments. acknowledgements this study was funded by the spanish ministerio de ciencia e innovación (research grant pid2019-104353gb-i00). a classroom-based study on the effects of wcf on accuracy in pen-and-paper versus computer . . . 643 references abrams, z. i. 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(2021). computer-mediated collaborative writing in l2 classrooms: a systematic review. journal of second language writing, 54, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2021.100854 zhi, m., & huang, b. (2021). investigating the authenticity of computerand paper-based esl writing tests. assessing writing, 50, 1-12. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.asw.2021.100548 a classroom-based study on the effects of wcf on accuracy in pen-and-paper versus computer . . . 647 appendix a writing prompts 1. pre-test: write a 150-word paragraph in english describing a) the house, b) the town/city, or c) the beach/mountain area where one of you spend your summer vacation. 2. draft: write a 150-word paragraph in english describing your bedroom (student 1’s bedroom or student 2’s bedroom only). 3. rewriting: rewrite your paragraph having in mind the corrections given to you about your grammatical, lexical, and mechanical errors, and the indications provided about the content and the organization of ideas in your paragraph to improve both aspects in this final version. belén gonzález-cruz, lourdes cerezo, florentina nicolás-conesa 648 appendix b instruction 2: metalinguistic awareness-raising activity step 1: whole-class spot-the-error instructions: let’s identify, correct, and explain together the errors contained in the following sentences. examples: i have a bed blue … è i have a blue bed … she like eating … è she likes eating … step 2: collaborative spot-the-error instructions: with your partner, read the following sentences. correct and explain the errors contained in them. example: i have a new mobile phone pink. correction: i have a new pink mobile phone. explanation: adjectives are placed before nouns. step 3: individual (homework) spot-the-error instructions: read the following sentences. correct and explain the errors they contain. example: i like play videogames online. correction: i play videogames online. explanation: ‘like’ is unnecessary. a classroom-based study on the effects of wcf on accuracy in pen-and-paper versus computer . . . 649 appendix c feedback processing: error logs step 1: put your pencils down! (15 min). here is the text you wrote together, with your teacher’s corrections. read it aloud, explaining the errors and their corrections to each other. the teacher’s corrections are included in red. attention: do not write anything at this stage. you must only talk about your errors and the corrections. step 2: now, write! (30-35 min). after you have identified your errors and the teacher’s corrections and you have talked about them, you must now dictate errors and corrections to each other. each of you must copy all the errors and corrections in your own worksheet. at the end of the task, you must both have written the same information in your respective worksheets. example: error # error correction 1 of my house of the house 2 is very comfortable it is very comfortable 3 i love spent time i love spending time 4 is like my zone it is like my zone 5 purple harts purple hearts 6 some photos in the walls some photos on the walls 7 my friends … etc. my friends … 8 in the tv on the tv 9 i wach some films i watch some films 10 i have a big table i have a big desk 11 there i do my homework where i do my homework 12 a wardrove a wardrobe 13 my favorite, my favorite piece of furniture 14 is like sleep it’s like sleeping 15 i have a big window there is a big window 16 on the table on the desk 17 is not perfect it is not perfect 18 but is my comfortable zone but it is my comfortable zone 19 my favorite part of my house my favorite part of the house belén gonzález-cruz, lourdes cerezo, florentina nicolás-conesa 650 appendix d error coding scheme (abridged) grammar tense verb form word form plural preposition pronoun conjunction discourse marker word order determiner sentence structure lexis word mechanics spelling punctuation 543 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (4). 2021. 543-578 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.4.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt why am i learning english? spanish efl sports science university students´ motivational orientations through the prism of the l2 motivational self system jelena bobkina universidad politécnica de madrid, madrid, spain https://orcid.org/ 0000-0003-0432-9957 jelena.bobkina@upm.es maría-josé gómez-ortiz universidad politécnica de madrid, madrid, spain https://orcid.org/ 0000-0001-8822-0320 maria.gomez.ortiz@upm.es maría cristina núñez del río universidad politécnica de madrid, madrid, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3349-8015 mc.nunez@upm.es susana sastre-merino universidad politécnica de madrid, madrid, spain https://orcid.org/ 0000-0001-9511-3793 susana.sastre@upm.es abstract the study explores the motivational profiles of spanish efl sports science university students from the second language (l2) motivation self system (l2mss) perspective to ultimately support spanish higher institutions´ plans committed to improving employability and competitiveness. the study analyzes the relationships between l2 motivation, l2 proficiency, gender, and l2 contextual variables using data from 196 english as a foreign language (efl) jelena bobkina, maría-josé gómez-ortiz, maría cristina núñez del río, susana sastre-merino 544 sports science university students. the data reveal that the ideal l2 self construct stands out as the most salient and powerful factor, while the ought-to and rebellious l2 selves are less significant and there are items loading on both of them at the same time. thus, higher means for the ideal l2 self motivation correspond to higher levels of l2 proficiency and are supported by l2 learning contextual variables. the strongest ought-to l2 self was registered in students with mid-low l2 proficiency and a lack of l2 learning experiences. meanwhile, the rebellious l2 self is clearly distinguishable only for students with high l2 proficiency. pedagogical and curricular implications of these findings are that the ideal and the rebellious l2 selves could positively predict students´ l2 proficiency. thus, new dynamics of education should explore language teaching methodologies that are more likely to enhance students´ ideal and rebellious l2 selves. keywords: second language motivational self system; l2mss; l2 proficiency; gender differences; spain; sports science; higher education 1. introduction motivation has long been a focus of second language studies because of its strong connection with success in second and foreign language (l2) learning. in recent years, l2 motivation theory has witnessed significant progress in its effort to provide a fresher view on the issue of motivation in language learning “as a natural progression from gardner’s theory” (dörnyei & ushioda, 2010, p. 80). the search for alternative models and incorporation of motivational concepts from cognitive and educational psychology has become a turning point in “a vigorous transition from the static and fixed approach of looking at l2 motivation to a more dynamic perspective” (liu & thompson, 2018, p. 37). the current view on motivation in language learning is dominated by the l2 motivational self system (l2mss) theory (dörnyei, 2005). in fact, it has become the most commonly used theoretical foundation in recently published empirical studies on l2 motivation (boo et al., 2015). this framework has been applied to, and validated with, l2 learners in various english as a foreign language (efl) contexts, including china, japan, iran, hungary, pakistan, and saudi arabia (islam et al., 2013; kormos & csizér, 2014; liu & thompson, 2018; moskovsky et al., 2016; papi & teimouri, 2012; ryan, 2009; you et al., 2016). although the l2mss is the most commonly used approach for studying language learner motivation at this time, the l2mss framework has not been given due consideration so far in the spanish context, especially in the field of english for specific purposes (esp) for sports science. the sports science student’s why am i learning english? spanish efl sports science university students ́motivational orientations. . . 545 profile can be particularly attractive for researchers as it stands at the crossroads of the natural, engineering and social sciences, and overlaps with a number of scientific fields, such as psychology, biology, physics, physiology, and psychophysiology, among others (fazio et al., 2017). with this in mind, the use of the l2mss framework could be crucial in understanding sports science students’ idiosyncrasy in comparison to other esp students,1 emphasizing the role of the “selves” in motivating students and enhancing their language achievement in english language learning, which in turn contributes to students’ further employability on the labor market. specifically, in spain, employability is closely related to a strong command of the english language, significantly raising job seekers´ chances of being employed (gazzola & mazzacani, 2019). this is particularly true in the sport sector, where the demand for skilled individuals is growing rapidly (gómez-ortiz et al., 2015). in fact, to address this need, spain has recently advocated the implementation of bilingual programs at all stages of education. now, most of spain’s regions are moving toward a bilingual educational system that requires teachers with expertise in english. thus, in most cases, teachers are obliged to have a certificate in advanced english (c1 level according to the common european framework of reference for languages [cefr], council of europe, 2001, 2020), which is recognized as a serious challenge that slows down the implementation of bilingualism in spain (ortega-martín et al., 2018). that is particularly true for physical education (pe) teachers, as many of them are still struggling to attain an advanced level certificate in english and suffer from high levels of pressure as a result of the dramatic rise of bilingual schools’ popularity (gómez-ortiz et al., 2015; torres-menárguez, 2018). therefore, the present study aims at analyzing the motivational profiles of spanish efl sports science university students who are esp learners with a clear demand for expertise in english in order to enhance their english achievement and, as a result, their employability in bilingual education programs.2 1 our polytechnic university offers a sports science degree together with engineering and architecture degrees. contrary to other esp students, whose linguistic expertise is limited to a rather restricted language domain, the field of sports science is more interdisciplinary. besides, teaching remains a major career path for these students. 2 physical education was one of the first subjects to be implemented in the bilingual educational curriculum in spain because “a pe class is mainly physical and practical, and done in large spaces, so communication is both verbal and non-verbal . . . pe offers good language learning opportunities because new vocabulary and grammar structures are introduced in context, with visual support and physical reinforcement” (dale & tanner, 2012, p. 76). this fact has caused a sharp demand for pe teachers with a high level of proficiency in english. unfortunately, the level of proficiency among the spanish efl sports science university students continues to be insufficient, preventing their access to some sectors of the labor market (gómez-ortiz et al., 2015). jelena bobkina, maría-josé gómez-ortiz, maría cristina núñez del río, susana sastre-merino 546 2. literature review 2.1. dörnyei´s l2 motivational self system (l2mss) relying on the previous models but marking a shift from a socio-psychological perspective toward motivational psychology, the l2mss originated as a way of exploring the relationships between learner self-identity and l2 learning (alhoorie & macintyre, 2020; dörnyei & al-hoorie, 2017; dörnyei & ushioda, 2010). based on the concepts of possible selves (markus & nurius, 1986) and self-discrepancy theory (higgins, 1987), its fundamental assumption is based on the idea that the discrepancy between the current state of the learners and their future self-guide “may function as a motivation to bridge the perceived gap and reach the desired end-state” (al-hoorie, 2018, p. 722). with regard to possible selves, markus and nurius (1986) suggested three types of constructs to complement the current conception of self-knowledge: what people might become, what they would like to become, and what they are afraid of becoming. higgins (1987) later conceptualized these self-forms into two types of attributes or selfguides: the attribute that people desire to possess, known as the ideal self, and the attribute that people feel obliged to possess, that is, the ought-to self. dörnyei incorporated these selves into his l2mss as the following constructs: the ideal l2 self, the ought-to l2 self, and the context (dörnyei, 2009). the ideal l2 self encapsulates the ideas that one might have about oneself as a language learner (dörnyei, 2005). in other words, the ideal l2 self is who a learner would like to develop into in terms of language identity. for this reason, this construct may become a powerful motivational force to learn an l2 due to the speaker’s desire to reduce the existing gap between the actual and ideal selves. some applied linguists claim that the l2 ideal self correlates significantly with integrativeness (ryan, 2009; taguchi et al., 2009) in the sense that learners might have visions of ideal selves communicating proficiently in an l2. yet compared to integrative motivation, “the ideal self typically explains more variance in learners’ desired efforts” in learning a language (liu & thompson, 2018, p. 38). by contrast, the ought-to l2 self refers to “the attribute that one believes one ought to possess to meet expectations and to avoid possible negative outcomes” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 29). it represents one´s vision of a future self to be possessed as a result of perceived duties, obligations, or responsibilities (dörnyei, 2005), and entails the wishes and expectations of significant others (papi, 2010). thus, the ought-to l2 self is more extrinsic and less internalized compared to the ideal l2 self. recent research has found correlations between the ought-to l2 construct and extrinsic motivation (dörnyei, 2005, 2009; ushioda, 2001), family influences (csizér & kormos, 2009), and the prevention-focused aspect of instrumentality (taguchi et al., 2009). why am i learning english? spanish efl sports science university students ́motivational orientations. . . 547 the context, traditionally operationalized in the l2mss as the learning experience, is the part of the l2mss that refers to “situation-specific motives related to the immediate learning environment and experiences” (dörnyei, 2019, p. 21). it covers different elements of the context and its effect on the development of the selves. in contrast to ideal and ought-to selves, this dimension is not related to self-image, but to a number of aspects of formal and informal instruction in language learning, including the teacher, the learner group, methodology, materials, and the way they influence the construction of the selves profiles. despite its importance, the l2 learning experience construct has been criticized recently as “structurally different from the other two constituents by dörnyei,” “somewhat restrictive,” and “vaguely discussed in the literature” (neigert, 2019, p. 64). 2.2. recent developments in the l2mss and the emergent rebellious self in spite of the fact that the l2mss model has greatly enriched our understanding of l2 motivation, it is not free from setbacks and criticism. in fact, doubts arise even from dörnyei himself in regard to the concept of self as the best possible anchor for motivation (dörnyei & ushioda, 2010). empirical studies using the l2mss have pointed to several problems, including a lack of ought/ideal delineation, a lack of accommodating learner profiles described as rebellious, and a lack of clarity regarding the placement of non-language specific motivation (csizér, 2019; lanvers, 2016; papi & khajavy, 2021). besides, evidence from recent metaanalyses (al-hoorie, 2018; mendoza & phung, 2019; dörnyei, 2019) shows that some areas of the l2mss, such as the l2 learning experience or the effect of age and gender, have not been studied extensively enough. in recent years, the l2mss framework was further developed by several researchers who have argued for the need to re-examine the existing framework incorporating the distinction between the “i” and the “other” aspects of higgins’s (1987, 1998) self-guides. in particular, the ought-to self turned out to be the most questioned construct as its predictive influence on students’ motivated learning behavior is not so clear-cut (csizér & lukács, 2010; dörnyei & chan, 2013; kormos et al., 2011). thus, according to dörnyei and chan (2013), while ought-to selves “do play a role in shaping the learners’ motivational mindset, in many language contexts they lack the energizing force to make a difference in actual motivated learner behaviors by themselves” (p. 454). in this connection, a number of advances have been proposed in order to further develop the l2mss framework, articulating the “i” versus “other” dimension that does not appear to be sufficiently recognized in the l2mss. thus, several studies suggest complete integration of the distinction between the own and other standpoints of self-discrepancy theory into the l2mss, following higgins´ jelena bobkina, maría-josé gómez-ortiz, maría cristina núñez del río, susana sastre-merino 548 (1987, 1998) four possible i/other discrepancies: actual/own versus ideal/own; actual/own versus ideal/other; actual/own versus ought/own; and actual/own versus ought/other (papi et al., 2019; papi & khajavy, 2021; taylor, 2013; thompson & vásquez, 2015). in this regard, considerable progress has been made by papi et al. (2019), who proposed a 2x2 model of future self-guides, which applies regulatory distinctions in the conceptualization of the self-guides and bifurcates the ideal l2 self and the ought-to l2 self by two standpoints, own and other. these bifurcations result in two ideal l2 selves from own and other standpoints (ideal l2 self/own and ideal l2 self/other), and two ought l2 selves from own and other standpoints (ought l2 self/own and ought l2 self/other). interestingly, in the research the ought l2 self/own emerges as the strongest predictor of l2 motivation in contrast to the traditional belief describing the ought-to self as a weak predictor of motivation (e.g., papi & teimouri, 2012, 2014; teimouri, 2017; you & dörnyei, 2014). in addition, different self-guides seem to predict qualitatively different motivated behaviors. in the same vein, thompson and vásquez (2015) argued for the need to incorporate a distinction between the ought-to l2 self and the anti-ought-to l2 self as “some learners are motivated by an urge to perform actions contrary to the suggestions or expectations of an external party” (liu & thompson, 2018, p. 38). thus, following brehm’s (1966) theory of psychological reactance, the antiought-to l2 self was defined as a reaction to social pressures in the opposite way than the one described in the ought-to l2 self (thompson & vásquez, 2015). lanvers (2016) describes this new self as a “rebellious” one, referring to learners´ general anti-stances and their rebellious attitudes toward pressure from others. though it is a new construct, several recent studies confirm the presence of the anti-ought-to or rebellious self as a part of the l2mss framework (e.g., thompson, 2017; thompson & liu, 2018). 2.3. factors interacting with l2 motivation: proficiency, gender, and contextual variables previous research on l2 motivation revealed that various factors could interact with l2 motivation, such as gender, l2 proficiency, or learning experience. in terms of l2 proficiency, in spite of the fact that most of the studies confirm the positive effect of students´ l2 motivation on their level of l2 proficiency (islam et al., 2013; papi, 2010; rajab et al., 2012; taguchi et al., 2009), this correlation is very complex. while most of the research is generally supportive of a link between dörnyei´s self-guides and learners’ intended motivated behavior, the capacity of self-guides to affect learners’ actual behavior and/or actual l2 achievement has not yet been established conclusively. nevertheless, showing that the selfguides correlate with and even predict l2 language proficiency could constitute a why am i learning english? spanish efl sports science university students ́motivational orientations. . . 549 real test for the l2mss theory (moskovsky et al., 2016). as a matter of fact, only a limited number of studies have tried to relate the self-guides to learners’ real l2 language achievement, such as course grades (dörnyei & chan, 2013; kim & kim, 2011), students’ self-reported language proficiency scores (liu & thompson, 2018), or the results of actual language tests (lamb, 2012; moskovsky et al., 2016). the results of these studies indicate a link between the self-guides and achievement, although this relationship is rather tenuous and does not work in the same way for both self-guides (moskovsky et al., 2016). when comparing the two l2 selves, the predictive effect of the ideal l2 self on the overall l2 language proficiency seems to be more evident than that of the ought-to l2 self. thompson and erdil-moody (2016) found that there were significant group differences only in the case of the ideal l2 self. in the same vein, dörnyei and chan (2013) concluded that the ideal l2 self was the only important predictor of students’ grades across two target l2s. by contrast, some studies claim that the ideal l2 self was not a good predictor of language proficiency, arguing that the learners´ ought-to self-guides must have been a driving force instead (kim & kim, 2011; yang & kim, 2011). interestingly, the nature of motivation seems to vary depending on students´ proficiency level. thus, in liu and thompson’s study (2018), the three “self” constructs were all influential for l2 proficiency (either positively or negatively), but the structure of motivation differed significantly based on proficiency level. learners of the mid-high proficiency group had high ideal and rebellious selves, but their ought-to self was less significant. on the contrary, students of the mid-low proficiency group presented a stronger ought-to self when compared to more advanced students. to sum up, though several studies acknowledge the possibility of using the l2mss framework as a predictor of l2 proficiency, this is not a clear-cut issue. in relation to gender, it is often believed that females show higher motivation than males (you et al., 2016). indeed, a number of empirical studies have provided evidence in favor of this hypothesis (csizér & dörnyei, 2005; you & dörnyei, 2014; you et al., 2016). csizér and dörnyei (2005) conducted a study involving over 8000 hungarian teenage students to describe the motivational profile of l2 learners through cluster analysis. the results of the study showed that the more motivated clusters were mainly populated by females, while the least motivated clusters were dominated by males. similarly, other researchers, such as ullman et al. (2008), as well as henry (2011), provided evidence that females were, in most cases, more motivated in l2 learning. in an attempt to explain this phenomenon, henry and cliffordson (2013) proposed that the core difference between male and female learners may lie in the fact that females’ possible selves are characterized by more interdependence and interpersonal qualities jelena bobkina, maría-josé gómez-ortiz, maría cristina núñez del río, susana sastre-merino 550 than those of men, which allows for the development of more elaborate and robust motivational future self-guides. the findings of more recent research drawing upon the l2mss framework, however, have been rather inconsistent. for example, in the study carried out by henry (2011) with swedish teenage students actively engaged in learning two l2s no significant differences were found between male and female ideal l2 or l3 selves. similarly, no gender differences were reported in another study in the swedish context (sylvén & thompson, 2015) and one more in the turkish context (thompson & erdil-moody, 2016). contrary to this, in the chinese setting, female students showed stronger ideal and ought-to selves than male learners (you & dörnyei, 2014; you et al., 2016). these results led scholars to assume that females and males have different motivational constructs. in light of such findings, some researchers claim the necessity for more systematic research on gender differences (al-hoorie, 2018) since the fact that females show higher motivation than males is often taken for granted. as regards the l2 learning experience, several studies describe it as the strongest predictor of l2 learning success (e.g., lamb, 2012; teimouri, 2017; zhu, 2019). nevertheless, despite being an essential element in understanding students’ motivation, its effect on the motivation self-guides has not yet been fully investigated (al-hoorie, 2018; csizér & kálmán, 2019), partially because of the vagueness of the concept itself. in fact, according to ushioda (2011), the l2 learning experience continues to be the least theorized construct in the l2mss. furthermore, dörnyei (2019) himself confessed that the l2 learning experience has not featured prominently in either theoretical or developmental research of the past decade and the analysis of this dimension is yet to be conducted. earlier studies have mostly focused on students´ immediate classroom experiences, such as the impact of the teacher (kikuchi, 2013; rostami et al., 2015), learning style (dörnyei & chan, 2013; kim & kim, 2018), or learning environment (ryan, 2009; kim, 2013), among others. however, an increasing number of researchers highlight the necessity of treating the l2 learning experience as a broader concept, including external stimuli and circumstances that the learner experiences during the course of learning a foreign language in and outside the classroom (csizér & kálmán, 2019). though previous studies indicate that the general learning experiences, such as prior language learning experience and positive language interaction (de angelis, 2007; thompson, 2013; thompson & aslan, 2014), sojourns abroad (allen, 2010; du, 2019; jackson, 2017; sandu & oxbrow, 2020), and bilingual education settings (lasagabaster, 2011; pfenninger, 2016) positively influence the l2 learning process and enhance students´ desire to learn english, research in this field is rather scarce. why am i learning english? spanish efl sports science university students ́motivational orientations. . . 551 3. the study this study explores the motivational profiles of spanish efl sports science university students using the l2mss framework, including the anti-ought-to/rebellious motivational construct, developed by thomson and vázquez (2015). gender, english proficiency, and contextual variables related to l2 learning, such as bilingual education, l1 english teachers, sojourns abroad and exchanges, and professional experience in english are also analyzed in relation to motivation. additionally, the study aims to question the possibility of predicting the level of english proficiency based on the l2mss model framework. therefore, the following research questions (rqs) are posed and investigated in this study: 1. what is the factor structure of spanish efl sports science students´ motivation according to the l2mss? 2. what is the relationship between efl sports science students’ motivation and the following: gender, teacher experience, l1 english teacher, sojourn abroad, bilingual education, and competencies in other languages? 3. does the nature of motivation of spanish efl sports science students vary with proficiency level? 4. can the l2mss framework be used to predict the level of english proficiency for efl sports science students? if so, how can we model that phenomenon? 4. method 4.1. context and participants the study was conducted in spain during the 2018-2019 academic year in one of the public universities in madrid. the university was established in the eighteenth century, making it among the oldest and most reputable technical universities in spain. in an attempt to adjust its educational model to real-world needs and to ensure the quality of education, explicit importance has been given to the teaching of english. in fact, the university implemented english for professional and academic education (epac) as a compulsory subject in all the university degree courses. furthermore, following the bologna plan guidelines for the development of linguistic competence, the university requires its students to certify a b2 level prior to graduation. the sample consisted of 196 undergraduate spanish efl sports science students who voluntarily responded to the survey. table 1 presents demographic information about the participants. they included 134 males (68.4%) jelena bobkina, maría-josé gómez-ortiz, maría cristina núñez del río, susana sastre-merino 552 and 62 females (31.6%), aged between 18 and 44 years (m = 22.79; sd = 3.52). regarding the level of studies, 173 students were undergraduates, and 23 were enrolled in two official master’s programs. additionally, 52 students (27%) also had other educational degrees. other characteristics that may influence the study of english are also included in table 1: professional experience communicating in l2, classes with l1 english teachers, bilingual education in english,3 sojourns in english-speaking countries, and knowledge of other languages. table 1 information about participants factor frequency gender female 62 (31.6%) male 134 (68.4%) age 18-24 161 (82.1%) 25-31 30 (15.3%) 32-38 2 (1.1%) 39-45 3 (1.5%) academic degree bachelor 173 (88.3%) master 23 (11.7%) other studies no 144 (73.5%) yes 52 (26.5%) sojourns in l2 speaking countries no 167 (85.2%) yes 29 (14.8%) bilingual education no 156 (79.6%) yes 40 (20.4%) other languages no 107 (54.6%) yes 89 (45.4%) l2 professional experience no 132 (67.3%) yes 64 (32.7%) l1 english l2 teacher no 45 (23%) yes 151 (77%) cefr-based self-rated l2 proficiency c2 12 (6.1%) c1 75 (38.3%) b2 72 (36.7%) b1 14 (7.1%) a2 12 (6.1%) a1 11 (5.6%) 4.2. instrument and data collection the spanish version of the questionnaire used for the study consisted of two parts. the first part included items concerning students’ motivation, and the second one aimed at collecting students´ background information, including 3 students’ professional experience in l2, classes with native-speaker english teachers and bilingual education may include any present or past experience. why am i learning english? spanish efl sports science university students ́motivational orientations. . . 553 gender, age, l2 learning contextual variables (bilingual education, l1 english teachers, sojourns abroad and exchanges, professional experience), and selfrated english proficiency in cefr. these questions replaced the original l2 learning experience items (see dörnyei & taguchi, 2010) since the focus of this study was on the totality of students´ learning experiences rather than on their immediate learning experiences. the 31 motivational items were adopted from liu and thompson (2018), who merged 20 items from dörnyei and taguchi (2010) assessing the ideal and ought-to selves used in a number of previous studies (e.g., claro, 2016; wong, 2018), with 11 items dealing with the anti-ought-to/rebellious self (e.g., “i can imagine myself living abroad and having a discussion in english;” “my parents believe that i must study english to be an educated person”; “i want to prove others wrong by becoming good at english i am studying”). appendix a presents the full list of items. the questionnaire was piloted for clarity by a volunteer group of 10 university students, and additional modifications were introduced to avoid ambiguity and minimize any language-related misinterpretations. reliability was established through calculating cronbach’s alphas for each factor; all of the values were high, indicating strong internal reliability for each factor: the ideal l2 self (f1) = .925 (12 items), the ought-to l2 self (f2) = .818 (6 items), and rebellious l2 self (f3) = .794 (8 items). the questionnaire was administered as a googledoc to sports science students learning english as a foreign language. data collection lasted about one month, and a total of 205 students took part in the survey. data from 9 nonspanish participants were removed due to the fact that their english learning trajectories were not known. a 6-point likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree) was used for items tapping into motivation. the items were randomized to prevent accidental survey bias. the raw data were introduced into spss 25 for further analysis. data regarding students´ english proficiency (ep) levels were collected through participants’ self-reported scores. students filled a survey to rate their ep in terms of the cefr levels on a 6-point scale. to help students with this task, short and unambiguous descriptors of each level were provided in the questionnaire. cefr’s user-oriented scale (council of europe, 2001, p. 37) was chosen as it is an official guideline used to describe foreign language learner achievement across europe and students are obliged to reach at least the b2 level upon completion of their university studies.4 4 most of our students are familiar with their ep level because the language proficiency exam is a compulsory requirement to enroll in the mandatory english for professional and academic communication (epac) course (universidad politécnica de madrid, 2017). even so, we tried to avoid biased opinions by providing students with short and unambiguous descriptors of the cefr levels (council of europe, 2001, 2020). jelena bobkina, maría-josé gómez-ortiz, maría cristina núñez del río, susana sastre-merino 554 4.3. data analysis a non-experimental, descriptive design was employed. the statistical analyses were carried out using spss 25 for windows. exploratory factor analysis (efa) was conducted to evaluate the motivation of spanish efl sports science students. one-way anovas were used for assessing differences in the three motivational constructs by independent variables, coupled with the welch correction test when no homogeneity of variance could be proved by levene’s tests, as recommended by field (2013). post-hoc tests were performed when necessary. cohen’s eta-squared (η2) was calculated to estimate the effect size of oneway anova tests. as norouzian and plonsky (2018) state, eta-squared is one of the most commonly employed effect sizes and is used in conjunction with anova and its variants. it belongs to the r family of effect sizes (wei et al., 2019). since, according to norouzian and plonsky (2018), no l2-specific benchmarks for η2 exist, we refrained from qualifying our eta-squared as small, medium, and large. according to these authors, the use of cohen´s (1988) benchmarks for interpreting effect sizes is not recommended in l2 research. hence, following plonsky and oswald (2014), eta-squared was directly interpreted for categorical predictor variables as the degree to which an independent variable explains differences among groups, that is, the percentage of variance in the dependent variable that can be accounted for by group membership was considered. bonferroni’s adjustment of the alpha-level was also calculated to counteract the problem of multiple comparisons, and the resulting p-value was analyzed. non-parametric multivariate analysis was the last step of the analysis. in all cases, the segmentation method selected was exhaustive chi-square automatic interaction detector (chaid) division, taking into account its advantages (berlanga et al., 2013). finally, to explore the predictive value of learner motivation (independent or explanatory variable) on english proficiency (dependent variable), a standard multiple linear regression was performed. 5. results 5.1. rq1: the nature of spanish efl sports science students’ motivation efa was performed to answer rq1 (“what is the factor structure of spanish efl sports science students´ motivation according to the l2mss?”), using the maximum likelihood extraction method and the oblique direct oblimin rotation method. the results of the analysis, which are included in appendix b, confirmed that the best solution included three factors. according to the kaiser-meyer-olkin (kmo) value of this efa (0.867, p = .000), the sample size was adequate. the final factor solution why am i learning english? spanish efl sports science university students ́motivational orientations. . . 555 included the items with eigenvalues greater than 1.0 that loaded onto the factors at a value of 0.3 or greater. thus, five items were eliminated and efa was re-run without these items. all the remaining items loaded onto one of the three factors. altogether, these three latent variables explained 47.18% of the total variance. the first factor (f1) included 12 items. it was identified as the ideal l2 self and explained 26.45% of the total variance. four items (11, 19, 24, and 28) were intended for the rebellious l2 self (f3) but had a stronger loading for the ideal l2 self (f1). the ought-to l2 self (f2) contained six items and explained 16.69% of the total variance. items 15 and 17 also loaded onto rebellious l2 self (f3), with a lower value. finally, the rebellious l2 self (f3) accounted for 4.04% of variance and consisted of eight items. items 14, 23, and 29 loaded only onto f3; items 18 and 30 were intended for f1 and f2 (with lower values), while 9, 26, and 27 (with a lower value) loaded onto f2. these results indicate a crossover in the latent variable that these particular items measure. 5.2. rq2: gender, l2 learning contextual variables, and l2 motivation rq2 aimed to shed light on the relationship between gender and other l2 learning contextual variables and the nature of efl sports science students’ motivation. table 2 presents these statistical results. in order to determine whether gender influences spanish efl sports science university learners’ motivation in terms of the three motivational constructs, one-way anovas were used (the three motivational variables were designated as dependent variables and gender as an independent variable). previously, levene’s test proved homogeneity of variance. the respective results for the motivational factors (f(1,194) = 2.619, p = .107, f(1,194) = 1.438, p = .232, f(1,194) = 0.230, p = .632) indicate no significant difference between males and females with regard to any of the three factors. the effect sizes (η2) for the three factors were 0.013, 0.007, and 0.001, which means that gender only explained 1.3%, 0.7%, and 0.1% of each factor, respectively. table 2 statistical results for variables influencing l2 motivation: levene´s test for homogeneity of variance, anovas (welch correction for lack of homogeneity) and effect sizes (η2) variables motivational factors no/male yes/female levene´s test anovaa effect size m sd m sd f p df f p η2 gender m (n = 134) f (n = 62) f1 4.51 1.03 4.75 0.93 0.523 .470 1,194 2.619 .107 0.013 f2 2.5 1.07 2.31 1.01 0.827 .364 1,194 1.438 .232 0.007 f3 3.17 0.96 3.10 0.92 0.020 .887 1,194 0.230 .632 0.001 l2 professional experience no (n = 132) yes (n = 64) f1 4.49 1.00 4.78 0.98 0.014 .906 1,194 3.618 .059 0.018 f2 2.58 1.05 2.15 1.01 0.055 .814 1,194 7.478 .007** 0.037 f3 3.24 0.98 2.96 0.85 1.240 .267 1,194 3.709 .056 0.019 l1 english teacher f1 4.29 1.19 4.67 0.92 5.934 .016* 1,60.4 3.994a .050a* 0.028 jelena bobkina, maría-josé gómez-ortiz, maría cristina núñez del río, susana sastre-merino 556 no (n = 45) yes (n = 151) f2 2.72 1.24 2.35 0.98 3.562 .061 1,194 4.312 .039* 0.022 f3 3.19 0.97 3.14 0.94 0.002 .963 1,194 0.120 .729 0.001 sojourns in l2 countries no (n = 167) yes (n = 29) f1 4.48 1.01 5.17 0.69 3.995 .047* 1,51.5 21.016 a .000a*** 0.060 f2 2.50 1.07 2.06 0.87 1.407 .237 1,194 4.413 .037* 0.022 f3 3.14 0.95 3.21 0.95 0.003 .954 1,194 0.148 .701 0.001 bilingual education no (n = 156) yes (n = 40) f1 4.47 1.02 5.05 0.78 3.782 .053 1,194 11.552 .001** 0.056 f2 2.43 1.07 2.46 1.00 1.014 .315 1,194 0.025 .873 0.000 f3 3.12 0.94 3.26 0.97 0.054 .317 1,194 0.649 .421 0.003 other languages no (n = 107) yes (n = 89) f1 4.47 1.01 4.72 0.97 0.291 .590 1,194 2.889 .091 0.015 f2 2.43 1.08 2.45 1.03 0.102 .750 1,194 0.017 .897 0.000 f3 3.07 1.00 3.24 0.88 1.322 .252 1,194 1.626 .204 0.008 note. a welch correction test was used to adjust the anova results due to the violation of the homogeneity assumption; *p ≤ .05, **p ≤ .01, ***p ≤ .001 l2 learning contextual variables were studied in order to explore their influence on l2 motivation. levene’s test proved homogeneity of variance for all three factors in the case of the following variables: professional experience in l2, bilingual education, and knowledge of other languages. for the variables of l1 english l2 teachers and sojourns in english-speaking countries, the assumption of homogeneity was violated for the ideal self (f1), and a welch correction test was used for adjustment (field, 2013). the welch test confirmed higher means for students with experience in both cases: l1 english teacher (f(1,60.434) = 3.994, p = .050), sojourns (f(1,51.513) = 21.016, p = .000). the effect sizes for l1 english l2 teachers indicate that this variable only explained 2.8%, 2.2%, and 0.8% of the motivational factors, respectively. in the case of sojourns in l2 countries, the variables accounted for 6.0%, 2.2%, and 0.1% of the factors. knowledge of other languages was the only contextual variable in the case of which no significant difference was uncovered between groups with respect to any of the three factors. for professional experience in l2, only the ought-to l2 self represented a significant difference between students with professional experience in l2. the effect size (explaining 3.2% of the shared variance) indicates certain differences between the two groups. with bonferroni´s alpha-level p adjustment, there were no changes in the significant group differences. the mean scores indicate that students with no professional experience in l2 contexts had stronger ought-to selves than the other group. in the case of nativespeaker english l2 teachers, there were significant differences both for the ideal self and for the ought-to self. when analyzing the mean scores, it was observed that students who had been taught by native-speaker english l2 teachers manifested stronger ideal l2 self motivation, and, conversely, students without such teachers exhibited a stronger ought-to l2 self. the effect size for f1 and f2 indicated minor differences between the two groups. taking into account the alphalevel p obtained after bonferroni´s adjustment, the results were no longer significant. concerning sojourns in english-speaking countries, significant differences were found for f1 and f2, depending on whether the students had stayed why am i learning english? spanish efl sports science university students ́motivational orientations. . . 557 in an l2-speaking country for more than three months or not. when applying bonferroni´s adjustment, f2 was no longer significant. considering the mean scores, they indicated for f1 that the students who had stayed in an l2-speaking country displayed a stronger ideal l2 self motivation, and, conversely, for f2, the ought-to l2 self was stronger for students with no experience abroad. finally, results for bilingual education indicated that only the ideal l2 self represented a significant difference between students with bilingual education (p = .001). the differences between students who had received bilingual education or those who had not proved to be significant, also after bonferroni´s adjustment. the effect size for f1 was 0.056, which means that when comparing the f1 value of students who had received bilingual training versus those who have had, six out of 100 pairs showed better values. 5.3. rq3: english proficiency and motivation three one-way anovas were performed in order to examine potentially significant differences between spanish efl sports science university learners’ english proficiency and motivation in terms of the ideal, ought-to, and rebellious l2 selves. therefore, the english proficiency level (measured through self-rated cefr levels) was included as the independent variable and the three motivational factors (the ideal, ought-to, and rebellious l2 selves) as the dependent variables. table 3 presents the results of these analyses. the results of levene’s test for the three factors indicate that the homogeneity assumption was violated in the case of the ideal l2 self and the rebellious l2 self, and a welch correction test was used for adjustment. the welch f-ratio for f1 and f3 reveals significant differences for both factors. by contrast, the anova result for f2 indicated no significant differences for the ought-to l2 self. the effect sizes for f1 and f3 explained 42.7% and 4.7% of shared variance, respectively, indicating a very important difference between groups with regard to the ideal l2 self and a minor difference regarding the rebellious l2 self. the bonferroni adjustment of the alpha level at .003 confirmed such differences in the ideal and the rebellious l2 selves. table 3 anova results for l2 proficiency and motivation and effect sizes f1 f2 f3 c2 (n = 12) m 5.51 2.25 3.77 sd 0.57 1.04 0.47 c1 (n = 75) m 5.04 2.33 3.11 sd 0.62 1.00 0.89 b2 (n = 72) m 4.54 2.20 3.20 sd 0.84 1.12 1.06 b1 (n = 14) m 3.77 2.46 3.03 jelena bobkina, maría-josé gómez-ortiz, maría cristina núñez del río, susana sastre-merino 558 sd 0.89 0.77 0.78 a2 (n = 12) m 3.78 2.61 3.03 sd 0.95 1.27 0.98 a1 (n = 11) m 2.67 2.76 2.64 sd 0.99 1.12 0.88 levene’s test f 3.366 1.665 2.558 p .006a** .145 .029a* anova df 5,35.015a 5,190 5,38.049 a f 22.294a 0.535 4.462 a p .000a*** .750 .003 a** effect size η2 0.427 0.014 0.047 note. a welch correction test was used to adjust the anova results due to the violation of the homogeneity assumption; *p ≤ .05, **p ≤ .01, ***p ≤ .001 post-hoc tests were performed to explore differences for f1 and f3 (dunnett’s test). for f1, no significant differences were found for c1 and c2’s mean scores or for b1 and a2. the significant mean differences can be expressed as follows: (c2 = c1) > b2 > (b1 = a2) > a1. for f3, there were significant differences only between proficiency levels for c2, summarized as c2 > (c1 = b2 = b1 = a2 = a1). table 4 presents a summary of the statistically significant results from rq2 and rq3 and their effect sizes and interpretation. table 4 significant results for l2 learning contextual variables, l2 proficiency, and motivation (p value and effect size) f1 p value and η2 f2 p value and η2 f3 p value and η2 effect size interpretation l2 professional experience .059, 0.018 .007**, 0.037 .056, 0.019 f2: 3.7% of shared variance l1 english l2 teacher .050a, 0.028 .039*, 0.022 .729, 0.001 f1 and f2: 2.8% and 2.2% of shared variance sojourns in l 2 speaking countries .000a***, 0.060 .037*, 0.022 .701, 0.001 f1: 6%, f2: 2.2% shared variance bilingual education .001**, 0.056 .873, 0.000 .421, 0.003 f1: 5.6% shared variance l2 proficiency .000a***, 0.427 .145, 0.014 .003a**, 0.047 f1: 42.7%, f3: 4.7% shared variance note. a welch correction test value; *p ≤ .05, **p ≤ .01, ***p ≤ .001 further analysis was performed, taking into account not only l2 proficiency but also l2 learning contextual variables related to motivational selves. appendix c presents the results of non-parametric multivariate analyses carried out for each factor through the segmentation method (chaid division). for f1, the most influential factor in the case of ideal l2 self motivation was l2 proficiency. three different groups emerged with different mean scores. the first group was composed of c1 and c2 english proficiency, with the highest mean why am i learning english? spanish efl sports science university students ́motivational orientations. . . 559 (m = 5.105). the second group included b2 students (m = 4.541, n = 72) and the third group was composed of b1, a2, and a1 students, with the lowest mean (m = 3.446, n = 37). within the c1 and c2 proficiency students (n = 87), the next influential variable was bilingual education. students who had studied in a bilingual program represented a higher mean score (m = 5.383, n = 20 vs. m = 5.022, n = 67). for b2 students, no other significant variable was identified that could describe their results in terms of f1. for f2, as already mentioned, l2 proficiency was not a significant variable. the most important explanatory variable was professional experience in l2. students without such experience manifested a higher ought-to l2 self motivation. within that group, students were also divided by a second explanatory variable: sojourns in l2-speaking countries. students with no experience abroad also had a higher f2 mean score. finally, the decision tree for f3 revealed that there were no variables significantly affecting the result in this motivational factor. 5.4. rq4: multiple regression analysis of english proficiency and motivation standard multiple linear regression was performed to explore the predictive effect of learner motivation (independent or explanatory variable) on english proficiency (dependent variable). correlations were found between the ideal l2 self and self-rated l2 proficiency (r = -.643, p < .001) and between the rebellious l2 self and proficiency (r = -.152, p = .016). finally, despite the fact that f2 was not correlated to l2 proficiency (r = .112, p = .060), it was included in the following linear regression analysis because of previous literature having proved its importance as an l2mss construct (see liu & thompson, 2018). the r values for the explanatory variables were lower than .70, so, according to tabachnick and field (2001), the three factors can be entered separately into the analysis. the result of the standard regression analysis was significant (r = 0.650, r2 = 0.423, p < .001), and the explanatory variables explained 42.3% of the variance (f(3,192) = 46.874, p < .001) when predicting efl proficiency levels. as presented in table 5, the ideal l2 self (f1) is the only significant predictor, with β = -0.639. consequently, the equation to predict english learners’ proficiency (y) by their english learning motivation can be modeled as: y* = 6.106 -0.765*f1 the results could be interpreted as showing that f1 has a positive effect on l2 proficiency. a higher value in ideal l2 self motivation implies a lower value of y*, which corresponds to higher proficiency levels (1 = c2 and 6 = a1 levels). jelena bobkina, maría-josé gómez-ortiz, maría cristina núñez del río, susana sastre-merino 560 table 5 efl proficiency level prediction: standard multiple regression results for a 3-predictor variable model predictor b β t p constant 6.106 17.429 .000*** ideal self -0.765 -0.639 -10.778 .000*** ought-to self 0.113 0.100 1.508 .133 rebellious self -0.05 -0.004 -0.061 .951 note. *p ≤ .05, **p ≤ .01, ***p ≤ .001 6. discussion this study sought to address four research questions regarding the nature of motivation in spanish efl sports science university students using the framework of the l2mss, including the anti-ought-to or rebellious motivational construct, developed by thomson and vázquez (2015). by analyzing the l2mss framework in the field of esp for the sports science context, this study also attempted to shed light on the role of the idiosyncratic possible l2 selves of these students with a clear demand for expertise in english and employability in spanish bilingual education programs. the findings presented above will now be discussed in relation to each of the research questions. the efa performed for rq1 showed a general validity of the l2mss framework for spanish efl sports science students. the results confirmed the value of the l2mss as a motivational model. the three constructs (i.e., the ideal, oughtto, and rebellious l2 selves) were also distinguishable in the context of spanish sports science students. the total explained variance (47.18%) as well as the results of the efa were similar to those obtained by liu and thompson (2018), supporting the claim that the l2mss can effectively represent efl students´ motivation. the rebellious self construct, described in several recent studies (thompson, 2017; thompson & vázquez, 2015), also emerged as an independent component of l2 motivation, although with a limited force, as it only explained 4% of the variance. in fact, the distribution of the items in relation to the motivational factors indicates certain divergences with respect to the results of liu and thompson (2018). thus, items 11 (“i enjoy a challenge with regard to english learning”) and 31 (“in my english classes, i prefer material that is difficult even though it will require more effort on my part, as opposed to easier material”) are intended for the rebellious l2 self (f3) in the original design but have a stronger loading for the ideal l2 self (f1). that is to say, our data shows that the rebellious component (f3) loses strength and definition if compared to liu and thompson (2018) as the factorial loads in our study were smaller and five out of the eight items load onto more than one factor. regarding f2, although our results explain more variance percentage than in liu and thompson´s (2018) why am i learning english? spanish efl sports science university students ́motivational orientations. . . 561 study (16.69% vs. 10.80%), two of the six items that loaded on this factor also loaded on f3. these results are somehow surprising as the rebellious self was expected to come up as a more striking element in a western context. instead, the f3 component was mixed up with both f1 and f2, thus being diminished in strength. these results suggest that students´ base culture, languages, or socioeconomic context may play an important role (gao, 2008, 2010; magid, 2009; taguchi et al., 2009). indeed, as macintyre et al. (2009) state, the effects of cultural differences in the construction of the self seem to constitute one of the major challenges for future research using the l2mss framework. in this regard, further research is needed to develop a reliable instrument for the rebellious construct, as well as to investigate its nature in relation to learning l2 english to verify the results of the study. the purpose of rq2 was to see if gender and other l2 learning contextual variables could be considered relevant factors that characterize the nature of motivation in spanish efl sports science students. with regard to gender, no major differences were found between males and females in a higher education setting. although females obtained higher means for the construct of the ideal l2 self (f1) in comparison with the ought-to (f2) and rebellious (f3) l2 selves, these differences were not statistically significant. in this sense, our findings are in line with several other studies, which did not report significant differences in terms of gender (brady, 2015; henry, 2011; sylvén & thompson, 2015; thompson & erdil-moody, 2016). nevertheless, other studies, in particular in the chinese context, provided evidence that females and males have different motivational constructs, as discussed previously (you & dörnyei, 2014; you et al., 2016; liu & thompson, 2018). these contradictory findings suggest that this question can be culture-specific, as the effects of culture and ethnicity can be crucial in understanding gender differences in l2 motivation and are to be taken into consideration, especially “in contexts where social practices, hierarchies and ideologies differ from the western norms” (henry, 2011, p. 101). regarding other l2 learning contextual variables under investigation, the results of anova and the decision trees revealed that the following features could have a significant influence on spanish efl sports science learners’ motivation: having a native-speaker english teacher, using l2 for professional purposes, benefitting from sojourns in english-speaking countries, and receiving bilingual education. nevertheless, their impact differed in terms of the ideal, ought-to, and rebellious l2 selves. specifically, the ideal l2 self (f1) was positively related to such variables as having an l1 english teacher, experiencing sojourns in english-speaking countries, and receiving bilingual education. at the same time, high levels of the ought-to l2 self (f2) characterized students with no professional experience involving the use of english, no sojourns in english-speaking jelena bobkina, maría-josé gómez-ortiz, maría cristina núñez del río, susana sastre-merino 562 countries, and no experience of having native speakers as their teachers. finally, in the case of the rebellious l2 self (f3), no variables significantly affected the results for this motivational factor. these findings are in line with some previous research (e.g., du, 2019; sandu & oxbrow, 2021), corroborating the relationship between the ideal l2 self and l2 learning variables tied to students’ greater exposure to a foreign language. nevertheless, the research in this area is still very scarce and the results need to be corroborated in future studies. regarding rq3, few studies so far have explored the impact of l2 proficiency on the nature of motivation in terms of students´ l2 selves (i.e., ideal, ought-to, and rebellious). in this regard, our research revealed that students with a higher level of english proficiency exhibited higher ideal l2 self motivation, displaying no differences between students at b1-b2 and students at c1c2 levels. in the case of rebellious motivation, it was higher for learners at the c2 level when compared to the rest of the students. liu and thompson (2018) reported similar results, acknowledging that learners of the mid-high proficiency group manifested higher levels of the ideal and rebellious l2 selves when compared to the mid-low proficiency group. it was also observed that students of lower l2 proficiency had a stronger level of the ought-to l2 self, but (in contrast to liu & thompson, 2018) no statistically significant differences were detected across the outcomes measured. one possible explanation for this discrepancy is that our students could be less sensitive to social pressure if compared to those from asian countries and thus their ought-to l2 selves play a less prominent role as a motivating factor (takahashi & im, 2020; yu & geng, 2020). the relationships between the three motivational selves and students´ proficiency were further explored through rq4, aiming to determine whether the l2mss framework can be used to predict the level of english proficiency for efl sports science students. previous studies have shown that students’ l2 motivation has a predictive relationship to l2 proficiency (islam et al., 2013; papi, 2010; rajab et al., 2012; takahashi & im, 2020), particularly in the case of the ideal l2 self (dörnyei & chan, 2013; kim & kim, 2014; lamb, 2012; thompson & erdil-moody, 2016). as regards the rebellious l2 self, and in line with other studies (dörnyei & chan, 2013; kim & kim, 2014; lamb, 2012), this construct did not prove to be a predictor of l2 proficiency. the multiple regression analysis confirmed that the ideal l2 self (f1) is the only relevant factor, explaining about 42% of the total variance; meanwhile, the ought-to (f2) and the rebellious (f3) l2 factors did not predict l2 proficiency. in this sense, the results of our study are especially relevant, taking into consideration that the ideal l2 self (f1) alone explained 42% of the variance in our case, while liu and thompson (2018) reported that the three factors only explained 12.5%. these variations can be due to the different nature of the samples. in particular, in the case of sports science why am i learning english? spanish efl sports science university students ́motivational orientations. . . 563 students, teaching remains one of the principal career paths for a good number of them. they know that physical education is one of the most demanded subjects in the spanish bilingual program (hernando et al., 2018) as it offers multiple language learning opportunities based on multimodal language input, such as video, speech, gestures, gaze and head/body movements, among others. this fact may affect sports science students´ learning experience, making them feel particularly useful members of the english teaching community, boosting their ideal l2 selves, and resulting in a stronger relationship between students´ ideal self and their level of english proficiency. the study suffers from several limitations. first, all participants were sports science university students; thus, the findings may not be applicable to students of other esp programs. in addition, the study was designed as questionnaire-based research, measuring students´ motivation at one point in time. in this regard, the paper might have benefited from qualitative and longitudinal data to shed light on the relation between the nature of students´ motivation and l2 contextual variables, among others. besides, in order to collect data related to students´ level of english proficiency, self-reported questionnaires were used; in future studies, such data could be strengthened by incorporating more reliable instruments that measure students´ level of language proficiency. also, the questionnaire items used in the research did not include the recent developments of the l2mss, bifurcating the ideal l2 self and ought-to l2 self into two standpoints, own and other (papi et al., 2019, papi & khajavy, 2021). 7. conclusion the current study sought to investigate the nature of motivation of spanish efl sports science university students from the l2mss perspective to ultimately encourage their study of english language and culture, as a way to boost their language achievement and, consequently, their employability in bilingual school programs. although the general validity of the l2mss framework for spanish efl sports science learners was demonstrated, the ideal self construct stood out once again as the most salient and powerful motivational factor. the findings also showed that higher means of ideal l2 self motivation are undoubtedly related to higher levels of l2 proficiency and that they are supported by l2 learning contextual variables (i.e., bilingual education, sojourns in english-speaking countries, etc.). in addition, the ideal l2 self turned out to be associated with a major positive impact in relation to the predictive value of learners’ motivation on english proficiency. interestingly, the ought-to construct did not seem to have any significant relationship with students’ l2 proficiency. besides, the rebellious self scores turned out to be significantly higher for students with the highest jelena bobkina, maría-josé gómez-ortiz, maría cristina núñez del río, susana sastre-merino 564 level of english language proficiency (c2) when compared to the rest of the groups (c1, b2, b1, a2, a1). in other words, students with the highest level of l2 competence tended to show a stronger rebellious l2 self. there are multiple pedagogical and curricular implications stemming from these findings. the most salient ones are those related to the ideal and the rebellious l2 selves that positively predict students´ l2 proficiency. encouraging students to pursue advanced qualifications in english is not a simple task and there are no quick and easy solutions, but it is clear that the new dynamics of education should include activating students´ ideal selves. to meet this goal, among other measures, actions related to maintaining closer contact with the l2 and its culture (e.g., immersion experiences, l1 english teachers, sojourns in english-speaking countries, etc.) are of vital importance. furthermore, challenging tasks and the excitement of working with authentic materials seem to enhance students’ curiosity and contribute to developing their ideal l2 self motivation, especially in the case of students with a high level of english proficiency. on the other hand, all those measures related to imposing english as a compulsory reward-based requirement do not seem to produce an expected effect on students. as regards the future lines of inquiry, more studies are necessary to explore the language teaching strategies that are more likely to enhance students´ ideal and rebellious l2 selves, especially in the case of university students. some examples may include, but are not limited to, giving learners choice and introducing meaningful language tasks (muñoz & ramirez, 2015) or promoting learners’ autonomy (alrabai, 2014; 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(2019). literature review on second language motivational self system. frontiers in educational research, 2(5), 137-141. why am i learning english? spanish efl sports science university students ́motivational orientations. . . 573 appendix a student questionnaire section 1 for each of the following statements circle the number which best represents your answer. strongly disagree disagree slightly disagree slightly agree agree strongly agree 1. my parents believe that i must study english to be an educated person. 1 2 3 4 5 6 2. i can imagine myself studying in a university where all my courses are taught in english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 3. i study english because close friends of mine think it is important. 1 2 3 4 5 6 4. i can imagine a situation where i am speaking english with foreigners. 1 2 3 4 5 6 5. i want to prove others wrong by becoming good at english i am studying. 1 2 3 4 5 6 6. i have to study english, because, if i do not study it, i think my parents will be disappointed with me. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. i am studying english even though most of my friends and family members don’t value foreign language learning. 1 2 3 4 5 6 8. i imagine myself as someone who is able to speak english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 9. i want to speak english because it is not something that most people can do. 1 2 3 4 5 6 10. the things i want to do in the future require me to use english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 11. i enjoy a challenge with regard to english learning. 1 2 3 4 5 6 12. i can imagine myself living abroad and having a discussion in english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 13. i consider learning english important because the people i respect think that i should do it. 1 2 3 4 5 6 14. i would like to reach a high proficiency in this language, despite others telling me that it will be difficult or impossible. 1 2 3 4 5 6 15. studying english is important to me in order to gain the approval of my peers/teachers/family/boss. 1 2 3 4 5 6 16. i can imagine myself living abroad and using english effectively for communication with the locals. 1 2 3 4 5 6 17. learning english is necessary because people surrounding me expect me to do so. 1 2 3 4 5 6 jelena bobkina, maría-josé gómez-ortiz, maría cristina núñez del río, susana sastre-merino 574 18. i am studying english because i want to stand out amongst my peers and/or colleagues. 1 2 3 4 5 6 19. i can imagine myself speaking english as if i were a native speaker of english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 20. it will have a negative impact on my life if i don’t learn english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 21. i am studying english because it is a challenge. 1 2 3 4 5 6 22. i can imagine myself speaking english with international friends or colleagues. 1 2 3 4 5 6 23. i chose to learn english despite others encouraging me to study something different (another language or a different subject entirely). 1 2 3 4 5 6 24. whenever i think of my future career, i imagine myself using english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 25. if i fail to learn english i will be letting other people down. 1 2 3 4 5 6 26. i am studying english because it is something different or unique. 1 2 3 4 5 6 27. studying english is important to me because other people will respect me more if i have a knowledge of english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 28. i can imagine myself writing english emails/letters fluently. 1 2 3 4 5 6 29. i want to study english, despite other(s) telling me to give up or to do something else with my time. 1 2 3 4 5 6 30. studying english is important to me because an educated person is supposed to be able to speak english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 31. in my english classes, i prefer material that is difficult, even though it will require more effort on my part, as opposed to easier material. 1 2 3 4 5 6 section 2 your gender: ________ male________ female your nationality: ____________________ your age: __________________ year of study: ______________ your major: _________________________ have you ever had, or do you have a l1 english speaking language teacher? 1._______ yes 2._______ no if yes, specify, when and where_________________________ have you spent a long period (at least a total of 3 months) in english-speaking countries? 1._______ yes 2._______ no if yes, specify, where and how long______________________ why am i learning english? spanish efl sports science university students ́motivational orientations. . . 575 please rate your current overall proficiency in english according to cefr levels by ticking one. ❏ c2 – upper advanced. proficient user. able to understand with ease virtually everything heard or read. able to summarise information from different spoken and written sources, reconstructing arguments and accounts in a coherent presentation. able to express spontaneously, very fluently and precisely, differentiating finer shades of meaning even in more complex situations. ❏ c1 – lower advanced. proficient user. able to converse about general matters of daily life and topics of one’s speciality and grasp the gist of lectures and broadcasts. able to read high-level materials such as newspapers and write about personal ideas. ❏ b2 – upper intermediate. independent user. able to converse about general matters of daily life. able to read general materials related to daily life and write simple passages. ❏ b1 – lower intermediate. independent user. able to converse about familiar daily topics. able to read materials about familiar everyday topics and write simple letters. ❏ a2 – elementary. basic user. able to hold a simple conversation such as greeting and introducing someone. able to read simple materials and write a simple passage in elementary english. ❏ a1 – beginner. basic user. able to give simple greetings using set words and phrases. able to read simple sentences, grasp the gist of short passages, and to write a simple sentence in basic english. jelena bobkina, maría-josé gómez-ortiz, maría cristina núñez del río, susana sastre-merino 576 appendix b variable loadings for the ideal, ought-to and anti-ought-to/rebellious l2 selves survey items factor 1 2 3 h2 22. i can imagine myself speaking english with international friends or colleagues. 0.880 0.784 12. i can imagine myself living abroad and having a discussion in english. 0.835 0.761 16. i can imagine myself living abroad and using english effectively for communication with locals. 0.833 0.711 28. i can imagine myself writing english emails/letters fluently. 0.818 0.320 0.684 4. i can imagine a situation where i am speaking english with foreigners. 0.783 0.626 2. i can imagine myself studying in a university where all my courses are taught in english. 0.749 0.562 8. i imagine myself as someone who is able to speak english. 0.746 0.585 19. i can imagine myself speaking english as if i were a native speaker of english. 0.706 0.464 0.592 11. i enjoy a challenge with regard to english learning. 0.629 0.325 0.425 24. whenever i think of my future career, i imagine myself using english. 0.623 0.306 0.409 31.in my english classes, i prefer material that is difficult, even though it will require more effort on my part, as opposed to easier material. 0.595 0.356 10. the things i want to do in the future require me to use english. 0.408 0.197 17. learning english is necessary because people surrounding me expect me to do so. 0.792 0.317 0.711 15. studying english is important to me in order to gain the approval of my peers/ teachers/ family/ boss. 0.736 0.353 0.545 13. i consider learning english important because the people i respect think that i should do it. 0.674 0.459 25. if i fail to learn english, i will be letting other people down. 0.625 0.406 6. i have to study english, because, if i do not study it, i think my parents will be disappointed with me. 0.597 0.415 3. i study english because close friends of mine think it is important. 0.488 0.242 26. i am studying english because it is something different or unique. 0.388 0.652 0.456 18. i am studying english because i want to stand out amongst my peers and/or colleagues. 0.304 0.492 0.616 0.479 29. i want to study english, despite other(s) telling me to give up or to do something else with my time. 0.549 0.303 27. studying english is important to me because other people will respect me more if i have a knowledge of english. 0.524 0.547 0.12 9. i want to speak english because it is not something that most people can do. 0.527 0.532 0.4 30. studying english is important to me because an educated person is supposed to be able to speak english. 0.332 0.377 0.519 0.351 23. i chose to learn english despite others encouraging me to study something different (another language or a different subject entirely). 0.486 0.247 14. i would like to reach a high proficiency in this language, despite others telling me that it will be difficult or impossible. 0.466 0.232 why am i learning english? spanish efl sports science university students ́motivational orientations. . . 577 appendix c decision tree segmentation method for the three motivational factors figure ac1 analysis of variables influencing ideal self-motivation (f1) through decision tree segmentation method jelena bobkina, maría-josé gómez-ortiz, maría cristina núñez del río, susana sastre-merino 578 figure ac2 analysis of variables influencing ought-to self-motivation (f2) through decision tree segmentation method figure ac3 analysis of variables influencing anti-ought-to/rebellious self-motivation (f3) through decision tree segmentation method 779 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (4). 2020. 779-805 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.4.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt cross-country comparison of efl teacher preparedness to include dyslexic learners: validation of a questionnaire joanna nijakowska university of warsaw, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0776-9448 j.nijakowska@uw.edu.pl dina tsagari oslo metropolitan university, norway https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6884-108x dina.tsagari@oslomet.no george spanoudis university of cyprus, nicosia, cyprus https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4853-8745 spanoud@ucy.ac.cy abstract the aim of this study was to validate a 24-item tepid (teachers of efl preparedness to include dyslexics) scale measuring the beliefs of 546 pre-service and in-service teachers of english as a foreign language (efl) across three countries (cyprus, greece, and poland) on their preparedness to include learners with dyslexia in mainstream foreign language (fl) classes. principal component analysis of the scale led to a two-factor structure, that is, knowledge and self-efficacy in implementing inclusive instructional practices with dyslexic efl learners, and stance towards inclusion. the analysis of measurement invariance confirmed the generalizability of the tepid across all subgroups and allowed valid comparisons between factor variances and covariances. the scale is a useful tool for investigating perceived teacher preparedness to include dyslexic learners and variables that influence tepid, comparing the results across countries, and designing tailored pre-service and in-service training schemes on inclusion. keywords: inclusion; dyslexia; teacher preparedness; foreign language joanna nijakowska, dina tsagari, george spanoudis 780 1. introduction inclusive educational settings should satisfy the diverse needs of all learners in terms of offering an individualized approach and differentiated instructional practices to support learning (forlin, 2013; frederickson & cline, 2002; košakbabuder, kormos, ratajczak, & pižorn, 2019; loreman, deppeler, & harvey, 2011). securing full participation in mainstream schooling for every student requires knowledgeable, well-trained and responsive teachers (bae, yin, & joshi, 2019; fuchs, kahn-horwitz, & katzir, 2019; kwok-shing wong & russak, 2020) who can accommodate the needs of all learners (stampoltzis, tsitsou, & papachristopoulos, 2018). this, in turn, cannot be achieved without appropriate inclusive teacher training and teacher preparedness for inclusion (coady, harper, & de jong, 2016; european agency for development in special needs education, 2012; forlin, 2010, 2012; hettiarachchi & das, 2014; robinson, 2017; sharma, forlin, deppeler, & guang-xue, 2013; woodcock, 2020). this study focuses on validating a self-report survey instrument measuring efl teachers’ beliefs on their preparedness to include english as a foreign language (efl) dyslexic learners. foreign language (fl) teaching is understood as learning an additional language in an instructed setting, in an environment in which that language is not used on a daily basis. dyslexia is understood as a type of specific learning difficulties (spld). spld are not attributable to vision, hearing, motor disabilities, or intellectual impairment. neither emotional issues nor environmental, cultural, or economic disadvantage cause spld. spld can be observed in students who experience difficulties in information processing and learning due to specific neurological functioning (scanlon, 2013; woodcock, 2020). dyslexic learning difficulties have neurobiological and genetic traces and are linked to phonological processing problems which, in turn, can lead to inaccurate and/or non-fluent, slow reading as well as incorrect spelling (international dyslexia association, n.d.). dyslexic readers are characterized by slow and inaccurate word-level decoding (apa, 2013). poor automaticity of low-level reading skills in turn negatively impacts higher-level text comprehension (perfetti, 2007). along with word-level reading difficulties, dyslexic individuals demonstrate “underlying weaknesses in the areas of working memory, executive functioning (planning, organizing, strategizing, and paying attention), processing speed, and phonological processing” (košak-babuder et al., 2019, p. 53). dyslexia has been repeatedly shown to influence the learning of a fl, especially in terms of written and spoken input processing. dyslexic individuals often face challenges in fl learning (reading in particular) across learning contexts and the majority would perform worse than their non-dyslexic peers on a number of tasks (department for education and skills, 2005; fazio et al., 2020; cross-country comparison of efl teacher preparedness to include dyslexic learners: validation. . . 781 kormos, 2017a, 2017b, 2020; kormos & smith, 2012). this is due to a considerable overlap among the basic cognitive factors that elucidate variations in l1 and fl language and literacy outcomes. l1 skills constitute foundations for fl development (see kormos, 2017a, for a review). enhancing efl teachers’ awareness of how well they are prepared to offer effective inclusive teaching to efl learners with dyslexia can be helpful in designing specialized training, and, in the long run, facilitating the inclusion of learners with dyslexia in the context of fl classroom instruction and learning support. 2. literature review dyslexia is commonly associated with l1 phonological processing difficulties leading to below-standard print processing, which manifests itself in inaccurate and/or non-fluent and slow reading and spelling. successful print processing requires the knowledge of letters and the possible sounds represented by each letter or letter cluster (sound-letter relations) as well as the ability to blend the sounds together to create words and to segment a word into its individual sounds in order to read or spell it (hulme & snowling, 2009). l1 cognitive factors have been proved to best account for individual differences in fl learning; in other words, there seem to be common cognitive reasons that determine low achievement in a fl and literacyrelated difficulties in l1 (kormos, 2017a). recent studies support the claim that individual differences in fl achievement reflect individual differences in l1 skills and provide evidence for the crosslinguistic transfer of l1 to fl skills. this means that students who are poorer at l1 decoding, and have reduced vocabulary range and lower spelling, writing, and language analysis skills, will demonstrate smaller achievement in fl classes. students who have weaker l1 literacy skills will develop weaker fl literacy skills (sparks, patton, & luebbers, 2019). since the underlying cognitive processes in l1 such as working memory, phonological processing, processing speed, and attention control seem to be linked to fl literacy development, dyslexic difficulties in l1 processing and acquiring l1 literacy-related skills often coexist with difficulties in fl literacy development (e.g., kormos, 2017a, 2017b, 2020). however, evidence supporting the claim that struggling fl learners also experience learning problems in their l1, and that l1 literacy-related problems always surface in fl learning difficulties is mixed (e.g., alderson, nieminen, & huhta, 2016; borodkin & faust, 2014a; ferrari & palladino, 2007). students with weak fl skills (low-achieving) do not have to always be at risk of, or diagnosed as having, dyslexia (kormos, košak-babuder, & pižorn, 2019). both individuals with dyslexia and students with low proficiency in a fl show a weakness in l1 language phonological processing. however, some studies show similar characteristics in l1 phonological processing in these two joanna nijakowska, dina tsagari, george spanoudis 782 groups of learners (sparks, 2016; sparks & luebbers, 2018; sparks & patton, 2016), while other research findings indicate that the weakness in phonological processing in l1 in non-dyslexic low-achieving fl learners transpires in a reduced set of skills in comparison to individuals with dyslexia. poor fl performance of fl low-achieving students without dyslexia may be a consequence of difficulties in l1 phonological processing that they experience; however, these difficulties tend not to influence their reading acquisition in l1 (borodkin & faust, 2014a, 2014b; borodkin, maliniak, & faust, 2017). being a fl student with dyslexia does not necessarily have to involve experiencing fl learning difficulties. many fl dyslexic students can compensate for their reading problems and demonstrate at least average achievements at different educational levels, especially when supported with appropriate teaching practices (nijakowska, 2010; olofsson, taube, & ahl, 2015). nevertheless, the accumulating research evidence confirms that many students diagnosed with dyslexia in their first language (l1) experience difficulties of varying severity in learning additional languages (bonifacci, canducci, gravagna, & palladino, 2017; dimililer & istek, 2018; kormos et al., 2019; łockiewicz & jaskulska, 2016, 2019; toffalini, losito, zamperlin, & cornoldi, 2018; ylinen et al., 2019; see kormos, 2017a, 2020, for a review), which seems to be apparent in both instructed settings, where additional language/s are learned in the school environment, and in naturalistic settings, where additional language/s are acquired in the home environment (geva & wiener, 2014; martin, 2013; peer & reid, 2016). fl achievement alone cannot be treated as an indicator of dyslexia (spld), and not only dyslexic (spld) learners but also non-dyslexic fl low-achievers should receive appropriate support from their well-trained fl teachers. it might be expected that more intensive instruction should likely bring about an increase in achievement for many struggling students. however, dyslexic (spld) students might need more individualized instruction, depending on their individual pattern of cognitive strengths and weaknesses, to meet their specific learning needs (hale et al., 2010). high-quality fl teacher training includes sufficient and adequate instruction in content knowledge and content delivery strategies (i.e., intensity and duration of special support) to meet the needs of diverse learners, including dyslexic fl learners. this can foster positive attitudes towards inclusion, lead to mastery of specialized knowledge and higher levels of teachers’ self-efficacy and student advocacy. this in turn boosts teacher confidence in choosing and exploiting instructional practices that are inclusive (e.g., chao, forlin, & ho, 2016; coady et al., 2016; das, gichuru, & singh, 2013; florian, 2012; florian & rouse, 2009; forlin, loreman, & sharma, 2014; indrarathne, 2019; peebles & mondaglio, 2014; sharma & nuttal, 2016; sharma & sokal, 2015; symeonidou & phtiaka, cross-country comparison of efl teacher preparedness to include dyslexic learners: validation. . . 783 2014; woodcock, 2020). however, both pre-service and in-service teacher training through professional development courses on dyslexia and inclusion offered to teachers working in instructed efl settings in the european context tend to be insufficient. efl teachers report that they are poorly prepared to face the challenges and demands of inclusive classrooms in terms of knowledge and skills, which can generate concerns (nijakowska, 2014; nijakowska & kormos, 2016). offering sound teacher training in dyslexia and inclusion for efl teachers is very important given that the international prevalence of dyslexia is between 5-10% of the student population (nijakowska, 2010). another equally crucial reason is that english is an opaque language. this means that there are many representations for pronunciations of print patterns and many spelling versions for one sound (moats, 2020), which can present a significant challenge for fl dyslexic learners who struggle making sense of letter-sound relationships because of their learning difficulty (cessar, treiman, moats, pollo, & kessler, 2005). as indicated by research evidence, inclusive instructional practices are more readily and successfully employed by more self-efficacious and less anxious teachers, who hold positive beliefs and attitudes towards inclusion (e.g., sharma & sokal, 2016). teachers’ awareness of inclusive practices coupled with knowledge of effective intervention programs and their theoretical underpinnings determine the level of teachers’ preparedness to teach in an inclusive way (e.g., kahn-horwitz, 2015, 2016; mccutchen et al., 2002; mccutchen, green, abbott, & sanders, 2009; podhajski, mather, nathan, & sammons, 2009). efl teachers’ languagebased content knowledge constitutes the foundation of their professional preparation and allows successful teaching to students who experience reading difficulties. this knowledge involves language and literacy concepts, phonological and orthographic awareness, explicit reading instruction and phonics (vaisman & kahn-horwitz, 2019). the above-mentioned knowledge of inclusive classroom practices, language-based content knowledge, knowledge of dyslexia and its manifestations in language learning, in turn, constitute a prerequisite for offering proper instruction to students with dyslexia (aladwani & al shaye, 2012; indrarathne, 2019; moats, 2009; washburn, joshi, & binks-cantrell, 2011a, 2011b). research findings confirm that poor teacher content/specialist knowledge can be, at least to a certain extent, linked to inappropriate and/or limited initial and in-service teacher training (e.g., goldfus, 2012; joshi et al., 2009). on the other hand, adequate, research-based teacher professional training can be instrumental in increasing the necessary language-based content knowledge (i.e., knowledge of basic language constructs) in both l1 and fl teaching contexts (e.g., kahn-horwitz, 2015, 2016; podhajski et al., 2009; vaisman & kahn-horwitz, 2019). efl teachers’ insufficient knowledge on how students with dyslexia learn languages and on inclusive education principles and practices, as well as the unavailability of joanna nijakowska, dina tsagari, george spanoudis 784 sufficient and appropriate preand in-service training opportunities may exert a substantial impact on teachers’ beliefs about their preparedness for inclusion and may demotivate them to provide dyslexic students with high-quality teaching. in addition to specialized knowledge, teacher perceptions of preparedness for inclusion can also be improved by fostering positive teachers’ attitudes towards inclusive education (hsien, brown, & bortoli, 2009). conversely, inadequate preparedness may lead to negative beliefs about inclusion (e.g., das, kuyini, & desai, 2013). teachers’ self-reported perception of the degree to which they feel prepared to provide inclusive instruction influences their beliefs about how effective they can actually be in the inclusive classroom. these selfefficacy beliefs relate to teachers’ perceptions (rather than their actual behavior) and assessment of how well they can perform in the classroom to promote dyslexic students’ engagement, learning outcomes and achievements (tschannen-moran & woolfolk hoy, 2007). teachers’ perceptions of their ability to teach in an inclusive way, their attitudes towards inclusion and their behavior in the classroom are related. the stronger their belief that they possess the skills necessary to teach in an inclusive classroom, the greater are teachers’ effort, commitment to teaching, and flexibility in handling difficulties (e.g., ozder, 2011; takahashi, 2011). importantly, self-efficacy beliefs can also be modified by appropriate teacher training (borg, 2011; forlin, sharma, & loreman, 2014). teacher self-efficacy beliefs are also crucial in that they can influence students’ self-efficacy beliefs, motivation to learn and academic achievements (e.g., guo, connor, yang, roehrig, & morrison, 2012). in sum, including learners with dyslexia in mainstream classrooms may pose a number of challenges to teachers. efl teacher preparedness for inclusion is a crucial issue, as it can exert a substantial impact on the way the needs of efl learners with dyslexia are accommodated. however, the concept of efl teacher preparedness has not been sufficiently addressed by research in fl teaching contexts and its constituent elements have not been verified. against this background, the purpose of the present study was to design and validate an instrument that could gauge the preparedness of efl teachers to include students with dyslexia in mainstream efl classrooms. the study involved the design and piloting of the tepid (teachers of efl preparedness to include dyslexics) scale, then tested its factor structure and compared the yielded solution across three countries with different educational systems and teacher training schemes (cyprus, greece and poland) to validate its strength. the paper reports the validation procedure and the psychometric properties of the tepid scale. to this end, two research questions were examined in the study: cross-country comparison of efl teacher preparedness to include dyslexic learners: validation. . . 785 1. what is the factorial structure of the tepid scale? what are the factors that make up the construct of efl teacher perceived preparedness to include learners with dyslexia in mainstream classrooms? 2. what are the levels of measurement invariance of the tepid scale scores across countries? do these levels of measurement invariance justify comparisons between factor means and factor relationships across groups? 3. method 3.1. participants data was collected from 832 teachers who responded to the online questionnaire powered by survey monkey. respondents were approached and contacted through local efl teachers’ associations, conferences and training events, and personal networks. at the beginning of the survey, the participants were informed about the purpose of the study and told that participation was voluntary and anonymous. all the teachers consented to take part in the study. only complete responses were analyzed. 546 participants (155 greek-cypriot, 233 greek and 158 polish teachers) answered all the questions. the average age of participants was 30 years. 52 (9.5%) of them were males and 494 (90.5%) females. 80% of the respondents were efl in-service teachers, while 20% were pre-service teachers. 29.1% of the teachers held a ba degree, 52.7% an ma and 6.2% were phd holders. the majority of respondents (54.2%) were experienced teachers, as they had had over 10 years of teaching experience, while 9% had no teaching experience. 66.9% of the participants reported some teaching experience with dyslexic learners. 45.2% of teachers taught regular classes in which there were students with dyslexia. 9.7% of respondents taught classes specifically designed and organized for students with dyslexia, while 12% reported conducting oneto-one lessons with dyslexic learners. 3.2. instruments based on the dystefl-needs analysis questionnaire (nijakowska, 2014), a new questionnaire, the dystefl-needs analysis questionnaire revised (dysteflnaq-r), was developed to measure the preand in-service efl teacher beliefs about their preparedness to include dyslexic efl learners in mainstream classrooms (tepid) and verify efl teacher professional training needs on dyslexia and inclusive instructional practices. the questionnaire consists of three parts (nijakowska, tsagari, & spanoudis, 2018). the first part comprises nine background questions about demographic details, level of education, general teaching experience joanna nijakowska, dina tsagari, george spanoudis 786 and experience in teaching students with dyslexia. the second part contains the tepid scale consisting of 24 items based on a 6-point likert scale (1 = definitely not true of me, and 6 = definitely true of me). the third part includes four questions about prior training on dyslexia and inclusive instructional practices and professional training needs regarding future training, such as, for instance, preferred mode, format and content of training. the current study focuses on analyzing the psychometric properties of the tepid scale, which is included in the appendix, that is, the second part of the dystefl-naq-r questionnaire. 3.3. procedure to ensure that the tepid instrument is reliable and valid, it was assessed by three external evaluators. the evaluators were expertise an experience in dyslexia, foreign language teaching and inclusive education. their comments were taken into consideration when finalizing the phrasing and coverage of the items and the appropriateness of the 6-point likert scale included in the tepid instrument. the questionnaire was then piloted with 100 in-service and pre-service efl teachers (20% from poland, 40% from greece, and 40% from cyprus). these teachers did not participate in the main study. the pilot group had characteristics similar to the participants of the subsequent study. the analysis of the pilot results focused on checking the reliability of the individual items of the tepid scale. reliabilities of the items ranged from .80 to .93, which means that they were highly internally consistent (dörnyei, 2010). the survey monkey software was used to administer the questionnaire. participation in the pilot and the actual study reported here was voluntary and anonymous. the language used in the survey was english so as to avoid the challenges imposed by translating the instrument into the mother tongues of the participants, who were expected to be fluent users of english. the authors computed the index for acquiescence response style, following van herk, poortinga, and verhallen (2004). acquiescence indices were calculated as the number of clearly positive scores (2 highest categories on the rating scales) minus the number of clearly negative scores (2 lowest categories on the rating scales). thus, from the 6-point rating scale of the tepid, the values 1, 2, 5, and 6 were taken. the resulting number was divided by the total number of items, resulting in an acquiescence index ranging from -1.00 to 1.00. also, the acquiescence response indices were computed separately for each item and for each country. cronbach’s α for the acquiescence response index was .88. the correlation of acquiescence indices across countries ranged from .88 to .95 (p < .001), indicating a high level of convergent validity. thus, we can conclude that there is no systematic bias in our data. cross-country comparison of efl teacher preparedness to include dyslexic learners: validation. . . 787 4. results 4.1. data screening the data received were cleaned and missing data patterns and univariate outliers were identified. only completed questionnaires were subject to analysis. the minimum amount of data for factor analysis was satisfied. a final size of the sample amounted to at least 155 per nationality, with over 6 cases per variable. 4.2. factor analyses the factorability of the 24 tepid items was examined across the three samples. several well-recognized criteria for the factorability of a correlation were used. 16 of 24 items correlated at least .3 with at least one other item. this indicates reasonable factorability. the kaiser-meyer-olkin measure of sampling adequacy was above .92 for all samples and bartlett’s test of sphericity was significant for all groups (cyprus: c2 (276) = 2701.95, p < .01; greece: c2 (276) = 3695.92, p < .01; poland: c2 (276) = 2917.26, p < .01). the diagonals of the anti-image correlation matrix were all over .48, justifying the inclusion of all the items in factor analysis. the communalities were all above .3, indicating that each item shared some common variance with other items. given these overall indicators, three separate factor analyses were performed with all 24 items for cypriot, greek and polish efl teachers. principal component analysis (pca) was conducted because the primary purpose of the study was to identify and compute composite scores for the factors underlying the tepid scale. for the cypriot sample, the initial eigenvalues showed that the first factor explained 44.9% of the variance, the second factor 11.9% of the variance and the third factor 5.2% of the variance. the fourth factor had the eigenvalue of just over 1, explaining 4.8%. a four factor solution was examined. to this end, both varimax and oblimin rotations of the factor loading matrix were used. the three factor solution, explaining 61.9% of the variance, was chosen due to a number of reasons, the first one being its theoretical grounding. also, the eigenvalues were “leveled off” on the scree plot after three factors. finally, the number of primary loadings was not sufficient and the fourth factor solution proved difficult to interpret. the varimax and oblimin solutions differed only slightly, and that is why both solutions were verified in the subsequent analyses. the oblimin rotation was chosen for the final solution. the oblimin rotation provided an almost identical factor structure across the three samples and was also deemed a theoretically more reasonable solution due to the nature of the factors being studied. for the greek sample, the same procedure was followed. the initial eigenvalues indicated that the first factor explained joanna nijakowska, dina tsagari, george spanoudis 788 43.8% of the variance, the second factor 10.8% of the variance and the third factor 4.9% of the variance. overall, the three factor solution explained 59.5% of the variance. for the polish sample, the initial eigenvalues showed that the first factor explained 48.5% of the variance, the second factor 11.3% of the variance and the third factor 4.9% of the variance. overall, the three factor solution explained 64.6% of the variance. tables 1 to 3 display the results of the analyses. all items had primary loadings over .33. several items presented cross-loadings across the three samples, which is reasonable given the nature of the current factors. with the exception of item 9, which belongs to the third factor in the cypriot sample but presents a cross-loading of .45 in the first factor, all other items loaded onto the same factors across all samples. also, item 11 appears to belong to the first factor in the cypriot sample but presents a rather low loading (.38) compared to the other loadings of the first factor. inspecting the factor loadings across the three solutions, it appears that the factor structures of the greek and polish samples are more robust compared to the cypriot sample. table 1 factor loadings for 24 items from the cypriot sample of the tepid (n = 155) items factor 1 factor 2 factor 3 22 .889 24 .849 8 .835 18 .814 14 .805 16 .802 7 .799 19 .795 12 .780 10 .761 23 .753 21 .751 3 .746 2 .714 6 .710 11 .387 17 .871 13 .849 20 .756 5 .755 15 .672 4 .636 9 .682 1 .331 note. factor loadings < .3; cross-loadings are suppressed cross-country comparison of efl teacher preparedness to include dyslexic learners: validation. . . 789 table 2 factor loadings for 24 items from the greek sample of the tepid (n = 233) items factor 1 factor 2 factor 3 7 .897 18 .866 24 .857 8 .851 22 .836 10 .835 16 .798 14 .798 19 .797 3 .780 12 .775 6 .715 2 .694 9 .669 21 .666 23 .661 20 .786 15 .762 5 .736 17 .733 13 .633 4 .510 11 .719 1 .718 note. factor loadings < .3; cross-loadings are suppressed table 3 factor loadings for 24 items from the polish sample of the tepid (n = 158) items factor 1 factor 2 factor 3 24 .897 22 .877 18 .871 7 .869 10 .866 8 .865 14 .859 19 .845 16 .832 21 .812 23 .810 12 .778 6 .773 3 .750 2 .739 9 .692 20 .792 15 .768 17 .733 13 .711 4 .673 5 .616 11 .768 1 .739 note. factor loadings < .3; cross-loadings are suppressed joanna nijakowska, dina tsagari, george spanoudis 790 composite scores were computed for each of the three factors, based on the mean of the items which had their primary loadings on each factor. descriptive statistics are presented in table 4. the skewness and kurtosis were well within a tolerable range for assuming a normal distribution following examination of the histograms. this suggested that the distributions were approximately normal. although an oblimin rotation was employed, only weak correlations between the composite scores existed ranging from .03 to .38 across the three samples. table 4 descriptive statistics for the three tepid factors across the three samples country factors no. of items m (sd) skewness kurtosis alpha cyprus factor 1 16 63.33 (16.59) -.20 -.42 .953 factor 2 6 31.73 (3.46) -.69 -.02 .851 factor 3 2 7.98 (1.90) -.44 .77 .352 greece factor 1 16 69.03 (14.59) -.47 .13 .957 factor 2 6 32.72 (2.69) -.72 .01 .787 factor 3 2 7.75 (1.93) -.45 .04 .294 poland factor 1 16 63.00 (19.06) -.51 -.59 .967 factor 2 6 31.67 (3.14) -.68 .23 .814 factor 3 2 8.61 (1.88) -.46 -.06 .416 internal consistency for each of the three scales was examined using cronbach’s alpha. the alphas (see table 4) were very high for the first two factors across all samples ranging from .78 to .95. by contrast, the third factor showed very weak reliabilities across all samples. overall, these analyses indicated that a two factor solution was underlying teachers’ responses to the tepid items and that two out of three factors were very highly internally consistent. we decided to discard the third factor and the related items (items 1 and 11) from further analyses due to its weak reliability. in the cypriot sample, item 9 was included in the first factor. for all further analyses, we used 22 out of 24 items. an approximately normal distribution was evident for the composite scores estimated for the two factors; thus, the data were well suited for parametric statistical analyses. 4.3. measurement invariance analysis in order to investigate the factorial structure of the tepid questionnaire and its measurement invariance across the three samples (greek, cypriot and polish), a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) was conducted using eqs 6.2 (bentler, 2006). this analysis attempted to confirm the two-factor solution identified through pca and test invariance of this structure across greek, cypriot and polish efl teachers. the first step in multi-group analyses is to screen the data properly for multivariate outliers and the estimation of baseline cfa models for each sample. preliminary analysis proved severe violations of normality among many items. for cross-country comparison of efl teacher preparedness to include dyslexic learners: validation. . . 791 that reason, a satorra-bentler corrected chi-square statistic was used. it adjusts the chi-square through the inclusion of a correction factor influenced by the degree of non-normality in all sample data (satorra & bentler, 1994). the authors identified three similar baseline models. the three models have the same two factors: (1) knowledge and skills in implementing inclusive instructional practices with dyslexic efl learners, and (2) stance towards the inclusion of dyslexic efl learners in mainstream classrooms, with the same pattern of fixed and free factor loadings. however, to improve the model fit, several error covariances were specified in the models. specifically, four error covariances were specified in the baseline model for the greek, five error covariances for the cypriot and three error covariances for the polish sample. the baseline models of different groups that are integrated in the configural model should ideally be similar, although it is not necessary that they are completely identical (byrne, shavelson, & muthen, 1989). the results of the three baseline models show that the tepid items are highly loaded onto their underlying factors in the three samples and all three models fit the data well. the model fit indices for the greek sample are: rmsea = 0.06, 90% ci = (0.05, 0.07), cfi = 0.93, tli = 0.92. the corresponding model fit indices for the cypriot sample are: rmsea = 0.07, 90% ci = (0.06, 0.08), cfi = 0.92, tli = 0.91, and for the polish sample they are: rmsea = 0.05, 90% ci = (0.04, 0.07), cfi = 0.95, tli = 0.94. the model results seemingly show that the tepid scale measures the theoretically designed constructs well in each of the populations under examination. after the baseline model has been determined for each sample, the three baseline models were combined into a multi-group model to form a configural model. in this model, the same number of factors and the same pattern of fixed and free factor loadings were specified in each of the groups, but no equality restrictions were imposed on any measurement and structural parameter across groups. the results of the configural model are presented in table 5, where summary fit indices are reported. goodness-of-fit statistics related to this model reveal a well-fitting multi-group model: rmsea = 0.08, 90% ci = (0.07, 0.09), cfi = 0.92 and tli = 0.91. the configural model provides the baseline value against which subsequently specified restricted models are compared. the present researchers tested measurement invariance by conducting hierarchical tests for invariance of measurement parameters. three multi-group cfas with varying (nested) parameter restrictions were estimated to test measurement invariance employing the ml estimator: configural model, metric invariance and scalar invariance. as shown in table 5, comparisons of the fit indices for the configural versus metric invariance models yielded a non-significant δs-b χ2. however, comparisons of the metric versus scalar invariance models yielded a significant δs-b χ2, indicating a lack of scalar invariance. joanna nijakowska, dina tsagari, george spanoudis 792 table 5 comparison of three levels of measurement invariance (mi) for greek, cypriot and polish efl teachers s-b χ2 δ s-b χ2 df δ df cfi tli rmsea comparisons configural invariance 1034.75 612 .93 .92 .06 metric mi 1087.54 52.79 658 46 .93 .93 .06 n.s. scalar mi 1291.24 203.7 700 42 .93 .92 .07 p < .01 5. discussion the aim of this study was to construct and validate a self-report survey instrument measuring efl teachers’ beliefs on their preparedness to include efl dyslexic learners. the first research question in this study focuses on the factors that make up the construct of efl teacher preparedness to include (properly address the needs of) learners with dyslexia (tepid). our findings prove a good fit for a two-factor solution with 22 items that was robust across the groups of greek, cypriot and polish efl teachers. the authors labeled the factors as follows: (1) knowledge and self-efficacy (f1), and (2) stance towards inclusion (f2). f1 comprises items referring to dyslexia-related knowledge and instruction-related teacher classroom behavior. items regarding knowledge related to dyslexia involve familiarity with the signs and nature of dyslexia, understanding of the difficulties dyslexic individuals may experience in fl study and of effective teaching methods (like multisensory carefully structured, metacognitive techniques) (birsh & carreker, 2019; kormos & smith, 2012; moats, 2020), awareness of the local educational policy, and accommodations in fl proficiency exams. items pertaining to inclusive instructional practices touch upon managing classroom environment, differentiating tasks and assignments, mode of presentation, instruction, assessment and feedback techniques to properly address individual learner needs as well as ability to foster development of effective learning strategies and learner autonomy. f2 contains items concerning the importance of individualization of the teaching approach, the introduction of adjustments and accommodations, the collaboration with parents and educational professionals as well as the relationship between teacher classroom behavior and students’ self-esteem and self-determination. these factors seem to reflect the constructs found in the literature and refer to the component parts of teacher preparedness for inclusion. the present findings seem consistent with previous research outcomes which highlight that the more teachers feel prepared to teach in inclusive settings, the more specialized knowledge they have to address individual learner needs, and the stronger teacher’s self-efficacy is, the more confidently they apply appropriate inclusive teaching and assessment practices (coady et al., 2016; das et al., 2013; florian cross-country comparison of efl teacher preparedness to include dyslexic learners: validation. . . 793 & rouse, 2009; hettiarachchi & das, 2014). previous studies showed that teachers with greater self-efficacy and positive stance towards inclusion prove to be more successful in implementing inclusive instructional practices in their classrooms (e.g., sharma & sokal, 2016). being prepared for inclusion entails knowledge about the nature of dyslexia as well as the language learning processes and learning difficulties efl learners with dyslexia may experience, which seems to be in line with the findings of the teacher content knowledge studies (aladwani & al shaye, 2012; moats, 2009, 2014; washburn et al., 2011a, 2011b). earlier studies demonstrated that teacher self-efficacy beliefs can not only regulate the way teachers respond to the demands and challenges posed by inclusive education but also influence the quality of support they provide to their students (guo et al., 2012; ozder, 2011). teachers’ perceptions and judgments of their capabilities prove powerful enough to impact their students’ learning (tschannen-moran & woolfolk hoy, 2001). pca of responses to the questionnaire items across the three groups indicate that the factorial structure of the tepid scale was almost identical across the cypriot, greek and polish samples. overall, the two-factor solution explained 56.8%, 54.6% and 59.8% of the variance for the cypriot, greek and polish samples respectively. internal consistency for each of the three scales was very high. cronbach’s alphas for the two factors across all samples ranged from .78 to .95. this reflects a compatible match and a shared similar understanding of the concept of teacher preparedness for inclusion among efl teachers across the three samples. the second research question addresses the levels of measurement invariance of the tepid scale scores across countries and whether these levels of measurement invariance justify comparisons between factor means and factor relationships across groups. a multi-group cfa confirmed the two-factor solution identified through pca and demonstrated invariance of this structure across the samples of greek, cypriot and polish efl teachers. the two-factor structure proved robust and similarly conceptualized across samples. the results of the three baseline models showed that the tepid items loaded strongly onto their underlying factors in the three samples and that all three models fit the data well. goodness-of-fit statistics related to a configural model revealed a well-fitting multi-group model. three multi-group cfas with varying (nested) parameter restrictions were estimated to test measurement invariance using the ml estimator: configural model, metric invariance and scalar invariance. when configural invariance was satisfied (the same items measured the examined construct across groups), we checked the metric (pattern) invariance by constraining the factor loadings to be equal across groups. this model verified whether the three groups responded to the items in the same way. in other words, we learned whether the power of relation between particular scale items and their joanna nijakowska, dina tsagari, george spanoudis 794 underlying factors are the same across groups. factor loadings proved to be invariant, which means that weak (metric) invariance (a prerequisite for valid between-group comparisons on two factors) was established. this in turn indicates that the respondents across the cypriot, greek and polish samples attributed the same meaning to the latent factors under examination. stepping through the levels of invariance, the authors retained the constraints from the metric level and added further constraints – they checked for scalar invariance constraining both factor loadings and intercepts to be equal across groups. strong (scalar) invariance, however, was not obtained. the corresponding latent factor intercepts lacked invariance across groups, which indicates that the meaning (interpretation) of the factors and the levels of the underlying items were not equal across the three groups. this can further suggest that group differences in estimated factor means can be biased. nevertheless, the tepid scale seems to be acceptable in studies exploring efl teacher preparedness for including dyslexic learners. this is so because the lack of scalar invariance, unlike the lack of metric invariance, does not disqualify meaningful comparisons between groups on their scores on the two factors. however, meeting the strong (scalar) invariance level could allow for stronger conclusions relating to the between-group differences on the group means (steinmetz, schmidt, tina-booh, wieczorek, & schwartz, 2009). the data were well-suited for further parametric statistical analyses since participants across the three samples seemed to interpret both the individual items and the underlying latent factor in a similar way. another reason for the appropriateness of data was the approximately normal distribution for the composite score data. these analyses can actually trigger the discussion on how different demographic variables (e.g., level of education, teaching experience, type of school teachers work at, age, gender) influence the beliefs of efl teachers about their preparedness to include dyslexic efl learners across three countries, that is, greece, cyprus and poland (nijakowska et al., 2018). 6. conclusion tepid appears to be a promising assessment tool. the data gathered demonstrated that the basis of greek, cypriot and polish efl teachers’ perceived preparedness for appropriate inclusive instruction and assessment of learners with dyslexia involves knowledge about dyslexia and skills (self-efficacy) in implementing inclusive instructional practices with dyslexic efl learners, as well as teachers’ stance regarding principles of inclusion. our findings satisfy the assumption of weak (metric) measurement equivalence of the tepid scale scores across countries. the level of measurement invariance the authors established endorses valid comparisons between factor cross-country comparison of efl teacher preparedness to include dyslexic learners: validation. . . 795 variances and covariances. reliability analysis for the total scale survey, as well as factors for each country, suggested that the tepid scale survey provides a reliable measure of efl teacher beliefs about their preparedness to include dyslexic efl learners in mainstream classrooms across different countries. this validates the generalizability of the tepid scale survey across all subgroups and supports binding comparisons across these groups. the questionnaire is measurement invariant (although strong mi was not satisfied) – it measures an identical construct with the same structure in a similar way in all compared groups. given the fact that metric invariance holds, future studies researching the occurrence, determinants and consequences of efl teacher perceived preparedness to include dyslexic learners can use the tepid scale and reach valid crossgroup comparisons. the authors believe that the tepid scale possesses sufficient strength to be used for examining efl teacher beliefs on their preparedness to include fl learners with dyslexia in mainstream classrooms, diagnosing how this perceived preparedness changes as a result of professional training, as well as designing tailor-made training schemes on inclusion incorporated into initial and in-service teacher training. the instrument also lends itself to the exploration of the impact different variables may exert on teacher beliefs on preparedness and comparing these findings across countries. the generalizability of our results is subject to certain limitations. it should be noted that the samples were not large enough to ensure factor stability. further research using larger samples is necessary in order to generate more precise scores. the present study provided partial support for construct validity of the tepid. convergent and discriminant validities using other reliable and valid measurements could not be verified. it is recommended that more detailed content and construct validities are subject to examination in future studies. future research may also incorporate other objective or independent measures in order to supplement the subjective evaluation of the variables examined in the development of the tepid. this, in turn, could improve the interpretation of findings. finally, the demographic characteristics of the sample, which include 90% of females and 80% of in-service efl teachers, constitutes a limitation. this may restrict the generalizations of the findings to female efl in-service teachers. research on teacher preparedness for inclusion as well as actual teacher inclusive behavior in the context of fl learning and teaching is still scant (e.g., kormos & nijakowska, 2017; russak, 2016). the tepid scale survey can prove useful in more systematic investigations of efl teacher preparedness for inclusion and the role inclusive teacher training plays in increasing teacher perceived preparedness – knowledge and self-efficacy, fostering positive attitudes and also alleviating concerns about implementing inclusive instructional practices. also, investigating how efl teacher preparedness for inclusion translates into student joanna nijakowska, dina tsagari, george spanoudis 796 achievement and motivation to learn seems necessary to draw a more complete picture of inclusion in instructed fl environments. in addition to teacher perception studies, research on actual inclusive practices that efl teachers employ to individualize and differentiate their approach in order to accommodate learners’ needs can generate important findings and implications for practice. cross-country 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(2011b). are preservice teachers prepared to teach struggling readers? annals of dyslexia, 61, 2143. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-010-0040-y woodcock, s. (2020). teachers’ beliefs in inclusive education and the attributional responses toward students with and without specific learning difficulties. dyslexia, 1-16. http://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1651 ylinen, s., junttilaa, k., laasonen, m., iversond, p., ahonene, l., & kujalaa, t. (2019). diminished brain responses to second-language words are linked with nativelanguage literacy skills in dyslexia. neuropsychologia, 122, 105-115. cross-country comparison of efl teacher preparedness to include dyslexic learners: validation. . . 805 appendix tepid scale 1. i believe foreign language learners with dyslexia benefit from attending regular classes in mainstream education. 2. i am familiar with the difficulties learners with dyslexia experience in foreign language learning. 3. i can give feedback to learners with dyslexia in such a way that it boosts their self-esteem. 4. i believe foreign language learners with dyslexia need adjustments in the mainstream language classroom. 5. i believe teacher behavior in a language classroom influences dyslexic learner self-esteem. 6. i am familiar with the signs of dyslexia. 7. i can provide differentiated instruction to cater for the individual needs of learners with dyslexia. 8. i can modify the way teaching materials are presented to accommodate individual learning needs of learners with dyslexia. 9. i am familiar with the principles of multisensory teaching and learning. 10. i can personalize assessment techniques to evaluate my dyslexic language learners’ progress. 11. i believe foreign language teachers should have high expectations for their learners with dyslexia. 12. i am familiar with the nature of dyslexia. 13. i believe developing self-determination in foreign language learners with dyslexia is important. 14. i can help foreign language learners with dyslexia to develop effective learning strategies. 15. i believe foreign language teachers should differentiate their approach to learners. 16. i can foster autonomy in foreign language learners with dyslexia. 17. i believe it is important for foreign language teachers to collaborate with parents and families of their dyslexic learners. 18. i know what to do if i think that one of my students is dyslexic. 19. i am familiar with other learning difficulties often associated with dyslexia. 20. i believe collaborative teamwork with a range of educational professionals is important for teachers of foreign language learners with dyslexia. 21. i am familiar with the accommodations that learners with dyslexia are entitled to in taking foreign language proficiency exams. 22. i can manage the classroom environment to cater for individual learning needs of learners with dyslexia. 23. i am familiar with the local educational legislation/policy concerning learners with dyslexia. 24. i can differentiate tasks/assignments to cater for individual learning needs of learners with dyslexia. 261 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (2). 2022. 261-301 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.2.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt learner variables in the development of intercultural competence: a synthesis of home and study abroad research zia tajeddin tarbiat modares university, tehran, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0430-6408 tajeddinz@modares.ac.ir neda khanlarzadeh allameh tabataba’i university, tehran, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8369-9467 nedakhanlarzadeh@yahoo.ca hessameddin ghanbar islamic azad university, tehran, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8895-3791 hessam.ghanbar@gmail.com abstract to provide insights into a wide array of individual learner variables implicated in intercultural education in home and study abroad contexts, this study systematically reviewed the effects of such variables on the development of intercultural competence. the corpus consisted of 56 journal articles published over the past two decades (2000-2020). the purpose of this study was to explore: (a) learner variables that were described in research on intercultural competence, including, inter alia, their age, gender, first language (l1) background, proficiency level, and attitudinal orientations; (b) settings in which learners’ intercultural development was studied, including both home contexts and study abroad contexts; and (c) effects of learner variables on the development of their intercultural competence. the results of this synthesis zia tajeddin, neda khanlarzadeh, hessameddin ghanbar 262 indicate that a growing number of studies have started to document intercultural instruction in both home and study abroad contexts. they show how learner variables were considered in conducting these studies and how variation in these variables impacted the effectiveness of instruction that targeted intercultural competence. the findings can considerably broaden our understanding of both opportunities and constraints in intercultural education in terms of learner variables and in particular variables that make the most contribution to intercultural development in home and study abroad contexts. keywords: learner variables; intercultural competence; home context; study abroad context 1. introduction with the rise of globalization, intercultural competence has been brought to the center of language education in the past two decades (baker & fang, 2021; byram, 2008, 2019; wagner & byram, 2017). the intercultural competence of language learners can be developed either through instruction in classrooms in the home context or during exposure when participating in study abroad. while study abroad affords great opportunities for intercultural development (e.g., bloom & miranda, 2015; czerwionka et al., 2015; schartner, 2016), the majority of language learners studying at home receive classroom-based instruction with less opportunity for intercultural interaction unless there are initiatives for this opportunity in the curriculum (e.g., álvarez valencia & fernández benavides, 2019; özdemir, 2017; zhang, 2020). to expedite learners’ intercultural development, teachers build on a range of instruction methods, including explicit and implicit instruction, awareness-raising activities, email communication, online (a)synchronous intercultural exchanges, and intercultural social networks. however, the effectiveness of these methods largely bears on learner variables such as age, gender, and language proficiency. the purpose of this synthesis research was to explore learner variables that are implicated in the studies on the development of intercultural competence in home and study abroad contexts. 2. intercultural language teaching one of the critical aspects of language teaching that permeates second language acquisition (sla) studies and has attracted the attention of numerous scholars is the concept of culture (byram et al., 2013; guilherme, 2000; tolosa et al., 2018). during the past few decades, as an upshot of globalization, a number of scholars have introduced the concept of intercultural communicative competence learner variables in the development of intercultural competence: a synthesis of home and study . . . 263 (icc), which is beyond simple cultural knowledge and considers the dynamicity of cultures, intercultural interactions, and cultural identities (see ho, 2009; kubota, 1998; wagner & byram, 2017). the concept of icc emerged and developed during the 1980s and 1990s, when a number of researchers attempted to demonstrate the underlying constructs of icc by suggesting different models to present a clear definition of it (e.g., abe & wiseman, 1983; byram, 1997; gudykunst & hammer, 1984; howard-hamilton et al., 1998; koester & olebe, 1988; martin & hammer, 1989). however, early studies in this area referred to icc using different terminologies, including multicultural competence, transcultural competence, cross-cultural adaptation, cross-cultural effectiveness, cross-cultural adjustment, and intercultural sensitivity, which implied the same concept to some extent (see biell & doff, 2014; deardorff, 2004; kramsch, 2011). the proposed concept of icc promotes the notion of intercultural speaker as an ideal goal in language and culture teaching, as opposed to the entrenched ideology of native-speakerism (byram & wagner, 2018). proponents of icc have challenged the essentialist views that highlight cultural differences and focus on biases and stereotypes (see holliday, 2011). according to the tenets of the icc approach, learners should attain the capability to be moderators between various languages and cultures (byram, 1997; byram & wagner, 2018; kohler, 2020; zarate et al., 2004). therefore, while most approaches to teaching culture focus on the straightforward delivery of cultural information to second and foreign language (l2) learners, intercultural approaches emphasize the importance of the “meaning-making” process as well as intercultural identity formation that learners go through during active engagement with language and cultures (see kohler, 2020; kramsch & nolden, 1994). unlike mainstream communicative competence models that idealize the target society’s cultural values and encourage l2 learners to comply with native speaker norms (alptekin, 1993, 2002), proponents of icc take learners’ first language (l1) values into account as well. moreover, learners are considered as both analyzers and participants throughout the interaction; they need to stay in conversation and resort to their linguistic and cultural repertoires in order to interpret their conversers’ messages and express their own (liddicoat & scarino, 2010). inspired by the concept of intercultural communicative competence proposed by byram (1997), intercultural l2 teaching and learning is the recent and leading paradigm of culture practice in sla (byram, 2019). thus, in short, icc refers to individuals’ ability to “see and manage relationships between themselves and their own cultural beliefs, behaviors and meanings, as expressed in a foreign language, and those of their interlocutors, expressed in the same language – or even a combination of languages” (byram, 1997, p. 12). to date, several models of intercultural language acquisition, teaching, learning, and assessment have been suggested by different scholars, which provide a zia tajeddin, neda khanlarzadeh, hessameddin ghanbar 264 foundation for the currently practiced icc teaching methods (e.g., bennett et al., 1999; byram, 2008; deardorff, 2006; risager, 2007; ting-toomey & kurogi, 1998). among the proposed models of intercultural competence, byram and zarate’s (1994) savoirs model stands out. the model is fundamental to the current understanding of the concept of icc in general and has informed subsequent intercultural teaching methods and related research. it is composed of four main phases, namely savoir, savoir être, savoir comprendre, savoir apprendre, and an additional phase called savoir s’engager, which was introduced later by byram (cf. byram, 1997; byram & zarate, 1994). these categories are related to the main aspects of icc: attitudes, knowledge, skills of interpreting and relating, skills of discovery and interaction, and critical cultural awareness. another model of intercultural pedagogy, put forward by scarino and liddicoat (2009), accounts for learners’ icc development through a four-stage circular process of noticing, comparing, reflecting, and interacting. according to this model, first, learners notice some new l2 cultural norms. subsequently, they discern similarities and differences between the new culture and their l1 culture by making comparisons. consequently, thinking upon the two cultures leads to learners’ reflection as an essential component of icc. ultimately, through the last stage, drawing on their intercultural repertoire, individuals engage in the meaning-making process and learn to express themselves. since icc cannot typically be achieved spontaneously and it necessitates constant engagement and feedback (mccloskey, 2012), a number of l2 teaching researchers have proposed more tangible, practical techniques which can guide teachers in implementing intercultural language teaching (e.g., busse & krause, 2015; east, 2012; ennis & riley, 2018; kohler, 2020; lázár, 2015; reid, 2015; rodríguez & puyal, 2012; tecedor & vasseur, 2020). such activities and teaching techniques can be implemented in different settings and take on different forms such as individual work, pair work, and whole-class activities (corbett, 2003). piątkowska (2015) categorized the different methods of enhancing learners’ icc into three groups: formal instruction, which normally occurs in the classroom context; experiential learning tasks, which refer to learners’ experiences in immersion or study abroad programs; and the use of new technologies, which can be performed by practicing icc through various technological instruments and platforms, including online forums, concordancers, telecollaboration, and video conferencing. examples of studies akin to these categories are briefly described below. east (2012) discussed the potential of task-based language teaching (tblt) in developing l2 learners’ icc as well as their linguistic competence. he believed that with the aid of appropriate teacher education, teachers can enhance their students’ icc via tblt and communicative competence-based language teaching methods. also, inspired by hughes’ (1986) work, reid (2015) proposed a set learner variables in the development of intercultural competence: a synthesis of home and study . . . 265 of teaching techniques that can be implemented in l2 classes with the aim of boosting learners’ icc, such as cultural assimilation, comparison method, drama, reformulation, noticing, role plays, cultural capsule, research, songs, games, portfolio, prediction, cultural island, field trip, and treasure hunt. in a similar vein, zhang and zhou (2019) identified overseas immersion as one of the most common approaches for boosting individuals’ icc. song (2020) studied the intercultural development of 33 american college students who wished to learn korean during the course of six weeks in korea. the analysis of participants’ data from an intercultural competence questionnaire, role play oral assessment, reflective writings, and interviews proved that they made significant improvement in the cognitive, affective, and behavioral aspects of icc. neff and apple (2020) investigated the effects of two types of study abroad programs, long-term and short-term, on learners’ intercultural communication, l2 confidence, and sense of l2 self. after the analysis of preand post-study abroad survey data, the results indicated that the students who had spent more time abroad developed higher levels of icc. several researchers have also highlighted the importance of computer or webbased approaches in fostering learners’ icc (e.g., furstenberg, 2010; godwin-jones, 2013, 2019; lewis & o’dowd, 2016; o’dowd, 2012; özdemir, 2017; schenker, 2012). o’dowd and dooly (2020) looked into the types of online intercultural exchange between students. they believe that there are two main overarching models. the first model, which is more common, refers to class-to-class exchanges or telecollaboration, where two teachers work together to design tasks or projects, integrated into the class syllabus. through the second model, called virtual exchange, students from different cultures contact one another via video-conferencing to engage in intercultural dialogue under the supervision of a teacher or trained facilitator. as an example of web-based approaches to icc development, van der kroon et al. (2015) found in their analysis of 16 students’ task-based telecollaboration sessions for achieving intercultural understanding that such programs are highly effective as they provide numerous opportunities in this respect. in general, as argued by piątkowska (2015), teaching practices which focus on experiential learning, whether by means of technological equipment or not, are likely to be more effective than methods that center on formal instructions. to date, most of the studies targeting icc have focused on developing icc teaching frameworks and models but there are no unified methods and guidelines for their classroom implementation (baker, 2015; byram & feng, 2004). this might be due to a lack of consensus upon the conception of icc, inconsistent teaching methods for implementation, ineffective support from policy-makers, and practitioners’ insufficient knowledge of intercultural language teaching (see gu, 2015; kim & ebesu hubbard, 2007; sercu, 2006; young & sachdev, 2011). however, a few researchers have embarked on conducting meta-analytic and systematic zia tajeddin, neda khanlarzadeh, hessameddin ghanbar 266 reviews of icc pedagogy and have have classified the current methodologies and attempts regarding this pedagogy. bradford et al. (1998), in their meta-analysis of 16 studies, explored the association between studies on intercultural communication effectiveness and icc, and attempted to find the relationship between knowledge-based and skill-based attributes in predicting icc. their analysis revealed the effects of these attributes and a strong association between icc studies and intercultural communication effectiveness. in this analysis, measurement of icc and intercultural communication effectiveness was demonstrated to be equivalent. avgousti (2018) looked at the effectiveness of online intercultural exchanges in developing learners’ icc by reviewing 54 studies exploring the impact of web 2.0 tools published from 2004 to 2015 in this respect. zhang and zhou (2019) undertook a review of 31 previous studies on intercultural interventions and examined the relative effectiveness of such interventions. in their review, immersion and pedagogical intervention were identified as the two major types of instruction. they categorized the conducted interventions as culture-based teaching materials, classroom activities, teaching strategies, and integrated intercultural programs. it was found that overseas immersion contributes to icc development to a greater extent than pedagogical intervention does. finally, bagwe and haskollar (2020) conducted a systematic review of variables impacting intercultural competence. they found that the impact of the intercultural training program was significant across the board; however, it was hard to predict the impact of demographic factors such as age, gender, education, linguistic ability, geography, religion, and ethnicity/race. 3. learner variables learner variables have long been neglected in the history of l2 acquisition because the main focus of l2 practitioners and teaching methods was on teachers, while learners were assumed to be passive recipients of the instruction. it was not until the 1970s that learners’ roles and individual learner variables were increasingly recognized as decisive factors in l2 pedagogy. consequently, l2 researchers began investigating the relative contribution of these variables to learners’ l2 achievement. the conducted studies have discussed the effects of various learner variables on general l2 achievement of learners, such as their attitudes and motivation (e.g., csizér, 2017; moskovsky et al., 2016), beliefs about language learning (alhamami, 2018; aragão, 2011), age (e.g., artieda et al., 2020; marinova-todd et al., 2000), and gender (e.g., bećirović, 2017; mori & gobel, 2006; norton & pavlenko, 2004). meanwhile, several studies have focused on the effect of each of these variables on specific aspects of l2, such as, for example, different skills and subskills (e.g., amiryousefi, 2018; ke & chan, 2017; lee & pulido, 2017; learner variables in the development of intercultural competence: a synthesis of home and study . . . 267 ruiz-funes, 2015; vandergrift & baker, 2015) and specific teaching methods or approaches (e.g., namaziandost & çakmak, 2020; baker-smemoe et al., 2014). some others also have sought to shed light on the relationship between different learner variables or their confounding effects on some components of l2 (e.g., calafato & tang, 2019; kormos & csizér, 2008; yashima et al., 2017). however, so far, the findings have not been conclusive, as they have not reached the same results. for example, marinova-todd et al. (2000), in their analysis of previous investigations on the effect of age, illustrated how different studies on l2 learners’ age supported or refuted the critical period hypothesis, and discussed the interplay between individuals’ age and a variety of social, psychological as well as educational factors that can affect l2 proficiency. as for icc, which is contended to be part of 21st-century individuals’ language competence, several learner variables are assumed to be critical (e.g., see council of europe, 2008; national standards in foreign language education project, 2006). for example, wagner et al. (2017) edited a volume on how this competence can be practiced across different age groups. since icc is inextricably intertwined with different cultures and individuals’ cultural experiences, other learner-related factors (e.g., learners’ social background, race, l1, overseas experience, prior knowledge, motivation, and attitudes) in conjunction with common learner variables (e.g., age, gender, and proficiency level) can play substantial roles in icc development. in fact, the reciprocal relationships between learners’ motivation, intercultural awareness and attitudes were highlighted by byram (2008). hismanoglu (2011) reported on the importance of learners’ previous cultural and overseas experience in developing their icc, which was echoed in other studies as well (e.g., medina-lópez-portillo, 2004; root & ngampornchai, 2013). mirzaei and forouzandeh (2013) found a significant relationship between individuals’ l2 learning motivation and icc. oz (2015) found a significant positive relationship between the ideal l2 self and icc of turkish efl learners. moreover, ghasemi et al. (2020) proposed an icc model that incorporates a relationship between learners’ international posture, ideal l2 self, l2 self-confidence, and metacognitive strategies, and suggested these factors as contributing to individuals’ intercultural competence. they highlighted that individuals who would like to engage in international affairs and take on international vocations are more likely to interact with people of other cultures and consequently possess a higher level of icc. despite this body of research and in conjunction with other studies on learner variables, the results of research on the role of these variables in icc are rather contradictory. for example, regarding learners’ gender, some of them prioritized females (e.g., berg, 2009; clark & trafford, 1995; sung & padilla, 1998), a number of them provided evidence for male learners’ better performance (e.g., kim & goldstein, 2005; medina-lópez-portillo, 2004; pan, 2007), and still others reported no relationship whatsoever between these two variables (mirzaei zia tajeddin, neda khanlarzadeh, hessameddin ghanbar 268 & forouzandeh, 2013; morales, 2017; patricia, 2005; tosuncuoglu, 2019). moreover, the relationship between learners’ age and their icc remained rather unnoticed. whereas some studies reported age as a decisive factor in learners’ icc (e.g., medina-lópez-portillo, 2004), others did not report any significant effects in this respect (e.g., busse & krause, 2016). these controversies suggest the need for a systematic review in order to explore the possible effects of learner variables on icc in different contexts. to bridge this gap, this synthesis research aimed to offer an in-depth review of the related studies and to highlight the existing gaps in the literature or areas which need further empirical investigation. thus, the following research questions were addressed in this study: 1. what types of intervention (i.e., instruction or no instruction) are described in studies on l2 learners’ icc development? what are the contexts of these studies (study abroad or home contexts)? 2. what learner variables are described in studies on l2 learners’ icc development? 3. what learner variables are examined for their effects in studies on l2 learners’ icc development? 4. method 4.1. literature search and inclusion criteria the aim of the present study was to synthesize current studies on icc development in relation to learner variables. the target studies either included instruction at home and study abroad, as the main interventions for developing learners’ icc (see zhang & zhou, 2019), or sought to measure the association between learner variables and icc level/development in non-instructional contexts. the systematic literature search employed in the present study included two main strategies to identify the relevant literature concerning learner variables in the development of icc: conducting a search in google scholar and using several reliable academic databases. in order to locate the relevant studies, multiple sources and databases were explored, as suggested by brunton et al. (2012), gough et al. (2013), and lipsey and wilson (2001). the process of probing studies in google scholar, which is a well-known platform for finding research papers, began by searching the first 300 studies which emerged on the first 30 pages of the search engine. the studies were published between the years 2000-2020. the following terms and phrases were used to locate the relevant studies: intercultural communicative competence, intercultural language learner variables in the development of intercultural competence: a synthesis of home and study . . . 269 teaching, intercultural competence teaching, intercultural instruction, intercultural communicative competence and learner variables, intercultural instruction, intercultural competence and second language, intercultural competence and l2, l2 learners’ intercultural competence, and intercultural competence and study abroad. however, only the papers which were published by some of the leading international publishers in the field of applied linguistics, such as taylor and francis, elsevier, sage, springer, wiley, oxford university press, cambridge university press, de gruyter, jstor, and frontiers, were selected. those papers were also limited to research studies; accordingly, book chapters, review papers, meta-analyses, conference papers, short papers (less than 6000 words), reports, and dissertations were not included. next, the same terms were directly searched in the language and linguistics section of several database websites, such as science direct, taylor and francis, and sage, in case the relevant studies were left out in google scholar search. a total of 115 papers were examined and the studies that focused on teachers’ icc rather than l2 learners’ were excluded. moreover, only the papers that were published in applied linguistics and l2 studies journals and focused on participants who were language learners or l2 speakers were targeted; that is, the studies that sought to analyze the icc level of individuals who were not l2 learners or l2 was not part of their learning programs were eliminated. this iterative process of literature search, which lasted from june 2020 to september 2020, led to the selection of 56 papers for final analysis. 4.2. data analysis the purpose of the present systematic review was to provide a clear picture of the studies conducted on icc instruction, the context of icc development, learner variables described in these studies, and the effects of learner variables on their icc levels. to this end, several factors or themes concerning the methodology and results of the studies were subject to analysis. these factors included the context of the studies, the employed treatment or instruction, the number of participants and their l1 and l2, the analyzed learner variables (e.g., gender, age, and language proficiency), and, more importantly, the effects of these variables on individuals’ icc. subsequently, each of these themes was further divided into several subthemes and coded based on previous related studies and systematic reviews. the analyzed variables and the coding scheme are presented below: · context of the study: this variable was sub-coded into home study and study abroad contexts. a home study referred to research that investigated individuals’ icc or icc development in their home country, whereas a study abroad focused on individuals whose icc or icc development was analyzed when they resided in the l2 context. zia tajeddin, neda khanlarzadeh, hessameddin ghanbar 270 · instruction: the reviewed research was either instructional or non-instructional. the former concerned studies that included icc interventions, and the latter referred to studies that did not aim at improving participants’ icc. · participants’ gender: participants’ gender was coded as male, female, both, and not mentioned. · participants’ age: individuals’ age was coded into four groups: not mentioned, below 18, 18 and above, and both. · micro-context: this variable dealt with the educational context where the data were collected. it was coded into not mentioned, universities and colleges, schools, language institutes, and different contexts. · l1 background: the participants’ first language was coded. the assigned codes were chosen based on the frequency of the languages. this category included english, chinese, german, others, different languages, and not reported. · l2 background: this theme referred to the codes which focused on the participants’ target language. in general, participants’ l2s were divided into eight codes: english, spanish, arabic, chinese, italian, german, not reported, and different languages. · language proficiency: the reviewed studies included participants at different levels of language proficiency. in this systematic review, this was coded into elementary, intermediate, advanced, mixed (the studies in which participants were at different proficiency levels), and not mentioned. · the effects of learner variables: of the 56 studies, 15 considered the effects of learner variables on icc or icc development. these learner variables included language proficiency; age; gender; previous contact with l2 culture; attitudinal, affective, or behavioral factors; ethnicity, race, or nationality; and other variables such as parents’ educational background or learners’ location. in addition, these codes were further divided into the two categories of effective and not effective based on their effectiveness. it should be noted that only the information which was explicitly stated in the reviewed research was included in our analysis. the frequency of each code and subcode was calculated and illustrated in tables using the spss software program. furthermore, in order to analyze the intersections between some variables, such as, for instance, participants’ age and gender, the crosstabs of the variables were calculated. 5. results in this part, we present the analysis of our three themes: (a) context and instruction, (b) learner variables, and (c) effects of learner variables across contexts. learner variables in the development of intercultural competence: a synthesis of home and study . . . 271 for each theme, we first present the frequency of studies related to the subthemes constituting each theme and then, whenever necessary, some examples of studies are cited from our corpus. 5.1. theme 1: context and instruction the first theme we investigated was the context of the studies (i.e., whether a study was conducted in a study abroad or home context) and the type of instruction. the number of studies across contexts and instruction types is presented in table 1 and table 2. table 1 number of studies across contexts and instruction types type of instruction total instruction no instruction context home 27 3 30 study abroad 8 18 26 total 35 21 56 table 2 types of instruction and contexts of the studies subthemes studies study abroad alred & byram (2002); berg (2009); bloom & miranda (2015); cubillos & ilvento (2018); czerwionka et al. (2015); elola & oskoz (2008); engle & engle (2004); heinzmann et al. (2015); hismanoglu (2011); holmes (2006); holmes et al. (2016); houghton (2014); jackson (2011, 2017); lee (2011, 2012); lenkaitis et al. (2019); martinsen (2011); medina-lópez-portillo (2004); palmer (2013); root & ngampornchai (2013); sample (2013); scally (2015); schartner (2016); shiri (2015); watson & wolfel (2015) home study acheson et al. (2015); álvarez valencia & fernández benavides (2019); busse & krause (2015, 2016); chen & yang (2016); escudero (2013); helm (2009); ishii (2009); kusumaningputri & widodo (2018); lee & markey (2014); liaw (2006); mirzaei & forouzandeh (2013); o’dowd (2000, 2003); özdemir (2017); peng & wu (2016); rodríguez & puyal (2012); rothwell (2011); schenker (2012); su (2011a, 2011b); tirnaz & haddad narafshan (2020); tran & duong (2018); truong & tran (2014); tudini (2007); wang & kulich (2015); wang et al. (2013); yildiz (2009); yu & van maele (2018); zhang (2020) instruction acheson et al. (2015); álvarez valencia & fernández benavides (2019); busse & krause (2015, 2016); chen & yang (2016); elola & oskoz (2008); escudero (2013); helm (2009); hismanoglu (2011); holmes et al. (2016); houghton (2014); ishii (2009); kusumaningputri & widodo (2018); lee (2011, 2012); lee & markey (2014); lenkaitis et al. (2019); lee (2011); liaw (2006); o’dowd (2000, 2003); özdemir (2017); rodríguez & puyal (2012); rothwell (2011); sample (2013); schenker (2012); su (2011a, 2011b); tirnaz & haddad narafshan (2020); tran & duong (2018); truong & tran (2014); wang & kulich (2015); wang et al. (2013); yildiz (2009); yu & van maele (2018); zhang (2020) no instruction alred & byram (2002); berg (2009); bloom & miranda (2015); cubillos & ilvento (2018); czerwionka et al. (2015); engle & engle (2004); heinzmann et al. (2015); holmes (2006); jackson (2011, 2017); martinsen (2011); medina-lópez-portillo (2004); mirzaei & forouzandeh (2013); palmer (2013); peng & wu (2016); root & ngampornchai (2013); scally (2015); schartner (2016); shiri (2015); tudini (2007); watson & wolfel (2015) first, it was revealed that almost half of the studies (n = 26) were conducted in a study abroad context (e.g., alred & byram, 2002; cubillos & ilvento, zia tajeddin, neda khanlarzadeh, hessameddin ghanbar 272 2018; lee, 2012) and the other 30 studies were undertaken in the home context (e.g., o’dowd, 2003; truong & tran, 2014; yu & van maele, 2018), suggesting a balanced distribution. as regards teaching methods (see table 1 and table 2), it was found that icc instruction through classroom-based methods (instruction category) was the most prominent method in our corpus (n = 35) (e.g., elola & oskoz, 2008; hismanoglu, 2011; zhang, 2020) and it was the most prominent category in the home context (n = 27) rather than in the study abroad (n = 8). however, some other studies (n = 21) utilized no teacher instruction and hence they were non-instructional (e.g., jackson, 2017; shiri, 2015), with the majority of these studies being implemented in the study abroad context (n = 18). to conclude, icc development through classroom-based instruction was the most frequent method in the home context and no instruction studies were the most recurrent ones in the study abroad context. 5.2. theme 2: learner variables as listed before, we targeted a wide range of learner variables in our corpus of studies, including gender, age, l1, l2, and language proficiency, and not all of them were investigated with regard to their effects. table 3 shows different breakdowns of gender and age. table 4 presents the studies related to the learner variables of age and gender. as can be seen in table 4, most of the studies used 18 and above (the most prominent age category in the sample) participants, who were mostly comprised of both male and female learners (n = 39). table 3 different intersections of gender and age age gender total nm female both not mentioned (nm) 3 0 0 3 below 18 2 0 1 3 18 and above 10 1 30 41 both 1 0 8 9 total 16 1 39 56 first, regarding gender, the results illustrated that most studies (n = 39) included both males and females as their participants (e.g., busse & krause, 2016; jackson, 2017; zhang, 2020). however, several studies (n = 16) did not provide information about the participants’ gender (e.g., acheson et al., 2015; álvarez valencia & fernández benavides, 2019; chen & yang, 2016), and no study considered only male participants in its sampling. moreover, one study used only females as participants (lenkaitis et al., 2019). second, the results of age analysis, as another targeted learner variable, revealed that most studies learner variables in the development of intercultural competence: a synthesis of home and study . . . 273 (e.g., álvarez valencia & fernández benavides, 2019; berg, 2009; bloom & miranda, 2015) tended to include adults in their investigation (n = 41), which was followed by studies (n = 9) with both adults and non-adults as their targeted participants (e.g., heinzmann et al., 2015; ishii 2009; özdemir, 2017). as shown in table 3, the studies rarely included non-adults (n = 3) as their only participants (e.g., acheson et al., 2015; chen & yang, 2016) or did not specify the participants’ age (e.g., elola & oskoz, 2008; truong & tran, 2014). table 4 studies reporting on the learner variables of gender and age gender male (n = 0) none female (n = 1) lenkaitis et al. (2019) both (n = 39) alred & byram (2002); berg (2009); bloom & miranda (2015); busse & krause (2015, 2016); cubillos & ilvento (2018); czerwionka et al., (2015); engle & engle (2004); heinzmann et al. (2015); hismanoglu (2011); holmes (2006); holmes et al. (2016); houghton (2014); ishii (2009); jackson (2011, 2017); kulich (2015); kusumaningputri & widodo (2018); liaw (2006); medina-lópez-portillo (2004); mirzaei & forouzandeh (2013); o’dowd (2000); özdemir (2017); palmer (2013); peng & wu (2016); rothwell (2011); scally (2015); schartner (2016); schenker (2012); shiri (2015); su (2011a, 2011b); tran & duong (2018); tudini (2007); wang et al. (2013); watson & wolfel (2015); yildiz (2009); yu & van maele (2018); zhang (2020) not mentioned (n = 16) acheson et al., (2015); álvarez valencia & fernández benavides (2019); chen & yang (2016); elola & oskoz (2008); escudero (2013); helm (2009); lee (2011, 2012); lee & markey (2014); martinsen (2011); o’dowd (2003); rodríguez & puyal (2012); root & ngampornchai (2013); sample (2013); tirnaz & narafshan (2020); truong & tran (2014) age not reported (n = 3) elola & oskoz (2008); o’dowd (2003); truong & tran (2014) below 18 (n = 3) acheson et al. (2015); chen & yang (2016); rothwell (2011) 18 and above (n = 41) alred & byram (2002); álvarez valencia & fernández benavides (2019); berg (2009); bloom & miranda (2015); busse & krause (2015); cubillos & ilvento (2018); czerwionka et al. (2015); engle & engle (2004); escudero (2013); helm (2009); hismanoglu (2011); holmes (2006); holmes et al. (2016); houghton (2014); jackson (2011, 2017); kusumaningputri & widodo (2018); lee (2011, 2012); lee & markey (2014); lenkaitis et al. (2019); martinsen (2011); medina-lópez-portillo (2004); mirzaei & forouzandeh (2013); o’dowd (2000); palmer (2013); root & ngampornchai (2013); scally (2015); rodríguez & puyal (2012); sample (2013); schartner (2016); shiri (2015); su (2011a, 2011b); tudini (2007); wang & kulich (2015); wang et al. (2013); watson & wolfel (2015); yildiz (2009); yu & van maele (2018); zhang (2020); both (n = 9) busse & krause (2016); heinzmann et al. (2015); ishii (2009); liaw (2006); özdemir (2017); peng & wu (2016); schenker (2012); tirnaz & narafshan (2020); tran & duong (2018) according to table 4, the great majority of the research articles reviewed focused on adult language learners (above 18 years old) in their research. to illuminate the participants’ background, table 5 depicts the micro-contexts of the studies, that is, whether the data were collected in university, school, language institutes, or other contexts. zia tajeddin, neda khanlarzadeh, hessameddin ghanbar 274 table 5 micro-contexts of the reviewed studies micro-context not mentioned palmer 2013 university and college alred & byram (2002); álvarez valencia & fernández benavides (2019); berg (2009); bloom & miranda (2015); cubillos & ilvento (2018); czerwionka et al. (2015); elola & oskoz (2008); engle & engle (2004); escudero (2013); helm (2009); hismanoglu (2011); holmes (2006); holmes et al. (2016); houghton (2014); jackson (2011, 2017); kulich (2015); kusumaningputri & widodo (2018); lee (2011, 2012); lee & markey (2014); lenkaitis et al. (2019); liaw (2006); martinsen (2011); medina–lópez–portillo (2004); mirzaei & forouzandeh (2013); o’dowd (2000, 2003); özdemir (2017); peng & wu (2016); rodríguez & puyal (2012); root & ngampornchai (2013); sample (2013); scally (2015); schartner (2016); shiri (2015); su (2011a, 2011b); wang et al. (2013); watson & wolfel (2015); yildiz (2009); yu & van maele (2018); zhang (2020) school acheson et al. (2015); chen & yang (2016); heinzmann et al. (2015); ishii (2009); rothwell (2011) language institute tirnaz & narafshan (2018); tran & duong (2018); truong & tran (2014) different busse & krause (2015, 2016); schenker (2012); tudini (2007) evidently, 43 studies chose universities and colleges as the main contexts of their data (e.g., alred & byram, 2002; álvarez valencia & fernández benavides, 2019), while few of them targeted individuals learning a second language at schools (e.g., heinzmann et al., 2015; ishii, 2009; rothwell, 2011) and language institutes (e.g., tirnaz & narafshan, 2018; tran & duong, 2018). consequently, the participants of icc studies were mainly adults. to present a clearer picture of different age groups’ participations from various micro-contexts in the reviewed studies, table 6 illustrates different breakdowns of age and micro-context. table 6 intersections of age and micro-context micro-context age total not mentioned below 18 18 and above both not mentioned 0 0 1 0 1 universities and colleges 2 0 38 3 43 schools 0 3 0 2 5 language institutes 1 0 0 2 3 different contexts 0 0 2 2 4 total 3 3 41 9 56 in addition to gender, age, and micro-context (e.g., schools and universities), the studies we analyzed reported on the learner variables of l1 background, l2 background, and language proficiency. table 7 outlines the list of the studies representing each of these three variables. as to the l1 and l2 of participants, table 7 shows that a great number of studies did not specify their l1 background (n = 27) (e.g., rodríguez & puyal, 2012; su, 2011a, 2011b). among those studies that included participants’ l1, learner variables in the development of intercultural competence: a synthesis of home and study . . . 275 english (n = 9) (e.g., acheson et al., 2005; lenkaitis et al., 2019) was the most recurrent finding, and a mixture of learners with different l1s (n = 8) (e.g., schartner, 2016; zhang, 2020) was the next. as regards the l2 background of learners in our corpus of studies, english was the most frequently studied l2 (n = 25) (e.g., hismanoglu, 2011; tirnaz & narafshan, 2020; tran & duong, 2018) and spanish ranked second in our corpus (n = 13) (e.g., elola & oskoz, 2012; lee, 2012; lenkaitis et al., 2019). table 7 studies reporting on the learner variables of l1 background, l2 background, and language proficiency l1 background not reported (n = 27) álvarez valencia & fernández benavides (2019); berg (2009); bloom & miranda (2015); elola & oskoz (2008); engle & engle (2004); escudero (2013); helm (2009); kusumaningputri & widodo (2018); lee (2012); liaw (2006); medina-lópez-portillo (2004); mirzaei & forouzandeh (2013); özdemir (2017); palmer (2013); peng & wu (2016); rodríguez & puyal (2012); root & ngampornchai (2013); sample (2013); scally (2015); schenker (2012); shiri (2015); su (2011a, 2011b); tran & duong (2018); truong & tran (2014); watson & wolfel (2015); yildiz (2009) english (n = 9) acheson et al. (2015); alred & byram (2002); cubillos & ilvento (2018); czerwionka et al. (2015); lenkaitis et al. (2019); martinsen (2011); rothwell (2011); tudini (2007); wang et al. (2013) chinese (n = 6) chen & yang (2016); holmes (2006); jackson (2011, 2017); wang & kulich (2015); yu & van maele (2018) german (n = 2) busse & krause (2015, 2016) different languages (n = 8) heinzmann et al. (2015); holmes et al. (2016); houghton (2014); lee (2011); lee & markey (2014); o’dowd (2000); schartner (2016); zhang (2020) other languages (n = 4) hismanoglu (2011); ishii (2009); o’dowd (2003); tirnaz & narafshan (2020) l2 background not reported (n = 4) jackson (2017); root & ngampornchai (2013); sample (2013); schartner (2016) english (n = 25) busse & krause (2015, 2016); álvarez valencia & fernández benavides (2019); chen & yang (2016); engle & engle (2004); escudero (2013); hismanoglu (2011); holmes (2006); houghton (2014); ishii (2009); jackson (2011); kusumaningputri & widodo (2018); liaw (2006); mirzaei & forouzandeh (2013); özdemir (2017); peng & wu (2016); rodríguez & puyal (2012); su (2011a, 201b1), tirnaz & narafshan (2020); tran & duong (2018); truong & tran (2014); wang & kulich (2015); yildiz (2009); yu & van maele (2018) spanish (n = 13) acheson et al. (2015); alred & byram (2002); bloom & miranda (2015); cubillos & ilvento (2018); czerwionka et al. (2015); elola & oskoz (2008); helm (2009); lee (2011, 2012); lenkaitis et al. (2019); martinsen (2011); medina-lópez-portillo (2004); scally (2015) arabic (n = 2) palmer (2013); shiri (2015) chinese (n = 1) zhang (2020) different languages (n = 8) berg (2009); heinzmann et al. (2015); lee & markey (2014); o’dowd (2000, 2003); schenker (2012); wang et al. (2013); watson & wolfel (2015) zia tajeddin, neda khanlarzadeh, hessameddin ghanbar 276 italian (n = 2) holmes et al. (2016); tudini (2007) german (n = 1) rothwell (2011) language proficiency not mentioned (n = 21) alred & byram (2002); czerwionka et al. (2015); busse & krause (2015); holmes (2006); liaw (2006); martinsen (2011); medina-lópez-portillo (2004); mirzaei & forouzandeh (2013); palmer (2013); peng & wu (2016); rodríguez & puyal (2012); root & ngampornchai (2013); sample (2013); scally (2015); schartner (2016); su (2011a, 2011b); truong & tran (2014); wang & kulich (2015); wang et al. (2013); watson & wolfel (2015) beginner/ elementary (n = 3) acheson et al. (2015); rothwell (2011); tran & duong (2018) intermediate (n = 11) álvarez valencia & fernández benavides (2019); elola & oskoz (2008); heinzmann et al. (2015); helm (2009); kusumaningputri & widodo (2018); lee (2011, 2012); lenkaitis et al. (2019); o’dowd (2000); tirnaz & narafshan (2020); tudini (2007) advanced (n = 7) busse & krause (2016); escudero (2013); jackson (2011, 2017); lee & markey (2014); o’dowd (2003); özdemir (2017) mixed (n = 14) berg (2009); bloom & miranda (2015); chen & yang (2016); cubillos & ilvento (2018); engle & engle (2004); hismanoglu (2011); holmes et al. (2016); houghton (2014); ishii (2009); schenker (2012); shiri (2015); yildiz (2009); yu & van maele (2018); zhang (2020) finally, relating to the proficiency levels of participants, similar to l1 background, less than half of the studies did not provide any demographic information about this learner variable (n = 21) (e.g., busse & krause, 2016; scally, 2015; schartner, 2016). it should be noted that most studies used students with different proficiency levels or mixed levels (n = 14) (e.g., yildiz, 2009; yu & van maele, 2018; zhang, 2020), followed by intermediate levels (n = 11) (e.g., heinzmann et al., 2015; kusumaningputri & widodo, 2018; lenkaitis et al., 2019), advanced levels (n = 7) (e.g., escudero, 2013; jackson, 2017; özdemir, 2017), and beginner levels (n = 3) (e.g., acheson et al., 2015; tran & duong, 2018). 5.3. theme 3: effects of learner variables across contexts the last theme we analyzed was the effect of learner variables on their icc. out of 56, 15 studies reported on the effect of one of the variables of language proficiency, age, previous contact or knowledge, gender, attitudinal, affective, or behavioral factors, ethnicity, race, or nationality, and other variables (parents’ educational background and learners’ location) (e.g., palmer, 2013; peng & wu, 2016; scally, 2015). table 8 outlines these studies. it should be noted that as the selected studies were of different research designs (i.e., quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods), the employed research methods and number of participants varied as well (from n = 10 to n = 1297). for example, o’dowd (2003) and bloom and miranda (2015) employed 10 and 15 participants in their studies, respectively, while heinzman et al. (2015) examined 540 learner variables in the development of intercultural competence: a synthesis of home and study . . . 277 or berg (2009) explored 1297 cases in their research. moreover, the researchers assessed the icc development of language learners in their studies using different assessment tools and techniques. the majority of the studies used questionnaires or tests which were mainly based on learners’ self-report and evaluations (e.g., berg, 2009; bloom & miranda, 2015; heinzman et al., 2015; ishii, 2009; martinsen, 2011; mirzaei & forouzandeh, 2013; palmer, 2013; peng & wu, 2016; scally, 2015). however, some of them employed tasks or critical incidents which required the participants to write down their answers (e.g., busse & krause, 2016; hismanoglu, 2011; o’dowd, 2003). meanwhile, others used texts such as analysis of individuals’ utterances and chats (tudini, 2007) or employed multiple assessment tools to enhance the depth of their analysis (cubillos & ilvento, 2018; medina-lópez-portillo, 2004). table 8 studies on the effects of learner variables studies analyzing the effects of learner variables (n = 15) berg (2009); bloom & miranda (2015); busse & krause (2016); cubillos & ilvento (2018); heinzmann et al. (2015); hismanoglu (2011); ishii (2009); martinsen (2011); medina-lópez-portillo (2004); mirzaei & forouzandeh (2013); o’dowd (2003); palmer (2013); peng & wu (2016); scally (2015); tudini (2007) language proficiency effective (n = 2) heinzmann et al. (2015); ishii (2009) not effective (n = 4) bloom & miranda (2015); cubillos & ilvento (2018); hismanoglu (2011); martinsen (2011) age effective (n = 3) heinzmann et al. (2015); medina-lópez-portillo (2004); scally (2015) not effective (n = 3) bloom & miranda (2015); busse & krause (2016); palmer (2013) gender effective (n = 3) berg (2009); heinzmann et al. (2015); medina-lópez-portillo (2004) not effective (n = 2) mirzaei & forouzandeh (2013); palmer (2013) attitudinal, affective, or behavioral factors effective (n = 3) ishii (2009); o’dowd (2003); mirzaei & forouzandeh (2013) not effective (n = 1) martinsen (2011) ethnicity, race, or nationality effective (n = 2) heinzmann et al. (2015); medina-lópez-portillo (2004) not effective (n = 0) none previous contact effective (n = 7) busse & krause (2016); heinzmann et al. (2015); hismanoglu (2011); medina-lópezportillo (2004); palmer (2013); peng & wu (2016); scally (2015) not effective (n = 1) bloom & miranda (2015) zia tajeddin, neda khanlarzadeh, hessameddin ghanbar 278 other variables (parents’ educational background and learners’ location) effective (n = 2) heinzmann et al. (2015); tudini (2007) not effective (n = 0) none in what follows, we provide more details on the effects of these variables within the studies conducted in study abroad and home contexts. moreover, we comment on exemplary studies from our corpus related to each learner variable in a specific context. table 9 presents the number of studies in which learner variables were found to be either effective or non-effective across two different contexts, that is, study abroad and home. it should be noted that we reported on the effects in terms of their statistical significance in purely quantitative studies and quantitative parts of mixed-methods studies (e.g., busse & krause, 2016; palmer, 2013; peng & wu, 2016); however, in a few of our sample studies the term effective was used by researchers without reporting on any statistical significance (i.e., qualitative or mixed-methods studies), which is why while referring to these studies, we just described the results as effective (o’dowd, 2003). table 9 also depicts the number of studies that targeted each learner variable. first, relating to language proficiency, it was found that this variable was examined in six studies (e.g., hismanoglu, 2011; ishii, 2009). however, a statistically significant effect was reported in one research project carried out in a study abroad context (heinzmann et al., 2015) and another in a home context (ishii, 2009); that is, students with a higher level of language proficiency were significantly more successful in icc learning. also, language proficiency was shown not to have an effect in four studies conducted in a study abroad context (e.g., cubillos & ilvento, 2018; martinsen, 2011). table 9 effects of learner variables across contexts learner variables effective effective not effective not effective not analyzed not analyzed study abroad home context study abroad home context study abroad home context language proficiency 1 1 4 0 29 21 age 3 0 2 1 20 30 gender 3 0 1 1 22 29 attitudinal, affective, or behavioral factors 0 3 1 0 25 27 other variables (parents’ educational background and learners’ location) 1 1 0 0 25 29 ethnicity, race or nationality 2 0 0 0 24 30 age, as another learner variable, was investigated in six studies (e.g., busse & krause, 2016; medina-lópez-portillo, 2004). it was found to have been learner variables in the development of intercultural competence: a synthesis of home and study . . . 279 effective in three studies (e.g., medina-lópez-portillo, 2004; scally, 2015) implemented in study abroad contexts; to put it more precisely, individuals’ age displayed a statistically significant negative correlation with their icc competence (see heinzmann et al., 2015; medina-lópez-portillo, 2004; scally, 2015). however, the age factor was found to have exerted no effect in the other two studies in the same context (e.g., palmer, 2013) and one study in a home context (see busse & krausein, 2016). regarding gender, which was examined in five studies (e.g., berg, 2009; heinzmann et al., 2015), it can be seen in table 7 that it was only effective in three study abroad contexts (e.g., heinzmann et al., 2015; medinalópez-portillo, 2004); however, the findings were somewhat contradictory. for example, heinzman et al. (2015) and berg (2009) reported on females’ significantly better icc performance, while medina-lópez-portillo (2004) found male students’ statistically significant higher icc. yet, gender was found to play no part in one study abroad context (see palmer, 2013) and another study in a home context (see mirzaei & forouzandeh, 2013). previous contact or knowledge, explored in eight studies (e.g., busse & krause, 2016; scally, 2015), was reported to be more influential in study abroad contexts in five studies (e.g., medina-lópez-portillo, 2004) in comparison with only two home context studies (e.g., peng & wu, 2016). however, this variable was found to be not effective in one study abroad investigation (see bloom & miranda, 2015). in general, students who had contact with individuals from other cultures or experienced living abroad tended to have significantly higher icc and performed better in icc learning programs (see heinzmann et al., 2015; hismanoglu, 2011; medina-lópez-portillo, 2004). we also examined the effects of attitudinal, affective, and behavioral variables. these variables, examined in four studies (see table 9), were found to be effective only in three home context studies (e.g., ishii, 2009; o’dowd, 2003) and not effective in only one study abroad context (see martinsen, 2011). for example, ishii (2009) reported some significant interaction effects between individual differences and treatment condition on cross-cultural attitudes. mirzaei and forouzandeh (2013) evidenced a strong statistically significant positive correlation between l2 learner icc and motivation. furthermore, o’dowd (2003) reported that the ability of students to build up a personal relationship with their partners, their sensitivity to their partners’ needs, their communicative style, and their capacity to produce engaging, in-depth correspondence were found to be effective and led to icc development. ethnicity, race, or nationality are other factors which were scarcely investigated in the studies in our corpus. it was uncovered that they were statistically significant variables in two studies conducted in the study abroad context (see heinzmann et al., 2015; medina-lópez-portillo, 2004). yet, heinzmann et al. (2015) did not specify the details of the effects of students’ nationality on their icc and only reported it as an explanatory variable in learners’ icc. medina-lópez-portillo zia tajeddin, neda khanlarzadeh, hessameddin ghanbar 280 (2004) reported the importance of learners’ race and ethnicity in both quantitative and qualitative data; however, no ample detail was provided in this respect. finally, the category named other variables included two variables, that is, individuals’ parents’ educational background and location, which were rarely examined. the variable of parents’ educational background proved to be statistically significant in one study abroad context (see heinzmann et al., 2015). it was found that students whose parents had tertiary education were significantly more successful than others. moreover, learners’ location was analyzed in one study implemented in a home context (see tudini, 2007), which compared off-campus versus on-campus students’ communication patterns and revealed off-campus students’ significantly better performance in intercultural communication. 6. discussion the aim of this study was to synthesize 56 studies to heighten the understanding of icc development based on study abroad and home contexts, instruction, and learner variables. this synthesis revealed that a number of learner variables are implicated in icc acquisition, including age, gender, l1 background, context of education, language proficiency, previous contact or knowledge, and attitudinal and behavioral variables. the first set of findings relates to context and instruction for icc development. the findings showed that half of the studies were conducted in either the study abroad or home context. the role of these two contexts in second language acquisition, including icc, has received great attention in many studies in the past two decades (e.g., collentine & freed, 2004; isabelli-garcía & isabelli, 2020; kinginger, 2009, 2013; mitchell & tyne, 2021). these studies have unveiled the role that classroom and/or study abroad have on self-regulatory strategies of l2 learners (e.g., allen, 2013), intercultural mindset (e.g., jackson, 2013), oral proficiency (e.g., magnan & back, 2007), grammatical competence (e.g., lafford, 2006), and learner motivation (e.g., bataller, 2010). in our corpus, the effects of home vs. study abroad contexts were not investigated comparatively in a single study. rather, each study was focused on either context. however, it was found that instruction in the home context was the prevailing practice in icc development. in other studies, not included in our corpus, researchers have repeatedly demonstrated the positive impact of studying abroad on icc development (e.g., lee, 2018; pascarella & terenzini, 2005). it is argued that intergroup contact during the study abroad experience helps reduce cultural prejudice, improves intercultural competence skills, and facilitates intercultural understanding and relations despite cultural, ethnic, and national differences. learner variables in the development of intercultural competence: a synthesis of home and study . . . 281 instruction vs. no instruction constituted another part of the first set of findings. it was found that the majority of the studies reviewed reported on instruction in the classroom, while other studies for icc development included no instructional phase. as to instruction-based icc development, the studies we reviewed included 42 instructional interventions. instructional tasks using technology and online environments provide space for more contact with other users of l2 in real-life contexts, more exposure to authentic interactions, and increased engagement in intercultural negotiation for moving from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism. this is one of the main reasons for the burgeoning interest in explicit instruction, including the use of online social networking, to scaffold learners’ icc development. furthermore, it helps learners gain cultural awareness, particularly when it draws on social networking to increase their chances of engaging in negotiation of meaning, discussing cultural issues, and eliciting meanings of cultural behavior from l2 speakers (o’dowd, 2012). the second set of findings related to learner variables considered with respect to developing icc. the learner variables that were analyzed in the studies reported in our synthesis included learner gender, age, l1 background, language proficiency, nationality, affective and behavioral factors, previous contact/knowledge, and parents’ educational background. however, in our corpus, these variables were not represented in the majority of the studies and/or were not explored to the same degree for their effects on icc. l1 background, gender, and language proficiency were not reported in many icc studies, although they constitute influential variables in second language acquisition (dörnyei & ryan, 2015; ellis, 2015; norris & ortega, 2000). also, despite the importance of learner variables such as motivation, willingness to communicate, identity, and language learning strategies in second language acquisition studies (dörnyei & ushioda, 2009; macintyre et al., 2011; norton & de costa, 2018; oxford, 2016), they were not among the variables reported in our corpus. this under-representation or non-representation of key learner variables results in our poor understanding of how icc is developed in home and study abroad contexts and why there are differential gains in icc among learners. the overall findings indicated that gender, age, and language proficiency were among the learner variables mostly described or observed for their impact on icc development although the impact varied across home and study abroad contexts. also, our findings revealed that most studies reported on icc development without measuring the role of learner variables. numerous studies not included in our analysis have demonstrated a mixed picture with respect to the impact of gender on intercultural competence (goldstein & kim, 2006; holm et al., 2009; mahon, 2006; solhaug & kristensen, 2020; solhaug & osler, 2017; tompkins et al., 2017; vande berg et al., 2009). one major finding concerned zia tajeddin, neda khanlarzadeh, hessameddin ghanbar 282 gender differences in intercultural competence. in our analysis, gender was effective in three studies but not in the others. it was found that females developed higher intercultural skills following instruction (heinzmann et al., 2015). similarly, females showed significant gains in the intercultural development inventory (idi). these mixed findings on gender differences are also evidenced in other studies not included in our synthesis. a number of researchers whose studies were not considered in our review reported no gender differences in intercultural competence and sensitivity (e.g., chocce et al., 2015; morales, 2017). for example, the studies conducted by chocce et al. (2015) and morales (2017) indicated that the development of intercultural sensitivity is not significantly affected by gender. however, numerous studies have reported that females show higher intercultural sensitivity (fabregas et al., 2012; holm et al., 2009; westrick, 2004). for instance, holm et al. (2009) found that female students assessed their intercultural sensitivity higher than male students did. also, solhaug and kristensens’s (2020) study revealed that female students exhibited substantially higher intercultural competence (intercultural empathy and awareness) than their male counterparts. in another study, tompkins et al.’s (2017) mixed methods survey indicated that women participants ranked higher overall in their intercultural sensitivity than men, which they attribute to women’s more motivation to understand, appreciate, and accept differences among cultures. the effect of gender was also found in the studies by demircioğlu and çakir (2016) and bećirović et al. (2019), who reported a significant impact of gender on intercultural sensitivity. as to the age variable, our synthesis showed that age impacted intercultural competence in some, but not all, studies, particularly those conducted in study abroad contexts. mixed findings were reported in other studies not listed in our corpus (e.g., schwarzenthal et al., 2017; williams, 2005; yilmaz & wujiabudulai, 2019). some studies reported that no age differences existed in the development of intercultural competence. for instance, schwarzenthal et al. (2017) found that self-reported intercultural competence was unrelated to age. similarly, yilmaz and wujiabudulai’s (2019) study showed no significant differences in participants’ intercultural sensitivity in terms of age. by contrast, williams (2005) reported that age was among the major factors influencing change in students’ intercultural communication scores. nonetheless, the majority of the reviewed research in the present study focused on adult language learners, as, in general, most of the conducted studies investigated the icc development among upper-level and older l2 learners rather than beginners or young language learners. this was the case despite the fact that the importance of icc in l2 primary classes has been highlighted in numerous studies (e.g., acevedo, 2019; byram & doyé, 2005; moloney, 2007). cushner (2015) justified this underrepresentation by emphasizing the complexity of the construct for young learners learner variables in the development of intercultural competence: a synthesis of home and study . . . 283 and claiming that the majority of the existing icc assessment tools might not be appropriate for young l2 learners. our synthesis research showed that the language proficiency of participants was not reported in the majority of the studies. of the six studies outlining the effect of language proficiency, a significant effect was found in only one study. language learning, along with corollary development of language proficiency, is likely to interact with intercultural development. however, its effect is not strongly supported in our pool of studies. this finding echoes intercultural competence researchers’ argument that there are preconditions for the effect of proficiency on icc (bennet, 2008; byram & feng, 2004; davies et al., 2005). raising this issue, bennett (2008) argued that language learning and hence language proficiency may not be a sufficient condition for intercultural development. in the same vein, davies et al. (2005) maintained that the effect of foreign language learning depends on the degree to which the curriculum is intercultural in orientation. as such, perry and southwell (2011) concluded that many studies have not been able to substantiate a causal relationship between language learning and intercultural development (e.g., byram & feng, 2004). learners’ l1 background, l2, and nationality were among other variables analyzed in this synthesis research. although the number of studies targeting these variables was very limited, it has been found that in some cases individuals’ l1, nationality, and race can affect their icc (see heinzmann et al., 2015; medinalópez-portillo, 2004). as highlighted in medina-lópez-portillo’s (2004) study, during study abroad students are confronted with relating to their race and ethnicity. owing to their race, those of european-american ethnicity might believe they are privileged over other students, including african-americans. in fact, due to the link between race and culture, the results do not seem unreasonable. as to l2, we found that about half of the studies investigated the icc development of learners of l2 english followed by l2 spanish. the predominant focus on l2 english in icc studies sounds logical due to its status as an international language (mckay, 2018; mckay & bokhorst-heng, 2008; seidlhofer, 2007; sharifian, 2009). also, english is the only language with its non-native speakers surpassing native speakers in number. in view of this, numerous studies have sought to shed light on icc development in the case of learners and users of english (e.g., chen & yang, 2016; jackson, 2011; wang & kulich, 2015; yu & van maele, 2018). in our corpus, spanish ranked second in the number of studies devoted to icc development. with about 20 countries listing spanish as their official language and spanish being the second most spoken language after mandarin, there is good reason to learn spanish and use it. this status of spanish as the target of many l2 learners has motivated numerous researchers to study the icc of l2 spanish users and learners (e.g., helm, 2009; lee, 2012; lenkaitis et al., 2019; martinsen, 2011). zia tajeddin, neda khanlarzadeh, hessameddin ghanbar 284 a set of other learner variables were analyzed in our synthesis, including attitudinal, affective, and behavioral factors, individuals’ parents’ educational background, previous contact and knowledge, and ethnicity. the findings indicated greater effectiveness of attitudinal, affective, or behavioral factors in home contexts, as illustrated in the studies by ishii (2009) and o’dowd (2003). ishii (2009) found that task-based intercultural instruction on intercultural competence was effective in japanese secondary efl learners’ icc. similarly, o’dowd’s (2003) study showed the impact of a spanish-english e-mail exchange on intercultural learning in the home context. this is in line with other studies that have examined the interface between attitudes and intercultural competence and reported mixed findings (e.g., vuksanovic, 2018). although both byram’s (1997) and deardorff’s (2006) model of intercultural competence includes an attitudinal component, the results of vuksanovic’s (2018) study demonstrated no significant correlation between the two variables. however, smakova and paulsrud (2020) found that their respondents’ effective and appropriate communication with people of other cultural backgrounds was fostered by cognitive, affective, and behavioral skills. 7. conclusion this synthesis research set out to investigate research on the development of icc in study abroad and home contexts and the nexus between icc and learner variables. our review illustrates that both contexts were examined to trace learners’ icc development. while the majority of the studies provided evidence for the need for instruction, a number of them showed that exposure-based non-explicit instruction can be influential in gaining icc. a great number of studies reporting on icc instruction substantiates the mounting significance of technological facilities for creating spaces for intercultural awareness. also, the studies conducted in the study abroad context emphasize the role of this context in creating opportunities for more intercultural contacts and providing relevant input. moreover, the findings of this synthesis research on learner variables illustrate the complexity of their effects on icc gains and the underrepresentation of most variables in icc research. out of the studies reviewed, 15 reported on the effect of one learner variable, whereas the others did not report on this effectiveness. this indicates that learner variables, a key concept in second language acquisition, need to feature more prominently in icc research to advance our understanding of their contribution to icc development. while the findings of this synthesis research may have revealed the contribution of learner variables to the development of icc, it has some limitations. first, our inclusion criterion was to analyze studies published between 20002020. a wider time span could be considered in future research to provide a learner variables in the development of intercultural competence: a synthesis of home and study . . . 285 chronologically clearer picture of context, instruction, and learner variables in icc studies. second, we excluded book chapters, short studies, and dissertations. stronger evidence might be provided if other researchers include these three data sources in their analysis. third, we included studies from journals published by selected leading international publishers. further studies could enlarge this corpus by considering other publishers, such as john benjamins and equinox, as well as journals published by universities and institutions. finally, as studies included in our research were limited to those that reported on l2 learner participants, future research could address the icc development of students from non-language fields of education. zia tajeddin, neda khanlarzadeh, hessameddin ghanbar 286 references1 abe, h., & wiseman, r. l. 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(2019). interventions to promote learners’ intercultural competence: a meta-analysis. international journal of intercultural relations, 71, 31-47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2019.04.006 273 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (2). 2015. 273-299 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.2.5 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl adversity and redemption: learning and teaching in the language learning histories of two efl student-teachers miri tashma baum givat-washington academic college of education, israel mirimtb@gmail.com abstract a better understanding of the multifaceted, dynamic and situated identity of the language learner stands at the center of much current sla research. one of the main ways in which it is investigated is through the examination of autobiographical language learning histories. in an effort to better understand some of the processes which lead to a motivated, confident and successful language learner and user, this article analyzes the language learning histories of two efl student-teachers, notable for their commitment to the learning and teaching of english. a close analysis of their narratives, focusing on thematic, stylistic and performative aspects, reveals what narrative psychologist mcadams (2006) has called “redemptive” patterns, that is, narrative structures in which hardship leads to inner growth and difficulties become “springboards” (pals, 2006) to success. the two narrators also display a similar flexibility in their evolving self-positioning in response to the difficulties they narrate, and for both, attachment to the imagined community of anglophone popular culture is an essential component in this process. together, the learning experiences delineated in the accounts support the call for student-focused pedagogy, which puts emphasis on creating a positive emotional atmosphere, on the one hand, and providing rich intercultural knowledge, on the other. keywords: identity, language learning, autobiographies, narratives, motivation, agency, self-positioning, israel miri tashma baum 274 1. introduction at the recent conference on psychology and language learning in graz, austria (may 2014), integrative perspectives on the self set the tone for many of the presentations. it is now widely recognized that the learner should be regarded as a complex and dynamic whole, her identity1 continually shaped and reshaped by her interaction with her environment, and that all the aspects making up identity—cognitive, affective, physical and social—have a bearing on other language-learning concerns such as motivation, self-efficacy, and the internalization of language learning. as dörnyei (2014b), drawing on the work of narrative psychologists such as mcadams (2001, 2006), bruner (1987, 1991, 2002) and polkinghorne (1988, 1990), suggested in his keynote speech at the conference, the analysis of autobiographical language learning histories (llhs) can be useful in exploring the evolving identities of learners, the sources of, obstacles to, and development of their motivation, and the possibilities for promoting future success. this paper seeks to explore the identity of two english-as-a-foreign-language (efl) student-teachers, both already teaching, whose llhs display some of the complex ways in which identity is reflexively shaped in interaction with changing social and cultural circumstances. a close analysis of their two narratives, taking into account thematic, structural and performative elements (riessman, 1993), reveals that, while the stories are different in many thematic and stylistic details, developing as they do out of different and unique sets of changing circumstances, the narratives share some central salient themes. both narratives focus on difficulties in childhood/adolescence coupled with a “redemptive” (mcadams, 2006) approach to these difficulties. for both, the entry into the profession of teaching retrospectively turns these difficult memories into what pals (2006) has called “springboards” to success. the two interviewees also describe a similar flexibility in their self-positioning in response to the difficulties they narrate, so that they manage to separate the weakening or potentially “contaminating” (mcadams & bowman, 2001) aspects of their experience from those which contribute to their language growth and identity enhancement. for both, attachment to the imagined community of anglophone popular culture is an essential component in this process. the two interviewees thus present a picture of the growth of a language learner and user, in stories which contain both experiences of setback and, increasingly, empowerment and well-being, throwing light on sometimes unexpected sources of motivation and learner autonomy, with interesting pedagogical implications. 1 in this study i will be using the feminine form of the pronoun to denote nonidentified subjects as this fits more closely with the research in which both interviewees are female. adversity and redemption: learning and teaching in the language learning histories of two efl. . . 275 2. theoretical framework 2.1. the complex self of the language learner ever since the “social turn” (block, 2007), there has been a growing interest in second language acquisition (sla) research in the identity of the language learner. there has been a shift towards holistic perspectives, focusing on individual learners, and a growing awareness of the complexity and dynamism of the language learner’s identity and experiences across different times and contexts (mercer, ryan, & williams , 2012; mercer, 2014). thus, ushioda (2009) calls for considering l2 learners as “persons-in-context,” whose motivation for language learning can only be understood within the context of their identity as particular human beings feeling, wishing, and acting in multiple microand macro-contexts (p. 220). mercer (2014) has argued for researching the language learner’s sense of self from a complexity perspective, according to which “the self can be understood as an ongoing process that is never completed, but is continually in a state of development and self-organising emergence” (p. 177). drawing on poststructuralist theory, researchers such as norton (2013, 2014) and pavlenko (2002, 2003) have shown how changing power relations affect the learner’s identity, including her language learning motivation. describing identity as “multiple, changing, and a site of struggle,” norton (2014) argues that affective descriptors such as motivated and unmotivated are “constructed in frequently inequitable relations of power . . . variable over time and space, and sometimes coexisting in contradictory ways within a single individual” (p. 73). the different levels of motivation within an individual reflect the different identity positions she may hold. according to norton, “language learners who struggle to speak from one identity position . . . may be able to . . . claim alternative identities from which to speak, listen, read, or write. if learners are successful in their bids for more powerful identities, their language acquisition may be enhanced” (2014, p. 74). in this conceptualization of multiple identity positions, norton draws upon davies and harré’s (1990) positioning theory (norton, 2014, pp. 77-78), which claims that the discursive practices in which the individual participates continually provide her with “subject positions” (davies & harré, 1990, p. 46) through which her identity is formed. there can be interactive positioning in which what one person says positions another. and there can be reflexive positioning in which one positions oneself . . . one lives one's life in terms of one's ongoingly produced self, whoever might be responsible for its production. (p. 48) miri tashma baum 276 one of the processes by which the self is produced is the recognition of one’s position as member of certain groups: “this recognition entails an emotional commitment to the category membership and the development of a moral system organised around the belonging” (p. 47). as pavlenko and norton (2007) show, one way in which individuals can achieve a powerful language-learning identity in addition to, and possibly bypassing, the traditional position of the classroom student, is through identifying with an imagined community of target language speakers: “our orientation toward such imagined communities might have just as much impact on our current identities and learning as direct involvement in communities of our everyday life” (pavlenko & norton, 2007, p. 670). as shall be seen, such identification has been central in my interviewees’ adoption of identity positions, which have allowed them to withstand the debilitating effects of inhibiting learning environments and succeed in their language learning efforts. 2.2. narrative and the redemptive self dörnyei (2014b) has recently persuasively argued that a better understanding of the complex makeup of language learners can be achieved through the study of their autobiographical llhs. as mercer (2013) notes, “as such, narratives represent a valuable form of qualitative data which can challenge simplistic, reductionist, abstracted, static, linear thinking about language learning processes and learners themselves” (p. 167). in many recent sla studies, the multifaceted experience of language learning is indeed approached through narrative inquiry (cf. benson & nunan, 2005; coffey, 2013; kalaja, menezes, & barcelos, 2008; mercer, 2013; norton, 2000; oxford, 1995; pavlenko, 2001, 2003, 2007; tse, 2000). the stories reveal the complexity, diversity and situatedness of language learners and language learning, and their inherently temporal structure foregrounds the essentially dynamic character of the language learning process. the appreciation of the full significance of autobiographical creation involves the awareness that the connection between the narrative and the qualities and experiences of its narrator goes deeper than simply the reflection of the latter by the former. leading sociologists such as giddens (1991) and bauman (2001), and psychologists such as mcadams (1993, 2001, 2006), bruner (1987, 1991), and polkinghorne (1988, 1990), have argued that our sense of identity as such is the product of the tale we continually spin out of the multitude of strands which form our experience. giddens (1991) defines self-identity as, “the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of her or his biography” (p. 53); bruner (1987) claims that, “we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives” (p. 15). addressing the challenges of identity-construction in the postmodern world, in which a “wild mix of cultural adversity and redemption: learning and teaching in the language learning histories of two efl. . . 277 narratives and discourses determines a person’s identity from one moment to the next” (mcadams, 2001, p. 115), mcadams claims that, nonetheless, “the naturally integrative power of narrative . . . can bring together disparate features and tendencies in a given life into a more or less unifying and purpose-giving whole” (p. 116), so that while no one narrative can capture a person’s identity, “people create unity and purpose in their lives, and they make sense of the psychosocial niches they inhabit in adulthood through stories” (p. 117). thus, the construction of a “narrative identity” becomes a process which creates for the postmodern individual, dynamic and multiply positioned as she is, a sense of coherence through time, endowing the evolving life with meaning and purpose (mcadams, josselson, & lieblich, 2006, p. 5). mcadams (2006) pays particular attention to the pattern of the “redemptive” narrative, “stories of upward mobility, liberation, recovery, atonement, and self-actualization” (bauer, mcadams, & pals, 2008, p. 96) in which “the intrinsically motivated protagonist overcomes intense suffering to experience an enhanced status or state” (bauer et al., p. 96). these are contrasted with “contaminating” narratives in which negative experiences are described as reversing positive processes (mcadams, 2006). “redemptive selves” (mcadams, 2006) are those individuals whose narrative identities generally follow the redemptive pattern. the episodes they choose to include in their life stories, and particularly those memories—high points, low points and turning points—which they have “privileged for self-definition” (mcadams, 2001, p. 110), create a narrative in which good follows bad, and personal suffering is redeemed in a commitment to those less fortunate. as we are the story we tell, those who structure their story in this way have indeed, argues mcadams (2006), a higher chance of achieving well-being, fulfillment, and generativity. further developing this idea, pals (2006) writes about the “springboard effect” as the richest instance of the redemptive sequence. the springboard effect “redeems the worst aspects of past experience, the experiences that pose a direct threat to the coherence of self-making and the construction of growth” (p. 195). it is achieved through “the active, interpretive efforts of the individual to make meaning of the experience and causally connect it to the self” (p. 195), creating a clear causal link between past difficulties and present understanding and accomplishment. the springboard effect results in both achievement-related success and integrative benefits such as “empathy, generativity, wisdom, and an overarching clarity of meaning and purpose in life” (p. 196). as dörnyei (2014b) has argued, the understanding of the connection between the life story one chooses to tell and one’s eventual success is valuable to language educators. llhs do not only express the learner’s identity; positive “emplotments” (polkinghorne, 1988, p. 151) of life events can reconfigure past miri tashma baum 278 difficulties in self-empowering and future-directed ways, leading to self-fulfillment and success. as shall be shown, the narratives recounted by my two interviewees are characterized by a redemptive pattern and display the springboard effect in the causal links they create between incidents of helplessness and humiliation in the past and a present teacher identity characterized by efficacy, empathy and generativity, and an enduring sense of purpose. 3. methodology 3.1. data collection and analysis in endeavoring to reach a deeper understanding of learners’ experiences of their english education and the way in which it may become an enriching and empowering element in their evolving identity, i have undertaken a close analysis of the llhs of two student teachers studying for an efl teaching certificate in a teacher training college in the south of israel. these histories were narrated in the course of in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted as part of a research project exploring the meaning of english for efl student-teachers in the area, in which 19 students were interviewed altogether (tashma baum, 2014). each student was interviewed once. the two students whose narratives i bring here had not met me previously although they knew of my position as the head of an efl department similar to their own, in a neighboring college. each interview lasted for about an hour and was conducted in hebrew to ensure the maximum expressive ability of the interviewees, who were native hebrew speakers. they were recorded, professionally transcribed, and then translated into english by me. the interviewees gave their informed consent to the research, and their anonymity was assured through the use of pseudonyms and the removal of identifying data from the texts prior to publication. while acknowledging the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of maintaining objectivity in my research, i believe that the organized mode of analysis (see below), the use of triangulation in comparing my findings with evidence from the different strands of the academic literature, and my prolonged engagement in the field will not only make the research trustworthy but will also allow some transferability (creswell & miller, 2000; lincoln & guba, 1985). in the course of the interviews, the students related short stories, which they thus privileged as meaningful episodes within their learning trajectories (coffey, 2013). together, the stories told in the course of each interview formed the interviewee’s llh for the purpose of my research. the two interviews analyzed in this study were chosen for the richness of the narratives they produced adversity and redemption: learning and teaching in the language learning histories of two efl. . . 279 (cohler & hammack, 2006; shoaib & dörnyei, 2005) and their clear demonstration of the redemptive approach and the springboard effect. in each interview, the interviewee produced a coherent, detailed plot (not always narrated chronologically), viewing her involvement with english as a story in which early emotional experiences—positive and negative—led to a complex positioning vis-àvis the language and speaking at length on the ways in which her current close relationship with the language emerged from this positioning. in analyzing the two narratives, i have chosen a primarily holistic orientation (lieblich, tuval-mashiach, & zilber, 1998). my main interest has been to follow the development of each llh separately, as each is distinct in its particular interweaving of the social and the psychological and in the rhetorical strategies employed to create, maintain and project the unique narrative self. for this purpose, i deemed holistic life story analysis, focusing on thematic, structural and performative aspects (riessman, 1993) particular to an individual, to be most suitable as only such a focus can do justice to the integrative nature of the stories, to the way they “bring together disparate features” (mcadams, 2001, p. 116). i hence considered each language autobiography separately. guided at least in part by prior theory on identity and language-learning (presented above), but open to novel insights from the data (riessman, 2008), i first noted all the salient thematic details connected with the encounter with and the changing attitude towards english, striving to always see these details within the context of the narrative story sequence as a whole (riessman, 2008). i then focused on stylistic features of the text such as discourse markers, metaphors, repetitions, and tense and pronoun shifts. stylistic features, perhaps less easy to consciously manipulate, can reveal much about the emotional aspects of the narrator’s experiences (lieblich et al., 1998). i also paid attention to performative aspects of the texts, taking account of ways in which the micro-context of the narrative, the interview situation, may have influenced the self-positioning of the narrator within her narrative (riessman, 2008). following this, i formulated my understanding of the main themes of each narrative, traced patterns of ascent and descent, and located singer’s (as cited in mcadams, 2001, p. 109) “self-defining memories” upon which the narrative turns. while this “case-centered commitment,” as riessman (2008, p. 74) has called it, is at the center of my research, a comparison of themes in the two narratives; such as the importance of the imagined community, the nature of the turning point, the redemptive pattern, and the attitude towards teaching which derives from it; can also be fruitful (see riessman, 2008). in the final section of my paper, i address some of the differences and similarities between the stories, and explore the pedagogical implications of some of the themes which the two have in common. miri tashma baum 280 3.2. the research population life stories are psychosocial texts that are jointly crafted by the individual himself . . . and the culture within which the individual’s life has meaning. our autobiographical stories reflect who we are, and they also reflect the world in which we live. (mcadams, 2001, p. 117) attention to time and place is central in any integrative approach, and it is one of the defining characteristics of narrative analysis (riessman, 2008). a consideration of the social and cultural context within which the two narratives were formed is thus essential for a more complete understanding of their significance. the college in which my two interviewees studied belongs to israel's southern district (mehoz darom), as do the towns and smaller communities in which the students lived and taught. a central characteristic of the demography of the south is its large percentage of mizrahim, that is, jews of middle eastern or north african extraction. the southern mizrahi population is underprivileged both economically and academically, although the situation is gradually improving (smooha, 2004). english is almost universally esteemed in israel and a key to educational and professional advancement (ben-rafael, 1994). it has been found to be especially highly regarded by members of the lower socioeconomic strata, to which this population belongs and who often see it as the passport to an improved socioeconomic position (ben-rafael, 1994; donitsa-schmidt, 2004; narkiss, 2002; spolsky & shohamy, 1999). the two participants in my study share the generational, gendered, socioeconomic and cultural milieu characteristic of the majority of students at their college: young jewish women (in their early to late 20s), from a mizrahi family background, of working-class or lower-middle-class economic status. socioeconomic factors such as the relative inferiority of the educational system in the area (smooha, 2004) can partially account for the interviewees’ negative school experiences. cultural factors such as the high symbolic value attached to english by the mizrahi population can clarify its attractiveness for the students to some degree. the distance between ethnic mizrahi culture, with its arab roots, and the “westernness” of anglophone culture may help explain its allure as an exotic other (tashma baum, 2014). i will now turn to the two llhs, analyzing each in turn and following the ways in which they describe the evolution of their situated, dynamic, complex narrators, who are deeply affected by the sociocultural conditions in which they find themselves, but who can also affect and change these conditions, to an extent, and carve their own inspiring path. adversity and redemption: learning and teaching in the language learning histories of two efl. . . 281 3.3. “a jumping of the way”: shanit’s story shanit (a pseudonym) was 23 years old at the time of the interview. she was born and grew up in a small, socioeconomically weak town in the south and was still living there at the time of the interview. since her father had worked abroad and her mother, a midwife, was of jewish-indian extraction, both her parents had some knowledge of english. she was married and expecting her first child. although still a student, shanit was already in her third year of english teaching, working at a prestigious elementary school in an affluent community some distance from her hometown. in response to my first question, inviting shanit to look back at her llh, shanit opens with a kind of abstract or summary (riessman, 2005) in which she describes her deep and abiding love for english and ends with a “happy ending” in the form of marriage with an english speaker: first of all, english is in my soul and always has been . . . i’ve always had the enthusiasm for english. i’d watch films, hear songs in english, loved the language, loved the accent. by the way, i also married a south african in the end who speaks english as his mother tongue, so i taught him a bit of hebrew, he knew a bit so i improved his hebrew. shanit presents herself here as very assured, consistent and firm. love of english is presented as a given from the start (“always”) and is immediately linked with the products of anglophone popular culture: the films and the songs. later on in the interview, shanit elaborates on this, claiming that she had preferred “the american style” to local cultural offerings even in elementary school, where she and a friend were regarded as “cool” by the other girls for their ability to “do the slang, do the accent.” at the present time, she still thinks that “american culture is more polite, more dignified, more intelligent when it comes to manners.” her marriage to an english-speaker thus seems the icing on the cake, as it were, of her lifelong attachment to the imagined community of english-speaking culture. interestingly, however, the power remains firmly in her hands in the description of this union: she focuses not on her husband’s superior knowledge of english but on her superior knowledge of hebrew and positions herself as her husband’s teacher. the parenthetical “by the way” which she adds before her mention of the husband is a further indication of her authoritative, controlling style: she has a clear grasp of the generic requirements of the narrative she has embarked on and is aware of the prolepsis or “flash-forwards” (bruner, 1987, p. 29) she is performing, and she thus excuses it with a discourse marker signaling awareness of moving away from the main timeline. miri tashma baum 282 having set this tone and returning to the time before the prolepsis, shanit then self-consciously skips, following the transitional but, to an experience which totally unsettles the confident mood: her illiteracy in elementary school: and i always loved but, i’m skipping a bit, but i didn’t know . . . i didn’t, i didn’t know how to read till the sixth grade. i didn’t know how to read a word in english, and i loved english. i could still speak english fluently, i had a wide vocabulary, and i didn’t know how to read, and no one helped me either, even when i had difficulties and stuff like that, i had no help. shanit signals her continuing control of the narrative with the acknowledgement: “i’m skipping a bit,” indicating that her move to the painful childhood story is deliberate; as she is about to show, the roots of her present pedagogical principles are to be found there. stylistically, repetitions dominate the account, pointing to the emotional charge of the events (lieblich et al., 1998). the emotional tone suggests that this episode is central to shanit’s learning trajectory, as in the words of mcadams (2001), “emotion . . . help[s] to organize events as goal-based stories” (p. 109). here, the word most often repeated is the word no. the text is suffused with negativity, especially in connection with lack of knowledge, as illiteracy is presented as a wholly negative state, linked with feelings of helplessness and abandonment: “i didn’t know . . . i didn’t know . . . no one helped me . . . i had no help.” this situation of lack, ignorance and passivity ends dramatically “one day,” when shanit’s parents come to her aid. the description of this moment is, tellingly, immediately followed by an affirmation of shanit’s commitment to teaching: till one day my parents sat with me and gave me a kind of little course. and then they taught me the letters, and then i really ran with the english, from the sixth grade on i ran with the english, and then i really became prominent in english. but it’s really really in my soul, even now when i teach something it’s in my soul that the students will know, that they’ll enjoy themselves. english is really a school subject i love. the principal always asks me . . . if i want to teach another subject, and i told her no way, i want all my hours only in english, i’m not built to teach any other subject, it’s simply a subject i truly truly love. the moment in which aid is given is the turning point of shanit’s story. her awareness of its centrality in the timeline can be felt in her three repetitions of the time adverb then to describe its outcomes. her growing agency is accentuated with the repeated use of the active verb ran. these repetitions as well as the repeated use of intensifiers (really, truly) can again be a sign of heightened emotion (lieblich et al., 1998). shanit does not yet create a causal link between this memory and her present devotion to the teaching of english, but the juxtaposition adversity and redemption: learning and teaching in the language learning histories of two efl. . . 283 of the two is the first sign that for shanit, the memory is intimately connected with her present profession and self-identity. as this memory seemed a deeply significant one, during the interview i asked for more information and received a more detailed narrative which brought into sharper focus the process by which shanit first passively acquiesced and then rebelled against her illiteracy, taking charge of her own learning. the opening of this second account again reveals the close relationship between the past and present in shanit’s understanding of her story, now establishing a clear causal link between them: interviewer: how did it happen that you didn’t know how to read till the sixth grade? what happened there? shanit: the truth is that i blame, not blame – but i see it as the negligence of the teacher. because of that, because i didn’t know how to read it’s important to me . . . it was in my soul: every student in my care has to know how to read! no matter what, what price i have to pay . . . i’m not taking the responsibility that a student leaves the class without knowing how to read, because i know from my own experience that the third or fourth grade teacher overlooked me, you understand? now a kid of his own initiative isn’t going to start looking for people to teach him . . . as far as i was concerned, i didn’t know so i didn’t know, i continued like that another year and another year and another year and i guess my teacher overlooked me, and i, of my own initiative, of course a girl isn’t going to start looking for a way to learn to read. in this second, more detailed account, shanit draws a causal link between her two positions of vulnerable student and dedicated, empathic teacher, showing how the latter evolved from the former in a process which weaves together moral and emotional aspects. the strong emotion and equally strong self-control characteristic of her narrative are evident in her opening, as she replaces direct accusation (“blame”) with a more considered, professional-sounding criticism (“the negligence of the teacher”) probably in accordance with her current position as an education professional. shanit displays a strong sense of personal and professional responsibility throughout, and the “negligence” she describes offends her moral sensibility just as much as it has offended her feelings. the memory is then causally linked with her present day commitment to the literacy of her students: “because of that, because i didn’t know how to read it’s important to me,” and the sense of moral and, since she has become a teacher, professional outrage thus aids shanit in turning her personal humiliation into a springboard for transformation and redemption. it provides her with the moral system, which, as davies and harré say, “links and legitimates the choices that are being made” (1990, p. 59). the moral stand is accompanied by a deep emotional identification with her students: “i’m not taking the responsibility that a miri tashma baum 284 student leaves the class without knowing how to read, because i know from my own experience that the third or fourth grade teacher overlooked me, you understand?,” and the direct appeal heightens the emotional charge. this sense is then strengthened as she uses similar phrasing to describe her students’ quandary: “a kid of his own initiative isn’t going to start looking for people to teach him” and her own: “i, of my own initiative, a girl isn’t going to start looking for a way to learn to read.” at this point, shanit returns to the traumatic experience of ignorance, passivity and helplessness, which she describes as lasting from the third or fourth grade to the sixth, and provides valuable insight as to the self-positioning involved in the response to adverse educational experiences:” so as far as i was concerned i said ok, i don’t know how to read. so i got along like that till i reached the sixth grade." presenting the thoughts of her childhood self, shanit reveals that active self-positioning is involved even in accepting a position of helplessness and deficiency. here the child is accommodating herself to the situation by consciously adding the new information relayed to her by society to her ongoing understanding of her identity. this moment is brought as a direct quotation of inner speech: “ok, i don’t know how to read,” and the dramatization highlights its centrality: it is the moment in which inability is accepted as a given, as a quality of the self. the formulation also emphasizes the deliberateness of the positioning: perhaps since this is such a moment of difficulty, as the child feels required to accept into her identity a position which, as a lover of american culture, she feels is alien and painful to her, the conscious effort of accommodating it is stressed. it is thus described as a deliberate self-defining speech act of declaration: “i don’t know how to read,” an utterance which in itself brings about the new situation (crystal, 1997). the effect of this new positioning is devastating: shanit then indeed “gets along,” illiterate and helpless, till the sixth grade, and though she eventually rejects this position, the repeated return to this experience in the course of the interview suggests that it continues to haunt her, tarnishing her identity, as it were, even as she becomes a successful, proficient teacher. the pattern of descent culminates in what shanit experiences as extreme social degradation: her placement in a lower level group: and then in sixth grade we were divided into proficiency-based groups . . and i really really love to learn, so i couldn’t bear the fact that i was in group b because i couldn’t read, and i could speak better than everyone and had a better vocabulary than everyone. so i felt like on the one hand, i’m sitting in group b and, like, smarter than everyone, you feel unfulfilled and you give the teacher all the answers, and on the other hand, you feel that your place isn’t here, on the other hand, you want to get to group a and you don’t have the ability. adversity and redemption: learning and teaching in the language learning histories of two efl. . . 285 in this version of the story, it becomes clear that the reason for taking action is an identity crisis, which shanit can no longer “bear.” faulty pedagogical practices have created a situation in which shanit is officially positioned as a weak student, a positioning which she has also internalized, as we saw, with regards to literacy. now this positioning is given an official stamp of approval in her assignment to group b, which causes it to clash more clearly with shanit’s ongoing self-positioning as proficient oral english user, a positioning enabled by her adherence to anglophone popular culture. in this emotional passage, replete with intensifiers and repetitions (really, better than everyone, on the other hand), shanit describes her acute sense of being in the wrong place, yet unable to move to the right one. the crisis can be seen as social as well as psychological: knowledge of english has given her a superior position among her classmates, and this precious social capital is now endangered. the shift to the second person pronoun and the present tense in the final sentence subtly add to her argument. using you to stand in for the self, shanit is presenting her plight as one with which all reasonable people can identify (see labov, 2013, p. 41, on the self as generalized other) and one not limited to a particular instance in the past. she thus increases the importance and widens the relevance of her predicament, making it general rather than private and suggesting that she is also speaking from her current position as a morally-involved educator. at this point, the turning-point takes place: so that’s really what . . . gave me the “jumping of the way” to say to my parents, “dad, i want to learn letters.” he wrote me every letter with the sound, large letter, small letter, and we drew lines. i learnt to read. but many things i missed that i made up later. . . over the years, slowly, i learnt a bit myself. . . till i arrived where i arrived, thank god. as davis and harré (1990) note, the agency of the individual manifests itself in resolving contradictory positionings: “to act rationally, those contradictions . . . must be remedied, transcended, resolved or ignored. . . . the possibility of choice in a situation in which there are contradictory requirements provides people with the possibility of acting agentically” (p. 59). shanit here rejects one position and embraces another. she steers her self-identity away from the position of passive non-reader towards that of reader, with all the hard work which this entails, beginning with the first determined action of speaking to her father and actively asking for help, dramatized through direct quotation: "dad, i want to learn letters." shanit describes the results of this plea as a “jumping of the way,” and the choice of expression is significant. a jewish religious term, it refers to a magical, divinely-assisted shortening of a righteous person’s journey. as davies and harré (1990) note, “the words the speaker chooses inevitably contain miri tashma baum 286 images and metaphors which both assume and invoke the ways of being that the participants take themselves to be involved in” (p. 49). the metaphor is significant for shanit, appearing as it does at the turning point of her story. not only does it link with the earlier description of her then “running with the material,” forming a motif of learning as travelling a road, but it also lends to this journey a mystical, even religious tone, turning the study of english into a calling. shanit’s highlighting of this moment is part of her fashioning of an identity based on self-motivation, hard work, and a clear moral purpose. with the spiritual overtones she gives it, it becomes the cornerstone of her long process of ascent and redemption. as the interview draws to a close, it remains clear that moral indignation and an enduring sense of betrayal remain a part of shanit’s identity as an english teacher but also that overall her professional identity, rooted so deeply in her personal story of trial and victory, is confident, generative and self-fulfilled. bitterness is still clear when shanit returns a final time to the story of her childhood trauma, in a moment which wholly conflates the past and present: bottom line, i take the responsibility for the english. if in the third grade they don’t learn it from me, who will they learn it from? they’ll develop a gap. i have kids in the sixth grade who don’t know how to read, and i work with them the whole year, but how much can you work with them? . . . and i, like, look at the teacher, at the teacher who taught me in the third grade – where were you? look, you overlooked four or five kids here! [emphasis added]. so these four or five kids simply sit in my class and i have to bring them learning materials for the third grade, it’s it’s they’re just miserable. in the emphasized words, the incompetent teacher who neglected to teach shanit’s sixth-grade students when they were in the third grade has become one with the teacher who neglected to teach shanit herself when she was at that age. by protesting the injustice done to the overlooked children, shanit gives voice to her own childhood pain; by working with them devotedly, she confronts and helps heal that pain. it thus seems that due to her redemptive approach, and particularly her ability to transform her most difficult language learning memories into a springboard for success, shanit’s current professional identity is a happy one: i think i’m not like the other teachers. i simply go to work and i enjoy myself, i enjoy teaching. you know, in the third grade when they know how to read at the end of the year it’s like for me it’s like, like i feel as though they’re my children, and i’ve just taught them how to walk. shanit describes herself here, as elsewhere, as a successful, appreciated, fulfilled teacher. her sense of accomplishment may also include a socioeconomic adversity and redemption: learning and teaching in the language learning histories of two efl. . . 287 element: the school she teaches in caters to a population belonging to a much higher socioeconomic bracket than shanit’s, and her position of authority there may also involve the acquisition of social capital, in addition to her considerable professional satisfaction. describing her sense of achievement when her students finally master reading, shanit here uses a complex simile which tellingly reflects on her story. her reflexive positioning as a mother makes use of a typical image of powerfulness in female discourse (davies & harré, 1990) and fits shanit’s authoritative tone; it also links shanit with the image of the one good teacher she describes in her narrative: her father. in addition, the motif of learning as travelling appears here one final time. following the immobility of the years of illiteracy, shanit had managed to “jump the way” and close the gap, “running” with the english all the way to college; now, the redemptive process reaches completion as she teaches her own young students “to walk” this rewarding path. 3.4. “it affects everything”: tehila’s story tehila was 29 years old and unmarried at the time of the interview. originally from the same town as shanit, she was now living and working in a nearby town similar in size and socioeconomic bracket. her mother was a cleaner at the local council and her father unemployed; neither of them knew english. although still a student, she had been teaching english at the local high school for four years at the time of the interview and had recently been made the english coordinator at the school. like shanit, tehila’s opening statement sets a tone of confidence and self-fulfillment, but the journey towards english teaching seems less deliberate than shanit’s: i have to say that i love it very much. it’s not something i expected to do or thought about in my past, and i’m very pleased that i rolled into this field, and that i find myself there and fulfill my future there, thank god. to “roll” (lehitgalgel) here is a hebrew idiom suggesting unintentional movement, “going with the flow,” as it were. tehila uses it again, as she continues to explain how she found herself teaching english: when i was about 20, i flew to the us as an au-pair, before studying. i got stuck there for five years. i loved the community and the culture in general very much. i returned here to israel, and a relative who’s actually an english coordinator in a school asked me whether i could replace a teacher who was away on maternity leave . . . because there was a big shortage of teachers at that time. and i went in for three months . . . and from there i started rolling with it. . . a year later they already asked me to teach. i was in the middle of my degree in human resource management, so i decided i would first finish my degree, and then do retraining in english, and now i’m in retraining. miri tashma baum 288 tehila’s use of passive verbs (“i got stuck there”) and of formulations in which she is the recipient of the action (“a relative . . . asked me,” “they . . . asked me”) in order to describe the process by which she entered the profession she now deeply loves is quite striking. in fact the only agentic decision here is one opposed to this process: her decision to first complete her degree in human resource management. the reason for this may lie in tehila’s sensitivity to the interview context: perhaps she is conscious of the interviewer’s position as the head of an efl department, and this causes her to use an apologetic tone in explaining how she is already teaching when she does not yet have a teaching certificate. an alternative or additional reason can be lingering feelings of inadequacy, and the source of these gradually becomes clear. it is only following my request of tehila to look back and elaborate on the beginnings of her love for english that she tells the painful episode at the heart of her story: i didn’t always love the school subject of english, i have to say, and because this is anonymous i feel more confidence to say, but when i was in high school, they did a diagnosis and claimed i had dyslexia in english. this was proven wrong eventually. but because i really loved watching movies, listening to songs and translating, i had a very wide vocabulary, but they never sat down and taught me reading properly. so as far as they were concerned then, that was considered dyslexia. it’s just that in my case it was a gap in knowing how to read and write. that’s why today i understand the struggling students that i teach better. and then i loved the language, i just didn’t love the studying in class, so you can divide it into two fields. as in shanit’s interview, the transition marker but opens the description of the difficult episode, then followed by two more buts intensifying the sense of jarring and contradiction. the experience described is also similar to shanit’s: tehila reveals the dissonance between the education system’s positioning of her as a weak student in english, based on her illiteracy, and her self-positioning as knower and lover of oral english. even as she reveals this, tehila impressively brings the two back together, creating a causal link by which she establishes the childhood distress as the springboard to her current success as a teacher of weaker students: “that’s why today i understand the struggling students that i teach better.” this is not to say, however, that the revelation is an easy one. the anxiety it generates can be felt when tehila draws sudden attention to the interview context, saying that she has the “confidence” to tell the story only because she knows it will be published anonymously. possibly, she means by this that people who know her as a teacher will not discover the gap she is now exposing between her competent, positive professional self and her “faulty,” alienated childhood self. alternatively, she may be thinking that her report could be taken adversity and redemption: learning and teaching in the language learning histories of two efl. . . 289 as criticism of the school system by future readers, in which case the revelation of her identity may place her in an uncomfortable position with coworkers and superiors. a third option is that she is legitimizing her criticism by positioning herself as an anonymous campaigner for educational improvement rather than someone conducting a personal vendetta, in which case the shift to a less “personal” positioning is somewhat similar to shanit’s as she moved away from personal “blame” to the more professional-sounding judgment of “negligence.” whatever the cause, tehila is clearly indicating that the childhood self she is now revealing coexists uncomfortably with her social and professional position as english teacher, a lack of fit which requires the temporary removal of the latter (through maintaining anonymity), so that the former can appear. in this respect, the interview context is clearly liberating, allowing tehila to make known formerly hidden aspects of her complex, changing identity, and to address, rather than suppress, contradictory and painful elements. now tehila has to deal with the reality of illiteracy, which, like shanit, she initially accepts. interestingly, the pronouncers of the verdict of dyslexia, presumably the educational diagnostician, the school guidance counselor and the teachers involved, are referred to throughout the quoted passage above only as “they,” and the pronoun distances them and makes their exact identity vague but by no means less threatening. rather than individuals who can be approached, the educational authorities are positioned as a nameless, shapeless entity, negligent in performing its duties, on the one hand, and having immense power over the fate of children entrusted to its care, on the other. tehila indeed submits to “their” verdict, unquestioningly incorporating it into her self-identity: i really believed, i thought it was dyslexia, because i didn’t understand that it was only a gap, because when people, you know, experienced people come and conduct an organized diagnosis, so you rely more on what the experienced people tell you, and sometimes you don’t try to challenge yourself, but stay with their opinion. unlike shanit, tehila’s low point does not directly lead her to the turning point and the start of the redemptive process. faced by society's judgment in its most authoritative, legitimized form: "experienced people conducting an organized diagnosis,” and perhaps also due to her different family circumstances, as her parents, unlike shanit’s, cannot provide her with an alternative learning environment, tehila relinquishes all the agency she may have had in pursuing literacy. this is emphasized here in her choice of stative rather than dynamic verbs: she “believe[s]” in the verdict handed down by the school system, she “reli[es]” on its representatives, she “[doesn’t] understand” the truth and “stay[s] with their opinion.” interestingly, as in shanit’s narrative, the confession of helplessness is miri tashma baum 290 given in the second person you, with similar effect: the underlying suggestion is that this is the only reasonable response possible under the circumstances (labov, 2013). faced with overwhelming judgment, tehila ceases to “challenge [her]self” in this field, and reading seems to come to a dead end. under these conditions, the teenage tehila demonstrates her agency and flexibility in maintaining two distinct identity positions, clearly separating the hated school topic from the beloved anglophone culture. this separation is, in fact, an empowering, growth-enabling response. it allows tehila to keep up her motivation to learn english, focusing mostly on songs and largely avoiding reading, uncontaminated by her disabling school experience. the situation recalls norton’s (2014) insight that motivation and investment in classroom learning are not necessarily linked: “a student can be highly motivated, but if the language practices of the classroom make a learner unhappy or dissatisfied, the learner may resist participation” (p. 84) as well as her assertion that the learner may claim alternative, more rewarding identity positions from which to learn. tehila’s affiliation with the imagined community conjured up by american music and cinema offers her such an identity and a motivating vision: there was the dream of living in america . . . me and my friend, we were two friends together, we both really wanted to visit new york and see a performance by celine dion, and that was the dream, yes. we didn’t think of living there, but yes, that was the dream. dörnyei (2009, 2014a) speaks of vision as a key motivational force in sustaining the long-term effort of language learning, and here we find it as a central element in tehila’s english-loving identity and a stimulus to action. it influences the next step of her learning trajectory, the action which initiates the redemptive process in her story: her trip to america. the turning point in tehila’s narrative follows her momentous decision to visit the us, despite her illiteracy. there, in a positive, supportive environment, tehila develops new identity positions which give her the impetus to teach herself to read in english. she takes the job of hebrew-teaching au-pair with a jewish family in a big american city, later working with other families and in the jewish schools of the community, and stays there for five years. this period is described as very industrious and fulfilling, and the english-speakers—now no longer an imagined community but actual members of the local jewish community— as warm and supportive: “i have very very good friends there and families i worked with, and we all became a part of one family." in an environment in which her social superiors are no longer “they” but rather “family,” and physically removed from the educational system which had condemned her to passivity and helplessness, tehila begins the process of redemption as she decides to “challenge [her]self” and learn to read: adversity and redemption: learning and teaching in the language learning histories of two efl. . . 291 when i got there i faced the reading . . . i tried to challenge myself, that is, i would sit with the children doing homework, always in the beginning i would go to the safe place of hebrew, because they were jews, and sometimes i would say, let’s try and help in english too, although i wasn’t confident in that field. i also saw signs, i’d travel a lot, so i would take a map and see that i can actually get along with the reading, so in the beginning it wasn’t reading stories, it was more sentences and signs, but after that i started reading newspapers a bit, and i succeeded more with the reading . . . in this section of the interview, in which the passive roles tehila had tended to assign to herself are suddenly replaced with agentic ones (riessman, 2002), a number of elements seem to band together in motivating tehila, and all are linked to her changing position within the society she has entered. norton (2014) has shown that “the ways in which power is distributed in both formal and informal sites of language learning . . . and how it affects learners’ opportunities to negotiate relationships with target language speakers“ (p. 74) are central factors in determining the success of the language learning endeavor. although her work as an au-pair suggests subservience, tehila’s additional role as hebrew teacher to the children in her care gives her a position of some authority. beginning with “the safe place of hebrew,” where she receives credit for her abilities in her field of expertise, tehila gradually finds the courage to take on english from a position of teacher or helper rather than the inferior position of learner. as she concurrently becomes an independent traveler, in accordance with her childhood vision of visiting the country, reading becomes a tool for selffulfillment. she begins accumulating mastery experiences (bandura, 1997): “i would take a map and see that i can actually get along with the reading,” experiences which are the most influential source of self-efficacy (mills, 2014). thus, from a position of strength, fulfilling a childhood dream, positioned as language user rather than learner, and developing all-important self-efficacy beliefs, tehila finally achieves the remarkable feat of autonomously learning to read english: from signs to maps to newspapers to stories. it is, however, only upon returning to israel and beginning work as a teacher that the pain of tehila’s high school misdiagnosis fully turns into a springboard for success. we have seen how tehila’s adolescent experiences caused her to wholly separate the attractive media aspects of english from the hated school subject. she now describes her own weak students similarly, as lovers of american popular culture who are nonetheless totally alienated from the language in its school setting. her description of her pedagogical work with these students is tellingly concerned with bringing the two together: one thing i try and work on particularly hard . . . is just to love the subject. i mean, they usually build walls of frustration . . . for me just the fact that they understood miri tashma baum 292 that they can learn another language, and breaking down the walls [is important] . . . so i start with strategies which perhaps not all the teachers here accept . . . i show them on their iphone, on the computer, they bring sentences which they came across on the computer and i say look, it’s so useful . . . it’s a language that will help you, there are signs today in israel which are only in english . . . so if you want to advance yourself, you must start acquiring the tools to deal with english. i think this attitude makes them look at it a little differently . . . and then . . . the fact that they’re succeeding in managing with the english, already makes them want it. by leading these weak students to love the school subject of english, tehila seems to be healing the painful split she herself had endured as a schoolgirl. based on her own experiences, it seems, she positions the students as language users rather than learners, drawing their attention to the usefulness of the language for achieving goals relevant to them, and supplying them with mastery experiences which she knows will foster their self-efficacy. she also has particularly friendly ties with her students, later claiming that “because i’m comparatively young among the staff . . . i understand them . . . we have a very good relationship,” reminiscent of the friendliness which characterized the american setting in which she herself found her motivation for literacy. interestingly, one can also detect in tehila’s descriptions a sense of defiance towards other teachers: “so i start with strategies which perhaps not all the teachers here accept,” even though tehila herself is now one of them. the separation of herself from the group is reminiscent of shanit’s claim that she is the only teacher at her school who enjoys teaching. this is perhaps another remnant of difficult schooldays experience: a lasting discomfort regarding the possibility of being positioned as a “regular” teacher, one of those threatening, insensitive figures of educational authority referred to only as “they” in tehila’s account of high school, and a need to distance oneself, as a different kind of educator, from them. it is only towards the end of the interview, when i ask tehila whether there is anything she feels it is important to add, that she gives the most passionate and direct expression to the darker side of her difficult past experiences, namely the threat such experiences pose for the development of a healthy identity: it’s really important to bring the right teachers to the profession. because really i see students arriving in class very frustrated, and it’s not their fault, and i’m one of them. and it has an effect, it affects everything, both the attitude to english and even other subjects, so that you no longer – you lose your confidence in yourself. as also happened to shanit, identification with the students becomes total here, in a moment conflating the past and present. in what may be a slip of the tongue, tehila presents herself as one of her students: “and i’m one of them,” adversity and redemption: learning and teaching in the language learning histories of two efl. . . 293 so that the powerful pronouncement following this: “it affects everything . . . you lose your confidence in yourself” is about both herself and her students. the use of second person narrator here, you, suggests that this is also a general truth. english can clearly not be separated from other subjects of study, or indeed from one’s identity as a whole: poor teaching can result in losing “your confidence in yourself” as such. in tehila’s case, the passage proves that while she has clearly chosen the “redemptive” path, tehila is not unaware of the other path she could have taken; her negative experience, she says, could have led her to lose all belief in herself, a classic pattern of “contamination” to use mcadams’ term. the apologetic tone which we saw at the start of her interview, stressing her lack of agency in the process by which she ended up an english teacher, may indeed be, as i have suggested, a sign of a lingering sense of inadequacy. as it is, her full awareness of this danger makes tehila’s victory over this hurdle, her selfobtained mastery of english, and her current role as successful, growth-enabling teacher, all the more remarkable. 4. conclusion placed side-by-side, the two narratives are different in many of their details, but there are also clear thematic similarities in the narrators’ responses to their adverse schooldays experiences and in the redemptive process that followed. the myriad cognitive, affective, physical and social elements that form the self make each individual unique (mercer, 2014), and there are indeed many differences in the details of the two stories and in the personalities of their narrators, as they emerge from the narratives. shanit faced her low point in elementary school; tehila faced it in high school. shanit was placed in a low-level group; tehila was diagnosed with dyslexia. shanit could enlist her parents’ help; tehila, from a weaker socioeconomic background, found the support she needed only as a young adult working in the us. shanit teaches in a socioeconomically strong elementary school; tehila teaches in a socioeconomically weak high school. shanit seems to have been more determined than tehila in identifying and pursuing her goals; she speaks of “running” and “jumping the way,” while tehila “rolls into” her profession unintentionally. at the same time, there are striking thematic similarities between the two stories. both shanit and tehila link the past and present in their narratives, going back and forth between them. their past is a story of childhood/adolescence marked by the coexistence and eventual resolution of two identities: devotee of american popular culture on the one hand; illiterate, alienated student in the english classroom on the other. both shanit and tehila display flexibility in their self-positioning during this period as they manage to maintain identity positions enabling them to advance their oral english, via songs and films, even as the miri tashma baum 294 identity imposed upon them by the education system temporarily destroys their motivation for literacy. this ability allows them to sustain the motivation which eventually leads each of them to the turning point of her narrative and the pattern of redemption which follows, culminating in a present reality of committed and fulfilling english teaching. the causal links which shanit and tehila create between the past and present reveal how strongly their identities are tied to their chosen profession, and how their pedagogical work draws on some of their most intimate and difficult memories. for both students, teaching transforms these memories into a springboard for current success and self-fulfillment, notwithstanding a lingering sense of grievance and pain. even as we admire these compelling stories of difficulties overcome and hard-earned success, it is worth addressing two possible caveats. the first has to do with what bruner (1991) has called narrative’s “embeddedness in genre” (p. 7), the tendency of narratives to follow general culturally-determined plotlines. as mcadams (2006) shows, the redemptive pattern of rising from adversity to achievement and generativity is a typically american storyline, embedded in american cultural products. thus, the great influence of american culture and values on israel, and particularly on those israelis who have a strong attachment to this culture, could have influenced my students to adopt this pattern in their understanding and construction of their own life stories, in the episodes they chose for presentation and in the causal links they created. in other words, not only the content but the form itself of my students’ narratives could be imbued with american influence. however, if this is so, it does not make their self-portrait less authentic; what it means is that the american-born image of the rags-to-riches hero has become one of the many cultural elements influencing, and here empowering, their evolving selves. an additional social element possibly influencing the redemptive approach of the students is a more immediate contextual one: the contribution of the interview situation itself. as mcadams says, “stories are performed in the presence of certain audiences. different situations call for different kinds of stories” (mcadams et al., 2006, p. 6); riessman (2005) similarly claims that “audiences are implicated in the art of narrative performance” (p. 5). in the case of shanit and tehila’s interviews, it might be conjectured that the students’ knowledge that i, their interviewer, was the head of an english department may have influenced them to position themselves as particularly committed english teachers. i do not believe that the influence of this knowledge could have been very strong as i was not in a position of authority over these students or involved in the development of their careers. nevertheless, the interview situation may have had some influence on the self-portrayal, and if so, one can only accept it as one of the many factors affecting the formation of the narrative and the narrative self in this case. adversity and redemption: learning and teaching in the language learning histories of two efl. . . 295 finally, i would like to draw attention to what i believe to be two important pedagogical implications of the experiences narrated by these student-teachers. first, both stories speak of the importance of a warm, encouraging, enabling learning environment in fostering self-efficacy in discouraged learners. this environment is found in shanit’s “home schooling” in the first story and in tehila’s years with her adoptive american “family” in the second. a large part of the stories’ redemptive power lies in these scenes in which the acquisition of literacy suddenly becomes possible for the protagonists, constituting the turning point of their story, and in the final scenes in which they manage to recreate this environment in their classrooms, consciously breaking away from the “negligent” teaching which they themselves had endured. they thus remind us that a warm, supportive atmosphere is indispensable for successful teaching. second, the two stories demonstrate the link between learning motivation and empowering identity positions and, in particular, norton’s (2014) observation that attachment to an imagined community of target-language speakers can offer such positions, possibly circumventing less enabling learning environments. as we have seen, the motivating power of this attachment drives the two narrators, making them autonomous learners par excellence as regards vocabulary acquisition, listening and oral skills. in connection with this, one vital insight to be drawn from the students’ accounts has to do with the importance of acknowledging such learners’ desire for cultural connection with the other, a desire attested to in other studies as well (kramsch, 2009; takahashi, 2013; tashma baum, 2014). in view of the instrumentalist and pragmatic focus in much current teaching of english as a foreign language (block & cameron, 2002; phipps, 2010; ros i solé & fenoulhet, 2013), i believe that developing teaching methods which would combine warmth and encouragement with intellectual stimulation geared to the dreams and desires of learners is the only adequate response to the difficult memories of shanit and tehila. too often an artificial, deficient instructional setting, the efl classroom could thus become, as kramsch (2009) has put it, “a symbolic multilingual environment, where alternative realities can be explored and reflected upon” (p. 210), a space inviting and incorporating the expression of the student’s manifold identity-positions. i believe that further research should be conducted into ways in which classroom teaching can successfully achieve this, both in terms of the encouragement of teachers’ sensitivity to their students’ complex identities and in the development of engaging learning materials responding to and enabling their expression (dörnyei, 2009; ibrahim, 1999; kramsch, 2009; phipps, 2010; ros i solé & fenoulhet, 2013; 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(2013). another language is another soul. language and intercultural communication, 13(3), 298-309. doi: 10.1080/14708477.2013.804534 459 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (3). 2022. 459-481 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.3.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt language learners’ emotion regulation and enjoyment in an online collaborative writing program zhipeng zhang taiyuan normal university, shanxi, china western sydney university, sydney, australia https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5783-5648 zhipeng.zhang@tynu.edu.cn xuesong (andy) gao university of new south wales, sydney, australia https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3426-8721 xuesong.gao@unsw.edu.au ting liu university of new south wales, sydney, australia https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3452-1838 ting.liu1@student.unsw.edu.au chwee beng lee western sydney university, sydney, australia https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3419-5283 chwee.lee@westernsydney.edu.au abstract collaborative learning in online contexts is emotionally challenging for language learners. to achieve successful learning outcomes, language learners need to regulate their emotions and sustain positive emotions during the collaborative learning process. this study investigated language learners’ emotion regulation and enjoyment, the most extensively researched positive emotion in foreign language learning, in an online collaborative english learning environment. in the study, we collected data by surveying 336 chinese zhipeng zhang, xuesong (andy) gao, ting liu, chwee beng lee 460 students majoring in english who collaboratively completed a series of english language writing tasks in 108 online groups facilitated by a social media app (wechat). principal component analysis revealed two primary types of emotion regulation: peer regulation and group regulation. the analysis also revealed one factor underpinning enjoyment: enjoyment of online collaboration. correlation analysis showed medium and positive relationships between peer regulation, group regulation, and enjoyment of online collaboration. structural equation modeling analysis further found that group regulation exerted a medium-sized direct effect on enjoyment of online collaboration. peer regulation affected enjoyment of online collaboration moderately and indirectly via group regulation. the theoretical and pedagogical implications of the findings can help to optimize face-to-face and online collaborative language learning activities. keywords: emotion regulation; foreign language enjoyment; online collaborative learning; foreign language learners 1. introduction learning a foreign language (fl) is not only a cognitive process but also an emotional one (swain, 2013). positive emotions help fl learners explore learning opportunities and take risks in unfamiliar cultural and linguistic contexts, which helps to develop their language competence (jiang & dewaele, 2019). in fl learning, enjoyment is one of the most prevalent positive emotions experienced by learners (jiang & dewaele, 2019; li et al., 2018; piniel & albert, 2018). recent studies uncovered a range of learner-internal (e.g., age, education level, and fl proficiency level) and learner-external (e.g., teachers’ friendliness and classmates’ support) variables that influence enjoyment (dewaele & macintyre, 2014; dewaele et al., 2019). however, these studies were classroom-based, even though one of the primary aims of fl learning is to communicate with others outside the classroom. in the modern era, learning is highly interactive, collaborative, and technologically enhanced (järvenoja et al., 2015). online collaborative learning is effective for learners’ fl development (kukulska-hulme & viberg, 2018). however, as yoshida (2020) indicated, few studies have explored how language learners’ emotions unfold and develop during online collaboration. in online collaborative learning, positive emotions such as enjoyment are needed to maintain the productive co-construction of language knowledge (poehner & swain, 2016). given that emotions may exhibit different patterns (e.g., factor/conceptual structure) across different language learning contexts (dewaele & macintyre, 2016; li et al., 2018), more studies are needed to explore the unique pattern of positive emotions, especially enjoyment, in the specific context of online collaborative learning. moreover, emotions are not a product of the mind but are also language learners’ emotion regulation and enjoyment in an online collaborative writing program 461 regulated and constructed from interpersonal interactions (swain, 2013). in an online setting, a positive emotional climate is more difficult to achieve because nonverbal emotional cues (e.g., facial expressions) that are abundant in face-to-face interactions are usually absent (dunlap et al., 2016). thus, learners may need to spend more time and energy regulating their emotions during online collaborative activities than they would in face-to-face interactions to be emotionally satisfied. to understand the emotional aspect of online collaborative language learning, the present study investigated the primary types of emotion regulation, the unique factor structure of enjoyment, and how different types of emotion regulation interacted to increase enjoyment among english as a foreign language (efl) learners who completed a series of online english writing tasks in collaboration at a chinese university. in the coming sections, we review relevant studies on emotion regulation and fl enjoyment. 2. literature review 2.1. emotion regulation emotion regulation refers to the processes involved in recognizing, understanding, and managing one’s emotions, including modulating, preventing, or inducing them for action and goal achievement (pekrun, 2006; von scheve, 2012). emotion regulation plays an important role in the self-regulated learning process because it monitors, changes, modifies, and maintains the valence, duration, and intensity of learners’ emotions (boekaerts, 2011). such regulation often leads to the growth of positive emotions and the reduction of negative emotions in learning, which supports learners’ academic achievement and well-being (pekrun, 2006). emotion regulation has been subject to numerous empirical investigations from an intrapersonal perspective of self-regulation (e.g., boekaerts, 2011; gross, 1998). however, there have recently been calls to incorporate an interpersonal perspective on emotion regulation in contexts such as face-to-face collaborative learning (järvenoja et al., 2015; järvenoja et al., 2013). for example, using the adaptive instrument for regulation of emotions, a scale developed by järvenoja et al. (2013) to measure emotion regulation processes, järvenoja and järvelä (2009) explored how emotions were regulated to cope with challenging situations. they examined 63 teacher education students in finland who studied in groups of three to five during three collaborative learning tasks. the results suggested that, when students worked collaboratively, they assisted each other’s regulation (co-regulation) and shared their regulatory efforts with others (socially shared regulation) while regulating themselves (self-regulation). näykki et al. (2014) further explored the relationships between emotion regulation and zhipeng zhang, xuesong (andy) gao, ting liu, chwee beng lee 462 emotional challenges by combining video observation data and video-stimulated recall interview data collected from collaborative learning processes of 22 students majoring in education in finland. this study revealed that, in the face of socioemotional challenges that disrupted a group’s positive climate, insufficient shared efforts within the group to regulate emotions could undermine group members’ enjoyment and engagement in collaborative learning. rogat and adams-wiggins (2015) examined the interrelations between regulatory processes and socioemotional interactions through observations of videotaped collaboration in two four-member groups of middle school students (n = 8) in the united states. results indicated that facilitative other-directed regulation, such as being inclusive of others’ ideas, contributed to a balanced regulation among group members and fostered positive social interactions. based on the videorecorded data gathered from 62 teacher education students in finland who collaborated in groups during a mathematics course, järvenoja et al. (2019) revealed how students employed strategies to regulate their emotions at the group level. a variety of regulatory strategies, including encouragement, awareness increasing, social reinforcement, and task structuring, were adopted by learners at the group level to ease the tension caused by challenges and create a positive environment for knowledge co-construction. similarly, mänty et al. (2020) asserted that group-level regulation could effectively shift a group’s emotional atmosphere from negative to positive. the data were collected using video recordings of collaborative activities and an emotion self-report tool among 37 primary school students in finland. emotion regulation in face-to-face collaborative activities was found to function beyond self-regulated mechanisms, operating to achieve and maintain a positive emotional climate that supported effective group learning (hadwin et al., 2018; järvenoja et al., 2015). researchers also paid attention to emotion regulation in language learning. using a scenario-based questionnaire filled out by 133 english major learners in poland, bielak and mystkowska-wiertelak (2020a) identified that language learners up-regulate positive and down-regulate negative emotions by implementing specific strategies, such as cognitive change, situation modification, attention deployment, and response change. importantly, the above study focused on language learners’ emotion regulation in the classroom language learning context. research on emotion regulation in online collaborative language learning has been limited (järvelä et al., 2015). the lack of non-verbal behaviors and relational cues, such as facial expressions and the use of hands, in online collaborative learning makes it more difficult to establish a positive atmosphere during interactions than in face-to-face settings (dunlap et al., 2016). emotion regulation is context-bound and situated in specific learning situations (järvenoja et al., 2015). therefore, a different pattern of emotion regulation may language learners’ emotion regulation and enjoyment in an online collaborative writing program 463 arise in online collaborative learning to sustain a favorable emotional climate for productive online collaborative language learning. to build on these considerations, this study aims to identify the types of emotion regulation that emerge and how these types of emotion regulation affect enjoyment during online collaborative language learning. 2.2. foreign language enjoyment enjoyment is a complex positive emotion that incorporates various dimensions in addition to a pleasurable feeling, such as “an intellectual focus, heightened attention, and optimal challenge” (boudreau et al., 2018). in other words, enjoyment refers to a sense of novelty or accomplishment from pushing oneself to earn an unexpected achievement in the face of challenging tasks, such as learning (csikszentmihalyi, 2008). csikszentmihalyi (2000) perceived enjoyment as a key component of the flow experience that enhanced learners’ engagement in learning activities. based on fredrickson’s (2003) broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, macintyre and gregersen (2012) argued that positive emotions like enjoyment could broaden learners’ perspectives and assist them in effectively absorbing an fl. in addition, enjoyment helps to reduce the lingering effect of negative emotions, promoting long-term resilience and well-being in the future (li et al., 2018). an increasing number of studies confirmed the positive effect of language learning enjoyment on learners’ willingness to communicate (dewaele & dewaele, 2018; khajavy et al., 2018), language learning grit (pawlak, csizér, et al., 2022), language motivation (pawlak, zarrinabadi, et al., 2022), language fluency (bielak, 2022), language performance (dewaele & alfawzan, 2018; saito et al., 2018), and language achievement (jin & zhang, 2018; li et al., 2019) in various contexts. dewaele and macintyre (2014) were the first to develop a 21-item fl enjoyment scale. they used the enjoyment scale to examine the potential variables influencing fl enjoyment of 1746 language learners from all around the world in classroom learning. their results suggested that learners who were older, multilingual, more educated, and more proficient in the target languages tended to experience more enjoyment than those with the opposite qualities. based on the principal component analysis of the same dataset (n = 1746), dewaele and macintyre (2016) modified the original 21-item scale into a 14item version and identified a two-factor structure of fl enjoyment: fl enjoyment – social and fl enjoyment – private. these two factors showed that the social atmosphere of the language classroom and learners’ private thoughts influenced enjoyment. via a series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of the scale data gathered from 2078 high school learners in china, li et al. (2018) further modified the 14-item scale into an 11-item version in the chinese efl context. zhipeng zhang, xuesong (andy) gao, ting liu, chwee beng lee 464 in findings that differed from the two-factor structure in the study of dewaele and macintyre (2016), a three-factor structure was confirmed by li et al. (2018) in the 11-item version, that is, fl enjoyment – private, fl enjoyment – teacher, and fl enjoyment – atmosphere. the results of such studies indicated that the factor structure of enjoyment might differ depending on the context in which the construct is investigated (dewaele & macintyre, 2016). however, these studies focused narrowly on traditional classroom language learning settings (e.g., dewaele & macintyre, 2014; li et al., 2018). few investigations of enjoyment have been performed in an online collaborative language learning environment, where knowledge and emotion are built up through group interaction facilitated by online technology (bakhtiar et al., 2018). enjoyment varies across different language learning situations (dewaele & macintyre, 2016; piniel & albert, 2018). therefore, the above factor structures of enjoyment identified in classroom learning may not fit in online collaborative learning. as a result, it is necessary to examine the factor structure of enjoyment in the present study. moreover, emotions are not private (intrapsychic) but are constructed or regulated interpersonally through interactions (poehner & swain, 2016; swain, 2013). this could also be the case for enjoyment. although the studies reviewed above identified numerous learner-internal (e.g., age and educational level) and learner-external variables (e.g., teacher and social atmosphere) that influence enjoyment, none of them investigated how learners regulated their emotions to experience enjoyment in interactions. this has motivated us to take a regulative perspective to further investigate language learners’ enjoyment during online collaboration. specifically, the present study addresses the following research questions: 1. what are the major types of emotion regulation, and what is the factor structure of enjoyment of chinese english-major students during an online collaborative efl writing program? (rq1) 2. what are the relationships between different types of emotion regulation and enjoyment during the program? (rq2) 3. in what ways do the participants enact different types of emotion regulation to increase their enjoyment during the program? (rq3) 3. method 3.1. participants and context the participants were 336 second-year english majors (310 females, 26 males) at a provincial comprehensive university in northern china. their ages ranged from 18 to 22, with a mean age of 19.72 years (sd = .89). they were all chinese language learners’ emotion regulation and enjoyment in an online collaborative writing program 465 l1 users and studied english as their only fl from seven to ten years. their english proficiency ranged from lower intermediate and intermediate to higher intermediate based on their final grades in the previous semester’s english proficiency exam (m = 73.91 out of 100; sd = 11.01). their english writing ability was also between lower intermediate and higher intermediate based on their selfperceptions on the 5-point likert scale (m = 3.14; sd = .86). by majoring in english, participants regularly took various english language courses (e.g., writing and reading) and content courses (e.g., applied linguistics and literature of english-speaking countries) in the classroom. participants, as sophomores, were required to attend a semester-long extracurricular program consisting of a series of online collaborative english writing activities. the program was exam-oriented, aiming to help learners prepare for the test for english majors band 4 (tem4), a national english language proficiency test mandatory for second-year english majors in china. during a semester (18 teaching weeks in total), participants worked on about ten possible writing tasks of tem4 in three-to-four-member online groups. a total of 108 online groups were formed randomly by participants using wechat, a popular social communication app where users can share messages, photos, and videos free of charge (zou et al., 2018). on wechat, teachers posted writing tasks and collected groups’ assignments on approximately a weekly or fortnightly basis. the writing tasks usually required participants to compose essays of at least 200 words based on a 200word piece of reading material. the writing topics differed weekly or fortnightly, including the pros and cons of artificial intelligence, the protection of local culture, the problems of media use, and others. within wechat groups, learners were encouraged to freely organize online meetings, search for online resources together, exchange thoughts, and collaboratively complete writing tasks assigned by teachers before the due date. the duration of online meetings on wechat differed for most of the groups and was between 20 and 50 mins per week. the ten collaborative english writing assignments together accounted for 30% of learners’ final grades in the english writing course. 3.2. instruments a composite questionnaire that contained 22 5-point likert items in total was used in this study. it began with a sociodemographic section (e.g., age, gender) followed by two well-established scales: the adaptive instrument for regulation of emotions (aire) (järvenoja et al., 2013) and the foreign language enjoyment scale (fles) (jiang & dewaele, 2019). the translation and back translation of the questionnaire were conducted by the first author and another chinese-english bilingual researcher. twelve second-year english major students at the same university were invited to zhipeng zhang, xuesong (andy) gao, ting liu, chwee beng lee 466 help assess whether the participants would potentially misunderstand the items. based on their comments, further revisions were made before the final version of the questionnaire was posted online using qualtrics, an online survey tool. in addition to the translated chinese version, the original english version was also provided in qualtrics, and participants could choose which version they wished to complete. the two scales are described in more detail in the subsections below. 3.2.1. adaptive instrument for regulation of emotions (järvenoja et al., 2013) the aire scale is grounded in self-regulated and socially regulated learning theory and is used to capture learners’ emotion regulation processes in collaborative learning activities (järvenoja et al., 2013). the scale includes 12 5-point likert items reflecting different types of emotion regulation, such as self-, co-, and socially shared regulation, which learners may enact during their collaborative learning. example items are: “i convinced myself that it could be a good thing to have differences in the group,” “i told the others that we needed to accept that some people did have differences,” and “as a group, we accepted the differences within the group.” the 5-point response options for the 12 items range from 1 (“did not happen at all”) to 5 (“did happen a lot”). a higher score indicates more frequent use of item-related regulation activities. high internal reliability of the scale (cronbach’s ɑ value = .85 and .86) was reported by järvenoja et al. (2013) at two measurement points, two weeks apart, in a face-to-face collaborative learning context. 3.2.2. foreign language enjoyment scale (jiang & dewaele, 2019) jiang and dewaele’s (2019) fles, which was used to measure enjoyment in the present study, is a modified version of the original foreign language enjoyment scale developed by dewaele and macintyre (2014) using 1746 fl learners worldwide. the scale includes ten items reflecting both social and private factors of enjoyment identified in dewaele and macintyre (2016). example items are: “it was cool to know english as a foreign language” and “there was a good atmosphere.” all ten items are scored on a 5-point likert style scale ranging from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 5 (“strongly agree”), with the higher score indicating a higher level of enjoyment. in the context of a chinese university, jiang and dewaele (2019) reported that the scale displayed high internal reliability (cronbach’s ɑ value = .889). 3.3. data collection before collecting data, we obtained permission from the university to conduct the research. then, three english language teachers briefly introduced the research language learners’ emotion regulation and enjoyment in an online collaborative writing program 467 purpose to potential participants and invited them to participate during regular class time. to reduce students’ potential concerns that participation in the research might impact their course grades, the teachers explained that the data were collected solely for research purposes and were unrelated to students’ course scores. we sent consent forms via email to participants who showed interest in the research project to obtain their formal approval and consent. data collection began in early january 2020 after the participants had completed all ten online collaborative english writing tasks in the winter semester of the 20192020 academic year. first, two scales in the questionnaire, aire and fles, were pilot tested with 37 students who were not included in the main study but were similar to the participants in terms of age, grade, major, and language proficiency. for aire, analysis of internal reliability indicated that item 2 “i tried to act more flexible, open, and tolerant” needed to be deleted due to a low corrected item-total correlation (r = .13). after this item deletion, the resulting 11item aire achieved a cronbach’s ɑ value of .923 in the pilot test and .937 in the subsequent main study. for fles, all ten items exhibited satisfactory correlations (r > .30) with the scale (field, 2013). cronbach’s ɑ value of fles was .917 in the pilot test and .942 in the subsequent main study. following the pilot test, a total of 345 questionnaires were distributed and completed online. nine cases with missing values were deleted, which left 336 participants in the database. 3.4. data analysis the data analysis proceeded in three steps. to investigate the major types of emotion regulation and the factor structure of enjoyment (rq1), principal component analysis was first performed using spss 27 based on the data collected from 336 participants. then, pearson correlation analysis was conducted to offer an initial glimpse into the relations across different types of emotion regulation and enjoyment (rq2). based on plonsky and oswald’s (2014) recommendations, the strength of the correlation coefficients (r) was interpreted as small (r = .25), medium (r = .40), and large (r = .60). finally, structural equation modeling (sem) was further conducted using amos 26 to explore how different types of emotion regulation directly and indirectly affected enjoyment in online collaboration (rq3). in the sem analysis, multiple fit indices were considered to assess three optional models. these were the ratio of chi-square to degree of freedom (χ2 / df), the comparative fit index (cfi), the tucker–lewis index (tli), the root mean square error of approximation (rmsea), and the standardized root mean square residual (srmr). good fit thresholds for these indices are χ2 / df < 3.00, cfi > 0.90, tli > 0.90, rmsea < 0.08, and srmr < 0.08 (dagnall et al., 2018; wan et al., 2021). for χ2 / df, rmsea, and srmr, the smaller value is assumed to be zhipeng zhang, xuesong (andy) gao, ting liu, chwee beng lee 468 the better model fit. for cfi and tli, the greater value represents the better model fit. it should also be noted that, following plonsky and oswald (2014), the strength of the determination coefficients (r2) in the present study was considered to be small (r2 = .0625), medium (r2 = .16), and large (r2 = .36). 4. results 4.1. major types of emotion regulation and factor structure of enjoyment to identify the appropriateness of the data for efa, we first tested two basic assumptions of factor analysis: sampling adequacy and multivariate normality (lattin et al., 2003). the kmo value of the data (n = 336) was .921, which was above the minimum acceptable level (.600), indicating that the sampling was sufficient (george & mallery, 2019). the bartlett’s test of sphericity obtained a value of c2 (210) = 5978.093, which was significant at the p < .001 level, indicating that the data were multivariate normal and the correlations between the items were sufficient for factor analysis (george & mallery, 2019). the subsequent principal component analysis extracted three factors with eigenvalues over kaiser’s criterion of 1, explaining 76.88% of the total variance. to maximize the items’ factor loadings for a clearer interpretation of the extraction results, varimax rotation was run to present the pattern of loadings (wipulanusat et al., 2017). after factor rotation, we retained three factors that included items with factor loadings of 0.5 or greater, as 0.5 was perceived as a cut-off value indicating items’ significant interpretability of the related factor (wipulanusat et al., 2017). table 1 shows the items and their factor loadings related to each factor. as shown in table 1, we named the factors to correspond with the items included in each factor. factor 1 included items 3, 4, 5, 7, and 8. with “i” and “others” being the keywords, all these items were associated with the regulatory acts directed by one person toward other peers in groups, such as “i tried to explain to others that we needed to understand the differences in the group.” therefore, factor 1 was labeled peer regulation. factor 2 contained items 9, 10, 11, and 12. starting with “as a group” and “we,” these items reflected the joint activities made by the group as a whole in supporting emotion regulation. therefore, factor 2 was named group regulation. factors 1 and 2 represented two major types of emotion regulation participants enacted during online collaborative language learning. factor 3 received high positive loadings from items 13, 17, 19, 20, 21, and 22, highlighting the enjoyable atmosphere for online collaborative learning; for instance, “there was a good atmosphere” and “we laughed a lot in groups.” consequently, factor 3 was named enjoyment of online collaboration. language learners’ emotion regulation and enjoyment in an online collaborative writing program 469 table 1 the factor items and their loadings items factor loadings factor 1 3. i told the others that we needed to accept that some people did have differences. .894 7. i tried to explain to others that we needed to understand the differences in the group. .892 5. i told the others we needed to be more flexible in order to find a compromise/solution to differences and conflicts between us. .879 8. i tried to convince someone that the others were not simply trying to be difficult, and we could sort out the problem. .846 4. i tried to understand that the others were not simply trying to be difficult, but there were some differences between us. .781 factor 2 9. as a group, we understood that we had to understand and reconcile our differences, being open and accepting diversity within the group. .837 12. as a group, we accepted the differences within the group. .828 10. as a group, we solved our problems by compromising to accommodate others’ differences. .777 11. as a group, we decided that we had to sort out problems together in order to carry on working. .624 factor 3 21. there was a good atmosphere. .910 17. it was a positive environment. .899 22. we laughed a lot in groups. .841 19. it was fun. .837 20. my peers in groups were nice. .822 13. i didn’t get bored. .822 note. the item numbers show the place where the items are in the original composite questionnaire. 4.2. correlations between peer regulation, group regulation, and enjoyment of online collaboration pearson correlation analysis was conducted among peer regulation, group regulation, and enjoyment of online collaboration to investigate relationships among these constructs. as displayed in table 2, all of them were positively and significantly correlated with each other (ranging from r = .255 to .569; p < .001). according to plonsky and oswald (2014), these results represent medium effect sizes, as the variance accounted for ranged from 6.5% to 32.3%. the correlation between peer regulation and group regulation was found to be the strongest (r = .569, representing a medium effect size, with 32.4% of the variance being explained). both peer regulation and group regulation were positively linked to enjoyment of online collaboration. however, compared with peer regulation (r = .255, representing a medium effect size, with 6.5% of the variance being explained), group regulation (r = .492, representing a medium effect size, with 24.2% of the variance being explained) exhibited a stronger relationship with enjoyment of online collaboration. zhipeng zhang, xuesong (andy) gao, ting liu, chwee beng lee 470 table 2 correlations between peer regulation, group regulation, and enjoyment of online collaboration factor group regulation peer regulation eoc group regulation 1.000 peer regulation .569*** 1.000 eoc .492*** .255*** 1.000 note. eoc = enjoyment of online collaboration; ***p < .001. 4.3. effects of peer regulation and group regulation on the enjoyment of online collaboration three models, depicted in figure 1, were established to investigate how peer and group regulation impacted enjoyment of online collaboration. as shown in table 3, model 3 was the best among the three models, as the fit indicators for this model (χ2 / df = 2.886; cfi = .960; tli = .952; srmr = .043; rmsea = .075) were better generated than those for model 1 (χ2 / df = 2.916; cfi = .960; tli = .951; srmr = .043; rmsea = .076) and model 2 (χ2 / df = 3.498; cfi = .947; tli = .937; srmr = .115; rmsea = .086). the parameters of model 3 are presented in table 4. as shown in table 4, peer regulation predicted group regulation significantly and positively (b = .567; p < .001), explaining 32.1% of its variance (effect size was medium). in addition, group regulation predicted enjoyment of online collaboration in a positive and significant way (b = .490; p < .001), explaining 24% of its variance (effect size was medium). further, peer regulation exhibited an indirect effect on enjoyment of online collaboration. the results suggested there was a mediating effect of group regulation between peer regulation and enjoyment of online collaboration. model 1 language learners’ emotion regulation and enjoyment in an online collaborative writing program 471 model 2 model 3 figure 1 three models to be tested a bootstrapping procedure was conducted to evaluate the significance of peer regulation’s indirect effect on enjoyment of online collaboration. as shown in table 5, with 95% confidence intervals, neither bias-corrected (.209 ~ .360) nor percentile confidence intervals (.205 ~ .359) included zero. this demonstrates that peer regulation exerted a significant indirect effect (du prel et al., 2009) on enjoyment of online collaboration. the standardized indirect effect coefficient of peer regulation for enjoyment of online collaboration was .278, signaling a medium effect size by explaining 7.7% of the variance. zhipeng zhang, xuesong (andy) gao, ting liu, chwee beng lee 472 table 3 model fit indicators for three models model label χ2 df χ2 / df cfi tli srmr rmsea model 1 253.654 87 2.916 .960 .951 .043 .076 model 2 307.849 88 3.498 .947 .937 .115 .086 model 3 235.966 88 2.886 .960 .952 .043 .075 note. χ2 = chi-square; df = degree of freedom; cfi = comparative fit index; tli = tucker–lewis index; srmr = standardized root mean square residua; rmsea = root mean square error of approximation. table 4 parameters for model 3 independent variables dependent variables unstd. path coefficients se z p std. path coefficients r2 peer regulation group regulation .460 .044 10.351 *** .567 .321 group regulation eoc .400 .047 8.359 *** .490 .240 note. eoc = enjoyment of online collaboration; se = standard error; *** p < .001. table 5 the indirect effect of peer regulation on enjoyment of online collaboration path unstd. estimate product of coefficients std. estimate bootstrap 2000 times 95% confidence interval bias-corrected percentile se z bc/pc p lower upper lower upper ie .184 .031 5.935 .278 ***/*** .209 .360 .205 .359 note. ie = the indirect path of peer regulation to enjoyment of online collaboration; se = standard error; *** p < .001. 5. discussion the purpose of rq1 was to identify the primary types of emotion regulation and the unique factor structure underpinning enjoyment in the online collaborative efl writing of chinese students majoring in english. through principal component analysis, this study identified two major types of emotion regulation in online collaborative language learning: peer regulation and group regulation. in line with the two types of emotion regulation, co-regulation and socially shared regulation, defined in previous studies (järvenoja & järvelä, 2009; järvenoja et al., 2019; järvenoja et al., 2013), the findings of the present study indicate that learners’ emotion regulation operates at individual and group levels in a collaborative learning context. peer regulation, the identified factor 1 of this study, was similar to co-regulation because it reflected individual learners’ attempts to affect others or their inclination to be affected by others. group regulation was equivalent to socially shared regulation, as they contained the same items stressing the joint regulatory efforts of the group as an entity. however, selfregulation, a traditional type of emotion regulation järvenoja and järvelä (2009) observed in face-to-face collaborative settings, was not identified as a major type of emotion regulation in the online collaborative setting examined in this language learners’ emotion regulation and enjoyment in an online collaborative writing program 473 study. this difference might have occurred because the implementation of emotion regulation depends on the situational context (hadwin et al., 2018; järvenoja et al., 2015). due to the reduction of non-verbal cues, such as facial expressions and physical behaviors in online collaboration, learners might tend to spend more time and energy than they would in face-to-face situations regulating each other’s emotional states and the group work instead of their own emotions (van der meijden & veenman, 2005). further, both peer regulation and group regulation contained items that reflected learners’ adoption of emotion regulation strategies originally used for selfregulation in previous studies (e.g., bielak & mystkowska-wiertelak, 2020a; gross, 1998). for example, cognitive change, an emotion regulation strategy to reassess the personal meanings of emotion-inducing situations, could be found in learners’ acceptance of individual differences in item 7 (“i tried to explain to others that we needed to understand the differences in the group”) and item 12 (“as a group, we accepted the differences within the group”). situation modification, which entails the alteration of emotionally-charged situations, was also notable in learners’ modification of the way they collaborate in item 5 (“i told the others we needed to be more flexible in order to find a compromise/solution to differences and conflicts between us”) and item 11 (“as a group, we decided that we had to sort out problems together in order to carry on working”). this result corroborates the previous finding that learners may enact various strategies originally developed to regulate themselves, such as change of cognitions and modification of the situation, to regulate peers’ emotions and the group’s emotional climate in a collaborative learning context (bakhtiar et al., 2018; järvenoja et al., 2019). enjoyment of online collaboration, the enjoyment-related factor identified in this study, corresponded to fl enjoyment–social (dewaele & macintyre, 2016) and fl enjoyment–atmosphere (li et al., 2018) in previous studies conducted in classroom learning contexts. all these factors focused on the positive learning climate built up by interactions among learners. however, enjoyment of online collaboration specified the online collaborative setting of this study where the socioemotional atmosphere was strongly present (linnenbrink-garcia & pekrun, 2011). the identification of this factor indicates that the enjoyment learners experienced during online collaboration was mostly linked to the social and emotional climate within their group. rq2 concerned the relationships between peer regulation, group regulation, and enjoyment of online collaboration. the pearson correlation analysis revealed medium positive correlations among these constructs. the results imply potentially reciprocal relations among two major types of emotion regulation and enjoyment. learners’ enjoyment in online collaboration depended on not only their engagement in peer and group regulation but also perhaps the interactions between these two types of emotion regulation. in line with previous studies (bakhtiar et al., 2018; zhipeng zhang, xuesong (andy) gao, ting liu, chwee beng lee 474 järvenoja et al., 2019), this finding suggests that different types of emotion regulation, such as peer and group regulation, often emerge simultaneously and interact with each other to construct a positive social climate in groups. rq3 pertained to direct and indirect influences of peer regulation and group regulation on enjoyment of online collaboration. the sem analysis demonstrated that group regulation directly and positively affected enjoyment of online collaboration. the effect size was medium. this result strengthens the previous finding that group regulation is essential to creating and maintaining a positive group climate during collaboration (mänty et al., 2020). facing socioemotional challenges, such as relational and communication problems, is a natural part of collaboration process (järvenoja et al., 2019). therefore, group regulation can help control the socioemotional atmosphere when challenging situations arise in collaborative learning (näykki et al., 2014). the study also highlighted an indirect medium-size effect of peer regulation on enjoyment of online collaboration, mediated by group regulation. this result suggests that peer-directed regulation contributed to enjoyment in online collaboration indirectly by boosting group-directed regulation. the facilitative role of peer regulation in group regulation supports the argument of rogat and adams-wiggins (2015) and hadwin et al. (2018) that consistent and productive regulation toward each other in a group enables the entire group’s shared regulation to function. 6. limitations and implications the current study has several limitations. first, the participants were english major students recruited from a single university in china. future studies should involve more participants from various academic levels and institutions to strengthen our findings on language learners’ emotion regulation and enjoyment. second, the study focused on online collaborative learning via wechatenhanced group chat. since different platforms may provide different affordances to language learners, it is also important to explore how language learners work together through various communication tools, such as blackboard or skype. when using different communication tools, language learners might employ different patterns of emotion regulation to increase their enjoyment of collaborative learning (kwon et al., 2014). third, the cross-sectional nature of this study means it may not reflect the dynamic changes in learners’ emotion regulation, their enjoyment, or the relationship between these aspects. future studies may adopt various techniques and instruments, such as idiodynamic approaches and interviews, to capture learners’ ongoing emotion regulation processes and their enjoyment experience within groups (elahi shirvan et al., 2020; järvenoja et al., 2018). language learners’ emotion regulation and enjoyment in an online collaborative writing program 475 despite these limitations, the findings of the present study can serve as a basis for some theoretical and practical implications. on the theoretical level, the present investigation extends previous studies on language learners’ emotion regulation and enjoyment to an online collaborative language learning context. within this context, we have identified peer regulation and group regulation, and their complex effects on learners’ enjoyment. the findings offer a novel understanding that different forms of regulation (i.e., peer-directed and groupdirected regulation) interact in contributing to an enjoyable group atmosphere in online collaborative activities. on a practical level, the findings of the present study remind language teachers that the shared efforts of group members are needed to respond to group-wide emotions, as these efforts directly promote learners’ enjoyment. thus, we propose that teachers should create opportunities to raise learners’ awareness of group regulation. for example, via learning analytics, teachers may capture log data from learners’ group regulation processes (gašević et al., 2016). these data could allow teachers to provide personalized feedback for groups, which would enable them to understand the importance of group regulation in face-to-face or online collaborative learning (malmberg et al., 2017). further, the study indicates that the importance of peer regulation, as another important type of emotion regulation influencing enjoyment indirectly through group regulation, should not be downplayed in language learning contexts. a positive collaborative climate requires peer-directed regulation to lay the groundwork for group-directed regulation. therefore, we suggest language teachers, as more capable peers of learners in collaborative groups or classrooms, employ appropriate strategies to guide or support learners’ emotional states. the strategies (e.g., cognitive change and situation modification) learners used in this study could be a good choice. for instance, in the study of bielak and mystkowska-wiertelak (2020b), language teachers purposefully reminded learners to accept the interpersonal differences in writing pace and strategy use. 7. conclusion this study has explored how english language learners regulate their emotions individually and collectively to increase their enjoyment during online collaborative learning. the findings suggest that an enjoyable collaborative atmosphere is possible when learners take on individual responsibility to manage the emotions experienced within groups and maintain their shared responsibility to overcome challenges (bakhtiar et al., 2018). more importantly, the study illuminates both direct and indirect effects of different emotion regulation types on fl enjoyment in online collaboration. zhipeng zhang, xuesong (andy) gao, ting liu, chwee beng lee 476 group regulation was highlighted as a direct influencing factor on enjoyment, mediating the effect of peer regulation. this finding further enriches our understanding of the complex interaction between different types of emotion regulation and positive emotions (fl enjoyment in this study). while such findings are enlightening, they provide only another piece of a very complex puzzle of how language learners regulate their emotions to enjoy the online collaborative learning process. therefore, further research is needed to gain more insights into this area. given the complexity of relationships between emotion regulation and enjoyment in online collaboration, it is advisable to conduct in-depth case studies on the online interactions of diverse collaborative groups using video observation and stimulated recall interviews. doing so would illuminate how different types of emotion regulation interact to enhance enjoyment. it would also make sense to include more emotional states, such as anxiety and boredom, to examine how these relate to different types of emotion regulation in online collaborative language learning. understanding the interplay between emotional experiences and emotion regulation activities during language learners’ online collaboration is vital for illustrating how they can transform their online interactions into pleasant and successful ones. language learners’ emotion regulation and enjoyment in an online collaborative writing program 477 references bakhtiar, a., webster, e. a., & hadwin, a. f. 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(2018). exploring a curriculum app and a social communication app for efl learning. computer assisted language learning, 31(7), 694-713. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2018.1438474 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: marek derenowski (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) language editor: melanie ellis (language teacher training college, zabrze) vol. 5 no. 2 june 2015 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, university of new south wales, sydney) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo) kata csizér (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) robert dekeyser (university of maryland) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) carol griffiths (fatih university, istanbul) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) sarah mercer (university of graz) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) bonny norton (university of british columbia) terrence odlin (ohio state university) rebecca oxford (university of maryland) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (university of pannonia, trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto) elaine tarone (university of minnesota) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2015 editor: mirosław pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak marek derenowski anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · infobaseindex · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the thomson reuters master journal list. special issue: psychology in language learning 1 guest editors: sarah mercer stephen ryan studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 5, number 2, june 2015 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors ....................................................................195 editorial .........................................................................................199 articles: jean-marc dewaele, taghreed m. al-saraj – foreign language classroom anxiety of arab learners of english: the effect of personality, linguistic and sociobiographical variables ...................................................... 205 kata csizér, edit h. kontra, katalin piniel – an investigation of the self-related concepts and foreign language motivation of young deaf and hard-ofhearing learners in hungary ............................................................ 229 liss kerstin sylvén – clil and non-clil students’ beliefs about language ....251 miri tashma baum – adversity and redemption: learning and teaching in the language learning histories of two efl student-teachers ..... 273 ana maria ferreira barcelos – unveiling the relationship between language learning beliefs, emotions, and identities ....................................... 301 andrew d. cohen – achieving academic control in two languages: drawing on the psychology of language learning in considering the past, the present, and prospects for the future .............................. 327 book reviews ................................................................................. 347 notes to contributors .....................................................................353 195 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors co-editors sarah mercer teaches at the university of graz, austria where she has been working since 1996. she completed her phd at lancaster university and her habilitation in graz. her research interests include all aspects of the psychology surrounding the foreign language learning experience, focusing in particular on the self. she is the author of towards an understanding of language learner self-concept (2011, springer) and is co-editor of psychology for language learning (2012, palgrave) and multiple perspectives on the self in sla (2014, multilingual matters). she is one of the co-editors of the journal system. contact data: institute für anglistik, heinrichstr. 36/ii, a8010 graz, austria (sarah.mercer@uni-graz.at) stephen ryan is a professor in the school of economics at senshu university, tokyo, japan. his research covers various aspects of psychology in language learning, with a particular interest in learner motivation, mindsets, and the role of the imagination. his most recent publication is the psychology of the language learner revisited (2015, routledge), coauthored with zoltán dörnyei. contact data: school of economics, senshu university, higashi mita 2-1-1, tama ku, kawasaki shi, kanagawa ken, 214-8580, japan (ryan@isc.senshu-u.ac.jp) contributors taghreed m. al-saraj is a saudi arabian researcher in applied linguistics. she received her doctorate degree from ucl institute of education in 2011, and she is currently a post-doctorate fellow at university of california, berkeley. her research focuses on individual differences in foreign language learning, and in particular on foreign language anxiety (fla) in the arab culture. her recent book the anxious language learner: a saudi woman’s story (2015, educate right) 196 became a bestseller on amazon and #1 in the hottest new release category. in the book, dr. al-saraj became a subject of her own research and became a language learner of turkish to see for herself if she would too experience foreign language anxiety as well as see for herself how fla affects the language learning process. contact data: berkeley language center, university of california, b-40 dwinelle hall, berkeley, california 94720, usa (t.alsaraj@aol.com). ana maria f. barcelos is an associate professor of english at federal university of viçosa, brazil; her main interests include beliefs about language learning and teaching as related to emotions and identities. she has coauthored and coedited among others, beliefs about sla: new research approaches (2003, kluwer) and narratives of learning and teaching efl (2008, palgrave macmillan). contact data: universidade federal de viçosa, departamento de letras, 36470000 viçosa mg brasil (barcelosam@hotmail.com) miri tashma baum heads the english department and coordinates eap (english for academic purposes) studies at givat-washington academic college of education, israel. her research interests include issues of language and identity, particularly the relationship between foreign language learning and identity construction, english teacher education, and english renaissance poetry. contact data: givat-washington academic college of education, english department, beit raban 7923900, israel (mirimtb@gmail.com) andrew d. cohen, professor emeritus from the university of minnesota, usa also taught at ucla, usa and at the hebrew university of jerusalem, istrael. he is coeditor of language learning strategies (2007, oup), author of strategies in learning and using a second language (2011, routledge), and coauthor of teaching and learning pragmatics: where language and culture meet (2014, routledge). he is also author of articles and book chapters on research methods, language assessment, bilingual education, language learner strategies, and pragmatics. most recently he has written a guide for language learners to improve their experience in dual language programs, with a companion guide for their teachers. contact data: (adcohen@umn.edu) kata csizér holds a phd in language pedagogy and works as an associate professor in the department of english applied linguistics at eötvös university, budapest, hungary, where she teaches various l2 motivation courses. her main field of research interest comprises socio-psychological aspects of l2 learning and teaching as well as second and foreign language motivation. she has published 197 over 50 academic papers on various aspects of l2 motivation and has coauthored four books, including the impact of self-concept on language learning (2014, multilingual matters, coauthored with m. magid). contact data: eötvös university, school of english and american studies, department of english applied linguistics, budapest, rákóczi út 5, 1088, hungary (weinkata@yahoo.com) jean-marc dewaele is professor of applied linguistics and multilingualism at birkbeck, university of london, uk. he does research on individual differences in psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, pragmatic, psychological and emotional aspects of second language acquisition and multilingualism. he has published over 150 papers and chapters, and a monograph emotions in multiple languages in 2010 (2nd ed. in 2013, palgrave macmillan). he is vice-president of the international association of multilingualism, former president of the european second language association and general editor of the international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism. he is father of a trilingual daughter and holds a black belt in go kan ryu karate. contact data: department of applied linguistics and communication, birkbeck, university of london. 26 russell square, london wc1b 5dt, uk (j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk) michelle k. gilluly is a graduate student at the university of graz, austria. she is currently writing her master’s thesis on language teachers’ self-concepts in their professional roles. her additional research interests are in the fields of language teacher identity and teacher efficacy. she has taught both german and english as second languages in the usa, austria, spain and mexico at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels. contact data: (michelle.gilluly@gmail.com) edit h. kontra is associate professor at the department of english applied linguistics of eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary. her main research interest lies in individual differences, language learners with special needs, as well as language testing. most recently she has been involved in various projects that investigated the language learning processes of dyslexic and deaf learners in hungary. contact data: eötvös university, school of english and american studies, department of english applied linguistics, budapest, rákóczi út 5, 1088, hungary (kontra.h.edit@btk.elte.hu) katalin piniel is assistant professor at the department of english applied linguistics at eötvös university, budapest, hungary, where she obtained her phd 198 in language pedagogy. she is interested in conducting research on the interrelationship of individual differences in foreign language learning. currently she is part of a research team exploring the motivations, beliefs, and strategies of deaf foreign language learners. contact data: eötvös university, school of english and american studies, department of english applied linguistics, budapest, rákóczi út 5, 1088, hungary (brozik-piniel.katalin@btk.elte.hu) liss kerstin sylvén is associate professor of applied linguistics at the university of gothenburg. her research interests focus around foreign and second language (fl/l2) learning, in particular in content and language integrated learning (clil) settings, and the effects of extramural exposure to the fl/l2. she is also interested in the complexity of individual differences (ids), and how they influence the fl/l2 learning process. contact data: department of education and special education, university of gothenburg p o box 300, se-405 30 göteborg, sweden (lisskerstin.sylven@ped.gu.se) 409 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (3). 2015. 409-429 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.3.4 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl searching for an english self through writing leena karlsson helsinki university language centre, finland leena.karlsson@helsinki.fi abstract most finnish university students, just like the other new global elites (kramsch, 2013), use english without problems. some students, however, struggle with english to the extent that their studies suffer. one could say that they have a deeply “wounded” english self (karlsson, 2013). my context of research and practice is the autonomous learning modules (alms) at helsinki university language centre. in my work as a language counsellor and practitioner-researcher, pedagogical concerns are always primary, and there is a need to appreciate diversity yet notice every student’s unique experiences. the broad background of my recent work is english as part of the identity of young academic finns. in particular, i have been interested in how students with a “wounded” english self can develop new identity positions, and in how a language counsellor can help them in this process. in this paper, my focus is on the subtle practical interconnections between learner autonomy, learner diversity, and learner identity as they emerge in a diary written by a student of english with dyslexia and language (classroom) anxiety. a narrative case study of mariia illustrates how the counsellor’s appreciation and her own recognition of the complex ecological realities (casanave, 2012) surrounding and interacting with her learning encourage and empower her. mariia uses her freedom to control her own learning (huang & benson, 2013) and makes choices from the many lifewide experiential learning opportunities in her life (karlsson & kjisik, 2011). reflective writing in the learning diary helps her to construct a realistic vision of herself as a learner and user of english, and she leaves the identity position of a failure in the classroom and claims a new, more successful one (norton, 2014). keywords: language self, storied self, language anxiety, narratives, learner identity leena karlsson 410 1. introduction on a january afternoon, mariia opens the classroom door. she peeps in and hurriedly looks at each face in the room. the route is clear; no familiar faces from the past but a few who look like “her people.” she enters.1 english has a very prominent status in finland; unlike languages such as french, german, italian, russian or spanish, it is only a so-called “foreign” language (ushioda, 2013, p. 3) in finland. as elsewhere in the nordic countries, english totally dominates the foreign language curricula at schools. in reality, it is a life skill, an educational skill and an absolute necessity for a university student. it is a working language at the university of helsinki alongside the two official languages: finnish and swedish. this sadly means that for some students it becomes, in kramsch’s (2013) words, “the language of dreams shattered” (p. 199). for a number of years, i have studied finnish university students whose dreams indeed have been shattered, or are about to be shattered, by the english language in the form of a foreign language requirement in their degree (e.g., karlsson, 2012, 2013). these students, despite having studied english for nine or more years at school, fear having to speak it in front of their fellow students in study-related situations and on university language courses, where i meet them. moreover, many close their eyes, ears and minds to all the opportunities for contact with this very prevalent language even outside the classroom. and yet, i think, the students could be seen as multilingual subjects (kramsch, 2009): they first acquired finnish as children (or swedish, in the case of the 6% swedish speaking minority) and later learnt the second domestic language in formal education settings and informally. english was the first foreign language for them, usually learnt in formal education contexts. they have often studied other foreign languages both in formal settings and on their own. they do not know all these languages equally well; in fact, they often claim not to know any of their foreign languages particularly well. although “silenced” speakers of english (kramsch, 2009, p. 17), they are expected to use it in their everyday life at the university and even learn about their subject of study partly through english. to use the words of a national survey on finns’ uses of, attitudes to and perceptions of english in the 2000s (leppänen et al., 2009), these students could be called the silent and marginalized have-nots, who, in the language classrooms at the university, will have to encounter the majority, the haves and have1 this story snippet was written by the writer as a re-storying of the case study student mariia’s words. mariia is a participant of the autonomous learning modules (alms) at helsinki university language centre. searching for an english self through writing 411 it-alls, the elite of english as a lingua franca in finland. the process of marginalisation often starts early; from the memoirs some students write it becomes clear that in the english language classroom a loss of confidence and joy of learning sets in as early as in primary school. others name secondary school english classes places of humiliation, in which they started believing of themselves as failures because of, say, a flaw in their pronunciation. yet others only changed into invisible learners in upper secondary school in order to avoid the stigma of not speaking fluently. as university students, such as mariia, they still fear opening language classroom doors and try to avoid them for as long as they can. this paper explores the subtle practical interconnections between learner autonomy, learner diversity, and learner identity as they emerge in a diary written by mariia, a student of english with dyslexia and language (classroom) anxiety. i will first give some background to my work and then a brief theoretical backdrop and methodological considerations. after these, i will present a narrative case study of mariia inspired by my reading of her learning diary written during an autonomous english course in spring 2014. 2. background if i had the power to decide who gets to study at the university, i would say that somebody with dyslexia needs to stay out. or not. i don’t know. (henriikka’s diary)2 in all of my longitudinal research efforts (karlsson, 2008, 2012, 2013), i have worked against the backdrop of big pedagogical and ethical questions: how can wounded learners develop new identity positions and how can a language counsellor help them in this? how does this happen within the autonomous learning modules (alms) at helsinki university language centre, my given framework for pedagogy, and during the individual counselling sessions? the present study is an addition to my prior body of research in this area. in alms, we promote pedagogy for learner and teacher autonomy and, as a way of supporting these, do systematic research on our pedagogical practice both individually and collaboratively. alms counsellors have become “authors of their own thoughts and actions” (vieira, 1999, p. 27) and aim at creating and producing educational knowledge, not only consuming it. my research arises out of the need to develop my own pedagogy of counselling for the “wounded” learners, but also out of a desire to develop what, borrowing from flavia vieira, i would like to call a “scholarship of counselling” (cf. vieira, 2010, 2 this is a direct quote from the diary by another alms student, henriikka, who also suffers from dyslexia and language (classroom) anxiety. leena karlsson 412 2013). that is, counsellors inquiring into, narrating and disseminating their own practice. this paper aspires to be one contribution to such scholarship. i have worked as a language counsellor in alms since 1995. since 2009, i have been the counsellor for two special alms groups per academic year which are targeted at helsinki university students who have classroom fears, language anxiety, learning and/or social problems; in other words, students who have a serious reason not to join a regular alms group (or other english language course). learning and mastering english in finland involves a lot of external pressure to succeed both from institutions and peers. the special groups in alms offer a safe place of exile where the students do not have to use energy to deal with these pressures and to worry about the narrowly defined criteria of success. building a personal relationship with these students in the individual counselling meetings is very important; i need to appreciate diversity and yet notice every flesh and blood human being with her unique experiences. focusing on the lived and felt experiences in learning english means that my task is to support students in telling their very own personal story in english, no matter how flawed the language. to do this, they must reach beyond the cognitive dimensions of the learning process. therefore, i invite my students to write autobiographical texts, personal and intimate stories, as part of their course work, often in a learning diary. in writing, i ask them to focus on the process, not the product, and to ponder their realities and expectations, memories, worries, anxieties, fears, doubts, uncertainties, but also their hopes and dreams and, very significantly, personal understandings of themselves as learners. this kind of writing gives the anxious students an opportunity to experience the unhurried, noncontrolled process of reflection in a safe space. i have come to understand that, more than simply examples of writing in english, the texts represent the students’ thinking, their reflection process (karjalainen, 2012). as a reader, my role is not to evaluate the language; i need to appreciate the meaning-making and creation of new thoughts and ideas that have been happening in the student during the writing. i consider such autobiographical reflection and writing a way of supporting students in the process of developing their learner autonomy, which can be very significant for students with language classroom anxiety. they talk about their learning as a part of their whole lives, as the holistic process that it is; it involves the whole person, their personal history, feelings, actions and language and, importantly, an integration of formal and informal learning. this happens when writing arises from students’ lifewide interests, that is, the personal, social, study-related and professional aspects of their lives. it is one of the pedagogical goals of the programme to help students to recognise and realise the value and potential of experiential lifewide learning (karlsson & kjisik, 2011) in developing their skills in english; they can learn it, after all, in many parts of their lives, not only searching for an english self through writing 413 through formal language teaching. formal learning situations only form a fragment of the totality of learning experiences; for many anxious students, however, this fragment weighs heavily in their memory. 2.1. theoretical voices in writing this paper, i have explored the interconnections between learner autonomy, learner diversity, and learner identity as they appear in pedagogical practice. the reality of these connections can be approached and interpreted from an ecological view of learning as a dynamic interaction between the learner and her environment (van lier, 2004), and as a subjective experience that happens in time and space and is socially, culturally and historically grounded (kramsch, 2009). an ecological analysis of learning gives a lot of thought to context, the interwoven factors and influences surrounding learning (palfreyman, 2014). as a practitioner-researcher, i am concerned with the whole complexity of context, both the physical and emotional. context includes the messiness of life as it happens, “the effects of sleep, health, weather, mood, work and personal conflicts” (casanave, 2012, p. 645), which are tangible in the pedagogical situation but mostly ignored in research efforts. ushioda’s (2009) person-in-context relational view of learner diversity nicely combines with ecological perspectives on learning. she argues for a “mutually constitutive relationship between persons and the context they act in” (p. 218), that is, the learner shaping and being shaped by her own context. she emphasizes, on the one hand, the significance of contextual factors and influences and, on the other hand, learners as flesh and blood “real persons” (p. 220). autonomy theory, ushioda suggests, has been grounded in people, not abstractions, with a focus on learners as people who are “not just language learners” (ushioda, 2011, p. 13). she remarks that pedagogical practices inspired by autonomy thinking have sought to encourage students to express their identities through the language they are learning, to “speak as themselves” (legenhausen, as cited in ushioda, 2011, p. 14), not as language learners practising and performing language. language (classroom) anxiety in this view is contextually grounded, relational, and an inseparable part of identity. identity can be seen as a “site of struggle” (norton, 2014, p. 60) and anxiety as an expression of a learner’s view of her relationship to the environment. when approaching identity as changing and multiple, i have also drawn on narrative approaches. it is a hopeful and comforting theoretical perspective for a practitioner-researcher working with “wounded” learners to view identity as narrative, with a focus on the telling and the emplotment in that telling (ricouer, 1991), and as an ongoing internal story, a storied self’ (mcadams, as cited in ryan & irie, 2014, p. 110). leena karlsson 414 the concepts of lifewide and lifedeep learning, which are of crucial significance to my practice, also arise out of an ecological approach to learning (jackson, 2013; karlsson & kjisik, 2011). the totality of our experiences, be they in language classrooms within formal education or experiences and activities outside the traditional classroom environment, is what we should be looking at. jackson (2010) writes: . . . while a learner is engaged in higher education, an individual’s life contains many parallel and interconnected journeys and experiences and these individually and collectively contribute to the ongoing personal and potentially professional development of the person. by reframing our perception of what counts as learning and recognizing and valuing learning that is not formally assessed within academic programmes we can help learners develop a deeper understanding of how they are learning in the different parts of their lives. heightened awareness is likely to help learners become more effective at learning through their own experiences. (p. 493) thinking ecologically (murray, 2014), a theoretical inspiration for this article, has become part and parcel of the autonomy literature: learner autonomy itself could be understood as an ecology (see palfreyman, 2014). it is this broad theoretical foundation of learner autonomy as a rich ecology that offers me an angle of inquiry compatible with narrative as a research method and storytelling as a pedagogical and learning tool. very significantly, research and practice of any work with “silenced” groups should be driven by an ethos for an ethical and democratic language pedagogy: at the micro level of the classroom, a focus on ecological processes can awaken in the students (and teachers) a spirit of inquiry and reflection, and a philosophy of seeing and hearing for yourself, thinking for yourself, speaking with your voice, and acting jointly within your community. (van lier, 2004, p. 99) 2.2. the power and potential of narrative story-based, or narrative, research is well suited to the purposes of a practitioner-researcher for whom pedagogical concerns are always primary. a counsellor-researcher like myself, who moves on the thin edge of theory and practice and works with the paradox of distance and proximity, faces the challenge of producing research texts that would describe this dynamic movement. she also battles with the complex ecological realities (casanave, 2012) of the world of learning and teaching, and in order to capture even a glimpse of the tangled network of contextual, personal, emotional and social factors surrounding her own and her students’ learning in a research text, she needs a method that allows for chaos and complexity. texts arising out of narrative research have the searching for an english self through writing 415 potential to speak as themselves, to be permeated by the physical and emotional, and not only the cognitive aspects of learning and teaching. in counselling, narrative pedagogy allows an appreciation of the whole when meaningful stories are told and listened to, that is, shared and even coconstructed. it allows an appreciation of the unity of the foreign language, and the human being and her autobiography. moreover, narrative counselling pedagogy allows an appreciation of the stories of lived experience and their interpretation, and unique meanings for the teller, arising from their particular experiential context. instead of arguing against experience, narrative pedagogy strives for empathy and a resonance of stories (conle, 1996), and thus creates vicarious experiences in the listener. exactly the same possibilities for deep interpretive understandings are available to a narrative practitioner-researcher. aoki (2009, p. 203) lists three “unique merits” of narrative as a research approach and for stories as research texts. she argues that stories are a natural form of representing human knowledge. she refers to the fact that teachers’ professional knowledge in particular is widely accepted as being storied (e.g., clandinin & connelly, 1995). aoki further suggests that a story captures the richness and nuances of meaning in human affairs and allows us to express the wealth of details in its very form. her third merit follows from the potential of capturing the richness and nuances of meaning: stories allow for vicarious experiences in readers (cf. conle, 1996; karlsson, 2008). this kind of writing indeed helps the readers to vicariously relive the experiences described in the research text. very significantly, it can also help them to see for themselves where the potential biases might be (aoki, 2009): in narrative texts, the experiential contexts that the story emerges from are described, the relationship between the research participants and the researcher are explained, and the participants are involved in the research also as readers and revisers of their stories. i would like to add one more merit of narrative as a method related to the consideration of (research) writing as a tool for inquiry. vieira (2010, p. 25) states that the creative use of language in narrative inquiry is a way to “counteract the disempowering effect of neutral academic discourses that say nothing about the uniqueness of pedagogical experience and its actors.” she continues to characterise pedagogical writing, the kind that a practitioner-researcher like myself engages in, as a process that presupposes “an intimate relationship between experience, writer and text” (p. 25). in higher education in particular, we are used to mostly reading and ourselves attempting to do academic writing that fades the self, the writer and the researcher. first-person explorations and coconstructed stories, however, can also be ways of writing from the self, not about the self (contreras & pérez de lara, as cited in vieira, 2013, p. 158) when autobiographical understandings and experiences are put in the broader context of educational knowledge and thinking. leena karlsson 416 i myself consider this kind of experimental pedagogical writing a way of exploring, describing and interpreting the complex ecological realities surrounding the writer and her research. these realities are full of encounters and episodes, actions, characters and their motivations and purposes and, as such, challenging for the writer of a research text. for ricoeur (1991), narratives presuppose plots that link these possibly discordant elements; narrating, in his view, is a creative act that weaves life events into a story with a plot. emplotment as an active interpretative process, i believe, helps both the writer and, later, her readers to understand the “selves” of those involved in the events. stories as ways of understanding the self, appreciating the discordances and controversies, are at the core of the notions of a narrative identity (ricouer, 1991), or a storied self (mcadams, as cited in ryan & irie, 2014, p. 110): the self which is understood as an ongoing internal narrative or exploration of who we are, have been or will be, with many potential plot lines, as a story that gets revised and retold. the nature of a narrative inquiry process and writing a research text arising out of it is closely linked to the idea of a storied self: the texts written are always based on an intense internal conversation. in a sense they are written for the self and with the knowledge that every text is a chapter in an ongoing story. this self-reflexive dialogue, however, needs to be transformed into an external report: integration is needed of the internal meaning-making and a way of reporting that is understandable to the readership. in the following section, i am going to tell the story of the narrative inquiry into how a student, mariia, constructed her own storied self. she engaged in reflective writing, which could be seen as resembling the researcher’s internal conversation just described. she wrote it in the pages of a learning diary in order to tell her very own personal story as a learner and user of english. 3. story of the research narrative starts on the professional landscape, in the experience of lived and told stories (clandinin & connelly, 2000). in my professional landscape, alms,3 i meet students who are not language majors but students from all faculties of the university taking a language course as an obligatory part of their degree. they can choose to take more teacher-fronted language courses, but they also have the option of taking an alms module in english. alms is based on autonomous principles and personal study plans negotiated with a counsellor (see karlsson, kjisik, & nordlund, 1997, 2007 for more information on the programme). 3 see our website http://www.helsinki.fi/kksc/alms for more information. searching for an english self through writing 417 student life in alms means taking part in two group awareness sessions at the beginning and in three individual counselling sessions during the course. they have a free choice of joining various skills support groups. at the beginning of the course, they make a detailed plan of their independent studies, including the skills support groups they want to join. to help them plan their studies with personally meaningful goals in mind, the students are invited to write a language learning history or memoir, which is shared and discussed with the counsellor in the first individual counselling meeting. they are encouraged to think about their previous experiences and, subsequently, to use their autobiographical insights and imagination in the planning. reflection on learning and self-evaluation are very central in the work the students do: they write learning diaries (or logs) and reflect on the development of their skills, strategies, learning approaches, attitudes, motivation, feelings and beliefs. i understand narrative as both the phenomenon and the method (clandinin & connelly, 1995, 2000). storytelling and sharing stories, that is, narrative as a phenomenon, is to be observed in alms counselling and other interactions through and in the dialogues between the participants, a counsellor and her learners, and learners and their peers (karlsson, 2012, 2013). as described above, written and oral narratives are used in alms as a method of supporting reflection on learning in face-to-face counselling; it is a method which is very much part of the phenomenon. understanding the complex and shifting phenomena on the landscape is essentially what narrative inquiry is about. when research work proceeds, aspects or themes relevant to the inquiry emerge and are named; in this case, learner autonomy, learner diversity, and learner self as they appear in pedagogical practice emerged as themes. the field texts on my landscape typically include all the learning materials and student diaries, learning logs and portfolios, counselling notes, my counselling/research diary, and, in the case of a few students every term, audio or video recordings of counselling meetings and/or research discussions. they make up “nested sets of stories” (clandinin & connelly, 2000, p. 144), mine and my students’. the narrative quality of these documents varies. for my students, the texts and documents are learning tools; for me they become field texts when i switch into my researcher role. the dual role i have, that of a counsellor and that of a researcher, is always an issue to be considered (karlsson, 2008). i prefer calling interviews “research discussions.” they inevitably share features of the close and personal counselling sessions but, for the student, they are not part of the course work. the aim of a research discussion, however, should be to empower, respect and give a voice to the student as an active and knowledgeable participant, just as in a counselling meeting. i never work with the students’ texts alone but bring them into the research discussion and explain how i am going to use them. i also send leena karlsson 418 the finished stories to the students so that they have the possibility to change the text or to say “no” to their publication. narrative pedagogy in alms has its roots in pedagogical ethics: the demands placed on the close and personal counselling practice are huge. the ethical principles need to be reconsidered repeatedly as pedagogical contexts change and ecological realities surrounding our work mould our actions: ethics are not only abstract principles but always contextual considerations. the same goes for research; narrative, i believe, “communicates ethics in a way nothing else can” (bolton, 2010, p. 34). working with these types of different data could be compared to the work of a biographer (karlsson, 2008). when interviewing, i specifically invite and elicit stories, even retrospective life histories, but mostly what could be called “small stories” (georgakopoulou, 2007), that is, shared and coconstructed narrative activities, story fragments, and episodic tellings of experiences, which also emerge in counselling discussions. diary entries can be approached as such small stories as well. 4. this study 4.1. mariia in this study, selecting one student’s learning diary as the main field text was a choice made deliberately: i wanted a new take on the phenomenon of diary writing in alms with, firstly, a focus on my own reading of a diary and, secondly, on how a diary reflects lifewide learning as part of a student’s very own personal story of english. casanave’s (2012) fresh approach to diary studies triggered this, but i also had an interest in seeing how a novel way of using diaries as data would work. i know from both my practical experience and previous research (karlsson & kjisik, 2007, karlsson, 2008, 2013) that students have varying expectations and wishes when it comes to the counsellor’s reading of their diaries, and, accordingly, i approach each diary with the unique student in mind and negotiate the reader-writer pact with each individual. some only give me permission to read selected entries, others point out certain sections as most relevant to their reflection process, while others seem happy about general skimming. this writer-reader relationship built around the learning diaries has been a pedagogical interest and a concern for me for a long time. the counselling meetings with students, however, are only short encounters, inherently episodic and fragmentary (karlsson, 2008): time never stands still in counselling, and a counsellor’s reading of a diary is very often fast and sporadic. i wanted to take the opportunity to fully focus on one diary in the research process because, unlike in a counselling meeting, “freezing” the text under the research lens and stopping time becomes a possibility, and repeated readings can be made. searching for an english self through writing 419 i made a total of three postcourse readings of mariia’s 15-page alms diary: two before and one after a research discussion, all from a holistic-content perspective (lieblich, tuval-mashiach, & zilber, 1998). the first reading happened against the background of mariia’s whole alms history, her memoir/learning history, her application letter to the course, her learning plan, contract and course completion form and other documents. in our counselling meetings, we had shared ideas arising out of the diaries; the discussions were mainly initiated by me and the entries i was invited to read were pointed out by mariia as reflections on her particular concerns, developments, or insights into the learning process and course work. in my researcher role, i read the diary as a coherent whole at one go and highlighted the bits of text in which mariia wrote about learner autonomy, her dyslexia and language anxiety, and her learner identity. before the research discussion, i made a second close and novel reading of the diary, a novel reading of a diary by an other who, by now, “is familiar enough with the writer’s system of meaning” (czarniawska, as cited in vandrick, 2013, p. 22). during this reading, i picked up and highlighted what i felt were personal keys for mariia in how she made sense of her experiences: dyslexia and language (classroom) anxiety, her dreams of writing and an academic life. the first and the second reading, and my interpretations arising out of the readings, guided me in preparing for the research discussion, a narrative biographical interview. at the very beginning of the discussion, which was carried out in finnish, i asked mariia to tell me “her alms story.” this was an elicitation question that had her talking for about 20 minutes. when mariia was telling her story, i did not interrupt her with questions but tried to listen carefully in order to see if my beliefs about her personal keys to making sense of her lived experiences were confirmed. as chase (2003) suggests, i had jotted down questions in advance that had to do with the interlinkages of her potential keys and the inquiry themes. however, i also took chase’s advice on “listening well” to mariia and the story she was telling. in the discussion that followed, my questions arose from what she had been telling. i aimed at creating an experience for mariia that would expand her view on her english self. having started with language anxiety and a weak english voice, she had become more confident during the course and was now using english in her lifewide interests. i had to ensure that the voice would continue to be heard; i had no right to take risks and shatter her dreams (kramsch, 2014). i gently invited mariia to expand her story on the themes relevant to the inquiry: self/identity, language (classroom) anxiety, dyslexia, learner autonomy, and their interlinkages. before the third reading, i listened to and transcribed mariia’s replies. reading the diary a third time in the light of the research discussion and mariia’s personal keys to meaning-making made me more sensitive to how the diary reflected leena karlsson 420 the complex ecological realities (casanave, 2012), the network of contextual, personal, emotional and social factors that had surrounded and interacted with mariia’s learning. it also made me more appreciative of how mariia was becoming aware of these ecological realities herself, the whole web of internal and external factors. i wanted to use the first person in mariia’s story because i strongly felt that it should be mariia’s voice talking in the pivotal section of the paper, the findings (cf. benson, 2013). the story as it appears in this paper is not only based on, but to a large extent uses her very words from the research discussion both when she told “her alms story” to begin the session and when she replied to my questions afterwards. then again, mariia’s story was coconstructed during a narrative inquiry process, and it is our story in the sense that the plot comes from my reading of her diary. it is our story also in the sense that i had interpreted the diary entries through my research lens when i was looking for interconnections between learner autonomy, dyslexia and identity. the plot moves from mariia’s learning history to her self; to dyslexia, fears and shame; to academic reading, academic and creative writing; and to an emerging new english self and seeing the role of english in her life in a totally different way. the discussion was held in finnish so my coconstruction of her story is also tangible in the translation, which is necessarily my interpretation of what she said in the discussion. a lot of reading between the lines took place in order to give form to her colourful idiolect of finnish. her storytelling and gestures, smiles and laughter have inevitably been simplified into a cohesive linear text in english, which is only a pale reflection of the original story-telling. mariia read the story i wrote and gave permission to publish it as “her story,” using her own name. she did not want to change any of the content or wordings. in an email to me she wrote: the first time i read my story, i was deeply moved, because it brought back all the tumult that i was going through last spring [time of the alms course]. i decided to read it a second time through more objective lenses but there is nothing to change. the text accurately describes my feelings last spring and my learning history and the phases i have gone through as an english learner. a desire to give mariia a voice, although genuine enough, is not a guarantee of what happens when the story is out. in the following, i present mariia’s story, her search for an english self through writing during an autonomous english course in spring 2014. 4.2. mariia’s story my history as a language learner has been a long road of anxiety and annoyance. alms was a new beginning for me and i have never learnt as much as in alms. i have searching for an english self through writing 421 always thought that i simply won’t learn. now i have gained hope and started believing in my own ability as a language learner. i used to think that i just didn’t have the right kind of brain and that my learning style was not suitable for learning foreign languages. i don’t learn by cramming and by memorising details by heart but had understood from what happened in language classes that that is the way to learn languages. during alms, i realized that i can learn languages exactly in the same way as i learn anything else i am interested in. i just need to get in touch with the language and start reading and using it in situations that are meaningful and interesting to me. in other subjects like history and literature i have never crammed, just read the books through and because i have liked it i have learnt. i don’t in fact remember names or dates or details, but i do remember the big picture and i am good at analysing and dwelling on it. analysing and “dwelling on” english, that is how i learn it. english has become a language that everyone knows and the expectation is that you should know it truly well. i am shy and i have been so ashamed of my bad english. for a long time my dyslexia was a kind of a walking stick for me: i had convinced myself that i don’t learn because of dyslexia but that was really not the reason. i was diagnosed in primary school when i struggled with learning to read and write and had a lot of support. in the end, i learnt to read and write very well in finnish, and in upper secondary school i had a finnish teacher helping me a lot: she taught me to look at my mistakes and to remember the ones i always got wrong and correct them. i didn’t always see them but they disappeared, and it wasn’t a problem in finnish anymore. in english i also struggled from the very beginning but never found a solution. when i finally found out about the alms group for “blockheads”, i felt relief: this was for me. everything changed. what happened with finnish can happen in foreign languages: i just need to stop thinking about dyslexia as a problem and using it as an excuse. i can just stop and think about those mistakes that i keep making and if needed, blindly correct them. in writing the diary entries i have used auto-correct which underlines my mistakes and i try again, and the computer underlines again and i try again and finally i take the dictionary and check the spelling. the next time i write the word, say the word ‘with’, the same thing happens: i always get it wrong but having corrected enough times i might learn and remember; with ‘with’ i now know i could do it, learn it but i am not good at forcing myself to do things. it really annoys me to be so lazy and bad and not use enough time to study. i always complain to my girlfriend that i have done nothing, just been lying around at home and read books and wandered around in town. i don’t like sitting in one place, studying for two hours a day is enough for me. i get bored easily but i do get credits and i do have goals and am doing alright with my studies. but i don’t want to push myself too hard. i only spend one day studying for an exam because i cannot force myself to sit in the library for a week, and if i did that, i would get bored and would, again, end up studying a new field. i need the freedom not to study if that is what it feels like. academic reading is fun and easy nowadays because when i have the urge to know, i do push myself. even an easy text is hard and english not understandable if i have no interest; it can even be from a field that i am interested in but if the text is not captivating, i quit. when i was reading fictional minds [required reading in her major], i was so engrossed that i didn’t even remember i was reading in english. my leena karlsson 422 brain, not that i am a neuroscientist, seems to work differently when the interest is there, reading is easier, this is the same in finnish. the secret for learning language from the academic reading is that i don’t cram! i have words that i haven’t noticed learning but suddenly i am using them when i am writing and speaking, they have come from the reading and now arise from the unconscious. this has been great fun; i almost feel guilty for how easy it feels. when writing, i write and speak at the same at the time. i have always done this in finnish. now i have started doing it in english as well; it is funny because i am not a good speaker. with english i also read the text out loud afterwards. reading aloud is slow and so i notice if something sounds funny or if something is missing, a or the, and i focus on them, and it is also a way of getting familiar with the rhythm of english. i notice that a sentence is not complete or that there needs to be a comma to get the rhythm right. the realization about the rhythm came from reading aloud and then that became helpful when writing the next texts. this spring i have started noticing what is natural in my texts: understanding this was one of the biggest things and english stopped being static, like a set of lego bricks. reading aloud in fact comes from my creative writing activities because i struggle with writing convincing dialogue and i realized that that is how i get it done. what i have felt about creative writing, by the way, has been a bit like what i have felt about english in my life: i wrote a lot until upper secondary school and then realized i was beastly and i stopped writing. it was something i loved but it was obvious that it didn’t just happen and that i would need to study it. i wasn’t a natural talent, which is what i thought all other writers were, so i stopped. i was truly sad for a long time but last summer i decided that i couldn’t go on: if i wanted to become a writer, i needed to write and i started and the first sentences were just terrible but i just continued and it got better, just by doing it so it is a similar story to english. recently i even ventured into a symposium for creative writing where i met academics from all over the world and they each spoke english in their own way. i just loved being there. i realized that these are intelligent people all in high professions and they speak this language in different ways and they enjoy the fruits of their language skills, and it was so important for me to realize that you don’t need to use english in the same way as native speakers, say in the uk or the states, and that they also have their individual ways of using the language not because of their nationality only but because of their personality. i want to have a career in academia so academic writing will be a part of my job. i dream of being able to express myself as well as possible and communicate my thoughts to others also in english so this dream has instrumental value. english is a necessity and i need to master the language. creative writing is in this sense a different story. well, i have a character that speaks english and i had difficulty translating his thoughts into finnish and then my girlfriend said “make him speak english in the text”. although i write semi-fantasy, i think about my stories in a rational way and so one character cannot speak english when the others speak finnish. but then in the symposium somebody spoke about people who write their poems and prose in english although it is not their mother tongue. he suggested that it can be liberating and can help you get rid of the chains of your own language and you might write better. and i thought that perhaps english could be the language of a story or a character; that searching for an english self through writing 423 perhaps my character could express his thoughts better even if i didn’t and that was a world-shaking thought. my strongest language, my perfect mother tongue might not necessarily be the language that is the most expressive. i realized that if i write my academic or creative texts in finnish, nobody will read them or hear my voice and that made me anxious and fearful first and then a small voice said, “why not, why couldn’t i write in english because then they would hear me.” this was the first time that i came up from the bog of anxiety, thinking i need to stop, and i got on top of the emotion and realized that i have the key to make it to the same league and i can speak to a big audience in this language. so i have learnt to see english as a resource, not as something that robs me of opportunities. 4.3. reflections it goes without saying that when reading and interpreting mariia’s diary and the experiences described in it, i brought my own restoried counsellor life and self to the reading. many previous stories have indeed been echoing in me during this inquiry. these stories, however, have also created possibilities for me and helped me in constructing the story reflectively, keeping in mind the context of alms, its variety of stories and the important pedagogical and ethical questions i referred to at the beginning of this article: how can wounded learners develop new identity positions and how can a language counsellor help them in this? how does this happen in alms during the individual counselling sessions? norton (2014) writes: . . . some identity positions may limit and constrain opportunities for learning to listen, speak, read or write (particularly under conditions of marginalisation), other identity positions . . . may offer enhanced sets of possibilities for social interaction and human agency, that is, the possibility to take action in social settings. (p. 61) this succinctly describes the plight of mariia and many finnish have-not students: they struggle to speak from the only one identity position that they have, a failure in the classroom. and they fail. but norton also offers a solution: students could claim a more powerful identity position in a different situation and manage better. this is exactly what happens with mariia. it is evidenced in her diary: in between her first couple of diary entries and the new beginning after the second counselling meeting there is a gap, but then the diary is suddenly full of text, and mariia is claiming a new identity position, that of a writer and reader instead of a classroom failure; she is herself, a person reading and writing, also in english. as mentioned before, i have been inspired by casanave’s (2012, p. 642) idea of dabbling and her tale of an “ordinary person’s low-pressure” language learning efforts as recorded in her own diaries. i invite all my students to try writing a diary during their time in the alms; some take up the offer, others leena karlsson 424 choose to keep just a record of their work. i believe that when a learning diary becomes the site for telling about learning as a part of one’s whole life, it can be compared to a personal diary: writing in a diary develops one’s autobiographical knowledge, which is emotionally-charged, experience-based and creative, a form of narrative knowing (jokinen, 2004). mariia’s diary speaks about such autobiographical knowledge and illustrates how she started to rethink her learning approach and her learner self. unlike casanave’s notebooks of eight years, mariia only kept this diary for one university term. dabbling does not quite describe her entries in that they are lengthy reflections, but writing certainly provided her a safe space for forming a “realistic vision” of herself as a learner and user of english in that it was indeed a low-pressure enjoyable experience (casanave, 2012, p. 642). mariia had told me about the issues she had had with learning english both in the counselling and research discussion. in the diary, she refers to her dyslexia, but it does not take a lot of space in her story; she refuses to see it as a problem anymore; it is the fresh realizations and understandings that inspire her. the freedom to control her own learning (huang & benson, 2013), the underpinning philosophy of a pedagogy for autonomy in alms, gives her the power to make experiential lifewide choices. through these choices, she realizes her potential capacity for autonomy, and her language anxiety is alleviated. in the diary entries, she is interpreting the web of experiences across different contexts, formal and informal, that influenced her learning, and in doing this she is constructing and expressing her english self, her storied learner and user self. she is very vividly bringing to life the broad ecological reality and its elements in her diary. it is obvious that dyslexia and classroom anxiety cannot be separated from mariia’s self: they are part of the narrative identity, the storied self, fragments whose power and significance, however, diminished as she continued her quest towards a realistic vision of her english self. being a learner of english, her enemy, starts to take less space in her thinking and becomes only a fragment of the identity. mariia’s diary documents the contextual multitude of influences on her learning and, in particular, thinking about her english learner and user self. the lifewide experiences that the alms encouraged and allowed her to recognize as learning opportunities and projects, at the same time expecting a cognitive reflexivity (cf. jackson, 2013), empowered her and helped her claim the new identity position. she started acting as herself, as mariia the reader and writer, the person inclined to ponder and wander around even when she was in her learner role (cf. ushioda, 2009). mariia’s “self-created learning ecology” (jackson, 2013, p. 1) includes a visit to london, staying with a family and talking to different family members, talking to a russian neighbour in english on the bus, coming to a reading and discussion support group in the alms, reading novels and academic books, cartoons and comics, writing stories in english, taking part in a searching for an english self through writing 425 seminar on creative writing, reading newspapers, journals and blogs, moving between finnish and english and reflecting on this, and writing a reflective and self-reflexive diary in english about the totality of her experiences, traversing between the experiences and developing a deeper understanding of how she is actually learning english in different parts of her life. the metaphor of ecology, which was not explicitly used in our discussions, points at a new pedagogical road for me as a counsellor. jackson (2013) suggests that self-created learning ecologies can become learning tools for university students and may help them to integrate experiences and the learning gained from the experiences in different contexts, that is, to recognize and benefit from lifewide experiential learning. this is closely related to a consideration of the complex ecological realities of language development and learning (e.g., van lier, 2004): the different contexts of students’ learning are inseparable from their emotional and experiential responses. many students, especially those whose english self is that of a have-not, only connect learning english with the classroom. for them, believing in and realising the value and potential of experiential lifewide learning (karlsson & kjisik, 2011) can make a huge difference. mariia is a case in point. i now think that the metaphor and concept of a self-created learning ecology could be explicitly named and introduced to students in alms. they could be encouraged to process the totality of their learning experiences with the help of this metaphor. this would be a way of putting english into a perspective: learning a foreign language can become an essential part of growing as a human being, not focusing on learning particular skills and worrying about, say, pronunciation flaws, but rather developing and being empowered as a person. 5. epilogue clough (2002) suggests that the writing of stories in educational research can be likened to the creation of a building with the writer as architect. the writer’s work is not technical (how?) as much as it is reflective (who for?): . . . the primary work is in the interaction of ideas; in the act of thinking, tuning, decision making and focusing on the primary intent of the work. and of course, writing a story – like constructing a building – is not carried out outside of a need, a community, a context. (p. 8) clough (2002, p. 64) reminds his readers of the fact that educational narratives organise the researcher’s own experience, and that they are expressions of the researcher herself. the construction process of educational stories is decisive in the way they turn out. the construction, moreover, does not happen in a void. leena karlsson 426 it happens amidst the lifewide realities of learning, studying, counselling, researching and living a life. our storied selves are changing, controversial and elusive; they are shaped by and they themselves shape the realities. we lift up different fragments of our fragile stories in different experiential contexts. identitymaking never stops. searching for an english self through writing 427 references aoki, n. 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(2013). the scholarship of pedagogy in adverse settings. in m. flores, a. carvalho, f. ferreira, & m. vilaca (eds.), back to the future. legacies, continuities and changes in educational policy, practice and research (pp. 257-276). rotterdam: sense. 157 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (1). 2019. 157-175 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.1.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt motivation and demotivation over two years: a case study of english language learners in japan keita kikuchi kanagawa university, japan https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0328-5331 keita@kanagawa-u.ac.jp abstract this paper is about four japanese university students majoring in international studies, who participated in a two-year study examining changes in their motivation. using monthly interviews and a 29-item questionnaire on dörnyei’s (2005) l2 motivational self system that was administered alongside each interview, the trajectories of learner motivation were investigated, based on both quantitative and qualitative data. first, changes in the participants’ motivation were identified using quantitative data. next, a variety of motivators and demotivators that learners experienced both inside and outside of their classrooms were analyzed using the qualitative data. with the data obtained, this study focuses on how four learners’ language learning motivation and contexts adapt to each other, and how the dynamics of the four learners’ motivation changes due to their learning experiences. each learner was different in their trajectory of motivation and the kinds of motivators and demotivators that they experienced in their particular contexts. the four learners underwent unique motivators and demotivators, and reacted differently. while participants identified their ideal l2 selves, or ought-to l2 selves, these self-guides were not strengthened by their l2 experiences over time. based on these findings, the importance of studying the rich experiences of language learners in motivation research is discussed. keywords: learning experience; l2 motivational self system; motivational trajectories keita kikuchi 158 1. introduction although teachers see students regularly in their classrooms, it may not be easy to understand each learner’s motivation to study the target language of the class. some learners appear to be motivated during the first weeks, while others do not seem to be so even from the beginning of the course. then, towards the end of the course, teachers cannot tell which students may maintain motivation towards language learning after the course. learners’ motivation may be influenced by reasons why they are taking the class or by their friends, parents, or other people in their lives. teachers may want to know what their students’ motivation is or how they can grasp it while many researchers argue that studying the motivation of language learners is not a simple task. in the view of dörnyei and ushioda (2011), language learners’ reasons for studying, their lengths of sustained study, and their intensity of study should be researched. while there are a handful of studies investigating large groups of learners (e.g., yashima, nishida, & mizumoto, 2017; you, dörnyei, & csizér, 2016), there have been few studies tackling the complexity of language learning motivation focusing on the aspects of motivation – discussed dörnyei and ushioda (2011). in terms of why learners study english, how long they study, and how hard they study, there should indeed be a number of fluctuations. while cross-sectional studies can capture a snapshot of the learners’ motivation, longitudinal studies of learners are also needed. this study serves to fill this research niche, following the experiences of four japanese college students studying english in a japanese college over two years. 2. literature review dörnyei’s (2005) l2 motivational self system has attracted the attention of many researchers. according to boo, dörnyei, and ryan (2015), who reviewed a large set of journal articles and book chapters published between 2005 and 2014, the use of the l2 motivational self system (l2mss) became very popular in 2011. regarded as an integrative synthesis of several key constructs and theories in l2 motivational research, it consists of three principal constructs: the ideal l2 self, the ought-to l2 self, and the l2 learning experience. using this theoretical background, large survey studies were first conducted in hungary (csizér & lukacs, 2010; kormos & csizér, 2008). then, taguchi, magid, and papi (2009) conducted a comparative study in japan, china, and iran. other researchers also conducted studies in saudi arabia (al-shehri, 2009), sweden (henry, 2009, 2010), indonesia (lamb, 2012), and germany (busse, 2013). while many small case studies on motivation were conducted focusing on the ideal l2 self or the ought-to l2 self, which work as participants’ self-guides motivation and demotivation over two years: a case study of english language learners in japan 159 in language learning (e.g., irie & ryan, 2015; nitta & baba, 2015; you & chan, 2015), studies focusing on l2 experiences that use the framework of the l2mss are rare. however, if we track back two decades, norton (1995) has conducted studies on investment, social identity and imagined communities, although she has eschewed using the term motivation due to the static nature of the term at that time. in her study, she used the term investment instead of motivation in studying the language learning experiences of five female immigrants to canada since the concept of investment “more accurately signals the socially and historically constructed relationship of the women to the target language and their sometimes ambivalent desire to learn and speak it” (p. 17). in more recent years, many l2 motivation researchers have been treating motivation not as a trait, but rather “a fluid play, an ever-changing one that emerges from the processes of interaction of many agents, internal and external, in the ever-changing complex world of the learner” (ellis & larsen-freeman, 2006, p. 563). in ushioda’s (2009) “person-in-context relational view,” motivation is viewed “not simply as cause or product of particular learning experiences, but as process – in effect, the ongoing process of how the learner thinks about and interprets events in relevant l2-learning and l2-related experiences and how such cognitions and beliefs then shape subsequent involvement in learning” (p. 122). she developed such views based on a qualitative study of 20 irish learners of french. the study focused on their conception of motivation, their motivational evolution and language learning experiences over 15 to 16 months. in the vein of this view of motivation in the socio-dynamic period (dörnyei & ushioda 2011), many researchers are studying language learners in context, and attempting to understand what is happening in their complex world. studying how learners interact with a variety of external and internal factors in their particular learning experiences is needed in this line of research. apparently, this way of looking at motivation is becoming closer to norton’s notion of investment. if we study motivation from the l2mss perspective, for instance, we should study participants’ ideal l2 selves or ought-to l2 selves as well as their l2 experience, and comprehend the dynamic interaction of learners’ selves and their experiences. by doing so, learners’ socially constructed relationships with the language and their learning histories, their motivation and demotivation, as well as ambivalence can be studied. kikuchi (2017) reported on one of the few case studies that examined the dynamics of a group of japanese learners of english over one school year. he studied the trajectory of english language learning motivation of five japanese freshmen over two semesters, using monthly group interviews, a questionnaire, and reflective journals. based on a quantitative analysis of the questionnaire measuring the l2mss, he identified the types of learners and how their motivation keita kikuchi 160 changed through the lens of dynamic systems theory (dst). turner and waugh (2007) describe one important aspect of dst as follows: within academic settings and events, each student may be thought of as a self-organizing system that acts and reacts to both external and internal informational signals. these processes may explain the unique, individual facets of students’ learning-related cognitions, emotions, motivations, and behaviors. (p. 229) based on the qualitative analysis of the data obtained, he described each learner’s self-organizing system and argued that the social environment outside of the classroom can be a crucial factor affecting learners’ dynamic systems. another key term in dst is attractor states, which are defined as “a critical value, pattern, solution or outcome towards which a system settles down or approaches over time” (hiver, 2014, p. 21). especially during a summer break, some learners had a great motivating experience, while others did not. that seemed to change their motivation in the second semester. each learner settled down to a different attractor state. using qualitative data, kikuchi (2017) discussed the agents or experiences that might have helped to develop such attractor states, while not focusing on learners’ l2 experiences per se. in this study, i followed the research design used in kikuchi (2017), but with two differences. first, a shorter questionnaire consisting of 29 items was developed (kikuchi & hamada, 2018) and used in this research. in addition, the length of the study was extended to two academic years. by extending it to two academic years, a richer history of language learning experiences over four semesters at university as well as three breaks was included in the study. this way, the development of participants’ ideal l2 selves and ought-to l2 selves over four semesters, as well as their l2 experiences could be tracked. in tracking the development of student motivation as well as the influence of the l2 experience, this study focuses on the following research questions: 1. how do learners’ motivational states change over two semesters in light of their l2 self systems? 2. how do learners’ motivation and language learning experiences affect each other? 3. research method 3.1. participants the four female students (asako, nana, tamami, and yuki; all pseudonyms) participating in the study were admitted to the department of cross-cultural studies, motivation and demotivation over two years: a case study of english language learners in japan 161 faculty of foreign languages, aoi university (a pseudonym) in 2015. to be a student at aoi university, there are several paths to admission. asako was admitted as a scholarship student based on an entrance exam in december 2014. this scholarship guarantees coverage of most of the tuition costs and living expenses. nana and tamami took the same entrance exam but did not receive scholarships. however, they were admitted without taking the february general entrance examination for many university applicants in japan. yuki took the general entrance examination in february and was admitted. in this university program, students take the toeic (test of english for international communication), a very common english proficiency test in japan. table 1 shows the changes in toeic scores for these four participants, as well as the average score for all 119 students admitted to this department in april 2015. table 1 toeic scores of the four participants participant april 2015 january 2016 january 2017 asako 465 405 660 nana 445 490 tamami 295 460 405 yuki 510 505 615 average 383 429 489 3.2. instruments the questionnaire used in this study was developed by kikuchi and hamada (2018). the eight constructs (based on taguchi, magid, & papi 2009) and the number of items for each construct were as follows: · criterion measure: motivated learning behavior (mot): the learners’ intended efforts for learning english (3 items; e.g., “i am prepared to expend a lot of effort to learn english”). · ideal l2 self (ids): an l2-specific aspect of learners’ ideal selves (4 items; e.g., “i can imagine myself as someone who is able to speak english”). · ought-to l2 self (ots): the attributes that learners believe they ought to possess (i.e., various duties, obligations, or responsibilities) in order to avoid possible negative outcomes (2 items; e.g., “i study english because close friends of mine think it is important”). · attitudes to learning english (attl): situation-specific motives related to the immediate learning environment and experience (4 items; e.g., “i like the atmosphere of english classes”). · instrumentality–promotion (inprm): the regulation of learners’ personal goals to become successful, such as attaining high proficiency in english in order to keita kikuchi 162 make more money or find better jobs (3 items; e.g., “studying english can be important because i think it will be useful in getting a good job someday”). · instrumentality–prevention (inprv): the regulation of learners’ duties and obligations, such as studying english in order to pass an examination (3 items; e.g., “studying english is important to me because, if i don’t have a knowledge of english, i’ll be considered a weak student”). · cultural interest (ci): the learners’ interests in the cultural products of the l2 culture, such as tv, magazines, movies, and music (5 items; e.g., “i like english magazines, newspapers, or books”). · attitudes to the l2 community (attc): the learners’ attitudes toward the community of the target language (5 items; e.g., “i like to travel to english-speaking countries”). 3.3. procedures in april 2015, i made an announcement in an english course to recruit students for a four-year-long project to study their motivation to learn english. i explained that participants would receive about 1000 yen (roughly the equivalent of ten us dollars) to compensate for their time participating in the interviews each month, held seven times throughout the year from april to january in the first year and nine times in the following school year. five students agreed to participate in this project. at the beginning, they were told that they would be able to drop out of this project any time, respecting research ethics. one female participant dropped out in the middle of the second year since she decided to study abroad. either during their lunchtime or after classes, they met with the researcher once a month for 30 to 60 minutes. after completing a questionnaire, interviews were conducted covering questions about their life experiences in general, experiences with their english learning, and factors that may have affected their motivation. all the interviews were recorded and transcribed. three research assistants were hired in order to transcribe the interview data. questionnaire sheets were scanned and responses saved in a spreadsheet program. 3.4. data analysis in order to answer the first research question, the questionnaire data were processed and analyzed in order to understand the changes in each of the eight constructs described in the previous section. the averages of the items measuring each of the eight motivational constructs were plotted: criterion measure (mot), ideal l2 self (ids), ought-to l2 self (ots), attitudes to learning english (attl), instrumentality–promotion (inprm), instrumentality–prevention (inprv), cultural interest (ci) and attitudes to the l2 community (attc). motivation and demotivation over two years: a case study of english language learners in japan 163 qualitative data collected from each interview were analyzed through three processes, data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing, as described by miles and huberman (1994). during the analysis, cognitive maps (p. 134) were used to display learners’ experiences and the effects on motivation. seven figures were made for each participant displaying the data obtained in the spring (1s1, 1s2, and 1s3) and fall semesters in the 1st year (1f1, 1f2, 1f3and 1f4), and the spring (2s1, 2s2, 2s3, 2s3 and 2s4) and fall semesters in the 2nd year (2f1, 2f2, 2f3, 2f3, 2f4, and 2f5) after the spring break at the end of the 1st year. out of seven figures, only one sample cognitive map for each participant is presented in the next section in order to save space. in figures 2, 4, 6, and 8, the boxes with the solid line are for learners’ comments related to their attractor states, while the ones with the broken line are for l2 experiences related to study at the university, and the ones with the dotted line are for l2 experiences outside the university. figure 1 asako’s motivational changes in spring and fall semesters over two years 4. results 4.1. asako: a test-driven learner with the experience of studying in cebu as seen in figure 1, asako maintained a higher instrumentality–promotion (inprm) and very low attitudes to the l2 community (attc), which matched her regular account in the interview that getting a good toeic score would be important for getting a good job. she felt that she would rather study on her own than practice in the 1 2 3 4 5 6 1s1 1s2 1s3 1f1 1f2 1f3 1f4 2s1 2s2 2s3 2s4 2f1 2f2 2f3 2f4 2f5 mot ids ots attl inprm inprv ci attc keita kikuchi 164 classroom. she was aware that her listening ability was weak, so she watched movies in english in her first year, and ted talks in her second year. she constantly said that she wanted to work on toeic test preparation in her second year, too. as seen in table 1, her score went up to 660 in january of her second year. in the spring semester of her first year, she often talked about her part-time job as staff at wedding ceremonies, which appeared to become a central part of her life. during the summer and spring vacations in her first year, she went to tohoku and niigata for volunteer work and became inspired. through these experiences, she started to realize that she could not keep a stressful part-time job, so she changed to being a waitress at a cafe. during the two years, the main highlight for her was that she went to cebu in the philippines to study english at a language school. she said in an interview: before studying in cebu, i thought that social experience is important. i thought i could learn more from a part-time job and it would be helpful for my future. however, i think that i want to study more after hearing stories from other people. i don’t know what i’m interested in studying, though. i just don’t know because i haven’t studied. since i want to find out what i’m interested in, i want to work on english for now …1 that’s why i study for the toeic. (asako, september [2], p. 4)2 although she expressed her determination to study english to find out what she would like to study, in the interview the next month, she noted: i work part-time on the weekend and hang out with friends. it’s easy to give into doing this kind of fun stuff. if i can find time, i feel like i want to study. i can’t study much, but finding enough time to study is not possible. it’s no good. i was able to do it right after i came back from cebu. (asako, october [2], p. 2) as expressed in the interview excerpt above, even though she was influenced by studying english in cebu, she could not help but make excuses for not studying english the next month. figure 2 shows the cognitive map drawn for the data obtained in the fall semester of her second year. after the life-changing experience from which she thought she should study something while she could at university, she did not appear to have a positive l2 learning experience. she thought about going to a free english conversation room, but she did not do that. she needed to take mandatory classes, but she explained that her classmates were not motivated, and she did not feel like studying hard. towards the end, she found one class, the toefl preparation class, to be interesting and she 1 unspaced elipses like this one indicate pauses. 2 following the participants's name is the month of the interview, with the number in square brackets indicating the year of the study and the page number referring to the interview transcript. motivation and demotivation over two years: a case study of english language learners in japan 165 took the toefl test at school. throughout the two years, she had one friend from her high school, whom she often mentioned. she was the one who asked her to go to cebu. as seen in figure 2, asako mentioned her again, saying that she had gone to myanmar. for her, her friends’ influence seemed to be the key. she started to watch dvds in english because her friend had asked her to. she also participated in a volunteer project because of another friend. in terms of her english study, she usually thinks of getting good scores on proficiency tests. she appears to be test-driven in her language learning and she prefers things that she can do by herself, like studying for tests. figure 2 cognitive map for asako’s dynamic system in the fall semester of her second year 4.2. nana: a learner becoming demotivated in studying english as seen in figure 3, nana’s motivation to study english went down, as observed by the drop in attitudes to learning english (attl) and criterion measures (mot). at the beginning of each semester, she usually shared her interests in new classes. however, she could not maintain her interest, as seen in figure 4. she became a member of the english speaking society (ess) club and felt that she was overwhelmed by the good english speakers from other universities during her first year. keita kikuchi 166 figure 3 nana’s motivational changes in spring and fall semesters over two years while she kept working hard with the ess club, she was not able to enjoy her english classes. she said in an interview (i – interviewer, n – nina): i: okay, what do you think, nana? do you think you have been affected by your classmates in your english class? n: well, things don’t go deep in english classes. if i ask a lot of questions, people make disgusted faces. i: i see. n: imagine that we were asked to talk about a topic. then i would ask what my partner was doing in high school. she would answer that she belongs to the tennis club, and then i would ask what she was doing in her junior high-school … i would stop asking any more questions then. i: i see. i see. even though you wanted to talk more … n: people don’t want to talk in english. they want to do it in japanese. people chat away in japanese and the teacher scolds us. (nana, november [1], p. 5) she mentioned in an earlier interview in the spring semester in her first year that she liked classes in which she could move around and talk with other students. in the fall semester, the teacher changed. she mentioned that her teacher did not seem motivated and often looked irritated during class. what she was describing in the interview excerpt above is the experience from that class. figure 4 shows the cognitive map drawn for the data obtained in the fall semester of her first year. one can immediately notice that she has a lot of feelings inside about english and she just cannot motivate herself to do anything. the debate contest in the ess club was 1 2 3 4 5 6 1s1 1s2 1s3 1f1 1f2 1f3 1f4 2s1 2s2 2s3 2s4 2f1 2f2 2f3 2f4 2f5 mot ids ots attl inprm inprv ci attc motivation and demotivation over two years: a case study of english language learners in japan 167 an important moment for her. when she found a gap between herself and students from other universities, she said that she felt self-pity. as far as english classes were concerned, on the other hand, she said that she could not find a reason to take them. the following is an excerpt from another interview: i: so, you are saying that the classes are easier than in high school and not demanding. so, you don’t know what to study. in terms of your motivation, do you ever think about being motivated to do something? n: well, in my high school time, i studied hard for the university entrance exam, midterm tests and such. things mattered for the grades. they acted as goals. on the other hand, i don’t have any goals now. from the school, we are not told to study for the toeic. since my parents tell me to study for the toeic, i think i have to study in the future. yet …, i don’t have any motivation. (nana, december [1], p. 7) figure 4 cognitive map for nana’s dynamic system in the fall semester of her first year during her demotivated state, she seemed to find many reasons not to study. as seen in figure 4, people around her were developing better scores on toeic. using a messaging application, she communicated with taiwanese or german friends and became inspired. yet, one can see that even these experiences did not work to bring her out of her demotivated state. keita kikuchi 168 4.3. tamami: a learner who likes english a lot but also enjoys her part-time jobs as can be seen in figure 5, tamami maintained very high attitudes to learning english (attl), although she did not attest to high ideal l2 self (ids) or criterion measures (mot). figure 5 tamami’s motivational changes in spring and fall semesters over two years the important event during the two years in terms of l2 experience was that she went to canada to attend a language school for two weeks with a group from the university including yuki, in march. after coming back, however, she said in april that she felt that she did not want to study abroad anymore. she said that she did not have any bad experiences in particular, but she just felt that way. over two years, on the other hand, she kept working part-time at a big clothing store in yokohama and a japanese pub in her neighborhood. during the interview, asked to share anything that she was highly motivated to do, she stated: well, i can think of my part-time jobs first. then i’d say assignments are next. i have many places that i want to go and things i want to buy. i want to move to a new place. that’s why my part-time job has a high priority. english is not a priority. with the parttime job, i’ve got the feeling that i have to do it and i want to do it, too. with english, hmm, i have the feeling that i’ve got to do it. i don’t have the feeling that i want to study. (tamami, october [2], p. 4) from this interview excerpt above, one can probably notice her strong passion for her part-time jobs. english is something that she does not have a strong feeling to 1 2 3 4 5 6 1s1 1s2 1s3 1f1 1f2 1f3 1f4 2s1 2s2 2s3 2s4 2f1 2f2 2f3 2f4 2f5 mot ids ots attl inprm inprv ci attc motivation and demotivation over two years: a case study of english language learners in japan 169 study. in another interview, she also stated: “i like english very much, but i don’t want to use english for work. because i like english so much, i wonder why not. i want to think of how i can take advantage of english” (tamami, december [2], p. 3). figure 6 cognitive map for tamami’s dynamic system in the fall semester of her second year even though she said she liked english very much, english became something that she liked just towards the end of her second year. while she maintained very strong attitudes towards learning english, as seen in figure 6, her focus was on a part-time job that she did only three or four times a week. even though she wanted to study for certification tests such as the toeic, she said that she did not have time. in fact, throughout the two years, she sometimes canceled her interview, or looked very tired. she mentioned that her clothing shop, her part-time job, has peak seasons and off-seasons. she told me that she got stressed out and tired during the peak seasons, needing to work a lot, while she could relax during the off-seasons. while she was a full-time college student, her time for study was based on how busy her part-time job was at the time. her two weeks in vancouver in march and the fact that she liked english did not become motivators for studying english, while the job satisfaction and money that she received became motivators to work three or four times a week. keita kikuchi 170 4.4. yuki: a learner who is rather stable in motivational dynamics compared to the other learners, we can see that yuki's response to the questionnaire was constant, as seen in figure 7. she maintained fairly high attitudes to learning english (attl) and ideal l2 self (ids) while had lower scores for ought-to l2 self (ots) and attitudes to the l2 community (attc). like nana, she attended the ess club. with tamami, she went to study abroad for two weeks. while she had these l2 experiences, it was notable that she did not develop her ideal l2 self or motivation to study english. figure 7 yuki’s motivational changes in spring and fall semesters over two years when she was asked to share her views about her l2 ideal self, she provided the following comment: i don’t want to go abroad, and that’s not going to be my main thing. when i work in the future, i may want to use english a bit. that’s not going to be my main issue. if you ask me to imagine it, perhaps i can see myself using english a bit. (yuki, december [2], p. 6) 1 2 3 4 5 6 1s1 1s2 1s3 1f1 1f2 1f3 1f4 2s1 2s2 2s3 2s4 2f1 2f2 2f3 2f4 2f5 mot ids ots attl inprm inprv ci attc motivation and demotivation over two years: a case study of english language learners in japan 171 figure 8 cognitive map for yuki’s dynamic system in the fall semester of her second year after coming back from vancouver, yuki said that she had already participated in short-term study abroad two times, including once when she was in her high school. she told me that it was enough. as expressed in the interview excerpt above, she developed the image that she probably would not use english in the future very much. as seen in figure 8, a cognitive map describing her fall semester during the second year, she felt that english classes were easy and were not structured like in her high school. she thought she was more excited about english then, but not in college. while her time with the ess club became a drive for her in college, she shared her feelings in another interview: when i was in high school, i devoted myself to the brass band club. in my junior high school, i wanted to go to a certain senior high school. i had a certain goal to achieve, and i was trying hard to accomplish it. that’s why i was eagerly and positively working on things. however, right now, i don’t have any concrete goals and i think about many things. i feel anxious then. (yuki october [2], p. 10) while she worked very hard organizing the ess club and had a part-time job on the weekend, she shared her anxiety about her future. like asako, not having a goal for the future seemed to bother yuki while she was actually busy with her club activities and part-time job. keita kikuchi 172 5. discussion by analyzing the four participants’ motivational change, the general tendency that can be observed is that all learners have different trajectories for the motivational components of the l2 self system. in general, the mean of each construct stays somewhere between 3 (somewhat not true for me) and 4 (somewhat true for me). for all students but nana, who became demotivated, the mean score stayed generally above 4 for instrumentality–promotion (inprm) and attitudes to learning english (attl). this can imply that many of the participants kept their instrumental motivation and attitudes towards learning english. it is also notable that both asako and yuki kept their ideal l2 self (ids) generally high, with means of more than 4. by analyzing the cognitive maps, including others not shown for lack of space, which depict their attractor states as well as experiences both in and outside the university, it was noted that at the beginning of each school year, many participants appeared to be excited about their new teachers and courses. however, all participants settled into an attractor state in which they focused on their club activities or part-time jobs. before tamami and yuki participated in a short language program in march of their first year, they experienced attractor states in which they worked hard on english in the study abroad preparation course. asako experienced an attractor state after she came back from cebu, trying to find something that she was interested in studying. however, these attractor states did not last long. many of the participants felt that the university classes were not interesting without any concrete course objectives. they were more attracted by part-time jobs in which they could get money and job satisfaction, or by club activities in which they played a certain role. in short, the language learning experiences did affect some of these learners, especially the ones who experienced the short study abroad program, but they did not seem to affect their dynamic system for a long time. over a decade ago, irie (2003) published a review of studies of english language learning motivation in japan, and observing the recurring patterns she concluded that “japanese university students are likely to appreciate the instrumental value in learning english for exams and a career, and also to have an interest in making contact with native speakers of english and visiting their countries” (p. 97). even now, this observation applies. some of the participants were interested in a long-term study abroad program, but they got to the state that it might be good enough if they could use english for a job later in their life, so they focused on proficiency test preparation. 6. conclusion from the four case studies of female college students presented in this paper, one can notice that the university classes that they were taking probably did not give motivation and demotivation over two years: a case study of english language learners in japan 173 them rich l2 experiences. each participant had experiences outside of school. asako went to cebu, and tamami and yuki went to vancouver to attend short english language programs. nana saw people from other universities talking in good english. however, all of them had a hard time motivating themselves to find good language learning experiences in their daily lives. why is that? while motivation is commonly regarded as an individual attribute, lamb (2016) states: it is important to recognize that it is also a social construction; that is, we come to strive for certain things in life as a result of our socialization in a particular community or society, and the extent to which we can act on our desires is also constrained by our social environment. (p. 324) as presented in the four cognitive maps above, all of the students found that their classmates’ motivation or the teacher’s motivation affected them, and often negatively. of course, we should not only be blaming classmates or teachers. notably, the interaction of each individual’s motivation with their classmates’ and with their teachers’ is clearly important. one might ask what motivates or demotivates japanese learners of english. i hope that it is clear that we cannot easily answer these questions since each one of them is struggling to learn english in a particular community or small society, and interacting with a variety of people who are also a part of it. admittedly, this case study is merely focused on two years of language learning experiences shared by four female students who attended a private university and were majoring in international studies with the original intention to study abroad only for a short time. more studies are needed to understand the rich experiences of english use in the daily lives of different kinds of japanese students. for instance, future studies might include participants who are not interested in studying abroad. it would be interesting to study a group of different genders, as well. this paper attempted to answer the call from dörnyei and ushioda (2011) for research into language learners’ reasons for studying, their lengths of sustained study, and their intensity of study. it was notable that without continuing rich l2 experiences and a personal goal to use english, learners in efl situations have a hard time finding reasons to study; thus, they do not study hard for great lengths of time. acknowledgements this work was supported by jsps kakenhi grant number 16k02857. keita kikuchi 174 references al-shehri, a. s. 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(2016). motivation, vision, and gender: a survey of learners of english in china. language learning, 66(1), 94-123. 447 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (3). 2019. 447-449 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.3.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial this collection of papers has emerged from the language education across borders conference held at the university of graz, austria in 2017 (see also kostoulas, 2019). in the age of translanguaging, multilingualism, multiculturalism, globalization, international migration, transnationalism, and the blending of content and language education, there is an ever greater need in language education to reflect on the interconnections and overlap between languages, disciplines, constructs, and contexts that have traditionally been conceptualized in bounded ways. instead, professional and personal domains have got increasingly permeable boundaries leading to emergent qualities that require new ways of theorizing, researching and teaching. the idea behind the conference was to promote interdisciplinary exchange and encourage people to challenge the notions of borders of all kinds. the aim was to promote discourse and exchange and re-think the fragmentation and separation imposed by borders – real or imagined. it was hoped that by prompting people to reflect on the kinds of borders that bound their research and practice, we would be challenged to think outside of these borders and find the rich, creative space that can lead to innovation and fresh perspectives on the familiar. we believe that the articles in this special issue illustrate just how widely the authors have engaged with this notion of “border crossing.” borders mentioned in the articles include geographical borders, cultural borders, linguistic borders, socio-cultural borders, psychological borders, disciplinary borders, as well as the border between digital and non-digital domains. kaur begins by showing how the students in her study have crossed geographical, socio-cultural and linguistic borders to access education and the challenges this poses and the strategies they employ to manage this. kimura and hayashi show how when their students cross geographical, socio-cultural, and psychological borders in the context of a study abroad, they are able to grow as l2 learners and individuals. indeed, hessel too examines the context of study abroad and concludes, “crossing borders features prominently as a theme in study abroad, not only in 448 terms of students’ physical border crossings, but also in their intercultural interactions with l2 speakers.” her work shows that study abroad represents a classic context to highlight the kinds of border crossings that international student mobility can lead to and the potential for growth inherent in this. lütge, merse, owczarek and stannard explore a different kind of space but an equally topical one, namely, the boundaries between the digital and analogue world, and they argue specifically in favor of crossing these borders in respect to the teaching and use of literature in the efl classroom. finally, resnik and schallmoser look at the emotional and psychological transitions in learning across borders – real and virtual. altogether this is a rich, varied collection of papers that highlight some of the ways in which learners can cross borders and how these border crossings can be harnessed to generate rich affordances for learning. there remains much work that can be done in interdisciplinary and cross-border spaces. not only learners transition these domains but teachers do as well. at present, the research agenda for work in hybrid, blended, interconnected and transdisciplinary spaces remains excitingly open for exploration in theoretical, empirical and practical terms. trans-, inter-, cross-, multi-, and pluri-, are becoming the new norms. the profession of language education is dynamic, multifaceted and experiencing enormous transformations on global, local and virtual levels. as such, the work we do will need to challenge and extend traditional linguistic, cultural, social, physical and disciplinary boundaries in order to meet the demands that this ever-changing new reality implies as well as reap the benefits for learners and teachers of those rich, fertile trans-border spaces. the special issue contains the following articles: in the first paper in this collection, kashmir kaur outlines the results of an empirical investigation into chinese students’ perceptions of their study experience in the uk, tracing their transition in terms of identity and their professional and linguistic development. she uses focus group interviews and compares this study abroad group to chinese students experiencing emi in their home country. also in the field of study abroad, harumi kimura and brenda hayashi analyze the accounts of japanese l2 learners who took part in a short study abroad program in the us to explore their linguistic and personal growth following their stay. their qualitative study starts where other studies often end by describing the students’ retrospective perceptions of their study abroad experience. in their conclusion, the authors call for short-term study programs without exclusive focus on l2 learning that focus on creating opportunities for social interaction and are open to first-yearstudents. hessel’s study is based on quantitative research, which is also contextualized in a study abroad program. in contrast to the previous studies, she focuses on lingua franca interactions by investigating the frequently neglected interactions among international students and their influence on the student’s l2 449 self-motivation to use and further improve the l2. hessel’s study shows the potential of international student interactions as a valuable opportunity for second language acquisition, self-motivation, and intercultural learning. these articles are followed by two papers that are concerned with aspects of foreign language learning in digital contexts. lütge, merse, owczarek and stannard explore the interaction with and production of digital literary texts. the authors go beyond merely suggesting a model because their paper also includes practical implications and provides examples for putting the integration of digital texts in foreign language teaching into practice. in the fifth and final paper, resnik and schallmoser offer a new perspective on tandem learning by investigating the online collaboration of l1 (first language) users in tertiary education who supported each other in the language learning process. in addition to the increased autonomy and reciprocity that an e-tandem scheme provides, resnik and schallmoser also report on the sources of the learners’ perceived enjoyment such as receiving one-on-one feedback, perceived improvement in their linguistic proficiency and the development of friendships. in sum, we hope that this special issue has remained true to the spirit of the conference and will inspire “border crossings” of all kinds and engagement in diverse domains of trans-, inter-, cross-, multi-, and pluritypes of research. anita lämmerer university of graz, austria anita.laemmerer@uni-graz.at sarah mercer university of graz, austria sarah.mercer@uni-graz.at references kostoulas, a. (ed.). (2019). challenging boundaries in language education. cham: springer. 171 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (1). 2015. 171-186 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.1.9 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book reviews online communication in a second language: social interaction, language use and learning japanese author: sarah e. pasfield-neofitou publisher: multilingual matters, 2012 isbn: 978-1847698247 pages: 238 the reviewed book aims at examining the processes of undirected language use in computer-mediated communication (cmc) settings. rather than focusing on cmc interactions in tasks designed, monitored and assessed by teachers and integrated with the regular language learning curriculum, pasfield-neofitou decided to investigate unrestricted, unguided, free communication between users of the same language, japanese, in this case. the researcher’s purpose was to observe and analyse “natural” communication, one that is not triggered or stimulated in any way by the teacher, the coursebook or the classroom assignment. it was also interesting to see how natural cmc interaction evolves and in what social settings. another interesting issue is how learners autonomously select cmc modes, given a great variety of dimensions cmc actually encompasses (e.g., synchronous vs. asynchronous, text vs. audio vs. video), and whether there is any correlation between the implementation of particular cmc environments and the languages that are used within these. as the author herself writes in 172 the introduction, “the volume serves to challenge traditional categorizations of ‘synchronous’ and ‘asynchronous’ cmc mediums, assumptions about the ‘placelessness’ of online domains, and previous characterizations of online conversations as ‘haphazard’ and ‘unstructured’” (p. 1) on top of all that, the process of learning japanese is examined, in order to see how learners were using cmc in their l2 and how this communication provided opportunities for language acquisition. this area is particularly worth exploring due to the considerable differences between english and japanese, mainly in terms of script, and the ways of handling the issue of script shift in different ways in a computer format. the particular research questions posed by pasfield-neofitou were as follows: 1. how do learners establish and maintain relationships in which they use a second language online? 2. what is the nature of learners’ cmc and in what combinations are they using cmc in their second language? 3. how does the use of cmc in conjunction with other resources provide opportunities for second language acquisition? it is the aim of the present review to assess whether and to what extent the author has actually managed to accomplish the formidable task she set herself, in particular, whether the book offers “an alternate, sophisticated view of cmc interaction which highlights identity, the skilful management of communication, and user agency in interaction with technology” (p. 1), as claimed in the introduction. this was to be accomplished by researching a body of cmc data collected from 12 students studying japanese at an australian university and their 18 japanese contacts who volunteered to communicate via different cmc modes (email, skype, mixi blogs/videos/comments/profiles, facebook messages/wall/albums/apps/profiles, myspace comments/profiles, world of warcraft profiles, msn convesations, phone emails, ameba blogs/profiles or mind map data). in total, 777 cmc data files were compiled into a corpus of 2,460 naturally occurring instances of communication collected over the period of three years. the book is composed of six chapters (with the first being entitled “introduction” and the last one “conclusion”), a list of references and an index of names. the key chapters reporting upon different aspects of the study are chapters 2-5: “learner backgrounds and online l2 networks,” “social settings of situated cmc use,” “features of cmc use” and “use of contextual resources and sla opportunities.” the first chapter, “introduction,” in fact contains not only a statement of aims and purposes of the researcher that are to be realized throughout the book 173 but also contains the whole theoretical background to the field the author decided to explore. thus, first of all, it contains a brief literature review reporting upon the findings of previous studies in such areas as the language of cmc (learner output produced in spoken vs. written, synchronous vs. asynchronous modes) and characteristic features of digital writing such as multiple punctuation, eccentric spelling, capitalisation, emoticons, rebus writing or nonlinguistic symbols. in particular, the researcher is trying to draw a distinction between spoken versus written and synchronous versus asynchronous communication, challenging the traditional distinctions of synchronicity by showing, for instance, how contemporary cmc applications blur the line by providing versatile forms of online presence (e.g., synchronous instant messengers allowing sending “offline” messages or hybrid tools like google wave and facebook allowing multiple modes of online communication). the review of literature on the language of cmc continues in the areas of cmc genre selection, the way cmc language output is conceptualized and the extent to which the personalized language output allows one to create a personal internet (rather than the global, everyone’s, internet). pasfield-neofitou claims, after miller and slater (2000), that l2 language use in cmc settings allows one to construct a personal online domain, a property of the learner, which is evolving given changing patterns in language use or technology preference. this interesting concept is in close parallel to the notion of interlanguage (see, for instance, selinker, 1972), which emphasizes learner ownership and active authorship of l2 language use. l1 perspectives in terms of development of language proficiency in english and in japanese are also reviewed, with special attention devoted to the notion of identity: how previous studies report upon the performance/construction of online identity in the individual and group dimensions, instructed cmc l2 use as well as the effect of cmc use on intercultural competence development. a separate part of the introductory chapter is a detailed presentation of the theoretical framework that pasfield-neofitou adopted for her study, namely, the social realist approach (see, for instance, sealey & carter, 2004). social realism makes use of a broad definition of applied linguistics which encompasses not only the teaching and learning of additional languages but also aspects of language in use, thus resulting in an overlap of linguistics and sociolinguistics. in this framework, according to belz (2002), the empirical world is viewed as highly complex and multifaceted, where social action is shaped by the interplay of macro (structure) and micro (agency) phenomena, which, in methodological terms, results in the view of the social world as stratified, comprising structure, agency, and culture, with language as a cultural emergent property (sealey & carter, 2004). in particular, pasfield-neofitou presents the stratified social world model, describing the four social domains of situated activity, 174 psycho-biography, social settings and contextual resources as influences constantly shaping language users’ lives, with a complicated network of interrelations between them. the selection of domains as areas for analysis is the backbone of the book, reflected in the titles of the successive chapters. the final part of the introduction contains a discussion of the methodological framework, the research procedure, sampling, data collection and analysis techniques. in particular, the research relies on ethnographic approaches to data collection, including interviews, qualitative surveys, focus groups, as well as such quantitative measures as calculations of post lengths. data collected from 12 students of japanese studying at an australian university and their 18 volunteer japanese contacts amounted to 777 cmc data files of different types resulting in 2,460 naturally occurring instances of communication. the researcher had access to archived text-based communication of the participants, which, however, they were allowed to censor if they did not wish the researcher to view material of sensitive or personal nature. the remaining part of the introduction retells the data analysis framework which sarah pasfield-neofitou uses to draw conclusions about language use and cmc patterns: comparative analysis of interviews and questionnaires, computer-assisted qualitative data analysis backed up by nvivo software and computer-mediated discourse analysis. the decision to cover all the three crucial areas in a single introductory chapter, namely, the statement of aims for the book, literature review and presentation of research methodology does not seem to be the most fortunate. as a result, some areas of l2 cmc do not get sufficient coverage, especially the effect of instructed cmc on l2 acquisition. even though this is beyond the major focus of the book, the body of literature is so immense that it could get a slightly more systematic coverage in the chapter. similarly, given great attention devoted to the social aspects of language development in cmc use, the review of l2 acquisition in telecollaborative cmc settings seems inadequate as well, with only few works of o’dowd and belz acknowledged. finally, greater acknowledgement of previous studies into cmc in tandem settings would have shed better light on how language acquisition patterns observed for japanese in the work under review refer to the already established body of knowledge. chapter 2, entitled “learner backgrounds and online l2 networks,” is an extended description of the participants of this longitudinal study, outlining their selfor psychobiographies with respect to language learning, internet use, and relationships with their japanese-speaking networks. the accounts are given based on the descriptive coding of participants’ attributes from their interview comments and the auto-coding of japanese email interview responses. obviously, much greater emphasis is laid on the australian participants than 175 their japanese counterparts, and the former’s sociocultural backgrounds are thoroughly covered in the chapter. pasfield-neofitou first produces a summary of the learners’ linguistic backgrounds indicating languages, trips to japan, years of japanese study and the like; then, a similar summary is made of their technological backgrounds (type of computer/operating system, total daily computer use, number of computers used, preferred online applications). in a way, the author produces an account similar to the language passport of the european language portfolio in the two areas of language use and computer use. a similar summary is made of japanese contacts, though to a less detailed extent. what follows is a descriptive account of the learners’ biographies, with rich data on their learning context, professional situation, proficiency in japanese, preferred learning habits, contacts with the japanese language and culture and the like. each description is a vivid and in-depth account of one’s psychobiography, which makes the next three chapters a truly interesting read. moreover, thanks to establishing the networks and relationships of cmc use and providing clear data on the nature of the relationships between australian participants and their japanese partners (who are, for instance, a former tutor, a friend from a bar, a myspace friend, a boyfriend or a museum boss), one can fully see and understand the complex nature of foreign language interaction occurring in cmc settings. the description of participants shows at the same time both stronger and weaker sides of the study. on the one hand, the 12 australian participants exhibit an immense range of learner profiles as far as age is concerned (ranging from 18 to 28 years of age), additional languages (ranging from 2 to as many as 6), level of proficiency in japanese (from beginner levels of 1-2 to very advanced levels of 11-12), length of study of japanese (1-17 years) and length of stay in japan (from none to as many as 13 months in total). collecting a rich body of data from participants across such a wide spectrum of sociodemographic and learning variables enabled the researcher to come up with examples of interactions with their corresponding linguistic and technological contexts. on the other hand, the body of data is quite naturally skewed towards the more proficient participants. for instance, out of 777 data samples as many as 294 (more than 37%) were produced by one particularly prolific and proficient participant, while 2 participants out of 12 account for almost 60% of the total number of data samples. some participants contributed very little to the corpus: hyacinth, 7 samples (6 blog entries and 1 blog profile); and noah only 4 (1 blog post, 1 comment, 2 profiles). as a result, it is difficult to make generalisations about the whole group as such; rather, individual cases need to be interpreted in relation to their sociocultural settings. 176 chapter 3, “social settings of situated cmc use,” is the first out of the three chapters recounting the results of the empirical work conducted by sarah pasfield-neofitou in her study. more specifically, the author identifies here the ways in which the participants’ experiences of sociocultural nature shape cmc use in a variety of computer environments. the three focal issues of management of identity, maintenance of interest, and nonuse/lapsing/lurking are discussed in great detail, with example incidents proving particular points. it turned out that there exist languageor nationality-specific online domains, specific places on the internet which are characteristic for particular linguistic/cultural communities. the participants in the study, in their substantial part, were shown to actually shape these japanese-language domains to personalise them. an important part of this chapter is also an attempt at investigating the effect that engagement in cmc interaction with japanese contacts had on the lives of the australian participants in a somewhat broader communicative context. data on, for instance, the increase in the number of facebook contacts, the ratio of actual “active contacts” to “all contacts” and the number of japanese-language environments used for everyday purposes, the characteristics of code-switching and medium-switching, all seem to demonstrate that involvement in cmc interaction does exert an effect on the way that learners use computers for work, study and leisure purposes. it is, thus, an important finding of pasfield-neofitou’s study that the l1-l2 computer use is bi-directional: what we do in digital environments in l2 shapes the way we use computers and the internet in l1. chapter 4, “features of cmc use,” is presumably the most significant part of the book reporting upon research in second language acquisition. this chapter examines the features of participants’ cmc use, focusing on the way in which learners use cmc in their l2, for what purposes and in what combinations. the situated cmc activity is analysed in terms of conversational organisation, language choice, orthography and code-switching and types of language use. as demonstrated with qualitative data, participants’ patterns of turn-taking are related to their language choice in terms of orthography and code-switching. since, as pasfield-neofitou proved in chapter 3, specific online domains are language/culture-specific, language choice analysed in chapter 4 shows how participants identified particular settings as either english or japanese in nature. their language choice was also influenced by interpersonal relationships, interlocutor’s status and learner’s motivations. quite interestingly, the analysis in the chapter touches upon the question of whether text-based communication is “talking” or “writing,” and challenges the notion of synchronicity of online communication. participants proved to distinguish between the two modes in terms of degree of synchronicity, based 177 on use rather than solely on medium choice, and they did not label particular media (such as msn, myspace or email) as clearly synchronous or asynchronous. thus, sealey and carter’s (2004) view of cmc as emergent from speaking, writing, technology and human behaviour is reinforced through the data from two case studies thoroughly described in the chapter. chapter 5, “use of contextual resources and sla opportunities,” is the last chapter reporting upon empirical work. it strives to examine how participation in online communication provides opportunities for language acquisition. the author draws on analytical coding of the interaction and interview data, reflecting upon such aspects as gaining an audience, facing interactional challenges, patterns of dictionary use and the use of other supplementary resources (paper-based printed resources, non-computer-based digital resources such as nintendo ds hand-held game system, software-based and internet-based digital resources). the use of multiple resources proved to be common, with online dictionaries being a popular resource. however, the use of resources appeared to be influenced by participants’ psycho-biographies, the social contexts in which communication with their japanese partners was taking place, as well as the very nature of the situated activity. a major part of chapter 5, though, is a discussion of how situated cmc activity planned in the study makes affordances for discourse repair, peer editing and feedback giving. participants were found to use the linguistic capital of their native-speaker partners to obtain feedback, with some, more proficient ones, engaging in peer editing. repair was rather infrequent and self-correction was more prevalent due to the informal nature of conversations; however, in some cases delayed repair was undertaken even after change of the topic, which testifies to the awareness of learners and their willingness to improve. the final part of the book draws a conclusion concerning the findings presented in chapters 3, 4 and 5. the research questions posed in the introduction are revisited and the most salient points are extracted from analysis. to sum up, the book by sarah e. pasfield-neofitou is a highly interesting and comprehensive monograph on the topic of social interaction in cmc settings, based on the particular example of learning japanese by australian students. the author makes a number of very important claims about participating in online domains and virtual communities, entering cmc networks and maintaining relationships, code-switching and turn-taking, as well as acquisition opportunities in cmc. the book attempts to cover such a vast area that it would be impossible to exhaust the topic completely. in fact, it should be treated as an invitation to undertake further research, in more controlled settings, with more systematic and principled sampling, not only in order to verify the claims made by pasfield-neofitou, but also, perhaps even more importantly, 178 to see to what extent the observations about the nature of learning japanese by australian speakers can be generalisable to foreign language acquisition as such. reviewed by jarosław krajka maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin, poland jarek.krajka@poczta.umcs.lublin.pl references belz, j. a. (2002). social dimensions of telecollaborative foreign language study. language learning and technology, 6(1), 60-81. miller, d., & slater, d. (2000). the internet: an ethnographic approach. oxford: berg. sealey, a., & carter, b. (2004). applied linguistics as a social science. london: continuum. selinker, l. (1972). interlanguage. international review of applied linguistics, 10, 209-241. 179 multiple perspectives on the self in sla editors: sarah mercer and marion williams publisher: multilingual matters, 2014 isbn: 978-1-78309-134-8 pages: 188 the collection of papers multiple perspectives on the self in sla, edited by sarah mercer and marion williams, is devoted to the multiplicity of ways in which the self can be viewed and the contribution which these different conceptualizations can make to the process of second language acquisition (sla). the book has been divided into twelve chapters, the first of which constitutes an introduction and includes explanations concerning the theme, purpose, audience, and organization of the volume. the first perspective is provided by nicole mills in chapter two, titled “self-efficacy in second language acquisition.” having situated the construct within the framework of social cognitive theory (e.g., bandura, 1997), she indicates its impact on academic achievement and goes on to contrast it with three other self-related constructs, that is linguistic self-confidence, self-concept and self-regulation. she then provides a brief overview of studies that have demonstrated a relationship between self-efficacy and attainment in second language learning, both in general and with respect to reading and listening, language anxiety, language learning strategy use and self-regulation. mills also emphasizes the 180 fact that empirical investigations into self-efficacy should be conducted with the help of instruments that are specific in relating self-efficacy to a particular area and tasks that students are expected to perform. the chapter closes with guidelines on how self-efficacy can be enhanced with regard to four main sources of information on the basis of which such beliefs are constructed, that is mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasions and affective indicators (bandura, 1997). in chapter three, sinthujaa sampasivam and richard clément set their sights on the concept of second language confidence (2lc), understood, after clément (1980), as “a lack of anxiety when communicating in the second language (l2) coupled with positive ratings of self-proficiency” (p. 23). first, they provide an overview of the development of the construct and resolve definitional issues, emphasizing the composite nature of 2lc, its dependence on context and relationship with anxiety. then they offer a taxonomical framework for organizing different learning situations which rests on a distinction between learning inside and outside the classroom, the former of which includes foreign language settings and computer-mediated communication, while the latter involves longand short-term stays abroad. the innovative character of the chapter, however, lies in the fact that different types of contexts in l2 learning are redefined in terms of harwood’s (2010) contact space theory, which discusses different types of intergroup contact with regard to two dimensions, that is involvement of self (i.e., involvement and participation in interaction), and richness of self-outgroup experience (i.e., multiplicity of channels and senses as well as the immediacy of feedback). they propose an integrated framework in which l2c is affected by richness of contact, mediated by frequency and proficiency, as well as self-involvement, hinging upon richness and perceived importance, and moderated by the quality of the available contacts. in chapter four, fernando d. rubio considers the role of self-esteem and self-concept, constructs that, in his view, have to a large extent remained on the sidelines of research into the role of affective factors in sla. one major contribution of the paper is that it successfully tackles the difficulties involved in defining the two overlapping concepts, without recourse to the vague distinction between cognition and affect. accordingly, self-esteem is seen as “a process of evaluation and the emergent evaluation,” and self-concept is understood as “the perceived entity that is evaluated” (p. 42). rubio then goes on to discuss theoretical perspectives on the two constructs in the field of educational and social psychology, placing emphasis on the contributions of psychodynamic, sociocultural, behavioral, humanistic, cognitive and phenomenological approaches, and to stress the dynamic character of self-esteem and self-concept, accounted for in terms of the findings of research in neuroscience. this is followed by an overview of studies that have investigated the constructs in sla, 181 the ways in which they can be explored and implications for classroom instruction. this last part is particularly insightful as it considers ways in which positive self-esteem and self-concept can be fostered, taking as a point of reference the model proposed by reasoner (1992), which aims to simultaneously foster learning and personal growth. rubio demonstrates what can be done to attain this goal in the classroom with respect to the five dimensions of the model, namely security, identity, belonging, purpose and competence. in the next chapter, bonny norton discusses the contribution of poststructuralist theory to the study of identity in sla, both inside the classroom and outside. she argues that this theory allows to define identity as “multiple, changing, and a site for struggle, frequently negotiated in the context of inequitable relations of power” and that “identity signals the way a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how the person understands possibilities for the future” (pp. 60-61). she provides an overview of the main arguments why such a perspective is of relevance to sla as well as highlights ways in which recent work in this area has been informed by poststructuralist theories of language, postulating that language is a tool for creating meaning and shaping power relationships; poststructuralist theories of subjectivity, which emphasize that a person can be placed in different positions within social networks, with these positions being constantly negotiated through language; and poststructuralist theories of positioning, which stress the role of context in shaping identities accorded by social structures. she illustrates such claims by discussing three individuals, one of whom attempts to construct her identity outside and the other two inside the classroom, showing that learners can opt for more beneficial identity positions, that text meaning is subject to negotiation, and how the concept of investment (norton, 2000) may explain why learners will or will not be committed to classroom practices. norton argues that adopting the poststructuralist stance can enhance instruction on condition that teachers, administrators and policy makers ensure that multiple learner identities are recognized and that classroom practices are negotiated to trigger greater investment. the discussion of the self in terms of identity is continued in chapter six by chantel hemmi, who applies this concept to bilingual individuals and reports the results of a small-scale study involving six cases of japanese women learning english. she discusses the main tenets of postmodernist and sociocultural views on identity, stressing, among other things, that identity is temporal, context-dependent and socially-constructed, and highlights the role of power relationships in different communities of practice. subsequently, she focuses upon the existence of competing identities in bilinguals, listing, after pavlenko (2006), some negative emotions that they can experience and the differences in the perceptions of 182 the world, ways of thinking as well as verbal and nonverbal behaviors when switching between languages. the study aimed to explore the ways in which the six participants learnt english, how they viewed their sense of belonging in their society and how they constructed their identities in first and second languages. the data obtained through a questionnaire and in-depth interviews constitute a fascinating read, showing that most of the women are indeed caught between different identities, but also that they are able to see more benefits than drawbacks of this situation. this being said, one has to wonder whether some of the conclusions do not go too far given the fact that they are based on a one-off interview and that an individual’s ability to reflect on such issues in such circumstances is at best limited. can we really take seriously, for example, the comment from one of the women that there are four different people within her: “i think there are three . . . no, i think four” (p. 86), when no further evidence is provided. in chapter seven, florentina taylor directs our attention to the multiplicity of selves that individuals can manifest in different social interactions. she thus emphasizes the relative nature of the self, building her discussion around the concept of relational context, seen as “a given social situation where the individual interacts with other persons in a particular social capacity, responding to particular social expectations” (p. 92). she makes a distinction between the private self, or what a person really thinks about himself or herself, and the public self, intended for encounters with others, which can in itself be multiple. she then goes on to outline three approaches to the study of the relational nature of the self in sla: synchronic, diachronic and an integration of these two. the first is related to the gap between how individuals view themselves and the ways they would like to be perceived, and the different images they would like to project, with the possibility that such presentation sets may become internalized and become part of the self-concept. the second is connected with the changes in individuals’ selves in time and embodied in the theory of possible selves and self-discrepancy theory, which stress the need to reduce the gap between the actual self and the ideal and ought-to self, and have provided a basis for l2 motivational self-system (dörnyei, 2005). the third places a premium on the role of multiple selves both at a specific point in time and over time, and is manifested in research on negotiated identities of immigrants. taylor concludes that an important lesson that comes from the relational view is that language learners should be recognized for who they really are, together with all their imperfections, and supported in their transition to who they would like to be with respect to a particular foreign language. the issue of possible and future selves is also the theme of chapter eight by stephen ryan and kay irie, who emphasize the role of imagination and stories individuals create about themselves, as both of these greatly contribute to the 183 construction of self-concept. they single out the vital role in this process of past experiences and attributions of successes and failures, readiness to reduce the distance between the actual self and the ideal and ought-to self, and the need for agency in pursuing possible selves. this is followed by the description of the ways in which imagining can be fostered, such as identification of proximal and distal goals as well as problem-solving strategies needed to attain them, focus not only on the expected outcome but also the process required to arrive at it, need to distinguish between fantasy and expectation, and contribution of thirdrather than first-person perspectives. then, the authors demonstrate how the concept of imagination is considered in the sla literature, concentrating primarily on the notion of imagined communities, l2 motivational self-system and selfdetermination theory, and highlight the methodological challenges involved in the investigation of imagined selves, singling out the contribution of q methodology and narrative inquiry in this respect. the paper closes with pedagogical guidelines, which include fostering internal explanations of outcomes, ensuring that imagined selves are not too removed from the current self-concept, encouraging the process of imagining, as evident, for example, in dörnyei and kubanyiova’s (2014) possible selves program, and enhancing third-person perspectives. in chapter nine, ema ushioda adopts a motivational perspective on the self, stressing in particular the developmental nature of motives to learn second languages and the intensity of engagement in this process. as she puts it, her aim is to “explore the processes whereby language learning motivation becomes (or does not become) an integral part of the self, and how such processes of integration and internalization relate to the interactions between the self and the surrounding social context” (p. 128). she illustrates how motivation can change over time as a function of both forward-looking and historical and experiential dimensions, exerting positive and negative influences in this respect and being internalized to varying degrees within a specific learner’s self. she then goes on to consider internal (e.g., self-related cognitions, attitudes, individual characteristics) and external (e.g., significant others, learning environment, educational context) factors, as well as presenting theoretical positions seeking to explain the relationships between them. the focus is then shifted to two theoretical frameworks that seek to elucidate the distinction between more and less internalized forms of motivation, that is self-determination theory and l2 motivational self-system, and metacognition, thanks to which the learning process can be successfully self-regulated. thus, opportunities should be created for learners to engage in problem-solving interactions in which their thoughts can be articulated and modified, while future research should focus on a finegrained analysis of interfaces between motivational and metacognitive processes in interactions concerning specific cognitive and linguistic issues. 184 in chapter ten, georg northoff tackles the self from a neurophilosophical perspective, seeking to explain how this construct is represented in the brain. first, he considers the definitions of the self from the point of view of philosophy, distinguishing between the mental self, viewed as distinct from the physical substance of the body, the empirical self, which stresses the role of the neuronal activity in the brain, the phenomenal self, equated with an individual’s consciousness and experience, and the minimal self, referring to a particular point in time, an experience that a person may not be aware of or able to reflect upon. he also deals with the complex issue of investigating the self, stressing the need for the use of objective and quantifiable measures that can be examined from a third-person perspective and focusing on the self-reference effect (sre), or events that are related to one’s own self. the importance of sre had been confirmed in studies that have relied upon functional magnetic resonance imaging and provided evidence for the role in the neural processing of the self of both domain specific and nondomain specific regions of the brain. northoff also delineates future directions for the study of the self from a neurolinguistic perspective, arguing at the same time that “a high degree of personal relevance and importance, for example, self-reference of the new language, may ease and facilitate subsequent learning and acquisition” (p. 157). while considerations of this kind are enlightening, it is not entirely clear how they can enhance the understanding of the self from an educational standpoint, all the more so that the author shies away from providing concrete pedagogical implications. in chapter eleven, sarah mercer looks at the self from the perspective of complex systems theories, attempting to combine different theoretical stances and give justice to the intricate, situated and dynamic nature of this concept. she first draws our attention to the integrative perspectives on the self, both within the field of psychology (e.g., mischel & morf, 2003) and sla (e.g., van lier, 2004). subsequently, she demonstrates how the self manifests the key features of complex dynamic systems, such as the existence of multiple interrelated components, the fact that it is in a constant state of flux, with changes in some of components triggering changes in others, or the quality of emergence, as an individuals’ self-efficacy or self-esteem are an outcome of an interplay of variables. as a result, the self “can be thought of as a coherently organized dynamic system encompassing all the beliefs, cognitions, emotions, motives and processes related to and concerning self. this implies the self can be understood as an ongoing process that is never completed, but is continually in a state of development and self-organizing emergence” (p. 163). mercer also reports the results of a study in which the dynamic nature of the selves of four female tertiarylevel students was investigated at the macro-scale, through autobiographic accounts, and concurrently, through three in-depth interviews, as well as at the 185 micro-scale, through the application of speaking tasks and subsequent stimulated recall sessions. she offers evidence for the dynamic nature of self beliefs about l2 learning and the fluctuations in the participants’ self-confidence during the performance of the speaking tasks, which were ascribed to a variety of factors (e.g., the interlocutor, task type, knowledge of vocabulary). she also makes recommendations for the methodology of future research on the self (e.g., the adoption of a holistic perspective and qualitative methods) and offers guidelines for classroom practice (e.g., paying attention to the choice of conversational partners or selecting engaging topics). finally, in chapter twelve, the editors make an attempt to bring together some of the themes that have emerged in the different papers, dividing their reflections into five sections, devoted to definitional issues, the role of contextual and temporal factors, methodological considerations and pedagogical implications. they argue, among others, that is it necessary to focus on the interconnectedness of the different facets of the self, acknowledge ways in which the self-system can interact with context at different levels, recognize changes in the self at both the macro and micro-levels, with reference to the past, present and future goals, employ a combination of different methods and techniques in the study of the self, and encourage a positive sense of self among learners. mercer and williams also consider the future directions of the study of the self in sla, pointing out that “given the centrality of the self in all things we do, we must make it a priority to seek to better understand how the self, as experienced by learners and teachers, can facilitate or inhibit effective language learning.” the main strength of the volume lies without doubt in its diversity as the editors have successfully managed to bring together a multiplicity of perspectives on the self in sla, show the ways in which these perspectives can be reconciled and illustrate how they can provide a point of reference for future empirical investigations in this area. as a result, the book will be a real eye opener to many readers, just as it has been to me, since it will help them realize the ways in which a number of seemingly separate constructs are in fact closely related and how reconciling the different approaches in research can help us better understand the nature of the self, the ways in which it can contribute to language learning, and the steps that can be taken to ensure that this influence fosters rather than impedes this process. although the contribution of some of the chapters is far from obvious, either due to somewhat unwarranted interpretation of the data (chapter six) or lack of tangible pedagogical implications (chapter ten), this can hardly be avoided in an edited collection. i am fully confident that, on the whole, the book constitutes an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the study of the language learner’s 186 self, be they graduate or doctoral students, or researchers seeking to gain further insights into this fascinating domain. reviewed by mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references bandura, a. (1997). self-efficacy: the exercise of control. new york: w. h. freeman. clément, r. (1980). ethnicity, contact and communication competence in a second language. in h. giles, p. robinson, & p. smith (eds.), social psychology and language (pp. 147-159). oxford: pergamon. dörnyei, z. (2005). the psychology of the language learner: individual differences in second language acquisition. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. dörnyei, z., & kubanyiova, m. (2014). motivating learners, motivating teachers: building vision in the language classroom. cambridge: cambridge university press. harwood, j. (2010). the contact space: a novel framework for intergroup contact research. journal of language and social psychology, 29(2), 147-177. mischel, w., & morf, c. c. (2003). the self as a psycho-social dynamic processing system: a meta-perspective on a century of the self in psychology. in m. a. leary & j. p. tangney (eds.), handbook of self and identity (pp. 15-43). new york: guilford. norton, b. (2000). identity and language learning: gender, ethnicity and educational change. harlow: pearson education. pavlenko, a. (2006). bilingual selves. in a. pavlenko (ed.), bilingual minds: emotional experience, expression, and representation (pp. 1-33). clevedon: multilingual matters. reasoner, r. (1982). building self-esteem: a comprehensive program. palo alto: consulting psychologists. van lier, l. (2004). the ecology and semiotic of language learning: a sociocultural perspective. norwell, ma: kluwer. 541 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (3). 2019. 541-564 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.3.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt enjoyment as a key to success? links between e-tandem language learning and tertiary students’ foreign language enjoyment pia resnik university college of teacher education vienna/krems, austria https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0948-9546 pia.resnik@kphvie.ac.at christine schallmoser king’s college london, university of london, uk https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7745-9133 christine.schallmoser@kcl.ac.uk abstract this paper reports on crossing borders virtually via an e-tandem scheme and presents the findings of a study, in which students of english from an austrian university were paired with students of german from the uk and the usa. drawing on data from 19 in-depth interviews, the study aims to identify links between e-tandem language learning and foreign language enjoyment (fle) (dewaele & macintyre, 2014, 2016). a category-based qualitative text analysis (kuckartz, 2014) revealed that a majority of the interviewees felt e-tandem language learning contributed to their fle. furthermore, a range of reasons underlying students’ perceived enjoyment of learning a language in tandem emerged: having authentic conversations in the target language with l1 (first language) users (dewaele, 2018), perceiving each other as cultural mediators and a difference from language classroom contexts on the level of power relations, which made students feel more at ease. helping each other, receiving one-on-one feedback and perceiving improvement in their linguistic mastery were furthermore mentioned as factors they felt boosted their enjoyment and so was developing friendships with l1 users. according to the interviewees, these aspects specifically increased their interest and enjoyment in using and pia resnik, christine schallmoser 542 learning the language and their eudaimonic happiness. the findings demonstrate that e-tandem language learning can be a resource to enhance perceived enjoyment in foreign language learners at tertiary level and they illustrate that social and private components of fle seem to be interlinked. keywords: foreign language enjoyment; individual differences; lx user; positive psychology in sla; tandem language learning 1. introduction emotions had been neglected in sla (second language acquisition) research for a long time, partly due to the false assumption of cognition being uninfluenced by emotion but also due to their complexity (resnik, 2018) which makes researching them a challenging endeavor. emotions were, consequently, frequently “the elephants in the room – poorly studied, poorly understood, seen as inferior to rational thought” (swain, 2013, p. 205). with the introduction of positive psychology (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000) to sla research (e.g., macintyre & gregersen, 2012a, 2012b; macintyre & mercer, 2014), a new leaf was turned over in the field’s emotion research. despite an awareness among language educators that, for instance, establishing positive classroom environments and developing and maintaining students’ motivation and positive emotions are crucial in fostering learning progress, research on the role of positive emotions in fll (foreign language learning) had remained scarce for a long time (macintyre & mercer, 2014). formerly, sla researchers mostly focused on the role of negative emotions in the learning process, with foreign language anxiety (fla) being among the most widely studied concepts (e.g., dewaele, 2007, 2010; gkonou, daubney, & dewaele, 2017; gregersen, macintyre, & olsen, 2017; horwitz, 1986, 2000; macintyre, 2002). the interest “in positive psychological states” (csikszentmihalyi, 2006, p. 3), shared by proponents of the movement, is of great relevance to fll as “positive and negative are not opposite ends of the same spectrum” (macintyre & gregersen, 2012b, p. 193). for example, experiencing fle in the classroom (dewaele & macintyre, 2014) does not necessarily imply a complete lack of foreign language classroom anxiety (flca). positive psychologists therefore stress the need for investigating positive emotions too for their different powers and influences on the language learner (macintyre & mercer, 2014; macintyre, gregersen, & mercer, 2016). the present paper follows this trend by investigating the links between fle and e-tandem language learning, where two speakers of different l1s (first languages) mutually support each other in the process of learning the target language enjoyment as a key to success? links between e-tandem language learning and tertiary. . . 543 (tl), making use of digital media (e.g., skype). it sheds light on how such an e-tandem scheme can be used to complement university courses in higher education. the paper is structured as follows: after explaining the concept of e-tandem language learning, elaborating on its benefits and providing the reader with an overview of previous research in the field, fle is explained in greater detail. this is followed by a description of the project design, the presentation of the research questions, the methodology used and the participants. afterwards, the results of the category-based qualitative content analysis (kuckartz, 2014) are presented, which are then discussed in light of the literature review. finally, the results will be summarized and ramifications will be addressed. 2. literature review 2.1. e-tandem language learning e-tandem language learning, frequently described as online collaboration or telecollaboration, refers to a more specific form of the latter (el-hariri, 2016) and is based on the core principles of learning in tandem, namely, reciprocity and autonomy. reciprocity encompasses both tandem partners’ commitment to their own and their partner’s learning (little, 1999a), while autonomy refers to both partners’ ability to plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning, which presupposes a degree of metacognitive awareness and metalinguistic knowledge (little, 1996). our approach is inspired by little’s and dam’s concept of learner autonomy (e.g., dam, 1995; little, 2013). both consider learning a social phenomenon rooted in collaboration and believe autonomy induces the most effective way of learning, making e-tandem language learning the perfect arena for improving these skills in learners. whereas a certain extent of autonomy is a precondition for tandem language learning, it ideally also develops further in the course of interaction between the partners. little (1999a) suggests three hypothetical benefits of learning in tandem: participants actively communicate in their tl, interaction has a sharper focus on both the participants’ interests and needs than usual, and partners are equally committed to their role not only of learner but also of supportive proficient speaker. furthermore, comprehension and production skills can be improved by means of authentic communication, while cooperativeness, tolerance, and apprehension can also be advanced (steinmüller, 1991). not only can l1 users provide otherwise inaccessible insights into their language and culture but they can also help overcome possible communication problems (little, 1999a). the past twenty years have seen rapid advances in the field of online collaboration and its more specific form, e-tandem language learning, and a number pia resnik, christine schallmoser 544 of researchers have investigated the effects of learning a language through an etandem exchange scheme on learner autonomy (e.g., little, 2001, 2016; schwienhorst, 2003). other studies focused on peer feedback within e-tandem settings (e.g., fondo garcia & appel, 2016; sotillo, 2005; ware & o’dowd, 2008), task design (e.g., fondo garcia & appel, 2016), and the advantages of telecollaboration as preparation for study abroad programs (e.g., kinginger, 2016). its opportunities for fostering intercultural learning and cross-cultural communication (e.g., hedderich, 1996; jin & erben, 2007; o’dowd, 2003, 2013; ware & kramsch, 2005) have been widely researched too and so have been learners’ perspectives on e-tandem learning (e.g., el-hariri, 2016; tian & wang, 2010). it has also been approached with a social-interactive view of autonomy based on vygotsky’s perspective of sociocultural theory (e.g., schwienhorst, 2003; sung & poole, 2017), and the affective dimension of e-tandem language learning was also discussed in papers with a focus on motivation (e.g., appel & gilabert, 2002; little, 2006; turula, 2017; ushioda, 2000); however, to our knowledge, no studies to date have investigated the links between learning through such an exchange scheme and fle (dewaele & macintyre, 2014, 2016), which is the focus of our study. 2.2. foreign language enjoyment according to fredrickson (2001, 2013), experiencing positive emotion plays an important role in humans’ flourishing. in her broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, she explains that “certain discrete positive emotions – including joy, interest, contentment, pride and love – . . . share the ability to broaden people’s momentary thought-action repertoires and build their enduring personal resources, ranging from physical and intellectual resources to social and psychological resources” (fredrickson, 2001, p. 219). the experience of positive emotions often does not last long, but it can have long-term effects. they “do more than simply feel good in the present” (fredrickson, 2003, p. 335). positive emotions broaden our mindsets and, for instance, possibly spark new ideas or actions; they might promote social bonds, “undo lingering negative emotions” (rahimi & askari bigdeli, 2014, p. 797) and contribute to our well-being (fredrickson, 2004). macintyre and gregersen (2012b, p. 198) conclude from fredrickson’s theory that, “it seems best to conceptualize emotion along two separate dimensions, positive-broadening and negative-narrowing” as they fulfil different functions (frederickson, 2003). while negative emotions usually hinder progress, positive emotions often boost it. such a conceptualization helps explain both ambivalent emotions and the fact that the presence of the experience of a negative emotion does not necessarily imply the lack of experience of positive emotion or vice versa (macintyre & gregersen, 2012b). recent research in sla has enjoyment as a key to success? links between e-tandem language learning and tertiary. . . 545 built on the newly gained insights and a number of studies have taken a holistic approach to investigating the psychology of foreign language learners, taking both negative and positive emotions into account (see e.g., boudreau, macintyre, & dewaele, 2018; dewaele & alfawzan, 2018; dewaele & macintyre, 2014; dewaele, macintyre, boudreau, & dewaele, 2016; dewaele, witney, saito, & dewaele, 2017). as “positive emotions are still under-researched” (pavelescu & petrić, 2018, p. 74), the present paper aims to contribute to our understanding of foreign language enjoyment (fle) (dewaele & macintyre, 2014). dewaele and macintyre (2014) have recently drawn attention to its role in sla. they define enjoyment “as a complex emotion, capturing interacting components of challenge and perceived ability that reflect the human drive for success in the face of a difficult task” (dewaele & macintyre, 2016, p. 216). thus, enjoyment is more than just taking pleasure in something as it is linked to personal investment, to accomplishing something relevant. dewaele and macintyre (2016) concluded from their analysis of 1742 multilinguals’ flca and fle ratings that fle is composed of social and private components. while the former are linked to the setting as such (e.g., classroom atmosphere) and people one interacts with (teachers and peers), the latter are linked to personal feelings and reactions to the learning process (e.g., fll being fun, enjoyable, having learned interesting things or having accomplished something). their research showed that flca and fle were negatively correlated (dewaele & macintyre, 2014) and they too stress that both should be seen as separate dimensions (dewaele & macintyre, 2016; see also boudreau et al., 2018), supporting macintyre and gregersen’s (2012b) suggestion mentioned above. further analyses (dewaele & macintyre, 2014) showed that learners overall tend to report higher fle scores than flca scores, that fle scores tend to increase with the overall number of languages known and that they are linked to fl mastery. students’ self-perception in relation to the group of fl learners was, furthermore, influential: the higher they perceived themselves hierarchically in the group, the higher their fle ratings were. a steady increase in fle ratings was furthermore observable according to their level of education. additionally, older learners reported higher fle scores than younger learners and gender showed to be influential too: females scored higher than males. this trend was also confirmed when reanalyzing the data at item level (dewaele et al., 2016): females reported having more fun in the fl classroom, were prouder of their accomplishments and agreed with learning interesting things more than male participants. the authors also identified gender-based differences in flca scores, making them conclude that “positive and negative emotions indeed are mixing in language classrooms” (dewaele et al., 2016, p. 57). a recent study by dewaele and alfawzan (2018), with participants from uk secondary schools and saudi universities, that is, very different contexts, pia resnik, christine schallmoser 546 demonstrated that fle had a slightly stronger effect than flca on performance in both contexts. their qualitative analyses additionally highlighted the important role of learners’ perceptions of their teachers and their teaching practices. dewaele et al. (2017) have also shown that teaching practices are highly influential and can have a positive impact on fle. learning another language is an emotional as well as cognitive process (pavelescu & petrić, 2018, p. 74). given the insight that “more frequent l2 use with positive emotions directly impacts acquisition” (saito, dewaele, abe, & in’nami, 2018, p. 1), it is imperative for foreign language teachers to focus on enhancing students’ positive emotions to maximize their language learning experience (de smet, mettewie, galand, hilingsmann, & van mensel, 2018). therefore, the study included in the present paper aims to advance our understanding of why e-tandem schemes could be a resource that produces perceived enjoyment in foreign language learners when using them to complement language classes in higher education. 3. project design students studying english at degree level at an austrian university and students of german at uk and us universities were invited to participate in the e-tandem scheme. the idea was to pair students sharing a similar discipline and, thus, similar interests and a shared passion for studying foreign languages, to keep problems that might arise due to living in different learning contexts and environments (schwienhorst, 2003), such as diverging learning aims and outcomes, at a minimum. furthermore, their shared background as modern languages students widens the range of opportunities for them, such as the possibility to compare technical terminology (st john, 1996), or the difference between studying in austria, in the uk, and in the usa. participants were contacted via e-mail or in class and provided with a detailed handout on our approach to e-tandem language learning as such, including its benefits, learner autonomy and its importance in fll. those students who decided to participate were asked to join a facebook group that was set up for our e-tandem scheme. facebook was used for various reasons: it facilitates synchronous communication, it is an integral part of most students’ daily life, its events function allows for an engaging presentation of tasks, and it can serve as a platform to get to know each other as friends, thus reducing the risk of trivialising the e-tandem partnership (schwienhorst, 2003) as a result of perceiving each other as pen-friends. via facebook messenger, the participants were introduced to their tandem partners and then they were sent weekly invitations to organize skype or whatsapp meetings and discuss a range of topics, such as themselves as language learners, their expectations of their tandem partners, studying in their countries, (popular) culture or enjoyment as a key to success? links between e-tandem language learning and tertiary. . . 547 the media coverage of current political debates, such as brexit. after the first five weeks, participants were expected to have developed the skills needed to continue on their own and only received two more reminders to arrange meetings. 4. description of the study 4.1. research questions to investigate links between e-tandem language learning and fle, this paper will examine the following research questions: 1. what do students enrolled in language degrees at tertiary level enjoy about e-tandem language learning when used to complement lx (foreign language) classes in higher education? 2. what lessons can be taken for use in other teaching and learning contexts? 4.2. data collection and methodology six months into the project, the students participating in the e-tandem scheme were contacted via e-mail by our research assistant and asked whether they were willing to give an interview to share their experiences. out of the 104 participants who had participated in the project at that time, 19 students agreed to be interviewed. thus, it needs to be highlighted at this point that the interviewees were self-selected and it could be the case that students whose tandem experience was a highly positive one were more likely to volunteer. still, this does not diminish the importance of the insights provided by them as to if and what they enjoyed about e-tandem language learning. the aim of the in-depth interviews was to provide an emic perspective (pike, 1954) by letting students explain their thoughts in their own voice (dewaele, 2015; dewaele et al., 2016). this is considered crucial as, according to feldman-barret (2006, p. 24), “verbal report, even with all of its failings, may be the only means of assessing the experience of emotion. if we want to know whether a person is experiencing an emotion, we have to ask them.” despite an awareness of research having shown that multilinguals tend to perceive and verbalise emotions differently in the different languages (e.g., dewaele, 2010; resnik, 2018), all interviews were conducted in english even though participants could choose the language of preference themselves. the interviews included general questions on: (1) students’ language learning history, (2) their experience with e-tandem language learning, and more precise questions on (3) their perceived language enjoyment, (4) their experience with autonomous pia resnik, christine schallmoser 548 learning, and (5) the role of anxiety in their language learning experience. these were followed by specific questions on (6) the most enjoyable aspect of e-tandem language learning, (7) suggestions for improvement of the scheme, (8) the then current frequency of meetings, and (9) whether they had visited their tandem partner or intended to do so. the interviews were recorded digitally and then transcribed, amounting to a corpus of 73,850 words. kuckartz’s (2014) thematic qualitative text analysis was chosen as an analytic framework, and categories were formed deductively and inductively, employing maxqda2018 (verbi software, 2018) for the process of coding. this means, based on the research questions, main topical categories were developed deductively for links between tandem language learning and fle before data were collected (perceived positive effect on fle; no perceived effect on fle, perceived negative effect on fle). initially, 20% of the data were assigned to the main categories by both researchers, which, according to kuckartz (2014, p. 72), should be sufficient for a first test of “the applicability of the topics and categories.” after having established the applicability, all of the data was coded by both researchers using the main categories in a next step. both coders first analyzed the data independently and then convened to discuss their codings and find a “consensus regarding the most appropriate coding” (kuckartz, 2014, p. 74). during this phase of the coding process, it became clear that none of the data could be assigned to the third main category (perceived negative effect on fle), while most of the data was assigned to the first main category (perceived positive effect on fle). therefore, it was decided to establish refined sub-categories for the main category “perceived positive effect on fle” only. rather than deriving them based on hypothesis or theories (kuckartz, 2014), the sub-categories were then constructed inductively based solely on the empirical data to provide an undistorted account of the interviewees’ utterances. thus, the data were analyzed exploratively with no preconceptions (mercer, 2011) and the following categories were formed via “feedback loops” (mayring, 2000, p. 3): authentic communication; cultural mediation; being at ease; developing friendships with l1 users; supporting others; improvement; motivation; practice and feedback. as mentioned above, the data were examined by means of a category-based qualitative analysis (kuckartz, 2014), as it allowed “to preserve some methodological strengths of quantitative content analysis (such as a quantification of the findings) and widen them to a concept of qualitative procedure” (mayring, 2000, p. 1). the project and related research tools obtained ethical approval from the social sciences, humanities and law research ethics subcommittees at king’s college london. it was considered to be of minimal ethical risk, despite some of the interviewees having been students in some of the researchers’ modules, as participation was voluntary and interview data was anonymized. additionally, students were contacted by and communicated with a research assistant, who enjoyment as a key to success? links between e-tandem language learning and tertiary. . . 549 had received training in how to conduct the interviews by one of the researchers. this way of organizing and conducting the interviews should help avoid students’ feeling obliged to participate and should give space for honest answers. additionally, students received a detailed information sheet, were asked to sign a consent form and were informed about the possibility to withdraw from the study within 2 weeks after having given the interview. 4.3. participants the interviewees were 19 students, 9 of whom were studying english and 10 of them german at tertiary level; they all participated in the e-tandem scheme between austrian, uk and us universities in spring or autumn 2017. their age ranged from a minimum of 20 to a maximum of 32 years, the mean age being 22.47 (sd = 2.80). female participants (n = 13) outnumbered the male ones (n = 6), which reflects females’ great interest in language-related jobs (wilson & dewaele, 2010) and, consequently, language degrees, but also the proportion of female and male students studying german at asor a-level/studying languages at degree level in the uk (office for standards in education [ofsted], 2015; universities and colleges admissions service [ucas], 2017) and of students pursuing a humanities degree in austria (unit for reporting and analysis of the austrian university, personal conversation). on a scale from 1 to 5 in the different skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing), the interviewees rated their proficiency in the target language as relatively high. the austrian students’ overall self-perceived proficiency amounted to an average of 15.58 (min. = 14.00, max. = 16.75, sd = .92), while the students of german in most cases perceived their target language mastery as lower, the average being 13.08 (min. = 9.75, max. = 17.50, sd = 2.35). this divergence can partly be explained by the german language students’ later onset of acquisition of the target language. despite studies demonstrating that the sooner does not necessarily equal the better (see, e.g., pfenninger & singleton, 2017), in this case, the amount of exposure to the language was also considerably lower for the german as a foreign language (gfl) students, which is also partly reflected in their self-reported current use. while all english as a foreign language (efl) students reported using english several hours a day, half of those studying german (n = 5) explained they used the language less often than on a daily basis. 5. results after answering questions on their language learning history, respondents were asked to indicate their self-perceived overall fle. a majority of students (n = 10) pia resnik, christine schallmoser 550 stated they felt their fle was very high, 6 students perceived it to be high, while 3 rated it to be medium. in their accounts of the impact of e-tandem language learning, 16 students mentioned they felt that the tandem scheme had a positive effect on their own fle; ying (32, tl german), for instance, explains it as follows: it’s a good experience, like every week, like sometimes i call my language partner because i have some questions and i ask her or just a normal chat to catch up with what’s going on in her life and sometimes she calls me ‘i need to talk to her now, in german!’. it’s really nice knowing that somebody’s thinking about you and they will also help you. yeah, you feel really nice, definitely. three students reported no self-perceived impact on their fle due to not communicating regularly or their fle being perceived so high they thought it could not possibly be increased any further. one of them (rich, 21, tl german), for instance, expanded on it as follows: “i already really, i really enjoyed learning german and like speaking german, so, it [the e-tandem scheme] didn’t stop me from enjoying german [laughing].” all interviewees were convinced that e-tandem language learning can generally foster fle though. emma’s (24, tl english) comment on why she thinks it can increase fle summarizes their explanations quite nicely: “yeah, i think so, yeah, cause whenever we talk to people it’s nice. em, cause, that’s what kind of makes life colorful [laughing]. em, and of course it’s em, yeah, it helps, it helps.” ben (20, tl german) too explained that he is convinced of e-tandem language learning bearing the potential of boosting learners’ fle at tertiary level because he, for example, feels understood by his tandem partner, with whom he has much in common: i definitely think so. em, just because you speak to someone, who learns, someone of your own age . . . , they understand how difficult it is, because sometimes when you speak to some older germans who, i don’t know. they might have learned french or something and they didn’t speak any english and they’re quite harsh when they just think ‘he isn’t german, he has some problems to learn german.’ yeah actually i am, but they are not trying to help me at all. none of those interviewed reported perceiving a negative effect on their own fle, and the small number of interview extracts assigned to the category “no perceived effect on fle” are summarized in the figure above. indeed, most interviewees (n = 16) highlighted perceiving a positive effect of e-tandem language learning and a range of explanations as to why they felt the tandem scheme has increased their own fle or general statements on its potential to increase fle were elicited. thus, most of the data gathered were assigned to the enjoyment as a key to success? links between e-tandem language learning and tertiary. . . 551 category “perceived positive effect on fle,” the sub-categories of which are presented in the following subsections. 5.1. authentic communication the fact that e-tandem learning provides a platform to interact with an l1 speaker in an authentic way was particularly prominent in the dataset and the majority of the 19 interviewees (n = 16) linked it to a perceived increase in their level of fle. jana (21, tl english), for instance, reported: “because, em, the students [. . .] are exposed to authentic language input. and they can finally see why they are learning the language, in which ways it can be useful. they can really see how it is used in real life.” lena (25, tl english) felt that the possibility to both apply and test her language skills with an l1 user had increased her enjoyment of learning the language: “it always makes learning a foreign language more enjoyable if you know people who speak that language and that you can test your skills with [laughing].” she continues explaining “then you see . . . you’ve learned this language . . . if you can really communicate with people.” in this context, most participants (n = 13) mentioned that successful authentic communication with l1 users provided reassurance and gave them confidence. gil (21, tl german), for example, concluded “there is no better way to realize that your hard work is paying off and you are now speaking with someone who is a native speaker of the language.” 5.2. cultural mediation another recurrent theme in the interviews was a sense that cultural mediation has had a positive impact on students’ language enjoyment. almost two thirds of those interviewed (n = 12) stated that they felt gaining first-hand insight into the tl culture boosted their fle. tom (24, tl german), for instance, said: “i think it’s great having a very different window into the language and the culture of the partner – in a way that you don’t get anywhere else.” interestingly, many interviewees established a link between becoming friends with someone perceived as an “ambassador” of the target culture, a perceived increase in motivation and in enjoyment. ellie (20, tl german) comments: it was a big help for speaking and to sort of learning about cultural differences and it really increased your motivation as a result of getting to know the other person and becoming friends with them and being able to talk to them i would say. pia resnik, christine schallmoser 552 students also appreciated the possibility to receive first-hand information on differences between the university systems. rich (21, tl german), for instance, said: “it was really good to hear . . . how the uni system works” and it provided an opportunity to gain insights he would otherwise never have had access to. others also indicated gaining a deeper understanding of political events and people’s perception of these in the target culture (e.g., brexit) as a booster of enjoyment: it was cool . . . to just have someone to talk english to next to my studies and, in particular someone who’s in the country and can tell me about, ehm, like has first-hand information about different topics, like political issues in the country or can explain his [their] perspective on what’s happening in the country as well. (jana, 21, tl english) 5.3. being at ease just over half of the interviewees (n = 10) reported feeling at ease when speaking with their tandem partners and they stated that less pressure than in the classroom made them enjoy the language more. for example, emma (24, tl english) commented: i felt relaxed and i enjoyed talking. i didn’t think a lot about error-making or anything like that . . .. and it wasn’t a situation where there was somebody judging you, but a person who just also wants to improve their language skills. joana (23, tl german) also highlighted that she felt the change of context made her enjoy speaking the tl more and she perceived it as “a bigger help and a more enjoyable help as well because it’s not something that you perceive strictly as purely academic, but it’s something that makes you feel like you’re at ease.” 5.4. developing friendships with l1 users while more than three quarters of the interviewees (n = 14) had visited each other or were intending to do so, almost half of them (n = 9) said the e-tandem scheme led to new friendships, which they felt boosted their fle. joana (23, tl german) had met her tandem partner various times both in austria and the uk, and according to her, one of the main advantages of the scheme is the option to get “to know more persons that later in life could actually turn out to be friends that you’re gonna have for life. so it’s nice . . . the whole thing has actually been a new discovery of a new person.” for ying (32, tl german), too, the newly gained friend who is an l1 user of the tl was crucial: “i think the most amazing part is we became friends, like not just language partners, or tutors. it’s a friendship. that really makes me happy.” rich (21, tl german) highlights that forming friendships in another language is usually difficult, and enjoyment as a key to success? links between e-tandem language learning and tertiary. . . 553 that the e-tandem scheme helped in this regard: “it’s like you don’t have to worry to make a friend in german, because the program has made a friend for you.” 5.5. self-perceived improvement approximately a quarter of those interviewed (n = 5) mentioned they felt making progress on the level of language competence due to regular meetings with their e-tandem partners contributed to their fle. when, for instance, emma (25, tl english) talks about how she felt when she attended a module on phonetics and oral communication skills, she comments: “i thought my pronunciation was awful and i, i didn’t enjoy talking a lot and i kind of didn’t feel confident talking in class. . . . but . . . the tandem thingy helped there a lot.” self-perceived improvement as a perceived enjoyment booster was, mostly, linked to pronunciation (n = 4). maria (21, tl english) mentioned in this context: there are always some words which are really hard for you, and my partner and i just did one session where we just . . . pronounced some words . . . in like half an hour german and english and yeah it just like [laughing] really helped. she said it 10 times, and then i said it again. yeah, it was really helpful [laughing]. and, i think i improved. 5.6. receiving feedback and helping each other according to four interviewees, receiving feedback from l1 users was among the most enjoyable aspects of participating in the project. for example, pablo (20, tl german) reported sometimes speaking the tl with his fellow students to practice but he feels whenever he is corrected by his tandem partner, he knows “for a fact that for the most part it’s correct . . . because it comes from a native speaker. unlike with some of my fellow students, when we practice we are not too sure.” another prevalent notion in five interviews was the perceived joy brought about by mutual support in the learning process; although some of these students mentioned they enjoyed receiving feedback, the ability to provide support seemed decisive. this is nicely illustrated in jana’s (21, tl english) example: yeah, also helping one another. because he moved to berlin two months ago and he sent me many forms he had to fill out for his housing, for the contract or at university, when he had to register for the courses and for me it was the same thing because i couldn’t find accommodation when i was in, on a small island in scotland, and he helped me and phoned friends. being in a similar situation was perceived in a positive way too, as mentioned by elisabeth (22, tl english): “it helps if you see that the other person is not that proficient as well and you can support . . . and help each other.” in her case, this is clearly also linked to feeling at ease. pia resnik, christine schallmoser 554 6. discussion the findings from the category-based qualitative content analysis of 19 interviews indicate perceived positive links between e-tandem language learning and foreign language enjoyment (fle). the vast majority of students (n = 16) mentioned they felt a boost in their fle due to participating in the e-tandem scheme. two interviewees, who did not report such a rise, explained the probability of a further perceived increase was low as their fle had already been at a very high level before participating in the scheme. at this point, it needs to be mentioned that we depended on students’ willingness to be interviewed and, thus, self-selection bias is a problem that needs to be treated with caution here. it is likely that those who volunteered were students whose e-tandem experience was highly positive overall. however, this does not diminish the valuable insights gained with regard to what they perceived as contributing to their enjoyment. in this context, it is interesting to note that 16 of the interviewees stated they felt their fle had been very high overall, with only 3 indicating a medium level of perceived enjoyment. given all participants were in tertiary education and studying the tl at degree level, this supports findings of previous studies, in which the level of education and fl mastery have shown to be positively linked to fle (dewaele & macintyre, 2014). it surfaced that the most salient factor that participants perceived as affecting their language enjoyment was authentic communication in the tl, one of the benefits of tandem language learning suggested by little (1999a) and mentioned in a number of studies in the field (e.g., cziko, 2004; sung & poole, 2017; turula, 2017). this result is also consistent with kohn and hoffstaedter’s (2017) findings who investigated the usefulness of lingua franca telecollaboration projects at secondary level. in their study, students too mentioned being able to interact in authentic settings, in which they were not anxious about making mistakes, as a source of satisfaction. similar to our students, authentic communication in e-tandems consequently also seems to reinforce joy in less advanced foreign language users as it gives them a sense of accomplishment, boosts their confidence as well as it demonstrates a meaningful use of the language concerned. additionally, gaining first-hand insight into the tl culture was an aspect the interviewees reported thoroughly enjoying, which is likely to be linked to having had authentic conversations. students appreciated this “window into the language and the culture of the partner” (tom, 24, tl german), with whom they reported enjoying discussing contemporary cultural topics (e.g., political issues or popular culture) they were interested in. this demonstrates that e-tandem language learning allows students to take on the role of cultural mediators (roberts, byram, barro, jordan, & street, 2001) themselves, who provide authentic enjoyment as a key to success? links between e-tandem language learning and tertiary. . . 555 insights into their cultural backgrounds, but it also allows them to benefit from the expertise of their partners. in order to exploit this potential of learning a language on exchange fully, careful consideration and planning is required from the teachers too when designing the tasks: not only do the tasks need to be appropriate for the respective age group and proficiency level of the learners, but they also need to cover content the students are genuinely interested in and they need to allow for having natural conversations (el-hariri, 2016) to make such a project a joyful experience and to prevent students from dropping out (little, 1999b). the fact that their own interest in a specific topic, such as culture, can be pursued further in etandem settings as they also provide a platform for students to choose their theme of discussion autonomously (little, 1999a) and to include material they consider beneficial (kohn, 2018) might have further contributed to an increase in the participants’ self-perceived fle. in a similar e-tandem scheme carried out at secondary level, the oral medium for communication was conducive to students’ autonomous selection of material they were interested in (kohn & hoffstaedter, 2017) and it can be argued that in the present e-tandem scheme, synchronous oral communication might have also facilitated a focus on topics that were of genuine interest to participants. another recurring theme as to why students mentioned that they enjoyed learning their languages in tandem was that the power relations were different from classroom contexts, where they reported experiencing higher levels of foreign language anxiety, including fear of failure in the form of making mistakes, which partly resulted from judging their own competence in relation to the group and the power relations between teacher and students. with their tandem partners, they felt at ease. this also seems to be the case in less experienced learners, as shown in previous studies (e.g., kohn & hoffstaedter, 2017). even though our students differed in their self-rated proficiency in the tl concerned, as mentioned in their biodata description above, interviewees from the uk, the us and austria reported feeling at ease. nevertheless, it is advisable to ensure similar levels of language proficiency in future tandem schemes in order to counteract the possible danger of some students dropping out as differences in tl proficiency are likely to affect power relations and might affect students’ motivation and self-concept too. despite the fact that power relations are always at play in tandem schemes (c. kramsch, personal conversation, december 8, 2017) also in the sense of one person being expert and the other one learner of the tl, the change of roles, which is usually absent in foreign language classrooms, seems to contribute to students’ well-being. this is also one of the reasons for students mentioning that they enjoyed receiving extensive feedback. the feeling of being in the same boat as their partners made them appreciate pia resnik, christine schallmoser 556 peer feedback rather than feeling anxious about it and they described it as helping and supporting each other rather than as being corrected. according to the interviewees, positive reinforcement, including praise and encouragement, often made them feel good about certain language skills (e.g., pronunciation) they had not felt confident about before and, consequently, made them feel they enjoy the use of the foreign language more. this nicely illustrates the potential of positive emotions to undo lingering negative ones (rahimi & askari bigdeli, 2014) but also, more generally, the broadening power of positive emotions (fredrickson, 2003; macintyre & gregersen, 2012b). it could conceivably be argued that students highly benefit from extensive one-on-one feedback and encouragement given outside the classroom by a tandem partner, as also indicated by a quarter linking perceived improvement of their language skills on various levels through learning in tandem with a perceived increase in fle. even though only 5 interviewees established this link between self-perceived language proficiency and fle, it needs to be mentioned at this point that when students who participated in the e-tandem scheme filled in a web survey, a vast majority reported observing an overall improvement of language skills through learning in tandem (schallmoser & resnik, in press). another prominent theme linked to students’ self-perceived language enjoyment was that they frequently mentioned having developed friendships with l1 users. a majority of the interviewees had already visited each other after six months, which reflects the interpersonal dimension of emotions and their internalization from interaction with others (swain, 2013, cited in pavelescu & petrić, 2018). the findings of the present study in particular showed that friendships seem to be a resource that produces hedonic enjoyment and increases eudaimonic happiness and if friendships with users of the tl are formed, these social bonds promoted by positive emotions (fredrickson, 2001) bear the potential of increasing students’ interest in the language and culture and, consequently, their motivation and pleasure taken in learning and using the language (see also saito et al., 2018). the abovementioned demonstrates too that the social and private aspects fle is composed of are clearly interlinked (dewaele & macintyre, 2016). furthermore, experiencing positive emotions also contributes to the expansion of an individual’s world view (fredrickson, 2013), which can, in turn, lead to an increased interest in both the target culture and building friendships with tl speakers. it can therefore be suggested that learning in tandem can trigger a self-perpetuation of positive emotions. the resulting augmentation of positive emotions can, consequently, induce an increase in a variety of resources: psychological, cognitive, physical, and social ones, with positive connections and friendships just being examples (fredrickson, 2013). enjoyment as a key to success? links between e-tandem language learning and tertiary. . . 557 interestingly, students emphasized the importance of building friendships with l1 users, who have also been mentioned frequently with regard to all other themes. this is furthermore supported by the fact that some of those who had been matched with foreign language (lx) users (dewaele, 2018) of the tl when the program started in 2017 dropped out. despite previous research having shown the benefits of lingua franca tandem schemes in secondary school settings (kohn & hoffstaedter, 2017), such as the development of intercultural communication skills (kohn, 2018), our students seemed to hold on to the somewhat idealized l1 user (cook, 2016) as a point of reference. this is not unusual (young & walsh, 2010) as language courses in the respective countries, especially at degree level, are still most often modeled on l1 varieties. additionally, their comparatively high level of lx competence seems to make them trust l1 users more as a source of knowledge of the tl, as pablo (20, tl german) nicely explained when saying that he then knows “for a fact that for the most part it’s correct . . . because it comes from a native speaker.” clearly, students’ awareness of advantages of lingua franca conversations (kohn, 2018) needs to be raised in the future to help counteract the abovementioned misconceptions. overall, the interviews demonstrated that e-tandem language learning can be used successfully as a resource to increase the foreign language enjoyment felt by highly advanced lx users, who study the tl at tertiary level. it is clearly one possible way of reinforcing the “surge in fle” that dewaele and macintyre (2014, p. 250) noticed in highly proficient lx users in their quantitative analyses. 7. conclusion this study investigated tertiary students’ perceived fle analyzing data gathered with 19 in-depth interviews. the findings suggest positive links between students’ perceived fle and e-tandem language learning. furthermore, they underline the importance of the social dimensions of fle (dewaele & macintyre, 2016) as aspects that contributed most to the enhancement of participants’ perceived enjoyment were primarily linked to interpersonal relations: the opportunity to have authentic conversations in their respective tl with l1 users gave them a sense of accomplishment and of meaningful use of the language (kohn, 2018), while the participants’ perception of each other as cultural mediators (roberts et al., 2001) raised their interest in the target language and its respective cultural background. in addition, students felt there was a positive shift in power relations during the e-tandem sessions, which made them feel at ease and appreciate extensive one-on-one feedback by peers. developing friendships with l1 users played another key role in enhancing both the participants’ perceived fle and their eudaimonic happiness and draws our attention to the benefit of social bonding, which can act as a helpful incentive for the continuation of lx use. pia resnik, christine schallmoser 558 furthermore, the findings of this study support the idea that tasks should be considered beneficial by the participants and of interest to them (kohn, 2018; kohn & hoffstaedter, 2017). therefore, it is not only advisable to design authentic tasks but also to take the students’ age as well as their level of proficiency into account. with regard to the proficiency level, it can be suggested that the participants’ level should be similar so as to avoid detrimental effects of unequal power relations, such as dropping out due to a decrease in motivation. it also emerged that there is a need for raising awareness among participants in tandem schemes that lingua franca communication can be beneficial (kohn, 2018) as well. overall, the findings show that e-tandem language learning bears the potential of boosting tertiary learners’ perceived fle but they also illustrate the crucial role of positive emotions in successful fll. in future studies, more light could also be shed on the link between the social and private elements of fle and links between e-tandem language learning and emotion research should be investigated more holistically too, taking, for instance, fla into account to improve our understanding of the benefits of implementing such a scheme in higher education. it might also be useful for future research to explore such links in other educational settings with less proficient language learners, for instance in secondary schools, as findings from previous studies (kohn, 2018; kohn & hoffstaedter, 2017) point towards similar results. acknowledgements we would like to thank all our students and participants for providing us with invaluable input and feedback. special thanks are due to our research assistant monika mair, who conducted and transcribed all the interviews. furthermore, we would like to thank our colleagues at the universities of vienna, cambridge, texas at austin, and oxford for their cooperation. enjoyment as a key to success? links 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(2010). which english? whose english? an investigation of ‘non-native’ teachers’ beliefs about target varieties. language, culture and curriculum, 23(2), 123-37. 403 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (2). 2018. 403-426 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.2.10 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt interwoven: culture, language, and learning strategies rebecca l. oxford university of maryland, usa rebeccaoxford@gmail.com christina gkonou university of essex, uk cgkono@essex.ac.uk abstract culture, language, and learning strategies form a grand tapestry, which is this article’s theme. the authors explain each part of the tapestry, provide ideas for teaching all parts in a smoothly united way, and explore key cultural issues (i.e., cognitive flexibility, ethnocultural empathy, intercultural understanding, and needs of intercultural trauma survivors). the article discusses cultural types, cultural communication styles, and related strategies, and it identifies publications that draw together culture, language, and strategies. the article offers new insights and abundant examples for teachers, teacher educators, and researchers. keywords: culture; cultural learning strategies; cultural communication styles; strategy instruction 1. introduction culture and language are interwoven, as shown in figure 2. language is part of a vast web of culture, and, as kramsch (1993, 1998) put it, language is a social practice that expresses cultural reality. this article reveals how learning strategies, culture, and language work together. it is written for teachers, researchers, graduate rebecca l. oxford, christina gkonou 404 students, and program administrators in the broad area of second language acquisition. readers who are interested either in ordinary classrooms or in immigrants’ needs regarding language and culture will find much of value in this article. the contents of the paper are symbolized by figure 1, which shows the closely woven, colorful tapestry of culture, language, and learning strategies. in the best of all possible classrooms, the threads of this tapestry will not and cannot be separated. figure 1 the tapestry of culture, language, and learning strategies. photo by r. l. oxford as noted above, the tapestry contains culture, language, and learning strategies, and these elements intertwine. for the last three or four decades in our field, more books about language teaching, language learning, and language learning strategies1 have been published than about culture teaching, culture learning, and culture learning strategies.2 in this article we try to bring these elements together and redress the imbalance. 1 some books and guidebooks for language learning strategies include, among others, chamot, a. u. (2004), chamot and harris (in press), cohen (2014a, 2014b), cohen and macaro (2007), griffiths (2008, 2013), o’malley and chamot (1990), oxford (1990, 1996, 2011, 2017), oxford and amerstorfer (2018), wenden (1991) and wenden and rubin (1987). 2 there are limitations on what many language teachers encounter about teaching culture and about culture learning strategies. works on anthropology and cross-cultural communication by e. t. hall (1976) and hofstede (2001) are very helpful but do not focus, like j. k. hall’s (2012) book, on how to teach culture. j. k. hall’s book seems to mention culture strategies in the sense of communication strategies; the term “culture learning strategies” appears rarely, if at all. cohen and ishihara (2014) write about pragmatics, i.e., the nexus of language and culture, and about strategies for pragmatics, but culture learning strategies are not the main focus. interwoven: culture, language, and learning strategies 405 the sections included in this article concern the following issues: section 1 focuses of the tapestry of culture, language and learning strategies. section 2 provides guidance for what to do before overtly teaching any learning strategies. this guidance includes recognizing cultural issues such as cognitive flexibility, ethnocultural empathy, intercultural understanding, and needs of intercultural trauma survivors. culture teaching and strategies for culture learning are the keys to section 3. section 4 offers detailed cultural examples, such as cultural types, cultural communication styles, and related learning strategies. section 5 highlights culture-related strategy instruction using the criteria format (oxford, 2017). section 6 presents published frameworks and standards that combine culture, language, and strategies, and the conclusion is in section 7. the appendix presents rich, varied teaching techniques for culture-language relationships and learning strategy use. 2. the tapestry of culture, language, and learning strategies culture and language form a tightly woven tapestry, rich with vibrant colors, shadows, and highlights. when an individual is learning culture and language, the tapestry also includes learning strategies, that is, conscious, learner-regulated thoughts and actions for developing specific skills and general proficiency. 2.1. language as we know, language is a system involving complex communication, either spoken or written, to express ideas and feelings. pragmatics, or the appropriate use of a language in situational contexts, is the nexus of language and culture. in this article, we sometimes use the terms target culture and target language to refer to what the person is trying to learn at a given time. 2.2. some fundamentals of culture culture is often seen as the human-made part of our environment (oxford, 2014) or the software of the mind (hofstede, 2001) – the shared attributes (i.e., common history, attitudes, values, behaviors, practices, and artifacts) of a group (boulding, 2000). however, sometimes culture is used to refer not to the shared attributes but to the people, in large or small groupings, who share the attributes. for example, culture can refer to a social stratum, like the brahmin (brahman) class of india, and to the “small culture or micro-culture” of a specific family/clan or organization, or even a school class (holliday, 1999). cultural groups might not be contained within certain geopolitical boundaries. this is especially rebecca l. oxford, christina gkonou 406 true at times of mass migration, in particular the permanent or temporary movement of people due to political or cultural oppression, war, and extremes of climate. examples are the kurds and the rohingya. from a more abstract perspective (kramsch, 1998), culture has three layers: (a) social (i.e., current, synchronic), (b) historical (i.e., across time, diachronic), and (c) imaginative (i.e., future-oriented imaginings, dreams, and hopes embedded in the culture), with all three layers funneled together simultaneously in a given place and time. the “cultural iceberg” model (american field services intercultural programs, 1984) is simple and attractive, so it is amazing how many language teachers do not know about this model or, if they are aware of it, do not mention it to their students. in the iceberg model, visible culture and invisible culture constitute an important distinction. food, celebrations, and clothing are part of the visible tip of the cultural iceberg, and below the waterline are invisible, often unconscious feelings, beliefs, or attitudes. for virtually any aspect of visible culture it is usually possible to discover its correspondingly deeper, invisible elements. for instance, above the water line (in the visible culture), we might see or hear about “burkinis,” the modest swimming attire desired by some burka-wearing muslim women. burkinis have much deeper (invisible) meanings and implications than merely the garments themselves. clashing, often invisible, issues include the role of women in a patriarchal society, generational views about women’s role, male anxiety or anger about women’s empowerment, female modesty/immodesty in relation to religion, and (for non-muslims perhaps) fear of the religious “other.” in teaching arabic, instructors should help learners recognize and face deep cultural issues like these, rather than paying attention to only stereotypical aspects of culture. the unconscious (invisible) aspects in the cultural iceberg, such as attitudes and values, are the most powerful because they are generally unquestioned and because they drive the conscious aspects. culturally responsive students understand the conscious elements of their culture and are enthusiastic about exploring – or at least willing to explore – the unconscious elements of the target culture and their own culture. 2.3. learning strategies and how to teach them learners benefit from employing strategies, defined earlier as conscious, learnerregulated thoughts and actions for developing specific skills and general proficiency (figure 2 offers a more detailed definition). a few examples of learning strategies are: (a) using background knowledge about culture and language to predict what will come next in a story or a news program; (b) collaborating with someone else to learn culture and language; (c) combining intuition, logic, and facts with cultural experience to communicate more effectively in the language; and (d) asking a native speaker questions to understand the target culture. interwoven: culture, language, and learning strategies 407 learning strategies . . . a) are conscious, teachable, intentional, self-chosen, and self-regulated thoughts and actions for learning the target culture and language; b) have several interlocking purposes: improving performance on immediate tasks, developing specific skills, and improving autonomy and long-term proficiency; c) support cognitive, emotional (affective), social, motivational, and metastrategic regulation (e.g., planning, organizing, monitoring, and evaluating) of learning (oxford, 2017b); and d) are flexibly and creatively combined into strategy clusters (strategies used simultaneously) and strategy chains (strategies used in sequence) to meet the learner’s needs and fit the context and the task. figure 2 longer definition of learning strategies (adapted from oxford, 2017b) strategy instruction usually involves finding out students’ current learning strategies, choosing a new strategy (or a combination of strategies) that students need the most for current tasks, demonstrating and naming the strategy for the students, explaining why it is helpful, asking students to try out the strategy in an authentic task, asking students to decide how useful the strategy was, and reminding students to use it again (i.e., transfer it to new, relevant tasks). this pattern is sometimes called fully informed, overt strategy instruction, because the teacher gives learners full information about the strategy. teachers can adapt this sequence to create simple, organic steps to meet students’ needs. sometimes strategy instruction is rapidly offered to one or two learners, rather than a whole class. chamot (2018) recommended differentiating strategy instruction to meet students’ needs based on diversity in cultural, socioeconomic, and educational background; personality factors; motivation and willingness; target language proficiency level; and strategy knowledge. not every learning strategy will work for every learner. psaltou-joycey and gavriilidou (2015), and cohen (2014) created teachers’ guides taking into consideration many crucial factors for tailoring strategy instruction to learners’ individual and group needs. 3. paving the way to strategy instruction (what to do before overtly teaching strategies) most of this section is designed to help teachers pave the way to strategy instruction. this means setting the scene by providing a welcoming, culturally-open atmosphere before overtly teaching any learning strategies. what if the teacher is not ready for conducting strategy instruction? what if the students have just arrived and have no way of grasping strategy instruction yet? in 3.1, we explain that the teacher can set the scene by creating an atmosphere of support, kindness, and understanding and by helping students develop confidence and cultural competence. three basic cultural competences are the focus: cognitive flexibility, ethnocultural empathy, and intercultural understanding. working on these competences first rebecca l. oxford, christina gkonou 408 makes it much easier for strategy instruction to occur successfully. in 3.2 we concentrate on the needs of trauma survivors. if students are traumatized from famine, war, and mass migration, they need special help before strategy instruction can begin. this is perhaps the only time strategy experts have ever said, “whoa! some teachers should hold off on strategy instruction until the students are ready!,” but keep in mind that the scene-setting we are proposing is for the purpose of preparing the atmosphere and the students so that strategy instruction will be successful and helpful when it comes. scene-setting or paving the way is an early, crucial stage, yet it is often forgotten. jumping into strategy instruction without that early stage can be problematic if teachers and/or students are often unready. when teachers stop to pave the way before conducting overt strategy instruction, they cultivate a highly positive, nonthreatening, and welcoming environment for students. in such an environment, students can thrive. in such an environment, some students in a given class simply start using good learning strategies on their own. that is fine. these students will become even more strategic when the stage is set for everyone and when overt strategy instruction does begin. 3.1. three needs given that language classrooms across the globe are becoming increasingly multilingual and multicultural (sometimes now called plurilingual and pluricultural), learners need to control and manage their emotions within the context of multiple interactions with peers and teachers from different social and cultural backgrounds. thus, strategic learning is crucial both for emotion regulation and academic achievement in the target language. within 21st-century classrooms, there is indeed an urgent need for language learners first to just fit in interculturally in order to be able to learn (matsumoto, yoo, & leroux, 2007; spencer-oatey & franklin, 2009). the three competences (three needs) noted at this section’s opening are crucial for anyone teaching or learning another language and culture. cognitive flexibility is the ability to create new categories and see more than one cultural perspective. ethnocultural empathy refers to the ability to understand the feelings of individuals who are ethnically and/or culturally different from oneself. however, ethnocultural empathy goes beyond merely understanding those people’s feelings; it involves an emotional response that is congruent with the perceived welfare of the individuals; we feel their feelings and care about them. it involves the ability to walk in another’s shoes or “feel with” a person quite different from oneself. intercultural understanding is defined as people’s ability to understand, appreciate, and be open to various aspects and forms of cultural and social diversity. all of these three competences are highly interconnected and encompass self-awareness and strong interpersonal competence. kramsch interwoven: culture, language, and learning strategies 409 (1993), mentioned earlier, stressed that since language is social practice, culture is at the heart of language teaching and learning. thus, the three competences should naturally be developed along with language competence. 3.1.1. what teachers can do to set the scene: cognitive flexibility the following teaching techniques can be used to enhance learners’ cognitive flexibility (see figure 3). please note that these teaching techniques help create a positive ethos in the classroom, but they do not represent specific strategy instruction. however, when the classroom encourages cognitive flexibility, quite often learners develop creativity and power when using learning strategies. encourage perspective-taking among learners. promote learners’ self-awareness by helping them to identify their own strengths and weaknesses and work toward improving the latter. enable learners to initiate their own learning and take the lead. allow learners’ creativity to flow. highlight the importance of group work and enhancing a team spirit. open up opportunities for inquiry and trial and error. support learners’ lateral thinking. encourage a range of perspectives and expanded perspectives. figure 3 setting the scene for cognitive flexibility as a step toward strategy instruction: some teaching techniques 3.1.2. what teachers can do to set the scene: ethnocultural empathy ethnocultural empathy can develop when the teacher focuses attention on it and uses relevant teaching techniques. these techniques, while not themselves constituting learning strategy instruction, can foster the kind of atmosphere that helps students in the classroom to care about each other and about people from the target culture and other cultures. as suggested earlier, such empathy helps students feel what someone in another culture is feeling. ethnocultural empathy (across cultural groups) has been studied to determine how similar or different it is from basic empathy (within one’s own cultural group). rasoal, jungert, hau, and andersson (2011) found that the two forms of empathy were correlated, that largely similar predictors were found for the two constructs, and that a confirmatory factor analysis failed to confirm two separate constructs. figure 4 presents some teaching techniques that can sow the seeds for strategy instruction, particularly related to ethnocultural empathy. these techniques are not the rebecca l. oxford, christina gkonou 410 same as strategy instruction. instead, they create the environment necessary for students to relax and care about people from other cultures. include stories in instructional practice, both in the form of personal anecdotes and students’ own stories to share with the rest of the class. provide ample opportunities for communication practice so that learners can find the appropriate words to convey their emotions and feelings. encourage peer support and collaboration. initiate discussions on learners’ experiences with different cultures and a reflection on the similarities and differences between one’s native culture(s) and the target culture(s). use literature – in any form, such as novels, poems, and plays – in the language classroom. display empathy, creating a caring and trusting environment, where learners can open up to each other, identify their shared values and treat cultural differences as a doorway that invites learning about other cultures. figure 4 setting the scene for ethnocultural empathy as a step toward strategy instruction: some teaching techniques 3.1.3. what teachers can do to set the scene: intercultural understanding the third need is the competence of intercultural understanding inside and outside of classrooms. figure 5 presents some teaching techniques to pave the way for strategy instruction fostering intercultural understanding. naturally, paving the path is not the same as overt strategy instruction; instead, it prepares the classroom ambiance to understand other cultures more deeply. this positive atmosphere allows students to be prepared to develop and use learning strategies for intercultural understanding. make and highlight connections between language use and cultural values. respect differences between languages and cultures. respect differences that students from various native languages experience. use problem-based learning and/or scenario-based learning to help learners understand other cultures, especially the target culture, by means of debates, role plays, discussion groups or literature. provide assistance about main points, which can be missed across cultural lines. initiate explicit, candid discussions about examples of understanding people from another culture. help students become aware of negative situations (e.g., bullying, rudeness, sarcasm, physical aggression and violence, all the way to war) that might result from the lack of intercultural understanding. figure 5 setting the scene for intercultural understanding as a step toward strategy instruction: some teaching techniques interwoven: culture, language, and learning strategies 411 3.2. focusing on trauma survivors here we discuss the varied learnings that are needed by trauma survivors for regaining emotional control and for learning the target language and culture. let us discuss terminology first. we use the term trauma survivor rather than trauma victim to refer to refugees, immigrants, and others who have been able to live, persist and carry on despite multiple traumas. for instance, nadia murad (2018) is a young woman from iraq’s yazidi minority. like many thousands of other yazidi women and men, she was caught up in the islamic state’s effort to exterminate her people. she was captured, enslaved, raped, tortured, and humiliated by the islamic state. her mother and many others were killed. nadia escaped and somehow found her way to germany. due to her migration history, she necessarily became a learner of culture and language. she became a spokesperson at the united nations to describe the plight of yazidi women. she urges us not to call her and other yazidi women “victims” but instead “survivors” of trauma who want to take back their lives. nadia’s argument seems to fit countless other refugees and immigrants, even those whose traumas have not been as fierce as hers. therefore, we respectfully use the term trauma survivors here. contemporary classrooms often include many learners who have fled their home country due to its unstable socio-political and financial condition. mass migration means that different cultures encounter each other constantly, and unfortunately often not positively. newcomers who have entered a country as immigrants, refugees, or terrorism survivors have challenges to cope with: they are already physically, emotionally, and socially traumatized, and simultaneously they have needs regarding orientation, resettlement, interculturalism, and language. various second language learners (in london and many other major cities) include diverse, traumatized refugees or immigrants from distant areas (e.g., northern iraq, where nadia came from) who are struggling with the language of their new country and have inadequate housing and funds; and individuals who come from the local community but do not know its language well and have financial issues and discrimination issues. all these people bring to the language classroom their own cultural perspectives, along with traumas and anxieties about fitting into the majority culture. even inside the language classroom, these students, especially trauma survivors, might be overwhelmed by things they observe for the first time, such as new teaching styles, books, freedom to express their opinion in public, and all sorts of cultural expectations in dress, food, religious behavior, and family interaction. additionally, these people need learning strategies for language and culture. figure 6 contains some techniques that teachers could use to address the emotional, social, and linguistic needs of trauma survivors in the classroom. the rebecca l. oxford, christina gkonou 412 techniques, except perhaps the technique teach organizational skills are not directly aimed at strategy instruction. instead, the purpose is to provide a supportive socioemotional, cultural, and linguistic environment for trauma survivors. strategy instruction can be incorporated into that environment when students have sufficient confidence and understanding. we think it will not be long. foster social immersion in the classroom. highlight the pros of student diversity in the classroom. mix students from different backgrounds. create opportunities for collaboration when culturally feasible. assign peer mentors to assist refugee and immigrant students. explain the importance of sharing cultural experiences and learning from each other. consider learners’ new contexts and whole environments. incorporate new contexts into lessons (i.e., make their new lives part of what is going on in class in order to facilitate learning, adjustment, and listening strategies). teach organizational skills explicitly as students may not know how learning could be achieved. focus on the “whole person” by identifying unique strengths and talents and by accentuating the positive traits to motivate students. give all students the same materials and affordances even if the refugee students have difficulties with the target language. figure 6 setting the scene to support trauma survivors as a step toward strategy instruction: some teaching techniques 4. ways to teach culture and selected culture learning strategies teaching culture in the students’ target language is often very difficult but might be effectively accomplished by a creative, lively teacher who uses visual images, nonverbal language (gregersen & macintyre, 2017), and music to bring learners into the target culture. teaching culture and language together can focus on pragmatics, that is, the use of the language appropriately in situational contexts (ishihara & cohen, 2014). an occasional question is how to teach culture if certain students are xenophobic. of course, they are often the ones who need cultural exploration the most. all students, and especially xenophobic ones, should be offered opportunities to get to know the culture through artistic means (music, art, literature, dance), through the media (emailing, tandem learning, online news), and through meeting and working with people from the culture (through field trips, long-term peer-to-peer project work, interviews, video-making). figure 7 presents some culture learning strategies. some of them help build up still further the cultural competences mentioned earlier. these learning strategies can be translated, simplified, and culturally adapted. interwoven: culture, language, and learning strategies 413 i . . . compare and contrast large and small cultures. compare and contrast roles of men and women in your culture and the target culture. compare and contrast how you feel in your own culture and the target culture. apply the right medium for learning a culture (e.g., use a notebook, use a smartphone, use youtube). analyze why certain aspects of culture seem surprising to you. analyze ways that such a response, if unhelpful, could be minimized. ask about culturally acceptable ways to talk about emotions in the target culture. notice feelings about one’s own small and large cultures. apply new knowledge about these aspects of culture. note. “i” is used to make the learning strategy more personal figure 7 some basic learning strategies for understanding cultures 5. detailed examples: learning cultural types, cultural communication styles, and related learning strategies here we discuss cultural types, communication styles, and relevant learning strategies, as well as ways to teach these. incredibly, many language teachers do not know about cultural types or cultural communication styles, and this creates an area of poverty at the center of much language learning and teaching. the first author, though having a master’s degree in a foreign language and years of experience in teaching languages and directing language-related programs, was shocked to learn about these massively important cultural elements for the first time only when she started doing research on cultural aspects of peace in her fifties. what if she had known earlier? what if many other language professionals could now learn about these crucial cultural factors and could help their students to develop much better cultural understanding? the tragedy of ignorance would be removed, and the teaching of language and culture would be revolutionized. 5.1. cultural types a key cultural variable related to attitudes, behaviors, and communications is cultural types. the collectivist cultural type represents 70% of the world’s cultures, and the individualist cultural type represents 30% (triandis, 1995). table 1 is a definitional comparison of collectivism and individualism. collectivism focuses on the individual only as part of the group (even regarding achievement), and it promotes harmony, tightly-knit relationships, collaboration, and strong hierarchies. in contrast, individualism focuses on the individual, accepts less harmony, and encourages rebecca l. oxford, christina gkonou 414 independence, competition, and lack of hierarchies (except politics and business). however, the picture of collectivism and individualism is not black and white for at least two reasons. first, sometimes individualist values coexist with collectivist values within a given culture. second, many countries contain individuals and subcultures whose values contradict those of the dominant culture. table 1 comparison of cultural collectivism and individualism (based on oxford, 2013a) collectivism individualism individual as part of the group, even regarding achievement individual as more important than the group, including regarding achievement harmony less emphasis on harmony tightly knit network of relationships (family, clan, work group, or other); reliance on relationships independence; self-reliance collaboration competition 5.2. cultural communication styles communication trends are different within collectivist and individualist cultures (oxford, 2013a, 2014). collectivist cultures value high-context communication, while individualist cultures are known for low-context communication (hall, 1976). high-context style involves communication that is indirect, nonlinear, polite, hierarchical, and face-to-face when possible. low-context style calls for communication that is direct (often blunt), linear, and less concerned with politeness, hierarchies, or face-to-face exchanges. face is very important in highcontext communication, but it has a much smaller role in low-context communication (see table 2 for details). table 2 comparison of high-context communication and low-context communication (based on oxford, 2013a) high-context communication low-context communication relates to collectivism relates to individualism indirect and ambiguous communication, with messages coming from the context (e.g., physical context, traditions, body language, social status, and unspoken understandings) rather than from what is said direct and often blunt; most of the information is in the explicit code, that is, it is openly expressed without the need for many contextual cues strong emphasis on politeness and eloquence less communicative emphasis on politeness eloquence a major value eloquence generally unimportant in ordinary communication nonlinear communication, not based directly on logic or facts, and includes many politeness rituals; sometimes people from low-context (individualist) cultures see this as going in circles linear communication based on the belief that truth is objective, factual, linear, logical, and deterministic (either/or, yes/no); sometimes people from high-context (collectivist) cultures see this as rude and aggressive not good to express overt disagreement overt disagreement acceptable interwoven: culture, language, and learning strategies 415 hierarchical communication (honoring a central authority figure) hierarchies less necessary in communication face-to-face relationships emphasized for bonding emphasis is not on bonding, so face-to-face communication is sometimes less needed or even undesired face (honor, including avoidance of shame) is prominent; concern for saving one’s face and saving others’ face face plays less of a role; concern, if any, is saving one’s own face 5.3. relevant learning strategies for cultural types and cultural communication styles based on the discussion in the two previous subsections (5.1 and 5.2), figure 8 presents useful learning strategies, which can be translated, simplified, and otherwise adapted. i . . . choose to explore the target culture’s type (collectivist or individualist). read about collectivist and individualist cultures and the communication styles that relate to them. take notes about these readings using a table or a roman-numeral outline. based on readings, list questions for the mentor/informant about the target culture, especially related to collectivism or individualism, whichever is relevant to the culture; use everyday terms, not technical terms like collectivism and individualism. seek a mentor/informant from the target culture. ask the mentor/informant about the target culture in everyday terms, flexibly using my list of questions. identify differences between collectivist and individualist cultures with specific examples based on answers from the mentor/informant (and any differences). focus my attention to recognize signs of high-context communication or low-context communication in target language conversations, films, and video. find media (e.g., movies, youtube) and focus to see examples of the target culture, if it is not close at hand; look for emotional, social, and other factors, cultural types, and cultural communication styles. depict (creating pictures, collages, or photos) my own illustrations of aspects of collectivist (or individualist) practices in the target culture; if desired, picture aspects of relevant cultural communication styles. identify when and how to adjust my communication style if needed in target language communication. identify my feelings when encountering a cultural communication style drastically different from my own. read about differences between collectivist individualist practices about face (shame, honor). find examples of “facework” differences in collectivist and individualist cultures as i read culturally authentic books and magazines or watch movies or youtube. apply new knowledge about individualist and collectivist cultures as i continue to learn the target language and culture. figure 8 useful learning strategies for understanding cultural types and their communication styles (based on oxford, 2013a) rebecca l. oxford, christina gkonou 416 5.4. an example of strategy instruction for cultural types and cultural communication styles the best way to teach strategies involves integrating strategy instruction into authentic learning tasks for culture and language. figure 9 provides an example of strategy instruction, specifically for learners when the target culture’s type is collectivist and its communication style is high-context. this example can easily be adjusted for learners when the target culture’s type is individualist and its communication style is low-context. background: a) this is strategy instruction for students who are learning a language associated with a collectivist culture. b) these steps assume that the students have already encountered at least some general information about identifying collectivist and individualist cultures. c) halfway through the strategy instruction process described in this table, students are introduced to the characteristics of such cultures and the typical communication styles of such cultures. note: the strategy instruction ideas below are comfortably adaptable for use in strategy instruction for students whose target culture’s style is individualist (naturally with a low-context communication style). these strategies are woven into language learning in the steps below. step a: introducing the strategies for identifying collectivist cultures the teacher looks at a globe and world map and mentions learning strategies in the process. to help students review, the teacher brainstorms a few collectivist cultures, such as korean and japanese, and then points them out on the globe or map (using resources). then the teacher lists these collectivist cultures on the board or screen. the teacher reminds the students of the strategies just used: brainstorming, using resources, and listing, and explains that these strategies often go together in a cluster or a sequence. the teacher asks students to explain why these strategies were useful to them. step b: practicing the strategies for expanding the list of collectivist cultures the teacher invites students, in pairs, to go up and look at the globe or map if they wish (using resources) in order to find the location of collectivist cultures. the teacher asks the pairs to use the strategies of brainstorming and listing on large sheets of paper at least 7 collectivist cultures that were not named by the teacher (examples: many cultures in the far east, africa, south america, the middle east; indigenous cultures, like the maori, in different parts of the world). students compare lists and consolidate them. step c: extending the listing strategy in order to make comparisons the teacher asks the students, in the same pairs as above, to use the strategy of making a comparison chart. it could be a tabular chart with the left side listing the 7 collectivist cultures named earlier and the right side listing 7 individualist cultures, or it could be some other kind of chart (oxford, 1990). the teacher asks the students how this strategy helps them organize and remember information. step d: looking back and thinking ahead the teacher asks the members of the whole class to use the strategy of reflecting together on what they learned, how the strategies helped, and which strategies could easily be transferred to other learning activities. interwoven: culture, language, and learning strategies 417 at this point (if it has not happened before), the teacher explains the characteristics of collectivist cultures, individualist cultures, and their corresponding communication styles. in order to understand the target collectivist culture for the target language (e.g., learning the mainstream chinese culture and the mandarin language), students must also learn about individualist cultures. in pairs or in the whole class, students might compare characteristics of collectivist cultures with those of individualist cultures or go more deeply into collectivist culture through a variety of classroom activities, such as game-playing, role-playing, drawing, outlining, video-watching, etc. to make these activities successful, the teacher might ask the students to use certain learning strategies, with a focus on only a few strategies that are the most helpful. a very useful selection of strategies might come from these: taking notes, making a chart to compare, using a semantic map, analyzing, synthesizing, inferencing (e.g., figuring out the culture’s beliefs by means of its proverbs; figuring out how to act by means of watching videos), taking one’s emotional temperature (e.g., identifying emotions, such as feeling more comfortable with one communication style more than another or being anxious about the culture and the language), using deep breathing, relaxing with meditation, asking questions for verification, asking questions for more information, and using symbols (e.g., a question mark to indicate what needs to be asked). many other strategies are found in oxford (2011, 2017b). alternatively, students might be encouraged to use their own favorite strategies. either way, after every three or four activities, the teacher might lead a strategy discussion, with the students talking about which strategies worked the best for them, how they used the strategies, and how they might transfer the strategies to other activities later. figure 9 example of strategy instruction when the target culture is collectivist and therefore uses high-context communication (based on oxford, 2013a) 6. culture-related strategy instruction using the criteria format the acronym criteria (see table 3) stands for cooperation, respect, integrity, tolerance of ambiguity, exploration, reflection, intercultural empathy, and acceptance of complexity (oxford, 2017b). the elements represented by the letters are connected with various learning strategies. some letters are linked with just one strategy, others with two strategies, and just one (“e”) with three strategies. for example, the strategies for the letter “e” are: “watch videos, read, and use other resources to explore the culture. take notes to refer to later. have a friend on social media from the culture.” the criteria acronym lends itself to cognitive flexibility, emotional self-regulation, and the search for understanding across cultures. an interesting idea is to ask students to role-play a situation in the criteria acronym and then act out several learning strategies that could relate to those situations. consider “t” for tolerance of ambiguity (in table 3): a specific, culturally confusing or mystifying situation has occurred, and students could identify it and act it out. then they would choose and act out a number of relevant learning strategies to educate themselves in dealing effectively with the situation. strategies named for the letter “t” are “analyze the situation and, if necessary, ask for help.” students can act out those strategies, but they can also creatively generate and act out other strategies. teachers can ask rebecca l. oxford, christina gkonou 418 individual learners (or small groups of learners) to suggest their own favorite culture-related strategies for each letter of the acronym. teachers can incorporate the acronym into strategy instruction in multiple ways, such as teaching the strategies related to one letter of the acronym at a time. tasks involving the acronym criteria assume strong proficiency or else simplification and adaptation. table 3 intercultural competence and related learning strategies useful for strategy instruction (oxford, 2017b) letter in the word criteria parts of overall sociocultural competence strategies relevant to each part c cooperation – ability to work with people whose cultural values are different from one’s own. seek a native speaker of the l2. ask questions, if appropriate, about a native speaker’s culture. r respect – regard, esteem, or consideration for other cultures and for cultural diversity; rejection of xenophobia, discrimination, and marginalization. show respect by using culturally appropriate turn-taking and other aspects of pragmatics. i integrity – honesty, honor, and fairness in dealing with other cultures research the signs of honor and fairness in the friend’s culture be sure to communicate by employing this knowledge t tolerance of ambiguity – ability to face new, often confusing cultural situations without becoming overly stressed, even when these situations include uncomfortable moments. if a confusing cultural situation emerges, analyze the situation and, if necessary, ask for help. e exploration – willingness to actively explore cultures. watch videos, read, and use other resources to explore the culture. take notes to refer to later. have a friend on social media from the culture. r reflection – ability to reflect, leading to cognitive flexibility and cultural adaptability. keep a long-running journal about what i am learning about other cultures. i intercultural empathy (also called ethnocultural empathy) – an emotional response elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of a person or group from another culture; ability to understand or “feel with” the other. envision myself as someone i know from another culture and experience that person’s feelings and thoughts. a acceptance of complexity – an important counterweight to the human desire to oversimplify the cultural data and accept stereotypes. overcome stereotypes by recognizing that they are merely generalities, often negative ones, and by focusing on complex characteristics of specific, authentic people from the culture. for the criteria acronym (or other modes for teaching culture strategies) to be helpful, the setting must offer at least some chances for communication across cultures. consider differences in communication possibilities in the following examples of second and foreign language learning. for a student who is learning english as a second language in the uk, the us, australia, or new zealand, interwoven: culture, language, and learning strategies 419 english is the most frequent vehicle of daily communication in those countries, so there are many face-to-face opportunities to use the language. however, for a student who is learning swahili as a foreign language in those countries, swahili is not the primary mode for everyday communication mode for most people there, so those countries offer comparatively few in-person possibilities for using swahili, especially in small towns. when there are not many face-to-face chances to use the target language and learn the target culture, social media offer unparalleled, technology-based, global opportunities for engagement in language and culture. these opportunities can be used by individuals or by whole classes. 7. publications involving combinations of culture, language, and strategies a classroom combination of culture, language, and learning strategies is very important. fortunately, some published frameworks and standards provide guidance about the triad of culture, language, and strategies. one of the best known is the common european framework of reference for languages: learning, teaching, assessment, or cefr (council of europe, 2001). the title refers to language, but the content clearly emphasizes the interaction of culture and language. the 2001 cefr contends that greater language knowledge facilitates intercultural respect, tolerance, cooperation, and communication and reduces prejudice and discrimination. in this powerful document, sociocultural competence is described as involving · attitudes of curiosity and openness; · knowledge of social groups and their products and practices in various cultures; · ability to interpret a text or event from another culture and relate it to one’s own culture; · ability to acquire new cultural knowledge and interact across cultures under real-time constraints; · and critical cultural awareness. the need for learning strategies is explained and illustrated throughout the 2001 cefr. the time period including the cefr’s development and publication is known for significant professional awareness of learning strategies and learner autonomy in europe and many parts of the world. more recently, the latest (provisional) edition of the common european framework of reference for languages: learning, teaching, assessment – companion volume with new descriptors (north, goodier, & piccaro, 2017), like the 2001 cefr, overtly demonstrates the relationship between culture and language. it includes the following competences in which culture plays a significant role: sociolinguistic competence, pragmatic competence, and plurilingual and pluricultural competence. it also embraces multiple aspects of linguistic competence rebecca l. oxford, christina gkonou 420 (e.g., vocabulary, grammar, phonology, and orthography), which – unless they are being treated as an academic memory exercise – must exist in a culturallinguistic nexus. the 2017 (provisional) cefr looks distinctly different from the 2001 cefr and was surely written by a different team. the 2017 (provisional) cefr could have strengthened its comments about the value of learning strategies, but at least it mentions strategies for both learning and performance. another recent and intriguing work published by the council of europe (beacco, byram, cavlli, coste, cuenat, goullier, & panthier, 2016) again brings together culture and language. it is called guide for the development and implementation of curricula for plurilingual and intercultural education. this publication explains the unified meanings of plurilingual and intercultural competence, that is, the ability to: (a) use a plural repertoire of linguistic and cultural recourses for communication and interaction in different cultures, (b) understand otherness, (c) mediate between or among members of two or more social groups, and (d) question assumptions of cultures, including one’s own. this guide offers ways to develop these interwoven competences but surprisingly does not emphasize learning strategies. the european language portfolio or elp (see cavana, 2012; council of europe, 2018a, 2018b) is a document allowing language learners to record and reflect on their learning of multiple languages and their intercultural experiences. it also supports the development of learner autonomy, which is ordinarily connected with learning strategies. the elp is linked to the cefr. the elp’s values are in synchrony with those of the european centre for modern languages (ecml). the elp contains three components: a language passport, a language biography, and a dossier (council of europe, 2018b). the council of europe stopped officially registering portfolios in 2014, but individual learners continue to use the elp system. the world readiness standards for learning languages (american council on the teaching of foreign languages [actfl], 2017) include the development of cultural understanding along with language skills. the standards are called the 5 c’s: cultures, communication, connections, comparisons, and communities. though only one standard is called “cultures,” strands of culture are quietly present in all the standards. an alert teacher or professor would likely notice the standards’ linkage of language and culture. chamot (2004) developed an excellent, learning-strategy-based pattern for teaching language by using an earlier version of the 5 c’s, although actfl surprisingly failed to integrate these valuable ideas about learning strategies into its documents about standards. 8. conclusion let us return to the tapestry metaphor, which contains culture, language, and learning strategies. the appendix interweaves all three factors in a lively, strategic interwoven: culture, language, and learning strategies 421 exercise. all parts of the tapestry should be intertwined in every language class. developing an understanding across cultures often means interacting with others in their language rather than one’s own, and learning how to do these things necessitates learning strategies. besides the metaphor of weaving, other metaphors also exist: (a) culture, language, and learning strategies combined as the nucleus of a cell; (b) learning strategies as a bridge to cultural and linguistic understanding; and (c) a journey on the culture and language (c&l) railroad, with learning strategies as the fuel. we hope that this article has provided insights about relationships between culture and language learning, strategy instruction, and the importance of setting the scene for strategy instruction. thinking more broadly about our theme, in fostering competencies in culture and language, we are seeking nothing less than the creation of peace cultures (boulding, 2000, 2008; oxford, 2014) and, in fact, peace at multiple levels (ghaith & shaaban, 1994; kruger, 2012; medley, 2016; oxford, 2013b, 2017a), from inner peace and interpersonal peace all the way to global peace. these aims can be achieved only through learning to interact beyond our own language and culture. learning strategies can profoundly help in this lifelong process. rebecca l. oxford, christina gkonou 422 references american council on the teaching of foreign languages. 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(2017b). teaching and researching language learning strategies: self-regulation in context (2nd ed.). new york: routledge. oxford, r. l., & amerstorfer, c. m. (eds.). (2018). language learning strategies and individual learner characteristics: situating strategy use. new york: bloomsbury. psaltou-joycey, a., & gavriilidou, z. (eds.). (2015). foreign language learning strategy instruction: a teacher’s guide. kavala, greece: saita publications. retrieved from http://www.saitabooks_eu/2015/ebook.162.html rasoal, c., jungert, t., hau, s., & andersson, g. (2011). ethnocultural versus basic empathy: same or different? psychology, 2(9), 925-930. spencer-oatey, h., & franklin, p. (2009). intercultural interaction: a multidisciplinary approach to intercultural communication. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. triandis, h. c. (1995). new directions in social psychology. individualism and collectivism. boulder, co: westview press. wenden, a. 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(1987). learner strategies in language learning. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. interwoven: culture, language, and learning strategies 425 appendix teaching techniques to highlight culture-language relationships and foster learning strategy use: a strategic exercise for the classroom column a in the table below displays a variety of teaching techniques (instructional activities) emphasizing culture but also linking culture and language. these teaching techniques can often be enhanced by interweaving learning strategy instruction. strategy instruction is noted in column b, which leaves space for readers to insert the strategies they might like to teach with regard to the activities in column a. the authors would like to express their gratitude to vee harris for several suggestions. column a teaching techniques (instructional activities) for culture and for culture-language relationships column b strategy instruction: which relevant learning strategies to teach the students? (write below learning strategies that relate to column a techniques/activities). invite guests from the target culture to come to talk about their lives and experiences. encourage students to ask questions of the guest and make comparisons with their own culture. ask students to talk about what surprises them in the target culture and which culture, theirs or the target culture, they would prefer? encourage use of technology (e.g., youtube, twitter, cnn, google images, bbc, or online newspapers), art (all kinds), dance (varied), and music (e.g., hip hop, rock, pop, indigenous, or orchestral music) to uncover differences in cultures, with a special emphasis on comparing the target culture and the students own culture. ask students to note down three differences and three similarities to the way people behave, dress, eat, or talk to each other in the target culture compared to their own culture (suggested by vee harris). ask students to identify ways in which the target literature they are reading now differs from literature in their own culture (suggested by vee harris). play a youtube video of a pet rabbit in class, and ask students to discuss attitudes about animals in the target culture. for instance, people in france might eat rabbits (suggested by vee harris). encourage students to read used comic books, comic strips, and graphic novels, as well as condensed, illustrated classics in the l2 (romeo and juliet, shakespeare’s play, was recently read by sheltered english students in alabama by means of condensed books, as reported in one of our graduate classes). rebecca l. oxford, christina gkonou 426 help learners to pay close attention to menus, applications, and business forms, which are practical, useful, and rich with the target culture and the target language. facilitate student-to-student pen pal systems to increase competence in the target culture and the target language. though students can send letters in handwriting, most likely they will use email or facebook.3 we know instances in which spanish language students have written native spanish speakers, as well as situations in which students of english as a second language have written to native english speakers who happen to be studying spanish. to make student-to-student exchanges more culturally specific, guide students in creating a “matchbox” in which they put ten tiny things that represent their culture. for instance, an english child might include a stamp of the queen’s head, a teabag, a small photo of prince harry and meghan markle, a trinket of the queen’s guard, and other things. help students exchange their matchboxes with members of the target culture. facilitate email discussions across the cultures (adapted from a suggestion from vee harris). foster tandem learning outside of the target language as a way to improve speaking and listening while enhancing cultural knowledge. a student whose native language is x and who is studying language y meets on skype (or some other way) with a student whose native language is y and who wants to learn language x. they teach their native languages to each other while sharing personal and cultural experiences. use local, regional, national, and international maps as a source of culture-based discussions in the target language. map activities (how to get from one place to the other and what will be found there) build reading, writing, speaking, and listening, especially if vocabulary supports are provided. encourage students to journal in the target language about cultural events. expand students’ competence in the target culture and the target language and their peace communication competence by using peace activities. there are so many that we simply refer you to oxford (2013b, 2014, 2017a). note. certain activities as noted were suggested by v. harris (personal communication, 6 june 2017), while others came from both of this chapter’s authors 3 facebook has problems for pen-pal writing: shortness of messages and lack of privacy. however, it might be a start. 385 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (2). 2020. 385-389 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.2.8 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review non-natives writing for anglo-american journals: challenges and urgent needs author: katarzyna hryniuk publisher: warsaw university press, 2019 isbn: 978-83-235-3677-2 pages: 172 i was looking forward to a publication of a scholarly text on academic writing and on the publishing process, which both have such an important impact on the professional experience of polish scholars. the book by katarzyna hryniuk, entitled non-natives writing for anglo-american journals: challenges and urgent needs, fulfils this need. the monograph, 172 pages in length, includes an introductory section, six chapters, an appendix, an extensive list of references, topic and author indexes, and a short summary in polish. it offers a fairly complete picture of issues in academic publication with a unique focus on poland. the “introduction” presents the content of the book in some detail and the research focus of the study on the use of anglo-american conventions in the writing of research articles by polish scholars as well as their own experiential assessment of this process. this introductory section promises the reader an interesting discussion both in relation to theoretical issues and empirical findings on academic writing in one’s non-native language. it brings to the fore the need for a discussion of the possible challenges and dangers of this endeavour. 386 chapter 1, titled “english as the leading language in academic communication,” discusses the position of english as a world-dominant language, also in academic publications such as those in linguistics and applied linguistics. the author describes and compares different models of the role english plays across the world and presents different attitudes to english as a lingua franca (elf). the reader will also find here an explanation of the concepts and terminology used throughout the book. the chapter presents a thorough and well-documented discussion on elf with special emphasis put on the academic side of using english for publishing purposes. in chapter 2, “written academic discourse and its composition,” hryniuk defines the concept of academic discourse as a genre, presents its characteristics together with criteria for its description and also touches upon the didactic aspect of her discussion of eap (english for academic purposes) courses. the academic genre as presented here refers to texts written on linguistics as a research discipline. the chapter also includes a brief description of the writing process and, in more detail, a presentation of different models of academic writing seen from various perspectives, that is, cognitive, socio-cognitive and sociocultural, emphasizing that the latter offers a particular challenge for scholars from different cultural backgrounds. this part of the chapter seems most interesting because hryniuk quotes comparative studies in this area and discusses conventions of writing which are unique to different cultural contexts and thus may pose a problem when intending to publish in english. chapter 3, titled “writing for publishing in international and local journals,” makes for interesting reading not only for writers but also for editors working for academic journals in linguistics and applied lingusitics, as the author shares her critical views (and those of other researchers) on the ways of assessment of journals in poland and abroad. she also emphasizes the role of the editor-in-chief and referees of articles as mentors and facilitators in the process of publication of submitted manuscripts. i would also add here a comment on the injustice of the present system in regard to newly created journals, which may never have a chance of successful promotion if this system of assessment continues to function. one limitation is that the author has failed to highlight the growing importance of open access systems in publishing academic research. chapter 4, “research on english as a foreign language academic writing by polish scholars: the main problems explored,” shows the author as well-informed not only on theory of publishing issues and academic writing (as shown in chapters 1-3) but also demonstrates her familiarity with comparative research on the use of academic writing conventions. the chapter is a thorough overview of studies devoted to developing academic writing skills, demonstrating the main issues under investigation and pointing to the challenges academic writing 387 poses for polish linguists. individual writing challenges are discussed based on selected studies of academic writing carried out by polish scholars, which, as hryniuk points out, have not been very extensive to this point. nevertheless, the author has managed to gather the most notable examples of up-to-date studies (among others łyda & warchał, 2011; warchał, 2010, 2015), which are mostly quantitative. at the same time, hryniuk emphasizes that qualitative research is also of value in investigating academic writing. her publications are in fact a good example of this approach since she emphasizes the importance of the commentaries made by the article authors on their own writing processes. this is well-evidenced in her present book. the chapter is not only very well constructed, but also highlights important, albeit lesser-known polish empirical studies on academic writing. chapter 5, entitled “the study,” starts the empirical part of the book. it offers a detailed description of the research project, complemented by an analysis of the academic publication experience of 16 polish scholars working in the area of linguistics and applied linguistics. the author used semi-structured interviews, which focused on participants’ attitude to writing an academic text in english for publishing purposes, on the one hand, and on their experiential comments on writing their own texts, on the other. the analysis of the data is very detailed, but what makes it particularly valuable are extracts from participants’ experiential comments. for the purposes of analysis, the author uses the results of her previous studies on the difficulties encountered by polish writers in using anglo-american conventions in academic writing and focuses on the areas of greatest discrepancy between polish and english, such as the use of authorial voice and the employment of hedges or evaluative language to express centrality. it is an interesting study, which, however, should only be regarded as a pilot study because of its modest sample (16 participants) and the scope of data analyzed. at the same time, it constitutes an excellent starting point in an important and as yet under-investigated area. the chapter is quite extensive, but the author uses a reader-friendly tabular presentation of the results in the form of the summary included in the final section. in the final chapter 6, “conclusions and implications for instruction,” hryniuk succinctly presents the results of her study and discusses them against the background of the theoretical and empirical studies outlined in the earlier parts of the book. she also offers some ideas for future research, suggesting the need to extend it to other areas of the humanities. however, what i find most useful here is the idea of incorporating the findings of this and other studies into academic writing courses, which deserve more attention and prestige in neo-philological university studies at ba, ma and, most, importantly, phd levels. the author suggests, for example, organizing workshops during which students or young 388 researchers could get hands-on experience of not only writing their texts, but also of revising and editing them for publication. in sum, katarzyna hryniuk’s book is interesting in content, it is presented in a coherent format and written in good academic english. it offers not only a very good theoretical overview of the process of academic writing and publication issues related to it, but also contextualizes it well by focusing on specific areas of difficulty for polish scholars publishing in english on the basis of selected studies and her own very interesting research project(s). there is only one issue that i feel should have been treated with appropriate attention in the book, which is plagiarism in academic writing. plagiarism has a presence in the academy and i see making our students and young scholars aware of it and working on ways of avoiding it (e.g., through self-plagiarism or accidental plagiarism) as an important issue in developing academic writing courses as well as in publishing itself. this monograph is much-needed, especially at a time when far-reaching reforms of higher education are being implemented in poland. one way of making polish scholarly expertise more visible abroad is the obligation to publish research results in prestigious journals that for the most part use english as a means of communication. the author is aware of the challenges and dangers that relate not only to writing but also to the financial restrictions that polish academia experiences and discusses all of them thoroughly in her book. at the same time, she offers a way forward and in this i see the greatest value of the publication both for publishing in english and for its didactic implications. i would additionally like to reinforce the position hryniuk takes in relation to the importance of local publications in poland, obviously on condition that they conform to the highest academic standards and the need to see them promoted. i can fully recommend the monograph, non-natives writing for angloamerican journals: challenges and urgent needs to scholars. it will be of interest to many types of academics. i see it as a guide for scholars publishing in english and especially those who are at the beginning of their adventure with publishing in english. selected parts of the book can also serve as a manual for teaching academic english in university departments and for supervising theses in linguistics and applied linguistics at ma and phd levels. also, as a journal editor myself, i view the book as an important resource for those who have responsibilities in the publishing process, journal editors and article referees. reviewed by danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia, poland danuta.gabrys-barker@us.edu.pl 389 references łyda, a., & warchał, k. (2011). ethnic and disciplinary cultures and understatement: litotic constructions in polish and english linguistics and biology research articles. in j. arabski & a. wojtaszek (eds.), aspects of culture in second language acquisition and foreign language learning (pp. 193-216). berlin: springer verlag. warchał, k. (2010). taking stance across languages: high-value modal verbs of epistemic necessity and inference in english and polish linguistics research articles. linguistica silesiana, 31, 123-136. warchał, k. (2015). certainty and doubt in academic discourse: epistemic modality markers in english and polish linguistics articles. katowice: university of silesia press. 399 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (2). 2023. 399-426 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.38280 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt examining the role of english language proficiency, language learning anxiety, and self-regulation skills in emi students’ academic success dogan yuksel open university, milton keynes, united kingdom https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9131-3907 dogan.yuksel@open.ac.uk adem soruç university of samsun, turkey https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4165-6260 adem.soruc@samsun.edu.tr barıs horzum sakarya university, turkey https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3567-0779 mhorzum@sakarya.edu.tr jim mckinley university college london, uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9949-8368 j.mckinley@ucl.ac.uk abstract this study focuses on the predictive power of linguistic (i.e., general english proficiency; identified simply as “proficiency” in this paper) and non-linguistic (i.e., language learning anxiety and self-regulation) factors on the academic success of english medium instruction (emi) students studying in engineering and social sciences programs in a turkish university setting. data were collected from 705 conveniently sampled emi students of four academic subjects mailto:adem.soruc@samsun.edu.tr dogan yuksel, adem soruç, barıs horzum, jim mckinley 400 (international relations; n = 158; business administration; n = 184; mechatronics engineering; n = 181; mechanical engineering: n = 182) representing two disciplines (i.e., social sciences and engineering) from a public university. pearson correlation and sem analyses were run to determine the relationships among language learning anxiety, self-regulation, proficiency and emi success. findings revealed that anxiety and self-regulation skills do affect emi students’ proficiency irrespective of academic disciplines. both self-regulation and proficiency impacted emi students’ academic success in engineering, while only proficiency predicted academic success in the social sciences. these results are discussed and pedagogical implications are given related to the impact of linguistic and non-linguistic factors in emi contexts. keywords: english medium instruction; individual differences; general english proficiency academic success; discipline-based differences; structural equation modelling (sem) 1. introduction scholars concur that the number of english medium instruction (emi) programs have increased exponentially in higher education (he) institutions, notably since 2012 (rose, mckinley, et al., 2020), because of globalization and internationalization (galloway et al., 2020). emi is defined as “the use of the english language to teach academic subjects (other than english itself) in countries or jurisdictions where the first language of the majority of the population is not english” (macaro, 2018, p. 19). as a global educational phenomenon, emi has been implemented in various contexts (mckinley & galloway, 2022), including turkey (altay et al., 2022; sahan et al., 2021; soruç & griffiths, 2018), where our study was conducted. different strands of emi research can be identified in the literature. while earlier emi research centered on specific language policies and their implementation in various contexts (e.g., evans, 2000; kırkgöz, 2009), more recent research has focused on beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes of students and teachers towards emi (macaro et al., 2018). linguistic factors in emi academic achievement, specifically the effect of language proficiency on academic success in emi, has also been investigated (curle et al., 2020; rose, curle, et al., 2020; xie & curle, 2022). in these studies, academic success entails the mastery of disciplinary knowledge and is usually measured by calculating the semester-long test scores of the students (curle et al., 2020; rose, curle, et al., 2020). although the relationship between individual differences (or non-linguistic factors) and academic success has been investigated with respect to, for example, self-efficacy and self-concept (thompson et al., 2019), ideal l2 self (rose, curle, et al., 2020; xie & curle, 2022), mindsets (kaya et al., 2021) examining the role of english language proficiency, language learning anxiety, and self-regulation . . . 401 and motivation (lasagabaster, 2016), there is an urgent need for research including other individual differences such as anxiety and self-regulation (thompson et al., 2019). the current correlational design study, therefore, aimed to investigate the role of linguistic factors, that is, language proficiency, and that of non-linguistic factors, that is, anxiety and self-regulation, on emi academic success by gathering data from both social sciences and engineering programs. 2. literature review 2.1. english language proficiency and emi academic success the interplay between english language proficiency and academic attainment in emi has been examined in a number of studies (e.g., curle et al., 2020; rose, curle, et al., 2020; thompson et al., 2019; xie & curle, 2022). in their study conducted with year 2 students (n = 139) in a japanese context, thompson et al. (2019) found language proficiency (i.e., toeic scores) and preparatory performance (i.e., english for specific purposes, or esp, course test scores) to be significant predictors of emi success in an international business course. similarly, when rose, curle, et al. (2020) investigated the relationship between toeic language proficiency scores and emi international business course scores of year 2 japanese students (n = 146), they found a statistically significant relationship between language proficiency (i.e., toeic) and emi success (i.e., content course scores). another study on this relationship was conducted with year 2 students (n = 106) in the chinese higher education context by xie and curle (2022). they used their participants’ business english proficiency scores and content scores in an international business course and found a statistically significant relationship between business english proficiency and content scores (i.e., academic success). when curle et al. (2020) examined this relationship in turkey, with year 4 students (n = 212) majoring in economics, they found contradictory results when compared to studies in the japanese and chinese contexts. in their study, general english proficiency, operationalized as scores on the cambridge preliminary english test, was not a statistically significant predictor of emi academic success. of these four studies, three have addressed the relationship between language proficiency and emi academic success in international business courses in asian contexts (rose, curle, et al., 2020; thompson et al., 2019; xie & curle, 2022), while the remaining one (curle et al., 2020) was conducted with economics students in the turkish context. however, studies are still needed in programs other than international business courses or economics in emi. our study, therefore, extends the scope of the aforementioned research related to the role of language proficiency in emi success in recruiting emi engineering students, which is a common emi discipline area (see sandström & neghina, 2017), as well as emi dogan yuksel, adem soruç, barıs horzum, jim mckinley 402 social sciences students, which is a more linguistically demanding discipline area (see bolton & kuteeva, 2012; kuteeva & airey, 2014). in our study, we maintain separate investigations into these different disciplines as the variation of emi between them is worthy of investigation. more to the point, it is hypothesized that the comparison of multiple emi programs from the same setting is most likely to yield more generalizable results in terms of the impact of language proficiency on academic success. 2.2. language learning anxiety language learning anxiety refers to tendencies towards nervousness and hesitation when communicating or learning in second language contexts. at various levels, almost all language learners experience language-learning anxiety at some point in their language-learning process (thompson & lee, 2014) and there might be various anxiety levels for different skills (cheng, 2017). dörnyei and ryan (2015) argue that without any doubt “anxiety affects l2 performance” (p. 176). previous research that has investigated the interplay between language learning anxiety and various issues related to language attainment confirmed almost unequivocally that higher levels of language anxiety were closely connected with lower levels of language success or attainment (e.g., zheng & cheng, 2018). hence, students’ self-regulation skills (see below) can be strengthened to moderate the negative effects of anxiety by helping them structure their learning environment (zimmerman, 2002) and transmit their efforts to self-direct the learning process (wang & zhan, 2020). anxiety caused by studying in english has been reported in numerous studies, which have generally examined the perceptions and responses of emi students (e.g., chun et al., 2017). also, several studies have investigated the presence and/or types of speaking anxiety in emi contexts (e.g., suzuki et al., 2017). however, studies examining the relationship between language learning anxiety and academic success in emi settings are rare (macaro et al., 2018). 2.3. self-regulation self-regulation refers to the ability of students to control, direct, and modify their learning experiences to become active agents of their own learning process (zimmerman, 2002). according to iwaniec (2014), self-regulation allows students to become more proactive in their learning and scaffolds them to reach their selfestablished goals. self-regulation can be observed through dedication, commitment, and resilience towards a specific field of study or topic (henry, 2019). the concepts of autonomy and self-regulation have also been used interchangeably in the field of language learning (griffiths & soruç, 2020). self-regulation is therefore examining the role of english language proficiency, language learning anxiety, and self-regulation . . . 403 accepted as a multi-faceted construct which contains “cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, behavioral, and environmental processes that learners can apply to enhance academic achievement” (dörnyei, 2005, p. 191). previous research has provided strong evidence demonstrating the effects of the level of self-regulation on students’ learning outcomes (e.g., bai & wang, 2023; zimmerman, 2008). in the field of language learning, for instance, self-regulation is considered a key aspect that leads to improved language competence (bai, 2018). however, few studies have explored self-regulation in emi contexts. in a study conducted in hong kong, hu and gao (2018) examined the processes of the utilization of resources in high-achieving and underachieving secondary students’ self-regulated strategic writing in their emi academic studies. their findings indicated that high achievers used a wider range of learning strategies compared to their low-achieving counterparts. in a recent study in the turkish context, soruç et al. (2022) found that self-regulation was a significant contributor to emi students’ academic success both in engineering and social sciences disciplines. in this study, the self-efficacy of the students also contributed to the academic success of the students. recent research in non-emi contexts has examined the relationship between self-regulation and language learning anxiety (guo et al., 2018; wang & zhan, 2020). to the best of our knowledge, no prior study has examined the co-impact of self-regulation and language learning anxiety in emi contexts. 2.4. non-linguistic factors as predictors of academic success in emi there is a strand of studies that examines the relationship between non-linguistic factors including motivation and emi academic success. in one of the first studies, lasagabaster (2016) investigated the interplay among motivation, gender, l1 and possible selves in english medium instruction (except for success). his findings demonstrated that ideal l2 self and integrativeness were positively correlated, indicating that the two factors tapped into the same domain and that the students had a positive attitude toward the second language. according to the proposed model, ideal l2 self, attitudes towards emi, family influence and instrumental promotion accounted for 47.6% of the variance of the criterion measures. in their study, thompson et al. (2019) explored the interplay among language proficiency, self-efficacy beliefs, self-concept, and emi success, finding that l2 self-concept were not predictors of emi academic attainment, while l2 self-efficacy was a significant predictor. the inconsistency of the relationship between non-linguistic factors and emi academic success led thompson et al. (2019) to call for further research in different academic subjects, other than internationally mediated emi business course, as well as developing multi-item measures and different models based on more advanced statistical analyses such as structural equation modelling (sem). dogan yuksel, adem soruç, barıs horzum, jim mckinley 404 when rose, curle, et al. (2020) examined the relationship between motivation (i.e., ideal l2 self) and academic success, they found that motivation did not correlate with higher emi success grades. therefore, rose, curle, et al. (2020) argued that, because “emi motivation warrants further investigation in future research” (p. 2158), alternative motivational constructs should be explored. similarly, xie and curle (2022) investigated the interplay between motivation (i.e., ideal l2 self) and academic attainment. their results demonstrated likewise that motivation did not predict emi success. this result led xie and curle to “highlight the need for further research in this domain” (p. 594). table 1 overview of the studies on non-linguistic factors and success in emi studies on nonlinguistic factors setting emi course year of study number of participants non-linguistic factors key findings of the study 1 lasagabaster, (2016) spain different emi courses from four different faculties various years of study 189 ten factors including ideal l2 self ideal le self and students’ attitudes towards emi significantly predicted their intended learning effort. 2 thompson et al. (2019) japan international business year 2 139 self-concept and self-efficacy l2 self-concept did not predict emi academic success, while l2 self-efficacy was a significant predictor. 3 rose, curle, et al. (2020) japan international business year 2 146 motivation (i.e., ideal l2 self) motivation did not correlate with higher emi success grades. 4 xie & curle (2022) china international business year 2 106 motivation (i.e., ideal l2 self) motivation did not correlate with higher emi success grades. we argue that more specific research is needed in various emi contexts or emi academic disciplines because the studies in table 1 are limited to one emi subject: english-mediated international business. we still do not know, for instance, whether the same findings would be obtained if students from another emi subject were surveyed, in particular such where english does not play an international role (thompson et al., 2019). besides, three studies out of four were conducted in the east asian contexts of japan and china, potentially limiting transferability to other emi contexts. based on the review of the literature above, the following specific gaps have been identified: • studies investigating the interplay between english language proficiency and emi academic attainment did not yield conclusive results. examining the role of english language proficiency, language learning anxiety, and self-regulation . . . 405 • the relationship between some individual differences (i.e., self-regulation and anxiety) has not yet been explored in emi settings. • the current research on academic success in emi has generally sampled international business students, ignoring other disciplines. • the relationship among linguistic and non-linguistic factors and emi academic attainment has not been examined considering the emi academic division or from the perspective of potential discipline-based differences (i.e., social sciences and engineering). • multi-item scales and different models of analysis, such as structural equation modelling (sem), have not been used to explore the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic factors and emi success. 2.5. proposing a hypothesized structural model in this study, we hypothesized that language learning anxiety, self-regulation, and language proficiency would directly or indirectly predict emi success. we also proposed that these three variables would have a direct or indirect impact on each other. previous research in the field of second and foreign language learning settings identified a negative relationship between language learning anxiety and second language achievement (e.g., oteir & al-otaibi, 2019; teimouri et al., 2019). more specifically, a review of around 60 years of research in the field of language learning anxiety showed that anxiety was one of the major causes of lower language proficiency scores (oteir & al-otaibi, 2019). in the field of second and foreign language learning, studies have revealed the positive impact of self-regulation skills on improving language proficiency (e.g., andrade & evans, 2013). previous studies confirmed that self-regulation skills contribute positively to success in language learning (oxford, 2011). in the field of emi, a recent study by soruç et al. (2022) confirmed the relationship between self-regulation and emi success. the interplay between language proficiency and emi academic attainment has been proposed in recent research (e.g., altay et al., 2022; soruç et al., 2022), although there are mixed results regarding the effects of language proficiency and emi academic attainment (e.g., curle et al., 2020) and implications for disciplinebased differences (e.g., soruç et al., 2022). our study aims to examine the relationship among these four constructs utilizing sem (see figure 1). dogan yuksel, adem soruç, barıs horzum, jim mckinley 406 language learning anxiety language proficiency emi successself-regulation figure 1 the rationale underlying the structural model hypothesized in this study based on our hypothesized structural model and responding to calls in previous studies (e.g., thompson et al., 2019; xie & curle, 2022), the present study aimed to address the following research questions: rq1a: to what extent do language learning anxiety, self-regulation, and language proficiency predict the success of emi students in engineering programs? rq1b: to what extent do language learning anxiety, self-regulation, and language proficiency predict the success of emi students in social sciences? rq2: to what extent do the sem models produced for emi programs from engineering and social sciences programs explain the relationship among learning anxiety, self-regulation, language proficiency and academic success? 3. methodology 3.1. research strategy correlational research design, a quantitative research method, was used in this study. correlational studies explore the interplay among various variables measured at once without any intervention. the current study adopted a correlational research design because the interplay among university students’ language learning anxiety, self-regulation skills, language proficiency and success in emi courses, operationalized as grade point average (gpa) scores, were measured at one time. 3.2. context of the study turkish higher education institutions offer two types of emi programs: partial and full (curle et al., 2020). the data for this study came from a partial emi program, which is also described as a “multilingual model” (macaro, 2018), where students are required to register for a minimum of two courses taught in english per semester. data were collected from four partial emi programs (i.e., two programs examining the role of english language proficiency, language learning anxiety, and self-regulation . . . 407 from social sciences, two from engineering) of a major public university in turkey with a population of more than 50,000 students, enabling the researchers to sample a higher number of emi students from various emi programs to examine any discipline-specific differences in terms of the relationship among linguistic and non-linguistic factors and emi success. selecting four emi programs from the same setting further helped us to tackle potential subject-related confounding variables (e.g., margić & vodopija-krstanović, 2018). 3.3. participants data were collected from students who were conveniently sampled from emi academic programs to represent two disciplines from a public university in the western part of turkey (see table 2 for details). table 2 distribution of the participants according to the academic programs academic programs f (%) m (%) total (%) age (m) (sd) overall ratio of the whole sample so ci a l sc ie n ce s international relations 77 (49) 81 (51) 158 (100) 21.5 (3.1) 22.4% business administration 86 (47) 98 (53) 184 (100) 23.8 (4.7) 26.1% e n gi n e e ri n g mechatronics engineering 52 (29) 129 (71) 181 (100) 24.3 (4.1) 25.7% mechanical engineering 49 (27) 133 (73) 182 (100) 25.1 (5.2) 25.8% in total, there were 705 participants from four emi programs: 215 of the participants were second-year students (30.5%), 194 were from the third year (27.5%), and 296 were fourth-year students (42.0%). first-year students were not included because they did not have emi success scores. a large proportion of participants were intentionally recruited from the four academic programs to run more reliable and valid analyses; for instance, structural equation modelling requires 150 or more participants as the ideal sampling size (kline, 2011). further details about the selection of the participants are the following: • all participants had completed at least two years of study (data collection took place at the end of the academic year) in one of the four emi programs. • turkish was the main language of all participants and they used english as a foreign language only. they all had comparable formal english language learning experiences within the turkish education system including the higher education institution. • no participant reported any high school emi experience. dogan yuksel, adem soruç, barıs horzum, jim mckinley 408 • all participants had taken the same assessments and exam procedures in their courses mitigating any testing effect on the scores used in this analysis. • all participants had completed a minimum of eight emi courses and 20 turkish-medium instruction courses during their studies in their programs. 3.4. data collection instruments and procedure with the ethical clearance obtained, students were invited to participate in the study at the end of the academic year. the data related to the students’ level of anxiety and self-regulation were collected via an online five-point likert scale questionnaire (iwaniec, 2014), while emi course scores (gpas) and language proficiency scores were obtained from the university registrar’s office. the whole process of data collection was conducted anonymously, and any personal identification information about participants was removed after determining the demographics. the following measures were used for language proficiency, success in emi courses, anxiety, and self-regulation. 3.4.1. general english proficiency (“proficiency”) to determine participants’ proficiency levels, a version of the cambridge preliminary english test (pet) at a b1 difficulty level (cambridge esol, 2014) was used. this proficiency test included questions on the four language skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. since the university provides partial or full emi programs, students are required to take this language test to measure their proficiency and when necessary to place the students in the appropriate level of language support classes. even though the students took the tests in different years before starting their emi programs, a very similar version of the cambridge pet test was administered each year by the university administration. 3.4.2. emi success to measure emi academic success, the sum of the final course scores for all content courses taken in english was divided by the number of english courses each student took. a minimum of 8 courses was determined as a unit threshold to be included in this study so that we could have robust evidence regarding our participants’ emi academic attainment. the fact that year 1 students were not sampled for the present study can be considered from this point of view since an inadequate number of emi courses was most likely to reduce the generalizability of the findings. following earlier emi success research (e.g., rose, curle, et al., examining the role of english language proficiency, language learning anxiety, and self-regulation . . . 409 2020; thompson et al., 2019; xie & curle, 2022), we took the grade point average (gpa) scores of our participants as our measure of academic success. 3.4.3. language learning anxiety scale (llas) a 5-point likert scale was used to determine the extent to which the participants felt anxious when studying in english-medium instruction contexts (see appendix a). we used the anxiety questionnaire developed by iwaniec (2014), who modelled the items on the scale using horwitz, horwitz, and cope’s (1986) foreign language classroom anxiety scale. the original scale included eight items, but this was reduced to five after the factor analyses (see details in the section on data analysis). 3.4.4. self-regulation scale (srs) to collect the data about students’ level of self-regulation in the emi context, we used the scale with 12 items developed by iwaniec (2014) (see appendix b); however, after the factor analysis, just eight items were used in the analysis (see details in the section on data analysis). 3.5. data analysis pearson correlation and sem analyses were utilized to ascertain the relationships among language learning anxiety, self-regulation, language proficiency and emi success. maximum likelihood estimations were used in sem. in the analyses, descriptive analysis and pearson correlation coefficient analysis were performed using spss 21.0 and sem was conducted using lisrel 8.54 programs. 3.5.1. language learning anxiety scale (llas) a series of analyses were conducted to examine the validity and reliability of the original scale in the turkish context. firstly, all the assumptions for the factor analyses were checked, confirming the factorability of the correlation matrix. then, an exploratory factor analysis (efa) was conducted with the data from business administration students (n = 184) to explore the factor structure of the data. according to the analysis, items 1, 4, and 5 were removed, so the scale was formed by five items with one factor. a confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) was run, using the data from mechanical engineering students (n = 182) to test if the factor structure fits the data. the analysis showed that five items with one factor all pertained to the llas, measuring the same construct (i.e., anxiety) accurately and consistently. after this, cronbach’s alpha for internal reliability was examined dogan yuksel, adem soruç, barıs horzum, jim mckinley 410 and the test returned an excellent value (r = .91). after all these analyses, the scale used in this study included five items (with one factor), measuring the level of anxiety of the students in the emi context. according to the results of cfa and the values of cronbach’s alpha, llas is a valid and reliable instrument. detailed results are presented in appendix c. 3.5.2. self-regulation scale (srs) to examine the validity and reliability of the srs in the turkish context, as in the anxiety scale, we carried out several analyses. after confirming the factorability of the correlation matrix, efa was, firstly, run using the data of the participants from international relations (n = 158), according to which the items 2, 3, 9, and 10 were removed from the scale, and remaining was an eight-item scale with one factor (i.e., self-regulation). immediately after this, cfa was run, using the data from mechatronics engineering students (n = 181). the analysis revealed that the eight items in the scale comprised a unified construct (i.e., self-regulation). finally, when cronbach’s alpha for internal reliability was measured, the test returned an excellent value (r = .96). according to these analyses, we used an eight-item srs with one factor. according to cfa and the values of cronbach’s alpha, srs is a valid and reliable instrument. detailed results are presented in appendix a. 4. findings the data were analyzed separately for the engineering and the social sciences (rq1a and rq1b, respectively). 4.1. rq1a: to what extent do language learning anxiety, self-regulation, and language proficiency predict the success of emi students in engineering programs? the data from 363 students (mechatronics; n = 181; mechanical engineering; n = 182) were analyzed, producing a model based on the variables proficiency (i.e., general english proficiency), language learning anxiety, self-regulation, and overall emi course scores. standard deviations and correlation coefficients are presented in table 3. when the data were closely examined, all the means proved to be above average. when the relationship between the variables was analyzed, language learning anxiety was found to be negatively correlated with self-regulation (r = -.41). also, language learning anxiety correlated negatively with proficiency (r = -.32) and emi success (r = -.11). furthermore, self-regulation had a positive correlation with proficiency (r = .48) and emi success (r = .24). examining the role of english language proficiency, language learning anxiety, and self-regulation . . . 411 additionally, language proficiency was found to be positively correlated with the emi success (r = .31). table 3 mean, standard deviation and correlations among the variables variables lla sr proficiency emi success lla sr -.41** proficiency -.32** .48** emi success -.11* .24** .31** mean 16.74 30.29 73.93 60 95 standard deviation 4.62 6.36 7.35 14.22 note. **p < .01; *p < .05; lla = language learning anxiety; sr = self-regulation; proficiency = general english proficiency; emi success = gpa to examine these relationships in more detail, in the second stage, sem analysis was carried out. in this model, we found that language learning anxiety and self-regulation were predictors of proficiency, while self-regulation and language proficiency significantly predicted emi academic attainment. the fit criteria used in the methodological literature (e.g., kline, 2011) were followed when reporting the findings of the present study. according to the model, fit indices were χ2/df = 0.15, rmsea = 0.001, srmr = 0.054, agfi = 0.99, gfi = 1.00, nfi = 1.00, cfi = 1.00. when these fit values obtained for the model were compared with the critical values determined for sem by schermelleh-engel et al. (2003), the fit indices were in the range determined for a good fit, thus leading us to maintain that it was the tested structural model which provided the model-data fit. the path diagram containing the standardized path coefficients for the model is provided in figure 2. language learning anxiety language proficiency emi success -0.16 self-regulation 0.39 0.76 0.89 1.00 0.26 1.00 0.11 figure 2 standardized path coefficients calculated for the structural model when the path diagram was examined, the path coefficients of some variables were low, and some were medium. in this respect, the standardized path coefficients obtained for the structural model and the t values and significance levels for these path coefficients are presented in table 4. dogan yuksel, adem soruç, barıs horzum, jim mckinley 412 table 4 standardized path coefficients, t values and significance levels regarding emi courses gpa model direct effect standardized β value t lla→ proficiency -0.16* -3.20 sr → proficiency 0.39* 7.59 sr → emi success 0.11* 2.02 proficiency → emi success 0.26* 4.58 note. * p < .05 lla = language learning anxiety; sr = self-regulation; proficiency = general english proficiency; emi success = gpa when the data in table 4 were closely examined, language learning anxiety (β = -0.16, t = -3.20) and self-regulation (β = 0.39, t = 7.59) were significant predictors of proficiency (p < .05). furthermore, self-regulation (β = 0.11, t = 2.02) and proficiency (β = 0.26, t = 4.58) were significant predictors of emi success (p < .05). these data showed a negative relationship between language learning anxiety and proficiency; therefore, when students in emi contexts had low anxiety levels, they developed higher language proficiency. also, the self-regulation skills of the students were significant predictors of language proficiency, meaning that when students had a higher sense of self-regulation, they improved their proficiency. both language learning anxiety and self-regulation skills accounted for 24% of proficiency. furthermore, in this emi context, the self-regulation skills of the students were found to be significant predictors of emi success, indicating that as students develop improved self-regulation skills, they become more successful in their emi courses. lastly, proficiency was also found to predict the students’ emi success significantly, which has revealed that as students become more proficient in english, they become more successful in emi courses. the students’ skills of self-regulation and their proficiency explained 11% of their emi success, while the model also demonstrated that language learning anxiety impacted emi success indirectly, explaining 5.6% of success in emi. 4.2. rq1b: to what extent do language learning anxiety, self-regulation, and language proficiency predict the success of emi students in social sciences? following the same procedures as those outlined above, the data from 342 social sciences emi students (international relations; n = 158; business administration; n = 184) were analyzed and then a model was produced based on the same variables as the engineering students. standard deviations and correlation coefficient values are given in table 5. overall, the data showed that the variables had scores above the average, and we found that language learning anxiety was negatively correlated with self-regulation (r = -.38). language learning anxiety was examining the role of english language proficiency, language learning anxiety, and self-regulation . . . 413 likewise correlated negatively with proficiency (r = -.34) and emi success (r = -.12). conversely, self-regulation was correlated positively with proficiency (r = .50) and emi success (r = .21). additionally, proficiency was positively correlated with the emi success (r = .33). table 5 means, standard deviations and correlations among the variables variables lla sr proficiency emi success lla sr -.38** proficiency -.34** .50** emi success -.12* .21** .33** m 17.89 28.52 73.29 66.39 sd 3.40 6.23 7.10 11.76 note. ** p < .01; * p < .05; lla= language learning anxiety; sr= self-regulation; proficiency = general english proficiency; emi success = gpa in the second stage, the sem analysis yielded the same results as in the case of the engineering students. the same fit criteria used for the engineering student data were followed when reporting the findings of the social sciences student data. in this model, fit indices were χ2/df = 0.25, rmsea = 0.001, srmr = 0.093, agfi = 1.00, gfi = 1.00, nfi = 1.00, cfi = 1.00. when these fit values obtained for the model were compared with the critical values determined for sem, the fit indices were in the range determined for a good fit, indicating that the structural model tested here provided the model-data fit. the path diagram containing the standardized path coefficients for the model is presented in figure 3. language learning anxiety language proficiency emi success -0.16 self-regulation 0.42 0.75 0.89 1.00 0.33 1.00 figure 3 standardized path coefficients calculated for the structural model analysis of the path diagram for the students of the social sciences, like the engineering students, showed that the path coefficients of some variables were low, and some were medium. in this respect, standardized path coefficients obtained for the structural model and the t values and significance levels for these path coefficients are presented in table 6. dogan yuksel, adem soruç, barıs horzum, jim mckinley 414 table 6 standardized path coefficients, t values and significance levels regarding emi courses gpa model direct effect standardized β value t lla→ proficiency -0.16* -3.33 sr → proficiency 0.42* 8.56 proficiency → emi success 0.33* 6.39 note. * significant at level p <.05; lla = language learning anxiety; sr = self-regulation; proficiency = general english proficiency; emi success = gpa according to the data in table 6, language learning anxiety (β = 0.16, t = 3.33) and self-regulation (β = 0.42, t = 8.56) were significant predictors of proficiency (p < .05). however, language proficiency (β = 0.33, t = 6.39) was the only significant predictor of emi success (p < .05). such results indicated that when social sciences emi students feel less anxious (as engineering emi students do), they develop higher language proficiency in emi courses. also, the data showed that self-regulation was a significant predictor of proficiency. similar to engineering emi students, students studying in social sciences emi programs with higher self-regulation skills had improved language proficiency. both anxiety and self-regulation account for 25% of improvement in proficiency. conversely, the non-linguistic factors of anxiety and self-regulation did not predict success in emi programs in social sciences, whereas proficiency did. the model showed that as the students of the social sciences increased their language proficiency, they became more successful in emi courses like international relations and business administration. language proficiency explained 11% of emi success. although the impact was not found directly, anxiety and selfregulation both accounted for the emi success, only 2.7%. 4.3. rq2: to what extent do the sem models produced for emi programs from engineering and social sciences programs explain the interplay between learning anxiety, self-regulation, language proficiency and academic success? the data showed that the language learning anxiety levels of engineering students were lower than the students from social sciences, while their self-regulation skills were higher. related to their emi success, however, the students in social sciences had higher gpa scores, but they were more anxious and their self-regulation skills were much lower. the fact that these two non-linguistic variables influenced each other negatively should be closely examined in future studies. when the two sem models were compared using akaike’s information criteria (aic), consistent aic (caic) and bayes information criteria (bic), we found that the value of aic for the model of engineering programs was 18.15, while the value of caic was 62.20. the value of aic for the programs in social sciences was examining the role of english language proficiency, language learning anxiety, and self-regulation . . . 415 16.49, while caic was 55.17. given that the better model was the one having the lower index scores, we can suggest that the sem model produced for social science programs (i.e., international relations and business administration) showed more effectiveness than the other model produced for engineering programs. the main reason for this can be because the self-regulation skills of the engineering students predicted emi success and that the model was more complicated. when the two sem models are compared, it can be maintained that emi students’ individual differences like anxiety and self-regulation predicted proficiency significantly, which explained one-fourth of the improvement in proficiency in both engineering and social sciences programs. regarding academic success in emi in both disciplines, proficiency was likewise found to be a significant predictor of emi success. the only difference observed in both sem models was about the self-regulation skills of the students. while this non-linguistic factor, or individual difference, was a significant contributor to the success of engineering emi programs, it did not directly predict the success of students studying in the social sciences. therefore, we suggest that not only proficiency but also the self-regulation skills of engineering students should be supported. this is not the same case in social sciences, because it was not self-regulation, but proficiency which contributed directly and significantly to the increase in students’ success. 5. discussion utilizing sem, this study is among the first few studies to examine the relationship between linguistic (i.e., general english proficiency) and non-linguistic (i.e., language learning anxiety and self-regulation) factors and emi students’ academic success comparing engineering and social sciences students. the first research question asked whether emi students’ general english proficiency, sense of anxiety and self-regulation skills predicted their success in engineering emi courses (rq1a) and social science emi courses (rq1b). our findings revealed that in both discipline areas, students’ individual differences such as their level of language learning anxiety and sense of self-regulation skills predicted their level of language proficiency. for engineering students, language learning anxiety and self-regulation skills accounted for 24% of proficiency. moreover, selfregulation and proficiency predicted emi students’ academic success explaining 11% of their emi success. this finding is important for emi practitioners or lecturers when teaching engineering students through emi because, according to this finding, when these students are trained to be more self-regulatory and when they are more proficient in the language, it is more likely they will achieve success. also, learning anxiety explained 5.6% of emi success via proficiency indirectly. however, there was a negative relationship between language learning dogan yuksel, adem soruç, barıs horzum, jim mckinley 416 anxiety and proficiency, indicating that when the students in engineering emi programs had low anxiety levels, they developed higher language proficiency. this finding is vital to the emi literature because no prior study has examined the predictive power of language proficiency, language learning anxiety and selfregulation skills on engineering students’ academic success. in the social sciences division, our results similarly demonstrated that language learning anxiety and self-regulation were significant predictors of students’ proficiency. anxiety and self-regulation accounted for 25% of improvement in proficiency. however, only proficiency significantly predicted emi success accounting for 11% of students’ level of success, while non-linguistic factors such as anxiety and self-regulation did not predict success in social sciences emi programs. although this finding suggests that anxiety and self-regulation skills are less important for social sciences students when compared to language proficiency level (see kuteeva & airey, 2014), we note that these non-linguistic factors still have an indirect effect. regarding the relationship between language proficiency and emi academic success, thompson et al. (2019), rose, curle, et al. (2020), as well as xie and curle (2022) found language proficiency as a significant predictor of emi success in social sciences programs. our results support the findings of these studies, as we also found that english language proficiency, among other factors, predicted emi students’ academic success in the programs of social science. given the fact that our participants were sampled from both international relations and business administration programs, including a higher number of students, these findings are transferable to other similar emi settings. in non-emi contexts, previous studies reported a strong link between students’ levels of self-regulation and their learning outcomes (e.g., bai & wang, 2023; zimmerman, 2008). similarly, for engineering students, a statistically significant relationship was found between self-regulation skills and academic success. however, we also found that self-regulation skills did not predict academic success in social sciences programs. these mixed findings should provide an impulse for further research because they emphasize the significance of disciplinebased differences in emi settings, as could be observed in some other studies (e.g., altay et al., 2022). while few studies have explored the relationship between language learning anxiety and academic success in emi settings, in non-emi settings, previous research demonstrated that higher levels of language anxiety were closely connected with lower levels of language success (e.g., zheng & cheng, 2018). similarly, in our study, for both discipline areas, language anxiety exhibited significant correlations with english language proficiency, and in the engineering programs, it indirectly predicted emi academic success via proficiency accounting for 5.6% examining the role of english language proficiency, language learning anxiety, and self-regulation . . . 417 of emi success. for social sciences students, conversely, language learning anxiety did not predict emi academic success. the second research question concerned the extent to which the sem models produced for the emi programs from engineering and social sciences explain the link between anxiety, self-regulation, proficiency and academic success. when comparing the sem models produced for the two groups, we found that language learning anxiety levels of engineering students were lower than those of students from social sciences, while their self-regulation skills were higher. lower language learning anxiety may be related to the varying role of the english language in engineering programs. dearden and macaro (2016) provided evidence regarding the varying role of language in emi contexts, suggesting that emi students as well as lecturers deal more with formulae than words. similarly, wellington and osbourne (2001) claimed that the intensity of the language used in engineering programs might be low because students mostly depend on a combination of words, pictures, diagrams, images, animations, graphs, equations, tables and charts in these programs. however, in social sciences, students rely mostly on their english proficiency because the courses they take encourage them to use language more flexibly and creatively (kuteeva & airey, 2014). dearden and macaro (2016) also found that social science lecturers stated that they focus more on language issues because, according to the lecturers, teaching social sciences subjects requires students to be engaged in more communicative and small group activities, thus leading to more frequent dependence on language (bolton & kuteeva, 2012). these differences concerning language in different disciplines may help explain why social sciences students manifest higher levels of language learning anxiety. 6. limitations although our study offers important contributions to the field of emi, it also has some limitations to consider when interpreting the results and transferring the findings to other contexts. first, the findings of this study came from a partial (i.e., multilingual) emi context in turkey. while this is generalizable to other partial emi contexts, studies could be carried out in full (or fuller) emi contexts to increase the generalizability of the conclusions more broadly. moreover, the participants and the academic divisions were sampled conveniently. random selection of the participants could extend the validity of the study and it could produce different results. also, in this study, we examined only two non-linguistic factors, namely, anxiety and self-regulation. therefore, future studies could investigate other individual variables including instrumental and intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, motivated behaviors, boredom, and so on. due to the intensity of the dogan yuksel, adem soruç, barıs horzum, jim mckinley 418 analysis, we reported only quantitative results without interviewing the participants. future studies should also use qualitative data to support quantitative data. finally, since the data were collected from 2nd, 3rd and 4th-year students, different anxiety or language proficiency may have occurred at different learning levels. future research can be carried out with a single education level. 7. implications for the teaching/learning the main findings of our study revealed that anxiety and self-regulation skills do affect emi students’ english language proficiency in both academic disciplines. moreover, we observed that both self-regulation and language proficiency impacted emi students’ academic success in engineering programs, whereas only english language proficiency impacted academic success in the social sciences discipline area. these two main findings indicate critical implications. • first, english language proficiency contributes to the student’s academic success in both academic areas (see also yuksel et al., 2021); therefore, uninterrupted language support should be given to emi students throughout their studies in order to boost their academic success. this language support can be in the form of in-sessional courses or english programs such as english for specific purposes and/or vocational english. • second, strategy instruction should be given to the learners related to their challenges (e.g., soruç et al., 2018, 2021) considering their specific language proficiency level and the academic discipline. however, we note that continuous language instruction or systematic strategy training is not the only factor that paves the better road for students’ academic success; students’ sense of anxiety should also be reduced, and self-regulation skills should be equally supported. • finally, the self-regulation skills of engineering emi students should be closely backed up through specific instructional, awareness-raising activities because it should be remembered that their self-regulation skills do affect their academic success as much as their language proficiency, while this may not be so significant in social sciences. 8. conclusions this study is the first to find that while both self-regulation and general english language proficiency were significant predictors of academic success in engineering programs, it was only language proficiency in social sciences programs found as the predictor of academic success. these findings have pedagogical implications examining the role of english language proficiency, language learning anxiety, and self-regulation . . . 419 for emi practitioners, lecturers, and higher education institutions because it explicitly highlights the importance of students’ individual characteristics such as the role of self-regulation skills on emi students’ academic success, especially in engineering programs as well as the potential but unnoticed value of disciplinebased differences in emi settings. more meaningful and direct pedagogical interventions should therefore be implemented because emi students in engineering programs might display different attitudes and have different needs from those 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(2021). a longitudinal study at an english medium instruction university in turkey: the interplay between english language improvement and academic success. applied linguistics review. https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2020-0097 dogan yuksel, adem soruç, barıs horzum, jim mckinley 424 appendix a language learning anxiety scale (llas) 1. *i tremble when i know i’m going to be called on in language class. 2. even if i’m well prepared for the class, i feel anxious about it. 3. in language class, i can get so nervous that i forget things i know. 4. *i worry about the consequences of failing tests, assignments and exams in english. 5. *it embarrasses me to volunteer answers in my language class. 6. i feel more tense and nervous in my language class than in my other classes. 7. i’m afraid other students will laugh at me when i speak english. 8. i start to panic when i have to speak without preparation in language class. * items removed after the factor analyses. examining the role of english language proficiency, language learning anxiety, and self-regulation . . . 425 appendix b self-regulation scale (srs) 1. if there is something i don’t understand in english, i do my best to find the answer in a variety of resources (course books, dictionaries, online resources). 2. *if i can’t understand something in the english class, i ask others (my english teacher, friends etc.) for help. 3. *i try to find opportunities to practise my english. 4. i try to prepare for every english lesson, even if i know that i won’t be tested. 5. i try to learn english by watching films in english and listening to music in english. 6. i have my own ways of studying english vocabulary. 7. i plan my preparation and reviews before the test. 8. i have my own special techniques to make even the most boring activities more interesting. 9. *when studying english, i arrange my environment to make learning more efficient. 10. *i use my own techniques to keep me focused on studying english. 11. when studying english, i arrange my environment so that to avoid possible distractions (tv, the internet, mobile phone). 12. i study english as long as it takes me to achieve my own goals. * items removed after the factor analyses. dogan yuksel, adem soruç, barıs horzum, jim mckinley 426 appendix c reliability coefficients and goodness of fit indexes of confirmatory factor analysis of scales scale total items factor loading ev reliability standard lolution fit measure model value language learning anxiety 5 .539-.880 61.73 0.91 .69-.96 χ2/df 1.697 rmsea 0.062 srmr 0.016 cfi 0.99 nfi 0.99 nnfi 0.99 gfi 0.99 agfi 0.94 self-regulation 8 .719-.979 85.49 0.96 .53-.99 χ2/df 1.879 rmsea 0.069 srmr 0.033 cfi 0.99 nfi 0.99 nnfi 0.99 gfi 0.96 agfi 0.91 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: miros aw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: krzysztof kwiatkowski (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) language editor: melanie ellis (language teacher training college, zabrze) vol. 3 no. 4 december 2013 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (trinity college, dublin) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham/university of new south wales, sydney) piotr cap (university of ód ) anna cie licka (texas a&m international university, adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) kata csizer (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) krystyna dro dzia -szelest (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabry -barker (university of silesia) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of ód ) jan majer (university of ód ) paul meara (swansea university) anna micho ska-stadnik (university of wroc aw) anna ni egorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) terrence odlin (ohio state university) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) pawe scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) david singleton (trinity college, dublin) odzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) merrill swain (university of toronto) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of ód ) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – pozna 2013 editor: miros aw pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak krzysztof kwiatkowski anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydzia pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam pozna proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, pozna contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy wiat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. wierzawska 1, 60-321 pozna print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: index copernicus central and eastern european online library (ceeol) the mla international bibliography the mla directory of periodicals linguistic abstracts ebsco efforts are being made to include studies in second language learning and teaching in the index of journals published by the polish ministry of science and higher education, and to have it listed by the european reference index for the humanities (erih) and the thomson reuters master journal list. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 3, number 4, december 2013 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors .................................................................... 453 editorial ......................................................................................... 459 articles: hanna komorowska – multilingualism: its open and hidden agendas ..... 463 paola vettorel and lucilla lopriore – is there elf in elt course-books? ..... 483 wei cai, xiangrong li and meihua liu – academic and linguistic gains during a semester-long study abroad: a cohort case study ............... 505 katalin piniel and kata csizér – l2 motivation, self-efficacy and anxiety: the interrelationship of individual variables in the secondary school context ................................................................................................................ 523 eugen zaretsky, benjamin p. lange, harald a. euler and katrin neumann – acquisition of german pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children ............................................................................................................... 551 jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak and anna mystkowska-wiertelak – teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study ...................................................................... 581 mehmet kanik – reverse discourse completion task as an assessment tool for intercultural competence .................................................... 621 book reviews ................................................................................. 645 reviewers for volume 3/2013 ......................................................... 652 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 653 453 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors jakub bielak obtained his phd in linguistics from the school of english of adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland. he teaches at the department of english studies of the faculty of pedagogy and fine arts (kalisz, poland) of the same university and at the department of modern languages of konin state school of higher professional education, poland. his interests include formfocused instruction, individual learner differences and applications of cognitive linguistics to language teaching. he has authored and co-authored one book and several articles in edited volumes and journals and co-edited two books. contact details: department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, nowy wiat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (email: kubabogu@amu.edu.pl) wei cai is associate professor of english at the department of foreign languages and literatures, tsinghua university, beijing, china. her research interests include mainly second/foreign language teaching and learning, business english and study abroad. contact details: department of foreign languages and literatures, tsinghua university, beijing, 100084 (e-mail: chinacaiwei@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn) kata csizér holds a phd in language pedagogy and works as a lecturer in the department of english applied linguistics at eötvös university, budapest, hungary, where she teaches various l2 motivation courses. her main field of research interest comprises socio-psychological aspects of l2 learning and teaching as well as second and foreign language motivation. she has published over 50 academic papers on various aspects of l2 motivation and has co-authored three books, including motivational dynamics, language attitudes and language globalisation: a hungarian perspective (2006, multilingual matters, coauthored with zoltán dörnyei and nóra németh). contact details: (e-mail: weinkata@yahoo.com) 454 harald euler has been a visiting professor at the department of phoniatrics and pediatric audiology, university of bochum, germany, since 2012, and at the department of developmental psychology, university of vienna, austria, since 2013. his research interests are fluency disorders, assessment of language development, and evolutionary psychology. contact details: department of phoniatrics and pediatric audiology, ruhr-university bochum, bleichstr. 15, 44787 bochum, germany (e-mail: euler@uni-kassel.de) mehmet kanik is a visiting assistant professor in the department of modern and classical languages at the university of houston, usa. he studied tesol, second language acquisition and foreign language education in turkey and the united states. his research interests are cross-cultural pragmatics, cross-linguistic influence and testing of pragmatics. contact details: (e-mail: mehmetkanik@gmail.com) xiangrong li is a senior staff member at the academic affairs office, tsinghua university, beijing, china. she is mainly interested in higher education and management. contact details: academic affairs office, tsinghua university, beijing, 100084, china (e-mail: leexr@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn) meihua liu is associate professor of english at the department of foreign languages and literatures, tsinghua university, beijing, china. her research interests include mainly second/foreign language teaching and learning, reticence and anxiety, language attitudes and motivation, second language writing, and study abroad. contact details: department of foreign languages and literatures, tsinghua university, beijing, 100084, china (e-mail: ellenlmh@yahoo.com) hanna komorowska is professor of applied linguistics and language teaching at the university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland, and at the university of warsaw, poland. as head of the curriculum development center she built a team which designed the first set of communicative syllabus documents for the polish school system. after the fall of communism she was heading the expert committee for flt and teacher education reform. she was also the founder and the first head of the foreign language teacher training college at the university of warsaw. former vice-president of warsaw university, the polish delegate for the modern languages project group of the council of europe, and member of the eu high level group on multilingualism, she is now a consultant to the european centre for modern languages in graz, austria, head of the selection committee of 455 the polish edition of the european language label and co-author of the european portfolio for student teachers of languages. she publishes widely in the field of flt methodology and teacher education. contact details: (e-mail: hannakomo@data.pl) benjamin p. lange is a linguist and psychologist, post-doc, institute of medical psychology and medical sociology, center of psychosocial medicine, university of göttingen, germany. his research interests are, among others, language evolution, language acquisition, and language-related sex differences. contact details: institute of medical psychology and medical sociology, center of psychosocial medicine, faculty of medicine, university of göttingen, waldweg 37, 37073 göttingen, germany (e-mail: kontakt@benjaminplange.de) lucilla lopriore, associate professor in english language and translation at roma tre university, rome, italy. she holds an ma, university of reading, and a phd, university of foreigners, siena italy. she has served as tesol italy president (19961998), on tesol international board of directors (2001-2014) and tesol international research committee (since 2013). she has also been national coordinator of ellie (early language learning in europe) project (2006-2010). her research interests are early language learning, assessment and evaluation; teacher education; language corpora; clil; and subtitling for language learning. her recent publications are “research into early foreign language learning in italy” (2014, in j. horváth & p. medgyes [eds.], studies in honour of marianne nikolov, lingua franca csopot), “norm and use in the language classroom” (2013, in j. mihaljevi djigunovi & m. krajnovi [eds.], uzrt 2012: empirical studies in english applied linguistics, ff press), and buzzwords in elt. unveiling english (2012, anicia). contact details: via mogadiscio, 19; 00199 roma; italy (e-mail: lucilla.lopriore@ uniroma3.it) anna mystkowska-wiertelak received her doctoral degree in applied linguistics from adam mickiewicz university in pozna , poland. she is a teacher and a teacher educator working at the english department of the faculty of pedagogy and fine arts of adam mickiewicz university in kalisz as well as the department of modern languages of the state school of higher professional education in konin, poland. her main interests comprise, apart from teacher education, second language acquisition theory and research, language learning strategies, learner autonomy, form-focused instruction and motivation. contact details: department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, nowy wiat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (email: mystkows@amu.edu.pl) 456 katrin neumann has been head of the department of phoniatrics and pediatric audiology, university of bochum, germany, since 2012. her research interests are fluency, voice, and hearing disorders; and language and hearing assessment. contact details: department of phoniatrics and pediatric audiology, ruhr-university bochum, bleichstr. 15, 44787 bochum, germany (e-mail: katrin.neumann@kgu.de) miros aw pawlak is professor of english in the english department at the faculty of pedagogy and fine arts of adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland. his main areas of interest are sla theory and research, form-focused instruction, classroom discourse, learner autonomy, communication and learning strategies, individual learner differences and pronunciation teaching. his recent publications include the place of form-focused instruction in the foreign language classroom (2006, adam mickiewicz university press) and several edited collections on learner autonomy, language policies of the council of europe, form-focused instruction, speaking in a foreign language and individual learner differences. contact details: department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, nowy wiat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (email: pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl) katalin piniel is assistant professor at the department of english applied linguistics at eötvös university, budapest, hungary, where she obtained her phd in language pedagogy. she is interested in conducting research on the interrelationship of individual differences in foreign language learning. currently she is part of a research team exploring the motivations, beliefs, and strategies of deaf foreign language learners. contact details: (e-mail: brozik-piniel.katalin@btk.elte.hu) paola vettorel is assistant professor in the department of foreign languages and literatures, university of verona, italy. her main research interests include english as a lingua franca (elf) and its implications for elt practices and materials, and elf and digital media. her publications include: “eil/elf and representation of culture in textbooks: only food, fairs, folklore and facts?” (2010, in c. gagliardi & a. maley [eds.], eil, elf, global english: teaching and learning issues, peter lang), ”world englishes and elf in elt textbooks: how is plurality tepresented?” (2012, in r. facchinetti [ed.], a cultural journey through the english lexicon, cambridge scholars, co-authored with s. corrizzato), “elf in international school exchanges: stepping into the role of elf users” (2013, journal of english as a lingua franca, 2[1]), “connecting english wor(l)ds and classroom practices” (in press, textus 1[2014]), and elf in wider networking. blogging practices (in press, mouton de gruyter). 457 contact details: via a. volta, 7; 32034 pedavena (bl); italy (e-mail: paola.vettorel @univr.it) ewa waniek-kilmczak is professor of english linguistics at the university of ód where she is the head of the department of english language and applied linguistics. she specialises in phonetics and phonology of english; her main research interests are in english phonetics/phonology, sociolinguistics and applied phonetics. she has organized and co-organised conferences on accents of english and teaching english pronunciation – in the present form accent conferences (www.filolog.uni.lodz.pl/accents) take place every december. her editorial work includes collections of papers devoted to teaching pronunciation and a more general editorial work for research in language (versita.com/ril). contact details: institute of english, university of ód , al. ko ciuszki 65, 90514 ód , poland (e-mail: ewaklim@unilodz.pl) eugen zaretsky has been a post-doc linguist in the department of phoniatrics and pediatric audiology, university of frankfurt/main, germany, since 2008. his research interests are language acquisition, language contact, language and fluency disorders, multilingualism, grammar, and genderlects. contact details: department of phoniatrics and pediatric audiology, goetheuniversity, frankfurt am main, theodor-stern-kai 7, building 7a, 60590 frankfurt am main, germany (e-mail: yevgen.zaretsky@kgu.de) 259 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (2). 2019. 259-261 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.2.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial the second 2019 issue of ssllt brings together six papers, all of which report empirical studies dealing with different aspects of teaching and learning additional languages in various contexts, and it also includes two book reviews. in the first contribution, alastair henry combines hermans’ (2008) concept of the dialogical self with the tenets of complex dynamic systems theories (hiver & alhoorie, 2016) to investigate the developing professional identity of a preservice teacher of english during the practicum in a school in western sweden. using a combination of intra-personal data in the form of semi-structured interviews conducted before and after the practicum as well as inter-personal data in the form of forum postings and a stimulated recall discussion of a lesson taught by the participant, henry shows that the construction of teacher identity entails interaction between present experiences and the imagined self. in the subsequent paper, anne huhtala, anta kursiša and marjo vesalainen seek to identify the motives driving 51 finnish university students to learn foreign languages other than english, in this case french, german and swedish, adopting as a theoretical framework dörnyei’s (2009) theory of the l2 motivational self-system. qualitative analysis of the narrative reflections written by the participants revealed that although the initial decisions to engage in language learning may be driven by social pressure, or the ought-to self, in the course of time it is the ideal self and the l2 learning experience that start to play the dominant role. the next two papers are concerned with language learning strategies, a field that has been able to withstand severe criticisms in the last two decades or so (dörnyei & ryan, 2015). first, richard labontee reports a validation study of a data collection instrument intended to tap into the use of vocabulary strategies in the process of learning swedish as an additional language. the data collected from 182 adult participants served as a basis for the development of a taxonomy in which the strategies for learning vocabulary were divided into the following six categories: memorization strategies, depth enhancing strategies 260 (use), association-based strategies, depth enhancing strategies (sources), selfregulation and reflection strategies, and lexical information strategies. second, hezi y. brosh employed questionnaires and interviews to elicit preferences concerning the use of language learning strategies from 120 students of arabic, all of whom were speakers of english. it was found, among other things, that while the advanced participants primarily opted for interaction with teachers, speaking, using flash cards or working individually, the beginners were more in favor of grammar and working in small groups. in the next paper, kim mcdonough and masatoshi sato set out to examine how the performance of information exchange activities focusing on relative clauses impacted the accuracy and fluency with which 37 learners of english in chile produced the targeted structure. the analysis of pretest and posttest scores on oral interactive tasks revealed that while the practice in which the students had engaged led to gains in accuracy, as reflected in the smaller numbers of errors committed, the fluency, measured in terms of the number of pauses, false starts and self-corrections remained unaffected. in the last empirical study, jan vanhove investigated the extent to which the presence of metalinguistic knowledge about substandard l1 gender assignment affects its use as a source of transfer. the analysis of the data obtained from 45 speakers of belgian dutch who were assigned to three conditions differing in the amount of metalinguistic knowledge available demonstrated that the influence of the standard variety trumped the impact of the experimental manipulation. finally, joanna rokita-jaśkow and mirosław pawlak provide reviews of volumes dedicated to teaching global english at primary level and the development of pronunciation in english-medium instruction courses, respectively. i am certain that the studies reported in the six papers as well as the two book reviews will provide food for thought for the readers and inspire them to follow up on these or similar lines of inquiry. this is because the development of teacher professional identity, the identification of factors which motivate learners to engage in the study of languages other than english, the use of learning strategies, the implementation of interactive activities, the impact of metalinguistic information, teaching english to primary school students and pronunciation instruction are all areas that are relevant to our understanding of how languages are taught and learned. mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl 261 references dörnyei, z. (2009). the l2 motivational self system. in z. dörnyei, & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 9-42). bristol: multilingual matters. dörnyei, z., & ryan, s. (2015). the psychology of the language learner revisited. new york: routledge. hermans, h. j. m. (2008). how to perform research on the basis of dialogical self theory? introduction to the special issue. journal of constructivist psychology, 21(3), 185-199. hiver, p., & al-hoorie, a. h. (2016). a “dynamic ensemble” for second language research: putting complexity theory into practice. modern language journal, 100, 741-756. 721 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 12 (4). 2022. 721-743 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2022.12.4.9 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the role of cognitive individual differences in digital versus pen-and-paper writing olena vasylets university of barcelona, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0241-1279 vasylets@ub.edu m. dolores mellado university of murcia, spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9089-0152 mariadolores.mellado@um.es luke plonsky northern arizona university, flagstaff, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5791-1839 lukeplonsky@gmail.com abstract it is unknown whether and to what extent cognitive individual differences may play different roles in paper versus computer-based second language (l2) writing. this exploratory study is a first attempt to explore this issue, focusing on the effects of working memory and language aptitude on the quality of paper versus computer-based l2 writing performance. forty-two spanish learners of l2 english performed a problem-solving task either digitally or on paper, took a working memory n-back test, and completed llama tests to measure language aptitude. the quality of their l2 written texts was assessed in terms of complexity, accuracy and fluency (caf) measures. the results indicated that the role of cognitive individual differences may vary depending on the writing environment. keywords: writing environment; pen-and-paper writing; digital writing; working memory; language aptitude olena vasylets, m. dolores mellado, luke plonsky 722 1. introduction because of its complexity, writing ability develops at a varied pace and is characterized by high variability in ultimate attainment, even in the first language (l1) (bereiter & scardamalia, 1987). second language (l2) writing can be even more complicated due to additional challenges, such as gaps in l2 knowledge or lack of automatization of l2 spelling rules (weigle, 2005). variability in l2 writing can also be attributed to individual differences, both cognitive and affective, that learners bring into the writing task (kormos, 2012, 2023; papi et al., 2022). the mixed nature of empirical evidence, however, precludes a nuanced understanding of the role of cognitive resources in l2 writing. the diversity of the research findings could be attributed, inter alia, to learner internal and external factors which can moderate the relationship between cognitive individual differences and l2 writing. importantly, writing represents a highly embodied activity, in the sense that it is contingent on the interactions between the writer’s mind, body and external environment (mangen & balsvik, 2016). the writing environment (i.e., handwriting on paper versus typing using the computer), thus, represents a learner-external factor which is central to writing activity. the effects of environment in writing can be justified from multiple theoretical perspectives, (e.g., hayes, 2012; kress, 2003; mangen & velay, 2010), and findings from neuroscience (askvik et al., 2020; ihara et al., 2021) and writing research (chan et al., 2017) have shown that the nature of learning and performance can differ depending on whether paper or computer is involved. surprisingly, however, except for the research on testing (barkaoui & knouzi, 2018), the performance environment has been practically ignored in second language acquisition (sla) research. recently, however, writing environment has been defined as a task complexity factor (vasylets & marín, 2022), which gives further theoretical justification for the hypothesis of a differential involvement of individual differences in paper versus digital writing (robinson, 2011). however, the empirical evidence to substantiate these claims is still lacking. the neglect of the role of environment in empirical research is exemplified by the fact that recent meta-analyses have not assessed whether and to what extent environment might moderate the relationship between language aptitude and l2 proficiency (li, 2016) or between working memory and l2 reading (jeon & yamashita, 2014; peng et al., 2018; shin, 2020). a rare exception is found in in’nami et al.’s (2022) study, which observed stronger correlations between working memory and paper-based reading tasks as compared to computer-based tasks. this finding provides a tentative indication that the relationship between cognitive abilities and l2 processing and outcomes might be moderated by the environment of task performance. to gain a deeper understanding of this issue, this study explores the role of cognitive individual differences in digital versus pen-and-paper writing 723 whether the writing environment might moderate the effects of working memory and language aptitude on l2 writing performance. 2. literature review 2.1. pen-and-paper versus computer-based writing pen-and-paper and computer-based writing present important differences in the way writers use their own body and interact with the external environment during text production (clark, 2001; clark & chalmers, 1998). the most notable difference between the two writing environments lies in the transcription processes. thus, in pen-and-paper writing some sort of stylus is employed to handcraft written signs on paper. on the other hand, in computer writing a keyboard is used to select ready-made written signs which appear on the screen. reading behaviors also differ as the fixed layout and tangible nature of paper is believed to benefit stable and efficient visual representation of the written text (hou et al., 2017). as such, pen-and-paper writing represents a rich kinesthetic and haptic experience which is also laborious and slow (mangen, 2016). on the other hand, computer-writing is faster and less laborious. however, the use of keyboard and screen is also believed to convert digital writing into a detached and mediated experience, which is more phenomenologically monotonous and impersonalized than pen-and-paper writing (kiefer et al., 2015). from a purely conceptual standpoint, the role of the environment in writing is acknowledged in multiple theoretical perspectives. thus, transcription processes form part of all relevant cognitive models of writing (flower & hayes, 1980; kellogg, 1996). importantly, in the recent update of his writing model, hayes (2012) incorporated the element of transcribing technology, although without providing any testable predictions concerning its role in writing performance and learning. in a similar vein, a major theoretician in semiotics, kress (2003, p. 3), points out important changes that digital technology produces in writing: the combined effects on writing of the dominance of the mode of image and of the medium of screen will produce deep changes in the forms and functions of writing. this in turn will have profound effects on human, cognitive/affective, cultural and bodily engagement with the world, and on forms and shapes of knowledge. theoretical justification for the role of environment can also be found in the tenets of embodied cognition (clark, 2001; clark & chalmers, 1998; wilson & golonka, 2013). conceptions of embodiment take many forms (barsalou, 2008), but the main underlying idea is that cognition represents a combination olena vasylets, m. dolores mellado, luke plonsky 724 of multiple resources, which include mind, body and their relations to the external world. a major proponent of embodiment in sla is atkinson (2011), who introduced the socio-cognitive perspective as an alternative approach to explain l2 learning. the core claim of this approach is that “mind, body, and world function integratively in second language acquisition” (atkinson, 2011, p. 143). although atkinson (2011) admits that the sociocognitive view is “new and undeveloped” (p. 162), he also stresses that this standpoint is open to the full range of possibilities and applications, including l2 writing (nishino & atkinson, 2015). one of the most recent applications of embodied cognition views to l2 writing is found in vasylets and marín (2022) who proposed that writing environment can be conceptualized as a task complexity factor, given that paper-based and computer writing can pose different cognitive demands on l2 learners. following this line of thinking and drawing on robinson’s (2011) prediction that “individual differences in affective and cognitive abilities . . . will increasingly differentiate learning and performance as tasks increase in complexity” (p. 19), we could thus hypothesize that individual differences may play out differently in paper-based versus computer writing. in terms of the empirical evidence, numerous studies in neuroscience, experimental psychology, and writing have found differences in learning and performance in the two writing environments. thus, various studies have found the advantage of pen-and-paper writing over computer writing in improving spelling (cunningham & stanovich, 1990) as well as letter and word learning (ihara et al., 2021; longcamp et al., 2006). in addition, a recent study by askvik et al. (2020) showed that, as compared to typing, handwriting was associated with increased activation in the brain areas important for memory and learning. rich haptic-kinesthetic experience, which is believed to facilitate encoding of new information, is the common explanatory factor of the learning advantage of pen-and-paper writing. there is also empirical evidence (albeit mixed) to show that writing processes (chan et al., 2017) and performance quality (cheung, 2012) may differ in the two writing environments. for example, chan et al. (2017) reported that the participants felt more comfortable when planning and revising using the computer; at the same time, writers were more careful during linguistic formulation in paper writing, which was attributed to the difficulty to make changes in handwritten texts. similarly, participants in zhi and huang (2021) reported that they perceived their writing processes to be more authentic in computer writing, while the inconvenience of revision in paper writing induced them to modify their natural writing behaviors. in sum, there is empirical evidence from various fields that shows that learning affordances, writing processes and performance may differ between pen-and-paper and computer writing. this provides the basis for the empirical justification of the hypothesis that writers may employ their cognitive resources differently depending on the writing environment. the role of cognitive individual differences in digital versus pen-and-paper writing 725 2.2. language aptitude in l2 writing foreign language aptitude, which is generally defined as a specific talent for learning a foreign or second language (carroll, 1981; skehan, 2002), is recognized as one of the central cognitive abilities in language learning in general (wen et al., 2017) and in l2 writing in particular (ahmaddian & vasylets, 2022). since its inception, the construct of language aptitude has been recognized as multicomponential (dörnyei, 2005). thus, the classical framework by carroll (1981) identifies four components of language aptitude: (1) phonetic coding ability, which consists in the ability to learn sound-symbol associations; (2) grammatical sensitivity, which refers to the ability to identify grammatical functions of words; (3) rote learning ability, which is an ability to learn sound-meaning associations; and (4) deductive learning ability, which refers to the ability to induce language rules from input. recent theoretical work has proposed that the role of language aptitude in sla may be rather intricate and task/instruction-specific (robinson, 2005; skehan, 2002). similarly, dörnyei (2010) defined aptitude as a complex system which dynamically interacts with the learning environment and can, thus, be affected by learner internal and external factors (see also grañena, 2013; kormos, 2013). in this line of thinking, kormos (2012) hypothesized the specific effects that aptitude components may have on l2 writing. thus, phonetic coding ability is expected to contribute to more accurate spelling; higher levels of grammatical sensitivity and deductive ability are expected to benefit linguistic encoding; rote ability can benefit lexical complexity of l2 writing. also, learners with high rote ability, who can potentially have a richer vocabulary, could be expected to produce more lexically complex written texts. finally, good deductive skills are predicted to help learners handle the grammatical encoding of the conceptual plan more efficiently. although the role of aptitude in l2 writing has a solid theoretical justification, empirical findings are scarce and inconclusive. thus, while aptitude appeared as a strong predictor of general l2 proficiency in li`s (2016) meta-analysis (r = .49, 95%; ci = .45-.54), findings for writing were not statistically significant, except for two aptitude components related to number learning and spelling clues. li (2016) explains these unexpected results by the fact that writing might require a different set of skills from those measured in traditional aptitude tests. however, it must be mentioned that in his analysis li did not consider the potential mediating role of the writing environment in the aptitude effects. by looking at the individual empirical studies, we can observe that writing environment has never been considered as an important variable, to the extent that some studies do not even explicitly indicate it. for example, the oft-cited study by kormos and trebits (2012) found that learners with high grammatical sensitivity produced longer clauses in the task which was more demanding in terms olena vasylets, m. dolores mellado, luke plonsky 726 of linguistic encoding; however, no relationship between quality of written production and aptitude was found in the task which posed high demands on content conceptualization. another recent study by yang et al. (2019) showed that l2 writing quality, as assessed by a holistic score, was predicted by vocabulary learning and grammar inferencing abilities, which are believed to tap into aptitude for explicit language learning (grañena, 2013). importantly, neither of the above-mentioned studies has specified the environment of writing task performance. absence of this information limits generalizability of the research findings and precludes a more fine-grained understanding of the effects of aptitude on l2 writing. 2.3. working memory in l2 writing working memory (wm) represents another cognitive trait posited to be important both in l1 (hayes, 2012; kellogg, 1996) and l2 writing (ahmaddian & vasylets, 2022; kormos, 2012; papi et al., 2022). wm represents a limited cognitive system responsible for the maintenance in active attention of the task relevant information and inhibition of irrelevant information (baddeley, 2003). cognitive models of writing by kellogg (1996) and hayes (1996, 2012) posit that wm plays a central role in writing. importantly, while hayes (1996) considers that all writing processes rely on wm resources, kellogg contemplates the involvement of wm only in high-level processes of planning, linguistic encoding and monitoring. taking a perspective of automaticity theories (schneider & shiffrin, 1977), it could be argued, however, that execution processes (typing and handwriting) could also draw on wm resources if they are not sufficiently automatized (see also, chenoweth & hayes, 2001). thus, as pointed out by kormos (2012), typing and handwriting would also draw on wm resources unless they are fully automatized. considering that the same writer may have different levels of automatization of typing versus handwriting skills, we could also hypothesize that wm resources could be differentially involved, depending on the environment of writing performance. this assumption, however, still needs empirical verification. the available evidence in l1 writing has largely shown positive correlations between wm and l1 writing quality of writers across different ages (hoskyn & swanson, 2003; vanderberg & swanson, 2007). this supporting evidence, however, comes largely from writing on paper, so it is not clear if the writing environment moderates the relationship in wm and l1 writing. because of potential gaps in l2 linguistic knowledge and/or lack of automatization of orthographic rules, l2 writers might face even greater challenges (weigle, 2005). for example, less proficient l2 writers might require wm resources for encoding procedures as well as for text monitoring/reviewing. importantly, transcribing processes (i.e., handwriting and typing) might demand the role of cognitive individual differences in digital versus pen-and-paper writing 727 attention if the spelling rules have not yet been automatized or if the orthography of a writer’s l1 is substantially different from that of the l2 (kormos, 2012). taking into account that l2 transcribing can be resource-demanding, we could hypothesize that the involvement of wm in l2 writing can vary depending on the environment of performance. the available empirical evidence, however, does not allow for verification of this hypothesis. thus, the meta-analysis by linck et al. (2014) reported a positive correlation between wm and l2 writing outcomes, with the estimated population effect size (p) of .255. this meta-analysis, however, did not consider writing environment as a potential moderating factor. examination of the individual studies also reveals that, similar to the research on language aptitude, studies on wm in l2 writing have never considered writing environment as a relevant factor, with some investigations even failing to report it (see table 1). table 1 studies exploring the relationship between working memory and l2 writing quality study l2 participants, mean age writing environment relationship between wm and writing quality adams & guillot (2008) french/english 12 paper partially positive mavrou (2020) spanish 20 paper partially positive cho (2018) english 20 computer null michel et al. (2019) english 12 computer null vasylets & marín (2021) english 19 computer partially positive kormos & sáfár (2008) english 15-16 not indicated partially positive lu (2015) english 20 not indicated null zabihi (2018) english 21 not indicated mixed another conclusion which can be drawn is the mixed nature of previous results. this attests to the complex nature of the relationship between wm and l2 writing performance, giving evidence to williams’s (2015) contention that “the relationship between wm capacity and l2 processing and learning is far more complex and nuanced than originally envisaged” (p. 301; see also baddeley, 2015). the potential effects of wm can be complexified by the moderating influence of learner internal and external factors. a recent study by vasylets and marín (2021), for example, showed that the effects of wm on l2 writing was moderated by the level of l2 proficiency, such that at low levels of proficiency wm had a positive association with writing accuracy, while at high levels of proficiency there was a positive link with lexical sophistication. by the same token, we could suggest that the writing environment could influence the way learners draw on wm resources during l2 writing performance (see also in’nami et al., 2022 for the findings in reading). exploration of this issue would help gain a more nuanced understanding of the intricacy in the links between wm and l2 writing. olena vasylets, m. dolores mellado, luke plonsky 728 taking into account the identified research gaps, the following research questions guided the present study: 1. does language aptitude play the same role in l2 writing performance depending on the environment (paper vs. digital) in which a task is performed? (rq1) 2. does working memory play the same role in l2 writing performance depending on the environment (paper vs. digital) in which a task is performed? (rq2) given the differences in the nature of the two writing environments and findings from previous research (e.g., in’nami et al., 2022), we hypothesized that working memory and language aptitude would be differentially involved in l2 writing performance in paper-based versus computer-based writing. we wish to emphasize, however, that this hypothesis is non-directional, that is, we make no predictions regarding a stronger relationship in either writing environment. 3. method 3.1. participants a total of 42 native spanish efl learners (age: m = 21.52; sd = 1.27) participated in the present study. the participants were fourth-year applied linguistics undergraduate students at a spanish university. for the purposes of the study, the participants were randomly divided into the digital group (dg) (4 males, 20 females) and the pen-and-paper group (p&p) (4 males, 14 females). in order to ensure comparable proficiency between the two groups, participants completed the oxford placement test. for logistical reasons, the p&p group took the classical version of the oxford placement test (allen, 1992) with a max score of 100, and the dg took the quick oxford placement test (ucles, 2001) with a max score of 60. in order to check whether the two groups were comparable in terms of proficiency, we multiplied the p&p group’s scores by .6. the scores of the two groups were then compared using descriptive statistics as well as an independent samples t-test. as shown in table 2, the mean scores of the two groups were very similar, the difference between them was not statistically significant and produced a very small effect size (d = 0.16). table 2 comparison of groups on opt group m (sd) difference between groups t (p value) cohen’s d (95% ci) paper and pencil 47.90 (4.51) 0.53 (.60) 0.16 (-0.45, 0.78) digital 46.96 (6.48) the role of cognitive individual differences in digital versus pen-and-paper writing 729 3.2. instruments 3.2.1. measure of working memory capacity working memory capacity was assessed by means of an n-back test (kane et al., 2007). in this test the participants were required to press the m key on the computer keyboard if the stimulus (letter) shown on the screen coincided with the stimulus shown three trials ago (3-back task); if the stimulus did not coincide, the participants had to press the n key. after pressing the key, the participants were presented with the feedback on their performance. the total stimulus set consisted of 15 letters which were presented for 500 milliseconds. every new stimulus was presented every 3000 milliseconds and the participants had 3 seconds to respond. there were three blocks, each of 25 trials. the test was administered online by means of an experiment created in https://www.psytoolkit.org/. the participants took between 5 to 10 minutes to complete the test. 3.2.2. measures of language aptitude to assess language aptitude, we employed the llama tests (meara, 2005). the llama suite consists of several tests tapping into different sub-dimensions of aptitude: (1) llama_b asks the participants to memorize the associations between shapes and sound combinations; this test is believed to measure learners’ ability to learn new words; (2) llama_d is phonetic recognition test which measures how effectively the participant can recognize short segments of oral language to which they have been exposed previously; (3) llama_e measures the ability to learn new sound-symbol associations; the test consists of a set of 22 recorded syllables which the participants have to match to a transliteration of the syllable sounds in an unfamiliar language; (4) llama_f measures the ability to infer the rules of an unknown language (i.e., explicit inductive learning ability); based on a set of pictures and sentences describing these pictures, testtakers have to work out the grammatical rules that operate in the language. the llama tests have been shown to have acceptable internal consistency and stability (grañena, 2013) and they have been widely used in previous empirical studies (artieda & muñoz, 2016; yang et al., 2019). 3.3. writing task the participants were invited to produce a written text in response to the complex version of the “fire-chief” task (gilabert, 2005). this task consists of a problem-solving picture-based writing activity in which participants are presented olena vasylets, m. dolores mellado, luke plonsky 730 with an image of a burning building from which numerous people need to be rescued. the task requires the participants to explain and justify the actions they would take in order to save as many people as possible from the burning building. 3.4. procedure there were two 50-minute sessions of data collection for both p&p and dg. during the first session, the participants in the p&p group completed the writing task in the computer lab. each participant was provided with a task prompt and instructions and with a blank writing sheet on which to write their text. the participants were asked to read the instructions carefully and to familiarize with the picture in order to get an overall idea of the situation in the task before starting to write their compositions. the participants were given 50 minutes to perform the task, but there was no specific word limit. the learners finished the writing task within a range of 12-47 minutes (m = 26.73; sd = 9.91). during the second session, the p&p group completed the llama tests and the working memory test on the computers at the university lab. the participants in the dg performed all tasks at home using their personal computers. during the first session, the digital group performed the writing task. the participants received the prompt and instructions by email and they were required to email the completed task to the researcher within the time limit of 50 minutes. the participants were asked not to use dictionaries and any other external sources during task completion. during the second session, the dg received by email the instructions for the llama tests and the link to the working memory test, and they performed the tests on their personal computers. 3.5. analysis of l2 written production caf measures were employed as quantitative indicators of l2 writing performance. to assess accuracy, we calculated the ratio of errors per 100 words (all errors/words x 100). we took into account errors in grammar and vocabulary; spelling and punctuation errors were not counted. total time (in seconds) and words per minute (total words/total time) were employed as the measures of fluency (wolfe-quintero et al., 1998). for lexical complexity, we employed synlex software (lu, 2010) to obtain automated measures of lexical density, sophistication and diversity (uber index). we also employed synlex to obtain automated measures of syntactic complexity, including mean length of t-unit as a general measure of complexity, coordinate phrases per clause as a measure of coordination, dependent clauses per clause to assess subordination; for nominal complexity, mean length of clause and the ratio of complex nominals per clause were calculated. the role of cognitive individual differences in digital versus pen-and-paper writing 731 3.6. statistical analyses prior to running the main analyses for the present study, descriptive statistics (means and standard deviations) were calculated for all independent and dependent variables. in order to address the two research questions guiding this study, a series of correlations were carried out at the group level between (a) the different measures of working memory (n-back) and aptitude and (b) each of the measures of writing quality for each group. these correlations themselves were not the focus of the study, however. rather, these correlations were then compared to understand whether and to what extent they might differ across the two writing conditions. toward that end, a statistical test was conducted to assess whether the difference between the observed correlations for each group was statistically significant. the jasp (jeffrey’s amazing statistics program) statistical software package (jasp team, 2021) was used for all correlational analyses, and the online tool based on the cocor package in r (http://comparingcorrelations.org/) was used to compare the observed correlation coefficients (diedenhofen & musch, 2015). this procedure is rarely employed in applied linguistics but it possesses, we feel, substantial potential to help the field better understand certain types of relationships. finally, we would like to express a note of caution in interpreting these correlations and the differences between them. the present study is based on a relatively small sample which may, along with error in our measurements, introduce a degree of noise that may also obscure our ability to detect the relationships and differences of interest. 4. results before addressing the research questions directly, we present in tables 3 and 4 the descriptive statistics for all of the dependent and independent measures, respectively, at the group level. table 3 presents the descriptives for the 11 dependent measures across four variables: accuracy, fluency, lexical diversity, and complexity. overall, the two groups are fairly similar. however, there are some differences that are perhaps worth noting. for example, the fluency of the p&p group was higher as they wrote about five more words per minute on average; also, p&p group produced almost twice as many errors as the dg. the dg, by contrast, showed signs of greater complexity in that their writing included a much greater number of dependent clauses per clause than the p&p group; on the other hand, coordination tended to be higher in the p&p group. olena vasylets, m. dolores mellado, luke plonsky 732 table 3 descriptive statistics for dependent variables variable pen and paper (n = 18) digital (n = 24) m (sd) m (sd) accuracy ratio of errors x 100 10.58 (3.77) 5.82 (2.75) fluency time (in seconds) 1633.33 (465.01) 1582.50 (685.43) words per minute 18.40 (3.35) 13.07 (5.72) lexical complexity lexical density 0.45 (0.04) 0.44 (0.03) lexical sophistication 0.17 (0.04) 0.17 (0.04) uber 15.94 (1.09) 15.79 (1.95) syntactic complexity mean length of t-unit 0.05 (0.01) 0.04 (0.01) mean length of clause 0.09 (0.02) 0.09 (0.02) coordinate phrases per clause 0.44 (0.10) 0.25 (0.90) dependent clauses per clause 0.24 (0.10) 0.50 (0.09) complex nominals per clause 1.16 (0.33) 1.01 (0.17) there were also some marked differences between the groups on the measures of working memory and aptitude (see table 4). although the p&p group’s scores were much higher on the llama d and llama f, the dg greatly outperformed their counterparts on the llama e and somewhat outperformed them on the n-back task. table 4 descriptive statistics for independent variables variable pen and paper (n = 18) digital (n = 24) m (sd) m (sd) working memory n-back 7.50 (4.45) 9.21 (5.93) aptitude llama b 79.83 (7.51) 70.65 (23.31) llama d 57.78 (25.33) 33.48 (15.77) llama e 34.17 (20.88) 81.74 (43.26) llama f 81.11 (22.40) 42.26 (28.75) the correlations between our aptitude and caf measures for the p&p and dg groups are presented in tables 5 and 6, respectively. we will now explore and compare those correlations in order to address rq1. the role of cognitive individual differences in digital versus pen-and-paper writing 733 table 5 correlations between language aptitude scores and caf measures in pen-and-paper writing condition variable llama b llama d llama e llama f accuracy ratio of errors x 100 -.09 -.16 -.39 -.56* fluency time (in seconds) -.03 -.37 -.36 .23 words per minute -.14 -.01 .24 .26 lexical complexity lexical density .11 -.18 -.002 -.24 lexical sophistication .10 .05 .15 .29 uber -.07 .59 .16 -.04 syntactic complexity mean length of t-unit .17 .18 -.01 .17 mean length of clause .20 .22 -.06 -.04 coordinate phrases per clause -.23 -.11 -.05 -.18 dependent clauses per clause .03 -.01 .08 .41* complex nominals per clause .03 -.01 .08 .41 table 6 correlations between language aptitude scores and caf measures in digital writing condition variable llama b llama d llama e llama f accuracy ratio of errors x 100 -.17 .03 -.40 .12* fluency time (in seconds) .26 -.12 -.18 .08 words per minute -.19 -.12 .43 -.03 lexical complexity lexical density .16 -.20 .44 -.17 lexical sophistication -.48 .21 -.45 .16 uber .29 .11 .22 -.01 syntactic complexity mean length of t-unit .37 -.14 -.07 .54 mean length of clause .19 -.12 -.16 .27 coordinate phrases per clause -.09 .23 -.04 -.19 dependent clauses per clause -.45 -.21 .05 -.28* complex nominal per clause -.17 -.04 .18 .01 note. n = 18 for p&p, 24 for dg; * = differences between correlations significant at .05 level the magnitude of the relationships we observed for the number of errors (measure of accuracy) was small to moderate across measures and across the two groups (see plonsky & oswald, 2014, for a set of benchmarks for interpreting correlations in l2 research). as shown in table 5, the correlations for the llama b and d were almost negligible. the other measures were more moderately correlated with the number of errors. of note, whereas the p&p group’s llama f score was substantially and negatively correlated with the number of olena vasylets, m. dolores mellado, luke plonsky 734 errors (r = -.56), the correlation for the dg was small and positive (r = .12). the difference in this pair of correlations represents one of the few in our results that was found to be statistically significant. we employed two measures of fluency: time (in seconds) and words per minute (wpm). in contrast to the results obtained for accuracy, the findings for fluency show greater consistency across the two conditions. in other words, very few pairs of correlations exhibited differences in magnitude or direction, none of which were statistically significant. three measures of lexical complexity (i.e., lexical density, sophistication and variety) were employed in the present study. the correlations between these variables and the various measures of aptitude ranged from moderate and negative (e.g., r = -.48 for lexical diversity x llama b for the dg) to similarly moderate and positive (e.g., r = .44 for lexical density x llama e for the dg). several correlations exhibited differences between the two groups in terms of size and/or magnitude (e.g., .59 [p&p] vs. .11 [dg] for uber x llama d). none of these differences were found to be statistically significant. however, they are no less noteworthy given the span of correlations seen here between the groups. five different measures of syntactic complexity were assessed in the present study, each of which was correlated with the four aptitude measures. the majority of the two groups’ correlations were fairly similar. however, as with the other measures of l2 writing we have seen thus far, there were a few noteworthy differences in correlation size and/or direction. the correlation between the llama f and the number of complex nominals per clause (cnom/c) was much stronger for the p&p group than the dg (r = .41 vs. .01). and in the case of the correlation between the llama f and the number of dependent clauses per clause (depc/c), the correlation was not only weaker for dg but also negative (r = -.28), compared to a stronger and positive correlation for the p&p group (r = .41), a difference that was found to be statistically significant. 5. discussion the aim of this study was to explore whether and to what extent language aptitude and working memory were similarly or differently involved in paper-based versus digital writing. based on previous theorizing (e.g., mangen & velay, 2010) as well empirical findings (in’nami et al., 2022), we tentatively hypothesized that the role of cognitive individual differences in l2 written performance would vary depending on the environment of production. to test this hypothesis, we conducted a study in which a group of spanish efl university learners of advanced l2 proficiency took a working memory test (n-back), a language aptitude test (llama tests), and performed a problem-solving task either digitally or on paper. the role of cognitive individual differences in digital versus pen-and-paper writing 735 in the first place, the comparison of the caf measures showed some differences in the quality of paper and digital texts. thus, we found that accuracy was higher in the dg, as the p&p group produced twice as many errors. this finding for accuracy can be explained by the fact the learners in the dg could benefit from the spell-checkers. notably, learners spent roughly the same time on the text production in both conditions. however, speed fluency appeared to be higher in the p&p group who wrote about five more words per minute on average. at the first sight, this finding may seem counterintuitive, as computer writing is inherently faster. to explain this finding, we can tentatively suggest that learners in the dg revised and edited their text to a higher extent, which eventually resulted in slower speed fluency as measured by the number of words per minute. this finding resonates with some recent studies (e.g., chan et al., 2017) which reported that the facility of revision in digital writing induced more intensive revision processes as compared to paper writing. although lexical complexity was largely similar in the two modalities, there were some differences in terms of syntactic complexity, with higher indices of coordination observed in paper writing, but higher subordination in digital writing. in sum, these results align with previous research which reported that the nature of writing processes as well as writing quality may vary depending on writing environment (cheung, 2012; zhi & huang, 2021). as for the main research questions, the experimental results partially confirmed our initial hypothesis of a differential involvement of cognitive individual differences in paper versus digital writing. thus, concerning language aptitude, the two groups were overall very similar in terms of the correlations between caf measures and llama b, d and e. in fact, the correlations for llama d (phonetic recognition) and llama b (vocabulary learning) were almost negligible, while the correlations for llama e (sound-symbol learning) ranged from small to moderate, but without reaching statistical significance. notable differences, however, were observed between the two groups in the size and nature of the correlations between caf measures and llama f, which measures grammar inferencing ability. for example, whereas for the p&p group the correlation between llama f score and the number of errors was substantial and negative (r = -.56), the correlation for the dg was small and positive. differences were also observed in the area of syntactic complexity. for example, the correlation between the llama f and nominal complexity (the number of complex nominals per clause) was much stronger for the p&p group than the dg. also, for the dg, the correlation between llama f and subordination (the number of dependent clauses per clause) was weak and negative (r = -.28), whereas there was a stronger and positive correlation for the p&p group (r = .41), a difference that was found to be statistically significant. our findings for llama f and p&p modality olena vasylets, m. dolores mellado, luke plonsky 736 resonate with the results of previous studies (e.g., kormos & trebits, 2012; yang et al., 2019) which also reported a positive relationship between grammar inferencing ability and quality of l2 writing performance. the notable finding in this study, however, is that the role of grammar inferencing ability may vary depending on the environment (paper versus digital) in which a task is performed. a similar tendency was also observed for working memory. thus, one notable finding was that the correlation between working memory and the number of errors was positive and moderate for p&p (r = .26) (for similar findings, see zabihi, 2018) but negative and moderate for the dg (r = -.31) (see vasylets & marín, 2021). differences in the nature of the correlations in the two writing environments were also observed between working memory scores and some measures of fluency (words per minute) and lexical complexity (density, diversity); notably, the direction of the correlations differed for all measures of syntactic complexity, except for the measure of general syntactic complexity (mean length of t-unit). however, in both writing conditions, the size and magnitude of the correlations were similar, which we consider noteworthy given the different direction of these correlations seen between the groups. given that some correlations for working memory were negative, our findings partially contradict the results of linck et al.’s (2014) metaanalysis which reported an overall positive correlation between working memory and l2 writing outcomes. this meta-analysis, however, does not consider writing environment as a potentially moderating factor, which can explain the discrepancies between our and linck et al.’s (2014) results. the complex pattern of findings for working memory obtained in this study, aligns, however, with the ideas of williams (2015) and baddeley (2015), who emphasized nuanced involvement of working memory in sla performance/production and called for more research striving for a fine-grained understanding of the role of this cognitive resource in sla. 6. conclusion in sum, the findings of this study provide an indication (albeit tentative) that the role of cognitive individual differences in l2 writing may vary depending on the environment (i.e., paper vs. digital) in which a task is performed. inherent differences in the haptic-kinesthetic experiences (richer experiences on paper versus less embodied and detached in digital writing), visual text presentation (stable and tangible on paper versus shifting and dynamic on the screen), as well as the way writing processes are implemented (easy revision/editing on the computer versus complicated revision/editing on paper) can account, inter alia, for the fact that cognitive resources can be differentially involved in paper versus digital writing. more controlled experiments are needed to clarify the mechanisms which account for the variability in the effects of cognitive resources in different environments of l2 writing. the role of cognitive individual differences in digital versus pen-and-paper writing 737 despite these potential contributions this study makes to our understanding of the role of modality in explaining relationships between individual differences and l2 writing performance, we feel the need to highlight a small number of limitations. in the first place, it should be taken into account that the participants in the pen-and-paper and digital groups obtained different scores on working memory and aptitude tests; additionally, the two groups performed the tasks under different conditions (at home vs. computer lab), which could have had a potential influence on the test/task results. another important consideration is that we do not have precise estimates of reliability for our independent or dependent measures. furthermore, any lack of reliability, whether stemming from internal consistency or other sources of non-construct relevant variance, can attenuate our ability to estimate our relationships of interest (see mckay & plonsky, 2021). such error may also have contributed to instability in our estimates and a lack of clear differences across writing environments. future research in this area might consider addressing (i.e., estimating and accounting for) these and other psychometric properties of the measures being employed. another general concern in the present study relates to our measures of aptitude. although previous studies have sought to validate the llama battery, further efforts in this area are needed. in particular, the data we collected for the present study did not support the aggregation of the llama subsets into a single aptitude score, thus calling into question the construct validity of the test as a whole (but not necessarily the subtests). finally, to our knowledge, this is the first study in applied linguistics to have employed a test for comparing the strength of correlation coefficients (diedenhofen & musch, 2015). this procedure may seem unfamiliar but it is not unlike the practice of comparing standardized beta coefficients to understand the relative contributions of different predictors in a multiple regression model (see mizumoto, in press). we encourage others to consider this technique in cases such as the present when a particular correlation is hypothesized to differ (i.e., be moderated by one or more variables). in spite of the exploratory nature of the study and the tentative nature of our results, we consider that the 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(2021). investigating the authenticity of computer-and paper-based esl writing tests. assessing writing, 50(1), 100548. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2021.100548 65 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (1). 2015. 65-85 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.1.4 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl an investigation of chinese university efl learner’s foreign language reading anxiety, reading strategy use and reading comprehension performance zhongshe lu tsinghua university, beijing, china lvzhs@tsinghua.edu.cn meihua liu tsinghua university, beijing, china ellenlmh@yahoo.com abstract the present study explored the interrelations between foreign language (fl) reading anxiety, fl reading strategy use and their interactive effect on fl reading comprehension performance at the tertiary level in china. analyses of the survey data collected from 1702 university students yielded the following results: (a) both foreign language reading anxiety scale (flras) and foreign language reading strategy use scale (flrsus) had important subcomponents, (b) more than half of the students generally did not feel anxious when reading english, and were confident in and satisfied with their english reading proficiency. meanwhile, (c) more than half of them moderately used different types of reading strategies such as planning, checking and confirming, predicting and assessing, when reading english, (d) compared with their female peers, male students felt significantly more anxious when facing reading activities, less satisfied with their english reading proficiency, and used specific analyzing and planning strategies significantly less often during a reading activity, (e) flras was significantly inversely related to flrsus, and both were significantly correlated with the students’ fl reading comprehension performance, and (f) flras (overall fl reading anxiety), flras1 (general anxiety about fl reading), and flrsus2 (predicting strategies) were good predictors zhongshe lu, meihua liu 66 of fl reading comprehension performance. based on the findings, some implications are discussed. keywords: fl reading anxiety, fl reading strategy use, fl reading comprehension performance 1. introduction both language anxiety and strategy use have been revealed to be of paramount importance in the learning of a second/foreign language (sl/fl) and interact with various other factors during the process (aida, 1994; ewald, 2007; jackson, 2002; liu & jackson, 2008; magogwe & oliver, 2007; onwuegbuzie, bailey, & daley, 1999; oxford & nyikos, 1989). meanwhile, it has been generally endorsed that both anxiety and learning strategies can be very specific and vary according to a specific language task such as listening, reading, speaking and writing (kinoshita & bowman, 1998; nakatani, 2006; oxford, 1990; sellers, 2000; vogely, 1998). accordingly, when facing a concrete language task, the associated anxiety language learners experience and the strategies they use may be different and interact with each other, mediating their performance on the task. nevertheless, the number of studies on the interaction of such issues in regard to specific language tasks is far from enough (nakatani, 2010). as reading is the most common fl/sl learning activity and a critical means of acquiring a fl/sl (saito, horwitz, & garza, 1999), the present study aimed to investigate the interrelation between fl reading anxiety and fl reading strategy use and their effect on fl reading comprehension performance at the tertiary level in china. 2. literature review language anxiety is a type of anxiety specifically associated with sl/fl learning contexts (young, 1991). it is ‘‘the feeling of tension and apprehension specifically associated with second language (l2) contexts, including speaking, listening, and learning’’ (macintyre & gardner, 1994, p. 284). often measured by the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas) developed by horwitz, horwitz, and cope (1986), language anxiety has been consistently found to be negatively related to language learning performance, especially oral performance (abu-rabia, 2004; ewald, 2007; clement, 1987; dewaele, petrides, & furnham, 2008; dewaele & thirtle, 2009; dewaele & tsui, 2013; gardner, 1985; horwitz, 2000, 2001; hurd & xiao, 2010; liu, 2006, 2007; macintyre & gardner, 1991, 1994; marcos-llinás & garau, 2009; mills, pajares, & herron, 2006; tallon, 2009). an investigation of chinese university efl learner’s foreign language reading anxiety, reading. . . 67 during the process, researchers have come to realize that anxiety can occur in any aspect of language learning (e.g., reading, listening, speaking and writing) and thus cannot just be measured by flcas, which is predominantly concerned with speaking anxiety in language class (kinoshita & bowman, 1998; sellers, 2000; vogely, 1998). they thus have developed several different scales to measure different types of language anxiety, such as the cultural anxiety scale (cas; macdougall et al., 1992, as cited in kinoshita & bowman, 1998), listening comprehension anxiety (elkhafaifi, 2005; vogely, 1998) and reading anxiety scale (ras; sellers, 2000). of particular interest in the present study was foreign language reading anxiety. reading, though not identified as being as anxiety-provoking as speaking, is a complex and difficult process even in one’s native language, and is even more so in an fl/sl (harrington & sawyer, 1992; lally, 1998; miyake & friedman, 1998; saito et al., 1999). thus, fl/sl learners may become anxious as well when reading in a sl/fl because it is both an important skill and a critical means of acquiring a fl/sl, which has caught the attention of many researchers (saito et al., 1999). in order to measure fl reading anxiety, saito et al. (1999) developed the foreign language reading anxiety scale, which has been used or adapted in subsequent research (liu & hu, 2009; mills et al., 2006). these investigations have resulted in mixed findings about the relationship between reading anxiety and l2 reading performance. for example, brantmeier (2005) examined reading anxiety with 92 university students enrolled in an advanced level spanish grammar and composition course. results indicated that the learners generally did not feel anxious about reading in a second language and that they were more anxious about post-l2 reading tasks (both oral and written) than the act of reading itself. students felt less anxious about reading when immediate communication apprehension was not a concern. wu (2011) investigated the relationship between language anxiety (la), reading anxiety (ra), and reading comprehension performance. analyses of the data collected from 91 university students showed that (a) ra was related to and yet independent of la, (b) students with lower la and ra tended to perform better in the reading comprehension test, (c) students’ la decreased with their learning in reading classes while ra showed no differences, and (d) there were no significant differences between males and females in their levels of la and ra. these results suggest that ra was a more stable construct compared to la. similar to language anxiety, strategy use has proved to be helpful in sl/fl learning, helping make sl/fl learning more efficient and successful (cohen, 1998; collier, 2010; grenfell & macaro, 2007; o’malley & chamot, 1990; oxford, 1990; takeuchi, griffins, & coyle, 2007; wenden & rubin, 1987). oxford and her colleagues made a great contribution to learning strategy identification (nyikos zhongshe lu, meihua liu 68 & oxford, 1993; oxford, 1990). believed to be conscious thoughts and behaviors that help learners better understand, learn, and remember the sl/fl information (chamot, 2005; murphy, 2008; nakatani, 2005; o’malley & chamot, 1990; oxford, 1990), language strategy use is often measured by the strategy inventory for language learning (sill) developed by oxford (1990), who placed a whole range of learning strategies into six categories: memory, cognitive, compensation, metacognitive, affective, and social. because the sill mainly deals with general statements which may not be relevant for identifying taskspecific strategies (nakatani, 2006; oxford, 1990), researchers have developed task-specific strategy use inventories to explore the use of specific strategies and its relationship to the performance in a specific task such as reading strategy use scale (dreyer & nel, 2003) and communication strategy use scale (nakatani, 2010). for example, dreyer and nel (2003) analyzed the use of strategies before reading, during reading, and after reading. the successful students in this study were active during all three phases of reading (post-test). they found that at-risk readers mainly used metacognitive strategies related to planning, whereas successful readers were goal-directed and tended to monitor and evaluate their learning and reading comprehension. meanwhile, both language anxiety and language learning strategies are shown to be interrelated to many other variables in language learning, such as students’ self-efficacy (onwuegbuzie et al., 1999; clément et al., 1994), willingness to communicate (jackson, 2002; liu & jackson, 2008), personal and instructional factors (yan & horwitz, 2008), the teacher’s role (aida, 1994; horwitz et al., 1986; ewald, 2007), gender (campbell, 1999; ehrman & oxford, 1995; machida, 2001), motivation (grainger, 1997, 2005), task type (skehan, 1989), and sl/fl proficiency (dewaele & thirtle, 2009; dewaele & tsui, 2013; liu, 2006; magogwe & oliver, 2007; oxford & nyikos, 1989). during the process of researching foreign language strategy use, criticisms have been voiced on this line of research: some target the methodology used to elicit, measure, and classify strategies; some concern assumptions about the role of strategy use in language learning; and some focus on the lack of theoretical rigour of learner strategy research (dörnyei, 2005; locastro, 1995; seliger, 1983). for example, seliger (1983) doubted whether “the verbalizations of learners represent some form of internal reality” (p. 180). it is true that many problems exist in the research of language learning strategy use. it is also true that the use of language learning strategies differs from learner to learner and from task to task and interacts with various other variables such as motivation, goal, anxiety, style, and outcome, as demonstrated in numerous current studies as well as in macaro (2006). only by continuously researching language learning strategy use in relation to other various factors can we better an investigation of chinese university efl learner’s foreign language reading anxiety, reading. . . 69 understand it and its role in language learning and can language teachers implement appropriate instruction in the classroom to really help learners, as also discussed in macaro (2006). as reviewed, anxiety is often debilitative while strategies are largely helpful in sl/fl learning, both of which probably interact with diverse other variables during the process. however, few studies have examined the interaction between language anxiety and strategy use concerning a specific sl/fl task such as a reading, listening or writing task. for this reason, the present study sought to explore the interrelation between fl reading anxiety and fl reading strategy use and their effect on fl reading comprehension performance at the tertiary level. to achieve this purpose, the following questions were formulated: 1. what are the components of the fl reading anxiety scale and the fl reading strategy use scale? 2. what are the profiles of the students’ fl reading anxiety and fl reading strategy use when dealing with a reading task? 3. how is the students’ fl reading anxiety related to their reading strategy use? 4. how are the students’ fl reading anxiety and fl reading strategy use correlated with their fl reading comprehension performance? 3. the study 3.1. participants altogether 1702 (778 males and 924 females) first-year (1174) and second-year (528) students from five universities in china participated in the present study. with an average age of 19 and the age range of 16 to 24, the students were from various disciplines such as electronic engineering, business and administration, chemistry, mathematics and chinese. 3.2. instruments the participants in the present study answered a set of questionnaires and took a reading comprehension test, as detailed below. with a reliability score of .872 in the present study, the 29-item foreign language reading anxiety scale (flras) was adapted from the original 31-item survey used in saito et al. (1999). to better fit the present context, two items, namely “i am worried about all the new symbols i have to learn in order to read english” and “i have to know so much about english history and culture in order to read english,” were deleted because they were concerned with a much bigger issue of causes of difficulties in english reading. zhongshe lu, meihua liu 70 with a reliability score of .903 in the present study, the 31-item foreign language reading strategy use scale (flrsus) was adapted from that developed by dreyer and nel (2003). to better fit the present context, two items, namely “i search out information relevant to my reading goals” and “i evaluate whether what i am reading is relevant to my reading goals,” were deleted because they were weakly concerned with reading english for general purposes. the background questionnaire aimed to collect personal information such as gender, age, university, and year of study. all the items except the background questionnaire items were accompanied by a 5-point scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree for items 1-29 or from never or almost never true of me to always true of me for items 30-58. the reading comprehension test comprised the following parts: three reading passages of 500-1000 words each, accompanied by questions of various types such as multiple choice questions and short answer questions, with a total score of 40. the test was taken from a college english band 4 (a nation-wide exit and proficiency english test for undergraduate non-english majors in china) model test. 3.3. procedure all the questionnaires were translated into chinese and double-checked. they were then administered in both chinese and english to 40 intact classes in 5 universities in the 12th or 13th week of the usually 18-week semester. the students answered the questionnaires in 15 minutes in class and then took the english reading test in 45 minutes. right before the study began, the course instructors explained to the class that the questionnaires were important and needed to be answered seriously, and that the reading test would account for 5% of their final course grade. 3.4. data analysis rotated principal factor analyses were run to identify the underlying factors of flras and flrsus. means and standard deviations of flras, flrsus and their subscales were computed to determine how anxious the respondents felt and how frequently they used different reading strategies when reading english. independent samples t tests were then run to explore the difference in the measured variables between male and female students. correlational analyses were conducted to examine the correlations between the measured variables and the students’ performance in english reading. finally, regression analyses were run to explore the predictive effect of the measured variables on english reading performance. an investigation of chinese university efl learner’s foreign language reading anxiety, reading. . . 71 3.5. results 3.5.1. factor analysis of flras and flrsus a factor analysis with varimax rotation for flras and flrsus respectively served to reveal the underlying components. the results revealed that, as presented in table 1, flras had two factors and flrsus had five factors. the two flras factors were: general anxiety about fl reading (flras1), which included 11 items (1, 5, 7, 9, 11, 19-24) reflective of nervousness/distress, or feeling intimidated when facing reading activities, and self-belief (flras2), which had 4 items (6, 10, 13, 29) reflecting confidence in and satisfaction with one’s fl reading proficiency. the two factors accounted for 21.37% and 3.66% of the total variance respectively. the five flrsus components were: specific analyzing (flrsus1), assessing strategies (flrsus 2), checking and confirming (flrsus3), planning (flrsus4), and predicting (flrsus5). nineteen items were included in the first flrsus component, flrsus1 (30-34, 38, 40-47, 50, 52-53, 57-58), which involved specific analyzing strategies during a reading activity and explained 30.60% of the total variance. flrsus2 had 3 items (48-49, 51), which concerned assessing what had been read during a reading activity and accounted for 3.01% of the total variance. three items (35-36, 55) represented the third flrsus component (flrsus3), which entailed checking and confirming during a reading activity and explained 2.62% of the total variance. two items (37, 56) tapped the fourth flrsus component (flrsus4), which referred to a sense of planning for a reading activity and accounted for 2.24% of the total variance. the fifth flrsus component (flrsus5) included two items (39, 54), which involved predicting during a reading activity and accounted for 1.71% of the total variance. the loadings in table 1 reveal that most of the items within a subcomponent of flras were significantly correlated with that subcomponent: the 11 items included in flras1 were related to flras1, with coefficients ranging from .490 to .679; the items included in flras2 were related to flras2, with a range of coefficients from -.535 to .486. it was the same with flrsus and its five components, with a coefficient range from .305 to .870. zhongshe lu, meihua liu 72 table 1 varimax rotated loadings for factor analysis of flras and flrsus (n = 1702) fl ra s1 fl ra s2 fl rs u s1 fl rs u s2 fl rs u s3 fl rs u s4 fl rs u s5 1. i am usually at ease reading in english. -.513 5. i start to panic when i am asked to read a text aloud in my english class. .533 6. no matter how hard i try, i just can’t read well in english. .651 .236 9. looking at books in english makes me upset and/or nervous. .622 10. i can read english, but i don’t feel like it. .450 11. i start to panic when i have to read silently in class. .490 13. i enjoy reading in english even though i may not understand everything i read. -.535 19. i get upset when i’m not sure whether i understand what i am reading in english. .563 20. i feel intimidated whenever i see a whole page of english in front of me. .679 21. i am nervous when i am reading a passage in english when i am not familiar with the topic. .613 22. i get upset whenever i encounter unknown grammar when reading english. .624 23. when reading in english, i get nervous and confused when i don’t understand every word. .583 24. it bothers me to encounter words i can’t pronounce while reading english. .525 29. i am satisfied with the level of reading ability in english that i have achieved so far. .486 30. i briefly skim the text before reading. .870 31. i skim/scan to get the main idea. .798 32. i pay attention to important information. .423 33. i try to relate the important points in the text to one another in an attempt to understand the entire text. .470 34. i generate questions about the text. .402 35. while i am reading, i reconsider and revise my prior questions about the text based on the text’s content. .693 36. while i am reading, i reconsider and revise my background knowledge about the subject based on the text’s content. .710 37. i plan how i am going to read a text. .496 38. i often look for how the text is organized and pay attention to headings and sub-headings. .439 39. i usually make predictions as to what will follow next. .627 40. while i am reading, i try to determine the meaning of unknown words that seem critical to the meaning of the text. .429 41. i try to underline when reading in order to remember the text. .739 42. i read material more than once in order to remember the text. .649 43. i make notes when reading in order to remember the text. .305 an investigation of chinese university efl learner’s foreign language reading anxiety, reading. . . 73 fl ra s1 fl ra s2 fl rs u s1 fl rs u s2 fl rs u s3 fl rs u s4 fl rs u s5 44. when appropriate, i try to visualize the descriptions in the text that i am reading in order to remember the text. .570 45. i summarize/paraphrase the material that i am reading in order to remember the text. .683 46. when reading, i ask myself questions about the text content to better remember the text. .655 47. when i think that i am not comprehending a text, i change my reading strategies (e.g. re-reading). .429 48. as i am reading, i evaluate the text to determine whether it contributes to my knowledge/understanding of the subject .407 49. after i have read a text, i review it. .545 50. after i have read a text, i try to interpret what i have read. .469 51. after i have read a text, i evaluate what i have read. .553 52. while reading, i jump forward and/or backward in the text to find the important information. .438 53. while reading, i distinguish between information i already know and new information. .516 54. i try to anticipate information in the text. .800 55. as i read along, i check whether i anticipated information correctly. .740 56. i set goals for reading (e.g. studying for a multiple-choice test, reading for a research paper). .380 57. i vary my reading style depending on my reading goals. .354 58. after i have read a text i summarise it. .605 note. flras1 = general anxiety about fl reading; flras2 = self-belief; flrsus1 = specific analyzing; flrsus2 = assessing strategies; flrsus3 = checking and confirming; flrsus4 = planning; flrsus5 = predicting. 3.5.2. profiles of the students’ fl reading anxiety and strategy use as described above, both flras and flrsus were 5-point likert scales, thus a score of 4-5, 3-4, and below 3 on the scale meant strong agreement, agreement and no/little agreement respectively. when computing the scores, the researchers adjusted the values assigned to different alternatives of 18 items which expressed confidence in reading english. for these items, the response strongly disagree received the score of 5 instead of 1, the response strongly agree was given the value of 1 instead of 5, and so on. thus, the total score of the flras revealed the respondent’s anxiety in english reading; and the total score of the flrsus was reflective of the frequency of strategy use when reading english. it was the same with their components. as shown in table 2, the participants scored 2.52 to 2.76 on flras and its two components, all below the scale mid-point of 3. this means that more than half of the students generally did not feel anxious when reading english (flras & flras1) and were confident in and satisfied with their english reading proficiency zhongshe lu, meihua liu 74 (flras2). meanwhile, table 2 shows that the participants scored from 2.97 to 3.58 on flrsus and its five components, meaning that more than half of the participants used those types of strategies moderately when reading english. table 2 means and standard deviations of the measured variables (n = 1702) flras1 flras2 flras flrsus1 flrsus2 flrsus3 flrsus4 flrsus5 flrsus m 2.52 2.59 2.76 3.21 2.97 3.33 3.14 3.27 3.21 sd .56 .48 .37 .53 .84 .81 .80 .94 .53 in order to explore the profiles of fl reading anxiety and reading strategy use for male and female students as well, we computed the means and standard deviations of flras and flrsus for them both respectively, which is presented in table 3. the results showed that male students scored higher on all the ffras scales and flrsus5 but lower on all the other flrsus scales than females. and the differences were statistically significant on all flras scales, flrsus1 and flrsus4, although all the effect sizes were small, as proved by the independent samples t-test results reported in table 3 (to avoid type i errors, bonferroni correction was carried out in the analyses, with the threshold of p lowered from .05 to be at .0055.). this suggests that compared with their female counterparts, the male students felt significantly more anxious when facing reading activities, were less satisfied with their english reading proficiency, and used specific analyzing (flrsus1) and planning (flrsus4) strategies significantly less often during a reading activity. table 3 independent samples t-test results of gender difference in flras and flrsus male (n = 778) female (n = 924) t-test result t p mean difference effect size (cohen’s d) flras1 2.58 2.47 4.11** .000 .11 0.24 (small) flras2 2.64 2.55 3.77** .000 .11 0.19 (small) flras 2.81 2.71 5.15** .000 .10 0.21 (small) flrsus1 3.17 3.23 -2.05** .040 -.06 flrsus2 3.01 2.97 1.57** .116 .04 flrsus3 3.32 3.33 -.27** .787 -.01 flrsus4 3.07 3.20 -3.46** .001 -.13 0.26 (small) flrsus5 3.26 3.28 -.63** .527 -.02 flrsus 3.19 3.23 -1.69** .091 -.04 note. **p = .000; cohen’s d effect size: small = d ≤ 0.2, medium = d = 0.5; large = d ≥ 0.8 (cohen, 1988). 3.5.3. correlations between flras, flrsus and english reading performance analyses of the reading test scores showed that the students scored 19 to 37 in the test, with a mean of 28.6. correlational analyses (two-tailed) were run to an investigation of chinese university efl learner’s foreign language reading anxiety, reading. . . 75 explore the correlations between flras, flrsus, and the students’ reading test scores. to avoid type i errors, bonferroni correction was carried out in the analyses, with the threshold of p lowered from .05 to be at .0055. the results are reported in table 4. table 4 correlations between the measured variables flras1 flras2 flras flrsus1 flrsus2 flrsus3 flrsus4 flrsus5 flrsus rp flras1 1 .371** (m) .885** (l) -.196** (s) -.112** (m) -.170** (m) -.165** (m) -.121** (m) -.210** (m) -.076* flras2 1 .531** (l) -.024 .026 -.027 -.046 -.025 -.029 -.071* (s) fllas 1 -.183** (m) -.153** (m) -.165** (m) -.185** (m) -.118** (m) -.209** (m) -.149** (m) flrsus1 1 .576** (l) .598** (l) .592** (l) .521** (l) .952** (l) .020 flrsus2 1 .439** (m) .429** (m) .368** (m) .689** (l) .085* (s) flrsus3 1 .452** (m) .544** (l) .732** (l) .075* (s) flrsus4 1 .387** (m) .709** (l) .034 flrsus5 1 .649** (l) .075* (s) fllsus 1 .048 note. *p = .002 or .003; **p = .0000; rp = performance on the reading test; s = small; m = medium; l = large; coefficient of determination: s = r ≤ 0.1, m = r = 0.3, l = r ≥ 0.5 (cohen, 1988) as noted from table 4, all the flras and the flrsus scales were highly significantly correlated with one another within the scales, with coefficients ranging from .371 to .952 (p = .000), whose effect sizes were all medium but to upper end or large. this means that, for example, a student who felt nervous when facing reading activities (flras1) tended to be less confident in his/her english reading proficiency (flras2), and a student who frequently used planning strategies (flrus4) tended to use other types of reading strategies more such as predicting strategies (flrsus5). meanwhile, flras1 and flras were significantly negatively correlated with flrsus scales, with a coefficient range of -.118 ~ -.210 (p = .000), whose effect sizes were small or medium but to the lower end. flras2 was negatively but not significantly correlated with flrsus scales. this indicates that a student who was anxious about reading english tended to infrequently use different types of reading strategies. for example, a less confident english reader tended to use planning strategies (flrsus4) less frequently. in addition, as shown in table 4, all flras scales were significantly inversely related to the students’ reading test performance (r = -.076 ~ -.149, p < .0055); and flrsu2, flrsu3 and flrsus5 were significantly positively related to the latter, with a coefficient range of .075 ~ .085 (p < .0055), though the effect size of all the coefficients was largely small (the effect size of the coefficient between flras and rp was medium but to the lower end). alternatively, a student who was less confident in his/her english reading proficiency (flras2) tended to perform worse on the english reading test. on the contrary, a student who used assessing strategies (flrsus2), and checking and confirming strategies (flsus3) more frequently tended to do better on the test. zhongshe lu, meihua liu 76 3.5.4. the regression model the results of the correlational analyses discussed previously show numerous bivariate relationships, which failed to indicate the influence of one variable on another. better clues were provided by multiple regression analyses. a stepwise method was employed in forming regression models. altogether three models resulted with the change in r2 being all significant: .022 for model 1 (flras), .036 for model 2 (flras, flras1), and 0.04 for model 3 (flras, flras1, flrsus2). model 3, the best one for the present study, with the change of .04 in r2 at the .008 level, included 3 variables: flras, flras1, and flrsus5. the results are shown in table 5, which reports coefficients from the regression models, as well as their levels of significance. table 5 regression coefficients and significance reading performance in english ß t p vif variance cohen’s f2 flras -.149 41.81** .000 1.000 3.1% .0225 (small) flras1 -.375 -7.33** .000 4.61 1.3% .0373 (medium to the lower end) flrsus5 -.372 -7.29** .000 4.62 0.6% .0417 (medium to the lower end) note. **p ≤ .01; cohen’s f2 effect size: small = f2 ≤ .02, medium = f2 = .15, large = f2 ≥ .35 (cohen, 1988) as can be seen, all the three variables were negative predictors for english reading performance and all the coefficients were statistically significant at the .000 level. among the three variables, flras was the most powerful predictor (b = -.149, t = 41.81), followed by flras2 (b = -.375, t = -7.33), and flrsus5 (b = .372, t = -7.29), with the effect size being small to medium but to the lower end. 3.6. discussion 3.6.1. factor analysis of flras and flrsus rotated principal factor analyses showed that flras had two important components: general anxiety about fl reading (flras1), and self-belief in english reading proficiency (flras2). as proposed by horwitz et al. (1986), fl classroom anxiety has three dimensions: communication anxiety, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation. in zhang (2013), fl listening anxiety involves three factors: listening anxiety, self-belief and listening decoding strategies. accordingly, in the present study, flras1 was interpreted as general anxiety about fl reading which was reflective of anxiety, stress or nervousness about english reading; flras2 was interpreted as self-belief because all the items in flras2 were concerned with learners’ self-belief in their own fl reading proficiency. understandably, flras1 an investigation of chinese university efl learner’s foreign language reading anxiety, reading. . . 77 was the leading component of flras. these findings clearly suggest that foreign language reading anxiety is specific and concrete, as found in brantmeier (2005). rotated principal factor analyses on flrsus revealed that it had five factors: planning, predicting, checking and confirming, specific analyzing, and assessing strategies. this shows that strategies can be very specific in regard to specific language tasks and fl reading strategies are a group of independent strategies related to fl reading. even so, the components of both flras and flrsus need to be confirmed in future research. with better confirmed categorization of the factors of the two scales, samples from different fl/sl contexts will be better analyzed and compared in terms of fl reading anxiety and reading strategy use to better understand the issues. it will also enable us to examine the relations between the two variables and other language learning-related variables such as motivation and past experiences. 3.6.2. profiles of the students’ fl reading anxiety and strategy use statistical analyses showed that more than half of the students generally did not feel anxious when reading english and were confident in and satisfied with their english reading proficiency, which is consistent with the findings in brantmeier (2005), wu (2011), and liu and hu (2009). this might be because reading is often the most common activity in fl/sl learning and usually does not require oral communication with others. if immediate oral communication were required, the fl reader might feel anxious, as found in brantmeier (2005). even so, around one-third of the participants still felt anxious when reading; thus, they need help the most. to help these students become less anxious during a reading task, course instructors can adopt a variety of strategies such as being empathetic and facilitative, giving them more opportunities, creating a (more) friendly classroom environment, and so on, as discussed in a number of current studies (horwitz, 2000; liu, 2006; tsui, 1996) meanwhile, more than half of the respondents moderately used different types of reading strategies such as planning, checking and confirming, predicting and assessing, when reading english, consistent with findings on the use of general strategies (lu & liu, 2011; takeuchi et al., 2007; wenden & rubin, 1987). this might be because when confronting a reading task, learners have to process countless pieces of information for different purposes. consequently, they have to employ different strategies during the process. in traditional chinese culture, men have often been considered to be of more use and greater competence. they thus usually have an advantage over women in school, life and work. for example, in schooling, male students are zhongshe lu, meihua liu 78 often given more opportunities and praised more, and should thereby be less anxious and more confident than their female counterparts. to our surprise, male students reported to be significantly more anxious about english reading and less satisfied with their english reading proficiency than their female peers, as proved by independent samples t-tests results, different from the findings in matsuda and gobel (2004) and wu (2011), who found no significant differences between males and females in fl reading anxiety. this might be largely thanks to the one-family-one-child policy adopted in the early 1980s which forces chinese people to change their views towards men and women and enables women to have more opportunities to learn and demonstrate their abilities in life, including in schools. in addition, the tests showed that male students employed specific analyzing (flrsus1) and planning (flrsus4) strategies significantly less often during a reading activity. no significant differences occurred in other types of reading strategies between them, similarly to the finding in ehrman and oxford (1995). this might be attributed to several causes such as general english proficiency, english reading comprehension proficiency, and english reading experiences. that is why gender difference in levels of fl reading anxiety and strategy use deserves further research. 3.6.3. correlations among flras, flrsus and english reading performance correlational analyses indicated that flras was significantly inversely related to flrsus, as found in research on general fl anxiety and strategy use (lu & liu, 2011; nakatani, 2006). this means that a student who was anxious about english reading tended to use specific analyzing, assessing, checking and confirming, planning and predicting strategies significantly less frequently while working on an english reading task. though it might be the other way around, this finding clearly shows that fl reading anxiety closely interacts with fl reading strategy use, which may interactively work together to affect students’ performance in fl reading tests, as proved by the regression analyses results reported in table 5. thus, in fl classroom teaching and learning, it is necessary for both learners and teachers to be aware of the interaction of these two variables first and then to consciously train anxious learners to use different types of reading strategies during a fl reading activity as done in conti (2004) and fraser (1999). in this way, anxious learners may gradually become able to use more types of various fl reading strategies, and to use them more frequently, when confronting a fl reading task. ultimately, students’ performance in fl reading may be improved. meanwhile, both flras and flrsus were generally significantly correlated with the students’ fl reading comprehension performance, as happened an investigation of chinese university efl learner’s foreign language reading anxiety, reading. . . 79 in numerous studies on general fl anxiety and strategy use (cohen, 1998; collier, 2010; grenfell & macaro, 2007; o’malley & chamot, 1990; oxford, 1996; takeuchi et al., 2007). stepwise regression analyses showed that flras (overall fl reading anxiety), flras1 (general anxiety about fl reading), and flrsus5 (predicting strategies) were good predictors of fl reading comprehension proficiency. contrary to the results of correlation analyses presented in table 4, flrsus5 became a negative contributor to the students’ performance in reading english. it might be that, when working alone, the use of predicting strategies positively affected students’ performance in reading english, as found in numerous studies reviewed before. however, when interacting with other variables, it might become a negative factor, as found in liu and zhang (2011). for this reason, the role of fl reading anxiety and strategy use in the learning of fl reading calls for continuous research. future research can also focus on the causes of anxiety when handling a fl reading activity and strategies to help sl/fl learners to become less anxious and use better strategies during the fl reading process, as suggested by mak (2011), ewald (2007), and dreyer and nel (2003). meanwhile, it is worth noting that most coefficients in the present study were small though significant, and the effect size of the difference between male and female students, of the coefficients between flras and flrsus scales and reading test scores, and of the regression coefficients was largely small or medium but to the lower end. this indicates that the difference between male and female students, and the relations between flras, flrsus, and fl reading comprehension performance were weak, though statistically significant, which might be due to the large number of participants involved in the study. whether the situation is the same in this case needs to be researched in future studies, to better understand gender difference in the measured variables, the relation between fl reading anxiety and fl reading strategy use, and their predictive effect on students’ performance in reading tests. although caution is needed when interpreting the findings, it is important to note that these variables can make a huge difference when a large number of participants are targeted, as shown by the effect sizes of the coefficients and t values in the present study. 4. conclusions the present study investigated the interrelations between fl reading anxiety and fl strategy use and their effect on fl reading comprehension performance at the tertiary level. the following conclusions resulted from the study: 1. flras and flrsus were significantly correlated with each other. zhongshe lu, meihua liu 80 2. more than half of the students generally did not feel anxious when reading english and were confident in and satisfied with their english reading proficiency. meanwhile, more than half of them usually moderately used different types of reading strategies such as planning, checking and confirming, predicting and assessing, when reading english. 3. compared with their female counterparts, male students felt significantly more anxious when facing reading activities, were less satisfied with their english reading proficiency, and used planning (flrsus4) and other specific analyzing strategies during a reading activity significantly less often. 4. the students’ fl reading anxiety was significantly inversely related to their fl reading strategy use, both of which were generally significantly correlated with the students’ fl reading comprehension performance. 5. flras (overall fl reading anxiety), flras1 (general anxiety about fl reading), and flrsus5 (predicting strategies) were good predictors of the latter. acknowledgements the present study was sponsored by tsinghua university initiative scientific research program (no. 20131089276). we are sincerely grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments which enormously helped to improve the quality of the present paper. an investigation of chinese university efl learner’s foreign language reading anxiety, reading. . . 81 references abu-rabia, s. 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(2013). foreign language listening anxiety and listening performance: conceptualizations and causal relationships. system, 43, 1-14. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (silesian university of technology, gliwice, poland) vol. 10 no. 1 march 2020 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) maria dakowska (university of warsaw, poland) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2020 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: jakub bielak mariusz kruk aleksandra wach © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: jakub bielak, melanie ellis, mariusz kruk, aleksandra wach cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · scopus · web of science emerging sources citation index (esci) · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the clarivate analytics (formerly thomson reuters) master journal list. special issue: investigating the dynamic nature of learner individual differences in l2 learning guest editor: laura gurzynski-weiss studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 10, number 1, march 2020 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ....................................................................... 9 editorial .......................................................................................... 15 articles: carmen amerstorfer – the dynamism of strategic learning: complexity theory in strategic l2 development ................................................... 21 jean-marc dewaele, livia dewaele – are foreign language learners’ enjoyment and anxiety specific to the teacher? an investigation into the dynamics of learners’ classroom emotions ....................................... 45 tammy gregersen – dynamic properties of language anxiety ......... 67 daniel o. jackson – working memory and second language development: a complex, dynamic future? ................................................................ 89 peter macintyre – expanding the theoretical base for the dynamics of willingness to communicate ............................................................ 111 ellen j. serafini – further exploring the dynamicity, situatedness, and emergence of the self: the key role of context ................................ 133 amy s. thompson – my many selves are still me: motivation and multilingualism ........................................................................ 159 daniel jung, megan dibartolomeo, fernando melero-garcía, lindsay giacomino, laura gurzynski-weiss, carly henderson, marian hidalgo – tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study..................................................... 177 notes to contributors .....................................................................221 9 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors carmen m. amerstorfer holds a phd from the university of klagenfurt, austria, where she is employed as senior scientist. she taught foreign language learners of all ages and at educational levels from pre-k to tertiary at educational institutions in austria, the netherlands, and china. in her current position as a teacher educator, she applies a problem-oriented teaching approach to her courses, focusing, for example, on games and activities in the efl classroom or global skills. carmen’s main research interests include learner-centered teaching, problem-based learning, strategic language learning, and features of psychology in language learning. in 2015, carmen organized an international conference on language learning strategies (ssu) that is hosted biennially throughout the world. she co-edited language learning strategies and individual learner characteristics: situating strategy use in diverse contexts (2018, bloomsbury) with rebecca l. oxford. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1746-2258 contact details: university of klagenfurt, universitätsstraße 65-67, 9020 klagenfurt, austria (carmen.amerstorfer@aau.at) jean-marc dewaele is professor of applied linguistics and multilingualism at birkbeck, university of london, uk. he has published widely on individual differences in psychological and emotional variables in second language acquisition and multilingualism. he is former president of the international association of multilingualism and the european second language association. he is general editor of the journal of multilingual and multicultural development. he won the equality and diversity research award from the british association for counselling and psychotherapy (2013) and the robert gardner award for excellence in second language and bilingualism research (2016) from the international association of language and social psychology. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8480-0977 contact details: department of applied linguistics and communication, birkbeck, university of london, 26 russell square, wc1b 5dt, london, united kingdom (j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk) 10 livia dewaele obtained her bachelor of arts in modern languages (french) and linguistics at worcester college, university of oxford, uk. she co-authored several papers with her father on foreign language enjoyment and anxiety and conducted a research project on study abroad. she is currently completing an ma in international relations at the university of chicago. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6795-5299 contact details: department of applied linguistics and communication, birkbeck, university of london, 26 russell square, wc1b 5dt, london, united kingdom (liviadewaele@aol.co.uk) megan dibartolomeo is a phd candidate in hispanic linguistics at indiana university, usa. she earned her ma in hispanic linguistics from indiana university. her research focuses on second language pragmatics, pedagogy, and individual differences in second language acquisition. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1969-7843 contact details: 355 n jordan ave, room 2160, bloomington, in, 47405, usa (mdibarto@indiana.edu) lindsay giacomino is a phd student in hispanic linguistics at indiana university, usa. her research interests include second language phonology, task-based language teaching, language learning strategies, and individual differences in second language acquisition. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1658-2474 contact details: 355 n jordan ave, room 2160, bloomington, in, 47405, usa (lgiacomi@ indiana.edu) tammy gregersen, professor of tesol at the american university of sharjah in the united arab emirates, received her ma in education and phd in linguistics in chile, where she also began her academic career. she is co-author, with peter macintyre, of capitalizing on language learner individuality (2014, multilingual matters) and optimizing language learners’ nonverbal communication in the language classroom (2017, multilingual matters). she is also co-editor, with peter macintyre and sarah mercer, of positive psychology in sla (2016, multilingual matters), with peter macintyre of innovative practices in language teacher education (2017, springer), and, with sarah mercer, of teacher well-being (2020, oxford university press). she has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and contributed numerous chapters in applied linguistics anthologies on individual differences, teacher education, language teaching methodology, positive psychology and nonverbal communication in language classrooms. she is 11 passionate about exploring other cultures and has enjoyed the opportunities that participation in international conferences around the world and fulbright scholar grants to chile and costa rica have provided. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0744-9655 contact details: department of english, college of arts and sciences, american university of sharjah, po box 26666, sharjah, uae (tgregersen@aus.edu) laura gurzynski-weiss, phd (georgetown university), is associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the department of spanish and portuguese at indiana university, usa. she is also an affiliate faculty member of the cognitive science program. professor gurzynski-weiss teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in second language acquisition, teaching methodology, taskbased language teaching, individual differences, research methods, and hispanic linguistics. her research focuses on variables including input, interaction, feedback, modified output, and task-related factors from cognitive-interactionist, psycholinguistic, usage-based approaches and complex dynamic systems theory. in addition to her publications in journals and edited volumes, she is the editor of cross-theoretical explorations of interlocutors and their individual differences (2020, john benjamins), and expanding individual differences in the interaction approach (2017, john benjamins), as well as the co-author of introducción y aplicaciones contextualizadas a la lingüística hispánica (with manuel díaz-campos & kimberly l. geeslin; 2018, wiley-blackwell). she is the co-recipient of the 2018 tesol award for distinguished research (with andrea révész). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2332-3198 contact details: department of spanish & portuguese, global & international studies 2127w, 355 north jordan avenue, bloomington, indiana, 47405-9716, usa (lgurzyns@indiana.edu) carly henderson is assistant professor of hispanic linguistics at augusta university. she received her phd from indiana university, usa. her research focuses on the role of corrective feedback, technology-mediated task-based language teaching, and learner individual differences in the second language acquisition of spanish. she is particularly interested in how the timing, type, mode of provision, and provider of corrective feedback interact with cognitive and affective individual differences to impact feedback efficacy and l2 development. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6546-9614 contact details: 1120 15th street, ah e227, augusta, ga, 30912, usa (carhenderson@ augusta.edu) 12 maría ángeles hidalgo received her phd from the university of the basque country, spain, and is a lecturer and researcher at the public university of navarre, spain. her main research focuses on young learners’ foreign language acquisition and, specifically, the effect of age and task-type on learners’ oral and written performance, focusing on aspects such as negotiation of meaning, general performance, and motivation. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7131-1880 contact details: universidad pública de navarra. campus de arrosadía. departamento de ciencias humanas y de la educación. ed. los acebos, room 0012, spain (mangeles.hidalgo@unavarra.es) daniel o. jackson, ms ed. (university of pennsylvania) and phd (university of hawai’i at mānoa), is associate professor in the department of english at kanda university of international studies, japan, where he teaches several undergraduate courses and a graduate course on second language acquisition for the ma tesol program. his primary research interests include task-based language teaching, individual differences in l2 processing and learning, and language teacher noticing. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1102-0379 contact details: dept. of english, kanda university of international studies, 1-4-1 wakaba, mihama-ku chiba-shi, chiba 261-0014, japan (jackson-d@kanda.kuis.ac.jp) daniel jung is a phd candidate in hispanic linguistics at indiana university, usa. he earned his ma degree in hispanic linguistics from indiana university. his research focuses on individual differences in second language acquisition. he is particularly interested in the dynamics of l2 motivation, both how it changes over time and how it influences (and is influenced by) other variables. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4678-7390 contact details: 355 n jordan av, room 2160, bloomington, in, 47405, usa (danjung@ indiana.edu) peter d. macintyre is professor of psychology at cape breton university, canada. his research focuses on the psychology of language and communication. he has published over 100 articles and chapters on language anxiety, willingness to communicate, motivation, and other topics. he has co-authored or co-edited books on topics including positive psychology in sla, motivational dynamics, nonverbal communication, teaching innovations, and capitalizing on language learner individuality. his awards include being recognized for teaching excellence (atlantic association of universities), the gardner award (international association for 13 language and social psychology), and the mildenberger prize (modern language association) for contributions to the study of language. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1085-6692 contact details: psychology department, cape breton university, sydney, nova scotia, canada b1p 6l2 (peter_macintyre@cbu.ca) fernando melero-garcía is a phd candidate in hispanic linguistics at indiana university, usa. he earned his ma degree in hispanic linguistics from the university of new mexico. his primary area of research is l1 and l2 laboratory phonology. his additional research interests include sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and translation and interpreting. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3554-314x contact details: 355 n jordan ave, room 2160, bloomington, in, 47405, usa (fmelerog@indiana.edu) ellen j. serafini received her phd from georgetown university, usa and is assistant professor of spanish applied linguistics in the department of modern and classical languages at george mason university, usa. she teaches various courses on methods of second language teaching and curriculum design, task-based language teaching, critical language pedagogy, bilingual education in the spanishspeaking world, spanish for heritage speakers, spanish for specific purposes, and community-based learning. her research focuses on the dynamic interaction among individual, pedagogical, and social factors in diverse language learning settings and the variable impact on affective and linguistic outcomes. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8048-9533 contact details: 4400 university drive, 3e5, fairfax, va 22030, usa (eserafi2@ gmu.edu) amy s. thompson received her phd from michigan state university, usa, and is professor of applied linguistics and currently department chair in the department of world languages, literatures, & linguistics at west virginia university, usa. her primary research interests involve individual differences (ids) in sla and the interactions of these ids and multilingualism. she teaches a range of theoretical and methodological courses in applied linguistics. examples of her research can be found in journals such as the modern language journal, tesol quarterly, foreign language annals, and the international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, among others. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4505-1755 14 contact details: dept. of world languages, literatures & linguistics, west virginia university, chitwood hall, po box 6298, morgantown, wv 26506, usa (amy. thompson@mail.wvu.edu) 317 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (2). 2023. 317-345 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.38277 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt effects of emi-clil on secondary-level students’ english learning: a multilevel meta-analysis jang ho lee chung-ang university, seoul, republic of korea https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2767-3881 jangholee@cau.ac.kr hansol lee korea military academy, seoul, republic of korea https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6912-7128 hansol@kma.ac.kr yuen yi lo the university of hong kong, china https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0850-5447 yuenyilo@hku.hk abstract this meta-analysis synthesized the effects of the english medium instruction and content and language integrated learning (emi-clil) approach on secondary-level students’ english learning. the dataset included 44 samples (n = 7,434) from 38 primary studies. the results revealed emi-clil’s overall effectiveness for the development of english competence compared to the mainstream condition in the short term (d = 0.73, se = 0.06, 95% ci [0.61, 0.86]) and longer term (d = 1.01, se = 0.06, 95% ci [0.88, 1.15]). additionally, we found that emi-clil’s overall effectiveness was influenced by several moderator variables. its effectiveness was significantly: (1) higher for learners whose first language (l1) was linguistically related to english; (2) lower for primary studies which confirmed the homogeneity of the emi-clil and comparison groups; (3) lower when studies targeted the productive (rather than receptive or overall) dimension of english learning; and (4) higher when outcome mailto:hansol@kma.ac.kr jang ho lee, hansol lee, yuen yi lo 318 measures focused on vocabulary. implications for pedagogy and future research are discussed. keywords: content and language integrated learning; english as a foreign language; english medium instruction; multilevel meta-analysis; secondary level 1. introduction this meta-analysis synthesized the effects of using english as the medium of instruction in content subjects on students’ english development. english medium instruction (emi) refers to a pedagogical approach to teaching content subjects (e.g., mathematics, science, history, geography; other than english) in english in contexts where english is not the majority language (macaro, 2018). emi can be traced back to the use of english as the medium of instruction at pre-tertiary levels in some post-colonial contexts in which english, as a former colonial language and current global lingua franca, is maintained as the medium of instruction for its social status and economic value (evans, 2017). emi has also been implemented in higher education institutions in non-anglophone contexts in attempts to attract more international students and/or enhance local students’ english proficiency, hence their competitiveness in the globalized world (rose et al., 2021). the underlying assumption of using emi is that, by providing language exposure, it would facilitate students’ english learning while teaching content subjects. however, the evidence of such “two-for-one” benefits for english development remains inconclusive (see the summaries of recent systematic reviews by goris et al., 2019 and graham et al., 2018). hence, a more rigorous statistical analysis of previous studies’ findings is needed. the present study responds to this need through a meta-analysis of relevant primary studies. in addition to emi studies, we included research studies under the label content and language integrated learning (clil), a similar pedagogical approach associated to a greater extent with europe. an early definition of clil by marsh (2002) states that it is “a generic umbrella term which would encompass any activity in which a foreign language is used as a tool in the learning of a nonlanguage subject in which both language and the subject have a joint particular role” (p. 58). the first part of this definition, that is, the use of a foreign language (mostly, english) as a tool and the involvement of non-language subjects, closely resembles that of emi, whereas the second part highlights the “joint role” of both language and content learning. although such a joint role has been reinforced in other clil definitions (e.g., coyle et al., 2010; morton & llinares, 2017), whether and how the integration of content and language learning can be effects of emi-clil on secondary-level students’ english learning: a multilevel meta-analysis 319 achieved in practice remains unclear (dalton-puffer, 2013). as the target language (e.g., english) is often not widely used beyond formal instruction contexts, clil students also learn it as an additional language in designated language lessons (dalton-puffer et al., 2014). however, the same practice is also common in emi programs, particularly those implemented at the secondary level. english learning is a desired outcome of both emi and clil. the reviewed literature did not reveal any substantial difference between these approaches in terms of their practice (i.e., students learning content knowledge through english while learning english as an additional language in parallel) or teacher and student profiles (i.e., most teachers are non-english speakers trained to be content specialists; students share their first language, or l1, as the majority language). accordingly, we believe that emi and clil share a “functionally equivalent” context (rose et al., 2021, p. 1) and can be included together in the current meta-analysis. 2. literature review 2.1. emi-clil’s effectiveness for english learning the popularity of the emi-clil approach partly derives from the search for more effective or innovative foreign language teaching approaches (pérez-cañado, 2016). with the paradigm shift to communicative language teaching (clt; nunan, 2011), which emphasizes meaningful language use resembling students’ language use outside the classroom, the potential of teaching content subjects through english for facilitating english learning has been recognized. in addition to timetabled english language lessons, adopting the emi-clil approach in some or all content subjects increases exposure to english input and english-use opportunities. the nature of the communication is also assumed to differ from that in english language lessons; discussions based on content knowledge (e.g., historical events, science experiments, social issues) may provide more meaningful contexts for purposeful communication (lyster & ruiz de zarobe, 2018). therefore, in view of second language acquisition (sla) theories, such as the input (krashen, 1982), interaction (long, 1996), and output (swain, 1995) hypotheses, the emi-clil approach appears to provide favorable conditions for english learning. learning content subjects in english may also increase students’ english-learning motivation, which is indispensable for academic success (genesee & lindholm-leary, 2013). lo and lo’s (2014) meta-analysis of emi secondary education in hong kong confirmed the aforementioned benefits. they compared academic achievement, first language and second language (l2 english) development, and affective variables between students studying with emi and chinese medium instruction (cmi). consolidating the results of 10 studies, they revealed that emi jang ho lee, hansol lee, yuen yi lo 320 students outperformed their cmi peers in english proficiency with a moderate effect size. the meta-analysis also revealed some potential moderators that affected the intergroup comparison. of particular interest to the current study are their students’ initial abilities and type of outcome measures. it was found that when students’ initial abilities were not controlled, emi students seemed to outperform cmi students in content subjects, yet the opposite was true when students’ initial abilities were considered. regarding outcome measures, it was found that the emi group performed better than their cmi counterpart in studies employing standardized measurements (e.g., high-stakes examinations developed by the authorities), but not for self-designed tests. this moderating impact of outcome measure type may have come from the fact that self-designed tests were generally more geared toward measuring certain knowledge addressed during the research period, which in turn may have favored cmi condition associated with instruction in the l1. 2.2. skepticism about emi-clil’s effectiveness for english learning despite the aforementioned theoretical support and lo and lo’s (2014) metaanalysis, the emi-clil approach is not universally praised (bruton, 2013); the criticisms are summarized as follows: first, some studies have demonstrated that the “assumed” favorable conditions for english learning in emi-clil may be absent in some classrooms. for instance, lo and macaro (2012) showed that the quality and quantity of teacher-student interactions were rather limited in emi lessons, leaving students few opportunities to negotiate or interact with teachers and peers in english. an et al. (2019) and hu and gao (2021) revealed a lack of language scaffolding (operationalized as language-oriented or language-related practices) in emi lessons in mainland china and hong kong respectively, implying that comprehensible input or content and language integrated teaching may not be available in practice. second, some researchers have identified methodological flaws in relevant studies, including heterogeneity between experimental and comparison groups, lack of robust statistical analyses of significant intergroup differences, and lack of control over confounding variables such as exposure to english outside classrooms (pérez-cañado, 2012). in particular, emi-clil research has largely been criticized for selection bias, such that emi-clil groups consist of students with higher socio-economic status, better academic ability, and stronger motivation (e.g., broca, 2016; bruton, 2013). hence, emi-clil groups and their comparison counterparts (i.e., mainstream efl groups) may not be homogeneous. some reviews have also cast doubt on emi-clil’s effectiveness for english learning. for example, graham et al.’s (2018) systematic review included 25 emieffects of emi-clil on secondary-level students’ english learning: a multilevel meta-analysis 321 clil studies published between 2008 and 2018 that had examined either language or content learning outcomes. regarding the former, the authors reported that previous studies revealed mixed findings, with some studies showing the superiority of the emi-clil condition over the comparison condition and others presenting no significant difference. they concluded that extant literature does not provide convincing evidence regarding emi-clil’s effectiveness for language learning. in an in-depth review of 21 european studies, goris et al. (2019) focused on longitudinal studies examining the effects of clil on english skills and knowledge. they revealed that a considerable proportion of longitudinal studies reported null effects. they further noted that longitudinal research on this issue has only started to flourish recently and called for more longitudinal clil studies. finally, in their report for the education endowment foundation, murphy et al. (2020) concluded that emi-clil programs may be more effective than mainstream ones (but mainly for vocabulary knowledge and receptive skills). they qualified their conclusion by suggesting that the observed superiority of emi-clil may have arisen from the combined effects of such instruction and other confounding variables (e.g., additional exposure to the target language input for the emi-clil group). overall, the aforementioned skepticism and theoretical support for emiclil’s effectiveness demand a more systematic approach to synthesizing the results of relevant primary studies; a range of moderators that may play important roles in emi-clil’s effectiveness must also be identified. 2.3. potential moderator variables before delving into the full meta-analysis, we first review potential moderator variables influencing emi-clil’s effectiveness. based on the above-mentioned literature, we identified six noteworthy moderators: (1) l1-english relation, (2) intensity of emi-clil program, (3) homogeneity confirmation, (4) target linguistic dimension, (5) vocabulary targeted, and (6) language test type. 2.3.1. l1-english relation most emi-clil studies have been conducted in european countries (e.g., the netherlands, germany, sweden, belgium) and in the asia-pacific region (e.g., hong kong and south korea). given such diverse contexts and learners’ l1s, the relationship between learners’ l1 and the target language (i.e., english) has been hypothesized to influence emi-clil’s effectiveness. jeon and yamashita (2014) adopted a similar rationale and approach to examining the role of l1-l2 distance in mediating the relationships between l2 reading comprehension and jang ho lee, hansol lee, yuen yi lo 322 other components. furthermore, lo and lo (2014) speculated that the typological difference between chinese and english may explain the diverse results of studies conducted in hong kong and other educational contexts. 2.3.2. emi-clil program intensity most emi-clil programs in relevant studies (e.g., dallinger et al., 2016; gierlinger & wagner, 2016; pérez cañado & lancaster, 2017) have taught one to three content subjects through english. however, in a small number of emi-clil contexts, more than 50% of weekly instructional hours were implemented in english (some emi programs in hong kong: lin & morrison, 2010; lo & murphy, 2010; salili & lai, 2003; clil in the netherlands: goris et al., 2013; verspoor et al., 2015; an international south korean high school: lee, 2020). given this variation in exposure to english inputs as well as a recent finding in a spanish clil project on the superiority of a more intensive clil course compared to a less intensive one (merino & lasagabaster, 2018), it was hypothesized that emi-clil program intensity may be associated with the development of english competence (see murphy et al., 2020, for a similar discussion). 2.3.3. homogeneity confirmation as mentioned above, emi-clil research has been severely criticized for unfairly comparing mainstream (i.e., traditional efl instruction) and emi-clil groups, owing to baseline intergroup differences (e.g., bruton, 2013; goris et al., 2019; graham et al., 2018; macaro, 2018). such a recurrent methodological flaw undermines any conclusive statement about emi-clil’s effectiveness for english learning. while the initial advantage of emi-clil groups persists in much emi-clil research, some recent studies have started to resolve this issue through diverse approaches (see coding scheme, section 4.5., for examples). however, whether the homogeneity of the mainstream and emi-clil groups is associated with the (reported) degree of developments of english competence through the emi-clil approach remains unconfirmed. accordingly, we included homogeneity confirmation as a moderator variable, in line with lo and lo’s (2014) meta-analysis. 2.3.4. target linguistic dimensions dalton-puffer’s (2008) much-cited summary of clil outcomes in europe pointed to the differential effects of clil intervention on a range of target linguistic aspects. she suggested that the clil approach may be more beneficial for receptive skills (i.e., reading and listening), vocabulary, and fluency as part of oral competence effects of emi-clil on secondary-level students’ english learning: a multilevel meta-analysis 323 than writing, syntactic knowledge, and pronunciation. in a similar effort to summarize the findings of previous emi-clil studies on language learning outcomes, graham et al. (2018) grouped a range of examined target linguistic aspects into overall english proficiency, receptive skills, and productive skills. their analysis revealed that, in general, studies in each category showed mixed findings regarding emi-clil’s effectiveness. like dalton-puffer’s (2008) and graham et al.’s (2018) reviews, which are geared towards providing pedagogical implications for emi-clil practitioners, the present meta-analysis also aims to offer evidencebased suggestions regarding the differential effects of emi-clil on different linguistic aspects but based on a rigorous statistical approach. 2.3.5. vocabulary targeted it has been suggested that the emi-clil approach exposes learners to a wider range of english vocabulary than its mainstream counterpart (dalton-puffer, 2007; macaro, 2018); vocabulary is generally the sole aspect of english knowledge dealt with explicitly in emi-clil lessons (an et al., 2019). accordingly, much emi-clil research has examined english vocabulary as the target linguistic knowledge via diverse lexical measurements (e.g., canga alonso & arribas garcía, 2015; gierlinger & wagner, 2016; goris et al., 2013; hendrikx & van goethem, 2020; lo & murphy, 2010; martínez agudo, 2020; olsson, 2015). regarding the findings of studies on vocabulary, dalton-puffer (2011) summarized that “they concur that clil students’ receptive and productive lexicon is larger overall, contains more words from lower frequency bands, has a wider stylistic range, and is used more appropriately” (p. 186). given vocabulary’s status in emi-clil research (ruiz de zarobe, 2011), we included the moderator variable “vocabulary targeted;” this assessed emi-clil’s effects on the development of vocabulary knowledge. 2.3.6. language test type emi-clil research has employed different types of language tests to measure language learning outcomes. some studies have adopted validated tests like the standardized key english test (cambridge esol, 2008), employed by merino and lasagabaster (2018), and the vocabulary levels test developed by schmitt et al. (2001), which has been widely employed in emi-clil research targeting vocabulary developments (e.g., bayram et al., 2019; castellano-risco et al., 2020). other studies have employed self-designed tests, conveniently and purposefully developed by the researchers, sometimes in collaboration with the teachers in the target context. as aforementioned, lo and lo’s (2014) meta-analysis found “type of outcome measures” to be a significant moderator. hence, we included language test type as a moderator. jang ho lee, hansol lee, yuen yi lo 324 3. the present study the number of recently published review articles on emi-clil’s effects on english competence (e.g., goris et al., 2019; graham et al., 2018; murphy et al., 2020) attests to the flourishing interest in this area. while these reviews have their own objectives and are of significant value for summarizing primary studies’ findings, they have some limitations owing to their descriptive and qualitative nature. another limitation is their rather subjective interpretation of the roles of potential moderators, which can be more systematically controlled in a meta-analysis. accordingly, we seek to address these limitations and evaluate emi-clil’s effectiveness with a rigorous, systematic, methodological meta-analysis. this meta-analysis focuses on secondary-level learners for the following reasons. first, theoretically, the language development trajectory of students at different key stages of education (particularly between primary and secondary/tertiary levels) is deemed to vary (see johnson & swain, 1994, for discussion about the language and conceptual development of learners who start acquiring content knowledge through an l2 at different ages). therefore, focusing on learners at a particular key stage eliminates one potential confounding variable. second, secondary level was found to be the most widely studied education level in emi-clil research (macaro, 2018), offering a sufficient number of samples and effect sizes based on which emi-clil’s effectiveness could be calculated meta-analytically. our research questions (rqs) are: 1. to what extent does the emi-clil approach lead to higher levels of english competence for secondary-level learners than its mainstream counterpart? 2. to what extent are the identified moderators related to emi-clil’s effect on the development of secondary-level learners’ english competence? 4. method 4.1. literature search and inclusion criteria we began by conducting a literature search and identified studies for review based on the following inclusion criteria: they were required to (1) be written in english and published between 2001 and 2021; (2) be conducted in the english as a foreign language (efl) context (including hong kong, for which several emi studies have been conducted); (3) target secondary education students; (4) be geared toward teaching content subjects (other than english) in english; (5) measure outcomes related to english proficiency or linguistic knowledge; (6) include emi-clil and comparison groups; and (7) report descriptive statistics to enable effect size calculation. figure 1 illustrates our literature search steps according to the prisma flow diagram. effects of emi-clil on secondary-level students’ english learning: a multilevel meta-analysis 325 figure 1 prisma flow diagram (page et al., 2021) first, we conducted keyword searches in databases (proquest, scopus, and web of science) with the following keywords: [emi or “english medium instruction” or clil or “content and language integrated learning”] and [outcome or development or effect or non-emi or non-clil or mainstream]. this keyword combination was derived from a series of discussions among the authors literature search: • database search (proquest, scopus, web of science), published in the last 20 years (i.e., between 2001 and 2021): 178 studies • manual search of scholarly journals of language and education: 104 studies • backward/forward reference search of review articles and identified articles: 225 studies records after duplicates removed (n = 386) inclusion criteria for studies: • should be written in english. • should be conducted in efl contexts (target language = english). • should target students in secondary schools. • should be geared toward teaching content subjects through english. • should measure outcomes related to english proficiency or linguistic knowledge. • should include emi-clil and comparison groups. • should report descriptive statistics to enable the calculation of effect sizes. studies included in the meta analysis (n = 38) studies excluded (349): • no proper comparison group (e.g., observational or descriptive studies): 243 • not about english learning outcomes: 50 • not efl: 14 • not written in english: 8 • not secondary education: 7 • duplicate studies (using the same dataset from the previous study): 3 • insufficient descriptive statistics: 24 data acquired from authors (n = 1) jang ho lee, hansol lee, yuen yi lo 326 aiming to identify primary studies relevant to our seven criteria. for this step, we identified 178 studies. second, we manually searched the relevant journals (e.g., international clil research journal, international journal of english studies, journal of immersion and content-based language education, the language learning journal, system), and identified 104 studies. lastly, we checked the reference lists of the identified primary studies and previous systematic reviews and a meta-analysis (goris et al., 2019; graham et al., 2018; lo & lo, 2014) to conduct forward and backward searches, and identified further 225 studies. overall, after removing duplicates, we identified 386 studies. we then reviewed these 386 studies to confirm if they successfully met our seven criteria. we had to exclude 349 studies for the following reasons: (1) 243 did not have proper comparison groups (e.g., observational or descriptive studies); (2) 50 were not about english learning outcomes; (3) 14 were not efl studies; (4) 8 were not written in english; (5) 7 were not conducted in secondary education contexts; (6) 3 were duplicate studies (using the same dataset as a previous study); and (7) 24 did not report sufficient descriptive statistics for effect size calculations. for the last criterion, we contacted the authors, and one study supplied the necessary data (rumlich, 2017). finally, 38 studies remained for our meta-analysis. 4.2. dataset construction subsequently, we began dataset construction by examining 38 primary studies. first, we found that seven studies included multiple independent samples; we decided to treat them as separate studies. for example, goris et al. (2013) had participants from three countries (the netherlands, germany, and italy), which we treated independently. similarly, merino and lasagabaster (2018) had participants from two distant communities in their country. hamidavi et al. (2016), lahuerta (2020), lo and murphy (2010), salili and lai (2003), and verspoor et al. (2015) investigated students in two different grades, genders, or cohorts simultaneously, giving two independent samples in their studies. as a result, we could identify 8 additional samples, meaning that there were 46 samples (38 + 8) among 38 primary studies. conversely, we found that two studies (martínez agudo, 2019, 2020) analyzed the same sample and that another two studies (lahuerta, 2017, 2020) came from the same sample; thus, we counted these four studies as two samples. in summary, after considering each study’s data structure, we identified 44 (38 + 8 2) samples (n = 7,434) from 38 primary studies. 4.3. effect size calculation to quantitatively synthesize previous findings on emi-clil’s effects on english competence, we calculated treatment effect sizes – differences in learning outcomes effects of emi-clil on secondary-level students’ english learning: a multilevel meta-analysis 327 between the emi-clil condition and its mainstream counterpart – across the collected studies. we chose to use unbiased cohen’s d, also known as hedges’ g, as our effect size unit. as this type of effect size can be calculated by – roughly speaking – dividing mean differences (measured by a certain scale) by a pooled standard deviation (measured by the said scale), the computed effect sizes are scale-free. as for interpreting effect sizes, we endorsed plonsky and oswald’s (2014) “t-shirt size” benchmarks, where 0.4, 0.7, and 1.0 are considered small, medium, and large effect size guidelines, respectively. the equations for computing effect sizes in a unit of unbiased cohen’s d, which involves calculating a cohen’s d effect size and a correction factor (j), can be found in hedges (1981). when computing effect sizes for each independent sample, we found that some utilized multiple numbers of measurements. to keep these effect sizes in the dataset and avoid any statistical dependence issue (i.e., when effect sizes from the same sample are mutually dependent), we used a multilevel metaanalysis approach, which is described in the data analysis plan subsection. we computed a total of 192 posttest and 9 delayed posttest effect sizes. the delayed posttest effect sizes related to four studies (lin & morrison, 2010; martínez agudo, 2019, 2020; pérez cañado & lancaster, 2017), which measured their participants’ long-term learning outcomes. 4.4. outlier diagnostics and publication bias1 to systematically detect outliers and influential cases among the calculated posttest effect sizes (n = 192; k = 43), we first standardized our effect sizes into zscores and excluded one sample (gutiérrez ortiz, 2020) with absolute effect size values greater than 3.29 (for details of this approach, see assink & wibbelink, 2016; tabachnik & fidell, 2013). then, we used viechtbauer’s (2010) metafor package (version 2.4-0) in r software (version 4.0.3), following lee and lee’s (2022) approach. as shown in figure 2, this package provides a filled circle to indicate an outlier based on studentized deleted residuals, which can be calculated by dividing the residuals of effect sizes by their standard errors, along with other mathematical measures, such as dffits values, cook’s distances, and covratio values (for definitions and equations of each measure see viechtbauer & cheung, 2010). accordingly, we excluded another sample (goris et al., 2013[3]) from the dataset. 1 due to its small sample size (n = 9), we did not follow this approach for our delayed posttest effect sizes. jang ho lee, hansol lee, yuen yi lo 328 effect sizes figure 2 plot of the studentized deleted residuals for 190 posttest effect sizes. (filled circles are suggested outliers) subsequently, we conducted egger’s bias regression test and computed a funnel plot (see figure 3) to check if the revised dataset still indicated smallstudy effects; there was no statistically significant sign of bias (z = 1.54, p = .122). additionally, the funnel plot showed an overall symmetrical pattern of the effect sizes based on the computed funnel-shaped diagram (though many effect sizes were located outside it). finally, in the revised dataset we had a total of 184 posttest effect sizes from 41 samples (n = 6,654). posttest effect sizes figure 3 funnel plot for 184 posttest effect sizes st u d e n ti ze d d e le te d r e si d u a ls st a n d a rd e rr o r effects of emi-clil on secondary-level students’ english learning: a multilevel meta-analysis 329 4.5. coding scheme 4.5.1. l1-english relation for this moderator variable, we divided the studies into l1-l2 (english) related and not related using beaufils and tomin’s (2020) genetic proximity calculator, which provides language relatedness scores (0~100). scores larger (smaller) than 78 indicate unrelated (related) languages. for 136 effect sizes out of 184 (74%), students’ l1s were related to english; all were from european countries (austria, the netherlands, germany, italy, spain, sweden, belgium). the remaining 48 effect sizes (26%) came from studies conducted in turkey, south korea, and hong kong. 4.5.2. emi-clil program intensity for this moderator variable, we categorized the selected studies into more intensive (intensity+; 56 of 184; 30%) and less intensive (intensity−; 126 of 184; 68%) emi-clil programs when they provided more or less than 50% of weekly instructional hours in english, respectively. the former included clil programs in the netherlands (goris et al., 2013; verspoor et al., 2015), and an international high school in south korea (lee, 2020), and emi programs in hong kong (lin & morrison, 2010; lo & murphy, 2010; salili & lai, 2003). the latter included most emiclil programs in which one to three content subjects were taught in english. two samples (hamidavi et al., 2016[1],[2]) did not report relevant information. 4.5.3. homogeneity confirmation studies were coded as “confirmed” (36 of 184; 20%) or “not confirmed” (148 of 184; 80%), depending on whether they confirmed the homogeneity of the experimental (i.e., emi-clil) and comparison (i.e., mainstream) groups before measuring english learning outcomes. we only coded studies as “confirmed” when they: (1) checked the baseline differences between the groups through a pretest2 related to the target linguistic aspects or general english proficiency (e.g., pérez cañado & lancaster, 2017; prieto-arranz et al., 2015; rallo fabra & jacob, 2015) and reported no statistically significant difference; (2) employed some statistical adjustments such as propensity score matching (feddermann et al., 2021) and elimination of outliers (pérez cañado & lancaster, 2017; prietoarranz et al., 2015); or (3) adopted a probability sampling method (martínez 2 we conducted an independent t-test based on the descriptive statistics related to the pretest when the author(s) of the selected studies did not explicitly mention intergroup homogeneity. jang ho lee, hansol lee, yuen yi lo 330 agudo, 2019). studies were coded as “not confirmed,” when they failed to test significant intergroup differences via a pretest or when they checked baseline differences through measurements (e.g., english learning motivation) other than a pretest of the target linguistic aspects and english proficiency. 4.5.4. target linguistic dimensions in view of graham et al.’s (2018) and goris et al.’s (2019) systematic reviews as well as the number of effect sizes in our dataset, we grouped the target linguistic aspects into “receptive,” “productive,” and “overall proficiency.” “receptive” (50 of 184; 27%) included listening (e.g., dallinger et al., 2016; lasagabaster, 2008) and reading skills (e.g., bayram et al., 2019; martínez agudo, 2020), and linguistic knowledge (i.e., vocabulary and grammar) measured receptivity (lasagabaster, 2008; martínez agudo, 2020). for “productive” (119 of 184; 65%), any measurements related to speaking and writing (e.g., lahuerta, 2017; pérez cañado & lancaster, 2017; rallo fabra & juan-garau, 2011) were included, along with linguistic knowledge measured productively (e.g., gutiérrez-mangado & martínezadrián, 2018; lo & murphy, 2010). “overall proficiency” (15 of 184; 8%) included any measurements described as measuring participants’ overall proficiency (e.g., merino & lasagabaster, 2018; verspoor et al., 2015). 4.5.5. vocabulary targeted studies were coded as “vocabulary” for this moderator variable if they measured participants’ overall english vocabulary knowledge (e.g., castellano-risco et al., 2020; gierlinger & wagner, 2016) or specific aspects of productive vocabulary competence through speaking or writing tasks, with, e.g., lexical complexity (lee, 2020), lexical diversity (van mensel et al., 2020), and lexical error ratio (lahuerta, 2020). studies that measured participants’ knowledge about english idioms (goris et al., 2013; hendrikx & van goethem, 2020) were also categorized as vocabulary-related (51 of 184; 28%). the rest were coded as “others” (133 of 184; 72%). 4.5.6. language test type language test types were coded as “validated” or “self-designed,” depending on their characteristics and descriptions. as mentioned above, tests developed by national agencies, professional assessment organizations, or applied linguistics specialists, which have been validated through several studies, were coded as “validated” (100 of 184; 54%). the rest, which were generally developed by study authors without reference to other literature, were coded as “self-designed” (84 of 184; 46%). effects of emi-clil on secondary-level students’ english learning: a multilevel meta-analysis 331 4.6. data analysis plan we used the metafor (version 2.4-0) package (viechtbauer, 2010) in r (version 4.0.3) as a meta-analysis tool. as aforementioned, we computed effect sizes in accordance with different measurements, and samples could have more than one effect size. when computing an average effect size based on these effect sizes, their data structure membership should be considered in addition to their sampling errors (i.e., standard errors of effect sizes). to this end, the metafor package provides a multilevel approach using a random-effects model (fernández-castilla et al., 2020) to include intra-sample effect size variance taking the multilevel data structure into account. the same approach was used for moderator analyses to provide accurate statistical estimates. specifically, we first employed simple metaregression for each moderator variable before conducting a multiple meta-regression to check if previous results were changed after controlling for other variables for higher precision (see lee et al., 2019 for a similar approach). 5. results 5.1. emi-clil’s overall effectiveness for english competence development figure 4 represents a forest plot for posttest effect sizes for 41 samples. due to space limitations, we could not plot all 184 effect sizes; figure 4’s estimates should be read only for understanding a general trend of the computed effect sizes across the included primary studies. overall, although about eight studies seemed to include zeros in the 95% confidence intervals of their effect sizes (indicating comparable learning outcomes between emi-clil and mainstream conditions), we found that most studies had positive effect sizes, indicating that the emi-clil condition led to higher levels of english competence for secondarylevel learners than its mainstream counterpart. subsequently, the multilevel meta-analysis of 184 posttest effect sizes calculated from 41 independent samples (n = 6,654) revealed that emi-clil’s overall effectiveness compared to the mainstream condition was 0.73 (se = 0.06, z = 11.66, p < .001, 95% ci [0.61, 0.86]). further, we found that the delayed posttest results based on a total of eight effect sizes from three independent samples (n = 676) indicated that the overall mean effect size was 1.01 (se = 0.06, z = 17.55, p < .001, 95% ci [0.88, 1.15]). it should be noted that mean effect sizes for the short and longer-term interventions should not be statistically compared as they were based on different datasets; thus, interpretations about the relative importance of these two findings (e.g., the effectiveness was greater longer term) should be avoided. jang ho lee, hansol lee, yuen yi lo 332 figure 4 forest plot for posttest effect sizes at the sample level (k = 41) (the dotted vertical line in the plot indicates zero.) 5.2. moderator analyses to investigate how the potential moderators were related to emi-clil’s overall effectiveness, we conducted moderator analyses. note that moderator analyses effects of emi-clil on secondary-level students’ english learning: a multilevel meta-analysis 333 were conducted in two phases for greater precision and that delayed posttest results were excluded due to their limited sample sizes (n = 8, k = 3). in the first phase, a series of simple meta-regression analyses were employed to check how each moderator variable was related to emi-clil’s effectiveness without considering any relationships among moderators. only one moderator, “target linguistic dimensions,” had statistically significant contributions (p = .01) to the overall effectiveness (see table 1). specifically, we found that learners in studies where the productive aspect of english was the main focus of evaluation showed lower english learning gains than in studies focusing on overall english skills or receptive aspects of english (β = -0.26, se = 0.10, z = -2.64, p = .01, 95% ci [-0.46, -0.07]). table 1 simple meta-regression for each moderator variable moderator variable category # of es posttest (n = 184; k = 41) est. se z p 95% ci l1–english relation related 136 -0.01 0.15 -0.05 0.96 -0.31 ~ 0.30 not related 48 (reference) emi-clil program intensity  50% 56 0.05 0.14 0.37 0.71 -0.22 ~ 0.32 < 50% 126 (reference) homogeneity confirmation not confirmed 148 0.08 0.14 0.55 0.58 -0.19 ~ 0.34 confirmed 36 (reference) language test type self-developed 84 -0.20 0.11 -1.86 0.06 -0.42 ~ 0.01 validated 100 (reference) target linguistic dimensions productive 119 -0.26** 0.10 -2.64 0.01 -0.46 ~ -0.07 others (overall, receptive) 65 (reference) vocabulary-targeted yes 51 0.14 0.10 1.37 0.17 -0.06 ~ 0.35 no 133 (reference) note. reference level of each moderator variable is marked “(reference)”; ** p < .01. table 2 multiple meta-regression with all moderator variables moderator variables category posttest (n = 178; k = 39) est. se z p 95% ci l1–english relation related 0.47* 0.19 2.49 0.01 0.10 ~ 0.84 not related (reference) emi-clil program intensity  50% 0.30 0.16 1.88 0.06 -0.01 ~ 0.62 < 50% (reference) homogeneity confirmation not confirmed 0.29* 0.13 2.25 0.03 0.04 ~ 0.55 confirmed (reference) language test type self-developed -0.17 0.10 -1.58 0.12 -0.37 ~ 0.04 validated (reference) target linguistic dimensions productive -0.34** 0.11 -3.12 0.00 -0.55 ~ -0.12 others (overall, receptive) (reference) vocabulary-targeted yes 0.25* 0.10 2.49 0.01 0.05 ~ 0.45 no (reference) note. reference level of each moderator variable is marked “(reference).” as a total of six effect sizes from three samples were omitted due to missing values across the included moderators, the results were based on 178 effect sizes from 38 samples, after controlling for the length of emi-clils. additionally, learners’ countries were statistically controlled for; * p < .05, ** p < .01 jang ho lee, hansol lee, yuen yi lo 334 in the second phase of moderator analyses, we conducted a multiple metaregression with all variables included as independent variables in the equation in order to compute more precise coefficients after controlling for other moderators. four moderator variables, “l1-english relation,” “homogeneity confirmation,” “target linguistic dimensions,” and “vocabulary-targeted,” reached statistical significance (p < .05), but “emi-clil program intensity” and “language test type” did not show any statistically significant moderating effect (p > .05; see table 2). the results showed that emi-clil’s effectiveness was (1) larger where learners’ l1s were linguistically related to english (β = 0.47, se = 0.19, z = 2.49, p = .01, 95% ci [0.10, 0.84]); (2) larger in studies where baseline differences between emi-clil and mainstream conditions were not confirmed (β = 0.29, se = 0.13, z = 2.25, p = .03, 95% ci [0.04, 0.55]); (3) smaller in studies where the productive aspect of english was the main evaluation focus than in studies focusing on overall english skills or receptive aspects of english (β = -0.34, se = 0.11, z = 3.12, p = .00, 95% ci [-0.55, -0.12]); and (4) larger when vocabulary learning outcomes were targeted rather than other aspects of english knowledge and skills (β = 0.25, se = 0.10, z = 2.49, p = .01, 95% ci [0.05, 0.45]). 6. discussion 6.1. emi-clil’s overall effectiveness for english learning our results, based on 184 posttest effect sizes from 41 samples (n = 6,654) and 8 delayed posttest effect sizes from 3 samples (n = 676), revealed that the overall effect sizes of emi-clil were 0.73 (short term) and 1.01 (longer term). this represents a medium-sized overall effect according to plonsky and oswald’s (2014) field-specific benchmark of effect size for intergroup comparison. therefore, we suggest emi-clil is moderately beneficial for students’ english learning in efl contexts compared to other types of l2 interventions in general. the present meta-analysis, by and large, corresponds to that of lo and lo (2014) regarding emi-clil’s overall benefits for english learning. we believe that this positive finding resulted from a complex combination of multiple components related to emi-clil pedagogy. first, one contributing factor may be emi-clil’s meaningful contexts for purposeful communication (dallinger et al., 2016; lorenzo et al., 2010; lyster & ruiz de zarobe, 2018), through which learners may receive english input, interact with others in english, and produce output, all of which are key components of sla (krashen, 1982; long, 1996; swain, 1995). second, learning content subjects in english may have served as a motivating factor (genesee & lindholm-leary, 2013), as some samples in the included studies were preparing for higher education in englisheffects of emi-clil on secondary-level students’ english learning: a multilevel meta-analysis 335 speaking countries. above all, it should be noted that emi-clil groups received, on average, hundreds of additional hours of english instruction more than mainstream efl groups, as reported by some included studies (e.g., castellano-risco et al., 2020; jiménez catalán & agustín llach, 2017; martínez-adrián & gutiérrez-mangado, 2009). this must be a powerful variable that could account for the superiority of the emi-clil approach (macaro, 2018). 6.2. the roles of moderator variables the findings from the moderator analyses revealed that (1) emi-clil’s overall effectiveness can be significantly influenced by two learner factors (i.e., learners’ l1 and baseline intergroup differences) and that (2) certain linguistic aspects were particularly sensitive to emi-clil. these findings are worth discussing in depth to provide evidence-based pedagogical directions for classroom teachers in emi-clil contexts. 6.2.1. influential learner-related moderator variables emi-clil’s overall effectiveness was significantly influenced by learners’ l1 and baseline intergroup differences. regarding the former, the l1-english relation turned out to be a significant moderator. this result indicates learners whose l1s were more closely related to english (mostly european efl learners) showed better english learning outcomes than those whose l1s were less related (asian efl learners). the potential advantage for the former may derive from structural l1-l2 similarities, which have been suggested to facilitate l2 learning (e.g., lado, 1957; stockwell et al., 1965). the debate about positive and negative transfer is beyond the scope of this paper, but one potential implication of the role played by language typology is that emi-clil teachers may need to provide more language scaffolding when students’ l1 is less closely related to english; this could involve raising students’ metalinguistic awareness (e.g., morphology, grammar, sentence structure). additionally, we found that baseline intergroup differences significantly influenced emi-clil’s overall effectiveness. we included homogeneity confirmation to address a methodological issue in emi-clil research, namely selection bias; it has been claimed that emi-clil groups are more motivated and have higher levels of english proficiency than their mainstream counterparts prior to emi-clil (e.g., bruton, 2013; macaro, 2018). the results showed that studies which did not confirm homogeneity between emi-clil and mainstream groups revealed larger effect sizes. that is, when there are baseline intergroup differences, the advantaged emi-clil group shows even more positive learning outcomes. thus, our result corroborates claims that emi-clil research suffers from selection bias. echoing lo jang ho lee, hansol lee, yuen yi lo 336 and lo’s (2014) results, we highlight the need to identify more comparable comparison groups (e.g., high aptitude students; verspoor et al., 2015) and check intergroup homogeneity (or at least conduct statistical adjustments). 6.2.2. linguistic aspects sensitive to emi-clil in addition to some learner-related moderators, we found that certain linguistic aspects were particularly sensitive to the emi-clil approach. for example, the moderator analyses revealed that vocabulary is a particular beneficiary, which accords with dalton-puffer’s (2008) summary of previous clil research findings. such benefits of emi-clil to english vocabulary learning may result from wider vocabulary exposure, including subject-specific academic vocabulary and lowfrequency words (dalton-puffer, 2007; macaro, 2018). furthermore, we found that the emi-clil condition was less favorable for the development of productive skills, compared to their receptive counterparts and overall proficiency. dallinger et al. (2016) suggested a possible explanation: as producing output “is encouraged but usually not forced, their productive skills (speaking, writing) might benefit to a smaller extent” (p. 24). this is supported by studies revealing limited opportunities for teacher and peer l2 interactions in emi-clil classrooms (e.g., lo & macaro, 2012). one implication for teacher education and pedagogy is that emi-clil teachers, most of whom are content subject specialists, should be informed about and try to provide favorable l2 learning conditions (e.g., opportunities to interact and use the target l2). 6.3. limitations and future research we address this study’s limitations here in view of their implications for future emi-clil studies and meta-analyses. first, we could not include some potentially important moderators due to a lack of detailed descriptions in the methodology sections of the selected studies. some of these potential moderators, the roles of which have not generally been discussed in previous studies, include (1) the quality of english input in emi-clil lessons (van mensel et al., 2020), (2) emiclil program quality control systems (verspoor et al., 2015), and (3) (non-)nativeness of instructors (gallardo del puerto & gómez-lacabex, 2017). thus, future emi-clil studies should provide more detailed descriptions of their emiclil contexts and directly examine the aforementioned moderator variables. second, the present meta-analysis focused only on english learning outcomes and did not include studies examining content learning outcomes. however, both types of outcomes should be analyzed to provide a more comprehensive view of emi-clil’s effectiveness (e.g., graham et al., 2018; lo & lo, 2014); effects of emi-clil on secondary-level students’ english learning: a multilevel meta-analysis 337 this would also align with macaro’s (2018) “cost-benefit” perspective. it remains unclear as to how much the development of english competence “costs” in terms of its effect on content learning. thus, future meta-analyses should widen their search scope and include studies on both language and content learning outcomes. notably, the costs and benefits of emi-clil may not be restricted to student learning outcomes; other aspects such as academic and career prospects and international mobility may be considered, notwithstanding the complications of capturing these intangible benefits through meta-analyses. 7. conclusion despite these limitations, the present study significantly contributes to emi-clil research by effectively synthesizing the findings of relevant studies conducted in the last two decades with a rigorous multilevel meta-analytic approach. our perusal of the selected studies revealed that careful consideration of potential confounding variables has only recently emerged, indicating that there is plenty of room for improvements in the methodological designs of emi-clil studies targeting secondary education. nevertheless, our findings lend further weight to the argument that researching emi-clil is worthwhile, given its potential contributions to english competence development among secondary-level learners, as well as its potential to serve as an alternative to traditional efl instruction. jang ho lee, hansol lee, yuen yi lo 338 references3 an, j., macaro, e., & childs, a. 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(2010). outlier and influence diagnostics for meta-analysis. research synthesis methods, 1(2), 112-125. https://doi. org/10.1002/jrsm.11 389 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (2). 2014. 389-392 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.2.10 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book reviews the language of peace: communicating to create harmony author: rebecca oxford publisher: information age publishing, 2013 isbn: 978-1-62396-094-0 pages: 364 in the language of peace: communicating to create harmony, rebecca oxford invites students, educators, and researchers to think about language in new and challenging ways. the book is probably most suitable as a text for courses relating to media, communication, or culture. it offers a comprehensive discussion of how language can be used to reduce conflict while promoting peace and harmony, and this discussion is interweaved with a practical concern for how the various themes of the book may be pursued in educational settings. these are lofty aims indeed. however, oxford is well aware that she is setting the bar very high and that some readers may regard the aims and claims of her book with a degree of skepticism; in the introduction, she is careful to address “those who are cynical about the possibilities of peace,” reassuring the reader that the book offers something more substantial than implausible idealism. as someone who certainly falls into this “cynical” category, i have to confess that my initial reaction upon opening this book was one of doubt. nevertheless, i was also intrigued to find out to what ex 390 tent she could achieve her aim of convincing even the “cynical” reader of the possibilities of using language to enhance peace within oneself, in relationships with others, across nations and cultures, and with the environment we inhabit. the book is organized into four distinct sections. the first section, part a, entitled “fundamentals of communication for peace,” establishes the theoretical foundations for the book and elaborates on some of its principal themes. in this section we explore understandings of the term peace and how the use of language is integral to peace and conflict. the discussion of the various understandings of peace spans notions of peace as an inner personal state to broader considerations of world peace. underpinning all of this is an exploration of the links between these various levels of peace, their interconnections, and their interdependence. the next two sections are the ones most likely to be of immediate interest to language educators. in these sections we encounter familiar themes from language education but approach them from a highly original and refreshing perspective. in part b, “learning the language of peace through words and images,” we focus on the use of language and images for peaceful aims. what is so refreshing, and even inspiring, about this section of the book is that despite its grand aims, it is clearly and firmly grounded in educational realities. here, oxford provides the book with practical substance by offering concrete examples of some of the ways in which learners and educators may study language and how it can be used to enhance peace. the core of this section is centered around critical discourse analysis (cda), which is used to analyze key speeches from well-known peacemakers, such as martin luther king and gandhi. at no time does the discussion slip into gratuitous platitudes, instead it adopts a hard-nosed, rigorous analysis of language. from a practical angle, the chapters in this section also offer ideas for how educators may expand upon the material in their own classes. i particularly enjoyed the implicit re-alignment of the aims of cda, from being primarily concerned with exploring how language can lead to miscommunication, misunderstanding and conflict to an analysis of how language can contribute to harmony. in a similar fashion, part c, “using peace language with other cultures,” reframes intercultural communication as a means of promoting peace; instead of concentrating on simplistic differences between cultural groups we find an insightful, positive focus on using language and communication to create empathy and dialogue between cultures. part d consists of a single, co-authored chapter based upon a study exploring people’s definitions and understanding of peace. all of the chapters in the book feature exercises for both readers and students. although each chapter could be used separately as a stand-alone resource, there is a satisfying coherence running throughout the book as a whole. one of the most impressive features for me was how the book never shirks the big questions, or the bold statements: oxford is unequivocal in her 391 view that peace is a genuine possibility and considers the contributions we can all make through our discussions and our use of language. this makes a welcome change from the standard academic diet of hedges and qualifications. i have to admit that as a reader there were several occasions when i thought that oxford was being overly ambitious but on each occasion she managed to skillfully connect the idealism to practical realities in a way that i found subtly persuasive. the authorial voice switches between a committed activist’s enthusiasm and an effortless scholarly erudition, making for a lively, stimulating read. the thematic scope of the book is truly impressive, ranging from intercultural communication to geopolitics, from aspects of psychology to critical media studies. this is also true of its tone and register, at times high-minded and idealistic while at others scrupulously systematic. and what is even more impressive is that at no time does the author opt for the short cut and offer superficial overviews. the book is as deep as it is wide. however, such an approach does have its pitfalls. few readers will have an informed interest in all of the areas covered; we all have our own specific interests and inevitably there may be certain parts of the book that appear less compelling than others. for example, in my own case, i found myself skimming over the poetry section, since my own brain appears to have a huge and resolutely stubborn blind spot when it comes to verse. nevertheless, this is a minor criticism: too much is surely preferable to too little. my overriding impression of this book is that it is one that made me stop and think about who i am and what i do as a language educator. that, in fact, represents very high praise indeed. after over 20 years (and counting) of involvement in language education, there is a tendency to get set in one’s ways and become resistant to new ideas or practices. more specifically, the book encouraged me to consider how language education may be about more than simply “repairing” what is wrong with learners’ use of language and reflect on how as language educators we can dare to believe in the possibility of improving ourselves, the people around us, and the world we live in. for a seasoned language educator, this was simultaneously unexpected and reinvigorating. although the book does not explicitly refer to positive psychology, it does share some of the same fundamental premises. just as positive psychology is concerned with enhancing well-being rather than simply fixing what is broken, this book investigates the positive contribution that can be made through the use of language. the experience of reading the language of peace: communicating to create harmony left this “cynical” reviewer profoundly grateful for the opportunity to step outside his comfort zone. i suspect that for many others involved in language education the book may require a similar leap out of the comfort zone into unfamiliar territory. and i also imagine that many such 392 readers will find the book in parts thought-provoking, frustrating, and inspiring. however, i am sure that all who make that effort to engage with this book will ultimately find it a highly positive, rewarding experience opening up unexpected areas for reflection and professional growth. reviewed by stephen ryan senshu university, tokyo, japan ryan@isc.senshu-u.ac.jp 473 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (3). 2019. 473-493 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.3.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt identity development through study abroad experiences: storied accounts harumi kimura miyagi gakuin women's university, sendai, japan https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5671-1854 kharumi@mgu.ac.jp brenda hayashi miyagi gakuin women's university, sendai, japan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8008-2514 bhayashi@mgu.ac.jp abstract this study investigated three japanese l2 learners who joined a governmentfunded, short-term study abroad program in the usa during their first year of college. four years after the program, we interviewed the learners about their overseas experiences. we also asked what they had done during their university years after the program. we then analyzed their accounts to explore participants’ linguistic and personal growth during and after the program. their stories offered important insights into what short-term study abroad programs should provide: critical experiences that participants embrace through meeting and communicating with new people in l2s for the purpose of mutual understanding. when participants perceived their experiences to be successful and valuable and felt a desire to become a more efficient l2 user, they took actions to improve their l2 skills in relation to other life goals after returning home. furthermore, their l2 identities are likely interwoven with their current and aspiring personal identities. as such, their stories are self-development trajectories and evidence of l2-learning-mediated personal growth through social interaction. we propose that short-term study programs: (a) avoid an exclusive focus on l2 learning on-site, (b) include ample opportunities of meaningful social interaction, and (c) target first-year students. keywords: study abroad; perception of successful l2 communication; l2 identity; narrative harumi kimura, brenda hayashi 474 1. introduction study abroad has been researched primarily in terms of language and intercultural gains as well as in foreign-language socialization (dufon & churchill, 2006; freed, 1995; kinginger, 2009, 2013). teachers and learners alike tend to assume that firsthand exposure to the target-language speech community, in addition to intensive l2 training, provides the best opportunities for language learning. scholars have recognized the need for investigation, and research in this field has expanded to a wide range of language features as outcome variables, which include l2 speech fluency (freed, segalowitz, & dewey, 2004), vocabulary growth (collentine & freed, 2004), pragmatic development (kasper & rose, 2002), intercultural competence (jackson & oguro, 2018), and ethnocentrism (yashima, 2010), among others. duration of stay (sasaki, 2011), levels of proficiency (isabelli, 2007), learning contexts (lafford, 2004) and other conditions, such as housing (magnan & back, 2007), have been linked to the above-mentioned outcomes. thus, most of the mainstream, quantitative studies on study abroad have been product-oriented and concerned with participants’ ability to develop through their study abroad experiences and assessment upon program completion. past studies on outcomes of study abroad have produced mixed results on these variables. research on ethnocentrism of study abroad participants, for example, has produced seemingly contradictory results. yashima (2010) investigated japanese university students who joined international volunteer programs for two to three weeks and reported that they had demonstrated a significant decrease in ethnocentrism, while participants of a longer-term program in neff, apple, aliponga, and hood (2018) did not. yashima’s participants were grouped with other volunteers from different countries and worked in a variety of areas such as human services, cultural events, and construction. participants in more conventional study abroad programs, such as those reported by neff and his colleagues, were unlikely to have experienced these types of activities. furthermore, isabelli-garcía (2006) reported a difference in outcomes among participants in the same program, depending on individual motivation in l2 learning and attitudes toward the new cultures. thorough examination of participants' study abroad experiences – including perceptions, interpretations, reflections, and evaluations – is needed to examine learning outcomes, assess existing programs, and enhance future study abroad programs. in social psychology, the effects of intercultural contact have long been researched in relation to conditions for achieving optimal contact such as equal status between different groups, shared goals, need for cooperation, and institutional support (allport, clark, & pettigrew, 1954). more recently, it has been found that the ways people perceive and evaluate such contact make a significant, identity development through study abroad experiences: storied accounts 475 favorable difference in ethnic prejudice (van dick, wagner, pettigrew, christ, petzel, castro, & jackson, 2004). when people find it important and meaningful to meet people from other cultures, they perceive the contact as valuable and become less biased and friendlier. however, we do not know whether this effect is enduring and stable after the contact phase is over. investigation on changes in participants’ attitudes and behaviors after returning from abroad has been scarce. sasaki (2011), who conducted one of the few studies, explored writing-skill improvement of study abroad participants and at-home learners. one of the most intriguing findings of her vigorous longitudinal study was that those participants who spent more than eight months abroad, compared to those who stayed for shorter durations, voluntarily practiced writing after they returned home, which contributed significantly to their writing skill improvement. although sasaki related the length of stay to different learners’ behaviors after their experiences abroad, other conditions might contribute to behavioral differences. for the purpose of exploring the factors that inspire study abroad participants to take subsequent action for change, it is imperative to investigate participants’ storied experiences to “elucidate what actually transpires on stays abroad” (jackson, 2013, p. 5429). furthermore, some teachers and researchers believe that an overall goal of study abroad is personal development (benson, barkhuizen, bodycott, & brown, 2013). we also take the position that “learning a new language changes the learner as a person” (benson et al., 2013, p. 1), and that l2 knowledge and use affect learners’ understanding of themselves. in fact, over their course of their lives, people are perpetually constructing and reconstructing their identities. identities are not invariant and stable, but fluid, continuously transformed, and multifaceted. although some parts of identity are dispositional, others parts are contested, changed, and developed, particularly when individuals face critical experiences. study abroad most likely provides such opportunities and, as such, it has a profound significance on individual identity development (benson et al., 2013; steinwidder, 2016). identity construction is an individual endeavor, but it is inevitably situated in contexts and therefore embedded in social scenarios. participants of study abroad undergo self-presentational challenges (leary & kowalski, 1995) with an l2 in unfamiliar cultures. they are concerned with their self-presentation and how people recognize and perceive them in the different culture. successful self-presentation helps participants build confidence, accelerate development, nurture new identities, and become oriented toward the future (benson et al., 2013), while self-presentational failure may induce anxiety (gkonou, daubney, & dewaele, 2017; guiora, 1984; kimura, 2017b), destabilize the present identity, and inhibit favorable development. harumi kimura, brenda hayashi 476 we conducted an exploratory case study to investigate how study abroad experiences could contribute to participants’ l2-learning-mediated personal growth and identity development. considering the increasing popularity of short-term study abroad programs in japan (japan student services organization, 2017), the potential long-term value of such programs should be examined in a local context. we examined: (a) some of the inspiring, critical experiences that made three study abroad participants think about future l2 learning plans and what they might consider doing after the program, and (b) actions they took upon returning home to explore how crossing geographical, socio-cultural, and psychological borders helped them grow as l2 learners and individuals. this study is part of a larger ongoing longitudinal investigation of a group of 23 participants in a government-funded, short-term study abroad program. although a detailed account of the program is found elsewhere (hayashi, kimura, kumagai, morris, & tashima, 2014; kimura, 2017a; kimura & hayashi, 2017), a brief background description is provided in the following methodology section. 2. methodology 2.1. program the study abroad program was a 2-week fully funded exchange program between japan and north america, called the kakehashi project. the period of stay was ten days and thus it was a mini-program, as defined by spencer and tuma (2018). twentythree university students of different majors and year groups and two escorts took part in the november 2013 program. the overall program objective was to promote a global understanding of japan and to nurture a mutual understanding between japan and the usa for future friendship and cooperation. the official mission was to specifically disseminate information about japan and its attractive points from the participants’ own perspectives. in three us cities, the participants were engaged in formal and informal face-to-face interactions with such people as local and international university students, business people, diplomats, and ordinary people. in formal settings, the student participants were grouped into four teams and made presentations on distinct themes about traditional and modern japanese culture on four different occasions to diverse groups of people. they also attended ceremonial welcoming events. in informal situations, they mingled and communicated with people from a range of socioeconomic statuses on different occasions, where they chatted spontaneously in non-controlled environments. with the exception of one 60-minute language class of international students learning japanese as a foreign language at stanford university – in which the student participants joined as guest native japanese speakers – the study abroad group did not attend any language classes. identity development through study abroad experiences: storied accounts 477 2.2. participants for this particular study, we chose three participants (we use pseudonyms) who joined the program as first-year students. although there were four first-year students among the 23 program participants, we were not able to approach one of these four students at the time of our interviews. we thought the first-year students had had ample time after their return home to make good use of their study abroad experiences as they continued their university years. miki was an english major. she extended her university education by a year to do a 1-year study abroad in germany. she made the plan by herself, did a homestay, and learned german at a language school. sachi was also an english major. she joined a 1-year exchange program and studied education in ohio before moving on to graduate school back in japan. risako was an intercultural studies major. she extended her university education by a year to join another governmentfunded study abroad program in italy for a year. she studied italian at a language school and joined some internship programs there. all three students decided to go abroad and experienced longer and different types of study. 2.3. data collection all program participants were required to cooperate in any data-gathering requests in terms of the program outcomes and signed consent forms before joining the program. while our study is not directly related to the program per se, the three participants viewed our interview requests as part of this obligation and did not hesitate to meet us and share their thoughts and feelings in relation to their experiences. they gave us permission to digitally record the interviews. we conducted open-ended, retrospective interviews with each of the three participants separately in kimura’s university office in february and march of 2017, almost four years after the program. we call our interviews open-ended because we did not plan any specific questions, and the interviews were more casual, interactional encounters than formal interviews, although we did have research agendas in mind. interviews were conducted in japanese. at the time of the interviews, the students were all 23 years old. miki and risako were interviewed shortly before graduation and sachi was almost finished with her first year of graduate study. kimura interviewed miki and sachi alone, and kimura and hayashi interviewed risako together. each interview was about an hour long. we, as interviewers, asked the participants to read the 1-page essays they had each submitted to the program organizer immediately after returning from the kakehashi program. we used each essay to begin the interview so that they could recall their program experiences. after chatting briefly about their essays, we asked a harumi kimura, brenda hayashi 478 regular introductory question, “can you tell me (us) some of your experiences of the kakehashi program?” (kvale & brinkmann, 2009). we also asked them to share what they did after the program. 2.4. researchers’ participation we participated in the study abroad program as escorts and we were part of the tour group. we not only observed their presentations and gave feedback on-site or at subsequent meetings, but we worked together with the students to build a good team and complete the mission. most importantly, we spent the whole time together and experienced the program along with the students, traveling long distances to visit three cities in the us in ten days. during the interviews, the participants sometimes talked to us and at other times talked with us, depending on the different degrees of our involvement in the storytelling or how interactive the interviews turned out to be (ochs & capps, 2001). the degrees of involvement changed mostly according to how much we interviewers were familiar with the particular episode being recounted. active interviewer involvement naturally happened for two main reasons. first, research interview events, unless they are carefully planned and strictly structured, are generally co-constructed on-site between interviewers and interviewees (barkhuizen, 2011). second, as we had been program escorts, we naturally shared many of the participants’ experiences. we were also teachers at their school. sachi took kimura’s tesol seminar and risako took hayashi’s teaching methods courses. our different identities as researchers, interviewers, former program escorts, and teachers were likely to impact how interview events were managed and negotiated (de fina, 2011), as well as our analyses and interpretation of the data. such was our involvement that we would refer to what we observed about the program and the participants during and after the program in discussing the results. 2.5. analysis we asked the three participants to recall their experiences (cf. life reality in pavlenko, 2007), or more appropriately, their adventures both during and after the program. they revisited and reflected on their past and narrated stories (cf. subject reality in pavlenko, 2007). while they were narrating their stories, as we recall, we started interpreting or co-constructing their stories with them, which is known as “narrative knowledging.” narrative knowledging refers to “meaning making, learning, and knowledge construction that takes place at all stages of a narrative research project” (barkhuizen, 2011, p. 395). identity development through study abroad experiences: storied accounts 479 the narrative knowledging process was also quite active when we mentally reconstructed their orally narrated stories and put them into writing as a coherent whole (cf. text reality in pavlenko, 2007). we did not transcribe the interviews or ask participants to write their own stories, out of concern that they might use different writing styles, such as formal versus informal, which could cause problems in our analyses. in writing up the participants’ stories, we sought to interpret and understand their experiences to produce coherent stories. we repeated the process of listening to the recorded interviews and writing (or revising) drafts before finalizing the stories. it was a process of determining if our interpretation was systematic, dependable, and meaningful (brown, 2014). we then asked the participants to verify their stories. this whole process, which was integral to a deeper understanding of participants’ experiences, gave shape to the final stories. 3. stories 3.1. miki’s story i chose english as my major even though i was not confident about my english ability. even after i started school, i was not active in seeking opportunities to meet foreign people. i sensed a barrier between japan and the outside world and thus i kept a distance from foreign people. i realize now that i was the one that built a barrier where there was none. during the kakehashi tour in 2013, i was a member of the group whose presentation theme was the 3.11 earthquake disaster. i was thrilled to be sharing first-hand experiences with people in the us. we were lucky because we had an attentive audience every place we presented – at universities and at local community centers. i felt happy knowing that many foreign students were learning japanese and going through difficulties in learning the language, just as we had our difficulties with learning english. it was also a good experience to work with fellow and senior japanese students who were sharing the same objectives for the tour. i felt as though the older students in my school were my role models. some of the tour participants enjoyed a reunion with american college students who had previously visited our school as part of another kakehashi exchange tour. our 10-day tour to the us made me realize that foreign countries are “just around the corner, not beyond our reach,” and that foreign people are our neighbors. after i came back, i began seeking opportunities to meet foreign people and became active in international exchange events. the most important decision i made was to take a 1-year leave from school to go to germany and learn the language. i made the plan by myself. although it was a challenge, i wanted an opportunity to learn another foreign language because i felt that i had not harumi kimura, brenda hayashi 480 done anything significant or special during my university years. i thought that my university years were the only time that i could have the freedom to do what i really desire. i wanted to exercise that freedom and make use of the time available. at first, my father did not support my plan. as a traditional father, he decides everything for our family, and i knew it would be difficult to gain his support. he had good reasons for not giving me quick approval, considering the considerable cost, the postponement of my graduation due to the extension of my time at university, and the difficulty in learning a new target language. i took every measure to persuade him, strategically revising my original plan and presenting details of all the possible costs and benefits. i argued that learning another language in addition to english and becoming functional in more than one foreign language is the “way to go.” looking back, i feel that i have never been as assertive or strategic in my life. after a series of presentations and negotiations, i finally succeeded in persuading him – my father gave me the “go ahead.” i think he purposely challenged me because he wanted to make sure that i was serious. in fact, we became closer after this confrontation. in germany, i did a homestay while learning german at a language school. i came to appreciate various aspects of german culture. for example, german people value their private lives – in particular, time spent with their family and friends. also, it is common for a german mother and son to have their shoulders touching while sitting on a sofa and watching television. german daughters say quite openly, “i love my father.” for japanese parents, earning money to support their families financially is of primary importance. we often hear fathers making statements such as, “i’m too busy to spend time with my family.” we do not hear teenagers say, “i love my father/mother.” although these differences might be simply cultural, i do respect german people who treasure their family life and family relationships. while in germany, i also realized that japanese people are great. they are punctual and abide by rules, and they have good manners. i took these things for granted because i had lived in japan for about 20 years and never knew what it was like to live outside of the country. after i graduate, i will obtain a job as an airline cabin attendant. rather than engaging in paperwork all day, i would prefer to work in the service industry, as i enjoy meeting and communicating with people. japan is known for its hospitality, omotenashi. working as a cabin attendant would give me a great opportunity to acquire the skills and know-how to be respectful and hospitable in welcoming guests. however, working for an airline is not my final goal. i would like to live and work in germany at some point in the future, and i hope my cabin attendant experience will be helpful in obtaining a job. although i believe that interpersonal skills, such as hospitality, are versatile and universal to some extent, i need to remain open-minded and flexible in order to adjust to identity development through study abroad experiences: storied accounts 481 cultural differences. there are many japanese communities in germany. in dusseldorf, for example, there are japanese schools, facilities, and shops. i have certificates for teaching english to junior and senior high school students and for managing school libraries. i may try to find a teaching job or another job at a school. i suspect that if i had not participated in the kakehashi project, i would not have tried the 1-year study abroad in germany and most likely i would not have taken action. 3.2. sachi’s story the kakehashi experience helped to change my perspectives on life. while participating in the kakehashi project, we made presentations on traditional and contemporary japanese culture including school cultures, as well as on the 2011 tohoku earthquake and tsunami. the audience was able to understand what we were trying to convey in english, and the fact that we were successful was an unforgettable experience. we interacted not only with university students, but also with local people. what i remember most from the project was the face-to-face interactions with local people – or “ordinary people” – who are, say, in lower socio-economic groups. i am ashamed to admit this, but i was quite prejudiced about these kinds of people before the actual person-to-person interactions. i had a skewed view that such people were “scary.” however, i discovered that i was completely wrong. the local people we met at community centers were friendly and compassionate. they were attentive listeners at our presentations, showed genuine interest in what we had to share, and made us believe that we were successful communicators. they also made me realize that i should be mindful about the prejudices i might unconsciously possess. i would not have been able to meet these people if i had not taken part in the kakehashi program. the overseas experience, i believe, helped me to become more open-minded and appreciative of diversity. even before the kakehashi project, i had been thinking of joining a longer study abroad program during my university years, but the 10-day experience firmly pushed me into participating. i wanted to learn firsthand about people in the outside world and get into “their ways of living.” this became my desire. at university, before the kakehashi trip, i was aloof and admittedly a bit arrogant. i failed the university entrance examination of my choice. my school was not where i wanted to be. after matriculation, i was not happy about my school life or the other students in my department. i was not able to respect them because they did not seem attractive to me. but through the experiences i gained from kakehashi and the 1-year exchange study abroad program in ohio i later joined, i came to enjoy communication with people of different backgrounds and views. i learned that diversity exists even among japanese students harumi kimura, brenda hayashi 482 in the same department of the same university. some may not score as high in academics, but they are full of ideas that would not occur to me. they are also serious about the world they live in and their own future careers. let’s stop being irritable and unappreciative of them, i told myself. i then began to interact with a variety of people and have enjoyable talks with other students in my department. i also made friends with students of other majors in my school. during the 1-year program in ohio, i was in esl classes during the first semester, and i attended regular classes in the second semester. i was the only international student in the discussion class. i was given a heavy reading assignment and naturally i had to express myself in english class. through the course, i discovered that the higher my own self-expectations, the more i learned. when i did not feel confident about myself and made compromises, it was obvious and eventually made me unhappy. when i believed i could do something, i was capable of doing it. we should not set limits on what we can do. the negative effect of setting limits is not just about myself – it is also about education in general. besides attending classes and visiting local schools for observation, i also helped two japanese students in the community to learn english. one of them was a boy about ten years of age. i thought he was very smart, but his mother would often scold him by saying: “why can’t you do this?” having high expectations does not mean pointing out what you cannot do and reinforcing negative feelings. instead, i believe, high expectations represent a belief about what one will be able to do in the future. when i told his mother he would do fine, she started to cry. it looked as if she wanted to believe in him, but could not for some reason. i think she was caught or trapped in what her boy should be able to do “now.” despite her good intentions, she was unknowingly setting limits on her son and herself. with this and other experiences, i learned to think deeper. i used to avoid careful thinking on any subject and i was happy that way; however, i realized that this was the wrong attitude. thinking deeply opens up new ways of looking at things. i am studying learner-centered approaches to language teaching at graduate school now. before i became a graduate student, i had a choice: teaching english at a private language school or studying education in a graduate program. while i was deciding, my mother suggested that i should go to graduate school before obtaining a job, because learning is “now or never.” i’m glad i followed her suggestion. when i was an undergraduate doing student teaching, i was more concerned about my teaching. i worried about how my teaching was going and how much fun students were having in my classes. i now know it is more important that students learn, which helps them determine what they will do in the future. teachers (as well as parents) need vision and patience. i appreciate what i am learning at school now. identity development through study abroad experiences: storied accounts 483 3.3. risako’s story i joined kakehashi when i was deciding how to spend my university years. toward the end of the program, one of the local escorts in his late thirties told all of us: “where there is no bridge, we will build one.” i thought that was exactly what he and the other program escorts were doing. i have kept that phrase in mind ever since. i had been interested in italy since i was a high school student. back then, i read a comic book written by kimidori inoue (inoue, 2009). she had visited italy, bulgaria, indonesia, and los angeles and investigated people’s dietary habits and the kinds of food people ate in those places. a book on her experiences and investigations was published, and of all the places mentioned, i became most interested in italy. at my school, i majored in intercultural studies. my school is one of the two schools in tohoku that provides italian language courses, so i was lucky to be able to start learning italian as my second foreign language. during the kakehashi program, i was impressed to see that the older students from my school were actually “using english” spontaneously. they were not just reciting from memory, but talking to their audience and communicating with people. they’re cool and i’d like to be like them, i thought. to become an italian language user, i would have to study in the country where the language is used and immerse myself in the culture. otherwise, it would be impossible to become fluent, as language and culture are inseparable. my group’s topic for our presentation was the “japanese mind.” we introduced the tea ceremony, flower arranging, and traditional folk songs – all part of our japanese cultural heritage. in planning the presentation, i thought deeply about my own culture and what defines culture. i was also able to work with other team members to create our unique presentation. it was a good experience to plan both the kind of introduction presentation and how to accomplish it. we spent long hours together before we left for the us, and we continued discussing and revising our presentation during the trip. after kakehashi, i enjoyed my school life more than ever because i had made friends with the older students and other group members during the program. in the meantime, i applied to become a member of a group of students who would visit taiwan to thank the citizens for their support after the great east japan earthquake. i was accepted for the 10-day trip and i made friends with taiwanese students. i then went to italy for a 1-month study abroad trip and studied the language at a local language school. i also took part in an italian speech contest and received fourth place. i applied to the tobitate program, another government-funded program for young people. i was accepted and placed in the intermediate/advanced class. while staying in italy, i spoke the language all the time. i communicated in italian even with other harumi kimura, brenda hayashi 484 japanese speakers. i also joined internship programs and experienced agritourism firsthand. i stayed in italy for a year. during my internship programs, i learned a valuable lesson. japanese people think ahead about what others need and try to provide help without waiting for a request. we try to “sense” the need of others and provide support even before they ask for it. however, italian people understand others’ needs when they are reminded of them, which is a big difference in attitudes. these differences in attitudes are found everywhere. for example, japanese people are, in general, very punctual, while italian people are not. of course, there are always exceptions. some italian people are actually punctual (and interestingly, they love japanese culture). when i had an appointment with these people, i tried to be on time. in other cases, i knew people tended to be late, so i did not have to worry about being late. because punctuality depends on the other party, i learned to become more flexible. italian food is popular in japan, but we do not have many tourists from italy or italian exchange students. not many japanese people speak italian. i wanted to promote a better relationship between the two countries and make a difference, but i was unsure of how to do it. after graduating from college, i wanted to join the japan foundation, an independent administrative institution established to foster mutual understanding and trusting relationships between japan and the world through culture, language, and dialogue. in fact, the organization has a major role in the kakehashi project. one of their employees joined the tour and helped escort us in the us. recently, i took the test to work at the institution. i passed the first stage, the writing test, but failed in the second stage, the interview. i believe that i was lacking real-life experiences. all of the other applicants who made it through the first stage looked older than i, in their late twenties. they seemed to know each other and i assumed that they had majored in italian at university. at the time of the interview, i was still a university senior without any job experience. although i was disappointed when i failed to get the job, i now know what i need to do in order to change (turn) my dream into reality. i will soon obtain a job at a travel agency. at this job, i will be tasked with planning, promoting, and escorting foreign travel tours. i feel fortunate because if i worked for another travel agency, i would only be able to do one of these tasks. i’d like to experience all jobs related to organizing travel tours. with some experience at the travel agency, i will retake the test for the japan foundation or seek other job opportunities at the ministry of foreign affairs or at affiliated institutions. there should be various opportunities for me to be “a bridge for tomorrow between japan and italy.” identity development through study abroad experiences: storied accounts 485 4. results 4.1. critical experiences at the beginning of the interview, all three interviewees shared what they thought were critical experiences of joining the program and how such experiences affected their self-understanding, world-view, and outlook on life. miki had doubts about her english skills and her motivation to learn english did not seem to be strong before joining the program. however, during her time in the us program, as a member of a group presentation, she shared responsibility with other members to complete their official mission of promoting japan. miki was happy to be welcomed, accepted, and understood by her audience. in this way, she gained self-confidence as an l2 user and strengthened her l2 learning motivation. she was then able to present her desired self-image, an aspect of her identity as a skillful l2 user (e.g., dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014; hessel, 2015). through such opportunities, she likely became aware of herself as someone who could pursue and achieve a goal. this self-reevaluation also made her more open-minded toward new cultures and proactive in communicating with foreign people. sachi failed the entrance examination of a prestigious university and was not happy or comfortable with her current school, her school life, or her friends – that is, the whole environment of her university life. she was not able to fit in socially with other students who she thought were less intelligent and uninteresting. she developed a dislike for her situation and distanced herself from other students in her department. however, interacting with socially and economically disadvantaged americans forced her to confront her biased, judgmental, and ethnocentric attitudes. they were generous, friendly, and genuinely curious about what she had to share with them. this experience literally transformed her. she became determined to communicate with anyone who happened to be around her. thus, the program offered her a chance to learn about the person she aspired to be. miki and risako found senior members as their role models (murphey, 1996). both students said that their seniors had performed amazingly, expressing themselves in english and actively seeking opportunities to speak up and communicate with local people. miki and risako developed a desire to be like the seniors and formulated an image they wish to become as l2 learners (dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014). risako also encountered a salient image of the person she aspired to be. near the end of the program, a local escort of the tour referred to the japanese expression kakehashi when he talked to all the participants. he said, “where there is no bridge, we will build one.” in english, the core meaning of the word, bridge, is a physical structure built over a road. its japanese counterpart is hashi. on the other hand, kakehashi in modern japanese is usually a mental bridge, a go-between, or a harumi kimura, brenda hayashi 486 mediator often between two groups of people. the founders of the program had this in mind when they named the study abroad project kakehashi. the concept of a mental bridge helped risako regulate her thinking and create future visions. 4.2. actions upon return the three interviewees talked to us about what actions they took after they returned. all of them renewed their l2 learning motivation, made longer study abroad plans, and put their plan into practice during their university years. besides english, miki learned german in germany and risako studied italian in italy. these students made up their minds to be multilingual and started to accomplish this goal. sachi combined l2 learning with academic pursuits and studied education in the us. it was not easy for miki to convince her father to agree to her plan for an extension of her university years and a study abroad in germany to learn the language. she presented the plan, but her father did not immediately approve. her father had been the decision-maker for her family, as in traditional japanese families, so miki had to negotiate with him. in response to her father’s rejection, she critically evaluated and reformulated her plan to convince him that it was feasible and meaningful for her future career to be able to use multiple languages. it is worth noting that she actually used the word presentation in japanese when confronting her father. it is a loan word, and although the core meaning stays the same as in english, the japanese counterpart is only appropriate for tangible formal events. however, she intentionally used the word to make the event “formal” in her thinking and doing. as we understand it, presentation was effectively used in her storytelling to externalize the formality both miki and her father must have internally felt. in fact, miki made her own decision, took full responsibility for her actions, and started moving toward independence. after attending esl classes for a semester as an exchange student in ohio, sachi entered a regular university program to study education and became committed to humanistic, student-centered approaches. when she tutored a japanese boy in the us, she helped his mother to deal with her own personal hardship – raising a child in a foreign environment. at first, sachi did not empathize with his mother and thought she was strict and unloving. however, she eventually understood the mother’s plight, made an imaginative leap into her mind, and lent her support. we understand that sachi converted her tentative evaluation into the motivation to provide help to the boy because she felt his mother’s pain and understood her vulnerability – that is, she developed empathy toward others. sachi put into practice what she had learned from books and in class, became genuinely involved with the son and his mother at a difficult time, and tackled the situation with confidence and empathy. identity development through study abroad experiences: storied accounts 487 risako’s actions and cognitive development after joining the project were mediated by the mental bridge metaphor, and one action led to another: a trip to taiwan, a short study abroad in italy, a speech contest, and participation in another government-sponsored program. it is safe to say that she established her relationship to the world through the concept of a go-between and integrated it into her mind and behavior. for example, one short snippet from risako’s story about the punctuality of italians is intriguing, even though she spoke jokingly. depending on the community she was currently in, risako chose to behave in a way she considered most appropriate – that is, like italians in general or italians who she thought were more concerned about punctuality and loved japanese culture. risako made an interesting observation, which seemed to indicate her enhanced cultural sensitivity and flexibility as she herself narrated. as a go-between, she needed to be able to appreciate each different culture in its unique way. moreover, it is also important to note that whichever behavior she chose to perform, the goal was the same: maintaining good social relationships. this is a good example of learning as problem-solving in social settings. to recap, all three participants made the most of their kakehashi experiences, developed new enthusiasm for overseas study, made their own choices, and experienced longer-term, deeper immersion in the target language cultures. each story was unique, but successful experiences of the short-term program led to stronger l2 learning motivation, a clearer purpose of l2 learning, and firmer determination and desire to learn even more. 5. discussion in this paper, we shared three stories by short-term study abroad program participants about their l2-learning-mediated personal growth. a very short stay abroad like the kakehashi project can create valuable opportunities for learning and growth when participants experience meeting and communicating with local people and establish emotional bonds through reciprocal appreciation. the participants presented themselves primarily not as l2 learners of english but as l2 users who went to the us to enhance the local community’s understanding of japan and to seek a deeper mutual understanding. their goals were more than personal since the participants had an official mission to represent japanese youth. this particular context created a concrete responsibility and greatly mattered in setting the stage for purposeful l2 communication. the program offered grassroots opportunities to achieve its objectives. the participants embraced the opportunities and felt that they had successfully completed their mission. this success would not have happened, however, if the participants had not been accepted and welcomed by the local people. acceptance in the new harumi kimura, brenda hayashi 488 l2 environment is crucial in order for study abroad participants to learn and grow (benson et al., 2013). it was fortunate that the kakehashi participants had attentive, compassionate audiences. at one of the community centers, an informal gathering after the official presentation lasted longer than it was scheduled. at stanford, after a language class had officially ended, local students voluntarily joined a campus tour and lunch at the student cafeteria. success of study abroad programs depends upon the willingness of local hosts to stay, talk, and work with the study abroad participants, whose learning and growth are situated in the l2 contexts and mediated by using the l2s (e.g., lantolf, 2000). although the focus of the program was not l2 learning, all three participants became motivated to learn different l2s and seemed to develop l2 skills after returning home. miki decided to learn german and acquired a sufficient command of the language for everyday exchanges. sachi studied education in a regular undergraduate program and tutored in the us. risako did an internship to learn agritourism and attained a level of italian that matched foreign language university graduates. their achievements suggest that l2 learning can continue after a short stay if learners are inspired during the program and undertake some meaningful actions in relation to l2 learning on their own after returning from the program. we think that the three participants understood the power of l2 knowledge in intercultural communication and developed curiosity toward other cultures and people. miki believed that becoming functional in more than one foreign language was the “way to go.” sachi described her motive as getting into “their ways of living.” risako mentioned the significance of immersing herself in the different cultures. our interpretation was that the study abroad experiences initiated the participants’ desire to cross geographical, linguistic, and cultural borders. as we have observed, each participant’s “whole person” learning and growth were situated in l2 contexts and mediated by learning and using l2s. as such, we suspect their l2 abilities and life skills have been developing in tandem, although the relationship between language and personal goals can be complex and even mosaic. through their endeavors, miki became more independent and nurtured negotiating, decision-making, and problem-solving skills. sachi became more self-aware and learned empathy. risako developed social skills and became more committed to making friends and fostering friendships with people in another culture. while they were working on and acquiring these life skills, their l2 knowledge and skills helped them to explore and expand their current and aspirational identities. a way to describe participants’ linguistic and personal development is that they nurtured multicompetence (cook, 2013). multicompetence is defined as “the knowledge of more than one language in the same mind or in the same community” and it “involves the whole mind of the speaker” (cook, 2013, p. identity development through study abroad experiences: storied accounts 489 3769). examples included miki appreciating the distinct parent-child relationships between germany and japan, sachi performing as a caring educator in a multicultural context, and risako becoming more flexible between practices of two communities in terms of strictness or leniency in regards to punctuality. multicompetence definitely goes beyond linguistic abilities. one contrast this study makes with past studies is that miki and risako thought highly of their fellow program participants – co-nationals – as role models (murphey, 1996) and valued their presence. they saw older students and fellow members performing successfully as l2 communicators in real situations and recognized ideal images of skilled l2 users. moreover, after returning home, risako started enjoying her school life more thanks to fellow participants in the same program, while sachi appreciated the presence of different types of students in her department and school. in contrast, coleman (2013), for example, conducted an extensive literature review on the negative influences of fellow participants or same nationals in the same program and pointed out a frequent finding: socializing with the same l1 speakers without mixing and mingling with speakers of other l1s or locals posed an obstacle in producing expected outcomes. we can only speculate the reasons for the different views on peers in the kakehashi program. members were on the road together during the program, developed close relationships, and came to see each other not as other l2 learners, but as thinking and feeling fellow human beings, which contributed to a deeper mutual understanding and respect. this exploratory study has three implications for future study abroad programs. first, short-term programs do not have to focus on l2 learning; with some inspirational experiences, l2 learning can happen later. second, the programs need to provide purposeful opportunities for communication with local, supportive people and for authentic communicative purposes beyond practice and exposure. in this way, participants can become actively engaged and communicate through meaningful activities with people both in and outside the program. third, it may be a good idea for short-term, study abroad programs to target first-year students, who have ample time to make use of the experience in their university years. however, this does not mean that short-term programs like the kakehashi project are not feasible for older students. the effects of such programs may appear later in life after deep reflection and other life experiences. there are two major shortcomings of this study. first, we were not able to receive feedback from one of the participants about the stories we wrote in time for publication. second, we had to compromise in combining both the participants’ stories and our analyses in one paper. we had a choice between shortening the stories or our analyses, and we decided to publish their stories as told to us and keep the analyses short. although it is unusual to publish whole stories harumi kimura, brenda hayashi 490 in one journal article, the last phase of narrative knowledging is for the reader to interpret the text reality (barkhuizen, 2011; pavlenko, 2007), and as such, the decision to have stories speak for themselves was a matter of priority. for further studies, we propose two lines of research. first, study abroad experiences need to be explored in relation to a variety of affective variables, as studies on l2 learning in general have started to cover different kinds of affect (dewaele, petrides, & furnham, 2008; macintyre & gregersen, 2012). second, in this time of globalization, japanese learners of l2s who experience intercultural contacts in domestic contexts – not just through study abroad – should also be investigated, such as the study by dörnyei, csizér, and németh (2006) with regard to hungarian learners. to conclude, although the stay was short, the three participants appreciated joining the program, perceived it as a life-changing event, and made use of their program experiences. in their stories, they shared experiences they perceived as critical. the official program goal played a crucial role in communicating with locals for reciprocal understanding, and the participants’ perceived success of intercultural contact helped generate stronger motivation and desire to learn l2s and become better people. in fact, upon returning home, the three learners all sought another, longer study abroad for immersion in another culture and their future career paths. we believe that the study abroad experiences, as well as on-site and subsequent l2 learning and usage, mediated their personal identity development. 6. conclusion this study investigated the life trajectory of three l2 learners who had participated in a short-term study abroad program four years ago. we focused on their experiences during the program, lessons they gleaned as direct results, and the actions they took upon their return to japan. we analyzed the learners’ storied accounts and found that their communication in an l2 with local people for reciprocal understanding and perceptions of successful intercultural contact led the learners to further inquiry, adventures, and last but not least, l2 learning. local hosts, fellow participants, and program escorts all inspired the three participants and helped them to cross borders. the significance of others in providing opportunities for identity development should not be downplayed in any context. acknowledgements we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and insightful suggestions. identity development through study abroad experiences: storied accounts 491 references allport, g. w., clark, k., & pettigrew, t. 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(2010). the effects of international volunteer work experiences on intercultural competence of japanese youth. international journal of intercultural relations, 34(3), 268-282. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2009.12.003 581 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (4). 2019. 581-606 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.4.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt exploring teachers’ and learners’ overlapped turns in the language classroom: implications for classroom interactional competence marco octavio cancino avila universidad andres bello, santiago, chile https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2450-8197 marco.cancino@unab.cl abstract the language choices that teachers make in the language classroom have been found to influence the opportunities for learning given to learners (seedhouse, 2004; walsh, 2012; waring, 2009, 2011). the present study expands on research addressing learner-initiated contributions (garton, 2012; jacknick, 2011; waring, reddington, & tadic, 2016; yataganbaba & yıldırım, 2016) by demonstrating that opportunities for participation and learning can be promoted when teachers allow learners to expand and finish their overlapped turns. audio recordings of lessons portraying language classroom interaction from three teachers in an adult foreign language classroom (efl) setting were analyzed and discussed through conversation analysis (ca) methodology. findings suggest that when teachers are able to navigate overlapping talk in such a way that provides interactional space for learners to complete their contributions, they demonstrate classroom interactional competence (sert, 2015; walsh, 2006). the present study contributes to the literature by addressing interactional features that increase interactional space, and an approach to teacher and learner talk that highlights ca’s methodological advantages in capturing the interactional nuances of classroom discourse. keywords: conversation analysis; classroom discourse; classroom interactional competence; teacher-learner overlap marco octavio cancino avila 582 1. introduction over the last 30 years, the relevance of approaches to classroom interaction that emphasize social aspects of learning has become apparent (kumaravadivelu, 1993, 1999; seedhouse, 2004; sert, 2015, 2017; van lier, 1988; walsh, 2006, 2013). in the same way, perspectives that include interaction as a crucial component of second language acquisition (sla), such as conversation analysis (ca; kasper & wagner, 2011), have informed second language (l2) and related pedagogy. this recent empirical and methodological shift has led researchers to focus on the interactional aspects of classroom discourse. furthermore, the sociocultural view of “learning as participation” has been gaining relevance within this context as it regards participation as an essential component of classroom interaction (brouwer & wagner, 2004; he, 2004; mondada & pekarek, 2004). from this perspective, learning is regarded as a culturally embedded process that takes place by means of social interaction, where learners depend on their repeated participation in activities with more competent interlocutors in order to succeed in language learning (hall & verplaetse, 2000). a key element here is the idea that participation, either with peers or with a more competent target language user, is pivotal to l2 learning. this perspective regards learning as “doing,” rather than just as “having” (sfard, 1998); that is, learning is seen as a social process fueled by participation, and not as a static product in learners’ minds. a construct that is particularly relevant to the language classroom and teacher practice is classroom interactional competence (cic; sert, 2015; walsh, 2006, 2011), which refers to “teachers’ and learners’ ability to use interaction as a tool for mediating and assisting learning” (walsh, 2006, p. 158). this concept derives from interactional competence, a term first posited by kramsch (1986), who called for a focus on the ability of learners to communicate meanings and reach joint understandings as a measure of performance, rather than assessing learners’ fluency and accuracy against a native-like standard. according to markee (2008), interactional competence is developed by learning the formal features of a language without disregarding turn-taking, repair and sequence organization systems, as well as paralinguistic features (i.e., gaze, body movement, etc.). in order to develop interactional competence learners must deploy those resources “to co-construct with their interlocutors locally enacted, progressively more accurate, fluent, and complex interactional repertoires in the l2” (p. 406). the notion of cic is also highlighted by van lier’s (2000) ecological view of language learning as it stresses the importance of the context and the relevance of the verbal and non-verbal interaction carried out by teachers and learners, and by learners and other learners. from an ecological perspective, learning is not found inside the learner’s head; rather, it lies in the gradual development exploring teachers’ and learners’ overlapped turns in the language classroom: implications for. . . 583 of mechanisms employed to deal with the meanings embedded in the world. if participants become aware of their environment, they will be able to discern which features that are part of that environment are likely to be useful for the learning process. van lier utilizes the term affordance taken from psychological research to label the relationship between active learners and these features, and regards interaction as a crucial element of the process. this view of learning has implications for pedagogy because learners’ activities in the classroom must be structured in such a way that access to interaction and participation is available and encouraged (van lier, 2000). within this perspective that highlights learning as participation, the present study sought to examine aspects of interaction in the context of the adult english as a foreign language (efl) classroom. analysis was focused on techniques by means of which teachers orient to learner overlapped and latched utterances. the former refer to simultaneous talk between teacher and learners, while the latter take place when a learner’s utterance immediately follows the teacher’s contribution. these techniques can create interactional space and promote opportunities for participation and learning in the researched context. furthermore, it is argued that being sensitive to learners’ attempts to develop and finish their contributions can promote opportunities for participation and learning within a cic framework. the co-constructed behaviors of teachers and students illustrated in the present study were analyzed by means of ca, a data-driven, empirical approach to the analysis of social interaction which seeks to discover systematic features present in the sequencing organization of talk (lazaraton, 2004), and understand how people engage in social activities by means of such features (hutchby & wooffitt, 2008). ca’s empirical interest in the identification and analysis of systematic features of interaction has been found to inform an approach to classroom discourse that seeks to detail interactional practices that facilitate or hinder opportunities for participation in the language classroom (walsh, 2002; waring, reddington, & tadic, 2016). even though the extent to which the observation and analysis of socially shared cognition can count as hard evidence for learning is still a contentious issue (kasper, 2009), work has been done to conceptualize cognition as being publicly available through interaction (markee, 2008, 2015; pekarek doehler, 2010; sert, 2017). researchers have suggested that as learners engage in learning, it becomes possible to analyze their co-constructed social activities, have access to cognitive processes by focusing on the details of social interaction (such as repair, hesitation, repetition, gaze and gesture), and even document changes through time that go beyond the adaptation to a particular interactional context. this highlights the idea that a conversation analytic approach to language learning can illuminate how meanings are being articulated in the moment-bymoment interaction and show how opportunities for participation and learning marco octavio cancino avila 584 can be maximized by allowing learners to articulate those meanings through the “methods” (pekarek doehler, 2010) they have at their disposal to accomplish intersubjectivity and maintain social order. thus, a conversation analytic approach was utilized in the present study to illustrate the way in which efl teachers orient to learner overlapped and latched utterances, and how their momentby-moment decisions in this respect can facilitate or hinder opportunities for learning and participation. 2. literature review 2.1. increasing interactional space creating and nurturing interactional space is a critical aspect of cic as learners are given the opportunity to make contributions to the conversation and to receive feedback on them (sert, 2015; walsh, 2012). this can be done by increasing waittime and planning time, by reducing the amount of times teachers fill classroom silence (by means of reducing teacher echo and turn completion), by providing them with feedback that is convergent with the classroom agenda, and by allowing learners to produce extended turns (walsh, 2006, 2013). particularly, allowing learners to produce extended contributions is central to promoting participation and engagement in the classroom. this has been researched in a number of environments and with an emphasis on specific interactional features. for example, cancino (2015) investigated the use of back-channeling tokens such as uh-huh and okay, and found that participation is more likely to emerge when these features are used at specific moments in the interaction as a means of giving confidence to learners as they attempt to develop a topic. however, teachers must be sensitive to the negotiation of meaning sequences prompted by learners in their discourse. as cancino suggested, when teachers decide to fill up space with backchannel tokens instead of producing clarification requests or confirmation checks when intersubjectivity, that is, the maintenance of the overall coherence of talk and mutual understanding, is at stake, potentially meaningful exchanges are lost. this is in line with waring (2008), who found that explicit positive assessment, that is, teacher utterances that contain positive feedback terms such as good, very good, excellent, and perfect, can hinder learning in certain contexts by discouraging further discussion about valid alternatives. 2.2. research on learner-initiated contributions research on learner-initiated contributions has addressed the way in which teachers’ management of particular episodes can promote or hinder learner exploring teachers’ and learners’ overlapped turns in the language classroom: implications for. . . 585 participation and engagement. for example, waring (2009) demonstrated how miyuki, a japanese learner of english as a second language, was able to step outside a traditional initiation-response-feedback (irf) sequence during a routine homework checking activity and engage in successful learner-initiated negotiation. this negotiation, according to waring, is more critically accomplished during teacher-whole class interactions rather than in pair work or group work, as the shift from the irf sequence to a more engaged participation pattern was coordinated by the teacher. expanding on the idea of learner initiation as a source for promoting l2 learning (waring, 2009) and learner agency (donato, 2000; van lier, 1988), waring (2011) looked into learner initiative and how teachers can encourage those instances. she developed a typology of learner initiative by analyzing 14 hours of audio and video recordings of adult esl classroom interactions with different levels of proficiency and cultural backgrounds. she found three types of learner initiative: “learner selfselects to initiate a sequence,” “learner self-selects to volunteer a response,” and “learner exploits an assigned turn to initiate a sequence.” these initiations were found to prompt instances of knowledge display and contribute to more symmetrical teacher-student talk (van lier, 1996). as waring suggests, it is likely that the frequency and types of initiatives taken by learners are affected by the classroom context (e.g., english as a second or foreign language, communication-oriented-language-oriented) and the pedagogical focus at the time. similarly, garton (2012) explored learner initiative and how learners can direct the interaction in teacherfronted exchanges. she analyzed audio recordings of english as a foreign language (efl) learners at different proficiency levels attending evening classes. she found that, by taking control of the turn-taking, learners were able to engage in complex interactional work. however, instances portraying learner initiative were more prominent in pedagogical contexts that did not promote learner fluency and meaning making (e.g., accuracy-focused contexts), which suggests that learners are less willing to initiate a turn when it requires them to convey opinions and ideas. also focusing on learner initiative, sert (2017) characterized a prediction activity as an important site for language learning and meaningful exchanges as efl teachers at a secondary school in turkey displayed a number of interactional resources to manage learner initiative and promote learner participation in such instances. the resources included embedded correction and the addition of para-linguistic features, that is, gestures, in the handling of learner initiative. sert argues that the type of cic enacted through such interactional resources could potentially promote l2 learning as learners were found to use newly learned items in subsequent interactions in the classroom. finally, jacknick (2011) examined how esl learners are able to challenge teacher-initiated activity transitions and go back to a previous topic by redirecting talk. by analyzing several instances portraying teacher shifts between and within activities, jacknick found that learners can use activity transitions to their advantage marco octavio cancino avila 586 by negotiating interactional space with their teachers when none is provided by them. this highlights the co-constructed nature of teacher talk and the importance of the teacher in this process, as she will be required to “cede conversational space to students even when she has not allotted it to them” (p. 34). the present study expands on the current research on learner-initiated contributions by focusing on empirical data portraying how teachers navigate instances where learners pursue their own interactional goals which may be in contrast with the teacher's own goals at a particular moment. thus, the focus is placed on episodes where there is no shift in the pedagogical goal at a particular interactional juncture, that is, where the goal of eliciting participation in a given classroom context remains intact, and where the overlapped/latched contribution produced by the learner may or may not attempt to trigger a topic shift, as the pedagogical goal of eliciting participation will be upheld in both cases. throughout the analysis, it will be argued that letting learners develop and finish their contributions can promote opportunities for participation, which can potentially lead to learning. within this pedagogical context, the analysis will also address the effect that learner-initiated talk can have on teachers’ verbal behavior when these utterances are produced as meaningful contributions that overlap a teacher’s turn or are immediately latched onto one another. building upon cic, it will be argued that an appropriate reaction to such interactional events (i.e., a reaction that promotes participation and learning) requires a great deal of sensitivity towards such instances, which must be accompanied by a willingness to give up the floor. the manner in which the teacher manages a contribution initiated by a learner (whether it is in overlap with the teacher’s utterance or latched onto it) can create opportunities for learning, and this will depend on the interactional strategies utilized by the teachers and the way they accomplish their rights and obligations in a goal-oriented setting such as the language classroom. 2.3. concepts relevant to the analysis a relevant feature of ca, and one that will inform the analysis, is the notion of turn constructional unit (tcu; sacks, schegloff, & jefferson, 1974). turns at talk are made up of tcus which are highly dependent on the sequential context in which a given interaction is embedded. these units can consist of a range of linguistic units such as sentences, clauses or lexical constructions, or can be made up of non-verbal elements such as silence, laughter, or body movements.1 1 in the example given liddicoat (2011), the lexical unit at is recognized as a tcu by the mother. the dependence of tcus on context can be clearly seen in how the mother is able to regard that single lexical unit as a meaningful turn: exploring teachers’ and learners’ overlapped turns in the language classroom: implications for. . . 587 tcus usually end with points of possible completion. these points tell interlocutors when a turn is finished or is about to be finished, and speaker change becomes possible as a next action; that is to say, they allow potential speaker change in a way that is not disruptive to the conversation. such points are labelled transition relevance places (trp; sacks et al., 1974). in the present study, overlap is regarded as a superordinate concept that refers simply to simultaneous talk (schegloff, 2000); that is, it refers to where a second speaker produces an utterance while the first speaker’s utterance is still ongoing. more specifically, the focus in the extracts is placed on instances where a learner contribution overlaps the teacher’s tcu. in addition, the focus is placed on latched utterances that immediately follow an incomplete teacher tcu (i.e., when the teacher’s utterance has not reached a trp). in the analysis, the segments containing episodes portraying teacher-learner overlap and latched utterances belong to a specific lesson stage identified by walsh (2006), namely, the classroom context mode (ccm). this mode shares similarities with the meaning and fluency context identified by seedhouse (2004) as both are characterized by opportunities for interaction provided by teachers. in the ccm, learners are encouraged to talk about their feelings, emotions, experiences and attitudes that are embedded in their own cultural backgrounds. extended learner turns are managed mostly by the learners themselves, with the teacher producing short turns that will usually take the form of direct repair (to fix a breakdown in communication), content feedback (feedback on meaning, as opposed to feedback on form), and backchannel feedback. a mode that allows meaningful communication such as the ccm is relevant to classroom research because it is a facet of classroom interaction whose intricacies are usually left aside in teacher training courses even though it is a crucial stage where learners must be prompted to engage in conversation and make meaningful contributions (cancino, 2017). thus, the research questions that will be answered in the present study are: 1. how do efl teachers manage overlapping learner talk? 2. how do efl teachers’ interactional decisions regarding overlapping learner talk hinder/facilitate opportunities for participation and learning? 1 ther: what kind of work do you do? 2 mother: food service 3 → ther: at? 4 mother: (a) / (uh) post office cafeteria downtown main post office on redwood 5 ther: °okay° (liddicoat, 2011, p. 55) marco octavio cancino avila 588 3. methodology 3.1. context of the study and participants the data analyzed in the present paper come from three teachers and their students in an adult efl classroom at a language institute in santiago, chile. the participants were audio-recorded in six lessons delivered as part of a 10-week course. the teachers had at least one year of experience teaching in those courses and were teaching elementary and upper-intermediate level classes. the students were adult professionals who sought to advance their language proficiency to gain access to international scholarships and enhance their job prospects. the number of participants in each group varied between 10 and 12. from the interactions, which amounted to 180 minutes of transcribed data in the ccm, five extracts that were representative of the collection were selected, transcribed and analyzed for the purpose of the present study. the selection of the five extracts was done taking into account a number of aspects. the data in the extracts contained teacher-fronted interaction and activities aimed mainly at developing oral fluency, as the focus of the analysis was placed on generating learning opportunities in a ccm. thus, the specific learning objective in each of the extracts was not learning formal features of the language, but rather, developing fluency and communication. moreover, the five selected extracts portray instances of teacher-learner overlapped and latched utterances that lend themselves to analysis as part of opportunities for l2 learning. thus, the main aspect of classroom interaction that was targeted in the present study was the way in which teachers can hinder/facilitate opportunities for learning through their management of teacher-learner overlapped and latched utterances. audio recording was chosen over video recording because administrators at the institution advised against the latter. they explained that some teachers might be reluctant to be video recorded on the grounds that it is a more invasive technique which could disrupt the normal progression of the lessons. certainly, the absence of non-vocal aspects such as gestures and gaze may have prevented the researcher from accessing relevant details about these teachers’ and learners’ interactional behaviors. however, a clear advantage of using audio recording in the l2 classroom is that it is less noticeable by teachers and learners and thus may produce interaction that is more valid ecologically. 3.2. method of data analysis ca methodology was applied to the data to illustrate the ways in which teachers manage teacher-learner overlapped and latched utterances, and the impact it has exploring teachers’ and learners’ overlapped turns in the language classroom: implications for. . . 589 on opportunities for learning and participation. the ca transcription system utilized was adapted from atkinson and heritage (1984) to meet the needs of the present study (see the appendix). the analysis of the extracts was informed by ellis and barkhuizen’s (2005) set of guidelines for the analysis of data under a ca approach as it presents methodological steps that are well-suited to tackling the interactional characteristics of institutional talk, given its goal-oriented nature. this set of procedures guided the researcher in the identification of “conversational practice” and the knowledge deployed by the participants which underlie that practice (lazaraton, 2004). the procedures include the selection of a sequence, the characterization of the actions and the understandings displayed by participants in the sequence, and the roles assumed by the interactants. emphasis was placed on the way that timing and turn-taking were instantiated in the interaction (i.e., how a speaker obtained a turn) and how overlapping talk and latched utterances were delivered and managed by the participants. the turn-taking practices utilized by teachers and learners were explored as well as the way in which teacher talk shaped those patterns and the production of tcus in order to reveal the structural organization of the interaction (heritage, 1997). thus, the application of the guidelines allowed the researcher to select the extracts for analysis and understand, from the perspective of the interactants, how the creation of interactional space is shaped by the management of teacher-learner overlapped and latched utterances. 4. results and discussion as has been stated, one of the ways in which cic manifests itself is by means of maximizing interactional space. this can be done, among other things, by allowing learners to produce extended turns (walsh, 2006). the analysis below will present the interactional behavior that these teachers adopted towards the creation (or reduction) of interactional space; namely, the management of teacherlearner overlapped and latched utterances. when the teacher’s potential tcu is overlapped by, or latched onto a learner’s utterance, the trp has not been reached yet. the teacher can then choose whether to complete his tcu and disregard the learner’s contribution or abandon the floor and allow the learner to make his or her contribution. as will be seen below, teachers who are sensitive to those instances and allow learners to express their ideas even when their turn at talk is being jeopardized can maximize interaction and participation when the pedagogical goal is to promote fluency and communication.2 the following 2 although the main pedagogical goal in the extracts is to promote fluency and communication, there are a number of “side sequences” in the data, which are defined by walsh (2006) marco octavio cancino avila 590 set of extracts will present a number of topics of conversation that include ccm interaction. extract 1 is part of an elementary lesson where the class is discussing trip experiences. the teacher (t1) is prompting students to ask questions from a handout. in this extract, l2 is asking l7 a question about the last time l7 had been on a trip to a new location. extract 1: t1, trip 1 t1: eh: ((addressing l2)) please, question number five 2 l2: eh::= 3 t1: =to ((name l7)) 4 l2: ((addressing l7)) when was the last time? (0.3) you (.) [tok] 5 t1: [took] 6 l2: took (.) ( ) you took (.) a trip to somewhere new (1.2) 7 l7: eh:: the last time (.) i:: took a trip to somewhere new? 8 was the:: (0.4) summer of the last year. (0.4) i went 9 to:: (.) aysen coyhaique, and i knew all the:: 10 patagonia? from (.) >in chile?< a:nd (arge-) argentina 11 (0.4) 12 t1: in argentina. 13 l7: in argentina, yes (argentina.) 14 t1: >what [did you think about it<] 15→ l2: [throughthrough ] balmaceda? 16 (1.3) 17 l7: °what?° 18 l2: through balmaceda? (.) 19 l7: eh: yes 20 (1.7) 21 l1: ( )= 22 l7: =yes (.) on a:: (0.5) 23 t1: boat?= 24 l7: =i don't knowno. 25 t1: no?= 26 l3: =boat? 27 (0.5) 28 l7: on a: truck? (.) and then (.) ehafter? (0.5) to:: (0.7) 29 come back ofto the north? (.) of chile? (.) eh:: was in 30 a:: (.) transfer (.) 31 t1: okay so you went on a truck= 32 l7: =yes= 33 t1: =and then you came back 34 l7: yes as “the brief departure from one mode to another and back again” (p. 65). side sequences are representative of teacher talk and must be short to be considered as such. exploring teachers’ and learners’ overlapped turns in the language classroom: implications for. . . 591 35 (0.4) 36 t1: [because sn-] 37→ l7: [oheh: ]:: (0.7) i:: hm: (0.7) i was? (.) eh:: (1) do38 doing i don't know how to say? eh: mochileando 39 backpacking 40 (0.4) 41 t1: alright? 42 (0.5) 43 l7: s[o:] 44 t1: [so] you were a backpacker 45 l7: yes (0.5) in line 4, l2 initiates the fpp3 in an adjacency pair by asking l7 the question when was the last time you took a trip to somewhere new?, which includes a repair sequence that is other-initiated and self-repaired (schegloff, jefferson, & sacks, 1977) in lines 5 and 6, respectively. l7 completes the spp with an extended turn (lines 7-10). in line 12, t1 asks a question in the form of teacherlearner echo (walsh, 2013), that is, t1 repeats part of l7’s contribution with an emphasis (in argentina). this type of repetition in a context that nurtures fluency and communication seeks to elicit further talk from learners (park, 2014). as l7 elaborates on her answer in line 13, t1 asks a fast-paced follow-up content question (>what did you think about it?<) in line 14 that seeks to elicit new meanings from l7. before t1 can finish this tcu, l2 produces the utterance throughthrough balmaceda? (line 15), which overlaps with the teacher’s turn (line 14). this type of overlap is labelled transitional as it is produced at a point where a trp is in place (jefferson, 1984). here, the trp occurred at the end of l7’s turn in line 13. this trp prompted overlapped further talk by both l2 and t1. the utterance in the form of a content question delivered by l2 in line 15 seeks to clarify the way in which l7 entered argentina. what is relevant to the provision of opportunities for learning here is that l2’s question in line 15 is followed by a 1.3-second pause, which is not used by t1 to regain the floor and orient to her own question. instead, t1 cedes the floor to l2 and allows the interaction to continue, even though her question, a fpp that requires a specific spp, has not been resolved because she has surrendered the floor and has allowed learners to pursue their own interactional choices. the 1.3-second pause allowed by t1 in line 16 has given l7 enough time to produce a clarification request in line 17, and l2 is being given enough interactional space to reformulate 3 in conversation, turns that are closely related to others, that is, question-answer sequences, are known as adjacency pairs (schegloff & sacks, 1973). the first pair part (fpp; the first utterance in the pair) initiates the action and makes a next action relevant, while the second pair part (spp; the second utterance in the pair) completes the initiated action. marco octavio cancino avila 592 her question to l7 about the way in which she reached argentina (line 18). then, in line 19, l7 addresses l2’s question instead of focusing on t1’s question (line 14), eliciting her opinion about the trip. t1 does not insist on her overlapped question in the interaction and instead, allows l7 to negotiate l2’s overlapped question (lines 17-24). thus, t1 is providing interactional space by acknowledging that her utterance was overlapped and by orienting to her pedagogical goal (promoting participation and meaningful exchanges) rather than to her will to gain the floor and convey meaning, which she had earned by taking the turn first (line 14). the unresolved fpp produced by t1 in line 13 is handled in such a way that she allows learners to navigate and develop their own interactional choices, provides enough time for l7 to clarify meanings and aligns with the ongoing talk generated by l2 and l7 by means of clarification requests (lines 23 and 25). in the same extract, t1 is once again able to manage learner overlap and allow them to successfully contribute to the interaction. after a pair of confirmation checks produced by t1, which referred to the type of transport utilized by l7 to travel to argentina (lines 31-34), t1 initiates a tcu by using the conjunction because (line 36). however, transitional overlap takes place as t1’s unfinished tcu and l7’s utterance (which adds to l7’s account of the trip in lines 37-38) are produced at the same time. t1 is again sensitive to learner overlap and stops in the middle of her tcu to give l7 enough interactional space to continue with her turn. t1 gives up the floor in the middle of l7’s elongated hesitation token (eh:::), which may have alerted her that l7 was preparing to make a contribution. l7’s turn following the overlap orients to the fact that she was backpacking, and t1 in turn aligns with this by producing a confirmation check in the form of an embedded correction in line 44. it is important to notice the resourceful manner in which t1 has managed to steer the interaction by acknowledging learner overlap, refraining from gaining the floor, and allowing l7 to continue with her initiated turns, which yielded further meaningful interaction that could not have taken place otherwise. extract 2 below illustrates another instance of effective management of learner talk, but this time delivered as part of an upper-intermediate level lesson. in this sequence, the teacher (t2) is prompting learners to give opinions on the veracity of a chilean talk show called la jueza (“the judge”). extract 2: t2, tv show 1 l1: hmm: (.) people say (.) is: eh (0.3) eh:: the 2 program:, (.) is a (f::ate) 3 t2: a fake= 4 l4: =a fake 5 (0.4) exploring teachers’ and learners’ overlapped turns in the language classroom: implications for. . . 593 6 l1: a fa[ke] 7 t2: [i] (once) ( ) heard so [me pe]ople= 8 l1: [hmm ] 9→ l4: =i like the program 10 (0.4) 11 t2: do you [like it? ] 12 l4: [ii ] like la jueza (.) i lii love= 13 l3: =la jueza= 14 l4: =i like because they have some: (.) somethi:ng (.) 15 troubles, problems? tha:t we know? .hhh and will learn 16 about (0.5) something we need, maybe w(.) with 17 the:: hmm (.) the rent, (.) 18 t2: ah:: okay?= 19 l4: =so the [the: the: hmm (.) ] the issues of the: paper that 20 l1: [(°ii don't like °)] 21 l4: you nee:d, what do you (.) can (.) what you can do: (.) 22 what youca:n't,= 23 l1: 24 t2: =so it's kind of in:formative [pro]gram. 25 l4: [is-] (.) for me is 26 informative (0.5) when they started to: overreacting i: don't 27 like (.) too much (0.3) [or: ] when they started to fight, (.) 28 t2: [hmm-hmm] 28 l4 or: (0.8)actually they(0.6) she: (.) give the:: (.) the 31 opportunity? (.) to: discuss? and fight. in line 1, l1 produces a tcu containing the idea that the tv show (sun) may not portray real stories. l1’s utterance is followed by a repair of the word fake prompted by both t2 and l4 (other initiated, other repaired) in lines 3 and 4, respectively. in line 7, t2 attempts to produce an account of a story related to the show (which later is completed as an opinion on the show’s veracity). before t2’s utterance i (once) ( ) heard some people reaches a trp, it is overlapped by l1’s token hmm, which could have been produced as a continuer (line 8). in line 9, l4’s utterance i like the program is latched onto t2’s incomplete tcu. after a 0.4second pause, t2 acknowledges l4’s latched utterance and does not pursue the completion of her turn. from a cic perspective, it can be argued that t2 demonstrated cic here as she acknowledges l4’s self-selection and allows her to expand and finish her contribution by asking do you like it? in line 11, a closed referential question that prompted an extended learner turn by l4 (lines 12-17). by giving up the floor and orienting to l4’s self-selection with a referential question, l4 has been allowed to produce extended learner turns in lines 14-17, 19-22, and 25-31. an important aspect when handling learners’ latched utterances that do not take place in trps is to be sensitive to the particular moments where learner agency marco octavio cancino avila 594 is being exercised by learners and act upon such instances in appropriate ways. as jacknick (2011) states, students demonstrate agency when they claim interactional space where it is not being afforded, and it is the teacher who can legitimize that claim by orienting to it. thus, allowing learners to expand and finish their contributions (as has been seen in the two extracts analyzed) is one of the ways in which teachers can demonstrate cic and transform a learner contribution into an opportunity for participation and ultimately learning (sert, 2017; garton, 2012; walsh, 2006). interestingly, t2 exhibits a rather contrasting approach to managing learner overlap in extract 3 below. here, t2’s pedagogical goal is to engage learners in conversation by having them answer general knowledge questions and discuss the possible options. one of the questions was who was the second person to walk on the moon? extract 3: t2, moon 1 l2: (well) we're not really sure about that. 2 t2: oh! well (0.3) [yeah] 3 l1: [the] second [(one:)] 4 l2: [some ] people °say° that's a 5 fake (.) 6 t2: yeah. (.) this, this [ah:: was] 7→ l3: [oh:: ] yes:: 8 l2: some people said [that’s a fake ] 9 t2: [the arrival of man to] the moon was a [fake] 10 l1: [it ] 11 was a fake ( ) 12 t2: and what do you believe. (.) whatwhat do you think. 13 l2: i mean (.) no hhh ((chuckles)) (i don't know) what to 14 be[lieve] 15 t2: [not ] sure about it? (.) butbut no i[dea who] was the 16→ l1: [but eh-] 17 t2: [se ]cond person?= 18→ l1: [but-] 19→ l1: =(but) (.) if you:: watch the:: video no:w (0.3) you can 20 see: eh hmm: (0.6) a fake eh:21 t2: really? 22 l1: ye::s .hhh black and °white° .hhh eh: ((laughs))= 23 l2: =the fla:g is: ((waving arms)) 24 l1: there is [( )] 25 t2: [ah ][::: ye]::s! it's waving 26 l2: [( )] 27 l3: ye:[::ah] 28 l2: [yeah] exploring teachers’ and learners’ overlapped turns in the language classroom: implications for. . . 595 29 l1: yes= 30 l2: =it's not supposed to:: (.) to wave? (.) [right? ] 31 l3: [ah: huh] 32 t2: ye[s?] 33 l2: [it] has (.) the (.) there's no air (.) in the moon? in lines 4-5, l2 develops the subtopic started in line 1 about the man landing on the moon (some people °say° that's a fake). in line 6, t2 addresses l2’s utterance but her repetition of words and the elongated hesitation token suggests that she was in the middle of an unsuccessful word search for moon landing or a similar concept. thus, her tcu is left incomplete and is overlapped by l3’s oh::: yes:: in line 7. in line 8, l2 repeats her utterance produced in lines 4-5. this tcu is overlapped by t2 in line 9 as she seemed to have found a suitable expression for moon landing (the arrival of man to the moon). in this exchange, t2 seems to be orienting more to her word search than to l3’ and l2’s utterances in lines 7 and 8, respectively. l1’s recognitional overlap (jefferson, 1984) in line 10 echoes the end of t2’s tcu. then, t2 elicits learners’ opinions in line 12 by means of an open referential question, but after l2’s hesitation in providing an answer (lines 13-14), she produces an epistemic check (not sure about it?; sert, 2013) in line 15 and then goes back to eliciting an answer to the question that was posed before l2’s subtopic initiation in line 4. it can be seen that t2 attempts to steer the interaction towards answering the original question about the second person to walk on the moon (no idea who was the second person?) in lines 15 and 17. what is interesting here is that this utterance is overlapped by l1’s contrastive token but on two occasions (lines 16 and 18), which portrays l1’s initiative to compete for the floor with t2. when t2’s tcu is completed, l1’s turn is latched onto t2’s turn in line 19, once more, by means of the same contrastive token. as l1 takes the floor in line 19, she is able to involve herself and other participants in addressing particular rumors surrounding the moon landing and the flag waving on the moon. t2 orients to l1’s subtopic by providing confirmation checks (lines 21, 32) and content feedback (line 30). also, l1 provides meaningful turns in lines 19-20 and 22, which suggests that her insistence on gaining the floor prompted participation and interaction that would have been lost had she not oriented to the completion of her idea over the teacher’s. although conversational structures can be powerful resources for teachers in order to shape learners’ performance and participation (he, 2004), l1’s insistence on gaining the floor and successfully producing a turn that steered the conversation back to a previous relevant topic reveals that learners can also manipulate turn-taking in order to procure interactional space when teachers are not giving it. nevertheless, l1’s display of cic in extract 3 is more conceivable at higher proficiency levels, where learners are more proficient and are more selfmarco octavio cancino avila 596 confident to interrupt teachers, insisting on gaining and keeping the floor even if their contributions are not being acknowledged from the outset. learners at lower proficiency levels lack the interactional features displayed by l1 in extract 3, so teachers at these levels need to be more sensitive to instances where learner talk overlaps theirs. extract 4 below is an example illustrating the careful handling of an incomplete utterance produced by a learner at an elementary proficiency level. in this extract, the teacher (t1) and her learners are discussing experiences in different countries and her pedagogical goal is to elicit learners’ answers and ensure their participation. extract 4: t1, spain 1 t1: ((addressing l1)) can you mention (.) a 2 place that you've been to? 3 (2.1) 4 l1: a place (.) eh:: (.) where i've been? (0.8) i’ve been to:: 5 (.) barcelona? (0.7) hmm:::: (.) the south of spain 6 t1: uh-huh? (.) [so: ] 7→ l4: [(this city) ] 8 (0.7) 9 t1: huh? 10 l4: (no) eh: describe (.) this city (.) 11 l1: eh[::: ] i:: lived in malaga for one month (.) the last 12 t1: [((chuckles))] 13 l1: year with ((name l6)) (0.6) and (.) from malaga? 14 we:: went to:: (.) sevilla? (0.5) cordoba? (.) granada? 15 (.)a::nd (tangier) in:: (.) morocco 16 t1: morocco? 17 l1: yes 18 t1: i imagine that's (.) a very beautiful place isn't it? 19 l1: yes in lines 1 and 2, t1 initiates the fpp in the adjacency pair by asking l1 about a place she has visited. this prompts l1’s spp in lines 4 and 5, which addresses the question posed by t1 but can also prompt further questions in relation to a potential sub-topic (the south of spain). in line 6, t1 acknowledges l1’s contribution with an acceptance token (uh-huh?). after a micropause, t1 initiates a new tcu by using the conjunction so, which is a token that yields further talk by the speaker when there is no rising intonation contour. at the same time, this token is overlapped by l4’s incomplete tcu this city (line 7). this transitional overlap (jefferson, 1984) is followed by a 0.7-second pause, which is not utilized by t1 to keep the floor and elaborate on her tcu. instead, t1 notices l4’s incomplete utterance and asks l4 for clarification (line 9), without locating the exploring teachers’ and learners’ overlapped turns in the language classroom: implications for. . . 597 specific trouble source. only then is l4 able to reformulate his tcu, where he prompts l1 to describe barcelona, the city l1 had just mentioned. although l1 does not provide a full response to this question, she takes a relatively long turn describing her trip schedule in that area. t1 seems to align with the topic of the question produced by l4 when she provides content feedback in line 18 (i imagine that’s a very beautiful place isn’t it). l4 does not participate further in this exchange, but he is able to exert learner initiative in line 7, which was carefully acknowledged and managed by t1. this voluntary shift in terms of the irf roles taken by the participants allows the interaction in lines 7-12 to be described in the following terms. first, l4 initiates an incomplete fpp (line 6); then, t1 and l4 produce an “insert expansion” sequence (schegloff, 2007), where t1 seeks to clarify the fpp (line 9) and l4 reformulates it (line 10); finally, l1 is able to produce the spp (lines 11-15). the analysis of this sequence suggests that interactional space was provided by t1 when she encouraged l4 to take the floor and develop her contribution. thus, at elementary proficiency levels, teachers can increase interactional space when they are able to notice incipient learner initiative. this can be done by either discontinuing their own turns or by giving the floor to a learner at the expense of having their own ideas and opinions placed on hold or dismissed altogether. even though more proficient learners may be able to exercise cic in a more successful manner when competing for the floor (e.g., l1 in extract 3), teachers who are not sensitive to learners’ interactional efforts in this respect will likely fail to provide opportunities for l2 learning. this is what transpires in extract 5, which is derived from an upper-intermediate level lesson where the teacher (t3) and the learners are discussing the problems that young popular celebrities face in their careers. extract 5: t3, bad influence 1 t3: what problems (.) can they (.) face (.) if they're (.) so 2 popular (0.6) what problems (0.3) 3 l6: drugs? 4 t3: drugs, (.) yes? (0.6) 5 l6: depression? 6 (1) 7 t3: the pressure. (.) ye[ah: the ] pressure of you know 8→ l6: [depression?] 9 t3: being famous so young (0.3) okay? 10 (0.6) 11 l4: they have access: (.) to different things that they 12 shouldn't even know (0.3) 13 t3: yeah: (.) for example? (.) dru[gs] (.) <yeah> marco octavio cancino avila 598 after t3 asks the question about celebrities and their problems in line 1, l6 produces a short response in line 3 (drugs?), which is echoed by t3 in the next line and followed by an acknowledgement token with rising intonation (yes?). l6 then produces another single-word token in line 5 (depression?) with rising intonation in order to answer t3’s question. in line 7, t3 mishears l6’s utterance as he orients to a different idea (the pressure). more importantly, t3 maintains the floor by producing an extended turn describing how pressure can affect famous people (lines 7 and 9). l6 then attempts to regain the floor in line 8 so as to repair t3’s mishearing of the word. this is done by repeating the utterance that caused the interactional impasse, which overlaps the tcu generated by t3. l6’s overlapping utterance in line 8 is delivered with a rising contour, at a normal speech rate and volume; yet, t3 does not acknowledge it in the exchange. access to t3’s gaze at this time would have provided more insight regarding the status of l6’s overlapped contribution. nonetheless, analysis of the audio sequence suggests that t3 dismissed l6’s chance to gain the floor to either expand his contribution or clarify the misheard word. this may have prevented l6 from participating further as his unsuccessful attempt to gain the floor in line 8 makes him withdraw from the interaction in subsequent turns (not shown). the reason for l6’s interactional behavior can be found in the nature of the turns in the exchange. the fpp produced by t3 in line 1 is followed by short spps in the form of a single word by l6 in three occasions (lines 3, 5, 8). as solem (2016) argues, learners use different types of devices (e.g., grammar structures, sentence formats, tags, and hedges) to display “epistemic status,” that is, to position themselves as being more or less knowledgeable in relation to a topic or learning objective. in this case, l6 has acknowledged this epistemic asymmetry by delivering single token words with a rising intonation, which confers prevalent epistemic status to the teacher as the one with the right and the authority to complete l6’s contribution. this interaction pattern provided by t3 and followed by l6 has caused the learner to orient to a particular role in the sequence, one that does not require keeping the floor and is constrained by the institutional rules embedded in the irf pattern. thus, l6’s disregarded overlapped contribution, along with t3’s and l6’s epistemic status orientation in the exchange, have caused t3 to manage the turn-taking pattern in the interaction in such a way that l6 was not given the chance to gain the floor and repair the misheard item, which prevented him from elaborating on his ideas. 5. concluding remarks on the basis of the discussion, a number of concluding observations can be made. the manner in which teachers navigate the instances where learners’ utterances exploring teachers’ and learners’ overlapped turns in the language classroom: implications for. . . 599 overlap or are latched onto theirs was found to affect learner participation. teachers who are more sensitive to their learners’ overlapping or latched talk and are able to stop contributing to the interaction by giving up the floor when a learner is attempting to gain it were found to nurture interactional space (see extracts 1, 2 and 4). these interactional strategies have been found to elicit further meaningful interaction from learners that may most likely not have been possible otherwise. the teachers demonstrated cic in the episodes because they oriented to the pedagogical goals of the moment, eliciting answers and interaction from learners, rather than their will to keep the floor and convey meanings. by being sensitive to their learners’ overlapped contributions, teachers are engendering agency in their students, which provides further support to the finding that teachers are the ones who can manage learner-initiated contributions and turn them into learning opportunities (garton, 2012; jacknick, 2011; sert, 2017). the analysis of extract 1 also suggests that low-proficiency learners are able to actively initiate turns and negotiate space for participation, despite their limited linguistic resources, which is in line with tai and brandt’s (2018) results. however, learners at higher proficiency levels may be linguistically better equipped to hold the floor by insisting on delivering their utterances when the teacher is not providing interactional space and is not orienting to the development of learners’ contributions (see extract 3). more proficient learners are able to insist on securing interactional space when teachers fail to do so. learners at lower proficiency levels may be more prone to producing short and incomplete overlaps (see extract 4), which suggests that teachers need to be more sensitive to such instances in the classroom context mode (ccm) so as to allow learners to expand and complete their contributions, thus providing interactional space. however, even at higher proficiency levels, learners who attempt to compete for the floor to get their meanings across may be unsuccessful when teachers simply dismiss their learners’ interactional efforts and students are forced to orient to their own turns as short “response move” tokens that establish epistemic asymmetry in the language classroom (solem, 2016; see extract 5). this provides further support to the idea that teachers must be able to demonstrate cic when learners attempt to initiate and maintain interaction, and that learner proficiency may not be enough to secure the provision of interactional space. thus, in the same way that teacher interruption and limited wait-time have been found to reduce interactional space (yataganbaba & yıldırım, 2016), data from the analyzed extracts suggest that failure to acknowledge learners’ overlapped talk can have the same detrimental effect, which results in reduced opportunities for learning. the analysis also indicates that teachers may display fluctuating behavior regarding the management of learners’ contributions. the same teacher was found to have rather different approaches to learner overlap and their latched marco octavio cancino avila 600 utterances (t2 in extracts 2 and 3). this suggests that teachers may not be aware of the role that this interactional feature can have in providing interactional space and may lack a strategic approach in this respect. a lack of sensitivity towards locally generated opportunities for interactional space may then result in inconsistent language use displayed by teachers, which demonstrates inadequate cic. in this respect, a reflective approach to language teaching can increase teachers’ “interactional awareness” (walsh, 2006) regarding their own language use and their learners’ contributions. interactional awareness implies an understanding of what is taking place at a particular moment in the interaction and displaying sensitivity in the strategic decisions taken based on the ongoing pedagogical agenda and learners’ contextualized talk. a major goal in any type of reflective practice, as nakamura (2008) writes, “should lead us to ask ourselves whether the way and the ways we talk to students help or hinder them from expressing themselves” (p. 278). the analysis in the present study has been done particularly with a focus on what the teacher does when exposed to learner initiative that is demonstrated by means of teacher-learner overlapped and latched utterances that seek to expand on and finish a contribution. this focus on the teacher’s verbal behavior is not unwarranted. the teacher is seen as the one who “orchestrates the interaction” (breen, 1998, p. 119). in other words, he or she is the one who can facilitate or disrupt opportunities for learning and participation. while the importance of the role of learners as enablers of cic by means of taking cues, identifying and understanding what is required of them, completing the required tasks, and managing their own turn-taking has been acknowledged (walsh, 2012), these actions will be accomplished to the extent the teacher provides the necessary space for learners. in efl settings, the teacher is arguably in a critical position to use interactional strategies that can have a direct impact on participation, and make changes that will enhance l2 learning, as learners mainly make progress thanks to the interaction that takes place in the language classroom (cancino, 2017; cross, 2010). teachers may benefit from being aware of the sociocultural idea that learning takes place when learners participate (brouwer & wagner, 2004; donato, 2000) and that the very action of making learners engage in the interaction embodies learning. as van lier (2000) states, interactional features that create opportunities for learning “do not just facilitate learning, they are learning in a fundamental way” (p. 246), that is, they are learning because learning originates within them. teachers would benefit from letting learners take initiative and seize their turns at talk as this can prompt learners to elaborate turns that have a freer range in terms of order, size and sequence, and to adopt features of ordinary conversation in their talk. indeed, interactions that will likely expose learners to linguistic and interactional resources that support learning should portray a “jagged profile” (walsh, 2006). allowing learners to be active agents in co-constructing exploring teachers’ and learners’ overlapped turns in the language classroom: implications for. . . 601 meanings by having teachers react appropriately to their attempts to initiate contributions and maintain the floor will likely expose learners to linguistic and interactional resources that support learning. learners usually abide by the unspoken rules of classroom discourse and regard their participation as assigned by the teacher by means of particular turn-taking and sequence organization patterns they must learn and follow in such a way that the interactional outcomes are closely linked to the teacher's decisions (rodriguez & wilstermann, 2018). this may greatly reduce the opportunities for meaning negotiation and involvement that are available in the exchanges and may hinder the role of the teacher as a “facilitator” who can grant greater participation rights (lee & ng, 2010). by being sensitive to their learners’ contributions and by allowing them to gain the floor and bypass their own contributions, teachers can achieve their pedagogical agendas and at the same time provide learners with interactional space, a crucial step towards generating opportunities for learning in the language classroom. marco octavio cancino avila 602 references atkinson, j., & heritage, j. 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(2016). teacher interruptions and limited wait time in efl young learner classrooms. procedia – social and behavioral sciences, 232, 689-695. marco octavio cancino avila 606 appendix transcription conventions (adapted from atkinson & heritage, 1984) t: teacher l1: identified learner (e.g., learner 1) name: a specific learner is being nominated in the interaction (e.g., name l1). [ ] overlapping utterances. overlap onset: ( [ ). overlap termination: ( ] ). = an equal sign is inserted at the end of one speaker’s turn and at the beginning of the next speaker’s turn to show that there is no gap between the turns. (0.4) periods of silence, timed in tenths of a second between utterances. micropauses, that is, pauses lasting less than 0.3 seconds, are symbolized ‘(.)’; longer pauses appear as time within parentheses: (0.5) is five tenths of a second. : sound extension of a word (more colons demonstrate longer stretches). . fall in tone (not necessarily the end of a sentence). , continuing intonation (not necessarily between clauses). an abrupt stop in articulation. ? rising inflection (not necessarily a question). ! words ending with emphasis. ° they surround talk that is quieter. ↑ ↓ indication of sharply higher or lower pitch in the utterance followed by the arrow. hhh audible in-breath. the more h’s, the longer the in-breath. .hhh audible out-breath. the more h’s, the longer the out-breath. > < they surround talk that is spoken faster than neighboring talk. < > they surround talk that is spoken slower than neighboring talk. (( )) analyst’s notes. non-vocal action. details of scene. ( ) approximations of what is heard. words within parentheses are uncertain. word underlined letters or words indicate marked stress. italics. english translation, immediately after the original word(s). → feature of special interest. 483 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (4). 2013. 483-504 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl is there elf in elt coursebooks? paola vettorel university of verona, italy paola.vettorel@univr.it lucilla lopriore roma tre university, italy lucilla.lopriore@uniroma3.it abstract this article aims to explore whether well-attested findings in the fields of world englishes (we) and of english as a lingua franca (elf) have determined a shift in perspective in the overall approach to english language teaching (elt), and how far this shift has permeated teaching materials and coursebooks. the research study was carried out in italy, a country where elt coursebooks have often played a relevant role in introducing innovations in language teaching methodology. the research design included a corpus of ten coursebooks that have been published and adopted in italian secondary schools in the last 6 years. the coursebooks were evaluated in terms of the presence or absence of references to we and/or elf, of awareness-raising activities, of the promotion of using english outside the school environment and of the use of effective english communication and intercultural strategies among nonnative speakers. findings show that there have been no significant changes in the inclusion of we and elforiented materials and related tasks, apart from the area of promotion of cultural and intercultural awareness. keywords: english as a lingua franca (elf), world englishes (we), elt materials, intercultural awareness, language awareness, communication strategies, localization, nonnative bilingual speakers of english paola vettorel, lucilla lopriore 484 the central role that coursebooks play in english language teaching (elt) is undeniable, since they have always represented a reference point both for teachers and learners, and are “an almost universal element of elt teaching” (hutchinson & torres, 1994, p. 315). even if coursebooks have been under scrutiny and criticism on several grounds (see among others alptekin, 1993; cortazzi & jin, 1999; gray, 2002, 2010b; prodromou, 1988), textbooks still constitute one of the main teaching tools “because they satisfy certain needs, . . . and prosper because they are the most convenient means of providing the structure that the teaching-learning system – particularly the system in change – requires” (hutchinson & torres, 1994, p. 317). many innovations in foreign language teaching have been successfully anticipated and diffused mostly thanks to their implementation in teaching materials, particularly through coursebooks and their teacher’s guides. indeed, in italy foreign language manuals have in many cases played an important role in familiarising both teachers and students with new, and often innovative, methodological routes, at times anticipating themes and approaches that were then tackled during in-service courses. more recently, the web has also provided many opportunities for access to linguistic and cultural resources to materials authors, publishers, as well as to teachers and students, whose more traditional paper-and-audio format coursebooks may be thus complemented. web resources, mostly videos, are at times presented for teaching purposes in their original unadapted versions, thus exposing learners to a variety of authentic language excerpts that can be exploited in class in addition to, and together with, the materials specifically created for teaching purposes. one of the main goals in foreign language (fl) teaching materials and coursebook development is to support classroom language work oriented at making learners effective language communicators, and to familiarize them with real communicative settings. this, particularly in elt, is even more so in a period when communication has become more and more global, with english functioning as a common means of communication across linguacultural boundaries and reaching out to local cultures. the fields of world englishes (we), and, increasingly, english as a lingua franca (elf) studies have represented in the last couple of decades two of the most vibrant and challenging research areas in linguistics and applied linguistics. in their different but complementary fields both research areas have shown how english cannot any longer be considered as a monolithic entity, not least in didactic terms. in this light, activities and tasks in the fl classroom should be oriented at fostering the development of language and (inter)cultural awareness as well as communication strategies, that is, at providing learners with tools to become effective communicators with english in its pluralized forms and differentiated contexts of use in today’s is there elf in elt coursebooks? 485 interconnected world. taking into account the widespread diffusion of englishes and the emergence of english as a lingua franca both in terms of contents and of teaching approaches would thus entail a shift in perspective, particularly as to the range of views and contexts presented in teaching materials. given the major changes the english language has gone through over the last decades, and the subsequent theoretical and methodological challenges, one would expect to find clear guidelines included in the materials addressed to teachers (teacher guides, resource packs, web extensions, etc.) so that an upto-date and comprehensive approach to englishes and to elf can effectively be put into practice in the classroom. having the chance to be provided with “appropriate” and realistic materials would allow teachers to go beyond an exclusive focus on english-as-a-native-language standard varieties, with british english (and culture) as the traditionally acknowledged main point of reference. alongside appropriate teacher training measures, it would help sensitize teachers to the deep changes english is going through, and to make them effective agents in taking them into account in their teaching practices (cogo & dewey, 2012; seidlhofer, 2003, 2004, 2011). this article aims to explore whether well-attested findings in the fields of we (e.g., kachru, 1986, 1992; kirkpatrick, 2010) and elf (see jenkins, cogo, & dewey, 2011 for a comprehensive overview) have led to a shift in perspective in the approach used in the design of elt coursebooks, and how far this shift has permeated english teaching materials employed in italian secondary schools. english(es) and elf in coursebooks: emerging issues given its spread at a global level, english is increasingly seen as the language to be obligatorily learnt, particularly in expanding circle countries, in europe and elsewhere in the world, both in state and in private institutions. indeed, over the last couple of decades english has become part of most school curricula, and increasingly so from an early age, in europe and in the rest of the world (graddol, 1997, 2006). at the same time, the spread of english at a global level has resulted in a kaleidoscopic plurality, where “the grammatical ‘rules’ and lexical forms of english used today are far more varied than ever before” (mckay, 2012, p. 73). furthermore, the majority of english users are nowadays bilingual speakers (e.g., crystal, 2012), who communicate more frequently with other l2 users than with native speakers, in contexts that are multilingual and multicultural by default. rather than adherence to standard english norms, it is the ability to effectively communicate about aspects of one’s own and of the interlocutors’ paola vettorel, lucilla lopriore 486 culture and to negotiate meaning which is salient in these contexts (e.g., hülmbauer, 2009; mckay, 2002; seidlhofer, 2011). traditionally, however, one of the main goals in elt has been that of orienting teaching to communication with native speakers, within contexts that are largely anglophone both in terms of a standard language and cultural references. the plurality into which english has developed has deeply questioned the appropriateness of such a model, which does not seem any longer realistic, or, at least, cannot account for the diversity of english users and contexts of use in the present world. in addition, a monocentric model based on native-speakerism (holliday, 2006; houghton & rivers, 2013; waters, 2007) has important implications in terms of linguistic goals: the feasibility as well as the relevance of reaching native-like proficiency has been thoroughly questioned (cook, 2002; seidlhofer, 2011), not least since it entails that the status of the language learner is conceived of as a permanent and insurmountable state. given that the benchmark is that of the (idealised) native speaker who should be carefully and fully imitated, such a view can also have problematic repercussions in identity terms, and result in linguistic insecurity (jenkins, 2007). as cook has repeatedly pointed out (2002, 2005, [2008] 2013), rather than being continuously confronted with a native speaker model, l2 users ought to be considered in their own right as multicompetent language users, who draw upon several and multifaceted resources to effectively communicate. english is in fact employed by elf users as a shared means of communication, in settings that are cross-linguistic and cross-cultural by definition and characterized by the interweaving linguacultures of the participants, who may or may not include native speakers of english, according to meaning-negotiation strategies that are peculiar to each situation (e.g., cogo, 2009; hülmbauer, 2007, 2009, 2012; seidlhofer, 2011). the coursebook is still mostly perceived as an indispensable and fundamental classroom tool for teachers and students alike, and the global spread of english has greatly impacted the elt publication industry (gray, 2002, 2010a), both in terms of selling figures and of contents, which have in many cases become “cosmopolitan” to accommodate the global demand for english. elt publishing has been a fast growing and highly competitive multi-million industry, flourishing mainly (even though not only) in native speaker inner circle countries, guided by market forces with these global products to be sold in as many parts of the world as possible (pennycook, 1994). as gray (2002) summarizes, “coursebooks are commodities to be traded, but what they contain is the result of the interplay between, at times, contradictory commercial, pedagogical and ethical interests” (p. 157). textbooks, whether addressed at an international or at a more local audience, seem to increasingly contain the term international either in the subtiis there elf in elt coursebooks? 487 tle, or in the teaching/learning aims they promise to attain. content appears most often as globalized, either through a “deterritorialization in which the uk ceases to function as the main locus of action” (gray, 2010a, p. 109), or via globalized themes (e.g., travel) and characters, in close connection to a consumerist perspective (cf. also mckay, 2012; thornbury, 2013). at the same time, as will be shown below, recent research about elt materials and publications has shown that a tendency to introduce sociolinguistic reflection related to the global spread of english is starting to appear. this is usually and mostly visible in the coursebook sections aimed at developing (inter)cultural awareness, thus starting to acknowledge that english, both as an international language (eil) and as a lingua franca (elf) is not any longer tied to one (anglophone) culture, but rather moulded by the many and different linguacultures of participants and speakers. as outlined above, elt materials can either be globally produced, addressing generalised, globally-set classrooms, or designed to suit more local audiences. generally, the scientific literature investigating the representations of english in elt coursebooks has focused mostly on specific contexts, from japan (matsuda, 2002; takahashi, 2010) and vietnam (truong & phan, 2009) to european contexts (kivistö, 2005; kopperoinen, 2011 for finland; lopriore & ceruti, 2012; vettorel, 2010a; vettorel & corrizzato, 2012 for italy), while a more general perspective has been taken into account in some other studies (cf. e.g., gray, 2010a; naji meidani, & pishghadam, 2013; tomlinson & masuhara, 2013). on the whole, these studies have shown that, although the focus is still predominantly on standard inner circle english and norms, some exemplifications of outer and, to a lesser extent, expanding circle interactions are starting to be included in listening and reading sections. as matsuda (2012) has pointed out, materials “tend to focus on the ‘standard’ varieties from the uk and the us” because “the efl curricula by default have focused almost exclusively on these varieties of english” which “have dominated the elt profession for a long time, and thus seem ‘natural’ to most teachers and students” (p. 171). despite an increase in the representation of english varieties when compared to the past, as shown by eggert (2007) for listening sections in two textbooks published respectively in 1994 and 2003, coursebooks still seem to be largely centered on standard received pronunciation (rp), or on general american english. for instance, in takahashi’s study (2010), elf-orientedness appeared greater in junior and more limited in senior high school japanese textbooks; some were more elf-inclusive in terms of representation, and others in terms of content and/or different accents.1 1 this was probably due also to the different styles of junior and senior school materials (cf. takahashi, 2010, p. 137). paola vettorel, lucilla lopriore 488 in naji meidani and pishghadam’s (2013) investigation of representations of cultural aspects of inner, outer and expanding circles and non-english speaking countries in four elt textbooks popular around the world (as well as in iran), multicultural viewpoints seemed to be increasingly included (cf. also gray, 2010a, p. 109), moving away from an anglophone-only perspective and taking into account also the learners’ home cultures. however, celebrity mainstream (american) culture was still widely present (cf. also clanfield, 2009; gray, 2010b), and expanding and outer circle cultural aspects were not always balanced and fairly represented. as to accents, only some of the material in naji meidani and pishghadam’s corpus included dialogues with nonnative speakers. other studies, too, have shown that the areas of culture and civilization seem to be more open to a plurilithic approach in elt materials. encouraging findings in this respect emerged from a study on elt textbooks addressed to italian lower and upper secondary school learners (vettorel, 2010a), as well as primary school ones (vettorel, 2008, 2010b), in which a broader view in the representation of culture and intercultural issues starts to become more manifest (lopriore & ceruti, 2012). the same appears true for civiltà2 coursebooks, which increasingly present awareness-raising activities related to the spread and pluralization of english, also in its role as an international language (vettorel & corrizzato, 2012). however, this seems to happen more rarely with respect to l2, bilingual users of english. although real-world interactions increasingly take place among nonnative speakers (nnss) through english as a lingua franca, and they may or may not involve native speakers (nss), l2 users are rarely envisaged in textbooks as successful communicators, and they tend rather to be represented as tourists or visitors (cook, [2008] 2013, pp. 173-174). even when bilingual speakers are present, they are frequently relegated to a minor role, and their utterances are most often pronounced in interactions where ns characters play a major role (see matsuda, 2002 and sherman, 2010 for occupational roles). indeed, representations of the plurality of english in today’s communications do not frequently occur in recorded materials or in interactions among book characters: kivistö’s study of accents in finnish textbooks revealed that only 3% were representative of nnss (2005). these results are confirmed in a more recent study, too: kopperoinen (2011) showed that the great majority of accents in two upper secondary school finnish coursebooks are by far native and generally rp, with a few exceptions, following the national curriculum and cefr guidelines. the 12 instances that were retrieved, some related to outer circle speakers, but mostly to european nonnative speakers, were connected to the spread of english in the world, or attention was drawn to cross-cultural misunderstandings. 2 coursebooks focusing on civilization. is there elf in elt coursebooks? 489 in their recent study of adult coursebooks, tomlinson and masuhara (2013) have shown that “the courses seem to give priority to criteria that that are more connected to face validity, to the achievement of instant ‘progress’, and to preparation for examinations than to helping learners towards the achievement of communicative competence” (p. 246). however, despite the fact that “the main focus of all the courses is still on linguistic accuracy” (p. 247), the authors notice that some coursebooks devote attention to “helping their learners achieve appropriacy and effectiveness of communication” (p. 247).3 tomlinson and masuhara’s investigation has also shown that almost none of their materials include activities aimed at encouraging the use of english in outside-classroom environments, either face-to-face or virtual, whereas some activities connected to the students’ own culture, and thus related to localization, are partly taken into account. when looking at whether the material helps “learners to use elf” (p. 244), the authors conclude that the focus is overwhelmingly on british english, and on “the same educated, english, middle-class, native-speaker voices” (p. 244), even when some nns interactions are present (one textbook) and references to several countries are made. to sum up, the areas where the pluralization of english seems to be taken into account in elt materials is that of culture and interculture, while elf settings and elf bilingual, nonnative users seem to be still largely marginal; when present, this inclusion is generally not accompanied by adequate reflection and language activities, nor does it take into proper account the students’ actual and future experiences as language users, thus resulting mostly in a lip-service-type “global orientation” (tomlinson & masuhara, 2013). the study a survey of how recent and most sold elt coursebooks in italy respond to and represent the global spread of english and the new forms of communication was thus needed. the study meant to investigate whether a perspective on we and elf had been taken into account in the best selling elt coursebooks in italy, starting with the following initial research questions: 1. do elt coursebooks currently used in italian high schools for preand intermediate learners represent we and elf? 2. how far do the observable changes in elt manuals reflect, and are consistent with, most relevant findings in we/elf both in terms of the lan 3 as to appropriateness in elf cf. seidlhofer (2011, pp. 199-200) and widdowson (2012). paola vettorel, lucilla lopriore 490 guage presented and in terms of language awareness and language use/language practice activities? 3. do changes in elt manuals include representation of we/elf in listening and speaking skills and related activities, as well as learners’ pragmatic and intercultural competence? method the study identified some among the most recently published coursebooks addressed to italian secondary school students at the preand intermediate levels, that is, at the biennio (the first two years of high school) and the triennio (the following three years) school levels. our analysis focused primarily on the aural and oral skills components, the listening and speaking activities, taking into account all sections of the material available to students as well as in teacher’s guidelines. specifically, we looked into the degree of inclusiveness as to speakers and contexts in the situations presented, and in terms of tasks provided to raise learners’ language, sociolinguistic and cultural awareness of different instantiations of english, both in terms of we and elf. we also examined whether the coursebook materials and activities were in any way connected to the learners’ experience of language use in elf settings, and to the presence of english(es) in their linguistic environment; in other words, to effective localization (tomlinson & masuhara, 2013). we investigated if, and how, the materials and tasks aimed at creating a link with the use of english in real, outside-school contexts and situations (tomlinson & masuhara, 2013), in order to familiarize learners with the role of language (and elf) use in such settings. one further point of investigation was the presence of activities oriented at fostering communication strategies, given the importance they play in spoken interactions, particularly among speakers of different linguacultures (e.g., mariani, 2010; seidlhofer 2011). the analysis was carried out by systematically examining all units, and different sections within units, in each textbook in the corpus, encompassing both linguistically oriented and culturally oriented texts and tasks. criteria of evaluation. our main research interest was focused on establishing whether the several pedagogical issues and implications brought about by research into we and elf have been in any way taken aboard in coursebooks. taking into account the developments in we and elf studies, as well as the most recent research in textbook analysis (gray, 2010a; matsuda, is there elf in elt coursebooks? 491 2012; mckay, 2012; tomlinson & masuhara, 2013), the following criteria were agreed upon in evaluating the coursebooks under consideration: 1. presence or absence of references to we and elf. 2. awareness-raising activities of we and/or elf. 3. promotion of the use of english outside the school environment and flexibility for effective localization. 4. promotion of the use of effective communication and intercultural strategies. these criteria were identified as the most relevant to our research study, aimed at investigating to what extent awareness of the plurality of english is promoted, and what support is given in classroom activities to a pluralistic and elf-oriented language use. some of the criteria are partly derived from tomlinson and masuhara (2013), given their relevance in contexts of use related to the plurality of english and elf. it is also noteworthy that tomlinson and masuhara’s recent coursebooks survey is to our knowledge the first to have taken into account elf-related criteria, too, and specifically the issue of to what extent elt materials “help the learners to develop cultural awareness” (p. 241), to “make use of the english environment outside the classroom” (p. 242), “to use elf “ (p. 244), “to become effective communicators in english” (p. 245), and to “provide the flexibility needed for effective localization” (p. 243). a number of questions were associated with the criteria: 1. presence or absence of references to we and elf. a) are there references to we and elf in: – reading and listening materials? – the activities (opportunities for reflection, localization)? – teachers’ guidebooks? b) are dialogues in elf settings included as to characters (nss, nnss) and/or settings? c) does the representation of nns characters go beyond that of linguistic “tourists”? 2. activities raising awareness of we and/or elf. a) are speaking and/or listening activities aimed at raising awareness of varieties of english, of we and of elf? b) what type of awareness is mostly elicited and how? 3. promotion of the use of english outside the school environment and flexibility for effective localization. paola vettorel, lucilla lopriore 492 a) is there any sort of support to the promotion and use of english outside the school environment in the activities proposed? b) are learners encouraged to reflect on localized environments both in language and (inter)cultural terms? 4. promotion of the use of effective communication strategies./help to learners to use elf supporting effective communication strategies. a) are learners sustained in the development of communication strategies? where? how? in what way? b) are these communication strategies only related to native vs. nonnative interaction or is their use encouraged in nnss-nnss cross-cultural interactions? c) are communication strategies in speaking activities overtly included? d) are models, and reflection on successful nnss in listening activities, provided? our research aim was first of all to find out whether a pluralistic and elforiented approach has been incorporated in recently published elt materials; secondly, we aimed at investigating whether the promotion of intercultural and communication strategies has been overtly given room to, in order to support effective language use in the outside-class environment. indeed, although elt materials are addressed to learners, with activities that take place in classroom contexts, opportunities for learners to become elf users are widely present in today’s world, so that the roles of learner and user can be seen as overlapping rather than separate (e.g., seidlhofer, 2011): not only do l2 learners become l2 users “as soon as they step outside of the classroom” (cook, 2002, p. 3; cf. also seidlhofer, 2011, p. 187), but opportunities to step into the role of elf users are very often provided also within educational activities, international school exchanges in the first place (vettorel, 2013), as well as telecollaboration (e.g., grazzi, 2013; guth & helm, 2011; kohn, in press). giving room to effective examples of elf users’ language on the one hand, and to communication strategies on the other, would therefore appear highly advisable in elt materials in order to prepare learners for actual language use beyond the classroom walls. the corpus of coursebooks. the coursebooks were chosen among those most adopted in the last 6 years (2008-2013), published by italian and/or british partner publishers, either written by nss, or by native and nonnative authors. all but one coursebook in our corpus can be defined as locally-suited, in that (a) they are addressed to italian secondary school learners, (b) they are produced either by locally-based publishers or, at times, jointly by international and italian is there elf in elt coursebooks? 493 ones, and (c) the coursebook authors include italian, or italy-based, ones. this choice of coursebooks was intended to provide as comprehensive a picture of materials on the italian scene, with their local characteristics, as possible. ten coursebooks were eventually selected for the analysis and constituted our audio-video and written corpus of reference.4 all the components of the selected coursebooks were analysed, that is, the student’s book, the teacher’s guide, their accompanying booklets (lexical books, clil, culture, test, etc.) and their audio and video components and, if available, web-based materials. findings the findings were quite informative and answered the research questions initially posed. all coursebooks make reference, to some extent, to issues related to the role of english, to its varieties and to the effects of globalization, particularly in the areas devoted to intercultural communication, and in the choice of nonnative characters. however, most of the overall coursebook structure and of the language activities offered very rarely represent we, not to mention elf, and the gap between what is announced and what is implemented is still a largely unexplored territory. findings are summarized below and organized according to the criteria listed earlier in the paper and the related questions. references to each coursebook will be provided in brackets (see the appendix for the complete corpus). presence or absence of references to we and elf and of awarenessraising activities (criteria 1 and 2). one of the main purposes of the analysis was to find out whether varieties of english, world englishes or elf had or had not been included in the coursebooks and, if so, to what degree. all ten coursebooks contain more or less explicit references to both british ad american english, mostly with the aim of showing differences in their spelling and pronunciation. however, this is something that has almost always been present in coursebooks, at least in those sold in the italian market during the last 30 years. in one of the coursebooks (book 5) the explicit statement that the course “offers a variety of accents, in particular british and american english” (book 5, vols. a & b, teacher’s guide, p. 6) is mirrored in the activities of a unit (book 5, vol. b, unit 14, pp. 136-142) on this theme, as in the workbook listening tasks where learners are 4 two different coursebooks (books 1 & 2; see the appendix) from the same publisher, written by the same authors, with the same title, but geared at different level groups were included in the corpus since, even if published at a short time difference (2008-2009), the most recent one showed some signs of a new perspective in terms of intercultural issues. paola vettorel, lucilla lopriore 494 asked to “listen to different speakers and decide whether they are american or english” (book 5, vol. b, pp. 278-279). one aspect that, on the contrary, has been introduced more recently in order to raise learners’ awareness are different english accents (irish, welsh, scottish, etc.), which have been included in a number of the coursebooks analysed (books 3, 5, 6, 8). these accent differences are usually presented as part of the listening, pronunciation or vocabulary sections, where learners are asked to focus on comprehension and to compare these varieties with standard english. one interesting example is the “how we speak” section in book 8, which focuses on dialects in britain and ireland and also includes reflection on accents and dialects in the students’ own country. a similar reflection activity is found in another coursebook with reference to new zealand english and maori (book 7). on the other hand, only some of the coursebooks under examination either just mention or explicitly address the issues of world englishes, elf and nnss. they usually use the notion of “authentic english” (book 9, teacher’s guide, p. 5), a notion underlying all those coursebooks that include the use of web-based materials (books 1, 2, 3, 5, 9, 10), corpora-informed language (book 3, teacher’s guide, p. 8), or samples of “wrong english usage” (books 1, 2) derived from learner corpora. specifically, it is interesting to note when and where these references are made and the way in which they are exploited. references to global english or we are often made in readings and in cultural sections (books 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10). in the video “varieties of english” linked to a unit on british and american english of one of the coursebooks (book 5), several nss of various english dialects are being interviewed while learners are asked how difficult they find to understand them, without however the provision of further opportunities for guided reflection. as for the presence of nnss, despite a growing tendency to use them as main characters in the storyline or in the dialogues, they are more than once (and still) portrayed as tourists or visitors to an inner circle country (the uk mostly; books 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9). not always though their accents in the recordings can be defined as authentic, as at times they sound like fake foreign accents produced by ns actors. in some coursebooks we and elf interactions are introduced both in readings and in activities, but seldom with clearly defined awareness-raising tasks. in one coursebook (book 5) in the activities related to a video on varieties of english, explicit mention is made of elf and learners are invited to read the wikipedia section on the theme, and to answer the question “do you think that elf is a valid form of english?”, which sounds somewhat biased. in almost all coursebooks nnss are seldom represented in interactions with other nnss. at times it is done in the context of the outer circle (e.g., call is there elf in elt coursebooks? 495 centres in india, book 9, p. 10), even though not with the specific purpose of highlighting elf interactions. even if they are occasionally presented in nonnative (elf) settings, the nns characters are already part of a ns context, and the english produced is elf only in terms of pronunciation, while lexis, and discourse markers are predominantly ns ones (books 1, 2, 9, 6, 10); their presence does not therefore lead to reflection on the part of the students on differences or similarities between varieties of english. in one coursebook (book 3, p. 10) a specific paragraph in the teacher’s guidebook introduction is devoted to englishes and to elf. it mentions how english has changed and explicitly draws teachers’ attention to we and the emerging elf; however, even if several nns characters often interact in the activities of that same book, the tasks are not specifically meant to highlight communicative linguistic and strategic characteristics of elf interactive settings. to sum up, signs of a shift in perspective in a number of coursebooks in terms of we do emerge, but that shift is in the majority of cases only realized in terms of acknowledging the co-existence of varieties besides standard british english, of stimulating recognition of differences in vocabulary, in spelling or in pronunciation, and in the use of varieties of english in the audio and video materials. explicit encouragement for teachers to focus their and their learners’ attention on the existence of we and elf is provided in only one of the coursebooks (book 3); however, the shift to a consistent presence of nnss as successful bilingual users of english, and of activities aimed not just at developing learners’ recognition but at actively involving them in enacting communicatively effective elf strategies, is still largely missing. in some of the coursebooks (books 2, 3, 9, 10) several activities are set in non-anglophone countries, but the locations are predominantly used only to illustrate aspects of local history, geography or cultural elements. it should be noticed, however, that one interesting dimension emerging in many of the coursebooks sold on the italian market, and partly present in our corpus too, is the elicited reflection on learners’ l1 as compared to english (books 1, 2, 3, 6, 7). more and more frequently translation activities and pragmatic differences between the two languages are presented as part of the learners’ general language education, as well as, in one case in particular (book 6), instances of other languages and of the presence of english in the students’ environment (e.g., book 7). this might be considered as a first step in terms of language and sociolinguistic awareness and may lead to further activities and tasks on both we and elf. furthermore, most of the explicit or implicit references to global english/englishes emerge in the coursebook sections officially dedicated to notions of cultural and intercultural communication, which are gradually substipaola vettorel, lucilla lopriore 496 tuting the so called culture and civilization (civiltà) sections where most traditional british culture samples, for instance, the english breakfast, the royal family, the british parliament, were once introduced. in one case, the objective to “build across-cultural awareness” is explicitly mentioned in the teacher’s guide together with that of encouraging discussion and “lead up to miniprojects” (book 7, teacher’s guide, p. 5). in another case, the teacher’s guide specifies that the culture sections deal with the uk and “world culture” (book 4, p. 14, our translation). the notion of culture underlying these new sections is linked to the emerging multiculturalism and to the multilingual contexts typical of most european countries. sometimes, even though not explicitly stated, the texts and activities are focused on other parts of the world (e.g., book 3, vol. 2, section on india and bangladesh, pp. 140-141; and section on the “all different, all equal” european policy, pp. 146-147). in most cases the sections devoted to culture/s make specific reference to religion, food or historical events. for instance, themes include breakfast around the world or world food (book 3, 5, 7), carnivals in the world (books 3, 6), and even social situations in different areas (book 6; book 3, vol. 2, p. 137, section on muhammad yunus and micro-credit in india and bangladesh). in some cases stereotypes about what is “typically english” are presented (book 4, “british food sucks”), or several points of view are introduced (e.g., brazilian, dutch, turkish, italian and spanish people, books 3, 8). very seldom specific references to other languages or to how english is used in those contexts are made. however, activities aimed at fostering reflection on the students’ own culture are increasingly present (books 1, 2, 3, 4), particularly in web-based materials (books 1, 2, 3, 6, 7); the fact that specific reference is made to intercultural communication may naturally lead in the near future to further reflections on the way english is being used also among bilingual users in cross-cultural we and elf settings. promotion of the use of english outside the school environment and flexibility for effective localization (criterion 3). very little overt encouragement to use english outside the school environment is to be found in the corpus of coursebooks analysed. when present, it is almost always meant to encourage students (and teachers) to visit the related website where materials such as songs, webpages, radio, tv and film excerpts, often unadapted, can be consulted and/or downloaded (books 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10). the notion of linguistic landscapes and of how the surrounding environment is permeated by english, and possibly of we and elf interactions, has not yet become integral part of these coursebooks. rather than actively discover and reflect upon english usage in their own contexts and in their own experience as, and with, potential elf users, references and activities are often limited to tasks that encourage is there elf in elt coursebooks? 497 learners to look for english in the press, on tv or on the internet, and active critical reflection on the presence of english in the learners’ environment is rarely included (e.g., books 3, 7). promotion of effective (elf) communication strategies (criterion 4). almost all coursebooks include suggestions on effective strategies to communicate, although not always specifically in relation to how they can be developed. the use of communicative strategies is generally highlighted either within the general heading of “study strategies,” or elicited in self-assessment activities (books 1, 2 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). very rarely are distinctions between speaking and interactive strategies made, very few references to effective strategies to communicate among nnss (books 4, 5, 6), and none to elf settings, are present. there appears to be no explicit reflection on successful communication as carried out by, or among, nnss, who, as illustrated above, are largely not represented in the listening materials of most coursebooks, either. conclusions and implications in line with previous studies, our findings show that, on the whole, there have not been significant changes in the recently published elt coursebooks in our corpus, particularly as to a shift towards awareness-raising activities related to the plurality of englishes, not to mention elf. characters continue to be prevalently nss, settings and accents overwhelmingly inner circle, anglophone ones. the idea that interactions among nonnative bilingual users of english can be successful, which may constitute a positive and attainable model, is not taken into consideration, apart from one textbook, where the characters do nevertheless sound like native speakers in the recorded materials. in a similar vein, there seems to be no consistent encouragement to take advantage of outside-school opportunities for language use. the area where more comforting findings emerge is that of intercultural awareness. several viewpoints appear to be increasingly acknowledged, especially in supplementary materials downloadable from websites. these materials not only provide reflection activities, but also support for learners’ use of the language in their local contexts. although it has often been the case that italian english language teachers have been made familiar with methodological innovations through elt materials, and teacher guides have played an important role in familiarizing paola vettorel, lucilla lopriore 498 educators with innovation in didactic approaches,5 this does not seem to have taken place yet for we, and even less so for elf. in the elt profession elf is still a highly debated issue (e.g., maley, 2010), and a tendency towards conformity to established and traditional conceptions in materials can indeed contribute to the reinforcement of ideologies of native-speakerism and language standards (houghton & rivers, 2013), which are however challenged by the widespread changes that have affected english over the last decades. the noninclusion of bilingual l2 speakers in their role of elf users can also be seen in relation to “traditional” teachers’ expectations (kivistö, 2005) and beliefs (dewey, 2012), to which coursebooks still seem largely to conform. acknowledging the deep changes english has been going through in terms of language use, as well as contexts of use (exposure to several varieties, effective elf interactions), could have an empowering effect, both on teachers and learners. including a plurilithic approach in elt materials would not only support the legitimization of their role of language users, setting bilingual expertise as an attainable goal, but also foster awareness that english is increasingly (and authentically) used in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural settings. this could be done by positively building on aspects of language and intercultural awareness which, as we have seen, are increasingly included in textbooks, to “reach out” to reality and prepare today’s learners to effectively interact in real-life communicative settings 5 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(2012). elf and the inconvenience of established concepts. journal of english as a lingua franca, 1(1), 5-26. is there elf in elt coursebooks? 503 appendix coursebook corpus no. authors and materials title publisher(s) year of publication 1 puchta, h., stranks, j., & thacker, c., & ackroyd, s. student’s book, workbook with cd, companion, revision english in mind pre-intermediate loescher / cambridge university press 2008 2 puchta h., stranks, j. student’s book, workbook with cd, companion, revision english in mind intermediate loescher / cambridge university press 2009 3 lopriore, l., ceruti, m. a. 2 volumes student’s book , workbook, voicing word, voicing progres, voicing grammar, dvd viewing voices voicing english loescher 2010 4 vol. 1: prodromou l., with cowan, a., minardi, s., prodromou, p., bowie, j.; vol. 2: prodromou l., with elliot, r., minardi, s., prodromou, p., bowie, j. teacher’s guide (one volume): tite, j., bowie p. flash on english eli 2011 5 calzoni d. , viviani, a. with brelstaff, t., phillips, a., walker, s. vols. a and b student’s & resource book, vocabulary notebook, dvd star prize loescher 2011 6 vols. 1 and 2: garton-sprenger j. , prowse, p.; workbook: garton-sprenger, j., prowse, p. with gomm, h.; teacher’s guide vol. 1: garton-sprenger, j., prowse, p. with bailry, a., gomm, h., smith, p.; teacher’s guide vol. 2: garton-sprenger, j., prowse, p. with bladon, r. new inspiration italy macmillan 2011 7 spencer d. new gateway macmillan / mondadori education macmillan 2011/ mondadori education 2012 8 vol. 1: comyns carr j., parsons, j. with foody, e.; vol. 2: mckinlay, s., hastings, b. with foody, e.; teacher’s guide vol. 1: fricker r., kent, j., kempton, g. with bettinelli, b., fantoni, p. e.; teacher’s guide vol. 2: kent j., kempton, g., fricker, r., reilly, p. with bettinelli, b., fantoni, p. e. speak your mind pearson 2102 paola vettorel, lucilla lopriore 504 9 radley p., simonetti, d. new horizon digital oxford university press 2012 10 latham-koenig, c., oxenden, c. student’s book, itutor , video english file intermediate oxford university press 2013 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: marek derenowski (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) language editor: melanie ellis (language teacher training college, zabrze) vol. 5 no. 1 march 2015 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, university of new south wales, sydney) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo) kata csizér (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) robert dekeyser (university of maryland) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) carol griffiths (fatih university, istanbul) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) sarah mercer (university of graz) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) bonny norton (university of british columbia) terrence odlin (ohio state university) rebecca oxford (university of maryland) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (university of pannonia, trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto) elaine tarone (university of minnesota) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2015 editor: mirosław pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak marek derenowski anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · infobaseindex · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to include studies in second language learning and teaching in the index of journals published by the polish ministry of science and higher education, and to have it listed by the thomson reuters master journal list. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 5, number 1, march 2015 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors ....................................................................... 7 editorial .......................................................................................... 11 articles: adriana biedroń – neurology of foreign language aptitude ............. 13 yinxing jin, kees de bot, merel keijzer – the anxiety-proficiency relationship and the stability of anxiety: the case of chinese university learners of english and japanese......................................................................... 41 zhongshe lu, meihua liu – an investigation of chinese university efl learners’ foreign language reading anxiety, reading strategy use and reading comprehension performance ............................................... 65 thomas lockley – promoting international posture through history as content and language integrated learning (clil) in a japanese context ........................................................................................................... 87 simone e. pfenninger – msl in the digital ages: effects and effectiveness of computer-mediated intervention for fl learners with dyslexia ... 109 jan vanhove – analyzing randomized controlled interventions: three notes for applied linguists ............................................................... 135 françois pichette, sébastien béland, shahab jolani, justyna leśniewska – the handling of missing binary data in language research ............ 153 book reviews ................................................................................. 171 notes to contributors .....................................................................187 7 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors sébastien béland is a lecturer at université de montréal, canada. his research interests are in the field of learning assessment and evaluation, and revolve around measurement models in education, item response theory, missing data, bayesian approaches, detection of aberrant response patterns, and differential item functioning. contact data: département d’administration et fondements de l’éducation, université de montréal, 2900 boulevard edouard-montpetit, montréal, qc h3t 1j4, canada (sebastien.beland@umontreal.ca) adriana biedroń received her doctoral and postdoctoral degrees in applied linguistics from adam mickiewicz university in poznań, poland in 2003 and 2013, respectively. she is a professor in the english philology department at the pomeranian university in słupsk, poland. her fields of interest include applied psycholinguistics and second language acquisition theory. her research focuses on individual differences in sla, in particular, on foreign language aptitude and cognitive and personality factors in gifted l2 learners. her most important publications are “working memory and short-term memory abilities in accomplished multilinguals” (with anna szczepaniak, 2012, the modern language journal) and cognitive-affective profile of gifted adult foreign language learners (2012, wydawnictwo naukowe akademii pomorskiej w słupsku). contact data: english philology department pomeranian university in słupsk, arciszewskiego 22a, 76-200 słupsk, poland (adriana.biedron@apsl.edu.pl) kees de bot is professor of applied linguistics at the university of groningen, the netherlands and the university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary. he has published widely on a range of topics, including language attrition, l2 production and the application of dynamic systems theory to language development. his most recent book is a history of applied linguistics, 1980-2010 (2015, routledge). 8 contact data: applied linguistics department, university of groningen, oude kijk in't jatstraat 26, 9712 ek groningen, the netherlands (c.l.j.de.bot@rug.nl) yinxing jin is a phd student at the university of groningen, the netherlands, supervised by prof. dr. kees de bot and dr. merel keijzer. his research interests lie in individual differences in foreign language learning. he is currently researching foreign language anxiety, out of which the current study grew. contact data: applied linguistics department, university of groningen, oude kijk in't jatstraat 26, 9712 ek groningen, the netherlands (y.jin@rug.nl) shahab jolani is a researcher in the department of methodology and statistics at the university of utrecht, the netherlands. his primarily research interest is in the analysis of incomplete data, particularly in longitudinal settings. his expertise lies in imputation of missing data, causal inference, longitudinal data analysis, bayesian computational statistics, analysis of incomplete data, and analysis of time to event data. contact data: department of methodology and statistics, faculty of social and behavioral sciences, padualaan 14, 3584ch utrecht, the netherlands (s.jolani@uu.nl) merel keijzer is assistant professor of applied linguistics at the university of groningen, the netherlands where she also holds a position as rosalind franklin research fellow. her research interests lie in bilingualism across the lifespan, and within that most of her published work focuses on first language attrition. contact data: applied linguistics department, university of groningen, oude kijk in’t jatstraat 26, 9712 ek groningen, the netherlands (m.c.j.keijzer@rug.nl) jarosław krajka, phd in foreign language teaching, d.litt in call/teacher training, head of applied linguistics division at maria curie-skłodowska university in lublin, poland. he is a founder and editor-in-chief of a major poland-based call journal teaching english with technology (http://www.tewtjournal.org), reviewer for a number of tefl and call journals such as tesl-ej, language value or european journal of teacher education. contact data: maria curie-skłodowska university, plac marii curie-skłodowskiej 5, 20-031 lublin, poland (jarek.krajka@poczta.umcs.lublin.pl) justyna leśniewska teaches at the institute of english studies, jagiellonian university, poland. her research interests are in applied linguistics and include second language vocabulary acquisition, collocation competence development, corpus-based linguistics, early bilingualism and efl teaching. 9 contact data: institute of english studies, jagiellonian university, ul. łojasiewicza 4, 30-348 kraków, poland (justyna.lesniewska@uj.edu.pl) thomas lockley is assistant professor at the nihon university college of law, tokyo, japan. he has worked in a wide variety of educational contexts for the past 15 years including primary, secondary and tertiary institutions in britain and japan. in all contexts, he has attempted to introduce culturally focused learning and teaching methods, in particular, those conforming to the principles of content and language integrated learning (clil). research interests include cross-cultural integration, educational contexts, learner self-concept and clil. contact data: thomas lockley, nihon university college of law, tokyo, japan (lockleyta@gmail.com) mirosław pawlak is professor of english in the english department at the faculty of pedagogy and fine arts of adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland. his main areas of interest are sla theory and research, form-focused instruction, classroom discourse, learner autonomy, communication and learning strategies, individual learner differences and pronunciation teaching. his recent publications include error correction in the foreign language classroom. reconsidering the issues (2012, adam mickiewicz university press) and several edited collections on learner autonomy, language policies of the council of europe, form-focused instruction, speaking in a foreign language and individual learner differences. contact data: department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, nowy świat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl) simone e. pfenninger, phd, is a senior research and teaching associate at the english department of the university of zurich, switzerland. her principal research areas are multilingualism, psycholinguistics and the age factor in sla, especially in regard to quantitative approaches and statistical methods and techniques for language application in education. she is currently conducting research into early vs. late learning of multiple foreign languages and the cognitive and psycholinguistic mechanisms that drive language change. her work is published in several books, edited volumes and in journals such as international journal of multilingualism and international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism. she has been involved in efl in switzerland for nine years at different levels: secondary school, adult education, higher education, assessment of processes and outcomes in language education, and language policy. contact data: university of zurich, english department, plattenstrasse 47, 8032 zurich, switzerland (simone.pfenninger@es.uzh.ch) 10 françois pichette is professor of linguistics at téluq université du québec, canada. his current teaching and research interests include firstand second-language acquisition, l2 reading and writing, early bilingualism, language testing, and second-language vocabulary acquisition. contact data: uer sciences humaines, lettres et communication, téluq 455, rue du parvis, québec (qc), g1k 9h6, canada (francois.pichette@teluq.ca) jan vanhove is an oberassistent at the department of multilingualism in fribourg, switzerland. he finished his phd with a thesis entitled receptive multilingualism across the lifespan: cognitive and linguistic factors in cognate guessing in 2014 and blogs semi-regularly about statistical issues and research design in applied linguistics and multilingualism research at http://janhove.github.io/. contact data: university of fribourg, department of multilingualism, rue de rome 1, ch-1700 fribourg, switzerland (jan.vanhove@unifr.ch) 397 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (3). 2013. 397-418 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl facets of imagery in academic and professional achievements: a study of three doctoral students letty chan university of nottingham, uk lettychan@gmail.com abstract since the inception of the l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2005), which operationalises motivation as a function of learners’ future identities, the field of l2 motivation has seen a growing interest in mental imagery. numerous studies have examined the role of a future self-guide, that is, the ideal l2 self, and have confirmed it to be powerful for explaining learner motivation (e.g., csizér & lukács, 2010; dörnyei & ushioda, 2009); however, few studies have explored how mental imagery, a key dimension of the ideal l2 self (dörnyei & chan, 2013), can manifest itself in actual motivated behaviour. using in-depth interviews, the present study aims to explore the motivational capacity of the natural use of mental imagery in three doctoral candidates studying at a british university. the main research focuses on examining how imagery was employed to stimulate the participants’ l2 learning and their doctoral research as well as career choice. this paper proposes a conceptual framework of types, functions, and conditions of imagery in academic and professional achievements based on the data obtained. it reveals an intriguing array of imagery types, functions, and conditions, which shape the achievement of the individuals’ desired goals. recommendations and implications for future research on imagery use in sla are also discussed. keywords: imagery, motivation, identity, ideal l2 self letty chan 398 definition of imagery the ability to use imagination and mental images is a ubiquitous human phenomenon. on the one hand, the concept of mental imagery is familiar to us at a common sense level, for example, when we use parlance including seeing with the mind’s eye, hearing in the head, or visualising. nevertheless, there are different aspects to the concept and its definition may vary according to the emphasis of the researcher (murphy & martin, 2002). investigators have drawn attention to various characteristics of mental imagery, such as the role of sensory modalities, agency, and memory. particularly useful to the present study is the emphasis on agency, which is highlighted in morris, spittle, and watt’s (2005) definition: imagery . . . may be considered as the creation or re-creation of an experience generated from memorial information, involving quasi-sensorial, quasi-perceptual, and quasi-affective characteristics, that is under the volitional control of the imager and which may occur in the absence of the real stimulus antecedents normally associated with the actual experience. (p. 19) for the purpose of this study, i would like to define mental imagery as the conscious or sub-conscious creation of images in the mind, which are transformational in nature. these mental pictures can be created either in the presence of relevant stimuli or in the absence of sensory input. they involve the use of multiple sensory modalities including visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile modes. imagery in sport psychology it has been well established in sport psychology that imagery has motivational capacity (e.g., martin & hall, 1995; martin, moritz, & hall, 1999; morris et al., 2005), particularly when the stakes are high in the sports market (e.g., the u.s. sports market generates $400 billion in revenue in a typical year; voelker, 2013). therefore, a whole industry of visualisation training has been developed to investigate the impact of various aspects of imagery, aiming to help athletes to achieve and maintain peak performance. indeed, visualisation is a popular strategy among athletes, coaches, and sport psychologists (cumming & ramsey, 2009). for example, it has been found that 99% of canadian olympic athletes surveyed reported using imagery in their training (orlick & partington, 1988) and more experienced athletes are said to use visualisation to a greater extent than their less experienced counterparts (ungerleider & golding, 1991). to fully utilise mental imagery in sports training, a number of models have been proposed in sport psychology to conceptualise the role of imagery in a systematic way (morris et al., 2005). one of the best-established frameworks is facets of imagery in academic and professional achievements: a study of three doctoral students 399 allen paivio’s (1985) applied model of imagery use in sport, which provides motivational and cognitive explanations of various types of imagery. centring on motivational functions (e.g., when an athlete visualises a positive outcome of a game) and cognitive functions (e.g., when a gymnast forms an image of the way to perform a specific move), paivio maintains that these two functions can be categorised into general and specific levels. since then, the concept and functions of imagery use have been further operationalised by hall and his colleagues (hall, 1998, 2001; hall, mack, paivio, & hausenblas, 1998; martin et al., 1999), using the sport imagery questionnaire (siq). in this questionnaire, five types of imagery used by athletes were identified: cognitive specific (cs), cognitive general (cf), motivational specific (ms), motivational general-arousal (mga), and motivational general-mastery (mg-m). these various types of imagery are used by athletes in mental rehearsal to perform different functions including imagining particular skills and movements in sports (i.e., in cs imagery), and visualising winning strategies in games (i.e., in cf imagery). examples of motivation-related imagery included picturing goal attainment, such as winning a gold medal (i.e., in ms imagery); visualising states of being stressed, anxious or aroused (i.e., in mg-a imagery); and imagining being confident, mentally tough, focused and positive (i.e., in mg-m imagery). the relevance of hall and colleagues’ extended framework to the present study is that it is possible to adopt several of its classifications of imagery types and functions. its description of some motivational and cognitive imagery may be applicable to language learners and teachers (e.g., imagining goal attainments in “motivational specific imagery” and picturing being confident and focused on “motivational general-mastery imagery”). however, the applied model of imagery use in sport is only partially relevant to second language acquisition (sla) for an obvious reason: sport imagery training focuses on the enhancement of strategies and responses involved in motor skills and performance, which is not a concern of l2 learners and teachers. nonetheless, it does provide a conceptual representation of what could potentially be incorporated into a framework of imagery use in sla. imagery in second language acquisition in the field of sla, the concept of imagery/vision has been foregrounded by means of a theoretical framework: the l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2005). this construct draws on a theory known as possible selves in personality psychology (markus & nurius, 1986), which proposes possible selves as mental representations of one’s aspirations and fears (markus & ruvolo, 1989): people will think of what they would like to become, what they could become, and what letty chan 400 they are afraid of becoming. what is important here is that these self-guides are future-oriented and imaginative with a heavy element of fantasy (segal, 2006). drawing on the theory of possible selves, dörnyei (2005) highlights both l2 learners’ future self-guides as well as their social context in l2 learning in the l2 motivational self system. the tripartite framework consists of the following components: ideal l2 self, that is, the l2-specific facet of a person’s ideal self: if the person we would like to become can speak an l2, then the ideal l2 self is a powerful motivator because we would like to reduce the discrepancy between our actual and ideal selves. ought-to l2 self, that is, the attributes that we believe we ought to possess in order to avoid possible negative outcomes; this is therefore someone else’s vision for a person and may bear little resemblance to the person’s own desires or wishes. l2 learning experience, that is, situation-specific motives related to the immediate learning environment and experience (e.g., the positive impact of success or the enjoyable quality of a language course). a number of validation studies have confirmed the motivational impact of this new approach, confirming the validity of these constructs (e.g., csizér & kormos, 2009; csizér & lukács, 2010; henry, 2009, 2010, 2011; hiver, 2013; kormos, kiddle, & csizér, 2011; magid, 2012; papi, 2010; ryan, 2009; taguchi, magid, & papi, 2009). these findings have confirmed the ideal l2 self as a strong predictor of various criterion measures related to language learning. apart from the impact on learners’ effort in l2 learning, the ideal l2 self is also closely intertwined with imagery. a link between these two constructs has been established through a line of research originated by al-shehri (2009), who conducted a survey with the rationale that learners who exhibit a visual learning style preference are more likely to possess stronger capacity for visual imagery and imagination, and can therefore be expected to develop a stronger ideal l2 self. confirming this hypothesis, the results showed significant correlations between students’ visual learning style, imagination, ideal l2 self, and motivated l2 behaviour (al-shehri, 2009). follow-up studies have also revealed the multisensory dimension of future self-guides, suggesting that both visual and auditory sensory modalities are incorporated in the development of learners’ future identities (dörnyei & chan, 2013; kim 2009; kim & kim, 2011). research has also established significant correlations between learners’ l2 selves and their actual academic achievements (i.e., grades), and such links can be extended to learners’ third language (dörnyei & chan, 2013). these results imply that if learners have developed an image of themselves as an effective l2 user, this identity can become a powerful driving force in their l2 learning. facets of imagery in academic and professional achievements: a study of three doctoral students 401 in addition to these surveys, a handful of intervention studies have investigated the impact of visualisation and possible selves on l2 motivation (e.g., fukada, fukuda, falout, & murphey, 2011; magid, 2011; magid & chan, 2012; sampson, 2012). for example, fukada et al. (2011) employed possible selves activities (e.g., sharing each other’s ideal future careers with peers, discussing their future goals and using drama) in order to enact japanese students’ future selves. as a result of these interventions, there was a significant increase in the correlations between students’ possible selves and their investments in l2 learning both in and outside the classroom. similarly, sampson (2012) used various possible tasks to develop and inform task development in the three phases of his action research. the study showed that japanese university students found the activities that provided steps towards their ideal self, the tasks that focused on their feared l2 selves, and the ones with a social component particularly motivating. finally, magid and chan (2012) and chan (in press) have conducted motivational programmes in which both possible selves activities and visualisations were employed to enhance chinese learners’ vision of their ideal l2 self. it was found that chinese learners welcomed the opportunity to visualise in class on the whole (chan, in press), that learners were more motivated to learn english, their linguistic self-confidence increased, and their goals became more specific (magid & chan, 2012). as seen from above, and this special issue of studies in second language learning and teaching, research in l2 imagery has seen a growing interest. a range of significant conceptual foundations exploring the mechanisms of vision in language learners and teachers have also been laid with a recent book motivating learners, motivating teachers: building vision in the language classroom by dörnyei and kubanyiova (2014), who have presented the mechanisms of vision in learning a foreign/second language and the ways it can be created and maintained by the teacher. as their book is essentially theoretical in nature, the present study complements their work by further exploring what takes place exactly in the realm of imagination and precisely how mental imagery works in l2 learning and teaching. it aims to take an initial step in mapping the territory of imagery use in sla by proposing a conceptual framework of types, functions, and conditions of imagery in academic and professional achievements, for the purpose of analysing the qualitative aspects of imagery exploited by three natural imagers. at this point, it is perhaps pertinent to define the meaning of academic and professional achievements in this study: academic achievements are linked to the participants’ experience of l2 learning and doctoral studies, whereas professional achievements are associated with their experience in english teaching and their vision as aspiring academics. doctoral candidates are employed in this study because they are seen to have personal insights into letty chan 402 what it means to be l2 learners as well as aspiring teachers. these participants do not only have ample imaging experiences, but they also have the maturity and sensitivity to reflect upon and report the experiences of their inner world. to this end, the main research questions (rq) are as follows: rq 1: what types of imagery did the participants exploit in their academic and professional lives? rq 2: what functions did imagery serve in these participants? rq 3: how did these participants use visualisations in their academic and professional lives? methodology participants three doctoral students, ivan, chloe and leila (pseudonyms) studying at the school of english at a british university, were recruited through personal contacts. they were invited to participate in the study, as they were known to use mental imagery spontaneously. ivan is a taiwanese student in his early thirties and taught english in a junior high school in taiwan for two years prior to the start of his doctoral degree. his first degree was in computer science, but he had changed his career trajectory by partaking in elt training in taiwan after graduation. the second interviewee is chloe, who is an experienced english educator in her thirties and has taught in both senior high schools and universities in china. having completed an undergraduate degree in english, chloe went on to become a senior high school english teacher and later on completed a masters degree at a british university. she then became an associate professor teaching academic english at a university in china for a number of years before starting her phd. the third interviewee, leila, is a young iranian student in her mid twenties. she majored in english literature at a university in iran and continued with her masters and doctoral degrees in english literature at a british university. ivan and chloe learnt english as a foreign language whereas leila acquired english as a young child in england and is therefore a bilingual speaker of farsi and english. in terms of their research focus, ivan’s research interests lie in intercultural communications, chloe’s are in sla, and leila’s in twentieth century theatre. data collection individual, in-depth interviews were conducted with all participants, and these took place between june 2012 and april 2013. all three participants were in facets of imagery in academic and professional achievements: a study of three doctoral students 403 the second year of their doctoral studies at the time of their interview. the interviews took an emic approach, which means they aimed to develop an insiders’ perspective on the inner world of natural imagers (patton, 2002). the interviews were semi-structured in nature, which allowed the interviewees to “respond to a certain set of questions” and have “the freedom to talk about what is of interest or importance to them” (hesse-biber & leavy, 2010, p. 102). an interview guide was presented to the informants a few days prior to the actual interview to allow sufficient time for preparation. all interviews were conducted in english, were audio-recorded, and took approximately 30 to 60 minutes. data analyses the interview recordings were transcribed into a nearly 15,000-word corpus. pseudonyms were employed for the three participants throughout this paper. in addition, to ensure the validity of the analyses and for the purpose of familiarisation with the data, the transcripts were read and re-read thoroughly before the actual analysis (harding, 2013). in the first stage of the analysis, brief notes, main ideas and a summary of different parts of the transcripts were written, which reduced the data to key points. then, having obtained a general idea of the data; a thematic analysis was employed to examine the commonalities and differences among the data provided by the three participants (gibson & brown, 2009). key phrases in the transcripts were underlined and coded into different categories. finally, the codes were reviewed, then adjusted to decide which should be kept and abandoned. to gain communicative validity and to verify whether the findings were in agreement with the participants’ actual experiences and viewpoints (hesse-biber & leavy, 2011), a report of the study was sent to the participants for their comments and confirmation. results imagery types imagery types are different groups of mental images that share particular qualities or features as identified in the participants’ data. the results indicated that the informants created five imagery types, as follows: goal achievement imagery, process-based imagery, mental rehearsal, negative imagery, and the imagery of bridging cultural barriers. goal achievement imagery. goal achievement imagery can be defined as “the perception-like mental representation of the pursuit and attainment of letty chan 404 a goal” (schultheiss & brunstein, 1999, p. 1). the results pointed to three channels for imagining goal achievements: the imagery of passing the finishing line, the imagery of functioning as a professional, and the imagery of how a significant other would react. the imagery of passing the finishing line can be exemplified by one of leila’s mental images, “sometimes, i would go through what might happen potentially when i pass my viva or the day i graduate, how i would be feeling emotionally.” the informants also created the imagery of functioning as a professional, of themselves taking up a particular role or profession, such as being a university teacher in the future. the following was what chloe commented: if i go back to china, i plan to work as a professor at a university and then i can give a lecture in front of hundreds of students at my lecture or at a conference. i just imagined that it would happen as a routine in china. in addition to imagining the attainment of a final goal or already functioning as a professional, informants also pictured how their significant others might react to their success. this was mentioned by leila who imagined telling her family the moment she got a scholarship; she had images of how she would tell them the news and what their reactions might be. process-based imagery. process-based imagery involves simulating the process required to reach a goal, which could include reviewing steps that lead to appropriate changes. it also entails forming necessary action plans and remembering intentions to carry out future actions, which, in turn, will affect a person’s motivation. process-based imagery was used by leila, who not only imagined the outcome, but also the process of moving towards a goal. she mentioned that she would sometimes start thinking about “how many steps [i] would have to go through before actually getting there” and it was similar to having “little snapshots of what [i] would be doing instead of detailed images.” leila gave an interesting illustration: if i say in my mind i need to come into the office to study or to work on saturday, i need to get into the office through the security. that’s the image i get, going through the security. i get an image of myself sitting at the desk in the office. mental rehearsal. mental rehearsal refers to times when individuals practise, rehearse and visualise a performance in their mind for a specific event. this was mentioned by all three informants, whose mental rehearsal revolved around teaching demonstrations, conference presentations, and lanfacets of imagery in academic and professional achievements: a study of three doctoral students 405 guage practice. as a novice teacher, ivan used mental rehearsal in practising teaching demonstrations as well as giving talks. it was found to be an effective strategy when ivan prepared for the national selection of teacher trainees in taiwan, as he said: “i imagined myself giving a very good teaching demonstration in front of [the examiners]. so, i keep thinking how i can present perfectly. actually, it’s not just imagery. it’s rehearsal!” leila also used mental rehearsal when she prepared for her presentation at an academic conference. describing the imagery, she explained: in my head, there’re lots of chairs in front of me and i know who’s going to be attending, but i have never seen their faces. i have only read their books, but i have an image of what they look like. sitting there, i have an image of myself there in front . . . presenting. negative imagery. most of the imagery created by the participants was positive, but some were negative. this was the case for leila and chloe, especially with issues about which they felt apprehensive. leila gave an example of imagining a potential phd supervision which she had anxieties about: if i have not worked enough for a potential supervision i have, it becomes a worry and anxiety for me. then, i can have negative images of what might happen, the negative things they would say, and how the meeting would go. chloe also had fears of not completing her doctoral degree: if i fail my phd study, then i’ll have to go back to my old university. my colleagues will gossip about me, “so what happened to her when she was in the u.k.? she didn’t even get a phd degree!” negative imagery had both preventive and motivational functions for these two participants, which means that it can help people to avoid a particular scenario by consciously steering them in a different direction. imagery of bridging cultural barriers. imagining conversing with foreigners can also be a common experience for language learners. this was the case for chloe when she was a senior high school and undergraduate student. as she did not have much exposure to the outside world or any contact with native english speakers, she would imagine different situations and various topics to discuss with them. she commented, “my images i can say were quite vague, but i know that i had imagery of speaking skilfully, fluently and proficiently to foreigners or to speak at a conference.” it is worth noting that the imagery of bridging cultural barriers was asletty chan 406 signed as a separate, independent imagery type because achievement in l2 learning is in itself slightly different from other achievements. for example, to imagine having a conversation with a native english speaker can be categorised as goal achievement imagery or process-based imagery depending on the construal of the imager. in other words, in l2 learning, such a scenario can be viewed as an interim process towards a higher goal or a goal in itself. imagery functions the results revealed four imagery functions: motivational, preventive, cognitive, and affective functions. motivational functions. all three participants mentioned the motivational impact of using imagery, including the effect it had on their behaviour. for example, ivan commented about envisioning himself as a great teacher, which motivated him to prepare for his exams to the point that he often forgot his meals. as he was deeply immersed in his readings, he would always think to himself, “this [material] will help my teaching and this will help my students.” in addition, as a doctoral candidate, ivan imagined himself finishing a first draft of his thesis by the end of his second year and he said, “this whole year, i just keep thinking about it, envisioning the life now.” ivan had a specific goal of writing a certain number of words every day in order to complete his first draft on schedule; something which he managed to achieve. preventive functions. leila and chloe sometimes imagined negative scenarios and suggested that this type of imagery could have a preventive function. leila mentioned, “it makes me try to avoid that situation because, in my mind, i create how horrible it might be and then i try to avoid it!” cognitive functions. imagery was used for two cognitive functions: as a mental rehearsal for a particular event, or as a writing strategy. mental rehearsal was used for practising presentations and teaching demonstrations and such examples were mentioned earlier on. as well as for mental rehearsal, imagery was also employed as a strategy during a person’s writing process, which can be demonstrated in the case of leila: when i write my actual article, my image would get more detailed of exactly how i would present. perhaps like particular bits of images i might worry about or i think are particularly good. i would think about what people’s reaction might be to that. facets of imagery in academic and professional achievements: a study of three doctoral students 407 affective functions. creating imagery in a person’s mind was found to have an impact on his or her affect. for example, leila would usually feel quite excited after envisioning positive imagery as she mentioned, “it makes me feel quite happy. it makes me feel like that it’ll be great. it makes me feel excited almost.” this was also the case for chloe, who would feel happy and slightly exhilarated after visualisation. conditions of functional imagery use the results of this study indicated various conditions that need to be fulfilled for imagery to attain a powerful motivating capacity. the first was the need to create imagery that is linked with a strong desire; specific; grounded in reality; and accompanied with a concrete plan. in addition, the imager should have imagery that is not competing; they should stay focused while working on a task; keep the imagery alive; be aware of the discrepancy between imagination and reality; not give up when the reality is different from their imagination; and create mostly positive imagery rather than negative. these conditions are discussed in more detail below. linking it with a strong desire. it is very clear that all three informants were not just experiencing positive imagery but had strong desires that accompanied their visualisations. for example, leila mentioned that her imagery usually involved scenarios that she aspired to or she wished to happen. this was the same for chloe who said, “imagery emerges quite naturally especially when i am longing for something!” using imagery that is specific. it is important for imagery to be specific and this can be epitomised by ivan, who said that if the vision is strong, it has to be very specific. for example, wanting to become a teacher is quite general, but if i put it in more specific terms, it will be i want to pass this specific exam. because if i pass the exam, that’s a stepping stone and i can go further. having a concrete plan. added to the previous point is the requirement of accompanying imagery with a concrete plan. all three informants knew the goals they would like to attain and they had very clear plans or roadmaps so that they knew exactly what to do next. this was the case for leila who said: i am a big planner, so i would say usually when i daydream about something, afterwards because i so want it to happen, i start thinking about how many steps i would have to go through before i actually get there. letty chan 408 creating imagery that is grounded in reality. in order for the imagery to achieve its function, the individual has to believe that the images are actually possible and are grounded in reality. this point was emphasised by leila: for me, my imagination needs some grounding in truth. if it’s something i construct out of the blue or based on my own imagination, then i don’t think it’s possible and it’s not something i want to do. having visualisations that are in harmony. it is also vital that people’s visualisations are in harmony with each other so that neither one nor the other becomes improbable or even impossible to achieve. when individuals have desires that are incompatible in reality, they may start visualising imagery that is in competition with other visualisations. this was the case for ivan, who imagined being a national committee member in the ministry of education and also a county committee member for english language teaching; however, it was impossible to be in both committees in reality: “for example, if i want to be in a national committee, that means i can’t do things for my school. so, it’s a dilemma because sometimes i envision this and sometimes i envision that.” staying focused. for those who are natural imagers or those who would like to use imagery for motivational purposes, visualisations could become a distraction especially when a person should actually be working or staying on task. this was mentioned by the informants such as chloe who said, “i have imagery when i am not studying, but when i am studying, i don’t think i have much imagery. even when i am distracted for a while, i will tell myself, ‘ok, go back to the right track!’” keeping the imagery alive. a key to keep imagery alive is to create visualisations frequently and regularly. in other words, if a goal was tied in with a strong desire, the informants visualised such a scenario regularly and frequently. this was the case for ivan, who was regularly visualising himself achieving different goals, such as passing an entrance exam or completing the first draft of his phd thesis. he commented, “i have done this vision thing for so long, for so many years. sometimes, [i do it] every couple of days, every three days, every other day, or every day.” this suggests that the frequency of imagery could be a strengthening factor. being aware of the discrepancy between one’s imagination and reality. as future-oriented imagery has an element of fantasy, individuals should be aware of the discrepancy between where they would like to be and where they actually facets of imagery in academic and professional achievements: a study of three doctoral students 409 are. its importance can be illustrated by what chloe said, “i am quite aware of the discrepancy between the present, the reality and the outcome. so, that’s why i can be quite driven to work harder. otherwise, it’s only a daydream.” not giving up when the reality is divergently different from one’s imagination. this condition is especially significant for teaching or academic achievements, which depend not only on diligence but also on various environmental factors. sometimes, the resulting outcome could be disheartening for the informants; therefore, it is essential not to allow oneself to be defeated. as ivan spoke about the disparity between his imagery and the real teaching situations, he commented, “i was disappointed for two seconds, but i keep envisioning being [a great teacher]!” creating mainly positive visualisations with a modicum of negative ones. all three participants stayed confident and tried to create positive visualisations instead of negative ones. this is likely to create good energy and emotions for imagers, as leila remarked: “as long as i am not feeling anxious, i try to create positive imagery.” discussion the results showed an interesting array of imagery types and functions, as well as the conditions of functional capacity for imagery use. regarding rq 1, which examined the types of imagery the participants exploited in their academic and professional lives, five imagery types were revealed: goal achievement imagery, process-based imagery, mental rehearsal, negative imagery, and imagery of bridging cultural barriers. in fact, the classifications of imagery types have been conceptualised differently in various models in sport psychology, for instance, the applied model of imagery use in sport (paivio, 1985), its extended model (e.g., martin et al., 1999), and the model of the content of imagery (munroe, giacobbi, hall, & weinberg, 2000). for example, in the extended version of the applied model of imagery use in sport, imagery type is an amalgam of both type of the imagery used by the athletes and the functions it served (martin et al., 1999), whereas in the model of the content of imagery type, it refers to the visual, kinaesthetic, auditory, and olfactory sensory modalities. in this study, the categorisation of imagery types was based on the informants’ data concerning their natural use of mental imagery in their l2 learning, academic, and professional achievements. these were grouped according to the themes that emerged from the data, representing the content and the nature of imagery use. as expected, individual variability was observed in the participants’ use letty chan 410 of imagery types. for example, although all participants described their goal achievement imagery in great detail, only leila mentioned the use of processbased imagery (i.e., imagining coming into the office to study or to work on saturday). in fact, it was rather surprising that the participants, who were highly motivated and successful, employed mainly goal achievement imagery, since research in psychology points to the superior motivational effects of process-based over outcome-based imagery1 (pham & taylor, 1997; taylor, pham, rivkin, & armor, 1998). nevertheless, as was seen in this study, goal achievement imagery can also generate motivational power, if it is specific and accompanied by concrete plans, regardless of whether these plans were visualised or were merely thoughts. this could be supported by conway, meares, and standart’s (2004) conception that mental imagery is “a type of mental representation, which is specialised for representing information about goals” and is a “language of goals” (p. 525). moreover, goal achievement imagery (e.g., to imagine winning and receiving awards) may serve a motivational function during a “long period when objective incentives and reinforcements are likely to be rare or improbable” (paivio, 1985, p, 245), which could be the case whilst learning a second language or studying for a doctoral degree. apart from the pattern found, related to goal achievement imagery, the data revealed that most of the mental images created by all three participants were positive. indeed, all the participants indicated that positive imagery came more naturally to them, and leila would even deliberately create positive visualisations whenever possible. as for the use of negative imagery, two participants, leila and chloe, mentioned generating small amounts of negative imagery, which had both preventive and motivational functions. that is, this type of imagery flagged up alerts so that they could change their course of action in order to avoid undesirable situations. regarding the possible impact of negative imagery, experts in sport research are divided as to whether it is beneficial or detrimental to human performance (dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014). indeed, sport psychology literature suggests that creating negative imagery can have an adverse effect on performance in competitive golf putting, causing greater errors (taylor & shaw, 2002); on the other hand, it can also prepare professional skiers for worst-case scenarios (hale, 2005). using the same reasoning, it seems that whether negative imagery has 1 outcome-based imagery essentially carries the same meaning as goal achievement imagery in that both emphasise the outcome of an event or a desired goal. goal achievement imagery, a term that is also used in sport psychology, is employed in the framework of this study to highlight the importance of personal goals in an outcome. facets of imagery in academic and professional achievements: a study of three doctoral students 411 advantageous or adversary effects depends on which particular imagery type is employed and what it is used for. for example, for the purpose of mental rehearsal in which a person is preparing for an individual academic presentation or teaching demonstration, having negative imagery may create unnecessary negative emotions that are associated with the performance. in this case, there may be detrimental effects, as can be seen in taylor and shaw’s (2002) study, which do not allow individuals to perform at their best. however, for situations that are somewhat unpredictable and highly dependent on others, such as teaching a disruptive class or answering questions in a viva examination, negative imagery may have the function of helping to create cognitive strategies. this function is similar to the imagery of cognitive general in the applied model of imagery use in sport, which refers to the planning of winning strategies in games (hall et al., 1999). this could be particularly useful for novice teachers who are apprehensive about dealing with a difficult language class. negative imagery may help them to imagine cognitive plans or strategies to manage different situations. it may also act as a desensitisation procedure (used in clinical psychology) as individuals handle fearful situations or stimuli (dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014). it is worth reiterating that the imagery of bridging cultural barriers was assigned as an independent imagery type, because imagery in l2 learning could involve both goal achievement imagery or process-based imagery depending on the understanding of the imager. however, regardless of whether it is connected to goal achievement imagery or process-based imagery, the imagery of bridging cultural barriers does have the effect of motivating contact with people from another culture. this is demonstrated by a recent study which showed that an elaborated imagery of social contact with another ethnic group may enhance the intention of such contact (husnu & crisp, 2010). regarding rq 2, which investigated the functions imagery served in the participants, this study indicated that imagery may serve multiple functions subconsciously, namely motivational, preventive, cognitive, and affective functions. as the participants were natural imagers, imagery was either conjured up spontaneously or was created consciously. in both cases, the functions of their imagery may depend on what the images meant to the individual personally (murphy & martin, 2002). as suggested by the interviewees, most imagery was reported to be geared towards a motivational or rehearsing function. in contrast, preventive, strategic, and affective functions were mentioned with less frequency and emphasis. the asymmetrical prominence of motivational and rehearsing functions may be related to the high levels of motivation demonstrated by these participants, who had a strong desire to succeed in their studies and in their letty chan 412 career development. as with other features, the motivational capacity of mental imagery has also been verified in various studies within sport and health psychology. its effects include significantly increasing the time to practise golfputting on a self-initiated basis (martin & hall, 1995), reducing alcohol consumption in undergraduate students (hagger, lonsdale, & chatzisarantis, 2012), and increasing fruit consumption among low fruit consumers (knäuper, mccollam, rosen-brown, lacaille, kelso, & roseman, 2010). with regard to the function of mental rehearsal, the data in this study suggests that the participants used it as an effective strategy in enhancing their motivation and performance in academic presentations, teaching demonstrations as well as whilst conversing with native english speakers. past research has also confirmed its effectiveness in situations such as job interviews (knudstrup, segrest, & hurley, 2003), teacher training (fletcher, 2000), and l2 learning (de guerrero, 1999). for example, knudstrup et al. (2003) conducted a study in which participants were instructed to use mental imagery techniques to simulate a job interview scenario. it was found the subjects who used mental imagery performed better in the interview and were more relaxed than those who did not use the technique. in another example, fletcher (2000) gave an account of how imagery techniques were used to “sensitise some novice teachers to the potential of classroom teaching” (p. 235). these student teachers enhanced their ability to assess pupils’ progress and to stimulate their imagination. imagery is a way to help student teachers to explore the various choices in the educational setting and to understand the complexities of their new roles. in terms of l2 learning, a questionnaire survey conducted by de guerrero (1999) showed that l2 learners used inner speech, which served cognitive functions such as texts planning, mnemonic, and selfand other-evaluation. these studies confirmed that imagery can be effectively used for the function of mental rehearsal. the last research question, rq 3, which examined the conditions of motivating functional imagery use, emerged naturally through the course of the interviews as i was struck by the fact that some of the points raised by the participants (without prompting) were highly compatible with the “conditions for the motivating capacity of future self-guides” proposed by dörnyei and ushioda (2011). images and senses are said to be integral components of the ideal l2 self, as dörnyei (2009) maintains that it is the “experiential element that makes possible selves larger than any combinations of goal-related constructs” (p. 15). from the data, it was noticeable that the participants were aware of the difference between daydreams and motivational imagery and were able to delineate what it meant for the imagery to have a real motivating impact on their behaviour. some of the conditions that were raised as a confacets of imagery in academic and professional achievements: a study of three doctoral students 413 scious approach by the participants included that imagery should be specific and vivid; that imagery should be perceived as possible; that imagery should be accompanied by concrete roadmaps; that there should be awareness of the discrepancy between one’s imagination and the reality; and that the participants should be keeping the imagery alive. despite the similarities in some of the conditions, the condition of staying focused was more specific to imagery use in the current context. in sport psychology, maintaining concentration on various environmental cues as well as internal strategies is important for an athlete (hale, 2005). similarly, the ability to maintain concentration and pay attention to important tasks at hand is an important criterion for aspiring l2 learners and teachers, especially when the use of mental imagery could become a distraction at times. finally, it is important to discuss the distinction between the conditions creating imagery that is grounded in reality and being aware of the discrepancy between one’s imagination and reality. at first glance, these conditions seem contradictory, because, on the one hand, imagery must be highly probable and constitute a likely possibility in order to be motivating, but, on the other hand, there should be a discrepancy between a person’s imagination and the reality. this notion has been discussed by dörnyei and ushioda (2011), who suggest that if the future self is not sufficiently different from the current self, the individual may feel it unnecessary to exert extra effort. research has also suggested that comparison of the current self against the possible self is a mechanism for the latter to induce actions (van dellen & hoyle, 2008). at the same time, it is also vital for the future self to be perceived as plausible because “a sense of controllability – that is the belief that one’s action can make a difference – is an essential prerequisite” (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, pp. 8384). therefore, imagery of the future, if pitched at the right level, may elucidate the opportunities individuals perceive to be available, as well as the expectations they have for themselves. conclusion the present study essentially draws upon research in sport psychology to inform understanding of and to investigate imagery use in the field of sla. its strength lies in taking an initial step in mapping the territory of how individuals exploit imagery spontaneously in their academic and professional arenas. this paper aims to offer categories of essential components which could be keys to the functional use of imagery, which is a new and relatively uncharted area, providing an in-depth description of how exactly imagery was used by three doctoral students. letty chan 414 in the future, researchers may explore the relationships between different imagery types, functions and conditions. although not a key focus of the present study, some initial signs here suggested that each imagery type may serve one or more functions. for example, imagery of mental rehearsal may serve the functions of motivating oneself and rehearsal simultaneously; it may also have the effects of influencing affects as a result of repeated mental practice (nordin & cumming, 2008). understanding the exact relationships between these variables may help practitioners and researchers to devise interventions and training more effectively and systematically. the framework proposed in this paper is by no means comprehensive and the classifications are not exhaustive, as it is based on the data obtained from few participants. it has also taken a macro perspective to investigate imagery used in different fields including individuals’ l2 learning experiences, their academic achievements as well as professional arena. future research could investigate the subject with larger scale, quantitative methods and pay attention to a specific area to gain in-depth insights into how learners and educators may use imagery for the purpose of l2 learning, teaching, and professional development respectively. facets of imagery in academic and professional achievements: a study of three doctoral students 415 references al-shehri, a. h. 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(2012). hot careers: sport psychology. gradpsych magazine. retrieved from http://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2012/11/sport-psychology.aspx 455 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (3). 2015. 455-472 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.3.6 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl parental visions of their children’s future as a motivator for an early start in a foreign language joanna rokita-jaśkow pedagogical university, cracow, poland jrokita@up.krakow.pl abstract this paper reports on the qualitative part of a project investigating parental educational aspirations as manifested by enrolling their children (aged 3-6) into very early l2 instruction. the concept of educational aspirations is widely studied in educational psychology as well as in sociology and pedagogy. in sla, these aspirations can fit in the new framework of imagery and creating visions as they are a part of an ideal l2 self. data analysis concludes that parental visions towards their children’s achievement reflect self-efficacy beliefs; in other words, those parents who were unsuccessful foreign language (fl) learners themselves hoped that by starting early their children would learn lingua franca english well and this would help them achieve educational and vocational success, which indicates an instrumental motive. by contrast, those parents who were successful language learners were positive about their children’s future plurilingual attainment, not necessarily voicing the necessity of “an early start.” they believe languages contribute to overall emotional and cognitive growth, which shows more intrinsic and integrative motives. these findings suggest that the differences in ultimate fl attainment may start very early and are rooted in the social (family) context. keywords: early foreign language learning, visions, educational aspirations, identity joanna rokita-jaśkow 456 1. introduction the pursuit of very early learning of foreign languages is extremely prevalent in monolingual settings where foreign language (fl) knowledge is regarded as a gateway to better occupational opportunities, and thus better life prospects. it is particularly notable in countries which are largely monolingual, and where a language of rather small international recognition is spoken, such as central european (cf. mihaljevic djigunovic & medved krajnovic, 2015; nikolov, 2009) or east asian countries (cf. park & abelmann, 2004). there, foreign language knowledge is regarded as indispensable in attaining educational and vocational success and partaking in the global labour market. starting to learn foreign languages early may thus be seen as an important investment towards achieving this goal. 1.1. goals of very early fll for many decades, starting to learn a fl early was regarded as an indispensable condition to guarantee success in fl acquisition. this conviction was rooted in nativist theories of second language acquisition which perceived second and foreign language acquisition in early childhood as succumbing to the same laws of universal grammar. however, research on the age factor conducted on child foreign language learning (fll) in instructional settings (muñoz, 2006, 2014; rokita, 2007; singleton & ryan, 2004) has unanimously shown that it is untrue that early starters excel at the rate of acquisition or that they reach the same levels of ultimate attainment as later onset learners. the advantage of a later start can be ascribed to greater memory capacities, better developed learning strategies, and also more conscientious study and awareness of the learning goals. bilingual language competence is likely to be achieved only in naturalistic settings. the fact that the language is acquired differently in naturalistic and instructional settings has led to the acquisition-learning distinction, although the two terms are often used interchangeably. in the case of the latter, what matters most is the social milieu in which learning takes place, from the family of the young child to educational institutions (kindergarten, teachers) to language education policy regulations. in parallel, an early start in a foreign language has become one of the key concerns of european language education policy. it is argued that the earlier one starts learning a foreign language, the higher the chances that the person will achieve a plurilingual competence, that is, that he or she will become competent, albeit only partially, in a few languages. plurilingualism is to be an asset of every european citizen, an investment in human capital which aims at raising the competitiveness of the eu economy with reference to the united states parental visions of their children’s future as a motivator for an early start in a foreign language 457 (williams, 2010). it is additionally assumed that through early fll experience the learners will develop a stance of openness, curiosity and tolerance, including a positive attitude to other cultures. furthermore, high quality education is assumed to boost motivation for further language learning in the future. to sum up, the outcome of an early start in a fl cannot be bilingual attainment. rather, it is to lay the grounds for future plurilingualism. the goal of this paper is to look at the issue of early fll from the psychological perspective and to explicate how it can fit in the l2 motivational selfsystem (dörnyei, 2005). it will show what visions parents of very young learners have of their children’s future foreign language attainment (their ideal l2 self), how “an early start” (i.e., at preschool age) is going to help to realise this vision, and how the visions themselves are formulated on the basis of the parents’ own self-efficacy beliefs. 1.2. the place of educational aspirations in educational psychology and sociology to date, aspirations have been mainly studied in psychology, pedagogy, educational psychology and sociology as the major drivers of human activity. initially they have been regarded as a purely psychological and individually driven construct. they have been defined as “a desire for change which appears to be beneficial in the mind of an individual. it is not a desire for any change but only that which will enable an individual to improve his/her position on an individual scale of values” (szefer-timoszenko, 1981, p. 5).1 it has long been a feature of psychological research to regard individual aspirations as depending on such internal features as personality, level of neurosis, perception of the self, experience of success and failure among others (lewowicki, 1975). more recent research on aspirations looks at the concept as socially driven. in another definition, a famous polish pedagogue argues that aspirations refer to “the pursuit of reaching intended goals, the realisation of intended ideals” (okoń, 1998, p. 36). the notion of intention assumes that aspirations can be of various types, depending on the values one has, and also that they can be the motor of an individual’s activity. one sets certain goals ahead of himself/herself, and it is these goals that motivate him/her to undertake serious effort to pursue this goal. only those goals are set which can be plausibly realised in the current socio-political, economic and educational reality. there are many kinds of aspirations, depending on the values to which one subscribes. educational aspirations are those which place particular importance on achievement in education as a gateway to occupational success. 1 all the translations from polish are by the present author. joanna rokita-jaśkow 458 in psychology, the study of aspirations found its place in different theories of motivation, such as the theory of needs (mcclelland, 1985), social learning theory (bandura, 1977), attribution theory (weiner, 1972), and self-determination theory (sdt; deci & ryan, 1985). in all these theories, aspirations are studied as a motor of human activity; they help explain the nature of human activity. mcclelland (1985) associated aspirations with a need for achievement which can be acquired through socialisation. he observed that certain needs can be aroused in a child through adopting the most appropriate approach, such as receiving praise from an adult. bandura (1977) proposed similar views, maintaining that a lot of adult behaviour is imitated by children, and so children can also learn that a good way to satisfy needs is to study and to acquire knowledge and skills. according to attribution theory, aspirations are regarded as a sign of a person’s sense of causality. proponents of this theory observed that people of higher achievement motivation are more likely to attribute their success or failure to their own hard work and that only people who have stronger aspirations can form and observe such a causative relationship (weiner, 1972). in sdt, aspirations do not occupy such a prominent position, yet they can be associated with intrinsic needs. in a recent study on the relationship of sdt and aspirations vansteenkiste, simons, lens, sheldon, and deci (2004) observed that when the realisation of certain intrinsic goals or aspirations is inhibited, people seek to realise their external goals, such as fame or wealth, yet this does not bring them the same feeling of satisfaction that the realisation of intrinsic needs/aspirations would. in pedagogy and sociology, educational aspirations are seen as objects of human activity. they have been found to correlate with high educational achievement and consequently occupational success (marjoribanks, 2003). this means that the higher aspirations for achievement one has, the higher educational success one obtains. a high level of education, in turn, usually enables obtaining higher occupational positions and, as a consequence, higher earnings, which translate into better material wealth and possibly general well-being. thus having high educational aspirations can be seen as a gateway to advancement on the social mobility ladder. while this may not always be true in the neoliberal world affected by serious economic crisis, education has been perceived as a means of reaching success and achieving higher social status. in addition, the level of aspirations may be dependent on the type of background one comes from as people can be inhibited from undertaking high effort and achievement by apparent obstacles posed by society, for example the teacher, the school, and even the educational policy. interestingly, marjoribanks (2003), on the basis of his studies in australia, coined the formula for the rise of one’s aspirations: aspiration x attainment x background. parental visions of their children’s future as a motivator for an early start in a foreign language 459 it is my belief that foreign language education can be subjugated to the same laws, particularly in largely monolingual countries in which a language of rather low international recognition is used, as is the case with poland, where the current study was conducted. thus a knowledge of highly prestigious language(s) can be regarded as a sign of membership in an elite. this certainly was the case, as history has shown, with latin, french or more recently english. learning the latter, which has become the global language, can be perceived as the password to entering an international community and participating in the global market. indeed, it should be admitted that high educational aspirations are a tenet of the aspiring middle class. this belief is further upheld as, in view of poststructuralist theories, it is accepted that language is not duly and subconsciously acquired but rather strenuously learnt through explicit and effortful study. this is not to deny the possibility of implicit learning of some aspects of language but simply to emphasise the difference between second and foreign language acquisition. in the latter case, the languages are rather an educational subject, and they are thus impacted by various socio-pedagogic factors, from the influence of significant others to the influence of the school (teachers, peers, materials) to the country’s education policy. 1.3. educational aspirations and poststructuralist approaches to sla since applied linguistics is a highly interdisciplinary field, it clearly draws on findings in other related subjects such as psychology, sociology and pedagogy. similarly, the notion of aspirations finds its place in sla pedagogy, particularly in the now roughly developing strand of research called poststructuralism/postmodernism or simply the social turn (block, 2003). on the whole, this viewpoint emphasises the importance of the social environment of the learner on his/her learning achievement, starting with the immediate social milieu one lives in and culminating with the wider socio-political context. globalisation requires ambitious individuals to be flexible and mobile, and to speak several foreign languages, one of them being lingua franca english. thus foreign language knowledge is regarded as an important capital and investment. these terms derived from economics are transferred into the field of applied linguistics and clearly denote the impact of globalisation on all aspects of human life. hence the poststructuralist approach to the study of sla highlights the necessity of taking into account the social milieu of the learner. first of all, it found reflection in the construction of a new model of foreign language motivation called l2 motivational self-system (dörnyei, 2005), where the traditional distinction between integrative and instrumental motivation joanna rokita-jaśkow 460 gains less significance as it is assumed that foreign language learners, especially today, do not aspire to integrate with the community of l2 users but rather want to be a part of global society giving them an advantageous position in the occupational market. therefore, it is visible that integrative motives mingle with instrumental ones. in this motivational framework, which consists of three components: the ideal l2 self, the ought-to self and the learning experience, aspirations can be seen as part of the first component. the ideal l2 self embodies motifs, desires and aspirations that one needs to possess when striving to become an ideal l2 user. an ideal l2 self can denote one’s vision of desired identity, so aspirations can constitute an important incentive towards its construction. an individual’s identity is viewed as unstable and fluctuating, something that can be changed and deliberately created according to how one wants to be perceived by others. these identities are referred to as possible selves. additionally, dörnyei argues (2009) that in order to construct the ideal l2 self which is a selfguide for motivated language behaviour, one must have a vision of what one’s life will look like when a particular goal has been attained. it is this vision that motivates an individual to undertake some effort and bear sacrifices towards this goal. to construct one’s ideal l2 self, one must first create a vision of his future identity, which undergoes a “guided selection from the multiple aspirations, dreams, desires etc.” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 33). no single vision is stable or sufficient indefinitely. to fulfil its motivating role, it must be continuously strengthened, substantiated, kept alive, operationalised, and counterbalanced with the vision of possible failure (dörnyei, 2009). this is usually the role of the significant others in the social milieu of the learner. another important component of the model is the learning experience, which encompasses “situated, executive motives related to the immediate learning environment and experience” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 29). in the case of very young learners, the child’s family environment will exert such influence by providing opportunities for l2 use/practice, by providing l2 learning material, by parental involvement in class and home revision activities, by verbal encouragement, and, finally, by acting as positive role models. learning experience will also include the frequency and quality of l2 instruction provided. it must be noted that young children do not make educational decisions themselves. parents are usually the key decision makers, thus placing their children on a path towards achieving success. this was observed by zentner and renaud (2007), who found that before mid-adolescence learners are affected by the ought-to selves of their significant others, typically their parents. they project their own beliefs and visions of what they would like their children’s future to look like. as ryan and irie (2014, p. 109) say, each person is guided by “the story of the self. this story affects how we interpret our pasts, how we see parental visions of their children’s future as a motivator for an early start in a foreign language 461 ourselves now and the paths we envision for our futures.” thus, in the case of very young learners of an l2, it is the story of the parents’ self that guides their children towards the future. in respect to fll, the goals parents set for their children will depend on their own foreign language experience, whether they have mastered foreign language(s) successfully or not, what educational and occupational position they have, and whether it was obtained owing to this competence. as dörnyei (2014) posits, having a vision is an important aspect of motivation as it helps to define the goal one is heading for. it allows a person to imagine what his/her future will look like once this vision is realised. thus vision and imagination are intertwined. these visions guide very young learners’ parents in making all educational decisions, not least regarding foreign language education, including the decision when to enrol a young child into early l2 instruction and what type of institution, language, and the like should be chosen. initially these are parents’ aspirations that they hold for their children’s achievement, yet in time they may be adopted as the children’s own. referring to dörnyei’s (2005) l2 motivational self system, it can be argued that initially parents influence their children's development of their ideal l2 self, which subsequently, in the context of a positive and supportive learning experience, may materialise in children's own development of an ideal l2 self. learning a foreign language may thus become a valuable goal to which the children aspire to large extent of their own accord. within mainstream psychological research, there is considerable evidence (e.g., gottfried, flemming, & gottfried, 1998) that the family environment plays an important role in the child's cognitive, linguistic and educational achievement. it does so by providing cognitively stimulating activities, overt parental opinions and attitudes, and parents acting as role models. in reference to fll, it is evident that if children observe their parents using foreign languages for work or social purposes, they will come to regard this as something natural. in addition, these parents will often openly voice the benefits that foreign language knowledge may have brought to them and, by the same token, may bring to the children. last but not least, it is easier for parents knowledgeable in a foreign language to engage in activities such as reading l2 storybooks, handling games or short conversations, as well as to judge the quality of an l2 course, materials or the linguistic competence of a teacher. it is the parents’ ability to imagine possible benefits or negative consequences such an investment (or lack of one) will have on their children’s future that drives them to bear considerable sacrifices (financial, time, etc.) towards this success. the visions of the child’s future are the aspired goals. the terms visions, imaginary goals and aspirations are equivocal. imagination plays a role in establishing learning goals. it is the imagined learning communities that a joanna rokita-jaśkow 462 learner’s parent aspires to join that motivate him or her to undertake the learning effort. imagined communities refer to groups of people, not immediately tangible and accessible, with whom we connect through the power of imagination. . . . a focus on imagined communities in language learning enables us to explore how learners’ affiliation with such communities might affect their learning trajectories. (norton, 2013, p. 8). what is more, these communities refer not only to local communities (the people one lives close to) but also to national or transnational communities that one prospectively can get to know. finally, it must be recognised that imagining future lives is about constructing one’s ideal identity. recent sla research points out that learner identities in the poststructuralist era are unstable, dependent on social factors, fluctuating and under constant reconstruction. bonny norton (2014), a highly influential writer on issues of language learner identity, contends that “identities are contingent, shifting and context-dependent, and [that] while identities or positions are often given by social structures or ascribed by others, they can also be negotiated by agents who wish to position themselves” (p. 66). one’s identity is also the outcome of one’s struggle for power and is defined by positioning in reference to others. fl knowledge is the competence that can give a person some advantage over others, and starting to learn a fl earlier can contribute to future success. if fll is regarded as an investment, then it also expresses desires to belong to some other, better “imagined community.” as ryan and irie (2014) put it, imagining themselves belonging to these communities serves as a guide for both the kinds of social situations in which they might envision themselves using english, and the appropriate language to use in those situations. for many language learners, their membership and participation in these imagined communities is an important part of who they are. (p. 118) thus we go astray from learning for its own sake; in the fll process, instrumental motives gain more relevance than purely integrative ones. integration does not mean aspiring to possess native-like competence of the language but, rather, to join the global community. the social trend affecting language learning decisions is globalisation. on the globalised linguistic market, it still remains to be seen what will give one an advantage: the knowledge of one lingua franca (english) or, rather, plurilingual competence. clearly, very young foreign language learners will not have visions of their own until they reach mid-adolescence, as is evident from pedagogical research parental visions of their children’s future as a motivator for an early start in a foreign language 463 on aspirations (e.g., holloway & yamamoto, 2008; yamamoto & holloway, 2010). parents, by openly stating the goals and benefits of early fll, may attempt to project their own aspirations onto their young children; however, it remains to be seen whether they will materialise. 2. the study at the cornerstone of this research lies the assumption that parents of very young language learners can, by their attitude, model a certain type of behavior, for instance, arouse interest in and aspirations for high foreign language achievement. in other words, parents can create a vision for the development of the ideal l2 selves of their children, their future language identities. it is assumed that only plurilingual identities and belonging to a global society will bring the children success and a privileged position on the linguistic market and, as a consequence, on the vocational market. indeed, languages seem to be one of the keys to mobility and realising vocational opportunities in the globalised world. positive role models and fll experiences in early childhood may result, it is believed, in the growth of children’s own educational aspirations and eventually the successful mastery of foreign language(s) in adolescence. in other words, parental visions and support can secure the rise of similar visions and outcomes in their children. this study aimed to answer the following research questions: 1. what are parental visions about their children’s future fl identity? 2. what is the “imagined community” the parents aspire to? 3. in what ways do the parents aim to realise their visions? 2.1. method this section will provide information on the organisation of the research. it provides information on the participants involved, the instrument used and the procedure employed. 2.1.1. participants the participants of the study were 15 parents of very young foreign language learners. all of the children were exposed to english as an fl either in their kindergarten or through home tuition. they were recruited from participants in a much larger quantitative study (n = 335) (cf. rokita-jaśkow, 2013). of these parents, seven were classified as of higher socio-economic status (ses), four as of moderate (lower middle-class) ses and four as of lower ses. the ses of the family joanna rokita-jaśkow 464 was established by analysing parental (especially the fathers’) occupations, which were judged according to the ranking scales developed by erikson, goldthorpe and portocarero (1979) for class distinction in postmodern society. the fathers’ occupations were diverse and included lawyers (1), academics (3), engineers (2), it specialists (3), bank/sales managers (1), small business owners (1), self-employed workers (1), office clerks (1), and manual workers (2). it is noteworthy that while it is the father’s occupation that determines the ses of the family, in the case of very young children it is usually the mother who makes the key educational decisions for her children, fathers being mainly breadwinners. thus the mothers’ level of general and fl education together with their aspirations seem to be more relevant for the study as this is their visions that are instilled initially. among the 15 parents interviewed 13 were mothers and two fathers. in regards to their level of fl knowledge, it was notable that all the interviewees of higher and moderate ses had a fluent or at least intermediate command of english. additionally, six of them had knowledge of other languages (lithuanian, arabic, italian, french, slovak). the lower ses interviewees had only a communicative (basic) knowledge of english or other fls (usually russian), which shows that they were failed language users themselves. it can be further speculated that this lack of competence may also account for the lower paid occupations. 2.1.2. research instrument the research instrument was a semistructured interview; it consisted of 17 open-ended prompting questions concerning such issues as “the place of fll in the child’s education,” “future child identity,” “educational plans for the future,” ‘parental involvement in fll,” “cultural capital,” and “social background/intergenerational transfer of capital.” the main objective was to elicit information on the parental visions of their children’s fl achievement and their future fl identity. the key issue was whether parents see an early start in a fl as an important positioning tool on the social stratum and what measures they take to secure this advantageous position. the interviews lasted approximately 60 minutes each. they were recorded and transcribed for further analysis. all the interviews were conducted in polish, and all the quotations are the author’s translations. 2.1.3. procedure data for this study was collected in the years 2012-2013, that is, prior to the polish ministerial bill lowering the age of obligatory l2 instruction to three years parental visions of their children’s future as a motivator for an early start in a foreign language 465 of age. this bill is to be binding as of september 2015, and as of 2017 all 3-yearolds will encounter foreign language teaching in the public sector. though this will free many parents from the decision of when to start the child’s fll, it will probably prompt many of them to increase their offspring’s learning opportunities by, for example, maximising the amount of language contact by means of additional classes or teaching the child other, rarer but prospectively lucrative languages (such as chinese?). thus, it can be seen that even the choice of language to be taught is regarded as a kind of investment. at this point it should be acknowledged that the same tool was used in the project whose partial results were published earlier (rokita-jaśkow, 2013, 2015), but some of the data then obtained was not analysed. from the previous qualitative and quantitative analysis it was found that the ses of the parents (rokita-jaśkow, 2013) as well as the parents’ own knowledge of foreign languages (rokita-jaśkow, 2015) were important distal variables accounting for the differences in early l2 acquisition. thus, the following data will also be interpreted with reference to these variables. 2.2. data analysis and interpretation 2.2.1. visions of higher ses parents as predicted, parental visions of their children’s future seem to be dictated by their own position in the social stratum. the parents who had achieved a relatively high position (parents 1-8) did it to a large extent due to their fl knowledge and a high level of education as both the fathers and the mothers performed occupations belonging to the first or second rank in the egp scales named after the authors: erikson, goldthorpe, and portocarrero (1979). by contrast, those parents who did not possess such linguistic or educational advantages obtained a moderate or even low ses (parents 9-15). thus the two factors seem to coincide. here, it must be remarked that the classes in polish society were established mainly after the fall of communism (in 1989) and the introduction of a free market which brought advancement opportunities to some and restricted others. it also led to the rise of a middle class. sociological research (e.g., marjoribanks, 2003) has shown that it is mainly the middle class that has the high educational aspirations, seeing it as a gateway to occupational success. a noticeable difference between higher ses and moderate/lower ses parents manifested itself in their perception of fl knowledge as a contributor to success. the former perceived fll as an important investment towards the child’s future but not as an ultimate goal in itself. what is more, they did not expect high outcomes from an early start but rather regarded early exposure to a fl as “something natural” since they used a fl on a daily basis for work and joanna rokita-jaśkow 466 social purposes. those parents believed their children are already exposed to a bilingual environment as they hear foreign languages in their surroundings, for example when parents have foreign guests (parents 6 & 9) or frequently travel abroad (parents 2 & 7), and when children observe their parents reading/telephoning in english (parents 1, 5 & 7) or are engaged in listening to storybooks and scaffolded watching of english cartoons on the internet with their parents. these were particularly parents who were members of prestigious professions. as the mother of hania (4;0), parent 5, says, “it would be strange if i knew english and did not teach it somehow to my child.” thus, she points out that it is only natural that parents wish to transfer onto their children the skills and knowledge which they possess themselves and expect that it may bring benefits. this indicates that intergenerational transfer of capital, in this case the linguistic capital, takes place. in another case parents proficient in english (6) decided to establish “nonnative bilingualism.” one of the mothers justifies it like this: “from the beginning i knew my husband would speak to the children only in english, . . . i had no choice but to agree.” she adds: even living here in poland we have had so many foreign guests visiting, and we also travel to friends abroad, for example to germany, that for our children it is even more important to have english as their first language. besides, it is very likely they will study or live abroad. (parent 6) another multilingual parent (parent 9) believed that “knowledge of other fls is a key to getting to know other cultures, which enrich one’s personality and make one open to other cultures.” he would like his daughters “to have international friends, not to be prejudiced against people of other colours and races.” he acknowledged he often took them to meetings with his international friends as he believes the experience of being in an international community enriches one’s personality. some other parents working in international corporations point to instrumental benefits of knowing the foreign language. parent 7, for instance, says: i think we would like children to know various languages because it is extremely important at work. i know a lot of time passes before they start working, but for now they do not have to speak fluently. they only have to be confident enough to use them . . . we often travel abroad. when we are abroad on holiday, for example in italy skiing, i draw my children’s attention to different languages, and i tell them that if they want to communicate, they have to learn their languages. (parent 7) parental visions of their children’s future as a motivator for an early start in a foreign language 467 it is noteworthy that this comment was made by an ambitious mother who knew three other languages herself and who believes that it is thanks to this competence that she managed to obtain a well-paid job. all the parents cited above belong to the higher ses groups. they have high fl competence themselves, which helped them achieve their social position. it is noticeable that the parents point to both instrumental and integrative motives when projecting the children’s future and the use of fls. the instrumental ones refer to practical utility, obtaining high status, and a well-paid job. the integrative ones mean joining the broadly understood international society in which their offspring would function without complexes, competing for the best jobs, having international friends, being a citizen of the world, and, employing byram’s (1997) words, having a bicultural identity, that is, an international one on top of the national one. it is characteristic of these parents that they acknowledge the necessity of knowing several languages in the future in order to function effectively in an international society. thus, they have a vision that their children will function within that global society, have foreign friends, travel widely, and probably perform white collar jobs which will require foreign language competence. multilingualism will be a part of their “international” identity. one parent (parent 7) emphasises that foreign language experience, just like any other additional classes, will add to the development of the child’s self-esteem. in regards to the second research question, it is also evident from the above discussion that these parents perceive “the imagined community” as global society. the parents wish their children to function in the global society without complexes, looking for jobs globally, which will allow them to reproduce the same ses and for which they will need to be plurilingual. however, it is noteworthy that some parents held the conviction that this kind of investment is not a goal per se. while they acknowledge they value fl knowledge, they realise the uncertainties of today’s life. there are no skills/knowledge that will guarantee the children success in life. the one area in which they feel they can influence their children is instilling christian values and ethics as they believe this brings a stable canon and can bring self-fulfillment to their children and a stable support to themselves. thus in times of heightened anxiety and apprehension about the future, when an individual has little control over his or her life (as many careers in fact result from coincidence or luck rather than thorough planning) and is dependent on global institutions (banks, transnational corporations/global policies), the highly conscious people revert from the ideology of global expansion and consumerism to the local values, where they find stability and security. this marks the reversion to humanistic values, which might be a new trend in life. as parent joanna rokita-jaśkow 468 2 acknowledges, “the most important value is family and this is how i want to bring up my kids.” this parent adds: “language is only an additional tool that helps us to realise our other skills; it is something that enables the exploitation of our basic knowledge more efficiently.” regarding question 3, the higher ses parents seem to deliberately plan their children’s career, for which, it must be admitted, they possess appropriate resources. they aim to realise their aspirations in reference to their children by sending them to additional classes, often with a native speaker (parent 3), maximizing home exposure to l2 via, for instance, watching english-speaking cartoons, sending the child to a foreign language course abroad (parent 3), choosing private schools for further education (supposedly with a higher level of linguistic and general education) or even, in the more distant future, sending their child to study abroad (parent 6). they also point to acting as positive role models themselves, during holidays or in social events, which are supposed to show children the utility of knowing foreign languages. three out of these 7 parents have already decided to speak a foreign language at home at least occasionally, thus establishing a form of artificial bilingualism. therefore, in the case of these parents we can talk of intergenerational transmission of linguistic capital taking place. 2.2.2. visions of lower/moderate ses parents in regards to moderate or lower ses parents, their visions of their children’s future, achievement goals and investments are probably much constrained by material means as well as by their own experiences as language learners. these parents express instrumental motives for their child learning a fl, such as getting a better job in the future or even emigrating. one of the parents (parent 8) gave birth to her daughter in the us, and, since the child has american citizenship and spent time in an english-speaking environment for some time before arriving in poland, the mother wants to maintain this language expecting the language will turn out useful when the child wishes to go back to the us at some point in the future. a similar perception of an “imagined community” associated with a concrete nationality was expressed by parent 12, who also has family members in the us and expresses hope for emigration or preparing the children to move out in search of better life prospects. thus, early fll is regarded as an investment towards achieving higher status, yet these parents perceive this possibility only through looking for better job prospects outside their country. historically, the us has been always regarded as a “promised land” and a site of emigration. this indicates that the parents would have no problem in abandoning their national identity and they would not mind adopting a new one if that meant better living standards. other parents have not set any learning goals for parental visions of their children’s future as a motivator for an early start in a foreign language 469 themselves or for their children. the children attend fl classes simply because they are offered to them in the kindergarten and also not to stand out from others, which might happen if a given child is the only one in the group who does not attend the classes. the effect of group pressure is quite evident. also, rather than plurilingual achievement, they clearly point to the necessity of knowing english as a lingua franca. here it must be recognised that many of these parents (except parent 11) are unsuccessful language learners themselves, and the lack of this capacity may have inhibited them from achieving higher ses; thus, they still perceive it as a minimum and yet a sufficient tool in achieving a well-paid job. some of these parents do not deliberately invest in the child’s achievement, saying that they do not want to impose anything on their children, just as their parents did not on them (parents 11, 13, 14); it thus seems that some negative intergenerational impact is visible. this apparent advocacy for freedom may in fact denote a lack of high aspirations or goal-mindedness. since they have not developed aspirations themselves, it is unlikely they will instill them in their children. with regards to future l2 identity, they either point to the national one or sometimes do not even seem to understand the question. it is evident they have not given much thought to that issue and it indicates poor educational awareness on the part of these parents. their goals seem to stay in the sphere of dreams. as parent 15 says: “i know i should start teaching my 4-year-old child some english. i am worried he will have problems at school later. but for now i cannot afford it.” when it comes to parental support (research question 3), it is not considerable for the reasons mentioned above: the parents either do not have the material resources or they are not aware of the necessity to increase the amount of l2 input. as parent 10 believes optimistically, “future school education will do.” parent 11, despite being an english teacher herself, also imagined english would be acquired incidentally and through school education. in addition to these deficiencies, the majority of the parents do not know fls well themselves. thus, they cannot help the children in revising class material or show them where to look for additional contact with the language. 3. conclusions and implications for further research the major purpose of this study was to shed light on the social determinants of a successful early start in a fl and the development of possible multilingualism in later life. it is the social milieu of the child, as described by its distal and proximal factors, that determines goals and opportunities for this development. the educational aspirations of parents, if aroused in children early, may result in educational success. joanna rokita-jaśkow 470 yet the study also revealed that differences in educational opportunities and parental aspirations can be observed in the early stages of the child’s life, which may also account, at least partially, for differences in subsequent achievement. it has been observed that in lower ses families, parents prefer to deter investments into later childhood or adolescence, first waiting to see how well the child does at school and then supporting the child financially if there are prospects that this investment may pay off. they do not aspire to the cosmopolitan world as they do not have any experience of living in it themselves. this is beyond the reach and imagination of less educated and less well-to-do parents. by contrast, in families who hold high aspirations there is a strong awareness of the necessity of investing in the child from the early start, for which they also have finances. the study was not free from flaws such as the relatively small number of respondents and their self-selection (as only those who volunteered took part). therefore, the majority of the respondents were those who found the topic appealing, with a consequent bias towards representatives of the middle class. less is known about the goals of fll among lower class parents. however, it must be recognised that the study is one of the few investigating the process of very early fll and probably the first one interpreting the educational and social phenomena within the poststucturalist sla framework, thus leaving scope for improvement and further investigations. consequently, it is suggested that the long-term impact of parental educational aspirations is further explored, perhaps in a longitudinal study. it would be worth investigating whether parental aspirations and investments in an early start in a fl result in the actual growth of children's own high aspirations towards fll and lead to linguistic/plurilingual achievement, and/or bring any other advantage to the early starters over later starters, also in the affective domain, such as developing an international identity, attitudes and motivation. acknowledgements the author of the paper would like to thank the reviewers for their careful reading and insightful remarks, which helped to improve the final version of the paper. the study is a partial outcome of the project financed by the national science center dec-2011/01/d/hs2/04115 titled “an early start in a fl – realisation of plurilingual policy or expression of parental educational aspirations.” parental visions of their children’s future as a motivator for an early start in a foreign language 471 references bandura, a. 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(2007). origins of adolescents’ ideal self: an intergenerational perspective. journal of personality and social psychology, 92, 557-574. 205 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (2). 2015. 205-228 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.2.2 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl foreign language classroom anxiety of arab learners of english: the effect of personality, linguistic and sociobiographical variables jean-marc dewaele birkbeck college, university of london, uk j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk taghreed m. al-saraj university of california, berkeley, usa t.alsaraj@aol.com abstract the present study focuses on the link between psychological, sociobiographical and linguistic variables and foreign language classroom anxiety of 348 arabic learners of english (250 females, 98 males). data were collected using the arabic foreign language anxiety questionnaire (aflaq; al-saraj, 2011, 2014) and an arabic version of the multicultural personality questionnaire-short form (mpq-sf; van der zee, van oudenhoven, ponterotto & fietzer, 2013). multiple regression analyses revealed that self-perceived proficiency in oral english and frequency of use of english explained over a third of variance in flca: more proficient and frequent users felt less anxious. two personality traits, emotional stability and social initiative explained a further fifth of variance in flca, with emotionally stable and more extraverted participants scoring lower on flca. age was the final predictor of a small amount of variance, with older participants feeling less anxious. degree of multilingualism, sex and education level had no effect on flca. keywords: foreign language classroom anxiety, english as a foreign language, arabic learners, self-perceived proficiency, frequency of use, emotional stability, social initiative, age jean-marc dewaele, taghreed m. al-saraj 206 1. introduction the number of studies on foreign language classroom anxiety (flca) has grown substantially in the last few years, with researchers investigating both internal and external sources of flca (dewaele, 2012; macintyre & gregersen, 2012). the puzzle about the characteristics of anxious foreign language learners is still incomplete. while flca has been linked to various psychological variables, no study has, to our knowledge, considered the relationship between flca and all high-order personality traits. it thus remains unclear to what extent flca is linked to a fl learner’s complete personality profile, in addition to well-researched sociobiographical and linguistic variables. this is a highly relevant question because of the relative stability of personality traits, and the relative stability of sociobiographical and linguistic background variables. if a strong relationship exists between flca, psychological, sociobiographical and linguistic background variables, then fl teachers and researchers should be aware that flca cannot simply be flushed out of the fl learner. what teachers can envisage are ways of allowing learners to handle this negative emotion and boost positive emotions instead, or at least develop a productive interaction between both (dewaele & macintyre, 2014; gregersen & macintyre, 2014). horwitz (2010) pointed out that “the concept of anxiety is . . . multi-faceted, and psychologists have differentiated a number of types of anxiety including trait anxiety, state anxiety, achievement anxiety, and facilitative-debilitative anxiety” (p 145). she argued that the profusion of anxiety types could explain why “so many early studies on the relationship between ‘anxiety’ and achievement provided mixed and confusing results” (p 145). horwitz, horwitz and cope (1986) emphasised the multi-faceted nature of flca, defining it as “a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings and behaviours related to classroom learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process” (p. 128). flca develops over time. it typically starts as an undifferentiated, negative affective response to some experience in the fl class (macintyre & gardner, 1991b). through repeated experience this anxiety becomes firmly associated with the fl class. it thus becomes a situationspecific anxiety, though it can spill over into other situations where the fl needs to be used. macintyre and gardner (1991a, 1991b) noted that flca can be exacerbated by excessive self-evaluation, worries over potential failure, and concern over the opinion of peers. all this leads learners to waste precious cognitive energy, disrupting information processing, and as a result hindering fl performance and acquisition (macintyre & gregersen, 2012). levels of flca have been linked to a range of sociobiographical, social and educational variables, foreign language classroom anxiety of arab learners of english: the effect of personality, linguistic. . . 207 but relatively less research has focused on the effect of personality traits on flca (horwitz, 2010; shao, yu, & ji, 2013). the present study focuses on arabic learners of english. it stems from our concern that despite the fact that english has become the most widely taught foreign language in arab countries, relatively little research has focused on arabic students’ experiences of flca (see however elkhafaifi, 2005; melouah, 2013). arabic students’ flca in english may be exacerbated by the switch from primarily rote methods of instruction in the high school system to western-influenced teaching methods in university english classes, requiring more independent work, more group work and a focus on oral communication (al-saraj, 2014). we also argue that it is useful to consider flca within one cultural context, and hence that the instrument to measure flca should be tailored to the specific culture (al-saraj, 2011). this allows us to avoid the “vexing problems . . . on whether personality trait scales possess conceptual and functional equivalence across culture” (p. 175). it would make sense, then, to see to what extent a personality questionnaire specifically adapted for arabs such as the multicultural personality questionnaire (mpq; van der zee & van oudenhoven, 2001) can predict the flca of arabs in english fl classes, in addition to the usual sociobiographical, social and educational variables. it is not our aim, in the present study, to compare the findings of our arabic learners with any other group, we are only interested in within-group differences and relationships. we are aware that the present study fits in the classic, modular individual differences paradigm, which has come under increasing criticism lately (dörnyei, macintyre, & henry, 2014; dörnyei & ryan, 2015). indeed, dörnyei and ryan point out that the identification of small and discrete components of learner psychology, measured within well-selected learner samples in order to predict the effectiveness of second language acquisition (sla) is a seemingly logical approach that is in fact an illusion. adopting a dynamic systems approach, dörnyei, macintyre and henry (2014) argue that since change in sla is typically nonlinear, it is very difficult to make predictions. they also insist on looking at “the whole system and the interaction of the parts, rather than focusing on specific units (e.g., variables) within it” (p. 2). as a consequence, they propose to find “alternatives to conventional research methodologies that, by and large, relied on statistical procedures to examine linear rather than nonlinear relationships” (p. 2). they thus issue a call to sla researchers to go and explore “unchartered territories” (p. 2). we would like to argue that while it is excellent to boldly go where no man (or woman) has been before, it is still important to continue the exploration of supposedly “charted territories.” just as artists can revisit common themes with striking originality, researchers can cast fresh light on supposedly familiar topics. indeed, we feel that establishing links jean-marc dewaele, taghreed m. al-saraj 208 between small and discrete components of learner psychology and linguistic profiles, within specific learner samples, can help us gain a better understanding of the dynamic and unique connections of fl learner emotions and their selfperceived fl performance. 2. literature review echoing what dörnyei et al. (2014) and dörnyei and ryan (2015) said about change in sla and the importance of looking at the whole system, the interaction of the parts, and avoiding microscopic analyses, we argue that the same is true for the area of foreign language anxiety (fla) itself. the field is developing quickly, is in a constant state of flux, with some parts developing faster than others, and links being established both within and outside the traditional area of fla research, with increased geographical coverage in terms of populations. it is thus important to take stock of where fla research stands today, and see in what direction it may evolve. 2.1. proficiency in the fl self-perceived proficiency in the fl and self-reported course grades are usually found to be the strongest predictors of fla or flca (arnaiz & guillén, 2012; horwitz, 2001; liu, 2006; liu & chen, 2013; macintyre & gardner, 1994; shao, yu & ji, 2013; sparks & ganschow, 2007; thompson & lee, 2013, 2014). participants who feel proficient and/or get good grades typically suffer less from fla/flca. high levels of self-perceived proficiency in the fl and good course grades are typically also linked to more positive attitudes towards the fl (liu & chen, 2013). however, onwuegbuzie, bailey, and daley (1999) found that students with high levels of university academic achievement reported more flca. similarly, saito and samimy (1996) found that the advanced japanese students of english suffered more from flca than intermediate peers. also, marcosllinás and juan-garau (2009) reported that students with high levels of flca did not score significantly lower on course achievement, which could be an indirect indicator of proficiency. the proportion of anxious speakers in english classes among chinese undergraduate students at three different proficiency levels remained quite stable (liu, 2006). the independence of the measures have also been questioned, as selfreported fl proficiency scores may themselves already be biased because of anxiety. macintyre, noels and clément (1997) showed that after controlling for actual proficiency in the french l2 of 37 anglo-canadian students, the anxious foreign language classroom anxiety of arab learners of english: the effect of personality, linguistic. . . 209 students underestimated their proficiency relative to less anxious students, who tended to overestimate their proficiency (p. 265). the image that emerges from the research is not clear-cut: the wide variety of proficiency or self-proficiency measures, of fla and flca measures, as well as the complex interactions between learner characteristics and situational variables, obscure any panoramic view. 2.2. frequency of use of the fl how frequently learners are exposed to a fl and how frequently they use it typically determines how proficient an individual will feel in that language and how much anxiety that individual will feel when using that language (dewaele, 2013b; liu, 2006). a study of north american students spending a year abroad in france showed that those who used french broadly and frequently made much more progress in french than those who only used their french in limited service encounters (kinginger, 2011). dewaele (2013b) found a highly significant effect of frequency of use of a fl on fla in that language: a higher general frequency of use of the l2, l3, l4 or l5 corresponded to lower levels of fla experienced by 1453 adult multilinguals in these languages with various types of interlocutors in various situations. thompson and lee (2014) also reported that 148 korean efl students who had studied abroad were less anxious in the english fl classroom after their return. frequency of use and self-perceived proficiency are different measures, but they are probably influencing each other. indeed as fl users gain mastery in the fl, they are likely to seek more opportunities to use the fl which will further boost their proficiency in the fl. 2.3. gender the effect of gender on fla/flca is not clear-cut: in some studies female students score higher on fla/flca than their male counterparts (arnaiz & guillén, 2012; dewaele, 2007). in other studies female learners reported lower levels of flca (macintyre, baker, clément, & donovan, 2002). sometimes researchers found no gender effect at all (aida, 1994; dewaele, petrides, & furnham, 2008) or limited effects (donovan & macintyre, 2005). donovan and macintyre (2005) did not find gender differences in fla among canadian junior high and high school students, but female university students reported higher levels of fla than their male peers. generally, it seems that the effect size associated with gender is very small (macintyre et al., 2002, p. 558). in recent research on a large internet-based sample, dewaele and macintyre (2014) found that the 1278 female participants reported significantly more fl enjoyment and flca jean-marc dewaele, taghreed m. al-saraj 210 than the 449 male participants, although the effect size was small. a follow-up study of specific items of the flca scale showed that female participants experienced significantly more mild forms of flca: they worried significantly more than male peers about their mistakes and were less confident in using the fl, again with a small effect size, but no gender difference emerged for items linked to paralysing effects of flca (dewaele, macintyre, & boudreau, 2015). gender thus seems to have very different effects on fla/flca in various studies. 2.4. age the effects of age are equally variable, possibly linked to age groups of participants (typically teens and young adults at university). bailey, onwuegbuzie and daley (2000), dewaele (2007) and donovan and macintyre (2005) reported that older participants suffered more from flca than younger ones. however, arnaiz and guillén (2012) found the opposite pattern, namely older adult multilinguals reporting less fla than younger adults in their different languages. a study into a large sample of adult multilinguals showed that fla seems to peak for participants in their twenties, after which it drops consistently across age groups (dewaele, 2010b). dewaele and macintyre (2014) found that teenagers scored highest on flca, followed by participants in their twenties, with a steady drop in flca among older age groups. 2.5. linguistic profile multilingualism and specific language profiles have been linked to fla/flca. knowing more languages has been linked to lower levels of anxiety in all languages (dewaele, 2007, 2010a, 2010b; dewaele & macintyre, 2014; dewaele et al., 2008; thompson & lee, 2013). typological distance between known languages and the target language also affect levels of fla. learners who already know a language belonging to the same linguistic family as the target language typically suffer less from fla/flca than peers who have no such affordances (dewaele, 2010a). dewaele (2010a) found that learners of french who already knew one or more other romance languages reported lower levels of fla in french compared to participants who knew languages belonging to other families. another factor affecting fla is the order of acquisition of fls. levels of fla have been found to increase significantly, and linearly, among pentalinguals in fls learnt later in life. these later fls were typically not mastered to the same degree as those acquired earlier in life (dewaele, 2013b). other linguistic profile variables linked to fla were age of onset of acquisition, with higher age correlating with higher levels of fla in different situations; context in which an fl had foreign language classroom anxiety of arab learners of english: the effect of personality, linguistic. . . 211 been acquired, with formally instructed participants feeling significantly more anxious than mixed and naturalistic learners; socialisation in the fl and size of fl networks were also linked to the fla: more socialised participants with larger networks of interlocutors in a fl were less anxious across situations (dewaele, 2013b). 2.6. personality traits personality traits “refer to consistent patterns in the way individuals behave, feel and think” (pervin & cervone, 2010, p. 228). they thus “summarize a person’s typical behavior” (2010, p. 229). the currently dominant taxonomy of personality traits is the so-called big five: five broad, bipolar dimensions, namely openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (2010, p. 228). the big five are situated at the summit of the hierarchy; there are a large number of narrower facets, “lower-order” personality traits, that are often correlated with big five traits but also explain unique variance. 2.6.1. the multicultural personality dimensions one big five questionnaire is the multicultural personality questionnaire (mpq; van der zee & van oudenhoven, 2000, 2001), which was developed to assess five traits that are key to multicultural effectiveness, cultural adaptability and psychological well-being in a foreign environment. as van der zee, zaal and piekstra (2003) pointed out: “even the mpq scales that closely correspond with big five scales are designed to cover more narrowly those aspects of the broader trait that are of relevance to multicultural success” (p. 78). these five traits have “demonstrated incremental validity over broad personality measures such as the big five in predicting criteria such as students’ international orientation” (van der zee et al., 2013, p. 118). the five dimensions used in the mpq are cultural empathy, which “refers to empathizing with the feelings, thoughts, and behaviours of culturally diverse individuals” (p. 118); openmindedness, which “reflects an open and unprejudiced attitude toward cultural differences” (p. 118); social initiative, which “refers to actively approaching social situations and demonstrating initiative in these interactions” (p. 118); emotional stability, which “reflects an ability to stay calm under novel and stressful conditions” (p. 118); and flexibility, which “refers to interpreting novel situations as a positive challenge and adapting to these situations accordingly” (p. 118). cultural empathy is most strongly related to the big five dimension of agreeableness (van der zee et al., 2003, p. 79); openmindedness is related to openness-to-experience (p. 79); emotional stability and social initiative are jean-marc dewaele, taghreed m. al-saraj 212 strongly correlated with neuroticism and extraversion (p. 80). flexibility is an addition to the big five dimensions reflecting intellectual flexibility, that is, a lack of rigidity (p. 80). van der zee et al. (2003) did find a link between three mpq dimensions and one verbal dimension: cultural empathy, openmindedness, and flexibility correlated positively with verbal ability. no research has yet, to our knowledge, combined these dimensions with fla/flca scores, although there has been previous research on specific big five dimensions using other instruments. 2.6.2. neuroticism dewaele (2002) found a significant relationship between neuroticism (used as proxy for anxiety, and the opposite of emotional stability) and 100 flemish students’ levels of fla in their english l3 (p. 31). a further study (dewaele, 2013a) revealed a significant positive link between neuroticism and the l2 flca of 86 mature multilingual students who were enrolled at the university of london. a similar relationship emerged in the l3 of 66 students (p. 678). a comparable pattern was found in a second group of 62 students from university of les iles balears in mallorca, spain. the relationship between neuroticism and flca was significant in the students’ l2, l3, and l4 (p. 678). it is likely that participants with higher scores on the neuroticism scale were more worried about how their linguistic fl competence would be judged. 2.6.3. extraversion macintyre and charos (1996) reported a significant negative relationship between extraversion and french l2 anxiety among anglo-canadian students (p. 19). dewaele (2002) also found a significant negative relationship between extraversion and 100 flemish students’ levels of fla in their english l3 (p. 31). the same pattern emerged in dewaele (2013a), with more extravert english l2 learners from mallorca reporting significantly lower levels of flca (p. 678). this finding was linked to facets of extraversion such as risk-taking and optimism. 2.6.4. psychoticism psychoticism, which has been described as tough-mindedness, aggressive behaviour and coldness (eysenck, eysenck, & barrett, 1985), appears to be inversely linked to fla/flca. a significant negative relationship emerged between psychoticism and 100 flemish students’ levels of fla in their english l3 (dewaele, 2002, p. 31). a similar pattern emerged in dewaele (2013a), with english l2 learners from mallorca who scored higher on psychoticism having significantly lower foreign language classroom anxiety of arab learners of english: the effect of personality, linguistic. . . 213 levels of flca (p. 678). one possible explanation is that high-psychoticism participants feel less anxious because they are less preoccupied about the perception their interlocutors have of them. 2.6.5. trait emotional intelligence a number of low-order personality traits have also been found to predict levels of fla/flca. dewaele et al. (2008) considered the link between emotional intelligence (ei) and sociobiographical variables on communicative anxiety (ca) in the l1, and fla in the l2, l3, and l4 of 464 adult multilinguals in different situations. trait emotional intelligence was defined as the “the extent to which individuals attend to, process, and utilize affect-laden information of an intrapersonal (managing one’s own emotions) or interpersonal (managing others’ emotions) nature” (petrides & furnham, 2003, p. 39). participants with higher levels of trait ei reported significantly lower ca and fla in all their languages, possibly because they are better able to read the emotional state of mind of their interlocutors, thereby controlling their ca/fla. shao, yu and ji (2013) reported similar patterns among 510 chinese non-english-major first year students. a significant negative association emerged between trait ei and english classroom learning anxiety (p. 921). the authors found that fla had a significant mediating effect on ei in predicting students' english achievement and fla also mediated the relationship between ei and self-rated english proficiency. the authors argue that fla could be seen as an emotion, one which students who score high on ei might be better able to control: “these students would draw on their emotional competence (e.g., by stimulating their motivational resources or using moderation techniques to reduce their anxiety in english class)” (p. 924). 2.6.6. second language tolerance of ambiguity dewaele and shan ip (2013) investigated the relationship between flca and second language tolerance of ambiguity (slta) among 73 secondary school students in hong kong. slta was defined as feeling comfortable with uncertainty and displaying a willingness to try out guesses (rubin, 1975, p. 45). the study supported gudykunst’s anxiety/uncertainty management theory (gudykunst, 2005, p. 298), and, more specifically, the axiom that more tolerance of ambiguity is linked to less anxiety. flca and slta were found to be inversely related and sharing over half of their variance (dewaele & shan ip, 2013, p. 57). in other words, those among the 73 hong kong efl learners who were more tolerant of ambiguity in their english classes were significantly less anxious in using the language. in a similar vein, thompson and lee (2013) reported jean-marc dewaele, taghreed m. al-saraj 214 that a previously unreported fourth factor emerged from their factor analysis of flca scores from 148 korean efl students. they labelled the fourth factor “fear of ambiguity in english” (the other factors were english class performance anxiety, lack of self-confidence in english and confidence with native speakers of english) (p. 10). 2.6.7. perfectionism higher levels of perfectionism have been linked to higher levels of flca. gregersen and horwitz (2002) interviewed a small number of specifically selected highly anxious learners (based on flca scores) and found that these learners were more perfectionist, setting themselves higher personal performance standards, procrastinating more, being more fearful of evaluation and concerned about errors. using three datasets through online questionnaires, dewaele (in press) found significant positive correlations between fla/flca and various measures of perfectionism among three groups of fl learners: 58 adult english l2 users, and 323 japanese and 69 saudi students learning english. this seems to suggest that the link between perfectionism and flca is stable across different populations of fl learners. 2.7. some concluding remarks to summarise, a range of variables that are linked directly or indirectly to fla/flca have been identified in the research literature. although some researchers have started including psychological variables in their design, they were typically few in number. indeed, the main variables to have been investigated were sociobiographical in nature or linked to fl instruction and use. we argue that it is necessary to include personality traits in research designs on fla/flca, preferably measured with instruments specifically designed for multilingual and multicultural individuals, in order to see to what extent these traits predict fla/flca, in addition to the more traditional sociobiographical variables and factors linked to fl learning and use. 3. research questions and hypotheses the present study explores the links between higher-order personality traits, sociobiographical variables, linguistic history, current use of english and flca in english among arabic learners. we will address the following research questions: foreign language classroom anxiety of arab learners of english: the effect of personality, linguistic. . . 215 1. are there effects of gender, age and education level on flca? we hypothesise that female, younger and less educated participants will score higher on flca. 2. is there an effect of self-perceived proficiency and frequency of use of english? we hypothesise that participants who feel proficient and use english frequently will suffer less from flca. 3. is there an effect of the number of languages known on flca? we expect that participants who know more languages will feel less anxious in their english foreign language class. 4. is there an effect of personality on flca? we expect that participants who score high on cultural empathy, flexibility, social initiative, openmindedness and emotional stability will suffer less from flca. 4. method 4.1. participants potential participants were invited in arabic to complete the online questionnaire through email as well as notifications on social media including facebook, linkedin, and twitter. only arabic native speakers who were studying english, or had recently completed english classes, qualified. anyone interested in the study was encouraged to also send the information to friends and family, and colleagues were asked to circulate the invitation. a notice of the study was posted to an online message board at the saudi ministry of education presidency for girls. in addition, invitations to participate in the study were circulated to universities in saudi arabia, the united arab emirates, oman, algeria, tunisia and egypt. a total of 348 participants (250 females, 98 males) filled out the three parts of the questionnaire. their ages ranged from 14 to 65 years (m = 27, sd = 10). a quarter of participants had a high school diploma or less, close to half had a bachelor’s degree (n = 163), less than fifth had a master’s degree (n = 63) and close to 10% had a phd (n = 33). all were native speakers of arabic but some had grown up with multiple languages. a majority of participants were bilinguals (n = 155), followed by trilinguals (n = 123), and these were followed by smaller groups of quadrilinguals (n = 19), pentalinguals (n = 27), sextalinguals (n = 8), septalinguals (n = 7), octalinguals (n = 4), and nonalinguals (n = 2), with 2 participants reporting 11 languages and 1 participant reporting 13 languages. we created one group for all those knowing four or more languages (4+). nearly 80% of participants were originally from saudi arabia (n = 277), with smaller groups from egypt (n = 9), yemen (n = 8), the united arab emirates (n = 7), and the remaining 47 participants were from 18 different countries. all jean-marc dewaele, taghreed m. al-saraj 216 were studying english or had recently finished studying english in arabic institutions. we are also aware that arab culture is relatively heterogeneous, and we do not claim to have a representative nor a very homogenous group of arab learners and users of english. this will be kept in mind when interpreting our results. participants reported frequent use of english (m = 4.1, sd = 1.0 on a 5point likert scale with the following descriptors: 1 = once a year, 2 = once a month, 3 = once a week, 4 = up to 3 hours a day, 5 = more than 3 hours a day). they judged their oral proficiency in english to be quite high (m = 3.5, sd = 1.1 on a 5-point likert scale ranging from minimal to maximal proficiency). self-reported oral proficiency in english and frequency of use of english were positively correlated (pearson r = .47, p < .0001, n = 348). this suggests that both measures have 22% of shared variance, which cohen (1992) would categorise as a medium effect size. 4.2. instruments the anonymous questionnaire was administered online. it had three sections: (a) demographic information (e.g., participants’ age, sex) and demographic information pertinent to language learning and cultural background (e.g., country of origin, languages known to participants and order of acquisition), (b) the aflaq, and (c) the arabic mpq-sf. we used the arabic foreign language anxiety questionnaire (aflaq; alsaraj, 2011, 2014), specifically designed to assess the anxiety of native speakers of arabic when using and learning english. the aflaq mirrors the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas; horwitz et al., 1986) that is commonly used. however, the proportion of items addressing each topic and the particular issues on the aflaq are tailored to the arab student population. as a result, the questionnaire has a particular focus on prompts of anxiety and stressors prevalent in this population (al-saraj, 2011, 2014; dewaele & al-saraj, 2013). seventeen items from the original flcas (horwitz et al., 1986) were retained with minimal modification or only slight rewording. for example, flcas item 4, “it frightens me when i don’t understand what the teacher is saying in the foreign language” (horwitz et al., 1986), was reformulated to avoid connotations with the arabic word that would translate to “frightens.” the modification is small but crucial, and the new item reads simply (translated from arabic), “i feel anxious when i don't understand what the teacher is saying in the foreign language.” five other items were more heavily adapted to make them clearer to the arab students while maintaining the general content. new items were created based on what saudi students reported in a questionnaire (al-saraj, 2011) to be anxiety-provoking situations in the class, namely practiced and spontaneous public speaking, listening foreign language classroom anxiety of arab learners of english: the effect of personality, linguistic. . . 217 and comprehension, and fear of being negatively evaluated. the aflaq, which is included in the appendix, contains 33 items, three of which are reverse-coded, and utilises a five-point likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). the aflaq yields a single overall score indicative of flca. cumulative scores on the aflaq range from 33 (a 1 on each of the aflaq’s 33 items, after re-coding of reverse-coded items) to 165 (a 5 on each of the aflaq’s 33 items, after re-coding). higher scores indicate a higher level of flca. all 348 participants completed the questionnaire. scores ranged from 35 to 161 (m = 94.5, sd = 25.2). a cronbach’s alpha analysis of the 33 items revealed a very high level of internal consistency (α = .96). a one-sample kolmogorov-smirnov test revealed that the aflaq scores are normally distributed (kolmogorov-smirnov z = 0.76, p = ns). the mpq has been used around the world and has been applied to various groups: students of several age levels, local employees, expatriate employees, their spouses and children, general citizens and refugees (van der zee et al., 2013, p. 118). in all cases, the scales proved to be reliable and showed consistent patterns of correlations with related variables. van oudenhoven, timmerman and van der zee (2007) tested the assumption of cross-cultural equivalence of the scales of the mpq. a multigroup common factor analysis yielded a satisfactory level of scale equivalence for the dutch, italian, german, and australian-english versions of the mpq. it makes perfect sense to use the mpq because fl is by definition a first step in developing not only multilingualism but also a certain degree of multiculturalism. we used the recent 40-item version of the questionnaire, the multicultural personality questionnaire-short form (mpq-sf; van der zee et al., 2013). an arabic version of the original english form of the mpq-sf was created in collaboration with jan pieter van oudenhoven, one of the questionnaire’s authors. the mpq-sf utilises a 5-point likert scale, ranging from 1 (totally not applicable) to 5 (completely applicable). each dimension was composed of eight items with possible response values ranging from 1 to 5, and so total scores on each factor ranged from 8 (a 1 on each of the factor’s 8 items after re-coding the 17 negatively-oriented items) to 40 (a score of 5 on each of the factor’s 8 items after re-coding of negatively-oriented items). high scores indicate a high level of the trait (e.g., high emotional stability). table 1 mpq-sf data variable range m sd cronbach’s alpha cultural empathy 8-40 32.8 4.1 .80 flexibility 8-33 21.8 4.0 .65 social initiative 11-40 26.7 5.4 .81 openmindedness 8-40 30.8 4.4 .77 emotional stability 8-37 22.8 5.8 .79 jean-marc dewaele, taghreed m. al-saraj 218 cronbach’s alpha analyses revealed that the five scales have sufficient internal consistency, as shown in table 1. dörnyei and taguchi (2009) argue that applied linguists should aim “at reliability coefficients in excess of .70; if the cronbach alpha of a scale does not reach .60 this should sound alarm bells” (p. 95). the first version of the questionnaire was pilot-tested with 12 participants. this led to the reformulation of some items. the research design and questionnaire obtained approval from the ethics committee of the school of social sciences, history and philosophy at birkbeck college, university of london, uk. 4.3. statistical considerations the sample size is sufficient for multiple regression analyses (tabachnick & fidell, 2001). although the data are normally distributed, we performed a number of supplementary analyses to make sure no major assumptions for multiple regression had been violated. collinearity diagnostics showed that tolerance values (1 r2) were sufficiently above zero, which means that this assumption has not been violated. residual scatterplots and normal probability plots showed no deviations from normality (tabachnik & fidell, 2001). 5. results pearson correlation analyses revealed that flca was significantly and negatively correlated with four personality traits: cultural empathy, social initiative, openmindedness and emotional stability, as shown in table 2 and figures 1 and 2. no relationship was found between flca and flexibility. figure 1 the link between social initiative and flca foreign language classroom anxiety of arab learners of english: the effect of personality, linguistic. . . 219 figure 2 the link between emotional stability and flca table 2 pearson correlation analyses between flca and the five mpq dimensions cultural empathy flexibility social initiative openmindeness emotional stability flca -.13* -.09 -.38*** -.36*** -.46*** notes. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .0001 a significant negative pearson correlation was found between self-rated oral proficiency in english and flca, as shown in table 3 and figure 3. a slightly weaker negative relationship was found between frequency of use of english and flca (table 3). the number of languages known by participants was not linked to their flca (table 3). age was negatively linked to flca (table 3). figure 3 the link between self-perceived oral proficiency and flca jean-marc dewaele, taghreed m. al-saraj 220 table 3 pearson correlation analyses between flca, knowledge and use of english, multilingualism, and age self-rated oral proficiency in english frequency of use of english number of languages known age flca -.57*** -.36*** -.08 -.15** notes. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .0001 an independent t test showed that there were no gender differences for flca scores (t(348) = 0.091, p = ns). a one-way anova revealed that level of education was unrelated to flca (f = 1.4, df = 3, p = ns). multiple stepwise linear regressions were performed for flca in order to determine the amount of unique variance explained by the variables that correlated significantly with flca, namely cultural empathy, social initiative, openmindeness, emotional stability, self-rated oral proficiency in english, frequency of use of english and age. model 1 shows that self-rated oral proficiency in english is the strongest predictor (f(1, 304) = 160.8, p < .0001). the adjusted r2 shows that self-rated oral proficiency explains 34.6% of variance in flca (beta = -.59, t = -12.7, p < .0001). model 2, with emotional stability added as a predictor variable, is significant (f(2, 303) = 142.1, p < .0001), the r2 change value indicating a further 13.8% of variance being explained (adjusted r2 = 48.1). self-rated oral proficiency makes the largest unique contribution to explaining flca in model 2 (beta = -.52, t = -12.4, p < 0001), followed by emotional stability (beta = -.38, t = -9.0, p < .0001). model 3, with social initiative added as a predictor variable is significant (f(3, 302) = 114.0, p < .0001), explaining a further 4.7% of variance (adjusted r2 = 49.5). self-rated oral proficiency makes the largest unique contribution to explaining flca (beta = -.49, t = -12.2, p < .0001), followed by emotional stability (beta = -.30, t = -7., p < .0001) and social initiative (beta = -.23, t = -5.5, p < 0001). model 4 includes frequency of use of english as predictor variable (f(4, 301) = 90.6, p < .0001), explaining a further 1.5% of variance (adjusted r2 = 54). self-rated oral proficiency explains most variance in flca (beta = -.43, t = -9.7, p < .0001), followed by emotional stability (beta = -.31, t = -7.3 p < .0001), social initiative (beta = -.23, t = -5.7, p < 0001) and frequency of use of english (beta = -.14, t = -3.2, p < .002). finally, model 5 includes age as a predictor variable (f(5, 300) = 74.3, p < .0001), explaining a further 0.7% of variance (adjusted r2 = 54.6). self-rated oral proficiency explains most variance in flca (beta = -.45, t = -10, p < .0001), followed by emotional stability (beta = -.32, t = -7.7 p < .0001), social initiative (beta = -.25, t = -6.0, p < .0001), frequency of use of english (beta = -.13, t = -2.9, p < .004) and age (beta = -.09, t = -2.2, p < .03). both cultural empathy (beta = -.07, t = 1.6, p = .11) and openmindedness (beta = -.02, t = 0.4, p = .66) were excluded in model 5. foreign language classroom anxiety of arab learners of english: the effect of personality, linguistic. . . 221 6. discussion to summarise, the findings reported here allow us to partially reject hypothesis 1 on the relationship between flca and sociobiographical variables: age was a small but significant predictor of flca, with older participants reporting lower levels of flca. however, gender and education level were unrelated to flca. hypothesis 2 is confirmed: self-perceived proficiency turned out to be the strongest predictor of flca, and frequency of use of english was also a small but significant predictor of flca. in other words, participants who felt proficient in oral english and used the language more frequently were much less likely to suffer from flca in english. hypothesis 3 is rejected as the knowledge of more languages was not linked to lower levels of flca. hypothesis 4 is partially confirmed: participants who were highly emotionally stable were least likely to suffer from flca in english. emotional stability may serve as a protective factor against anxiety in the face of foreign language classroom stressors. social initiative was also a significant predictor of flca, with participants scoring high on this dimension suffering less from flca. two other dimensions, cultural empathy and openmindedness showed the expected negative relationship in the correlation analyses, but turned out not to be significant predictors in the multiple regression analyses. the weak relationships between sociobiographical variables and flca were not unexpected. previous findings indicated scattered effects in different directions (arnaiz & guillén, 2012). this is possibly due to the type and age of fl learners. age differences seem more salient when comparing younger populations (macintyre et al., 2002). when a more heterogeneous population is considered in terms of age, differences tend to shift in the other direction, with older participants reporting lower levels of fla (dewaele, in press; dewaele et al., 2008). we were, however, surprised that the number of languages known by participants was not linked to flca as previous research has shown that the knowledge of more languages is linked to lower levels of fla/flca across languages (dewaele, 2010a, 2010b; dewaele et al., 2008; thompson & lee, 2013). the main difference between samples used in previous studies and the present participants is that they all have arabic as an l1. it is unclear how this could somehow be linked to a lack of relationship with multilingualism. the finding that self-perceived proficiency appeared as the strongest predictor of flca is not entirely unexpected (arnaiz & guillén, 2012; liu & chen, 2013; macintyre & gardner, 1994; sparks & ganschow, 2007), but the amount of variance explained (over a third) is much higher than in dewaele and shan ip (2013), where it amounted to a mere 6.6% of variance. the frequency of use of english explained a modest additional 1.5% of unique variance in the present jean-marc dewaele, taghreed m. al-saraj 222 study. this demonstrates that self-perceived proficiency and frequency of use behave as separate dimensions, despite being correlated. the personality traits emotional stability and social initiative explained a further 18.5% of variance in flca, which is in line with the findings for neuroticism and extraversion in dewaele (2013a). it thus seems that fl learners who are by nature inclined to “actively approach social situations and demonstrate initiative in these interactions” (van der zee et al., 2013, p. 118), especially in the fl classroom, are less likely to suffer from flca. moreover, students who can stay calm under “novel and stressful conditions” (van der zee et al., 2013, p. 118), which, transposed to an fl classroom means having to express themselves in a language they have not yet entirely mastered with peers and teacher listening and judging their performance, will also suffer less from flca. the finding that openmindedness and cultural empathy were significantly negatively correlated with flca was not unexpected, as openmindedness shares characteristics with tolerance of ambiguity (dewaele & shan ip, 2013) and cultural empathy shares similarities with emotional intelligence, which is linked to fla (dewaele et al., 2008, shao, yu & ji, 2013). van der zee et al. (2013) report a significant correlation between cultural empathy and emotional intelligence and between openmindedness and emotional intelligence (both p < .01) (p. 123). however, these two dimensions were not found to explain unique variance in the regression analyses. an important aspect of the present study is the use of the aflaq and the arabic version of the mpq-sf. al-saraj (2011, 2014) has argued that a mere translation of instruments might result in culturally inappropriate or irrelevant instruments, hence the need not just to translate but also to adapt questionnaires with a specific population in mind. the aflaq and the arabic version of the mpq-sf were specifically tailored towards arabic learners and users of english. we explained earlier that our aim was not to compare the results of our participants with other groups but rather to try and find relatively stable relationships between independent and dependent variables within this relatively homogeneous group of arabic learners. further research could explore potential differences between specific nationalities within the group. we mentioned earlier that dörnyei and ryan (2015) felt of the modular individual differences approach that “while yielding valuable insights, this seemingly logical approach proved to be an illusion as a whole” (p. 21). we respectfully beg to differ. while we do not deny the fact that systems behave dynamically and that nonlinearity makes longitudinal sla research particularly challenging, we feel that a focus on specific variables, within a specific, relatively homogeneous leaner sample, using a conventional statistical approach can produce satisfying and original results, thus expanding the frontiers of the so-called “charted territories.” we do not deny that other unseen variables may have foreign language classroom anxiety of arab learners of english: the effect of personality, linguistic. . . 223 played a role in the background and that complex interactions exist between all variables, but with this caveat in mind, we feel that the relationships we have uncovered are essential in understanding the bigger picture of fla/flca. it seems to us that for the health of our discipline, it is crucial that researchers be encouraged to sail everywhere, including against the tide into charted waters. 7. conclusion the present study investigated the link between self-perceived oral proficiency in english (a fl), frequency of use of english, sociobiographical variables and five multicultural personality traits on flca of arabic learners of english using instruments in arabic (aflaq; al-saraj, 2011, 2014; and an arabic version of the mpq-sf; van der zee et al., 2013). the results suggest that participants who felt more proficient in oral english and used the language frequently were significantly less likely to suffer from flca in english. these two linguistic variables explained over a third of variance in flca. participants’ personality was also linked to their levels of flca with two personality traits, emotional stability and social initiative, explaining a further 18.5% of variance in flca. these two personality traits have been found to have similar relationships in previous research (dewaele, 2013a). age was the only sociobiographical variable to explain a further 0.7% of variance. number of languages known, gender and education level were unrelated to flca. it thus seems that the english flca of our arab learners is predicted mainly by proficiency and frequency of use of english, but that two psychological traits also determine levels of flca. acknowledgments we would like to thank our participants for taking the time to fill out our questionnaire. many thanks also to all those, including reviewers, who have given us excellent feedback on previous versions of this paper. jean-marc dewaele, taghreed m. al-saraj 224 references aida, y. 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(3) i feel nervous and confused when the language teacher is unsuccessful in explaining the lesson. (4) i fear speaking or asking the teacher in my foreign language class. (5) i feel anxious when listening to a passage in my listening/speaking class. (6) i get nervous when there is a lot of vocabulary that i don't understand being used in my foreign language class. (7) i feel nervous using the foreign language outside of the college or class. (8) i am not nervous speaking the foreign language in front of my classmates.* (9) i get nervous when i arrive late to class or the day following my absence. (10) i get anxious when there are too many foreign language students registered in my class. (11) i feel anxious when i see classmates better than me in my foreign language class. (12) i feel comfortable in speaking with my foreign language teacher.* (13) i feel anxious in reading/writing and grammar class (14) i get upset due to the method of testing in the foreign language class (15) i get anxious when i feel that i can't speak well in front of other language students not in my class. (16) i get nervous when looking at my grades. (17) i get nervous and confused when i am speaking in my language class. (18) during language class, i find myself thinking about things that have nothing to do with the course. (19) i tremble when i know that i'm going to be called on in language class. (20) i feel nervous when talking in the foreign language to someone i just met. (21) i get nervous when the language teacher gives us a lot of things to do in so little time. (22) i feel overwhelmed by the number of grammatical rules i have to learn in the foreign language. (23) i fear pronouncing words incorrectly in my foreign language class. (24) i fear failing my foreign language class. (25) i feel low self-confidence about speaking the foreign language in front of the class. (26) i feel anxious about speaking the foreign language in front of other student (27) i feel nervous when i am around more experienced foreign language users. (28) i don't feel anxious when learning a foreign language.* (29) in language class, i can get so nervous i forget things i know. (30) i feel anxious when i don't understand what the teacher is saying in the foreign language. (31) i feel anxious when i want to volunteer to say something but can't find the proper words to say it in my foreign language class. (32) i feel nervous at english exam time. (33) i feel nervous when standing to give a presentation in front of the class. * reverse-coded items studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl retraction statement the article by musa nushi “can l1 markedness and l2 input robustness account for fossilizability of l2 forms?” has been recalled on account of ethical concerns. 13 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (1). 2015. 13-40 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.1.2 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl neurology of foreign language aptitude adriana biedroń pomeranian university, słupsk, poland adriana.biedron@apsl.edu.pl abstract this state-of-the art paper focuses on the poorly explored issue of foreign language aptitude, attempting to present the latest developments in this field and reconceptualizations of the construct from the perspective of neuroscience. in accordance with this goal, it first discusses general directions in neurolinguistic research on foreign language aptitude, starting with the earliest attempts to define the neurological substrate for talent, sources of difficulties in the neurolinguistic research on foreign language aptitude and modern research methods. this is followed by the discussion of the research on the phonology of foreign language aptitude with emphasis on functional and structural studies as well as their consequences for the knowledge of the concept. the subsequent section presents the studies which focus on lexical and morphosyntactic aspects of foreign language aptitude. the paper ends with a discussion of the limitations of contemporary research, the future directions of such research and selected methodological issues. keywords: foreign language aptitude, neurology, neurolinguistics, individual differences 1. introduction in the research on individual differences, foreign language aptitude (fl aptitude) has recently become one of the most often debated topics among scholars not adriana biedroń 14 only in the field of sla and language education but also neurolinguistics. the research on the construct has always been considerably inspired by the sciences of cognitive psychology, genetics and neurology; however, only in the recent twenty years have the developments in neurology allowed genuine progress in the field (cf. long, 2013, p. 33). as early as the 1980s, researchers trying to find the source of exceptional linguistic abilities concentrated on the neurological basis underlying talent for learning languages (fein & obler, 1988; novoa, fein, & obler, 1988; obler, 1989; schneiderman & desmarais, 1988a, 1988b). in their classic study of gifted foreign language learners, schneiderman and desmarais (1988a, 1988b) suggested that linguistic talent denotes greater neurocognitive flexibility as well as bilateral processing of the brain. currently, the first part of this intuitive hypothesis referring to brain flexibility has been confirmed by experimental research conducted by susanne reiterer and her coworkers (reiterer, hu, sumathi, & singh, 2013), who, as a result of functional neuroimaging, provided evidence that phonetically talented subjects are more neurocognitively flexible than less gifted individuals. recently, the knowledge of human cognitive abilities has greatly expanded owing to new discoveries in related science fields such as psychology of individual differences, cognitive science, neuroscience and genetics, with the effect that the construct has been updated and reconceptualized. fl aptitude is now defined as a conglomerate of various cognitive abilities (carroll, 1993; dörnyei, 2010), subject to the same biological, that is, genetic and neurological, principles as all other abilities, such as mathematical or musical ones. the functioning of the neural system is a basis for individual differences in cognitive abilities. in this respect, there are three sources of ability differentiation: neural conduction velocity, neural efficiency, and gray and white matter volumes. as jensen (1997, 2002), a major proponent of the hereditarian position, argues, all the variation in mental performance has a biological basis. he explains that there is a negative correlation between the intelligence quotient (iq), which is a measure of general cognitive ability, and the reaction time of a person. according to this correlation, the higher the iq level of a person is, the less time he or she needs to solve a problem or to learn something. his arguments rest on interdependencies between the results obtained using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri), electroencephalogram (eeg), event related potential (erp), emission tomography (pet), and studies of nerve conduction velocity and iq scores. thanks to these neuroscientific methods of analysis, it has been well evidenced that intelligence is related to both brain functioning and structure. for example, an fmri study demonstrated that the general cognitive factor appears to be based on the volume and location of gray matter tissue in the brain (haier, jung, yeo, head, & alkire, 2004). many studies have converged on the view that the frontal neurology of foreign language aptitude 15 lobes are essential for fluid intelligence, a distinctive role being attributed to the lateral prefrontal cortex (schoenemann, sheehan, & glotzer, 2005). consequently, at the moment there is no academic discussion about individual differences, especially cognitive factors, without neuroscientific research. applied linguists and language educators cannot fail to include these breakthroughs from neuroscience into fl aptitude research. 2. neurolinguistic research on foreign language aptitude neurolinguistics has become the most informative and ground-breaking source of knowledge about sla, complementing earlier dependence on behavioral records (cf. long, 2013, p. 33). the number of studies on neurological substrates of fl aptitude is growing and the data obtained from them are becoming more consistent and replicable (cf. chee, soon, lee, & pallier, 2004; díaz, mitterer, broersma, & sebastián-gallés, 2012; golestani, price, & scott, 2011; hu et al., 2013; pereda, reiterer, & bhattacharya, 2011; reiterer et al., 2011a; reiterer, pereda, & bhattacharya, 2011b; sebastián-gallés et al., 2012). nevertheless, there are many neglected or poorly investigated areas and, generally, the redefinition of the construct is far from complete. this situation originates from a variety of sources. the most important are the following: the heterogeneity and extension of the fl aptitude construct, the high level of individualization of the brain, and, last but not least, a small number of researchers interested in fl aptitude and specialized in neurolinguistics. one of the most important obstacles in examining fl aptitude is the heterogeneity of the construct. to start with carroll’s (1959) classic model of fl aptitude, which conceptualized the construct as comprising four distinct and relatively independent abilities: phonetic coding ability, grammatical sensitivity, inductive language learning ability and rote memorization ability, all the successive models (grigorenko, sternberg, & ehrman, 2000; robinson, 2002; skehan, 2002; sparks, javorsky, patton, & ganschow, 1998) have attached extra aptitudes reflecting current views and advances in the domain of sla. skehan’s (2002) aptitude model underscores the importance of incorporating developments in sla research to update fl aptitude theory, while robinson’s (2002) aptitude complexes framework highlights the dynamic interactions between fl aptitude profiles, task features and their implications for l2 instruction. moreover, both models lay emphasis on the role of the memory factor in language acquisition. grigorenko et al.’s (2000, see also sternberg & grigorenko, 2000) canal-f theory stresses the ability to cope with novelty and ambiguity when learning a foreign language, whereas sparks et al.’s (1998) linguistic coding differences hypothesis (lcdh) emphasizes the dynamic nature of fl aptitude and adriana biedroń 16 postulates that native language (l1) skills are essential for predicting foreign language (l2) learning. besides, such constructs as working memory (wm), phonological short-term memory and noticing ability have been incorporated in all the contemporary models of fl aptitude (robinson, 2002; skehan, 2002), which extends the fl aptitude research to the fields usually associated with psychology. particularly, the proposal to include wm in the array of fl aptitudes seems to have gained increasing attention among sla researchers in recent years (dekeyser & koeth, 2011; doughty, 2013; juffs & harrington, 2011; wen & skehan, 2011; williams, 2012). overall, the whole construct of fl aptitude is highly complex and multifaceted, which is reflected by dörnyei’s (2005, p. 33) statement that it has become an umbrella-term for a number of cognitive factors creating a composite gauge regarded as the general capacity to master a foreign language. this has effects on the research on the neurology of fl aptitude, where some mechanisms which serve language learning behavior are better investigated than others. for example, neural mechanisms for procedural and declarative memory, memory consolidation and attention (schumann, 2004a, p. 1), phonological abilities (reiterer et al., 2013), and the congenital nature of l1 and l2 aptitude (díaz et al., 2012) are often investigated. others, for example analytic aptitude required for grammar processing, the ability to learn vocabulary, noticing ability, wm as fl aptitude, pragmatic ability and semantic fluency, remain neglected. it seems that these disproportions largely reflect weak areas in the theory of fl aptitude. another major problem that complicates the foundation of a unified neurological picture of fl aptitude is a high level of the individualization of the brain. according to schumann (2004b, p. 7), “all brains are different—as different as faces . . . and these differences have consequences for learning.” some differences result from genetic inheritance; for example, greater brain plasticity (cf. díaz et al., 2012; golestani, 2012; sebastián-gallés & díaz, 2012; sebastiángallés et al., 2012). some others are considered adaptive changes in the brain occurring in response to experience (golestani, molko, dehaene, lebihan, & pallier, 2007; green, crinion, & price, 2006). accordingly, high fl aptitude might be a consequence of both inborn functional and structural/ anatomical characteristics as well as an individual brain response to an idiosyncratic experience of learning a language. de bot (2006) expresses his opinion on this interrelationship in the following way: there are individuals who will have both exceptional language skills and deviant brain structures. . . . it is likely that learning might have an impact on brain structures, although it is unclear how plastic the brain is and to what extent specific teaching and learning methods might enhance plasticity or make optimal use of it. (p. 130) neurology of foreign language aptitude 17 according to schumann (2004b), there are five sources of variation among brains, which result in differences in fl aptitude, namely genetic, developmental, experiential, degeneracy and individual appraisal system. his claim is in most part based on classic theories of heritability (cf. jensen, 1997; plomin, 1997), ascribing significant genetic contributions to cognitive abilities. genetic variance in a child attributable to parental genes accounts for about 50% of correlation between siblings and is higher for monozygotic twins (about .86) and lower for fraternal twins (.60) and for regular siblings (.48), which means that genes are the most influential factor in the development of cognitive ability. the second source is the specific chemical environment during the embryonic stage of development. as a result, human brains are similarly constructed but differ significantly at the microstructural level. the third source of variation are the interactions with the environment, with the effect that they channel the brain’s anatomy, that is, the increase of neurons and connections among them. because each individual has idiosyncratic environmental experience, these influences contribute to additional microstructural variation in the neural structure. the fourth process which contributes to variation between brains is called degeneracy. this term describes a situation when two or more different neural systems subserve the same goal, that is to say, when the same behavior can be achieved by different underlying processes. these alternate systems discriminate individual brains (indefrey & gullberg, 2006; schumann, 2004b). the fifth source of variance are idiosyncratic preferences and aversions, that is, an individual appraisal system (scherer, 1984). individual experiences and affective reactions are stored in memory and used to evaluate future experiences, and consequently affect individual choices. moreover, people seek environments fitting their genotype, which in turn influences their abilities (jensen, 1997). jensen (1997) also points to the fact that randomness or luck should be considered another source of variation. the development of fl aptitude might be a consequence of evolutionary selection processes (schumann, 2004b), which means that individuals can be differently prepared to respond to environmental changes, and, consequently, to survive and to transmit their genes. adaptation to the environment can generate a hypertrophy, which is a structural (anatomical) abnormality in the brain (van den noort, nordby, bosch, & hugdahl, 2005), which, in turn, can result in a specific ability. the brain of a talented individual with a particular hypertrophy responds to the learning process strengthening certain neural connections or creating new neural pathways. this, in sequence, facilitates learning, and, consequently, the talented individual might achieve high expertise in the field of study (cf. golestani et al., 2011; perani, 2005; reiterer et al., 2013). generally, neurological differences between foreign language learners, which might be assigned to different domains of fl aptitude, are divided into adriana biedroń 18 functional (i.e., those connected with brain activation) and structural (i.e., those connected with brain anatomy). these differences are associated with distinct aspects and levels of language processing starting with simple perceptual/cognitive functions such as nonnative sound learning and articulation, and phonetic expertise, through more complex ones such as wm for verbal and lexical information, to the most compound processes including reading, syntax, bilingual functioning and executive control over linguistic fluency. most of the research in the domain of language has focused on brain functioning using such methods as fmri, eeg, and magnetoencephalography (meg). however, over the last 17 years the number of studies examining brain structure or a change over time, that is, plasticity, has grown significantly thanks to the development of very advanced technologies such as anatomical magnetic resonance imaging (amri) and diffusion tensor imaging (dti; golestani, 2012, p. 2). neuroimaging techniques are described in table 1. table 1 neuroimaging techniques technique definition pet (positron emission tomography) used for localization of different neural functions by means of injection of radioactive tracers. more active brain areas have higher levels of blood flow and, consequently, of the tracer. by creating pictures of the tracer distribution, a neuroscientist can obtain a pattern of brain functioning. pet has high spatial resolution (goswami, 2004: 5-6). fmri (functional magnetic resonance imaging) gives similar results to pet, but relies on measuring the magnetic resonance signal generated by the protons of water molecules in neurons. fmri has high spatial resolution (goswami, 2004: 5-6). erp (event related potential) erp is, unlike pet and fmri, based not on localization of neural activity, but on the timing of neural events. erp has high temporal resolution. electrodes placed on the skin of the scalp record activity of the brain. this experimental technique is based on eeg (encephalography) (goswami, 2004: 5-6). meg (magnetoencephalography) a diagnostic technique which measures the level of magnetic signals as a result of electrical activity in the brain. meg has high temporal resolution. (http://psychologydictionary.org/magnetoencephalography-imegl/) amri (anatomical magnetic resonance imaging) a high resolution technique which can be used to describe the shape, size and integrity of grey and white matter structures in the brain. (http://fmri.ucsd.edu/research/whatisfmri.html) dti (diffusion tensor imaging) it can be used to map white matter fibre tracks (http://fmri.ucsd.edu/research/whatisfmri.html) traditionally, it is believed that changes in brain functioning are rapid whereas those in brain structure take longer. however, these new methods of brain investigation have revealed that also structural changes can occur rapidly, basically within hours (golestani, 2012). another important discovery is that, generally, the same regions which functionally subserve cognitive processes involved neurology of foreign language aptitude 19 in language processing also structurally correlate with these processes. as a result, a number of anatomical differences have been found in more versus less proficient foreign language learners. for example, mechelli et al. (2004) discovered that the acquisition of multiple languages results in an expansion of grey matter in the left parietal cortex. green et al. (2006) studied anatomical changes implicated in processing a language among simultaneous interpreters as compared to monolingual, bilingual and multilingual speakers. what they found was higher grey matter density in interpreters in three regions: bilateral putamen, the inferior and superior colliculi, and the bilateral dorso-medial thalami, a phenomenon ascribed to long-term effects of the acquisition of a very advanced linguistic skill, which, in turn, makes the acquisition of succeeding languages easier. stein and colleagues’ (stein et al., 2012) study provided evidence for brain structural plasticity as a result of second language learning. they conducted a longitudinal study by means of amri on native speakers of english learning german prior to and after five months of learning. as a result, they discovered structural changes over time in the left inferior frontal gyrus and in the left anterior temporal lobe, which positively correlated with individual differences in the increase in second language proficiency during training. generally, the differences in the left inferior parietal cortex and in the left inferior frontal cortex associated with bilingualism are related to the age of acquisition and predict second language proficiency (golestani, 2012, p. 20). interesting as they are, these studies explain differences in proficiency between learners, but proficiency does not equal aptitude. accordingly, reiterer, pereda and bhattacharya (2009, p. 98) point to the fact that “language proficiency” is an ambiguous term involving various factors including aptitude for languages. therefore, most of the studies presented in this review must be interpreted as indirect evidence of differences in fl aptitude. all the above mentioned research provides evidence for brain plasticity as a result of experience. however, many studies offer an alternative interpretation of this phenomenon, tracing the roots of anatomical specificity to genetic factors (cf. golestani, 2012). the example of a polyglot emil krebs (1867-1930), who fluently spoke more than 60 languages, is presented as classic evidence for a peculiar inborn brain architecture that facilitates fl aptitude. apparently, the cell structure in his broca’s area was significantly different from a normal brain cell structure (amunts, schleicher, & zilles, 2004). in contrast, no plausible explanation for talent has been discovered in the brain of a linguistic savant, christopher (smith, tsimpli, morgan, & woll, 2011). the discussion of the origination of hypertrophies will be addressed at greater length in the following section. for the sake of clarity, the following review will present both functional and anatomical studies in the fields of phonology, grammar and lexis with respect to fl aptitude. adriana biedroń 20 3. neurology of phonological aptitude the phonological aspect is the best investigated of all the components of fl aptitude (christiner & reiterer, 2013; díaz et al., 2012; golestani et al., 2011). as far as anatomy is concerned, differences in the phonological cognitive functioning include the auditory cortex, the parietal cortices and the inferior frontal gyrus, all of which are related to such levels of phonetics as auditory processing, the perception of nonnative sounds, the use of tonal information, and the ability to imitate nonnative sounds. differences in auditory processing have been found in left heschl’s gyrus (hg) anatomy, which means that higher gray matter density is associated with better performance (sutherland et al., 2012; warrier et al., 2009). a significant factor related to language aptitude is phonetic perception, which is required for phonetic production, accent imitation, verbal wm, as well as semantic perception and production. many studies have confirmed substantial individual differences among people in the perception, recognition and learning of foreign sounds (golestani et al., 2007; golestani, paus, & zatorre, 2002; golestani et al., 2011; sebastián-gallés et al., 2012). as a result of the examination of brain structure in expert phoneticians, golestani and her team discovered that phonologically talented learners have more grey matter and white matter in parietal regions, in particular in the left hemisphere. their results suggest that this morphological difference is inborn and might have existed before the onset of phonetic training thus affecting career choices of the subjects. as they explain, complementary influences of inborn predispositions and experience-dependent brain pliability interact in determining not only how experience shapes the human brain, but also why some individuals become engaged in certain fields of expertise (golestani et al., 2011, p. 4213). left parietal cortex is pertinent to phonetic tasks and is the location of phonological verbal wm; therefore, the anatomy fundamental for wm in the left auditory cortex also predicts phonological aptitude. the researchers explain the asymmetry in the amount of white matter in more talented learners in terms of greater myelineation, that is, an increase in myelin volume (white matter), which indicates a better isolation of the transport of electric signals, which, in turn, leads to faster and more efficient neural processing vital in learning the phonetics of a language. the researchers conclude that morphological differences in parietal white matter can predict the pace and efficiency of learning new sounds. there is a number of other hypertrophies that differentiate more from less able l2 learners, mostly related to the anatomy of the hg. for example, higher white matter density has been found in the left hg, as well as in a split or a duplicate of the hg, in more able learners. in fact, there can be two or three hg per hemisphere. additionally, the right insula and hg are more superiorly located in slower learners (golestani et al., 2011). what is more, a larger volume of grey neurology of foreign language aptitude 21 matter in the hg has been found in musicians, which positively correlates with musical aptitude (schneider et al., 2002; cf. christiner & reiterer, 2013). generally, a global displacement of components of the language area in the left hemisphere can predict the learning of speech sounds. there is also evidence that variation in perisylvian anatomy is related to oral language ability. abnormalities have been found in children with dyslexia and other language disorders. abnormal asymmetry of the planum temporale has been detected in people with poor verbal ability (golestani et al., 2007). moreover, an increase in grey matter has been observed in the mid-body of the corpus collosum which connects the two hemispheres in highly proficient l2 speakers (coggins, kennedy, & armstrong, 2004; van den noort, bosch, & hugdahl, 2006). interestingly, the differences lie not only in the auditory cortex, but also in the more general language network and even in the right hemisphere. for example, greater white matter density has been observed in certain visual brain regions, which means that those are also engaged in phonological processing (golestani et al., 2007). sebastián-gallés et al. (2012) examined neuroanatomical markers of individual differences in vowel perception. they compared brain morphology in two groups of highly proficient early bilinguals, equally proficient in an l2, but differing in their ability to perceive both native and nonnative vowels. voxel-based morphometry analysis revealed that there is a larger white matter volume in the right insulo/fronto-opercular region in poorer perceptual discriminators of native and nonnative vowels. the higher white matter volumes in poor perceivers indicate a stronger activation of these areas which are used as a compensatory mechanism that enhances auditory discrimination abilities. this conclusion accords with similar results obtained by reiterer et al. (2011a), reiterer et al. (2011b) and wong, perrachione, and parrish (2007), where a more extended or bilateral activation in poorer language learners was observed. another group of studies refers to the use of tonal information linguistically. wong and colleagues (wong, chandrasekaran, garibaldi, & wong, 2011; wong et al., 2007; wong et al., 2008) confirmed larger volume of the left hg in more successful learners using fmri, amri and dti. moreover, wong et al. (2011) found that white matter connectivity in the left temporoparietal region correlated positively with the use of tonal information. summing up, there is a partial dissociation between the structural correlates of phonetic perception and production (golestani, 2012, p. 15). functional studies on phonological processing generally corroborate three hypotheses related to fl aptitude, that is (a) a stronger and bilateral activation of brain areas of less gifted individuals in comparison to those of more gifted ones, (b) the dual genetic/environmental source of aptitude differences, and (c) the common neural basis for l1 and l2 aptitudes (díaz, baus, escera, adriana biedroń 22 costa, & sebastián-gallés, 2008; golestani & zatorre, 2004; reiterer et al., 2011a; reiterer et al., 2011b; wong et al., 2007). one of the earliest questions asked by neurolinguists was whether neural correlates for an l1 and l2 are the same or different. most studies have converged on the view that unlike an l1, which always activates the same areas in the left hemisphere, an l2 activates a very changeable network of both hemispheres (dehaene et al., 1997). this observation is typically not ascribed to differences in aptitude but to the age of onset and level of proficiency. in many studies late-onset, low proficiency l2 learners have demonstrated greater right hemisphere activation, whereas areas of l1 and l2 activation tend to overlap in early-onset, more proficient learners (kim, relkin, lee, & hirsch, 1997). more recently, these results have been replicated by golestani and zatorre (2004), indefrey and gullberg (2006), reiterer et al. (2011a); reiterer et al. (2011b), sebastián-gallés et al. (2012) and wong et al. (2007), all of whom reported a more extended or bilateral activation in the brains of less successful language learners. specifically, more active cortical regions in less proficient learners during l2 processing concentrate in the left posterior inferior frontal gyrus (ifg) (indefrey, 2006; stowe, 2006; van den noort et al., 2005). in indefrey’s (2006, p. 300) interpretation, the ifg is optimized for an l1 and less efficient for an l2. effort increases activation, which means that learners might compensate for lower efficiency in an l2 by driving this region more strongly or activating a bigger number of neurons to perform a task, whereas automatized activities require less effort, and, consequently, less activation. all of this indicates that the efficiency of the neural organization, next to brain anatomy, might establish a neurological basis for fl aptitude. indefrey and gullberg (2006) postulate that with the increase in l2 proficiency, the processing profile in an l2 becomes similar to an l1. what causes higher activation in lower-proficiency l2 speakers is the increased “control effort” (reiterer, 2009; reiterer et al., 2011a). generally, most contemporary researchers choose a moderate view termed partial overlap (reiterer, 2009, p. 160). according to this opinion, there is a basic core overlap for l1 and l2 processing; however, in all probability, the level of proficiency or fluency triggers brain activation in additional areas for an l2. golestani and zatorre (2004) investigated changes in brain activity during phonetic processing by means of fmri. their subjects were ten monolingual english-speaking individuals, who were scanned during performing an identification task of a sound unknown to them: a hindi dental retroflex. the fmri was conducted before and after five sessions of training. as a result, they confirmed that the successful learning of a nonnative phonetic contrast causes the employment of the same areas that are active in the processing of native contrasts. moreover, frontal speech regions are less active in successful learners as compared to neurology of foreign language aptitude 23 poor learners, which indicates that the phonetic processing is more automatized and more efficient in the first group. díaz et al. (2008) compared mismatch negativity (mmn), an electrophysiological brain response, in two groups of bilinguals, extremely good and poor, at various tasks testing their perception ability. they found individual differences between these two groups with respect to phonetic discrimination ability detected in both languages of the subjects, the native and the foreign one. the conclusion was that foreign language phonetic abilities can be predicted from native phonetic abilities; moreover, these abilities belong to language-specific rather than general acoustic abilities. díaz et al. (2012) argue that the large variety among late bilinguals in their mastery of l2 phonology, particularly l2 phonological contrasts, is grounded in their varied discrimination of native phonological contrasts. if the age of onset is controlled for, individual differences in l2 proficiency are caused by a general language mechanism (cf. golestani & zattore, 2004). moreover, both earlyand late-onset bilinguals are able to display a native-like performance on l2 phonological tasks that involve pre-lexical processes, that is, phoneme categorization, but their abilities deteriorate as the task becomes more lexicalized, as, for example, in selecting a word (sebastián-gallés & díaz, 2012). wong et al. (2007) report a study assessing the neural correlates of learning to use pitch patterns in words by english-speaking adults. the use of pitch patterns resulted in changes in a network of brain activation, that is, successful learning was associated with activation in left superior temporal region after training, whereas bilateral auditory cortex activation was discovered in less successful foreign language learners both before and after training. it is worth mentioning that in the less successful learners the regions responsible for nonlinguistic pitch perception as well as those for increased wm and attentional effort were more activated. this means that left auditory cortex is involved in learning pitch patterns in words and that some phonological processes are prewired and independent of practice. a number of studies of phonetically talented l2 learners conducted by reiterer (2009) and her colleagues (cf. christiner & reiterer, 2013; hu et al., 2013; hu & reiterer, 2009; nardo & reiterer, 2009; reiterer, berger, hemmelmann, & rappelsberger, 2005; reiterer et al., 2011a; reiterer et al., 2013; reiterer et al., 2009; reiterer et al., 2011b; rota & reiterer, 2009) have provided remarkable insights into the interdependencies between phonetic abilities, cognitive and personality factors, and brain activation patterns in talented l2 learners. their preliminary results basically confirmed the findings of previous studies, that is, a greater activation of language-related areas in less talented l2 learners. for example, in a neurological study, reiterer et al. (2005) investigated the impact of proficiency level among german students of english on the cortical organization adriana biedroń 24 of foreign language processing. two groups of learners, high and low proficiency, were subjected to eeg coherence analysis during native and foreign language processing. the researchers observed reduced eeg coherence in highly proficient foreign language speakers in both foreign and native language processing. the study corroborated previous research results, namely that less proficient learners activate more brain areas than more proficient ones (cf. chee et al., 2004; haier et al., 1992; perani et al., 2003). the authors suggest that the lower activation of cortical regions during both l1 and l2 processing may result from such factors as extensive training and exposure, a more efficient approach to language learning during the acquisition of l1 or genetically predisposed language aptitude. because brain activation patterns correlated with pronunciation aptitude scores, reiterer (2009, p. 176) suggests that the primary factor of fl aptitude correlates with reduced effort in speech production as well as increased cortical efficiency. the reduced effort is a consequence of higher proficiency; therefore, fl aptitude can be a result of an interaction between inborn aptitudes, early experience and training. the question why some late-onset adult bilinguals display different abilities for imitating foreign accents remains unanswered. a study that addressed this problem was conducted by reiterer et al. (2011a). the subjects were 141 germanspeaking individuals studied for their mimicry capacity, which is a factor indicating their abilities for the imitation of foreign sounds. they displayed significant individual differences in imitating words, sentences and texts in both their l2, english, and in tamil and hindi, natural languages unknown to them. moreover, the late-onset bilinguals revealed large individual differences in the employment of left-hemisphere speech areas, namely the left inferior parietal cortex (supramarginal gyrus) and the left inferior frontal/premotor area (reiterer et al., 2011a), with higher activation in the case of low ability and enhanced gray matter volume in high ability subjects. as in the previous studies of this kind, the conclusion is that increased “control effort” causes higher activation in lower-proficiency l2 speakers. the same rule applied to all the languages tested, that is, the l1 (german), the l2 (english) and the l0 (hindi/tamil), which indicates that there are high similarities between l1 and l2 phonetic processing dependent on either the level of expertise or the inborn abilities of the speaker, with the latter explanation being more plausible as the individuals were not exposed to the l0 before (cf. golestani & zatorre, 2004). this conclusion is valuable because it presents evidence for an inborn character of abilities. hu et al. (2013) investigated behavioral predictors and neural substrates of aptitude for pronunciation in advanced l2 learners. previous research provided evidence for a correlation between phonological wm, as measured by digit span and pseudo-word repetition, and language learning ability in earlystage learners, which declines in more advanced learners. this study confirmed neurology of foreign language aptitude 25 this by demonstrating that there was no association between phonological wm and l2 pronunciation aptitude in advanced learners. one hundred and nine german university students and graduates, who began learning english at the age of ten, participated in the behavioral part of the study. students outside one standard deviation from the mean were classified as high and low aptitude speakers. among those, two subgroups were selected to participate in fmri experiments. behavioral tests included english pronunciation aptitude, phonetic coding ability, phonological wm, musical aptitude, intelligence and personality. it turned out that phonetic coding ability and empathy together, but not the classic measures of phonological wm, predict language pronunciation aptitude in advanced learners. the authors attribute the contribution of empathy to the role of mirror neurons, which can play an important role in sla being responsible for speech comprehension and prosody. when it comes to the neuroimaging study, in the advanced l2 learners enhanced hemodynamic responses were found in the speech-motor neural network and speech-auditory perception areas. the authors conclude that these areas contribute to the talent for l2 pronunciation in advanced learners. unlike in early-stage learners, the areas responsible for phonological wm were not related to the individual differences in l2 pronunciation aptitude, which, together with the lack of phonological wm among the predictors of pronunciation aptitude, leads the authors to conclude that this cognitive factor is not equally crucial at all stages of learning. apparently, aptitude for pronunciation is a dynamic process which requires different neural networks at different phases of learning. another breakthrough study was conducted by reiterer et al. (2013), who maintain that it is possible to predict phonetic talent from purely biometric data. they investigated individual differences in speech-imitation ability in lateonset bilinguals using the neuro-acoustic approach. the researchers tested the imitation ability of an unknown language, hindi, in 138 german-english bilinguals. twenty-six participants with the highest and the lowest scores were further tested using a functional neuroimaging experiment in which they were supposed to imitate sentences in three different conditions. clearly more widespread activations with higher peak activities in the left supramarginal gyrus and postcentral areas were observed for the low ability group. as the left supramarginal gyrus is also a site of the phonological loop of verbal wm, its stronger activation in the poor imitators implicates their weak verbal wm (cf. hu et al., 2013; reiterer et al., 2011a). as reiterer et al. (2013) conclude, this result fits in with behavioral data confirming a strong correlation between wm and both native language processing and foreign language learning success (cf. linck, osthus, koeth, & bunting, 2013). in their experiment, reiterer and her collaborators (2013) used a newly developed analysis termed “articulation space” and adriana biedroń 26 found that the high ability subjects had a larger articulation space allowing access to a wider range of sounds, which, in turn, makes them better sound imitators. the researchers claim that very talented speech imitators have more flexible phonetic categories and are not limited to the mother tongue sound pronunciation schemas. as the authors conclude: “there is higher neuro-cognitive flexibility, reflected by higher articulatory flexibility in the group of the more talented speech imitators” (reiterer et al., 2013, p. 11). for these exceptional learners, there is no interference in phonological learning from the l1. as a result of their study, the researchers refute the critical period for sound learning for some very talented learners; however, they admit that interference from an l1 is rather a norm for the less talented ones. a study examining the link between singing talent and speech imitation ability was done by christiner and reiterer (2013). the research question was whether good singing ability predicts good sound imitation ability. the researchers examined four factors, namely the ability to sing, musical talent, the ability to imitate speech and wm in 41 singers ranging from beginners to advanced. as the authors argue, singing is a better indicator of the ability to imitate speech than playing a musical instrument. as much as 66% of the speech imitation ability can be explained by wm together with singing performance, that is, the singer’s sense of rhythm and quality of voice. according to nardo and reiterer (2009), reiterer et al. (2011a) and hu et al. (2013), 15% of adult or late second language learners can imitate sounds to a high degree. there is a clear connection between musicality in general and articulation ability. the higher the musicality, the better the pronunciation and imitation in a second language, and the ability to sing is the clearest indicator of this. musicians, thanks to their improved auditory wm, remember speech streams longer (nardo & reiterer, 2009). moreover, the processing of verbal material and of music in the brain largely overlap in the areas responsible for short-term memory. the enhanced wm in singers and musicians can be connected with their tendency to rehearse. singers retain perceptual plasticity and are open to new sound combinations. interestingly enough, jordan (2014) suggests that there is a difference between musicians and nonmusicians in wm capacity and that the phonological loop might be enhanced as a result of musical training. summing up, it seems that both the aptitude for singing and for the imitation of unknown sounds rely on common neural networks, vocal and motor flexibility and auditory memory. 4. neurology of lexis and morphosyntax the ability to learn new words is marginally investigated neurologically. this is because most neuroscientific research focuses on the phonological aspect of neurology of foreign language aptitude 27 learning foreign words (cf. hu et al., 2013), overlooking the semantic aspect. the learning of new words and syntax are complex processes based on the functioning of wm, which underlies language learning in general (robinson, 2003). verbal wm, which is crucial for learning languages, is associated with grey matter density in the left posterior superior temporal sulcus (sts; richardson et al., 2011). words in a foreign language are processed in wm and stored in long-term memory. vocabulary knowledge reveals large differences between subjects and is related to many factors such as general intelligence, the number of languages a person knows, education and socio-economic status. there are a few neuroscientific studies of lexical knowledge and semantic memory, which show correlates in the left and right posterior supramarginal gyri and in the posterior sts and temporo-parietal cortex (lee et al., 2007; richardson, thomas, filippi, harth, & price, 2010). grey matter density of the bilateral posterior supramarginal gyri depends on the number of words the subject knows; what is more, this area is connected to the brain areas that process sounds and meanings of words. therefore, the bilateral posterior supramarginal gyri may be places where phonological and semantic information is integrated. de zubicaray, rose and mcmahon (2011), making use of the amri and dti methods, examined the relationship between semantic memory and brain structure in healthy older adults. they found that semantic memory, as assessed by six standardized neuropsychological tests, was correlated with gray matter volumes in a predominantly left lateralized network. with the use of fmri, breitenstein et al. (2005) examined 14 learners acquiring new vocabulary in order to test changes in the activation of the brain and track which of these learning-related activity changes correlate with semantic knowledge. they discovered that the proficiency in the learning of new words depends on correlated amplitude changes between the left hippocampus and neocortical regions and that the learning-related hippocampus activity is an indicator of the ability to acquire both native and foreign vocabulary. analytical aptitude implicated in learning the structure of a language is also poorly investigated. a few studies have addressed the problem of morphosyntactic attainment in late-onset learners (lopez-barroso et al., 2011; wong, morganshort, ettlinger, & zheng, 2012; wood bowden, steinhauer, sanz, & ullman, 2013). lopez-barroso et al. (2011) provided evidence that the phonological component of wm, that is, articulatory rehearsal, influences the learning of syntax. by blocking rehearsal, segmentation and rule learning in an l2 are significantly impaired as compared with a learning condition without interference or interference with the phonological store. moreover, white matter density in the left ventral language pathway was related to learning variability under rehearsal blockage. wong et al. (2012) tapped into the neurogenetic source of variability in learning syntax, in particular the role of the dopaminergic system. it is known adriana biedroń 28 that the genes encoding dopamine receptors and transcriptors have an impact on different types of procedural learning. dopamine is also associated with wm and attention. all of this indicates that dopamine-related genes can contribute to variation in grammar learning, with the effect that individuals with different genetic profiles may have different learning abilities. the research revealed that subjects with an increased impact of dopamine are better at procedural learning, wm capacity and executive function. as a conclusion, the authors suggest that different genotypic profiles can benefit from different types of training. wood bowden et al. (2013) suggest that late-onset university learners are capable of attaining native-like brain processing of syntax as well as native-like syntactic proficiency. the subjects of their study were 32 late learners of spanish, who were divided into two groups: low-intermediate, with little experience; and advanced, with more experience in learning, including immersion. with the use of the erp method, both groups were compared with native speakers of spanish while performing two types of violation tasks: semantic and syntactic. in the semantic violation tasks there were no differences between all the three groups, but in the syntactic violation tasks there was no difference only between the advanced and native groups, which indicates that the syntactic processing in these groups was subserved by the same neurocognitive processing. the authors argue that unlike l2 semantic processing, which always depends on l1 neurocognitive mechanisms, l2 syntactic processing initially differs from l1 processing but can develop into native-like provided there is sufficient proficiency and exposure. syntax processing and artificial grammar learning have been examined in two studies of white matter structural connectivity (flöel, de vries, scholz, breitenstein, & johansen-berg, 2009; nauchi & sakai, 2009). the studies showed correlates in the left pars opercularis and pars triangularis subregions of broca’s area, thus confirming that verbal processing is left-lateralised. finally, language control which engages speech networks as well as a high level, left-lateralized fronto-parieto-subcortical brain network (golestani, 2012, p. 19) affects semantic and phonemic fluency. studies on executive aspects of speech processing show correlations with brain morphology in regions including the caudate nucleus and the superior frontal gyrus. grogan, green, ali, crinion, and price (2009) examined brain structural correlates of semantic and phonemic fluency and found that performance on semantic fluency was linked to gray matter in the left inferior temporal lobe, and on phonemic fluency to the presupplementary motor area and head of the caudate nucleus bilaterally. summing up, the limited knowledge available does not allow any general conclusions, especially in view of the fact that all the above-described studies do not refer to fl aptitude directly. a review of the most important studies is presented in table 2. neurology of foreign language aptitude 29 table 2 review of the most important neurolinguistic studies on fl aptitude presented chronologically study findings phonology golestani and zatorre (2004) successful processing of native and nonnative phonetic contrasts activates the same brain areas. reiterer et al. (2005) less proficient learners activate more brain areas than more proficient ones. van den noort et al. (2006) increase in grey matter in the mid-body of the corpus collosum in highly proficient l2 speakers. golestani et al. (2007) abnormal asymmetry of the planum temporale related to poor verbal ability. wong et al. (2007) bilateral auditory cortex activation in less successful learners both before and after training. díaz et al. (2008; 2012) l2 phonetic abilities can be predicted from l1 phonetic abilities. golestani et al. (2011) phonologically talented learners have more grey matter and white matterin parietal regions, in particular in the left hemisphere. hypertrophies are mostly related to the anatomy of the left hg. reiterer et al. (2011a, 2011b) high similarities between l1 and l2 phonetic processing depend on inborn abilities. more extended activation in poorer learners. wong et al. (2011) larger volume of the left hg in more successful learners. sebastián-gallés et al. (2012) larger white matter volume in the right insulo/fronto-opercular region in poorer perceptual discriminators of native and nonnative vowels. hu et al. (2013) phonetic coding ability and empathy together predict language pronunciation aptitude in advanced learners. reiterer et al. (2013) high ability subjects have larger articulation space allowing access to a wider range of sounds, which, in turn, makes them better sound imitators. christiner & reiterer (2013) 66% of the speech imitation ability can be explained by wm together with singing performance. vocabulary breitenstein et al. (2005) proficiency in learning of new words depends on correlated amplitude changes between the left hippocampus and neocortical regions. the learning-related hippocampus activity is an indicator of the ability to acquire both native and foreign vocabulary. semantic memory de zubicaray et al. (2011) semantic memory is correlated with gray matter volumes in a predominantly left hemisphere. syntax flöel et al. (2009) integrity of white matter fiber tracts arising from broca's area is linked with the ability to extract grammatical rules. nauchi and sakai (2009) inferior frontal gyrus proposed as the grammar center. lopez-barroso et al. (2011) articulatory rehearsal in wm influences the learning of syntax. wong et al. (2012) subjects with an increased impact of dopamine are better at grammar learning. wood bowden et al. (2013) l2 syntactic processing initially differs from l1 processing, but can develop into native-like provided there is sufficient proficiency and exposure. adriana biedroń 30 semantic and phonemic fluency grogan et al. (2009) performance on semantic fluency is linked to gray matter in the left inferior temporal lobe, and on phonemic fluency to the pre-supplementary motor area and head of the caudate nucleus bilaterally. 5. conclusions and suggestions for further research neuroscience is a relatively new field, which includes disciplines such as neurology, psychology and biology. neurological techniques of brain examination have ushered in a new era in research on sla in general and on individual differences in particular. methods such as pet, fmri, amri, erp, and dti, which measure either changes in brain activity or in brain anatomy, help to discover how a foreign language is organized in the brain, how the age of onset, aptitude, proficiency level and training affect this organization, and what functional and structural features differentiate monolinguals from bilinguals at different levels of linguistic proficiency and with different lengths of exposure to a foreign language. nevertheless, neurolinguistic research on fl aptitude is, for the most part, in the commencing stage, with one notable exception, which is phonological abilities. this area of fl aptitude is relatively thoroughly analyzed and research results are reliable, replicable and practically applicable (e.g., golestani et al., 2011; reiterer et al., 2013). other groups of abilities, that is, those involved in learning lexis, syntax, pragmatics and communication skills, remain on the sidelines of neurolinguistics. as has been suggested, the main reason for this disproportion is the lack of a unified definition of the construct of fl aptitude, but also its complexity and extension. for example, the paradigm of wm, although very popular among applied linguists (cf. robinson, 2003), cognitive psychologists (cowan, 2014) and neuroscientists (postle, 2014), and proposed as another fl aptitude (cf. doughty, 2013; wen & skehan, 2011), has attracted relatively little attention in the neuroscientific research on individual differences with respect to sla, which is a major oversight in view of the developments in the field of wm. for instance, baqués, castellà, and bowers (2014) suggest that implicit memory for words does not rely on the phonological loop, whereas explicit memory for words does. many studies have found that individual differences in wm capacity can be partly attributed to differences in attentional processes, especially these involved in inhibiting irrelevant information. both functional and anatomical studies have confirmed that prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia and thalamus perform attentional control over wm in parietal cortex (ekman, fiebach, tittgemeyer, & derrfuss, 2014). also majerus et al. (2014) provided evidence for common neural patterns underlying verbal wm storage and attention. finally, a new interpretation of wm capacity, termed process neurology of foreign language aptitude 31 overlap theory (conway, 2014), which refers to the pattern of positive correlations (the positive manifold) between various cognitive tests accounted for in terms of complex intercorrelations between domain-general and domain-specific processes, seems to be relevant for fl aptitude theory. in the words of its author, “the theory accounts for the hierarchical structure of cognitive ability, the strong relationship between wmc and fluid intelligence, the worst performance rule, and ability different” (conway, 2014, p.3). neurological studies cast some light on very controversial aspects of fl aptitude, for instance, the partial overlap of l1 and l2 aptitude (reiterer et al., 2011a), greater plasticity of the brain of more successful language learners (reiterer et al., 2013), a more bilateral activation in less successful learners (reiterer et al., 2005), particular hypertrophies in the brain of more phonologically gifted individuals (golestani et al., 2011), and, probably the most controversial of all, the contribution of genes and environment to the development of linguistic giftedness (golestani et al., 2011; perani, 2005). golestani (2012), for example, argues that solid grounds exist to believe that certain aptitudes are genetically predisposed: “we found evidence for a potential brain structural ‘intermediate phenotype’ . . . for a domain-specific aptitude which can, with adequate opportunity and training, lead to expertise” (p. 22). in a similar vein, perani (2005) hypothesizes that the diversity between bilingual brains is genetic and might rely on functional differences in processes connected with mirror neurons. she argues for the prewired patterns of functional and anatomical variability, which condition the development of specific talents. from this perspective, these individuals who are born with anatomical differences predisposing specific talents will reach a high level of proficiency. a recurring question in the research on phonology-related regions refers to the impact of training on brain structure. generally, it appears that different parts of the cortex depend on heritable factors to different degrees, that is to say, some are more stable and others more subject to change. genetic studies show that the morphology of broca’s area may be more pliable as a result of experience than the morphology of the hg (peper, brouwer, boomsma, kahn, & poll, as cited in golestani, 2012). to quote golestani (2012): “it is likely that both genetics and the environment play a role in shaping brain structure and cognitive aptitudes, with different relative contributions in different brain areas” (p. 22). this implicates the possibility of an increase in fl aptitude attributable to training and practice. what is more, genetics and the environment interact in accordance with individual choices and interests of people, who tend to select the environment compliant with their genetic predispositions (cf. jensen, 1997). now, after a few decades of the ardent debate, these scientific problems still remain largely unexplored. as far as research methodology is concerned, golestani adriana biedroń 32 (2012) suggests a multiple approach including functional, structural and behavioral analyses of subjects in order to discover the underlying mechanisms of learning languages and language learning aptitudes. thanks to the combined methods, further research could explore the relationship between innate genetically-driven factors and the effects of experience and training, as well as the plasticity of the brain and different language aptitudes (cf. golestani et al., 2011). another aspect worth further investigation is the relationship between musical aptitude and fl aptitude. so far, we have learnt a great deal about the anatomy underlying both abilities. multiple or split transverse gyri in the left auditory cortex predispose individuals to become phoneticians or to work in other domains requiring detailed auditory processing, such as, for example, sound technicians, acousticians, musicians and other language experts (golestani 2012; see also christiner & reiterer, 2013). although evidence from both functional and structural experiments indicates a solid link between these two groups of aptitudes as well as their congenital nature, it would be interesting to examine the alleged transfer of musical training, in particular of the vocal skill (cf. christiner & reiterer, 2013), to the development of imitation skills. summing up, the neurology of phonological aptitude is quite well explored, whereas morphosyntactic, lexical and pragmatic aspects of processing in the brain of poor versus successful foreign language learners belong to the less-well-explored regions of sla. these areas need to be attended to in neuroscientific research on fl aptitude. neurology of foreign language aptitude 33 references amunts, k., schleicher, a., & zilles, k. 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(2013). native-like brain processing of syntax can be attained by university foreign language learners. neuropsychologia, 51, 2492-2511. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2013.09.004. 497 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (2). 2018. 497-523 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.2.14 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt past its expiry date? the sill in modern mixed-methods strategy research carmen m. amerstorfer university of klagenfurt, austria carmen.amerstorfer@aau.at abstract has the strategy inventory for language learning (sill) passed its expiry date? the sill (oxford, 1990) was designed as a self-evaluation tool to measure the frequency of language learning strategies used by foreign and second language (l2) learners. with simple mathematics, learners can analyze their strategy preferences overall and in six categories (i.e., memory, cognitive, compensation, metacognitive, affective, and social strategies). diverging from its original purpose, the sill became the most popular instrument in lls research, which brought widespread acclaim but also criticism. this article explains what makes the sill an extraordinary tool for learners, teachers, and researchers and how it can be adapted to suit specific contexts and the demands of a modern world. an example of how the sill can be integrated into mixed-methods research demonstrates how the instrument can fulfil additional purposes to those originally intended. despite its naturally quantitative orientation, the sill contributed to the acquisition of rich qualitative information, which enabled a holistic view of five individual l2 learners. in addition to new insights about strategic l2 learning, the study attests that the sill has not expired yet, but perhaps needs a modern touch, for instance, in the form of adaptation or combination with other research methods and the inclusion of strategies for learning language with technology. keywords: strategy inventory for language learning (sill); language learning strategies; mixed-methods research; learner preferences carmen m. amerstorfer 498 1. introduction almost 30 years ago, oxford (1990) published a questionnaire for foreign and second language (l2) learners to analyze how frequently particular language learning strategies (lls) are used. lls are actions and thoughts that support processes and emotions involved in l2 learning and that contribute to the improvement of language proficiency (for a detailed discussion about lls definitions and related issues, see oxford, 2011). oxford’s strategy inventory for language learning (sill) has achieved significant fame and has become the most popular tool in lls research. the sill has been adapted to suit specific groups of participants (e.g., young learners), specific research contexts (e.g., the language spoken in a learning environment), and particular research objectives (e.g., to inquire about a certain aspect of l2 learning, like vocabulary or pronunciation). the flexibility the sill provides in terms of opportunities for adaptation has contributed to its global success, which was not diminished by the criticism, starting in 2003 (dörnyei & skehan, 2003), that accompanied its popularity. contrary to the criticism, the sill has been increasingly employed in lls research (mizumoto & takeuchi, 2018) as the purposes of the sill have expanded, resulting in the instrument attaining a prominent role in mixed-methods research and small-scale studies in addition to its use in large-scale studies (e.g., gavriilidou & psaltou-joycey, 2018). this article introduces the sill as it was originally intended 28 years ago and reports how it has become the most frequently used instrument in lls research (section 2). the design and contents of the sill and other main advantages are explained in section 3. section 4 discusses criticism of the sill, and section 5 explains adaptations of the sill to meet circumstantial and contextual requirements. section 6 is a detailed review of how the sill contributed to a mixed-methods study inquiring the individual lls use of five l2 learners. the final part of the article argues that the sill has not passed its expiry date and recommends future research. 2. the origin of the sill and what has become of it the sill (oxford, 1990) was published as a tool for l2 learners to self-evaluate the frequency of their use of language learning strategies.1 it is comprised of 50 statements that describe strategic learner action, which l2 learners rate on a 5-point 1 oxford published two versions of the sill: version 5.1 © r. l. oxford, 1989 for english speakers learning a new language (oxford, 1990, p. 283-291) and version 7.0 [efl/esl] © r. l. oxford, 1989 for speakers of other languages learning english (oxford, 1990, p. 293-300). this article refers to the sill version 7.0. past its expiry date? the sill in modern mixed-methods strategy research 499 scale. the sill shows in numbers how often l2 learners use lls overall and which types of lls they prefer.2 its relatively uncomplicated, quantitative manner of measuring strategy application was soon deployed for research purposes, and the sill became “without doubt the most widely used instrument in language learner strategy research” (white, schramm, & chamot, 2007, p. 99). the sill was the central data collection tool for scores of doctoral dissertations,3 master’s theses, and diploma theses. the instrument has greatly benefited learners, teachers, and researchers and has led to forward-looking and trend-setting publications about lls (e.g., gao, 2010; gunning, 1997; gunning & oxford, 2014; oxford & burrystock, 1995). according to grenfell and macaro (2007), by the mid-1990s, the sill had been utilized “to assess the strategy use of more than 10,000 learners worldwide” (p. 17). more recently, a thorough investigation of questionnaires in lls research confirmed the popularity of the sill as the number-one data collection instrument (mizumoto & takeuchi, 2018). but why has the sill made such a tremendous impact on lls research? what is the secret of its success or its frequency of use? the following section explores the most striking advantages of the sill which have greatly contributed to its fame. 3. advantages of the sill the sill owes its remarkable popularity as a self-evaluation and research tool to three basic features: its comprehensible design, its user-friendliness for l2 learners, and its user-friendliness for researchers. this section provides a detailed description of the instrument by highlighting these three main advantages. 3.1. systematic and understandable structural design the sill has a coherent structural design that is appropriate for the originally intended purpose of the instrument, that is, to measure the frequency of l2 learners’ strategy use. the items on the sill are grouped into six strategy categories, three of which are direct strategies and three are indirect strategies (see also rubin, 1975). direct strategies “require mental processing of the [target] language” (oxford, 1990, p. 37), which occurs when learners store and retrieve 2 section 3 describes the original sill in more detail and provides a list of all 50 strategy statements in the sill. 3 in 1999, oxford estimated that the sill was used for 40 doctoral dissertations but it can be presumed that the number has dramatically risen since then. an accurately updated count is not available in the literature but oxford (personal communication, september 26, 2017) estimates that it might be in the hundreds by now. carmen m. amerstorfer 500 information from their memory (memory strategies), when learners try to understand and create new language (cognitive strategies), and when learners try to compensate for knowledge gaps in the target language (compensation strategies). indirect strategies “support and manage language learning without (in many instances) directly involving the target language” (p. 135). they cater for the coordination of learning processes (metacognitive strategies), are responsible for the regulation of a learner’s emotions, motivation, and attitude (affective strategies), and support learning processes when learners interact with others (social strategies). table 1 provides an overview of the categorization of strategies in the sill. oxford (1990) emphasizes that direct and indirect strategies are intertwined and that all strategies support each other despite the division of strategies into two main groups and six strategy categories.4 table 1 categorization of strategies in the sill (adapted from oxford, 1990 with permission) direct strategies memory strategies part a remembering more effectively cognitive strategies part b using all your mental processes compensation strategies part c compensating for missing knowledge indirect strategies metacognitive strategies part d organizing and evaluating your learning affective strategies part e managing your emotions social strategies part f learning with others 3.2. user-friendliness for l2 learners due to its straightforward design and a manageable number of explicit statements, the original sill is easy for l2 learners to use. the sill is comprised of a total of fifty items that are grouped into the six above-mentioned strategy categories, each describing a strategic action in one comprehensible sentence. examples include: “i use new english words in a sentence so i can remember them” (item 2; memory), “i try not to translate word-for-word” (item 22; cognitive), “i try to guess what the other person will say next in english” (item 28; compensation), “i plan my schedule so i will have enough time to study english” (item 34; metacognitive), “i write down my feelings in a language learning diary” (item 43; affective), and “i ask english speakers to correct me when i talk” (item 46; social) (for a complete list of all sill statements, see oxford, 1990, p. 293-300). 4 oxford stopped using the direct versus indirect distinction decades ago, when it became clear that users were ignoring her cautions about how direct and indirect strategies (and, for that matter, all categories of strategies) functionally overlap and support each other. oxford’s (2017) most recent model, the s²r (strategic self-regulation) model, identifies strategy categories broadly and again emphasizes the functional flexibility and overlap of strategy categories. importantly, oxford’s (2017) strategy definition has many components of her 1990 strategy definition past its expiry date? the sill in modern mixed-methods strategy research 501 in the instructions for the sill, l2 learners are asked to indicate how each strategy statement relates to their own l2 learning by ticking a number on a 5point scale (1 = never or almost never true of me; 2 = usually not true of me; 3 = somewhat true of me; 4 = usually true of me; 5 = always or almost always true of me). it usually takes a person only a few minutes to complete the inventory without putting much strain on them. likewise, the calculation of the outcomes of the inventory is straightforward and only requires an understanding of basic math. young language learners, however, may not be able to produce their own sill results and may need the assistance of an adult. once learners know how to add and divide numbers, they can calculate their sill results, as the next section explains. 3.3. user-friendliness for lls teachers and researchers the sill is user-friendly for researchers and teachers because no particular computer software nor any specific knowledge of statistics is required for the quantitative analysis of the outcomes. according to oxford’s (1990) guidelines, the numbers indicated for each strategy category are added up and divided by the number of statements in the corresponding category. this simple calculation determines average (i.e., mean) numbers for each of the six categories. likewise, an overall average (grand mean) is achieved by adding up the ratings of all statements and dividing the total number by 50. a language learner’s sill profile, therefore, presents three outcomes: a self-evaluation for each strategy statement, an average or mean number for each of the six strategy categories, and an overall average or grand mean of strategy use. the average numbers obtained through these simple calculations correspond with a key to determine high, medium, and low frequency of lls use, as shown in table 2. table 2 key to determine high, medium, and low frequency of lls use (adapted from oxford, 1990 with permission) range of means per strategy category or overall high always or almost always used 4.5 to 5.0 usually used 3.5 to 4.4 medium sometimes used 2.5 to 3.4 low generally not used 1.5 to 2.4 never or almost never used 1.0 to 1.4 hsaio and oxford (2002) remark that the sill generates comparable outcomes to those of task-based strategy measures (e.g., tseng, dörnyei, & schmitt, 2006; vandergrift, goh, mareschal, & tafaghodtari, 2006) but is easier to administer due to its user-friendly design (see also ardasheva & tretter, 2013). but is the sill carmen m. amerstorfer 502 really a fantastic research tool or are appearances deceitful? has the sill been idealized because of its comprehensiveness and easy handling? the next section discusses criticism of the tool. 4. criticism of the sill the design of the sill as a research instrument was sharply criticized by dörnyei (2005) and woodrow (2005), who oppose the use of likert scales to measure the frequency of strategies in combination with items defining specific learner behaviors. dörnyei (2005) argues that it is impossible to reveal a general trend, and therefore the total scale scores are invalid. tseng et al. (2006) criticize the use of “behavioral items” (e.g., using flashcards) in combination with frequency adverbs in the 5-point scale. however, ardasheva and tretter (2013) examined central tendency and variability statistics of individual sill items and concluded that the sill scale offers a suitable range of options for learners to select “a point on a continuum that best corresponds to their behavior” (p. 485). ardasheva and tretter further highlight that “the use of behavioral items to measure latent constructs including learner characteristics and behaviors . . . is a common practice in educational research that has produced valid results” (p. 145). oxford and amerstorfer (2018) agree that “likert-scale surveys often offer a broad picture of lls use” (p. xxix), and griffiths and oxford (2014) note that “[o]ver the years, probably the most common method used in strategy research has been the likert-scale type questionnaire” (p. 4). gunning and oxford (2014) suggest that ordinary data gathered with the sill should be analyzed with non-parametric statistics. however, mizumoto and takeuchi (2018, p. 105) have shed greater light on this, explaining that parametric statistics are clearly usable for the sill under specific conditions: the whole issue of which statistics (parametric or nonparametric) to use for strategy questionnaires, which are ordinal scale in nature, boils down to the distribution of data. if the data is normally distributed, we can justify the use of numerical summaries of the data such as the means and the standard deviations, and those values are used for making assumptions about a population’s parameters. (hence the name ‘parametric’ statistics) presaging the work of mizumoto and takeuchi (2018), statisticians quoted by oxford (2011) presented the frequent relevance of parametric statistics for likert-scale inventories, which would include the sill (see the editorial for this special issue). locastro (1994) advises against using the sill across different sociocultural environments because l2 learners might find some of the statements inappropriate for their own language learning situations. moreover, the contents of the original sill have partly become outdated. twenty-eight years after its publication and many technological advances later, the sill lacks strategy statements that refer to statepast its expiry date? the sill in modern mixed-methods strategy research 503 of-the-art l2 learning and teaching (amerstorfer, 2016). today many classrooms in developed parts of the world are equipped with technology that simply had not been invented or was not available for public use before the 1990s, such as the internet, smartphones, tablets, and learning apps. one part of the us government is now revising the sill, with oxford’s assistance, to include items related to technology-enhanced language learning (tell) (oxford, personal communication, september 26, 2017). since sociocultural and technological factors influence l2 learning (in addition to many other factors, such as educational policies, the languages spoken in a country or region, and demographic and personal information about individual participants), the design of a study should be adjusted to suit the research context. for nearly two decades, oxford has encouraged researchers and teachers to adapt the sill for their contexts by adding, omitting, or revising items. by adapting the original sill, problems related to missing, inappropriate, or outdated strategy statements can be minimized, as described in section 5. yet, if cleverly employed, even sill statements that are inappropriate for a specific research environment can reveal interesting information (see section 6). further criticism comes from white et al. (2007), who argue that since the application of lls involves mainly internal, mental processes, “reliable data cannot be gathered when subjects are asked to give reports on information that they usually do not pay attention to . . . or when they are asked to give generalized reports after several performances” (p. 99). contradicting this concern, hsaio and oxford’s (2002) evaluation of 15 strategy classification systems shows that oxford’s (1990) scheme, out of several other well-known schemes, most consistently reflects l2 learners’ actual strategy application. nevertheless, a possible lack of learner awareness of lls use is indeed a problematic issue. the problem, however, does not lie in the strategy categorization or the research instrument per se but is a general concern acknowledged and discussed in the lls literature (amerstorfer, 2016; cohen, 2012; gu, 2007; o’malley & chamot, 1990; oxford, 2011). researchers often emphasize consciousness or awareness as an important factor that distinguishes strategies from non-strategic learner action (cohen, 2012). oxford (2011, p. 12) cautions that learning strategies, which are “intentional and deliberate,” must not be confused with skills, which are “automatic and out of awareness.” lls are “teachable actions that the learners choose from among alternatives and employ for l2 learning purposes (e.g., constructing, internalizing, storing, retrieving, and using information; completing short-term tasks; and/or developing l2 proficiency and self-efficacy in the long term)” (oxford, 2011, p. 12). this means that language teachers can actively support learners’ growth of lls awareness and lls use. many suggestions for measures to increase learner awareness regarding their own strategy use are available. chamot (2018), for instance, employs strategy carmen m. amerstorfer 504 awareness-raising activities in teacher education; gunning and turner (2018) integrate awareness-raising in strategy instruction at primary level; and oxford, lavine, and amerstorfer (2018) use aims (amazing images of strategies) to improve individual l2 learners’ awareness of strategic actions. still, the fact remains that a research tool cannot be held responsible for a lack of learner awareness. if insufficient awareness of lls use endangers the reliability of a study, as white et al. (2007) claim, perhaps the research design of a study needs reconsideration. if the sill is found problematic for a specific purpose or in a certain context, the researcher must choose instruments that are more appropriate. alternatively, the sill can be combined with other instruments or adapted accordingly, for example, by adding awareness items to ask learners to what extent they are aware of each strategy. despite all criticism and concerns, the sill remains the most frequently used research instrument in lls research. its success is reinforced by the results of a review of research on the psychometric qualities of the instrument (oxford & burry-stock, 1995), refuting further criticism by dörnyei and ryan (2015) who claim that “the scales in the sill are not cumulative, and therefore computing mean scale scores is psychometrically not justifiable” (p. 158). the review shows that the utility and reliability5 of the sill are both high. furthermore, the sill items match oxford’s (1990) categorization scheme (high content validity), there is a relationship between l2 proficiency and strategy use6 (high predictive validity; see also lan & oxford, 2003; magogwe & oliver, 2007), and the sill achieves similar results to other research tools (high concurrent validity). to sum up, the sill has survived the critical headwind. it has been successfully employed as both a self-evaluation instrument and a research tool for almost thirty years. its popularity has not faded, and teachers and researchers have adapted the instrument to make it suitable for specific circumstances. the next section focuses on sill adaptations. 5. adaptation of the sill compared to designing a new questionnaire from scratch, adapting the sill is a much more economical option in terms of human and financial resources. translating the 5 the utility of a research instrument is its “usefulness . . . in real-world settings for making decisions relevant to people’s lives. . . . reliability refers to the degree of precision or accuracy of scores on an instrument” (oxford & burry-stock, 1995, p. 6; original italics). 6 the existence of a relationship between l2 proficiency and lls use has generally been recognized, but the direction of causality has to this date not been clarified. in other words, it remains unclear whether l2 learning success causes an increase in lls use or whether frequent use of lls leads to higher l2 proficiency. past its expiry date? the sill in modern mixed-methods strategy research 505 sill7 is one form of adaptation that has pragmatic advantages. translations are particularly meaningful for studies that involve participants with low l2 proficiency. they avoid problems caused by insufficient knowledge of the target language and lower inhibition in learners who experience l2 anxiety. nevertheless, translation is sometimes only part of a more extensive adaptation process, as suggested by hambleton and patsula (1998). khalil (2005), for instance, applied a fourstep process to translate the sill into arabic. after a close-to-the-original translation by the researcher, an english-arabic translator assessed the translation against the source version. then an arabic linguist evaluated the translation for naturalness, clarity, and smooth reading. finally, the translation was pre-tested by a group of palestinian efl learners, who were asked to feed back on the wording and clarity of the items and response scales. to provide guidance and support for researchers in the field, gavriilidou and mitits (2016) designed an adaptation protocol for adjusting the sill, which “ensures high instrument reliability and validity and offers other researchers . . . a procedure that overcomes most of the problems entailed when instruments are used in different languages and cultures” (p. 600). in addition to translation, other recommendations to adjust the sill to fit specific research demands include removing or rephrasing individual strategy statements, for instance, depending on whether the research is conducted with efl (english as a foreign language) or esl (english as a second language) learners. the same measure can be applied if the categorization of sill statements is unclear (i.e., if individual statements correspond with multiple strategy groups), or if the wording of the original statements is inappropriate for a specific group of participants or does not reflect the context in which the research is conducted (hsaio & oxford, 2002). gunning (1997) adapted the sill to assess the lls of young efl learners at a primary school in québec, canada. she involved schoolchildren, consultants from québec, and the author of the original sill, rebecca l. oxford, in the development of the children’s sill. in the design of the 30-item instrument, gunning paid particular attention to “simplicity, comprehensibility to children, choice of concrete rather than abstract items, and random selection among redundant items” (gunning & turner, 2018, p. 267-268). the children’s sill has been translated into english, french, chinese, spanish, and indonesian and further modified to suit young language learners in different contexts. similarly, ardasheva and tretter (2013) developed a strategy inventory for school-aged english language learners (ells). the objective was to adapt and validate the original sill to accommodate elementary, middle, and high school learners of esl in the usa. as a first step, they simplified the wording of the original 7 the sill has been translated into at least 17 different languages (oxford, 1999). it is likely that the number has gone up in the 2000s but no updated count is available in the literature. carmen m. amerstorfer 506 strategy statements. then, taking into account the lls literature and results from confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses (i.e., finding consistent correlations between sill items), ardasheva and tretter developed the sill-ell student form. a group of experts (i.e., an early childhood educator, an elementary teacher with background in esl, and an esl teacher) supported the adaptation process. 28 items remained in the sill-ell student form, and 22 items were eliminated from the original sill (see ardasheva and tretter, 2013, p. 488-489). ardasheva and tretter (2013) conclude that their shortened version of the sill “has strong psychometric characteristics for use with school-aged ells to diagnose their use of lls in six distinct categories.” the authors describe the reduced length of the instrument as a “pragmatic value for busy classrooms” (p. 474). aside from adjusting to educational and cultural circumstances and factors concerning the first language and age of participants, particular research objectives may require the development of a less general and more targeted instrument in comparison to the original sill. teh, embi, yusoff, and mahamod (2009), for example, modified the sill to investigate the relationship between gender and lls use of 457 arabic students in malaysia. the sill was first translated into malay to prevent misinterpretation of the instructions and the statements. furthermore, another category of strategies was added to oxford’s six strategy categories, and some further adaptations were made. in total, the questionnaire comprised 60 strategy statements. in addition to the above-mentioned possibilities for adaptation, the sill can be adjusted to focus on a specific strategy type (e.g., memory strategies, social strategies) or language skill (e.g., reading, speaking). for example, the metacognitive awareness listening questionnaire (vandergrift et al., 2006) is designed to be conducted after a listening task. nakatani (2006) developed the oral communication strategy inventory (ocsi) and employed it in a mixedmethods study that aimed at identifying strategies that facilitate efl learners’ oral communication (nakatani, 2010). the sill and its adaptations have repeatedly been integrated into mixed-methods studies, which combine different research methods to support each other (e.g., berkil, 2009; bielak & mystkowskawiertelak, 2018). section 6 shows how the sill fulfilled multiple purposes in a recent study that also employed a mixed-methods design. 6. the sill in a mixed-methods study about lls the research study for my phd dissertation (amerstorfer, 2016) combined the sill with other research methods in order to holistically investigate the situated strategy use of individual efl learners in the context of cooperative learning. the five female participants who volunteered to take part in the study were first language past its expiry date? the sill in modern mixed-methods strategy research 507 (l1) german speakers, between 14 and 18 years old, attending a vocational school in austria that has a strong focus on learner cooperation and self-regulation (wittwer, 2017). data were collected in an initial round of semi-structured interviews, four weeks of in-class observations in combination with stimulated recall interviews, a set of questions to prompt written responses after the four-weeks of interviews and observations, and a final round of observations after one year to inquire about a specific issue that evolved during data analysis. this article exclusively focuses on the part of the study that involves the sill (for further details on the mixed-methods design of the whole study, see amerstorfer, 2018). 6.1. the sill as data collection tool in the study a minimally adapted german translation of the sill was used in the first part of data collection, an initial interview with each individual participant. the original purpose of the sill was expanded so that the inventory served three further purposes in addition to the quantitative evaluation of the participants’ frequency of lls use: 1. the sill functioned as an icebreaker during the initial meeting with the participants, contributing to a pleasant interview atmosphere and establishing the foundation for a respectful and trustful relationship between participant and researcher. 2. as the sill was administered at the beginning of the data collection procedures, it focused the participants’ minds on the topic of lls and thereby increased their awareness of lls. 3. the selection of specific sill statements for follow-up questions contributed to the acquisition of qualitative information about the individual participants’ lls use. 6.2. the implementation of the sill in the study personal meetings with each individual participant marked the beginning of data collection. the meetings were held in german to prevent misunderstandings and to minimize anxiety. all interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. first, the participants received a general introduction about the aims of the study and the extent and nature of their involvement. the value of the participants’ role in the project was explicitly stated, and the students were told that everything they volunteered to share with the researcher was important. all expressions of opinions, feelings, and thoughts were appreciated, taken seriously, and treated anonymously. in addition to data collection, the aim of the first personal meeting was to create an atmosphere of a respectful and trusting relationship. carmen m. amerstorfer 508 the participants were made to feel free to speak their minds, and it was emphasized that a language barrier should not impede their willingness to share. then, the sill was presented. the instructions were read out aloud, and it was stressed that there was no time pressure. the participants were asked to carefully read each strategy statement and to indicate which of the five options best applied. they were encouraged only to think about themselves and not about how others would rate the statements or how others would expect them to rate the statements. they were told that there are no right or wrong answers and that they could ask questions at any time. finally, it was explained that the researcher was not testing the participants’ abilities or knowledge but that she was only interested in the learners’ individual preferences. no interview situation during the project was intended to cause any stress or anxiety, and the participants were expected to feel safe and respected. after the administration of the sill, the initial interview continued with a set of personal questions to establish holistic profiles of each participant. the questions concerned, for example, the participants’ family situations, leisure activities, attitudes towards efl, and enjoyment of cooperative learning. at the end of the interview, the ratings on the sill were quickly scanned, and all items rated 1 (= never or almost never true of me) and 5 (= always or almost always true of me) were highlighted on the inventory for further investigation. in the final phase of the interview, qualitative information in relation to the sill was collected. the participants were asked why they had given particular statements the lowest or highest possible ratings. not all of these follow-up questions resulted in verbal responses because sometimes the participants found it difficult to express their preferences or rejections in words. some questions elicited a shoulder shrug, a facial expression, or a hand gesture rather than an explanation in words. sabrina,8 for example, gave the lowest possible rating to sill item 20 (“i try to find patterns in english”) but was not able to describe why the statement is not true of her. all responses, verbal and non-verbal, were treated sensitively and respectfully in order to maintain a positive relationship. to avoid any pressure on the students and therefore jeopardizing the trust between participants and researcher, further inquiry about non-verbal responses during the first interview was postponed to other opportunities during the four weeks of contact time at the school. the follow-up investigation of individual sill statements revealed some very interesting details, as the next section demonstrates. 6.3. examples of responses to individual sill items this section provides examples of sill statements that were rated lowest (=1) or highest (=5) by the individual participants, followed by summarized explanations 8 to preserve anonymity, alias names are used. past its expiry date? the sill in modern mixed-methods strategy research 509 why the participants (almost) never or (almost) always use these strategies. the examples are not indicative of the participants’ overall frequency of strategy use or their preferred strategy types. instead, the examples demonstrate the wealth of qualitative data that was collected through an investigation of the numbers on each end of the likert scale. some explanations refer to more than one strategy with the same high or low rating. 6.3.1. strategy statements that are never or almost never true of . . . sabrina sill item 6: i use flashcards to remember new words. sabrina does not have time to prepare flashcards. different strategies work better for her when studying vocabulary, for example, reading and simply trying to memorize new english words and phrases. sill item 26: i make up new words if i do not know the right ones in english. this strategy is unimaginable for sabrina. instead of making up a new word, she would describe what she wants to say with other english words, and if that fails, she would rather use german than make up a foreign word that is unlikely to exist. stella sill item 6: i use flashcards to remember new english words. stella memorizes vocabulary very fast. hence, flashcards are unnecessary for her, and preparing them would be too much effort. lisa sill item 4: i remember a new english word by making a mental picture of a situation in which the word might be used. sill item 5: i use rhymes to remember new english words. sill item 6: i use flashcards to remember new words. sill item 7: i physically act out new english words. lisa does not use strategies 4-7. her preferred strategy for vocabulary learning is reading the sentences in which new words and phrases appear in a text. she rarely makes flashcards, and the ones she makes are exclusively used to study her other foreign language, spanish. lisa finds spanish vocabulary much more difficult than english vocabulary. sill item 26: i make up new words if i do not know the right ones in english. lisa is amused at the thought of making up new words in english because an invented word is bound to be wrong. she prefers to look up unknown words in carmen m. amerstorfer 510 a bilingual online dictionary. lisa hypothesizes that if she did not remember a newly acquired word or phrase during an exam, she would write as much as she could remember. in such a situation, she would risk getting it wrong but making up a word from scratch is out of the question. sill item 28: i try to guess what the other person will say next in english. guessing what someone will say next does not make any sense to lisa. instead of guessing what her interlocutor will say, lisa listens carefully and gives her conversation partners enough time to finish what they want to say. sill item 39: i try to relax whenever i feel afraid of using english. in general, lisa is not afraid of speaking english. in her head, she prepares the sentences or phrases she wants to say. she adds that she generally does not view talking in english as frightening. sill item 43: i write down my feelings in a language learning diary. sill item 44: i talk to someone else about how i feel when i am learning english. lisa does not like writing or talking about her feelings. when she is stressed because of an increased workload, she talks about it with a peer. paula sill item 3: i connect the sound of a new english word and an image or picture of the word to help me remember the word. sill item 4: i remember a new english word by making a mental picture of a situation in which the word might be used. sill item 5: i use rhymes to remember new english words. sill item 6: i use flashcards to remember new words. sill item 7: i physically act out new english words. paula never uses strategies 3-7 because she has her own way of studying new vocabulary. she writes new words and phrases five or more times to commit them to memory. she used to memorize example sentences for all new words,9 but her strategy for vocabulary learning changed over time. christina sill item 43: i write down my feelings in a language learning diary. christina does not keep a language learning diary but sometimes she writes down situations that were easy or difficult for her. she emphasizes that she focuses on the positive and writes about successful language learning situations. 9 in a follow-up interview, paula explained that her mother used to insist on written example sentences for new vocabulary. past its expiry date? the sill in modern mixed-methods strategy research 511 6.3.2. strategy statements that are always or almost always true of . . . sabrina sill item 11: i try to talk like english native speakers. sill item 12: i practice the sounds of english. sabrina is enthusiastic about the sounds of british english. she finds imitating a british accent “cool” and “fun.” even when she quietly reads a text to herself, she imagines british pronunciation. sill item 32: i pay attention when someone is speaking english. listening carefully is both important and interesting for sabrina. she is aware that she may not be able to understand everything an english speaker says; nevertheless, she tries to understand as much as possible by paying careful attention. for sabrina, listening to english speech has much potential for learning growth. stella sill item 1: i think of relationships between what i already know and new things i learn in english. when stella learns a new phrase in english, she thinks, “ah! i’ve heard this somewhere before” or “this is related to something i already know.” creating such thought connections makes it easier for stella to memorize new information. sill item 9: i remember new english words or phrases by remembering their location on the page, on the board, or on a street sign. stella often remembers the exact location of a new phrase on the page of her textbook and even what it says above and below it. this helps her retrieve information from her memory. sill item 19: i look for words in my own language that are similar to new words in english. stella often finds parallels between different languages. for instance, if she already knows a similar word in spanish, it is easier to learn a new word in english. sill item 27: i read english without looking up every new word. instead of looking up every new word in a dictionary, stella prefers reading the whole sentence and guessing from the context. sill item 39: i try to relax whenever i feel afraid of using english. sill item 40: i encourage myself to speak english even when i am afraid of making a mistake. before oral presentations, for example, stella tries to calm down by reminding herself that making mistakes is ok and “not a tragedy.” stella’s english teacher carmen m. amerstorfer 512 promotes this attitude by telling the students to speak as much as they can and without worrying about mistakes. making mistakes is part of the learning process. lisa sill item 22: i try not to translate word-for-word. in lisa’s opinion, word-for-word translations are tedious and not very useful. she tries to grasp the context of a text and looks up individual words that are essential to understanding a text rather than translating every word. paula sill item 9: i remember new english words or phrases by remembering their location on the page, on the board, or on a street sign. paula does not purposefully memorize where on a page she sees a word or phrase. she is naturally able to remember the location of a word without making an effort. even if she cannot remember exactly what the new vocabulary item was, paula can tell where it is printed on a page. paula explains that this ability is the reason why she writes new vocabulary repeatedly (see explanation for sill items 3-7 above). christina sill item 10: i say or write new english words several times. christina writes new english vocabulary and german translations in her vocabulary book. when she studies vocabulary at home, she writes the new items several times. then she says the new english phrases aloud and reads the german equivalents quietly. in a subsequent step, she covers up the english side of the vocabulary list to assess which phrases she can remember. sill item 40: i encourage myself to speak english even when i am afraid of making a mistake. christina tells herself motivating sentences like “you can do it!” 6.4. close analysis of the examples the participants’ explanations for using or not using certain strategies provide profound insights that could not have been gained if the sill had been the only medium for data collection in the study. as mentioned before, the sill was used in addition to other methods, like in-class observations and stimulated recall to gain comprehensive information about each participant. this section focuses on the wealth of qualitative data that was obtained by asking questions about the highest and lowest possible ratings that were given to specific sill statements. as exemplified in section 6.3, the participants’ responses to the sill statements are often straightforward reasons regarding individual preferences. sabrina past its expiry date? the sill in modern mixed-methods strategy research 513 and stella, for example, describe the rejection of sill item 6 (the preparation of flashcards to remember new words) as too time-consuming (sabrina) and too much effort (stella). nevertheless, other explanations are more elaborate and show how strategies are applied differently for studying two foreign languages. lisa, for instance, points out that while she rejects flashcards in english, she makes them for spanish because spanish vocabulary is more difficult in comparison to english. stella adds that in addition to looking for similarities between german and english (sill item 19), she creates links between the two foreign languages she studies, that is, english and spanish. on many occasions, participants suggest substitutes for unsuitable strategy statements, which, however, can be used for different purposes. for instance, as an alternative for looking up every unknown word (sill item 27), stella guesses from the context. lisa uses guessing from the context as an alternative to word-for-word translations (sill item 22). the same strategy is utilized for two different purposes by the two learners. this demonstrates that strategies depend on personal preferences and that they are not tied to specific purposes. moreover, strategies are flexible and can be adjusted to relevant influences. strategic l2 learning depends by nature on a multitude of factors, such as individual learner preferences, but also features of the learning context and situational circumstances. a large number of interrelated influencing factors are in constant interaction with each other when strategies are selected and applied – or rejected and subsidized (for more on the flexible and dynamic nature of l2 learning, see, amerstorfer, 2016; gao, 2010; larson-freeman & cameron, 2008; mercer, 2012; oxford, 2017; wang, 2018). another finding of the analysis is that strategies often appear in combination with other strategies. this confirms previous findings, synthesized, for example by cohen (2007) and oxford (2011). amerstorfer (2016) found that sometimes strategies are even only effective if applied in a specific sequence, exemplified in the participants’ practices for vocabulary learning. lisa and paula generally reject the sill items related to memory and use a sequence of other strategies to study vocabulary instead. christina’s response to sill item 10 (“i say or write english words several times”) is similar. she describes in great detail how she first writes new english words and their german equivalents several times and then tests her memory by covering the translations in the vocabulary book in a subsequent step. the data confirm that lls rarely appear in isolation and that l2 learners meaningfully combine lls by arranging them in specific sequences. psychological aspects of language learning have achieved much attention in the literature (see e.g., dörnyei, 2005; dörnyei & ryan, 2015; mercer, ryan, & williams, 2012; williams, mercer, & ryan, 2015). psychological influences on the participants’ choice and application of lls are noticeable in the reactions to some strategy statements. sabrina and lisa, for example, demonstrate affective carmen m. amerstorfer 514 reactions to the idea of inventing new words in english (sill item 26). they state that made-up words are unlikely to exist (sabrina) and bound to be incorrect (lisa), and offer alternatives such as rephrasing, using the l1 (sabrina), and using a dictionary (lisa). furthermore, lisa embeds the rejected strategy in a fictive situation by explaining how she would instead write down as much of a new english phrase as she could remember in a written exam situation. in addition to the importance of affect in language learning (macintyre & gregersen, 2012; williams, mercer, & ryan, 2015), lisa’s imagination of a hypothetical situation affirms the importance of context in strategic language learning. similar to the emotional reaction to inventing new words, lisa expresses affect in her rejection of sill item 28, namely, she finds that guessing what the other person will say next is silly. in lisa’s opinion, this strategy cannot possibly support a conversation in a meaningful way, so she substitutes guessing with a combination of patience and attention. moreover, lisa reveals supplementary information about her generally low level of l2 anxiety in connection to sill item 39 (“i try to relax whenever i feel afraid of using english”), which is again an important aspect of psychology in language learning. also linked to psychology is christina’s response to sill item 43, in which she explains that she focuses on successful l2 learning situations. interestingly, lisa distinguishes between expressing her emotions and complaining about stress. she does not write her feelings in a learning diary, nor does she talk about her feelings when learning english (lowest possible ratings for sill items 43 and 44). however, in the interview lisa reports that she complains to her peers about the large workload in english and other school subjects when she feels stressed. an example of a positive emotional reaction to sill statements is sabrina’s account of how enamored she is of the sounds of british english and how she practices by imitation and imagination (sill items 11 and 12). likewise, sill items 39 and 40 are positively connected to motivation in stella’s explanation of how she relaxes and encourages herself before an oral presentation in english. additionally, stella describes how the english teacher boosts students’ confidence to talk without worrying about making mistakes. similarly, christina and stella provide examples of what they say to themselves for encouragement. these examples show how lls can improve learners’ self-perception, confidence, and motivation (see mercer & williams, 2014, for further information). contrary to what has been described in section 4, some explanations for high strategy ratings signify an immense strategy awareness and self-reflection on the part of the participants. for example, sabrina points out the potential of listening carefully to english speakers (sill item 32); stella highlights the supportive role of thought-connections and connections between languages to store new information (sill items 1 and 19); and stella and paula are aware that knowing where a word is printed on a page enables the retrieval of information from memory (sill item 9). past its expiry date? the sill in modern mixed-methods strategy research 515 paula actively exploits her awareness of the ability to remember the location of words and therefore repeatedly writes new words and phrases to memorize them. this richness of qualitative information that was gained in the interviews by far exceeds the intended purpose of the sill as a self-evaluation and research tool. the participants’ explanations and reflections reveal much more than numerical frequencies of strategy application and tendencies regarding the preference of strategy types. in the interviews, the participants transcended the content-related boundaries of the sill, added strategies that are not included in the fifty original statements, and created meaningful, situated connections. furthermore, the participants’ descriptions confirmed the importance of psychology in language learning and highlighted that strategic l2 learning is complex and flexible. the next section offers broad outcomes and possibilities for future research. 6.5. general outcomes and possibilities for future research inviting participants to elaborate on the sill statements with the highest and lowest possible ratings disclosed deep and meaningful information about individual strategy preferences, confirmed known facts about lls, and led to new conclusions about strategic l2 learning. the responses to the follow-up questions not only included non-verbal reactions like shoulder-shrugs, facial expressions, and hand gestures, uninformative answers such as “i don’t know” or “because i always do it this way,”10 but also detailed reasoning, elaborate explanations, and additional examples of strategic actions. the data analyzed in the previous section lead to the following general outcomes, some of which call for further research: 1. the study confirms that strategies are often used in combination with other strategies, as described, for instance, in individualized routines for vocabulary learning (for further information on how strategies appear together with other strategies, see, e.g., cohen, 2007, 2014 and oxford, 2011, 2017). 2. the study supports oxford’s (1990) statement that the strategies and strategy categories of the sill interact with each other. strategies from different sill categories were combined with each other. moreover, oxford’s sill was complemented by additional strategies that are not included in the instrument, particularly as alternative suggestions for sill statements that received low ratings. 10 as mentioned before, other occasions were used to further inquire about inconclusive answers to avoid any kind of pressure on the participants. the data presented in this article were obtained in the first of a series of interviews, which had as one of its goals the establishment of a trustful relationship between the researcher and the participants. carmen m. amerstorfer 516 3. in general, connections play a very important role in l2 learning. in addition to connections between strategies and strategy categories, learners establish links between new language knowledge and previously acquired knowledge. this is true for knowledge of different languages, that is, the learners’ l1 and other foreign languages, as well as knowledge gained in other school subjects,11 and knowledge about the self. 4. the personal rejection of a strategy can result from the expected time and effort involved in its application. this particularly seems to be the case for strategies that produce physical outcomes (e.g., making flashcards, keeping a learning diary) in contrast to strategies that involve mainly cognitive activity (e.g., planning ahead) or verbal expression (e.g., practicing pronunciation, talking about learning processes with peers). further studies are required to affirm this tentative conclusion. 5. time and effort invested in strategic learning are linked to autonomy (e.g., not writing example sentences for new vocabulary unless someone requests it) and to an individually experienced demand (e.g., preparing flashcards for spanish but not for english because one l2 is perceived to be more difficult than the other). 6. strategic l2 learning and psychology are strongly related, as expressions of emotions, confidence, motivation, and anxiety demonstrate. 7. participants are aware of their strategic actions, which proves that strategic l2 learning involves conscious thought. learners have a goal in mind when they choose a strategy that was previously successful or a strategy that is expected to lead to an anticipated outcome. likewise, it can be presumed that the rejection of strategies is also conscious to a certain extent. however, this assumption requires further investigation. 8. strategic l2 learning depends on a multitude of influences. individual learner differences (e.g., self-confidence, anxiety), immediate situational circumstances (e.g., the learning task, a cooperation partner), and the wider learning context (e.g., educational policies, cultural influences) play important roles. hence, depending on the factors involved in a particular learning situation, two learners can use the same strategy for different purposes, or the same learner can use different strategies in similar learning situations. 9. the perceived effectiveness of a strategy and individual strategy preferences can change over time. one strategy can increase in popularity and 11 a different part of the study that is not reported in this article shows that the participants create links between efl and what they learn in other subjects. lisa, for instance, deducted the new english verb “to clone” from an it class. past its expiry date? the sill in modern mixed-methods strategy research 517 substitute for another one. these findings underscore previous reports of l2 learning as a complex and dynamic system. 10. the categorization of strategies is only meaningful to a certain extent. it is useful to organize strategies into categories as a guideline for data analysis (see oxford, 2017, and cohen, 2018, for further information on options for strategy categorization). however, the complexity and flexibility of strategic language learning can disaffiliate a strategy from a specific category. several of these outcomes need further research for verification. moreover, the findings may inspire new studies, particularly regarding the complexity of strategic language learning, as has previously been explored by gao (2010) and wang (2018). the sill-related outcomes of my phd study (amerstorfer, 2016) raise further questions as to how individual aspects of strategic l2 learning influence strategy selection and application. other interesting projects could focus on particular areas of l2 learning, for instance, strategies for grammar or pronunciation learning. finally, complementary to the selection and application of strategies, which has so far been the main focus of lls-related research, studies about the rejection of strategies could lead to further important findings. 7. conclusions this paper has described how the sill transformed from an evaluation tool for l2 learners and teachers into the most popular instrument in lls research. the instrument convinces with its clear and understandable structural design and its easy handling for learners, teachers, and researchers. the sill has withstood criticism. for instance, the use of parametric statistics (under appropriate instances) for likert-scale instruments such as the sill has been championed by experts with outstanding statistical sophistication. the sill remains the most frequently used tool for quantitative data collection in lls research. moreover, this instrument is increasingly integrated into mixed-methods studies, as it can be easily adapted to suit specific research demands and contexts. adaptations of the sill can take the form of a simple translation or involve multiple steps and drastic changes to the original version. single sill statements can be rephrased, removed, or replaced. however, the study in section 6 demonstrates that sill items that would usually be considered as unsuitable for the research environment resulted in interesting findings that would not have been discovered if those statements had been altered. the research was conducted in a learning environment in which the main language is german and where english is studied as a foreign language. l1 english speakers were not available, so strategy statements such as “i pay attention when someone is speaking carmen m. amerstorfer 518 english” (sill item 32), “i look for people i can talk to in english” (sill item 35), and “i ask for help from english speakers” (sill item 48) were less suitable than in an esl environment. nevertheless, these statements were not excluded from the sill and led to new knowledge that otherwise would not have been discovered, as sabrina’s explanation in relation to sill item 32 demonstrates.12 therefore, the exclusion of strategies for reasons of inadequate suitability should be treated with caution. furthermore, despite the learning and research context, what is suitable for one person may not be suitable for another. strategic language learning is strongly connected to personal preferences, as the rejection of several memory strategies by two of the five participants shows. would a researcher exclude the sill statements that refer to memory strategies from a questionnaire if a large number of participants had given those strategies low ratings in a previous study? given the wealth of information the participants put forward as alternative strategies, an exclusion of those strategies would have been counterproductive. low-rated and high-rated sill statements both led to interesting findings. strategy rejection should therefore be researched further as it seems to bear equal potential for new insights as strategy preferences do. to maximize the qualitative information related to a participant’s sill ratings, follow-up interviews could inquire about all sill statements instead of selecting the statements that received the highest or lowest possible ratings. such an interview would without doubt reveal much information about a learner’s strategic learning activities. however, the practical implementation would be very time-consuming. an interview that includes about 50 strategy statements would be much longer than one containing a few selected items, and the questions would become rather monotonous. these problems could have a negative impact on the participant’s willingness to take part in the study, and the responses could suffer if the participant adopts an attitude of “let’s get it over and done with.” furthermore, strategy statements with medium ratings may cause expressions of indifference or inconclusive answers; however, these are just speculations. the research design of the reported study with additional interview questions for strategies that were rated high or low resulted in authentic and individualized responses that positively contributed to the holistic profiles that were the central aim of this part of the study. this article concludes that some sill items may be unsuitable for the context or purpose of a study and that statements that relate to modern technology for l2 learning and teaching are lacking (though they are being added now). such issues can be overcome by adapting the sill, sometimes in a few simple 12 note that only a selection of examples was included in this article. past its expiry date? the sill in modern mixed-methods strategy research 519 steps. ultimately, the sill has not expired. it remains a useful self-evaluation tool and the most popular instrument in strategy research. surely, the sill will continue to contribute to the establishment of new knowledge in this complex field of research, especially if employed in combination with other research methods. carmen m. amerstorfer 520 references amerstorfer, c. m. 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(2005). the challenges of measuring language learning strategies. foreign language annals, 38(1), 90-98. 619 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (4). 2017. 619-647 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.4.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability fang-yu liao indiana university of pennsylvania, usa f.liao@iup.edu abstract this paper looks at how l2 students’ writing experiences relate to the way they think they can write poems and to further investigate if any types of writing experiences contribute to their perceived poetry writing ability. the paper starts by bringing up the value of introducing poetry writing to l2 students. then, the literature review section highlights the characteristics of l2 poetry and the values of writing poetry in l2 writing classrooms. for the methodology, semi-structured interviews were used to elicit the participants’ understanding of their writing experiences. additionally, a rating scale was used for the participants to identify their perceived capability of writing poetry. all 18 participants who were from regions that included countries from eastern asia, middle east, or africa, were l2 students from an m.a. tesol program located in the usa. through a hierarchical cluster analysis, the findings categorized these students as having five different types of writing experiences. through a pearson correlation test, the researcher also examined if any of the specific writing experiences were found to correspond either positively or negatively with the perceived poetry writing ability. the data suggest that if students recall more grammar and structured writing experiences, they are more inclined to perceive that they have a lower perceived poetry writing ability. finally, the study seeks to contribute to educators’ understanding about the potential of poetry writing instruction in l2 writing classrooms. it can trigger the exploration for l2 students to find their own personal purposes of writing as multilingual writers. keywords: meaningful literacy; poetry writing; grammar; teaching writing; second language writing fang-yu liao 620 1. introduction the following is a poem by a malaysian student presented in hanauer (2010, p. 7): “white paper” she stares at the paper it stares blankly at her back without any traces of ink all clean, white and smooth. she picks up her pen gripping it tightly time is passing swiftly she could not think of any whispers were heard from a distance chairs dragged from the floor above doors were slammed by the neighbors she needs some peace and silence. 20 years of memories? all to be reflected in a poem could that even be possible? she begins to shed tears. hold on. her pen started to move. it was a piece of paper but with words and scribbles of all kind to her delight, now she got it her first poem! by acknowledging the existence of diverse definitions of poetry in different disciplines, i need to provide the notion of poetry used in this study. hanauer (2004) defines second language (l2) poetry as “a literacy text that presents the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of the writer through self-referential use of language that creates for the reader and writer a new understanding of the experience, thought, or feeling expressed in the text” (p. 10). this statement focuses on the deep meaning that enables writers or readers of poetry to discover a more personalized and developed understanding of life experiences. this definition of poetry1 is applied in this study because it is very useful for the empirical 1 based on this definition of poetry that focuses on expression and meaning, some may wonder what makes writing poetry different from prose if both genres construct meanings the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability 621 perspective. using this perspective to examine poetry enables us to see its more fluid and spontaneous aspects, especially if we are dealing with poems written by l2 multilingual writers, who are very capable of playing with words, meanings, and structures with multicultural and multilingual potential. some might wonder why poetry writing should be introduced to l2 writers when the students primarily want to learn academic writing. i acknowledge the value and the need of academic writing for l2 students, and i do not intend in this study to advocate replacing it with other kinds of writing instruction. instead, i hope to emphasize the value of inviting l2 students to write poems in their l2 as meaningful literacy instruction in language classrooms. a body of literature has shown that there is value of teaching poetry writing (e.g., self-discovery, engagement, or a sense of confidence) to l2 students (see e.g., chamcharatsri, 2009; garvin, 2013; hanauer, 2004, 2010, 2011a, 2011b; iida, 2008, 2010, 2012b). from my own standpoint as a teacher, the main purpose of teaching poetry writing to l2 students is not to teach writing skills; instead, the goal is to stimulate the connection of writing with personal experiences and instilling passion towards writing. with that being said, some might further wonder why poetry should be taught rather than other genres. iida’s (2012a) robust empirical results showed that the benefits of writing poetry can be transferred to different genres, such as prose. in addition, because some l2 students might feel that they cannot write poems because poetry is considered a genre for professional or gifted poets only, it is more likely that l2 students will gain a sense of confidence and authorship once they have been guided through the process of writing poetry in their l2. as bomer (1995) stated, “our experiences form us; what we understand of experiences is what we understand ourselves to be, our identities” (p. 156). students’ writing experiences shape the ways they become writers. therefore, if we consider poetry writing a significant subject matter to teach l2 students, then educators need to take into account how l2 students’ writing experiences contribute to their perceptions of poetry writing. thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate how l2 students’ writing experiences relate to their perceived poetry writing ability. the paper is divided into four sections. first, i contextualize the study by discussing literature on writing poetry in an l2. second, i describe the methods of this study by presenting information on the participants, the data collection procedures and data analysis. third, i present the findings of the study concerning five types of writing experiences. last, i discuss the findings as well as the current study’s limitations and suggestions for future research. and expressions. while i acknowledge such distinctions are under heavy debate, going into them is not the point of this paper. fang-yu liao 622 2. studies on writing poetry in a second language there is an increasing body of literature focusing on l2 poetry writing (see cahnmanntaylor, bleyle, hwang, & zhang, 2017; cahnmann-taylor, zhang, bleyle, & hwang, 2015; chamcharatsri, 2009, 2013; garvin, 2013; hanauer, 2004, 2010, 2011a, 2011b, 2014, 2015; iida, 2008, 2010, 2012a, 2012b; liao 2016; ostrow & chang, 2012; tin, 2010). however, among them, only hanauer’s (2010) and iida’s (2012a) studies applied computational corpus analysis to explore the characteristics of l2 poetry. their studies provided empirical insights into what l2 poetry writing looks like. some might assume that poetry is written by writers with innate talents. they might not think that l2 writers are capable of writing poetry. in order to demonstrate that l2 students are capable of writing poetry in an additional language, hanauer (2010) presented a longitudinal study investigating 81 esl students with a total corpus of 844 poems from the years 2003-2009. the data were presented in seven categories: text size, lexical category, lexical frequency profile (lfp)2 (laufer & nation, 1995), poetic features, thematic organization, lexical context, and expressed emotion. he found that the average text size is 53 words with an average of 10 lines with five words in each line. the data showed that the l2 students tend to compose descriptive or narrative poems in first person singular with high-frequency vocabulary. the common poetic features used in a poem are imagery (78.9%) and sound patterns (73.93%). the poems also include a high-percentage of emotional vocabulary. hanauer (2010) argued that language learners are capable of expressing their feelings and personal experiences through writing poetry. to further confirm that l2 students can write poetry in english, iida (2012a) compared and contrasted his efl haiku data set with hanauer’s (2010) esl poetry one. both studies examined the characteristics of a poetry corpus using several categories, including word numbers, linguistic features, word frequency band and percentage, high frequency words/usages, and percentage of words from total word count according to affective processes. iida found the average size of 20 efl students’ haikus was 12.59 words in three lines, 3.63 words in the first line, 4.99 words in the second line, and 3.92 words in the third line. according to iida, the short text size of the efl students’ haikus is due to its nature of three-line structure with 5-7-5-syllable patterns. similar to hanauer’s results, iida’s study showed that the efl haiku writing is short, descriptive, direct, and personal. if now one can better understand that l2 students are capable of writing poetry in an l2, one may still wonder if writing poetry in a second language benefits l2 students. some may doubt the educational value of applying l2 poetry 2 it is a tool created by laufer and nation (1995) to measure the percentages of words second language learners use in their compositions at different vocabulary frequency levels. the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability 623 writing in the language classroom where the aim is to learn academic writing. iida (2012a) conducted an empirical study that explored the influence of haiku writing on prose writing. twenty efl students wrote an essay within 40 minutes before the beginning of a 6-week haiku writing project. after finishing the haiku project, the 20 students participated in a post-test writing a second essay within the same timeframe. he reported that there were statistically significant differences between the two textual features: word count (from 117.00 mean to 156.05) and negation3 (from 0.91 mean to 0.34). the participants were able to write more words in the post-test essay, which he interpreted to mean that haiku writing contributes to students’ capability to express their thoughts more fluently. also, the participants used fewer negations in the post-test, which iida felt indicated that the students tended to write their prose in a more direct way compared to the pre-test. thus, iida proposed that efl haiku writing benefits efl students and its value can be transferred to a different genre like prose. in line with this, studies have also shown that writing poetry in an l2 is valuable because student writers develop linguistically (hanauer, 2010, 2011b; iida, 2012a; ostrow & chang, 2012; tin, 2010). scholars have proposed that writing poetry in an l2 helps student writers construct voice as well as express thoughts and feelings (cahnmann-taylor et al., 2015, 2017; chamcharatsri, 2009, 2013; garvin, 2013; hanauer, 2004, 2010, 2011a, 2011b, 2015; iida, 2008, 2010, 2012b; liao, 2016; ostrow & chang, 2012). writing poetry thus allows l2 student writers to progress on two levels: personal and educational. on the one hand, writing poetry motivates english learners to explore the language focusing on the selfexpression of their personal experiences and co-constructs interactions among writers, readers, and texts. on the other hand, writing poetry can improve language learners’ linguistic competence and writing skills for other genres. in sum, we have looked at the characteristics of l2 poetry examined in studies that indicate that l2 students are capable of writing poetry in an l2. we have also seen that l2 poetry writing is regarded as a process that is free, expressive, and valuable to l2 writers. if poetry writing is a suitable and valuable approach for l2 learners at both personal and educational levels, we could apply it in our language classrooms. then, the next logical question to ask would be: how do our l2 students with various past writing experiences respond to this poetry writing approach? therefore, this study explores the possible relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability. 3 it is a grammatical term that indicates a sentence involves a negative word, such as not, don’t or won’t. fang-yu liao 624 3. method to investigate the possible relationship between writing experiences and perceived poetry writing ability, this study was conducted by means of interviews and rating scales. in the following subsections, i present the information about the participants, data collection, and data analysis of this study. 3.1. participants all 18 participants were l2 students—coming from countries from eastern asia, middle east, or africa—in an m.a. tesol program located in the usa (see appendix a for more background information about each participant). the rationale for choosing this group of students was that they were advanced esl writers who had devoted themselves to learning english for years. some were english teachers already, and some may have already become ones by the time of publication. their status and backgrounds gave them significant hands-on writing experiences as well as academic knowledge to be used to reflect on their learning journey. therefore, their understanding and responses are important and valuable for the current study. participation in this study was in agreement with the protocol approved by the host institution. the majority of the l2 students’ poetry writing experiences came from an m.a. tesol class where the participants were required to produce a poetic inquiry in which they wrote ten original poems concerning their l2 learning experiences and then analyzed those poems. in a different m.a. tesol course, three participants produced an original poem in a mini-lesson led by one of their classmates. some participants had also written poetry because of their own personal interests in addition to one of the two m.a. tesol experiences described above. out of the 18 participants, five had not had prior experiences writing poetry. the participants had experienced english writing instruction from 2 to 17 years, and the range from eight to 15 years was the most frequent. 3.2. data collection two methods were used in this study: interviews and rating scales. in order to yield rich information and facilitate understanding of each participant’s perspective on their writing experiences, in the interviews the participants were asked to share at least three positive and three negative english writing experiences (see appendix b for interview questions). each participant was interviewed once. also, each interview lasted around 40 minutes and was audio-recorded. a rating scale presented in figure 1 was used with one of the interview questions: the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability 625 “do you think you are capable of writing poetry? why?” the use of rating scales enabled me to measure each participant’s perceived capability of writing poetry and to compare and contrast the participants’ responses. some scholars may question the application of a self-assessed rating scale as a standardized measurement; yet i want to emphasize not only that the focus of the study is on perceived poetry writing ability but also the fact that most of the participants (13 out of 18) had actual experiences in writing poetry. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 incapable i-------i-------i-------i-------i-------i-------i very capable of writing of writing poetry poetry figure 1 rating scale 3.3. data analysis to examine the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability, the main data utilized for this study were the interview questions concerning the participants’ three positive and three negative writing experiences along with the questions related to their perceived poetry writing ability. the audio data were transcribed and the participants’ names replaced by pseudonyms. next, i analyzed the interview data according to a coding system. examining the participants’ three positive and three negative writing experiences, i created a coding system that contained 11 categories of the writing experiences the participants had shared in the interviews (see the note under table 1). these categories were created out of the themes and ideas mentioned in the participants’ descriptions of their writing experiences (see appendix c for the definitions and examples of the categories). also, i counted the frequencies of each participant’s writing experiences occurring in their descriptions of three negative and three positive writing experiences in the interview. however, if one described writing experiences involving different themes, all themes were counted. through this, each participant was represented by a different combination of his or her specific writing experiences. then, statistical analysis described in the next paragraph was conducted to examine the possible relationship between these different writing experiences and the perceived poetry writing ability yielded from the rating scales. i listed these frequencies and the rating scale results in table 1. fang-yu liao 626 table 1 frequencies of participants’ writing experience categories and their perceived poetry writing ability (rating scale scores; n = 18) participant categories of the coding system rating scale scorea b c d e f g h i j k amanda 1 0 2 2 0 0 0 1 0 0 2 3.5 amir 0 0 2 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 5 bob 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 charles 1 0 1 2 1 1 0 1 2 0 1 4 ember 1 0 2 3 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 6 enzo 0 0 0 2 0 1 0 1 0 2 1 5 grace 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 3 1 1 1 5 iris 1 0 0 3 0 1 2 0 1 0 0 4.5 joseph 1 0 1 2 0 0 1 2 0 0 1 2.5 joy 1 0 1 2 0 1 2 2 0 0 0 6 kelly 2 0 1 2 0 2 1 0 0 0 0 4 liz 0 0 3 1 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 7 mike 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 4 rania 2 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 3 roger 1 0 2 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 3 3 sarah 1 0 4 1 0 2 0 0 1 0 2 6 thapelo 1 1 0 1 2 2 0 0 0 0 0 5 zak 0 2 1 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 6 note. a = grammar and structure, b = components in the composition, c = tests, d = interesting topics and free writing, e = academic paper and research writing, f = creative writing, g = topics chosen by teachers and uninteresting topics, h = essays and journals, i = writing style, j = self-need and self-expectation mismatch, k = feedback from the instructor. figure 2 dendrogram dendrogram using average linkage (between groups) rescaled distance cluster combine 0 5 10 15 20 25 mike 13 roger 15 amanda 1 amir 2 charles 4 joseph 9 rania 14 bob 3 iris 8 kelly 11 joy 10 enzo 6 thapelo 17 zak 18 grace 7 liz 12 sarah 16 ember 5 the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability 627 a statistical method known as hierarchical cluster analysis4 was utilized to explore these participants’ writing experiences. each individual participant’s writing experiences represented different combinations, and this statistical approach helps to find similar patterns among participants and creates groups of similar participants through using multiple correlations. since the data were coded statements about writing experiences, the groups identified by means of the cluster analysis represent shared sets of patterns of writing experiences. this means that each identified group includes participants with similar combinations of past writing experiences and perceived poetry writing ability. therefore, by examining each individual group, the possible relationship between different writing experiences and perceived poetry writing ability can be studied. the groups were defined through the analysis of a visual representation in the form of the dendrogram depicted in figure 2. the grouping was decided by the distance under 10. 4. results: how writing experiences relate to perceived poetry writing ability as presented in the dendrogram, there were five identified groups. these five groups showcase five different representative writing experiences that l2 students encountered and how those experiences relate to how they perceive their capability in writing poetry. in this section, i examine the possible relationships between the five different types of writing experiences and the perceived poetry writing ability. 4.1. the relationship of focus on assessment and perceived poetry writing ability the first group of concern (group 1) includes five students whose experiences with writing focused on testing, as shown in table 2. these five participants addressed various examinations, such as the gre, toefl, or school final exams. table 2 also shows that the five students’ writing experiences were frequently about the feedback they received. most of them focused on good feedback from instructors, which encouraged them greatly, while three of them recalled negative feedback or poor grades as discouraging, frustrating, and embarrassing. take roger, for example, who described his negative assessment-based writing experience in the form of examinations: i took the toefl and . . . i did good in the speaking and listening also in the reading part. but . . . i didn’t perform well like very well like in the writing, so that was . . . shocking to me . . . it was actually . . . the worst score i took it. at the second time and 4 please refer to yim and ramdeen (2015) for more information about the use of hierarchical cluster analysis in research. fang-yu liao 628 it was . . . way better than the first one, like convincing at least to me and also to . . . who . . . accepted me here in the states. roger further described his positive assessment-based writing experiences: i got . . . good feedback from . . . professor . . . it was like a 15-page paper, and he wrote something thoughtful paper, although that guy is really like well known for his tough grading . . . and i know like some of my classmates . . . got b in the assignment, so you know i was full of myself at that time and i was proud of that. as shown, this type of writing experience provides a certain evaluation to student writers in different forms: grades, written comments, or oral assessments. therefore, the experience i am referring to as focus on assessment is a type of writing experience where l2 students are aware of the connections between the writers, the texts, and the readers. table 2 the categories of writing experiences of group 1 members and their rating scale scores category amanda amir charles mike roger grammar and structure 1 0 1 1 1 components in the composition 0 0 0 0 0 tests 2 2 1 1 2 interesting topics and free writing 2 1 2 1 1 academic paper and research writing 0 0 1 0 0 creative writing 0 1 1 0 1 topics chosen by teachers and uninteresting topics 0 0 0 0 0 essays and journals 1 1 1 0 0 writing style 0 0 2 0 0 self-need and self-expectation mismatch 0 0 0 0 0 feedback from the instructor 2 1 1 3 3 rating scale score 3.5 5 4 4 3 group 1’s rating scale scores are average. students in group 1 believe that they can write poetry, but there are some language barriers or more knowledge to learn. take charles for example: the reason is . . . i believe because i can write . . . just not that advanced . . . i won’t say . . . i’m incapable of writing poetry because . . . last year i proved that i could . . . but . . . i wouldn’t say that i’m very capable of writing poetry, because that i gonna take . . . extra resources and . . . extra work, for me, you have to be poetic . . . it’s . . . sometimes genetic . . . it floats in your blood, so i wouldn’t go that far, i will say, okay i’m in the middle, i can write. the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability 629 this statement implies that group 1 participants were influenced by this type of writing experience, that is, focus on assessment, which emphasizes the results of the evaluation. they were conscious of the existence of readers, but it caused them to perceive their ability to write less positively. the consciousness of being evaluated can be stressful for students, as roger attested: “it’s challenging. it’s like important, you know, to tell the teacher, see i’m a good student.” 4.2. the relationship between focus on grammar and perceived poetry writing ability table 3 shows two writing experiences mentioned by all the three participants: grammar and structure and interesting topics and free writing. first, from their grammar and structure narratives, they learned how to write by studying the alphabet, grammar, sentences and paragraphs at the beginning. next, the interesting topics that the participants had were themes related to personal experiences or cultureoriented issues. take joseph for example: “basically . . . in the secondary school, there is no . . . many tasks we did in, in writing, so we basically learn grammar in, in my context, so we learn grammar basically and there is no much about writing.” joseph further described his experiences in writing on a preferred topic as follows: i wrote something . . . about . . . educational journey. that was interesting. i put everything in . . . two or three pages. the educational journey (is about) . . . how did you learn english . . . what did you like about english . . . why did you become a teacher of english . . . this is something . . . that i know . . . i mean . . . everyone likes to talk about himself . . . so i guess . . . because i was writing myself about my experiences . . . that’s how . . . i like it. based on joseph’s descriptions, focus on grammar is a type of writing experience that not only takes grammar or sentence structure into account but also gives l2 writers an opportunity to work on the topics in line with their interests. focus on grammar can be described as participants consciously checking the grammar use in their writing, even though they enjoyed writing about topics they prefer. table 3 the categories of writing experiences of group 2 members and their rating scale scores category bob joseph rania grammar and structure 1 1 2 components in the composition 1 0 1 tests 0 1 0 interesting topics and free writing 1 2 1 academic paper and research writing 1 0 0 creative writing 1 0 0 topics chosen by teachers and uninteresting topics 0 1 1 essays and journals 0 2 0 fang-yu liao 630 writing style 0 0 0 self-need and self-expectation mismatch 1 0 0 feedback from the instructor 1 1 0 rating scale score 1 2.5 3 table 3 indicates the lowest rating scale scores of all the five groups. within this group, the participants are divided into two sub-groups depending on whether they experienced poetry writing or not. both joseph and rania were not confident about their poetry writing ability due to the lack of knowledge and experiences of poetry writing. also, group 2 participants stated that because they were capable of making sentences and were also familiar with a great amount of vocabulary, they could not claim they were incapable of writing poetry. however, bob experienced poetry writing in one of his classes, but he did not agree that he had written poetry, and he thought that his writing failed to reflect his english level. therefore, among all the participants, bob gave himself the lowest score. another participant, joseph, wrote: i can write something . . . after all this long journey . . . in learning english . . . i can write grammatical sentences . . . some vocabulary . . . i make myself clear . . . and my professor says your writing okay . . . but . . . it depends on . . . how do you define . . . this poetry writing task . . . what do the professor . . . will you expect me . . . to write in this . . . poem . . . that i need to present to you. do i need to follow . . . the strict poetic devices . . . do i have to follow . . . all these . . . strict rules for writing poetry? joseph did not know if he had to follow certain rules when writing poetry, which contributed to his lower rating for poetry writing ability. as revealed previously, joseph studied grammar instead of writing. this shows that when using a formbased writing approach, students may fail to see writing as “authentic” (raimes, 1991, p. 408). joseph said: “it’s really annoying . . . to give our answer in writing, yea, because sometimes you have an idea, but you cannot write it down, so that’s . . . why it’s difficult and annoying.” therefore, l2 students might be unable to express themselves within the constraints of the forms or structures of grammar-based instruction. they are more likely to think about respecting specific rules while producing poetry, such as rhyme and stanzas. by doing so, students may perceive they have lower poetry writing ability. 4.3. the relationship between focus on topic type and perceived poetry writing ability group 3’s writing experiences are mainly in the interesting topics and free writing, and topics chosen by teachers and uninteresting topics categories, as showed in table 4. this group included iris, kelly, and joy, while enzo was the the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability 631 outlier of this group (see figure 2). group 3 participants shared many positive writing experiences concerning free writing or topics that interested them, including personal diaries/online blogs, topics related to their own experiences given by the teacher, or topics selected on the basis of their own interests. in addition, three core participants addressed their experiences of writing about some topics that were not interesting to them but were provided by their teachers. for example, iris shared one negative writing experience: the teacher would like to talk about global warming, which is oh my god all of the students like that, they only know global warming when they hear the word global warming what comes to them what they are going to share. oh my god we are going to talk about pollution, again, again, again, isn’t that sad? iris further described one positive writing experience: first you are asked to read and after . . . about 5 to 10 minutes, the professor asked you to write a summary whatever you remember, whatever you want to write, there is no pressure, there is no obligation or there is no scores something like that, we are free to write anything although we don’t remember anything . . . you kind of find that there is no fear . . . in heart when you write it. this indicates that teachers bored iris by making her write prescribed topics. meanwhile, she felt trepidation when she could choose her own topic. therefore, focus on topic is a type of writing experience that emphasizes practice with different topics of l2 writers’ or instructors’ choice. that being said, focus on topic enables l2 students to take both the content of the writing and their own writing interests into consideration. table 4 the categories of writing experiences of group 3 members and their rating scale scores category enzo iris joy kelly grammar and structure 0 1 1 2 components in the composition 0 0 0 0 tests 0 0 1 1 interesting topics and free writing 2 3 2 2 academic paper and research writing 0 0 0 0 creative writing 1 1 1 2 topics chosen by teachers and uninteresting topics 0 2 2 1 essays and journals 1 0 2 0 writing style 0 1 0 0 self-need and self-expectation mismatch 2 0 0 0 feedback from the instructor 1 0 0 0 rating scale score 5 4.5 6 4 fang-yu liao 632 group 3 members rated their perceived poetry writing ability above average. both joy and kelly were confident in writing poetry, while enzo was satisfied with his level of writing poetry. similarly, iris showed her concerns for rhyming; yet she still believed that she could write good poems. however, kelly stated: i never think myself as a second [language] writer, i think i was the one who can write, who can write in english, so . . . basically i think . . . i’m not very good, like, put something . . . in a poetry . . . so that’s the reason i didn’t [feel] very close to the very capable of writing poetry, but . . . since . . . i think i am one of the english writer, so . . . it shows like i can write poetry, but not as good as i think. kelly felt that she did not have a good command of poetry writing, but she saw herself as a multilingual writer who can write poetry. therefore, even if there was a topic that failed to meet the participants’ interests, they were still able to complete the tasks. for example, when assigned job topics, she “did some writing just because the teacher wanted . . . [her] to do it.” group 3 participants tended to have faith in their writing no matter what types of tasks they encountered, which contributed to their above average ability to write poems. 4.4. the relationship between focus on the process of completing writing tasks and perceived poetry writing ability table 5 indicates that group 4’s writing experiences were mostly components in the composition and academic paper and research writing. first, thapelo and zak both addressed learning how to organize paragraphs, including making statements for introductory, body, and concluding paragraphs. next, both recalled their academic writing experiences concerning m.a. thesis and research papers. they both saw academic tasks as an interesting and helpful experience to improve their writing skills. unlike the previous three groups, group 4 focused on organization of writing and professional writing for academic uses. thapelo explained: from high school, that is when we started to write . . . paragraph . . . we were taught to summarize . . . excerpts from a book in a plain form . . . that is our aim to write. but when i started to do my undergraduate, that is when we started to write a long paper maybe 15 pages . . . the research paper way . . . you should know this is . . . supporting ideas, how to write a conclusion, and how to write an introduction, and how to write a point. thapelo further described his research writing experience in the following way: i had to do a research about . . . underage drinking . . . looking at . . . how is it affect underage drinking, what are the circumstances of under drinking, and how to prevent that, so . . . the challenge was sometimes i got this study and i feel like . . . the way the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability 633 the researcher phrase the idea, there is no way that i can change it . . . but . . . to find what i suppose to read [and] to put it in my own ways. so the challenge . . . [is] how can i put this in my own ways, even the fact that the statement is more precise. in his first experience, he was exposed to the knowledge of the elements in a composition, such as the supporting ideas, the introduction, or the conclusion. as for the second experience, he focused on one research paper he wrote for a class in which he encountered some challenges. based on this data, focus on the process of completing writing tasks describes a writing experience which emphasizes writing processes. group 4 participants embrace the significance of their writing processes and they act to accomplish their writing tasks. table 5 the categories of writing experiences of group 4 members and their rating scale scores category thapelo zak grammar and structure 1 0 components in the composition 1 2 tests 0 1 interesting topics and free writing 1 1 academic paper and research writing 2 2 creative writing 2 0 topics chosen by teachers and uninteresting topics 0 0 essays and journals 0 0 writing style 0 0 self-need and self-expectation mismatch 0 0 feedback from the instructor 0 0 rating scale score 5 6 as for the rating scale, thapelo and zak felt confident about their capability to write poetry. despite the fact that thapelo had poetry writing experiences while zak did not have any, both were confident about their capability to write poetry. also, similarly to the other groups, thapelo had finished the poetry-writing task, but he still did not consider himself a poet, so he still needed to write and learn more about writing poetry. similarly, zak addressed his concerns about being a non-native speaker, which created certain challenges that he might face, such as word choice. thapelo’s reasoned: because i feel like . . . i’m not yet professional poetry writer, and i still need to learn more . . . even the experience that i had in dr. [name of professor]’s class . . . and then after that class, i never wrote in a poetry, so i feel like i still need to write more, cuz i’m not yet there . . . i’m still working on that, but even . . . you know the business in the program, i don’t have time to take my poetry writing to the next level. fang-yu liao 634 this being said, if poetry writing is used as part of the curriculum in class, students would be advised to fulfill the class requirement. students like thapelo may not practice poetry writing after the course, but they may see poetry writing as a task that they could accomplish. therefore, in line with the category of focus on the process of completing writing tasks, students may feel positive about writing poetry, but it still remains a classroom task. 4.5. the relationship between focus on purpose and perceived poetry writing ability table 6 shows that group 5’s writing experiences were mostly tests, interesting topics and free writing, and creative writing. first, three participants had many writing experiences with tests, and they complained about the pressure from the examinations, but at the same time they learned the writing skills from it. second, all of them talked about their personal writing experiences with diaries, journals, or reflection on novels/literature. next, all three of them had poetry writing experiences, including class projects, personal endeavors, and one minilesson. although they confessed that some of their experiences were challenging for them, they all considered writing poetry as a positive experience. sarah shared one writing experience with examinations: from my . . . 6, 7, 8, grade to . . . 12 grade, which is the last year of high school, all my english learning is based on examinations . . . because . . . i have to pass, so all my even writing and everything was just examinations . . . not only writing, like everything basically with learning english . . . is just for exams. so you just learn . . . like sometimes i try to practice a lot, especially when i have like very important exam, i try to get some topics or something like that from online and . . . then practice writing. she further described her poetry writing experiences: after i start mastering the english language, i really start writing a lot of poems in english. so when i look at back at them now, i just feel like . . . it’s so good . . . kind of positive experience . . . because sometimes i, i used to use writing poems to learn more english, so i used to . . . try to . . . find the words . . . so i used to find a words that has the same ending, so it rhymes. the first narrative represents the case of obtaining a good grade for writing tests. however, the second excerpt describes the participant’s personal interest in writing poetry. this being said, focus on purpose represents a type of writing experience emphasizing l2 students’ own purposes in writing, which invites them to discover autonomy and meaning in writing. the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability 635 as for the rating scale, all three participants were very confident about their ability to write poetry. compared to all the other groups, these three participants all agreed they had a good command of poetry writing. however, three participants shared slightly different rationales. first, ember stated she did not have any trouble writing poems but she could not mark 7 on the scale because of vocabulary problems, such as choosing fancy words to express her feelings. second, liz revealed her interest in and willingness to write poetry, and she also believed that once someone has become interested in learning something, he or she is able to have a good command of it. last, sarah described her rationale as follows: i don’t wanna say 7 cuz i don’t wanna seem arrogant, so i just . . . rate 6 . . . because i have a lot of experiences and i like my poems . . . when . . . some of my really close friends read some [of my poems], they are like very impressed, which is kind of add to my self confidence about my writing . . . besides that, i think . . . sometimes especially when i have like stronger emotions, i really know how to . . . put them into words, because it makes me feel better, so i think i’m very capable. this excerpt reveals sarah’s high confidence in her own poetry writing ability. also, sarah released her emotions through writing poems, which can be seen as one of the purposes for which she wrote poems. this indicates that focus on purpose describes a tendency to have a positive effect on l2 students’ perceived ability in writing poetry. l2 students can achieve ownership of their writing if they write for themselves or write for a self-identified purpose. table 6 the categories of writing experiences of group 5 members and their rating scale scores category ember liz sarah grammar and structure 1 0 1 components in the composition 0 0 0 tests 2 3 4 interesting topics and free writing 3 1 1 academic paper and research writing 1 0 0 creative writing 2 2 2 topics chosen by teachers and uninteresting topics 0 0 0 essays and journals 0 0 0 writing style 0 0 1 self-need and self-expectation mismatch 0 0 0 feedback from the instructor 0 0 2 rating scale score 6 7 6 5. correlation between rating scale scores and narrative categories the correlation between the different categories of writing experiences and the rating scale scores expressing the ability to write poetry was calculated. unlike fang-yu liao 636 finding shared patterns among participants through hierarchical cluster analysis, this final analysis aimed to see if any of the specific experiences were found to correspond either positively or negatively with the perceived ability to write poetry. the spearman correlation test was chosen because the data set is not normally distributed. the assumption was that the data set should involve at least one kind of ordinal data. the data in this study were frequency counts of categories and rating scale scores. both measures can be seen as interval, so an argument can be made in favor of examining the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability. therefore, the spearman correlation test was run at the end of the analysis. table 7 presents the correlations between the participants’ self-rated poetry writing ability and the 11 narrative categories. table 7 correlations between the rating scale scores and the narrative categories (n = 18) category rating scale spearman correlation sig. (2-tailed) grammar and structure -.529* .024 components in the composition -.125* .622 tests .341* .166 interesting topics and free writing -.033* .898 academic paper and research writing .169* .502 creative writing .447* .063 topics chosen by teachers and uninteresting topics -.187* .458 essays and journals -.034* .893 writing style .108* .669 self-need and self-expectation mismatch -.114* .654 feedback from the instructor -.406* .095 note. *correlation is significant at the .05 level (2-tailed) among all narrative categories, the rating scale only significantly correlates on a two-tailed test with one writing experience: grammar and structure. this is a significant negative correlation, which means that high frequencies of grammar and structure experiences correlate with low scores for poetry writing ability. in other words, the more frequently participants recalled their writing experiences related to grammar or structures, the lower their self-rated writing poetry ability turned out to be. conversely, the participants who had higher scores for their perceived poetry writing ability tended not to mention their writing experiences about grammar and structure. this does not mean these participants had not experienced learning writing within the grammar and structure approach, but it implies that they did not see grammar and structure as a priority for their writing. therefore, for them, writing poetry is achievable. to sum up, it seems that learning the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability 637 in a grammar heavy writing context was not conducive to developing a sense of ability in writing poetry for the l2 students in this study. 6. discussion and pedagogical implications the aim of this paper was to investigate the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability. i am aware that the number of participants is limited and the findings are generated mainly from interview data and one rating scale. there are no other types of data, such as written poems or observations. despite these limitations, this study does provide some insights for the field of tesol concerning a humanizing approach in language classrooms in which writing poetry is a way to express personal emotions and feelings, and its meaning-making is a stimulus for writing development. 6.1. towards a humanizing approach in language classrooms it is interesting that the five types of writing experiences explicated in this paper show different levels of relationship with students’ perceived poetry writing ability. the data presented here do not support the claim that poetry writing involves a more valuable purpose compared to grammar and structure instruction in language classrooms. what the data do suggest is that there are different types of writing instruction, and each writing experience has its own strengths and purposes in the language classrooms. oftentimes, l2 students learn english with test preparation and examinations in mind instead of real-life situations, with the result that the focus is on students’ grammar and structure in their writing pieces (bilton & sivasubramaniam, 2009; iida, 2008). educators direct their students’ attention to more technical writing rules and focus less on other important aspects of writing. schultz (2001) addressed the emphasis on mechanical and practical features in foreign language classrooms, stating that “students are rarely afforded the opportunity simply to write from their imaginations, practicing their language skills in formats that they define for themselves” (p. 94). this implies that, to some extent, l2 writing classrooms are dehumanized. l2 students also need an outlet to express themselves instead of only being exposed to tedious and mechanical drill practices. being exposed to only one type of english variety, standard english, through examinations, grammar instruction, or mechanical drills, l2 students acquire english in order to acquire near-native english ability (fernsten, 2008; kramsch, 2003; mckay, 2009). these students tend to compare themselves to native english writers and see themselves as outsiders when experiencing difficulty in producing native-like english skills, especially writing. this being said, fang-yu liao 638 pennycook (1996) stated that most efl students fail to have ownership over writing in english. in line with pennycook, matsuda (2001) pointed out the difficulties efl japanese writers have when constructing their voice, noting that they might be “being deprived of familiar discursive options . . . combined with the writers’ lack of familiarity with the discourse features that are available in constructing voice in written english” (p. 51). it is obvious that there are several obstacles that hinder l2 students’ writing progression. fernsten (2008) undertook a case study using critical discourse analysis to examine the writer’s identity of an esl 1.5 generation student, mandy, in the usa. mandy voiced her notion of writing and her writer’s identity as follows: i really see writing as like someone’s individual expression . . . i personally just don’t understand like how they [a lot of people] can put limits and structures and like borders and wall around writing . . . i have teachers like rephrase my words and that really upsets me. and i am like, you know, if i want it like that, i would have written it like that, but this is how i saw it, you know, so that is why i wrote like this . . . to me, that ruins my papers . . . like it is not mine anymore. (p. 49) in much the same vein, a chinese student from dai’s study (2010), whose name was tian, reflected: “i seldom have the chance to put what i really think in them [compositions], just apply the useful sentence patterns and paragraph structure i’ve memorized. and always, the topic given was not something i wanted to write about” (p. 549). these two examples reinforce the view expressed in the previous paragraph that l2 students are often unable to construct their own voice in english writing. they also show the peripheral position of creative writing in l2 writing classrooms. l2 students fail to be introduced to a more diversified pedagogy because of the need to meet the requirements of mechanical correctness or standardized styles of writing. given the limitation of emphasizing practical and mechanical features, eventually, the question for tesol teacher training programs and l2 writing teachers is whether to limit l2 writing instruction to only grammar and structure drills or whether to invite more diverse instruction that contributes to voice construction, self-discovery, and emotional engagement. 6.2. writing poetry as a way to express personal emotions and feelings the concept of poetry is portrayed differently across the five groups in this study, especially between the focus on grammar group and the focus on purpose group. the finding is that the rating scale scores concerning perceived poetry writing competence significantly but negatively correlate with only one writing experience: focusing on grammatical and structural accuracy. this negative correlation the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability 639 suggests that if students experienced more grammar and structure writing experiences, they were more inclined to believe they had lower poetry writing ability. this implies the possibility that these students associate rules with every type of writing, including grammar drills and poetry. for students in the focus on grammar group, the concept of poetry involves standards and rules. when asked about the reason for ranking his poetry writing ability as poor, joseph revealed the following concern: “do i need to follow . . . the strict poetic devices . . . do i have to follow . . . all these . . . strict rules for writing poetry?” therefore, for students who have dominant grammar and structure writing instruction, writing poetry makes them think they need to fulfill regulations like the use of poetic devices. in contrast, after having the experiences of writing poetry in english, one student in the focus on purpose group, sarah, revealed her rationale for a high perceived competence to write poetry in the following words: “sometimes especially when i have like stronger emotions, [i] really know how to . . . put them into words because it makes me feel better, so i think i’m very capable.” the concept of poetry does not involve rules like those mentioned by the focus on grammar group; instead, it is associated with emotions. therefore, for those students who have poetry writing experiences or any writing experience emphasizing its purpose, poetry writing expresses personal emotions and feelings. to some degree, this is in line with previous studies that have found that writing poetry in an l2 promotes constructing voices and expressing feelings and thoughts (see chamcharatsri, 2013; hanauer, 2015; iida, 2012b). as presented in iida’s (2012b) study, the participants reported benefitting from self-expression in the poetry project. the data of the current study coincide with iida’s association of writing poetry and self-expression, which plays a valuable role for l2 students. more specifically, chamcharatisri (2013) conducted a study that examined how four thai efl students experienced love through writing poetry in both thai and english. the results showed that efl thai students are inclined to express love in english, their l2, because it helps them to express themselves more freely. this emphasizes the use of poetry writing to help l2 student writers express emotions. moreover, according to hanauer (2015), the notion of voice has its own theoretical stance and understanding in creative writing. the notion of voice under his lens means “the ability to construct a discerning identity in the creative writing that expresses the author’s sense of himself or herself in his or her new social/cultural context and in a second language” (p. 71). hanauer conducted both studies of computational linguistic analysis and human readers rating poetry pairs, and the results showed that l2 poetry writers had a discernible voice in their written poetry and those informed readers were able to distinguish l2 student poems written by the same poet from those written by different poets. fang-yu liao 640 in this sense, l2 writers have their personalized ways of writing even in the genre of poetry. therefore, the concept of voice is viewed as natural instead of as an end product or a goal that l2 writers need to accomplish. in line with his results, one can assume that those student writers in the current study who believed that they had lower poetry writing ability were are unable to recognize that every l2 student has natural embedded competence in writing poetry. on the other hand, those student writers who rated themselves as having higher poetry writing competence can associate writing poetry with a personalized and expressive act. however, the results of the current study on poetry writing in an l2 will need further theoretical and empirical discussion. 6.3. meaning-making as a stimulus for writing development the students who self-perceived higher poetry writing competence and how this furthered their writing progression seem to have experienced different types of writing instruction just like the rest of the students who rated their perceived poetry writing ability lower. these students also described anxiety or stress from their writing experiences, such as examinations. what makes these students different from others is that they focus every writing experience on its purpose or its meaning. liz rated her perceived poetry writing ability the highest among all. she recalled one of her writing experiences as follows: when we take examinations, somebody will sit right next to you . . . you just have two sentences, then, you see others have a whole paragraph, and then you become nervous and nervous more, more nervous, then you see somebody put their period to . . . their composition. everybody just like checking the answers . . . and you’re still working on the third sentence. that is terrible for me . . . i think couple times of that experience . . . i think that triggers my [self] intensive training for my college entrance examination . . . i want to . . . prevent [it] from happening [again], so i did something. no matter whether it is a positive or negative writing experience, these students tended to transform struggles or hard feelings they encountered into contributions to their own learning. this process of making meaning out of their writing experiences and furthering their learning stands out for this group of students, who see themselves as not only confident multilingual writers but also creative poetry writers. this concept of meaning making connects to what hanauer (2011b) has labeled the “meaningful literacy” approach to humanize l2 writing classrooms. hanauer believes that through writing poetry in an l2 “students learn about themselves, about the presence of others, and the diversity of thought and experience that are so much part of this world” (p. 10). in this sense, learning a language is beyond mere linguistic development. instead, writing poetry in a the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability 641 meaningful literacy approach invites a personalized and self-positioning way of learning a language, self, and the world. however, the connection between learners’ meaning-making processes and their writing progression remains speculative until additional empirical studies are conducted and analyzed with larger samples and appropriate statistics in order to make any further generalization. 7. conclusion overall, the data suggest that the more exposure to l2 poetry writing there is, the higher the perceived poetry writing ability. again, i did not intend to claim that poetry writing has higher value than other kinds of writing instruction. instead, my interpretations of the data support the idea that each type of writing instruction has its place in l2 writing classrooms. students who have poetry writing experiences perceive poetry in a more personal and emotional way. however, the notion of poetry is associated with the use of poetic devices and formalities by those whose writing instruction has been dominated by grammar and structure. i do not aim to argue which approach is accurate or inaccurate. what i do suggest is that exposure to poetry writing instruction for l2 students can invite them to explore the genre of poetry from a new angle. plus, the students who perceived higher poetry writing competence and had poetry writing experiences tended to make meanings or define purposes of their own writing and learning progression. the question which remains is whether l2 students in this study who find their own personal purpose in working on different types of writing are more likely to become confident multilingual writers who are able to autonomously continue this learning process as writers. i do not imply that only poetry writing instruction can help students to become competent and confident writers. instead, the study indicates the potential of poetry writing instruction to trigger l2 students’ exploration to find their own personal purpose of writing as multilingual writers. therefore, poetry writing could usefully be integrated as a component in l2 language classrooms. fang-yu 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(2015). hierarchical cluster analysis: comparison of three linkage measures and application to psychological data. the quantitative methods for psychology, 22(1), 8-21. fang-yu liao 644 appendix a background information about participants participants gender country first languages poetry writing experiences years of experiencing writing instruction amanda female china mandarin none 10 amir male niger french & local dialect personal interests and one in-class activity 8 bob male saudi arabia arabic & local dialect one course assignment 15 charles male saudi arabia arabic & local dialect one course assignment 17 ember female china mandarin & local dialect one course assignment and personal interests 11 enzo male saudi arabia arabic & local dialect one course assignment 12 grace female indonesia indonesian & local dialect one course assignment 13 iris female indonesia indonesian & local dialect one in-class activity 9 joseph male iraq arabic & local dialect none 8 joy female ivory coast french & local dialect one course assignment 13 kelly female china mandarin one course assignment 15 liz female china mandarin & local dialect personal interests and one in-class activity 8 mike male togo french & local dialect none 12 rania female saudi arabia arabic & local dialect none 2 roger male saudi arabia arabic & local dialect one course assignment 12 sarah female algeria arabic & french one course assignment and personal interests 11 thapelo male south africa xitsonga & local dialects one course assignment and personal interests 8 zak male japan japanese none 8 the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability 645 appendix b interview questions to all of the participants: 1. tell me about how you learnt writing in english. 2. in general, as a student, how do you feel about the writing classes you had experienced in your own country? 3. what was positive or negative about the experiences? 4. can you share three of your best and worst writing experiences? 5. what did you learn from these experiences? 6. did you experience writing poetry during the years of learning english? to those participants who never had poetry writing experiences: 1. if you were in a writing class and your professor told you to write your own poetry, what would you think of this assignment? 2. do you think that you are capable of writing poetry? why? 3. will you apply poetry writing to your teaching in the future? why? to those participants who had poetry writing experiences: 1. please try to recall your memory when you heard that you were going to have a poetry writing assignment, what did you think of this assignment? 2. what kinds of difficulties did you face when writing your poetry? 3. what did you learn from the poetry writing experience? 4. what are the differences between the writing classes from the past experiences and this poetry writing experience? 5. do you think that you are capable of writing poetry? why? 6. will you apply poetry writing to your teaching in the future? why? fang-yu liao 646 appendix c definitions and examples of the categories of the coding system category definition example grammar and structure utterances which describe participants’ past writing experiences concerning the grammar and the structures basically in in school in in the secondary school, there is no uhmm there is no uhmm many tasks we did in in writing, so we basically learn grammar in in my context, so we learn grammar basically and there is no much about writing. components in the composition utterances which describe participants’ past writing experiences concerning the patterns in the compositions, such as the introduction, the thesis statement, the body, and the conclusion basically, teacher uh gave us some topics and explained how to organize paragraph and essays, and then we were assigned to write essay. so, following the instruction, for example, first section was organizing the introductory paragraph, and then body paragraph, and concluding paragraph. tests utterances which describe participants’ past writing experiences concerning tests, such as in-class quizzes, entrance examinations, toefl, or gre the last year of high school, all my english learning is based on examinations, like just i wanna learn, because i wanna you know i have to pass, so all my even writing and everything was just examinations. interesting topics and free writing utterances which describe participants’ past writing experiences concerning interesting topics and their free writing experiences, such as personal blogs or diaries the coordinator cannot come up with just one single topic, so he gave us the opportunity to choose anything we want to write about. so, i have chosen up to four topics, because we were supposed to write four papers. i chose my topics, which are related to tesol and, believe me, it was great. he guided us. he told us all that we need to know about writing. he gave us samples and all these stuff. academic paper and research writing utterances which describe participants’ past writing experiences concerning the research tasks or academic projects they had before it’s about social orientation in second language acquisition. it’s about sort of like identity or like culture like acculturation, so i pick about like 3 books . . . i hate the the 15 pages and because that’s like well you read and then uhmm you you should select like 3 themes. creative writing utterances which describe participants’ past writing experiences concerning creative writing it’s about science fiction you have to write your own story . . . you have to create a scenario, you know, you have the protagonist facing you know a problem and then you know how they overcome the problem, so when i was thinking and had a lot of thinking in mind . . . which was you know interesting because the professor likes it. topics chosen by teachers and uninteresting topics utterances which describe participants’ past writing experiences concerning topics chosen for them by instructors which they found uninteresting the teacher would like to talk about global warming, which is oh my god all of the students like that, they only know global warming when they hear the word global warming what comes to them what they are going to share, oh my god we are going to talk about pollution, again, again, again, isn’t that sad? essays and journals utterances which describe participants’ past writing experiences concerning essays and journals the teacher brings texts related to polygamy, we discuss in class, and then, afterwards, the teacher tries to formulate some kind of topic from the broad issue of polygamy and have people write on it. writing style utterances which describe participants’ past writing experiences concerning the differences if it is in united states, plagiarism is so because it’s the top number one, but in my country plagiarism because oh it almost ignored at all, so i’m sure that most of the the relationship between l2 students’ writing experiences and their perceived poetry writing ability 647 or connections between the first language and second language, or different types of writing they had been exposed to students who has a final paper they like to copy and paste copy and paste. self-need and self-expectation mismatch utterances which describe participants’ past writing experiences concerning their perceptions of the gap between their self-need or self-expectation and the real learning outcomes i spent about 9 to 10 years just learning some basic, and 1 or 2 year, i i i i transfer myself to this uh level where i am in the master, so uhmm my feeling about writing in xyz [his graduate program] needs uhmm more improvement, because i did not give that uhmm expected outcome from the writing class that i need. feedback from the instructor utterances which describe participants’ past writing experiences concerning the feedback given by the teachers i got like . . . good feedback from . . . xyz professor i’m not going to mention the name . . . it was like a 15 page paper, and he [the instructor] wrote something thoughtful paper, although that guy is really like well known for his tough grading . . . and i know like some of my classmates . . . they got b in the assignment, so you know i was full of myself at that time and i was proud of that. 637 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (4). 2014. 637-663 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.4.4 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the use of pragmatic markers across proficiency levels in second language speech colleen neary-sundquist purdue university, west lafayette, in, usa cnearysu@purdue.edu abstract this study investigates the use of pragmatic markers (pms) by learners of english at varying proficiency levels. the study analyzes data from a university-level oral proficiency exam that categorized chinese and korean english-as-a-second-language (esl) speakers into four proficiency levels and compares data with those of native speakers taking the same test. findings indicate that pm use generally rises with proficiency level. the rates of pm use showed a dramatic increase between the highest and second-highest proficiency group. the highest proficiency esl group used pms at the same rate as native speakers. the study also found that the variety of different pms used goes up steadily with proficiency level. these results are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding how second language learners’ use of pms develops. keywords: pragmatic marker, proficiency level, pragmatic competence, second language development, oral speech production 1. introduction pragmatic makers (expressions such as so, well, and you know) have been shown to perform a number of important discourse and pragmatic functions in second language speech. in particular, as a subcategory of formulaic language in second language development, pragmatic markers facilitate the development of second colleen neary-sundquist 638 language fluency (hasselgreen, 2004; towell, hawkins, & bazergui 1996). they also allow for the communication of speakers’ attitudes, how they intend their utterance to be interpreted, and the establishment of intersubjectivity with their interlocutor (aijmer, 2013; blakemore, 2008; overstreet & yule, 1997). as halliday and hasan (1976) and schiffrin (1987) point out in their analyses of l1 pragmatics, pragmatic markers (pms) are also one of the principal ways that coherent discourse is constructed (halliday & hasan, 1976; schiffrin, 1987).1 despite the wide variety of functions and their importance in the development of second language fluency, they have received relatively little attention in second language acquisition research (müller, 2005).2 previous research has examined the use of pms in learner speech, but a number of important questions remain. in particular, little is known about the overall pattern of pm use across a wide spectrum of language learners. although some l2 studies of pms reveal important findings about individual markers (e.g., house, 2013; müller, 2005; romero-trillo, 2002), few studies focus on the wider range of use of pms, including those that may be used less frequently by some learners. moreover, as hasselgreen (2004) and hellermann and vergun (2007) note, the proficiency level of learners plays a role in the frequency and range of these types of expressions, although few studies break down proficiency levels into sub-levels while examining the larger set of pms. furthermore, few studies focus on the similarities and differences between highly advanced learners and native speakers with respect to the frequency and variety of pms. such information may tell us much about the interaction of proficiency level and pragmatic competence and whether learners progress more gradually or rapidly in the advanced stages of second language learning. this study attempts to shed new light on these issues, examining pm use among english as a second language (esl) learners at multiple proficiency levels compared to native speakers performing the same tasks. the rate of use and the range, or richness, of pm use will be explored from a quantitative perspective. the paper fills several gaps in the literature because it will examine the larger set of pms rather than a small subset, and because it focuses on both the range and frequency of unique pms across several sub-levels of proficiency. the results of statistical analysis reveal that the overall frequency of pms increases at varying rates at each proficiency level and reaches a rate almost identical to 1 note that these authors use the term discourse markers rather than pragmatic markers, the term used throughout this paper. further discussion of definitions used in this study is included in the background section on terminology. 2 for a helpful overview of previous research on the development of l2 pragmatic competence in general, see bardovi-harlig (2013) or ishida (2013), in which the study of pragmatic markers is mentioned in the larger context of l2 pragmatics research. the use of pragmatic markers across proficiency levels in second language speech 639 that of native speakers, although the range remains relatively limited at the most advanced stage of proficiency. this study will explore possible reasons for this pattern of use and point to future studies that may reveal more about the development of l2 pragmatic competence. 2. review of the literature 2.1. pragmatic markers: terminology and definitions although pms have received a great deal of attention in cross-linguistic studies over the last two decades, there is little consensus regarding the definition or appropriate terminology for this type of expression (blakemore 2002, 2008; romero-trillo, 2012; schourup 1999).3 in an early study investigating discourse markers in english, schiffrin (1987) uses this term to refer to “sequentially dependent elements that bracket units of talk" (p. 31). fraser (1999) also uses the term discourse markers but defines them differently as “linguistically encoded clues which signal the speaker’s potential communicative intention” (p. 168). under the name discourse particles, they have been identified as particles that “are placed with great precision at different places in the discourse and give important clues to how discourse is segmented and processed” (aijmer, 2002, p. 1). alternatively, others such as hasselgreen (2004) define these expressions as smallwords, which she points out are phrases “occurring with high frequency in the spoken language, that help to keep our speech flowing, yet do not contribute essentially to the message itself” (p. 162). these various terms and definitions are offered here to give some idea of the variety of approaches to these expressions. one of the most problematic aspects of classification deals with the difference between what is referred to as pragmatic markers and what others might label discourse markers. this terminological confusion arises, according to romero-trillo (2012), because some scholars make clear distinctions between the two terms while others use the term pragmatic markers to refer to a superordinate category under which discourse markers may be subsumed. in the present study, this more general term pragmatic marker will be used in order to avoid confusion with specific terms, including discourse markers, which refer to various subclasses of these expressions. in particular, the current study follows the definition and list used by carter and mccarthy (2006), in which the 3 for further discussion of definitions and terminology of pragmatic markers, see lenk (1997), schoroup (1999), callies (2009), romero-trillo (2012) and aimjer (2013). indepth studies of particular pragmatic markers have been undertaken in languages as diverse as spanish (chodorowska-pilch, 2008; durán & unamuno, 2001), chinese (feng 2008; wang & tsai, 2007), japanese (sasamoto, 2008), and english (bell, 2010; lenk, 1998; schourup, 1999). colleen neary-sundquist 640 term pragmatic marker is used. this definition and the reasons for its use will be discussed in the methodology section of this paper. despite the lack of consensus concerning terminological conventions in previous research, according to schourup (1999), there is general agreement on several fundamental characteristics of pms. in his comprehensive overview, schourup highlights three characteristics that most definitions of pms share: connectivity, optionality, and non-truth-conditionality (pp. 1230-1232). connectivity is the idea that pms connect blocks of language to other blocks of language and that they signal the relationship between them. optionality refers to the fact that these expressions are syntactically detachable from the utterance; they can be removed without disturbing the grammaticality of the utterance. finally, pms are said to not to affect the truth or falsity of an utterance. therefore, although they may contribute somehow to the interpretation of an utterance, they are not an essential part of its meaning. carter and mccarthy (2006) provide a definition that takes these characteristics into consideration yet also places weight on the pragmatic contribution of these expressions. they discuss the connectivity and optionality of pms, but they also highlight the importance of interpersonal meaning and the speaker's intentions in the definition. as part of their grammar of english based on a corpus of oral production data, carter and mccarthy (2006, p. 208) define pms as “a class of items which operate outside of the structural limits of the clause and which encode speakers’ intentions and interpersonal meanings.” the authors subdivide the class of pms into discourse markers (including such expressions as so, well, and anyway), stance markers (actually, i think, of course), hedges (kind of, maybe), and interjections (gosh, wow). pms are classified as grammatical options with social, contextual, and affective functions in spoken english. from this definition, the importance of pms for interpersonal communication is evident. these expressions allow speakers to communicate their intentions, indicate their attitudes towards information that is presented or received, and link their ideas for greater clarity. in other words, as carter and mccarthy (2006) point out, pms are a broad class of items that can provide structure and organization to utterances while indicating attitude, assertiveness, or reactions to discourse (p . 105). in the next section, previous research relating to pms in second language learning is discussed. the reader should keep in mind that the issues of the definition and identification make the comparison of different studies of pms tentative. the literature review below outlines the findings of studies into the rate and range of use of pms in second language research; however, the studies mentioned do not define or identify the markers in exactly the same way. the use of pragmatic markers across proficiency levels in second language speech 641 2.2. pragmatic markers in second language studies in most second language research on the rate of pm use, studies indicate that learners do not use pms in their speech nearly as much as native speakers. fung and carter (2007) compared a corpus of elicited classroom data from intermediate-advanced learners of english in hong kong with the british english cancode corpus. they found that non-native speakers largely underuse pms in comparison to native speakers. over half of the pms they examined were used less frequently by non-native speakers. however, they acknowledge that their results must be considered preliminary due to the fact that the conditions under which the data were obtained were significantly different for native and nonnative speakers. romero-trillo (2002) found similar results in his study of the use of a set of pms by native and non-native speakers of english. analyzing corpora of spoken data from spanish native and non-native learners of english, he determined that native speaker adults used markers such as you know, i mean, or you see at a significantly higher rate than non-native speaker adults.4 these findings are also supported by müller's (2005) investigation of the use of so, like, well, and you know by native speakers and german learners of english. analyzing data from a paired silent film retelling, she found overall significant underuse of these markers by learners (except for well). although it is clear from previous research that the total frequency of pms by non-native speakers of english is lower than that of native speakers, much recent research focuses only on a small set of expressions. fuller (2003), hellerman and vergun (2007), müller (2005), and romero-trillo (2002) looked at three, four, five, and six individual pms, respectively. such detailed analyses provide insight into the use of specific pms in particular contexts and allow us to explore how their use by esl speakers differs from that of native speakers. however, in order to gain an overall picture of the frequency, distribution, and variety of pms in learner speech, it is necessary to widen the search and investigate a greater number of expressions. thus, this study attempts to fill a gap in previous research by investigating a larger variety of expressions from a comprehensive list of pms.5 most studies of pms focused on a single proficiency level or fail to address the role of proficiency at all. fung and carter (2007) focus solely on intermediate4 in the case of look and listen, romero-trillo found no significant difference in the frequency of use by native versus non-native speakers. 5 note that fung and carter (2003) and hasselgreen (2004) looked at a larger number of pms than most studies. fung and carter identified 23 pragmatic markers among the 100 most common english words and hasselgreen looked at a total of 19 smallwords (her term for pragmatic markers). the current analysis expands on these larger-scale studies by focusing on even more expressions, including the 121 found in carter and mccarthy's (2006) corpus-based grammar. colleen neary-sundquist 642 advanced learners and also provide no comparative data from native speakers and nonnative speakers performing the same task. müller (2005) examined four specific markers in detail but did not consider overall rates of discourse marker use, nor did she examine different proficiency levels. romero-trillo (2002) analyzed data from both children (1st graders) and adult (university students) native and non-native speakers but did not split up the non-native speakers according to proficiency. one of the few studies that addressed the issue of proficiency level in relation to a large set of pms is hasselgreen (2004). she focused on two groups of norwegian learners of english (norwegian a, described as “more fluent,” and norwegian b, or “less fluent”) and determined that the frequency with which native speakers used smallwords was significantly higher than that of both nonnative speaker groups. these groups were selected entirely on the basis of global grades on a speaking test (p. 160). native speakers used 445 smallwords per 10,000 words while norwegian a and b groups used them at a rate of 279 and 235 per 10,000 words, respectively. hasselgreen noted that these differences were highly significant, with p < .0001 for native speakers versus norwegian a and p < .05 for norwegian a versus b (p. 171). hellermann and vergun (2007) also examined the interaction of proficiency level with pm use, although they limited their analysis to a small set of expressions. they investigated video recordings of classroom interaction and interviews of 17 adult learners of english with no previous formal english language instruction. focusing on the pms well, you know, and like, they analyzed the interaction of pm use and proficiency level. proficiency was classified according to the four levels of english language courses available to the learners: from absolute beginner (level a) to advanced (level d). hellermann and vergun's (2007) findings indicated that the use of pms for well, you know, and like went up with each proficiency level, although they found very few examples, if any, at level a and level b (p. 167). data on the interaction of proficiency level with the rate of pm use are potentially revealing if we consider the possibility that there might be a developmental path in the acquisition of pms. both scarcella (1983) and hays (1992) speculated that learners acquire and use only certain pms at lower levels of proficiency before acquiring others to use in more varied contexts at higher proficiencies. this suggestion is supported by hasselgreen's (2004) study: she proposed three hypothetical stages of development in the use of pms that are exemplified by each group of speakers in her study (lower proficiency learners, higher proficiency learners, and native speakers). certain smallwords are underused by the lowest-level speakers while other expressions are only part of the repertoire of higher-proficiency speakers or native speakers (p. 222). the use of pragmatic markers across proficiency levels in second language speech 643 related to the role of proficiency and the possibility of a developmental path of acquisition in the use of pms is the issue of the extent to which learners use a variety of pms. when we focus on just a small set, the diversity is not clear. richness could be related to proficiency level and development. as discussed above, previous research has found that learners generally use pms at a lower rate than native speakers. however, as we will see below, pms are also often overused by non-native speakers. müller (2005) found that the markers so, like, and you know were underused by learners in comparison with native speakers. however, the marker well was not underused by non-native speakers. a full discussion of müller’s results is beyond the scope of this study since she also considered the effects of gender, age, relation between partners, role in the discourse, and time abroad on pm use. relevant to this study is the fact that müller’s analysis found differences in the rates of use of particular functions of pms. for example, after identifying 10 different functions for you know (five at the textual level, and five at the interactional level), müller found that native speakers of american english used you know significantly more often than l1 german speakers on all of the textual functions and three out of the five of the interactional functions. hasselgreen (2004) also found a complex pattern of learners using different markers than native speakers to perform various communicative functions. in the category of hedges, for example, which “indicate the degree of vagueness or commitment” (p. 204), learners underused just, sort of/ kind of, like, and a bit. the “general extender” (overstreet & yule, 1997) type of hedge, exemplified by and stuff/and everything, was virtually absent from both norwegian l1 groups. within the same category of hedges, the learners used i think and or something at higher rates than native speakers. what is more, the higher-proficiency norwegian group used more hedges than the lower-proficiency group, but not a greater variety. romero-trillo (1997) found that the markers i mean, well, you know, you see were underused but that listen was overused. he attributes this to transfer of spanish oye ‘listen,’ which is used frequently in spanish. the current study aims to address several gaps in previous research by examining both the general rate of use as well as the range of use of pms using data from learners at varying proficiency levels in comparison with native speakers. previous studies have generally done one or more of these things, but not all at the same time. hasselgreen (2004) is the only previous study that considered the proficiency level of the learners and had comparable native speaker data on a larger set of pms. however, the current study differs from hasselgreen’s in three ways that will contribute to the understanding of the development of learner pm use. the current study has a higher number of finelycolleen neary-sundquist 644 grained proficiency levels (5 vs. hasselgreen’s 2), uses monologic data rather than dialogic, and investigates a much larger set of pms (121 vs. 19). it is important to consider both proficiency level and native speaker comparison data when trying to build an understanding of aspects of learner speech. foster and tavakoli (2009) called for the inclusion of native speaker comparison data in more research studies. they argued that the inclusion of data from native speakers performing the same tasks under the same conditions is important in order to distinguish more clearly task and processing effects from other effects. likewise, data from learners at multiple proficiency levels allow for the investigation of how learner interlanguage develops. 3. research questions this study was designed to investigate the acquisition of pms by learners at various proficiency levels both in terms of the rate of their use as well as the type of expressions used. it therefore attempted to answer the following three research questions concerning the rate, frequency, and variety of pms used by learners: 1. what is the rate of pm use by esl speakers at different proficiency levels and how does this compare to that of native speakers performing the same speech tasks? 2. do esl speakers and native speakers use the same pms most frequently, even if they are generally alike or different in their rate of pm use? 3. do esl speakers use a lesser variety of pms than native speakers? after the methodology section below, the results of the quantitative analysis will be presented in the order corresponding to the order of these three research questions. 4. methodology 4.1. the oral proficiency test the data for this study came from a computer-mediated, semi-direct test of oral proficiency (hereafter opt) that is administered to prospective international teaching assistants.6 the exam consists of ten items that require examinees to record their responses by speaking into a computer microphone. after receiving 6 for more information on the methodology, participants, data coding, and testing procedure, see neary-sundquist (2013), where these issues are discussed in the context of a similar study. the use of pragmatic markers across proficiency levels in second language speech 645 a prompt for each item, examinees have 3 minutes to take notes and plan their response.7 each response is limited to 2 minutes, after which time the recording is automatically stopped.8 for this study, four of the ten tasks were selected for transcription and coding, including the “news,” “personal,” “passing information,” and “telephone” tasks.9 in the news task, an opinion about a news item must be given. in the personal task, the examinees give a response to an open-ended audio question about their personal experience, such as how they learned english or who their favorite teacher is. in the passing information task, the examinees relate some information that they have read to someone who has no knowledge of it, such as describing a job notice to someone they think might like to apply for the job. in the telephone task, examinees listen to a recorded message from one of their office mates and leave a short message on his/her home answering machine. the particular questions used in the different tasks in the opt were not identical; rather, they came from several different forms of the test that are given regularly. the internal consistency coefficients on the different versions of the test are very high, ranging from .96 to .98, and the single factor solutions were found in a study of the factor structure (ginther, dimova, & yang 2010). the exams are rated by two trained raters both of whom are also instructors in the university’s english proficiency program. when the two raters disagree, the exam is sent to a third rater to break the tie. the ten tasks in the exam are given a single holistic score that ranges from 2 to 6. a set of descriptors for each level can be found in appendix a. 7 the exam item prompts include written, video, and audio input; the exact text of the prompts is secured and consequently not available to the public. 8 the monologic nature of the data used in this study could be considered a limitation in the analysis of pms, due to their importance in interaction between the speaker and interlocutor. however, the testing circumstances under which the data were collected also offered a number of advantages. first of all, there was no variability introduced by the presence of an interlocutor. that is, the examinees were not more or less likely to employ a pm based on their judgment of the reactions of a conversation partner. secondly, the testing environment allowed for the collection of larger amounts of data than have often been used in previous studies of pms. thirdly, since the data examined in this study came from a language test, they had already been subdivided into proficiency levels whose reliability had been independently established. this makes it possible to investigate the use of pms by varying proficiency levels, an aspect of learner pragmatics that has not been previously examined in the literature. 9 these four tasks were chosen out of the ten available in order to provide tasks with a range of task types and levels of structure. the passing information and telephone tasks were considered more structured since they entail repeating specific information. the news and personal tasks were considered less structured since they are open-ended and the speaker has more leeway in structuring their response. colleen neary-sundquist 646 4.2. participants data consisting of 184 speech samples were analyzed. the esl speaker examinees were all graduate students and prospective teaching assistants at an american university. the esl speakers were grouped into four different proficiency levels, numbered 3 to 6. there were 10 participants at level 3, 10 at level 4, 10 at level 5, 7 at level 6, and 10 native speakers. all of the esl speaker examinees came from either a chinese or korean language background.10 the native speaker group consisted of speakers of american english who were also graduate university students. a table showing the language background and scores of the participants can be found in appendix b. level 6 has only seven examinees because that number was the total available in the testing records. an additional limitation was that there were only six responses to the personal item for the native speaker group; the earlier version of the exam lacked this question. the data for each level was evenly split between examinees with a chinese and korean l1 background; that is, there were 5 examinees with l1 chinese and 5 examinees with l1 korean in each group of 10. the group of 7 examinees at level 6 was made up of 3 native chinese speakers and 4 native korean speakers. 4.3. data preparation and coding the oral exam responses were transcribed by the author using carter and mccarthy's (2006) list of pms. their definition is appropriate for this study since it was generated from a corpus-based investigation of actual language use. the corpus-based nature of the definition makes it particularly appropriate for this study since it likewise investigates a corpus of native and non-native discourse in context. furthermore, this definition of pms is particularly useful for methodological reasons: carter and mccarthy's classification is accompanied by a list of 121 expressions. unlike other studies that more narrowly define pms and focus exclusively on a small group of pms, carter and mccarthy's definition is more comprehensive and their list of appropriate expressions more extensive. their list includes sub-categories of pms, including “discourse markers” like you know, well, or so, “stance markers” 10 these two language backgrounds were chosen based on several criteria. the first was that enough speakers of these languages take the exam in order to provide a range of participants at every proficiency level. the second consideration was that these groups learned english as a foreign language but their schooling does not take place in english, which might be the case for indian learners of english. two language groups, rather than one, were chosen in order to counterbalance the results against the possibility of transfer effects from the l1. the use of pragmatic markers across proficiency levels in second language speech 647 such as actually, of course, and hopefully, “hedges,” for example, i think, just, and kind of, as well as ”interjections” like gosh, wow, or ouch.11 two coders, the author and a colleague, analyzed the transcripts wordby-word for pms. this methodology allowed for the identification of pm versus non-pm use of particular words. for example, so has multiple functions in english, some of which are not pms (as an adverb or conjunction indicating purpose), and some which are pms (with functions such as introducing a summary, shifting the discourse, or even holding the floor; see buysse, 2009 and buysse, 2012 for a thorough discussion of the various uses of so). similarly, also can function as an adverb or as a pm that can signal a number of different discourserelated messages, including an additive function that is used when the speaker wants to legitimize the relevance of their utterance (see waring, 2003 for further discussion on the functions of also in discourse). as an illustration of the multiplicity of uses, the passages below contain examples of so and also that were not counted as pms, and further examples that were counted as pms: . . . she’s very worried so she’s wondering whether ah she could set up a special time ah with you to ah get some help on homework ah before the next exam. (korean level 6 speaker) i have to take lessons, in english, and . . . many lessons in physics are also in english as well. (chinese level 3 speaker) . . . so, i’d say that it’s, it’s a good idea to involve university students, and give them interaction with schoolchildren. (chinese level 6 speaker) she asked to arrange a special time for her. if you can, she really appreciate you. also, she worried about her homework because she did not do it well. (korean level 4 speaker) the first examples of so and also, underlined above, were not counted as pms. the second set of examples of so (so i’d say) and also were counted as pms. this use of so occurred at the end of the speaking passage, after several reasons for the speaker’s opinion were enumerated. it marked a summative statement. prosody also sometimes gave clues to the identification of this type of so (see below). a further advantage of the hand-coding methodology was that it was possible to allow for some variation in the list of expressions. for example, carter and mccarthy (2006) list to sum up and in the end as pms, but they do not include in sum or all in all. since the coders were reading through all of the data rather than electronically searching for expressions, it was possible to identify 11 for a comprehensive list of all pms and typical examples, see carter and mccarthy (2006). colleen neary-sundquist 648 such variations in wording. pragmatic marker appears to be a highly idiosyncratic phenomenon in some cases, and this research methodology takes such individual variation into account. interrater reliability for the coding of pms was .94. in the case of a discrepancy in the identification of the pms, the two coders discussed the example in question and came to an agreement. coding posed several challenges at times; as aijmer (2013) pointed out, the meaning of pms is inherently “flexible and fuzzy” (p. 15). however, identifying pms was aided by the use of a well-defined list (carter & mccarthy, 2006). in cases where the raters still had doubts about whether a particular expression was being used as a pm or not, listening to the actual recordings, rather than relying on the transcripts, was often helpful. fung and carter (2007, p. 413) noted several prosodic “clues” that distinguish pms: “pauses, phonological reductions, and separate tone units.” paying attention to such prosodic clues sometimes helped the coders to identify pm uses of some words and expressions. as aijmer (2013) noted, however, the relationship between the formal properties of pms, such as prosody, and their function and meaning is complex; prosodic features cannot be relied upon exclusively to identify pms. after the pms were identified and counted, the total number of words used by each examinee was calculated. non-lexical filled pauses such as um, ah, or uh were removed from the transcripts and not included in the total word count. the total number of words and the number of pms used by each subject on each task were then entered into spreadsheets. the number of pms was divided by the total number of words to calculate the percentage of pms that was used by each subject. the resulting percentages were then averaged to give the average percentage of pm use for all of the responses at each level and for each task. 4.4. statistical analysis descriptive statistics, including means, standard deviations, and 95% confidence intervals were calculated for the rates of pm use using statistical analysis software, version 9.1.3. a spearman rank order correlation was used to calculate the relationship between pm use and proficiency group since the opt scale is ordinal. a kruskal-wallis test with mann-whitney post-hoc tests was performed to test the results for statistical significance. 5. results the quantitative results are presented in the following sub-sections according to the three main issues generated by the research questions. the data are followed the use of pragmatic markers across proficiency levels in second language speech 649 by a brief description of the results. the relationship between the results and the research questions will be addressed in the discussion section of the paper. 5.1. rate of pragmatic marker use the rate of pm usage was calculated by dividing the total number of words used by a speaker by the total number of pms they used. table 1 presents the descriptive statistics and 95% confidence intervals (cis) for the rates of pm use for all five proficiency groups, along with the means and standard deviations of the number of words and pms, and the mean rate of pms for each level. table 1 descriptive statistics for the rate of pm use level n mean no. of words (sd) mean no. of pms (sd) mean pm rate (sd) min max lower 95% ci upper 95% ci 3 10 421 (79) 9 (5) 0.021 (0.01) 0.003 0.035 0.01 0.03 4 10 525 (144) 13 (10) 0.025 (0.019) 0.006 0.066 0.01 0.04 5 10 579 (122) 18 (10) 0.031 (0.016) 0.012 0.064 0.02 0.04 6 7 743 (116) 40 (21) 0.052 (0.02) 0.037 0.094 0.04 0.07 ns 10 584 (215) 31 (13) 0.052 (0.014) 0.025 0.067 0.04 0.06 note. ns = native speakers the results show that pm use rose with proficiency level; however, the pattern was not entirely straightforward. levels 3 and 4 were similar, at 2.1% and 2.5%. the sharpest gain in pm use occurred at levels 5 and 6, with a jump of 1% and then a further jump of over 2%. but pm usage did not continue to rise for the native speakers; instead, their usage was identical to that of the level 6 group. the pattern showed that the two highest and the two lowest proficiency groups were very alike in their pm use but that the middle level showed a steeper rise in pm use. correlation tests and tests of statistical significance indicated that there was a positive correlation between pm use and proficiency level and that there were significant differences between levels. the spearman correlation for the rate of pm use and proficiency level was .66. the results of a kruskal-wallis test were significant (h = 22, 4 df, p = <.0001). mann-whitney post-hoc pairwise comparisons showed that level 3 was significantly different from levels 5, 6, and native speakers, and that levels 4 and 5 were each significantly different from levels 6 and native speakers. the results of the analysis of pm usage rate can be summarized as follows: the use of pms correlated positively with proficiency level. learners generally used pms at a lower rate than native speakers, but advanced learners’ rate of use did reach native-speaker levels. the use of pms increased gradually from levels 3 to 5 and rose rather abruptly between levels 5 and 6. colleen neary-sundquist 650 5.2. frequency of particular pragmatic markers the second research question is: which particular pms were used most frequently both by learners and by native speakers? table 2 shows the three most frequently used expressions for each level. results indicate that the three most frequently used expressions were the same for the level 3, 4, and 5 proficiency groups. i think, so, and also were the top three pms in these three groups. the level 6 group is noticeably different in this regard, with just one of these expressions in the top 3: so. the native speakers had two of the same expressions as the first three proficiency groups: i think and so. in terms of differences in the groups, level 6 and the native speaker group stood out for their frequent use of just, while the level 6 results were notable for the inclusion of you know. table 2 the three most frequently used pms for each proficiency level level 3 level 4 level 5 level 6 native speakers i think so also i think also so i think so also just so you know i think so just table 3 provides an overview of these five most common pms in the corpus at each of the five proficiency levels. both the raw figures for the number of pms used and the percentage each pm represents are given. the percentages for each particular pm were obtained by dividing the number of occurrences of that marker by the total number of pms. the data indicate that the higher proficiency levels, including levels 5 and 6, along with the native speakers, had a more evenly distributed use of different pms. speakers at lower levels (levels 3 and 4) used certain pms, including i think or so or also for level 4, at a much higher rate than other more common phrases like just or you know. thus, the higher levels of proficiency showed a flatter distribution of the most frequently used pms, while the two lower levels exhibited some spikes in the frequency of certain pms. table 3 the frequency of particular pms by proficiency level pms level 3 level 4 level 5 level 6 ns total pms (% of pms) 92 (100) 134 (100) 181 (100) 281 (100) 310 (100) i think 30 (32.6) 31 (23.1) 32 (17.7) 25 (8.9) 44 (14.2) so 16 (17.4) 10 (7.5) 26 (14.4) 31 (11) 28 (9) also 12 (13) 25 (18.7) 21 (11.6) 19 (6.8) 15 (4.8) just 3 (3.3) 5 (3.7) 7 (3.9) 31 (11) 23 (7.4) you know 1 (1.1) 5 (3.7) 14 (7.7) 29 (10.3) 10 (3.2) note. ns = native speakers the use of pragmatic markers across proficiency levels in second language speech 651 5.3. the variety of pragmatic marker use in the previous section, results indicated that learners in the lower proficiency groups were overusing certain expressions such as i think in relation to the higherproficiency speakers. if this is the case, then this lack of variety in their expressions should be apparent in more than just one expression. figure 1 shows the number of different pms used by learners in each proficiency group. the number of different expressions used at each level went up steadily from 25 pms at level 3 to 69 pms among the native speakers. this shows that as learners acquire pms, they also make use of a greater variety of them. however, it is possible that, although they were using a greater variety of expressions, these new expressions did not represent a large proportion of their overall pm use. in order to examine if this was the case, it is necessary to look at how much of the learners’ pm use is accounted for by the most frequently used expressions at each level. figure 1 the number of unique pms used by level figure 2 compares the use of the three most frequent pms for each proficiency group with the remainder of the pm each group used. the data here show that the percentage of pms accounted for by the most used expressions fell consistently with proficiency level. that is, pm use for the lower proficiency groups was composed of repeated use of a few expressions and a more limited use of a larger variety of expressions. the three most frequent expressions accounted for a majority of pm use for the level 3 proficiency group and almost half for the level 4 proficiency group. 25 32 49 58 69 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 level 3 level 4 level 5 level 6 native speakers colleen neary-sundquist 652 figure 2 the percentage of pms accounted for by the three most frequent pms 6. discussion 6.1. frequency of pragmatic markers across proficiency levels according to the results presented above, the data indicate that pm use rises with proficiency level and correlates positively with it. at first glance, the fact that this is the case is not surprising. it is expected that pm use would rise with proficiency level, based on previous research on pms among second language learners (hasselgreen 2004; hellerman & vergun, 2007). the use of pms shows that the speakers are able to provide additional information about their message, in addition to its basic meaning. this may indicate that they do not have to allocate as much attention to formulating their basic message and can instead give some attention to how they would like it to be interpreted. this is reflected in increased pm use at higher proficiency levels. thus, in terms of the research question 1 of this study, the data indicate a general rise in the frequency of pms with increased proficiency. what is surprising, however, is the abrupt rise in pm use between levels 5 and 6. this seems to indicate that pm use makes sudden progress after a certain critical mass of general proficiency is reached. during the transition from level 5 to level 6, the learners' use of pms jumps dramatically to native-like levels. this seems to indicate that this area of pragmatic development occurs fairly late for level 3 level 4 level 5 level 6 native speakers 63 49,3 43,7 32,3 30,6 37 50,7 56,3 67,7 69,4 3 most used pms all other pms the use of pragmatic markers across proficiency levels in second language speech 653 learners. this could possibly be due to the fact, often mentioned in definitions of pms, that these expressions are part of the message but not of the essential propositional meaning. therefore, learners are only able to add these types of nuances to what they are saying when they do not have to devote as much attention to formulating the content of what they are saying. looked at from the perspective of pms and fluency, this could also indicate that the use of pms is actually supporting or even enabling the speakers to become more fluent. however, this suggestion must be considered with caution in light of the fact that this study does not directly examine the relationship between pm use and fluency measured with temporal variables. the relationship between pms and fluency is no doubt complex and provides rich opportunities for further study. although a sharp increase in the rate of pm use is seen between levels 5 and 6, the use of pms was still notable at levels 3 and 4. even at the fairly low proficiency level (level 3), the examinees used 2.1% pms. this is remarkable when we consider that pms are not regularly taught in the classroom. it is likely that this pedagogical oversight is due to the fact that pms are considered secondary, extraneous, and optional compared with the necessity of mastering categories such as verbs, nouns, and prepositions. it may also arise from the fact that pms are considered too difficult to teach. with few formal instructional materials, teachers are left to rely on their own intuition, which they soon find inadequate to explain the intricacies of pm use. 6.2. the most frequent pragmatic markers at each proficiency level in terms of research question 2, the results indicate that the first three proficiency groups were remarkably similar with respect to the pms they used most frequently. at least at this level of analysis, the results are somewhat surprising in how similar they are across groups; we might have expected at least some variation in the most frequent expressions. however, the pattern that emerges instead is one of close similarity among the first three levels and then a drastic difference at level 6, with only one of the same expressions to be found among the three most frequent pms. interestingly, this pattern mirrors the pattern seen above for the frequency of pms in general. in both cases, the first three proficiency groups cluster together, followed by a jump in use for level 6 and the native speaker group. these results therefore also support the intriguing pattern that some significant change in the acquisition of pms occurs between the level 5 and level 6 proficiency groups. it is important, however, to note that the native speaker group has two expressions in common with the three lower proficiency groups; this argues against the significance of the fact that the level 6 group differs markedly with colleen neary-sundquist 654 respect to the proficiency groups below it. note that these expressions do not represent the most frequent expressions for all of the groups. rather, they were included based on the fact that they appeared in the top three most frequent expressions for any one group. as we can see in table 3 above, the three highest proficiency groups, level 5, level 6, and native speakers, are quite similar in their rates of use of these five expressions. the level 3 proficiency group seems to follow the same general trend as these three higher proficiency groups, although the rates of use are quite different for i think. the level 4 proficiency group is the outlier here, with noticeably higher rates of use for i think and also. what the two lower proficiency levels have in common is that they both use i think to a much greater extent than the three higher proficiency groups. there are several possibilities that would account for greater use of i think. it is possible that they are using this expression as a filler, much in the same way a speaker might repeat umm. other possibilities are that they could be marking greater uncertainty about what they are saying, or they may be overusing this pm to compensate for the fact that they do not have a command of a greater variety of expressions. recall that hasselgreen (2004, p. 222) also discussed the possibility of an order of acquisition for pms based on which pms the lower and higher proficiency groups in her study seemed to have mastered. her results are not directly comparable to those in this study due to the differences in the types of tasks from which her data were drawn. however, she too observed two main stages of development that resemble those found in this study: learners at lower levels of proficiency tend to overuse a small number of expressions, while those at higher levels expand to a greater variety that resembles the pattern of use among native speakers. the possibility of such changes in pm use would have important implications both for the study and teaching of pms and requires further research. if it is true that there is an order of acquisition for pms, this would not be the first pragmatic phenomenon that has shown evidence of such an order. dittmar and terborg (1991), for example, found an order of acquisition for expressions that encode modality. similarly, kasper and rose (2002) suggested that the act of making requests proceeded through five stages for l2 learners. as pointed out in the methodology section, this study relies on monologic data, which has some advantages in terms of research design, allows for the analysis of a large amount of data for cross-sectional comparison, and makes it possible to consider pm use by learners at independently established proficiency levels. however, another effect of the monologic data may be that certain markers, such as you know, are likely to be less frequent since there is no interlocutor present. however, it is interesting to note that many of the pms the use of pragmatic markers across proficiency levels in second language speech 655 that signal the speaker’s attitude or offer indications about how their utterances should be interpreted are still well represented in the results. for example, hedges such as i think were still quite frequent among learners at all levels. this suggests that even in a monologic environment, the speakers are still giving cues to an imagined interlocutor, at least in the circumstances under which the data were collected. even learners at a low proficiency level feel the requirement to offer this type of pragmatic information, which may indicate some interesting avenues for future research into learner pragmatics. 6.3. variety of pragmatic markers at each proficiency level in terms of research question 3 and the variety of pm use, esl speakers use fewer unique expressions than native speakers. in contrast to the rate of use of pms in general, which rose sharply between levels 5 and 6, the number of unique expressions used rose more gradually from 25 expressions at level 2 to 58 at level 6. the largest gain in the number of expressions used occurred between levels 4 and 5, where 17 new expressions were gained. although the level 6 group used pms at the same rate as native speakers, they were still well behind them in the variety of expressions. the data on the variety of pms further suggests the interesting possibility that learners first attain command of a critical mass of expressions before they begin to use them at more target-like levels. this increase in the number of unique expressions used thus occurs earlier than the increase in the rate of pm use, which, we saw, occurred between levels 5 and 6. the fact that an increase in the variety of expressions used precedes an increase in the rate of use is logical and might indicate that a critical mass of pms must be mastered before esl speakers might begin to use them at native-like levels. one interesting possibility concerning the relationship between the rate and the range of pm use is suggested by research on second language vocabulary acquisition. various studies of vocabulary acquisition have found a consistent relationship between general proficiency level and measures of lexical diversity (daller, van hout, & treffers-daller, 2003; malvern & richards, 2002; o’loughlin, 1995; zareva, schwanenflugl, & nikolova, 2005). lexical diversity has proven to have a more consistent positive correlation with proficiency level than other measures of vocabulary acquisition. lu (2012) found that a number of different lexical variation measures had significant correlations with the quality of oral english narratives produced by chinese learners on proficiency test rankings. it was lexical variation, rather than lexical sophistication or density, that exhibited this correlation. yu (2010) colleen neary-sundquist 656 also found a statistically significant positive correlation between lexical diversity and the ratings given to writing and speaking samples of learners of english. the acquisition of pms might proceed in a fashion that is similar to that of vocabulary, with learners showing an overreliance on a more limited number of expressions. 7. conclusions, limitations, and directions for future research this study provides new data on the general rate of pm use in the speech of esl learners. the data indicate that the frequency of pms increases gradually at first, increases more dramatically at the highest proficiency levels, and reaches a rate identical to that of native speakers. learners at lower levels of proficiency tend to use only a small repertoire of pms that includes i think, so, and also, while those at higher levels use more varied expressions at rates similar to those of native speakers. the richness of these expressions increases gradually across proficiency levels but never reaches native-like patterns of variation. this study was limited by several important factors that offer indications of areas for future research. the data used in this study come from a semi-direct test of oral proficiency. the fact that the data come from a language test and are monologic (no interlocutor was present) may have a noticeable impact on the types of language produced. there are few studies that directly compare the same tasks being performed under both monologic and dialogic conditions, and those that have examined this have shown mixed results. gan (2012) found that esl learners produced more t-units and clauses and longer t-units and utterances on monologic rather than dialogic tasks. michel, kuiken, and vedder (2007) found that the language produced by learners of dutch on monologic tasks was more complex but less fluent and accurate than the language produced on dialogic tasks. therefore, the monologic condition under which the data for this study were gathered may have a significant impact on the results. further research should look at pm use in more naturalistic data and with a speaking partner. this is especially important given the interactive nature of pms. as discussed above, the monologic data proved to be advantageous in many ways in the research design of this study; however, dialogic data would provide additional information concerning aspects of pm use that are not addressed in this study. as discussed above, another limitation involved in the study of pms is the lack of agreement about their function, status, and identification. the identification issue is particularly troublesome since it affects the comparability of different studies. this study has tried to minimize the problem by using a comprethe use of pragmatic markers across proficiency levels in second language speech 657 hensive, published list of pms from a corpus-based grammar (carter & mccarthy, 2006). however, the generalizability of the results here is still limited by the fact that most studies use different definitions, lists, and even terminology for pms. building an understanding of how learners use pms will require not only more research but particularly research that makes it clear which types of expressions were counted as pms. the findings of this study that highly proficient non-native speakers use pms at a rate, but not with a range, similar to native speakers also suggests areas for future research. there may be potentially instructive comparisons to be made between the use of pms and the development of vocabulary in general. research into second language vocabulary acquisition, as discussed above, has shown that lexical diversity correlates positively with proficiency level. it would be instructive to consider the development of pm use in comparison with the development of lexical diversity and to examine whether they proceed in a similar fashion. in fact, the development of pm use should be considered in light of the growth of other linguistic subsystems in learners’ interlanguage. in this vein, 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(2005). relationship between lexical competence and language proficiency: variable sensitivity. studies in second language acquisition, 27, 567-595. the use of pragmatic markers across proficiency levels in second language speech 661 appendix a descriptors for the levels of the oral proficiency test level content delivery 6 wide range of vocabulary complexity of sentence structure interpretative/summary statements some non-native usage meaning clearly expressed provision of a frame economy of expression smooth delivery almost no pauses/hesitations/ choppiness thought expressed in one utterance no problems with articulation use of varied intonation and tone 5 somewhat unconventional words listener effort needed at times simple sentence construction well organized and coherent meaning clear clearly non-native like delivery some pauses and choppiness, but comprehension unobstructed some sound substitutions listener effort required at points 4 dependence on the prompt ineffective/abrupt transitions omission of function words systematic problems with bound morphology topic shifts lack of coherence weak organization repetition interferes with coherence intended meaning unclear lack of elaboration ineffective repetition of words/ phrases pauses/hesitations are more frequent flat intonation many identifiable articulation/ pronunciation/stress problems pace interferes with comprehension close listener attention required 3 misuse of particular words problems with bound morphology frequent attempts to re-start/ re-phrase without clarification unintended meaning misunderstands prompt deliberate/ineffective delivery frequent pauses/hesitations within phrasal boundaries ineffective attempts of interpretative statements limitation of vocabulary colleen neary-sundquist 662 appendix b participant data number native language native country oral proficiency test score 5 chinese china 3 5 korean korea 3 5 chinese china 4 5 korean korea 4 5 chinese china 5 5 korean korea 5 3 chinese china 6 4 korean korea 6 10 english usa n/a the use of pragmatic markers across proficiency levels in second language speech 663 appendix c list of pragmatic markers from carter and mccarthy (2006) actually i mean not to say that's to say admittedly i must admit now there again also i must say obviously third/ly amazingly i think of course to be frank and i'm afraid oh to be honest and then i'm sorry okay to put it another way anyway ideally on top of that to put it mildly/bluntly apparently if you ask me ooo to sum up arguably if you like oops to tell you the truth as i say in a manner of speaking or rather ugh as i was saying in fact ouch understandably as it were in general perhaps undoubtedly basically in other words predictably unfortunately by any chance in the end presumably well certainly in the x place probably what's more clearly indeed putting it mildly/bluntly where was i confidentially just (about) really wow ‘cos just think remember you know damn kind of right you see doubtless last of all rightly essentially lastly roughly finally like sadly fine like second/ly first(of all/ly) listen seriously for a start literally so fortunately look so to speak frankly maybe sort of going back to mind you strictly speaking good naturally surely gosh next surprisingly great no doubt thankfully honestly hopefully 359 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (2). 2020. 359-384 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.2.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt learnervs. expert-constructed outlines: testing the associations with l2 text comprehension and multiple intelligences sholeh moradi shahid bahonar university of kerman, kerman, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2964-4101 sholeh.flam@gmail.com shima ghahari shahid bahonar university of kerman, kerman, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7182-8460 ghahary@uk.ac.ir mohammad abbas nejad shahid bahonar university of kerman, kerman, iran https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5287-0970 mabbasnejad2000@yahoo.com abstract cognitive organizers (cos) are text aids which represent objects, concepts, and their relations by the use of symbols and spatial arrangements without adding to semantic content. the present study examines language learners’ text comprehension through outlines, a popular co, compared with text-only condition, and further investigates the effect of learner-constructed outlines (i.e., systematic note-taking) and expert-constructed outlines (i.e., readymade displays) on comprehension. finally, the predictive power of multiple intelligences (mi) across different input modalities is scrutinized. following stratified random sampling, a total of 111 efl undergraduates were divided into text-only (receiving a text twice), expert-constructed (the text followed by an outline), and learner-constructed (the text followed by an outline to be drawn sholeh moradi, shima ghahari, mohammad abbas nejad 360 up by the learner) groups. a toefl examination, a 1218-word expository text on systematic sleep disorder, a follow-up reading comprehension test, and a multiple intelligences inventory constituted the data collection measures. the results of multiple regression and anova were as follows: (a) cos lead to more content recall than text displays; (b) expert-constructed and learner-constructed outlines are equally effective; (c) mi significantly predicts the groups’ reading comprehension; (d) interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences are significant correlates of textonly groups’ performance; and (e) visual, verbal, and intrapersonal intelligences are significantly associated with learner-constructed groups’ reading scores. the study offers several implications for theory and practice. keywords: textual enhancement techniques; cognitive organizers; expert-constructed outlines; learner-constructed outlines; multiple intelligences; expository texts 1. introduction as a predominant text genre in the present academic environments, expository (or scientific) texts are characterized by (a) the high density of unfamiliar and/or technical vocabularies, (b) the frequent use of causal and sequential text schemas, and (c) the need to integrate and draw numerous elaborative inferences with current segments of text (diakidoy, kendeou, & ioannides, 2003). the ubiquitous presence of concepts and concept relations in expository texts calls for the implementation of techniques and/or strategies to render implicit connections more explicit (van gog, kester, nievelstein, giesbers, & paas, 2009). an approach that has been used over the past two decades to compensate for poor text structure (the other approach being text restructuring) is the use of cognitive organizers. cognitive organizers (cos) or adjunct displays are broadly defined as text aids which represent objects, concepts, and their relations by the use of symbols and their spatial arrangements without adding to the semantic content (mccrudden, schraw, & lehman, 2009). they hold great potential for helping readers see the unseen phenomenon by clearly and efficiently representing multiple intraand inter-concept relations for the reader to view at a single glance (amundsen, weston, & mcalpine, 2008; redford, thiede, wiley, & griffin, 2012). according to manoli and papadopoulou (2012), cos differ in the ways they depict the relations between concepts (e.g., vertical hierarchical vs. nonlinear coordinate displays). a reader-friendly and easy-to-construct type of co is an outline. research on the effectiveness of cos, in general, and outlines, in particular, on text comprehension has been inconclusive, with some investigations suggesting no significant difference between control and experimental groups and learnervs. expert-constructed outlines: testing the associations with l2 text comprehension and. . . 361 others showing “significance for certain types of students when responding to certain types of questions” (kinchin, 2014, p. 39). despite second language (l2) learners’ more complex reading challenges as a result of their limited l2 competence and their higher demand for input enhancement techniques as supplementary aids, little research to date has studied the effectiveness of outlines for l2 learners (see below for the few exceptions). to bridge these gaps in the literature, the present study investigates the contributions of two forms of cos, namely learner-constructed outlines (i.e., students’ systematic note-taking as a productive strategy) and expert-constructed outlines (i.e., students’ review of readymade outlines as a receptive strategy) in comparison with the text-only condition (presentation of a text twice), on l2 learners’ comprehension. it is worth mentioning that in this study, following the conventions in the literature, the terms adjunct displays, adjunct aids, concept maps, advance organizers, and cognitive organizers are used interchangeably, since outlines, as the focus of the study, belong to all the categories (for more on this see tzeng, 2010). 2. literature review in this section, initially, the most noticeable theories supporting the use of cos are introduced and described. then, outlining, as a popular co, will be presented by reviewing its different forms and advantages, the empirical studies into its impact on learning and comprehension, and potential research areas. finally, the effect (or association) of individual differences, particularly cognitive and affective characteristics, with the use of cos will be addressed by reviewing relevant studies. 2.1. cos: theoretical background a major concern of educational practitioners has long been to find a solution to the difficulties in comprehending the content (or expository) texts. expository texts comprehension, as postulated by robinson, involves “learning concepts [which] define attributes, recognizing defining attributes when presented with a range of examples, learning hierarchical and coordinate relations among concepts and finally, transferring this knowledge by correctly identifying concepts given new examples” (1998, p. 86). some of the problems with comprehending these texts may be related to students and caused, for example, by their inability to draw inferences across sentences, lack of relevant content knowledge, or unawareness of useful reading strategies. other comprehension barriers can be attributed to the nature of the text and its poor organization or structure (kendeou, van den broek, helder, & karlsson, 2014; schnotz, 2014). cos or adjunct displays (ads) are among the strategies used for facilitating text comprehension. sholeh moradi, shima ghahari, mohammad abbas nejad 362 cos can be simply defined as those supportive materials which include only important text information and which differ in their formats and in the way(s) they communicate ideas. they are supposed to be abstract and inclusive, provide a means of organizing the new material, avoid distractions, save information processing resources, and enhance later recall and retrieval (gurlitt & renkl, 2010). there are several theoretical explanations in support of the adjunct display effect (ade) (darsh & gersten, as cited in robinson, katamaya, & fan, 1996). according to the selective cued hypothesis (mayer, 1984), the learning and recall effects of cos are explained by the double presentation of the information, once in the text and once in the displays. alternatively, the conjoint retention hypothesis (kulhavy, white, topp, chan, & adams, 1985) and dual coding theory (paivio, 1983) maintain that “textual information referenced in a display is dually [conjointly] encoded in memory, both verbally and spatially,” thereby leading to increased retrieval effect (marefat & ghahari, 2009, p. 181). the third category of theories supporting ade includes the visual argument (waller, 1981) and computational efficiency (larkin & simon, 1987) hypotheses, which suggest that viewing objects in a two-dimensional position results in a quicker and easier computation of concept relations and facilitates later retrieval. apart from being computationally efficient, cos are potentially search efficient. according to the search efficiency hypothesis (o’donnell, 1993) and based on empirical research, cos are effective in locating information at both local (for scanning specific or local information) and global (for detecting the main idea) levels (robinson & skinner, 1996). 2.2. expertand learner-constructed outlines: overview of existing research cos have been largely studied over the past two decades as a potential breakthrough in easing off the problems associated with text comprehension (marefat & ghahari, 2009). examples include graphic organizers, concept maps, and outlines of robinson et al. (1996), knowledge maps with lists of griffin and robinson (2000), graphic organizers of rowland-bryant et al. (2009), and graphic overviews of shaw, nihalani, mayrath, and robinson (2012). the current literature provides evidence that outlines, as a type of co, are favored over others (e.g., graphic organizers, knowledge maps, graphic overviews) for the following reasons: (a) they have a highly convenient and readerfriendly format, (b) they convey hierarchical concept relations, and (c) they are easy to design and construct (even by a layman; robinson & kiewra, 1995). in this study, the effectiveness of expert-constructed outlines (as an input-based receptive strategy) on reading comprehension was compared with learners’ selfgenerated outlines (as an output-based and productive strategy). learnervs. expert-constructed outlines: testing the associations with l2 text comprehension and. . . 363 expert-constructed outlines enjoy a number of advantages: (a) they contain the most salient ideas of the text, which are most likely to be included in assessment measures too, (b) the ideas are organized in a logical sequence (i.e., superordinate ideas are followed by the subordinates), (c) they help students grasp the content better through a simplified presentation of the text, (d) they may assist instructors at identifying subtle nuances of certain contents and detect possible areas of difficulty prior to teaching, and (e) they can be interjected at different parts of a text without requiring extensive student training or taking much class time (mccagg & dansereau, 1991). on the other hand, boyle and weishaar (1997) enumerate four advantages of having students generate their own outlines. first, students gain a better understanding of the main points of the material and relations between them when constructing their own displays. second, students can personalize the outlines by using their own terms, abbreviations, and symbols. third, once trained, students can construct them with similar content in other classes. finally, students get more actively and autonomously involved in an activity (e.g., reading assignment or lecture) when they develop outlines on their own, as opposed to reviewing a readymade display. the literature on the effect of adjunct aids on students’ text comprehension, however, is limited, context-specific (e.g., students with learning disabilities), and inconclusive (kinchin, 2014; manoli & papadopoulou, 2012; stull & mayer, 2007). even fewer studies have researched the cross-linguistic dynamics of the cos and their effectiveness in l2 learning contexts. through a pre-/posttest design study, chularut and debacker (2004) scrutinized the possible facilitative effect of concept mapping on esl students’ (n = 79) learning from english texts. the results revealed that students’ language achievement as well as learning self-regulation and self-efficacy improved as a result of studying english-language texts accompanied by cos. suzuki, sato, and awazu (2008) also investigated the instructional effectiveness of the spatial graphic representation of an english sentence with coordinators in efl reading settings. they used two different types of displays (a linear sentential representation and a spatial graphic representation) and studied 56 first-year undergraduates as participants. the results indicated that the readers comprehended graphic representation of texts significantly better and more effectively than sentential displays. having conducted a comparative study on two types of expert-constructed displays (i.e., outlines and graphic organizers), marefat and ghahari (2009) observed that adjunct aids were more efficient than text aids for reading comprehension of l2 readers (71 undergraduates). however, multiple-choice reading tests revealed that neither of the displays was superior to the other. similarly, rahmani and sadeghi (2011) examined the product and process effects of two expert-constructed aids, namely note-taking instruction and graphic sholeh moradi, shima ghahari, mohammad abbas nejad 364 organizers, on the comprehension and retention of l2 written input. the results revealed that students who completed and studied graphic organizers performed considerably better in both comprehension and recall conditions than did students who studied their conventional outlines. that is, both the product and process effects of note-taking instruction were approved. despite ample evidence in support of the effectiveness of cos, “there are some studies that yield conflicting results regarding [their] use” (manoli & papadopoulou, 2012, p. 353). for instance, alvermann (1981) evaluated the compensatory effect of graphic organizers on descriptive texts. participants (114 tenth graders) were required to read two versions of an expository passage (comparison versus description) and a graphic organizer. immediate and delayed recall measures suggested that the experimental group outperformed the control group under the descriptive text condition. results indicated that graphic organizers were useful for reorganization of information but ineffective when the reorganization was unnecessary. bean, singer, sorter, and frazee (1986) compared the effectiveness of graphic organizers and outlining for students in 10th-grade world history classes. the participants were randomly assigned to one of the three groups (graphic organizer with previous training in summarization, graphic organizer alone, and outlining). no differences were detected between graphic organizers, outlines, and traditional instruction for comprehension and recall of text information. balajthy and weisberg (1990) and davis (1994) were also among the studies which found that cos were effective for certain groups rather than for all learners, that is to say, for low ability and beginning level students. rice (1994) and griffin and tulbert (1995) questioned the “facilitative effects of graphic organizers on text comprehension” (as cited in manoli & papadopoulou, 2012, p. 353). likewise, kools, van de wiel, ruiter, crüts, and kok (2006) examined the effect of graphic organizers on the comprehension of a health education brochure text and compared subjective and objective comprehension measures. participants were asked to read a brochure text about asthma with and without these organizers, and subjective and objective measures of text comprehension were administered. findings suggested that, in contrast to the effects of graphic organizers on objective text comprehension, there was no difference between the groups on the subjective measures of comprehension (i.e., open-ended comprehension questions). finally, ciullo and reutebuch’s (2013) summary of 12 studies into the effect of graphic organizers or concept maps for students with learning disabilities suggested that mapping was not effective for improving learning unless the instruction was explicit. 2.3. cos and individual differences research has suggested that the beneficial effects of cos are mediated by learners’ individual characteristics, namely cognitive and affective variables. basque and lavoie learnervs. expert-constructed outlines: testing the associations with l2 text comprehension and. . . 365 (2006), in their overview of the studies into the effectiveness of collaborative concept maps, found that success in the use of cos depends to a large extent on learner characteristics such as motivation and situational factors like the mode of learning. they documented that cos are most effective for highly motivated learners and in face-toface learning situations. there is also evidence that, similar to most learning strategies, students with low verbal ability benefit more from cos-supported materials than do high-ability learners (manoli & papadopoulou, 2012). as nesbit and adesope ascertain, the structural form of cos, “specifically the use of brief labels and simple node-link-node syntax to represent propositions, may be more easily comprehended and constructed by learners who have lower verbal ability” (2006, p. 420). besides, cos have been more efficient for the students with low prior knowledge than those with high background knowledge. comparing the effects of three types of aids (i.e., knowledge maps, outlines, and lists) on students’ recall of college-level biology lectures, lambiotte and dansereau (1992) revealed that knowledge maps were more effective than the other two aids for the students with low prior knowledge of biology. they reasoned that “the specific macrostructure signaled by [them] might guide the knowledge construction of less knowledgeable students but conflict with the cognitive structures already established in more knowledgeable students” (as cited in nesbit & adesope, 2006, p. 420). the literature also supports the association between students’ self-regulation and self-efficacy competencies with their effective use of cos (chularut & debacker, 2004). according to gardner (1983), multiple intelligence theory (mit) is a learnercentered theory that considers learners as different individuals possessing varying types of intelligences and learning dispositions. accordingly, learners with different intelligence types come across a problem-solving task (like an l2 reading comprehension assignment) with different sets of strategies. gardner defined multiple intelligence as “the ability to solve problems, or to create products, that are valued within one or more cultural settings” (1983, p. 81). there are at least nine ways that people have of comprehending and realizing the world. table 1 summarizes the definitions of these nine micro-intelligences. table 1 mi and its subscales micro-intelligence definition verbal intelligence the ability to produce and perceive language in oral and written forms effectively logical intelligence the effective use of numbers and reasoning in problem solving tasks visual intelligence the graphical ability to use visual things and ideas in space, color, form, and shape kinesthetic intelligence the effective use of whole or parts of body to solve problems musical intelligence the sensitivity to rhythm, pitch, and melody to express emotions and thoughts naturalist intelligence the capacity to perceive and classify the natural world and environment existential intelligence the philosophical ability to tackle deep questions about life and human existence intrapersonal intelligence the ability to recognize and accept one’s capabilities and limitations interpersonal intelligence the ability to manage one’s relationships and interactions with others notes. verbal = linguistic; logical = mathematical; kinesthetic = bodily; visual = spatial. sholeh moradi, shima ghahari, mohammad abbas nejad 366 based on an extensive literature review, mi is a significant determiner and/or correlate of a variety of learning mechanisms and outcomes; among them are learning strategies awareness and use (akbari & hosseini, 2008), learning styles (denig, 2004; vincent & ross, 2001), knowledge retention and recall (ozdemir, guneysu, & tekkaya, 2006), literacy skills (brand, 2006), reading achievement (armstrong, 2003; mcmahon, rose, & parks, 2004), writing proficiency (looi & mustapha, 2010; saricaoglu & arikan, 2009), and learners’ beliefs and attitudes (bas & beyhan, 2010). given the fact that cos are among the popular learning strategies, it was presumed in this study that their application may be mediated by learners’ mi, too. such an association, however, has not yet been investigated. for this reason, mi is studied here as a potential moderator for text comprehension across three input modalities. 3. aims of the study notwithstanding the pressing demands of language learning settings for versatile input enhancement techniques and despite language learners’ more complex reading challenges as a result of limited l2 competence, little research to date has investigated the effectiveness of expertand learner-constructed adjunct aids in this certain context. as manoli and papadopoulou contend, “allowing for the nonsupportive findings of studies, room for research is left in further exploring the effectiveness of [cos] as a reading strategy, especially in the language teaching courses” (2012, p. 354). in addition, there has been no attempt to examine the mediating effect of multiple intelligences on the optimal use of cos. the present study is guided by four motivations: (a) the high proportion of expository texts in academia and their comprehension complexity, (b) the limited language competency of some l2 readers, which compounds their comprehension difficulties, (c) the scant and inconsistent literature on outlines, as a leading input enhancement technique and co, in l2 reading contexts, and (d) the absence of empirical research into the mediatory role of multiple intelligence on the efficiency of cos, in general, and outlines, as a particular subcategory of them. the following research questions were addressed in the present study: 1. is there any significant difference between the effect of text displays and outline displays on l2 readers’ text comprehension? 2. is there any significant difference between the effects of expertand learner-constructed outlines on l2 readers’ text comprehension? 3. does l2 learners’ multiple intelligence predict their text comprehension across the input modalities? learnervs. expert-constructed outlines: testing the associations with l2 text comprehension and. . . 367 4. methodology the research features a descriptive case study and adopts an ex-post facto design for it examines the effect of a single treatment across several groups. in the first part, input enhancement with three levels of text-only (no advance organizer), learner-constructed outlines, and expert-constructed outlines served as the independent variable and text comprehension was the dependent variable. in the next stage of data coding, the independent variable (or predictor) was multiple intelligence with its nine subscales and the dependent variable was text comprehension across the three modalities. 4.1. participants a total of 120 students (aged from 18 to 30, m = 21.30) from six different classes took part in the current study for some course credit. they were all junior students (80 females and 40 males) majoring in english literature and translation at two state-run universities in the southeast of iran. therefore, respondents in this study were homogenized in terms of their first language, field of study, experience with expository texts structures, and reading practices. a convenience sampling technique was employed by administering the tests to six classes the instructors and students of which agreed to cooperate. the english learners in the present study live in a typical foreign language environment and, like many asian l2 english learners, do not have sufficient exposure to the target language; therefore, they tend to receive a good portion of their l2 input from reading (ghahari & ahmadinejad, 2016a, 2016b; ghahari & basanjideh, 2015, 2017; ghahari & heidarolad, 2015). after coding and scoring the data, nine of the participants were excluded because their answer sheets were filled either incompletely or inaccurately. as a result, a total of 111 data sheets remained for further analyses. the english proficiency level of the sample was examined via a toefl examination (educational testing service, 2004). a one-way anova revealed no significant difference between the three groups, suggesting that the sample’s proficiency level was homogeneous and, considering their average scores, was the (upper)intermediate level (see table 2). table 2 sample composition and proficiency check results group mean sd f sig. text-only (n = 36) 20.42 6.15 1.322 .271 outline (n = 35) 21.97 5.96 learner-constructed (n = 40) 22.50 5.14 sholeh moradi, shima ghahari, mohammad abbas nejad 368 thus, level of proficiency, field of study, age, l1 background, educational level, and nationality were controlled, but learners’ individual differences like gender, learning styles, and study habits were possible confounding variables. 4.2. materials the study involved three instruments: (a) a toefl examination (ets, 2004), (b) the co package (including a text, an outline, and a multiple-choice test) (katayama & robinson, 2000), and (c) the multiple intelligence inventory (mckenzie, 2005). each instrument is described in detail below. 4.2.1. the proficiency test the toefl used in this study was one of the six full-length paper-based tests administered by ets (2004). the test, which aimed at determining the subjects’ language proficiency, contained a total of 40 questions including structure, written expression, and reading comprehension subtests. the whole test lasted 40 minutes to complete. using a cronbach’s alpha formula, the reliability was estimated to be .73, which is acceptable according to cohen’s (as cited in george & mallery, 2003) criteria. 4.2.2. cos package: the original draft the original package of co was designed by katayama and robinson (2000). the criteria for this selection were two-fold: (a) the materials were already developed and validated by a panel of experts in the field, and (b) they were closely relevant to our objectives in this study. in their research, the variable under study was text length; therefore, they provided their subjects with a chapterlength expository text covering the topic of sleep disorders. as stipulated earlier, a text is characterized as expository if it encompasses numerous unfamiliar and technical terms, a causal and sequential text structure, and multiple interconnected concepts to be elaborately inferred (diakidoy et al., 2003). following these criteria, katayama and robinson (2000) selected a text which addressed six specific types of sleep disorder. it contained approximately 3,500 words (with nearly 1,500 technical terms) and was distributed on eight single-spaced pages. the text was followed by a 30-item, four-option multiple-choice test measuring the factual knowledge of information explicitly stated in the text (i.e., display items). the reason for the inclusion of factual questions was to minimize the intervening effect of mental processes since display and inferential items call for different information processing paths: inferencing refers to “the abstraction learnervs. expert-constructed outlines: testing the associations with l2 text comprehension and. . . 369 of information that is not explicitly presented” and is a non-linear and multifaceted ability, where more than single information should be effectively comprehended, restored, and retrieved at the time of task completion (botting & adams, 2005, p. 50). display items, on the other hand, require learners to readily and accurately recall text information in a linear manner. hence, in answering display items, intensive reading and linguistic knowledge are the responsible parameters, whereas answering inferential items needs a strategic approach (an awareness of cognitive and metacognitive strategies) towards a text (jaswal & markman, 2001). katayama and robinson (2000) also administered a 10-item matching test of application to assess the students’ ability to apply knowledge from the text to novel examples. 4.2.3. cos package: the modified draft the materials used in katayama and robinson’s (2000) study were modified by marefat and ghahari (2009) to adjust to the limitations of class time, students’ tolerance, and their research objective. they divided the original text, which was a complete chapter on different types of sleep disorder, into three texts each covering one type of sleep disorder. the cos were the same as the original version with regard to their type and number. they did not make any changes in the number and format of the test items either. the instruments were in three sets: each set included a text, an outline, a graphic organizer, and a test consisting of 10 fouroption multiple-choice factual items. the number of words ranged from an approximate of 600 to 1,000, typed on single-spaced pages. the package was piloted before the main study and the test reliability was computed (α = .76). for the purpose of this study, one set of materials used in marefat and ghahari’s (2009) research was chosen and used iteratively. this set consisted of a 1,218-word text focusing on one type of sleep disorder (i.e., systemic sleep disorder), an outline of the same text (i.e., the expert-constructed display), and a test consisting of 10 four-option multiple-choice display items. the internal consistency of the test was found to be acceptable (α = .71). 4.2.4. the multiple intelligence checklist the multiple intelligence (mi) test designed by mckenzie (2005) was employed in this study. it consists of 9 sections each containing 10 questions. in the order of appearance, the sections reflected the participants’ naturalistic, musical, logical, existential, interpersonal, kinesthetic, verbal, interpersonal, and visual strengths. the reliability of the test fell within the acceptable range (a = .78). sholeh moradi, shima ghahari, mohammad abbas nejad 370 4.3. procedure the data collection procedure was completed over the period of two months (from early may through to late june 2015) in six academic classes. the participants gave their informed consent to take part in the study and were assured that their anonymity was strictly protected. to control for the effect of background knowledge, the text topic was disclosed to the participants prior to the study and their familiarity with it was inquired. they all admitted that the topic was novel and fairly unknown to them. the instruments were administered over two sessions (90 min) outside of the regular class time. using stratified random sampling, each class was divided into three groups. the study was carried out differently in the three groups, namely expertconstructed display, learner-constructed display, and text-only display groups. however, activities like taking the toefl, completing the mi test, studying the expository text, answering the follow-up reading comprehension test, as well as the time allotted to each task were common across them. below is the full description of the procedure in each group. 4.3.1. expert-constructed groups the groups received the text and were given 10 minutes to study it. they were notified that the text would be collected before they received the comprehension test and that it was a text-for-test task requiring a detailed study. having returned the texts, the participants received the outline of the same text. they were briefly notified that the outline was based on the same text and would help them answer the follow-up questions. ten minutes were allotted for the study of the displays. the added materials were then collected and the students started the testing part of the experiment which included 10 multiple-choice questions (10 min). after submitting the test, they were asked to fill out the mi survey checklist. 4.3.2. learner-constructed groups a week before the experiment, the researcher practiced over the course of a 90minute session with the students how to develop a standard outline. the procedure in this group is consistent with the guidelines suggested by haugwitz, nesbit, and sandmann (2010) and schroeder, nesbit, anguiano, & adesope (2018). at the end of the practicum, most of the students’ notes were in the shape of standard outlines. thus, they were partly familiar with the construction and organization of outlines and no confusion and questions were raised during learnervs. expert-constructed outlines: testing the associations with l2 text comprehension and. . . 371 the main study. in the treatment session, the students received the text and were given 10 minutes to read it. they were asked to review it carefully and were notified that the text would be collected before test administration. having submitted the texts, the participants were asked to develop an outline out of it. they were given 10 minutes to do the task. the constructed materials were then collected and the participants started doing the multiplechoice comprehension test (10 min). after completing the test, the students went through the mi checklist. 4.3.3. text-only groups the text-only groups received the same text and reviewed it over 10 minutes. they were notified that they had to read it carefully and return it before test administration. the groups were then offered another 10 minutes to study the text for the second time. next was the testing part in which the subjects, like the expertand learner-constructed groups, sat for the multiple-choice comprehension test (10 min) and the mi checklist. 4.4. data analysis for the effect of input enhancement type on text comprehension, a t test and a oneway anova with a follow-up post hoc scheffe test were used. to examine the predictive power of multiple intelligence (with nine layers) in relation to reading comprehension (under the three conditions), a multiple regression analysis was run. 5. results as depicted in table 3, the expert-constructed groups achieved the highest mean score (m = 6.86, sd = 2.14) followed by the learner-constructed condition, which stood at the second place (m = 6.35, sd = 1.72). the lowest mean score in the comprehension test was achieved by the text-only group (m = 5.61, sd = 2.17). table 3 descriptive statistics for the input groups’ reading comprehension (n = 111) groups min max mean (sd) text-only (n = 36) 2 9 5.61 (2.17) expert-constructed concept map (n = 35) 2 9 6.86 (2.14) learner-constructed concept map (n = 40) 3 10 6.35 (1.72) in order to examine whether there is any significant difference between the effect of cos (i.e., expertand learner-constructed groups) and the text-only sholeh moradi, shima ghahari, mohammad abbas nejad 372 condition on l2 learners’ text comprehension, an independent samples t test was run. preliminary levene’s test confirmed the equality of variance (f = .116, p = .73). it was revealed that the outline groups significantly outperformed the textonly groups, implying that the provision of outline as a textual enhancement technique successfully enhanced reading achievement (t = -2.43, df = 69, p = .018). in order to get a clearer picture of the effect of outlines and to allow for a cross-comparison, a one-way anova was run for the three groups. as table 4 demonstrates, the anova result was significant (f = 3.46, p = .035) and the effect size was moderate (h2 = .06) following cohen’s (1988) criteria. it implies, therefore, that there is a significant difference among the given input modes. table 4 anova results for the three input modes sum of squares df f h2 between groups 27.951 2 3.462* .06 within groups 435.941 108 total 463.892 110 notes. * p < .05. in order to specifically address the second question and to find out the most effective outline presentation mode, a post-hoc scheffe test was run. according to table 5, the learner-constructed and expert-constructed conditions did not significantly differ in terms of their effectiveness on text comprehension (p = .554). when compared in pairs, then, the only significant difference in table 5 lies between the expert-constructed and text-only groups (p = .037). table 5 post-hoc comparisons among the three input modalities group mean difference std. error sig. to vs. lc -.739 .462 .282 to vs. ec -1.246 .477 .037 lc vs. ec -.507 .465 .554 notes. to = text-only; lc = learner-constructed; ec = expert-constructed. to sum up, outlines in general were effective for expository texts comprehension compared with presenting a text twice; there existed, however, no difference between the two modes of input-based (expert-constructed) and output-based (learner-constructed) displays, to use van patten’s (1996) term. finally, to test the prediction power of multiple intelligences in relation to text comprehension across the input modes, a multiple regression analysis was run, the results of which are as follows. as table 6 suggests, text-only (f = 1.11, r2 = .27, p < .05) and learner-constructed (f = 2.54, r2 = .43, p < .01) groups’ performance could be predicted by mi. of the multiple intelligence subscales, learnervs. expert-constructed outlines: testing the associations with l2 text comprehension and. . . 373 interpersonal (t = 2.28, p < .01) and intrapersonal (t = 2.17, p < .01) intelligences were significant predictors of text-only groups’ performance; that is to say, those with a higher level of interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences outperformed the text-only condition. table 6 correlational and regressional results with input modality as criterion variable (n = 111) predictor (intelligence type) text-only ec lc r beta t r beta t r beta t naturalistic -.02 -.31 -1.48 -20 .22 .88 -.15 .00 .01 musical .03 .39 1.70 .04 .18 .80 -.05 -.32 -1.90 logical -.11 -.38 -1.80 -25 -.08 -.30 -.10 -.18 -1.07 existential .13 -.14 -.69 .26 -.11 -.54 .17 -.04 -.30 interpersonal .22 .47 2.28* -13 -.03 -.14 .07 -.01 -.07 kinesthetic .05 .14 .64 -42 -.02 -.10 -.00 .34 1.83 verbal -.07 -.49 -1.99 -15 -.09 -.36 .03 .61 2.84** intrapersonal .13 .54 2.17* -05 -.09 -.31 .16 .50 2.62* visual .11 .10 .54 .18 .02 .075 .24 -.62 3.17** f r2 f r2 f r2 1.11* .27 .20 .06 2.54* .43 notes. ec = expert-constructed; lc = learner-constructed; * p < .05; ** p < .01. with respect to the learner-constructed condition, verbal (t = 2.84, p < .01) and visual intelligences (t = -3.17, p < .01) were found to be the strongest predictors of group performance, followed by intrapersonal intelligence (t = 2.62, p < .05). no other significant interaction was detected among the mi subscales and the three input modes. 6. discussion three research questions were investigated in this study. first, we asked whether adjunct displays lead to better text comprehension than text displays do, as well as which text enhancement technique (input-based vs. outputbased) is more suitable for l2 learners’ text comprehension. the analysis showed that adjunct aids (outlines) were more efficient than texts as they produced significantly higher scores on comprehension than texts did. our findings provide evidence in support of ade (i.e., adjunct displays effect) and are consistent with the results of previous studies (e.g., amundsen et al., 2008; marefat & ghahari, 2009; jiang & grabe, 2007; rowland-bryant et al., 2009; schroeder et al., 2018; shaw et al., 2012), affirming that when text is accompanied by adjunct aids, comprehension of text information is improved. sholeh moradi, shima ghahari, mohammad abbas nejad 374 there are several justifications for the better performance of the outline groups over the text-only group. firstly, as maintained by krug, george, hannon, and glover (1989), outlines can contribute to decoding a passage by activating both form schemata (i.e., keywords) and context schemata (i.e., main ideas). an alternative explanation is related to the form of presentation: an outline presents topics and subtopics in a hierarchical form and sequences the concepts and their relationships from the most general through to the most specific. this hierarchical organization and connection of prior knowledge to the new information matches the knowledge structure in the brain and, therefore, results in meaningful learning (marefat & ghahari, 2009). another plausible rationale for the contribution of outlines to text comprehension may refer to their structure, in that they are more computationally effective and search-efficient (both locally and globally) than a plain text. as redford et al. (2012) maintain, they increase the salience of the cues, lessen the working memory requirements, and provide more resources for text comprehension. this is in line with the major tenets of search efficiency, conjoint retention, dual coding, visual argument, and computational efficiency hypotheses, all of which suggest that the contribution of outlines to searching and locating information (local and global) lies in their physical structure. according to mccrudden et al. (2009), outlines (as a co) promote text comprehension and recall by minimizing the cognitive load needed to get the intended message and activating relevant background knowledge (i.e., schemata). this reasoning is also in conformity with cognitive load theory (sweller, van merrienboer, & pass, 1998), and meaningful learning hypothesis (ausubel, 1963), which reckon an optimal level of information load and input quality as a key to learning and retrieval. comparing outlines with text displays, however, provides counterevidence to selective cued hypothesis (mayer, 1984). according to the hypothesis, better recall of information induced by the displays pertains, more than anything else, to the presentation of the information twice, once in the text and once in the displays. however, as it was indicated earlier, the text-only groups received the same text twice but still underperformed in the comprehension test in comparison to the outline groups. finally, and more specifically related to language learning contexts, schmidt’s (1990) noticing hypothesis warrants discussion. according to the hypothesis, for any kind of learning and recall to happen, learners have to consciously attend to the target features in the input. it can be rationalized that by inserting appropriate displays in the texts, teachers and materials developers can direct learners’ attention to certain points (usually the main ones) and maximize their learning outcome. the second research question was whether the type of display the students viewed (expertvs. learner-constructed) would differentially affect their performance on the comprehension test. no significant difference was observed learnervs. expert-constructed outlines: testing the associations with l2 text comprehension and. . . 375 between the expertand learner-constructed groups. according to kiewra (1985), note-taking can facilitate learning by boosting attention, raising awareness of text organization, storing the information into memory, and encouraging the learner to compare the material with previously learned, which is known as the encoding hypothesis. the fact that no significant difference was detected between the two display types in this study is in contradiction to the results of schroeder et al. (2018), kiewra (1985), and katayama and robinson (2000) in l1 settings and rahmani and sadeghi (2011) in l2 reading contexts. one justification for this contradictory finding can be the reviewing factor. according to crooks, white, and barnard (2007), the value of note-taking lies in its two salient properties: as a technique that scales up encoding of the content (i.e., encoding hypothesis) and as a device for externally storing the material (i.e., external storage idea). the external storage hypothesis postulates that “note-taking per se is not facilitative of recall, unless learners are given the opportunity to review their notes prior to recall” (rickards & friedman, 1978, p. 136). rahmani and sadeghi (2011) also maintain that notes serve as a storage device of information that can assist in retrieving the content in delayed recalls and in answering exam questions provided that they are systematically reviewed. as little time was invested and/or remained for the learner-constructed groups in this study to review the notes, its comparable performance to the expert-constructed groups does not seem unexpected. the final research question was related to whether learners’ multiple intelligences predicted their performance on different types of textual presentation. results revealed that from among the intelligence types under study, interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences significantly predicted the text-only groups’ performance, while visual, verbal, and intrapersonal intelligences were significant predictors of the learner-constructed groups’ reading scores. the former can be accounted for on several grounds: interpersonal intelligence, as defined by nicholson-nelson (1998), refers to the ability to work effectively with other people and to understand them and recognize their goals, motivations, and intentions. students who exhibit a high endowment of this intelligence have strong leadership skills and are skilled at organizing, communicating, mediating, and negotiating. according to gardner (1983), an individual who is high in interpersonal intelligence understands the intentions, motivations, needs, and desires of others better, and is capable of working effectively with them. therefore, it may be inferred that a reader who inherently has a higher level of interpersonal intelligence can make sense of the text and deduce the author’s intention more readily and successfully. similarly, intrapersonal intelligence has been described as the ability to understand oneself, to assess one’s strengths and weaknesses, and to act effectively using this knowledge source (gardner, 1983). students gifted in intrapersonal ability have a strong sense of self, are confident, and can enjoy working alone. they naturally notice and acknowledge their potentials and sholeh moradi, shima ghahari, mohammad abbas nejad 376 identify ways of circumventing challenges more efficiently. this reasoning might explain why intrapersonally intelligent students turned out to be more successful in doing text-only assignments, which are by their nature more demanding and reader-unfriendlier than the competing ones. it must be noted that, in order of difficulty, the text-only condition followed by the learner-constructed mode demanded more attention and commitment on the part of the learners. in the expert-constructed condition, however, the tasks were ready-made and scaffolded and, therefore, put little burden of responsibility on the readers’ shoulders. the next mi-related finding was the mediating role of visual, verbal, and intrapersonal intelligences in relation to the learner-constructed groups’ text performance. visual (or spatial) intelligence (intelligence of pictures and images) is defined by nicholson-nelson (1998) as the ability to create spatial representations of the world and to transfer them mentally or concretely. students who are endowed with a high level of spatial intelligence tend to understand new information more productively if it is accompanied by a mental or physical picture; they do well with maps, charts, and diagrams, favor mazes and puzzles over plain texts, and are skilled at drawing, designing, and creating things. accordingly, a student with high visual/spatial intelligence benefits more than the competing peers from cos like outlines, which simplify the flow of information, logical arguments, explanations, and examples present in a typical expository text. another predictor of learner-constructed groups’ performance was verbal intelligence. gardner (1983) has described verbal (or linguistic) intelligence as one’s sensitivity to spoken and written language, ability to use language to accomplish goals, as well as ability to learn new languages. based on this definition, students who exhibit verbal/linguistic intelligence have a preference for writing, reading, telling stories, and solving puzzles. accordingly, they learn best through hearing and seeing words, speaking, writing, and reading. learner-constructed outline mode matches these students’ writing and note-taking abilities, which in turn will result in a better test performance. 7. conclusion and implications to recap, three plausible conclusions are drawn on the basis of the findings: (a) learnerand expert-constructed outlines are more effective than text-only condition for l2 text comprehension; (b) students with higher verbal and visual competencies are more successful in taking systematic notes and organizing them into outlines, a task which calls for both language and spatial competencies; (c) those with a high emotional intelligence1 (i.e., intrapersonal and interpersonal) 1 emotional intelligence (ei) refers to the capacity to recognize one’s and others’ emotions and to manage one’s relationships and interactions with others. according to goleman (1998), ei actually encompasses intrapersonal and interpersonal components of multiple intelligences. learnervs. expert-constructed outlines: testing the associations with l2 text comprehension and. . . 377 competency are more active and self-regulated learners when assigned demanding and intricate tasks to accomplish. based on the above observations, the following implications for practice are suggested: 1. the study gives credence to the role of input enhancement techniques, supporting the idea that with these instructional interventions the amount of time spent on reading a text and the amount of cognitive capacity allotted to its processing are considerably lessened. educators and materials developers are encouraged to incorporate outlines to help readers, particularly l2 learners, learn more inter-concept relations and text structure and to improve text comprehension and recall. outlines can be utilized for both learning and assessment purposes. they can be incorporated as warm-up, brainstorming, preview, and review activities. 2. it is recommended that teachers instruct students on different forms of note-taking (conventional and systematic) practices. by training students to construct outlines while reading, they will not only learn the target materials but also learn how to learn. however, students must be given time to review their self-designed notes or outlines for more effective results. 3. outline practices are better viewed as a developmental and graded activity. that is to say, practicing and interpreting expert-constructed outlines are more suitable for novice readers since they typically help maximize feelings of encouragement and motivation. on the other hand, outline construction is more suitable for later stages to foster learner autonomy and self-regulation. 4. the predictive power of multiple intelligence in relation to input modalities of text presentation offers insights for teachers and educators to take cognitive and affective styles of the learners into account. as leyu (2001) and ghahari and sedaghat (2018) contend, the number of instructional decisions in education will be markedly increased by taking learners’ individual differences and preferences into account. hence, the role of the teachers as the most influential agents that can promote the one-method-does-not-fit-all approach is highlighted. it is recommended that teachers triangulate a variety of strategies and techniques to address both the educational and psychological needs of l2 readers. other research avenues also exist. first, from among the textual enhancement techniques, only outlines (learnerand expert-constructed modes) were studied here. thus, one area for further investigation is comparing outlines with other cos (e.g., graphic organizers, underlining, and mnemonics). second, this study was limited to expository texts and cross-sectional data collection. future studies sholeh moradi, shima ghahari, mohammad abbas nejad 378 could investigate the long-term retention effect of outlines, apply a longer treatment, incorporate follow-up review assignments, and examine their effectiveness for other text genres (e.g., narrative and argumentative). finally, a larger sample size could be included in future studies in order to maximize the generalizability of the findings. learnervs. expert-constructed outlines: testing the associations with l2 text comprehension and. . . 379 references akbari, r., & hosseini, k. 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(2001). personalize training: determine learning styles, personality types and multiple intelligences online. the learning organization, 8(1), 36-43. 15 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (1). 2020. 15-19 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.1.1 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editorial the goal of the special issue is to provide robust examples of how we as a field can research the dynamic nature of learner individual differences (ids). the papers in this volume provide both a sound theoretical discussion of several ids in relationship to their (posited or empirically attested) role(s) in l2 learning, as well as specific methodological ideas on how to best reveal the dynamic nature of ids. as repeatedly mentioned in the field (dewaele, 2013; dörnyei, 2005, 2009, dörnyei & ryan, 2015; dörnyei & ushioda, 2009; gurzynski-weiss, 2020), including in a special issue within this very journal (de bot & bátyi, 2017), learner ids are no longer seen as static and stable but as dynamic and changing over time and in response to other ids (dörnyei, 2009, 2010; gurzynski-weiss, 2020; kormos & csizér, 2014; serafini, 2017), as well as context (de bot & fang, 2017; lowie, van djik, chan, & verspoor, 2017; mercer, 2015; serafini, 2020). while this is mentioned frequently in relationship to complex dynamic systems theory (cdst; de bot, lowie, & verspoor, 2007; larsen-freeman, 1997, 2011, 2015, 2020), there still exists a general lack of understanding with respect to how to investigate the dynamicity of ids, particularly for those who have worked in other frameworks and are newer to cdst and/or approaching ids as dynamic with respect to longitudinal design. in this special issue, i invited a renowned expert to explore the dynamicity of a commonly investigated learner id within the field of second language acquisition (sla). the impressive list of contributors and the id they examine is as follows: carmen amerstorfer on learning strategies; jean-marc and livia dewaele on classroom emotions; tammy gregersen on anxiety, daniel o. jackson on working memory, peter macintyre on willingness to communicate, ellen j. serafini on the l2 self, and amy s. thompson on multilingual selves. each author ensures the accessibility of their expertise by first describing their id of focus, the role it plays in l2 learning, and then moving on to the heart of the special issue: a discussion on how the id in question can change, what influences this 16 change, and, critically, concrete examples of research methodology that will allow us to explore the dynamicity of their id. the special issue concludes with the first semester data of a multi-year study exploring multiple learner ids (jung, dibartolomeo, melero-garcía, giacomino, gurzynski-weiss, henderson, & hidalgo). carmen amerstorfer opens the special issue with her article on learning strategies titled, “the dynamism of strategic learning: complexity theory in strategic l2 development.” in this article, amerstorfer discusses how a holistic investigation of l2 strategies requires the integration of numerous interconnected, flexibly-interacting influences at constant interplay. most importantly, she re-examines data from a previous study through a cdst lens, demonstrating how cdst offers additional insight compared to methods that have viewed ids as more static. jean-marc and livia dewaele then write on classroom emotions in their contribution “are foreign language learners’ enjoyment and anxiety specific to the teacher? an investigation into the dynamics of learners’ classroom emotions,” focusing specifically on the interplay between foreign language enjoyment and foreign language classroom anxiety, and how they are influenced by (and undoubtedly influence in turn) the specific language teachers. analyzing multiple factors at play, dewaele and dewaele demonstrate how foreign language enjoyment appears to be more dynamic and teacher-dependent than foreign language classroom anxiety, which is comparatively more stable and less teacher-dependent. in her “dynamic properties of language anxiety,” tammy gregersen, using published data from existing studies, first demonstrates how anxiety is in fact a dynamic learner id. gregersen then moves on to describing the roles language anxiety plays within a dynamic system, and how these considerations change all levels of research: theory, research questions, methodology, as well as pedagogical implications. daniel o. jackson follows with a discussion on working memory, with an article entitled “working memory and second language development: a complex, dynamic future?” jackson begins by asserting that working memory (wm) has always been considered as dynamic and interrelated, at least internally with its multiple facets. considering wm as a complex learner id, however, has been less discussed, particularly with respect to cdst. jackson reappraises wm within a cdst framework, highlighting theoretical and methodological challenges and opportunities. in his “expanding the theoretical base for the dynamics of willingness to communicate,” peter macintyre examines how learners navigate a multitude of considerations in the moments they decide whether or not to communicate in the l2. using his idiodynamic method, macintyre demonstrates how his team is able to examine the nuances of willingness to communicate at the timescale of a few minutes, and how this detailed examination is leading to new theory, research methods, and pedagogical implications. 17 ellen j. serafini, in her “further exploring the dynamicity, situatedness, and emergence of the self: the key role of context,” examines how learner selves manifest across contexts and timescales, critically considering existing research and calling for much-needed work that examines how learner perceptions of themselves and their interlocutors impact the system and, ultimately, language learning. exploring multilingual selves in “my many selves are still me: motivation and multilingualism,” amy s. thompson investigates the dynamicity of multilingual learners’ language systems and the influences that induce change. specifically, through a re-examination of data published earlier through the lens of the dynamic model of multilingualism (herdina & jessner, 2002; jessner, 2006, 2008), thompson demonstrates how researchers can utilize dynamic analysis to increase understanding within their existing data sets, as well as in larger conversations within the field. finally, the empirical study “tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: initial results from a longitudinal study” by jung et al. presents the first semester data of a study examining multiple learner ids over several years. focusing on the l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2009), personality (ashton & lee, 2009), learning and cognitive styles (reid, 1995; oxford, 1993), and working memory (stone & towse, 2015), the study examines what learner ids are present in the initial semester of study, how they vary between learners and relate to other ids, and how four learner profiles emerged in the initial semester dataset. together, the papers in this issue provide cutting-edge examples of how to approach learner ids from a cdst framework: theoretically, empirically, and even at times providing guidance on how to use this information in pedagogical contexts. each paper has an exceptionally thoughtful discussion of the dynamicity of the id in question, what this reconceptualization means for existing research, with some studies even reexamining published data to demonstrate how additional insight can be uncovered through dynamic approaches, and how viewing these learner ids as dynamic reshapes our work at all levels of research. i would like to thank mirosław pawlak for the honor of the invitation to edit a special issue for studies in second language learning and teaching (and the freedom to choose a topic – what a dream!). my sincerest thanks to the contributors for the outstanding contributions they have shared in this collection, and their camaraderie and enthusiasm from the get-go. i would also like to thank the reviewers who generously lent their time and expertise to critique and constructively comment on earlier drafts of these papers. finally, my sincerest thanks to daniel jung at indiana university, who tirelessly assisted in editorial work throughout this process. finally, it is important to mention that many of these research projects will be presented in our aila ren symposium at the world congress of applied linguistics (aila) in groningen, the netherlands, in august 2020. i invite you all 18 to join us there for additional conversation and collaboration in moving dynamic id research forward. laura gurzynski-weiss indiana university, bloomington, in, usa lgurzyns@indiana.edu references ashton, m. c., & lee, k. (2009). the hexaco-60: a short measure of the major dimensions of personality. journal of personality assessment, 91, 340-345. de bot, k., & bátyi, s. (2017). editorial. studies in second language learning and teaching, 7, 13-17. de bot, k., & fang, f. (2017). circadian rhythms and second language performance. studies in second language learning and teaching, 7, 47-60. de bot, k., lowie, w., & verspoor, m. (2007). a dynamic systems theory approach to second language acquisition. bilingualism: language and cognition, 10, 7-21. dewaele, j-m. (2013). the link between foreign language classroom anxiety and psychoticism, extraversion, and neuroticism among adult biand multilinguals. modern language journal, 97, 670-684. dörnyei, z. (2005). the psychology of the language learner: individual differences in second language acquisition. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. dörnyei, z. (2009). the l2 motivational self system. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 9-42). bristol: multilingual matters. dörnyei, z. (2010). the relationship between language aptitude and language learning motivation: individual differences from a dynamic systems perspective. in e. macaro (ed.), continuum companion to second language acquisition (pp. 247-267). london: continuum. dörnyei, z., & ryan, s. (2015). the psychology of the language learner revisited. new york, ny: routledge. dornyei, z., & ushioda, e. (eds.). (2009). motivation, language identity, and the l2 self. bristol: multilingual matters. gurzynski-weiss, l. (ed.). (2020). cross-theoretical explorations of interlocutors and their individual differences. amsterdam: john benjamins. herdina, p., & jessner, u. (2002). a dynamic model of multilingualism: changing the psycholinguistic perspective. multilingual matters. 19 jessner, u. (2006). linguistic awareness in multilinguals: english as a third language. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. jessner, u. (2008). a dst model of multilingualism and the role of metalinguistic awareness. modern language journal, 92, 270-283. http://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1540-4781.2008.00718.x kormos, j., & csizér, k. (2014). the interaction of motivation, self-regulatory strategies, and autonomous learning behavior in different learner groups. tesol quarterly, 48, 275-299. larsen-freeman, d. (1997). chaos/complexity science and second language acquisition. applied linguistics, 18, 141-165. larsen-freeman, d. (2011). a complexity theory approach to second language development/acquisition. in d. atkins (ed), alternative approaches to second language acquisition (pp. 60-84). new york, ny: routledge. larsen-freeman, d. (2015). complexity theory. in b. van patten & j. williams (eds.), theories in second language acquisition (pp. 227-244). amsterdam: routledge. larsen-freeman, d. (2020). complexity theory: relational systems in interaction and in interlocutor differences in second language development. in l. gurzynski-weiss (ed.), cross-theoretical explorations of interlocutors and their individual differences (pp. 191-209). amsterdam: john benjamins. lowie, w., van dijk, m., chan, h., & verspoor, m. (2017). finding the key to successful l2 learning in groups and individuals. studies in second language learning and teaching, 7, 127-148. mercer s. (2015). dynamics of the self: a multilevel nested systems approach. in z. dörnyei, p. d. macintyre, & a. henry (eds), motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 139-163). bristol: multilingual matters. oxford, r. l. (1993). style analysis survey (sas). tuscaloosa: university of alabama. reid, j. (1995). learning styles in the esl/efl classroom. boston, ma: heinle & heinle. serafini, e. j. (2017). exploring the dynamic long-term interaction between cognitive and psychosocial resources in adult second language development at varying proficiency. modern language journal, 101, 369-390. serafini, e. j. (2020). the impact of learner perceptions of interlocutor individual differences on learner possible selves during a short-term experience abroad. in l. gurzynski-weiss (ed.), cross-theoretical explorations of interlocutors and their individual differences (pp. 211-245). amsterdam: john benjamins. stone, j. m., & towse, j. (2015). a working memory test battery: java-based collection of seven working memory tasks. journal of open research software, 3, 2-9. http://doi.org/10.5334/jors.br studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt editors: founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland) editor: achilleas kostoulas (university of manchester, uk) editor: mariusz kruk (university of zielona góra, poland) editor: aleksandra wach (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) language editor: melanie ellis (pedagogical university of kraków, poland) vol. 9 no. 2 june 2019 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, israel, trinity college, dublin, ireland) helen basturkmen (university of auckland, new zealand) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk, poland) simon borg (university of leeds, uk) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, uk, university of new south wales, sydney, australia) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo, usa) kata csizér (eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary) maria dakowska (university of warsaw, poland) robert dekeyser (university of maryland, usa) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london, uk) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham, uk) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) rod ellis (curtin university, perth, australia) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia, poland) carol griffiths (university of leeds, uk, ais, auckland, new zealand) rebecca hughes (university of nottingham, uk) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland) terry lamb (university of westminster, london, uk) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan, usa) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (state university of applied sciences, konin, poland) jan majer (state university of applied sciences, włocławek, poland) paul meara (swansea university, uk) sarah mercer (university of graz, austria) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław, poland) carmen muñoz (university of barcelona, spain) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków, poland) bonny norton (university of british columbia, canada) terrence odlin (ohio state university, usa) rebecca oxford (university of maryland, usa) aneta pavlenko (university of oslo, norway) simone pfenninger (university of salzburg, austria) françois pichette (téluq university, quebec, canada) luke plonsky (northern arizona university, usa) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university, poland) vera regan (university college, dublin, ireland) barry lee reynolds (university of macau, china) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam, germany) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham, uk) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh, uk) linda shockey (university of reading, uk) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) david singleton (university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary, trinity college, dublin, ireland) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada) elaine tarone (university of minnesota, usa) pavel trofimovich (concordia university, canada) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, poland) stuart webb (university of western ontario, canada) maria wysocka (university of silesia, poland) kalisz – poznań 2019 founding editor and editor in chief: mirosław pawlak editors: jakub bielak achilleas kostoulas mariusz kruk aleksandra wach © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: jakub bielak, melanie ellis, achilleas kostoulas, mariusz kruk, aleksandra wach cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print run: 60 copies print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · scopus · web of science emerging sources citation index (esci) · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · directory of open access journals (doaj) · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the clarivate analytics (formerly thomson reuters) master journal list. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 9, number 2, june 2019 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt contents notes on contributors ....................................................................255 editorial .........................................................................................259 articles: alastair henry – a drama of selves: investigating teacher identity development from dialogical and complexity perspectives ............ 263 anne huhtala, anta kursiša, marjo vesalainen – “this language still motivates me!” advanced language students and their l2 motivation ..................287 richard labontee – questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language learning context ..... 313 hezi y. brosh – arabic language-learning strategy preferences among undergraduate students .................................................................. 351 kim mcdonough, masatoshi sato – promoting efl students’ accuracy and fluency through interactive practice activities ......................... 379 jan vanhove – metalinguistic knowledge about the native language and language transfer in gender assignment ................................. 397 book reviews: joanna rokita-jaśkow – review of janet enever’s policy and politics in global primary english ..................................................................... 421 mirosław pawlak – review of karin richter’s english-medium instruction and pronunciation: exposure and skills development ..................... 429 notes to contributors .....................................................................433 255 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt notes on contributors hezi y. brosh, phd (associate professor, united states naval academy), is the first scholar to explore the influence of cognitive and affective variables on the learning of arabic as a foreign language by hebrew speakers. as an applied linguist, he focuses on the teaching and learning of arabic as a foreign language and has expertise in sociolinguistics, curriculum planning and design and development of teaching materials. he is the author of numerous conference papers, articles, and textbooks. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4881-425x contact details: united states naval academy, department of languages and cultures, 589 mcnair road, annapolis, maryland 21402-5030, usa, tel: 410-2935354 (brosh@usna.edu) alastair henry is professor of language education at university west, sweden. his research focuses on the psychology of language learning and teaching. with zoltán dörnyei and peter macintrye, he is the coeditor of motivational dynamics in language learning (2015, multilingual matters), and with martin lamb, kata csizér, and stephen ryan, he is a coeditor of the palgrave macmillan handbook of motivation for language learning (2020, palgrave macmillan). with zoltán dörnyei and christine muir, he cowrote motivational currents in language learning: frameworks for focused interventions (2016, routledge). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7789-9032 contact details: university west, division of educational science and languages, gustava melins gata 2, 461 32 trollhättan, sweden (alastair.henry@hv.se) anne huhtala works as university lecturer of swedish at the university of helsinki, finland. her present research interests include motivation, identity formation, l2 learning, and teacher education. she is also interested in the study of metaphors and in questions concerning evaluation in learning. she participates, for example, in the following research and development projects: mummi (motivation-usage256 multilingualism-multiculturalism-identity), and developing pre-service and inservice teacher education. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5046-8187 contact details: university of helsinki, department of finnish, finno-ugrian and scandinavian studies, unioninkatu 40, helsinki, finland (anne.huhtala@helsinki.fi) anta kursiša is university lecturer of german at the university of helsinki, finland. her research interests are foreign language acquisition in a multilingual context, reading comprehension and cross-linguistic influence and interaction, with a focus on german as a foreign language, as well as l2 motivation for languages other than english. she is mainly interested in exploring the perspective of learners. at present, she participates, for example, in the projects mummi (motivation-usage-multilingualism-multiculturalism-identity), and multilingualism and german in finland. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1423-0635 contact details: university of helsinki, department of languages, unioninkatu 40, helsinki, finland (anta.kursisa@helsinki.fi) richard labontee completed his msc in applied linguistics and second language acquisition at the university of oxford, uk in 2012. he then taught and performed research at niigata university of international and information studies, japan before being brought on as a doctoral candidate at the university of gothenburg, sweden, in swedish as a second language in 2014. after receiving his doctoral degree in second language acquisition, he now works as an academic english language supervisor at the university of gothenburg and maintains research interests in language learning strategies and vocabulary acquisition. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5180-7005 contact details: göteborgs universitet, institutionen för svenska språk, 405 30, gothenburg, sweden (richard.la.bontee@svenska.gu.se) kim mcdonough is professor and canada research chair in applied linguistics at concordia university. her research interests include task-based language teaching, collaborative writing, and visual cues during interactive l2 use. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3165-9687 contact details: concordia university, 1455 de maisonneuve blvd w, education department, fg 6-151, montreal, qc h3g 1m8 canada (kim.mcdonough@concordia.ca) mirosław pawlak is professor of english in the english department, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts of adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland, and department 257 of research on language learning and teaching, faculty of philology, state university of applied sciences, konin, poland. his main areas of interest are formfocused instruction, corrective feedback, pronunciation teaching, classroom interaction, learner autonomy, learning strategies, motivation and willingness to communicate. his most recent publications include error correction in the foreign language classroom. reconsidering the issues (2015, springer), willingness to communicate in instructed second language acquisition: combining a macroand micro-perspective (with anna mystkowska-wiertelak, 2017, multilingual matters), and several edited collections on learner autonomy, form-focused instruction, speaking in a foreign language, classroom-oriented research and individual learner differences. he is editor of the journals studies in second language learning and teaching and konin language studies, as well as the book series second language learning and teaching, published by springer. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7448-355x contact details: department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, ul. nowy świat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl) joanna rokita-jaśkow, phd, is associate professor of applied linguistics at pedagogical university of cracow, poland, where she holds a chair for elt. her main research interests concern efl teacher education and early foreign language learning. she is an author/editor of 6 books and over 40 articles in refereed journals and monographs on these topics. her most recent book is titled: early instructed sla: pathways to competence (coedited with melanie ellis, 2019, multilingual matters). she is a member of the aila – ren network on early language learning, the convener of the international conference on child foreign/second language learning (2016, 2019) as well as the founder of postgraduate studies for pre-primary and primary educators of foreign languages at pedagogical university of cracow. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6272-9548 contact details: pedagogical university of cracow, faculty of philology, institute of neophilology, ul. karmelicka 41, 31-128 kraków, poland (joanna.rokita-jaskow@ up.krakow.pl) masatoshi sato is associate professor in the department of english at universidad andrés bello, chile. his research interests include peer interaction, corrective feedback, learner psychology, professional development, and the researchpedagogy link. in addition to his publications in international journals, he recently coedited the: peer interaction and second language learning (2016, john 258 benjamins), the routledge handbook of instructed second language acquisition (2017, routledge), and evidence-based second language pedagogy (2019, routledge). he is the recipient of the 2014 actfl/mlj paul pimsleur award. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7111-3406 contact details: universidad andrés bello, department of english, faculty of education & social science, fernández concha 700, las condes, santiago, 7550000 (masatoshi.sato@unab.cl) jan vanhove is senior lecturer at the department of multilingualism at the university of fribourg, switzerland. he has done research on receptive multilingualism and crosslinguistic influence between closely related languages, and collaborates on projects at the fribourg institute of multilingualism (e.g., on lexical richness, language aptitude, and heritage languages). he blogs semi-regularly about research design and statistics at http://janhove.github.io. orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4607-4836 contact details: university of fribourg, department of multilingualism, rue de rome 1, ch-1700, fribourg, switzerland (jan.vanhove@unifr.ch) marjo vesalainen works as senior lecturer in university pedagogy at the centre for university teaching and learning at the university of helsinki, finland. her present research interests lie in the areas of evaluation and assessment in teaching and learning, questions related to motivation, and teacher education. she is also interested in the study of learner language and l2 learning. she takes part, for example, in the following research projects: mummi (motivation-usagemultilingualism-multiculturalism-identity), developing pre-service and in-service teacher education, and arvi (assessment practices in higher education). orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0055-0155 contact details: university of helsinki, centre for university teaching and learning hype, unioninkatu 40, helsinki, finland (marjo.vesalainen@helsinki.fi) 321 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (2). 321-324 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book reviews the strategy factor in successful language learning author: carol griffiths publisher: multilingual matters, 2013 isbn: 978-1-84769-940-4 pages: 220 the book by carol griffiths, titled the strategy factor in successful language learning, is without doubt a valuable addition to research into the field of language learning strategies in the sense that, on the one hand, it may provide a source of inspiration for further studies, and, on the other, it may constitute a useful point of reference for second and foreign language teachers. the volume is divided into five main parts in which the author, having clarified the reasons for her own interest in this area, addresses key issues related to our understanding of learning strategies, the findings of her own research in this domain, as well as the ways in which strategy training can be incorporated into language pedagogy. the first part, “a conceptual perspective,” touches upon a number of controversial issues connected with the field of language learning strategies, such as the terminology employed, the definition of the construct, factors impinging on the efficacy of strategy use, theoretical underpinnings, difficulties involved in the classification of strategies, as well as the challenges that are likely to be encountered in empirical investigations focusing on this area. in the second part, titled “a quantitative perspective,” carol griffiths reports the results of her research endeavors with the 322 aim of providing insights into such crucial issues as the relationship between the frequency and quantity of strategy use and successful language learning, the utility of specific strategy types, the impact of individual, situational and learning target related variables, the stability of strategy use over time, and the question whether modifications in the application of strategies lead to success as well as the issue as to whether strategies are the cause of progress in language learning or the effect of such progress. the third part, “a qualitative perspective,” is based on data obtained from semi-structured interviews with ten learners, complemented with information about strategy use, individual variation and achievement, which allows the author to construct the individual profiles of these learners and offer further insights into the use of language learning strategies as well as factors impacting this use. the fourth part, entitled “a pedagogical perspective,” is intended to demonstrate how the study of learning strategies can translate into classroom practice and does so by elucidating the place of strategic learning in theories of language teaching, providing a rationale for strategies-based instruction, giving an account of programs that can be used for this purpose, offering guidelines on how such training should be conducted and elucidating the impact of teachers’ perceptions and learner variables in this respect. finally, the fifth part, “overview,” highlights the main points brought up throughout the book and it is followed by appendices containing the data collection instruments used in the studies described earlier and a glossary including key terms related to the realm of language learning strategies. my overall evaluation of the volume is very positive and i am deeply convinced that is it a much-needed, valuable addition to existing literature on language learning strategies. this is because, on the one hand, it attempts to impose some order on a field that is afflicted by numerous controversies, one of the most crucial of which is tied to the question whether the concept of strategy should be replaced with a more general construct such as self-regulation (dörnyei, 2005), and, on the other, it does a superb job of reconciling theory and practice by demonstrating at every step the relevance of the issues discussed to language teachers. in fact, it is possible to point to a number of reasons why the book makes a worthwhile reading for wide audiences, not only scholars or researchers, but also practitioners as well as graduate and postgraduate students. for one thing, the author addresses some of the current controversies, related, among others, to the definition, distinctive features and characteristics of language learning strategies, offering reasonable solutions to at least some of them. of particular interest, for example, is her attempt to define strategies according to their distinctive characteristics (section 1.3. in part 1), or to classify them according to the frequency of their application by more and less successful students (i.e., base, core, and plus strategies; section 2.4. in part 2). second, in addition to offering a 323 thorough overview of the key issues involved in the classification, description and strategy training, the author draws upon her own research to illustrate many of these points as well as providing directions for future empirical investigations in this area. third, she manages to combine quite successfully the quantitative (part 2) and qualitative (part 3) paradigms, which is, by her own admission, a recognition of the fact that numbers and statistics cannot tell the whole story, and which allows her to gain much more insight into strategies that different learners use and the factors that may affect their employment in a particular situation. fourth, she looks, if only somewhat superficially, into the dynamics of strategy use by tracing changes in this respect over time (section 2.9 in part 2), an area that has thus far been largely neglected by researchers. fifth, she seeks to account for strategy use and in particular its relationship to attainment in terms of complex systems theories (e.g., larsen-freeman and cameron, 2007; section 2.10 in part 2), although it would clearly be an overstatement to suggest that this is the theoretical perspective guiding her study of language learning strategies. sixth, it is commendable that the volume offers a number of pedagogical implications for practitioners and that this is done in part 4 on the basis of the quantitative and qualitative findings discussed in parts 2 and 3. in a word, the book is in many ways original and it sheds new light on key issues involved in the study of language learning strategies. having said this, i would now like to focus on areas that, to my mind, can be viewed to some extent as weaknesses of the book. even though i understand the intentions of the author when it comes to dividing the text into chapters and sections, reservations can be expressed about mixing theoretical considerations with research findings throughout the volume. one striking example concerns the discussion of variables impacting strategy selection, which is perhaps justified given their focus, but it is hard to see why the relevant theoretical issues (e.g., regarding aptitude, motivation, sex, affect, context) are discussed alongside the research findings in parts 2, 3 and 4. it might be a better idea to include these in part 1, which is intended as a theoretical background anyway and thus includes references to these factors, perhaps together with an overview of the results of studies of their influence on strategy use. another problem is the fact that the theoretical issues relating to factors affecting strategy use are often discussed somewhat superficially, which is surely warranted given the main focus of the book but only as long as the discussion is confined to the role of a particular variable in shaping the application of learning strategies rather than attempting to provide a state-ofthe-art overview of research on a given variable. more specifically, there are problems with the interpretation of the motives given by learners, which is visible, for instance, in the following sentence on page 70: “given that educational/employment goals might be considered extrinsic to the learner, something the 324 student uses as an instrument to reach some further target, these findings might suggest that extrinsic/instrumental motivation types are more productive than the intrinsic/integrative types of motivation which drive those who want to travel or form friendships for their own personal satisfaction.” the problem here is that the desire to get a good job or better education can be intrinsic as well if the learner feels that such goals are important to him or her, a comment which should alert us to the fact that instrumental and integrative motivational orientations can each be intrinsic or extrinsic, depending on whether the desire to learn comes from the learner, significant others or simply an attempt to ward off adverse consequences. finally, although the author combines the quantitative and qualitative perspectives on the study of learning strategies, the research findings that she presents are still representative of what could be referred to as a macro perspective on strategy use, or such that aims to capture rather general, contextneutral patterns, rather than a micro perspective that taps into the application of strategies as they are employed in the performance of a specific task. obviously, this can hardly be considered a weakness in the light of the fact that both of these approaches can be regarded as equally valuable, and this point is raised at this juncture only because combining these two approaches can be expected to offer the most valuable insights into strategy use. these shortcomings notwithstanding, the book by carol griffiths is definitely worth reading as it considerably extends our knowledge about language learning strategies, it succeeds in addressing some of the most controversial issues, points to important directions for future research, and offers a number of feasible guidelines for practitioners. as a consequence, the book will be of relevance to wide audiences, ranging from theorists and researchers, through materials writers and teacher trainers, to classroom teachers and students enrolled in graduate and postgraduate courses. reviewed by miros aw pawlak adam mickiewicz university in pozna , kalisz, poland state school of higher professional education, konin, poland pawlakmi@amiu.edu.pl references dörnyei, z. (2005). the psychology of the language learner: individual differences in second language acquisition. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. larsen-freeman, d., & cameron, l. (2008). complex systems and applied linguistics. oxford: oxford university press. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: miros aw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: krzysztof kwiatkowski (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) language editor: melanie ellis (language teacher training college, zabrze) vol. 3 no. 3 october 2013 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (trinity college, dublin) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham/university of new south wales, sydney) piotr cap (university of ód ) anna cie licka (texas a&m international university, adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) kata csizer (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) krystyna dro dzia -szelest (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabry -barker (university of silesia) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of ód ) jan majer (university of ód ) paul meara (swansea university) anna micho ska-stadnik (university of wroc aw) anna ni egorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) terrence odlin (ohio state university) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) pawe scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) david singleton (trinity college, dublin) odzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) merrill swain (university of toronto) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of ód ) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – pozna 2013 editor: miros aw pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak krzysztof kwiatkowski anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydzia pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam pozna proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, pozna contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy wiat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. wierzawska 1, 60-321 pozna print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: index copernicus central and eastern european online library (ceeol) the mla international bibliography the mla directory of periodicals linguistic abstracts ebsco efforts are being made to include studies in second language learning and teaching in the index of journals published by the polish ministry of science and higher education, and to have it listed by the european reference index for the humanities (erih) and the thomson reuters master journal list. special issue: the role of the imagination in language learning guest editors: stephen ryan sarah mercer studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 3, number 3, october 2013 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors .................................................................... 333 editorial ......................................................................................... 337 articles: gillian judson, kieran egan – engaging students’ imaginations in second language learning ............................................................................................. 343 christine muir, zoltán dörnyei – directed motivational currents: using vision to create effective motivational pathways...................................... 357 garold murray – pedagogy of the possible: imagination, autonomy, and space .................................................................................................................... 377 letty chan – facets of imagery in academic and professional achievements: a study of three doctoral students ................................ 397 ewa guz, ma gorzata tetiurka – the role of teacher imagination in conceptualising the child as a second language learner ................. 419 book reviews ................................................................................. 441 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 445 333 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors letty chan is a doctoral candidate in applied linguistics at the school of english, university of nottingham, uk. she has taught academic english at the university of hong kong and nottingham trent university, uk. she has published several book chapters and journal articles in the area of vision and imagery and her current research interests include the l2 motivational self system, faith and l2 identity, the use of imagery in the l2 classroom, and dynamic systems theory. contact details: lettychan@gmail.com zoltán dörnyei is professor of psycholinguistics at the school of english, university of nottingham, uk. he has published over 60 academic papers on various aspects of second language acquisition and language teaching methodology, and is the author of several books, including: the psychology of the language learner (2005, lawrence erlbaum/routledge), the psychology of second language acquisition (2009, oxford university press), teaching and researching motivation (2nd ed., 2011, pearson, co-authored by ema ushioda) and motivating learners, motivating teachers: building vision in the language classroom (in press, cambridge university press, co-authored by magdalena kubanyiova). contact details: zoltan.dörnyei@nottingham.ac.uk kieran egan is a professor of education at simon fraser university in british columbia, canada (http://www.educ.sfu.ca/kegan/). his work deals both with innovative educational theory and detailed practical methods whereby implications of the theory can be applied at the classroom level. various of his books have been translated into more than twenty languages. his recent books include an imaginative approach to teaching (2005, jossey-bass), the future of education: reimagining our schools from the ground up. (2008, yale university press), and learning in depth: a simple innovation that can transform schooling (2010, university of chicago press). he is a director of the imaginative education research group (http://www.ierg.net). contact details: egan@sfu.ca 334 tammy gregersen, an english/spanish bilingual, earned her phd in linguistics at the universidad catolica de valparaiso in chile. she is currently a professor of tesol at the university of northern iowa, cedar falls, usa, where she specializes in second language acquisition methodology, individual differences and nonverbal communication. she has published in distinguished peer-reviewed journals such as the modern language journal, foreign language annals, the teacher trainer, language teaching research, reflections on english language teaching, the international journal of teaching and learning in higher education, lenguas modernas, and signos. contact details: tammy.gregersen@uni.edu ewa guz holds a doctoral degree in linguistics from john paul ii catholic university of lublin, where she is currently employed as a lecturer at the department of methodology and typhlopedagogy. she also works as a teacher trainer in the university college of language teacher education in warsaw. her most recent research interests include the development of academic literacy at the undergraduate level, formulaicity vs. creativity in l2 production and acquisition, nearnative proficiency, teacher training and classroom discourse analysis. contact details: ewasik@o2.pl gillian judson is a lecturer at simon fraser university in british columbia, canada, and one of the directors of the imaginative education research group (ierg). she is author of the books a new approach to ecological education: engaging students’ imaginations in their world (2010, peter lang), engaging imagination in ecological education: a practical guide for teachers (in press, pacific educational press) and editor of the books, wonder-full education: the centrality of wonder in teaching and learning across the curriculum (2013, routledge) and teaching 360º: effective learning through the imagination (2008, sense publishing). her research interests include teacher education, professional development, and social studies education. contact details: gcj@sfu.ca sarah mercer teaches at the university of graz, austria where she has been working since 1996. she completed her phd at the university of lancaster and her habilitation at the university of graz. her research interests include all aspects of the psychology surrounding the foreign language learning experience, focusing in particular on the self. she is the author of towards an understanding of language learner self-concept (2011, springer) and is co-editor of 335 psychology for language learning (2012, palgrave) and multiple perspectives on the self in sla (2014, multilingual matters). contact details: sarah.mercer@uni-graz.at christine muir is a postgraduate teaching fellow at the school of english, university of nottingham, uk, and is currently completing her phd under the supervision of professor zoltán dörnyei. she graduated from the university of edinburgh with an msc in language teaching, having previously spent time teaching english in russia, finland, the czech republic and the uk. her current research interests include directed motivational currents, vision theory, time perspective and dynamic systems theory. contact details: christine.muir@nottingham.ac.uk garold murray is associate professor in the language education center at okayama university, japan. his research interests focus on learner autonomy, social learning spaces, semiotics of place, and imagination in language learning. he is editor of the book social dimensions of autonomy in language learning (2014, palgrave) and co-editor of identity, motivation, and autonomy in language learning (2011, multilingual matters). contact details: garold.murray@gmail.com stephen ryan is a professor in the school of economics at senshu university, tokyo, japan. he received his phd from the university of nottingham, uk, and his research addresses a range of issues relating to the psychology of foreign language learning, with a recent focus on mindsets and the role of the imagination in language learning. he is co-editor (with sarah mercer and marion williams) of psychology for language learning: insights from theory, research and practice (2012, palgrave macmillan). contact details: ryan@isc.senshu-u.ac.jp ma gorzata tetiurka is a lecturer at john paul ii catholic university of lublin, where she currently teaches young learner methodology at the department of methodology and typhlopedagogy. she is currently working on her doctoral thesis concerning the role and use of l1 in a foreign language classroom. she is also an in-service teacher trainer and materials writer. contact details: mtetiurka@kul.pl studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: marek derenowski (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) language editor: melanie ellis (language teacher training college, zabrze) vol. 4 no. 1 march 2014 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham/university of new south wales, sydney) piotr cap (university of łódź) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, adam mickiewicz university, poznań) kata csizer (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) terrence odlin (ohio state university) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (university of toronto) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2014 editor: mirosław pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak marek derenowski anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · linguistic abstracts · ebsco efforts are being made to include studies in second language learning and teaching in the index of journals published by the polish ministry of science and higher education, and to have it listed by the european reference index for the humanities (erih) and the thomson reuters master journal list. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 4, number 1, march 2014 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors ....................................................................... 7 editorial ...........................................................................................11 articles: kay irie – q methodology for post-social-turn research in sla ........... 13 muriel gallego – second language learners’ reflections on the effectiveness of dictogloss: a multi-sectional, multi-level analysis .............................. 33 abulfazl mesgarshahr, esmaeel abdollahzadeh – the impact of teaching communication strategies on efl learners’ willingness to communicate .. 51 musa nushi – can l1 markedness and l2 input robustness account for fossilizability of l2 forms? (recalled) shaopeng li, lianrui yang – topic prominence in chinese efl learners’ interlanguage .................................................................................................... 109 book reviews ................................................................................. 127 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 133 7 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors esmaeel abdollahzadeh has a phd in tefl and applied linguistics. he is an assistant professor teaching applied linguistics, esp and advanced writing courses at the department of foreign languages of iran university of science and technology, tehran. he has presented and published nationally and internationally on issues in second language academic reading and writing, discourse and esp, as well as language learning strategies. contact details: department of foreign languages, iran university of science and technology, tehran, iran (eabdol@gmail.com) muriel gallego is an assistant professor of spanish at ohio university. she serves as language program director and as teaching assistant coordinator for the spanish division of the department of modern languages. she teaches both undergraduate and graduate level courses. she earned her phd in applied linguistics-spanish from purdue university, where she also completed her master's degree in latin american literature and a graduate certificate in english as a second language (esl). her current research interests include theories of second language acquisition, foreign/second language pedagogy, critical pedagogy and sociolinguistics (variationism, dialectology and language in contact). contact details: department of modern languages, ohio university, usa (gallego@ohio.edu) kay irie is a professor at gakushuin university, tokyo where she is developing a clil-based english program. she also teaches in the graduate college of education at temple university japan, tokyo. her current research interests include learner autonomy and motivation in language education. she is a coeditor of realizing autonomy: practice and reflection in language education contexts (2012, palgrave macmillan). 8 contact details: preparatory office for the faculty of international social studies, gakushuin university, 1-5-1 mejiro, toshima-ku, tokyo, 171-8588 japan (kay.irie@gakushuin.ac.jp) shaopeng li is currently undertaking a phd at the school of english, shanghai international studies university, china. his research interests are in second language acquisition and efl teaching, and more specifically in typological and discourse transfer in interlanguage and inter-individual and intra-individual factors influencing second language acquisition. his publications appear in such journals as journal of cambridge studies, journal of foreign languages, contemporary foreign languages studies and foreign language research. he is now studying in the department of theoretical and applied linguistics, university of cambridge, uk as a visiting phd student, which is funded by china scholarship council. contact details: school of english, shanghai international studies university, shanghai, 200083 (lishaopeng99@126.com) musa nushi is an assistant professor of applied linguistics in shahid beheshti university, tehran, iran. he received his phd from the college of foreign languages of allameh tabataba'i university in tehran, iran in 2013. he has taught english to iranian efl learners and teachers for almost 10 years. he spent the 2005-2006 academic year teaching farsi in portland state university, usa. his research interests lie mainly in the interface of second language acquisition and second language instruction, with particular emphasis on the role of corrective feedback in the l2 development. his work has appeared in journals such as journal of cognitive science and iranian journal of applied linguistics. contact details: department of english language and literature, faculty of letters and human sciences, shahid beheshti university, evin, tehran, iran. postal code: 1983969411 (mosesnushi@hotmail.com) abulfazl mesgarshahr has an ma in tefl from the department of foreign languages at iran university of science and technology, tehran. his research interests include second language production and willingness to communicate. contact details: department of foreign languages, iran university of science and technology (eng.am31@gmail.com) mirosław pawlak is professor of english in the english department at the faculty of pedagogy and fine arts of adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland. his main areas of interest are sla theory and research, form-focused instruction, classroom discourse, learner autonomy, communication and learning strategies, individual 9 learner differences and pronunciation teaching. his recent publications include the place of form-focused instruction in the foreign language classroom (2006, adam mickiewicz university press) and several edited collections on learner autonomy, language policies of the council of europe, form-focused instruction, speaking in a foreign language and individual learner differences. contact details: department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, nowy świat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl) lianrui yang is currently professor and dean of the school of foreign languages, ocean university of china, qingdao. his research interests are second language acquisition and foreign language teaching, with a focus on the dynamic perspective on second language development. he is currently editorial board member of system, language learning journal, international journal of language, society and culture. his recent books include china sl studies (2013), multi-disciplinary studies in sla (2010) and second language acquisition and foreign language teaching in china (2007). he has published more than one hundred research articles in academic journals. contact details: school of foreign languages, ocean university of china, qingdao, 266100 (larryyang@126.com) 621 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (4). 2013. 621-644 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl reverse discourse completion task as an assessment tool for intercultural competence1 mehmet kanik university of houston, usa mehmetkanik@gmail.com abstract this paper proposes a prototypic assessment tool for intercultural communicative competence. because traditional discourse completion tasks (dcts) focus on illocutionary competence rather than sociolinguistic competence, a modified version of a dct was created to target sociolinguistic competence. the modified dct employs speech acts as prompts and asks respondents to write about a situation in which a given speech act would be appropriate. this new tool is named a reverse discourse completion task (r-dct). the task was given to learners of turkish as a second language. data from 12 participants were analyzed for their provision of sociopragmatic factors such as power, distance and imposition and also with respect to whether the situation was relevant to a given speech act. responses from the participants show that r-dcts can be used to assess intercultural competence as they help reveal respondents’ knowledge of sociolinguistic context in which a given speech act may be appropriate. by removing the need for comparison with native speaker data and the limitations that emerge from the lack of linguistic formula at respondents’ disposal, r-dct is a promising elicitation task to assess sociolinguistic competence, an integral part of byram’s (1997) model of intercultural communicative competence. keywords: discourse completion task, reverse discourse completion task, intercultural competence, sociolinguistic competence 1 an earlier version of this paper was published in the proceedings of the third international conference on the development and assessment of intercultural competence. mehmet kanik 622 in today’s globalized world, people from different cultures are in contact with one another more than ever. this can be seen in statistics such as the number of international tourists and the number of passports. for instance, according to the world tourism organization, the number of international tourist arrivals increased from 278 million in 1980 to 1,035 million in 2012 (united nations world tourism organization, 2013). there was also an increase in the number of passports. for example, in 1989 there were 7,261,711 americans with passports and this number increased to 113,431,943 in 2012 according to the state department’s website travel.state.gov. in addition to international travel, the internet made intercultural communication possible without travelling abroad by opening up the door for new communication technologies like email, teleconference and video chat. this contact between people from different cultures has made intercultural competence an important aspect of communicative competence. fantini (2009, p. 458) defines intercultural competence as “complex abilities that are required to perform effectively and appropriately when interacting with others who are linguistically and culturally different from oneself.” in an attempt to clarify the multitude of conceptions and definitions of intercultural competence, deardorff (2004, 2006) conducted a study with university scholars and administrators as participants, which she refers to as “the first study to document consensus” (deardorff, 2011, p. 66). she found in her study that intercultural scholars agree on a definition similar to fantini's definition. the definition in her study is “the ability to communicate effectively and appropriately in intercultural situations based on one’s intercultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (deardorff, 2006, pp. 247-248). two models also came out of her study. she categorized the elements that received 80% or more agreement by intercultural scholars under requisite attitudes, knowledge and comprehension, skills, desired internal outcome and desired external outcome in a pyramid model, with attitudes at the base followed by the other skills respectively to the top, which is the desired external outcome. attitudes include respect, openness, curiosity and discovery, while knowledge and comprehension consist of cultural self-awareness, deep understanding and knowledge of culture, culture-specific information and sociolinguistic awareness. skills that interact with knowledge and comprehension are listening, observation, interpretation, analysis, evaluation and relating. she argues that improving the elements at the lower level will improve the ones above them. when the outcomes are considered, she categorized elements such as adaptability, flexibility, ethnorelative view and empathy under desired internal outcome, whereas she designated desired external outcome to include the competence of behaving and communicating effectively and appropriately to achieve one’s goals to some degree. a person needs to improve most of the elements mentioned below the desired external outcome to be competent in an intercul reverse discourse completion task as an assessment tool for intercultural competence 623 tural setting (deardorff, 2006, p. 254). she also depicted these functions and skills in a process model according to which developing intercultural competence is an ongoing and lifelong process (deardorff, 2006, p. 256). in a highly cited model, byram (1997) proposes that intercultural (communicative) competence comprises linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse and intercultural components. byram states that he bases his model on van ek's (1986) model of communicative competence. byram's model is different from that of van ek's, which is based on native speaker competence. unlike van ek’s model, byram’s model is based on intercultural speaker competence. according to byram, there are two major reasons for criticizing models such as van ek's. the first reason is that by using native speaker competence as a model, they set an unrealistic goal for learners. the second reason is that such a competence is a “wrong kind of competence,” leading to the abandonment of one's native competence to attain the competence of other native speakers (byram, 1997, p. 11). in van ek’s model, learners are expected to rely only on the unattainable competence of native speakers; however, in byram’s model, an intercultural speaker would rely on his or her competence in two or more languages to function well in an intercultural setting. byram’s model of intercultural communicative competence is similar to the communicative competence model of canale and swain (1980), which includes grammatical, sociolinguistic, strategic and discourse competences (canale, 1983). bachman (1990) proposed a model of communicative language ability, which has overlapping components with byram’s and canale and swain’s models. bachman’s model is outlined in table 1 together with the parallel components of the other models. as can be seen in the table, according to bachman’s model of communicative competence, pragmatics is a subcomponent of language competence and is comprised of sociolinguistic and illocutionary competences; the former is also addressed in canale and swain’s and byram’s models, neither of which includes illocutionary competence. table 1 communicative competence models bachman (1990) canale and swain (1980), canale (1983) byram (1997) 1. language competence a. organizational competence a. grammatical competence grammatical competence linguistic competence b. textual competence discourse competence discourse competence b. pragmatic competence a. illocutionary competence b. sociolinguistic competence sociolinguistic competence sociolinguistic competence 2. strategic competence strategic competence intercultural competence 3. psychophysiological mechanisms mehmet kanik 624 when it comes to the assessment of intercultural competence, scholars agree that this kind of competence is a complex phenomenon and the assessment should be achieved by employing a variety of measures (fantini, 2009; deardorff, 2009, 2011). since intercultural competence has a multitude of components, they agree that one tool cannot measure it. deardorff (2006, p. 249-250) lists 22 components of intercultural competence and elsewhere (deardorff, 2011) she asserts that “given how daunting intercultural competence assessment can seem, it is important to start with manageable portions” (p. 74). fantini (2009) mentions areas to assess such as attributes, building relationships, communicating, collaborating, awareness, attitudes, skills, knowledge, host language proficiency, and developmental indicators over time. he also lists 44 assessment tools for intercultural competence. the focus of tests varies depending on the goal of the assessment. the tests, some of which are self-assessment tools, aim to measure components such as language proficiency, understanding and awareness of self and others, cross-cultural sensitivity, cross-cultural behavior and skills, personality analysis, cultural profile and preferences, world knowledge, readiness and potential for international assignment, unconscious prejudices and so on. one of the assessment tools that fantini (2009) lists is the maxsa instruments. they include a strategies inventory for learning culture, a language strategy survey and a speech act measure. the following is an example from the maxsa speech act measure taken from cohen, paige, shively, emery and hoff (2005, p. 346): during dinner with a friend’s family in the host community you accidentally spill your glass of red wine on the table cloth. you: friend’s mother: oh, dear! you: friend’s mother: no, no. don’t worry about it. you don’t have to do that. the stain will probably come out in the wash. you: this is an example of a discourse completion task (dct), which was initially employed in studies in pragmatics in the 1980s (see blum-kulka, 1982; blum-kulka & olshtain, 1984; cohen & olshtain, 1981). these early studies employed a written dct and this tool has been used in the field of pragmatics ever since. in these studies, respondents of a written dct receive situations and are expected to write utterances they think would be the most appropriate for a given sociocultural context. most frequently, they target a specific speech act or speech acts. for example, cohen and olshtain (1981) focused on reverse discourse completion task as an assessment tool for intercultural competence 625 apology performance, blum-kulka (1982) investigated directives, and blumkulka & olshtain (1984) elicited requests and apologies. this data collection tool was employed both in cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics. the focus was either on the comparison of uses of speech acts in different languages (blum-kulka & olshtain, 1984; cohen & olshtain, 1981) or the comparison of learner output with that of native speakers (blum-kulka, 1982). normally, dct prompts include information regarding the speakers to give a sense of the power relationship between the two speakers, the social distance between them and, finally, the reason for the speech act. for example, the following item from blum-kulka and olshtain’s (1984, p. 198) study establishes the contextual features for the respondent. at the professor’s office a student has borrowed a book from her teacher, which she promised to return today. when meeting her teacher, however, she realizes that she forgot to bring it along. teacher: miriam, i hope you brought the book i lent you. miriam: _____________________________________________________________ teacher: ok, but please remember it next week. among many possible factors which may influence the performance from the gender of the speakers to the setting in which the speech act is performed, three, namely social distance between the speaker and the hearer, relative power of speakers in relation to each other and the ranking of imposition, are considered to be the major defining sociopragmatic factors in the use of speech acts (brown & levinson, 1987; hudson, detmer, & brown, 1995). these three factors are commonly considered in collecting data in pragmatics research. the speech act measure of the maxsa instruments mentioned above was also designed based on these three sociopragmatic factors. cohen et al. (2005, p. 49) say that “because factors such as social status, social distance, and degree of severity (apologies) or degree of imposition (requests) can affect the kind of language that is pragmatically appropriate in a speech act, such factors are identified in the description of the vignette.” as they further explain three primary variables were used to provide a set of varied vignettes: social status, social distance, and severity of the infraction (apologies) or degree of imposition of the request . . . although degree of severity and degree of imposition may be perceived differently by each individual and perhaps in different cultures, we attempted to vary severity/imposition in the ten vignettes in the speech act measure. (p. 50) mehmet kanik 626 by design, dcts expect the respondent to write an appropriate response after analyzing the sociopragmatic factors implied in the situation prompt. the responses are analyzed by coding them into strategies used to create a speech act. this strategy use has been the major focus of research. blum-kulka, house and kasper (1989) and hudson, detmer and brown (1985) provided useful guidelines in analyzing strategy use for request, refusal and apology speech acts. the ease of implementation and the ability to standardize have been important factors triggering the common use of elicitation tasks such as dcts in pragmatics research. in an attempt to collect naturally-occurring data, researchers face challenges as they often lack control over variables. it becomes difficult to collect speech acts that are uttered based on the same sociocultural factors such as setting, power, distance and imposition. in contrast, a dct allows researchers to collect many samples of the same speech act based on the predefined sociocultural factors and in a relatively much shorter time. another difficulty of collecting natural data lies in the challenge of collecting data from the same users for different situations or for a second time (cohen, 2004). considering these factors, it is not hard to imagine why elicitation tasks have been commonly used. however, since such tasks do not bring natural data, they have brought with them questions regarding their validity and thus such elicitation tasks have been examined by some scholars and some others suggested modifications (e.g., bou franch & lorenzo-dus, 2008; cohen & shively, 2002; golato 2003; hinkel 1997; johnston, kasper, & ross, 1998; roever, 2006; rose, 1992, 1994; rose & ono, 1995; sasaki, 1998; varghese & billmyer, 1996; yuan, 2001; zuskin, 1993). these investigations and suggestions varied from comparison of elicitation tasks with each other to adding more descriptions to the dct situation, giving the situation in video format, adding (multiple) rejoinders to the dct, focusing on the effect of the type of rejoinder and the difference between oral and written dcts as well as the difference between natural and elicited data. suggestions in these works aim to make the measures of pragmatics more valid and reliable. however, as cohen (2004) says, “while any enhancement may make the task more authentic, we must remember it is still a task attempting to simulate reality” (p. 317). considered in this way, a dct does not prove that a learner can perform speech acts appropriately in a natural situation, but it shows the potential and the linguistic formulas a person has and sheds light on his/her sociopragmatic awareness. the question of what dcts are actually assessing emerges at this point. if we go back to the models of intercultural and communicative competences, we see that they all included sociolinguistic competence or awareness as part of the (intercultural) communicative competence. bachman’s (1990, p. 90) model also includes illocutionary competence, defined as “the knowledge of reverse discourse completion task as an assessment tool for intercultural competence 627 the pragmatic conventions for performing acceptable language functions,” whereas sociolinguistic competence is “the knowledge of sociolinguistic conventions for performing language functions appropriately in a given context.” to illustrate this, bachman (1990) says: imagine a context in which i wish to get someone to leave. to accomplish this, i use my illocutionary competence, which indicates that a simple statement can function as a request. (i will also use my sociolinguistic competence . . . to determine which of several possible statements is the most appropriate in this specific context). (p. 90) in this respect, bachman’s definitions of illocutionary and sociolinguistic competences resemble leech’s (1983) definitions of pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics respectively. leech (1983, p. 11) refers to the level of pragmatics in which politeness, appropriateness, power relations, distance between speakers, and imposition of speech acts are interpreted as sociopragmatics. leech defines this level as “the sociological interface of pragmatics.” by pragmalinguistics, on the other hand, he refers to “the particular resources which a given language provides for conveying particular illocutions.” for example, knowing the form i deeply apologize entails pragmalinguistic competence, whereas knowing when to use it requires sociopragmatic competence. when the definitions of illocutionary and sociolinguistic competences are considered, it seems that a dct targets illocutionary competence, which is not addressed in byram’s model. dcts give the researchers only an indirect access to sociopragmatic competence of the respondents while providing direct access to their pragmalinguistic repertoire. it is, of course, arguable whether these particular competences are mutually exclusive. it could be argued that sociolinguistic competence includes illocutionary competence. one may think that a person who has sociolinguistic competence should be able to find the necessary illocutions to perform appropriately during interaction. it could also be argued that what is more essential here is sociolinguistic competence rather than illocutionary competence, as a person can learn all the formulas in a target language but may still fail to use them appropriately if he or she does not develop sociolinguistic competence. however, the dct, which was proposed as one of the assessment tools of intercultural competence, targets the knowledge of illocutionary items more than sociolinguistic competence. to increase the focus of the instrument on sociolinguistic competence, modifications to dcts are needed. from this perspective, i believe that reversing the dct will give one a more direct idea of the sociolinguistic awareness or competence of test takers. in a reverse discourse completion task (r-dct), test takers are provided with speech acts and asked to write a situation in which that given speech act could be uttered. mehmet kanik 628 reverse discourse completion tasks as mentioned above, while different models of communicative competence have a sociolinguistic competence component, traditional dcts ask respondents to provide illocutionary (pragmalinguistic) items. however, dcts focus more on illocutionary competence in bachman’s model as they give one a good idea of the pragmalinguistic repertoire of speakers. on the other hand, r-dcts will focus more on sociolinguistic competence, which is addressed in models of communicative competence and intercultural communicative competence models mentioned in this paper. with this characteristic, a r-dct will assess the sociolinguistic competence component of intercultural competence and pragmatic competence. it does not mean a r-dct is assessing sociolinguistic or illocutionary competences as mutually exclusive competences. what is significant about r-dcts is that they are changing the focus of the measure to understand how test takers would interpret utterances. deardorff’s (2006) model, for instance, includes skills such as listening, observing, interpreting, analyzing, evaluating, and relating. interpreting utterances and understanding in what kind of situations they may be appropriate is a component of intercultural competence. by asking testees to write situations for utterances given, we will be able to assess their sociolinguistic competence directly, rather than indirectly, without limiting the measure to the knowledge of illocutionary items, as is the case with traditional dcts. given this facet of r-dcts, i propose that they can aspire to test intercultural competence as well as pragmatic competence. they can be used in addition to other measures to assess one aspect of intercultural communicative competence. in a traditional dct, a situation is provided to test takers or participants and they are asked to provide utterances that they think would be appropriate in this situation. in such a measure, they may evaluate the situation well, but may not have the illocutionary items at their disposal and may fail to respond appropriately because of a lack of knowledge of formulas. in a r-dct, utterances are provided and participants are asked to write about a situation in which a given utterance would be appropriate. considering that power, social distance and imposition are commonly accepted sociopragmatic factors that influence the way people speak in social context, these contextual features will be looked for in participants’ descriptions. of course, there are many factors that may influence the context of speech and hence the choice of language such as gender or age of the interlocutors or even the location in which the conversation is taking place. however, as mentioned above, power, social distance and imposition are considered to be the major social factors influencing choices of speakers in social interaction. they can reverse discourse completion task as an assessment tool for intercultural competence 629 even be considered as the primary factors to focus on before others. thus, they are used in the proposed r-dct. here is an example of an r-dct item: write a situation in which the below statement could be uttered. also, provide information regarding the setting, who the speaker is, who the listener is and what is asked. speech act: ‘i know you came from another city but to reach a final decision about you i need to see you again next week.’ situation: ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ setting: _____________________________ speaker: ____________________________ hearer: _____________________________ request: ____________________________ one challenge of this task is to select the utterances provided. they need to be authentic or elicited from the speakers of the language in which the test is given (not necessarily native speakers), and they need to be examples of successful (intercultural) communication. they also need to have a potential to represent the targeted situation (e.g., a request situation in which the power of the speaker is higher than that of the hearer, the distance between the speaker and the hearer is high, and the imposition of the act on the speaker is high for a speech act originally used in such a situation). as could be seen, the novelty of r-dcts is to reverse the traditional dct in which a situation is given to the participants in order to provide them with utterances and ask them to interpret them and write about a situation in which they think the utterance would be appropriate. method the first part of the study was the creation of a prototype of an r-dct. as seen in the example item, an r-dct uses speech acts as the prompts for which test takers describe situations in which a given speech act may be appropriate. in an ideal case such a speech act sample comes from naturally-occurring successful intercultural communication. however, for this prototypic study, earlier data retrieved from 65 native turkish speaking college students using a written dct were used in selecting the speech acts to be included in the r-dct. the portion of data from students who received their college education in english was excluded as kanik (2011) found that receiving education in a foreign language may influence speakers’ native languages. for the r-dct, four scenarios from the earlier data were chosen. situation 1 includes a speaker who is a human remehmet kanik 630 sources manager and is asking an applicant from another city to come again next week for a second interview. this scenario reflects higher power of the speaker in relation to the hearer and both the social distance and the imposition of the request are high. in situation 2, the speaker, a manager in a factory, has higher power in relation to the hearer, who is a worker. the request to work overtime on the day of the request reflects high imposition and the distance is low. in the third situation, an employee in a restaurant speaking to a customer has lower social power and the social distance is high. the request to move to another table from the one which the customer specifically reserved for a special evening represents high imposition. finally, a college student has lower social power in relation to his or her professor in situation 4. the distance is considered to be low in such a situation and the request to extend the deadline for a project, while the deadline for submitting grades is near, represents high imposition. the requests chosen as prompts while creating the r-dct were used for these situations in the earlier data. table 2 lists these situations. table 2 situations speaker hearer request situation 1 a human resources manager an applicant come again next week for a second interview situation 2 a manager in a factory a worker work overtime situation 3 an employee in a restaurant a customer move to another table situation 4 a college student a professor extend deadline for a project then, requests that are believed to represent appropriate use in these situations were chosen. the process of choosing them was based on the frequency of the strategies used in the request speech acts written by the respondents. first, the average number of strategies used to form requests was calculated and the most commonly used strategies were identified. for example, if the average of the strategies employed was three, than the most commonly used one of the three strategies was identified. the next step was to pick requests composed of these identified strategies. after four requests were identified, they were used as the prompts in the r-dct. the instrument created included these four requests (see the appendix for requests used as prompts in the r-dct). the next step was asking the respondents to write about a situation that they thought would be appropriate for each of the requests given. for this phase of the study, the instrument was given to learners of turkish as a foreign language at a university in istanbul, turkey. responses from 12 participants were included in the data. initially, there were data from more than 12 participants. however, some of the data did not reveal role relationships, and thus they were excluded since this study depended on role relationships in situations written about by the par reverse discourse completion task as an assessment tool for intercultural competence 631 ticipants. these 12 students came from six different countries, namely afghanistan, bosnia-herzegovina, china, kazakhstan, turkmenistan and ukraine. seven of them were male and 5 were female. the mean age of the participants was 23.8. at the time of data collection, they were aiming to study in turkey and thus they were learning turkish at a university language center. these students took the r-dct within the last month of their first academic year in istanbul. table 3 shows participants’ age profiles. table 3 participants’ age group m n mdn minimum maximum range female 23.2 5 24 20 25 5 male 24.2 7 22 21 33 12 total 23.8 12 23.5 20 33 13 after the data were gathered, the situations written about by the participants were analyzed for role relationships and the requests made in the situations. based on the role relationships and requests made, the ranking of power relationships, distance and the imposition of requests was created. based on the role relationships and the relevance of the situation to the utterance, the situations were judged to be either satisfactory or unsatisfactory. see figure 1 for the instrument used while assessing the responses. figure 1 assessment rubric as the assessment rubric shows, the responses were scored based on the sociopragmatic factors described by the respondents and also on whether the situation written about was relevant, because a situation may reflect the sociopragmatic factors a given speech act was used for but it may be irrelevant. those situations that described factors matching the targeted design and were relevant were given a score of 10. if a respondent provided a situation that mehmet kanik 632 would reflect the intended sociopragmatic factors and was relevant for each prompt, than that respondent received 40 points in total. results scoring based on the sociopragmatic factors and the relevance of the situations revealed that 3 participants wrote about situations that were relevant and would be appropriate for the utterances given in all four scenarios. seven of them were able to write relevant and appropriate situations in three of the four scenarios. two of them were able to provide situations for the utterances given satisfactorily in only two scenarios. table 4 shows the descriptive statistics representing results for each scenario. they show that scenario 2 resulted in the lowest mean score, while scenario 4 resulted in the highest mean score. it could be concluded that students had the most difficulty in designating roles for scenario 2 and the least difficulty in scenario 4. the next four sections summarize the role relationships created by the participants for each scenario. samples from the data are also given. table 4 descriptive statistics n minimum maximum m sd scenario 1 12 20.00 10.00 7.5000 4.52267 scenario 2 12 20.00 10.00 6.6667 4.92366 scenario 3 12 20.00 10.00 7.5000 4.52267 scenario 4 12 20.00 10.00 9.1667 2.88675 score 12 20.00 40.00 30.8333 6.68558 scenario 1 the utterance was used for a situation in which a human resources manager asks an applicant who is from another city to come again next week for a second interview. the sociopragmatic variables in this situation were originally rated by educated native speakers of turkish and their ratings reflect the power of the speaker, the distance between the speaker and the hearer and the imposition as high. the turkish utterance that was chosen and that reflects the strategies most commonly used for this situation is “biliyorum ba ka bir ehirden geldiniz ama sizinle ilgili karar netle tirebilmem için haftaya tekrar sizinle görü mek istiyorum” [i know that you came from another city but to clarify my decision about you i need to see you again next week]. table 5 summarizes the role relationships and the ranking of sociopragmatic factors in the situations created by the participants. reverse discourse completion task as an assessment tool for intercultural competence 633 table 5 role relationships provided by the participants in scenario 1 speaker hearer # (%) power distance imposition employer applicant 8 (66.6) high high high doctor patient 01 (8.3) low high high police (immigration officer) foreign resident 01 (8.3) high high high student student 01 (8.3) neutral low low business representative business representative 01 (8.3) neutral high high for this speech act, 8 of the 12 respondents provided situations with an employer as a speaker and an applicant as a hearer, resulting in a high ranking of power and distance. another participant chose the roles of a police (immigration) officer and a foreign resident to reflect high ranking of power and distance. all 9 participants included a request for a second appointment to an applicant from another city, creating high imposition. in the assessment of intercultural competence or pragmatic competence, those test takers who wrote about a situation in which the utterance would be appropriate would be considered satisfactory. the following is a sample situation from the data from participant 6, who was male, 24 and chinese: “bir irketin müdürüsünüz. bir elemanla i görü mesi yapman z için haftaya tekrar gelmesini rica ediyorsunuz.” [you are the director in a company. you are requesting an employee (applicant) to come again next week to have a job interview.] other role relationships provided by the respondents include doctor-patient, studentstudent and business representative-business representative. scenario 2 the prompt was aimed at a situation in which a manager asks an employee to work overtime. the power of the speaker and the imposition were high while distance was ranked low. the utterance that was chosen for this study was “yar n tefti var. bugün temizlik için mesaiye kalabilir misin?” [there is inspection tomorrow. could you work overtime today for cleaning?] table 6 summarizes the role relationships and the ranking of sociopragmatic factors in the situations created by the participants. table 6 role relationships provided by the participants in scenario 2 speaker hearer # (%) power distance imposition boss employee 8 (66.6) high low high secretary coworker 01 (8.3) neutral low high security guard cleaner 01 (8.3) neutral low high administrator teacher 01 (8.3) high low high principal student 01 (8.3) high high high mehmet kanik 634 for this speech act, 9 participants created situations in line with the situation the original utterance was used for. that is, they were situations with the speaker with higher power than the hearer, low distance between the speaker and the hearer and high imposition. while doing so, 8 of them used a boss and an employee scenario, while 1 participant used an administrator and a teacher as roles. however, the administrator-teacher situation would be unusual, as cleaning is not typically conducted by teachers at schools. of the remaining three situations, two included neutral power relations. one participant preferred the roles of a secretary and a coworker and another those of a security guard and a cleaner. again, it would be unusual for a secretary or a security guard to ask a coworker or a cleaner to work overtime. the last situation entails an interaction between a principal and a student. this situation was also unusual as students do not do cleaning and it is irrelevant, as the utterance conveyed working overtime clearly and did not apply to this scenario. thus, the three responses that were not in line with the sociopragmatic factors of the situation the utterance was used for could not be considered satisfactory responses. the following is a sample situation provided by participant 2, who was female, 20, and from afghanistan: “bir fabrikada ef olarak çal yorsunuz. bugün fabrikada bitmesi gereken temizlik var. bunu bir çal an zdan mesaiye kalmas istiyorsunuz.” [you work as a manager at a factory. there is cleaning left to be finished today at the factory. you are asking one of your staff to work overtime.] scenario 3 the utterance in this scenario was used for a situation in which an employee in a restaurant asks a first-time customer who reserved a table for a special night to move to another table. the sociopragmatic factors were ranked as low power on the part of the speaker and high distance, as the employee does not know the customer, as well as high imposition, as the employee is intruding on the customer’s special night and asking him or her to move away from the table was specifically reserved for the night. the utterance used for this situation was “efendim, çok özür dilerim. burada teknik ekibin acilen çal mas gerekiyor. sizi ba ka bir masaya alabilir miyiz?” [sir/madam, i deeply apologize. the technical team needs to work here immediately. could we move you to another table?] table 7 summarizes the role relationships in the situations created by the participants for this utterance. reverse discourse completion task as an assessment tool for intercultural competence 635 table 7 role relationships provided by the participants in scenario 3 speaker hearer # (%) power distance imposition waiter customer 2 (16.6) low high low waiter customer 4 (33.2) low high high teacher student 01 (8.3) high low low worker worker0 01 (8.3) neutral low low chair of a meeting participants 01 (8.3) neutral low low secretary customer 01 (8.3) low high low customer representative customer 01 (8.3) low high low construction worker customer 01 (8.3) low high high the results revealed a lot of variability in this situation. six participants created situations with waiter and customer roles. two of these situations do not convey high imposition and overall only five of the situations include high imposition requests. four of these involve an interaction between a waiter and a customer and one of them between a construction worker and a customer. the setting is a restaurant. the reason for low imposition scenarios (i.e., ones having no indication of special circumstances making the situation more difficult) could be that the utterance did not refer to a special night or special reservation of the table. if the utterance included a disarmer (e.g., “i know that you are celebrating a special day . . .”), more participants might have created situations with high imposition requests. however, the mean of the number of strategies and the most commonly used strategies based on the mean of strategies did not include a disarmer in the earlier data. thus, situations that did not reveal high imposition but were relevant were considered to be acceptable for this utterance, which amounts to nine responses. the following is a sample situation from the data provided by participant 7, who was female, 25, and kazakh (russian): “bir lokantada garson olarak çal yorsunuz. mü teriye teknik ekibin acilen çal mas gerekti ini söylüyorsunuz ve onlar ba ka masaya alaca söylüyorsunuz.” [you work as a waiter in a restaurant. you tell your customer that the technical team needs to work immediately and tell them you will move them to another table.] other role relationships used included worker-worker, chair of a meetingparticipants, teacher-student, customer representative-customer and secretarycustomer. the first two had neutral power relationship and the last two conveyed low power, high distance, but low imposition. one of the situations, teacher-student, was not an appropriate situation for the utterance given. the utterance could not be directed to a student by a teacher as the utterance (“sir/madam, i deeply apologize . . .”) would be a strong request and would not reflect a typical utterance by a teacher addressed to a student. mehmet kanik 636 scenario 4 the request speech act in this scenario came from the situation in which a college student asks a professor to extend the deadline for a project. the ratings of sociopragmatic factors revealed a speaker with low power, low distance between the speaker and the hearer and high imposition as the deadline for submitting grades by the professor is approaching. the utterance was: “biliyorum proje teslimi için son gün geldi ama ben yeti tiremedim. bana iki gün daha müsaade edebilir misiniz?” [i know that today is the deadline for project submission, but i could not finish it. could you excuse me two more days?] table 8 outlines the role relationships that emerged in participants’ responses. table 8 role relationships provided by the participants in scenario 4 speaker hearer # (%) power distance imposition student professor 06 (50) low low high employee (architect, engineer, researcher) boss 5 (41.6) low low high boss boss 01 (8.3) neutral low high eleven participants provided situations that were in line with the situation the utterance was used for in terms of the sociopragmatic design, that is, the speaker with low power, low distance between the speaker and hearer, and high ranking of imposition. these situations were considered satisfactory responses. of these 11 situations, six revealed a student-professor scenario while five revealed employee-boss scenario. only one participant preferred a neutral power relationship between two bosses. here is a sample situation from data provided by participant 8, who was female, 23, and ukrainian: “siz bir ö rencisiniz. mezun olmak için bir proje haz rlamal z. teslim günü geldi i zaman proje haz r de ildi. bu sebeple retmene iki gün daha müsaadeyi soruyorsunuz.” [you are a student. you must prepare a project to graduate. the project is not ready on submission day. for this reason, you are asking your teacher for two more days.] discussion discourse completion tasks have been used commonly for more than three decades now and have been used as useful tools to collect data in pragmatics research. this study is an attempt to modify the traditional dct to switch its focus by reversing it to allow more direct access to participants’ or test-takers’ sociopragmatic competence. this would be achieved through seeing how they would interpret utterances offered to them and create situations reverse discourse completion task as an assessment tool for intercultural competence 637 in which they think the utterances would be appropriate. a traditional dct asks respondents to write (or even say or act out) a speech act for a given situation. with this characteristic, we may gain insight into the pragmalinguistic repertoire of the respondent, or illocutionary competence, and make inferences about his or her sociopragmatic interpretation of a situation, or sociolinguistic competence. an r-dct reverses the situation and allows the researcher or tester to better understand how the respondent interprets the utterance and the sociopragmatic aspects or forces it carries. utterance interpretation or inference constitutes an important part of discussion in pragmatics (see, e.g., wilson & sperber, 2004). it is also part of the intercultural competence models. for example, deardorff (2006, p. 254) puts interpretation under necessary skills in her model. correctly interpreting utterances and communicative intentions of speakers are important aspects of successful communication. in this respect, the r-dct gives a better picture of the sociolinguistic awareness of the participants rather than the illocutionary items they have at their disposal. compared to dcts, r-dcts will potentially make it easier to assess the sociolinguistic competence component of intercultural communicative competence or pragmatic competence. in this respect, what is novel in the r-dct is the way it reverses the dct to change the focus of the measure. in assessing intercultural competence or pragmatic competence, several measures can and need to be employed; thus, instead of an attempt to replace any existing tool such as dcts, it is an attempt to complement the existing tools by focusing on a specific component of users’ competence. one important advantage of r-dcts is that they could help diminish the need for comparing learner data with native speaker data. assessing competences with native speaker criteria has been criticized in the field of intercultural competence (byram, 1997). although the utterances used as prompts in the r-dct created for this study came from data collected from native speakers of turkish, statistical comparison with native speakers would not be necessary. a better way of utilizing utterances for r-dcts would be getting them from spoken corpora. however, the corpora should be clear about the role relationships in the situation in which the speech sample is used. the corpus used should be either a corpus of speech acts or a spoken corpus in which pragmatic elements such as speech act type, information about interlocutors, roles, settings, activity type and so on are tagged. spoken corpora without these features will be difficult for speech act retrieval, especially the large ones. it is because searching the corpora for speech acts is challenging. for example, there may be many instances of apologies that do not include any of these words: sorry, afraid, apologize, forgive me. by the same token, these boxes are really heavy may be a request speech act. these challenges make mehmet kanik 638 general spoken corpora difficult resources for speech act retrieval (see ruhi, schmidt, wörner, & ery lmaz, 2011, for a discussion of these issues and ways of enhancing retrieval of speech acts from a spoken corpus). if the sample speech acts are retrieved from a corpus of speech acts or a corpus with pragmatic tagging, a natural and appropriate utterance, regardless of whether it comes from a native speaker or not, could be used as a prompt in an r-dct. thus, successful interchanges from a corpus, be they among native speakers or not, could be used as prompts in r-dcts. this will also free the testers from their intuitions about what utterances could be appropriate in a situation. if the sample from the corpus of real communication does not demonstrate any misunderstandings or breaks in communication, then the utterance could be considered an example of a successful utterance for a given situation. in addition, in a traditional dct, second language learners’ or speakers’ failure to provide an utterance that is similar to a native speaker’s may be due to several factors. it may be, for instance, because (a) the participant did not understand the text in the dct prompt, (b) he or she did not understand the situation described in the prompt, (c) he or she used conventions in his or her first language and they did not transfer well, or (d) they understood everything but did not have the pragmalinguistic forms in their repertoire. there may even be more factors. such complexity makes traditional dcts weak candidates for assessing intercultural competence because it is not clear to what nonnative speakers’ failure to provide native speaker utterances should be attributed. there is also the question whether it is even desirable to compare their utterance to native speakers’ utterances, as discussed by byram (1997). in this regard, r-dcts help minimize such complexities and allow us to make better judgments about respondents’ intercultural or pragmatic competence. we could tell whether a respondent is likely to be engaged in misinterpretations or misunderstandings based on how he or she interprets the utterances given. although this study is an attempt to propose a prototype of a novel tool as developed from an existing tool, it has limitations. one of them is that the only person involved in analyzing the situations created by the participants was the researcher. analysis and ratings by additional persons may have been beneficial. it is especially true when we are focusing on appropriacy rather than accuracy. since appropriacy is a fluid phenomenon that can be context specific and individually variable, deciding whether the situations written about by the participants would be appropriate situations for the utterances given would benefit from the contributions of multiple raters. another question would arise about the assessment tool for the proposed measure. for this study, those participants who were able to create relevant situations with sociopragmatic characteristics similar to situations in reverse discourse completion task as an assessment tool for intercultural competence 639 which the utterances given to them were used were considered to have performed satisfactorily. those that created situations that carried sociopragmatic factors different from the original situations had problems. this is confirmed by the data, which revealed that situations that carried the sociopragmatic characteristics of the original situations would be those in which the utterance given would be appropriate. those that differed from the original situation in terms of sociopragmatic factors turned out to be the ones in which the utterance would not be appropriate. for example, in scenario 3, one participant provided a teacher as the speaker and a student as the hearer, creating sociopragmatic factors different from the intended design. the utterance in this situation would not be appropriate. in contrast, even if respondents created situations with roles different from the original situations, the utterance could potentially be appropriate as long as the sociopragmatic factors did not contradict the original situations. for example, in scenario 4, the utterance came from a student-professor situation, and yet employee-boss designations in the data carried the same sociopragmatic pattern and thus created situations in which the utterance could be used. this shows that an approach to assessment using sociopragmatic factors could be useful in assessing intercultural or pragmatic competence. however, limiting the assessment to sociopragmatic factors has to be further researched, possibly by comparing it to naturally occurring data. one way of seeing whether correct designation of factors in creating situations leads to appropriate situations for utterances given is through a comparison to natural utterances and situations. if similar utterances in similar real life situations with the same sociopragmatic context are appropriate, then better judgments can be made about the assessment method employed in this study. however, assessing appropriacy will always be challenging as an utterance that could work perfectly in some contexts may become inappropriate if the contextual features change a little. it is because appropriacy and conversations are dynamic, fluid, contextspecific, and personally evaluated at the time of speech by the interactants. this study proposes the use of sociopragmatic factors in the assessment rubric with the acknowledgement that it needs to be further investigated through a comparison to naturally-occurring speech. finally, the prototypic r-dct employed for this study brought a challenge during the assessment of responses. initially, data was gathered from more than 12 participants. however, the r-dct did not require participants to explicitly identify roles (see the appendix). therefore, some responses did not make any indication about the roles of the speakers and hearers in the situations they created. since the assessment proposed in this paper relies on sociopragmatic factors of power, distance and imposition, some responses could not be used. although this problem created a limitation for this study, it mehmet kanik 640 also led to the second version of the prototype, as could be seen from the sample item given above. an r-dct created with items that ask respondents to explicitly identify roles will address this limitation. however, this version still needs to be tested by employing it to gather another set of data. conclusion this paper has described a new measure, which i have proposed to name reverse discourse completion task, for assessing intercultural (communicative) competence as well as pragmatic competence. since testing intercultural competence is a complex endeavor, the proposed measure is an attempt to address one aspect of this multidimensional competence rather than an answer to the problem. the new measure was tested with 12 participants in a study-abroad setting and the results indicate that the task could be used to assess the sociolinguistic competence component of intercultural competence. the study has also shown that sociopragmatic factors could be used in assessment. however, more elaboration on the proposed assessment method is needed. further testing and use of this measure with a larger number of participants will improve the measure itself and the assessment procedures. it would be especially beneficial to compare data gathered using r-dcts with naturally-occurring ones in order to see whether situations the r-dct predicts as appropriate for utterances given will in fact be appropriate in real life. nevertheless, the r-dct can be implemented in addition to the available measures to address sociolinguistic competence. acknowledgments the author would like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions to improve the manuscript. he is also grateful to zohreh eslami for her comment on the assessment tool and hasan fehmi erol for his help with data collection. reverse discourse completion task as an assessment tool for intercultural competence 641 references bachman, l. f. 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(1993). assessing l2 sociolinguistic competence: in search of support from pragmatic theories. pragmatics and language learning, 4, 166-182. mehmet kanik 644 appendix items in the reverse discourse completion task 1. “biliyorum ba ka bir ehirden geldiniz ama sizinle ilgili karar netle tirebilmem için haftaya tekrar sizinle görü mek istiyorum.” [i know that you came from another city but to clarify my decision about you i need to see you again next week]. durum: [situation] ___________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ 2. “yar n tefti var. bugün temizlik için mesaiye kalabilir misin?” [there is inspection tomorrow. could you work overtime today for cleaning?] durum: [situation] ___________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ 3. “efendim, çok özür dilerim. burada teknik ekibin acilen çal mas gerekiyor. sizi ba ka bir masaya alabilir miyiz?” ? [sir/madam, i deeply apologize. the technical team needs to work here immediately. could we move you to another table?] durum: [situation] ___________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ 4. “biliyorum proje teslimi için son gün geldi ama ben yeti tiremedim. bana iki gün daha müsaade edebilir misiniz?” [i know that today is the deadline for project submission, but i could not finish it. could you excuse me two more days?] durum: [situation] ___________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: miros aw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: mariusz kruk (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) vol. 1 no. 4 december 2011 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (trinity college, dublin) simon borg (university of leeds) piotr cap (university of ód ) anna cie licka (texas a&m international university, adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) kata csizer (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) krystyna dro dzia -szelest (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabry -barker (university of silesia) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of ód ) jan majer (university of ód ) anna micho ska-stadnik (university of wroc aw) anna ni egorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) terrence odlin (ohio state university) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) pawe scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) david singleton (trinity college, dublin) odzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) merrill swain (university of toronto) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of ód ) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – pozna 2011 editor: miros aw pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak mariusz kruk anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydzia pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam pozna proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print and online, with the print edition being the original version. published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, pozna contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy wiat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. wierzawska 1, 60-321 pozna studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 1, number 4, december 2011 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors .................................................................... 463 editorial ......................................................................................... 465 articles: adriana biedro – personality factors as predictors of foreign language aptitude ........................................................................................... 467 ma gorzata baranucarz – the relationship between language anxiety and the actual and perceived levels of foreign language pronunciation ....................................................................................... 491 mojgan rashtchi, mahnaz afzali – spoken grammar awareness raising: does it affect the listening ability of iranian efl learners? ........ 515 marcin jaroszek – the development of conjunction use in advanced l2 speech ......................................................................................... 533 reviewers for volume 1/2011 ........................................................ 555 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 557 463 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors mahnaz afzali has obtained her ma in tefl from islamic azad university, north tehran branch, iran, and is a secondary school teacher. she has been teaching english to young learners for five years and her research interests include language teaching and young learners, language teaching and the related strategies, and classroom assessment. contact details: (e-mail: info@alitrade.net) ma gorzata baranucarz received her phd in applied linguistics in 2004 with a dissertation entitled field independence as a predictor of success in foreign language pronunciation acquisition and learning. she is an assistant professor at the university of wroc aw and since 1998 has been a teacher at the teacher training college in wroc aw. her main areas of interest are methodology of fl teaching, sla (particularly individual learner differences and fl pronunciation acquisition), psycholinguistics, and phonetics and pronunciation pedagogy. contact details: (e-mail: mbaran-lucarz@ifa.uni.wroc.pl) adriana biedro received her phd in applied linguistics from adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland, in 2003. she is an assistant professor at the english philology department of pomeranian university, s upsk, poland. her fields of interest include applied linguistics and sla theory and research. her research focuses on individual differences in sla, in particular, foreign language aptitude and cognitive and personality factors in gifted l2 learners. contact details: department of english philology, pomeranian university, owia ska 8, 76-200 s upsk, poland (e-mail: adrianabiedron@wp.pl) marcin jaroszek is a senior lecturer at the institute of english studies of jagiellonian university. he was awarded his phd in humanities in 2009. that year he was also appointed assistant to the head of the teacher training col 464 lege of jagiellonian university. since october 2010 he has been acting in the capacity of the coordinator for student and educational affairs for the english philology with the german language programme offered by the english philology department of jagiellonian university as well as head of the efl and linguistics section at the o wi cim state school of higher professional education. his major research interests include spoken discourse analysis and its applicability to classroom contexts. contact details: institute of english studies, jagiellonian university, ul. prof. s. ojasiewicza 4, 30-001 kraków, poland (e-mail: marcin.jaroszek@uj.edu.pl) mojgan rashtchi is associate professor in the tefl department at islamic azad university, north tehran branch, iran. she has published several articles in the field of language teaching and learning both in iran and internationally. she has also published a number of books on teaching english to children and adults. her main areas of interest include first language acquisition, critical thinking, philosophy for children, and language teaching methodology. contact details: (e-mail: mojgan.rashtchi@gmail.com) 573 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (4). 2017. 573-599 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.4.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the impact of contemplative practices on foreign language anxiety and learning emily e. scida university of virginia, charlottesville, usa ees2n@virginia.edu jill n. jones university of virginia, charlottesville, usa jnj5ee@virginia.edu abstract this study looked at the impact of the integration of contemplative practices on foreign language anxiety, positive and negative affect, self-efficacy, classroom climate, and language learning in students enrolled in an advanced intermediate spanish language course in the usa. data included preand post-test surveys, exam scores to measure learning outcomes, student interviews, and course evaluations. in the contemplative group, students engaged in brief 10-minute contemplative practices once a week, while the non-contemplative group followed the same syllabus but was not exposed to contemplative practices. analysis of the data showed no significant differences in foreign language anxiety, self-efficacy or affect between the non-contemplative and contemplative groups at post-test but significantly higher scores on classroom climate measures in the contemplative group. significantly higher grades were found on course exams for students in the contemplative group. analysis of the pre-/post-survey data revealed a significant decrease in foreign language anxiety in both groups over the semester but not for affect or self-efficacy. this study extends the existing research on contemplative practices to a new context—affect and learning in foreign language courses. keywords: foreign language anxiety; affect; contemplative practices; classroom climate; self-efficacy emily e. scida, jill n. jones 574 1. introduction even after decades of attention, foreign language anxiety (fla) continues to occupy a prominent place in the research on second language acquisition. it comes as no surprise that emotions, both positive and negative, have a significant impact on language learning—retention, performance, skill development, and learner experience. recent studies on affect have incorporated ideas from positive psychology in second language learning and focus on promoting positive emotion in the classroom to support effective learning by broadening attention and thinking, building personal resources, and promoting resilience and wellbeing (macintyre & gregersen, 2012a; macintyre, gregersen, & mercer, 2016). a significant body of research on contemplative practices (e.g., mindfulness and meditation) has demonstrated the benefits of these practices for physical and psychological health and well-being (baer, 2003; brown & ryan, 2003; brown, ryan, & creswell, 2007; grossman, niemann, schmidt, & walach, 2004). our study builds on this work by examining the role that contemplative practices might have in both reducing negative affect, like stress and anxiety, and promoting positive affect and well-being among language learners. 2. literature review 2.1. foreign language anxiety fla is understood to be a situation-specific anxiety defined as “a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings and behaviors related to classroom language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process’’ (horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986, p. 128). different from trait anxiety, a generalized anxiety relevant across situations, and from state anxiety, experienced as an emotional state at a particular moment, fla is categorized as a situationspecific anxiety, one that is associated with a particular context—that of learning and using a second language (macintyre & gardner, 1991b). because fla involves performance evaluation, horwitz et al. (1986) found similarities between it and three related anxieties: (a) communicative apprehension—a hesitation or fear of communicating with people, (b) test anxiety—a fear of failure in performance evaluation contexts, and (c) fear of negative evaluation—an anxiety about being evaluated by others in any social context. horwitz et al. (1986) developed an instrument to measure fla called the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas), which has been utilized in numerous studies and which consists of 33 items designed to elicit students’ feelings about second language learning. the impact of contemplative practices on foreign language anxiety and learning 575 2.1.1. effect on achievement and learner experience understanding fla is critical because of its potential debilitating effect on student performance, achievement, motivation, and learning experience. research has indicated that students who experience fla may engage in avoidance behaviors, like homework procrastination, skipping classes, postponing taking their foreign language required courses, or reluctance to engage in the classroom (horwitz et al., 1986). for some, fla includes physiological manifestations such as heart palpitations, sweating, trembling, or tenseness. psychological effects of fla may include low levels of self-confidence and self-efficacy. within social cognitive theory (bandura, 1986), self-efficacy, or one’s beliefs in the ability to perform a task or activity, has been shown to predict academic achievement and performance in various academic domains (graham & weiner, 1996). in a meta-analysis of research on self-efficacy and foreign language (fl) learning (raoofi, tan, & chan, 2012), 11 out of 12 studies showed that self-efficacy predicted academic achievement, and three out of four studies found that self-efficacy was negatively related to anxiety. fla can affect learning experiences and outcomes in every realm of the fl course: retention and recall of vocabulary and grammar, poor test performance, difficulties in development of speaking (macintyre, noels, & clément, 1997), listening (arnold, 2011; vogely, 1998), reading (saito, horwitz, & garza, 1999), and writing (cheng, horwitz, & schallert, 1999). the experience of fla may differ based on target language, course, and level. for example, kim (2009) reported higher levels of self-reported anxiety among efl students enrolled in a conversation course compared to those in a reading course. ewald (2007) found that even students enrolled in upper-level spanish courses experience fla despite their advanced proficiency, while marcos-llinás and garau (2009) demonstrated that advanced-level spanish language students experience higher levels of fla as compared to beginning and intermediate learners. a study by rodriguez and abreu (2003) showed fla to be stable across spanish l1 learners of different target languages, in this case, english and french, while huang (2012) found that chinese undergraduates studying non-western languages (korean, japanese, arabic) experienced higher levels of anxiety than those studying english. much research has identified a negative relationship between fla and various measures of language achievement (horwitz, 2001). “one of the most consistent findings in the sla literature is that higher levels of language anxiety are associated with lower levels of language achievement” (macintyre & gregersen, 2012b, p. 103). in fact, macintyre and gardner (1991b, p. 96) claim that fla “is one of the best predictors of success in the second language,” which other studies (onwuegbuzie, bailey, & daley, 2000; saito & samimy, 1996) confirm. emily e. scida, jill n. jones 576 for example, in a study of learners of japanese, aida (1994) showed that students with high levels of anxiety, as measured by the flcas, had significantly lower final grades in the course than the low anxiety group. the same findings were attained by horwitz (1991) for students in beginning-level french and spanish and by gardner and macintyre (1993) for learners of french. others have studied the impact of fla on oral performance measures. phillips (1992) found that students with high levels of anxiety scored lower on oral exams in an intermediate french course; not only were their oral exam grades lower, but they also produced shorter utterances, used fewer dependent clauses, and spoke less than low anxiety students. these results held in a replicated study by hewitt and stephenson (2011), who reported that among spanish-speaking learners of english, more highly anxious learners performed more poorly (in quantity and accuracy) and received significantly lower grades on oral exams than less anxious learners. macintyre and gardner (1994) demonstrated that fla affects cognitive processing during input, processing, and output stages, concluding that the “combined effects of language anxiety at all three stages may be that, compared with relaxed students, anxious students have a smaller base of second language knowledge and have more difficulty demonstrating the knowledge that they do possess” (p. 301). academic performance and achievement may suffer due to the adverse effect that stress and anxiety have on memory, attention, concentration, and problem-solving (bamber & schneider, 2016). the negative self-talk and rumination associated with anxiety “can impair the ability of an individual to process information at each of these stages [input, processing, and output] because the self-related cognition consumes cognitive resources that would otherwise be allocated to the task at hand” (macintyre & gardner, 1991a, p. 515-6). attention and working memory are inhibited by intrusive negative thoughts, which may interfere with learning, because “excessive self-evaluation, worries over potential failure, and concern over what others think, divide their attention between the task and their own self-thoughts, thus sapping the learner of the cognition necessary for learning” (gregersen & macintyre, 2014, p. 5). one study (sellers, 2000) that supports this claim looked at the effect of reading anxiety on students of spanish and found that students with high levels of anxiety were less focused and more distracted by interfering thoughts, which resulted in lower reading comprehension scores. while much previous research has focused on typical experiences of fla using a retrospective, summative approach, more recent research applies an idiodynamic approach (macintyre & legatto, 2011) to assess moment-to-moment changes in learners’ affect in a particular context and to understand the interacting variables that produce these fluctuations. one such study by gregersen, macintyre, and meza (2014) underscores the importance the impact of contemplative practices on foreign language anxiety and learning 577 of understanding affective factors like language anxiety on an individual level using qualitative and quantitative approaches, including physiological, idiodynamic, interview, and self-report survey data. 2.1.2. addressing fla in the classroom given the potential negative consequences of experiencing fla in second language contexts of use, we might ask ourselves what can be done to prevent or reduce student anxiety in our classrooms. teachers can establish a supportive and comfortable learning environment by incorporating more small group activities, focusing on communication rather than accuracy, using familiar topics and tasks, providing sensitive error correction, and adopting authentic assessment practices (phillips, 1999). helping students to confront mistaken beliefs and expectations about language learning and offering instruction on successful learning strategies, such as affective strategies, can bring their beliefs and approaches to learning more in line with what research has proven to be realistic and effective. teacher immediacies, like making eye contact, leaning in, using gestures, and incorporating humor, can all contribute to a positive affective atmosphere (gregersen, 2005). the ability of teachers to recognize nonverbal cues characteristic of high anxious students, like limited eye contact and facial expression, closed postures, and nervous hand movements, will help us to identify those students who are anxious in our classes (gregersen, 2005). teachers might consider introducing students to anxiety management strategies like relaxation techniques, breath exercises, guided mental imagery, journal writing, and systematic desensitization (gregersen & macintyre, 2014; horwitz et al., 1986; kim, 2009; macintyre & gregersen, 2012a; onwuegbuzie, bailey, & daley, 1999; smith, 2008). gregersen and macintyre (2014, p. 13) suggest that “social interaction and community-building play a critical role in overcoming language anxiety” and present a number of classroom activities designed to promote positive interaction, provide encouragement, and reduce or prevent anxiety. in addition, instead of focusing solely on reducing or eliminating negative emotions (anxiety, fear, worry) in the classroom, teachers might emphasize promoting positive emotions that facilitate language learning through building and broadening techniques, such as imagining future l2 (second language) selves (dewaele & macintyre, 2014; macintyre & gregersen, 2012a; macintyre, gregersen, & mercer, 2016). 2.2. research on contemplative practices contemplative practices quiet the mind, develop insight and self-awareness, and promote an attitude of kindness and compassion toward ourselves and others. emily e. scida, jill n. jones 578 examples include a wide variety of practices such as yoga, sitting and moving meditations, writing, contemplative arts, and deep listening, among others. mindfulness involves the cultivation of a receptive attention to and open-awareness of present experience with a compassionate, non-judgmental stance and can be developed through formal meditation practices or informal practices applied to everyday activities and interactions. 2.2.1. benefits for health and well-being research has demonstrated that mindfulness training and other contemplative practices are effective in improving physical, mental, and emotional health, reducing stress and enhancing well-being in healthy populations, and alleviating physical and psychological symptoms of conditions such as chronic pain, cancer, fibromyalgia, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and eating disorders, in clinical populations (baer, 2003; brown & ryan, 2003; brown, ryan, & creswell, 2007; grossman et al., 2004; kabat-zinn et al., 1992; shapiro, oman, thoresen, plante, & flinders, 2008; shapiro, brown, & astin, 2011). one program that incorporates contemplative practices is the mindfulness based stress reduction program (mbsr), developed by jon kabat-zinn in 1979. it is an 8-week program in which participants learn and practice a variety of mindfulness and meditation practices which have proven to result in improved health and well-being and reduced stress in numerous studies (e.g., baer, 2003; brown, ryan, & creswell, 2007; grossman et al., 2004). mindfulness-based practices and programs are now widely integrated outside of the field of medicine, with the goal of enhanced well-being, health, and performance—in education, business contexts, the military, government, law enforcement and sports, among other areas. “mindfulness, as an open, or receptive attention to present experience, may facilitate non-defensive processing of threatening experience, and thereby produce more adaptive responding in challenging or threatening situations, with salutary well-being consequences” (weinstein et al., 2009, p. 376). contemplative practices like mindfulness result in positive psychological outcomes because they have the effect of increasing emotional and cognitive flexibility, lowering emotional reactivity to stressful situations, cultivating more adaptive coping strategies, and promoting quicker recovery from negative emotional states like anxiety. results of a number of studies on the effects of mbsr point to significant reductions in symptoms of anxiety and depression in patients diagnosed with these disorders (kabat-zinn et al., 1992) and in patients diagnosed with other medical conditions (hofmann, sawyer, witt, & oh, 2010). in a review of 57 research studies on the effects of mindfulness meditation on the stress and anxiety of college students, bamber and schneider (2016) found that mbsr the impact of contemplative practices on foreign language anxiety and learning 579 was effective in reducing stress in 73% and anxiety in 100% of studies reviewed, while mindfulness meditation was effective in reducing stress in 78% and anxiety in 77% of studies reviewed. with this potential benefit in mind, the authors state that “mindfulness-based interventions could easily be incorporated into courses with a brief meditation session before the start of every didactic course” (bamber & schneider, 2016, p. 29). in a research review on universal promotion and prevention programs for higher education students, conley, durlak, and dickson (2013) found that mindfulness-based interventions were the most effective in reducing students’ levels of emotional distress (including depression, anxiety, and stress), as compared to cognitive-behavioral interventions, and those delivered in class (as opposed to in small group workshops/programs) were the most effective. in a qualitative study, college-level students with diagnosed anxiety who had participated in an mbsr program reported a greater sense of inner calm, a greater ability for focus and concentration in learning situations like studying or test-taking, approaching learning in more effective ways, and relating to their anxiety in new ways (hjeltnes, binder, moltu, & dundas, 2015). 2.2.2. effect on learning while research points to the numerous benefits for health and well-being, mindfulness interventions have also been shown to improve concentration and attention (hjeltnes et al., 2015, p. 9). a number of studies have demonstrated that meditation may enhance attention, working memory, executive functioning, and the ability to process information, suggesting the potential to affect learning (jha, krompinger, & baime, 2007; moore & malinowski, 2009; shapiro et al., 2011). for example, zeidan et al. (2010) examined whether four brief 20-minute mindfulness practices would affect cognition and mood among undergraduate students; they found that these interventions enhanced visuo-spatial processing, working memory, and executive functioning and reduced anxiety and fatigue in the treatment group. they posit that the reduction in anxiety and fatigue and improved vigilance (present-moment awareness) contributed to the improvement in cognitive performance. in a study looking at the effect of meditation on brain structure, hölzel et al. (2011) reported increases in gray matter concentration in brain regions associated with learning and memory processes, emotion regulation, self-referential processing, and perspective taking among participants in an mbsr program. morrison, goolsarran, rogers, and jha (2013) asked whether participation in a short-form mindfulness training would reduce mind-wandering and improve working memory, which are crucial for learning, among college students over the course of the semester; results pointed to reductions in mind-wandering (improved sustained attention) but no effect on emily e. scida, jill n. jones 580 measures of working memory. turning to another component of learning, sable (2014) looked at the impact of contemplative practices (mindfulness meditation practice extended into journal writing, listening, inquiry, and dialogue) on critical thinking among undergraduates. based on qualitative and quantitative data, the author concluded that these practices strengthened students’ development of reflective dispositions for critical thinking and resulted in higher levels of selfconfidence, engagement with multiple points of view, and a sense of connectedness with others. mindfulness-based practices can also enhance positive emotions, important in any learning context, since positive emotions broaden one’s attention and thinking, build one’s personal resources, promote creativity and flexibility, and support well-being and resilience (macintyre & gregersen, 2012a; shapiro, brown, & astin, 2011). recent research in fl learning emphasizes the importance of both enhancing positive emotions and reducing negative emotions in the classroom (dewaele & macintyre, 2014). 2.2.3. effects on fla and language learning while contemplative practices have been integrated into educational contexts with the goal of supporting well-being, reducing stress and negative emotions, fostering resilience and emotion regulation, and enhancing learning, we found little research in the field of second language learning that has investigated the effects of contemplative practices on fla and language learning. several studies (macintyre & gregersen, 2012a; ratzlaff, 2012; smith, 2008; young, 1999) have advocated the use of relaxation techniques to establish a comfortable low-stress classroom environment for language learners; however, only one has tested the effect of such practices on the reduction of fla (schlesiger, 1995). one study (franco, mañas, cangas, & gallego, 2010) investigated the effects of contemplative practices on academic performance (in three courses: spanish language, foreign language, and philosophy), anxiety, and self-concept in a group of freshman high school students in spain. their results indicate that for students in the treatment group there was a significant increase in academic performance in all three courses and in self-concept and a significant decrease in anxiety as compared to students in the control group. while this study did examine changes in anxiety, the authors used the stait-trait anxiety inventory (stai; spielberger, 1983) as a general measure of anxiety and not an instrument to measure fl anxiety. arnold (2011) incorporated visualization techniques and breath practices to reduce the anxiety associated with listening comprehension exams among collegelevel efl students and found that students in the treatment group outperformed those in the control group on the final listening comprehension test, with students reporting positive experiences with the practices used. no measure of anxiety was the impact of contemplative practices on foreign language anxiety and learning 581 included in arnold’s study. schlesiger (1995) studied the effects of using different anxiety-reduction techniques on fla and on achievement in a second-semester german course. the anxiety-reduction techniques consisted of visual imagery, assertiveness training, mantra concentration, and autogenic training. results indicated a significant reduction in anxiety in the treatment groups compared to the control group; as for achievement, only the mantra concentration technique resulted in improvements in learning among students. outside of foreign language learning, results of research looking at the effects of mindfulness on student achievement are mixed. for example, yamada and victor (2012) incorporated brief 10-minute mindfulness practices at the beginning of class time in an undergraduate psychology course. they found that while students in the treatment group demonstrated reduced levels of anxiety and rumination and increased mindful awareness traits as compared to the control group, there were no significant differences in student learning outcomes between the groups as measured by three exams and course final grade. in ramsburg and youmans (2014), students who meditated at the beginning of a lecture in a psychology course scored higher on post-lecture quizzes than students who did not meditate. research has suggested a relationship between teacher support, classroom climate, and student learning. teachers who exhibit social and emotional competence in the classroom establish positive relationships with students and are perceived by students as caring and supportive (jennings & greenberg, 2009). teacher support may have a direct impact on student motivation, which in turn may result in improved academic performance (niemiec & ryan, 2009; taylor et al., 2014). for example, in a study on foreign language learning in a university course, noels, clement, and pelletier (1999) found that an autonomysupportive teaching style is linked to intrinsic motivation among students and that greater intrinsic motivation is related to lower anxiety, increased perceived competence, and improved learning outcomes. the potential for contemplative practices to positively affect anxiety and student learning informed this study. specifically, we were interested in the following research questions: 1. to what extent are there differences between students in the contemplative practice group and non-contemplative practice group for the following measures: students’ perceived a. fla, b. positive and negative affect, c. self-efficacy, d. classroom climate? emily e. scida, jill n. jones 582 2. are there significant differences from preto post-test in the following measures between students in the contemplative practice group and non-contemplative practice group: students’ perceived a. fla, b. positive and negative affect, c. self-efficacy? 3. are there differences in measures of l2 learning (average exam scores) between students in the contemplative practice group and non-contemplative practice group? 4. what were students’ overall perceptions of and experiences with the contemplative practices integrated into the course? 3. the study 3.1. course description the advanced intermediate spanish course is the last course in the four-course sequence that students may take to fulfill the foreign language requirement at the university of virginia, charlottesville, usa. the goal of this course is to support development of intermediate-level proficiency, in speaking, listening, reading, and writing, communicative competence, and cultural competence. to promote these goals, students engage in learning activities that include compositions, a cultural video project, exams, quizzes, a final exam, online homework, and an oral exam. our department typically offers 22-25 sections each semester with 18 students in each section. classes meet three days a week for 50 minutes each or two days a week for 75 minutes each and are taught by graduate student instructors and full-time lecturers. 3.2. research design this project involved the integration of contemplative practices in our advanced intermediate spanish course with the primary goals of decreased fla and improved learning. we were also interested in seeing the relationship, if any, between the practices and students’ self-efficacy, positive and negative affect, and perceptions of classroom climate. two instructors, teaching three sections each, integrated contemplative practices into the classroom, and the remaining three instructors did not incorporate these practices. all instructors followed the same syllabus and administered the same course assessments throughout the semester (exams, quizzes, language skill assessments, etc.), and all had comparable teaching experience and qualifications. throughout this article, the students the impact of contemplative practices on foreign language anxiety and learning 583 who took the course with the teachers who integrated contemplative practices are referred to as the contemplative group and students who took the course with a teacher who did not use contemplative practices are referred to as the non-contemplative group. the instructors of the contemplative practice group sections led their classes in brief 5-10 minute contemplative practices at the beginning of class time approximately once a week, generally in english; students in the non-contemplative group were not exposed to stress-reduction practices. students in the contemplative practice group were invited to participate but were not required to do so. a variety of contemplative practices were chosen to expose students to different options that might appeal to different students, and these included: · breath meditation · loving-kindness practice · body scan/body awareness · mindful movement/stretching · journaling · visualization meditation · gratitude writing · just worrying labeling technique · rest your hands · vision-setting, goal-setting, intention-setting 3.3. methodology 3.3.1. sample the data for this study comes from two semesters of advanced intermediate spanish: fall 2014 and spring 2015. the total number of participants in this study was 249 students, enrolled at the university of virginia. in fall 2014, the contemplative group consisted of four sections taught by two instructors, for a total of 71 students, while the non-contemplative group had six sections taught by two instructors, for a total of 107 students. in spring 2015, the contemplative group included two sections, taught by the same two instructors with 36 total students, and the non-contemplative group also had two sections, taught by one instructor, with 35 total students. both the contemplative and non-contemplative groups followed the same syllabus. the two instructors of the contemplative group were long-time practitioners of contemplative traditions (meditation and yoga). most students involved in this study had minimal or no prior experience with contemplative practices. students in these sections were generally between 18-25 years old with the majority taking the course to fulfill a emily e. scida, jill n. jones 584 foreign language requirement. for additional details on students’ background and academic characteristics, see table 1. placement in spanish is through the appropriate score on the sat ii exam or on our online placement exam or through completion of the prior course in the sequence. many students place directly into this course having taken several years of spanish in high school. table 1 respondents’ background characteristics characteristics percentage gender male 42.7% female 56.8% transgender < 1.0% race/ethnicity white/caucasian 76.5% hispanic or latino 4.3% black/african american 9.4% asian/asian american or pacific islander 11.1% american indian or other native american 1.3% multiracial 3.4% other race 1.7% u.s. citizen yes 97.0% no 3.0% average grades in high school a’s 84.5% b’s 14.6% c’s 0.8% years studying spanish prior to college 1 year 8.2% 2 years 8.2% 3 years 15.6% 4 years 23.8% 5 or more years* 44.2% year at university first** 27.8% second 38.9% third 21.4% fourth 12.0% fifth 0.0% note. all questions represented in this table were multiple choice/fixed-response questions. *there are significantly more students who took five or more years of spanish in the contemplative group (contemplative group: 54.9%; non-contemplative group: 35.7%). **there are significantly more first-year students in the contemplative group (contemplative group: 38.8%; non-contemplative group: 19.1%). the impact of contemplative practices on foreign language anxiety and learning 585 3.3.2. data collection to answer the first research question, we compared scores of self-reported fla, positive and negative affect, self-efficacy, and student perceptions of classroom climate at post-test. to answer the second research question, we evaluated changes in self-reported fla, positive and negative affect, and self-efficacy using pre-tests and post-tests. we used the following instruments in the online questionnaires. the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas) examines students’ anxiety related to fl learning with 33 statements evaluating feelings about language learning (horwitz et al., 1986). the positive and negative affect scale (panas) measures self-reported mood on a time scale with a list of 20 emotion words (watson, clark, & tellegan, 1988). the general self-efficacy scale (schwarzer & jerusalem, 1995) assesses a general sense of perceived self-efficacy using 10 statements to predict coping and adaptation after stressful events. classroom climate measures (fassinger, 1995) measure student perception of the classroom climate with 23 statements that evaluate class, student, and teacher traits. all of these instruments have been tested for reliability and consist of composite measures that address each respective instrument. preand post-questionnaires were delivered via an online survey platform called questionpro. to answer the third question about learning outcomes, we compared the achievement of students in the contemplative group to those in the noncontemplative group, looking at grades on four chapter exams. because there is some missing data for either preor post-measurements across the groups, the sample sizes vary in the final analysis, since missing data was not imputed given the small size of missing data and randomness of the missing data. to answer the fourth question, we relied on comments from the surveys, and we conducted individual interviews with 14 students after the academic year had ended. to triangulate data, we also used end-of-semester anonymous course evaluations. the next section presents the data analysis. 3.3.3. data analysis to analyze differences between students in the contemplative and non-contemplative groups (research questions 1 and 3), we used independent samples t tests. although results are skewed slightly positive, given the ordinal and positive nature of the scale (i.e., going from negative to positive), we would expect that type of distribution. the results of normality tests are displayed in table 2; these were computed using spss skewness (skew) and kurtosis (kurt) whereby the only variables that exceed a +/-2 threshold are students’ grade, students’ general efficacy (pre-) and students’ perceptions of instructor supportiveness. emily e. scida, jill n. jones 586 for all scaled items (i.e., fla, positive affect, negative affect, general efficacy, classroom climate), the minimum is 1.0 and the maximum is 5.0. for the contemplative practices, the mean represents the proportion of respondents who indicate that they engage in practices that help reduce stress or anxiety. as for average exam grades, the minimum is 60.7 and the maximum is 98.3. moreover, the sample size is sufficient for the independent samples t test. for the comparisons between preand post-measures, conducted for the contemplative and non-contemplative groups separately, we used paired samples t test. for both tests, when there were significant differences between the standard deviations among the groups being compared, we report and use the “equal variances not assumed” test statistic. prior to analysis, several transformations were made in order to ensure that, for all variables and composite measures, a more positive mean score indicates a better outcome, that is, a higher mean score means less anxiety, more positive affect, less negative affect, more efficacy, or a better classroom environment. the following section presents the results for all research questions. 3.4. results to answer research questions 1 and 3 (are there significant differences between the contemplative and non-contemplative groups across the following measures: average exam grades, fla, positive and negative affect, self-efficacy, and classroom climate), table 2 presents the sample size, minimum, maximum, standard deviation, variance, skewness and kurtosis. then, table 3 separates most of these statistics by contemplative and non-contemplative group. the last column in table 3 indicates the test statistic that compares the means of the contemplative and non-contemplative group. we used 10 separate independent samples t tests to answer this question; due to this volume we applied the bonferroni correction by dividing the significance level (.05) by the total number of independent samples t tests. that is, significance is evaluated by whether or not the p value is less than .005. thereafter, table 4 uses a + or to visually display the significant differences and which group (i.e., contemplative or non-contemplative) had a more positive outcome for the variable (e.g., + would mean less anxiety). table 2 descriptive statistics for variables variables n min max m sd sem skew kurt average exam grades 247 60.70 98.31 88.15 6.81 .433 -4.64 39.85 overall anxiety (flcas) (pre) 182 1.13 4.76 2.96 0.71 .052 -0.08 -0.09 overall anxiety (flcas) (post) 210 1.55 4.82 3.32 0.65 .045 -0.33 -0.05 positive affect (pre) 181 1.00 4.60 3.06 0.76 .056 -0.34 -0.29 positive affect (post) 210 1.10 5.00 3.00 0.82 .057 0.04 -0.47 negative affect (pre) 181 1.20 5.00 3.94 0.77 .057 -1.18 1.66 the impact of contemplative practices on foreign language anxiety and learning 587 negative affect (post) 210 1.00 5.00 3.94 0.79 .055 -1.09 1.15 general efficacy (pre) 180 1.00 4.00 3.12 0.45 .034 -0.49 2.28 general efficacy (post) 209 1.40 4.00 3.20 0.46 .032 -0.44 1.37 classroom interaction norms 206 2.50 5.00 3.69 0.50 .034 0.02 -0.25 emotional climate 206 2.25 5.00 3.68 0.62 .043 -0.21 -0.51 student trait confidence 206 1.71 5.00 3.48 0.72 .050 0.03 -0.49 instructor approachability 206 1.00 5.00 3.92 0.68 .048 -0.65 1.10 instructor supportiveness 205 1.00 5.00 4.41 0.66 .046 -1.36 2.96 table 3 independent samples t tests: differences in key metrics between the contemplative and non-contemplative groups metric contemplative group non-contemplative group sig. (2-tailed) effect size (cohen’s d)n m sd se n m sd se average exam grades 107 89.64 5.69 .55 141 86.39 10.38 .62 .002* 0.388 overall anxiety (flcas; post) 95 3.36 .73 .07 115 3.30 .57 .05 .481* 0.092 positive affect (post) 95 3.14 .87 .09 115 2.89 .76 .07 .029* 0.306 negative affect (post) 95 3.81 .83 .09 115 4.06 .74 .07 .023* 0.318 general efficacy (post) 94 3.21 .47 .05 115 3.19 .45 .04 .784* 0.043 classroom interaction norms 93 3.79 .48 .05 113 3.60 .49 .05 .005* 0.392 emotional climate 93 3.82 .62 .06 113 3.57 .60 .06 .004* 0.410 student trait confidence 93 3.52 .79 .08 113 3.44 .66 .06 .405* 0.110 instructor approachability 93 4.11 .60 .06 113 3.77 .71 .07 .000* 0.517 instructor supportiveness 92 4.63 .48 .05 113 4.23 .74 .07 .000* 0.641 note. *p < .005 table 4 independent samples t tests: differences in key metrics between the contemplative and non-contemplative groups with indication of which group had a more positive outcome for a given variable metric contemplative non-contemplative average exam grades* + overall anxiety (flcas) positive affect negative affect general efficacy classroom interaction norms* + emotional climate* + student trait confidence instructor approachability* + instructor supportiveness* + note. *p < .005 as seen in table 4, the contemplative group had significantly higher average exam grades and more positive perceptions of their classroom environment for the following classroom climate measures: classroom interaction norms, emotional climate, instructor approachability, and instructor supportiveness. emily e. scida, jill n. jones 588 in tables 5-8, we present the results that correspond to research question 2. table 5 and table 7 present the descriptive statistics and results for the paired samples t test, and table 6 and table 8 highlight and interpret the significance tests. to adjust for the multitude of paired-samples t tests, we used the bonferroni correction for this research question by dividing the desired significance level (.05) by the total number (5) of paired-samples t tests used to answer this research question resulting in a desired p value of .01. between the preand post-survey, students’ anxiety decreased significantly in both the contemplative and non-contemplative groups. not surprisingly, the contemplative group indicated that they engaged in contemplative practices more frequently at the end of the semester compared to the beginning, whereas the non-contemplative group was not significantly more likely to engage in stress reduction practices. for measures of affect and efficacy, there are no significant differences between the two groups. table 5 non-contemplative group, paired samples t tests, pre/post comparisons metric n m sd se sig. (2-tailed) effect size (cohen’s d) do you engage in any practices that help reduce your stress or anxiety levels? (pre) 87 0.57 0.50 0.053 0.059* 0.205 do you engage in any practices that help reduce your stress or anxiety levels? (post) 87 0.67 0.47 0.051 overall anxiety (flcas) (pre) 82 2.92 0.63 0.069 0.000* 0.875 overall anxiety (flcas) (post) 82 3.28 0.61 0.067 positive affect (pre) 82 2.98 0.71 0.079 0.539* 0.068 positive affect (post) 82 2.92 0.78 0.086 negative affect (pre) 82 3.99 0.69 0.076 0.790* 0.030 negative affect (post) 82 4.02 0.75 0.083 general efficacy (pre) 82 3.06 0.41 0.045 0.029* 0.246 general efficacy (post) 82 3.19 0.42 0.047 note. *p < .01 table 6 summary table, non-contemplative group, paired samples t tests, pre/post comparisons metric significance do you engage in any practices that help reduce your stress or anxiety levels? overall anxiety (flcas) less anxiety* positive affect negative affect general efficacy note. *p < .01 the impact of contemplative practices on foreign language anxiety and learning 589 table 7 contemplative group, paired samples t tests, pre/post comparisons metric n m sd se sig. (2-tailed) effect size (cohen’s d) do you engage in any practices that help reduce your stress or anxiety levels? (pre) 82 0.54 .50 .055 .007* 0.304 do you engage in any practices that help reduce your stress or anxiety levels? (post) 82 0.71 .46 .051 overall anxiety (flcas) (pre) 79 3.03 .71 .080 .000* 0.770 overall anxiety (flcas) (post) 79 3.23 .74 .083 positive affect (pre) 79 3.13 .77 .087 .820* 0.026 positive affect (post) 79 3.15 .89 .100 negative affect (pre) 79 3.93 .81 .091 .043* 0.232 negative affect (post) 79 3.78 .86 .097 general efficacy (pre) 78 3.14 .47 .053 .091* 0.194 general efficacy (post) 78 3.21 .50 .056 note. *p < .01 table 8 summary table, contemplative group, paired samples t tests, pre/post comparisons metric significance do you engage in any practices that help reduce your stress or anxiety levels? more practices* overall anxiety (flcas) less anxiety* positive affect negative affect general efficacy note. *p < .01 to better understand student experiences with and perceptions of the contemplative practices used in class, we examined their responses in the interview data and comments from end-of-the-semester course evaluations. student reactions to the practices were overwhelmingly positive. they were initially surprised at encountering them in class but quickly adjusted and accepted them as part of the routine: “by the second and third time we did it, it was old news, and everybody . . . got comfortable with it.” one student reflected: i did not expect that to happen in a class setting . . . and for the spanish department to allow time to be taken out of class to do that, i really appreciated that! i thought that showed that they were really, you know, invested in our mental health. on average, students who participated in the contemplative practices noted a reduction in stress levels and worry, especially before exams, as well as improved focus and increased energy. whether the practices helped performance and achievement, students were unsure. emily e. scida, jill n. jones 590 i don’t know . . . i don’t think they had like a really direct impact in my learning process. i think it was just kind of a way to release stress and…kind of relax and just prepare. i mean maybe in a sense it can help, because it kind of takes your focus away from stresses and makes you more focused in the class and what you are learning. so i can see that could be like a potential benefit of it. i don’t really know if it helped me or not like that but maybe it did, i don’t really know. one student remarked how the practices functioned as a transition into the lesson, “because you are kind of resetting, like going from english and then calm down and then go to spanish. so it was kind of like a nice barrier, break right in between the two languages.” overall, the contemplative practices helped to establish a comfortable classroom climate, with positive interactions, respect, and appreciation. i definitely think that taking a moment collectively to be mindful had an effect on the way that we interact with each other, the atmosphere of the class . . . sort of broke everything down and created a moment of peace before continuing. it definitively has an effect on how you treat other people, the way everyone interacts and the process of class work . . . as a student it was a good exercise to being more attentive, maybe interactive . . . at least appreciative of the class. for another student, the practices “did add that feeling of feeling comfortable in the classroom that i would say helped in general with the class.” students also responded positively to the teachers of the contemplative groups, perceiving them as caring and supportive and, with one teacher, “i think . . . by her being calm and just open to contemplative practices like offering it made us a little more calm too in that class.” a comment from the course evaluations stated that the practices “showed that the teacher really cared about our stress levels and wanted us to do the best we could do.” another interesting finding from the interviews was the connection made by students between the contemplative practices used in class and their own religious practices. one student, who had attended a catholic high school, had experience with using prayer, meditation, and reflection in class before, and for her this is another take on the same idea of sort of taking a break, pausing and . . . being quiet and reflective for a moment before . . . i feel the same objective is being is trying to be met with the mindfulness and the deep breathing . . . sort of just things that again disconnect you from the chaos of everyday . . . allow you to you know to sort of put things in proper places and take a deep breath. this student recognized also that there are other ways to practice self-care— exercise or taking a walk—that may lead to the same end. another student saw a link between her religious life and the contemplative practices used in class, the impact of contemplative practices on foreign language anxiety and learning 591 especially compassion exercises where you think of another person and “give them kind thoughts,” and “taking a moment to . . . think about greater things” is something they have in common. in a comment from course evaluations, another student remarked that he had attended a quaker school “where we practice a moment of meditation before each class and i fully believe that meditating before class allows you to refocus yourself on the present subject.” while the majority of student experiences and perceptions were positive, the contemplative practices received a more lukewarm reception from others who thought that they were interesting and relaxing but did not deem them necessary. on the course evaluations, one student shared: “i did not benefit from these techniques. they seemed out of place in the classroom and i was not a fan.” for some, doing a contemplative practice right before an exam took valuable time away from the exam. in the interviews, one student remarked that the practices had “nothing to do with spanish” and were “taking up class” but still found them “kind of relaxing.” we also wanted to understand whether students used the practices beyond the confines of the class. for one student, a practice called just worrying— where one labels thoughts as “just worrying” and then returns to present moment awareness—resonated for her: i thought about the one—worrying—a couple of times throughout the rest of the semester when i was walking somewhere and tons of things were going on and i was like: it will get done! like, this is just worrying! it always gets done! the breath practices were also used, especially before exams: “when i am getting stressed, i just sit there, take a second, close my eyes and just breathe for a minute.” in the course evaluations, a student shared: “i have begun to do breathing exercises before starting big assignments because it helps to focus. a few minutes of relaxation seems to lead to productivity.” another student remarked: “i've incorporated the breathing and stretching techniques outside of class time because i've found that those techniques have especially helped me de-stress, and i will continue to practice these techniques.” this is also reflected in the survey data, where students in the contemplative group were significantly more likely to engage in stress reduction practices at the end of the semester as compared to the beginning. when asked what recommendations students had regarding the future implementation of these practices in our spanish courses, the most common remark was that we should integrate them more frequently, more regularly, making it a part of the class routine instead of something that happened spontaneously. one student suggested that we explain in class why these practices are beneficial. emily e. scida, jill n. jones 592 3.5. discussion the purpose of this study was to examine the impact of contemplative practices integrated into a foreign language course. specifically, we were interested in whether the practices would have an effect on fla, positive and negative affect, self-efficacy, classroom climate, and learning outcomes as well as how students perceived and experienced the contemplative practices used in class. while there was a significant decrease in fla from preto post-test among students in both the non-contemplative and contemplative groups, there was no significant difference in fla between groups at the end of the semester. we had expected that the integration of contemplative practices would have a significant impact on student anxiety, as had been reported in other studies on fla (franco et al., 2010; schlesiger, 1995) and in numerous studies demonstrating the positive effects of mindfulness on stress and anxiety (e.g., bamber & schneider, 2016; conley et al., 2013). while the students interviewed did perceive a direct impact on their stress and worry, perhaps the small “dosage” of practices was not sufficient to impact levels of fla. in addition, the timing of survey administration at the end of the semester may have failed to measure potential effects in the quantitative data. another important result of this study is that students in the contemplative group demonstrated significantly higher average exam grades compared to students in the non-contemplative group. this finding aligns with many studies reporting the positive effects of contemplative practices on student learning (arnold, 2011; franco et al., 2010; ramsburg & youmans, 2014; schlesiger, 1995) but contrasts with results of a prior study (yamada & victor, 2012) that found no improvements in student grades. previous research (e.g., hjeltnes et al., 2015; jha et al., 2007; zeidan et al., 2010) has shown that contemplative practices enhance focus, attention, concentration, and processing, resulting in improved learning and performance. in the interview data, many students reported experiencing decreased levels of stress and worry and an increased ability to focus on learning and testing after having participated in the contemplative practices. there were no significant differences in levels of self-efficacy between the contemplative and non-contemplative groups at the end of the semester or from preto post-test. the lack of increased self-efficacy in the contemplative group would suggest no link between self-efficacy and fla or achievement, which runs counter to some prior research pointing to a positive relationship between selfefficacy and learning outcomes and a negative relationship between self-efficacy and fla (raoofi et al., 2012). finally, the results of measures of classroom climate at the end of the semester show significantly higher scores in the contemplative group as compared to the non-contemplative group in classroom interaction norms, emotional climate, the impact of contemplative practices on foreign language anxiety and learning 593 instructor approachability, and instructor supportiveness. this suggests that the use of contemplative practices in class is related to students’ perception of a positive classroom climate, but further research is needed to understand if there is a causal connection between these factors. in the qualitative data, students in the contemplative groups perceived their teachers to be caring and supportive, and many experienced the class community to be close-knit. research suggests that a positive classroom climate may have a positive impact on student motivation and learning (e.g., noels et al., 1999). despite the favorable results of this study, it is not free from limitations. primarily, the design is not a true experiment since the instructors teaching the contemplative group did not teach the non-contemplative groups and viceversa. second, most of the data is based on self-report and students’ perceptions, and timing of the administration of the survey instruments at the end of the semester may have affected results of the post-survey measures. in addition, while student learning outcomes were higher in the contemplative group as compared to the non-contemplative group, we cannot be certain whether the contemplative practices and/or other factors generated that result. for example, although overall prior aptitude is non-significant between groups, further analysis may control for students’ prior aptitude and other student background characteristics such as prior language experience and other demographic variables. finally, as with many studies, this is a single-institution study with a small sample size and therefore the results cannot be generalized to all contexts of second and foreign language courses or all learner populations. 4. conclusion negative affective states like fla can have a significant adverse effect on student achievement, performance, and self-concept in our courses. contemplative interventions like mindfulness may reduce negative affect, like stress and anxiety, promote positive affect, and enhance focus and attention in learning contexts. results of the current study suggest that the integration of contemplative practices in a foreign language course may positively affect learning by addressing student stress, enhancing attention and focus in class, and promoting a comfortable and supportive classroom climate. this study points to several implications for fl teaching. the first is to address student emotion in the classroom by incorporating activities that promote positive emotion as well as those that reduce negative affect like stress and anxiety; examples might include activities that spark creativity, imagination, and self-direction, like group projects, guided imagery, and imagining future l2 selves (dewaele & macintyre, 2014; gregersen & macintyre, 2014; macintyre & gregersen, 2012a). second, teachers should emily e. scida, jill n. jones 594 aim to establish a caring, supportive classroom climate with positive teacher-student and student-student relationships and teacher support and approachability. to better measure the potential impact of such interventions on fla, future studies might integrate longer “doses” of contemplative practices (longer practices, and/or more frequency) and consider examining the long-term effect on students across the sequence of fl courses or throughout their undergraduate careers. future research might also investigate the potential for contemplative practices to promote positive emotion, and what role that may have on language learning. acknowledgements this project was supported through a grant from the contemplative sciences center at the university of virginia and through funding from the dean of the college and graduate school of arts & sciences. we would like to acknowledge the valuable contributions that the following individuals made during the various stages of this project: rosana colón basora, cara goman, candace miller, and catalina vallejo. finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and insightful comments. the impact of contemplative practices on foreign language anxiety and learning 595 references aida, y. 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(1999) affect in foreign language and second language learning: a practical guide to creating a low-anxiety classroom atmosphere. boston: mcgraw-hill. zeidan, f., johnson, s. k., diamond, b. j., david, z., & goolkasian, p. (2010). mindfulness meditation improves cognition: evidence of brief mental training. consciousness and cognition, 19(2), 597-605. 33 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (1). 2014. 33-50 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.1.3 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl second language learners’ reflections on the effectiveness of dictogloss: a multi-sectional, multi-level analysis muriel gallego ohio university, usa gallego@ohio.edu abstract despite the extensive research conducted regarding focus on form instruction, no conclusive results have been provided concerning (a) the issue of which techniques contribute most effectively to l2 acquisition, and b) at which level of proficiency those techniques should be implemented for best results. dictogloss, one of these techniques, has been proven to be effective (fortune, 2005; kowal & swain, 1994; malmqvist, 2005; nabei, 1996; swain, 1998). while previous studies evaluating dictogloss explored feedback opportunities and the amount and type of language related episodes produced, fewer studies have reported on the effectiveness and its applicability according to proficiency level (fortune, 2005; garcía mayo, 2002) and none have explored learners’ conceptions about the task. therefore, this study seeks to determine which proficiency level might be most appropriate for the implementation of dictogloss and to gather learners’ opinions regarding its usefulness and effectiveness. a total of 497 participants enrolled in novice-mid (n = 275) and advanced-low (n = 222) levels took part in the study. all participants engaged in two dictogloss tasks and completed a survey afterwards. overall, results indicate that dictogloss was better received by advanced-low level students and that most students found it both useful and effective for learning. keywords: collaborative task, dictogloss, focus on form instruction, metatalk muriel gallego 34 1. introduction research on sla has witnessed a growing body of studies that address how focus on form (fonf) instruction could enhance l2 acquisition (doughty, 1991; doughty & varela, 1998; doughty & williams, 1998; ellis, 1998; leeman, arteagoitia, fridman, & doughty, 1995; long, 1991; long & robinson, 1998; norris & ortega, 2000; spada, 1997; etc.). another widely investigated aspect has been the evaluation of different techniques that can be incorporated into fonf instruction. however, despite the great number of studies conducted, there is no concrete empirical support in favor of one fonf technique. nevertheless, there is a consensus among researchers that (a) noticing is a prerequisite for acquisition, (b) comprehensive input alone is not sufficient for acquisition, and (c) producing output is necessary for l2 attainment. fonf instruction can be implemented through a variety of techniques (input enhancement, input flood, output enhancement, etc.). one such technique, known as dictogloss, leads learners to pay attention to form while engaging in text reconstruction. previous research has yielded differing results concerning the effectiveness of this technique (fortune, 2005; kowal & swain, 1994; malmqvist, 2005; nabei, 1996; swain, 1998). most studies have explored the opportunities for feedback obtained during the task and the type and number of language related episodes (lres). lres are defined as parts of students’ dialogs in which they “talk about the language they are producing, question their language use, or correct themselves or others (swain & lapkin, 1998, p. 326). however, such studies have paid less attention to the viability of the implementation of dictogloss with learners displaying different degrees of proficiency and, to my knowledge, no studies have focused on exploring learners’ opinions and attitudes towards this task and its components. with this in mind, the current study seeks to expand on previous research by exploring students’ conceptions regarding the effectiveness of dictogloss as well as the effectiveness of dictogloss with learners of different proficiency levels. 2. dictogloss as a focus on form technique the idea of dictogloss as a collaborative task was first introduced by wajnryb (1990) and consisted of an adapted type of dictation that involved students working collaboratively to reconstruct a passage that was read to them. the task preparation requires that the instructor select a text, either authentic or created specifically for the purpose of the task. the text generally contains several instances of a targeted form. shak (2006) suggests that task conductibility and success are determined by (a) the level of language used in the text, which second language learners’ reflections on the effectiveness of dictogloss: a multi-sectional, . . . 35 should be compatible with the learners’ linguistic ability, and (b) the target language features made apparent to the learners, which could be achieved through recurrences of the features in the text. the texts used in the present study were adjusted to each of the proficiency levels and included target features that were being covered in class at the moment of data collection. according to wajnryb, a dictogloss task should have four stages: 1. preparation: the topic is introduced and the instructor conducts a warm-up activity that contributes to the students’ familiarization with the main ideas included in the text. at this time, the instructor should introduce new vocabulary and explain how the activity works in addition to organizing students in small groups or pairs. 2. dictation: the instructor should read the passage twice. the first time students are instructed to listen and the second time they are to take notes. the text is supposed to be read at normal speed, identically both times. 3. reconstruction: learners share their notes and discuss how to reconstruct the text. the instructor monitors the activity but does not provide any type of input during this stage. 4. analysis and correction: this stage could be adapted to the needs of each classroom. the main goal is to share the reconstructed texts and have students engage in error correction and analysis. one option is for the instructor to write students’ texts on the board and provide feedback. this part should be carried out in a sentence-by-sentence manner. the instructor can later provide the original version for students to consult. many studies do not follow this procedure exactly. for instance, both fortune and thorp (2001) and fortune (2005) did not require students to attempt to reproduce the dictoglos text, but to produce a text of their own, maintaining the overall original meaning. in those studies, the reconstructed texts may contain alternative lexical and grammatical forms. shak (2006) proposes an overall different approach. in her version of the task, participants are asked to reconstruct the text individually and then in groups. in wajnryb’s version, participants start off in groups sharing notes and then conduct the reconstruction process with a partner. allowing learners to start the reconstruction process individually could limit the opportunities for noticing, since it is completed initially without engaging in metatalk, one of the main goals of the dictogloss task. another common variation regarding task implementation has been the use of l1. scott and de la fuente (2008) maintain that l1 use always occurs to some extent in the foreign language classroom and therefore suggest that l1 prohibition could be futile. they also affirm that exclusive use of the l2 might impose a cognimuriel gallego 36 tive challenge and might inhibit collaborative interaction, impeding the use of metatalk (p. 109). malmqvist (2005) addressed this issue stating that l1 use was allowed in her study because the participants were beginners or false beginners and they lacked the ability to conduct metatalk in the target language. during the dictogloss sessions carried out in the present study, participants were reminded and encouraged to use the l2. lastly, the dictogloss was implemented following wajnryb’s (1990) original format, and included all four stages proposed by her. 3. the effectiveness of dictogloss and metatalk previous studies (fortune, 2005; garcía mayo, 2002; kowal & swain, 1994; malmqvist, 2005; nabei, 1996; qin, 2008; salazar campillo, 2006; swain, 1998) have shown a variety of results concerning the effectiveness of dictogloss with regard to focusing on form, noticing interlanguage gaps and acquiring the given forms. this section includes an overview of research in which the dictogloss task was evaluated in light of the metatalk produced and measuring its effectiveness. within the context of this task, collaboration is thought to generate metatalk, which directs learners’ attention towards certain linguistic features through reflection and discussion (kowal & swain, 1994; swain & lapkin, 1998). exploring the intricacies of metatalk, swain (1998) carried out a study with 48 students in an 8th grade french immersion class and sought to determine whether students could engage in metatalk following the modeled example they were previously provided and whether there was a relationship between metatalk and second language learning. there were two groups in her study, the metatalk group (n = 26; it was exposed to modeled metatalk and explicit rule teaching) and the control group (n = 22; it was not exposed to modeled metatalk and explicit rule teaching). results indicated that the metatalk group produced 2.5 times more lres than the control group (metatalk group: 14.8; control group: 5.8), showing that modeling the metatalk increased the production of lres. findings also suggested that students’ conscious reflection about language might be a source of language learning. kowal and swain (1994) conducted their study with 19 students enrolled in an 8th grade class. the students were required to take part in four dictogloss tasks that were designed to provide practice in the use of the french present tense. while carrying out the activity, all of the stages were completed: they discussed vocabulary and topic, they heard and reconstructed the text and some texts were chosen by the teacher for the final discussion. results showed that form was the focus of the students’ discussion and that peer feedback was highly important in moving from semantic processing, required for understanding, to grammatical processing, needed for production. second language learners’ reflections on the effectiveness of dictogloss: a multi-sectional, . . . 37 fortune (2005), whose advanced level participants indicated a higher level of readiness to engage in metatalk in comparison to intermediate level participants, carried out a study in which students at two different levels of proficiency took part in a dictogloss task. the main goal was to investigate the metalinguistic terms used by the learners during interaction. it also sought to compare how frequently metalanguage was used by intermediate and advanced learners to establish whether metalanguage use enables more sustained engagement with the targeted form and whether it helps learners to attend to those forms more readily. results indicated that advanced level students used metatalk 46.4% of the time and that intermediate level students used metatalk only 29.4% of the time. the advanced level students concentrated more on form, and they employed more metatalk in doing so, showing more readiness than the intermediate level students. however, the researcher indicates that lres without metalinguistic content do not necessarily hold less value in the production of output. in this case, the task was not evaluated as an instructional technique capable of enhancing l2 acquisition but as a context that provides students with the opportunity to produce metatalk. with an operationalization similar that of fortune (2005), leeser (2004) conducted a study using dictogloss in a spanish content class. his 42 participants were required to engage in two dictogloss tasks. the first dictogloss maintained a structure fairly similar to the original one proposed by wajnryb (1990); during the reconstruction, however, the participants were required to say aloud everything that they were writing in order to reflect why they chose certain forms. no details are mentioned about stage 1 or 4. more significant modifications were introduced during the second dictogloss. first, a review of the topic was presented, and students were also given a handout including spanish aspectual differences (preterit vs. imperfect) and were allowed to ask questions after going over the handout. they also watched a video showing two participants reconstructing a text and discussing linguistic difficulties that they encountered during this stage. the analysis and correction stage was not completed since the students were dismissed after they finished the reconstruction. results show that students produced a total of 138 lres. of these lres, 39.86% were lexical and 60.14% were grammatical (and more than a half of them related to subject-verb agreement and tense/aspect choice). of the linguistic questions that emerged during the reconstruction, 76.81% were solved correctly. as in fortune (2005), only an analysis of lres was conducted but no preand post-tests were administered. finally, with a fairly different interpretation of dictogloss, qin (2008) attempted to account for possible distractions or off-tracking that students could experience during the completion of the activity. previous research findings muriel gallego 38 (garcía mayo, 2002; nabei, 1996; swain, 1998; williams, 1999) showed that students might not attend to the intended forms; thus, it was both important and fruitful to employ mini-techniques in order to raise awareness and to model the reconstruction (swain, 1998). in qin’s (2008) study, the stages were organized in a different manner: during stage 1, the instructor first introduced the topic and then handed out copies of the text. students were instructed to read individually and then discuss the meaning with partners. in addition, the instructor emphasized the targeted form (passive voice) and reminded the participants to pay special attention to it. this modification was introduced in order to prevent students from focusing their attention on a nonintended form. the overall completion of the task, and the opportunities for metatalk, is not circumscribed to facilitate the targeted forms. it provides an arena for ample production of lres (lexical, discourse, grammatical, etc.) as well as fostering the acquisition of both the targeted form and additional forms and concepts. qin (2008) conducted the task without including a listening component as the text was not read to the students. therefore, it should not be considered dictogloss. when engaging in a dictogloss task, the overall completion and the opportunities for metatalk, is not circumscribed to facilitate the targeted forms. it provides an arena for ample production of lres (lexical, discourse, grammatical, etc.) as well as fostering the acquisition of both the targeted form and additional forms and concepts. qin (2008) study is reported here, nonetheless, since it suggests the inclusion of modifications to foster awareness-raising and noticing during metatalk. in sum, previous studies investigating dictogloss have mainly focused on the number of lres that learners produce during metatalk, the terminology used during interaction, the quality and effects of metatalk, and the opportunities for feedback that dictogloss provided. however, to my knowledge there are no studies that have taken into account students’ impressions of the dictogloss activity or researched students’ opinions regarding the effectiveness of metatalk. therefore, the present study intends to incorporate a unique element into the discussion of the effectiveness of this task. additionally, it has been suggested that metalinguistic activity can be performed both explicitly and implicitly (garcía mayo, 2002; gutiérrez, 2008); therefore, the present study seeks to identify whether learners can recognize their reflections about the language even when not discussing rules explicitly. lastly, since learners in novice level classes might not be cognitively ready to fully engage in metatalk and comprehend how all the stages of the task serve the purpose of focusing on form (fortune, 2005; garcía mayo, 2002; leeser, 2004), the present study also explores the feasibility of its application as perceived by learners at different levels. to address the aforementioned issues, the following research questions guided the investigation: second language learners’ reflections on the effectiveness of dictogloss: a multi-sectional, . . . 39 1. do advanced-low and novice-mid level students of l2 spanish find the dictogloss task conducive to learning? 2. do advanced-low and novice-mid level students of l2 spanish identify the acts of talking and thinking about the language as part of the dictogloss task? 3. do advanced-low and novice-mid level students of l2 spanish recognize metatalk as an effective practice that enhances acquisition? 4. method this study sought to gather attitudes and impressions concerning the effectiveness of dictogloss from students in l2 spanish classes at two different levels at two different american universities. participants in both institutions engaged in two dictogloss sessions and completed a survey afterwards. the data obtained from both institutions were compared and contrasted in order to respond to the research questions. 4.1. participants a total of 497 learners of spanish participated in the study. none of the participants reported being native speakers of any language other than english or to have engaged in dictogloss activities in any of their previous language classes. these participants were enrolled in 25 classes: 14 classes (novice-mid level) at university a, and 11 classes (advanced-low) at university b. at the time of the study, university a, a mid-size state-run university, worked under a quarter system. the majority of students enrolled in the novice level series were taking the course to fulfill the college of arts and sciences foreign language requirement. in this first year course, students had access to grammar explanations written in english in their textbooks and were provided with explicit grammar instruction while in class, mainly in the l2. they regularly engaged in collaborative activities in the l2 and they were used to receiving input, interacting and producing output. all sections of novice-low, novice-mid and novice-high level classes shared the same syllabus; therefore, the same assignments and exams were administered across sections. on the other hand, at the time of the study university b, a large staterun university, worked under a semester system. the majority of students enrolled in the advanced-low level classes were either majoring or minoring in spanish. they could have taken a placement test to be automatically admitted to the advanced-low level or have taken the previous required classes in the department. in this third year (advanced-low) course, the students had access muriel gallego 40 to grammar explanations written in english in their textbooks but did not receive explicit grammar instruction as frequently as the other group. they were also familiar with collaborative activities in the l2 and were used to interacting and producing output. all of the sections of advanced-low level classes shared the same syllabus; therefore, the same assignments and exams were administered across sections. table 1 shows the total distribution of participants. table 1 participants and institutions in university a (group 1) university b (group 2) total of students 275 222 total of classes 14 11 average of students/class 20 20 all instructors were new to the dictogloss activity and were therefore trained on how to carry it out. the training period took place during two specifically designed workshops taught by the researcher. afterwards, all instructors were provided with instructional materials: (a) a handout with directions intended for instructors, (b) a handout with directions intended for students, (c) a powerpoint containing the warm up activities (preparation stage) and the modeled reconstruction, (d) the dictogloss text to be read to the students, and (e) the questionnaires. 4.2. treatment, data collection and data analysis all the sections in both institutions engaged in the activity on two occasions. the sessions were conducted on the same day across sections to account for the uniformity needed with regard to materials and content covered. the activity was therefore designed to cover the grammar and vocabulary items included in the syllabus for the given days. each dictogloss took approximately 35-45 min and the participants were asked to respond to the survey after the second session to allow for a familiarization period due to the complexity of the activity. the task followed the four suggested stages of dictogloss (wajnryb, 1990), and, as in swain’s (1998) study, the discussion for text reconstruction was “modeled” to foster pushed output. in addition, the texts used for the activity were short, included an average of 6 sentences, were seeded with the target form, and were not so dense with regard to content. only participants who were present during both dictogloss sessions were included in the data pool (n = 497). no demographic information was gathered and the responses were anonymous. frequency was calculated for all responses in order to determine the percentage of respondents selecting a particular answer. second language learners’ reflections on the effectiveness of dictogloss: a multi-sectional, . . . 41 4.3. survey design prior to the beginning of the study, the operationalization of the dictogloss and the survey were piloted. one dictogloss session was conducted with two intact classes (one novice-mid and one advanced-low). afterwards, students completed the survey and were also given a form to provide feedback (both for the task and the survey). surveys and feedback forms were reviewed in order to identify any problems with wording, to determine if the questionnaire was capturing the information needed to answer the research questions and to estimate how much time the participants needed to complete the questionnaire. after the pilot, it was determined that the activity was to be implemented following its original format. additionally, the survey was found too long, and was redesigned to comprise 10 questions. six of the questions were ordinal and followed a 5-point likert scale type, 1 was open ended and 3 were multiple choice. overall, these questions intended to assess aspects of the dictogloss activity and targeted (a) its effectiveness, (b) the perceived skills employed in the activity, (c) the value of metatalk, and (d) the implementation of metatalk. 5. results the responses to the survey items were compared between groups to determine learners’ perceptions concerning the effectiveness of the activity as well as learners’ engagement in talking and thinking about the language and their appreciation of metatalk. responses to the 4 survey questions that targeted information related to the research questions are reported here and the remaining data will be reported elsewhere. significant levels of skewness were noted on nearly every response for each group and are presented in table, 2 along with the means. table 2 descriptive statistics survey item group mean standard deviation skewness a. this activity helped me understand the grammar concept better 1 2 3.34 4.40 0.06 0.05 -0.01 -0.72 b. i talked with my partner about how the language works (rules) when we were putting the sentences back together 1 2 3.96 4.59 0.06 0.04 -0.45 -1.06 c. i thought about how the language works (rules) when we were discussing with my partner 1 2 3.96 4.54 0.61 0.04 -0.55 -1.06 d. talking and thinking about how the language works helped me understand the concept better 1 2 4.08 4.51 0.05 0.04 -0.51 -0.92 muriel gallego 42 due to a lack of normal distribution, a mann-whitney u test was conducted to identify statistical significance between groups. results indicated that the differences between group 1 (novice-mid) and group 2 (advanced-low) were statistically significant (u = 11518.50, z = -11.68, p < .05) regarding the perception of the impact of the activity on their understanding of the targeted form. concerning item a in table 2 (“this activity helped me understand the grammar concept better”), group 2 valued the dictogloss as a technique that fosters acquisition, whereas group 1, even though not completely disregarding its value, did not consider this technique as valuable as the participants in group 2. significant effect of group was also found in the responses regarding item b in table 2 (“i talked with my partner about how the language works (rules) when we were putting the sentences back together;” u = 17412.00, z = -7.86, p < .05). this indicates that participants in group 1 did not perceive having talked about the language as much as those in group 2. moreover, statistical significance was found on item c in table 2 (“i thought about how the language works (rules) when we were discussing with my partner;” u = 18916.00, z = -6.76, p < .05), pointing out that discussion and reflection took place among participants in group 2 to a greater extent than among those in group 1. the same trend existed for item d (table 2) concerning the usefulness of metatalk (“talking and thinking about how the language works helped me understand the concept better;” u = 19562.50, z = -5.90, p < .05), implying that novice-low level learners did not consider metatalk to be an effective practice with regard to their acquisition, while advance-low learners recognized the connection between metatalk and acquisition. to summarize, the dictogloss and its components were overall received differently by the two groups. additionally, simple frequency calculations were conducted to establish the percentage of participants selecting one particular answer to the questions that gathered participants’ opinions with respect to the effectiveness of the dictogloss, their perceived involvement in metatalk, and the effects that metatalk had on participants’ comprehension of a given grammatical form and the overall benefit perceived after completing the task. these responses are summarized respectively in tables 3 (for group 1) and 4 (for group 2). table 3 frequencies and percentages for novice-mid level participants (group 1) survey item strongly disagree disagree neutral agree strongly agree a. this activity helped me understand the grammar concept better 6 (2.3%) 35 (13.7%) 111 (43.4%) 72 (28.1%) 32 (12.5%) b. i talked with my partner about how the language works (rules) when we were putting the sentences back together 0 17 (6.6%) 60 (23.4%) 94 (36.7%) 85 (33.2 %) second language learners’ reflections on the effectiveness of dictogloss: a multi-sectional, . . . 43 c. i thought about how the language works (rules) when we were discussing with my partner 0 24 (9.4%) 52 (20.3%) 88 (34.4%) 92 (35.9%) d. talking and thinking about how the language works helped me understand the concept better 1 (0.4%) 4 (1.6%) 55 (21.7%) 107 (42.1%) 87 (34.3%) table 4 frequencies and percentages for advanced-low level participants (group 2) survey item strongly disagree disagree neutral agree strongly agree a. this activity helped me understand the grammar concept better 0 0 27 (12.2%) 79 (35.7%) 115 (52.0%) b. i talked with my partner about how the language works (rules) when we were putting the sentences back together 0 0 10 (4.5%) 71 (32.1%) 140 (63.3%) c. i thought about how the language works (rules) when we were discussing with my partner 0 0 17 (7.7%) 67 (30.3%) 137 (62.0%) d. talking and thinking about how the language works helped me understand the concept better 0 0 16 (7.4%) 75 (34.6%) 217 (58.1%) the dictogloss task was considered effective by participants in group 2 (advanced-low level students), since more than half of them (52%) indicated that they comprehended the concept better after completing the activity. moreover, in addition to the 35.7% that also agreed with the effectiveness of the activity, only 12% remained neutral and none of them disagreed or strongly disagreed. conversely, the activity was not so well received by participants in group 1 (novice-mid level students) since the majority remained neutral (43.4%) and 13.7 % and 2.6% of the participants disagreed or strongly disagreed with the effectiveness respectively. however, 28.1% and 12.5% of the participants stated agreement or strong agreement with the degree of effectiveness, indicating that only half of the participants in group 1 considered the dictogloss task to be a valuable learning experience, while the majority of the participants in group 2 considered it effective and none of them indicated disagreement. the same trend, although not so precise, was revealed with regards to the value of metatalk across groups 1 and 2. the participants in group 1 (novice-mid level students) showed a mixed pattern. while the majority (43% agreed, 34.3% strongly agreed) thought that talking and thinking about the language contributes to their understanding of a given concept, 21.7% still remained neutral. on the other hand, participants in group 2 (advanced-low level students) indicated a distinct preference. almost 60% strongly agreed with the importance of metatalk in facilitating their understanding of a grammatical concept, 34.6% agreed and only 7.4% remained neutral. muriel gallego 44 one last consideration should be made concerning the perceived involvement in the different components of the activity, primarily metatalk. while most participants in group 2 acknowledged having talked about the language with a partner and having thought about the language while conducting the reconstruction stage, participants in group 1 indicated a less clear perception of discussing and thinking about the language. 6. discussion concerning the first research question, participants indicated different degrees of agreement about the effectiveness of the task. advanced-low level learners considered this activity to be greatly effective. on the other hand, novice-mid level students did not consider this activity to be highly conducive to learning. this could be attributed to factors such as the length and complexity of the task, which are elements that could interfere with its applicability at novice levels. this collaborative task entails interaction and output production, two procedures that can promote noticing related to meaning or form; in addition, metatalk is expected to occur especially during the reconstruction period, particularly if the reconstruction was previously modeled. metatalk is thought to raise awareness and promote noticing (swain, 1998), which will consequently have a positive impact on the development of learners’ interlanguage. consistent with garcía mayo (2002), the results of the present study indicate that the auditory component of the dictogloss might have posited a greater challenge for novice-mid learners than to higher-level ones. it could be speculated that the participants in group 1 were more concerned about employing their listening abilities and preoccupied with determining form-meaning connections. it seems that the reconstruction stage was perceived by the novice-low students as a mere regurgitation of the words and phrases they were able to capture during the listening rather than an opportunity for discussing formrelated instances in order to reconstruct the sentences. moreover, directing their attention towards other aspects of the task such as the recognition of lexical items or the accuracy of the notes taken could have limited students’ capacity to attend to target forms and to engage in metatalk. participants in group 2 possessed a level of competence that allowed them to comprehend the passage heard without much difficulty and consequently feel more confident about the accuracy of the notes taken, which gave them more time for focusing on form and discussing specific linguistic aspects in order to reconstruct the text. therefore, novice-mid level participants (group 1) could have been confused as to why a task that appeared to be a mere listening activity also required them to engage in metatalk. on the other second language learners’ reflections on the effectiveness of dictogloss: a multi-sectional, . . . 45 hand, advanced-low level participants (group 2) could have been less concerned about the adjacent aspects of the task and were cognitively ready to conduct the reconstruction and engage in metatalk, focusing on form rather than primarily or exclusively on meaning. advanced level learners are expected to be cognitively ready to notice and produce certain complex forms, whereas beginner or intermediate-level learners might still be at a stage in which they intend to grasp meaning and might experience difficulty when expected to focus on form (leeser, 2004). it appears that participants in group 1 (novice-mid) were more prone to focus their attention on comprehending lexical items in order to enable their construction of meaning, therefore restricting their chances of noticing forms to facilitate the reconstruction of the text. given that attention is limited, due to economy principles, it is also selective and must be, therefore, strategically allocated. schmidt (2001) indicated that “the allocation of attention is the pivotal point at which learner-internal factors (including aptitude, motivation, current l2 knowledge, and processing ability) and learner-external factors (including the complexity and distributional characteristics of input, discoursal and interactional context, instructional treatment, and task characteristics) come together” (pp. 12-13). for this reason, advanced-low level participants (group 2) could have been able to allocate their attention to a wider spectrum (due to higher processing ability, l2 knowledge, aptitude, and motivation). the second research question aimed to investigate whether participants were able to recognize the acts of talking and thinking about the language as inherent components of the dictogloss activity. results showed a discrepancy between the two groups indicating that those in group 1 conducted the activity without realizing that the objective of reconstructing the text was to discuss how the language works. those in group 2, on the other hand, were well aware of having talked and thought about the language. this indicates that the ability to understand the central point of this activity and to recognize that reflection and metatalk were taking place could be related to students’ level of l2 competence, familiarity with collaborative tasks and cognitive readiness. interestingly enough, contrary to the results shown in swain (1998), findings of the present study do not seem to indicate a connection between modeling the reconstruction and metatalk, and the participants’ ability to recognize their involvement in metatalk. in the present study, participants in both groups benefited from a modeled reconstruction and were instructed to pay special attention to certain features, and yet they were able to recognize their engagement in metatalk at different rates, due to their proficiency level. lastly, the third research question was established to investigate whether participants valued metatalk. the effectiveness of metatalk has been demonmuriel gallego 46 strated through previous research, and even though this study did not measure the number of lres produced or participants’ ability to engage in metatalk, results are in line with those of fortune (2005), whose advanced-level participants indicated a higher level of readiness to engage in metatalk when compared to intermediate-level participants. our advanced-low participants (group 2) valued metatalk significantly more than the novice-mid participants (group 1). gutiérrez (2008) pointed out that the ability to reflect about language is related to the ability to engage in metalinguistic activity. therefore, it can be concluded that the ability to engage in metatalk, which is related to the ability to reflect about language, can also be linked to learners’ ability to recognize this as a practice conducive to their language acquisition. moreover, in spite of the fact that students in both groups valued metatalk as a practice that impacts positively their acquisition process, the majority of the participants in group 2 only recognized having talked (63.3%) and having thought (62%) about the language while engaging in the activity. by contrast, a mere third of the participants in group 1 identified talking (33.2%) and thinking (35.9%) about the language as part of the dictogloss activity. what could explain this is that participants who were not cognitively ready to embark on a lengthy and complex task were not able to recognize the fact that discussing the language was a focal point and were therefore less able to perceive metatalk as a valuable learning experience. one last consideration should be made concerning participants’ ability to recognize their involvement in metatalk. gutiérrez (2008) has claimed that metalinguistic activity can be produced in other ways than explicitly (through recitation of rules or discussion of said rules), indicating that when not verbalizing their noticing, it is not necessarily true that learners are not able to partake in metalinguistic activity due to lack of knowledge. we can, therefore, speculate that, especially in the case of novice-mid level learners, the lack of verbalization might not necessarily indicate lack of knowledge, or lack of metalinguistic ability. this is attributed to the fact that participants in group 1 recognized thinking about the language more than discussing it with their partners, whereas the level of recollection about their involvement in both aspects (thinking about the language, talking about the language with their partners) was very similar with respect to both actions amongst participants in group 2. therefore, novice-mid level learners might possess the capacity to engage in metalinguistic reflection, which could indicate metalinguistic ability, and yet either decide not to, or lack the ability to engage in discussions about the language, especially when required to do so using their l2. as previously mentioned, participants in the present study were encouraged to avoid the use of l1, but this could not be controlled as strongly with the novice-mid level participants, who did not have the appropriate competence to conduct metatalk in the l2. second language learners’ reflections on the effectiveness of dictogloss: a multi-sectional, . . . 47 7. implications, caveats and future research results indicate that advanced-low level learners considered dictogloss as more valuable in comparison to lower-level learners; however, its applicability across levels can be fostered by making some adjustments. for example, during the first stage it is important to discuss the topic of the text and to introduce new vocabulary. the topic of the text should be appealing and familiar to the students since it will facilitate their interaction before engaging in the task and their commitment to the task in general. also during stage 1, the reconstruction process can be further explained by indicating that this is not a regular dictation and sentences should not be copied verbatim, as well as clarifying that this is not a listening comprehension activity and that students should not concern themselves with exact reconstruction. during the dictation and reconstruction stages no feedback should be provided, except for the clarification of instructions. the last stage is critical to the successful completion of the activity and, according to wajnryb (1990), kowal and swain (1994) and swain (1998), it is as important and valuable as the reconstruction-interaction stage. since the provision of feedback is very relevant during this stage, it is recommended to first review the sentences each group produced. if the time permits, all sentences may be revised; if not, one sentence per group should be sufficient. additionally, given that metatalk can be conducted not only related to the sentence level, lres might focus on features such as lexicon or discourse because the discussion could incorporate these aspects as well. dictogloss has been implemented in various ways in different studies; therefore, the interpretation and generalization of the results could be problematic if the premises originally established for the task were not followed. consequently, future research should measure the effectiveness of dictogloss as long as all four stages are completed and any modification made to the implementation is carefully explained. fostering familiarization amongst learners before carrying out this activity could contribute to a richer collaboration and more fruitful metatalk. participants’ level of competence in the l2 as well as the activity’s complexity leading to cognitive overload should be considered when implementing this task with novice learners. the results yielded by this investigation should be considered in light of the limitations it presents. firstly, the degree of receptiveness the participants displayed towards this activity can be related to their overall attitude towards the class, the instructor, and l2 learning in general. collecting data at two different universities might have also impacted the results. the present investigation concerning students’ attitudes towards dictogloss across levels contribmuriel gallego 48 utes to determining its effectiveness and instructional value. however, since the instructors’ impressions were not investigated, future research could examine that as well as the potential connection between instructors’ attitudes and students’ attitudes. additionally, more research is needed concerning learners’ ability to engage in metalinguistic reflection and their ability (or lack thereof) to engage in metatalk and the possible causes of such connections. lastly, this study did not examine the interrelation between learner attitudes and degrees of receptiveness or the amount and types of lres and l2 acquisition, which could be investigated in future research. overall, although several studies that have evaluated dictogloss have focused on the amount and type of lres produced during the reconstruction stage, fewer studies investigated the effects this fonf technique has on the acquisition of a given form and interlanguage development. this could be further investigated taking into account not only the type of metatalk but also any possible correlation between types and amounts of lres produced, the overall effectiveness of the activity, the level of receptiveness displayed by learners, the correlation between focus on a specific form through collaboration and metatalk and acquisition of that form, and the development of l2 fluency and accuracy. 8. conclusion findings from this study indicate that a collaborative task such as dictogloss is generally well received and valued by students, more so by those who display higher levels of l2 competence and who are cognitively ready. even when the metatalk and the reconstruction are modeled for students, the different components (the listening aspect, the interaction, the reconstruction of the text, the metatalk conducted while reconstructing, the form-meaning connections, etc.) can posit a considerable amount of challenge for learners of lowerproficiency levels. however, despite facing more challenges when engaging in the task, novice-mid learners also valued dictogloss as a fruitful learning experience. data presented here is therefore in line with the studies favoring the implementation of dictogloss as an effective fonf technique. acknowledgements i would like to thank all the students and instructors who participated in the study; without their input, this would not have been possible. special thanks go to becky conley, carey busch and mary jane kelley for their invaluable help and comments. all errors remain my own. second language learners’ reflections on the effectiveness of dictogloss: a multi-sectional, . . . 49 references doughty, c. 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(1999). learner-generated attention to form. language learning, 49, 583-625. 83 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (1). 2019. 83-116 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.1.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt reframing the l2 learning experience as narrative reconstructions of classroom learning phil hiver florida state university, tallahassee, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2004-7960 phiver@fsu.edu gabriel obando florida state university, tallahassee, usa universidad de nariño, colombia https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6121-9290 gvo16b@my.fsu.edu yuan sang florida state university, tallahassee, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2889-1223 ys13f@my.fsu.edu somayeh tahmouresi florida state university, tallahassee, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2889-1223 st17@my.fsu.edu ashlee zhou florida state university, tallahassee, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0114-4703 sz16h@my.fsu.edu yang zhou florida state university, tallahassee, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6793-7330 yz17c@my.fsu.edu phil hiver, gabriel obando, yuan sang, somayeh tahmouresi, ashlee zhou, yang zhou 84 abstract in this study we investigate the situated and dynamic nature of the l2 learning experience through a newly-purposed instrument called the language learning story interview, adapted from mcadams’ life story interview (2007). using critical case sampling, data were collected from an equal number of learners of various l2s (e.g., arabic, english, mandarin, spanish) and analyzed using qualitative comparative analysis (rihoux & ragin, 2009). through our data analysis, we demonstrate how language learners construct overarching narratives of the l2 learning experience and what the characteristic features and components that make up these narratives are. our results provide evidence for prototypical nuclear scenes (mcadams et al., 2004) as well as core specifications and parameters of learners’ narrative accounts of the l2 learning experience. we discuss how these shape motivation and language learning behavior. keywords: l2 learning experience; language learning story interview; qualitative comparative analysis 1. introduction a longstanding emphasis within the field of language learning and use is a focus on contextual and relational features of the second language (l2) classroom and the learning experience, aspects which are thought to play a key part in initiating and sustaining l2 learning motivation (see e.g., joe, hiver, & al-hoorie, 2017). although the role of the learning context and experience has been recognized for decades (e.g., kramsch, 2008; van lier, 2004), this aspect of l2 motivation theory is arguably the least theorized (ushioda, 2011, p. 201). as guidance, dörnyei (2009b) has described the l2 learning experience as the “situated, ‘executive’ motives” (p. 29) and “the causal dimension” (dörnyei, 2005, p. 106) relating to the impact of the teacher, the curriculum, the peer group, or the experience of success. however, little work has been done since to clarify the role of such executive motives and the mechanisms underlying their causal effect. in this study, we set out to re-theorize the language learning experience using insights from mcadams’ integrative life narrative dimension (mcadams, 2012). this framework originates in the work of scholars who proposed a narrative model of psychology and individual differences (see mcadams & pals, 2006), and it has more recently been adapted as a novel framework for individual differences research in the psychology of language learning (dörnyei & ryan, 2015). our primary objective in developing such a study was to investigate the situated and dynamic nature of the l2 learning experience. by undertaking such a study we aimed to develop insight into individuals’ own representations of their pathways of development and language reframing the l2 learning experience as narrative reconstructions of classroom learning 85 learning achievements, and to subsequently draw on this to provide a more finely grained understanding of the contribution of the l2 learning experience in motivating language learning behavior. 2. literature review 2.1. the l2 learning experience for more than a century, empirical work in education has acknowledged the notion that the learning experience exerts an influence on individuals’ attitudes and perceptions to learning (nolen, horn, & ward, 2015). in the realm of l2 learning and use, the understanding that learner characteristics, behavior, and development can be influenced by various competing temporal and situational factors has also been recognized for decades (larsen-freeman, 2015b). one central motivational component, which originates in gardner’s (1985, 2010) model under the label of attitudes toward the l2 learning situation or course, is comprised of evaluation of the teacher and evaluation of the course. in its various incarnations (e.g., dörnyei, 2005, 2009b; noels, 2001; ushioda, 2001) the association between this component and language learning is hypothesized to be both positive and causal. for instance, masgoret and gardner’s (2003) metaanalysis of 75 studies reports that the correlation between attitudes toward the learning situation and grades is r = .24, with a modest effect size of d = .49. others have expressed more reservation about any direct effect the learning situation and learning experience might have on outcomes of interest. for example, gardner (2007), commenting on two studies showing a weak relationship between attitudes toward the language learning situation and l2 achievement, states: one would expect that in cooperative classes with an experienced and skilled teacher and good teaching materials, etc., that students would have more favorable attitudes toward the situation and thus would learn more english and thus get higher grades . . ., but the simple truth is that we obtain similar [weak] results in many of our studies. (p. 17) elsewhere, gardner (2010) has elaborated on the relationship between the learning situation and achievement, explaining that the relationship between the two is mediated by motivation: “someone may demonstrate . . . very positive attitudes toward the learning situation, but if these are not linked with motivation to learn the language, they will not be particularly highly related to achievement” (p. 91). in more recent work based on dörnyei’s l2 motivational self system (l2mss) model, the l2 learning experience has been reported by some as the strongest predictor in the l2mss (e.g., lamb, 2012). however, this is far from a widely reported finding, and because an even greater number of studies have phil hiver, gabriel obando, yuan sang, somayeh tahmouresi, ashlee zhou, yang zhou 86 found an inconsistent relationship between the components of the l2 motivational self system and actual language achievement or performance (e.g., alhoorie, 2016; dörnyei & chan, 2013; kim & kim, 2011; macintyre & serroul, 2015; moskovsky, assulaimani, racheva, & harkins, 2016), few conclusions can be drawn. this is not surprising given that having a positive attitude toward the course and its teacher does not necessarily imply more or better learning, even if the learner perceives that to be the case (beleche, fairris, & marks, 2012). indeed, it is not an unusual experience for a learner to get the impression that they have learned a subject well, but to subsequently discover gaps in their knowledge that they were unaware of. this misleading impression of mastery can happen for many reasons, and in some instances student satisfaction with learning may represent little more than the illusion or misattribution of having learned (stark & freishtat, 2014). experimental research from mainstream education highlights the problematic nature of associating positive attitudes toward a course or enjoying a class – measured through course evaluation forms and student evaluation of teachers – with actually learning from it (see ottoboni, boring, & stark, 2016, for one review). a number of experimental studies conducted in different contexts around the world (e.g., arbuckle & williams, 2003; braga, paccagnella, & pellizzari, 2014; carrell & west, 2010) have demonstrated that student satisfaction with a course is often biased and negatively correlated with success in subsequent, more advanced courses. in other words, students who report enjoying the learning situation more tend to be those who, ironically, are likely to have learned less from it. because effective learning sometimes requires an active struggle and sustained persistence to achieve success, if anything, the relationship between attitudes to a learning situation and student learning can in some cases be negative (macnell, driscoll, & hunt, 2015). in short, the field’s inattention to conceptual and theoretical clarity – perhaps due to greater interest to-date in other self-constructs – has resulted in a slightly ambiguous state of affairs regarding what the l2 learning experience construct captures empirically or should represent substantively, and whether or how it might shape students’ motivation and through motivation their achievement in second language learning. despite being presumed to be a central motivational factor since the inception of the field, important questions about the l2 learning experience construct, as it is currently postulated, remain. we turn now to exploring several promising advances in our field that may assist in clarifying this situation and contribute new insight into the l2 learning experience. reframing the l2 learning experience as narrative reconstructions of classroom learning 87 2.2. a complex dynamic systems reframing of the l2 learning experience nearly a decade ago, dörnyei (2008, 2009a) proposed the need to rethink individual difference variables in a situated, dynamic manner, and this has led to more comprehensive work on individual differences that reflects the way they interact with the environment through a complex interplay of synchronic and diachronic variation (dörnyei & ryan, 2015). scholars championing this new way of thinking have called for an integrative framework “to explain the dynamic development of real people in actual contexts” (dörnyei, 2017, p. 87). one immediately relevant implication of this would be to no longer conceive of the l2 learning experience exclusively as a conventional, modular independent variable. in this new l2 motivation research landscape, complexity theory (cdst) has begun to establish its relevance and explanatory potential (dörnyei, 2017; dörnyei, macintyre, & henry, 2015). however, this “ontological shift” (dörnyei & ryan, 2015, p. 11) also suggests a need to appropriately revise existing understanding of constructs in the field in ways that are compatible with this new way of thinking. borrowing from a recent practical blueprint that informs the planning and design of cdst research (hiver & al-hoorie, 2016), here we outline and articulate the conceptual considerations which guided us in the design of this study. a major contribution of cdst to theorizing and researching l2 motivation is its utility for reconceptualizing the objects and phenomena of interest in our field to more closely reflect the way they actually work (larsen-freeman, 2013, 2015a). cdst encourages thinking about how parts of the whole relate to each other in l2 motivation research, and because the world is dynamic, the unit(s) of analysis should be equally dynamic – phenomenologically real complex systems situated in context (hiver & al-hoorie, 2016). thus, adopting a cdst perspective suggests the need to conceptualize and operationalize the l2 learning experience more organically as a relational and soft-assembled complex system (i.e., shaped by initial conditions, contextual affordances, and dynamic change) – one in which the agent in the system, capable of exercising intentional action that contributes to the system’s outcomes and processes of change, is the l2 learner himself or herself. as these developments indicate, language learning motivation is now recognized as a dynamic, situated factor characterized by temporal and contextual variation (dörnyei, macintyre, & henry, 2015). one advantage of refocusing attention more explicitly on motivational processes than on outcomes and variables, is that it necessitates a more developmental perspective in l2 motivation research (nolen, horn, & ward, 2015). thus, a particular added value of adopting a cdst perspective for examining the l2 learning experience is an emphasis on processes of change and development that are capable of producing a rich repertoire of l2 motivation behaviors. initial conditions and histories play a critical role phil hiver, gabriel obando, yuan sang, somayeh tahmouresi, ashlee zhou, yang zhou 88 in systems’ processes of becoming (verspoor, 2015), something the l2 learning experience reflects well. complex systems grow and change as they adapt dynamically to the problems posed by their surroundings and are characterized by nonfinality as they progress iteratively through time (rose, rouhani, & fischer, 2013). investigating the l2 learning experience as a complex and dynamic system is also compatible with the idea that context shapes system behavior and its outcomes (ushioda, 2009). through their experience in context, complex systems come to anticipate the consequences of certain interactions and seek to adapt to changing circumstances. this notion of interdependence between a context, the individuals studied within that context, and the phenomena of interest has recently come to be discussed more explicitly in relation to l2 motivation (ushioda, 2015). in the l2 learning experience, context can be seen as an intrinsic, core part of resulting motivated thought and action, and the main implication is that l2 motivation is always situated and thus contextually constrained (e.g., joe, hiver, & alhoorie, 2017). complex systems’ openness to the environment gives rise to context-dependent behaviors and this means that contextual factors should be seen as actual dimensions of the l2 learning experience itself. we see the cdst perspective as having unique power to push our thinking in new directions as we attempt to reframe the l2 learning experience in a more dynamic and situated way. 2.3. an integrative life narrative dimension of the l2 learning experience psychologists calling attention to the limitations of a more conventional mode of individual differences research to both represent meaningful aspects of individuality and to account for variation (i.e., differences), have proposed a narrative model of psychology and individual differences (e.g., mcadams, 2006, 2012; mclean & pasupathi, 2011). drawing on their intellectual mentor jerome bruner’s work (e.g., 1986, 1987), mcadams and pals (2006) introduced a radical new way of seeing the subject of interest (i.e., human individuals) in psychology research – a model they termed the new big five. this conceptualization of the core of individual differences as narrative in their essence now has over a decade of empirical support from cognitive, developmental, personality, and social psychology research, and complements both the dispositional trait-like and characteristic adaptation (i.e., state) aspects and levels of personality (mcadams, 2018; mcadams et al., 2004; mcadams & mclean, 2013). it has also more recently been adapted as an innovative approach to thinking about and doing individual differences research in the psychology of language learning (dörnyei & ryan, 2015). narrative approaches to personality suggest that people create meaning and purpose in their lives through the construction of life stories that entail the development of an explicit narrative identity (singer, 2004). people explain who reframing the l2 learning experience as narrative reconstructions of classroom learning 89 they are, how they came to be, and where they believe their lives may be going by formulating, telling, and revising stories to consciously legitimize their personal past and their imagined futures (bruner, 1990). one’s narrative identity, in this tradition, is a deliberate, internalized, and analytical life-story of the self that selectively reconstructs the past and anticipates the future, providing an overall sense of coherence and purpose (mcadams et al., 2004). although it does not discount the performative and discursive functions of narratives that more socially-oriented scholars attend to, this narrative approach to personality differs from a more generic narrative mode of inquiry because it maintains that individuals’ accounts of significant life-story episodes (i.e., their narrative identity) express core themes and reveal underlying dynamics of personality (mcadams, 2018; mcadams et al., 2006). in their work taking stock of progress in the field and reimagining future avenues for exploration in the psychology of language learning, dörnyei and ryan (2015) propose that the narrative mode of thought lends itself to “explain[ing] the dynamic ways in which people attempt to understand events, the meanings they ascribe to various experiences, and the ways by which they organize and structure them through storied arcs” (p. 199). they outline a potential framework for a new narrative-based representation of the psychology of the language learner that places the l2 learner’s narrative identity – “the specific aspect of an individual’s ongoing internal narrative that relates to learning and using a second/foreign language” (p. 202) – at the core of this model and “connects to all parts of the learner’s psychology, and both drives and regulates change” (p. 203). this narrative-based representation of the psychology of the language learner is both informed by and premised on a cdst perspective of individual differences that insists on the importance of context, accentuates change, and respects variability. by adopting this integrative framework “to explain the dynamic development of real people in actual contexts” (dörnyei, 2017, p. 87), this new representation of language learner psychology is able to broaden our understanding of the dynamics of individuality in multilevel nested systems – for instance, by uncovering how language learners’ narratives interact with characteristic adaptations to form a broader system, and how these relate to other tiers, constituents, and substrates (e.g., dispositional traits, the learning situation) within the broader framework. however, while l2 motivation has come to be conceptualized in ways that emphasize its situated, adaptive and dynamic nature, the utility of a narrative model of language learner psychology and individual differences requires more detailed empirical support. with some exceptions, little work has been done to identify and describe typical autobiographical narratives and narrative trajectories, develop a working knowledge of the types of l2 narrative identities learners develop and patterns of change within such a typology. in order to contribute to current understanding in the field, we have adopted a design in this study that phil hiver, gabriel obando, yuan sang, somayeh tahmouresi, ashlee zhou, yang zhou 90 is both aligned with a situated and dynamic perspective (i.e., cdst), and draws on this integrative life-narrative dimension as “the main organizational mechanism – or cohesive device” (dörnyei & ryan, 2015, p. 202) – for the l2 learning experience. we set out to explore the following questions: rq1: how do language learners construct overarching narratives of the l2 learning experience? rq2: what are the characteristic features and components that make up these narratives? rq3: what role do these dimensions of the l2 learning experience play in motivating l2 learning behavior? 3. method following established principles of life-narrative research in psychology (see e.g., mcadams, 2012), our design explored the l2 learning experience construct inductively by beginning with concrete observations and qualitative characterizations of the phenomenon itself which we used, subsequently, to develop a more abstract description and understanding of the phenomenon. we did this using a newly-purposed instrument called the language learning story interview (llsi) – adapted from mcadams’ life story interview (2007). the design of this study, thus, fell into the “context of discovery” (mcadams, 2012, p. 17) since we adopted a data-driven approach to exploring the l2 learning experience in order to generate new theoretical insight about this phenomenon of interest. the analytical strategy we adopted in this study was qualitative comparative analysis (qca), a method that originates in case-based approaches to researching complex dynamic phenomena (rihoux & ragin, 2009). it assumes two very important things about research rarely entertained by other qualitative methods: first, the aim of all research is to provide generalizable findings; secondly, causality can be systematically investigated through qualitative data if the right type and number of cases are analyzed. qca begins by defining the outcome of interest and casing the outcome (i.e., recruiting a typical sample that will guarantee relevant data about that phenomenon). in order to develop a complex causal explanation of an outcome, data about the conditions thought to influence the outcome are needed. this is called selecting the causal conditions. conditions are roughly equivalent to how variables are used conventionally, and qca uses the ones and zeros of boolean algebra to code these conditions. in the most conventional analysis using discrete variables all the cases are assigned one of two possible crisp membership values for each condition or set included in a study: 1, membership in the set; 0, non-membership in the set. reframing the l2 learning experience as narrative reconstructions of classroom learning 91 the results are then summarized in truth table rows to determine which causal conditions, or combinations of conditions, are necessary or sufficient for the outcome being investigated. by solving contradictions and minimizing the causal conditions in order to keep the fewest possible causes that still result in the outcome, the researcher will obtain the parsimonious minimal formula. if the formula holds for all of the cases being compared, the consistency (i.e., the number of cases that share this combination of conditions and also display the outcome of interest) is 1.0. consistency scores, in general, should be as close to 1.0 as possible. 3.1. participants using critical case sampling, we collected data from college-level (n = 8) l2 learners. these eight cases (female = 4; male = 4) were selected from within a larger cohort of language learner respondents enrolled in credit-bearing modern foreign languages at a large public university in the southeastern usa. all were non-language majors aged between 18 and 24, in their first or second year of college, and were l1 english users. of the 10 modern foreign languages on offer these participants were all enrolled in either arabic, mandarin chinese, or spanish, taking up to two years of the language as part of their undergraduate degree requirements. we deliberately sampled these learners from instructed l2 settings – participants reported between two and twelve years of formal l2 learning experience in various languages – to yield more particular information than might be possible from a sample of learners in a non-tutored environment. 3.2. materials we developed a novel data elicitation instrument for this study – the llsi – based on mcadams’ life story interview (2007). this protocol (see appendix a) asked individuals to describe the overall trajectory of their l2 learning experience by classifying this language learning story into chapters, and then to focus on particular scenes that stood out from their story (e.g., high points, low points, turning points, challenging points). extending this narrative into the future, we also asked respondents to imagine the next chapter in their language learning story in a similar format. finally, we asked each participant to consider their typical language learning behavior and the value of language learning for them, and then to reflect on any connections or relationships between these and their language learning story. this llsi instrument was refined through focus groups and piloting with l2 learners unrelated to this study. as researchers, because we represent nearly 15 separate languages learned, we then undertook to further pilot these intermediate versions of the structured interview protocol among ourselves. minor adjustments were made phil hiver, gabriel obando, yuan sang, somayeh tahmouresi, ashlee zhou, yang zhou 92 and follow-up questions included in the final version to ensure the instrument was clear and would elicit relevant data. 3.3. data collection following ethical approval, our call for participants went out through respective course instructors, and all prospective participants provided their email addresses to the research team. participation was voluntary and compensated: respondents received a small gift card on completing the interview. participants were contacted in advance and briefly informed about the interview protocol. this was done under the pretext of gaining greater knowledge of their language learning background (e.g., languages learned, length of l2 learning experience) but in fact served to provide participants with details regarding the unconventional interview structure and allow them thinking time prior to the interview session. all interviews were conducted face-to-face in english and recorded with the signed consent of participants. each session lasted between 50 and 90 minutes (resulting in roughly 11 hours of recorded narrative data) and took place in a low-key setting to reduce any power distance between researcher and participant. every effort was made to grant participants the freedom to control the pace and content of the interviews. 3.4. data analysis initial data analysis proceeded collaboratively by reviewing data recordings and transcripts (i.e., totaling roughly 75,000 words) repeatedly. using a scheme of inductive and descriptive codes, we categorized the data based on episodes elicited from the structured interview (e.g., was there an instance of a turning point in this participant’s data? what was the turning point for this participant versus another?). from these descriptive codes, we created conceptual maps (kane & trochim, 2007) to represent temporal patterns and connections between themes in the narrative data (e.g., an initial lack of interest in early casual exposure to languages linked to a later sticky object that sparked interest in classroom l2 learning). once done with these preliminary steps, we used qualitative comparative analysis (qca; rihoux & ragin, 2009), the analytical technique we have briefly outlined above. our first step here was to define the outcome of interest as a generalized motivation to continue to pursue language learning (i.e., code = “mtl”), because we assumed that the data elicited from each individual through the llsi would be associated with a meaningful level of this generalized motivation for those individuals to continue to pursue language learning. next, a truth table algorithm for fuzzyset qca (fs/qca) was set up to summarize the data synthetically. the independent reframing the l2 learning experience as narrative reconstructions of classroom learning 93 variables chosen as predictive input conditions in computing the truth tables (see appendix b) were the descriptive codes we had developed in the conceptual maps. using the fsqca 3.0 data analysis software (ragin & davey, 2016), each case being compared was assigned membership values ranging from 0 (i.e., non-membership) for each causal condition or “set” to 1 (i.e., full membership) (ragin, 2009) – scores between these two values indicate partial membership (i.e., relative scores indicate strength), thus the “fuzzy” set (i.e., non-dichotomous) logic. all causal conditions were selected for the analytic moment proper, given the exploratory design. results tabulated in the truth table rows helped us determine which causal conditions, or combinations of conditions, were necessary or sufficient for the outcome being investigated. two central indices of fit (i.e., the extent to which causal conditions are necessary and sufficient) in truth table data exploration are consistency (i.e., the degree to which cases that share conditions or combinations of conditions display the outcome of interest) and coverage (i.e., the extent that a causal combination accounts for instances of an outcome) (ragin, 2009). by omitting several logical remainders, and minimizing prime implicants (i.e., unique or isolated functions and conditions) we obtained a summary of the outcome of interest’s central dimensions in the dataset – final model: mtl = f(qg*pl*pg*so*te*ri*rl*nc*my*li*lf*eh*df*ce). final model fit was analyzed using the quine-mckluskey algorithm and by running a subset/superset analysis. solution coverage of the model’s configuration was excellent (.99) while the solution consistency also showed excellent definition (i.e., .98). these steps allowed us to adhere to best practice in qca. 4. results and discussion in this section, we present our results as an attempt to capture core parameters of how learners construct overarching narratives of the l2 learning experience and what those stories look like. we do this first by highlighting prototypical, self-defining, nuclear scenes – highly significant stand-alone scenes actively retrieved by the learners, that revolve around the most important concerns and conflicts in one’s life, and which provide the individual with a better understanding of both themselves and others or the world (mcadams et al., 2004) – and then examining their themes revealed through our analysis of the dataset. 4.1. prototypical, self-defining, nuclear scenes 4.1.1. the initiating scene: getting into language learning in comparison to the more intense and specific scenes we elicited from our participants’ language learning experience (e.g., a high point, a low point), we expected phil hiver, gabriel obando, yuan sang, somayeh tahmouresi, ashlee zhou, yang zhou 94 that protagonists’ beginning encounters with language learning might only be vaguely remembered or thought of mostly as undramatic and banal. however, in our respondents’ narrative accounts of “getting into” l2 learning we found the opposite to be the case. this highlights the significance of initial conditions we alluded to in our previous review of the literature. the fact that the opening chapters of all our respondents’ language learning stories contained elaborate, varied, and intriguing “ways in” to their first l2 learning experiences (see table 1) suggests that these initiating scenes can be seen as clearly demarcated initial conditions for subsequent iterative change in learners’ l2 learning experience. for some individuals, this exposition was set through discovering their success at first-try with tongue twisters in the language, or their genuine surprise as a child at being dropped into a foreign language classroom while accompanying a parent who had relocated abroad; for others, it was prefaced by exposure to the language through bilingual friends playfully talking trash to each other in it, or by a default placement in the only language offered in the school; yet another stumbled onto the alphabet of the language as a young teenager while browsing youtube channels and decided to try their hand at learning. these initial encounters with language learning, for all respondents, were rich in specific detail and imagery and conveyed strong enduring affect (e.g., confidence, embarrassment, fear). this is important because the specificity criterion could be thought of as one measure of a scene’s subsequent influence on later episodes in the narrative. table 1 representative initiating scenes representative scenes participant a learner discovered that she was dropped into a foreign language classroom almost immediately after relocating abroad with her parents and was genuinely surprised at the situation. jennifer a learner had his first encounters with the l2 through bilingual friends who would playfully talk trash to each other in it and invite him to mimic them. chandler on his first try, a learner discovered his success and facility with complicated tongue twisters in the new l2. jonathan one first-time learner stumbled onto the alphabet of the language while browsing his favorite youtube channels as a teenager. jim on her first day of secondary school, a learner was enrolled in l2 classes by her parents and felt a sense of anticipation at the newness of it all. laura cognitively, the retrieval of early self-defining autobiographical scenes is thought to occur first through abstract general categories (i.e., school, friends, travel) and then through an affective response (i.e., how a scene makes them feel at the time of recall) but is also thought to require greater effort to access specific episodic detail (mclean & fournier, 2008). while none of these initiating scenes were accompanied by introspective analysis and evaluative reflection, a reframing the l2 learning experience as narrative reconstructions of classroom learning 95 characteristic of later scenes, we were struck by the ease with which all respondents were able to call up these nuclear episodes of getting into l2 learning in the first place. and, because we found no instances in which these initiating scenes lacked specificity, our data suggest that a broadly applicable structural characteristic of an informative narrative of the l2 learning experience is an initiating scene which underpins all later temporal and causal coherence of that narrative. thus, in iterative processes of change such as those which are part of individuals’ language learning stories, a system’s initial conditions can be seen as complex causal factors which produce the subsequent outcome, which then produces the next, which itself produces the one after that, a pattern which repeats successively through time (van geert, 1994; verspoor, 2015). 4.1.2. the sticky object scene: sparking interest in language learning we were intrigued to discover that, despite their elaborate initiating scenes, none of our protagonists expressed an initial interest in l2 learning. what we did find, however, were accounts in all participants’ data of a prototypical scene (see table 2) in which “a sticky object” – a thing, idea, or even person which attracts emotions and to which emotions are attached, depending on the history of contact with it (ahmed, 2004, 2010) – sparked interest in the l2 learning process at various intermediate points in time. this could be seen as parallel to lorenz’s notion of a butterfly effect in which seemingly small events have an unforeseen influence on a system’s functioning. for one respondent, the desire to join the navy after high school (a notion/desire) was the sticky object that sparked this interest after an early chapter of disinterest and not caring that lasted several years. for others, the sticky object was a pc game (a thing) in the foreign language routinely played at home or picking up a book (a thing) that sparked a new outlook. for another, it was the loss of a mentor and then of a significant other (people) in short succession – the first of whom passed away and the other who moved away for good – that triggered a new-found interest in the process of language learning. table 2 representative sticky object scenes representative scenes participant a learner stumbled on the book fluent forever which kindled an interest in learning multiple languages simultaneously. jim a learner dreamed of joining the navy after school and realized that language learning might help him do so. this sparked an interest in l2 learning he had never experienced due to negative prior l2 learning experiences. alex a learner became inspired to enroll in l2 classes to learn the language used as part of a pc game they routinely played at home. kayla phil hiver, gabriel obando, yuan sang, somayeh tahmouresi, ashlee zhou, yang zhou 96 a learner’s mentor passed away, shortly after which his partner left him. the attachment he felt to both individuals (one a l2 teacher, the other an l2 user) spurred him to learn an l2 in order to recreate the previous bond he felt with them. chandler a learner falls in love with the traditional l2 writing system, which allows him to de-stress from his other l2 learning which causes him anxiety. jonathan when thinking about these prototypical scenes in which sticky objects stimulated interest, they were triggered in the moment by contextual affordances and were closely associated with excitement, aspirations, and the stimulation of curiosity. as such, even though the potential for interest is in the individual learner, through these sticky objects the environment defined the direction of interest and contributed to its development. this type of interest more closely corresponds with situational-affective interest (hidi & renninger, 2006). once this situationalaffective interest was triggered and focused the individuals’ attention on language learning, subsequent chapters and episodes showed that participants came to value the subject matter or the learning process more and desired to explore that learning more fully. in episodes following the sticky object scenes, respondents reported finding a sense of what was “in it” for them, spending more time on l2 learning activities and persisting in the face of learning challenges, feeling more rewarded by this effort, and progressing to deeper forms of engagement (e.g., for self-actualizing purposes). this type of interest that developed can be thought of as individual-cognitive interest – the type of interest maintained through expressions of task meaningfulness, personal involvement, and social support (hidi, 2006). our data suggest that it was this individual-cognitive interest that sustained respondents’ investment and engagement in their l2 learning experience as they reported beginning to value opportunities for learning and starting to better regulate their own involvement in these activities. 4.1.3. an overcoming difficulties scene like any good story that presents complications or problems requiring resolution as a way of preserving narrative coherence, we found that all our protagonists’ narrative accounts of their l2 learning experience contained at least one, but often multiple, self-defining scenes of being confronted by a significant obstacle in language learning and working to overcoming the challenge presented by it. this nuclear scene (see table 3) involved prototypical episodes such as coming to terms with how their explicit knowledge of language did not afford the communicative capacity for its use, and repeatedly discovering one’s inability to accomplish seemingly basic tasks (asking for directions; ordering food) in the language outside the classroom. it ranged from having to confront the realities of one’s low proficiency while on a study abroad program in a public and reframing the l2 learning experience as narrative reconstructions of classroom learning 97 embarrassing way, to failing every question on a language exam by misinterpreting instructions and subsequently having to meet the instructor personally to explain their performance. for some, it extended also to events such as having to take a year off language learning due to being put on academic probation or offending a foreign language acquaintance due to a lack of awareness of expectations accompanying l2 use in that context. thus, such scenes of overcoming language learning obstacles appear to be a central part of an informative narrative of the l2 learning experience. table 3 representative overcoming difficulties scenes representative scenes participant a learner is put on academic probation and forced to take time off language learning but stages a triumphant comeback the next semester and achieves widespread recognition for his performance and progress in the l2. alex a learner was pushed to learn an l2 she had no interest in and hated it. she became angry at the school system and decided to redouble her pursuit of languages that interested her. tiana a learner repeatedly discovered her inability to accomplish everyday tasks (e.g., asking for directions; ordering food) in the language outside the classroom and became determined to only do them in the l2 until she overcame her embarrassment and frustration. kayla a learner confronted the realities of his low proficiency while on a study abroad program in a public and humiliating way which helped him realize he had not taken it seriously. he became determined to change his outlook and not give up. jim a learner misinterpreted instructions and did so poorly in his l2 exam that he was not sure he would pass the class. after realizing his mistake, he decided to put the failure behind him and do his best regardless of whether he would pass the class. jonathan a learner offended a new acquaintance (an l2 speaker) by promising to do something but not following through due to ignorance of expectations in that context of l2 use. he decided to “own” his mistake and never make the same mistake twice. chandler from a narrative perspective, negative and conflicting events are closely associated with meaning making largely because they require more cognitive effort to resolve than positive events (mcadams, 2012). this was true in our dataset both in the sense of individuals’ responses to this type of incident as learners, as well as for how they incorporated the scenes into their language learning narratives and assigned causal and thematic coherence to them – a process termed autobiographical reasoning (mclean & fournier, 2008). participants drew on autobiographical reasoning as a way to establish personal growth connections to challenging situations and language learning events fraught with obstacles. these novel solutions included dimensions such as learning from failure and mistakes, pacing oneself, deliberately not quitting, learning to cope productively, aspiring to something greater, taking initiative in learning, and paying attention to detail. these scenes of overcoming difficulties were used by our phil hiver, gabriel obando, yuan sang, somayeh tahmouresi, ashlee zhou, yang zhou 98 participants as a way of making connections between past experiences and their current self in a way that developed and maintained their overall narrative of the l2 learning experience. for all participants, this scene was self-enhancing because the sense of explanatory coherence it added allowed learners both to learn something new about themselves and generalize to those guidelines from their self-development to other l2 learning events more broadly. 4.1.4. a making human connections scene the final prototypical nuclear episode which all our respondents’ narrative accounts had in common was what we termed a making human connections scene. while there were many variations on this prototypical scene, ranging from friendship to intimacy and unity, all of our participants’ narratives of their l2 learning experience contained clear episodes of making connections with other significant individuals and through the relationship developing prosocial goals along the lines of unity and dialog with other people (see table 4). for some, these events revolved around extremely brief points of contact with others lasting only hours or days that established ideas of belonging and being affiliated with a community of other l2 learners or l2 speakers – even one that was only imagined. the fact that such fleeting encounters with other learners, teachers, or l2 users could have such an anchoring effect speaks to the power of people and to human connections in the l2 learning experience. table 4 representative making human connection scenes representative scenes participant a learner was shocked at the end of a semester by his grade, and when he emailed the teacher, who had simply made a mistake, the teacher apologized, commended him for his effort and recognized his contribution to the class. jim learners decided to setup a group chat in the l2 outside the classroom and it became their primary means of communication for that semester. tiana on the way home from school, a learner met a cashier at a gas station who spoke the l2 being learned and was subsequently introduced to a community of l2 speakers. kayla a learner and his assigned partner working on a five-minute oral presentation spent hours perfecting their assignment together and emerged good buddies. jonathan a learner sat in a bus behind two l2 speakers and eavesdropped on their conversation the whole ride, then introduced herself to them before getting off. jennifer a learner met a wrestler at a bar and was invited to a gym that no tourist or englishspeaker had visited before. alex while for some, these nuclear episodes of making human connections through and with the l2 were specific to particular encounters, relationships, or between the protagonist and one or only a few other people, there were some reframing the l2 learning experience as narrative reconstructions of classroom learning 99 scenes here which captured the idea of being part of a larger community. in these, the respondents’ narrative accounts of the events showed their commitment to prosocial goals such as a sense of togetherness, allegiance, or solidarity with other l2 learners and users, and illustrated the unique effect the episode had on their overall l2 learning: that of developing an orientation of belongingness and synchrony with other people through language learning. this is not remarkable given the social purpose of language and the distributed (i.e., between people) nature of group learning experiences, but it is curious in the sense that few respondents in our sample reported extended study abroad experiences and suggests that these human connection scenes are not rare or extraordinary, nor are they contingent only on outside contact with target language speakers and their culture. having described how learners construct overarching narratives of the l2 learning experience and what prototypical, self-defining scenes in those stories look like (i.e., through the four prototypical nuclear episodes present in all narrative accounts of the l2 experience), we now scope out to a broader consideration of the core thematic parameters of learners’ overarching l2 learning experience narratives, borrowing from mcadams and colleagues’ (2006) emotional, motivational, and cognitive categories for narrative accounts. 4.2. core parameters of learners’ narratives 4.2.1. emotional loading/tone the first core thematic parameter that is salient in our dataset is that respondents’ narrative accounts of key scenes from their l2 learning experience had a characteristic emotional loading or emotional tone, ranging from extreme positivity to extreme negativity. these themes are represented by the fs/qca “emolo/to” designation in table a1 (see appendix a). previous studies have shown that extended narrative accounts of key autobiographical scenes tend to exhibit a particular positive or negative tone and that this affectivity forms the emotional core of one’s narrative identity (e.g., barrett, 2006; mcadams et al., 2004). we found strong support for this in our own data, even apart from the nuclear scenes that were designed to elicit particular emotional values (e.g., a high point, a low point, a failure or regret). in our dataset, scenes and episodes with a positive emotional loading featured the general expression of positive affect such as enjoyment, enthusiasm, and excitement, scenes in which bad things turn to good (e.g., the overcoming difficulties scene), the resolution of events characterized by happy endings, and particular experiences of inspiration, confidence, pride, and triumph which sparked a personal investment that was previously phil hiver, gabriel obando, yuan sang, somayeh tahmouresi, ashlee zhou, yang zhou 100 absent. scenes and episodes with a negative emotional loading, however, showed unhappy outcomes and events in which good things turned bad, negative affect such as frustration, fear, embarrassment, and discouragement, and the feeling of being intimidated by and exhausted with ongoing l2 learning. the more of these characteristics were present in the scene or episode, the more extreme the emotional loading. virtually all the narrative accounts of the l2 learning experience contained a mixture of positive and negative emotional loading, and this is perhaps to be expected in learning situations (pekrun & linnenbrink-garcia, 2012). such emotional complexity may even be desirable as it is associated with adaptability and with easier, more efficient access to conceptual knowledge (lindquist & barrett, 2008). however, on balance, the narrative accounts of these learners who reported being motivated to continue to pursue language learning were more intensely positive than negative in their emotional loading. this suggests that emotional quality and intensity are key metrics connected to the differential role that the l2 learning experience might play in motivating l2 learning. one additional aspect that distinguished the narrative accounts of these protagonists was the sequencing of affective scenes. scenes with negative emotional loading tended to set up a transition of some sort to scenes with positive emotional loading (e.g., the overcoming difficulties scene). in this way, good scenes emerged from and were accentuated by the narrative contrast with a preceding bad scene. thus, the quality (i.e., positive/negative), intensity (i.e., high/low), and sequencing (i.e., neg.→pos./pos.→neg.) of the emotional loading/tone in learners’ narrative accounts of the l2 learning experience appears to play a central role in how the l2 learning experience motivates l2 learning behavior, and that it is only under the right conditions that the emotional loading of the l2 learning experience has both a positive and causal association with language learning. 4.2.2. motivational themes the second core parameter of protagonists’ narrative accounts of key scenes from their l2 learning experience was the motivational themes that were connected to the kinds of intentions our participants displayed (i.e., what they wanted and how they went about getting it) in their language learning. motivational themes in life-narrative accounts have previously been examined from various standpoints, some of which (e.g., mcadams et al., 2006) emphasize their positive association with achievement and responsibility. we also found support for this in our dataset, and these themes are represented by the “mothem” designation in table a1 (see appendix b). one superordinate dimension apparent in our respondents’ narrative accounts of the l2 learning experience was the theme of reframing the l2 learning experience as narrative reconstructions of classroom learning 101 agency which suggests the volition to assert, expand, and control the self, gain greater personal autonomy and mastery, and empower the individual self. one relatively common expression of agency was a person explicitly saying that an experience provided him or her with a feeling of power. another involved the participant experiencing an enhanced sense of control over his or her language learning trajectory and destination. the focus on the self in narrative accounts of autobiographical experiences means that these are necessarily agentic, but it is through more deliberate and effective action, thought, or experience, that protagonists are able to strengthen the self and become more powerful agents. another superordinate motivational theme which stood out in our data was a theme of personal growth evident in events that served to promote the positive development of the self. for example, the respondent might report that he or she overcame language learning obstacles, learned through failure, effort and mistakes, learned a new lesson about life, came to a deeper self-understanding, reached a higher level of language development, or discovered something new and important about him or herself or learning in general. this theme of personal growth and maturity illustrates how narrative accounts of the l2 learning experience are grounded in the past, relevant to the present, and oriented to the future. when protagonists gain insight and self-awareness, or are strengthened by significant challenges, this can lead to empowerment and a sense of pride and accomplishment that will result in setting new learning goals and plans, as well as taking on new roles and responsibilities in future episodes of their l2 learning experience. thus, the motivational themes of agency and personal growth are mutually reinforcing, as greater agency feeds into personal growth which in turn engenders personal empowerment. in this way, motivational themes are one particular snapshot of how iterative and adaptive change may take place within the l2 learning experience, and in doing so establish a sustained and dynamic influence on language learning. 4.2.3. narrative complexity the third and final core parameter of participants’ narrative accounts of key scenes from their l2 learning experience is what others (e.g., mcadams et al., 2004; mcadams et al., 2006) have called narrative complexity. simple stories of l2 learning experience are likely to contain few characters, straightforward plots, and clear resolutions. complex stories of l2 learning experience, on the other hand, may have many characters and interwoven plots and may suggest multiple meanings and ambiguous resolutions. our analysis suggests that high narrative complexity was the rule rather than the exception in learners’ autobiographical accounts. most scenes or episodes showed evidence of mixed emotions, multiple phil hiver, gabriel obando, yuan sang, somayeh tahmouresi, ashlee zhou, yang zhou 102 perspectives or motivations, or a differentiated presentation of the self. these themes are represented by the “narrcomp” designation in table a1 (see appendix b). narrative complexity can be seen as a way of accounting for the elaborateness of the content and structure of key autobiographical scenes, and because more complex (multiple, conflicting) narrative accounts of the l2 learning experience result in more explicit attempts to understand events and ascribe meaning to these various experiences, what we have previously referred to as autobiographical reasoning, this offers one way of establishing a developmentally-oriented index (i.e., one that informs future learning and ongoing development) of learners’ narrative accounts of the l2 learning experience. narrative complexity was exhibited in our data through respondents incorporating multiple points of view (e.g., role taking), expressing mixed motivations (e.g., doing a single thing for many conflicting reasons) and complex emotional experiences (e.g., mixing opposite emotions in the same scene), or representing contradictory aspects of the self (e.g., as victim and victor) in ways that did not violate the temporal and causal coherence of their narratives. how does this narrative complexity in learners’ stories of the l2 learning experience impact their language learning? our data suggests that narratives of the l2 learning experience with multiple and conflicting thoughts, motivations, and self-images were those that relied more on autobiographical reasoning and metacognition. in this way, we see narrative complexity as a key aspect of learners’ narrative accounts of the l2 learning experience associated with learners deriving greater meaning, more coherent interpretations, sharper insights, and more valuable lessons from their narratives that feed back into their ongoing development and language learning. 5. conclusion in this study we set out to re-theorize the language learning experience, using insights from mcadams’ (2007) integrative life narrative dimension, with a particular focus on its situated and dynamic nature. borrowing from established research designs of life-narrative research in psychology, we demonstrated how language learners construct overarching narratives of the l2 learning experience and what the characteristic features and components that make up these narratives are. our results showed that learners’ narrative accounts of the l2 learning experience contained four temporally linked prototypical nuclear scenes. the prototypical initiating scene set the exposition for learners’ narrative accounts of “getting into” l2 learning, which suggests that specific detail and imagery conveyed in these scenes represents the initial conditions in learners’ l2 learning experience which introduced subsequent iterative change in the narrative. the prototypical sticky object scene was one in which a thing, idea, or person that attracted reframing the l2 learning experience as narrative reconstructions of classroom learning 103 emotions sparked interest in the l2 learning process, which suggests that this is one way learners come to spend more time on l2 learning activities, persist in the face of learning challenges and feel more rewarded by this effort, and progress to deeper forms of engagement. the prototypical overcoming difficulties scene revolved around learners encountering a significant obstacle in language learning and working to overcoming the challenge presented by it. this nuclear scene was used by our participants as a way of making connections between past experiences and their current self in a way that developed and maintained their overall narrative of the l2 learning experience. in addition, the prototypical making human connections scene showed learners’ commitment to prosocial goals such as a sense of togetherness, allegiance, or solidarity with other l2 learners and users, and illustrated the effect this episode had on their orientation of belongingness and synchrony with other people through language learning. our results also highlighted core emotional, motivational, and cognitive specifications and parameters of learners’ narrative accounts of their l2 learning experience. analysis of the data indicated that respondents’ narrative accounts of key scenes from their l2 learning experience had a characteristic emotional loading or emotional tone, and that in addition to the emotional quality and intensity of these, it was the sequencing of the emotional loading/tone in learners’ narrative accounts of the l2 learning experience which held a key place in their l2 learning behavior. with regard to superordinate motivational themes, we found that separate but mutually reinforcing dimensions of volition/agency and personal growth were connected to the kinds of intentions our participants displayed in their language learning. this suggests that the waxing and waning of motivational themes through time is one particular mechanism by which iterative and adaptive change may take place within the l2 learning experience, and in doing so establish a sustained and dynamic influence on language learning. finally, narrative complexity within the l2 learning experience was associated with learners understanding themselves better, interpreting events more coherently, and learning more valuable lessons from their ongoing narratives. narrative complexity, thus, appeared to be fundamental to the ways in which the l2 learning experience fed back into participants’ ongoing development and language learning. while our chosen case-based methods allowed us to look at the l2 learning experience in a new light, several limitations remain. first retrospective reports of the kind which made up our dataset are imperfect representations of the reality of language learning encounters. narrative psychologists agree that elicited narrative accounts are imaginative reconstructions of past events and anticipations of future ones. our larger dataset did include language learning narratives from many more learners, but due to the exploratory nature of the study we limited ourselves to a modest sample of only eight critical cases. this phil hiver, gabriel obando, yuan sang, somayeh tahmouresi, ashlee zhou, yang zhou 104 was necessary given the exploratory nature of the present study and the finegrained analyses we conducted. future investigations will need to examine the transferability of the current findings by building on the lessons learned from these learners’ narrative accounts of the l2 learning experience with more representative samples from various socio-geographic language learning contexts and using more robust confirmatory methods as appropriate. seen this way, the present study can be thought of as a first exploratory step to reframe the l2 learning experience in a situated and dynamic way using insight from dörnyei and ryan’s (2015) framework for a new narrative-based representation of the psychology of the language learner. we welcome further work to establish the contribution of this framework for current understanding in the field. reframing the l2 learning experience as narrative reconstructions of classroom learning 105 references ahmed, s. 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(2015). initial conditions. in z. dörnyei, p. d. macintyre, & a. henry (eds.), motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 38-46). bristol, england: multilingual matters. reframing the l2 learning experience as narrative reconstructions of classroom learning 109 appendix a the language learning story interview (adapted from mcadams, 2007) introduction this is an interview about the story of your life as a language learner. as a researcher, i am interested in hearing your story, including parts of the past as you remember them and the future as you imagine it. i’m going to ask you to think of your experience as a language learner in a new way—as a language learning story with chapters, with key scenes, characters, and themes. first we will start big, and talk about the chapters. then we’ll go into more detail and focus on the details of these chapters later on. i will guide you through the interview so that we finish it all in just over an hour. this interview is for research purposes only, and its main goal is simply to hear your language learning story. as researchers, my colleagues and i collect people’s stories of language learning in order to understand the different ways in which people experience language learning. there are no right or wrong answers to these questions. instead, i would like you simply to tell me about some of the most important things that have happened in your language learning story and how you imagine your language learning story developing in the future. everything you say is voluntary, anonymous, and confidential. i think you will enjoy the interview. do you have any questions? ok, so let’s start by thinking about language learning life chapters. a. language learning life chapters please begin by thinking about your life as a language learner as if it is a book or novel. imagine that this book has a table of contents containing the titles of the main chapters in your language learning story. to begin with, can you describe briefly what the main chapters in the book might be? you can have as many chapters as you want, and please give each chapter a title. as the storyteller here, go chapter by chapter and give me an overall plot summary of your story. we want to spend approximately 15 to 20 minutes on this first section of the interview, and there will be time later to go into more detail about each chapter. follow up q: can you tell me a little bit more about what each chapter is about, and tell me how you get from one chapter to the next? [note to interviewer: the interviewer should feel free to ask questions of clarification and elaboration throughout the interview (e.g., can you tell me a bit more about why…?; can you think of an example of…?; do you mean that…?), and especially in this first part.] now let’s move on to key scenes in your language learning story phil hiver, gabriel obando, yuan sang, somayeh tahmouresi, ashlee zhou, yang zhou 110 b. key scenes in your language learning story now that you have described the overall plot outline for your language learning story, i would like you to focus on a few key scenes, events, or specific incidents that stand out in your story. think of key scenes as moments in your language learning story that stand out— maybe because they were especially good or bad, vivid, important, or memorable. for each of the key events we will think of, i would like you to describe in detail what happened, when and where it happened, and who was involved, and what you were thinking and feeling in the event. then, i’ll also ask you tell me why you think this particular scene is important or significant in your language learning story? the first key event i would like you to focus on is a high point. 1. a high point thinking back to the chapters you have told me about, can you describe a scene, episode, or moment from your language learning story that stands out as an especially positive experience? this might be the high point scene of your entire language learning experience, or else an especially happy, joyous, exciting, or wonderful moment in the story. can you describe this high point in detail? what happened in the event, when and where was it, who was involved, and what were you thinking and feeling? follow up q: can you tell me briefly why you think this particular moment was so good and why the scene is so significant to you as a language learner? 2. a low point the second scene is the opposite of the first—a low point. thinking back over your entire language learning story, can you describe a scene, episode, or moment that stands out as a low point or an especially negative experience? even though this event might be unpleasant, i would appreciate if you can tell me about it in detail. what happened in the event, when and where was it, who was involved, and what were you thinking and feeling? follow up q: can you tell me briefly why you think this particular moment was so bad and why the scene is so significant to you as a language learner? [note to interviewer: if the participant is clearly uncomfortable doing this, tell him or her that the event does not really have to be the lowest point in the language learning story but merely a negative event or experience of some kind.] 3. a turning point now i want to ask you about a turning point. looking back over the chapters of your language learning story, it may be possible to identify certain key moments that stand out as turning points—events that marked an important change in you or in your language learning story. can you think of particular episodes in your language learning story that you now see reframing the l2 learning experience as narrative reconstructions of classroom learning 111 as a turning point in your story? for this event, can you again describe what happened, where and when it was, who was involved, and what you were thinking and feeling? follow-up q: also, can you tell me in a few words why this scene is so significant to you as a language learner? [if no: if there is no key turning point that stands out clearly, please describe a key event in your language learning experience in which you went through an important change of some kind.] 4. a positive early memory now, let’s go back to the early chapters of your language learning story. i’d like you to think of an early memory of language learning—from the early chapters of your language learning story—that stands out as especially positive in some way. this should be a very positive, happy memory from the early chapters as a language learner. can you describe this good memory in detail? what happened in the event, when and where was it, who was involved, and what were you thinking and feeling? follow up q: can you briefly tell me why this memory is so significant to you as a language learner? 5. a negative early memory now i’d like you to think of an early memory of language learning—still from the early chapters of your language learning story—that stands out as especially negative in some way. this could be a very negative, unhappy memory, maybe one of sadness, fear, or some other very negative emotional experience. can you describe this bad memory in detail? what happened in the event, when and where was it, who was involved, and what were you thinking and feeling? follow up q: can you briefly tell me why this memory is so significant to you as a language learner? thank you. now, we’re going to talk about the future. c. the future plot of your language learning story 1. the next chapter so far i’ve asked you to think about your language learning experience as a book with chapters and scenes from the past and present. now i’d like you to extend your book chapters into the future by telling me how you see or imagine your future. can you describe what will be the next chapter or chapters in your language learning story. what is going to come next in your language learning story? describe these chapters in detail if you can. 2. dreams, hopes, and plans for the future now let’s talk about your plans for the future. many language learners have an idea about what they want for themselves in the future. can you describe your plans, dreams, or hopes phil hiver, gabriel obando, yuan sang, somayeh tahmouresi, ashlee zhou, yang zhou 112 for the future as a language learner. what do you hope to accomplish in the future in your language learning story? 3. long-term project do you have a long-term learning project in your language learning story? a long-term learning project is something that you have been working on and plan to work on in the future chapters of your language learning story. can you describe any long-term project that you are currently working on? tell me what the project is and how you involve yourself in this learning project. follow up q: why do you think this project is important for you and your language learning story. d. challenges in this next section i’ll ask you about the various challenges, struggles, and problems you have faced in your language learning. i will begin with general things, and then i will focus on some specific areas where many language learners experience challenges or a crisis. 1. language learning challenge looking back over your language learning experience, please describe what you think is the greatest challenge or problem you have faced as a language learner. what is or what was the challenge or problem? how did this challenge or problem develop? how did you deal with the challenge or problem? follow up q: can you briefly tell me what the importance of this challenge or problem is in your language learning story? 2. a failure, regret many people experience failures and regrets in learning, even the strongest and most enthusiastic learners. looking back over your language learning experience, what is the greatest failure or regret you have experienced? this failure or regret can be in any area of your language learning—using the language, the language classroom, language exams, or any other area. can you describe the failure or regret and the way in which it happened to you? follow up qs: how have you coped with this failure or regret? what effect has this failure or regret had on you and your language learning story? 3. giving up looking back over your language learning experience, can you think of a scene or period in your language learning story when you met a problem or had challenges that made you want to give up and stop your language learning? please describe in detail what the problem reframing the l2 learning experience as narrative reconstructions of classroom learning 113 was and how it developed. what was it about the problem or challenges that made you want to give up as a language learner. follow up qs: how did you cope with the problem or challenge? what impact did this scene or period have on your overall language learning story? e. personal language ideology now, i would like to ask a few questions about your beliefs and values as a language learner and about questions of meaning in your language learning story. please think carefully about each of these questions. first i want you to think about the value you see in your language learning experience. 1. value of language learning can you describe briefly what you see as the most valuable part of language learning for you? is there anything important that you get from language learning, that you could not get otherwise? please explain and give me details if you can. 2. approach to language learning what else can you tell me that would help me understand how you approach language learning and what you do as a language learner? what can you tell me to help me understand who you are as a language learner? 3. change, development of views now let’s think about changing views. can you tell me how your beliefs and views of language learning have developed over time? have they changed in any important ways? please explain and give me details if you can. f. life theme reflection thank you for being a part of this language learning interview. i have just one more question for you. many of the stories you have told me are about experiences that are special because they stand out from the day-to-day. i’m wondering if you can reflect for one last moment. looking back over your entire language learning story with all its chapters, scenes, and challenges, extending back into the past and ahead into the future, do you see a central theme, message, or idea that runs throughout the story? what is the major theme in your language learning story? thank you. phil hiver, gabriel obando, yuan sang, somayeh tahmouresi, ashlee zhou, yang zhou 114 appendix b truth tables compiled on the basis of the data used in the study table a1 independent variables used as input conditions in computing truth tables qca code data theme ac learning for self-actualizing purposes mothem ad desire to add additional languages narrcomp am ambitious language learning mothem as aspiring to something greater mothem bh broadening horizons mothem bl balancing all languages narrcomp ca coping productively/adaptively narrcomp ce casual exposure to languages narrcomp cl desire for consistency in learning narrcomp cm coping unproductively/maladaptively narrcomp co confidence emolo/to cr caring and interest mothem cu curiosity mothem cz getting out of a comfort zone mothem de paying attention to detail mothem df difficulty mothem dg discouragement emolo/to di deliberate initiative in learning mothem ds disappointment emolo/to dt distractions narrcomp ef effort paid off narrcomp eh exhaustion emolo/to ej enjoying the process of learning emolo/to em embarrassment emolo/to ep constant effort and perseverance mothem et enthusiasm emolo/to ex excitement emolo/to fa failure mothem fe fear emolo/to fu frustration emolo/to gl efficient language learning narrcomp gr daily grind narrcomp id intimidated emolo/to ii inspired by something emolo/to iv investing time and energy mothem lf learning from major failures mothem li initial lack of interest in language learning emolo/to lm learning from minor mistakes mothem mc miscommunications narrcomp mg metacognition narrcomp ml learning multiple languages narrcomp my mastery goals mothem nc negative class experience emolo/to no negative change in outlook narrcomp reframing the l2 learning experience as narrative reconstructions of classroom learning 115 nsa negative study abroad experience emolo/to nt negative teacher experience emolo/to ob overcoming obstacles mothem ov overthinking things narrcomp pa pacing oneself narrcomp pc positive class experience emolo/to pd pride emolo/to pf perfectionism narrcomp pg progress mothem pl realizing one’s potential mothem po positive change in outlook narrcomp psa positive study abroad experience emolo/to pt positive teacher experience emolo/to qg not giving up or quitting mothem rg receiving recognition narrcomp ri risk-taking narrcomp rl making personal connections or relationships mothem sd serendipity emolo/to so sticky object sparking interest emolo/to sr self-regulated learning narrcomp te trial and error narrcomp tl learning technical aspects of language narrcomp tr triumph emolo/to ul using language throughout whole life mothem uq unique experiences through language mothem vi valuable interactions through language mothem table a2 causal condition membership values for fs/qca qca code respondent ale00 cha00 jen00 jim00 jon00 kay00 lau00 tia00 ac .5 0 .5 .5 .5 .75 .5 0 ad .75 .5 1 .5 1 1 1 .5 am 0 .5 1 .5 1 .75 1 .5 as .25 .5 1 .5 1 .75 1 .5 bh 1 1 1 1 1 .5 1 1 bl 1 1 .5 .75 1 .5 .5 1 ca .5 1 1 .5 .75 .5 1 1 ce 1 1 1 .75 .75 .75 1 1 cl 0 0 .5 1 .25 .5 .5 0 cm .5 0 0 .25 .25 .25 0 0 co .75 .5 .5 .5 .75 .5 .5 .5 cr 1 1 .5 .5 1 .75 .5 1 cu .5 .5 1 .75 1 .5 1 .5 cz 1 1 .75 .5 1 .5 .75 1 de 0 1 1 1 .5 .75 .5 1 df 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 dg 1 1 .5 .5 1 .75 1 1 di .75 .5 1 .5 1 .75 1 .5 ds .25 .5 .5 .5 1 .5 1 .5 dt 0 .5 .5 .5 .5 .5 .5 .5 ef 1 1 1 1 1 .75 1 1 phil hiver, gabriel obando, yuan sang, somayeh tahmouresi, ashlee zhou, yang zhou 116 eh .5 .5 0 .5 1 .25 1 .5 ej 1 .5 1 .5 .5 .25 .5 .5 em 1 1 .75 0 0 .5 0 1 ep 1 1 1 1 .5 .75 .5 1 et .5 .5 1 .5 .5 .5 .5 .5 ex .75 0 1 .25 1 .5 1 0 fa 0 .5 .5 .5 .75 .5 .75 0 fe 1 0 0 .5 0 0 1 .5 fu .5 1 .5 1 .5 .75 1 1 gl 1 .25 1 1 .75 .5 .25 1 gr 0 1 .75 1 1 .75 1 1 id 1 1 .5 1 .5 .5 1 1 ii .75 1 1 .5 .5 .75 1 .5 iv 1 1 1 1 1 .75 1 1 lf 1 1 1 1 1 .75 1 1 li 1 1 .25 .5 .5 .75 .5 .5 lm 1 1 1 0 1 .75 0 0 mc .75 .5 .5 .5 1 1 .5 .5 mg 1 .75 1 .5 .75 .75 .5 .5 ml 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 my 1 1 1 .75 1 1 .75 .75 nc 0 .5 1 .5 .5 .25 .5 1 no 1 0 .25 .25 .25 0 .25 .5 nsa 0 0 1 0 .25 .25 0 0 nt 1 1 1 .5 1 1 1 1 ob .25 .5 0 .25 1 .25 .5 .25 ov .5 1 1 .5 1 .5 1 .5 pa .5 .75 .5 .25 1 .5 .75 .5 pc 1 .5 1 .5 1 .75 .5 1 pd 1 1 1 .25 1 .5 1 1 pf 1 1 1 1 1 .75 1 1 pg 1 1 1 .75 1 .75 1 1 pl 1 .25 .75 .5 1 .75 .25 1 po 1 0 1 1 1 .5 0 1 psa 0 0 0 .25 .25 .25 0 0 pt 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 qg 0 .5 1 .25 .5 .5 .5 0 rg 1 1 1 .75 1 .75 1 1 ri 1 .75 1 1 1 .75 .75 1 rl 1 .5 1 1 .75 .5 .5 1 sd 1 1 1 .75 1 .75 1 1 so .5 .75 1 .75 1 .75 .75 .5 sr 1 1 1 1 1 .75 1 1 te 0 0 .5 .5 .75 .75 0 0 tl 1 1 .5 .5 .75 .5 1 1 tr .5 .75 1 .75 .5 .5 .75 .5 ul .5 1 1 .75 1 .75 1 .5 uq 1 .5 1 1 1 .75 .5 1 vi .5 0 .5 .5 .5 .75 .5 0 note. scores of 1 and 0 indicate full membership and non-membership in the causal condition “set,” respectively. scores greater than 0 but less than 1 indicate levels of partial membership in the set. qca relies on absolute cut-off scores for membership and non-membership, but in order to simplify our fs/qca analyses these conventional cut-off scores did not feature in our coding. 11 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (1). 2014. 11-12 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.1.1 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial the first 2014 issue of studies in second language learning and teaching brings together five papers, which either report the results of original empirical studies or provide valuable insights into the methodology of research into the processes of language learning, teaching and use. in the first contribution, kay irie discusses the tenets of q methodology, an alternative approach to exploring individuals’ views about complex issues or phenomena that combines the features of quantitative and qualitative paradigms but has yet to be applied on a larger scale to empirical investigations of language learning and teaching. she also presents a detailed procedure for conducting such research with reference to her study on language learners’ self-concept, discusses the possible applications of this approach and addresses its limitations. in the next paper, muriel gallego presents the results of a study which aimed to tap learners’ perceptions about dictogloss and showed, on the basis of the data collected by means of posttask surveys administered to 497 participants from two different universities, that this activity is favorably received by learners, with the caveat that it is appreciated more by those who represent higher proficiency levels and are cognitively ready to engage in a task of this kind. abulfazl mesgarshahr and esmaeel abdollahzadeh, in turn, touch on the relationship between the use of communication strategies and language learners’ willingness to communicate, a potentially very promising line of inquiry that has thus far been, somewhat surprisingly, neglected by researchers. they found in their experimental study that training students in the use of a wide variety of communication strategies translated into a dramatic increase in the level of willingness to communicate, at least in the case of pre-intermediate learners. the final two papers included in the present issue focus on learners’ interlanguage development, seeking to account for factors leading to fossilization and tracing the development of a particular linguistic feature. first, musa nushi puts to the empirical test han’s (2009) selective fossilization hypothesis, demonstrating 12 that although l1 markedness and input availability indeed influence whether or not second language forms fossilize, other factors, such as individual variation, have to be taken into account to explain adult language learning. second, shaopeng li and lianrui yang explore the development of topic prominence in chinese learners of english as a foreign language from a discourse perspective with respect to topic chains and zero anaphora, providing evidence that discourse structures are likely to be impacted by typological differences between the mother tongue and the target language. i am deeply convinced that all of these papers make a valuable contribution to the field of second language acquisition and will provide an inspiration for other researchers, both in terms of further exploring the themes addressed as well as embracing and refining the methodological procedures employed. miros aw pawlak adam mickiewicz university, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references han, z.-h. (2009). interlanguage and fossilization: towards an analytic model. in v. cook & l. wei (eds.), contemporary applied linguistics. vol. 1: language teaching and learning (pp. 137-162). london: continuum. 301 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (2). 2015. 301-325 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.2.6 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl unveiling the relationship between language learning beliefs, emotions, and identities1 ana maria ferreira barcelos federal university of viçosa, brasil barcelosam@hotmail.com abstract several authors (frijda, manstead, & bem, 2000; van veen & lasky, 2006) suggest that emotions, cognitions, and identities are intrinsically related. authors in social psychology (fiedler & bless, 2000; frijda, manstead, & bem, 2000; rosiek, 2003) have considered how beliefs are particularly sensitive to affective influences and how emotions, cognitions, and identities are intrinsically related. understanding this relationship would help researchers to reveal complex key issues in beliefs research, such as the relationship between beliefs and action. yet, although research on beliefs in applied linguistics goes back to the 70s and 80s, there has been scant connection with emotions and identities. this paper aims to reflect on the relationship between beliefs, emotions, and identities by looking at these coconstructing, overlapping concepts to advance our understanding of language learning and teaching. through a review of studies on beliefs, emotions, and identities within applied linguistics and other areas, i illustrate how beliefs and emotions are intrinsically and interactively related, and how beliefs within a socio-historical context influence the construction of identities. identities influence the kinds of emotions and beliefs that individuals attribute to themselves and to others. emotions, in turn, can influence identities and how we construct them. implications for research on beliefs, emotions, and identities are suggested. keywords: emotions, identities, beliefs, language teacher education, language learning 1 this article is a modified version of previous talks (barcelos, 2011, 2014) and an earlier version of a manuscript in portuguese (barcelos, 2013). ana maria ferreira barcelos 302 what matters in teacher education, is not the mechanical repetition of this or that gesture, but the understanding of the value of feelings, emotions, desires, of the insecurity to be overcome by security, of fear that, in being educated, starts to give birth to courage. no true teacher education can be done apart from, on the one hand, the exercise of criticism, which implies the promotion from naïve curiosity to epistemological curiosity, and on the other hand, without recognizing the value of emotions, sensitivity, affect, intuition or guessing. paulo freire (1996, p. 45). 1. introduction research on beliefs about language learning and teaching has been recognized as a solid area of research in applied linguistics (al) and is covered by an extensive volume of studies. although beliefs are said to have an affective component (nespor, 1987; rokeach, 1968) and are believed to relate to our identities, the relationship between beliefs, emotions, and identities has not been the focus of empirical studies in the field of al itself or in other fields for that matter. even in psychology, with a wide literature on cognition and emotion concerned with affective influences on memory, the reference to research on beliefs is incipient (fiedler & bless, 2000, p. 144).2 in this article, i wish to explore what i anticipate to be the complex relationship between beliefs, emotions and identities. understanding this relationship is important for three reasons. first, given the inseparability of cognition and emotion as recognized in diverse fields such as neuropsychology (damasio, 1994; ledoux, 1996), education (frijda, manstead, & bem, 2000; zembylas, 2004) and al (aragão, 2007; dewaele, 2005; gieve & miller, 2006; pavlenko, 2005), there is a need to better understand the affective dimension of teacher and learner cognition. more specifically, it is important to understand how emotions interact to shape what teachers (borg, 2006) and learners (kalaja & barcelos, 2013) do, their implications for their learning (how and what they learn) (nespor, 1987), and how teacher emotions are part of teachers’ practical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge (rosiek, 2003) and learners’ emotions are related to their beliefs (aragão, 2011). thus, understanding the relationship between beliefs and emotions can help us understand how together these influence teachers’ and learners’ actions. within the field of language teacher research, recent work has already begun to unveil the ways in which emotions interact with teacher cognition (golombek & dorian, 2014; johnson & worden, 2014; kubanyiova, 2012). second, although there are numerous studies on identity in al (block, 2007; murphey, chen, & chen, 2005; norton, 2001; pavlenko & norton, 2007; yoshimoto, 2008) and the relationship between beliefs and identities has been 2 the collection edited by frijda, manstead and bem (2000) is an exception. unveiling the relationship between language learning beliefs, emotions, and identities 303 suggested in the literature (see following sections), none has investigated how identity, emotions, and beliefs are related. the investigation of this relationship can shed light on several issues in belief research, such as the dissonance or conflict between beliefs and actions as well as how beliefs evolve and develop. finally, in all theoretical models of beliefs such as ellis (1994) and borg (2006), there is a lack of reference to the concepts of emotions and identities. although these models include several factors which influence beliefs, such as context, professional development and classroom practice, emotions and identities do not appear as influential factors. for example, woods’s (1996) model does not explicitly mention emotions but attributes an important role to interpretation, which can be viewed as an emotional component of appraisal. given these gaps in the existent literature and research, this paper attempts to bring together current literature on the concepts of beliefs, emotions, and identity with a specific focus on emotions and their interrelatedness with beliefs and identities. it is hoped that by doing so, it can outline some of the theoretical and potentially methodological issues that future work in this area will need to address. it does so, firstly, by discussing the concepts of beliefs, identity, and emotions within studies in al, psychology, social sciences, and education; secondly, by reflecting on the interrelationships between these three concepts as suggested in the literature; and, finally, by suggesting directions for further research on the coconstructedness of these three concepts as well as by considering implications for language teaching and learning. 2. beliefs, identities, and emotions in this section, i briefly review the concepts of beliefs, identity, and emotions defining them and drawing insights from studies in a range of disciplines. although each construct is discussed separately for purposes of organization and clarity of the article, in reality, all of them are interrelated constructs as i hope to show in the second part of this paper. 2.1. beliefs the interest in learner beliefs started in the mid-70s with the focus on the learner and his/her contributions to the learning process: his/her experiences, needs, thoughts, and beliefs; aspects which still deserve and receive the attention of researchers (barcelos, 2004; breen, 2001; kalaja & barcelos, 2003). pioneering studies about beliefs were conducted by horwitz (1985), wenden, (1986), and, in brazil, leffa (1991), almeida filho (1993) and gimenez (1994). learners bring many individual contributions to the language learning process ana maria ferreira barcelos 304 such as their motivation, attitudes, learning styles, and beliefs, all of which frame what and how they learn (breen, 2001). research on beliefs about language learning and teaching has grown in recent years with a considerable number of theses and dissertations,3 several journal articles, book chapters, stateof-the-art articles (barcelos, 2003, 2004; bernat & godsvenko, 2005; borg, 2003), books (barcelos & vieira-abrahão, 2006; borg, 2006; kalaja & barcelos, 2003; woods, 1996) as well as encyclopedia entries (barcelos & kalaja, 2013; kalaja & barcelos, 2013). gaining insights into learners’ beliefs may help researchers understand: (a) any possible resistance to new methodologies (shamin, 1996), (b) any potential cognitive dissonance between teachers’ and students’ beliefs (barcelos, 2000), (c) their language learning difficulties, such as anxiety (horwitz, 1990), (d) their use of language learning strategies (yang, 1992), and (e) their motivation (lima, 2005). research about teacher beliefs or cognition is a topic that has been investigated longer than research on learner beliefs in al. the concept of teacher beliefs is situated within a research tradition in education, which started in the seventies and changed the paradigm about teachers and their work with the publication of several seminal studies such as clark and peterson (1986), shavelson and stern (1981) and shulman (1986) on teachers’ thoughts and knowledge, which portrayed teachers as knowledge constructers (borg, 2006). thus, teachers’ beliefs and thoughts started gaining prominence in the research literature. understanding teachers’ beliefs helps us understand both teachers and learners’ actions and decision-making processes in the classroom (borg, 2003; johnson, 1999; pajares, 1992; woods, 1996). since beliefs act as a filter for human behavior, they are an important feature of reflective teaching (richards & lockhart, 1996), which encourages teachers to reflect upon and question their beliefs to understand how they teach. in particular, beliefs are an important feature of educational and teacher change, since a change in teachers’ practices requires a change in their beliefs. beliefs have been investigated through a variety of methods and approaches (kalaja & barcelos, 2013), ranging from a more positivistic mainstream approach using closed questionnaires, with beliefs being viewed mostly as mental fixed constructs in one’s minds, to a more contextual approach making use of interviews, narratives (written and visual), and observations, among others. more recent studies4 conducted within the contextual approach have conceptualized beliefs as being dynamic and emergent, socially constructed and contextually 3 for a review of the studies, see barcelos (2007). 4 due to limitations of time and space, i will not review these studies here. for a sample of these, please see barcelos and kalaja (2011), kalaja and barcelos (2013), and barcelos and kalaja (2013). unveiling the relationship between language learning beliefs, emotions, and identities 305 situated, potentially paradoxical and dialectal, that is: they are social and individual, shared, diverse and uniform; and constitute a complex dynamic system that is interrelated, embedded, nonlinear, multidimensional and multilayered (kalaja & barcelos, 2011; mercer, 2011). 2.2. identities the concept of identity has become more widely discussed in al after peirce’s (1995)/norton’s (1997)5 publication of her study with immigrant women in canada. identity can be defined as “people’s understanding of their relationship to the world, the construction of that identity across time and space, and people’s understanding of their possibilities for the future” (norton, 1997, p. 410). this definition stresses how identities are related to individuals’ desire for recognition, affiliation, security, and safety, which are all dependent on how material resources are distributed in society. within a postructuralist view, identity is seen as multiple, multifaceted and dynamic. studies in social sciences offer other important insights about identities that may help us better understand them. lemke (2008) presents five interesting perspectives on identities that help shed light on their relationship to beliefs and emotions. first, identities are multiple. this means that we behave differently in different situations (formal and informal) and settings (professional and intimate) and with different people (children or peers). second, identities are multi-faceted and dynamic, they develop and change as who we are is constructed within the constraints of our interactions in different settings in our lives with different people (lemke, 2008, p. 19). third, identities are hybrid. thus, we may be forced to act in more normalized ways than we would like to since there may exist “contradictions between our subjective identities, who we are to ourselves, and our projected identities, who we wish to seem to be to others.”(p. 20). we compromise to reconcile the pressures between who we want to be and the pressures and forces of the multiple cultures and institutions that seek to shape our identities. fourth, identities are contested and conflictual, not only because “there are struggles over the kinds of identities we are allowed to claim for ourselves,” but also over “the kinds of identities we can conceive for ourselves” (p. 31). lastly, identities are performed. in other words, we have what lemke (2008, pp. 24-25) has called longer and short-term identities and identity-in-practice. longer-term identities, “inscribed in our habitus,” are dispositions for action in the moment, and are themselves constituted through many actions across many moments. our longer-term identities are 5 bonny norton peirce and bonny norton refer to the same person. ana maria ferreira barcelos 306 performed and constituted through ways of enacting relationships to people who are significant to us in scenarios we recognize as familiar. 2.3. emotions historically, there has always been a neglect of emotions and overemphasis on the rational dimension of language, language learning and teaching. as swain (2013) puts it, emotions are the elephant in the room: poorly studied and understood and “seen as inferior to rational thought” (p. 205). however, there are exceptions and several authors have recently begun to emphasize the inseparability of emotion and reason and the central role of emotions in the process of learning a language (aragão, 2005, 2011; dewaele, 2011; garret & young, 2009; rajagopalan, 2004; swain, 2013). in her pioneering work, arnold (1999) defined affect broadly as “aspects of emotion, feeling, mood or attitude which condition behavior” (p. 1). the affective domain for her includes aspects such as motivation, anxiety, extraversion, and introversion. a more dynamic definition of emotions sees them as “a complex, multifaceted psychological phenomenon,” which is “constantly generated, unfolded, and changed through multiple recursive effects at any one moment” (so, 2005, p. 44). to aragão (2011), emotions are “bodily dispositions for situated action,” which “represent a variety of ways of acting in relation to the dynamics of the immediate environment” (p. 302). since the beginning of research in affective factors and emotions in al, the field has witnessed different ways of looking into “affective variables,” as shown in table 1. table 1 timeline of research on emotions in al 70s 80s 90s 2000s 2010s humanistic teaching (moskowitz, 1978) attitudes (gardner & lambert, 1972) affective filter hypothesis (krashen, 1985) first studies on anxiety (bailey, 1983) research on affect (affective factors as individual differences) (arnold, 1999) studies on language learning anxiety in language learning (horwitz, 1990; macintyre, 1999) schumann’s work on the (1997) neurobiology of emotions research on emotions and multilingualism (dewaele, 2010; pavlenko, 2005, 2006) emotions within the framework of the biology of cognition (aragão, 2005, 2007) “affective turn” (pavlenko, 2013) sociocultural approach to emotions (swain, 2013; imai, 2010; golombek & dorian, 2014; johnson & worden, 2014) critical approach to emotions (benesch, 2012) research on positive emotions (gregersen, 2013; macintyre & gregersen, 2012) unveiling the relationship between language learning beliefs, emotions, and identities 307 as illustrated in table 1, earlier research concentrated on the works of gardner and lambert (1972) on attitude and motivation, and on building a more humanistic classroom (moskowitz, 1978). later on, the first studies on anxiety using diaries appeared (bailey, 1983), as well as krashen’s affective filter hypothesis6 (krashen, 1985). in the 90s, the role of anxiety in language learning began to be investigated (horwitz & young, 1991; macintyre, 1999). the premise is that too much anxiety is not conducive to language learning. other studies during that decade focused on motivation and the neurobiology of emotions (schumann, 1997). the first decade of 2000s saw an increase in the role of emotions as to how multilinguals and bilinguals experience emotions and express them in their respective languages (dewaele 2010; pavlenko, 2005, 2006; pavlenko & dewaele 2004a; 2004b), as well as the diversity of emotions learners experience in the classroom (mercer, 2005; oxford, 1995), and emotions as processes (so, 2005). the last decade has witnessed a different wave of studies focusing on emotions that concentrate on emotions of speakers of other languages (garret & young, 2009), self-esteem (rubio, 2014), and positive emotions (gregersen, 2013; macintyre & gregersen, 2012),7 as well as studies based on critical theories (benesch, 2012), and sociocultural theories (imai, 2010; swain, 2013). al has experienced the social turn (block, 2003), and now it seems we are living an emotional turn or what pavlenko (2013) has named the “affective turn.” for pavlenko, the affective turn replaces the single research question on how affect influences l2 learning with a range of diverse questions regarding linguistic, psychological and social dimensions of emotion that suggest how l2 learning can in turn influence emotions. this emotional turn, in my view, has raised some criticisms about how emotions have been investigated in al. the main criticisms refer to how emotions are defined and investigated. first, emotions are marginalized and seen in a limited way only as “affective variables” or factors and “individual differences,” dissociated from the social contexts, limited to motivation, anxiety and personality characteristics (pavlenko, 2013; swain, 2013). for instance, in books on sla, for example, ortega (2009), a separate section for affect and other individual differences includes items such as personality, extraversion and speaking styles, learner orientation to communication and accuracy, foreign language anxiety, willingness to communicate and l2 contact, cognitive styles, learning styles, learning strategies, and self-regulation theory, but makes no reference to 6 the affective filter hypothesis accounts for the influence of affective factors in language acquisition, where anxiety, boredom, nervousness among others would prevent comprehensible input to reach learners’ minds thus, preventing acquisition. 7 swain (2013, p. 205) brings an interesting perspective on so-called “negative” emotions. according to her, “the negative expression of emotion often signals conflict,” but conflict can be necessary to mediate learning. ana maria ferreira barcelos 308 other types of emotions. second, the relationship of emotions with power relations, ideology and culture have largely been marginalized in research to date (zembylas, 2005), with the exception of benesch (2012). third, most studies focus on a single negative emotion such as anxiety8 and overlook the diversity of students’ experiences and emotions as well as their dynamic and situated nature. fourth, they heavily rely on quantitative approaches and survey instruments (brown & white, 2010; swain, 2013). fifth, “affective factors” are usually discussed in terms of a causal relationship to l2 acquisition and as predictors of success (gieve & miller, 2006; pavlenko, 2013). this is problematic because identity, emotions and beliefs are dynamic and social concepts, and, thus, the relationship to language learning is not one of causality but of interaction and reciprocity (pavlenko, 2013). it is assumed that only emotions influence language learning, while the reverse is rarely considered (swain, 2013). finally, there is the implicit assumption that “emotion is out there (or in here) somewhere in psychological reality waiting to be isolated, pinned down and dissected” (parkinson, 1995, p. ix). these criticisms show that the current approach to emotions still views them as decontextualized variables detached from one’s mind and body ignoring their contextualized and embodied nature. i would argue that this way of looking at emotions does not do justice to the complex interplay of emotions with other constructs such as those which are the focus of this article, identities and beliefs. 2.4. defining emotions before looking at the relationship between emotions and other constructs, it is necessary to define them. however, there are as many definitions of emotions as there are different emotions and their combinations as we feel. the word emotion itself implies movement and motivation (e-motion) (hansen, 1999). emotions color our perceptions and influence how we choose to act in the future and “trigger the appropriate biochemicals to set the internal scene in readiness for that action.” fear is the clearest example of that: it “orchestrates a massive physiological preparation for fight or flight” (hansen, 1999, p. 214). in psychology, izard (1991) explains that an emotion is “experienced as a feeling that motivates, organizes, and guides perception, thought, and action” (p. 14). in al, so (2005) defines emotions as, “the psychological outcome of dynamic interactions between different layers of internal and external systems – physiological, cognitive, behavioural and social” (pp. 43-44). emotions are seen as, “constantly generated, unfolded, and changed through multiple recursive effects at any one moment.” so believes we should talk about emotion processes instead of emotional states since 8 according to mcintyre and gregersen (2012, p. 195), anxiety is the most studied emotion in sla. unveiling the relationship between language learning beliefs, emotions, and identities 309 they are “dynamic,” “self-organizing,” and “nonlinear and constantly emerging through the causal interdependence among internal and external variables on different timescales” (p. 5). instead of providing a single definition of emotion, it is best to list some of their characteristics as pointed out by solomon (2004, p. 13). these five aspects of emotions, which are often interwoven, characterize emotions as being: (a) behavioral: when we experience an emotion it usually includes facial and verbal expressions, reports (such as i love you) and elaborate plans for action; (b) physiological, including hormonal, neurological, neuromuscular changes; (c) phenomenological, which includes physical sensations, ways of seeing and describing the objects of one’s emotions, as well as “metaemotions;” (d) cognitive, which refers to appraisals, perceptions, thoughts, and reflections about one’s emotions; and (e) social, referring to interpersonal interactions and cultural considerations. in addition, recent literature in education and psychology has described emotions as active, interactive and processual, hierarchically, discursive and culturally constructed. table 2 presents a summary of these characteristics. table 2 characteristics of emotions characteristic definition authors active, interactive & processual emotions are processes and not static entities. interactive: usually they involve a relationship between a subject and an object or an interaction between an individual and his/her environment, as well how we position ourselves towards these. mesquita & markus (2004, p. 355) bosma & kunnen (2001, p. 41). hierarchically constructed emotions form a complex network, an open system in which new emotions get added, but nothing gets out easily. ekman (2004, pp. 128-129) socially constructed emotions are context dependent (the types of emotion one is allowed to express or not depend on national cultures, as well as on institutional cultures and emotional rules of different contexts). emotions are not private, individual, psychological states but social and embodied. mesquita & marcus (2004), zembylas (2004). benesch (2012, p. 133) culturally constructed emotions are shaped by and also shape the sociocultural context (social relationships, systems of values in families, cultures and school situations). emotion is a mode of social action, developed over time. mesquita & markus (2004), zembylas (2004) parkinson (1995) discursively constructed emotions are embedded in discursive, ideological practices, and power structures. zembylas (2005) as illustrated in table 2, this set of characteristics present a very different view of emotions from how they are typically portrayed in al. emotions are discursively constructed and seen as processes, which shape and are also shaped by the sociocultural context. as such, they are interactive, dynamic and form a ana maria ferreira barcelos 310 complex network. this view of emotions also emphasizes the role of power, norms, rules and standards that can regulate emotions. in addition, it helps us understand how they relate to identities and beliefs, a topic i now turn to. 3. the relationship between emotions, beliefs, and identities how has the relationship between beliefs, identities, and emotions been addressed in the literature? in this section, i first address some studies in social psychology (and a few in al) that have suggested a relationship between each set of constructs. first, i discuss how beliefs and identities are related. second, i present studies that suggest the relationship between identities and emotions. finally, i show how emotions and beliefs are related based on studies from social psychology. 3.1. beliefs and identities beliefs and identities are related in intimate and intricate ways. we are what we believe and our beliefs make up our identities. this complex relationship between beliefs and identities has been suggested in psychology and philosophy. as early as 1968, rokeach used the metaphor of an atom to compare to the structure of beliefs. according to rokeach, beliefs systems are grouped into core and peripheral beliefs. core beliefs, besides being more resistant to change, have the following characteristics: (a) they are more interconnected with others, and, because of this, they communicate with each other more easily and may bring more consequences to other beliefs; (b) they are more related to a person’s identity and “self.” this resonates with dewey’s (1933) concept of “pet beliefs,” that is, beliefs to which we get attached to and which we do not let go of easily. these pet beliefs are more related to our identity and emotions, smililarly to the core beliefs. thus, the more central a belief is, the more related it is to our identities and emotions and other beliefs. although there are no specific studies that have investigated the relationship between beliefs and identities in al,9 some researchers have hinted at or suggested this relationship in their work (barcelos, 2000; murphey, 1995; oxford, 2008; sakui & gaies, 2003; singh & richards, 2006; woods, 2003). as early as 2003, woods had already stated that beliefs “seem to be intrinsically related to people’s selves and identity” (p. 225). in respect specifically to teachers, sakui and gaies’s study (2003) showed how the beliefs of a teacher are related to her professional identity. studies in ecological linguistics have also suggested the interrelationship between beliefs and identities since to perceive the world is to 9 in this paper, i have focused on the concept of the relationship between identity and beliefs. however, there have been other studies which have examined the relationships between different self constructs and beliefs (see, e.g., mercer, 2011, 2014; ryan & irie, 2014). unveiling the relationship between language learning beliefs, emotions, and identities 311 coperceive oneself (van lier, 2004 citing gibson, 1979). this means that when “we perceive something, we perceive it as it relates to us” (van lier, 2004, p. 91). thus, to believe is to ascribe meaning to the world and to ourselves, and when we do this, we are constructing our identities in the world. in short, as illustrated in table 3, so far the relationship between identities and beliefs has only been suggested in al. this relationship is best characterized up to now as interactive. thus, we can conclude that beliefs are related to one’s identities and the more central a belief, the more important it is to one´s identities. table 3 the relationship between beliefs and identities education/philosophy applied linguistics ecological linguistics core beliefs are more related to a person´s identity and self (rokeach, 1968) pet beliefs (dewey, 1933): more related to identities and emotions beliefs are related to self and identity (woods, 2003) a teacher’s identity is made up of her beliefs (sakui & gaies, 2003) to believe is to ascribe meaning to the world and as we do this we construct our identities (van lier, 2004) 3.2. identities and emotions regarding the relationship between emotions and identities, there have been very few studies in al that have addressed this issue. in identity research in al, norton (2001) has examined identities together with the construct of investment. investment is defined as “the socially and historically constructed relationships of learners to the target language, and their often ambivalent desire [emphasis added] to learn and practice it” (norton, 2001, pp. 165-166). although desire is mentioned in this definition, the investigation of desire itself as an emotion has not been the focus of studies in al.10 indeed, research on identities has not yet adequately dealt with many aspects of emotions, despite the fact that aspects of our identities are shaped by pain, fear and desire: “we are what we fear, we are what we desire” (lemke, 2008, p. 27). these persistent fears and recurrent desires across time and situations help define our long-term identities (lemke, 2008, p. 27). for example, learners’ fears of speaking english in class or outside and their desires to go abroad to become fluent are related to their identities. in social sciences, identities are related to emotions by the “emotional factors and pressures that lead us to ‘identify’ only with one or a few of the available social types in our communities” (lemke, 2008, p. 37). the emotional identification and emotional reasons influence us to assume identities that may seem conflicting and incompatible, play at them, or try them on in private 10 for an exception, see motha and lin (2014), who reconceptualize desires as part of the process of language learning and teaching from a critical perspective. ana maria ferreira barcelos 312 (lemke, 2008). in addition, we use our emotions to make claims about our identities (such as when i say “i love english,” i may be making a claim about my identity as someone who loves the language and may feel good about studying it). in the field of education, some researchers (day, 2004; zembylas, 2004, 2005) have emphasized how emotions are inextricably tied to teachers’ identities and have an essential role in understanding teacher thinking, reasoning, learning, and change. teachers’ identities are influenced by how they feel about themselves and their students. their professional identity helps them position themselves in relation to students and make adjustments in their practice and their beliefs in order to engage with students (day, 2004, p. 46). emotions and teaching are epistemologically and constitutively interrelated (zembylas, 2004) and, thus, teaching is defined as “a way of being and feeling, historically, in relation to others” (zembylas, 2005, p. 469). in zembylas’s (2004) study of a secondary school teacher, the findings reveal how cultural, political, social and institutional factors influenced the experiences and expressions of the teacher’s emotions and played a role in the construction of her “sense of teacher-identity” (p. 195). in this way, the study showed how emotions are significant aspects of identity formation and vice versa, and essential in the structures of power to “constitute some teacher-selves while denying others” (p. 936). thus, like identities, emotions are also performative, that is, the ways in which teachers understand, experience, perform, and talk about emotions are highly related to their sense of identity (zembylas, 2005). in short, as shown in table 4, identities and emotions are closely related either as part of the selves or as aspects of identities. we are shaped by the emotions we feel (fear, desire, joy, love), and these in turn shape the kinds of identities we construct of ourselves. table 4 the relationship between emotions and identities applied linguistics social sciences education self: includes desires, hopes and dreams (ryan & irie, 2014) self: dynamic system of beliefs and emotions (mercer, 2014) identities: shaped by fears and desires emotions help us identify with social types (lemke, 2008) emotions are aspects of teacher identities teacher identities: composed of how they feel about students (and their jobs, and themselves) teachers’ identities are revealed through their way of talking about emotions (zembylas, 2004) 3.3. emotions and beliefs next, i wish to explore more deeply the relationship between emotions and beliefs. if we look at the root of the word belief, we see that it already reveals the interrelatedness with emotions. syal (2012) explains that unveiling the relationship between language learning beliefs, emotions, and identities 313 the word belief comes from two words: be – and – life. be comes from being, to be is to live. lief comes from the indo-european word leubh which means love. thus, belief means to be in love with. a true belief is something that resonates both in heart and mind. despite this etymology, and despite the fact that beliefs and emotions have been shown to be interrelated, with emotions being influential for thought and action, scant attention has been paid to this relationship between the two in empirical studies. in social psychology, the relationship between beliefs and emotions has been characterized by researchers (frijda et al., 2000; hannula, evans, philippou, & zan, 2004) as interderdependent and reciprocal (hannula et al., 2004). according to frijda et al. (2000, p. 3), emotions “are at the heart of what beliefs are about,” and this intimate relationship can be seen in the different ways that emotions affect beliefs. first, emotions provoke changes in the mental operations such as mental image productions in the brain as well as bodily changes (damasio, 2004). thus, when one is sad, there are fewer new images being produced and a constant rerun of the same old sad images; when one is happy, new images of different scenarios and possibilities are constantly created. second, emotions validate and provide evidence for beliefs and guide our attention towards information that is relevant to our goals (winograd, 2003). in this case, we search for evidence that suits our agenda and disregard the existence of evidence that contradicts our story. third, emotions awake, intrude into, and shape beliefs, creating, altering, amplifying, and making them more resistant to change (frijda et al., 2000). four features may explain the influence of emotions upon beliefs (frijda & mesquita, 2000). first, there is instrumentality, which refers to “entertaining thoughts to help us achieve our emotional goals” (p. 64). thus, our emotions make us accept existing beliefs, or strengthen beliefs based on their functions. thus, when we are in love, “small signs of attention are taken as signs of affection because they open the gate to further approach. an ambiguous statement (‘i really like you’) is understood as an understatement (‘she really likes me!’) because it encourages action” (p. 65). second, emotions have motivational force, which refers to our motivation to get rid of discomfort, or to achieve pleasure and harmony. third, there is a concept called control of the scope of thought, which has to do with how we seek information that is relevant to our goals and avoid wasting time and energy attending to information or details that are irrelevant. emotions therefore direct our attention to goals and information which is deemed most relevant. fourth, motivated bias refers to the processes whereby humans entertain beliefs and look for, retrieve and generate information that supports their emotional ana maria ferreira barcelos 314 goals. this motivational bias makes beliefs more resistant to change as the person becomes closed off to and not interested in alternative views. other studies can be found in the field of language teacher education, with emotions seen as a functional component of a teacher’s cognitive development (golombek & dorian, 2014; johnson & worden, 2014) and as essential to teachers’ conceptual changes (kubanyiova, 2012). in language learning, the increasing recognition of the inseparability of emotion and cognition stems largely from a sociocultural approach to these constructs (imai, 2010; swain, 2013), from studies based on the biology of cognition originating from the works of biologist humberto maturana11 (aragão, 2011), and from a more critical/poststructuralist approach to emotions (benesch, 2012; motha & lin, 2014). aragão (2011), for instance, has argued that the relationship between embarrassment and self-esteem influenced by beliefs associated with a student’s self-concept “play[s] a fundamental role in the way students see themselves in class and how they behave in their learning environment” (p. 303). these studies show the importance of the interrelationship between emotions and beliefs in language learning and teaching. to sum up, the review so far has suggested that the relationship between beliefs and emotions is dynamic, interactive and reciprocal, with cognitions influencing emotions and vice versa (clore & gasper, 2000; frijda & mesquita, 2000; parkinson, 1995). feeling is believing (clore & gasper, 2000, p. 30) and “emotions are believable” (winograd, 2003, p. 39). in this “emotion-belief spiral,” emotions generate and sustain certain beliefs, and these in turn further support emotions (frijda & mesquita, 2000, p. 49). accordingly, beliefs are part of emotions as they give meanings to events. in other words, beliefs are inherently emotional. in addition, emotions not only involve the beliefs formed long ago or at a given moment but also stimulate the elaboration of beliefs. in other words, emotions are processes in which information generates emotional responses, which, in turn, generate new information. this rumination helps prolong the life of temporary beliefs, making them more persistent. the more you think about some beliefs, the stronger they become in the neural pathways, making them more resistant to being challenged. 3.4. unveiling the relationship between beliefs, emotions and identities in this paper, i have attempted to bring together the concepts of beliefs, emotions, and identities, trying to unveil their interrelationships. in order to do that, 11 humberto maturana is a chilean neurobiologist who conceptualized the biology of cognition, “a theoretical framework which characterizes living beings as dynamic systems operationally closed to information from the environment, treated as beings in constant transformation in their living and in permanent structural coupling with the environment” (aragão, 2005, p. 104). unveiling the relationship between language learning beliefs, emotions, and identities 315 i have briefly reviewed studies in al and other areas considering how al has dealt with these three aspects separately and in combination. although the relationship between these three concepts has been a concern of psychologists for about two decades now, in al the discussion of this relationship between all three remains scarce so far. for the most part, al still tends to view these three concepts in isolation. studies examining beliefs rarely recognize them as having an emotional component and, similarly, studies on identities tend not to explicitly include an emotional or affective component. however, the review of the studies in psychology has suggested that emotions and beliefs are connected in complex ways, where beliefs and emotions influence each other interactively. emotions shape beliefs intensifying them, making them stronger or weaker, creating beliefs, altering them, and these beliefs in turn shape our emotions. in changing our beliefs and our emotions, we are constructing different identities within what is possible or allowed to construct given the power structures in society in general. in addition, emotions are part of our identities. we are what we believe and what we feel. beliefs form and are part of our identities, and emotions lie at the core of what beliefs are about. perhaps we can talk about emotions-beliefs-identities-in-practice to indicate how these have been formed over the years from interactions in different settings and are continually being reconstructed through our past and present situated experiences. interestingly, all three concepts are usually described in similar ways in recent studies: identities are multiple, dynamic, hybrid, contested and conflictual; beliefs are complex, dynamic and contradictory; and emotions are active, interactive, processual, and culturally, socially and discursively constructed. it may be that they are all part of one network and cannot be looked at separately; or rather, they are perhaps part of the same continuum, or parts of the same nucleus that forms our “selves.” as was suggested by woods (1996) with his use of the term beliefs-assumptions-knowledge (bak), we can speculate and say that we may be talking about beliefs-emotions-identities (bei). they may all be part of a complex system (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008), with nonlinear behaviors that “change and adapt in response to feedback” (p. 2). we could also interpret this relationship from the perspective of distributed cognition, which sees “languaging as inherently affective” (jensen, 2014, p. 1). according to jensen, “emotion and affect are studied, not as inner mental states, but as processes of organism-environment interactions.” thus, emotions, beliefs, and identities change and adapt in response to any changes within themselves and within each other. they interact at different times but also simultaneously. i suggest that looking at these three aspects together may bring interesting insights especially to the issue of teacher/learner cognition change and the relationship to action. change is not only cognitive; it is also emotional and it ana maria ferreira barcelos 316 affects our identities (kubanyiova, 2012). studies in education have already started looking at how emotions are related to the process of change and teacher identities (zembylas, 2004, 2005). in this respect, there is clearly a gap in al. the gap refers to not seeing emotions as part of identities and beliefs and not looking at this triadic relationship. in terms of research, issues of terminology need to be discussed. if these concepts are part of one network, or are part of a continuum, how should we talk about them? how should we investigate them? should we use, then, the inclusive concept of self, as defined by mercer (2014)? what implications does this bring for research? how can we observe this in the classroom and other language learning and teaching contexts? rubio (2014) goes further and asks: “which comes first – the feeling or the thought? can one go without the other? can you do research focusing on just one of them independently of the other?” (p. 42). he believes we do not have answers to these questions yet. i contend that identities, beliefs, and emotions work together to modulate our actions in language learning and teaching. therefore, we need empirical studies that investigate these combined interrelationships in the actual life of language classrooms and other learning contexts. in terms of teaching, because beliefs, emotions, and identities are embodied in contexts, if we want to see their interrelationship we need to see that what happens in the classroom influences how learners construct their identities, emotions, and beliefs in that group. thus, our concern should be not only about what learners or teachers bring to the classroom but also about the sorts of emotions that are constructed in the interaction within the classroom and inside schools, and in the discourses and practices in the classroom, as zembylas (2005) suggests. it is a social constructivist perspective. how do learners and teachers see themselves? what kind of identities, emotions, and beliefs are they constructing in our classrooms? which emotions are they allowed to express and construct? how do these emotional rules or norms shape their practices and discourses about learning english in and outside a classroom? in which ways do learners and teachers help (or not) in the construction of their (imagined) identities, emotions and beliefs? furthermore, what beliefs are available in our community for our learners and teachers? in practical terms, it is possible that talking about these issues in class may help to bring them onto the surface and help teachers and their learners to construct more learning opportunities in class. discussions could be prompted by reading texts which help learners and teachers metacognitively reflect about their own emotions and beliefs (see andrés & arnold, 2009 and murphey, 1998 for excellent discussions of learners and teachers’ emotions). another suggestion is to ask learners to write their language learning histories or draw how they unveiling the relationship between language learning beliefs, emotions, and identities 317 feel, what they believe, and how they see themselves in relation to learning a language (mercer, 2006; oxford, 1995). we listen to our students’ emotions and beliefs not in order to change them, but to “recognize them and use them to help us understand when – and how – it is appropriate to intervene” (swain, 2013, p. 11). having learners analyze and reflect about their own data and discuss them with others in class is also good practice as recent research has suggested (murphey & falout, 2010). finally, i would add that we can ask learners to reflect on the relationship between their own beliefs, emotions, and identities, such as by asking them to work with collages, mini-autobiographies and reflective questions to help them understand their desires and emotions in efl learning and teaching, as has been suggested by motha and lin (2014). for al, this emotional or affective turn (pavlenko, 2013) may mean a new way of defining and researching emotions either based on a sociocultural (imai, 2010; swain, 2013) or critical approach (benesch, 2012), or simply understanding emotions as part of cognition and, as such, as embedded in our identities and in how we relate to the world holistically. this understanding may help us learn, teach and research emotions-beliefs-identities in interaction. that is what i hope. ana maria ferreira barcelos 318 references almeida filho, j. c. p. 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(2005). beyond teacher cognition and teacher beliefs: the value of the ethnography of emotions in teaching. international journal of qualitative studies in education, 18(4), 465-487. 275 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (2). 2014. 275-300 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.2.6 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl circular seating arrangements: approaching the social crux in language classrooms joseph falout nihon university, japan researchdigest@gmail.com abstract circular seating arrangements can help instill a sense of belonging within classroom communities with overall positive effects on learning, emotions, and wellbeing. yet students and their teachers within certain language classroom contexts, due to sociocultural limitations, may be relegated to learning in antisocial environments instilled partly by rank-and-file seating. attributions for teacher demotivation can often lie in student misbehaviors, while student demotivation, silence, and resistance relate strongly to lack of bodily displays and physical affordances of interpersonal care, understanding, and trust that, if present, would contribute positively to many social aspects of their learning and identity formation. specifically, rank-and-file seating constricts the area in the classroom most likely to dispose attention and interest to the learning and to others, whereas circular seating potentially expands this area, known as the action zone, to the whole classroom. seating arrangements therefore can play an important role in the formation of interpersonal dynamics and identity formation among students and their teachers. in this paper, the purposes and ways of using circular seating in language classrooms will be explored from a social psychological perspective. language teachers are invited to imagine and experiment with possibilities for uses of different seating arrangements in their own classrooms. keywords: action zone, belonging, near peer role models, group framing of motivation, sociopetal spaces joseph falout 276 1. introduction: gathering around desks bolted to floors, rules forbidding rearrangement of classroom furniture and equipment, discouraging remarks from senior colleagues, fear of committing a culturally insensitive practice, and a recurring notion that it makes students squirm, stammer, and shrink; against these counterforces, whole-class circular seating arrangements seemed patently unsuitable for japanese classrooms of english as a foreign language (efl). however, through trial and error over several years in the classroom, i endeavored to discover ways to implement circular seating with positive effects that improved listening and speaking, nonverbal communication, motivation, and group dynamics. in the process i began to understand how circular seating in any classroom context might not only be relevant for learning but crucial for well-being. circular seating now helps me to transform apathy and resistance in my classes into participation and enthusiasm through what i call the social crux, which is the “sustained connections between people through mutual engagements of imagination that sparks communities into learning and action” (falout, 2013, p. 133). the social crux conveys a tipping point that “relates to qualities of human experience somewhat missing, yet terribly needed, for motivational transformations of learning efl in japan” (p. 145). the social crux represents a probability that enough socializing affordances and meaningful interaction within a group will invigorate the group into mutually supporting, while individually suitable, adaptive self-regulating behaviors. after establishing key educational deficiencies in university efl classrooms in japan, this paper explains from a social psychology perspective the inherent and universal engagingness of circular arrangements of people and the related positive potentials for students. the paper then builds a principled approach, which i call classcraft, for applying circular seating arrangements in language learning classrooms within contexts both acquainted and unacquainted with this practice. especially for teachers who do not readily have freedom of choice regarding classroom allocations, seating arrangements, and class sizes, a discussion follows for encouraging high-hope thinking as a means to pursue possible alternatives. the term circular seating may be understood in reference to a range of circular-like patterns, including ovals, irregular circles, broken circles, and semicircle seating patterns. additionally, it is notable that no single seating pattern should be considered as optimal for all situations and uses. one of the aims of this paper is to invite teachers to imaginatively expand their own flexibilities in rearranging student locations and activities within given sociocultural and physical boundaries inherent to their context of teaching, for the purpose of improving teaching, learning, and living. circular seating arrangements: approaching the social crux in language classrooms 277 2. sitting in silence japanese efl students may be best known in the field of applied linguistics for exhibiting motivational crisis (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011; ushioda, 2013). this would predictably have an adverse effect on teacher motivation. one study (sugino, 2010) used a questionnaire with 37 potential causes of teacher demotivation that included student behaviors, class facilities, teaching materials, employment conditions, and relationships with administrators. participating were 97 university english teachers, spanning a range of differences in their first language, years of professional experience, gender, and service to a public or private school. the results showed that five of the top seven demotivators of university english teachers related to student behaviors. specifically these were, in descending order: using cell phones in class, sleeping, acting in a rebellious manner, not responding verbally, and lacking interest in studying. many university english teachers in japan face problems with student apathy and resistance, whether the classroom population represents academically underprivileged or elite backgrounds, and the experiences can take a toll on teachers’ emotional lives (sakui & cowie, 2008). the following account illustrates the poignant shock of a teacher unfamiliar with this educational environment. nanette potee (2002), experienced with teaching university classes in america, relates her first day teaching a class at a university in japan: i felt excited and slightly nervous, but confident. i had taught this introduction to communication course several times before and was looking forward to the new class i was about to encounter. all thirty students were sitting quietly in their seats, facing forward. i introduced myself, explained a bit about the course, and asked for questions or comments. i waited, and waited, and then prompted again . . . what i got was blank, slightly embarrassed stares (eyes averted or down) and silence . . . after several more failed attempts at getting students motivated to start a discussion, i gave up. i was at a loss. i wasn’t quite sure how to continue . . . my confidence was shaken and i suddenly felt very discouraged. what was i doing wrong? why weren’t they talking? this type of activity had always worked in my classes at home. (p. 207) optimistic, potee carried forward in her teaching, learning how she and her students could adjust to each other’s classroom expectations. meanwhile, she also conducted a substantial study on student demotivation to understand why high school students in japan withdraw from engaging in the classroom and studying english. although the reasons were varied, feelings of demotivation were often attributed to boredom with teacher-fronted lessons and sense of alienation from the teacher. potee (2002) drew two clear implications. first, teachers might try to joseph falout 278 become aware about the psychologies of their students, and second, display care toward their students as people, allowing students to feel close to the teacher. further reports about problems within english classrooms in japan at the tertiary level can be found. for example, king (2012) conducted an extensive study on student silence. he observed over 900 university students in 30 different english classrooms, with a mean attendance of 29 students, for 48 total hours. almost 40% of the students’ time was spent listening to the teacher, 8% listening to other students, 7% conversing in pair or group talk, and 20% disengaging from learning in off-task behaviors. students initiated talk in english seven times, which was 0.04% of the total observation time (king, 2012, p. 10). although many of these classrooms featured seating arrangements designed to promote group work, only one class session from the entire data set “made use of what could be loosely termed a circular seating arrangement. this class had only 9 students and had relatively high levels of oral participation in comparison to the rest of the sample” (j. king, personal communication, january 20, 2014). king (2012) identifies five pedagogical, socio-dynamic influences perpetuating silence in these classrooms. first, there exists much student apathy toward learning english, particularly with non-english majors, combined with a widespread acceptance of student disengagement (usually sleeping during class) across the educational system. king notes that this type of silence prevailed throughout the study, and most often occurred in large-sized, teachercentered classrooms in which the teacher traditionally lectures from the front. related to this first perpetuator of silence is the second, namely the primary method of instruction, grammar-translation, taught within teacher-centered classrooms in which students are rarely invited to voice their thoughts or vocalize at all. third, in addition to listening to the teacher, much time is also spent listening to audio recordings, reading, and writing. therefore even when students are on task, the tasks do not require speaking in english. fourth, an apparent confusion arises when students are requested to talk in pairs or groups. a variety of reasons for this might include lack of scaffolding or time for the students to prepare for the task, lack of familiarity with doing the tasks or using the language, unclear directions from the teacher about the task, and passive aggression from the students to avoid doing the tasks. fifth, a general enculturated trait of excessive self-monitoring or hypersensitivity to being judged poorly by others results in silent withdrawal as a means of self preservation against the threat of unwanted attention and embarrassment. 3. action zones we can easily recognize a simple physical arrangement common to human communication and education spanning diverse geographic locales and histori circular seating arrangements: approaching the social crux in language classrooms 279 cal periods. the following iconic images depict brief snapshot moments within broader cultural practices, which themselves suggest something elemental— meaning a fundamental force of nature—about human life and learning. prehistoric humans gathered in repose around settling bonfire embers. youth camps, outdoor recreation centers, and corporate retreats now feature campfire talks for sharing tales, skits, and ditties. socrates poised in dialectical exchange with engrossed pupils surrounding. large scale academic lecture halls today bend tiers of students around their teacher, while an electrical public address system brings an individual’s inquiry or viewpoint into the unfolding dialogue. thousands of romans, in mass cheer to gladiators in battle, splayed around the stands of the colosseum. from community park arenas to olympicsized international stadiums, sports and entertainment audiences worldwide exhibit much enthusiasm for the audience itself. they show each other their colors, shout their expectations, and sometimes in a massive display of coordinated grace, rise to their feet and settle in rolling groups to create “the wave.” knights comport with king arthur at the round table. in many of today’s parliaments and houses of representatives, members sit side by side in curved rows radiating into concentric circles—an array of democratic procession— deliberating the administrations of their country. native americans cluster and circumrotate to bolster faith and hope during their ghost dance. dances, prayers, songs, dramas, and games have been performed in circles for ages, with all ages, for encouragement and enlightenment. circular physical arrangements such as these endure because of the powerful influences that people can have on each other when participating in these formations. “the circle itself has become a worldwide symbol of unity and strength and simply sitting in a circle promotes the same effect” (pease & pease, 2006, p. 339). social interaction is encouraged by sociopetal spaces, such as a small circle of chairs around a coffee table, and discouraged by sociofugal spaces, such as airport waiting lounges (forsyth, 2006). sociopetal spaces can bring people together, excite their senses, endear each one to the others, create an atmosphere of mutual care, and stimulate the entire circle into a social action zone. action zones in classroom settings are identified as areas in which the most interest, excitement, and class participation takes place (marx, fuhrer, & hartig, 2000). innumerable classroom features and interpersonal variables might dispose the formation of many types of action zone patterns. however, a common feature in many usual-sized classrooms with row-and-column seating, all facing forward toward the teacher standing front and center, is an action zone ranging across the front rows and down along the aisles directly facing the teacher, forming an inverted t-shape pointing away from the teacher. at times this shape may fill out into a triangle, with the action zone dissipating joseph falout 280 toward the back and center of the room at the tip of the triangle, and intensifying toward the row in front as its base (figure 1). thus action zones tend to form in relation to proximity, visual contact, and perpendicular orientation (i.e., face-to-face) with the teacher (marx et al., 2000). figure 1 triangle-shaped action zone formed in row-and-column seating academic achievement is facilitated for students within the action zone, while academic problems can arise for those outside of it. due to their proximity and orientation, students within the action zone can see and hear the teacher and see the board or projection screen better, while the same is true for the teacher, who can best see and hear students at the front of the classroom (wannarka & ruhl, 2008), especially in large-sized classrooms. even with classrooms of 50 or more students, teachers might believe they can monitor all students equally, even those at the back of the classroom. and although they may practice strategies for including all students within the lessons, such as asking questions to students seated in various locations and walking around the classroom, students sitting outside of the action zone may still not receive as much of the teacher’s attention (shamin, 1996). susceptible to the teacher’s neglect, these students start turning their attention away from the lessons and toward other activities, such as chatting or doing homework for other classes. in a vicious cycle, this encourages classroom-wide stigmatizing of students at the back as unintelligent and disreputable, which furthers in ostracizing them from classroom participation. in contrast, students sitting in the front may receive from the teacher more quality care and time in explicit, didactic-based communications, such as during comprehension checks, and in implicit, nonverbal signals that build in-group identification. students in the front rows can circular seating arrangements: approaching the social crux in language classrooms 281 be both self-regarded and regarded by their teacher as more capable, confident, diligent, and motivated in their studies (shamin, 1996). although students might sit away from their preferred areas in order to sit with friends, it has been shown that students often follow the same seating area preferences as they move from class to class (benedict & hoag, 2004). students who choose to place themselves in the action zone have been empirically found to exhibit higher degrees of creativity, assertiveness, success, esteem, and attention (marx et al., 2000). students in large lecture classes forced out of their preferred front seats, which are in the action zone, to back seats, which are outside the action zone, retained the same probability of receiving high grades as they did while up front. meanwhile, students forced out of their preferred back and side area seats and placed into front seats had an increased probability of higher grades, while students forced out of their preferred middle area and placed into side seats experienced a decreased probability of receiving high grades (benedict & hoag, 2004). to summarize up to this point, a wide variety of age groups and cultures commonly display, within rank-and-file style seating, this t-shaped or triangleshaped action zone. it is understood to form in part due to self selection by students who are more assertive and enthusiastic in learning and participating, and in part due to the influences of the physical arrangements promoting comparatively higher levels of concentration and retention for those who sit in the zone (e.g., knapp & hall, 2010; pease & pease, 2006; richmond, mccroskey, & hickson iii, 2008). one implication is that classroom participation and academic achievement can be manipulated for individual students by seating placement. strategically speaking, however, not all students can sit in the action zone at all times, and therefore at any given moment rank-and-file seating dually induces inclusion and exclusion around the classroom. a meta-analysis (wannarka & ruhl, 2008) of seating arrangement studies concluded that row-and-column seating was least useful for tasks requiring social interaction, and most useful for independent work requiring quiet concentration. on the other hand, clustered desks and semicircle arrangements were found to be most conducive for peer collaborative work and communication with the teacher. from one study (marx et al., 2000) comparing row-andcolumn to semicircle seating with 27 students, the students showed higher rates of asking questions to their teacher when in the semicircle. attention, interest, and social action were encouraged because the semicircular arrangement could seat all students relatively close to the teacher with an unobstructed view of both teacher and board. moreover, demarcations for action zones failed to emerge within the semicircle, indicating a socially all-includable nature inherent to this arrangement (figure 2). in other words, circular-style seating can help turn a whole class into an action zone. joseph falout 282 figure 2 all-includable action zone formed in semicircle seating 4. social crux in circular seating circular seating by itself is not what brings people together; it is the people within this seating arrangement and how they feel, think, respond, and interact with each other, both inside and outside of the circle, that potentially brings them together. the probability that their sustained mutual care and meaningful engagement of their imaginations can transform into learning and action is what i call the social crux (falout, 2013). approaching this criticality, therefore, rests on the qualities of their relationships and values of their interactions. these qualities and values emerge and change over time. the cultivation of students’ relationships and interactions may be aided by the interpersonal dynamics afforded in circular seating arrangements. important for choosing to use circular seating arrangements is understanding positive social psychological possibilities for students, particularly when they are invited to share each other’s experiences and imaginations, to “open up and allow their individual strengths to grow and permeate into each other’s potentials and foibles and needs for social support” (falout, 2013, p. 133). this section of the paper will explain reasons that the all-includable action zone of circular seating potentiates whole-class sharing of each other’s experiences and imaginations, especially as they presently unfold before everyone in the circle, which may therefore help classrooms to approach the social crux. 4.1. inclusion, intimacy, immediacy in designing their ideal large lecture halls, university students saliently focused on circular-style seating with desks or tables arranged in concentric circles up circular seating arrangements: approaching the social crux in language classrooms 283 on elevated tiers, and plenty of natural light and acoustic properties for clearly seeing and hearing the professor, who was commonly depicted in the center and sometimes with a rotational chair in order to face each student (bourdieu, passeron, & de saint martin, 1994). the students also described mobility for themselves and for equipment such as screens. they likened their envisioned sociopetal spaces to architectural examples not seen traditionally for academic purposes, such as a “circular amphitheatre” and a “theatre-in-the-round,” and provided reasons such as “advantages: much greater intimacy. the lecturer is close. contacts are more direct” (bourdieu, et al., 1994, p. 27). social inclusion is propitiated in circular-style seating, as opposed to row-and-column seating, through propinquity, meaning physical proximity (tharp, estrada, dalton, & yamauchi, 2000). the degree of physical closeness may also engender feelings of immediacy, denoted by feelings of psychological closeness and positive affect toward one another, and conveyed in verbal and nonverbal communications. immediacy experienced between students and teachers has been shown to improve cognitive learning (richmond et al., 2008). 4.2. belonging, identity, empathy no other external circumstance predicts happiness better than that which instills the sense of belongingness, which is a psychological need strongly related to physical health that is met when people have frequent and sustained contact with someone they feel mutually cares about them (baumeister, 2005). close relationships with others greatly contribute to ongoing formations of personal identities. people can both see themselves and experience the world through other’s eyes, which expands their perspectives and understandings of self, others, and the world (aron, ketay, riela, & aron, 2008). imagining how others feel fosters a formation of one’s own identity in likeness with others and a sense of empathy for them. thus watching others in distress can cause an empathetic arousal of distress in one’s self. according to the empathy-altruism hypothesis, people help others in need partially for the purposes of altruism, which might be thought of as helping others for no apparent personal reward, and partially to relieve their own suffering caused by empathetic arousal. in short, the closer people feel to each other, the more they want to help each other (baumeister & finkel, 2010). due to shared empathy and sensations potentiated when in a circle, as opposed to rank-and-file seating, students may more likely repress mean-spirited laughter over other’s mistakes, offer help for those struggling to find the words to express themselves, and out of consideration give their undivided attention when others are speaking. joseph falout 284 4.3. community, shared experience, shared space comparing multi-disciplinary team meetings held in different meeting rooms, one study (li & robertson, 2011) showed that in groups of 10 to 30 people, the physical arrangement of furniture and equipment and the space of the room could profoundly influence various communication methods and behaviors. a larger room with row-and-column seating for peripheral participants, a separate corner area for specialists, and a table off to another side for key participants, was shown to be less effective for clear and coherent communication processes than either of two smaller rooms with a larger percentage of the participants seated closer together and more or less around a central table. the more intimate and circular the arrangement, the more likely all participants could view the same thing at the same time, see referencing gestures such as pointing, and more readily involve themselves in the discussion. moreover, the presenters in these rooms could deliver more cohesive presentations, better synchronize their messages with various projected displays, and better control the movements and positioning of themselves and various equipment, such as video cameras, flatscreen tvs, and lightboxes, in a way that facilitated the negotiation of meaning with professionals of various disciplines. being able to see the same things at the same time and use a shared space contributed greatly to effective collaboration (li & robertson, 2011). with just a little time together in such an environment, new ideas, practices, and innovations are made possible through the work commitments that emerge out of the building relationships themselves. this sense of community can motivate the group toward empowering each other individually, the group as a whole, and through extended social networks, other groups in the outside community (mccombs & miller, 2009). 4.4. attention, interest, enthusiasm circular arrangements help to focus the attention of students, which in turn provides a forum for interest, enthusiasm, and other positive emotions to intermingle. according to the broaden-and-build theory (fredrickson, 1998), positive emotions can complement each other, expanding the scope of feeling not only other positive emotions in range and duration but also expanding the scope of cognitions and behaviors. interest can function as a primary emotion that compels openness to new ideas, experiences, and actions. thus interest contributes to exploration for new information, leading to developing intelligence, creativity, and personal growth, as well as shaping attention (fredrickson, 1998; fredrickson & branigan, 2005). attention, in turn, physically reshapes neural circuits, enabling new ways of thinking and learning from experiences. when changes in circular seating arrangements: approaching the social crux in language classrooms 285 their own thinking patterns are shown to them, students’ metacognitive recognitions of their own and of their classmates’ insights can become an energizing experience that contributes to sustained learning and desire for improving themselves and their world (mccombs & miller, 2009). 4.5. dialogic energy, languaging, dialogue the circle facilitates being physically exposed and mentally open to hearing the voices of others, indicating both their ideas and the language used to convey the ideas. beginning to listen and then speak the new language and ideas one hears, called ventriloquation, is a process of appropriating these different voices for one’s own uses (wertsch, 1991). dialogic mediation or dialogic inquiry involves teacher and students engaging together in activities and meaning-making that reconceptualizes and recontextualizes knowledge, and it develops both an individual’s cognitive functions and a group’s collaborative knowledge building (johnson, 2009; wells, 1999). in short, dialogic energy comes from “the ongoing dialogue, the vibrant ‘chain of texts’ of a speech community” (wertch, 2006, p. 63) acting through and upon each other; wherein “one voice comes into contact with another, thereby changing the meaning of what it is saying and becoming increasingly dialogical, or multivoiced” (wertsch, 1991, p. 90). as students gain multivoiced abilities, also known as heteroglossia (bakhtin, 1981), they become more flexible and adaptable in their language learning and production. this happens in part because speaking and writing can mediate cognitive and affective development in a dialectical relationship (i.e., a mutually unifying process) known as languaging. “through languaging . . . learners articulate and transform their thinking into artifactual form, and in doing so, make it available as a source of further reflection” (swain & deters, 2007, p. 822). when languaging together in a circle, the diaologic chain of texts is immediate, almost tangible, and is situated in a social context of meaningful participation. similarly, noddings’ (2005) notion of dialogue may facilitate discovery: dialogue is open-ended; that is, in a genuine dialogue, neither party knows at the outset what the outcome or decision will be . . . dialogue is a common search for understanding, empathy, or appreciation. it can be playful or serious, logical or imaginative, goal or process oriented, but it is always a genuine quest for something undetermined at the beginning . . . dialogue permits us to talk about what we try to show. it gives learners opportunities to question “why,” and it helps both parties to arrive at well-informed decisions . . . [by] not only to inform the decision under consideration; it also contributes to a habit of mind—that of seeking adequate information on which to make decisions. (p. 23) joseph falout 286 4.6. social modeling, near peer role models, coping models students can become inspired to try an activity for themselves by watching others perceived as similar to them do that activity. this is also known as near peer role modeling (murphey & arao, 2001). students may initially lack confidence using the language or feel frustrated that their abilities are not up to par with native-level fluency, but after observing similar others (i.e., classmates), students see more possibility for their own improvements and abilities, gain courage and make more effort to speak, and become happy with their own small successes (murphey & arao, 2001). being able to observe everyone in a circle allows for the open possibilities of finding others in the classroom to identify with and emulate. moreover, watching another student struggle to speak and gradually improve may be better for building confidence than watching another student speak flawlessly. the reason is that those who struggle, known as coping models, can show others that their determination and positive thoughts are effective at overcoming difficulties and making progress (schunk, pintrich, & meece, 2008). 4.7. self-presentation (desire for positive peer evaluation) usually people want to make a good impression of themselves when observed by others. this is known as self-presentation, which denotes the difference in one’s behaviors between public and private conditions (baumeister & finkel, 2010). a good impression, for some students, may mean attracting negative attention to themselves by misbehaving, perhaps for reasons of self-worth protection or self-handicapping, which provides them with social and personal excuses to perform poorly in the class subject (brophey, 2004). but teachers can implicitly model and explicitly encourage the development of group norms that lead to interpersonal behaviors in the classroom supportive of mutual care and learning (dörnyei & murphey, 2003). then with this sense of self-presentation, students in a circle observing each other would want to act in a way that contributes to building positive reputations and relationships with their classmates. even half-heartedly going through the motions at first might matter, for the behaviors that people adopt simply for the sake of good appearances in front of others, rather than something done in private, have more tendency to actually become internalized attitudes, values, and behavioral patterns (tice, 1999). in other words, even though students may initially be putting on a false air of willingness to speak, confidence, or other idealized classroom norm, because they are doing so in full view of their classmates in the circle, in the end they may come to view themselves as possessing these positive attributes. circular seating arrangements: approaching the social crux in language classrooms 287 4.8. person-in-context (self expression) another aspect of how students portray themselves involves a complex interplay of each student’s unique sense of identity within co-constructing relationships of the identities of others within the social learning environment. recognized in the person-in-context relational view (ushioda, 2009), this perspective aims to remind teachers that students are people, and that formulaic approaches to teaching language may disregard the potential growth of their individual agency and participation. this view can help teachers to focus upon pedagogical and interpersonal practices that “encourage students to develop and express their own identities through the language they are learning—that is, to be and become themselves” (ushioda, 2009, p. 223). this might also include paralinguistic expression. circular seating, compared with rank-and-file seating, would seem a more natural and organic way to elicit from students their own voices for sharing what they wish to share about themselves, especially from a point of emotional security as an accepted member of the circle. from my experience, i believe circular seating tends to elicit more help-seeking, such as asking for the meaning and spelling of words spoken, more earnestness, such as more details given when describing opinions about a topic, and more playfulness, such as humoristic wordplay and exaggerated facial expressions of emotions (e.g., a sidelong glance of mock reprieve, something best seen by all class members and appreciated to its comic effect from the vantage of the circle). it is also worth noting that the person in situation view (boekaerts, 1993), of a similar ethos, stresses the importance of encouraging students to speak for themselves in an open way about how they feel in the moment, particularly when learning moments are stressful. this allows students to feel that the learning environment is supportive, which increases their sense of control and belonging, and in the long term promotes the maintenance of their emotional well-being (boekaerts, 1993). 4.9. context-in-person (extended and embodied cognition) context-in-person (murphey, falout, fukada, fukuda, 2012) highlights the view that the emotional and cognitive development of learners is inextricably linked with their social and physical environments, and inextricably linked with their bodily actions and states. in particular, this view can help language teachers to remember that students make meaning from actively observing and participating with others around them. for example, taking and receiving verbal and nonverbal cues, shadowing, sharing attention, solving problems, and helping others to remember are ways that language learners rely on interaction for learning (atkinson, 2010). especially when facing each other, as in a circle, people’s mirror neurons become activatjoseph falout 288 ed as a way of interpersonal understanding, producing effortless connections deep into aspects of the minds of others (iacoboni, 2009). several layers of extended and embodied cognition are at play in the following example. one student might be attempting to explain something to the class and not realize it is incorrect. another student tries to cue him into his mistake as she makes a rising tone of question with her voice, which he unintentionally shadows. then she becomes more explicit by proffering a word that he intentionally shadows in order to grasp its message. his facial expression conveys his incomprehension, and he prompts her for more help with a pleading gesture. she responds with her own short series of gestures that he also mirrors, and his own actions help him to understand his mistake, recall the proper thing to say, and readjust his explanation to the class. this vignette illustrates the kind of context-in-person learning affordances that i often see students take in circular seating but not usually in rank-and-file seating, if at all. 4.10. group dynamics, group framing of motivation, emotional contagion emotional contagion is a pervasive tendency to unintentionally synchronize facial and bodily expressions, vocal tones and rhythms, and other subconscious means of communicating feelings, resulting in “catching” someone else’s emotions (hatfield, cacioppo, & rapson, 1994). emotional contagion best happens when people face each other, such as when in a circle, and can involve both positive and negative emotions. consequently, a learning environment promoting positive interactions during language learning is crucial for passing on positive emotions, resulting in a general positive shift in the motivations among all classroom members. importantly, students feeling poorly motivated, when interacting with others feeling highly motivated, can experience a reframing effect called group framing of motivation, in which their views of their own past and present experiences as well as future expectations regarding language learning increase in degree of positivity (falout, fukada, murphey, & fukuda, 2013). 4.11. friendship, social networks, social capital the sociofugal spaces of rank-and-file seating discourage students from talking to one another and forming friendships, yet without friends students are more likely to experience emotional distress at school. reciprocated friendships in school, meaning mutually close and trusting relationships, have been shown to predict adaptive responses to school-related stressors, prosocial behavior toward others in general, self-beliefs of competency, interest in school, desire to seek academic challenges, and academic achievement (e.g., altermatt & pomerantz, 2003; wentzel, barry, & caldwell, 2004). friendships also expand the potential benefits of resources availa circular seating arrangements: approaching the social crux in language classrooms 289 ble through social networks, known as social capital (bourdieu,1985), which can extend beyond the classroom walls and the limited time spent in school. therefore, the potentials of forming and strengthening friendships within classroom sociopetal spaces, such as circles, can lead to lifetime potentials of support for well-being. 5. classcraft for circular seating classcraft is the term i use for a teacher’s approach to professional development, preparing syllabi or curricula, determining grades, meeting with students outside of class, and more, in addition to conducting class itself. like any craft, classcraft is a mixture of art and science, method and intuition, and derived by experiences lived within and outside of classrooms, and imagined by listening to others and reading widely. the general goals may relate to productivity, efficiency, aesthetics, politeness, safety, and any number of things that each teacher feels is necessary or helpful for taking care of others in their learning and taking healthy pride in the craft of teaching. while each teacher’s classcraft may be uniquely related to their local context, sharing one’s classcraft becomes a dialogical process among teachers as they approach the social crux together. 5.1. choose the room before the course starts, and consider the placement of the circle from my experiences, rooms that are not much bigger than the circle tend to foster intimacy and interpersonal focus. a little extra space for arranging the circle in different areas, such as nearer or further from the board, may offer extra possibilities for different activities both inside and outside the circle. large rooms, however, seem to have a tendency to distract by the degree of their open space outside the circle. especially if the rest of the room retains too many rank-and-file rows, it has an effect, perhaps through context-in-person, to distract students. my hypothesis is that too many leftover rank-and-file rows provoke some students to revert to antisocial tendencies brought on by past experiences in sociofugal learning environments. an exception to this rule-of-thumb, i have found, is in large-sized rooms that do not contain rank-and-file seating, but instead open workstations for small groups to gather. spaces between these workstations can be opened up for placing the circle within, and intimacy and interpersonal focus seems sustainable. 5.2. limit class size, if possible yoneyama and murphey (2007) argue that a class size of 20-25 students is the maximum capacity for caring, healthy relationships between teacher and stujoseph falout 290 dents and among classmates, particularly for language classes. feelings of immediacy are a function of propinquity, and in my experience yoneyama and murphey’s threshold of 25 students generally holds true. 5.3. construct the circle first thing before or just as class starts although a circle can be established at any time, i have found that students seem to initiate the circle making activity faster when it is done at the beginning of class. afterward, the circle can be disassembled and reassembled as needed during the rest of the class session. students also seem most likely to internalize this norm of making the circle when they walk into the classroom, maybe as it is a time of a state of readiness for trying something different in the school day. 5.4. ask students to make the circle themselves and take apart when finished, giving them responsibility for it making the very spaces in which students will together share their experiences and imaginations is a first step for taking responsibility in their own learning, and perhaps a first step for creating many positive emotions such as confidence and self-respect. completing the circle shows them that something is already accomplished in the first few minutes of class through their cooperative effort. however, as madigan (1992) cautions, students may not be ready or willing to accept responsibility for participating in active roles in learning, and therefore teachers can be almost certain to encounter some kind of resistance. madigan explains a process that teachers might take to get beyond this resistance, and i would add that this process works best if used at the very start of a course. first, do not panic. show empathy with the students without analyzing their feelings. simply acknowledge and accept their discomfort with sincerity, and show faith that they can get past this stage of resistance. be ready to re-explain the requirements or guidelines and then wait patiently. for example, students who wish to hide or test the teacher may set their chairs somehow out of the circle or off-center, so that their chairs are behind other’s chairs, or not oriented toward the center of the circle. in this case, remind the students of the acceptable positioning, such as the tautology, “please make a circular circle.” remembering that students would probably show resistance no matter what the activity is helpful for the teacher’s patience. the final point is that by modeling respect, relationships of trust might be established between teacher and students and among classmates during whole-class activities (madigan, 1992). circular seating arrangements: approaching the social crux in language classrooms 291 5.5. occasionally set a good example by helping, but not to the point that students expect it while it is important to establish the expectations that the students are responsible for creating the seating arrangement in which they will learn together, it is equally important for the teacher to model behaviors of helpfulness and collaboration. take care that the expectations are not reversed, or else the students will start to gradually wait and watch until the teacher makes the circle, which defeats the lessons of self-respect, social responsibility, and taking on an active role for one’s own learning. 5.6. use the circle regularly, and scaffold its newness to the students with easy activities at first students unaccustomed to speaking before others will understandably feel nervous, confused, and worried of being judged poorly when they first sit in a circle. students may need to gradually become acclimated to it, therefore limiting time spent in the circle at first, and gradually increasing the length of experiences in the circle might help them to adjust. also the activities at the beginning might be designed for brief and simple contributions to whole-class activities, such as verbal or nonverbal activities both new and familiar (e.g., the rock-scissors-paper hand game), call-and-response shadowing activities or sing-alongs, simple declarative statements, and rapid question-and-answer activities. later on, the activities can be increased in complexity, amount of time speaking, and degree of open discussion. 5.7. do various activities with the circle that apply its numerous advantages being inventive and experimental, teachers can discover many uses for the circle, especially those things that might not be easily done otherwise. for example, dörnyei and murphey (2003) describe a string toss game in which the students toss a ball of string randomly around the circle. each student who catches it grabs hold of the string before sending off the rest of the ball into the air toward another student. in a short while, everyone becomes part of the network of string that symbolizes their connections to each other. “this game gives a structured opportunity for students and teachers to realize the emotional ties amongst themselves and to share some positive feelings by giving others in the group [those who catch the string] a compliment or word of thanks” (dörnyei & murphey, 2003, p. 163). joseph falout 292 5.8. be flexible with seating arrangements and don’t overuse any one pattern considering the results from their meta-analysis on various seating arrangements, wannarka and ruhl (2008) caution, “teachers should let the nature of the task dictate seating arrangements” (p. 89). additionally, ehrman and dörnyei (1998) note that “positions in a circle are not always equal in their communicative ‘status’” (p. 295), as members disproportionately direct their talk to those directly opposite them rather than equally around, “therefore, it may be worth moving students around from time to time” (p. 295). 5.9. be a good model, sit upright, show attention; students will mirror your posture and disposition the mirror neurons of all members in the circle are susceptible to the influences they exert on each other. this brings the teacher a chance to consciously display nonverbal readiness for open communication, respect, trust, and empathy. students can unconsciously mirror the teacher’s positive postures, and through emotional contagion, the postures may spread. the less that stands in between them, such as desks, the more bodily displays that can be seen, and thus the more likely these postures will be replicated and the emotions associated with them embodied. when doctors, managers, and teachers go without their desks, the more likely their patients, subordinates, and students feel relaxed and that they are given attention and fair treatment (allan & pease, 2006; knapp & hall, 2010). teachers might also take careful notice of students’ postures and dispositions. regardless of gender, age, national and cultural background, or years of experience, teachers from gregersen’s (2007) study, after receiving a list of criteria for nonverbal behaviors of language learning anxiety, could more accurately decode students’ nonverbal displays of anxiety. this implies that teachers may be able to improve their recognition of students in emotional need and prepare themselves to proactively address such moments, such as through displays of teacher immediacy. 5.10. make sure things are returned properly, cleaner than before you came into the classroom general good classcraft dictates such polite approach regardless of seating arrangements involved. it shows consideration for the next group using the room, even if this includes the same teacher or means the same group. moreover, it prevents causing irritation to incoming teachers who may expect the room to be standing in the traditional or usual arrangement. circular seating arrangements: approaching the social crux in language classrooms 293 6. unbolting thinking teachers who languish along with their students in rooms with bolted-down tables and chairs may have been conditioned over time to believe that they have no alternative but to stick with the given room and its dully prearranged seating. perhaps they fantasize about unbolting the seating themselves, only knowing that such action would be impractical task-wise if not maladaptive career-wise. a practical and adaptive approach, however, may be in unbolting their thinking that they and their students are stuck in their bolted-down settings. it may be helpful to remember that people who retain high hopes, as compared with those whose hopes have fallen, are more likely to reach their goals (snyder, cheavens, & sympson, 1997). 6.1. high-hope thinking two necessary aspects of maintaining one’s hope involve pathway thinking and agentive thinking. pathway thinking (waypower) is the ability to imagine one or more different ways to reach one’s goals, including the ability to generate alternative ways when impediments arise. the ability to initiate and continue pursuit of the goal along one or more of the pathways is known as agentic thinking (willpower). high-hope thinking can be invigorated and sustained through social support networks and communally shared goals, including shared recognition and respect for individually separate but mutuallycomplementary goals; whereas low-hope thinking can be instigated and sustained through lack of goals, communication, and cooperation, and individually or communally focusing on failure (snyder, 1994; snyder et al., 1997). for teachers who feel frustrated by lack of choice about their present seating conditions, high-hope thinking can help them to embrace obstacles to achieving circular seating in their classrooms as opportunities to learn more about their situations and those of others who might be of benefit, generate multiple creative solutions, activate the energy to stay committed to their goal and forge onward, and reframe the goal if useful. 6.2. possible positions the immediate goal might not be of procuring circular seating arrangements per se but of engineering classroom positions for the students that more aptly avail whole-class communication. the chairs and desks may be fixed, but the people are not. provided the class size is small enough, students can reposition themselves to sit in only the chairs that run the circumference of a block of joseph falout 294 desks, turning toward each other in an open rectangular arrangement. larger classes might instead stand alongside the walls around the room, facing inward. this formation is also conducive for pair and group rotations, adding further repositioning possibilities, and offers relief from cramped seating. with students lined around the room, the desks and spatial expanse amid them, however, may act as a barrier to immediacy and to verbal and nonverbal communication. instead, taking everyone outdoors into an open space to gather in concentric circles can help establish greater propinquity within larger classes, although students may not feel comfortable sitting on the ground or standing too long. such rearrangements may therefore provide only a temporary change of environment more suited for whole-class communication. pathway thinking might lead to further creative repositioning of students appropriate for each given situation, while agentive thinking helps teachers to continue searching for even better alternatives. 6.3. possible places every day brings another chance to discover a place for holding classes. pathway thinking can help teachers to work around their preconceptions, help keep their eyes freshly opened and their imaginations ever generating ideas about where their next classes might meet. agentive thinking can embolden teachers to take adventurous expeditions into classrooms they had never peeked into, or buildings they had never entered. they might realize possibilities in inconspicuous places, such as a library lecture hall, a practice theater, an empty cafeteria wing cordoned off after peak hours, or simply a classroom virtually abandoned for want of a more central location on campus. unfettered by the assumption that these newfound coveted sites are unattainable, teachers with high-hope thinking become eager to learn who might help in requisitioning these special places for their classes. 6.4. possible people in general, those with high-hope thinking are more gregarious than those with low-hope thinking, creating a wider circle of friends, acquaintances, and allies (snyder et al., 1997). teachers with ongoing professional relationships in various areas of their schools already have a strong base of social capital from which to seek advice or assistance about requisitioning special classrooms and non-traditional places for classes. explaining the purpose, such as potentiating many positive social psychological aspects in learning, can be key to attaining these goals. first, it can establish a ground for identifying shared or mutually circular seating arrangements: approaching the social crux in language classrooms 295 compatible goals, such as taking countermeasures to reduce student attrition at the school, or meeting a quota of alternative-style lectures held in that library lecture hall in order to maintain outside funding. second, it can open deeper discussion with recommendations for using more suitable or more possible-to-procure places for circular seating arrangements. and third, it can help turn someone else into an advocate for the cause, leading to fundamentally greater organizational changes, such as purchasing chairs and desks with wheels, or involving teacher or student voice in redesigning classrooms. additional pathways for teachers with high-hope thinking include asking in advance, which allows others the time to plan and act. also, if at first told something is not possible, teachers with high-hope thinking might remember that policies and administrations change occasionally, and therefore the same question might be worth asking again. finally, high-hope thinking comes from and is sustained by engaging with others (snyder et al., 1997). asking other teachers how they arrange their seating and conduct cooperative or whole-class activities, particularly when constrained to bolted-down settings, and how they may have otherwise liberated their classes from such settings, can supply both practical solutions and fresh hope. 7. rounding it up circular arrangements of sitting, standing, and dancing can be seen in human communication and education ranging across geographic locales and historical periods, from prehistory to antiquity to modern times. circular arrangements bring an elemental force of human connection brought about by the people within them. proximity, face-to-face orientation, and eye contact afforded by the circle create an all-includable social action zone for the whole class. time spent in the action zone fosters empathy, respect, and trust among potentially all class members. in this environment, students can feel a sense of belonging, which provides a safe base to expand their imaginations about what can be possibly said and done in the world, while finding their own voices to express themselves and their own values to take action. these conditions allow for acceptance of others and community-based affirmations of each member to flourish, verbally and nonverbally, which provides growth in individual selfdirection and well-being (rogers, 1961). teachers are therefore invited to experiment with various applications of circular arrangements of students in their classrooms, develop their own pedagogical purposes and applications with this practice, and share their classcraft and high-hope thinking with other language teachers for 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(2007). the tipping point of class size: when caring communication and relationships become possible. jalt hokkaido journal, 11, 1-18. 371 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (3). 2015. 371-393 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.3.2 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl emotion as the amplifier and the primary motive: some theories of emotion with relevance to language learning rebecca l. oxford university of maryland, usa (professor emerita) rebeccaoxford@gmail.com abstract emotion is crucial to living and learning. the powerful intertwining of emotion and cognition ignites learning within a complex dynamic system, which, as several sections of this paper show, also includes societal and cultural influences. as “the primary human motive” (macintyre, 2002a, p. 61), emotion operates as an amplifier, which provides energetic intensity to all human behavior, including language learning. this chapter explains major theories of emotion drawn from positive psychology, social psychology, social constructivism, social constructionism, and existential psychotherapy. it also offers implications for language learning related to understanding and managing emotions; expressing emotions appropriately despite cultural and linguistic differences; viewing emotions as transitory social roles; enhancing positive emotions and developing resilience; and recognizing, perhaps paradoxically, both the negative and the positive aspects of anxiety. the chapter concludes with the statement that language learners can become more agentic in dealing with their emotions. this form of self-regulation can lead to greater success in language learning. keywords: language learning; positive psychological, social, and existential theories of emotion rebecca l. oxford 372 1. introduction emotion is “the primary human motive,” said macintyre (2002, p. 61). the human brain is an emotional brain (le doux, 1998; see also johnson, 2014; lewis, havilandjones, & barrett, 2008). it creates relationships among thought, emotion, and motivation in a complex dynamic system in which components interact in complex, nonlinear, organic, and holistic ways (dörnyei, 2009; mercer, 2011). emotion “functions as an amplifier, providing the intensity, urgency, and energy to propel our behavior” in “everything we do” (macintyre, 2002a, p. 61). all learning is a powerful combination of cognition and emotion (lewis, 2005; piaget, 1981), so dörnyei (2009) spoke of a “cognition-emotion interface” in language learning. as a background to my own research with learner histories and as a means of deepening my understanding of learner anxiety and other emotions, i decided to study emotion theories. this article and a prior one (oxford, 2015) grew from that interest. my aim here is not to provide a review of research on emotions in language learning nor to examine all theories of emotion. instead, i intend to describe several focused theories of emotion drawn from various branches of psychology, sociology, and philosophy and to explain how those theories apply to language learning. the article addresses theories of emotion in (a) positive psychology, (b) social psychology, (c) social constructivism, (d) social constructionism, and (e) existential psychotherapy. 2. emotion theory in positive psychology the goal of positive psychology is to “increase flourishing by increasing positive emotion, engagement, meaning, positive relationships, and accomplishment,” said martin seligman (2011, p. 12), the father of positive psychology. according to so and huppert (as cited in seligman, 2011), “flourishing [is] . . . defined as having high positive emotion, plus being high on any three of the following: selfesteem, optimism, resilience, vitality, self-determination, and positive relationships” (p. 238). well-being is the operationalization of flourishing. some discussion areas in the theory of well-being in positive psychology are particularly germane to understanding emotions. these areas relate to positive emotions, negative emotions, flow, resilience, and emotional intelligence. though positive psychologists do not tend to refer to a mix of emotions, i include this topic along with positive emotions, because every human life contains a mix of emotions. emotion as the amplifier and the primary motive: some theories of emotion with relevance. . . 373 2.1. positive emotions and a mix of emotions in seligman’s (2011) well-being theory within positive psychology, positive emotion is one of the five key areas, accompanied by engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment, summarized as “perma.” seligman (2011) endorsed frederickson’s (2001, 2003, 2004) “broaden-and-build” concept of positive emotions by saying “the positive emotions broaden and build abiding psychological resources that we can call on later in life” (p. 66). the broaden-andbuild concept says that positive emotions, such as happiness, curiosity, and interest, broaden the individual’s awareness and encourage innovative, diverse thoughts and actions. this broadened range builds skills and resources. for instance, pleasure in interacting with someone else can build up friendship and social skills, joy in childhood’s rough-and-tumble play can lead to motor skills, and curiosity can lead to searching skills. positive emotions (a) “trigger upward spirals toward emotional well-being” (frederickson & joiner, 2002, p. 172), (b) broaden the scope of attention (frederickson & branigan, 2005), (c) contribute to resilience (frederickson, tugade, waugh, & larkin, 2003; waugh, tugade, & frederickson, 2008), and (d) speed up recovery from cardiovascular situations related to negative emotions (frederickson & levenson, 1998). oxford and cuéllar (2014) and oxford, pacheco acuña, solís hernández, and smith (2014) significantly adapted seligman’s well-being theory (perma) to interpret histories of language learners who were selected for the studies because of their record of success and high proficiency. we were interested in capturing a true mix of emotions—both positive and negative ones—and not just concerned about the presence of positive emotions, as seligman might have been. with these successful learners, we discovered a mix of emotions but realized that positive emotions, such as interest and happiness in learning, were more prevalent than negative emotions, such as sadness and anxiety. we framed the narrative task by asking: “what obstacles did you face in language learning? were you able to overcome them, and if so, how?” the learners in these studies proved to be resilient in working to overcome their difficulties. we also asked: “what were the peak experiences in your language learning?” we avoided defining a peak experience so that the learners could respond freely. maslow (1970) described peak experiences as transient but powerful moments of self-actualization. in his view, a peak experience is “a great and mystical experience, a religious experience if you wish – an illumination, a revelation, an insight . . . [leading to] ‘the cognition of being,’ . . . almost, you could say, a technology of happiness . . .” (maslow, 1971, p. 169). peak experiences are especially joyous, exciting, ego-transcending moments in life, involving sudden feelings of intense happiness or ecstasy, creativity, meaning, well-being, wonder, awe, love, rebecca l. oxford 374 unity, empathy, limitlessness, and timelessness. maslow (1971) indicated that “most people, or perhaps all people, have peak experiences, or ecstasies” (p. 168). peak experiences can never be a goal; they are byproducts of engaging fully in something meaningful. in analyzing language learner histories, oxford and cuéllar (2014) and oxford et al. (2014) found that many of the successful learners had peak experiences gained through interacting with teachers, fellow students, and native speakers in the target language and experiencing the richness of the culture. in other narrative research that did not apply positive psychology (see kao & oxford, 2014; ma & oxford, 2014; oxford, 1996, 2011a, 2011b, 2013, 2014; oxford, ehrman, & lavine, 1991; oxford, lavine, felkins, hollaway, & saleh, 1996; oxford, massey, & anand, 2005; oxford, meng, zhou, sung, & jain, 2007; oxford et al., 1998), we allowed learners to talk and write about the negative and positive relationships with teachers and their experiences with language learning as a whole. we opened the door to anything they might want to say. results showed an array of emotions, connected in various ways with learners’ personalities, goals, self-esteem levels, self-concepts, and experiences of crossing linguistic and cultural borders (pavlenko & lantolf, 2000), often involving moving to other countries. while some of the emotions, such as anger, shame, guilt, and anxiety, were negative, other emotions experienced by these learners, such as love, confidence, pleasure, pride, contentment, and joy, were highly positive. 2.2. the roles of negative emotions in contrast to positive emotions, “negative emotions warn us about a specific threat: when we feel fear, it is almost always preceded by a thought of danger” (seligman, 2011, p. 139), such as sadness being preceded by a thought of loss or anger being preceded by a thought of trespass. our negative emotional reaction is often disproportional to the actuality of the danger. negative emotions— “the firefighting emotions” (seligman, 2011, p. 66)—narrow the individual’s response options to survival behaviors (frederickson, 2001, 2003, 2004). for example, anxiety leads toward the fight-or-flight response. in other researchers’ narrative studies of language learning, multiple emotions were found, most of which were negative and potentially “narrowing” in the sense of frederickson’s theory. in pavlenko’s (2006) investigation, the narratives of bilingual writers who had learned english as a second language displayed “an array of emotions,” such as guilt, insecurity, anxiety, worry, sadness, and confusion (p. 5). japanese women learning english self-identified responses of longing, disappointment, sadness, and powerlessness, but also occasional confidence (piller & takahashi, 2006). in her book lost in translation, hoffman (1990) explained the emotional changes and sense of dispossession that occurred emotion as the amplifier and the primary motive: some theories of emotion with relevance. . . 375 when she moved with her family from poland to canada. in hunger of memory: the education of richard rodriguez, rodriguez (2004) portrayed emotional and social alienation from his familial linguistic and cultural identity. one wonders why the emotions were mostly so negative. did the sociocultural aspects of language learning make the process such a profoundly unsettling psychological experience (guiora, 1983)? why was so little positive emotional value found for some of these individuals during a large part of their language learning process? research on language anxiety reveals that this frequently found emotion has many negative correlates for learners: (a) worsened cognition and achievement (gardner, tremblay, & masgoret, 1997; horwitz, 2001, 2007; macintyre, 2002a), (b) negative attitudes toward the language (dewaele, 2005), (c) decisions to drop the language (dewaele & thirtle, 2009), (d) less willingness to communicate (macintyre, 2002b), and (e) diminished self-confidence, reduced personality, and lowered personal agency and control (horwitz, 2007; horwitz & young, 1991). however, contrary to positive psychology’s pessimistic reaction to negative emotions, evidence also exists that language anxiety can occasionally be stimulating and helpful (e.g., marcos-llinas & juan garau, 2009). the januslike (dewaele & mcintyre, 2014) negative and positive natures of language anxiety can be explained from an existential psychotherapeutic perspective: “anxiety has a negative expression in angst or anguish and a positive one in excitement and anticipation” (van deurzen, 2012, p. 153). language anxiety (and implicitly other negative emotions) can be managed through particular emotional strategies promoted by positive psychology. for instance, the abcde macrostrategy (seligman, 2006, 2011), drawing on the theory and practice of rational emotive behavior therapy (rebt; ellis, 2003), contains a set of interlocking strategies. specifically, the learner must recognize that beliefs, especially irrational beliefs, about adversity cause consequent negative feelings (e.g., anxiety) but disputation, which means presenting counterevidence, results in energization, or a positive change of mind (seligman, 2006). within the abcde macrostrategy, the strategy of identifying irrational beliefs— “i must/should” (dogmatic demands), “it’s terrible” (awfulizing), “i can’t stand it” (low frustration tolerance), and “i’m worthless and incompetent” (self/other rating)—is very important, especially for language learning. many language learners hold dysfunctional, irrational beliefs about their own learning, and this contributes to language anxiety. the strategy of identifying irrational beliefs must always be accompanied by the strategies of (a) identifying counterevidence and (b) creating a new mindset. the abcde macrostrategy combats the pessimistic explanatory style (peterson, seligman, & vaillant, 1988), which is often found in anxious learners. well-being theory notes that “emotions don’t follow inexorably from external events but from what you think about those rebecca l. oxford 376 events, and you can actually change what you think” (seligman, 2011, p. 90). in rebt, the abcde macrostrategy is a central focus for personality change, but it can also be deployed to diminish language anxiety specifically. (see cohn & frederickson, 2010, for predictors and consequences of positive psychology interventions.) 2.3. flow csíkszentmihályi (2008) described flow not as passive or relaxing but as occurring when an individual’s mind and body are stretched to their limit in a quest to accomplish something worthwhile and difficult. flow is comprised of complete engagement in an activity, merging of action and awareness without distraction, intrinsic motivation (autotelism, or the desire to do the task for its own sake because it is enjoyable), balance between challenge and skill (task is neither too easy nor too hard), heightened control (security and lack of worry about failure), effortlessness, lack of self-consciousness, and an altered perception of time (slowing down or speeding up) (csíkszentmihályi, 1998, 2008, 2013; csíkszentmihályi & csíkszentmihályi, 2006). flow is associated with emotion by means of skill level and challenge. as noted, a state of flow occurs when the tasks’ challenge matches the person’s skill level. when skill level and challenge are imbalanced, lack of flow is assured and one of the following negative emotional states is likely to emerge: anxiety (higher challenge than skill level), boredom (lower challenge than skill level), or apathy (both challenges and skill levels are low) (nakamura & csíkszentmihályi, 2005). peterson (2006) stated, “the aftermath of the flow experience is invigorating . . . [although] flow in the moment is nonemotional and arguably nonconscious. people describe flow as highly and intrinsically enjoyable, but this is an after-the-fact summary judgment, and joy is not immediately present during the activity itself” (pp. 66-67). flow can produce emotions such as pleasure, joy, and excitement—but, as peterson contended, after the experience is over. 2.4. resilience resilience is the ability to successfully spring back from adversity. language learners need resilience in times of emotional, cognitive, and/or physical stress. some resilience theories and research studies emphasize “personal strengths (e.g., cognitive, social, emotional, moral/spiritual)” (truebridge, 2014, p. 15), such as hope, interest, excitement, outgoing personalities, ability to enlist support and develop competence, problem-solving ability, and self-esteem (masten & obradovic, 2006; werner & smith, 1992). benard (1991) listed the following personal, individual components of resilience: positivity (e.g., hope for the future, emotion as the amplifier and the primary motive: some theories of emotion with relevance. . . 377 interest, engagement), persistence, hardiness, goal-directedness, achievement orientation, educational aspirations, a sense of anticipation, a sense of purpose, and a sense of coherence. resilience also involves social factors, such as compassionate relationships, messages that focus on strengths and build positive emotions, and opportunities for responsible participation (luthar, cicchetti, & becker, 2000; luthar, sawyer, & brown, 2006; truebridge, 2014). resilience was theoretically linked to “psychological fitness” in the military (seligman, 2011, pp. 127, 240). the opposite of resilience often involves giving in to negative emotions, such as depression or anger, when situations become very difficult. in a study involving multiple learner histories (oxford et al., 2007), resilience in language learning emerged as the main theme. in one of these learner histories, a chinese learner of english overcame her anxiety, embarrassment, and shame about speaking english. to help her teacher, whose instruction was being evaluated by the district education authorities, the student stood up and spoke in english when other students would not. this action saved the teacher’s reputation in the eyes of the inspectors and served to make the student feel competent, confident, and resilient. the study contained numerous stories of learner resilience. 2.5. emotional intelligence daniel goleman’s (2005) view of emotional intelligence (eq) grew out of prior work on multiple intelligences, empathy, neuro-linguistic programming, and transactional analysis. goleman asserted that the intelligence quotient (iq), or traditionally described intelligence, is too narrow to explain variation in human behavior and contended that it was essential to consider emotional intelligence. he identified the domains of emotional intelligence as knowing and managing one’s own emotions, motivating oneself, recognizing and understanding other people’s emotions, and managing relationships. emotional intelligence has been shown to reduce stress and anxiety, decrease conflict, improve relationships, and increase stability, self-motivation, social awareness, and harmony (goleman, 2005). with increased awareness and effort, it is possible to develop new aspects of emotional intelligence in individuals and organizations (goleman, 2005). emotional intelligence theory is useful for understanding differences in the attitudes and behavior of language learners and users. dewaele, petrides, and furnham (2008; see also dewaele, 2013) found that adult multilinguals with higher emotional intelligence had lower levels of foreign language anxiety in various situations and languages. they discovered that in communication situations such individuals, compared to individuals with lower emotional intelligence, perceived themselves as more capable of (a) gauging the emotions of their interlocutor, (b) controlling their own stress, and (c) feeling confident (and rebecca l. oxford 378 hence less anxious). other factors in lower anxiety and stronger confidence were younger age of acquisition of the foreign language, stronger socialization in that language, higher self-perceived proficiency, use of the language outside the classroom, communication with a larger network of people, and knowledge of more languages (dewaele et al., 2008). as we have seen, emotions and related phenomena (such as flow) play an important role in positive psychology, which therefore has implications for understanding language learners’ emotions. in the next few sections, we see that emotions are very social. as is evident in their names, social psychological theory, social constructivist theories, and social constructionist theories all emphasize the social nature of emotions. existential psychotherapy also suggests the involvement of social relationships in an individual’s emotions. i will now outline briefly each theory and its relevance for this discussion. 3. emotion theory in social psychology social psychologists markus and kitayama (1991) discussed the influence of culturally-based self-construals on emotional expression. they first described the differences in self-construals between people in collectivist cultures and those in individualist cultures. collectivist cultures, such as asian, latin-american, african, and some southern european cultures, stress harmony, interdependence, cooperation, long-term relationships, and group loyalty, in contrast with individualist cultures, which view the individual as unique, independent, special, self-reliant, autonomous, and competitive, with many loosely connected, short relationships. markus and kitayama (1991) contrasted emotional expression in collectivist and individualist cultures. in collectivist cultures, emotional expression “may or may not be related directly to the inner feelings [of a person]” because of the desire to retain interpersonal harmony (markus & kitayama, p. 236). emotional expression is often “a public instrumental action” (p. 236). overt expression of anger and of other intense emotions might threaten the interdependent self and is typically avoided. in individualist cultures, emotional expression is expected to be a literal portrayal of an independent person’s feelings. for example, overt expression of anger and grief are seen as acceptable expressions of the independent self. for further information on the social psychological view of culture, self, and emotion, see kitayama, markus, and matsumoto (1995). 4. emotion theory in social constructivism social constructivists argue that knowledge and artifacts are socially constructed, though the degree to which this happens is disputed even among themselves. emotion as the amplifier and the primary motive: some theories of emotion with relevance. . . 379 some social constructivists, such as vygotsky (1978), palincsar (1998), brown, collins, and duguid (1989), and von glasersfeld (1995), have been especially concerned with the socially constructed way in which learning takes place. von glasersfeld offered the most radical perspective, that is, that the process of constructing knowledge depends strictly on the individual’s subjective experience, not on any objective or actual “reality.” 4.1. averill’s concept of transitory social roles emotion theorist averill (1980, 1982, 1985, 1986, 1996) took a position that was, perhaps confusingly, called social constructivist by dewaele (2006) and social constructionist by ratner (1989). because averill’s work has been cited as social constructivist in the language learning field, i will include his work in this section on social constructivism. averill criticized overly simplified views on emotion, such as cognitive appraisals or patterns of arousal alone. in his view, emotions are part of larger sociocultural systems that link culture and cognition and are therefore socioculturally constructed. he argued that emotions can be analyzed socially, psychologically, and biologically. averill (1980) defined an emotion as “a transitory social role (a socially constituted syndrome) that includes an individual’s appraisal of the situation and that is interpreted as a passion rather than as an action” (p. 312). these transitory social roles or syndromes are generated by social norms and expectations, which are mentally represented by schemata, or cognitive structures. although individuals actually choose the roles, they are not aware of this; they perhaps surprisingly interpret their own emotional responses not as active decisions but as passive responses to situations (averill, 1982; see johnson, 2014), responses which are shaped by what the culture determines as what, where, when, and how to feel and act. in averill’s perspective, emotional syndromes or subsystems “are composed of such elements as physiological changes, expressive reactions, instrumental responses, and subjective feelings” (dewaele, 2006, p. 122). averill (1982) described syndromes as sets of covarying responses and as subsystems of behavior. a syndrome also includes beliefs about the nature of the stimulus. for instance, grief is a syndrome with many possible grief responses and many potential targets, and it is based partially on beliefs about what conditions should elicit genuine grief. for averill, emotions echo “the thought of an epoch, the secret of a civilization. it follows that to understand the meaning of an emotion is to understand the relevant aspects of the sociocultural system of which the emotion is a part (subsystem)” (p. 24, as cited in dewaele, 2006, p. 123). dewaele (2006, p. 123) stated that averill’s social constructivist position was “ideally suited” for his own sociolinguistic analyses of emotions of multilingual rebecca l. oxford 380 individuals. dewaele (2004a) found that the perception of emotional force of swearwords was associated positively with self-rated language proficiency in multilinguals. these individuals generally preferred to swear in their first language, though they sometimes swore in their other languages, depending on the effects on the interlocutor (perlocutionary effects) and the competence of the interlocutor. dewaele (2006) reported that multilingual study participants used their native language most frequently to communicate anger. however, he found that another language can indeed become the most frequent language of anger expression, depending on socialization in that language. though not studying personality factors in the 2006 study, he mentioned that such factors might play a role. he had found in an earlier study that extraverts, compared with introverts, were more willing to express strong emotions in their nonnative language (dewaele, 2004b). 4.2. linguistic approaches to social constructivism cognitive linguists wierzbicka and harkins (2001) also took a social constructivist stance, specifically arguing that emotions are socially constructed and that language is crucial in the development and expression of emotions. though they accepted many neuroscientific advances in studying emotions, they cautioned that brain research on emotion was too generally applied and that such research did not consider people from different cultures and with different languages (see dewaele, 2006). “[w]hatever the conditions that produce an emotion like anger, whether or not it is visibly expressed, and whatever physiological responses accompany it, it is only through language (if at all) that we can know that what is experienced is anger” (wierzbicka & harkins, 2001, pp. 2-3). panayiotou (2006) likewise described emotions as socially constructed through language. she argued “that emotions that seem key in some cultures may be linguistically non-existent in others” (p. 183). the operative word is “linguistically,” because panayiotou depicted emotions as “language dependent,” since “the raw of bodily experience of an emotion must be filtered through a cultural meaning making system . . ., that is, language, before it can be defined as an emotion” (panayiotou, 2006, p. 187). languages “actively construct and reconstruct” emotions (pavlenko, 2002, p. 209). certain emotions may have supposed equivalents in translation, but they are not adequate equivalents due to the contrasting salience in different cultures. for example, the emotion of guilt, that is, feeling criticized for what we have done or a transgression we have committed, and the emotion of shame, that is, feeling criticized for the person we have become (wollheim, as cited in panayiotou, 2006) have been differentially applied to various cultures, which emotion as the amplifier and the primary motive: some theories of emotion with relevance. . . 381 have subsequently been called “guilt cultures” and “shame cultures.” panayiotou (2006, p. 188) maintained that “every language contains its own ‘naïve picture’ of the world, including its own emotionology (stearns & stearns, 1988)” and uses its particular emotion words. this shapes the way people in that culture experience emotions.1 a bilingual person draws upon two “emotional universes” (panayiotou, 2006, p. 204) that offer certain emotion terms, which are often incongruent, but these universes are intertwined by virtue of the fact that that the bilingual person experiences them. 5. emotion theory in social constructionism like social constructivists, social constructionists contend that knowledge and artifacts are socially constructed. however, following berger and luckmann (1967) and gergen (1999, 2007), their emphasis is often on what is socially constructed. this would include the texts, activities, objects, beliefs, emotions, and moral systems that are produced by the group or society and that help shape how each person behaves in the group or society. there are many different social constructionist approaches, not just one position (harré, 2002; stam, 2001; weber, 2012). social constructionists adopt a functional framework, suggesting that the transfer of judgments, beliefs, and cultural norms serves the purpose of sustaining cultural values (armon-jones, 1985, 1986). kingston (2011) argued that a contextual approach should look to the cultural continuities of basic beliefs, evaluations, and behavior patterns that help to construct emotional experience, but it should also allow for some degree of personal interpretation of cultural rules. 5.1. strong and weak forms social constructionism has different forms. one strong form of social constructionism argues that emotions are of purely social origin, with no emotion existing naturally outside of our ability to understand and describe it socially through language (see hacking, 1999 for a critique of such a form of social constructionism). some social constructionists’ emphasis on language and emotion is reminiscent of the linguistic approach described earlier by wierzbicka and harkins (2001), social constructivists discussed in the prior section. a weak form of social constructionism acknowledges an underlying naturalist impulse in certain situations (i.e., a desire to see emotions as natural rather than purely social and existing outside of language) but still highlights the fact 1 the greek language has no word for emotion and does not discriminate between feelings and emotion (panayiotou, 2006). rebecca l. oxford 382 that the power of social norms can significantly shape the experience of emotions. all social constructionism shares the assumption that culture specifies ways to appraise, feel, and act when experiencing or performing a certain emotion. 5.2. role of social practices in constructing emotions social constructionists harré (1986, 1995) and harré and finlay-jones (1986) noted that cultural aspects such as language and social practices are keenly influential in the construction of emotions. people develop emotions based on direct or indirect social experiences. for example, harré and finlay-jones (1986) described the emotion of accidie, which involved “boredom, dejection, and even disgust with fulfilling one’s religious duty” (p. 221) in the middle ages. at that time, accidie was felt to be a sin. accidie no longer exists as an emotion because of the shift of cultural priorities and a different view of the moral order (harré & finlay-jones, 1986). for social constructionists the purpose of emotions is to support the norms and values of society. emotions regulate socially undesirable behavior and promote attitudes that endorse certain political, aesthetic, social, religious, and moral practices. envy at someone else’s success and guilt over cheating are “both emotions that have been prescribed by the individual’s society so that the individual will take the appropriate attitude towards success and cheating,” stated johnson (2014) in explaining the social constructionist perspective of armon-jones (1986). if an emotion violates the norms and values of the majority of the society, armon-jones (1986) insisted that such an emotion is still socially learned, but from a social subset or peer group whose norms and values the individual identifies with, rather than from the society at large. 6. emotion theory in existential psychotherapy the goal of existential psychotherapy is to help people “gain insight into the unavoidable paradoxes that life presents and to gain strength from that knowledge,” rather than to provide “quick pragmatic solutions” (van deurzen, 2012, p. xiii). existential psychotherapy puts responsibility on the individual to be authentic and purposeful in life, and it strongly emphasizes the importance of social relationships. emmy van deurzen, a major authority in the field of existential psychotherapy, proposed an explanation of a large set of emotions, many of which are related to social interactions. from an existential viewpoint, we might consider that a person’s emotions are affected by, and in turn affect, social interactions, as illustrated in figure 1. emotion as the amplifier and the primary motive: some theories of emotion with relevance. . . 383 exhilaration happiness high/tension val low/release despondency depression, sadness figure 1 the compass of emotion; adapted from figures 5.1 through 5.7 in van deurzen (2012, pp. 151-155) in figure 1, exhilaration and happiness are at the high-tension apex of the “compass” or circle of emotion, while despondency, depression, and sadness are at the low-tension, release-based nadir. the emotions located in between occur in relation to our wanting something important (our value). in the upper right quadrant are pride, jealousy, and anger, which reflect perceived threats to value. these threats can come from other people or situations. pride occurs when we still feel control of what we value but are perhaps too eager to show it off, suspecting that it might be under threat. jealousy arises when what we value is being threatened and we feel that it might be taken away. anger emerges when what we value is deeply threatened and we are making a lastditch effort to get it back or to keep on grasping it. despair, fear, and sorrow are emotions in the lower right quadrant, and they signify the loss of value. despair occurs when we recognize we might have to give up what we value. fear is an apprehension that the threat might steal what we value, possibly requiring us to let go. sorrow arises when we realize • despair • fear • sorrow • desire • envy • shame • pride • jealousy • anger • joy • love • hope achieving of value threat to value loss of value aspiration to value rebecca l. oxford 384 that the threat has actually taken what we value, and we have no choice but to let go. at the bottom of the circle we experience general sadness and depression, a sense of being without energy. the bottom left quadrant contains shame, envy, and desire, which together signify aspiring to what we value when we do not have it. shame emerges because we feel we are unable to accomplish anything of value. envy happens when we see what we value being gained by others; we feel we cannot be the same as they are, so we covet what they have. desire occurs when we start reaching out once more toward what we value. the upper left quadrant involves hope, love, and joy, which together signify the gaining of value once more. (however, in language learning, attaining what the learner values, a personally acceptable degree of proficiency and selfconfidence, might occur for the very first time, rather than “once more.”) hope springs forth when we have an inkling that we can actually gain what we value once again. via love, we participate in committing to what we value and in working toward attaining it. joy arises when we feel we are finally integrating with what we value. at the top of the circle we experience genuine exhilaration and happiness, reflecting a positive, high tension. all of the emotions described by van deurzen can apply to language learners, although the salience and frequency of the emotions will vary across learners and across time. for instance, learners might feel shame if perceiving themselves unable to accomplish anything valuable in learning. they might experience envy if someone else can communicate in the target language more effectively than they. they might experience hope and exhilaration if they believe they might someday be able to use the language effectively. they might experience joy if they attain what they value, which might be any or all of the following: a desired level of proficiency, self-efficacy and confidence to go with it, an ability to communicate easily in the target language and get to know aspects of the target culture intimately, an ability to forge friendships with people from the target culture, and so on. anxiety is not specifically shown in figure 1. van deurzen (2012) indicated that anxiety is “a more general and basic experience” (p. 153). as noted earlier, van deurzen described anxiety as being negatively expressed in anguish and positively expressed in excitement. she also stated: “the emotional cycle swings downwards from possession of something that is deeply valued, and considered essential, to its loss and eventual absence. the emotional cycle swings upwards from the sense of emptiness of existence through a lack of what is valued to an aspiration to obtain what is desired and to fulfillment in its ultimate possession” (van deurzen, 2012, p. 153). emotion as the amplifier and the primary motive: some theories of emotion with relevance. . . 385 figure 1 and its explanation imply that language learners who experience negative emotions, such as despair, fear, sorrow, shame, and envy, can hope to experience positive emotions, which are part of the same cycle. there is a “potential for transformation of destructive emotional experience to constructive emotional experience” (van deurzen, p. 153). van deurzen cautioned that loss and gain are not the same as failure and success and that letting go is as important as building up. she disparaged positive psychology’s tools, which she considered to be overly simplistic techniques and one-sided solutions. nevertheless, i contend that some positive psychology strategies, including rebt and aspects of resilience and emotional intelligence, might help struggling language learners transform negative emotions to positive ones. 7. implications for language learners this paper has presented a number of theories of emotion drawn from positive psychology, social psychology, social constructivism, social constructionism, and existential psychotherapy. the discussion so far leads to the following implications: 1. managing emotions is a critical part of emotional intelligence (goleman, 2005). positive psychology offers readily teachable techniques for managing emotions (seligman, 2011), and research on language learning strategies (oxford, 1990, 2011b) highlights affective strategies for doing the same. these are very important and readily sharable techniques and strategies. in teaching them, language teachers can help learners develop their emotion management capabilities. 2. resilience involves both personal factors, including emotions and problem-solving skills, and social factors, such as a supportive environment (truebridge, 2014). teachers and learners can work together to strengthen the resilience of all involved in the language learning process. 3. expressing emotions might be useful in some settings and not in others. cultural individualism and collectivism influence whether it is wise to express an emotion publicly (markus & kitayama, 1991). teachers can help learners identify their emotions and decide whether and how to express them in different settings. 4. cultural and linguistic differences make it difficult to understand all the subtleties of emotional communication in another culture and language (dewaele, 2004a, 2004b, 2006), and, indeed, some emotions and emotion words do not have translations in some languages. teachers and native informants can help learners understand the complexities of emotion across cultures. rebecca l. oxford 386 5. averill (1980) asserted that emotions are transitory social roles that language learners—and all other individuals—actively accept, though they do not usually understand that they are literally taking on roles. if teachers help learners understand that both positive and negative emotions are transitory social roles, learners might feel motivated to take on positive ones when possible and might feel relieved to know that any negative emotions are only transitory. 6. moreover, if emotions are socially and linguistically created, as argued by many social constructivists and social constructionists, teachers might enable learners to develop social and linguistic techniques for dealing with negative emotions and enhancing positive emotions. 7. according to van deurzen (2012), existential psychotherapy suggests that anxiety can have positive or negative expression. existential psychotherapy also implies that language learners who experience negative or destructive emotions, such as despair, fear, sorrow, shame, and envy, can expect or hope to experience positive or constructive emotions at some point in the cycle. thus, we might say that no learner is doomed. knowing that emotions can be managed, controlled, shaped, and transformed makes the learner less of a purely passive recipient and more of an agent in the emotion game. recent research (e.g., kao & oxford, 2014; ma & oxford, 2014; oxford & cuéllar, 2014; oxford et al., 2014) reveals that some successful language learners already grasp this important truth. emotion as the amplifier and the primary motive: some theories of emotion with relevance. . . 387 references armon-jones, c. 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(2001). introduction. in j. harkins & a. wierzbicka (eds.), emotions in cross-linguistic perspective (pp. 1-34). berlin: mouton de gruyter. 133 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (1). 2021. 133-156 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.1.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt foreign language education in rural schools: struggles and initiatives among generalist teachers teaching english in mexico jesús izquierdo1 universidad juárez autónoma de tabasco, villahermosa, tabasco, mexico https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5605-2318 jesus.izquierdo@ujat.mx silvia patricia aquino zúñiga universidad juárez autónoma de tabasco, villahermosa, tabasco, mexico https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7223-8582 saquinozuniga@gmail.com verónica garcía martínez universidad juárez autónoma de tabasco, villahermosa, tabasco, mexico https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5299-3540 verónica.garcia@ujat.mx abstract in many countries, english as a foreign/second language (l2) teaching has become compulsory in urban and rural public schools. in rural areas, the challenges for the implementation of this state-sanctioned policy have been explored among l2 teaching specialists. however, this mixed-methods study considered a different teacher group and examined the struggles and initiatives of generalist teachers who are obligated to teach english in rural schools. to this end, data were collected from 115 teachers in 17 rural secondary schools in the southeast of mexico. first, the participants completed a survey with closed-ended questions that elicited information about teacher education, teaching experience and knowledge of the rural school system. then, a 1 correspondence concerning this article should be sent to the first author. jesús izquierdo, silvia patricia aquino zúñiga, verónica garcía martínez 134 subsample of participants completed an individual thematized semi-structured interview. they were selected on the basis of l2 teacher education involvement. in the survey data, response patterns were identified using frequency analyses. the interview data were analyzed using categorical aggregation. the data revealed that the generalist teachers struggle with l2 professionalization, sociocultural and instructional challenges. nonetheless, only few participants have been engaged in l2 teacher education which could help them overcome these challenges. instead, they rely upon limited strategies to counteract the day-today challenges at the expense of effective l2 teaching practices. keywords: language policy; language planning; english as a foreign language; rural education; teacher education 1. introduction in many countries, english language learning in public education has become state-mandated despite a heated debate on the linguistic, economic, social and cultural benefits and drawbacks of this policy (crystal, 2012; roldán & peláez, 2017). as a result, in higher education, many universities offer undergraduate and graduate programs that privilege english as a second/foreign language (l2) instruction over other languages or promote content and english language integrated learning (arias & izquierdo, 2015; woodend et al., 2019). as for elementary and middle school education, many countries have sanctioned english as an l2 learning through various layers of public education and established specific language attainment goals, instructional guidelines and evaluation criteria under the common european framework (kihlstedt, 2019). in this way, educational policy makers and stakeholders are enacting english as an l2 teaching across the levels of public education. undoubtedly, these reforms seem promising for public education but bring with them several challenges, particularly in rural areas. in the rural elementary and secondary schools of latin america, for instance, there is often a shortage of l2 teaching specialists (bonilla & cruz-arcila, 2014; coelho & henze, 2014; roldán & peláez, 2017). in the absence of l2 specialists, in rural schools, generalist teachers are obligated to deliver english instruction despite resistance (coelho & henze, 2014; hernández & izquierdo, 2020). different from l2 specialists, generalist teachers hold general pedagogical knowledge, deliver subject-matter instruction across all areas of the curriculum, lack formal l2 teacher preparation and often lack l2 competence. as these teachers cover all areas of the curriculum with the same learners, they spend many hours with them throughout the day and the school year (hernández & izquierdo, 2020; zein, 2017). foreign language education in rural schools: struggles and initiatives among generalist teachers. . . 135 nonetheless, the challenges that generalist teachers in rural schools encounter to accomplish l2 policy require attention in industrialized and developing countries (coelho & henze, 2014; hansen-thomas et al., 2016; hernández & izquierdo, 2020; zein, 2017). also, the strategies that they implement to counteract those challenges need documentation. to this end, this sequential explanatory mixed-methods study collected data from generalist teachers who deliver english l2 instruction in rural secondary schools in the southeast of mexico. the quantitative and qualitative data provide insights into the strategies that these teachers rely upon for overcoming social, professional and instructional challenges for the delivery of l2 instruction in their schools. the results reveal that generalist teachers are in urgent need of professionalization projects for the development of the l2 teaching competence and proficiency which they require for the enactment of the english language teaching policy in rural areas. 2. literature review educational systems worldwide are experiencing remarkable l2 education reforms. these reforms are promoting state-sanctioned educational policies that favor the learning of english in public education in countries where english is neither the native nor the official language (crystal, 2012). despite the establishment of the english language in the form of linguistic imperialism, the learning of english constitutes a major curricular change in countries that see in this language a benefit for international interaction and economic growth (woodend et al., 2019). nonetheless, in many parts of the world, the teaching of english and the attainment of the l2 curricular goals in public elementary and secondary schools face many challenges (coelho & henze, 2014; giannikas, 2011; izquierdo et al., 2016; lightbown & spada, 2020; ramos holguín & aguirre morales, 2016; roldán & peláez, 2017). in rural areas, the sociocultural characteristics of the schools, teachers, parents and learners bring about additional challenges that counteract attainment of the l2 curricular expectations (hossain, 2016; lamb, 2012). while the conditions may vary from industrialized (hansen-thomas et al., 2016) to developing countries (bryan & mclaughlin, 2005), in rural communities, learners often face a shortage of school choices. in the available schools, some teachers are underqualified, teachers work in overcrowded classrooms, schools often lack educational resources and appropriate facilities, and some teachers may teach various grades in the same classroom at the same time. moreover, as families are poorly remunerated, children work and have limited study time and educational resources (bonilla & cruz-arcila, 2014; hossain, 2016; pinzón, 2014; roldán & peláez, 2017). as for l2 instruction, in the rural communities of latin america, for instance, inhabitants often object to learning this language as it does not figure high jesús izquierdo, silvia patricia aquino zúñiga, verónica garcía martínez 136 in their life projects (coelho & henze, 2014). moreover, educators and stakeholders, who are tightly connected with rural educational institutions, regard the l2 policy as a mere fallacy and as an unachievable decontextualized goal (ramos holguín & aguirre morales, 2016; roldán & peláez, 2017). instead, rural community learners and inhabitants prioritize public education courses which promote the development of competencies that contribute to the ability of male learners to work in the agricultural sector and of female learners to obtain employment in nearby villages (pinzón, 2014). scarce exposure to english outside of the class in rural settings further fosters apathy towards l2 instruction among learners (coelho & henze, 2014). rural learners do not see the practical use of the english lessons because teachers place heavy emphasis on error correction and decontextualized grammar learning (pinzón, 2014). additionally, learner and teacher absenteeism in schools constitutes a common trend that contributes to the learners’ educational dissatisfaction. in light of these issues, it comes as no surprise that rural learners show less l2 learning commitment and achievement in comparison to their peers in urban areas (hossain, 2016; lamb, 2012; zein, 2017). on the language teachers’ side, the aforementioned sociocultural conditions and low salaries demotivate qualified l2 educators from a career in the rural context (ramos holguín & aguirre morales, 2016). this is of major concern in an era when the recruitment of language-teaching professionals has become an indisputable challenge in industrialized and developing countries (coelho & henze, 2014; kissau et al., 2019). for the l2 educators who already work in public schools, the new educational policies place high demands in terms of l2 proficiency and l2 pedagogy (könig et al., 2016). the l2 proficiency of rural english teachers is often poor (coelho & henze, 2014). thus, they need to pursue l2 competence development courses for the use of english as the object of study and the means of communication inside and outside of the l2 class. with respect to l2 pedagogy, in-service l2 teachers have to give up the traditional grammar-oriented english teaching practices that characterize education in rural schools (pinzón, 2014). instead, under the mandate of the educational reforms, teachers need to adopt pedagogical practices that facilitate learners’ attention to meaningful language and the creation of valuable l2 communicative conditions (izquierdo et al., 2016). in urban areas, training for l2 competence and l2 pedagogy improvement is accessible through institutional or private teacher development programs (coelho & henze, 2014). nevertheless, in rural areas, educators are often deprived of such l2 teacher education opportunities (hansenthomas & grosso, 2015; zein, 2017). more challenges arise when the educational system enforces the l2 policy in rural schools which cannot count upon trained l2 educators (coelho & henze, 2014; ramos & aguirre, 2016; roldán & peláez, 2017). therefore, already hired foreign language education in rural schools: struggles and initiatives among generalist teachers. . . 137 generalist teachers, who do not relate their teaching identity to the l2 teaching profession, are forced to deliver l2 instruction (hernández & izquierdo, 2020; zein, 2017). in these schools, two types of generalist teachers face the compulsory implementation of l2 teaching. one group of teachers may hold some knowledge of the l2 and teaching certifications in areas of the curriculum that exclude l2 pedagogy (hansen-thomas & grosso, 2015; zein, 2017). the other group has general pedagogical training but lack both l2 competence and l2 teacher education (coelho & henze, 2014; hernández & izquierdo, 2020). evidence from studies that have focused on generalist teachers indicates that their appreciation of their own l2 pedagogy underqualification deteriorates their self-perception of their teaching effectiveness and self-esteem (hansen-thomas et al., 2016). this perception emerges from the need of metalinguistic knowledge to deliver appropriate language-related explanations. it also results from their awareness that general pedagogical training is insufficient for the creation of engaging l2 lessons (carr, 1999; zein, 2017). while in some educational contexts generalist teachers have no institutional support for the delivery of l2 education, in other contexts they receive technology-enhanced instructional packages which could help them compensate for their lack of l2 competence and l2 teacher education (hansen-thomas & grosso, 2015; roldán & peláez, 2017). these instructional aids aim to make “learning more pleasant to the students because they offer a reality of experiences, which stimulate self-activity and imagination” (hossain, 2016, p. 3). moreover, they can provide exposure to meaningful l2 input and output opportunities whereby learners can realize the importance of l2 learning during secondary education. nonetheless, for the effective implementation of the official technology enhanced packages, the rural school educators often lack proper training on the use of technology or do not have access to the necessary facilities and equipment for their implementation (hossain, 2016; roldán & peláez, 2017). in sum, generalist teachers face many challenges in the delivery of english l2 education in rural schools. to date, only a handful of studies have been conducted with this group of teachers. hansen-thomas et al. (2016), for instance, explored the development of l2 teaching competencies among generalist teachers through peer collaboration with l2 specialists. also, hossain (2016) examined the challenges that generalist teachers face in the teaching of english in rural areas. these studies have provided some valuable insights into their perception of self-efficacy and motivation, but questions arise regarding the daily challenges that they face in english teaching in their school settings. furthermore, little is known about the strategies and actions they rely upon on a daily basis for the implementation of english language teaching policy. empirical evidence on these issues is valuable as the choices teachers make in their daily educational jesús izquierdo, silvia patricia aquino zúñiga, verónica garcía martínez 138 practices are not only decisive for the effective implementation of the l2 educational policies (hernández & izquierdo, 2020; roldán & peláez, 2017) but they also play a key role in teacher attrition rates in the rural context, where teacher recruitment is a major concern (hancock & scherff, 2010; kissau et al., 2019; ramos holguín & aguirre morales, 2016). in order to explore the struggles and initiatives of generalist teachers as they face the compulsory teaching of english in rural areas, this study addresses the following two research questions: 1. what are the challenges that generalist teachers encounter on a daily basis in the delivery of english l2 instruction in rural public schools? 2. on what strategies do they rely for the delivery of english l2 instruction in rural public schools? 3. method 3.1. research design in order to answer the research questions, a sequential explanatory mixedmethods study was conducted (creswell, 2018). first, a survey was administered to a large group of generalist secondary school teachers who are required to teach english in rural areas of the southeast of mexico. through the survey, quantitative data on their teacher education and teaching conditions were collected. then, a sub-sample of teachers, who showed some or no participation in l2 teacher education and english learning courses in the survey, took part in an interview. in the interview, they provided qualitative data on the challenges of rural l2 education and the strategies they put in place. 3.2. context and participants in mexico, public secondary education can be completed in general, technical and tele-secondary schools. all schools follow the same national curriculum. general and technical schools are often located in urban areas or town suburbs, whereas tele-secondary schools are in rural areas. according to the ministry of education (secretaría de educación [se]), tele-secondary schools serve 50% of the learner population nationwide and are widely distributed across the 32 mexican states (se, 2011). in the southeast of mexico, the context of this study, 37% of the learner population completes secondary education in tele-secondary schools, whereas 35% attends general secondary schools and 28% goes to technical schools (se, 2017). in general and technical secondary schools, specialist educators teach each area of the curriculum. in the case of l2 instruction, each school counts on foreign language education in rural schools: struggles and initiatives among generalist teachers. . . 139 one or more english teachers. they go from classroom to classroom and deliver english lessons across the three grades of secondary education (izquierdo et al., 2016). in the tele-secondary schools, however, one generalist teacher covers all the areas of the curriculum with the learners of one secondary school grade throughout the entire school year (hernández & izquierdo, 2020). in order to assist the generalist teachers with the delivery of each area of the curriculum, the ministry of education broadcasts televised lessons and offers online educational packages (https://telesecundaria.sep.gob.mx) and free textbooks. due to the use of technological resources such as televised programs and web-based resources in the delivery of the content of each area of the curriculum, these schools are called tele-secondaries. in the case of english, the generalist teachers should first watch the televised lessons with their learners and then provide extensive l2 practice through the integration of the textbook and educational packages. in mexican rural areas, the conditions of public schools vary from one school to the next (bryan & mclaughlin, 2005). in the case of tele-secondary education, where a school has only two generalist teachers, learners from two different grades are often grouped in the same classroom and work with the same teacher throughout the year. due to this variability in the conditions of the rural secondary schools, non-probabilistic sampling was used for the teacher sample selection. upon consideration of convenience sampling, four conditions were met: the participating teachers would work in tele-secondary schools with the three grades of secondary education, the selected teachers should teach one grade only, the school should have two sections of each secondary grade, and schools would need to be scattered across the four geopolitical areas of the southeast of mexico. these criteria favored the homogenization of the school conditions among the participants and created conditions for generalizable results among the teacher sample. based on these criteria, 17 secondary schools were selected for the study. the research team first contacted the school superintendents and principals, who invited all school teachers to a meeting in their schools. during the meetings, the research team informed all teachers of the purpose, data collection instruments and ethical procedures of the study. for the quantitative phase, only the 115 teachers who signed a consent form were considered. approximately similar numbers of grade 1 (36%), grade 2 (32%) and grade 3 (32%) teachers constituted our quantitative sample. their average age was 41 years old, and, on average, they had been in the rural secondary school system for 16 years. most participants were female teachers (53%). their schools were situated in small villages in the southeast of mexico. the distance between the rural schools and the researchers’ university varied from 27 to 159 kilometers. further details on the participants’ educational and teaching profiles are presented in the results section. jesús izquierdo, silvia patricia aquino zúñiga, verónica garcía martínez 140 for the qualitative phase of the study, only nine participants provided written consent for an individual interview. from this group, four teachers were selected on the basis of some or no participation in l2 teacher education and english learning courses. in the following sections, pseudonyms are used for each interviewee. as per the participants’ explicit request, details on their school affiliation are omitted. lydia had worked in the rural secondary school system for 27 years, the largest number of years among the interviewees. her undergraduate studies were in the area of administration. she did not report attendance of l2 teaching or english learning courses. she indicated knowledge of the foundations that underpin english language learning in secondary education and of the english materials from the ministry of education. nonetheless, she had no knowledge of the common european framework. celia held a ba in education and had been in the rural secondary school system for 24 years. she reported knowledge of the curricular foundations of english learning in secondary education, the common european framework and the l2 materials from the ministry of education. she had attended an english language learning course in a private institution but had not been involved in any kind of l2 teacher education seminar or workshop. similar to celia, juan had earned a ba in education and had been in the rural secondary school system for 24 years. nevertheless, juan indicated not knowing the foundations of english learning in secondary education or the common european framework but knew about the l2 materials from the ministry of education. he had attended a formal english language learning course and reported that he had autonomously been learning english and about english language teaching. martha had a ba in education and had been in the rural secondary school system for only eight years. different from the other interviewees, martha did not only know the foundations of english language teaching in secondary education and the common european framework, but she had also attended l2 competence development and l2 pedagogy courses. specifically, she had obtained a university certificate in english language learning that lasted eight semesters and had earned a 120-hour certificate in english language teaching from a higher education institution. with respect to the l2 materials from the ministry of education, martha indicated she knew about them but preferred not to use them. 3.3. quantitative data collection instrument: survey this instrument included 17 closed-ended questions that were organized into six sections. sections 1 through 3 elicited information about the participants’ experience and knowledge of the tele-secondary school system. specifically, foreign language education in rural schools: struggles and initiatives among generalist teachers. . . 141 these sections included questions about their past and current teaching experience (section 1), the secondary school curriculum and its principles for the teaching of english (section 2), and the ministry of education’s instructional resources (section 3). then, the survey had a set of questions about the participants’ english language learning experience (section 4) and attendance of language teaching workshops and seminars (section 5). finally, teachers were presented with questions about their willingness to participate in l2 competence development and l2 pedagogy courses (section 6). the initial version of the survey was conceptualized by the first author and then analyzed for construct and ecological validity (field, 2017) by the co-authors, who served as experts due to their research experience with tele-secondary school teachers and their knowledge of the public secondary school curriculum. after the analyses, changes were made in sections 2 and 3 following the recommendations from the experts. the participating teachers completed the final survey version in spanish (see appendix for the english version) within ten minutes during the first visit of the research group. 3.4. qualitative data collection instrument: individual interview a thematized semi-structured interview (creswell, 2018) was conducted to expand upon the participants’ survey answers. three central themes, organized in logical sequence, were explored: 1) the curricular demand for compulsory english language learning instruction in rural secondary schools, 2) the challenges in the delivery of l2 instruction on a daily basis, and 3) the individual strategies for the compliance with this curricular demand. the research team identified these themes on the basis of the research questions, the literature review and the prompts in the initial survey. each interview theme included three start-off open-ended questions, which met construct and ecological validity criteria as determined by the group of experts (creswell, 2018). during the interview, all the participants were asked the three start-off questions. then, emerging personalized questions were used for a deeper exploration of the participants’ initial responses. each teacher was interviewed individually for about 30 minutes in a quiet school classroom. all interviews were conducted in spanish by a trained member of the research team and audio-recorded. 3.5. data analysis procedures the survey responses were entered into excel spreadsheets by a research assistant. a second research assistant crosschecked the spreadsheet data with the survey answers. using the statistical software spss version 25, frequency distribution analyses were run (field, 2017). through these analyses, response patterns were identified for jesús izquierdo, silvia patricia aquino zúñiga, verónica garcía martínez 142 post-secondary education, interest in l2 teacher education, knowledge about english language learning in tele-secondary education and english teaching conditions. the interviews were transcribed verbatim with a word processor by a research assistant. then, the transcripts were crosschecked against the audio-recorded interviews by the first author. the word files were imported into atlas.ti version 8.4.4 for the completion of categorical aggregation analyses (creswell, 2018). following this procedure, the data from the four informants were integrated and treated holistically for the identification of emerging categories. during the first transcript analysis, 118 excerpts were coded under nine categories. for reliability purposes, these results were discussed with a qualitative research specialist. after the discussion, the texts were re-coded for categorical reduction (creswell, 2018) and three main categories of analysis were established: sociocultural factors, professionalization and l2 instruction. then, within each main category, challenges and strategies were identified. using the reduced categorization system, a total of 141 excerpts were identified in the interviews during the second coding: lydia (n = 26), celia (n = 38), juan (n = 24) and martha (n = 53). 4. results in the following sections, the survey analysis results are first presented, followed by the interview data findings. 4.1. survey data in the quantitative data, the following survey response patterns were observed. 4.1.1. post-secondary education the survey data indicated that 95% of the generalist teachers held either undergraduate or graduate degrees in education or educational studies. specifically, out of the 63% of the generalist teachers with undergraduate degrees, eight had earned a ba in disciplinary areas such as biology, administration, law or veterinary medicine. among the 37% of the generalist teachers with ma (n = 37) or phd (n = 6) studies, the survey revealed that three of them had pursued graduate degrees in law or natural sciences. 4.1.2. l2 education the generalist teachers had received three years of public english language instruction during the completion of secondary education (izquierdo et al., 2016). foreign language education in rural schools: struggles and initiatives among generalist teachers. . . 143 while in the survey 89% of the generalist teachers expressed interest in attending english language courses and l2 teacher education seminars, only 17% had undertaken the completion of at least one course for the improvement of their english language competence or of their l2 pedagogical knowledge. among them, one had completed a ba in modern language studies with a concentration on foreign language teaching. 4.1.3. familiarity with the l2 curricular demands the survey revealed that about 83% of the generalist teachers reported knowing the learning principles and teaching/evaluation practices that their school curriculum states for the english class. nonetheless, about 43% of the teachers were unaware of the l2 proficiency benchmarks that their learners are expected to reach by the end of each secondary school grade on the basis of the common european framework. moreover, 62% of the generalist teachers reported not using the ministry of education’s l2 educational resources. 4.1.4. english language teaching self-confidence a noticeable response pattern in the survey data related to the detriment in the level of l2 teaching confidence among the generalist teachers throughout the secondary school grades. in their answers, it was observed that 80% of the generalist teachers felt confident teaching the content of the english curriculum in grade 1. nonetheless, the number of confident teachers drastically decreased with respect to grade 2 (37%) and grade 3 (24%). 4.2. interview data in this section we describe the challenges and strategies that were documented under the three main categories of analysis that emerged from the interview data. 4.2.1. sociocultural factors in this category, 19 excerpts for challenges and 12 excerpts for strategies were identified. with respect to the challenges, the interviewees systematically referred to the economy, infrastructure and identity affiliation of rural communities as indisputable barriers to the appropriate compliance with the l2 educational policy (all the extracts are translations from spanish): jesús izquierdo, silvia patricia aquino zúñiga, verónica garcía martínez 144 extract 1 many children work after school because they do not receive financial aid from the government. those who have financial aid do not invest in educational resources; instead, they spend the money on food and groceries for their families. (celia) extract 2 these children do not have computers or internet . . . our school is in a remote community where there are no internet networks and we often experience blackouts. (juan) extract 3 the learners are not interested in learning english. “what do i need english for? i’m not a gringo and i will stay in my village” is what they often say. (juan) with respect to the economic conditions, the teachers indicated that rural families struggle under low income. this leads to a series of interrelated educational obstacles. as learners work after school time, they often lack time for assignment completion. additionally, learners with government financial assistance spend the financial aid on family expenses and see the purchase of complimentary l2 materials as irrelevant, as extract 1 illustrates. with respect to infrastructure, extract 2 shows that rural communities often face power and internet access constraints. under these conditions, the learners have limited study time or lack power to use technological resources for independent study or the completion of assignments using the technology-enhanced materials from the ministry of education. this hinders timely coverage of the l2 curriculum as teachers need to spend more time than expected covering the content of each curricular unit during class time. finally, a major sociocultural constraint to l2 learning among rural learners relates to their identity perception, as revealed by extract 3. the teachers explained that rural learners rarely believe that they will come into contact with english speakers because they often settle down in their rural community and conceive of their community as detached from the english-speaking world. moreover, they do not see themselves as individuals who require english for academic purposes as they often disregard studies beyond secondary education. in order to counteract these limitations to english l2 learning, the teachers indicated that they sometimes engage in brief discussions with the learners about two sociocultural aspects of rural life: migration and the need for better paid jobs, as extract 4 indicates: extract 4 some people from this rural community go to the usa looking for a better life. thus, they need at least some knowledge of english to communicate and work. (lydia) foreign language education in rural schools: struggles and initiatives among generalist teachers. . . 145 with respect to migration, teachers acknowledged that some rural community inhabitants either move to major international tourist cities or migrate to the united states. in light of the former situation, teachers discuss with their learners the need of some basic communicative skills for employment in the tourist sector. as for the latter case, teachers raise learners’ awareness of the need of basic communicative skills for workers who migrate to the united states. to meet these needs, teachers consider the study of english vocabulary and phrases that their learners will require to greet people, introduce themselves or sell/buy products. as for the relevance of english in the pursuit of post-secondary education, the interviewees acknowledged that, in the english lessons, they try to help rural learners realize that life quality improvement can be reached through employment in professional jobs that demand some knowledge of english. moreover, to help the learners realize the value of l2 reading comprehension, they implement translation tasks with short academic texts that the learners might encounter in senior high school or university programs. 4.2.2. professionalization in this category, 16 excerpts for challenges and 13 excerpts for strategies were recorded. as for the challenges, all the participants clearly identified themselves as generalist teachers and felt equally committed to all areas of the secondary education curriculum. moreover, for some of them, the delivery of the english l2 curriculum is far beyond their general pedagogical knowledge and their own interest, as lydia and juan indicate in extracts 5 and 6: extract 5 we [generalist teachers] face a major challenge in the teaching of english in the rural schools . . . we don’t even have the basic vocabulary; we have no training or skills to teach english. (lydia) extract 6 since we don’t know english, its teaching is not a priority for us. (juan) for the development of the l2 and l2 teaching competencies, the interviewees indicated that they require institutionalized seminars from the ministry of education. nonetheless, they reported that such courses are scarce since the institution is committed to the provision of courses that focus on the generalities of the curricular reforms of secondary education. when l2 teacher education courses are offered, they are often delivered by peers who are not l2 teacher educators, or through short webinars, which do not foster l2 teacher development. jesús izquierdo, silvia patricia aquino zúñiga, verónica garcía martínez 146 a shared viewpoint among the participants was that the l2 teacher professionalization challenge can only be overcome with the teacher’s interest, individual initiatives and time investment. during the interview, only one participant acknowledged enrollment in various l2 competence development options. they included long-term language learning certifications, short l2 courses, short stays in english-speaking countries, or online l2 learning tutorials. as for l2 teaching competence development, only this participant indicated the completion of a long-lasting l2 pedagogy course. 4.2.3. l2 instruction in this category, the largest number of excerpts was identified (challenges: 31, strategies: 46). in the interviews, the participants highlighted multiple instructional difficulties that revolve around four interrelated issues: high l2 curricular demands, lack of sensitivity to the reality of rural schools, inadequacy of the instructional resources and prioritization of other curricular subjects over l2 instruction. with respect to curricular demands, the interviewees acknowledged that the educational reforms have set overwhelming expectations in terms of the l2 competence that the learners need for the completion of secondary education and in terms of the l2 competence that the generalist teachers are required to deliver the l2 lessons. they explained that, as generalist teachers, they hold limited notions of the l2, as extracts 5 and 6 illustrated. second, rural learners complete elementary education in their communities and come to secondary education without the expected l2 pre-requisites, as lydia indicates in extract 7: extract 7 i feel our official textbooks are too advanced as they assume learners have taken english in kindergarten and elementary school. (lydia) third, some rural learners lack proper linguistic competencies in their mother tongue, spanish, as celia indicates in extract 8: extract 8 we work in a rural community where children speak spanish with many deficiencies. then, we have to teach them english! . . . often the situations and contexts in the materials do not relate to the life of the learners. (celia) moreover, the interviewees stated that this lack of sensitivity permeates the televised lessons, technology-enhanced materials and books from the ministry of education. they felt these materials include content beyond the l2 abilities of teachers and students and often present contexts and situations which are irrelevant to foreign language education in rural schools: struggles and initiatives among generalist teachers. . . 147 rural learners. under these challenges, the interviewees see the preparation and delivery of l2 lessons as time-consuming, and often prefer dedicating that time to the implementation of maths and first language literacy lessons. during the interviews, the generalist teachers discussed several initiatives that counteract most of the aforementioned instructional challenges. these initiatives included avoidance of the official materials, coverage of limited l2 vocabulary (see extracts 10-11), reliance on internet-based video-tutorials (see extract 10) and use of translations (see extracts 9-10). according to the interviewees, the official materials are relevant only to identifying the l2 topics that they need to teach. nonetheless, the topics are covered by activities from books and websites that are appropriate to the teachers’ l2 competence. the participants reiterated that these activities focus on vocabulary and grammar-rule learning in short dialogues. for the implementation of these tasks, the teachers often rely on projecting videos with explanations in spanish; the generalist teachers felt these materials are particularly valuable as they provide specialized explanations or accurate word/sentence pronunciation that are beyond their l2 knowledge. for the interviewees, these tasks integrated vocabulary with which they felt comfortable due to their level of english and activities that required basic l2 knowledge from the learners themselves. often, they indicated their teaching emulated the l2 activities they had experienced as l2 learners and which they considered effective for vocabulary and grammar learning. two interviewees also explained that their l2 teaching was based on their analysis of what they considered effective l2 teaching practices that they had developed through trial and error: extract 9 i translate the book and activities into spanish and then project the translations . . . when there’s power outage, i tell the students: ok, pull out your dictionary, we’re going to translate the text in the book . . . sometimes i ask them to work in groups and translate the texts . . . in these groups, i appoint a student leader who reports back to me whether all of them contributed. (lydia) extract 10 i teach basic vocabulary, as if they were in elementary school: colors, vocabulary about the family, fruits, jobs… i play video tutorials . . . students translate the vocabulary and check the pronunciation. (celia) extract 11 i teach vocabulary in context. then, they make vocabulary presentations. we watch videos where they check the pronunciation of the words . . . when i play an audio, i stop it and ask them for the words they understood. this way, they learn vocabulary that they can use if they go to college. (celia) jesús izquierdo, silvia patricia aquino zúñiga, verónica garcía martínez 148 5. discussion through two research questions, this study examined the challenges and initiatives of generalist teachers who are obligated to deliver state-sanctioned english l2 instruction in rural secondary schools in the southeast of mexico. our evidence substantiates the claim that, despite attending to a significant proportion of the student population, rural generalist teachers constitute a forgotten minority of the public education sector in terms of institutional support. such support could help them comply with the demands of their school curriculum (hansen-thomas et al., 2016; hossain, 2016; zein, 2017; ramos holguín & aguirre morales, 2016). in terms of l2 education, policy makers and educational stakeholders need to recognize the fact that the lack of l2 preparedness amongst generalist teachers constitutes an undisputable challenge to the implementation of the english language teaching policy and the attainment of the l2 curricular aims in rural schools. our evidence suggests that the l2 educational policies, curricular guidelines and educational packages available do not help teachers compensate for their lack of l2 competence, a sound understanding of instructed l2 acquisition and l2 teaching strategies. in the absence of all these aspects of l2 teacher knowledge, our participants have taken up two worrisome practices. one initiative relates to their professionalization. despite the urgent need of l2 teacher preparedness, in our study only a few generalist teachers have committed themselves to the development of l2 competence and l2 pedagogical knowledge. this behavior diverges from the actions of generalist teachers in other international contexts who have pursued l2 teacher education initiatives for the enhancement of l2 teaching knowledge and skills (hansen-thomas & grosso, 2015; pinzón, 2014; zein, 2017). explanations for this behavior are found in the interviews, where our participants openly acknowledged that, as generalist teachers, they see themselves equally committed to all areas of the curriculum. for them, l2 instruction constitutes just another subject area to teach. under time and financial constraints, they then privilege teacher education that focuses on the principles of the educational reforms and subject-matter areas such as spanish reading comprehension, mathematics and the sciences, as these curricular areas constitute the focus of national standardized tests (saulés, 2012; se, 2016). the second initiative relates to the implementation of instructional strategies that may work to the detriment of l2 learning in rural schools. for instance, in an attempt to consolidate the learning of basic l2 knowledge among their learners, the generalist teachers disregard the official textbook and technology-based materials. instead, they opt for resources that are less challenging for them and their learners. the content of these resources alters the flow of the linguistic and communicative features in the english curriculum. also, teachers foreign language education in rural schools: struggles and initiatives among generalist teachers. . . 149 make individualized choices with respect to the l2 content that is covered and left out. this brings serious challenges for the teacher who will work with the learners the year after. finally, teachers select l2 instructional tasks that do not foster communicative use of english. instead, these tasks lead to the systematic use of translations, decontextualized grammar rule practice, vocabulary memorization and error correction that foster apathy towards the english class among rural learners (pinzón, 2014; ramos holguín & aguirre morales, 2016; yunus & abdullah, 2011). in terms of sociocultural challenges, as in other international contexts (ramos holguín & aguirre morales, 2016; roldán & pelaez, 2017; zein, 2017), our generalist teachers perceived the l2 educational policies as rigid and detached from the reality of l2 education in rural communities. in mexico, rural learners advance through public education with academic and language learning flaws that have accumulated during their transit throughout the educational offerings available to them (bryan & mclaughin, 2005). these flaws relate not only to deficient subject-matter learning in elementary education. they are also associated with poor development of their mother tongue and lack of sufficient knowledge of the world outside of their rural communities. our data indicate that the generalist teachers are quite aware of these and other sociocultural challenges that pertain to the l2 academic achievements and failures of their rural learners. because of these challenges, one laudable initiative of our generalist teachers is that they consider the learners’ family, social, cultural and emotional problems in the organization of their english lessons. for instance, as the rural learners lack some first language literacy skills, teachers implement translation tasks where the learners do not only cover the grammar and lexis of the l2 but also learn about the proper use of their mother tongue. also, as many family members from the rural south of mexico migrate to the united states (bryan & mclaughlin 2005), the generalist teachers dwell upon their learners’ need to maintain communication with their parents or siblings abroad. this sociocultural value that our generalist teachers give to the learning of english in rural schools and their efforts to help their learners gain some l2 proficiency contrasts with the perceptions of teachers in the rural areas of other latin american countries (bonilla & cruz-arcila, 2014; coelho & henze, 2014; ramos holguín & aguirre morales, 2016; roldán & peláez, 2017). for our generalist teachers, it is clear that the geographical proximity between mexico and the united states, as well as the border-crossing conditions of mexican migrants, draws an important social scenario for the role of english language learning in rural learners’ lives. therefore, they feel morally compelled to provide their learners with some l2 knowledge in case they or their relatives migrate. the study then provides evidence of some drawbacks of the enactment of l2 education policies in rural areas. however, the mixed-methods approach jesús izquierdo, silvia patricia aquino zúñiga, verónica garcía martínez 150 of the study brought about various methodological challenges. for instance, the quantitative sampling criteria allowed for the selection of teachers across comparable rural schools, disregarding the fact that the conditions of rural schools substantially vary from one region to the next. in order to take into account rural school differences and increase the generalizability of the results (field, 2017), stratified or cluster sampling could be considered in future research. as for the qualitative insights of the study, they come from a small number of teachers who participated in short interviews. these insights result from data that could have been corroborated through classroom observations. however, the generalist teachers rejected the idea of being observed, most likely for reasons that have been addressed in previous l2 classroom-based studies (izquierdo et al., 2016). nonetheless, the use of various qualitative data collection instruments deserves consideration for the triangulation of qualitative evidence in future research. 6. conclusion the generalist teachers in this study reflect and act upon the sociocultural, professionalization and instructional challenges around the english language teaching policy in their rural schools. as in other international contexts (ramos holguín & aguirre morales, 2016; zein, 2017), they are aware of their need of l2 teacher education, but l2 teaching preparedness does not figure high among their initiatives. instead, they prefer teacher education that provides them with general information about the secondary school curriculum, educational reforms and the pedagogy of the various subject-matter areas they teach in the learners’ first language. under these circumstances, they rely upon teaching practices that help them circumvent the l2 competence and l2 pedagogy demands of their school curriculum. but these l2 professional and teaching initiatives raise concerns about the effectiveness of the implementation of l2 educational policies in rural schools. l2 teacher education options are scarce in rural areas (coelho & henze, 2014; hansen-thomas & grosso, 2015), and the institutional l2 teacher training available is not sufficient. moreover, teachers often face time limitations for teacher education outside of their teaching schedule and rural school settings. therefore, the organization and promotion of l2 teacher education programs for generalist teachers in rural areas should be a major concern for policy makers, educational stakeholders and higher education institutions. upon consideration of previous research that focused on l2 teacher development in rural areas (hansen-thomas & grosso, 2015; pinzón, 2014), the l2 preparedness challenge among generalist teachers can be overcome through the implementation of teacher projects that unfold in the rural schools. their implementation can consider the integration of teacher teams and l2 educator specialists. educational projects which foreign language education in rural schools: struggles and initiatives among generalist teachers. . . 151 foster collaboration between generalist teachers and l2 specialists constitute effective teacher education strategies which promote collegial critical inquiry, focused dialogue and in-depth reflection (hansen-thomas & grosso, 2015). furthermore, as generalist teachers cover subject matter and l2 teaching with the same learners during the complete school year, they could engage in collaboration with l2 specialists and develop teaching projects where they work on the integration of english with other areas of the curriculum. the integration of l2 and subject matter teaching is complex but achievable and gratifying (arias & izquierdo, 2015). through the integration of language and content learning, generalist teachers can foster the interrelated learning of english and areas of the curriculum such as life sciences, history, and so on. as teachers participate in these projects, they can improve their l2 competence, expand their repertoire of l2 instructional tasks and deepen their knowledge of l2 pedagogical principles (hansen-thomas & grosso, 2015). also, as their learners face the integration of l2 and subject-matter learning in these l2 teacher education projects, they can realize the importance of l2 learning, develop l1 and l2 academic skills and increase their self-confidence (arias & izquierdo, 2015). in turn, this type of l2 teacher education initiatives could have positive implications for the enactment of l2 educational policies among generalist teachers and scaffold the effective implementation of english language education in rural schools. acknowledgements we are grateful to the school superintendents, principals and teachers. we also thank lisseth cuevas, darcy stock and the journal editor and reviewers for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. jesús izquierdo, silvia patricia aquino zúñiga, verónica garcía martínez 152 references arias, a., & izquierdo, j. 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(2017). elementary english education in indonesia: policy developments, current practices, and future prospects. english today, 33(1), 53-59. jesús izquierdo, silvia patricia aquino zúñiga, verónica garcía martínez 154 appendix english language professionalization survey for generalist teachers in rural secondary schools teacher’s name _________________________________________________________ i. teaching experience 1. please indicate the year that you started working as a teacher in tele-secondary education in the southeast of mexico: ________________________ 2. underline the grades that you have taught in the public secondary schools of the southeast of mexico. a) grade 1 b) grade 2 c) grade 3 3. underline the grade you currently teach at your tele-secondary school. a) grade 1 b) grade 2 c) grade 3 4. underline the grade that you are at most at ease teaching english in tele-secondary education. a) grade 1 b) grade 2 c) grade 3 ii. curricular knowledge 5. are you aware of the curricular basis that supports english learning in secondary education in the 2011 curriculum and syllabus for the basic education levels (i.e., kindergarten, elementary and secondary education)? a) yes b) no 6. are you aware of the common european framework’s english benchmarks that secondary school students must reach, according to the 2011 curriculum and syllabus? a) yes b) no 7. are you aware of the pedagogical approach that supports english learning and teaching in tele-secondary education? a) yes b) no iii. didactic materials 8. do you use in your english classes the didactic materials that are available at the website www.telesecundaria.sep.gob.mx to teach this language in tele-secondary schools? a) yes b) no 9. if you use the didactic materials that are available at the website www.telesecunda ria.sep.gob.mx, underline the reasons that motivate yourself to do so. · they are easy for me to understand. · they are easy for my students to understand. · they are available in my school. · my school has the appropriate technological resources for their implementation. · my school has the appropriate infrastructure for their implementation. foreign language education in rural schools: struggles and initiatives among generalist teachers. . . 155 · it motivates students to learn english. 10. if you don’t use the didactic materials that are available at the website www.telesecund aria.sep.gob.mx, underline the reasons that push you to do this. · they are difficult for me to understand. · they are difficult for my students to understand. · they are not available in my school. · my school does not have the appropriate technological resources for their implementation. · my school does not have the appropriate infrastructure for their implementation. · it does not motivate students to learn english. 11. have you attended some training about how to employ the didactic materials that are available at the website www.telesecundaria.sep.gob.mx to teach english in tele-secondary schools? a) yes b) no iv. knowledge of the english language 12. underline the educational levels in which you underwent obligatory english lessons. a) public secondary d) private primary g) private university b) public preparatory e) private secondary c) public university f) private preparatory 13. underline other educational options that you have reached out to in order to improve your english knowledge. a) university language schools. how many semesters? _____________ b) private institutions such as harmon hall, english point, etc. how many semesters? _________ c) autonomously. how many months? ___________ d) english courses provided by the ministry of education for tele-secondary school teachers. approximate duration in hours: ______________ e) other (please indicate which): __________________________________________ v. english language teaching training 14. check the training/education that you possess in relation to english language teaching. a) english language teaching courses organized by the ministry of education for tele-secondary school teachers. approximate duration of hours: ________________ b) english language teaching courses not organized by the ministry of education for telesecondary school teachers. approximate duration of hours: _____________ c) i haven’t taken any courses related to the teaching of the english language. d) workshops, conferences or congresses about english language teaching organized by the ministry of education for tele-secondary school teachers. approximate duration of hours: _____________ e) workshops, conferences or congresses about english language teaching not organized by the ministry of education for tele-secondary school teachers. approximate duration of hours: _____________ jesús izquierdo, silvia patricia aquino zúñiga, verónica garcía martínez 156 f) i haven’t participated in any workshop, conferences or congresses about english language teaching. vi. willingness to participate in english language learning and teaching courses 15. are you interested in taking a course to improve your english language proficiency? a) yes b) no 16. are you interested in taking a course related to english language teaching? a) yes b) no 17. are you interested in taking a course related to the available online english-language instructional materials concerning tele-secondary education? a) yes b) no thank you very much! . 153 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (2). 2014. 153-172 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.2.2 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl introducing positive psychology to sla peter d. macintyre cape breton university, canada peter_macintyre@cbu.ca sarah mercer university of graz, austria sarah.mercer@uni-graz.at abstract positive psychology is a rapidly expanding subfield in psychology that has important implications for the field of second language acquisition (sla). this paper introduces positive psychology to the study of language by describing its key tenets. the potential contributions of positive psychology are contextualized with reference to prior work, including the humanistic movement in language teaching, models of motivation, the concept of an affective filter, studies of the good language learner, and the concepts related to the self. there are reasons for both encouragement and caution as studies inspired by positive psychology are undertaken. papers in this special issue of ssllt cover a range of quantitative and qualitative methods with implications for theory, research, and teaching practice. the special issue serves as a springboard for future research in sla under the umbrella of positive psychology. keywords: positive psychology, motivation, the good language learner, humanistic education, positive emotion peter d. macintyre, sarah mercer 154 1. what is positive psychology? positive psychology (pp) is the empirical study of how people thrive and flourish; it is the study of the ordinary human strengths and virtues that make life good (csikszentmihalyi & nakamura, 2011; lopez & snyder, 2009; peterson, 2006; seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000). from its inception, pp has been designed to address three topic areas: the workings of positive internal experiences such as emotions, positive individual characteristics such as traits associated with living well, and institutions that enable people to flourish. the goal of pp, expressed simply, is to help people lead better lives. to do so, rather than taking a palliative approach to reducing pain or coping with distressing experience, pp seeks to develop tools to build positive emotions, greater engagement, and an appreciation of meaning in life and its activities (seligman, 2006). there are several books written by pp researchers for a general audience, including seligman’s (2002) authentic happiness and flourish (2011). these books strive to mobilize the empirical research into practical actions that have empirical research support. when comparing these two works by seligman, we see the transition toward a more complex concept of well-being. seligman (2011) uses the acronym perma to reflect the multiple dimensions of the good life, including a focus on positive emotion (p), engagement with activities that use one’s character strengths (e), developing positive interpersonal relationships (r), finding meaning by serving a cause beyond oneself (m), and recognizing areas of accomplishment and achievement (a). as a defined scholarly area, pp has been said to have a short history and a long past (peterson, 2006); it represents a form of “rebirth” for humanistic psychology (funder, 2010), but with a stronger emphasis on empirical research. the narrative of the founding of modern pp is most often traced to 1998, when thenpresident of the american psychological association, martin seligman, focussed on “prevention” as the working theme for the annual convention (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p. 7). positive psychology became the focus of his year at the helm of the organization (seligman, 1999). a short time later, the millennial issue of american psychologist featured 16 papers introducing the newly christened field of positive ssychology to a wide audience. in their seminal article, seligman and csikszentmihalyi (2000) each tell a personal story that led them to focus on the positive side of being human, stories that we will include here as an illustration of the shift in perspective that pp represents. for csikszentmihalyi, best known for his work on creativity and flow, the study of human psychology took hold during the second world war: introducing positive psychology to sla 155 as a child, i witnessed the dissolution of the smug world in which i had been comfortably ensconced: i noticed with surprise how many of the adults i had known as successful and self-confident became helpless and dispirited once the war removed their social supports. without jobs, money or status they were reduced to empty shells. yet there were a few who kept their integrity and purpose despite the surrounding chaos. their serenity was a beacon that kept others from losing hope. and these were not the men and women one would have expected to emerge unscathed: they were not necessarily the most respected, better educated, or more skilled individuals. this experience set me thinking: what sources of strength were these people drawing on? (p. 6) seligman, who was previously best known for studies of learned helplessness and clinical depression, tells a story of an everyday experience infused with deep meaning, as so many everyday experiences can be. he describes a moment of understanding, where he could make a choice to live a more positive life: the moment took place in my garden while i was weeding with my five-year old daughter, nikki. i have to confess that even though i write books about children, i’m really not all that good with children. i am goal-oriented and time-urgent and when i’m weeding in the garden, i’m actually trying to get the weeding done. nikki, however, was throwing weeds into the air, singing, and dancing around. i yelled at her. she walked away came back and said, “daddy, i want to talk to you.” “yes, nikki?” “daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday? from the time i was three to the time i was five, i was a whiner. i whined every day. when i turned five, i decided not to whine anymore. that was the hardest thing i've ever done. and if i can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.” this was for me an epiphany, nothing less. (pp. 5-6) proponents of pp have pointed out that, in general, psychology can tend towards the negative when it is focussed on abnormalities, disorders, and mental illness (seligman, 2006). if there is a single document that best captures the practice of modern psychology, it is the diagnostic and statistical manual (the dsm-5 published by the american psychiatric association, 2013); a thick compendium that details mental disorders, their frequency, contributing and exacerbating factors, associated disorders, and so on. pp does not aim to replace the dsm or to alter the topics of clinical psychology. rather, pp aims to contribute another perspective to psychology by studying what we can do to increase strengths and attributes such as resiliency, happiness, optimism and the like in the general population. if pp has something akin to the dsm, it would be the via inventory of strengths survey (formerly called values in action survey), a worldwide, internet-based, ongoing study of character strengths and virtues (peterson & seligman, 2004). the 24 character strengths in the via peter d. macintyre, sarah mercer 156 survey are organized into six categories representing virtues that are found in all cultures. table 1 provides a brief description of each of the six overarching virtues and the specific character strengths categorized within each. second language acquisition (sla) rarely deals with these topics at present; however, their relevance in the field is immediately apparent when one considers the practical, human, and social dimension of language learning. many language educators are aware of the importance of improving individual learners’ experiences of language learning by helping them to develop and maintain their motivation, perseverance, and resiliency, as well as positive emotions necessary for the long-term undertaking of learning a foreign language. in addition, teachers also widely recognise the vital role played by positive classroom dynamics amongst learners and teachers, especially in settings in which communication and personally meaningful interactions are foregrounded. for these reasons, we feel that studying the role of strengths, such as those listed in table 1, along with the institutions, such as classrooms, schools, and language policies, that explicitly enable the expression and development of strengths would represent a valuable addition to current perspectives on language learning processes and contexts. table 1 six virtues and 24 character strengths in the via inventory of strengths (adapted from ruch, weber, park, & peterson, 2014) wisdom and knowledge: cognitive strengths that entail the acquisition and use of knowledge (1) creativity: thinking of novel and productive ways to do things (2) curiosity: taking an interest in all of ongoing experience (3) open-mindedness: thinking things through and examining them from all sides (4) love of learning: mastering new skills, topics, and bodies of knowledge (5) perspective: being able to provide wise counsel to others courage: emotional strengths that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external or internal (6) bravery: not shrinking from threat, challenge, difficulty, or pain (7) perseverance: finishing what one starts (8) honesty: speaking the truth and presenting oneself in a genuine way (9) zest: approaching life with excitement and energy humanity: interpersonal strengths that involve “tending and befriending” others (10) love: valuing close relations with others (11) kindness: doing favors and good deeds for others (12) social intelligence: being aware of the motives and feelings of self and others justice: civic strengths that underlie healthy community life (13) teamwork: working well as member of a group or team (14) fairness: treating all people the same according to notions of fairness and justice (15) leadership: organizing group activities and seeing that they happen introducing positive psychology to sla 157 temperance: strengths that protect against excess (16) forgiveness: forgiving those who have done wrong (17) modesty: letting one’s accomplishments speak for themselves (18) prudence: being careful about one’s choices; not saying or doing things that might later be regretted (19) self-regulation: regulating what one feels and does transcendence: strengths that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning (20) appreciation of beauty and excellence [short: beauty]: noticing and appreciating beauty, excellence, and/or skilled performance in all domains of life (21) gratitude: being aware of and thankful for the good things that happen (22) hope: expecting the best and working to achieve it (23) humor: liking to laugh and joke; bringing smiles to other people (24) religiousness: having coherent beliefs about the higher purpose and meaning of life 2. pp roots in humanistic psychology the short narrative of the history of pp might begin in 1998, but the long past traces back to foundational philosophies in the east and in the west that questioned the meaning of living well (dahlsgaard, peterson, & seligman, 2005). topics of love, virtue, character strength, and related subjects have occupied the thoughts of great philosophers, poets and teachers for centuries. the recent history of psychology, and indeed education, features significant contributions from the humanist tradition found in the influential work of maslow and others (e.g., see maslow, 1979). maslow’s (1968, 1970) approach to studying human nature shares common ground with csikszentmihalyi in emphasizing the study of characteristics of respected and admired persons. this is the good specimen approach where one focuses on the best examples of lives well lived (csikszentmihalyi & csikszentmihalyi, 2006; maslow, 1969). psychology has more often taken an illness-oriented approach, most famously embodied in the work of sigmund freud. whereas freud studied neurotic maladies to inform a ground-breaking theory of the mind, maslow compiled case studies of admired colleagues and mentors, from which he wrote his influential descriptions of self-actualizing people (maslow, 1968, 1970). yet, maslow’s particular approach to humanistic psychology was both eclectic and inclusive: “i am freudian and i am behavioristic and i am humanistic” (maslow, 1969, p. 724). his personal experience included years of being psychoanalyzed himself, and his original research was in the behaviourist tradition, studying monkeys as harry harlow’s first doctoral graduate (hoffman, 1992). although maslow himself embraced empiricism and sought to ground his thinking in research data, humanistic psychology generally did not engage with a strongly empirical approach, which ultimately led to extensive criticism of work emerging from this branch of psychology. it is peter d. macintyre, sarah mercer 158 a credit to maslow himself that he was able to resolve the apparent dichotomy between empiricism and humanism and embrace multiple epistemological perspectives (waterman, 2013). 3. on the trail of positive psychology in sla as with the field of psychology, pp in sla could perhaps be viewed as having a short history and a long past. lake (2013) was one of the first to explicitly adapt and apply pp concepts in his study of japanese learners’ positive self, positive l2 self, self-efficacy, and intended effort. lake successfully demonstrated that pp-inspired measures correlate with effort, self-efficacy, and toeic bridge scores. there are several additional, established concepts familiar to those studying sla that could also be brought under a pp umbrella. although there are a number of lines of inquiry that we could consider, let us focus on five especially salient ones: the humanistic movement in language teaching, models of motivation that draw upon a range of affective factors, the concept of an affective filter, studies of the good language learner, and the more recent literature on concepts related to the self and its development. the humanistic movement in language teaching was at its peak in the 1970s and 1980s. characteristically, humanistic approaches took a holistic view of the learner, combining cognition and affect; the underlying assumption, as expressed by roberts (as cited in stevick, 1990), being that “the affective aspects of language learning are as important as the cognitive aspects, [and therefore] the learner should be treated in some sense as a 'whole person'” (p. 26). today few would dispute such core principles and their importance for understanding language learner psychology and behaviours. however, humanism became closely associated with alternative forms of language teaching such as suggestopedia, the silent way, and total physical response (asher, 1969; gattegno, 1963; lozanov, 1979). as with humanistic psychology, these instructional methods came under considerable criticism for their lack of scientific support and validity; however, the humanistic tradition as a guiding approach and epistemology has had a considerable, lasting influence in sla. indeed, integrating affect and cognition remains a key tenet of many contemporary sla models. in particular, work by r. c. gardner and his colleagues has played an important role in drawing attention to socio-affective factors and the importance of positive attitudes toward the language, its speakers and related cultures (gardner & lambert, 1972; gardner, 1985, 2010). in the socio-educational model, gardner (2010) holds that positive attitudes towards the learning situation (teacher and course) facilitate language learning. the social milieu in which the learning takes place is a key source of introducing positive psychology to sla 159 both positive and negative attitudes, as learners internalize elements of the context in which they live. clément’s (1980, 1986) socio-contextual model places even more emphasis on the learning context, the power relationships among language groups, and tensions between language acquisition and language loss, especially for members of a minority group learning the language of a majority group. in addition, clément proposes a secondary motivational process within the individual, self-confidence, which is defined by low anxiety and perceptions of high linguistic competence. both gardner’s and clément’s models foreground the role of social and cultural contexts, highlighting that an individual’s psychology does not exist in a vacuum; an individual learner is always embedded in multiple contexts. a third perspective of note is offered by krashen (1985), who also drew attention to the role of emotions with what he termed the affective filter. krashen argued that a high degree of negative emotion raises a filter that reduces the amount of comprehensible input reaching the learner. conversely, in the presence of positive emotions, the affective filter is lower and the learner is open to being exposed to more comprehensible input. a fourth noteworthy approach, studies of the “good language learners” (glls; naiman, 1978, rubin, 1975; stern, 1975; stevick, 1989), provides recognizable parallels to the holistic approach of maslow’s studies of self-actualizing persons. essentially, gll studies sought to understand the lessons that can be learned from “good” or “expert” learners or teachers (griffiths, 2008). the related set of studies of “expertise” (see, e.g., farrell, 2013; johnson, 2005; tsui, 2003) also examined positive examples of learners and/or teachers, typically focussing on the integrated use of competences and skills. an important feature of many gll studies has been the tendency to look at the processes by which “good” language learners acquire a foreign language and not just merely describe the learner and their language output. such a process-oriented approach to understanding the learner resonates with more recent developments in complexity perspectives. most recently, a fifth line of relevant research has developed that emphasizes the self as a central concept. with respect to motivation, dörnyei’s (2005) l2 self system model proposes that people are motivated to deal with perceived discrepancies between their current sense of self and their future selves, one to move closer to their vision of an ideal self and another to prevent developing negative aspects of the self, such as a sense of failure or disappointing important others. this approach stresses the importance of having positive future goals, a requisite level of optimism that one is able to change and potentially achieve these future self-states, as well as the strategic knowledge necessary in order to achieve future goals. related studies investigating the self in its various forms peter d. macintyre, sarah mercer 160 also highlight the role of positive self-beliefs, a sense of competence, a growth mindset and accompanying optimism about the potential for positive change in one’s abilities (e.g., mercer & ryan, 2010; mercer & williams, 2014). 4. criticism of prior work as can be seen, even from this brief and by necessity selective overview, it is apparent that there is already a substantial base work consistent with pp with which sla researchers can build connections. however, it should not be surprising to find that the approaches described above also have their critics. the early humanistic teaching techniques received considerable criticism for their lack of scientific support and validity, and the whole movement was criticised for supposedly attending unduly to the emotional sphere with too little focus on the linguistic, cognitive dimensions of language learning (e.g., gadd, 1998). the models stemming from the work by gardner and clément have been considered to be less applicable to locations beyond the canadian context in which they were developed, and some have questioned the applicability of the models in the case of english as a lingua franca where the language group is diffuse, global, and difficult to specify. the affective filter hypothesis also has been criticized for being imprecise in describing the origins of the filter and for being difficult to measure. the gll studies have been faulted for being overly-prescriptive and ignoring the lessons to be learned from unsuccessful learners as a way to balance the perspective (e.g., rees-miller, 1993). self-related concepts have been criticized for the seemingly endless array of self-related concepts that have been invented, leading to confusion about vague and inconsistent use of terminology (gardner & tremblay, 1994; macintyre, mackinnon, & clément, 2009). pp has itself also generated a number of critiques (brown, sokal, & friedman, 2013; coyne & tennen, 2010; friedman & robbins, 2012; held, 2004; waterman, 2013). the journal psychological inquiry devoted an entire 98-page issue to debating the merits of pp. the target article by lazarus (2003), still listed as one of the journal’s five most downloaded papers, took aim at a number of issues common to all of psychology, and pp in particular. in one of the last works of his life, lazarus cited problems with (a) the over-use of crosssectional research designs, (b) a tendency to treat emotion too simplistically as either positive or negative, (c) inadequate attention to both differences among individuals within a group as well as the overlap between groups when discussing statistically significant group differences, and (d) poor quality measurement of emotions. lazarus ended his criticism by urging proponents of pp to avoid oversimplification of research results that can seem like little more than slogans. in the popular press, ehrenreich (2010) also takes issue with pp introducing positive psychology to sla 161 in her book entitled bright-sided: how the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined america.1 she identifies a tendency in the united states to promote exclusively positive thinking and purge negative thoughts. at the individual level, she offers the example of excessive promotion of positive thinking that can lead to victim self-blaming among cancer patients, as one example relevant to ehrenriech’s own life. at the national level, she identified a refusal by corporations to accurately assess risk that partially contributed to a sharp economic downturn in 2008. there is no doubt that the future development of the pp approach within sla can learn from these and other criticisms. in future studies, sla research might be at an advantage over the discipline of psychology, having travelled much further down the road of recognising the genuine value in research that allows a variety and mixture of epistemological and methodological stances. sla research has developed an openness to different understandings of empirical studies such as those employing systematic, rigorous qualitative research. as a field, sla has the ability to see language phenomena from more than a single perspective (macintyre, noels, & moore, 2010). openness to using a full range of research tools, and acceptance of a diversity of methods, will prove invaluable when opening up new areas of research into aspects of pp that have not yet been explored in sla. examples of topics waiting to be studied include flourishing, eudemonia, hope, gratitude, wellbeing, and hardiness in respect to language learning. other examples of the rich conceptual vein to be explored might include adaptations of the character strengths listed in table 1 above. a particularly intriguing area of overlap between language learning/teaching and pp is in the emphasis on a participant-active approach. the late christopher peterson (2006) admonished readers of his primer in positive psychology that pp “is not a spectator sport” (p. 25). likewise, the communicative approach to language learning also emphasizes the need to talk in order to learn and autonomy-inspired approaches emphasize the self-directed actions and agency of the learners (see chaffee, noels, & mcewan, this volume). a vital component in self-directed learning is an awareness of one’s strengths and weaknesses. using the tools of pp (such as the via inventory) or adaptations of those tools could be valuable in helping learners to become aware of their personal strengths and to develop strategies for building on and employing these strengths in new ways to assist their own language learning. teachers too may benefit from an increased focus on their own strengths as educators as well as on the positive dimensions of their educational settings. for exam 1 the book was published in the uk under an even more provocative title, smile or die: how positive thinking fooled america and the world (2010, granta). peter d. macintyre, sarah mercer 162 ple, rather than taking a problem-focused action research approach to classroom issues, teachers could opt for an appreciative inquiry approach beginning with the positive aspects and strengths of their classroom lives and practices, working to build on these through cooperation in new ways in order to improve teaching and learning (see, e.g., cooperrider & whitney, 2005). 5. revisiting familiar concepts from a pp viewpoint it would seem that we are now well equipped as a scholarly community to realise the potential offered by pp to better understand what enables individual learners, groups of learners, and teachers to flourish. we can address the critiques of the past, whilst no doubt making our own mistakes in the present, as we connect with existing frameworks and extend ideas in new directions. in order to illustrate how a fresh perspective can be brought to bear on existing constructs, let us briefly explore the role of emotions in language learning, revisit the idea of the gll, and consider the concept of expertise. 5.1. positive and negative emotion one of the most important findings in the pp literature thus far has been fredrickson’s (fredrickson, 2001, 2003; fredrickson & branigan, 2005) clarification of the difference between positive and negative emotion (macintyre & gregersen, 2012), that is, emotions that are generally experienced by individuals as pleasant versus unpleasant. emotion research has been successful in identifying a relatively small number of basic, universal emotions that are closely tied to physiological responding and basic survival (emotions such as fear, disgust, anger, and so on). fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory (2001, 2003) examines the nature and function of positive emotion. fredrickson concludes that positive and negative emotions are not dichotomous or opposite ends of the same continuum (as was implied by krashen’s concept of the affective filter); they are better conceptualized as two dimensions of experience. at the core, the function of positive emotion is qualitatively different from negative emotion. whereas negative emotion tends to narrow a person’s field of attention and predisposes specific action tendencies, positive emotion creates tendencies toward play and exploration, yielding a broadened field of attention and building resources for future action. the implications of positive-broadening emotions for sla can be profound. differentiating positive and negative emotions leads to a more nuanced understanding of how they affect l2 learning and communication. the most widely studied emotion in sla has been anxiety (dewaele & macintyre, this introducing positive psychology to sla 163 volume). prior research has presented a conventional, one-dimensional view of positive and negative emotion using a see-saw metaphor (positive goes up, negative goes down). a two-dimensional view of emotion can accommodate the see-saw view of emotion, but also opens up the possibility of examining ambivalence (macintyre, 2007) which is the co-occurrence of negative with positive emotion (see table 2). ambivalence is a common experience in sla; for example, when a person is feeling both confident and anxious before giving a classroom presentation or approaching a native speaker. further, a twodimensional view allows for understanding amotivation, apathy or the absence of emotion in the situation as the lack of arousal of both positive and negative emotions in a particular context. table 2 a two-dimensional view of emotion low positive highly positive low negative lack of emotional arousal pleasant emotional tenor highly negative unpleasant emotional tenor ambivalent feelings 5.2. expertise and gll reloaded the developments in positive psychology and those in sla also offer a new take on both the gll and the concept of expertise. in a recent study, one of the present authors (mercer, 2011) was surprised to discover the relatively negative beliefs held by one of the expert learners who had attained an exceptionally high level of proficiency. although this learner was clearly highly successful in terms of achievement within her context, she appeared to lack confidence in certain domains and hold more fixed mindset beliefs. reflecting on such findings in light of pp suggests that taking a process-oriented view of learners and their experiences and, more importantly, considering their wellbeing during this process might be a valuable way of examining “good” language learners, rather than focusing primarily on their states and outcomes. 5.3. goals of language learning for us, as with many language educators, one of the goals is to foster the positivity of our learners’ educational experiences, and supporting them as individuals in reaching their personal highest levels of achievement and success (fredrickson, 2001). whilst learners’ ultimate levels of achievement and proficiency will be a focus of sla research, perhaps a vital additional perspective would be to focus on the processes and timescales in which learners can be seen to be happy and experience flourishing in language learning. griffiths (2008, pp. 1-2) asks key questions peter d. macintyre, sarah mercer 164 in her collection on the gll such as, what is it that makes a good language learner? and why are some learners more successful than others? viewed through a pp lens, these questions might take a slightly different focus concentrating not on levels of proficiency, language competence and achievement, but instead considering the processes, rather than the product of learning. the following are example questions that capture processes over different timescales: 1. over the long term (measured in years), why are some learners happier, more resilient, and enjoy language learning more than others? 2. in what ways/how do learners appear to develop a sense of flourishing whilst engaging in language learning (activities) during a specific course (measured in days and months)? 3. what features of short-term, immediate experience are associated with the ebb and flow of engagement in the learning situation, such as a classroom, during the minutes that teacher and students spend together? can we better understand what leads to greater engagement for some learners and not others (measured in seconds and minutes)? 4. how do learners’ immediate experiences interact with their mediumto-long-term emotional trajectories whilst learning a foreign language (measured on multiple timescales)? as research progresses with a process-oriented approach, positive experiences can be understood in more nuanced terms as we consider not only moment-tomoment experiences but also how ongoing experiences fit within the language and self-development process. kahneman and riis (2005) draw a valuable distinction between these two processes that they link to the conceptualization of self. first, the experiencing self, with a timeframe of approximately 3 seconds, is our ongoing window of conscious experience; the experiencing self is active and fleeting. second, the remembering self has a long history in memory. the remembering self knits together the narrative that captures the meaning of events in our life, and is open to reinterpretation. kahneman’s (2011) studies of the experience of happiness draw the distinction between the experiencing and remembering selves, helping to clarify ways in which immediate negative events can ultimately be interpreted within a positive narrative or vice versa. thus, the multiple processes involved in learning a foreign language might produce a complex answer to a deceptively simple question such as “what makes learners happy?” when we consider these different perspectives on experiences. introducing positive psychology to sla 165 6. four encouraging trends for the future of pp research in sla if pp is to be taken up in sla, it needs to develop along strong empirical lines. in considering the potential for pp-inspired research to have an impact on sla, we see four trends that support emerging research in this area. first, the social turn in sla means that the field is taking seriously the idea that contexts in which language learning occurs are diverse, nuanced, and they matter. the three pillars of pp include positive emotions, positive character traits and positive institutions. conducting studies of enabling institutions, so far, has been the weakest link for pp (waterman, 2013). however, in sla research, greater care is now being taken to describe the contexts in which learning occurs, especially at the classroom level. perhaps the next step is to focus a little more on the institutions (broadly defined formal and informal organizational structures) that enable success and promote positive language learning environments. institutions are embedded in the broader cultural milieu that will shape the ways in which the aims of pp are pursued and various possible configurations of its pillars (see leu, wang, & koo, 2011; sheldon, 2009). a second trend that bodes well for developing interest in pp is the idea of complex dynamic systems, which has become a “hot” topic in sla (macintyre, dörnyei, & henry, 2015). larsen-freeman and cameron (2008) have argued that l2 development involves complex, dynamic, emergent, open, self-organizing and adaptive systems. systems thinking adopts inherently holistic perspectives and examines dynamism across different contexts and timescales. models of the learning and communication process are incomplete without explicit consideration of positive emotions, individual strengths, and the various institutions and contexts of learning, such as governments, public/private schools, community groups, and networks in which learning occurs. in addition, lazarus (2003) questioned whether one can consider any emotion positive or negative. in a functional sense, all emotions are adaptive (e.g., fear serves a protective function). quickly moving between positive and negative affective states, and explicitly considering ambivalent states (macintyre, 2007), is one of the strengths that dynamic models have over prior approaches to individual differences research (macintyre & serroul, 2015). a third reason that pp topics might be especially relevant to sla is the methodological diversity already present in the field. as noted previously, core epistemological advances have been made toward reconciling the humanistic and pp traditions that sometimes seem impossible in psychology (waterman, 2013). however, sla research has been receptive to a variety of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research for several years now, with studies routinely collecting data from multiple types of sources. the strength of largepeter d. macintyre, sarah mercer 166 scale quantitative surveys lies in assessing the reliability and generalizability of the findings, but the weakness is that general trends in large datasets might not apply to any single individual within those data sets. on the other hand, the strength of individual-level qualitative data is that a rich description of the relevant factors for an individual can be proffered, with the weakness that reliability and generalizability typically cannot be assessed. the strength of each method is the weakness of the other (creswell, 2003). it is highly desirable to maintain the empirical base for pp in sla, and the diversity of rigorous research approaches already available is encouraging. a fourth, related sign that sla is ready for pp is what might be called an “individual turn” (macintyre, 2014). the dense data that is required to study in detail the processes of language learning often must be collected and interpreted at the individual level (de bot, lowie, & verspoor, 2007). research that uses group averages and correlations among variables has been a mainstay of sla theory development over the years (dörnyei & taguchi, 2010). more recently, alongside the existing large-sample methods, there has been a burgeoning interest in documenting the complexity of individual cases; it is for this reason we have opened this paper with the personal stories of csikszentmihalyi and seligman. individual level research can describe in some detail the processes that lead to happiness, the protective force of learned optimism, or describe the most enjoyable facets of learning for a specific person, with nomothetic studies identifying how commonly occurring these events might be. an example of a dense, individual-level, mixed methods approach (quantitative and qualitative) to sla research can be found in macintyre and serroul’s (2015) idiodynamic study that integrates motivation with perceived competence, anxiety and willingness to communicate as part of an ongoing, dynamic process. perhaps we are at an optimal time for a wide ranging research program devoted to study the role of pp in sla from both the individual and group perspectives. with greater methodological diversity in the sla field, perhaps we can avoid some of the issues that led to criticism outlined above. 7. a preview of the special issue we hope that this brief introduction to pp will help to orient readers of the special issue of ssllt to the other papers in this volume, and demonstrate that applications of pp in sla are both possible and desirable. within this issue, readers will find a collection of innovative research papers inspired by pp themes. the papers in this volume demonstrate a range of diverse methods, large-scale and small-scale, quantitative and qualitative, research-oriented and teaching-oriented. gabry -barker examines the positive interpretations of failure experiences, showing how one might maintain enthusiasm from one situation to another. murphey examines the introducing positive psychology to sla 167 role of music in the process of well-being, or to use the future-oriented term, “wellbecoming.” falout examines how the physical layout of instructional space within an institutional setting can foster positive emotion and facilitate learning. dewaele and macintyre discuss the links between positive and negative emotion in a large-scale survey, using enjoyment and anxiety as their areas of focus. chaffee, noels and mcewan examine the motivational side of learner resiliency when faced with controlling versus autonomy-supportive teachers. gregersen, macintyre, hein, talbot and claman take three pp activities that have received empirical support in the literature and document how both learners and pre-service teachers use facets of emotional intelligence to understand their reactions to the pp activities. oxford and cuellar examine learner narratives to reveal hot cognition, emotion, flow, and other themes among their experiences. finally, oxford’s provocative book on language and peace is reviewed by ryan, who discusses why he liked the work in spite of some initial misgivings. all-in-all, the articles in this special issue contribute to the literature on pp in sla in both pedagogically and theoretically-oriented ways using a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods. 8. conclusion we conclude by claiming that positive psychology is not frivolous pop psychology; it is a rapidly expanding field of knowledge with rigorous methods and a promising future. there is an abundance of specific concepts and general themes to be explored. in speculating on the future of pp, peterson (2006) said that “. . . the endeavour will swim or sink in accordance with the science it produces over the next decade” (p. 305). in the sla field, we envision future theory development and pedagogical applications that will establish the relevance of pp for language learning. the recent history of pp shows that, when collected under one umbrella, the study of ordinary human strengths and virtues tells a compelling story. advancing a pp perspective in sla helps to ensure that the literature covers the full range of positive and negative experience with languages, communication, and the learning processes. the introduction of pp opens up a broad, rich collection of underresearched themes. the sla field is perhaps in a particularly strong position to engage with pp to generate innovative thinking and research. 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(2013). the humanistic psychology–positive psychology divide: contrasts in philosophical foundations. american psychologist, 68(3), 124-133. doi:10.1037/a0032168. 553 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (3). 2018. 553-574 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.3.2 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt how i see it: an exploratory study on attributions and emotions in l2 learning sachiko nakamura king mongkut’s university of technology thonburi, bangkok, thailand info@sachikonakamura.org abstract learners’ attributions have received increasing attention in second/foreign language (l2) learning. studies have shown that how learners attribute their performance influences not only their self-efficacy, motivation, and goal attainment but also their emotions (hsieh, 2012; hsieh & kang, 2010; hsieh & shallert, 2008; weiner, 2000, 2014). this exploratory study investigated how japanese adult learners of l2 english attributed changes in their l2 learning attitudes and motivation through a 10-week toeic preparation program. it also examined emotions expressed in their attributional statements and the differences between learners with lower and higher l2 proficiency. a content analysis of openended questionnaire responses suggested eight attributional categories: perceived l2 improvement, enjoyment, positive feelings, increased l2 exposure, realization of l2 needs and importance, effective l2 instruction, and praise from the teacher for positive changes in attitudes and/or motivation and perceived inefficient l2 skills for negative changes in attitudes and/or motivation. enjoyment was an emotion the most frequently mentioned by both groups while other emotions, such as joy, happiness, and disappointment, were expressed only by the beginner learners. these results offer important implications for l2 pedagogy and prospects for further research in the area. keywords: attribution; emotion; affect, motivation; attitude sachiko nakamura 554 1. introduction attributions refer to the explanations individuals give in a particular situation, generated by “a search for causality represented by a ‘why’ question” (weiner, 2014, p. 355). it has been found that attributions that learners make influence their expectation of future success or failure, beliefs about their competence, intensity of work and effort, and in turn, motivation, goal attainment, and emotions (hsieh, 2012; hsieh & kang, 2010; hsieh & shallert, 2008; weiner, 2000, 2014). this exploratory study was initially motivated by findings from a needs analysis, which indicated a striking relationship between emotions and attributions among adult learners of english as a foreign/second language (l2) in a 10-week preparation course for the test of english for international communication (toeic). at the beginning and end of the program, a questionnaire was distributed in order to gain information about the participants as well as their feedback on the program. two of the items in the post-questionnaire asked students if there had been any changes in their attitudes and motivation regarding l2 learning. it also asked, in open-ended questions, what had brought about those changes. an interesting pattern was observed in the responses. while beginner learners tended to attribute improvements in their attitudes and motivation to emotional aspects of their learning experience, intermediate and advanced learners’ accounts were more cognitive in nature. emotions and feelings are, in fact, argued to be the results of evaluations which learners carry out in a particular situation while learning (pekrun, 2000; méndez lópez & aguilar, 2013). in general education studies, learners in academic settings have been found to experience a range of emotions such as enjoyment, hope, pride, frustration, anger, and shame (pekrun, 2014; pekrun, frenzel, goetz, & perry, 2007; pekrun, goetz, titz, & perry, 2002). various classroom emotions have also been discussed from an attributional theory perspective. they include happiness, admiration, liking, and surprise as success-linked emotions, and unhappiness, humiliation, embarrassment, and hopelessness as failure-linked emotions (weiner, 2014). despite this interplay between attributions and emotions, however, research investigating attributions in light of emotions is scarce. moreover, in second language acquisition (sla) studies, it is only recently that emotions have been given due attention (dewaele, 2015; pavlenko, 2013), with only anxiety (and to a much lesser extent, enjoyment) having been investigated to a degree (dörnyei & ryan, 2015). the aim of the current study is twofold. first, it is to investigate how japanese adult learners of l2 english attribute changes in their attitudes and motivation toward l2 learning, on completing a 10-week toeic preparation program. second, it is to explore how emotions are expressed in their attributional statements and how these differ between learners with lower and higher l2 proficiency. how i see it: an exploratory study on attributions and emotions in l2 learning 555 2. literature review 2.1. emotions in learning emotions can be viewed as “short-lived subjective-physiological-functional-expressive phenomena that orchestrate how we react adaptively to the important events in our lives” (reeve, 2009, p. 9), and feelings are subjective verbal descriptions of emotional experience (reeve, 2009). in academic settings, emotions that are particularly crucial to learning are conceptualized as academic emotions consisting of four categories: achievement emotions, epistemic emotions, topic emotions, and social emotions (pekrun, 2014). achievement emotions are associated with success and failure resulting from achievement activities in academic settings, such as enjoyment, hope, and shame. epistemic emotions can be provoked by cognitive challenges. the examples of these emotions are curiosity, frustration about obstacles, and delight following the overcoming of a problem. topic emotions are emotions triggered by learners’ interest, whether positive or negative, in learning materials presented in class. social emotions are linked to teachers and peers in the classroom, such as admiration and social anxiety, and are of particular importance in teacher/student interaction and group work. from a pedagogical standpoint, emotions are argued to have significant effects on learners’ performance and achievement (dewaele, 2015; linnenbrink, 2007; macintyre & gregersen, 2012, pekrun, 2014; schutz & pekrun, 2007). dewaele (2015), for instance, posits that “emotions – both positive and negative – are the driving force behind l2 learning” (p. 14) and emphasizes the crucial role that emotions play in the language classroom. findings from empirical studies in fact lend support to these claims (e.g., méndez lópez & aguilar, 2013; pekrun, goetz, perry, kramer, & hochstadt, 2004; pekrun et al., 2002). through a series of qualitative case studies, pekrun et al. (2002) found that students experience a rich variation of both negative and positive emotions in academic settings. they then developed a quantitative self-report instrument and measured the effects of emotions on academic achievement. the results indicated that academic emotions (i.e., enjoyment, hope, pride, relief, anger, anxiety, shame, hopelessness, and boredom) are closely correlated with students’ motivation, learning strategies, cognitive resources, self-regulation, and achievement. méndez lópez and aguilar (2013) investigated the effects of emotions of mexican-speaking students on their motivation to learn english through a qualitative approach (using narratives, journals, and interviews). their results indicated that both positive and negative emotions contributed to enhancing and diminishing motivation and demonstrated how language learners became responsible based on their reflection on emotional experiences in language instruction. sachiko nakamura 556 2.2. attribution theory and l2 learning a theoretical notion of attribution was first introduced by heider (1958) within the field of social psychology. the theory was further developed by rotter (1966), who looked at causal events from internal and external dimensions. weiner (1976), whose attribution theory has been widely acknowledged and adopted, expanded the notion by formulating a fully-fledged attribution theory model. according to his model, attributions can be characterized by three dimensions: locus, stability, and control. the first dimension, locus, concerns whether causes are perceived to be internal or external to the actor. for instance, when a student attributes his poor grades to his lack of effort, the locus is characterized as internal. on the other hand, if he perceives the poor grades as due to external factors, such as the teacher’s poor instruction or learning materials, the locus is external. the second dimension, stability, is concerned with whether a cause is stable or fluctuates over time (i.e., is unstable). effort is often regarded as unstable while aptitude and ability are typically viewed as stable. the last dimension, control, concerns the extent to which individuals believe they have control over the cause. this dimension therefore relates to judgements of responsibility. learners’ attributions can thus influence their subsequent behaviour at cognitive and affective levels (hsieh & schallert, 2008; weiner, 2000). much research has looked into causal attributions and investigated them in relation to various constructs such as achievement (dweck, 1975), learners’ perceptions (tse, 2000), motivation (kálmán & eugenio, 2015), self-efficacy (hsieh & kang, 2010; silver, mitchell, & gist, 1995), self-efficacy and motivation (hsieh & schallert, 2008), proficiency (thepsiri & pojanapunya, 2010), age, gender, and target language studied (williams, burden, poulet, & maun, 2004), as well as culture (mori, gobel, thepsiri, & pojanapunya, 2010). many of these studies found the same factors to which learners attributed their success and failure. williams et al. (2004), for instance, identified 21 attributional categories by surveying 285 secondary students learning foreign languages in the uk. effort, ability, and interest were the three most cited elements in both positive and negative attributions. the influence of the teacher and environment were other major causes for successful and unsuccessful learning. these factors were also found in other studies in a foreign language learning context (e.g., gobel & mori, 2007; mori et al., 2010; thepsiri & pojanapunya, 2010). at the same time, the attributions in each study were uniquely characterized by the context, such as culture and educational traditions, in which the participants were learning the l2. in their study of japanese and thai university students, mori et al. (2010) found that students in both countries attributed their success to teachers and classroom atmosphere while they attributed their failure to lack of ability and how i see it: an exploratory study on attributions and emotions in l2 learning 557 effort. in other words, the students focused more on external factors for success and internal factors for failure. they described this tendency as self-critical and concluded that such a tendency is rooted in the non-western cultures where interdependence is emphasized, and thus modesty and acquiescence are accepted responses. kálmán and eugenio (2015) investigated attributions among adult learners of l2 english in a corporate setting in hungary and found corporate culture as one of the main causes of successful learning. many of their participants reported that they were grateful to the organization for providing the opportunity and support for their learning. this is another example of attribution studies that highlight the impact of the contexts in which learners are embedded. 2.3. attributions and emotions attribution theory highlights an important link between emotions and achievements. weiner (2014) contends that cause-emotion relations are a crucial element in the attributional approach and that “feelings are determined by thoughts, and specifically by beliefs about causality . . . and emotions depend on ‘how it seems to me’” (p. 355). based on a large body of empirical research in the domain, weiner (2014) discusses success-linked emotions and failurelinked emotions. the former include happiness, pride, envy, admiration, liking, disliking, gratitude, and surprise. the latter involve unhappiness, shame (humiliation and embarrassment), guilt (regret), sympathy (pity), scorn (contempt), anger, helplessness, hopelessness, hope, and schadenfreude. for example, happiness often arises following success, regardless of its cause. then, happiness functions as a reward (pleasure) and increases achievement motivation. gratitude is a positive emotion toward others who have volitionally contributed to the success. the public expression of gratitude elicits modesty and appreciation. as failure-linked emotions, shame is typically aroused by an attribution to low aptitude whereas guilt and regret are typically aroused by an attribution to a lack of effort. schadenfreude is a positive self-directed affect aroused by the damage befalling another person. for example, if a student is accepted to a high rank class because of cheating and then fails an exam, fellow students could experience schadenfreude (see weiner, 2007, for detailed descriptions of these emotions). an examination of qualitative data in attribution studies in fact reveals various emotions expressed by l2 learners. in the study by williams et al. (2004), for example, they reported that “interest was cited 77 times (8.0%) and included wanting to learn, liking, enjoying” (p. 22). their participants also referred to the teacher by expressing liking and disliking. attributions for not doing well at school included comments such as “it’s boring,” “i hate languages,” and “i don’t enjoy languages.” in the study by tse (2000), her participants expressed appreciation sachiko nakamura 558 for having opportunities to speak the language and to participate in discussions. they also felt that teacher attention and sympathy contributed to maintaining their interest in learning the language. these learners also expressed enjoyment of taking their courses. negative emotions associated with unsuccessful learning experience were also found. a student said in the interview, “i do not want to feel that alienated again” (p. 78). the above literature review depicts an important relationship among attributions, emotions, and other affective constructs. depending on the ways in which learners perceive their performance, different types of emotions are triggered. those emotions also have an influence on other affective constructs such as motivation as well as cognitive aspects of learning and achievement. the current study seeks to further explore this interrelation. specifically, the study investigates japanese learners’ attributions for the changes in their l2 learning attitudes and motivation, taking into account emotions articulated in their attributional statements. to that end, the following research questions (rqs) were posed: rq1. what changes do japanese learners report in their attitudes toward l2 learning and motivation to improve their l2 skills, over the 10 weeks of their toeic preparation program? rq2. to what aspects of l2 learning experience do the learners attribute the changes? rq3. how are emotions expressed in the attributions? rq4. how do learners with lower and higher l2 proficiency differ in their attributions? it should be noted that the first research question is closely related to the second research question. 3. method 3.1. participants the participants were 42 adult japanese learners of l2 english, aged from their early twenties to their late fifties, working in various departments, such as human resources, accounting, and education, at the university where the program was offered. based on their previous toeic scores, other english proficiency tests (e.g., step eiken), and self-reported proficiency levels, 28 (12 males and 16 females) were placed in a beginner class, and 14 (6 males and 8 females) in an intermediate/advanced class. the average toeic score of the beginner class was 271.67 (sd = 72.15), and that of the high intermediate/advanced class was 649.38 (sd = how i see it: an exploratory study on attributions and emotions in l2 learning 559 206.19), which respectively correspond to low a2 and between b1 and b2 on the common european framework of reference (educational testing service, 2015). the majority of the participants had similar previous l2 learning experiences through studying english as a compulsory subject at junior high school (i.e., 3 years) and senior high school (i.e., 3 years). one student in the beginner class homestayed in australia for 1 month, and two students in the intermediate/advanced class homestayed in canada for 3 weeks and 1 year, respectively. one student in the latter class participated in a study aboard program for 2 years in the united states when she was in college. regarding their current l2 use, 18 students (64.3%) in the beginner class and six students (42.9%) in the intermediate/advanced class reported at the beginning of the program that they had no opportunities or needs to use english at all in their daily lives. six students (21.4%) in the former group and four students (28.6%) in the latter group reported that they would use english for up to 1 hour per week, and four students in each group (14.3% for beginner and 28.6% for intermediate/advanced) would use english from 1 to 5 hours per week, mainly at work through tasks such as writing and sending emails, and answering questions from international students studying at the university. 3.2. course description the program was offered at a university in southern japan for 10 weeks. it was designed to improve employees’ toeic scores as part of the university’s globalization agenda. each group met once a week for a 90-minute class (i.e., a total of 10 classes each). both courses were taught by the author, using officially authorized toeic exercise books, toeic test koushiki purakutisu risuningu hen (educational testing service, 2011) and toeic test koushiki purakutisu riidingu hen (educational testing service, 2014a) for the beginner class, and toeic test shin koushiki mondaishuu vol. 6 (educational testing service, 2014b) for the intermediate/advanced class. while those exercise books were the main classroom materials with which students worked on solving toeic listening and reading practice questions, various communicative tasks and activities were provided as well. 3.3. data collection 3.3.1. questionnaire the data for the current study were collected by means of a questionnaire administered at the end of the course. the first question asked learners to indicate changes in their attitude toward learning english from 1 (it became very negative) sachiko nakamura 560 to 7 (it became very positive). the next question, in an open-ended format, asked them to write about what caused the changes. questions about motivation also followed the same pattern. the first question asked learners to indicate changes in their motivation to improve their l2 skills from 1 (i became very demotivated) to 7 (i became very motivated), and the next question asked them to write about what caused the changes. the original questionnaire was written in japanese, and the learners wrote their response in japanese as well. table 1 includes the english translation of the questionnaire items. table 1 translated questionnaire items about changes in attitudes and motivation item symbol item qa-1 have there been any changes in your attitude toward learning english through the course? (1) it became very negative (2) it became negative (3) it became a little negative (4) there is no change (5) it became a little positive (6) it became positive (7) it became very positive qa-2 what caused the changes? qb-1 have there been any changes in your motivation to improve your english skills through the course? (1) i became very demotivated (2) i became demotivated (3) i became a little demotivated (4) there is no change (5) i became a little motivated (6) i became motivated (7) i became very motivated qb-2 what caused the changes? 3.3.2. list of emotions all the emotions discussed as academic emotions by pekrun (2014) and the ones elaborated on by weiner (2014) in his attribution theory were put on a list, which is included in table 2. this list was aimed to help discern emotions expressed in the attributional statements. table 2 list of emotions admiration curiosity envy hopelessness schadenfreude anger disgust frustration humiliation scorn anxiety disliking gratitude liking shame compassion embarrassment guilt love surprise confusion empathy happiness pity sympathy contempt enjoyment helpless pride unhappiness how i see it: an exploratory study on attributions and emotions in l2 learning 561 3.4. data analysis the learners’ rating scores in qa-1 and qb-1 were imported into an excel spreadsheet, and their means, standard deviations, skewness, and kurtosis were calculated in order to answer rq1. based on the responses to qa-2 and qb-2, a total of 79 (53 from beginner, and 26 from intermediate/advanced learners) statements explaining reasons for either positive or negative changes in l2 learning attitudes and/or motivation were collected. using the numerical data from qa-1 and qb-1, those statements were first divided into two types (negative changes, positive changes) for each element (attitudes, motivation) for each group (beginner, intermediate/advanced). more specifically, statements provided by the students who chose answers 1, 2, and 3 were categorized as attributions for negative changes and those by the students who chose answers 5, 6, and 7 as attributions for positive changes. next, the statements were content analyzed, a method of analysis in which the qualitative categories used are not predetermined but are derived inductively from the data analyzed (dörnyei, 2007, p. 245). this analysis was aimed to answer rq2 and rq4. in order to explore rq3, attributional statements were examined based on the emotion list (table 2) to see whether and how any of the emotions on the list were articulated. 4. results first, the changes in l2 learning attitudes and motivation will be presented. next, the categories of attributions emerging from the content analysis will be reported followed by the emotions found in the attributions. lastly, the differences in attributions between beginner and intermediate/advanced learners will be reported. 4.1. changes in l2 learning attitudes and motivation table 3 shows descriptive statistics for each group’s scores for attitudes and motivation obtained from qa-1 and qb-1 in the questionnaire, in which learners were instructed to indicate changes in their attitudes toward l2 learning and motivation to improve their l2 skills, based on the seven possible response choices for each item. for both attitudes and motivation, 1 indicated that they had changed very negatively, and 7 indicated that they had greatly improved, with 4 indicating no change. as shown, the majority of the students in both groups (75% of the beginner and 85% of the intermediate/advanced learners) reported their l2 learning attitudes had improved. while five students in the beginner sachiko nakamura 562 group indicated their l2 attitudes had become negative, none of the students in the intermediate/advanced group reported such negative changes. two students in each group reported no changes in their attitudes. similarly, the majority of the students in both groups (89% of the beginner and 84% of the intermediate/advanced learners) reported their increased motivation, and none of the students in the two groups reported decreased motivation. three beginner learners and two more advanced learners indicated no change in their motivation level. table 3 descriptive statistics for l2 learning attitude and motivation change for beginner (n = 28) and intermediate/advanced (n = 13) learners m sd skewness kurtosis 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 attitudes beginner 4.82 1.31 0.70 -0.54 1 (4%) 0 (0%) 4 (14%) 2 (7%) 14 (50%) 5 (18%) 2 (7%) intermediate/ advanced 5.43 0.94 0.24 -0.49 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 2 (15%) 6 (46%) 4 (31%) 1 (8%) motivation beginner 5.18 0.67 0.58 1.13 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 3 (11%) 18 (64%) 6 (21%) 1 (4%) intermediate/ advanced 5.50 0.94 0.00 -0.58 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 2 (15%) 5 (38%) 5 (38%) 1 (8%) 4.2. categories of attributions table 4 presents the number of attributional statements categorized by two directions of the changes (i.e., positive or negative) in attitude and motivation by each group, based on the numerical data obtained from qa-1 and qb-1 in the questionnaire (table 3). table 4 the number of attributional statements for positive changes and negative changes in attitudes and motivation positive changes negative changes total attitudes beginner 22 4 26 intermediate/advanced 11 2 13 motivation beginner 23 3 26 intermediate/advanced 11 2 13 the content analysis of those statements suggested eight attributional categories: perceived l2 improvement, enjoyment, positive feelings, increased l2 exposure, realization of l2 needs and importance, effective l2 instruction, and praise from the teacher for positive changes in attitude and/or motivation, and perceived inefficient l2 skills for negative changes in attitude and/or motivation. how i see it: an exploratory study on attributions and emotions in l2 learning 563 table 5 includes the categories along with representative extracts translated from japanese into english. of the 78 attributional statements, improved l2 skills that the learners perceived during the program was the most commonly cited element to explain the positive changes. for example, one student wrote, “i feel more motivated to study english because i noticed that my listening skill got better.” many learners displayed enjoyment that they experienced through learning as the reason for the positive changes. learners also attributed their improved attitudes and motivation to various positive feelings. for instance, one student wrote, “i felt happy when i knew the answer, so i feel more positive about studying english.” in the attributions termed increased l2 exposure, learners explained that whereas they hardly had any chance of using english in their daily life previously, the program gave them such opportunities, and that had a positive influence on their attitudes or motivation. students referred to their better understanding of learning needs and goals as the reason for their improved attitudes or motivation. effective l2 instruction they received in the class was also mentioned by several students. other students referred to the positive feedback they received from the teacher, and this component was typically mentioned with gratitude. in the statements attributing the negative changes in attitudes and motivation, the most commonly cited element was inefficient l2 skills that learners perceived while studying. due to the small number of attributional statements given for the negative changes, this was the only category that emerged from the analysis. table 5 categories of attributions for positive and negative changes in attitudes and motivation category representative extracts perceived l2 improvement i think my l2 listening skill got better. i can understand grammatical rules better. enjoyment i felt joy when i was able to understand english. i enjoyed conversation activities in class. positive feelings i was able to take the course with refreshed feelings. the program lifted up my feelings. increased l2 exposure i started to make more time to study english. the program gave me time with english even once a week. realization of l2 needs/importance the course made me realize how important it is to study english. my l2 learning objectives became clearer. effective l2 instruction the teacher’s explanations and instruction were clear and useful. the teacher gave good reading strategies. praise from the teacher the teacher praised me. the teacher’s feedback gave me confidence. perceived inefficient l2 skills audio in listening questions was too fast for me to comprehend. the course made me realize how bad i am at english. sachiko nakamura 564 4.3. types of emotions as illustrated in the categories above, enjoyment was the type of emotion most frequently cited in learners’ responses to the open-ended questions. however, there was a variation regarding which aspects of the class students reported to have enjoyed. while many referred to their classes in broad terms, as in “i enjoyed the classes” or “the classes were so much fun,” some discussed more specific elements such as writing and conversation activities. a few wrote that they felt enjoyment from learning new things or being able to understand english better. in attributional statements, which were mostly categorized as positive feelings, various affective concepts were expressed with the japanese term kimochi ‘feeling.’ some described a feeling of being refreshed by studying for the first time in a long time, and some described an uplifting feeling evoked by participating in class after long hours of working. three participants indicated their negative feelings toward english had decreased. one used the japanese term kennokan, which is best translated as hatred, saying that her old hatred toward english had softened. one participant referred to happiness: “i felt happy when i knew the answer.” a few noted that the program had raised their curiosity and made them feel like studying more. several students expressed hope for their further l2 improvement. gratitude was another emotion expressed in statements about receiving praise from the teacher. unlike the statements relating to positive changes, few emotions were expressed in those relating to negative changes. one participant wrote that she was shocked to realize how poor her english was, using the japanese term gakuzentosuru. the word, describing a strong negative sense of surprise, depicts a feeling of shock, disappointment, and even shame. another student described his low l2 proficiency with the japanese word tsuukan, which captures a feeling of pain, possible sadness and disappointment. 4.4. differences between beginner and intermediate/advanced learners since the study did not obtain enough data on attributions for negative changes, discussions regarding differences between the two groups will focus on the attributions for positive changes only. table 6 presents the number of attributional statements in each category. positive changes in attitudes and motivation for the two groups are further illustrated in figures 1 and 2, respectively. the most notable difference between beginner learners and intermediate/advanced learners was that certain categories appeared only in either one of the groups. increased l2 exposure, which was most cited by the intermediate/advanced learners as the reason for positive how i see it: an exploratory study on attributions and emotions in l2 learning 565 changes in attitudes (45%) and motivation (25%), was not mentioned by the beginner learners at all. positive feelings constituted nearly one fourth of the attributions for positive changes in attitudes (20%) and motivation (25%) among the beginner learners but were not expressed among the intermediate/advanced learners at all. the same applied to praise from the teacher. another striking difference between the two groups was the proportion of affective characteristics in the responses. as discussed above, various emotions and feelings were identified in the attributional statements categorized as enjoyment, positive feelings, and praise from the teacher. while more than half (56%) of the attributional statements in the beginner group contained affective characteristics, such statements constituted only 17% in the intermediate/advanced group. table 6 the number of attributional statements in each category beginner intermediate/advanced attitude motivation attitude motivation perceived l2 improvement 6 8 2 3 enjoyment 9 4 2 2 positive feelings 4 5 0 0 increased exposure 0 0 5 3 realization of l2 needs/importance 0 2 0 2 effective l2 instruction 1 1 1 1 praise from the teacher 0 2 0 0 others 0 1 1 1 total 20 23 11 12 figure 1 the proportion of attributional statements in each category for attitudes 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% perceived l2 improvemnet enjoyment positive feelings increased l2 exposure realization of l2 needs/importance effective l2 instruction praise from the teacher others attitude attitude beginner attitude intermediate/advanced sachiko nakamura 566 figure 2 the proportion of attributional statements in each category for motivation 5. discussion the first research question concerned the changes adult japanese learners of l2 english reported in their attitudes toward l2 learning and motivation to improve their l2 skills over the 10 weeks of their toeic preparation program. the majority of the students in both the beginner and intermediate/advanced groups reported that their attitudes had become more positive while several students in both groups indicated no improvement, and three students in the beginner group reported that their attitude had become slightly negative. with regard to motivation, all of the beginner learners and most of the intermediate/advanced learners reported that they felt more motivated while a few in the latter group indicated no change. reasons for those changes were provided in the openended questions, which were used to investigate the second research question. the second research question looked into the aspects of l2 learning experience to which the participants attributed changes in their l2 learning attitude and motivation. the content analysis of learners’ responses to the questionnaire suggested eight attributional categories: perceived l2 improvement, enjoyment, positive feelings, increased l2 exposure, realization of l2 needs and importance, effective l2 instruction, and praise from the teacher for positive changes, 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% perceived l2 improvemnet enjoyment positive feelings increased l2 exposure realization of l2 needs/importance effective l2 instruction praise from the teacher others motivation motivation beginner motivation intermediate/advanced how i see it: an exploratory study on attributions and emotions in l2 learning 567 and perceived inefficient l2 skills for negative changes in attitudes and/or motivation. these categories share some similarities with those found in other attribution studies. as discussed, the role of teachers was one of the most frequently cited factors influencing success (mori et al., 2010; thepsiri & pojanapunya, 2010; tse, 2000; williams et al., 2004). similarly, the learners in the current study referred to the teacher’s effective l2 instruction and praise as the reasons for their improved learning attitudes and motivation. at the same time, these attributions uniquely reflect characteristics of the learners in this study, as demonstrated by other studies (e.g., kálmán & eugenio, 2015; mori et al., 2010). the two factors, increased l2 exposure and realization of l2 needs and importance, appear to have had an impact because of the context in which the learners were embedded. as discussed in the course description, most of the participants were enrolled in the program as the request of their departments. at the beginning of the program, many of them reported that they did not use english for work, let alone in their daily lives. they probably did not possess a strong need for their l2 improvement, either. however, once the program started, the opportunity to use the l2 notably increased. this increased exposure by itself was influential enough for the participants to change their learning attitudes and motivation. during the program, the participants were also introduced into various ways in which l2 skills can enrich their lives. this could have led them to further realize the importance and value of possessing good l2 skills. these elements can also be characterized as unstable based on weiner’s attributional dimensions. given that the program was offered only for the limited time, the l2 exposure can easily decrease together with the needs of l2 skill improvement unless learners maintain their motivation and continuously seek out such l2 opportunities. another interesting characteristic can be found in perceived l2 improvement, the most cited element to explain positive changes in learning attitudes and motivation. in attribution theory and research, ability is typically characterized as uncontrollable and stable. at the same time, ability can be viewed as controllable and unstable based on implicit theories (dweck, 1999). the theories propose two types of mindsets and posit that learners with a growth mindset believe that their abilities can be developed through effort and hard work, as opposed to those with a fixed mindset who perceive ability as a fixed trait. it has been argued that when learners are equipped with an incremental view of ability (i.e., a growth mindset), they become motivated to seek out challenges and opportunities to learn (see dweck, 1999 for the motivational model of achievement). based on this notion, the result that the learners in this study reported their l2 improvement indicates that they most likely thought their ability can be enhanced even by a short period of time of practice, leading them to sachiko nakamura 568 feel more motivated to improve their l2 skills. this finding also lends support to the result of a study on adult learners’ attributions by kálmán and eugenio (2015), which found that ability significantly contributed to motivation. the third research question concerned how emotions were expressed in the attributional statements. so many emotions were articulated that several categories emerged (enjoyment, positive feelings, and praise from the teacher). among various emotions and feelings articulated in the statements, enjoyment was the most notable emotion referred to by many learners. among the beginner learners it was the most and second most cited reason for improved l2 learning attitudes and motivation, respectively. this result corroborates the findings from previous studies (pekrun et al., 2002; pekrun et al., 2004), in which enjoyment correlated positively with learning motivation, and is in line with the notion that positive emotions such as enjoyment of learning most likely increase interest and strengthen motivation (pekrun et al., 2007). enjoyment is also one of the academic emotions discussed by pekrun (2014) as an example of achievement emotions (see the literature review in section 2). other emotions found in the attributional statements, such as happiness, curiosity, hope, hopelessness, disliking, and disappointment, are also among those referred to within the attributional perspective on emotions and/or academic emotions. this finding shows the powerful role that emotions play during the l2 learning process, aligning with the discussion of significant effects of emotions on learning voiced by many scholars (e.g., dewaele, 2015; linnenbrink, 2007; macintyre & gregersen, 2012; pekrun, 2014; schutz & pekrun, 2007). the fourth research question concerned the differences in attributional statements between learners with lower and higher l2 proficiency. it was found that certain categories only emerged in one of the groups. increased l2 exposure, which was the most cited reason for the improvement of both l2 learning attitudes and motivation among the intermediate/advanced students, was not mentioned by the beginner students. this finding may be accounted for in light of l2 metacognition and autonomy. in essence, metacognition refers to “individuals’ awareness and management of their learning process” and consists of two components: metacognitive awareness and metacognitive strategies (raoofi, chan, mukundan, & rashid, 2013, p. 37). the former refers to information which learners possess about their own learning, while the latter are skills with which learners manage and guide their own learning (rahimi & katal, 2012). previous research has indicated that possessing and utilizing metacognitive awareness and knowledge helps learners to be successful in l2 learning (cotterall & murray, 2009; raoofi et al., 2013). it has also been argued that developing metacognitive awareness of one’s own language learning ultimately facilitates autonomous learning (for further discussion of autonomous learning, how i see it: an exploratory study on attributions and emotions in l2 learning 569 see, e.g., reinders, 2011). taking into consideration these views, it can be speculated that the intermediate/advanced learners in this study were more metacognitively developed and able to make effective use of the resources available to them. the beginner learners, on the contrary, may not have had such knowledge or skills so that they did not benefit as much from mere exposure and increased access to the l2, which, in turn, may have resulted in little influence on their learning attitudes or motivation. in a similar vein, praise from the teacher, which only appeared in attributions by the beginner learners, may not have had such an impact on the intermediate/advanced learners, who may have been used to being acknowledged or praised for their good l2 skills. another remarkable difference found between the two groups was the proportion of affective attributions. in explaining reasons for the improvements of their l2 learning attitudes and motivation, the beginner learners expressed a number of emotions such as joy about learning new things, happiness about getting their answers correct on the toeic questions, gratitude for the teacher’s praise, and feeling refreshed from studying english for the first time in a long time, which added up to 56 % of their attributional statements. on the other hand, enjoyment was the only emotion expressed by the intermediate/advanced students, and it only constituted 17% of their attributional statements. several explanations can be offered. in weiner’s (2014) attribution perspective on emotions, happiness is experienced when a learner is successful, regardless of the cause of their success (p. 357). as illustrated in figures 1 and 2, perceived l2 improvement was one of the most cited attributional categories among the beginner learners. when one considers this improvement as success (or successful l2 learning), it may be natural for those who recognized their achievement to express positive emotions. however, this account may not be sufficient to explain why enjoyment constituted a smaller proportion of the intermediate/advanced learners’ attributional statements, and why other emotions were not identified. it is possible that the number of participants in this group was too small to obtain any other emotions. another possible interpretation is that it may be simply natural for beginners to have emotional reactions first. as such individuals make progress and expand their knowledge and skills, they become more aware of cognitive aspects of their learning. in other words, those who are more advanced are more conscious of and thus likely to be affected by cognitive elements in their learning, whereas beginner learners, not yet having built metacognitive awareness or knowledge, may be inclined towards affective aspects of l2 learning, which results in changing their perceptions based on feelings and emotions. sachiko nakamura 570 6. conclusion the current study sought to investigate how adult l2 learners attributed changes in their l2 learning attitudes and motivation during a toeic preparation program. it was found that the beginner learners tended to attribute improvements in their attitudes and motivation to emotional aspects of their learning experience while the intermediate and advanced learners’ accounts were more cognitive in nature. this finding highlights the important role that emotions play in l2 learning, particularly among beginner learners. several limitations of this study must be noted. the first has to do with its small sample size, which produced a relatively small number of attributional statements to analyze, particularly those from learners with higher l2 proficiency as well as those relating to negative changes. the exploratory nature of this investigation may also face criticism, especially in light of attribution research, which by and large studies attributions within a success-failure framework. another issue is concerned with the absence of another researcher to assist with the content analysis. by investigating emotions expressed in attributions, the current study treated emotions as a result of evaluations, that is, cognitive appraisal as the antecedent of emotions. yet, the author acknowledges that the causal relationship between appraisals and emotions is not always linear and uni-directional and that there can be a reverse causal relationship, where emotions and/or mood influence information-processing, as suggested by the mood-congruence effect (e.g., johnson & tversky, 1983) and the affect-infusion model (aim; e.g., forgas, 1995). based on the limitations discussed above, together with the findings from the current study, several suggestions can be made for further research. a larger sample will provide richer accounts of the differences observed between learners with lower and higher l2 proficiency. it will also enable the collection of more data to form other attributional categories for negative changes in l2 learning attitudes and motivation. alternative theoretical perspectives, such as communicative or transactional approaches (parkinson, 2009), may offer insight into the roles and functions of emotions in l2 learning. another promising approach in the emerging field of positive psychology is to consider emotions through the lens of human strengths, such as resilience, courage, and gratitude (e.g., seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2014; snyder, lopez, & pedrotti, 2010). the results of the present study, though limited, suggest implications for l2 pedagogy, particularly in test-related efl programs. administrators and instructors in such programs by and large pay greater attention to cognitive aspects of l2 learning, for example, what language features are to be taught, in what order, and in what ways. while these are all important, clearly affective factors, such as emotions, do play a critical role in l2 learning, especially among learners with how i see it: an exploratory study on attributions and emotions in l2 learning 571 lower l2 proficiency. as suggested by the current study, providing learning experiences whereby students feel joy and enjoyment is as important as equipping them with new l2 knowledge or test-taking strategies in increasing motivation and improving attitudes, and, in turn, assisting their further l2 development. acknowledgements i would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions which helped me improve the quality of the paper. sachiko nakamura 572 references cotterall, s., & murray, g. 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(2004). learners’ perceptions of their successes and failures in foreign language learning. the language learning journal, 30(1), 19-29. 645 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (4). 2013. 645-649 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book reviews linguistic and cultural acquisition in a migrant community editors: david singleton, vera regan and ewelina debaene publisher: multilingual matters, 2013 isbn: 9781847699893 pages: 200 migrant communities attract the attention of researchers as well as policy-makers and politicians, for various reasons, but it is the nature of linguistic and cultural experience of both migrant and host communities that remains a key factor in understanding the “gains and losses” caused by sustained cultural and language contact. with “adequate communication . . . regarded by many as the key component of intercultural effectiveness” (ward, bochner, & furham, 2001), the acquisition of linguistic and cultural characteristics of the host community becomes a necessity to ensure migrant well-being in the new environment. treated as a major variable with predictive power, acculturation has a long tradition of being included in the study of language developments (e.g., schumann, 1986). thus, the book specifically addressing the issues of language and culture can be expected to provide significant contribution into the field of second language acquisition as well as cross-cultural communication. what makes the book particularly valuable is the focus on polish migrants discussed across different host counties and forming different communities. based on the data obtained in the course of a project targeting a community of 646 recent polish migrants in ireland compared to the “solidarity era” immigration in france, the book includes 8 chapters whose authors investigate various aspects of these two polish migrant communities (defined with reference to the host community as french or irish “polonia”), supplemented by a short report on the polish community in austria. the majority of papers (1-5) adopt a sociolinguistic perspective, discussing linguistic signals of social identity in relation to a variety of variables, including attitudes, length of residence, socioeconomic status and the characteristics of the migrant community (size and cohesiveness). psycholinguistically-oriented chapters (6-8), on the other hand, concentrate on the acquisition of selected elements of the target language system (which is english in all three cases) by adults and/or young learners. the papers adopting a sociolinguistic perspective vary in methods and scope, from general introduction into the history and major characteristics of the polish community in france and ireland (chapter 1) and austria (chapter 4), through a preliminary report on the use of an l1 discourse marker like in l2 english (chapter 3) and an exploratory study of accommodation strategies in the use of english by polish speakers to a mixed-method investigation of a convergence in a variable deletion of ne by polish immigrants in france. the first chapter sets out to compare the cultural and linguistic situation of two very different migrant communities: the so-called “solidarity” emigration to france (in the early 1980s) with the post-polish-eu-accession migrants to ireland (after 2004). the time span and an enormous difference in socio-political as well as socio-economical circumstances prompt a broad political and cultural perspective against which the attitudes and identity issues need to be considered. the data gathered in the course of interviews within each community differ considerably: they come from 10 couples with children and 15 employees of various polish organizations in france, and 30 polish people met during various personal contacts in ireland. the interviews were all conducted in polish, and while there is some structuring of the interviews mentioned in the case of the french data, the information about attitudes, experience and plans for the future mentioned by the polish immigrants in ireland comes from informal conversations. however, as the aim of the chapter is to introduce the context for the two migrant communities rather than to discuss the results of the interviews in depth, the information elicited in the course of the interviews helps to illustrate the major characteristics of the polish immigrants (especially in the case of france) and a broader socio-political context for each of the groups. unavoidably, the discussion shows that the multi-layered differences in the conditions under which the two polish migrant communities formed result in major differences in attitudes and acculturation strategies adopted by the two groups of immigrants. interestingly, the author puts a strong emphasis on the 647 information obtained on french versus irish policy towards immigration, but uses the overall comparison for selecting a number of rather well-known factors that affect integration, such as reasons to immigrate, intended length of residence, status and demographics of the migrant community, institutional support and the degree of contact with the home country, claiming that two migration patterns, namely migration for settlement and for mobility, can be distinguished and put to further investigation in the future. in contrast to the first, largely introductory chapter, the second one tells the “tales from the french polonia” on the basis of a very different study: wellstructured, convincingly motivated and described with a strong methodological background. the approach is variationistic, and the issue investigated, which is at the centre of sociolinguistic l2 research, is the use of an informal variant in the target language as a signal of integration with the majority language speech community. the quantitative analysis of l2 speech is based on the data from recorded interviews in french with the use of goldvarb, and further supplemented by a qualitative analysis of two particularly striking cases. the overall results of the quantitative study show that l2 speakers follow the deletion pattern typical of l1 speakers, and that the level of l2 french affects the convergence pattern. however, in two particular cases, the general pattern is not followed, and it is the attitude towards the home and host community that proves to be decisive in these cases. the authors conclude that it is the combination of the two methods, quantitative and qualitative, that is needed for a comprehensive study which can best account for the dynamics of l2 language use by immigrants. the use of l2 features specific to the host community is further explored in chapter 3, which concentrates on the positional distribution of like as a discourse marker used by young polish immigrants (aged 9-19) to ireland. described for its specific pattern in irish english, the discourse marker is investigated in the semi-directed interview data obtained from 6 out of 103 participants. this preliminary report brings initial results suggesting the saliency of like and the tendency for immigrants to follow the tendencies found in the l1 community. with chapter 4 we move back to identity and attitudes rather than linguistic investigation, changing the host community for austria. a brief account of “the polish diaspora in austria” begins with the discussion of identity issues, a short presentation of the main characteristics of the polish identity portrayed with reference to history-based stereotypical values (linked to the polish language but also, somewhat surprisingly, slavic values), and continues to talk about a project based on interviews with 20 solidarity era immigrants and 5 representatives of the second generation. the data presented in the paper suggest a surprising similarity between the two groups, but the discussion reveals more complicated patterns in 648 the data which, however, are not documented. the paper ends with directions for future research, including methodological considerations. finally, the last chapter within the sociolinguistic approach continues the theme of attitudes and identity considering the patterns of accommodation observed in the speech of 25 polish post-2004 immigrants to ireland. as respondents represent a group of young people with previous experience in english, the questions explored in the study refer to the effect their irish experience had had on the change in their speech patterns and how these speech patterns correspond to the attitudes/identity issues. some of the intriguing problems include the desire to sound like a native speaker and the consequences that speaking with a foreign accent may have on speech accommodation in a variety of contexts. the discussion is based on the data from focus group meetings, individual interviews and mini-questionnaires, which is the methodology similar to the one employed for the irish and french polonia study (the results of the second study are not discussed at length here, but mentioned in the discussion and conclusions). with many interesting comments, the chapter bears a certain similarity to other exploratory and preliminary reports in the first part of the book, offering directions for future research and providing interesting, albeit somewhat poorly documented ideas. the second part of the book concentrates on language processing and language learning. the first chapter here (chapter 6) investigates the relationship between phonological short-term memory and lexical knowledge in polish adult learners of english. the learners were divided into two groups depending on their proficiency level and tested for their phonological short-term memory and lexical knowledge twice, before and after a 6-month language course. the results support a positive relationship between the two tasks, which diminishes with a growing language proficiency; however, as the study uses l1 based nonwords to check the first aspect, the serial recall does not change with the increased l2 language experience of the learners. a thorough analysis and discussion leads to the conclusion that the constructs and tasks used in this study require further exploration. in a similar vein, the following study (chapter 7), which aims to check the effect of age and environment on the acquisition of english phonology at a segmental level by child and adult learners in an immigrant versus nonimmigrant setting, concludes with a call for developing more reliable measures of constructs used in the study, in this case: language experience and language use. the methods employed relied on similarity judgments between polish and english segments performed by participants on the basis of the comparison of the auditory material with their self-produced polish correlated with the degree of intelligibility of their speech, operationalized in terms of the raters’ agreement on the segment produced. the results point to a significant effect of age both in production and perception of differences between the vowels of english and polish, and the effect of immersion 649 in the english speaking environment. contrary to expectations, the amount of l1 use has not been found to affect the acquisition of l2 in immigrant children, which is interpreted as a sign that a more reliable, independent measure of language use is needed for further studies. the book closes with the chapter reporting on a study of particular importance for the educational aspects of immigration, as it compares the acquisition of english vocabulary by irish and polish children. nine participants in each group, aged around 7, took an expressive vocabulary test and a word definition task twice, with a 6-month break. the tests were in english and polish (the translated version was used only once, with the second testing for english). the analysis of the results points to the progress in vocabulary acquisition in both groups; however, the polish group seems to be making it to a relatively greater extent in terms of the change over the period of 6 months. the quantitative analysis is further supplemented by a qualitative analysis of two highestand two lowest-scoring polish children for the purpose of finding possible patterns of variability. in conclusion, the authors stress that it is only when we consider the progress polish children make in a faster-rate acquisition of vocabulary that we can see the potential of l2 learners in spite of their lagging behind their native english speaking irish peers. moreover, individual variability and the effect of such variables as length of residence, l2 exposure and the use of l2 by the parents need to be taken into account in setting realistic goals for learners’ achievement. the studies reported in the two parts of the book provide a number of threads and ideas that combine in providing a multidimensional picture of polish communities beyond poland. the greatest strength of the book is in the multitude of approaches, which can inspire future research. as many of the authors admit, the papers tend to report on preliminary or partial findings, exploring the data and looking for initial confirmation of their ideas. while the book contributes to the heavily under-researched theme of polish recent, post-eu-accession migration, it leaves the reader with a strong hope for further studies based on the project that would provide a more comprehensive, data-based picture of the polish migrant community in ireland and elsewhere. undoubtedly, the methodological choices made by the contributors can inspire discussion and will profit further development of research in the field. the inspirational role of the book cannot be underestimated: by providing insights into the nature of research ideas developed in the project, the book offers a point of reference for other researchers interested in the acquisition of linguistic and cultural aspects in migrant communities. reviewed by ewa waniek-klimczak university of ód , poland ewaklim@uni.lodz.pl 427 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (2). 2018. 427-443 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.2.11 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the use of language learning strategies in a second and third language: the case of foreign language majors mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl zuzanna kiermasz łódź university, poland zuzannakiermasz@gmail.com abstract although multilingualism has become a fact of life in the last few decades, this phenomenon has largely failed to find a reflection in research on language learning strategies. even when scholars have addressed this issue, it has mostly been done with the purpose of proving the advantage of multilingualism over bilingualism, and scant attention has been given to how the nature, utility or status of a particular additional language can impact the frequency and patterns of strategy use. the present paper seeks to partially fill this gap by investigating the employment of strategies by 107 polish university students majoring in english and, at the same time, being required to reach a high level of proficiency in another additional language. the data were collected by means of the strategy inventory for language learning (oxford, 1990) and interviews conducted with selected participants. a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrated that strategy use in the second language was higher than in the third language, both overall and with respect to specific groups of strategies, mostly traditional and memory strategies were deployed, and the outcomes could be attributed to the proficiency level in both languages and varied motivation to master these languages. keywords: second language; third language; language learning strategies; multilingualism mirosław pawlak, zuzanna kiermasz 428 1. introduction while it is certainly possible to find individuals who are monolingual in some societies, it is also true that the world is currently becoming more and more multilingual, with the phenomenon of multilingualism, or “coexistence, contact and interaction of different languages at the societal or individual level” (wei, 2013, p. 26) becoming gradually ubiquitous, simultaneously impacting and being impacted by changes happening in different spheres of life (cf. aronin, 2015; zarobe & zarobe, 2015). on the one hand, multilingualism can be seen as a natural order of things resulting from the coexistence of social groups speaking different first languages, prolonged contacts with immigrant communities, or simply the rampant process of globalization which has been made possible, among other things, by access to cutting-edge technologies such as the internet or the influential social media applications. on the other hand, the ability to speak several languages is also actively promoted by numerous countries which have been enacting laws making it possible for instruction in two or more foreign languages to be initiated early in the process of education. in effect, aronin and singleton (2012, p. 1) point out that “the development of multilingualism in the world has reached a critical point in terms of scale and significance,” while cenoz (2013, p. 71) explains that “differences between second language acquisition (sla) and tla [which can by and large be equated with the concept of multilingualism] have been neglected in sla [second language acquisition] research and in studies on bilingualism.” such developments, however, have on the whole failed to find a reflection in research on language learning strategies (lls) that has primarily focused on the application of strategic devices in a second or foreign language (l2), giving very little attention to the differences in this respect between various additional languages that learners may aspire to learn in succession, as well as the possible transfer of strategies between different languages (see e.g., cohen, 2011; griffiths, 2018; oxford, 2011, 2017; pawlak, 2011, for an overview of existing research on language learning strategies). the present paper is intended to rectify this problem by reporting the results of a study which was conducted with the purpose of comparing the use of lls in a second (l2) or third (l3) language, reported by students who were majoring in english, but were required at the same time to achieve a high level of mastery in yet another foreign language. the first part of the paper will be devoted to a succinct overview of the scant body of previous research that has tapped into the use of strategies by multilingual learners. the second part will be devoted to the presentation of the research questions, the design of the study, its findings and the discussion of these findings. the paper will close with the consideration of future directions of research the use of language learning strategies in a second and third language: the case of foreign. . . 429 on the use of lls in different additional languages and pedagogical implications that could enhance the effectiveness of everyday teaching of foreign languages, irrespective of the order in which they are learnt. 2. previous research into the use of lls in l2 and l3 (l4) language acquisition when one examines state-of-the-art publications dealing with language learning strategies (e.g., cohen, 2011; griffiths, 2018; griffiths & cansiz, 2015; griffiths & oxford, 2014; oxford, 2011, 2017; pawlak, 2011), it immediately becomes clear that strategies are typically considered with respect to l2 and only very infrequently are any other additional languages brought into the picture. in fact, when the use of lls is considered in such cases, it typically involves comparisons between learners of one and more additional languages, the conceptualizations of lls are sometimes fuzzy and imprecise, to say the least, or simply the way in which the findings are interpreted, also, by scholars citing these studies, tends to focus on the comparison between bilingualism and multilingualism rather than differences between strategy use in l2 and l3. in one of the first studies exploring the use of lls by multilinguals, miβler (2000) used the german version of the strategy inventory for language learning (sill, oxford, 1990) as well as interviews to determine whether the number of languages known by 125 university students had an effect on lls use. she found that greater experience in language learning was indeed accompanied by more frequent application of strategies, but this effect was mediated as well by individual difference variables. in a later study, kemp (2007) employed a 40-item questionnaire based on a 5-point likert scale in which participants could also include their own comments to explore the application of grammar learning strategies (gls) by 144 learners who knew between two and twelve languages. similarly to miβler (2000), she revealed that the more languages the participants knew, the more likely they were to fall back on strategies for learning grammar, suggesting the existence of what she describes as a “threshold effect,” whereby the use of gls is proportional to the number of additional languages that are used by the learner. these findings were, by and large, corroborated in several subsequent empirical investigations. psaltou-joycey and kantaridou (2009), for example, also used the sill and found in the case of 1555 universitylevel greek students learning foreign languages that learners who were trilingual used more lls than bilingual ones, with those more advanced reporting using metacognitive and cognitive strategies more often. sung (2011), in turn, detected a positive correlation between the number of languages learners knew and the frequency of lls use, with those who had studied two or more l2s before starting to learn yet another additional language being more frequent users mirosław pawlak, zuzanna kiermasz 430 of metacognitive, cognitive, affective and social strategies than participants who had previously learnt only one language. the research project conducted by jessner, megens and graus (2016) showed with the help of think-aloud protocols that, when exposed to a text in an unknown language (i.e., romanian), young adult students who knew more additional languages were more likely to employ a greater number of compensatory strategies and were more creative when it came to tackling communication problems. while the studies mentioned above are insightful in that they demonstrate that experience in learning multiple foreign languages translated into greater lls use, at least with respect to some categories thereof, of particular relevance to the present paper are empirical investigations that have focused more directly on the application of strategies in specific languages learnt as an l2 or l3, also looking into learner-internal and learner-external factors impacting the learning process. in one such study, merkelbach (2011) administered the sill to investigate the use of lls among korean university students learning english as an l2 and german as an l3. the analysis revealed that l3 learners employed more metacognitive, memory, affective and social strategies, but this did not apply to compensation and cognitive strategies that were used more often by l2 learners. importantly, the multilingual participants were highly motivated and deliberately selected to take part in the study, and previous experience in learning english as an l2 proved to be less important than having more than one first language (l1), a result that was attributed to a lack of strategies-based instruction in the english language classroom and thus little likelihood of transfer of lls between languages. in the norwegian context, haukås (2015) conducted what is perhaps the first study of lls use in l2 and l3 in a school setting where learners are required to learn specific foreign languages rather than allowed to choose them. she administered a slightly modified norwegian version of the sill to 132 learners of l2 english and 104 learners of l3 german and found, in contrast to the studies described earlier in this section, that the former reported using more strategies than the latter. she ascribes such results to limited awareness of the participants of how the knowledge of an l2 can benefit the learning of an l3, lack of motivation to learn german as well as limited utility of this target language (tl). also worth mentioning are two studies undertaken in the greek context, with greek learned as an l2 and english as an l3, both of which used greek versions of oxford’s (1990) sill. in the first of them, mitits and gavriilidou (2016) examined 307 learners, aged 12 to 15, and found a correlation in the use of lls in l2 and l3 but otherwise their results were inconclusive. while they demonstrated higher overall use of strategies in greek than in english, the analysis of specific categories revealed more frequent application of cognitive strategies in l2 and affective strategies in l3. in an extension of this study, mitits the use of language learning strategies in a second and third language: the case of foreign. . . 431 (2016) also compared the use of strategies by monolingual (l1 greek) and multilingual learners (l2 greek and l3 english), and was only able to detect an advantage for l3 learners in the case of compensation and memory strategies, but these results are of little relevance to the research project reported below. when examining such research, one can hardly avoid the impression that the bulk of it has been conducted and interpreted with the aim of emphasizing the benefits of multilingualism with respect to the application of lls and growing awareness of similarities and differences between different languages which can be capitalized upon in learning further languages. in fact, this goal of research on lls within the framework of multilingualism is quite explicitly stated by jessner and török (2017), who write: “current work on strategies makes clear that in terms of multilingual learning we have very limited knowledge of the actual processes and their nature. there is no doubt that work on multilingualism can help disentangle the interweaving and interdependence of metalinguistic and crosslinguistic awareness in processes of crosslinguistic interaction and offer food for further thought” (p. 206). however, while there is undoubtedly merit to research projects focusing upon the use of strategies by multilinguals, it is not clear how merely demonstrating that someone who has experience in learning more than one additional language uses more strategies, both in general and with respect to specific categories, is likely to shed light on how metalinguistic awareness can in fact aid the learning process. in other words, although such research does lend support to the benefits of learning multiple languages, it is difficult to see how it could assist the learning of specific additional languages. for this to happen, more studies should be undertaken which would take account of the structural features of the languages learnt as l2, l3, l4, etc., or, like merkelbach (2011) or haukås (2015) did, consider the status and utility of these languages within a particular society or the role of individual factors such as motivation. after all, it could easily be argued that the frequency of lls use as well as types of strategies may hinge upon the nature of a given tl (e.g., the size of the lexicon and the extent to which word-formation is based on compounding) or the proficiency in that language. additionally, some languages might be inherently more appealing than others because of the way they sound, historical reasons or personal backgrounds, and the application of lls can surely be a function of individual difference factors such as learning styles or the vision of one’s ideal language self (see dörnyei, 2009) with respect to a specific additional language. all of this indicates that research on the use of strategies in different languages has to go beyond merely providing evidence for greater frequency of lls by multilinguals and should seek to determine the degree to which such use is also a function of the additional languages being taught and learnt. the study reported in the present paper represents a modest attempt to fill this gap by mirosław pawlak, zuzanna kiermasz 432 examining the lls used by english majors in poland who are required to achieve a high level of mastery of yet another additional language. 3. the present study 3.1. aims and research questions the study aimed to investigate the use of lls in l2 and l3 by polish university students enrolled in the first-year of a three-year ba program in english which also included an intensive course in an additional foreign language. the following research questions (rqs) were addressed: 1. are there differences in lls use in l2 and l3, both in general and with respect to the six categories of strategies included in the sill and specific strategic devices? 2. what are the dominant patterns in strategy use in l2 and l3? 3. are there differences in strategy use between the most frequently learnt l3s? 3.2. participants the participants were 107 first-year students attending a regular ba program in english at a major polish university, 86 of whom were females and 21 males. with the exception of one person who was an erasmus student, all the participants were of polish origin and spoke polish as their mother tongue. their mean age amounted to 20.3 years, and although it ranged from 17 to 24, the sample was rather homogenous in this respect, with the value of standard deviation equaling 1.72. for all of them, english, the language in which they were majoring, was an l2, with the mean experience in learning it standing at 12.34 and ranging from 5 to 17 years (sd = 2.72). when it comes to their mastery of english, it could be described as falling somewhere in between b2 and c1 according to the common european framework of reference (cefr), but there was much individual variation in this respect, particularly when different tl skills and subsystems were considered. the l3s the participants were also required to learn included: spanish (41), german (38), french (14), italian (7), russian (5), dutch (1) and polish (1). the mean length of instruction in these languages stood at 4.61 years, but considerable heterogeneity could be observed, as it ranged from 1 to 14 years and standard deviation was very high (sd = 4.04). not surprisingly perhaps, the proficiency in the l3s was lower than in the l2 and oscillated around a1 and a2 according to the cefr, with some exceptions (e.g., there were participants who self-evaluated their mastery of italian and spanish as c1 and c2, respectively). it should also be mentioned that 52 (48.6%) students did not the use of language learning strategies in a second and third language: the case of foreign. . . 433 know any other languages in addition to the l2 or l3, while 55 (51.45%) participants knew one or more other languages, such as spanish, german, french, russian, ukrainian, chinese, japanese or latin. it can reasonably be assumed that they must have constituted their l3, l4 and so on but no detailed information is available in this respect. the ba program that all participants attended included an intensive course in english, classes in history, literature and linguistics, all of which were taught in that language, as well as a component devoted to l3 instruction which, however, was much less pronounced than in the case of the l2. 3.3. data collection and analysis both quantitative and qualitative data were collected to provide insights into the use of lls in l2 and l3. the former were obtained by means of the sill (oxford, 1990), which consists of 50 5-point likert scale statements (1 – never or almost never true of me and 5 – always or almost always true of me) tapping the reported use of metacognitive, cognitive, memory, social, affective and compensation strategies. although numerous criticisms have been leveled at this instrument (see e.g., dörnyei, 2005; dörnyei & ryan, 2015; white, schramm, & chamot, 2007), including those by oxford (2011, 2017), who was the one to create it in the first place, its use appeared to be justified in view of the fact that it has been to some extent a default data collection instrument in the majority of studies of lls use in l2 and l3 conducted to date. thus its employment in the present investigation made it possible to attempt comparisons with the findings of previous research. in addition, as stressed by amerstorfer (this special issue), despite its undeniable limitations, the sill is definitely not past its expiration date and can still offer useful insights into the use of strategies, particularly when it is augmented with other research methods, as was the case in the present study. given the differences in the level of mastery of english among the participants and to reduce the danger of misunderstanding of some of the items included in the sill, the inventory was translated into polish (with the exception of one student for whom polish was not the l1) and the internal consistency reliability of this translated version was satisfactory, both for the l2 and l3 (α = 0.81 for l2 and α = 0.73 for l3). the participants were requested to fill out the sill during one of their classes, indicating the frequency of lls use for english and the l3s that they were studying (different for different participants). quantitative analysis was used in this case, with the means and standard deviations1 being calculated 1 mizumoto and takeuchi (2018) discuss the criticism that means and standard deviations should not be calculated for a likert-scaled (ordinal scale) instrument, such as the sill. medians are technically more appropriate for ordinal data. however, mizumoto and takeuchi mirosław pawlak, zuzanna kiermasz 434 for the l2 and the l3 for individual items, the six categories and the entire inventory. oxford’s (1990) guidelines were followed for interpreting frequency of lls use as high (5.0-3.5), medium (3.4-2.5) or low (2.4-1.0). two-tailed pairedand independent-samples t-tests were calculated to establish statistical significance of lls use between l2 and l3, and between the most frequent l3s, respectively. the quantitative data were complemented through semi-structured interviews in which four students learning spanish as the l3, all of whom were volunteers, were queried about similarities and differences in the employment of strategies in l2 and l3, taking as a point of reference the items included in the sill. as was the case with the entire sample, all of those students were much more proficient in english (l2, b1-b2 according to the cefr) than spanish (l3, a1-a2 according to the cefr), and, not surprisingly, had been learning the l2 much longer (812 years) than the l3 (1-4 years). although the authors are fully aware that learners of the remaining l3s should have ideally been included in the interviews, this was not possible owing to difficulties in accessing them. the students responded to three broad questions about the differences in the ways they approached the learning of l2 and l3: (1) “compare the way you usually learn a specific thing in l2 and l3 (e.g., vocabulary, grammar),” (2) “can you see any differences between your l2 and l3 learning?,” (3), “can you see any similarities between your l2 and l3 learning?” depending on the situation, the three questions were augmented with some additional queries intended to prod the students to offer more details. the interviews were held in polish to ensure that the participants would be able to express their ideas freely and precisely, they were conducted individually by one of the present authors, and they were audio-recorded. the recordings were subjected to qualitative analysis which focused on the actions and thoughts employed in the process of the learning of the specific foreign language. 3.4. results as can be seen from table 1, the reported use of lls for the l2 (english) proved to be higher than for the l3, with the differences reaching statistical significance. this applied as well to the overall use of lls (3.45 vs. 3.01) and all the six categories included in the sill, that is, in the order of the magnitude of the difference in means, memory (a difference of 0.88), metacognitive (a difference of 0.79), cognitive (a difference of 0. 74), social (a difference of 0.57), compensation (a difference of 0.19), and affective (a difference of 0.07) strategies. applying the criteria suggested by oxford (1990) and expounded above, the overall use of lls in l2 and present a more nuanced explanation, saying that under specific conditions the use of means is acceptable for ordinal data. the use of language learning strategies in a second and third language: the case of foreign. . . 435 l3 could be characterized as medium, which was the case for most categories. the exceptions were three groups of lls in the case of l2, that is, cognitive (m = 3.76), social (m = 3.76), and metacognitive (m = 3.74), where the reported means exceeded the threshold of 3.5 and strategy use could thus be described as high. another interesting difference between the employment of lls in l2 and l3 is the fact that there was notably more individual variation in the case of the latter, both on the whole and with respect to all the six categories, with the values of sd being the highest for social (0.89) and metacognitive (0.84) strategies. table 1 the reported use of language learning strategies in l2 and l3 strategy type language m (sd) paired t-tests and significance memory l2 l3 3.06 (0.35) 2.94 (0.44) t = 2.63 p < .01 cognitive l2 l3 3.76 (0.28) 3.02 (0.53) t = 9.06 p < .01 compensation l2 l3 3.45 (0.38) 3.26 (0.57) t = 2.94 p < .01 metacognitive l2 l3 3.74 (0.48) 2.95 (0.84) t = 9.39 p < 0.01 affective l2 l3 2.79 (0.45) 2.72 (0.45) t = 1.57 p = .06 social l2 l3 3.76 (0.51) 3.19 (0.89) t = 6.63 p < .01 overall lls use l2 l3 3.45 (0.18) 3.01 (0.36) t = 8.74 p < .01 note. l2 stands for english in all cases while l3 signifies one of the following languages: spanish, german, french, italian, russian, dutch and polish it is also revealing to examine the differences in lls use between l2 and l3 with regard to specific strategies, particularly those that deviated from the overall pattern, that is situations in which their reported application was higher in l3 than l2. in the case of memory strategies, this was observed for making associations with sounds or images (l2 m = 2.87 vs. l3 m = 3.09) or imagining a situation in which a particular word could be used (l2 m = 3.38 vs. l3 m = 3.42), with both of these being significant (p < 0.05). with respect to cognitive strategies, differences in favor of the l3 could be detected in the case of repeating or rewriting new words several times (l2 m = 3.74 vs. l3 m = 3.81), dividing words into parts that could be understood (l2 m = 3.22 vs. l3 m = 3.39), and searching for cognates in l1 and the additional language (l2 m = 3.74 vs. l3 m = 3.81), but the difference reached significance only for the last item (t = -2.66, p < .01). when it comes to compensation strategies, more frequent use of lls was reported for l3 in the case of guessing the meaning of unknown words (l2 m = 3.80 vs. l3 m = 3.87), the use of gestures (l2 m = 3.54 vs. l3 m = 3.83), and making up mirosław pawlak, zuzanna kiermasz 436 new words (l2 m = 2.18 vs. l3 m = 2.44), with the latter two differences being significant (t = -2.44, p < .01, and t = -2.02 and p < .05, respectively). as to affective strategies, the use of lls was higher in l3 in the case of the strategy of trying to relax when being afraid to use the tl (l2 m = 3.19 vs. l3 m = 3.24), noting nervousness in the process of language learning (l2 m = 3.47 vs. l3 m = 3.50), and writing about feelings in relation to language learning in a diary (l2 m = 1.22 vs. l3 m = 1.19), but none of these differences proved to be statistically significant. in the case of social strategies, a statistically significant difference was only revealed for asking the speaker to repeat or slow down when a misunderstanding arises (l2 m = 4.14 vs. l3 m = 4.33, t = 2.05, p < .05). there were no situations in which the reported use of any metacognitive strategy was higher in l3 than l2. generally speaking, it seems that the lls used more frequently in the l3 than in the l2 were simply more geared to the challenges that lower proficiency learners were likely to be faced with when learning an additional language. although the investigation of the differences in strategy use in different l3s was difficult due to the fact that there were considerable discrepancies in the numbers of students learning those l3s, the researchers decided to undertake comparisons in the case of the most popular of these languages, that is, spanish, german and french (41, 38 and 14 participants, respectively). the overall reported use of lls for the three languages equaled 3.41 (spanish), 3.51 (german) and 3.48 (french), with the differences being too minute to reach statistical significance. predictably, the two-tailed independent-samples t-tests also failed to reveal statistically significant differences with regard to any of the six categories included in the sill. as regards the interviews, the quality of the data they yielded left much to be desired since the participants seemed to not only exhibit scant knowledge concerning strategies and how they can be beneficially used, but also showed little awareness of what the process of learning l2 and l3 involved and found it relatively difficult to describe what they actually did when learning either of the two languages. this situation was quite surprising because, as english majors, the students had attended courses in linguistics and language teaching methodology, and it necessitated posing some additional queries to encourage the interviewees to provide more comments and details. nonetheless, qualitative analysis of the recordings allowed the researchers to make three crucial observations. first, all the students agreed that they were more likely to use lls in the l2 than the l3, but they could not really explain why this was the case. second, the students did not see many differences in the ways in which they learned l2 and l3, and when such differences were mentioned, they were typically attributed to greater proficiency in english (l2), a finding which should hardly come as much of a surprise. after all, while watching movies or tv series with the original the use of language learning strategies in a second and third language: the case of foreign. . . 437 soundtrack may appear commonplace and natural for a student representing the b2 or c1 level, it surely must pose a major challenge for someone at an a1 level and may not even be attempted. on the other hand, the participants made no reference to other factors, such as the nature of the tl, its status or motivation to actually learn it. third, irrespective of whether l2 or l3 was in focus, the scope of the reported lls was very limited and the participants predominantly mentioned drawing on quite traditional memory and cognitive strategies, such as memorizing word and rules, and engaging in formal practice. there was little evidence for the application of metacognitive, social, affective or compensation strategies in the interview data. the excerpts that follow illustrate some of these points: i do not know what my language learning depends on. i do not plan my learning. i learn english by heart and in spanish it is the same. in english i watch many films and tv series, everything in english. in spanish – not yet. i learn spanish grammar in polish and i write some sentences in order to acquire it faster. in english i read books and do exercises because the grammar is more advanced. i learn differently. in english it is enough to read something and i remember it. i need to devote more time to learning spanish. in english i write the words down and rewrite them in order to memorize the spelling, in spanish i write the words down and read them. 4. discussion based on the analyses presented in the previous section, an attempt can be made to offer at least tentative answers to the research questions posed for the present study. with respect to rq1, it was found that the use of lls, both in general and with respect to the six categories included in the sill, was higher in english (l2) than in the l3s that the participants were also learning. this by and large stands in contrast to the findings reported by merkelbach (2011) as well as mitits and gavriilidou (2016), but mirrors the results obtained by haukås (2015). even though the students reported statistically significantly more frequent use of some strategic devices in l3 than l2 (i.e., creating associations with image or sound, envisioning a situation in which a particular word could be used, looking for cognates in the l1, relying on gesticulation, resorting to word coinage, asking interlocutors to repeat or slow down when a communication problem arises), these differences can primarily be ascribed to the overall lower proficiency in the l3. this is because, when using an additional language, a beginner learner is simply much more likely to try to find words in the l1 that are similar to those in the tl or use gestures to get the intended messages across mirosław pawlak, zuzanna kiermasz 438 in the face of inadequate tl resources. these findings were largely corroborated in the interviews because, even though the students mainly focused on similarities in learning l2 and l3, the differences they mentioned were clearly related to the proficiency level. what should also be noted is that there was more individual variation in lls use in l3 than l2, which, yet again, is not entirely unexpected since the participants had been learning their l2 (english) for a much longer period of time and they were in fact majoring in it, which may have resulted in more consistent use of language learning strategies. there are a few viable explanations for such findings. for one thing, there were probably considerable differences in the participants’ motivation to learn the l2 and the l3 (see also henry, 2011), which, as demonstrated by merkelbach (2011) and haukås (2015), may be a crucial factor in the readiness to employ lls. after all, it is clear that students majoring in a given l2 are likely to be much more motivated to improve their proficiency in that language rather than in an l3 that is often imposed on them by the requirements of the program. second, and closely related to the previous point, there is the issue of the perceived utility of the tl being learnt, because, having chosen english as their major, the participants must have been cognizant of the benefits of their proficiency in that language for their future professional careers. by contrast, the benefits accruing form the command of the l3 may have been seen as much less tangible and thus less likely to become a stable element of the students’ ideal selves (dörnyei, 2009). third, the overriding factor accounting for differences in the application of strategies, whether in regard to quantity or quality, was the substantial gap in l2 and l3 proficiency. on the one hand, differential proficiency levels may have explained the greater overall frequency of strategy use in the l2 but, on the other hand, it may have also been the reason why the use of some strategic devices was reported more frequently for l3, being more suitable to learning and using an additional language that is still relatively little known. obviously, the nature of a particular l3 is also a crucial variable but it was difficult to explore in the present study because the l3s were not investigated separately and the data collection tools may not have been appropriate to capture the role of their distinctiveness with regard to lls use. when it comes to rq2, few differences were revealed in the patterns of lls use in the l2 and l3 since in both cases the students predominantly drew on a repertoire of quite traditional strategies, mainly memory and cognitive in nature, such as memorization or repetition, giving little attention to metacognitive, affective, social or cognitive strategies. this can perhaps best be explained in terms of instruction the participants received and evaluation procedures they underwent. this is because even though the courses in l2 and l3 are aimed to develop a high level of communicative ability, considerable weight is given to the mastery of pronunciation features, the development of a rich lexicon, and the command of a range of somethe use of language learning strategies in a second and third language: the case of foreign. . . 439 times very complex grammatical structures, with the instructional techniques employed being often very traditional and relying on translation, sentence completion or paraphrasing. additionally, the regular in-class tests and the end-of-the-year examinations that the students are required to take usually stress form-focused components which to a large extent determine the final grades or scores. in such a situation, as pawlak (2012) indicated with respect to grammar learning strategies, an intimate correspondence is bound to occur between how students learn and how they are taught and tested. as already pointed out above, when differences in patterns of lls use were visible, they were mainly related to proficiency whereas other factors, such as those related to the nature and structure of a particular tl, seemed to take the back seat. what should also be emphasized is the scant awareness on the part of the students of the process of l2 and l3 learning, which translated into difficulty in obtaining requisite data. this situation also testifies to the fact that the program the students had been attending may have failed to reach its envisaged objectives and developed in the students the necessary level of understanding of both language and language learning. finally, with respect to rq3, no differences in strategy use were detected between the different l3s, which is surprising because the existence of differences of this kind could be expected on various grounds, related for example, to the utility of a given additional language, its perceptions by students, as well as the wider social or historical considerations (e.g., in the case of german). truth be told, however, the data collection tools used may have not been sensitive enough to allow the researches to gain insight into the impact of such potentially important factors. although the study has produced invaluable insights into the use of lls in l2 and l3, thus contributing to the scant body of empirical evidence in this respect, it also suffers from a number of limitations that dictate that the findings should be taken with considerable circumspection. first, although the sill has been the obvious choice in the studies dealing with the application of strategies in l2 and other languages learners might be familiar with, the instrument suffers from a number of shortcomings, not least those related to the extremely general character of the items it comprises (cf. amerstorfer, this volume; dörnyei, 2015, dörnyei & ryan, 2015; oxford, 2011; tseng, dörnyei, & schmitt, 2006; woodrow, 2005 ). second, mainly owing to difficulty in accessing the potential informants, there were major discrepancies in the numbers of students learning different l3s, with the effect that these languages were treated as a single entity which they surely were not. thus, it was not possible to look into lls use as a function of a particular foreign language, whether with respect to its difficulty, structure, status in the polish society or perceived utility. third, again due to logistical constraints, it was not possible to include in the interviews representatives of all the l3s investigated with the help of the sill, which clearly restricts the validity of the findings. fourth, the study did not tap into the use of lls with respect to concrete activities, whether from-focused (e.g., translation of sentences) or mirosław pawlak, zuzanna kiermasz 440 meaning-focused (e.g., finding differences between two pictures showing a scene in a park), which made it difficult, if not impossible, to capture the impact of the specificity of a particular tl on strategy use. finally, the use of lls can be a function of students’ pursuing their personal agendas or possessing distinct individual profiles, but individual variation of this kind was not explored in the present study. 5. conclusions and implications for future research the present paper has reported a study intended to tap the use of language learning strategies in l2 and l3 among english majors with the help of the sill and interviews with selected participants. although the research project is not free from serious limitations, the analysis showed that the participants were more likely to use lls in the l2 than l3, both on the whole and with respect to specific categories, a result that was mainly attributed to the impact of motivation, as english, the l2, was the tl in which the participants were majoring. in the case of the few strategies where the opposite was the case, the impact of proficiency was evident, with the lls more often applied in the l3 being more suitable for less advanced learners. other than that, few differences in patterns of strategy use in the two languages were uncovered, with the lls being on the whole rather traditional, which may be the corollary of the instruction that the students received and the format of final examinations. quite surprisingly though, as transpired from the interviews, the participants manifested little awareness of what learning additional languages involved and found it exceedingly difficult to pinpoint differences in strategy use in the l2 and l3. while these findings are promising and, in line with merkelbach (2011) and haukås (2015), help advance the research agenda beyond merely showing that multilingual learners are more strategic by focusing on the impact of various tls in this respect, the results reveal just several pieces of the puzzle. there is clearly an urgent need for more research. empirical investigations of this kind should focus more specifically on the employment of lls in different l3s, target other populations than students majoring in a particular foreign language, explore lls in l2 and l3 with respect to different skills and subsystems, compare the application of strategic devices in different kinds of language tasks (e.g., translation, or focused communication tasks that necessitate the application of a particular tl form for successful completion), and take into account the mediating influence of individual learner differences. on a somewhat different tack, the findings seem to indicate that even students majoring in english or other foreign languages should be made more aware of what the task of language learning involves and how the process could be enhanced with adept use of language learning strategies. obviously, basing pedagogic intervention of this kind on the tangible research results on lls use in l2 and l3 would be a no-lose proposition, which only stresses the pressing need for well-designed research projects in this area. the use of language learning strategies in a second and third language: the case of foreign. . . 441 references aronin, l. 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(2005). the challenges of measuring language learning strategies. foreign language annals, 38(1), 90-98. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: miros aw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: krzysztof kwiatkowski (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) language editor: melanie ellis (language teacher training college, zabrze) vol. 3 no. 2 june 2013 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (trinity college, dublin) simon borg (university of leeds) piotr cap (university of ód ) anna cie licka (texas a&m international university, adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) kata csizer (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) krystyna dro dzia -szelest (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabry -barker (university of silesia) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of ód ) jan majer (university of ód ) paul meara (swansea university) anna micho ska-stadnik (university of wroc aw) anna ni egorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) terrence odlin (ohio state university) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) pawe scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) david singleton (trinity college, dublin) odzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) merrill swain (university of toronto) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of ód ) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – pozna 2013 editor: miros aw pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak krzysztof kwiatkowski anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydzia pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam pozna proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, pozna contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy wiat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. wierzawska 1, 60-321 pozna print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: index copernicus central and eastern european online library (ceeol) the mla international bibliography the mla directory of periodicals linguistic abstracts ebsco efforts are being made to include studies in second language learning and teaching in the index of journals published by the polish ministry of science and higher education, and to have it listed by the european reference index for the humanities (erih) and the thomson reuters master journal list. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 3, number 2, june 2013 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors .................................................................... 155 editorial ......................................................................................... 159 articles: sarah mercer – working with language learner histories from three perspectives: teachers, learners and researchers ................................. 161 thomas lockley – exploring self-perceived communication competence in foreign language learning ........................................................................ 187 parisa abdolrezapour, mansoor tavakoli, saeed ketabi – enhancing learners’ emotions in an l2 context through emotionalized dynamic assessment ........................................................................................................ 213 stuart benson, danielle fischer, joe geluso, lucius von joo – effects of communication strategy training on efl students’ performance in small-group discussions ................................................................................. 245 mahmoud s. al mahmoud – discrimination of arabic contrasts by american learners ........................................................................... 261 monica karlsson – quantitative and qualitative aspects of l1 (swedish) and l2 (english) idiom comprehension ................................................ 293 book reviews ................................................................................. 321 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 325 155 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors parisa abdolrezapour is a doctoral student in applied linguistics at the university of isfahan, iran, where she also teaches undergraduate courses. she has published a number of articles in academic journals including discourse studies, australian journal of linguistics, innovation in language learning and teaching, international journal of applied linguistics and sociolinguistic studies. her research interests lie primarily in cognitive and emotional aspects of language teaching and learning as well as cross-cultural studies. contact details: abdolrezapour@gmail.com stuart benson currently works in the department of international communication at kanda university of international studies in chiba, japan. he graduated from victoria university of wellington, new zealand with a masters degree in tesol. his research interests are in vocabulary, specifically in the explicit teaching of vocabulary learner strategies and collocations. contact details: stuart-b@kanda.kuis.ac.jp danielle fischer is a lecturer in the department of international communication at kanda university of international studies, japan. she graduated with an ma in tesol from monterey institute of international studies in california, usa. she has previous experience teaching pragmatics and discussion skills to business professionals both in japan and in various countries in eastern europe. her most current research focuses on critical thinking and cultural exploration through book discussions. contact details: danielle-f@kanda.kuis.ac.jp joe geluso is currently working towards a phd ikrn applied linguistics and technology at iowa state university, usa. from 2009 to 2013 he was a lecturer in the department of international communication at kanda university of in 156 ternational studies, japan. his research interests include second language acquisition, cognitive linguistics, phraseology, corpus linguistics, and call. contact details: jgeluso@iastate.edu monica karlsson has taught english at university level for more than 15 years. her main fields of interest lie in sla, especially vocabulary and grammar. she now holds a permanent position at the school of teacher education at halmstad university, sweden, where she teaches proficiency courses as well as more theoretical courses. she is also part of a research society, formed at halmstad university, which focuses on classroom-based research. contact details: monica.karlsson@glocalnet.net saeed ketabi got his phd from cambridge university, uk. currently, he is an associate professor of applied linguistics at the university of isfahan, iran, and is teaching various elt courses at the graduate level. he has published and presented several papers in his area of expertise. contact details: s.ketabi@yahoo.com thomas lockley is assistant professor of english at the nihon university college of law in tokyo, japan. he has taught french, german and japanese in uk secondary and primary schools and international communication and english, mainly in the guise of content and language integrated learning (clil), in japanese universities. his research interests include clil, educational contexts and learner self-perceptions. contact details: lockleyta@gmail.com al mahmoud, m. earned his masters of science in linguistics from georgetown university, usa, in 2005 where he worked as a teaching assistant at the arabic department. he holds a phd degree in second language acquisition and phonology from michigan state university, usa. he is currently assistant professor of linguistics at imam university, riyadh, saudi arabia. he served as the associate dean for development and quality at the college of languages and translation, imam university (2011-2012). al mahmoud has taught courses both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. his research interests include second language phonology and acquisition of sounds, the relationship between perception and production of l2 sounds, and theories of second language acquisition. contact details: mssaam@hotmail.com 157 sarah mercer teaches english at the university of graz, austria, where she has been working for over ten years. her phd completed at the university of lancaster, uk, investigated the self-concept of tertiary-level efl learners. her research interests include all aspects of the psychology surrounding the foreign language learning experience. she is particularly interested in learner beliefs, self-concept, motivation, attributions and mindsets. contact details: sarah.mercer@uni-graz.at miros aw pawlak is professor of english in the department of english studies at the faculty of pedagogy and fine arts of adam mickiewicz university in kalisz, poland and the institute of modern languages of state school of higher professional education, konin, poland. his main areas of interest are sla theory and research, form-focused instruction, corrective feedback, classroom discourse, learner autonomy, communication and learning strategies, individual learner differences and pronunciation teaching. his recent publications include the place of form-focused instruction in the foreign language classroom (adam mickiewicz university press, 2006), production-oriented and comprehension-based grammar teaching in the foreign language classroom (with anna mystkowska-wiertelak, springer, 2012), error correction in the foreign language classroom: reconsidering the issues (adam mickiewicz university press, 2012), applying cognitive grammar in the foreign language classroom: teaching english tense and aspect (with jakub bielak, springer, 2013), as well as several edited collections on learner autonomy, form-focused instruction, speaking and individual learner differences. miros aw pawlak is the editor-in-chief of the journal studies in second language learning and teaching (http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl) and the book series second language learning and teaching (http://www.springer.com/series/10129). he has been a supervisor and reviewer of doctoral and postdoctoral dissertations. contact details: pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl mansoor tavakoli holds a phd in tefl and is associate professor at the university of isfahan, iran. he has been teaching tefl courses for more than 16 years. his research interests include second language acquisition, language teaching and assessment. contact details: mr.tavakoli14@gmail.com lucius von joo currently teaches at kanda university of international studies, japan. he graduated with an edm in comparative and international education from teachers college. he has taught deaf education, elementary education and efl/esl in california, japan and new york in the past 10 years. his research in 158 terests include computer assisted learning, film and documentary content based learning, discussion skill pragmatics, teacher training origins and application of lessons, student educational backgrounds and learning approaches, video-cued multivocal ethnography, and family and communities as educators. contact details: lucius-v@kanda.kuis.ac.jp 505 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (4). 2013. 505-522 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl academic and linguistic gains during a semester-long study abroad: a cohort case study1 wei cai tsinghua university, beijing, china caiwei@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn xiangrong li tsinghua university, beijing, china leexr@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn meihua liu tsinghua university, beijing, china ellenlmh@yahoo.com abstract the present case study investigated university students’ academic and linguistic gains during a semester-long exchange program abroad. thirty three third-year english majors from a chinese university answered a battery of questionnaires and 13 of them participated in semi-structured interviews both prior to and after the program. analyses of the data showed that the participants gained greatly from the exchange program both academically and linguistically. based on the findings, some implications about exchange programs are discussed. keywords: gain, exchange program, academic, linguistic 1 the present study was funded by the direct grant from the chinese university of hong kong (pi 2010354). wei cai, xiangrong li, meihua liu 506 increasingly, tertiary-level students across the globe are gaining some form of international education, because it is generally believed that study abroad (sa) facilitates the learning and acquisition of the target language and culture (allen & herron, 2003; huebner, 1995; isabelli, 2007; kinginger, 2008; lafford, 2010; llanes & muñoz, 2009; pérez-vidal & juan-garau, 2011; sasaki 2007; segalowitz & freed, 2004; serrano, llanes, & tragant, 2011). consequently, sa has caught increasing attention from educators and researchers around the globe. in recent decades, east asian students have increasingly become the majority of international students on university campuses (xia, 2009). however, research on sa has been scarcely reported, except that in hong kong contexts (jackson, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2014). it is especially so in mainland china, where increasingly more institutions of higher education have realized the importance of international education and joined exchange programs in recent years. to fill in this gap, the present study, situated in a chinese university efl context, aims to examine intermediate-to-advanced english learners’ academic and linguistic gains during a semester long study abroad. literature review an increasing number of linguists have examined second/foreign language (sl/fl) learning and acquisition within vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural framework (lantolf & pavlenko, 1995; nassaji & swain, 2000; pavlenko, 1998; storch, 2002). a primary tenet of the sociocultural theory is that higher forms of cognitive development originate first in the social world, in interaction between individuals before they are internalized and that each individual’s functional system is shaped essentially by his/her experiences and interactions with the surrounding community (vygotsky, 1978). during this whole process, language is considered the primary mediating artifact through which speakers engage in social interactions (jimenez, 2003) and the individual is considered a social being situated within a particular cultural and historical context (shively, 2008). thus, different types and degrees of participation in a certain community (e.g., the target language community) determine how well the speaker needs to control the new mediating language in order to achieve his/her goals/motives (jimenez, 2003). thus, the individual’s target language proficiency is never static and changes all the time as his/her degree of participation and interaction changes (shively, 2008). then, what happens to an individual when s/he becomes immersed in a different linguistic and cultural environment, such as an sa context? a number of studies in the past two decades have indicated that sa students do not always experience the intense exposure to the target language and the accompanying gains in language proficiency that were once assumed academic and linguistic gains during a semester-long study abroad: a cohort case study 507 (isabelli-garcía, 2010; pelligrino, 1998; wilkinson, 1998). for example, to describe the acquisition rate for gender acquisition in spanish and explore whether individual variability and language contact might affect this rate, isabelli-garcía (2010) recruited 12 intermediate english learners of spanish in the sa and athome contexts respectively over a 4-month period. the results showed that no difference existed between the two learning contexts and that social behavior and language contact abroad had minimal influence on the acquisition rate. even so, to most researchers and language educators, the sa context constitutes a rich environment for language and culture learning. research has shown immersion in the target culture is of great value in fostering acquisition of sl/fl skills in listening, reading and writing, and especially in speaking (isabelli, 2007; jackson, 2008, 2010; kinginger, 2008; lafford, 2010; lindseth, 2010; llanes & muñoz, 2009; magnan & back, 2007; martinsen, 2008; pérez-vidal & juan-garau, 2011; segalowitz & freed, 2004; serrano et al., 2011; smartt & scudder, 2004). dekeyser (2007) claimed that learning the sl abroad provided more opportunities for practice in real-life situations and thus automatization of sl skills. hernández (2010) investigated 20 1-semester study abroad students and found that students improved their l2 speaking proficiency during sa and that student contact with the target language had a significant effect on their speaking improvement. thus, the researcher believed it important to focus on learning activities that enhance students’ integrative motivation and interaction with the l2 culture in both the formal classroom (“at home”) and in the sa program. pérez-vidal and juan-garau’s (2011) studied 55 catalan/spanish efl undergraduates who spent a 3-month sojourn in an english-speaking university. they found that sa benefits surpassed those benefits obtained as an effect of formal instruction in the domains of fluency, both oral and written, oral accuracy and formulaic language, and written lexical complexity. yashima and zenuk-nishide (2008) analyzed the effects of learning contexts on proficiency development as well as attitudinal and behavioral changes. two cohorts of 165 students enrolled in two different courses, of whom 16 joined a 10-month sa program in various english-speaking countries, participated in the study. the results indicated that the sa group demonstrated a clear advantage in all of the indicators over groups who stayed home. sasaki (2007) compared the changes in english writing behavior of 7 japanese university students (the sa group) who spent 4 to 9 months in englishspeaking countries with those of 6 counterparts majoring in british and american studies (the at-home group) who remained in japan. after a 1-year observation period, the researcher found that only those in the sa group improved their sl writing ability and fluency, made more local plans, and became more motivated to write better l2 compositions. these findings were partially supwei cai, xiangrong li, meihua liu 508 ported by lord’s (2009) case study of one participant’s written production to investigate the processes of the 1-year sa and l2 acquisition. as such, it is clear that sa generally facilitates the learning and acquisition of an sl/fl. this may be the exact reason why more and more institutions of higher education are joining exchange programs around the world. however, though sa programs have become increasingly popular and have caught the attention of increasingly more and more researchers worldwide, they have been the focus of interest of relatively few researchers in asian contexts. as more and more chinese institutions and students of higher education are involved in exchange programs, research is urgently called for in this area to examine what benefits sa programs may have, how to prepare students who are going abroad to maximize their time abroad, and how to sustain their gains after the exchange experience. the interest in collecting data from students in a prestigious university in beijing, china, which has been sending increasingly more students abroad on exchange programs, has motivated the present study, part of which is reported in the present paper. the examination of chinese learners’ linguistic and academic gains while staying abroad can throw some light on the variability that has been observed in previous research. the particular questions for the present research are: 1. what are the students’ perceived academic gains during one semester’s study abroad? 2. what are the students’ perceived linguistic gains during one semester’s study abroad? in the present paper, academic gains referred to gains in school work, seminar and research skills, and intellectuality, while linguistic gains referred to gains in different aspects of english, both formal and informal. research design this study examined the perceived academic and linguistic gains of 33 intermediate to advanced learners of english from a prestigious university in mainland china who joined a semester long study abroad program in english speaking countries. survey respondents thirty-three (1 male and 32 female) 3rd-year intermediate to advanced english majors from a prestigious university in beijing answered a battery of academic and linguistic gains during a semester-long study abroad: a cohort case study 509 questionnaires in the present study. they all went abroad as exchange students during the first term (fall) of their third academic year at university. with an age range of 18 to 21, their average age was 19.7. among these students, 22 (66.7%) had never been abroad, and the others except gong had stayed abroad for varying lengths ranging from 10 days to 1 year. the exception was gong who had lived in japan for 7 years since she was 5. with an average of 8.91 years spent in learning english, all the survey respondents went to english speaking countries as exchange students. interview respondents thirteen females of the 33 survey respondents participated in the semistructured interviews, 8 of whom had been abroad for varying durations of time and 3 had been to their host country on an exchange program in the middle school, as presented in table 1 (all the names were pseudo to protect their privacy). prior to the sa, gong had lived in japan for seven years when small, homestayed in america for 2 weeks in the middle school, spent 1 week in south korea on a program for university students, and 1 month in turkey on a program as a volunteer teacher of english to beginners. having stayed in different cultures made gong “more desirable to know different places in the world and more confident to adapt to various environments.” peng, xiao and han had studied and travelled in america for 1 month in middle school. and the other 4 who had been abroad had traveled or stayed in such countries as australia, south korea, britain and spain for 10-15 days on programs for university students. because of these experiences abroad, they reported having improved their english, known more about the local cultures (gong, han, & peng), (greatly) enhanced their interest in english (xiang & peng) and motivation (xiao) to go abroad, and understood more about the differences between china and other countries in different aspects (gao). during the sa, 4 (30.8%) of the 13 sojourners lived in school accommodations with other international students and thus used english also when at home. all the others shared a room on campus or an apartment off campus with other chinese students and thus spoke chinese when at home. during their free time, 3 (23.1%) mainly socialized with other international students, 2 (15.1%) with local students, and the others with mixed students— internationals, chinese and local students, depending on what activity they were involved in. when traveling in the host city or country, their companions were predominantly chinese because it was easier to communicate and get along with them, as reported in the post-sojourn interviews. wei cai, xiangrong li, meihua liu 510 table 1 detailed information about the interviewees (n = 13) interviewees had been abroad before? host country during the sa accommodation during the sa people they were with most during the sa travel during the sa li yes (spain) britain rented mixed yes peng yes (america, south korea, spain) america rented mixed yes gong yes (japan, south korea, turkey) america sa internationals yes gao yes (australia, european countries, cambodia) america rented mixed yes xiao yes (aermica, european countires) britain sa locals & internationals yes han yes (america) canada rented mixed yes ning yes (south korea, russia, britain) america sa internationals yes pan yes (australia) france rented mixed yes min no canada rented mixed yes yong no australia sa internationals yes deng no america rented locals yes ye no canada rented mixed yes tang no america rented mixed yes note. sa = school accommodation instruments the data in the present study were collected via preand post-sojourn surveys, and preand post-sojourn semi-structured interviews, as detailed below. pre-sojourn international exchange survey. the 97-item mixed form presojourn international exchange survey was adapted from that used in jackson (2010) to gather data about the participants’ background, liberal education, l2 proficiency/use, intercultural contact/travel experiences, attitude towards home/host/other cultures/identity, aims/reasons for going on exchange, sojourn learning, self-rated abilities the native language and the target language, academic achievements, self-perceived difficulties while abroad, self-perceived preparation of the coming study abroad, and personal comments about the program. academic and linguistic gains during a semester-long study abroad: a cohort case study 511 post-sojourn international exchange survey. the 71-item mixed form post-sojourn international exchange survey was adapted from that used in jackson (2010), which mainly covered the following aspects: demographic data, accommodation while abroad, gains from the exchange program, difficulties and challenges during sa, self-perceived importance of the exchange program, self-rated proficiency in the medium language used in the courses while abroad, and personal comments on the exchange program. pre-sojourn interview guide. this 55-item pre-sojourn interview guide was adapted from that used in jackson (2010) which involved the following aspects of the participants’ ideas of the exchange program: background information and motivation to study abroad, goals and expectations of the program, attitudes toward and participation in service learning during sa, current intercultural contact/intercultural communication skills, current identity, previous travel or study abroad, level of preparedness for sa, language usage during sa, journal writing, and future plans. post-sojourn interview guide. this 94-item post-sojourn interview guide was adapted from that used in jackson (2010), which involved the following aspects of the participants’ ideas of the exchange program: overall impression, residence abroad, academic/intellectual development, free time, extracurricular activities & travel while abroad, intercultural adjustment and learning/intercultural communication skills, personal/social development, identity, linguistic development/usage, pre-sojourn preparation for life/study abroad, service-learning while abroad, reentry, current intercultural contact/ intercultural and global education, and future plans. procedure the present study was conducted during the first semester of the students’ third academic year but actually lasted more than a semester. both the presojourn survey and interview were done 2 months prior to the students’ leaving for their host universities in late august or early september because they would spend the summer holiday (mid july to late august) at home. both the postsojourn survey and interview were conducted within a month after they came back. each survey took the students about 25 min and each interview lasted for about 1.5 to 2 hrs, which was tape-recorded. all the survey items were presented to the students in both chinese and english to avoid any misunderstanding. chinese was predominantly used during the interviews for the sake of the ease in expressing ideas, with occasional use of english when the speakers liked to. wei cai, xiangrong li, meihua liu 512 data analysis all the survey data were analyzed using spss 20 in terms of mean and standard deviation. all the interview data were transcribed and subjected to open coding to identify recurrent themes and issues (charmaz, 2006; richards, 2009). all the sources were triangulated when presenting the results. results in the present study, all the items assessing the students’ perceived academic and linguistic gains were placed on a 5-point likert scale with values of 1-5 assigned to each of the five descriptors respectively. thus, the higher a score on an item, the greater the students’ perceived gain was. academic gains analyses of the post-sojourn survey data showed that the mean for each academic gain item ranged from 3.44 to 4.56 (sd = 0.511 ~ 0.979) (items 1-7, table 2), well above the item midpoint of 3, meaning that the respondents believed they had academically gained a lot from the exchange program. as shown in table 2, because of the sa, they added diversity to their academic program such as by taking courses not offered at their home university (item 7; m = 4.56), improved practical and academic skills (item 4; m = 4.11), enhanced knowledge and skills in their discipline (item 1; m = 4.06) and critical thinking skills (item 6; m = 3.94), enhanced résumé and increased job opportunities (item 2; m = 3.72), and gained valuable experience for future career (item 3; m = 3.61). they also reported that the sa experience challenged them intellectually (item 5; m = 3.44). table 2 reported academic and linguistic gains (n = 33) item my exchange experience m sd 1. enhanced my knowledge and skills in my discipline (major). 4.06 0.725 2 enhanced my résumé and increased job opportunities. 3.72 0.826 3 provided me with valuable experience for my future career. 3.61 0.979 4 improved my practical, academic skills (e.g. writing essays, giving oral reports, doing project work, etc.). 4.11 0.583 5 challenged me intellectually. 3.44 0.858 6 enhanced my critical thinking skills. 3.94 0.725 7 added diversity to my academic program (e.g. took courses not offered at the home university). 4.56 0.511 8 enhanced my proficiency in a second or foreign language. 3.83 0.786 9 enabled me to gain exposure to a second/foreign language in daily life. 4.11 0.758 10 increased my ability to communicate in the language used in the host community. 4.22 0.732 academic and linguistic gains during a semester-long study abroad: a cohort case study 513 these results are generally consistent with those of the interview data. as expected, all the 13 interviewees took a variety of courses from different disciplines such as introductory psychology, human cultures, studies on homosexuality, introductory business, writing, drama, british literature, freedom and equality, uk economy, and leadership in action. though all the interviewees took 4 courses during the semester abroad, as did most local students, the courses generally required lots of reading, writing and discussion, and the course teachers were generally more demanding than those at their home university, as reported by the interviewees. therefore, during the process of meeting the course requirements and adapting to the academic life in the host universities, the interviewees encountered several challenges such as much reading (5/38.5%) and writing (2/15.4%), joining in classroom discussions (4/30.8%), assignments being challenging (1/7.7%), teachers being demanding (1/7.7%), and responding to the teachers promptly in class (1/7.7%). the first two to three weeks were especially difficult to them, though they soon became accustomed to the life there. nevertheless, because most courses were “challenging” (li), “interesting” (ning and min) and “up-to-date” (pan), the interviewees generally liked the courses they registered and believed they had benefited considerably from the courses and “expanded their visions” (4/30.8%) thereafter. hence, when asked about the academic gains from studying abroad for one semester, the sojourners reported that the experience offered them a chance to take courses that were not offered at their home university (3/23.1%), improved their critical thinking or the ability to think and judge (6/46.2%), and writing (3/23.1%) and reading abilities (3/23.1%), changed their interests for future study (3/23.1%), expanded their interests (2/15.4%), enabled them to become (more) enthusiastic in class (1/7.7%), to read for details (1/7.7%), to know different thinking styles and what majors of other disciplines often did (1/7.7%), and to look at one thing from different aspects (1/7.7%). as deng remarked, the professors there are often critical, and remind us that what we take for granted is often not true. this drives me to think more and deeply. for example, i gradually realize that what we believe is good and beneficial may not be so to people of another culture. this study-abroad experience also improved their ability to solve problems (1/7.7%), to speak out ideas promptly and to work on an unfamiliar task soon (1/7.7%), along with abilities in other aspects. for example, as reported in the post-sojourn interviews, ning learned to write according to certain rules, especially when citing sources; gong came to realize the difference in ways of learning between the host and home university students. as gong recalled, “in amerwei cai, xiangrong li, meihua liu 514 ica the primary way of learning was reading and writing, and discussion dominated classrooms, very different from that in here [home university].” consequently, 12 of the interviewees commented that this experience abroad would positively affect their academic life and future career, though it might not necessary empower them to become professionals. and the most important academic gain from the sa was the ability to think independently (10/76.9%). as confided by tang, first of all, i learned to think independently. in a multi-cultural society in america, i could access a huge amount of information and different people whose ideas and judgment could be extremely different. i found that to observe and evaluate an event from various angles is closer to the truth. after that, i gradually learned how to form my own ideas about an event, instead of simply believing what i heard. ning also recalled that “i had access to a huge amount of information in america. it was important for me to think independently so that i didn’t simply take whatever i read or heard. i learned to have my own judgment.” as a result, the survey respondents generally reported that this sa experience was very valuable (13/39.4%), valuable (14/42.4%) and somewhat valuable (6/18.2%) to their academic life. linguistic gains prior to the sa, 10 (30.3%) of the survey respondents believed that their overall proficiency in the host language (namely english) was very good or good respectively, 7 (21.2%) thought it was fair, 4 (12.1%) reported it to be poor, and only 2 (6.1%) believed it to be excellent. this was fairly consistent with their self-ratings of abilities in the four skills of the language of instruction (namely english) in the host country, which ranged from 3.09 to 3.39 on the scale of 1 to 5 (see table 3). table 3 self-ratings of the abilities in the language of instruction (n = 33) item skill pre-sojourn post-sojourn m sd m sd 11 listening 3.27 0.94 3.33 0.840 12 speaking 3.12 0.82 3.67 0.767 13 reading 3.39 0.79 3.67 0.732 14 writing 3.09 0.84 3.35 0.857 15 overall proficiency 3.21 0.70 3.5 0.707 post-sojourn survey data showed that, after the sojourn, 4 students rated their overall proficiency in the language-of-instruction as excellent, 12 very academic and linguistic gains during a semester-long study abroad: a cohort case study 515 good, 12 good, and 5 just so so. their self-ratings of abilities in the four skills of the language of instruction in the host country ranged from 3.33 to 3.67 on the scale of 1 to 5, as shown in table 3. clearly, the students’ self-ratings of their proficiency in the language-of-instruction increased greatly after the sojourn. this is further supported by their responses to the post-sojourn survey items on linguistic gains from the exchange program (items 8-10, table 2). the means for the three linguistic gain items ranged from 3.83 to 4.22 (sd = .732 ~ .786), well above the item midpoint of 3, suggesting that the respondents believed they had greatly improved their proficiency in the language of instruction because of the sa. as reported, the sa helped increase their ability to communicate in the language used in the host community (item 10; m = 4.22), gain exposure to the sl/fl in daily life (item 9; m = 4.11), and enhance their proficiency in the sl/fl (item 8; m = 3.83). these findings generally conform to the self-reports of the interviewees. prior to the sa, 4 (30.8%) of the 13 interviewees self-rated their english as pretty good and the rest rated themselves as intermediate learners of english. although they thought that different aspects of their english needed to be improved more or less such as daily english, writing, vocabulary, listening and logical thinking, they generally believed they were able to effectively express their ideas and communicate with other people, because most of them had had contact with english-speaking people. as reported by the interviewees, during the sa, all of them except pan joined in one or more than one extra-curriculum activities such as entertainments and cooking contests organized by the host university or community, 7 (53.8%) volunteered in gardening, fund-raising, and reading to the old, 1 (7.7%) worked as a teaching assistant, and 1 joined the volleyball team of the host university. involvement in these activities enabled them to (a) have (more) communication and even make friends with local and international students (9/69.2%), (b) learn how to communicate with different people (3/23.1%), and (c) become more motivated to learn (2/15.4%). consequently, although they believed that the sa brought them some losses such as losing the chance to eat good food, the time with friends and the chance to take the courses offered at their home university, linguistically speaking, they generally achieved what they could not have achieved at their home university from the sa: (a) being in the real english-learning environment (13/100%), (b) becoming more confident to communicate with people of different backgrounds (10/76.9%), and (c) having access to real american/british english (7/53.8%). compared with their home university peers who did not join the exchange program, the interviewees claimed that they outweighed them in many aspects. wei cai, xiangrong li, meihua liu 516 they claimed that they were more academic, more proficient in english, and had more widened visions, as reported in the post-sojourn interviews. discussion academic gains as revealed in the present study, the participants reported having greatly gained academically from the exchange program, which improved their critical thinking, and writing and reading abilities, changed their interests for future study, expanded their interests, enabled them to become (more) enthusiastic in class, to know different thinking styles, and to look at one thing from different aspects, and improved their ability to solve problems, to speak out ideas quickly and to deal with unfamiliar tasks. the primary reason for the reported gains might lie in the difference in the curriculum and teaching style between their home and host universities. as reported by the interviewees, in their home university, each student normally had to take 7 to 10 courses per semester to fulfill ba/bs degree requirements. because of this, they were busy transferring from one class to another, doing coursework, and preparing for course exams almost every day, leaving little time to read intensively and think critically. coupled with the fact that the classes were usually big at their home university, few students could really participate in or contribute to classroom discussions, and in most cases the course teachers could not expect much involvement in classroom activities of the students and had to dominate the class. by contrast, the participants took 3-4 courses during the semester at the host universities, as did the local students, which often required extensive reading, discussion and writing. the course teachers often challenged students to reflect on and contribute to a better understanding of their readings via classroom discussions and individual writing. thus it was generally fairly challenging to meet the course requirements. moreover, the classes in the host universities were usually small, the participants either chose to or were forced to read, write and participate in classroom interactions a lot to achieve satisfactory scores in the courses. during the process, they not only became more knowledgeable about certain topics, wrote more academically in the mainstream style, but learned to read (more) intensively and faster and think (more) critically and learned how to challenge existing ideas and formulate their own. meanwhile, because they were required to take far fewer courses, they felt less tense and happier to learn and became more attentive and enthusiastic in classrooms. academic and linguistic gains during a semester-long study abroad: a cohort case study 517 linguistic gains during the sa, none of the interviewees took any english language enhancement class. nevertheless, because the language of instruction of all the courses was english and the community language was mostly english as well, coupled with the fact that most students in all the interviewees’ classes were local students or internationals who were highly proficient in english, they were not only forced to read and write lots of english but use english in all classroom activities and most extracurricular activities, just like the locals and other international students. as a result, the participants had intense exposure to the language-ofinstruction during the sojourn, contrary to their counterparts in isabelligarcía’s (2010) and pelligrino’s (1998) studies. it was especially so for those who lived in student hostels on campus and/or joined extra-curricular activities organized by local or international students. although the purely englishspeaking environment made some of them (quite) anxious during the beginning two to three weeks, as they adapted themselves to the situation, they became increasingly more confident and more active participants of the community they were in. they all thus reported having improved their proficiency in english, in both formal and informal use of the language during the sojourn, as happened in numerous existing studies (kinginger, 2008; lafford, 2010; lindseth, 2010; llanes & muñoz, 2009; magnan & back, 2007; martinsen, 2008; nagy, 2008; pérez-vidal & juan-garau, 2011; sasaki 2007; segalowitz & freed, 2004; serrano et al., 2011). and the greatest progress was reported to be in listening (8/61.5%), reading (6/46.2%), writing (5/38.5%), and speaking (4/30.8%). in general, 8 of the interviewees reported to be (very) satisfied with the progress. han was not satisfied because she thought she could have done better, and xiao regretted having not turned to the teachers in the language center for help more. this might be because the students of the home university tended to pursue perfection, as found in liu (2009). moreover, although all the interviewees reported having made progress in the target language (namely english), there were still two who reported having the least progress in speaking. this was quite contrary to our expectation and might be related to how much contact they had with native speakers and how often they used english in their daily life. further examination of the data and findings revealed that most students’ gains were largely attributed to their active participation in the target language community, as found in many existing studies (dewaele & regan, 2002; engle & engle, 2004; magnan & back, 2007; segalowitz & freed, 2004). this was best illustrated by xiao’s experience in the present study. as recalled wei cai, xiangrong li, meihua liu 518 by xiao, since she joined the volleyball team of the host university, she played volleyball with other team players at least twice a week, which enabled her to communicate extensively with local and other international students on a variety of topics. she thus greatly improved her english, in both formal and informal ways. likewise, some participants in the present study might have achieved more linguistically if they had tried to maximize their contact with the target language and make full use of their zone of proximal development (shively, 2008; vygotsky, 1978) by choosing to live, hang out and travel with the local or other international students instead of other chinese most often (jackson, 2014), as confided in the post-sojourn interviews. to conclude, the present research revealed that the participants gained greatly from the exchange program both academically and linguistically. they became more confident when using the language-of-instruction in the host university both formally and informally. nevertheless, since all the findings resulted from the students’ own self-reports, they might not be reflective of what the participants had actually done when abroad, as discussed in pavlenko (2007). to further validate the findings, more objective data-collection methods are required. for example, a preand postproficiency test design may measure more objectively whether and to what extent students improve their proficiency in the target language during the sa. conclusions and implications the present research investigated chinese intermediate-to-advanced efl learners’ academic and linguistic gains during one semester’s study abroad; and the gains were reported to be generally satisfactory. as discussed above, active participation in the target language community greatly helped most students in the present study gain both academically and linguistically. for this reason, as maintained by llanes and muñoz (2009) and allen and herron (2003) as well, students should be made more aware of the need to maximize their contact with the target language by making use of all opportunities available for active target language use. although all the participants of the present study were intermediate to advanced learners of english and more than half of the interviewees had been abroad for different durations of time prior to the sojourn, they encountered various challenges such as feeling anxious in the purely native english-speaking environment and finding it difficult to adapt to the academic life in the host universities during the first few weeks. because they had been used to studying hard and/or effectively, as they confided themselves, they courageously tackled the difficulties to become better. nevertheless, most students who are not so academic and linguistic gains during a semester-long study abroad: a cohort case study 519 proficient in the language of the host country and not so accustomed to working hard or effectively, and/or have never been abroad, may have more difficulties, especially during the first few weeks. this suggests some help is needed to prepare them for the life and study abroad. and the most common way is orientation, which aims to discuss and share ideas about sa students’ concerns, expectations, possible challenges and strategies to handle various difficulties prior to the sojourn (jarvis & stakounis, 2010; shively, 2010). as reflected by the interviewees, all the host universities organized orientations for new international students, which were quite useful in helping them become familiar with the school environment and campus facilities, and even the host cities. by contrast, no formal or official orientations and/or training sessions on the life and study abroad were held by their home university, which was considered a great shame by most interviewees. hence, it might have been equally important to organize orientations for their home university and other institutions with a similar context to better prepare their students for the pending sa. as more institutions of higher education and students are joining exchange programs in china, more research on study abroad is needed. nevertheless, when interpreting the data and reporting the results, researchers have to be critical and cautious, as suggested in pavlenko (2007), because what the participants confide may not be what they actually do. and the findings will be more insightful if future research could further explore the relationship between the characteristics of sa students’ environment (e.g., extra-curriculum activities, type of accommodation, etc.) and their academic and linguistic gains. wei cai, xiangrong li, meihua liu 520 references allen, h. w., & herron, c. 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(2008). the impact of learning contexts on proficiency, attitudes, and l2 communication: creating an imagined international community. system, 36, 566-585. 525 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (2). 2018. 525-535 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.2.15 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt conclusion: the future of research into language learning strategies mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied science, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl rebecca l. oxford university of maryland, usa rebeccaoxford@gmail.com abstract in this concluding paper to the special issue (si) we seek to achieve three main goals. first, based on the papers it included in the si, other recent publications as well as our own ideas, we point to the future directions of research into language learning strategies. second, we comment upon the methodological issues that such research inevitably has to face, stressing in particular the need to combine a macro-and micro-perspective. third, we emphasize the pedagogical orientation of such empirical investigations and make a plea for intensive efforts on the part of specialists to find ways in which the findings of lls research can in fact inform classroom pedagogy. keywords: language learning strategies; future research directions; research methodology; classroom pedagogy this special issue of studies in second language learning and teaching has brought together thirteen papers by specialists in language learning strategies (lls) from different parts of the globe. from the very outset, it was our intention mirosław pawlak, rebecca l. oxford 526 to cover all the main areas of research into lls, both these that have long been established and these that have only begun to gain prominence, thus taking stock of what the field has been able to accomplish, navigating uncharted waters, and setting the course for future empirical investigations. initially, though, we mainly set our sights on the use of lls with respect to all the major skills and subsystems, that is listening, reading, speaking writing, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and pragmatics. with time, however, we recognized that there was a pressing need to focus on a number of other crucial issues, such as the use of strategies for learning culture in a second or foreign language (l2), differences in strategic learning between the additional languages people might be studying (e.g., l2, l3, etc.), the employment of lls in technology-mediated language learning, the link among strategies, self-directed learning, self-regulation and autonomy, but also methodological concerns, in particular reliance on various data collection tools, such as the sill (oxford, 1990). as a result, the special issue has kept growing to become a respectable volume in its own right, a publication which surely complements and extends the state-of-the-art overviews of the field that have appeared over the last decade or so (e.g., amerstorfer & oxford, 2018; cohen, 2012, 2014; cohen & griffiths, 2015; cohen & macaro, 2007; grenfell & harris, 2017; griffiths, 2013, 2018; griffiths & oxford, 2014; oxford, 2011, 2017; oxford & amerstorfer, 2018; pawlak, 2011). while all of the contributions have understandably made an effort to establish links with the past in providing a more or less extensive synthesis of existing research, all of them have also highlighted the directions in which subsequent empirical investigations can profitably be taken. it is such suggestions, innovative ideas gleaned from other sources, as well as the co-editors’ own proposals and ruminations that offer a basis for reflection on the future of research into language learning strategies, both with respect to its foci and methodology. when it comes to the former and as this special issue has demonstrated, one clear way to take the field forward is to investigate lls in regard specific domains in which they may be employed rather than in a more generalized fashion. in other words, we are perhaps more likely to obtain valuable insights into different facets of strategies if we focus specifically upon target language (tl) subsystems or skills, culture or affect than if we only seek to probe into strategic learning in a more general manner. this is because, when asking general questions, concerning, for example, planning the learning process, studying specific target language features, or collaborating with others, we are likely to get rather general, often routinized answers. as a result, we are bound to overlook the fact that such strategic devices may be applied differently depending on whether the focus is on grammar, reading or pragmatics, not least because each of these domains is bound to pose challenges of unique kind for l2 learners. another important conclusion: the future of research into language learning strategies 527 consideration is that some areas have been evidently relegated to the back seat, with the effect that we still know little about lls used for learning grammar, pronunciation, translation, or culture, but also speaking which has mainly been considered in terms of primarily reactive communication strategies. obviously, such a shift of focus is by no means tantamount to losing sight of the bigger picture and there is certainly merit to establishing overall profiles of strategy use for particular learners or groups of learners. one could even argue that this should ultimately be the goal of lls research because, after all, language constitutes a unified whole, this is how it is used in specific cultural circumstances, and this is how it should be learned. there are also other issues that are likely to figure prominently on the agenda of research into lls in the near future. one of them is the use of strategies in different additional languages that learners might be learning consecutively or simultaneously, both in general and in regard to specific domains. although there is some research in this area, it has mainly focused on showing that multilinguals are more frequent strategy users than bilinguals or monolinguals and it has not really shed light on how learning different languages can in fact shape lls use as a result of their specificity, status or utility. this gap must without doubt be addressed as shedding light on these issues can in fact inform actual teaching rather than merely providing proof that the knowledge of multiple languages can give a boost to strategic learning. another challenge for researchers is to investigate strategies as they are used in specific learning tasks or the different phases of these tasks rather than only trying to uncover general patterns in a population or to collect responses to hypothetical situations. after all, it is one thing to uncover the dominant trends of grammar learning strategy use by english majors with the help of a specifically designed questionnaire and quite another to determine the strategies actually employed in a focused communication task (cf. ellis, 2003) or a controlled exercise. by the same token, while there is surely value in assessment of affective or emotion regulation strategies through narratives or scenarios (e.g., gkonou, 2018), new and possibly more illuminating observations could perhaps be obtained through tapping into these emotions in real situations that may transpire in the classroom (e.g., doing a role play, taking a quiz, being engaged in a pair-work activity). yet another potentially fruitful line of inquiry is the investigation of the dynamic nature of strategy use, thereby following in the footsteps of specialists who have undertaken this challenge in regard to other individual difference (id) factors, such as motivation (e.g., dörnyei, macintyre, & henry, 2015) or willingness to communicate (e.g., macintyre & legatto, 2011; pawlak, mystkowskawiertelak & bielak, 2016). on the one hand, it would be interesting to determine how strategy use changes over time, both in terms of its intensity, the predominant mirosław pawlak, rebecca l. oxford 528 patterns of strategies that students draw upon, and the functions that strategic devices perform. on the other hand, as superbly demonstrated by cohen and wang (2018), it is enlightening to investigate changes in the application of strategies during the performance of specific language learning tasks, thus shedding light on the multiplicity of functions strategic devices can perform as well as rapid, moment-by-moment changes in these functions over the course of an activity. the examination of the dynamic nature of lls can of course be done quantitatively (i.e., by means of inventories) or qualitatively (e.g. through interviews), but the most valuable insights will likely come from mixed-methods studies. such research also lends itself to harnessing of innovative techniques that have been applied to other id variables, such as retrodictive qualitative modeling, where presentday patterns of strategy use are explained in terms of prior learning trajectories (see dörnyei, 2014) or the idiodynamic method (see macintyre & legatto, 2011), which might allow a window on fluctuations in strategy use on a second-by-second basis (see more ideas on methodological issues toward the end of this article). however, a word of caution appears to be in order at this point. while the dynamism of lls surely can be approached from the perspective of complex dynamic systems or cds (see e.g., larsen-freeman & cameron, 2007; see especially linkages between lls and cds in oxford, 2017, 2018), it need not and, in fact, should not be the only theoretical stance which can be applied to probing into such phenomena. upon reflection, the lack of dogmatism that has characterized the field of lls research over the past decades may be one of its main strengths and the reason why it has proven to be so robust and vibrant despite all critiques that have been leveled against it (see e.g., dörnyei, 2005; dörnyei & ryan, 2015). future research into lls should also continue to look into the plethora of factors that may impinge upon different aspects of strategy use but also, even more importantly, examine the link between this use and attainment. an important caveat is that this agenda should be considerably expanded to include contextual issues, look into well-known concepts from new perspectives and, ultimately, illuminate the intricate connections between the application of lls and the notion of self-regulation. on the most general level, there are variables that have barely been taken into account in studies of lls, such as willingness to communicate, working memory, or enjoyment as a manifestation of positive emotions. the same applies to complex relationships between bundles of factors (e.g., learning styles, motivation, aptitude, emotions), lls use, as well as achievement, which in itself can be operationalized in a variety of ways (e.g., examination scores, course grades, self-assessment). on closer inspection, however, it becomes obvious that some apparently well-known constructs have been subject to reconceptualization and are now frequently viewed as multidimensional, good cases in point being motivation, currently investigated in the conclusion: the future of research into language learning strategies 529 field of l2 research within the framework of the l2 motivational self-system (cf. dörnyei, 2009), or aptitude, which is often equated with different components of working memory (cf. wen, 2016). moreover, in line with what has been said about the need to look into lls in task performance, research into diverse influences on the use of strategies and the ways in which such use translates into learning outcomes would become more revealing if it were complemented by a situated, context-sensitive and dynamic dimension. this is because even the most advanced statistical procedures are unlikely to unravel the intricate fabric of mutual, constantly changing relationships between strategy use, individual learner characteristics, contextual factors and attainment, measured in terms of actual attainment of communicative goals in interactions during communicative tasks. most importantly, however, more research is needed that would empirically show how adequate use of strategies, at whatever scale they are explored, feeds into and propels learners’ agency, autonomy and the overall process of self-regulation (oxford, 2017), taking into account people’s behaviors, emotions and motivations. while there is certainly no logical reason why, as dörnyei (2005) urged, the concept of strategies should be discarded and replaced with the notion of self-regulation, the links between the two constructs should clearly be emphasized (see zimmerman & moylan, 2009). this is because it is difficult to see how any kind of learning, including l2 learning, could be successfully managed, or self-regulated, without adept application of strategies. what we should always keep in mind as lls researchers is that although empirical inquiry in this area can contribute to building theories of l2 acquisition, which is evidenced, for example, by the fact that selinker (1972) included the strategies for learning and communication among the processes of l2 acquisition, the bulk of the research that is being done has a strong pedagogical orientation. to put it differently, there would be little point in conducting for their own sake exacting, technically sophisticated, empirical investigations of lls (such as the numerous studies referred to in this special issue), without a glimmer of hope that their findings would inform teaching at least to some extent. to our mind, the results of these empirical investigations should culminate in well-designed programs for strategic intervention in different areas, such that would be feasible and implementable, rather than merely reflecting the wishful thinking of their creators, in most cases researchers. although plonsky (2011) demonstrated in his excellent meta-analysis that language strategy instruction (lsi) is moderately effective, he also pointed to a number of moderating variables that should be taken into account. as is the case with any kind of pedagogic intervention, such as different options in teaching grammar (cf. loewen, 2014; nassaji, 2017), the effectiveness of lsi is mediated by its length, intensity, context in which it is undertaken, the types of strategies that are taught, the way in which it is conducted, as well as a host of id factors. there is little doubt that future research should tease mirosław pawlak, rebecca l. oxford 530 out the role of such variables, thus potentially enhancing the efficacy of instruction in lls. another critical issue is that it is one thing to show that some kind of training leads to more frequent use of certain categories of lls and quite another to provide evidence that this increase is accompanied by tangible gains in the mastery of the tl, irrespective of how these gains are defined. without such solid proof of efficacy, it will be exceedingly difficult to convince policy makers, teacher trainers, coursebook writers, publishers, or, first and foremost, teachers to devote scant classroom time to embarking upon comprehensive strategic interventions. the last issue that deserves attention in respect to foci of future research are the contexts in which lls are explored. for one thing, we believe that it is of paramount importance to strike a balance between the broader contexts in which strategy studies are conducted (e.g., foreign vs. second), the different educational levels and types of programs within these contexts (e.g., diverse issues are likely to come to the fore for secondary school learners of english and students majoring in this language), ages (i.e., children vs. adults), but also different socioeconomic situations (e.g., opportunities for study abroad may shape the ways in which strategies are employed). we would also like to single out several specific settings in which empirical investigations of lls should gain momentum in response to the ongoing changes in how second and foreign languages are taught and learned. one of them is content-based language instruction, whether it comes under the guise of immersion, content and language integrated learning (clil), or english-medium instruction (emi), in which case pertinent studies are few and far between (e.g., ruiz de zarobe & zenotz, 2018). the same holds true for the use of lls in study abroad situations (e.g., briggs, 2015), where research could become more robust, following the lines of inquiry outlined earlier in this paper. finally, in view of the growing role of new technologies in l2 learning, be it in the form of internet resources, special educational software, social media or computer-mediated communication (cf. golonka, bowles, frank, richardson, & freynik, 2012), to name but a few, there is clearly an urgent need to investigate the use of lls in such environments. given the nature of interaction with new technologies, there are grounds to assume that patterns of strategy use in these situations might be considerably different from those in the classroom or in learners’ own time when they practice the tl in more traditional ways (e.g., greater focus on social strategies can perhaps be expected). the same could obviously be said about factors mediating strategy use (e.g., greater enjoyment and reduced anxiety), lls assessment (i.e., possibilities of precisely recording the strategies used), as well as lsi which can capitalize upon the opportunities that the use of new technologies accords (see e.g., becker, rodriguez, estrada, & davis, 2016; zhou & wei, this special issue). now that the foci of future empirical investigations of language learning strategies have been delineated, a few comments are in order on methodological conclusion: the future of research into language learning strategies 531 issues, some of which have been signaled throughout this paper. in our view, perhaps the most important thing is adept integration of a macroand micro-perspective in the study of lls (cf. pawlak, 2013). this means that there is still undeniable value in large-scale studies, involving the use of carefully designed questionnaires administered to hundreds of respondents and the application of advanced statistical procedures to gauge the relationships between variables. on the other hand, there is a need to complement such research with contextualized studies in which data are collected from participants as they are engaged in the performance of different types of learning tasks. in both cases, however, there is room for a skillful combination of quantitative and qualitative methods as well as the employment of various data collection tools. in the case of the macro-perspective, it is of particular significance to design valid and reliable research instruments that allow insights into patterns of strategy use in large samples, as exemplified by the papers on strategies for learning vocabulary and grammar (gu and pawlak, respectively) in this special issue. when it comes to the micro-perspective, the inclusion of small or sometimes very small numbers of participants has to be compensated for by the collection of rich data and the employment of sometimes quite ingenious tools in order to capture the dynamic nature of lls. irrespective of the perspective that is employed in a particular study, strategy research can also avail itself of a number of innovative approaches and techniques, some of which have been referred to above. these include, among others, retrodictive qualitative modeling (dörnyei, 2014), the idiodynamic method (macintyre & legatto, 2011), the employment of narratives (e.g., gkonou, 2018), reliance on scenario-based assessment of lls (e.g., gkonou & oxford, 2016), or the application of decision-tree methods (cf. mizumoto & takeuchi, 2018). one can only hope that these novel approaches will help shine a light on all the potential avenues of empirical inquiry that have been highlighted earlier in this paper. on a more general note, it should also be mentioned at this juncture that real statistical changes might soon be coming to lls research. for instance, as noted by mizumoto and takeuchi (2018), more modern statistical procedures will eventually replace nonparametric procedures (see also larson-hall & herrington, 2010; plonsky, egbert, & laflair, 2015). in addition, novella (2015) points out that at least one research journal, basic and applied social psychology, now bans the use of any significance testing due to criticism of the null hypothesis and the “magical” p-value. most research journals have (as yet) not banned significance testing, though we do not know what we can expect in the coming years. mizumoto and takeuchi (2018) also provide a summary of a number of innovative statistical procedures that could be valuable for future lls research. those procedures are now widely known and used among professional statisticians. while multiple approaches can be adopted in the study of language learning strategies, all the research endeavors can be called into question if specialists mirosław pawlak, rebecca l. oxford 532 fail to prove the relevance of lls to l2 pedagogy, an issue that has already been emphasized in the present paper. in other words, whatever aspect of lls we choose to investigate and whichever data collection tools we employ, no matter how innovative they might seem, the yardstick for appraising the empirical evidence we generate will be the degree to which it translates into everyday l2 instruction. this, however, has been a major challenge for many years and although certain elements of strategy instruction are included in coursebooks, neither is it done in a principled manner not are teachers eager to dedicate scarce classroom time to such pedagogic interventions. this state of affairs could be attributed to the fact that researchers have set somewhat unrealistic goals and focused upon issues that are not of immediate concern to practitioners. most importantly perhaps, they have failed to illuminate how different types of strategies can contribute to l2 learning by producing measurable gains, whether with respect to overall tl mastery, specific skills, subsystems, or other elements of language use. while this situation is unfortunate, it mirrors the woes of other areas of l2 acquisition research where empirically-driven guidelines rarely make their way into classrooms. however, particularly in the case of strategies, efforts at bridging the gap between theory, research and practice are of paramount importance to justify the existence of the field as such. we hope that this special issue will not only encourage researchers to explore new lines of inquiry into lls but also inspire them to seek ways in which the findings of their studies will feed into everyday l2 teaching in a variety of instructional contexts. conclusion: the future of research into language learning strategies 533 references amerstorfer, c. m., & oxford, r. l. 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(2009). self-regulation: where metacognition and motivation intersect. in d. j. hacker, j. dunlosky, & a. c. graesser (eds.), handbook of metacognition in education (pp. 299-315). new york: routledge. 177 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (1). 2019. 177-198 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.1.8 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt anagnorisis and narrative incorporation: how significant incidents affect language-learning behavior julian pigott ryukoku university, kyoto, japan https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2073-7475 pigott@world.ryukoku.ac.jp abstract this paper examines how fleeting experiences exert a disproportionately powerful effect on the language learning motivation and behavior of university students. a thematic analysis of interview data is used to show how significant incidents have two principal consequences. the first, anagnorisis, is an immediate, revelatory change in beliefs about language learning. the second, narrative incorporation, is a process through which the memory of the incident and/or its anagnorisis becomes a constituent of self-narratives. it is argued that the significant incident is best understood not as an external influence on motivation, but as a component of the learner’s worldview. keywords: significant incident; anagnorisis; narrative incorporation; motivation; learning experience 1. introduction in this paper i examine how significant incidents influence language learning, and how they can be conceptualized in terms of existing models of motivation. the importance of experiences in shaping our lives is self-evident, but the longterm effect of particularly memorable, idiosyncratic events on language learning julian pigott 178 behavior is the target of relatively little research. it is to be expected that quantitative research addressing motivation as a general trait should overlook the significant incident. however, in the qualitative realm, too, i suspect that the need to find commonalities between learners, their experiences, and their behavior, may have led researchers to discount the utility of studying what appear to be highly idiosyncratic phenomena. the aim of this study is therefore to address a hitherto underexplored motivation-relevant phenomenon, the significant incident. i draw on findings from the critical incident literature and my own analysis to show that significant incidents in fact share certain general characteristics. i start by offering an overview of critical incident technique (cit), and a selection of relevant findings from the l2 motivation field. after a justification of the methodological approach, extracts from interviews conducted with five university-age japanese learners of english are presented with commentary. the results of a thematic analysis illustrate how these learners’ behaviors are regulated by the consequences of memorable experiences from their formative years. the paper concludes with a consideration of how the findings can be reconciled with existing conceptions of motivation. 2. background to the study two bodies of research supply the theoretical background to this study. i start by introducing a body of work occupying a theoretical niche of its own, critical incident technique. i then address recent research investigating language-learning motivation as a complex dynamic phenomenon. 2.1. critical incident technique critical incident technique (cit; flanagan, 1954) was developed as an instrument for institutional problem-solving using the content analysis of interviews. facts about individuals’ behavior in defined situations were gathered, and then used to develop broad psychological principles of utility in solving practical problems (flanagan, 1954). during the second world war, under the auspices of the aviation psychology program of the united states army air forces, john flanagan and his colleagues used cit to formulate a set of critical requirements for combat leadership in cognitive, affective, and behavioral terms. flanagan’s (1954) seminal overview of this body of work has been more frequently cited than any other by industrial and organizational psychologists in the second half of the 20th century (butterfield, borgen, amundson, & malio, 2005). cit has subsequently been used in organizational psychology and management (cope & watts, 2000), healthcare (webster & mertova, 2007), intercultural practice (chell & allman, 2003), and cross-cultural training (wight, 1995). anagnorisis and narrative incorporation: how significant incidents affect language-learning behavior 179 the literature on critical incidents in education (thiel, 1999; tripp, 1993; woods, 1985, 2012) focuses on how critical incidents can be manufactured or managed to pedagogical advantage. the documenting and analysis of critical incidents has also become an established part of reflexive practice technique (cruickshank & applegate, 1981; farrell, 2008, 2009). in education, the focus of research has become broader than the original aim of establishing effective performance requirements. instead, understanding participant experience and decision-making has itself become a target of research. chell (2004), for example, views cit as a means of gaining an understanding of how incidents and their consequences are perceived and managed by the individual. woods (1985) shows how critical incidents are indispensable to understanding life-change, and that they define reality and identity for the experiencer. with the shift of the research focus to the individual, some have questioned whether it is possible to ascribe criticality to an incident, prompting alternative suggestions for descriptors such as revelatory and significant (keatinge, 2002). i use the term significant to describe the incidents because i hesitate to imply by definition that if a given incident had not happened, then such-and-such an outcome would not have followed. significant is also a more appropriate descriptor for the longerterm effects of such events. in the aggregate, the sizable cit literature suggests that significant incidents tend to exhibit the following characteristics: · they are seminal moments in learning and/or self-awareness. · they lead the individual to question the way things normally operate. · they have a traumatic, shocking, surprising, or risky element. · they are unplanned, unanticipated, and uncontrolled. · their full impact on the individual’s understanding and worldview becomes apparent only in retrospect (cope & watts, 2000; tripp, 1993; webster & mertova, 2007). i contend that these characteristics can be encapsulated in two categories. the first of these is coined here as anagnorisis, after the moment in a play when a character makes a critical discovery leading to a new understanding of reality—in aristotle’s (n.d.) words, “a change from ignorance to knowledge” (poetics, xi). the second consequence of the significant incident, narrative incorporation, describes the process by which memory comes to serve as a foundational component of beliefs and narratives used by the learner to make sense of learning. narrative incorporation serves a preservation and confirmatory function, maintaining a vision of reality against the pressure of contrary forces (woods, 2012). it is important to note that the object of study is not the incident itself but how it is remembered, and the meaning attributed to it; for example, the fear an adult feels towards dogs because of a childhood recollection of being attacked by the family canine, is real (and a legitimate object of study) even if, in fact, the dog only intended to play. julian pigott 180 the categorization into anagnorisis and narrative incorporation is, as will be shown, well grounded in empirical data. it is also consistent with cit literature. while hitherto untapped by l2 motivation researchers, the above categorization constitutes a valuable resource for researchers interested in the role played by significant incidents in language learning. 2.2. the significant incident and l2 motivation motivation is a famously slippery concept to nail down in a universal definition. it has been defined as an account of behavior (dörnyei, 2001a), a latent variable (gardner & tremblay, 1994), a cumulative arousal (dörnyei & ottó, 1998), a manifestation of desire (dörnyei, 2005), and an emergent phenomenon (ushioda, 2001) – such is the conceptual indeterminacy that led the american psychological association to consider removing it as a search term from their psychological database at one point (walker & symons, 1997). within the l2 motivation field, a substantial amount of quantitative research has been conducted on environmental influences on language learning motivation such as the classroom environment and pedagogical practice (chambers, 1993, 1999; csizér & kormos, 2009; dörnyei, 2001b; dörnyei & ushioda, 2011; yashima, 2009). compared to such well-researched variables, events outside the classroom that trigger changes in beliefs and behavior are often highly idiosyncratic and therefore difficult to capture using traditional quantitative methods based on group averages (dörnyei, 2005; gardner, 1960; noels, 2001). in principle, a qualitative approach (lamb, 2004, 2009; norton, 1997, 2000; ushioda, 2009, 2015) focusing on the individual, or a small number of individuals, offers easier methodological access to the significant incident. rather than traits, qualitative methodologies tend to focus on how the learner thinks about language learning, the beliefs underlying this thinking, and how participant understanding shapes behavior (ushioda, 2001). lamb (2004, 2009), for example, shows how changes to the motivation of young indonesians derive from the way they are involved in on-going processes of identity construction during adolescence within their institutional and cultural context. work on long-term motivational change within the qualitative realm has tended to reflect findings in educational psychology (shunk, pintrich, & meece, 2007), showing how elementary and junior high schools have a negative effect on the motivation of incoming students (chambers, 1999; koizumi & matsuo, 1993). in related research into life-long language learning, shoaib and dörnyei (2005) identified six salient motivational transformation episodes (mtes) associated with a reformulation of learners’ motivational disposition. one of these, moving into a new life phase (e.g., leaving school or starting work) was found to anagnorisis and narrative incorporation: how significant incidents affect language-learning behavior 181 instigate a revision of learning goals. the idea of a transformational episode clearly resonates with that of the significant incident, but mtes have unfortunately not gained traction within the field. while the role of particular memorable incidents in influencing learner motivation remains undertheorized in the literature, work addressing motivation from a self or identity perspective provides a possible theoretical link between such incidents and changes in behavior. views of the self, which are altered by anagnorisis and narrative incorporation, have been shown to have a direct and unequivocal effect on behavior, attitudes, and motivation (dweck & molden, 2008). the two most influential self-related concepts within l2 motivation work are possible selves and self-discrepancy. possible selves (markus & nurius, 1986) are symbolic futures to be approached or avoided: “individuals’ ideas of what they might become, what they would like to become, and what they are afraid of becoming” (dörnyei, 2005, p. 99). according to markus and nurius (1986), they are likely to derive from salient categories within the sociocultural and historical context, including immediate social experience. the significant incident clearly can fall into this category. according to self-discrepancy theory (higgins, 1987, 1996), discrepancy between the actual and hoped for selves causes psychological discomfort that the learner is motivated to alleviate by bringing the selves into alignment. as outlined below, significant incidents may either inspire particular hoped for selves, or reveal to the learner “deficiencies” in their actual selves. in general, the significant incident is a catalyst for learners to reconceptualize their view of themselves in relation to the world, and what they can do about their situation through language learning. the recent movement incorporating concepts from complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) into the l2 motivation literature has encouraged researchers to address the complex and dynamic nature of language learning and motivation (dörnyei, 2011; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008; van geert, 2007). in previous research (pigott, 2012), i used a simplified version of larsen-freeman and cameron’s (2008) complexity thought modeling procedure to analyze the language learning motivation of a small group of japanese university students. i found that a cdst approach was of utility in describing how participants’ experiences in junior high school were integral aspects of their l2 motivation as university students. non-linearity, for example, explains how seemingly inconsequential incidents such as intercultural encounters at an early age can potentially exert a disproportionately significant effect on motivation (a butterfly effect), while eight years of test-focused compulsory english classes often exert a disproportionately insignificant influence. the influence of such incidents is contingent on the initial conditions of the “learner system” (i.e., learner characteristics). or, if the learning trajectory itself is taken to be a complex system, the julian pigott 182 significant incident can be understood to generate particular initial conditions for learning. in line with larsen-freeman and cameron’s (2008) observation that events closer in time may in fact be less relevant to behavior than particularly important events widely separated in linear time, the influence of such events operates over timescales that dwarf more usual targets of the researcher such as the task, lesson, or curriculum. recent research within the cdst paradigm has focused on motivational change over various timescales. yashima and arano (2014), for example, examined motivational change during the course of four years spent at university. henry (2015) analyzed motivational changes over the course of a single academic year. macintyre’s (2012) idiodynamic method addresses motivation at the level of the second, using software to examine the “fluctuations of approach and avoidance tendencies” (p. 114). the findings presented here add to this growing body of research by examining changes to motivation occurring over the space of up to a decade. my view of the use of cdst concepts within motivation research are in alignment with mercer’s (2015) observation that they provide useful metaphors collectively reminding theorists not to take an overly reductionist approach toward understanding motivation. it bears remembering, however, the old adage about babies and bathwater. schumann (2015) writes that a cdst approach allows researchers to “abandon the notion of single and linear causality and frees them from the implicit demand in conventional research for large subject studies” (p. xvi). this may be true, but i would argue that this is precisely what decent qualitative approaches have been doing long before interest in cdst concepts arose. it is, to my mind, regrettable that the incorporation of cdst thinking has not led researchers to embrace the rich, existing array of qualitative approaches available, but rather to bypass them in the enthusiastic rush to develop “cdst-specific” qualitative methods (cf. macintyre, dörnyei, & henry, 2015). the method used here, thematic analysis, is a tried-and-tested one, and has nonetheless proved effective in elucidating the nature of the language learning-related significant incident, including characteristics that are amenable to a cdst interpretation. my own tentative solution to dealing with the conceptual amorphousness of motivation, noted at the head of this section, is to think of motivation as accounting for short-term changes in behavior. i proposed a definition along these lines in previous work (pigott, 2017b): given fundamental drives, beliefs, identities, circumstances, behavior is directed in a particular direction. motivation can be understood as the exercise of conscious control over behavior whereby the current learning trajectory is either maintained despite factors that would otherwise divert it, or altered in the face of influences supporting its continuation. (p. 12) anagnorisis and narrative incorporation: how significant incidents affect language-learning behavior 183 if motivation were thusly more tightly defined, i suspect it would find close corollaries in concepts such as grit – deep commitment to long-term goals and a refusal to give up in the face of failure (duckworth, 2016), and resilience – positive adaptation despite experiences of significant adversity (luthar, cicchetti, & becker, 2000). this would provide a clearer research target to researchers new to the field. it could also lead to a welcome focus on other important learning influences such as significant incidents. i return to this point in the conclusion. 3. method my theoretical interest in the significant incident derives from my experience of researching l2 motivation through the analysis of interview data (cf. pigott, 2016, 2017a, 2017b). in interviews about language learning, participants invariably recall memorable experiences from their formative years that sparked their interest in language learning. for example, experiences such as making friends with an exchange student in high school, or chancing on a book about gender relations in norway (pigott, 2012) raise awareness, in a dramatic and sudden manner, of the utility of english ability as a means to the end of studying and living overseas. the significance of such memorable experiences is as striking as the lack of attention paid to them within the motivation literature. table 1 interview details pseudonym/age interview/date total time koichi (m), 22 1 27th april, 2012 4hr 2min 2 2nd november, 2012 3 24th january, 2014 daisuke (m), 24 1 28th april, 2012 3hr 48min 2 4th august, 2012 3 13th december, 2013 ryota (m), 19 1 12th may, 2012 3hr 45min 2 23rd september, 2012 3 13th december, 2013 manami (f), 20 1 1st june, 2012 4hr 54min 2 29th september, 2012 3 10th january, 2014 nana (f), 22 1 9th june, 2012 4hr 30min 2 24th november, 2012 3 6th december, 2013 the findings presented here are taken from a larger project investigating five japanese university students’ engagement in language learning by way of an exploratory, grounded theory approach (glaser & strauss, 1967). the primary analysis resulted in a drives-based, learning as a means of self-fulfillment (lms) model (pigott, julian pigott 184 2016). accounts of significant incidents and their consequences are taken from transcripts of 15 unstructured interviews with five students, recruited opportunistically (cohen, manion, & morrison, 2000) from classes at a japanese university specializing in modern languages. each participant was interviewed three times over a period of 18 months, yielding a total of 21 hours of recordings (see table 1). prior to participating in the interviews, participants were informed that the research would be anonymous, and that all recordings, transcripts and research notes would be stored under password protection. written consent was then obtained from participants. interviews were conducted in a university classroom and recorded on two ic recorders. the purpose of the interviews was to explore participants’ english learning histories in as much detail as possible. topics covered included memorable experiences, rationales for studying english, and views about english. an illustrative sample of questions that were asked to most or all participants is given in table 2. table 2 representative interview questions topic question(s) learning history tell me the story of your english learning, starting from the beginning. tell me about your english classes in school. memorable (in a positive or negative sense) language learning-related experiences what have been some important influences on your english learning? reasons/rationales for studying english why do you study english? feelings towards and/or conception of english what is english for you? english in japan do you think japanese people need english? (why?) since some of the participants were planning to study abroad, my expectation was that, by spacing the interviews out, new things would be learned about participant motivation in each interview, due to their current circumstances – for example, changes in motivation during and after studying abroad. surprisingly, however, the topic of conversation in the second and third interviews tended to return to a discussion of memorable experiences that had occurred several years earlier, to which participants attributed their current motivation for english. a thematic analysis was carried out to identify influences on learning behavior lying outside the scope of the lms model. transcripts were coded according to procedures established by gillham (2005): relevant sections were identified, and excerpts were coded iteratively through repeated reading of the transcripts and listening to the recordings, until themes emerged. one of these influences is the significant incident (the others were cultural identity and institutional constraints). anagnorisis and narrative incorporation: how significant incidents affect language-learning behavior 185 4. results: anagnorisis and narrative incorporation this section presents empirical support for the corollaries of the significant incident, anagnorisis and narrative incorporation. 4.1. corollary 1: anagnorisis through anagnorisis, the significant incident triggers a change in worldview and behavior. table 3 summarizes the five significant incidents and anagnorises identified in the data. table 3 critical incidents incident shorthand anagnorisis 1 (nana) from homeless to cool being able to speak english makes one cool, and commands respect. 2 (daisuke) “i can be a star” through my english ability, i can excel in college. 3 (ryota) train station humiliation not being able to speak english is humiliating – a personal failing. 4 (manami) a titanic realization english can be used to help people in need. 5 (koichi) “so that’s how the world works” english is indispensable in the modern world. the following sections present extracts from the interview transcripts selected to illustrate the two corollaries of the significant event. extracts are accompanied by explanatory commentary designed to summarize key features, or to elaborate on the broader context, or theoretical consequences of aspects of the extracts. chevrons indicate the use of japanese, while parentheses contain my own clarifications of meaning. 4.1.1. anagnorisis 1: from homeless to cool as a junior high school student, nana went to a restaurant. there, she encountered an unkempt customer to whom she took an instinctive dislike. shortly thereafter, something unexpected occurred: extract 1 i went to a <yakiniku> [grilled beef] shop with my friend or with my father i don’t remember . . . and we sat down, and there was this guy looks homeless. really dirty or something and i was like “what is he?” but here comes this blonde beautiful woman and they started speaking english . . . and i was like “wow”, really shocked . . . after they started speaking english my first impression totally disappeared and i was thinking “wow he must be really smart.” (interview 1) julian pigott 186 nana’s anagnorisis took the form of the revelation that the ability to speak english can transform someone from “homeless” to “cool.” she recounts how she began to analogize the incident to her own situation: extract 2 . . . i was really shocked and i realized if i could speak english that well, people are gonna be really impressed with me . . . yeah because if i dig it more (if i think about it more . . .) i realized no one was impressed with me . . . i was good at math but everyone is good at math. there was nothing i was really good at, just average or lower, so my parents never complimented me . . . so i was just maybe thinking “i wish i could speak english that well” . . . (interview 1) at that time, nana had been an unhappy teenager, in trouble at home and at school. the idea that english proficiency could earn her respect from others was intoxicating. in her own words: “i was shocked and also excited – you know, this could happen to me!” (interview 3). as noted in the literature review, a significant incident can have a “shocking” element to it. this shock can be understood to stimulate the appearance of an english-speaking possible self. 4.1.2. anagnorisis 2: “i can be a star” during high school, daisuke developed an apathy toward studying that peaked during his time attempting to enter university in the united states. he remained stuck in the preparatory english course for two years, spending his time outside of class playing video games by himself. upon his return to japan, he spent several months in a listless state before passively agreeing to enter a university specializing in language education. during an orientation weekend for new students, he experienced an anagnorisis that led to a profound change in attitude. he realized that his maturity and language aptitude would give him a competitive advantage over his peers: extract 3 . . . at the camp . . . i realized that a lot of students cannot speak english as i could so i realized “ok, i think i can pretend i’m a good student and the impression people will have of me will be good, and also the tuition is expensive, so i think i can study here and successfully.” this anagnorisis was the confluence of a host of factors such as maturity, experiences, and perhaps a sense of guilt felt towards his parents. it also speaks to his need for distinction and social status, the degree of which is perhaps contingent on his personality (d – daisuke, i – interviewer): anagnorisis and narrative incorporation: how significant incidents affect language-learning behavior 187 extract 4 d: like my father, i actually enjoy talking with people from different countries. i: why is that, do you think? d: this part is difficult i don’t have the vocabulary to explain it . . . i don’t think this is the best way . . . that i’m special . . . <yuunou> [able, capable] . . . i feel superior than other people – you know communicating in english, something like that – not everybody can do so naturally . . . when i do this i feel that i’m good at it that i’m different, i mean better than other people. i feel pride, the long-nosed thing – braggart. i think that’s the reason . . . (interview 3) the camp experience triggered in daisuke a sweeping revaluation of his life and goals, representing a “seminal moment in self-awareness” (see background to the study). from that point on he maintained a stellar academic record at college. 4.1.3. anagnorisis 3: train station humiliation the third example illustrates how anagnorisis need not necessarily be pleasant. coming home from junior high school one day, 14-year-old ryota was approached by a tourist with a map in his hand, asking for help: extract 5 r: i think he was confused, or i think he didn’t know how to buy a ticket or something and suddenly, all of a sudden, he came near, came over to me and said something but i couldn’t understand what he was saying. i: what did you do? r: just gesture. did a gesture (waving his hand in front of face, meaning “sorry, can’t understand/help”). i: so he’s standing there, and you’re gesturing . . . r: yeah, for five minutes . . . i try to get him to give up and i just wanted to go home. r: i was just felt confused, and a little bit annoyed i: how about his proximity, his physical proximity? was he close to you? far away? r: (laughter) too close, so i was so . . . a little frightened, scared. (interview 2) this experience revealed to ryota what he viewed as a personal deficiency in language ability. in order to rectify the situation, a change in behavior was necessary. he recounts his reaction to the incident as follows: “i felt so embarrassed . . . not only about my english level but also i couldn’t help him buy a ticket, so that’s the starting point of my english study” (interview 1). from then on ryota began to work harder in english classes. this incident has a traumatic element to it. in terms of the motivation literature it brings to mind the idea of a feared self – a non-english speaking self – to be avoided. julian pigott 188 4.1.4. anagnorisis 4: a titanic realization manami recalls watching the movie titanic during her high school years and being moved to tears by a scene in which a family heads to its death because it cannot understand a sign written in english: extract 6 m: in a scene in titanic, there is a person who can’t understand the . . . notice and “what is the meaning of the word i can’t understand i can’t run away, escape!” . . . the ship is sinking and everybody is panicking and the person cannot understand what’s happening – and i saw the scene. i thought the person can’t understand english so they can’t do anything, so i want to help people who can’t understand language. at that time, i was learning english so i want to learn english perfectly and . . . german or spanish or something, and i can help the person who can’t understand the word or language . . . i: so you like helping people m: (with emphasis) yes . . . (interview 1) this completely unexpected event and its anagnorisis revealed to manami the power of language to do something very dear to her heart – help people. she now works for a hotel frequented by foreign tourists in kyoto, using her english in the service of others. 4.1.5. anagnorisis 5: “so that’s how the world works . . .” koichi first encountered english courtesy of his cram school teacher, who was preparing him for his junior high school entrance exams. as an aside one day, his teacher informed koichi that he would be studying english for the first time in the new semester, and that he should take this subject seriously: extract 7 i: he told you you should study english? k: yeah i: what did he say? k: . . . whatever i do i have to speak english . . . if i want to work all over the world, if i want to go out from japan, english is a vital language . . . or even when we are in japan . . . english used not to be that important but nowadays it’s getting important . . . is basically what he said. i: so before that you’d never really thought about english? k: no, i don’t think so . . . (interview 2) anagnorisis and narrative incorporation: how significant incidents affect language-learning behavior 189 as noted previously, the significant incident is a function of the person and the environment. if anagnorisis 2 was strongly personal, stemming in part from daisuke’s psychological need for distinction and his recent history of abject failure, then anagnorisis 5 is more external in origin, taking the form of received wisdom from a respected elder. after this conversation, koichi’s understanding of the world and his place within it changed, and his behavior along with it: extract 8 k: his message was so strong and it makes me to study. i: do you know why? k: he explained, he had an example of a guy who is really good at math but who has just been to america or england. he had <gakkai> [a conference], and he has a lot of knowledge of math or science but he couldn’t speak at all so he had to have a translator so that was not cool. i: not cool. k: not cool . . . it’s not direct. even if we’re not native english speakers we have to speak in our words to get them understand. (interview 2) this significant incident is perhaps the most straightforward in nature. it clearly led kosuke, in a relatively matter-of-fact manner, to “question the way things normally operate” (see background to the study). 4.1.6. discussion in this section, i showed how certain incidents trigger a change in how participants view the utility of english study. the anagnorises presented ranged from the dramatic (nana, manami), through the humiliating (ryota), to the matter-of fact (daisuke, koichi). their characteristics align with those observed in the cit literature: they were all seminal moments in self-awareness, having been retained in the form of powerful memories; they led the individual to question the way things normally operate; and they were unplanned, unanticipated, and uncontrolled. some significant incidents were shocking, or even traumatic, while others (anagnorisis 5) were more matter-of-fact. in terms of the motivation literature, all of the significant incidents can be understood as some kind of transformational episode leading the learner to discover future possibilities in the form of future ideal or feared selves. compared to the numerous other day-today episodes that learners encounter and forget, these episodes can be understood to have a butterfly effect on learning. the significant incidents introduced above appear, in some ways, to be more important than hundreds of hours of classroom learning in causing motivational change (non-linearity), and to set consequential starting conditions for motivated language study. the results are julian pigott 190 congruent with a cdst interpretation. in the following section, i examine how the memory of the significant incident, or its anagnorisis, becomes a foundational component of self-related narratives. 4.2. corollary 2: narrative incorporation narrative is how we impose a sense of order on a chaotic montage of life and experience (bamberg, 2007). as we shape our stories over time and according to context, they in turn shape us. this section addresses how the memory of the incident forms the keystone of influential self-narratives over time. nana (anagnorisis 1; extracts 1 and 2) recounts being reminded of the restaurant experience upon watching the reality show contestant susan boyle on tv while attending boarding school in the uk: extract 9 a similar feeling i found was in the uk in the high school there was a common room we were watching a tv show. there was this ugly woman not ugly but old woman . . . and the audience were disappointed “oh no, a bad one comes again,” including me and my friends were thinking like that and here she comes and started singing a beautiful song that similar shock . . . that guy dressed up like a homeless speaking english that well – i don’t know . . . when i was watching susan boyle i remembered the homeless guy. it was that shocking for me . . . appearance is not . . . doesn’t matter to learn language, i thought. (interview 2) for nana, language ability, like a beautiful singing voice, is an equalizer for those who grow up with certain disadvantages or insecurities. the lesson she learned through the original anagnorisis finds support in subsequent experience and, at the same time, one presumes, events are likely to be interpreted in terms of the anagnorisis. this can be observed in nana’s recollection of volunteering at the kyoto marathon: extract 10 n: . . . [at] the marathon there was a place like they were organizing . . . yes and the staff looked at me a little like “here comes a lazy university student.” they looked at me like that but as soon as i spoke english it changed the way they looked at me . . . that’s what i did and they looked at me like “wow.” at first you know “her hair is brown and put too much make-up on” but then after i spoke english they changed the way looked at me so . . . i: and how did you feel? k: felt good really i had the really . . . how do you say. i didn’t feel confidence when i was young . . . and how do you say i forgot . . . <hyouka> [assessment], i had a low evaluation of myself, so that’s why once they said “wow you can speak english” anagnorisis and narrative incorporation: how significant incidents affect language-learning behavior 191 and then i felt “wow english could be the things i can feel like you know proud, confident.” (interview 3) viewed in conjunction with her account of childhood unhappiness, the significant incident can be seen to constitute a key part of a narrative of hardship, anagnorisis, struggle, and ultimate success. it is not only a “learning-changing” incident, but a life-changing incident, since language learning is of such importance to nana. ryota (anagnorisis 3; extract 5) says the following of an experience in a high school english class several months after his uncomfortable train station encounter: extract 11 r: i can’t forget the first time i could make myself understood in english. that experience gave me the motivation so if i did more, the probabilities of understanding each other is more increased, so i just worked so hard, more and more all the time. i: can you tell me about the first time that you made your alt [assistant language teacher] understand you? r: i just asked “can you tell me the way to the station?” i: you asked your alt? r: alt teachers understood that word. that sentence. i: this is in a class? r: after the main english class working together, so alts gave us some questions, useful expressions in daily life, like what i said just now . . . that sentence . . . so i just tried to speak like a native speaker, and i said “could you tell me the way to the station?” and she understood quickly. i: so what did she say? r: “oh great” and “the station is . . .” and, <sono choushi> keep going [keep up the good work] . . . and i just wish i had the motivation in the class before i met the man in the station, yeah . . . (interview 2) at the time of the interview i was puzzled by how such a seemingly humdrum exchange was felt to be so significant by ryota. in the third interview, he explained that this direction-giving exchange was a sort of replication of the train station experience from which, this time, he escaped unscathed. he measures other experiences, too, in terms of this incident: “after entering high school i met my alt teachers they remind me . . . of that incident in my junior high school (time)” (interview 2). he recalls the incident periodically in school, or when he works as a guide for tourists in kyoto, reminding him of the consequences of failure, spurring him to work harder. for the other three participants, the specific memory of the significant incident appears less of a fixture in their thinking about themselves and the course of their lives, but the anagnorisis that it triggered remains salient, having taken root in how they see the world. when asked “what is english for you?,” julian pigott 192 daisuke’s (anagnorisis 2; extracts 3 and 4) answer bears a resemblance to his account of the significant incident in its emphasis on distinction from peers: extract 12 probably my identity . . . my english is not perfect, but this is what i can do better than normal people, yeah, this is the tool to describe that i am daisuke . . . who i am, what kind of things i can do . . . those things. identity. i like that word . . . i still have that pride right now that, you know, i have more opportunities (than his peers) to communicate with people from different countries . . . (interview 2) manami’s realization that language could be used to help people (anagnorisis 4; extract 6) is, years later, an established aspect of her worldview. she explains the purpose of communication as follows: extract 13 to . . . know the person’s feeling, and know what the person (wants). i want to know that . . . it’s maybe my goal, because it connects to service and i want to be said by person “thank you” or “i needed you” (i.e., i want to earn people’s gratitude) so, yes . . . maybe my goal is . . . mmm maybe it is easy [simplistic] but talking is my goal. (interview 3) her desire to communicate coexists with the need to help people relax, and achieve closeness, and she rationalizes her plans to study other languages such as german in terms of how she can use it to help people more. in the literature review i noted that research in the critical incident literature suggests that the full impact of critical incidents on the individual’s understanding and worldview becomes apparent only in retrospect. this observation finds support in the analysis presented here. in fact, it appears that the term “full impact” could be something of a misnomer. it is not necessarily the case that the impact of a significant incident crescendos to “full impact,” at which point the intensity of effect remains constant. rather, the impact of the incident is continuously redefined depending on context. the significant incidents that prompted anagnorises 1 and 3 remain salient features of the contemporary thought of nana and kosuke, while the memory of the other significant events have faded somewhat into the background (although not completely – they still arise upon prompting in an interview, for example). while their anagnorises still “ring true” with current beliefs and behavior, this may not necessarily hold true in the future. in the previous section, it was noted that the significant incident is a function of the person and the incident itself. the same is true of the longerterm effects of its anagnorisis. as koichi (anagnorisis 5; extracts 7 and 8) shrewdly observes in response to my inquiry as to why he remembered his cram school’s anagnorisis and narrative incorporation: how significant incidents affect language-learning behavior 193 message so vividly: “because i’m still interested in english. if i was studying something else maybe i would have forgotten” (interview 2). a significant incident may gain or lose significance over time. this section has shown how the significant incident can be seen to have an immediate effect on self-awareness that leads the learner to question the way the world operates (anagnorisis). it also addressed the more challenging task of examining how the memory of these experiences exerts an influence over the long term (narrative incorporation). 5. conclusion this paper used a thematic analysis of interview testimony to show how significant incidents are an important influence on language learning behavior. it offers support for research conducted in the critical incident literature while suggesting that these characteristics can be grouped into two broad categories, anagnorisis and narrative incorporation. the first of these is relatively straightforward, the latter a much more challenging category. in terms of the motivation literature, one way to position these findings with reference to motivation theory is to posit that significant incidents have a formational influence on possible selves, such as ideal selves and feared selves. as a consequence of significant incidents, english ability is revealed as a means of attaining prestige (nana, daisuke), a tool to help people (manami), an aptitude necessary to avoid humiliation (ryota), and as a plain necessity for the millennial japanese (koichi). the call for papers for this special issue requested contributions addressing how learning experiences shape students’ motivation and, through motivation, their achievement in second language learning. if, as i suggested at the foot of the literature review, motivation is to be defined as affecting short-term changes in behavior, motivation is not necessarily essential as an intermediary conceptual function through which beliefs lead to action. significant incidents could be understood not to act directly on motivation over the long term, but on the realm of behavioral possibilities open to the learner (in cdst terminology, the state space). behavioral change due to a change in worldview (and one’s role within the world) does not necessarily require conscious execution (or motivated behavior). according to this view, motivation is reduced to a bit part, rather than a starring role, on the behavioral stage. the results presented here offer succor to teachers who despair of “systematic” approaches to language pedagogy, and suggest that more success may be gained from deviation from the curriculum to convey the fun of language learning or intercultural exchange, whether this be by inviting guests to class, or by going on class outings. to educational authorities (in particular i am thinking julian pigott 194 of my own context in japan) i would contend that the findings remind us that language learning is a personal undertaking that cannot necessarily be forced (at least not successfully, without a great deal of wasted time and effort) on people who do not see themselves as needing the language in question. on the basis of the findings presented here, it would appear that the significant incident warrants increased research attention, and there are surely many fruitful avenues down which to travel. i will suggest three ideas to conclude this paper. first, the distinction between anagnorisis and narrative incorporation is, admittedly, arbitrary. it is difficult to state exactly where the distinction lies between the immediate criticality of an incident, and its absorption into, and alteration of, more stable beliefs and worldviews. complicating matters further, there are cases in which anagnorisis occurs some time – perhaps years – after the purportedly critical incident, as can be inferred from expressions such as: “looking back, i realize that [such and such] was a real turning point in my life . . .” i hope that further research can shed light on, and improve, these tentative theoretical categories. second, it may be possible to differentiate between types of anagnorisis. this might be done according to a scheme along the lines of that suggested by koestler’s (1967) acronym aha, denoting the type of “aha” (scientific); 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(2014). understanding efl learners’ motivational dynamics: a three-level model from a dynamic systems and sociocultural perspective. in z. dörnyei, p. d. macintyre, & a. henry (eds.), motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 285-314). bristol: multilingual matters. 87 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (1). 2015. 87-108 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.1.5 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl promoting international posture through history as content and language integrated learning (clil) in the japanese context thomas lockley nihon university college of law, tokyo, japan lockleyta@gmail.com abstract this article uses the conceptual framework of second language willingness to communicate (l2 wtc), and in particular the contributory construct of international posture (ip; yashima, 2002), to report on a content and language integrated learning (clil) course taught in the japanese university context. the research follows up an exploratory, small-scale study with a focused qualitative investigation. due to space restrictions the current paper reports only on the key qualitative findings and attempts to build a picture of how the theme of the course, japanese international history, affected learners’ ip, a construct that has been shown to be key to japanese learners of english’s l2 wtc (yashima, 2002). it is shown that after completing the course, learners felt more connected to the wider world, and as a result ip developed in varied and meaningful ways, seemingly increasing l2 wtc and stimulating critical thinking facilities both within and without the classroom. keywords: content and language integrated learning, second language willingness to communicate, international posture, japanese efl thomas lockley 88 1. introduction there is an increasing awareness of the importance of context in english as a foreign language (efl) pedagogy (wedell & malderez, 2013) and its influence on the provision and success of education systems around the globe. as yashima (2002, p. 62) writes, “a careful examination of what it means to learn a language in a particular context is necessary before applying a model developed in a different context.” all contexts have their own characteristics, and the successful introduction of both educational reforms and new classroom methodologies is largely determined by how much weight and recognition educators and planners give to these factors (wedell & malderez, 2013). for example, in the japanese context, where this study is based, learners have traditionally been regarded as being stronger in the passive language skills than the active ones, especially speaking (lamie, 1998), although recent curricular reforms may be changing this (lockley, hirschel & slobodniuk, 2012). therefore, any methodology that aims at improving, for example, spoken l2 communication in japan, needs to be carefully implemented and targeted with due consideration of both theory and practical conditions. this is not to suggest that there are no commonalities between diverse learning contexts, simply that educators should not blindly apply one “foolproof” model to another without first critically engaging with the particular idiosyncrasies of that environment. this paper will use the empirical framework of second language willingness to communicate (l2 wtc; macintyre, clément, dörnyei, & noels, 1998) and in particular international posture (ip), which has been shown to be key to l2 wtc in the japanese efl context (yashima, 2002). it will seek to show that ip may be addressed contextually through the instructional method of content and language integrated learning (clil), when the curricular content it is specifically targeted at forming and promoting higher feelings of ip. the data available will address only one context; however, it is hoped that educators will be able to draw parallels with their own contextual conditions, extrapolate the findings and use the more generalisable literature review and discussion to inform other teaching and learning environments. 2. literature review 2.1. second language willingness to communicate wtc was originally conceptualised for the first language communication field (mccroskey & baer, 1985) but was reconfigured for the l2 context in 1998 by macintyre et al. l2 wtc is commonly presented as an heuristic pyramid (see promoting international posture through history as content and language integrated learning (clil). . . 89 figure 1), representing the mental processes engaged in by individuals as they decide whether to engage in l2 communication or not. figure 1 the l2 wtc heuristic pyramid (macintyre et al., 1998, p. 547) l2 wtc “is the main cause of second language use,” (yu, li, & gou, 2011, p. 253) and learners of foreign languages with higher l2 wtc tend to be more active in the use of the target language. as such, many authorities, (for example macintyre et al., 1998; mercer, 2011), see the development of l2 wtc as one of the most desirable outcomes of foreign language learning (fll) and therefore recommend curricula be designed specifically with its promotion in mind. although, as figure 1 shows, l2 wtc has many contributory constructs, the most important are generally held to be fll motivation and self-perceived communicative competence (spcc), which flows from motivation, self-evaluation and fll anxiety (macintyre et al., 1998; dörnyei, 2005; peng, 2014). high levels of self-evaluation and low levels of fll anxiety are most likely to contribute to spcc and hence to l2 wtc. spcc seems to be a universal and non-context specific factor leading to l2 wtc (peng & woodrow, 2010). yashima (2002), who conducted the first study of l2 wtc in the japanese efl context, found that although the original canadian study correlated closely with her findings, japan differed in the relationship between motivation and l2 thomas lockley 90 wtc; motivation was only directly correlated to l2 wtc when coupled with spcc. it was not enough for learners to be motivated; they also needed to be confident in their spoken ability to be willing to communicate. most importantly for this study, yashima also found that japanese learners with a higher degree of what she termed international posture, were more motivated and hence more inclined to partake in l2 communication. other studies in the wider east-asian context have sought to separate the desire to communicate from a willingness to communicate (wen & clément, 2003; zeng & tan, 2014; zhou, 2014). wen and clément’s (2003) study found that although many learners stated a clear desire to enter into communication, their willingness, or unwillingness, to do so was contextually based in that the chinese students were more concerned with peer and teacher judgment than linguistic outcomes. for wen and clément (2003) then, l2 wtc was not only a display of linguistic or communicative competence but also a socio-cultural and social-psychological phenomenon. in south korea, edwards’ (2011) study found that, aside from the original conception of l2 wtc, there were two additional significant factors that he called intercultural complex and l1 audience sensitivity. intercultural complex referred to a socio-culturally constructed mixture of beliefs, attitudes, and values that south korean learners have concerning the non-korean world and how they compare themselves to that outside world. l1 audience sensitivity is similar to what wen and clément (2003) found concerning chinese learners, namely that relative status and evaluation by others were key factors in whether a south korean would be willing to communicate in any given situation (l1 and l2). if they perceived their own status as high in a particular context, l2 wtc would be higher; therefore l2 wtc appeared to swing on a socially constructed pendulum. different culturally based models of discussion and opinion forming may also play a role in the difference between desire and willingness (peng & woodrow, 2010). in japanese, and possibly other east-asian contexts, discussion patterns, indicative of interdependent selves, are often very different from european/north american contexts, which are indicative of independent selves (markus & kitayama, 1991; yashima, 2013). independent selves generally exhibit a more definitely opinionated egocentric focus, while interdependent selves represent group related and fluctuating opinion-forming patterns (markus & kitayama, 1991). in the japanese world, people are normally given the opportunity to contribute to discussions in turn should they so desire, whereas in many european cultures, individuals tend to have to fight to impart their opinions and therefore have to be more proactively willing to communicate (markus & kitayama, 1991). there may also be more deference to authority figures, such as educators, in east-asian contexts, which can influence communication patterns (markus & kitayama, 1991). promoting international posture through history as content and language integrated learning (clil). . . 91 2.2. international posture following trends within the international efl research community in the early 21st century (see for example dörnyei & csizér, 2005; macintyre, baker, clément, & donovan, 2002; ryan, 2009; wen & clément, 2003), yashima felt that simple positive feelings towards an l2 community which contribute to fll motivation, integrativeness (gardner, 1985), were insufficient in the case of efl as there is no clear “english language” l2 community. furthermore, in an earlier study (yashima, 2000), she had found that identification of japanese efl learners with american/british l1 speakers of english was not high among reasons that learners gave for wanting to study english. therefore, she coined the term international posture (2002, p. 57), defining it as “an interest in foreign affairs, willingness to go overseas to study or work, readiness to interact with intercultural partners and . . . a nonethnocentric attitude toward different cultures.” ip is in direct contrast to factors which hinder individual language learners’ l2 wtc, a “tendency toward approach-avoidance and ethnocentrism” (yashima, 2002, p. 58). in 2004, yashima, zenuk-nishide, and shimizu found that the two most prevalent goals for japanese language learners were (a) academic achievement such as success on tests and entry to prestigious universities and (b) a desire to see oneself as connected to an imagined international community and connect with non-japanese people, ip. this second was affirmed by one of the few other studies to be done in the japanese context (piggin, 2010) which found that ip was more relevant than any of the other l2 wtc variables and that “the latent variable of international posture explicitly influences . . . the motivational propensities, which influence . . . l2 wtc” (p. 5). there have been few studies on ip outside japan, but in south korea, edwards (2011, p. 20) argued that his concept of intercultural complex, that is, attitudes, beliefs, and values that south korean learners carry around with them and bring to any communication event, was hindering l2 wtc. intercultural complex, seemingly congruent with lower ip, was, he believed, manifest of a deep sense of inequality vis-à-vis the non-korean world. as did yashima (2009), edwards (2011, p. 24) found that non-korean contact experience, in the form of travel abroad and international friendship, boosted l2 wtc; real-life exposure to the non-korean world mitigated these self-perceived inequalities. in china, ip does not seem to have been explicitly studied, although it is often referred to in the literature. zhou's (2014, p. 14) study found, as yashima et al. (2004) did, the need for an imagined international community to relate to but did not mention ip in particular; peng (2014) wrote that she considered “learner beliefs to be more important than ip and integrativeness in studying chinese classroom behaviour” (p. 26). thomas lockley 92 yashima concluded her 2002 study with an assertion that “efl lessons should be designed to enhance learners’ interest in different cultures, and international affairs and activities, as well as to reduce anxiety and build confidence in communication” (p. 63). throughout the decade she researched ways of promoting ip, finding perhaps unsurprisingly that the easiest way is for individuals to study abroad in an english speaking community (yashima, 2009). however, as ryan and mercer (2011) point out, long-term meaningful study abroad is out of the question for the overwhelming majority of efl students globally. a second way yashima (2009) found to promote ip was to engage in contentbased language lessons. “through cognitively and emotionally involving content, learners are encouraged to form opinions and express themselves in english. . . . the imagined community becomes visible and concrete” (p. 149), and a language becomes a tool for communication rather than just another subject to study at school to be tested and graded (yashima, 2009). learners who engaged in contentbased lessons “showed developmental profiles similar to students who had participated in a year abroad programme in terms of proficiency, international posture and self-initiated amount of communication” (p. 151). muto, shinohara, adachi, and kikuta (2012) also found data to support yashima’s research, and their research participants, who were as young as 8-12 years, “improved their international posture through activities and decreased their fear and anxiety about speaking english” (p. 541). their correlational analysis established three important principles for fostering ip, reducing foreign language anxiety, increasing interest in foreign cultures and customs, and encouraging an awareness of personal goals and objectives as to why they were studying english. in lockley’s previous 2014 study, comments related to the verve and bravery of historical characters who actively learned foreign languages and studied abroad, in comparison to a self-perceived ethnocentric passive current generation, were numerous, and all of them reflected negatively on the present. to their credit, many learners stated that these stories inspired them with a desire to go out and be more proactive in various facets of life, in particular the study of english (lockley, 2014, p. 177). this seemingly imagination based motivational construct may be helpful for understanding the motivation facilitated through the clil pedagogy. ushioda and dörnyei wrote in 2009 of the key motivational influence of a future l2 self, that is, imagining positively and realistically how l2 will be integrated in a learner’s future life so as to create a path towards that goal. dörnyei (2009) provided some conditions necessary for the triggering of self-regulation mechanisms including the detection of the gap between the current self and the imagined (or ideal) future l2 self. as with l2 wtc, it seems important that l2 curricula are designed to stimulate the future l2 self motivational construct, which can include ip (yashima, 2009). promoting international posture through history as content and language integrated learning (clil). . . 93 2.3. content and language integrated learning (clil) clil is an educational approach whereby pedagogical content is delivered in l2 in such a way as to develop l2 lexical and communicative competence (in all four language skill areas: speaking, writing, listening and reading) while promoting higher level thinking skills and l2 motivation (coyle, hood, & marsh, 2010). communicative competence is developed through dialogic interaction, group work and cooperative learning to foster critical thinking and subject understanding (coyle et al., 2010; moore, 2011). the understandable temptation for learners to regress to l1 can be lessened through appropriately scaffolded curricula, which provide enough support for learners to feel confident in using the l2 only (nikula, 2012). proponents of clil argue that it seems to render significantly improved fll outcomes (várkuti, 2011). learners seem to use a significantly higher level of vocabulary more effectively and apply lexical knowledge in broader terms (navés & victori, 2010; várkuti, 2011), especially when languagelearning strategies are embedded in curricula (breidbach & viebrock, 2012). the content of clil should ideally be linked to clil’s fll learning objectives (banegas, 2013), aiming to promote l2 wtc through socio-culturally derived l2 motivation (banegas, 2013; yashima, 2009), as well as through increased practical l2 usage leading to spcc and lower fll anxiety. although there have been only a few studies on the link between l2 wtc and clil, those that have been done (see for example menezes & juan-garau, 2014) have found that clil learners have a significantly higher l2 wtc than non-clil learners. teaching content to improve global cultural awareness may provide a scaffolding for learners to eventually use their skills outside the classroom, thereby providing the necessary self-confidence to communicate with dissimilar others (aubrey, 2009; ting-toomey, 1999). this should facilitate ip through increased inter-cultural interactions, or, at least in the initial phases, promote ip related imagination based motivational constructs such as the future l2 self (ryan, 2009; ushioda & dörnyei, 2009). until recently there has been little clil research outside of the european context (costa & coleman, 2010; lockley, 2014), and while that body of research is growing, this trajectory is still in its infancy. some researchers have questioned the ability of japanese educators to incorporate both more communicative methodology and higher-order thinking skills in to efl curricula (see for example goto butler, 2011; sato & kleinsasser, 1999), but recent studies on clil in the japanese context seem to indicate that this is not in fact the case. ikeda (2013) found that clil is perfectly feasible in japan if teachers are trained properly and contextual factors are taken into account. furthermore, yamano (2013) found that clil motivated efl learners, gave them more awareness and critical cognition of global thomas lockley 94 issues, and improved learning outcomes in various ways, including accelerated vocabulary learning. godfrey (2013) found that both learners and educators derived motivation from clil. clil seemed to promote speaking skills and criticalthinking, and to broaden the socio-cultural scope of curricula. 2.4. international history as clil and its connection to ip the seeming lack of global research into ip may lie in the fact that higher ip could be a normal phenomenon in some contexts. for example, chinese and euro/american contexts may not see a particular need to promote ip as the more obvious multicultural societies allow a mainstream acceptance of interactions with the other. i wonder if ip is particularly important in societies that do not consider themselves to be multicultural or where populations see themselves, rightly or wrongly, as cut off from the international mainstream. ip may therefore be especially relevant in cultures such as japan, where there is a strong perception of limited contact with the outside world (seargeant, 2009); history is a particularly important subject for critically engaging this type of belief (martin & wodak, 2003) since many such perceptions have historical roots (seargeant, 2009). therefore, i hypothesise that if clil history is taught with the aim of diminishing that self-perceived marginalisation, as a cooperative international endeavour, with protagonists playing global roles and global social currents playing a large role in local cultural antecedents, it will increase feelings of ip. furthermore, it will give engaged learners something to communicate about with the world (yashima, 2009) that does not emphasise their “cultural uniqueness” but instead showcases their shared history and points in common with their supposedly dissimilar other interlocutors. this would promote the idea of an (not imagined, as it is essentially real) international l2 community, of which the learner is a part, which is neither defined by “geographical location [n]or cultural tradition [which thereby] situates the learner as an outsider looking in, the imposter struggling to establish a legitimate claim to membership” (ryan, 2009, p. 131), but rather establishes them as part of wider global cultural and social currents. this article will study such a curriculum and seek to assess whether, through increasing understanding of the global nature of cultures and histories, it contributed to higher ip levels in the learners who took part. the following research questions have been addressed in the present study: 1. does international history as clil contribute to higher international posture? 2. if so, in what ways does it do this? promoting international posture through history as content and language integrated learning (clil). . . 95 3. the study 3.1. context this study took place in an elective class for third and fourth year learners enrolled as international communication majors in a private university specializing in foreign languages near tokyo. most learners were of japanese nationality; a small minority were chinese and south korean. a detailed outline of the course and conceptual foundations can be found in lockley (2013). 3.2. procedure this research followed up an exploratory, small-scale quantitative study format with a focused qualitative investigation. due to space restrictions the current paper reports only on the key qualitative findings from questionnaire data and participant reflective accounts. each data set and method is explained below. a questionnaire (n = 29) to assess ip was formed through qualitatively analysing 124 individual learner reflective accounts collected and analysed over two years (see lockley, 2014) and conducting in-depth interviews with 9 learners who had taken the course. the interviewees and questionnaire respondents were also among the 124 reflective account writers. of the questionnaire respondents, 27 were female and 2 male, they were between 20 and 23 years old. one learner was of south korean nationality and another was chinese (this learner had grown up in japan). the participants had an average self-reported toeic score of 688. the questionnaire, in both english and japanese, was administered online twice, in september 2012 and january 2013; this study shall only deal with the qualitative comments. the questionnaire questions were individually analysed, with the two data sets being compared to see whether there was any evidence that attitudinal change had occurred. representative comments were collated to provide supporting evidence. the data from the 124 learner reflective accounts (around 75000 words in total; n = 124, 101 females, 23 males) was collected in 2011/2012 from four different classes that took the course. the learner profile was similar to that reported above, but more chinese students participated. the data was extracted following dörnyei’s (2007) recommendation of a 3-stage approach to analysis: 1. open coding; the data as a whole was analysed line-by-line for data pertinent to this research and included in an existing category or formed a new one. thomas lockley 96 2. axial coding, to move the coding process from “first-order concepts to higher-order concepts” (dörnyei, 2007, p. 261). this aims at integrating individual and distinct categories into wider conceptual categories and is where the central research narrative begins to take shape. 3. selective coding, which establishes a core category and final narrative to emerge and establish the meaning and import of the study. this is what appears in the findings section below. the amount of data was too large to report on in only one study, so this study is the second to use the same data set. for the findings on comments related to fll outcomes in general and fll motivation, see lockley (2014). this study only treated comments indicative of ip. 3.3. findings 3.3.1. questionnaire data the questionnaire data is reported below; the comments below are those that were most representative of those expressed overall. 3.3.1.1. “what does english mean to you?” the answers to this question were coded as to whether the answers were indicative of ip (called integrated regulation), or whether english was simply a means to some other end, for example, professional success (referred to as introjected regulation). in september 2012, 23 out of 29 responses seemed to be indicative of ip and this had not changed by january 2013. representative integrated regulation comments were, “i want to be able to communicate with people from other cultures,” “i would like to talk to many people around the world, so english is the tool for talking with them,” and “learning english is the tool to communicate with foreigner. even though i really want to be a friend with foreigner, it's meaningless that we can't communicate each other with the same language.” introjected regulation type comments were, “english is just one of my tool for me” and “i learn english for my future job.” this suggests that the participants in general already tended towards a high level of ip at the beginning of the course, which would not be surprising as they were majoring in international communication and were likely to have chosen this due to higher levels of ip or their l2 selves envisaging a future in which english figured highly (ryan, 2009). promoting international posture through history as content and language integrated learning (clil). . . 97 3.3.1.2. “are you an ‘international person’?” in the interviews that were conducted for questionnaire construction, the japanese word kokusaijin (‘international person’) was constantly used by the interviewees interchangeably with the concept of high ip; therefore, for ease of participant understanding, the questionnaire used “international person” instead of ip. in september 2012, 15 answered yes and 14 answered no; in january there had been some change, with 17 answering yes and 12 no. when asked for reasons why, those who answered yes gave reasons such as, “i'm not perfectly an international person but i'm an international person a little bit because i could know the other countries sides of views and opinions,” “because i could learn japanese history from many aspects from classes and international students,” and “because i study english and chinese. and i'm interested in international things.” while there was little difference in the numerical total of yes answers from september to january, there was a marked difference in reasons for those that answered no in january. in september they gave reasons such as “because i can't speak english,” “i don't have much knowledge about the world” and “i don't still have enough skill to communicate with foreigners.” in january, answers were more positive and aspirational, for example, “i don't know history well as yet, but i want to be an international person,” “because i don't have enough knowledge about the world” and “because i don't know enough about my or other cultures.” although the numbers do not reveal much positive ip change, in fact the comments seem to show that those who answered in the negative were showing clear signs of conceiving of an imagined future l2 self (ryan, 2009) when they might be become international people. 3.3.1.3. “has this course changed how you feel about history?” in the second questionnaire administration, this additional question was answered to see whether and how the history content of the course had a direct relation to ip promotion. participants answered overwhelming in the positive, 26 yes and only 3 no. the reasons they gave were overwhelmingly related to their critical engagement with and reconception of international historical antecedents (martin & wodak, 2003): “it was a little surprised for me that japan was affected by so many countries and at that time, japan influenced so many countries,” “studying history is important to be a real international person.” these comments seem to indicate the development of ip through the international nature of the clil content. thomas lockley 98 3.3.2. reflective accounts data analysis as the data above shows, ip seems to have been developed through the internationally focused nature of the clil history course. it may have led to new conceptions of self and other (coyle et al., 2010; martin & wodak, 2003) through promoting understanding of the hybrid nature of cultures and interconnectedness of peoples, and through this to helping learners feel more part of a wider global, rather than marginalised local, community. the reflective accounts, written at the end of the semester-long course, contained data that was more wide-ranging and gives a far deeper picture of how clil helped develop ip. although, references are given where a comment seems to corroborate other researchers’ findings, this section does not engage in an extensive discussion, which comes below. history isn’t made by only its country. other countries make its history . . . learning own and others history, i think it can help us to understand each other. (#7) in [school], japanese history classes were more japan-centered and i had almost forgotten that it was only one part of international society . . . (#38) abroad came to seem closer and otherness dissipated (sudhoff, 2010), indicative of yashima’s (2002) definition of ip as a lack of ethnocentricity and a feeling of connection to an international community: i never thought there were many japanese in thailand, these people were assimilated with the thais. i got to think thai is not just foreign people but they are close to us. (#13) knowing items which connect countries is interesting. i think there are more things which connect countries. if i know these things, i feel foreign countries closer than before. (#95) the interconnectedness of japanese and other cultures was felt: i was really surprised many european artists tried to paint japanese style. even now, japanese arts are perceived as special from all over the world. (#59) and it reinforced a sense of pride, which, as the next quote shows, is not necessarily negative but must be considered carefully so as not to re-enforce ethnocentric beliefs (coyle et al., 2010). it may however also indicate a way to critically engage with edwards’ (2011) intercultural complex: before that, i felt inferiority complex to europe and america. but the technology to make silk was top class quality of the world. so we should be proud about this. (#96) promoting international posture through history as content and language integrated learning (clil). . . 99 knowledge and reflection also promoted critical thinking and positive feelings of international connectivity (mehisto, marsh, & frigols, 2008) about non-japanese people who came to share expertise and help develop the nation through the ages: many people from abroad gave japanese many kinds of knowledge. and i feel that japan have connected many other country long time ago and also now. (#108) all of japanese students know that kimigayo is the japanese national anthem, but few students know that the idea was proposed by a british man and the music was made by two japanese men and a germany musician. (#57) history necessarily covers conflicts as well as positive intercultural occurrences. at the time of writing, japan and some neighbouring nations are embroiled in tenacious territorial disputes, so the fact that there were no antipathetic or xenophobic comments, despite the very real possibility that there could have been, was heartening. on the contrary, japanese, south korean and chinese learners expressed regret that political and historical disputes disrupt current day friendly relations, which again seems to show the development of higher ip through critical engagement with a refocused cooperative historical narrative: one day i saw news about korean people are really angry about the past when japan occupied korea. if i did not take this class i might be unable to understand why they are still angry about it, but i can think now (#1) we discussed [the sino-japanese war] if you were china side, how you require the help after failed the war. i never thought in a million years how china recovered from the war . . . in this way, i could learn real history which includes different point of view of foreign countries. i also thought why many countries including japan want to hide the fact that is adverse for their country? i think they should open the public to understand exactly, because we have a right to know. (#45) furthermore, this was not only relevant to the japanese learners, the chinese and south korean learners seemed also to show similar tendencies: for example [japan invaded] china and did some inhumane things like experiment on human body. . . . in other side, japan paid for that incident for a long year. but chinese don’t know that. it because chinese government hiding that intentional. they don’t want chinese people know japan become a good country. (#58) i didn’t like past japan because i studied things in korean school with korean textbook from korean teacher . . . however i learned that history is just history and we can’t change or deny it . . . i could notice extremely important thing during this class. i could thomas lockley 100 study other side of history. my viewpoint was changed so i could feel i’m globalist. i want to tell these things to korean and japanese people then we can be closer. (#62) positively, a don’t-look-back-in-anger but look-forward-with-purpose attitude was also observed: i understand that history is significant for future relationships. as we can see the bad relationships between china and korea . . . we should change our hard relationships right now, or we trouble again and again. (#71) learners understood the global continuity of past, present and future; clil history helped empower them to realize that they can make a difference for the future. some came to believe that critical reflection on histories and cultures should be central to fll curricula (brooks-lewis, 2010; sudhoff, 2010): history is vital for student who learn foreign language because history gives us a key to know how our relationship has been built and how international exchange has been made. by understanding it, we can build more good relation, more good future with other country. (#94) i would like to be an international person in the future . . . to bridge the gap between two countries. to be such person, we have to well understand about each countries . . . perhaps we can find the good way to associate with people of other countries through learn the past of their countries. (#80) 3.4. discussion this section will attempt to answer the research questions and form a coherent narrative. the answer to the first research question: does international history as clil contribute to higher international posture?, seems to be yes. the questionnaire data gives a clear picture of ip and self-conceptual development, seeming to show a small, but clearly observable, shift to a more ip orientated future l2 self. in an attempt to confirm that it was clil that had affected this change and not some other external factor, the third qualitative questionnaire question, “has this course change how you feel about history?”, was asked. the answers to this seemed to confirm that clil had helped mitigate the idea of international marginalisation, which, as hypothesized, may lead to higher ip and hence l2 wtc. this suggests, although it needs further research and strong empirical support, that similarly focused clil courses may have like or related effects in contexts that experience similar self-perceived international marginalisation. while the literature suggests that south korea could be a beneficiary of this, in perhaps mitigating edwards’ (2011) intercultural complex, there are promoting international posture through history as content and language integrated learning (clil). . . 101 likely to be numerous other areas of the globe which have considered themselves cut off from “international currents” for a variety of reasons and therefore may also benefit from a reconceptualisation of historical antecedents through clil. furthermore, of significance to fll outcomes is the fact that suitably scaffolded l2 is the language of instruction, which should also lead through increased actual l2 use to greater spcc and l2 wtc. the answer to the second research question: if so, in what ways does it do this?, is far more difficult to answer, but the reflective account data gives a comprehensive and nuanced picture. the comments showed that learners saw nations as less isolated entities. they realised that histories are shared and fluid and, hence, learners felt themselves closer to other parts of the world when they could relate with the populations more closely. the comment “thai is not just foreign people but they are close to us” is particularly representative of this. this aspect of the curriculum seems to have led to ip formation and it is important here to establish what the clil approach contributed to this as opposed to external or specific contextual factors such as the educator’s personality or the particular classroom environment. the clil approach seems to have allowed learners to critically engage and co-construct issues relationally in the socio-cultural context of interdependent selves, coming to mutually negotiated conclusions about the meaning and import of lesson content and materials (ushioda, 2009). the fact that the materials were designed (lockley, 2013) to create fll motivation through the use of l2 historical content of a compelling nature, for example, tales of pirates, romance and adventure, and through these appeal to an adventurous imagined l2 self, is also likely to have been a factor in ip formation. particularly in relation to film footage used, learners were able to draw inspiration (lockley, 2014) and construct a future l2 self. the above comment, “i would like to be an international person in the future . . . to bridge the gap between two countries” is particularly indicative of this. as ryan (2009) and yashima (2009) point out, this may have more validity than integrativeness and most probably is a large contribution to the formation of ip observed here. the comments about japanese cultural influence around the world show learner pride, and in the words of one student, the awareness of the influence countered the inferiority complex she had felt. this seems related to edwards’ (2011) intercultural complex, derived from self-perceived feelings of inferiority. it suggests that if these negative feelings of inequality, which, it seems, may also exist in the japanese context, can be mitigated, this could again lead to better l2 wtc. it could have particular significance in interdependent self cultures, where it seems that wtc may be a far more socially, relationally, and group constructed phenomenon, based on interlocutor status and intergroup dynamics thomas lockley 102 (edwards, 2011; peng, 2014). but it is in the political consciousness raised by the course that some of the potentially most interesting effects on ip and l2 wtc were seen. japanese students showed empathy whereas before they wrote that they had not understood the historical roots of current day regional international friction. chinese and south korean learners also experienced similar outcomes. the following were powerful and meaningful statements in this connection: “[the chinese government] don’t want chinese people know japan become a good country,” “my viewpoint was changed so i could feel i’m globalist. i want to tell these things to korean and japanese people then we can be closer.” coupled with the resolutions to understand but leave history behind (indicative again of imagined future l2, and perhaps global, selves) such as: “i found that the important thing is that we think history and past incident how we behave or live from now on” and “as we can see the bad relationships between china and korea . . . we should change our hard relationships right now, or we trouble again and again.” students of different nationalities all wrote that the course content had brought them closer together. this seems to be an attitude more indicative of ip formation and certainly if the dissimilar other becomes less dissimilar, then it is probable that an individual is more likely to be willing to communicate with them. in this case perhaps the term integrated, rather than integrativeness, might be suitable, not integrating towards a dominant or hegemonic culture or l2 but rather the equal and collective mixing of peoples and cultures, forming an inclusive rather than exclusive and mutually antagonistic regional community as global citizens on an equal basis (marcus & kitayama, 1991; yashima, 2013). this is somewhat reminiscent of norton and mckinney’s (2011) concept of middle ground communities of practice, where seemingly different groups come together to make a new and mutually understanding group based on principles of equality and inclusiveness. whether this “international” community of practice is either imagined or real, goes above and beyond the traditional conceptions of both ip and integrativeness and takes on a deeper and more faceted meaning. the place of history in foreign language curricula is not a topic that is often discussed; in fact, as brooks-lewis (2010) wrote, it is virtually absent from the literature. however, the data above shows that learners who took this course identified it as a key need for language learners. comments such as “history is vital for student who learn foreign language because history gives us a key to know how our relationship has been built and how international exchange has been made” show that historical exchanges cannot be disconnected from fll, as history has made the present in which that language exists as a sociocultural living entity. this has particular significance if, as the data appears to show, historical content, when suitably presented, can lead to ip and hence to promoting international posture through history as content and language integrated learning (clil). . . 103 l2 wtc, which, as macintyre et al. (1998) stated, should be the ultimate learning objective of any fll curriculum. this discussion appears to have shown that this type of clil course is not only relevant to the japanese context, but that it may be far more widely generalisable. it may also have relevance for multiculturalism and community relations in countries where there are significant mixed ethnic populations. japan and other east-asian countries such as south korea are, due to economic strength and easier cross-border flows of people, currently going through massimmigration for the first time. other parts of the world such as europe have traditionally been more obviously ethnically mixed and in the last 50 years this trend has only increased; with this trend has often come social tensions and community friction. it would be nice to think that perhaps if education systems were to concentrate on the concepts of fostering unity and interethnic empathy, in effect feelings of ip and integration, then it would not only contribute to fll but also to better social relations. of course, this may seem like a wild and overly ambitions hope, but the global and intercultural awareness principles of both clil (coyle et al., 2010; mehisto et al., 2008;) and yashima’s conception of what ip means—cultural openness, empathy and lack of ethnocentrism—do actually hint at this possibility. 4. future research possibilities one future research direction could be working with a wider population in multiple locations, if possible in different parts of the globe and different types of society, for example more multiethnic and multicultural contexts. it is also important to note that, as rumlich (2013) points out, many students who choose clil lessons may already be more motivated or higher achievers, or they perhaps would not choose the seemingly harder clil option. more research needs to be done on clil with lower level, nonelective learners to establish whether similar pedagogical outcomes are related to l2 level or an initial learner willingness to engage with the subject matter. 5. conclusion this study has presented data to deepen the literature on contextual factors pertaining to clil and, in particular, the little studied subject of clil as history in japan and its contribution to ip and l2 wtc. it seems to show that the stated aims of the course, to improve students ip and thence l2 wtc, were successful, and posits reasons as to why that might have been. the data suggests that clil history, taught from a cooperative international standpoint, promoted feelings thomas lockley 104 of closeness to other peoples and reduced feelings of global marginalization. through this, varied fll motivational constructs were stimulated and more positive and integrated feelings towards an imagined, or real, international community with which learners felt an increased identification, were created. this was not limited to japanese learners; learners of other nationalities who were present in the same classes also seem to have experienced similar learning outcomes, suggesting that this study may also have implications for contexts other than the japanese one. acknowledgements thanks to all the students who provided the valuable data for this study. thank you also to the two blind reviewers for their hard work, constructive and insightful comments and suggestions for further reading, and to simon cooke for his advice at all stages of writing. finally, thank you to the people who gave me such a deep understanding of the crucial place of historical knowledge in the world, particularly my grandfather laurence john vigor. promoting international posture through history as content and language integrated learning (clil). . . 105 references aubrey, s. 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(2014). communication research in the efl context: challenges and directions. mediterranean journal of social sciences, 4(1), 11-20. 41 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 11 (1). 2021. 41-70 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.1.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt english for specific purposes teachers’ beliefs about their motivational practices and student motivation at a chinese university xiaowan yang guangdong university of foreign studies, china https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4104-6534 xiaowan.yang@gdufs.edu.cn mark wyatt khalifa university, uae https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8647-8280 dr.markwyatt@gmail.com abstract while it is increasingly recognized that teachers have a crucial role to play in motivating learners, language teacher cognition research that focuses on beliefs about second language (l2) learner motivation and motivational practices is still rare, particularly in english for specific purposes (esp) settings in asia. furthermore, much of what is available does not employ stimulated recall interviews to facilitate a comparison of espoused beliefs elicited beforehand, observed classroom practices and situated cognitions. we have employed such methodology in an under-researched esp setting in china, to gain insights into the influence of culture and context on teacher beliefs and behavior. our qualitative case study of three chinese esp teachers highlights harmony and tensions between espoused beliefs regarding student motivation and the teacher’s motivational role, and motivational practices, this harmony/disharmony being likely to impact these teachers’ self-determination. it considers possible reasons for identified tensions, including limited professional development opportunities in esp, apparently dated knowledge of l2 motivation theory, deeply embedded confucian values and an entrenched assessment xiaowan yang, mark wyatt 42 culture. findings suggest the need for awareness-raising and mentoring activities designed to support cognitive harmony regarding motivation and motivational practices amongst esp teachers. keywords: teacher beliefs; l2 motivation; motivational practices; english for specific purposes; china; stimulated recall 1. introduction while the understanding of both second language (l2) learner motivation and teachers’ motivational practices has developed considerably in english language teaching (elt) in recent decades (lamb, 2017), there has been less focus on these issues in the english for specific purposes (esp) literature, even though motivation is also important in the latter field. so, whereas, for example, the journal studies in second language learning and teaching (ssllt) devotes considerable attention to motivation, having published no fewer than 19 articles with motivation in the title since pawlak (2012), in contrast, the most recent article in english for specific purposes with motivation in the title was peacock’s (2003) book review of dörnyei (2001), which makes no reference to esp. references to esp are also rare amongst the 19 articles with motivation in the title in ssllt, though barzegar and sadr (2013) do explore the effects of emotional intelligence awareness-raising on l2 motivation in an esp context, supported by teachers’ motivational strategies. however, neither in this study nor in the fields of elt or esp more generally is there much consideration of teachers’ beliefs about motivation and motivational practices. we explore language teachers’ beliefs about motivation and motivational practices in an esp learning environment in china. this is a national context where there is still pressure on teachers to adopt western ideas and methods related to elt, even though these ideas and methods may not always fit cultural norms and contextual realities (butler, 2011). such pressure might contribute to cognitive disharmony in teachers. while such cognitive disharmony can spur the positive change characteristically sought in teacher education (golombek, 2015), unfortunately another potential outcome is that it may be a cause of downwardly spiraling self-efficacy beliefs in unsupported in-service teachers (wyatt, 2018). our perspective is that, while the relationships are always likely to be highly complex (bastürkmen, 2012), relative harmony between beliefs about l2 learner motivation and motivational practices seems likely to support psychological well-being in self-determined teachers (deci & ryan, 1985). we explore this issue in an under-researched esp university context in china, focusing on three teachers in a qualitative case study (stake, 1995) for insights into english for specific purposes teachers’ beliefs about their motivational practices and student. . . 43 their beliefs about student motivation, motivational practices and how these are shaped by culture and context. 2. literature review in reviewing the literature, we first consider the need for language teacher cognition research regarding l2 learner motivation and teachers’ motivational practices, and argue that there is a need for qualitative research in esp settings that includes stimulated recall. we then review the literature on language teachers’ espoused beliefs regarding l2 learner motivation and their motivational classroom practices, and consider the roles played by the esp context and local culture in shaping teachers’ beliefs. we then review language teacher cognition studies in china. 2.1. the need for l2 learner motivation-oriented teacher cognition research utilizing stimulated recall language teacher cognition research, the study of “what language teachers think, know and believe” and of how these cognitions shape their classroom practices (borg, 2006, p. 1), is needed for the following reasons. firstly, as borg (2015) explains, it can furnish insights into how policy is being realized in practice; it can also shed light on the extent to which teaching practices seem optimal, support the evaluation of past or ongoing teacher education programs and shape any needs analysis leading into the design of future programs. it can additionally shed light on how educational organizations work, the extent to which different aspects of the curriculum appear to be aligned, the influence of cultural assumptions on practices in different contexts and the extent to which educational policy needs re-examining (imran & wyatt, 2015; walsh & wyatt, 2014). it is also required to investigate widely discussed areas of teaching and learning that have been under-explored in teacher cognition studies (borg, 2015), particularly since there can be a gap between second language acquisition theory and teaching practice (borg, 2006). hennebry-leung (2020) reminds us that l2 motivation theory developed by researchers and disseminated through academic publications may be only partially accessible to teachers as public theory, before being reconstructed as these teachers develop their own private theories in unpredictable ways in different contexts. although reasons for any lack of congruence between teachers’ beliefs and practices may be complex (bastürkmen, 2012), an identified gap between cognitions and practices regarding l2 motivation theory in particular could be a cause for concern. for example, while there is increasing empirical evidence that the use of motivational strategies by teachers (dörnyei, 2001) might be appropriate xiaowan yang, mark wyatt 44 in different ways in different contexts, the view that was prevailing until the 1990s, advanced by gardner and his associates (e.g., gardner & lambert, 1959), was that students’ underlying motives and attitudes towards the language and its speakers were far more important than anything that happened subsequently in class (lamb, 2017). teachers holding such a gardnerian view, reflecting somewhat dated theoretical knowledge, might hold skeptical beliefs as to the value of motivational strategies. beliefs, which can be conceptualized as an affective way of knowing (pajares, 1992), intersect with knowledge to shape practices. to date, there has been only limited research exploring the relationships between language teachers’ conceptions of l2 motivation and their motivational practices (lamb, 2017). moreover, that research available has tended to elicit espoused (zhu & shu, 2017), idealized (imran & wyatt, 2015) or professed (zheng, 2013) beliefs, which are not necessarily closely related to classroom practice, unlike the “practically-oriented cognitions” (borg, 2006, p. 280) which inform teachers’ actual work. to elicit the latter, sometimes termed situated cognitions (walsh & wyatt, 2014) or implicit beliefs (zhu & shu, 2017), it is common in teacher cognition research to observe classroom behavior and then seek explanations in stimulated recall interview (sri). stimulated recall involves using data from the observed lesson in the form of audioor video-recordings or notes to prompt reflection on classroom events (gass & mackey, 2000). this method can provide insights into how factors such as context, culture or teacher education impact teachers’ classroom practices and shape situated cognitions that perhaps conflict with espoused beliefs, leading to cognitive disharmony that once understood can be addressed. for example, using stimulated recall with in-service secondary school english teachers in hong kong, hennebry-leung (2020) was able to identify the need for mechanisms in continuing professional development that would facilitate the intertwining of teacher learning, teaching practice and reflection in an interactive way to support greater harmony. however, the method has been under-employed in language teacher cognition research on motivation. while muñoz and ramirez (2015), for example, identified a gap between espoused beliefs regarding motivational strategies, elicited in interview, and observed classroom practices, they did not use stimulated recall to explore the situated cognitions of the colombian teachers in their study. qualitative research methodology utilizing stimulated recall is particularly needed in esp. bastürkmen and bocanegra-valle (2018) highlight that while there are large bodies of literature on linguistic description in esp and on teaching and learning esp, there is almost nothing on the esp teacher. we focus now on what we do know, first considering more broadly espoused beliefs regarding l2 student motivation and the motivational practices of language educators. english for specific purposes teachers’ beliefs about their motivational practices and student. . . 45 2.2. language teachers’ espoused beliefs regarding l2 learner motivation and motivational classroom practices while the field of l2 motivation research has made considerable advances in recent decades (al-hoorie, 2018; dörnyei & ushioda, 2011; lamb, 2017), we know only a little about language teachers’ espoused beliefs regarding student motivation and self-reported motivational classroom practices from the few small-scale studies (e.g., cowie & sakui, 2012; harvey, 2013; hennebry-leung, 2020; lee, 2015) available. these studies reveal espoused beliefs based on varying levels of theoretical knowledge regarding research on l2 motivation. two of three experienced and masters-qualified hong kong chinese teachers in lee (2015), for example, were unable “to provide any detailed account of leading l2 motivation theories” (p. 7). at the same time, the third of them seems to have had a sense of historical developments, for example, knowing something about gardner and lambert’s (1959) social-psychological approach, which held that an integrative orientation, that is, a willingness to identify with the target language community, was more important for success than an instrumental orientation, that is, a concern with pragmatic gains from l2 proficiency such as getting a better job. of course, the explanatory power of this dichotomy has been questioned since the 1990s (lamb, 2004). the teacher also knew about the emergent orientation, international posture (yashima, 2002); this refers to a willingness to interact in intercultural settings through english, including in contexts where it is used as a lingua franca, without, however, necessarily wishing to identify with the foreign other. furthermore, the teacher was also aware of the cognitive-situated phase of l2 motivation research that emerged in the 1990s, when the importance of the classroom environment was recognized, and interest in motivational macro-strategies (dörnyei, 2001) was sparked; these macro-strategies include setting a personal example with behavior, developing good relationships with learners, making well-presented learning tasks stimulating, familiarizing learners with the target language culture, encouraging learner autonomy and promoting learners’ self-confidence (lamb, 2017). what teachers know about l2 motivation is important, since this knowledge is likely to shape their beliefs and perhaps their practices. for example, teachers holding gardner’s now much-challenged view that orientations are more important than any subsequent educational experience may be less likely to employ motivational macro-strategies (lamb, 2017). such a stance is evident, for example, in a japan-based teacher in cowie and sakui (2012), who reports believing: “students are innately motivated. . . [and] there is relatively little she can do to change their levels of determination to learn” (p. 138). xiaowan yang, mark wyatt 46 in contrast, if teachers believe their motivational practices can make a difference, this might impact their use of strategies. several uk-based eap teachers interviewed in harvey (2013) highlight the need for strategies, such as creating trusting relationships with students within a safe environment in which risks with language can be taken and new identities experimented with. these teachers also emphasize that students need to “know that their teacher understands their experience of the learning process and the pragmatic gains for which they are aiming, and that there are various influences operating in their lives” (p. 2). to draw on two further current motivation theories, deci and ryan’s (1985) self-determination theory and dörnyei’s (2009) l2 motivational self-system: if teachers employ macro-strategies appropriate for the context, then students’ psychological needs for relatedness, autonomy and competence are more likely to be met, allowing students to engage efficaciously in more intrinsically-motivated, self-determined behavior (deci & ryan, 1985); teachers’ use of macro-strategies might allow learners to fulfil their ideal l2 selves, that is, their visions of themselves as competent language users (dörnyei, 2009). 2.3. the role of the esp context and local culture in shaping teachers’ beliefs as teachers’ espoused beliefs quoted in harvey (2013) above suggest, learners need to feel that their goals and social experiences are valued. context matters, with “the local educational culture,” “broader curriculum goals,” “preferences and interests of particular learner groups,” and “individual learner needs, wants and identities” all requiring the consideration of their teachers (lamb, 2017, p. 311). esp learners, like the eap learners referred to in harvey (2013), are perhaps more likely to be concerned about pragmatic gains that relate to an instrumental orientation than are many other learner groups. if related to professional needs and clearly relevant to future careers, the esp curriculum might be more motivating (bastürkmen, 2010; kember et al., 2008), particularly if course material authentically (danaye tous & haghighi, 2014) focuses on students’ specializations (malcolm, 2013) in an accessible way (marwan, 2009). it can also help motivation if a specifically task-based syllabus based on practical business situations (chen, 2005; dudley-evans & st john, 1998) is followed. however, besides strengthening instrumental motivation, supporting esp learners’ intrinsic enjoyment in using materials is also important, as some teachers emphasize, for example most of the 21 esp university teachers in spain sampled by bastürkmen and bocanegra-valle (2018). according to ahmed (2014), increases in intrinsic motivation can be achieved by the fulfilment of several related principles, for example by promoting learner autonomy through the use of authentic materials that capitalize on esp learners’ interests in developing technology in a digital world. english for specific purposes teachers’ beliefs about their motivational practices and student. . . 47 ideally, employing motivational principles through interactive use of engaging materials and tasks (watson todd, 2003) can also enhance both esp learners’ feelings of relatedness and their self-efficacy beliefs (su et al., 2018). teachers’ motivational practices are likely to be shaped by factors such as the value they attach to motivational principles and their perceptions of the motivation of their esp learners. in turn, these esp teachers’ cognitions will have been shaped by various sources. these sources would include classroom practice, professional coursework, and schooling, that is, lortie’s (1975) apprenticeship of observation, which refers to the thousands of hours that teachers have already spent as learners observing their own teachers (borg, 2006). these sources might be felt within or across cultures. though under-explored in language teacher cognition research, local culture experienced through schooling, teacher education and teaching practice is likely to play a pervasive role in shaping esp teachers’ cognitions and motivational practices. this is clear to l2 motivation researchers, with lamb (2017) emphasizing that motivational strategies, developed in relation to the local curriculum and sociocultural context, are culture-specific. so, comparing hungarian and taiwanese elt contexts, cheng and dörnyei (2007) highlight that hungarian teachers tend to support proactive autonomy, for example by encouraging learners to choose or design instructional materials. this is in contrast to taiwanese teachers, who may be more likely to support reactive autonomy, for example through encouraging learners to work independently while following their teacher’s agenda. the authors ascribe this finding to “the common belief amongst chinese educators that the teacher is the ultimate source of knowledge” (cheng & dörnyei, 2007, p. 170). another motivational strategy that emerged in cheng and dörnyei’s (2007) study as particularly important in a chinese context is recognising students’ sustained effort, which these authors relate to confucian values and the historical importance of paper-and-pencil exams in career advancement. similarly, wong (2014) found that the motivational strategy hong kong chinese elt teachers reported using most often was offering students rewards, such as confectionary or writing implements, which the students could then use for showing off. this strategy, which is strongly discouraged in many educational contexts for the negative effects it can have on intrinsic motivation, physical health and psychological wellbeing, appears related to the stress placed in china on performing in high stakes exams (wong, 2014). the importance of exam preparation in china is evident in other studies (e.g., yuan & stapleton, 2020; zhu & shu, 2017). for example, lamb and wedell (2015) compared inspiring english language school teachers in indonesia and china from learners’ perspectives. the chinese learners in the study appeared xiaowan yang, mark wyatt 48 to measure progress more in terms of “improved assessment scores,” and also differed from their indonesian counterparts by placing more value on “the effective use of traditional methods” than on “novelty in methodology” (p. 214). a chinese elt teacher, selected for observation as she had been nominated as inspiring by multiple former students, taught in the following way. besides radiating enthusiasm throughout, she revised grammar through rapid short stages, initiated all activities to which students responded, encouraged competition between groups, focused on textbook language and ensured there was always a clear right answer. subsequently, this teacher emphasized in interview that she wanted her lessons to be not only interesting, but also fast and intensively competitive, since she was preparing students for a highly competitive world of future exams (lamb & wedell, 2015). there was thus a synergy between practices and the situated cognitions elicited, which appeared to be in harmony with local culture; these researchers had not investigated her espoused beliefs. 2.4. language teacher cognition studies in china although research exploring english language teacher cognition regarding learner motivation and teachers’ motivational practices is limited, particularly in esp contexts in china, some local studies focusing on language teacher cognition in other elt curricular areas and typically eliciting both espoused beliefs and those situated in relation to observed classroom practices do provide insights. zheng (2013), for example, explored tensions between the espoused beliefs and practices of a secondary school english teacher. this teacher professed to promote learners’ overall language competence in accordance with the new western-influenced curriculum through communicative language teaching (clt) and the use of authentic activities, but instead then taught to pass the exam. zheng discusses these tensions in terms of core beliefs, which are more stable, and peripheral beliefs competing against each other, with some new beliefs assimilated into her practices, but others showing evidence of only token adoption. relating these findings to complexity theory, zheng (2013) suggests that teachers potentially conflicted need help in reflecting so that they can better understand themselves and how factors such as culture, prior learning experiences, learner expectations and curriculum chaotically and dynamically impact what they do in a rapidly changing chinese society. tao and gao (2018) have similarly argued that reflection-focused professional development could benefit chinese esp university teachers seeking to develop robust professional identities. they explain that, despite growing recognition of the importance of esp in chinese universities, esp teachers can still feel marginalized. bearing in mind that feelings of being marginalized can undermine wellbeing and self-determination in teachers (deci & ryan, 1985), we now explore english for specific purposes teachers’ beliefs about their motivational practices and student. . . 49 language teacher cognition regarding l2 motivation and motivational practices at a chinese university. we do this by employing not only emic but also etic perspectives, i.e., by analyzing the voices of our participants in relation to motivational and cultural constructs in public theory. utilizing this combination of perspectives is a strategy recommended by watt and richardson (2015), who argue that a combined emic/etic approach “is important to progress the burgeoning body of work concerning teachers’ beliefs and motivations” (p. 203). 3. the study as indicated above, language teacher cognition research relating to student motivation is limited, particularly amongst esp teachers in china. furthermore, research utilizing stimulated recall to explore the relationships between the classroom practices and espoused beliefs of chinese esp teachers, and to explore how these beliefs are impacted by culture and context, is needed. our research questions are accordingly: 1. what espoused beliefs do three chinese esp teachers hold about student motivation? 2. to what extent do their motivational practices in the esp classroom fit their espoused beliefs, and which factors might explain any gaps identified? 3.1. research context and participants this qualitative case study (stake, 1995) took place at a chinese university, where business english, as part of the university’s college english curriculum, is compulsory for all 2nd-year business majors. it is taught by a team of seven esp teachers, all nonnative speakers of english, expected to follow the same clt-oriented syllabus, which outlines teaching objectives, textbook and assessment. classes are large, each containing approximately 50 students with a shared l1. english is the default language of instruction, with chinese occasionally used to facilitate understanding. three teachers were selected for the final study (from five willing and available volunteers – the other two participated in a pilot study). the most important consideration in selecting these three cases was to maximize what could be learned (stake, 1995). of the two male volunteers, for example, one (gang – pseudonym) seemed more highly articulate than the other and therefore seemed more likely to be able to provide rich information about his beliefs and practices; he was also highly popular with students, according to the student evaluations of teaching that were shared, which suggested that he knew how to motivate his students. gender balance and variety were also considerations in xiaowan yang, mark wyatt 50 sampling. the two females selected included li (pseudonym), the most experienced of the five volunteers; li was highly supportive of the research and was eager to contribute. also included was yan (pseudonym), a teacher who had a particularly varied background and who was studying part-time for a phd. the participating teachers also had certain shared characteristics. all three held business-related masters degrees and had 5-10 years’ esp experience, though li had also taught general english for 20 years. they had received the teaching certificate for tertiary education from the provincial education department. none had taken specific english language teaching qualifications, which is quite typical of college english teachers in china; most major in linguistics, translation or literature (borg & liu, 2013). also typical of chinese college english teachers is that li and gang had not worked outside teaching; relevant business work experience amongst such teachers is unusual (tao & gao, 2018). yan was an exception; like several of the teachers in tao and gao (2018), she had gained some experience in an international company before becoming a university teacher. in-service training in such university contexts is limited, usually taking the form of lectures by experts (e.g., on linguistics), peer discussions, both formal and informal, and observations of demonstration classes (rao & lei, 2014). participating teachers were informed of the research aims and design, and were guaranteed confidentiality, anonymity and the right to withdraw at any stage, in line with ethical guidelines. 3.2. data collection and analysis qualitative data were collected through pre-observation interviews, classroom observations and stimulated recall interviews (sris) by the first researcher (hereafter i). as an insider (holliday, 2007) colleague on study leave, i could easily build rapport with the participants and could utilize shared cultural knowledge during data collection. at the same time, i was fully conscious of needing to be reflexive. i maintained a neutral role throughout data collection processes, seeking to explore and avoiding rushing to judgment. this is particularly important in sris, to allow for more complete recall commentaries to be gathered. pre-observation interviews focused on participants’ general understanding of esp student motivation and their own motivational practices (appendix a). these interviews were semi-structured to allow both interviewer and interviewees flexibility to explore themes of relevance as they arose (dörnyei, 2007). each interview lasted approximately 50 minutes and was audio-recorded with consent, to enable me, the interviewer, to focus fully on the conversation and to facilitate subsequent analysis (kvale & brinkmann, 2009). all interviews were conducted at least one week before classroom observations in an attempt to minimize the impact of pre-conceived notions triggered by the interview questions. english for specific purposes teachers’ beliefs about their motivational practices and student. . . 51 particularly given that teacher beliefs can be contradictory and unconscious while verbal commentary may not always be reliable (gass & mackey, 2000), non-participatory classroom observations were needed. i wanted to compare what teachers actually did in the classroom and what they reported that they thought they should do or did. two of each participant’s classes (each lasting 50 minutes) were observed but not recorded in order to reduce intrusiveness. instead, observational notes were taken and copies of teaching materials such as worksheets, handouts, course book and powerpoint slides were collected to support subsequent description. reactivity relating to the observer’s presence (holliday, 2007) was not thought to be an issue. this is because lessons are frequently observed for various purposes at the research site (e.g., for teacher development, teaching management, and research), with demonstration lessons quite common (rao & lei, 2014). so teachers and students tend to be quite comfortable with an observer’s presence. observational data providing evidence of motivational strategies employed in the esp classroom were partially analyzed immediately after each observed lesson, with an instrument based on dörnyei (2001) developed for this purpose (appendix b). this analysis enabled me to frame the issues to be discussed during the sris (gass & mackey, 2000), which were conducted shortly afterwards. designed to uncover cognitive processes underlying classroom practices (brown & rodgers, 2002), sris took about 35 minutes each and were audio-recorded. observational notes and copies of teaching materials were used as stimuli to prompt teachers to reflect on classroom behavior (see appendix c for guiding questions). various strategies were employed during the sris to ease any tension that teachers might experience while commenting on their own practices. firstly, the sris were conducted in a relaxed environment, with drinks and snacks provided, and both interviewer and interviewees were seated comfortably on sofas. i was very careful with body language and choice of words when asking follow-up questions, striving to maintain a neutral respectful tone. this was to avoid participants feeling that they had to present themselves more favorably or to defend themselves upon feeling judged, challenged or confronted. data generated from pre-observation interviews and sris were first transcribed, translated into english and sent to the participants for verification. with their confirmation, interview transcripts were then coded through close and repeated readings. during this process, reflexivity (holliday, 2007) was crucial, and was achieved partly through dialogue with the second researcher, who brought an outsider perspective to data analysis. a range of teacher beliefs regarding student motivation and motivational practices were identified, categorized and subsequently reassembled into recurrent themes. conscious of the possible effects of the social desirability response bias, we interrogated emergent findings xiaowan yang, mark wyatt 52 rigorously. for example, since methods associated with western-oriented clt are promoted in this context, we were conscious that teachers may be more likely to espouse adoption of them, whether or not this is merely token (zheng, 2013). illustrations of espoused beliefs, observed practice and situated cognitions in relation to particular motivational strategies were tabulated reflexively and re-examined for any hint of reactivity (holliday, 2007). thick descriptive accounts were then developed and are presented below to help us address and subsequently discuss our research questions. 4. findings 4.1. what are li’s espoused beliefs about student motivation? li reported that motivation was “definitely” the most important factor that contributed to language learning success. she felt that most esp students were motivated to learn the course as “it is practical” and “closely related to their subject of study,” but for students who “don’t need english in their future life,” “nothing could fire them up.” from this perspective, she argued that although teachers did have an impact, they did not and should not play a big role in motivating students. instead, students “need to be motivated from inside . . . by themselves.” factors li felt most important for esp student motivation were relevance to real-world needs, learner autonomy and positive self-efficacy beliefs, realized through motivational techniques including “developing a good relationship with students,” “boosting students’ confidence,” and “empowering students and letting them decide what best fits their needs.” the most effective strategy overall was “relating the course to practical needs,” for which she favored various motivational techniques (table 1): table 1 li’s favored motivational techniques practical needs favored motivational techniques a higher gpa award bonus grades for active participation, presentations and assignments future study or career use authentic and relevant materials and activities oral communication in future career question students frequently during class frequent group work to increase speaking opportunities 4.2. to what extent do li’s motivational practices in the esp classroom fit her espoused beliefs, and which factors might explain any gaps identified? li’s classroom observations revealed a degree of fit between espoused beliefs and motivational practices. at the start of both observed classes, for example, english for specific purposes teachers’ beliefs about their motivational practices and student. . . 53 li explained how topics related to the course and business world. she also linked success in job interviews or future careers with the acquisition of certain high frequency phrases or sentence patterns. however, there were also apparent tensions between li’s espoused beliefs and classroom practices, regarding, for example, learner autonomy. in interview, li acknowledged the importance of empowering students and “letting them take control.” in both her observed sessions, however, li exercised tight control over the flow of teaching and learning. she was observed to check her watch frequently, timing every section of her lesson, with group discussions limited to finding easily located answers in reading texts; when invited to participate, students were asked to keep their contributions short and simple. when this was highlighted in sris, li verbalized another belief that seemed more powerful: it (letting students take control) would be ideal, but classes do not always work like that . . . the classroom should be led by the teacher. we cannot let students do whatever they want. anyway, teachers teach, students learn. this belief that teachers should be at the center is also evidenced by her limited interaction with students. during her observed classes, she talked most; students spoke only when asked to. she stayed behind the podium mostly and there was no personal interaction with students. when this behavior was highlighted in sris, li attributed it to contextual factors, including time constraints and large class size: although i know my students would like some lead and say in the classroom, i just don’t have enough time. i have to lead the students so that we can move faster to cover everything. we don’t have time for chit-chat . . . if everyone speaks for one minute, that’s a 50-minute class finished already. i couldn’t afford to let them pull the class in different directions. i have to do more talking and keep discussions short. the use of non-authentic teaching/learning materials suggests another tension between li’s beliefs and practices. although li reported believing that authentic materials can motivate students, in her class she stuck to obviously dated course book materials (first published in 1983). her sris revealed that this was an intentional choice: i know readings are dated and activities are not so relevant. but at least, this is a published course book, which means it is more authoritative and trustworthy. i don’t want to mislead my students with materials from other sources . . . like the internet . . . what if it is not written in correct english, like japanese english? li did not seem aware that her overarching belief about authentic english appears to be at odds with her belief about using authentic materials as a motivating xiaowan yang, mark wyatt 54 strategy. in her mind, only english “used by native speakers” and “official english, like bbc or voa english” is authentic, while “english used by non-native speakers” may mislead students. feeling that she has to look for extra materials in authentic english (in her sense) clearly adds to the difficulty of providing materials to motivate students. she reported already finding this challenging with classes, where “students have varied levels of language ability and subject knowledge.” further to the issue of materials, li was observed to use black and white powerpoint slides. when asked to reflect on the motivational use of these materials, li explained: i don’t believe in the power of them. in fact, i wouldn’t use powerpoint if there were not such an assessment item in the teacher evaluation . . . i strongly disagree with the use of entertainment in the classroom, too. but i have to occasionally use it so as to please my students . . . i don’t think learning needs so much fun. learning needs a lot of hard work and painstaking effort. we should not give students the wrong idea. li seemed fully aware of this tension between belief and practice. the pressure of having to please the students and fulfil institutional requirements forced her to use some motivational techniques that she did not believe in at all. 4.3. what are gang’s espoused beliefs about student motivation? like li, gang acknowledged the importance of motivation in l2 attainment. in his opinion, motivated students “participate in activities,” “long for challenges,” “make frequent eye contact” and are “curious and interested.” however, gang also emphasized the important role that teachers play in motivating students and, interestingly, the impact of student motivation on him: teachers are the center of the class. they lead . . . the influence is mutual. if i’m not in a good mood, my students will feel that . . . i cannot motivate my students without motivating myself first. i think they can feel my passion. my students have a strong impact on me as well. sometimes they ignore my jokes and bury their heads in their smart phones. i feel like a clown and the whole class could be ruined. 4.4. to what extent do gang’s motivational practices in the esp classroom fit his espoused beliefs, and which factors might explain any gaps identified? in his observed classes, gang practiced many espoused beliefs, e.g., regarding the use of relevant material, which he felt was important: “providing them with authentic materials or real-world activities is motivating.” in one session, he replaced the course book reading with a more recently published report, and in english for specific purposes teachers’ beliefs about their motivational practices and student. . . 55 the other session, he redesigned two course book activities to make them more related to the real world. one activity, for example, drew upon the yearly local trade fair and invited students to write an invitation letter to clients for a real exhibitor; this replaced the course book activity that asked students to write an invitation letter to an imagined italian sportswear company. he also suggested that students could be more motivated if teachers “link their grades with their effort.” in his observed lessons, he gave an extra credit to groups who excelled in an activity, provided positive feedback for progress and effort rather than correctness, and rewarded a team by inviting them to post their assignment on a class blog. he also regarded learner autonomy as vital, suggesting that teachers should give students the opportunity to contribute and should value their input. for example, he reported encouraging students to find readings to share with teammates and to pool interesting ideas, articles and learning resources through the class blog. in gang’s view, a relaxing class atmosphere with positive relationships helped motivate students, as “this helps reduce the pressure of language learning.” he played english pop songs with strong beats before each observed class and started his classes informally chatting with students. impressively, given class size, he knew most students’ names, while they addressed him casually “gang ge” (brother gang), which is not typical in chinese classrooms. gang moved around the classroom, exchanging opinions with students during activities. however, tensions were observed between gang’s espoused beliefs and practices, mostly relating to supporting learner autonomy. for gang, teachers should “allow students to decide how they learn” since these “adults” “know very well what they need and what they should do.” nevertheless, when describing the teacher’s role, he used the expressions: “center,” “lead” (as quoted above), “boss,” “control;” these suggest teacher-centeredness and clashing beliefs. gang claimed he was “constantly fighting against the students over the control of the class,” and conflict was apparent in an authentic reading observed. gang replaced the course book reading text with a recently published report he intended to use as in-class reading material with self-designed follow-up activities. however, students immediately complained the report was too long, so he assigned it as homework for a quiz next time. again, students complained that it was too difficult and they did not have time; gang finally agreed not to quiz them. while this incident echoes li’s concern about finding suitable authentic material, it also reflects gang’s struggle regarding autonomy and control. he rationalized his practice afterwards: it is an interesting report. i didn’t expect them to complain about it . . . students misbehave when they are given autonomy . . . i don’t want them to hate me . . . forcing them to read won’t work. xiaowan yang, mark wyatt 56 conflict between his desire to control the flow of teaching and wish to motivate through authentic use of relevant material caused gang difficulty in following through his plans. this was also evident after a warm-up activity in which gang compared an on-campus basketball team with the lakers and played a short lakers video. the animated students clearly wanted to discuss further but gang stopped them abruptly and proceeded with a reading activity from the course book. reflecting on this behavior, he attributed it to the following: students have contradictory expectations. they want to get a good mark, and they want to have fun. i have to decide what’s good for them. if we waste too much time, there’s no way we could cover everything . . . students may fail their exams! they won’t blame themselves for not working hard enough. they will blame me for not being a good teacher. his teacher-centeredness seemed the product of his need for effective classroom management; learner autonomy seemed desirable but not feasible. gang claimed: “without constraints” he could be more flexible with his motivational strategies and “let students take control.” 4.5. what are yan’s espoused beliefs about student motivation? while yan’s beliefs about motivation were similar to li’s and gang’s, she was more confident about the possibility of motivating learners, arguing this role is crucial due to the heavy reliance chinese students place on teachers. “you have to convey what you believe important to students.” she maintained: “you model for them. you help them grow and become independent.” students, in turn, motivate teachers: “when students look at you with inquisitive eyes, when they respond actively to your questions, you will be more passionate about teaching.” for yan, a key motivating factor is “a strong interest in communicating with the world, different cultures and different people.” she also felt “a positive attitude,” “relevance,” “autonomy,” expectancy of success, students’ self-confidence and intrinsic interest were crucial. teachers had a role in nurturing motivation: “don’t demotivate them. convince them they are doing great . . . learning this course can help them, contribute to their success.” 4.6. to what extent do yan’s motivational practices in the esp classroom fit her espoused beliefs, and which factors might explain any gaps identified? observed motivational practices that seemed to fit beliefs included emphasizing relevance. for example, yan was seen to share her personal business experiences with students, once when demonstrating through a job interview how to english for specific purposes teachers’ beliefs about their motivational practices and student. . . 57 respond tactically to tricky questions, and then when reflecting on pragmatic failure in a cross-cultural business meeting. afterwards, she explained the benefits of sharing her own experience with students: i’m not in any way implying that my life is perfect. but through sharing my experience, students may get a better understanding of what the real business world is like. that’s something they don’t get from the course book or classroom learning. in a way, students may see my experience as an extension of theirs. they may have a vision of what their life could be and see a lot more possibilities. she also gave students “real-life cases or examples for them to analyze” to engage them in active thinking and encourage them to apply what they had learnt to real-world problems. yan replaced a job interview listening activity in the course book with a recent bbc video, which had subtitles and was easy to follow. she also used real-world examples to either explain or make her point. an example was a quote from steve jobs “stay hungry, stay foolish,” which was to explain the word “stay” in “stay alert.” the questions for group discussions were usually analytical. when she gave feedback, she focused not only on what students did well, but also on areas in which they could further improve. yan developed positive relationships with students, which helped her better understand their needs, and also created a relaxing class atmosphere. unlike li and gang, yan used (technology-enabled) peer assessment for students’ group assignments to encourage teamwork skills and autonomy. little tension was identified between yan’s beliefs and practices, except for her use of grades as a motivational technique. in her class, students were given a very clear assessment system, with every participation, presentation and activity graded, even though she had earlier expressed her strong objection towards the use of grades. we are manipulating students, in a very bad way . . . it’s just a number. at the end of the day, you need something that can really interest you and satisfy you. this makes your life meaningful. i don’t think a high gpa can do it for you. her practice, however, was shaped by institutional requirements and social reality: the syllabus has decided everything . . . (including) how students are assessed. their grades rather than their ability or their passion decide which scholarship they get, what jobs they find, which overseas university they go to. this needs changing. she admitted that “no one operates in an ideal environment” and other contextual factors, including mixed-ability students, large class size, and time pressure, “may have minor influences on [her] motivational practices.” then she added: “we can always find a way out.” xiaowan yang, mark wyatt 58 5. discussion before discussing our findings, we should acknowledge the limitations of our research. these include the small sample size, restricted by the location of the study, and the limited number of observations, restricted by time available for data gathering. furthermore, our use of dörnyei’s (2007) framework to analyze observed lessons could be seen as reflecting an etic perspective, which can only partially capture the dynamics of teachers’ cognitions and practices (burns et al., 2015). with that in mind, we now discuss our findings in relation to the literature. 5.1. the espoused beliefs of three chinese esp teachers about student motivation as is evident above, the three teachers appear to have quite different espoused beliefs about l2 learner motivation and the teacher’s role in supporting this or not and to what extent through the motivational process (dörnyei, 2001). li appears to hold a gardnerian view that l2 motivation is largely innate, and, like teachers in cowie and sakui (2012) and hennebry-leung (2020), believes the teacher can have a limited impact. despite this, she identifies characteristics of a motivating esp course that resonate with the partly western-influenced literature (cf. bastürkmen & bocanegra-valle, 2018; chen, 2005; dudley-evans & st john, 1998); it should be relevant, and related to practical needs, incorporating authentic activities and learner-centered group work. she is aware that students need to feel autonomous and efficacious and can be supported through a positive relationship with the teacher. all of this suggests dörnyei’s (2001) macro-strategies, and yet she is ambivalent about actually using these strategies herself to support learning. she also believes in the importance of rewards, which relates to the chinese assessment culture (hennebry-leung, 2020; wong, 2014), and in the need for students to apply dedicated effort, which suggests confucian values (cheng & dörnyei, 2007). in contrast, both gang and yan seem to believe that the teacher has a central role in motivating learners through the use of macro-strategies (dörnyei, 2001), and indeed both recognize the reciprocal nature of teacher and student motivation (skinner & belmont, 1993). these teachers evidently appreciate that “‘motivating’ is an intensely interactive process,” forged from the dynamic, mutual engagement of teachers and learners (lamb, 2017, p. 132). yet, reflecting on their own reciprocally motivating relationships with learners, these teachers recall different kinds of experiences. both refer to eye contact, yan positively in terms of learners’ “inquisitive eyes,” gang negatively, recalling eye contact lost through his failed jokes, with students then burying their heads in their smart phones, leaving him feeling like a clown. it is possible that gang’s apparent insecurity in his relationships with students, as evident here, may partly reflect english for specific purposes teachers’ beliefs about their motivational practices and student. . . 59 the uncertain status of esp teachers in chinese universities, particularly those teachers who are without a background of working in business (tao & gao, 2018). in some ways, gang’s and yan’s espoused beliefs mirror those of li. like her, they both declare that relevance is important in an esp context (kember et al., 2008), report valuing authentic materials and activities that stimulate learners to engage (dudley-evans & st john, 1998), indicate that positive relationships are important and support learner autonomy (bastürkmen & bocanegra-valle, 2018), for example through incorporating peer assessment, as yan does, or encouraging students to maintain a class blog, as seen in gang’s self-reported and observed practice. this latter practice could be an indication of proactive autonomy (cheng & dörnyei, 2007). however, gang also talks about teachers being “the center of the class,” which suggests reactive autonomy that can be linked to traditional notions of the chinese teacher’s role (cheng & dörnyei, 2007). cultural values also surface in his (and li’s) self-reported practices of rewarding student effort. as to yan, like li, she emphasizes the importance of self-confidence in learners, indicating she develops this by helping them feel they are succeeding. of the three, yan’s understanding of motivation seems the most sophisticated. for example, as with a teacher in lee (2015), she appears familiar with the concept of international posture (yashima, 2002) in stressing learners will need to be able to communicate in intercultural contexts in the future, and also alludes to the notion of ideal l2 selves (dörnyei, 2009). she is also the most positive about the beneficial effects of motivational strategies on student learning. 5.2. the extent to which their motivational practices in the esp classroom fit their espoused beliefs, and the factors which might explain identified gaps as the narrative above suggests, the degree of fit between motivational practices and espoused beliefs varies among the teachers, with the greatest harmony observed in yan’s work. she appears to have “a cohesive, student-centered approach to motivation,” a quality also possessed by teachers from hong kong in hennebry-leung’s (2020, p. 205) study. particular strengths of yan’s teaching, besides the positive rapport and evident relationship-building, include effective use of authentic materials that stimulate learners’ curiosity and skilful drawing on her real-world business experience. similarly, for esp teachers in tao and gao (2018), drawing on real-world business experience in their own materials design and teaching is crucial, with one reporting that such experience makes him feel “more emboldened” to teach esp (p. 7). like these teachers in tao and gao (2018), yan’s drawing on her own business experience may have contributed to her developing a clearer sense of her own professional identity. xiaowan yang, mark wyatt 60 the only tensions observed in yan’s work relate to her use of grades as a motivational technique, which she dismisses afterwards as “manipulating” practice shaped by institutional requirements and social reality. though she struggles against these influences, for example through autonomy-supportive peer assessment, the assessment culture (wong, 2014) is too strong to ignore. this assessment culture also seems to have shaped the work of li and gang, who both appear deeply concerned about covering the material rapidly, like the chinese elt teacher in lamb and wedell (2015). in these cases, espoused beliefs regarding learner autonomy, group work and participation do not appear to be realized in the classroom, with li keeping a tight control over classroom flow and gang quickly curtailing an authentic discussion about basketball the students seem to enjoy due to pressure of time. tensions are highly evident. in li’s case, her justification for not encouraging participation through speaking, that if everyone spoke for one minute there would be time for nothing else, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how closed pair and group work activities can be managed in a language classroom; this suggests espoused beliefs regarding participation, elicited pre-observation, represent mere token adoption (zheng, 2013). perhaps exposure to western-oriented clt methodology accessed through informal continuing professional development and mediated by the context had led to the formation of peripheral, partially-assimilated beliefs. perhaps contextual constraints may have influenced another apparent tension in li’s work, her use of the inauthentic course material provided for teachers despite her espoused belief in the need for material that was authentic. nevertheless, there is also evidence that li’s core beliefs center on traditional views, of both language, with native-speaker models perhaps treated with undue deference in a globalizing world (lamb, 2004), and her teacher’s role. she seems to see this role as a knowledge-giver (cheng & dörnyei, 2007), adopting a confucian perspective from which she likewise rejects the notion that learning should be fun. indeed, in stimulated recall, she acknowledges only introducing limited “entertainment” in her classes in an attempt to boost students’ teacher evaluation scores; this system of evaluating teachers may be a source of anxiety in an assessment-driven culture in which teachers’ social status is being eroded (gu & lai, 2012). fear of upsetting the students seems also to have contributed to tensions between gang’s espoused beliefs and practices. he tries to motivate the students by creating an informal classroom dynamic and through authentic, relevant materials and activities. however, worry about being negatively appraised for not focusing sufficiently on preparing students for formal assessment in a traditional way produces conflicts within himself, leading to uncertain behavior that may confuse the students. like caroline, a teacher in walsh and wyatt (2014), gang’s guiding principle seems to be to make the students happy. this suggests a english for specific purposes teachers’ beliefs about their motivational practices and student. . . 61 reactive approach to motivating students guided not by learner needs but by classroom events (hennebry-leung, 2020). gang’s situated cognitions reveal that western-oriented espoused beliefs regarding learner-centeredness and perhaps more deeply-embedded confucian-oriented beliefs regarding teacher control can both be abandoned if their result is not him being better accepted by the students. the pressures imposed by the context, which may also have been exacerbated by his own lack of real-world business experience, since this could have inhibited the development of a more robust professional identity (tao & gao, 2018), therefore seem to create considerable disharmony. these pressures can be acute as he sometimes misjudges the context, expecting learners to accept apparently relevant materials, for example, which they reject due to task difficulty and pressure of time. having discussed these cases, we now draw conclusions. 6. conclusions in exploring gaps between the espoused beliefs of three chinese esp teachers and their motivational practices, we have drawn upon pre-observation interviews, classroom observations and sris. sris (under-employed in this field) have enabled us to gain insights into the three teachers’ levels of self-awareness of their classroom practices, the extent to which seemingly competing beliefs appear core or peripheral and the pull of cultural and contextual factors on their situated cognitions. this in turn has allowed us to identify gaps between espoused beliefs and classroom practices and explore apparent cognitive disharmony, which can impact self-determination (deci & ryan, 1985). while a certain degree of synergy between espoused beliefs and practices was observed, perhaps the most striking finding is the crucial role of cultural influences in these chinese esp teachers’ cognitions about motivation and motivational practices. cultural influences, which have perhaps been under-represented in earlier models of teacher cognition (e.g., borg, 2006, p. 283), interact with mediating contextual and personal factors to shape harmony/disharmony between espoused and situated beliefs and classroom practices. we suggest that where there is harmony, teachers relating positively to their students are more likely to self-confidently and autonomously find ways of helping them, resulting in a sense of wellbeing associated with self-determination (deci & ryan, 1985). this insight into the role of cultural influences suggests how borg’s (2006) model can be conceptually applied to confucius-heritage east asian countries. there are other implications. firstly, college english teachers in china tend to have majored in linguistics, translation or literature (borg & liu, 2013), and are likely therefore to have gained competence in the language. however, neither their major nor their subsequent teaching certificate appears to prepare them specifically for english language xiaowan yang, mark wyatt 62 teaching. while in some esp university contexts, e.g., that of tao and gao (2018), a minority of teachers might have an ma in applied linguistics or tesol, even this rarely contains an esp component (bastürkmen, 2010). the esp teachers in this study, none of whom had such a postgraduate qualification, might have benefited from some kind of practical but relatively formalized in-service support, at the very least in employing clt methodology and in materials design. one teacher might additionally have benefited from theoretical input on language learning motivation and the legitimization of world englishes (saraceni, 2015). ideally, however, the in-service teacher education would also have focused specifically on the esp context, providing input on the students’ subject area and needs, as in banegas (2018). it could have equipped teachers with esp materials design and evaluation tools (bastürkmen, 2010; dudley-evans & st john, 1998), and oriented them more fully to esp learners’ pragmatic goals (kember et al., 2008), and how to address them. such teacher education may have enabled teacher beliefs about learner-centeredness which appear token to be assimilated into practice through awareness-raising that may have initially provoked cognitive dissonance (golombek, 2015) before harmony was restored; such teacher education may also have facilitated authentic materials being tailored more closely to learners’ needs. for the esp learners at this university, these innovations may well have been motivating. teachers’ connections with the esp subject area could also have been strengthened outside formal teacher education in various ways, for example through involving teachers without real-world business experience in participating in university-company partnerships; such activities helped esp teachers in tao and gao’s (2018) university context to further develop their professional identities. so there are implications here for context-sensitive teacher education. there are also implications for university administrators. teachers worldwide experience unnecessary stress, with their needs insufficiently considered by non-academic staff at universities, and this situation can contribute to cognitive disharmony. here, it appears pressures teachers felt from the students’ teacher evaluations could have been reduced. teachers could also have been provided with up-to-date teaching material, which would have reduced their need to search for their own, and professional development opportunities that encouraged a sharing of ideas that worked, and emphasized reflective processes leading to greater self-awareness; these professional development opportunities could have included mentoring. support such as this would increase the likelihood of teachers being able to find ways of more deeply reconciling cultural and contextual issues with espoused beliefs about student motivation and motivational practices. without such support, college english educators may unfortunately find reconciling tensions between traditional chinese beliefs and western ideas about learning and teaching english for specific purposes teachers’ beliefs about their motivational practices and student. . . 63 overtly challenging. it is, therefore, crucial that in approaching this challenge they are self-aware, as our case study data demonstrate. more research is needed, however, and ideally this could employ, besides interviews and sris, additional introspective methods such as reflective diaries, in line with a sociallysituated approach to language teacher cognition research (burns et al., 2015) focused primarily on emic perspectives. acknowledgements we would like to thank the participating teachers. we would also like to thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers for helping us to improve the manuscript. funding this work was supported by guangdong university of foreign studies (grant number 17qn23) and the department of education, guangdong province, china (grant number 2017gxjk042). xiaowan yang, mark wyatt 64 references ahmed, m. k. 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(2017). implementing foreign language curriculum innovation in a chinese secondary school: an ethnographic study on teacher cognition and classroom practices. system, 66, 102-112. https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.system.2017.03.006 xiaowan yang, mark wyatt 68 appendix a interview guide (semi-structured interviews) 1. how long have you been teaching english? 2. when did you start to teach esp? 3. what course do you teach this semester? 4. how do you enjoy teaching esp? why? 5. are your students generally motivated to learn esp? 6. in a few words, how would you sum up your views on what motivation is? 7. what for you are the key characteristics of a motivated learner? 8. do you think teachers play a role in student motivation? 9. what factors can best motivate your students? 10. how do you motivate your learners in the esp classroom? 11. how have you come to develop the view you hold today about motivation and its value? english for specific purposes teachers’ beliefs about their motivational practices and student. . . 69 appendix b observational instrument motivational teaching practice proposed by dörnyei (2001) observed motivational teaching practice li gang yan creating the basic motivational conditions appropriate teacher behavior and a good relationship with learners a pleasant and supportive classroom atmosphere a cohesive learner group with appropriate group norms generating initial motivation enhancing the learners’ language-related values and attitudes increasing the learners’ expectancy of success increasing the learners’ “goal-orientedness” making the curriculum relevant for the learners creating realistic learner beliefs maintaining and protecting motivation making learning stimulating and enjoyable presenting tasks in a motivating way setting specific learner goals increasing the learner’s self-confidence allowing learners to maintain a positive social image creating learner autonomy promoting cooperation among learners promoting self-motivating learner strategies encouraging positive selfevaluation promoting motivational attributions providing motivational feedback increasing learner satisfaction offering rewards and grades in a motivating manner xiaowan yang, mark wyatt 70 appendix c interview guide (sris) 1. what were you doing here/at this point? was this your plan before the lesson? 2. do you remember what you were thinking here? why did you decide to do this? 3. were you thinking of any alternative actions or strategies at that time? 4. what were you noticing about the students? 5. how were the students responding to this strategy/activity…? 6. did any student reactions cause you to act differently than you had planned? 7. did you have any particular objectives in mind at this point? if so, what were they? 8. do you remember any aspects of the situation that might have affected what you did? 495 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (3). 2019. 495-517 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.3.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the role of international student interactions in english as a lingua franca in l2 acquisition, l2 motivational development and intercultural learning during study abroad gianna hessel university of graz, austria https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5228-9577 gianna.hessel@uni-graz.at abstract crossing borders features prominently as a theme in study abroad, not only in terms of students’ physical border crossings but also in their intercultural interactions with second language (l2) speakers whose background (linguistic and otherwise) they may perceive as markedly different from their own. researchers have had a long-standing interest in study abroad participants’ interactions with other l2 speakers abroad for their perceived potential to enhance l2 development, l2 motivation and intercultural learning processes. the focus of existing studies in this area has been on the interactions of study abroad participants with host national students, while their interactions with other international students who are also l2 users abroad have received far less attention, despite the ever-growing international student populations at european universities. this study examined students’ views regarding the role that lingua franca (lf) interactions with other international students played in their l2 acquisition, their l2 motivational development and their intercultural learning during study abroad. the data were derived from an empirical study that involved 81 german erasmus students who were studying in the uk for up to one academic year. the students’ views were elicited at the end of their stay with open-ended questionnaire items, and their verbal responses were analyzed using thematic content analysis. the analysis of the students’ reflections revealed a number of functions in each of the three areas, highlighting the potential of international student interactions as a viable gianna hessel 496 source of l2 acquisition, l2 self-motivation, and intercultural learning during study abroad. keywords: study abroad; erasmus; english as lingua franca (elf); intercultural interactions; l2 self-efficacy; intercultural learning 1. introduction the promotion of student mobility forms a key objective of european higher education policy, which has come to feature prominently in the internationalization strategies pursued within the individual member states, both at the national and the institutional level (engel, sandstrom, van der aa, & glass, 2015). the eu’s erasmus program (european action scheme for the mobility of university students), which has constituted part of erasmus+ since 2014, is by far the world’s largest mobility program for students and staff in higher education with more than 300,000 funded student exchanges per year. “improved foreign language competences” and “enhanced intercultural awareness” are two of its key learning objectives (european commission, 2014, p. 31). participation in study abroad involves border crossings not only in the form of students’ physical relocation to another national context, but also as part of their engagement in interactions with other second language (l2) speakers whose background (linguistic and otherwise) students may perceive as markedly different from their own. a greater abundance of opportunities for engagement in such intercultural interactions is arguably one of the key features that distinguish study abroad and home country environments, traditionally conceived. unsurprisingly perhaps, there has been considerable research interest in l2-mediated interactions as they may promote second language acquisition (sla) through comprehensible input, noticing, the production of output, negotiation of meaning, and implicit and explicit feedback (krashen, 1985; long, 1996, 2015; schmidt, 1990; swain, 1985). there is also research evidence that intercultural interactions may strengthen students’ l2 learning motivation (e.g., cubillos & ilvento, 2013; isabelli-garcia, 2006; yang & kim, 2011) and promote the development of intercultural competence, investigated mostly in terms of more positive attitudes towards the “other” (e.g., hernández, 2010; kinginger, 2008; yager, 1998). presumably on the assumption that first language (l1) speakers provide superior input for sla, the existing study abroad research in this area has focused on exchange students’ interactions with host nationals. interactions with other international students abroad, be they temporarily mobile within their degree program (as is the case for erasmus students) or degree-seeking (i.e., the role of international student interactions in english as a lingua franca in l2 acquisition, l2. . . 497 studying towards an entire degree at a university abroad), remain considerably under-researched, despite the ever-growing international student populations at european universities. the present study seeks to contribute to this area by examining students’ views on the role that interactions with other international students played in their l2 acquisition, l2 motivational development and intercultural learning during erasmus study abroad. 2. literature review international student populations at higher education institutions in most european countries are growing, largely due to increasing numbers of credit-mobile european students that participate in erasmus+ exchanges (european commission, 2018), and to increasing numbers of degree-mobile students from within and outside of europe (eurostat, 2018). perhaps not surprisingly in this light, study abroad research carried out in europe has found that a major part of international students’ social networks abroad consists of other international students (e.g., beaven, 2012; de federico de la rúa, 2008; hessel, 2016). as a result, the daily interactions within their local friendship circles frequently involve the use of a lingua franca (lf), defined here as a language which is neither of the students’ l1. rather, the language of communication may be one that is either widely spoken in the destination country or another widely spoken language, such as english. in the current study, which is set in the uk, english as the lingua franca used among the international students happens to fulfil both of these roles. it is clearly beyond the scope of this article to discuss, or even to summarize the current debates in the field of english as a lingua franca (elf; e.g., jenkins, cogo, & dewey, 2011; seidlhofer, 2013). most significantly, the definition of elf interactions adopted in this study is one that excludes english l1 speakers as participants. while there are wider definitions that include english l1 speakers (e.g., seidlhofer, 2013), the narrower view is consistent with the research interest in elf interactions among international students for whom english is a second language. empirical studies on students’ views regarding the benefits of lf interactions with other l2 learners for sla (only few of which involve study abroad participants) have typically produced rather negative results. the participants in these studies tended to hold strong reservations against other l2 speakers as a source of learning and showed clear preferences for l1 speaker input. these preferences were based on beliefs in the superiority of l1 speaker input in terms of accent, grammatical correctness, lexical diversity, and idiomaticity (e.g., dervin, 2013; friedrich, 2000; li, 2009; matsuda, 2003; timmis, 2002). however, a recent study with 141 erasmus study abroad participants in italy conducted by borghetti and beaven (2017) indicates what seems to be a cautious shift in gianna hessel 498 learner attitudes towards greater recognition of the potential benefits of lf communication with other l2 speakers (in this case other international students abroad) for l2 learning. the participants’ views still tended to show a preference for l1 speaker input, sometimes based on such deep-seated assumptions that they failed to understand how this could even be questioned. and yet, countertendencies were also evident in the data. for example, some students thought that l2 speakers were more supportive and accommodating in their language behavior, and showed greater understanding of their communicative needs, which the participants considered beneficial for learning. these views were more prevalent among the students who reported having used english rather than the host country language as a lingua franca during study abroad. there are indeed empirical grounds to justify and support such a shift in beliefs. studies focusing on l2 learner interactions suggest that while they do not tend to be as lexically rich and syntactically complex as conversations with l1speaking participants (e.g., sato, 2015), they tend to involve higher volumes of learner output (e.g., porter, 1986), self-corrections (e.g., shehadeh, 2001), and corrective feedback (sato & lyster, 2007). this may be a result of learners being more ready to take risks in speaking and signal to their fellow learners that they are experiencing difficulties with comprehension (e.g., pica, lincoln-porter, paninos, & linnell, 1996), as well as lower levels of anxiety experienced in interactions with other learners (e.g., philp, adams, & iwashita, 2014). a recent classroombased study by sato and viveros (2016) also found that l2 learners with lower l2 proficiency levels tended to engage in more supportive and collaborative interactions, which tended to produce more opportunities for learning than interactions among more advanced-level learners. while these studies were carried out in a classroom context, they highlight lf communication that involves only l2 learners as a context that may bear its very own advantages for sla. however, research in the field of study abroad has yet to link lf interactions among international students abroad more strongly with linguistic outcomes, measured and perceived. the current study examines study abroad participants’ perceptions regarding the role of lf interactions with other international students in their l2 learning. to the best of the author’s knowledge, no study abroad research inquiry to date has examined the ways in which lf interactions among international students may affect students’ l2 self-motivation to use and further improve the l2. existing studies merely touch upon the motivational capacity of contact with l1 speakers (e.g., cubillos & ilvento, 2013; dörnyei, csizér, & németh, 2006; kormos, csizér, & iwaniec, 2014). in the present study, self-motivation to use and further improve the l2 is conceptualized as resulting from learners’ reflections on their l2 self-concept, which denotes the conceptions individuals hold about themselves as users and learners of the l2 (mercer, 2011). self-concept extends across time, containing the role of international student interactions in english as a lingua franca in l2 acquisition, l2. . . 499 conceptions of the self in the past, the present, and the future, with the latter expressing mere possibilities for self-development (markus & nurius, 1986). self-efficacy (bandura, 1997) is a well-established construct in social cognitive psychology that forms part of the present-orientated dimension of selfconcept. in general terms, self-efficacy refers to an individual’s beliefs about their “capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments” (bandura, 1997, p. 3), or more simply put, an individual’s beliefs about what he or she is able to do. bandura (1994) proposed that self-efficacy plays a central role in how people feel, think, motivate themselves, and behave in relation to specific tasks. this includes what kind of tasks or activities they pursue, as how controllable or threatening these are perceived, how much effort they expend on them, whether they persist when obstacles are encountered, as well as how much stress and anxiety they experience during task completion (bandura, 1994, p. 71). in l2 learning, stronger self-efficacy in a given skill domain has been associated with higher levels of engagement in l2 usage and fewer avoidance behaviors, lower levels of l2 use anxiety (e.g., mills, pajares, & herron, 2006), more effort expended on l2 learning (e.g., mills et al., 2006), more effective usage of strategies (e.g., graham, 2007), greater persistence in the face of difficulties (e.g., matthews, 2010), stronger valuing of l2 learning (e.g., mills, pajares, & herron, 2007), and higher attainment in the respective l2 skill domain (e.g., hsieh & kang, 2010). both bandura’s theoretical considerations and the results obtained in sla research support the notion that l2 self-efficacy plays a key role in self-motivation to use and further improve the l2. it is therefore included as a construct in this study on the impact of lf interactions with other international students on l2 self-motivation. it is plausible that engagement in such interactions should affect l2 self-motivation because they provide learners with self-relevant information that may lead to development in their l2 selfconceptions, including l2 self-efficacy in pertinent domains. the present study examines this hypothesis based on the students’ reflections. the third domain under consideration concerns students’ intercultural learning, that is, the development of their intercultural competence in the context of their interactions with other international students. intercultural competence itself remains a debated construct with regard to its content, structure and assessment. however, currently widely accepted conceptualizations of the construct converge in proposing a multi-dimensional construct with affective (attitudes towards self and other), cognitive (knowledge and awareness of self and other), and behavioral (skills in relating) dimensions (e.g., byram, 1997; deardorff, 2006; rathje, 2006; spitzberg & changnon, 2009). thus, the students’ responses are analyzed with regard to development in these three domains, and with a focus on developing intercultural awareness in particular, as it constitutes a key learning gianna hessel 500 objective of participation in the erasmus+ program (european commission, 2014). intercultural awareness is widely regarded as part of the cognitive dimension of intercultural competence (e.g., byram, 1997; deardorff, 2006). it is understood here as awareness of the relativity of beliefs, values and expectations transmitted within different social groupings, and their impact on human thought and action (one could think of this as a kind of meta-cultural awareness), as well as awareness of one’s own internalized beliefs, values and expectations (self-awareness). developing such awareness has been held to be crucial for interpreting and evaluating other belief systems, expectations and behaviors in their own terms rather than according to one’s own expectations of what is normal, and for developing a respectful attitude towards them (bennett, 2009; chen, 2010). based on the knowledge gaps identified, the present study sought to answer the following research question: what are the students’ views concerning the role that interactions with other international students in english as a lingua franca played in (1) their l2 acquisition, (2) the development of their l2 selfmotivation, and (3) their intercultural learning during study abroad? 3. method 3.1. the study abroad context: the erasmus program the present study is set in the context of erasmus, the world’s largest formal exchange program for students and staff, which now forms a major part of erasmus+ (european commission, 2014). erasmus exchanges last between 3 and 12 months (6.2 months on average; european commission, 2015). the preparation of erasmus students typically involves assistance with academic and administrative matters, and advice on dealing with practicalities in the host country in the form of one-off preparatory events or online learning modules. further support that students receive from their departmental erasmus coordinators varies greatly from some initial academic advice to more comprehensive mentorship before and/or during the exchange, depending on the individual. linguistic preparation and in-program provision of l2 instruction are not a mandatory part of erasmus placements in the uk so long as the minimum language requirements of the host universities are met (as was the case for all participants in the current study). placements are typically implemented in the form of a direct-enrolment program where exchange students attend courses together with local students. participants in the current study reported having 11.3 academic contact hours per week on average. the role of international student interactions in english as a lingua franca in l2 acquisition, l2. . . 501 3.2. participants the participants in this study were 81 german university students (57 female, 24 male; mean age: 22.21, sd = 1.37) who were studying a range of subjects at 44 different higher education institutions across germany. in order to identify them correctly as outgoing erasmus students to the uk, the students were recruited via email through the erasmus offices of their german home institutions. of the participants, 40 students were studying in the uk for two terms or more (group 1), while 41 students were staying in the host country for one term only (group 2). upon departure, students had completed an average of four terms of their home degree with good success (average gpa = 2.0 on a scale from 1 [highest] to 6 [lowest]). all students had extensive english language learning histories with 8-9 years of learning english at school and an average of two terms of english language instruction at university. their proficiency at program entry, based on their most recent ielts/ toefl/cae result and the baseline proficiency test, was upper-intermediate to advanced. 3.3. instruments all students completed comprehensive questionnaires in german prior to their departure, after one term abroad, and after nine months abroad (students in the longer term abroad group 1 only). the questionnaires were administered via an online platform and accessed anonymously with a personalized link that was emailed directly to each participant by the survey host. the questionnaire itself was preceded by a consent form, which detailed the conditions of participation, and the processing and storage of data. the wider questionnaire contained closedand open-ended items that captured psychological constructs, such as l2 self-efficacy, l2 use anxiety, l2 learning effort expended, as well as the participants’ l2 learning and mobility histories, academic background, study abroad placement, course work and extracurricular activities abroad, l2 learning experiences, intercultural interactions, and reflections on the study abroad experience as a whole. with particular relevance to the data discussed below, the students’ views concerning the role of elf interactions in their own learning were elicited using the following open-ended item (english translation/german original): what kind of role, if any, do you think the interactions with other international students (except english mother-tongue speakers) played in your learning? [welche rolle, falls überhaupt, hat ihrer meinung nach die interaktion mit anderen internationalen studierenden (englische muttersprachler ausgenommen) für ihren lernprozess gespielt?] gianna hessel 502 a written response to this item was not mandatory. an alternative response option was ticking a box labelled “none/keine rolle”. while the questionnaire as a whole was themed around the students’ l2 learning, their l2 self-motivation, intercultural learning and personal development, this specific item was deliberately kept open to avoid leading the students to any of the three areas in particular, and to allow for individual and different associations in the response. the disadvantage of this strategy is that more students may have shared thoughts on the role of their interactions with other international students in relation to their sla, their motivational development, and their intercultural learning if asked specifically. 3.4. procedures of data analysis the students’ questionnaire responses were imported into maxqda 2018 for coding. they were analyzed using thematic content analysis, in which the three a priori main categories were: the perceived role of interactions with other international students for whom english was l2 in the students’ second language acquisition (1), in their l2 motivational development (2), and in their intercultural learning (3). thematic sub-categories were developed inductively based on the analysis of the data. the analysis followed the procedures for thematic content analysis detailed in kuckartz (2012). in the reporting, all sub-categories or themes are exemplified with one illustrative quote irrespective of category size (i.e., their prevalence in the data). 4. findings the clear majority of students in both groups (77.5 % in group 1; 85.4 % in group 2) thought that the elf interactions with other international students had played a role in their english language acquisition, their motivational development and/or their intercultural learning abroad, which they elaborated upon in a written response. the number of students who explicitly stated that these interactions had played an important or very important role was higher within group 2, among students who had studied abroad for one term only. the following sections will discuss the ways in which the interactions with other international students were perceived to contribute to the students’ l2 learning, their l2 selfmotivation and intercultural learning. 4.1. the role of lingua franca interactions in students’ l2 learning just under half (41.5 %) of the students’ responses in the abroad group (group 2), and 27.5 % of those in the longer term abroad group (group 2) referred to the the role of international student interactions in english as a lingua franca in l2 acquisition, l2. . . 503 role of lf interactions with other international students in the students’ l2 learning. the most prevalent theme within both groups was fluency development through lf communication. for the advanced classroom learners in the present study, lf communication with other international students played a key role in developing the fluency in english that they so desired. some students explicitly stated that the interactions with other international students were their only outlet for speaking practice during their stay in the uk: extract 1 a very large role because other than with my local language buddy the interactions with english students were rather limited. significantly, in the students’ responses there was a certain duality between gratitude for the possibility to practice the language and feelings of discomfort associated with speaking. their statements frequently featured expressions such as “having to speak” or “being forced to speak” english (germ. man war dazu gezwungen) with other internationals, thus expressing a certain pressure to engage in something that one does not feel comfortable with and would otherwise not choose to do: extract 2 one was forced to speak english, whereby it became the normal language of communication. this relates to initial, sometimes rather strong inhibitions and uncertainties surrounding the students’ ability to converse in english, which was perhaps unexpected considering their extensive english language learning histories (this motivational theme will be discussed in section 4.2). most importantly here, the interactions with other international students facilitated l2 fluency development by pushing the students to speak in a context that was perceived as a rather safe space for doing so. other than fluency development, students also referred to the contribution of lf communication to building their vocabularies: extract 3 everyone has their own active vocabulary. by talking to international students i picked up new words that i like but haven’t used actively yet. students also reported observing preferences in word choice, which they associated with different groups of l1 speakers, for example, their fellow l1 speakers of german: gianna hessel 504 extract 4 everyone has a different active vocabulary. the vocabulary of germans seems quite similar. so it was interesting for me to see what kind of words the french tend to use actively. further and in relation to meta-linguistic awareness, students reported developing awareness of what they thought of as l1 transfer patterns: extract 5 sometimes one would notice mistakes that seemed typically ‘french’, for example, but similarly would take care to watch one’s own language and vocabulary. as another perceived benefit of lf communication with english speakers of different linguistic backgrounds (mostly other erasmus students from within europe), students referred to improvements in their listening comprehension skills and particularly in their ability to understand different accents: extract 6 it was important in order to learn to understand different accents. while there was consensus in the students’ responses regarding the benefits of conversing with other international students for developing fluency, they seemed more divided on its efficacy as a source of input for sla otherwise (e.g., grammatical correctness, eloquence, vocabulary). five students explicitly expressed doubts regarding the potential of this practice for learning, and even concerns about it being counterproductive, as one risks the acquisition of “incorrect” language: extract 7 you gain confidence in speaking but there is no guarantee for correctness, hence no real improvement. there is an assumption here that the language used in lf communication may not be “correct” while the language of l1 speakers must be, and is therefore the only valid input for l2 learning. this also supposes a view of sla as an un-reflected osmotic process that is contingent largely on the correctness of the source. thus, as previously observed (e.g., borghetti & beaven, 2017), some of the students’ statements expressed or implied inferiority of lf communication with other l2 speakers to communication with l1 speakers as a source of l2 learning. that said, a number of students expressed an opposing view, proposing that lf communication was just as helpful in developing l2 proficiency as speaking with l1 speakers: the role of international student interactions in english as a lingua franca in l2 acquisition, l2. . . 505 extract 8 speaking english, regardless of whether that is with native or other non-native speakers, can only be helpful. a few students even referred to “incorrect” language or mistakes made by others as a resource for their own learning: extract 9 a large part of my interactions in english was with international students. that was very exciting for me since you can learn from others’ mistakes. 4.2. the role of lingua franca interactions in shaping students’ l2 self-motivation 15 of the students’ reflections (7 in group 1; 8 in group 2) referred to the role that interactions with other international students in elf had played in shaping their l2 self-motivation. the central theme in this category was the vital role that these interactions played for some students in building their self-efficacy in conversing in english, and thereby their self-motivation to speak. despite their extensive histories of learning english, the students’ l2 speaking self-concepts tended to be underdeveloped and marked by uncertainties surrounding their ability to converse. elf interactions with other international students for whom english was a second language were perceived as an initially “safer” context for speaking practice. the sense of being in a safe context for speaking practice seemed to be conveyed through a sense of being on equal footing, mistakes going unnoticed, and shared understandings of what it means to be an l2 learner: extract 10 an important role. i felt that i wasn’t the only one who couldn’t speak perfect english. we encouraged each other and were understanding of the other’s situation, which helped me to carry on learning and gave me courage to speak. it was easier to speak english with each other where one is not afraid of making mistakes as no one can speak the language perfectly. in the minds of the students, the language produced neither had to be perfectly correct, nor free of an l1-influenced accent, which seemed to enhance their self-motivation to engage in speaking practice. in particular, the thought of not having to worry about making mistakes featured prominently in the students’ answers, as exemplified by the following comment: “a very important role. you learn to just converse despite the language barrier without feeling the gianna hessel 506 pressure that every mistake in grammar or word choice gets noticed immediately”. some also reported meeting specifically for speaking practice: extract 11 we met on a daily basis and talked to each other. in doing so, one gains self-confidence confidence in the language. the l2 practice within these lf interactions enabled enactive mastery experiences (bandura, 1997), that is, experiences of successful communication, which was a key factor in building the students’ self-efficacy in using the l2 in social interactions and in enhancing their self-motivation to speak. lf interactions also seemed to strengthen students’ self-efficacy by providing opportunities for mere self-validation. in other words, they provided perhaps over-due answers to questions of how well the students were able to converse (on different topics, in different settings, etc.). as uncertainties surrounding students’ speaking skills get reduced, the certainty of self-beliefs and predictions of performance success increase, which enhances self-efficacy (bandura, 1997). one such source of selfvalidation (and often one of self-enhancement for these advanced learners) were external comparisons with other esl speakers: extract 12 i might sound like a douchebag, but when others are worse [at english] than i am which many of them are – then it does give you confidence. vicarious experiences (bandura, 1997), that is, watching perceived similar others (their international peers) succeed at conversing in english, were another source of self-efficacy represented in the data. such observations build confidence by conveying to the students that successful communication in english is a realistic option for them as well: extract 13 it gave me some vocabulary and above all self-confidence since many weren’t good [at english], but managed well nonetheless. lf interactions with other international students did not only have the capacity to strengthen the students’ self-efficacy and self-motivation to speak english, but in some cases also enhanced the students’ self-motivation to further improve their english. as a type of vicarious experience, one student reported being motivated by encounters with highly proficient students for whom english was a second language. the highly proficient esl speakers seemed to serve as the role of international student interactions in english as a lingua franca in l2 acquisition, l2. . . 507 mastery models for self-development with whom the student could identify. these encounters may enhance l2 learning motivation in several ways: by increasing self-efficacy through the vicarious experience and by replacing native speaker ideals, which may contribute to greater accessibility and specificity of learners’ ideal l2 selves: extract 14 a lot, since i almost only interacted with other international students. it has motivated me to improve my english further since i met quite a few who can speak english really, really well. the interactions with other international students also had the capacity to enhance self-motivation to improve the l2 by highlighting the value of english as a tool for relating to others from around the world. this motivational capacity seemed to derive from the transformation of an imagined potential into lived experience through the interactions with international peers: extract 15 a large part of my interactions in english was with international students. . . . they also strengthened my interest in further improving my english language skills since it was only thanks to the english skills we had acquired that we could talk and get to know each other in the first place. with particular significance to discussions of elf as an impediment to multilingualism, there were also instances of enhanced self-motivation to learn additional languages represented in the data. the underlying motive appears as a generalized integrative motive for learning further foreign languages. one may highlight this as an instance where learning english actually enhanced or even conditioned motivation to learn other languages: extract 16 i got to know many new perspectives and their cultures and am motivated to learn more languages. 4.3. the role of lingua franca interactions in students’ intercultural learning there were 20 responses in total in which students elaborated on the role of interactions with other international students in their intercultural learning. the responses in this category were spread almost evenly across the two groups (9 in group 1, and 11 in group 2). most commonly, they referred to interactions gianna hessel 508 with other international students as an opportunity for learning about other “cultures” or national systems, as exemplified below: extract 17 the other international students made it possible for me to gain insights into foreign cultures. this strong interest in getting to know more about other systems, societies or “cultures” is unsurprising perhaps for internationally mobile students, and yet encouraging as it cannot be taken for granted. significantly, it seemed to stimulate engaging conversations and personally meaningful exchanges in l2. the level of complexity and biases in what the students learned about the other in their exchanges would be worth an investigation in itself, which would require the recording and analysis of these discourses. considering the students’ own perspective on this matter, some students stated that the “insights into other cultures” gained in the conversations with their peers had indeed helped them to let go of preconceptions and prejudice, as exemplified by the following excerpt: extract 18 a very important role because they [the interactions] provided me with insights into other cultures and cleared prejudice out of the way. the second major theme was related to the students’ exposure to different perspectives and gaining insights into different systems. this theme reflects a developing awareness that one’s familiar social norms, expectations and assumptions regarding ways of life are not be taken for granted, absolute or normal, but relative: extract 19 the interactions with other international students are also about exchanging experiences of living and studying in the different countries. this exchange is very beneficial for learning because it shows you that systems and methods are relative, and that other approaches and ways of thinking also lead to success. getting to know these other perspectives is a real enrichment of one’s own thinking and learning. while such growing awareness of the relativity of familiar beliefs, norms, and expectations may be considered as part of the cognitive domain of intercultural competence, it is also associated with affective changes as it enables a reevaluation of other belief systems, expectations, and behaviors as different but equally valid, rather than as “ab-normal” or “strange” according to one’s own standards. the excerpt below exemplifies such a self-perceived shift towards greater tolerance of other ways of thinking and behaving: the role of international student interactions in english as a lingua franca in l2 acquisition, l2. . . 509 extract 20 the communication with other international students has really helped me a lot in terms of self-confidence and tolerance since i got to know a lot of new perspectives and their cultures. also belonging under this theme of developing intercultural awareness, some of the responses provided indications for growing self-awareness that is, an increasing awareness of the specifics of one’s own belief system as a result of the interactions with other international students: extract 21 a very important role because the exchange on the different cultures influenced my perspective on my own culture, other cultures and european culture very strongly. 5. discussion the present study examined students’ views regarding the role of elf interactions with other international students in their second language acquisition, their l2 motivational development and their intercultural learning during study abroad. for the advanced classroom learners in the current study, the elf communication with other international students emerged as a key site for developing the much-desired fluency in english, as illustrated by the excerpt below: extract 22 i had no inhibitions to speak english and therefore learned much more than i ever learned at school or in any language course. i developed a real feel for the language. most significantly in this respect, the students’ statements highlighted the importance of lf interactions with other international students as a safe space for practice. thus, not only were opportunities for extended conversations with other international students more available than with l1 speakers, but they may also be the initially preferred choice, especially among the less efficacious students. in this respect, hessel (2019) showed with the same sample of advanced classroom learners that the students’ self-efficacy in using the l2 in social interactions upon arrival in the uk statistically predicted their patterns of social contact with host-national students, as well as overall l2 proficiency gain during study abroad (hessel, 2017). further perceived linguistic benefits of lf interactions included improved listening comprehension and ability to understand different accents, vocabulary acquisition (including discussions about vocabulary), and developing meta-linguistic awareness. however, while there was wide consensus in the responses gianna hessel 510 regarding the benefits of l2 practice in lf interactions for developing fluency, the students’ attitudes were more varied regarding its efficacy as a source of l2 learning otherwise. interestingly in this regard, the benefits of lf communication for l2 learning were more consistently supported by students in the shorter term abroad group, who had studied abroad for one term only. thus, the role of length of stay in the perceived benefits of lf interactions with other international students would be an interesting theme for further exploration in future studies. as for the most prominent motivational functions of lf interactions, the analysis highlighted their significance in helping the students to build up self-efficacy in using the l2 in social interactions. the key mechanisms in this process were enactive mastery experiences (bandura, 1997), vicarious experiences (bandura, 1997), that is, observing peers succeed at conversing in english, as well as external comparisons with the skills of other esl speakers (marsh, 1986). even if external comparisons with peers may not be favorable and students find themselves among the less proficient speakers in their international student group, these comparisons will still contribute to increasing self-certainty (i.e., provide answers to questions such as “how good am i at speaking?”) and thereby strengthen selfefficacy. this key motivational function of lf interactions among international students is highly important because self-efficacy in using the l2 in social interactions has been shown as a predictor of overall l2 proficiency gain during study abroad (hessel, 2017). the students’ reflections also highlighted that even participants with extensive l2 learning histories may still struggle with a weak l2 speaking selfconcept and benefit greatly from lf interactions in this regard. considering this linguistic and motivational potential, student support programs need to raise awareness of lf interactions with other second language speakers/international students as a viable source of l2 learning in its own right so that students may make the most of the affordances of contemporary study abroad contexts. as pointed out by borghetti and beaven (2017), study abroad participants may still not be cognizant of the learning potential of lf interactions due to the prevailing dominance of l1 or native speaker models in l2 learning and teaching. it is also important in this regard to make students aware that they are multilingual speakers, whose linguistic repertoire is different from that of monolingual speakers of the language they are learning. besides recalibrating goals and role models, such awareness may orientate them towards other l2 speakers in the external comparisons that inform the formation and development of their l2 self-concepts. it would also be desirable for host institutions to harness the motivational and linguistic potential of international student interactions directly by encouraging and supporting gatherings of this kind. bringing together international students with a shared interest in l2 practice is different from the commonly run the role of international student interactions in english as a lingua franca in l2 acquisition, l2. . . 511 erasmus societies, in which the focus tends to be on shared interests of travel and cultural exchange. if the exchanges in these meeting spaces are partly facilitated (e.g., when the space is first opened up), they may provide a context for implementing the suggestions for supporting students’ intercultural learning provided below, in order to take their conversations about cultural phenomena to another level. significantly, this does not make opportunities for interactions with l1 speakers obsolete since exposure to a wide variety of speakers is desirable for students’ linguistic development. it also remains unclear to what extent, for example, self-efficacy built up in lf communication may readily transfer to interactions with l1 speakers. in the intercultural learning domain, the students’ statements are indicative of a number of desirable learning processes, including the development of intercultural awareness, and associated changes in attitude towards more tolerance of other ways of thinking and behaving. another component of the attitudinal dimension of intercultural competence, curiosity and interest in other cultures (e.g., byram, 1997; deardorff, 2006), is also evidenced well in the students’ statements. moreover, some of the reflections suggest that simplistic generalizations about the other (stereotypes and prejudice) are being replaced with more complex beliefs as a result of the students’ exchanges. however, the students’ use of the word culture/s in the present study suggests an understanding of the concept as a monolithic entity that defines people, largely referring to nationality, rather than culture as a fluent, negotiated, and often instrumentalized process of identification, inclusion and exclusion. this understanding may be prompted through salience of the students’ national identity in this context, or it may represent a generally narrow understanding of the concept (similar to “large culture” as defined in holliday, 1999). significantly, the latter bears a danger of essentializing, that is, reducing self and other to a single identity marker (in this case nationality) and over-emphasizing difference rather than recognizing commonalities, for example, in shared subject cultures, sports cultures, student culture and so on (e.g., dervin, 2016). it is therefore highly desirable in the context of preand in-program interventions to extend students’ conceptions of culture and raise awareness of intersectionality, that is, the multitude of identity markers such as gender, age, social class, or profession in any one individual (see e.g., ierest, 2015, for actual teaching resources). such deconstruction of the concept should also address the political dimension of culture and its instrumentalization in processes of othering, inclusion and exclusion, both on the individual and the collective level. this will facilitate the recognition of these processes at work in the students’ interactions abroad and help them to consider overlaps and commonalities with others, rather than dwelling on difference constructed along national lines as their gianna hessel 512 awareness of the relativity of belief systems grows. developing intercultural awareness, that is, growing awareness of the relativity of belief systems, including one’s own, while desirable, liberating or “mind-opening,” also creates threats to self-concept and is therefore troublesome (perkins, 1999). this is another strong rationale for combining the experience of diversity during study abroad with guided reflection in order to enable transformative learning (mezirow, 1997). moreover, while intercultural learning processes were evidenced in statements of about 25% (20 out of 81) of the participants, it remains unclear whether the other students experienced similar learning. facilitation of intercultural learning before, during and after study abroad serves to support these processes in all participants to maximize its potential as a transformative experience for learning and self-development. 6. conclusion the purpose of this study was to provide initial insights into the role of lf interactions with other international students in study abroad participants’ l2 acquisition, l2 motivational development, and intercultural learning, and thereby inspire further research on this largely unexplored topic. the findings highlight the potential of lf interactions for enhancing student learning and development in all three of these areas. undoubtedly, there are limitations to using open-ended questionnaire items as a means of data elicitation, as compared to face-to-face interviews, for example. above all perhaps, they constrain the length and depth of the response obtained and do not allow for clarifications or follow-up questions. they also lack in context concerning the participant background (the “self” that is speaking) and the position from which the statement is being made. naturally, there is a bias in the interpretation of findings towards those participants who decided to provide a written response, rather than ticking the “no role” option. future work will need to investigate the ways in which lf interactions may affect the l2 learning, l2 self-motivation and intercultural learning of study abroad participants and the dynamics involved further and in greater depth, using face-toface interviews or focus groups. the affordances, as well as the limitations and potential detriments of lf interactions need to be explored with learners at a range of different l2 proficiency levels. studies employing mixed methodologies may also attempt to link students’ engagement in lf interactions with linguistic and motivational outcomes in a quantitative manner. future studies may also inquire further into the students’ discourses, their co-construction of images of self and other, their positioning and resistance in the context of lf interactions in order to gain deeper insights into the level of criticality of these informal exchanges. research on study abroad participants’ interculturality in the context of lf interactions will need to the role of international student interactions in english as a lingua franca in l2 acquisition, l2. . . 513 consider students at different l2 proficiency levels as the latter would presumably influence the depth and complexity in which beliefs, expectations, experiences, and cultural phenomena can be discussed. the findings of this study highlight 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(2011). sociocultural analysis of second language learner beliefs: a qualitative case study of two study-abroad esl learners. system, 39(3), 325-334. 419 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (3). 2013. 419-439 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the role of teacher imagination in conceptualising the child as a second language learner ewa guz john paul ii catholic university of lublin ewasik@o2.pl ma gorzata tetiurka john paul ii catholic university of lublin mtetiurka@kul.pl abstract in order to initiate and maintain meaningful interaction in a young learner l2 classroom, an adult teacher needs to approach children in ways consistent with their developmental profile and adjust teaching methodology so as to accommodate young learners’ current skills. this requires the ability to predict the child’s possible responses to classroom events by imagining what s/he might think and how s/he might behave when presented with specific instructions. bearing in mind that the teacher’s perception of the world is purely and completely adult in nature, in order to be effective, educators need to create a mental image or a concept of a young learner by gathering knowledge about his or her developmental characteristics and fully grasping the pedagogical implications of this knowledge. in this paper, we aim to explore the role of imagination in the conceptualisation of a child as a second language learner amongst university level pre-service teachers involved in an early primary efl education programme. we report on qualitative research based on data obtained in the course of a two semester teacher training course of 35 ba and 30 ma students majoring in english. in the study, we focused on the working image of the child’s developmental characteristics created by the participants and their ability to employ this in their teaching. our data show a substantial discrepancy between the participants’ theoretical conceptions concerning the business of teaching and the actual actions undertaken during lessons with young learners. although participants were able to successfully identify the most distinctive develewa guz, ma gorzata tetiurka 420 opmental characteristics of primary-level learners, they experienced difficulty with integrating them into actual classroom practice. keywords: young learners, cognitive development, teacher beliefs, teacher cognition, imagination the conceptual core and major part of the discussion presented in this paper have been informed and motivated by our belief that imagination (and imagining) constitute an indispensable part of the business of teaching. imagination, which is essentially the ability to envisage the possible by forming images in the mind, enhances rational thinking and stimulates invention, novelty, and flexibility (egan, 2008). the creative and innovative potential of imagination offers considerable benefits to education (egan, 1992, 2005). egan (2005, p. xii) refers to imagination as “the main workhorse of effective learning” and argues that engaging teachers' imaginations in teaching (as well as students' imaginations in learning) lies at the core of any meaningful educational practice irrespective of the area/skill taught and the profile of the learner. in fact, virtually every act of pedagogical planning, from designing a curriculum or a syllabus to drawing up a lesson plan or a particular classroom activity, depends on the teacher’s ability to imagine the possible outcomes of his/her choices, decisions and actions (bullough, 1989). creating an imaginary teaching scenario typically requires establishing a number of learning goals, selecting relevant materials and developing activities which promote learning. while the first two procedures require little or no imagination from the teacher (the goals and materials being institutionally determined rather than selected by educators), planning for the actual classroom interaction requires that the teacher imagines the possible behaviours and responses of the learners. in this sense, any educational procedure undertaken in the classroom is determined, to a great extent, by the teacher’s pre-conception of a learner in terms of his/her overall development and the way s/he thinks, behaves and learns. with an increasing number of european countries adopting an early start policy towards l2 education, the profile of an average l2 learner has recently undergone a radical change (cameron, 2001, 2003; ellis, 2004; enever, 2011; enever & moon, 2009; mckay, 2006; szpotowicz 2011, 2012). cameron (2003, p. 105) reports that lowering the age of the child entering the system of mandatory second language education has led to a considerable increase in the number of children learning english within a formalised and institutional setting. the year 2008 marked the introduction of an early start policy in poland with english being selected as the obligatory second language by nearly the role of teacher imagination in conceptualising the child as a second language learner 421 80 % of institutions (szpotowicz & szulc-kurpaska, 2009, p. 11). the expansion of efl in the polish primary school setting has created a very specific, continually growing and particularly learner-sensitive educational context, which presents all those involved in early language education with new challenges. one of the principal effects of lowering of the average age of an efl learner has been an increased demand for professionally qualified and efficient educators who possess both the knowledge and skills critical to becoming what brewster, ellis and girard (1992, p. 269) refer to as “teachers of language and teachers of children.” they emphasise that creating an educational setting conducive to teaching a foreign language to a primary learner is contingent not only upon the teacher’s command of the target language but also his/her ability to adjust the methodology to the needs and abilities of a child. enever and moon (2009, p. 10) express similar concerns about “teacher quality” and stress the need for providing professionals with qualifications appropriate for teaching primary learners. in fact, it is emphasised by the majority of researchers involved in investigating early l2 pedagogy that being a children’s language teacher requires an ability to perceive children as active recipients of instruction and to create an appropriate learning environment (cameron 2001, 2003; dimroth, 2008; haznedar & gavruseva, 2008; moon, 2000, 2005; nicholas & lightbown, 2008; phillips, 1993; slattery & willis, 2001; vale & feunteun, 1995). considering the developmental gap between an adult teacher and a young learner, primary-level classrooms represent a particularly challenging educational context, in which the teacher’s conceptualisation of the learner (the child) and his/her needs constitutes an issue of paramount importance. the major challenge facing l2 teachers at the primary level is the need to imagine what it is like to be a child and a learner and integrate this knowledge into their professional practice. to create a working image of a child learner at the primary level, the teacher has to acknowledge their unique developmental characteristics and preferred ways of learning. what these are will be discussed in the following sections. children’s developmental characteristics following the definition proposed by mckay (2006, p. 1), by young learners we understand those who are learning a foreign language during the first six years of formal schooling, in other words, primary school children. teaching primary-level learners is particularly challenging for a number of reasons. not only do they differ significantly from other age groups, but they are also characterised by great individuality among their peer group (ioannou-georgiou & pavlou 2003; moon 2000; phillips, 1993). what is more, they are in the process of ewa guz, ma gorzata tetiurka 422 constant cognitive, emotional, social and physical growth (mckay, 2006, p. 6), which requires on the part of the teacher the skills of both observation and flexibility. the child’s growth is far from harmonious and highly unpredictable (moon, 2005). a child who performs adequately in one area (for example, oral language expression) may experience difficulties in another (for example, lack fine motor skills and struggle with written expression) and require extra support. however, it is generally acknowledged that a primary teacher is responsible for the overall development of a child, as is expressed in the notion of holistic teaching (ioannou-georgiou & pavlou, 2003; phillips, 1993; wright, 2001). consequently, a teacher cannot fall into a routine while teaching primary children but needs to constantly resort to his/her imagination to predict possible outcomes, challenges and limitations of classroom instruction. in the paragraphs that follow, we will briefly characterise the most prominent features of primary children as learners, focusing on their physical, emotional, cognitive and social development. these will be followed by a brief outline of the main principles of teaching english to young learners (teyl). primary children can vary dramatically as far as their physical development is concerned. this is manifested not only in their different pace of physical growth (with boys falling approximately 18 months behind girls) but also in the extent to which they have mastered fine and gross motor skills (mckay, 2006). an early-years teacher may find herself/himself confronted with children who still have difficulties holding a pen or operating scissors alongside those who are competent writers and art makers. however, the majority of early primary children display a great need for movement, physical expression as well as a constant yearning for kinaesthetic play (read, 2007). the period of a typical school lesson is usually too long for early primary pupils to remain still at their desks (halliwell, 1992; scott & ytreberg, 1990). children at this age fail to concentrate on a task for longer than several minutes and have no inhibitions about expressing boredom or a lack of interest openly (moon, 2005). although the exact duration of the child’s attention span depends on his/her personality or attitude towards learning, it is estimated that the approximate time of concentration on a single question is elongated by three minutes with each year of the child’s maturation (cohen, 2002). throughout the primary years, children are usually unstable emotionally, though at different periods for different reasons. young children rely to a great extent on adult support and, initially, they might feel insecure in a school situation (hyson, 2004). hyson (2004, p. 34) observes that securing an emotionally stable environment is the key to providing young children with opportunities to explore and learn. this can be achieved by uniting learning experiences with positive emotions, assisting children in understanding their emo the role of teacher imagination in conceptualising the child as a second language learner 423 tions as well as supporting the regulation of their own feelings. adults can also assist children in other aspects of their overall development. according to vygotsky (1978), learning takes place in a social context with more able others who make learning possible for the child (gajdamaschko, 2006). any task performed with the support of someone more knowledgeable moves a child to his or her zone of proximal development (zpd) bringing better results than if the child was left to his/her own resources (daniels, 2011). this is not to say that primary children are ready to work closely with their peers (fontana, 1995). on the contrary, sharing and cooperation must be gradually learnt through the spirit of competitiveness, which is usually present even in small children (scott & ytreberg, 1990). at the onset of primary school, the child’s thinking and intellectual development is marked by the most dynamic growth and changes. in the course of primary education, children only begin to learn to think in an abstract way (fisher, 1990; piaget, 1969; wood, 1998). the early days of schooling are marked by the reliance on concrete thinking, which is expressed in the children’s ability to grasp only what is here and now, and learn from direct experience (mckay, 2006). as williams and burden (1997, pp. 204-208) put it, children can only understand and focus on what is “meaningful to them” and in ways that are “meaningful to them.” also, they are naturally and instinctively inclined to make attempts at understanding the surrounding world (moon, 2005, p. 31). their thinking and behaviour are meaning-oriented, which is why any message they receive is subject to “searching for meaning and intention” (cameron, 2003, p. 11). the child’s thoughts and mental representations at the age of seven or eight are concrete in nature and based on the resources and knowledge available at the time. these include a limited inventory of familiar objects, situations, events, experiences and people (donaldson, 1978). gathering direct, hands-on experiences and exploring the environment allow children to build expertise and develop new ways of thinking (robson, 2006, p. 6-7). higher-order thinking skills such as predicting, classifying or hypothesising develop around the age of eleven (bloom, 1956; fisher, 1990). however, as more abstract forms of reasoning come into use, children still tend to rely on and benefit from concrete and reality-based thinking. children as efl learners the special developmental characteristics of primary-school children have direct implications for l2 teaching methodology. some researchers argue in favour of a task-based (cameron, 2001; carless, 2002; carless & gordon, 1997; szpotowicz & szulc-kurpaska, 2009) or project-based approach (hedge, ewa guz, ma gorzata tetiurka 424 1993), which advocate the use of goal-oriented activities promoting active pursuit of meaning. the selection of tasks reflects the child’s natural predisposition for play, drama, movement and music-based activities (cameron & mckay, 2010; moon, 2000; williams, 1991). as regards the child’s linguistic development, the onset of efl instruction occurs at a time when a primary child’s knowledge of the mother tongue is incomplete and a number of its aspects are still developing. although the majority of primary children have developed their l1 oral competence, their literacy may have not been established (pinter, 2006). as far as the second/foreign language is concerned, children see it “from the inside,” as a means of getting or expressing a message, rather than “from the outside,” as a formal and abstract system (cameron, 2003, p.11). therefore, the use of metalanguage and explicit language instruction in a primary classroom must be limited to the minimum. the role of teacher beliefs we have argued in the introductory section of this paper that teacher imagination plays a significant role in shaping classroom practices of individual teachers by allowing them to formulate mental preconceptions and images of future and possible classrooms events. the imaginary concepts are underpinned by the teacher’s current knowledge, experiences and beliefs about teaching (bullough, 1989; werbi ska, 2004). current research defines teacher beliefs as a tacit but practical knowledge concerning a variety of aspects of teaching, such as the target language itself, the learners, the institutional policy, the professional context, the methodology, the didactic materials and instructional activities (borg, 2006, 2011; peterson & comeaux, 1987; tsui, 2003). a whole array of factors is listed as contributing to building teacher preconceptions of teaching. these range from the context of work, professional training, work experiences and target language awareness to personal background and individual life circumstances (murray & christison, 2011; trappes-lomax, 2002). most importantly, however, these beliefs shape the teacher’s understanding of what constitutes good or bad teaching and determine particular actions and decisions undertaken during l2 lessons (borg, 2003; widdowson, 2002). considering the unique nature of the maturational needs of young learners, adult teachers need to be particularly aware of these developmental characteristics. moon (2005) observes that educators need to acknowledge that children are in constant flux as regards their cognition, command of l1 as well as their physical and emotional condition. similarly, scott and yrtreberg (1990, p. 9) highlight the transitory nature of child development, which necessitates a highly utilitarian approach to instruction on the part of the teacher. the role of teacher imagination in conceptualising the child as a second language learner 425 halliwell (1992) advocates the use of constructive realism, which involves careful planning for the child’s actual engagement and occupation during the lesson based on a thorough understanding of his/her mental as well as physical profile. linse (2005, pp. 1-17) describes the main principles of “developmentally appropriate instruction” which, as she claims, should be informed by the teacher’s awareness of the child’s psychological and physical needs. to conclude, researchers agree that effective instruction of young learners cannot take place if the designed activities are beyond the child’s conceptual ability (williams, 1991). to make any predictions about what is (un)doable for primary learners, adult teachers (and novice ones in particular) have to rely on their imagination. seen in this light, teacher imagination emerges as a powerful instrument, which allows teachers to envisage possible classroom scenarios and anticipate children’s thoughts, actions and verbal responses. method the underlying rationale of this paper is that the major challenge facing teachers of primary children is the need to temporarily step out of their adult shoes and look at the world through a child’s eyes, and for teachers of young learners, that imaginative leap is even greater than for teachers of other age groups. the question of whether (and if so, to what extent) such a shift in thinking is feasible constitutes the major issue raised in this paper. our primary concern is to consider the extent to which pre-service teachers are successful in creating the concept of a child as a learner and complying with it in their instructional practice. to address this issue, we postulate the following research questions: rq 1: what are the characteristics of the “imagined image” of a primary learner constructed by pre-service teachers? rq 2: how successful in terms of practical implications are adult pre-service teachers in conceptualising young children as second language learners? participants the participants of the study were 65 polish pre-service trainee teachers with no prior teaching experience in formal contexts. they were all universitylevel students working towards their degree in english literature, linguistics or applied linguistics. the group included 35 ba students (25 female, 10 male) and 30 ma (27 female, 3 male) students. the instruction the participants were exposed to over a period of two semesters included: 120 h of input classes in teyl, 90 h of lecture on young learners’ characteristics, 30 h of observation ewa guz, ma gorzata tetiurka 426 practice and 90 h of teaching practice in grades 1-3 and 4-6. the goal of the course was to prepare participants for teaching efl in polish primary schools. the topics covered during the course included, among others, the cognitive, social and emotional characteristics of the child, paying particular attention to the differences between children and other age groups. special emphasis was placed on the practical dimension of teyl, with trainees taking on the role of children and discussing the practical implications of doing so. data collection data collection continued over a period of one academic year. the data were drawn from a variety of sources obtained in the course of the teyl instruction and included: notes and reports from participants’ observation practice which involved observing eight different expert, full-time teyl teachers (with minimum five years of experience) working in primary schools and evaluating various aspects of their instruction; no limitations were imposed or guidance offered as to the content and length of answers; lesson plans based on adaptations of selected children stories for classroom use prepared by participants; lesson plans in which participants were asked to re-design an unsuccessful lesson; video recordings and transcripts of lessons conducted by participants during their teaching practice. prior to the study, participants were given extensive information about the character and purpose of the research. written permissions were obtained to indicate explicit consent to participate in the study. procedure in the introductory part of this paper, we argued that in order to provide a full picture of the learning space created by a particular teacher, we need to consider both his/her pedagogical intentions (based on his/her theoretical preconceptions) and the actual classroom events, decisions and learning outcomes. in other words, the planned needs to be juxtaposed with the enacted. therefore, for the purpose of this study, the data gathered were grouped into three categories: opinions, ideas and practices. the first category, which can be described as reflective in nature, consisted of participants’ observation notes and reports based on their comments, reflections and evaluations concerning various aspects of the observed the role of teacher imagination in conceptualising the child as a second language learner 427 lessons conducted by expert teachers. for the purpose of this study, we analysed data from a task in which the participants were instructed to pay attention to and describe the most effective classroom practices in the observed lessons. effective practices were defined as ones which activated and motivated young learners the most and created opportunities for the meaningful use of l2. the second category (labelled as conceptual) consisted of lesson plans prepared by participants. to obtain data for this category, participants were asked to adapt a children’s story for classroom use by preparing a set of pre-reading vocabulary activities, while-reading comprehension activities as well as post-reading speaking activities. the third category was based on the actual teaching experiences of the participants and included transcripts and video recordings of their lessons. we analysed teacher instructions, teacher and student initiations and responses, teacher feedback as well as the pedagogical context in which these came about (elements of task design and the didactic aids used). our focus here was twofold. firstly, we were interested in the teacher’s ability to carry his/her message across on the verbal level and engage primary learners in classroom goings-on. to investigate the quality of teacher-learner communication, transcripts were analysed in terms of any communication breakdowns and misunderstandings between the participants of discourse. secondly, teacher talk was examined in terms of the teacher’s conceptions of a child as a young l2 learner. results and discussion our first research question sought to identify the conceptualised image of a young efl learner created by the participants as reflected in their opinions, ideas and practices represented in the data. imagining a child as a second language learner: opinions as regards the reflective part of the data, a fairly consistent picture emerged from the participants’ observations of the lessons conducted by expert teachers. as we have already pointed out, the focus here was on the most effective activation techniques that allowed the observed teachers to involve children in the lessons and successfully pursue their learning goals. table 1 shows the inventory of classroom practices which were listed by the preservice teachers as the most effective for successful language learning among young learners along with the percentage of participants who indicated them. ewa guz, ma gorzata tetiurka 428 table 1 reflecting on young learners’ classroom activity type of activity participants (%) team games involving an element of competition and/or a reward 92 tasks involving movement/physical activity 62 guessing-based activities 59 singing and reciting rhymes 59 activities based on visual stimulation 52 variability 48 multi-sensory stimulation 17 drawing 17 as shown in table 1, a number of key elements were identified by participants as crucial in activating young learners during english lessons both in grades 1-3 and 4-6. first of all, it was reported that the learners participated most willingly in game-based activities which contained elements of teamwork, rivalry and the anticipation of “something winnable.” despite the controversy over the use of instrumental motivation in teaching (see, for example, kohn, 1993), awarding prizes to winners was found to be particularly appealing and motivating. overall, participants pointed out that competition increased learner motivation and the amount of l2 output produced, at the same time ensuring maximum participation. another technique which maximised the learners’ involvement in the lessons involved some form of kinaesthetic or tactile activation. tasks based on movement and physical activity (for example, pointing, miming, gesturing, dancing, cutting, inserting stickers in the notebook, etc.) were found engaging by more than half of the observers. as one of the participants put it, “children are full of energy and cannot sit still for a long time, movement gives them an opportunity to behave naturally.” the last category of activities, which were identified as effective activators by nearly half of the participants, included singing, recitation of memorised rhymes and tasks which involved guessing and some form of visual stimulation (flashcards, pictures, posters, puppets, video clips, images projected on walls). apart from specific types of classroom practices, participants pointed out two other aspects of teyl. firstly, it was observed that children immediately lost interest when faced with routine and excessive repetition. therefore, participants emphasised the need to diversify activities, introduce some novelty to break the predictable course of classroom events as well as combine various types of sensory stimulation to make the activities appealing for the largest possible group of learners. finally, the teacher’s attitude was considered significant as, to use a quotation from one of the participants, “students intuitively feel when the teacher is bored or absent-minded and quickly assume a similar stance towards the lesson.” the role of teacher imagination in conceptualising the child as a second language learner 429 in sum, our results show that pre-service teachers were able to identify a number of procedures and activation techniques which, in developmental terms, are the most appropriate for primary-level learners. this allowed them to form some preconceptions concerning young learners’ expectations, preferences and abilities. the working image of a young learner that emerged from the participants’ reflections was that of a learner who eagerly engages in a variety of games and competitions, which are preferably not too long and involve some sort of physical activation intertwined with visual and/or aural stimulation. these observations are in line with the findings of recent research, which suggest that while the visual modality develops gradually throughout the primary school, the ability to learn and retain information through the auditory channel appears around the age of ten or eleven (price, dunn, & sanders, 1980). therefore, young learners benefit most from the concurrent activation of the visual, auditory and kinaesthetic channels (iliuk, 2002, p. 43). indeed, generally, the human brain tends to favour multisensory over unisensory training as the simultaneous activation of a number of senses facilitates the development of new neural connections which enhance language learning (shams & seitz, 2008; wrighton, 2010). imagining a child as a second language learner: concepts and practices of major interest from the point of view of this study is whether the participants’ reflections and observations concerning the developmental profile of primary learners have any bearing on their actual pedagogical practices. the conceptual and experiential part of our data (including story adaptations, lesson plans and lesson recordings along with their transcripts) shed further light on how the beliefs during the observation practice translate into the participants’ pedagogical activity. one of the major observations made in this part of our analysis is that the working image of a child observable in the participants’ lesson designs and classroom practices was highly variable and far from consistent. in particular, our data showed a huge degree of variation in the preconceptions and actions of individual participants. not infrequently, the tasks and materials designed by an individual teacher as part of a single lesson alternated between fairly adequate and effective to completely unsuited to the needs and abilities of young learners. this might suggest that the beliefs and conceptions of pre-service teachers concerning the child as a language learner are not firmly established and, thus, inconsistently applied. also, the participants were highly varied in terms of their ability to conceive a mental image of a child as a participant of an efl lesson. nearly two thirds (69%) of the analysed lesson plans and 60% of the lesson tranewa guz, ma gorzata tetiurka 430 scripts contained examples of activities and formulations indicating the participants’ failure to recognise the developmental characteristics of children and their pedagogical implications. this mismatch between the intended and the enacted was manifested most vividly in the teachers’ selection of language used to address the learners. to illustrate these points, we will now look at some examples of the participants’ misconceptions of young learners as manifested in the elements of lesson design and classroom discourse. misconceptions of a child as a second language learner one of the findings of this part of our investigation is that participants experienced considerable difficulty with conceptualising children’s cognitive skills and tended to endow young learners with the intellectual capacities of adults, which was reflected in the way they planned and conducted their lessons. not infrequently, the teacher’s reluctance to acknowledge the fact that they are in a young learners’ classroom was clearly noticeable already in the initiating parts of the lessons. extract 1 below, which comes from the beginning of a lesson in the second grade of primary school, is highly representative of teachers’ unrealistic expectations towards children’s contribution to the lessons (t stands for teacher and s for student): extract 1 <t> kto zapisze temat lekcji? [who will write the subject of the lesson on the blackboard?] <s1> (volunteers and is appointed for the job) <t> (dictates the subject) utrwalanie czasownika have got. [the verb have got: consolidation.] <s2> prosz pani co to znaczy utrwalanie? [what does consolidation mean, miss?] <t> zapami tanie, uczenie si . [memorising, learning.] <s2> (nods but is clearly confused) <ss> (take seven minutes to copy the subject to their notebooks in silence) <t> czasownik.... [the verb...] <s3> prosz pani, jeszcze nie sko czyli my! [we are not done yet, miss!] <t> dobrze, dobrze. [okay, okay...] <t> (waits another minute and resumes speaking) czasownik.... have got oznacza ‘mie ,’ ‘posiada ’ i ma dwie formy has got i have got. have got wyst puje w pierwszej i drugiej osobie liczby pojedynczej oraz we wszystkich osobach liczby mnogiej. has got wyst puje tylko w trzeciej osobie liczby pojedynczej: she has got, he has got, it has got. a teraz zrobimy sobie wiczenie... [the verb have got means ‘to own,’ ‘to possess,’ and it has two forms has got and have got. have got appears in the first and second person singular and all persons plural. has got appears only in the third the role of teacher imagination in conceptualising the child as a second language learner 431 person singular, for example: she has got, he has got, it has got. and now we are going to do an exercise...] <t> (distributes handouts with a gap-fill exercise entitled “how many eyes?”) <ss> (take about seven minutes to fill in the gaps with the forms of have got) <t> okay. sprawdzamy. [okay. let’s check your answers.] (appoints individual students to read out their answers, most students provide wrong answers and need to be corrected) in this part of the lesson, the teacher’s pedagogical objective was to revise and practise two forms of the verb have got. judging from the students’ responses, the teacher failed to meet the learning goal set for this part of the lesson as the majority of learners came up with incorrect answers. as far as the learners’ involvement in the lesson is concerned, the 15 min covered in extract 1 (nearly one third of the lesson) proceeded with the majority of learners being passive. the learners’ contribution to the lesson was minimal and involved copying from the blackboard, listening to the teacher’s explanation of the target structure, reading out answers from a notebook and filling in gaps in a grammar exercise. individual students were appointed to move and speak, while the rest of the class remained still and silent throughout. as regards the presentation of the target structure, the teacher lectured about its formal aspects paying virtually no attention to its meaning or the context in which it could be used. no examples of the target structure were provided and the majority of the teacher’s explanation was based on metalanguage (a verb, singular, plural, forms, the first, second and third person). also, the length of the teacher’s explanation exceeded the actual attention span of a primary school child. the teacher expected the learners to pick up the forms of the target language through copying text from the blackboard and discussing abstract grammar rules. the target language was presented to learners as passive knowledge made up of decontextualised, abstract generalisations whose understanding required higher order thinking skills such as theorising and hypothesising. form was favoured over meaning and the functional dimension of the l2 was completely neglected. evidently, the procedures outlined above are at variance with the developmental characteristics of a child and the principles of the teyl methodology outlined earlier in this paper. for example, a primary child approaches the surrounding world as a tool for conveying meaning rather than as an abstract structural concept. replacing concrete and tangible experiences with decontextualised, metalinguistic explanation focusing on the formal nuances of language deprives the learner of genuine learning opportunities. as we have already pointed out, nearly 60% of the transcripts of lessons carried out by the participants contained recurrent examples of abstract terms (appearing typically in teacher instructions or explanations) ewa guz, ma gorzata tetiurka 432 whose understanding involved mental operations typical of adults such as theoretical and abstract reasoning. classroom discourse, or more specifically, constructing coherent and understandable teacher talk, proved to be a major stumbling block in teacher-child communication. extract 2 below provides a good example of the application of excessively complex language when simple, down-to-earth formulations could easily have been used. extract 2 (the teacher points to a poster on the blackboard with two big circles on it. he wants learners to guess that all the objects are divided according to colour and type of food.) <t> (points to the poster) let’s play a game. we are going to guess what might be the criterion here. the first student to guess wins. <ss> (start shouting out names of objects they can see in the circles) banana, apple, lemon... <t> no, no, no. don’t tell me what you can see. tell me, what do you think, which criterion i used? <ss> (silent and clearly confused) <t> focus on the appearance! <ss> ale prosz pana, co mamy robi ? [but sir, what are we supposed to do?] although in theory the teacher planned well in terms of activating the children (by incorporating elements of visual stimulation, guessing and competition), he has clearly failed to verbalise his message in a way comprehensible to young learners. eager to take part in the game, the learners relied on the context and the teacher’s gestures (pointing to the pictures) and wrongly presumed they were to name the objects. instead of following the children’s lead and letting them name the objects, the teacher repeated his earlier instructions using the word criterion in his questions, which caused confusion and deemed the task undoable. the additional instructions provided later to prompt the learners (“focus on the appearance!”) were too abstract and caused further misunderstanding. this resulted in a communication breakdown and the children demanding a straightforward explanation. in sum, the teacher showed a great deal of awareness of the developmental characteristics of his students, but failed to convey his message on the level of discourse. the findings presented so far are further corroborated by the suggested classroom procedures included in the lesson plans designed by the participants. below are a selection of extracts from different lesson plans intended for grades 1-3 (6-9 years) which show examples of classroom procedures suggesting an overall lack of (or very weak) awareness of the developmental characteristics of children on the part of the pre-service teachers: the role of teacher imagination in conceptualising the child as a second language learner 433 1. t asks learners to work individually with dictionaries to make a list of ten activities that can be performed in a garden. they are to write these activities in their notebooks. 2. t presents new lexical items (22 words denoting kitchen utensils) by writing them on the blackboard, reading them out slowly and loudly and translating them into polish. learners read the words loudly and slowly and write them down in their notebooks. 3. while t is reading a story, the pupils are following the text in their copies and match cards with names of days of the week with cards showing pictures and animals. 4. t asks learners about the techniques they use for learning and memorising new information and choose the technique that is the best. 5. t explains the meaning of new words (sparkling and dull) and asks children to make sentences with them asking volunteers to come up to the black board and to write down sentences they came up with. as evidenced in 1-5 above, participants were found to resort extensively to activities requiring intellectual involvement, the use of literacy skills and abstract thinking. the procedures outlined above require the learners to: cope with large portions of new material (1, 2), perform a number of activities simultaneously (3), formulate and voice their opinions on unfamiliar and abstract topics (4), show an increased awareness of grammar and grammatical terminology (5). although these activities could be easily performed by an adolescent or adult learner, they clearly exceed the cognitive and conceptual capacity of a child. once again, these data show the teachers’ unrealistic expectations and unsuccessful conceptualisation of the children’s attention span, thought processes, language learning strategies and the mastery of academic skills. they imply that the teachers have not been able to fully “imagine” what it means to be a young child learning a foreign language. based on the data presented above, we have compiled a list (see 1-12 below) of young learners’ developmental characteristics, skills and abilities that pervaded the participants’ opinions, ideas and practices. these characteristics form the core of the conceptualised image of a child created by preservice teachers analysed in our study: the working image of a child as a language learner: 1. children can remain still for longer stretches of time. 2. children can read and write with ease and good speed. 3. children rely on literacy skills in their learning. ewa guz, ma gorzata tetiurka 434 4. children have a long attention span. 5. children can understand abstract terms including grammatical terminology. 6. children can follow abstract explanations and grasp their practical implications. 7. children can use deductive logic and apply rules to examples. 8. children see language as an abstract concept. 9. children pay attention to language form, rather than meaning. 10. children need to be informed about the learning objectives of their lessons. 11. children do not need explicit instructions. 12. children are autonomous when it comes to organising their classroom work and learning. the image presented in the list above is truly adult-like in nature. children are portrayed here as passive recipients or vessels into which the teachers pour their knowledge. cognitively speaking, they are imagined by the pre-service teachers as being capable of performing highly advanced mental operations involving theoretical and hypothetical reasoning and deductive logic. they are imagined as form-orientated, autonomous learners who appreciate formfocused instruction and are in full control of their minds and bodies. sadly, the description of a child outlined above makes no allowances for children’s playful disposition, their natural curiosity and the drive to search for meaning in everything they do. it fails to acknowledge as well the children’s need to move and explore the world through concrete experiences activating all the available sensory channels. to put it simply, it fails to appreciate the child itself. conclusions in this paper, we set out to investigate how pre-service teachers imagine young efl learners. we attempted to gain insight into the “imagined concept” of a child as a second language learner as constructed by pre-service teachers in the course of their training. our findings indicate that the participants’ preconceptions of the developmental characteristics of children are not yet firmly established. also, a high degree of variation in the perception of young learners was observed across and within individuals. the most common and persistent misconceptions of the child’s developmental profile identified in the course of this study concern the child’s cognitive potential and the preferred classroom activities. participants were found to make excessive use of activities requiring theoretical and abstract thinking and tended to rely heavily on the use of literacy skills. our data also point to a discrepancy between teachers’ theoretical orientations and their actual classroom practices. in particular, most participants experienced considerable difficulty on the level of classroom the role of teacher imagination in conceptualising the child as a second language learner 435 discourse and failed to select appropriate language as a means of expressing their pedagogical intentions. to conclude, we feel that the focus of teyl instruction should be shifted from theoretical to practical issues. currently, the majority of tertiary-level teyl training programs in polish educational settings (including the one mentioned in this study) can be described as structured along a presentation-practiceproduction (ppp) paradigm, in which the provision of theoretical knowledge (concerning child development, teaching methodology, the principles of l2 acquisition, etc.) precedes any actual classroom-based experiences such as observation or teaching. in other words, the foundations of the imagined profile of a child learner created by pre-service teachers are derived from theoretical claims and other people’s statements about the nature of a child and instruction rather than direct hands-on classroom experiences. perhaps, if we complemented practice with theory (rather than theory with practice), we could prevent some of the practical difficulties, which have been exposed in the course of this investigation. clearly, this is not to say that the provision of the theoretical background is unnecessary. on the contrary, theoretical knowledge constitutes a vital element in developing the teachers’ awareness of young learner characteristics. however, we believe that the theoretical statements concerning the developmental profile of young learners should be directly linked to classroom experiences to ensure that the working image of a child as a second language learner captures both the conceptual and practical aspects of young learners’ instruction. intertwining theory with practice throughout the instructional period would allow trainee teachers to find their individual ways of bridging the gap between theory and practice through interacting with children and developing personal routines and teaching strategies. ewa guz, ma gorzata tetiurka 436 references ahmadi, s., & gilakjani, a. 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(2010). determining the effectiveness of a multisensory approach to teach the alphabet and phonemic awareness mastery in kindergarten children (doctoral dissertation). argosy university. retrieved from http:// www.zoo-phonics.comimagesresearch_a_multisensory_approach_by_cha rlene_wrighton_10_ 10.pdf 651 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (4). 651-652 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl reviewers for volume 3/2013 the editors would like to express their gratitude to the following scholars who have kindly consented to review one or more submissions to volume 3/2013 of studies in second language learning and teaching. their insightful and thorough comments and suggestions have without doubt greatly enhanced the quality of the journal: larissa aronin trinity college, dublin, ireland kees de bot university of groningen, the netherlands adriana biedro pomeranian university, s upsk, poland frank boers victoria university of wellington, new zealand piotr cap university of ód , poland darla deardorff duke university, usa anna cie licka a&m international university, texas, usa kata csizér eötvös university, budapest, hungary jean-marc daweale birbeck college, university of london, uk jelena mihaljevi djigunovi zagreb university, zagreb, croatia zoltan dörnyei university of nottingham, uk mercedes durham cardiff university, wales, uk anna ewert adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland pauline foster st. mary’s university, twickenham, uk robert gardner university of western ontario, canada christina gkonou university of essex, uk tammy gregersen university of northern iowa, usa naeema hann leeds metropolitan university, uk roberto heredia a&m international university, texas, usa elaine horwitz university of texas at austin, usa dimitra karoulla-vrikki university of cyprus, cyprus fiderike klippel ludwig-maximilians-university, munich, germany jaros aw krajka maria curie-sk odowska university, lublin, poland meihua liu tsinghua university, beijing, china thomas lockley nihon university, tokyo, japan ataollah maleki zanjan university of medical sciences, zanjan, iran peter macintyre cape breton university, canada aya matsuda arizona state university, usa sarah mercer university of graz, austria carmen muñoz university of barcelona, spain 652 theophile munyangeyo leeds metropolitan university, uk joanna nijakowska university of ód , poland françois pichette université du québec, canada luciana pedrazzini university of milan, italy simone pfenninger university of zurich, switzerland pawe poszytek sztuka uczenia foundation, gda sk, poland arkadiusz rojczyk university of silesia, poland jacek rysiewicz adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland stephen ryan senshu university, japan francoise salager-meyer university of the andes, venezuela pawe scheffler adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland michael sharwood smith heriot-watt university, scotland, uk david singleton university of panonnia, hungary odzimierz sobkowiak adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland ema ushioda university of warwick, uk ewa waniek-klimczak university of ód , poland 427 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 13 (2). 2023. 427-450 https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.38281 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt a longitudinal study on students’ self-regulated listening during transition to an english-medium transnational university in china sihan zhou chinese university of hong kong, china https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1815-5938 sihanzhou@cuhk.edu.hk gene thompson rikkyo university, japan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2406-1364 thompson@rikkyo.ac.jp abstract listening to academic content in english medium instruction (emi) classrooms at university can be a demanding task for students who transition from first language (l1) instructed secondary schools. this longitudinal mixed methods study analyzes data from 316 students collected at the beginning, midterm, and the end of their first semester after entering an emi transnational university in southeast china. the analysis of questionnaire responses revealed significant variations in students’ listening strategies over time, with a significant decrease in deep processing cognitive strategies at the midterm when content difficulty increased. conversely, two types of metacognitive strategies (problem solving, plan evaluation) increased significantly during the second half of the semester. informed by zimmerman’s (2000) social cognitive self-regulated learning (srl) model, thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 34 participants revealed that students generally developed a more top-down listening approach focusing on content learning over the semester and became more selective in their strategic and self-regulatory processes after the midterm “watershed” moment. results highlight the importance of structured topic mailto:sihanzhou@cuhk.edu.hk sihan zhou, gene thompson 428 knowledge in emi curriculum design and the necessity of strategy training in language support programs. keywords: english medium instruction; listening; self-regulation; transition; china 1. introduction the exponential growth of english medium instruction (emi) has become an established phenomenon in the higher education sector worldwide (macaro et al., 2018; rose et al., 2019). in china, emi programs have expanded rapidly over the last two decades in lockstep with the internationalization of universities (rose et al., 2019; zhou et al., 2021). however, warnings revolving around issues of learning quality have emerged (hu et al., 2014), casting doubt on whether students are capable of sufficiently processing subject knowledge via an unfamiliar second language (l2) in class. in particular, for students who transition from secondary schools where instruction is provided in the first language (l1), listening to academic content in emi university classrooms poses tremendous challenges. students may need to strategically regulate their listening to survive and thrive amid the challenges. though transitional learning difficulties of students have been well documented in emi research (e.g., aizawa & rose, 2020; evans & morrison, 2016), their strategic and self-regulated learning in the face of these difficulties remains relatively underexplored. researchers have recently suggested that students develop strong autonomy and engage in diverse strategic undertakings to regulate their learning at transition (e.g., ding & stapleton, 2016; macaro et al., 2019), and this period is considered to drive and reflect radical changes in learning (ding & stapleton, 2016; evans & morrison, 2011). however, few studies have adopted a self-regulated learning (srl) framework to investigate the issue, and variations in students’ strategic choices have rarely been explored through a longitudinal lens. the current study addresses these gaps by adopting a longitudinal mixed methods design to examine chinese students’ strategic and self-regulated listening during their first semester at an emi transnational university in southeast china. it draws on questionnaire and interview data collected at the beginning, midterm and the end of students’ first semester, to offer a more comprehensive and detailed picture of students’ listening experience during the transition period. 2. literature review 2.1. conceptualizing self-regulated listening self-regulation first made inroads into l2 research at the turn of the century (dörnyei & ryan, 2015) and has received significant attention in the learning of a longitudinal study on students’ self-regulated listening during transition to an english-medium . . . 429 vocabulary and writing (e.g., rose & harbon, 2013; teng & zhang, 2016; tseng et al., 2006). listening, however, as noted by teng and zhang (2021), has received less coverage in l2 self-regulation research. recent research within the field of l2 learning has integrated learner strategies within self-regulation frameworks (e.g., oxford, 2011; teng & zhang, 2016; zeng & goh, 2018). zimmerman’s social cognitive self-regulated learning (srl) model (see zimmerman, 2000) has been adopted (see teng & zhang, 2016) as it emphasizes a cyclical nature from which learners can monitor, evaluate, and then adjust their strategies as they pursue learning goals. in other words, selfregulated learning can be defined as “the processes whereby learners personally activate and sustain cognitions, affects, and behaviors that are systematically oriented toward the attainment of personal goals” (zimmerman & schunk, 2011, p. 1). zimmerman’s (2000) three-phase cyclical model includes forethought, performance, and self-reflection. in the forethought phase, learners analyze the task, set goals and strategically plan to achieve the goals via appropriate methods. after that, learners enter the performance (or volitional control) phase, in which they avail of a range of general or task-specific strategies to maintain learning effort and motivation, while monitoring or recording their learning processes. finally, learners evaluate their performance, conduct causal attribution, and adjust their learning in the self-reflection phase before the subsequent learning cycle. as panadero (2017) has explained, an advantage of this framework is that it encapsulates a complete version of different sub-phases of srl. indeed, compared to tseng et al.’s (2006) widely cited volitional framework that seems to correspond to the performance phase (ziegler, 2014), zimmerman’s srl model also highlights self-regulatory processes such as goal setting and selfreflection surrounding the performance. given that students’ listening in emi classes (performance) might be closely associated with their learning before (forethought) and after class (self-reflection) (see zhou & rose, 2021), such a model allows for a more holistic and contextualized understanding of their strategic learning at an emi university context. educational psychologists have long recognized metacognition as integral to self-regulation, and research on self-regulated listening has incorporated measures of metacognition (e.g., zeng & goh, 2018), often employing the metacognitive awareness listening questionnaire (malq) developed by vandergrift et al. (2006). the malq measures l2 listeners’ metacognitive awareness of four strategies (directed attention, problem solving, planning-evaluation, and mental translation) and knowledge of themselves (person knowledge). more recently, zhang and zhang (2019) referred to evidence from a confirmatory factor analysis (see teng & zhang, 2016) and conceptualized self-regulation as an overarching construct inclusive of a metacognitive aspect. in line with this conceptualization, the present study adopts sihan zhou, gene thompson 430 zimmerman’s srl model as an overall framework to investigate students’ self-regulated listening while including the malq as a measure of their metacognitive awareness of strategy use while listening in emi classes (performance phase). in addition to metacognitive strategies, some researchers have also highlighted deep processing strategies as a key part of self-regulated learning (e.g., panadero et al., 2021; pintrich, 2004). the present study views deep processing strategies as important task-specific cognitive strategies of students’ self-regulated listening in class (i.e., the performance phase). in contrast to surface strategies (e.g., rote memorization), deep processing strategies are “directed towards the intentional content of the learning material (what is signified)” (marton & säljö, 1976, p. 7), and aim to establish meaningful connections between new and prior knowledge. students’ attempts to make these connections, as panadero et al. (2021) note, “are usually cognitively demanding” but “they benefit the students significantly” (p. 12), and hence include strategies associated with these deep processes into their development of a deep learning self-regulation strategy scale. similarly, pintrich (2004) also pinpointed the close relationship between deep processing strategies and an intrinsic goal orientation, and included three such cognitive strategies, namely, elaboration, organization, and critical thinking in the development of the motivated strategies for learning questionnaire (mslq) (pintrich et al., 1991). in the field of l2 learning, oxford (2011) included deep processing strategies into the strategic self-regulation (s2r) model, and argued that learners who frequently adopt these strategies show higher abilities to regulate their learning. whereas in an efl/esl listening classroom topic knowledge is usually graded in the materials to tailor to different listeners’ proficiency levels (macaro, 2018), new professional subject knowledge is delivered in emi classes regardless of the heterogeneity of students’ language competence. this poses a question of whether students are able to engage in some deep processing of content knowledge when listening to emi lectures, and if so, what additional learning is required to afford the process. the mslq developed by pintrich et al. (1991) was adapted to measure this construct given its shared socio-cognitive underpinning with zimmerman’s srl framework (see pintrich, 2004). 2.2. listening in emi higher education during the transition period listening to the lengthy lectures typical of university learning through english can be demanding for first-year students who transition from an l1-mediated secondary schools (aizawa & rose, 2020). this is because such students are confronted with not only an unfamiliar instructional language but also more professional subject knowledge (macaro, 2018). they may minimally interact with the teacher (dafouz & garcía, 2013), and only process the information superficially a longitudinal study on students’ self-regulated listening during transition to an english-medium . . . 431 (kırkgöz, 2005). they also often struggle to cope with the academic and specialist vocabulary featured in teacher talk (aizawa & rose, 2020; evans & morrison, 2016), which frequently interrupts their comprehension in emi classes. in response to these challenges, studies that explored students’ autonomous and strategic learning during the critical transition period have burgeoned across different contexts in recent years (e.g., ding & stapleton, 2016; macaro et al., 2019; soruç & griffiths, 2018; yang, 2017). among them, mainland china remains an under-explored area despite the rapid expansion of emi programs in its tertiary sector (rose et al., 2019). studies have found that students’ autonomous learning extends beyond the classroom (zhou & rose, 2021), where they industriously previewed textbooks before class for vocabulary troubleshooting (ding & stapleton, 2016), and reviewed their class notes after class (macaro et al., 2019). additionally, students were reported to employ a range of strategies when learning via emi (e.g., eser & dikilitaş, 2017; soruç & griffiths, 2018; zhou & rose, 2021). however, findings remain rather inconsistent. in the study of eser and dikilitaş (2017) from the middle east, students reportedly relied heavily on the use of surface strategies such as translation and memorization to process course content with a noted absence of metacognitive strategies for “arranging, planning and evaluation of a learning process” (p. 127). in contrast, zhou and rose (2021) discovered that chinese students, upon their arrival at an emi university, reportedly engaged in some meaningful processing of subject matter while listening to emi lectures after sufficient preview before class. similar to soruç and griffiths’ (2018) study in turkey, zhou and rose (2021) also revealed that students applied metacognitive strategies to selectively direct their attention in class according to speech features of the teacher (e.g., stress, repetition, pause) and rhetorical functions (e.g., introduction, explanation, exemplification). given this inconsistency in findings, more research is needed to explore students’ strategic listening in emi university classes during transition, taking into account the restraints and affordances associated with each learning context. while marked changes are believed to take place during the critical transition period (ding & stapleton, 2016; evans & morrison, 2011), longitudinal research to capture such changes remains in severe paucity. findings from the limited number of such studies indicate that students become self-regulated learners during the transition period, resorting to “unremitting practice and peer support” to adapt to the new learning environment (evans & morrison, 2011, p. 204). ding and stapleton (2016) also suggested that students’ adaptation might shift from reactively coping with the transitional challenges to proactively directing and managing their own learning. however, each of these studies mainly drew on qualitative data with relatively small sample sizes (n = 9 in ding & stapleton, 2016; n = 28 in evans & morrison, 2011), and are limited by a lack of sihan zhou, gene thompson 432 triangulation between the qualitative and quantitative data to provide a full overview of students’ strategy development over time. to address these limitations, the current study adopts a longitudinal mixed methods design, collecting both quantitative questionnaire data from a total of 316 respondents and qualitative interview data of 34 participants three times throughout the semester. in summary, despite blossoming research into self-regulation within the field of language learning, listening remains an underexplored area. further, within the specific field of emi research, studies in recent years have begun exploring students’ strategic and autonomous learning during the transition period, whereas mainland china, regardless of its rapidly growing emi provisions, remains an under-researched context. finally, existing research has hitherto yielded inconsistent findings about students’ strategy use in emi classes, and lacks longitudinal studies using mixed methods to capture their learning development over time. the present research therefore addresses these gaps in the literature by exploring the self-regulated listening of students during their first semester at an emi transnational university in china. this study examines the following research questions: 1. what strategies do students reportedly use in listening to emi lectures during their first semester transitioning into a transnational university? 2. are there changes in students’ use of listening strategies during the first semester? 3. how do students self-regulate their learning in relation to listening over time? 3. method the study adopts a longitudinal mixed methods design, collecting questionnaire and interview data at the beginning (time 1/t1, week 2 & 3), halfway (time 2/t2, week 8 & 9), and the end (time 3/t3, week 13 & 14) of the first term to investigate students’ strategic and self-regulatory listening processes. following what flick et al. (2012) described as a strong form of triangulation, quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed independently drawing on its own framework, and only joined together in the interpretation stage to “extend knowledge potential, rather than to confirm results derived from one method” (p. 100). the two sources of data also complement each other to “expand the explanatory power” (riazi & candlin, 2014, p. 145), allowing for an understanding of students’ strategic learning at different layers. 3.1. setting and participants data were collected at an emi transnational university located in southeast china. at entry, students completed the oxford online placement test (oopt), which a longitudinal study on students’ self-regulated listening during transition to an english-medium . . . 433 measures their listening proficiency against the common european framework of reference for languages (cefr). all chinese students enrolled in the (1) business and (2) humanities and social sciences faculty courses of communications and linguistics were invited to participate in the study. an initial sample of 412 students completed the questionnaire at t1, and a total of 316 students filled the questionnaire at all three time points, yielding an attrition rate of 23.3%. results from a pearson chi-square test indicated no significant differences between those continuing to t3 and those withdrawing from the study in terms of gender, age, major, eap class level, years of english learning, or study abroad experience. this suggests that the sample stayed relatively stable over time despite the inevitable attrition common to longitudinal research. all of the participants came from secondary schools with subject matter instructed through their mother tongue of mandarin chinese, and the large majority (86%) had never studied or lived abroad. a sub-cohort of 35 respondents agreed to participate in semi-structured interviews. following a maximum variation sampling strategy (dörnyei, 2007), the interviewees were invited to account for a range in gender, major, and listening proficiency. a total of 34 students completed all three interviews; one female business major withdrew at t2. table 1 introduces the questionnaire and interview participants. table 1 questionnaire and interview participants variable groups questionnaire interview t1 (n = 412) t2 (n = 344) t3 (n = 316) t1 (n = 35) gender female 313 269 246 25 male 99 75 70 10 major business 267 230 209 12 humanities & social sciences 145 114 107 23 english listening proficiency* a1 7 6 6 1 a2 89 76 67 8 b1 176 148 138 15 b2 87 69 63 5 c1 50 42 39 5 c2 3 3 3 1 years of english learning more than 9 years 268 218 204 19 6-9 years 113 99 90 15 less than 6 years 31 27 22 1 note. *based on oopt score for the listening section collected prior to t1 3.2. instruments the present study included the following sets of data, which were collected at three time points during the first semester: sihan zhou, gene thompson 434 • two questionnaires to measure students’ (1) metacognitive awareness of listening strategies and (2) deep processing listening strategies; • semi-structured interviews to explore the self-regulated learning of students in relation to listening in emi classes. the metacognitive awareness of listening strategies questionnaire was adapted from vandergrift et al.’s (2006) metacognitive awareness listening questionnaire, adopting a 6-point likert scale (1 = totally disagree; 6 = totally agree) to report listening strategy usage. exploratory factor analysis (efa) with direct oblimin rotation was used to check the robustness of the adapted questionnaire. as two out of the three items of the person knowledge factor were found to have low communality values (< 0.30), this factor was excluded from the questionnaire. the revised 18-item questionnaire (see appendix a) produced a factor structure that aligned with the malq, including strategies of directed attention, plan-evaluation, problem solving, and mental translation. the overall questionnaire had strong reliability with a cronbach’s α of .84, and the individual subscales were acceptable to very good, with cronbach’s α of .83 (problem solving), .80 (directed attention), .74 (plan-evaluation), and .66 (mental translation). the 15-item questionnaire for deep processing listening strategies was adapted from the motivated strategies for learning questionnaire developed by pintrich et al. (1991) with a 6-point likert scale. the questionnaire used items from three factors of the mslq related to cognitive strategies, namely elaboration, organization, and critical thinking, which, according to oxford’s (2011) definition, are the key strategies for making meaningful associations between prior and new content knowledge. the overall questionnaire (see appendix b) had strong reliability with cronbach’s α of .91 (cronbach’s α for the subscales of elaboration, organization, and critical thinking was .84, .82, and .87 respectively), and the efa results identified the same factor structure as that of the mslq. the semi-structured interviews were designed based on zimmerman’s threephase cyclical srl framework, exploring students’ perceptions, feelings, and learning behaviors before, during, and after listening to emi classes. all questions were delivered in an open-ended format to minimize the potential interference to students’ natural courses of behaviors, while probes were used to encourage further discussions when interesting themes were tapped upon. due to university restrictions on audioand video-recording emi classes, stimulated recall interviews which might more accurately capture students’ situated strategic processes within emi classrooms could not be used, and this limitation is duly noted. a longitudinal study on students’ self-regulated listening during transition to an english-medium . . . 435 3.3. procedures and analyses at each time point (t1, t2, t3), participants completed the two questionnaires via an online survey platform immediately after they finished emi lectures. in the following week, students were interviewed on an individual basis in chinese for 30 to 60 minutes. interviews were audio-recorded for data analysis purposes. to address research question 1 (rq1), descriptive statistics were calculated to present an overview of students’ listening strategy use in emi classes during the transition term. regarding research question 2 (rq2), repeated measures manova was conducted to examine whether students’ (1) metacognitive awareness of listening strategies and (2) deep processing listening strategies varied over time. this was followed by a series of univariate repeated measures anova to examine changes for each sub-category of strategy. thematic analysis following kuckartz’s (2014) guidelines was used to analyze the interview data, using primary categories related to zimmerman’s (2000) threephase cyclical model of forethought, performance, and self-reflection. sub-categories were identified inductively from the dataset. the matrix coding query function of nvivo 11.0 was used to extract all passages coded under distinct time points and a summary of longitudinal patterns was developed to address research question 3 (rq3). the coded themes will be presented in the findings section with representative excerpts referring to participant number and listening proficiency (e.g., s1, a2). 4. findings 4.1. students’ use of listening strategies during the first semester table 2 presents descriptive statistics for students’ reported use of listening strategies in emi classes at the beginning (t1), midterm (t2), and the end (t3) of the first semester (illustrated visually in figure 1). upon arrival (t1), the metacognitive strategy of directed attention (mt1 = 4.48, sd = 0.80) and the deep processing cognitive strategy of elaboration (mt1 = 4.42, sd = 0.70) were most heavily adopted. at the midterm (t2), however, the reported use of problem solving (mt2 = 4.23, sd = 0.59) surpassed directed attention and became a popular strategy alongside elaboration. this suggests that at the midterm, students engaged heavily in processes such as inferencing the meaning of unknown expressions, and comparing their understanding with what they knew about the topic to verify the inferences. these two strategies remained highest at the end of term (problem solving: mt3 = 4.32, sd = 0.67; elaboration: mt3 = 4.29, sd = 0.66). interestingly, across all time points, the reported use of mental translation, which is believed to hinder effective listening (vandergrift et al., 2006), remained consistently low compared to others (mt1 = 3.59, mt2 = 3.62, mt3 = 3.62). sihan zhou, gene thompson 436 table 2 descriptive statistics for students’ listening strategies at t1, t2 and t3 variable time n m sd min max metacognitive awareness of listening strategies directed attention t1 305 4.48 0.80 2.25 6.00 t2 303 4.12 0.76 1.25 6.00 t3 315 4.14 0.82 1.00 6.00 problem solving t1 305 4.29 0.70 2.17 6.00 t2 303 4.23 0.59 2.17 6.00 t3 315 4.32 0.62 2.67 6.00 plan-evaluation t1 305 3.84 0.77 1.20 6.00 t2 303 3.76 0.71 1.20 5.80 t3 315 3.87 0.72 2.20 6.00 mental translation t1 305 3.59 0.90 1.00 6.00 t2 303 3.62 0.81 1.00 5.67 t3 315 3.62 0.81 1.00 6.00 deep processing listening strategies elaboration t1 291 4.42 0.70 2.00 6.00 t2 295 4.30 0.67 1.00 6.00 t3 314 4.29 0.66 2.00 6.00 organization t1 291 3.99 0.91 1.25 6.00 t2 295 3.82 0.88 1.00 6.00 t3 314 3.87 0.92 1.00 6.00 critical thinking t1 291 4.01 0.81 1.00 6.00 t2 295 3.87 0.80 1.00 6.00 t3 314 3.91 0.76 1.00 6.00 figure 1 means for students’ use of listening strategies in emi classes at t1, t2 and t3 3.50 3.60 3.70 3.80 3.90 4.00 4.10 4.20 4.30 4.40 4.50 directed attention problem solving plan evaluation mental translation elaboration organisation critical thinking t1 t2 t3 a longitudinal study on students’ self-regulated listening during transition to an english-medium . . . 437 4.2. longitudinal development of listening strategies to address rq2, repeated measures manova was conducted to examine whether the two sets of strategies (metacognitive awareness of listening, deep processing) varied significantly over time during the first semester. assumptions were confirmed (multivariate normality, linearity, absence of multicollinearity between dependent variables). as table 3 illustrates, a significant main effect of time was detected using wilk’s lambda on the combined four components of metacognitive awareness of listening strategies (λ = 0.84, f[8, 1158] = 13.56, p < .001, ηp2 = .086) as a group, and on the three deep processing listening strategies collectively (λ = 0.96, f[6, 1084] = 3.54, p = .002, ηp2 = .019). this suggests that these two aspects of strategic listening demonstrated some changes over the first semester. to further explore these variations, univariate repeated measures anova was conducted for each type of strategy (see table 4), followed by post-hoc bonferroni analysis to indicate change between each pair of time points. table 3 manova for the effect of time on listening strategies dependent variable wilk’s lambda f hypothesis df error df p partial eta squared (ηp2) metacognitive awareness of listening strategies 0.84 13.56 8.00 1158.00 .000 0.086 deep processing listening strategies 0.96 3.54 6.00 1084.00 .002 0.019 table 4 univariate repeated measures anova for the effect of time on listening strategies dependent variable type iii sum of squares df mean2 f p partial eta squared (ηp2) metacognitive awareness of listening strategies directed attention 23.019 1.844 12.485 46.018 .000 0.137 problem solving 1.099 1.865 0.589 2.983 .055 0.010 plan-evaluation 1.659 1.889 0.878 3.555 .032 0.012 mental translation 0.361 1.891 0.191 0.680 .499 0.002 deep processing listening strategies elaboration 2.667 2.000 1.333 6.271 .002 0.023 organization 3.631 2.000 1.815 5.308 .005 0.019 critical thinking 3.168 2.000 1.584 6.179 .002 0.022 among the metacognitive awareness strategies, directed attention (f[1.84, 536.52] = 46.02, p < .001, ηp2 = .137) and plan-evaluation (f[1.89, 549.66] = 3.56, p = .032, ηp2 = .012) varied significantly over time. the reported use of directed attention dropped significantly at the midterm (mt1 = 4.48, mt2 = 4.12, p < .001), indicating that students seemed less persistent in controlling for the loss of their sihan zhou, gene thompson 438 attention in class. in contrast, their reported use of plan-evaluation declined slightly at the midterm (mt1 = 3.84, mt2 = 3.76, p = .542), then escalated significantly during the second half of the term (mt2 = 3.76, mt3 = 3.87, p = .036), indicating that students might have become more goal-directed and evaluative in listening after a semester of learning through emi. similarly, the increase in the problem solving strategy also reached a significant level in the latter half of the term (mt2 = 4.23, mt3 = 4.32, p = .011). this suggests that students enhanced their usage of strategies to draw on topical, contextual and linguistic cues to handle comprehension breakdowns. in terms of deep processing listening strategies, results reveal significant changes over time for all three strategies, namely, elaboration (f[2, 544] = 6.27, p = .002, ηp2 = .023), organization (f[2, 544] = 5.31, p = .005, ηp2 = .019), and critical thinking (f[2, 544] = 6.18, p = .002, ηp2 = .022). results from the post-hoc bonferroni analysis show that the most notable changes took place during the first half of the semester, when the reported use of all strategies decreased significantly at the midterm (elaboration: mt1 = 4.42, mt2 = 4.30, p = .007; organization: mt1 = 3.99, mt2 = 3.82, p = .005; critical thinking, mt1 = 4.01, mt2 = 3.87, p = .002). in other words, this trend suggests that students at the midterm were less inclined to process information in an in-depth manner such as associating new information with prior knowledge, or organizing and critically evaluating new knowledge taught in class. due to the increased depth and density of subject knowledge taught at the midterm, it might be that listening by then consumed additional working memory, hence restraining the use of higher-order cognitive strategies (o’malley & chamot, 1990). 4.3. self-regulated learning in relation to listening during transition thematic analysis of interview data (n = 34) explored how students self-regulated their learning before (forethought), during (performance) and after (self-reflection) listening to emi classes. themes are referred to using italic text with frequency counts presented in parentheses to outline the prevalence of each in the data, and illustrated via representative excerpts labelled with the participant’s identifier, listening proficiency, and the time point when the comment was made (e.g., s1, a2, t1). 4.3.1. forethought the overall trend was that students’ goals of listening seemed to shift from understanding the literal meaning of teacher talk (t1: n = 12) to achieving a sufficient understanding of the subject content (t2: n = 12; t3: n= 8). at term start, students focused on language-related challenges to achieve basic understanding. especially for lower proficiency students, decoding acoustic input from the teacher consumed excessive cognitive capacity, making the digestion of content a longitudinal study on students’ self-regulated listening during transition to an english-medium . . . 439 knowledge a far-fetched goal: “i think it’s hard to combine listening and comprehending together. i need to listen first, and then comprehend [the content] but now listening itself is difficult enough for me” (s32, a2, t1). however, from the midterm, students shifted in their listening goal to more thoroughly understand content and to establish connections between key concepts, as described by participant 13: i would hope that i can digest the knowledge points. that is to say, i don’t merely understand, but i can retain the information in my memory and develop my own opinions. i wouldn’t have this requirement at the beginning of the term – then, i just hoped to understand what he [teacher] was talking about. (s13, b1, t2) changes appeared in students’ preview of courses materials prior to emi classes, a commonly undertaken self-regulatory process at semester start (t1: n = 26). the primary change was reducing looking up unknown words during preview (t2: n = 14). forsaking searching the meaning of new words seemed to set free attention to focus on the content: at the beginning [of the term], whenever there was a new word, i would look it up. but after all i may never know all the words, so now i look up fewer. it’s less timeconsuming and i have more time to attend to the content. (s14, b1, t2) students at the midterm were more inclined to extrapolate meaning during preview, ignore words with minor impact on overall comprehension, and circle words to look up later. as students became more familiar with the diverse teaching styles of instructors, they appeared more selective and skillful in preview. for example, a student described how she decided to skip certain sections of preview materials: “it’s unnecessary to read explanations because the teacher would explain these in class anyway” (s19, b1, t2). 4.3.2. performance the key trend reported during the performance phase during the first term was the development of a more “top-down” listening approach, that is, students increasingly applied topic knowledge to build meaning from the incoming teacher talk. compared with arrival, many students at midterm reflected an improvement in inferring meaning of words or sentences to handle unfamiliar expressions (t2: n = 6; t3: n = 5), owing to their expanded repertoire of relevant field-specific subject knowledge: after the midterm revision, i kind of feel a surge in the ability to connect and compare the knowledge currently learned in class to the knowledge learned in previous lessons. i start to form clearer images in my mind when the teacher touches on certain points, sihan zhou, gene thompson 440 and some examples will pop up from earlier lessons. this makes it easier to guess when i find something difficult to understand – sort of like doing gap filling of information in my mind. (s32, a2, t3) some low-proficiency listeners also indicated an awareness to monitor their comprehension, a strategy typically adopted by more proficient l2 listeners (vandergrift, 2003). such real-time monitoring of comprehension triggered verification and rectification of meaning building, as a student commented: “when there was something that our teacher talked about and it differed from what i thought, i would then look at the powerpoint to see if there were explanations on that point” (s33, a2, t3). a midterm fatigue was noted among many students (t2: n = 15), who reportedly lost attention due to diminishing interest in the more theoretical and challenging course content. to cope, some students restrained certain strategy use to save working memory for comprehension in class. a typical behavior was reducing note taking to prioritize listening to the teachers (t1: n = 11; t2: n = 19; t3: n = 26). discussing notetaking as “hand-functioning” instead of “brain-functioning” (s24, a2, t2), some students suggested that it might consume attention which could be otherwise used for digesting content knowledge. similarly, although many students actively engaged in organizing knowledge structures while listening to introductory content early in the semester (t1: n = 8), this was less prevalent by midterm as they preferred to follow the teacher’s unfolding speech then engage in systematic review and structuring knowledge after class. 4.3.3. self-reflection students carried out evaluation and review activities after listening to emi classes, with two noted peaks of evaluative occasions during the first term. one selfevaluative peak appeared at the beginning of the term, when students struggled amid difficulties from a new instructional language, leading to reflection upon the degree of understanding (t1: n = 16). students appeared to critically assess potential causes, as described by the student below: if there was a moment i didn’t understand in class, after class i would think back to that moment on what caused the breakdown – was it that i wasn’t focused enough or just a matter of my proficiency? (s32, a2, t1) following such reflection, students expressed willingness for adaptative measures such as maintaining concentration in class to more closely follow the teacher (t1: n = 5), adjusting notetaking to prioritize comprehension (t1: n = 7), and practicing listening and enlarging vocabulary after class (t1: n = 6). the midterm a longitudinal study on students’ self-regulated listening during transition to an english-medium . . . 441 exam catalyzed another flux of self-evaluation, when students inspected their listening methods against their performance in the exams (t2: n = 7). some spotted a mismatch between effort and instructional focus, as a participant reflected: “i used to look at the slides a lot but after the midterm exam i realized that most of the key points tested were actually talked about by the teacher and less so with the powerpoint” (s32, a2, t2). echoing this evaluation, 19 of 34 students at midterm reportedly shifted their focus from reading the slides to primarily listening to the teacher. changes also emerged in students’ review activities after class. compared to the term start when the majority engaged in the review of lesson content (t1: n = 27), many admitted a shrinkage in time invested in review at midterm due to busier university life (t2: n = 12). the students who persisted in review seemed to become more selective in what to focus upon. compared to the detail-oriented review activities at the beginning of the term, where students “read through the slides carefully and word by word” (s31, b1, t1), briefer browsing through slides or notes to summarize key information became a popular strategy at midterm (t2: n = 11), followed by a focus on developing an overall knowledge structure at the end of the term (t3: n = 9). this seemed to facilitate a more goal-directed review: i started doing mind maps from the midterm and since then almost every two lessons i would draw one. now i’ve started to combine them into a large one. this makes it faster to review because when i see this map, i know immediately where this knowledge point is located. (s31, b1, t3) to sum up, students during the transition semester engaged in dynamically evolving self-regulated learning activities for listening. they seemed to develop a more “top-down” listening focus, drawing on their expanding subject knowledge to handle linguistic barriers, and became more selective in their strategic learning activities after the midterm “watershed” moment in correspondence to their changing needs of listening. 5. discussion this study highlights students’ adaptation to emi study during the transition semester. various strategies were employed, and midterm seemed to be a “watershed” moment as students became more skillful and selective in their self-regulatory activities and use of different strategies. both our first and second research question explored students’ use of listening strategies in emi classes during the transition term. findings show that as content knowledge became more intense from the midterm, students selectively used strategies while listening in class. the use of strategies requires cognitive resources (o’malley & chamot, 1990), sihan zhou, gene thompson 442 and quantitative findings illustrate a decrease, at the midterm, in certain deep processing cognitive activities such as organizing and critically evaluating knowledge. however, qualitative findings reveal that the restricted use of some strategies in class could be a conscious decision by students to free up attention for the incoming teacher speech stream. similar to soruç and griffiths’ study (2018), students in this study reduced note taking to prioritize comprehension. recognizing that real-time structuring of knowledge was less effective in class, they delivered more systematic organization of knowledge after class. given the reported lack of higher-order cognitive strategies in emi classes (e.g., eser & dikilitaş, 2017), our findings suggest a necessity to interpret students’ strategic processes in class against the broader selfregulatory processes of learning before and after class to better understand their contextualized decision-making process (zhou & rose, 2021). our third research question addressed the development of the broader self-regulated learning behaviors of students in relation to listening during their transition to emi studies. our findings highlight that students placed an increasing priority on mastering subject content via the use of a “top-down” listening approach over time. a similar trend was noted in yang (2017), where students in an emi program in taiwan shifted from decoding english in discrete pieces to using it holistically for comprehension, as content learning became the “top priority” and language only as “the medium to master the content” (p. 13). in the present study, the priority of subject matter appeared consistent in strategic and self-regulatory processes surrounding listening, including goal setting and preview before emi classes, as well as meaning inferencing and monitoring comprehension in class. students seemed to develop their strategic competence to extrapolate the meaning for unfamiliar expressions while listening, echoing macaro et al.’s (2019) transition-year study in italy. findings reveal that such change was underpinned by an expanded repertoire of disciplinary knowledge. research into l2 listening recognizes the role of relevant topic knowledge in facilitating a top-down listening approach (macaro et al., 2005). however, different from an efl/esl course where topic knowledge is usually independent between lessons, an emi course is fieldspecific and usually structured interrelatedly throughout the course. therefore, progression through an emi course involves acquiring more knowledge related to a given field of study. this repertoire of subject knowledge may serve as an “advance organizer” (herron et al., 1998), offering relevant schematic knowledge for meaning inferencing and elaboration. for less proficient listeners, a more “topdown” listening approach may free up their attention from bottom-up decoding to monitor, verify and rectify comprehension in an emi class – a strategy usually employed by effective l2 listeners to reduce misunderstanding resulting from inappropriate meaning inferencing (graham & macaro, 2008). a longitudinal study on students’ self-regulated listening during transition to an english-medium . . . 443 finally, this study highlights dynamic changes in regulatory behaviors, as demonstrated by the reflective activities that students carried out at the beginning and after the midterm exam. upon arrival, the transition from an l1 mediated secondary school to an emi university exposed students to dual challenges of an unfamiliar instructional language and more professional subject knowledge. when students’ cognitive capacity fell short of coping with both, the situation required metacognition to leverage personal and strategic knowledge to meet task demands (flavell, 1979). in our study, the self-evaluation that the students engaged in after class by then might therefore serve as an opportunity to seek more appropriate listening strategies suitable to their current ability and objectives. since the metacognitive knowledge system is dynamic and constantly “revised because of the feedback loop effects of metacognitive regulation and metacognitive experiences” (zhang & zhang, 2019, p. 886), the adjustment of strategies fueled by self-reflection could strengthen students’ understanding of themselves, and presumably result in more critical and personalized use of listening strategies (goh & hu, 2014). after the midterm, our findings reveal another flux of reflective activities. students diagnosed shortfalls in their listening strategies from evaluating their exam results. as illustrated above, students attended to the teacher instead of the slides after reflecting on the effectiveness of previous listening behaviors. this finding has highlighted the role of post-assessment reflection in helping learners monitor and identify the problems in their current learning methods. when students perceive assessment feedback as a source for enhanced self-regulation instead of an end point, it may catalyze adaptive measures for more effective learning in the subsequent srl cycle, as educational studies have suggested (zimmerman & moylan, 2009). 6. conclusion this longitudinal mixed methods study explored students’ strategy use and selfregulated listening during their transition to emi university study. findings suggest significant variations in the strategies used by students over their first semester as they dynamically adjusted to the new environment. the study also indicates that strategy adjustment in emi classes may differ from an efl/esl context due to the distinct role of how topic knowledge is structured, attained, and used by students (see macaro, 2018). this study demonstrates that students’ strategic decisions in emi classes are interrelated with their self-regulated learning before and after class, offering empirical support to the synergy between learner strategy and self-regulation (oxford, 2011; rose, 2012). results indicate expanded metacognitive knowledge based on self-initiated reflection, attesting to the validity of integrating metacognition with self-regulation (see teng & zhang, 2016). sihan zhou, gene thompson 444 findings have pedagogical implications for emi practice in higher education settings. given the important role of topic knowledge, content experts could strengthen the connection between topics within an emi course to help students build a network of key disciplinary concepts and develop their “topdown” processing strategies in listening. meanwhile, language specialists could offer language strategy training (e.g., comprehension monitoring) to cultivate students’ ability to use strategies more effectively (graham & macaro, 2008). this study points to the importance of credit-bearing summative assessments in catalyzing students’ reflections on their learning. as such assessment may trigger serious evaluation on listening methods and knowledge attainment, instructors can embed post-assessment reflective tutorials in an emi curriculum to scaffold students towards more constructive use of feedback from the assessment. finally, this study highlights an increasing focus on content rather than language during the transition period. while this trend aligns with the contentoriented nature of emi (macaro et al., 2018; zhou et al., 2021), it also raises concerns about the sustainability of language gains once students meet the basic needs to comprehend emi classes (see gao, 2008). emi program designers in higher education may need to specify language-related learning goals (in addition to content) with respect to students’ future professional development needs. if such goals require language competence that exceeds the basic “survival needs” of students in understanding emi lessons, language support programs should 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(2011). self-regulated learning and performance: an introduction and an overview. in b. j. zimmerman & d. h. schunk (eds.), handbook of self-regulation of learning and performance (pp. 1-12). routledge. a longitudinal study on students’ self-regulated listening during transition to an english-medium . . . 449 appendix a metacognitive awareness of listening strategies questionnaire (for efa analysis, see zhou & rose, 2021) directed attention • when my mind wanders in emi classes, i recover my concentration right away • i try to get back on track when i lose concentration • i focus harder on what the teacher talks when i have trouble understanding • when i have difficulty understanding what i hear, i (don’t) give up and stop listening problem solving • when i guess the meaning of the word, i think back to what i have heard to see if my guess makes sense • i use the general idea of the lesson to help me guess the words i don’t understand • i use the words i understand to guess the meaning of the words i don’t understand • i use my experience and knowledge to help me understand • before i listen to emi classes, i think of similar topics i have listened to • as i listen to emi classes, i compare what i understand with what i know about the topic plan-evaluate • i have a goal in mind as i listen to emi classes. • as i listen to emi classes, i periodically ask myself if i am satisfied with my level of comprehension. • after listening, i think back to how i listened and what i might do differently next time. • before i start to listen, i have a plan in my head for how i am going to listen. • as i listen to emi classes, i quickly adjust my interpretation if i realize that it is not correct. mental translation • i translate in my head as i listen to emi classes • i translate word by word as i listen to emi classes • i translate key words as i listen sihan zhou, gene thompson 450 appendix b deep processing listening strategies questionnaire (for efa analysis, see zhou & rose, 2021) elaboration • when i listen, i try to relate what the teacher says to what i already know • when i listen, i try to understand the concepts in this class by making connections with what i read before the class • when i listen, i pull together information from different sources to help me understand, such as pre-reading materials, slides, etc. • when i listen, i try to relate ideas in this lesson to those in other lessons whenever possible • when i listen, i write brief summaries of the main ideas of what teacher talks • i try to apply ideas i listened in the class in other class activities such as discussion organization • after the class, i go over my class notes and make an outline of important concepts • after the class, i go through my class notes and try to find the most important ideas • as i listen, i make simple charts, diagrams, or tables to help me organize what i hear in class • as i listen, i outline key points to help me organize my thoughts critical thinking • whenever i hear an assertion or conclusion in this class, i think about possible alternatives • when a theory, interpretation, or conclusion is presented in class, i try to decide if there is good supporting evidence • i treat what i hear in class as a starting point and try to develop my own ideas about it • i often find myself questioning things i hear in this course to decide if i find them convincing • i try to play around with ideas of my own related to what i hear from the teacher 515 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (4). 515-531 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl spoken grammar awareness raising: does it affect the listening ability of iranian efl learners? mojgan rashtchi islamic azad university, tehran, iran mojgan.rashtchi@gmail.com mahnaz afzali islamic azad university, tehran, iran info@alitrade.net abstract advances in spoken corpora analysis have brought about new insights into language pedagogy and have led to an awareness of the characteristics of spoken language. current findings have shown that grammar of spoken language is different from written language. however, most listening and speaking materials are concocted based on written grammar and lack core spoken language features. the aim of the present study was to explore the question whether awareness of spoken grammar features could affect learners’ comprehension of real-life conversations. to this end, 45 university students in two intact classes participated in a listening course employing corpus-based materials. the instruction of the spoken grammar features to the experimental group was done overtly through awareness raising tasks, whereas the control group, though exposed to the same materials, was not provided with such tasks for learning the features. the results of the independent samples t tests revealed that the learners in the experimental group comprehended everyday conversations much better than those in the control group. additionally, the highly positive views of spoken grammar held by the learners, which was elicited by means of a retrospective questionnaire, were generally comparable to those reported in the literature. keywords: corpus-based materials, corpus linguistics, real-life listening skills, spoken grammar mojgan rashtchi, mahnaz afzali 516 over the last 30 years, owing to the intensive work in different areas of applied linguistics, the view regarding superiority of literacy has been changed and the primacy of oral production has been realized. consequently, greater attention has been paid to the problem of understanding the spoken form of the foreign language (brown, 1990). listeners, when listening to spoken texts, encounter a number of features unique to spoken discourse (buck, 2001; rost, 2002). they need to have enough knowledge of these features in order to comprehend and thus communicate effectively. to this end, mccarthy and carter (1995) argue that learners should receive special instruction on the characteristics of spoken grammar and these features should be integrated into english as a foreign language (efl) teaching materials. in general, spoken grammar is viewed from three different perspectives. the first view rejects the exisistence of any grammar except written grammar (leech, 1998), although nowadays, with advances in corpus linguistics and analysis of spoken corpora, this view is not taken seriously. the second view holds that there is no special grammar of spoken language, and its proponents (biber, johansson, leech, conrad, & finegan, 1999; cullen & kuo, 2007; leech, 2000) believe in the same grammar performing different functions for written and spoken language. they argue that speech and writing draw on the same underlying grammatical system rather than on two separate systems. however, some structures such as ellipsis are more common in speaking rather than in writing. the last view, however, maintains that there is a special grammar of spoken language. carter and mccarthy (1995) highlight the grammatical features of spoken language largely neglected by standard grammars and somehow take the view of a new grammar of speech. nevertheless, they state that “spoken language and written language are not sharply divided but exist on a continuum” (carter & mccarthy, 2006, p. 164). as wendy and lam (2002, p. 250) point out, “spoken language is not written language spoken aloud,” but it has its own features and structures that differ from written language. carter and mccarthy (2006) define spoken language as an interactive, normally unplanned, face-toface process, full of pauses, repetitions, interruptions, ellipsis, discourse markers, vague language, and hedges. similarly, biber et al. (1999) describe structural and functional aspects of spoken language based on spoken corpora. interest in spoken grammar has arisen with the growing availability of large computerized corpora. the findings of the studies of spoken corpora have been reported in detail in many publications (biber et al., 1999; brazil, 1995; carter & mccarthy, 1995, 1997, 2006). although corpora are accepted as a valuable source of authentic language use for both research and pedagogy, there are still debates on their application in language pedagogy. spoken grammar awareness raising: does it affect the listening ability of iranian efl learners? 517 the key controversial issue is whether teaching materials should be corpus-driven or corpus-based. some corpus linguists (sinclair, 1991; stubbs, 1996) emphasize using authentic corpus-driven materials in language pedagogy. on the other hand, widdowson (2000) questions the authenticity of corpus-based materials claiming that authenticity is a function of text reception as well as text production. he argues that learners who are not able to create contexts similar to those which native speakers produce will have problems with processing the texts which are created for language learning as well. another opponent, cook (1998), believes that learners run the risk of “produc[ing] corpus-attested but contextually inappropriate language” (p. 60). however, the proponents of corpus-based or corpus-informed materials (mccarthy & carter, 1994; summers & rundell, 1995) accentuate that materials should be influenced and informed by corpus findings and the data should be modeled on authentic patterns; therefore, they should be corpus-based rather than corpus-bound. nonetheless, literature indicates that listening and speaking materials are actually based on the written language norms. carter (1998) compared real data from the spoken corpus with textbook dialogues and realized that core spoken language features were absent from these dialogues. this is also supported by cullen and kuo (2007), who, after surveying 24 general efl textbooks published in the year 2000, concluded that in these books “coverage of features of spoken grammar is at best patchy” (p. 361). approaches to spoken grammar mumford (2009) highlighted three approaches to spoken grammar: world englishes/english as a lingua franca (elf), the passive knowledge approach, and the production approach. the supporters of world englishes/elf (prodromou, 1996; rajagopalan, 2004; widdowson, 1994) claim that there is no need for specifically native speaker norms. for example, referring to estimates that up to 80% of communication in english takes place between nonnative speakers, prodromou (1996) concludes that corpus language is inappropriate to the needs and interests of learners. in the same vein, rajagopalan (2004) asserts that simply mutual intelligibility between speakers is a desirable goal in communication. in contrast, kuo (2006) maintains that learners’ need is beyond merely international intelligibility; they should be allowed to follow native speakers’ model in order to communicate effectively in native and nonnative contexts. in her research, kuo (2007) comes to the conclusion that for many of her students, native speakers’ model is desirable. mojgan rashtchi, mahnaz afzali 518 the passive knowledge approach, on the other hand, contends that learners should have a passive knowledge of spoken grammar, and in order to raise students’ awareness of these features, recordings of native speakers’ scripts and noticing tasks should be used. an advocate of this approach, timmis (2005), provides a framework for spoken grammar teaching; however, he does not recommend its teaching for production. he argues that “it is quite hard to frame useful and digestible production rules” (p. 120). alternatively, the production approach claims that learners should be able to use native speakers’ norms in their production; thus, there is a need to go beyond passive knowledge since learners who are unaware of these norms will suffer a distinct disadvantage when encountering native speakers. an important question regarding the application of spoken grammar in the classroom is the way it should be practiced. mccarthy and carter (1995) propose a “three i’s” paradigm including illustration, interaction, and induction. according to this paradigm, first particular forms in real data are illustrated, then learners do some tasks which actively involve them in noticing features through interaction, and finally, learners induce the patterns of usage. another model is proposed by timmis (2005), who maintains that noticing tasks and activities can help learners produce the features. although spoken grammar continues to be an unresolved issue, rules of speaking seem an inextricable component of communicative competence (cameron as cited in o’keeffe, 2009). consequently, learners’ awareness of the features can play a vital role in enabling them to communicate. spoken grammar and listening listening is the medium through which spoken grammar can be comprehended. carter and mccarthy (2006) claim that spoken grammar should be heard and not just read from a written text. o’keeffe, carter, and mccarthy (2007) state that “listening to spoken grammar, along with noticing tasks, can raise learners’ awareness of its features and this kind of listening is often best carried out as ‘listening for something’ rather than ‘listening to something’” (p. 137).they suggest that more advanced learners can be encouraged to notice and spot spoken language features in listening and then to discuss why they are different from the written norm. in turn, this will help them develop real-life listening skills. buck (2001) defines l2 listening ability as the ability to process extended samples of realistic spoken language in real time, to understand the linguistic information included in the text, and to make whatever inferences are unambiguously implicated by the content of the passage. the objectives of listening instruction, according to rost (2006), should focus on any of the four areas inspoken grammar awareness raising: does it affect the listening ability of iranian efl learners? 519 cluding “improving learners’ comprehension of spoken language, increasing the quality of learners’ intake from spoken input, developing learners’ strategies for better understanding of spoken discourse, or engendering a more active participation in face-to-face communication” (p. 47). in order to help learners develop effective listening skills, the methods of instruction and the type of materials are very important. regarding the type of materials, as johns (1994) points out, learners should be exposed to corpus-based materials to develop the appropriate use of a language. learners who are exposed to such materials and learn some features of spoken grammar will be more familiar with characteristics of spoken discourse as well as the strategies speakers use to orient, monitor, manage, modify, and soften their message, the result of which will be better comprehension and more appropriate response to what is being said. in the present study, the researchers have adopted the passive knowledge approach for teaching conversational spoken grammar and have employed awareness raising activities for improving conversational listening ability of iranian efl learners. this study contributes to the research on spoken grammar as a very novel field in elt as well as to listening instruction studies. the significance of the study lies in the fact that research in spoken grammar is limited and much of the discussion in the field regards the role of spoken grammar in speaking ability of l2 learners rather than in the skill of listening. the present study, accordingly, addressed the following research questions: 1. can awareness raising of spoken grammar through corpus-based instruction enhance the listening comprehension ability of iranian efl learners? 2. what is learners’ attitude towards corpus-based materials and spoken grammar instruction? method participants the participants of the study were 45 male and female iranian university students aged between 18 and 29 who were majoring in english translation at one of the major universities in tehran, iran. they were selected based on convenience sampling and were members of two intact classes randomly assigned to the experimental (n = 22) and the control group (n = 23). instrumentation three different instruments were utilized for gathering the data required for this study. the first instrument was the preliminary english test mojgan rashtchi, mahnaz afzali 520 (pet), which was used to ensure the homogeneity of the groups and was piloted with 20 students whose proficiency level was identical to that of the participants of the study. the overall reliability of the test computed through kr-21 was 0.85 and the interrater reliability of the writing section of the test was 0.90, showing a high correlation between the scorings of the two raters. the second instrument was a 30-item achievement listening test adapted from the self-listening comprehension parts of the corpus-based touchstone (levels 3 and 4) by mccarthy, mccarten, and sandiford (2006a, b) used as the preand posttests (appendix a). the test was administered to the participants of the study before and after the treatment to determine whether there was any gain in the listening scores of the participants after the intervention. in the process of these two administrations, the “b-index” of the achievement test was computed “to make decisions about which items to keep and which to discard” in the criterion-referenced test (brown, 2005, p. 84). the items which appeared to be acceptable remained in the revised version. the agreement of the test was computed by estimating the threshold loss agreement through the subkoviak approach, which is usually used to estimate the reliability of criterion-referenced tests (brown, 2005). the estimated agreement coefficient of the test was .84, which justified its use in the study. also, its content validity was approved by two university instructors based on a table of specifications prepared by the researchers. additionally, a 30-item 5-point likert type questionnaire in the native tongue of the participants was designed to probe students’ opinions regarding the course. its content validity was approved by two experts and its reliability estimated through cronbach’s alpha (r = .81) signified a relatively high reliability index (see appendix b for the english translation of the questionnaire). materials as mentioned earlier, the materials were chosen from corpus-based touchstone (mccarthy et al., 2006a, b), which according to ruhlemann (2008) is unique among english textbooks and employs the three i’s methodology for raising students’ consciousness of spoken grammar. it is worth mentioning that the term spoken grammar is synonymous with conversational grammar and refers to the grammar of informal, conversational english rather than to the discourse used in more formal settings such as debates or speeches. moreover, it is different from vernacular or nonstandard forms of grammar (biber et al., 1999), which are restricted to regional dialects and are sometimes regarded as a sign of ill-education (see appendix c for features of spoken grammar). spoken grammar awareness raising: does it affect the listening ability of iranian efl learners? 521 procedure the participants attended a 16-week listening and speaking course. the classes met two times a week, each session lasting 90 min. seventy minutes of each session were allocated to this study. the two classes had the same listening texts taken from touchstone, but their tasks and activities were different. both classes were taught by one of the researchers, which may be regarded as a limitation of the study. in the first week the pet was administered to the participants and it was verified that the two groups were homogeneous at the onset of the study. subsequently, the two classes were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. in order to guarantee that the participants were not familiar with the spoken grammar features, the participants of the two groups sat a listening pretest as well. in weeks 2-15 the participants in both groups practiced listening using the same materials in pre-, while-, and post-listening stages for 70 min per session. the control group did not receive any explicit instruction on the spoken grammar features and was implicitly exposed to them. to stimulate and generate background knowledge before the listening tasks, the group received prelistening tasks based on content related to the topic. afterwards, as the whilelistening activity, the group listened to a dialogue and answered some listening comprehension questions or did fill-in-the-blank tasks. in the post-listening phase, however, the learners were engaged in different activities such as role playing, paired dialogue writing, and discussion concerning the topics. in contrast to the control group, the three i’s methodology, as awareness raising tasks for spoken grammar instruction, was used in the experimental group. to activate the learners’ background knowledge, during the pre-listening stage some questions were put forward by the teacher to introduce the topic of the lesson. afterwards, the learners listened to a corpusbased real-life dialogue adopted from touchstone, the targeted features were illustrated through a noticing task, and the learners were asked to do some activities which enhanced their awareness regarding the target features (appendix d). finally, in the post-listening phase, the participants were encouraged to discuss the context-related functions of the feature. in week 16 the same listening test used as the pretest was administered to both groups as the posttest as the final session of the study. mojgan rashtchi, mahnaz afzali 522 results proficiency test as the first step, two classes were selected based on convenience sampling and took the pet, the results of which signified the homogeneity of the two groups in terms of their language proficiency level. this was done to keep the variable of language proficiency constant. hence, the two classes were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. next, an independent samples t test was run to compare the mean scores of the groups on the proficiency test. the distribution of the scores on the pet was normal with respect to the skewness ratios, 0.256 for the experimental group and 0.846 for the control group, falling within the normality range of -1.96 and +1.96. it should be mentioned that the values are obtained from dividing the statistics by the standard error of skewness. the levene's test p = .54 verified the equality of the variances and thus, the legitimacy of running a t test. the results of the independent samples t test (t = -0.057, df = 43, p = .955) revealed no significant difference between the means of the two groups at the .05 level of significance. pretest to check the homogeneity of the two groups in terms of their conversational listening ability, a listening comprehension pretest was administrated to both groups, the results of which are offered in table 1. table 1 descriptive statistics for the conversational listening pretest group n min max m sd variance experimental 22 8 24 15.23 5.520 30.470 control 23 6 25 15.04 5.312 28.225 as table 2 illustrates, the result of levene's test, p = .547, signified the equality of the variances and the t observed (t = 0.114, df = 43, p = .910) showed no significant difference between the means of the two groups on the listening pre-test indicating the same level of conversational listening ability before the intervention. table 2 independent samples t test for the conversational listening pretest levene's test for equality of variances t test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2-tailed) mean dif. 0.369 .547 0.114 43 .910 0.184 spoken grammar awareness raising: does it affect the listening ability of iranian efl learners? 523 posttest after the intervention, the test used as the conversational listening pretest was administered to the participants as the posttest, the descriptive statistics of which are given in table3. table 3 descriptive statistics for the conversational listening posttest group n min max m sd variance experimental 22 10 27 18.50 5.059 25.595 control 23 8 25 15.39 5.176 28.794 the results of the posttest (t = 2.036, df = 43, p = .048) revealed that there was a slightly significant difference between the conversational listening ability of the experimental and control groups. moreover, as the table shows, the eta squared value ( 2) for variability in the listening ability (dependent variable) was .087, which means that 8.7% of the variability in the listening ability can be accounted for by the spoken grammar suggesting a moderate effect size (utilizing the commonly used guidelines proposed by cohen, 1988: .01 = small effect, .06 = moderate effect, .14 = large effect). table 4 independent samples t test for the conversational listening posttest levene's test for equality of variances t test for equality of means eta squared ( 2) f sig. t df sig. (2-tailed) mean dif. 0.088 .768 2.036 43 .048 3.109 .087 questionnaire as mentioned in the instrumentation section above, to find out about the opinion of the experimental group on the course, the members were asked to fill in a questionnaire with 30 items on a 5-point likert type scale and also to write their comments about the course while remaining anonymous. the responses were scored as: strongly agree (5 points), agree (4 points), unsure (3 points), disagree (2 points), and strongly disagree (1 point). the proportion of students agreeing with each category in the questionnaire is presented in table 5. as the results show, a vast majority of students agreed that spoken grammar instruction was helpful, particularly as an aid for improving their listening ability (84%) and their familiarity with spoken language features (92%). particularly noteworthy was the fact that a large majority believed that mojgan rashtchi, mahnaz afzali 524 they needed to know the spoken grammar features and the way native speakers talk to each other (93%). table 5 the proportion of students agreeing with each major category % n categories 84% 21 spoken grammar efficacy in enhancing listening ability (qs 20, 25, 26) 1 92% 21 spoken grammar efficacy in learning spoken language features (qs 3, 5, 11, 28) 2 93% 21 need for spoken grammar (qs 1, 6, 13, 16, 22) 3 86% 21 course efficacy (qs 2, 8, 30) 4 83% 21 tasks efficacy (qs 10, 21, 27, 29) 5 88% 21 material efficacy (qs 4, 9, 18, 19, 24) 6 85% 21 motivation, self-confidence, autonomy (qs 7, 12, 14, 15, 17, 23) 7 regarding the course efficacy, there was 86% agreement that the objectives of the course were achieved and the course was highly effective. in addition, about 83% of the students agreed that the tasks were useful and helped them to understand the materials better. furthermore, the materials were regarded by students as highly in line with the course objectives and useful (88%). it was also believed by 85% of students that the course increased their motivation, selfconfidence, and autonomy. discussion as regards the first research question concerning the ability of awareness raising of spoken grammar through corpus-based instruction to enhance listening comprehension ability of efl learners, the results from the independent samples t tests suggest that learners informed of the features in the experimental group comprehended the everyday conversations significantly better than the learners in the control group, although the p value was only slightly lower than the cut-off point at the .05 level of significance for rejecting the null hypothesis. this shows that teaching spoken grammar features, in general, could be beneficial for understanding the everyday-life conversations of native speakers and employing noticing and awareness raising tasks could have some role in bringing about the improvement of the learners. however, the finding is in line with the theoretical basis of the study which claims that listening to spoken grammar along with noticing tasks helps learners become aware of what they are likely to hear and also know the intention of the speaker. it can be assumed that once learners can make predictions based on the functions of words and phrases and their interpersonal meaning, they become better listeners and communicate more effectively. the finding supports carter and mccarthy (2006), who believe that spoken grammar should be spoken grammar awareness raising: does it affect the listening ability of iranian efl learners? 525 taught through listening, and listening can be enhanced through raising learners’ awareness of the spoken grammar features. the students' positive views on teaching the spoken grammar features elicited by the questionnaire are generally comparable to those observed by timmis (2002), goh (2009), and kuo (2006) in their surveys. as they show in their studies, teachers and students are quite positive toward the need for teaching and learning spoken language features and confirm the necessity for paying special attention to the rules and strategies used by native speakers in their conversations. the usefulness of the noticing tasks similarly supports timmis’ (2005) claim that such tasks encourage learners to compare what they say with what a native speaker says in the real world and the finding that 92% of students in his survey found the tasks useful or very useful. it is evident from the results that awareness of spoken grammar features motivates and, as goh (2009) states, empowers students because they gain more selfconfidence to encounter native speakers. it is worth mentioning that nine out of 21 of the students commented on the open-ended questions of the questionnaire. their comments can be categorized as follows: 1. pace of the course: three students complained about the pace with which the courses were taught. for example, one wrote that “although all tasks were fully covered, the pace was too fast, i think there must be more sessions.” 2. speaking: another topic of comments was the speaking ability of the participants, which was said to be influenced by the course material and spoken grammar instruction. the following are examples of the comments: “i think i like to use the things i learnt when i am speaking; i unconsciously use something i learnt when i speak and this makes me happy; i used to be very careful in using correct grammar when i was speaking, but now i take it easy.” 3. audiovisual materials: two students suggested that they preferred to have video texts instead of listening texts. they wrote: “when i watch something i can better understand what is going on; it was better to use video in the class.” the first comment points to one of the limitations of the study. actually, more time was needed for gaining the optimum results. the second issue, speaking, is strongly related to spoken grammar and the comments denote its positive impact on the learners’ speaking ability. however, the researchers delimited the study to the listening ability because the cultural and contextbased features inherent in spoken grammar are still considered to be controversial issues. employing audiovisual materials, in fact, provides learners with mojgan rashtchi, mahnaz afzali 526 the visual cues which can trigger appropriate schemata for understanding and can be an interesting topic for further research. the overall results, although they cannot be fully generalized, imply that spoken grammar instruction may not only enhance the listener’s abilities mentioned by buck (2001), but may also cover the first three goals of listening instruction proposed by rost (2006), discussed earlier in this paper. when learners are exposed to corpus-based materials modeled on corpus-driven conversational texts, and also when they have the opportunity to be aware of the features a native speaker employs in speaking, their comprehension of everyday conversations is facilitated. this reduces the burden of processing the flow of information they receive. these elaborated listening texts can enhance comprehension in the same way as simplified texts do without damaging the richness of the original text (long, 1996). conclusion as the findings of the present study divulge, since corpus-based spoken grammar instruction through corpus-based materials can have an impact on efl learner’s everyday listening skills and can enhance their ability in communication, its implementation in listening and speaking courses seems desirable. it seems that this type of instruction works well if corpus-based materials and consciousness raising activities are employed. however, it is in fact rarely used in efl classrooms and debate about its pedagogic relevance is still continuing. more investigations are needed to fill the gap between the findings of this study and their application to language courses. hence, the findings of similar studies can have important implications for the domain of language teaching and can aid those researchers who are interested in investigating how awareness of spoken grammar facilitates real-life listening skills. spoken grammar awareness raising: does it affect the listening ability of iranian efl learners? 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(2000). on the limitations of applied linguistics, applied linguistics, 21, 2-25. spoken grammar awareness raising: does it affect the listening ability of iranian efl learners? 529 appendix a listening comprehension test (section 6, questions 25-30) transcript of the listening task: kayla: water’s fine. nice pictures! where did you get it? hector: at that thrift store downtown. kayla: huh. never been there. they have nice stuff? i mean, as nice as that picture? hector: oh, yeah, but a lot of it needs fixing. this picture had a cracked frame, so i had to get it repaired. kayla: you got anything else there? hector: actually, yeah. see this bookcase? nice. huh? kayla: yeah, nice wood. but that shelf is broken. hector: yeah, i know. i’m going to get my brother to fix it for me. and look at this clock – this is my favorite! kayla: lovely. but . . . it’s not working. hector: it’s not? shoot. guess that needs fixing, too. kayla: bet the battery needs to be replaced, that’s all. hector: maybe, but . . . kayla: yeah, here. just take this piece off, and . . . ow! broke another nail. huh . . . i can’t this piece off. hector: just leave it, then. i’ll take it downtown to get it fixed. 25 – which statement is true? a. kayla and hector have both shopped at the thrift store. b. kayla believes all stuff at the thrift store need fixing. c. kayla believes all stuff at the thrift store is as nice as the picture. d. kayla doesn’t know much about the thrift store. 26 – hector had to . . . a. fix the picture frame himself. b. get a repairman to fix the picture frame. c. get his brother to fix the picture frame. d. get kayla’s brother to fix the picture frame. 27 – the bookcase is going to be repaired by . . . a. hector’s brother c. the shop owner b. hector d. a repairman 28 – hector . . . the clock needed fixing when he bought it. a. was sure c. was told b. didn’t know d. guessed 29 – kayla thinks that the battery . . . a. is replaced by the wrong one. c. is not fixed in its place. b. has no problem. d. has no power. mojgan rashtchi, mahnaz afzali 530 30 – the clock is fixed by . . . a. kayla. c. hector. b. hector and kayla. d. none of them. appendix b questionnaire the following questionnaire is about the spoken grammar you have been taught, and your listening course. remember there are no right or wrong answers. just answer as accurately as possible. show your agreement or disagreement with each sentence by marking one letter. a = strongly agree b = agree c = unsure d = disagree e= strongly disagree a b c d e 1 i want to be able to comprehend what a native speaker uses in real-life conversation. 2 the aim of the course was clear from the very beginning. 3 i have realized i don’t need to use all the words in a spoken english phrase. 4 the tasks done in the course contributed to my understanding of the course material. 5 the course helped me understand the spoken grammar. 6 it was not interesting to find out how native speakers speak to each other. 7 i was interested in the spoken grammar as a result of the course. 8 by the end of the semester, the aim of the course had been achieved. 9 the course materials were useful. 10 the number of tasks done was appropriate. 11 now i know the difference between spoken and written grammar. 12 the course helped me to develop the ability to plan my own work. 13 i have never been made aware of the characteristics of informal spoken english. 14 as a result of my course, i feel more confident than before to face native speakers. 15 the instructor motivated me to do my best work. 16 it is useful to know ellipsis and vague language and to perceive its meaning. 17 i was satisfied with my performance in the course. 18 the dialogues we listened to did not conform to some written grammar rules. 19 the degree of difficulty of the materials was appropriate. 20 the course taught me how to listen. 21 i enjoyed the tasks. 22 i want to learn the informal grammar rules that native speakers use when they speak to each other. 23 if the course continues, i will sign up for it in the future. 24 the amount of material covered was appropriate. 25 being aware of spoken grammar, now i can better comprehend the conversations. 26 i don't think this approach affected the way i listened. 27 the tasks were discussed and corrected in a satisfactory way. 28 the spoken grammar was less complex than written grammar. 29 the overall effectiveness of this course was high. 30 the tasks made me notice the spoken grammar features. other comments: spoken grammar awareness raising: does it affect the listening ability of iranian efl learners? 531 appendix c spoken grammar features ellipsis interjections changed tenses: present tense/past tense this and these; a, an, and some vague language and modifiers: i guess/i think, kind of/sort of, a little/ . . . insert though discourse marker now discourse markers you know?; you know what i mean?; . . ., though; i know what you mean, but . . . question statements and response elicitors huh and right summarizing response forms all right, insert just overtures (long expressions) used for organizing repetition through synonyms or opposites overtures used to refer to shared experience reported speech: using the past continuous with reporting verbs overtures used to relate a point/agree with another speaker/. . . overtures used to introduce appendix d samples of spoken grammar noticing tasks rewrite the conversation with complete sentences. a: need this screwdriver? here. ----do you need this screwdriver? here it is. b: thanks. can’t get this shelf off the wall. ----thanks. i can’t get this shelf off the wall. a: want me to try? ----do you want me to try? b: thanks. sure you got time? ----thanks. are you sure you’ve got time? put the brackets round any words you think might not be necessary in informal spoken language and compare your answers with your partner. kayla: hi, there [it is] . . . ooh! [do you] want some help? hector: sure. just take that end. [have you] got it? kayla: yeah. [i] think so. oops! wait a second. 229 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (2). 2015. 229-249 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.2.3 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl an investigation of the self-related concepts and foreign language motivation of young deaf1 and hard-of-hearing learners in hungary kata csizér eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary weinkata@yahoo.com edit h. kontra eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary kontra.h.edit@btk.elte.hu katalin piniel eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary brozik-piniel.katalin@btk.elte.hu abstract in recent years increased attention has been given in applied linguistics to the learning processes of various groups of special needs (sn) students, especially to those whose achievement is impeded by dyslexia or other learning difficulties. however, students with sensory impairment, particularly those who are deaf or severely hard of hearing (hoh), seem to have remained on the periphery of second language acquisition (sla) research although they constitute a highly interesting group both from a linguistic as well as a cultural point of view. since the best approach to understanding how this special minority handles foreign language learning is by first exploring their so-called individual 1 deaf, spelled with a capital d, is used in the literature to denote people who share a sign language as well as distinct cultural values and consider themselves a linguistic and cultural minority, as opposed to deaf, spelled with a lowercase d, which refers to the audiological condition, that is, a disability. kata csizér, edit h. kontra, katalin piniel 230 differences, a nationwide research project was launched in hungary to investigate students’ language learning beliefs, motivation, strategy use and motivated learning behavior. as part of that project, the present paper intends to detail how self-related concepts of hearing impaired students at eight different sn schools can be described. in order to gain an in-depth understanding, a mixed-method research design was employed. first, a barrier-free instrument was used to measure learner variables among 105 14-19-year-old deaf and hoh learners. then 31 individual interviews were conducted with selected students using maximum variety sampling. the quantitative data indicate that deaf and hoh (d/hh) learners lack pronounced, well-developed and detailed future ideal l2 selves and corresponding visions to guide their learning. another important finding is the paramount importance of language learning experience for our d/hh participants. based on the analysis of the qualitative data, we can conclude that students’ language learning experiences are largely shaped by the choice of language used as the medium of education, the intensity and content of the english classes as well as how far students internalize extrinsic motives. keywords: deaf and hard-of-hearning students, second language learning, second language learning motivation 1. introduction it has long been acknowledged that learning a second language (l2) is not just another school subject but an inherent part of one’s identity formation (gardner, 1985); still, it is relatively recent that identityand self-related investigations have become truly mainstream in l2 motivational research (csizér & magid, 2014; dörnyei & ushioda, 2011; mercer & williams, 2014). the relationship between selves and l2 learning is of particular interest in the case of special needs learners for whom the acquisition of a first language (l1) might already be impeded by a variety of obstacles. one such group of students in hungary are deaf and severely hard-of-hearing learners, who are the center of our investigation and whose l1 and identity is a frequent topic of debate among linguists, educationalists and deaf activists (dotter, 2011; grosjean, 1992; skutnabb-kangas, 2008). there are two fundamentally different ways of looking at deafness (bartha, 2005; jokinen, 2000): from a medical-pathological point of view, the term denotes a deficit, deficiency or impairment which has severe consequences regarding the general cognitive development and the language acquisition of the concerned individuals (dotter, 2008; grosjean, 2001). those who adopt this view may see a patient in the hearing impaired student suffering not only from a severe or profound hearing loss but, among others, also from dysphasia, as a result of an investigation of the self-related concepts and foreign language motivation of young deaf. . . 231 which they cannot be expected to achieve much in foreign language (fl) learning and should perhaps be “steered away” from learning it (mole, mccoll, & vale, 2008, p. 5). according to the anthropological-cultural view, also shared by the international and local deaf communities, the lack of hearing should merely be considered a difference in perception, thinking and communication. deaf and severely hard-of-hearing people perceive the world and process information visually, and they prefer to communicate in sign languages, which are full-fledged, natural, visual-spatial languages with complex grammatical structures and extensive vocabulary (holcomb & payton, 1992). in this sense, deaf people constitute a linguistic and cultural minority with a deaf identity. the representatives of the socio-cultural approach to deafness (sometimes labelled as deafhood to indicate the difference in viewpoint, see for instance ladd, 2003) maintain that deaf people are capable of everything other than hearing and can learn to read, write and use fls if they are taught appropriately. if the education of deaf children is predominantly governed by the deficit approach, which was the case internationally until quite recently and still is in hungary, it can easily exert a negative effect on foreign language learners’ motivational self-system. therefore, the aim of the present investigation is to explore how identity-related issues along with other factors might contribute to or thwart inclination for foreign language learning for young deaf and severely hard-of-hearing individuals taking part in fl education in special needs schools. as no similar study has been conducted either in hungary or internationally, we believe that mapping the foreign language learning motivation of 14-19 year old learners with a severe or profound hearing loss can be of interest to specialists working in a wide variety of contexts. the results presented in this article form a part of a large-scale, 3-year research project sponsored by the hungarian scientific research fund (otkak105095). the investigation was designed to be a mixed-method and multi-perspective project including questionnaire and interview data from deaf and hardof-hearing pupils studying in specialized schools around the country as well as interviews with their teachers and school-principals (kontra, csizér, & piniel, 2015). the present article is the first publication that combines the results of the quantitative and qualitative student data. our main aim in this study is to describe these special needs students’ l2 motivational self-system with the help of the quantitative data and to explore how qualitative data can lead to a better understanding of issues related to self and identity. 2. background to our study it is clear that being able to communicate in a foreign language opens new opportunities in accessing information (especially through foreign language media), kata csizér, edit h. kontra, katalin piniel 232 being able to communicate with foreigners, and also in having better job opportunities. these possibilities should not only be the privilege of the majority but also of those who face difficulties in learning. in light of this, research into the psychology of language learners has been expanding to include learners that also have to cope with learning difficulties (e.g., dyslexic learners: kormos, 2013; and hearing impaired learners: kontra & csizér, 2013). recently, kormos (2014) has emphasized researchers’ role in investigating the psychology of language learners (their experiences, their motivations, etc.) who do not come from mainstream social and educational backgrounds. she argues that information from such studies can assist policy makers and classroom practitioners to cater for the special needs of these students, build their motivation and lead them to more positive language learning experiences. with our study, we hope to add to this perspective by exploring the motivation of hungarian deaf language learners. in this part of our paper, we will provide a brief summary of definitions pertaining to deafness as well as information on deaf education. next, a short introduction into self-related motivational research will be presented. 2.1. deaf people and deaf education according to the estimate of the world federation of the deaf the number of deaf individuals around the world is around 70 million (jokinen, 2000). reliable statistical figures concerning the exact number of deaf people in hungary do not exist, but officials of the hungarian association of the deaf and hard-of hearing estimate that there are approximately 40-60 thousand people with a severe or profound hearing loss in hungary, which makes the deaf community the third largest linguistic and cultural minority in the country (bartha, 2005). deaf communities are fundamentally different from any other linguistic and cultural minority as a result of the fact that approximately only 5%-10% of deaf children are born to deaf parents. these children can grow naturally into deaf culture and identity. they can also acquire their national sign language naturally in stages similar to those of hearing children developing speech (harris, 2010). the majority (90%-95%), in contrast, grow up in hearing families, which results in a number of consequences concerning the development of language and identity. jokinen2 (2000) argues that as soon as a child has been found to be deaf, sign language should be used with them to ensure fundamental language development. this, however, is not the case: 2 jokinen was president of the world federation of the deaf from 2003 to 2011. an investigation of the self-related concepts and foreign language motivation of young deaf. . . 233 instead, parents are advised not to use sign language, and to use speech which the deaf child can at best make minimal use of but mostly none at all . . . even for those deaf children who do get access to formal education, teaching given through the medium of a sign language is also very rare. (p. 206) jokinen (2000) also points out that “any foreign language should be taught via the mother tongue” (p. 206), but a key question is: what can be considered the mother tongue of the majority of children who are born without hearing or lose it in infancy before the development of speech? according to skutnabb-kangas (1994), the mother tongue of a person can be defined, among others, by internal identification, that is as the language the person identifies with, or by external identification, meaning it is the language the person is identified to be a native speaker of by others. a mismatch between the two can lead to conflict. educational systems that eliminate the use of national sign languages from deaf education and build on the spoken language of the majority society promote the development of a hearing identity without acknowledging the right of the individual to choose. hungarian deaf education is deeply rooted in the so-called oralist tradition (bartha, 2005; muzsnai, 1999; vasák, 2005). hungarian parents of children with a severe hearing loss are advised not to introduce sign language to the child but to use speech instead. consequently, most of these children grow up without an adequate amount of comprehensible input in any language, either spoken hungarian, the language of the majority society, or hungarian sign language (hsl), the natural first language of the deaf community. most children first encounter hsl in kindergarten, and they tend to learn it from their peers. muzsnai (1999) observes that children entering school do not have a solid language base either in hsl or in spoken hungarian. the special schools for hearing impaired children apply the auditory-verbal approach in teaching (csuhai, henger, mongyi, & perlusz, 2009). the current curriculum introduces hsl in grade 7 only for social-communicative purposes. although hsl was accepted as the official first language of deaf people in hungary on a legislative level (act 125/2009), schools have until 2017 to introduce bilingual education, that is, education through not only spoken hungarian but hsl as well. this will also apply to the teaching of foreign languages, which are currently also taught and learned via the auditory-verbal approach. 2.2. self-related motivational research despite the fact that research into l2 learning motivation has been developing for decades, it is relatively recent that self-related issues have become of mainstream interest (dörnyei & ushioda, 2009), and even more recent is the inclusion of educationally disadvantaged groups in motivation studies (kormos, kata csizér, edit h. kontra, katalin piniel 234 2014). l2 motivation is defined as students’ choice, effort and persistence related to the learning of l2s (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). this intended effort is linked not only to the ways students’ experience language learning but also to how they see themselves as present language learners and future language users, as well as how they view and to what extent they internalize the expectations of important others in their environment. one theory stands out as providing the initial motivation to research self-related issues: dörnyei’s l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2005, 2009). this theory states that students’ motivated learning behavior (i.e., how much effort they are willing to invest into language learning and how persistent they are) will be largely affected by three distinct variables: their ideal l2 self, that is, to what extent students can imagine themselves as highly proficient users of the given foreign language; their oughtto l2 self, which describes what outside pressures students acknowledge throughout the learning process; and, finally, language learning experience, which influences attitudes towards the classroom processes (dörnyei, 2005, 2009; dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). the tripartite theory has received empirical support from a number of studies, for example dörnyei and ushioda (2009), who dedicated an edited volume to research supporting this theory. still, the treatment of the three variables seems to be somewhat uneven. it appears that the most important driving force regarding language learning motivation is students’ ideal l2 selves with notions related to their ought-to selves being internalized to varying degrees; language learning experience, however, remains somewhat in the shadows: it is not clear how experience is linked to the selfvariables, and how it eventually shapes motivation. earlier studies on deaf foreign language learners in hungary have investigated a number of issues of which one of the most important is the use of sign language in teaching. a study of 331 deaf and hard-of-hearing adults revealed that, in the opinion of the investigated participants, positive learning experience is linked to sign language use in the classroom (kontra & csizér, 2013) as sign language is the easiest means of communication for deaf persons. this view is reiterated in the first phase of the present investigation for deaf and hard-ofhearing students, as deaf learners think that intake, process and output is easier when information is conveyed through hsl (kontra, csizér, & piniel, 2015). no previous hungarian studies have systematically researched self and identity-related issues of deaf and hard-of-hearing foreign language learners within a single theoretical framework. hence, for the present study, we formulated the following research question: how can the components of l2 motivational self-system be described for deaf and severely hard-of-hearing foreign language learners in special needs schools? an investigation of the self-related concepts and foreign language motivation of young deaf. . . 235 3. method our study was designed to be a mixed-method investigation, in which the quantitative/questionnaire study preceded the qualitative/interview phase. this was thought be advantageous for the purpose of the present investigation because based on earlier quantitative/qualitative studies of various deaf and hard-ofhearing participants we had enough input for designing and validating the questionnaire (piniel, csizér, & kontra, 2014), while data from the questionnaire study provided selection information on participants in the qualitative phase. 3.1. participants the study was conducted in the seven primary schools (year 1 to year 8) specializing in deaf education in different regions of hungary and the only secondary vocational school with specialized classes for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. currently in special primary schools for the deaf and hard-of-hearing children in hungary, the first two years are preparatory years with a heavy focus on speech and language therapy. this means that children enter school at around age 6, and after completing the first two preparatory years, around the age of 8, students move on to the first grade (kontráné hegybíró, 2010). in seven out of the eight schools, our participants were taking english as foreign language, and in one they were learning german. one hundred five deaf and severely hard-ofhearing (from here on: d/hh) students participated in the questionnaire study. they were between 14-19 years of age, and all of them were taking classes in english or german at the time of data collection. as nine questionnaires contained too much missing data they were excluded from subsequent analysis. therefore, the final sample consisted of 96 learners. there is an equal ratio of gender in the sample: 48 girls and 48 boys. in terms of their identity, 41 regard themselves as deaf and 54 as hard-of-hearing (there was one student whose data is missing). another important piece of information is that there are only 6 students whose parents are deaf; all of the other participants were born into hearing families. hence, in terms of hsl, 6 participants had a chance to learn it at home as an l1, but the majority of our participants learnt it at school either from friends or from hsl teachers. seventy-eight (81%) participants claimed to use hsl for communicating with friends and peers. the 31 interview participants were selected from the questionnaire sample. there were 17 boys and 15 girls. nineteen of them identified themselves as hardof-hearing individuals, while 12 claimed to be deaf. students were selected purposefully based on their responses to the questionnaire as well as on information provided by their language teachers, as we intended to have participants whose kata csizér, edit h. kontra, katalin piniel 236 communicative skills were judged adequate for taking part in an interview. participation was voluntary and permission was sought from both schools and parents. 3.2. instruments for this mixed-method study we used two instruments. first, we collected data with a piloted questionnaire tapping into various individual difference variables. the questionnaire was made available for the participants in print as well as in hsl. (for the pilot study see piniel, csizér, & kontra, 2014.) second, we developed an interview schedule with the help of which we taped interviews: the topics covered were similar to those included in the questionnaire and investigated students’ views on issues related to individual differences in language learning. the original questionnaire consisted of 41 5-point likert-scale items organized into 11 constructs complemented with biographical questions (piniel, csizér, & kontra, 2014). the constructs used in the present article are as follows: 1. motivated learning behavior (mlb, 3 items): the amount effort learners intend to invest into language learning (sample item: “i prepare a lot for the english classes”), with a reliability coefficient of α = .76; 2. ideal l2 self (il2s, 3 items): in what ways students imagine themselves as future language learners and users (sample item: “i will be able to communicate well in english in a couple of years”), with a reliability coefficient of α = .67; 3. ought-to l2 self (ol2s, 5 items): students’ views on the perceived expectations of others related to l2 learning and use (e.g., “nowadays, english is important for everyone”), with a reliability coefficient of α = .73; 4. language learning experience (lle, 3 items): in what ways students have experienced l2 learning (sample item: “i like the english classes”), with a reliability coefficient of α = .71. the interview schedule was designed in a semi-structured format, and it included five main topics: 1. students’ views on the importance of learning a l2; 2. students’ beliefs about english/german as a foreign language and about learning it; 3. learning modality: students’ experience regarding the use of different communication channels in l2 learning (oral and written communication and/or sign language); an investigation of the self-related concepts and foreign language motivation of young deaf. . . 237 4. students’ motivated learning behavior (intended effort) and their use of learning strategies; 5. students’ language learning goals and their ideal l2 selves (how they see themselves in the future as l2 users). 4. data procedures and analysis questionnaire data was collected in the 2012/2013 school year. participation was anonymous. after seeking the consent of the principal and the parents at each school, we administered the questionnaire with the support and help of the local language teachers either during class time or immediately after the last lesson of the day. in each case a researcher was present. after a brief introduction, a printed questionnaire was distributed among participants and a timed video recording of the questionnaire’s items in hsl was played. the students watched each item in hsl and were provided adequate time to then read the statements and record their responses. the administration of the questionnaire took approximately 30 minutes. procedures concerning the interviews included anonymous and voluntary participation in the 2013/2014 school year. each interview was conducted with the help of a sign language interpreter, who translated the spoken questions of the researcher into hsl and the signed responses of the participants into spoken hungarian. students frequently used a mixed code, and one student chose to give the complete interview in spoken hungarian. each conversation was audio recorded and also videotaped in order to help transcription. the interviews typically lasted 30 minutes. the data analysis presented here has been done in two steps. first, we analyzed quantitative data with the help of spss 17.0. both descriptive and multivariate analyses were included. second, a research assistant transcribed the interviews and checked the accuracy of the sign language interpretation. the transcripts were then submitted to analysis in maxqda. data-coding in the qualitative part was done separately by two researchers, and results were compared and discussed to obtain the final coding. in the results section, each quote from the interviews is assigned a code consisting of the self identification of the student as d (deaf) or hh (hard-of-hearing), the alphabetical code of the school, the grade level, and the location of the text in the transcript. 5. results and discussion 5.1. descriptive statistics of the scales as a first step of the analysis, the descriptive statistical results concerning the components of dörnyei’s l2 motivational self system were calculated, as shown kata csizér, edit h. kontra, katalin piniel 238 in table 1, second column. the results indicate that our deaf and hard-of-hearing participants’ motivated learning behavior is around medium level (m = 3.70), and both the self-related components as well as their experience show similar endorsements. it seems that these special needs students invest some energy into language learning, but this level cannot be characterized as particularly high. taking into account the possible difficulties they might be facing, these results cannot be seen as really surprising. interestingly enough, the picture becomes somewhat more complex if we contrast the mean values with data coming from other hungarian studies with similar teenage learners (csizér & lukács, 2010; galántai & csizér, 2009; kormos & csizér, 2008, 2010; piniel & csizér, 2013). despite the fact that these results cannot be directly compared using statistical techniques, it turns out that the mean values of the present dataset represent general trends for similar age groups concerning their tempered enthusiasm for foreign language learning: the mean values of motivated learning behavior are between 3.50 and 4.21 and the scales measuring language learning experience fail to reach 4.00 on a 5-point likert scale. the results related to oughtto selves are even lower: between 3.30 and 3.45. there is, however, one striking difference, that is, the mean values related to students’ ideal l2 selves. deaf and hard-of-hearing students seem to score lower than any other student group without special needs but score similarly to another special needs group, namely, dyslexic language learners. as research into l2 motivation in recent years has clearly established that the role of the ideal l2 self is of central importance in successful l2 learning in the long run (dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014), these results give cause for concern. it seems that many of these deaf and severely hard-of-hearing teenagers do not have future visions of themselves as language learners and this lack of their ideal l2 selves might hinder the learning process. another important result that needs to be pinpointed here is the relatively high mean value of language learning experience (m = 3.72). it seems that students seem to like english/german classes, which reinforces the findings from other research studies that deaf individuals have, generally speaking, positive attitudes towards foreign language learning (kontráné hegybíró, 2010). in order to further analyze and contrast our results, we have run regression analysis with motivated learning behavior set as a dependent scale and the three components of l2 motivational self system as independent constructs. the results are detailed in table 2. again, despite the fact that the figures are not comparable statistically, there are a number of interesting results to be noted. first, we have to acknowledge that the explanatory power (r2) of the regression equation models presented numerically in table 2 is highest for the present study. this not only provides further validation for the importance of self-related concepts for special needs students but also underlines the fact that an investigation of the self-related concepts and foreign language motivation of young deaf. . . 239 these students use similar mental schemata to appraise english/german and foreign language learning. second, although all three components contribute significantly to motivated learning behavior, that is, the amount of effort students are willing to invest into language learning, there are differences in the strengths of this contribution. as for the ideal l2 self, we cannot fail to note that the beta value is the lowest for our d/hh participants. this is in line with the descriptive finding: a low score there indicated that students do not seem to have sufficiently developed ideal l2 selves. the significant but low beta value here gives support to our argument that a more detailed and concrete ideal l2 self could and should be part of d/hh students’ identity, or, in other words, the low mean value in table 1 does not indicate lack of importance but lack of presence. table 1 the mean (and standard deviation) values of the components of the l2 motivational self-system measured on 5-point scales scale present study study 1 study 2 non-dys study 2 dys study 3 study 4 study 5 mlb 3.70 (0.95) 3.50 (0.76) 3.82 (0.80) 3.50 (1.0) 4.10 (0.68) 4.21 (0.77) 3.80 (0.75) il2s 3.55 (0.82) 4.30 (0.69) 4.16 (0.83) 3.66 (1.14) 4.43 (0.65) 4.23 (0.76) 4.39 (0.60) ol2s 3.36 (0.80) n.r. n.m. n.m. 3.45 (0.75) n.r. 3.38 (0.71) lle 3.72 (0.94) 3.39 (0.99) 3.18 (0.93) 3.26 (0.90) 3.77 (0.80) 3.29 (0.91) 3.16 (0.98) notes. mlb = motivated learning behavior, il2s = ideal l2 self, ol2s = ought-to l2 self, lle = language learning experience n.r. = not reliable, n.m. = not measured study 1 = kormos & csizér (2008) study 2 = kormos & csizér (2010; this study contained two subsamples for learners of english with and without diagnosed dyslexia [non-dys and dys in the table]) study 3 = galántai & csizér (2009) study 4 = csizér & lukács (2010) study 5 = piniel & csizér (2013) table 2 regression analysis of components of l2 motivational self system with motivated learning behavior as the dependent scale with beta values and significance scale present study study 3 study 5 il2s .16* .26* .48* ol2s .23* .18* .22* lle .61* .50* .21* r2 .72* .54* .50* notes. study 3 = galántai & csizér (2009) study 5 = piniel & csizér (2013) * indicates significance at .05 level in the case of the ought-to l2 self, the picture is even and clear: there are no differences as to what extent outside expectations contribute to students’ intended effort in language learning. the values related to the ought-to l2 self kata csizér, edit h. kontra, katalin piniel 240 in the studies are all significant but not particularly high. this can be put down to several reasons. one can argue that teenage learners might want to downplay the importance of external values or expectations. another hypothetical explanation might be that students are not sure what outside expectations they should meet. unfortunately, these propositions cannot be verified or falsified with our current data set. at this point they remain hypotheses and point to the need for further investigations. last but not least, the role of language learning experience tends to vary from context to context. again, further research is needed to find out the reasons behind this variation, but we would like to argue that it relates to issues connected to teaching practices in the various schools. as for our d/hh language learners, language learning experiences are the most important components of the l2 motivational self system. this means that the quality of teaching carries increasing importance for special needs students in general and d/hh learners in particular. based on the above quantitative data analysis, we have two important conclusions. first, the role of language learning experience seems to be of utmost importance for d/hh students: despite possible difficulties, students do not dislike learning english/german, and language learning experience is the strongest predictor of motivated learning behavior for this group of students. second, the impact of the ideal l2 self is lower than for other, nonspecial needs students, which is in concert with a lower endorsement of the self-concept as well (i.e., we obtained lower mean values as well as a low but significant beta value in the regression analysis). thus, in the next part of our analysis, we will present our qualitative results in connection with experience and self for deaf students. first, we will describe and discuss how they speak about their future selves and what kind of plans they have in connection with english/german. second, we will look into issues that can be linked to their learning experience. 5.2. results from the interview study 5.2.1. ideal l2 self as the quantitative results indicated a relatively low level of students’ ideal l2 self, first we will look at how students expressed their views concerning their future selves and language use. in the 31 interviews, we coded 106 segments in which students talked about how they imagine themselves and their future concerning learning and using the english or german language. only a small number of students rejected the idea of continuing the learning of a fl in the near future, expressing direct refusal to continue with their language studies in the future either because they did not think they would need fl skills or because they had difficulties an investigation of the self-related concepts and foreign language motivation of young deaf. . . 241 in learning languages. the following excerpt expresses such a negative view from an 8th grade student who otherwise considers fls important (this and all other excerpts are presented in the authors’ translation; the coding indicates: i = interviewer, st = student, f25 = the id number of the student, d = deaf, hh = hard-of-hearing, gr. = grade, the final numerical data are line numbers from where the quote is taken): i: when you finish your studies at this school, do you think you will continue learning english? st: well, i don’t think so. not for sure. i: why not? st: because it’s difficult. if i had to take an exam, that would cause difficulties. i: is english important to you? st: yes, it is important. i: why is it important? st: if i had to go abroad for work, i would have to speak english. but english is difficult for me. (f25, d, gr. 8, 23-30) a few participants showed indecisiveness concerning their future plans, and they responded with a simple i don’t know to all attempts of the interviewer at eliciting some information. some of them also mentioned that without formal training they would surely forget everything in the future. those students who envisage learning english or german in the near future almost invariably consider doing it as part of their studies in secondary education, and only a few of them imagine improving their language skills via selfstudy with the help of books or the internet: i: how long will you continue learning english? st: as long as i live. i need to gain experience. i: how do you think you will continue learning english? st: i’m sure it will be difficult. i’ll learn from books or with the help of a translator program, something like that. (a6, d, gr.11, 30-33) other options, such as trying to find a language school where they might admit d/hh students or hiring a private tutor who knows how to teach d/hh learners was not mentioned by any of the participants, which might be partly due to the low or relatively low socio-economic status of the students’ families, but it is also possible that students had not seriously thought about this issue and considered their possibilities before the interview. if they had discussed this issue with experienced d/hh adults, they might have lamented that the out-ofschool possibilities readily available to their hearing peers are rarely offered to d/hh persons (cf. kontra, 2013). no wonder that quite a few students said they had no idea where and how they would continue learning fls: kata csizér, edit h. kontra, katalin piniel 242 st: i’d like to continue learning english. i: and where would you like to do that? how would you like to do it? st: well, that i don’t know. i: how do you imagine it? st: i don’t know. (a7, d, gr. 8, 227-231) one of the hh girls expressed her worries about continuing her english studies in secondary school together with hearing peers: st: well, i like english, i know it is important for my future studies, but as far as the matura exam [school-leaving exam] goes, i do not think i will take the matura exam in it, because it is not easy in secondary school, and i didn’t attended a regular primary school, i attend a special needs school, and i do not know, in a different school, there they speak a lot and maybe i will not understand . . . (e20, hh, gr.8, 102) it is clear from this extract that the student is not worried about her own language learning abilities. her concern stems from the disadvantaged situation of special needs learners in integrated settings, where teaching and testing are both designed for hearing students’ needs, and the special needs learner is expected to cope with the requirements or ask for an exemption. it is reassuring to see that, on average, every participant mentioned something regarding the role of fls in their future lives, but further analysis of these segments shows that the views they expressed about themselves are not very detailed or varied. there is, however, one strong part of students’ future self-image: international travel. we have found more than 20 instances where students spoke about wanting to learn english/german because they plan to travel or work abroad. some of the students were able to specify the kind of job they would like to do abroad and for which they would need fl skills, such as being a cook in austria, a butcher in germany, a painter and decorator in italy, or working with computers in england, sweden or just simply “abroad.” one of the students even mentioned that she had heard of a “deaf” university in the usa and was thinking of perhaps studying there in the future. there were participants who mentioned the school-leaving examination as part of their future self-image. some mentioned being able to communicate more easily with english in the world or simply said that a person could have an easier life if they spoke english. it seems that this is the component of students’ selves that could be best utilized to develop their future self-image and vision (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). as regards the importance of knowing fls, especially english, there seems to be quite a strong awareness of this in several of the participants, especially in those in the upper grades. for instance, one of the boys in a 6th grade class hopes to become a footballer and insisted in the interview that footballers did not need to know english. on the other hand, an 11th grader emphasized that an investigation of the self-related concepts and foreign language motivation of young deaf. . . 243 english was a world language that everybody should want to learn: “this (i.e., english) is a world language. they should know it. so it is important. german and english. i think everyone should know it. i just don’t get it why they do not want to learn it” (h31, s, gr. 11, 49). for another student, the need for english is also self-evident. when asked if she would be using the english that she has learned when she becomes an adult, she replied: “of course. how else would i communicate with foreigners? in english!” (a7, d, gr. 8, 216-221). it is well known from previous studies (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011) that the milieu, the immediate surroundings of the learner exert an important influence on how they see themselves in the future and how much importance they attribute to the learning of fls. students who have a parent either working or planning to work abroad tend to consider fl skills as a natural part of their future selves, and the same can be said about students who have friends or acquaintances abroad as, for example, the following boy: “i first started to learn english with the help of a dictionary, and then my mother helped me, and then my mother knows someone in canada, nn, and i usually skype with him” (f24, hh, gr7, 17). there are, however, boys and girls among our participants who do not get much encouragement from home for studying fls: st: in my family nobody learns english because they are hearing impaired, too. i: so you feel that hearing impaired people do not need english? st: well, i think i don’t. (a4, hh, gr. 10, 183-186) this does not mean that the family would directly discourage the child from learning fls; they simply do not provide a positive model and cannot help in doing the homework or finding out-of-school language learning opportunities. 5.2.2. language learning experience data concerning language learning experiences are detailed in table 3. our results indicate several issues. first, it is not very reassuring to see that learning difficulties have the highest number of coded segments. interview data reveal that the most often mentioned difficulties relate to learning new words and expressions (15), oral communication and pronunciation (17), and the length of words, sentences and texts as well as reading comprehension (10). one participant expressed wordrelated difficulties really poignantly: [it is difficult] “if they say words in english that i don’t even know in hungarian” (a6, d, gr. 11, 59). it seems that grammar (5) and testing (2) pose less difficulty, although one student elaborated on how tests have become increasingly difficult: “in 9th and 10th grade we had tests suitable for deaf learners. now in grade 11, all the tests are for hearing students; therefore, it is more difficult, and i have to study more to reach the [appropriate] level” (h30, kata csizér, edit h. kontra, katalin piniel 244 d, gr. 11, 139). we consider sign language use in class as an important part of students’ language learning experiences. these results reflect the fact that sign language is not the medium of teaching for these students, but that they learn english mainly through spoken hungarian. more than one student communicated that they use hsl because they are deaf, but this sign language use is mostly limited to students’ helping one another in class (29), predominantly when new and difficult words have to be learnt: “if there is a strange word then we try to sign it” (g27, hh, gr. 7, 156). this is general practice because, as one student put it, “i will learn and memorize it much quicker if i use sign language” (f26, hh, gr. 7, 101). one difficulty in using sign language at school is the diminishing number of deaf students in specialized schools, as integration is prevalent. the next quote about translating from english to hsl illustrates this: i: do you translate [the text] to hsl in your head? st: i used to. but not anymore. . . . i: why not? st: because i cannot use hsl really well. i: don’t you practice hsl with anyone? st: no. there are too few hearing impaired students in our school. (c13, hh, gr 8, 242-247) when students have to ask questions, very few of them claimed that they use hsl together with spoken hungarian (7 coded segments). this is no surprise as there were only two teachers in our sample who were proficient users of hsl. this lack of hsl on the teachers’ part was explained by one student as “teachers help by speaking. they are not allowed to sign because our head teacher says that we shouldn’t use hsl, only speaking is allowed” (c13, hh, gr 8, 13/69). table 3 emerging themes and number of coded segments linked to language learning experience emerging themes number of coded segments learning difficulties 68 students’ use of hsl in language learning 54 achievement and grades 53 teacher’s sign language use 51 learning intensity 31 learning modality 18 analyzing teachers’ sign language use is less straightforward as more students were interviewed from each class; therefore, they individually formed an opinion on their teachers. hence, the number of coded segments often relates only to a single teacher. to be precise, we have found 19 coded segments of teacher an investigation of the self-related concepts and foreign language motivation of young deaf. . . 245 sign language use, but this relates to 3 teachers in our sample. in addition, where sign language was not part of teaching, it was very difficult to make students comment on this use. still, many students claimed that it is important and useful for the teacher to use hsl while teaching (12 coded segments). an illustrative exchange follows: i: is it important [for the teacher] to be able to sign? st: yes. i: why? st: because i am deaf and it is needed for communication. (f25, d, gr. 8, 71-74) comments related to learning modality were not very frequent in the interviews (18 coded segments). one reason behind this is that audio-verbal teaching is widespread in hungary (csuhai et al., 2009), and this cannot be challenged by students. as a result of this, the majority of these comments (14 altogether) relate to speaking as a channel of communication in general and good pronunciation in particular, which often cause problems for students as more than one of them said that speaking and pronunciation skills are difficult to master. 6. conclusion to conclude our paper, there are a number of interesting points to be summarized. first, the most revealing identity-related issue concerns our participants’ ideal l2 selves. despite the fact that they know that learning foreign languages is important and they have generally positive attitudes towards learning as well as some future plans, what they lack is pronounced, well-developed and detailed future ideal l2 selves and corresponding visions to guide their learning. this might be related to their difficulties in relation to language learning in general and the lack of sign language use in learning in particular. in our view, teachers’ role would be crucial in intervention and helping students develop not only realistic expectations about themselves but also building and including motivating future visions into their learning. another important finding to reiterate is the paramount importance of language learning experience for our d/hh participants. as the learning process is fraught with difficulties for this special needs learner group, again the role of the teachers cannot be overestimated. a somewhat reassuring point is that despite the fact that students encounter numerous difficulties, they do not express negative attitudes towards language learning in general; foreign language teachers can build on these positive attitudes to help experience foreign language learning in a positive way. kata csizér, edit h. kontra, katalin piniel 246 there is much further work to be done in connection with future research. first, the intervention studies developing d/hh ideal l2 selves could be designed. second, we have not discussed students’ ought-to l2 selves in great detail in this study as we feel that we need to collect more quantitative as well as qualitative data to investigate how and in what ways students’ experiences are related to their ought-to l2 selves. third, observation studies could complement the picture in order to find out how various selves and experiences shape classroom learning. an investigation of the self-related concepts and foreign language motivation of young deaf. . . 247 references bartha, c. 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(2008). bilingual education and sign language as the mother tongue of deaf children. in c. j. kellett bidoli & e. ochse (eds.), english in international deaf communication (pp. 75-94). bern: peter lang. vasák, i. (2005). a világ siket szemmel. [the world in the eyes of deaf people]. budapest: fogyatékosok esélye közalapítvány. 607 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (4). 2019. 607-631 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.4.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt patterns of uptake and repair following recasts and prompts in an efl context: does feedback explicitness play a role? reza shirani university of victoria, canada https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4746-7719 rezashirani70@gmail.com abstract this study sought to examine the effectiveness of two categories of feedback, namely recasts and prompts. also, the study focused on the relationship between subsets of each feedback type and the extent to which they led to learner uptake and repair in an efl context. data were collected through non-participant observations of three intact upper-intermediate efl classes where 36 hours of interactions among 59 students and three teachers were audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed in terms of pre-specified coding systems that addressed four different subtypes of prompts – clarification requests, repetitions, elicitations, and metalinguistic clues – and two recast subtypes – explicit and implicit recasts. data analysis showed that among prompts, clarification requests led to the highest percentage of uptake whereas elicitations were associated with the highest repair percentage. as for recasts, more explicit ones led to higher percentages of uptake and repair. the results of the study may contribute to a more in-depth understanding of the patterns of uptake and repair in an efl context. the study confirms the role of feedback explicitness in such a context. keywords: corrective feedback; prompts; recasts; repair; uptake reza shirani 608 1. introduction recently, classroom interaction has been a major research topic due to its important role in language learning. interaction provides learners with opportunities to receive input and generate output as they attend to linguistic form and negotiate for meaning. whereas some underscored the role of comprehensible input as the only necessary source of language learning (e.g., krashen, 1982; schwartz, 1993; truscott, 1996), there was a growing consensus among other researchers that input is not sufficient by itself if learners are to achieve favorable mastery of an l2 (e.g., lightbown & spada, 1990; long, 1996; mackey, 2012; norris & ortega, 2000). most of these researchers have shown that, besides receiving input, learners need to produce output and receive feedback when necessary. defined as feedback on erroneous language production, corrective feedback (cf) is a focus-on-form (fonf) technique that draws learners’ attention to linguistic forms and features (nassaji & fotos, 2011). cf falls into four broad categories of prompts, recasts, explicit feedback, and direct correction. nicholas, lightbown, and spada (2001) define recasts as “utterances that repeat a learner’s incorrect utterance, making only the changes necessary to produce a correct utterance, without changing the meaning” (p. 733). prompts, on the other hand, are elicitation strategies which “withhold correct forms (and other signs of approval) and instead offer learners an opportunity to self-repair by generating their own modified response” (lyster, 2004, p. 405). to assess the effectiveness of cf, it has been suggested that researchers consider learner uptake, “a student’s utterance that immediately follows the teachers’ feedback and that constitutes a reaction in some way to the teachers’ intention to draw attention to some aspects of the student’s initial utterance” (lyster & ranta 1997, p. 49). uptake then may be either successful or unsuccessful. to date, many studies (e.g., ellis, basturkmen, & loewen 2001; fu & nassaji, 2016; llinares & lyster 2014; lyster & ranta, 1997; panova & lyster, 2002) have explored the relationship between different types of cf and learner uptake. however, further research is needed to examine the relationship between implicit and explicit feedback types and learner uptake and repair in a foreign language (fl) context, where the provision of appropriate types of cf is of vital importance. therefore, this study aimed to investigate the patterns of uptake and repair following implicit and explicit recasts and prompts in three fl classes. 2. recasts, prompts, and feedback explicitness to date, most of the previous studies (e.g., llinares & lyster, 2014; lyster & mori, 2006; lyster & ranta, 1997; panova & lyster, 2002) have considered recasts a patterns of uptake and repair following recasts and prompts in an efl context: does feedback. . . 609 single implicit feedback type. some other studies (erlam & loewen, 2010; nassaji, 2007; sheen, 2006), however, have demonstrated that recasts fall on a continuum of explicitness, depending on their features. on the whole, the following features have been found to influence the explicitness of recasts: · prosodic emphasis: if a recast is provided with added intonational emphasis, it will be less implicit and therefore more salient to the learner (e.g., nassaji, 2007). · length: shorter recasts are more explicit than longer ones because they focus on the part of the utterance that contains the error (e.g., sheen, 2006). · intensity of focus: recasts provided intensively on a particular linguistic form are generally more explicit than the ones given extensively on any random form (e.g., erlam & loewen, 2010). · number of feedback moves: recasts accompanied by a second feedback move become more salient to the learner (e.g., erlam & loewen, 2010; sheen, 2006). moreover, a controversial feature that may affect the explicitness of recasts is whether they are declarative or interrogative. whereas some (e.g., loewen & philp, 2006; sheen, 2006) have provided evidence that recasts with declarative intonation are more salient and thus more explicit, others have argued the opposite (e.g., nassaji & fotos, 2011). all in all, previous research has shown that not all recasts are implicit. on the other hand, according to lyster (2004), clarification requests, repetitions, metalinguistic clues and elicitations are the four types of cf that are classified as prompts, in that they push or prompt the learner to self-correct. theoretically, prompts are believed to be highly effective as they provide negative feedback, draw learners’ attention to form, and provoke self-repair. prompts can, for example, lead to noticing the hole (i.e., when learners realize that they are not able to generate the output they desire to [swain, 1993]). moreover, swain (2005) posited that prompts can result in noticing the gap (i.e., when learners discern the differences between their interlanguage and the target language). although it is generally suggested that both recasts and prompts contribute to l2 acquisition, there is controversy over which type can contribute more. 3. previous studies many experimental and descriptive studies have investigated the efficacy of cf. however, because the main focus of the current study is on the relationship between feedback and uptake, only the previous studies on uptake are reviewed here. a widely-cited observational study into cf by lyster and ranta (1997) investigated the frequency of cf types and uptake in four elementary french immersion reza shirani 610 classes and reported that recasts were the most frequent type (55%) whereas elicitations (14%), clarification requests (11%), metalinguistic feedback (8%), and repetitions (5%) occurred less frequently. also, it was found that prompts led to more uptake and repair vis-à-vis recasts. however, the repair percentage of recasts (18%) was calculated according to the overall number of recasts and not based on the total number of uptake moves succeeding those recasts. clearly, not all recasts did lead to uptake in their observation. as noted by oliver (1995), uptake opportunity has a decisive effect on the number of uptake moves. uptake opportunity was not, however, considered in the above study. panova and lyster’s (2002) study also explored cf and uptake patterns in an l2 classroom setting and found similar results to those obtained by lyster and ranta (1997). analyzing 10 hours of interaction, they observed that although recasts occurred more frequently than other kinds of feedback, they led to fewer uptake moves (40%) and repair (13%) than prompts. ellis et al. (2001) conducted another study into feedback, uptake, and repair in an english as a second language (esl) context and also found that recasts were the most dominant type of feedback, but in contrast to lyster and ranta (1997), ellis et al. (2001) discovered that recasts could be highly facilitative as they led to a great deal of uptake (71.6%) and repair (76.3%). unlike lyster and ranta, ellis et al. computed the percentage of repair based on the total number of uptake moves following recasts, and not according to the overall number of recasts. nassaji’s (2007) study also examined whether uptake and repair can be influenced by how a feedback type is provided. forty-two esl learners were randomly paired up with a teacher and engaged in task based interactions in which they received cf in different ways. six types of recasts and five subtypes of elicitations were identified and coded on the basis of the extent to which they were accompanied by certain signals that could make the feedback more salient. the analyses revealed that whenever a feedback move was provided more explicitly, learners were more likely to generate uptake with repair. loewen and philp (2006), too, reported that the degree to which recasts are accompanied by explicit features can have a positive influence on uptake and repair. in another study, lyster and mori (2006) compared recasts and prompts in french immersion (fi) and japanese immersion (ji) classes. first, they examined the relationship between different types of feedback and learner uptake and repair in each context. second, they compared the overall communicative orientation of the two contexts. as for the first comparison, in the fi context, prompts resulted in higher percentages of uptake (62%) and repair (53%) whereas in the ji context, recasts were found to be more effective (61% uptake; 68% repair). as for the second comparison, the ji context demonstrated some extent of form-focused orientation, which was not observed in the fi context. patterns of uptake and repair following recasts and prompts in an efl context: does feedback. . . 611 more recently, llinares and lyster’s (2014) study of feedback and uptake across content and language integrated learning (clil), french immersion (fi), and japanese immersion (ji) instructional settings revealed that teachers applied prompts and recasts at a similar rate in all three instructional settings, with recasts being the most dominant type of feedback. moreover, whereas recasts led to a higher percentage of repair (77%) in the clil setting, prompts resulted in more repair (53%) in the fi instructional setting. fu and nassaji’s (2016) investigation of a chinese as a fl class also reported that recasts were the most prevalent type of feedback (56.5%). one intriguing inference from the findings of this study is that although recasts failed to lead to a large number of uptake moves (49.6%), whenever they did result in uptake, they led to a high number of repair moves. however, similar to lyster and ranta (1997), computations in this study were based on recasts-repair ratio, rather than uptake-repair ratio. as for prompts, clarification requests were found to lead to larger amounts of uptake (100%) and repair (66.7%) than other types of elicitation strategies. research into cf in relation to uptake patterns has reported conflicting findings. although most of the previous studies have, as discussed earlier, agreed on the higher frequency of recasts compared to prompts, they have revealed conflicting results with regard to which type may lead to more uptake and repair episodes, with some favoring prompts and some favoring recasts. moreover, most of the previous studies of cf and uptake (cf. sheen, 2006) have ignored how the explicitness and implicitness of prompt and recast subtypes may affect the patterns of uptake and repair in language classrooms. these studies (e.g., llinares & lyster, 2014; lyster and ranta, 1997; panova and lyster, 2002) have, for example, coded all of the recasts as one single type regardless of their explicitness or implicitness. yet, as discussed earlier, recasts may vary in terms of explicitness under the influence of certain factors such as intonation, the number of moves and length. finally, further research is needed to broaden the understanding of the nature of cf, its types, and patterns of uptake and repair in a fl context because, to date, the studies of cf in esl contexts have comprised a larger proportion of research than those in fl classrooms. in fl contexts, where the classroom may be the only place for learners to learn, use, and practice a foreign language (brown & lee, 2015), it is important for teachers and practitioners to provide the most efficient types of cf to facilitate learning. 4. this study in light of the need for further research, this study examined discourse patterns of uptake and repair following different types of prompts and recasts during interactions in three fl classrooms. also, a more specific aim of the study was to explore the reza shirani 612 effects of recasts that are more or less explicit. hence, this study addressed the following questions: 1. what is the frequency of recasts and prompts and their subtypes during classroom interactions in a fl context? 2. to what extent do recasts, prompts, and their subtypes lead to learner uptake in a fl context? 3. to what extent do recasts, prompts, and their subtypes lead to learner repair in a fl context? 5. method 5.1. participants participants were 59 students and three teachers from three intact upper-intermediate classes (class a: 25, class b: 16, class c: 18) at a language school in iran. all were present during the observations and audio recordings of the classes investigated in the study. the classes were true reflections of a fl context as all of the students shared the same linguistic background, farsi. also, none of them had ever stayed in an english-speaking country. the participants were placed in this level after passing oral and written tests at the end of the previous semester. with the exception of five students (three from class a; two from class c), who had just joined this language school after leaving another school, all other participants had been studying english for more than three years at the language school investigated in this study. finally, it should be noted that all of the participants were either university freshmen or school seniors who were going to improve their english skills. information about the students and teachers in each class is presented in table 1. table 1 participants of the study classes teachers students class a one 29 year-old male language teacher; spoke farsi as his native language; had obtained an overall score of 8.5 on the ielts academic module; had taught english for nine years; held an ma in applied linguistics. fifteen female and 10 male upperintermediate students; ranged in age from 16 to 19; had been learning english for three to four years. class b one 26 year-old male language teacher; spoke farsi as his native language; had obtained an overall score of 8 on the ielts academic module; had taught english for four years; held a ba in tefl. seven female and nine male upperintermediate students; ranged in age from 18 to 21; had been learning english for three to four years. class c one 31 year-old female language teacher; spoke farsi as her native language; had obtained an overall score of 8.5 on the ielts academic module; had taught english for seven years; held an ma in tefl. ten female and eight male upperintermediate students; ranged in age from 16 to 20; had been learning english for three to four years. patterns of uptake and repair following recasts and prompts in an efl context: does feedback. . . 613 5.2. context the efl classes in this study constituted 22 90-minute sessions in total, and they were held three days a week over approximately two months. the aim of these classes was to develop all linguistic skills of language learners with a primary emphasis on oral and aural abilities, and a secondary emphasis on writing and reading skills, within the communicative orientation of language teaching and learning. the language institute where the classes were observed expected the teachers to follow task-based teaching together with some form-focused instruction. to achieve this, in addition to employing teachers who were inspired by task-based and form-focused instruction, the institute held a number of instructional meetings and workshops in order for the teachers to stay au courant with the latest advances. over the course of such workshops, the teachers were encouraged to utilize adequate explicit instruction to make sure that together with the fluency of the learners, their accuracy also improves. aside from these training sessions, the teachers were observed and given feedback twice a year by a more experienced professional. also, every teacher was required to observe at least 630 minutes of two other teachers’ classes each year to maintain consistency in teaching methodology. the policy of following task-based and form-focused principles was also implemented by the teachers of the classes in this study. thus, although most of the time was spent on completing and working on meaning-focused tasks, at times, the teachers were observed to teach some of the linguistic features (especially l2 grammar) explicitly. the textbook used in these classes was american english file 4 (lathamkoenig & oxenden, 2014). this textbook is task-based in design with the majority of the tasks focusing on meaning. it also provides learners with opportunities for both dyadic and group interactions and with a decent deal of written and oral input. although the teachers used different tasks and activities (and sometimes different materials) from time to time, the basic teaching routine in these classes did not seem to change considerably during the study. it was observed that the teachers usually divided the class time into three main sections. the first 1520 minutes of the class was devoted to reviewing the major topics that were worked on during the previous session. this section involved asking learners questions related to the linguistic features that were taught before. for instance, to check that conditionals had been learned, students were asked questions such as “what would you buy if you had one million dollars?,” “where will you go tonight if the weather is good?” and so on. when a student failed to provide a targetlike answer, the teachers usually provided cf. reza shirani 614 during the next 50-60 minutes of the class, the focus was on the topics and features that were introduced in the new lesson. this section usually began with some explicit instruction (e.g., an explicit grammar explanation, or a short lecture in l1) concerning particular linguistic features, together with some awareness-raising activities (e.g., input flood, input enhancement, and cf). it then continued with assigning learners to pairs and groups to do meaningand form-focused tasks (as required by the textbook) collaboratively. meanwhile, the teachers tended to walk around the classroom, monitor the students, and provide feedback when necessary. when all of the students were done with the task, each pair/group was asked to present the task to the whole class. again, cf was provided, especially when an error was associated with the linguistic features that were supposed to be learned in that session. at the end of each session, the teachers tended to involve learners in whole-class discussions about real-world topics. this kind of activity was usually related to the linguistic features that were covered in that very session, and it contained a good deal of cf provided during teacher-student interactions. the teachers tended to avoid any kind of explicit explanation of grammatical rules at this point and also prevented the learners from using l1 for any purpose. as with previous sections, all the interactions in this section were recorded. 5.3. data collection after debriefing sessions with the teachers, each class was observed and audiorecorded for eight sessions (36 hours of classroom time in total; 12 hours from each class). during observations, the observer sat unobtrusively at the back of the classrooms with no involvement in any of the activities and events. the observer wrote down notes to make real-time records of paralinguistic, nonverbal, and contextual events that might transcend the audio recordings. for example, it was observed that some feedback moves were followed by specific gestures and facial expressions instead of uptake. example 1 (s = student, t = teacher) s: there are many people who overlook at the role of women in the society. t: they overlook the role of women in the society? according to the notes, the feedback in example 1 was followed by the student nodding his head, which could be a sign of either understanding the correct form or providing a “yes” answer to the teacher’s interrogative utterance. thus, the role of observing and taking notes was to ease the codification procedures, which are explained in the next section. also, it should be noted that the classes patterns of uptake and repair following recasts and prompts in an efl context: does feedback. . . 615 could not be video-recorded because permission to do so was not obtained from both the institute and the participants. to capture every possible interaction and feedback move such as unplanned and spontaneous interactions and feedback, the interactions were audio-recorded from the beginning of each session to the end. 5.4. data codification thirty-six hours of audio-recorded data were transcribed by the researcher and checked and confirmed by a research assistant to make sure that the transcription was clear and inclusive. lyster and ranta’s (1997) model was used to identify the sequences of error treatment in the transcribed data. lyster and ranta explain their model as follows: the sequence begins with a learner’s utterance containing at least one error. the erroneous utterance is followed either by the teacher’s corrective feedback or not; if not, then there is topic continuation. if corrective feedback is provided by the teacher, then it is either followed by uptake on the part of the student or not (no uptake entails topic continuation). if there is uptake, then the student’s initially erroneous utterance is either repaired or continues to need repair in some way. if the utterance needs repair, then corrective feedback may again be provided by the teacher; if no further feedback is provided, then there is topic continuation. if and when there is repair, then it is followed either by topic continuation or by some repair-related reinforcement provided by the teacher. following the reinforcement, there is topic continuation. (p. 45) the data were then coded for error, feedback types, and uptake based on the definitions below. 5.4.1. error learners’ utterances that included one or more phonological (e.g., incorrect pronunciation), grammatical (e.g., subject-verb agreement), or lexical (e.g., use of a wrong word) nontargetlike form(s) were coded as erroneous. for instance, in the following interaction move, the student’s utterance was coded as erroneous because it contained a grammatically nontargetlike form. example 2 s: my father used to went to the gym when he was younger. t: he used to go to the gym when he was younger. in some cases, the students’ utterances contained more than one nontargetlike form. lyster and ranta referred to these types of errors as multiple. however, in reza shirani 616 this study utterances with more than one error were coded the way utterances with one error were coded: both were categorized as erroneous. 5.4.2. feedback types initially, three major categories of feedback, namely recasts, prompts, and others were identified. recasts were coded as a broad type of cf that reformulated all or parts of a student’s erroneous utterance and that provided the targetlike form. prompts were coded as feedback that pushed learners to correct their erroneous utterances, and then were categorized as elicitations, metalinguistic clues, clarification requests, and repetitions (lyster, 2004). because the study focused mainly on recasts and prompts, and because other types of feedback rarely occurred in the interactions, any other kinds of feedback were categorized as others (e.g., explicit correction, nonverbal feedback, and using l1). moreover, two main types of recasts were recognized, namely explicit recasts and implicit recasts, based on certain factors which will be discussed thoroughly in section 5.4.2.2. the data were thus coded for six types of feedback – four types of prompts and two types of recasts. 5.4.2.1. prompts clarification requests occur when the teacher uses such interrogative phrases as pardon me? or i’m sorry? to push the learner to reformulate or modify their utterance because there is either an error in form or lack of comprehensibility in meaning (panova & lyster, 2002). example 3 s: you looked that movie? t: excuse me? elicitation refers to overt strategies aimed at eliciting the targetlike form from the students by indicating to them that their linguistic production is erroneous. elicitation may occur in the form of overt questions like would you come again? or requests for reformulation of an utterance. also, the teacher may repeat the erroneous utterance up to the nontargetlike form and then pause in hopes that the student will fill in the blank with the correct form. example 4 s: she’ll goes to the pool to tomorrow. i’m sure. t: hmm, she’ll …? patterns of uptake and repair following recasts and prompts in an efl context: does feedback. . . 617 repetitions occur when the teacher repeats all or part of the student’s erroneous utterance usually with a rising intonation to signal that the student’s utterance is erroneous. example 5 s: we discussed about our school subjects and then had dinner. t: discussed about? metalinguistic clues are metalinguistic comments on the correctness of the student’s utterance in a declarative or interrogative form without providing the correct form. example 6 s: i was pretty sure she had took the man to the hospital. t: in the past perfect tense, you need the past participle form of the verb. 5.4.2.2. recasts: explicit and implicit recasts explicit and implicit recasts were distinguished based on four inherent features suggested by different researchers: length (nassaji & fotos, 2011; sheen 2006), prosodic emphasis (loewen & philp, 2006; nassaji & fotos, 2011), intensity of focus on a particular linguistic feature (ellis 2001; erlam & loewen, 2010), and the number of feedback moves (see doughty & varela, 1998; loewen & philp, 2006). these factors were considered for three reasons. first, among other characteristics (e.g., contextual, social, and cultural issues), the above-mentioned factors are considered inherent features of recasts. second, despite controversy over other features (e.g., interrogative and declarative intonation), these characteristics have been widely agreed on in the literature. third, an analysis of the data revealed that categorizing recasts based on these four factors was the most appropriate because there was no trace of any other characteristics of explicit recasts in the data. first, coding explicit recasts will be discussed. short recasts are a single word or a short phrase with one content word (sheen, 2006). because short recasts reformulate only the erroneous part of the utterance, they are more salient. example 7 s: i think it is really necessary that one washes his hands regularly. t: wash. recasts with prosodic emphasis reformulate the erroneous utterance by putting an intonational stress on the correct form. this may occur in either a declarative or an interrogative form. reza shirani 618 example 8 s: once upon a time, everyone used to enjoyed the clean weather in our city. t: everyone used to enjoy the clean weather. example 9 s: if they forbidded smoking, we would have a less polluted city. t: if they forbade smoking? intensive recasts “focus on one or two particular linguistic structures” (erlam & loewen, 2010, p. 880). intensive recasts are considered more explicit than extensive ones (ellis, 2001; lyster, 1998b). the teachers in this study provided intensive recasts, particularly after they had taught the grammar and pronunciation sections of the textbook. for instance, when the textbook concentrated on a specific grammar feature, say conditionals, they tended to constantly provide students with intensive feedback. example 10 s: if i had had a car, i have not gone to work by bus. t: if i had had a car, i wouldn’t have gone to work by bus. multi-move recasts contain at least one recast accompanied by another feedback move in a single turn. multi-move recasts are considered explicit because they offer a double emphasis on the nontargetlike form (see doughty & varela, 1998; erlam & loewen, 2010; loewen & philp, 2006). example 11 s: i’m quite sure happiness was more rampant in the past. t: happiness was rampant? it was everywhere. in example 11, the teacher uses two feedback moves to address the same error (i.e., a repetition and a recast). as noted by sheen (2006), multi-move recasts may occur (a) after the repetition of feedback (i.e., corrective recasts), (b) after another full or partial recast move (i.e., repeated recasts), and (c) with any other types of feedback other than explicit correction (i.e., combination recasts). the second category of recasts were implicit ones. long recasts consist of more than two words (erlam & loewen, 2010, p. 880), and therefore their corrective nature may be implicit to the learner. example 12 s: animals protect their babies from dangerous. t: they protect their babies from danger. patterns of uptake and repair following recasts and prompts in an efl context: does feedback. . . 619 recasts without prosodic emphasis implicitly reformulate (with either a declarative or an interrogative intonation) the student’s erroneous utterance without putting an intonational stress on the correct form. example 13 s: there are many people who overlook at the role of women in the society. t: they overlook the role of women in the society? extensive recasts are concerned with a range of linguistic items any time during interaction without a deliberate focus on one or two particular linguistic features. explicit recasts were coded as possessing at least one of the characteristics of explicitness discussed above. inevitably, there were particular circumstances where a recast entailed both an implicit feature (e.g., it was long) and an explicit feature (e.g., it was intensive). on such occasions, because the recast move contained at least one explicit feature, it was coded as explicit. moreover, on a few occasions, explicit recasts exhibited more than one of the explicit features. for example, a recast could be simultaneously intensive and short. as with recasts entailing one feature of explicitness, recasts with more than one property of explicitness were coded as explicit recasts. on the other hand, implicit recasts were coded as possessing all implicit features and no explicit features. in other words, every single-move extensive long recast without any prosodic emphasis – whether interrogative or declarative – was coded as implicit. 5.4.3. uptake uptake was defined as “a student’s utterance that immediately follows the teacher’s feedback and that constitutes a reaction in some way to the teacher’s intention to draw attention to some aspect of the student’s initial utterances” (lyster & ranta, 1997, p. 49). in this study, two types of uptake were identified, namely repair and needs repair. repair referred to a student’s successful correction of a nontargetlike form. example 14 s: she’s much more smarter than i expected. t: she’s much…? s: much smarter. needs repair referred to a partial correction or off-target reformulation of an erroneous utterance. reza shirani 620 example 15 s: i had no idea what did he use to do as a child. t: i had no idea what he used to do as a child. s: no idea. such acknowledgments as yes, ok, or yeah were also coded as needs repair because the student did not provide any correction. moreover, the term no uptake referred to the cases when the student did not produce any verbal response to cf. 5.5. reliability after codification of the data (from all of the classes) by the researcher, the research assistant recoded a random sample of 50% of the data to ensure the reliability of the codification. inconsistencies in coding were then negotiated. table 2 shows the inter-rater reliability scores for erroneous utterances, broad categories of cf, subsets of cf, and learner uptake. table 2 inter-rater reliability scores % agreement erroneous utterances 87 recasts 90 explicit recasts 83 implicit recasts 86 prompts 91 clarification requests 92 repetitions 89 metalinguistic clues 96 elicitation 87 others 89 uptake and uptake types 93 5.6. data analysis the study used frequency data and simple percentages to describe the frequencies of different types of cf as well as the relationship between each feedback type and uptake/repair. it should be noted that for the same purposes, some of the prior studies (e.g., sheen, 2006) have employed chi-square tests. however, as nassaji (2007, p. 532) correctly points out, one of the assumptions of the chi-square is that the data must be independent within and across cells. although chi-square has sometimes been used in sla research in such conditions, the independent assumption is violated if one participant contributes more data to one cell than the others. patterns of uptake and repair following recasts and prompts in an efl context: does feedback. . . 621 thus, like in many other studies (e.g., lyster & ranta, 1997; nassaji, 2007; panova & lyster, 2002), simple percentages were used to analyze the data. 6. results 6.1. feedback frequency the numbers and percentages of the occurrence of the general types of cf are presented in table 3. following 678 erroneous utterances, prompts constituted more than half of the feedback moves and were the most frequently used type of feedback, whereas recasts occurred after 36.6% of the erroneous utterances. table 3 the distribution of broad categories of cf prompts recasts others n % n % n % class a 234 57.3 157 38.5 17 4.2 class b 201 61.2 121 36.8 6 1.8 class c 243 60.9 142 35.5 14 3.5 total 678 59.2 420 36.6 37 3.2 to compare the distribution of different subsets of recasts and prompts, further analyses were conducted. as can be seen in table 4, the most frequently used subtypes of prompts in all of the classes were elicitations and repetitions, which occurred after 229 and 213 erroneous utterances respectively. it should be noted that the difference in the distribution of elicitations and repetitions was too small. the least frequent subtype of prompts, however, was metalinguistic clues, which constituted 10.4% of all prompt moves. table 4 the distribution of different subsets of prompts elicitation repetitions clarification requests metalinguistic clues n % n % n % n % class a 76 32.5 74 31.6 51 21.8 33 14.1 class b 61 30.0 60 29.8 54 26.8 26 12.9 class c 92 37.8 79 32.5 60 24.6 12 4.9 total 229 33.7 213 31.4 165 24.3 71 10.4 within recasts, as shown in table 5, whereas explicit ones were provided after 255 erroneous utterances, 165 recast moves possessed implicit features. reza shirani 622 table 5 the distribution of different subsets of recasts explicit recasts implicit recasts n % n % class a 90 57.3 67 42.7 class b 66 54.5 55 45.5 class c 99 69.7 43 30.3 total 255 60.7 165 39.3 6.2. feedback and uptake further, the numbers and percentages of learner uptake after each broad category of feedback were calculated. the results are shown in table 6. as for prompts, 91.0% led to uptake and only 9.0% did not. as for recasts, 62.6% led and 37.4% did not lead to uptake. as can be seen, prompts led to much greater percentages of uptake than did recasts. table 6 the number and percentage of uptake following general categories of cf uptake no uptake n % n % prompts (n = 678) 617 91.0 61 9.0 recasts (n = 420) 263 62.6 157 37.4 total 880 80.1 218 19.9 the frequencies of uptake following subtypes of recasts and prompts were also compared. table 7 presents the results. within prompts, clarification led to the greatest percentage of uptake (97.6%). likewise, elicitation (91.7%) and repetitions (91.5%) led to great percentages of uptake. thus, the difference in uptake was quite insignificant when elicitations, repetitions, and clarification requests were provided. however, metalinguistic clues led to a smaller percentage of uptake compared to other types of prompts. table 7 the relationship between subtypes of feedback and learners’ uptake uptake no uptake n % n % prompts elicitation (n =229) 210 91.7 19 8.3 repetitions (n = 213) 195 91.5 18 8.4 clarification requests (n = 165) 161 97.6 4 2.4 metalinguistic clues (n = 71) 51 71.8 20 28.2 recasts explicit recasts (n = 255) 193 75.7 62 24.3 implicit recasts (n = 165) 95 70 42.4 57.6 patterns of uptake and repair following recasts and prompts in an efl context: does feedback. . . 623 furthermore, as table 7 shows, whereas explicit recasts led to 75.7% of uptake, implicit recasts resulted in 42.4% of uptake. therefore, as the above analyses suggest, the implicitness and explicitness of recasts might have influenced the frequencies of uptake. apparently, explicit recasts were more likely to provoke a learner response. 6.3. feedback and repair the frequencies of leaner repair following each broad category of cf were calculated based on the total moves of (a) each feedback type and (b) immediate uptake. as table 8 shows, 41.6% of prompts led to repair and 49.4% led to needs repair. also, 45.7% of uptake following prompts contained repair and 54.3% included needs repair. this seems to suggest that whenever prompts did lead to uptake, the possibility of repair was less than half of the whole uptake moves whereas the likelihood of needs-repair was more than half of the total uptake. as for recasts, 46.6% led to repair and 15.9% led to needs repair. moreover, 74.5% of uptake following recasts contained full repair whereas 25.5% of uptake needed further repair. in total, recasts led to a larger repair percentage with regard to both the number of feedback moves and the frequencies of uptake. table 8 the relationship between general categories of feedback and learners’ repair repair needs repair n % of feedback % of uptake n % of feedback % of uptake prompts 282 41.6 45.7 335 49.4 54.3 recasts 196 46.6 74.5 67 15.9 25.5 total 478 43.5 54.3 402 36.6 45.7 the relationship between different subtypes of feedback and learner repair was also analyzed. as can be seen in table 9, among prompts, elicitation led to the greatest amount of repair (51.5% of feedback and 56.2% of uptake). the smallest percentage of repair, however, was associated with repetitions (35.7% of feedback and 39% of uptake). repetitions and uptake following them, therefore, offered the highest percentage of needs repair vis-à-vis other prompts. moreover, as far as the ratio of repair to feedback moves was concerned, clarification requests (43.4%) were found to result in a higher percentage of repair compared to metalinguistic clues (39.4%). however, when the ratio of uptake and repair was considered, whereas 44.7% of uptake following clarification requests brought about repair, 54.9% of uptake following metalinguistic clues was the cause of learners’ repair. therefore, the extent to which prompts led to repair could noticeably vary according to whether the total numbers of feedback moves or the overall frequencies of uptake were considered. reza shirani 624 as for recasts, the explicit ones were associated with a larger repair percentage than the implicit ones. whereas 58.2% of explicit recasts and 67.9% of uptake following such feedback led to repair, 21.8% of implicit recasts and 51.4% of uptake following them were related to full repair. this implies that when an implicit recast did lead to uptake, on more than half of the occasions, the uptake was likely to contain the correct form. moreover, the above analyses seem to suggest that when recasts are accompanied with some characteristics of explicitness, they are more likely to provoke repair. table 9 the relationship between subsets of feedback and learners' repair repair needs repair n % of feedback % of uptake n % of feedback % of uptake prompts elicitation 118 51.5 56.2 92 40.2 43.8 repetitions 76 35.7 39.0 119 55.9 61.0 clarification requests 72 43.4 44.7 89 54.0 55.3 metalinguistic clues 28 39.4 54.9 23 32.4 45.1 recasts explicit recasts 131 58.2 67.9 62 27.5 32.1 implicit recasts 36 21.8 51.4 34 20.6 48.6 in summary, according the analyses, learner repair might be, to some extent, influenced by the way feedback was provided. when the students were given the correct form, and when they responded to such feedback, the possibility of repair was stronger than when the learners were invited to self-repair. moreover, it should be noted that although prompts led to a higher percentage of uptake, recasts, especially explicit ones, might lead to a higher percentage of repair than prompts. this might be particularly true when the ratio of uptake to repair is considered. 7. discussion the first research question in this study concerned the frequency of recasts and prompts and their subtypes in the iranian efl context. in all of the three classes, prompts occurred more frequently than recasts. these findings might imply teachers have a tendency to encourage students to self-repair rather than providing the correct form instantly. the findings stand in contrast to those of many studies (e.g., ellis et al., 2001; fu & nassaji, 2016; nabei & swain, 2002; panova & lyster, 2002) in which the higher frequency of recasts has been accounted for in terms of the assumption that recasts perform a more communicative function than prompts and that they result in fewer communication breakdowns as they keep the interlocutors’ attention primarily on meaning. yet, patterns of uptake and repair following recasts and prompts in an efl context: does feedback. . . 625 some studies (e.g., kennedy, 2010; lyster & ranta, 1997) have shown that for more proficient learners, teachers usually provide prompts more than recasts because such learners are believed to have adequate linguistic resources to rely on when they are prompted to self-repair. accordingly, the higher frequency of prompts in this study might be attributed to the participants’ proficiency level, which was rated as upper-intermediate by the language school, and to their considerable language learning experience, which ranged from three to four years. furthermore, data analysis revealed that among prompts, elicitation, an explicit feedback type (nassaji & fotos, 2011), was the most dominant type of feedback before repetitions, clarification requests, and metalinguistic clues. similarly, explicit recasts occurred more frequently than implicit ones. the teachers’ tendency to provide more salient and explicit feedback types may be attributed to the context of the study. unlike students in many other contexts, iranian learners have minimum exposure to english outside the classroom, and to compensate for this, most of the language schools, including the one in this study, hold training courses and workshops for their teachers to make sure that students receive appropriate instruction. such training courses are usually taught by an invited professor or researcher who provides a theoretical and practical presentation of appropriate cf techniques. during the training courses at the language school in this study, the teachers were encouraged to use sufficient explicit feedback to make sure that students would notice the corrective nature of feedback in some way. in one of the between-semester workshops, for example, it was observed that the invited researcher made frequent references to the studies that have confirmed the positive role of explicit instruction and explicit feedback in the iranian efl context. thus, the teachers’ training background might play a role in how cf was provided in this study. another factor that might have encouraged the teachers to use explicit feedback frequently might have to do with iranian students’ preferences for different types of cf. the present researcher did not conduct any formal surveys to explore the participants’ preferences and perceptions of cf, but previous research (e.g., kaivanpanah, alavi, & sepehrnia, 2015) has shown that the majority of iranian efl learners view cf as positive and even necessary. very casual post-study interviews with a few random participants also revealed their preference for explicit feedback. a 19-year-old male student from class a, for example, said: “i think we deserve to get feedback from teacher. i want to know where i am wrong. i just want to correct it.” another 17-year old-female student from class c stated: “when i do not realize my mistakes in conversation, i will repeat them again and again. i think teachers should let us know.” the second research question concerned the extent to which recasts, prompts, and their subtypes lead to learner uptake in a fl context. similarly to reza shirani 626 previous studies (e.g., fu & nassaji 2016; lyster & ranta, 1997; panova & lyster, 2002), prompts were found to provide more uptake opportunities vis-à-vis recasts. this may be related to the efficacy of prompts in pushing learners to produce output; according to swain’s (1993) output hypothesis, pushing learners to produce output helps them notice gaps in their interlanguage as they struggle to convey their meaning. to compensate for their gaps, learners are pushed to make use of their linguistic resources, engage in hypothesis testing, and reflect on their output more carefully. the greater uptake opportunity following prompts might be attributed to their greater saliency and their elicitative force (yang & lyster, 2010). moreover, it was found that within prompts, clarification requests led to the largest uptake percentage. this might be explained by the assumption that clarification requests were used after either miscomprehension of the message or emergence of an error (panova & lyster, 2002). as the observer took notes, even when the teachers provided clarification requests to encourage the students to self-repair an error, the students sometimes responded to such requests as if there were lack of message comprehensibility. the following extract from the data may exemplify that kind of situation: example 16 s: all he had to do was went running to lose weight. t: sorry? s: running! he could lose weight if he did sports. t: so… all he had to do was go running. s: yes. as can be seen, in the first sentence, the learner uses the word went when the base form of the verb should have been used. when the teacher makes a clarification request, the learner, according to the researcher’s notes, along with his oral language production, gesticulates and imitates running with his body language, which is probably an attempt to get the message across. the teacher’s second attempt to provide cf (in the form of a recast), however, indicates that the intention behind the first feedback is probably corrective. the third research question concerned the extent to which recasts, prompts, and their subtypes lead to repair in a fl context. compared to prompts, recasts led to a higher percentage of full repair both when the ratio of feedback to repair and the ratio of uptake to repair were considered. of course, when examining the efficacy of recasts on measures of repair, it should be noted that recasts may not elicit student-generated repair other than the repetition of the feedback, and therefore, those feedback types that give learners more language production opportunities might be more effective (lyster 1998a, 1998b; lyster & ranta 1997; panova & lyster 2002). patterns of uptake and repair following recasts and prompts in an efl context: does feedback. . . 627 moreover, it was found that within prompts, although clarification requests led to many uptake moves, they were not as effective as elicitations and metalinguistic clues – the more salient types of prompts – as far as learner repair was concerned. the role of feedback saliency in generating a higher percentage of repair is even more tangible within recasts, among which those with explicit features were associated with a larger number of both uptake and repair moves when compared to implicit ones. these findings confirm loewen and philp’s (2006) finding that the efficacy of recasts could depend considerably on their characteristics. they were found to be more effective if combined with more explicit features like stress, multiple feedback moves, shortened length, and interrogative intonation (see also sheen, 2006). nassaji (2007), too, concludes that the extent to which a feedback type results in learner repair may depend on how explicitly it is provided and that whenever a feedback move is combined with salient intonational or verbal cues, learners are more likely to generate uptake with repair. 8. conclusions, implications, and directions the findings of this study suggest that the efficacy of prompts and recasts in an efl context may depend on how explicitly they are provided. in other words, these findings and the findings of some other studies (e.g., doughty & varela, 1998; loewen & philp, 2006; nassaji, 2007; sheen, 2006) seem to imply that the effectiveness of cf may depend on how successfully it draws learners’ attention to form. this confirms schmidt’s noticing hypothesis (1995), whereby in order for cf to be effective, it is important for learners to notice the corrective nature of such feedback so that they can make use of it to improve their interlanguage. the fact that more explicit feedback types led to higher percentages of repair verified the effective roles of explicitness, salience, and noticing – three interrelated concepts. moreover, it should be noted that in developing an in-depth understanding of cf, uptake and repair should not be ignored. chaudron (1997, p. 440), for instance, claimed that “the main immediate measurement of effectiveness of any type of corrective reaction would be a frequency count of the students’ correct responses following each type.” accordingly, although providing uptake does not indicate language acquisition (loewen, 2004; panova & lyster, 2002), it may contribute to l2 development as it indicates that the learner has noticed the feedback and used it in some way (mackey & philp, 1998; sheen, 2004). in addition, immediate repair has been believed to contribute to language development to some extent (mcdonough, 2005; nassaji, 2007; pica, 1994). lastly, even if one assumes that uptake does not play a major role in acquisition, it is still quite clear that it influences language use. reza shirani 628 now that learner uptake and repair seems to be fair criteria to assess cf, it should be further noted that investigating learner uptake in relation to different factors (explicitness/implicitness of feedback in this study) is of vital importance in an efl context, particularly in iran, where there is usually minimum exposure to l2 outside the classroom, and where a variety of instructional techniques and curricula are used across language schools. reporting that in an efl context the effectiveness of different types of cf may be positively influenced by how explicitly they are provided, this study may have practical implications for language teachers and practioners who seek to provide their students with the most beneficial kind of feedback. when considering the findings of this study, one, however, should exercise due caution. for one thing, this study was conducted with iranian upperintermediate students in one single language school, and therefore generalizing the findings to other students with different levels of proficiency might be problematic, especially given that previous studies (e.g., mackey & philp, 1998; philp, 2003) have found that the efficacy and distribution of different types of cf vary significantly across different proficiency levels. thus, an open issue for future research could be how the effect of cf explicitness and implicitness vary under the influence of learner proficiency. also, as mentioned earlier, some (e.g., loewen, 2004; panova & lyster, 2002) have suggested that uptake should not be equated with language acquisition. thus, a more appropriate approach to cf may be illustrated by carefully controlled experimental or quasi-experimental studies (e.g., lee & lyster, 2016; nassaji, 2017) that address the relationship between cf and the acquisition of particular linguistic forms. such studies may provide a more tangible insight into the relationship between cf and actual language learning. finally, this study investigated cf effectiveness in terms of how explicitly it is provided. however, there might be other factors that influence the efficacy of cf. for example, such learner-related variables as motivation, anxiety, attitude towards an l2, and so forth may all play a role in how learners benefit from cf. another open issue for future research, therefore, is how the usefulness of cf varies under the influence of such factors. acknowledgements i would like to thank all of the people who have contributed to this research. i am grateful to the participants of the study, and the two anonymous reviewers 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(2010). effects of form-focused practice and feedback on chinese efl. learners’ acquisition of regular and irregular past tense forms. studies in second language acquisition, 32, 235-263. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: miros aw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: krzysztof kwiatkowski (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) vol. 2 no. 3 october 2012 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (trinity college, dublin) simon borg (university of leeds) piotr cap (university of ód ) anna cie licka (texas a&m international university, adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) kata csizer (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) krystyna dro dzia -szelest (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabry -barker (university of silesia) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of ód ) jan majer (university of ód ) anna micho ska-stadnik (university of wroc aw) anna ni egorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) terrence odlin (ohio state university) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) pawe scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) david singleton (trinity college, dublin) odzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) merrill swain (university of toronto) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of ód ) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – pozna 2012 editor: miros aw pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak krzysztof kwiatkowski anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydzia pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam pozna proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print and online, with the print edition being the original version. published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, pozna contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy wiat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. wierzawska 1, 60-321 pozna indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: central and eastern european online library (ceeol) the mla international bibliography the mla directory of periodicals linguistic abstracts ebsco efforts will also be made to include studies in second language learning and teaching in the index of journals published by the polish ministry of science and higher education, and to have it listed by the european reference index for the humanities (erih) and the thomson reuters master journal list. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 2, number 3, october 2012 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors .................................................................... 291 editorial ......................................................................................... 295 articles: diane larsen-freeman – the emancipation of the language learner ... 297 larissa aronin, david singleton – affordances theory in multilingualism studies ...................................................................................................... 311 levent uzun – what is your educational philosophy? modern and postmodern approaches to foreign language education ............................ 333 julian pigott – a call for a multifaceted approach to language learning motivation research: combining complexity, humanistic, and critical perspectives ..................................................................................... 349 aleksandra wach – computer-mediated communication as an autonomyenhancement tool for advanced learners of english ................................. 367 katarzyna rokoszewska – the influence of pronunciation learning strategies on mastering english vowels ............................................... 391 gabriella morvay – the relationship between syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension in efl learners ....................................... 415 book reviews ................................................................................. 439 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 453 291 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors larissa aronin is professor at the oranim academic college of education, israel and is a research associate at trinity college, dublin. she has published on a wide array of topics connected with multilingualism in a range of international journals such as international journal of the sociology of language, international journal of multilingualism, and language teaching. she contributed to the encyclopedia of applied linguistics (wiley-blackwell, 2012) and coedited the exploration of multilingualism: development of research on l3, multilingualism and multiple language acquisition (john benjamins, 2009) and multilingualism (john benjamins, 2012). she serves as a secretary of the international association of multilingualism, and is an editorial board member of international journal of multilingualism (taylor and francis) and studies in second language learning and teaching (adam mickiewicz university), and an advisory board member of language teaching (cambridge university press). contact details: (e-mail: larisa@research.haifa.ac.il) marek derenowski received his phd in applied linguistics from adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland. he is a teacher and a teacher educator working at the department of english studies of the faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university (kalisz, poland). he also works at the institute of modern languages of konin state school of higher professional education. for the last seventeen years he has also been a teacher of english in senior high-school. his major interest is in teacher education and professional development, the place of target language culture in the foreign language education and learner autonomy. contact details: department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, nowy wiat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (email: dereno@icpnet.pl, dereno@amu.edu.pl) 292 diane larsen-freeman is professor of education, professor of linguistics, and research scientist at the university of michigan, ann arbor, usa. she is also a distinguished senior faculty fellow at the graduate sit institute in vermont, usa. for the winter terms 2012 and 2013, she has been a visiting professor at the university of pennsylvania, usa. her interests include second language acquisition, english grammar, language teaching methodology, and complexity theory. one of her recent books, coauthored with lynne cameron, complex systems and applied linguistics, was awarded the 2009 kenneth mildenberger prize by the modern language association. contact details: (e-mail: dianelf@umich.edu) gabriella morvay attended the college of education in nitra, slovakia, majoring in english and hungarian language and literature. she earned her ma in tesol from teachers college, columbia university, usa, in 1995, and her phd in linguistics from the graduate center of the city university of new york in 2009. she is currently an assistant professor of esl and linguistics at the borough of manhattan community college of the city university of new york. contact details: (e-mail: gmorvay@bmcc.cuny.edu) julian pigott teaches at ritsumeikan university in kyoto, japan. he received his ma in applied linguistics from the university of birmingham, uk, and is currently studying for a phd in applied linguistics at the university of warwick, uk. his research involves examining language learning motivation in new ways using narrative, phenomenologocial, and critical perspectives. more generally, he is interested in deweyian and rogerian educational theory and its application to the japanese context. contact details: (e-mail: julianpigott@gmail.com) katarzyna rokoszewska received her phd in applied linguistics from the university of wroc aw, poland, in 2007. she is an assistant professor at the institute of foreign languages at jan dlugosz university in cz stochowa, poland, where she teaches efl methodology and sla courses. she also worked as a teacher at the teacher training college in cz stochowa for ten years. her research interests include various aspects of sla and methodology of teaching foreign languages, including teaching foreign languages to young learners. she has a particular interest in individual learner differences, the sociocultural approach and complexity theory. she has published a monograph entitled comparing selected modern methods of teaching english to young learners (peter lang, 2011) and many articles. contact details: (e-mail: k.rokoszewska@ajd.czest.pl) 293 david singleton took his ba at trinity college, university of dublin, ireland, and his phd at the university of cambridge, uk. he is a fellow of trinity college, dublin, where he is professor of applied linguistics, and where he has spent a considerable amount of time on the university council and the college board. he also holds the title of research professor at the university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary. he has served as president of the irish association for applied linguistics, as secretary general of the international association of applied linguistics and as president of the european second language association. his publications number close to 200, his books and articles ranging across a wide spectrum of topics, including syllabus design and pedagogical grammar, but focusing mainly on cross-linguistic influence, the second language lexicon, the age factor in language acquisition and multilingualism. contact details: (e-mail: singleton.centiceps@gmail.com) levent uzun, currently a phd candidate, works at the english language teaching department, the faculty of education, uludag university, bursa, turkey. his research interests include philosophy of education, call, educational technologies and ict, educational materials development, and vocabulary acquisition. he has published and presented several academic papers in various international journals and at various international conferences. contact details: (e-mail: ulevent@uludag.edu.tr) paola vettorel is assistant professor in the department of foreign languages and literatures, university of verona. she has presented papers in various national and international conferences; her main research interests include english as a lingua franca and its implications for teaching and learning english. contact details: (e-mail: paola.vettorel@univr.it) aleksandra wach, phd, works at the school of english, adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland as an efl teacher and teacher trainer. her main professional interests include: learning and teaching grammar, the application of music in teaching, teacher training, and, currently, the application of new technology in foreign language learning and teaching. contact details: (e-mail: waleks@ifa.amu.edu.pl) dorota werbi ska, phd, works in the modern languages department at pomeranian university, s upsk, poland. her research interests include qualitative studies in language teacher development, language teacher cognition and identity, the hidden curriculum in the english classroom, teacher burnout, and 294 teacher reflectivity. she is the author of three books and almost 50 articles published nationally and internationally, as well as editor of two collections. the title of her recent book is developing into an effective polish teacher of english (pomeranian university press, 2011). contact details: (e-mail: werbinsk@pro.onet.pl) 473 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (3). 2015. 473-493 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.3.7 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl language learning strategies: an holistic view carol griffiths fatih university, istanbul, turkey carolgriffiths5@gmail.com gökhan cansiz fatih university, istanbul, turkey gokhancansiz@gmail.com abstract the language learning strategy question has been debated on a number of levels, including definition, the strategy/success relationship and strategy coordination. in addition, awareness has been steadily growing of the importance of taking an holistic view of the strategy phenomenon and examining strategies not just in isolation but as part of an overall picture which includes learning situation, learning target and individual learner characteristics. this article will first of all review the literature and the previous research on these controversial issues, and suggest a workable definition. then, in order to illustrate the importance of such an holistic view, the results of a small scale study which looks at the strategies used by 16 successful language learners who were all either teaching english or teaching in english at university level will be reported. the quantitative results indicated that these successful learners used many strategies, especially those that suited their goals and their situations; they also frequently used and carefully orchestrated strategy repertoires which suited their own individual needs. the responses of one highly successful respondent were also examined qualitatively. the implications of these findings and the importance of viewing learners holistically are discussed and suggestions are made for ongoing research. keywords: learner differences, learning target, learning context, orchestration, number, frequency carol griffiths, gökhan cansiz 474 1. introduction when rubin (1975) identified seven learning strategies which she believed to be typical of good language learners, it was optimistically anticipated that in order to learn language effectively, all that was necessary was for all learners to adopt the strategies used by good learners, and a great deal of effort was put into discovering what these strategies might be. unfortunately, in the years since, this initial optimism has been shown to be overly simplistic, and controversy has raged on a number of fronts, beginning with the basic question of the very nature of strategies themselves. 2. definition: what are strategies? rubin (1975) defined learning strategies as “the techniques or devices which a learner may use to acquire knowledge” (p. 43). over the next decade, however, this very broad and general definition was interpreted in various and sometimes conflicting ways (e.g., stern, 1975; hosenfeld, 1976; naiman, frohlich, stern, & todesco, 1978; cohen & aphek, 1980; bialystok, 1981) until by 1985, o’malley, chamot, stewner-manzanares, kupper, and russo (1985) were lamenting the lack of consensus regarding a definition which, they felt, was causing "considerable confusion" (p. 22) and impeding progress with research. nevertheless, the controversy continued, until by 2003 dornyei and skehan (2003) had gone even further and recommended abandoning the term strategy in favour of the “more versatile” (p. 610) term self-regulation. this was followed by tseng, dörnyei, and schmitt (2006), who proposed a “new approach [which] . . . highlights the importance of the learners’ innate self-regulatory capacity” (p. 79), leading gao (2007) to wonder anxiously: “has language learning strategy research come to an end?” however, as griffiths (2013) puts it, "the slippery strategy concept hangs on tenaciously and refuses to be so easily dismissed" (p. 6). this is evidenced by renewed conference interest worldwide and numerous publications on the strategy subject (e.g., cohen, 2011; cohen & macaro, 2007; gao, 2010; griffiths, 2008, 2013; oxford, 2011; oxford and griffiths, 2014). this may be partly because the idea of replacing strategies with self-regulation entirely was never really a viable option. even an early advocate of self-regulation such as winne (1995) emphasized the idea that in order to self-regulate, learners need strategies. more recently, dörnyei and ryan (2015) concede that “neither self-regulation nor learning strategy has to become a casualty of the controversy, caught in the cross-fire of the various arguments” (p. 169). in other words, “movements towards self-regulation are not incompatible with language learning strategies” (rose, 2012) since strategies and self-regulation are mutually interdependent. language learning strategies: an holistic view 475 in the face of controversies raging at the time, by 2006 macaro had abandoned the attempt to achieve a decisive definition and opted for listing defining characteristics instead. gu (2012) adopted a similar position when he examined strategies in terms of prototypes. griffiths (2008, 2013), however, argued, as o’malley et al. (1985) had done more than 20 years before, that definition is necessary for meaningful research. from an extensive review of the literature she distilled a definition of language learning strategies which consists of a number of essential elements: 1. they are active. they are what learners do (rubin, 1975). for this reason, they are typically expressed as verbs (usually the gerund, e.g., asking for help, or first person present tense, e.g., i look for opportunities). this helps to distinguish strategies from styles, with which they are often confused. styles are a learner's preferred ways of learning, typically expressed as adjectives (e.g., auditory, visual, etc.). the use of the term activity in griffiths’s (2008) definition, however, invites confusion with the way the term is used in activity theory (leontiev, 1978), where it has a specific meaning including a subject, an object, actions, conditions and operations. for this reason it may be better to use the term actions when defining strategies, since this is a term which can be used to describe whatever a person is doing, both physical (e.g., highlighting) and mental (e.g., thinking of relationships). 2. the “consciousness” dimension remains problematic, in as far as it is used by different people at various times to mean different things, and it is, therefore, in itself, almost impossible to define. even in a medical environment with specialist equipment, it can be difficult to determine if someone is conscious or not. mclaughlin (1990) therefore concludes it has “acquired too much surplus meaning and should be abandoned” (p. 617). perhaps wenden's (1991) distinction between “deliberate” and “automatic” is more useful from our point of view. as she points out, novice learners (whether learning a language, to drive a car or whatever else) need to think about each step deliberately. after some time, when learners are more expert, much of what they do becomes automatic, to the point where they are hardly aware of their actions any longer. 3. strategies are chosen (e.g., bialystok, 1981; cohen, 2011). clearly, actions which are dictated by others (e.g., the teacher) are not strategic, and are unlikely to be used beyond the immediate task. conversely, good learners have a repertoire of strategies from which they can select the most useful ones to suit the current need. 4. strategies are goal-oriented (e.g., macaro, 2006; oxford, 2011). actions chosen at random for no particular purpose cannot be considered strategies. it carol griffiths, gökhan cansiz 476 is the goal which distinguishes strategies from skills, another concept with which they are often confused. skills refers to the way language is used, for instance, to read, write, listen or speak (richards & schmidt, 2010). skills can, however, be used as strategies as well. if, for instance, a learner reads in order to expand his vocabulary, he is using the reading not so much for its own sake but as an action which he chooses for the purpose of learning, and it is, therefore, by definition, a strategy. this is, of course, a somewhat circular argument, but in fact this is not unusual in a complex activity such as language learning, where relationships often exist in a state of mutual interdependence rather than being strictly distinct and linear. 5. the use of the term regulating in griffiths’s (2008) definition also requires further explanation. regulation is commonly used more or less synonymously with other terms such as management, control and the like. in other words, regulatory strategies might be considered what others (e.g., anderson, 2008; o'malley et al., 1985) call metacognitive, or what oxford (2011) terms metastrategies. but not all strategies are “meta.” many of the most commonly used are, in fact, cognitive: they are used to engage directly with the language to be learnt (e.g., looking for patterns, using words in a sentence, etc.). it may, therefore, not be strictly correct to use the term regulating to apply to all strategies. 6. language learning strategies are, exactly as the term suggests, for learning language. there are other kinds of strategies, of course, such as communication strategies or teaching strategies, and the different kinds of strategies may become intertwined and difficult to distinguish. nevertheless, the basic goal of a language learning strategy is to learn something. other kinds of strategies may present an opportunity for learning. communicating with a shop assistant at the check-out counter, for instance, may provide an opportunity to practice or learn new language. however, it is also possible to engage in such encounters (sometimes for years) and learn little or nothing. it is not until the customer makes the effort to engage with the learning opportunity, to remember what has been said, to check and use it later, that learning will actually take place. up until this point is reached, all the wonderful communicative opportunities will count for little or nothing in terms of learning. in view of the above, let us suggest an updated definition: language learning strategies are actions chosen (either deliberately or automatically) for the purpose of learning or regulating the learning of language. language learning strategies: an holistic view 477 3. relationship of strategies to successful learning rubin (1975) recommended learning strategies as a means to promote successful learning. many researchers (such as dreyer & oxford, 1996; green & oxford, 1995; kyungsim & leavell, 2006) have discovered a positive relationship between frequency of strategy use and successful learning. in addition, griffiths (2003, 2008, 2013) discovered that the higher level students in her studies used many more strategies than lower level students. successful strategy use, however, may depend on more than merely how many or how often. as porte (1988) and vann and abraham (1990) noted, although their unsuccessful language learners were very active strategy users, they appeared to be unable to choose strategies appropriate for the task at hand; in other words, they were unable to orchestrate their strategy repertoires effectively. anderson (2008) discusses the importance of strategy orchestration, pointing out that strategies are not an isolated phenomenon: they are interdependent, and it is important that learners are able to integrate their strategies so that they work well together if they are to achieve positive outcomes. in addition, effective strategy use needs to be seen as part of an overall picture which includes the individual characteristics of the learner, the learning target/goal, and the learning context/situation. 3.1. individual learner differences strategy use is often believed to be associated with learning style, defined by reid (1995) as “an individual’s natural, habitual and preferred way(s) of absorbing, processing and retaining new information and skills” (p. viii). in turn, learning style may be influenced by personality, a broader concept defined as “those aspects of an individual’s behaviour, attitudes, beliefs, thought, actions and feelings which are seen as typical and distinctive of that person” (richards & schmidt, 2010, p. 431). furthermore, personality may be at least partly determined by a range of other individual characteristics such as gender (e.g., nyikos, 2008). strategy choice may also be affected by students’ age (e.g., griffiths, 2013); by their beliefs (e.g., horwitz, 1987; white, 2008); and by their ability to exercise autonomy (e.g., cotterall, 2008; wenden, 1991), defined by holec (1981) as “the ability to take charge of one’s own learning” (p. 3). students’ affective states may also have a major effect on how they go about learning (e.g., arnold, 1999; krashen, 1982), as may their degree of aptitude or natural talent (e.g., ranta, 2008). and all of these factors may be more or less influential depending on motivation, often considered to be the most powerful variable since carol griffiths, gökhan cansiz 478 it may impact on an individual’s desire to achieve a given objective, and, therefore, the drive and perseverance in the face of other possible disadvantages, such as gender discrimination, age, or low scores on aptitude tests (e.g., dörnyei & ushioda, 2010; dörnyei, macintyre, & henry, 2015). all of the individual characteristics noted above contribute to a learner’s sense of identity, which was, perhaps, first raised as an issue in language learning related to the question of investment by norton peirce (1995). in recent years, identity has become a major area of study (e.g., gao & lamb, 2011; lo bianco, 2009; norton, 2014; nunan & choi, 2010; pavlenko & norton, 2007; soruç & griffiths, 2015). it is possible that all of the factors which contribute to identity (e.g., level of motivation, gender, whether they have introverted or extroverted personalities, their beliefs, how old they are, etc.) may influence a learner’s choice of strategies. in addition to individual characteristics, however, strategy choice may also be influenced by the learning target (goal) and the learning context (situation). 3.2. the learning target/goal goal orientation—or, as rubin (1975, p. 48) calls it, “the task”—is another variable that good language learners must deal with in order to achieve success. strategies will vary, for instance, according to whether students are aiming to develop skills, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation or pragmatic competence. students studying general english may need to adopt different strategies if their goal changes to passing an international exam. issues of strategy selection and deployment, learner identity, and context will also need to be considered if students are to successfully complete a course in english for specific purposes (esp), designed to prepare them for any of the “perceived needs and imagined futures” (belcher, 2006, p. 133) for which such courses have been developed. in more recent years, clil (content and language integrated learning) courses have become popular (e.g., dalton-puffer & smit, 2013). the dual focus of such courses may well require students to adjust their familiar strategy repertoires in order to deal effectively with both content and language goals at the same time. 3.3. the learning context/situation recent discussions of psychology in language learning highlight contextual factors, and this is something that can be traced as far back as rubin (1975), who also acknowledged the importance of context in successful language learning. indeed, the central role of the sociocultural environment in which a student must try to learn has long been recognized (e.g., oxford, 1996). but it was, perhaps, norton and toohey’s (2001) article which really highlighted the concept language learning strategies: an holistic view 479 of the situated learner, pointing out by means of two case studies that successful language learning is very dependent on the learner’s ability to maximize the affordances of a particular cultural context. learning situations can vary in a number of ways. for instance, whereas face-to-face classroom teaching would once have been considered the norm, increasingly distance learning is gaining popularity because it eliminates the waste of time and money spent commuting. however, successful distance learning may require different strategies from classroom learning: according to white (2003), successful learners in a distance programme were those who were frequent users of metacognitive (self-management) strategies. the study abroad context is another which may well require adjustments to familiar patterns of thinking and behaviour (e.g., irie & ryan, 2015). others who have examined the role of context in language learning and strategy deployment include ryan (2006), who considered the effects of the global context on language learning; takeuchi, griffiths, and coyle (2007), who examined the effect of individual, group and contextual differences on strategy choice; gao (2010), who compared the role of agency and context in relation to strategy use; and griffiths et al. (2014), who took a narrative view of strategy use in east asian contexts. from the extensive literature briefly summarized above, it would seem that successful strategy use may be related to a complex amalgamation of how many strategies are employed, how often, and how well they are orchestrated. in addition, successful strategy selection may depend on the learner’s own individual characteristics, the learning target, and the learning context. since all of these factors are inter-dependent and cannot be meaningfully separated from each other, they need to be considered holistically if a meaningful picture is to be achieved. a study was therefore set up which aimed to explore the following question: how do successful language learners use language learning strategies effectively within the constraints of their own individual characteristics, their learning goal, and their learning context? 4. method 4.1. participants and setting in order to investigate this question, 16 successful learners were identified. the participants were deliberately chosen to be from different places (participant 1 = brazil, 2 = china, 3 = the czech republic, 4 = finland, 5 = greece, 6 = india, 7 = iran, 8 = japan, 9 = kazakhstan, 10 = kenya, 11 = south korea, 12 = kyrgyzstan, 13 = pakistan, 14 = poland, 15 = russia, 16 = turkey.) in order to minimize the possibility of cultural bias. furthermore, half of them were male and half female in order to minimize the potential for gender bias. carol griffiths, gökhan cansiz 480 the participants were all either teaching english or teaching in english at tertiary level, a position which, by its nature, requires a reasonably high level of english. in addition, they were all personally known to the first author (an experienced examiner of international exams), who is able to confirm that they were all productively competent, that is, they were all capable of speaking and writing with high levels of fluency, accuracy and appropriacy. 4.2. data collection in order to investigate the research question, a questionnaire was constructed including items on strategy quantity, frequency and orchestration, plus the way strategies were chosen according to individual characteristics, learning goal and learning situation (see appendix a). participants were asked to rate each item according to how strongly they agreed from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), and there was also space allowed for comments. since the participants were widely scattered geographically, delivering the questionnaires in person was simply not practical; they were sent out by email and returned at the participants’ convenience. 4.3. data analysis the data obtained from the questionnaires was entered into spss and a ratings total for each participant was calculated. since likert-scale data is nonparametric, the ratings were analysed for medians and sums. additionally, as strategy use is often thought to vary according to gender, and the gender balance of the sample was exactly 50/50, differences were also calculated for gender using a nonparametric test of differences (mann-whitney u). the numerical data was then used as a background to a further qualitative analysis of the responses of participant 16, who scored band 9 ielts (the only participant to have such a standardized measure of proficiency). his extensive comments were examined for the richer insights they might provide into the strategies used by successful learners. 5. results 5.1. questionnaire results the total ratings for each item indicate that the participants were most strongly in agreement that they used strategies frequently, and that they chose their strategies to suit their goals (for both, sum = 66, median = 4). they were least in agreement language learning strategies: an holistic view 481 about the choice of strategies so that they worked well together (orchestration: sum = 49, median = 3). these results are set out in table 1 in appendix b. the differences between male and female levels of agreement were not significant except for item 2 (“i used strategies frequently”), with the females more strongly agreeing that they used strategies frequently than the males (males = 30, females = 36, mann-whitney u: p < .05). actually, more frequent use of strategies by females is commonly reported in the strategy literature though it is not always significant, as in the case of this study. 5.2. qualitative results in order to further explore individual strategy use, we can examine the comments contributed by participant 16, whose total rating over all 6 items was 29 out of 30, a rating only equalled by participant 12, a multilingual teacher from kyrgyzstan, fluent in her own language plus russian, turkish and english. in other words, both of these participants were very successful language learners. however, it is only participant 16 for whom we have a standardized exam score, so we will confine our further exploration to the extensive comments that he made in addition to the questionnaire ratings. these responses are as he wrote them, though occasionally abbreviated in order to keep within the prescribed word limit. 5.2.1. item 1: “i used many strategies: which strategies did you use?” it all depended on the skill/area. for phonology, i wrote down the pronunciation of every word i learned in ipa. for vocabulary, i kept a notebook where i wrote new words and their forms (as in manner-ism-s). i used writing as a strategy for syntax as well. i had notebooks for new sentence structures, which i tried to use in my essays. the meaning component of learning had a life of its own. i would buy thesauri and dictionaries that explained nuances of meaning. sometimes i asked native speaker colleagues. as for skills, i challenged them one by one. i remember when i was a sophomore i decided to make sure i could understand any passage i read. i started reading the book line by line, which we did not have to do in class, highlighted every new word, and read sentences that did not make sense over and over again. in whatever i studied i always included a strategy not directly related to the topic of study. for example, when i studied words from word cards like many other people, i took up crossword puzzles that i thought would help me organize my mental vocabulary and establish meaningful relationships between words. (i still do crossword puzzles almost every day). or when a professor suggested reading a dictionary from cover to cover, i would immediately set to it, but also underline and highlight unfamiliar words that could be useful along with their pronunciation and meaning. carol griffiths, gökhan cansiz 482 5.2.2. item 2: “i used strategies frequently” indeed, i did. every time i needed to learn something, i had to make it meaningful for me, a common ‘superstrategy’ but the strategies were a form of writing, repeating, and memorizing. i think the strategies were something like: 1. identify a problem (phrasal verbs, for example). 2. find a book that addresses the topic. 3. devour the book. 4. try to identify what you’ve learned. 5. try to remember them when you do writing or speaking. 6. if you cannot remember, go back to the book or refer to a dictionary. 5.2.3. item 3: “i chose my strategies so that they worked well together” orchestration is a difficult skill. when for example i had to discuss a book chapter i’d read, i had to underline it if the discussion was with a friend or write down what i would say if it was for a class. to be able to discuss a reading passage, i applied all the strategies typically for reading, but bringing reading into a new life in the form of speaking was hard. i had to understand the writer’s purpose and form of organization as well as way of thinking. when listening was put into the equation, i remember times when my mind went blank. for these tasks i had to practice and find my own way through the jungle. for example, i’d started putting a dot next to every entry in the dictionary that i looked up. when i saw – after several years – that some entries had a dozen dots next to them, i felt that i had to ‘quarantine’ such words that refused to sink in. i started to pay more attention to the way they were used in actual sentences. 5.2.4. item 4: “i chose strategies to suit my individual characteristics: which characteristics?” 5.2.4.1. style/personality i certainly am an introvert who finds it unnecessary to socialize, especially to learn a thing such as language. i acknowledge that language is essentially a form of communication between people, yet i don’t want to accept that i need others to be good at it. when you want to be better than others, a desire i believe to be an essential part of personality, you have to know what others do (in this case, their strategies) but also do something extra, or at least personalize it in some way. so it is a kind of competition between me and others, although they may never know about it. but sometimes i transform it into a game. for example, years ago when i started working at a language school where there were more than 70 teachers with quite a few of whom i got along well, i would play vocabulary games with my colleagues, asking the meaning or pronunciation or usage of a word. once the game went viral, i would sit back and enjoy it as i secretly studied more words. language learning strategies: an holistic view 483 5.2.4.2. gender i never felt a strategy could be feminine or masculine, though i heard others imply (or express) they might be. speaking in front of a mirror is an example. when i talk about it in front of a group of learners, especially some males find it abominable and laugh it aside. or keeping extremely neat notebooks may seem girlish, but i don’t care. i’m proud of every effort i spend. 5.2.4.3. age i had to use different strategies as i got older but it was the circumstances rather than age per se that demanded such a change. as an undergrad, being a proficient reader and writer was the entire requirement. as long as i could read the course material and write essays in the exams or projects, no one seemed to expect higher proficiency levels. therefore, i used to focus on vocabulary learning strategies which were mostly at recognition level. when, however, i had to put whatever competence i had into performance in actual teaching, i needed new strategies, as the previous ones did not work. now i had to be a fluent writer and speaker, for which i had no training. i remember thinking about what my teachers had done to help us improve, yet i could find no path to tread on. all i remembered was suggestions like “force yourself to speak” or “keep a journal.” it was not until i was about thirty that i actually knew what i was doing. till then, i would try to adopt every strategy i’d heard of. later i started to judge them by their merits. memorizing entire passages, for example, was out of the question, although they seem to have helped in some way. age might still have a say in the type of strategies i use. after thirty-five, i’d rather listen than read and speak rather than write. it might have something to do with my deteriorating sight or boredom with the written word. so lectures and documentaries on youtube turned into a pastime, dethroning the supremacy of vocabulary notebooks. now i believe i have an arsenal of strategies that can target a variety of needs. 5.2.4.4. beliefs i believe anyone can do anything they aspire to do but the problem is whether it is worth the effort and the time. by the time i was thirty, i knew more than enough to continue teaching until i would retire. i really could have taken other paths or taken up other hobbies. yet once you cannot have a full grasp of your job (and nonnative teachers are at a disadvantage), you cannot get satisfaction from it and keep working like a robot on an assembly line. when “full grasp” becomes the objective, you only have your strategies. in fact, strategies act as your war tactics. if you want to conquer a language, first you need a map of the enemy territory (ok, this is a terrible analogy. i have to say there is no hostility in this battle). you also need to know the correct inventory of your weapons (i.e. strategies), the number and ability of soldiers (i.e. your competence in the form of language skills), what to do during your march into the foreign territory along with means of communication (i.e. measuring your advancement). and each requires a strategy. carol griffiths, gökhan cansiz 484 5.2.4.5. autonomy i like learning by myself. whatever strategy i use should include no one else if possible. i should develop as follows: first i should identify the problem, study it like any other student, and test my knowledge. for example, once i realized i had problem paraphrasing but even the best writing books could only provide some superficial information. i certainly needed a human teacher (in contrast to a computer program), but there had to be a roundabout route because such teachers are not available at every corner or when you happen to find them they are usually too busy to offer a helping hand. then i found what i was looking for in several language exams that directly tested paraphrasing, though in a more rudimentary and controlled way. now i had a way of assessing my performance by some external, objective measure. 5.2.4.6. affect as a libra, i have to make the journey of learning at the extremes, depending on how i feel at the moment. i still have a feeling that studying means writing, probably a cultural heritage. when i first started teaching, i realized mastery of the written word would not suffice and i had to focus on performance skills, for which i had not developed many tools/strategies. studying english has become an escape strategy in times of distress. at such times, when for example i have to read a book but cannot because of emotional turmoil, i get a new notebook and start reading the book as if i am trying to learn the language and write down new words and study word etymology along with example sentences. i think i have developed some kind of therapy out of language study. i’ve had to take classes from all kinds of professors in my undergraduate and graduate studies. i always felt my knowledge of the language would empower me against all teachers, especially mean ones. the same was true about my feeling of rivalry with friends, although i always looked the most uncompetitive person. what they knew, i had to know, but i also had to know something extra. 5.2.4.7. aptitude i don’t believe i have an aptitude for languages: i simply believe in the power of brute force, that is putting in as much time as possible. someone more talented would be much better than what i am now. an individual factor might be an internal drive to be better than all others, maybe a log to hold onto in the gushing waters of life. i tried almost every strategy i heard about. memorizing was such a strategy. or making word cards. i made such cards even for turkish because at times i felt i was ignoring my mother tongue. it may be irritating to know more about a second language than your first. 5.2.4.8. motivation one of my greatest fears has probably been being embarrassed in front of others. and making mistakes or performing poorly means embarrassment. so what prevents mistakes? yes, language learning strategies: an holistic view 485 perfection, which i know is impossible to attain but also which i can’t help to aspire to. nothing is worse than running after a mirage. yet it provides continuous motivation. i feel bad when i do not know what others do. when a friend knows a word i don’t, i get nervous. this motivates me to avoid such disappointment. 5.2.5. item 5: “i chose strategies to suit my learning goal: what was your goal?” my goal was the full mastery of the target language. so i divided language into components and attacked them. yet the more i learned, the i more i realized that what i knew was dwarfed by what there was to learn. so i developed an appetite for reading. i chose a novelist (jeffrey archer, for example) and read all his books (at least all i could find). for listening i remember times when i would sit by the radiator, earphones on, listening to bbc or voa with a shortwave radio, when my friends in the dorm went to sleep. 5.2.6. item 6: “i chose strategies to suit my learning situation: what was your learning situation?” at eleven i started middle school, where i had science classes in english in addition to english classes. in those years memorization was a great part of our working schedule. we had to memorize conversations and reading passages and had to rewrite any miswritten sentence a hundred times. the head of english would give crossword puzzles and offered prizes for those who solved them first. oh i loved it then (and still do). i did not do much for english in high school as we had to prepare for university entrance exams. i almost never had to communicate in english until university years, when we were supposed to write (which i could do fairly easily, unless the topic was unfamiliar) and speak (which i found most difficult, for we no longer talked about simple personal problems). i had to review my strategies. i could write what i had in my mind but i did not know how to find ideas and put them in order. then i went after writing books that neatly showed how i should start a paragraph and continue it. interestingly, no one was of any help. teachers would correct grammatical errors mostly and friends – when i asked them to edit my paper – said it was just fine. the same was true for speaking. for two years after graduation i worked for a publishing company where i had to write, edit, and publish english teaching materials (audio or paper). now i needed strategies for more advanced learning. then i started teaching at university, i also started doing a master’s degree in english literature. now i needed better reading strategies since i needed to read and understand more. i found a book for fast-reading. yet reading fast did not work by itself. there were too many new vocabulary items. i started underlining words and writing their meanings on the margins. this is a demanding task, yet several years ago i got a novel and underlined all the unknown words as i read it. then i wrote them down in a notebook along with the sentence it appeared in. there were exactly 100 of them. the learning context is also inevitably affected by the culture in which it is situated. the effects of culture as a whole on language learning strategies are hard to measure, yet subcultures like those between peers and colleagues or within institutions seem to play a part. carol griffiths, gökhan cansiz 486 6. discussion much of the effectiveness of the account of the strategies used on the way to becoming a highly successful language learner lies in the empathy generated by the creative use of figurative language, which lifts the narrative from the mere academic to a human level to which we can all relate. we all know how it feels to “devour” a book in an attempt to find a “way through the jungle,” and to hold on desperately “in the gushing waters of life.” especially evocative are the military metaphors which talk of using an “arsenal of strategies” as “war tactics” and maintaining an “inventory of your weapons.” also insightful are the comments about the anxiety at the feeling of “ignoring [the] mother tongue,” the “cultural heritage” involved with equating studying with writing, and that “non-native teachers are at a disadvantage.” these insights are important when trying to understand and explain the complicated psycho-affective and socio-cultural tensions which accompany the process of trying to learn a language other than the first. perhaps most importantly, the commentary, along with the results of the survey, underline the reality that language learning is a highly complex process, and it is not enough to look just at strategies, or individual differences, or target or context. all of these factors interact with each other in complex patterns which render them effectively inseparable, and it is essential to take an holistic view if a meaningful picture is to be constructed. it is to be hoped that the example of an extremely active strategy user and highly successful language learner presented here might be examined by those who also wish to become highly proficient. by means of this examination, patterns might be discovered which could be adapted to other situations and goals according to individual needs. this study has produced some useful findings, but it has looked at just a small sample scattered around the world, and is therefore very limited in terms of numbers, both overall (n = 16) and in terms of having just one participant from each location. both greater breadth and greater depth are required. in terms of obtaining a broader picture, a useful way to follow up this study, in line with recent calls for greater contextual sensitivity, would be to use the survey with larger numbers in just one location, thereby providing a more detailed examination of the individual contexts. when this has been done in a number of different places, a metaanalysis could be undertaken to investigate the generalizability of findings across various contexts. as for greater depth, more qualitative investigation of the type presented in this paper may provide us with deeper understandings of the strategy use of real individuals in actual contexts. language learning strategies: an holistic view 487 7. conclusion as we can see, rubin’s (1975) article has given rise to a great deal of controversy over four decades. as o'malley et al. (1985) put it, there has been little consensus over important issues such as definition, the question of how strategies are related to successful learning, and the relationships among strategies, individual differences, learning targets and contextual variables. nevertheless, although selfregulation threatened at one point to put an end to strategy research (gao, 2007), the baby has refused to be thrown out with the bathwater (rose, 2012), and language learning strategies have continued to engage research interest worldwide. the challenge for today is to continue with efforts to achieve consensus on important issues such as, especially, definition, but also underlying theory, strategy assessment and data analysis with which this article has had no space to deal. we also need to continue with attempts to find ways to help students “improve their performance” (p. 41), as joan rubin put it 40 years ago. in order to do this, we need to find ways to investigate how learners with a complicated mixture of individual characteristics, from a wide variety of situations and aiming at diverse learning targets can effectively utilize language learning strategies in order to maximize their chances of success. of course, no single study can investigate all of these variables at once, and in the interest of feasibility, the research task may well need to be broken down into manageable chunks. nevertheless, it is important to remember that any one result, however interesting, will only be one piece of the overall picture. language learning is an extremely complex undertaking, and learners are multifaceted; it is therefore important when interpreting insights from research that they are viewed holistically and that all relevant individual, contextual and target variables are taken into account. carol griffiths, gökhan cansiz 488 references anderson, n. 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(1995). inherent details in self-regulated learning. educational psychologist, 30, 173-187. carol griffiths, gökhan cansiz 492 appendix a the questionnaire name: nationality: first language: dear participant. would you mind reading the statements below and indicating whether you personally agree or disagree with them on a scale of 5 to 1. 5=strongly agree 4=agree 3=neutral 2=disagree 1=strongly disagree could you also please add any other ideas you have in the comments box. when learning english 5 4 3 2 1 comment 1. i used many strategies (activities consciously chosen to regulate learning) which strategies did you use? 2. i used strategies frequently 3. i chose my strategies carefully so that they worked well together 4. i chose strategies to suit my individual characteristics (e.g. age, gender, culture, style, personality, etc.) which characteristics 5. i chose strategies to suit my learning goal what was your goal? 6. i chose strategies to suit my learning situation what was your learning situation? any other comments many thanks for your time language learning strategies: an holistic view 493 appendix b table 1 participants’ ratings of strategy items (refer to appendix a for original wording) no. gender 1 number 2 frequency 3 orchestration 4 individual characteristics 5 goal 6 context total 1 f 4 4 3 3 3 3 20 2 f 5 5 4 2 5 5 26 3 f 3 4 3 3 4 3 20 4 f 2 5 2 1 2 2 14 5 m 4 4 1 5 4 5 23 6 m 4 4 4 5 5 5 27 7 m 4 4 4 4 4 4 24 8 m 5 3 2 3 4 4 21 9 f 5 5 4 5 4 3 25 10 m 3 3 3 5 5 3 22 11 f 5 4 2 5 5 5 26 12 f 4 5 5 5 5 5 29 13 f 3 4 3 3 4 4 21 14 m 4 4 3 5 5 5 26 15 m 3 3 2 2 2 4 16 16 m 5 5 4 5 5 5 29 median 4 4 3 4 4 4 sum 63 66 49 61 66 65 note. participant origins: 1 = brazil, 2 = china, 3 = czech republic, 4 = finland, 5 = greece, 6 = india, 7 = iran, 8 = japan, 9 = kazakhstan, 10 = kenya, 11 = korea, 12 = kyrgystan, 13 = pakistan, 14 = poland, 15 = russia, 16 = turkey 441 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (3). 2013. 441-443 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book reviews motivating learners, motivating teachers: building the vision in the language classroom author: zoltán dörnyei, magdalena kubanyiova publisher: cambridge university press, 2014 isbn: 1107606640 pages: 240 when applied linguists, zoltán dörnyei–with his focus on the language learner–and magdalena kubanyiova–with her focus on the language teacher– teamed up to write motivating learners, motivating teachers: building the vision in the language classroom, it was a match made in motivation heaven. their collaboration provides the language learning and teaching community with a long-awaited tenet-to-technique “vision on vision” that takes us from thinking motivation to doing motivation. the authors elaborate upon and celebrate the positive impact of language learners and teachers envisaging their potential, becoming excited about it, and taking action to transform their visions into reality. this text presents a persuasive well-documented case for the power of the imagination and how to tap into it. zoltán and maggie (their self-reference–not mine) captivate readers through their approachable, almost conversational writing style, sharing past successful and unsuccessful personal teaching and learning experiences (as well as those of others), and providing engaging activities that guide individuals through a journey of dynamic self-discovery to enhance their language acquisition. 442 the book opens with an introductory chapter that convincingly justifies the reasons why a book on vision and motivation in language education that targets both teachers and learners is necessary and ends with a summative conclusion that showcases a reader-friendly graphic organizer that contains their “main visionbuilding blocks” (p. 157). in between is the crux of their thoughtful deliberations, divided into three parts. first up is a theoretical overview on the role of vision in motivating human behavior. second is a section advocating six related “envisioning” actions to motivate language learners. third is a conclusion with recommendations for teachers who need to rekindle their passions and keep their zeal alive. part i, the “theoretical overview,” contextualizes vision, motivation, and the self in contemporary thought by first explaining what vision is and why its presence is important in a current discussion on language learning motivation and teaching. while linking the envisioning process with the creation of tangible personalized goals, zoltán and maggie reinforce how sensory elements and mental imagery play a pivotal role in formulating and acting upon future l2 selfguides. they draw on a multiplicity of disciplines to incorporate investigations from a variety of well-established sources–like markus and nurius’ (1986) possible selves, higgins (1987, 1998) self-discrepancy theory, dörnyei and ushioda’s (2011) future self guides, paivio’s (1986) theory of imagery functions in performance and dörnyei’s (2005) l2 motivational self system, among others–to firmly ground their innovative ideas on a reliable and valid research foundation. furthermore, they bring their theories to life by illustrating them in the real experiences of successful visionary individuals like philippe petit (who walked a tightrope between the twin towers of the world trade center in 1974), albert einstein, and beethoven–individuals who made a place for themselves in the world because they had the power to imagine and to act upon those imaginings. in part ii, zoltán and maggie transform premise into practice by providing insight into how teachers can infuse their classrooms with vision to impassion their learners about language. each chapter is dedicated to one of the key facets of vision-centered motivational practice: creating the language learner’s vision, strengthening it through imagery enhancement, substantiating it by making it plausible, transforming the vision into action, keeping the vision alive, and counterbalancing it by considering failure. with any other authors this discussion could have exclusively circulated among those living in ivory towers and remained just another dry and academic treatise on motivational trends in second language acquisition. instead, zoltán and maggie brought their argument to the classroom, imbuing it with inspirational stories of real teachers–both those legendary few whose names most of us recognize as well as those unfamiliar ones who might just be “all of us.” in some of their “tool box” excerpts, the authors share success stories of envisioning programs from research environments and classroom contexts to 443 make us believe that we can all successfully carry them out, too! other “tool boxes” highlight artefacts produced by visionary language learners who participated in l2 possible selves activities, journal entries from researchers who observed learner participants, and summaries that re-cap major points. however, as a language teacher educator, what excited me most and kept me engaged from cover to cover were the extraordinarily creative classroom activities scattered throughout the text. motivation-stimulating ideas are offered on everything from sharing language learning histories, autobiographies, narratives, diaries and reflective journals to creating hollywood-style success stories and inventing avatars! most experienced teachers (including me!) have felt de-motivated or even suffocated at some point during their classroom careers. what is so exciting about the third part of motivating learners motivating, teachers is that zoltán and maggie recognize that teachers need to re-kindle their own flames and keep them ignited. in acknowledging this, they not only provide vindication for these feelings that often cause teachers guilt and a bit of remorse, but they also offer an avenue by which teachers can extricate themselves from a downward spiral through motivational intervention. in keeping with the guidance given on nurturing learners’ visions, the authors encourage teachers to use their passions, purposes and philosophies to vividly develop their own desired future self-images and to compare these visions with their realities in order to experience the disparity that stimulates growth and development. according to zoltán and maggie, in building resilience and sustaining hope, teachers can protect their visions and shield themselves against the adversity that often arises in the teaching profession and in the day-to-day grind of their classrooms. it is no coincidence that in this ssllt special edition on the imagination we review dörnyei and kubanyiova’s motivating learners, motivating teachers. when the editors first contacted me about some of the aims of this special issue, they informed me that, “the purpose of the special issue is to make the point that the imagination is a central part of the learning process that is not some optional extra that we pay lip service to.” the central role of the imagination was echoed in every word of motivating learners, motivating teachers: building the vision in the language classroom. i highly recommend this book for all the virtues cited above. any book that encourages me to indulge in daydreaming (really! . . . see their chapter on “creating the language learner’s vision”) is well worth picking up! reviewed by tammy gregersen university of northern iowa, cedar falls, usa tammy.gregersen@uni.edu 135 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (1). 2015. 135-152 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.1.7 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl analyzing randomized controlled interventions: three notes for applied linguists jan vanhove university of fribourg, switzerland jan.vanhove@unifr.ch abstract i discuss three common practices that obfuscate or invalidate the statistical analysis of randomized controlled interventions in applied linguistics. these are (a) checking whether randomization produced groups that are balanced on a number of possibly relevant covariates, (b) using repeated measures anova to analyze pretest-posttest designs, and (c) using traditional significance tests to analyze interventions in which whole groups were assigned to the conditions (cluster randomization). the first practice is labeled superfluous, and taking full advantage of important covariates regardless of balance is recommended. the second is needlessly complicated, and analysis of covariance is recommended as a more powerful alternative. the third produces dramatic inferential errors, which are largely, though not entirely, avoided when mixed-effects modeling is used. this discussion is geared towards applied linguists who need to design, analyze, or assess intervention studies or other randomized controlled trials. statistical formalism is kept to a minimum throughout. keywords: randomized experiments, cluster randomization, pretest-posttest designs, covariates, mixed-effects modeling 1. introduction intervention studies in which participants are randomly assigned to the treatment or control group are the gold standard for establishing the effectiveness of language learning methods. it is therefore essential that the data that they jan vanhove 136 produce be analyzed optimally and the analyses reported as cogently as possible. in this contribution, i discuss three common practices in the statistic analysis of randomized controlled interventions that obfuscate or even invalidate the insights gained from such studies. specifically, i focus on superfluous “balance tests” on covariates, overcomplicated analyses of pretest-posttest data, and the inappropriateness of ignoring the effects of assigning whole groups of participants to the experimental conditions. the issues i discuss are not new nor are they unique to applied linguistics. but applied linguists that take an interest in them need to foray into different fields where they are often explained using dauntingly looking statistical formalism. my goal is to bring these issues to the attention of applied linguists who need to design, analyze, or assess intervention studies or other randomized controlled experiments, and to provide them with practical recommendations. throughout the article, formalism is deliberately kept to a minimum. 2. superfluous balance tests as i do not wish to single out specific studies, let us consider a hypothetical intervention that investigates the effectiveness of a new method for learning to read closely related foreign languages through self-study. fifty participants are recruited and randomly given either the new learning method (treatment) or its predecessor (control) for self-study. after six weeks, all participants are administered a reading test in the related languages they have been studying (posttest-only randomized controlled experiment). in addition, the researchers extract several background variables at the onset of the study, for example, the learners’ age, sex, socioeconomic status, and other foreign language skills. (pretest scores are discussed below.) 2.1. what are balance tests? in addition to analyzing the post-test scores, conscientious researchers will often run statistical tests (e.g., t tests or anovas, or χ²-tests) on the background variables in order to ensure that the treatment and control groups are comparable in all relevant respects save for the self-study method used. the two groups are then typically deemed comparable if these balance tests yield a p value higher than a specified threshold (often p > .05). if the p value lies below this cut-off, additional analyses are often carried out to investigate the impact of the potential confound variable. for instance, say we observe a significant difference in the reading scores between the control and treatment group (e.g., t(48) = 2.4, p = .02), but also a significant age difference in the same direction analyzing randomized controlled interventions: three notes for applied linguists 137 (e.g., t(48) = 2.7, p = .01). we then might be tempted to include the learners’ age as a “control variable” in an analysis of covariance (or might be spurred to do so by a reviewer). conversely, had we observed a nonsignificant treatment effect, we might also be inclined to include age as a covariate in an ancova if the control and treatment groups differed in age. 2.2. problems with balance tests as mutz and pemantle (2013) argue, such balance tests are (almost always) superfluous in randomized experiments and may lead to suboptimal analyses down the road. here, i summarize their main points. first, to understand their superfluity, consider the null hypothesis that is being tested when the researcher conducts a balance test on (for instance) the age variable: the null hypothesis is that the participants in both the control and the treatment groups were randomly drawn from the same population and that any age differences between them are consequently due to sampling error. since the researcher randomly assigned the participants to the control or treatment groups, she already knows that this is the case. thus, rejecting this null hypothesis always constitutes a false positive (typei error: finding a significant result even though there is no effect). (note that the topic is randomized experiments; the point does not hold if the allocation of participants to control or treatment groups was not done at random.) consequently, the p value produced by a “silly” (abelson, 1995, p. 76) balance test cannot tell us anything that we do not already know. in this respect, researchers run the risk of burying their main findings under a layer of superfluous analyses (see lazaraton, 2005, pp. 218-219, for a related sentiment). second, the use of balance tests suggests that researchers think that randomization is a mechanism for creating samples that are balanced with respect to potential confound variables. balance tests would then be a method for establishing whether our sample is indeed balanced with respect to the background variables measured or whether we were “unlucky” to have drawn an arguably random but nevertheless unbalanced sample (e.g., an older treatment group). however, randomization is not meant to ensure background variable balance in any specific sample. rather, randomization balances out the effect of both measured (e.g., age) and unmeasured confounds (e.g., motivation, intelligence, chronotype, etc.) on average: if we were to run the same intervention study a large number of times and randomized the assignment of the participants to the control or treatment groups each time, randomization guarantees that the average observed treatment effect corresponds to the true treatment effect. in any given sample, we may observe smaller or larger treatment effects, but the distribution of these observed effects is unbiased and follows the laws of probability. jan vanhove 138 thus, statistical tests already account for fluke findings due to randomization (see also oehlert, 2010, chapter 2). in other words, the hypothetical p value of .02 cited above has its precise meaning: assuming that the treatment is equally as effective as the control method (= the null hypothesis), the probability of observing a difference as large as or even larger than the one observed is 2%. third, since p values already take chance findings due to randomization into account, it follows that acting on balance tests invalidates them. as illustrated above, p values are conditional probability statements: they reflect the probability of observing a particular or more extreme results if the null hypothesis were true. by using balance tests, we introduce an additional set of conditions (if the null hypothesis were true and background variables a, b, and c differed by no more than a specific margin between the two groups) that is not taken into account by the reported p value. what is more, not only do p values lose their precise meaning after a significant balance test: the mere intention to act on significant balance tests invalidates the reported p value even if the balance test comes out nonsignificant. the reason is that statistical inference is affected not only by what we do when observing a particular data pattern (e.g., a positive balance test) but also by what we would have done had the data come out differently (see gelman & loken, 2013; see also simmons, nelson, & simonsohn, 2011, for related issues). unfortunately, for practical purposes, it is impossible to recalibrate p values to take such conditionalities into account. 2.3. proper uses of background variables does all of this mean that collecting background variables is a waste of time? no. one valid and indeed highly recommendable procedure is to block on variables that are deemed important (see oehlert, 2010, chapter 13). for instance, if we have reasons to believe that women and men would differ substantially in their reading test scores, we may want to consider blocking on the sex variable: half of the men would be randomly assigned to the treatment group and half to the control group, and similarly for the women. the decision to block on a given (or several) variables must be made before the randomization, and blocking is difficult if the participant sample is not completely defined at the onset of the data collection (e.g., when participants trickle to the lab over the course of several weeks; but see moore & moore, 2013, who discuss methods for blocking on covariates in such cases). when feasible, however, blocking on background variables that are actually related to the outcome increases statistical precision by accounting for a source of residual variance: less residual variance means narrower standard errors, which in turn translates into a greater probability of finding true treatment effects (“power”). note that this requires that analyzing randomized controlled interventions: three notes for applied linguists 139 the blocking variable be included in the analysis. interestingly, even blocking on poorly chosen or measured background variables does not decrease precision in any but the smallest of samples (see imai, king, & stuart, 2008).1 a second way to make fruitful use of background variables is to use them as covariates in the analysis regardless of whether the two groups are balanced with respect to them or not (mutz & pemantle, 2013). entering covariates that are really related to the outcome into the analysis again increases statistical precision by accounting for a source of residual variance, even if the means of the variable are similar in the two groups. however, covariates that are not actually related to the outcome decrease statistical precision since they fit noise in the data at the cost of degrees of freedom. hence, it pays to be discriminate and to select a small number of background variables that are known to be substantially related to the outcome (e.g., from the literature); then, when analyzing the study’s results, one can forgo conducting balance tests and use the selected variables in a multivariate analysis. 3. using pretest scores the fictitious intervention study described above can substantially be improved upon by the inclusion of a pretest, giving rise to a pretest-posttest randomized controlled experiment. when pretest scores are available, it is always advantageous to use them in the analysis—even if the control and treatment groups are comparable with respect to them. pretreatment ability is perhaps the single most important predictor of posttreatment ability, and taking interindividual differences in pretreatment ability into account greatly improves the precision of the study with respect to the treatment effect. however, the analyses of pretest–posttest studies reported in the literature are often needlessly complicated and can be simplified for greater readability without loss of technical accuracy. this point is not new (see huck & mclean, 1975) but bears repeating. 3.1. repeated measures anova: too much information in our fictitious pretest-posttest example, researchers might be tempted to conduct a repeated measures anova (rm anova) with condition (control, treatment) as a 1 blocking on a continuous variable is possible, too, but it is somewhat more involved. one approach, recommended by dalton and overall (1977), maxwell, delaney, and hill (1984) and mcaweeny and klockars (1998), is to rank the participants by their covariate score and assign them to the conditions according to an abbaabb. . . pattern. whether a refers to the treatment or the control group is determined at random. the data can then be analyzed in an ancova with the covariate score as a continuous predictor. a discussion on blocking on several covariates simultaneously lies far outside the scope of this article, but see moore (2012). jan vanhove 140 between-subject factor and time (pretest, posttest) as well as the interaction between condition and time as within-subject terms. the report may then read something like this: a repeated-measures anova yielded a nonsignificant main effect of condition (f(1, 48) < 1) but a significant main effect of time (f(1, 48) = 154.6, p < 0.001): in both groups, the posttest scores were higher than the pretest scores. in addition, the condition × time interaction was significant (f(1, 48) = 6.2, p = 0.016): the increase in reading scores relative to baseline was higher in the treatment than in the control group. (fictitious example) in technical terms, this analysis is defensible (but see below), but its main problem is one of communicative efficiency. as huck and mclean (1975) showed, the main effect of condition substantially underestimates the treatment effect: logically, the treatment effect can only be observed in the posttest data, but the main effect of condition is computed on the basis of both the preand the posttest data. this yields a diluted estimate of the actual treatment effect. additionally, finding a main effect of time is trivial: we already know that test scores change with time. of the three reported results, only the interaction result is actually germane to the research question—we were interested in knowing whether the increase relative to baseline differed between the two groups. this interaction term provides the true treatment effect. 3.2. t tests: as correct but much simpler inundating one’s readership with irrelevant or trivial results derived from a rather complicated analysis strikes me as counterproductive. what may not be fully appreciated is that a much simpler analysis provides the same information: a two-sample t test on the gain scores, that is, the differences between the posttest and pretest scores, always yields the same result as the condition × time interaction in a rm anova. in our example, the report would reduce to: “a two-sample t test on the gain scores revealed that the treatment group showed a higher increase in reading scores than the control group (t(48) = 2.49, p = 0.016).” (note that for a given analysis, f = t².) 3.3. a more flexible and (slightly) more powerful alternative both rm anovas and t tests on gain scores assume that the pretest and posttest scores are linearly related with a slope of 1 (hendrix, carter, & hintze, 1978; huck & mclean, 1975). this assumption is clearly violated when the pretest and posttest scores are on different scales, but it can also be violated by mere measurement analyzing randomized controlled interventions: three notes for applied linguists 141 error. performance on imperfect tests is a combination of ability and extraneous factors such as form on the day, topic of a reading test, and so on. participants who overor underperformed due to extraneous factors on the pretest are relatively unlikely to overor underperform by the same margin on the posttest (“regression to the mean”). as a result, the slope of the relationship between the pretest and posttest scores will often be less than 1 even if both tests are scored on the same scale. using analysis of covariance (ancova), the slope parameter can be estimated from the data rather than be assumed to be 1. doing so costs a degree of freedom and hence some loss of statistical power if the slope actually is equal to 1, but it can lead to more power if the slope is not equal to 1 (e.g., van breukelen, 2006). however, as maris (1998) showed, estimates of the treatment effect that are derived from gain score analyses are not biased in the presence of measurement error. put differently, gain score analyses and analyses using the pretest data as a covariate yield the same, correct estimation of the treatment effect on average, but ancova has more power. note, however, that this applies only to studies in which the assignment was done at random (see van breukelen, 2006). in addition to having greater statistical power, ancova comes with increased flexibility compared to gain score analyses. first, the pretest and posttest data need not be expressed on the same scale: if the pretest data have been collected on a 10-point scale and the posttest data on a 25-point scale, there is no need to transform the data to fit on a common scale. second, gain score analyses (or rm anova) and ancova both assume that the relationship between the pretest and the posttest data is linear. however, ancova models can be furnished with nonlinear terms (e.g., quadratic or cubic terms, or regression splines) to relax this assumption (see, e.g., baayen, 2008, pp. 108-111). in sum, using rm anova to analyze pretest–posttest data is an unnecessary complication, as simpler analyses on gain scores always yield the same result. using the pretest data as a covariate in an ancova is usually (somewhat) more powerful and is more flexible with respect to the linearity assumption. 4. interventions with intact groups in the example above, the learners were randomly assigned to the treatment or control group on an individual basis. oftentimes, however, randomization occurs not at the individual level but at a higher level. for instance, whole classes or schools are often assigned to the conditions of the intervention so that within each class or school, all pupils belong to the same condition. designs in which intact groups are randomly assigned to conditions are known as groupor clusterrandomized interventions and are a popular choice when practical considerations jan vanhove 142 do not allow random assignment at the individual level, when interactions between participants in different group at the same school may contaminate the results, or when doing so increases the study’s ecological validity (e.g., when testing methods that will later only be used with intact groups). crucially, however, ignoring the fact that randomization took place at the group level drastically affects the insights gained from the study. to take another hypothetical example, consider a researcher who is interested in comparing the efficacy of two class-based methods (control and intervention) for teaching reading skills in related foreign languages. at her disposal stand ten classes, each taught by a different teacher, of 20 students each.2 five classes are randomly assigned to the control method and five to the intervention method. at the end of the semester, all 200 students take a reading test that provides the dependent variable for the analysis. unfortunately, a t test (or, equivalently, an anova) on the 200 resultant data points is too likely to yield a statistically significant result when there is, in fact, no effect (see, e.g., barcikowski, 1981; walsh, 1947). in statistics parlance, such a test has a higher-than-nominal (i.e., higher than 5%) type-i error rate and is thus anti-conservative. this anti-conservatism is the result of a violation of the test’s assumption that the data points be independent of one another: participants’ scores tend to be more alike within a cluster than between clusters since their performance is shaped by the same or similar contextual factors (e.g., the students’ background, teachers). as a result, data points within a cluster do not contribute entirely independent information, and analyzing the data as though they did overstates our confidence in the results. the degree to which our confidence would be overstated depends on the intraclass correlation. 4.1. intraclass correlation and its effects the degree to which participants’ scores within a cluster tend to be alike is expressed by the intraclass correlation coefficient (icc). it is computed by dividing the between-cluster variance by the sum of the betweenand within-cluster variances. the icc takes on values between 0 and 1, with 0 indicating the complete absence of clustering and 1 indicating that all scores within each cluster are identical. importantly, ignoring even small degrees of interrelatedness within clusters can invalidate the analysis. figure 1 shows how the actual type-i error rate increases as a function of (a) the icc and (b) the number of participants per 2 the classes can also all be taught by the same teacher. what is important for this example is that the ten classes are not taught by, say, five teachers, each of whom teaches two classes. such a design would further invalidate the assumption of independence (see below in main text). analyzing randomized controlled interventions: three notes for applied linguists 143 cluster if the data of a cluster-randomized experiment are analyzed by means of t tests on the actual observations. as is clear from this plot, even iccs as small as .01 give rise to appreciably higher type-i error rates, especially when the number of participants per cluster is high. for the reader’s reference, hedges and hedberg (2007) provide icc estimates that range from .17 to .27 for scores on reading achievement tests when randomization occurs at the school level, and schochet (2008) provides an icc estimate of about .15 for evaluations of educational programs when randomization occurs at the school or classroom level. figure 1 type-i error rates for cluster-randomized experiments when analyzed by means of a t test on the participants’ scores as a function of the intraclass correlation coefficient (icc) and the number of participants per cluster (m). for this graph, the number of clusters was fixed at 10, but the type-i error rate differs only slightly for different numbers of clusters. such reference values are useful for planning cluster-randomized experiments (see hedges & hedberg, 2007; killip, mahfoud, & pearce, 2004; schochet, 2008; spybrook et al., 2011). for a given number of participants, clusters, icc coefficient and expected effect size, the probability of finding a significant intervention effect can be computed. this is referred to as the study’s power. figure 2 illustrates the effects of cluster size and icc on the power of a study with jan vanhove 144 128 participants to observe a medium-size effect (d = 0.5, see cohen, 1992).3 as this graph illustrates, a (correctly analyzed; see below) cluster-randomized experiment always has less power than a completely randomized experiment (i.e., m = 1) with the same total number of observations. figure 2 power to detect a medium-size effect (d = 0.5) for a correctly analyzed cluster-randomized experiment with 128 participants in function of the intraclass correlation coefficient (icc) and the number of participants per cluster (m). including strongly predictive covariates (e.g., pretest scores) in the analysis reduces the effect of clustering, that is, it increases statistical power and reduces type-i error rates of flawed analyses, but cannot be counted on to make it disappear entirely (bloom, richburg-hayes, & black, 2007; hedges & hedberg, 2007; moerbeek, 2006; murray & blitstein, 2003; schochet, 2008). 4.2. taking clustering into account when the icc value is known, it can be used to recalibrate statistical analyses (see blair & higgins, 1986, for when the raw data are available, and hedges, 3 these power computations assume that the analyst knows the icc value and uses it in the analysis; if the icc value is unknown, the power levels will be lower (see blair & higgins, 1986). analyzing randomized controlled interventions: three notes for applied linguists 145 2007, for when they are not). however, these recalibration methods require that the icc parameter of the population to which we want to generalize is known, or has at least been estimated with great precision; using sample estimates of the icc to recalibrate one’s results does not work as these estimates are too imprecise (blair & higgins, 1986; hedges, 2007). in most cases, an accurate estimate will not be available, which is why i focus on two analytical tacks that do not require one: analyses on cluster means and mixed-effects modeling. 4.2.1. (weighted) t tests on cluster means a conceptually straightforward approach is to calculate the mean (or another summary measure) of each cluster and run a t test on them rather than on the original observations. when the number of observations differs from cluster to cluster, a t test in which the cluster means are weighted for cluster size is recommended (see, e.g., campbell, donner, & klar, 2007).4 this analysis is easy to compute and report, and it perfectly accounts for violations of the independence assumption: the type-i error rate is at its nominal level (i.e., 5%). a drawback of this approach is that individual-level covariates (e.g., the participants’ age) cannot directly be accounted for. cluster-level variables (e.g., the teacher’s sex) and cluster-level summary measures of individual-level covariates (e.g., the average age of pupils in a class), however, can be entered in a multiple regression model or ancova ran on the cluster means. this comes at the cost of a residual degree of freedom for each covariate, however, which can be prohibitively expensive power-wise in studies with a small number of clusters if the covariate is only weakly related to the dependent variable. additionally, researchers may find it psychologically difficult to reduce a dataset to a fraction of its original size—if the analysis is carried out on ten cluster means, why bother recruiting several participants per cluster? however, larger clusters reduce the variance of the cluster means within each treatment group, which in turn makes the intervention effect stand out more clearly (barcikowski, 1981). put differently, cluster-level analyses are more powerful when the clusters are large compared to when they are small. that said, when given the choice between running an experiment on ten clusters with 50 observations each or on 50 clusters with ten observations each, the latter is vastly preferred due to its higher power (see figure 2). 4 in statistical packages that do not offer the facility to weight cluster means by cluster size, the same can be accomplished by computing a linear regression on the cluster means with the experimental condition as a (nominal) predictor and cluster sizes as weights. jan vanhove 146 4.2.2. mixed-effects modeling mixed-effects modeling has gained popularity among language researchers in recent years and represents an attractive alternative to researchers who have carried out a cluster-randomized experiment. mixed-effects models are fitted on the original observations and can explicitly account for the effect of clustering by fitting the clusters using a random-effect term. this is also known as multilevel or hierarchical modeling. multilevel modeling is not yet part and parcel of the statistical education of applied linguists. given its increasing popularity in related disciplines (e.g., psycholinguistics), i think it is nonetheless useful to outline its advantages for analyzing group-randomized experiments. additionally, i want to highlight that even multilevel models do not necessarily produce entirely accurate p values. the following discussion is unavoidably more technical in nature and assumes some familiarity with the lmer (“linear mixed-effect regression”) function in the lme4 package (bates, maechler, bolker, & walker, 2014) for r. in addition to being free, lme4 combines state-of-the-art modeling with relative userfriendliness and has become the software package of choice in psycholinguistics (for an introduction to lme4 geared towards language researchers, see baayen, 2008). readers who are primarily interested in the bottom line of this more technical discussion can skip to the recommendations section. 4.2.2.1. advantages one advantage of lmer, and multilevel modeling more generally, is that it can cope with several dependency levels simultaneously. suppose that ten schools with a total of 80 classes and 1,360 students participate in an experiment. assignment to the experimental conditions occurs at the class level, and each student contributes five observations (e.g., test scores). in addition to modeling classes (the level of randomization) as random effects, schools and students can—and indeed should—be modeled as random effects, too. second, lmer fits can include covariates pertaining to different levels (e.g., age of the student, sex of the teacher, and school type). third, mixed-effects models can be fitted on non-gaussian data as well (e.g., dichotomous or poisson data) using the glmer function in the lme4 package. however, lmer outputs do not, by default, feature p values. as bates (2006) explained, the reason is that it is not clear how to compute degrees of freedom for terms in mixed-effects models. however, several strategies exist for “squeezing” p values out of lmer fits. analyzing randomized controlled interventions: three notes for applied linguists 147 4.2.2.2. assessing statistical significance in multilevel models the first strategy is to take the t value for the model term and interpret it as a z value (see, e.g., baayen, 2008, pp. 247-248). the null hypothesis is then rejected when |t| > 1.96. as baayen (2008) points out, however, this approach is anti-conservative (i.e., yields spurious significance) for small samples. what counts as a large enough sample for this approach to be reasonable depends on the design of the study, specifically the number of clusters, as well as on the intraclass correlation. a different kind of p value can be computed by comparing nested models by means of a likelihood-ratio test (lrt, see, e.g., faraway, 2006, pp. 156-157). this test, too, is anti-conservative for small samples: it assumes that the distribution of the lrt statistic approximates a χ² distribution with one degree of freedom (in the present context) under the null hypothesis, but this approximation is poor for small samples and sometimes even for large samples (faraway, 2006). again, what constitutes “small” and “large” samples depends on the number of clusters and the intraclass correlation. a third strategy is to compute approximate p values using a simulationbased approach called parametric bootstrapping (see faraway, 2006, pp. 157158). in a parametric bootstrap, a large number (say, 1,000) of alternative datasets are produced under the null hypothesis. this is accomplished by fitting a mixed-effects null model to the data that does not contain a term for the intervention effect but is otherwise fully specified (intercept, random effects and covariates). new datasets are then simulated on the basis of this null model: new “observations” for the dependent variable are created by taking predictions on the basis of the intercept and covariates and adding residuals drawn from the distributions of the random effects and the residual standard error. then, a lrt statistic is computed for each dataset by comparing the model with the intervention effect fitted to the simulated data to the corresponding model without the intervention effect. since the datasets were simulated in the absence of a treatment effect, any variability in the (1,000) lrt statistics is due to randomness alone. thus, to an approximation, the distribution of bootstrapped lrt values serves as a reference distribution for the lrt statistic computed on the basis of the actually observed data (i.e., as per the second strategy): the bootstrapped p value is equal to the proportion of lrt values under the null hypothesis that are larger than the actual one. a user-friendly implementation of this procedure is available in the pbkrtest package (halekoh & højsgaard, 2014) for r. parametric bootstrapping yields more conservative p values than likelihood-ratio tests, and is therefore to be preferred over the other two strategies, which give anti-conservative results. the achilles’ heel of this approach is that the jan vanhove 148 null model needs to be specified correctly. for technical reasons,5 the null model on the basis of which the simulated data sets are generated tends to underestimate the between-cluster variance (see faraway, 2006, pp. 154) and hence the icc. this underestimation may yield anti-conservative p values from parametric bootstrapping, too. parametric bootstrapping is computationally expensive, however, and it is therefore difficult to verify whether the p values that it yields are at nominal levels. to my knowledge, no monte carlo study has yet been run to investigate the properties of p values computed by means of parametric bootstrapping. in any event, the bootstrapped p values will be more accurate than those resulting from the other two strategies, but not necessarily entirely accurate. 4.3. recommendations for analyzing clustered-randomized interventions when randomization at the level of the participants is not feasible or desirable, cluster-level randomization presents an alternative. the effects of clustering need to be duly accounted for so that the statistical significance of the intervention not be overstated. this need brings with it an appreciable but unavoidable loss of statistical power. in order to salvage as much power as possible, carefully considered covariates (both at the individual and at higher hierarchical levels) can be included in a mixed-effects analysis. if p values need to be extracted from such an analysis, parametric bootstrapping is the least unduly optimistic of the three methods discussed, but even so, borderline significant results are best enjoyed with a grain of salt. a second important corollary of what i have discussed is that, unless the icc is known (and it rarely is), interventions with one cluster per condition do not allow for meaningful statistical inferences (see also murray, varnell, & blitstein, 2004). for instance, a t test on two cluster means would have a t distribution with zero degrees of freedom as a reference—which does not exist. conceptually, this translates to the realization that we have no way of teasing apart the intervention effect from the cluster effect when the conditions and the clusters are completely conflated, that is, we have zero power. such designs are therefore strongly discouraged. lastly, clustering can also occur even when randomization occurs at the level of the individual. for instance, if researchers randomly assign individuals to conditions, but then proceed to apply the treatments to groups of several participants, they could also induce clustering effects (see lee & thompson, 2005). such forms of clustering need to be taken into account as well. 5 to compute a lrt statistic, the models being compared need to be fitted using maximum likelihood. maximum likelihood estimates of variances tend to be too low, however, and more so in small samples. analyzing randomized controlled interventions: three notes for applied linguists 149 5. summary the three notes discussed in this paper can be summarized as follows: 1. testing for background variable balance is superfluous in randomized experiments. to take full advantage of important covariates, it is best to include them in the analysis regardless of whether the control and treatment groups are balanced with respect to them or not. 2. analyzing pretest-posttest using rm anovas is needlessly complicated since t tests on gain scores accomplish the same thing; using the pretest scores as a covariate in an ancova is a more flexible and more powerful alternative. 3. traditional t tests or anovas are inappropriate for analyzing interventions with intact groups (e.g., classes). mixed-effects modeling coupled with parametric bootstrapping represents an attractive alternative, but the p values that this procedure yields should still be interpreted with caution. 6. closing thought i have discussed three relatively common practices in the analysis of randomized intervention experiments and labeled them as superfluous, overcomplicated, and inappropriate, respectively. i have done so in part by citing the effects of these practices on p values, and specifically with their yielding too many or too few statistically significant results. this may give the impression that the categorization of findings into “significant” and “nonsignificant” results is the goal of experimental studies (“categoritis,” abelson, 1995, p. 111). however, uncertainty is inherent in statistical analyses, and even randomized experiments—whether they yield p values below or above an arbitrary threshold—do not necessarily produce definite answers. in simple (but not oversimplified) terms, a significant result does not prove the existence of an effect, and a nonsignificant result much less proves that an effect does not exist (see, among many others, cohen, 1994; schmidt, 1996). thus, while this article has offered recommendations for conducting more accurate or more transparent significance tests, it has done so with the understanding that their results are not the be-all and end-all of experimental research. acknowledgments i thank 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(1947). concerning the effect of intraclass correlation on certain significance tests. the annals of mathematical statistics, 18(1), 88-96. 649 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (4). 2017. 649-671 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.4.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt discourse markers in non-native efl teacher talk gloria vickov university of split, croatia gvickov@ffst.hr eva jakupčević university of split, croatia ejakupcevic@ffst.hr abstract the present study aims to investigate the use of discourse markers (dms) in nonnative (croatian) efl teachers´ talk with primary and secondary school students. the study concentrates on the occurrences and frequencies of dms, but it also provides an account of the function distribution of the three most frequently used dms (ok, so, and). the quantitative and qualitative analyses of the recorded transcriptions reveal that the teachers use a variety of dms, almost exclusively the ones typical of classroom management and classroom discourse organization, with no significant differences in the patterns of dm use with the primary and secondary school students. the dms fulfill a number of structural and interpersonal functions mainly aimed at providing coherent and stimulating classroom discourse. the findings of this study might contribute to raising awareness of the diversified functions of dms, which could facilitate non-native efl teachers´ overall lesson organization and structuring of particular teaching segments. keywords: discourse markers; non-native (croatian) efl teachers; classroom discourse 1. introduction discourse markers (dms hereafter) are multifunctional linguistic units with a principally non-propositional function and serve to connect segments of spoken gloria vickov, eva jakupčević 650 and written discourse (fraser, 1999; müller, 2005). they are syntactically independent and semantically optional, their main role being to maintain the cohesive relations in discourse. in addition, dms are used to achieve a variety of interactive functions essential to the relationship between discourse participants, such as politeness, repairs, attention-getting and feedback (iglesias moreno, 2001). functions of these units thus exist both on the textual and interpersonal levels, facilitating understanding for the discourse participants, guiding them through interpretation, and helping them to choose the right meaning out of all possible meanings (aijmer & simon-vandenbergen, 2006; brinton, 1996). theoretical accounts of dms are marked by an extraordinary diversity of terminology, definitions and taxonomies. over the years, these units have been referred to as pragmatic particles (ostman, 1981), discourse particles (schourup, 1985), discourse connectives (blakemore, 1992) and pragmatic markers (fraser, 1996), to name just a few. furthermore, a variety of theories and perspectives have been used to consider discourse markers, such as the theory of discourse coherence (schiffrin, 1987), relevance theory (blakemore, 1992) or the grammatical-pragmatic perspective (fraser, 1996). however, in spite of this diversity, it is generally agreed that these units contribute to the pragmatic meaning of utterances and thus play an important role in the pragmatic competence of speakers (house, 2013; lenk, 1998; müller, 2005), enabling them to use language in a way that is culturally, socially and situationally appropriate (fung & carter, 2007). consequently, insufficient and incorrect use of dms may reduce communication effectiveness and may cause failure in interpersonal and intercultural interaction (martinez, 2004; wierzbicka, 1991), leading the speaker to be perceived as impolite, and his social behavior or commitment to the conversation to be brought into question (crystal, 1988; iglesias moreno, 2001; lam, 2009). the importance of dm use in everyday native speech is an indicator of its relevance for foreign language learners who need to be aware of the textual and interpersonal effects achieved by the consistent use of dms in order to communicate adequately in specific contexts (furko & monos, 2013; müller, 2005). but despite the fact that natural communication in a language largely depends on the appropriate use of dms, these linguistic units appear not to receive enough recognition in foreign language teaching materials (lam, 2009; müller, 2005; vickov, 2010). existing efl studies largely point to non-native students´ poor command of english dms at different proficiency levels, in that they use dms less or differently, or use a narrower range of these units than native speakers (buysse, 2012; liao, 2009). this seems to be caused by a variety of factors, one of them being artificial or inappropriate language input in the classroom (fung & carter, 2007; müller, 2005). even though language teachers are said to be responsible for about two thirds of classroom discourse (ellis, 1994) and their discourse markers in non-native efl teacher talk 651 language use is very likely to be at least as influential as the textbooks are (müller, 2005), there is a serious lack of research focusing on non-native teachers’ use of dms (yang, 2011). in an attempt to shed more light on this issue, the present study investigates the use and functions of dms in croatian efl teacher talk with students at two proficiency levels, in the final years of primary and secondary school. the findings of the study will allow for a better understanding of dm use in non-native efl teacher talk. the study may also prove useful in defining the characteristics of efl classroom discourse as well as in providing guidelines for teacher preparation courses. 2. discourse markers in efl classroom context over the last decade, the interest in the process of acquiring and using discourse markers by non-native speakers of languages, especially english, has generated a considerable amount of research (e.g., buysee, 2012; fuller, 2003; fung & carter, 2007; hellermann & vergun, 2007; lam, 2009; liao, 2009; müller, 2005). however, although english has been increasingly learned as a foreign language taught by non-native speakers of english in a formal pedagogical setting, there has been notably less research conducted in the classroom context (chapeton castro, 2009). the existing empirical research is mostly focused on efl/esl learners´ use of dms in spoken language and is mainly conducted on small samples of learners at the advanced level. the findings suggest that efl learners use dms less frequently than native speakers (weinert, 1998), and often use them in inadequate ways, that is ways in which they would never be used by native speakers (yang, 2005). furthermore, some of the findings are indicative of an overuse of particular dms such as, for example, but, and and so (paatola, 2002; vickov, 2010). possible causes of such language behavior may lie in the unnatural language input in the formal educational context and pragmatic fossilization (trillo, 2002) or l1 interference (jalilifar, 2008; vickov, 2014). it could also be a consequence of an under-representation of dms in english textbooks and questionable competences of non-native efl teachers in using dms in spoken classroom discourse, as pointed out in one of the most influential studies in this area, conducted by müller (2005). in providing valuable insights into the functions of four discourse markers (so, well, you know and like) in native (american) and non-native (german) discourse on the basis of a substantial parallel corpus of spoken english at an advanced level, müller has drawn readers´ attention to the link between pedagogical practices and language use suggesting that english textbooks and non-native efl teachers seem not to provide a fully adequate basis for illustrating native-like dm usage. however, even native teacher talk, as shown by hellermann and vergun (2007), seems to be deficient in the domain gloria vickov, eva jakupčević 652 of dm use, suggesting that the specific and unnatural classroom context might be to blame for the lacking language input. nevertheless, some studies (e.g., de fina, 1997; fung & carter, 2007; walsh, 2006) have suggested the idea of dms being an inevitable part of successful classroom management and a key part of pragmatic knowledge in general, making them indispensable not only to language learners but also, perhaps even more importantly, to teachers, who are among the most important sources of language input in classroom discourse. fung and carter (2007), for example, consider dms to form the basic fabric of talk in pedagogical setting. in the context of teaching, dms have been found to aid the comprehension of lectures (flowerdew & tauroza, 1995) and, conversely, speech lacking these units can contribute to the misunderstanding of academic monologues (jung, 2006). research also shows that the importance of dm use for language teachers is twofold as they simultaneously perform both social and educational functions in the classroom. firstly, as successful teaching stems from, among other things, successful interaction management in the classroom (allwright, 1984), dms have an especially important role in enabling teachers to structure their discourse, in that way making it possible for learners to interpret the communicative demands of the context and participate in activities more successfully (de fina, 1997). as suggested by walsh (2006), teachers can use dms to signal the progression of a lesson and indicate the beginnings and ends of particular teaching stages. this makes the methodology explicit and allows for more planning and thinking time, along with aiding the students´ understanding of both the content and the interaction patterns. furthermore, dms also help establish interpersonal relationships in the classroom, creating a better atmosphere for active participation (chapeton castro, 2009; othman, 2010). they facilitate the process of interpretation and social involvement in spoken interaction, and are essential to the maintenance of conversational cooperation, ensuring that interactions go on smoothly (lam, 2009). all in all, by reducing understanding difficulties and social distance between the teacher and the learners, these language units contribute to the effectiveness of learning in general and help create a shared space between the teacher and the students (walsh, 2006). simply put, dms in teacher talk can help learners understand not only the teacher’s language but also the purpose of a specific activity and how it relates to the context. this was confirmed, for example, in the study conducted by chapeton castro (2009), in which she investigated the use of dms in the classroom context by a non-native teacher who was shown to use dms effectively to organize discourse and to fulfil interpersonal functions. in addition to the significant roles dms play in the management and interpersonal relations in the classroom, the teachers’ use of these units is also vital discourse markers in non-native efl teacher talk 653 because teachers teaching in the efl context are an important and prevailing source of input for their learners. according to walsh (2006), modeling the target language is one of the key activities that foreign language teachers perform, and the fact that they frequently represent the only source of foreign language input for the learners highlights the importance of studying the actual language they use. the finding that dms seem to be rather rare or completely non-existent in efl textbooks (celce-murcia, 2001; müller, 2005) additionally reinforces the importance of teacher talk for the acquisition of these units by efl learners. however, despite the relevance of teacher talk for the learners´ acquisition of dms and the rising interest in the research regarding non-native foreign language teachers in general (llurda, 2005), there is almost a total lack of research focusing on foreign language teachers´ use of dms in the classroom environment (rongrong & lixun, 2015; shahbaz et al., 2013; yang, 2011). at best, this area is merely touched upon in the context of foreign language learners’ use of dms (hellermann & vergun, 2007; mihaljević djigunović & vickov, 2010; müller, 2005; nejadansari & mohammadi, 2015). due to all this, the present study seeks to extend the current knowledge about non-native efl teachers´ use of dms. 3. the present study the aim of this study is to provide more insight into the use and functions of dms in croatian efl teacher talk with students at two proficiency levels, more specifically, in the final years of primary and secondary school. in the final year of primary school croatian students are 13-14 years old and have been learning english for at least eight years, while at the end of secondary school they are 1718 years old on average and have been learning english for 12 years. the two different education levels were chosen for two reasons. firstly, they represent important thresholds in the croatian education system, and secondly and more importantly, we wanted to see if croatian efl teachers adapt their language, dm use in particular, to their students’ age and proficiency levels. in other words, taking into consideration the secondary school students’ higher level of language proficiency, we wanted to see if the teachers ́use of english dms with the secondary school students would be more intensive and richer than with the primary school students, with respect to the frequency and types of dms used. in identifying dms in our study, we relied on the framework provided by fung and carter (2007), who define dms as “intra-sentential and supra-sentential linguistic units which fulfill a largely non-propositional and connective function at the level of discourse” (p. 415). their framework enables a functionallybased analysis and a systematic classification of the different roles dms perform in the pedagogic register. as argued by yang (2011), fung and carter´s multigloria vickov, eva jakupčević 654 functional framework of dms is effective in that it “provides a descriptive model to analyze dms on different levels” (p. 105). it provides a context-based model to analyze dms from a functional perspective for classroom discourse, which can be thus applied to investigate the use of dms not only in non-native efl students´ spoken discourse but also in teacher talk. in this taxonomy, dms are classified into four categories: interpersonal (e.g., indicating response, marking the attitude of the speaker), referential (i.e., marking textual relationships between verbal activities surrounding the dm), structural (e.g., opening and closing of topics, summarizing, holding the floor), and cognitive (e.g., denoting the thinking process, reformulating, elaborating). fung and carter (2007) also provide criteria concerning whether a linguistic item or expression can be defined as a dm. these criteria include position, prosody, multigrammaticality, indexicality and optionality and can be summarized as follows: · dms are difficult to place within a traditional word class; they are drawn from different grammatical and lexical inventories; · they are syntactically optional: dms can be omitted without the truth value of the utterance being affected; · they are often sentence-initial, although they may occur at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a discourse unit or form a discourse unit of their own; · they have little or no semantic meaning in themselves; · they are multifunctional; · they are prosodically independent and are largely separate from the utterances they introduce; there are prosodic clues that occur with dms and these include pauses, phonological reductions, and separate tone units; · they function as indexical expressions to signal the relation of an utterance to the preceding context and to assign the discourse units a coherent link. fung and carter´s (2007) defining criteria are in line with some of the most highly cited researchers in dm studies such as schiffrin (1987), brinton (1996) and müller (2005). 3.1. research questions the study addressed the following research questions: 1. what is the frequency distribution of dms in the classroom talk of croatian efl teachers? 2. what is the frequency of use of dms in primary and secondary classrooms? 3. what are the functions of the most frequently used dms? discourse markers in non-native efl teacher talk 655 3.2. method 3.2.1. participants the participants in our study were six efl teachers (ts 1-6), none of whom were native speakers of english and none of whom had spent more than a year in an english-speaking country. three of the teachers were recorded while teaching primary school students and three while teaching secondary school students. all of them were experienced teachers, with an average of eight years of work experience at school. they all taught in private foreign language schools and worked with learners representing different age groups. 3.2.2. procedure two 45-minute classes were recorded for each teacher, although the duration was somewhat varied due to external factors (teachers being late or finishing early), as can be seen in table 1. in total, 501 minutes (8 hours 21 minutes) of teacher talk in the classroom were recorded, yielding a corpus of 32,681 words. table 1 the duration of recordings and number of words per teacher t1 t2 t3 t4 t5 t6 total minutes recorded 87 73 80 90 85 86 501 no. of words 6974 5098 5266 5145 7285 2913 32681 no. of dms 1082 474 477 738 590 283 3644 dms/1000 words 155.15 92.98 90.58 143.45 80.99 97.16 111.50 no. of different dms 40 28 39 32 34 18 three of the teachers were recorded while teaching classes in the final year of primary school (8th year of learning), and three in the final year of secondary school (12th year of learning). the researchers were not present during the classes so as to cause as little interference as possible. instead, the teachers were provided with digital voice recorders and instructed to turn them on, place them on their desks and teach a regular class. the classes included a variety of language activities ranging from grammar and conversation exercises to the activities focused on developing reading and listening skills. 3.2.3. analysis for our analysis, quantitative and qualitative methods were combined, ranging from a macro-investigation through the careful reading of the transcripts and using the concordance analysis software antconc (anthony, 2014) to a more detailed gloria vickov, eva jakupčević 656 micro-discourse analytic examination. the recordings were transcribed, with the transcription presented in standard orthographic form. the transcripts were first analyzed in detail by reading through them and marking the occurrences of dms, based on the definition and framework provided by fung and carter (2007). the status of a dm needs to be contextually-referenced, which is why the initial analysis of the transcripts was performed manually. through this process, a list of 51 identified dms was compiled. during the identification process particular attention was paid to those linguistic units which only act as dms in certain contexts, such as or and and, which are often used as conjunctions. another example, described in more detail in section 3.3.3.2, is the word so with a variety of non-dm uses which had to be carefully identified and excluded. these units were one of the main reasons why the initial analysis of the transcripts was performed manually; machine-aided analysis cannot differentiate between their uses. however, antconc (anthony, 2014) was used after the initial analysis to perform searches for specific dms and double-check their numbers, and to check the contexts in which problematic dms (e.g., or, and and so) appeared. the final, qualitative analysis of the most frequent markers was performed by reading through the transcripts once more and extracting examples in order to determine their main functions and common patterns of use. as de fina (1997) noted, markers may assume activity-specific functions which may be different from the ones described by existing research, and it is important to emphasize that the interpretation of their meaning cannot be performed out of context, which is why further careful reading of the transcripts was necessary. we used a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches in our qualitative investigation, looking at the available research and finding examples for the most frequent dms, as well as supplementing them with the additional functions detected in our corpus. 3.3. results and discussion 3.3.1. the frequency distribution of dms in the classroom talk of croatian efl teachers there were 3,614 occurrences of dms in our corpus, which amounted to 111.50 dm tokens per 1,000 words. in total, 51 different dms were identified, although 20 of those appeared in fewer than 10 instances, which is why they were excluded from table 2. out of the remaining 31 dms, 8 of them had more than 100 occurrences in the corpus. discourse markers in non-native efl teacher talk 657 table 2 the most frequent dms dm no. dms/ 1000 words dm no. dms/ 1000 words ok 755 23.11 also 35 1.08 so 548 16.77 oh 29 0.89 and 368 11.27 excellent 27 0.83 mhm/aha 265 8.11 i don't know 25 0.77 yeah/yes 262 8.02 ah 24 0.74 right 234 7.17 and then 22 0.68 but 224 6.86 let's see 21 0.65 all right/alright 140 4.29 well 21 0.65 or 96 2.94 actually 18 0.56 because/cause 78 2.39 of course 18 0.56 now 66 2.02 first 17 0.53 then 61 1.87 let's say 16 0.49 like 55 1.69 fine 14 0.43 what about 46 1.41 for example 11 0.34 good 37 1.14 you know 11 0.34 great 37 1.14 as can be seen from table 2, four dms alone, ok, so, and and mhm/aha, account for more than half of the dm occurrences in the corpus. this is in line with previous research where these markers have been mentioned as typical of the classroom environment (chapeton castro, 2010; fung & carter, 2007; othman, 2010). moreover, a shared attribute of the most frequently used markers is their high degree of multi-functionality, as elaborated on in section 3.3.3, which makes their frequency less surprising. when it comes to the teachers’ individual trends of dm use (table 3), five out of six teachers used ok most frequently, while one used so most often. all of the teachers had the following markers among their top ten: ok, so, and and yeah/yes. table 3 five most frequent dms per teacher these results indicate that there was not much variety in the teachers’ use of these top dms, which is not surprising due to the limitations of the classroom t1 no. dms/ 1000 words t2 no. dms/ 1000 words t3 no. dms/ 1000 words so 249 35.71 ok 105 20.6 ok 116 22.03 right 113 16.21 so 87 17.07 so 68 12.92 and 106 15.2 and 50 9.81 yeah/yes 48 9.12 all right/alright 105 15.06 but 46 9.02 but 35 6.65 ok 103 14.77 yeah/yes 43 8.43 all right/alright 33 6.27 t4 no. dms/ 1000 words t5 no. dms/ 1000 words t6 no. dms/ 1000 words ok 166 32.27 ok 201 27.6 ok 64 21.98 mhm/aha 149 28.97 and 70 9.61 and 46 15.8 so 67 13.03 but 54 7.42 so 36 12.36 and 66 12.83 so 41 5.63 mhm/aha 35 12.02 right 49 9.53 right 40 5.5 great 28 9.62 gloria vickov, eva jakupčević 658 environment and the tasks the teachers are expected to perform within it, such as organizing the flow of discourse, allocating turns, responding to students and evaluating their responses. however, as qualitative analysis will also show (see section 3.3.3), individual differences were visible in the patterns of use and preferences for specific dms. 3.3.2. the frequency of use of dms in primary and secondary classrooms to answer the second research question we addressed in our study, we compared the teachers´ use of dms with students at two proficiency levels: primary and secondary school levels. as can be seen from table 4, the values for the secondary school efl teachers are higher throughout. they used 2033 dms in total, as opposed to 1611 dms used by primary school teachers, but when this is viewed taking into account the number of dm tokens per 1000 words, the difference is smaller: while secondary school teachers used 117.26 dms per 1000 words, their primary school counterparts used 105. when it comes to the average number of different dms used, this is also greater for the secondary school teachers (36) as opposed to the primary school ones (28). table 4 teachers’ use of dms: secondary versus primary school secondary school primary school t1 t2 t3 t4 t5 t6 total words: 17338 total dms: 2033 dms/1000 words: 117.26 average number of different dms: 36 total words: 15343 total dms: 1611 dms/1000 words: 105 average number of different dms: 28 although the secondary school teachers used a greater variety of dms and used them more frequently, there was less of a difference between the two groups than could be expected taking into account the fact that the secondary school students had been learning english four years longer than their primary school counterparts had; it is logical to assume that the teachers’ language should be adapted to the higher proficiency level of the students with a wider range of dms. the reason for this might be that all of the classes were recorded in private schools, where we could expect a higher level of students´ language proficiency, meaning that they are already quite fluent by the end of primary school, and this can allow teachers to talk more “freely,” thus using a similar number of dms with the secondary school group. another reason, however, may be that the teachers´ use of dms seems to be largely conditioned and constrained by the specific features of the classroom environment. classroom talk occurs within specific time boundaries, is guided by social and institutional discourse markers in non-native efl teacher talk 659 norms and has precise goals, which imposes certain restrictions upon teachers. they are the ones organizing the discourse, and they plan the procedures within the classroom and are responsible for the management of turns and the evaluation of responses. it might be because of these constraints that, in spite of the secondary school students’ higher language proficiency, their efl teachers failed to use a greater variety of dms than while teaching at the primary school level. finally, a possible cause of not having employed a larger variety of dms in the talk with the secondary school students may simply lie in the teachers’ communication style or even in their own poor competence in this area of language production. of course, this is only an assumption as the teachers from our sample were not tested with respect to their competence in the area of dm use. 3.3.3. the functions of the most frequently used dms in addressing the third research question related to the functions of the most frequently used dms, our study included the qualitative analysis of the markers ok, so, and and. the three dms were chosen both on practical and theoretical grounds. similar to müller (2005), fuller (2003) and liao (2009), the rationale for choosing them is related to the fact that they occurred in significant numbers in our corpus for meaningful qualitative analysis. in theoretical terms, we were interested in dms with a range of different functions which might be relevant for efl teachers. these markers are frequently discussed in literature as units useful for classroom management (house, 2013; othman, 2010). furthermore, they are also among the dms most commonly used by native speakers in the pedagogic sub-corpus of cancode (cambridge and nottingham corpus of discourse in english), as determined by fung and carter (2007). finally, the findings of other studies seem to confirm these markers are the prevailing ones in the non-native efl teacher talk (e.g., chapeton castro, 2009; rongrong & lixun, 2015; shahbaz et al., 2013). 3.3.3.1. ok the dm ok is the most frequently and diversely used marker in our corpus, as well as in the talk of five out of the six teachers, which is in line with previous research describing its many functions both outside and inside the classroom (house, 2013; othman, 2010; schleef, 2004). according to house (2013), ok is one of the most common, broadly acceptable and adaptable dms, especially useful for esl speakers owing to its ability to realize many interactional functions in different positions with minimal linguistic and cognitive effort of the speaker. gloria vickov, eva jakupčević 660 a detailed illustration of the functions of ok in the lecture genre is found in othman (2010), who has described its uses both with rising and falling intonations. the former marks a progression or confirmation check, functioning as a response elicitor, a seek of assurance and a device for partitioning different points of information. ok with a falling tone functions as an attention-getter, especially in transitions between activities. in this way, it can serve as a signpost for opening or closing topics, a tool for shifting lecture mode. fung and carter (2007) have listed this function in the structural category, while ok also functions in the interpersonal category, indicating responses such as agreement, confirmation and acknowledgement. additionally, chapeton castro (2009) has listed the use of ok as a turn taker and turn giver, which was very commonly found in our corpus. as used by our participants, ok performs both structural and interpersonal functions, appearing to serve as a useful classroom management tool for all of our teachers. structurally, it is most commonly used in our corpus in its sentenceinitial position, as a topic opener or a means of shifting the lecture mode, holding the students’ attention and making transitions between activities more salient: (1a) t3: ok, in your notebooks, what’s the last thing that we had written, possibility, probability? (1b) t4: ok, today our plan is the following . . . in our corpus, ok is very frequently used in combination with other dms. within the structural function, it is sometimes followed by now, to emphasize the topic shift/opening function: (2) t3: ok, now, nominal relative clauses is something you have been using naturally without thinking twice about it . . . the interpersonal uses of this marker are much more common in our sample. among the most frequent instances is the sentence-final position of ok with rising intonation as a progression check or a seek of assurance, used by the teacher not expecting an answer, but making sure they have the students’ attention: (3) t2: i think you will have the same type of exercise, just to paraphrase, ok? similarly, this use of ok appears in the sentence-medial position, allowing the teachers to partition the information and in this way make it easier for students to follow the discourse flow: (4) t5: but, um the third unit starts with page 24, ok? and finishes with the with page 31 so actually it's like seven seven pages right? discourse markers in non-native efl teacher talk 661 it is interesting to note that the sentence-final function of ok is especially prominent with one teacher, t5. for this teacher, the sentence-final position is used almost like a fixed formulaic utterance, repeated after nearly every turn. this might be a result of the teacher’s personal linguistic habits, or it can be caused by extra-linguistic factors such as the content of the class itself (e.g., revising for a test, prompting the teacher to feel the need to emphasize key information), or the fact that the students are teenagers whose attention needs to be maintained: (5) t5: now, exercise eight um go through these five questions and in like two or three minutes i’ll ask you to answer these questions, ok? furthermore, ok is used both sentence-initially and finally as a response marker, allowing the teacher to acknowledge what the student has said. however, this is frequently not its only use, as a single dm does not necessarily perform only one function at a time. in her analysis chapeton castro (2009) has given examples of ok functioning as a response marker, and at the same time as a turn giver, which was also common in our corpus, especially when the students are answering a series of questions and the teacher acknowledges the answer and passes the turn to another student. similarly, ok is often used to both respond to the answer and introduce the follow-up question: (6a) t5: ok, all types of food or just some? (6b) t5: ok, in mcdonald’s, ok, what food can cause addiction? a common response technique in our sample is for the teachers to restate the students’ words after hearing an answer, which is commonly followed by a response-marking ok: (7a) t2: he was scary, ok. (7b) t6: mhm the air is polluted, ok. as was mentioned before, ok is commonly used in combination with other dms. in our corpus, it is most frequently paired up with but, and and so, used to acknowledge what the speaker has said and indicate that the message needs to be modified in some way. with so, what follows is usually another question (as in example 8a) or a summary of what the student has said (as in example 8b): (8a) t1: ok, so what do you mean by real things? (8b) t4: mhm, ok, so she had to go through the book to find the answers, ok¸ and what about paula? gloria vickov, eva jakupčević 662 this combination is used very frequently by t1, who uses it to start a great number of turns with the function of opening or shifting a topic and prefacing questions: (9) t1: ok, so tell me a little before we continue with the book, how was your prom, so tom knows what to expect tonight? similarly, the combination ok, and is used to acknowledge the answer and preface a follow-up question (as in example 10a) or provide additional information (as in example 10b): (10a) t5: ok, and what was um um the experience, was it a positive one, was it a negative one? (10b) t2: ok, and food can be spoilt as well, right. finally, the combination of ok and but, which is mostly a marker of contrast, is frequently used by our teachers to correct or modify what has been said by the students (see examples 11a and 11b). in this way it is used to soften the impact of the correction. (11a) t3: ok, but we are still talking about a past modal here. (11b) t5: ok, they were misled by their food, ok, but a group of teenagers sued mcdonald’s and what were charges. to sum up, ok is the most frequent marker in our sample, accounting for 755 out of 3644 dm tokens (over 20% of all the dm tokens), as well as 23.11 out of 1000 (2.3%) of all the words in the corpus. ok performs a variety of functions in our corpus, mostly interpersonal, but also structural ones. the examples show that the participants are able to use the potential of this multifunctional marker and augment it by using it in combination with other common markers. finally, in line with the quantitative and qualitative data on the use of ok in our sample, we can conclude that the use of ok largely depends, among other factors, on the teaching style of individual teachers, as well as on the type of classroom activity, once again emphasizing the importance of taking extra-linguistic factors into account. 3.3.3.2. so closely following ok, there are 548 occurrences of the dm so out of the total number of 3644 (over 15%) dms in our sample. this is in line with the pedagogical sub-corpus of cancode used by fung and carter (2007) as the native corpus in their study, where so is also the second most frequent dm. it is important to note that the word so can have a variety of non-discourse marker functions (müller, 2005), which we took care to exclude. some of them are listed below discourse markers in non-native efl teacher talk 663 with examples from our corpus, shedding light on the common issue of identification of dms in general, which can often be problematic due to the multi-functionality of many words that operate as dms. for example, when not a dm, so appears in our corpus as an adverb of degree (as in example 12a), to express purpose (usually in combination with that, as in example 12b), in some fixed expressions (as in example 12c), and as a substitute (as in example 12d): (12a) t5: daria and marija, that's so nice, you have a question? (12b) t1: so like i said always check what is said before and always make sure what is written after so that it fits in completely . . . (12c) t3: i’m just exceptionally smart and intelligent and so on. (12d) t4: no, i don’t think so, it’s b1 level from last year, ok? similarly to ok, so is versatile as a dm, performing, along with its referential function, a variety of structural functions. in her analysis of efl speaker data, house (2013) has found that so is used as a useful element supporting the speaker in the planning of upcoming moves, as well as a means of looking back on previous ones. a very detailed analysis of so in non-native speaker speech can be found in müller (2005), who has listed and exemplified a variety of different functions of the dm, some of which are also found in our sample. firstly, as a referential marker, so is used to mark a result or consequence (as in example 13a). although this might be one of the more salient functions of so, it is not as frequent in our sample as the structural functions of this dm. similarly, according to müller (2005), the result can be merely implied, and not stated, such as in example 13b, where the dm is sentence-final. (13a) t4: . . . you won’t be able to use your mind maps, so try to memorize when these things are used . . . (13b) t3: all of them all of them have one, so. as a structural marker, so is used in many ways to help the organization of discourse and specific moves, for example to open a new topic or to indicate a topic shift (as in examples 14a and 14b). it can likewise be used to indicate a return to the main thread of discourse after an interruption or digression from a topic (as in example 14c), where the speaker returns to the topic after interrupting it with the dm right?, at the same time indicating to the listeners that the information which follows is important. (14a) t1: so, let’s start off with we’ll come back and forth, we’ll combine. (14b) t2: so, we’ll start with the second exercise. gloria vickov, eva jakupčević 664 (14c) t1: so, these are the main parts that you need to focus on before you put your um answer um the missing paragraph, right? so, the main ideas that they want to present and are usually put here towards the end of the paragraph. another frequent function of so found in our corpus is to preface a summary (as in example 15a), introduce a rewording (as in example 15b) or give an example (as in example 15c). this use is, not surprisingly, particularly common in parts of the lessons in which grammar or vocabulary are being explained. (15a) t1: to restore control by reintroducing a little disconnectedness, right? so, to not be constantly connected. (15b) t4: . . . and think of your own examples, so don't use examples from the book. (15c) t4: so, deception is like, let's say a lie, but um maybe in a more physical sense . . . however, in parts of lessons which focus more on conversations with the students, so is most commonly used to mark a speech act: preface a question (as in example 16a) or an instruction (as in example 16b): (16a) t1: so, what about you, your generation is not that much older than this generation, so um did you also have similar things to keep you distracted from other things? (16b) t3: so paraphrase it give me the same meaning and do the same. as mentioned before, so is sometimes combined with other dms in our corpus, most frequently with ok, but also with alright. this combination is only used by t1 and t3, although it is t1 who uses it very frequently, almost as a fixed phrase, prefacing questions and summaries: (17a) t1: alright, so, how could you explain that? (17b) t1: alright, alright, so, it takes you emotionally, right? moreover, it is interesting to note that t1 uses so most frequently of all teachers. in fact, with 35.72 occurrences per 1000 words, it is the most used dm by a single teacher. this, together with the variety of uses of this dm shows once again that the teaching style and the individual preferences of the teachers influence their dm use greatly. 3.3.3.3.3. and the third most frequent dm in our sample, and, is not as represented in esl literature as ok and so. the reason for this may lie in its low salience as a dm, and the possible difficulties this may present in the course of its identification and teaching. moreover, it does not perform a variety of functions comparable discourse markers in non-native efl teacher talk 665 to the previous two, although it is obvious from the quantitative analysis of our data that our teachers find it useful. it is interesting to note that in the pedagogical sub-corpus of cancode, used by fung and carter (2007) as the native corpus, and is the most frequently used dm with 11.736 tokens per 10000 words, which is comparable to our frequency of 11.27 tokens. according to fung and carter (2007), and can function in three categories: referential, structural and cognitive. the first of those covers the uses of and as a coordinating device (as in example 18a) or to express addition (as in example 18b): (18a) t3: but i have my kindle and i have a dictionary so after class i’ll look it up for you. (18b) t3: ok so this is we are talking about obligation and we said that we have must and have to what’s the difference? structurally, and is used to denote continuity, as in example 19a. this use is very common in our corpus as it allows the teachers to keep the turn when necessary. similarly, in example 19b, the speaker is continuing a thought interrupted by the comprehension check right? this case is similar to example 14c, where the dm so is used in the same way. the combinations of right? as a check of progress or understanding and so or and thus aid the listeners in following the discourse flow, making it extremely useful in esl classroom contexts where the success of the teaching is dependent on the listeners’ understanding, hindered by the use of a language foreign to them. (19a) t2: and, if you remember, there was also something else, there were three columns. (19b) t5: all of us watch a lot of movies and tv series, right? and that’s a good practice for you. in a similar sense, the participants in our study commonly use and to preface questions, using it to denote that additional information on a topic is needed, as exemplified above in the combinations of ok and and. in examples 20a and 20b, we see and used on its own to seek elaboration on a topic from students, which makes it very useful in conversational parts of lessons. (20a) t6: and, where would you live, in town or countryside or village? (20b) t5: and, which bookstore is that? finally, as a cognitive dm, and can be used by the speaker to denote their thinking process, such as in example 21a, where it is used by the speaker to indicate that they will digress from the topic to provide unrelated but important information, or in example 21b, where it is used to preface a self-directed question. (21a) t1: and, yes, by the way, since before i forget these papers that you just took now so always have them with you . . . (21b) t4: and what else did i want to mention? gloria vickov, eva jakupčević 666 to conclude, although lacking the variety of functions presented by ok and so, and is used in diverse ways by the teachers, which shows it is a very useful classroom management tool. table 5 functions of the three most frequent dms dm category function ok structural opening and closing topics indicating topic shifts holding attention marking transitions introducing a follow-up question interpersonal progress check partitioning different points of information response elicitor seek of assurance indicating responses: agreement, confirmation and acknowledgement so referential expressing result or consequence structural opening topics indicating topic shifts returning to main thread prefacing a summary introducing a rewording giving an example marking speech acts: prefacing questions or instructions and referential coordinating device/expressing addition structural denoting continuity prefacing questions: seeking or providing additional information cognitive denoting the thinking process 3.3.3.4. summary of the functions of the most frequent dms the qualitative analysis of the three most common dms in our corpus (ok, so, and), as summarized in table 5, shows that the participants are aware of the diverse functions of these units and use them according to their personal preferences and teaching styles. structurally, all the three markers are used to denote the discourse flow and help students follow its course by making important points in the teachers’ talk, such as transitions between activities, questions, instructions and explanations, more salient. they are also used in numerous combinations adding to their meaning. their importance for the organization of classroom activities and discourse cannot be overstated, so it is not surprising that this use is prevalent in our corpus. however, the teachers also use the dm ok to fulfill key interpersonal functions, to check the progress of the discourse and partition information, again aiding students in understanding and following discourse. also, they frequently use it to acknowledge the students’ answers discourse markers in non-native efl teacher talk 667 and contributions, at the same time asking for additional information or offering clarification, thus creating a stronger interpersonal bond with the students. on the whole, the three most frequent dms in our study are used by the teachers to fulfill functions that help them structure the classroom discourse and establish interpersonal relations with their students. 4. concluding remarks in the present study an attempt has been made to shed additional light on the use of dms by non-native (croatian) efl teachers. in particular, the study concentrated on both frequency and function distribution of english dms in the teacher talk with the primary and secondary school students, in order to gain a full picture of the teachers’ use of dms as cohesive devices in the discourse generated in classroom interaction. the results have shown that croatian non-native efl teachers use a variety of dms, with 51 different ones identified in our corpus. however, only four markers account for more than half of the total number of occurrences in our corpus. these are the markers ok, so, and, and mhm/aha, which are, along with the equally frequent marker alright, typical of the classroom settings, more precisely, for transitions between teaching activities, giving instructions, asking questions, and so on. the qualitative analysis reveals that the three most frequently used dms, ok, so and and, fulfill a number of structural and interpersonal functions which may contribute greatly to the pragmatic flow of classroom interaction. teachers’ appropriate use of these markers is highly important as they are facilitative of students’ listening comprehension (flowerdew & tauroza, 1995). as used by our participants, these markers help construct coherent classroom discourse and interactional relationships with students, aiding them in following the course of classroom interaction as well as inviting them to actively participate. in this respect, ok has been confirmed as a useful classroom management tool as it was used as a topic opener and a means of shifting the lecture mode, holding the students’ attention and making transitions between activities more salient. it is also used to partition the information, which makes it easier for students to follow the discourse flow. furthermore, ok is employed as a response maker, allowing the teacher to acknowledge what the student said, and at the same time as a turn giver. the combination of ok and other discourse markers (and, but and so) enables the teachers to correct and modify their students’ utterances as well as to provide additional information. similarly to ok, so is used in many ways to help the organization of classroom discourse. its referential and structural functions range from opening a new topic, indicating a topic shift, indicating a return to the main thread of discourse after an interruption or digression in a topic to prefacing a gloria vickov, eva jakupčević 668 summary and giving examples. and has proved to be very useful in conversational parts of lessons as it is used to seek elaboration on a topic from students or to denote the speaker’s thinking process (e.g., teachers use and to indicate that they would digress from the topic to provide unrelated but important information). structurally, and is mostly used to denote continuity, which allows the teachers to keep the turn when necessary. all of the described uses contribute to the students’ understanding and easier and more successful participation in classroom discourse, which makes dms invaluable parts of the language of instruction. the findings of our study seem to be corroborated by a number of similar studies, such as liu (2006), walsh (2006), eslami and eslami rasekh (2007), yu (2008) and chapeton castro (2009). the findings of this study might contribute to raising awareness of the diversified functions of dms which could facilitate non-native efl teachers´ overall lesson organization and structuring of particular teaching segments. furthermore, as pointed out by chapeton castro (2009), the knowledge of the pragmatic uses of dms might help teachers to establish more interpersonal relationships in the classroom and to create a more inviting atmosphere for active participation. further findings of our research show that there is not much difference in the patterns of teachers’ dm use with primary and secondary school students. although this is probably due to the constraints and specific nature of the classroom discourse, it might also indicate that the teachers lack the necessary competence in this area of language production. as a matter of fact, since correct usage of various dms in different communication situations requires a nativelike communicative competence, the question arises as to what degree non-native efl teachers are capable of illustrating authentic use of english dms (müller, 2005). in an attempt to answer the question, we suggest that further research be undertaken in the area of the teachers´ competence in using english dms in both oral and written language production. we believe that this is important not only for establishing the level of the teachers´ discourse and pragmatic competence, but also for defining the needs and guidelines for teacher professional training and preparation courses. as the present research is a study confined to six croatian efl teachers, no claims can be made as to its generalizability. comparative, large-scale studies of dm use among efl teachers of different l1 backgrounds, with students at different proficiency levels and within different educational contexts could provide valuable insights into the general features and patterns of dm use by nonnative efl teachers. a comparative study with a native teacher 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(2008). interpersonal meaning of discourse markers by foreign language teachers in classroom. journal of the graduates of sun yat-sen university (social sciences), 29(3), 129-135. 249 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (2). 249-278 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the dynamic nature of motivation in language learning: a classroom perspective miros aw pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl abstract when we examine the empirical investigations of motivation in second and foreign language learning, even those drawing upon the latest theoretical paradigms, such as the l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2009), it becomes clear that many of them still fail to take account of its dynamic character and temporal variation. this may be surprising in view of the fact that the need to adopt such a process-oriented approach has been emphasized by a number of theorists and researchers (e.g., dörnyei, 2000, 2001, 2009; ushioda, 1996; williams & burden, 1997), and it lies at the heart of the model of second language motivation proposed by dörnyei and ottó (1998). it is also unfortunate that few research projects have addressed the question of how motivation changes during a language lesson as well as a series of lessons, and what factors might be responsible for fluctuations of this kind. the present paper is aimed to rectify this problem by reporting the findings of a classroom-based study which investigated the changes in the motivation of 28 senior high school students, both in terms of their goals and intentions, and their interest and engagement in classroom activities and tasks over the period of four weeks. the analysis of the data collected by means of questionnaires, observations and interviews showed that although the reasons for learning remain relatively stable, the intensity of motivation is indeed subject to variation on a minute-to-minute basis and this fact has to be recognized even in large-scale, cross-sectional research in this area. keywords: l2 motivational self system, motivational changes, process-oriented view of motivation, interest and engagement miros aw pawlak 250 as dörnyei and skehan (2003, p. 614) explain, “motivation is responsible for why people decide to do something, how long they are willing to sustain the activity, and how hard they are going to pursue it.” it is clear that all of these factors are of pivotal significance in the case of learning second and foreign languages, with the effect that, to quote dörnyei (2005), “motivation is of great importance in sla: it provides the primary impetus to initiate l2 learning and later the driving force to sustain the long and often tedious learning process; indeed all other factors involved in sla presuppose motivation to some extent” (p. 65). it is thus not surprising that different theoretical positions have been advanced over the years with a view to elucidating the role of motivation in this domain and numerous studies have been conducted in order to identify learners’ reasons for language learning, gauge the intensity of their effort, or identify the most efficacious ways in which the nature and magnitude of their motivation could be boosted (see e.g., dörnyei, 2001, 2005; ellis, 2008; ortega, 2009; pawlak, 2011). it is unfortunate, however, that most of the theoretical models and the research projects they have spurred have failed to take into consideration the dynamic character of motivation, as reflected in its temporal variation, both over extended periods of time, and within single lessons as well as sequences of such lessons. the present paper is an attempt to partly rectify this problem by reporting the findings of a classroombased study which sought to investigate changes in the motivation of polish senior high schools students, not only with respect to their overall goals and intentions, but also their interest and engagement in english lessons taught over the period of four weeks.1 literature review according to dörnyei (2005), it is possible to distinguish the main phases in research into motivation in second language learning, namely: (a) the social psychological period, the hallmarks of which are gardner’s (1985) motivation theory and clément’s (1980) theory of linguistic self-confidence, (b) the cognitive situated period, characterized by the influence of cognitive theories deriving from the field of educational psychology, such as deci and ryan’s (1985) self-determination theory or weiner’s (1992) attribution theory, and (c) the process-oriented period, emphasizing the importance of motivational changes and represented by the work of ushioda (1996), williams and burden (1997), dörnyei and ottó (1998), or dörnyei (2000), among others. there are also oth 1 the author would like to express his gratitude to el bieta tomczyk for her invaluable assistance in conducting the present study. the dynamic nature of motivation in language learning: a classroom perspective 251 er important developments in this area, such as, for example, relating motivation to the performance of communicative tasks (e.g., dörnyei, 2002; kormos & dörnyei, 2004), exploring the link between motivation and group dynamics (e.g., dörnyei, 2001; ushioda, 2003), identifying the causes and symptoms of demotivation (e.g., nikolov, 2001), examining motivational self-regulation (e.g., ushioda, 2003), or adopting a neurobiological perspective on motivation (schumann, 1998, 2001). while all of these issues have shed new light on the role of motivation in sla, due to space limitations, the present review will only focus on the theoretical positions and research findings that are directly relevant to the study reported below. for this reason, the discussion will be confined to a brief overview of the theory of the l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2009; dörnyei & csizér, 2002), the theoretical models underpinning the conceptualization of motivation as a process, and the studies that have attempted to provide insights into temporal aspects of this attribute. the theory of the l2 motivational self system has its roots in two crucial theoretical developments in the field of second language acquisition and mainstream psychology, namely the concept of integrativeness or integrative motivation introduced by gardner and lambert (1959) and the results of psychological research on the self (e.g., markus & nurius, 1986). as dörnyei (2005) explains, such a reconceptualization of the construct of motivation stems from a number of observations such as the fact that learning a foreign language does not only involve acquiring a new communicative code, but also affects the personality of an individual, difficulties involved in applying gardner’s (1985) concept of integrativeness to contexts in which learners have little contact with native speakers, as well as the empirical evidence (e.g., dörnyei & csizér, 2002) that the key components of motivation, such as integrativeness, instrumentality, attitudes towards l2 speakers or manifestations of motivated learning behavior are intricately interrelated. in light of these considerations, he reinterprets the notion of integrativeness as the l2-specific aspect of an individual’s ideal self, because, he argues, “if one’s ideal self is associated with the mastery of an l2, that is, if the person that we would like to become is proficient in the l2, we can be described as having an integrative disposition” (2005, p. 102). drawing on the motivational paradigms proposed by noels (2003) and ushioda (2003), he identifies the following dimensions of the l2 motivational self system: (a) ideal l2 self, which is related to the abilities and skills that learners imagine they could possess, with the effect that they are intent on reducing the distance between their actual and ideal selves, (b) ought-to l2 self, which is connected with the attributes that the learner thinks should be possessed in order to avoid adverse consequences, and (c) l2 learning experiences, which is a situation-specific factor, related to the immediate learning environment and experience. the theory miros aw pawlak 252 is intended to be compatible with the process-oriented understanding of motivation, as the three components are believed to evolve all the time in response to a host of variables. attempts to account for the dynamic dimension of motivation have been made, among others, by williams and burden (1997), dörnyei and ottó (1998), and ushioda (1998), but the existence of temporal variation in this respect can also be explained in terms of sociocultural theory (vygotsky, 1978) and dynamic systems theory (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). williams and burden (1997) differentiate three stages of the motivation process in language learning: (a) reasons for doing something, (b) deciding to do something, and (c) sustaining the effort, or persisting, with the first two of these being related to undertaking the effort and the last to persevering in pursuing the goals set. in a somewhat similar vein, dörnyei and ottó (1998) propose a model of motivational evolution that distinguishes three stages, each of which can be associated with different motives: (a) the preactional stage, where motivation to accomplish a goal is generated and thus it is possible to talk about choice motivation, (b) the actional stage, during which the initial motivation has to be maintained and protected, and which thus involves executive motivation, and (c) the postactional stage, which entails some kind of evaluation of the learning process and can be referred to as motivational retrospection. ushioda (1998) argues that in institutionalized learning motivation is characterized by flux rather than stability, which is related to the fact that learners’ goals evolve over time under the influence of positive and negative experiences related to the second language and the process of learning it. as she comments, ”the notion of a temporal frame of reference shaping motivational thinking integrates the phenomenon of evolution over time, which seems central to the learner’s experience of and thus conception of language learning motivation” (1998, pp. 82-83). the explanation of the temporal aspect of motivation in terms of vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural theory is based on the assumption that motivation is socially constructed in the process of interaction with more proficient language users, as such social participation enables learners to develop culturally valued goals and intentions, which translates into their greater effort to acquire a foreign language (e.g., bronson, 2000; norton & toohey, 2001; rueda & moll, 1994; ushioda, 2008). finally, the process-oriented view of motivation sits well with the tenets of dynamic systems theories (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008), since they help us account for the fact that learners’ motives, effort and engagement are subject to constant changes in response to a whole gamut of internal and external influences, which are intricately interrelated and are themselves in a constant state of flux. research into the temporal variation of motivation in language learning is still in its infancy, with the effect that the relevant studies are few and far be the dynamic nature of motivation in language learning: a classroom perspective 253 tween, particularly when it comes to fluctuations in motivational intensity during a lesson or several lessons. kozumi and matsuo (1993), for example, detected a decrease in the motivation of japanese seventh-grade learners of english over the period of seven months, after which time it began to stabilize and more realistic goals started to be pursued. a decline in the level of motivation over time has also been reported by other researchers. tachibana, matskukawa and zhong (1996), for example, found that their chinese and japanese participants became less interested in learning english from junior to senior high school, and gardner, masgoret, tennant and mihic (2004) observed a drop in the scores on the measure of attitudes and motivation from the fall to the spring in the case of canadian learners of french at the university level. similar trends have been identified in the research projects undertaken by inbar, donitsa-schmidt and shohamy (2001) in israel, and chambers (1999) and williams, burden and lanvers (2002), both of which involved language learners in great britain. of relevance are also studies that have managed to identify changes in the nature of learners’ motivation over time, such as those carried out by ushioda (2001) or shoaib and dörnyei (2005). the first demonstrated that irish adult learners of french were able to develop more specific l2-related personal goals over the period of 16 months, whereas the second investigated factors affecting the motivation of language learners over two decades and pinpointed a number of temporal patterns and motivational transformation episodes. an attempt to identify factors responsible for motivational evolution has also been undertaken in two recent studies by hsieh (2009) and nitta and asano (2010). the former, which involved two taiwanese learners interviewed before and after a 1-year long study abroad program, found changes in the participants’ goals, attitudes and self-concepts, as well as pinpointing a number of internal and external factors responsible for these changes. the latter focused on the transformations in the choice and executive motivation of japanese students over a 1-year course and provided evidence for fluctuations in these two areas and the impact of social and interpersonal factors, such as teaching style, intergroup relations and group cohesiveness. finally, it is interesting to mention the research project by egbert (2003), who investigated the role of flow (csikszentmihalyi, 1990) in second language learning, and managed to identify task conditions under which such a state can take place. these included the perceived balance between task challenge and participant skills, the existence of opportunities for concentration and attention on task goals, the perception of intrinsic interest and authenticity, and a sense of control over process and product. this study is particularly germane to the present paper as, in a sense, it touches on changes in motivational intensity over the course of a lesson, the main thrust of the research project reported below. miros aw pawlak 254 the study research questions as mentioned above, the research project reported in this paper sought to investigate the dynamic nature of motivation by tracing its fluctuations over time, both more generally, and in the course of single lessons and sequences of such lessons, as well as accounting for the changes in this respect in terms of the tasks performed, the aims and stages of a particular class, and the overall motives driving the participants’ efforts to learn english. to refer to the process model of motivation introduced by dörnyei and ottó (1998) and briefly characterized above, the study can thus be said to have addressed issues involved in both choice motivation and executive motivation. this is because, on the one hand, it set out to capture the learners’ reasons for learning english, adopting as a point of reference the theory of l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2009; dörnyei & csizér, 2002), to explore the modifications these motives undergo over time, and to gauge the extent to which they can be related to changes in the participants’ motivated learning behavior in the language classroom. on the other hand, it also focused on motivational intensity, manifesting itself in “maintaining assigned goals, elaborating on subgoals, and exercising control over other thoughts and behaviors that are often more desirable than concentrating on academic work” (dörnyei & ottó, 1998, p. 45), looking into how this intensity fluctuates within a particular language lesson as well as how it varies from one class to another. specifically, the study was designed to address the following research questions: what factors underlie the participants’ motivated learning behaviors and in what ways do such behaviors manifest themselves? how do these factors and behaviors change over time? how do levels of motivation change in the course of a lesson and a sequence of lessons? what factors are responsible for these changes? such a focus dictated that motivation was defined not only in terms of the antecedents of motivated learning behaviors, or “what moves a person to make certain choices” (ushioda, 2008, p. 19), but also, and more importantly perhaps, as the manifestations of their willingness to “engage in action, and to persist in action” (2008, p. 19). with an eye to investigating the latter aspect, following crookes and schmidt (1991) and peacock (1997), motivation was operationalized in practical terms as interest and enthusiasm for the learning task, persistence, and levels of concentration and enjoyment. the validity of such an approach is supported by ushioda (1993), who calls it “practitioner validated,” the dynamic nature of motivation in language learning: a classroom perspective 255 arguing that increased learner participation and enthusiasm are invaluable in and of themselves, and, more recently, by cowie and sakui (2011), who found in their research that, in the view of teachers, “motivated students demonstrate a set of specific behaviors in the classroom, such as showing enthusiasm and effort, working on task and working independently” (p. 124). participants the participants were 28 polish senior high schools learners, 18 females and 10 males, who attended the first year of a 3-year program and were divided into two separate groups for the purpose of their english classes, one of which consisted of 15 (group 1) students and the other comprised 13 learners (group 2). although, as is typically the case in educational institutions in foreign language settings, the participants’ command of english varied quite considerably and the two groups could be viewed as mixed-proficiency, the overall level of advancement could be characterized as falling somewhere in between pre-intermediate or intermediate, or roughly a2 in terms of the common european framework of reference for languages. the average semester grade in english for all the students was 3.13 on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 6 (highest), with the standard deviation equaling 0.99, which shows that the learners’ performance was middling and there was much individual variation. it is interesting to note that the groups differed to some extent in these respects, as the mean grade of 2.8 in group 1 was lower than average and the standard deviation value of 1.32 was higher, whereas the reverse was the case in group 2, with the mean grade amounting to 3.46 and the standard deviation value standing at 0.66. despite these differences, which mainly testify to greater disparities in the level of the students in group 1, the teacher of the two groups described the two classes as equivalent in terms of their overall motivation. the participants in both groups had four english classes a week and, although scant information is available in this respect, it can be assumed, based on what the participants said in the interviews and the present author’s experience, that at least some of them had the benefit of additional classes outside the school, with the caveat that it cannot always be interpreted as indicating superior levels of motivation. data collection and analysis the study was conducted over the period of 4 weeks and it involved four naturally occurring english classes during which the participants in the two groups were taught by their regular teacher and covered the same material miros aw pawlak 256 based on successive units from the coursebook. the choice of instruments used to collect data on the participants’ motivation was dictated by the inherent features of this notion and the research questions that the study aimed to address. according to dörnyei (2001), motivation is abstract and therefore it is not directly observable, it is multidimensional with the effect that “the specific motivation measure or concept . . . is likely to represent only a segment of a more intricate psychological construct” (pp. 185-186), and it is inconsistent and thus subject to temporal variation. for these reasons, methodological triangulation was employed and multiple data collection tools were used for the purpose of the study with a view to obtaining a more multifaceted picture of the participants’ motives, effort and engagement, and changes in these areas over time. these were as follows: a motivation questionnaire containing 42 6-point likert-scale items, where 1 indicated complete disagreement and 6 complete agreement; the tool was intended to supply data about the participants’ motives for learning english; it was based on surveys designed by ryan (2005), taguchi, magid and papi (2009), and csizér and kormos (2009), who fell back upon the theory of l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2009); the items included in the instrument measured such factors as motivated learning behavior (i.e., effort and persistence in learning english), ideal l2 self (i.e., learners’ perceptions of themselves as successful speakers of english), ought-to l2 self (i.e., opinions about the need to learn english in the eyes of significant others), family influence (i.e., parents’ roles in motivating learners), l2 learning experience (i.e., the extent to which learners enjoy learning english in a specific context), instrumentality (i.e., regulation of goals for pragmatic gains or in order to avoid adverse consequences), knowledge orientation (i.e., learners’ opinions about the impact of english on extending their world knowledge), and international posture (i.e., students’ views about english as a tool for communication with foreigners); the internal consistency reliability of the instrument was established for all the participants by calculating cronbach’s alpha, which amounted to 0.82, a value that is highly satisfactory;2 interviews with 11 students, 5 from group 1 and 4 from group 2, at two points in time with a view to tracing changes in the nature and intensity of motivation as well as the factors responsible for these changes; the focus of the interviews were the reasons for learning english, involvement in this process (e.g., as indicated by attending addi 2 the interpretations of the values of cronbach alpha are based on dörnyei and taguchi (2010). the dynamic nature of motivation in language learning: a classroom perspective 257 tional classes), opinions about the classes included in the study, the most and least motivating tasks during these lessons, the changes observed in reasons for learning english and the level of engagement as well as the causes of such changes; the interviews were carried out by the regular classroom teacher of the participants, the interactions were digitally audio-recorded and subsequently transcribed; a motivational grid, where the participants were requested to mark the levels of their interest and engagement at 5-min intervals during a particular lesson on a scale of 1 (minimum) to 7 (maximum); the responses were provided nine times on cue in the form of a prerecorded beep; additional space for comments was provided at the end of the grid; the value of cronbach’s alpha for the first lesson in both groups was 0.80, which shows that the instrument has adequate internal consistency reliability; an evaluation sheet, a slightly adapted version of a survey used by peacock (1997), in which the participants were instructed to indicate their interest in a particular class by responding to seven items based on a semantic differential scale (e.g., interesting vs. boring; pleasant vs. unpleasant; attractive vs. unattractive); the positive adjective came first in some items and second in others; the tool in fact involved 7point likert scale items, with the extreme spaces being accorded the values of 1 (e.g., uninteresting) and 7 (e.g., interesting); also in this case the reliability of the instrument was acceptable, as cronbach’s alpha calculated for the first lesson in both groups stood at 0.77; a questionnaire for the teacher, also partly adapted from peacock (1997), in which she was requested to indicate her responses to eight likert-scale items on a 1-7 scale (1 – lowest, 7 – highest) after each of the investigated lessons; the questions concerned such areas as learners’ interest, effort, engagement, enjoyment, concentration, attention, the learning challenge a particular class posed, and the extent to which it was appropriate to a given group; detailed plans of the three lessons which were provided by the teacher; they were the same for the two groups and made it possible to relate changes in the level of motivation to particular stages of the lesson and the tasks performed. prior to the study, the tools were piloted with a comparable group of senior high school learners and some modifications were introduced. it should also be emphasized that polish was used to supply instructions and word the items in all the surveys, and the interviews were also conducted in the learners’ mother tongue. this decision was dictated by the participants’ relatively miros aw pawlak 258 low level of proficiency and the danger that they could misunderstand or completely fail to understand questions in the target language, let alone be able to adequately express their ideas concerning their motives or changes in their interest and engagement. figure 1 schedule for the administration of the data collection tools as illustrated in figure 1, which provides a graphical representation of the schedule for the administration of the data collection tools, the motivation grid, the evaluation sheet and the teacher questionnaire were filled out during each of the four lessons, with the effect that four sets of data were available for each of them. the interviews with the 9 students, 5 from group 1 and 4 from group 2, were carried out after the first and fourth lesson, with the interval of approximately 4 weeks between them. finally, the learners were requested to fill out the motivation questionnaire several days after the last lesson analyzed for the purpose of the present study.3 3 although it could be argued that the administration of this questionnaire both at the beginning (i.e., before the first lesson) and the end (after the fourth lesson) of the study •motivation grid •evaluation sheet •questionnaire for the teacher lesson 1 the world of work speaking •motivation grid •evaluation sheet •questionnaire for the teacher lesson 2 job interview speaking and listening interview 1 •motivation grid •evaluation sheet •questionnaire for the teacher lesson 3 job application writing and speaking •motivation grid •evaluation sheet •questionnaire for the teacher lesson 4 present perfect introduction interview 2 motivation questionnaire the dynamic nature of motivation in language learning: a classroom perspective 259 the data collected in these ways were subjected to a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses depending on their nature. the former involved: (a) calculating the means and standard deviations for all the items in the motivation questionnaire for each of the two groups as well as all the participants, (b) tabulating the means for motivational intensity for each of the nine times in a lesson the students in the two groups were requested to indicate the level of interest, enjoyment and engagement, (c) determining the means for each of the items included in the evaluation sheet as well as the means and standard deviations for each of the four lessons in the two groups, (d) comparing the overall means in the evaluation sheets with the assessments made by the teacher in the teacher questionnaire. in cases where there was a need to establish the statistical significance of the differences, paired and independent samples t tests were used, with the desired significance level being set at p < .05. qualitative analysis consisted in: (a) identifying the recurring themes in the interview data with particular emphasis on the changes in the reasons for learning english and involvement in the four lessons, as well as factors underlying such changes, and (b) relating fluctuations in motivational intensity to the foci of the four lessons, the stages they comprised, and the tasks and activities performed. results when it comes to the combined results of the questionnaire in both groups, the highest means were determined for such statements as: (a) “i believe that i will be able to read and understand most texts in english if i continue to learn this language” (m = 5.54, sd = 0.50), (b) “studying english is important because i think that one day it will help me find a job” (m = 5.54, sd = 0.66), (c) “if i study hard, i will be able to learn english” (m = 5.25, sd = 0.74), (d) “i like the atmosphere of my english classes” (m = 5.25, sd = 0.85), (e) “studying english is important to me because english proficiency is necessary for promotion in the future” (m = 5.21, sd = 0.88), (f) “i respect the values and ways of life of other cultures and nationalities” (m = 5.17, sd = 0.92), (g) “i think that learning english is interesting” (m = 5.04, sd = 0.86), (h) “i am sure that i will be able to write in english if i continue to learn this language” (m = 5.04, sd = 0.75), (i) “i imagine myself as someone who is able to speak english” (m = 5.04, sd = 0.86), (j) “i like the sound of english” (m = 4.92, sd = 1.32), and (k) “learning english is important for me because i would like to travel” (m = could have shed light on the changes in the subjects’ choice motivation over time, it was decided that the period of 4 weeks was too short for the occurrence of any noticeable differences in the responses provided. miros aw pawlak 260 4.83, sd = 0.87). items with the lowest means were as follows: (a) “learning english has a negative influence on polish national values” (m = 1.88, sd = 1.03), (b) “i think that polish is changing for the worse under the influence of english” (m = 2.79, sd = 1.32), (c) “i have to learn english so as not to disappoint my parents” (m = 2.92, sd = 1.14), (d) “there is a danger that poles will forget about the importance of their own culture as a result of globalization” (m = 3.00, sd = 1.32), (e) “i would like it if other cultures were similar to polish culture” (m = 3.13, sd = 1.42), (f) “i have to learn english because if i fail, i will not be promoted to the next class” (m = 3.17, sd = 1.43), (g) “i would be nervous if i met an english or american native speaker” (m = 3.21, sd = 1.56), and (h) “i am learning english because my parents and family expect me to do so” (m = 3.29, sd = 1.04). such results testify to the impact of such motivational variables as the ideal l2 self, instrumentality, international posture and l2 learning experience. they also indicate that intrinsic motives play a more important role than extrinsic ones, particularly in view of the fact that the participants appear to attach little importance to the opinions of significant others, or what could be described as oughtto self, and externally-imposed requirements. it should be noted however that the values of standard deviation were quite high in some cases, which may indicate that the responses are subject to considerable individual variation. when it comes to the differences between the responses of the two groups, they never reached statistical significance but were the highest in the case of the following items: (a) “i would be nervous if i met an english or american native speaker” (3.77 in group 1 and 2.55 in group 2, a difference of 1.22), (b) “parents encourage me to learn english in my free time” (3.08 in group 1 and 4.00 in group 2, a difference of 0.92), (c) “i am anxious and make mistakes when i speak english during a lesson” (4.23 in group 1 and 3.36 in group 2, a difference of 0.87), (d) “parents encourage me to attend additional english classes” (3.23 in group 1 and 4.09 in group 2, a difference of 0.86), (e) “i think that polish is changing for the worse under the influence of english” (3.15 in group 1 and 2.36 in group 2, a difference of 0.79), and (f) “i would like it if other cultures were similar to polish culture” (3.46 in group 1 and 2.73 in group 2, a difference of 0.73). on the whole then it could be argued that the participants in group 2 were characterized by greater international posture and received more parental encouragement than students in group 1, although these conclusions can only be tentative given the small numbers of respondents in both groups and the potential impact of mediating variables. these findings were to a large extent corroborated by the qualitative analysis of the audio-recordings and transcripts of the interviews, with the important caveat that, due to the small number of the interviewees (a total of nine), it was not possible to pinpoint differences between the two groups in the reasons for learning english and motivational intensity. in the first place, it is clear that the the dynamic nature of motivation in language learning: a classroom perspective 261 main factors underlying the participants’ motivation to learn english were instrumentality, understood both in terms of a promotion (i.e., concerned with hopes, aspirations and accomplishments) and prevention (i.e., related to avoidance of negative outcomes) regulatory focus (higgins, 1998), and international posture. to be more specific, all the participants mentioned the need to learn english in order to enhance their prospects of getting a better job in the future, perhaps even abroad, and some of them, particularly less proficient ones, stated that it is a mandatory subject and they have to study it in order to be promoted to the next class or successfully pass their school-leaving examinations. moreover, the majority of the interviewees emphasized the fact that a good command of english as an international language will make it possible for them to communicate with foreigners in a variety of situations related to traveling, work, education or entertainment. other motivational factors were the ought-to self, l2 learning experience, and knowledge orientation, but these were much less common and hinted at by one or two learners. a more general observation is that most of the motives mentioned by the participants were intrinsic rather than extrinsic in nature, which bodes well for their efforts, and although there was little direct evidence of the impact of the ideal l2 self, some of the statements are indicative of the learners’ conviction that they will be able to use english successfully for different purposes. some of these points are illustrated in the following excerpts taken from the interviews, which are accompanied by comments in parentheses:4 i am learning english mostly because i have future plans connected with this language, either going abroad or just some future career. i will need english for sure in international contacts and so on (instrumentality – promotion, international posture). i need english to do well on my final exams and then get into a good university and it is clear that i will need it in a future job (instrumentality – prevention and promotion). the first reason is that it is a mandatory school subject, but i am also motivated to learn it because some time in the future i would like to travel, because i do not have such opportunities at present. i am aware that english is a language used all over the world and i am sure i will need it (instrumentality – prevention, international posture). i am learning english because it will come in handy in my further education, at the university but also in getting a job, because the knowledge of english is required, it is basic in many jobs . . . if i want to go abroad, english will be indispensable (instrumentality – promotion, knowledge orientation, international posture). 4 all the excerpts were originally in polish and they were later translated into english by the present author. miros aw pawlak 262 in the future i am going to go abroad on holidays. i would like to be able to communicate with people without problems. besides, it is a prestigious language and everybody is learning it (instrumentality, ought-to self). i have always liked the language and i have enjoyed learning it. i like it and studying it is fun (l2 learning experience). there were considerable differences in the level of the participants’ engagement in the learning process, or the intensity of their motivated learning behavior, which can be primarily attributed to their dominant reasons for learning english (e.g., compulsion, obligation, self-perceived importance of this language), the level of proficiency and their previous attainment, although there were obviously exceptions. some participants, for example, particularly those who viewed english as any other school subject, had difficulty learning it and received lower grades, often confined their efforts to school work, completing the homework assignments set by the teacher or reviewing for tests. even if they attended additional tutoring sessions or private schools, it was so, it can be surmised, under the influence of their parents, and their main motivation was improving their grades and, in some cases, passing the course. on the other hand, some of the interviewees, mainly those who were more cognizant of the role of english, had specific future goals and manifested high international posture, were much more likely to work on english in their own time, not only by attending additional classes, but also by seeking out additional resources, using the internet, reading books, listening to music or falling back on sometimes rather ingenious learning strategies that they found effective and enjoyable. the following excerpts illustrate some of these trends: in general, i am not very involved in learning english. only what i do in school and the homework. but i do don’t learn english too much in my free time. maybe when i play some games (a student with barely a passing grade for the previous semester). i mean… i am attending some private lessons and i do things for school. i study for tests. that’s all. private lessons and schoolwork (a student who failed the previous semester in english). i am attending additional classes, but we are doing things unrelated to the material covered in school. i also watch movies in english. right now there is a fair in the us and there were press conferences and everything was in english, and i understood about 90 percent of what i heard (an average student who appears to be quite motivated). i do not have any additional classes, but i write down interesting vocabulary, which is important in my opinion. i use word cards. i use a lot of interesting techniques. we do grammar in school but i use additional books or computer software. i translate song lyrics into polish . . . or i stick cards with what i have to learn on a board or the dynamic nature of motivation in language learning: a classroom perspective 263 the computer and whenever i do something on a computer i read those things (a very successful student talking about favorite learning strategies). the analysis also yielded evidence for transformations of the nature and intensity of the motivation of most of the participants, with the caveat that such changes were frequently described in rather general terms and the rationale for them differed in rather fundamental ways. for some of the students, they signaled greater awareness of the importance of english in everyday life, with the effect that the emphasis was shifted from extrinsic motives, such as good grades or parents’ aspirations, to intrinsic ones, such as learning for oneself in order to find a good job, facilitate one’s education, travel and communicate with foreigners. such a transition from a prevention focus to a promotion focus as well as from the ought-to self to international posture and the potential importance of the ideal l2 self resulted in greater involvement in the learning process and the willingness to make more effort to accomplish the goals set. an alternative scenario was that extrinsic motives, as reflected in the desire to get a promotion to the next class, receive good grades or pass final exams, remained at the fore in the course of time but they seemed to grow in strength, with the effect that they also resulted in enhanced engagement, albeit perhaps somewhat less permanent and more susceptible to external influences. it is also interesting to point out that in many instances such changes were closely connected with the move from junior to senior high school, a trend that could perhaps be ascribed to higher requirements in the latter, the prospect of school-leaving examinations and aspirations regarding future education. some responses also highlighted the key role of the teacher in shaping students’ motives and determining their engagement, and demonstrated that success may be a vital factor in and of itself, thereby testifying to the importance of what hermann (1980) referred to as resultative motivation. the following examples illustrate some of these points: at the beginning i did not see the reason why i was learning english. i was learning because i had to, and now, as i said before, i have plans for the future connected with english and i can see that an increase in my engagement from the moment i started learning and the present (visible changes in the reasons for learning and motivational intensity). it seems to me that with time, i don’t know why, i have been learning more for myself. not for grades, because when i was younger, it was mainly to get a five (i.e., the highest grade) on my diploma and be happy with it. now i am trying to learn in such a way that i may not get a five, but at least i get the most for myself from the experience. i don’t know. i think it is natural. i am getting more and more mature and my way of thinking is changing (a shift from extrinsic to intrinsic motives evident). miros aw pawlak 264 i think i became more engaged from the second year of junior high school. i don’t know why. maybe because we had a teacher who only paid attention to more advanced students with good knowledge of english, and we hardly ever got to speak. it changed in the second year because we had a new teacher and it remained like this in the third year as well (the role of the teacher in determining the level of learners’ engagement is visible). it has been the same all the time. my engagement has been the same over time and i think about the same things all the time. that’s why i am learning (no modification of motives or intensity visible). the more i learn, the more i can see, i don’t know, the progress i am making. for example, when i am listening to a song and i know what it is all about, it motivates me tremendously to learn even more and it is really cool (resultative motivation visible). table 1 means for motivational intensity in group 1 and group 2 during the four lessons minute/group and lesson 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 g1 l1 g2 l1 4.86 4.75 5.43 4.92 5.86 5.33 5.50 5.50 5.93 5.50 5.93 5.33 6.00 5.25 5.79 5.33 6.07 5.58 g1 l2 g2 l2 5.50 5.09 5.86 5.09 5.64 5.36 5.86 5.00 6.00 5.18 5.93 5.27 5.57 5.46 5.43 6.00 5.79 5.82 g1 l3 g2 l3 5.00 4.64 5.75 5.36 5.50 5.55 5.83 5.73 5.92 5.82 5.67 5.73 5.33 6.00 5.25 5.91 5.33 6.00 g1 l4 g2 l4 5.08 4.73 5.54 5.18 5.54 5.18 5.15 5.36 5.31 5.64 5.31 5.73 5.62 5.45 5.69 5.64 5.23 5.27 table 1 and figures 2-5 represent fluctuations in the intensity of learners’ motivation in groups 1 and 2, as defined earlier in this paper and measured by means of the motivation grid during the four lessons analyzed for the purpose of the study. since, due to limitations of space, it is not possible to discuss the changes in the two groups on a minute-by-minute basis, taking into account the lesson plans provided to the teacher, the analysis will only be confined to the most conspicuous patterns as well as selected events during particular classes, and it will be augmented by insights obtained from the interviews. what immediately catches the eye is the fact that the reported levels of motivation in both groups were very high and only in four cases did they fail to reach the value of 5, always in the first 10 min of the lesson. leaving aside for the moment the question whether these high scores are a reflection of the students’ interest, effort or engagement or their attempts to please their teacher, it is clear that they make the analysis exceedingly difficult as in the vast majority of cases the differences are minute and, given the small number of students in both groups, they could be the dynamic nature of motivation in language learning: a classroom perspective 265 the outcome of a lower or higher assessment by one students at a particular point in time. nevertheless, some fluctuations in motivational intensity could be detected and differences in this respect between the two groups were also evident. figure 2 changes in motivational intensity in group 1 and group 2 during lesson 1 figure 3 changes in motivational intensity in group 1 and group 2 during lesson 2 when we look at the first two lessons, which were devoted to discussing the world of work and focused mainly on the skills of speaking, listening and as well as grammar practice involving verbs followed by the gerund and the infinitive, we can see that the motivation of students in group 1 was generally 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 group 1 group 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 group 1 group 2 miros aw pawlak 266 higher than that of learners in group 2, the only exception being the last 10 min of lesson 2, dedicated to a game in which the students worked in pairs and had to guess the name of a job on the basis of a sentence provided by a partner. this pattern is difficult to explain, since, on the one hand, the students in group 2 represented a higher level of proficiency, as represented by the mean semester grade, but, on the other, the class could have focused on things that they were already familiar with. another interesting pattern was that interest and engagement of the students in the two groups was generally higher in the second part of the lesson than in the first, which may indicate that, irrespective of changes in the intensity of motivation which may be reflective of the tasks performed, some time is needed before students are drawn into a language lesson, in which, it should be emphasized, language is not only the medium but also the goal of instruction and it is thus necessary to make the switch from the mother tongue to the target language. as to specific changes in motivational intensity during the two lessons, it is worthwhile to take a closer look at the slight dip of 0.46 in group 1 between minutes 15 and 20 in lesson 1, and the increase in group 2 between minutes 35 an 40 in lesson 2. one way to account for the former is that it coincided with the completion of a pair work activity in which the students were supposed to characterize a number of jobs in terms of how interesting, easy, stressful, good or bad they are, and then say what job they would like to perform in the future. while such speaking tasks can be viewed as inherently motivating, the activity was planned for 10 min and it is clear that boredom could have begun to set in, not to mention the fact that the composition of pairs could have also played a part. as for the latter, it would be tempting to speculate that the growth in motivational intensity in group 2 at the end of lesson 2 was due to the fact that, as the analysis of the responses to the motivation questionnaire showed, these students were characterized by greater international posture. however, since the differences between the groups were small, they did not reach statistical significance, and other segments of the lesson were also devoted to discussing jobs, an equally plausible explanation is that they were the outcome of the beginning of a new activity (i.e., a game) that was more interesting than the preceding one (i.e., sentence construction). the dynamic nature of motivation in language learning: a classroom perspective 267 figure 4 changes in motivational intensity in group 1 and group 2 during lesson 3 figure 5 changes in motivational intensity in group 1 and group 2 during lesson 3 the patterns of motivational intensity are more complex in the case of lessons 3 and 4 since there is much more equivalence in motivational intensity in the two groups, with one or the other manifesting slightly greater interest and engagement at different points in time, and, particularly in lesson 3, the changes in both groups are somewhat more dynamic. in lesson 3 the reported motivation in group 1 first increased by 0.75 from minute 5 to minute 10, then decreased somewhat in minute 15, only to increase again in minutes 20 and 25, and then kept decreasing until the end of the lesson, with the difference between minute 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 group 1 group 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 group 1 group 2 miros aw pawlak 268 25 and minute 45 equaling 0.59. when such fluctuations are juxtaposed with the lesson plan, it turns out that the first increase was related to a transition from collaborative picture description to reading a text for general comprehension, the subsequent slight decrease coincided with matching questions with paragraphs, and the following increase overlapped with a pair work activity in which the students were requested to answer questions to the text. the drop at the end of the lesson took place when learners began working on vocabulary exercises and motivational intensity never returned to the previous after that, even when a speaking activity was performed in the last ten minutes of the class. although the levels of interest and engagement in group 2 were similar in the first half of the lesson, they were much higher than in group 2 in the last 20 min and the differences were statistically significant. these patterns do not yield themselves to easy interpretations and, although it would seem that speaking activities were more involving than controlled exercises, apparently much also depended on the degree of their novelty, the learning challenge posed, the appearance of symptoms of boredom, the preceding tasks, group dynamics, or the relevance of the activities to the class as a whole and individual students. lesson 4 turned out to be the least revealing with respect to intraand inter-group changes in motivation, which can perhaps be explained by the fact that it was in its entirety dedicated to grammar, specifically, the introduction of the present perfect. table 2 means for the overall evaluation of the four lessons in group 1 and group 2 group/lesson lesson 1 lesson 2 lesson 3 lesson 4 g1 g2 6.13 6.23 6.18 6.42 6.14 6.16 6.14 6.34 figure 6 learners’ overall evaluation of the four lessons 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 lesson 1 lesson 2 lesson 3 lesson 4 group 1 group 2 the dynamic nature of motivation in language learning: a classroom perspective 269 as can be seen from table 2 and figure 6, learners’ overall evaluations of the lessons with the help of the semantic differential scale (interesting/boring, pleasant/unpleasant, etc.) proved to be highly positive in both groups, with all the mean scores exceeding 6.00 on a 1-7 scale. in fact, the minute differences in the assessments of the four lessons appear to indicate that all of them were equally interesting, engaging and enjoyable, a finding that is surprising in view of the fact that they sometimes had a very different focus. although the means were a little higher in group 2, these differences were also small (the highest amounting to 0.20 in lesson 2 and lesson 4) and failed to reach significance, with the outcome that it would be unwarranted to jump to conclusions on this basis. somewhat more revealing perhaps are the teacher’s evaluations of the motivation of the learners over the course of the four lessons, the means for which are presented in table 3 and figure 7. while the assessments did not differ much in group 2, the only exceptions being those for lesson 1 and lesson 2 (a difference of 0.38), more variation was visible in group 1, where the participants were regarded as the most engaged in lesson 2, much more so than in lessons 1 and 3 (a difference of 0.63 and 0.50, respectively). it is also interesting to note that, on the whole, the teacher perceived students in group 1 as more involved than learners in group 2, which is evidenced by the fact that the means were considerably and statistically significantly higher for all the four lessons. this may come as a surprise in the light of the fact that the students in group 2 viewed all the four lessons as slightly more engaging than those in group 1 and one might wonder to what extent the teacher’s judgments might have been colored by the rapport she had been able to establish with the two groups. table 3 means for the teacher’s evaluation of the four lessons in group 1 and group 2 group/lesson lesson 1 lesson 2 lesson 3 lesson 4 g1 g2 4.75 4.25 5.38 4.63 4.88 4.63 5.13 4.50 miros aw pawlak 270 figure 7 the teacher’s evaluation of students’ interest and engagement over the four lessons an attempt was also made to interpret changes in motivational intensity and overall evaluations of the lessons using insights obtained by means of the interviews but it was only partly successful since the responses of the participants were mostly general, they contained few references to specific activities performed in class, and they did not include comparisons between the four lessons. the main finding was that the majority of the interviewees were of the opinion that speaking tasks were the most involving activities and considered controlled vocabulary or grammar practice to be less engaging. on the other hand, some of them were aware of the fact that the success of such communication tasks hinges upon the way in which they are organized and the quality of participation of all the students involved, which might account for the fact that decreases in motivational intensity sometimes coincided with the presence of collaborative work in pairs or groups. such generalizations have to be regarded with circumspection, however, since there was much variation in the responses supplied and it was clear that the learners had their own agendas, dictated, for example, by what they perceived as their strong and weak points, or what was important from the perspective of their reasons for learning english. overall evaluation of the four lessons was unanimously positive and the learners were convinced of high levels of their engagement, which is consistent with the findings dealt with earlier in this section. the following excerpts are illustrative of some of the points raised: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 lesson 1 lesson 2 lesson 3 lesson 4 group 1 group 2 the dynamic nature of motivation in language learning: a classroom perspective 271 i am mostly interested in activities connected with speaking and describing different things. i think the most important thing is to speak. i enjoy the least vocabulary exercises. i know that it is important but i do not find it attractive (a preference for communication tasks and a dislike of vocabulary work). the most interesting and motivating were conversations and the least sentence completion, and all the traditional grammar exercises (a preference for speaking activities and a dislike of grammar practice). the least interesting for me was conversation in groups, because it was not very successful. much depends on the people who are in the group and their involvement (a cautionary comment about the value of pair and group work). the most interesting was writing a cv because it is useful not only in poland but also abroad . . . the exercises on the present perfect were also very useful because we can say what we have been doing (a preference for writing a specific type of text and for a newly introduced grammar structure). in my opinion the lessons were interesting and if a lesson is interesting i am more involved it in (a positive evaluation of the lessons related to the level of engagement). discussion although the data collected for the purpose of the study did not always yield the kind of insights into the issues under investigation the present author would have hoped for, they were still sufficient to provide responses to the research questions posed, some of which were more definitive than others. when it comes to the participants’ reasons for learning english and the level of engagement in this process, the analysis of the data obtained by means of the motivation questionnaires and the interviews demonstrated the importance of instrumentality, international posture, and, to a lesser degree, the ideal language self, the ought-to self, the l2 learning experience and knowledge orientation. although, in general, the prevalence of more intrinsic motives could be observed, which should translate into greater perseverance in the learning task over time, extrinsic ones also played an important part, particularly in the case of weaker learners for whom being promoted to the next class or passing final examinations was often a top priority. the same could be said about the students’ involvement, the level and nature of which seemed to be a function of the main reasons for learning, proficiency and attainment. on the whole, participants with more far-reaching goals, irrespective of whether they were reflective of a promotion or prevention focus of instrumentality, miros aw pawlak 272 high international posture or the influence of the ideal language self, were more likely to go beyond mere school requirements, do additional things in their own time and look for more effective and enjoyable strategies for learning english. it was also observed that both factors underlying motivated learning behavior and the magnitude of such behavior are subject to change over time, with the fluctuations in the latter often being closely intertwined with the transformation of the former. apart from greater maturity, the transition to high school, growing awareness of one’s goals and more acute concerns for the future, such modifications were sometimes also related to the teacher or success in learning english. the analysis of the motivation grids provided some evidence for the dynamic nature of motivation in the course of single classes, with the caveat that the changes detected were not as considerable as could have been expected. on the one hand, it is obvious that motivational intensity fluctuated over time, typically being higher in the later stages of a given lesson, and a number of increases and decreases could be observed in some cases. on the other hand, though, the assessments made by the participants at 5-min intervals were overall quite high, which translated into high mean values, and made the interpretation of the dynamics of interest, engagement and effort much more difficult. a similar problem came up with respect to tracing changes in motivational intensity over the time the four lessons were conducted, since the participants’ evaluation were extremely positive, always exceeding a 6 on a 7point scale, thus making it virtually impossible to reveal any fluctuations in this respect. this also held for the interviews, in which the students expressed a highly positive opinion about the four lessons, often praising the teacher for her ability to focus exactly on their needs and involve them in classroom activities. even though a possibility that the lessons were indeed so interesting and engaging cannot be ruled out, a more plausible explanation of such results is that at least some of the students were trying to please the teacher with their answers rather than provide an accurate assessment of classroom realities. such an interpretation is warranted in view of the fact that the teacher’s assessment of the learners’ engagement in the lessons was a little less enthusiastic, with the important qualification that it could have been subjective and reflective of her experiences with and attitudes towards the students in the two groups. the juxtaposition of the results of the motivation grids with the lesson plans and the analysis of the interview data also provided some insights into the factors that can account for fluctuations in the level of motivation within a lesson, but, due to a lack of consistent patterns and the presence of contradictory responses, conclusions in this respect can only be very tentative and somewhat speculative. more precisely, it would seem that what matters the dynamic nature of motivation in language learning: a classroom perspective 273 here is not only the overall topic, the stage of the lesson or the task being performed, but also the place of this task in the overall lesson plan, the amount of novelty it involves, the phase of its execution, group dynamics, learner characteristics, as well as the priorities pursued by a group as a whole or individual students, with all of these internal and external variables constantly interacting in unpredictable ways and exerting an influence on motivational intensity at a particular point in time. in line with the tenets of dynamic systems theory, then, the study of the dynamic nature of motivation must, in the words of debot, lowie and verspoor (2007), “recognize the crucial role of interaction of a multitude of variables at different levels” (p. 7). some of the problems mentioned above are without doubt related to the weaknesses of the study which should be addressed in future research endeavors of this kind. for one thing, the period of four weeks is simply too short to detect changes in the nature and magnitude of motivation, and studies spanning much longer periods of time are necessary to capture the evolution of reasons for learning foreign languages and engagement in this task. second, the tools used to collect data on fluctuations in motivational intensity could have been lacking in some ways (e.g., items included in the evaluation sheets, questions posed in the interviews, the frequency of indicating the level of motivation), or simply insufficient to tap changes in this respect as a function of the instructional activities employed, their timing, learners’ goals, beliefs and characteristics. finally, and most importantly perhaps, the fact that it was the regular classroom teacher who collected the data might have unduly affected the results, as, under such circumstances, the participants might have been unwilling to express more critical comments about the classes they were attending. while it is not clear how this problem could be overcome without compromising ecological validity, it is indeed a crucial issue that should be tackled in future research. conclusion the study reported in the present paper contributes to the still scant body of research into the dynamic nature of motivation in second and foreign language learning, and it is one of the first to investigate changes in motivational intensity within single lessons and series of lessons. the analysis of the quantitative and qualitative data collected by means of multiple data collection tools provided evidence that both the nature and magnitude of motivation are not stable and they are subject to change over time. such fluctuations were detected both over a longer period of time, as demonstrated by the learners’ comments in the interviews, and, at least to some extent, in the course of single miros aw pawlak 274 lessons, as shown by the participants’ assessment of their interest and engagement at 5-min intervals. at the same time, the study failed to identify meaningful changes in motivational intensity from one lesson to the next, and the conclusions regarding the factors which may impinge upon fluctuations in these respects can only be tentative given the complex, sometimes contradictory patterns that emerged from the data. such limited success in revealing temporal variation in the students’ motivation can be attributed to the design of the study, which did not include interviews or written reports after each class, potential flaws in the instruments used, as well as the fact that all the data were gathered by the regular teacher of the learners involved, which may have prevented them from voicing critical opinions. despite these limitations and weaknesses, which should no doubt be taken into consideration when planning future empirical investigations, the research project constitutes a valuable contribution to the study of the dynamics of motivation in language learning. it also demonstrates the importance of combining the macroand micro-perspective, as represented by the use of general motivational questionnaires and instruments better suited to capture the complexity of learners’ interest and engagement at a particular point in time, respectively, and the need to rely on methodological triangulation in order to obtain a multi-faceted picture of the changes taking place. although research into temporal aspects of motivation is an arduous task in view of the fact that it has to be longitudinal, it requires the use of sophisticated tools which are sensitive enough to uncover fluctuations in learners’ motives and engagement in different contexts, lessons, and tasks, and it entails meticulous analysis of copious amounts of quantitative data, it is clearly a 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(2002). ‘french is the language of love and stuff’: student perceptions of issues related to motivation in learning a foreign language. british educational research journal, 28, 503-528. 371 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (3). 2017. 371-375 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.3.1 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial the department of english and american studies, the school of education and the english linguistics team (tanja angelovska and colleagues) at the university of salzburg in partnership with the centre for applied research and outreach in language education (carole) at the university of greenwich (alessandro benati) organized an international conference on l2 grammar acquisition: new research on processing instruction, input manipulation and teaching implications in july 2016. the event resulted in a variety of instructed l2 (second language) grammar acquisition studies and current contributions to the field. in addition, it gave rise to a very productive research agenda with prominent plenary speakers discussing the role of input in grammar acquisition and instruction. questions were addressed as to how we can develop a better understanding of how l2 learners acquire grammar and what processing strategies they use when exposed to input (vanpatten, 2015). similarly, most effective ways to approach l2 grammar instruction in today’s diverse language classrooms were sought, thereby challenging traditional grammar-based approaches. this event has borne fruits for this special issue of studies in second language learning and teaching in carefully chosen papers presented at the event and additional contributions, selected as relevant to the field in many respects. participating researchers, colleagues, language teachers and practitioners raised a whole host of more specific questions about how grammatical features in a target language are acquired and taught. some of them are: does manipulating input make a difference? how does manipulating input make a difference? what is the role of output? what pedagogical interventions are effective? what is the role of grammar development in reading comprehension? what is the role of transfer in (instructed) l2 grammar acquisition and beyond? what is the role of input continuity in curriculum design and practice? although these issues have been investigated, the resulting findings are not completely conclusive. thus, it is not surprising that “grammar instruction has been relatively unaltered 372 by research findings” (larsen-freeman, 2015, p. 263), a fact which carries in itself a plethora of reasons and causes. the contributions to this special issue fill an existing gap in instructed l2 grammar acquisition and focus on questions of how research and/or theory can feed practice and vice versa, thereby focusing on both comprehension and production of l2 grammar. similarly, another grammar-related important gap with regard to the impact on pedagogy was identified by collins and muñoz (2016): the ways in which this prior linguistic knowledge may be used to facilitate the learning of new foreign languages (for example, helping students identify sources of erroneous hypotheses about the l3 based on influence from the l2) has not yet had much impact on mainstream pedagogical approaches. (p. 141) consequently, some of the papers in this issue respond to this gap and look into the perspective beyond l2 grammar acquisition. although the papers do not cover all aspects related to instructed l2 grammar acquisition, they explore some of the most recent developments in this area of sla research and derive practical implications for classroom instruction. suitably, this special issue begins with alessandro benati’s contribution in the form of a comprehensive overview of the role of input, output and instruction in second language acquisition providing examples of several pedagogical interventions to grammar instruction. the effectiveness of processing instruction, input enhancement, structured output and collaborative output tasks is reviewed and an overall evaluation is provided, which is relevant for both practitioners and researchers. the collection of papers continues with a second overview paper by tanja angelovska expanding on the question of which pedagogical considerations can be made in regard to the role of prior language knowledge beyond instructed l2 grammar acquisition. a discussion of (combinations of) existing theoretical accounts and associated pedagogical aspects, such as explicit information, negative evidence, metalinguistic explanations, grammar consciousness raising, and input enhancement fittingly adds to benati’s paper. in addition, acknowledging the three phases of input, practice and output, the author illustrates a recently developed method (hahn & angelovska, 2017), focusing on concrete examples of how it is applicable in instructed l2 grammar acquisition and beyond. the next contribution is anja steinlen’s paper on “the development of english grammar and reading comprehension by majority and minority language children in a bilingual primary school.” she reports the results of a study investigating the minority and majority language children’s english grammar and reading comprehension skills tested at two points in time with a year inbetween. apart from filling the gap through addressing minority primary school 373 children, the added value of this study is a discussion of the relatively unexplored aspect of using children’s family language as a resource in foreign language teaching, even at the primary school level. simone pfenninger and johanna lendl continue this line of work on l2 grammar acquisition in the primary school context and discuss the impact of perceived l2 english input continuity from primary to secondary school. using mixed methods, they analyze learners’ beliefs, attitudes and self-efficacy through a questionnaire and language experience essays before and after children transitioned to secondary school. the authors articulate important problems associated with this transition referring to such issues as the variety of coherence in curriculum design and practice and mixed ability classes. in the following paper, a rather different, but equally relevant perspective is addressed within an output-based approach to instructed l2 grammar acquisition and with a focus on writing. monika geist fills the existing gap in the studies on noticing grammar aspects in the writing process by l2 english teenagers with l1 german. her analysis includes an interesting selection of problem-solving strategies that learners apply in l2 writing concerning both areas of morphology and syntax. the results of this study open a new area in research on noticing grammar and suggest relevant implications for teaching. this concise compilation offers innovations not only in terms of theoretical and methodological refinements, as well as practical implementations, but also in terms of the inclusion of various languages. thus, the last three papers of this special issue bring into play different language combinations (l1 frenchl2 spanish; l1 english/l1 dutch-l2 spanish; and l1 english-l2 german), grammatical features (past tense and aspect, irregular verb morphology and dative clitics) and different theoretical directions, all contributing to advances in experimental research on instructed l2 grammar acquisition. besides the transfer phenomenon, the factor of proficiency as relevant for determining transfer in l2 grammar acquisition and beyond has been brought into investigation in some of the papers of this special issue. four proficiency levels (a2, b1, b2 and c1) were included in the study by josé amenós-pons, aoife ahern and pedro guijarro-fuentes, who examined the process of acquiring l2s that are closely related to the l1 through data on how adult french speakers learning l2 spanish in a formal setting develop knowledge and use of past tenses in this l2. the focus of their paper “l1 french learning of l2 spanish past tenses: l1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues” is on the role of transfer and simplification in regard to acquiring mental representations of l2 grammar (spanish past tenses, i.e., simple and compound past, pluperfect, imperfect and progressive forms). their results show that l1 influence attenuates progressively as proficiency increases. another important finding refers to the negative l1 transfer-related difficulties that proved to 374 be related to grammar-discourse interface issues within the interpretation process of integrating linguistic and pragmatic information. in terms of research-based implications, derived on the basis of their findings, they provide clear recommendations for the teaching of closely related languages. the authors conclude that instruction should not only focus on cross-linguistic contrasts, but it should also prioritize uses requiring complex interface integration, even though such uses pose heavy “burdens” on the level of processing. the l2 acquisition of spanish dative clitics in clitic doubling structures by l1 english and dutch formally instructed, intermediate (b1 and b2 levels) learners was the focus of the study by maria angeles escobar alvarez. similarly to the previous contributors, she took into account the role of transfer in the acquisition of new syntactic structures, where dative clitics appear and animate objects are marked by the dative preposition to. using a grammaticality judgement task (gjt), she found that the difficulties l2 learners experienced were not always due to negative l1 transfer, but they were also related to the complexity of the argument structure where the clitic is inserted. ultimately, a tentative proposal for foreign language teaching is presented. it is based on a gradual acquisition of salient patterns including transitive and more complex argument structures where dative clitics are inserted. the last contribution to this special issue by thomas wagner directly addresses psycholinguistic mechanisms governing the acquisition of l2 irregular verb morphology by intermediate english learners of german as a foreign language (gfl). the main finding of his study refers to the organization of irregular verb morphology in the mental lexicon of intermediate gfl learners and the fact that it might best be captured by the linguistic notion of structured lexical entries, as well as the psycholinguistic mechanism of an analogy-based pattern associator. in terms of implication-based perspectives, wagner concludes that massive exposure facilitating analogical inferencing is to be called for and states that cross-linguistic focus on forms would be beneficial in order to make foreign language learners aware of both the similarities and differences between the two verbal paradigms. i am confident that the papers in this volume will influence the future contributions to the field of instructed l2 grammar acquisition in various ways, either by considering complexities and overlapping interactions of associated factors, triangulation of methods involving both offand online measures, and/or through the inclusion of learners at different ages of acquisition and proficiency levels within wide ranges of language combinations. for now, we should be satisfied with this current collection which gives the first incentives for and attempts at advancing the field of l2 grammar acquisition and beyond, given the importance of the multilingual realities we are surrounded by. i plead for theoretical 375 and methodological advancements in the field of l2 grammar acquisition and instruction because: (a) “there are intriguing new findings on differential learnability of properties within the same groups of learners” (slabakova, 2016, p. 7), (b) we need to increase the explanatory power of the current pedagogical options in terms of how the linguistic representations develop in real time, and (c) we have to work out evidence-based and research-led pedagogical implications. each paper in this special issue was first reviewed by the guest editor. then the contributions were submitted to a double-blind review once the authors incorporated the comments and feedback. i would like to thank the reviewers for their time, insights, and attention to detail. i would especially like to thank the contributors to this special issue for working hard to meet to the given deadlines but, more importantly, for the quality of the work they produced. the last words of gratitude go to the sponsors of this event, the rectorate of the university of salzburg, and the city and land of salzburg—without their support neither the event nor the publication of this special issue would have been possible. tanja angelovska university of salzburg, austria tanja.angelovska@sbg.ac.at references collins, l., & muñoz, c. (2016). the foreign language classroom: current perspectives and future considerations. the modern language journal, 100 (supplement 2016). doi: 10.1111/modl.12305 hahn, a., & angelovska, t. (2017). input-practice-output: a method for teaching l3 english after l2 german with a focus on syntactic transfer. in t. angelovska & a. hahn (eds.), l3 syntactic transfer: models, new developments and implications (bilingual processing and acquisition 5) (pp. 299-319). amsterdam: john benjamins. larsen-freeman, d. (2015). research into practice: grammar learning and teaching. language teaching, 48, 263-280. slabakova, r. (2016). the scalpel model of third language acquisition. international journal of bilingualism. advance online publication. doi: 10.1177/1 367006916655413 vanpatten, b. (2015). foundations of processing. international review of applied linguistics, 53, 91-109. 415 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (3). 415-438 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the relationship between syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension in efl learners gabriella morvay borough of manhattan community college, the city university of new york, usa gmorvay@bmcc.cuny.edu abstract via a variety of measurements, 64 hungarian native speakers in the 12th grade learning english as a foreign language in slovakia were tested in a cross-sectional correlational study in order to determine the relationship between the ability to process complex syntax and foreign language reading comprehension. the test instruments involved a standardized reading comprehension test in english, and a test of syntactic knowledge in both hungarian and english, in addition to a background questionnaire in hungarian. power correlations and regression analyses rendered results that showed syntactic knowledge to be a statistically significant estimator for foreign language reading comprehension. the study provides evidence that the ability to process complex syntactic structures in a foreign language does contribute to one’s efficient reading comprehension in that language. keywords: syntactic knowledge, nonnative reading comprehension despite the existence of numerous studies on nonnative or foreign language (hereafter l2) reading comprehension,1 the precise factors involved in l2 reading have not been researched to the extent one would expect. this might be due to the fact that much of l2 reading research has been a replication of native language 1 while participants in the study are efl learners, the term l2, as opposed to foreign language, is used to refer to their nonnative language reading comprehension in order to follow common practice in the reading literature. gabriella morvay 416 (hereafter l1) reading studies. also, researchers in l2 routinely adopted l1 conceptual frameworks for conducting research in l2 (e.g., clarke, 1979; cziko, 1978). the gap in l2 reading research is obvious when it comes to investigating adults whose l1 reading skills are high, and who are relatively proficient in their l2 as well, for most substantial research has focused on l2 learners who are either children or adults with special needs or whose l1 literacy skills are low. relatively little study has been undertaken concerning the processes involved when skilled l1 readers attempt to become fluent in l2 reading and achieve variable outcomes. for such individuals, one might hypothesize that higher-level linguistic processes, such as those associated with syntax, might plausibly be related to individual differences in l2 reading proficiency. in fact, while l2 vocabulary knowledge is intuitively and obviously taken to be relevant to successful l2 reading comprehension, the function of syntax is taken to be less so. this unclear role of syntax in l2 reading comprehension can be observed in some studies which demonstrate conflicting findings about the importance of syntactic knowledge (e.g., barnett, 1986; brisbois, 1995; shiotsu & weir, 2007). consequently, this study was motivated by the need to find out whether knowledge of syntax plays a significant role in l2 reading comprehension. the fact that certain syntactic structures are acquired later and, thus, are considered to be more difficult than others suggests that reading comprehension might be affected by these differences in structural complexity. the present study examined this possible interdependence in learners of english as a foreign language (efl) whose native language is hungarian, and who study english in a classroom setting as opposed to a more natural second language environment. given that the two languages are fundamentally different from each other, the study provided a good opportunity to observe how students utilize their knowledge of syntax in both hungarian and english. the study is a correlational one; therefore, it establishes various relationships between syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension; it does not claim, however, that the lack of the first one causes a deficit in the second. l1 reading and syntax although there is a general consensus that a link between syntactic skills and reading comprehension exists, researchers are less in agreement when it comes to determining the specific relations between syntax and each of the two major aspects of reading, namely decoding and comprehension. some researchers have demonstrated a link between syntactic abilities and decoding and l1 reading comprehension respectively, but have pointed out that there was a stronger relationship between syntactic abilities and the former than there was the relationship between syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension in efl learners 417 with the latter. for example, willows and ryan (1986) found that syntactic tasks of repetition, localization, correction and cloze tasks correlated more strongly with decoding than with reading comprehension. bowey (1986) obtained the same results when she experimented with children in fourth and fifth grades. on the other hand, nation and snowling (2000) found a strong correlation between syntactic awareness skills and reading comprehension. these and other l1 studies (cox, 1976; ehri & wilce, 1980; forrest-pressley & waller, 1984; morais, cary, alegria, & bertelson, 1979; rego & bryant, 1993) indicate that the relationship between syntactic abilities and reading comprehension is still controversial. normally developing readers – since the discussion of various reading disabilities is beyond the scope of this paper – go through stages leading to the achievement of skilled, fluent reading (chall, 1983; ehri, 1991). there is no doubt that those children who struggle to learn to read often fail to perform well on various verbal tasks which do not involve reading (liberman & shankweiler, 1985; vellutino, 1979). these problems are often so subtle that they may not be detected in everyday communication, and only sophisticated testing might shed light on them. moreover, poor readers do not perform as well as competent readers in understanding oral puns and jokes (hirsch-pasek, gleitman, & gleitman, 1978), and cannot detect, correct, or explain semantically and syntactically anomalous sentences (ryan & ledger, 1984). there has been much speculation about whether these deficiencies are due to impoverished verbal short-term memory, deficient speech perception and production, or lack of syntactic awareness. in recent years, two competing hypotheses have attempted to explain the differences between poor and good comprehenders, each offering a fundamentally different view of what reading requires and how language acquisition is related to it. while one view, the processing limitation theory, claims a deficiency in processing and locates the problem in the “subsidiary mechanisms that are used in language processing” (crain & shankweiler, 1988, pp. 168-169), the other view, the structural lag hypothesis, blames poor reading comprehension on a deficiency in linguistic knowledge, more precisely on insufficient syntactic abilities (e.g., bentin, deutsch, & liberman, 1990; demont & gombert, 1996; waltzman & cairns, 2000). l2 reading and syntax while most reading research in a foreign language has investigated vocabulary knowledge, also the ability to process structures has an important facilitative effect on reading comprehension (barnett, 1986; berman, 1984). among recent studies on children’s l2 reading development and syntactic abilities, martohardjono, otheguy, gabriele, and troseth (2005) focused on strucgabriella morvay 418 tures that are considered to be milestones in the development of monolingual children, specifically coordination and subordination. the team investigated whether bilingual children with a strong knowledge base in their l1 (spanish) acquire reading comprehension in l2 (english) better than those with weaker l1 syntax. their second question concerned the degree to which a strong syntactic base in l2 contributes to listening comprehension in l2, and if this is a “more significant factor than the corresponding base in the l1” (p. 4). the tasks and stimuli were based on the literature on complex sentence development. kindergartners were tested on a syntax measure using various coordinate and subordinate structures in spanish and english through an act-out task. martohardjono et al. (2005) found that performance on the coordinate structures exceeded the performance on subordination, which reflects the developmental order for monolingual children. in addition, performance on l1 (spanish) coordination was better than on english (l2) coordination. on the other hand, although performance on the subordinate structures was also somewhat better in spanish, the difference was not statistically significant. finally, the combined performance on both coordination and subordination was significantly better in spanish. the participants were then tested on the pre-reading level of the gates-macginitie standardized reading test (macginitie, macginitie, maria, dreyer, & hughes, 2000) which has components known to be precursors of reading ability.2 correlations between the syntax measure and the precursors to reading indicated that there were more significant correlations between the spanish syntax scores and english pre-reading than between the english syntax scores and english pre-reading. correlations between spanish syntax and english listening also appear to be stronger than those between english syntax and english listening. based on these results, martohardjono et al. concluded that there is indeed a strong relationship between syntactic skills in l1 and listening comprehension (as precursor to reading) in l2 in young esl learners, and this relationship is particularly strong between the knowledge of subordination and listening comprehension in both l1 and l2. some recent investigations have also focused on the syntactic knowledge that l2 readers bring to the reading process and how such knowledge influences comprehension. bernhardt (2003), for example, hypothesized that syntax would be a key variable in predicting l2 reading comprehension. she claimed that evidence within l2 contexts predicts that the impact on the comprehension process of readers moving between predictable and unpredictable word order is significant. languages such as german, russian, or french exhibit degrees of flexibility in word order and, consequently, readers cannot merely rely on word meaning 2 these four components were literacy concepts, oral language concepts, letter-sound correspondences, and listening comprehension. the relationship between syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension in efl learners 419 for comprehension, but must understand the signaling relationships between and among words. odlin (2003) also noted that l2 learners from flexible word order languages have higher numbers of oral production error rates when learning rigid word order languages (e.g., english). odlin further hypothesized that learners from rigid word order languages have higher error rates in the receptive language skills, namely reading and listening, when learning flexible word order languages. a very recent study dealing with the issue of syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension in l2 was conducted by shiotsu and weir (2007), who investigated the relative significance of syntactic knowledge and vocabulary in the prediction of reading comprehension performance. they pointed out that even though a number of contributing factors to reading ability have been empirically validated, the relative contribution of these factors to the explanation of performance in a foreign language reading test is limited. while previous studies (i.e., brisbois, 1995; ulijn and strother, 1990) attached a greater importance to vocabulary knowledge in foreign language reading, shiotsu and weir (2007) offered support for the relative superiority of syntactic knowledge over vocabulary knowledge in predicting performance on a reading comprehension test. they further claimed that the literature on the relative contribution of grammar and vocabulary knowledge to reading comprehension is too limited to offer convincing evidence for supporting either of the two predictors, and a more sophisticated statistical approach (i.e., structural equation modeling) would shed more light on the question. research questions based on the above discussion, the following research questions were investigated: 1. to what extent does syntactic knowledge contribute to reading comprehension? 2. what are the effects of l1 (hungarian) syntactic knowledge on l2 (english) reading comprehension? 3. what are the effects of l2 (english) syntactic knowledge on l2 (english) reading comprehension? the research questions investigate whether there is a different contributing effect of l1 and l2 syntax respectively on l2 reading comprehension, and if so, which one. while martohardjono et al. (2005) found a stronger relationship between bilingual children’s l1 syntax and l2 listening than between their l2 syntax and l2 listening comprehension, our hypothesis predicts the opposite for the young adult population that was studied, for the following reason: since the participants’ mean age was over 18 years, their l1 syntactic skills had gabriella morvay 420 been finalized. the strong correlation between l1 syntax and l2 listening comprehension in martohardjono et al.’s study is due to the fact that children’s syntactic abilities at kindergarten age have not been developed fully. even though there is a widely-held belief that children attain adult syntax at about the age of 5, c. chomsky (1969) noted that while differences between a 5-yearold’s and an adult’s grammar might not be apparent in a conversation, direct testing can reveal differences. her investigation supporting this claim involved 40 elementary schoolchildren between the ages of 5 and 10. in that study, the researcher elicited information about children’s knowledge of sentence subject assignment to infinitival complement verbs and found that 3 out of 14 children who failed to show mastery of this syntactic feature were over 9 years of age. this suggests, according to c. chomsky, that “active syntactic acquisition is taking place up to the age of 9 and perhaps even beyond” (p. 121). this claim is especially true for the less dominant language in the case of bilingual children. studies of oral language development have challenged the notion that children know most structures by the age of five or six. certain syntactic structures have not emerged in the syntactic development process as yet, and so this gap must have affected the relationship between the two skills. since our participants’ l1 syntactic abilities were not in the developing stages, but rather were mature, it was predicted that their l1 syntactic comprehension would have no effect on their l2 reading comprehension. instead, it was predicted that l2 syntax would have a significant effect on l2 reading comprehension given that these adolescents were still in the process of acquiring complex structures in the l2. furthermore, while aural comprehension has strong predictive value in the early stages of reading acquisition, in adults this predictive value fades, and listening and reading comprehension rates level out (baddeley, logie, & nimmo-smith, 1985; danks & end, 1987; duker, 1965; dymock, 1993; sinatra & royer, 1993). method participants experimental group. participants in the experimental group were 64 (26 males, 38 females) 12th graders attending a high school in galanta, slovakia. their ages ranged from 17 to 19, with a mean age of 18.3 years (sd = .71). they were recruited via the help of the school principal and local english teachers. the language of instruction in the school was hungarian, which is the native language of all the participants. the participants’ background information was collected via a written questionnaire in hungarian. in addition, all the participants were foreign language learners of english, all of whom have been learning the language in a class the relationship between syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension in efl learners 421 room setting since the approximate age of 11, ensuring relative equality among participants in their language learning experiences. the average number of years the participants had studied english was 8. all the participants were literate in slovak, but did not speak it at home. furthermore, all the participants in the study signed the required consent forms. execution of the study was in compliance with institutional review board protocol of the city university of new york. control group. these participants were 15 native english speakers between the ages of 18 and 24 (mean age 22.5). this group only took the english version of the test of syntactic comprehension in order to ensure the reliability of the drawings used in the study, and to provide a confirmation that, in fact, native speakers do not have difficulties with the types of complex sentences used in the test. materials the measures used in the study were one standardized proficiency test and two experimental tasks specifically designed for the study. all of the tests and tasks were group-administered. in addition, a written background questionnaire was administered to ensure as much homogeneity of the participants as possible, and to identify the possible differences between the participants which might affect their reading performance such as gender, reading habits, knowledge of other languages, and so forth. gates-macginitie reading test level 6. the gates-macginitie reading test (macginitie et al., 2000), which is a standardized reading test, was designed to provide a general assessment of reading achievement of native english speakers in sixth grade. however, an earlier pilot study, carried out in december 2005 in order to find the most appropriate level for the grades tested, revealed that level 4 was much too easy for 11h graders learning efl. therefore, it was speculated that level 5 would be an adequate match for 11th graders, and level 6 for 12th graders, that is, the population in this study. the test consists of a vocabulary and a comprehension section, including 45 and 48 items respectively. the time for completing the sections is 20 min for the vocabulary one, and 25 min for the comprehension one. the vocabulary test measures reading vocabulary; the words are presented in a brief context intended to suggest which part of speech the word belongs to, but not to provide clues to meaning. participants are expected to select the word or phrase out of five possible choices that is closest in meaning to the test word, which is underlined. the comprehension section measures readers’ abilities to read and understand different types of prose. according to the publishers of this standardized test, all of the passages are taken from published books and periodicals. some are fiction, and some are nonfiction, from various content areas, and written in a gabriella morvay 422 variety of styles. the content is selected to reflect the type of materials that students at a particular grade level are required to read for schoolwork and choose to read for recreation. some questions require participants to construct an interpretation based on a literal understanding of the passage; others require them to make inferences or draw conclusions. the comprehension section also measures the ability to determine the meaning of words in an authentic context. test of syntactic knowledge in hungarian. this test was developed on the basis of previous research by martohardjono et al. (2005),3 and consisted of sets of three drawings, out of which one accurately reflected the meaning of the syntactic structures involved. the sentences were read aloud by the experimenter as they appeared on the screen. the example below illustrates the procedures that were followed. example 1 a nagymama bántotta az orvost a kórházban. the grandmother hurt the doctor the hospital [in] ‘the grandmother hurt the doctor in the hospital.’ below the sentence, the following three drawings appeared, marked with a, b and c: 3 the format of our stimuli was carefully chosen to reflect as closely as possible the ability to comprehend sentences, as opposed to producing them. many of the previous studies used poorly controlled production tasks (e.g., cloze test) to measure comprehension. for more discussion on the importance of comprehension tasks in l2 studies, see klein and martohardjono (1999). the relationship between syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension in efl learners 423 of the three drawings, one was always semantically anomalous (i.e., it used a wrong picture for one of the vocabulary items in the sentence; e.g., a nurse, instead of a doctor), while the other two illustrated the contrasts tested. thus, in example 1, which tested the participants’ understanding of the active voice, c is the semantic distracter, while a and b present the contrast which is tested. at the same time, the participants had answer sheets on which to circle the letter that corresponds to the drawing that matches the sentence at the top of a power point slide. in the set illustrated in example 1, drawing b matches the meaning of the sentence presented, so for the right response the letter b should be circled in the answer sheet. the drawings were scanned and included into a powerpoint presentation and were projected on a screen, thus ensuring adequate visibility for all the participants. each slide disappeared automatically after 15 s, followed by a blank slide that appeared for another 15 s before the presentation of the next slide. there were 30 items in this section. in addition, there were five practice items at the beginning of the session in order to establish the routine and ensure familiarity with the task. test of syntactic knowledge in english. this test was identical to the hungarian version, except that the sentences written at the top of the slides were in english and were read aloud by the experimenter in english instead of hungarian. the structures used in hungarian were used in the english version as well. in addition, six passive sentences were added to the test items (see the description of the test items below). therefore, the english version of the test was slightly longer, amounting to 36 items as opposed to the 30 items in the hungarian version. example 2 shows a set of drawings that tested the passive voice. here, a and b reflect the contrast which is tested, while c is the semantic distracter. example 2 the mother was kissed by the father in the theater. gabriella morvay 424 stimuli used in the tests of syntactic knowledge. lexical items used in the english sentences were controlled for frequency, in the following manner: thorndike and lorge’s (1944) the teacher’s word book of 30,000 words was used to select vocabulary items that occur at least 100 times per million words, and at least 1,000 times in selected 120 juvenile books. furthermore, verbs were all presented in the simple past tense; in the case of the passive voice, the past participle was used as required, with the past tense marked on the auxiliary be. verb choice was balanced, so that regular (e.g., kiss-kissed, visit-visited, push-pushed), irregular (e.g., catch-caught, see-saw, buy-bought), and unchanged (e.g., hurt, hit) forms of the simple past tense (in the active, relative clauses and subordinates with temporal adverbials) and past participle (in the passive sentences) were used. moreover, only animate nouns were used in order to make sentences reversible, and thus plausible, such as the ones in example 2, in which both mother and father can function as the subject of the sentence. finally, sentence length was controlled for, making the average sentence 11 syllables long. the following hungarian structures were tested: 1. relative clauses (n = 12) within which only subject headed sentences of two types were tested: a) subject-subject (ss; n = 6) relative clauses, where the subject of the relative clause is identical with the subject of the main clause, as in example 3: example 3 a n vér [aki az orvost látta] magas volt. the nurse who the doctoracc saw tall was ‘the nurse that saw the doctor was tall.’ b) subject-object (so; n = 6) relative clauses where the object of the relative clause is identical to the subject of the main clause, as shown in example 4: example 4 a n vér [akit látott az orvos] magas volt. the nurse whom saw the doctor tall was ‘the nurse that the doctor saw was tall.’ due to word order flexibility in hungarian, ss and so relative clauses are not always centrally embedded (as they are in english). however, in order to make the structures comparable in difficulty with their english counterparts, this particular word order was tested. in addition, the relationship between syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension in efl learners 425 this is one of the two most common word orders as verified by three native hungarian speakers independently. for each sentence that appeared in one condition, (e.g., ss relative) a matched sentence, that is, using the same lexical items, appeared in the other condition (e.g., so relative), as shown in examples 3 and 4. what follows are the other hungarian structures that were tested: 2. subordinate clauses containing the temporal terms miel tt ‘before’ and miután ‘after’ (n = 12). the sentences containing miel tt (n = 6) were divided into two categories, depending on the placement of the subordinate clause. this is because the location of the adverbial clause influences processing difficulty. one set (n = 3) contained the subordinate clause sentence-initially, as in example 5, and the other set (n = 3) contained the subordinate clause after the main clause, that is, in sentence-final position, as in example 6. example 5 miel tt a fiú megvacsorázott, befejezte a házi feladatát. before the boy had dinner, finished the home work-poss ‘before the boy had dinner, he finished his homework.’ example 6 a fiú befejezte a házi feladatát miel tt megvacsorázott. the boy finished the home work-poss before had dinner ‘the boy finished his homework before he had dinner.’ the sentences containing miután (n = 6) were also divided into two types for the same psycholinguistic reason: one set (n = 3) contained the subordinate clause in sentence initial position, as in example 7, and the other set (n = 3) contained the subordinate clause in sentence-final position, as in example 8. example 7 miután a férfi meglátogatta az anyját, megebédelt. after the man visited the mother-poss had lunched ‘after the man visited his mother, he had lunch.’ example 8 a férfi megebédelt miután meglátogatta az anyját. the man lunched after visited the mother-poss ‘the man had lunch after he visited his mother.’ gabriella morvay 426 3. simple active sentences (n = 6). in these sentences the subject noun, verb and object appear in svo word order as shown in example 9: example 9 a lány megrúgta a fiút a játszótéren. the girl kicked the boyacc the playground [prep] ‘the girl kicked the boy in the playground.’ the total number of sentences used for the hungarian stimuli (n = 30)4 thus included 12 relative clauses, 12 ‘before’/’after’ clauses and six active ones. the following english structures used as stimuli matched those of the hungarian test, except for the passive voice: 1. relative clauses (n = 12) within which centrally embedded subject headed sentences were tested. a) six of them were ss relative clauses, as shown in example 10: example 10 the nurse [that saw the doctor] was tall. b) the other six were so relative clauses, as illustrated in example 11: example 11 the nurse [that the doctor saw] was tall. 2. subordinate clauses containing the temporal terms before and after (n = 12) again, depending on the position of the before and after clauses, the sentences were divided into two types. in six of the sentences the temporal clauses with before and after occurred sentence-initially, as in examples 12 and 14, and in the other six they occurred in the sentence-final position, as in examples 13 and 15. example 12 before the man visited his mother, he had lunch. example 13 the man had lunch before he visited his mother. example 14 after the man played football, he called his wife. 4 appendix b lists all the 30 sentences used for this task. the relationship between syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension in efl learners 427 example 15 the man called his wife after he played football. 3. simple active sentences (n = 6) such as example 16: example 16 the child fed the mother in the hospital. 4. passive sentences (n = 6) since the passive in hungarian does not exist in the exact form in which it does in english, it was speculated that in english this structure might pose potential difficulty to hungarian speakers. an example of the stimuli in this set is shown in example 17: example 17 the mother was fed by the child in the hospital. as the numbers show, the english version of the test was longer by the six additional passive items, thus making the total number of the english sentences 36.5 this included 12 relative clauses, 12 before/after clauses, six active and six passive sentences. procedures data were gathered over a 3-day period. all the participants attended a session where the purpose of the study was explained in hungarian, and the informed consent forms were distributed to be either signed by them, or by their parents if they were minors. the background questionnaire was also distributed, and the participants were asked to return the completed forms the following day. the first task to be administered was the test of syntactic knowledge in english, which did not require an additional timing device, for the powerpoint automatically projected the slides at 15-s intervals. the entire test took about 20 min to complete. the next day the participants started with the gates-macginitie reading test, which took 60 min, including instructions. after the session, they were given a 30-min break. then, the students went on to the last task, the hungarian test of syntactic knowledge, which took approximately 17 min. on the 5 appendix a lists all the 36 sentences used in this task. gabriella morvay 428 final day of testing, the participants who had missed either the first or the second session were tested separately in smaller rooms. results descriptive statistics the control group of native english speakers (n = 15) scored at ceiling (100%) on the test of english syntactic comprehension; what is presented below are the results of the experimental group. table 1 includes descriptive statistics concerning the number and age of the participants. table 1 description of participants participants number mean age sd minimum maximum male 26 18.4 .702 female 38 18.2 .714 total 64 18.3 .709 17.6 19.6 table 2 shows descriptive statistics for all participants on each test taken. the four measurements that were used yielded the following mean scores, standard deviations and raw numbers for minimum, maximum and item totals. table 2 descriptive results of the variables variable n % of correct responses m sd minimum maximum total no. of items english reading comprehension 64 44% 19.85 11.27 0 44 45 english vocabulary 64 52% 21.29 6.05 8 35 40 english syntactic knowledge 64 93% 33.57 3.06 25 36 36 hungarian syntactic knowledge 64 98% 29.35 1.46 23 30 30 one of the most striking results is the ceiling performance on the hungarian syntactic knowledge. this result is obviously highly skewed by the ease of the test. the english syntactic knowledge yielded a near-ceiling result at 93%. the widest range (with sd of 11.27) was found with the english reading comprehension test, where the participants scored anywhere between ceiling and floor (0 minimum and 44 maximum out of the possible 45). the english vocabulary test also produced a relatively wide range of scores with most participants scoring in the mid-range. the relationship between syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension in efl learners 429 relationships between l2 reading comprehension and independent variables the data were analyzed using stata 10.0 software. in order to find out how the various factors relate to l2 reading comprehension and to each other, a correlational analysis was performed and its results are shown in table 3. table 3 correlations between the variables english reading comprehension english vocabulary english syntax hungarian syntax english reading comprehension 1.000** english vocabulary .543** 1.000** english syntax .475** .552** 1.000 hungarian syntax .292** .143** .225 1.000 *p .05 **p .01 table 3 reveals that all the variables significantly correlated with english reading comprehension. l2 vocabulary correlated most highly with l2 reading comprehension (r = .543). the second most highly correlated variable indicates that l2 syntactic ability has a very powerful weight in reading comprehension (r = .4754), supporting the main hypothesis of this study. looking at other correlations among the independent variables it can be noticed that english vocabulary knowledge correlated most highly with english syntax (r = .552) but did not correlate with hungarian syntactic knowledge. the correlation between english and hungarian syntax (r = .225) did not reach significance. the intercorrelation of variables is usually a problem in research, for it suggests that the variables are not totally independent from each other. the highly complex task of reading comprehension, and the measurement of it, involves skills that overlap: word knowledge, syntactic comprehension, and inferencing. when testing for syntactic comprehension, it was attempted to reduce the level of “contamination” of these skills. for example, words used in the syntactic test were pretaught and the sentences were read aloud by the researcher in addition to the participants reading the sentences to themselves. the following sections discuss the regression analyses and the results with respect to the research questions. the research questions of this study concern the degree of contribution of syntactic skills to reading comprehension in l2. in order to answer them, the two variables of syntax (english and hungarian) that did not correlate with each other were regressed to shed light on their independent effects. the results are shown in table 4. gabriella morvay 430 table 4 the contribution of l1 and l2 syntactic knowledge to l2 reading comprehension english reading comprehension coefficient se t p > | t | english syntax 1.5874 .4154 3.82* 0.000 hungarian syntax 1.5074 .8705 1.73 0.088 n = 64 f(2, 61) = 10.84 r2 = .2623 adjusted r2 = .2381 % of variance = 24% table 4 shows that 24% of variance in the dependent variable (english reading comprehension) is explained by the learners’ knowledge of syntax, and that syntactic ability in english is a statistically significant estimator for english reading comprehension (t = 3.82). hungarian syntax, on the other hand, has a much weaker effect (t = 1.73).6 if we take out hungarian syntax from the regression, the results indicate that english syntax explains most of the variance (21.36%), showing its strong contribution to l2 reading comprehension. this is displayed in table 5. we can state that while l1 syntactic abilities have some effect, syntactic abilities in l2 have a much stronger effect on l2 reading comprehension. table 5 contribution of l2 syntactic knowledge to l2 reading comprehension english reading comprehension coefficient se t p > | t | english syntax 1.7498 .4111 4.26* 0.000 n = 64 f(1, 62) = 18.11 r2 = .2260 adjusted r2 = .2136 % of variance = 21.36% discussion let us begin with reiterating some of the characteristics of our participants and their results on the various tests. given the participants’ mean age (18.3) and the fact that at the time of testing they had been studying efl for 7 6 due to the fact that l1 syntactic processing was so highly skewed by its ceiling effect, farreaching conclusions concerning its contribution (which was 7%) cannot be reached. the relationship between syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension in efl learners 431 8 years on average, the findings indicate that the study involved a relatively highly-skilled cohort that possessed relatively high l2 proficiency. participants performed above 90% on the syntactic test in both languages, although there was a range of significant differences among the structures tested. l2 reading comprehension and l2 vocabulary performance, however, were in the lower range of 44 and 52% respectively. to start the discussion, one might want to rephrase the major research question that was the focus of this study: what is the role of the ability to process complex syntactic structures in efficient l2 reading? by looking at the data, it can be noted that all the independent measures correlated with l2 reading comprehension either at the .05 or at the .01 probability level. in other words, the following ranking of correlations emerged: the measure most highly correlated with l2 reading comprehension was l2 vocabulary, followed by l2 syntactic ability. these measures correlated at the .01 level, while l1 syntax correlated at the .05 level. the fact that l2 vocabulary knowledge had the strongest correlation of all the measurements had been expected, for one must know the words of the language one wants to read and understand. both l1 and l2 studies indicate the crucial nature of this skill (e.g., daneman, 1988). some research studies have even shown a causal relationship between lexical knowledge and reading comprehension (e.g., mckeown, beck, omanson, & perfetti, 1983), and in l2 this strong relationship has also been demonstrated (e.g., koda, 1993). however, vocabulary knowledge alone is not enough, and while there is no research that would dismiss the importance of lexical knowledge, there are very few studies that strongly acknowledge the importance of syntax (e.g., barnett, 1986; shiotsu & weir, 2007). since the goal was to investigate the extent to which the ability to process complex syntax would contribute to l2 reading comprehension, it is appropriate to point out that the study is based on correlational analysis and therefore gives no evidence of causality. in the present study l2 syntax had the second highest correlation (right after l2 vocabulary) with l2 reading comprehension (r = .475). this demonstrates the highly significant role l2 syntax plays in l2 reading comprehension, contributing overall 21.3% to it. our hypothesis predicted that l2 syntax would play a larger role in l2 reading than l1 syntax. this was an accurate prediction given that the contribution of l1 syntax to l2 reading comprehension was only 7%. martohardjono et al.’s (2005) study with bilingual spanish-english children found a stronger relationship between the children’s l1 (spanish) syntax and l2 prereading skills than between their l2 syntax measure and l2 prereading skills. the researchers mostly emphasized the subskill of listening as the most significant predictor of l2 reading comprehension. nevertheless, significant correlations were determined also between other prereading skills (i.e., literagabriella morvay 432 cy concepts, oral language concepts, and letter-sound correspondences) and the syntax measures. while both l1 and l2 syntactic skills correlated with these measures, l1 syntax indicated a more significant relationship than that of l2. this study differed from martohardjono et al.’s (2005) in that the goal was to link the syntactic abilities of highly literate young adults to their l2 reading comprehension. the relationship between syntactic skills and reading comprehension in older l2 learners is still a controversial one. this study contributes to the ever growing field of l2 reading research in that (a) it examines a typologically different language (hungarian), (b) it uses a syntax measure that more accurately taps into participants’ syntactic processing and comprehension skills (as opposed to cloze tasks, enactment or grammaticality judgment tasks, and (c) it includes participants who have learned their english skills in a foreign language classroom setting. it can thus be claimed that the findings confirm that strong syntactic abilities are necessary for efficient l2 reading comprehension among highly skilled older l2 learners. conclusions and suggestions for future research this study supports some not-so-well established previous claims regarding the contribution of syntactic abilities to reading comprehension. it takes a step further the findings of martohardjono et al.’s (2005) study with children, and makes further contributions in that it sheds light on reading comprehension of adult learners whose l1 reading level is high. furthermore, this study also illuminates some differences in difficulty of the various structures in a typologically contrasting language and points out the possible reasons for such difficulty. it also uses stimuli in a listening comprehension/syntax task that taps learners’ syntactic knowledge as closely as possible (klein & martohardjono, 1999), as opposed to other studies that used mostly production tasks. moreover, it points out the shortcomings of the current readability formulas that leave out syntactic factors from their calculations of text difficulty. the implications of the study for classroom reading/foreign language instruction in slovakia are manifold. first and most importantly, the study suggests that grammar instruction, within which complex structures are addressed, might be beneficial for hungarian students in slovakia. whether it is useful or not to point out the similarities/differences between hungarian and english structures is not for this paper to determine, but incorporating them into various skills of efl, such as listening and, predominantly, reading, is a necessary element of instruction and practice at every level of efl. the more highly skilled in english syntax these learners become, the greater their chances to become skilled english readers as well. the relationship between syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension in efl learners 433 some of the limitations of this study are that as a cross-sectional, correlational study it can only suggest relationships, while its predictive power is limited. furthermore, the fact that our independent variables intercorrelate makes it very difficult to determine the exact amount of each measurement’s contribution. since all the participants were also l2 speakers of slovak (the official language of slovakia), in the future it will be useful to look at the same structures in slovak (an indo-european language that is syntactically closer to english than hungarian), and determine its effects on english reading comprehension of hungarian speakers in slovakia. as a follow-up study one could also compare the results with those of monolingual participants from hungary in order to measure the impact of another language when there is no intervening nonnative language. gabriella morvay 434 references baddeley, a., logie, r., & nimmo-smith, i. 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(1986). the development of grammatical sensitivity and its relationship to early reading achievement. reading research quarterly, 21(3), 253-66. the relationship between syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension in efl learners 437 appendix a list of sentences in the test of syntactic knowledge (english version) practice sentences p1. the tall man drank a cup of coffee. p2. the teacher went to the restaurant. p3. the woman bought a pair of shoes. p4. the boy is swimming outside. p5. the girl put the book on the table. 1. the thief that caught the man was dirty. ss relative 2. the grandmother hurt the doctor in the hospital. active 3. the girl went to the museum before she fed the dog. temporal adverbial (easy) 4. the tiger ate the lion in the jungle. active 5. the dog that the child found was fat. so relative 6. after the girl read the newspaper, she cleaned her room. temporal adverbial (easy) 7. the girl was hit by the boy in the playground. passive 8. before the man played football, he called his wife. temporal adverbial (difficult) 9. the cat that the dog killed was black. so relative 10. after the boy visited his mother, he had lunch. temporal adverbial (easy) 11. the woman that the man pushed was blond. so relative 12. the girl hit the boy in the playground. active 13. before the boy finished his homework, he had dinner. temporal adverbial (difficult) 14. the mother fed the child in the hospital. active 15. the doctor that saw the nurse was tall. ss relative 16. after the girl talked to her brother, she bought ice cream. temporal adverbial (difficult) 17. the bear killed the crocodile in the river. active 18. the man played football before he called his wife. temporal adverbial (easy) 19. the grandmother was hurt by the doctor in the hospital. passive 20. the thief that the man caught was dirty. so relative 21. the girl read the newspaper after she cleaned her room. temporal adverbial (difficult) 22. the cat that killed the dog was black. ss relative 23. the mother kissed the father in the theatre. active 24. the dog that found the child was fat. ss relative 25. the boy that the girl kicked was short. so relative 26. before the girl went to the museum, she fed the dog. temporal adverbial (difficult) 27. the woman that pushed the man was blond. ss relative 28. the bear was killed by the crocodile in the river. passive 29. the boy visited his mother after he had lunch. temporal adverbial (difficult) 30. the mother was kissed by the father in the theatre. passive 31. the doctor that the nurse saw was tall. so relative 32. the boy finished his homework before he had dinner. temporal adverbial (easy) 33. the tiger was eaten by the lion in the jungle. passive 34. the boy that kicked the girl was short. ss relative 35. the mother was fed by the child in the hospital. passive 36. the girl talked to her brother after she had ice cream. temporal adverbial (difficult) gabriella morvay 438 appendix b list of sentences in the test of syntactic knowledge (hungarian version) practice sentences p1. a magas férfi egy csésze kávét ivott. p2. a tanér az étterembe ment. p3. a hölgy egy pár cip t vett. p4. a lány az asztalra tette a könyvet. 1. a tolvaj, aki megfogta a férfit, piszkos volt. ss relative 2. a nagymamam bántotta az orvost a kórházban. active 3. a lány elment a múzeumba miel tt megetette a kutyát. temporal adverbial (easy) 4. a tigris széttépte az oroszlánt a dzsungelben. active 5. a kutya, amelyet talált a gyerek, kövér volt. so relative 6. miután a lány elolvasta az újságot, kitakaritotta a szobáját. temporal adverbial (easy) 7. miel tt a férfi focizott, fölhivta a feleségét. temporal adverbial (difficult) 8. a macska, amelyet elkapott a kutya, fekete volt. so relative 9. miután a fiú meglátogatta az anyját, megebédelt. temporal adverbial (easy) 10. a n , akit meglökött a férfi, sz ke volt. so relative 11. a lány megütötte a fiút a játszótéren. active 12. miel tt a fiú elkészitette a házi feladatát, megvacsorázott. temporal adverbial (difficult) 13. az anya megetette a gyereket a kórházban. active 14. az orvos, aki látta a n vért, magas volt. ss relative 15. miután a lány beszélt az öccsével, fagylaltot vett. temporal adverbial (easy) 16. a medve megölte a krokodilt a folyóban. active 17. a férfi focizott miel tt fölhivta a feleségét. temporal adverbial (easy) 18. a tolvaj, akit megfogott a férfi, piszkos volt. so relative 19. a lány elolvasta az újségot miután kitakaritotta a szobáját. temporal adverbial (difficult) 20. a macska, amely elkapta a kutyát, fekete volt. ss relative 21. az anya megcsókolta az apát a szinházban. active 22. a kutya amely megtalálta a gyereket, kövér volt. ss relative 23. a fiú, akit megrúgott a lány, alacsony volt. so relative 24. miel tt a lány elment a múzeumba, megetette a kutyát. temporal adverbial (difficult) 25. a n , aki meglökte a férfit, sz ke volt. ss relative 26. a fiú meglátogatta az anyját miután megebédelt. temporal adverbial (difficult) 27. az orvos, akit látott a n vér, magas volt. so relative 28. a fiú befejezte a házi feladatát miel tt megvacsorázott. temporal adverbial (easy) 29. a fiú, aki megrúgta a lányt, alacsony volt. ss relative 30. a lány beszélt az öccsével miután fagylaltot vett. temporal adverbial (difficult) 295 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (3). 295-296 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial the current issue of studies in second language learning and teaching brings together seven thought-provoking papers that offer fresh theoretical insights or report research findings, with contributions in both of these groups putting forward valuable pedagogical recommendations. first, diane larsenfreeman touches on the issue of the emancipation of the language learner, taking the stance that although such empowerment has indeed been the case over the last few decades, the process continues to be constrained by the view of language as a closed system and a fixed target. she argues that a solution to this problem lies in embracing a complexity theory perspective, according to which language is an open and dynamic system, always in a state of flux, with the effect that nontarget like forms produced by learners should not always be viewed as errors, since, on many occasions, they testify to their creativity and innovation, thereby being signs of learners’ efforts to exercise their agency. subsequently, larissa aronin and david singleton demonstrate how the concept of affordances can be applied to the study of multilingualism, pointing to its compatibility with fundamental theories in this domain and highlighting the benefits that its adoption in empirical investigations can produce for language instruction. the next two contributions examine the transformations that have taken place in language education as well as research focusing upon specific aspects of the learning process, with leven uzun arguing that the effectiveness of instruction could be considerably enhanced if teachers became cognizant of their educational philosophy and julian pigott making the point that only by combining a variety of perspectives will we be able to fully comprehend the complexity of language learning motivation. the last three papers are empirical in nature and present the results of studies touching upon various aspects of foreign language teaching and learning. accordingly, aleksandra wach provides evidence for the considerable potential of information and computer technology, and in particular computer-mediated communication, for 296 the development of learner autonomy in the case of english majors enrolled in a ba program, but also emphasizes the significance of teachers’ guidance for effective use of such resources. next, katarzyna rokoszewska examines the use of pronunciation learning strategies, an area that has thus far been neglected by researches, and demonstrates that frequent reliance on such strategies is positively correlated with the production, but not perception of english by first year english department students, which indicates that other factors, including those tied to research methodology, may affect the nature of this relationship. finally, gabriella morvay shows that the knowledge of complex syntactic structures in a foreign language constitutes an important predictor of the reading comprehension abilities of hungarian learners of english. miros aw pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl 751 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 10 (4). 2020. 751-777 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.4.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the use of refusal strategies in interlanguage speech act performance of korean and norwegian users of english anna krulatz norwegian university of science and technology, trondheim, norway https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8588-273x anna.m.krulatz@ntnu.no tülay dixon northern arizona university, flagstaff, usa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4502-2874 to283@nau.edu abstract the present paper describes a contrastive study of interlanguage refusal strategies employed by korean and norwegian learners of english as an additional language. the data were collected from multilingual first-year students at an american university in south korea and in an english-medium program at a norwegian university by means of an online open discourse completion task and analyzed using the coding categories based on beebe, takahashi, and uliss-welts (1990), and salazar campillo, safont-jordà, and codina espurz (2009). the data were analyzed to compare the average frequencies of refusal strategies used by the two groups, and the types of direct, indirect, and adjunct strategies that they employed. independent samples t-tests revealed significant differences in the use of direct and indirect strategies with small effect sizes. the differences in the use of adjunct strategies were not statistically significant, and the effect sizes were negligible. descriptive statistics of the differences in the types of direct, indirect, and adjunct strategies also revealed interesting patterns. the findings suggest that multilinguals’ pragmatic anna krulatz, tülay dixon 752 performance is a complex phenomenon that cannot be explained by the differences in cultural and pragmatic norms of their first language alone. keywords: interlanguage pragmatics; refusals; english; korean; norwegian; multilinguals 1. introduction the ability to produce speech acts is a subcomponent of sociolinguistic competence, which accounts for the knowledge of the sociocultural rules that govern language use (canale & swain, 1980). previous research suggests that due to varying social norms among speech communities, performance of speech acts is not uniform across different cultures (e.g., house & kasper, 1981; wolfson, 1989) and that increased proficiency in the target language (tl) is not a reliable predictor of native-like performance (xiao, 2015). refusals are typically formulated in response to a range of other speech acts, including invitations, requests, and suggestions, and entail a possibility to offend or upset the interlocutor. in fact, it has been suggested that refusals pose a face-threat to both parties involved in the interactional exchange (cf. johnson, roloff, & riffee, 2009). the person making a refusal violates relational expectations of the requester, especially if this person has a high ability to comply, while the person receiving a refusal risks coming across as incompetent to select a person with a high ability to comply. to mitigate the offence – and to save face – refusals often consist of a long and complex sequence of semantic formulas. the choice of strategies used to perform a refusal is dictated by the contextual variables, such as the status of the interlocutor and the level of imposition. consequently, performance of refusals requires selection of appropriate linguistic means and access to extensive cultural knowledge and can thus pose a challenge to adult language learners (nelson, carson, al batal, & el bakary, 2002; salazar campillo, safont-jordà, & codina espurz, 2009). to date, research on interlanguage refusals has examined performance by english learners of various first language backgrounds. however, to our knowledge, while some studies have compared english refusals produced by korean learners of english with those produced by native speakers (e.g., jung & kim, 2008; kwon, 2004; lee, 2013; lyuh, 1994), no previous research has investigated refusals by norwegian learners of english, and only one previous study has presented a limited qualitative analysis of interlanguage refusals by korean and norwegian speakers of english (krulatz & dixon, 2016). the reason these two groups are of particular interest is because the korean and norwegian cultures the use of refusal strategies in interlanguage speech act performance of korean and norwegian. . . 753 differ substantially on cultural dimensions of power distance and individualism (hofstede, 2001), which may have an impact on how their members produce face-threatening acts such as refusals. the korean culture is believed to be somewhat hierarchical and highly collectivist, while the norwegian culture is highly egalitarian and individualist, implying the possibility of refusal strategy difference related to directness and status of the interlocutor. although hofstede’s framework has been criticized on several grounds (jones, 2007; mcsweeney, 2002; signorini, wiesemes, & murphy, 2009), his approach remains to be commonly employed in the research on cultural differences (gong, lee, & stump, 2007; holden, 2004). we want to remain cautious, however, about the possibility of making inaccurate cultural generalizations and acknowledge that it is important to recognize intra-language variation present in any cultural group. research suggests that while pragmatic norms vary across languages and cultures, multilinguals have enhanced pragmatics awareness and increased flexibility in the selection of appropriate linguistic choices in comparison with monolinguals (cenoz & hoffman, 2003; kecskés, 2015; safont-jordà, 2005). however, most research on interlanguage to date has adopted the construct of a native speaker as a point of departure and compared non-native performance to an estimated monolingual native-speaker norm (cenoz & gorter, 2014). this is problematic not only because pragmatic norms are arguably impossible to establish but also because the monolingual native speakers of english are a minority group among the users of english worldwide, with multilingual speakers being the norm rather than exception (cenoz & hoffman, 2003; cook, 2009; grosjean, 2010). for these reasons, the present study focuses on multilingual speakers of english. we take the position that non-native use of english by multilinguals of different linguistic backgrounds is an important area for pragmatics research. following current dominant perspectives on bilingualism and multilingualism, we adopt a broad definition of multilingualism that does not require balanced proficiency in all languages (aronin & singleton, 2012). thus, for the purpose of this article, multilingualism is defined as “the ability to use languages for the purposes of communication and to take part in intercultural interaction, where a person . . . has proficiency of varying degrees, in several languages, and experience of several cultures” (council of europe, 2001, p. 168).1 1 the council of europe distinguishes between the notions of plurilingualism and multilingualism, with the first term referring to individuals and the second one to social contexts. we do not make such a distinction in this article. anna krulatz, tülay dixon 754 2. review of literature 2.1. korea and norway: cultural dimensions hofstede’s (2001) dimensions that label national cultural differences (i.e., power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term vs. short-term orientation) can be helpful in explaining the reasons why different cultures realize certain speech acts differently. for refusals, it is important to consider the power distance dimension, which refers to the inequalities among members of a society (hofstede, 2001), as the inequality – or equality – among its members can impact to what extent and using what means a refusal is mitigated. according to hofstede (2001), south korea and norway are substantially different in terms of power distance, with south korea scoring 60 and norway 31 out of 100. this means that south korean society is somewhat hierarchical while norwegian society is egalitarian. consequently, unlike in korea, markers of social distance in norway tend to be eliminated from discourse to underscore equality between interlocutors and to minimize the level of imposition (awedyk, 2003; dittrich, johansen, & kulinskaya, 2011; fairclough, 1992; rygg, 2012). given that koreans are more status-conscious than norwegians, and that the differences in social status influence the selection of linguistic means in performance of refusals, it can be anticipated that koreans are likely to use more extensive mitigation strategies to minimize threats to the interlocutor’s face, in particular when communicating with an interlocutor of higher social status, both in their first language and additional languages (e.g., english). on the other hand, norwegians are expected to employ fewer strategies to soften their refusals. another cultural dimension relevant for the study of speech acts is individualism, which explains the degree of interdependence among the members of a society (hofstede, 2001). south korea scores fairly low on this dimension (18), with norway’s score being relatively high (69). thus, south korea is considered a highly collectivistic society in which members have a strong group commitment and assume responsibility for fellow group members. loyalty is an important value, and an offence leads to shame and loss of face. norway, on the contrary, is a highly individualist society, in which personal opinions are respected and freely expressed, and the right to privacy is highly valued. it can therefore be expected that there are differences in the length and the content of refusal strategies employed by korean and norwegian speakers of english, namely, that the korean participants employ longer strings of strategies and more indirect strategies than the norwegian participants to minimize the imposition on the interlocutor. we fully acknowledge that hofstede’s (2001) framework has been criticized on several grounds, including his methodology (jones, 2007; mcsweeney, the use of refusal strategies in interlanguage speech act performance of korean and norwegian. . . 755 2002), the use of nations as a basis for measuring cultural aspects (mcsweeney, 2002), the oversimplification of cultural differences, the assumption that cultural values are stable, and some inconsistencies between the categories in the framework (cf. signorini et al., 2009). nevertheless, hofstede’s conclusions have not been successfully discredited, and his approach remains to be the most commonly recognized, robust and, comprehensive framework employed in research on cultural differences (gong et al., 2007; holden, 2004). 2.3. refusals in korean and norwegian refusals in korean have been studied by lyuh (1994) and kwon (2004), both of whom compared the refusal strategies employed by korean speakers and american english speakers. the results of these studies indicate that koreans employ more complex semantic formulas and less direct strategies in their first language (l1) than americans. when refusing someone of a higher status, korean speakers, but not english speakers, use extensive mitigation. direct refusals are used less frequently by korean speakers in comparison with english speakers, and reasons (an indirect strategy) are often employed by the koreans as excuses for refusals, which could be attributed to the fact that direct disagreement is often considered hostile in korea’s collectivist society (jung & kim, 2008). in addition, korean speakers typically apologize before refusing, while english speakers show gratitude or express positive opinions. in all, korean refusals tend to come across as less direct and transparent and more tentative than english refusals. no study to date has investigated the speech act of refusal in norwegian. a general, baseline study of stereotyped politeness phrases in norwegian was undertaken by white (1979), who described basic greetings, responses to greetings, farewells, requests, apologies, expressions of gratitude, and responses to expressions of gratitude. white’s (1979) paper, however, contains a mere list of politeness expressions collected via “eavesdropping” (p. 3), accompanied by explanations of when these expressions should be used. regarding apologies, which are similar to refusals as they entail complex semantic formulas and can be used as adjuncts to refusals, white (1979) lists expressions such as unnskyld ‘sorry,’ unnskyld meg ‘excuse me,’ beklager ‘sorry,’ desverre ‘unfortunately,’ and jeg er lei meg ‘i am sorry,’ and provides examples of contexts when these could be used. she also elaborates that in situations when norwegians want to offer a sincere apology, they “often find some more original way of expressing their sympathy or pleasure . . . in order to indicate real sincerity rather than merely dutiful politeness” (white, 1979, p. 40). these claims, however, are not based on any empirical evidence and can therefore only be taken as hearsay. other relevant research on politeness and other speech acts such as requests suggests that norwegians use conversational strategies that stress equality anna krulatz, tülay dixon 756 between interlocutors. awedyk (2003) found a large degree of similarity between the requestive strategies used by his english-speaking and norwegian-speaking subjects. a study by dittrich et al. (2011) compared how politeness is performed in norway and great britain by examining the forms of address employed in equal and unequal relations with others, and found a higher prevalence of title use among the british subjects, while the norwegian participants opted for more personal and informal usage in all situations. we now move on to what previous research has found regarding refusals by korean and norwegian speakers of english. 2.4. refusals by korean and norwegian learners of english the existing research on refusals of korean learners of english suggests that although korean english speakers and native english speakers employ some of the same refusal strategies, the frequency and content of these strategies are different. in comparison with native speakers, korean speakers of english tend to use fewer direct refusals (jung & kim 2008; lyuh, 1994), which could be attributed to transfer from korean, as the same pattern observed in native korean performance (kwon, 2004). in terms of the content of the reasons that are given as part of the refusal, lyuh (1994) noted that korean speakers in his study referred to existential circumstances that prevented them from accepting a request, whereas english speakers’ reasons were more personal. jung and kim (2008) and krulatz and dixon (2016) also noted that korean speakers’ reasons were more elaborate than reasons provided by native english speakers. another difference between the two groups relates to the strategies used before the head act of refusal itself. korean english speakers often apologize or show regret before refusing (jung & kim, 2008), which has been observed in the refusals of native speakers of korean as well (kwon, 2004). in lee’s (2013) study, the status difference was also observed found to affect the fluency level of korean english speakers. the participants took more production time when refusing someone of a lower status. the results are unanticipated as it is usually expected that refusing someone of a higher status would be more difficult and, thus, take more production time. according to lee (2013), korea is going through cultural changes which involve moving from a collectivist society to an individualistic one. thus, maintaining self-image is becoming more important than saving other people’s face. lee (2013) suggests that as refusing someone of a lower status might reflect negatively on a person’s public image, korean english speakers take more time to do so. familiarity with interlocutors is yet another variable that affects how the speech act of refusal is realized. jung and kim (2008) accounted for this variable when they compared the refusal strategies employed by korean and native the use of refusal strategies in interlanguage speech act performance of korean and norwegian. . . 757 speakers of english. their results showed that the use of direct strategies increased for both groups when they were refusing familiar people in comparison to refusing unfamiliar people. as for indirect strategies, korean english speakers used more indirect strategies with unfamiliar interlocutors while native speakers did so with familiar interlocutors. with familiar interlocutors, korean speakers also resorted to more adjunct strategies (i.e., positive feeling, empathy, pause fillers, and gratitude) compared to native english speakers. besides the baseline report by krulatz and dixon (2016), to our best knowledge, no other study has examined refusals by norwegian users of english. krulatz and dixon (2016), who used some of the same data analyzed in the current study, examined refusals by korean and norwegian speakers of english and found that both groups have difficulties pertaining to the use of main refusal strategies (i.e., direct vs. indirect), and overuse, underuse, or misuse of indirect and adjunct strategies (e.g., advice, criticism, gratitude, and reason). however, this study only used a limited data sample and did not include an in-depth analysis of refusal strategies. a few other studies have explored performance of other speech acts by norwegian speakers of english, including requests (brubæk, 2012; krulatz, 2016; savić, 2015) and expressions of gratitude (johansen, 2008). brubæk (2012) investigated english requests by norwegian high school students focusing on their ability to adapt choice of strategy and the level of formality to contextual demands. she concluded that the participants transferred request strategies from their first language and overused familiar and informal expressions. krulatz (2016) analyzed request strategies employed by norwegian teachers of english in scenarios with varying social distance. she found that these advanced users of english employed a range of requestive strategies and varied their requestive behavior depending on the social distance between the interlocutors. in her cross-sectional study, savić (2015) examined the development of requests in young norwegian learners and reported clear patterns of pragmalinguistic development, in particular the complexity of head acts and the use of alerters, supportive moves, and downgraders. finally, johansen (2008), who compared expressions of gratitude by native speakers of english and norwegian learners of english, reported differences between how these two groups interpreted the social distance and the size of the imposition in their choices of negative and positive politeness strategies. 2.5. the multilingual orientation in the study of pragmatics with the increased globalization and mobility, multilingualism is becoming more ubiquitous, and it has been recognized as the new linguistic dispensation that has replaced the monolingual norm (cf. aronin & singleton, 2012; stavans & anna krulatz, tülay dixon 758 hoffman, 2015). however, with some exceptions (e.g., safont-jordà, 2013; stavans & webman shafran, 2018), the majority of studies on pragmatics in additional languages continue to focus on learners’ deficiency in pragmatic competence, as measured by the monolingual yardstick, and ignore their multilingual backgrounds. as with other components of communicative competence, negative transfer from the first language has traditionally been identified as a source of pragmatic failure (thomas, 1983), and the challenge of attaining native-like pragmatic competence has been attributed to cross-cultural and cross-linguistic variation in pragmatic norms (rose & kasper, 2001). by contrast, research on pragmatic performance through the multilingual lens suggests that, compared with monolinguals, multilinguals display enhanced pragmalinguistic awareness and increased flexibility in the selection of appropriate linguistic choices (cenoz & hoffman, 2003; kecskés, 2015; safont-jordà, 2005). in the present study, we move away from the deficiency view of pragmatic competence in learners of english as an additional language and, rather than comparing native and nonnative performance, we examine two groups of multilingual learners of english. recognizing that balanced pragmatic competence in several languages is an unrealistic goal (cenoz, 2007), we consider these language users in their own right. 3. the study 3.1. research questions to date, research on interlanguage refusals by multilingual learners of english has been limited. at the same time, korean and norwegian learners of english constitute interesting comparison groups considering the large discrepancies in the scores on hofstede’s (2001) dimensions of individualism and power distance. the present study aims to contribute to this relatively neglected area of interlanguage pragmatics research by exploring the following research questions: 1. to what extent does the frequency of strategies (i.e., direct, indirect, and adjunct) in the elicited responses differ between korean and norwegian users of english? 2. to what extent do korean and norwegian users of english employ different strategies in an equal and unequal social status situation? 3. to what extent do korean and norwegian users of english employ different types of direct, indirect, and adjunct strategies? the use of refusal strategies in interlanguage speech act performance of korean and norwegian. . . 759 3.2. participants participants in this study consisted of two groups: 81 korean college students, native speakers of korean (age: 18-35, males: 31, females: 50), and 62 norwegian college students, native speakers of norwegian (age: 18-35, males: 13, females: 49). all participants were enrolled in english-medium courses at an institution of higher education in their country of origin. the majority of the participants (91% of the korean informants, and 76% of the norwegian informants) reported that they had resided in an english-speaking country prior to participation in the study. the length of residence is summarized in table 1. table 1 length of residence in an english-speaking country length of residence % korean participants % norwegian participants none 9 24 0-12 months 15 65 1-2 years 20 5 3-5 years 36 3 6-10 years 13 3 more than 10 years 7 0 the participants were asked to report their proficiency (basic, intermediate, or advanced) in other languages besides their first language and english. all of them admitted some level of proficiency in at least one additional language: 54% in one additional language, 33% in two additional languages, and 13% in three or more additional languages. thus, as per the definition of multilingualism adopted in this study, all participants can be considered multilinguals. the participants were also asked to self-report how comfortable they felt regarding their ability to communicate with native speakers of english. most korean respondents (85%) and norwegian respondents (92%) answered that they felt comfortable in all or most situations or environments. these data are summarized in table 2. table 2 self-reported ability to communicate with native speakers of english ability level % korean participants % norwegian participants i feel comfortable in all environments/situations 23 39 i feel comfortable in most environments/situations 62 53 i am often uncomfortable 7.5 2 i never really feel very comfortable 7.5 6 3.3. data collection procedures data were collected through an online discourse completion task (dct) consisting of two refusal scenarios, which required participants to write email refusals. a link anna krulatz, tülay dixon 760 to an online survey containing a background questionnaire and a discourse completion test consisting of two refusal scenarios was sent to the participants via email (see appendix). the survey was administered in english, and the participants had unlimited time to respond. the responses were fully anonymous, and no ip addresses were stored. only two dcts were used in the survey to reduce the serial task effect. although an important limitation of dcts is that responses may not correspond to how participants would react in natural settings, this elicitation method is commonly used in interlanguage pragmatics research as it allows collection of large samples of learner data containing the speech act in focus as well as control over different variables such as social distance and power dominance (chaudron, 2003; jucker, 2009). additionally, requiring participants to write emails enhanced the authenticity of the task. the first scenario elicited a refusal in response to a peer’s invitation to his birthday party (an equal status refusal), and the second one targeted a student’s refusal to a professor’s request to give a short talk (a different status refusal). consequently, the two scenarios differed with regard to the parameters of distance and power (cf. blum-kulka, house, & casper, 1989), as summarized in table 3. these parameters were varied to ensure elicitation of varied request strategies while at the same time limiting the number of scenarios to two helped avoid participant fatigue. table 3 the characteristics of the relationship between the requester (s, speaker) and the requestee (h, hearer) refusal situation social distance power dominance refusal 1 (peer) -sd s = h refusal 2 (professor) +sd s < h 3.4. data analysis salazar campillo et al. (2009) propose a taxonomy for refusal analysis that is based on beebe et al. (1990). both taxonomies divide refusal strategies into three categories: direct strategies, indirect strategies, and adjuncts to refusals; however, the strategies under these categories differ slightly. in the present study, the taxonomy of refusals is based mainly on salazar campillo et al. (2009) but complemented with some of the strategies from beebe et al. (1990). table 4 provides an overview of the different types of refusal strategies analyzed in this investigation together with examples from the data. below, we discuss the changes made to the taxonomy proposed by salazar campillo et al. (2009) as well as the refusal strategies that require additional explanations. the use of refusal strategies in interlanguage speech act performance of korean and norwegian. . . 761 table 4 typology of refusals refusals examples direct strategies performative verbs/bluntness i have to decline. non-performative statements/negation of proposition i can’t make it that day. indirect strategies plain indirect i’m not sure if i’ll be able to talk about my paper in class. wish i wish i could go. reason/explanation i’ve got some assignments to do. i’m quite busy next week. regret/apology i’m sorry but . . . alternative: change option change time you can tell your students to email me if they have any questions. i would love to come at another time if that would help. disagreement/discussion/criticism i’m afraid i don’t consider this suggestion as the best way to help the students. statement of principle/philosophy advice avoidance: hedging change of topic sarcasm i do not feel confident to teach others. i do not fare well under pressure. perhaps you should ask someone else. unfortunately, . . . by the way, what are you doing next week? don’t have too much fun without me! adjuncts to refusals positive opinion this is a great idea, but . . . i’m sure the students would greatly benefit from this, but . . . willingness i’d love to go, but . . . gratitude thanks for inviting me to the party. solidarity/empathy hope you understand. slight changes were made to the taxonomy by salazar campillo et al. (2009) due to the type and nature of the data collected. wish was found in the data but could not be accounted for using the strategies outlined in salazar campillo et al.’s (2009) coding taxonomy, and thus was added from beebe et al.’s (1990) taxonomy. in addition, as the data in this study were comprised of written e-mails, the non-verbal strategies under the avoidance category were removed. the distinction between a reason and statement of principle was unclear in sentences such as “i am not a person who likes to stand in front of people,” “i don’t feel comfortable standing in front of an audience,” and “i do not feel confident to teach others.” such sentences were marked as statements of principle because they refer to “reasons” that are permanent, which makes them part of the participants’ disposition and, thus, statements of principle. an example of a reason is “i have previous arrangements.” anna krulatz, tülay dixon 762 another challenge was coding refusals preceded by unfortunately, sadly, and regrettably, as in “unfortunately i can’t go to your party.” in this example, the word unfortunately denotes regret; however, coding the whole statement as regret is problematic, as unfortunately is followed by a negation of proposition. in such cases, unfortunately, as well as other similar words that denote regret (e.g., sadly), was marked as a hedge. the difference between the positive opinion and gratitude strategies should also be clarified. gratitude refers to comments of appreciation and thankfulness only for the proposition itself (e.g., thanks for inviting me to the party), whereas positive opinion refers to comments in which the participants find the proposition to be a good idea (e.g., i’m sure the students would greatly benefit from this, but . . .). however, the territory of the positive opinion category was expanded due to the refusal scenarios in this study. one scenario asked the participants to refuse a friend’s birthday party invitation, while the other asked them to decline their professor’s request to do an in-class presentation on a paper that the participants wrote in a previous semester. in order to accommodate these scenarios, the positive opinion category included statements in which the participants congratulated friends on their birthday and appreciated the professor’s compliment on their paper (e.g., “i hope you have a blast at your party and happy early birthday” or “thank you for your praise about my paper”). before coding the data, the researchers went through three cycles of training on sample refusals and jointly discussed any problematic or challenging codes. next, the data were coded independently by the two researchers using the codes agreed upon (beebe et al., 1990; salazar campillo et al., 2009). each refusal was divided into its component strategies, and each strategy was matched with a code. for example, the refusal by a norwegian participant below was divided and coded as follows: (1) (i) i am really sorry to tell you [regret/apology] (ii) that i cannot come to your party [negation of proposition] (iii) even though i want to. [willingness] (iv) i have some other things planned that day. [reason] (v) maybe we can have a beer later? [alternative] the simple percentage agreement was used to calculate interrater reliability because the coding scheme was not dichotomous. interrater reliability was 92%. the researchers then discussed and resolved any discrepancies together with the help of the coding guidelines until they reached a consensus. a total of 286 refusals were produced by the participants in response to the dcts in this study. however, after the removal of infelicitous responses (i.e., acceptance of invitation or request), 157 refusals by korean participants and 122 the use of refusal strategies in interlanguage speech act performance of korean and norwegian. . . 763 refusals by norwegian participants (a total of 279) were included in the analysis. the analysis involved calculating: (a) the frequency of strategy use and (b) the types of direct, indirect, and adjunct strategies used by the two groups. the differences between groups were analyzed using descriptive statistics (means and standard deviations), independent-samples t-tests, and effect sizes. for t-tests, the data were checked for normality using histograms and q-q plots and were deemed to be normally distributed. the alpha level was set to .05 for all statistical analyses. the effect sizes were interpreted using the following benchmarks suggested for l2 research: d values around 0.40 as a small effect size, values around 0.70 as a medium effect size, and values around 1.00 as a large effect size (plonsky & oswald, 2014). 4. results 4.1. frequency of strategies used to answer research question 1, the means of total strategies per item as well as the means of total direct strategies, indirect strategies, and adjunct strategies for each of the two groups were compared (see table 5). on average, the korean participants utilized more refusal strategies (5.17 strategies per item) than the norwegian participants (4.61 strategies per item). however, this difference was found to be statistically non-significant on the basis of an independent samples t-test for mean differences (t(277) = 2.737, p = .07). in addition, the effect size for this analysis was small, d = 0.33. table 5 means and standard deviations of strategy use per response by korean and norwegian users of english responses statistic strategies per item direct strategies indirect strategies adjunct strategies korean (n = 157) m sd 5.17 1.67 0.50 0.51 2.82 1.24 1.85 1.09 norwegian (n = 122) m sd 4.61 1.70 0.69 0.52 2.31 1.24 1.63 1.24 on average, both the korean and the norwegian participants utilized substantially more indirect than direct refusal strategies, as shown in table 5. the norwegian participants were observed to use direct strategies more frequently than the korean participants (0.69 vs. 0.5 direct strategies per item), a difference which was found to be statistically significant with a small effect size (t(277) = -3.084, p = .002, d = 0.37). however, the korean participants employed, on average, more indirect strategies than the norwegian participants (2.82 vs. 2.31 strategies per item). this difference was also found to be statistically significant with a small effect anna krulatz, tülay dixon 764 size (t(277) = 3.405, p = .001, d = 0.41). however, no significant difference or large effect were found in the average number of adjunct strategies per item (t(277) = 1.607, p > .05, d = 0.19). a typical example of a korean refusal consisting of direct, indirect, and adjunct strategies is illustrated in (2), where the participant refused a request by a professor to give a short presentation in class:2 (2) thank you for giving me such a wonderful opportunity [gratitude] unfortunately [hedge], i won’t be able to do this. [negation of proposition] first of all, i am not really ready for it [reason] and i think i need to focus on my studying first. [reason] i really appreciate on seeing me as outstanding student. [gratitude] i’m sorry to reject this kind of opportunity. [regret/apology] (kp67) a typical example of a norwegian refusal consisting of direct, indirect, and adjunct strategies is illustrated in (3): (3) it was nice of you to consider me for this. [gratitude] however, i will not be able to come to your class to talk about my paper [negation of proposition] as i have a big assignment due on friday. [reason] i am sure your students will do fine. [positive opinion] (np24) table 6 means and standard deviations for higher and equal status situations responses statistic strategies per item adjunct strategies direct strategies indirect strategies korean, higher status (n = 77) m sd 5.42 1.89 2.11 1.30 0.30 0.46 3.01 1.26 korean, equal status (n = 80) m sd 4.96 1.57 1.69 1.04 0.69 0.49 2.64 0.49 norwegian, higher status (n = 60) m sd 4.76 1.90 1.73 1.25 0.52 0.50 2.52 1.30 norwegian, equal status (n = 62) m sd 4.47 1.48 1.53 1.00 0.85 0.47 2.11 1.16 as can be seen in table 6, the same patterns in the differences between the two groups were observed in the responses to the two refusal situations: higher status (professor) and equal status (peer; research question 2). the korean participants used on average more strategies per item both in the higher and equal status scenario. the differences between the groups were statistically 2 the letter code and number below each example indicate the participant and the group (e.g., kp8 = korean participant #8). the use of refusal strategies in interlanguage speech act performance of korean and norwegian. . . 765 significant, but the effect sizes were small (higher status: t(135) = 2.026, p = .045, d = 0.35; equal status: t(140) = 1.975, p = .05, d = 0.32). however, although the korean participants employed on average more adjunct strategies per item than the norwegian participants, these differences failed to reach statistical significance, and the effect sizes were negligible (higher status: t(135) = 1.755, p = .082, d = 0.3; equal status: t(140) = 0.900, p = .37, d = 0.16). statistically significant differences were observed in the use of direct and indirect strategies in the two refusal situations. in response to the higher status scenario, the norwegian participants employed on average more direct strategies (0.52 per item) than the korean participants (0.30 per item), a statistically significant difference with a small effect size (t(135) = -2.607, p = .01, d = 0.46). the korean participants, on the other hand, employed on average more indirect strategies (3.01 per item) than the norwegian participants (2.52 per item) (t(135) = 2.251, p = .03, d = 0.38). likewise, in the equal status scenario, the norwegian participants showed a slight preference for direct strategies (0.85 per item) as compared with the korean participants (0.69 per item), t(140) = -2.051, p = .04, d = 0.33. by contrast, the korean participants used on average more indirect strategies (2.64 per item) than the norwegian participants (2.11 per item), t(140) = 2.628, p = .01. this difference had a small to medium effect size (d = 0.62). 4.2. types of direct, indirect, and adjunct strategies the use of direct, indirect and adjunct strategies was examined to answer research question 3 (“do korean and norwegian learners of english use different direct, indirect, and adjunct strategies?”), as shown in figures 1-3, both groups of participants used primarily one type of direct strategies (negation of proposition), five types of indirect strategies (reason, regret/apology, alternative, hedging, and plain indirect), and three types of adjuncts (positive opinion, gratitude, and willingness). inferential statistical comparisons were not made due to the large number of variables (nine strategy types, two different scenarios, and two groups). however, descriptive statistics together with qualitative analyses reveal some interesting patterns of strategy use by the two groups, and these are illustrated in the sections that follow with examples from the data. 4.2.1. direct strategies direct strategies accounted for 14.9% of all strategies used by norwegians and 9.4% of all strategies used by koreans. both types of direct strategies from the coding taxonomy, that is, negation of proposition and bluntness, were present in the data. as figure 1 illustrates, negation of proposition was utilized somewhat anna krulatz, tülay dixon 766 more frequently by the norwegian participants (11.9% of all strategies) than by the korean participants (9.4%), whereas bluntness was only employed by the norwegian participants (3.0%). figure 1 frequency of direct refusal strategies both groups tended to provide a reason for refusal immediately after negating a proposition, as illustrated in (4): (4) i would love to do it [willingness] but i can’t make it. [negation of proposition] i’m on vacation with my family [reason] and we are going to stay here in thailand for three weeks. [reason] (np47) when employed, bluntness also tended to be accompanied by other mitigating strategies such as reasons, apologies, and hedging. two instances of minimal or no mitigation of bluntness by norwegian participants stand out, as illustrated in (5): (5) i’m sorry [regret/apology] but i have to say no. [bluntness] (np37) 4.2.2. indirect strategies overall, indirect strategies were the most frequently employed strategies in the data, and these strategies were used in a similar fashion in both equal and unequal social status scenarios. they constituted 49.9% of all strategies used by the norwegian participants, and 54.8% of all strategies used by the korean participants. within these, reason and regret/apology were used the most often, followed by alternative, hedging, and plain indirect (figure 2). there was some use the use of refusal strategies in interlanguage speech act performance of korean and norwegian. . . 767 of other indirect strategies, namely, disagreement, statement of principle, advice, avoidance, change of topic, wish, and sarcasm. however, due to the relatively low frequency of these strategies, they are not discussed in depth. figure 2 frequency of indirect refusal strategies the korean participants used the strategies of reason and regret/apology (18.5% and 17.0% of all refusals, respectively) more than the norwegian participants (15.3% and 13.6%, respectively). in fact, korean refusals often consisted of strings of several reasons in addition to other strategies, and reasons and regrets/apologies often co-occurred, as illustrated in (6), where the participant is refusing a friend’s invitation to a birthday party: (6) thank you very much for inviting me to your birthday party. [gratitude] i would love to attend it [willingness] but i am sorry [regret/ apology] that i will not be able to make it. [negation of proposition] i have a part-time job from 6 to 10. [reason] my boss may be angry if i don’t show up. [reason] i already missed two times of work [reason] and i might lose my job if i miss this time again. [reason] thanks for inviting me to the party, though. [gratitude] i hope you have a lot of fun. [positive opinion] (kp66) the norwegian participants used over twice as many hedges (e.g., unfortunately or sadly) as did the korean participants. alternatives, however, were used with a similar frequency and in a similar way by both groups of participants and included suggestions of another option or time. a typical use of an alternative is illustrated in (7): anna krulatz, tülay dixon 768 (7) thanks so much for the invite. [gratitude] unfortunately [hedge], i won’t be able to make it to your party [negation of proposition] but i’ll buy lunch for us next time. [alternative] hope your party’s a blast. [positive opinion] (kp60) plain indirect strategies were used by the korean participants to a greater extent (4.9% of all strategies) than by the norwegian participants (3.2%). nevertheless, when using plain indirect strategies, both groups tended to mitigate them by additionally employing a regret/apology or a reason, as exemplified in (8): (8) thank you for sending this email to me [gratitude] but i think i cannot go to your class to talk about the term paper. [plain indirect] i am so sorry professor johnson. [regret/apology] (kp6) 4.2.3. adjunct strategies adjunct strategies were used extensively by both groups. they comprised 35.2% of all strategies used by the norwegian participants and 35.8% of all strategies used by the korean participants. the most frequently employed adjuncts were positive opinion and gratitude, whereas willingness and other strategies (solidarity/empathy and agreement) were used to a lesser extent. figure 3 summarizes the use of adjunct strategies by the two groups. figure 3 frequency of adjunct refusal strategies norwegians and koreans displayed very similar patterns of use of the positive opinion strategy. in the peer scenario, positive opinion statements were typically related to the birthday party and birthday wishes, as illustrated in (9): the use of refusal strategies in interlanguage speech act performance of korean and norwegian. . . 769 (9) that sounds like a lot of fun [positive opinion] but i can’t come. [negation of proposition] hope you’ll have a great night [positive opinion] and also that your birthday is going to be amazing. [positive opinion] (np25) in the professor scenario, positive opinions were usually focused on some aspect of the student’s own performance or on good experiences associated with the course taken from the requesting professor. an example is provided in (10): (10) i am very happy that you liked my paper. [positive opinion] thank you for the request [gratitude] but i won’t be able to be there next week. [plain indirect] i will be on family vacation so i won’t be in town. [reason] thank you once again for inviting me though. [gratitude] (kp37) example 10 also provides a good illustration of a typical use of the strategy of gratitude, which, in the professor scenario, often served both as an opener and a closure to the refusal. in the peer scenario, however, gratitude was more commonly expressed at the beginning of the response to thank for the invitation to the party, as in (11): (11) thank you for your invitation [gratitude] but i am terribly sorry [regret/apology] that i can’t attend. [negation of proposition] i have an important meeting on that day [reason] but i won’t forget to get you a present for the next time we meet. [alternative] (np8) the last adjunct strategy type to be discussed here, willingness, was used by the korean participants nearly twice as frequently (4.8% of all strategies) as by the norwegian participants (2.5%). typically, this strategy followed the pattern “i would . . ., but . . .” and was accompanied by a specific reason. an example is provided in (12): (12) thank you for inviting me to your party. [gratitude] i would love to go to your party [willingness] but i have a big exam on that day [reason] so i cannot make it. [negation of proposition] (kp58) 5. discussion this study compared how multilingual korean (n = 81) and norwegian (n = 62) learners of english construct refusals. although there were statistically significant differences in the frequency of direct, indirect, and adjunct strategies used by the two groups (research question 1), the effect sizes were small. statistical anna krulatz, tülay dixon 770 differences were also found in the average number of strategies used in an equal and unequal social status situation (research question 2); however, the effect sizes were once again small with the exception of indirect strategy use in equal status scenarios. in such scenarios, koreans used more indirect strategies than the norwegian participants, and the difference had a small to medium effect size (d = 0.62). finally, there were more similarities than differences in the way the direct, indirect, and adjunct strategies were used (research question 3). the consistently small effect sizes indicate that the differences between the two groups were not of great magnitude (despite statistical significance), which gives support to the argument that multilingual speakers’ pragmatic choices are more complex than predictions of refusal strategy choices based on their l1s may suggest. below, we provide a more detailed summary and discussion of the main findings. research question 1 focused on the extent to which the frequency of direct, indirect, and adjunct strategies differs between korean and norwegian users of english. independent samples t-tests indicated significant mean differences in the use of direct and indirect strategies by the two groups. similar to previous research, the korean participants showed preference for indirect strategies (jung & kim 2008; kwon, 2004; lyuh, 1994). the norwegian participants, on the other hand, tended to choose more direct strategies. surprisingly, however, no statistically significant differences were found in the average number of strategies per refusal, nor in the use of adjunct strategies. this finding is at odds with the prediction grounded in hofstede’s (2001) assumption related to status consciousness, namely that koreans can be expected to use more strategies than norwegians to soften their refusals. factors other than cultural differences between the two groups, which we attempt to identify below, may offer a possible explanation with regard to the lack of significant difference in the frequency of the refusal strategy choice. research question 2 set out to examine the extent to which korean and norwegian users of english employ different strategies in an equal and unequal social status situation. in the present study, the korean participants employed significantly more indirect strategies both in the equal and the higher status scenario, suggesting that maintaining face was equally important in both situations. norwegians, on the other hand, tended to use more direct strategies in response to both scenarios, which may be a result of strategy transfer from the first language (brubæk, 2012), and a manifestation of their egalitarian views and an expectation that the person being refused should respect their right to freely express personal opinions (hofstede, 2001). research question 3 asked about the differences in the types of strategies employed by the two groups. overall, the two groups also displayed several similarities in the types of direct and indirect strategies they employed. for instance, the use of refusal strategies in interlanguage speech act performance of korean and norwegian. . . 771 both groups utilized negation of proposition to a similar extent and tended to employ alternatives in a similar way. however, some differences were also found. concerning direct and indirect strategy types, the korean participants used more reasons in comparison with the norwegian participants, which is consistent with the expectations based on previous studies (e.g., kwon, 2004; lyuh, 1994). on the other hand, the norwegian participants were the only ones to use bluntness, a direct strategy which indicates that free expression of opinions is accepted by this group. these findings are consistent with the assumption that, due to the korean culture’s low score on the cultural dimension of individualism and high score on power distance (hofstede, 2001), koreans may work harder to avoid the loss of face in potentially face-threatening situations. there was also a difference in the use of hedging, but, contrary to the expectations, it was the norwegian participants who used hedges more. this contradicts the prediction that the korean participants would employ longer sequences of refusal strategies and more mitigating moves. therefore, it is difficult to determine the extent to which cultural differences affect the observed variation between the groups. it is possible that because all participants were multilinguals with the majority of them having spent some time in the tl culture, their cultural norms of politeness have changed; they have developed multilingual pragmatic competence and thus become more flexible in their choice of pragmatic strategies (cenoz & hoffman, 2003; kecskés, 2015; safont-jordà, 2005). their performance on the study tasks was likely affected by complex factors such as their attitudes to english and exposure to and competence in other languages in addition to their native language cultural norms. it is also impossible to dismiss the impact of fluctuation of cultural values over time and individual differences in pragmatic norms as potential variables that influenced our findings. overall, the findings suggest that while native cultural and linguistic backgrounds may have some impact on the production of face-threatening acts such as refusals, multilinguals’ pragmatic performance may also diverge from that of monolingual speakers. this can be attributed to the influence of other languages in their linguistic repertoires and the socio-cultural requirements and behavior patterns of those languages (kecskés, 2015), as well as other factors such as the order of acquisition, extent and mode of exposure, language learning goals, and attitudes towards the l3 (stavans & webman shafran, 2018). it is important to acknowledge that the present study had several limitations that have to be considered when interpreting the findings. the most important weakness pertains to the use of dcts as the exclusive means of data collection. while dcts allow expedient collection of large samples of speech acts that may be otherwise underrepresented in naturalistic data, the responses may diverge from the refusals the participants would have produced in natural settings. anna krulatz, tülay dixon 772 future research should combine dcts with other measures, such as role-plays, in order to triangulate the data. moreover, we did not undertake a qualitative analysis of the content of the refusals of the two groups in this paper. such an analysis could reveal further similarities and differences in refusal performance, and could, for instance, examine whether reasons given in support of refusals referred to external or personal factors. another limitation is the age group and the social background of the respondents. as they were all college students, their responses are not entirely representative of all norwegian and korean learners of english. additionally, the majority of the norwegian respondents were females, and it is possible that gender plays a complex role in the performance of refusals, in particular when confounded with factors such as social distance. therefore, future studies should include groups of different ages and a better gender balance. finally, the participant sample of this study was diverse in terms of the length of residence in an english-speaking country and self-reported ability to communicate in english, both of which may have caused some amount of variation within the groups. 6. conclusion the aim of the present study was to investigate differences and similarities in pragmatic performance by korean and norwegian multilingual speakers of english with a focus on refusals. as english has more non-native than native speakers, and as we oppose the use of the monolingual norm as a yardstick to measure non-native performance, we purposely selected participants who were multilinguals, that is, those who spoke another language in addition to their native language and english. two major findings were reported. first, the groups differed significantly in the frequency of direct and indirect strategy use, but the differences in the average number of strategies per refusal and the frequency of adjunct strategies were not statistically significant. secondly, the analysis of the different types of direct, indirect, and adjunct strategies revealed both similarities and differences between the two groups. at the outset, it was hypothesized that due to differences on the cultural dimensions of power distance and individualism, the two groups could be expected to produce refusals that differ in the level of directness and the amount of mitigation. this hypothesis was only partly confirmed by the findings, as both similarities and differences in the performance of refusals were identified. taken together, these findings suggest that multilinguals’ pragmatic performance is a complex phenomenon affected by a range of factors, and the first language cultural and pragmatic norms cannot be taken as a single predictor of performance in other languages they know. rather, it is possible that the pragmatic the use of refusal strategies in interlanguage speech act performance of korean and norwegian. . . 773 norms they apply blend into a unique system that also fluctuates depending on the language being used, the context of the interaction, and the intentions of the speaker. to quote kecskés (2006), multilinguals develop “a pragmatic style that does not exactly 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(2015). proficiency effect on l2 pragmatic competence. studies in second language learning and teaching, 5, 557-581. the use of refusal strategies in interlanguage speech act performance of korean and norwegian. . . 777 appendix dct scenarios refusal 1 (peer) subject: birthday party invitation hi, it’s my birthday next week, and i am having a party to celebrate it. it’s going to be next friday at 7 pm at my house. rsvp3 by tuesday to let me know if you can make it. i would love to see you there! thomas refusal 2 (professor) subject: invitation to give a short presentation hi, this is professor johnson – you took my english class last semester. i am emailing you because you wrote an outstanding term paper, and i was wondering if you would be willing to come to my class next week to talk about it. my new students are quite anxious about the paper, and i think it would be nice for them to talk to someone who has already gone through the process. it would not have to be long, perhaps 10-15 minutes. please let me know if that is something you could do. thank you in advance, prof. johnson 3 rsvp is an initialism derived from the french phrase répondez s’il vous plait, meaning “please respond.” studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: miros aw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: marek derenowski (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) language editor: melanie ellis (language teacher training college, zabrze) vol. 4 no. 2 june 2014 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham/university of new south wales, sydney) piotr cap (university of ód ) anna cie licka (texas a&m international university, adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) kata csizer (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) krystyna dro dzia -szelest (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabry -barker (university of silesia) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of ód ) jan majer (university of ód ) paul meara (swansea university) anna micho ska-stadnik (university of wroc aw) anna ni egorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) terrence odlin (ohio state university) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) pawe scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) david singleton (trinity college, dublin) odzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) merrill swain (university of toronto) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of ód ) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – pozna 2014 editor: miros aw pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak marek derenowski anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydzia pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam pozna proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, pozna contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy wiat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. wierzawska 1, 60-321 pozna print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: index copernicus central and eastern european online library (ceeol) the mla international bibliography the mla directory of periodicals linguistic abstracts ebsco efforts are being made to include studies in second language learning and teaching in the index of journals published by the polish ministry of science and higher education, and to have it listed by the european reference index for the humanities (erih) and the thomson reuters master journal list. special issue: positive psychology guest editors: peter d. macintyre tammy gregersen studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 4, number 2, june 2014 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors .................................................................... 143 editorial ......................................................................................... 149 articles: peter d. macintyre, sarah mercer – introducing positive psychology to sla ............................................................................................... 153 rebecca l. oxford, lourdes cuéllar – positive psychology in crosscultural narratives: mexican students discover themselves while learning chinese .............................................................................. 173 tim murphey – singing well-becoming: student musical therapy case studies ............................................................................................. 205 jean-marc dewaele, peter d. macintyre – the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom ............ 237 joseph falout – circular seating arrangements: approaching the social crux in language classrooms ........................................................... 275 danuta gabry -barker – success: from failure to failure with enthusiasm .................................................................................................. 301 tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, kate hein finegan, kyle talbot, shelby claman – examining emotional intelligence within the context of positive psychology interventions ............................................... 327 kathryn e. chaffee, kimberly a. noels, maya sugita mceown – learning from authoritarian teachers: controlling the situation or controlling yourself can sustain motivation ...................................................... 355 book reviews ................................................................................. 389 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 393 143 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors co-editors peter d. macintyre is a professor of psychology at cape breton university in sydney, nova scotia, canada. peter received his phd from the university of western ontario in 1992 under the supervision of r. c. gardner. from 1992 to 1994 he held a position as a post doctoral research fellow at the university of ottawa working with r. clément. in 1994, peter joined the faculty at cape breton university and was appointed full professor in 2004. he co-wrote capitalizing on language learners’ individuality (2014, multilingual matters) with tammy gregersen and co-edited motivational dynamics in language learning (2015, multilingual matters) with zoltan dörnyei and alastair henry. contact details: cape breton university, 1250 grand lake road, sydney, ns, canada, b1p 6l2; phone +1-902-563-1315 (peter_macintyre@cbu.ca) tammy gregersen has a master’s in education and a phd in linguistics from two chilean universities and presently teaches and researches in tesol in the department of languages and literatures at the university of northern iowa, cedar falls, usa. her research passions include emotional and psychological influences on language teaching and learning, nonverbal behavior in applied linguistics, dynamic systems and mixed methods approaches, and methodological language teaching adaptations for improved language learning, particularly considering positive psychology. she co-authored capitalizing on language learners’ individuality (2014, multilingual matters) with peter macintyre, and has over 50 peer reviewed publications in international journals. she is lead editor of an upcoming edited book called positive psychology in sla (with peter macintyre and sarah mercer). contact details: university of northern iowa, 5534 university avenue, cedar falls, ia 50613, usa; phone +1 (319) 215-9316 (tammy.gregersen@uni.edu) 144 contributors kathryn everhart chaffee is a graduate student studying social and cultural psychology at the university of alberta, edmonton, canada, under the supervision of dr. kimberly noels. she completed her ba in psychology at the university of delaware, usa, where she learned about cultural psychology from dr. beth morling. three years spent teaching english in japan cemented her interests in cultural differences and language learning motivation. her research focuses on examining control strategy use and academic motivation crossculturally. she is also interested in how individuals choose to seek intercultural contact with a specific culture or linguistic group. contact details: (kathryn.chaffee@ualberta.ca) shelby l. claman is trained in both linguistics and language education and recently graduated from the university of northern iowa with a bachelor’s degree in teaching english as s second language and spanish teaching. she is currently pursuing certification in special education and will be a co-teacher for secondary students with specific individual needs in a u.s. high school in fall, 2014. her research interests lie in the educational system where there is a deficit of cultural and linguistic awareness education. she hopes to pursue issues involved with social justice; in particular, where the ties between socioeconomic status and student achievement intersect. contact details: (shelbyc@uni.edu) lourdes cuéllar studied social work and has a major in science education. she has been a member of humanist movement since 1989. she has specialized in non-violence and humanist topics, as well as in autonomous learning and virtual learning environments. she studied chinese in beijing language institute and she is currently a language teacher and an academic counselor in the foreign language teaching center at the national autonomous university of mexico, mexico city. she is an independent researcher assigned to joquicingo park of study and reflection, a project linked to the school of knowledge by silo. contact details: alonso de villaseca 190-6, col. independencia03630, méxico, d.f. del. benito juárez, méxico (cuellar.lourdes@gmail.com) jean-marc dewaele is professor of applied linguistics and multilingualism at birkbeck, university of london, uk. he has published widely on individual differences in psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, pragmatic, psychological and emotional aspects of second language acquisition and multilingualism. he is the author of 145 the monograph emotions in multiple languages (2010, palgrave macmillan). he is vice-president of the international association of multilingualism and former president of the european second language association. he became general editor of the international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism in 2013. contact details: department of applied linguistics, birkbeck college, 26 russell square, london wc1b 5dt, uk (j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk) joseph falout researches, publishes, and presents internationally regarding social educational psychology of language learning and teaching, with an interest toward pedagogical applications. his collaborations include creating the theoretical and applied foundations of ideal classmates, present communities of imagining (pcoiz), and critical participatory looping (cpl). falout edits for the asian efl journal and jalt’s oncue journal. he teaches eap and esp at graduate and undergraduate levels as an associate professor at nihon university, japan. he has also taught rhetoric and composition, public speaking, and esl at colleges in the usa. contact details: nihon university, college of science and technology, 7-24-1 narashinodai, funabashi, chiba, 274-8501, japan (researchdigest@gmail.com) danuta gabry -barker is professor of english at the university of silesia, katowice, poland, where she lectures and supervises ma and phd theses in applied linguistics, psycholinguistics and especially in second language acquisition. her main areas of interest are multilingualism and applied psycholinguistics. as a teacher trainer she lectures on research methods in second language acquisition and tefl projects. professor gabry -barker has published over a hundred articles nationally as well as internationally and the books aspects of multilingual storage, processing and retrieval (2005, wydawnictwo naukowe uniwersytetu skiego) and reflectivity in pre-service teacher education (2012, wydawnictwo naukowe uniwersytetu skiego). she has edited nine volumes, among others for multilingual matters, springer and the university of silesia press (wydawnictwo naukowe uniwersytetu skiego). professor gabry -barker is the editor-in-chief (together with eva vetter) of the international journal of multilingualism (taylor & francis/routledge). contact details: university of silesia, institute of english, ul. gen. grotaroweckiego 5, 41-205 sosnowiec, poland (danuta.gabrys@gmail.com) kate hein finegan received a master's degree in tesol from the university of northern iowa, cedar falls, usa, and is currently teaching in the iowa intensive english program at the university of iowa. her interests include vocabulary teaching and learning, learner autonomy, and esl services in university writing 146 centers. her research on critical thinking and vocabulary learning received first place at the 2014 university of northern iowa humanities research symposium. she will present in the coming months at the technology in second language learning conference and the midtesol conference. contact details: (heincab@uni.edu) maya sugita mceown is a post-doctoral research fellow at the university of alberta, edmonton, ab, canada. she completed her phd at the graduate school of foreign language education and research, kansai university, japan. she is currently working on a comparative study of language teachers’ motivational instruction between japanese and canadian contexts based on self-determination theory. contact details: (msugita@ualberta.ca) sarah mercer teaches at the university of graz, austria, where she has been working since 1996. she completed her phd at lancaster university and her habilitation in graz. her research interests include all aspects of the psychology surrounding the foreign language learning experience, focusing in particular on the self. she is the author of towards an understanding of language learner self-concept (2011, springer) and is co-editor of psychology for language learning (2012, palgrave) and multiple perspectives on the self in sla (2014, multilingual matters). she is one of the co-editors of the journal system. contact details: institut für anglistik, heinrichstr. 36/ii, a-8010 graz, austria (sarah.mercer@uni-graz.at) tim murphey, phd université de neuchâtel, switzerland, tesol’s professional development in language education series editor, co-author with zoltan dörnyei of group dynamics in the language classroom (2004, cup), author of music and song (1992, oup), researches vygotskian socio-cultural theory with transdisciplinary emphasis on community, play, and music at kanda university, japan. his most recent books are teaching in pursuit of wow! (2012, abax) and meaningful action: earl stevick’s influence on language teaching (2013, cup), co-edited with jane arnold. he also has a critical novel on the japanese entrance exam system in italian, japanese, and english, the tale that wags. tim murphey grew up in a very musical/sportive family and did his phd at the université de neuchâtel, switzerland on the use of music and song in foreign language learning (while teaching skiing) and in his younger days played his guitar in the paris subways and college campus cafés producing two lps and several 45s. contact details: kanda university of international studies, 1-4-1 wakaba, mihama ku, chiba-shi 261-0014, japan (mitsmail1@gmail.com) 147 kimberly a. noels trained in linguistics, communication, and psychology, and is currently a professor in the social and cultural psychology area of the department of psychology and an adjunct professor in the department of educational psychology at the university of alberta, edmonton, ab, canada. her interests focus on the social ecology of second language learning and the interconnections between language, identity, psychological well-being, and interethnic relations. her research has received awards from the modern language association, the international association of language and social psychology, national communication association, and the society for the psychological study of social issues. contact details: (knoels@ualberta.ca) rebecca oxford is professor emerita and distinguished scholar-teacher, university of maryland, usa, and is currently an adjunct professor of psychology and language teaching at two campuses of the university of alabama, usa. she has published more than 200 articles and chapters, a dozen books, and six journal special issues on learning strategies, individual differences, culture, teaching methods, and peace, as well as co-editing two book series, tapestry (heinle) and transforming education for the future (information age publishing). her lifetime achievement award states, “rebecca oxford's research on learning strategies changed the way the world teaches languages.” she has presented research in 42 countries. contact details: (rebeccaoxford@gmail.com) stephen ryan is a professor in the school of economics at senshu university, japan. he received his phd from the university of nottingham, uk, and his research addresses a range of issues relating to the psychology of language learning, with a recent focus on the role of the imagination. he is co-editor (with sarah mercer and marion williams) of psychology for language learning: insights from theory, research and practice (2012, palgrave macmillan). contact details: (ryan@isc.senshu-u.ac.jp) kyle read talbot received his master’s in tesol/applied linguistics from the university of northern iowa, usa, and currently lectures full time at the iowa intensive english program at the university of iowa. he has a variety of professional interests including positive psychology, nonverbal behavior, learner autonomy, and intercultural studies. he has presented research on affective assessment at the tesol arabia conference in dubai, and this fall he will present research on technology and learner autonomy at the technology for second language learning conference, and research on long-term goals and language learning at the midtesol conference. contact details: (talbotk@uni.edu) ________________________/ii studies in second language learning and teaching d epartm ent of english studies, faculty o f pe dagogy and fine arts, adam m ickiew icz university, kalisz s s l lt 2 (3). 4 3 9 -4 5 1 h ttp ://w w w .ssllt.a m u .e d u .p l book reviews reflectivity in pre-service teacher education: a survey o f theory and practice author: danuta gabryś-barker publisher: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego, 2012 isbn: 978-83-226-2055-7 pages: 312 the most recent publication by danuta gabryś-barker, reflectivity in pre service teacher education: a survey of theory and practice, concerns the nature of reflection and the development of reflectivity among preservice teachers. despite all the novelties that have found their way into the foreign language classroom and the shift of attention from the teacher to the learner, teachers still remain an indispensi ble element of the educational mosaic. the extent to which teachers may exert a positive influence on the learning process undoubtedly depends on their ability to develop "reflective awareness" of themselves, and to communicate openly and em pathetically with their learners. as the french writer ernest dimnet once said: "the object of reflection is invariably the discovery of something satisfying to the mind which was not there at the beginning of the search" (1930, p. 24; translation md). it seems warranted to say that it is essential to introduce prospective teachers to the practice of reflection as early as possible in the course of teacher training. in the light of the above, the publication under review provides an in spiring opportunity to learn how effective instruction in reflective teaching can 439 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl be successfully implemented in various teacher training programmes. the additional value of the book comes from the fact that its content can be inspir ing not only for novice teachers, but also for experienced practitioners who are at any stage of their professional development, assuming that they are still willing enough to develop their personal and professional reflectivity. the book is divided into five chapters, followed by an epilogue and an appendix containing unedited sample diary entries. the opening chapter (chapter 1), "teachers as a professional group," depicts teachers as a unique group of experts, with a specif ic focus on preservice teachers. furthermore, the chapter focuses on teachers' moti vation, attitudes and beliefs, all of which have a direct influence on their perception of the roles they perform in the classroom. in addition, the chapter discusses the issue of teachers' professional development at different stages of their career. chapter 2, "reflectivity in teacher development," offers a more theoretical approach towards teacher professional development, with the main emphasis being placed on the con struct of productive reflectivity, which can be developed through various teacher training programmes as well as through action research applied in the classrooms. chapter 3, entitled "from critical incidents to critical events in classroom practice," provides a theoretical background necessary for in-depth understanding of the con cept of a critical incident, which is the main unit of analysis in the empirical part of the book. moreover, the chapter takes a closer look at the impact of teachers' percep tions of themselves on the process of language instruction. the additional value of the chapter lies in the inclusion of selected examples of critical incidents from various published empirical studies, which enables the reader to gain insight into the research data presented in the consecutive chapters of the book. chapter 4, "diary studies in developing teachers' reflectivity," introduces the teacher diary as an effective tool that can be employed during the process of reflection. furthermore, the author in cludes a number of examples of diary use taken from various educational projects. additional reflection on diary writing by preservice teachers paves the way for the ultimate, empirical chapter of the book (chapter 5) entitled "a study of pre-service teachers' development through diary use." it contains a discussion of diary entries collected from preservice teachers who identify and analyze almost 300 critical incidents over a period of one academic year. the study focuses predominantly on trainee teachers who are still involved in the process of developing their profession­ al qualifications. as a result, a question arises whether more experienced teachers will find this publication worth reaching for, since it describes experiences which they may find difficult to relate to. "epilogue," the final part of the book, discusses classroom-based research and focused diary writing as effectual means of developing productive reflectivity in training programmes for teachers, as well as highlighting the significance of teach­ ers' personal involvement and their personalized approach to professional devel440 opment. teachers' personal involvement may be difficult to observe among teach­ ers in the polish educational context, since there seems to be a problem of personal identification with the teaching profession among them. furthermore, polish edu cators are often not willing to involve themselves in any form of professional devel opment, mainly due to their instrumental approach to teaching practice. gabryś-barker states that "teaching is a learning process and insofar as it is a process it is longitudinal" (p. 11). some experienced teachers may believe that they have already developed a sufficient set of teaching practices and they do not need to become more reflective. such an attitude may lead to undesirable routine behaviors or even professional burnout. no matter what their teaching experience is, educators should never stop learning, reflecting and modifying their behavior. therefore, this book should not only be considered as a perfect tool for reflection among preservice teachers, but it can also help other, more experienced educators to improve their teaching practices and rediscover their enthusiasm for teaching. the study presented in the book undoubtedly proves that diaries may serve as a valuable source of infor mation to be analyzed and reflected upon, under the condition that pre-service teachers are willing to remain systematic and honest in their diary writing. further­ more, pre-service teachers, despite their eagerness, may not be experienced enough to reflect upon important educational issues and they will either give up writing, or focus mainly on survival techniques, unless supported by an experienced mentor, someone who will aid them in going through their process of reflection. what makes this book a valuable asset to the field of teacher training is the fact that it is not only well-grounded in theory but also touches upon a number of practi cal issues for further analysis and discussion. what is worth stressing yet again, it has great potential not only as a useful guide for in-service teachers, but also as a valuable tool to be used in training programmes for preservice teachers, whose major concern in the initial stages of their careers is their own teaching performance. reviewed by marek derenowski adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland state school of higher professional education, konin, poland dereno@icpnet.pl references dimnet, e. (1930). sztuka myślenia. warszawa: wydawnictwo traska, evert i michalski. 441 mailto:dereno@icpnet.pl 737 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (4). 2018. 737-744 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.4.8 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt book review early instructed second language acquisition: pathways to competence editors: joanna rokita-jaśkow, melanie ellis publisher: multilingual matters, 2019 isbn: 978-1-78892-249-4 pages: 257 in a large scale survey of teachers’ perceptions of the challenges they face in teaching english to young primary school learners (copland, garton, & burns, 2014), some of the key issues that are identified are as follows: teaching speaking, using only english in the classroom, enhancing motivation, maintaining discipline, catering for different individual needs (including special educational needs), dealing with parents, and teaching grammar as well as reading and writing. the relevance of early instructed second language acquisition, edited by rokita-jaśkow and ellis, is clearly shown by the fact that it addresses most of these central issues. the book consists of a general introduction and twelve chapters which are organized into three parts: “early language learning in compulsory instruction,” “pathways to developing early l2 oracy and literacy,” and “pathways to understanding relationships in early foreign language learning and teaching.” part 2 is further subdivided into a section on forms and functions of the second or foreign language (l2) classroom input and a section dealing with pathways to developing 738 early literacy. each part and subsection is preceded by an introduction which describes the general background and the specific contexts in which the studies are set. an afterword is provided to bring together the main themes of the individual chapters and to suggest avenues for further research. in chapter 1, tilted “policy and practice in early foreign language learning: the case of poland,” joanna rokita-jaśkow and małgorzata pamuła-behrens describe the implementation of very early language policy in poland. the authors show very clearly how a combination of bottom-up influences (e.g., parental motives) and historical context (e.g., joining the european union) led in 2014 to the adoption of regulations which introduced foreign language instruction for five-year-old children into their final year of pre-primary education. the provision of fl teaching was then to be extended to include even younger children; however, after a change of government these plans were abandoned. as the authors conclude (p. 23), “the motives for making these decisions, as well as further directions in reforms are as yet unknown and difficult to evaluate.” the second chapter in this part of the book concerns instructional practices in pre-primary foreign language [fl] instruction. sandie mourão argues that in order to make fl instruction at this level more effective, we need a model in which pre-primary practices are emulated and in which play is a central feature. in the model, circle time, routines and play, which are all elements of early childhood education and care, provide the basis for fl teaching. during circle time and other daily routines children may be first exposed to new language which is then practiced in teacher-led play activities. central to the model is providing children with opportunities for spontaneous language use and play in specially designed english language areas. these areas need to contain materials used in teacher-led activities so that the children can recreate some of the activities experienced earlier. the examples of interaction between children in a portuguese pre-primary institution indicate that in such child-initiated play, fl words and phrases are indeed used by the learners. the third contribution in the collection, “from research on child l2 acquisition of english to classroom practice” by teresa fleta, focuses on the acquisition of english morphosyntax by spanish child learners aged four to eleven, attending a private immersion school in madrid, in which 90% of the instruction takes place in english. the data that fleta discusses come from two studies, one longitudinal and one cross-sectional, both of which were conducted in the early 2000s. fleta examines transfer from spanish into english, developmental stages for english grammatical constructions, and common english patterns appearing in the children’s output. as far as transfer is concerned, she finds that the occurrence of null subjects in children’s english sentences is limited. only limited transfer is also present in the formation of interrogatives: the learners did not invert subjects with 739 main verbs, as is the case in spanish, and they followed clear developmental stages. finally, the children shared structures containing dummy be forms. in chapter 4, “spotting the differences between child-child and child-adult interactions: evidence from spanish efl learners at low levels of proficiency,” amparo lázaro-ibarrola and raúl azplicueta-martinez examine the interaction that takes place in the above-mentioned types of dyads. there were 20 child participants, who were year-three primary school students, aged eight and nine. they performed story-based pictured placement tasks either with their level-matched peers or with one of the researchers. the authors were interested in the negotiation for meaning (nom) strategies used by the learners in both arrangements. the main finding that the analysis produced was that there was frequent use of nom strategies with some significant differences between the modes. to mention just two of them, when interacting with the researcher, the learners more often repeated his production, which, as the researchers argue (p. 95), suggests “a great amount of uptake by imitation of the model.” secondly, in child-child pairs, there was significantly more structural transfer, which testifies to the “risk of structural transfer being reinforced in peer-peer interactions” (p. 96). the last chapter in the section dealing with forms and functions of l2 classroom input is the contribution by małgorzata szulc-kurpaska, titled “the role of teacher language in a young learner classroom.” it is an account of an investigation into teacher and learner language on the basis of recordings made in four grade 6 classes of primary school in a small town in poland. the four teachers who volunteered to have their lessons recorded were women in their late twenties, with similar teaching experience (4-6 years). szulc-kurpaska investigated own-language use by the teacher and the learners, as well as the functions of teacher language and interactional features (e.g., scaffolding and feedback). the author provides a very detailed description of these aspects of classroom language, performing both quantitative and qualitative analysis. to illustrate, the quantitative analysis showed that teacher language dominated classroom talk, ranging from 82% to 89% of all the words spoken. furthermore, a sizeable proportion of that language was delivered in the l1, namely from 23% to 55%. learners’ responses were brief and “there were no instances of creativity or spontaneity in their target language use” (p. 121). chapter 6 by renata šamo opens part 2 of the book. it is titled “young efl learners and their reading awareness: a case study with twins,” and it deals with the knowledge and use of reading comprehension strategies in reading narrative texts in l1 croatian and l2 english. the participants were a boy and a girl attending grade 5 of primary school in croatia at the time of the study. their l1 was croatian and their l2 english. šamo used three tools to collect the data: a meta-comprehension strategy questionnaire, l1/l2 reading comprehension 740 tasks, and self-report questionnaires which followed the reading comprehension tasks. with respect to their performance on the comprehension tasks, both children obtained very high scores. however, their awareness of comprehension strategies differed since the female member of the pair exhibited a higher level of meta-comprehension. the next chapter, “effective learning interventions in young children: the impact of critical reading strategies” by yolanda ruiz de zarobe and maria victoria zenotz, is a report on a quasi-experimental study investigating the effectiveness of the teaching of critical reading strategies. the participants were 100 students receiving instruction based on clil (content and language integrated learning] in a school in the basque country. the students were taught the school subjects through english, basque and spanish. in the study, participants in experimental groups in year 5 and year 6 received explicit instruction in task-based reading strategies and critical reading strategies respectively. so, for example, in year 6 the students received training in deciding whether what they were reading was true or not. that was followed by a critical reading test in which the students’ task was, among other things, to distinguish “true from false.” the critical reading intervention turned out to be effective since the experimental group outperformed the control group on the post-test, with the difference in scores being statistically significant. in the final chapter in the section concerning the development of reading skills, “extensive reading in primary efl: can story apps do the trick,” annika kolb and sonja brunsmeier explore the potential of story apps to foster extensive reading in grade 3 and grade 4 (aged 8-11) in german primary school. the focus of the chapter is on the ways in which the children make meaning from the text. the data were collected through video recordings, interviews and the children’s worksheets. the analysis showed that the children used a variety of comprehension strategies: they made predictions and inferences, and they monitored their comprehension. the child readers also empathized with the characters in the stories, which supported understanding as well. the authors conclude that the “multimodal and interactive nature” (p. 165) of story apps contributes to navigating the meaning-making process. the part of the book addressing relationships in early fl learning begins with the chapter by barbara loranc-paszylk entitled “parental perceptions of bilingual primary schools in poland: the (added) value of english.” the researcher distributed a questionnaire among 31 parents whose children attended private primary english-medium instruction schools in the silesian voivodship in poland. she also interviewed 15 of the parents who were asked about the advantages of attending bilingual primary level programs and obstacles to such programs, as well as, more generally, about how satisfied they were with the programs and 741 their children’s progress in english. in their responses, the parents referred to two main advantages: immersion in english and having native-speaker teachers. interestingly, despite these advantages, the parents were not satisfied with the progress that their children were making in learning english. some of the other concerns that they voiced related to school enrolment policies which allowed admitting beginner level students, inadequate classroom management skills of native-speaker teachers, and insufficient use of english by polish teachers. as participants’ children had only completed year 1 or year 2 of primary school, concerns were also expressed about the provision and the quality of bilingual teaching at further stages of education. foreign language learners’ parents are also the focus of the contribution by joanna rokita-jaśkow. her paper, “parental involvement in very early fl education,” explores at the ways in which parents support the development of very young learners’ efl skills as well as the correlations between parental involvement and such variables as parents’ knowledge of english. the participants were 125 parents of children aged from three to six living in a town in southern poland. they were given a survey consisting of 35 statements grouped into three categories: learning at home (e.g., reading fl books to the child), parenting (e.g., providing the child with fl educational games), and communicating (e.g., talking to fl teachers). in general, the results indicated a somewhat limited level of involvement on the part of the parents, as evidenced by the fact that the means for most types of activities were below 3.0 on a 5-point scale. as for the correlations, unsurprisingly, it was found that a certain level of fl proficiency is necessary for a parent to engage in various types of activities at home and that parents with a higher level of education were more likely to create a stimulating fl environment for their children. in chapter 11, “investigating the self-concept of children with special educational needs in the context of foreign language learning,” król-gierat examines how special educational needs (sen) learners perceive themselves as foreign language learners, whether they like efl instruction and find it easy or difficult, and whether their self-concept as learners is consistent with their end-ofterm evaluation. the participants were 10 grade 3 primary school pupils with sen who were asked to fill out a simple questionnaire and to take part in an interview. information about their progress in english was collected from their teacher. the general picture of sen efl learners in the study is quite positive: they mostly enjoyed their english lessons, they found learning english easy or only moderately difficult, and they were able to meet the requirements of the curriculum. however, five of the 10 children provided descriptions of their “academic self-concept” which conflicted with those of their teacher. 742 the final chapter included in the book is “power relationships in an early foreign language classroom” by ewa guz and małgorzata tetiurka. it reports the results of a study which investigated how trainee teachers communicate and negotiate power in a primary school classroom. the analysis is based on 45 video recordings, lesson transcripts and observations. the focus of the researchers was on cases in which teachers failed to establish successful classroom relationships. it was revealed that certain verbal and non-verbal behaviors disrupt communication between the teacher and the children. as a consequence, learners “disengage cognitively, verbally and behaviorally,” which may lead to the teacher losing control of the class (p. 240). the collection of papers edited by rokita-jaśkow and ellis offers the reader valuable insights into a range of important issues in early fl instruction. it contains studies examining various early fll contexts by means of a variety of research designs. all this makes it relevant and useful to those involved in the process of providing language instruction to young learners. rather unsurprisingly, the two general issues which run through many of the papers, and which are also crucial in early fl learning, are those of input and interaction. for acquisition to occur, young learners need large amounts of both input and communicative interaction. the classroom should of course provide large amounts of it; however, it does not always do this, as the paper by szulc-kurpaska (chapter 5) shows. the classroom described by szulc-kurpaska, that is, one in which learners do not initiate spontaneous utterances, and where there is little or no creativity in their language production, is not one that we want. however, leaving learners unmonitored to interact for extended periods may not be the best solution either. as lázaro-ibarrola and azplicueta-martinez make clear in chapter 4, in child-child fl interactions l1 structural transfer is “abundant.” as they point out, “this finding warns of the risk of l1 structural transfer being reinforced in peer-peer interactions” (p. 96). research is needed to determine how serious this risk is. since classroom time is limited, learners need exposure and practice outside formal instruction. one way for learners to experience a foreign language at home is through story apps, which, as kolb and brunsmeier show in chapter 8, “can do the trick” and engage child-learners with different texts. another option suggested by rokita-jaśkow in chapter 10 is for children to watch l2 educational videos and cartoons, preferably with support from the children’s parents. this suggestion is in line with the proposal offered, among others, by scheffler (2015), who shows how very young learners can be introduced to english through a tv animated series. while the beneficial role of fl (subtitled) television is generally recognized, a little more controversial seems to be another proposal made by rokita-jaśkow and ellis in the afterword, according to which 743 parents should engage in “quasi-authentic communication in l2” with their children, following an fl system developed in poland by grzegorz śpiewak, called the dedomo method. as pointed out by scheffler and wysocka (2013), the main drawback of this system is the fact that it relies on extrinsic motivation because children are rewarded for producing utterances in english. they may also be punished by their parents by not having their requests granted if these requests are made in polish. this is contrary to what rokita-jaśkow and ellis themselves advocate (p. 245) when they stress the importance of developing and sustaining learners’ intrinsic motivation. as the brief comments in the previous section indicate, the book clearly has potential to stimulate discussion and further research. it contains good quality research, with only minor issues that could have been presented more clearly or elaborated on. for example, the discussion section in fleta’s chapter could have been aligned better with the results section and research questions. as it stands, it refers to the acquisition of negation, which is not covered in the description of the results. in šamo’s paper, the distinction between identical and fraternal twins should have been addressed. the children who are the subject of šamo’s study are fraternal twins, which means that they are just like siblings born at different times. finally, the statistical analysis in rokita-jaśkow’s paper (chapter 10) could have been explained in more detail. for example, the statement that the kruskal-wallis test was used to investigate correlations “since the statements were of a descriptive character” (p. 197) is not sufficient. the editors took great care to produce a well-designed volume. the introductory parts, the afterword and the division of the material into three main sections are certainly useful, with just two or three editorial decisions being not entirely clear to this reader. for example, the chapter by mourão is placed in the part addressing issues in compulsory instruction; yet, the data that are discussed come from a private institution in portugal where pre-primary children attend english lessons at the initiative of the school director. as mourão (p. 30) says, “english becomes part of the primary curriculum in grade 3 (8 years old),” and thus the instructional proposals made, interesting as they are, may not be applicable to teaching provided to older learners in primary schools. another somewhat puzzling decision was to place the chapter by fleta in the subsection on classroom input. fleta focuses on the language that young learners actually produce, for example, how they form interrogative structures in english, so the focus is on output rather than input. finally, all the data from learners, teachers and parents are either samples of the english language or are related to english instruction. the book is, then, primarily about the acquisition of english in instructed settings rather than early instructed second language acquisition in general, as the title implies. this said, the publication makes an important contribution 744 to the field and is bound to provide an impetus for research on how children learn additional languages and how they should effectively be taught. reviewed by paweł scheffler adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland spawel@wa.amu.edu.pl references copland, f., garton, s., & burns a. (2014). challenges in teaching english to young learners: global perspectives and local realities. tesol quarterly, 48(4), 738-762. http://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.148 scheffler, p. (2015). introducing very young children to english as a foreign language. international journal of applied linguistics, 25(1), 1-22. http://doi.org/ 10.1111/ijal.12035 scheffler, p., & wysocka, h. (2013). pochwała naturalności, czyli język obcy oswojony. języki obce w szkole, 3, 76-85. 395 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (3). 2015. 395-408 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.3.3 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl tracking students’ autonomization through emotion traces in logbooks anne chateau university of lorraine, france anne.chateau@univ-lorraine.fr peggy candas university of lorraine, france peggy.candas@univ-lorraine.fr abstract until relatively recently the impact of emotions on language learning has often been ignored and “the nature and contribution of positive emotions and beneficial emotional states deserves further attention” (bown & white, 2010, p. 433). our study focuses on a flexible language learning system that combines different elements: work in a virtual learning environment, group work, counselling sessions and a logbook. one of its objectives is to help students progress towards autonomy—defined as “the capacity to take control over one’s own learning” (benson, 2011, p. 2)—in their learning of english. the logbook has been shown to be useful in helping students become conscious of the new role they have to play in such a system (chateau & zumbihl, 2012). a discourse analysis of 100 logbooks from the 2012-2013 cohort of students showed that the traces of emotions they contained could enable us to identify important steps in the development of autonomy, as well as make hypotheses on the links between emotions, students’ self-efficacy and the development of learner autonomy. keywords: flexible language learning system, autonomization, emotions, self-efficacy anne chateau, peggy candas 396 1. introduction numerous researchers in various fields concerned with language learning and acquisition have tried to understand what could make learners more successful in their language learning. researchers of learner autonomy are among them. from the beginning, theorists such as little (1991) have firmly grounded this notion in the psychology of learning, in particular in constructivist approaches, using the work of barnes (1976), bruner (1966), kelly (1963), rogers (1969), and vygotsky (1978) to defend and legitimize this approach. tremblay and eneau (2006) argue that the psychological dimensions of autonomy have been the subject of a great number of existing studies, to the detriment of social and environmental dimensions, for example. we would like to add that all psychological dimensions have not been as thoroughly investigated as others, with the organizational dimensions, both cognitive and metacognitive, being predominant in research. surprisingly, given the now widely accepted research in neurosciences showing that cognition and emotion are largely indistinguishable, studies of the emotional dimensions of learner autonomy remain rare. it is all the more surprising since the two studies of affective strategies benson (2011) reported on “provide some evidence of their importance” (p. 88), both suggesting that “language learners are aware of the emotional side of language learning and are capable of using strategies to control their emotions” (p. 89). in psychology, the line of research which finds its roots in bandura’s (1997) work on self-efficacy has largely contributed to bringing emotions to the fore. however, the impact of emotions on language learning, except for work on specific emotions (see oxford, this issue; horwitz, 2010), has often been ignored. as bown and white stated in 2010: “the wider spectrum of students’ experiences of emotions including enjoyment of learning, hope, pride, satisfaction, relief, anger, boredom and shame, for example, has largely been overlooked. the nature and contribution of positive emotions and beneficial emotional states deserves further attention” (p. 433). more generally, there is a growing body of recent research calling for a greater recognition of the role of emotion in learning, among which there is mendez-lopez (2011), who declared that “the investigation of emotions has not been at the forefront of the research agenda in the english language teaching field . . . [although] . . . there are numerous scholars who have acknowledged that foreign language learning motivation is emotionally driven” (p. 44). in scovel’s words (as cited in benson, 2011, p. 88), emotions are potentially “the most influential force in language acquisition” but seem to remain an area that sla researchers understand very poorly, making it clear that research is urgently needed in this area. tracking students’ autonomization through emotion traces in logbooks. 397 in order to try and fill this gap our article aims at presenting the results of a study of the possible links between emotions and the development of learners’ autonomy within the context of a flexible language learning system developed in a french university. the paper first presents the theoretical background of the study, then its context and objective. the next parts focus on the questions and hypotheses, on the methodology adopted for the study, and finally the results are presented and discussed. 2. theoretical background in the last 30 years, research on learning and self-study in the field of language learning (benson, 2011; holec, 1981; little, 1991, murray, gao, & lamb, 2011; portine, 1998) has led to the creation of innovative flexible language learning systems, very often within the context of self-access language resource centres (rivens mompean, 2013). their aim has been to develop both language learning and learning to learn. this has fostered reflections on the concept of autonomy, as defined by holec (1981) as the “ability to take charge of one’s own learning” (p. 3). for little (1991), autonomy is neither a synonym for self-instruction nor a teaching method or methodology (p. 3), but is seen as a “psychological necessity” (p. 14). furthermore, little, ridley and ushioda (2002) elaborate: our previous work in the field [convinced] us that learner autonomy is not an optional extra, to be developed or not . . . on the contrary, we believe that autonomy is an essential characteristic of all truly successful learners, regardless of their age or the domain in which they are learning. (p. 1) moreover, autonomy is not innate (bertin, grave, & narcy-combes, 2010; holec, 1990) but can be gradually developed. since the development of autonomy is an ongoing process, autonomy is not “a steady state achieved by certain learners” (little, 1991, p. 4) but is best defined as a continuum. therefore, autonomy is a convenient theoretical construct, but, as such, it does not lend itself easily to inquiry. for this reason, in our studies we prefer to refer to the process of autonomization, defined as a “matter of acquiring those capacities which are necessary to carry out a self-directed learning programme” (holec, 1985, p. 180). autonomization indeed implies a necessary process of transformation of the learner, as explained by mozzon-mcpherson (2007): starting from the premise that autonomy is an ability and a capacity to determine the objectives of one’s learning, define the contents, select the methods and the resources, and monitor progress and evaluate outcomes (dickinson, 1987; esch, 1994), anne chateau, peggy candas 398 then such development is seen as a process of transformation within the individual. it can happen anywhere, and at any stage of life. (p. 70) the same author also pinpoints the fact that “each learner in a lsm [learner selfmanagement] programme undergoes a gradual transformation, one which challenges beliefs about language and perceptions of their roles as learners” (p. 70). discoveries in the field of neuroscience in the last 30 years have led to a growing interest in emotions (berthoz, 2003; damasio, 1994). emotions underpin behaviour and decision-making, and rationality requires emotional input. berthoz (2003) shows, after darwin (1872/2009), that decisions imply a highly hierarchized process in which emotions play a fundamental role. the fact that several researchers have shown the importance of the affective dimensions of learning does not come as a surprise. learning is indeed a process implying emotions (candas & eneau, 2010; linard, 2003; trocmé-fabre, 2003), and emotions can sometimes interfere with, or even prevent, learning (horwitz, 2010). the concept of “self-efficacy,” defined by bandura (1998) as one’s belief in one’s ability to succeed in specific situations, is very important to manage emotions, such as stress or anxiety for example, which could be a hindrance to learning. bandura (1998) mentions four main sources of influence on the development of self-efficacy beliefs: · performance attainment derived from mastery experiences: the most effective way of creating a strong sense of efficacy. · vicarious experiences provided by social models (seeing people similar to oneself succeed). · verbal (or social) persuasion. · physiological feedback (or emotional arousal): people interpret stress reactions and tensions as signs of vulnerability to poor performance. “mood also affects people's judgments of their personal efficacy. positive mood enhances perceived self-efficacy, despondent mood diminishes it” (bandura, 1998, p. 3). somatic and emotional states are thus one of the four sources of self-efficacy. moreover, since for bandura self-efficacy is so important to manage emotions that could prevent learning, he suggests building learning environments that help learners develop their self-efficacy by controlling negative emotions. referring to teachers or trainers, bandura (1998) emphasizes the nature and extent of their role: successful efficacy builders do more than convey positive appraisals. in addition to raising people's beliefs in their capabilities, they structure situations for them in ways that bring success and avoid placing people in situations prematurely where they are likely to fail often. (p. 2) tracking students’ autonomization through emotion traces in logbooks. 399 mills (2014) explains how, in the 21st century, researchers in foreign language learning, in particular motivation scholars, came to integrate self-efficacy research in educational psychology into their investigations so as “to guide their research and understanding of language development” (p. 12). her review of recent research in this area shows that “these investigations established a relationship between self-efficacy and fl [foreign language] achievement” (p. 12). moreover, we would like to suggest that the study results in mills (2009) point to a link between self-direction in a formal context and self-efficacy, when the course is project-based, learner-centred and open to the outside world: mills (2009) suggests that the positive emotional indicators experienced by students during a project-based learning course, including increased engagement, enjoyment, and motivation, may have played a key role in enhancing their self-efficacy beliefs in french. furthermore, learner-centred curricula, which allow students to become active decisionmakers and engage with a wide network of available resources both inside and outside the classroom, may also play a role in increasing students’ self-efficacy. (mills, 2014, p. 19) the importance of emotions on the development of self-efficacy in order to enhance learning thus led us to trying to find a way to study learners’ emotions. the definition of the concept of emotion being rather complex (scherer, 2005), however, we decided to rely on that given by cosnier (2006, p. 18). he indicates that, for most specialists, primary or basic emotions include fear, surprise, anger, happiness, sadness, disgust and their derivatives. this definition is close to the definition given by plutchik (1980), one of the most widely recognized classifications of emotional responses. 3. context our study was carried out in the university of lorraine, france, in which a flexible language learning system has been designed to improve first year ma psychology students’ skills in english, as well as their autonomization, in the first semester of the university year. the objective, defined in cooperation with the professors in charge of the ma degree in psychology, is to make students able to follow a course in scientific english given in the second semester of the university year. the system, first introduced in 2006, combines online work in a wirtual learning environment (vle) that offers several types of resources and exercises, class sessions, collaborative work (in groups of two or three students), as well as counselling sessions, with counselling being understood here as it was defined by gremmo (1995), among others. this learning system, already described in previous publications (e.g., chateau & zumbihl, 2010, 2011, 2012) has been gradually improved over the years, via students’ feedback, and includes a number of guidance elements such as: anne chateau, peggy candas 400 · an introductory practice session where the students find their way around the tools and resources available, · a forum to enable the students to find solutions to their problems (either linguistic or technical) with their peers or their counsellors. the flexible system and its impact on learners have been continually studied and evaluated since its initial introduction by action-research, a cyclic process in which action and critical reflection take place in turn. some of its elements have been validated over the years, and a new guidance element was introduced in the university year 2008-2009. this element, a logbook, helps students to keep a record of their autonomous learning all along the semester; it is a free space with some guiding principles: students write the dates, duration of their work sessions, the resources and activities they worked on, the difficulties they had, how they solved them (or not), and what they thought about these resources and activities. moreover, at the end of their work, they have to give a personal assessment of what they did during the semester (i.e., their impressions and perspectives). the students are told from the beginning that the tutors will read their logbooks and sometimes annotate them so as to help them in their learning process. a study carried out over the first cohort to use this new guidance element validated the logbook as a useful tool for improving learners’ reflexivity (chateau & zumbihl, 2010). even though it would be illusory to expect the logbook, or any other tool, to induce changes for every learner given the fundamentally complex and individual nature of the autonomization process, it did nevertheless show that the system increased the probability of something significant happening for learners as far as their autonomization was concerned. this confirmed results found by dam (2006) and rivens and eisenbeis (2009) that led these authors to conclude that students’ logbooks helped them to become more autonomous. furthermore, a later study (chateau & zumbihl, 2012) showed that students’ comments in their logbooks illustrated “the necessary process of transformation that learners have to undergo in order to reach autonomy (mozzon-mcpherson, 2007; portine, 1998) and [demonstrated that] it is a long and difficult process that requires support” (p. 171). that second study confirmed previous results and also showed the necessity to study the transformation process in more detail. 4. the study 4.1. questions and hypotheses as part of our endeavour to study learners’ autonomization process, which, as mentioned earlier, has been shown to be facilitated by reflective writing in logbooks, we decided to focus on the learners’ transformation process, mentioned by mozzontracking students’ autonomization through emotion traces in logbooks. 401 mcpherson (2007) as necessary for learners to become more autonomous, in order to determine whether it could be traced in the logbooks, and, if it could, explore the way it appeared and identify the elements that could help to trace it. our first analyses of 100 logbooks seemed to show that the autonomization process develops irregularly and unpredictably. we postulated that “events,” specific to each learner, occurring at some particular point and inducing reflexivity and awareness, triggered transformation. indeed, studies in the field of what is called in french autoformation existentielle, an existential approach to transformative learning, support this idea of transformation originating from “striking events” (galvani, 2010). an additional hypothesis was that such events occurring in the midst of their work for the english module would probably be recorded in the logbooks and, given that cognition and emotion are intermingled (damasio, 1994), might be detected thanks to traces of the emotions felt in relation to these events. finally we also decided to study whether the transformation process had been sparked and encouraged in any way and, if that was the case, to try to understand how. 4.2. methodology out of a cohort of 112 students in the university year 2012-2013 some logbooks were incomplete and could not be analysed. every year there are indeed students who give up the course for reasons not necessarily linked with language learning, in particular those who at some point decide to take up their first year of the ma degree in two years. our data thus consisted of 100 logbooks numbered from 1 to 100 in the next sections of the article. two were written entirely in english, 14 alternately in english and french and the rest (almost) entirely in french. our examples in the result and discussion sections will thus be in one of these two languages and translated when given in french. in order to analyse these logbooks, we used content analysis as described by bardin (2001), that is, a form of discourse analysis consisting in the two following stages: · sequence analysis: in this type of analysis, the discourse is studied in its development. the objective is to follow the thinking process and the dynamics of the discourse. a new sequence appears when there is a change in the subject for example, or when the author changes her or his way of expression from description to explanation. · thematic analysis: with this type of analysis, the contents of a document can be divided into categories which are then applied to all the texts to be analysed. each theme corresponds to a meaning unit, which includes all the ideas on a specific subject. anne chateau, peggy candas 402 in this case, we looked for all phrases and words implying emotions, changes, and raised awareness which we found to be recurrent in the sequence analysis. 4.3. results in the 100 students’ logbooks analysed, we found two main categories: · thirty logbooks were rather clearly limited to facts and contained only a very short description of the activities carried out by the students. in this first category of logbooks, students only gave the results they obtained in exercises, and there were no traces of emotion or transformation. these logbooks consisted in mechanical descriptions of exercises where we could not find any real trace of personal implication. · in the remaining 70, that is to say in a little more than two thirds of the logbooks, we could associate an “event” in the logbook and either raised awareness leading to a change in representations, or traces of emotions, or taking action. the “events” most often mentioned in a majority of the students’ logbooks were the counselling session, specific exercises offered in the vle such as the recording exercise they have to do from a podcast they choose from the scientific american site, or the feedback they obtained on a given task from the teacher. we were able to identify raised awareness concerning the language learning process through terms some students used such as: “(se) rendre compte” ‘to realize;’ “realized;” or “revelation” (which is a very strong term). traces of negative emotions could be found in terms such as “peur” ‘fear;’ “apprehension” or “frustrant” ‘frustrating,’ and traces of positive ones in the verbs “plaire” ‘to enjoy,’ “like” or “adorer” ‘love’ and their diverse forms. finally, some of the logbooks revealed their author’s intention to take action and go on with their learning of english, even after the end of the course. table 1 gives a quantitative view of the results. table 1 number of occurrences of 4 types of linguistic traces per element included in the flexible language learning system “raised awareness” traces of negative emotions traces of positive emotions “taking action” langues-u exercises * 10 11 46 0 recording exercise 20 5 14 1 counselling session 12 0 10 6 summary/commentary (+ group work) 1 0 42 1 final assessment/ impressions on the system 34 3 65 14 total 77 19 177 22 note. *langues-u is a lorraine university vle with online thematic files of authentic video, audio and written documents. the documents focus on a given subject (psychology, education, the environment, technology) and are accompanied by pedagogical activities. tracking students’ autonomization through emotion traces in logbooks. 403 table 1 summarizes the numbers of occurrences of linguistic traces we found in the logbooks in connection with the “striking events” the students reported, all in relation to elements in the flexible system. as far as the recording exercise is concerned, we found 40 occurrences linked with terms indicating positive emotions such as intéressant ‘interesting’ and plaisir ‘pleasure,’ or with terms revealing some change or raised awareness such as “je me suis rendu compte” ‘i realized.’ in the final assessment section of the logbooks, we could find 34 linguistic traces indicating that the student’s awareness had been raised concerning her or his language learning process. one such example is present in logbook 99: pendant des années, j'ai toujours pensé que j'avais un niveau d'anglais faible mais grâce au cours d'anglais que j'ai suivi pendant ce premier semestre, maintenant je pourrais dire que non seulement, cela m'a aidé à m'améliorer mais surtout après que j'ai eu mon feed-back de l'enregistrement audio et que j'ai su que je l'ai réussi au premier coup, ma plus grande réussite, c'est que cela m'a vraiment encouragé pour continuer et m'a redonné plus confiance pour l'avenir. [i had always thought my level of english was low, but thanks to the english course this semester i can say it helped me improve, and above all after the feedback i obtained for my recording, i knew it was my most important success, and it really encouraged me to go on and gave me confidence for the future.] several traces of emotions mentioned in the learners’ discourse were linked with the intention of taking action and seem close to mastery experiences, essential to the building of self-efficacy according to bandura (1998). for example a student (logbook 61) declares: j'ai trouvé ce système vraiment intéressant, car il permet de travailler à son rythme. pour moi qui ai de nombreuses difficultés, j'ai pu travailler sur les problèmes que j'avais et à mon allure. j'ai aujourd'hui conscience que maitriser l'anglais est important dans ma futur vie professionnelle et personnelle. c'est pourquoi, je monte actuellement un projet pour partir travailler deux mois dans un pays anglophone cet été. [i found the flexible system very interesting because you can work at your rhythm. i am now aware of the fact that mastering english is important for my future professional and personal life. that’s why i am now preparing a project to go and work in an english-speaking country for 2 months next summer.] as table 1 indicates we found relatively few traces of negative emotions. one might argue that it is only logical, since the students could have been afraid of criticizing the system designed by the teachers, in particular because they knew their logbooks would be read and evaluated. the same could be the case for traces of positive emotions. however, what could perhaps be regarded as anne chateau, peggy candas 404 “disguised compliments” is almost always restricted to specific exercises or tasks, with the same students not hesitating to give neutral or negative feedback about other tasks, which seems to imply that these students were honest in their comments. among the traces of positive emotions we found numerous occurrences of terms linked with the notion of interest, which silvia (2008) calls an “eccentric emotion” (p. 57). the words intéressant and interesting, for example, were used 93 and 23 times respectively, thus standing out as particularly significant in our data. interest is not included in classical lists of emotions—though it is present in plutchik’s wheel of emotions—but mentioned by silvia (after darwin) among “knowledge emotions: states such as interest, confusion, surprise, and awe” (2008, p. 57). silvia (2005) also writes it is “an emotion associated with curiosity, exploration, and information seeking” (p. 89). for mendez-lopez (2011), the function of interest is to motivate learning and exploration. interest thus drives us to discover new things, which is an important component in learning. we are well aware that words such as intéressant are very common, at least in french and in english, and could be said to convey a weak meaning. however, our hypothesis is that, in some cases, interest could also signal a favourable terrain in a learner, opening the way for further exploration. further research is warranted to address this question. 5. discussion the study confirms that logbooks are tools that allow and facilitate learners’ · verbalization of their learning process, in that they provide spaces where students describe their day-to-day steps, progress, decisions and hesitations alike, expressing their discoveries, difficulties, opinions and impressions, either during the learning phases or at key moments. · reflexivity, since students sometimes describe “events” that led them to realize or understand something of importance about their learning process or themselves as learners, somewhere along the logbooks or more frequently in the final assessment section. indeed, regarding reflexivity, a certain number of logbooks indicate that students need time before they start to reflect upon their learning activities. this is particularly striking for example in logbook 11, where the student gives a rather factual description of her activities and results all along the semester and only starts reflecting on her work and giving her impressions in the final assessment part at the end of the module. the timespan necessary for reflection to occur thus seems to be an element that should be taken into account by designers of flexible language learning systems, as is the need for specific moments, or even tasks, with a clear focus on assessing one’s learning choices and trajectory. tracking students’ autonomization through emotion traces in logbooks. 405 when it happens, the transformation process is apparent in the logbooks and it is generally linked with an event which induces awareness raising. but not all events produce the same effects and the transformation process does not appear predictable. this seems to indicate that the variety of tasks and tools present in the flexible language learning system is a means to cater for the needs of learners who are all different and may well increase the likelihood of triggering something significant in each learner’s autonomization process. sometimes the transformation may seem limited (e.g., “i am not that bad at english,” “pronunciation is very important”), but it led some students to actually take action and probably enhanced their self-efficacy. an obvious limitation of this study is its time duration. the logbooks are written while the students work in the flexible system, that is, over a period of four months, which is relatively short in view of the complexity of the psychological processes involved in autonomization, all the more so since our findings showed that time is a crucial parameter as far as the onset of reflective thinking is concerned. a longer period of study would certainly be necessary to know if other changes occurred in the long term. 6. conclusions one could object that this study is somewhat biased since the logbooks are one of the requirements that students have to fulfil in order to validate their language module. this may have an influence on the words and phrases the learners use to express themselves. they could indeed feel prone to express more positive emotions than negative ones, but they could also choose to remain neutral, which they did not in many logbooks. moreover, it should be noted that the students know from the start that the only requirement concerning logbooks, which are not graded by the teachers, is to respect the guiding principles mentioned in the context section of this article and that no specific content is required. having said that, and although the results remain to be confirmed in other contexts, we contend that our findings provide exciting new leads on how to track traces of the autonomization process in reflective writing while opening up prospects of research on potential ways of fostering it. as far as traces of emotions are concerned, our study focused 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(1978). mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. boston, ma: harvard university press. 601 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (4). 2017. 601-618 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.4.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt polish listening span: a new tool for measuring verbal working memory katarzyna zychowicz pomeranian university, słupsk, poland katarzyna.zychowicz@apsl.edu.pl adriana biedroń pomeranian university, słupsk, poland adriana.biedron@apsl.edu.pl mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl abstract individual differences in second language acquisition (sla) encompass differences in working memory capacity, which is believed to be one of the most crucial factors influencing language learning. however, in poland research on the role of working memory in sla is scarce due to a lack of proper polish instruments for measuring this construct. the purpose of this paper is to discuss the process of construction and validation of the polish listening span (plspan) as a tool intended to measure verbal working memory of adults. the article presents the requisite theoretical background as well as the information about the plspan, that is, the structure of the test, the scoring procedures and the steps taken with the aim of validating it. keywords: working memory; central executive; listening span katarzyna zychowicz, adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak 602 1. introduction working memory (wm) is a term adapted from cognitive psychology, which generally refers to our ability to maintain and operate on a limited amount of information when doing some mentally demanding tasks (baddeley, 2015). there is much evidence that wm storage and executive components are involved in foreign or second language (l2) learning and processing (linck, osthus, koeth, & bunting, 2014; wen, 2015, 2016); however, this relationship is difficult to pinpoint due to various methodological problems, the method of measurement being one of the most important issues. in order to examine the relationship between wm and second language acquisition (sla), valid and reliable tools are needed. one of the prerequisites of the reliability of cognitive tests is the use of the participants’ native language. therefore we decided to construct two polish tools for measuring wm capacity: a listening span, which is a measure of the central executive (ce), and a nonword list, which is a measure of the phonological loop (pl). this article describes the process of construction of the first one, that is the polish listening span test (plspan). the plspan, based on daneman and carpenter's (1980) listening span and polish reading span (biedroń & szczepaniak, 2012a, 2012b), is a tool employed to assess the ce. the instrument is designed for testing adult native speakers of the polish language. at first we present the theoretical background to our study: the concept of wm, together with its two most important components, that is the pl and the ce as well as methods of their measurement. then, we describe the newly developed tool and the procedures implemented in the construction process. finally, we offer some conclusions and suggestions for further research. 2. working memory wm (baddeley, 2003, 2015; baddeley, gathercole, & papagno, 1998; baddeley & hitch, 1974) has recently been high on the agenda of sla researchers as a significant factor determining the outcomes of l2 learning (biedroń & pawlak, 2016; biedroń & szczepaniak, 2012a; dekeyser & juffs, 2005; dekeyser & koeth, 2011; doughty, campbell, mislevy, bunting, bowles, & koeth, 2010; doughty, 2013; juffs & harrington, 2011; mackey, philip, egi, fujii, & tatsumi, 2002; miyake & friedman, 1998; papagno & vallar, 1995; pawlak, 2017; robinson, 2003; sawyer & ranta, 2001; skehan, 2012; wen & skehan, 2011; wen, mota, & mcneill, 2015; wen, 2016; williams, 2012). recently, there have been some suggestions that wm can be another foreign language aptitude (wen & skehan, 2011; wen, 2015, 2016). baddeley and hitch (1974) proposed the multicomponent wm model that comprises two storage systems, that is a phonological loop (pl) and a visuospatial polish listening span: a new tool for measuring verbal working memory 603 sketchpad, regulated by a supervisory attention-limited control system (ce). later, they extended the original tripartite model by adding a fourth component, the episodic buffer, which stores information (baddeley, 2000). the most relevant for language learning are the pl and the ce. the pl temporarily stores sound-based information through an articulatory rehearsal process. the pl, viewed as equivalent to a language acquisition device (baddeley et al., 1998), plays a crucial role in learning novel phonological forms of new words. the ce is responsible for executive functions, such as controlling, allocating and inhibiting attentional resources in higher-level cognitive processes. besides the modular model of wm proposed by baddeley (2003), there are other models emphasizing the factor of executive attention as central to the wm system. the most popular are two, namely the embedded process model (cowan, 2005) and the attentional control model (engle, kane, & tuholsky, 1999a), in which wm is an activated subset of long-term memory (ltm). in these models, attention capability accounts for the predictive validity of wm span tests and underlies other cognitive abilities, including fluid intelligence. consensual theories of wm, which aim at unifying discrepancies (e.g., wm as a gateway to ltm; baddeley, 2012; conway et al., 2008; cowan, 2014) have significant implications for research on the effects of wm on human cognition. a more unitary approach to wm theory has been proposed by wen (2016, p. 24), who states that “wm is best conceived as a primary memory system (as opposed to ltm as secondary) for learning that functions as an interface between stm components . . . and ltm . . . , which in turn affects real-world actions.” research in wm has provided ample evidence that it plays an important role in a number of complex cognitive abilities, such as first language (l1) acquisition and l2 learning, reasoning, comprehension and cognitive control. it is relevant to many everyday tasks, such as reading, making sense of spoken discourse, problem-solving and mental arithmetic. moreover, wm measures overlap with fluid intelligence test results (conway, macnamara, & engel de abreu, 2013; engle, laughlin, tuholski, & conway, 1999b; kane, conway, hambrick, & engle, 2008). it is quite likely that wm, with its origin in and dependence on rapid developments in modern cognitive science, may hold the very key to elaborating the concept of foreign language aptitude (chan, skehan, & gong, 2011; dekeyser & koeth, 2011; miyake & friedman, 1998; sawyer & ranta, 2001; wen, 2016; wen, biedroń, & skehan, 2016). there is much evidence for this suggestion. first of all, there are clear individual differences among l2 learners, both in relation to their phonological component and executive functions (wen, 2015, 2016; williams, 2012). for example, l2 learners have displayed individual variation in their pl, as measured by the simple version of memory span task, and their ce, as indexed by the complex version of memory span task (linck et katarzyna zychowicz, adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak 604 al., 2014). moreover, a great number of empirical studies in cognitive psychology and sla (see wen, 2016, for a review) have provided ample evidence that both the pl and the ce exert consistent and distinctive influences on various aspects of l2 acquisition and processing, and that their relevance varies according to the proficiency level. the pl has been shown to be most important for the acquisition and development of vocabulary, formulaic sequences and grammar (ellis, 2012; martin & ellis, 2012), mostly in l2 beginners. the ce has been demonstrated to be involved mainly in noticing, monitoring, and self-repair in language comprehension and production in intermediate l2 learners (linck et al., 2014). results and findings from wm-sla studies are summarized in table 1. table 1 results and findings from wm-sla studies (adapted from wen, 2016) sla domains and activities pl ce major sla studies l2 vocabulary acquisition and development instrumental in storing and acquiring novel phonological forms not yet clear bolibaugh and foster (2013); cheung (1996); ellis and sinclair (1996); foster, bolibaugh and kotula (2014); french (2006); french and o’brien (2008); service (1992); speciale, ellis and bywater (2004) acquisition and development of l2 grammar and/or morphosyntactic constructions facilitates the storage and chunking of morphosyntactic constructions not yet clear martin and ellis (2012); williams and lovatt (2003) l2 language comprehension (listening and reading) used to maintain a phonological record that can be consulted during offline language processing facilitates processing syntactic and semantic information alptekin and erçetin (2011); berquist (1997); harrington and sawyer (1992); havik et al. (2009); leeser (2007); miyake and friedman (1998) language production (speaking and writing) predicts narrative vocabulary at early stage; predicts grammatical accuracy at later stage is related to performance measures of l2 speech (e.g., accuracy) abu-rabia (2003); ahmadian (2012); bergsleithner (2010); fortkamp (1999, 2003); guará-tavares (2008); o’brien segalowitz, collentine and freed (2006, 2007); payne and whitney (2002) still, despite all the promising evidence, there is much controversy surrounding wm and the results are often contradictory or ambiguous. one such ambiguity relates to grammar learning. a few studies (e.g., fortkamp, 2003; linck et al., 2014; martin & ellis, 2012; williams & lovatt, 2003) provide evidence for a polish listening span: a new tool for measuring verbal working memory 605 complex relationship between wm and grammar learning. fortkamp (2003) examined the relationship between the ce component of wm, operationalized as a speaking span in an l2, and speech production during a picture description and a narrative. her investigation revealed that wm positively correlates with fluency, accuracy and structural complexity, which led her to conclude that grammatical encoding in l2 speech production depends on the regulation of attention and control, which are seen as key elements of the ce component of wm. williams and lovatt (2003) conducted two experiments targeted at relating pl and grammar learning. they found an important link between pl and grammar rule learning in a semiartificial language; however, the link only partially explained the variance in the acquisition of grammar. therefore, they concluded that for a fuller understanding of the process of grammar learning research should include tests of both pl and ce. o’brien et al.’s (2006) research concentrated on the role of phonological short-term memory, that is the pl, as measured by serial nonword recognition, in speech production focusing on lexical, grammatical and narrative abilities of adults. the results of their study clearly indicate that pl plays an important role in the grammatical proficiency of l2 students at later stages of l2 development. kormos and sáfár (2008) studied the relationship between pl, measured by a nonword repetition test, and ce, measured by a backward digit span test, and performance in the l2 in an intensive language program, and found a high positive correlation between fce use of english, reading, listening and speaking parts and both pl and ce. however, since fce use of english measures both grammar and vocabulary at the same time, it is difficult to draw conclusions concerning exclusively grammar results. martin and ellis (2012) investigated the influence of pl, operationalized as a nonword repetition span and a nonword recognition span, and ce, operationalized as a listening span test capacities on the learning of vocabulary and grammar in an artificial language, and documented separate effects of pl and ce on grammar learning, either direct or mediated by vocabulary. the ce component of wm turned out to be a stronger predictor of learning outcomes, with ce explaining 14% and pl explaining 10% of the variance in production, and 11% and 17%, respectively, in comprehension. summing up, research on the relationship between wm and the knowledge of grammar is relatively scarce and the results are inconclusive; however, the ce subsystem seems to be definitely more strongly implicated in grammar production than the pl (see linck et al., 2014). 3. working memory measurement the definition and structure of wm as well as its variable impact on different aspects of sla and processing affect the construction of tasks employed in its katarzyna zychowicz, adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak 606 measurement. the construct of wm is widely operationalized to refer to the total resources that are available to an individual for simultaneous processing and storage. according to just and carpenter (1992), any individual possesses finite resources that are consumed by both the processing and storage of information. this means that the processing and storage demands of a task can be traded off against each other. for example, in an easy task processing demands will be low and so storage capacity will be relatively high. in this view, measuring the storage capacity of the individual without reference to a particular processing task does not seem to make sense and therefore wm tests should involve storage and processing of information simultaneously. in line with this view, daneman and carpenter created the first test measuring wm capacity, namely the reading span task (rst). in the original rst (daneman & carpenter, 1980), participants were instructed to read series of sentences aloud, while remembering the final word of each sentence in a particular series. in addition, daneman and carpenter (1980) developed a listening version of the rst. the listening span also required the retention of sentencefinal words, but the participants listened to, rather than read, lists of sentences. in order to ensure subjects’ focus on both processing and remembering information, daneman and carpenter added a true/false component to the test, where subjects decided if a sentence they listened to was true or false within 1.5 seconds from hearing it; however, they did not monitor the accuracy of the answers. engle at al. (1999a) decided to alter this procedure for their reading span and asked their subjects to verify the correctness of the presented sentences, excluding all subjects with processing scores below 80% from analysis, which helped ensure that attention was paid to the processing task. in what follows, we discuss the construction, scoring procedures and validation of the plspan. 4. the study 4.1. aims the aim of the study, which took place at pomeranian university in słupsk, poland, in may 2015, was to design a valid and reliable tool for measuring wm capacity in polish. the plspan test is based on the same principle as that followed by daneman and carpenter (1980), and engle et al. (1999a), but the language of the input is polish. it has often been stressed (e.g., linck et al., 2014) that cognitive tests, including wm tests, should be conducted in participants’ native language, as tasks performed in the l2 would indicate not only wm capacity but also l2 proficiency. this would negatively influence any analysis of the results, especially if the study was to be held in the field of sla and later correlated with any linguistic outcome. polish listening span: a new tool for measuring verbal working memory 607 4.2. participants fifty eight firstand second-year english majors enrolled in a ba program agreed to take part in the study. the sample consisted of 36 females and 22 males, aged 19-23, with the mean age of 21.6. they were monolingual polish learners of english as a foreign language whose proficiency level was intermediate (b1/b2 in terms of the common european framework of reference). they had been studying english for 3-11 years, with the mean length of about 9 years, either at school or in additional courses or private tutoring. in the ba program they attended classes in english, including the four skills, namely speaking, listening, reading and writing, as well as classes dealing with grammar and pronunciation. they also participated in a number of content classes, such as introduction to linguistics, strategic training, introduction to literary studies and varieties of english, all of which were taught in the target language. 4.3. the test the test consists of 9 sets of sentences of growing sizes, from 2 sentences in set 1 to 10 in set 9, producing a total of 54 sentences. the sets were recorded using audacity software, with 1.5-second gaps between sentences. the length and complexity of the items was controlled for. each is a grammatically correct complex sentence, approximately 8 words in length and, when recorded, lasts from 2.77 seconds to 3.56 secpnds with the average length of 3.06 seconds. 50% of the sentences were altered lexically so that some of them do and some of them do not make sense in everyday life. for example, the sentence: marek jest po egzaminach, więc wyjeżdża na biwak ‘mark has already taken his exams, so he is going camping’ makes sense. on the other hand, the sentence: koza szybko powiedziała, że na pewno woli mikrofon ‘the goat quickly said that it surely preferred the microphone’ is senseless as goats do not speak. the altered words are nouns, verbs and adjectives placed in any but final position in a sentence. the participants’ task is to determine whether or not each sentence makes sense to ensure the processing of the input, and, at the same time, remember the last word of each sentence for subsequent recollection. each sentence-final word is a common noun in the nominative case to avoid confusion with word endings. test reliability and validity were verified in two ways: the material was first evaluated by judges and later a pilot study was conducted. 4.4. administration as with most tests in the field of cognitive science, subjects take the test individually, which allows them to focus on both tasks that they are requested to katarzyna zychowicz, adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak 608 perform. additionally, it gives the researcher an opportunity to observe the subjects and ensure that they focus on both processing and storage. the administration of the test takes about 10 minutes. before they begin the test, they are informed of its content and the tasks they are supposed to perform. during the listening to the sentences they are to judge whether each sentence makes sense and mark all those that do on the answer sheet, ignore the senseless sentences, and remember all the sentence-final words. after each set there is a pause during which participants are supposed to recollect all the words they remember from the set. the order of recall is free, that is, they can list the words in any order, not necessarily in the order the sentences were presented. the actual test is preceded by two trial sets in order to make sure that subjects understand both tasks, learn to judge sentence sensibility and practice focusing on two things at the same time. one trial set is presented below: posialiśmy już marchewkę i pietruszkę, został jeszcze seler ‘we have already planted carrots and parsleys; all we are left to do are celeries.’ nie mam czasu, niech pomoże ci drewniane krzesło ‘i do not have time, our wooden chair can help you.’ karolina jest już dorosła, może posmarować na wybory ‘caroline is already an adult, she can butter to the election.’ 4.5. scoring and analysis in daneman and carpenter’s traditional test, each subject was assigned an absolute span score. the test started with a 2-element item and continued until the subject failed to retrieve an item. the test ended at that time, and the last item size (e.g., 4 or 5) recalled was the span score. however, absolute spans have several shortcomings (conway, kane, bunting, hambrick, wilhelm, & engle, 2005; linck et al., 2014). first of all, such scores take on one of very few values, usually from 2 to 6, thus limiting the sensitivity of the measure and disallowing diversification of results. secondly, by just estimating the item size for a participant and then discontinuing the test, data on all other trials are ignored. moreover, the difficulty of a span item may vary on many dimensions, thereby threatening span reliability (conway et al., 2005, p. 774). in summary, absolute span measures cannot be applied to research on individual differences. instead, the use of scoring procedures exhausting the information collected is advised, such as the partial scoring procedure, where correct responses to individual elements within an item are assigned 1 point, and all other responses are assigned 0 points, with no attempt to classify the type of error (conway et al., 2005). polish listening span: a new tool for measuring verbal working memory 609 given the above, the result of the plspan is a partial score, that is the number of correctly remembered words in all the sets. it allows for greater diversification of the results as well as preventing the floor and the ceiling effects (conway et al., 2005). furthermore, points are assigned to all elements recalled, irrespective of the correctness on the processing component. the outcome of the processing task, that is, the judgments concerning the logic of the sentences, serves only as a distractor precluding subjects from mental rehearsal and is usually close to the ceiling. however, it is taken into consideration while calculating the score, as results with the score below 80% of correct answers in the processing task are excluded from the sample, the reason being the lack of ample concentration on the task. 4.5. results 4.5.1. reliability reading span, operation span and listening span have been used in hundreds of independent studies involving thousands of subjects. according to conway et al. (2005, p. 776): one conclusion that can be drawn from this body of research is that measures obtained from these tasks (span scores) have adequate reliability . . . for example, estimates of reliability based on internal consistency, such as coefficient alphas and splithalf correlations, which reflect the consistency of participants’ responses across a test’s items at one point in time, are typically in the range of .70-.90 for span scores. wm span tests seem to be reliable across time as well. typical test-retest results correlate in the range of .70-.90. in order to verify the reliability of the plspan, the test-retest method was applied. the correlation between the initial test and the retest which took place 3 weeks later was .91, which indicates a high reliability of the test. the kuder richardson alpha for internal consistency reliability for the test was .76. splithalf reliability was estimated at .78, which allows a conclusion that the test is a reliable measure of ce. 4.5.2. validity 4.5.2.1. construct validity the test can be said to possess high construct validity as it was constructed following leading experts in the field of cognitive neuroscience who verified their katarzyna zychowicz, adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak 610 tools in numerous empirical studies. the results of their research indicate that the construct measured by wm span tests is the ability to control attention and thought. measures of wm capacity reflect individual differences in the aforementioned ability. also, as described in the first part of this paper, results of wm span tests correlate with numerous tests of higher-order cognition, including intelligence, thus demonstrating high predictive validity. construct validity also refers to convergent and discriminant validity. wm span tasks correlate extremely well with each other and, at the same time, correlate mildly with more traditional simple span tasks. in order to measure the convergent validity of the plspan, we correlated the results of our test with the results of the polish reading span by biedroń and szczepaniak (2012a, 2012b), which is supposed to tap the same construct, and a nonword repetition test, which is to measure only storage capacity. the results we obtained are as follows: for the polish reading span and the plspan pearson coefficient r was .77, p = .000, which is a high or very high correlation. for the plspan and the nonword repetition test pearson coefficient r was .33, p = .011, which is a low moderate correlation. such results allow us to conclude that although all the three tests measure one concept, that is memory, which is visible in the positive correlations between them, the plspan and the polish reading span measure a different aspect of it, namely the ce component of wm whereas the nonword repetition measures only its phonological aspect. even though it would seem that the two verbal memory tests using the same modality, that is, aural reception, would correlate better than those using two different modalities, the results of the analysis clearly show that the effect of modality is far weaker than could have been expected. 4.5.2.2. content validity content validity of the test was assessed by five competent judges, four linguists and a psychologist. the judges were familiarized with the concept of wm and the purpose of the test. next, they were asked to evaluate all the test tasks on a 5-point likert scale, where 1 indicated total disagreement and 5 total agreement. after reading each sentence they answered three questions: · is the sentence comprehensible? · is it possible to immediately decide whether the sentence is acceptable in everyday speech? · does the sentence make sense? after reading all the sentences in a given set the judges were asked two additional questions: · are the sentences in the set thematically connected? polish listening span: a new tool for measuring verbal working memory 611 · are the words at the end of the sentences thematically connected? the judges were also asked whether the test as a whole measures wm. the answers of the judges were analyzed, and all the sentences with mean values below 4.5 were replaced with new ones, which were also evaluated. kendall’s coefficient of concordance for all the sets was above .9, with the value of .94 for the entire test. the high concordance among the judges indicates that the test is valid. 4.5.2.3. face validity the next step in verifying test validity was the face validity check. for this purpose, a group of ten university students was chosen since young adults and adults were the targets of the test. they were asked to listen to the entirety of the test and decide whether the gaps between the sentences of 1 second were long enough to judge sensibility. later, they evaluated the test according to the same criteria as the competent judges, but they listened to the sentences instead of reading them. again, the analysis of their answers indicated that the test is valid, with kendall’s coefficient of concordance for all the sets equaling .91. the evaluation of the test by the students was followed by a focus session, in which the students expressed their opinions about the content and the form of the test. their opinions were very positive. they said they had fun judging the sensibility of the sentences, as lexical changes made in senseless sentences created funny images of, for example, singing tattoos or writing buckets. according to one respondent, “it was funny . . . and strange. i’m not used to doing two things at the same time, so it was also challenging and very difficult.” they also believed that the test would measure memory, as well as intelligence and concentration, as mentioned by another respondent: “‘i think it will measure memory and concentration, and i think . . . intelligence, too.” that was a surprising finding since they could not have known that the original version of the listening as well as the reading span correlated well with results of iq tests. however, all of them agreed that the pace of the presentation of the sentences was too high, that is, 1 second was not enough to decide if a sentence makes sense or not. one respondent even said: “it was too difficult for me. maybe because it was so fast.” on the basis of their opinions the gaps were lengthened to 1.5 seconds, which was the original timing in daneman and carpenter’s (1980) test. 4.5.3. processing task as expected, the processing task turned out to be a very simple one, thus allowing the subjects to achieve very high results, often even 100%. however, one person refused to finish the test as he “couldn’t concentrate on remembering katarzyna zychowicz, adriana biedroń, mirosław pawlak 612 while thinking.” another person achieved a 57% level of correctness and was also excluded from the analysis. the only factor influencing sensibility judgment was the grammatical category of the word altered, which we chose to be nouns, verbs or adjectives. noun alternations achieved over 99% correctness, verbs seemed to cause some initial confusion and achieved almost 97% correctness, with the first two sentences achieving only 86% and the rest of the sentences close to 99%. the sentences with adjective alternations seemed to be the most difficult to process, since they achieved only 83% correctness and one sentence, that is, wiał tak zielony wiatr, że połamał ogromne drzewo ‘the wind was so green that it broke a huge tree,’ reached only 57% correctness. 4.5.4. storage task the mean result of the test was 26.52, which is almost half of the 54 elements of the test. the minimum score was 8 points and the maximum was 41 points, which shows that the sensitivity of the measure is considerable. besides no floor or ceiling effect was observed, which shows that the span of the test is accurate. all the measures of test reliability show that the test is a reliable measure; however, the discriminating power of several items within the test is still not satisfactory, possibly due to the very strong primacy and recency effects observed during the analysis. 5. discussion the analysis of the processing task revealed several interesting findings. as mentioned above, a strong ceiling effect was observed, which had been expected, and which indicates that participants had few problems with judging sentence sensibility. we had expected that any problems connected with this task might result from the position of the word altered, namely that the later the alternation appeared in the sentence, the more difficult it would turn out to be to evaluate. yet, no such effect was observed in the analysis, which allows a conclusion that the position of the senselessness in a sentence has no influence on the sensibility judgment. another presupposition we had was that any problems appearing while judging sensibility might result from the grammatical category of the semantic alternation. this proved to be right, and the results show that while altering nouns and verbs poses no difficulty, changing adjectives seems to mislead some subjects. the storage task brought findings we had expected. the high sensitivity of the test, its accuracy, reliability and validity appear to indicate that the test is a fine measure of the ce. the only limitation of the plspan is the low discriminating polish listening span: a new tool for measuring verbal working memory 613 power of several positions, which we attributed to the primacy and recency effects. this is consistent with the results obtained by other researchers (murdock, 1962; unsworth & engle, 2007). 6. conclusions the study reported in the present paper aimed to design an instrument that could be used to examine, in the polish educational context, the subcomponent of wm which is the most relevant for sla research, that is the ce. in line with the theoretical suggestions, we constructed the plspan, which is a complex span test intended to measure the ce. the test is designed for adults and young adults. it is based on classical tests of wm, that is, the reading span and listening span. the procedures applied to assess test reliability and validity proved that the test is a good measure of the ce component of wm. our study suffers from a number of limitations that can mainly be attributed to highly individualized cognitive abilities of the participants. a problem that is very difficult to solve is the primacy and recency effects. another is the grammatical category of the altered words. there are a number of methodological issues that should be addressed in further research. one such problem is domain specificity versus domain generality of tasks. in view of lack of any reliable criterion, the choice of a task depends on the researcher, and this can significantly affect the results of a particular study. we agree with wen (2016) that future research should specify the consequences of using the two different types of measures. moreover, the relationship between wm components and aspects of l2 learning is far more complicated and nuanced than the relationship that can be revealed through simple correlation analysis. wen suggests that the measures of wm should be functionally oriented by targeting specific functions, such as, for example, information updating. in this way, an integrated wm profile that comprises all individual wm components or functions can be obtained. a precise multi-span profile will allow for individualization of the learning process and compensation for weaker areas. summing up, in the process of test construction, the theoretical conceptualizations of wm have been complemented by established assessment procedures to examine the ce, which paves the way for further studies in the field of sla. we are hopeful that, as a result of the construction and validation of the plspan, the explanatory power of wm as foreign language aptitude in l2 learning will be greatly enhanced. acknowledgements the study reported in this paper 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(2003). phonological memory and rule learning. language learning, 53, 67-121. 311 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (3). 311-331 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl affordances theory in multilingualism studies larissa aronin oranim academic college of education, tivon, israel trinity college, dublin, ireland larisa@research.haifa.ac.il david singleton trinity college, dublin, ireland singleton.centicepts@gmail.com abstract the concept of affordances originating in gibson’s work (gibson, 1977) is gaining ground in multilingualism studies (cf. aronin and singleton, 2010; singleton and aronin, 2007; dewaele, 2010). nevertheless, studies investigating affordances in respect of teaching, learning or using languages are still somewhat rare and tend to treat isolated aspects of multilingualism. this is despite the fact that the theory of affordances can actually provide a valuable, supplementary, up-to-date framework within which a clearer, sharper description and explication of the intriguing range of attributes of multilingual communities, educational institutions and individuals, as well as teaching practices, become feasible. it is important that not only researchers and practitioners (teachers, educators, parents, community and political actors) but also language users and learners themselves should be aware of how to identify or, if necessary, design new affordances for language acquisition and learning. the aim of this article is to adapt the concept of affordances to multilingualism studies and additional language teaching, and in so doing advance theoretical understanding in this context. to this end the article contains a brief summary of the findings so far available. the article also goes further into defining the ways of how affordances work in relation to multilingualism and second language teaching and puts forward an integrated model of affordances. keywords: affordances, multilingualism, second language learning, complexity, multiple language acquisition larissa aronin, david singleton 312 the concept of affordances originating in gibson’s work (gibson, 1977), is gaining momentum in multilingualism studies. this concept was tackled from a linguistic perspective some years ago by segalowitz (2001). later studies have treated affordances from an applied linguistics perspective with regard both to learning and to teaching second and further languages (dewaele, 2010; otwinowska-kasztelanic 2009, 2011; van lier, 2007), relative to content and language integrated learning (cf. järvinen, n.d.) and in connection with the personal characteristics of multilingual users and learners (singleton & aronin, 2007). aronin and singleton (2010) took a wider perspective on affordances and language use and put forward the notions of social language affordances and individual language affordances. they pointed out, inter alia, that social language affordances are prerequisite to individual language affordances. it remains the case, however, that studies dealing with the affordances of multilingualism are still thin on the ground and that their treatment is far from systematic. in fact, it is rather the case that different aspects of multilingualism are explored from an affordances point of view according to what happens to be the research enthusiasms of the particular authors in question. this is regrettable, as the theory of affordances is potentially a very powerful point of departure and lends itself extremely well to investigating the nature of multilingualism in all its dimensions. it deserves more active and systematic use on the part of multilingualism researchers, since affordances can genuinely shed new light on multilingual phenomena, in particular, on second1 and multiple language acquisition. in order make full use of the lens of affordances in language acquisition and teaching and multilingualism it is necessary to bring the concept of affordances into association and alignment with these areas of knowledge. to this end we first briefly summarize the relevant findings in the field and refer to some of gibson’s relevant key points, which certainly warrant more attention. then we identify a range of manifestations of affordances and attempt a deeper, more acute characterization of the ways in which affordances are operative in the multilingual context in respect of the acquisition and learning of additional languages. we also propose an integrated model fusing complexity and affordances approaches with the widely recognized main elements of multilingualism, that is so say, settings, users and languages. what are affordances? the typical response to the question “what are affordances” is “well, these are possibilities, possibilities for action.” while this is more or less true, 1 by second language here we mean languages other than mother tongue, that is, second and consecutive languages. affordances theory in multilingualism studies 313 linking and limiting the idea of affordances to the notion of possibilities means losing sight of the heart of the matter, the whole reason for employing this concept. a. deumert (personal communication, 2011) has shrewdly observed that there is a need to further clarify the term affordances, its theoretical underpinning and its advantages over other terms. affordances is an expression commonly deployed in contemporary sociolinguistic work, yet its meaning is rarely specified to the extent of furnishing an explanation of what exactly is provided by the term affordances which goes beyond the denotation of existing terms. what is routinely called “the theory of affordances” is not a fully-fledged theory, but rather a conceptual understanding shared across many fields. let us begin our exploration of this issue with a look at the work of gibson, who coined the term affordance. while brief explanations and references to gibson’s oft-cited definition appear in most articles on affordances, here we will present elements of the notion which are to be found in gibson’s (1979/1986) original writings on the topic, including aspects which are especially noteworthy in connection with multilingualism. gibson (1979/1986) notes that while the verb to afford is in the dictionary, the noun affordance is not. he had made it up. it is worth remembering that gibson developed his affordance concept not with reference to the social or human sciences, but in its application to physics, optics, anatomy and the physiology of eye and brain. his creation of the affordances notion came out of his interest in vision and perception, first with regard to animals in the natural environment and then, by extension, to human beings. the idea was subsequently generalized to numerous fields of research and practice; thus, for example, it is very popular in fields as diverse as design, psychology and aviation. the widely cited definition of affordances by gibson (1979/1986) runs as follows: “the affordances of the environment is what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (p. 127). the example of affordances given by the author also refers to the physical world. if a surface of support with the four properties is also knee-high above the ground, it affords sitting on. we call it a seat in general, or a stool, bench, chair, and so on, in particular. it may be natural like a ledge or artificial like a couch. it may have various shapes, as long as its functional layout is that of a seat. knee-high for a child is not the same as knee-high for an adult, so the affordance is relevant to the size of the individual. but if a surface is horizontal, flat, extended, rigid, and knee-high relative to a perceiver, it can in fact be sat upon. if it can be discriminated as having just these properties, it should look sit-on-able. if it does, the affordance is perceived visually. (gibson, 1979/1986, p. 128) as gibson (1979/1986, p. 128) illustrates, terrestrial surfaces are climbon-able, or fall-off-able, get-underneath-able, or bump-into-able relative to larissa aronin, david singleton 314 the animal. “this is not the world of physics, but the world at the level of ecology”, explains gibson (1979/1986, p. 2). remarkably, the ecological approach (haugen, 1972; hornberger, 2002) renders gibson’s vision closer to the field of society and language and language teaching and learning. the affordances of language in society – be it in the area of instruction and didactics or in the more general field of education and social context, draw from the original gibson’s literally ecological views but translate into something somewhat different in form, type, scale and manifestation, as they refer to the social dimension in greater measure than they refer to purely physical dimension. different physical dispositions and characteristics afford different behaviours for different animals, including the human species, and different kinds of encounters. the same objects or events can present different affordances for different actors; thus, for instance, grass presents different ranges of affordances for birds, animals and for people. in the same way, a book in a foreign language presents different affordances for learners and users with differing levels of mastery of this language. researchers from different disciplines developed those particular aspects of affordances deemed relevant and important for their respective fields. psychologists, and design engineers in aviation and ergonomics developed the idea further. thus, for example, the aspect of perception – the noticeability of an affordance – was the dominant focus of interest when computer interfaces or door handles were being designed. gibson’s key points in search of further insights, let us address some of gibson’s original insights which we feel are especially important in the context of a discussion of multilingualism and additional language learning. these elements recur as leitmotifs through his books, but have not, to our knowledge, been given the attention they warrant. the relevant key elements we are thinking of are: affordances being furnished according to the size of an animal; the mutuality of animal and environment; nesting; information about the self accompanying information about the environment, the two being inseparable. we will begin with the last of these, to which we wish to give special emphasis, because it has not yet been, as far as we know, directly connected to the teaching, learning and use of multiple languages although it has a considerable bearing on it. this point, information about the self, to our mind, corresponds with and complements awareness phenomena, also a recently affordances theory in multilingualism studies 315 developing topic. here is what gibson (1979/1986) says about this issue: “information about the self accompanies information about the environment, and the two are inseparable. . . . perception has two poles, the subjective and the objective, and information is available to specify both. one perceives the environment and coperceives oneself” (p. 126). the concept of linguistic and metalinguistic awareness (see, e.g., jessner, 2006) also has to do with information about the self. it turns the attention of the language apprentice towards the language(s) she/he is concerned with and towards him/herself as a language learner and language user. when the two are coupled and placed in the context of affordances, information about the self receives more shades and aspects and is seen to manifest an active, dynamic role in the language learning enterprise. in the same way as animals need to be aware of their location, as well as the disposition of objects and other animals, for successful hunting, eating, or hiding, so language users and language learners need to be aware of their needs, of where they stand with regard to other languages and other speakers, of their progress as language acquirers, and of the prospects for further language acquisition and for language use. the concomitant notions of aperture vision, ambulatory vision and ambient vision discussed in gibson’s works also translate well into the perspectives of language and metalinguistic awareness. gibson (1979/1986, pp. 1-2) pointed out that “. . . in fact, they are kinds of vision we need in life, not just pictorial depth perception. we need to see all the way around at a given point of observation and to take different points of observation.” to see “where we are” at each particular moment is a biological necessity for survival (in the widest sense of this word). in sociolinguistic terms, the global locomotion of speakers and languages – mobility – is always opening up new horizons for language users and giving them an awareness of the possibilities and the importance of deploying other languages. looking around and getting around are important not only in relation to visual perception but also, in humans, in relation to language use. to apperceive which language(s) and to which extent is/are needful for a person or a group in particular circumstances is of universal practical importance. this is what we must weigh in our everyday and long-term language-related decisions, as individuals and as communities. it is what educational authorities and political groups must constantly come back to in the language domain – evaluating the affordances and contemplating which affordances require to be added or removed. with respect to second language learning this points to the importance of a variety of indispensable kinds of selfmonitoring. the implication of gibson’s idea is that second language teachers need to supply the affordances for such self observation – for learners to be able, for instance, to situate the skills they have gained in a given language at larissa aronin, david singleton 316 particular times and in particular places in their relation to their skills in other languages, and to be able to reflect on their learning aims. let us turn now to the issue of affordances being furnished according to the size of an animal (gibson, 1979/1986). in the context of acquiring and using language this postulate implies that affordances are always connected with the features of the learner and user as well as with the features of a language learnt and used. it also translates into the specificity of affordances for each actor; that is, what an affordance is for one person or group of learner-users does not correspond to what it is for another individual or group. it is clear, for example, that affordances for speakers of a heritage language would be different from affordances for speakers of a national or official language in the same setting. alternatively, an affordance may be perceived by some learner-users as an affordance which is not worth making anything of. thus, it happens regularly in the immigration context that some immigrants, often the older ones, feel they will not be able to learn a new language, and so rely on continuing to communicate in their own language by living in their “bubble” – the family or community where the language of origin is regularly used. a striking example of this kind is the phenomena that characterized the soviet republics such as uzbekistan, estonia and latvia, where and when for decades ethnic russians or russian speaking people used to live but would use not more than just a very few words in uzbek, estonian or latvian respectively. the affordances, that is, native speakers, books, culture, second language exposure, situations in which the use of the second language was appropriate were many, but were not utilized by thousands of people. within the framework of second language teaching this notion that “affordances are furnished according to the size of an animal” tells us that it is sensible to individualize approaches to designing courseware, and methods and techniques of teaching/learning strategies. with regard to the mutuality of animal and environment, according to gibson (1979/1986), this signifies that the observer and the environment are complementary. for human beings the links to the environment, that is, social milieu, are not limited to the physical dimension, as in the case of animals. the emotional, moral, evaluative and intentional and cognitive vectors are no less real for people than the material composition of their environment. all of these, separately and together, offer a variety of affordances of different kinds and scope. with regard to the field of multilingualism and additional language acquisition we would define gibson’s point in terms of dynamic mutuality of identity and milieu. the dynamic mutuality of identity and milieu is both a process and a result as each specific moment and each particular sociolinguistic situation provides a specific set of affordances. it is for educators, teachers and learners to make use of all the relevant affordances, or some part of them, or none of them. affordances theory in multilingualism studies 317 the fourth key element is nesting, as termed by gibson (1979/1986). according to him, nesting refers to the fact that “smaller units are embedded in the larger units”, as canyons are nested within mountains, trees are nested within canyons and leaves are nested within trees (p. 9). nesting corresponds to (but is not the same as) the notion of niche in globalization studies and scaling properties in the complexity approach. we refer to it later in this article. an example of an affordance “nested” in a small area is the affordance for the unique whistle language used by the local inhabitants in the sierra of oaxaca, mexico – the mazatecs. specific geographical conditions, namely the rugged highland areas virtually without level ground, the hilly, mountainous terrain, and the profusion of valleys, can be seen as the particular set of affordances which lead to mazatecs’ unique way of communicating over long distances (over 2 km) without the use of phones. another example of a very small-scale phenomenon is the case of boa sr of the andaman islands, who had lived through the 2004 tsunami, the japanese occupation and the diseases originally brought by british settlers; this person was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in bo. her recent death effectively annuls the affordance for this language. more generally, in language learning it typically is the case that smaller units (e.g., a family) have a different range of affordances than larger units (e.g., a school). the above leitmotifs embody the holistic and complexity backdrop of gibson’s affordances theory. categorization of affordances there have been categorizations of affordances in literature which are relevant to the research areas both of language learning and of language in society. some researchers have proposed a division between social affordances and individual affordances (e.g., good, 2007; heft, 2001). thus, andrea scarantino (2003) suggested two scales of opposition with respect to the classification of affordances: surefire versus probability affordances and happening versus goal affordances. these can be briefly characterized as follows. sure-fire affordances are “affordances such that manifestation follows the triggering circumstances with certainty” (scarantino, 2003, p. 959); for example, cows having lush grass pastures in summer, or, closer to our domain, the provision of english as a discipline (as l1 and as l2) and as a means of instruction in the united kingdom and in australia. probability affordances, on the other hand, are “such that the manifestation follows the triggering circumstances with some positive probability p less than 1” (scarantino, 2003, p. 959-960). in early bilingual acquisition the one person one language strategy works very well in many cases probably because the larissa aronin, david singleton 318 sure-fire affordances of each language are provided for a child. some other parental strategies relying on circumstances of communication (such as a strategy of using the two languages interchangeably within and outside the family, a strategy of letting such factors as topic, situation, person, and place dictate which language should be used, or a “language-time” strategy: for example, one language in the morning and the other in the afternoon, or one language during the week and the other during the weekend), provide probability affordances for each language, which may be a less efficacious approach. goal affordances are “what makes an organism-involving event a doing” (scarantino, 2003, p. 958). happening affordances refer to manifestation in the triggering circumstances. learning esperanto would involve a doing. being exposed to polish in warsaw is a happening affordance. in other words, doings are events triggered by the selection of a goal, while happenings are not so triggered. we can imagine that goal affordances are more timeand energy-consuming and are more difficult to pick up on and implement than happening affordances. and this fact has implications for the pedagogy of language teaching and for the formulation of language policy. happening and sure-fire affordances seem to be stronger predictors of success with language learning. on the other hand, maybe for some individuals, goal setting and motivation would push them to higher success levels. one must beware, of course, of seeing the differentiation of these categories in absolute terms. as we have described elsewhere (aronin & singleton, 2010, 2012) affordances of multilingualism include social language affordances and individual language affordances, which cumulatively may be dubbed language affordances. language affordances are affordances through the realization of which communication via a language or languages or the acquisition of language or languages is possible. we call affordances offered by a particular community (e.g., world, country, family) at a specific time which relate to licensing the use and acquisition of a language or languages, social language affordances. affordances through the realization of which an individual can interact with/make use of a language or languages are individual language affordances. social language affordances are differently exemplified in each country or community. we can cite the example of the 18th century habsburg empire, where linguistic affordances were provided in respect of many languages, as described by rindler-schjerve and vetter (2007). contemporary spain provides another example of the provision of social affordances for bilingualism/multilingualism in a number of its regions – catalonia, valencia, galicia and the basque country – each region manifesting such affordances to a different scale (cenoz, 2009; guttierez, salgado, fernandez, & berg, 2007; huguet, 2007; lasagabaster, 2007; safont jordà, 2007). affordances theory in multilingualism studies 319 we might also cite the case of oxana, a ukrainian feral child, who spent about six years with the dogs in a shed behind her house (markmcdermott, 2010), thus being denied the social language affordances (aronin & singleton, 2010, 2012), a case which prompted our reflection that linguistic social affordances seem to “open the way” to individual linguistic affordances. manifestations of affordances research on multilingualism and additional language acquisition seen in an affordances perspective calls for a more exact identification of affordances. that is, we need to decide what kinds of properties in the sociolinguistic environment qualify as linguistic affordances. having made some progress in this direction, we shall find it possible to arrive at a classification of linguistic affordances that can be typically found in a community, to inventorize in detail the affordances offered in specific sociolinguistic environments for particular languages and analyse and quantify the affordances in particular sociolinguistic environments in terms of types of affordances (e.g., material, ideational, goal/happening, sure-fire/probability). affordances come in all shapes and sizes. the many and various forms in which affordances manifest themselves of course constitute great diversity and complexity. they also account for the diversity of language learning outcomes and patterns of language use. as noted above, human beings invariably entangle emotional, moral, evaluative, intentional and cognitive elements in their interactions with the environment. whereas for animals affordances are conceived as mainly involving objects and their attributes, for human beings they clearly include specifically human phenomena, such as cognitive, evaluative and emotional affordances. thus we may incorporate in our inventory of linguistic affordances: events and happenings, assumptions and common knowledge, school buildings and libraries, curricula, knowledge of languages other than target languages, the degree of professionalism of language teachers, the availability of textbooks and dictionaries for learners, computers and monitors for listening to and observing correct pronunciation, native-speaker interlocutors, cognates between the languages known by an individual, and supporting parents. all of these so widely different things, which may be tangible or intangible, are affordances. these kinds of typically human affordances seem to us valid in many formal social settings. clearly, language attitudes research, multiple language teaching and acquisition studies would benefit from looking into affordances of such types. legal provisions for granting official status to a language constitute language affordances. phenomena of past, present or future can serve as aflarissa aronin, david singleton 320 fordances for particular actions, as well as the events taking longer or shorter periods of time. some affordances are spread over vast territories, others are available only in tiny niches. let us consider some examples of affordances occurring in the form of long-time events. the colonization of africa brought affordances for english, french and portuguese to cameroon. in its turn, decolonization in africa provided affordances for the (approximately) 240 regional and tribal indigenous languages spoken in this country, and also in the long run served up affordances for the european languages. thus, the term affordance represents a general category denominating a spectrum of phenomena, which from other points of view are quite different, which may indeed seem to have nothing in common. affordances that permeate the reality of language learning and language use are of a multitude of complexions: physical, as physical objects of a range of sizes and functions, from the pens and erasers of a poor indian village to the impressive school halls, classes and dormitories of eton college, or ephemeral, as in case of attitudes, feelings or perceived social decencies. one example of the operationalization of affordances in relation to language acquisition is the study by dewaele (2010), where he links knowledge of typologically related languages to stronger affordances. how affordances work now let us see how affordances in their different manifestations work in society with regard to the acquisition and use of languages. for this let us consider the already mentioned lost affordance of boa sr and the language which has died together with her. in other instances of endangered languages, if the affordance of last speakers is picked up in a timely and energetic manner, the language may be saved. it is often the case, however, that by the time such an affordance is perceived, it is already too late for this single affordance to suffice. other affordances have to be supplied in order for a language to be rescued: a thoroughgoing accumulation of speakers with good competence in the language, books, dictionaries, finance for collectors of and researchers into language data, schools, legal provisions, opportunities for the language to be used among the community, and so forth. from such experiences and facts we can deduce the proposition that typically – to have an impact – the relevant affordances have to be available in sets. in second language learning, for performing an action or realizing a goal – such as memorizing ten words, understanding an l2 text, or, more ambitiously, mastering the basic structure of a language – one separate affordance is not enough. rather, sets or packages of affordances are required to be furnished in order that the affordances theory in multilingualism studies 321 action may be performed or the goal achieved. a set of affordances would include a variety of types: actions and material objects, emotions and feelings, and social affordances relative to a given community or country. in the field of language teaching, the tertiary didactics developed by hufeisen and neuner (2004) in fact lists the set of affordances that were already available for the bilinguals who commenced the study of their third language (in that particular case english as l3 after german as l2). the work on receptive multilingualism by marx (2007) in effect reveals affordances relevant to acquiring receptive skills generated by the interaction of the characteristics of the languages and the traits of the learners. marx (2007) described a study in which speakers of german, with some knowledge of english, french, spanish, italian, hungarian or japanese, were asked to read texts in one of the germanic languages unknown to them – dutch, swedish, norwegian or icelandic – and then answer seven questions in writing. in this study the author did not use the term affordances, but from our point of view she essentially demonstrated the effective deployment of affordances which a specific group of people, namely speakers of german, can make use of in order to acquire a passive knowledge of linguistically close languages. another illustration of affordances operating in concert comes from the sociology of language field. it relates to the classic concept of domain, developed by joshua fishman (1965) in his early seminal work “who speaks what language to whom and when?” having analysed multilingual settings in order to establish the rationale behind the language choice of bilingual speakers, fishman discovered that in stable bilingual contexts, the use of one language rather than another in certain situations is not accidental, but is customarily associated with specific settings, topics, and groups of interlocutors. he defined a domain as a “cluster of social situations typically constrained by a common set of behaviour rules’ and as a “social nexus which brings people together for a cluster of purposes” (p. 75). in our view a domain can also be defined from the point of view of affordances theory as a peculiar cluster of affordances which together (as a set) ensure the use of particular language in a given setting. a domain, thus, is an environment which provides a substantial number of affordances favouring a specific language or specific languages (as opposed to another or other languages) in a multilingual society (aronin & singleton, 2010, p. 122; 2012, p. 180). a language domain is what it is, because it is the space-time where the most suitable affordances in respect of a given language or set of languages are conglomerated. this is why a domain is the most conducive time and space for a particular kind of language speaker to use a particular language or particular languages. in such an understanding we can consider the notion of larissa aronin, david singleton 322 domain in the initial characterization offered by fishman, who identified five domains: family, education, employment, friendship, and government and administration, but we may also broaden the focus to any desired extent in regard to a particular situation. the complexity approach and the affordances approach make it clear why actual practices do not always allow us strictly to predict language choice in respect of a given meeting point of affordances, why sometimes domains have fuzzy borders and volatile outcomes. the affordances which happen to occur together within a particular domain are not necessarily perceived, or, if perceived, are not necessarily effectuated for various reasons outweighing the imperative to act on the affordance in a particular situation. for instance, in the work domain, where in countries such as poland people (both immigrants and host minority language speakers) typically speak the official language of a country, language choice may be diverted by the happenstance of several speakers of the same minority language gathering by chance in a room for the performance of a given task. the fact of the possibility of countless significant diversions from any particular expected outcome is also in line with the so called “butterfly effect” in complexity theory, the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. summing up how affordances work, we can state that: sets of affordances are required to be available in order that a given action may be performed, a given goal attained. each action or goal requires the availability of its own specific set of affordances. exactly which, how many, and in what configuration affordances need to be present depends on the particular nature of the relevant actiongoal, actor (speaker) and environment (sociolinguistic setting). the practical implication of this perspective for researchers would be that it is of importance to identify the set of affordances pertaining to any particular goal. after determining the number and kinds of affordances, or specific affordances, it would be possible to start considering whether and how to make the vital affordances perceivable, to facilitate their effectuation, or to design the lacking affordances if needed. further theoretical considerations with regard to the theoretical dimension in this section of the article we will (a) argue for the significance of affordances theory in the context of multilingualism and language teaching, and (b) put forward a model integrating the basics of multilingualism affordances theory and the complexity approach. affordances theory in multilingualism studies 323 the concept of affordances would be very beneficial to our field if it were developed further, to the point where it specifically engaged with issues in multilingualism and second language acquisition. affordances theory is internally consistent and appropriate both in its abstract theoretical manifestation and in its variegated and detailed factual, material form. it is very applicable to the interrelated fields of knowledge associated with language, cognition and society. in contrast to other fields of research, where particular features of affordances are privileged, in multilingualism studies, virtually all dimensions of affordances are relevant (e.g., perception of affordances, effectuation of affordances, creation of affordances, identification of affordances) depending to an extent on the particular area of interest such as language acquisition, language teaching, language learning, family multilingualism, language policy, and so forth. the affordances approach accords well with the basic tripartite division of the main elements in multilingualism into speaker, settings and language (edwards, 1994). for these three basic elements we use a slightly different nomenclature: user, environment and language (aronin & singleton, 2012). the slight change of terminology is due to the fact that since 1994, when edwards’s book was published, the purview and perspectives of multilingualism studies have been broadened considerably. in response to this change we use what seems to us a more comprehensive terminology: user covers not only speakers but also signers and writers, and environment captures a wider range of phenomena than setting. accommodating affordances theory to multilingualism studies we might represent the three basic elements of multilingualism using the triangle in figure 1 . setting user language (s) figure 1 affordances-generating tripartite frame of reference the triangle enables us to visualize how affordances are generated at the cross-section of each two of the three sides of this triangle and of the three of them: in the space of interaction between setting and language, between language and user, between user and setting, as well in the interaction involving setting, user and language together. we may imagine that the imagiaffordances larissa aronin, david singleton 324 nary space inside the triangle is brim-full of affordances, specific for each particular setting, user, language or combination of languages. the triangle model emphasizes the necessary and complex mutual trilateral interconnections and interactions between the learner/speaker and the milieu/context (gibson’s actor and environment), which generate affordances specific for each situation. with the help of this model we can consider affordances provided by settings to users and languages at any level of detail, with the desired degree of reference. the triangle may, as we have seen, be looked upon as a tripartite framework containing affordances generated by the interaction of the three basic aspects of multilingualism: user, environment and language. for each particular situation of any scale we can envisage a triangle (smaller or larger) specific to this scale containing affordances particular to the situation. for each particular situation, the affordances can be identified and then an informed decision on the value of their use can be taken. thus, the coalescence of the three cornerstones of multilingualism, namely settings, user and language, and the concept of affordances, can prove fruitful. the coadunation of affordances theory with a consideration of the three basic aspects of multilingualism yields a comprehensive and holistic view which is in line with the complexity science. gibson (1979/1986) himself pointed out the adherence of his theory to “the kind of thinking that is beginning to be attempted in what is loosely called systems theory” (p. 2). at present, about 25 years later, with the further development of dynamic systems theory and its application to multilingualism and additional language acquisition, the connection is more (and increasingly) obvious (on the complexity approach in the field see e.g., aronin & singleton, 2008; herdina & jessner, 2002; larsen-freeman, 1997, 2002, 2006). as already indicated, the tripartite frame of reference described above (figure 1) can be used as a methodological tool for zooming into sociolinguistic or language teaching contexts of any scale, representing particular affordances generated by the interplay of language, user and setting elements. one suggestion in this connection (made by one of the anonymous reviewers of this article) would be the use of multi-level modelling (hierarchical linear models, or nested models) for such data. in multi-level analysis data sets are hierarchially nested, which might provide a suitable statistical framework for the multiple layers of the phenomena in question. in terms of complexity science the model and the reality it represents have scaling qualities. this basic notion of complexity thinking refers to the concept of a similar pattern or appearance being present at many different levels of scale. one of the basic examples of scaling qualities and self-similaraffordances theory in multilingualism studies 325 sets, the sierpinski triangle shown in figure 2 is a fractal2 which shows the idea of self-similarity clearly. each part of this strictly self-similar structure contains an exact replica of the whole. a b c d e figure 2 the sierpinski triangle we can imagine that triangle a in figure 2 represents a frame with affordances for teaching english as a foreign language in poland; triangle b (the big one embracing three smaller black triangles and one smaller white triangle) represents frames with affordances with respect to teaching efl in the three major polish cities; triangle c represents frames with affordances for teaching efl at the schools of these cities; triangle d represents frames with affordances for teaching efl in individual classes, and so on. obviously, the real content of each triangle/frame, that is, the set of affordances, would not be exactly the same in different cities, schools and classes, but we may have reason to believe that they would be similar. this is because each frame contains the same three variables, elements which are always present in language teaching or language use: language, user and setting. some elements may be less to the fore than the others in certain situations, but they are always present. this model based on the sierpinski triangle (figure 2) can also be interpreted as a representation of the language domains as taken more widely. thus, for example, triangle a may represent the educational domain in a country; triangle b may represent the tertiary, secondary and primary educational levels; triangle c may represent particular kinds of schools; triangle d may represent individual schools; triangle e may represent specific classes, and so on. these examples may appear to resemble a traditional hierarchy but they in fact do not. the model incorporates and presents a complexity view based on a set of underlying assumptions which differ from those of classical science (byrne, 1997; capra, 2005). it allows us to reflect the complexity of the real world, while recognizing the common constitutive elements: settings, user and language. 2 a fractal is a geometric pattern that is repeated at ever smaller scales to produce irregular shapes and surfaces that cannot be represented by classical geometry (fractal, n.d.). larissa aronin, david singleton 326 each scale, however small, of the sierpinski set, would generate its own affordances and its own unique ways of realization in the real world. here a quotation from le page (1998) would be appropriate. he considers the mismatch between a real world and traditional approach “a theoretical problem” (p. 68). in this connection he cites strevens (as cited in kachru, 1982) as follows: . . . a central problem of linguistic study is how to reconcile a convenient and necessary fiction with a great mass of inconvenient facts. the fiction is the notion of a ‘language’ – english, chinese, navajo, and kashmiri. the facts reside in the mass diversity exhibited in the actual performance of individuals when they use a given language. (p. 23) such a view is dissimilar to traditional approaches where researchers endeavour to fit whatever they study into clear forms, formulas and explanations. the belief that one can understand the world by breaking things down into their components and ignoring the relationships between the subsystems out of which a system is composed is known as the reductionist paradigm. the contrary view, asserted by complexity thinking, emphasizes: (a) that the whole is not the sum of its parts; and (b) that the world around us is characterized by irregularity, fragmentariness, fuzziness and even chaos. in this light, in research we should aim at detecting the emergent patterns of the real world rather than confine ourselves to the traditional search for stable regularities. complexity thinking is concerned with relationship as unit of analysis (cf. capra, 2005; cilliers, 1998; dent, 1999). therefore the complexity angle of vision makes the relationship between constraints and affordances, a matter of our special interest. we might wish to turn our attention to the properties of the multilingual environment that afford for using multiple languages or constrain using most or some of them. affordances for some languages may be constraints for other languages, particular affordances for some languages may be better perceived and taken up, and for other languages for some reason (we would like to know which) perceived in a worse light. some affordances within those for a particular language may be better perceived and better picked up, others not perceived at all. and, in some settings, routinely, only some kinds of affordances are taken up, while others are neglected. the questions for sociologists of language might be as follows: which are the affordances that are overlooked and which are those that are easily detected? what accounts for the particularities of each situation? specialists in didactics and language acquisition would surely be interested in investigating other issues: which affordances work better for the acquisition of an l2? are these different from those which favour an l3? are such affordances readily perceived? is there a justified necessity to ensure that particular affordances of language acquisition are effectuated? such questions would oblige the researcher to assess the degree of percepaffordances theory in multilingualism studies 327 tion and takeup of specific language learning/teaching affordances, and also to identify affordances that are needed but are not in place. finally, to illustrate the foregoing, we will give a brief example of a pilot study using the affordances approach carried out with the aim of identifying which affordances are furnished in particular environments for particular aims. while the general elements – language, setting and users – were largely shared with the wider arabic population of israel, the special focus of the research task, undertaken by nour igbaria, an m.ed. student at oranim academic college of education, was on a small “triangle.” igbaria’s (2010) aim was to identify the affordances that are present for the english language (that is for using english) in a particular city, um elfahim, most of the citizens of which are arab citizens of israel. she conducted ten interviews in a shop selling mobile phones, a place where a researcher has access to people of different walks of life, gender, age and education. the participants were interviewed in their mother tongue, arabic, about their perception of the presence of english in their environment. in terms of gibson’s theory, the student was trying to detect their ambient vision of affordances for english in this particular socio-political location. among the preliminary findings was that most of these affordances are material objects; that is, the english language reaches these citizens of um elfahim via the material objects they use daily, rather than through reading articles or any kind of writing or any other kind of use in everyday life. although these societal language affordances present themselves in this locality without distinctive marking for men or women, females seemed to effectuate more affordances for english than the males: they mentioned english perceived by them on clothes, in names of shops, on bags, and so on. thus, the study detected a particular manifestation of affordances (material objects). the study also alerted us to a possible trend: the more educated participants perceived more affordances for english. the possible explanation for this correlation is that the more educated citizens of the town encounter english more, in the context of their academic studies, than those who study less. adolescents show more interest and notice for english affordances. they listen to music and watch videoclips in english. igbaria (2010) came to the conclusion that age differences and level of education (probably, more correctly, length of studies) seem to affect the awareness of the individual of the affordances relative to english in their environment. we may conclude that the present affordances cluster of this town consists mainly of material culture affordances. even from this mini ethnological inquiry we may infer a hypothesis regarding the teaching of english in the town in question with respect to different age-groups and their learning environments and about the learning materials they are likely to appreciate and use effectively. larissa aronin, david singleton 328 to our mind, not only a complexity approach, but also classic qualitative and quantitative methodologies are possible ways forward. the present article, however, does not seem to us to be the place for the further development of such research possibilities. rather, we would invite our readers to join us in this enterprise, and would very much welcome suggestions concerning the mounting of specific collaborative studies. conclusions in this article we have briefly explored the original idea of affordances with a view to understanding how this concept translates into the context of multilingualism research. we have noted that the affordances approach is compatible and associable with the fundamental theories used in this area. we have suggested that virtually all branches of multilingualism studies can benefit from employing the concept of affordances and from drawing on the affordances approach. we have suggested further that language teaching may benefit from particular studies referring to specific situations in concrete, practical terms. while in our previous publications we have emphasized the explanatory value of affordances, here we direct attention to the need and possibility for researching and exploiting the practical implications of the affordances approach. we have also arrived at the conclusion that the term affordance denominates a spectrum of phenomena; the types and manifestations of affordances are many and manifold. we have continued the discussion of the categorization of affordances by claiming that the relevant affordances are actions, objects, possibilities, events, facts and realities, historical events and memories, cultural conditions, emotions and sensitivities, thus physical or emotional phenomena, phenomena of the past, present or future, phenomena of long or short duration, phenomena spread over vast territories or available only in tiny niches. we have stated that affordances function in sets, each set relating to a particular outcome. our claim is that sets of affordances are required to be available in order that a given action may be performed, a given goal attained, that each action/goal requires the availability of its own specific set of affordances. exactly which, how many, and in what configuration affordances need to be present clearly depends on the particular nature of the relevant actiongoal, actor(s) and environment. finally we have proposed a model integrating affordances and complexity approaches which can serve as a tool for investigation in regard to the multilingualism and to multiple language acquisition. our string view is that we should make full use of the lens of affordances in our analysis of multiple language learning and use, as we believe that affordances can genuinely shed new light on multilingual phenomena. affordances theory in multilingualism studies 329 references aronin, l., & singleton, d. 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(2007). multiple language learning in the light of the theory of affordances. innovation in language teaching and learning, 1, 83-96. van lier, leo. 2007. action-based teaching, autonomy and identity. innovation in language teaching and learning, 1, 46-65. 517 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (3). 2017. 517-534 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.3.8 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl l2 acquisition of spanish dative clitics by english and dutch learners m. ángeles escobar-álvarez the national distance education university (uned), madrid, spain maescobar@flog.uned.es abstract this article examines the second language acquisition (sla) of spanish dative clitics in clitic doubling (cld) structures that are closely related to the double object construction (doc) in english and dutch. it also addresses the question of how adult english and dutch speakers learning l2 spanish in a formal setting develop knowledge and use of the animacy constraint in the target language, which is different from the first language (l1) counterparts. the role of transfer in acquiring new syntactic structures has been taken into account, where dative clitics appear and animate objects are marked by the dative preposition ‘to.’ new findings are obtained on cld and the spanish animacy constraint from a grammaticality judgement task (gjt), completed by english and dutch learners at b1 and b2 cefr levels. the difficulties learners experienced were not always due to negative l1 transfer, but also related to the complexity of the argument structure where the clitic is inserted. this has clear implications for the teaching of pronominal elements which are closely related to different syntactic configurations in spanish. keywords: dative alternation; dative clitics; clitic doubling; argument structure; animacy 1. introduction dative alternation is a well-known phenomenon in second language acquisition (sla). recent studies, including bresnan, cueni, nikitina, and baayen (2007) for m. ángeles escobar-álvarez 518 l2 english, and jäschke and plag (2016) for german-english interlanguage, have shown that the two alternative forms are not acquired at the same time. in particular, some factors, such as animacy and syntactic complexity, are key to successfully predicting which structure is chosen in a given context in english (en), either with a prepositional object, as in (1a), or without a preposition in the socalled double object construction (doc), as depicted in (1b): (1) a. en. mary gave the wonderful watch to her mother. b. en. mary gave her mother the wonderful watch. other languages like dutch (and spanish also allow dative alternation with a prepositional phrase structure and a doc, similar to the english examples in (1). as illustrated by the examples in (2), dutch (du) allows dative alternation in similar semantic contexts forcing the prepositional dative to occur at the end of the sentence:1 (2) a. du. anna heeft het boek aan haar student gegeven. ana has the book to her student given ‘anna has given the book to her student.’ b. du. *anna heeft aan haar student het boek gegeven. anna has to her student the book given (cf. anna heeft haar student het boek gegeven.) however, spanish (sp) differs with respect to english and dutch, since an animated object introduced by the dative preposition can appear either at the end of the sentence or in the doc configuration. the doc counterpart necessarily includes a doubling dative clitic, as in (3). therefore, the acquisition of spanish dative clitics along with the spanish dative alternation represents an interesting comparison to study in sla. (3) a. sp. maría entregó el precioso reloj a su madre. ‘mary gave the wonderful watch to her mother.’ b. sp. maría *(le) entregó a su madre el precioso reloj. mary dat-cl gave to her mother the wonderful watch. ‘mary gave her mother the wonderful watch.’ research on the acquisition of dative alternation in spanish as an l2 by english speakers has reported higher accuracy with prepositional phrases at the 1 like most germanic languages, dutch exhibits v2 phenomena. and in main clauses, the inflected verb goes into the second position, while the arguments remain within the vp, along with the past participle. l2 acquisition of spanish dative clitics by english and dutch learners 519 end of the sentence over double objects (cuervo, 2007; imaz agirre, 2015; perpiñan & montrul, 2006,). following cuervo (2003), the spanish doc is an instance of dative clitic doubling (cld). note that the animate indirect object is next to the verb, and so is the dative clitic in the previous example in (3b). yet a closer comparison reveals some mismatches between english and dutch doc, on the one hand, and spanish cld, on the other hand, as mentioned above. another irregularity deals with the so-called “animacy” effect, wherein the recipient (indirect object) must be animate in the doc configuration in both english and dutch, but not in spanish cld. note that both recipients in the examples in (4) are next to the verb and are likewise introduced by the dative preposition ‘to’ regardless of whether they are animate or inanimate. interestingly, the animacy constraint in spanish needs to be formulated in different terms. in fact, only direct objects seem to be subject to animacy, which explains why animate direct objects must be preceded by the preposition a ‘to’, as illustrated by the minimal pair in (5): (4) a. sp. ana le dio a su estudiante el libro. ana cldat gave to her student the book ‘ana gave her student the book.’ b. sp. juan le puso al coche gasolina. juan cldat put to the car the petrol ‘juan put petrol in the car.’ (5) a. sp. ana visitó a sus padres. ana visited to her parents ‘ana visited her parents.’ b. sp. *ana visitó sus padres ana visited her parents this article reports empirical data on the acquisition of spanish dative clitics with cld by speakers of english and dutch, who share a similar dative alternation in their l1 but are faced with a different dative alternation in the foreign language. the study compares the l2 acquisition of spanish cld along with the l2 acquisition of objects marked by the dative preposition by two different groups of english and dutch learners in foreign language settings, based on their performance in a comprehension task, for the first time to the best of our knowledge. the objective is to examine the development of dative clitics in their foreign interlanguage. analyzing the dative alternation in l2 spanish is also key to l2 grammar teaching as it presents an interesting dilemma: deciding which structure needs to be taught first. and in this case, one assumes that sla can be extended to explicit teaching and learning, which cannot change the natural order of acquisition. in order to determine the linguistic phenomena that can be critical, and hence relevant m. ángeles escobar-álvarez 520 for the present study, this study focuses on the l2 acquisition of spanish dative clitics with a special emphasis on cld: when the recipient precedes the theme and as a consequence is doubled by a clitic, as illustrated by the previous examples in (3). the paper is structured as follows. section 2 mentions some previous studies on the acquisition of animate objects in spanish as an l2; then section 3 presents an analysis of the syntax of dative clitics. section 4 explains the method. section 5 discusses the results. finally, section 6 deals with the interpretation of the findings and their implications for grammar teaching in the classroom of spanish as a foreign language. 2. the acquisition of animate objects in l2 spanish previous studies have investigated the l2 acquisition of spanish animate objects marked by the dative preposition a ‘to,’ including after instruction or feedback on this particular structure (cf. martoccio, 2012 and all references cited therein). in particular, martoccio (2012) found a wide array of difficulties regarding the use of the dative preposition a in front of affected objects, replicating previous and current research studies such as montrul and bowles (2009), farley and mccollam (2004), guijarro-fuentes and marinis (2007) and guijarro-fuentes (2012), among others. martoccio (2012) argues that difficult structures need to be explicitly taught in order to increase learners’ awareness of them. in martoccio’s study, instructed groups improved significantly more than uninstructed groups when tested on those structures not found in their l1. within the generative tradition, transfer effects have been found in the case of l2 acquisition of spanish cld. bruhn de garavito’s (2000) study presented data confirming that l1 english learners could not distinguish grammatical double objects from ungrammatical ones when the dative was not animate. in cuervo’s (2007) study, english learners performed at chance level when the dative argument was inanimate, rejecting possessor datives in these contexts. interestingly, sikorska’s (2009) experimental data on the acquisition of spanish cld by l1 polish learners also showed chance performance when the dative argument was not animate. this finding supports the claim that these learners misanalyzed the cld construction and mistakenly considered it to be constrained by the animacy of the dative clitic, which is a negative l1 transfer effect. unlike english doc or its polish counterpart, the spanish cld is not constrained by an animacy constraint on the dative. rather, the animacy constraint is present with some direct objects, as discussed below. l2 acquisition of spanish dative clitics by english and dutch learners 521 3. the analysis of dative clitics in cld this study addresses the question of how cld is acquired in l2 spanish, bearing in mind that two different classes of datives are examined. when dative determiner phrases (dps) go with verbs such as give or introduce, two core arguments are presented, and the dative is usually interpreted as goal. in addition, some dative dps that are interpreted as benefactives in romance languages are therefore interpreted as non-core datives since they typically go with other types of verbs traditionally considered transitives like visitar ‘visit’ or conocer ‘meet.’ hence, they are analyzed as affected objects introduced by the spanish dative preposition a. thus, the experimental question to be raised is how core and noncore dative clitics with these two types of verbs are acquired in l2 spanish. the question of what grammatical elements need to be learnt in order to target a different distribution of verbal arguments cannot be investigated without making some further assumptions about the argument structure of the verb including all its participants: agent, theme and goal. the first assumption is that internal arguments (the direct object and the indirect object) are internal to the event semantics and help construct the event. the external argument (the subject and the adjunct) are event modifiers. following a generative grammar approach, arguments are dps and the subject is related to the event by being the specifier of the verbal head. applicative constructions are analyzed likewise, allowing both internal and external arguments in similar positions next to an applicative head. following the argument structure above, the analysis of the english dative alternation as previously illustrated in (1) posits the idea that the doc alternative in (1b) exhibits a functional projection responsible for the case assignment of the non-core internal argument her mother, namely an applicative head, as in pylkkänen’s (2008) analysis, as depicted in (6b) below. a similar analysis including an intermediate applicative head can also be extended to the l1 dutch doc since indirect objects (without any dative preposition) also precede direct objects, as illustrated by its dutch counterpart in (2) above. (6) a. [vp [dpagent mary] [v’ [v’ gave [dpobject the wonderful watch] ] [ppgoal to [dp her mother ] ] ] ] b. [vp [dpagent mary] [v gave [applp [dpbenef her mother] [appl e [vp [v e ] [dp object the wonderful watch] ] ] ] ] ] as for spanish, according to cuervo’s (2003) analysis of benefactive constructions, we can assume that the dative clitic in examples such as those depicted in (4a) is inserted in the applicative head between the functional lowercase v, where the external subject is projected, and the v-domain, that is, the m. ángeles escobar-álvarez 522 thematic environment for internal arguments, as depicted in (7).2 the clitic will further incorporate into the verb as an instance of head movement from its canonical position in appl. (7) [vp [dpagent ana] [v dio [applp [dpbenef al estudiante] [appl le [vp [v e ] [dpobject el libro] ] ] ] ] ] in the literature on romance languages, other analyses can be found which have accounted for the presence of clitics in ditransitive configurations with non-core arguments, such as in torrego (2010) on the spanish phenomenon of leismo.3 interestingly, laughren and eisenchlas’s (2006) analysis claims that the same applicative head is responsible for affected objects, which are crucially definite and animated, and therefore preceded by the dative preposition a, as illustrated by the minimal pair in (5) above. this account predicts that the affected or animated object preceded by the dative preposition a is in complementary distribution with a second dative phrase doubled by a clitic in ditransitive configurations with verbs like presentar ‘introduce.’ this prediction is well supported by the examples in (8) below. note that the affected or animated object su jefe ‘his boss’ in the sentence depicted in (8a) is, however, in complementary distribution with the indirect object a su mujer ‘to his wife’ doubled by the dative clitic le in the sentence depicted in (8b) since it is now preceded by the dative preposition a. (8) a. juan le presentó a su mujer su jefe. juan cldat introduced to his wife his boss ‘juan introduced his wife his boss.’ b. *juan le presentó a su mujer a su jefe. juan introduced to his wife to his boss extending laughren and eisenchlas’s (2006) analysis to the grammatical counterpart in (8a), as in (9), the same applicative head is responsible for the 2 cuervo (2003) extends pylkkänen’s (2008) work on applicatives and argues in favor of the existence of a doc structure in spanish, particularly in the case of cld which can be extended to the examples in (4a) with the assumption that the dative clitic is heading the low applicative head as in the analysis in the text. the agreement of the number feature between the dative clitic and the doubled phrase (cf. ana les dio los libros a los estudiantes/ana cldatplur gave the book to the students), follows straightforwardly. the clitic will further incorporate into the verb as an instance of head movement from its canonical position in appl. 3 the so-called leísmo involves replacing the accusative clitic with the dative, when the do can be doubled by the dative le producing apparent clitic doubled constructions since the features [+human] and/or [+affected] are also required. l2 acquisition of spanish dative clitics by english and dutch learners 523 presence of the dative preposition in front of animate objects as well as for the dative clitic heading the applicative head, as indicated by the tree in (9). further evidence for this unitary analysis comes from the fact that the cluster of argumental clitics that includes an accusative clitic and a dative clitic (cldat + clacc) bearing different indexes (i, j) are in complementary distribution, when referring to two animated objects, as illustrated by the minimal pair depicted in (10). (9) [vp [dpagent juan] [v presento [ [applp [dpbenef a su mujer] [appl le [vp [v e] [dpobject su jefe] ] ] ] ] ] (10) a. *lei loj presentó a su mujeri. cldat clacc introduced to his wife b. sei loj presentó a su mujeri. clrefl clacc introduced to his wife ‘he introduced him to his wife.’ a dative clitic cannot double an indirect object in the presence of an accusative clitic since it also doubles an affected object and competes for the same applicative head, which explains the ungrammaticality of the example in (10a). in contrast, the combination of the reflexive clitic se together with the accusative clitic lo is possible, as illustrated by the grammatical sentence in (10b). this possibility has been argued to constitute evidence for the presence of an additional applicative head for reflexive datives (escobar & teomiro, 2016; teomiro, 2013). an analysis that includes a different applicative head for the clitic se in french can also be found in boneh and nash (2011). 4. method the main objective of this paper is to present new experimental data concerning the acquisition of spanish dative clitics by english and dutch adults learning spanish as a foreign language in a formal context. the fact that these learners need to discriminate between two configurations where dative clitics appear, namely as clitic pronouns with ditranstive verbs and as doubling clitics in cld will be discussed. 4.1. grammaticality judgment tests it is now generally accepted that sla requires implicit and explicit learning. following ellis (2004, 2009), one way to test metalinguistic knowledge is by using some reliable mechanisms like grammaticality judgment tests (gjt). in this way we could be able to obtain metalinguistic judgments referring to the two main questions of our study, namely: m. ángeles escobar-álvarez 524 1. do participants in our study discriminate between the dative clitics that appear in each of the two syntactic configurations as discussed above? 2. are they aware of the animacy constraint associated with animate objects marked by the dative case marker a in l2 spanish? in relation to these questions, two alternative hypotheses were considered. the first one is that l1 transfer could have a negative effect on the acquisition of apparently closely related syntactic structures. or, on the other hand, implicit knowledge could complement and counterbalance that negative effect by acquiring the animacy constraint associated with the target syntactic structures. if the first hypothesis is correct, it would be expected that the spanish cld would always be a challenge for l1 english or l1 dutch learners, provided that they start with a doc configuration constrained by a different animacy effect on the dative next to the verb, as discussed above. on the other hand, if learners had already acquired both syntactic configurations, they would have implicit knowledge and would naturally select a number of features in the l2 in order to construct each syntactic structure (chomsky, 1995; lardiere, 2008; van patten, 2011), namely the features that conform to particular elements functioning as syntactic heads like appl, to form the new syntactic configurations, as mentioned above. 4.2. participants two groups of english and dutch learners participated in the study. participants were university students taking spanish as a foreign language in the second or third year at two different universities: the university of bristol (uk) and the university of ghent (belgium). all of them had studied spanish in secondary school before attending college. as for their educational background at university, the learners had attended formal spanish courses using a communicative approach for two years prior. the first group consisted of a total of 69 english learners, with an age range of 22, enrolled in a spanish course (b1+ level) that was divided into three different groups at the university of bristol. the second group consisted of a total of 73 dutch learners, with an age range of 24, enrolled in three different spanish courses (b1 = 28, b1+ = 24 and b2 = 21) at the university of ghent. all courses followed a communicative teaching approach and the grammar of spanish dative clitics had not been explicitly taught to any of the groups.4 4 credit has to be given to the students who participated in the study along with their instructors, especially prof. ana ramos (bristol university) and prof. patrick goethals (ghent university). l2 acquisition of spanish dative clitics by english and dutch learners 525 4.3. procedure learners in each group were asked to freely participate in the study. they were given a comprehension test preceded by some instructions on how to complete it. the task was presented as an optional exercise to revise their grammar. students had as much time as they needed. in order to motivate them, the students were offered a certificate of participation. the materials consisted of a grammaticality judgment test that contained five items as a placement test, followed by another 35 experimental grammar items. all items were distributed on the same answer sheet. as for procedure, each participant had to complete the test on their own. in the case of grammatical sentences, the correct answer was “yes.” and in the case of ungrammatical sentences, the correct answer was “no.” all of these questions (test items and placement test items) had to be answered next to each sentence on the questionnaire, which was distributed amongst the two groups of participants (english and dutch groups) in a formal setting in the classroom of spanish as foreign language, with a time limit of 15 minutes. both studies were approved by each corresponding institution and were performed in accordance with ethical standards. 4.4. materials in this section we describe the instrument designed to measure the sample items and the response options. the study implemented a comprehension task based on a gjt, where inanimate datives and animate/direct objects appeared together with a large number of other experimental items, which were employed as distractors. the test included 41 test sentences, eight of which were test items for the present study. the distribution of the test items consisted of four grammatical spanish applicative dative constructions and four ungrammatical ones. the test items were presented with very different verbs and in different configurations listed in a counterbalanced order to impel learners to use their unconscious knowledge of the target language. hence, the test contained grammatical sentences with a dative clitic, and ungrammatical sentences without either an obligatory dative clitic or the dative case marker a, as depicted in (11). firstly, grammatical experimental sentences included cld with a dative clitic after the verb in the imperative form, as in (11a); cld with an animate dative phrase, as in (11b); cld with an inanimate phrase doubled by a dative clitic, as in (11c); and, cld in a ditransitive configuration with a reflexive dative, as in (11d). (11) a. cómprale a mi madre una caja de bombones. (cf. item 3) buy her my mother a box of chocolate m. ángeles escobar-álvarez 526 ‘get my mother a box of chocolates.’ b. juan le dio a maria el libro. (cf. item 14) juan cldat gave to mary the book ‘juan gave mary the book.’ c. juan le puso gasolina al coche. (cf. item 6) juan cldat put petrol to the car ‘juan filled the car with petrol.’ d. alberto se vio la película en inglés. (cf. item 20) alberto clref saw the film in english ‘alberto watched the film in english.’ as for the ungrammatical sentences, different linguistic contexts for dative alternation were included. these contexts consisted of a number of cld configurations without a dative clitic, as illustrated in the examples in (12): a fronted dative not doubled by a dative clitic, as in (12a); a ditransitive configuration with two animate objects without a dative clitic or a dative case marker, as in (12b); and a ditransitive configuration without a dative clitic or a dative case marker, as in (12c). (12) a. *a maria se ha quemado la comida sin querer. (cf. item 16) to mary clref has burnt the food by accident b. *ana presentó a su novio su madre. (cf. item 22) ana introduced to her boyfriend her mother c. *manolo leyó el libro su hijo. (cf. item 38) manolo read the book his son in this sense, a grammatical sentence with the relevant morphology of the applicative structure was tested together with an ungrammatical sentence lacking the morphosyntactic dative marker (i.e., the dative clitic, the dative preposition or the reflexive dative clitic), among other distractor sentences. the task for all test items above, which appears in the appendix at the end of this article, consisted of indicating whether the sentences sounded natural or not in the learner’s l2 spanish. we believed that this was more informative in terms of their unconscious competence than having to say whether the sentences were grammatical or ungrammatical. 5. results 5.1. placement test items results for the placement test appear in table 1. in this case, the following items were tested: (a) the correct use of the spanish verbs ser/estar ‘be’ with individual predicates (cf. item 2), (b) the correct use of the auxiliary verb haber ‘have’ l2 acquisition of spanish dative clitics by english and dutch learners 527 in a present perfect verb form (cf. item 3) and (c) the correct use of morphological agreement for 1st person singular (cf. item 7). table 1 placement test results: correct response participants item 2 item 5 item 7 dutch group (73) 78% 98% 91% english group (75) 62% 87% 77% table 1 indicates the correct response means for the three relevant placement items represented by ungrammatical sentences in spanish, assuming that rejection of ungrammatical items can be a measure of explicit knowledge (gutiérrez, 2013). in particular, the placement items range from incorrect use of the spanish verb ser (item 2) to the spanish auxiliary verb haber (item 5) to verbal inflectional agreement of first person singular (item 7). an independent-samples t test showed that, as far as language proficiency is concerned, there was a significant effect for l1, t(df) = 2.64, p = .009, with the dutch speakers significantly outperforming the english speakers. 5.2. experimental test items table 2 indicates the correct response means of the experimental conditions ranging from the grammatical (g) sentences including a dative clitic (cf. items 3, 6, 14 and 20) to the ungrammatical (ug) sentences without an obligatory clitic (cf. items 16, 22 and 38). table 2 experimental test results: grammatical and ungrammatical sentences participants item 3 (g) item 6 (g) item 14 (g) item 20 (g) item 16 (ug) item 22 (ug) item 38 (ug) group 1 82% 42% 82% 32% 50% 71% 93% group 2 35% 39% 39% 18% 28% 35% 42% likewise, in order to determine whether the difference between the experimental test conditions was significant between groups, a t-test analysis was conducted, contrasting the means of both of them. table 3 below contains the resulting values per each experimental item. considering these statistical values, the dutch learners of spanish performed better than english learners in both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, especially regarding the cld condition (items 3 and 14), and the animate object condition (items 22 and 38). both groups, however, had similar difficulties with non-animate dative clitics (item 6) and reflexive dative clitics (items 16 and 20). note that significant differences between both groups were obtained except for the latter conditions (items 6,16 and 20). m. ángeles escobar-álvarez 528 table 3 t-test results: l1-dutch group versus l1-english group t test item 3 item 6 item 14 item 20 item 16 item 22 item 38 t 3.93 0.26 3.58 1.22 1.65 2.81 4.65 p .000 .791 .001 .224 .104 .007 .000 the fact that the dutch students obtained better results than the english students on the placement test items above indicates that the former had a higher level of spanish. yet, there were no significant differences in terms of the experimental items regarding a complex argument structure, such as item 6 (cld with an inanimate dative), item 16 (cld with a reflexive dative clitic) or item 20 (a ditransitive structure with a reflexive dative clitic). this result clearly suggests that both english and dutch learners had difficulties with the cld condition and with reflexive dative clitics in complex argument structures. our results also pinpoint a similar tendency to reject the dative clitic in two-participant events deriving the doc alternative in l2 spanish, regardless of the learner’s proficiency level. this indicates that there is a particular difficulty in acquiring clitics in complex argument structures, as has also been observed in the acquisition of other clitics with applicatives (escobar & teomiro, 2016). 6. discussion in this paper, we have examined the results obtained by two different groups of adult students learning spanish as a foreign language, presumably at the same b2 level. both groups shared a similar dative alternation configuration in each of their l1 languages: english and dutch. likewise, they had to learn a different syntactic structure in spanish, their target language, in which a dative clitic doubles a dative phrase. in addition they also had to acquire an animacy constraint, nonexistent in their l1 languages, through the marking of animate or affected objects by the dative preposition a. relevant data on the question of how dative clitics develop in foreign language settings were gathered for this study by means of the comprehension task. first of all, it was found that, at lower levels of acquisition, the english learners incorrectly accepted the omission of the dative clitic. in contrast, the presence of dative clitics with cld was generally accepted by the dutch learners, who demonstrated a better level of spanish according to our placement test results. however, this was not always the case since the dutch learners also failed to reject the omission of dative clitics with cld when the dative phrase was fronted (cf. item 16). as for the second question, no systematic transfer from l1 was found. there was, however, an l1 effect: both groups at all levels incorrectly rejected cld with an inanimate dative phrase doubled by a dative clitic (cf. item 6). finally, the dutch learners that exhibited a better level of spanish on l2 acquisition of spanish dative clitics by english and dutch learners 529 our placement test also obtained better results in terms of the spanish animacy constraint. however, they also appeared to have some difficulty with the experimental conditions when some complex structures were at stake, namely item 22, in which both animate direct object and indirect object compete for the dative preposition, and item 20, which contains a reflexive dative in an apparent ditransitive configuration. these results indicate that they are compatible with hypotheses that emphasize the natural development of syntactic structures in second or foreign languages. this then suggests that the acquisition of new complex configurations leads to different performances at all levels, although at higher levels it is expected to be completed. we would like to argue in favor of at least two developmental stages for the learning of dative clitics based on the syntax of the particular configurations that need to be acquired over time, as depicted in (13). (13) two developmental stages i. dative clitic pronouns with simplex ditransitive configurations juan le dio el libro. juan dcli gave the book (to maria) ‘john gave the book to her.’ ii. dative-cltic doubling with complex ditransitive configurations juan le dio a maría el libro. juan dtcl gave to mary the book ‘john gave mary the book.’ thus, salient patterns when teaching dative clitics according to the argument structure where they appear should be taken into account. first, transitive configurations should be presented where animate objects are preceded by dative preposition a; then dative clitics could be introduced as an image pattern of the english ditransitive construction with a prepositional dative pronoun at the end of the sentence. finally, the intricate phenomena of dative clitic doubling regarding a complex argument structure should be explained. regarding the type of verbs to be taught, the easy transitive configuration should be introduced with verbs that take non-affected objects such as: pagar ‘pay,’ comprar ‘buy,’ vender ‘sell’ or alquilar ‘rent,’ among others, as in (14), since the accusative clitic (masculine lo or feminine la) can act as the verbal object in all these cases. the second pattern to be taught would deal with transitive verbs taking animate objects introduced by the dative preposition a such as: conocer ‘meet,’ visitar ‘visit’ and presentar ‘introduce,’ as in (15). (14) a. ¿has pagado el cheque? sí, (*le/lo) he pagado. ‘have you paid the check? yes, i’ve paid it.’ m. ángeles escobar-álvarez 530 b. ¿has vendido la casa? sí, (*le/la) he vendido. ‘have you sold the house? yes, i’ve sold it.’ (15) a. ¿conoces a su amiga? ‘have you met his friend?’ b. ¿has visitado al médico? ‘have you visited the doctor?’ c. ¿has presentado a tu novio? ‘have you introduced your boyfriend?’ as part of the second pattern, the spanish verb escuchar ‘listen’ can also be taught as a transitive verb which goes with an animate object understood as affected in the examples provided in (16), where the dative clitic is also required. significantly, it is important to note that the english verb also takes the dative preposition to, as illustrated in the translations of these examples. (16) a. ¿has escuchado al médico? ‘have you listened to the doctor?’ b. sí, ya le/(*lo) he escuchado. ‘yes, i have already listened to him.’ once transitive configurations with the affected/non-affected object dichotomy are presented, animate objects co-occurring with datives in ditransitive configurations should be explained. this pattern turned out to be particularly challenging for both groups of learners in our study. finally, dative reflexive clitics should be introduced as a complex argument structure. in sum, our analysis is based on two main tenets: rethinking the language knowledge base, and modifying language instruction in accordance with our understanding of the nature of the linguistic phenomena to be acquired. following hawkins (2001), the main evidence for a nativist approach to sla that supports language development, and not just transfer from learners’ l1 grammatical options, comes from studies that identify ug-specific constraints on l2 grammatical knowledge that do appear to be derived from l2 input. the fact that this study has observed development in the acquisition of the l2 spanish cld phenomena, especially by the group of dutch learners with a more advanced level, seems to support such an approach. in other words, an approach to sla based on explicit and implicit knowledge predicts that l2 learners are bound to overcome negative transfer effects at a later stage. the acquisition data observed during this study refer to a developing language system, the participant’ interlanguage, where characteristics of both the l1 system and the target system are found, as is also extensively discussed by the literature of other studies (benati & angelovska, 2016). l2 acquisition of spanish dative clitics by english and dutch learners 531 7. conclusion to conclude, we have examined the l2 acquisition of spanish dative clitics by english and dutch learners. the linguistic phenomena concerning clitic doubling (cld), where the dative clitic doubles a full dative phrase introduced by a dative preposition, has been a challenging configuration for both groups of learners. we have shown that cld involves quite an intricate syntactic structure of several functional heads. to palliate the effect of such a complexity, we have tentatively proposed a learning method based on a gradual acquisition of salient patterns including transitive and more complex argument structures where dative clitics are inserted. we have put forward a view of language knowledge as the initial stage followed by explicit grammar instruction based on practices that can help capture the nature of the linguistic phenomena to be acquired. a proposal for further research is to study the acquisition of other types of clitics, like ethical dative clitics. not only would this provide us with an analysis of other developmental stages, but the comparison of different methodological approaches would deepen our understanding of the whole process of l2 grammar acquisition. m. ángeles escobar-álvarez 532 references benati, a., & angelovska, t. (2016). second language acquisition. a theoretical introduction to real world applications. london: bloomsbury. boneh, n., & nash, l. (2011). high and higher applicatives: the case of non-core datives. in m. b. washburn, k. mckinney-bock, e. varis, a. sawyer, & b. tomaszewicz (eds.), proceedings of the 28th west coast conference on formal linguistics (pp. 60-68). somerville, ma: cascadilla proceedings project. bresnan, j., cueni, a., nikitina, t., & baayen, r. j. (2007). predicting the dative alternation. in g. bouma, i. kraemer, & j. zwarts (eds.), cognitive foundations of interpretation (pp. 69-94). amsterdam: royal netherlands academy of science. bruhn de garavito, j. (2000). the syntax of spanish multifunctional clitics and near native competence (unpublished doctoral dissertation). mcgill university, montreal, canada. chomsky, n. (1995). the minimalist program. cambridge, ma: mit press. cuervo, m. c. (2003). datives at large (unpublished doctoral dissertation). massachusetts institute of technology, cambridge, ma, usa. cuervo, m. c. (2007). double object in spanish as a second language. studies in second language acquisition, 28, 583-615. ellis, r. (2004). the definition and measurement of l2 explicit knowledge. language learning, 54, 227-275. ellis, r. (2009). implicit and explicit learning, knowledge and instruction. in r. ellis, s. loewen, c. elder, r. erlam, j. philip, & h. reinders (eds.), implicit and explicit knowledge in second language learning, testing and teaching (pp. 3-25). bristol: multilingual matters. escobar, l., & teomiro, i. (2016). the gradual acquisition of clitic se in spanish l2. topics in linguistics, 17(1), 17-29. doi: 10.1515/2016-0002 farley, a. p., & mccollam, k. (2004). learner readiness and l2 production in spanish: processability theory on trial. estudios de linguistica aplicada, 22(4), 47-69. guijarro-fuentes, p. (2012). the acquisition of interpretable features in l2 spanish: personal a. bilingualism, language and cognition, 15(4), 701-720. guijarro-fuentes, p., & marinis, t. (2007). acquiring the syntax/semantic interface in l2 spanish: the personal preposition “a”. eurosla yearbook 2007, 7, 67-87. gutiérrez, x. (2013). the construct validity of grammaticality judgment tests as measures of implicit and explicit knowledge. studies in second language acquisition, 35(3), 423-449. hawkins, r. (2001). second language syntax: a generative introduction. malden, ma: blackwell. l2 acquisition of spanish dative clitics by english and dutch learners 533 imaz agirre, a. (2015). the acquisition of dative alternation in english by spanish learners. vigo international journal of applied linguistics, 12, 63-90. jäschke, k., & plag, i. (2016). the dative alternation in german-english interlanguage. studies in second language acquisition, 38(3), 485-521. lardiere, d. (2008). feature assembly in second language in second language acquisition. in j. liceras, h. zobl, & h. goodluck (eds.), features in second language acquisition (pp. 106-140). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. laughren, m., & eisenchlas, s. (2006). the role of animacy and definiteness in the clitic-dp nexus. in k. allan (ed.), selected papers from the conference of the australian linguistic society (pp. 28-30). retrieved from http://www.als.asn.au martoccio. a. m. (2012). the acquisition of differential object marking in l2 spanish learners (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of illinois at urbana-champaign, usa. montrul, s., & bowles, m. (2009). back to basics: differential object marking under incomplete acquisition in spanish heritage speakers. bilingualism: language and cognition, 12(4), 363-383. perpiñan, s., & montrul, s. (2006). on binding asymmetries in dative alternation construction in l2 spanish. in c. a. klee & t. l. face (eds.), selected proceedings of the 7th conference on the acquisition of spanish and portuguese as first and second languages (pp. 135-148). somerville, ma: cascadilla proceedings project. retrieved from http://www.lingref.com/cpp/casp/7/index.html pylkkänen, l. (2008). introducing arguments. cambridge, ma: the mit press. sikorska, m. (2009). low applicative datives in spanish as a second language: acquisition of semantics and morphosyntax. resla, 22, 327-350. teomiro, i. (2013). low applicatives and optional “se” in spanish non-anticausative intransitive verbs. revista de lingüística y lenguas aplicadas, 8, 248-270. torrego, e. (2010). variability in the case patterns of causative formation in romance and its implications. linguistic inquiry, 41(3), 445-470. vanpatten, b. (2011). stubborn syntax: how it resists explicit teaching and learning. in c. sanz & r. leow (eds.), implicit and explicit language learning: conditions, processing, and knowledge (pp. 9-21). washington, dc: georgetown university press. m. ángeles escobar-álvarez 534 appendix the questionnaire nombre: grupo: lengua materna: instrucción: marca (si) si se dice “sí” o (no) si no se dice en español 1. voy a casa en pie (si) (no) 2. ¿dónde eres ahora? (si) (no) 3. cómprale a mi madre una caja de bombones. (si) (no) 4. pepa comió la comida a mediodía. (si) (no) 5. el conductor tenido un accidente ayer. (si) (no) 6. juan le puso gasolina al coche (si) (no) 7. el niño tengo clases a las 7h. (si) (no) 8. juan leyó el libro sin enterarse de nada. (si) (no) 9. la puerta se cerró de repente. (si) (no) 10. ana se secó el pelo con el secador. (si) (no) 11. juan miró al espejo para ver que estaba bien peinado. (si) (no) 12. pepa se bebió de la cerveza. (si) (no) 13. marta murió durante dos días. (si) (no) 14. juan le dio a maría el libro. (si) (no) 15. este niño no me come la sopa. (si) (no) 16. a maría se ha quemado la comida sin querer. (si) (no) 17. cuando me di cuenta, el helado había derretido. (si) (no) 18. ana se peinó en la peluquería para ir a la fiesta. (si) (no) 19. pepa cortó el dedo cuando estaba cocinando. (si) (no) 20. alberto se vio la película en inglés. (si) (no) 21. juan se tropezó sin darse cuenta. (si) (no) 22. ana presentó a su novio su madre. (si) (no) 23. se me ha puesto malo el perro. (si) (no) 24. se me ha roto el coche. (si) (no) 25. el cristal rompió debido a la tormenta. (si) (no) 26. pepa no ducha todos los días. (si) (no) 27. pepe se arregló la barba para hablar con el presidente. (si) (no) 28. juan se comió pizza. (si) (no) 29. juan fue de su casa para siempre. (si) (no) 30. pepa le dijo a juan que no volvería. (si) (no) 31. mi hijo me necesita un médico. (si) (no) 32. se me ha tirado el jarrón a propósito. (si) (no) 33. la hierba se congeló durante la noche. (si) (no) 34. juan se afeita todas las mañanas antes de ir al trabajo. (si) (no) 35. juan lavó el pelo después de hacer deporte. (si) (no) 36. ana se comió la pizza entera. (si) (no) 37. pepa se cayó de repente. (si) (no) 38. manolo leyó el libro su hijo. (si) (no) 39. mi prima me quiere un coche nuevo. (si) (no) 40. se me han caído las llaves sin querer. (si) (no) 327 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (2). 2015. 327-345 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.2.7 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl achieving academic control in two languages: drawing on the psychology of language learning in considering the past, the present, and prospects for the future andrew d. cohen professor emeritus, university of minnesota, usa adcohen@umn.edu abstract this paper first considers what it means to become truly proficient in a language other than the native one. it then looks briefly at the evolution of dual language programs. next, it focuses on the issue of whether the first language (l1) or the second language (l2) serves as the language of mediation. other dual language program issues are then discussed, such as how proficient learners actually become in academic and social language in the l2, their proficiency in grammar and pronunciation, and possible administrative constraints in the design and execution of such programs. finally, attention is given to a guidebook written directly for dual language learners and for their teachers in which learners are encouraged to take a proactive role to ensure that they make the most of their dual program language learning and use experiences. keywords: dual language program, immersion program, translanguaging, inner voice, l2 pragmatics 1. introduction how well are children in u.s. public schools mastering other languages in class? this paper will first consider what it means to become truly proficient in a language other than the native one. it will then look at the evolution of dual language programs. next, we will discuss the issue of whether the first language (l1) or andrew d. cohen 328 the second language (l2) serves as the language of mediation. fourth, the paper will touch briefly on other dual language program issues such as how proficient learners actually become in academic and social language in their l2, their proficiency in grammar and pronunciation, and, finally, possible administrative constraints in the design and execution of such programs. fifth, we will discuss the preparation of a guidebook for dual language learners. there is evidence that various types of dual language programs are successful according to research reports, especially with regard to immersion programs (see fortune, 2012, for a recent review of the literature). it is also fair to say that dual language programs have become a relatively permanent fixture in north american schools. consider, for example, the long wait lists for programs in numerous states across the us. the consequence is that parents may be putting their children into a dual language program which is not their first choice, but rather the one where they stand a better chance of getting their child admitted (as i learned with regard to a charter school program in forest lake, mn which offers both spanish and chinese immersion programs). in this era of increased multilingualism, advanced language proficiency is actually being called for in the workforce. many of the original culver city, ca spanish immersion pupils (1970-1976) now as adults no longer profess to know spanish very much at all.1 my hunch is that they never achieved advanced proficiency in the language. serving as evaluator of that program from 1971 to 1975 and then doing research on a similar program in st. paul, mn in the mid-1990s, i came away drawing the conclusion that the students stop short of achieving high-level proficiency. in other words, they lack a proficiency level that would sustain them for a lifetime. since the us is characterized as a monolingual society where ability in other languages often serves more as window dressing than serving a more substantial role in communication, it is legitimate to speculate as to what advanced target language (lt) proficiency would look like. what would it take for, say, 6thgrade students to be good enough in their language skills so as to: · have people think their pronunciation is native or near-native in the lt (i.e., the one that they are learning in the program)? · get the pragmatics right in the high-stakes situations in the lt (e.g., making a polite request effectively)? · have only a few minor grammar errors in their oral language (as opposed to glaring breaches of agreement, such as in spanish gender, for example, *un muchacha bueno)? · have relatively easy access to the necessary vocabulary in the lt? 1 i attended the 40th reunion of that program in 2010 and spoke with the eight graduates who attended. achieving academic control in two languages: drawing on the psychology of language learning. . . 329 · read and critique scientific material of interest in the lt without having the language be an obstacle? · express themselves in written language at a reasonably communicative level in the lt? · take a major role in a presentation and discussion of a scientific topic entirely in the lt, without the need to switch to the l1 for terminology? recent evidence from a clil study underscores the importance of my third and fourth questions above. the findings from a study of what makes for language proficiency in german-english clil program lower secondary-school students in berlin would suggest that vocabulary knowledge and grammatical control are major contributors to success in studies both in l1 german and in l2 english (zydatis, 2012). the rest of this paper will delve into issues that may have a determining effect on just how proficient students become in the lt. we will look briefly at the past, then consider current efforts to produce students who are proficient in an lt, and will then look to ways to enhance the process of attaining lt proficiency. 2. the evolution of dual language programs programs for promoting multilingualism are viewed in different ways in the us. a major reason for the move to dual language programs was to eliminate the stigma attached to programs primarily for minority students, aimed at removing the shackles that they suffered by virtue of having to rid themselves of a home language in favor of the societal language. dual language programs were also intended to avoid the perception of giving unfair advantage to the haves by providing them yet another program to advance themselves at the expense of the less fortunate minority students. the guiding principle behind a dual language program is that everyone is benefiting. the reality of such programs, of course, varies according to the particular site, the administrative handling, the teachers involved, and the financing of the program (see de jong, 2011). historically, bilingual programs were often seen as a stop-gap measure for minority pupils. according to palmer (2009), views in u.s. society toward english-speaking middle-class children learning a foreign language differ dramatically from mainstream views toward immigrant children learning english. a spanishspeaking child must learn english; it is expected, and any failing is considered a problem. for an english-speaking child, the learning of a foreign language (even one like spanish, which is rapidly becoming a second national language) is viewed as an attractive option for enrichment, with any level of success highly valued and applauded. perhaps one of the more important side-effects of immersion education is the double standard that it may reflect when majority-group children are applauded because they can say a few words in the minority language, while andrew d. cohen 330 high performance is expected from minority-group children. in reality, both groups merit praise for their accomplishments in their respective l2. nowadays, however, there is a paradigm shift because the minority language is actually slipping away. in other words, children growing up in homes where the lt at school is spoken around them choose not to learn that language, often with the support of their parents who want their children to succeed in life and do not see how high proficiency in their heritage language could contribute to that goal. so, the new challenge is to reach these heritage learners and cater to their special language needs. this creates a new kind of linguistic diversity different from that which was found in the past (see garcía, 2009, for an international historical perspective). the current challenge is how to educate all students equitably and meaningfully. as garcía and sylvan (2011) put it: imposing one school standardized language without any flexibility of norms and practices will always mean that those students whose home language practices show the greatest distance from the school norm will always be disadvantaged . . . models of bilingual or multilingual education that impose norms of language use in one or the other language without any flexibility will also privilege those whose language practices follow monolingual norms in two or more languages . . . (p. 398) garcia and sylvan recommend providing a model of multilingualism that adopts a dynamic plurilingual approach with translanguaging2 as an important strategy so that students and teachers can make sense of learning moment by moment. elements of translanguaging are not new. the early bilingual programs allowed for simultaneous translation and other means for language switching. however, the recent use of the term is meant to promote in a positive way the use of multiple languages simultaneously to communicate; translanguaging constitutes a form of flexible bilingualism. means for using translanguaging in language assessment are also being explored in recent studies (lopez, guzman-orth, & turkan, 2014; shohamy, 2011). although nonheritage english-speaking students may learn more of the minority language in an immersion program than in a foreign-language-in-theelementary-school (fles) program in u.s. public schools, they are still likely to graduate from such programs less proficient in the minority language than minoritylanguage speakers are in english. this is most likely due to the dominance of english in their community, the fact that their only access to input in the lt is often the classroom, and the fact that the implicit message that they receive from the larger context is that english counts more than an l2, be it spanish or whatever language 2 translanguaging is “the ability of multilingual speakers to shuttle between languages, the diverse languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system” (canagarajah, 2011, p. 401). for a powerpoint on how translanguaging is used effectively in elementary-school efl instruction in sweden, see gunnarsson (n.d.). achieving academic control in two languages: drawing on the psychology of language learning. . . 331 (palmer, 2009). of course, nowadays minority students may have limited skills in the l2 or not know the language at all, even in cases where the lt is spoken by family members at home. this reality says a lot about motivation in language learning. the motivation to learn a minority-group language may be extremely low, and, ironically, even lower if it is a heritage language of the children. this is because pupils may be embarrassed about their roots. this was definitely the case with my wife of 47 years who was a monolingual speaker of yiddish until she entered kindergarten, but who today has extremely limited yiddish skills, due largely to her desire from a very young age not to use the language. when i evaluated a bilingual elementary school program in east los angeles in 1980-81, i found the spanish surname children were poorer at spanish and less motivated to learn it than were their anglo peers. with regard to the specific lt program that majority children are placed into, it is likely that these majority children will encounter initial difficulties in communication and, consequently, may have a sense of insecurity or even one of failure in the presence of native speakers of that language, assuming that the program has some or many native speakers (cohen & swain, 1976). in the early days of immersion education, participation in such programs often was of a pull out nature, where participation in the program ostracized the students by playing up their deficit. this was true in the early years of the culver city spanish immersion program, one of the first in the us. in more recent years, programs have become large enough so that the entire school is participating in them. sometimes the programs are so large that they are housed in more than one building. in addition, the programs do their utmost to ease the burden of studying the school subjects through a language in which the children are still gaining proficiency. for example, realizing that students will not understand everything they say, immersion teachers use body language, visuals, manipulatives, exaggerated facial expressions, and expressive intonation to communicate meaning (fortune & tedick, 2003). there is also a clear distinction between two-way immersion programs and dual language programs that involve instruction in two languages from the start. it would appear that immersion programs, at least in the us and canada, with their emphasis on natural immersion into the language, are producing in the students a form of what i would term a pidgin language3—since the pupils in such programs tend not to be formally taught the grammar in the early years (harley, 1993; swain, 1991). they are expected to pick it up from the environment much as native-speaking children do. in dual language programs where the languages, especially the nonnative language, are taught early on, according to research findings 3 that is, their own modified and peer-reinforced variety of the language, such that in the romance languages such as spanish and french, they may essentially avoid the use of the subjunctive and conditional forms of the verb. andrew d. cohen 332 reported by thomas and collier (2013), there is considerable evidence that the instruction programs have a resounding impact on development in both languages. these findings apparently hold for both majority and minority group students. i visited a dual-language program, la escuela bilingüe internacional, at its two campuses, the one in oakland, ca for pre-kindergarten (starting with 3year-olds) through grade 1, and the one for grades 2-8 in emeryville, ca.4 my impression, without formal measurement but as an evaluator and researcher of both early bilingual and immersion programs, was that the mostly english l1 learners were relatively fluent in oral spanish, especially at the upper elementary level. having the teachers keep the languages separate and formally instruct pupils in and through both of them seems to have paid off. the several 5th-grade students that i had personal interviews with did not appear to me to be lapsing into pidgin spanish, that is, poor pronunciation, lack of gender, and general nonnative-like language use that i have observed in one-way immersion programs where language mixing is permitted. so this might be an argument in favor of not encouraging translanguaging in the classroom. possible explanations for the apparent language success in this particular dual language program would include the fact that the students are from families where parents pay to have their children schooled in an accredited private charter school. the fact that the two prekindergarten grades have three teachers in each classroom (a lead teacher and two associate teachers) and the class size is limited to 20 children means that each pupil gets substantial comprehensible input. teachers stick to their language guise and the students know that something serious is going on. another factor is that the program starts early: two years before kindergarten. in addition, starting in kindergarten pupils receive one hour per day of english instruction (unlike in pure immersion programs), and instruction early on in the lt includes instruction in grammar. another notable feature of this charter school program is that as of 3rd grade, all the students study mandarin as well, so that they are not only developing solid skills in spanish but some reasonable fluency and literacy in mandarin as well. 3. learning content through the l1 and the l2 the fact that immersion, two-way immersion, and dual-language programs have existed in the us for many years has provided an opportunity to observe how elementary-school pupils can learn content material either through their l1, through the l2, or through both languages simultaneously. the programs present themselves in a myriad of ways. while getting content through the l2 can 4 see the program website (http://www.ebinternacional.org) for its description. achieving academic control in two languages: drawing on the psychology of language learning. . . 333 work, there is usually some deficit in the processing of the academic content, at least initially.5 there are various reasons for this deficit. one reason is that the learners lack an understanding of vocabulary that would help them grasp the concepts. another reason is that lt grammatical structures may render the concepts less accessible. to add to the complexity, the language of transmission of content (i.e., through the lt) does not fully determine the language that learners use to process this information. in fact, the language that the pupils use for thought in the classroom varies. it would appear that students differ in just how capable they are of thinking through academic issues in the lt. so, when they are thinking through issues that are challenging to their brains, to what extent are they doing it in the lt and to what extent in the l1? motivated by a desire to explore this issue, i conducted research some years ago in a spanish full-immersion program in st. paul, mn. the study focused on the languages that grade 3-6 students actually thought in for accomplishing classroom tasks (cohen, 1994). a team of undergraduates from the university of minnesota followed 32 3rd-6th-grade pupils around for five months, tracking by means of verbal report the languages that the pupils used for tackling math and science tasks. a finding from that study was that the students used their l1 more than the l2 for conceptually complex verbal problems in math. the students were found to start processing a word problem in spanish by reading it to themselves or out loud, and then to either perform online translation to english before solving the math problem, or to continue in spanish until or unless they encountered a conceptual problem. early research findings from late-french-immersion in canada have shown some evidence that use of l1 supports the learning of l2 (behan, spek, & turnbull, 1995; behan, turnbull, & spek, 1997). the students in late-frenchimmersion programs (i.e., middle-school students) were found to use english for vocabulary searches, to structure the activity, to argue out the issues, and to plan their presentations in french. the conclusion from that research was that learners worked through their cognition in their l1. the use of english apparently also helped the teachers know what the students were thinking when they were engaged in complex tasks. so this early work suggested that l1 use in communicative and immersion l2 classrooms served as a cognitive and metacognitive tool, as a strategic organizer, and as a scaffold for language development. a subsequent study along the same lines by swain and lapkin (2000) found a wide variation in the use of the l1. functions that tended to be performed in the l1 were the focusing of attention, figuring out what was expected, 5 this is also the case with clil programs in europe (see zydatis, 2012, regarding a germanenglish clil program). andrew d. cohen 334 developing an understanding of the task, looking for l2 vocabulary, and seeking information about an activity. it was also found that there was more use of the l1 with peers, especially if the purpose was social as in expressing feelings; and that there was less use of the l1 in science than in writing. not surprisingly, they found the amount of l1 increased as the issues became more abstract. they also found that as l2 proficiency increased, l1 use decreased. the bottom line apparently was that the l1 was used as a tool to mediate their understanding of the task and also for understanding the content associated with the task. the reason why the choice of language for mediation makes a difference is that if languaging is principally going on in the l1, it is not surprising that the students are not so fluent, so articulate, or native-like in the lt. it could be argued that what makes it possible for pupils to think comfortably in the l2 is that they are well-rehearsed at doing this. as an outgrowth of the cohen (1994) study, an intervention was conducted at the same school in st. paul, mn to enhance the academic language of 5th-grade spanish immersion students (cohen & gómez, 2008). the focus was on improving their inner voice in the lt. the students’ development of their inner voice in the lt appeared to assist them in solving problems in science and history. a few years later, turnball, cormier, and bourque (2011) conducted a quasi-experimental study to determine if, when, and how the l1 was used when students in the first years of their l2 learning talked about complex science concepts. specifically, the researchers looked at differences in the complexity of oral utterances and at differences in the use of l1 in oral utterances among lateimmersion 7th graders who were participating either in a special literacy-based program (n = 25) or in a program involving the typical, district-prescribed approach (n = 24). in order to assess whether increased use of the l1 in complex statements about the context was positively associated with gains in french and science knowledge, each turn was coded as french only, english only, or as a codeswitch (e.g., il a tremblement de terre sous l’eau et shake et cause a tsunami). the results showed that the l1 did act as an important cognitive tool to help make sense of complex science content. during the initial oral interviews, both groups relied mainly on english. during the initial interviews, use of french was linked with lower levels of complexity, and use of english or code-switches was associated with higher levels of complexity. during the final interviews, the experimental group’s oral output was more complex, but these students still needed english to manage and articulate this greater complexity. when students spoke french only, their utterances were less complex. correlational analyses showed a positive and significant relationship between code-switching and text length (number of words) and the total number of words written in french. error rates in written french decreased for both groups as more english or code-switching achieving academic control in two languages: drawing on the psychology of language learning. . . 335 were evident in their oral production. while correlations between language use and science results were less clear, there was a positive and significant correlation between utterance complexity and results in science for both groups. consequently, the hypothesis that the greater number of turns coded as english or code-switches would be positively correlated to an increase in complexity, better results in written french, and better results in science knowledge was generally confirmed. drawing on several of vygotsky’s theoretical insights concerning mediation, the relationship of cognition and emotion, and the zone of proximal development, swain and lapkin (2013) suggested principled use of the l1 and target language in immersion programs: • students should be permitted to use their l1 during collaborative dialogue or private speech in order to mediate their understanding and generation of complex ideas (languaging) as they prepare to produce an end product (oral or written) in the target language. however, as proficiency in the l2 increases, students should be encouraged to use the l2 as a mediating tool. further, when new and complex material is introduced within and across grades, students should again be allowed to make use initially of their l1 to language, that is, to mediate their thinking. • teachers need to set clear expectations about l1/l2 use in order to create a secure classroom environment in which students are able to engage in interaction with confidence. for younger children, this goal can be accomplished through a teacher’s consistent use of the l1 or the lt. for older children, this goal can be further accomplished through teacher/student negotiation of a set of classroom practices relating to the use of the l1 and the lt. swain and lapkin assert that successful realization of this goal with older students involves making beliefs explicit about the cognitive/emotive interface in language use and language learning, leading to a constructive climate of cooperation in the classroom. it would appear that teachers can play a substantial role in setting the rules for language use in a given classroom. a case in point is what happened when an instructor from mainland china, who was fresh out of an mat degree in idaho and had only been in the u.s. for two years, took over teaching a 5th-grade chinese immersion class at a spanish and chinese immersion school in hopkins, mn. he was appalled by the chinglish going on in the classroom.6 the students had had 5 school years before starting 5th grade to perfect this hybrid code, with lots of english mixed in with chinese. his reaction was to insist that his students speak only 6 note that, in principle, there is a difference between code-mixing, as in this case, and codeswitching, as in translanguaging, though in reality sometimes the data look very similar. in both cases, there is shuffling back and forth between one code and another. andrew d. cohen 336 in chinese. so he spent a full month coaching them in how to do this. when i visited his class, i observed the students taking charge of a game where one played the role of a detective and needed to ask fellow students a series of questions in order to determine who had committed a given crime. english was not used by the students at all during this game. the teacher sat on the sidelines and did not intervene even once during this activity. the results in this classroom simply demonstrated how much impact teachers can have once they decide that they wish to reverse a language use trend in a given immersion classroom. the experience of this strong-willed 5th-grade teacher reinforced a sense that i had, which is that immersion students need more guidance in how to be immersion students so as to avoid the creation of a pidgin language, in this case chinglish. the experience motivated me to write a guidebook for learners on how to be better performers in their given program. the guidebook and a companion guide for teachers has been piloted to a limited extent and the plan is for more piloting. the guidebook will be described below (see section 5). as can be seen, there are opposing views as to the best way to achieve advanced proficiency. one view is to keep the languages separate, at least in oral use. so students may be thinking in their l1, for instance, but need to use only the lt in class during the lt portions of the curriculum. another view is that translanguaging be openly encouraged in the classroom, thus allowing for bilingual conversations where the teacher is speaking mostly or entirely in the lt and some of the students in the l1 from time to time. 4. other issues concerning dual language programs when the notion of starting learners off in a language other than their mother tongue was first introduced, there were high hopes that the learners would literally soar in their abilities. years of various kinds of dual language experiences have caused educators to temper somewhat their expectations. generally, the learners develop competence, but there is a decided gap between what they can do in the lt and what native speakers can do in different language domains. 4.1. the proficiency of l2 learners in academic vs. social language to what extent are the pupils capable of speaking in the l2? what can they speak about? in developing an l1, children have numerous opportunities to enrich their social language, whether talking about whom they like and dislike, their concerns and aspirations about the special things in their lives, their interactions with siblings and their parents, and the like. to what extent are these achieving academic control in two languages: drawing on the psychology of language learning. . . 337 areas developed in the l2? it is perhaps not so surprising that immersion students are better for the most part at academic language than social language. much of their class time focuses on academic language. fortune (2008) found that, most of the time, learners express emotions through their l1, with a practical implication being that teachers may actually need to teach learners how to express their feelings through the lt. consistent with this view, i observed a 1stgrade spanish immersion teacher in a spanish immersion program in forest lake, mn working with her students on the language of emotions: getting them to identify verbally various emotional states. she used pictures to help her students deal in spanish with the emotional states of happiness, sadness, anger, and excitement. presumably, these kinds of exercises can get the pupils to be more comfortable using the lt to discuss their emotions with their peers. 4.1.1. the learners’ grammatical control a major gatekeeper in determining how far learners ultimately get in their l2 proficiency is grammar. especially in immersion programs, there has been a decided effort to refrain from teaching too much frontal grammar and from correcting the use of grammar. the consequence, as noted above, has been that immersion students (such as in the spanish immersion programs that i have had experience with in st. paul and in forest lake, mn) have developed a striking pidgin language where the students share what can appear as a blatant disregard for issues such as gender agreement, number in the verb, and tense and aspect issues (e.g., nonuse of the conditional and the subjunctive).7 one solution may well be that of coaching learners in the use of grammar strategies (see section 5). 4.1.2. the learners’ pronunciation developing fluency in a language can have a toll, namely, it may be at the expense of a feeling of social well-being. becoming fluent may inadvertently involve embracing an accent that is acceptable to the lt group. the problem here is that pupils may find that they are having to give away part of their own identity to sound that way. in fact, as they reach puberty, the learners may wish to avoid sounding too native-like because deep down inside, it just does not reflect their self-identity. i remember from the early days of french immersion in canada that some pupils perfected the french /r/ only to regress to an accented /r/ in 7 research in french immersion has also shown that, despite some years of comprehensible input, students' spoken and written french may well contain numerous morphological, syntactic, and lexical deviations from native-speaker norms (genesee, 1987; lapkin, swain, & shapson, 1990). andrew d. cohen 338 order to not sound too french. a more striking example of conformity was reported to me by the colombian research assistant in the spanish immersion program that we were working with in st. paul. she related to me that a nativespanish-speaking 4th grader spoke native spanish when speaking with her mom on her cell phone, but then she reverted to english-accented spanish after getting off the phone since the prestige variety was the accented one. so this truly is a psychology of language learning issue, and an important one to bear in mind in such teaching contexts. language programs may be working at cross-purposes with societal trends. 4.2. administrative constraints on the program a final issue regarding dual language programs concerns the administrative structure of the program and its impact on the outcomes. in the early days of bilingual and immersion programs, the practicing of different models of bilingual instruction was not necessarily constrained by budgetary considerations. bilingual programs, for example, often had federal funding to help defray the costs. now the local school districts are more likely to be paying for public programs, which more than likely calls for various administrative compromises. in other words, the model may not be pure but rather mixed. consequently, if the school program is open for all children, this would mean being obliged to include recently arrived pupils who are new to the particular language program and, therefore, do not have the language background that their peers have. in the early years of immersion, when classes were kept small and experimental, the numbers of native speakers of the lt was kept low so as not to intimidate the learners. now, even with fancy labels like dual immersion, the reality is that poor performing pupils may be somewhat lost in the administrative shuffle. this reality would help to explain why private charter schools have sprung up, with the parents paying a considerable amount to keep them functioning. 5. preparing a guidebook for dual language learners guidebooks have been written for some dual language, especially immersion, programs. however, the bulk of the literature on dual language programs is aimed at the teaching staff, the administrators, and parents, and not directly at the learners themselves. one such guidebook aimed at teachers by fortune and menke (2010) acknowledged that learners may encounter difficulties functioning in their respective programs. the handbook provides dual language and immersion educators and parents with rich information and resources that address the common concerns with children who struggle with language, literacy, and achieving academic control in two languages: drawing on the psychology of language learning. . . 339 learning. another more recent example of a guidebook aimed at the teaching staff and administrators is for teaching chinese immersion, a language considered a challenge language for english speakers, and one for which there is both a lack of curricular materials and a lack of qualified teachers (asia society, 2012). this particular guide has sections focusing on the basics of program design written by experts in the field and has detailed descriptions of exemplary chinese immersion programs across the us. however, again, the focus is not on communicating directly with learners but rather with their teachers and with administrators. given the increasing complexity of dual language programs and the diverse nature of demands being put on learners, there may well be a benefit to developing guidebooks for learners themselves on how to be better performers in their given program. a guidebook written expressly for learners would include strategy instruction, which covers the basic skill areas, as well as grammar and pragmatics. so, this brings us to the challenge of how to coach students in these programs in order to maximize the benefits of the programs. drawing on insights from the field of the psychology of language learning, the goal is to find ways to maximize the learning of and through the language and, thus, to empower learners to become more proactive in their approaches to their language program. a major challenge, of course, is to write the guide in language that is comprehensible for, say, 4th-6th graders. it was in response to this noticeable lack of a guide written directly for children that i wrote such a guidebook, with a companion guidebook for teachers (cohen, 2014a, 2014b). the guidebook has so far been piloted with with 5th and 6th-grade spanish immersion students at the lakes international language academy (http://www.lakesinternational.org/) in forest lake, mn, usa, and there are plans for further piloting this next year. the guidebook includes the following: 1. an effort to increase young learners’ awareness of their perceptual, cognitive, and personality-related learning style preferences, namely, their typical preferences for approaching the learning of the l2. 2. presentation of material to heighten students’ awareness about language learner strategies, namely, the processes that they consciously select in learning and using language in general and in the completion of specific l2 language tasks (whether learning new vocabulary, using the correct tense of the verb, or making a request). in the guidebook, language learner strategies are classified by • goal: strategies for learning the l2, for example, identifying, distinguishing, grouping, memorizing strategies, andrew d. cohen 340 strategies for using the l2, that is, performing their knowledge by means of retrieval, rehearsal, communicative, or cover strategies; • function: metacognitive, cognitive, social, or affective; • skill: listening, speaking, reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar, or translation strategies; • other language aspects: strategies that learners of, say, hebrew or arabic, use in order to successfully inflect the verb for gender, strategies that are used by learners at different proficiency levels, strategies that learners use for interactions within specific subcultures, strategies for dealing with speakers of different varieties of the l2. 3. a heads up for learners that their motivation is likely to fluctuate according to the task they are working on. a solution applied in this learners’ guide is to have the learners take their own motivational temperature as they do different language tasks and to make adjustments when needed. the instrument suggested for this is taking my motivational temperature on a language task constructed by cohen and dörnyei (2006) in 2001. 4. guidelines for fine-tuning the l2 inner voice, namely, enhancing the students’ l2 inner voice. in the cohen and gómez intervention (2008), the instructors taught students to talk to themselves in l2 academic language using cardboard cell phones, while looking at themselves in a pocket mirror or using puppets, and writing postcards to themselves in the l2 (which they then mailed to themselves). at the beginning of the study, the students were not aware that they already used an inner voice in english to solve problems. they learned that they could use an l2 inner voice as a vehicle both for solving academic problems and when employing metacognitive strategies to monitor their vocabulary and grammar. for the cohen and gómez (2008) study, 30 lessons were planned according to the school curriculum in science and history. each lesson emphasized the use of academic language and complex structures, in particular the subjunctive and the conditional moods, since nativespeaking children at that age control these structures but immersion children were found not to (felix-brasdefer, 2001). before each problemsolving activity, the teacher modeled the use of the inner voice for solving the problem. at the end of each lesson, the instructors discussed the use of academic language in class. students were encouraged to pay attention to the strategies used in performing academic language tasks. achieving academic control in two languages: drawing on the psychology of language learning. . . 341 strategies included creating mental linkages, repeating, highlighting, using synonyms, asking for clarification or verification, and collaborating or coconstructing responses with their classmates. 5. a focus on often neglected grammar strategies, based on insights from a website dedicated to the pursuit of ways to enhance learners’ control of spanish grammar, the learner strategies website for spanish grammar (http://www.carla.umn.edu/strategies/sp_grammar). examples are provided on the website of 72 strategies that l2 learners of spanish have reported using successfully in their efforts to deal with problematic grammar. for example, here is a strategy for remembering which verbs take the subjunctive: to remember the situations in which to use the subjunctive, remember that the subjunctive is weird – w (wishes, will), e (emotions), i (impersonal expressions), r (recommendations), d (doubt, desire, denial). research with undergraduate learners of spanish at the university of minnesota confirmed for the most part that use of strategies from the website was beneficial (cohen, pinilla-herrera, thompson, & witzig, 2011). this website is mentioned just in the teachers’ guide and the intention is that teachers in spanish programs would explore it and determine when and how to make use of it. 6. attention to basic strategies for dealing with l2 pragmatics. in the learners’ guide, the section is referred to as “strategies for knowing when and how to use language.” the following is an excerpt: what makes things tricky for a learner of the language is that the true meaning of the sentence may not be clear. for example, if someone asks you, “is that your cell phone?” are they just interested in the awesome phone you have or are they telling you to turn it off? while learners are given links to both a spanish and a japanese pragmatics website, a more detailed explanation is provide in the teachers’ guide, where material is presented on what pragmatics is, on the components of a speech act, and on the strategy framework for learning and performing pragmatics, as well as links to the two websites. insights were based on three websites for teachers, curriculum writers, and learners: • pragmatics and speech acts (http://www.carla.umn.edu/speecha cts/index.html), with information about six speech acts: requests, refusals, apologies, complaints, compliments, and thanking, in as andrew d. cohen 342 many as ten different languages. suggested strategies for teaching the particular speech acts and sample teaching materials are provided, along with an annotated bibliography (updated in 2012), which includes information on other areas of pragmatics as well. • a japanese website strategies for learning speech acts in japanese, (http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/japanese/introtospeechacts/index.htm), an introductory module with five additional modules, each dedicated to the l2 learning of specific speech acts in japanese: apologies, compliments, requests, refusals, and expressing gratitude. • an l2 spanish website, dancing with words: strategies for learning pragmatics in spanish (http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts /sp_pragmatics/home.html). the site consists of an introductory unit and eight additional modules: compliments, gratitude and leave taking, requests, apologies, invitations, service encounters, advice, suggestions, disagreements, complaints, and reprimands, as well as considerations for pragmatic performance.8 6. conclusions dual language programs have come a long way. a lot of exciting programs are now available. it is therefore a propitious moment to focus on supporting learners in enhancing their performance in the program in which they are enrolled. it is not a given that their participation alone will ensure that they derive the maximum benefits from such programs. it is usually the case that the learners themselves can enhance their experience in such programs by being more proactive. the potential payoff is having language skills to last a lifetime, rather than having fleeting skills, which attrite rapidly once the learner is no longer in the program. 8 for a paper on efforts to further update these websites for l2 pragmatics, see cohen (in press). 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(2012). linguistic thresholds in the clil classroom: the threshold hypothesis revisited. international clil research journal, 1(4), 17-28. retrieved from http://www.icrj.eu/14/article2.html 13 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (1). 2014. 13-32 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.1.2 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl q methodology for post-social-turn research in sla kay irie gakushuin university, tokyo, japan kay.irie@gakushuin.ac.jp abstract q methodology, an approach to inquiry on the subjective views about a complex phenomenon/issue which has been increasingly employed in a wide range of social science fields has not yet been applied in language learning and teaching research. it is a unique approach that has characteristics of both qualitative and quantitative research methods. the purpose of the present paper is to introduce q methodology as an alternative approach and demonstrate its potential to respond to the needs of the field that has been expanding in its epistemological diversity since the social turn (block, 2003; ortega, 2012). the relevance of the methodology for sla research will be discussed with a particular focus on the parallels between the development of the methodology in the 1930s and current criticisms towards the traditional cognitive approach in sla. using a published study (irie & ryan, 2014), the author explains how the focus on the holistic understanding of subjectivity is built into the procedure. suggestions for possible areas of research and teaching in which q methodology could be applied are discussed. keywords: q methodology, sla research, subjectivity, qualitative, quantitative 1. introduction the expansion of theoretical perspectives in sla that has been taking place over the last 20 years, referred to as the social turn (block, 2003), promoted kay irie 14 the use of interpretative methods of research such as ethnography, narrative inquiries, and case studies as means to understand “subjective meanings of their [individuals’] experiences” rather than to measure “the objective reality that exists” (cresswell, 2009, pp. 7-8). the recognition that the variability of success in sla results from complex interactions between external and internal factors within each learner, and how s/he views the language and the learning, necessitates such approaches. they provide a rich description of the learner and context, and capture his/her stories as they emerge in a process of bottom-up inductive analysis of the data in forms of text typically gained from interviews and open-ended questionnaires. as theoretical perspectives on the process of language learning further diversify with an increasing emphasis on complexity, there may be a corresponding need to expand the range of research methods in order to provide alternative angles and depth to this investigation. q methodology is an approach to the investigation of individuals’ viewpoints on any matter and has been gaining popularity in a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences such as psychology, education, nursing, journalism, and policy studies. its systematic nature leads to consistency and comparability across studies, and transparency for the audience. its ingenuity brings out and maintains the view of every participant intact in the process of identifying the individual views and what is common to them. however, in sla, q methodology has been perceived as “a variation of the normal likert scale questionnaire” in the quantitative tradition (bartels, 2005, p. 7). it is only very recently that a few researchers have started to explore some of the possibilities of the method (irie & ryan, 2014; pemberton & cooker, 2012; rodriguez & shepard, 2013) for understanding language learners. q is unique in the sense that it has characteristics of both quantitative and qualitative approaches. it employs a special type of factor analysis to identify views that exist in a group of individuals and an interpretative process that requires the researcher to read through the data in a manner that resembles coding in qualitative studies. the main goal of the methodology is to gain an understanding of the salient feelings and opinions held by individuals, and the core of feelings shared in a group or community. what makes q methodology distinctive is that this aim, commonly seen in qualitative inquiries, is pursued and reflected throughout the process of data collection, analysis and interpretation. for these reasons, some researchers, such as ramlo and newman (2011), argue that q can be placed in the middle of the continuum between qualitative and quantitative research projects as a mixed methods approach that leans towards the qualitative end of the spectrum due to its focus on subjectivity. as a researcher, i have often found myself torn between the arguments for a qualitative inquiry into the processes of language learning and my own q methodology for post-social-turn research in sla 15 intuitions and biases as someone trained within the quantitative tradition. discussions with colleagues over the years have taught me that i am not alone in this respect and it is for this reason that i began to explore the possibilities of q as a methodology that incorporates the strengths of both the qualitative and quantitative tradition. in this paper, i aim to share some of that journey and to introduce q methodology, which is still relatively unknown in the field, and highlight its potential as an alternative strategy of interpretative inquiry. following a discussion of the history and development of q, i will consider its relevance for sla research before demonstrating how the aim of holistic understanding of subjectivity is built into the method using a published study (irie & ryan, 2014) as an example. although the demonstration is not meant to be a manual, given the small number of q studies in the field, it entails a certain level of procedural explanation. finally, i will conclude this paper by making suggestions for possible areas in which q methodology could be applied in research and teaching. 2. the impact of the social turn on the study of the individual mind one of the major criticisms of the traditional cognitive approach to sla has been that it does not pay sufficient attention to the individual learner (e.g., atkinson, 2010; lamb, 2013; ushioda, 2009). this tendency was certainly understandable since the ultimate goal of this line of research was to establish universal models that could explain the process of sla. however, a growing recognition of its limitations has led to the introduction of more socially-oriented approaches. many of those who advocate alternative views such as sociocultural theory, complex theories, and language socialization, claim that the process of language learning is essentially different for all learners as it cannot take place without interacting with the surroundings (benson & cooker, 2013). moreover, individual difference research, a sub-field of sla, which seeks "to understand the general principles of the human mind and to explore the uniqueness of the individual mind" (dörnyei, 2005, p. 1), cannot be exempted from this criticism. in response to gregg's (2006) support for the cognitive approach, lamb (2013) points out that "the only individual differences of interest, in this view, are those that systematically identify particular categories of learners and can be hypothesized to have specific effects on the learning process and outcome, such as age, language aptitude, or type of motivation" (p. 32). while such cognitive approaches seek general principles of causeand-effect based on abstractness and generalizability usually through quantitative methods, alternative approaches seek situatedness and aim to highlight the uniqueness of the learner, often using qualitative methods. the impact of the new paradigms in individual difference research in sla can be witnessed in the increasing attention paid to the importance of context and understanding learners as kay irie 16 flesh and blood rather than viewing these learners as representatives of large samples (dörnyei & ushioda, 2009, 2011; murray, gao, & lamb, 2011). another point raised in reaction to the cognitive approach to sla research is the importance of emotion (subjective feelings) and how it has been dealt with separately from cognition (schutz & pekrun, 2007; swain, 2013). in the cognitive approach to sla, pursuing the goal of identifying linear causeeffect relationships, the only emotion that has drawn attention in the field is anxiety (e.g., horwitz, 2010; macintyre & gardner, 1994; see pavlenko, 2013 for a discussion of the need to expand research on affect). it has been considered as an individual difference factor that negatively affects cognitive learning processes. however, the process of language learning involves a series of emotional experiences. the development of neuropsychology and neuroimaging technology have clearly shown that emotion modulates not only cognitive processing such as attention, memory, and decision-making but also actions through certain parts of the brain such as the amygdala (phelps, 2006; schumann, 1997). swain (2013) states that emotion is an integral part of cognition and that emotions are interdependent, if not inseparable (p. 196). despite the differences that exist across the methodologies, what is common to all the interpretative qualitative studies is that they tell stories of learners’ experiences which reveal how their emotions and cognitions are integrated to bring about (or fail to bring about) changes in their linguistic abilities, as well as attitudes, thoughts, and actions towards the target language. therefore, how the learner feels about language learning and use is a legitimate research interest that needs to be explored. 3. the emergence of q in reaction to conventional factor analysis interestingly, q methodology itself emerged from epistemological and methodological concerns occurring within mainstream psychology in the 1930s which are in many respects similar to those currently being expressed in the field of second language learning research. the key figure behind the development of q was william stephenson, a protégé of charles spearman, the british psychologist known for his seminal work on human intelligence and as a leading statistician on factor analysis as well as the author of spearman's rank correlation coefficient. despite the fact that stephenson had been studying under such a prominent figure in individual difference psychology, he claimed that conventional factor analysis, which had become the standard procedure of the field by the mid-1930s, was not helping researchers to understand individuals holistically and overlooked first-person accounts and subjective feelings. the statistical procedure of conventional factor analysis, in step with the broad direction of psyq methodology for post-social-turn research in sla 17 chology research, required researchers to break up people's thoughts and beliefs into a set of components to develop scales. furthermore, stephenson was deeply concerned that the conventional approach was providing information about the sample or the population as a whole but not the differences among the individuals being studied (brown, 1980; watts & stenner, 2012). as an essential step in conventional factor analysis, all measurements must be standardized. standardized scores represent the positions of the measurements taken within and relative to the overall distribution of sample scores for the variable. the process of standardization dissociates the scores from the very individuals who produced them. all the scores for each item or variable directly reflect the personal characteristics of certain participants, and they only make sense by reference to them. however, the converted, standardized scores demonstrate only the standing of a specific score relative to statistically aggregated scores, no longer representing the individual. let us think about this in terms of research in sla, for example, in an area such as motivation, where factor analysis has been frequently employed. in the traditional cognitive approach, motivation is often measured by a battery of assessments using likert-type items, a set of constituents identified by the researcher. factor analysis is then used to confirm the unidimensionality of each scale. suppose one of the items in the data matrix was enjoyment with the item i like reading books in the target language. on a 5-point likert scale, person a chooses 5, person b 1, person c 4, and so on. the standardization process transforms these individual scores into relative scores that reflect the variability of the motivational intensity measured by this statement in proportion to the whole population or the whole sample. the fact that this item differentiates person a from person b by four points on a likert scale will be lost in a conventional factor analysis as the factors obtained show not individual differences between the participants but the associations between items; they show nothing about how each person feels about reading books in the target language. dissatisfied with this standard method of research, stephenson (1935) proposed q methodology as an alternative way of studying the subjectivity of individuals in a holistic yet orderly fashion. the relevance of q methodology for post-social-turn sla research is evident in the remarkable resemblance between the line of criticism leveled against the traditional cognitive approach to the study of the human mind in the 1930s and the current wave of criticism aimed at sla research from scholars seeking a more holistic understanding of language learners. q methodology identifies the signature stories that exist within a particular group of people in a systematic way that provides a certain level of transparency to the process of interpretation. this kay irie 18 transparency, in turn, alleviates some of the unease researchers from quantitative backgrounds often feel when encountering purely qualitative studies. 4. q methodology in this section, i will demonstrate how this seemingly quantitative method actually is designed to capture and find patterns in the subjective views of individuals, which is often the goal of qualitative studies. since many readers will not be familiar with the procedures associated with a q study, perhaps the most appropriate way to discuss the theoretical underpinnings of q is to outline the various steps integral to a study considering the rationale informing each of these steps. in a typical q study, participants are given a set of cards, with each card bearing a statement (or a picture) about the topic under investigation. the participants are then asked to rate the statements according to their psychological significance (e.g., most agree to most disagree) based on their feelings, reasoning or simple preference. this is often followed by an interview with the participants about the placement of the statements and the topic. the rankings or scores are analyzed statistically by the use of inverted factor analysis, another of stephenson’s innovations (1935), in which people’s views (or the sorts), and not the statements/items, are intercorrelated to produce factors. the factors represent similarities among people's views on a certain topic, not among the items as in conventional factor analysis. this procedure will be explained in more detail later. these factors are, then, interpreted using the information derived from the statistical analysis with the support of interview data and demographic data to construct a narrative account. this process is one of the reasons for q methodology often being associated with the qualitative research tradition (e.g., brown & good, 2010; shemmings, 2006; shinebourne, 2009; stenner, watts, & worrell, 2008; watts & stenner, 2005). in the subsections that follow, i will illustrate the procedure using a study on the self-concept of language learners referred to as l2 self (dörnyei & ushioda, 2009; mercer & williams, 2014), which relates to how one perceives oneself in relation to one’s second language learning and use. this is a longitudinal study partially reported in irie and ryan (2014). the aim of the study was to explore how the language learners changed their self-concept when they experienced a dramatic change in their learning environment: 19 japanese university students (14 females, 5 males, age 19-22), who participated in various study-abroad language programs through their university in tokyo, sorted a set of statements about learning and using their target foreign language before, during, and after their study-abroad experience. for the purpose of illustration of the five main stages, and to point out the distinctive features of the q methodology for post-social-turn research in sla 19 methodology, i use only the data from the second session taken about 7 months after their departure. the discussion concerns the following, each treated in a separate subsection: defining a research question, developing a q set, administrating q sorts, extracting factors and interpreting the factors. 4.1 . defining a research question considering the focus of q methodology, the nature of q studies is usually exploratory: q methodology is designed to discover new ideas (watts & stenner, 2012, p. 53). however, this is not to say that q studies cannot be used for explanatory purposes or testing theories (ramlo & newman, 2011, p. 185). the topics suitable for q studies are complex phenomena that could be considered suitable for qualitative studies and on which people have different views and feelings about. for the illustrative study, q methodology was chosen as a method of investigation as the focus was on l2 self, an extremely personal and dynamic concept that is relatively new in the field of sla. the purpose of the investigation was to explore how the learners incorporate their anticipation of and actual experience of going overseas as part of their l2 self-concept. therefore, the main question was how they perceived themselves in relation to l2 learning and use, which became the basis for the condition of instruction, the actual instruction given to the participants to sort the statements: how descriptive is this statement about your view of learning and using the target language? 4.2. defining and developing a q set developing a q set, a collection of statements, may at first appear similar to the process of developing a scale in traditional psychometric studies. however, a q set is an embodiment of concourse, a concept proposed by stephenson: "the universe of subjective communicability surrounding any topic, of the kind found in ordinary conversation, back-fence gossip, commentary deposited on internet blogs and exchanged in chat rooms, and extending to the high-level discourses of epistemic communities across all the sciences" (brown & good, 2010, p. 2). the concourse, therefore, is infinite as there is no limit to how people feel and what people say about the matter, which is deeply rooted in specific historical and cultural contexts. the development of the set becomes the key to the quality of a q study. the statements in a q sort should be as heterogeneous as possible yet all about the chosen topic onto which the participant can project their feelings. brown (1980) refers to the process of making a q sort “more an art than science” (p. 186). the construction of a q set kay irie 20 has been criticized (block, 2008, kampen & tamás, 2013) for the lack of systematicity in selecting statements and evaluation of the meaningfulness for the participants. one way to guard against these criticisms is to identify key themes and issues either a priori, based on theories and previous studies or within the statements collected from various sources and to consider the balance and coverage of themes. the latter approach of using emergent themes is familiar in qualitative research. the meaningfulness for the participants can be assessed by how the participants feel: “. . . we have to make sure that our participants emerge from a q study feeling they have been given the means to successfully model and express their viewpoint” (watts & stenner, 2012, pp. 58-59). for the q set in the illustrative study, a total of 127 statements were collected from the literature and established questionnaires that have been used in previous l2 motivation and other related research. these were then reduced to a set of 50 statements mainly through piloting and eliminating overlaps and redundancy (see table 3). in addition to the preservation of the range of the statements, particular care was paid to how realistic and relevant the ideas and wordings of the statements in japanese were to the japanese university students who participated in the study. 4.3. administering q sorts the q sort is at the heart of any q study. for this step, the participant is asked to place the cards along a continuum between two extremes in a quasi-normal distribution in response to the condition of instruction (see figure 1). the use of such forced distribution is another point q methodology is often criticized for, as it can seem to restrict the sorter’s expression of their views. however, this step is primarily a device to encourage the sorter to think carefully and compare all items; in fact, this forced distribution has a negligible effect on the results of factor analysis (brown, 1980, pp. 288-289; brown, danielson, & van excel, 2014). unlike likert-type questionnaires, participants can stop at any time and look at the placement of all the other items and make changes which they feel are necessary. this facilitates a greater level of reflection and engagement with the research instrument. q practitioners tend to carry out a follow-up interview to gain more information about the views of participants. the interview data can be useful in interpreting the results of the statistical analysis. the interview data can also add richness and depth to the narrative construction. in the illustrative study, the participants ranked the 50 statements in each pile of cards following the guidelines of how many cards should be allocated to each score, ranging from -5 (least descriptive of me) to +5 (most descriptive of me). q methodology for post-social-turn research in sla 21 rating (# of cards) -5 (2) -4 (3) -3 (4) -2 (5) -1 (7) 0 (8) +1 (7) +2 (5) +3 (4) +4 (3) +5 (2) figure 1 fixed quasi-normal distribution used for the 50-card sorts used in the illustrative study (irie & ryan, 2014). the number in the parentheses indicates the number of cards to be placed at each score. 4.4. statistical analysis: inverted factor analysis the statistical analysis of the data is usually carried out through the use of dedicated software (e.g., pcq, pqmethod). in q studies, items (statements) are rated, or “measured” by each person, not the other way around, as is usual in survey studies in which people are measured by items. therefore, in this inverted factor analysis, unlike in the conventional statistical procedure, the participants are regarded as variables and the q items as a sample. it is participants’ views that are grouped based on the similarity of the rated order of the items, not the similarity of the items. therefore, the extracted factors represent nonexclusive groups of people who share similar viewpoints (watts & stenner, 2012). table 1 shows the result of the transition made from the sort done in the shape of the inverted pyramid (figure 1) to numerical data. for example, for participant a in table 1, the data shows that this participant gave a score of 3 to statement 1. this means that participant a placed the card under the score 3 in the sort (figure 1), and there are three other statements with the same score. going from the left to right in row 1, statement 1 (i would like to try living in a foreign country in the future) is agreed with more strongly by participants a and c than participants f (-3) and g (-5). if we are to compare the sorts manually, we might spread the invertedkay irie 22 pyramid diagrams on the floor and try to group them visually according to the similarity of the arrangements of the item. instead, in q, this is done statistically by inverted factor analysis. given the complexity of the matter investigated in q studies, the centroid factor analysis is preferred over principal component or cluster analysis as it allows more room for the researcher to explore solutions by manually rotating factors using what she or he knows about the participants and the topic (brown et al., 2014). it also allows the participants to load on more than one factor as people cannot be categorized exclusively into one group or the other. this means that we can make copies of a sort and place them in more than one group by looking at different parts. this point is an important one that distinguishes q from other socalled reductionistic approaches. the purpose of q methodology is not to identify every single viewpoint (which is infinite) but to highlight the salient feelings shared in the particular group of people. three factors emerged in the segment of data focused on in the illustrative study, accounting for 51% of the total variance. in table 2, the factor loadings with x indicate a defining sort, which means that these sorts largely characterize the view that has emerged as a factor. in other words, these sorts define the core of the feeling represented by the factor. table 1 raw data matrix of 8 selected sorts in the illustrative study participants/sorts item a b c d e f g h 1 3 1 3 0 0 -3 -5 0 2 -2 -1 -1 1 -1 0 -1 -2 3 -3 -5 -5 -5 0 1 -2 1 4 -1 -1 -3 -2 1 1 0 0 5 1 0 2 0 1 -1 -2 0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 0 0 2 -1 3 +5 1 2 48 0 1 5 1 -5 -1 3 1 49 1 -3 -1 -5 0 -1 1 2 50 -4 -2 -1 1 -5 0 -1 -5 table 2 factor loadings of the selected q sorts (after a varimax rotation) sort/participants factor 1 factor 2 factor 3 a 0.73x -0.02 0.32 b 0.69x -0.01 0.31 c 0.75x -0.05 -0.03 d 0.62x -0.36 0.00 e -0.04 0.60x -0.05 f -0.24 0.64x 0.30 g 0.04 -0.12 0.59x h 0.22 0.03 0.69x q methodology for post-social-turn research in sla 23 the final step in the statistical procedure before interpreting the factors is to produce a factor array. this can be considered as a model or composite q sort for a particular factor. the factor arrays for the three factors with the ranking assigned to each statement in the model sorts are shown in table 3. statement 1 i would like to try living in a foreign country in the future is given a rating of +2 in factor 1 but -2 in factor 2. this means that people who belong to factor 2 are likely to have ranked this statement as -2. the statements ranked at both ends (+/-5) can be considered to have the strongest psychological significance for those who loaded on the factor and share a similar view. table 3 factor arrays for the selected factors in the illustrative study no. statement factor 1 factor 2 factor 3 1 i would like to try living in a foreign country in the future. 2 -2 -2 2 whenever i think of my future career, i imagine myself being able to use english. -1 0 -1 3 i will be able to use english effectively in the future. -5 1 0 4 i can imagine speaking english comfortably with foreign friends in the future. -2 1 0 5 i want to play an active role in a globalized society. 0 0 -1 6 i would like to be able to express my opinions in english. -4 2 -2 7 i want to be respected because i speak english fluently. -1 4 0 8 i’ve wanted to speak english fluently since i was very young. 0 -2 -1 9 english will expand my possibilities in the future. -1 1 -3 10 if i could speak english i would be a much cooler person. -3 2 -3 11 i must learn english in order to become an educated person. -5 0 0 12 learning english is necessary because it is an international language. 3 0 1 13 i am expected to be able to function in english after i graduate. 1 -1 4 14 in order to get a good job i will need to be able to use english well. 3 -4 1 15 i need to be fluent in english to do the job i want to do. -1 -4 -3 16 i study english to enjoy travel abroad. 0 0 -3 17 i will feel happy spending a lot of time studying english. 2 1 -1 18 my goal is to be able to speak english like a native speaker. 2 1 2 19 i will continue studying english after university. -4 0 0 20 i enjoy encountering new ideas in my english study. -4 4 -1 21 i have an english learner role model. -2 -4 -5 22 becoming fluent in english is one of the most important things in my life right now. 0 1 -2 23 to be honest, i have no idea why i’m learning english. 4 -1 5 24 i like learning languages in general not only english. -2 1 -1 25 i am a proactive english learner. -3 0 2 26 i regularly study english in my own time. -2 2 -1 27 i enjoy films or tv programs in english. 4 2 3 28 i enjoy reading newspapers, magazines, or websites in english. 0 -1 1 29 interacting with foreign people in english is fun for me. -1 4 2 30 i like myself when i’m speaking english. 1 2 1 31 i feel comfortable in the casual style of communication in english. -3 5 -2 32 i feel like i’m a different person when i speak english. 1 -5 3 kay irie 24 33 i feel good when speaking english. -3 3 -3 34 i am appreciated by my family because i speak english. 1 -2 0 35 people around me are not interested in the progress of my english learning. 0 -2 0 36 some of my family or friends may feel let down if i fail to learn english well. 1 -1 5 37 i have close friends that speak english as an l2. 0 3 4 38 people around me don’t understand how important learning english is for me. 1 -3 -5 39 i think i’m naturally quite good at learning languages. -1 -1 1 40 i’m too shy to speak english well. 3 -2 0 41 i don’t have the right personality for learning english. 5 -1 1 42 no matter how hard i try, i don’t think i’ll ever be able to master english. 4 -5 3 43 i’m just not smart enough to learn english well. 3 -2 4 44 if i make more effort, i am sure i will be able to master english. 1 3 -4 45 for people around me learning english doesn’t really matter that much. 5 3 -4 46 speaking english is a part of my everyday life. 2 -3 1 47 i have friends i communicate with in english. 0 5 2 48 i’m the only person i know who is serious about learning english. 2 -4 3 49 these days i feel like english is at the center of my everyday life. -1 -1 2 50 i don’t have opportunities to use english in my everyday life. -2 -3 -4 4.5. interpreting the factors among published q papers, it is understandably common to see discussion focused only on the statements ranked at the extreme ends of the factor array; more often than not, this is a consequence of the publication requirements of journals and very similar to the frustrations experienced by qualitative researchers, who are often required to simplify and reduce their data for publication. however, interpretation should be based on the whole configuration of a q sort following the factor array. it is a story-building process. although there is no fixed way of interpreting the factors and developing a narrative, which sometimes invites criticism (e.g., kampen & tamás, 2013), i find the use of crib sheets as described by watts and stenner (2012) useful. it provides a framework for rigorous logical thinking. following their procedure as a guideline, i now illustrate how studying the entire factor array can bring a much fuller picture and breathe life into the factors that emerge from the statistical analysis. this is the point where the truly qualitative nature of the methodology becomes apparent. in order to communicate this point, i will focus only on factor 1 and outline how the process of interpretation may unfold. the process begins with going through the rating of each item in the factor 1 array (table 3) and comparing it with that of other factor arrays, writing down the notable items that fit four categories: (a) items ranked at +5, (b) items ranked higher in factor 1 than in other factors, (c) items ranked lower in factor 1 than in other factors, and (d) items ranked -5. for q methodology for post-social-turn research in sla 25 example, item 1, i would like to try living in a foreign country in the future, can be placed under the category (b) as it is ranked only at +2, but -2 at the other two factors. item 2 whenever i think of my future career, i imagine myself being able to use english is rated -1 and also similarly by the other two factors, so it will not be included in this crib sheet at this initial stage. item 3 i will be able to use english effectively in the future is ranked at -5, which indicates the great psychological significance of this item to those who hold this view, and particularly so when compared to other factors which ranked the item more or less in the middle. therefore, it is not simply drawing a cut-off line. the researcher needs to make a decision whether the item actually is a crucial element in the view, as if reading through a transcript and deciding if a certain utterance or episode is meaningful or not, and how to categorize it. table 4, the first crib sheet, provides the result, an overview of what distinguishes this view from the other views. the outline of the mixed, if not self-contradictory, view represented by this factor is already emerging. table 4 crib sheet 1 for factor 1 item ranking (a) items ranked at +5 (2 items) 41 i don’t have the right personality for learning english. 5 45 for people around me learning english doesn’t really matter that much. 5 (b) items ranked higher in factor 1 array than other factor arrays (11 items) 1 i would like to try living in a foreign country in the future. 2 12 learning english is necessary because it is an international. 3 14 in order to get a good job i will need to be able to use english. 3 23 to be honest, i have no idea why i’m learning english. 4 27 i enjoy films or tv programs in english. 4 34 i am appreciated by my family because i speak english. 1 38 people around me don’t understand how important learning english. 1 40 i’m too shy to speak english well. 3 42 no matter how hard i try, i don’t think i’ll ever be able to master english. 4 46 speaking english is a part of my everyday life. 2 48 i’m the only person i know who is serious about learning english 2 (c) items ranked lower in factor 1 array than in other factor arrays (11 items) 4 i can imagine speaking english comfortably with foreign friends. -1 6 i would like to be able to express my opinions in english. -4 7 i want to be respected because i speak english fluently. -1 19 i will continue studying english after university. -4 20 i enjoy encountering new ideas in my english study. -4 24 i like learning languages in general not only english. -2 25 i am a proactive english learner. -3 26 i regularly study english in my own time. -2 29 interacting with foreign people in english is fun for me. -1 37 i have close friends that speak english as an l2. 0 47 i have friends i communicate with in english. 0 0 kay irie 26 (d) items ranked at -5 (2 items) 3 i will be able to use english effectively in the future. -5 11 i must learn english in order to become an educated person. -5 in order to make the view more complete, by looking at all the remaining items in the factor array, an additional set of 11 items are selected for the interpreted meaning based on the statement and its ranking to develop the description of the view (see table 5). this process also requires a great deal of rigor on the part of the investigator to keep asking herself/himself what the rating of the statement means and make decisions on the selection. together with the items in the first crib sheet, a total of 37 items provides a picture that is more comprehensive than only the four items rated at both ends yet also more coherent than trying to make sense of all the 50 items. table 5 crib sheet 2 for factor 1 (11 additional items) item (the reason for selecting the item) ranking 2 whenever i think of my future career, i imagine myself being able to use english. (the lack of clear future self image that is usually connected with a career goal) -1 9 english will expand my possibilities in the future. (the ambivalent feeling about the utilitarian value of english) -1 13 i am expected to be able to function in english after i graduate. (indifference to the society's expectation) 1 15 i need to be fluent in english to do the job i want to do. (the ambivalent feeling about the utilitarian value of english) -1 17 i will feel happy spending a lot of time studying english. (the willingness to study and the frustration of not being able to spend enough time) 2 18 my goal is to be able to speak english like a native speaker. (high expectation) 2 22 becoming fluent in english is one of the most important things in my life right now. (the lack of commitment) 0 31 i feel comfortable in the casual style of communication in english. (the difficulty of adjusting to the way people communicate in the language community) -3 33 i feel good when speaking english. (the frustration with the language, conflict in making it as a part of self) -3 43 i’m just not smart enough to learn english well. (attribution of failure to a stable and uncontrollable factor) 3 44 if i make more effort, i am sure i will be able to master english. (limited value of effort) 1 as the final output of the analysis, each view is described in simple and ordinary expressions for the readers to also experience the feelings that guided the people to rank the statements. let us consider the example of factor 1 and how it can be summarized (see table 6). q methodology for post-social-turn research in sla 27 table 6 summary interpretation of factor 1 factor 1: i'm interested but english is not my thing the l2 self identified by factor 1 is characterized by two conflicting attributes. on the one hand, those who share this view hold a desire to live overseas (1: +2) and are enjoying films and tv programs in english (27: +4); they even consider english as part of their everyday life (46: +2). their english ability is appreciated by their family to some extent (34: +1). for them, the ultimate goal of language learning is to become like a native speaker (18: +2). on the other hand, when they turn their thoughts to their future, it is very difficult for them to imagine themselves as effective and comfortable users of english (3: -5, 4: -1, 2: -1). this anticipated failure to master the language is attributed to a stable and controllable factor such as their unfit personality (41: +5, 40: +3), and lack of ability (43: +3), which cannot be overcome by effort (42: +3, 44: +1). while they wish to spend more time on improving their english (17: +2), they feel they are alone in their struggle (45: +5, 48: +2, 38: +1, 37: 0, 47: 0). with a fixed mindset, it is understandable that they do not make learning english a priority (25: -3; 26: -2, 22: 0). their perception of their unsuitable personality may also come from the discomfort they experience in l2 communication (33: -3, 31: -3, 29: 1). after formally studying english in school for at least 8 years, they espouse the discourse of internationalization and the necessity of english (12: +3, 14: +3). however, when it comes to the personal meaning of learning english, they seem to be at a loss (23: +4, 13: +1) and doubt its value in education (11: -5, 7: -1) and even for their future career (9: -1, 15: -1). they certainly do not find enjoyment in the process of language learning (24: -2), including encountering new ideas and values (20: -4) or expressing their ideas (6: -4). therefore, it is unlikely that they will continue to study english once they graduate from university. the narrative descriptions of the views identified can be compared to the findings in other studies and used to develop theories, support or cast doubt on them. for example, the view described for factor 1 complements the ambivalent feelings held by japanese learners of english pointed out in the literature. kozaki and ross (2011) discuss the body of research that suggests these mixed attitudes may be a consequence of japanese educational policy on english as a foreign language under the framework of internationalization that has a dual aim of developing human resources for international business and developing their sense of “uniqueness” as the japanese in the largely monolingual nation. similarly on the ambiguity, ryan (2009) argues the internationalization discourse is not meaningful enough for the majority of the students to actually make a long-term commitment. while generalizability based on statistics is not usually relevant to interpretative studies, analytic generalizability, identifying concepts at a more abstract level, extends the value of the study beyond particular cases studied (yin, 2009). the factors described in most q studies are not of any single person but of a composite picture that can provide a holistic understanding of a feeling. 5. possible applications of q methodology in sla research q methodology can be applied to any area of sla research that requires an indepth understanding of the learner’s situated subjective view of a complex kay irie 28 phenomenon. the most obvious place to start may be the themes related to affect and beliefs as these directly focus on the minds of learners and are areas that have proved challenging using other methods. researchers adopting socially-oriented approaches and working on concepts such as identity and agency, who have been almost exclusively employing ethnography and narrative studies, may also consider q methodology. it can identify patterns in the construction of perceptions within a group of learners or within the same person over a period of time in a single-participant design (e.g., goldstein & goldstein, 2005). although the use of single-participant design is still rare, it may be used to explore self-organization and self-similarity discussed in complex-adaptive systems theories (e.g., larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008; richards, ross, & seedhouse, 2012) as it can identify the commonalities or changes in the same person over time. the use of q methodology may shed new light and deepen the understanding of aspects of sla that have been previously investigated within the traditional cognitive framework. it can break down the barriers between cognition and emotion as well as the existing categories so as to overcome “a straightjacket of dichotomous thinking” (ortega, 2010, p. 170). for example, many categories are identified for personality, learning styles, and strategy use; however, it has been difficult to see how they are orchestrated within each learner in particular contexts. creating a q set that covers a range of attributes complemented by in-depth interviews, it may be possible to identify beliefs and perceptions in which various learning preferences and self-perceived qualities are integrated and internalized. these identified views may serve as initial conditions or as a grouping for purposive sampling in longitudinal case studies. finally, one of the distinctive and valuable qualities of q methodology that was mentioned but not elaborated on in the present paper is the participant’s active engagement in the research task. sorting the statements about language learning actually provides the learner with valuable opportunities to reflect on their own learning (cooker & nix, 2011) and this ecological dimension has led pemberton and cooker (2012) to propose that it can be used also as an educational task to facilitate learners’ autonomy and self-awareness. the full or partial involvement of students to generate q statements should enhance their meaningfulness. this immediate pedagogical usefulness is also in line with the recent call for more ethical considerations in second language research (e.g., ortega, 2005, 2012). q methodology represents a highly original research method that can paint an emotional and cognitive landscape of a particular context by connecting the core feelings and thinking of individuals about a complex subject matter. it can do so without polarizing the view of each person into components q methodology for post-social-turn research in sla 29 that are fixed a priori. q methodology offers an alternative strategy of inquiry, responding to the demands of the ever-diversifying theoretical perspectives and complexity of the subject matters in the field. kay irie 30 references atkinson, d. (2010). colloquium – alternative approaches to second language acquisition. language teaching, 43, 96-98. benson, p., & cook, l. (2013). the applied linguistic individual: gaining perspective. in p. benson & l. cooker (eds.), the applied linguistic individual: sociocultural approaches to identity, agency and autonomy (pp. 178186). sheffield: equinox. bartels, n. (2005). researching applied linguistics in language teacher education. in n. bartels (ed.), researching applied linguistics in language teacher education (pp. 1-26). new york: springer. block, d. (2003). the social turn in second language acquisition. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. block, j. (2008). q-sort in character appraisal: encoding subjective impressions of persons quantitatively. washington, dc: american psychological association. brown, s. r. (1980). political subjectivity: applications of q methodology in political science. new haven, ct: yale university press. brown, s. r., danielson, s., & van exel, j. (2014). overly ambitious critics and the medici effect: a reply to kampen and tamás. quality & quantity. doi: 10.1007/s11135-014-0007-x brown, s. r., & good, j. m. m. (2010). q methodology. in n. j. salkind (ed.), encyclopaedia of research design (pp. 1150-1156). thousand oaks, ca: sage. cooker, l., & nix, m. (2011). on q: an appropriate methodology for researching autonomy? (part 2). learning learning, 18(1), 31-38. retrieved from http://ld-sig.org/ll/18one/18-1toc.html cresswell, j.w. (2009) research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. thousand oaks, ca: sage. dörnyei, z. (2005). psychology of the language learner: individual differences in second language acquisition. hillsdale, nj: lawrence erlbaum. dörnyei, z., & ushioda, e. (2009). motivation, language identity and the l2 self. bristol: multilingual matters. dörnyei, z., & ushioda, e. (2011). teaching and researching motivation. harlow: pearson education. goldstein, d. m., & goldstein, m. e. (2005). q methodology study of a person in individual therapy. clinical case studies, 4, 40-56. gregg, k. r. (2006). taking a social turn for the worse: the language socialisation paradigm for second language acquisition. second language research, 22, 413-42. horwitz, e. k. (2010). foreign and second language anxiety (research timeline). language teaching, 43, 154-167. q methodology for post-social-turn research in sla 31 irie, k., & ryan, s. (2014). study abroad and the dynamics of change in learner l2 self-concept. in z. dörnyei, p. macintyre, & a. henry (eds.), motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 520-552). bristol: multilingual matters. kampen, j. k., & tamás, p. (2013). overly ambitious: contribution and current status of q methodology. quality & quantity. doi 10.1007/s11135-013-9944-z kozaki, y., & ross, s. j. (2011). contextual dynamics in foreign language learning motivation. language learning, 61, 1328-1354. lamb, m. 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(2005). doing q methodology: theory, method and interpretation. qualitative research in psychology, 2, 67-91. watts, d. s., & stenner, d. p. (2012). doing q methodological research: theory, method & interpretation. thousand oaks, ca: sage. yin, r. k. (2009). case study research. vol. 5: design and methods (4th ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage. 279 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (2). 279-282 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book review nabywanie j zyków trzecich i kolejnych oraz wieloj zyczno . aspekty psycholingwistyczne (i inne) [third and additional language acquisition and multilingualism. psycholinguistic (and other) aspects] author: zofia ch opek publisher: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu wroc awskiego, 2011 isbn: 978-83-229-3224-7 pages: 449 the book by zofia ch opek even at first sight makes an impression on the reader, as it includes 449 pages, out of which the text covers 397 pages and the remaining ones contain a bibliography of some thousand resource texts. the length of the text alone testifies to the extent of the material it presents to the readers. the monograph consists of eight chapters, each one of which is a thorough overview of both theoretical studies in the field and empirical studies in the particular area of multilinguality. in chapter 1 “sociolinguistic aspects of multilingual language acquisition and use”1 and chapter 2 “neurolinguistic aspects of multilingual language acquisition and their use,” the author pre 1 chapter titles used in the review are translations of their polish originals. 280 sents an outline of the selected aspects of multilinguality, the purpose of which is to provide a thorough background knowledge for the subsequent chapters focusing on multilinguality from a psycholinguistic perspective. this partly justifies why the author did not provide a more thorough discussion of the acculturation model of language acquisition in chapter 1 or why there is no comment on the affective filter (krashen) in chapter 2, the two models that the reader might expect to find in this book. the author focuses instead in a more detailed fashion on the factors that constitute multilinguality in an individual language learner and user and the educational contexts of foreign language learning. the presentation of neurolinguistic aspects of multilinguality constitutes a competent description of the processing of linguistic knowledge and competence as they occur in the brain. the author not only moves freely and competently discussing very rich resource material but also shows her understanding, ability to interpret it and inclination to take a critical view. chapter 3 “characteristics of a bi-/multilingual” is devoted to the discussion of the broadly understood concept of communicative competence and the latest theories of individual multilinguality. the theories and models the author refers to are among others, jessner and herdina´s dynamic model of multilinguality, which has to be considered a milestone in the development of multilingual research, and thus it can never be discussed enough. one of the merits of this chapter is a precise definition of the constructs and terms the author provides the reader with. i refer here to such concepts as metalinguistic awareness, metapragmatic awareness and metacognitive awareness, which are often defined quite freely and sometimes used interchangeably, even in scholarly texts. each of these constructs is illustrated with examples from empirical studies in bilingual and multilingual contexts. chapter 4 “cross-linguistic influences” deals with language contact, which is one of the most important and visible issues in learning foreign languages. the significance of the issue justifies the size of the chapter. the resource material overviewed here must cover almost all the research work done in the area of cross-linguistic influences, that is, in language transfer. the author not only discusses comprehensively the reasons for language transfer in bilingual and multilingual language users but also illustrates this discussion with examples of different types of transfer in different language subsystems. the reader will also find here a presentation of the construct of paralinguistic transfer, which relates to intercultural communicative competence and is therefore a significant aspect of communication. the author refers here to the well-known study of r. kaplan on culturally-based models of thinking, which she rightly considers to be formative for transfer at the level of both oral and 281 written discourse. the only aspect of the topic that might leave the reader unsatisfied is the discussion of the role of affect in multilingual development. in chapter 5 “mental lexicon,” the author presents the models of lexical access by dijkstra, grosjean and costa. naturally, she also discusses models of the mental lexicon itself. the presented models of weinreich, de groot, kroll and stewart´s are models of second language mental lexicons. the author suggests how these models could be adapted for the context of multilingual lexical storage, which is much more complex than the bilingual one. the models of mental lexicon constitute one of the most thoroughly researched aspects of language acquisition so it was not possible for the author to present a complete overview; however, the selection made for the purposes of this chapter is sufficient for the reader to get a general idea. at the same time, the author is aware of the fact that l2 models of mental lexicon cannot be easily adapted to the l3 mental lexicon and that the research done so far seems to be highly selective and does not allow us to form l3 models. thus, she points to the need of more research in the area. chapter 6 “hypotheses and models of language processing in production and reception” is a very scrupulously prepared text overviewing the research dealing both with language production and also with processes involved in language reception. the author uses classical and seminal, as well as the latest, publications in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics on this subject. she starts with a discussion of the models of l1 processing (dell, levelt), moves on to l2 processing (de bot, paradis) and finally shows the possibilities of application of these models to multilingual contexts of language acquisition (de bot, paradis). these are very complex theories; however, the author manages to interpret them not only correctly but also in a very accessible way for the reader who may not necessarily know a great deal about this area of research. the penultimate chapter of the monograph, chapter 7 “models of language development,” is devoted solely to the multilingual context, in contrast with the previous chapters where the author reports on quite a few bilingual theories and studies. the works quoted here referring to multilingual development are the most recently published theoretical and empirical sources, for example those of ecke and hall, muller-lance, and herdina and jessner. it is an exhaustive presentation of the state of multilingual research, but not always very easily assimilatable (for example, for a polish reader). the final chapter, chapter 8 “summary,” presents an overview of the whole monograph, which allows the reader to come to grips with the vast amount of knowledge presented in a more elaborate fashion in the previous chapters. the author also discusses here possible ways forward for multilingual research. 282 the value of this monograph lies in the fact that it is probably the first thoroughly presented compendium of knowledge on multilingualism and multilingual research. also, the fact that the author is able to take a critical view of research which has been an active domain for scholars for only about the last ten years or so is worth pointing out. it would be difficult not to agree with the opinion that some multilingual research is still highly selective and not reliable and also artificial, using laboratory studies of multilingualism based on l2 research paradigms. thus, there is a need to create more appropriate multilingual research paradigms and a more holistic and multidisciplinary approach. the author also rightly points to the flaws in multilingual research demonstrated by the imprecise use of terminology, even at the basic level of what constitutes l2, l3, or ln. to sum up, i think that the monograph by zofia ch opek is a valuable text for those scholars whose research interests are in multilinguality, as the book constitutes a thorough compendium overviewing both theory and empirical studies in the area, supplemented by a critical evaluation of their merits. the monograph would therefore be especially useful as a reference book for those scholars for whom more recent publications on multilinguality are not easily available. reviewed by danuta gabry -barker university of silesia, katowice, poland danutagabrys@hotmail.com 13 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (1). 2016. 13-18 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.1.1 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial the focus of this special issue is instructed second language acquisition (isla). it is to explore some of the most recent developments in this area of sla research and its implications for classroom instruction. drawing on some current definitions (leow, 2015; loewen, 2015; nassaji, 2015; nassaji & fotos, 2010), isla is defined as an area of sla that investigates not only the effects but also the processes and mechanisms involved in any form-focused intervention (explicit or implicit) with the aim of facilitating language learning and development. instructed sla differs from naturalistic sla, which refers to second language (l2) acquisition taking place through exposure to language in naturalistic language learning settings with no formal intervention (doughty, 2003). it is also different from classroom instruction with no focus on form. furthermore, although instructed sla is often taken to refer to what is learned inside the classroom, instructed sla can also take place outside the classroom through, for example, various instructional strategies (such as feedback, tasks, or explanation) that are often associated with instruction. of course, this does not mean that the processes involved in sla in and outside the classroom are exactly the same. although there might be commonalities in learning processes, the classroom context has its unique features that might have an impact on learning. for example, in classroom learning a group of learners come together in a particular place to learn the language jointly during a given period of time. this might have an impact on learning opportunities in terms of the nature of the discourse created, learners’ participation, interaction, and engagement with language. as allwright (1984, p. 156) pointed out, language interaction in the classroom setting is collectively constructed by all learners and “the importance of interaction in classroom learning is precisely that it entails this joint management of learning.” sla researchers have long been interested in the role of instruction in various contexts. of central interest have been not only whether instruction has 14 any effects in general but also whether there is any relationship between different types of instruction and l2 development. thus, the two most important questions often raised about the role of instruction are: does instruction make a difference, and if so, what type of instruction is most effective? concerns about the role of instruction in general have been traditionally motivated in part by the position against instruction and the claim that formal instruction has little impact on l2 development (cook, 1991; dulay, burt, & krashen, 1982; krashen, 1985; krashen & terrell, 1983; schwartz, 1993). much of the early research on the role of instruction concentrated on this question. findings from the extensive body of research over the past three decades, which have been summarized and discussed in many reviews (e.g., doughty & williams, 1998; ellis, 1994, 2006, 2008; housen & pierrard, 2005; larsen-freeman & long, 1991; long, 1983; nassaji & fotos, 2010; nassaji, 2016; norris & ortega, 2000; spada, 1997), provide strong evidence that instruction is not only helpful but also in many cases needed for l2 acquisition. as for different types of instruction, a growing body of research has examined this question as well. however, to date, research in this area has not been able to show clearly what type of instruction best facilitates sla. this suggests that the relationship between instruction and learning is complex and may be mediated by many factors. thus, caution is warranted in making any causal relationship between any particular type of instruction and language learning. the goal of this special issue is to contribute to the current body of research in isla by publishing studies that have examined not only the relative effects of specific types of instruction but also what mechanisms can mediate or explain their outcomes. the papers include reports of studies that have addressed some of the key areas of isla including those related to instructional training, feedback provision and effectiveness, processing instruction, and input enhancement. they have addressed different target structures and also different languages including chinese, spanish, french, and english. conducted in both classroom and laboratory settings, the studies have explored issues in ways that have important relevance for both theory and classroom practice. the special issue begins with a paper by hawkes and nassaji who examine the role of extensive recasts in learners’ ability to detect and correct their own errors in subsequent posttests. most previous laboratory studies of recasts have examined the role of intensive recasts provided repeatedly on the same target structure. this is different from recasts that occur naturally and spontaneously during communicative interaction. this study examined the beneficial effects of spontaneous recasts provided during small-group activities outside classroom contexts. twenty-six esl learners received either incidental recasts or no feedback on their erroneous utterances. using a within-group research design and a 15 new testing methodology (video-based stimulated correction posttests), the study revealed that students successfully and partially successfully corrected more errors from error+recast episodes than from error-recast (no recast) episodes. this finding confirms that extensive recasts during small-group work may be beneficial to students. leow and cerezo in the paper titled “deconstructing the i and sla in isla: one curricular approach” first provide a brief overview of the mechanisms assumed to be involved in instructed sla, with a focus on their specific characteristics and assumptions. then, taking a curricular perspective, they argue for a more comprehensive view of isla that takes into account not only the processes of isla but also a focus on language curriculum and the implications drawn from such a focus for instructed l2 environments. benati addresses the role of input enhancement. he provides a detailed overview of classroom studies in three key strands: input flood, textual enhancement, and processing instruction. input flood is a technique in which learners are provided with numerous examples of a certain target form in the input (either oral or written). textual enhancement aims to raise learners’ attention to form by highlighting certain aspects of input by means of various typographic devices, such as bolding, underlining, and italicizing in written input. the assumption is that such visual enhancements make grammatical forms more noticeable and subsequently learnable. as for processing instruction, it is a particular approach to teaching language that is based on how learners interpret and process the input data. benati’s findings indicate that l2 learners benefit from each of the instructional strategies reviewed. however, their effectiveness may vary depending on the extent to which they provide learners with positive and negative evidence and also how explicitly they draw learners’ attention to form. among the three types of instructions reviewed, processing instruction with structured input practice is argued to be an effective way of enhancing input. loewen and inceoglu examine the beneficial effects of textual enhancement on both learners’ knowledge and perception of the spanish preterit and imperfect verb forms. using eye-tracking and pretest-posttest measures, their study revealed no effect of textual enhancement on learners’ amount of attention and their knowledge of the targeted forms. the authors conclude that the study contributes to the body of research on textual enhancement and also suggest that eye-tracking could be used as a useful technique to assess learners’ noticing. using a quasi-experimental study, oliver and young investigate the effect of vocabulary instruction on students’ reading fluency and comprehension. the focus is on two types of training: bottom-up isolated vocabulary training and top-down contextual training. the study found that while isolated vocabulary training negatively affected learners’ fluency and comprehension, context16 based training had a positive impact on fluency but no effect on comprehension. these results point to the complex interaction between type of vocabulary training and learners’ reading fluency and comprehension. the authors discuss the implications of the findings for classroom instruction. zuniga and simard explore the use and frequency of student-centered interactional practices in french (fsl) and english (esl) classes in secondary schools in the montreal area. the beneficial role of meaning-focused interaction has been amply documented in the l2 literature. using a classroom observation scheme developed for the purpose of the research, the study analyzed 63 hours of classroom instruction in the two settings. the findings revealed that neither of two classes was as interactive as expected. however, notable differences were observed between the two with the fsl classes being more teacher-centered involving fewer interactive activities than the esl classes. these findings point to the role of instructional context as an important variable affecting the use of interactive practices in classroom settings. the last paper deals with the role of interactional feedback. within the field of isla, interactional feedback is viewed as an important tool for drawing learners’ attention to language forms during meaning-focused activities. however, most of the studies in this area have been in esl or efl contexts. fu and nassaji explore the provision of teacher feedback, learner uptake, as well as learner and teacher perception of feedback in an adult chinese as a foreign language (cfl) classroom. analysing 10 hours of videotaped student-teacher interaction, the study identified 12 types of feedback used by the teacher including recasts, delayed recasts, clarification requests, translation, metalinguistic feedback, elicitation, explicit correction, asking a direct question, repetition, directing question to other students, re-ask, and using l1-english. most feedback types, including recasts and delayed recasts, were followed by a notable degree of uptake. as for the students’ and teacher’s perception, they did not match and both the teacher and the students were generally not accurate in perceiving the frequency of each feedback type. taken together, the studies presented in this special issue provide a snapshot of the variety of issues investigated in the field of isla. it is our hope that the papers help shed light on understanding the role and complexity of instructed language learning in l2 development and also stimulate ideas that can be further explored in future research. hossein nassaji university of victoria, canada nassaji@uvic.ca 17 references allwright, r. 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(2016). research timeline: form-focused instruction and second language acquisition. language teaching, 49, 35-62. nassaji, h., & fotos, s. (2010). teaching grammar in second language classrooms: integrating form-focused instruction in communicative context. london: routledge. 18 norris, j. m., & ortega, l. (2000). effectiveness of l2 instruction: a research synthesis and quantitative meta-analysis. language learning, 50, 417-528. schwartz, b. (1993). on explicit and negative data effecting and affecting competence and linguistic behavior. studies in second language acquisition, 15, 147-163. spada, n. (1997). form-focused instruction and second language acquisition: a review of classroom and laboratory research. language teaching, 29, 1-15. 621 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (3). 2018. 621-642 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.3.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt expressing authorial self in research articles written by polish and english native-speaker writers: a corpus-based study katarzyna hryniuk university of warsaw, poland k.hryniuk@uw.edu.pl abstract this cross-linguistic and cross-cultural, corpus-based study explores the notion of writer identity expressed through self-reference. the study examines how writers from two cultural regions – polish and anglo-american – construct a credible representation of themselves in writing. that is, it investigates the differences and similarities in the frequency of use, and the role of first person pronouns and determiners, in the corpora of 40 research articles in the area of applied linguistics – 20 written by polish authors in english, published in polish institutions, and 20 by native english speakers, published in anglophone journals. additionally, the frequency of use and the role of nominal lexical items referring to the writers, such as the author(s) and the researcher(s), are explored. the location of pronouns, determiners and the lexical items in the imrd structure (introduction-method-results-discussion) is also researched, as certain types of pronouns and determiners were expected to occur in the given sections, depending on their functions. the results clearly show that there is a striking difference between the use of pronouns and determiners in the texts written by the two groups of writers. the findings carry important implications for formulating clearer instructions and developing appropriate writing strategies by novices writing for publication in efl. keywords: writer identity; authorial self; research article; academic writing; first person pronoun katarzyna hryniuk 622 1. introduction academic writing, regarded as a very complex skill, develops through a writer’s socialization into new discourse communities and their practices (e.g., duff, 2007, 2010; flowerdew, 2013). in this process, not only must novice writers acquire new genres with all their characteristics, but they also try to construct new academic writer identities (ivanič, 1994, 1998). in polish higher education institutions, such learners, when writing in english as a foreign language, learn to follow angloamerican conventions of writing, but at the same time, they are under a strong influence of the local, socio-cultural context in which they write. therefore, the term discourse communities is used in plural in this introduction to indicate that even in one discipline there is no one monolithic community (ivanič, 1998). novice writers have many options to choose from in terms of content, wording and text organization when creating academic discourse. however, they most often follow the patterns present in the texts they are exposed to, that is, academic publications, and frequently the choices they make are subconscious (ivanič, 1994). therefore, in this article i emphasize the importance, and explore the means of raising critical awareness of academic writers’ linguistic choices, since “every word a writer writes contributes to the impression he is creating of herself to a reader” (ivanič, 1994, p. 5). this impression of a writer which emerges from the text, based on characteristics ascribed by a reader, creates writer identity. following ivanič (1998), in this article the term identity will be used to denote self. ivanič and camps (2001) also discuss the issue using the term voice, which is understood as a representation of identity in a given text. to clarify the meaning of the term with reference to writing, they compare it to speech, stating “that the lexical, syntactic, organizational, and even the material aspects of writing construct identity just as much as do the phonetic and prosodic aspects of speech, and thus writing always conveys a representation of the self of the writer” (ivanič & camps, 2001, p. 3). the authors adopt the bakhtinian, social-interactionist view of language development, in which people write by drawing on voices they have encountered in the past when participating in discourses. these voices locate their users historically and culturally. but at the same time they select, recombine and use them in new, unique ways, establishing their identity in this way. in this view, writing is a social, interpersonal process (ivanič, 1998). it takes place in encounters with other people and texts (ivanič & camps, 2001). in other words, in bakhtin’s framework, a learner establishes the self, and “the source of consciousness is embodied in the voices surrounding” (vitanova, 2005, p. 167). expressing authorial self in research articles written by polish and english native-speaker writers. . . 623 2. theoretical framework in the study described in this article, the framework developed by ivanič (1998) will be used. she distinguished the following aspects of writer identity: · autobiographical self – associated with the writer’s history, roots, usually not deducible from a text; it is socially constructed and continuously developing; · discoursal self – the impressions of writers, which they project in the texts; it is reflected in discourse characteristics (relating to beliefs, values, and power relations in a given context); · authorial self – the degree to which they establish presence in their texts, relating to their opinions, beliefs, position; it can be also described as “authoritativeness writers are prepared to invest, to personally get behind statements” (hyland, 2011, p. 166). it is this last aspect which i focus on in my study – that is, writer identity expressed by the use of personal pronouns and determiners. in particular, the appearance of the pronoun i in academic texts is worth exploring, because, by using it, authors enhance the persuasive effect of their arguments (szymańska, 2011). as ivanič (1998) wrote, some writers attribute ideas more to other authorities in their writing, presenting the content as objective truth, and avoid using first person pronouns, others take more responsibility and intrude into a text, which changes readers’ perception. in the present study the notion of an authorial self will be explored rather than voice, because the latter has a broader meaning. it encompasses both authorial self and discoursal self (matsuda, 2001). it must be also emphasized that the three aspects listed above are not completely separate. they interrelate as authorial self can be regarded as an aspect of discoursal self, and it is also likely a product of autobiographical self. these aspects present just different perspectives on writer identity (ivanič, 1998). the fourth aspect of identity distinguished by ivanič (1998, p. 27) refers to the so-called “available possibilities for self-hood.” these are social identities, not belonging to particular individuals, but prototypical possibilities. this aspect shapes all the three previously discussed. the authorial self is influenced or, one can say, socially constructed by these “possibilities,” as the conventions for whether and how to establish authorial presence differ from one social context to another. writers try to predict values, beliefs and expectations of readers, depending on the context, and in accordance with them either consciously or subconsciously shape the self (ivanič, aitchinson, & weldon, 1996). a wide ranging discussion on writer identity started at the turn of the century, resulting in many publications on the topic, some of which will be outlined in the next part of this article, but it seems inconclusive. still, since non-nativespeakers’ rhetorical identities are shaped by different literacy traditions, the katarzyna hryniuk 624 conventions of personality remain a dilemma for both novice and experienced writers (hyland, 2011). many writers, academic writing instructors, and thesis advisors are hesitant when they are asked the question of whether and how to use personal pronouns and determiners in academic texts. they often either follow traditional conventions (what they were taught) or refer to style manuals and handbooks, which often give contradictory information. my suggestion is to use an inductive approach to text exploration, specifically corpus-based data driven learning (boulton, 2012; hryniuk, 2015; johns, 1991), such as the one in the present study, to increase both learners’ and instructors’ awareness of the possible ways of expressing authorial self in various discourses and contexts. therefore, the aim of the present cross-linguistic and cross-cultural, corpus-based study is to explore the notion of writer identity expressed through self-reference. the study examines how writers from two cultural regions construct a credible representation of themselves in writing. that is, it investigates the differences and similarities in the frequency of use, and the role of first person pronouns and determiners in the corpora of 40 research articles in the area of applied linguistics – 20 written by polish authors in english, and 20 by native english speakers. additionally, the frequency of use and the role of nominal lexical items referring to the writer, such as the author(s) and the researcher(s) is explored. the location of pronouns, determiners and the lexical items in the imrd structure (introduction-method-results-discussion) is also researched. in this structure, typical of articles in experimental sciences, each section performs a different communicative function (see hryniuk, 2017). the results of the study carry important implications for teaching academic writing for publication in efl settings by enabling the formulation of clearer instructions for novice writers. however, before presenting the results, the main findings from previous research will be outlined. 3. previous research the use of pronouns, determiners and other means to express authorial self in academic writing has not received enough attention in publications by foreign, and even less by polish scholars so far. however, the most prominent studies which will be outlined below brought about significant results. the largest number of studies focused on disciplinary differences in the use of pronouns by writers writing in their mother tongues. there were also studies in which a comparison was made between expert and novice writers writing in english as a second/official language (e.g., in hong kong). only a few researchers, however, concentrated on the comparison between pronoun use in different languages by l1 writers, and between the use of pronouns and determiners by english native expressing authorial self in research articles written by polish and english native-speaker writers. . . 625 speakers and non-native speakers writing in english as a foreign language, in the same discipline. these studies will be reviewed in the abovementioned order. 3.1. studies on expressing authorial self carried out outside poland many studies concentrate on the use of pronouns and determiners in english texts in specific academic disciplines written by native speakers. for example, kuo (1999) explored the use of personal pronouns in scientific journal articles in the area of computer science, physics and electronic engineering. the author found that, although none of the journal guidelines stated the editorial policy concerning the use of pronouns, most frequently appearing were first person plural pronouns and determiners (we, us, our), even in single-authored articles. they were used to distance the writer from the text. there were no occurrences of first person singular pronouns at all. the author also analyzed different meanings and functions of the first person plural pronouns. she found that writers most often used the so-called exclusive we, which refers to speaker-writer only (e.g., “. . . we propose to use a statistical . . .” kuo, 1999, p. 132). this pronoun emphasizes writers’ role in research. it highlights their contribution. the second most frequently used first person plural pronoun was the so-called inclusive we, which refers to both speaker-writer and hearer-reader (e.g., “we easily see that . . .” kuo, 1999, p. 132) or to the whole discipline (“. . . we [researchers in the field] deal with unstructured targets . . .” kuo, 1999, p. 134). it is most often used to express shared knowledge, beliefs, goals, and the like. it decreases the distance between the writer and the reader. this division into exclusive and inclusive we will be also considered in the study part of the present article. a few studies by hyland (2001, 2003, 2011) also focused on the use of first person pronouns and determiners in english texts from various disciplines. in the study published in 2001, hyland explored their use by experienced native-speaker writers in the corpus of 240 research articles in eight disciplines: mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, marketing, sociology, philosophy, applied linguistics, physics and microbiology. in another study (hyland, 2003), besides the articles, he also analyzed 800 article abstracts in the same disciplines to explore the use of self mentions in them. he found out that a large majority (75%) of the pronouns and determiners was in the so-called “soft” disciplines (i.e., the humanities and social sciences), on average over twice more per article than in science and engineering (hyland, 2001, 2003). more first person singular pronouns were used in the humanities and social sciences, in philosophy in particular, while in sciences the plural form was preferred, which was explained not only with the fact that the writers attempted to make their texts less personal, but it also pointed to more collaborative nature of research in sciences. the author also found important katarzyna hryniuk 626 disciplinary differences in the functions of first person pronouns used in the article abstracts. in those where quantitative research was presented, that is, mainly in sciences, the first person pronouns were more often used for describing procedures, in other ones – for elaboration of arguments. also, in the humanities and social sciences, personal pronouns were more frequently used in abstracts to state the author’s viewpoint (hyland, 2003). two studies carried out by harwood (2005b, 2005c) also focused on disciplinary differences in the use of the personal pronoun i, and inclusive and exclusive we by english native-speaker writers. in the first one, he quantitatively and qualitatively explored research articles from four academic disciplines: business and management, computing science, economics and physics. the results showed that in the “soft” disciplines (here: business and management, and economics) the pronoun i was preferred, while in computing science and in physics, exclusive we was used instead. in the “soft” disciplines, only one case of exclusive we was found. the use of i in the “hard” disciplines was very rare. inclusive we was used in both the “soft” and “hard” disciplines, but in computing science inclusive we comprised only one third of the cases, and in the physics articles only 10%, while in the “soft” disciplines all but one of the pronouns were inclusive (harwood, 2005c). the second study by harwood (2005b) was a qualitative analysis of the use of first person pronouns in research articles in the same disciplines. harwood (2005a) also focused on differences between the use of pronouns in the methodology part of works written by native-speaker students of computing and by expert writers in the same discipline, using a taxonomy by tang and john (1999) and other scholars, as well as a category distinguished by himself, that is, the methodological i (used for step by step descriptions of procedures). he found that the methodological i comprised 80% of all pronouns used in the works by novice writers, while only 3% in the works by expert writers. the pronoun that expert writers chose most frequently was we (in 90% of instances) and most of the instances were exclusive we – referring to the writer alone. harwood (2005a) also carried out a qualitative functional analysis of the methodological i use in the corpora to show how the writers achieve different effects. in two other studies harwood (2006, 2007) investigated the views of writers in political science on appropriate and inappropriate use and functional-pragmatic effects of personal pronouns in their own and other scientists’ writing. these were interview-based accounts which the author strongly recommends conducting for the purposes of instruction in english for specific purposes. harwood and hadley (2004) also suggest a pedagogical approach and activities based on such investigations, to which i will return in the final part of this article. in the 2011 study, hyland explored the use of first person pronouns and determiners in 64 reports written in l2 by undergraduates at a hong kong university expressing authorial self in research articles written by polish and english native-speaker writers. . . 627 and compared it with their use in a parallel corpus of 240 articles written by expert native-speaker writers. the texts written by students were from the following disciplines: biology, mechanical engineering, information systems, business studies, teaching english as a second language, economics, public administration and social sciences. the main results showed that expert writers used four times more pronouns and determiners than novice writers. the novice writers used i most frequently (it comprised 60% of all occurrences of pronouns), and we was the second most often used pronoun, even in single-authored texts. the pronouns were more often used to state goals and report on the methodology in the students’ research rather than to make strong claims, unlike in articles written by expert writers. in other words, the novice writers were reluctant to firmly stand behind their claims and downplayed their role in interpreting results. overall, the most often appearing functions of pronouns in students’ reports were the ones which made their statements less risky and less facethreatening. their aim was mainly to guide readers through the discourse. a very often cited study of first person pronoun use in many languages is a qualitative exploration by vassileva (1998). she compared preferences of l1 academic writers from five countries (english, german, french, russian and bulgarian) with regard to the use of the pronouns i and we in linguistics research articles. she attributed the differences which she found to native language cultures of the writers and to their pragmatic choices rather than to the linguistic systems. she observed large differences, in particular between the use of the pronoun i in the five languages. in english, it appeared twice as often as in german and even more often when compared with any other of the languages explored. this pronoun was very frequently used in english for expressing the authors’ views, in the discussion section in particular, and for showing commitment to the aims and procedures of their studies. to the contrary, in slavic languages (bulgarian and russian) the pronoun we dominated as most often used for expressing personal views. in english and in german, unlike in the other three languages, inclusive we was commonly used when referring to other people’s work, evaluating previous research results and claims. exclusive we, on the other hand, was more often used for describing methodology, procedures, and analyses in the slavic languages, while the writers of german and english origin preferred to use i in such contexts (the french were on the borderline between the two). vassileva (1998) concludes that the differences can be attributed to native language cultures. thus, the degree of self-promotion through self-reference was the greatest in english, next in german and then in slavic languages. the greatest difference, however, was between english and german writers, who used mostly i as a sign of individuality, and russian and bulgarian ones, who used mainly we as a sign of community as a whole. vassileva (1998) claims that there katarzyna hryniuk 628 is a strong influence of english in terms of expressing individuality, through the use of the pronoun i, on german and french academic writing. although english has become dominant also in eastern europe, slavic languages seem to resist this trend. in bulgarian and russian academic culture, writers still prefer to employ the collective we instead. she also explains that the fact that russian and bulgarian discourses favor a “collective approach” is the sign of the long-lasting influence of the powerful communist ideology in these countries. by avoiding first person singular pronoun use, vassileva (1998) claims, writers from slavic countries try to preserve their cultural identity. hyland (2011) expresses the same view on collective identity of writers in asian cultures. however, matsuda (2001) offered a different explanation of the fact that japanese writers’ texts seem to lack voice, strongly associated with individuality in the english native-speakers’ eyes. matsuda (2001) showed how japanese writers, who also belong to the so-called “collectivist cultures,” constructed their voice in electronic discourse (web diaries) through the discursive means which are language-specific. he claims that the english language lacks the counterparts of these discursive features, and that is what makes voice construction in english difficult for the japanese, as it may be for any other second language writers. he argues that the notion of voice does not have to be tied to the ideology of individualism and claims that what the japanese need is to get better acquainted with the proper discourse features and strategies for constructing voice in english writing. a very relevant study on expressing identity in academic writing in english as a foreign language was carried out by martinez (2005). she focused on the differences between the use of first person pronouns in writing by native and non-native english speakers whose mother tongue was spanish. she analyzed the distribution of the pronouns in different sections of the imrd structure of research articles in the area of biology. all instances of pronouns were plural forms because all articles in the corpora were of multiple authorship. only the pronouns which referred to the writers, that is, the occurrences of exclusive we were considered. martinez (2005) found that native-speakers overall used twice as many pronouns than non-native speakers, six times more in the results sections, and almost twice more in the discussion sections. these results contradict the view that first person pronouns are not used in sciences and that the results section is used exclusively for reporting facts impersonally. the researcher also found that, as opposed to native english speakers, non-native-speakers avoided using the pronouns in the functions which would make their arguments more persuasive (e.g., for expressing intentions, decisions, or stating claims). this strategy may decrease their chances of getting published. native english speakers claimed more responsibility for their findings by using pronouns, making their expressing authorial self in research articles written by polish and english native-speaker writers. . . 629 arguments more effective in this way. martinez (2005) explains that avoidance of first person pronoun by non-native speakers may be the result of transfer from spanish which is (like polish) a pro-drop language. thus, the first person pronoun is redundant in a sentence because it is also marked by a verb suffix. however, the author claims that raising awareness of the differences between the use of the pronoun by native and non-native speakers of english may lead to the employment of more effective writing strategies. hence, all of the authors of the studies came to a similar conclusion (for a review of research on the use of personal pronouns and determiners see also işik taş, 2010). 3.2. studies on expressing authorial self carried out by polish researchers although none of the early studies comparing polish and anglo-american academic discourse (for an overview see hryniuk, 2017) concentrated on the use of pronouns and determiners, an important observation was made by duszak (1994) that polish academic writing, in the area of language studies in particular, is strongly influenced by german writing conventions. after clyne (1981), she claimed that it follows the so-called teutonic intellectual style. thus, in line with the traditional, conservative trends set by the post-war german academia, writing is supposed to be objective, impersonal, and dismissive of personal experience. in this view, the use of pronouns to express authorial self is not allowed. however, mikołajczyk (2011), who compared polish and german academic writing, noticed that this trend is changing. english as a scientific lingua franca has influenced even german rhetorical conventions in this area (see also vassileva, 1998). slavic conventions, such as polish, however, seem to be more resistant to the changes. an example of a more recent study which implies the abovementioned view is the one by trepczyńska (2016). she analyzed 49 undergraduate students’ papers in the area of literature, culture, linguistics and applied linguistics, written by polish students of english studies, to explore the number and the distribution of pronouns and determiners in them. she also analyzed the functions of the pronouns. a vast majority of the pronouns (75%) were in the plural form, although all papers were single-authored, and they were located in the main body of the text. students most frequently used first person singular pronouns in the low-risk functions of signposting and stating aims, while the plural pronouns were preferred for the more face-threatening functions of making claims or elaborating on arguments. this tactic, as the author claims, “dilutes the authority of the writer” (trepczyńska, 2016, p. 117). similarly to the results of the studies outlined before, trepczyńska (2016) concluded that novice writers are reluctant to express their identity through the use of singular first person pronouns, and they avoid direct criticism in this way. she claims that the results imply katarzyna hryniuk 630 a lack of assertiveness on the part of the writers, and unwillingness to assume responsibility for their claims. summing up the previous research, it must be stated that more research is needed to get a thorough insight into the ways that authorial self is expressed in different contexts and cultures. therefore, the study described in the following section is intended to contribute to the research on this issue with regard to polish efl writers. 4. the study this study quantitatively and qualitatively investigates the differences and similarities in the frequency and functions of first person pronouns and determiners, as well as nominal phrases referring to the writer(s), in the corpora of 40 research articles in the area of applied linguistics, written in english by polish and anglo-american writers. its aim is also to compare the location of the lexical items in the imrd structure of the articles. for this purpose, the following research questions were addressed: 1. what are the differences (and similarities) in the use of first person pronouns, determiners, and nominal phrases referring to the author, between the texts written by polish and anglo-american writers? 2. are there any significant differences between their uses in specific sections of the imrd structure in the two sub-corpora? 3. what rhetorical functions do the analyzed items perform in the articles? 4.1. corpus and methodology in this study the same corpus was used as in my previous ones (hryniuk, 2015, 2016, 2017). it consisted of 40 empirical research articles in the area of applied linguistics – 20 written by polish authors in english, published by polish institutions, and 20 by native english speakers, published in anglophone journals. all of the articles were published in representative, peer-reviewed, highly reputable linguistics journals in the years 2009-2013. it is important to note that articles in the anglo-american corpus were longer – on average by 2,800 words, but in such small specialized corpora full texts should be used (bowker & pearson, 2002; flowerdew, 2004). the polish sub-corpus consisted of 135,358 words and the anglo-american one of 191,423. therefore, the number of the pronouns’ occurrences per 1,000 words was counted as well. moreover, only 2 articles in the polish corpus had more than one author, in the anglo-american one – 7 had two or three authors. expressing authorial self in research articles written by polish and english native-speaker writers. . . 631 all of the articles had the imrd structure (i.e., introduction-method-resultsdiscussion). the conclusion section was added because it was present in most of the articles – in 95% of the articles in the polish sub-corpus, and in 60% of the articles in the anglo-american one. in the remaining 40% of the articles from the angloamerican sub-corpus, the conclusion sections were absent or merged with the preceding ones. similarly, in 40% of the articles from the polish sub-corpus, the discussion sections were absent or merged with the results sections (hryniuk, 2017). the following pronouns: i, we, us, and determiners: my, our were searched for. the examples of pronouns and determiners which were used in the utterances expressed by the writers’ informants, rather than by the writers themselves, were excluded (e.g., me was only found in the utterances of the writers’ informants so it was not counted). also, only the cases of first person plural pronouns referring to the writers, known as exclusive we, were considered. certain types of pronouns were expected to occur in the given sections of the articles depending on the function they performed in the texts. thus, in the qualitative analysis of the pronouns’ functions, categories distinguished by hyland (2011) were used. they were matched with the functions of the given article sections in the following way: 1. stating a purpose/goal, which acts like signposting – expected in the introductions. 2. explaining a procedure, also named methodological i by harwood (2005a) – expected in the methodology sections. 3. stating results/claims – expected in the results sections. 4. elaborating an argument – expected in the discussion sections. 5. expressing self-benefits – expected in the conclusion sections. three of the functions listed above, that is stating a purpose, explaining a procedure, and expressing self-benefits, involve little risk, but the functions stating results/claims and elaborating an argument are regarded as the most facethreatening for the writer. additionally, the use of nominal lexical items, such as the author(s) and the researcher(s) was explored in the present study. although they introduce greater distance to the statements expressed in texts, they also commonly mark a writer’s presence. in order to arrive at an in-depth insight into the use of the lexical items explored, and to achieve precision, a concordance program wordsmith tools 6.0 (scott, 2012) was used in the study. i have generated concordance lines in order to explore the context of use of all the lexical items. katarzyna hryniuk 632 4.2. results the results clearly show that there is a striking difference between the use of pronouns and determiners in the two sub-corpora, as shown in table 1. the total number of the pronouns and determiners in the polish corpus (pc) is 52, while in the anglo-american corpus (ac) 297 – almost six times more. if we look at the frequency of their use, in the ac, the number is 1.55 per 1,000 words, while in the pc, it is only 0.38, that is four times less. table 1 the number and the frequency of pronouns and determiners per 1,000 words polish corpus anglo-american corpus 52 (0.38) 297 (1.55) as can be seen in figures 1 and 2, the greatest difference between the corpora is in the use of the pronoun i. if we consider the percentages, they are four times larger in the case of the ac than in the pc. looking at the numbers, the difference is even larger. also, although the percentage of the use of the pronoun we in both corpora is the same (58%), when we look at the number, it is almost six times larger in the case of the ac. interestingly, the largest proportion of the pronoun we can be found in both corpora, although in the polish one only 2 articles had more than one author, and in the anglo-american – 7. figure 1 percentages and the numbers of pronouns and determiners in the polish corpus 4% (2) i 58% (30) we8% (4) us 13% (7) my 17% (9) our expressing authorial self in research articles written by polish and english native-speaker writers. . . 633 figure 2 percentages and the numbers of pronouns and determiners in the anglo-american corpus looking at figures 3 and 4, we can see large differences between the two sub-corpora in the distribution of the pronouns and determiners in particular article sections. the greatest number of the lexical items in the pc is in the first two sections of the articles (introduction and method), while in the ac, the numbers referring to the first two sections of the articles, as well as to the discussion sections, are similar. in the results sections, the percentage of the pronouns and determiners is over twice smaller (13%) than in the other three sections of the ac, but the number (38 instances) is much larger when compared with the number of occurrences of these items in the same sections of the pc. only one determiner was found in the conclusion sections of the ac, so it is not marked in the chart. figure 3 percentages and the numbers of pronouns and determiners in article sections of the polish corpus 16% (47) i 58% (172) we 5% (16) us 2% (7) my 19% (55) our 42% (22) introduction 33% (17) method 11% (6) results 6% (3) discussion 8% (4) conclusion katarzyna hryniuk 634 figure 4 percentages and the numbers of pronouns and determiners in article sections of the anglo-american corpus when we compare the frequency of pronouns and determiners use per 1,000 words in particular sections of the articles, as table 2 shows, the largest concentration of them can be found in the introductions, the method sections and the discussions in the ac. in the pc, although the frequency number is the largest in the method sections, it is still almost three times lower than the frequency number in the same sections of the ac. the numbers presenting the largest differences between the corpora are in italics in the tables below. table 2 the numbers (n) and the frequency (f) of pronouns and determiners occurrence per 1,000 words in particular sections of the polish (pc) and the anglo-american corpora (ac) article section pc ac n f n f introduction 22 0.41 94 1.57 method 17 0.72 82 1.94 results 6 0.16 38 0.77 discussion 3 0.27 82 2.29 conclusion 4 0.39 1 0.21 totals 52 0.38 297 1.55 a juxtaposition of the numbers of particular pronouns and determiners in the specific sections of the articles also reveals many differences between the corpora, as shown in table 3. the frequency numbers of the items occurrence per 1,000 words are not given in the table because they are very low. only in the case of the ac, the frequency of occurrence of the pronoun we is larger than 1 in the introduction sections (i.e., 1.16) and in the discussion sections (i.e., 1.29). in the pc the frequencies of the item occurrence are very low (the largest number is 0.46 in the method sections). 32% (94) introduction 27.50% (82) method 13% (38) results 27.50% (82) discussion expressing authorial self in research articles written by polish and english native-speaker writers. . . 635 thus, the largest differences, as shown in numbers, between the corpora can be noticed in the use of the pronoun i in the method sections (1 in pc and 35 in ac), and the pronoun we in the introductions (12 in pc and 69 in ac), as well as in the discussion sections with regard to the pronoun we (0 in pc and 46 in ac) and the determiner our (0 in pc and 27 in ac). the numbers of the pronouns and determiners in those article parts are in italics in the table. table 3 the numbers of particular pronouns and determiners occurrence in the specific sections of the polish (pc) and the anglo-american corpora (ac) article section i we us my our pc ac pc ac pc ac pc ac pc ac introduction 1 3 12 69 2 7 1 3 6 12 method 1 35 11 29 0 2 4 2 1 14 results 0 5 6 28 0 3 0 0 0 2 discussion 0 4 0 46 1 3 2 2 0 27 conclusion 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 2 0 totals 2 47 30 172 4 16 7 7 9 55 additionally, the numbers of lexical items, such as the author(s) and the researcher(s), in particular article sections of the corpora were examined, as they are commonly used in research articles with reference to the writers, as an alternative to the first person pronoun use. as table 4 shows, the same number of the noun pharse the researcher(s) appears in the texts by polish and anglo-american writers. the noun pharse the author(s), however, is over twice more often used by polish writers. it seems that polish writers tend to identify themselves with the authors of the texts, rather than researchers, when referring to themselves in the third person singular or plural. the largest concentration of both of those lexical items is in the method sections. interestingly, in 12 cases, the phrase the present author was used in the pc, unlike in the ac – here no instances of the use of this adjective together with the noun author were found. table 4 the numbers of the phrases the author(s) and the researcher(s) in particular sections of the polish (pc) and the anglo-american (ac) corpora article section the author(s) the researcher(s) pc ac pc ac introduction 2 1 0 1 method 12 4 7 12 results 4 2 3 1 discussion 2 1 2 0 conclusion 0 0 2 0 totals 20 8 14 14 katarzyna hryniuk 636 although in most of the cases the pronouns and determiners performed the functions which were expected in the particular sections of the articles (listed in the previous part of this article), in the qualitative analysis i will focus on the largest differences between the corpora in this respect. in all of the article sections the largest number of the pronoun we was found in both corpora, so examples given below will mostly include this pronoun. if we look at the functions in which the pronoun is used in the introductions, we can notice that apart from the main one, which is stating a goal, in the ac we was also often used in the functions involving high risk, for example: (1) . . . we maintain that . . . (ac) (2) as we demonstrate in this study . . . (ac) (3) in this study, we take a different approach . . . (ac) even if such phrases could also be found in the pc, they were often hedged through the use of modal verbs, or the writers expressed caution by stating explicitly that making a claim is risky, for example: (4) . . . we may also hypothesize . . . (pc) (5) . . . we may forward the claim . . . (pc) (6) . . . we may risk stating . . . (pc) in the method sections of the pc, there was only one occurrence of the singular pronoun, but in the ac, both plural and singular first person pronouns were used in the function of explaining a procedure, as it was expected. the overall number of the pronoun use in this section was much smaller in the pc. also, an example of a surprisingly highly risky statement was found there: (7) . . . we postulate that . . . (pc) in the results sections, also differences between the corpora were found in the use of the pronoun we. while in the ac it was used in the typical function for this article section, namely stating results and claims (e.g., “we present”), and also in the function typical of the method sections, namely explaining a procedure (e.g., “we compared,” “we examine,” “we used”), in the pc, again the sentences with the pronouns were hedged by the use of modal verbs or negations, weakening the strength of the claims in this way, for example: (8) . . . we may risk stating . . . (pc) (9) . . . we may conclude . . . (pc) (10) . . . on the basis of the results, we cannot say . . . (pc) expressing authorial self in research articles written by polish and english native-speaker writers. . . 637 in the discussion sections, the pronoun we was found only in the ac. it most often performed the risky function of elaborating an argument (e.g., “we argue that . . .,” “we agree with . . .,” “we stated”), but also the function of stating results and claims, typical for the preceding section (e.g., “we noted,” “we captured,” “we examined,” “we reported,” “we compared”). the latter function occurrence can be explained with the writers’ need to restate the main results in the discussion sections. single occurrences of the first person pronouns were found in the conclusion sections of the polish corpus. the only one found in the ac, was the pronoun us, and it performed a typical for this section function of expressing self-benefits: (11) . . . it gives us reasons to keep searching . . . on the basis of this analysis, it can be stated that polish writers often prefer other means of expression, such as passive voice and other structures making their writing impersonal, instead of first person pronouns, but by avoiding them, they do not take advantage of all of the available language resources which can make their writing more effective in certain contexts. 5. discussion the present study results have shown that polish writers’ texts written in english as a foreign language are characterised by an infrequent use of first person pronouns, when compared with native english speakers’ writing in the same discipline. the most evident differences were found in much less frequent use of first person singular pronouns in the methodology sections of research articles, and first person plural pronouns use in all sections of the imrd structure. moreover, while the distribution of the pronouns’ occurrence was very similar in the introduction, the method and the discussion sections in the texts written by angloamerican writers, in those written by polish writers, larger concentration of the pronouns could only be found in the introductions and the method sections. finally, the analysis of the functions performed by the pronouns, as indicated by the functions of research article sections, has shown that even if polish writers in the majority of cases used the pronouns in the proper functions, they often weakened their claims by hedging and using negations in the same sentences. polish writers prefer to use impersonal structures, or plural forms of pronouns, the effect of which is also distancing themselves from the ideas expressed in the texts, more typical of writing in sciences, as the previous research has shown (kuo, 1999; hyland, 2003; harwood, 2005b, 2005c). it seems that using personal pronouns more often to get behind their statements, and assume responsibility for their claims, would make their writing more persuasive (szymańska, 2011). katarzyna hryniuk 638 another issue is that the differences can only be discussed here in terms of the underuse of first person pronouns by polish writers when taking angloamerican writers’ practices as a point of reference. however, especially with regard to english as the language of international publication, it is advisable to avoid privileging anglo-american conventions of writing over any other native language writing conventions (connor, 2011). we must also bear in mind that the writing conventions themselves are changing. in line with the prevailing practices of positivist epistemology in the past, writers used to hide their identities and authority behind the shield of objectivity, and it seems that this style of writing is still most often practiced by polish writers, both in sciences and the humanities. now, after the shift towards constructivism, a change in writing style can be observed. as hyland (2005, p. 66) writes, now “academics do not simply produce texts that plausibly represent an external reality, but use language to acknowledge, construct and negotiate social relations . . . writers seek to offer a credible representation of themselves.” for example, in the united states, where much emphasis is put on developing academic writing, especially at tertiary level education, students are taught to signal the presence of the author and interact with the reader, which reflects cultural ideals of the society at large (dahl, 2004). however, it may be disputable if efl writers who are obliged to publish in international journals also have to strictly follow these changes. it must be acknowledged that the present study results cannot be generalised to all academic writing by polish and anglo-american writers, as the corpus explored was not very large. nevertheless, it may shed light on the issue of expressing authorial self, as an aspect of writer identity, by those two groups of writers. also, following martinez’s inquiry (2005), one may conclude that more frequent use of first person pronouns by non-native speakers of english would make their writing more persuasive. however, further research would benefit from examining reactions of readers to the use of various conventions of writing, due to the fact that identity is also ascribed by them, as it has been stated in the introduction. overall, the current study emphasizes the complexity of the relationships between personal identity, knowledge construction, and writing conventions in a given discipline, which are worth further exploration. 6. conclusions and implications for instruction obviously, there may be many reasons for the avoidance of pronoun use. as it was stated in the introduction, the cultural context in which academic writing in slavic languages has been shaped is one of them (duszak, 1994; vassileva, 1998). another reason can be the influence of transfer from the mother tongue. polish is a pro-drop language, which means that apart from using a pronoun in a sentence, expressing authorial self in research articles written by polish and english native-speaker writers. . . 639 the person is also marked by a verb suffix. the use of subject pronoun is then redundant. when it is overused, it sounds unnatural and pompous. the reason for the omissions of personal pronouns may also be little experience of the writer, the native culture conventions of writing or the target audience. with regard to the problem, the critical-pragmatic approach can be introduced in efl academic writing instruction, as suggested by harwood and hadley (2004). according to the authors, in order to enhance strategic writing for publication, and not to move from one prescriptivism to another at the same time, novice writers can study different patterns of pronoun use present in corpus data, and be provided with alternatives which they can adopt or flout. increasing awareness in this way should make tutors as well as international publications gatekeepers more tolerant of different discourse practices. raising editors’ and reviewers’ awareness of different patterns in academic writing may positively influence acceptance rates and reduce rejecting and overlooking the findings from less known areas in the world. katarzyna hryniuk 640 references boulton, a. 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(2005). authoring the self in a non-native language: a dialogic approach to agency and subjectivity. in j. k. hall, g. vitanova & l. marchenkova (eds.), dialogue with bakhtin on second and foreign language learning (pp. 149-169). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. 51 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (1). 2014. 51-76 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.1.4 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the impact of teaching communication strategies on efl learners’ willingness to communicate1 abulfazl mesgarshahr iran university of science and technology, tehran eng.am31@gmail.com esmaeel abdollahzadeh iran university of science and technology, tehran eabdol@gmail.com abstract one of the pedagogical implications of the research on the willingness to communicate (wtc) might be to propose practical ways of making language learners more willing to communicate in the classroom. this study investigated the impact of teaching communication strategies (css) on iranian efl learners’ wtc. to this end, 8 intact classes were included as the experimental and control groups. the control group underwent regular language instruction, while the experimental group received the treatment (i.e., communication strategy training). the self-report measurement of wtc (macintyre, baker, clément, & conrad, 2001) was done before (pre-test) and after the treatment (post-test). the results of the independent-samples t test showed that the degree of wtc of the treatment group was significantly higher compared with that of the control group. it was concluded that teaching css helps learners become more willing to communicate in the classroom. keywords: willingness to communicate, communication strategies, strategic competence, communication apprehension, self-perceived communicative competence 1 this research received no financial support. the authors acknowledge the cooperation of the participants of the study. abulfazl mesgarshahr, esmaeel abdollahzadeh 52 1. introduction the development of communicative competence in language learners might be the central purpose of communicative approaches to language teaching (larsenfreeman & anderson, 2011; richards & rodgers, 2001). however, we cannot be assured that by achieving communicative competence, second language (l2) use is guaranteed. it happens that some learners after a long period of time spent on learning english and having a presumably high level of language competence are still reluctant to interact (macintyre, 2007a). such communication aversion displayed by these learners might indicate that there must be an elusive variable whose task is to put that competence into practice and make the individual more responsive, leading to the actual and volitional initiation of l2 communication (dörnyei, 2005). this variable goes beyond communicative competence; it is about more than the ability to use a language; it is the psychological preparedness to communicate at a particular moment (macintyre, 2007b). this variable has been called willingness to communicate (wtc). factors that might impact upon an individual’s wtc are numerous (e.g., cao, 2011; macintyre, baker, clément, and donovan, 2003; macintyre & doucette, 2010; peng, 2007; yashima, 2002). among these, one’s l2 proficiency, as macintyre, clément, dörnyei and noels (1998) believe, will have a significant effect on wtc. this means that language learners, especially at lower levels, are highly likely to experience some difficulty when communicating in the target language. too much difficulty during communication may make them abort their attempt to carry on. this communicational frustration, if constantly felt by learners, may thus result in eroding confidence, and, consequently, in dissipating the desire to communicate. this study aims to demonstrate that if language learners could manage to strategically compensate for deficiencies in communication, their wtc would probably not fade away. they may acquire the ability to get their meaning across to communicative partners and to cope successfully with the problems popping up during the communication process. dörnyei and thurrell (1991) referred to this ability as strategic competence. strategic competence, otherwise known as communication strategies (css), is considered as one component of communicative competence (canale & swain, 1980). it is conceivable that an underdevelopment of this competence may account for some learners’ lack of the ability to overcome interactional pitfalls, which may adversely affect their wtc. in this study, we wanted to make language learners more willing to communicate by dint of making them assured of their strategic competence. the impact of teaching communication strategies on efl learners’ willingness to communicate 53 2. willingness to communicate and communication strategies the investigation of the relationship between wtc and css seems to be a conspicuous rarity in the literature. in the frequently quoted heuristic model of wtc by macintyre et al. (1998), communicative competence is considered as one of the affective and cognitive variables having stable and enduring influence on wtc. although a certain level of all the other competences (e.g., linguistic, discourse, sociolinguistic) is required in order for effective communication to occur, they believe that a speaker can go a long way by relying primarily on strategic competence, which is mainly the knowledge of css. in a similar vein, dörnyei and thurrell (1994) refer to conversational/communicational strategies as the invaluable means of dealing with communication “trouble spots.” they hold the view that these strategies enhance fluency and add to the efficiency of communication. knowing such strategies is particularly useful for language learners, who frequently experience such difficulties in conversation, because they provide them with a sense of security in the language by allowing extra time and room to maneuver. (p. 44) when the learner anticipates problems during communication, this “sense of security” can allay his/her fear of speaking, or language anxiety, leading to a lower level of communication apprehension as well as a higher level of wtc. in order to illuminate the likely links between the two main variables of the present study, we continue with first a closer look at the concept of wtc and its immediate antecedents to see how they determine l2 use, and second with what css are and how they can be exploited by language learners to clear any communication problem. 2.1. willingness to communicate a rich body of research, either in communication studies or in language learning studies, has been dedicated to exploring the reasons behind what burgoon (1976) called “unwillingness to communicate” (e.g., lee & ng, 2010; mccroskey & richmond, 1990; millrood, 2001; sunderland, 1998; yung & mccroskey, 2004; zhang & head, 2009). the findings indicate that a labyrinth of psychological, social, contextual, situational, and linguistic variables impact upon the degree to which an individual is willing to communicate with a particular person at a particular moment. among all these variables that make an individual’s wtc susceptible to variation are: the sense of kinship between communicators, the register of discourse (the abulfazl mesgarshahr, esmaeel abdollahzadeh 54 formality or informality of the situation), the degree of evaluation of the speaker, the topic of discussion, situational variables (macintyre et al., 1998), the group size in the classroom (cao & philp, 2006), sex and age (macintyre, baker, clément, & donovan, 2002), culture (barraclough, christophel, & mccroskey, 1988) to name just a few. moreover, wtc is not static. as macintyre and legatto (2011) argue, it can be seen as a dynamic system changing from moment to moment. in accordance with the model proposed by macintyre (1994), people with the least wtc are apprehensive (about communication) individuals who perceive themselves to be incompetent as communicators. in other words, the model specifically focuses on two of the most immediate precursors of wtc: communication apprehension, and self-perceived communicative competence. communication apprehension is defined as “an individual’s level of fear or anxiety associated with either real or anticipated communication with another person or persons” (burroughs, marie, & mccroskey, 2003, p. 231). the anxiety that a student experiences, due to some communication problems he or she might think likely, is easily inimical to the desire to communicate. some causes of communication apprehension might include: novelty, formality, subordinate status, and degree of attention from others (mccroskey, 1997), all of which are particularly relevant to the language classroom. self-perceived communicative competence is the perception one might have of his or her own competence as a communicator (burroughs et al., 2003). although actual competence might encourage communication, it is the perception of that competence that will ultimately determine the choice of whether to communicate or not (clément, baker, & macintyre, 2003). this might explain why some language learners, being incompetent communicators notwithstanding, demonstrate a comparatively high level of wtc, while some others, regardless of their high language competency, shun any communication partner and prefer to remain reticent due to an underestimation of their competence. there is much evidence that the links between communication apprehension, self-perceived communicative competence, and wtc are strong: if communication apprehension recedes, an individual’s perceived competence is likely to be higher, leading to a greater level of wtc (e.g., barraclough et al., 1988; donovan & macintyre, 2004; macintyre, 1994; macintyre, babin, & clément, 1999; macintyre, baker, clément, & conrad, 2001; macintyre & charos, 1996; mccroskey, 1997). so if we are to enhance learners’ willingness to interact, we need to allay their apprehension at the time of communication and bolster their confidence regarding their communicative competence to initiate and maintain the interaction. this study intends to show that css might help. the impact of teaching communication strategies on efl learners’ willingness to communicate 55 2.2. wtc in this study when it is believed that second language learners must communicate in order to acquire the language (macintyre et al., 2003; macintyre & charos, 1996; savignon, 2005), the learner’s wtc comes to the forefront of language teaching and learning concerns. it then makes sense to suggest that a learner will stand a much better chance of success in acquiring an l2 when he or she is not disinclined to initiate l2 communication when such a predisposition emanates from both the self and the situation. in addition to the differences between l1 wtc and l2 wtc, we need to recognize that the latter itself might differ between english-as-a-foreignlanguage (efl) and english-as-a-second-language contexts. wtc assumes even greater importance when we consider learning a second language in an efl context, in which language learners might have less opportunity to initiate communication beyond the classroom. furthermore, even two different countries (e.g., japan vs. iran), as representing two different efl contexts, may provide more or fewer opportunities for learners to communicate in an l2 outside the classroom. wtc is thus conceived in somewhat different ways in different contexts. this study, therefore, has to conceptualize wtc with regard to the restrictive features of its immediate context. in iran, a language class is the only place that affords some opportunities for learners to communicate; thus, wtc barely makes any sense outside of the classroom. by wtc we mean the degree to which an efl learner is willing to interact inside the classroom when he or she feels free to do so. 2.3. teaching communication strategies communication strategies refer to all those techniques that language learners employ, in spite of a deficient language competency, when target language items are not available. this is the way learners may circumvent communication pitfalls by their immediately accessible (non)linguistic resources. the efficacy of teaching css has not been devoid of controversy. doubtless, it is worthwhile for learners to have a repertoire of such strategies at their disposal, whereby they achieve a degree of communicative effectiveness beyond their immediate linguistic means (thornbury, 2005). while there is ample evidence in support of teaching css (brett, 2001; dörnyei 1995; dörnyei and thurrel, 1991; ellis, 1984; faucette, 2001; littlemore, 2001, 2003; maleki, 2007, 2010; nakatani, 2010; oxford; 2001; yule & tarone, 1997), some have voiced their misgivings about teaching them (bialystok, 1990; canale & swain, 1980; thornbury, 2006). thornbury (2005), for instance, contended that while these strategies of communication might provide learners with an initial conversational “foothold,” they may abulfazl mesgarshahr, esmaeel abdollahzadeh 56 also lead to the premature closing down of the learner’s developing language system (interlanguage), making them dependent on their strategic competence at the expense of their overall communicative competence. a point deserving a special mention here is that the present study includes teaching those css which are deemed conducive to strategic competence development. as faucette (2001) argues, the css requiring l2 production are recommended and desirable strategies to teach. among them, interactional strategies might be particularly worthwhile. they lead to the initiation and maintenance of communication and smooth meaning negotiation (maleki, 2010). reduction strategies such as topic avoidance, message abandonment, going off the point, or even borrowing (for a comprehensive review of definitions and taxonomies of css see dörnyei & scott, 1997) were not dealt with in this study. as their names suggest, these strategies induce a sense of unwillingness to communicate in an l2. a brief description of all the strategies that were practiced in this study is provided in the section 4.4. 3. research question the research question of the present study is: does teaching css have any statistically significant impact on the degree of wtc of iranian efl learners? 4. method 4.1. participants the participants of this study were 120 efl learners (78 females and 42 males) in a private language institute. all the participants had completed four terms at the elementary level as well as the key english test (ket) to start the preintermediate level. they ranged in age from 15 to 40 years. since random selection of the participants was not possible, 8 intact classes were the target participants. four classes constituted the control group (n = 62), while 4 other, similar classes of efl learners formed the experimental (treatment) group (n = 58). all the participants were assumed to be at the intermediate level of english based on the ket scores they had obtained. they were all learning english as a foreign language with little opportunity to speak english outside the classroom. 4.2. instrumentation the self-report measurement of wtc (see appendix a) employed in this study consisted of 27 items, all of which referred to the students’ willingness to enthe impact of teaching communication strategies on efl learners’ willingness to communicate 57 gage in communication tasks during class time (macintyre et al., 2001). students were required to indicate on a scale from 1 to 5 how willing they would be to communicate inside the classroom (1 = almost never, 2 = sometimes, 3 = half of the time, 4 = usually, 5 = almost always). the items were grouped into four skill areas (alpha levels indicate reliability estimates for each set of items): speaking (8 items, = .89), reading (6 items, = .81), writing (8 items, = .78) and comprehension (5 items, = .65). the scale was translated into persian to ensure the intelligibility of the questionnaire and increase the return rate. the persian version of the instrument was translated back to english to ensure the accuracy of the translation as well. 4.3. procedure both the experimental and control group were taught by one of the researchers and received the same amount of class instruction, while the training on css (the treatment) was offered only to the experimental group. prior to the treatment, both groups took the wtc questionnaire mentioned above to examine whether their wtc levels were significantly different. the next step was to provide the cs training (the treatment) to the experimental group. by contrast, the control group, following the regular efl curriculum, received no treatment. the final phase involved the readministration of the self-report wtc measurement (as the post-test) to gauge the participants’ wtc in both groups on the penultimate session of the course. 4.4. treatment teaching css can be incorporated into whatever task is being done in class. in other words, any opportunity in class might be grasped by the teacher as a “golden moment” to teach the intended strategy of communication. for instance, when teaching vocabulary, every new item can, by the teacher’s scaffolding, be explained or “circumlocuted” by the learners, however simple that circumlocution might be. for the purposes of this study, however, some specific tasks were devised to encourage learners to make use of css to deal with communication problems. these tasks will now be explained in some detail. circumlocution is describing or exemplifying the target object or action for which the exact word is, for whatever reason, not available. it can be regarded as a “meaning negotiation” tool in that the aim is to restore or maintain mutual understanding (van den branden, 1997) by the interlocutors to achieve a communicative goal (tarone, 1980). the negotiation of meaning, whose efficacy for second language learning has been validated by numerous abulfazl mesgarshahr, esmaeel abdollahzadeh 58 researchers (e.g., ernst, 1994; foster, 1998; foster & ohta, 2005; long, 1983; savignon, 2002), is the essence of this cs. the use of monolingual dictionaries proves really helpful in acquiring the circumlocution strategy. every session, 10 carefully selected words (see appendix b) were provided to the learners. they looked them up in their dictionaries (learners have to bring and use a monolingual dictionary in class) as homework and brought the meanings to class. in pairs, one learner said the word and another one said the meaning, and then the other way round. raising learners’ awareness of the simple way in which a dictionary may define a word is of particular importance (for example by explicitly mentioning useful phrases and expressions; see appendix c). after 10 sessions repeating the same task, the learners were given 5 words in their mother tongue and tried to define them in english, and then again in pairs one learner gave the definition in english and another one said the word in the mother tongue. at this point the original english words were given in order for the learners to compare their own definitions with their dictionary’s. a formulaic sequence is defined as “a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other meaning elements, which is prefabricated: that is stored and retrieved whole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar” (wray, 2000, p. 465). implicit in this definition is the fact that, since formulaic sequences are accessed as wholes, they require minimal processing capacity, leading to more fluent speech (ellis, 2003). ample evidence lends support to the efficiency of investment in formulaic sequences either as an approach in its own right or as one type of cs (e.g., boers, eyckmans, kappel, stenger, & demecheleer, 2006; canale & swain, 1980; ellis, 2005; howarth, 1998; thornbury, 2002; shin & nation, 2008). as a first step, the teacher’s job is raising learners’ awareness of the pervasiveness of formulaic sequences in written or spoken english (boers et al., 2006), and of their beneficence in language reception and production. introducing the concept of chunks by bringing up some familiar examples (in the morning, go for a walk, wearing glasses, how much does . . . cost?) seems essential. learners need to become aware of the fact that whenever they want to speak, write, listen, or read, chunks are greatly helpful. using a regular text in students’ course book, the teacher introduced various chunks presented in the text (see appendix d). in practice, for noticing formulaic sequences, learners were required to underline all the chunks on a few pages of their storybook (at every level a storybook is the regular supplement to the main course book) or in the listening task transcripts provided at the back of the course book. the impact of teaching communication strategies on efl learners’ willingness to communicate 59 fillers are a few fixed phrases that are supposed to come to the help of learners when they need more time to think about what to say. they are considered as invaluable delaying or hesitation devices that can be used to buy some time and carry on the conversation when language learners would otherwise end up feeling more and more desperate and would typically grind to a halt (dörnyei and thurrell, 1991). at first, a number of fillers were presented to the students: well, i think/mean, i believe that, let’s say, let me think/see, actually, you know, as a matter of fact, to be quite honest with you, you see what i mean, as far as i know/remember, in my idea/opinion, uh, what else i can say, how can i say that? then a prepared piece of text (see appendix e) was distributed among them. this piece of writing contained no fillers. the students, in pairs, were required to put different fillers in appropriate places (usually between the chunks). every pair swapped their work with the neighbors for comparison. then they were provided with the same text containing fillers (it may include some other strategies of communication such as circumlocution). in pairs, they compared their work with the new version of the text and discussed the proper use of fillers in discourse. appealing for help is a straight strategy of asking for questions, help or repetition in case incomprehensibility. the following devices to appeal for help were directly provided to learners on the board: pardon me!, what does (x) mean?, how do you say (x) in english?, i didn’t get you, could you please repeat your question?, i don’t get you. what do you mean?, can you say that again?, may you write it up?, how do you spell that?, can you explain more?, i didn’t understand the first part, could you please repeat that? the teacher wrote the following question on the board: “do you use a thimble when you sew?” in pairs, students asked this question to each other and then tried to use the sequences provided on the board to ask for help. during the task, they consulted their dictionary to prepare for an appropriate response to their partner’s request for help. the strategy of approximation involves the use of a single target language item or structure which the learner knows is not correct but which is assumed to share enough semantic features (semantic contiguity) with the desired item to be correctly interpreted (tarone, 1981). a short explanation and some examples were used to raise the learners’ awareness of this strategy (some examples include: driving card for driver’s license, ship for sail boat, vegetable for broccoli, bus for double-decker, and king house for palace). then, in pairs students were required to brainstorm a word or a phrase in order to describe some pictures presented to them. since the exact word for every picture was not available, they were supposed to look for a term as close as possible to the intended idea. for example, a picture of the gherkin tower stimulated the following phrases from the students: “a long building,”“high building,” or even “a big house!” abulfazl mesgarshahr, esmaeel abdollahzadeh 60 the use of all-purpose words is the strategy of extending a general, empty lexical item to contexts where specific words are lacking (dörnyei, 1995). by recognizing the versatility of a verb such as get, which enjoys a high level of coverage (richards & schmidt, 2002), a learner may convey the sense of many other verbs (for example: obtain, acquire, become, catch, receive, succeed, enter, earn, realize, retrieve, etc.) through just one verb. the use of all-purpose words provides the opportunity for the learner to compensate for their inadequate vocabulary repertoire. in pairs, students were required to replace all the verbs, if possible, with get on one page of their story book. then the teacher checked their work for the accuracy and appropriateness of the verb replacements. 5. results as mentioned above, the questionnaire used in this study addressed four skill areas: speaking, reading, writing and comprehension. we broke the questionnaire down and performed independent-samples t tests concerning wtc in each skill area before and after the treatment. because of space limitations, we report the results for only one skill: speaking. an independent-samples t test (table 1) was run to compare the degree to which the participants of the study were willing to communicate before the treatment. there was no statistically significant difference before the treatment in the degree of wtc between the experimental group (m = 45.36, sd = 26.72) and the control group (m = 40.46, sd = 24.39), with t(113) = 1.035, p>.05. table 1 independent-samples t test for the experimental and control groups on the pre-test levene’s test for equality of variances t test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2-tailed) mean dif. .050 .507 1.035 113 .260 4.897 the experimental group received the css training while the control group followed the regular classroom instruction. after the treatment, the wtc questionnaire was administered again, and the performance of the experimental and control groups were compared. the results of the independent-samples t-test (table 2) showed that there was a significant difference in the wtc scores between experimental group (m = 59.21, sd = 27.31) and control group (m = 42.79, sd = 27.64), with t(99) = 3.48, p< .05. furthermore, the magnitude of the difference in the means was large (eta squared = .10). this meaningful difference the impact of teaching communication strategies on efl learners’ willingness to communicate 61 showed that the participants who received cs training became more willing to communicate than those who received no treatment on css. table 2 independent samples t test for the experimental and control groups on the post-test levene’s test for equality of variances t test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2-tailed) mean dif. .722 .374 3.563 99 .001 16.424 moreover, two paired-samples ttests were run in order to find whether there was any significant increase in wtc for individual groups after the treatment. table 3 shows that there was no statistically significant difference in wtc scores for the control group between their performances on the pre-test (m = 37.17, sd = 24.41) and post-test (m = 43.79,sd = 28.59), with t (52) = 1.27, p > .05. table 3 paired samples t test for the control group on the preand post-test group mean sd sem t df sig. (2-tailed) control group -6.61950 37.8276 5.19602 -1.274 52 .208 for the experimental group, there was a statistically significant difference in wtc scores between their performances on the pre-test (m = 42.84, sd = 27.76) and post-test (m = 63.46, sd = 28.04), with t(47) = 3.35, p < .05. this means that the participants in the experimental group became significantly more willing to communicate after receiving the training on css. table 4 paired samples t test for the experimental group on the preand post-test group mean sd sem t df sig. (2-tailed) experimental group -20.62500 42.58722 6.14694 -3.355 47 .002 6. discussion this study presents the argument that language learners will become more willing to communicate if they acquire the ability (employing css) to overcome communicational problems. there might be some very direct explanations for the effects of each strategy of communication on wtc. consider a situation to which the following comment by macintyre and legatto (2011) applies: “when vocabulary items do not flow easily to mind, wtc declines” (p. 165). in such situations css, circumlocution for example, help learners compensate for the evasive word and keep their wtc unscathed. on other occasions, fillers offer abulfazl mesgarshahr, esmaeel abdollahzadeh 62 them some extra time to think online about how to solve the imminent problem and reduce the attendant apprehension. appealing for help gives learners the assurance that in case of the very problem occurring, seeking for direct help will prevent the interaction from coming to an end. the use of all-purpose words affords them the opportunity to keep the communication going in spite of their limited vocabulary size. all these may lead to higher levels of wtc. but more generally, we can argue that css enhance learners’ wtc. first, css make learners feel less communication apprehension. it is clear that the fear of engaging in interaction adversely affects one’s wtc. this communication phobia might wither away if we attempt to eliminate the roots. communication apprehension originates from feeling uneasy about encountering problems during interaction: not knowing the right word to convey the intended meaning, not being able to repeatedly fall silent during speaking in order to think about the words to use and not knowing how to deal with incomprehension. this fear might be alleviated when a learner feels that he is equipped with some techniques or strategies by which he can resolve any communication problem with ease. teaching css, in this sense, might give learners a comforting sense of security (dörnyei & thurrell, 1994). second, css help learners achieve a higher perception of their communicative competence. as mentioned earlier, there exist two perspectives on an individual’s communicative competence: the actual communicative competence and the perception one has of one’s communicative competence. as noted by clément et al. (2003), the latter ultimately determines the choice of whether to communicate or not. some experience of successfully coping with communication difficulties brings the learner a higher perception of his/her communicative competence. the dubiousness of this perception by no means matters. it improves one’s self-confidence and consequently emboldens one to feel assured enough to take risks and venture into interaction in spite of the deficiency of one’s actual communicative competence. next, css improve learners’ state communicative self-confidence. according to clément (1980, 1986), self-confidence involves two key constructs: perceived competence and a lack of anxiety. these constructs represent relatively enduring personal characteristics. however, as macintyre et al. (1998) argue, some situations might entail more confidence than others depending on the characteristics of prior l2 experience. as learners see their ability to overcome communicative pitfalls during interaction, they feel much more confident about initiating and maintaining communication. gaining psychological security (dörnyei & thurrell, 1994) and linguistic self-confidence (macintyre et al., 1998) through acquiring the strategies of communication may greatly contribute to learners’ level of willingness to interact. the impact of teaching communication strategies on efl learners’ willingness to communicate 63 furthermore, css can be psycholinguisticaly comforting for learners so that they are willing to initiate communication. according to skehan’s (1998) dual mode system, much of language is more exemplarrather than rulebased. this study has tried to expand the strategy of employing prefabricated patterns by learners through raising their awareness about the prevalence of formulaic sequences. by using this strategy, learners can gradually build a reliable repertoire of highly useful prefabricated patterns on which they can draw at the time of communicative difficulties and reduce the learning burden while maximizing communicative ability (ellis, 2008). finally, css motivate learners. css can be regarded as a useful means to remove the causes of demotivation in learners. it frequently happens that when a learner, especially at lower levels, does have some ideas in his/her mind to convey, he/she keeps them bottled up just because of not knowing just one word. this lack of the ability to compensate for a missing word and consequently avoiding the conveyance of the intended meaning may lead to the erosion of motivation. being aware of the existence of a strategy such as circumlocution and knowing the way to employ it might bolster the learner’s confidence to venture into communication. experience tells us that achieving success in meaning conveyance by learners can arouse their motivation and enthusiasm to initiate communication. one point regarding css merits special attention, namely the overuse and misuse of some strategies by learners of which both the learner and the teacher should be wary. it is exemplified by a learner who obviates the need for the use of many verbs and repeatedly resorts to the use of just one verb (e.g., get, in accordance with the strategy of using all-purpose words). this is redolent of the case made by some researchers against teaching css, where they believed that these strategies may hinder learners’ language development system, making them dependent on their strategic competence at the expense of their overall communicative competence (thornbury, 2005). indeed, at beginning stages it is only natural and we should not expect too much of learners, that is, we should not expect them to use css immaculately. on the other hand, when they grow aware of css, they can easily notice them in discourse. this is where the teacher might play the role of a model. he may introduce and demonstrate the appropriate use of different strategies. for instance, he can make use of appealing-for-help-devices whenever a learner asks a question. he can circumlocute a new word before presenting it, which, if the learners guessing the right word, may be really encouraging for them. in early stages learners need conscious effort to use css. but, little by little, they become accustomed to utilizing them. they no longer need to think about what strategy to use. during interaction, the right strategy of communiabulfazl mesgarshahr, esmaeel abdollahzadeh 64 cation automatically matches the problem at hand. the knowledge of css is declarative at the outset, but it gradually becomes proceduralized through repeated practice and use during communication (anderson, 1983). during the observation of one class, the learners, who had become expert users of css, were required not to use css. they found speaking really difficult! with a lot of class exuberance and a bundle of raised hands, in response to the teacher’s question: “have you ever had any problems in a hotel room?”, one learner started talking excitedly about an interesting happening in a hotel. her wtc as well as the expertise with which she used various css was striking: let me say this, let me say this. it’s very interesting. ok, let me see, ok, yes it was two years ago, i think. we were in mashhad, yes. there are many hotels you know there in mashhad. and we got one. it was, as far as i remember, a hotel with four stars, um, let’s say a beautiful hotel, yes. when we got to our room, suddenly my, let me see, let me see my, uh huh, my niece got cry! she has five years old. there is, you know, what is the thing that, let’s say, artists make from wood or stone for example, for a king, it’s a kind of art, i can’t remember its word. what is it in english? (one of her peers: “sculpture you mean?”) yes! yes sculpture. there was a sculpture in the room. she was very afraid form it. it was very interesting, you know. we got a thing, uh fabric, yes, we got a fabric on it but my niece cried again. we make a phone call to secretary, you know, and they bring out from our room. the satisfaction she derived from sharing her experience and from coping successfully with communication problems bestowed a great sense of selfconfidence and motivation upon her. although there were some minor grammatical errors (or maybe mistakes), they hardly hindered comprehension and the meaning conveyance as well as the problem solving processes by the use of css seemed impeccable. she made use of strategies such as fillers, circumlocution, appeal for help and all-purpose words (four uses of the verb get) to get her point across. 7. conclusion this study attempted to investigate the question of whether teaching css has any significant impact on iranian efl learners’ wtc. the results showed that the level of wtc for the experimental group, who received css training, dramatically improved in comparison with the control group, who followed regular language instruction. this offers evidence for the belief that learners can go a long way by relying primarily on their strategic competence (macintyre et al., 1998). there are some implications of this finding for both materials developers and teachers. textbooks that specifically incorporate teaching css into their the impact of teaching communication strategies on efl learners’ willingness to communicate 65 lesson plans might be more effective than those that do not. a teacher’s guide should provide an overview of the background knowledge teachers need to understand the rationale for strategy training (maleki, 2007). the teachers themselves should be proficient users and preachers of css to act as models of proper strategy use. they might expose learners to communication problems and help them with how to get them resolved by using different strategies. with regard to the fact that the participants of this study were preintermediate learners of english, it is suggested that similar studies be conducted with learners of different language proficiency levels. more importantly, if wtc enhancement is intended, it seems necessary to perform a careful analysis of the assumptions of various theoretical positions claiming to account for learners’ willingness to speak. the conclusions drawn from the findings of this study were based on self-report data. they need to be verified through more studies with more rigorous designs. acknowledgments the authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers of studies in second language learning and teaching for their insightful comments. abulfazl mesgarshahr, esmaeel abdollahzadeh 66 references anderson, j. 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(2009). dealing with learner reticence in the speaking class. elt journal, 64(1), 1-9. doi: 10.1093/elt/ccp018 the impact of teaching communication strategies on efl learners’ willingness to communicate 71 appendix a the wtc scale measurement (macintyre et al., 2001) directions:this questionnaire is composed of statements concerning your feelingsabout communication with other people, in english. please indicate in the space provided the frequency of time you choose to speak in english in each classroom situation. if you are almost never willing to speak english, write 1. if you are willing sometimes, write 2 or 3. if you are willing most of the time, write 4 or 5. i = almost never willing 2 = sometimes willing 3 = willing half of the tine 4 = usually willing 5 = almost always willing speaking in class, in english … 1. speaking in a group about your summer vacation. … 2. speaking to your teacher about your homework assignment. … 3. a stranger enters the room you are in, how willing would you be to have a conversation if he talked to you first? … 4. you are confused about a task you must complete. how willing are you to ask for instruction/clarification? … 5. talking to a friend while waiting in a line. … 6. how willing would you be to be an actor in a play. … 7. describe the rules of your favorite game. … 8. play a game in english, for example monopoly. reading in class (to yourself not out loud) … 1. read a novel. … 2. read an article in a paper. … 3. read letters from a pen pal written in native english. … 4. read personal letters or notes written to you in which the writer has deliberately used simple words and constructions. … 5. read an advertisement in a paper to find a good bicycle you can buy. … 6. read reviews for popular movies. writing in class, in english … 1. write an advertisement to sell an old bicycle. … 2. write instructions for your favorite hobby. … 3. write a report on your favorite animal and its habits. … 4. write a story. … 5. write a letter to a friend. … 6. write a newspaper article. … 7. write the answers to a "fun" quiz from a magazine. … 8. write down a list of things you must do tomorrow. abulfazl mesgarshahr, esmaeel abdollahzadeh 72 comprehension in class … 1. listen to instructions and complete a task. … 2. bake a cake if instructions are not in persian. … 3. fill out an application form. … 4. take directions from an english speaker. … 5. understand an english movie. the impact of teaching communication strategies on efl learners’ willingness to communicate 73 appendix b some carefully select words used in circumlocution tasks ticket, rail, bungee jumping, adventure, circus, bullfight, cruise, windsurfing, journey, elastic, parachute, dome, umbrella, cereal, compass, patience, atm, charity, rubbish, vacuum cleaner, ashtray, mug, stool, carpet, haggle, zoo, eager, substance, peace, advice, flight attendant, complain, facility, flat, souvenir, glue, magic, watermelon, ruler, palace, tease, handkerchief, overhead projector, eavesdrop, sink, flour, morale, inflation, digest, spice, mustache, bald, starve, kidney, addicted, superstition, loyal, doubt, famine, heir, jealous, sculpture, inquisitive, identity card, military service, fog, thermometer, chador, sew, needle, fabric, etc. abulfazl mesgarshahr, esmaeel abdollahzadeh 74 appendix c some key words or phrases in circumlocution material, fabric, a kind of, object, stuff, something, somebody, metal, wood, plastic, when, where, a … is a place where …, it is used for …, you use it when you want to …, it is made of …, it is an instrument to … the impact of teaching communication strategies on efl learners’ willingness to communicate 75 appendix d a sample text to underline the chunks have you ever driven faster than the speed limit or driven through a red traffic light? the answer is probably 'yes'. every year thousands of motorists become offender – they break the rules of the road. but what are the punishments for this offence? in most countries, drivers have to pay a fine. but in the u.s.a, australia and some european countries, offenders also get points on their driving license. after they get a certain number of points, they can't drive. life is difficult when you can't drive. so some states in the u.s.a. have introduced a new way to avoid this – traffic school. offenders have a choice: they can get a point on their license or they can do a course at traffic school. traffic schools run driver improvement courses. they cost about $80. and take eight hours. motorists learn the rules of the road and they learn how to be better drivers. they don't have to take a driving test. but at the end of the course, they have to pass a written examination. (taken from foley and hall, 2002, p. 106). abulfazl mesgarshahr, esmaeel abdollahzadeh 76 appendix e a sample text without and with fillers a short description of your last holiday (without "fillers") it was two or three months ago. we travel a lot. traveling is very necessary for a good and happy life. my family and i went to mashhad. it was a wonderful journey. we did a lot of things there. we went by plane. i'm afraid of flight. but i had no choice at that time because my family liked to go by plane. we stayed in a hotel, a very big, beautiful and modern hotel. we went to a kind of park that everything worked by water, it was kind of interesting. we went to the zoo, many interesting animals. we went shopping every day. there are many big shopping centers in that city. i love shopping, especially buying things for your friends or your family. i don't know what is the word in english for the things you buy for your friends or your family when you are on travel. we always liked to argue about the prices with the shop assistants there. to cut a long story short, we had a lot of fun. (177 words) a short description of your last holiday (with "fillers") let me see, welli think it was two or three months ago. as a matter of fact, we travel a lot. you knowin my idea, traveling is very necessary for a good and uh happy life, you see what i mean. any way my family and i went to mashhad. well uh it was a wonderful journey. you know we did a lot of things there. as far as i remember, we went by plane. actually, to be quite honest with you, i'm afraid of flight. but you know l had no choice at that time because my family liked to go by plane. any way, we stayed in a hotel, a very big, uh beautiful and let's say modern hotel. we went to, uh to a kind of park that let's say everything worked by water you know, it was kind of interesting. what else i can say, right, we went to the zoo, many you know interesting animals. we went shopping every day. there are many big shopping centers in that city you know. and actually i love shopping, especially, let me see, buying things for your friends or your family, as a matter of fact, i don't know what is the word in english for the things you buy for let me seeyour friends or your family when you are on travel, you see what i mean. we always liked to, how can i say that, argue about the prices with the shop assistants there. after all, to cut a long story short, we had a lot of fun. (265 words). 301 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (2). 2014. 301-325 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.2.7 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl success: from failure to failure with enthusiasm danuta gabry -barker university of silesia, sosnowiec, poland danuta.gabrys@gmail.com abstract in this article i would like to look briefly at the background to the concept of enthusiasm, its evolution from earlier understandings in the domain of religion to its modern understandings as expressed by various lexicographic sources. this will lead me to the major focus of the article, which is the various applications of enthusiasm in education. not surprisingly, there is a large body of empirical studies on teacher and learner enthusiasm and its contribution to successful teaching and learning. a selection of studies is presented here and their results are discussed. the empirical part of this article looks at my own qualitative study of pre-service efl teachers’ narratives and their perceptions of teacher enthusiasm and its impact on teaching and learning success, as seen from their own perspective. in the concluding part i suggest how teacher training should incorporate ideas on teacher enthusiasm and strategies to deploy them as prospective weapons in preventing professional burnout in teachers. as churchill said, “success is not final . . . failure is not fatal . . . it´s the courage to continue that counts.” i strongly believe that it is enthusiasm that gives us courage to continue. keywords: teacher enthusiasm, enthusiasm indicators, enthusiasm effectiveness, learner achievement, affectivity, teacher training, pre-service teachers danuta gabry -barker 302 the mediocre teacher tells the good teacher explains the superior teacher demonstrates the great teacher inspires william arthur ward 1. introduction winston churchill defined success as “the ability to go from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” ever since i was first involved in teaching, whether in a secondary or tertiary context, my attitude has been based on my passionate desire to be a teacher; this has generated my enthusiastic approach to the profession, my learners and also to the english language, with its rich culture. however, this enthusiasm has not always worked to my advantage as a teacher, nor has it to the advantage of my learners. i therefore decided to take a closer look at the phenomenon of enthusiastic teaching, not only experientially but also empirically through reviewing the available literature on the topic. at the same time, i was conducting my own study with pre-service teachers of efl and successful efl learners. also, when looking through various online sites advertising jobs for teachers of foreign languages, i observed that the most commonly used term, and thus the quality searched for by employers in their prospective employees, was enthusiastic: “randstad education are currently looking for an enthusiastic modern fls teacher to work in a successful high school in the blackpool area” (www.ukjobs.cam/language teaching-jobs) “we welcome enthusiastic and qualified linguists” (www.educ.com.ac.uk) “candidates must be enthusiastic about teaching” (www.ile.org/en/pro grammes/flta) “we are looking for enthusiastic teachers who are committed to excellence” (www. jobs.theguardian-com/…/secondary-teaching/modernforeign-languages) [emphasis added] 2. defining enthusiasm: the evolution of the term etymologically, the word enthusiasm comes directly both from late latin enthusiasmus and from a greek word enthousiasmos, more precisely, deriving from an adjective entheos (‘having the god within’): en ‘in, within,’ theos ‘god.’ when tracing back the meaning of the term enthusiasm, we need to look as far back as ancient times when it meant divine possession. the person possessed by a god, for example apollo or dionysus, was called an enthusiast. socrates referred to poetic inspiration as enthusiasm. so it denoted inspiration success: from failure to failure with enthusiasm 303 instigated by unknown forces, by gods. its religious connotations can be found in a sect in syria in the 4th century, called enthusiasts (also known as euchites), who became renowned for indulging in religious prayers and contemplation, and aspiring to be possessed by the holy spirit. in the 16th and later 17th century enthusiasm continued to be used in a religious context, with reference to protestants. however political changes in britain, namely the english civil war (1642-1651) and the glorious revolution of 1688 in england, changed the meaning of enthusiasm to become a strongly negative term used to describe any political or religious engagement. later on, the collocation blind enthusiasm was applied to suggest fanaticism. the term was widely used in the 18th century to describe the methodists, led by john wesley. in sum, the evolution of understanding of enthusiasm has moved from “possession by a god,“ “rapturous inspiration like that caused by god,” “an overly confident or delusory belief that one is inspired by god” and “ill-regulated religious extremism” to modern understandings such as “craze, excitement, strong liking for something” (enthusiasm, 2000). taking a closer look at the concept and its definitions in lexicographic sources, we will find a more detailed description of its nuances. dictionary entries present enthusiasm as a feeling of excitement and the experiencing of affective and emotional states, such as overflowing with great enjoyment or approval. it is also referred to as a lively interest (enthusiasm, n.d.). thus the commonly used descriptive terms with reference to enthusiasm will be keenness, passion, excitement, but also warmth, motivation and devotion, interest, obsession or craze. so modern understandings of enthusiasm bring associations with positive feelings and focused engagement in a given action, subject or area of interest. what meaning does enthusiasm have in the educational context? does it always bring about positivity in teachers and learners? does teacher enthusiasm result in the learner’s more engaged and motivated attitude to learning and better achievement? 3. teacher enthusiasm and related concepts 3.1. teacher enthusiasm and its mechanisms in various studies of teacher effectiveness and profiles of good teachers, their enthusiasm for the subject and enthusiasm for teaching it come to the fore as most significant traits. and as metcalfe and game (2006, p. 92) put it, “what good teachers have is passion. the spark. sharing their passion. kids pick up on their excitement, and that makes them curious.” what good teachers have is enthusiasm, and it is generally believed that this enthusiasm influences students danuta gabry -barker 304 directly in enhancing and developing their subject interests, motivation to learn it and attention, thereby indirectly affecting their learning achievement. what is teacher enthusiasm? the complexity of the concept and variety of perspectives it brings to mind make it almost impossible to conceptualize enthusiasm consistently. for example, kunter et al. (2008) assume that teacher enthusiasm is a personality trait expressed in certain affectively determined behaviours such as enjoyment, excitement and pleasure in performing classroom actions, deriving from teacher’s intrinsic motivation, positive attitude and interest in the subject and teaching it. on the other hand, collins’ definition (1978) of teacher enthusiasm drawn from indicators focuses solely on the teacher’s behavioural manifestations of enthusiasm, for example use of voice or non-verbal communication. in the classroom context, enthusiasm expressed by a teacher will have different dimensions and will be context-specific. enthusiasm for teaching itself and enthusiasm for the subject taught have to be treated as separate categories, with possibly different effects on learners and teachers themselves in different educational contexts, as demonstrated by the study of kunter et al. (2011). theorists argue that three mechanisms are involved that make teacher enthusiasm an effective tool in the teacher’s hands. first, teachers engage learners´ attention through an appropriate presentation of input material, including items that are enthusiastic, engaging, innovative, person-related (bettencourt, gillett, galland, & hull, 1983). second, a state of momentary emotional contagion is created when students exposed to expressive behaviours of a teacher subconsciously mimic his/her non-verbal behaviours (mottet & beebe, 2000). third, teachers being treated as role models create a learning context in which imitative learning occurs; in other words, the teacher´s intrinsic motivation is passed on to the learners in the form of expressive verbal and non-verbal behaviours of high engagement in a given task: the learners follow the teacher´s behaviour. although no systematic scholarly work has described in detail the positive effects of teacher enthusiasm on learner achievement, research has demonstrated that it may serve as a variable conducive to attention-getting, motivation development and interest growth, all of which are conducive to learner achievement. 3.2. other related concepts: teacher presence, immediacy, flow, motivation and burnout syndrome teacher enthusiasm can be viewed in relation to other concepts which either include it, such as teacher presence, or contribute to it, such as teacher immediacy or flow. a teacher´s success not only depends on effective methods of teaching and subject knowledge, but above all it depends on the strong relationship teachers develop with their students. these strong relationships are built upon success: from failure to failure with enthusiasm 305 the teacher`s understanding of the behaviour, motivation and personalities of the class, seen not only as a group but primarily as individuals with their own idiosyncrasies. this relationship is very much affective in nature and evolves dynamically to create teacher presence in the classroom (gabrys-barker, 2012). teacher presence is a multifaceted phenomenon. anderson, rourke, garrison, and archer (2001) define the concept of teacher presence as “the design, facilitation, and the direction of cognitive and social processes for the purposes of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes” (p. 5). rodgers and raider-roth (2006) see it as a state of awareness and readiness to respond compassionately to individuals in the group and to the group as a whole. it therefore follows that the concept of presence in all its complexity relates not only to pedagogical relationships with students, but also to self-awareness and connection with the subject taught and pedagogical skills. teacher presence in the classroom is a construct that derives from these relations and its nature depends on a variety of aspects on which these relations are built. these include: the way a teacher addresses his/her students (the degree of formality, remembering or always confusing their names, using register numbers, etc.); the way he/she uses his/her voice for different purposes such as establishing rapport, lecturing, assessing learners, praising and punishing (e.g., too loud a manner of speaking is overwhelming and too dominating); the teacher`s involvement in his/her actions in and beyond the classroom context (genuine involvement in teaching and relating to the students), the degree of enthusiasm manifested, creativity and openness to learners´ needs and idiosyncracies; effective feedback given to the students on the level of acknowledgement feedback (a genuine communicative response) and informational feedback (evaluating students’ performance) (gabry -barker, 2012, p. 117). thus, it would be right to describe teacher involvement in the process of teaching and an enthusiastic approach to his/her professional development, performance and achievement as creating and enhancing thoughtful teaching and “scholarly passion” (neumann 2006, p. 416). it is affectively marked and personal emotions are fundamental to passionate thoughts, leading to passionate involvement. research in the area of student motivation demonstrates that teacher presence, seen as teacher involvement, is a significant factor in developing learners´ motivation to learn and also be actively engaged in classroom processes (gabry -barker, 2012). teacher immediacy is a concept that overlaps with the notion of presence. teacher immediacy originated in communication studies and can be defined as “nonverbal behaviours that refer to physical and psychological closeness between people” (keller, 2011, p. 13). immediacy has a bearing on the rapport between a danuta gabry -barker 306 teacher and his/her students and their degree of closeness and approachability or (their contraries) distance and intimidation. the subtle difference between immediacy and enthusiasm is worth noting. “enthusiasm would seem to emphasize instructors´ expressive style in teaching their subject matter, whereas immediacy would seem to centre on instructor-student interaction and closeness” (babad, 2007, p. 223). however, there is not a sharp distinction between the two. indeed they are best viewed as directly interrelated, as the rapport between the teacher and learner (immediacy) determines to a great extent the teacher´s instructional style and vice versa. it is not an easy task to measure immediacy; however, tools of its measurement do exist. teacher immediacy is traditionally investigated with richmond, gorham and mccroskey´s (1987) instrument, which consists of nonverbal behaviour indicators such as movement and body position in the classroom, gestures used, occurrence of smiles, many of which are also indicators of teacher enthusiasm. another tool of sla research is the teacher immediacy scales of noels (2001), used in studying learner motivation and autonomy as affected by teacher communication styles. unfortunately, no research has so far been carried out to demonstrate the relation between teacher immediacy and enthusiasm. in addition to the notions of presence and immediacy, enthusiasm has also a lot in common with the concept of flow, a key concept proposed in positive psychology by csikszentmihalyi (1990). flow is defined as a mental state of total immersion and absorption in what one does. it is characterised by high energy and focus on the task with all the positive emotions the task evokes in a person; it is an intense and focused motivation to perform a target task. thus, it may be assumed that an enthusiastic person will be in the state of flow more often when engaged in a given activity/ performance, such as teaching, and taking a deep interest in a subject by actively searching to expand one´s resources in and knowledge of this domain. flow represents a specific type of motivational state, and in general, some type of motivational state contributes to every human activity. however, with respect to teachers, dörnyei (2001) observes that not much research to date has been done on teacher motivation. in his research work, he identifies four specific features of the motivation to teach: an intrinsic component, contextual factors, its fluctuating character and its fragility (table 1). table 1 specific features of motivation to teach (based on dörnyei, 2001, pp. 156-165) no. specific components of teacher motivation descriptive characteristics 1. the intrinsic component teaching seen as vocation intrinsic rewards (teaching and working with young people, the subject taught and value of continuous expansion of knowledge, inner job satisfaction): personal efficacy fulfilling one´s psychological needs to be autonomous, relatedness with others, success: from failure to failure with enthusiasm 307 competence (being successful in accomplishing the goal): teaching efficacy 2. the external (social context) component macro-level: value attached to the profession by society, politicians, parents, etc. micro-level: a particular institutional structure, standards and norms, climate, cooperation, degree of independence, etc. 3. the temporal component (fluctuating) pursuing professional development: a planned career choosing a contingent path (steps and stages in a career, hierarchy steps) external motives (e.g., power, money, approval, etc.) internal motives (development of knowledge, interest, success) 4. the fragility component (negative influences, motivational crisis) stress impediment of independence and autonomy lack of success (insufficient self-efficacy) perception of intellectual stagnation inadequate career structure (limited options) each of the components of motivation as delineated by dörnyei can be seen as a possible source of teacher enthusiasm or a contrary, de-motivating force. statistics (oecd, 2005, 2012) show that teacher dropout from the profession is high, which may be assumed to result from the above-mentioned negative influences the teachers are unable to cope with. job satisfaction (or rather dissatisfaction) causes a significant dropout in the teaching profession. a prolonged dissatisfaction with the teaching job and reaction to stressful experience, as in the case of other jobs, may lead to what is described in literature as burnout, that is, “feelings of physical depletion, helplessness, hopelessness, depressions, detachment and especially disillusionment” (travers & cooper, 1996, p. 30). the reasons causing burnout to occur are complex but generally it happens when failure is perceived as final and no hope of help and support from the outside is expected any more. it results from prolonged stress (travers & cooper, 1996). but more importantly burnout “is the result of unmet needs and unfulfilled expectations and occurs gradually over a period of time. it affects self-esteem. it is characterized by progressive disillusionment” (travers & cooper, 1996, p. 44). such an understanding of burnout and its symptoms suggests that, although an idiosyncratic phenomenon with by no means every teacher prone to experiencing it in the course of his/her career, it is quite widespread and one of the causes of professional dropout. however, awareness of the onset of its symptoms may prevent its occurrence. it may be assumed that cultivating teacher motivation (and the enthusiasm drawn from it) can lower the probability of a teacher`s sense of failure and the burnout resulting from it. 3.3. teacher enthusiasm research according to dörnyei (2001), “the teacher’s level of enthusiasm and commitment is one of the most important factors that affect the learners´ motivation to danuta gabry -barker 308 learn” (p. 156). although research in enthusiasm in general is quite extensive (e.g. abrams, 1990; anderson & holt-reynolds, 1995; bloch, 1986; tucker, 1972), the growth of interest in teacher enthusiasm is more recent. the focus on teacher enthusiasm coincides with more investment in learner-centred classrooms due to humanistic psychology (maslow, 1954) and its later application to the language classroom (moskowitz, 1980). there also is a growing interest in redefining professional profiles in terms of teacher competence levels and effectiveness in the classroom. although this research on teacher enthusiasm is developing, it is still not very systematic, tending to conceptualize the phenomenon differently and often produces contradictory findings. it uses teacher and learner rating questionnaires, direct participatory and non-participatory observations, and also experimental methods applying statistical analysis for example to determine the correlation between different aspects of enthusiasm and its effects. the existing confusion and contradictory findings of research on teacher enthusiasm stem mainly from the lack of a clear definition of the concept and thus various interpretations of it. research on teacher enthusiasm seeks to conceptualize this complex phenomenon by taking two different approaches to it. prior research embraces various aspects of teacher enthusiasm and its effects, but is not very systematic in its approach to the concept and lacks replication studies. rosenshine and furst (1971) investigated teacher-behaviour variables affecting his/her effectiveness, showing that enthusiasm is the third most influential variable, after clarity and variability. one of the most significant areas of research on teacher enthusiasm looks at enthusiasm indicators identified as type of vocal delivery, eyes and gestures when teaching and their relation to learner achievement (collins, 1978; sanders & gosenpud, 1986). it was observed that teacher enthusiasm had minimal effects on final scores and examination grades (sanders & gosenpud, 1986). effects of teacher training in enthusiasm on student learning behaviour and achievement were investigated by bettnecourt, gillett, gallant, and hull (1983). the study obtained rather disappointing results, showing the lack of influence that teacher enthusiasm training had on learner gains. on the other hand, it appeared that on-task behaviour was more evident in the case of teachers who were trained in enthusiasm techniques than in control group teachers. stewart (1989) looked at the effects of teacher enthusiasm on lecture recall, which proved to be positive due to more effective information processing in an animated, enthusiastic lecture than in a merely factual one. murphy and walls (1994) exemplified the use of collins’ (1978) enthusiasm indicators by measuring expert teachers on the enthusiasm indicators scale, coming up with high scores for this group of teachers. some other studies described profiles of influential teachers showing enthusiastic teachers as most valued by their learners and most effective success: from failure to failure with enthusiasm 309 (bauer, 2002; dean, 2005; stronge, 2007; urban, 2008). this line of investigation was also followed by research on enthusiasm as an effective communication strategy which showed that enthusiastic teachers were perceived by learners not only as effective communicators (killen, 2006) but that they also more effectively transmitted knowledge and motivated and stimulated their learners than their unenthusiastic counterparts (feldman, 2007). in trying to determine predictors of students´ intrinsic motivation and measuring them, patrick, hisley and kempler (2000) demonstrated that enthusiasm is the best predictor of intrinsic motivation and vitality. it is not surprising that some researchers also looked at the influence of teacher enthusiasm on affectivity dimensions of the teaching/learning process (frenzel, goetz, ludtke, pekrun, & sutton, 2009) showing that enthusiasm is conducive to a positive classroom climate. kunter, frenzel, nagy, baymert and pekrun (2011) observed that research on teacher enthusiasm has to take into consideration two different perspectives of the concept: enthusiasm for teaching and enthusiasm for the subject, showing that the former is more related to professional satisfaction and well-being, whereas the latter was independent of the specific teaching context. missing from these studies is concern for subject specificity as a factor in enthusiasm and how it affects learners’ enthusiasm as a result of interest in the given subject and its perceived degree of difficulty. in her detailed study, keller (2011) made an attempt to conceptualize and operationalize teacher enthusiasm by combining the two perspectives: the personality trait approach of kunter et al. (2008) and behavioural concepts of teacher enthusiasm derived from collins (1978). in fact, keller’s model embodies the belief that the “core” of enthusiasm lies in the teacher´s personality that manifests itself in a certain behaviour which “depicts enjoyment and excitement toward the subject and teaching the subject. this core would manifest itself in expressive, enthusiastic teaching behaviours that are in turn observed and perceived by students, positively influencing their attitudes and affective and cognitive outcomes” (keller, 2011, p. 139). importantly for practical purposes, research on teacher enthusiasm also defines its indicators and looks at the relation between teacher enthusiasm, learner motivation and learning achievement. it is observed that teaching enthusiasm clearly positively affects learner motivation and is a stimulation to work on a task more attentively; however, it does not clearly have a significant influence on learner achievement. the first researcher to take scholarly interest in defining indicators of teacher enthusiasm was rosenshine (1970), who classified behavioural components of enthusiasm into high inference and low inference variables. danuta gabry -barker 310 high inference variables measured behaviours that required considerable inferring from what was observed or heard in the classroom. they included variables such as mobility animation, energy or expressiveness. low inference variables measured those behaviours that required an observer to classify teacher movement into objective categories, such as words per minute, amount of gesturing, or movements per minute. (as cited in sanders & gosenpud, 1986, p. 52) rosenshine´s study (1970) using independent observers showed that high scores on both types of ratings—high and low inference variables—relate positively to the learners´ learning achievement and their rapport with both the teacher and the learning task. sanders and gosenpud (1986), who adapted rosenshine´s scale as the enthusiasm awareness index, came up with contrary results which showed no significant correlation between teacher enthusiasm and a university student’s achievement in final grades and tests. however, the study did not dismiss the significance of teacher enthusiasm, but concluded with the belief that it may have a more longitudinal effect, and that it may also correlate with the age of a learner. the previous studies carried out in primary and secondary schools were based on immature learners for whom teacher enthusiasm may be a stimulating factor, whereas in the case of tertiary level students, it may not be such an effective variable. it seems that more rigorous study of teacher enthusiasm started with defining its indicators in the already mentioned research by collins (1978) and it still remains to be one of the most influential works aiming to identify the indicators of teacher enthusiasm. collins defined enthusiasm indicators as specific use of vocal delivery, eyes, gestures, high energy levels and responsiveness to learners´ ideas and feelings (table 2). table 2 enthusiasm indicators and their description (based on collins, 1978, p. 53) indicator description vocal delivery great and sudden changes from rapid excited speech to a whisper, lilting, uplifting intonations, many changes in tone, pitch eyes dancing, snapping, shining, lighting up, frequently opened wide, eyebrows raised, eye contact with total group gestures frequent demonstrative movements of body, head, arms, hands and face, sweeping motions, clapping hands, head nodding rapidly movements large body movements, swings around, changes pace, bends body facial expression appears vibrant, demonstrative, changes denoting surprise, sadness, joy, thoughtfulness, awe, excitement word selection highly descriptive, many adjectives, great variety acceptance of ideas and feelings accepts ideas and feelings quickly with vigor and animation, ready to accept, praise, encourage or clarify in a non-threatening manner, many variations in responding to pupils overall energy explosive, exuberant, high degree of vitality, drive and spirit throughout lesson success: from failure to failure with enthusiasm 311 these indicators are not only widely used in research studies on enthusiasm (e.g., bettencourt et al. 1983; patrick et al., 2000) but also in more practical teacher training contexts. for example, at penn state college of education (philadelphia, usa), it is used as a form of evaluation of pre-service teachers (lunsford, 2011). enthusiasm indicators are assessed on a 5-point likert scale divided into low, medium and high level of enthusiasm measurement (table 3). table 3 teacher enthusiasm scale (based on lunsford, 2011). indicator/level low medium high vocal delivery monotonous voice, minimum vocal inflection, little variation in speed of speech, drones on and on, poor articulation pleasant variations of pitch, volume and speed, good articulation, uplifting intonation, many changes in tone and pitch great sudden changes from rapid excited speech to a whisper, varied eyes look dull or bored, seldom opens wide or raises eyebrows appears interested, occasionally light up, shining, opening wide characterised by dancing, snapping, shining, lighting up, eyebrows occasionally raised gestures seldom moves arms out or stretches out towards person or object, never uses sweeping movements, keeps arms at side or folds across body, appears rigid often points with hand, using total arm; occasionally uses sweeping motion using body, head, arms, hands and face; steady pace of gesturing is maintained. quick and demonstrative movements of body, head, arms, hands and face (e.g., clapping hands, head nodding rapidly) facial expression appears deadpan, does not denote feeling or frowns most of the time, little smiling or one-second lip upturns, lips closed agreeable, smiles frequently, longer and at a regular rate, looks pleased/happy/sad when obviously called for, mouth open, quick and sudden changes in expression appears vibrant, demonstrative, shows surprise, awe, sadness, joy, thoughtfulness, excitement, total smile body movement seldom moves from one spot or movement mainly from a sitting to a standing position moves freely, slowly, and steadily large body movements, swings around, walks rapidly, changes pace, unpredictable, energetic so the question is: will these teacher enthusiasm indicators be also found in the responses of the subjects in the present study, namely university students who are at the same time pre-service efl teachers? 4. pre-service efl teachers’ perceptions of enthusiasm 4.1. description of the study the main reason for conducting this study was not to find out about teacher enthusiasm as such but to determine pre-service teachers´ perceptions of it. nal and nal (2012) demonstrated in their study that pre-service and novice teachers danuta gabry -barker 312 are more enthusiastic than their more experienced colleagues. thus, this study was carried out with a group of 50 trainee teachers of efl in their third and fourth years of study at the university following the foreign language teacher training program of studies. the choice of the study group was determined by my professional context. as a fl teacher trainer i am concerned with improvement and introduction of new training modules and topics. teacher enthusiasm has not been discussed in the program of training so far. my trainees have a role in the choice of topics discussed and studied in their action research projects. the needs analysis conducted pointed to enthusiasm as one of areas of trainees´ interest. the trainee students in this study were either actively involved in teaching practice at different levels of schools (primary, secondary and language schools) or taught as novices a limited number of english lessons a week on a regular basis. they also gave private tutorials to school learners. all of them were instructed in tefl methodology and had completed a course in psycho-pedagogy. at the moment of data collection, they were also involved in individual action research diploma projects required for the completion of their academic ba and ma degrees. the present study is qualitative and its general focus is on the following issues related with teacher enthusiasm: 1. the students´ perceptions of what teacher enthusiasm is 2. indicators of teacher enthusiasm in a classroom context 3. the effects of enthusiasm on learners and teachers themselves the tool used for the elicitation of the students´ views was a reflective narrative text called teacher enthusiasm and its role in his/her teaching process and learners´ achievement (350 words). the students were instructed to comment on the above issues (1-3) taking into account their own learning perspective, teaching practice and not necessarily what they had learned in their course of study to be teachers in the near future. 4.2. sample narratives 4.2.1. defining teacher enthusiasm the narratives open with a definition of teacher enthusiasm. here, the respondents are mainly concerned with the affective aspects of a teacher´s instructional style and treat teacher enthusiasm in the majority of cases as a personality trait which expresses itself in a positive attitude to learners, openness and willingness to help, and being compassionate about working with students. the following samples illustrate this understanding of teacher enthusiasm: success: from failure to failure with enthusiasm 313 . . . and attitude of a teacher towards the lesson itself as well as the learners . . . it´s also important for the students to notice that the teacher is fascinated with the language, the students like to know that the teacher tries to develop his/her own language competence, too. (student 8) teacher enthusiasm means also his/her willingness to self-develop. (student 34) this term encapsulates such components as creativity, involvement, selfdevelopment, self-education, and being student friendly. (student 38) an enthusiastic teacher is someone who motivates learners and facilitates their learning. it should be a person whose attitude towards the language is positive and convincing. in this sense, enthusiastic does not mean excited or passionate about the language but being supportive and showing a lively interest (towards students). (student 14) enthusiasm is positive feelings and emotions. (student 33) very few definitions offered by the students combine both the personlike and behavioural perspective on teacher enthusiasm: teacher enthusiasm may be identified as a teacher behaviour that influences students ́ learning to some extent. enthusiastic behaviour may be described as both positive verbal and non-verbal behaviours which convey the teacher´s attitude to the students. (student 3) to begin with, teacher enthusiasm may be defined as a positive attitude towards teaching, the language itself, students and the material being taught. what is more, this enthusiasm strongly refers to teacher´s character, whether she or he is friendly and is able to motivate students and convince them that they are successful. also showing passion for teaching is a key to success . . . (student 15) 4.2.2. indicators of teacher enthusiasm as in the case of conceptualising teacher enthusiasm, when identifying the indicators of teacher enthusiasm, the participants again focus on personality features of a teacher in the first instance: firstly, when the teacher is an energetic, happy and competent person and when he/she sends positive vibes, which influence the learner directly . . . teacher enthusiasm can also include praising the student. (student 5) for me as a learner, a teacher shows enthusiasm when he/she is willing to help students and is open to their problems and questions . . . enthusiastic teachers are often fulfilled people who love what they do. it can be noticed at first glance. they are optimistic and often have a positive, smiling face expression. (student 9) danuta gabry -barker 314 an enthusiastic teacher is usually a person who has a good contact with his/her students, gives them positive feedback and encourages them to gain knowledge or learn a language. (student 36) being student-friendly means that the teacher understands students´ needs and treats them equally. a smile is important. so is a sense of humour. (student 38) a lot of attention is paid in teacher training these days to developing autonomy, both in the case of learners and teachers. this, to some extent, comes from the great emphasis put on reflectivity in teaching. this is visibly demonstrated in the comments the trainees make on teacher enthusiasm, which is perceived as facilitation of learner autonomy by accepting learners´ ideas and feelings and the teacher´s willingness to self-develop: an enthusiastic teacher will also be more flexible and more willing to modify the lesson. as he is not tied to the syllabus, he is more likely to improve learners´ autonomy. (student 37) an enthusiastic teacher is motivated to improve his/her methods of teaching, he is involved in lessons. h/she tries to be creative and make attractive lessons. an enthusiastic teacher does not perceive his/her mistakes as failures but a motivating force to improve . . . an enthusiastic teacher arises curiosity in learners, does not show or explain everything but lets the students discover things . . . encourages students to look for language exposure outside the classroom. (student 7) teacher enthusiasm can also be manifested by varying the tasks and activities in the classroom. such a variety displays teacher engagement in organising interesting classes . . . an enthusiastic teacher is not only able to invent and introduce his/her new, interesting ideas but also to take students´ suggestions into account and make practical use of them. (student 9) i would not say that this type of a teacher has to be “funny,” good-looking, non-stop smiling but i would rather say demanding but flexible in order to interest learners and take into consideration their needs and abilities. (student 10) additionally, the attitude to learners in terms of emphasis on their success, on positive features of learners and feedback given are seen as significant aspects of teacher enthusiasm: an enthusiastic teacher also provides learners with feedback in a non-threatening way . . . from the perspective of a fl learner, i may say that learners almost always respond with enthusiasm to an enthusiastic teacher and therefore learning a fl is a pleasant experience for them. (student 12) success: from failure to failure with enthusiasm 315 an enthusiastic teacher stresses good points and strengths of learners rather than focusing only on weak points and failures. he/she believes in students doing their best and emphasises what they can do and not what they cannot do. (student 13) whenever the teacher is truly enthusiastic about teaching, he makes a lesson a personal experience for himself and for the learners. learners can feel it. (student 46) such teachers are more likely to have a more personal attitude to learners. they will try to perceive them individually and to help them accordingly. (student 37) only two essays mention teacher enthusiasm as demonstrated by nonverbal communication: it may be indicated by varying one´s voice, the tone and volume to catch students´ attention, using one´s body language like clapping one´s hands or giving students signals of approval and by facial expressions such as smiling, shown one´s happiness or encouragement. (student 3) teacher enthusiasm can be seen in his body language. body language is something we cannot cheat on. (student 46) comparing the indicators enumerated by the subjects with collins’ (1978) indicators, not all of them play a role in students´ conceptualizations of teacher enthusiasm. for example, voice delivery, the use of eye contact, appropriate face expressions or movement in the classroom space hardly figure in the comments and they are present in only two examples. non-verbal signs of enthusiasm are important as they are most obviously perceived by the learners and contribute to various aspects of the learning process: attention getting and clarification of meaning, not to ignore their more important affective effects. however, they do not seem to be surfacing in the trainees’ comments. on the other hand, the students’ comments abound in personality features relating to overall energy levels, positive emotions and openness to students as a way of facilitating their classroom performance. teacher enthusiasm is also very strongly marked here in the perception of the professional qualifications of a teacher as a language instructor and user. seen as major indicators, included here are self-development, creativity and teacher autonomy. 4.2.3. the effectiveness of teacher enthusiasm: the age factor one of the most significant observations made in the student narratives is that participants perceive teacher enthusiasm to be strongly age-related (both the age of learners and of teachers), which hardly features in theoretical concepdanuta gabry -barker 316 tualisations and research studies. enthusiasm is seen as significant independent of learner age; however, its importance in respect of the indicators needs to be adapted to learner age: teacher enthusiasm is important in each age group. children because they are focused on “here and now” have to be enthusiastic all the time. adolescent are in an age of transition, confusion and self-consciousness, therefore their complex problems can be solved by praising their self-esteem and self-image by enthusiastic teachers. adults have to be intrigued by the teacher because of the little time for lessons they have, their insecurity can be reduced by teacher enthusiasm. (student 23) as i noticed, novice teachers are more excited about their work. they would like to improve the curriculum and syllabus and use different teaching styles . . . an enthusiastic teacher is very important for children. children pay attention to eye contact and gestures. when the teacher is smiling and nice, they are motivated to learn . . . i believe that these physical aspects are important and can be developed by teachers. teacher enthusiasm is also important for teenagers, who would like to see an interesting presentation of a topic. (student 20) the participants in this study, all pre-service teachers, are still very young, in fact in their early twenties. they see themselves as full of ideas and open to change, which they seem to be voicing very strongly, as the last comment demonstrates clearly. 4.2.4. the effects of enthusiasm on learners and teachers themselves teacher enthusiasm is perceived as having effects on both learners and the teacher himself/herself. in the case of learners, its impact is on learners´ affective functioning, creating positive energy and positive attitudes to learning, teachers and the subject: it is easier to memorise something when it is connected with some emotions and has some influence on our mood and feelings. (student 33) enthusiasm encourages learners´ achievement. (student 22) why is enthusiasm so effective? i think that it may be because when students are engaged in the lesson they remember more. students´ attention is held longer. teacher´s enthusiasm shows that the subject can be interesting, grammar does not have to be boring, and the learning process may be fun and pleasure. (student 20) . . . what is more, enthusiastic teachers often prepare their students for different competitions and they enjoy taking part in school events . . . such teachers enjoy success: from failure to failure with enthusiasm 317 working with students which has a positive influence on learners´ attitude towards language learning. students are eager to work and they achieve good results. in my opinion enthusiastic teachers are successful teachers. (student 19) as a result of teacher enthusiasm, learners become more motivated and autonomous in their learning: this characteristic develops the learners´ and teachers´ autonomy and “working on themselves.” (student 20) students who have enthusiastic teachers are more likely to study outside of the school . . . it can influence a classroom atmosphere. if it is full of energy and positive attitude, students´ interest and excitement in language learning may increase. enthusiastic teacher´s presentation of material shows that he or she is a dedicated teacher and wants his/her students to understand and get to higher proficiency levels. (student 6) another significant feature of effective teaching is the relationship developed between teachers and their learners. it is a teacher´s enthusiastic instructional style that builds the rapport conducive to learning: it can also influence their attitude towards school as a whole. enthusiasm is very important in student-teacher relationship because lesson success is based mostly on the relation they have built with the teacher. (student 27) teacher enthusiasm can influence his or her relations with students. they become more confident to talk with the teacher and ask questions. (student 6) teacher-learner rapport which is conducive to learning results from a facilitative classroom atmosphere free of coercion and threat: teacher enthusiasm can contribute to learners´ achievement because they are not threatened and they are not afraid to use the language and speak during the lesson . . . an enthusiastic teacher helps students to be autonomous and learn on their own. the teacher with a positive attitude creates an atmosphere without stress and without negative impact on students. i think that teacher enthusiasm is very important in the learning process but also in the process of teaching. (student 30) enthusiasm of the teacher leads to good classroom atmosphere which encourages reflection and learner initiative. (student 24) by being enthusiastic, teachers are believed not only to create positive motivations and attitudes but also to contribute to the formation of their learners´ personalities: danuta gabry -barker 318 teacher enthusiasm is visible not only in students´ motivation and their attitude to the subject but it is evident as well in students´ personal growth and development. when students notice teacher enthusiasm related to their actions and classroom behaviour, students´ level of self-confidence increases, and simultaneously their level of anxiety decreases. (student 25) first of all, teacher´s enthusiasm prompts learner´s engagement in the subject, lesson or the whole course. students are often infected with enthusiasm by the teacher . . . secondly, teacher´s enthusiasm is the main reason why learners want to attend the classes. nobody wants to be in the class where there is a sad, bored and nonvigorous tutor. classroom climate full of enthusiasm and energy should prevail in the classroom because then students´ motivation to learn increases. (student 4) the instructional style of enthusiastic teachers, which presupposes their more intensive engagement in lesson preparation, affects the learners´ own engagement in the lesson: it may contribute to the increase of students´ interest by novelty, variety and surprise of an enthusiastic presentation of the material prepared by the teacher. (student 3) starting with the positive effects, it can be said that it enriches teacher´s lessons. the teacher who is enthusiastic is more motivated to work, to experiment and to employ novel elements in his/her lessons . . . one of the examples can be resigning from frontal teaching to encourage learners to work in pairs or groups. (student 47) for a learning process to occur, students should be excited and surprised . . . teachers who are bored with their job are de-motivation for students. only someone who is enthusiastic and loves his job will be creative and interesting partner in the teacher-learner relation. (student 45) students like and tend to admire enthusiastic teachers. as one of the respondents says: “when a teacher creates his positive, enthusiastic attitude, it leads to the students´ desire to copy and follow the teacher in gaining knowledge with enthusiasm” (student 40). their enthusiasm also significantly affects teachers themselves, as it helps them to be more effective in their instructional practices: teacher enthusiasm can have an impact on students´ achievement but also on his or her success as a fl teacher. when teachers like their work, they are full of energy, they can work more effectively. (student 29) an enthusiastic teacher will spend more time on preparation of his classes than a teacher who feels forced to work as a teacher and takes no pleasure in it. (student 27) success: from failure to failure with enthusiasm 319 enthusiasm is responsible for teacher´s attitude towards his/her work. it makes teacher more eager to organise additional lessons and to develop oneself. (student 47) being enthusiastic towards one´s own work and the positive energy exuded add to teachers´ positive affective functioning and their ability to cope and overcome difficulties: teacher’s positive attitude lowers his/her stress level and if a teacher feels secure in his/her classroom, they can be more creative, because their imagination and knowledge are not blocked by stress. (student 29) it may also prevent monotony and frustration often caused by stress and ineffectiveness of teaching methods (or rather their inappropriate use). moreover, it leads to personal growth, evokes inspiration and creativity, being flexible and ready for the unexpected as well as having rewards from one´s own experience. (student 22) working as a teacher is not only tiring, but also very demanding and has an impact on private life. being enthusiastic may bring some ease and make this work slightly more interesting . . . enthusiasm is a part of teacher presence in the classroom . . . from my short experience, i can admit that sometimes even one enthusiastic reaction, involvement in learners´ speech with a smile on my face was priceless. for a student and for me. a frank “thank you” and a positive attitude towards me was unforgettable. (student 44) according to the participants, growing professional awareness and the need for constant professional development also result from enthusiasm for teaching: “enthusiasm plays a motivational role and facilitates teacher autonomy and self-development” (student 31). “positive thinking encourages the need to develop; it shows the sense of teacher´s work and performance” (student 22). as the last aspect, teacher enthusiasm may also be a positive feature in other than the teaching context: the last advantage i would like to write about is that teacher enthusiasm is helpful in daily life when we end our work and go back home with the sense that we did our best as teachers and we are not tired. (student 33) 4.2.5. the dangers of teacher enthusiasm some respondents, while acknowledging the positive aspects of teacher enthusiasm, also strongly emphasize its dangers for both learners and the teachers themselves. these dangers are registered in feelings of uncertainty that learners may have when exposed to an over-enthusiastic teacher solely focused on his/her presentation and not paying enough attention to students´ reactions: danuta gabry -barker 320 he or she may cause the students “to alienate,” to think that the teacher´s perspective is so different and strange that the learners are not able to relate to it. the subject and the teacher may be, therefore, labelled as “peculiar” and the high level of enthusiasm can be detrimental to the learning process. (student 17) enthusiastic teachers are also perceived as sometimes having unrealistic expectations of their learners, possibly expecting them to match their own interest and level of involvement: it is generally believed that teacher enthusiasm should be enormous as it reveals their positive attitude to work. however too much enthusiasm can affect negatively the process of teaching when the teacher and students can be too motivated to achieve success, which they are not able to achieve. (student 25) flexibility and openness to change, which were mentioned as indicators of enthusiastic teachers, are not always conducive to effective teaching according to selected narratives: the friendly and humorous relationship with the students can lead to discipline problems. what is more, teachers willingness to modify his plans can lead to a rather chaotic lesson, when students can lose track of what is happening. (student 37) if there is too much of it, the lesson will become chaotic and it will lack discipline. also enthusiasm will be depleted more quickly. (student 38) as studies show, it is not enthusiasm alone but enthusiasm together with the feedback the teacher gives which are a necessary combination, otherwise: “when the teacher is over-enthusiastic, learners can feel oppressed and dominated by the teacher, his/her eagerness and flow of ideas” (student 47). one of the participants expresses his concern that enthusiastic teachers are so cognitively (work load preparation) and affectively engaged in their classroom instruction that their enthusiasm would naturally tend to dissipate with time: “the teacher that spends a lot of his time on additional classes can quickly burn out his enthusiasm . . . enthusiasm can be seen as a finite resource and that wise management of that resource is needed” (student 37). 4. conclusions: enthusiasm in teacher training this article demonstrates varied understandings of enthusiasm in general and its indicators in a teaching context. the studies overviewed demonstrate how teacher enthusiasm affects learning outcomes, which is mostly done through creating a positive classroom atmosphere, appropriate rapport between a success: from failure to failure with enthusiasm 321 teacher and his/her learners, but also by bringing about more learner engagement and attention during the lesson and thus indirectly bringing about learner achievement. the article also elaborated on pre-service teachers’ awareness of the nature of teacher enthusiasm and their own beliefs about its significance. the implications of the study conducted are formulated here with a view to proposing how teacher enthusiasm can be fostered as a more expressive style of teaching, resulting in more enthusiastic teaching. alternatively, it can be reinforced in prospective teachers when introduced to teacher training programmes for pre-service teachers in the course of their studies. although the scholarly literature does not produce a clear conceptualization of teacher enthusiasm, tending to look at it from two distinct perspectives, this does not matter much for practical classroom—and training— purposes. we as teacher trainers might believe that we have less influence on developing enthusiasm understood as a personality trait. in practice, however, even in this domain there is scope for influencing trainees` intrinsic motivation and attitude towards the language itself and even more for developing a positive attitude to teaching it. at the same time, we have a great opportunity to help our trainees become more expressive (and thus be perceived as enthusiastic), focusing on developing their verbal and nonverbal expressive behaviours in class. adapting a more expressive style of teaching will influence learners’ motivation and thus, as mentioned earlier, it may also result in more enjoyment of teaching and the teacher becoming more enthusiastic (frenzel et al., 2009). this behavioural aspect of enthusiasm does not seem to feature in pre-service teachers´ narratives, so we might start by making our trainees aware of the behavioural indicators of enthusiasm and their own experience of this as learners and novices in teaching. i believe that pre-service teachers, still students themselves, can find a valuable resource in their own learning experiences and how they felt about their own teachers in the past, and reflect on the extent to which those teachers and their enthusiasm influenced their choice of a professional career. reflective narratives are yet another form of experiential learning for future teachers and a valid source of information for us as teacher trainers. i propose a behavioural training program that should help trainees to develop: verbal indicators demonstrating a teacher´s acceptance of ideas and feelings (which are both spontaneous and animated); ways of praising, clarifying and giving feedback in an unthreatening manner; ways of using proxemics and making the trainees aware of the role of position in space, demonstrating closeness, interest and involvement as opdanuta gabry -barker 322 posed to power and domination, and how to change position (movement in space, entering learners´ spatial zone to demonstrate closeness); expression of teacher´s physical animation (co-verbal behaviour) as demonstrated by eye contact, facial expressions, gestures (for different functions) and changes of posture (expressing attitude, interest, involvement); vocal animation (paralanguage) demonstrated in a teacher´s intonation, variation in vocal tones (volume, pitch, quality); strategic use of voice (emphasis, attention getting, signalling important points), which can become the focus of training; the importance of overall energy, drive and spirit throughout the lesson, which may constitute an additional topic for discussion of teacher enthusiasm. the enjoyment of teaching is demonstrated in enthusiastic teaching and, as one respondent affirms, “if the teacher enjoys teaching, students will enjoy learning” (sandra, student 6). there is arguably a direct relation between teacher enthusiasm and learner enthusiasm. i strongly believe that enthusiasm is in the final analysis contagious, as are other affective states expressed in teacher-learner classroom rapport (frenzel et al., 2009; 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(2008). lessons from the classroom: 20 things good teachers do. michigan: great lessons. 715 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (4). 715-716 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.4.9 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl reviewers for volume 5/2015 the editors would like to express their gratitude to the following scholars who have kindly consented to review one or more submissions to volume 5/2015 of studies in second language learning and teaching. their insightful and thorough comments and suggestions have without doubt greatly enhanced the quality of the journal: larissa aronin oranim college of education, israel dario luis banegas university of warwick, uk helen basturkmen university of auckland, new zealand adriana biedroń pomeranian university, słupsk, poland kees de bot university of groningen, the netherlands diana boxer university of florida, usa vera busse carl von ossietzky university of oldenburg, germany christine pearson casanave temple university, japan campus jasone cenoz university of the basque country, spain mable chan the hong kong polytechnic university, hong kong anna cieślicka a&m international university, texas, usa corinne crane the university of texas at austin, usa kata csizér eötvös university, budapest, hungary jean-marc daweale birbeck college, university of london, uk susanne even university of indiana, usa danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia, poland christine goh national institute of education, singapore william grabe northern arizona university, usa suzanne graham university of reading, uk alastair henry university west, trollhättan, sweden yukie horiba kanda university of international studies, japan elaine horwitz university of texas at austin, usa hea in (lauren) park georgetown university, usa richard kiely university of southampton, uk diane larsen-freeman university of michigan, usa batia laufer university of haifa, israel robert lew adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland shuai li georgia state university, usa tonty liddicoat university of southern australia, australia 716 meihua liu tsinghua university, china thomas lockley nihon university, tokyo, japan peter macintyre cape breton university, canada rosa m. manchón university of murcia, spain hiram h. maxim emory university, atlanta, usa sarah mercer university of graz, austria james milton swansea university, wales, uk hossein nassaji university of victoria, canada colleen a. neary-sundquist purdue university, usa joanna nijakowska university of łódź, poland tarja nikula university of jyväskylä, finland sue ollerhead university of new south wales, australia rebecca oxford university of maryland, usa lynn pearson bowling green state university, ohio, usa simone pfenninger university of zurich, switzerland françois pichette university of quebec, canada ewa piechurska-kuciel opole university, poland katalin piniel eötvös university, budapest, hungary jennifer redmann franklin & marshall college, lancaster, pa, usa susanne reiterer university of vienna, austria jacek rysiewicz adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland stephen ryan senshu university, japan elke schneider winthrop university, rock hill, usa satomi takahashi rikkyo (st. paul's) university, tokyo, japan ruth trinder vienna university of economics and business, austria jan vanhove university of fribourg, switzerland ewa waniek-klimczak university of łódź, poland freerkien waninge university of nottingham, uk mark wyatt university of portsmouth, uk xian zhang pennsylvania state university, usa 551 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (4). 2013. 551-580 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl acquisition of german pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children eugen zaretsky goethe university, frankfurt/main, germany yevgen.zaretsky@kgu.de benjamin p. lange university of göttingen, germany kontakt@benjaminplange.de harald a. euler ruhr university, bochum, germany euler@uni-kassel.de katrin neumann ruhr university, bochum, germany katrin.neumann@kgu.de abstract existing studies on plural acquisition in german have relied on small samples and thus hardly deliver generalizable and differentiated results. here, overgeneralizations of certain plural allomorphs and other tendencies in the acquisition of german plural markers are described on the basis of test data from 7,394 3to 5-yearold monolingual german and bi/multilingual immigrant children tested with a modified, validated version of the marburger sprachscreening (mss) language test and 476 children tested with the setk 3-5 language test. classified correct and wrong answers to mss and setk 3-5 plural items were compared. the acquisition patterns of immigrants corresponded to those of younger german children. both monolingual german and immigrant children demonstrated generally the same universal frequency and phonetically/phonologically based error patterns, irreeugen zaretsky, benjamin p. lange, harald a. euler, katrin neumann 552 spective of their linguistic background, but with different tendencies such as overgeneralization of -s by german children only. keywords: plural acquisition, morphology, german language, pluralization, bilingualism the highly complicated plural system of modern high german is a longstanding battleground for the proponents of different grammar acquisition models stressing different constellations of factors, such as frequency, applicability, iconicity, and transparency, which influence mental processing and encoding of the plural forms (köpcke, 1988; korecky-kröll & dressler, 2009; mugdan, 1977; park, 1977; veit, 1986). this article focuses on salient features of the plural formation in the german language in monolingual german and 4year-old bi/multilingual immigrant preschoolers. much attention has been paid to topics concerning plural acquisition in german, especially in monolingual native speakers (for an overview, see korecky-kröll, 2011). comparative studies of dysgrammatically speaking or other linguistically impaired german children and correctly speaking control subjects have also been extensively conducted (schoeler, illichmann, & kany, 1989; veit, 1986). in these studies, however, sample sizes ranged mostly from only 10 to 20 participants (clahsen, rothweiler, woest, & marcus, 1992; korecky-kröll & dressler, 2009; szagun, 2001; wegener, 1994). only few studies report sample sizes larger than 30 (e.g., schaner-wolles, 1989, 2001). the findings from these small-scale studies are hardly generalizable and are unable to reliably detect differences between subgroups. several studies (marouani, 2006; wegener, 1994) on plural acquisition in bilingual children have recently been published which mostly opted for case studies or longitudinal designs. the results might thus be of heuristic, but not of parametric value. for instance, korecky-kröll and dressler (2009) found almost no traces of s-overgeneralization (-s used instead of other suffixes) in the data of the only child in their study. this led to the conclusion that the dualroute model regarding -s as the default plural marker should be wrong, which fits with the authors’ preference for the single-route models. in our studies, however, -s turned out to be the most widespread plural allomorph in the overgeneralizations of native german children. one of the largest studies (walter, 1975) had 135 subjects, but with an excessive age range from 2.6 to 25.0 years. therefore, large-scaled cross-sectional studies with maximally unselected samples are needed in order to specify, for example, effects of age and of foreign languages spoken at home on plural acquisition. acquisition of german pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children 553 the present study addresses the following questions: 1. which plural acquisition and error patterns are characteristic of 4-yearold monolingual and bi/multilingual children? 2. do the acquisition patterns of the immigrant children correspond to those of younger native german children? 3. are the dissimilarities in the answers of the germans and immigrants of quantitative or qualitative nature, that is, do the immigrants acquire german plurals in the same way that native speakers do, or do they tend to use some other strategies which could be traced back to their native languages? substantial influence of native languages would be reflected in significant differences in the distribution of overgeneralized plural markers in the answers of the subgroups with a certain linguistic background. the absence of any qualitative differences between the overgeneralization patterns in the plural forms of german and immigrant children would suggest the universality of the plural acquisition patterns. one would also expect to find such universal patterns reflected in the comparable difficulty levels of the plural allomorphs with obvious correspondences between the older immigrant children and younger german children. plurality in german estimations of the actual number of different plural markers in german mostly range between four and nine (mugdan, 1977). the most frequently stated plural allomorphs are -e, -(e)n, -er, -s, and zero (-ø) or -e, -e plus umlaut, umlaut, -s, -er, -(e)n, and -ø, the latter set being the version adopted in this article. the -er and -er plus umlaut are not subdivided into two plural allomorphs because -er, in contrast to -e, always demands umlauting. the -s and -(e)n, on the contrary, never demand umlauting. for examples, see table 1. table 1 plural morphology of german: examples suffix singular plural english translation -s auto autos car -e kreis kreise circle -(e)n rabe raben raven -er bild bilder picture -e + umlaut fall fälle case umlaut hafen häfen harbor no suffix koffer koffer suitcase eugen zaretsky, benjamin p. lange, harald a. euler, katrin neumann 554 the choice of the plural markers is partly regulated by phonotactic rules and morphological structure. for instance, certain word final sound chains like the suffixes -heit, -keit, -ung or a schwa require the plural marker -(e)n. there is also a clear link to the grammatical gender, as in neuter das haus – die häuser ‘house,’ feminine die maus – die mäuse ‘mouse.’ because some plural suffixes are more compatible with certain genders than others, one can reduce the range of possible suffixes by identifying the gender of the substantive. for instance, the zero suffix is not compatible with feminine nouns where the suffix -(e)n dominates. the only plural formation rule which has almost no exception is the suffixation of -(e)n, the most frequent german plural suffix (bartke, marcus, & clahsen, 1995; elsen, 2001; köpcke, 1988), after a schwa at the end of feminine nouns: die geige > die geigen ‘violin.’ in some cases, neither phonotactic rules nor the gender can account for the choice of the appropriate plural allomorph so that language learners have to memorize the plural forms (cf. masc. der mast – die masten ‘mast,’ masc. der geist – die geister ‘ghost’). some other tendencies in plural formation can be summarized as follows (bittner & köpcke, 2001). more than 60% of masculine and neuter nouns are pluralized by adding -e with or without umlaut, whereas the form -e without umlaut can be found in only 40 feminine nouns. another tendency is a strong association between the suffix -s and masculine and neuter nouns ending in a nonreduced vowel (uhus ‘eagle owls,’ kinos ‘cinemas’). feminine nouns also show a tendency for -s to be added, but are to a certain extent influenced by the preponderance of (e)n-suffixes (cf. firma – firmas or firmen ‘firm, business,’ diva – diven ‘diva’). the so called schwa-drop or schwa-deletion rule (wegener, 1994) is one of the simplest plural rules in german. it does not allow a plural suffix to contain a schwa where the final word syllable also contains a schwa. thus, nouns ending in the unstressed pseudo-suffixes -e, -en, -el, -er are never followed by the suffixes -er, -e, -en: *apfel-er, *apfel-e, *apfel-en (‘apple’-pl). despite its rarity in vocabulary and in spoken language, the affix -s functions as an almost universally applicable emergency plural form. it preserves the phonological structure of the noun (no umlaut is added) and is used in cases where no other plural allomorph seems to fit. this can be seen in recently borrowed or not yet integrated foreign words, proper names, abbreviations, nonce or onomatopoetic words, and other nouns which do not evoke associations with acquired german words or plural patterns (bartke et al., 1995) and are considered to be phonologically or lexically conspicuous, or both. such nouns are classified as not normal language material by wegener (1994): lkws ‘trucks,’ frankfurts, warums ‘whys,’ altmanns ‘the altmanns.’ those conspicuous, marked nouns are believed to be at the opposite end of the more usual, unmarked acquisition of german pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children 555 nouns with their prototype consisting of two or more syllables, ending in a schwa or schwa plus consonant, or some derivational suffix. according to mugdan (1977), the plural allomorphs in basic german vocabulary, namely 2,180 nouns without derivational morphemes or word final sound combinations which correspond to the derivational morphemes, are distributed as follows: (a) masculine nouns: -e (-e is a very frequent plural affix for masculine nouns) > -(e)n > -er > zero > other suffixes (very seldom), (b) feminine nouns: -(e)n > -e > zero > other suffixes, (c) neuter nouns: -e > -er > -(e)n > zero > other suffixes. the plural allomorph -e clearly prevails compared to other allomorphs in basic german vocabulary as it was defined by mugdan (1977): -e (77.8%) > -(e)n (16.8%) > -er (4.6%) > zero (0.7%) > others (about 0.1%). the umlaut was not taken into account. masculine and neuter nouns show very similar distributions of plural allomorphs. hence, some authors (wegener, 1994) believe that for the studies on plural acquisition the classification masculine/neuter versus feminine nouns plays a more important role than a pure gender classification, at least at the early stages of plural acquisition. for instance, wegener (1994) demonstrated on the basis of a nonce words test with turkish and russian children that the turks, who generally had a poorer command of german than the russians, tended to ignore the gender distinctions. instead, they added -(e)n to any substantive, whereas the russians had already acquired the most basic gender-based subdivision of german nouns and were aware of the fact that nonfeminine nouns ending in a consonant often require the -e suffix. according to our calculations, out of the 1,000 most frequently encountered german noun lexemes taken from the derewo lexeme list by the mannheim institute for german language (institut für deutsche sprache, 2009), 430 require (e)n-plurals (43%), 219 (22%) e-plurals, 131 (13%) ø-plurals, 115 (12%) e-plurals with umlaut, 57 (6%) s-plurals, 36 (4%) er-plurals, and 12 (1%) umlaut alone. masculine nouns made up 41.6% of the list, feminine nouns 41.5%, and neuter nouns 16.9%. our results differ from those by mugdan (1977), probably due to the consideration of derivative morphemes and similar sound combinations, proper names, compounds, and other words left out by him. the distribution of plural allomorphs for each gender presented in table 2 can provide insight into the overgeneralization regularities observed in our sample, for instance regarding the question of whether the -e marker really dominates for masculine nouns and -(e)n for feminine nouns. eugen zaretsky, benjamin p. lange, harald a. euler, katrin neumann 556 table 2 frequencies and percentages of the plural allomorphs according to gender in the derewo lexeme list (1,000 most frequent noun lexemes) suffix masculine nouns feminine nouns neuter nouns # % # % # % -s 21 5 11 3 25 15 -e 133 32 6 1 80 47 -(e)n 44 11 380 92 7 4 -er 7 2 1 0 28 17 -e + umlaut 99 24 15 4 1 1 umlaut 10 0 2 0 0 0 no suffix 103 25 0 0 28 17 some regularities associated with the plural allomorphs are visualized in figure 1 by means of a joint plot of category points in a principal component analysis for categorical data. to our knowledge, this method has never been utilized to visualize relations between the most important factors influencing the choice of plural allomorphs before. the language material for figure 1 was extracted from the corpus of leipzig university (leipzig university, department for natural language processing, 2010), these were 1,000 most frequent nouns for each of three grammatical genders. the figure reveals, among other things, a close association between nouns of the feminine gender and the -(e)n plural marker, a tendency for nouns ending in a full vowel to receive -s as the plural marker, and an association between masculine nouns and consonants in the word final position. also, nouns of masculine gender tend to be shorter than nouns of neuter gender. the -e plus umlaut is loosely associated with the masculine gender. in order not to overload the figure, only three categories of word final sounds were chosen: schwa, full vowels, and consonants. it should be noted that the choice of other frequency lists or an extension of this frequency list might result in somewhat different visualizations. the same data based on the corpus of leipzig university were utilized in a classification tree, as shown in figure 2. to our knowledge, classification trees have also never been used for the visualization of the german plural system. this statistical method illustrates relations between any kind of data (metrical, ordinal, nominal) and calculates tables and/or trees which reveal hierarchical structures in the data and sort out unimportant factors. according to figure 2, the choice of the plural allomorphs in the target language depends on gender more than on other factors, such as the number of syllables (this factor was of importance for lower nodes not represented in figure 2), schwa deletion rule, and word final sounds. acquisition of german pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children 557 figure 1 most important factors influencing pluralization in 3,000 most frequent german nouns (1,000 for each grammatical gender), visualized by means of principal components analysis for categorical data. figure 2 factors influencing the choice of plural allomorphs in 3,000 most frequent german nouns according to a classification tree eugen zaretsky, benjamin p. lange, harald a. euler, katrin neumann 558 the frequencies of plural allomorphs in adult spoken language directed at children are of interest because of their expected correlations with the corresponding frequencies in the child's language. in the corpus of clahsen (1999), the frequencies of types and tokens in adults’ child-directed language are distributed as follows (types are given in parentheses): -e 30% (33%), -er 15% (8%), -(e)n 49% (53%), -s 6% (5%), without zero and umlaut forms. as in the derewo lexeme list mentioned above, the -(e)n affix is the most widespread one and, according to our assumption, would be the first one to be acquired and actively overgeneralized, followed by -e. this would correspond to the assumption made by macwhinney (1978) that the most frequent plural suffix in the input will be overgeneralized first, and will probably be the first one to be used productively. already macwhinney (1978) pointed out that grammatical forms following regular patterns are seldom incorrect, whereas forms following irregular patterns often tend to be incorrect. among the german plural formation rules, he mentioned two regular ones which can be explained in purely phonological terms: (a) roots ending in a schwa or /ai/ add -n (tante > tanten ‘aunt’), (b) roots ending in other vowels add -s (auto > autos ‘cars’). as in german the first of these two rules has almost no exceptions and the second rule has only about 20 exceptions, we would assume that both of them are the first ones to be acquired. their universal applicability assures that they are also acquired early by immigrant children, irrespective of their linguistic backgrounds. we predicted, following the single route models (dressler, mayerthaler, panagl, & wurzel, 1987, köpcke, 1988; korecky, kröll, & dressler, 2009), that the plural markers first acquired and hence overgeneralized would be -(e)n and -e, followed by -s. furthermore, we assumed that the differences between german and immigrant children would correspond to those between younger and older germans, because the active period of language acquisition at preschool age is not yet completed and thus the acquisition universals (e.g., preference for the most frequent and most salient markers) applied to the native language would be identical to those applied to foreign languages (pinker & prince, 1992). method instruments and procedure a series of large-scale language assessment studies was carried out in several cities in hesse, germany, in order to validate and establish a norm for a new version of a screening tool called marburger sprachscreening (mss; euler et al., 2010; neumann, holler-zittlau, van minnen, sick, zaretsky, & euler, acquisition of german pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children 559 2011) for 4-year-old children with or without an immigrant background. children were tested either by language experts or by daycare center teachers with an extensive battery providing sufficient information about their performance in grammar, vocabulary, articulation, phonological short-termmemory, spontaneous speech, and speech comprehension. the subtests called plural and accusative and dative forms were important for this study. apart from mss, several reference tests were conducted: speech perception, phonological memory, and the setk 3-5 grammar test (grimm, 2001) as well as some other tests which are of no relevance here. the constellation of the test battery and also of the mss items varied from study to study, but the plural items of the mss never changed: apfel-äpfel ‘apple,’ ball-bälle ‘ball,’ auto-autos ‘car.’ the plural elicitation was carried out in a standardized form by naming a certain object in a picture in singular and asking the child questions such as “here is one apple and there are many . . .” all test items are normally acquired up to the age of two (von suchodoletz, 2010) and thus are supposed to be familiar to 4-year-old children. the setk 3-5 examines all plural allomorphs except the zero plural. in contrast to mss, which contains three plural items only, setk 3-5 is designed to test 18 such items, some of which are nonce words conforming to german phonotactics: (a) real words: fisch(-e) ‘fish,’ bild(-er) ‘picture,’ stuhl (stühle) ‘chair,’ buch (bücher) ‘book,’ hand (hände) ‘hand,’ schiff(-e) ‘ship,’ glas (gläser) ‘glass,’ gabel(-n) ‘fork,’ vogel (vögel) ‘bird;’ (b) nonce words for a wug test: eine ribane(-n), ein tulo(-s), eine plarte(-n), ein biwo(-s), eine tapsel(-n), ein ropf (röpfe), ein dolling(-e), eine kland (klände). because nonce words do not allow the reproduction of memorized plural forms, the setk 3-5 items are of especially high value for this study, reflecting the internalized plural formation rules and strategies. the elicitation form in setk 3-5 corresponded to that in mss. participants results from mss tests, including classified wrong answers, were obtained from 893 children (50% germans, 50% with immigrant background; 54% male, 46% female; age range 4.0 to 4.11 years, median 4.3). the largest immigrant groups were turks (9%), russians (6%), arabs (5%), and italians (4%). the classification as germans or immigrants was based not on the nationality but on the languages spoken at home. german children raised bilingually from their birth on were classified as immigrants. for instance, some cases occurred when one parent spoke german and the other spoke english so that the child could learn english from the very beginning. the immigrants were thus a very heterogeneous group in many respects: eugen zaretsky, benjamin p. lange, harald a. euler, katrin neumann 560 the german language skills of immigrant children were very different when they were enrolled in the daycare centers. daycare center teachers gave school grades for the german language skills at this point in time. the data were available for 203 immigrants. for 9% of the children the language skills were estimated as excellent, for 11% as very good, for 12% as good, for 15% as satisfactory, for 22% as bad, and for 31% as very bad. according to the questionnaire for the daycare center teachers, 35% of the immigrant children had contact with the german language from their birth on, 3% received the first language input in german during their first year of life, 6% in the second year of life, 12% in the third year of life, and 45% in the fourth year of life. this does not mean that the last group immigrated to germany in the fourth year of life. rather, many of them were brought up by their family members at home and contacted their mother tongue only. data were available for 188 children. 46% of the immigrant children had no contact with their mother tongue in the daycare center. however, 54% (predominantly turkish children) had at least one child in their daycare center groups who spoke their mother tongue, which might have influenced their acquisition of german negatively. data were available for 223 children. on average, immigrant children attended daycare centers for 15 months, with a range of 0-50 months according to the questionnaires filled out by daycare center teachers. it must be noted, however, that the numbers exceeding 2 years are not realistic and probably include nursery schools located in the same daycare centers. in the first 2 years of life, children normally attend nursery schools or stay at home. according to the parents, 5% spoke only german at home, 83% spoke german and other language(s), 12% spoke only other language(s). according to our classification rules, however, children from families where only german was spoken from the birth of the child on were not considered as immigrants. hence, 5% of the cases mentioned above relate to families where other languages must have been spoken as well, for instance, according to the questionnaires filled out by daycare center teachers. in order to compare age effects for both german and immigrant children, 162 3-year-old children and 137 5-year-old children completed the sample of children tested internally, which means that they were tested by language experts from a department of phoniatrics and pediatric audiology. a database with external mss results, namely tests administered throughout the state of hesse by specially trained daycare center teachers, contained 6,144 cases (70% germans, 51% males; age 4.0 to 4.5 years). this database did not contain all the items of the internal tests, as the external acquisition of german pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children 561 tests were a screening distilled from the internal mss test items, but it could be used as a comparison. descriptive information about the samples and plural items used in the study is shown in table 3. in order to compare linguistically more proficient groups with less proficient ones, all participants were classified on the basis of their test results by language experts, mostly speech and language therapists, as linguistically typically developed, in need of language training, and requiring medical therapy. some children needed both language training and medical therapy. table 3 description of databases mss 3-yr-olds internal tests mss 4-yr-olds internal tests mss 4-yr-olds external tests mss 5-yr-olds internal tests setk 4-yr-olds internal tests n (germans) 107 446 4,280 137 300 n (immigrants) 55 447 1,864 58 176 age (median) 3;8 4;3 ~4;2 5;5 4;2 no. of plural items 3 3 3 3 18 no. of overgeneralizations and zero forms 129 852 n.a. 71 3,282 n.a. = not available data analysis the answers were entered into spss 15 in binary form (right-wrong) and as a string (wrong answers as words) for a later detailed classification of overgeneralization patterns. wrong answers were categorized according to the plural allomorphs (e.g., apfels = s-overgeneralization, apfeln = (e)n-overgeneralization). the data were controlled and corrected by the first author. overgeneralizations were classified independently by two clinical linguistics students. in the plural items of mss with 4-year-old children, the kappa index was .95, in the plural items of setk 3-5 .94, indicating a very high concordance of the classifications. zero forms were generally analyzed separately from overgeneralizations because there was enough evidence to suggest that in most cases these were not overgeneralizations of the plural allomorph -ø but repeated singular forms. for instance, of the 4-year-olds who produced three zero forms in the mss test out of three possible ones (n = 95), 79% were classified as requiring language training, whereas only 26% of all other children (n = 787) belonged to this group ( 2(1) = 108.74, p < .001). children who required language training (n = 120) produced, in a correct or incorrect way, on average 2.5 plural allomorphs in setk 3-5 (sd = 1.85), whereas children who did not require language training (n = 335) produced 5.3 plural allomorphs (sd = 1.01, z = -13.30, p < eugen zaretsky, benjamin p. lange, harald a. euler, katrin neumann 562 .001). altogether, 24% (n = 95) of the children who repeated all three singular forms in mss belonged to the group which repeated at least one mss question completely or partly in other subtests, whereas all other children (n = 783) belonged to this group in 8% of the cases ( 2(1) = 27.82, p < .001). obviously, children who used fewer than three plural allomorphs on average and tended to repeat test questions were hardly capable of overgeneralizing -ø, one of the most difficult german plural markers. hence the following calculations will mostly refer to overgeneralizations only, without zero forms. because the data in most cases were not normally distributed, differences were tested nonparametrically, with 2-tailed p values if not stated otherwise. distribution of plural markers in the error patterns was examined by calculating chi-square. differences between germans and immigrant children were assessed by the mann-whitney u test, a nonparametric equivalent of a t test for two independent variables. results preferred plural markers: linguistically less versus more proficient groups in order to examine whether the overgeneralization patterns of the immigrants correspond to those of younger germans, 3-year-old germans were compared to 4and 5-year-old germans. the discrepancies in the distribution of plural markers in the error patterns in mss between 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds, and between 4-year-olds and 5-year-olds were not significant according to crosstable chi-square tests; all ps > .05. the same applies to the frequency differences in the mss test results between 4-year-old germans and immigrants. as was shown in zaretsky, neumann, euler, and lange (2013), the error patterns of the germans and the largest immigrant groups (34 turks, 12 russians, 15 italians, 18 arabs, 176 other immigrants versus 300 germans) in the setk 3-5 were also rarely significant: arabs, italians, and turks demonstrated with all 18 nouns the same error patterns (not significantly different, all ps > .05). russian children produced significantly different results for only one item (dolling: 2(3 ) = 25.51, p < .001). here degrees of freedom do not refer to the number of immigrant groups compared, but to the number of overgeneralized plural markers (overgeneralizations of -s, -(e)n, -er, etc.) documented for this item. all immigrants added together produced only 3, out of possible 18, significantly different error patterns in comparison to the germans (the items vogel, apfel, ropf, ps < .05). the fact that the differences between younger and older germans and between 4-year-old germans and immigrants were not significant in most cases does not mean that the frequencies of overgeneralizations of certain plural allomorphs were equal in the groups. the frequency of the zero forms acquisition of german pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children 563 was significantly lower at age 5 than at age 3 according to the mann-whitney u test, as shown in table 4. the 3-year-old germans overgeneralized -(e)n significantly more often than the 5-year-olds. the differences in the frequencies of other plural allomorphs were not significant. table 4 frequency of plural allomorphs and zero forms in the answers of german and immigrant children in setk 3-5 -er -s -e plus umlaut -(e)n umlaut -e zero forms germans # 10 237 0 150 10 172 1,304 % 1 13 0 8 1 9 69 immigrants # 2 62 1 184 11 98 1,041 % 0 4 0 13 1 7 74 the percentages of the plural allomorphs from the total number of the overgeneralizations in the setk 3-5 sample demonstrated the following tendencies: -(e)n and zero forms were preferred by immigrants, -s by germans. furthermore, the immigrants used -(e)n significantly more often than -s in the correct or wrong way (on average 1.5 en-occurrences, sd = 2.18, versus 0.6 soccurrences, sd = 0.97; wilcoxon-test: z = -4.06, n = 162, p < .001). germans, on the contrary, used -s almost significantly more often than -(e)n (1.1 enoccurrences, sd = 1.28, versus 1.2 s-occurrences, sd = 1.29; z = -1.88, n = 294, p = .06). however, although -s was the plural marker of choice for the germans, it never clearly dominated over other plural allomorphs even in the nonce words: on average 0.09 s-overgeneralizations (total number of sovergeneralizations divided by the number of items not demanding –s; sd = 0.13) versus 0.07 other overgeneralizations (total number of overgeneralizations divided by the total number of items), without zero forms (sd = 0.10, n = 295, z = -1.49, p > .05). differences in plural errors between germans and immigrants corroborating our initial hypothesis, the error patterns of immigrants in their plural forms correspond to those of younger germans. in order to look for parallels between younger germans and older immigrants, umlauting as a component of pluralization was examined first. as many as 29% of 3-year-old germans (n = 105) and 12% of the 4-year-old germans (n = 137) used it at least once in an incorrect way in the mss plural items subtest ( 2(1) = 11.02, p < .001). it could be assumed that significant differences in average numbers with respect to umlaut errors could also be found between germans and immigrants. indeed, on average, immigrants produced 1.3 wrong umlaut forms in setk 3-5 (sd = eugen zaretsky, benjamin p. lange, harald a. euler, katrin neumann 564 1.11, n = 163), while the germans produced 0.9 such forms (sd = 0.91, n = 294, z = -4.22, p < .001). seventy-one percent of the immigrants (n = 163) and 61% of the germans (n = 294) made at least one umlaut error in setk 3-5 ( 2(1) = 4.54, p < .05). one might expect to note higher rates of correct umlaut forms or at least of attempted umlaut productions in the answers of the arabs (n = 18) than in the answers of other immigrants (n = 157), due to the phenomenon of internal plurals in arabic. however, there was no significant difference in this respect. it could be assumed that younger children, like any other linguistically less proficient group, often produce plural forms which are nonexistent in the language of adults, thus trying to verify their hypotheses concerning possible plural rules of the target language (korecky-kröll & dressler, 2009). indeed, for instance, in forms like röpfel instead of röpfe, which occurred in setk 3-5 4 times, the element -el was misused as a plural allomorph, even though the only meaning which -el has as a suffix in german is the diminutive one. in mss, such forms including double plural markers (apfelns) could be found in the answers of 4% of the 5-year-old germans (n = 107) and 12% of the 3-year-olds (n = 137; 2(1) = 6.35, p < .05). in setk 3-5, 74% of the immigrant children (n = 165) and 62% of the germans (n = 295) produced at least one nonexisting plural form ( 2(1) = 6.36, p < .05), thus showing a further parallel between younger germans and older children with a foreign language background. one more parallel between these groups is evident in the frequency of strong deviations from the expected answers: numerals or other quantifiers without substantives (“four” instead of “four cars;” elsen, 2001; stephany, 2002; vollmann, sedlak, müller, & vassilakou, 1997), semantically inappropriate answers (“trees” instead of “pictures”), and phonetic deformations of the items which do not allow interpretations concerning overgeneralized plural allomorphs (“tra” instead of “trees;” laaha, ravid, korecky-kröll, laaha, & dressler, 2006). altogether, 8.6% of the 3-yearold germans (n = 105) had acquired some of these strategies to avoid plural formation at least once in mss, whereas among the 5-year-olds this figure was only 2.2% (n = 136, 2(1) = 5.08, p < .05). such strategies were found in the answers of 20% of the 4-year-old germans (n = 293) and 33% of the immigrants (n = 162, 2(1 )= 9.44, p < .01) in the setk 3-5 data. although in the turkish language the plural suffix is usually omitted after numerals, there were no significant differences between the turks (n = 34) and other immigrants (n = 301). the total number of correctly used plural allomorphs in the answers of the linguistically less proficient groups was expected to be smaller than in those of linguistically more proficient groups. the mss results allowed such comparisons only for 3 allomorphs (-s, -e plus umlaut, umlaut). the number of correctly used plural allomorphs corresponded to the number of correctly produced plural forms. older germans produced significantly more of these forms in mss, as shown in acquisition of german pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children 565 table 5. in setk 3-5, germans employed on average more plural allomorphs in a correct way than immigrants (see table 5). furthermore, the proportion of germans who used all six plural allomorphs in setk 3-5 was significantly higher than that of the immigrants: 41% (n = 293) versus 18% (n = 162, 2(1) = 25.84, p < .001). as shown in the section “plurality in german,” the choice of the plural allomorph depends to some extent on the gender of the nouns. because german uses overt and covert morphosyntax to mark nouns and articles for number, gender, and case, it can be assumed that a correlation between the mss subtest called plural and correct gender markers in the accusative and dative forms subtest would be rather high. accusative and dative cases are marked in this task on the articles: auf das (acc. sg. neutr.) dach, auf der (dat. sg. fem.) wippe. for the summarized overall results of the 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old mss participants, the correlation between the sum of correct plural forms and the sum of correct gender forms marked on articles was r = .68 (p < .001, n = 1,248). three-year-old germans produced on average more correct gender forms than 4-year-olds (see table 5). four-year-old immigrant children in mss produced on average less correct gender markers than germans (see table 5), which demonstrates a further parallel between younger german and older immigrant children. table 5 comparisons between younger versus older german children and german versus immigrant children. results of mann-whitney u-tests for mss and setk 3-5 items topic n m sd z frequency of zero forms germans 295 4.42 3.44 -2.26* immigrants 163 6.39 5.90 younger germans 105 0.43 0.66 -3.78*** older germans 137 0.15 0.38 frequency of the plural marker -(e)n germans 295 0.51 1.19 -2.77** immigrants 163 1.13 2.02 younger germans 105 0.11 0.35 -2.74** older germans 137 0.02 0.15 frequency of the plural marker -s germans 295 0.80 1.10 -4.80*** immigrants 163 0.38 0.80 younger germans 105 0.03 0.17 -0.31 older germans 137 0.02 0.15 number of correctly used plural allomorphs germans 294 5.1 1.12 -9.89*** immigrants 162 3.0 2.19 younger germans 105 2.1 0.93 -7.00*** older germans 147 2.8 0.49 correct gender forms germans 446 2.9 1.22 -15.64*** immigrants 447 1.4 1.30 younger germans 107 2.5 1.36 -2.92** older germans 446 2.9 1.22 eugen zaretsky, benjamin p. lange, harald a. euler, katrin neumann 566 not classified answers germans 293 1.0 2.51 -5.01*** immigrants 162 3.3 5.41 younger germans 105 0.30 0.66 -4.27*** older germans 137 0.04 0.19 * <.05 ** <.01 *** <.001 the fact that the immigrant children’s command of gender is deficient should also find its reflection in overgeneralization patterns. according to our calculations based on the derewo corpus, the plural allomorph -e must be closely associated with masculine and neuter nouns, because in adult language only 1% of the commonly used feminine nouns are pluralized by adding -e, whereas 32% of the masculine nouns and 47% of the neuter nouns demand this plural suffix (cf. wegener, 1994). german setk 3-5 participants, being more aware of the regularities controlled by the category of gender, overgeneralized -e with neuter and masculine nouns significantly more often (0.14, n = 296, sd = 0.14) than immigrant participants (0.10, n = 162, sd = 0.12, z = -3.12, p < .01), whereas the difference for feminine nouns was not significant. no qualitative differences relating gender to the error patterns of germans and immigrants were identified. yet immigrants with the category of gender in their native languages (e.g., italians), n = 266, demonstrated in mss significantly higher rates of correct gender forms than children without such a distinction in their native languages (e.g., turks), n = 126: 1.6 (sd = 1.29) versus 1.2 (sd = 1.26, z = -3.12, p < .01). as the second group was generally significantly weaker in grammar (5.1 correct answers, sd = 3.70, n = 265, versus 3.9, sd = 3.43, n = 125, z = -3.22, p < .01), this discrepancy cannot with certainty be attributed to the influence of the native languages. yet it is noticeable that those immigrants whose native languages lack gender demonstrated numerically higher percentages of gender errors (from the total number of article errors) in all four mss items checked. this difference reached significance for only one item: 2(1) = 7.53, p < .01, n = 76 immigrants without gender category in their native languages, 137 with gender category. both immigrants and younger germans produced significantly more answers which could not be classified (usually no answer at all) in the plural subtest than the corresponding linguistically proficient groups (see table 5). common features of plural acquisition in germans and immigrants further analyses of the overgeneralization patterns revealed some of the regularities common for both germans and immigrants, but they did not imply acquisition of german pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children 567 any further comparisons between younger and older germans. such comparisons between germans and immigrants were impossible with our mss data, so only setk 3-5 data could be considered. the simplest plural rule in german demanding -n after a schwa in the word final position can be illustrated by comparing the correct answers for the setk 3-5 plural items ribane and plarte, which are generated according to this rule, with the correct plural forms of the items tapsel, dolling, ropf, and kland, which follow other more complicated plural formation rules. the germans produced on average 0.5 correct answers in the first group of test items (n = 293, sd = 0.40) and 0.2 in the second item group (sd = 0.20, z = -11.53, p < .001), the immigrants 0.3 in the first item group (sd = 0.40) and 0.1 in the second one (sd = 0.20, n = 162, z = -6.05, p < .001). the simplicity of the second rule demanding -s after full vowels also finds confirmation in the setk 3-5 data. the comparison of the means of the correct answers for the word groups biwo and tulo versus tapsel, dolling, ropf and kland yielded significantly different results between germans and immigrants: (a) germans: 0.4 correct answers for the first item group (sd = 0.42) versus 0.2 for the second item group (sd = 0.20, n = 293, z = -8.52, p < .001), (b) immigrants: 0.2 (sd = 0.38) versus 0.1 (sd = 0.20, n = 162, z = -3.69, p < .001). only one of 455 children tested with setk 3-5 was able to produce correct plural forms for all of the comparatively difficult items including tapsel, dolling, ropf and kland, whereas the correct forms for the simpler items plarte, ribane, biwo and tulo were produced by 57 children. the close association of the suffix -n with the word final schwa and that of -s with the word final full vowels is reflected in further analysis: 12% of the immigrants (n = 162) and 7% of the germans (n = 294) used at least one overgeneralization with the items ribane, plarte, biwo and tulo ( 2(1) = 4.62, p < .05), thus deviating from the two rules mentioned. this is a very low value in comparison, for instance, with the percentage of overgeneralizations with the setk 3-5 item kland, demanding -e plus umlaut in analogy to hand ‘hand:’ 38% in the german group, 26% in the immigrant group. furthermore, we found other plural markers in only approximately 10% of the classifiable incorrect answers for the items ribane, plarte, biwo and tulo. hence, children who produced incorrect forms of these items seldom overgeneralized plural allomorphs and repeated singular forms in more than 90% of cases instead. the items with the plural allomorph -e plus umlaut (ropf and kland) were obviously associated with three incorrect plural formation patterns (-e, -s, -(e)n: ropfe, ropfs, ropfen) which, taken together with the zero forms, accounted for 90% of the errors. the close association of certain plural allomorphs with a certain phonetic-phonological environment seems to block the overgeneralizaeugen zaretsky, benjamin p. lange, harald a. euler, katrin neumann 568 tion of other plural markers, which results in the abundance of zero forms with ribane, plarte, biwo and tulo. no difference between germans and immigrants was observed in this respect. one closer, yet not so obvious, association of a plural allomorph with a certain phonetic-phonological environment is the suffix -e following a word final consonant: wort > worte ‘word.’ marouani (2006) demonstrated that even immigrant children (arabs in her study) tend to recognize this pattern in the initial stages of l2 acquisition of german. this is supported by our setk 3-5 data, even if one disregards the schwa deletion rule and gender, when -e is compared with the otherwise most frequently overgeneralized allomorph -(e)n: (a) germans: 1.6 correct or wrong e-uses in setk 3-5 items ending in a consonant (sd = 0.07) versus 0.4 en-uses (sd = 0.06, n = 300, z = -15.81, p < .001), (b) immigrants: 1.6 (sd = 1.92) versus 0.9 (sd = 1.69, n = 176, z = -7.49, p < .001). the schwa deletion rule, which is universally applicable and seems to be acquired before the very first actively produced plural, prohibits the occurrence of two schwas in adjacent syllables (in setk 3-5: apfele, vögele, ribanee). no deviations of the rule in the setk 3-5 data and only one deviation (apfele) in the mss data of all the 3-, 4and 5-year-olds evaluated together were found. obviously, even children with a minimal command of german had already internalized this rule and did not doubt its applicability. the simplicity or, in other words, the universality or wide-ranged applicability of the plural rules as one of the dominant factors in the plural acquisition can also be illustrated by the data of the umlauting in setk 3-5. because the plural allomorph -(e)n is not compatible with the umlaut (as a part of plural allomorph) in the nominative case, both germans and immigrants overgeneralized -(e)n significantly more often without umlaut: (a) germans: 0.4 enovergeneralizations without umlaut (sd = 0.76) versus 0.1 with umlaut (sd = 0.33, n = 296, z = -6.72, p < .001), (b) immigrants: 0.5 (sd = 0.98) versus 0.2 (sd = 0.56, z = -4.45, p < .001). the same applies to combinations of -s with the umlaut which are also impossible in the target language: (a) germans: 0.8 -s without umlaut (sd = 1.07) versus 0.0 with umlaut (sd = 0.16, n = 295, z = 10.25, p < .001), (b) immigrants: 0.4 (sd = 0.77) versus 0.0 (sd = 0.08, n = 163, z = -5.84, p < .001). the almost total lack of combinations of -s with the umlaut can obviously be explained by the fact that -s, in contrast to -(e)n, is not compatible with the umlauts in any grammatical case. yet the case of umlauting demonstrates that the nonnominative noun forms could be mistakenly transferred into the nominative declension system, resulting, theoretically, in overgeneralizations corresponding to accusative, dative, and genitive forms, particularly because these forms are equivalent to the plural suffixes (gen.: des buches = -s ‘of the book,’ dat.: mit den händen = acquisition of german pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children 569 -(e)n ‘with the hands,’ acc.: über den bären = -(e)n ‘about the bear’). whether setk 3-5 participants indeed tended to overgeneralize such forms was verified by dividing all overgeneralizations into two groups: potential nonnominative forms and all other incorrect plural forms without equivalents in the adult language. on average, immigrants produced 0.5 potential nonnominative forms (sd = 1.15) and 1.0 other forms (sd = 1.26, n = 163, z = -4.27, p < .001). the ratio in the answers of the germans was 0.3 (sd = 0.69) versus 0.6 (sd = 0.95, n = 296, z = -6.41, p < .001). this means that both germans and immigrants tended to produce nonexistent forms twice as often as potential case forms. hence, the plural forms produced by our participants mostly could not be viewed as memorized forms in other grammatical cases. as was demonstrated in zaretsky, neumann, euler, and lange (2013), both germans and immigrants stick to the same overgeneralization patterns: -e > -(e)n (fische > fischen), -e + umlaut > -e (hände > handen), -er > (e)n (bilder > bilden), -(e)n > -s (ribanen > ribanes), umlaut > -(e)n (vögel > vogeln), -s > -(e)n (autos > auten). because both germans and immigrants demonstrate the same acquisition strategies resulting in the same overgeneralization patterns, the levels of difficulty of the plural allomorphs might also be the same. the common denominator of the plural allomorphs tested in mss and setk 3-5 is -e plus umlaut, -s, and umlaut. the database of the external mss tests demonstrated the following tendencies: umlaut (germans: 68% of the correct answers, n = 4,280, immigrants: 29%, n = 1,864) was more difficult than -e plus umlaut (germans: 84%, 2(1) = 539.70, p < .001, immigrants: 42%, 2 (1) = 389.78, p < .001), and -e plus umlaut was more difficult than -s (germans: 93%, 2(1) = 512.48, p < .001, immigrants: 67%, 2(1) = 444.74, p < .001). in setk 3-5, real words supply evidence that umlaut was more difficult than -e plus umlaut, whereas nonce words reflected a higher level of difficulty of -e plus umlaut compared to -s: (1) items apfel and vogel were answered significantly less often correctly than the items hand and stuhl: (a) germans: on average 0.9 (sd = 0.29) versus 0.6 (sd = 0.39, n = 296, z = -8.65, p < .001), (b) immigrants: 0.4 (sd = 0.45) versus 0.3 (sd = 0.38, n = 162, z = -4.54, p < .001); (2) the items kland and ropf were answered significantly less often correctly than biwo and tulo: (a) germans: 0.1 (sd = 0.22) versus 0.4 (sd = 0.42, n = 293, z = -9.55, p < .001), (b) immigrants: 0.1 (sd = 0.23) versus 0.2 (sd = 0.38, n = 162, z = -4.64, p < .001). taking the low scores of umlaut on the scales of iconicity, frequency, cue validity, and productivity (köpcke, 1988) into account, one would expect very low rates of overgeneralizations of this plural marker. in our setk 3-5 data, such overgeneralizations accounted for only 2% of all overgeneralizations in the germans’ answers and for 3% in the immigrants’ answers. eugen zaretsky, benjamin p. lange, harald a. euler, katrin neumann 570 some authors postulated a variability of the error patterns within a short speaking period in spontaneous speech or test situation without notable semantic variation: stühle, stühl, stühlen ‘chairs’ (elsen, 2001; korecky-kröll & dressler, 2009; park, 1977). the same tendency was observed when comparing the item apfel in mss with the same item in setk 3-5. as many as 88 % of the 4-year-old germans who produced the correct form of apfel in mss (n = 95) could also produce it in setk 3-5 ( 2(1) = 35.92, p < .001, = 0.50, p < .001). the same values for the immigrants were 70% (n = 46) and 92% (n = 117, 2(1) = 67.14, p < .001, = 0.64, p < .001). this means that a considerable subgroup of both germans and immigrants changed their mind concerning the correct form of the apfel plural within approximately 20 minutes. discussion and conclusions the following parallels between immigrants compared to germans and younger germans compared to older germans were identified: 1. the distribution of plural allomorphs in incorrect answers was basically the same, which means that the discrepancies in the error patterns were of quantitative and not of qualitative nature. however, linguistically less proficient groups tended to overgeneralize -(e)n, repeat singular forms, produce quantifiers without pluralized nouns or forms strongly deviating from the rules of the target language. linguistically stronger groups overgeneralized -s and produced more correct plural forms. 2. although no plural allomorph could be considered to be the default plural marker universally compatible with any phonetic-phonological environment, -(e)n had certain features of the default plural, especially in the linguistically weaker groups, whereas -s possessed such features in the proficient groups. 3. linguistically weaker groups used fewer plural allomorphs (types) than proficient ones. 4. the umlauting was more problematic for the linguistically weaker groups. the parallels between younger germans and older immigrants allowed us to draw the conclusion that the plural acquisition patterns in both cases were basically the same. furthermore, the following parallels could be found in the error patterns of both germans and immigrants: acquisition of german pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children 571 1. the choice of the plural allomorph depended on its frequency in the input (-(e)n, -e), simplicity, and applicability (universality) of the rules, and to a lesser extent on the command of the gender category, because some plural allomorphs are closely associated with certain genders. 2. the wrong plural forms mostly did not correspond to the accusative, dative, and genitive forms in the adult language, which means that these were not merely memorized items, but the result of actively applied rules or schemata. 3. both germans and immigrants stuck to the following overgeneralization patterns: -e > -(e)n, umlaut plus -e > -e, -er > -(e)n, -(e)n > -s, umlaut > -(e)n, -s > -(e)n. 4. the difficulty levels of the plural allomorphs were universal: umlaut alone was more difficult than -e plus umlaut, and -e plus umlaut was more difficult than -s. 5. both germans and immigrants overgeneralized -s, -(e)n, and -e, while other plural allomorphs could be encountered only sporadically. 6. error patterns were variable even within a single test session. one of the main findings of the study, the tendency to overgeneralize -(e)n at a young age, -s at a later age, and -e independently of age, or at least to prefer these plural markers to all the others, has been described by a number of authors. scupin and scupin (1910) reported overgeneralizations of -(e)n at the age of 3 and those of -s at the age of 5. walter (1975) did not find -s in the early overgeneralizations, whereas -(e)n and -e were overgeneralized at all ages. in a single case study of elsen (2001), a german girl observed up to the age of 2.5 produced enand e-overgeneralizations in spontaneous speech in the early stages, -(e)n being the most frequently overgeneralized plural allomorph (types, not tokens, are meant), and s-overgeneralizations in the later stages. solely the phonological form of the nouns and the frequency of the plural allomorphs in the input, and not the morphology (suffixes), gender or animacy of the nouns, determined the choice of the plural allomorphs in this study, which confirms our observations (e.g., -(e)n strongly associated with schwa in the word final position, -s strongly associated with full vowels, nonsyllabic plural allomorphs associated with the schwa in the final syllable). the -(e)n as the most frequent plural allomorph in the input language is expected to be overgeneralized in models such as natural morphology or cognitive morphology represented in plural acquisition studies by köpcke’s schema model (bittner & köpcke, 2001). according to köpcke (1988), -(e)n is overgeneralized frequently due to its high scores on the scales of salience, type frequency, and cue validity, -s due to its high scores on the first and the third eugen zaretsky, benjamin p. lange, harald a. euler, katrin neumann 572 ones, -e on the first and (moderately) on the second ones, whereas -er is high only on salience and umlaut is (moderately) high only on cue validity. constant oscillations between different plural forms of the same nouns, which occurred in our tests in the different forms of the item apfel produced in the course of about 20 min, probably demonstrate the continuous work of associative learning mechanisms, which weight different cues from the input, cause frequent shifts of the determining criteria, and result in new overgeneralizations. according to wegener (1995), such form and error variations falsify the approach of a single regular plural allomorph in german, namely -s, and demonstrate that german children have several regular and marked-regular plural classes at their disposal. the term marked-regular plural refers to somewhat less regular classes, that is, those following the subsidiary rules and not the main rules. accounts of zero forms dominating in the answers of children are omnipresent in the literature on plural acquisition (clahsen et al., 1992; gawlitzekmaiwald, 1994; mugdan, 1977; schaner-wolles, 2001). macwhinney (1978) mentioned a strong tendency to use zero suffixes with real and especially nonce words in any age group between 3.0 and 12.0. phillips and lowell (1980) assumed all correct forms to be a mere reproduction of the plural forms learnt by rote at least up to the age of 7. our data did not confirm this assumption: not a single german child and only 4 immigrant children, all in need of language training, repeatedly produced only zero forms or not classifiable answers in the case of wrong answers. hence, it is rather to be assumed that the pluralization patterns result from some rules or schemata, probably based on probabilistic analysis of the frequency of certain plural allomorphs with certain word final sounds, certain genders, and other factors. the fact that the great majority of the documented incorrect plural forms in our data did not correspond to any forms of adult language also reveals the active use of some pluralization rules or schemata internalized during preschool age. schaner-wolles (1989) assumed that the first productive plural rules are applied by german preschoolers at the comparatively late age of 5 or 6, preceded by frequency-based patterns resulting mostly in overgeneralizations of -(e)n. only at later stages do they switch to overgeneralizations such as auto > auten ‘car,’ following a rare plural formation pattern observed only in approximately 20 german nouns such as fresko > fresken ‘frescos’ and konto > konten ‘deposit account.’ yet the difference between the overgeneralization of the frequency-based suffix -(e)n, on the one hand, and the use of the internalized rules extracted from such rare patterns in the input, on the other hand, (i.e., the demarcation of the frequency-based and “real” plural rules) remained opaque. in the mss studies, forms such as auten, which disregard one of the simplest german plural rules, were mostly produced by linguistically less profi acquisition of german pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children 573 cient groups such as immigrants and cannot be considered as a result of some advanced pluralization strategies. yet such forms are definitely based on some internalized pluralization rules at the age of 4 and even 3. both transparency and productivity concepts disfavor the umlaut plurals in any form: umlaut, -e plus umlaut, -er plus umlaut. partial plural marking such as -e without umlaut, which was one of the most common plural errors in the mss studies (klände > klande and alike), has been recognized in a number of studies (schaner-wolles, 2001; szagun, 2001). park (1977), who conducted a longitudinal study with two german children without developmental disorders or delays up to the age of almost 4 years, reported, apart from omnipresent enovergeneralizations, a tendency to omit either the umlaut or the suffix -e in the nouns demanding -e plus umlaut in plural. the author stressed an all-pervasive strategy to replace the less iconic plural allomorphs by the more iconic ones, -e plus umlaut being less iconic than -e. marouani (2006) observed the tendency to avoid umlauting with -e in the answers of arab children learning german, with a clear trend towards omitting umlaut as a plural marker per se. the data shown in zaretsky, neumann, euler, and lange (2013) suggest that overgeneralizations of unproductive plural allomorphs (namely umlaut, -er, and -e plus umlaut) are rare. this supports the findings of korecky-kröll and dressler (2009) and contradicts the results of behren (2002), who claimed that the child she studied quickly identified all plural allomorphs and overgeneralized all of them. in fact, not a single overgeneralization of -e plus umlaut was found in the setk 3-5 answers of the germans and only one such overgeneralization in the immigrants’ answers in the present study. the fact that the plural rules without exceptions or with very few exceptions are hardly violated even at the youngest age finds further support in the literature. according to walter (1975), the schwa deletion rule in words such as junge > jungen ‘boy,’ where one of the schwas is deleted after vowels or liquids, was never violated in any age group between 2.5 and 25.0. using a nonce words task, wegener (1994) demonstrated that both russian and turkish learners of german closely associated the nouns ending in a schwa with the suffix -n, which accounted for over 90% of the answers. marouani (2006) noted that arab preschoolers learning german seemed to disregard the plural rules associated with gender for the benefit of the simplest phoneticphonological regularities such as schwa (-n), full vowels (-s), or consonants (-e) in the word final position. this was especially prominent in one of the tests with the nonce words presented either as masculine or feminine nouns, which did not result in any variations in the choice of the plural allomorphs (der/die trul > trule, der/die fnör > fnöre). köpcke (1988) found that young german adults tended to use -s with nonce words ending in a full vowel (69% of all eugen zaretsky, benjamin p. lange, harald a. euler, katrin neumann 574 answers), -n with feminine nouns ending in -e (94%) and tended to avoid plural allomorphs containing a schwa with the nouns having a schwa in the final syllable (schwa deletion rule). schaner-wolles (1989) pointed out that one could hardly find combinations of the umlaut with -(e)n in the answers of 40 2to 6year-old germans, 10 thereof being 4 years old. all of these patterns, that is, -s after full vowels, -(e)n after a schwa in the word final position, -e after consonants in the word final position, strict application of the schwa deletion rule, and incompatibility of umlaut with -(e)n, were verified here. our results contradict those of wegener (1994), who demonstrated that even 9-year-old germans produce correct s-forms of nonce words with full vowels in the word final position (kafti, ziro) only 40% of the time. in fact, 40% was the average rate of correct answers for the nonce words biwo and tulo given already by the 4-year-old german children reported here. gawlitzek-maiwald (1994) conducted one of the few studies directly comparable to ours, using nonce words from the h-s-e-t test (grimm & schöler, 1978), ein mattau, ein kolz, ein maling, ein naloß, die findin, ein luch, with a sample of 33 children aged 3 to 6 years. the participants closely associated the items zawo and mattau, which follow one of the simplest pluralization rules, with -s. in the cases of incorrect answers they preferred not to use any suffix at all (cf. biwo, tulo in setk 3-5 here). because masculine and neuter nouns are closely associated with the suffix -e, this suffix was dominant in the items naloß, luch, and kolz. as there were no immigrants among the participants and only 4 children were 3 years old in the sample of gawlitzek-maiwald (1994), the suffix -(e)n was not as prominent in the answers as in our study, whereas -s and -e dominated. this also explains why children “clearly observe gender distinctions” (gawlitzek-maiwald, 1994, p. 263), while many of our test subjects did not. this overview should suggest that the results of the present study do not deviate from any important results of most of the previous studies on plural acquisition. the large sample size, without any limitations in recruitment, as well as including immigrant children of a certain age make it possible to generalize the results of the present study to 4-year-old preschoolers learning german as their native or foreign language and attending daycare centers in germany. some of the conclusions which can be drawn from the results contribute to the dispute about the psycholinguistic background of overgeneralization patterns reflected in the distribution of plural allomorphs and zero forms. the most obvious point supported by our data is that at the early stages, german l1 and l2 learners clearly abide by the frequency-based phoneticphonologically motivated regularities extracted from the input: acquisition of german pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children 575 1. because -(e)n is the most frequent plural allomorph, followed by -e, children tend to overgeneralize -(e)n and -e. 2. because the umlaut is not compatible with the plural allomorphs -(e)n and -s, one can hardly find occurrences of such combinations (e.g., äpfels), either in setk 3-5 or in mss. 3. because the schwa in the word final position requires -n, the full vowel requires in the overwhelming majority of the cases -s and a consonant requires, at least as a tendency, -e, these plural markers dominate with these word final sounds. 4. because the schwa deletion rule is never violated in german, it seems to be acquired prior to the very first actively produced plural form. one of the weakest tendencies is not phonetically-phonologically, but grammatically motivated. as -e is closely associated with masculine and neuter nouns, and not with feminine ones, the tendency to use -e with masculine and neuter nouns is to a certain extent represented in the answers of the children who already have a certain command of the gender category. the development of the plural system is reflected in the growing consideration of gender and the applicability or compatibility of the plural allomorphs, in the transition from purely iconic plural markers -(e)n, -e, -s to the less iconic markers -e plus umlaut and umlaut, in the transition from phoneticphonological patterns (word final sounds, presence of the schwa in the last syllable) to a more complex system based on more subtle regularities encoded in the input. there is no evidence that -s or -(e)n or any other allomorph fulfils the functions of a universal default plural, although -(e)n seems to have some features of the default form in the group with a limited command of german (immigrants) and -s in the linguistically more proficient group (germans). the fact that the plural acquisition patterns are basically universal and abide by the same rules is supported by the quantitatively and not qualitatively different distribution of the plural allomorphs in the error patterns, by the same difficulty levels of the plural allomorphs, and by the same overgeneralization patterns like -e plus umlaut > -e, -s > -(e)n. there are inherent limitations of our study. a cross-sectional study design presupposes a short inventory of test items which should be chosen very carefully. although two validated tests were utilized in this case, another set of items might result in somewhat different tendencies and, hence, conclusions. also, the examination of the zero plural allomorph was not possible. however, a longitudinal study with thousands of participants or an extended list of test items was not feasible. it should be taken into account that tasks with nonce words are rejected by a considerable number of young test subjects. an exteneugen zaretsky, benjamin p. lange, harald a. euler, katrin neumann 576 sion of the test battery might be an option for children of the middle school age, but not for preschoolers. hence, test items must be chosen carefully and correspond exactly to the purpose of the study. also, multivariate statistics might be utilized in the future research for more sophisticated analyses. in summary, there is no evidence that monolingual germans and bi/multilingual children use qualitatively different pluralization strategies. the tendencies demonstrated by 4-year-old bi/multilingual children correspond to those employed by 3and 4-year-old monolingual germans. because the time window for first language acquisition is still open at the preschool age, children with foreign linguistic background adopt the same plural acquisition strategies that can be detected in the answers of native german children. acquisition of german pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children 577 references bartke, s., marcus, f. g., & clahsen, h. 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(1975). zur entwicklung morphologischer strukturen bei kindern [on the development of morphological structures in children] (unpublished master thesis). heidelberg university, heidelberg, germany. wegener, h. (1994). variation in the acquisition of german plural morphology by second language learners. in r. tracy & e. lattey (eds.), how tolerant is universal grammar? essays on language learnability and language variation (pp. 267-294). tübingen: max niemeyer. zaretsky, e., neumann k., euler, h. a., & lange, b. p. (2013). pluralerwerb im deutschen bei russischund türkischsprachigen kindern im vergleich mit anderen eugen zaretsky, benjamin p. lange, harald a. euler, katrin neumann 580 migranten und monolingualen muttersprachlern [plural acquisition in german in russian and turkish speaking children in comparison with other immigrants and monolingual native speakers]. zeitschrift für slawistik, 58(1), 43-71. 419 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (2). 2017. 419-442 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.2.4 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the development of english grammar and reading comprehension by majority and minority language children in a bilingual primary school anja k. steinlen university of erlangen-nuremberg, germany anja.steinlen@fau.de abstract both for the first language (l1) and for all additional languages (l2 or l3), grammatical knowledge plays a vital role in understanding texts (e.g., grabe, 2005). however, little is known about the development and interaction of grammar and reading comprehension in beginning foreign language learning, especially with respect to children with a minority language background. this longitudinal study, therefore, examined minority and majority language children’s english grammar and reading comprehension skills. the children attended a german-english partial immersion primary school and were tested at the end of grades 3 and 4. as expected, we found grammar to affect reading comprehension but also reverse effects. most importantly, the results did not reveal any differences between the two language groups, irrespective of the test. therefore, immersion primary school programs seem to be suitable for minority language children, and these children do not automatically represent an at-risk group for foreign language learning. keywords: immersion; primary school; young learners; grammar; minority language anja k. steinlen 420 1. introduction regardless of the language to be learnt, successful reading comprehension is dependent on the grammar the reader knows, that is grammar plays a very important role in understanding texts, both for the first language (l1) and for the other languages (l2 or l3)1 acquired (e.g., grabe, 2005, 2009; jeon & yamashita, 2014). however, little is currently known about how grammar and reading comprehension for english as a foreign language develop and interact in a bilingual primary school context, especially with respect to minority language children who often have a migration background. in germany, individuals are usually regarded as immigrants if they (or at least one of their parents) migrated to germany after 1949. in 2014, this was true for 35% of the children attending primary school (autorengruppe bildungsberichterstattung, 2016). there is often interdependence between minority group background, low socio-economic status, and linguistic and ethnic diversity (e.g., bos & pietsch, 2006; chudaske, 2012; hesse, göbel, & hartig, 2008; schwippert, wendt, & tarelli, 2012) and this may affect foreign language learning in the classroom (e.g., genesee & fortune, 2014; khodadady & alaee, 2012). as in many other countries, in germany the number of schools offering bilingual programs is steadily increasing. there are currently almost 300 bilingual primary schools2 corresponding to 2% of all (private or public) schools (fmks . . ., 2014). bilingual programs are particularly effective if 50% of the teaching time is used to teach content subjects entirely in the target language (e.g., genesee, 1987, 2004; pérez-canado, 2012; wesche, 2002; wode, 1995). in such a (partial) immersion context, the students acquire skills in the school language (l1, often the students’ first language, in this case german) as well as in the target language (here english).3 the umbrella term throughout europe for the educational option of teaching content through another language is content and language integrated learning (clil), which refers to “all types of provision 1 following hahn and angelovska (2017), the terms l2 and l3 will be used according to the chronological onset of acquisition, that is the term second language (l2) refers to the first non-native language acquired by an individual, while third language (l3) relates to the second non-native language being learned. 2 in germany, primary schools generally start at the age of 6. after four years (i.e., after grade 4), children leave for secondary school (which generally consists of hauptand realschule, offering a six-year middle-school degree, and gymnasium or gesamtschule offering high-school diplomas that provide access to tertiary education). 3 in german primary schools children usually learn to read and write in german first. reading and writing skills in english as a foreign language are acquired incidentally. an approach for systematic english literacy instruction for efl teaching has not yet been developed (e.g., burwitz, 2010). the development of english grammar and reading comprehension by majority and minority. . . 421 in which a second language (a foreign, regional or minority language and/or another official state language) is used to teach certain subjects in the curriculum other than the language lessons themselves” (eurydice, 2006). since it is a legal requirement to teach the subject german language arts in german (kultusministerkonferenz, 2013), public schools in germany are only allowed to offer partial immersion programs, that is, a maximum of 70-80% of the teaching time may be conducted in the foreign language (fl). minority and majority language children’s development of grammar and reading comprehension i in english as a foreign language constitute the focus of the present study. the children attended a bilingual german-english primary school offering a partial immersion program from grade 1 to 4, with english being used in all subjects, except for german language arts, mathematics and religious studies, which corresponds to 50% of the teaching time. the l1 of the majority language children was german; for the minority children, german was their l2. english as a target language was, therefore, the majority language children’s l2 and the minority language children’s l3. 2. the acquisition of foreign language grammar competences in many different areas have to develop when a foreign language is learned, such as phonetic, phonological, lexical, morphological, syntactic, discourse-pragmatic as well as sociolinguistic skills. although the learner's primary concern in the earliest stages of l2 acquisition may be the acquisition of the lexicon (singleton, 2009), mastering the grammatical principles of the l2 is, of course, also essential for efficient communication in the language (ellis, 2008). as learning a new language entails the development of both receptive and productive language skills, a large body of research has been devoted to this relationship in grammar acquisition because, for early l1, it has repeatedly been claimed that comprehension4 leads to production (although this asymmetry does not necessarily seem to apply to all areas, e.g., szagun, 2006). however, once l1 has been acquired, it is assumed that a person who is able to produce a grammar structure is also able to comprehend it, and vice versa (hendriks, de hoop, & lamers, 2005; hendriks & koster, 2010). a similar comprehension/production asymmetry in early l2 acquisition has been proposed for a long time (e.g., tasseva-kurktchieva, 2008; unsworth, 2007). the development of receptive l2 grammar knowledge, by contrast, is an area several researchers have declared an unexplored territory in sla research (e.g., ellis, 2008), possibly because the product of receptive language knowledge is much less accessible than 4 following buyl and housen (2015), the terms receptive grammar, grammatical comprehension and comprehension of grammar will be used interchangeably. anja k. steinlen 422 productive knowledge (e.g., peyer, kaiser, & berthele, 2006). an abundance of studies is concerned with productive l2 grammar acquisition, in particular with its systematicity, as shown by morpheme order studies (see e.g., kwon, 2005, for a review) or by studies conducted in the field of processability theory (pt), a psycholinguistic theory of l2 grammar acquisition which explicitly predicts the order in which l2 learners learn to process different morphosyntactic phenomena (e.g., pienemann, 2005).5 within pt, it is tacitly assumed that the route of comprehending grammatical structures is identical (or at least similar) to the route found for the production of such structures, which means that the same developmental patterns are assumed for grammar comprehension and production (see e.g., larsen-freeman, 2002). l2 receptive grammar development was examined within the framework of the early language and intercultural acquisition project (elias), a project which focused on immersion education in bilingual preschools in four european countries (comprising belgium, germany, great britain and sweden; see kersten, rohde, schelletter, & steinlen, 2010a). in this context, the elias grammar test 1 (egt-1; kersten, piske, rohde, steinlen, weitz, & kurth 2010b), a picture selection task, was administered with the aim to assess preschoolers’ development of their grammar comprehension of english. the egt-1 was administered to a total of 148 preschoolers (age 3-6), 39 of whom had a migration background and spoke languages other than the majority language at home (e.g., arabic, turkish, greek, urdu, to name just a few). the results of this study showed that increased l2 contact duration and l2 input intensity correlated with l2 grammar comprehension. in addition, no effects of gender were noted (steinlen, håkansson, housen, & schelletter, 2010). a surprising finding was that minority language children (for whom english was usually the l3) performed as well as their majority language peers in the egt-1, that is, language background did not exert an influence on foreign language grammar comprehension. in a more detailed analysis of this population, steinlen (2013) suggested that these results may have been due to the fact that the foreign language is used as a medium of communication in an immersion setting, and that such an approach seems to be particularly beneficial for immigrant children. finally, relating to the question whether l2 grammar comprehension and production follow the same developmental patterns, steinlen et al. (2010) found that some english grammatical phenomena (such as plural -s or genitive -‘s, assumed 5 pt offers an account of the stages learners go through in learning to process l2 morphosyntactic structures. more specifically, it predicts a basic developmental chronology, or “processability hierarchy”, that consists of five hierarchically ranked developmental stages. while the processing mechanisms in the processability hierarchy are claimed to be universal, the resulting developmental schedules (i.e., which grammatical structures arise at each stage) are language-specific. the development of english grammar and reading comprehension by majority and minority. . . 423 to be acquired at stage 2 of the pt hierarchy) were indeed identified considerably better than other phenomena (such as third-person singular -s, stage 5 of the pt hierarchy), although implicational scaling computations have not been carried out. in a more recent study, buyl and housen (2015) examined whether l2 receptive grammar follows a systematic and continuous development. 72 francophone beginning child l2 learners who acquired english in a bilingual primary school in belgium (aged 6-9) were tested. the learners’ ability to process six morphosyntactic phenomena was tested by means of the egt-1. buyl and housen’s (2015) results showed that the developmental orders obtained through implicational scaling for the six target phenomena agreed with pt’s predictions, namely, the english grammatical phenomena negation, genitive -’s, canonical word order and plural -s (which do not require any exchange of grammatical information and are predicted to be processable from stage 2 of the pt hierarchy onwards) were receptively acquired before cases of third person singular -s (which do require an exchange of grammatical information and belong to stage 5 of the pt hierarchy). based on these findings, buyl and housen (2015) assume similar mechanisms underlying the acquisition of receptive and productive l2 grammar processing skills. comparing the development of different english and german competences by minority and majority language children attending a bilingual primary school, steinlen and piske (2013) employed the egt2 (a revised version of the egt-1 for older learners, see kersten, piske, rohde, steinlen, weitz, & kurth, 2012) in their small cross-sectional study with 20-25 children per grade. controlling for cognitive and socio-economic background, steinlen and piske (2013) did not find any significant differences between minority and majority language children with respect to their scores in the egt-2, independent of the grade, paralleling findings obtained in the preschool context. in order to better understand the relationship between l2 reading and grammar comprehension, the next section is devoted to the reading process and l2 studies conducted within the primary school context. 3. development of foreign language reading comprehension reading is generally defined as the ability to “understand, use, reflect on and engage with written texts to achieve their own goals, to develop their own knowledge and potential, and to participate in social life" (oecd, 2009, p. 23). reading skills depend, inter alia, on the reading speed and thus to a large extent on the shortterm storage capacity of the reading person. further determinants are background knowledge, lexical access, the presence of vocabulary and grammar, (reading) motivation and positive attitudes towards reading, as well as knowledge of textual features, reading strategies, and cognitive basic skills (e.g., oecd, 2009). anja k. steinlen 424 there are differences between the acquisition of reading skills in an l2 and an l1 because, unlike l1 reading, l2 reading involves two languages. this implies continuous interactions between the two languages and constant adjustments to accommodate the different demands of each language. for this reason, l2 reading is cross-linguistic and inherently more complex than l1 reading (see e.g., koda, 2007). the following determinants for successful l2 reading skills have been identified: l1 reading skills (see above) and l2 language skills, such as l2 grammar and vocabulary knowledge, and the degree of automatization of l2 word recognition (see frisch, 2013, for a review). l2 reading comprehension in bilingual schools has been assessed in many studies, in particular in canada. in general, the results showed that children in immersion programs performed significantly better in l2 reading tests than comparable peers in mainstream foreign language programs and that they may even achieve scores similar to native monolingual children (see e.g., genesee & jared, 2008 for canada, and zaunbauer, gebauer, & möller, 2012 for germany). in sum, the results of these studies clearly indicate the benefits of bilingual (immersion) programs for the development of l2 literacy skills. in germany, only one study has focused on minority language children’s development of foreign language reading skills in mainstream english programs, offering two lessons per week (keßler & paulick, 2010). in these tests, the minority language children performed worse than their majority language peers at the end of grade 4. however, this discrepancy seems to disappear in later years, as large-scale studies conducted with ninth graders showed (e.g., hesse, göbel, & hartig, 2008; köller, knigge, & tesch, 2010; rauch rauch, jurecka, & hesse 2010; but see van gelderen, schoonen, de glopper, hulstijn, snellings, & simis, 2004 for different results from the netherlands). with respect to bilingual school programs, the few studies examining the foreign language reading comprehension skills of minority language children did not report any differences between minority and majority language students (see genesee & jared, 2008, for a review). for the german context, steinlen (2016) compared minority and majority language children in a bilingual primary school. the performance of both groups did not significantly differ in english reading tests in grades 3 and 4, which suggests, among other things, that the phonological and orthographical similarity between many german and english words (the minority language children’s l2 and l3) may have positively affected the outcomes of the english reading tests. 4. the impact of l2 grammar on l2 reading comprehension although grammar knowledge is a well-acknowledged component of reading comprehension in l1 and in l2 research (e.g., bernhardt, 2000; grabe, 2009; jeon the development of english grammar and reading comprehension by majority and minority. . . 425 & yamashita, 2014; van gelderen et al., 2004), its role in reading comprehension is not a common topic in second language reading research. as an instructional issue, the separation of grammar and reading may be due to the relative non-emphasis on grammar in communicative methods and in language-arts instruction, especially at the beginning level in early foreign language teaching (grabe, 2009). as yet the role of l2 grammar in l2 reading comprehension is not well understood. for example, some authors have claimed that fluent l2 readers do not make extensive use of grammar knowledge once they progress to a certain point, when top-down schema knowledge, inferencing, and contextual knowledge play then more important roles in comprehension (e.g., bernhardt, 2000; celce-murcia & olshtain, 2000). other authors (particularly grabe, 2005, 2009) argue in favor of a strong relation between grammar and reading in l2 acquisition, because, in their opinion, grammar knowledge, along with the associated processes of syntactic parsing, is a major foundation of fluent l2 reading, even at very advanced levels of l2 comprehension (see also alderson, 1993; van gelderen et al., 2004). in a meta-analysis of l2 reading comprehension and its correlates, jeon and yamashita (2014) came to the conclusion that l2 grammar knowledge was indeed one of the three strongest correlates of l2 reading comprehension (apart from l2 vocabulary and l2 word decoding). several explanations have been put forward to account for the discrepancies relating to the role of grammar in l2 reading comprehension (e.g., akbari, 2014). first, as there is an overlap between the knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, it is difficult to isolate the contribution made by grammar from that of vocabulary. secondly, different test formats measure different aspects of language ability. in reading comprehension studies, grammar knowledge has been tested in various task types, ranging from form-focused discrete-point grammar tests (e.g., gascoigne, 2005) to gap activities (e.g., lópez, 2008). thirdly, the formats of l2 reading comprehension tests have not been equivalent, ranging from cloze tests of texts to assessments comprising the word-, sentence and text level (see steinlen, 2016). a small body of studies has examined the reversed relationship between l2 grammar and reading, that is, how l2 reading affects l2 grammar knowledge. in a study with english-speaking university students learning spanish, rodrigo, krashen, and gribbons (2004) showed that l2 reading activities had positive effects on l2 grammar. specifically, l2 extensive reading (i.e., reading a large amount of text at a relatively faster speed with the focus on meaning, not language) combined with discussions in the l2 seems to affect l2 grammar knowledge more positively than extensive l2 reading only (see also lee, schaller, & kim, 2015). thus, better l2 grammar performance facilitates l2 reading comprehension, and more l2 reading activities in the classroom result in better l2 grammar performance in tests. however, as these studies have only been conducted anja k. steinlen 426 with older l2 learners, there is a need to examine beginning l2 learners (in primary school) and learners for whom the target language is the l3 to better understand the relationship between grammar and reading in foreign language learning. 5. research questions as mentioned above, there is a lack of systematic investigations of the relationship between foreign language (fl) grammar and fl reading comprehension in bilingual primary schools. the following questions are, therefore, addressed in the present study: 1. how do english grammar and reading comprehension skills develop in a bilingual primary school within one year, that is, from grade 3 to grade 4? 2. will majority and minority language children perform differently in the two tests as english is the l2 for majority language children and the l3 for their minority language peers? 3. is there an influence of fl grammar comprehension on fl reading comprehension and vice versa? 6. method 6.1. participants and procedure the data presented in this paper were collected in a public district primary school in germany. the school offers both a musical and a partial german-english immersion program, with one cohort per year. in the partial immersion program, all subjects except for german language arts, religion, and mathematics are taught in english from the first day of grade 1 onwards. the immersion students are thus exposed to both english and german for about 50% of the teaching time. in the subject lessons taught in english, the students usually receive their instruction from native speakers of german, who studied english in order to become english teachers. these teachers speak english exclusively in the classroom although technical terms are always introduced in both english and german (see tamm, 2010). as in other german primary schools, the children receive initial literacy instruction in german first, from grade 1 onwards. reading and writing skills in english are acquired incidentally and, according to the teachers, are not taught systematically. however, the english writing system is present from the start. in the middle of grade 1, students start to read and write single english words. different literacy activities focusing on the content of the respective subjects being taught in english are carried out from grade 2 onwards (e.g., silent reading, reading aloud the development of english grammar and reading comprehension by majority and minority. . . 427 in groups and in class, reading comprehension checks on texts, etc.). students start to write longer english texts from grade 3 onwards, but there is no specific focus on spelling errors. according to informal interviews, the teachers were insecure in the initial stages of the immersion program as to whether they should focus on grammar in the immersion classes at all. theoretical findings such as those obtained by studies carried out in the context of processability theory (e.g., pienemann, 2005) and reports from other immersion schools caused the teachers to deal with grammar very reluctantly, which was at that time hardly ever addressed in an explicit manner in class. however, experience soon showed that children in grades 3 and 4 in particular asked for explanations of specific structures and also expected concrete answers. the teachers also felt that activities geared at specific grammatical phenomena seemed to help the children to internalize the structure in question. this is why certain grammatical aspects are now included in the school curriculum, including, for example, possessive pronouns, third-person singular -s, present continuous, past tense, and negation. however, the topics are always embedded in the context of teaching a particular subject in the foreign language, and offered either at the children’s request, or because the teacher notices that without addressing a specific grammatical problem there would be a risk of fossilization (i.e., the incorrect language becomes a habit and cannot easily be corrected, e.g., ellis, 2008). in this study, the data of four cohorts have been used, corresponding to 88 children (45 girls and 43 boys),6 all of whom had attended the im-program since grade 1. more than half of them (52%) had a minority language background. such a background was attested when one or both parents were born abroad (see also bos & pietsch, 2006; chudaske, 2012; dollmann, 2010; schwippert et al., 2012) and, most importantly, when a language other than german was spoken at home. the minority language children were all born in germany, and none of them only spoke german or did not speak any german at all at home. the parents’ questionnaire did not provide information concerning the use of the family language and the use of german before the children entered school. it is, therefore, not clear whether german is the children’s l1 or l2. in informal interviews, however, most parents stated that the family language was their children’s l1, with german being acquired in preschool (at age 3) at the latest. the target language (english) is, therefore, the children’s l3. the family languages included arabic, french, greek, kiswaheli, kurdish, persian, russian, serbocroatian, spanish, and turkish.7 the parents did not report any hearing problems 6 there were 21 girls and 26 boys in the majority language group and 30 girls and 22 boys in the minority language group. 7 only the children with a turkish background received turkish lessons in school (one hour per week since grade 1); the other minority language children were not instructed in their respective family languages. anja k. steinlen 428 of their children. the children were tested at two points in time (t1 and t2), with one year in between t1 and t2. in grade 4 (t2), they were 10.2 years on average (sd = 5.4 months, range = 112-144 months). accordingly, the children were twelve months younger in grade 3 (t1). the data from the four cohorts in grade 3 and grade 4 were collapsed.8 the number of participants per test varied, for example, due to sickness or other school-related activities, because the tests were carried out on different days. the measures were taken approximately six weeks before the end of the school year. 6.2. measures the elias grammar test 2 (egt-2; kersten et al., 2012), which was originally developed for bilingual preschools (see steinlen et al., 2010), was adapted for the primary school context and included passive sentences and relative clauses in addition to the previously used sets word order, singular versus plural nouns, singular versus plural verbs, object pronouns masculine versus feminine, subject pronoun masculine versus feminine, negation, possessive pronouns and masculine versus feminine. the egt-2 was conducted as a group test. the children heard a sentence or a phrase and had to match it with one of three images. two of the images contrasted in one grammatical dimension, while the third image served as a distractor. in total there were 36 prompts. as the egt-2 is not a standardized test, reliability and validity data are not available. the australian test of reading comprehension (torch; mossenson, stephanou, forster, & masters, 2003) is a modified cloze test. the students first read an english passage about grasshoppers and then filled in the blanks of another text about the same topic to demonstrate their comprehension. the total number of blanks was 19, and 30-40 minutes were allowed for the test. spelling did not matter. this particular test on grasshoppers was originally designed for monolingual english-speaking children in grade 3. the reliability coefficient was reported to be between .90 and .93, dependent on the text used, suggesting a strong degree of internal consistency. validity data are not available. 6.3. control variables due to the fact that test scores relating to linguistic or academic achievement may be affected by cognitive variables (e.g., bleakley, & chin, 2004; chudaske, 8 for grade 3, univariate anovas did not reveal any significant differences among children in the four cohorts with respect to their age (f(3,84) = 1.154, p > .05) or with respect to their cognitive abilities (cpm: f(3,73) = 0.367, p > .05). the development of english grammar and reading comprehension by majority and minority. . . 429 2012), these have to be taken into account as control variables. we used the cpm (coloured progressive matrices; raven, bulheller & häcker, 2002) in grade 3 to measure general non-verbal intelligence. using one of six possible alternatives, the children’s task was to complete an incomplete geometrical pattern. the test consists of 36 items, which are presented in three sets of 12, in increasing order of difficulty within each set. 20 to 30 minutes are allocated for the test. the publishers reported the internal consistencies to lie between r = .80 and r = .90, and the cpm to be a good indicator for spearman’s g-factor, which also yielded satisfying correlations with school performance tests (bulheller & häcker, 2010). 6.4. parent questionnaire in addition to the child’s age and his or her country of birth, the parents provided information about the language/s used at home and their educational background, with 0 corresponding to no school certificate and 6 to a university entrance certificate (following zaunbauer et al., 2012). the parents also assessed their relative wealth compared to other families on a five-point scale, ranging from 1 (not wealthy at all) to 5 (very wealthy). moreover, preschool reading activities at home (e.g., dickinson, griffith, golinkoff, & hirsh-pasek, 2012) and parental supervision of the child’s homework (e.g., fan & chen, 2001) were asked for and rated on a four-point scale (1 = never, 4 = very often). the parental questionnaire was answered by 73 persons, that is, there were 15 missing questionnaires regarding the tested children (8 minority language and 7 majority language children; see table 1 for further information). 7. results using anovas, linear regression analyses, and repeated measure anovas, statistical analyses were computed with the spss 23 version (2014). the data were not cleaned for outliers and the missing data were not imputed. in all the analyses, it was seen that the assumptions of homogeneity of variance and sphericity were met. in the following, results are reported in raw scores. 7.1. family variables the family variables were taken from the 73 parent questionnaires, corresponding to a response rate of 83% (generally, 75%-80% are considered acceptable, e.g., draugalis, coons, & plaza, 2008). according to the teachers, non-responses were usually due to skepticism about surveys in general and/or parental time constraints, which may also account for the fact that not all questions were answered by all respondents. anja k. steinlen 430 as a first step, minority and majority language children were compared with regard to their family background (parents’ self-estimated wealth, parental educational background) and family activities, such as supervision of homework and preschool reading activities, using one-way anovas (table 1). any group differences may affect outcomes of the english tests (e.g., genesee & fortune, 2014; khodadady & alaee, 2012). table 1 one-way anovas of language background by family background max. points maj. lang. (n = 35-38) m (sd) min. lang. (n = 30-35) m (sd) comparison (f-test) family’s self-assessed wealth 5 3.43 (0.73) 3.13 (0.86) f(1, 63) = 2.216, p = .142 mother’s educational background 6 5.61 (0.87) 5.34 (1.05) f(1, 67) = 1.136, p = .290 parents read book to preschooler 4 3.43 (0.73) 3.20 (0.80) f(1, 70) = 1.672, p = .200 child reads alone 4 2.92 (0.94) 2.94 (0.95) f(1, 66) = 0.008, p = .928 parents supervise homework 4 3.03 (0.94) 3.21 (0.85) f(1, 70) = 3.792, p = .055 as shown in table 1, none the comparisons reached a conventional significance level (p < .05). the parents considered their background in between average and slightly above average in terms of wealth, and they greatly supported their child, as shown in the high values obtained for preschool reading activities and homework supervision. therefore, the parents of the present study may be described as middle-class, concerned about their child’s educational welfare, highly educated (i.e., hochschulor fachhochschulreife, corresponding to a university entrance certificate), indicating a high educational background, independent of their migration and/or their language background. 7.2. test for cognitive differences next we tested whether the cognitive development of the children, as operationalized by the cpm conducted in grade 3, was age-appropriate by comparing the children’s data with norm values using a one-way anova (table 2). we did not note any significant differences between minority and majority language children. all children showed norm-adequate performance (30-32/36 points were reported as norm values for this age group, bulheller & häcker, 2010). the development of english grammar and reading comprehension by majority and minority. . . 431 table 2 one-way anovas of language background by cpm scores max. points maj. lang. (n = 39) m (sd) min. lang. (n = 38) m (sd) comparison (f-test) cpm grade 3 36 31.4 (4.5) 30.0 (4.4) f(1, 73) = 2.052, p = .156 7.3. grammar and reading comprehension tests table 3 presents the results of the english grammar and reading tests conducted in grades 3 and 4 for minority and majority language children separately, including the results of one-way anovas. table 3 one-way anovas of language background by grammar and reading test scores measure max. points norm values majority language background m (sd) [n] minority language background m (sd) [n] comparison (f-test) english grammar grade 3 36 n.a. 22.7 (5.4) [n = 39] 25.5 (5.0) [n = 40] f(1, 77) = 5.804, p = .018* english grammar grade 4 36 n.a. 26.3 (5.0) [n = 38] 27.8 (5.4) [n = 42] f(1, 78) = 1.842, p = .179* english reading grade 3 19 12-14 (3rd graders) 7.5 (5.2) [n = 39] 7.4 (5.1) [n = 42] f(1, 79) = 0.005, p = .942* english reading grade 4 19 12-14 (3rd graders) 10.2 (5.6) [n = 40] 12.2 (5.4) [n = 39] f(1, 77) = 2.612, p = .110* note. n.a. = non-available as shown in table 3, no significant differences were noted for the comprehension tests contrasting the performance of minority versus majority language children, except for the egt-2 conducted in grade 3 where minority language children outperformed their majority language peers. comparing the average values of all children in the partial immersion program with their monolingual english peers from australia, our partial immersion group obtained lower scores in the reading comprehension test torch in grades 3 and 4 (mossenson et al., 2003), falling within the normal monolingual speaker range of third graders (12 points) in grade 4, that is, lagging one year behind. for the egt-2, norm values are not available; however, on average the children identified 75% of the prompts correctly. descriptive analyses showed that such phenomena as word order, singular versus plural nouns, subject pronoun masculine versus feminine, negation and relative clauses were identified better (>85%) than passive sentences, singular versus plural verbs, object and possessive pronouns masculine versus feminine (<75%). in a future study, the implications of these asymmetries in foreign language grammar comprehension in relation to pt will be explored anja k. steinlen 432 in more detail (steinlen & piske, 2017). in order to examine the children’s progress from grade 3 to 4, majority and minority language children were grouped together, using paired t-test analyses. the results are presented in table 4 which shows significant differences between grade 3 and grade 4, indicating progress in english grammar and reading skills within one year. table 4 paired t-test analyses for reading and grammar test scores from grade 3 to grade 4 measure time english grammar grade 3 to 4 f(69) = -6.776, p = .000 english reading grade 3 to 4 f(70) = -7.139, p = .000 it is noted in many studies (e.g., alderson, 1993) that there may be intercorrelations between l2 grammar and l2 reading at the same time. table 5 presents the results of this analysis. table 5 intercorrelations for two comprehension tests in grade 3 and in grade 4. all significant correlations (p < .05) are indicted by an asterisk (*) english test grade 3 english grammar comprehension (egt-2) english reading comprehension (torch) .575* english test grade 4 english grammar comprehension (egt-2) english reading comprehension (torch) .598* analyses indeed revealed significant correlations between english grammar and reading, both for grade 3 and for grade 4, which indicates that the better the results of the l2 reading test were, the better were the results of the l2 grammar test and vice versa. this result indicates that grammar plays an important role in reading, but that grammar is also positively affected by reading skills, although the route of causal effects, unfortunately, cannot be discerned by such an analysis. finally, multiple linear regression analyses were computed (table 6) to test whether reading comprehension at the end of grade 4 can be predicted by the children’s language background, their non-verbal intelligence, their scores obtained in the same reading test in grade 3, and most importantly, by their grammar comprehension in grade 3 and vice versa. the development of english grammar and reading comprehension by majority and minority. . . 433 table 6 linear regression predicting english grammar and reading at the end of grade 4 dependent variable and predictors beta* r2 corrected english reading grade 4 [n = 59] language background .116, p = .210* cpm .140, p = .111* english reading grade 3 .642, p = .000* english grammar grade 3 .136, p = .207* .585, p = .000 english grammar grade 4 [n = 60] language background -.099, p = .279* cpm .093, p = .284* english grammar grade 3 .684, p = .000* english reading grade 3 .141, p = .198* .582, p = .000 table 6 shows that the children’s language background did not exert any influence on their english grammar and reading comprehension skills (all beta’s were not significant), and the same applies to the cognitive variable cpm. english grammar in grade 4 was only significantly predicted by the same english grammar test at grade 3, which accounted for 58% of variance. the same result was found for english reading that was only predicted by english reading the year before, which again accounted for 58% of variance. parts of the non-significant findings may be due to the small sample size or due to the outliers which were not excluded from the analysis. 8. discussion in this study the development of english grammar and english reading comprehension was examined with respect to minority and majority language children attending a partial immersion program in a primary school. 8.1. grammar and reading with respect to the development in the target language, all children, unsurprisingly, showed progress from grade 3 to grade 4, irrespective of the english test. the positive impact of time has been noted in most longitudinal studies (see e.g., buyl & housen, 2015; steinlen et al., 2010 for l2 grammar; steinlen, 2016; steinlen & piske, 2016 for l2 reading). english reading comprehension skills, in particular, showed more gains (33%) than grammar (13%). informal interviews with teachers indicated that considerably more reading comprehension activities were carried out in grade 4 than in grade 3, whereas any focus on grammar comprehension activities or explicit grammar instruction was on an on-demand anja k. steinlen 434 basis, which, according to interviews with teachers, occurred more often in grades 4 than in grade 3. in addition, we found an interrelation between the english tests on grammar and reading (for each grade). the impact of l2 grammar on l2 reading has been reported in many studies (e.g., grabe 2005, 2009; jeon & yamashita, 2014; morvay, 2012; shiotsu & weir, 2007; van gelderen et al., 2004), indicating that, apart from l2 vocabulary and decoding, l2 grammar knowledge is one of the strongest correlates of l2 reading comprehension. thus, the better the grammar is, the better the reading skills will be. however, the role of l2 reading for l2 grammar development is less well understood. in this study we also noted significant correlation values in both directions, in that l2 reading seemed to have a positive effect on l2 grammar as well. as informal interviews with teachers indicated, from grade 3 onwards (and in grade 4 particularly), children are more and more encouraged to read english books on their own, starting with picture books and moving to more complex story books. all classes have their own english library, and children are allowed to take home books ad libidum. as the small body of studies showed (e.g., lee et al., 2015; rodrigo et al., 2004), l2 extensive reading seems to positively affect l2 grammar knowledge, although we cannot infer which children of our sample actually engaged in such activities. as regression analyses showed, such relationships between l2 grammar and l2 reading were not found across grades and across test formats, though. that is, english grammar in grade 4 was not predicted by english reading in grade 3 and vice versa. the only significant predictors for l2 test scores in grade 4 turned out to be the same test format a year earlier, that is, english grammar in grade 4 was well predicted by english grammar in grade 3, accounting for 58% of variance (the same applies to l2 reading). finally, in this study non-verbal intelligence predicted neither l2 reading nor l2 grammar in grade 4, confirming an earlier finding on l2 grammar (french & o’brien, 2008, but see morvay, 2012, for a different result on l2 reading). 8.2. minority language children the most important result of this study relates to minority language children and their achievement in english grammar and reading tests. a growing body of recent studies has reported that in partial immersion programs, minority language children performed as well as their majority language peers in different kinds of english tests (e.g., steinlen & piske, 2013, 2016; steinlen, 2016). the same finding was obtained for this sample. language background did not exert any influence on english grammar and reading comprehension at the end of grade 4. likewise, no significant differences between these two groups were the development of english grammar and reading comprehension by majority and minority. . . 435 found regarding their performance in grade 3, except for the grammar test, where minority language children even outperformed majority language children. similar results have been reported in recent studies dealing with regular foreign language teaching programs where english is taught as a subject for two hours a week. for example, hopp, kieseier, vogelbacher, and thoma (2017) examined 200 minority and majority language children at the end of grade 3 with a computer-based sentence repetition task assessing english grammatical structures such as svo and verb raising. they did not find any significant differences between minority and majority language children, especially when language background was controlled for social and cognitive variables. similar results were reported by wilden and porsch (2016) who conducted a study with over 3,000 students in grade 5, of whom around 36% reported using a language other than german at home. in sum, a multilingual background per se does not necessarily lead to underachievement in learning a foreign language, as other studies have suggested (e.g., elsner, 2007; may, 2006). 8.3. implications for grammar instruction in general, studies addressing the relationship between grammar and reading comprehension have been conducted with older foreign language learners, disregarding beginning l2 learners (in primary school). grabe (2009) argued that in addition to word recognition, a simple foundational knowledge of l2 grammar is indeed essential for beginning l2 readers because much basic textual information is conveyed through grammatical information. in his view, some amount of early grammar instruction is therefore indispensable for l2 reading development because what beginning l2 readers need is the “glue” that holds sentences and texts together and which specifies how the content is to be understood. while there are multiple ways to teach grammar, recognition and awareness of grammatical structures seem to be the keys to reading comprehension (see also angelovska & hahn, 2014; hahn & angelovska, 2017). in the primary school classroom, the minority language children’s family languages could also be used as a resource in foreign language teaching. this relates to tasks activating metalinguistic awareness (see hopp et al., 2017). in interviews minority and majority language third graders were asked to comment on different grammatical structures as they are evident in german and english sentences. minority language children sometimes also referred to their family language to account for structural differences, which indicates that they were able to exploit an additional resource, which hardly receives any attention in foreign language teaching (see angelovska & hahn, 2014, for similar results for adults). anja k. steinlen 436 9. conclusion in sum, this longitudinal study examined the development of english grammar and reading comprehension by minority and majority language children attending a bilingual primary school. no significant differences between these two groups were found in grade 4, adding to a growing body of evidence showing that a minority language background per se does not constitute a risk factor for learning a new language in school. likewise, no significant differences between these two groups were found regarding their performance in grade 3, except for the grammar test, where minority language children even outperformed majority language children. in particular, a bilingual (i.e., partial immersion) context seems to be particularly beneficial for minority language children because the language of instruction is made very comprehensible and it therefore does not only promote the target language but also the children’s majority language skills. however, in such a context, too, teachers should address grammatical aspects when carrying out reading activities, because the results reported here have shown once again that grammar and reading skills are intimately linked in the acquisition of the target language. acknowledgements the author would like to express her gratitude to thorsten piske and two anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments greatly improved this manuscript. all errors are, of course, entirely attributable to the author. in addition, the support received by the colleagues of the bilingual school in tübingen and by the research assistants at the friedrich-alexander-university of erlangen-nuremberg is gratefully acknowledged. most importantly, this study would not have been possible without the children’s enthusiastic participation. the development of english grammar and reading comprehension by majority and minority. . . 437 references akbari, z. 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(2012). englischleistungen immersiv unterrichteter schülerinnen und schüler. unterrichtswissenschaft: zeitschrift für lernforschung, 40(4), 315-333. 533 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (4). 533-553 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the development of conjunction use in advanced l2 speech marcin jaroszek jagiellonian university marcin.jaroszek@uj.edu.pl abstract the article discusses the results of a longitudinal study of how the use of conjunctions, as an aspect of spoken discourse competence of 13 selected advanced students of english, developed throughout their 3-year english as a foreign language (efl) tertiary education. the analysis was carried out in relation to a number of variables, including 2 reference levels, one representing english native discourse and the other observed in teacher talk in actual efl classes, language type exposure, as registered by the participants of the study on a weekly basis, and teaching procedures. the study investigated possible factors determining the development of 3 aspects of conjunction use: (a) formal conjunctions, (b) specific conjunctions, that is, those conjunctions that are both characteristic of natural english discourse and are underrepresented in l2 discourse, and (c) conjunction diversity. the results point to a restricting effect of teacher talk on the development of specific conjunction use and conjunction diversity. these 2 aspects of conjunction use enjoyed only a slight rise, approaching the teacher reference level. on the other hand, formal conjunctions use did increase radically throughout the study, exceeding the native reference level. in this case teacher talk played a reinforcing role at most. as indicated in a correlational analysis, although there was a clear tendency of the participants’ development of conjunction use towards the native reference level, exposure to authentic english may not have been facilitative of the development of this discourse aspect. an interesting observation was made with reference to the effect of formal instruction on the development of conjunction use: although the subjects did receive intensive training in conjunction use in the 1st semester of their efl course, it was not until the 2nd year that their levels of formal conjunction use in marcin jaroszek 534 spoken output increased. this suggests that formal instruction may have no immediate effect on the development of spoken discourse competence. keywords: discourse competence, conjunction, l2 learning it was more than two decades ago that poland’s education underwent a radical change in its english as a foreign language (efl) practices. since then teaching english has come a long way from overly formalized instruction, through methodological ad-libbing, to general approaches which are aimed at developing communicative competence in the first place and seem to administer to the specific needs of students, no matter what their age or proficiency level. this metamorphosis has produced various results: some students have only learned to pidginize english, while others have learned to use it accurately and fluently for professional purposes. it could seem then that the implementation of these new methodologies has indeed helped produce l2 learners that will eventually demonstrate advanced levels of english, rich lexical repertoires and will, above all, construct a natural, native-like discourse. however, it is day-to-day observation that often undermines this belief. many advanced efl learners’ output, especially in the spoken domain of communication, is rife with awkward utterances, unnatural wording or artificial responses in one-onone communicative encounters. spoken discourse is by no means a meaningless interactional tug of war. nor is it just a mechanical, raw transfer of information from speakers to their recipients or a disorderly exchange of turns. communication is, or rather should be, a spontaneous allocation of power and an unpredictable, yet logical flow of ideas. to master this competence is quite an undertaking for l2 learners. just as in l1, l2 discourse construction requires that the learner demonstrate specific knowledge of linguistic devices, understand l2 cultural codes and be able to combine these elements into an individual utterance, unique for the discourse maker, yet still not exceeding the bounds of the social communicative rigor. there are a number of questions related to l2 discourse construction which certainly beg answers in modern applied linguistics. some of them are whether advanced l2 learners have the capabilities to construct a natural discourse or what position discourse competence development takes in teaching english. moreover, it would be worth investigating whether efl teachers realize the significance of discourse competence and, if so, whether they actually develop it in their classrooms. an example of such a study can be an attempt to establish how advanced students’ discourse develops in the long term and what factors might stimulate or impede the process. the development of conjunction use in advanced l2 speech 535 this article attempts to address these questions in relation to a narrow patch of spoken discourse construction – conjunction use. it provides some theoretical background on discourse construction in relation to conjunction use, as well as the place of communicative competence in teaching of efl. the main part of the article presents the study of how 13 advanced efl students’ conjunction use developed over a period of 3 years, including factors which might have affected this process. discourse and communicative competence of many models of communicative competence that attempt to single out all constitutive components, two have received the widest recognition. in bachman’s (1990) model, communicative competence is defined as language competence broken down into organizational competence and pragmatic competence. the model by canale (1983) posits that there are four components that make up communicative competence. two of them, that is, grammatical competence and discourse competence, reflect the use of the linguistic system itself. the other two, that is, sociolinguistic competence and strategic competence, reflect the functional aspects of communication. it seems that no matter which model is considered as better reflecting the actual communicative mechanisms, the researchers’ attention has been diverted from the grammatical aspects of communication onto the functionalist values of language production by portraying communication as “a synthesis of knowledge of basic grammatical principles, knowledge of how language is used in social contexts to perform communicative functions, and knowledge of how utterances and communicative functions can be combined according to the principles of discourse” (canale & swain, 1988, p. 73), the aspects of communication which are of particular interest to this paper. discourse construction the definitions of discourse are aplenty. it can be viewed simply as “a linguistic unit that comprises more than one sentence” (fromkin, rodman, & hyams, 2003, p. 581) or as language production built of a minimum of two stretches of speech (kurcz, 2005, p. 161). correct as these definitions seem, they refer only to the textuality of language production, which is indeed a significant discourse domain, yet often fails to determine the authenticity of one’s discourse. it seems that to really comprehend the phenomenon of discourse construction, a further, perhaps more challenging, multi-dimensional linguistic inquiry must be undertaken, that which goes beyond the sentence itself (mccarthy, 2001, p. 96). marcin jaroszek 536 individual discourse is realized in “the resources which people deploy in relating to one another – keeping separate from one another, cooperating, competing, dominating – and in seeking to change the ways in which they relate to one another” (fairclough, 2003, p. 88). here, discourse is seen as constructed on a psycholinguistic level, with individual choices undertaken to establish or maintain social relations. as claimed by blommaert (2005, p. 29), these choices include semantic relations, as realized in, for example, wording or metaphor; grammar, materializing in, for example, transitivity; modality or cohesion, achieved through the use of, for example, conjunction or schemata; and text structure, for example, episode marking or turn-taking systems. conjunction use as part of discourse competence cohesion and textuality of discourse are realized through the use of various grammatical devices, including reference, or ellipsis, or the device of a particular interest to this paper, namely, conjunction. it should be noted that in discourse analysis conjunctions are not restricted to connectives on the level of syntax; this category is extended onto any devices that connect two sentences and help complete the transition from one thought to another. thus, the category covers the use of the common and or however, but also complex conjunctions such as as a result or yet then (quirk, greenbaum, leech, & svartvik, 1985). the role of conjunction in discourse construction is realized in the dimension other than that of reference or ellipsis. as claimed by halliday and hasan (1976), “conjunctive relations are not tied to any particular sequence in the expression” (p. 227), which suggests that their role as cohesive devices is limited to their organic value in discourse (halliday & hasan, 1989, p. 81). yet, no matter what discoursal role is attributed to conjunction, it does contribute to the texture of spoken and written discourse. as noted by halliday and matthiessen (2004), conjunction “provides the resources for marking logico-semantic rerelationships” (p. 538) of longer stretches of speech or longer spans of paragraphs. salkie (1995, p. 76) distinguishes four types of conjunction: (a) addition connectives (e.g., and), (b) opposition connectives (e.g., yet), (c) cause connectives (e.g., therefore), and (d) time connectives (e.g., then). halliday and hasan (1976) classify conjunctive cohesion into additive, adversative, causal, as well as the forth domain divided into temporal and continuative. this, however, as well as other conjunctive domains such as halliday’s (2004, p. 541) elaboration, extension, and enhancement, or internal/external conjunctive dimension, exceed the frame of the ongoing discussion. it should be realized that although conjunction use helps achieve the logicality of discourse, cohesion and coherence do not fully determine the comprethe development of conjunction use in advanced l2 speech 537 hensibility of communication. it is not just the use of conjunctions that determines appropriate discourse construction. it is the natural use of these devices that does the job. it should therefore be underscored that although a deficit in natural discourse devices may not pose a threat to the textuality of speech, it will no doubt result in constructing discourse with a lower degree of naturalness. and this inauthentic conjunction use is indeed likely to make it more difficult for the other participant of the communicative encounter, particularly an l2 native speaker, to process the spoken output of their interlocutor. the authenticity of classroom discourse exposing learners to communication patterns typical of natural discourse and providing them with relevant practice opportunities may improve construction of discourse. a language classroom, in poland a naturally dominant educational setting, attempts to create these conditions, whether explicitly or implicitly. a classroom, however, has its apparent institutional limitations and, therefore, its discourse is likely to deviate more or less from natural conventions. nevertheless, there are claims that classroom communication, and in particular its “modified input and negotiated interaction are no antonyms of genuine communication” (majer, 2003, p. 14). what fuels this pedagogical optimism might be the failure of classroom research in the last three decades to suggest remedial measures to authenticate classroom communication. as a result, some theoreticians (cf. majer, 2003; van lier, 1996) have sought to challenge the old pedagogical dogma and claim that classroom discourse “constitutes one of many discourse domains” and, therefore, is “authentic in formal learning environments” (majer, 2003, p. 14). van lier goes a step further first rhetorically asking how learners are going to transfer knowledge acquired in the classroom if classroom communication is unnatural (van lier, 1984, p. 160) and then making a somewhat surprising claim that if teachers “spoke to their students differently, now as if they were addressing a neighbour, now a car mechanic, and so on, they would be using language inauthentically” (van lier, 1996, p. 130). with all due respect to these theoreticians, it is difficult to escape the thought that this very defense of classroom discourse authenticity may in fact be an instance of label shifting: if something seems not susceptible to change, it can simply be renamed. thus, what used to be inauthentic/unnatural becomes authentic/natural. and the objective of language instruction is indeed to help learners communicate in natural settings other than a foreign language classroom, that is, in casual social contact with a neighbor or a car mechanic. it cannot be excluded that classroom communication is one of natural discourse domains, materializing in what can be referred marcin jaroszek 538 to as institutional discourse (seedhouse, 2004), but majer’s and van lier’s propositions seem to exceed the logic of applied linguistics as, in fact, they amount to centralizing the peripheral and marginalizing the central. method the main portion of this paper is a longitudinal study of how the use of conjunctions, as an aspect of discourse competence of selected advanced learners of english, developed over a period of 3 years and what factors might have affected this process. the study, which is part of a larger project investigating the development of various l2 discourse devices, for example, modality (jaroszek, 2011), analyzes conjunctions singled out in the survey study (carried out in the year preceding the commencement of this research) and implements the procedures modified after their verification in the pilot study. the specific methods are described in the following section. participants the participants initially included 18 students of english at an english language teacher training college selected from three groups of freshmen. the number of students was a conscious choice, as it was anticipated that some of the students might, for various reasons, quit their education, thus naturally becoming excluded from the study. eventually, 13 students’ conjunction use development was analyzed. there was an even number of students representing high english proficiency and those representing a low proficiency level selected from each group. the selection criterion was entrance examination results. the participants were selected on the basis of document analysis after entrance examinations in july and september 2004. both spoken and written test results were analyzed. all the selected students gave consent to their participation in the study, had the magnitude of their required commitment in the course of the study explained to them, and were instructed on the procedures of data collection. they were, however, not informed as to the objective of the research, since it would have most likely affected their language performance, thus distorting the results. procedures the study commenced in october 2004 and was completed in may 2007, spanning a total of 3 academic years of the subjects’ college education. the development of the subjects’ spoken conjunction use was measured perithe development of conjunction use in advanced l2 speech 539 odically with the use of the tools described below. in addition, a number of instruments were used in an attempt to determine what factors affected this process. this section stipulates the data collection procedures. student diary. the aim of the diary was to identify what type of english the subjects were exposed to over the period of 3 years. the students were obligated to fill in a weekly diary form which was designed to record the type of their l2 exposure. in the first part the subjects were to specify the amount of time they spent in contact with a given type of english. the second part of the diary included the types of classroom interaction in college courses throughout the week. the diary clearly stated that the students were to specify the proportions of the interaction types as used in the classes with respect to student talking time. when absent from college, the students were to fill in the first part of the diary only. the subjects were instructed on how to interpret the terms used in the diary form. the diaries were collected on a weekly basis. since some subjects occasionally happened to fail to hand in their forms, the results needed to be statistically calculated. to retain the representative proportions for l2 exposure types measurement, the following equation was used: ext = tn x (35/nq), where ext represents the proportionate l2 exposure, tn represents a total of exposure hrs as reported in the returned questionnaires, nq represents the number of returned questionnaires, and 35 represents the constant number of weeks in 1 year of l2 exposure. student interviews (english). the development of the participants’ conjunction use was measured longitudinally over a period of 3 years. their conjunction use was measured in spoken performance samples collected on seven occasions throughout the study: in november 2004, february 2005, june 2005, october 2005, june 2006, october 2006 and may 2007. for each recording, the participants took part in two approximately 10-min discussions in groups of three. one discussion was designed to trigger the subjects’ informal output, the other the formal one. the samples were tapescribed and examined for the use of conjunctions. student interviews (polish). in an effort to verify a possible l1 transfer in the use of conjunctions, student interviews were conducted in polish in may 2007. this was designed to help identify the participants’ l1 conjunction use and contrast it with the observed l2 performance. its form was similar to that of the english interviews. marcin jaroszek 540 native speaker interview. in may 2007, the spoken production of a native speaker of english was recorded following the same procedures which were used for regular student interviews. she participated in two approximately 10min discussions in a group of three (the remaining two students were nonnative speakers of english). she was a student at the same college as the research participants, hence she served as a reliable reference point in the study. the aim of this interview was to help compare the subjects’ l2 conjunction use with that of their peer. it is realized that interviewing one person only is by no means representative, yet it does offer some reference for further analysis. teacher talk analysis. as revealed in the pilot study, much of the reported classroom interaction involved a lock-step procedure. it can be concluded that it is also teacher talk that might have been one of the major factors affecting the students’ conjunction use development. it seemed reasonable then to analyze the conjunctions applied by the teachers of the research subjects throughout a 3-year college program. each teacher’s one 45-min lesson unit was tapescribed and analyzed. this helped investigate possible relationships between teacher discourse and the students’ conjunction use development. reference subjects. the teachers, whose discourse was subject to analysis, were fully qualified professionals with extensive experience and expertise in teaching english-oriented subjects to university students. a total of 12 teachers included four men and eight women, six with phd and six with ma degrees. the age range was from 30 to 52, with the average of 41. the teachers were not notified of the exact time of recording, hence the high reliability of teacher talk samples. the english native college student was a 24-year-old female studying at the same college on a regular basis. she was a relatively extroverted type, extremely diligent and self-motivated. it should be noted that intensity levels presented in this discussion are in the form of the following ratio: ddr = n/l, where ddr represents the discourse device ratio, n represents the number of occurrences found, and l represents the length of language output, as manifested in the number of transcribed text characters. the ratio calculation helps sustain the proportions of speech stretches and the number of devices used. the length of speech, therefore, had no effect on the calculation result of conjunction use intensity. a similar procedure was used in the calculation of other intensity discourse types, unless otherwise stated. an attempt will be undertaken to relate the student level of specific discourse device use to the teacher level, which will be an average calculation of the teachers’ language output in actual classes (referred to as teacher reference), and to the native speaker’s level, calculated from the language output the development of conjunction use in advanced l2 speech 541 of a native speaker female student recorded in the same communicative setting, referred to as native reference. to examine the reliability of the native reference level, two other samples of native speakers’ language output are referred to. they are not taken as reference points, though. classroom procedures analysis. to verify the subjects’ weekly diary reports and to examine teaching procedures for the use of techniques developing discourse competence, classroom observation was conducted. since this research investigates spoken production, only speaking classes were observed twice a year. it helped identify the classroom procedures and the teachers’ possible attempts to trigger the students’ use of discourse devices. during the classroom observations, activities that promote the development of discourse competence, in a direct or indirect manner, were timed. this was expected to help determine the actual position of discourse-related instruction in efl classroom practices. in addition, teaching materials used in efl courses taken by the participants were collected over a period of 3 years. they were examined by the researcher for the existence and use of activities that could help develop specific components of communicative competence. the intensity of discourse competence promotion will be specified on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 represent no promotion. results this section attempts to present and discuss the development of the overall use of conjunctions and to single out and analyze the development of those conjunctions the specificity of which determines the naturalness of l2 discourse, with reference to both the teacher reference level and native reference level, as well as types of language exposure. overall results the analysis of the use of conjunctions shows that the intensity levels of their employment can be radically different from recording to recording in the case of the same individual. this suggests that the degree to which the speaker uses conjunctions to link stretches of their speech may depend on the length of the stretches or on individual choices. the occasional deviations from both teacher reference (0.0081) and native reference (0.0089) are no indication of conjunctive deficit. although not much deviating from both the teacher and native reference levels, the students’ overall conjunction intensity ratio did undergo changes from the first measurement at 0.010978 to the final measurement at marcin jaroszek 542 0.008571. notwithstanding this somewhat insignificant alteration, the overall development trend provided by figure 1 shows that the intensity of conjunction use by the students was ‘corrected’ to the reference levels. this again indicates that the exposure of l2 learners to specific input types does have a decisive effect on the development of discourse competence. figure 1 overall conjunction use development it should also be noted that the final level of conjunction use among the students appears to have remained independent of their l1 conjunction use intensity (0.01102201). this is an interesting finding since the l1 conjunction intensity level is almost identical with the l2 conjunction level at the initial measurement. it seems that the exposure to large quantities of l2 input balanced the l1 influence in this respect. specific conjunctions since the use of conjunctions was dominated by the common and, but or so (0.056, 0.0015, 0.011 in native discourse respectively), which are found in large quantities both in l2 english discourse and natural english, the analysis of these three could distort the results and might not adequately reflect the possible development of conjunction intensity. therefore, an attempt was made to single out those conjunctions which were both characteristic of natural english discourse and underrepresented in l2 discourse as examined in the survey study. these were and so, but still, and still, and then, and but then. they will be referred to in this discussion as specific conjunctions. 0 0,002 0,004 0,006 0,008 0,01 0,012 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 le ve l recording average native reference teacher reference overall development trend the development of conjunction use in advanced l2 speech 543 the results of the study show that two subjects distorted the picture of possible development. both student 1 (s1) and s2 demonstrated a high level of specific conjunction use in the initial measurement, the remaining subjects having the same ratio three or four times lower or even at utter zero. to calculate a possible development trend, s1 and s2 were rejected. as shown in figure 2, after the rejection of s1 and s2, the development of the use of specific conjunctions was significant, from a jarringly low 0.000058 to 0.000298. although in recording 5 there was a sharp breakdown in the use of specific conjunctions, the overall trend was steady and significant, although the final level of student specific conjunction use did not reach the teacher reference level, let alone the native reference level. what also increased with respect to the use of specific conjunctions was the number of students using them. this number increased steadily throughout the study and doubled at the final measurement (from four students in recordings 1 and 2, through six in recordings 3, 4, and 5, to seven in recording 6 and to eight in recording 7). figure 2 specific conjunction overall development with s1 and s2 rejected the use of specific conjunctions by the teachers was not uniform, hence few conclusions can be drawn in this respect. the level of 0.000533, although higher than the students’ ratio, could be incidental. only 11 out of 17 teachers used specific conjunctions, with some of them exceeding the native reference level (e.g., teacher 7’s [t7] ratio at 0.0032 or t8’s ratio at 0.0015 compared with the native reference level of 0.001140). 0,000000 0,000200 0,000400 0,000600 0,000800 0,001000 0,001200 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 le ve l recording average native reference teacher reference trend marcin jaroszek 544 what also needs to be underscored is the similarity between the students’ final use of specific conjunctions and that of the teachers’, as the number of teachers whose talk included them was the aforementioned 11 out of 17 (65%), and the number of students was eight out of 13 (62%), yet with more even intensity results in individual cases. this suggests that notwithstanding a higher teacher overall conjunction use level, as compared with the students’ overall conjunction use level, specific conjunctions may not be an integral part of many teachers’ repertoire. their use by teachers may not be dependent on class type and seems to be an individual quality of the teacher. formal conjunctions the analysis of formal conjunction use development shows more dynamic changes in their use throughout the study from the average ratio at the first measurement at 0.000111 to the final high 0.000533. the intensity of formal conjunction use more than quadrupled over the course of the research. that it radically increased is no surprise as the use of formal conjunctions is directly linked to grammar competence, which was a dominant element of the students’ college education. what is astonishing is the fact that, as illustrated in figure 3, the students’ use of formal conjunctions remained at low levels throughout the first year of the study, notwithstanding the intense training in conjunction use which they received in the first semester of the writing and grammar courses. although it would be an overstatement to claim that formal instruction had little influence on the students’ actual discourse competence, it certainly had no immediate effect. whether year one linguistic training materialized in this respect only in year two is also difficult to determine. in the third semester, the students took a course in descriptive grammar, during which conjunctive aspects of discourse construction were discussed. this could have been reflected in the temporary increase in the use of formal conjunctions in recording 4 (0.00029), which decreased shortly after to the stable 0.00025, only to rise to the high 0.00053 in the final measurement. whether it was so, however, is sheer speculation. the increase in the use of formal conjunctions might as well have been caused by a more extensive exposure of the students to authentic english, richer in formal conjunctions (native reference level of 0.000489), beginning in year two, and less intensive contact with teacher discourse, relatively deficient in the use of formal conjunctions (0.00022), in the same period. this interpretation has solid grounds, since whereas in the fourth and fifth semesters the students’ use of formal conjunctions remained around the teacher reference level, as shown in figure 3, it reached the native reference level in the final measurement. it is also the development of conjunction use in advanced l2 speech 545 likely that both the aforementioned factors had a facilitative effect on the increase in the use of formal conjunctions by the students. figure 3 overall formal conjunction use development the teachers’ use of formal conjunctions cannot be linked to any particular subject or class type. as illustrated in table 1, some of the teachers showed high ratios, for example, t13 (u.s. history), with a ratio of 0.000468, and t3 (listening), with a ratio of 0.000498. a similar irregularity can be found at low intensity levels: for example, t12 (american literature), t4 and others (efl) used no formal conjunctions. table 1 teacher formal conjunction use t1 linguistics & grammar 0.000258 t2 teaching of efl 1 0.000215332 t3 listening 1 0.000498 t4 grammar & writing 1 0.0 t5 voice projection 0.0 t6 introduction to literature 0.0 t7 british & u.s. studies 0.0 t8 phonetics 0.0 t9 british literature 0.000255 t10 teaching of efl 2 (lecture) 0.000202 t11 use of english 2 0.001653 t12 american literature 0.0 t13 u.s. history 0.000468 t14 reading 3 0.0 t15 use of english 3 0.000194 t16 speaking 3 0.0 t17 integrated skills 3 0.0 average 0.00022 0 0,0001 0,0002 0,0003 0,0004 0,0005 0,0006 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 le ve l recording average native reference teacher reference trend marcin jaroszek 546 in the authentic communications analyzed, all three samples showed higher ratios than the average teacher reference level, with the college student setting the native reference level at the high 0.000489. the high native reference level ratio, as compared with formal conjunction use levels found in the additional two native samples (0.000311, 0.000305), might have resulted from the partly formal contexts of the student recordings. each measurement included one task which could promote the use of formal conjunctions. also, the low levels of the teacher use of conjunctions should not be attributed to their possible linguistic deficiency. it seems rather that some of the teachers are still not able to alleviate the apparent classroom limitations and fail to employ natural discourse devices in their classroom communication. the contrastive analysis of the students’ use of polish and english formal conjunctions shows no correlation (see table 2). in fact, some of the students demonstrated high polish ratios and low english intensity levels (e.g., s5 and s12), or low polish ratios and high english intensity levels (e.g., s3 and s13). the correlation between l1 and l2 formal conjunction use was -0.1857 with p = .544. this finding suggests that the students’ use of formal english conjunctions could be independent of l1 influence. table 2 polish formal conjunction vs. english formal conjunction use student polish formal conjunctions english formal conjunctions s1 0.0004 0.000548 s2 0.000502 0.000218 s3 0.000441 0.00029 s4 0.0 0.00037 s5 0.000761 0.000135 s6 0.000329 0.000452 s7 0.0 0.000115 s8 0.000602 0.000337 s9 0.001367 0.0 s10 0.000662 0.000177 s11 0.0 0.000152 s12 0.001193 0.000188 s13 0.001174 0.000339 conjunctions diversity for the analysis of conjunction diversity no ratio was used as the number of conjunctions is a finite one. the results will be given in absolute numbers showing how many different conjunctions were used by individual subjects. the analysis shows less radical changes than those in formal conjunction use development, yet the progress is still significant (see table 3). although the development of conjunction use in advanced l2 speech 547 the overall results do show a rising trend, as in the specific conjunction development analysis, two cases (s1 and s2) were rejected from calculations, as their high initial ratios distorted the development trend. table 3 conjunction diversity development student recording 1 recording 2 recording 3 recording 4 recording 5 recording 6 recording 7 polish s1 9 8 7 8 10 5 5 9 s2 7 5 6 4 9 5 6 9 s3 6 4 5 7 8 10 8 15 s4 6 5 4 3 7 6 7 10 s5 5 6 4 5 6 7 8 9 s6 4 4 4 7 4 4 5 12 s7 4 5 6 7 7 6 6 9 s8 4 5 8 5 5 6 7 12 s9 5 6 7 5 5 5 5 18 s10 6 3 6 6 5 4 5 11 s11 4 3 4 5 5 6 6 4 s12 5 4 4 5 5 5 9 14 s13 4 4 6 5 6 7 6 19 average 5.307692 4.769231 5.461538 5.538462 6.307692 5.846154 6.384615 11.61538 native reference 11.000000 teacher reference 6.058824 as illustrated in figure 4, the students’ conjunction diversity level grew steadily from a low 4.8 at the first measurement to 6.55, a level slightly higher than the teacher reference level of 6.06. in contrast to formal conjunction use, the students’ level remained far lower than the native reference level of 11. figure 4 conjunction diversity development with s1 and s2 rejected 0,000000 2,000000 4,000000 6,000000 8,000000 10,000000 12,000000 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 n o of c on ju nc ts recording average native reference teacher reference trend marcin jaroszek 548 the six most common conjunctions used by the students were and, but, then, because, so, and or. formal conjunctions showed little diversity. the natural and so or but then, already discussed in the previous sections, were used sporadically. in addition to the common six conjunctions, the college reference student used however, even though, and on the other hand and the aforementioned specific conjunctions. so did the other two native referents. the distribution of conjunctions throughout the teacher discourse was relatively even, not exceeding the bounds of 5 (for t17) to 7 (for t5 and t12), with the average of 6.058824. since the observed individual differences were insignificant, no conclusion as to the type of class or subject taught can be drawn. the students’ polish conjunction diversity levels were comparably high and reached the english native reference level with the average of 11.62. this indicates that it was the students’ discoursal deficiency in the use of conjunctions, and not classroom limitations, that brought about the low levels of their conjunction diversity. at the same time, for all the students the correlation between l1 and l2 conjunction diversity was virtually nonexistent: 0.0603 with p = .845. yet, after the rejection of five students: s6, s9, s10, s11 and s12, it amounted to a significant 0.7054 with p = .049, which suggests that, at least in individual cases, l1 conjunctive diversity can affect the diversity of conjunctions in l2. classroom procedures the analysis of classroom procedures indicates that the development of discourse competence may take a peripheral position even in teaching english to advanced learners. as shown in table 4, illustrating the place of discourse competence in teaching materials used in efl classes, discourse competence was taught predominantly with regard to grammar (31.16, as compared to oral skills at 14.31), with the stable level of discourse-oriented grammar teaching at approximately 5.0 throughout the study and oral discourse development between a low 0.87 in the first semester and 4.23 in the forth semester. interestingly, sociolinguistic competence also appears to have been dismissed in the teaching process (7.57). this peripheral position of discourse competence development was confirmed by classroom observation. although the number of observations (6) is not representative of all the efl courses, since the observed classes were speaking-oriented, a somewhat gloomy picture of classroom practices emerges. in all six lessons, discourse competence was promoted, yet it happened indirectly through the negotiation of meaning in pairwork or groupwork. table 5 illustrates this finding. the development of conjunction use in advanced l2 speech 549 table 4 teaching materials vs. communicative competence development semester competence 1 2 3 4 5 6 total discourse competence oral competence included 1.56 1.98 4.03 4.32 2.12 1.72 15.73 oral competence activated 0.87 1.78 3.76 4.23 2.02 1.65 14.31 written competence 5.87 1.87 1.35 2.36 2.47 2.68 16.6 written competence activated 5.65 1.45 1.32 2.13 2.13 2.45 15.13 grammar competence discourse-oriented grammar included 4.86 4.79 6.87 5.46 6.21 6.31 34.5 discourse-oriented grammar activated 4.54 4.67 4.79 5.34 6.96 4.86 31.16 sociolinguistic competence competence included 0.78 0.89 1.89 2.59 1.59 2.15 9.89 competence activated 0.33 0.54 1.54 2.16 1.16 1.84 7.57 only in two lessons were the students instructed on discourse construction. both lessons were taught by one teacher, which suggests that it is not a syllabus, but individual teaching beliefs that determine the content of language instruction. if the statistics were to be trusted in this respect, out of 150 contact hrs of speaking oriented classes, 16% were devoted to direct development of discourse competence, which clearly indicates that, throughout their 3-year college education, the students received fewer than 30 hrs of language instruction that directly promoted spoken discourse competence as contrasted with 760 contact hrs of efl classes. it is a safe statement, then, that discourse competence may still be left to its own self-adjustment, which casts doubt on the adequacy of teaching practices. table 5 classroom observation results: type of discourse promotion type of discourse promotion direct discourse development indirect discourse development ob se rv at io ns type duration type duration 1 none negotiation of meaning 30 min 2 none negotiation of meaning 25 min 3 training in discourse markers 15 min negotiation of meaning 30 min 4 none negotiation of meaning 28 min 5 discourse management 30 min negotiation of meaning 15 min 6 none negotiation of meaning 35 min total time (270 min) 45 163 % of time 6% 0% conclusions the analysis of possible factors contributing to the development of conjunction use was carried out in two ways. linearly, overall scores in conjunction use intensity levels were related to possible factors. the other way inmarcin jaroszek 550 volved correlating individual subjects’ conjunction use development with types of their language exposure throughout the study. as the results show, it is teacher talk, exposure to authentic input, and teaching procedures, although not necessarily in the order given, that appear to be fundamental underlying characteristics of the development of discourse competence in advanced l2 learners. these results will now be discussed. the analysis of formal conjunction use produces interesting results with regard to the effect of formal instruction on discourse development. notwithstanding the intensive training in conjunction use which the students received in the first semester of the grammar and writing course, their levels of formal conjunction use did not increase until the second year, which indicates that formal instruction may have no immediate effect on the development of discourse competence. it seems that fully internalizing a discourse device so that its use can pass situational rigors of communication, as in the case of formal conjunctions, is a long-term process. it is also possible that the subjects’ progress in the use of formal conjunctions was stimulated by factors other than language instruction, that is, teacher talk or authentic l2 input. however, whether the subjects’ eventually progressed in formal conjunction use in the second year due to exposure to teacher talk, natural discourse or other factors is not certain. the analysis of the development of specific conjunction use and of conjunction diversity has produced different results. unlike the use of formal conjunctions, which increased radically throughout the study, the levels of both the employment of specific conjunctions and conjunction diversity rose only slightly, approaching the reference level set by teacher talk. in this respect, the native reference level was far higher than both the teacher reference level and the student level at the final measurement. this finding suggests that teacher talk, no doubt, has an effect on learners’ conjunction use, yet not always a positive one. the effect of teacher talk on the development of conjunction use definitely deserves more than a thought in this discussion. it seems that the development of specific conjunction use and conjunction diversity was affected primarily by teacher talk, which showed relatively low levels in these respects. the six most common conjunctions used by the students and the teachers were and, but, then, because, so, and or and they did perform their function adequately, making the discourse coherent and cohesive. the natural and so or but then were sporadically used. this finding, however, should not be interpreted as a mere criticism of the teachers’ discourse competence. a foreign language classroom has its apparent limitations, and for various reasons, including educational ones, teacher talk is, and sometimes must be artificially formalized, focused mainly on knowledge transfer or factual teaching and, consequently, deficient in communicative devices, thus departing from natuthe development of conjunction use in advanced l2 speech 551 ral, standard discoursal conventions. the finding under discussion also indicates that it is not only the textuality of speech that defines the whole of the discourse, but also the natural and appropriate use of discourse devices, which in the case of conjunctions suffered a significant deficit on the part of both the students and the teachers. and this very coherence and cohesion factor appears to account for the reason why the students refrained from a more resourceful use of conjunctions. the students, as it seems, may not have deemed it necessary to use other conjunctions if those at hand ensured the coherence and cohesion of their discourse. sensitizing both l2 learners and teachers to the necessity of a more resourceful and natural use of conjunctions is, therefore, advisable. natural speaking standards can be enforced by intensive contact with authentic english, whether through individual interaction with l2 native speakers or passive exposure to input. however, exposure to authentic english, as this study indicates, may not have a remedial effect on all discourse domains. although the overall results show a clear tendency of the subjects’ development towards the native reference level, a correlational analysis of all 13 individual subjects failed to produce results indicating regularities. apart from the subjects’ mother tongue, teacher talk and type of l2 exposure, the study also examined classroom procedures applied in efl classes through classroom observation and teaching materials evaluation. the teaching materials, collected on a weekly basis throughout the study, clearly show that oral discourse competence took a peripheral position in classroom procedures. the same conclusion can be drawn from classroom observations, which indicate that the students might have received fewer than 30 hrs of language instruction that directly promoted spoken discourse competence throughout their 3-year college education, as contrasted with the total of 780 contact hrs of efl classes. although, the sample of classroom observation is by no means representative, these findings may point to the inadequacy of teaching procedures with respect to discourse competence development at university level. this gives a somewhat gloomy picture of classroom practices. teaching efl may still be viewed as the development of communicative competence mainly with regard to grammar competence and sociolinguistic competence. in contrast, discourse competence appears to be stranded on pedagogical peripheries or optimistically left to its own self-adjustment, which could materialize on the condition that a sufficient amount of naturalistic instruction or exposure to large quantities of authentic input is provided. if, however, the predominant educational setting is a foreign language classroom, more emphasis should be placed on techniques helpful in natural discourse construction, especially at advanced levels. marcin jaroszek 552 although the present research has shown a number of developmental patterns in conjunction use and identified possible factors determining it, there are areas which require further investigation. a major question confronting future researchers is whether the number of 13 students that participated in this study is representative enough to make valid generalizations for a larger population. in addition, future research should explore the development of discourse domains other than those included in this investigation, such as use of back-channeling devices or references as well as discourse marking. future research could also focus on identifying other factors that most likely determine the construction of discourse and the development of discourse competence. possible factors include personalities, individual differences, or learning styles of the speaker. the development of conjunction use in advanced l2 speech 553 references bachman, l. f. (1990). fundamental considerations in language testing. new york: oxford university press. blommaert, j. (2005). discourse: a critical introduction. cambridge: cambridge university press. canale, m. (1983). from communicative competence to communicative language pedagogy. in j. c. richards & r. w. schmidt (eds.), language and communication (pp. 2-28). new york: longman. canale, m., & swain, m. (1988). some theories of communicative competence. in w. rutherford & m. sharwood smith (eds.), grammar and second language teaching (pp. 61-84). new york: newbury house. fairclough, n. (2003). analyzing discourse: textual analysis for social research. london: routledge. fromkin, v., rodman, r., & hyams, n. (2003). an introduction to language. boston: thomson wadsworth. halliday, m. a. k., & hasan, r. (1976). cohesion in english. london: longman. halliday, m. a. k., & hasan, r. (1989). language, context, and text: aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective. oxford: oxford university press. halliday, m. a. k., & matthiessen, c. (2004). an introduction to functional grammar. london: arnold. jaroszek, m. (2011). factors determining the development of modality in advanced l2 speech – a longitudinal study. studia linguistica universitatis iagellonicae cracoviensis, 128, 23-52. kurcz, i. (2005). psychologia j zyka i komunikacji. warszawa: wydawnictwo naukowe scholar. majer, j. (2003). interactive discourse in the foreign language classroom. ód : wydawnictwo uniwersytetu ódzkiego. mccarthy, m. (2001). issues in applied linguistics. cambridge: cambridge university press. quirk, r., greenbaum, s., leech, g., & svartvik, j. (1985). a comprehensive grammar of the english language. london: longman. salkie, r. (1995). text and discourse analysis. london: routledge. seedhouse, p. (2004). the interactional architecture of the language classroom: a conversation analysis perspective. oxford: blackwell. van lier, l. (1984). analysing interaction in second language classrooms. elt journal, 38, 160-169. van lier, l. (1996). interaction in the language curriculum: awareness, autonomy and authenticy. harlow: longman. 149 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (2). 2014. 149-152 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.2.1 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial most positive psychology advocates would agree that social bonding and interpersonal engagement are essential to one’s well-being. not only was this issue of studies in second language learning and teaching (ssllt) a pleasure to put together, it was also an opportunity for like-minded colleagues with a passion for positivity to become friends. when we thought about gathering together research on positive psychology in sla we did not know whether the idea would be well received. we started with a few inquiries to ask whether there was interest in collaborating on a conference symposium. as it happens, there was no need for concern—not only were people interested but they were genuinely excited about the idea. the response was a resounding yes to the symposium and so we considered whether we might try to publish a collection of papers based on the symposium. ssllt was our first and only choice because the journal has developed a strong reputation for excellent articles that are oriented toward both research and teaching, and it is published with open access. needless to say we were thrilled when the journal accepted the proposal for a special issue within a day or two; in no time, we were on our way. the debut for many of these papers was the 2014 international conference for language and social psychology in beautiful honolulu, hawaii. the fact that so many people in the audience skipped the sun and sand to engage with the presenters was most gratifying to all of us; the room was literally singing! the positive reception that the papers received gave us the momentum we needed to complete the special issue without delay. within two weeks of the conference, all of the authors had completed their manuscripts. just a few weeks after that, ssllt was ready to send us the proofs. if good news travels fast, then this special issue must contain some very good news indeed. the present collection of papers as a whole reflects the positioning of positive psychology within the modern sla field. there is a creative, eclectic mix of qualitative and quantitative methods used in the research, coupled 150 with innovative teaching practices. the three founding pillars of positive psychology as laid down by seligman and csikszentmihalyi (2000) (specifically, positive character traits, positive emotions and positive institutions) are three of the pillars for this special issue. the opening paper by macintyre and mercer points to additional pillars within the literature, including principles of humanistic education, the good language learner studies, and extensive work on motivation that will support the application of positive psychology to sla in both theory and practice. macintyre and mercer help to set the context for studies of language learning that will be inspired by positive psychology. in addition to situating positive psychology in sla, the authors point to some of the trends that bode well for the future of the field-within-the-field. the authors emphasize that positive psychology must not be confused with frivolous pop psychology. the paper provides a starting point for anyone interested in learning more about positive psychology and language learning. the second paper by oxford and cuellar examines in-depth the narratives of mexican learners of chinese using martin seligman’s perma model as a theoretical guide. the result is an outstanding paper that paints a nuanced picture of the psychology of the learners. there is rich food for thought in this article that should inspire future research that both applies and extends the perma model. the paper by tim murphey shows his brilliance as an educator. the paper uses the future-oriented term well-becoming to highlight the development of well-being as a process rather than an end-state. this observation alone makes the paper worth reading but murphey goes much further. using his experience with singing he manages to turn his student language learners into engaged, applied researchers. this paper is an excellent example of the best of carl rogers’ writing about education—a teacher sharing who he is with his students to tremendous effect. the fourth paper, by dewaele and macintyre, is based on reporting the results of a large-sample survey that introduces a new measure of foreign language enjoyment. the authors note that emotion has not been widely studied in sla, and positive emotion has been especially neglected (outside theories of motivation). dewaele and macintyre draw upon the foundational research of barbara fredrickson, whose broaden-and-build theory has changed the way emotions are conceptualized. the mixed methods paper presents numerical data alongside learner voices that capture the richness of emotional experience during language learning. joseph falout’s paper is classroom-oriented in a literal sense; it examines the important effects of seating arrangements on student learning. falout’s well-structured argument reflects a modern concern for a long-standing issue in education, that is, the effect of the structure of the space on the people within 151 it. falout uses the concept of the action zone in the classroom to show why something as basic as seating arrangements is not a trivial matter for students. this paper should be read by everyone who decides on the physical layout of the classrooms, especially teachers and school administration. readers are encouraged to share it with decision makers as a way to open a much needed dialogue on the spaces where learning happens in modern pedagogy. the paper by danuta gabry -barker takes its inspiration from winston churchill’s notion that success reflects the ability to go from one failure to another without losing enthusiasm. the paper opens with the fascinating mixed history of the term enthusiasm. the core of the paper presents an analysis of pre-service teacher narratives that reveal both strengths and limitations in their own training. gabry -barker expertly draws upon the literature, as applied to the narratives, to recommend training teachers to use a more expressive style. this is an important observation to offer pre-service teachers, and long serving ones too. gabry -barker is talking about a critically important element of teaching, and working with pre-service teachers to develop realistic conceptions of enthusiasm is an excellent idea. the seventh paper, by gregersen et al., takes a somewhat unusual approach; its logic is best seen by working backwards. the authors identify learners who reported making progress toward self-development, as uniquely defined by each individual, over a 3-week period. contributing to self-development was a series of three scaffold exercises drawn from the literature on positive psychology (specifically: three good things, savouring, and learned optimism). the paper focuses on ways in which the respondents’ emotional intelligence facilitated working through the exercises and contributed to self-development. this appears to be the first paper in the literature to use qualitative methods to show in detail how emotional intelligence operates in the sla context. the final paper is a two-part study by chaffee, noels and sugita-mceown that examines ways in which learners can adapt to a controlling teacher. kim noels and her colleagues’ work on self-determination theory is well respected in the sla literature and this paper takes their work in a new direction. by examining ways in which learners exercise secondary control, the authors are able to identify effective and ineffective ways of dealing with difficult classroom situations. the authors use detailed statistical analysis of their data to support recommendations for creating more resilient learners. although the statistics might be challenging for some readers, the paper is well worth reading for its sage conclusions on building resilient learners. finally, the special issue includes stephen ryan’s review of the book the language of peace: communicating to create harmony written by rebecca oxford. as editors, we are honoured to feature oxford’s highly original work in 152 two places in this special issue. the book review captures ryan’s personal reactions to the book and its treatise on the links between language and peace. ryan describes his approach to the issue as “cynical,” at least at the outset. however, as his review shows, the merits of the text won him over. in some sense, this special issue has been an overnight success that was years in the making. getting a diverse collection of highly experienced and well-respected researchers, scholars and teachers to produce both a symposium and a special issue in a rather short timeframe can be achieved only if the authors are at the top of their game. we are fortunate to count the contributors to this volume among our mentors, colleagues and friends. as guest editors, we sincerely appreciate both the encouragement and assistance from the journal editor miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak, who worked closely with us on the proofs, and the team at ssllt. we close this editorial with a heart-felt thank you to all those who made this collection possible. we now offer it to a worldwide audience of teachers and researchers who will hopefully take away their own inspirations. peter d. macintyre cape breton university, canada peter_macintyre@cbu.ca tammy gregersen university of northern iowa, cedar falls, usa tammy.gregersen@uni.edu references seligman, m. e. p., & csikszentmihalyi, m. (2000). positive psychology: an introduction. american psychologist, 55(1), 5-14. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.55.1.5 learning and teaching english: insight from research editors: luciana pedrazzini, andrea nava publisher: polimetrica, 2012 isbn: 978-88-7699-231-5 pages: 354 the volume learning and teaching english: insights from research, ed ited by luciana pedrazzini and andrea nava, offers a comprehensive and valu able contribution to an integrated approach to second language acquisition (sla), corpus linguistics and language teaching. the papers concerning the three different but interrelated areas contribute to opening up perspectives on how they can be fruitfully combined in applied linguistics (al), both from a theoretical and a practical, language classroom point of view, thus benefiting all agents involved researchers, teacher trainers, teachers and learners. as the editors highlight in the introduction entitled "taking stock of research in applied linguistics: implications for second language pedagogy," the volume intends to shed light on current al research from different european perspec tives in the fields of sla, corpus linguistics and language teaching. these broad areas correspond to the three sections into which the volume is organized, each containing papers "by european researchers investigating the contents, the processes and the tools of language learning and language teaching through different methodological approaches" (p. 10). 443 the first section, "second language acquisition research," opens with v. cooks "some issues for sla research," where the author analyses five issues central to sla research: interlanguage, characteristics of l2 learners, and the ac quisition of vocabulary, grammar, and writing. it is shown how interlanguage can not be considered in defective-only terms, but rather as including l2 users "dis tinctive qualities in their own right independent of monolinguals" (p. 42) and of native speakers. cook discusses the concept of multicompetence, showing that l2 users think, and use the languages in their repertoires, in ways that are different from those of monolinguals, displaying increased language awareness and greater effectiveness in their l1, too. the author also problematizes the notion of "the earlier, the better," not least in connection to native-like-set proficiency attain ment targets. indeed, in our contemporary societies multilingualism and multilin gual children increasingly represent the norm rather than an exception: "a second language is not an afterthought but a core element of human existence" (p. 63). this complexity ought to be dealt with by integrating sla perspectives with those of language teaching, linguistics and psychology. in "researching grammar learning strategies: state of the art," m. paw­ lak provides a comprehensive overview of research concerning language learn­ ing strategies, with particular reference to those related to grammar learning (gls), a field which has recently seen a lively research interest in poland, too. the author puts forward a comprehensive taxonomy to investigate gls, which include metacognitive, affective, social and cognitive strategies; cognitive strategies are further subdivided into four subgroups: those "aiding the produc tion and comprehension of grammar in communication tasks," "employed in developing explicit knowledge of grammar," "employed in developing implicit knowledge of grammar" and "applied in dealing with corrective feedback" (pp. 79-80). findings from the author's study suggest that several variables are at work in gls use, at times in contrasting ways. this points to the need for further investigation in this area, highly relevant in language teaching, particularly "with respect to the performance of specific tasks focusing on learning and using grammatical structures" (p. 87), communicative tasks in the first place. a. nava's contribution "'sla in action': raising teachers' awareness of english lexicogrammar and its acquisition" focuses on the complex interrela tion between sla research and second language pedagogy and practice. draw ing on findings from the "sla in action" research project, a model is set forth and it is arguably suggested that classroom researchers and teacher trainers play a pivotal role in connecting research and practice. the concept of kal ("knowledge about language and language learning," p. 91) appears central in fostering teachers' ability to interrelate these dimensions both with "a de clarative and procedural dimension" (p. 92) and with sla tenets and pedagogi444 cal classroom practices. awareness of kal seems to have been so far largely neglected in teacher training courses in italy; the approach proposed by the author, together with a teacher training package for pre-service and in-service courses, are thus very much welcome. the proposal combines experiential learning, reflection, restructuring and planning, of which the sample module at the end of the chapter indeed provides a valuable illustration. the same per spective is taken by l. pedrazzini in her contribution "sla properties from practice: the input hypothesis." after an exhaustive overview section on input in sla approaches and on krashen's input hypothesis, the author discusses the implications of findings from her case study in teacher education terms. the need for a deeper interrelation between knowledge of sla principles (krashen's input hypothesis in this case) and consistent actual classroom prac­ tices clearly emerges as paramount, with sla researchers and teacher educa­ tors playing an important mediating role. the second section of the volume, "corpus linguistics research," opens with l. pinnavaia's contribution "learning idioms with corpora: the case of food and drink," dealing with the area of idiomatic expressions, which is often prob lematic for foreign language learners. the author discusses how corpora such as the bnc (british national corpus) and the boe (bank of english) can constitute a valuable pedagogic resource in terms of real language performance. possible pat terns of idiom use and of their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic nature can be explored by means of corpora, and they can provide insights into the textual envi ronment of idioms and their "real," nonstatic and foregrounding use, thus also making learning more memorable and eventually effective. in "how bilingual dic tionaries became more learner-friendly? a study on collocations in three edi tions of a bilingual english-italian dictionary," b. berti uses the bnc corpus and collocational dictionaries to examine ten english nouns, together with their italian counterparts, in the semantic field of education. the author looks into their collo­ cational patterns as represented in the three editions (1961, 1990, 2008) of the garzanti-hazon bilingual english-italian dictionary. her findings show that word collocations and their combinatorial properties have not always been fully taken into account, not least in pointing out differences between british and american varieties of english. indeed, corpora can constitute a privileged source in the compilation of bilingual dictionaries, which represent a relevant reference and didactic tool in teaching and learning. m.t. prat zagrebelsky well complements the section on corpora offering a comprehensive view of their potential pedagogic advantages in "using corpora to explore language and learner language." the author points out that corpora can constitute a valuable teaching tool in several ways, from the exploration of "areas of language use not covered in a satisfactory way by grammars and dictionaries," to the creation of ad hoc corpora "to carry 445 out linguistic projects," as well as the compilation and analysis of "learner corpora in order to reflect on learner language" (p. 188). by illustrating three projects that can be carried out by teachers and students to explore and perceive the complex dynamics of "real language" use, the author convincingly shows how corpora such as the international computer archive of modern and medieval english corpus collection (icame), the international corpus of english (ice), the bnc, the boe or the international corpus of learner english (icle), as well as other freely available ones, can constitute invaluable classroom resources to investigate different as pects of language use. the same perspective is adopted by f. meunier, who, in her contribution "learner corpora in the classroom: a useful and sustainable didactic resource," illustrates how involving students in learner corpora can in­ deed facilitate positive, productive analysis and monitoring of their productions. the author, highlighting the need to foster teachers' awareness of the importance of making use of corpora in their practices, also provides practical suggestions to exploit learner corpora in pedagogic activities "as useful and sustainable didactic resources" (p. 214). several among the resources available on the internet to sup port teachers' engagement in taking on this type of approach are illustrated, too. a. nava and l. pedrazzini close this section with their contribution "investigating l2 spoken english through the role play learner corpus." the authors describe an exploratory study carried out at the university of milan looking into learners' awareness of spoken grammar features, and intended to highlight similarities and differences with native speakers in the use of tails and of discourse markers 'yes' and 'yeah' in a learner corpus of role-play interactions. the authors discuss impli cations of their findings in terms of course syllabuses and activities, highlighting the "need for explicit teaching of spoken grammar in l2 curricula," particularly in relation to pragmatic competence (p. 245). the last section, "language teaching research," is introduced by m. c. rizzardi in "the common european framework o f reference fo r languages and its implications for the italian language teacher. bridging the gap be­ tween theory and practice." the author digs into the manifold opportunities the common european framework of reference (cefr) can offer in planning effective language learning tasks and objectives, which do not seem as yet to have been fully exploited. a series of guidelines stemming from a research project with italian teachers are put forward, aimed at encouraging language teachers to develop reflective and action-oriented pedagogic practices, not least in a curricolo verticale perspective to link aims, practices and outcomes between different school levels. exemplificatory guidance grids are provided with thorough reflection on the process, where the cefr constitutes a starting point in the development of learning outcomes, aims (tasks and texts) as well as competences and strategies. indeed, the cefr can represent a challenge for 446 language teachers; however, its "putting into action encourages the teachers to reflect on their daily decision-making practice from the learner's perspec tive and from the point of view of performance" (p. 276). in "language issues in the cul classroom: focus on the pupils" c. m. coonan discusses a research project aimed at investigating learner foreign lan­ guage production in clil classes in five high-school contexts. findings show how communicative competence and collaborative negotiation of meaning appear to be characteristic features of clil lessons, above all of group work. accuracy seems a problematic point, together with the difficulty for weaker learners to capitalise on the experience, and the ability to produce longer stretches of language. syn ergy between language and subject teachers thus emerges as a fundamental issue in providing adequate methodological support while planning and carrying out clil-based activities, not least in tuning the teaching styles of the content and language subjects involved. enhanced language learning and the development of language competence in the foreign language can be fostered by several factors, such as didactic modes involving student interaction, focus on form by the teacher, and the provision of language structures prior to lessons. l. mariani's contribution "researching high school students' beliefs about language learning" discusses findings from a 612-participant research study carried out in italian high schools. by relying on metaphor analysis, the research uncovered how assumptions and beliefs constitute a "hidden curricu­ lum." the action-research orientation of the study allowed subsequent reflec­ tion on findings, benefiting the way in which teachers viewed "talking about learning and teaching," as well as their relationships with learners. the impli cations of findings can of course be related to the role played by motivational constructs: instrumental motivation emerges as internally-related ("the per ception of the opportunities that knowing a language can offer," p. 326), and integrative motivation is a strong factor, sometimes connected to an unrealis tic, idealized native speaker model. it is also noteworthy that "most students expressed a view of language as a tool for communication and a bridge to in tercultural understanding" (p. 327). the section closes with k. doro's chapter "the importance of advanced l2 vocabulary in academic contexts: a hungarian example." the contribution is re­ lated to first-year english university students in hungary, with particular reference to issues such as vocabulary improvement, which are well explored in the intro ductory section. the academic language needs of advanced students of english attending english-medium higher education courses are then discussed, and key research issues which could be further explored in other contexts are highlighted. the volume tackles a variety of topics, albeit all interrelated, within the fascinating, complex and ever-developing research fields covered in the three 447 sections. the different perspectives included provide a comprehensive, com plementary and intermingling view of contributions made to sla and language teaching in the different fields of enquiry. the practical implications for teacher education and classroom practices are always highlighted. one possi ble suggestion for improvement could be the inclusion of more overt refer ences to the developing and vibrant field of english as a lingua franca (elf) research, for instance to elf corpora (voicex and elfa2), to the problematiza tion of sla-related issues, as well as to the implications for language teaching (and learning); this could indeed complement the challenging issues presented in the volume, providing an additional and relevant perspective. it is certainly worth mentioning that the volume stems from the confer ence "learning and teaching english: what the research in english applied linguistics has to say" organized by the university of milan in april 2010, which was open both to researchers and teachers and thus constituted an extremely valuable opportunity to interrelate research in al and sla with classroom practices. to conclude, edited volume represents a stimulating and challenging opportunity for reflection on the significant and relevant contribu­ tions that diversified fields of enquiry can provide to integrate research, reflec­ tion and teaching practices. the interrelated perspectives emerging from the contributions in the volume constitute indeed a valuable tool, particularly in these challenging times, when foreign language education and all its agents that is, researchers, teachers, teacher trainers and language learners alike are faced with increasingly demanding educational tasks. reviewed by paola vettorel university of verona, italy paola.vettorel@univr. it 1 http://www.univie.ac.at/voice/ 2 http://www.helsinki.fi/englanti/elfa/elfacorpus 448 http://www.univie.ac.at/voice/ http://www.helsinki.fi/englanti/elfa/elfacorpus 507 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (3). 2014. 507-528 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.3.7 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl looking for structure: is the two-word stage of language development in apes and human children the same or different? mark patkowski brooklyn college, city university of new york, usa mpatkowski@brooklyn.cuny.edu abstract previously published corpora of two-word utterances by three chimpanzees and three human children were compared to determine whether, as has been claimed, apes possess the same basic syntactic and semantic capacities as 2-year old children. some similarities were observed in the type of semantic relations expressed by the two groups; however, marked contrasts were also uncovered. with respect to the major syntactic mechanism displayed in two-word child language, namely word order, statistically significant differences were found in all three comparisons that were tested. these results indicate that chimpanzees do not exhibit the linguistic capacities of 2-year old children. keywords: language development, animal language, cross-species comparison, semantic relations, word order in the 19th century it was demonstrated that man is not in a category apart from that of animals. today it seems necessary to defend the view (before many psychologists) that man is not identical with all other animals – in fact that every animal species is unique . . . i propose that (man’s) entire cognitive function, of which his capacity for language is an integral part, is species-specific. (lenneberg, 1969, p. 642) mark patkowski 508 the foundation for basic productive combinatorial symbolic communication, approximately what a human child does in the second year of life, is present in the two species of our most proximal clade, the bonobos and the chimpanzees. (lyn, greenfield, & savage-rumbaugh, 2011, p. 322) eric h. lenneberg, widely known for producing what is arguably the most fully elaborated statement of the critical period hypothesis in his classic 1967 book, the biological foundations of language, is also widely recognized as an early pioneer of the current biolinguistic approach to the study of language (boeckx, 2013; boeckx & longa, 2011). critical periods are hallmarks of biologically-based, species-specific behaviors (newport, 2002) and, as the quote presented above makes clear, lenneberg firmly held that the capacity for language is an exclusively human characteristic, one that is deeply rooted in biology. points of view concerning the species-specificity (or not) of language differ, of course, and research into the capacity for human-like language of a variety of animals, primarily apes but also dolphins and parrots among other nonprimates, has been on-going for several decades (e.g., brakke & savage-rumbaugh, 1995; fouts, 1975; gardner & gardner, 1969; pederson & fields, 2009; pepperburg, 2014; premack & premack, 1972; terrace, petitto, sanders, & bever, 1979). however, it is the research involving pan paniscus (bonobo chimpanzees) that is generally considered to have provided proponents for the linguistic talents of nonhuman animals with their best evidence (anderson, 2004). in particular, kanzi, the most famous of the bonobos, is reported to have “picked up” his linguistic skills spontaneously and without formal training (he was merely a witness to the training that his adoptive mother, a singularly “unlinguistic” ape, was undergoing), unlike all prior chimpanzees involved in language experiments who were expressly and extensively trained by their experimenters. furthermore, two additional bonobos (mulika and panbanisha) and one common chimpanzee (panpanzee) are also reported to have learned symbols without training (savage-rumbaugh et al., 1993). observation of the apes’ spontaneous communication as well as experimental investigation have led the researchers to postulate that chimpanzees follow and invent “simple syntactic rules . . . (and tend) to follow the ordering strategies of english” (savage-rumbaugh et al., 1993, p. 38), and generally possess productive abilities “in the arena of grammatical structure” equivalent to those of 2 year old human children, although “strong constraints – probably rooted in a smaller brain” prevent them from progressing beyond this level (lyn, greenfield, & savage-rumbaugh, 2011, p. 319). effectively, the claim is that chimpanzees can reach a level equivalent to brown’s (1973) stage i of early child language. indeed, the above researchers draw several comparisons between their chimpanzee subjects and the children in brown’s study. looking for structure: is the two-word stage of language development in apes and human. . . 509 this position clearly runs counter to the biolinguistic approach which, while it fully endorses testing theories of language origin by identifying possible biological homologies and analogies of human linguistic mechanisms in nonhuman species (fitch, 2010), nevertheless maintains both that the early acquisition by children of abstract syntactic knowledge can only result from a “genetic endowment of human beings that is responsible for the emergence of this remarkable linguistic capacity” (narita & fujita, 2010, p. 356), and furthermore that, as chomsky says, “there comes a time when the (language acquisition) system just isn’t working anymore” (as quoted in bley-vroman, 2009, p. 180). in short, such claims regarding the syntactic capacities of chimpanzees, if validated, would clearly pose a serious challenge to the biolinguistic claims concerning the species-specificity of language and its corollary notion of a critical period. this paper, then, examines previously published corpora of two-word utterances produced by three chimpanzees (greenfield & savage-rumbaugh, 1991; lyn, greenfield, & savage-rumbaugh, 2011) and compares them to the earliest available two-word productions of three human children, using the classic brown (1973) data for adam, eve, and sarah, from the childes database (macwhinney, 2000). as is well known, brown (1973) characterized stage i child language primarily in semantic terms, and found that a set of eight “prevalent” two-term semantic relations (agent + action; action + object; agent + object; action + locative; entity + locative; possessor + possession; entity + attribute; demonstrative + entity) could account for approximately 70% of stage i production (p. 178). in further characterizing stage i language, brown also listed three “operations of reference” (nomination, recurrence, and denial), noted that the modalities of interrogation, negation, and the imperative have their beginnings in stage i (p. 180), and further noted that “word order seems to be the major syntactic mechanism controlled in stage i english” (p. 203). pacesova (1981) provides a very useful and succinct summary of the grammatical patterns of stage i english that express brown’s semantic relations: all the children evidently work on the expression of subject-verb-object relationships. words in these roles are combined in subject-verb, verb-object, subject-object and subject-verb-object. other productive patterns for most of the children are noun-locative, adjective-noun and demonstrative pronoun-noun. word order is fairly stable, though inversion may occur in emotional speech. personal pronouns are as yet rare, or completely absent. the grammar lacks provisions for copulas, prepositions and numerals. inflection is not utilized. the constructions are simple and consist mostly of two or three morphemes. (p. 24) the two key questions posed by this investigation are therefore: mark patkowski 510 1. do the two sets of utterances resemble one another in terms of the semantic relations they encode? 2. do the two sets of utterances resemble one another with respect to the major stage i syntactic mechanism, namely word order? an objection might be raised: why should anyone expect english word order from chimpanzees who communicate by means of lexigrams, a set of abstract symbols made available to them by the researchers? the answer is twofold: (a) the chimpanzees are exposed to a constant stream of standard english input from caretakers who “conform to their english-based ordering strategy even in their gesture plus lexigram utterances” (greenfield and savagerumbaugh, 1991, p. 245). illustrations are provided by savage-rumbaugh et al. (1993), who list 660 sentences spoken in scrupulously standard english that were presented to kanzi and that ranged from “start a fire” (p. 115) to “take the telephone to the bedroom” (p. 153) and “can you get the orange that’s in the potty” (p. 188). examples of mixed spoken-english/lexigram input from gillespie-lynch, greenfield, lyn, and savage-rumbaugh (2011) include “you could play with the orangoutans” (p. 453) and “play hide with panbanisha and karen” (p. 451) (following the convention adopted in the chimpanzee research, words in capital letters designate lexigrams); (b) if the bonobos are truly functioning “in the arena of grammatical structure” at a level equivalent to that of a 2-year-old human child, then the word order test proposed above must surely be considered appropriate. 1. method 1.1. the data: chimpanzee corpus as already mentioned, the data consist of previously published corpora for three chimpanzees and three children. the chimpanzee data were published in the appendices to two research reports, greenfield and savage-rumbaugh (1991) and lyn, greenfield, and savage-rumbaugh (2011). in describing their approach to classifying the chimpanzees’ two-element combinations, the researchers state that they followed “accepted methodology” (greenfield & savage-rumbaugh, 1991, p. 241), citing brown (1973) among others. the 1991 appendix presents a corpus of 717 spontaneous two-element combinations (that is utterances consisting of either two lexigrams or a lexigram and a gesture) produced over a five month period by kanzi, a bonobo chimpanzee (pan paniscus), beginning when he was 5.5 years old. the 2010 appendix presents two corpora, also of two-element combinations including mixed lexigram/gesture and a handful of gesture/gesture looking for structure: is the two-word stage of language development in apes and human. . . 511 utterances, one for panpanzee (637 combinations), a common chimpanzee (pan troglodytes), and one for panbanisha (642 combinations), a bonobo chimpanzee. these data were also collected over 5 months, beginning when both were 3.5 years old. kanzi’s corpus consists of 51% of his total recorded combinatorial output during that period with most of the eliminated data having been dropped either because of the absence of a second observer to record context, or because they consisted of immediate imitations. panpanzee’s and panbanisha’s corpora represent the totality of their two-element utterances over the 5-month collection periods, also excluding immediate imitations. the lexigrams, which provide the main medium for chimpanzee communication, are a set of geometric symbols, 392 of which are listed in segerdahl, fields, and savage-rumbaugh (2005). in the laboratory, the symbols are available to the chimpanzees on a computer keyboard. when a key is pressed, the selected symbol becomes brighter and a spoken word is produced by means of a speech synthesizer. in the field, laminated boards with pictures of the lexigrams are used, to which both chimpanzees and experimenters can point. the lexigram set comprises a large number of content “words” including many nouns (well over 200), a smaller number of verbs (under 70), and a few adverbs, adjectives, and prepositions. a certain number of additional function words are also included, such as some determiners, pronouns, and wh-words. in addition, some bound inflectional morphemes are supplied (e.g., -ing, -ed, “plural”). at the time of the studies, the three chimpanzees are reported to have had productive vocabularies ranging from 70 to 105 lexigrams. as already noted, the chimpanzees also make use of gestural signs. however, before these are discussed, the problem of how to count utterances needs to be raised briefly, with particular attention to the distinction between counting tokens and counting types. in the present context, tokens would refer to the total sample of twoword utterances, including multiple instances of a single utterance, while types would refer to distinct utterances that fall into the same category. for example, thirty repetitions of “mommy read” would count as thirty tokens of the agent + action category of semantic relations but as only one type, while “mommy read” said twice and “dog play” said four times would count as two types (and six tokens) of the same category. it is instructive to note that two of the researchers centrally responsible for elaborating the “accepted methodology” purportedly followed in the chimpanzee research clearly make the token-type distinction. thus, brown (1973) specifically draws the reader’s attention to the fact that the frequencies he presents for his “prevalent semantic relations” in table 22 (p. 174) are for “multi-morpheme types (or distinct utterances as opposed to ‘tokens’)” (p. 184). bloom, lightbown, hood, bowerman, and maratsos mark patkowski 512 (1975) do the same, stating that it is “the frequencies of semantic-syntactic relations in utterance types, not tokens” (p. 14) that are presented in their results in table 2 (p. 15). yet, the token-type distinction is never acknowledged in either greenfield and savage-rumbaugh (1991) or lyn, greenfield, and savagerumbaugh (2011), not even in table 2 (p. 313) of the latter study. this table is labelled “the most frequent types of two-element combination constructed by panbanisha, panpanzee, and kanzi,” but all the frequencies presented in the various columns are actually token counts. why is such emphasis being placed on the token-type distinction? because, as ellis (2002) puts it, “type frequency determines productivity” (p. 166). that is, a higher number of distinct utterances encoding a particular relation or pattern makes it less likely that the pattern in question is being used as an unanalyzed “chunk,” and makes it more likely that the pattern has been acquired productively. therefore, in assessing the extent to which learners may have acquired certain structural patterns, it is more useful to count types than tokens (although, of course, there are other circumstances when counting tokens will be called for). more generally, one could point out, it has been a long-held tenet of linguistics that the linguist “is interested in types, not tokens” (lyons, 1977, p. 28), or, similarly, that “linguistics offers generalizations concerning sentence-types, not sentence-tokens” (fiengo, 2003, p. 253). this study, then, will be careful to keep the reader apprised of the exact nature of any counts that are presented. returning to the topic of the chimpanzees’ gestural signs, two aspects immediately stand out. first, the vast majority of mixed lexigram/gesture utterances follow a single pattern: lexigram-first, gesture-last. table 1 illustrates this aspect. table 1 frequencies and percentages of chimpanzees’ mixed utterance following the gesture-last order frequency percent kanzi 94 70.7 panpanzee 114 82.0 panbanisha 90 80.4 combined 298 77.6 note: these counts represent frequencies in utterance types, not tokens. second, pointing gestures, rendered as “that” and “you” in the kanzi corpus, and as “indicates ___/dg” (where indicates is followed by an agent, object, goal, etc., and where dg stands for “deictic gesture”) in the panpanzee and panbanisha corpora account for the vast majority of the gestures used in mixed utterances. another category of gestures, labelled “representational gestures” (or rg as opposed to dg), is described as comprising a few informal and american sign language gestures and includes signs for “go” (by far the most utilized of looking for structure: is the two-word stage of language development in apes and human. . . 513 the rg signs), “come,” “hide,” and several others. strikingly, adding the token frequencies for the rg “go” to the token frequencies for the deictic signs yields totals that account for over 95% of the gestures used in the mixed utterances of all three chimpanzees, as can be seen in table 2. table 2 frequencies and percentages of different chimpanzee gestural signs signs kanzi panpanzee panbanisha deictic gestural signs: “that” 258 (58.8%) – – “you” 133 (30.3%) – – “indicates” – 211 (82.1%) 216 (73.7%) representational gestural signs: “go” 26 (5.9%) 40 (15.6%) 63 (21.5%) “come” 10 (2.3%) 2 (0.8%) 7 (2.4%) all other signs 12 (2.7%) 4 (1.6%) 7 (2.4%) notes: these counts represent frequencies in utterance tokens. the deictic gesture “indicates” essentially consists of pointing at agents, objects, entities, and locations. this gesture was reported for panpanzee and panbanisha, but not kanzi. however, kanzi’s two most frequently used gestures (“that” and “you”) seem to be rough equivalents to the “indicates” gesture. greenfield and rumbaugh (1990, 1991) and lyn, greenfield, and savagerumbaugh (2011) argue that the gesture-last ordering strategy is evidence that the chimpanzees have invented a formal, linguistic rule. this argument can be critiqued on at least two grounds. first, the deictic gestures, which are used in 75% or more of the chimpanzees’ mixed utterances, do not appear to be truly “linguistic” gestures. take kanzi’s deictic “you”; it is quite different in nature from the pronoun “you” in american sign language. indeed, while pronominal reference in asl does make use of pointing, it crucially also involves establishing within the signing space in front of the signer’s body a series of points of reference which identify the objects, persons, and locations which will be referred to (friedman, 1975, p. 946). furthermore, even though extending the index finger is the handshape most commonly employed for pronominal reference, at least eight other possible shapes are also available (baker-shenk, 2002, p. 205). it was considerations of this nature that led rivas (2005) to conclude, after an examination of 3448 signed utterances by five veteran signing chimpanzees, that “there was no evidence for the use of you and me as actual pronouns. . . (and that) that could not always be interpreted as a demonstrative” (410-411). rivas then suggested that the gestures in question be referred to simply as “pointing” (413); clearly, such pointing can only be categorized as an extralinguistic feature of communication. secondly, a modality-based rule that applies independently of the semantic-syntactic context is not a “linguistic” rule. as anderson (2004) puts it, a combining principle which simply places the gesture in mark patkowski 514 last position is “as if, in english, we wrote the first word of the sentence, spoke the second, and e-mailed the third” (p. 42); such a principle might be intriguing, but it has nothing to do with syntax. therefore, this study will only consider the two-element combinations from the chimpanzee data that consist of two lexigrams. in addition to the more theoretical objections raised above, practical considerations also dictate this choice: with just two or three gestural signs accounting for 95% of the mixed utterances produced by kanzi, panpanzee, and panbanisha, and with mixed utterances accounting for approximately 40% of total utterances, any attempt to uncover statistical evidence for syntactically driven word order will be falsified by the effect of the nonsyntactic “gesture-last” rule. table 3 illustrates how the original total count for all three chimpanzees of 1996 utterance tokens is winnowed down to the 614 lexigram-only utterance types which are analyzed in this paper. table 3 summary description of chimpanzee corpus name age (years) two-element utterances all tokens all types lexigram-only types kanzi 5.5 to 6 717 303 170 panpanzee 3.5 to 4 637 326 184 panbanisha 3.5 to 4 642 372 260 total 1996 1001 614 note. all data are drawn from the appendices in greenfield and savage-rumbaugh (1991) and lyn, greenfield and savage-rumbaugh (2011). 1.2. the data: child language corpus as previously discussed, the child language data sets of two-word utterances are drawn from the childes database (macwhinney, 2000). specifically, the following files were selected: for adam: adam01.cha for eve: eve01.cha through eve03.cha for sarah: sarah001.cha through sarah007.cha the earliest files available were selected to ensure that the children were clearly at stage i. the difference in the number of files used for each child resulted from the considerable differences in overall length of the various files and in the number of two-word utterances contained therein. two-word utterances were counted as follows: two-word sequence, followed by a period, or a question or exclamation mark: tie shoe . two-word sequence, followed by a pause: tie shoe (.) mommy . two-word sequence as a retracing: tie [/] tie shoe . looking for structure: is the two-word stage of language development in apes and human. . . 515 two-word sequence follows the expression “oh”: oh tie shoe . in all of the above examples, tie shoe would be counted as a two-word utterance. below are two examples where tie shoe would not be counted: unintelligible material is present: xxx tie shoe . a pause occurs between the two words: tie (.) shoe . in cases where two words appeared to be used as a single expression by the child, they were counted as a single word. this applied to expressions that were expressly coded as single lexical items in the files (e.g., bunny+rabbit), but also to a handful that were not (e.g., sit down). all utterances coded in the childes files as imitations (imit) were eliminated. as can be seen from table 4, the final count in utterance types is almost identical to that for the chimpanzees. the mean length of utterance (mlu) values for eve and sarah are clearly within the stage i range, whose upper limit brown (1973) set at 2.00 (p. 249). on the other hand, adam’s mlu places him within the stage ii range (2.00 to 2.50), but his performance on two key stage i morphemes (the progressive -ing form, and the plural -s) suggests that he is barely entering that stage. out of adam’s 1263 transcript lines, only two, arguably three, contain true instances of the “primitive progressive, with -ing but no auxiliary” described by brown (p. 318), two of which could be interpreted as imitations, even though they are not coded as such in the file, namely: mother: do you hear a horn playing? adam: horn playing . mother: you didn’t watch where you were going. adam: watch going . the following exchange provides an interesting contrast: mother: he’s going out. adam: he go out. in the third progressive -ing occurrence, adam seems to be commenting on a story his mother is reading to him, when he says, like adam adam swimming. there are twelve more uses of the -ing suffix in adam’s transcript, but these involve constructions other than the progressive, including nine instances of camping trip where the present participle functions as a modifier, a construction which brown specifically excludes in his scoring criteria for this morpheme (p. 259). as for the plural -s, it only occurs three times in play checkers, no pictures in here, and dirty my hands. in short, despite his slightly elevated mlu, adam can still be mark patkowski 516 considered a high stage i speaker who is beginning his transition to stage ii and his two-word corpus should still provide a reasonable basis for comparison with the chimpanzee data, especially as it is combined with those of eve and sarah. table 4 summary description of child corpus name age mlu two word-utterances tokens types adam 2:3:4 2.215 484 251 eve 2:3:5-2:3:19 1.714 269 176 sarah 2:3:5-2:4:10 1.820 380 215 total 1886 642 note. all data are drawn from the childes database (macwhinney, 2000). mlu = mean length of utterance. 2. procedure and results 2.1. semantic relations in their appendices greenfield and savage-rumbaugh (1991) and lyn, greenfield, and savage-rumbaugh (2011) assign all the two-element combinations in the chimpanzee corpora to several categories of semantic relations, seven of which are drawn from brown’s (1973) set of eight prevalent stage i semantic relations, specifically: 1. agent + action: adam put, eve read 2. action + object: put book, hit ball 3. agent + object: mommy pumpkin (“mommy is cutting the pumpkin”) 4. action + locative: walk street, go store 5. entity + locative: sweater chair, book table 6. attribute + entity: big train, other room 7. demonstrative + entity: that doll the missing eighth category is possessor + possession (e.g., mommy pumpkin meaning ‘mommy’s pumpkin’). it should be noted that in the chimpanzee studies, the category action + locative appears to be labelled action + goal, where “goal coded deictic gestures and substantive lexigrams always indicated a place or location [emphasis added]” (lyn, greenfield, & savage-rumbaugh, 2011, appendix, p. 2). the chimpanzee demonstrative + entity category comprises exclusively mixed lexigram/gesture utterances, as does the agent + object category, leaving only five categories for comparison with the child data. looking for structure: is the two-word stage of language development in apes and human. . . 517 nevertheless, once the child corpora of two-word utterances types were compiled as described in the preceding section, each utterance type was considered for assignment to one of all eight of brown’s semantic relations. overall, it was possible to categorize 76.5% of the child utterance types, a proportion consistent with brown’s previously mentioned claim that his prevalent relations account for about 70% of most samples. an area of difficulty in the coding task involved locatives. as brown describes them, “stage i locatives are either the name of places or one of the pro forms” (1973, p. 194). however, as he further notes, the “pro forms” (the pro-adverbs here and there) often function as demonstratives. thus one coding strategy might have been to classify n + proadverb sequences (e.g., cromer there) under the entity + locative category, but to assign pro-adverb + n sequences (e.g., there cromer) to the demonstrative + entity category. the problem is that the child’s semantic intentions are not always made clear from the context. such a structure-based strategy could then conveniently (from the perspective of the eventual word order analysis) assign n + (here or there) combinations to the semantic category whose expected syntactic frame would be n + locative, while equally conveniently assigning (here or there) + n combinations to the semantic category whose expected syntactic frame would be demonstrative + n (effectively, a dp), thus artificially inflating the children’s word order scores. to avoid this unsatisfactory outcome, it was decided to treat all instances of here and there as locatives. the problem did not arise with respect to the action + locative category (expected syntactic frame: v + locative) as neither here nor there can properly function as demonstratives in two-word utterances that include a verb. another “appropriate” way that there might appear in first position would be as an expletive. however, use of the expletive there does not occur in stage i child language. indeed, language acquisition studies concerning the use of expletive subjects (usually in the context of children’s understanding of raising vs. control verbs) typically test subjects in the 3-5 year range (e.g., becker, 2009). the differences between the child and chimpanzee groups as a function of semantic relation were then tested by means of a two-tailed mann-whitney u test, using the probability tables for very small samples from mann and whitney (1947), reproduced in popham and sirotnik (1973, p. 394). the two-tailed test was applied because there were no a priori expectations as to the directionality that any differences might take. the results failed to reach significance for all five semantic categories. as an examination of table 5 shows, there is a great deal of variability in the proportional frequencies, both within and across the two groups. for example, within the child group, the proportion of total utterance types in the action + object category ranged from 0.079 to 0.283. similarly, within the chimpanzee mark patkowski 518 group, proportions in the entity + locative category ranged from 0.092 to 0.181. across the two groups, proportions in the action + locative category ranged from 0.028 to 0.173, with the higher proportions found in the chimpanzee group; meanwhile, results for the entity + attribute category went in the other direction, with a range from 0.046 to 0.167, with the higher proportions found in the child group. such results are very much in line with brown’s (1973) own finding of considerable variation in frequency among the eight semantic relations (p. 179). table 5 child and chimpanzee usage of different semantic relation categories: absolute and proportional type frequencies agent + action action + object action + locative entity + entity + locative attribute human children: adam 22 71 13 7 25 0.088 0.283 0.052 0.028 0.100 eve 17 23 5 9 10 0.097 0.131 0.028 0.051 0.057 sarah 4 17 7 33 36 0.019 0.079 0.033 0.153 0.167 chimpanzees: kanzi 8 22 23 22 16 0.047 0.129 0.135 0.129 0.094 panpanzee 12 11 26 17 11 0.065 0.060 0.141 0.092 0.060 panbanisha 3 13 45 47 12 0.012 0.050 0.173 0.181 0.046 mann-whitney u test (two-tailed) u = 2.0 ns u = 1.0 ns u = 0 ns u = 2.0 ns u = 2.0 ns note. ns = nonsignificant it will be recalled that the first research question was: do the two sets of utterances resemble one another in terms of the semantic relations they encode? the short answer is that this comparison uncovered no statistically significant differences; hence, with respect to this specific set of five semantic relations, the chimpanzees do seem to be functioning approximately at the level of a 2-year-old human child. 2.2. word order it is an accepted finding in the study of first language acquisition that children’s two-word utterances in english almost always exhibit appropriate word order. bloom (1970) and brown (1973) remarked upon this phenomenon decades ago, looking for structure: is the two-word stage of language development in apes and human. . . 519 as did tomasello (1992) about 20 years later, as do contemporary textbooks (e.g., o’grady, archibald, aronoff, & rees-miller, 2009). researchers such as christophe, nespor, guasti, and van ooyen (2003) have even argued that 12-week-old infants can already discriminate between languages that differ in their word order. on the other hand, explanations for this phenomenon have varied over time, even just within the single tradition of generative grammar. for instance, in the context of early generative transformational theory, circa the “extended standard theory” period (chomsky, 1965), bowerman (1973) suggested that the “surface structures of most of children’s utterances can be generated directly by the rules of the base component and do not require transformational modification” (p. 172). later accounts took inspiration from transformational theory circa the “principles and parameters” period (chomsky, 1981). for example, gibson and wexler (1994) proposed that the interplay between the settings of two parameters (specifier-head and complement-head) produces a language’s basic word order, such as the english svo order. wexler (1998) further proposed his “very early parameter-setting” (veps) hypothesis according to which certain basic parameters (including the two just mentioned) are set by 18 months of age. more contemporary approaches in the generative grammar tradition draw from the minimalist program (chomsky, 1995) and focus on the operation merge to characterize the underlying architecture of children’s early multi-word constructions. thus, yang and roeper (n.d.) argue that the operations asymmetric merge and label both directly capture the unique combinations found in early child language and predict word order invariance. at the same time, they consider that “minimalism has not supplemented the basic architecture of p & p for the task of language acquisition” (p. 2) and that the parameter-setting paradigm remains extremely useful in the language acquisition research context. for the purposes of this paper it is the well-established fact of word order invariance in very early child language that matters most. that invariance is best tested in three of the five semantic relation categories presented in table 5: agent + action, action + object, and action + locative. in terms of gibson and wexler’s proposals, setting the specifier-head parameter will yield the sv order of agent + action, while setting the head-complement parameter will result in the vo order of action + object. the positioning of locatives (particularly adverbial locatives) is a controversial issue in linguistics, but if we limit ourselves to the stage i locatives at hand, under an analysis such as larson’s (1988) which places the locative in complement position of the lexical verb within a vp shell, setting the head-complement parameter would also account for the v-locative sequence in the action + locative category. this is not to suggest that the child is generating an entire vp shell structure with several empty nodes but rather, along the lines of yang and roeper’s argumentation, that the child is merging a v and a locative (either a noun or one of the two pro forms) with the latter in complement position. mark patkowski 520 as discussed above, the entity + locative category presents certain problems and will be disregarded in the word order analysis. similarly, the entity + attribute semantic relation can fit equally well into two syntactic frames that yield opposite word orders: an adjective-noun sequence (e.g., big truck) and noun-adjective or noun-adjectival participle sequences (e.g., dog happy, truck broken). as brown commented, “either order is likely to be heard, since the model language includes both the prenominal adjective (yellow block) and the predicate adjective (the block is yellow)” (p. 197). to reiterate, then, the three semantic relation categories that offer the most straightforward material for comparing the word order strategies of children and chimpanzees are agent + action, action + object, and action + locative. the results of the comparison are presented in table 6. the mann-whitney u test employed here was one-tailed as there was a strong expectation of directionality in the findings since, as already discussed, children’s “violations of normal word order are triflingly few” (brown, 1973, p. 156). table 6 child and chimpanzee performance on word order in three semantic relation categories: proportion of utterance types in normal word order agent + action action + object action + location human children: adam 0.864 0.944 1.000 eve 0.941 1.000 1.000 sarah 1.000 1.000 1.000 chimpanzees: kanzi 0.750 0.818 0.435 panpanzee 0.500 0.455 0.739 panbanisha 0.667 0.615 0.667 mann-whitney u test (one-tailed) u = 0 exact p = .050 u = 0 exact p = .050 u = 0 exact p = .050 as can be seen, all three comparisons came in at the .05 level of significance; the contrast to the results in table 5 is evident. the answer to the second research question, whether the two sets of utterances resemble one another with respect to the major syntactic mechanism that is present at stage i, namely word order, is that they are not. chimpanzees may be capable of cognitive operations involving certain semantic relations that also feature in the cognition of human children, but these results yield no evidence of a capacity for syntax on a par with that of 2-yearold human children at stage i of their language development. 3. concluding discussion so far, the data examined in this study have led to two conclusions: (a) no statistically significant differences were found in the frequency with which three looking for structure: is the two-word stage of language development in apes and human. . . 521 chimpanzees and three 2-year-old children expressed five types of semantic relations in their two-word utterances, (b) significant differences in word ordering were found in the three patterns that were tested. the general conclusion, it was suggested, is that while human and nonhuman primates may share certain cognitive capacities, the ability to process language syntactically is not one of them. that general conclusion may be further elaborated by examining qualitative data that were not included in any of the tables presented above. to start with, the complete absence of the possessor + possession category in the chimpanzee corpus stands out, especially when one notes, as roeper (2009) does, that the first two semantic relationships to appear in child language are usually location and possession. in fact, roeper even argues that possession can be demonstrated to be a part of the 1-year-old child’s one-word grammar (p. 49). another marked contrast involves the sheer level of linguistic production: it only took child transcripts representing from 1 to 3.5 hours of conversation to yield a two-word corpus comparable in size to the chimpanzee corpus which, it will be recalled, was gathered over 5 months. question making in general, and wh-interrogation in particular, also provide stark contrasts. as would be expected at stage i, adam’s, eve’s, and sarah’s transcripts contain numerous instances of declarative utterances followed by question marks that indicate the rising intonation of a yes/no question (e.g., neil sit?). as for the chimpanzees, they were regularly exposed to both yes/no and wh-interrogation by their experimenters, and had access to a “question mark” of their own, the lexigram rendered as question. however, only panbanisha ever made use of this lexigram, and then only twice: “question yes” classified as a “performative-affirmative” (no gloss given), and “question refrigerator” classified as a “performative-entity,” where panbanisha is asking to go to the refrigerator (lyn, greenfield, & savagerumbaugh, 2011, p. 309, and appendix, pp. 14 and 18). the children all produced wh-questions. eve used where; sarah used where and what; adam used where, what, who, and why. even though lexigrams were provided for where, what and how, the chimpanzee corpus does not contain a single instance of their use. two more areas of the chimpanzees’ “linguistic” production deserve particular scrutiny: the extensive use of conjunction in two-element combinations, and the very limited production of lexigram-only, three-element combinations, which also appear to rely on conjunction. starting with the former, 144 or 23.5% of the total chimpanzee corpus of 614 two-word, lexigram-only utterance types presented in table 3 above consisted of “conjoined actions” (e.g., grab play), “conjoined attributes” (e.g., quiet scare), “conjoined entities” (e.g., banana raisin), and “conjoined locatives” (e.g., grouproom bedroom). while a handful of utterances in the child corpus that were designated as “unclassifiable” do seem to resemble such conjoined expressions (e.g., coffee grape-juice mark patkowski 522 or pull ride), these accounted for a tiny proportion of adam’s, eve’s, and sarah’s overall production; in fact, they accounted for a very small proportion of the unclassifiable category itself. roeper (2009) specifically discusses the almost complete absence of conjunction at the two-word stage of child language, arguing that while conjunction might look like the simplest way to assemble twoword strings, the problem is that conjunction fails to make a structural distinction between those two words. that is, children are driven “to always ‘merge’ – to always build phrases where one element dominates” (p. 56), in short to display the basic structure of language in their earliest utterances. children do this by performing the asymmetric merge and label operations, but chimpanzees appear not to, as attested to by their word order performance and their extensive use of (symmetric) conjunction. furthermore, their three-element combinations seem consistent with such an analysis. unfortunately, an extensive review of the chimpanzee research uncovered very few three-element, lexigram-only utterances that also came with glosses to help illuminate their possible meanings. a table supplied by savagerumbaugh, mcdonald, sevcik, hopkins, and rubert (1986, p. 225) lists 25 threeelement combinations (without glosses), only one of which consists solely of lexigrams, which suggests that three-lexigram utterances are very rare indeed. the four that were found are listed below, with their glosses: 1. t-room scare noise (brakke & savage-rumbaugh, 1995, p. 147). gloss: panbanisha and the experimenter are looking in the toy room when panbanisha notices the noise made by the toilet in the bathroom. 2. sleep hug milk (gillespie-lynch et al., 2011, p. 450). gloss: panbanisha is vocalizing happily as the caregiver prepares milk for her nap. 3. chase bite grab (gillespie-lynch et al., 2011, p.453). gloss: both kanzi and panpanzee produced this sequence to ask their caregiver to play with them by chasing, biting and grabbing them. 4. shirt on bad (lyn, greenfield, savage-rumbaugh, gillespie-lynch, & hopkins, 2011, p. 68). gloss: panbanisha doesn’t want to put her shirt on, and feels bad about it. with such limited evidence, one can do little more than offer an impressionistic interpretation. however, impressionistically speaking, all four utterances strike this observer as displaying no more underlying structure than would result from simple, symmetric conjunction, certainly when compared with “typical” three-word sentences constructed by adam, eve, and sarah, three of which are presented below looking for structure: is the two-word stage of language development in apes and human. . . 523 (each being the first three-word utterance, not counting potential unanalyzed “chunks” such as i don’t know, taken from the child’s first childes file): 1. alright look tv. (adam) 2. read the puzzle. (eve) 3. i broke dat. (sarah) in a study to which this one bears some similarity, rivas (2005) examined 3448 videotaped instances of signing by five chimpanzees who had been using signs in their communications with humans for several decades, including washoe and others who had been studied extensively in earlier research (e.g., fouts, 1975; gardner & gardner, 1969). it is important to note that these chimpanzees were exclusively taught to use signs based on american sign language and did not have access to other modes of communication such as the lexigrams employed by kanzi, panpanzee, and panbanisha. a total of 2,366 utterances that did not contain imitations, or unclear or unidentifiable signs, were selected for analysis. of these 474 were two-sign combinations, and another 307 involved three or more signs. the study addressed three research questions, the third of which is of particular relevance to the present paper: “what combinations of signs do the chimpanzees make and is there a semantic or grammatical structure in these sequences? are semantic relations present and do order preferences exist?” (p. 405). the basic conclusions reached by rivas were: that there is no clear evidence of semantic relations in the two-sign combinations of the five chimpanzees; that utterances involving three or more signs are essentially repetitive concatenations of signs; and that no syntactic pattern is evident in the signing order of multi-sign utterances. rivas summarized as follows: “the chimpanzees’ combinations of signs show no internal structure, whereas humans combine words or signs in a semantically and grammatically structured way” (2005, p. 413). rivas’s second and third conclusions are fully in accord with this study’s findings. the first conclusion, however, renders a more severe judgment on the chimpanzees’ semantic capacities than does this study. the difference appears to be in the willingness to accept the coding schemes employed in categorizing the chimpanzees’ utterances. in carrying out the present study, some of the categorizing listed in the appendix by lyn, greenfield, and savage-rumbaugh (2011) did seem somewhat puzzling, as the two following examples may illustrate: slow string: categorized as attribute + entity, with the explanation that slow is a way of asking permission due to caregivers’ requests to go more slowly mark patkowski 524 open dog: categorized as action + goal (where “goal” actually refers to “place or location”), with no explanation offered. nevertheless, the overall coding seems reasonably appropriate and was not contested. rivas, on the other hand, finds little correspondence between the sign combinations (and the semantic relations they embody) in his study and those reported earlier by the gardners. to take just one example, the gardners had reported action + object utterances such as eat apple, but rivas found that over half of the candidates for this relation type consisted of strings such as drink gum or clothes eat, which he judged to be unrelated combinations. be that as it may, both studies essentially conclude that the two-word stage of language development in children and apes is different, and lend support to the contention by hauser et al. (2014) that “animal communication systems have thus far failed to demonstrate anything remotely like our systems of phonology, semantics, and syntax, and the capacity to process even artificially created stimuli is highly limited” (pp. 8-9). to place this conclusion in the broader context of the “animal rights” debate which has arisen in recent years, it is useful to turn to the cambridge declaration on consciousness (2012) which was signed by a prominent group of cognitive neuroscientists and which states in part that: convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates. to argue, as lenneberg did, that the faculty of language is a species-specific characteristic available only to humans, or to argue more narrowly, as hauser, chomsky, and fitch (2002) do, that it is only the computational mechanism for recursion (effectively, the ability to perform multiple merge operations) that is unique to our species is not equivalent to endorsing the classical cartesian position on animals as unfeeling automatons undeserving of recognition as fellow creatures on this planet. it is entirely possible, indeed fully justifiable in this writer’s opinion, to simultaneously accept the position articulated in the cambridge declaration on consciousness and that presented in the writings of lenneberg and his successors. language is unique to humans, but human and nonhuman animals do share many other fundamental biological characteristics. looking for structure: is the two-word stage of language development in apes and human. . . 525 references anderson, s. 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(n.d.). minimalism and language acquisition. unpublished manuscript, university of pennsylvania & university of massachusetts at amherst. retrieved from http://people.umass.edu/roeper/online_papers/minimalism%20%20yang-r oepe%20may%202010.pdf 199 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (2). 2015. 199-203 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.2.1 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial the various papers that make up this special issue of studies in second language learning and teaching have emerged from the first psychology in language learning (pll) conference, which took place in may 2014 at the university of graz, austria. we would like to open this special issue—the first of a series of two—by discussing that conference’s background, its focus, and its possible future in the hope that such a discussion will clarify our current aims and scope in this special issue. the original impetus for organising the conference came from a book that we, the editors of this special issue, were privileged to edit (mercer, ryan, & williams, 2012). the rationale behind that book was to bring together different areas of language learning psychology within a single volume. the experience of working on the book in conjunction with so many distinguished scholars from around the world convinced us of the potential of an approach that emphasises the commonality between various strands of research that had previously been developing in isolation from each other. many subareas of our field, such as motivation, autonomy, self, identity, strategy use, and beliefs, have existed as separate communities, with little exploration of the interplay and connections between these closely related areas. our aim in organising the 2014 conference was to build on the momentum of the book by creating a shared space that would facilitate exchange, and providing opportunities to explore and expand upon how these different areas are interlinked. a secondary aim was to reinterpret the word psychology within the context of foreign language education. for so long, psychology has been closely associated with cognitive processes in second language acquisition and with psycholinguistics, but in our book, the conference, and in this special issue, we are seeking to specifically foreground social and educational psychology themes. language learning is primarily a social and educational activity and we feel that these dimensions also need to be reflected in how we frame discussions of the psychology of learning a second or foreign language. 200 in the initial stages of organising the conference, we had anticipated a relatively small, but hopefully productive, gathering of like-minded people. however, once the call for papers went out, we were overwhelmed by both interest and proposals from all over the world. in the event, time and space limitations restricted us to a conference involving over 250 participants, who came from all continents except antarctica. of course, the success of the conference owed a considerable amount to the distinguished roster of plenary speakers, featuring zoltán dörnyei, andrew cohen, peter macintyre, ema ushioda, paula kalaja and jean-marc dewaele; the enthusiasm of this group of renowned scholars to contribute to and participate in our small conference was a further factor that persuaded us of its relevance and future viability. indeed, we are pleased to announce that the conference will continue as a regular biennial event, with the second one already efficiently organised by a team in finland and scheduled for summer 2016 (see: https://www.jyu.fi/en/congress/pll2016). we envision this and the following special issue of ssllt will serve as a bridge linking the two conferences, expanding upon issues emerging from the first, while preparing the ground for the second. it goes without saying that the graz conference did not emerge in a vacuum. it can be seen as part of a broader recent trend towards a growing awareness of the importance of psychology in understanding language learning and language learners. evidence of this trend can be found in the edited volume we mentioned earlier or, going further back, in zoltán dörnyei’s pioneering text, the psychology of second language acquisition (2009). we would argue that we are currently witnessing the birth of a new, coherent sub-discipline within applied linguistics with a distinct and clear identity of its own. the immediate future appears exciting and, in this special issue, we hope to share some of our feelings of excitement by pointing towards key areas that we believe may shape a future research agenda. developments occurring elsewhere further support our case for an active, lively future for this field. 2015 will see the publication of two authored books dedicated to themes of language learner psychology, one coming from a theoretical perspective (dörnyei & ryan, 2015) and another taking a more practical, pedagogic approach (williams, mercer, & ryan, in press). furthermore, two edited collections (gkonou, tatzl, & mercer, 2015; gregersen, macintyre, & mercer, 2015) specifically connected to the graz conference will also appear this year, addressing a range of issues in language learning psychology. given such levels of current activity, we are confident that our expectation of an exciting, productive future is justified, and we hope that this special issue will simultaneously highlight and complement recent developments. 201 a key theme of the graz conference was methodological innovation—just how do we go about researching something as complex and elusive as psychology in language learning? this motif strongly echoes throughout the selection of papers in this special issue. the first paper in the collection, by jean-marc dewaele—a plenary speaker in graz—and taghreed al-saraj, represents a powerful call to stop and take stock of how the field has been developing in recent years. in their study of the foreign language anxiety of arab learners of english, the authors, while remaining aware of calls for methodological innovation, remind us that we still have a lot to learn using established methods. they describe their approach as “sailing against the tide into familiar, charted waters,” and this metaphor offers a timely reminder of the need to avoid innovation simply for the sake of innovation and that we should not turn our backs on proven methods that bring results: a key element in research is choosing the most appropriate tools for the questions in hand, not the most fashionable. the next paper in the collection, kata csizér, edit kontra and katalin piniel’s study of the self-concept of deaf language learners in hungary, while still based in the quantitative tradition, is one that also moves out of that framework to include a qualitative dimension. what is particularly interesting about this paper is that it gives some indication of how the scope of inquiry into the psychology of language learners is expanding. it is fair to say that until recently that scope has been relatively narrow, including only language learners who fall into a convenient category that remains markedly monolingual and mainstream. the hungarian research points to a field confident enough to step out of the security of that mainstream. moving to the other side of the methodological spectrum, liss kerstin sylvén takes an innovative approach to the investigation of the beliefs of language learners in sweden. instead of collecting data through familiar methods such as questionnaires or interviews, the study employs a multimedia ethnographic approach based on photos taken by learners to explore and illustrate their own views of an l1, swedish, and a foreign language, english. the themes of methodological plurality and contextual sensitivity are further developed in miri baum’s fascinating investigation of the autobiographical language learning histories of two english teachers in israel. drawing on recent developments in personality psychology that position an ongoing internal narrative at the core of individual identity, the study offers a powerful and poignant account of two individuals’ “redemption” through language learning and how these feelings of redemption affect their approaches to teaching. moving away from discussions of methodology, the next two papers in this special issue offer valuable historical perspectives on how our field is evolving and where these developments may be taking us. first, ana maria barcelos reviews how beliefs and emotions have been conceptualised and studied within 202 applied linguistics, and through this review she illustrates the need for future research to focus more on how these constructs influence and interact with the construction of individual identity. next, andrew cohen—another plenary speaker at graz—provides a highly practical and personal view of the evolution of dual language programs in the us. andrew cohen has done an enormous amount over the years to raise the profile of and interest in the psychological dimension of language learning and his contribution here builds on his experience of over forty years’ involvement in dual language programmes offering insights which encourage dual language learners to take a proactive role in their own learning. he highlights in particular the need for learners to be agentic and strategically aware in order to make the most of the learning opportunities afforded in such settings. the final paper in this collection is a review of the book social dimensions of autonomy in language learning edited by garold murray. given the complexity and situatedness of the approach taken in the book, it was felt to be particularly suitable for review in the context of the pll conference and its overarching themes. the reviewer, michelle gilluly, concludes that the collection is extremely useful for both researchers and practitioners in reflecting on the emotional, spatial and political dimensions of autonomy. bringing the papers together for this special issue has been an exciting extension of the conference journey. we hope you find them useful and that they serve to prompt yet further discussion, research and debate. a final hope is that the debate stimulated by the various papers included here will carry us to the next stage of that journey—a second special issue of ssllt—and that you, the reader, will be there to accompany us. sarah mercer university of graz, austria sarah.mercer@uni-graz.at stephen ryan senshu university, tokyo, japan ryan@isc.senshu-u.ac.jp 203 references dörnyei, z. (2009). the psychology of second language acquisition. oxford: oxford university press. dörnyei, z., & ryan, s. (2015). the psychology of the language learner revisited. new york: routledge. gkonou, c., tatzl, d., & mercer, s. (eds.). (2015). new directions in language learning psychology. dordrecht: springer. collection in preparation. gregersen, t., macintyre, p., & mercer, s. (eds.). (2015). positive psychology in sla. bristol: multilingual matters. collection in preparation. mercer, s., ryan, s., & williams. m. (eds.). (2012). psychology for language learning: insights from research, theory and practice. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. williams, m., mercer, s., & ryan, s. (in press). exploring psychology in language teaching and learning. oxford: oxford university press. 357 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (3). 2013. 357-375 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl directed motivational currents: using vision to create effective motivational pathways christine muir university of nottingham, uk christine.muir@nottingham.ac.uk zoltán dörnyei university of nottingham, uk zoltan.dörnyei@nottingham.ac.uk abstract vision, that is, the mental representation of the sensory experience of a future goal state (involving imagination and imagery), is currently at the forefront of motivational innovation, and in recent years it has been seen increasingly more often in the motivational tool kit of practicing language teachers. theories such as dörnyei’s l2 motivational self system have explored the power that creating effective visions can harness (see, e.g., dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014) and when viewed in conjunction with other current research avenues, such as future time perspective and dynamic systems theory, vision offers exciting potential. a directed motivational current is a new motivational construct that we suggest is capable of integrating many current theoretical strands with vision: it can be described as a motivational drive which energises long-term, sustained behaviour (such as language learning), and through placing vision and goals as critical central components within this construct, it offers real and practical motivational potential. in this conceptual paper, we first discuss current understandings of vision and of directed motivational currents, and then analyse how they may be optimally integrated and employed to create effective motivational pathways in language learning environments. keywords: directed motivational current, vision, imagery, motivation process, l2 motivational self system, possible selves christine muir, zoltán dörnyei 358 in recent years, vision has not only been successfully introduced into the landscape of l2 motivation theory, but has become instrumental to our understanding of how to inspire motivated action in the language classroom. our practical understanding of vision has been supplemented by the theory of possible selves and imagery, as well as a comprehensive motivation construct, the l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2005, 2009), which has mediated this knowledge to facilitate its practical application in the language teaching domain. indeed, research into vision offers significant contributions to our understanding of how we might increase levels of student motivation as a part of future self-guides. we can define vision as “the imitative representation of real or hypothetical events” (pham & taylor, 1999, p. 250), occurring “when a representation of the type created during the initial phases of perception is present but the stimulus is not actually being perceived” (kosslyn, thompson, & ganis, 2006, p. 4). the term has been used in a number of diverse areas in the social sciences, so much so that van der helm (2009) talks about the vision phenomenon, covering “the ensemble of claims and products which are called ‘visions’ or could be called as such” (p. 96). he identifies seven different types of vision, but he argues that the core meaning of the concept is largely uniform, capturing the future, the ideal and the desire for deliberate change. within the context of possible language selves, we might view vision as “the sensory experience of a future goal state, or in other words, a personalized goal that the learner has made his/her own by adding to it the imagined reality of the goal experience” (dörnyei & chan, 2013, pp. 454-55). the detailed visions we create and the senses we use to form each vision of our future selves are generated through the same neural mechanisms as if we were to experience the event in reality (e.g., moulton & kosslyn, 2009); indeed, the brain can have difficulty in distinguishing an event which is occurring in reality from a detailed vision of the same event (cox, 2012). taylor, pham, rivkin, and armor (1998, p. 430) suggest that it is due to this that mental simulations gain mental simulations gain their motivational power; by functioning within the constraints of reality we are able to believe them to be genuine possibilities. such imagined realities can give rise to strong emotional reactions, allowing individuals to prepare coping and other strategies in advance of the event itself. through enhancing “the links between thought and goal-directed action” (pham & taylor, 1999, p. 250) in this way, visionary interventions can push us on to achieve because in our visions we have already seen, felt and experienced ourselves succeed. a vision in isolation however is not necessarily sufficient to inspire motivated action; such daydreams can easily dissolve into mere fantasy. yet by combining a powerful vision of a future self with a matching and highly strucdirected motivational currents: using vision to create effective motivational pathways 359 tured behavioural sequence, we may be able to consciously create a motivational surge of energy which can focus action towards a specific target in the future. significantly, when correctly set up, such a motivational current may in fact become self-propelling: when there is an intricate structure of subgoals laid out along a clear path towards a well-defined vision, the level of motivation fuelling action will be kept on a continuously high plane, thereby facilitating ongoing momentum. we have called this phenomenon a directed motivational current (dmc) (dörnyei, ibrahim, & muir, in press; dörnyei, muir, & ibrahim, in press) and have argued that it represents a unique motivational framework: it is a potent motivational pathway, which emerges when a specific set of initial conditions fall into place to allow for directed motivational energy to be channelled into a behavioural sequence that is aimed towards a predefined, explicit goal. the conceptualisation of this framework draws together knowledge from some of the most promising strands of l2 motivation research, such as vision/imagery, time perspective and dynamic systems theory. vision is key to this new conceptualisation of motivation, and we can think of vision as the “d” of a directed motivational current, providing both direction and focus to motivational endeavour. this paper is primarily conceptual. we start by considering the current role of vision within the l2 classroom, and discuss why we believe a new conceptualisation of motivation is both necessary and timely. we continue by offering examples of dmcs in varied contexts, and describe what we currently believe to be the specific parameters of the framework. we go on to situate dmcs within the broader context of motivational literature, giving examples of the theories which are currently most influential in colouring our understanding of dmcs. we conclude by outlining three specific areas of practical application for dmcs within l2 learning contexts and discuss where we believe future research is necessary in order to further develop the framework. vision in the l2 classroom dörnyei and kubanyiova (in press) understand vision as “one of the highest-order motivational forces” (p. 9). motivation has historically been viewed as a static entity, with the assumption that students can be categorized as either “motivated” or “unmotivated.” however, any teacher who has spent time in the classroom would be quick to point out that this is simply not the case; levels of motivation ebb and flow throughout the course of a lesson, a day and even over far longer periods of time. vision understood as a “highest-order motivational force,” relates to a long-term endeavour, which is able to override these fluctuations. in viewing student motivation in this way, vichristine muir, zoltán dörnyei 360 sion can be seen as “one of the most reliable predictors of their long-term intended effort” (dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014, p. 9). the latter aspect of the above description—the link to long-term effort— is of critical significance: if we are able to inspire motivated behaviour over time, this offers the possibility of creating far greater levels of stability within classroom contexts. language teachers understand well that not only can it often be a struggle to generate motivation in students, but that it is equally difficult to maintain levels of motivation for a period of time sufficient for measurable academic progress to be made. this can especially ring true in instances where the relevance of the new language to the students is difficult to illustrate. against this backdrop, the attractive notion of a dmc stems from the fact that by creating vivid goals and a potent motivational pathway leading to a personally relevant vision of a possible future self, students become inherently motivated, which in turn allows teachers to focus their energies more productively. in motivational psychology, the best paradigm to accommodate and operationalise the concept of vision has been possible selves theory, as set out by markus and nurius in their seminal paper (1986). as has often been described in the literature, this theory foregrounds three types of possible selves, imagined as what a person might become, what they would like to become and what they are afraid of becoming. when a person has created an intricate vision of their ideal self, that is, what they would like to become, higgins (1987, 1998) describes motivational impetus being created by the vividly explicit discrepancy between this imagined self and a person’s present self. in the field of sla, possible selves theory has been translated as a part of the l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2005, 2009), which is made up of three components, the ideal l2 self, the ought-to l2 self, and the l2 learning experience. each of these elements has an influence on our levels of motivation and each must be considered when looking at motivation within classroom contexts. numerous studies have confirmed the validity of the model since it was first introduced (cf. e.g. the papers in dörnyei & ushioda, 2009, as well as busse, 2013; csizér & lukács, 2010; henry, 2009, 2010, 2011; hiver, 2013; islam, lamb, & chambers, 2013; kormos, kiddle, & csizér, 2011; lamb, 2012; magid, 2012; papi, 2010; papi & teimouri, 2012) and the ideal l2 self has time and again been found to be a central motivating factor: a focused, personal and realistic vision of a possible future. the importance of being able to create vivid and thought-out images of our future selves is critical to the success of using vision as a motivational tool. accordingly, this process has been the subject of a great deal of scrutiny in psychology (particularly sports psychology), which has led to our understanding of how to create an effective vision becoming increasingly more advanced. directed motivational currents: using vision to create effective motivational pathways 361 past research has highlighted the specific implications of different aspects of the visionary experience, most notably the question of imagery perspective, the use of transportable versus fixed identities, the differences between outcome simulation and process-oriented imagery and of the use of multisensory imagery. although these ideas are not exhaustive, each represents a different segment of our understanding of using vision to inspire motivational gain, and each issue allows us to craft our visualisations in specific ways in order to achieve different motivational objectives. imagery perspective offers us two choices, firstor third-person perspective (see, e.g., vasquez & buehler, 2007). a first-person perspective involves the imagining of an event as if it were being experienced by the person in reality, whereas a third-person perspective involves the creation of a vision in which a person acts as the audience, looking down on themselves as actors. each imagery perspective has been found to have different motivational gains. the experiential knowledge gained from a first-person perspective is able to effectively increase self-efficacy and preparedness for the event in question (dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014), whereas a third-person perspective may be more effective in motivating action as it allows for “a greater tendency to focus on the event’s coherence with the self-concept” (libby & eibach, 2011, p. 718): the discrepancy between the ideal self and the present self is accentuated and is, therefore, more likely to prompt action. regardless of the perspective employed, it is vital a visualisation is constructed using an individual’s transportable identity. zimmerman (1998) identifies three identities which make up our self; a discourse identity, a situated identity, and a transportable identity. in any given situation, a person’s discourse identity is the communicative function being played, for example, speaker or listener, and a person’s situated identity represents the role which is being played, for example, student or lecturer. a person’s transportable identity subsumes all the factors which come together to make a person’s identity unique to them; their sex, race, passions, fears, hopes, dreams and so on. in order for a visualisation to be truly internalised, and therefore effective from a motivational standpoint, all areas of a person’s transportable identity must be embraced, creating a vision which reflects not only their personal context but all aspects of their character (richards, 2006; ushioda, 2011). whereas the relative advantages of a first-person and a third-person perspective can be seen as balanced, in that both can successfully be employed to achieve different motivational objectives, process-oriented imagery has been found to offer considerable advantages over the use of outcome simulation. this was a significant development, since the latter had been at the centre of motivation theories for many years. aside from allowing practichristine muir, zoltán dörnyei 362 cally for the planning process to begin (taylor, pham, rivkin, & armor, 1998), process-oriented imagery also provides a person with a vivid plan of action (pham & taylor, 1999, p. 250), thereby creating a pathway to the goal, as opposed to it being perceived as disconnected from present reality. research has also shown that visionary techniques are most effective when they involve more than one sense, that is, when they are more than purely visual representations. by including an auditory dimension in their research paradigm, dörnyei and chan (2013) showed that the predictive capacity of imagery was dramatically increased, and therefore they concluded that “vision is multisensory in nature, involving all the senses and not just visualization” (p. 21). in a paper comparing visualisation techniques and potentials in people with and without sight, eardley and pring (2006) also concluded that all the senses can be effectively used to increase motivation through imagery. their results indicated that even where someone is born blind, they are still capable of using effective imagery techniques, and further, that nonvisual imagery techniques played an “important role” for both blind and sighted individuals. an important development in the understanding of future self-guides was the recognition that even the strongest and most detailed vision may not be sufficient to trigger motivated action in the absence of some key conditions (dörnyei, 2005). dörnyei and ushioda (2011) offer the following summary of the conditions necessary to allow for the motivating capacity of self-guides to be realised: a learner must have an ideal self. a learner’s ideal self must be elaborate and vivid. a learner’s ideal self must be sufficiently different from a learner’s present self. a learner must believe that it is not comfortably certain that they will reach their goal. a learner’s ideal self must be perceived as plausible. a learner’s ideal self must not clash with their ought-to self or other elements of their self-concept. a learner’s ideal self must be regularly activated in their working self-concept. a learner’s ideal self must be contrasted by a feared self, depicting possible consequences should they fail to achieve their goals. a learner’s ideal self must be accompanied by procedural strategies, which allow for a roadmap to be created in the mind of the learner. this last point is of crucial relevance from the point of view of the current paper. we believe that vision theory is only one part of a wider narrative which can be effectively augmented through the inclusion of a well-structured behavioural regime to form a potent motivational framework. as noted above, we have operationalised this behavioural regime within the framework of dmcs. directed motivational currents: using vision to create effective motivational pathways 363 directed motivational currents vision can govern our behaviour in diverse ways and, as we have seen, does not necessarily always lead to immediate and decisive action. a vision may lie dormant for decades waiting for an appropriate time to emerge at a point when the necessary conditions—a number of interrelated circumstances and factors—fall into place and allow this focus to come to the fore. in contrast, a vision can also initiate a far more intensive course of action by activating a special kind of motivational “fast track.” a dmc is representative of exactly this kind of motivational surge; it is created when a structured pathway is set up towards a vision, in a way in which this pathway both reinforces momentum towards the vision and at each step intensifies it; in this way, a detailed vision of a possible future self acts as the fuel for this drive. in offering some examples of dmcs, we hope they will be immediately recognisable. in each of the following illustrations there is a clearly defined vision and an explicit turning point where action becomes decisively tuned in towards it. a visible change in routine is also evident in each: for the period of time leading up to the accomplishment of the goal, other areas of the individual’s life becomes secondary, as all efforts are aligned towards goal achievement. due to this, it is not uncommon that in the period of time after the goal has been achieved, an individual might feel both physically and mentally drained and take time to adjust back to the everyday routine governing their lives before the dmc was initiated. within the field of education, a readily recognisable example of a dmc is someone working towards a deadline for a piece of writing, either within the context of work or study. let us imagine a university student finishing a final dissertation; in the weeks leading up to this final deadline they might (perhaps uncharacteristically) decline offers of evenings out and work with far greater fervour in order to successfully succeed in producing a piece of work which represents the best of their abilities, thus ensuring that down the line they may be offered their dream job, the vision fuelling the dmc. for the period of time prior to the deadline, their behaviour becomes highly focused and disciplined, fully geared at achieving success. directed motivational currents are also prevalent in the world of sports, a realm where visionary techniques have been used for decades as a means of inspiring intensified motivated action in athletes. if we imagine a 100-m sprinter, in the three weeks before a race, the motivated behaviour exhibited by the athlete is likely to be fundamentally different from behaviour exhibited during the months of training leading up to this point. the generated dmc, from the specific race approaching, is likely to have strong noticeable effects christine muir, zoltán dörnyei 364 on all areas of their life: perhaps on the number of times per week they train and how hard they work during these sessions, a change in their eating or sleeping habits and a general sense of heightened energy is also likely to be evident as the goal becomes closer and within reach. we can also see evidence of dmcs in everyday situations, such as when someone might set themselves a target to lose weight and generally live a healthier lifestyle. we can see here the difference between someone who is intrinsically motivated in a particular area and someone who is swept up in a dmc. in the case of the former, one might naturally be inclined to spend time working out every week, a habit built into their daily routine and which might, for example, mean that the ordering of a healthy option from a restaurant menu is unremarkable. in contrast, a dmc is evidenced when someone displays motivated behaviour which is over and above their normal levels of motivation, and which pervades several aspects of their lives, such as their eating habits and daily routines. we would likely find such a surge and change in priorities when someone decides to run the next local half marathon or sets an ambitious weight loss goal; when a clear vision is set. as the above examples illustrate, a dmc is clearly and specifically visionoriented. at all times there is a pre-defined finishing line at an explicit point in the future, allowing for motivational vigour to be efficiently directed. the concept of everything in an individual’s life lining up when in a dmc can be imagined in the same way as the movement of a swimmer’s hair moving underwater. when motionless, hair billows around of its own accord, each strand moving seemingly independently, changing direction and velocity due to a multitude of factors; the currents in the water, meetings with other strands of hair, meetings with other objects in the water, even the weather conditions on the surface, along with a host of other factors. the movement of each strand is, to an observer, seemingly random, but in reality is influenced and affected by a multitude of unknowable factors. when a swimmer starts to swim towards a point in the distance however, this forward motion overrides the influence of all these unknown factors. each strand begins to organise itself and the forward movement forging ahead through the water becomes the dominant force over the multiple factors which were previously determining the movement of each strand. this is similar to what might happen to the gym convert; as they become focused on reaching their goal, this focus overrides other influences in their lives and on their time, and their everyday routine is temporarily altered to facilitate successful goal achievement. directed motivational currents: using vision to create effective motivational pathways 365 the dmc makeup although each dmc is by definition unique and guided by an individual’s personal vision of a future self, what makes the notion of a dmc significant from a scientific point of view is that there are several common features which can be seen in every dmc. these characteristics can be considered “defining” of a dmc, as without any of these components a dmc could not emerge. first and foremost, a dmc is always and in every case directional; the relative success of a dmc hinges on a clear vision being established and truly internalised. a second key feature of a dmc is that it requires a structure which is both salient and facilitative. this is created through setting frequent and varied subgoals which offer tangible feedback of progress. if our motivation peaks when we are approaching a goal, such proximal subgoals serve to keep motivation high and keep us looking forward, on towards the next step along the pathway. in addition to looking towards the end of a dmc pathway, the launch of a dmc is of equal importance and must be equally well managed. a successful dmc requires a clear starting point. whether this manifests itself as something akin to a dramatic firework display, clearly recognisable to others, or is a more private, yet equally firm and meaningful, decision, it must nevertheless have taken place and have been explicit. a dmc does not simply drift into being; whether conditions are deliberately put into place or whether they happen to fall that way, the released motivational force of a dmc decisively dominates multiple aspects of an actor’s life and therefore must result from a conscious decision. once this launch has been initiated, a kind of motivational autopilot comes into force, whereby a person’s normal routines are temporarily replaced by a new set of routines focused on goal achievement. regardless of whether this new regime involves regular visits to the gym, a set of language practice targets for each day or the attendance of a course to learn a new skill, the salient point is that the necessary steps taken will not require volitional control at every stage, but will become internalised as part of the dmc. a further feature of dmcs is that there must be a clear emphasis on participant ownership. this follows on from the centrality of vision to the construct. as discussed, an effective vision is highly personal and individualised, and even the ought-to self image—which involves importing someone else’s vision for an individual—only has motivational value if the individual fully adopts it as his/her own. this level of ownership extends to the structure of the dmc itself. the actor needs to embark on the process with full conviction, believing in the significance of each target and feeling assured that each subgoal is not only achievable but will contribute strongly to achieving the final vision. the positive emotional loading created in this way allows munchristine muir, zoltán dörnyei 366 dane activities related to each subgoal to take on increased levels of significance, and for the strength of the overall vision to permeate throughout the entirety of the dmc, endowing each subgoal with a uniqueness it would otherwise be without. when viewed in conjunction with the satisfaction obtained from this clear perception of progress, the positive emotional loading of being on a rewarding journey stands as a final significant aspect of how a dmc comes to be self-propelling in the wake of a potent vision. dmcs in mainstream motivation theories although a new concept, dmcs have often been alluded to in the motivation literature. looking specifically at l2 motivation, lepp-kaethler and dörnyei (2013) found strong evidence of motivational pathways akin to dmcs in their study of how links with sacred texts can elevate bible translators’ and other faith practitioners’ language learning efforts. the authors describe the heightened level of motivation observed in some of their participants, extraordinary both in terms of intensity and longevity, as a “jet stream” in which “learners are caught in a powerful inner current” (p. 186). such a powerful current of motivation has also been described in non-language-related research, for example, by harber, zimbardo and boyd (2003, p. 262) as a “fast track,” which was evidenced in future-oriented students when compared to those who were more oriented towards the present (see below for more detail). let us survey briefly a number of established motivation theories in psychology which display significant links with certain elements of dmcs. goal-setting theory the most obvious connection in this respect is with goal-setting theory (locke & latham, 1990). its main tenet is that human action is caused by purpose and that this purpose is translated into the goals that people set for themselves. dörnyei (2001) describes four central means by which goals can govern behaviour: they direct attention and effort towards goal-relevant activities at the expense of actions which are not relevant. they regulate effort expenditure in that people adjust their effort accordingly to the difficulty level required by the task. they encourage persistence until the goal is accomplished. they promote the search for relevant action plans or task strategies. each of these functions plays a role in a successful dmc, yet equally relevant is the recognition in goal theory that proximal subgoals, that is, shortdirected motivational currents: using vision to create effective motivational pathways 367 term targets leading to the accomplishment of the overall, distal goal, increase the motivational loading of goal-related behaviour. subgoals of this sort not only provide constant targets to aim for, but also act as progress markers allowing an individual regular positive feedback. flow theory the type of motivational autopilot described earlier has been touched upon within the literature in several different guises. it is related to the concept of proximal subgoals, as discussed above, but it is more prominently associated with csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) flow theory, describing optimal task engagement. csikszentmihalyi explains that people can enter a unique mindset—or flow— where they are wholly focused and are intent on achieving the task in hand. this state of being absorbed in a task is not unlike being caught up in the surge of a dmc, although csikszentmihalyi's notion of flow concerns a significantly shorter time-scale (a one-off activity). the conditions necessary for the initiation of flow are also comparable to the conditions needed to launch a dmc. egbert (2003) gives a brief summary of the broad dimensions of these conditions: a balance exists and is recognised between the challenge posed by the task and participant skill, clear goals are outlined and there is opportunity for deep concentration, the participant has intrinsic interest in the task or views the task as authentic, the participant is able to claim control over both the task itself and the outcomes. perceived behavioural control ajzen’s (1988, 1991) concept of perceived behavioural control, a key element of his theory of planned behaviour, offers a further theoretical link with dmcs. the perceived level of control an individual has over a situation relates to the fact that the actor in a dmc must believe that it is within their capabilities to manipulate the situation sufficiently in order to achieve a favourable outcome. only in this way can an individual take full psychological ownership of pursuing a goal. the vision aspect of a dmc is particularly relevant here, because the detailed imagery constructed in advance, particularly processoriented imagery, allows the goal to take on aspects of reality, and the highly structured pathway offers a straightforward route towards it, with each step clearly mapped out and understood. christine muir, zoltán dörnyei 368 self-determination theory self-determination theory (deci & ryan, 1985) is a further theoretical strand relevant to dmcs, even though it is, in contrast to the theoretical bases discussed above, not goal-related. at the heart of this theory lies the concept of intrinsic motivation, that is, the motivation to engage in a task for reasons purely related to the enjoyment of the task itself, as opposed to pursuing rewards or recognition (i.e., extrinsic motivation). one particularly pertinent aspect of self-determination theory is the assumed strong link between motivation and autonomy (i.e., self-determination), a connection which has also been recognised in sla contexts. ushioda (1998, p. 2), for example, pointedly states that “autonomous language learners are by definition motivated learners.” this is clearly relevant to the overall “ownership” condition of a dmc, and it also helps to explain the broader process of learners engaged in a dmc attributing their successes to their own efforts, thereby increasing their levels of motivation as their self-efficacy and perceived behavioural control grows. time perspective the theoretical approach labelled as time perspective has in recent years enjoyed something of a renaissance within the field of mainstream motivational research. although the concept of time has forever intrigued motivation scholars, given the pervasive static perception of motivation mentioned at the beginning of this paper, it was a relatively recent development which conceded that “the perception of time is inevitably linked to the selection and pursuit of social goals” (carstensen, isaacowitz, & charles, 1999, p. 166), and which has allowed time perspective to truly start exerting an influence on motivational theory. a basic understanding of time perspective can be illustrated thus: imagine two candidates begin a new job knowing that they will be promoted after three years if they perform well. someone with a strongly developed future time perspective will perceive those three years as shorter in duration (and will thus be less impatient) than someone with a less developed future time perspective. the futureoriented individual would also more likely appreciate the instrumental value of tasks currently under completion and therefore would exhibit a higher level of motivation at the present moment (a finding first made by de volder & lens, 1982, and subsequently replicated in a raft of other studies from a broad range of disciplines). in contrast, the candidate oriented more towards the present would likely have less regard for his future promotion because of its perceived greater distance from the present. because dmcs are, by definition, future-oriented, this line of thinking is helpful in understanding the motivational power of vision-formation. directed motivational currents: using vision to create effective motivational pathways 369 dynamic systems theory finally, the solidifying and aligning function of dmcs can be most aptly understood and valued from a dynamic systems theory (dst) perspective. as a technical term, a dynamic system is descriptive simply of a context which has multiple factors in play, each influencing those surrounding them and thereby causing multiple interferences. the behaviour of such systems can, and often does, seem random (or non-linear) when viewed as a whole because the multiple interactions can become so complex that rather than seeing patterns of movement, we perceive movement to be chaotic. despite its complexity, understanding the world around us from a dst perspective does make intuitive sense, because our actions, however banal, are influenced by such a large number of factors and conditions that it is usually impossible to describe our motives with 100% accuracy. in this respect, it is highly relevant that, as mentioned in the first part of this paper, vision can be seen as a highest-order motivational force, able to override lower-level fluctuations. a vision-driven dmc is even more potent as it combines the future-oriented perspective of vision with the robustness of a self-propelling behavioural structure. in this way, a dmc can be seen as a predictable pathway even in a complex dynamics terrain. dmcs in the l2 classroom vision and imagery are becoming increasingly more recognised within language teaching methodology. dörnyei and kubanyiova’s (2014) discussion is matched by two practical collections of classroom activities, arnold, puchta and rinvolucri’s (2007) imagine that! mental imagery in the efl classroom and hadfield and dörnyei’s (2013) motivating learning. when considering dmcs in the classroom, although obviously not referred to under this term, several key aspects have traditionally been capitalised on in language instruction. in many ways, the structured setting of a classroom is an ideal context for the creation of a dmc, as it allows for the laying out and controlling of an intricately structured pathway. in this final section we would like to illustrate the operation of dmcs on three different time scales: a language teaching task, a project and study-abroad. regardless of the timescales, the generated motivational current in each case has a specific starting point, a well-defined final goal and a clear structure which facilitates progress. christine muir, zoltán dörnyei 370 language teaching tasks the shortest of the suggested applications is able to function at a lesson level, where a dmc is set up, launched, pursued and the goal reached all within the duration of a single class. an example of this is a language teaching task, where the goal might be, for example, the creation of a performance, a presentation or a poster. in order to successfully set up a dmc within this short time scale, it is important that power be given early on to the students themselves, especially if the class is large, where it would likely be impossible to create a central vision which each student may effectively personalise in the time available. within the clear parameters of the activity in hand, students must be allowed to take control and design the specifics of the task so that it becomes personally relevant to them. to increase the motivation-facilitating capacity of the structure, proximal subgoals need to be set for progress points throughout the lesson to allow for a building of momentum and enthusiasm for the final goal. in visual tasks, such as the preparation of a display, this incremental feedback is provided by the task itself, as the visual elements are constructed and elaborated to form the overall picture. projects this is perhaps the most easily recognisable way of implementing a dmc in the classroom. a piece of project work is ideally suited as it is characteristically likely to be well structured, and the extra time allocated to the project, in contrast to aiming to create a dmc within the confines of a single lesson, means that there is also greater opportunity for students to create more detailed, individualised goals personal to themselves. a dmc at project level can gain real momentum as the structure can be controlled to offer a series of meaningful subgoals which can be laid out in advance. at the start it is vital that all students “get on board” and personally engage with their project’s objectives, understanding in turn how those can contribute towards achieving their own personal learning goals/vision. in order for this to happen it is important to spend time “selling” the project and offering an effective rationale, whetting the students’ appetites. study-abroad a study-abroad period, for example, during an undergraduate degree in modern languages studies, by definition must have a clear starting point, as students will need to commit to the goal in advance. however, this feature directed motivational currents: using vision to create effective motivational pathways 371 alone is not necessarily sufficient for a dmc to be created; while some students who have gone abroad for a term or a whole year come back with dramatically improved levels of the l2, there are also many students who have gone away and made very little noticeable improvement. in an extended dmc such as a year-abroad, a strong vision takes on an even higher level of significance, almost in proportion to the length of time it is required to support. directed motivational currents such as this will typically see motivation peak during the beginning of a student’s time abroad, and then find a plateau where highly motivated behaviour, over and above that which might have been exhibited while at home, can be maintained for a long period of time on “motivational autopilot.” directed motivational currents are uniquely able to facilitate what might be considered the foundation of a successful study-abroad programme; the implementation of a structure which is sufficiently overarching and able to hold the whole sequence together in a meaningful way. a particularly successful application of providing a purposive framework such as this has been the study-abroad programme developed by celia roberts and her colleagues (2001) as part of the ealing ethnography research project. the project was designed to answer two key research questions, the first relating to whether language teachers can “learn to teach an ethnographic programme” and, secondly, aimed at understanding whether using these ethnographic approaches could make the period abroad “an active learning experience” (p. 13). to create an overall purpose for engaging with the target language and culture, undergraduate students were trained (in year 2) to complete an ethnographic study of an individually chosen aspect of the host country while resident abroad (year 3) to be written up in a research report (year 4). this project was highly effective in providing students both with an “excuse” for immersing themselves in the life of the l2 community and, further to this, an opportunity for meaningful intercultural encounters, serving as a motivating intellectual challenge to prepare for, undertake and evaluate. conclusion vision occupies a firm and increasingly prominent place within the landscape of l2 motivation research. a growing body of research has allowed for confidence in the motivating power of vision within the context of language learning, mirroring the high levels of success found by researchers looking at vision within other fields, for example in sports psychology. the concept of dmcs adds to the mix a tightly structured behavioural regime, offering a potent and predictable motivational framework. the motivational surge characterising dmcs is used in many areas of life, from running political campaigns to christine muir, zoltán dörnyei 372 preparing for the village choir concert, as it releases a great deal of goalspecific energy to fuel on-task behaviour. furthermore, dmcs are effective in overriding the messy complexity of everyday life and aligning diverse elements of a system; a good illustration of this capability is the well-documented fact that setting superordinate goals for a group of people is one of the best strategies to create cohesiveness, even amongst people who have displayed hostility towards each other in the past. what is particularly noteworthy from an educational perspective is that dmcs can be consciously employed for the purpose of motivational interventions, for example to fight apathy or achieve feats which may be beyond the normal capabilities of the agents in question. to realise this potential, further research will be needed to fully understand the initial conditions necessary for a dmc to be created, as well as the optimal structural properties of the emerging surge. in any case, the combination of vision with a matching action structure offers a heady mixture, a potentially very powerful tool which has the ability to transport learners to achieve goals they did not imagine within their reach. directed motivational currents: using vision to create effective motivational pathways 373 references ajzen, i. 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(pp. 87-106). london: sage publications. 283 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (2). 283-300 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl foreign language anxiety and self-perceived english pronunciation competence magdalena szyszka regional educational centre for foreign languages, teacher training college in opole, poland mszyszka@nkjo.opole.pl abstract in foreign language learning a negative correlation has been reported between language anxiety and both oral performance (liu, 2006; stephenson wilson, 2006; woodrow 2006) and self-perceived levels of speaking ability (kitano, 2001; macintyre, noels, & clement, 1997; piechurska-kuciel, 2008). however, little is known about the relationship between language anxiety and the way students perceive their own competence regarding one of the integral components of oral performance – pronunciation. the present study is an attempt to investigate the link between foreign language anxiety and the self-perceived levels of pronunciation of 48 teacher training college students, who study english as a foreign language. a negative correlation, r = -.54 (p < .05), was found between the level of their language anxiety and self-perceived english pronunciation competence, indicating that more apprehensive teacher trainees perceived their pronunciation as poor, whereas those with lower levels of anxiety declared higher pronunciation competence. moreover, statistically significant negative correlations were noted between the levels of anxiety and self-perceived competences of several suprasegmental aspects of pronunciation, such as word pronunciation, stress, weak forms, rhythm, linking, and assimilation. the teacher trainees who rated their competence of these suprasegmentals more highly experienced lower levels of foreign language anxiety. the perception of segmentals, however, appeared to be unconnected with the participants’ anxiety. keywords: language anxiety, pronunciation, communication apprehension magdalena szyszka 284 as many authors attest (cheng, 1998; pawlak, 2003; szpyra-koz owska, frankiewicz & gonet, 2002), developing learners’ pronunciation seems to be a neglected area. at the same time, teachers and foreign language learners view pronunciation as an important facilitator of communication and fluency in speaking (waniek-klimczak, 1997; wrembel, 2002). indeed, the segmental and suprasegmental elements of pronunciation are an integral component of spoken language (pawlak, 2011, p. 5), and as such are frequently taken into account when oral performance is evaluated (szpyra-koz owska, 2003; waniekklimczak & d utek, 2003). oral performance is reported to be associated with language anxiety (la; liu, 2006; stephenson wilson, 2006; woodrow, 2006). for instance, learners are sometimes reported to experience anxiety when giving speeches in class, interacting with a native speaker, or being corrected while speaking (mak, 2011, p. 210). anxious foreign language learners also mention problems directly linked to pronunciation. for example, they complain about difficulties “discriminating the sounds . . . of a target language” (horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986, p. 126) and feel embarrassed because of their pronunciation errors (price, 1991, p. 105). these self-perceived pronunciation problems indicated by apprehensive learners have been overlooked in quantitative studies on la, and only a few researchers have investigated whether la interplays with the component of pronunciation in oral performance (e.g., feigenbaum, 2007). the purpose of the present study is to fill in the existent gap by investigating the relationship between la and students’ self-perceived levels of pronunciation competence in english as a foreign language. in the theoretical part of the paper, the concepts of la and its relationship to both oral performance and self-perceived competence in the foreign language (fl) speaking skill is briefly described. then, the potential link between la and fl pronunciation is discussed. the empirical part presents the results of a correlational study confirming the hypothesis that a relationship exists between la levels and selfperception of learners’ l2 pronunciation. la and fl pronunciation la has attracted the attention of many researchers (cf. horwitz, 2010). the results of their studies contribute to understanding how language learners’ feelings of la interact with the process of acquiring a foreign or second language (macintyre, 1995; macintyre & gardner, 1989; piechurska-kuciel, 2008). a learner in a fl classroom may experience, among other things, “the worry and negative emotional reaction aroused when learning or using a second language” (macintyre, 1999, p. 27), which denotes la. it may be maniforeign language anxiety and self-perceived english pronunciation competence 285 fested by the physical symptoms of nervousness, for instance sweating, heart pounding or feeling cold, as well as impaired cognitive abilities such as limited performance, creativity and concentration (woodrow, 2006, p. 310). the concept of la subsumes anxious reactions in the context defined as a language classroom. it is categorized as situation-specific (ellis, 1994, p. 480), because the feeling of worry and apprehension, which is often experienced in the language classroom, changes into a solidified reaction concerning language learning and language performance. this type of anxiety refers to “a single context or situation only. thus, it is stable over time but not necessarily consistent across situations” (macintyre, 1999, p. 28). a learner may feel anxiety while learning a fl, but in a different context this feeling may disappear. horwitz et al. (1986, p. 127) distinguish three aspects of la linked to oral performance: communication apprehension, test anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation, which are termed as performance anxieties. the first one is observed in oral communication contexts and is manifested in the levels of anxiety or fear a learner experiences while interacting in a fl. this type of anxiety may be manifested by a fear of speaking in class, called oral communication anxiety, or a fear of speaking in public – stage fright – as well as by a fear experienced while listening, termed receiver anxiety (horwitz et al., 1986, p. 127). test anxiety appears in contexts of formal evaluation, during which a learner experiences feelings of worry, which, in turn, influence the whole process of learning (aydin, 2009, p. 128). the last one, fear of negative evaluation or social-evaluative anxiety (piechurska-kuciel, 2008, p. 64), is encountered when a learner fears being evaluated negatively in a range of social situations. there is a range of research exemplifying the relationship between levels of la and learners’ oral performance (liu, 2006; philips, 1992; stephenson wilson, 2006; woodrow, 2006). this research appears to confirm that la is a feeling that may be associated with different forms of fl oral performance. liu (2006) investigated 547 first year undergraduate learners of english in china, applying an adapted foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas; horwitz et al., 1986) to measure la, as well as teacher observation, reflective journals, classroom observation, and a semi-structured interview to identify the activities that made the participants most and least anxious. the researcher found that most participants experienced anxiety when giving oral presentations in class. philips (1992) discovered a negative correlation between la and oral performance. she used the flcas to measure the levels of la of 44 participants, who were students of a fl aged from 17 to 21. they took an oral examination whose results were analyzed and correlated with la levels. a negative moderate relationship was found (r = -.40, p < .1), which confirmed magdalena szyszka 286 that “students who expressed more foreign la tended to receive lower exam grades than their less anxious classmates” (p. 17). a similar study was conducted by stephenson wilson (2006), who investigated 40 students enrolled in an english for specific purposes course at granada university. la was measured with the flcas translated into spanish. the oral performance evaluation followed philips’ (1992) procedure of conducting an oral test consisting of two parts; the first one was a free discussion on a given topic, while the second one consisted of a role-play. pearson’s correlation was carried out for oral test grades and la levels, confirming a statistically significant negative correlation (r = -.494 at p < .001). in another study, woodrow (2006) found a negative correlation between oral performance and speaking anxiety experienced inside and outside the classroom in the second language learning context. the quantitative data were collected from 275 participants who were studying english for academic purposes in australia. the researcher proposed a dual conceptualization of speaking anxiety, referring to in-class and out-of-class second language anxiety as separate constructs and such a division was supported in the study. the correlational analysis indicated that both of these types of anxiety are related to oral performance. apart from the interest in finding correlations between oral performance and la, some researchers investigated the interplay of la and the way learners perceive their own fl abilities, including self-perceived l2 speaking competence. macintyre et al. (1997) investigated 37 students learning french as l2, who were asked to self-report on their perceived french competence, in the areas of speaking, listening comprehension, reading and writing. they used a 6-point likert scale, where 0 indicated no competence and 6 indicated fluency. the participants were also tested objectively with a number of proficiency tests. la was measured on a 19-item scale that consisted of gardner’s french use anxiety and french class anxiety scales. the results confirmed the hypothesis that “actual competence, perceived competence and language anxiety are all interrelated” (macintyre et al., 1997, p. 274). the negative significant correlation was found between la and self-rated speaking proficiency. kitano (2001) measured anxiety levels and the self-perception of speaking ability among 212 fl students. the results indicated that “an individual student’s anxiety was higher as he or she perceived his or her ability as lower than that of peers and native speakers” (p. 549). the self-rating of the individuals’ current level of speaking ability was negatively related to class anxiety (r = -.509, p = .00). in yet another study piechurska-kuciel (2008) found a strong reverse correlation between la and self-perceived levels of the speaking skill, which was sustained over a three-year period among 393 secondary grammar foreign language anxiety and self-perceived english pronunciation competence 287 school students of english in poland. the participants responded to a questionnaire that comprised, among others, the flcas and self-perception of english speaking abilities. much in the same vein, onwuegbuzie, bailey, and daley (1999) investigated factors associated with fl anxiety among 210 students. the instrument measuring la was the flcas, and the self-perceived competence of learners was measured with self-perception profile for college students questionnaire. a multiple regression analysis showed that one of the factors predicting the level of la is perceived scholastic competence. the relationship between pronunciation as a component of oral performance and fl anxiety is still a barren land in research studies. nevertheless, there is some justification for directing attention towards the potential links between aspects of fl pronunciation and la. shams (2006) claims that pronunciation might contribute the three components of anxiety, that is communication apprehension, test anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation. la may be triggered by communication apprehension when a learner fears that communication will break down because of his or her poor pronunciation. pronunciation may also play a role in test anxiety “when the subject feels that the teacher is assessing and ‘grading’ the quality of pronunciation. it can also contribute to fear of negative evaluation when the speaker fears what others may think of the way she sounds” (p. 55). the potential connection between fl pronunciation and la might be of a physiological and affective nature. the first link concerns the motor activity of speech mechanisms the learners activate when speaking. pronunciation encompasses “meaningful use of tl [target language] phonological features” (burgess & spencer, 2000, p. 191) produced with the help of respiratory, phonatory and articulatory speech organs (rogerson-revell, 2011, p. 28). the articulation of phonological features, represented by both segmentals, such as vowels and consonants, and suprasegmentals, such as weak forms, linking, assimilation, stress, rhythm and intonation, may be physically affected by the feeling of apprehension. la as an emotional arousal is manifested in physical changes or tensions in the muscles, which may alter the way a learner speaks or pronounces the target language (scovel, 1978). in other words, a high level of anxiety may affect the language learner’s fl learning, and may also lead to neuromuscular problems with pronunciation by physically impeding the fl learner’s speech. the other potential connection between pronunciation and la is signalled, though not developed thoroughly, in very few studies a hypothetical link between affect and pronunciation has been revealed by some language learners, including the ones in the study of derwing and rossiter (2002, p. 161), where 60 out of 100 respondents perceived a change in their pronunciamagdalena szyszka 288 tion when nervous and the same number declared a change in accent when they were excited. in another study, one learner claimed that “i hate it when the teacher calls on me to speak. i freeze up and can’t think of what to say or how to say it. and my pronunciation is terrible” (horwitz & young, 1991, p. xiii). these examples signal that the area in question is under-researched. the statements on pronunciation problems expressed by apprehensive language learners draw attention to the issue of how la interacts with learners’ perceptions of competence. price (1991, p. 105) finds self-perceived pronunciation problems as a source of classroom-related anxiety. the anxious learners in price’s (1991) study compared their pronunciation to that of a native speaker, and the inability to articulate fl words correctly made them feel embarrassed and intimidated. according to young (1991), the discrepancy between a learner’s perceived competence and reality may trigger high levels of anxiety, as in the case of a learner who views pronunciation as the most significant aspect of the target language. however, the reality is that most “students, unless they are highly motivated, will not sound like a native speaker” (p. 428). it is important to note that care needs to be taken to ascertain whether la is the cause or the effect of different aspects of fl learning (cf. stephenson wilson, 2006, p. 93). moreover, macintyre, noels, and clement (1997) note that “highly anxious students do not perceive their competence to be as high as a more objective analysis reveals it to be” (p. 278). therefore, the danger in self-perceived pronunciation competence ratings is that students may under-estimate their abilities if they are not confident enough in pronouncing words in a fl. alternatively, they may want to raise or protect their feelings of self-worth by overestimating the quality of their pronunciation. macintyre et al. (1997, p. 278) name these two approaches as ‘self-enhancement’ and ‘self-derogation,’ respectively. the results of research on the pronunciation self-perception of advanced learners confirm the discrepancies between learners’ self-perceived and externally evaluated pronunciation competences (dlaska & krekeler, 2008; nowacka, 2006). to the best of the author’s knowledge, none of the studies so far have investigated self-perceived pronunciation levels with reference to la. little is known about the relationship between la and the way students perceive one of the integral components of speaking – pronunciation. as hardly any studies have been conducted in this area, the present study fills in this gap by investigating the relationship between fl anxiety and students’ self-perceived pronunciation competence (here also referred to more succinctly as selfevaluation) of english as a fl. the hypothesis adopted for the purpose of the study is the following: la is negatively correlated with the self-perceived compeforeign language anxiety and self-perceived english pronunciation competence 289 tence of fl learners. in other words, students experiencing higher levels of la perceive their pronunciation to be worse in comparison to less anxious learners. method the empirical part provides a detailed description of the participants, the instruments used to measure fl anxiety and self-perceived pronunciation competence, as well as the procedure followed in the study. participants the participants were 48 teacher training college students aged between 19 and 36. the average age of the respondents was 21. there were 41 female and 7 male students. they were studying to become english teachers at all educational levels in poland, and they were in their first of three years of training. all of them were taking part in a pronunciation course at the teacher training college offered throughout the first and second semester of their studies (60 hours in total). the course was important for the participants, as it finishes with an examination they were obliged to pass to continue their teacher training studies. the participants of the study were familiar with the basic notions describing different aspects of phonetics, which were used in the pronunciation self-perception questionnaire. the segmental features, that is, vowels and consonants, were studied thoroughly in the first semester, and the suprasegmentals were referred to in the second semester. therefore, the participants chosen for the study were aware of the nuances of english pronunciation and were able to self-rate their pronunciation competence. instruments and procedure the first instrument used in the study was the flcas developed by horwitz et al. (1986) to measure the level of fl anxiety. the wording in the survey was slightly adapted to suit the context; for example, instead of using the original expression “foreign language class,” a reference to all classes conducted in english was made. the participants were asked to respond to the 33 flcas items referring to their feelings of anxiety experienced during the classes and lectures conducted in english at the college. the responses were given on a 5-point likert scale, where 1 indicated strong disagreement, and 5 – strong agreement with a statement. when calculating the data from the flcas, it was taken into consideration that nine items were reversed. the comagdalena szyszka 290 efficient cronbach alpha was calculated indicating the high internal reliability of the tool (alpha = .94). the second instrument used in the study, the pronunciation self-evaluation form (psf), was a questionnaire designed by the author to measure the participants’ self-perceived level of aspects of their segmental pronunciation, that is, vowels and consonants, as well as suprasegmentals, such as pronunciation of individual words, word stress, weak forms, rhythm, linking, assimilation, and intonation. additionally, the participants were asked to rate their overall perceived pronunciation competence. the choice of these aspects of pronunciation was largely dependent on the pronunciation course content, which aimed at familiarizing teacher trainees with and creating opportunities for practicing the segmental and suprasegmental features of english pronunciation mentioned above. the respondents were instructed to self-rate each aspect of their pronunciation on a 5-point likert scale (1 indicated very poor and 5 very good). moreover, they were reminded of the aspects focused on by the questionnaire both orally before the distribution of the questionnaire, and in writing in the form of a key reminding them of these aspects of pronunciation which constituted an integral part of the questionnaire. the key included examples of each pronunciation aspect listed in the questionnaire. additionally, the respondents were asked to provide basic biodata. the respondents were invited to participate in the study in the spring semester of 2011. they were requested to write their names on both questionnaires in order for the researcher to be able to match the data from both of the instruments. however, at the same time, they were informed that this information would be used only for the purposes of the study. after receiving oral consent from the teacher trainees, the author chose two consecutive pronunciation classes to collect the data. it took approximately 30 minutes to respond to each survey. the instruments were administered separately with a week-long break inbetween. this time interval allowed the students to concentrate on one concept at a time. first, the participants were asked to respond to the flcas. after a week, they were given the pronunciation self-perception questionnaire and reminded of the meaning and interpretation of each aspect of pronunciation mentioned in the questionnaire. additionally, to avoid misinterpretations, they were provided with a key including short explanations and examples of those aspects. results the present section presents a number of analyses used to investigate the relationship between fl anxiety and the self-perceived pronunciation competence of the participants. firstly, the basic statistics for la and aspects foreign language anxiety and self-perceived english pronunciation competence 291 of the self-perceived pronunciation of the participants are given. secondly, pearson’s correlation between la and the aggregated data from the psf is calculated. thirdly, spearman’s rho correlations between la and each pronunciation aspect, evaluated by the 48 participants, are obtained. finally, the 48 participants are divided into two groups of high and low anxiety learners, whose self-perceived pronunciation competence levels are measured with a t test to find out whether these levels differ in the two groups. the data collected from the flcas were computed and aggregated. the sum of points for each participant indicated an individual’s level of la with the lowest la score being 43 (the minimal value of the scale was 33) and the highest la reaching 128 out of a maximum of 165 points. the mean la of the 48 participants was 81.35 and standard deviation equaled 23.07. the data from the second questionnaire, the psf, were calculated to obtain the following: points indicating self-rated pronunciation competence referring to each segmental and suprasegmental aspect, an individual’s overall self-perceived pronunciation level, and the aggregated self-assigned points of all pronunciation questionnaire items. means, standard deviations, and minimum (min.) and maximum (max.) values were calculated for each self-evaluated aspect of pronunciation, as well as for the aggregated overall pronunciation level (see table 1). the respondents rated their pronunciation of segments very highly: consonants (m = 3.9) and vowels (m = 3.8), similarly to their ability to pronounce individual words (m = 4). the average scores for the self-perceived competence of suprasegmentals, such as word stress, weak forms, rhythm, linking, assimilation and intonation, were very similar (either m = 3.4 or m = 3.5). table 1 means, minimum values, maximum values and standard deviations of self-perceived levels of aspects of pronunciation and the aggregated data of the self-perceived pronunciation questionnaire (pronunciation competence) of the participants (n = 48) no. aspect of pronunciation m min. max. sd 1. vowels 3.8 3 5 .63 2. consonants 3.9 3 5 .62 3. word pronunciation 4.0 3 5 .62 4. word stress 3.4 2 5 .84 5. weak forms 3.5 2 5 .85 6. rhythm 3.4 1 5 1.03 7. linking 3.5 1 5 .87 8. assimilation 3.5 2 5 .77 9. intonation 3.5 1 5 .92 10. self-perceived overall pronunciation 3.5 2 5 .68 11. pronunciation competence 3.59 2.3 4.8 .55 magdalena szyszka 292 then the pearson’s product moment correlation coefficient of la and the aggregated values of the pronunciation self-perception questionnaire were calculated for the 48 participants. the correlation coefficient equaled r = -.54 (p < .05), which indicated quite a strong negative relationship between these two variables. this statistical measure confirmed that students who declared lower pronunciation competence experienced a higher level of fl anxiety, and those who perceived their pronunciation as better were less anxious. subsequently, the level of language anxiety was correlated with each of the subparts of the pronunciation self-evaluation questionnaire using spearman’s rho (rank-order correlation coefficient r). the self-perceived levels of segmental aspects of pronunciation, that is, vowels and consonants, turned out to be insignificantly related to the teacher trainees’ language anxiety levels (see table 2). table 2 spearman’s rho correlation of the language anxiety level and pronunciation self-evaluation items for n = 48 (* indicates statistical significance at the minimum .05 level) no. language anxiety level correlated with pronunciation self-perceived competence of the following: r p 1. vowels -.1 .48 2. consonants -.25 .07 3. word pronunciation -.29* .04 4. word stress -.52* .00 5. weak forms -.32* .02 6. rhythm -.57* .00 7. linking -.44* .00 8. assimilation -.36* .01 9. intonation -.27 .06 10. overall pronunciation -.46* .00 self-evaluation of the learners’ pronunciation of words was weakly but statistically significantly correlated with language anxiety (r = -.29, p = .04). other weak negative correlations with language anxiety concerned selfperception of weak forms (r = -.32, p = .02) and assimilation (r = -.36, p = .01). the data showed that the level of language anxiety was most strongly related to the self-perception of rhythm (r = -.57, p = .00) and word stress (r = -.52, p = .00). the link between that overall pronunciation evaluation of the respondents and language anxiety was also indicated by a considerably strong negative correlation (r = -.46, p = .00). the self-rated aspects of pronunciation that did not correlate significantly with language anxiety were vowels, consonants and intonation. foreign language anxiety and self-perceived english pronunciation competence 293 finally, to confirm that the aggregated data of self-perceived levels of pronunciation competence were different in the two different groups of more apprehensive and less apprehensive participants, a t test for unmatched samples was used (see table 3). table 3 the results of the t test for unmatched high language anxiety (hla) and low language anxiety (lla) groups hla mean lla mean t df p hla sd lla sd hla vs. lla 34 37 -2.56 46 .01 4.65 5.84 the teacher trainees participating in the study were assigned to the high language anxiety (hla) group if their la level exceeded the mean score m = 81.35. those participants whose la score was below the mean constituted the group of low language anxiety (lla). there were 24 participants in each group. then their aggregated scores of self-perceived pronunciation competence were calculated with a t test. the results showed that these two groups differed significantly (t = -2.56, p = .01). highly anxious teacher trainees evaluated their pronunciation competence significantly differently than the low anxiety group. discussion the hypothesis that there is a negative relationship between the levels of learners’ la and the way learners perceive their target language pronunciation has been generally confirmed in this study. the results of the study reveal that a link exists between one of the affective factors of la, and the selfperception of learners’ abilities to pronounce words in a fl. the correlation coefficient indicates a negative relationship, which means that the students who experience higher levels of la perceive their pronunciation competence as worse than those whose anxiety is lower. highly apprehensive learners feel insecure with their way of pronouncing a fl. that negative perception may further affect students’ oral performance because if learners do not feel confident enough with the way they articulate foreign utterances, they may limit their oral communication in a foreign language. most self-perceived suprasegmental aspects of pronunciation, apart from intonation, are found to be significant correlates of la. the highest negative correlation is observed between the level of la and self-evaluation of rhythm, as well as word stress. self-perceived levels of linking, assimilation, weak forms and word pronunciation indicate a lower but still significant correlation with la. these results draw attention to suprasegmentals, which play an immense role in magdalena szyszka 294 communication (gregersen, 2011, p. 159). without the proper use of stress, rhythm, weak forms or sound links, the message is devoid of cues enriching oral communication. if a highly anxious learner perceives himself or herself as unable to use them properly, his or her oral performance may suffer. however, not all aspects of self-perceived pronunciation are found to correlate significantly with general fl anxiety levels in the present study. the only suprasegmental feature that does not correlate with la in this study is intonation. it is considered one of the least teachable aspects of pronunciation because, among other things, it is “quite sensitive to the discourse context and the speaker’s intent” (celce-murcia, brinton, & goodwin, 1996, p. 175). the respondents might have been uncertain or even unaware of their intonation competence because of the complexity of the phenomenon and the context specificity of this aspect. intonation is believed to be the pronunciation feature that learners “are sensitive to, but mostly at an unconscious level” (kelly, 2000, p. 86). the study reveals that the way the participants perceive their competence in segmentals is independent of anxiety levels. the two segmental pronunciation categories whose self-perceived levels of pronunciation do not confirm a significant relationship with the respondents’ levels of la are vowels and consonants. their self-perception levels among the respondents were considerably high, with the mean for consonants reaching m = 3.9 and for vowels m = 3.8 on a 5-point likert scale. the reason may lie in the amount of time spent practicing these aspects during their phonetics course and the fact that they had already been tested on these aspects. thus, the teacher trainees feel quite confident about their pronunciation of consonants and vowels, regardless of their level of la. the explanation for this might be that the speech sounds of the target language are for adult fl learners perceptually related to the sounds assigned to the mother tongue (l1) sound inventory (flege, yenikomshian, & liu, 1999) or, in other words, l1 phonological category. this filtration might result in the inability to detect new sounds, and in consequence, perhaps in an inaccurate self-perception of one’s own pronunciation. a fl sound may be difficult to discriminate by a language learner if it is perceived as similar to an l1 sound, and then an l2 sound can be assimilated to the same ‘phonological space’ as an l1 sound (strange & shafer, 2008, p. 171). the study confirms that the way learners perceive their pronunciation is associated with feelings of la. the results imply that the more anxious an individual is, the more critically he or she perceives their way of pronouncing most aspects of connected speech, such as weak forms, assimilation and linking, as well as word pronunciation, stress and rhythm. obviously, this is not to say that some sort of causality may be established at this point between anxiety and perceived competence in either direction. the outcomes of the study also foreign language anxiety and self-perceived english pronunciation competence 295 focus on suprasegmental aspects of pronunciation that are considered to be more important in oral communication than the pronunciation of vowels and consonants, as they “carry more of the overall meaning load than segmental features” (celce-murcia, brinton, goodwin, & griner, 2010, p. 163). the study is not free from limitations that must be addressed. firstly, the research tool used in the study for evaluation of the perceived levels of pronunciation competence refers only to some selected aspects of pronunciation. an extended list might shed more light on the phenomena investigated. secondly, both the flcas and self-perception questionnaire were signed with the participants’ names because of further correlational investigation, so the participants might have been tempted to build up a positive image while giving the replies. finally, the size of the sample was limited to 48 participants. therefore, the results of the study should be treated with care and further studies are needed as they may further illuminate the relationship between la and self-perceived pronunciation competence. conclusions a highly anxious learner or a teacher trainee who does not believe in their abilities and self-evaluates poorly, for example in the area of fl pronunciation, may be discouraged from developing fl oral communication skills and making efforts in fl learning. after all, learners compare their pronunciation with other learners, teachers and native speakers (price, 1991). if they notice that their pronunciation is far from what they perceive as being competent, they may feel apprehensive. macintyre et al. (1997) assume that when a learner perceives his or her competence as low, anxiety occurs and “the arousal of anxiety probably makes some students more reluctant to speak. if language learners do not choose to communicate, they cannot re-assess their competence” (p. 278). to break this vicious circle, it is important to lower the levels of la in the classroom, for example while practicing pronunciation. introducing different types of relaxation techniques when teaching pronunciation, such as breathing, guided-imagery activities or visualization activities (celce-murcia, brinton, goodwin, & griner, 2010, p. 335) is justifiable in consideration of the above findings. these techniques can lower levels of anxiety and relax the muscles of the articulatory organs (cf. wrembel, 2006). moreover, there is a need to develop pronunciation self-evaluation abilities among teacher trainees for pedagogical purposes, so that they will be able to use these abilities later in the course of teaching. l2 pronunciation selfevaluation is especially encouraged in the context of teacher training. keys claims that the “major factor in training new teachers . . . is the emphasis on magdalena szyszka 296 providing learners with the skills of self-evaluation and self-improvement through analysis of their own production” (as cited in nowacka, 2006, p. 108). teacher trainees will have to be able to judge the pronunciation of their future learners, and the self-evaluation process gives them a great opportunity to practice. kenworthy (1987, p. 118) maintains that pronunciation selfevaluation and monitoring should be practiced by teachers because it leads to improvements and adjustments in pronunciation. she advises teachers to integrate self-evaluation and monitoring into the process of pronunciation teaching. nowacka (2006, p. 123) stresses the need to include pronunciation self-assessment techniques in a pronunciation teaching course for teacher trainees who in the future will have to evaluate others. allowing teacher trainees to get involved in self-perceived practice encourages active learning. they might feel more responsible for their own pronunciation learning processes, which may lead them to greater confidence, independence and increased awareness of their individual pronunciation needs. in general, such a type of practice may trigger teacher trainees’ greater autonomy, understood as an ability that allows language learners to take responsibility for their own process of learning a language (micho ska-stadnik, 2004, p. 12). self-perception of pronunciation competence is very subjective and may be inaccurate (cf. nowacka, 2006) due to participants’ tendencies to either overestimate or underestimate their competences (cf. daley, onwuegbuzie, & bailey, 1999). therefore, it might be interesting to research the link between la levels and learners’ pronunciation evaluated more objectively by external raters. foreign language anxiety and self-perceived english pronunciation competence 297 references aydin, s. 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(2002). miejsce fonetyki j zyka angielskiego w szkole – implikacje dla kszta cenia nauczycieli. in w. sobkowiak & e. waniek-klimczak (eds.), dydaktyka fonetyki j zyka obcego na poziomie licencjackim (pp. 29-40). ock: wydawnictwo pa stwowej wy szej szko y zawodowej w p ocku. wrembel, m. (2006). pronunciation teaching methods and techniques: the past, the present and the future. in w. sobkowiak & e. waniek-klimczak (eds.), dydaktyka fonetyki j zyka obcego w polsce (pp. 251-261). konin: wydawnictwo pa stwowej wy szej szko y zawodowej w koninie. young, d. j. (1991). creating a low-anxiety classroom environment: what does language anxiety research suggest? the modern language journal, 75, 426-439. 227 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (2). 227-248 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl gender-dependent language anxiety in polish communication apprehensives ewa piechurska-kuciel opole university, poland epiech@uni.opole.pl abstract this paper analyzes the relationship between communication apprehension and language anxiety from the perspective of gender. as virtually no empirical studies have addressed the explicit influence of gender on language anxiety in communication apprehensives, this paper proposes that females are generally more sensitive to anxiety, as reflected in various spheres of communication. for this reason, language anxiety levels in communication apprehensive females should be higher, unlike those of communication apprehensive males. comparisons between them were made using a student t test, two-way anova, and post-hoc tukey test. the results revealed that polish communication apprehensive secondary grammar school males and females do not differ in their levels of language anxiety, although nonapprehensive males experience significantly lower language anxiety than their female peers. it is argued that the finding can be attributed to developmental patterns, gender socialization processes, classroom practices, and the uniqueness of the fl learning process, which is a stereotypically female domain. keywords: communication apprehension, apprehensives, language anxiety, gender although there are several studies that have explored possible links between communication apprehension and language anxiety, the clear-cut influence of gender on their interplay has not yet been established. accordingly, the major aim of this paper is to shed more light on this complex relationship. in the first part of the article the theoretical underpinnings of the concepts of ewa piechurska-kuciel 228 communication apprehension and language anxiety are described, together with their connection to gender. next, the empirical research carried out for the purpose of this article is outlined, followed by a discussion of its results. finally, the paper considers the limitations and implications of the research. communication apprehension and gender the ability to communicate effectively is presently viewed as an indispensable skill in modern western society, enabling its members to overcome differences and create an environment where they can come together to work, study, and play (scott, 2008). it is therefore expected that a successful and responsible individual should display efficient communicative abilities, which are necessary for managing the ongoing, dynamic, and change-oriented communication process that also requires understanding and a readiness to communicate in a proficient manner (richmond & mccroskey, 1998). unfortunately, this is not the case for many who suffer from a particular deficit, communication apprehension, which hinders them in building satisfying human relationships and thus permeates every aspect of their lives. the burden of communication apprehension may appear to greatly limit an individual’s chances for creating positive relationships with others, because in order to cope effectively with everyday stressors (e.g., foreign language learning) one must engage in dialogue with other people. the exchange of information may instigate positive coping, provide emotional support, and help one to solve problems. individuals deprived of the social skills of information sharing, as in the case of communication apprehensives, are likely victims of elevated stress levels or other serious consequences of daily hazards. deficits connected with communication apprehension (ca) have been explored for almost eighty years, with initial studies, such as those of lomas (1937) or gilkinson (1942), mostly focusing on ca in the context of public speaking. notwithstanding, the contemporary approach to ca takes into consideration a broadened perspective, viewing it as indispensable to understanding numerous communication environments and experiences (e.g., blume, dreher, & baldwin, 2010; degner, 2010; roby, 2009). similarly, the definitions of ca have evolved from “a broadly based anxiety related to oral communication”, which was given by mccroskey (as cited in mccroskey & beatty, 1984, p. 79), into “a broad-based fear or anxiety associated with either real or anticipated communication with another person or persons,” by the same author (mccroskey, 1976, p. 3). therefore ca, originally restricted to speaking, especially in public, has now been expanded to all communication modes and grouping patterns (dyadic encounters or small groups). moreover, the gender-dependent language anxiety in polish communication apprehensives 229 definition provides for possible causes of ca, such as situational settings (e.g., public speaking) and the individual’s personality traits (quietness, reticence and shyness) (osman, nayan, mansor, maesin, & shafie, 2010), viewed from the perspective of unspecified (anxiety) and specified (fear) danger. among the most significant causes of ca three basic categories are distinguished: excessive activation, inappropriate processing, and inadequate communication skills (richmond & mccroskey, 1998). when excessive activation takes place, normal physiological arousal usually connected with the necessity to perform exceeds the individual’s control abilities, causing swallowing difficulty, dry mouth, excessive trembling and sweating, as well as temporary memory loss. from this point of view, one’s cognitive processes are secondary due to this overphysiological reaction. however, in the second type of explanation for the genesis of ca, inappropriate cognitive processing may play a key role. in this case even normal physiological arousal, though negatively assessed by an individual, leads to inappropriate processing of available information. here, one’s cognitive predisposition to interpret bodily reactions in a negative manner leads to the triggering of higher ca levels, obviously to one’s disadvantage (hawkins, 1992). the third explanation for ca focuses on the role of inadequate communication skills. when an individual is unsure of appropriate communication behavior in a given setting, the uncertainty gives way to the experience of anxiety. it seems important to underline the fact that deficient skills might be inadequate in triggering ca. a more potent reason for its elevated levels should instead be attributed to low selfperception of one’s communicative skills, even when they are objectively adequate. this is termed the “inappropriate cognitive processing explanation” (richmond & mccroskey, 1998, p. 98). as a result, it is often difficult to distinguish an apprehensive communicator incapable of getting his or her message across from an incompetent communicator, who fails due to a lack of skills (fortham & gabbin, 1996). finally, it is worth adding that in most cases ca is likely to evolve in early childhood, mostly due to negative reinforcement of the child’s communicative behaviors (mccroskey, 1977), personality characteristics, or hereditary temperamental states (pryor, butler, & boehringer, 2005). this synergy of heredity and environment may become an antecedent of adult ca (mccroskey, 1984). communication apprehension, with its serious debilitating effect on communication, induces an array of negative consequences that can be identified in almost every aspect of one’s social and personal life. these consequences can be divided into two basic categories: internal and external (mccroskey & beatty, 1986). internal effects of ca are connected with a subjective affective response to communication, i.e., a repeated feeling of discomfort within an individual. conversely, the external impact of ca is connected with behavioral manifestations of this phenomenon in specific types of ewa piechurska-kuciel 230 situations (trait-like ca), taking the forms of communication avoidance, withdrawal, and disruption. in the case of avoidance, high ca individuals prefer not to speak with others and avoid situations that induce communication. such people often take occupations with lower communication requirements, or, when they cannot avoid communication, select inconspicuous seats in the classroom or within small groups in order to make communication less likely. the basic signs of communication withdrawal are talking less than others, falling absolutely silent, or talking only as much as is absolutely needed. the third sign of ca, communication disruption, is revealed in unnatural nonverbal behavior, vocalized pauses, and faltering verbal presentation (mccroskey, 1981). generally speaking, there are three universal tenets underlying ca research (charlesworth, 2006). first of all, individuals with high levels of ca will avoid and/or withdraw from oral interaction with others. the reason is that a highly apprehensive person is not able to identify any positive experiences in communicating; hence any interactional attempts are accompanied by feelings of tension or embarrassment. regarding cognitive processes, a high level of ca is related to excessive attention to one’s self, resulting in poorer performance in public speaking situations (daly, vangelisti, & lawrence, 1989). second, as a result of avoidance/withdrawal, communication apprehensives are often seen in a poor light by themselves and others. the greater self-focus of an apprehensive individual leads to the missing of external cues and opportunities to adapt to audience reactions. it is also accompanied by more negative thinking, a greater concern with evaluation, performance, and other self-related issues. third, this poor image has economic, political, and academic consequences, meaning that if these individuals cannot communicate effectively, they will not develop to their full potential. in effect, “high ca can impede an individual’s communication ability and social opportunity” (francis & miller, 2008, p. 39), while in the educational context it leads to lower overall school achievement as measured by standardized tests, lower final grades in all courses, and negative attitudes on the part of highly apprehensive students (mccroskey, 1977). it has also been demonstrated that ca has an exceedingly negative impact on learning in most instructional environments because the classroom setting in its own right may be a powerful activator of many apprehensive behaviors (thurlow & marwick, 2005), alongside with social influences, such as tedium, conflicts with the teacher, or inattention. as far as the relationship between ca and gender is concerned, any analysis should start with defining gender as “socially created and learned distinctions that specify the ideal physical, behavioral, and mental and emotional traits characteristic of males and females” (ferrante, 2010, p. 268). as gender denotes special attributes and characteristics proper for males and gender-dependent language anxiety in polish communication apprehensives 231 females, it can be inferred that gender is learned through the process of socialization. empirical research demonstrates quite conflicting results concerning the interplay of gender and ca. first of all, there are no significant differences between females and males with regard to general levels of ca (borzi & mills, 2001; mccroskey, simpson, & richmond, 1992), although females may be slightly more apprehensive about public speaking than males (bello, 1995). the authors speculate that this result may be a consequence of gender differences in handling public speaking apprehension. highly apprehensive females are hypothesized to cope better, or at least disguise their anxiety, in contrast to highly apprehensive males. however, there are other studies that prove the opposite, in which no interactive effect was found between gender and public speaking apprehension (e.g., mcdowell, 2000). on the other hand, in a study by frantz, marlow, and wathen (2005) a statistically significant difference was found between males and females with respect to their overall ca score. likewise, aly and islam (2005) confirmed the effect of gender on ca, finding that women experience a higher level of ca than men. the reason may be that the stereotypical feminine role usually promotes female inferiority, meaning that a female is likely to suffer from elevated levels of apprehension when she needs to communicate her ideas or feelings to a group, especially over a longer period of time when her speech may appear less clever, serious or convincing. however, in informal situations her greater assets are empathy and a willingness to demonstrate selfdisclosure and emotion, which serve as an aid in combating the negative effects of her apprehension (strohkirch & parks, 1986). unfortunately, due to the inconsistency of research findings, it is still extremely difficult to speculate about the explanatory power of gender in understanding ca. language anxiety and gender aside from the apprehension present in l1 communication as described above (ca), the context of foreign (or second) language learning has also generated a lot of influential research on apprehension specific to this environment – termed language anxiety (la). foreign language (fl) acquisition is a highly dangerous process, because it threatens the learner’s view of himself (self-concept) as well as his view of the world (guiora, 1983). studying an fl, especially in the context of formal education, requires the development of skills and abilities necessary for performing in a new code quite quickly. not surprisingly, these performance demands constitute a basic threat to the learner’s ego, as loss of face becomes a likely occurrence in situations where this new code has not yet been mastered. conseewa piechurska-kuciel 232 quently, fl learning has been characterized as “fundamentally different . . . compared to learning another skill or gaining other knowledge” in “that language and self are so closely bound, if not identical, that an attack on one is an attack on the other” (cohen & north, 1989, p. 65). sadly, when one is in essence forced to speak (perform) in order to learn a second language (skehan, 1989), one’s psychological readiness required for communication in the second language may be highly strained, scarcely leaving space for voluntary choice. these perils of forced communicative needs produce language anxiety, a variable that is an inherent part of the fl learning experience. language anxiety is usually defined as “a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors related to classroom language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process” (horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986, p. 128). gardner and macintyre (1993) meanwhile propose viewing it as “the apprehension experienced when a situation requires the use of a second language with which the individual is not fully proficient.” such clarifications of the term illustrate the role of the formal language learning context in creating self-centered thoughts, feelings of incompetence and fear of failure (e.g., macintyre & gardner, 1994). according to the theoretical model of la (e.g., gardner & macintyre, 1993), its foundations are constituted by the universal, psychological characteristics of the fl learner, existing independently from language context, such as: fear of negative evaluation, test anxiety, and ca. test anxiety, defined as “a situation-specific form of trait anxiety (zohar, 1998, p. 330), is usually connected with emotional reactions accompanying situations where one’s performance is being measured or assessed (mcdonald, 2001). its major role in generating elevated levels of la can be attributed to learners’ inappropriate perception of fl production. instead of viewing it as “an opportunity for communication” (horwitz et al., 1986, p. 128), they react to it with test anxietyspecific reactions: worry, emotionality, and task-generated interference (register, may, beckham, & gustafson, 1991). in consequence, apprehension specific to the fl learning process is produced. fear of negative evaluation, on the other hand, pertains to “the sense of dread associated with being evaluated unfavorably while anticipating or participating in a social situation” (weeks, jakatdar, & heimberg, 2010). it is proposed that students who fear negative evaluation tend to suffer from elevated levels of la, especially with respect to their self-perception of speaking abilities (kitano, 2001). students’ concern over fl competence, especially performance, induces avoidance of the possibility of negative evaluations, leading to minimal interactions or passivity and withdrawal. their fear of losing face in gender-dependent language anxiety in polish communication apprehensives 233 front of classmates and/or the teacher deprives them of the chance to improve, and inevitably leads to augmented la levels. the effects of la can be identified in all spheres of the learner’s life: cognitive, personal, social and academic (macintyre, 1999). first of all, cognitive consequences of la concern interference with students’ cognitive performance in language processing, as in the case of internal ca effects. anxiety is speculated to tighten information processing, leading to disruption in concentration and performance due to impaired cognitive control (pekrun, 1992). it also causes elevated distractedness and increased responsiveness to potential threats (bishop, duncan, brett, & lawrence, 2004). anxious individuals’ threat prioritization leads to task-irrelevant thinking and self-concern. aside from that, general cognitive processes involved in language acquisition also undergo serious anxiety-threatening disturbances. hence, at the level of input apprehension affects the student’s ability to attend to, concentrate on, and encode fl messages. at the next stage, processing, it hinders cognitive operations involving complex information, memory demands, and the organization of the material presented. finally, at the output anxiety stage, it weakens the use of productive skills such as speaking or writing in the fl. personal effects of la consist in self-deprecating and worrisome thoughts, or overwhelming fear (horwitz & young, 1991; piechurska-kuciel, 2008). to a large extent, they are identical with internal effects of ca; i.e., the student’s subjective affective responses to communication, such as repeated feelings of discomfort. social effects of la include the learner’s unwillingness to communicate in the fl classroom and in a natural setting (macintyre, 2007; macintyre & charos, 1995). likewise, in ca similar effects can be identified when taking into consideration the external impact of ca (communication avoidance, withdrawal, and disruption). academic consequences of la, alternatively, refer to the detrimental influence of the phenomenon on fl learning and performance (e.g., hewitt & stephenson, 2011), proving it to be a significant predictor of failure in the language classroom (woodrow, 2006), which is also confirmed by a negative correlation between la and course grades, as well as proficiency tests and communicative competence (chen, 2008; tsiplakides & keramida, 2009). here again, clear similarities between la and the external impact of ca can be identified. the role of the student’s gender in la research has been clearly recognized, though again, with conflicting results. firstly, previous to or at the beginning of language courses manifestations of la have not been shown to be gender-dependent (campbell, 1999; campbell & shaw, 1994; matsuda & gobel, 2004; pappamihiel, 2001; wong, 2009). yet at the same time, a great deal of research suggests that girls are generally more anxious, irrespective of ewa piechurska-kuciel 234 their proficiency levels (e.g., abu-rabia, 2004; koul, roy, kaewkuekool, & ploisawaschai, 2009; mahmood & iqbal, 2010; piechurska-kuciel, 2008). the reasons for such results are attributed to females’ greater sensitivity to anxiety (e.g., simon & nath, 2004) and their higher levels of school stress (byrne, 2000; ginsburg & silverman, 2000). females may perceive the language acquisition requirements as nerve-racking, and react to them with higher levels of la. another explanation rests in the significant sex-related differences in social behavior, cognitive activity, general verbal ability (bacon & finnemann, 1992), and significant differences in the learning abilities between the sexes (halpern, 2000). it is proposed that any conflicting research results may be attributed to the diverse age levels of the participants and cultural differences. for the purpose of this paper it is proposed that ca has a strong influence in inducing elevated levels of la, alongside with the impact of gender. first of all, it can be argued that ca and la are parallel phenomena, differentiated only by the language context. the relationship between ca and language anxiety stems from the use of the four skills (speaking, listening, writing and reading), strengthening the negative effects of ca in fl situations. however, it is worth pointing out that speaking seems to be “the single most important source of language anxiety” (macintyre, 1999, p. 33), although problems comprehending oral messages also constitute a significant source of la (arnold, 2007). moreover, the procedures applied while learning the fl in the classroom also require various grouping patterns that enable effective fl use: dyads, small groups or whole class discussions, which is a very important aspect of ca’s origins. that aside, both phenomena share common features, such as fear of making mistakes, intense feelings of self-consciousness, and a desire to be perfect while using language skills. likewise, personal convictions about not being understood or not being able to understand others evoke strong feelings of communication avoidance. both ca and la indicate the necessity to perform, yet la also requires the need to learn and use the fl (foss & reitzel, 1988), which in effect produces elevated levels of la in all students, not only communication apprehensives. obviously, though it may be accepted that “second language situations could create and amplify ca” (jung & mccroskey, 2004), it is now of more importance to decide if ca determines the magnitude of la. in spite of their conceptual similarity or even synonymity (macintyre, baker, clément, & donovan, 2002; macintyre & charos, 1996), the two phenomena in question should not be treated as identical due to two basic reasons. first of all, ca is one of the foundations of la; hence any fluctuations in the first lead to differences in the latter. however, a more powerful argument against the equivalence of the constructs can be found in the model of the development of la. following gender-dependent language anxiety in polish communication apprehensives 235 spielberger (1972), who speculated that anxiety effects are the function of ability level, as proficiency and experience in the fl increase, anxiety starts declining “in a consistent manner” (macintyre & gardner, 1991, p. 111). it follows that the learner’s developing proficiency is connected to more competent language use (mihaljevic djigunovi , 2004), and less pronounced la (piechurska-kuciel, 2008). plainly, from this point of view, la cannot be regarded as a trait-like feature, but a learned experience. conversely, ca, when viewed as a personality trait, stems from the individual’s personality profile, which remains stable. even though situational settings also generate ca, they refer to universal, every-day situations, among which the input of fl learning can be regarded minimal. moreover, the development of ca (usually originating in childhood) and its reliance on heredity exclude a dynamic decrease like the one observed in the case of la. as far as the role of gender in the interdependence of ca and la is concerned, no empirical studies have thus far addressed the explicit influence of gender on la in communication apprehensives. this paper proposes that females are generally more sensitive to anxiety, which is reflected in various spheres of life, especially because gender-related symptoms of anxiety remain stable over adolescence (van oort, greaves-lord, verhulst, ormel, & huizink, 2009). as such, their communication deficits prompted by anxiety should be transferred to the fl learning context, producing higher la. the main hypothesis is as follows: female communication apprehensives declare higher levels of la than their male peers. method participants the informants in this study were students of the six secondary grammar schools in opole, located in south-western poland. there were 621 participants (396 girls and 225 boys) from 23 classes (natural groups). their average age was 16.5, with a minimum of 15 and a maximum of 18. less than a half of them lived in the city of opole (286 students), about one-third (213) in the surrounding villages, while almost 20% resided in neighboring towns (122). they were all first-grade students in their schools, with 3 to 6 hours a week of english instruction. their level of english proficiency was elementary to intermediate with an average length of the english language experience reaching almost 9 years, with the vast majority (91%) having learned it for 5 to 15 years. the participants also studied french or german as the other compulsory fl (two lessons a week). for the purpose of corroborating the aforementioned hypothesis, a speewa piechurska-kuciel 236 cial participant grouping was needed. on the basis of the personal report of communication apprehension (prca) – long form (mccroskey, 1978), the sample was divided into three groups: the lower quartile ( 48 pts) included a group of 164 students (96 girls and 68 boys) with low levels of ca (later called lca), while the upper quartile ( 72 pts) comprised a group of 152 students (112 girls and 40 boys) with high levels of ca (hca). the remaining group of students (middle quartiles) was excluded from further analysis. instruments the basic instrument used in the study was a questionnaire. it consisted of several parts, the first of which explored demographic variables: age, gender (1 – male, 2 – female) and place of residence (1 – village: up to 2,500 inhabitants, 2 – town: from 2,500 to 50,000 inhabitants, 3 – city: over 50,000 inhabitants). the next part included the personal report of communication apprehension (prca) – long form (mccroskey, 1978), which is a scale measuring the level of an individual’s oral ca. it features such items such as: “while participating in a conversation with a new acquaintance, i feel very nervous” or “my thoughts become confused and jumbled when i am giving a speech.” the scale followed a 5-interval likert-type response format, from 1 (i strongly disagree) to 5 (i strongly agree). the minimum number of points was 24 and the maximum 120. its reliability in terms of the cronbach’s alpha was .89. finally, the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas) was included in the questionnaire (horwitz et al., 1986). its purpose is to assess the degree to which students feel anxious during fl classes. sample items on the scale are as follows: “i can feel my heart pounding when i’m going to be called on in language class” and “i keep thinking that the other students are better at languages than i am.” all the positive items were key-reversed so that a high score on the scale represented a high anxiety level. the minimum number of points that could be obtained on the scale was 33, while the maximum was 165. the scale’s reliability was assessed in terms of cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .94. procedure and analysis the research design was correlational, measuring the relationship between variables, or, more specifically, differential, which means that it compared two or three groups on a dependent variable (graziano & raulin, 1993). there were two main kinds of variables identified in the study: the dependent variable is represented by la levels, as well as gender (two levels: male and female), while the independent variable is ca (two levels: lca and hca). gender-dependent language anxiety in polish communication apprehensives 237 the data collection procedure took place in december 2010, when the respondents were in their first grade of secondary school. they were asked to complete the questionnaire without thinking too long about the answers, which took them 10 to 45 min. the data were computed by means of the statistical program statistica. standard descriptive statistics were used to report means and standard deviation for baseline characteristics (p .05). a two-way anova with a tukey hsd posthoc test were used to analyze the data. thanks to the first procedure (also called two-factor analysis of variance), it was possible to measure the effects of two factors simultaneously (i.e., the effect of gender and ca in the lca and hca groups). this procedure is not only able to assess the role of both factors, but also the interaction between the parameters. after obtaining the main effects (of gender and ca) and the interaction effect (gender x ca) through the anova procedure, a post hoc test was performed. the tukey’s hsd (honestly significant difference) test for unequal sample sizes provides specific information on which means obtained in the four groups (lca females and males, hca females and males) are significantly different from one another. results table 1 shows the means and standard deviation of the four groups of students (lca females, lca males, hca females and hca males). the results of the student’s t test between lca and hca groups are also presented, which demonstrated that there is no significant difference between hca males and females, while such a difference can be identified between lca males and females. table 1 means, sd and t test of la levels in lca and hca males and females (n = 316) females (n = 208) males (n = 108) t m sd m sd lca 78.51 26.33 65.75 18.34 -.46*** hca 97.04 22.37 91.87 22.37 -1.25 ***p < .001 the results of the two-way anova showed a significant difference in main effects, that is between the ca groups: f(1, 312) = 64.69, p < .001, and between males and females: f(1, 312) = 10.43, p < .01. however, there was no significant difference for the interaction effect: f(1, 312) = 1.87, p = .17 (see figure 1 for a visual representation of the data). ewa piechurska-kuciel 238 figure 1 language anxiety levels in communication apprehensive (hca) and nonapprehensive (lca) males (m) and females (f) the results of the tukey post-hoc test showed a significant difference in the means of all the four groups, apart from the comparison between hca males and females, as previously confirmed by the student t test. discussion the goal of this study was to corroborate the hypothesis that female communication apprehensives declare higher levels of la than their male peers. however, the results demonstrate that the hypothesis is incorrect, as male and female apprehensives show similar levels of la. in order to comprehend this seemingly odd finding, a discussion of the results should start with an analysis of the nonapprehensive group’s behavior. females with low levels of ca experience a significantly higher level of la, unlike low communication apprehensive males, who seem to enjoy a more relaxed attitude to the fl learning process. it would therefore be quite natural to expect that this result can be explained by female anxiety sensitivity induced by several causes, among them developmental patterns, gender socialization processes, classroom practices, and the specificity of the fl learning process. as far as developmental patterns and gender processes are concerned, they cannot be analyzed independently from each other due to the fact pinpointed by ruble (as cited in mchale, kim, dotterer, crouter, & booth, 2009) that “gender is multidimensional, and its different dimensions are thought to exhibit different developmental patterns that emerge through different processes” (p. 483). the cohort studied was comprised of late adolescents (15 to 18 years of age). this developmental period is characterized by physical and psychological maturation, as well as by changing social roles and environ60 70 80 90 100 f m lca hca gender-dependent language anxiety in polish communication apprehensives 239 ments. at that time bodily changes are accompanied by intellectual growth and emotional independence, helping the adolescent to gain a sense of self. it can then be expected that females, who mature earlier than males, should manage their fl learning process more efficiently. however, the results prove that in spite of earlier maturation, girls’ affective response to the fl learning situation is likely to reduce their developmental advantage. consequently, it seems that biological differences between the two genders are a dominant cause of anxiety. taking into consideration the present emphasis on the integration of biological and socialization approaches, the role of biology in gendered psychological processes and behaviors employed in the interplay of ca and la also cannot be overlooked when discussing the results. changes in the brain structures and alternations in reproductive hormones in the oestrous cycle are the basis for an increased tendency toward developing affective disorders in females. from this point of view, it may be claimed that females’ fluctuating hormone levels are the most probable causes of their anxiety sensitivity, leading to the augmented la experience. however, in their pursuit of identity girls focus on building and maintaining relationships through communication in various settings, the fl classroom being one of them. surrounded by friends of the same and opposite sex, they should feel sufficiently comfortable to risk performing within this traditionally “feminine” subject area. unfortunately, general classroom practices may have an opposite effect on female affective reactions identified in the fl learning process. on the one hand, teachers have greater expectations of females, believing that they mature earlier and take a more serious approach to their work. in effect, girls appear to care more about the quality of their work, devote more time to studying regularly, and have a more positive attitude to language learning. yet, on the other hand, teachers interact with boys more often and ask them more challenging questions, which is attributed to male students’ needing more help, or sustaining their interest in the lesson in an attempt to avoid disruption. in effect, girls may feel that their socially (and academically) positive behavior is not adequately rewarded, which causes them to feel unmotivated and deprived of support. moreover, the uniqueness of learning an fl in the context of formal education, with its focus on performance demands, may increase their negative experiences, the occurrence of la among them. males for whom communication in their mother tongue is a pleasant experience are speculated to be more able to manage their negative emotions when learning an fl. first of all, although they may not be psychologically mature enough to take part in l2 communication with their full potential, the perils of second language acquisition do not pose a threat sufficient for them to experience la equaling the levels of their female peers. this fact can be ewa piechurska-kuciel 240 explained by the male ability to successfully cope with everyday stressors, by their more detached attitude to that “girly” subject, as well as by constant attempts of their fl teachers to sustain boys’ interest in this academic area. for these reasons, it may be deduced that males do not tend to regard the language learning process a high-stakes enterprise that could ruin their selfesteem or ego. consequently, their la levels are considerably lower in contrast to those of female classmates. judging from la levels in nonapprehensives, it should be expected that female communication apprehensives suffer from significantly higher la than their male peers. as this is not the case in the cohort studied, the discussion of the results should center around the specific effects of ca that either reduce the negative effect of femininity or magnify the positive effect of masculinity. in the case of the former it should be hypothesized that the three basic categories of the sources of ca (excessive activation, inappropriate processing, and inadequate communication skills) may play a key role in girls’ more effective control of negative emotions in the l2 learning process. with their excessive activation already experienced in l1 communication, negative experiences encountered in the fl learning process are obviously augmented. however, communication apprehensive girls, in spite of their communication problems, are able to cope with the demands of the subject more effectively with their serious attitude to schoolwork. even when they experience over-physiological reactions their study habits allow them to ease their emotionality. the same can be said about another source of ca, that is, inappropriate cognitive processing. connected with an exaggerated tendency to assess one’s bodily reactions in a negative manner, inappropriate cognitive processing induces higher ca. it may be ascertained that females’ conscientiousness is a vital asset, allowing them to tame their negative emotions. this type of explanation is even more convincing in the case of the third source of ca, namely the role of inadequate communication skills. even in spite of the threat created by the fl learning process, girls work hard to lower the level of uncertainty, trying to make up for their communication deficits with their diligent studies or laborious preparation for lessons. aside from that, it may be quite understandable that in spite of their objectively acceptable l2 skills, they may be convinced about their inadequacy, as studies of self-competence beliefs show (rudasill & callahan, 2010). still, the typically female domain of language learning allows communication apprehensive girls to apply better adaptation behaviors, which is not the case in communication apprehensive boys. therefore, excessive activation of a communication apprehensive male’s nervous system may become a serious threat in the educational context, which does not suit his stereotypical preferences. over-physiological reac gender-dependent language anxiety in polish communication apprehensives 241 tions, when inevitably identified with the l2 learning process, give way to elevated la. also, in the case of normal somatic reactions assessed improperly (inappropriate cognitive processing), males may feel threatened. in this case, their avoidance and withdrawal from language study is a likely occurrence. obviously, male prejudice against language learning, worsened by their more careless attitude to homework or school duties, may lead to greater vulnerability to negative emotions such as la. however, the role of inadequate communication skills may not constitute a likely explanation for high levels of la in communication apprehensive males. the reason is that males have a tendency to overestimate their performance, both in math and language (chevalier, gibbons, & hoskins, 2008). thus, boys suffering from ca may deprive themselves of chances for a more satisfactory school life due to their plausible prejudice or carelessness. generally speaking, ca is a factor that has considerable potential to ruin an individual’s chances of building successful social relationships. it is clearly understood that its combination with la, inducing negative emotions in the fl learning process, may evolve into menacing stringency, affecting one’s life to an unimaginable extent. yet, it seems that in the polish educational context females without that deficit fare much worse than their male counterparts, while communication apprehensive females experience similar la levels as their male classmates. one would therefore be justified in concluding that the impact of gender is reduced in the interaction between ca and la in the context of the polish secondary grammar school. conclusions this study has attempted to fill a gap in the research devoted to the role of gender and ca in generating la. as both ca and la imply fear or anxiety connected with communication, most of the concluding recommendations should center on aspects of communication in the context of the fl class, with a special focus on gender differences. first of all, the teacher should create a safer classroom atmosphere that to at least a small degree reduces the apprehensive students’ stress levels and allows them to encounter more positive experiences. this can be achieved by placing more emphasis on individual work and homework, which will give the apprehensives a chance to succeed by working independently. apart from that, when in the classroom, instead of being forced to communicate in open pairs, apprehensive students should be encouraged to rehearse privately, with no threat of public speaking. this will allow them to work on their fl skills free from external pressures. as skills training is very effective in combating the ewa piechurska-kuciel 242 negative effects of ca and la, it will be necessary for apprehensives to prepare and memorize a repertoire of ready-made conversational gambits. students’ confidence in communication can also be improved by introducing short relaxation techniques, such as muscle relaxation or meditation, which can be practiced during every lesson. last but not least, the approach to evaluation should also be altered, with the teacher praising students more for their efforts than aptitude or skill. such interventions may reduce negative behaviors on the part of apprehensive students, such as withdrawal, avoidance and disruption – all clear symptoms of anxiety. the issue of gender in the process of fl learning should also be more openly addressed by reducing female inferiority. it seems that the teacher’s attention should be distributed equally between the genders. girls, even though in most cases invisible, need to receive more praise and attention and be allowed to openly voice their opinions, while boys should be supervised and motivated. however, in the case of communication apprehensives the teacher’s attempts should be more reserved and noninvasive regarding the vulnerable student’s privacy. this study is not free from limitations that must be addressed. first of all, one must bear in mind the fact that it was carried out in the polish educational context, and an individual’s communication is deeply entrenched in his or her culture, due to the fact that “the amount of talking in which a person engages would be dependent, at least in part, on that person's cultural orientation” (barraclough, christophel, & mccroskey, 1988, p. 187). hence, the individual’s communicative behavior is rooted in the culture in which one is raised. from this point of view, the research context is very specific, so its results may not be directly generalized to other cultures. apart from that, the cross-sectional study design does not allow for drawing complex cause-andeffect inferences, apart from the impact of gender. instead, longitudinal studies or panel designs applied in culture-specific contexts may shed more light on the gender-dependent interplay of ca and la. another drawback of the study can be attributed to the fact that the unclear role of language experience, which has a powerful explanatory role in analyzing la levels longitudinally, has not been catered for. it would also be interesting to establish if the length of one’s experience with the fl might be a reliable correlate of their la, when stimulated by ca. finally then, it seems very interesting to shed more light on the aspect of gender analyzed from the perspective of feminine, masculine and androgynous dimensions. gender-dependent language anxiety in polish communication apprehensives 243 references abu-rabia, s. 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(1998). an additive model of test anxiety role of exam-specific expectations. journal of educational psychology, 90, 330-340. doi:10.1037/00220663.90.2.330 127 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (1). 2014. 127-131 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.1.7 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book reviews capitalizing on learners’ individuality: from premise to practice authors: tammy gregersen and peter d. macintyre publisher: multilingual matters, 2014 isbn: 978-1-78309-119-5 pages: 260 there are without doubt very few academic publications that would be as enlightening, inspiring, thought-provoking, reader-friendly, classroom-oriented and downright useful as the book by tammy gregersen and peter d. macintyre capitalizing on learners’ individuality: from premise to practice. as the authors clarify in the introduction, “our book seeks to close the gap between theory and classroom application concerning individual differences in second or foreign language (fl) learning . . . this book is our attempt to wed pioneering research premises with innovative practices” (p. xiv), and it has to be admitted at the very outset that they have done a superb job of meeting this goal. the book opens with an introduction, which can be viewed as its integral and extremely important part because, in addition to the rationale for why the volume was put together and a brief description of the contents of the successive chapters, the reader will find here useful hints on how the book can most beneficially be used, how the various activities can be most successfully imple 128 mented in the classroom, how they can be assessed, and how they can further be augmented with the use of technology. this is followed by seven chapters dealing with such aspects of individual learner variation as anxiety, beliefs, cognitive factors, namely aptitude, working memory and multiple intelligences, motivation, language learning strategies, language learning styles, and, finally, willingness to communicate. each of these chapters is structured in a similar way and begins with a story which is intended to provide a down-to-earth illustration of the individual difference (id) variable in question. then come theoretical considerations which offer a brief overview of the key developments in the field, an action plan which delineates the ways in which a particular factor could be handled, and a number of practical activities that teachers can apply in their classrooms with an eye to enhancing their learners’ self-awareness, autonomy and sense of well-being, ensuring at all times a supportive affective environment. what is of particular relevance from the perspective of the teacher, each of these activities is accompanied by the specification of the required proficiency level, the delineation of the procedure that should be followed, possible ideas for the assessment of the task, and, in many cases, a description of potential modifications that may need to be introduced in order to harness new technologies or cater to the needs of specific learners or learner groups. the volume closes with an epilogue which attempts to shed light on how the id factors discussed throughout the book fit in together and how the complex interactions between them can be addressed in the classroom, adopting as a point of reference dynamic systems theory (e.g., de bot, lowie, thorne, & verspoor, 2013; larsen freeman & cameron, 2008). as i made clear at the beginning, i consider the volume to be a true gem and an urgent must-read for anyone interested in the role of individual learner differences in the process of second or foreign language learning and teaching, whether they are academics, university staff involved in teacher training, materials writers, teachers, or undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students. in the first place, the authors should be commended for the selection of the id variables that they focus upon (i.e., anxiety, beliefs, cognitive abilities, motivation, learning strategies, learning styles and willingness to communicate) for the reason that they are not only of considerable interest to theorists and researchers and have undergone far-reaching modifications in recent years (e.g., cohen, 2009; dörnyei, 2005; mercer, ryan & williams, 2013), but they are also of immediate relevance for practitioners who can truly capitalize on them to make the learning and teaching of foreign languages more efficacious. second, the discussion of the selected id variables is reflective of the latest advances in the field, notably their interpretation within the framework of dynamic systems theory (e.g., larsen-freeman & cameron, 2009), which recognizes the 129 interrelatedness and constant fluctuation of different factors in response to a wide array of influences. what is particularly commendable, though, is that the authors do not leave the reader with the impression that, since individual differences are in a constant state of flux, little can be done to tap into them or shape them for the benefit of the learner, but in fact point to very concrete ways in which these goals can successfully be attained. they also strive, and to a large extent succeed in doing so, to resolve a number of theoretical conundrums, good examples being motivation (chapter 4) and language learning strategies (chapter 5). third, tammy gregersen and peter macintyre do a truly admirable job of linking theory, research findings and everyday classroom practice, taking the latest developments in theory and research as a point of departure for an action plan which will allow teachers to capitalize on individual differences. in each case, they also suggest a wide range of activities which are aimed, on the one hand, at increasing learners’ proficiency in the target language and, on the other, raising their awareness, fostering their autonomy and ensuring a positive affective climate. it should also be emphasized that the inclusion of a story intended to stir teachers’ and learners’ imagination makes the discussion of the selected id variables more convincing, more accessible and more easily relatable to teachers’ everyday concerns. moreover, all the activities are preceded with an inspirational quote or proverb which can help get students more involved, modifications are proposed for emergent learners and large classes, and useful suggestions are provided for the application of information and computer technologies, which may be particularly appealing to learners. it is also important that the authors do not rule out the use of learners’ mother tongue “when it facilitates communication in the tl or when the affective benefits outweigh the linguistic costs” (p. xvii), a much-needed provision which enables the application of these activities with various proficiency levels and in diverse instructional settings. finally, the value of the book also lies in the fact that the pedagogical recommendations it proposes are feasible and grounded in classroom realities, as is the case with the approach to multiple intelligences (pp. 74-79 in chapter 3), where emphasis is laid on ensuring variety rather than trying to match instruction to individual preferences. all the merits listed above dictate that the book is in many respects unique, it offers a number of fresh insights into individual learner differences and it will be of interest to wide audiences. it is indeed difficult to single out any major shortcomings and my only concern lies with the fact that the development of autonomy may not be achievable to the same extent in different contexts and with various learner groups. there are also different levels of autonomy (e.g., benson, 2006), with the caveat that not all learners can be expected to take responsibility for their learning to the same extent, be it be 130 cause of their personality, learning styles, beliefs or simply the goals they set for themselves. teachers implementing the different activities in their classrooms should surely be aware of this qualification as unrealistic expectations in this respect can do more harm than good and jeopardize the accomplishment of the educational goals envisaged for a particular class or even the entire course. this could clearly have grave consequences in terms of academic achievement as, in most instructional settings, the effects of educational practices are evaluated by means of tests or formal examinations, the outcomes of which may greatly influence the future of the learner. the authors, however, recognize this danger and, where necessary, include comments urging some circumspection in this respect, as is visible in the chapter on beliefs (chapter 2), where they state that “not all learners are equally autonomous and teachers must be more directive in some cases” (p. 40). besides, it is ultimately the teacher who knows his or her learners best and should promote autonomy only to the degree to which it is warranted in a specific context. this comment, though, is only intended as a cautionary note and does not in the least affect my extremely favorable assessment of the book, which is undoubtedly an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the role of individual learner differences and the ways in which they can be dealt with in order to optimize second and foreign language learning and teaching. we could only wish that there were more publications of this kind focusing on other aspects of the complex process of instructed second language acquisition. reviewed by miros aw pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state school of higher professional education, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references benson, p. (2006). autonomy in language teaching and learning. language teaching, 40, 21-40. cohen, a. d. (2009). focus on the language learner: styles, strategies and motivation. in r. schmidt (ed.), an introduction to applied linguistics (pp. 161-178). london: hodder education. debot, k, lowie, w, thorne, s. l., & m. verspoor. (2013). dynamic systems theory as a theory of second language development. in m. mayo, m. gutierres mangdao, & m. adrián (eds.), contemporary approaches to se 131 cond language acquisition (pp. 199-220). amsterdam: john benjamins. dörnyei, z. (2005). the psychology of the language learner: individual differences in second language acquisition. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. larsen-freeman, d., & cameron, l. (2008). complex systems and applied linguistics. oxford: oxford university press. mercer, s., ryan, s., & williams, m. (eds.). psychology for language learning: insights from research, theory and practice. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. 199 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (1). 2019. 199-223 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.1.9 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt korean language learning demotivation among efl instructors in south korea nigel gearing macquarie university, sydney, australia https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1520-7461 nigelgear62@gmail.com abstract studies investigating the motivation of l1 speakers of english to learn the national language of the host society they currently reside in remain rare, despite the exponential growth of such individuals residing in these nations this century. previous such studies in south korea have concluded that learning korean as a second language (l2) is largely perceived as difficult, unnecessary and is therefore accompanied by experiences of demotivation and amotivation (see gearing & roger, 2018). however, these studies did not explicitly address demotivation and amotivation when examining experiences that affect the motivation to learn korean of 14 english as a foreign language (efl) instructors working in south korean university language education centers (lecs). therefore, this study investigates which learning experiences resulted in the amotivation of participants and how two participants who experienced demotivation employed strategies to remotivate themselves. coding of semistructured interviews and optional diaries found that despite intent, most participants displayed symptoms of both amotivation and demotivation. the main implication of this study is that in the absence of perceived necessity, affected individuals with insufficient internal motivation or vision to acquire korean consequently attribute externally related demotivating experiences to pre-existing or resulting amotivation. keywords: amotivation; demotivation; learning experience; korean; remotivation nigel gearing 200 1. introduction thirty thousand native english speakers work as english language teachers in south korea (habid, 2014), typically on one-, or in some cases two-year contracts in elementary, middle and high schools, private language institutes (or hagwons), and universities, some for many years. this paper focuses on 14 english-speaking expatriates living and working as university language instructors there and the reasons why specific experiences caused participants to become demotivated. empirical studies into demotivation of second language (l2) learners have tended to focus on their classroom experiences of english learning (see falout, elwood, & hood, 2009; falout & maruyama, 2004; farmand & rokini, 2014; kikuchi, 2011, 2013, 2015; oxford, 2001; sakai & kikuchi, 2009; trang & baldauf, 2007; tsuchiya, 2006; tuan, 2011) finding that students attribute motivation to themselves and their demotivation to teacher and classroom-related factors. other empirical longitudinal l2 motivation studies (see chambers, 1993; gardner, masgoret, tennant, & mihic, 2004; tachibana, matsukawa, & zhong, 1996; williams, burden, & lanvers, 2002) confirm a “general pattern of demotivation among students as the initial novelty of learning another language wears off and increasing cognitive, linguistic and curricular demands and social pressures set in” (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, pp. 142-143). this can be reflected in the process model of l2 motivation (dörnyei & ottó, 1998), where in the preactional stage students are initially motivated by choice and plans are formed. in the actional stage, the action is launched. in the post-actional stage, motivational functions are generated and appraised and causal attributions are made (dörnyei, 2005). ultimately, however, without a vision, or “the pull towards an imagined future state” or a future-self-guide, an individual’s self-concept cannot realistically be sustained (dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014, p. 9). a rare example of a study of demotivation among learners of other languages other than english (lotes) is provided by ushioda (1998). this examination of 20 french learners in ireland also confirms the dominance of teacher-related issues as demotivators for students. interestingly, dörnyei (1998) and chambers (1993) also found significant non-classroom related factors including negative attitudes towards learning l2s and their respective communities. dörnyei (1998) examined the demotivation of 50 self-identified demotivated learners of english or german in hungary using one-on-one interviews. chambers (1993) administered a questionnaire to 191 13-year-old english (first language) l1 speakers from four schools as l2 learners in leeds, england, and seven of their teachers. however, in a globalized world, these studies offer limited insight being set in european contexts last century and analyzing demotivation among school-aged learners for whom l2 acquisition was compulsory. adults may have additional, possibly korean language learning demotivation among efl instructors in south korea 201 competing commitments to language learning necessitating a cost/benefit analysis of the time and cost versus the perceived return on such an investment (norton, 2013), particularly, as negative gatekeeping encounters may result in marginalization (norton, 2000, 2001). thus, while the notion that in a globalized environment “the impact of negative social experiences and cultural encounters on l2 motivation is not confined to english” (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011 p. 156) would appear to be obvious, its significance may be less so. this century, unprecedented numbers of individuals have located to english and non-english speaking nations and a significant number of adults have worked for many years in host nations with their own first languages (dörnyei & al-hoorie, 2017). ushioda (2006) addresses the need to examine “motivational issues pertaining to linguistic diversity, mobility, and social integration” in response to “a rapidly changing and expanding europe” (p. 149). this requires moving “beyond the individual, to focus critical attention on this social setting in facilitating or constraining the motivation of the individual l2 learner/user” (ushioda, 2006, p. 158). this study fills a gap in the literature by examining one such context with english-speakers as learners of korean, some having lived “on location” for more than a decade and their experiences which may have demotivated or amotivated them. 2. theoretical framework and literature review a review of the literature reveals a gap between the number of studies on l2 learner motivation over those examining which experiences may cause these learners to lose motivation. this is significant because “language-learning failure is a salient phenomenon and the study of its causes is often directly related to demotivation” (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, p. 142). however, “few studies focus on why learners are not motivated to learn” (sakui & cowie, 2012, p. 205). there are several relevant constructs in the studies that do exist on a spectrum where, at one end, students see no point in learning an l2 (amotivation), through to specific external experiences that cause them to lose motivation related to that aspect of their l2 acquisition (demotivation). amotivation, is the “realization that ‘there’s no point or it’s beyond me’ which can be attributed to the learner’s belief that the expectation of success is unrealistic” (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, p. 140). demotivation, on the other hand, relates to: specific external forces that reduce or diminish the motivational basis of a behavioral intention or an ongoing action. demotivation does not mean that all the positive influences that originally made up the motivational basis of behavior have been annulled; rather, it is only the resultant force has been dampened by a strong negative component, while some other positive motives may still remain operational. (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, p. 139) nigel gearing 202 however, meshart and hassani (2012) make the point that not all researchers agree with dörnyei’s (2001) original definition of demotivation being solely attributable to external factors. falout and maruyama (2004), and sakai and kikuchi (2009) both include internal factors in their definitions of demotivation. drawing no distinction between internal or external factors, kikuchi (2015) differentiates between demotivation, which is situational, in that learners can be motivated again, from a more generic amotivation. in addition, falout et al. (2009) note that some demotivating factors can result in a total loss of motivation. a further complicating factor is the interchangeable use of demotivation and amotivation in the literature. chambers (1993) found that some students were demotivated before commencing learning in the l2 classroom. however, when dörnyei and ushioda (2011) refer to these specific learners in that study who “simply did not see the point of learning an l2” (p. 140), they are applying their definition of amotivation. in response, the term unmotivation was established by sakui and cowie (2012) to address the difficulty of differentiating between amotivation and demotivation as “in practical terms, language teachers have to deal with both types and it is difficult to differentiate between the two in classroom situations” (p. 205). in this study, demotivation will refer to specific external factors or experiences that may lead to amotivation or to describe specific episodes where individuals lose their motivation but they retain an overall motivational intent to continue acquiring korean. finally, remotivation refers to the “strategies [language learners] use to cope with pressures, to make meaning of their situations and actions, and to revive their motivation” (falout, murhpey, fukuda, & trovela, 2013, p. 328). 2.1. models and frameworks of demotivation the main demotivating factors identified by dörnyei (1998) and a review of japanese studies of demotivation (sakai & kikuchi, 2009) rank the learner’s perception and therefore experience of the teacher’s competence, personality, teaching style and methodology as the most important demotivating factors. dörnyei and ushioda (2011, p. 148) list nine demotivating factors as identified by dörnyei (1998) in order of decreasing importance: (1) the teacher (personality, commitment, competence, teaching methodology); (2) inadequate school resources (group too large or not large enough, high teacher turnover); (3) reduced self-confidence (experiences of lack of success or failure); (4) negative attitudes towards the l2; (5) compulsory need to study the l2; (6) interference from another language being studied; (7) negative attitudes towards the l2 community; (8) attitudes of group members; and (9) coursebook. sakai and kikuchi’s (2009) review of multiple studies of japanese english-language learning students and their issues of demotivation (see falout & maruyama, 2004; korean language learning demotivation among efl instructors in south korea 203 hasegawa, 2004; tsuchiya, 2006), identified a six-factor model of student demotivation. this comprises: (1) teachers (attitudes, behaviors, teaching competence, language proficiency, personality, and teaching style); (2) characteristics of classes (course content and pace, focus on grammar and external examinations, monotony); (3) experience of failure (disappointing results, lack of acceptance by teachers and others); (4) class environment (attitudes of classmates and friends, compulsory nature of study, inappropriate level of lessons, and inadequate use of facilities and resources within the school); (5) class materials (not suitable, uninteresting or too much reliance on books and handouts); and (6) lack of interest (a perception that english learnt in school will not be practical or necessary). kikuchi (2015) confirms that all six factors were evident in questionnaire responses obtained from more than 1000 japanese high school english language learners that participated in the kikuchi (2011) study. he particularly noted the participants’ ability to distinguish the behavior of the teacher and the class environment of their making, citing examples including a lack of use of technology in the classroom, using materials that were not relevant or timely, and large class sizes. however, teachers could not easily control these factors which were deemed more demotivating than issues more within the teacher’s control, including “difficult or one-way explanations, poor pronunciation, or the instructional approach” (kikuchi, 2015, p. 59). placing the main demotivating factors identified by dörnyei (1998) and the sakai and kikuchi (2009) studies together establishes a comprehensive framework of the most important factors and experiences comprising demotivation from the perspective of the learner who may then enter the language learning classroom where the powerful responses they brought with them from the outside may then be triggered by classroom practices. as dörnyei and ushioda (2011, p. 148) note, “by far the largest category (with 40 per cent of the total frequency of responses) directly concerned the teacher.” a further 15 per cent were related to reduced self-confidence (in part due to a classroom event under control of the teacher). more than ten per cent of demotives comprised inadequate school facilities and negative attitudes towards the l2 (which included the sound of the language and how it operates). following teacher and classroom-related demotivators, the experience or fear of failure was the third factor. factors two and four in the sakai and kikuchi (2009) model relate to characteristics of the class as do factors two and eight of the main factors identified by dörnyei (1998) whereas the fifth factor in the japanese model, that is, class materials, arguably equates to factor nine, the coursebook. the compulsory nature of english learning, negative attitudes towards the l2 and the l2 community, and interference from another language being studied are only mentioned by dörnyei and ushioda (2011). nevertheless “closer contact with the l2 results in strong evaluative feelings which affect subsequent commitment to continue learning the language” (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, p. 149). if these are mainly negative, demotivation may result. nigel gearing 204 interestingly, high-proficiency learners tend to attribute their demotivation to external factors (falout et al., 2009). therefore, because dörnyei and ushioda (2011), and sakai and kikuchi (2009) find that demotivated language learners attribute much of their demotivation to classroom-related experiences, it appears that they can be regarded as high proficiency learners. 2.2. self-regulation based on the findings of falout and maruyama (2004) and sakai and kikuchi (2009), kikuchi (2015, p. 60) concludes that: less-motivated learners are more sensitive to demotivators than more highly-motivated learners. it is possible that students who are more motivated are more able to self-regulate their cognitive and emotional wellbeing when encountering demotivators. learners who have a clear goal or reason to study the foreign language and are therefore motivated might not perceive potential demotivators as demotivating [and] might be more likely to overlook negative aspects of the learning environment and keep their focus on learning rather than on environmental conditions. in addition, kikuchi (2009) found that students without clear goals far more readily noticed potential demotivators including monotony of the lessons, unmotivated fellow classmates, and the student’s own lack of ability to understand the class. ultimately, while participants in many studies on demotivation attribute their loss of motivation to external forces, thereby identifying as high-proficiency learners (falout et al., 2009), forming conclusions based on these findings of such learners’ experiences alone may be premature. this is because by attributing the majority of their demotivating factors to the teacher and classroom-related experiences, the demotivated participants identified by dörnyei and ushioda (2011) could also be seen as perceiving themselves as high proficiency learners. 2.3. situation-specific demotivation a one-year longitudinal study of english l1-speaking university students learning french at a canadian university by gardner et al. (2004) showed that situation-specific motivation (including attitudes towards the learning situation) ultimately determined the level of success of individuals doing the course. this finding was confirmed by dörnyei, csizér, and németh (2006). their survey questionnaire of 13,000 hungarian language learners in 1993, 1999, and 2004 targeted attitudes towards english, german, french, italian, and russian, finding a steady decline in the motivation to learn foreign languages apart from a marked increase in the direct instrumental benefits derived from learning english such as korean language learning demotivation among efl instructors in south korea 205 career and financial opportunities. conversely, studies of english l1 speakers as l2 learners have found that visiting an english-speaking environment was a key transformational event (shoaib & dörnyei, 2005). however, study abroad demotivators include a lack of enthusiasm regarding study involvement, setting unachievable goals, being ill-prepared, or an inability to deal with cultural differences or second language acquisition (benson, barkhuizen, bodycott, & brown, 2013). finally, in a globalized world “the complexity of the association between context and motivation lies in the unprecedented growth of english in mainstream education in many countries. it reduces students’ interest in learning other foreign or local languages when the need to acquire english is prioritized” (ushioda, 2013, p. 6). it is against this backdrop that this study draws on relevant literature to explain “why some learners can ‘bounce back’ after a demotivating episode and others completely lose interest” (dörnyei & ryan, 2015, pp. 100-101); and therefore, addresses the following research questions: 1. which experiences demotivated participants once they had commenced learning korean? 2. which specific experiences significantly diminished participants’ continued behavioral intent? 3. what strategies did participants employ to remotivate themselves? 3. methods qualitative research employs a wide range of data-gathering tools, including recorded interviews and diaries (dörnyei, 2007). when transcribed and analyzed, these provide an effective means to explore new areas, make sense of highly complicated situations, answer “why” questions and broaden the scope of understanding of interpretations of a phenomenon gained from rich data analysis of participants’ experiences. for these reasons, a qualitative methodology was used to elicit data with the assistance of individual in-depth interviews forming the primary means of data collection, supported by optional diaries. 3.1. participants 14 participants were recruited from the author’s professional network in south korea. participants one to seven worked at the same university as the researcher. the remaining participants were recruited from seven different language centers around south korea. participants three and seven were employed on tenure contracts. all other participants were employed on one, or two-year, renewable contracts. table 1 outlines each participant’s details (the names used are pseudonyms). nigel gearing 206 table 1 participants participant (pseudonym) nationality age qualifications (highest degree obtained) number of years of work experience in south korea andy new zealand 34 bachelor (hospitality management) 4 angela united states 57 ma (creative writing) 9 barry united states 34 ba (broadcasting) 10 david canada 49 ba (psychology) 10 duncan england 39 ma (english language teaching) 6 james canada 40 ba (english literature) 11 john south africa 26 ba (human resource management) 2 michael england 28 ba (english literature) 2 paul australia 28 ma (tesol) 5 richard united states 49 ma (tesol) 15 robert new zealand 64 ma (education) 11 sharon united states 32 mba 10 vernon canada 46 ba (computer science) 6 3.2. procedures participants were asked to keep optional diaries for two weeks prior to their individual in-depth semi-structured interviews and were given no instructions about what to include in them. six participants brought these to their interviews to refer to where relevant and five gave them to the researcher for inclusion in the data analysis. the semi-structured interviews comprised 20 open-ended questions relating to a broader study on factors and experiences that may affect participants’ motivation to learn korean, or not, their motivation in general and how they coped with new and potentially challenging situations (see appendix). the guide was developed based on the observations of the author who, as a peer of many participants, shared a similar profile and experiences as an efl instructor in south korea. the selection of the qualitative, semi-structured interview as the primary data-gathering tool was due to its suitability for studies designed to elicit descriptions and interpretations of the lived world related to the phenomena being examined (kvale, 1996). its flexibility provided a guide from which to probe, or possibly digress when necessary, to gain more specific information (mackey & gass, 2005). each participant was accordingly interviewed at the venue of their choice. all interviews were audio-recorded and then transcribed. 3.3. data analysis the transcripts yielded 136,602 words of text. coding was conducted in a lineby-line process in which words and phrases deemed relevant were placed into themes that concurrently emerged. initial coding of one participant was initially korean language learning demotivation among efl instructors in south korea 207 conducted as this allowed for subsequent reassessment if further coding of the remaining participants was required (saldaña, 2013). the major advantage of this approach is that it allows for data to be compared for similarities and differences, a key aim of this study, and was therefore the approach used in data analysis. themes that emerged are listed in table 2. table 2 experiences of demotivation and ways of countering situation demotivation experiences of demotivation • lack of perceived need/relevance • cultural differences • teaching methodology • curriculum/resources • the teacher • other students • size and level of class • time of classes • cost • lack of perceived need/relevance • lack of accommodation in daily life • difficulty accessing korean communities of practice • dislike of l2 community • dislike of l2 language • lack of time • korean-speaking partner • peer attitudes • difficulty of learning korean countering situation demotivation – classroom countering situation demotivation – non-classroom • personal reflection – the importance of korean proficiency as a goal despite obstacles • self-awareness • renewed self-study/goal setting • relocation to a more suitable language program • personal reflection – the importance of korean proficiency as a goal despite obstacles • self-awareness • renewed self-study/goal setting • assertiveness in korean communities of practice 4. results results are presented around key emergent themes including how participants responded to non-classroom and classroom-related related experiences that they attributed their demotivation to, and situational demotivation experienced in the language-learning classroom and the broader sociocultural context. 4.1. forms of learning undertaken by participants participants were placed in three groups regarding the korean learning they undertook, as illustrated in table 3. group 1 comprised the participants who undertook korean instruction in the formal language classroom environment. those who also undertook korean instruction, however in an informal manner, by way of tuition or language exchange, fell in group 2. finally, group 3 comprised participants who did not undertake formal or informal korean instruction and whose korean learning was characterized autonomous self-study. nigel gearing 208 table 3 forms of learning undertaken by participants group 1 group 2 group 3 participants who studied korean in formal classroom setting. (richard, patricia, robert, vernon, duncan, and james) participants who studied korean by way of one-on-one lessons with korean tutors. (michael, andy, angela, paul, and david) participants who self-studied korean with no interaction with a classroom teacher or one-on-one tutor. (john, barry, and sharon) 4.2. participants for whom amotivation and unmotivation are relevant all participants exercised some initial motivation to learn korean. however, nine participants became demotivated to the point of amotivation, once they entered the actional stage of learning (dörnyei & ottó, 1998), including john, richard, andy, robert, angela, patricia, duncan, david, and vernon. overall, a sense of not knowing how long their south korean sojourns would last, due to the temporary nature of their employment contracts, a realization that in everyday life it was possible to survive with only minimal korean, and a lack of accommodation as korean speakers were key themes affecting amotivation and unmotivation among participants. john self-studied korean for a short time before discontinuing, stating: “i don’t know how long i will be here. even if you study korean for deep conversations you will revert back to your first language”, adding that “there’s only the korean way. it is very demotivating when every time [what is said in korean by an english-speaking second language user of it] isn’t right” (interview). andy undertook one-on-one informal language tuition, saying “my wife doesn’t care and i can get by fine in daily life, as it is. she is back up [but] there’s nothing that complex. you eat, need a taxi. most doctors speak english” (interview). patricia extended this theme, noting that while she “should speak the language [korean]. you learn that you can live here for years without speaking [it]” (interview). richard elaborated, making the point that: “for those that live in a foreign community, there is a great possibility that you will not learn the foreign language at all because you are only interacting in your own language” (diary, day 11). other participants in this group cited classroom management and teacher-related issues, the teaching methodology, curriculum and resources as demotivating. patricia cited additional difficulties, such as the cost, size of and wide range of levels of students in her class, saying “we [herself and one other student] found the class to be too slow” (interview). the remaining participants comprised two groups, those who continued to self-study korean on a sporadic, ad hoc basis while citing intermittent demotivating experiences, and those for whom learning korean was a significant goal and developed strategies to counter situational demotivation. participants defined their self-study as using textbooks and on-line language learning resources, attempting to understand aspects of korean culture and history by reading korean korean language learning demotivation among efl instructors in south korea 209 books, listening to korean music, watching korean televisions programs and films, and using korean in daily life. the first group included michael, richard, barry, and paul. michael and paul undertook informal language tuition. michael and paul discontinued after a short time citing lack of time and competing goals (e.g., other study commitments) as demotivating factors. paul also mentioned a change of location from a smaller city to a large metropolitan city where it was comparatively easy to survive in daily life without korean and his korean partner as a demotivating factor “in the country, nobody spoke english.” however, in his korean communities, the ability and willingness of koreans to communicate in english resulted in “selfguilt for not learning more [korean].” due to his relationship being conducted in korean, paul felt a sense of alienation at not being able to fully participate in conversations, particularly when “sometimes i get lost. i am curious to be able to communicate, but in korean [to] get that perspective.” while he represented the minority viewpoint of participants that he was accommodated by koreans, he added that while some koreans could speak english, “they shouldn’t have to” (interview). barry cited koreans preferring to deal with his korean partner, a tendency to rely on her and a dislike of aspects of korean culture as demotivating experiences (interview). the second group comprised sharon and james whose ability to manage situational demotivation was due to sufficiently strong future l2 self-visions. as opposed to other participants who also cited previous negative l2-learning experiences (i.e., barry, angela, and patricia), their motivation to learn korean appeared to be strongly internalized. this was despite sharon’s shared in the interview the sentiment with patricia that she was not a “natural” language learner (interview). sharon and james also emphasized the role having chosen to study korean had on their motivation, with sharon saying “i started learning korean because i wanted to [not because it was] something i have to learn to get a grade, [therefore] it was easier” (interview). her demotivation resulted from experiences related to the difficulty of assimilating certain aspects of the language, koreans’ lack of accommodation of her as an l2 speaker of their l1 and difficulties gaining deeper access to her korean communities of practice. while james learned korean formally for his entire time in south korea, he experienced more specific episodic demotivation due to dissatisfaction with the teaching methodology, curriculum, resources, and his fellow students at the first university where he studied korean. 4.3. non-classroom related experiences largely due to a lack of exposure to english by koreans residing there, all participants except paul and james emphasized the difficulty of being understood due to their accented pronunciation in korean. significantly, participants believed that this specific form of lack of accommodation of them as l2 speakers of korean nigel gearing 210 excluded them from opportunities to gain further experience as korean learners and users. john’s viewpoint was typical: “there is only the korean way. they don’t get into contact with foreigners often. they are so shy and focused on form and being perfect. they can’t think outside the box or creatively” (interview). importantly, a significant number of koreans that participants interacted with were motivated to learn and speak english, particularly those with korean partners (john, richard, andy, barry, paul, james, and david). they also believed that among koreans they encountered in daily life, particularly in the service industries, many preferred to communicate in their own first language with fellow koreans, rather than with their non-korean partners. richard and barry found the resulting lack of perceived opportunities to communicate in korean in daily life, due to their partner’s presence, or perceived comparative linguistic expertise in korean, demotivating. for richard, this took the form of korean staff “automatically” addressing his wife over him in encounters (interview). for barry, his korean wife’s ability to conduct tasks and business more efficiently had resulted in his korean use and level having “gone down, because i don’t have to do those things” (interview). participants also believed that in in their lec workplaces, the use of korean was not required or encouraged: there was strong discouragement from management to use korean in the classroom, even to go to korean classes. the president [of the university] was a fluent speaker of english. i have always felt a major disincentive in [work] places to learn korean. (interview with robert) some participants also attributed discouragement from koreans to their demotivation to continue learning korean. andy was typical of this cohort, concluding that “there’s no reward in learning korean so when other priorities take over, it’s the first thing i drop” (interview). while the contributing factors to their demotivation varied, the overall theme of korean acquisition being an ongoing, low priority goal, was shared by richard, barry, patricia, and paul. negative feelings towards the l2 community manifested in strong criticism of the language related to korean culture were expressed by patricia, angela, and barry. barry found “studying korean included studying korean culture”; however parochialism and nationalism caused defensiveness among some koreans leading him to conclude that “there’s so many topics that you can’t talk about” (interview). for angela, the language and culture were linked as demotivating factors: it felt really uncomfortable to even say those words [because of the requirement to use] some korean phrases, and words in everyday life [their usage] helps a lot, but culturally korea seems like a baby or adolescent. the language does not seem beautiful. i love spanish so much more. (interview) korean language learning demotivation among efl instructors in south korea 211 however, for participants who had committed to living permanently in korea, their motivation to learn korean was a high priority. while claiming korean was a difficult language to learn, for sharon “the only time korean takes a back burner to anything” was when she was studying the bible or preparing lessons (interview). her experience contrasted to those of michael, richard, andy, patricia, robert, paul, duncan, and vernon, who claimed lack of time was a demotivating factor. for sharon, a total immersion lifestyle outside work was a powerful motivator with “baby steps dramatically” improving her korean because “everything once i leave school” is in korean (interview). this included a koreanspeaking family “having adopted me as if i was a member of their family” (diary, day 7), conducting all her business in korean, membership of a korean-speaking church and associated activities in addition to self-study of korean and taking korean proficiency examinations. however, she did experience demotivation as summed up by her relationship with her roommate: our whole existence is in korean. that’s helped. it’s also frustrating. she can dominate the conversation. with her family, i was really nervous. i would make excuses not to go, or at certain times, when i know not everyone would have arrived, or when everyone was leaving, because i couldn’t understand what was going on. (interview) participants with less robust visions of themselves as korean speakers were more susceptible to demotivating experiences. while sharon embraced taking formal korean tests, barry experienced such goal-oriented study as demotivating: last year, i tried studying for a few tests in korean and gave up. the vocabulary was way too difficult, the grammar was way beyond me. sometimes you study for a goal. i study because i want to. i’ll stick with it more. (interview) in summary, the findings of this section indicate that the greater the motivation of the participant, the more they were able to employ strategies to counter demotivating experiences outside the classroom environment. however, the majority appeared less able or willing to counter the demotivation they experienced. 4.4. classroom-related experiences interestingly, vernon was the only participant to undertake classroom instruction who cited the degree of difficulty of learning korean as a demotivating factor. other factors related to his classroom-related experience, the most significant being the teaching methodology, curriculum and resources. duncan and james recounted a similar pattern of complaint. james described his first formal korean learning environment as “terrible”, claiming that “learning for enjoyment was almost sucked out of it” due to the grammar/translation and audio-lingual, nigel gearing 212 teacher-centered methodology which he claimed denied the students opportunities for communicative practice, he added that “they say they are communicative, but we are sitting in a half circle” performing tasks which he believed were “completely devoid of context” such as students taking it in turns to construct sentences using assigned sentence patterns (interview). duncan’s demotivation was also directly related to the teaching methodology: she [the teacher] tried to go through the material so fast we could never consolidate the information. she was trying to do a semester’s worth of language teaching in two months one evening a week, for two hours. it became overwhelming. (interview) duncan commented that “there were only four of us. we could easily [have] done some good role plays.” rather, he found “the listen, and repeat style of learning, here is a list of vocabulary and verbs. go and learn it by next week” inappropriate and stopped attending the class. he then took lessons at a cultural center noting the teacher’s emphasis on students “communicating together, playing different games and really trying to go through it at a good pace” (interview). he still believed the lack of opportunities to use the language outside the lessons made it difficult for him to consolidate the learning and discontinued attending these lessons. patricia believed the formal korean taught in her class was inappropriate for her daily-life needs with james expressing frustration at classroom materials and tasks, particularly those related to the culture of the language, being taught: if you are interested in the culture, you are more interested in the language itself. [it] is not hanbok [the traditional korean dress]. that’s a small [part] of it. [it] is what i am talking about to some dude in the coffee shop [or a] businessman. [it] is what i see on tv, not [a] buddhist lantern festival. (interview) robert and vernon found the teacher’s inappropriate actions demotivating and robert, james, and vernon identified other students as an issue. vernon criticized the teacher’s inability to control the class as some students would take away the focus of the lesson rendering the lesson “a waste of time.” additionally, in attempting to protect students’ feelings, the teacher was reluctant to give necessary feedback in a class where the levels of the students ranged dramatically (interview), the latter point also being made by patricia. robert stopped attending his korean class because: one of the young, american, males fancied the teacher. he monopolized her time. the people organizing it said: “well, we can’t do much about it. these two seem to be developing a relationship. (interview) james’ criticism of his fellow students centered around their perceived acceptance of a teaching methodology that he believed would have been more readily challenged korean language learning demotivation among efl instructors in south korea 213 if it had not been for the reputation of the university they were studying at. “because of expectations, a lot of students seriously believe that they are in a class for fifty minutes, even if they are sleeping. the class was tough. i learned something” (interview). the cost of formal language classes was mentioned by john, michael, and patricia as a demotivator and that the times formal classes were offered was almost exclusively when participants were themselves teaching with john, michael, andy, barry, patricia, and paul attributing these two issues as the most prohibitive regarding entering the korean language classroom. in summary, for all participants except james, their pre-actional intent to learn korean was a secondary goal, if it was a goal at all, initially in response to living in a nation with its own national language, although in sharon’s case, korean acquisition emerged as her primary goal in reaction to the growing realization that she was “going to retire here [south korea]” (interview). james’ primary goal was characterized by a “steady chipping away at the mountain,” only stopping due to financial issues (interview). however, the situational demotivation he experienced during his first korean-language class led him to discontinue studying there. how sharon countered situational demotivation outside the classroom, and james did likewise inside, which is the subject of the next section. 4.5. remotivation strategies for sharon, demotivating experiences were the linked lack of accommodation in daily life and the difficulty of gaining access beyond the peripheral to koreanspeaking communities as a non-native speaker. additionally, the hierarchical nature of the language, particularly the honorific form, had led her, at times, to conclude that the “grammar issue had gotten too much.” to counter the resulting demotivation and to remotivate herself, she would “take a break [and then] go back into it.” “eventually,” she would buy some more korean books and return to focused study on areas she believed she needed to improve upon. able to “understand more,” she became re-motivated after assimilating the necessary new learning by practicing it in her korean communities (interview). in this way, her reliance on books was gradually replaced by increasing korean language use in daily life. however, she readily acknowledged the challenge of attempting to function in entirely korean-speaking communities, particularly her korean family and church “who sometimes forget that korean is not my first language” (interview). finally, she took korean proficiency tests to impose selfdiscipline, particularly regarding korean grammar acquisition. to counter situational demotivation, she engaged in enjoyable l2 activities, including listening to korean singers, watching korean television and engaging in simpler conversations, such as gossip within her korean communities. james also employed specific nigel gearing 214 strategies to counter situational demotivation experienced inside the classroom. driven by a determination that “this language is not going to beat me,” james, removed himself from his first korean-learning environment to keep his l2 vision alive, enrolling at another university program which emphasized the use of contemporary korean television shows for listening tasks, as opposed to his prior learning experience where the institution made “its own body of videotape.” he still referred to the “boring materials being better, but not great”. however, concluded that the teaching methodology at his second school was far more appropriate and communicative (interview). 5. discussion participants’ experiences reflect that “people differ in how they can generate a successful possible self, which suggests that one of the main sources of the absence of motivation in some learners is the lack of a properly developed self image and an ideal language self-component in particular” (dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014, p. 34). due to their perceptions of their learning environments, most participants experienced weakened motivation or amotivation. such learners, with little intrinsic or extrinsic motivation, were more likely to interpret their learning environment as demotivating due to an inability to interpret environmental conditions positively (kikuchi, 2015). interestingly, while sharon was able to manage episodic demotivation, she was reluctant to describe herself as a high-proficiency learner. as stated, such learners tend to attribute their demotivation to external factors (falout et al., 2009). rather, she took action to remotivate her ideal l2 self by interpreting demotivating experiences reflectively. in so doing, she proves that not all lower-proficiency learners need relegate themselves to becoming trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of demotivation and poor performance (falout & maruyama, 2004). this is because, although she did not label herself a lower proficiency learner, she was reluctant to be identified as a high proficiency learner. this also implies insufficient internal motivation among other self-studying korean participants whose incidents of demotivation were in direct contrast to hers. turning to demotivation inside the classroom, duncan and james were experienced career efl teachers working in highly-prestigious korean universities in a major metropolitan center. the amotivation that resulted from duncan’s belief that he was largely unable to use the korean learnt in class in daily life and demotivation of james reflected the findings of dörnyei and kubanyiova (2014). these authors believe that a classroom methodology and management that continually deny participants the ability to link their current activity to their future l2 self-visions, particularly regarding “studenty” tasks, will result in demotivation korean language learning demotivation among efl instructors in south korea 215 (dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014, p. 34). also, highly-motivated students may withdraw from their classes if the teacher’s sole focus on pragmatic delivery of the curriculum is too removed from students’ imagined identities (norton, 2000). conversely, “communicative tasks – especially l2 films, music, food enable students to link classroom activities with their future l2 visions” (dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014, p. 107). therefore, duncan’s decision to discontinue learning korean after his demotivating classroom experiences may be indicative of a student without clear goals who more readily experienced demotivators (kikuchi, 2009). his first formal korean learning class experience largely demotivated him with its lack of communicative opportunities. while his second korean class did offer these opportunities, he then attributed his demotivation to being unable to use the korean he had learned there in daily life. this implies that, contrary to duncan’s interpretation, his experiences correspond to those of an unmotivated learner (sakui & cowie, 2012), as upon entering the language-learning classroom, he then attributed his pre-existing (albeit denied) lack of motivation to demotivating events experienced there and outside it. correspondingly, james’s continued learning korean in the formal language classroom implies that despite negative experiences, he remained less susceptible to them. dörnyei and kubanyiova (2014) found that such students were able to look beyond the negative aspects of their classroom learning experience as a “counterbalance” should their ideal-l2 self-visions not be realized (p. 114). however, little evidence supports james interpreting any such environmental factors positively or neutrally, which falout and maruyama (2004) and kikuchi (2009) claim is possible. rather, he attributed his demotivation externally to classroom-related issues, an action in keeping with that of a high proficiency learner. not surprisingly, therefore, the demotivation he experienced concurs with the findings of previous studies of student demotivation. these include a lack of a pleasant, relaxed atmosphere, skilled teachers, and choice as the most important (rudnai, 1996), and teachers’ behaviors, attitudes, context, classroom format, and structure as the most significant (gorham & millette, 1997), as well as the monotony of lessons, unmotivated fellow classmates and particularly the “poor instructional approach that teachers used in the classroom” (kikuchi, 2015, p. 59). while duncan’s criticisms partially mirror the sixfactor demotivation model of sakai and kikuchi (2009), they possibly more closely correspond to kikuchi’s (2015) revised four-factor model of demotivation comprising: (1) teacher behavior, (2) class environment, (3) experiences of difficulty, and (4) loss of interest. duncan had no interest in test scores or acceptance by the teacher and his classmates which partially define the third demotivating factor of sakai and kikuchi’s (2009) model. however, the same authors note that while they expected teacher variables to be the strongest predictors of demotivating nigel gearing 216 experience, they proved to be on par with a cluster of more internal variables, a finding supported by falout et al. (2009). as a learner with clear goals, it could be presumed that james would be able to look beyond the negative learning environment and remain focused on the learning, not the environmental conditions (falout & maruyama, 2004; kikuchi, 2009), particularly as “future-oriented students who ascribe higher valence to goals in the distant future [are] more willing and resolute when engaging in non-interesting yet essential activities” (dörnyei, henry, & muir, 2016, p. 29, emphasis original). however, since james left his first korean language program, his experience contradicts this. rather, his actions appeared to more closely reflect those of an individual dörnyei and kubanyiova (2014) describe as able to address “real or imagined barriers head on” (p. 97). ultimately, his response to his negative learning environment explains why he left his first korean class over continuing to engage with the noninteresting behavior which was the source of his demotivation. additionally, neither james nor duncan referred to a “low regard for english-speaking people” (sakai & kikuchi, 2009, p. 61), which in this context would imply koreans. it could be argued that with the exception of james, all participants who undertook korean language classroom learning entered it with pre-existing demotivating experiences resulting from reduced self-confidence, largely due to experiences of failure (dörnyei, 1998). for all other participants, except james and paul, the most demotivating of these were the expressed, negative gatekeeping encounters they believed they had experienced, particularly repeated attempts to use korean in daily life as l2 speakers of korean as they were met with a lack of accommodation. the resulting demotivation and amotivation were largely attributed to not being understood due to their pronunciation. in addition, participants believed that koreans in their communities (where possible) would prefer to use english. these experiences were then used to justify their resulting lack of motivation, with vernon noting that “a demotivating factor is talking with other foreigners about the pointlessness of learning korean” (interview). for those at the actional stage of the process model of motivation (dörnyei & ottό, 1998) (no matter how briefly or regardless of level of commitment), it appears that upon contact with the l2, strong negative evaluative feelings, particularly towards the l2 and l2 community, affected participants’ subsequent commitment to learn korean, regardless of whether this contact was primarily in the classroom or in the broader sociocultural context. the externalizing of this demotivation was then used to rationalize their resulting lack of motivation to learn korean internally. however, in light of this, it becomes questionable as to what degree participants possessed intrinsic motivation, self-determination and/or an l2 vision. to conclude, only sharon and james reactivated their demotivated korean learning through activities which limited the motivational damage that they korean language learning demotivation among efl instructors in south korea 217 were experiencing. “this process of affirming this sense of motivational autonomy becomes self-motivation, of getting your motivation on line again” (ushioda, 1998, p. 86, emphasis original). participants largely externalized their demotivation and amotivation to factors they believed they experienced in the classroom and beyond it, in daily life in south korea. however, internal, or reactive demotivational factors may give a clearer indication of learning outcomes over the external experiences which more proficient learners are more likely to attribute their demotivation to (falout & maruyama, 2004). james and sharon’s respective interpretations of demotivation illustrate this point. after 16 years as a korean-language classroom learner and the understandable outsider presumption that such commitment would have resulted in advanced-learner status and fluency, james still identified himself as an “upper intermediate” student. however, as a selfidentifying high proficiency learner, he still externalized much of his demotivation: “by projecting the responsibility of their loss of motivation onto external causes, learners may be better able to limit the motivational damage and disassociate the negative effect they are currently experiencing from their own enduring motivation for wanting to learn the language” (ushioda 1998, p. 86). by contrast, sharon’s experiences illustrate that with sufficient internal motivation, the need to attribute demotivation externally becomes increasingly redundant. 6. conclusion this study addressed the following research questions: (1) which experiences demotivated participants once they had commenced learning korean?; (2) which specific experiences significantly diminished participants’ continued behavioral intent?; and (3) what strategies did participants employ to remotivate themselves? in addressing research question one, this study found that participants did exercise initial effort to learn korean. however, they tended to lose learning motivation due to perceived negative experiences in and outside the classroom. those that undertook korean language classroom instruction attributed their resulting lack of motivation to classroom-related experiences and to pre-existing factors that they brought with them. these were the result of experiences of limited success, or failure, when having attempted to use korean outside it or in response to methodological and teaching-related issues inside it. also, their initial experiences in daily life in south korea may have led them to believe that there was little need to learn korean. this was reinforced by their perception that they were largely not accommodated as non-native speakers of the language and that the korean desire to acquire english, or for fear of using it, resulted in their attempts to access korean communities being discouraged, particularly in their lec workplaces. the resulting strong, negative evaluative feelings did affect any subsequent nigel gearing 218 commitment to learn korean inside or outside the classroom. participants also regarded as demotivating the time and cost of learning korean, the number of students, their behavior and methodological issues, including the materials, teaching approach, form of language taught and the range of levels in the same class. turning to research question two, participants tended to lack sufficiently strong future l2 visions and were therefore relatively poorly equipped to deal with episodes of situational demotivation that inevitably accompany the ebbs and flows of l2 acquisition. to deflect this internal deficit, participants externally projected the attribution of their loss of motivation onto the negative gatekeeping encounters they experienced as non-native korean speakers and in the language classroom to the teaching methodology and associated issues of classroom management. turning to research question three, as negative evidence, sharon and james were more able to counter the situational demotivation they experienced over other participants. for sharon, this largely involved further noting the gaps in her korean proficiency which motivated her to further succeed. she did this by committing to relevant self-study before attempting to re-enter her korean communities with the renewed goal of achieving a deeper level of membership through her practice of korean there. for james, this entailed removing himself from a demotivating formal classroom situation to one more suited to his needs. interestingly, sharon, who was reluctant to be identified as a high proficiency learner, was more successful in this endeavor than james. in summary, from the perspectives recounted by participants, demotivation can be viewed as existing on a continuum. at one end, lack of motivation represents the culmination of multiple demotivating experiences which were then attributed to a lack of language-learning motivation. however, the degree to which this rationalizing may come from amotivated language learners implies a form of denial on the part of those participants. conversely, depending on the strength of the individual’s future l2 self-guide, while the motivated language learner may well also experience demotivating episodes, these individuals appear to be more able and willing to manage related situational demotivation. this study corroborates findings of the literature on demotivation that the teacher and classroom-related issues are the most demotivating for l2 learners and, in this case, closer contact with the l2 did not change much in this respect. therefore, the demotivating factors and experiences learners bring with them to the classroom setting should not be overlooked as they can affect the resulting demotivation. for participants, these may be directly related to previous negative experiences with the l2 itself, the l2 community and negative perceptions of the culture of the host nation and/or the projection of a limited vision of an ideal l2 self onto these experiences. finally, this study has shown that the more internally motivated learners may be, the less inclined they may be to externalize issues of demotivation. korean language learning demotivation among efl instructors in south korea 219 this study is the first to examine how issues of unmotivation, demotivation, and amotivation impact on the willingness of english-speaking efl instructors to invest in learning the korean language. considerable practical advantage would be gained by knowing why some learners are more able to manage demotivating episodes, while for others amotivation results. the degree to which participants’ experiences are unique to south korea or would be replicated in comparable scenarios is a question that further research could profitably explore, particularly in a globalizing world. however, it is also important to note this study’s limitations. as a colleague of participants, the author’s shared profile arguably created an empathetic and conducive atmosphere which may have influenced interviewees and therefore the interviews themselves. further studies would benefit from analysis of a wider cohort’s experience (in terms of employment), to be conducted in other host societies with small national languages by a researcher unknown to participants. acknowledgements the author gratefully acknowledges the assistance and comments of the editors, reviewers and dr. peter roger, macquarie university, with previous drafts of this article. nigel gearing 220 references benson, p., barkhuizen, g., bodycott, p., & brown, j. 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(2013). motivation and elt: global issues and local concerns. in e. ushioda (ed.), international perspectives on motivation (pp. 1-17). london, uk: palgrave macmillan. korean language learning demotivation among efl instructors in south korea 223 appendix questions for semi-structured, in-depth interviews of participants 1) how important, as a goal, is learning korean to you? why/why not? 2) why did you start learning korean? 3) if you have stopped learning korean, why? 4) if you have continued learning korean, why? 5) is learning korean something you have chosen to do, or do you feel it is something you ought to do? 6) do you feel social pressure to learn korean? if yes, where does that pressure come from? 7) is learning korean something you do for pleasure or a hobby or interest? 8) is learning korean something you do because you believe it may provide some external benefit(s) in your life now or in the future? 9) what might these external benefits be? do they apply to you? 10) in terms of goal-setting now, in this situation of one-year renewable contracts in a globalized environment, does learning korean have to compete with other goals? 11) if so, can you rank your short-term goals and long-term goals and place learning korean in this context and explain why you ranked it where you did? 12) have your short and long-term goals changed since arriving in korea? if so, how and why? 13) it has also been said that students who have no clear internalized purpose (learning for enjoyment) and no strongly felt externalized reason to learn another language (expectation, how well this relates to your present and future goals) are unlikely to expend the effort required. do you agree with this statement? why/why not? 14) do you believe you have much control over your own level of functioning in your life? for example, in an unfamiliar setting, or environment, do you see the challenge of overcoming the obstacles in your path as something you can easily take in your stride, perhaps enjoy, or even find exciting, or, in such a situation, do you tend to feel burdened, or even overwhelmed? 15) do you have a belief system about yourself regarding learning languages (e.g., age, aptitude)? 16) what is your expectation regarding learning korean, e.g., do you anticipate success? why/why not? 17) it has been said that goals that are hard and specific lead to the highest performance. to what extent would you agree/disagree? do you feel that this ‘principle’ applies to learning korean? 18) in terms of formal learning and/or classroom learning what obstacles have you experienced while learning korean? 19) what obstacles, if any, have you experienced when trying to use or experiment with korean outside the classroom, in daily life? 20) what other obstacles have you experienced while learning korean? 251 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (2). 2015. 251-272 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.2.4 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl clil and non-clil students’ beliefs about language liss kerstin sylvén university of gothenburg, sweden lisskerstin.sylven@ped.gu.se abstract this article presents the findings of an innovative qualitative study involving one clil (content and language integrated learning) student and one student in a parallel, non-clil strand at high school level in sweden. the aim of the study was to investigate differences in students’ beliefs about language. the success of second (l2) and foreign language (fl) learning depends to a large degree on individual differences (dörnyei, 2005; skehan, 1991). differences are normally elicited through questionnaires, interviews, and/or observations. in the present study, the aim was to get direct access to the informants’ own perspectives, without the content being too directed through predetermined questions. in this study, students were asked to take photos illustrating how they view (a) their l1 (swedish), and (b) the fl/l2 english. then the photos were thematically organized by the researcher. subsequently, the thematic organization and the photos themselves were discussed with each of the informants during an interview. the informants were asked to elaborate on each theme and/or picture as to why and how it illustrates the respective language for them. the findings reveal substantial differences between the two informants in their views on their l1 and fl/l2, with the clil student highlighting communication rather than seeing the two languages as separate systems, and the non-clil student seeing language rather the other way around. keywords: individual differences, learner beliefs, clil, visual narratives liss kerstin sylvén 252 1. introduction the role of individual differences (ids) in language learning has been recognized for a long time. dörnyei (2005) identifies creativity, willingness to communicate, aptitude, motivation, self-esteem, language learning styles and strategies, personality traits, anxiety, and learner beliefs as the most salient ids to take into account when trying to understand the process of second (l2) and foreign language (fl) learning. for this paper, the id learner beliefs is the focus of the study, as illustrated in learners’ photographs and narrated in the subsequent interviews. the growing interest in learner beliefs in the area of language learning is evidenced, among other things, in the increasing number of publications taking into account both teacher and learner (barcelos & kalaja, 2011; ellis, 2008; ferreira barcelos & kalaja, 2013; kalaja, menezes, & barcelos, 2008; see also barcelos, this volume). all these studies add pieces to the patchwork of understanding the importance of learner beliefs, what they are, how they interact with other ids and factors relevant for language learning, and how best to deal with them. the present study aims at filling a gap in this field of research, namely, how fl/l2 learners perceive their first language (l1) and their fl/l2 (in this context english) through the camera lens. content and language integrated learning (clil) is an umbrella term covering methods used in educational settings to combine the teaching of a subject, such as history or biology, with the learning of an fl/l2 (marsh, 2002; tedick & cammarata, 2012). in the swedish context, english is by far the most common target language used in clil. english is also frequently encountered in swedish everyday life, and there is an ongoing debate whether it should be considered as an l2 or an fl in sweden (hyltenstam, 2004; viberg, 2000). officially, it is still seen as an fl, even though for certain individuals, it may very well be an l2 (sundqvist & sylvén, 2014). as a consequence, when referring to english in this paper, the abbreviation fl/l2 is used. as we know very little about learner beliefs in connection with clil, the present study aims at investigating any possible differences in students’ views on language by using a qualitative approach involving one clil student and one student in a parallel, non-clil (where the l1 swedish is used as the medium of instruction, and the fl/l2 english is studied as a separate subject) strand in upper secondary school in sweden. the intent is to gain insights into the thoughts about language among adolescent fl/l2 learners in order to identify possible underlying assumptions that might influence the language learning process and further add to our understanding of clil and non-clil students. clil and non-clil students’ beliefs about language 253 2. theoretical and contextual framework 2.1. content and language integrated learning (clil) learning an fl is most likely easiest when surrounded by people using that language and in an environment where the fl is virtually the only means at hand to make oneself understood. under such circumstances, large amounts of authentic language input are available for the learner, as well as opportunities for output and interaction with others in the fl. all these factors, input, output, and interaction, are considered vital for successful learning to take place (e.g., gass, 1997; long, 1981). such ideal conditions, however, are rarely available for the individual fl learner, who rather has to settle for language classes offered in an educational setting. the immersion method in canada (genesee, 1987) and, later, clil in europe (marsh, 2002) and elsewhere (lin & man, 2010) are approaches which aim to increase the amount of both input, output, and interaction for fl learners by using the fl as the medium of instruction in school subjects such as biology, history, and mathematics. immersion, clil and other types of bilingual education have attracted a great deal of interest from the research community, evident not least from the number of edited volumes (dalton-puffer, nikula, & smit, 2010; mehisto, marsh, & frigols martín, 2008; ruiz de zarobe, sierra, & gallardo del puerto, 2011), specialist journals and symposia as well as thematic strands devoted to clil at large international conferences. the principle aim of clil is to increase learners’ exposure to a target language and, in so doing, also increase chances for more successful learning. several studies have reported that this intended aim is being met. for instance, navés and victori (2010) showed that clil students in grades 7 and 9 outperform their non-clil peers in higher grades in english fluency, lexical complexity and accuracy. admiraal, westhoff and de bot (2006) and navés (2011) both found positive effects of clil on reading comprehension. furthermore, jimenéz catalán, ruiz de zarobe and cenoz (2006) investigated vocabulary knowledge among spanish students and found clil students to have a larger english lexicon than their non-clil peers. similar findings have been reported in studies from other contexts (klippel, 2003; zydatiss, 2007). however, clil is not always the panacea to l2 learning, as it sometimes has been depicted, as there may be other factors influencing the positive outcomes reported. bruton (2011), for instance, criticizes the lack of baseline data in many studies, and rumlich (2013) highlights the fact that students opting for the clil approach seem to be higher achievers than those choosing non-clil. as pointed out by sylvén (2013), clil has not led to an increase in english proficiency compared to non-clil education in the swedish context, which may be explained by four factors: liss kerstin sylvén 254 lack of framework, lack of teacher training, late introduction, and large amounts of exposure to english outside of school. one of the underlying assumptions about clil is that by using language in social interaction in the classroom in order to construct meaning of a specific subject content, the language will more or less automatically be learnt. however, in order for any clil approach to be more successful, lyster (2007), among others, calls for a counterbalanced approach, where authentic input of the l2 is offered together with explicit language learning including grammar, in order to facilitate and improve the l2 learning process. the stance taken in this paper is that although language is co-constructed in a social context, the cognitive process of l2 learning takes place within the individual l2 learner’s mind. it is therefore of interest to learn more about individuals’ own idiosyncratic beliefs and assumptions as they influence the learning process (e.g., cotterall, 1995; dweck, 2006; skehan, 1991), and, further, to see if there are possible differences at group level between clil and non-clil students. 2.2. learner beliefs learner beliefs “play a central role in learning experience and achievements” (cotterall, 1999, p. 494), and are an important factor to account for in fl/l2 learning research. many studies, therefore, focus on beliefs in connection with language learning. to do this, a widely used instrument is the beliefs about language learning inventory (balli) questionnaire (horwitz, 1987), which was specifically designed for the purpose of tapping into learner beliefs about language learning. horwitz (1999) reviews several studies using balli where possible differences between cultural groups are investigated and finds that rather than specific groups being different from one another, large intergroup variations were found suggesting that individual factors such as age and language learning context play a crucial role in learner beliefs. cotterall (1999) uses her own set of questions to investigate subareas of learner beliefs in need of further investigation and finds that learners hold beliefs about metacognitive strategies, feedback, self-efficacy, self-esteem and their own ability as a language learner. these would thus be fruitful areas for further research to extend our understanding of the broader concept of beliefs. in this paper, the focus is on the subarea of learners’ beliefs about language per se. in an in-depth meta-analysis of three studies on learner beliefs, ellis (2008) concludes that not only do the dynamic and situated beliefs among learners influence the language learning process, but also that teachers’ beliefs are important to take into account. ellis suggests that becoming aware of both learners’ and teachers’ beliefs would be beneficial in the fl/l2 classroom. in a clil and non-clil students’ beliefs about language 255 clil context, these may be relevant findings to take into account, where an fl/l2 is used as the medium of instruction and language is learned in nontraditional ways. studies looking into learner beliefs have typically used questionnaires to elicit data. however, as pointed out by kalaja, alanen, and dufva (2008), other measures than questionnaires are perhaps needed in order to get a better understanding of individuals’ beliefs about language learning, and thus they call for more qualitative methods such as written narratives or more specifically visual narratives. they feel that traditional methods were inadequate in their quest for a more in-depth understanding of beliefs and therefore find the visual narrative approach innovative and useful. others have followed suit with this approach (alanen, kalaja, & dufva, 2013; dufva, kalaja, & alanen, 2011), and, most recently, kalaja (in press) asked students attending the teacher training programme in finland to illustrate themselves as in-service teachers in the future, teaching a foreign language class by drawing a picture. by combining visual and oral narratives richer renderings of the “multiplicity of meanings present in the views held by a learner” (kalaja et al., 2008, p. 198) can be captured. whereas photographs are used in other fields of research, such as ethnography, as a method of gathering valuable empirical data, they have not been used to any great extent within the field of fl/l2 learning. one of the very few studies using photographs taken by the informants themselves, and thus similar in approach to the present study, was conducted by nikula and pitkänen-huhta (2008), who focused on informal l2 learning among 14-15 year-olds. a total of seven students took photographs illustrating objects, places and events in their everyday lives where english played a role. the authors found that english indeed plays an important role in these young people’s lives, and that they encounter english daily in school as well as outside, through the entertainment industry, tourism and also in many of their hobbies. by asking the informants to use the camera, the researchers were able to get access to their everyday activities in connection with english in a way that would have been very difficult otherwise. in a similar vein, looking into the narratives of identity among young learners of english in hong kong, besser and chik (2014) asked learners to photograph their everyday english learning opportunities. they find socio-economic class to be an important indicator of identity development and argue that the use of photographs is a fruitful way of capturing participants’ thoughts in richer detail. an aspect which is not addressed in the studies accounted for above is learners’ thoughts and beliefs about language per se. the present study uses photographs to elicit learner beliefs about language and thereby aims at filling that gap. liss kerstin sylvén 256 2.3. individual differences and clil this article reports on findings from students involved in clil and non-clil settings respectively and examines their beliefs about languages. whilst there are no studies about learner beliefs and clil, there has been work on other ids which is of relevance. the most commonly researched id in connection with clil is motivation. in many studies, a preconception seems to be that motivation is an inherent characteristic of clil (fehling, 2008; lasagabaster & sierra, 2009). however, without having baseline data at the pre-clil level, it is difficult to claim any such intrinsic feature of clil. recently, sylvén and thompson (2015) found that clil students are significantly more motivated than their non-clil peers already from the commencement of clil. these findings corroborate rumlich (2013), who refers to the selection of students into clil versus non-clil strands as “a creaming effect” (p. 185). in other words, it is the cream of the crop, or the most able and motivated students, who opt for clil. another id studied in connection with clil is willingness to communicate (wtc). menezes and juan-garau (2014) focussed on wtc in a study including clil and non-clil students and administered two questionnaires. the results clearly show the clil students to have a significantly higher wtc than the nonclil ones. similarly, pihko (2007) found the level of wtc to be higher among clil than non-clil students. neither of these studies reported baseline, pre-clil data, though, and it is therefore difficult to know whether the findings are the result of clil or were pre-existing among those who chose the clil option. anxiety is yet another id studied in clil contexts. thompson and sylvén (in press) investigated clil and non-clil students at the beginning of a clil programme, and the results indicate that already before the start of clil there are significant differences in levels of anxiety between the two groups. the clil students suffer less from anxiety and have higher levels of self-confidence as regards l2 use in comparison to the non-clil students. in other words, when clil is an optional choice, students opting for clil are less anxious and more self-confident than their non-clil peers already before clil starts. needless to say, this is crucial information to take into account when analysing possible effects of clil. indeed, whenever clil is an optional choice (as is the case in the swedish context) and not mandatory for all students, such findings are not at all surprising. rather, it is to be expected that students who are more proficient in and less anxious about english are also the ones choosing clil where english is the target language. what is important is therefore to be aware of these baseline differences whenever effects of clil are analysed. given the importance of learner beliefs and other ids in the language learning process and the alleged language learning benefits of clil, it was decided in clil and non-clil students’ beliefs about language 257 this study to take a closer look at clil and non-clil students’ beliefs about language. the specific research questions addressed by this study are: 1. what beliefs are reflected in adolescent students’ photos of their l1 and the fl/l2 english? 2. are there differences between clil and non-clil students? 3. methodology the present study is part of a large-scale longitudinal research project, the cliss project,1 the overall aim of which is to study the proficiency and progress in written academic english and swedish among clil as well as non-clil upper secondary level students (grades 10-12) in sweden (for details, see sylvén & ohlander, 2014). 3.1. the swedish context sweden, where the present study was conducted, is a fairly small country, with approximately 9 million inhabitants, located in the very northern part of europe. swedish is the official majority language, and there are five official minority languages (finnish, yiddish, meänkeli, romani and sami). altogether, more than 150 languages are spoken in sweden, according to the website of institutet för språk och folkminnen (http://www.sprakochfolkminnen.se). in the country, there has long been an awareness of the need to learn other languages and nowadays english is introduced as the first foreign language in school already in grade 1 (skolverket, 2014). english is also encountered to a great extent outside of school in everyday life, and there is an ongoing debate whether english should be regarded as a second rather than a foreign language (hyltenstam, 2004; viberg, 2000). for instance, english tv productions and movies are subtitled rather than dubbed, english words and phrases are often found in ads, new terms in sports and it, among other areas, are used in their original english form rather than being translated into a swedish equivalent. studies have shown that young people spend a lot of their spare time doing things in english on the computer, for instance, playing digital games, and that this extramural exposure to english correlates positively with their learning outcomes in english in school (oscarson & apelgren, 2005; sundqvist & sylvén, 2012, 2014; sylvén & sundqvist, 2012). indeed, in many of these studies, it is shown that learners believe they learn most of their english outside of school. therefore, an important background 1 funded by the swedish research council, project number 2010-5376 liss kerstin sylvén 258 factor to control for in any study involving fl/l2 learning is the amount of extramural exposure to that language. in the cliss project, this is done by using a so-called language diary in which students are asked to indicate all types of encounters they had with english during one week. information from this diary was also used to identify prospects for participation in the present study, as explained below. 3.2. procedure the present study takes an emic perspective, giving the students themselves the chance to interpret the task, take the photographs, and, in the subsequent interview, talk about what the photographs illustrate. as students’ exposure to english outside of school was deemed to be a decisive factor to control for in the present study, information gained from a language diary as described above was used and a list was established where students with high amounts of exposure were found at the top, and those with the least at the bottom. individuals with high and low exposure to english outside of school were targeted, and an even distribution between gender and clil versus non-clil was aimed for. a total of 20 individuals were identified, and an e-mail was sent out to them, outlining the details and aims of the present study and asking for voluntary participation. a reward of two movie tickets and something to eat and drink during the interview were offered for those who were willing to take part. the mail was sent out during the very last semester before graduation, which had a detrimental effect on the number of affirmative responses. many students replied that they were too involved in studying for exams and/or taking part in various activities in connection with the final term. however, eight students replied that they were willing to participate in the study, four girls (two clil, two non-clil) and four boys (two clil, two non-clil). for this paper, two of the boys, one clil and one non-clil, were selected for detailed analysis. the reason for choosing these individuals was that they were the ones who shared most commonalities (see below for further details about the participants) as evidenced in a background questionnaire and the language diary. it was therefore deemed as particularly interesting to investigate if their beliefs may help explain why one of them chose the clil option and the other did not. when an agreement about participation was reached, an e-mail was sent out to each of the students. in this e-mail, the study was outlined, and the specific task was presented. the students were informed that participation was voluntary, that they could opt out at any time, and they were ensured anonymity in the subsequent dissemination of results. more specifically, the task the participants were asked to do was to take approximately five photos per day and per language during one week illustrating (a) their l1 (swedish), and (b) their clil and non-clil students’ beliefs about language 259 fl/l2 (english). several of the participants asked for information about how the task should be interpreted. as it was deemed important to gain access to participants’ own views and thoughts and not steer them in any particular direction (cf. benson & lor, 1999; kalaja, in press; ryan & mercer, 2012), no such further information and/or elaboration was offered, but it was left for the students themselves to make their own interpretations. the photographs were sent in to the researcher, who then organized them thematically. the photos were printed out on separate sheets of paper and placed in piles, where each pile represented one theme. each pile was then analysed again, and some reordering of the photographs took place. this was repeated until no further reordering was deemed necessary, and enough themes had been found to cover all photographs. subsequently, the thematic organization and the photos themselves were discussed with each of the informants during an interview. the interviews were all conducted on a one-to-one basis in swedish, and they were audio-recorded. no other guide than the photographs, with their respective themes, was used during the interviews. we met either at a local coffee shop or in the school cafeteria and the interviews took between 30 and 60 minutes. during the interviews, the informants were asked to elaborate on each theme and/or picture as to why and how it illustrates the respective language to them. the recordings were transcribed using the software nvivo. the transcripts were subject to analysis using the themes of the photographs as the starting point. the interpretation of the photographs was supported by quotes from the interviews, and in some cases, the photographs were reorganized so as to fit the intended meaning, rather than the interpretation made by the researcher. the coding of the photographs, together with the interview transcripts was repeated until saturation was reached, and no fresh codes could be assigned as inspired by grounded theory (charmaz, 2006; strauss & corbin, 1998). the grounded theory approach to data analysis was used in order to allow the data to “speak for itself” and to reduce the influence of preconceived notions on the process. in order to ensure anonymity for the participants, all personal information has been removed from the photos included here as illustrations and pseudonyms have been used throughout. 3.3. participants as described above, two individuals were selected for analysis in this paper. they are two boys, here referred to by the pseudonyms eric and vincent, one in a clil class and the other in a non-clil class. both are in their final term of upper secondary school. they have both grown up in the area where they presently live and are both enrolled in the natural science strand, which is academically the most demanding strand in swedish upper secondary school, theoretically liss kerstin sylvén 260 rather than practically oriented, and one of the preparatory strands for higher education. both eric and vincent report their wish to enrol in engineering studies and plan on entering higher education after the summer break. both of them have high levels of exposure to english outside of school, as evidenced in their language diaries (see above). although obviously ids mean that the two can differ in personality and other aspects, in terms of their contextual circumstances both share many commonalities. eric said that he found the task of photographing “english” and “swedish” fun but challenging, and he was not quite sure he had done it the way he was supposed to. vincent said that he thought the task had been intriguing and appealing to him from the start, much because he likes and spends much time photographing in his everyday life. it was clarified that there were no “rights” or “wrongs” about how to do this, but it was up to each individual to make his/her own interpretation of the task to illustrate swedish and english in a number of photographs (see the procedure section above). 4. the photographs 4.1. eric in the interview, eric explained that he joined the clil program initially because he thought it would be nice to learn more english than what would be possible only in the language arts classes. he was good at english already from an early age and claims that before joining the clil program, he learnt most english outside of school. in 4th to 6th grade, for instance, he played a great deal of digital games in english and in doing so acquired a large english vocabulary. his photos were thematized into two themes: school (7 photographs) and screens (12 photographs). the screen theme consists of photographs of computer and tv-screens. some of the photos depict ongoing games, and he recalls from his younger gaming career: “i was really motivated to understand what was happening in the game.” he recalls how he learnt words and phrases he would never even have encountered anywhere else than in these games. he offers the phrase excavation site as an example of something he learnt from one of his gaming experiences. he still continues to play digital games, but to a lesser extent, and says that he now also learns a great deal of english in school. pointing to photos taken in chemistry and math class, eric says: ”i definitely think we get better at this kind of english.” several of eric’s photos are from the history, chemistry and english classrooms, subjects which are all taught in english. he says he enjoys using english as the medium of instruction in school and says he has no problems doing so. apparently, clil and non-clil students’ beliefs about language 261 he believes that studying in english is beneficial, both regarding content and language, and he clearly connects english with school to a large extent. one of eric’s photographs illustrates his notebook, with notes from chemistry class. from this photograph, it is evident that not only is the subject taught through english, but eric also uses english for his own notes in class. the notebook is interesting as he does not seem to revert to his l1 but uses english also for his notes. this challenges to some extent the general belief that cognitive activities take place in the l1 even in an fl/l2 context. about the english language class, eric comments, english vocabulary. i’m trying to learn. not sure if this english [i.e. in the english language class] helps us in our other clil subjects. the level is really high, spelling needs to be correct, and so does grammar. in the other subjects it doesn’t matter if it’s correct or not. he illustrates the english language class with a photo of a word list page in the english book. given the underlying assumption that in clil language and content are two equally important integrated parts, eric’s thoughts are intriguing. it seems as though when studied as a language, english, in eric’s view, is difficult and demanding. this stands in sharp contrast to his comment above about getting “better at this kind of english” when it is used as the medium of instruction. eric also uses english to a great extent in his spare time, among other things for chatting online, playing computer games, or having skype conversations with friends. he explains their use of english by saying, ”skype, computer games, chats – all in english. a lot of writing. bad english – nobody cares.” this quote further illustrates the dichotomy between english as a school subject and as a communicative tool. about his l1, eric says: well, i think that if you get used to switching to english too fast when you know an expression in english without thinking about what it is in swedish, well then my swedish will suffer. but i do use a lot of swedish expressions also! eric did not make a clear distinction as to whether the photos illustrated swedish or english. this indicates that to him there are not clear boundaries between the two languages. this view is also strengthened in the interview, where he says, “we switch between languages and mix them all the time.” his beliefs are that languages are meant to be used for communication, and as long as those involved in a particular communicative situation understand, it makes no difference what languages are used and mixed. however, eric admits that his l1 swedish is the one in which it is easiest to express himself and ends by saying, “i liss kerstin sylvén 262 know english really well. it’s like another l1. but of course it is easier to use swedish.” to sum up eric’s beliefs, he does not seem to distinguish between the two languages but rather believes they are both to be used for communication. however, he seems to dichotomize between english when studied as a subject and when used as the medium of instruction. 4.2. vincent while eric sent in fewer photographs than expected (see the procedure section), vincent did the opposite and delivered a total of 53 photographs. during the interview, he explained that photography is one of his favourite pastimes and one of the reasons he thought this task was appealing. vincent’s photos were thematized into three broad themes: exteriors (31), interiors (13), and school (5). there were also photographs that were difficult to interpret and thus also impossible to put into a certain theme. in these instances, the interview was very helpful in allowing vincent to explain and clarify his beliefs as represented in his photographs. to start off the interview, vincent talked a little bit about why he had chosen to attend the non-clil program of the natural science strand in high school and said that he thought studying several subjects through the medium of english may have been a little too much for him: “i like studying english the way i do now, but i don’t want it to get too serious. i wouldn’t want to be educated with english all the time.” he made it clear that clil was never an option that he considered. figure 1 is a photograph in the exterior theme. what we see is a path in the woods. this photo, according to vincent, illustrates how, the swedish language manages to find its way forward all the time, despite the threats posed by other languages, in particular english. the trees surrounding this path symbolize these constant threats. so there are many hurdles in the way. he explains that he considers english with the ongoing influx of words and phrases into other languages to be a threat to swedish but says that he is convinced that swedish will live on despite this. it is as though he believes the two languages to be two distinct forces, with human characteristics, almost as individuals constantly fighting one another, with the strongest destined to survive. clil and non-clil students’ beliefs about language 263 figure 1 a path in the woods another photograph in this theme, presented in figure 2, is of a typical swedish landscape with some old buildings in the distance and with snow on the ground. these are surroundings in which he grew up, and vincent sees them as very swedish. thus, he connects his l1 to his home environment and believes that the environment and the language are inseparable. figure 2 snowy landscape figure 3 includes a photo of a large lake near to where vincent lives. in the photo, we see a lot of birds swimming around on the surface. liss kerstin sylvén 264 language is like water — broad and deep. what you see in your everyday life is the broadness of the language, but then there is so much more to language than what meets the eye on the surface. the deeper you dive down into the language, the more you learn. and you have to dive deep to find the really sophisticated kind of language. once again, vincent’s belief that language can be seen as an individual becomes evident. in order to learn more about the individual, be it language or a human being, deeper levels of familiarity need to be reached. figure 3 birds swimming on a lake an illustration of the second theme, interiors, is found in a photo of a typical swedish rug. this colourful rug, according to vincent, illustrates the multicultural sweden of today, where people from all over the world gather and try to communicate through swedish: “swedish becomes like a common denominator for all of us living here, regardless where you originally come from.” here it becomes clear that vincent does not see the expanding ethnic diversity in sweden as a threat but rather as a vibrant addition to the speakers of swedish. this accentuates his belief that swedish is the language that should be, and is, used in sweden. another interior photo shows a completely white wall. when asked about the meaning of that photo, vincent explained, “this is an illustration of how monotonous english is when you don’t know it too well. you use the same words over and over.” this quote should be compared with what he says about a photo of almost total darkness, but with a bit of light coming in at the upper left hand corner: “there’s some light coming in there. english becomes brighter and brighter the more i learn.” then, there is a picture with a colourful teacup, which illustrates vincent’s progress in english, and that to him the language becomes richer as his proficiency increases. the teacup, he says, was chosen because tea is so strongly culturally connected to england. clil and non-clil students’ beliefs about language 265 however, there are numerous photos that are very dark, some with light spots, others almost completely black. this, vincent says, “illustrates the darkness of the english language. it is full of swearwords and such. i watch a lot of american tv-programmes and all i hear is swearing.” again, though, he refers to his own level of proficiency in english, and says that, of course, there are positive things about english also, and that the more he learns, the more he is able to pick up also other words, apart from swearwords in tv programmes and films. thus, to vincent, language can be illustrated by colour: white when the level of proficiency in the language is low, and more colourful the more proficient one becomes. it is also evident that vincent believes swearwords to be the dark side of language as he illustrates this aspect with dark, or even black, photographs. finally, a few words about two pictures which were especially difficult to interpret before the interview. they both illustrate a devastated room, and one of them is shown in figure 4. it turns out that they were taken right after a horrendous storm had hit vincent’s home town and destroyed parts of his house. in one of the photos, we see how the window has been covered with planks and plastic, after the roof had hit the glass window, and, as shown in figure 4, the mess caused by the broken window. but how does that fit into the meaning of english and/or swedish? this is catastrophe. it is not what language is now but what might happen to swedish in the long run. the more words from other languages come into swedish, the worse it will get. but then, just like i had to do with my room, we just have to start cleaning it up. here, the interpretation that vincent sees language as a force or an individual is strengthened. these photos illustrate how he believes english forcefully tries to attack swedish, but also how swedish, with the help of its speakers, can recover from the attack by cleaning up the mess. figure 4 room devastated by storm liss kerstin sylvén 266 to sum up vincent’s data, he has many diverse and complex thoughts about language. he seems to view the l1 and the fl/l2 as separate entities, and each language as something or someone in need of being safeguarded from external influences. 5. discussion the overriding research question guiding this study was how a clil and a non-clil student illustrate their beliefs about their l1 and an fl/l2. the data reveal interesting insights into the minds of two adolescent boys, eric and vincent. there are certainly similarities but also a great deal of disparity in their respective accounts. the two boys use both english and swedish to a large extent in and outside of school, both say that the two languages are necessary in today’s world, and both claim to be fairly proficient in their l2, english. however, while eric does not seem to bother much about when he uses which language, vincent has thoughts about the nature of each of the two languages and how they are two distinct forces or individuals that are in competition with one another. eric apparently considers languages to be communicative tools, to be used to convey a message, and if that purpose is fulfilled, they have done their job. he pays no particular attention to whether the language in question is used correctly or not and says “bad english. nobody cares” about the language used in skype conversations, chats and games. this is an illustration of what in saussurian terms would be the “parole” part of language, that is, the individual use of language for communicative needs (chambers, 1995). in other words, language is for eric merely a tool. vincent, on the other hand, seems to be concerned more with the “langue,” to continue in the saussurian vein. in other words, language to him is in itself a system with rules that need to be adhered to. he worries about mixing the languages and feels that swedish might be in need of some cleaning up as there has been such a major influx of english into it. both “langue” and “parole” are necessary in the fl/l2 learning process as they are the two sides of the language coin. it seems as though eric and vincent represent one side each, and that they both would benefit from learning more about the other’s point of view. eric, in order to become proficient in other, more academic areas of english, would benefit from learning more about the system, that is, grammar, spelling, and so on. vincent, on the other hand, would probably profit from having some of eric’s undauntedness as regards the communicative use of english. as we saw, vincent was not interested in attending the clil programme as he thought that would entail too much work and because he liked learning english the way he did, that is, as a separate subject. this view is in line with his clil and non-clil students’ beliefs about language 267 thinking that languages are separate systems that need barriers to reduce the influence on one another. it may also be a sign of possible underlying language anxiety, that is, that he is worried about using a language he does not know well enough. this interpretation coincides with the findings on differences in levels of anxiety among clil and non-clil students in thompson and sylvén (in press). eric, on the other hand, thought that clil was the perfect way to both learn a subject and english at the same time. interestingly, and also in line with his comments about languages as a means to communicate with others, he did not consider the english language class to be very helpful. rather, he complained about how everything has to be “correct” in english class and said that in the regular clil classes it really does not matter if the language used correctly or not. this is entirely in line with nikula and pitkänen-huhta’s (2008) findings where the informants argued that school english and the english they use outside of school are two different entities. one informant says: “when we talk with our friends we don’t much care about grammar or word order or anything” (nikula & pitkänen-huhta, 2008, p. 177), which in the present study is paralleled by eric’s comment about his conversations with friends: “bad english – nobody cares”. finally, it is fascinating to see how vincent uses colours to describe various aspects of the meaning of languages and how he clearly distinguishes between swedish and english. to illustrate his l1, he uses a bright and colourful rug. the colours, he says, elucidate the many different people who speak swedish. in stark contrast to this, many photographs illustrating english are black or white. the white photographs illustrate vincent’s personal feelings about not knowing the language well enough and how he is forced to use the same words over and over again. the black pictures, on the other hand, illustrate the dark side of english, namely the numerous swearwords. he admits that there is a dark side to swedish, too, but there is so much more to that language that it is not as noticeable to him as it is in english. as he progresses in his learning of english, though, it becomes less black-and-white, and this he illustrates by a photograph of a bright teacup. the metaphors of force, individual, colour and a cup that becomes more colourful the more it is filled with knowledge give fascinating insights into the beliefs about language in an adolescent fl/l2 learner. such insights would be difficult to elicit through questionnaires and interviews alone and serve as an example of the usefulness of visual narratives, and specifically photographs, in connection with fl/l2 learning. 6. conclusion and pedagogical implications the views accounted for in this paper represent two individuals and their idiosyncratic views of their l1 and fl/l2, and, therefore, no generalisations can be liss kerstin sylvén 268 made. however, it is intriguing to note the clil student sees both the l1 and fl/l2 as communicative tools. in other words, language is merely to be used to convey information and to communicate with others. in sharp contrast to this, the non-clil student sees both languages as separate systems, or individuals, that need to be safeguarded from external influences. from a pedagogical point of view, these different ways of seeing language are of interest as they most probably entail different motives to learn an fl/l2. they probably also influence other ids such as wtc, anxiety, and language learning strategies. in line with the findings of ellis (2008), the use of photographs to elicit individual learners’ beliefs about language may be a fruitful activity in the classroom in order to raise the awareness of this complex area of ids. such activities could also 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(2007). deutsch-englische züge in berlin (dezibel). eine evaluation des bilingualen sachfachunterrichts in gymnasien: kontext, kompetenzen, konsequenzen. frankfurt am main: peter lang. 205 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (2). 2014. 205-235 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.2.4 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl singing well-becoming: student musical therapy case studies tim murphey kanda university of international studies, chiba, japan mitsmail1@gmail.com abstract much research supports the everyday therapeutic and deeper socialneurophysiological influence of singing songs alone and in groups (austin, 2008; cozolino, 2013; sacks, 2007). this study looks at what happens when japanese students teach short english affirmation songlet-routines to others out of the classroom (clandestine folk music therapy). i investigate 155 student-conducted musical case studies from 7 semester-long classes (18 to 29 students per class) over a 4-year period. the assignments, their in-class training, and their results are introduced, with examples directly from their case studies. each class published their own booklet of case studies (a class publication, available to readers online for research replication and modeling). results show that most primary participants enjoyed spreading these positive songlets as they became “well-becoming agents of change” in their own social networks. “well-becoming” emphasizes an agentive action or activity that creates better well-being in others, an action such as the sharing or teaching of a songlet. the qualitative data reveals a number of types of well-becoming such as social and familial bonding, meaning-making, teaching-rushes, and experiencing embodied cognition. the project also stimulated wider network dissemination of these well-becoming possibilities and pedagogical insights. keywords: affirmation-songs, experiential learning, project work, wellbecoming, expansive learning tim murphey 206 1. introduction: connecting project work, positive psychology, and neuroscience leo van lier wrote in the foreword to the book project-based second and foreign language education (van lier, 2006, p. xi) how most americans cite john dewey’s “advocacy of experiential and action based learning” when in fact there are actually a great number of admired european educators who advocated such experiential learning years before (comenius, 17th century prague; pestalozzi, 19th century switzerland; the italian montessori, early 20th century; and of course the giant of educational theory piaget a bit after dewey). van lier also says that we must add the special case of l. s. vygotsky, whose influence was huge in the early soviet revolution, and then was forced underground under leninist and stalinist repression, only to surge to “world-wide prominence in the last third of the 20th century” (van lier, 2006, p. xi). van lier goes on to stress that we need to appreciate the “deeper foundations of educational thought (whether it be enlightenment, democracy, or fulfillment) that underlie this approach to education” (p. xii). even the famous hypnotherapist milton erickson regarded well-designed tasks for patients in the real world, outside of therapy, as usually more productive of change and learning than actual therapy (rosen, 1991). students are normally already heavily invested in certain important relationships out of class that can be rich contexts for exploratory learning tasks. gregersen and macintyre (2014) state that the social conceptualization of investment emphasizes that a learner’s complex identity changes across time and space and is reproduced in social interaction (dörnyei, 2001), dynamically re-adjusting as the learner struggles to adapt and change (norton, 2010). as language learners interact in their tls, they are engaged in ongoing identity construction. (p. 111) most out of class contexts are under-accessed as potential fields for invested changes in identity, agency, and language acquisition. my hypothesis is that students can “well-become” through teaching others, and that others will “well-become” with them, that is, the well becoming through teaching (wbtt) hypothesis. this action research/project work that i am specifically interested in is the sharing of positive learning from my classes with people in the students’ networks out of class. what i have seen over the years is that this sharing/teaching not only validates the material we use, but it also augments it with a reality factor that provides an experience of agency and altruism within one’s everyday life, and even some love 2.0, that is, positivity resonance among family and friends and strangers as they sing together. barbara fredrickson (2013) describes love 2.0 as positively connecting with others, which can happen in a microsinging well-becoming: student musical therapy case studies 207 second. these micro-seconds of connection and positivity resonance have been shown to actually change our health at the cellular level in her laboratory: when i compare love to oxygen and food, i’m not just taking poetic license. i’m drawing on science: new science that illuminates for the time how love, and its absence, fundamentally alters the biochemicals in which your body is steeped. they, in turn, can alter the very ways your dna gets expressed within your cells. (fredrickson, 2013, p. 4) in 1978, my master’s thesis was on situationally-motivated teacher produced texts, advocating that the teachers should produce texts that were based on the situations in which their students actually lived and learned (murphey, 1985). since then i have shifted to situationally-motivated student produced texts (chou, lau, yang, & murphey, 2007; murphey, 1993a), realizing that through students’ activities away from the classroom in their own social networks valuable learning can also be accessed. project work and task-based learning often describe only classroom-based learning. i contend that out of class teaching tasks that students do themselves are inherently more motivational and much more exciting as they push the social envelop, getting all parties to dynamically re-adjust competencies and identities (gregersen & macintyre, 2014). in the typical flipped classroom, teachers get students to watch their lectures outside of class and then come prepared to discuss and do activities with the material in class with their classmates (jackson, 2013). if we think that our students learn greatly through task-based learning in our classes, why not flip it and encourage them to do it out of class and then come to class to share their experiences through case studies? this is what i have been doing with my students over the last four years. it is through teaching people in their real lives, and bringing those experiences to class for discussion and cs writing that students learn most. the social neuroscientist cozolino writes (2013): learning is enhanced through music training. listening to music evokes memory recall and visual imagery, and stimulates a wide range of emotions. it also results in increased complexity in the organization of white matter as well as a significant increase in regional cerebral blood flow over the posterior two-thirds of the scalp (nakamura, sadato, oohashi, nishina, fuwamoto, & yonekura, 1999). these activations reflect the deep evolutionary history of music in the forming of social groups and the expansion of cognitive processes. the possibility that music stimulates neuroplasticity is supported by the fact that children with music training demonstrate better verbal memory than their nonmusical counterparts (ho, cheung, & chan, 2003). music training is also associated with math proficiency because it increases language skills, working memory, and the ability to represent abstract numerical qualities (chan, ho, & cheung, 1998; schmithorst & holland, 2004). (pp. 233-234) tim murphey 208 thus, i have been sending students out to teach the world for about a decade and doing class publications of the students’ own work, giving them personal copies to take away, and making enough for the next group to read as near peer role models (murphey & arao, 2001; singh, 2010). the idea that first person experience is most essential is shown in the student quote below: before i did this case study, i read a booklet of case studies from a previous class. many students wrote: “after i taught songs to friends or family, they really looked happy, and i also became happy." somehow, i did not believe their words. i changed my mind after my experience. it is true. i can't explain exactly why, but my sister and i laughed a lot and felt happy during the activity. though i hesitated to do this and thought that we might quarrel doing this, i could enjoy teaching and my sister enjoyed it . . . it has been a few days since i taught her, but i still hear her singing "do it again" in the house. (ito, 2013, p. 13; see the information on student citations in section 2.2) 1.1. participants all principal participants (155) were third and fourth year japanese university students of an english department at a small private liberal arts university near tokyo, with a few cases of mixed ethnicity, roughly 10%, in classes of 18 to 30 students. one hundred and fifty one were taking an elective, content-based instruction (cbi; also known as content and language integrated learning (clil)) course titled, the importance of music and song (tiomas), whose goal was to improve students’ knowledge and use of english through interesting content teaching. four were actually in another cbi course (volume 7 in table 1 below) and chose a song teaching option that they were given. the great majority were female students (84%) and all courses were electives that students chose to take after reading the description online. secondary participants were those invited to take part by the cs authors, half of which were near peer role models, with the other half varying from different family members to part-time coworkers, from 12 year-olds to the elderly, and even a few native speakers. while 221 secondary participants were exposed to songs directly from my students, we will see in the qualitative data that the network contagion often spread much wider. each of the booklets in table 1 is a collection of one class’ case studies, plus a short introduction by me, often with appendices with song lyrics and suggestions for teachers who may wish to use some of the songs in their classes (a number of my students are studying to be english teachers and i use the booklets for workshops with elementary, junior high school, high school, and cram school teachers). the booklets also acted as a souvenir of the class, with the class picture often on the front or back cover. the booklets are available at https://sites.google.com/site/folkmusictherapy/home singing well-becoming: student musical therapy case studies 209 table 1 volumes, dates, and music therapy case studies (css) students volume title date of publication no. of music therapy css no. of times cited in this paper music therapy, vol. 1 july 2010 29 10 music therapy, vol. 2 december 2011 21 8 music therapy, vol. 3 july 2012 28 8 music therapy, vol. 4 january 2013 18 9 music therapy, vol. 5 july 2013 30 6 music therapy, vol. 6 january 2014 25 10 how do people . . . (vol. 7) january 2013 4 music css, 24 other tasks 1 total 155 music css 52 1.2. methodolgy (in class training) except for the first class, students were loaned copies of a previous class booklet as a model near mid-term and in one of the last few classes they each received a copy of their own class booklet. among many other smaller assignments, the case studies (css) assignments were usually given in the later half of the semester courses, with a minimum of 400 words required. these courses all met twice a week for 90 min and students were periodically requested to update a partner on their out of class teaching in preparation for submitting their paper. closer to the end of the semester they were asked to bring in a rough draft to obtain feedback from other students. finally, a few weeks before the end of the semester, they were to send their finished cs electronically to their teacher. the css were then assembled into a file, following a quick spelling and grammar check, and a class publication was created. usually, we had time to print them out and proof read one last time in class before giving them to our campus printing specialists to make the final copies. 2. specifically teaching affirmation songs: well-becoming and english learning in appendix a there are the initial 2010 guidelines sheet for teaching an affirmation song and writing it up, which is also printed in volumes 1 to 3 (all volumes also have pedagogical tips for teachers, lists of song lyrics, and some have web links https://sites.google.com/site/folkmusictherapy/home). students were asked to teach one or two of many short affirmation songs that we had been learning in class to someone in their social network. they had a choice from about 20 songlets, most only one line to a stanza, a few a bit longer. they had also practiced these 20 songlets as learners and were able to experience a wide range of teaching and learning protocols throughout this process. the 17 songs that are included in these css can be found in table 2, along with their conversational prompts: students were taught in class that anytime tim murphey 210 they were asked one of these questions, they were to answer with the song, in and out of class. most used this strategy in their css as well. a few advanced students actually used english to teach the songlets to peers also studying english. however, for most, especially when teaching family members, just learning to sing the lyrics in english was the goal and the teaching was mostly in japanese. in these cases, they translated the lyrics and explained learning strategies (using body language, repeating, blended language, etc.) mostly in japanese, which facilitated the learning of the english song. i see this use of the l1 as contributing to an ultimately better appraisal of the l2 overall (turnbull & dailey-o’cain, 2009). it was clear from the start the students believed the songlet learning was a healthy experience, and that teaching them to friends and family was seen as sharing something useful to help them live better. some language was learned, as the songs were in english, but more important was the possibility of improving the lives of participants in a way that increased their perception of the value of the english language (murphey, 2013a) by focusing on songs with positive outcomes. sharing and teaching songs that resonated with them often boosted the students’ confidence and showed them the usefulness of not only english, but of learning, teaching, sharing, and interacting with friends, family, and colleagues. the wellbecoming was achieved through teaching and learning english songs and should be recognized as the major outcome of the project. through teaching the songs, students’ understood themselves better and became more confident in their abilities. linguistically speaking, they learned about rhyming, blending, vowel changes, as well as assonance, alliteration, and rhythm. from the discourse of media arts, they learned that songs were like “ghost discourse” (murphey, 1992) in that the language in songs usually had no precise referents (i, you, it), place, or time, permitting the listener to meld the song into their own lives and form their own meanings. at another fractal level, the use of these english songs by japanese participants was fuel for their and their learners’ emergent well-becoming. this was truly a case of the expansive learning (sannino & ellis, 2014) that we expect to happen when we switch roles and become teachers of something that we have not yet mastered ourselves. 2.1. quantitative results in the 155 css, a total of 17 different songs were taught (table 2). all lyrics are either in appendix b or a link is given there for easy capture along with some notes about the song. singing well-becoming: student musical therapy case studies 211 table 2 affirmation songs the students chose to teach no. rank total title question prompt 1 1 55 5 ways to happiness what are the 5 ways to happiness? 2 2 28 “superhappy . . . or trulyawesome . . .” how are you? (#1 and #2) 3 3 21 “young & strong & beautiful” are you young? 4 4 11 “today” (each verse different question) wadaya gonna do? content? who are you? 5 5 11 “write write write it down” how do you write? 6 6 11 “do it again!” how do you succeed? 7 7 10 “love you forever” who do you love? or do you love me? 8 8 9 “smile song or warau uta” why do you smile? 9 9 5 “the weather song” what’s the weather like? 10 10 5 “compliment song” what do you like? 11 11 4 “happy person” what’s a happy person? 12 12 4 “make new friends” how do you have a good life? 13 13 3 “use it or lose it!” how do you learn? 14 14 3 “diversity song” how do you eat well? 15 15 3 “i love us playing” what do you love? 16 16 1 “turtle song” what is more beautiful than a bird in a tree? 17 17 1 “bear song” what’s the bear song? 2.1.1. song choice surprisingly, three of the longest songs were in the top four: “5 ways to happiness,” “young strong & beautiful,” and “today.” song #2, “superhappy,” was the first affirmation song learned in classes and usually the one they were most comfortable with due to the borrowed-tune of “supercalifragilistic” and five strategies that they had learned for mastering a long line (chucking, back formation, rhythm, singing, and attaching a question prompt for it’s retrival). the purpose of these positive affirmation songlets were to help people focus on ways to become happy, to enjoy themselves, to accept their mistakes, and to "do it again!". a few were focused on specific tasks such as writing (e.g., “write write write it down”), and others more generally on love and playfulness. their common ingredient was that they were fun to sing, fairly easy to remember, and made you think more positively (readers can access several recordings at http://mits.podomatic.com and articles about some of the songs at http://kandaeli.academia.edu/timmurphey). 2.1.2. song teaching successes only one person could be said to have been unsuccessful in teaching, but because he was in the first class, his example became excellent educational material for subsequent classes. he admirably dared to teach his 12-year-old sister four songs in a short time frame. when he became impatient, the activity felt forced and was no longer pleasant. it was at this point that the younger sibling gave up. from this tim murphey 212 experience, it was learned that being too ambitious and trying to do too much is not a good idea. now the students’ learn the kiss (keep it short and simple) principle, but are still encouraged to challenge themselves appropriately. 2.2. qualitative emergent themes i analyzed the 155 css using grounded theory (glaser & strauss, 1967) and through repeated readings over the years allowed myself to have conversations with the data and let the themes emerge. this section contains quotes drawn from the actual css that support several crucial ideas, several of which, i must admit, i may not have valued enough on my first few readings and which seemed to have taken on more importance as i was re-reading the css in preparation for this article. i call these types of well becoming, and while the list is not complete and is indeed overlapping, these are the ones that emerged in the data: (a) high affect well becoming, (b) we-learning, (c) social and familial bonding, (d) meaning-making, (e) teachingrushes, (f) embodied cognition, and (g) love 2.0 & power posing well becoming. in addition to the types of well-becoming, i highlight at the end (h) pedagogical learning, and more specifically (i) learner centeredness, both of which relate to the teaching goal that many of my students have. finally, i give examples of (j) the network contagious spread of songlets in fractal pedagogy, which highlights how many of the learners ended up teaching and sharing with many others. please note in the quotes below i have bolded parts for emphasis and the un-bolded is intended to give them more of a context in which to grasp them. the number (e.g., #1) at the beginning of each quote refers to table 2 to let readers know about which song the student is writing. i introduce each section briefly before providing the quotes as examples. an important note is that these css have all been published as class publications and are online for those who wish to consult the data. in the sections below, i cite 50 out of the 155 students (citing two students twice). the citations are a fair dispersal of all seven volumes which can be seen in the last column of table 1 above. note that at the end of every student quote, apa guidelines are followed with the author’s last name, year, and the page number. i have set up a special reference list for these published css following the general article reference list. also, all quotes from the css are in italics to facilitate the reading process and distinguish them from other quotes. 2.2.1. high affect well-becoming the following student citations show extreme levels of positive affect and allow us to see that the activity of songlet learning had exciting and positive results with many involved: singing well-becoming: student musical therapy case studies 213 (#1) after a week, i decided to call . . . she said suddenly, "i can change my own mind by singing a song a little bit. i try to change my mind positively more from now. thank you for your teaching! please teach me more . . .” in conclusion, when we sing a song that includes happiness and meaningfulness, people tend to create positive thinking as above . . . singing a song is a tool to give good effects for mental and physical health. (koge, 2012, p. 11) (#15) i manage my stress by singing this song [what do you love?] . . . the laughing part was too embarrassing to sing at class. however i didn't feel embarrassed at home with my mother. rather i enjoyed singing it with her . . . that went beyond my imagination . . . i appreciate my mother. (enomoto, 2012, pp. 8-9) (#2) he [father] said, "i love this song." and he was enjoying singing it, so i was happy, too. i was surprised that he seemed to be a little silly while he was singing! . . . he said, "i like the song, so sometimes i was singing while walking" (walking is his routine). and when he sang the song while walking, he walked longer than usual. . . he looks more relaxed and happier than before. he often hummed the song at home. (wakaume, 2010, p. 16) (#1) from 6pm-midnight . . . i sang it and showed the gestures during a pause in our work. . . two hours later when we cleared the tables i started singing the song and she joined me . . . we worked humming it for the rest of this work time and enjoyed it. . . our hard working time changed to an enjoyable working time. the song made us happy. she told me that she wanted to sing more english songs . . . i really enjoyed doing this case study because now i have someone to sing with at my part-time job. now, we are happier. (sato, 2013, p. 12) (#7) few days later, she had an admission examination. when she came back home, she came to meet me. she told me her performance on the test and that she sang the song inside herself while she waited for the interview test to calm down. i was so glad to hear it and be helpful. i would not forget this experience with the lyf song. (sasamori, 2013 p. 18) (#1) . . . the main goal of the experiment was to make my grandfather and myself happy. it was the most joyful homework ever i had. (tokuyama, 2012, pp. 29-31) perhaps the greatest testament for the usefulness of the set of songlets we learned each semester and were teaching is the comment below from eriko who suggests to future students "to choose a person who is depressed" because then they will see how they really work: (#1) she seemed to improve with each call and she seemed to really enjoy singing. this experience was good for me, because my friend was full of energy from this homework . . .her condition changed right before my eyes. my advice to others who wish to teach affirmation songs is to choose a person who is depressed. there are many songs tim murphey 214 to cheer someone up, and each person has their own needs. choose songs wisely for the person you are working with, think of how they fit each other. (abe, 2010, p. 24) 2.2.2. we-learning the word together jumped off the page in many of the css, pointing to the importance of cohesiveness. while it can be helpful in many ways to sing alone, it is much more enjoyable and impressive when we sing with others. the students explain: (#1) [my mother said] to sing with you is better than to sing alone. i am happy when i sing songs with someone." we always sing the songs in the class with our partners. therefore this activity should be held in the group if it is possible. (shirai, 2011, p. 11) this is great advice for future students doing this project, or perhaps anybody teaching anything! learning as a tribe (cozolino, 2013) is vastly more interesting and enjoyable. schools bring us together as groups but then often insist on individual assignments and assessment and we lose out on bonding and learning with others. singing together bonds us together. dr. diane austin (2008) reports that “the most compelling clinical examples [of music therapy] involve the client and therapist singing” (p. 19). (#10) . . . we sang the song together . . .we laughed a lot . . . i'm not sure that singing together is a good method to learn english or not but it definitely makes us feel happy . . . (tanaka 2012, p. 6) (#11) . . . i intentionally didn't ask my father to sing alone. i think singing together with someone else feels better and makes long verses easier to remember . . . i asked my father to join [with my sister] . . . singing together definitely helped the song to get stuck in his head and provided a better atmosphere. group singing helps with language learning! (yamashita, 2013, p. 5) 2.2.3. social and familial bonding many students mentioned how the activity allowed them to take on new roles and to bond in different ways with their family members and friends: (#5) “it was a rare opportunity that she [mother] learned something from me, so she looked very happy when i taught her the song. i was also happy. (miyamoto, 2011, p. 6) (#7) . . . she (mother) was happy because she could talk to me for a long time. recently i have not called. it was a good communication for us . . . (sugahara, 2011, p. 7) singing well-becoming: student musical therapy case studies 215 (#1) she said that she could relax by breathing deeply before the exam, she could be positive by looking up at the sky and she could smile a lot . . . especially, i thought that the bond between saya and i became much stronger than before by singing together. (numayama, 2013, p. 15) (#2) [he said] when he felt fatigue at his work place, he closed his eyes thinking many things. then he remembered our talking and tried to sing in his head . . . when he sang in his head "i want to cry to the world i want to fly all around" (that is his favorite part), he smiled in his office and co-workers were wondering... of course he didn't sing "i'm in love" in a loud voice. (that is my next goal, to get him to cry to the world, "i'm in love!" haha!)... i actually realized that music has limitless power for fun....the song gave us a precious time when my father and i could laugh together. i think the real power of music comes when we share. the time when we share something is important and also happiness. it is not too much to say that singing together makes living together a wonderfully joyful time! (hori, 2014, p. 5) 2.2.4. meaning making (ghost discourse) one piece of content of the tiomas course is the idea of ghost discourse (murphey, 1992): that songs are like language coming from ghosts that we cannot see and it is up to us to give them meaning. the language from most songs does not designate precise places, times, people, and the like; thus we are free to invent our own stories and meanings, usually imagining people we know, and the song gets time and place dated with the time and place, the where and when we listen to it most often. a few students noted this in their css. interestingly, the first below commented on the need to acknowledge sadness. this is reminiscent of fredrickson’s (2013, p. 153) three positives to every negative ratio for a healthy life: (#4) we were eating cakes in her house and talking about the last part of the lyric "i'll laugh, and i'll cry and i'll sing." risa said, "yuki said she likes the optimistic view. i also like it, but i think it's important to cry and talking negative things with my friends too. sharing feelings with others always helps me. so i want to laugh and cry and sing with friends and dearest people." after that we cooked dinner, talking and singing not only this song, but also other songs. it was very fun. i intended to teach the song for my friend, but i learned another interpretation and meaning of the song from my friend: having negative experiences and crying may give us some chances to notice little happiness in our ordinary life. tim said we can make meaning of the lyric by ourselves. i understand it's true through this project. (nishina, 2013, p. 11) (#2 & #6) . . . it was interesting to see the differences among people in many ways of interpreting the songs. this reminds me that i create my own meaning to songs but my friends hear different ways so truly the words do not have meanings but each person gives them meanings. (goto, 2013, p. 10) tim murphey 216 2.2.5. teaching rushes at the beginning of this article, i cited manami ito, a student who said she had read previous css but had not really believed them. later, when she completed the activity herself, she recognized that it was indeed a fun and rewarding experience. though it is advantageous to learn from the accounts of others, firsthand experience can have a much deeper impact. this is what i call a teaching rush! for instance, at the level of your reading this article, you may indeed learn a lot and get motivated to do similar projects, but it will be vastly more convincing when you actually do them and see for yourself that these concepts may help people to learn more effectively. here are a few more examples of teaching rushes and advice for better teaching: (#3 & #4) . . . the most important thing is how much i could enjoy teaching! while i was teaching songs, i could enjoy it and my mother seemed to enjoy singing new songs. our enjoyment made it a successful project! (sekine, 2014, p. 17) (#2) . . . watching someone's skill improve was very exciting. (yonaha, 2014, p. 8) (#4) i learnt that you do not have to sit in front of the desk to learn something new. (amemiya, 2013, p. 27) (#5) it is an effective way to teach that mixes study with happy things. (sato, 2013, p. 27) (#1) we laughed many times. we almost forgot that this was studying. (omagari, 2013, p. 28) 2.2.6. embodied cognition neuroscientist oliver sacks says (2007), listening to music is not just auditory and emotional, it is motoric as well: ‘we listen to music with our muscles,’ as nietzsche wrote. we keep time to music, involuntarily, even if we are not consciously attending to it, and our faces and postures mirror the “narrative” of the melody, and the thoughts and feelings it provokes.” (p. xi) in other words, we have physiological reactions to music (body language) and we have muscle and neurological network memory. more recently, this has been termed embodied cognition (atkinson, 2011). in every day language, it could be as simple as the tapping of your foot. this also corresponds with the common experience of having a song stuck in your head (murphey, 1990), even one we may not like. singing well-becoming: student musical therapy case studies 217 (#1) through teaching this song, i thought that when we memorize something, we should use our body. and also it's important for us to use rhythm. when my sister used her hands, she really memorized . . . i think music makes us happy and smart. (fujisawa, 2012, p. 10) (#1) we sang the song together with big gestures like when we were little kids . . . she really seemed happy while she sang the song . . . this case study brought us an opportunity to sing and laugh together. (akimoto, 2013, p. 15) (#1) he told me that he tried to act like the lyrics while he was singing the song . . . it made him relax and comfortable. i was really surprised. (sudo, 2010, p. 20) (#1) . . . she sang it happily. she said, "this song keeps running in my brain!" . . . my advice to others who wish to teach "5 ways" is to use body language. it is easier to remember the song with body language than just singing. (kato, 2010, p. 10) (#2) i was surprised to see that he was using some gestures with the rhythm in order to remember some words, although i did not tell him to use them. i guess people will naturally use gestures to remember . . . teaching him made me happy. (murakami, 2013, p. 20) (#14) to my surprise, she soon started to imitate me before i finished teaching . . . she said “it is just fun! i can’t stop enjoying myself!!” after finishing memorizing it . . . i noticed teaching songs makes me happy, so i want to teach more songs from this class. (suzuki, 2014, p. 18) (#8 & #12) the final day, i was very surprised because she asked me the questions before i asked her! [the power of routine embodied questions, tm] she seemed to like the songs very much, and wanted to tell the song to her friends. (namba, 2014, p. 16) (#1) . . . she hated studying english. however, i sang the song with the gestures her reaction changed and she was interested . . . she said, "at first i did not want to learn the song however it was interesting for me because the gestures were easy to remember.” (matsui, 2010, pp. 28-29) 2.2.7. love 2.0 & power posing well becoming in 2013, i started teaching students about micro-moments of love and positivity resonance from fredrickson’s book love 2.0 (2013, p. 153) and combining it with amy cuddy’s power posing (2012). they both quickly got attached to the song "young and strong and beautiful" (ysb). after singing the song, we would all do a power pose in class raising our arms high and crying to the world, “i’m in love!” needless to say, we had many micro-moments of connection and laughter resonating throughout the group. i also presented the challenge of tim murphey 218 doing a power pose in public and crying, “i’m in love!” some reported doing it in their action logs, but i was really impressed when i was bicycling by the soccer field one day and two students (a woman and a man) called my name in the middle of the soccer game and did a power pose while shouting the phrase. the power pose is body cognition tied to ysb and love 2.0 for my students. the comments below use a bit of this language: (#2) she told me that "thank you for choosing me as the learner. i'm happy i could learn this song from you. i'm in love!" i told her "the teacher of my class shouted 'i'm in love!!' too. she was surprised and laughed . . . thank you for giving me a great time with my friend in english. (matsunaga, 2013, p. 31) (#8) it made good harmony between my mother and i. i felt really comfortable; it was a micro-moment! . . . the next day, she mailed me to tell me about how the song was affecting her. she said, “i can’t forget the song ‘why do you smile?’ because it has a memorable melody. this song is repeating in my head!” (yoshihara, 2014, p. 12) (#2 & #6) in the morning of december 8th she had the toeic test, i called her again and asked “how do you succeed?” surprisingly, she could answer completely and asked me “are you young?” i gave advice to her to do power pose before the test. i think these two songs helped her english learning. (kahsiwagura, 2014, p. 26) (#6) [visiting at a nursery school in australia] i became aware that a little girl tried to pile up some blocks as high as possible. when the blocks had stacked up as tall as her, the blocks tower had collapsed suddenly. she was surprised and became fretful after that. then i walked up to her and sang, "do it again!" to her. she gave me a strange face at first, but she got more and more smiley and she did it again and again singing, "do it again!" many times with me. it was a micro-moment of love for me! (odaka, 2014, p. 27) (#1) since she did these five ways to happiness, she looked happier than before. i’m really happy to see that, too. at that time, i felt like “even if i just changed one person, the world is better than before!” i felt the importance of, “when you change yourself, you change the world”. even when one person has more power, it will be better than before, and can change the world! (shoji, 2013, p. 27) 2.2.8. pedagogical recommendations it was not specified as a requirement for their paper, but many students gave advice on teaching the affirmation songlets, some of which was very helpful. (#11) my advice . . . is to think about the student's feelings and change the way of teaching flexibly when they seemed to have troubles. (akiyama, 2010, p. 19) singing well-becoming: student musical therapy case studies 219 (#1) to teach two different types of people i should use different ways. this time i taught them by the same way. it was good for misa but not for my mom. (kyo, 2011, p. 18) (#1 & #8) he said, "i want to take your class because it sounds interesting!" . . . i could show my family what i learned in university . . . i want to be an english teacher in the future, so this experience was good practice teaching for me . . . choose suitable songs for learners at their levels... be positive while teaching songs . . . it is important that we follow our own advice and be cheerful and positive. (sugawara, 2014, p. 4) (#5) i love the songs we sing in class and have wanted to share them with someone . . . my advice to others who wish to teach affirmation songs is to choose short songs or make long songs into shorter ones. (tsuchiya, 2010, p. 11) 2.2.9. learner centeredness the passages below show how students naturally adjust to their learners in a way to help them learn better. (#3) [i sang a song and] she gave a wry smile and said, “i would like to remember another song.” i gave up to teach this song unwillingly, and then i passed my notebook to her to choose a song. after she read some lyrics and asked tunes, she chose the song: are you young? my original plan was completely destroyed . . . (ogasawara, 2011, p. 5) (#7) next day, i changed my teaching way. the new one was singing beside her although she didn’t listen to my song. i kept singing the song again and again when she took a rest in the living room. then, she became increasingly curious about the song so sang following me . . . after singing slowly three or four times together, i taught her the meanings . . . she completely sang it by herself even though i didn’t teach for a long time. (sasamori, 2013, p. 18) [non-teaching teaching, tm] (#5) [purposeful choice of song, tm] the reason why i chose this song was she was writing [her] graduation thesis and she was worried about how to do it. (kanai, 2011, p. 12) (#7) then she [mother] recorded her singing on her cell phone . . . after the lesson, she sang the song smoothly when i asked "do you love me?" i think my music therapy project was a great success. finally, i learned that having fun is very important for teaching and learning . . . i am glad for having this kind of opportunity. (tomitsuka, 2011, p. 14) (#6 & #7) teaching is always challenging, but the most important thing is thinking what are the best ways and materials for the students. (chiba, 2014, p. 10) (#6) to tell the truth, some elderly people forget the people who they met each day. in other words, every day is the first time i met them. however, miraculously, they could remember the melody of “do it again”. (hashimoto, 2014, p. 22) tim murphey 220 2.2.10. the network contagious spread of songlets in fractal pedagogy in the first quote below, the student asks her mother to teach a song to her father in order to learn. there is evidence that this happened more than once, as family members taught work colleagues and teachers taught their students. emotional contagion (hatfield, cacioppo, & rapson, 1994) describes how our emotions can be contagious in our environments, stimulated by those around us and other contextual elements. in terms of dynamic systems theory, a song being sung by a person close to us can be an “attractive attractor” (see gregersen & macintyre, in press). while this study is mostly about the primary participants (student teachers) teaching songs to secondary participants (the immediate receivers), quite often the songs and teachings spread more widely in families, friend groups, and other social networks. for example, in the second citation below, a student talks about teaching the songs to a cram school co-worker and shows how they spread in that environment, and how they brought people closer together in friendships. (#4) i knew she (mom) would forget the song easily so i told her to be a teacher of my father. she was proud that she could sing an english song, so she was being a teacher next day . . . next day, my mother and my father were singing "today" completely. (hoshino, 2011, p. 26) (#6 & #10) . . . he and i went to the same cram school (our present work place) when we were jh students . . . first i showed him my action log where all the songs i learned are because he said he wanted to know every song that i learn . . . we were [at the restaurant] about two hours and i asked, "how do you succeed?" every 30 minutes . . . after that he wanted to look at other songs and he looked in my action log and read.,, two weeks later . . . we sang the song together . . . (next) i taught him "what do you like?" . . . before we did the case study, we were not good friends and now sometimes he uses the song and gestures to teach his students [in a cram school]. now many other teachers have interests to teach english with songs so we are making songs which make english learning easier. (suzuki, 2013, p. 14) (#1) my sister taught our younger sister and [we] sang together. (demise, 2010, p. 12) (#1) . . . she told me she taught the 5 ways of happiness at the nursery school. children had fun and enjoyed it. (ito, 2012, p. 32) (#1) in addition, she taught it to my father, and he is also smiling . . . the affirmation songs are so effective to be happy and learn english. therefor i want to tell my students about affirmation songs in the future, too. (kamoda, 2012, p. 37) singing well-becoming: student musical therapy case studies 221 (#1) i told the song to my sister in the living room. so my mother naturally listened to it in the kitchen and she said the song was repeating in her head (ssimh). (kumano, 2012, p. 18) (#1) he often hummed the song at home. he said, "i want to tell the song to my subordinates. they would have a liking for the song." my mother also seemed to be happy when she saw my father's smile. i was also happy because i could have a chance to talk and interact with my father. thus, the song had a good effect for not only him, but also for my family. (wakaume, 2010, p. 16) (#2) . . . when i was helping her with cooking, she hummed the rhythm and started singing. we sang the line together and it was very fun. my sister came and asked us what we were doing and we said "how are you?" to her. of course she did not know what we were talking about but we all laughed together . . . she said it made her feel well and increased her energy . . . she also said that she asked her colleagues the question and taught the answer too. when she was talking about this story her face was shining and it also made me feel happy too . . . (yokohara, 2012, p. 18) 3. discussion these css inspired me greatly not only with the possibilities for seeding more education beyond our classroom doors and turning more students into teachers, a form of flipped education, but also with the possibility for seeding positive psychology in our everyday conversational and singing lives. this exercise showed it is possible to turn people's thoughts and behaviors toward the positive, and that introducing new activities like singing in a foreign language are a powerful tool to do so. this activity allowed students to learn the class material better, but there is much more to it than that. teaching these songlets to others creates far greater affordances than simply learning the material better. it accomplishes something that does not seem probable within classrooms alone. this task engages expansive learning: at the beginning of a process of expansive learning the object is only abstractly mastered as a partial entity, separated from the functionally interconnected system of the collective activity. by ascending to the concrete, an abstract object is progressively cultivated into concrete systemic manifestations and transformed into a material object that resonates with the needs of other human beings as well. these phases often require the subject to struggle and break out of previously acquired conceptions in conflict with new emerging ones. (sannino & ellis, 2014, p. 8) students struggled with being teachers and often broke out of previous conceptions of themselves as they described the emergence of new identities, new tim murphey 222 skills, new and improved relationships and feelings of agency and well-becoming, among other things! i was happy that some of the content was useful, but it was how they used it that was the most important. the songlets and the teaching procedures were used as ways to create and deepen relationships, to spread joy and understanding in social networks, and to have fun and improve bonds with friends, family, and co-workers. and maybe learn a little english and see more value in the language. as davis and sumara (2006) also write of expansion: education—and by implication, educational research—conceived in terms of expanding the space of the possible rather than perpetuating entrenched habits of interpretation, then, must be principally concerned with ensuring the conditions for the emergence of the as-yet unimagined. (p. 135) the qualitative data shows that the out of class tasks of teaching songlets to others was “expanding the space of the possible” and allowed for the emergence of affordances facilitating the well-becoming of the participants that beforehand had not been imagined. diane austin (2008) asks, “why is singing such a powerful therapeutic experience?” (p. 20). and she answers: when we sing our voices and our bodies are the instruments. we are intimately connected to the source of the sound and the vibrations. we make the music, we are immersed in the music and we are the music. we breathe deeply to sustain the tones we create and our heart rate slows down our nervous system is calmed. our voices resonate inward to help us connect to our bodies and express our emotions and they resonate outward to help us connect to others. (p. 20) while i hope this article communicates a lot of the positive resonating advantages of getting students to teach others out of class, simply reading it will not infuse you nor your students with the same enthusiasm and understanding as the actual experiences of engaging with others, struggling to help them learn, and the joy of all the small successes along the way. the wellbecoming through teaching (wbtt) hypothesis is confirmed by the qualitative data. however, to really know and understand this at the personal level, teachers need to do it with their students. in before happiness shawn anchor (2013) describes five "actionable strategies to achieve success and happiness,” two of which sound close to what my students have been doing with these songs. his third strategy is to zoom in on the target and magnify its size. in the context of the songlets, when students want to zoom in on feeling good about writing, for example, and make the target bigger, they can sing "how do you write?", which offers advice on how to write and gets them to focus on their goals in a powerful way. singing well-becoming: student musical therapy case studies 223 anchor calls his fifth recommended strategy “positive inception,” in which he advises us to learn how to transfer the positivity to others, to "franchise success by creating simple easy-to-replicate positive patterns and habits and then helping them spread" (anchor, 2013, p. 18). i call these songlets speed dictations at first in the classroom and try to do one each class. linked with their question, they become a routine that students recycle 10 or 12 times in the first 90-min class and later as review. the home fun (not homework) is always to call that day's partner and ask all the speed dictation questions and have a short chat. asking them to further teach a songlet routine to someone not in the class is literally franchising the positive potential embedded in the songlet routine. however, it would be a mistake to assume i knew exactly what was going to happen when they taught outside of classes (thus, all the different and emergent ways of well-becoming). complexity thinking (davis & sumara, 2006) attempts to dissuade us from linear thinking and posits that we accept that putting minds together to achieve a task outside of class (away from the teacher/researcher) is too complex an activity to anticipate simple linear results. in 1984, dick allwright wrote an article titled, “why don’t learners learn what teachers teach?” he asked students at the end of a class what they learned, and as it turns out, they all told him different things and some things that the teacher had not even talked about. i later wrote an article to respond to his question entitled, “why don’t teachers learn what learners learn? taking the guesswork out with action logging” (murphey, 1993b). his article had prompted me to start asking students in every class what they learned and to write about it in an action log. to help them, i list activities on the board for students to evaluate and ask them to comment on them as well. of course this does not assure that they are learning what i am teaching, but it does give me a lot of feedback about what is going on in their minds that i can adjust to in the next class. their css require a lot of mind-reading by the student, both of the person they are teaching and the readership of their study (the teacher and other students, cf. theory of mind, bruner, 1981; iacoboni, molnar-szakacs, gallese, buccino, & maziotta, 2005). thus, once again, i feel prompted to say that this type of project creates environments of emergent and expansive learning (sannino and ellis, 2014); while allowing little control over the final product, it creates great un-imagined affordances. 4. limitations the conclusions i come to are based upon descriptive css by students away from the classroom, which were written and rewritten several times, and readers may justifiably doubt the total veracity of these accounts. i can imagine that there may indeed be a few that were more imagined than actual, but i still have faith tim murphey 224 and trust in 98% of what they describe. the quantitative data is merely descriptive rather than evaluative and in the future i would like to make an instrument that helps in evaluating the different aspects of the task. the qualitative data was very useful in teasing out the types of well-becoming and other phenomena that deserve more attention (pedagogical initiatives and network contagion); however, some overlap with others a good deal, which my complexity thinking allows, but my older-earlier brain wishes to tease apart more. here i find walt whitman’s phrase reportedly shouted from the rooftops to be of help, “do i contradict myself? well then i contradict myself. i contain multitudes.” what i regret not doing more (and will do more in the future) is asking my students to teach diverse others: 50% taught near peer role models and i think they would learn more from diversity. for potential replication and dissemination readers can find the css at https://sites.google.com/site/folkmusictherapy/home. 5. implications if we think that what we are teaching is valuable to our students, there is a good chance that it will also be valuable to their friends and families. putting these ideas into songlets allows for bite-size processing that can facilitate acquisition and enjoyable repetition. i think teachers are capable of creating their own valuable songlets about their particular interests and for their students particular needs. (if teachers need more help, google “nflrc-uh” and put my name into their search engine and you can freely download several presentations on the topic that could be of use to you.) needless to say, i am hooked on getting my students to share their learning beyond the classroom. while bite-size songs are attractive, i believe this could be done with stories, puzzles, manga, movies, and other means. getting students to write up css gets them to give back to the school and contribute to the learning of others. when students read these css they believe that they too can do these things because of the near peer role model effect (murphey & arao, 2001; singh 2010). 6. conclusion these students learned through teaching diverse others what they could not have learned in a classroom. they taught their teacher the power of we! and confirmed to him that songs can change the world and educate us all. this has a host of benefits for diverse stake holders: the students benefitted from reinforced learning, new learning, bonding, stronger social ties, new insights; their chosen participants benefitted through positive singing, reflecting and socializing; and all learned a bit of english and perhaps became healthier and happier. the uninvited in the same contexts and those in the participants’ networks learned some of these same singing well-becoming: student musical therapy case studies 225 things by accident of position. later student readers who learned from previous css got inspired. i learned through multiple readings and possibly you, now, the readers of this article and your students may follow. the qualitative results of these css support the wbtt hypothesis, that when we share important information we all can become more “well,” especially when that sharing involves us singing it together. stimulating such interactions in and out of school should be the goal of all teachers, all educators, to give students something positively generative to make the world a better place with the potential to teach us all about well-becoming. when classes of students can function as socially intelligent dynamic systems (sindys, murphey, 2013c) that actively share information, they are more able to take what they learn in class and share it in their networks out of class, enriching those networks into becoming sindys as well. this also gives added value to the learning of a foreign language (murphey, 2013a) and creates true cbi/clil classes that are focused on the content, not the language. perhaps the greatest cbi value accruing from these teachings is the underlying altruism expressed through the giving of time and the potential for improving of lives. teaching someone is not your typical everyday transaction outside of schools. however, when they can become part of our everyday lives, they can greatly enrich our relationships, gratitude, and resources. a class assignment can become a giving and sharing with others that returns unexpected benefits to student teachers and the social networks themselves. in a previous article (murphey, 2010), i noted that we often over-rated information, success, and teaching (telling) processes when we should give more value to questions, challenges and experiential learning as they guide us to more expansive learning. graciously, the universe is appropriately constructed with enough never ending complexity as to forever present us with challenges that serve to help us develop. facing these challenges together (singing together) make living a much richer experience than we will probably ever have the capacity to fully appreciate. and we will continually attempt the impossible, daring greatly, partially failing, and marvel at the miracles of partial success and understanding, improvising and softly singing our way to serenity. acknowledgements many thanks to all my students who worked and learned and then taught me through their awesome papers and experiences. thanks also to joe falout, who discussed this paper with me and gave me insightful advice, and the editors and readers of this volume for their astute guidance. tim murphey 226 references allwright, d. (1984). why don’t learners learn what teachers teach? – the interaction hypothesis. in d. m. singleton & d. g. little (eds.), language learning in formal and informal contexts (pp.3-18). dublin: iraal. anchor, s. (2013). before happiness. new york: virgin. atkinson, d. (ed.). (2011). alternative approaches to second language acquisition. london: routledge. austin, d. (2008). the theory and practice of vocal psychotherapy: songs of the self. london: jessica kingsley. brown, b. (2012). daring greatly. new york: gotham. bruner, j. s. (1981). intention in the structure of action and interaction. in l. p. lipsitt & c. k. rovee-collier (eds.), advances in infancy research. vol. 1 (pp. 41-56). norwood, nj: ablex. chan, a. s., ho, y. c., & cheung, m. c. (1998). music training improves verbal memory. nature, 396(6707), 128. chou, h., lau, s., yang, h., & murphey, t. (2007). students as textbook authors. the english teaching forum (3), 18-23. cozolino, l. (2013) the social neuroscience of education. new york: w.w. norton & company. cuddy, a. (2012). your body language shapes who you are. a talk retrieved from the tedtalks website: http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_ language_shapes_who_you_are davis, b., & sumara, d. (2006). complexity and education: inquiries into learning, teaching, and research. new york: routledge. dörnyei, z. (2001). motivational strategies in the language classroom. cambridge: cambridge university press. fredrickson, b. (2013). love 2.0. new york: hudson street. glaser, b. g., & strauss, a. l. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. chicago: aldine. gregersen, t., & macintyre, p. d. (2015). ‘i can see a little bit of you in myself ’: a dynamic systems approach to the inner dialogue between teacher and learner selves. in z. dörnyei, p. d. macintyre, & a. henry (eds.), motivational dynamics (pp. 260-284). bristol: multilingual matters. gregersen, t., & macintyre, p. (2014). capitalizing on language learners’ individuality. bristol: multilingual matters. hatfield, e., cacioppo, j., & rapson, r. (1994). emotional contagion. cambridge: cambridge university press. singing well-becoming: student musical therapy case studies 227 ho, y., c., cheung, m. c., & chan, a. s. (2003). music training improves verbal but not visual memory: cross-sectional and longitudinal explorations in children. neuropsychology, 17(3), 439-450. iacoboni m., molnar-szakacs i., gallese v., buccino g., mazziotta j. c., & rizzolatti, g. (2005). grasping the intentions of others with one's own mirror neuron system. plos biol 3(3), e79. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030079 jackson, t. (2013, november 19). “flipped classroom” model shows proven progress in addressing broken educational experience in the u.s. press release retrieved from http://www.marketwatch.com/story/flippedclassroom-model-shows-proven-progress-in-addressing-brokeneducational-experience-in-the-us-2013-11-19 munsch r. (2001). love you forever. ontario: firefly. murphey, t. (1985). world englishes: the raison d'être of situationally motivated teacher produced texts. tesol newsletter, 19, 13. murphey, t. (1990). the song-stuck-in-my-head phenomenon: a melodic din in the head. system, 18(1), 53-64. murphey, t. (1992). the discourse of pop song. tesol quarterly, 26(4), 770-774. murphey, t. (1993a). students as flexitexts: alternative to tie-you-down bound textinecessity. english teachers association of switzerland newsletter, 10(2), 28-29. murphey, t. (1993b). why don't teachers learn what learners learn? taking the guesswork out with action logging. english teaching forum, 31(1), 6-10. murphey, t. (2013a). value added english learning. journal of the saitama educators 3(5), 1-8. retrieved from http://issuu.com/saitamacityeducators/ docs/vol.3__issue_5 murphey, t. (2013b). know happy, know life! journal of saitama city educators, 3(5), 18-21, 30-32. retrieved from http://issuu.com/saitamacityeducators/ docs/vol.3__issue_5 murphey, t. (2013c). the impact of self-information given to socially intelligent dynamic systems (sindys) i.e. classes! "scuola e lingue moderne" anils, 1-5. pp. 6-9. murphey, t., & arao, h. (2001). changing reported beliefs through near peer role modeling. tesl-ej. 5(3)1-15. retrieved from http://tesl-ej.org/ej19/a1.html nakamura, s., sadato, n., oohashi, t., nishina, e., fuwamoto, y., & yonekura, y. (1999). analysis of music-brain interaction with simultaneous measurement of regional cerebral blood flow and electroencephalogram beta rhythm in human subjects. neuroscience letters, 275(3), 222-226. norton, b. (2010). language and identity. in n. hornberger & s. mckay (eds.), sociolinguistics and language education (pp. 349-369). bristol: multilingual matters. tim murphey 228 rosen, s. (1991). my voice will go with you: the teaching tales of milton h. erickson. new york: w.w. norton. sacks, o. (2007). musicophilia: tales of music and the brain. new york: knopf. sannino, a., & ellis, v. (eds.). (2014). learning and collective creativity: activitytheoretical and sociocultural studies. new york: routledge. schmithorst, v. l., & holland, s. k. (2004). the effect of musical training on the neural correlates of math processing: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in humans. neuroscience letters, 354(3), 193-196. singh, s. (2010). near-peer role modeling: the fledgling scholars education paradigm. anatomical sciences education 3, 50-51. turnbull, m., & dailey-o’cain, j. (eds.). (2009). first language use in second and foreign language learning. amsterdam: john benjamins. van lier, l. (2006). foreword. in becket, g. & miller p. (eds.), project-based second and foreign language education (pp. xi-xvi). greenwich, ct: information age. references of student authors cited in the data volumes 1-3 had no individual cs titles, just a number, so below there are no titles for entries for volumes 1-3. later in volumes 4-7 we started giving titles to the individual case studies. i separated these individual student citations for the convenience of researchers. the same purpose is served by the booklets listed in table 1. abe, e. (2010). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 1(18), 24. akimoto, n. (2013). spreading the five ways to happiness. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 4, 15. akiyama, y. (2010). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 1(14), 19. chiba, k. (2014). doitagain, doitagain, doitagain! in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 6, 10. demise, y. (2010). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 1, (8), 12. enomoto, s. (2012). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 3, (4), 8-9. fujisawa, s. (2012). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 3, (5), 10. goto, y. (2013). are you young? in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 5, 10. hashimoto, k. (2014). teaching songs to the elderly. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 6, 22. hori, n. (2014). singing makes us wonderfully joyful. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 6, 5. hoshino, m. (2011). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 2(17), 26. ito, n. (2012). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 3(23), 32. singing well-becoming: student musical therapy case studies 229 ito, m. (2013). the joy of laughing and singing. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 4, 13. kahsiwagura, y. (2014). loving young and make many mistakes and succeed. in t. murphey (ed.) music therapy case studies, 6, 26. kamoda, m. (2012). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 3(27), 36-37. kanai, s. (2011). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 2(8), 12. kato, y. (2010). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 1(6), 10. koge, y. (2012). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 3(6), 11. kumano, a. (2010). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 1(13), 18. kyo, p. (2011). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 2(12), 18. matsui, s. (2010). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 1(23), 28-29. matsunaga, c. (2013). a great opportunity. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 5, 31. miyamoto, n. (2011). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 2(2), 6. murakami, m. 2013). my genius brother. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 4, 20. namba, a. (2014). music helps us remembering! in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 6, 16. nishina, m. (2013). are you content? in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 5, 11. numayama, n. (2013). cram school student and 5 ways. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 5, 15. odaka, k. (2014). do it again and again! in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 6, 27. ogasawara, y. (2011). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 2(1), 5. omagari, y. (2013). five ways friend. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 5, 28. sato, a. (2013). singing while we work. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 4, 12. sasamori, m. (2013). a happy story. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 4, 18. sato, t. (2013). how do you write? in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 5, 27. sekine, m. (2014). teaching songs project. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 6, 17. shirai, m. (2011). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 2(7), 11. shoji, n. (2013). simple songs simple happiness. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 7, 29. sudo, s. (2010). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 1(15), 20. sugahara, y. (2011). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 2(3), 7. tim murphey 230 sugawara, c. (2014). singing on the phone. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 6, 4. suzuki, s. (2013). cram school buddies. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 4, 14. suzuki, t. (2014). even a child can sing an english song. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 6, 18. tanaka, h. (2012). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 3(2), 6. tokuyama, h. (2012). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 3(22), 29-31. tomitsuka, r. (2011). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 2(9), 4. tsuchiya, a. (2010). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 1(7), 11. wakaume, m. (2010). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 1(11), 16. yamashita, e. (2013). group singing helps language learning. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 4, 5. yokohara, a. (2012). in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 3(12), 18. yonaha, m. (2013). doi ta ga in. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 4, 8. yoshihara, k. (2014). melody influences our feelings, memories, and relationships. in t. murphey (ed.), music therapy case studies, 6, 12. singing well-becoming: student musical therapy case studies 231 appendix a the assignment sheet (from volume 1, 2010, p. 35) case study of teaching an affirmation song to someone (musical therapy) –assignment monday may 31, 2010, due monday june 7 bring to class 400 words minimum printed out: use direct “…” quotes when possible. teach someone an affirmation song (5 ways to happiness, or happy person, (eng or jap) or ysb or www …) and explain to them about affirmations and how they can help someone be happier and healthier. ask them to sing it for several days and then to report back to you. you will write a short paper on this experience, a case study. see sample parts and phrases below: 1.the person i chose to teach and why. i chose my grand mother (club member, work colleague, friend) who have known for xx years. i will use the pseudonym hiro (or yuri…etc. ) for him/her. i taught them the song xxxxx. i choose this song because 2. the story of our meeting, teaching, and learning i first taught yuri on (date june 2 at 2 pm) for about 20 minutes. we were sitting (where) and she seemed to want to learn / not be very interested/ etc. she repeated after me and we sang together maybe xx times. finally she sang it alone. she had trouble with … she liked …. she asked about …..…. i explained the meaning and the ideas…… she seemed to have trouble pronouncing …… understanding ….. so i explained/ practiced with her…. i told her i would call her three times in the next 24 hours and ask her the question for the song so she could practice remembering it, and i explained that she could practice by herself whenever she wanted and that it would do her some good. i explained that when people said or sang affirmations that it pointed their brain toward thinking and doing things that were good for them. she seemed to understand and said she would try. 3. follow up: i called her three times as promised at 4 pm and 8 pm the same day and 9 a.m the following day. i also saw her a few days later. she seemed to improve with each call and she seemed to really enjoy/ to be bothered a little. i saw her three days later and immediately asked the question and she responded….. i asked her how she felt learning the song with me and how she felt now that she was singing it regularly and she said, “…” 4. conclusions and recommendations for me, this experience was interesting/difficult/ because …. if i were going to do it again i would ……my advice to others who wish to teach affirmation songs is to…. remember a case study is just like telling a story…. it’s easy…. write write write it down/set your feelings free/i make it up as i … (version 5/31/10) tim murphey 232 appendix b song notes and lyrics (in order of use in this study). first is the title in bold, then the question prompt that we used in class. then in brackets are the number of times it was used in the case studies, followed by some notes and the lyrics in italics or a source to find popular lyrics. 1) the five ways to happiness! (what are the 5 ways to happiness?) [55 css] this is the epitome of an affirmation song as it suggests 5 ways to become happy, repeats a lot, and has gestures to help one remember the lyrics better. it is sung to the tune of the 12 days of christmas, a familiar tune. lyrics and audio are available and on my podcast page http://mits.podomatic.com articles about the use and teaching of the song can be found at http://kandaeli.academia.edu/timmurphey (cf: know happy, know life! murphey, 2013b) english lyrics (tim murphey) when you want to be happy, there’s (#) thing you can do… (#: one, two, three, four, five) (tune: “the 12 days of christmas”) 1. smile from ear to ear. 2. breathe in deep. 3. look up at the sky. 4. sing a melody. 5. dare to show your love. 2) young strong & beautiful (are you young?) [28 css] seeks to get people excited about the “adventure” of life and to get “fascinated” by small things. in the last two years, i have added amy cuddy’s (2012, http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language _shapes_ who_you_are) research on power posing to it, and taught participants to do a power pose at the end and "to cry to the world" “i’m in love!” which usually generates a lot of energy. i also tie it to fredrickson’s love 2.0 (2013) idea that we can enjoy micro-moments of love, or “positivity resonance”, with anyone at any time. to demonstrate the meaning of “cry to the world” in my classes, i open a window and stick my head out and shout, “i’m in love!” then i tell them their assignment for the next week is to cry to the world “i’m in love!” with a power posture in a public place and to write about it in their class notebook. this is a very embarrassing and risky thing to ask shy japanese undergrads to do. however, one of my favorite memories is of a student who immediately after my demonstration at the window got up and went to the window and shouted "i 'm in love!" the class loved it and he felt so free and refreshed! to learn the song the last few years many students watch the class singing it on youtube with american sign-language. lyrics and audio are available and on my podcast page http://mits .podomatic.com lyrics i'm young and strong and beautiful i'm living an adventure, the world's so fascinating, it makes me wanna cry! i wanna cry to the world! i wanna fly all around i wanna tell everybody i'm in love i’m in love i'm in love i'm in love i'm in love i'm in love i wanna tell everybody i'm in love singing well-becoming: student musical therapy case studies 233 3) super happy optimistic joyful and prodigious (how are you?) [21css] [tune of supercalifragilisticexpiallidocious...] is an easy greeting song that is fun and students usually like playing with it in class. teachers can use such songlets as a classroom management tool: when they need a few seconds to get the next activity ready they can turn to the class and say, "please ask the person beside you "how are you?"" and then students can have an energizing mini conversation, say some words that might be self fulfilling prophecies, practice some fun english, and not let their minds become idle. students can also be asked to make their own greeting to the same tune and fit some words in. my second one for this tune is "truly awesome so tenacious lovingly vivacious." in japanese, i sing sugoi kampeki subarashi sekyiokuteki genki. 4) today [11css] is a wonderful classic old scottish folk song. i teach it one stanza at a time over three classes with each stanza having a different question prompt which is answered naturally in the first line of the stanza (what are you going to do today?/are you content? /who are you?) in my teaching, i exchange the old english word "ere" with "before." for lyrics and song go to youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubgjzaycjqc which is a john denver version. 5) write write write it down (how do you write?) [11css] sung to the tune of row row row your boat, it expresses the idea of improvisation, i.e. “you make it up as you go along” and you need to “set your feelings free” and just “ write!” students find it useful to teach to classmates who were struggling with writing assignments. lyrics: write write write it down/ set your feelings free/ i make it up as i go along/ my pen is writing me. i ask them what is an “upasi” and they guess awhile and then find out “up as i.” 6) do it again! (how do you succeed?) [11css] sung to the tune of santa claus is coming to town, it is useful to show them native-like blended pronunciation of “doidagin”. the lyrics are doidagin x 8 + make many mistakes and doidagin! in japanese we sing yariba dekiru naseba naru x 2 + nana korobiya – oh ki! 7) love you forever (lyf) [10 css] is borrowed from robert munsch’s (2001) famous children’s book by the same title. which can be read to the students also. as a question prompt i use: “who do you love?” and then the students sing to each other. while most people are very shy about saying “i love you”, singing it is an art form that is ok in most cases. lyrics “i’ll love you forever, i’ll like you for always, as long as i’m living, my baby you’ll be.” 8) smile song or warau uta why do you smile? [9 css] this song is built on a japanese proverb and we usually sing the japanese and the english together. very short and sweet. “warau kado niwa fuku kitaru. smiling brings you happiness, let it show the way.” 9) the weather song: what’s the weather like? [5 css] the tune is the refrain of the 1950’s hit “the witchdoctor”. only lyrics: “it’s raining cats n’ dogs and it’s cold outside, my sunshine is deep inside.” tim murphey 234 10) compliment song: what do you like? [5 css] to the tune of oh suzannah! “i like your shirt, i like your pants, i like your shoes and socks, i like the way you do your hair, you look just like a bear.” great for lesson on teaching students to give compliments. 11) happy person: what’s a happy person? [4 css] this one line song is a quote from hugh downs: “a happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.” i put it to music and translated it in japanese with help from friends, “tokubetsu na jokiyo ga hito wo shiawase ni shinai, tokubetsu na kangaikata ga hito wo shiawase ni shimas.” 12) make new friends: how do you have a good life? [4 css] this is an old camp song that goes: “make new friends / and keep the old. one is silver and the other’s gold.” a good song for the first few classes when you want your students to make friends. 13) use it or lose it! how do you learn? [3 css] using a famous tune of the sukiyaki-song we sing “use it or lose it. it’s in your mind, now’s the time, take advantage of it. you can say it now. just like “holy cow”, it’s in your mind and now’s the time!” 14) diversity song: how do you eat well? [3 css] using the tune of “santa claus is coming to town.” “take a little bit of this, take a little bit of that, (x 2) diversify and balance your life.” great for teaching blended forms of lidabida (little bit of) and it encourages good eating habits with kids. 15) i love us playing: what do you love? [3 css] to the tune of the came song “rolling hills”. the lyrics basically give the results of a big survey we did several years ago asking students what they loved about their jhs and hs english classes. i put their answers into these lyrics: i love us playing, i love us singing songs, i love us intereacting, when we talk a lot/ we talk a lot we learn a lot, we talk a lot we laugh a lot, we talk a lot we learn a lot, when we talk a lot/ hahahs hahaha tehehe hehehe, (real laughter), when we talk a lot/ 16) turtle song: what is more beautiful than a bird in a tree? [1 css] lyrics: a turtle trying to fly is more beautiful than a bird sitting in a tree. i teach this song often along side brene brown’s daring greatly (2012). 17) bear song: what’s the bear song? [1 css] this is an old and fun children’s song that repeats a lot and has natural shadowing in it. lyrics are easily available on youtube in english and in japanese (and perhaps other languages), but telling very different stories. singing well-becoming: student musical therapy case studies 235 appendix c references of class publications murphey, t. (ed.). (2010). music therapy case studies 1 july. a class publication at kanda university of international studies. chiba, japan. murphey, t. (ed.). (2011). music therapy case studies 2 dec. a class publication at kanda university of international studies. chiba, japan. murphey, t. (ed.). (2012). music therapy case studies 3 july. a class publication at kanda university of international studies. chiba, japan. murphey, t. (ed.). (2013). music therapy case studies 4 jan. a class publication at kanda university of international studies. chiba, japan. murphey, t. (ed.). (2013). music therapy case studies 5 july. a class publication at kanda university of international studies. chiba, japan. murphey, t. (ed.). (2014). music therapy case studies 6 jan. a class publication at kanda university of international studies. chiba, japan. murphey, t. (ed.). (2013). how do people help you have a great day and meaningful life (volume 7 for this study) jan. a class publication at kanda university of international studies. chiba, japan. all the above sources are available online at https://sites.google.com/site/folkmusictherapy/home 673 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (4). 2017. 673-694 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.4.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt game on! young learners’ incidental language learning of english prior to instruction vanessa de wilde ghent university, artevelde university college ghent, belgium vanessa.dewilde@ugent.be june eyckmans ghent university, belgium june.eyckmans@ugent.be abstract in this paper the incidental language acquisition of 11-year-old flemish children (n = 30) who have not received any formal english instruction is investigated. the study looks into children’s english proficiency and the learner characteristics that can be associated with it. in order to measure the children’s english proficiency, a receptive vocabulary test and a proficiency test (which measured listening skills, speaking skills, reading skills and writing skills) were used. information about learner characteristics was gathered through two questionnaires (for children and parents). the results show that a significant proportion of the 11-year-olds can already perform tasks at the a2 level (the common european framework of reference for languages) without having had any formal instruction. the study confirms that children learn english from the input they receive through different media (especially gaming and computer use). furthermore, the data reveal a strikingly positive attitude towards english and demonstrate that in some situations flemish children prefer using english over their l1 with their peers. keywords: incidental language acquisition; young learners; media exposure; computer games vanessa de wilde, june eyckmans 674 1. introduction the ubiquity of english in the daily lives of non-english native speakers around the world is a well-established fact. its impact on present day societies is unprecedented and has been explained by the extent of its geographical diffusion, the huge cultural diversity of its speakers, and the central role it plays internationally in domains such as science, technology, the media and many others (dewey, 2007). english has clearly become the lingua franca among language users who do not share a common tongue. in europe, the pervasiveness of the english language in the street (e.g., in advertising, shop windows, etc.) has prompted scholars to also consider english as part of the linguistic landscape of many european countries (griffin, 2004; mcarthur, 2000). in fact, english seems to have passed the stage of being considered a foreign language, and instead has become part of the working and social life of many eu citizens. the position of english in today’s society also has an impact on the young. because of the international status of english and its prevalence in contemporary media, children are exposed to english long before they start their formal l2 english instruction. as a result of this abundant input, children are exposed to—and may interact with—different types of semantic and syntactic information that can be processed and acquired. this type of incidental language acquisition is defined as a “by-product, not the target, of the main cognitive activity” (huckin & coady, 1999, p. 182) and has received a lot of attention in the sla research of the past two decades (hulstijn, 2012). flanders too is a region where the prevalence of english in europe is strongly felt, and this is heightened by the overwhelming supply of english-spoken television broadcasts that are subtitled instead of dubbed. this situation has created an interest in what has been called “incidental foreign language acquisition from media exposure” (kuppens, 2010, p. 65). this particular kind of incidental language acquisition has been acknowledged as being different from instruction-based language acquisition as well as immersion, but surprisingly few studies have been conducted concerning its development. in this study we look into the english competence of young flemish learners who might have “pre-learned” the language (mainly) through media exposure. we will explore the false beginner status of these learners, and we will focus on the individual differences that shape language learning gains in this pre-instructional phase. after delineating the educational system in flanders with regard to english instruction, the results of previous studies about incidental knowledge of english in children will be chronicled so as to arrive at the research aims of a new smallscale investigation. the procedure and materials of this new study are outlined in game on! young learners’ incidental language learning of english prior to instruction 675 section 4 and are followed by the results section. in the discussion and conclusion sections, the main findings of this pilot study are interpreted and future research avenues are put forward. 2. background to the study and literature review in flanders, formal instruction in english starts a lot later than in many other european countries (enever, 2011). as there are three official languages in belgium (dutch, french and german) and the capital region is officially bilingual, belgian legislation requires that the first foreign language to be taught in flanders be french. children start learning french at the age of 10 (at the latest), and english becomes compulsory at the start of secondary school (where it is taught from the first or second year onwards, i.e., when children are 12 to 13 years old). this is in sharp contrast with the surrounding countries where english lessons start at age 10 at the latest, but often much earlier and sometimes as early as age 4 (enever, 2011). the educational targets set by the flemish government concerning language competences are linked to the common european framework of reference for languages (cefr). for example, children are expected to obtain the a1 level for french at the end of primary school, that is, after two years of french instruction. in secondary education, the attainment targets for french and english are the same. at the end of the first grade of secondary education, learners are expected to be at the a2 level for both french and english. this is after four years of french instruction (4 hours per week) and after one or two years of english instruction (2 or 3 hours per week) depending on the school’s program (onderwijs vlaanderen, 2016). this situation, where english is clearly expected to be learned more quickly than french, is undoubtedly the result of the perceived dominant status of english in flanders. in large parts of europe, english is considered as a lingua franca. this is no different in flanders, where english is omnipresent in daily life, not in the least because of the profusion of the english language in the different media. flemish children, like many other children in europe (edelenbos, johnstone, & kubanek, 2006), are often exposed to english outside the school from an early age onwards. english-spoken tv broadcasts in flanders are mainly subtitled and hardly ever dubbed. there is also exposure to english through social media, computer games, watching things online (e.g., youtube), and so on. recent research has demonstrated that nearly all (98.2%) 9-year-old to 12-yearold flemish children have access to a computer at home. two thirds of the children have their own computer, 40% have their own smartphone, and 18% have their own tablet. they mainly use these devices for gaming but also for watching films, clips and using social media (mediaraven & linc, 2016). vanessa de wilde, june eyckmans 676 a couple of recent studies seem to indicate that contexts of abundant language input may lead to a form of language acquisition which is neither instruction-based nor a type of immersion but can be seen as a form of naturalistic acquisition through media exposure (saville-troike, 2012). a study by kuppens (2010), which examined the translation skills of 374 flemish children in the last year of primary school, found significant effects of watching subtitled english television programs and movies on the scores of the dutch-to-english and english-to-dutch translation tests. in the study children were asked to translate eight sentences from dutch to english (e.g., het spijt me. ‘i’m sorry.’) and eight sentences from english to dutch (e.g., what’s going on? ‘wat gebeurt er?’). playing english computer games was also positively associated with english-to-dutch translation skills. another study, carried out in iceland (lefever, 2010), investigated 182 children’s listening, reading and oral communication skills in english before the start of classroom instruction and found that many of these children had a basic understanding of spoken english before the start of formal instruction and were in the first stages of understanding written english. furthermore, over half of the children could take part in a simple conversation in english. lefever concludes that these skills seem to be influenced by the type and amount of language input children are exposed to in a naturalistic environment. he summarizes the findings as follows: “above all, the study substantiates that children are learning english on their own and demonstrates that they are active and autonomous learners” (p. 15). in a sub-study of the early language learning in europe (ellie) project, lindgren and muñoz (2013) investigated the influence of exposure to a foreign language1 on children’s test results (listening comprehension and reading comprehension). in this study watching movies and films in the foreign language (possibly subtitled) explained most of the variance in test results, and listening to music with lyrics in the foreign language and playing computer games came far behind. it should be noted that the children in this study all received foreign language classroom instruction. finally, a study by sylvén and sundqvist (2012) with 86 swedish children aged 11-12 showed that children who frequently gamed in english outperformed moderate gamers, who outperformed non-gamers on an english vocabulary test. a study by jensen (2016) with 49 eight-year-old and 58 ten-year-old danish children confirmed the relationship between gaming and the development of english vocabulary knowledge: children who gamed frequently scored higher on a receptive vocabulary test. here again, out-of-school exposure seemed 1 the children in this study came from seven european countries (croatia, england, italy, the netherlands, poland, spain and sweden). the foreign language was english in all countries except england, where children studied french or spanish. game on! young learners’ incidental language learning of english prior to instruction 677 to be an important factor in children’s second language acquisition. as in the ellie study, the children who participated in this study also received formal english instruction in school. 3. aims and research questions the aim of this study is twofold. first, we want to investigate flemish learners’ english language skills and vocabulary knowledge before the start of formal english instruction. by gathering these data, we hope to get a clearer picture of the false beginner status of young learners and the differences that exist between them regarding knowledge of english before the start of formal instruction. secondly, we wish to identify the variables which are related to young flemish learners’ language skills and vocabulary knowledge. the research questions of this study are: 1. how proficient are flemish children in english (listening comprehension, reading comprehension, writing ability, speaking ability and receptive vocabulary size) before embarking on formal english classroom instruction? 2. which learner characteristics can be associated with children’s english proficiency before the start of formal english classroom instruction (e.g., gender, socio-economic status, use of different media)? 4. method 4.1. participants in this study 30 children were tested. the children were all in the last year of primary school. they made up two intact classes of a school in ghent, belgium. they had not had any english lessons prior to the test as english is not part of primary schools’ curricula in flanders. the group consisted of 16 boys and 14 girls. eighteen children were native speakers of dutch, and 12 children had a multilingual background (arabic-dutch, turkish-dutch, french-dutch, dutch-cape verdean creole). 4.2. instruments, procedure and analysis listening comprehension, reading comprehension, writing ability and speaking ability were measured with the cambridge english test for young learners – flyers. this test, which was designed for efl-learners aged 7-12, measures learners’ language skills at the a2-level (cefr). this level corresponds to the level which is expected from flemish children at the end of the second year of secondary school. for this study we used the sample papers of the test (cambridge vanessa de wilde, june eyckmans 678 english language assessment, 2014). the test itself was not adapted, but the instructions were provided in english and in dutch, the official language of instruction in flanders. this was done because the children had not had any english lessons before and instructions had to be clear for all participants. the listening test consisted of five tasks, each including five items. in task 1, the participants saw a drawing of a children’s party and were asked to connect a child in the picture with the correct name based on a dialogue they heard. in task 2, the participants were asked to listen for specific information and fill in the correct word in a police report. in task 3, a drawing of a piece of furniture had to be connected with the room it belonged in based on a dialogue they heard. in task 4, five questions were asked and the participants had to respond by choosing one of three drawings. in task 5, the participants had to follow the instructions given by the speaker in order to color, draw and write things in a drawing. reading and writing were tested together. the reading and writing test consisted of seven tasks. in task 1, the participants were given 10 definitions which they had to link with the correct word. in task 2, children had to assess whether statements about a drawing were correct or incorrect. in task 3, they had to complete a dialogue by choosing the correct answers to the questions asked. task 4 was a gap-filling exercise. the participants had to complete a story by filling in the correct word in the gap. they could choose a word from a list. in task 5, the participants had to read a text and answer questions about the text. task 6 was again a gap-fill. the participants had to complete ten sentences with the correct word that they could choose from among three alternatives. the last task was a gap-fill where no choices were furnished. the participants had to complete the sentence with a word they thought suitable in this context. both tests (listening and reading/writing) were administered in the classroom. the last part of the test for young learners was an oral test. this test consisted of four tasks. the first task was about identifying the differences between two similar drawings. the examiner made a statement about the drawing and the speaker had to react by saying how his/her drawing was different. the second activity was an information gap activity. both the examiner and the speaker asked questions and gave answers. the third task was a storytelling task. the speaker told a story about buying a new television based on five pictures. the examiner described the first picture and the speaker continued. the last task was a short interview about the learner’s family and personal interests. the oral test was administered individually. to score it a rubric was developed based on the criteria laid out in the teachers’ manual provided with the flyers test. the five criteria used to assess the children’s oral proficiency in english were interactive listening ability (1), production of appropriate and extended responses (2), pronunciation (3), grammar (4) and vocabulary (5). game on! young learners’ incidental language learning of english prior to instruction 679 the children’s receptive vocabulary size was tested with the peabody picture vocabulary test 4 (ppvt-4) form a (dunn & dunn, 2007). the first 108 items were tested (nine sets of 12 items). the test ended when children had done all 108 items or when they had more than eight mistakes in a set of 12 items. the test was administered individually. apart from the language tests for the children, parents and children also filled in a questionnaire that was developed with the help of teachers’ and policy makers’ input (see appendices a and b). these questionnaires served to gather information about exposure to english through different media, contact with speakers of english, use of english, attitude towards english, children’s and parents’ language background and parents’ educational level and current job. the parental questionnaire was filled in before the tests. the children’s questionnaire was given to the participants on the same day they took the listening, and reading and writing tests. in the results section the descriptive statistics for the administered tests and the correlations between the test scores are discussed. kendall’s correlations were calculated due to the small sample size. the children’s individual learner characteristics, as reported in the questionnaires, are also looked at in the results section. finally, the relationships between the learner characteristics and the language test scores are analyzed by means of non-parametric tests (kruskal-wallis and mann-whitney u tests). 5. results 5.1. english proficiency table 1 demonstrates a large range in test results for all four tests. mean scores were higher for receptive skills than for productive skills. for the listening test 25% of the children got an (almost) perfect test result. table 1 descriptive statistics for the administered tests (n = 30) statistic receptive vocabulary (ppvt-4) (max score = 108) listening (max score = 25) reading and writing (max score = 50) speaking (max score = 20) mean 66.20 16.13 23.03 9.98 median 72 16 19 8 sd 26.30 7.06 13.60 5.66 range 90 21 47 18.50 minimum 12 4 2 1 maximum 102 25 49 19.50 percentile 25 48.25 10 13 5.36 percentile 50 72 16 19 8 percentile 75 86.75 24 35.75 15.75 vanessa de wilde, june eyckmans 680 figure 1 shows that the distribution of the results for the receptive vocabulary test, the listening test and the speaking test was bimodal, pointing to a clear gap between children with very low scores and children with very high scores. this was not the case for the results of the test that measured reading and writing ability, where the distribution was positively skewed (figure 1), with many children having a low score and only few children obtaining a high score. figure 1 distribution of the results for the different language tests in order to explore the relations between the different language tests in this relatively small sample, kendall’s correlation coefficients have been calculated. table 2 shows that there were strong and significant correlations between the test scores on all measures. table 2 kendall’s correlation coefficients between the scores on all administered tests test receptive vocabulary test listening reading and writing speaking ppvt-4 .68 .73 .75 listening test .68 .78 .71 reading and writing test .73 .78 .67 speaking test .75 .70 .67 note. all correlations are significant at the .01 level. 5.2. learner characteristics in order to gain insight into the relationship between the individual learner characteristics and children’s pre-school knowledge of english, information concerning their exposure to different english media and their actual use of english was gathered by game on! young learners’ incidental language learning of english prior to instruction 681 means of a survey. figure 2 shows the amount of time the children spent doing each of these activities per day. it needs to be pointed out that only three options were available in the survey: 0-30 minutes per day, 30 minutes-1 hour per day, and more than 1 hour per day. this means that children who did not spend time doing a particular type of activity (0 minutes) couldn not be distinguished from children who spent a limited amount of time doing a particular type of activity (anything from 1 to 30 minutes per day) in the data analysis. also, children who spent 30 minutes per day on an activity could tick two boxes (0-30 minutes or 30 minutes-1 hour). they were asked to tick the box which was closest to their average exposure per day. we only used the answers about exposure to english from the children’s questionnaire for our analyses since many children reported they had also filled in this part of the parents’ questionnaire. figure 2 daily exposure to english media as reported in the children’s questionnaires the results demonstrate that watching english television with subtitles in the home language was quite common in this group of children. seventeen children spent more than 30 minutes per day on this activity, and of these 17, six children spent more than 1 hour per day doing this. only few children watched english television without subtitles or english television with english subtitles for more than 30 minutes per day. twenty-nine children did not read in english or spent little time reading in english (0-30 minutes per day). only one child read in english more than 30 minutes per day. ten children spent more than 1 hour playing computer games in english per day, eight children gamed between 30 minutes and 1 hour per day, and 12 children reported spending less than 30 minutes per day gaming in english. the results for computer use in english per day were similar: 12 children 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% tv no subtitles tv english subtitles tv subtitles home language listening to music reading gaming computer use speaking 0-30 min 30 min 1h more than 1h vanessa de wilde, june eyckmans 682 spent more than 1 hour doing this activity, seven children spent between 30 minutes and 1 hour, and 11 children spent less than 30 minutes. listening to english music was clearly the most prevalent activity for these children. seventeen children reported that they listened to english music more than 1 hour each day, five children said they listened between 30 minutes and 1 hour, and eight children reported listening to english music less than 30 minutes per day. it is important to note here that a lot of the music played on the radio in flanders has english lyrics, which explains the amount of time children are exposed to english music. even if they do not deliberately look for opportunities to listen to english music, it is all around them. three children spoke english more than 30 minutes per day, of whom one child spoke english more than 1 hour per day. none of the children spoke english at home. when asked about the occasions on which they spoke english, the children mentioned they sometimes used english when they were on holiday (4), during gaming (7), when talking to english-speaking family (4) or for fun with friends or parents (10). when asked about their attitude towards english, an overwhelming majority of them (27) professed to find english fun. only two children claimed not to like english, and one child did not answer this question. with regard to the educational level of the parents, the responses to the survey revealed that 20 mothers had a degree in higher education, eight mothers had a secondary education degree and two mothers had a degree in primary education. twenty-one fathers had a degree of higher education and eight had a secondary education degree. one answer was missing. 5.3. relationships between english proficiency and learner characteristics in order to investigate the relationship between the learner characteristics and the test scores obtained by the children, the appropriate non-parametric tests were selected, the results of which are presented in table 3. the kruskall-wallis test was used to measure the exposure effects of different media. the test showed a significant relationship between gaming in english and all test scores. computer use was significantly related to three out of four english language tests (receptive vocabulary test, reading and writing, speaking ability), but there was no significant relationship with the scores of the listening test. watching television with subtitles in the first language and listening to english music did not seem to be related to the test scores of the children.2 2 we did not perform any tests for the variables of watching english television without subtitles, watching english television with english subtitles, reading english books and speaking english as most of the children in this pilot study indicated they simply did not do these activities. game on! young learners’ incidental language learning of english prior to instruction 683 mann-whitney u tests showed that there was no significant relationship between gender or language used in the home and the children’s test scores. a kruskall-wallis test showed that there was no significant relationship between parents’ education and the children’s test scores either. table 3 the relationship between the learner characteristics and the test scores as measured by kruskall-wallis and mann-whitney u tests ppvt-4 listening reading and writing speaking exposure effects gaming in english .001* .022* .015* .011* computer use in english .007* .155* .020* .008* english tv subtitles home language .784* .570* .483* .823* listening to english music .672* .263* .354* .843* gender .603* .646* .318* .723* language used in the home .532* .187* .730* .253* parents’ education mother’s education .397* .384* .163* .616* father’s education speaking english “for fun” .884* .006* .825* .033* .678* .020* .864* .013* note. *p < .05 figure 3 boxplots showing the distribution of test results for the various situations in which children spoke english: children who spoke english for fun (fun), children who spoke english during gaming (games), children who spoke english because they had to or who did not speak english (no) in order to get a more detailed picture of the various situations in which children claimed to speak english, three categories were distinguished. first, there was a group of children who did not speak english “for fun”: they either did not speak english or spoke english because they had to (on holiday or with family members they did not share any other language with). a second group of children mentioned that they spoke english “for fun” with friends or family although they had no communicative imperative to use english with these people vanessa de wilde, june eyckmans 684 since they share at least one other language (dutch). a third group mentioned they spoke english during gaming. these conversations could be with someone with whom the only language they share is english or not. a kruskall-wallis test was used to look at the relationship between reasons for (not) speaking english and the test results. the test showed a significant difference for all test scores (ppvt: .006, listening: .033, speaking: .020, reading and writing: .013). figure 3 shows the distribution of the test scores for the different groups. 6. discussion before discussing the results with reference to the main research questions of this study, the different sets of test scores merit some attention. although the test scores for the different skills tests (listening, reading and writing, speaking) and the scores of the receptive vocabulary test showed strong correlations, it is clear that the children did much better on the listening test and on the receptive vocabulary size test than on the productive skills test (admittedly, writing skills were measured together with reading skills in the flyers test). the mean percentage of correct responses in the ppvt was 62% and for the listening test it amounted to 64%. however, the reading and writing test only reached a mean of 46% and the speaking test 49%. this discrepancy in test scores seems to indicate that the receptive skills of these children, who had not received any formal instruction in english before they were tested in this study, were better developed than their productive skills. this is different from the test results of the flyers tests taken in a “normal” situation (i.e., after having received formal instruction). the scores on this test are expressed as shields, results ranging from one to five shields. when we look at the grade statistics for the flyers test (cambridge english language assessment, 2017), 26.2% of the children have a score of five shields for the listening test and 33.7% of the children get four shields. for reading and writing 13% of the children have a score of five shields and 29.8 % receive four shields. for speaking 63.1% of the children have a score of five shields and 27.1% get four shields. the fact that, in this study, the test scores for the listening test were much higher than the scores for the reading, writing and speaking tests could be explained by our participants’ predominant exposure to spoken english through different media. with reference to the first research question of this paper, the distribution of the test scores furnishes a response as to the differences in children’s uptake of english before the start of instruction. in the receptive vocabulary test, the listening test and the speaking test a bimodal distribution was observed. this means that our participant group displayed two distinct profiles: children who obtained decidedly low scores on the tests and children who obtained high or very high scores and could already communicate at the a2 level (cefr) before the start of english classes game on! young learners’ incidental language learning of english prior to instruction 685 in school. the results for listening comprehension are especially revealing in this respect since 12 of the 30 children had a score below 50% and 13 children had a score of 80% or higher (with five children obtaining the maximum score). when we interpret these results in light of the competence levels that have been stipulated for the different curricula in flanders, we can conclude that 40% of the children had already reached the required competence level for listening comprehension at the end of the second year of secondary education when they were in the final year of primary school. one can imagine that this makes for very heterogeneous classes at the start of formal english instruction, which poses considerable challenges for the foreign language teacher. the results obtained for the other skills tests (reading, writing and speaking) were markedly lower than those for listening. for speaking, reading and writing more than half of the children scored less than 50%, but there were still children with high scores for each of these tests. on a reading and writing test four of the 30 children scored 80% or higher. with regard to speaking ability seven children had a score which was higher than 80%. in summary, for these skills too about 10-25% of the children had obtained the required competence level set for the end of the second year of secondary education (cefr a2) in the final year of primary school. on the receptive vocabulary test eight children had a score lower than 50%, 22 children knew at least half of the 108 words, eight of which had a score of 80% or higher. again, this shows that a lot of children already knew quite a few english words receptively before the start of english classes in school. with regard to the second research question about the factors that are related to children’s incidental acquisition of english before starting formal english instruction, the variables related to media use seemed to be most telling. the amount of gaming in english and the number of hours of computer use in english were significant predictors of children’s test scores (with significant results for the relationship between gaming and all four tests and significant results for the relationship between computer use and receptive vocabulary size, speaking ability and reading and writing skills). this confirms earlier research (jensen, 2016; sylvén & sundqvist, 2012) in which a significant correlation was found between the time spent gaming and the results of vocabulary tests. as stated above, the children in the swedish and danish studies had already received english instruction in school whereas the flemish children had not. still, the flemish children also seem to pick up language from playing games. the number of hours the children reported watching television with subtitles in the first language or listening to english music does not seem to be linked to the test scores. the results for watching television were somewhat different from what was attested in earlier research. kuppens (2010) found a significant effect for watching english television with subtitles on the scores of a dutch-to-english and vanessa de wilde, june eyckmans 686 an english-to-dutch translation test of flemish children. this incongruence can be explained by the type of test that was used. in the study by kuppens children were asked to translate eight short sentences from dutch to english (e.g., het spijt me. ‘i’m sorry.’) and eight from english to dutch (e.g., i love you. ‘ik hou van jou.’). the children in our study had to engage in various complex tasks (see section 4.2), which required more active interaction with the english language. the effect of watching television with subtitles on children’s foreign language proficiency was also found in lindgren and muñoz (2013). in their study, children from seven european contexts were tested. the fact that the children in this study came from different european contexts in which television programs are dubbed in some countries and subtitled in others will probably have influenced these children’s english proficiency. in our study, however, all children are brought up in a context in which english television programs are nearly always subtitled. this explains why the factor of watching television with subtitles did not discriminate between our participants: they all watch a significant amount of english spoken television from which they undoubtedly reap the rewards. as was mentioned above, no significant differences in test results were attested between boys and girls. in previous research (sylvén & sundqvist, 2012) boys seemed to outperform girls, but it was also reported that boys were more fervent gamers than girls, which might explain the differences in test results between boys and girls. in this study, both boys (6) and girls (4) spent a lot of time gaming (more than 1 hour per day), rendering gender insignificant. the data analysis also shows significant differences between the test results for children who use english for fun (with peers and during gaming) and children who do not do this. the more proficient children seem to use english spontaneously because they like to do so, not only with speakers of other languages (i.e., during gaming) but also in situations where they engage in role plays with their peers. 7. conclusion the results of this study showed that a significant proportion of the 11-year-olds could already perform tasks at the a2 level (cefr) without having had any formal instruction. the results of the skills test and the receptive vocabulary test revealed that a couple of children were very adept. the test results were very high especially for listening comprehension, with 13 children scoring 80% or higher. on the other hand there were also children with (very) low scores on the different tests. the bimodal distribution of the test results for the ppvt, listening and speaking ability confirmed that there was a group of children who hardly knew any english and another group of children who had reached all the curriculum objectives before the start of instruction. game on! young learners’ incidental language learning of english prior to instruction 687 all of the children reported having at least some contact with the english language, mainly through listening to music, watching television, gaming and computer use. reading in english and speaking english happened far less frequently. in this study, only two exposure factors were shown to be significantly related to the children’s test results: gaming and computer use. the children’s answers in the questionnaire revealed a positive attitude towards the english language. a large majority of the children (27 out of 30) considered english a “fun” language. children with poor test results also displayed a positive attitude towards the language. another interesting result which could be linked to the status of the language is the fact that many children reported speaking english “for fun” with their parents or peers, with whom they shared either their first language or the language spoken at school. among the limitations of the study, the limited number of participants is the most obvious. a large-scale data collection is currently being organized in order to check the generalizibility of these initial findings. in this follow-up study a “zero-category” has been included in the survey so as to distinguish between the children who spend little time doing particular media-related activities and those who spend no time at all doing this activity. the new survey also accounts for more types of computer use than the current one. specific information about computer use will shed light on the relationship between the use of different media and incidental acquisition of english. despite its limitations, this study confirms that children learn english from the input they receive through different media (especially gaming and computer use). some children have already become quite proficient before the start of formal english classroom instruction and can communicate at the a2 level of the cefr. furthermore, it seems that these children, who live in an environment where english is omnipresent but where it is not the majority language, sometimes speak english amongst each other. in some situations children seem to choose english over their l1. whether this is because the children want to practice english or because they feel english is the most appropriate language in certain contexts is something to be taken up in future research. this study shows that flemish children embark on formal instruction in english at very different starting points. this is something teachers should take into account in their teaching practice, which should include opportunities to practice the basics as well as more challenging tasks for pupils who have already reached the set competence level before the start of the course. what unites these children is their positive attitude towards english. it is up to teachers to create a challenging learning environment for all children, regardless of their entry level. because this is no mean feat, further research should also be aimed at finding ways for teachers to deal with these heterogeneous english proficiency levels in the classroom. vanessa de wilde, june eyckmans 688 acknowledgments the data collection was funded by artevelde university college ghent in the context of the false beginners pwo-project. we thank the schools, the teachers, the pupils and their parents for participating in the project. game on! young learners’ incidental language learning of english prior to instruction 689 references cambridge english language assessment. (2014). cambridge english: young learners: flyers. retrieved from http://www.cambridgeenglish.org/exams/young-le arners-english/ cambridge english language assessment. (2017). cambridge english: flyers (yle flyers): grade statistics. retrieved from http://gradestatistics.cambridgeengl ish.org/2015/ylef.html dewey, m. (2007). english as a lingua franca and globalization: an interconnected perspective. international journal of applied linguistics, 17(3), 332-354. doi: 10.1111/j.1473-4192.2007.00177.x dunn, l., & dunn, l. (2007). peabody picture vocabulary test (4th ed.). circle pines, mn: american guidance service. edelenbos, p., johnstone, r., & kubanek, a. (2006). languages for the children in europe: published research, good practice and main principles. retrieved from http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/repository/languages/ policy/language-policy/documents/young_en.pdf enever, j. (ed.). (2011). ellie early language learning in europe. london: british council. griffin, j. l. 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(2016). eindtermen moderne vreemde taalen – frans/engels – a-stroom, eerste graad. retrieved from http://www.ond.vlaanderen .be/curriculum/secundair-onderwijs/eerste-graad/vakgebonden/a-stroom /moderne-vreemde-talen-frans-engels/eindtermen.htm saville-troike, m. (2012). introducing second language acquisition (2nd ed.). cambridge: cambridge university press. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511888830 sylvén, l. k., & sundqvist, p. (2012). gaming as extramural english l2 learning and l2 proficiency among young learners. recall, 24(3), 302-321. doi:10. 1017/s095834401200016x game on! young learners’ incidental language learning of english prior to instruction 691 appendix a questionnaire for children how much contact do you have with english? 1. tick the box. how many minutes/hours do you do the things from the list per day? in english 0-30 minutes 30 min – 1 hour more than 1 hour watch tv without subtitles watch tv with english subtitles watch tv with subtitles in the home language listen to english music read english books, magazines, comics game in english youtube/social media (in english) speak english in the home language 0-30 minutes 30 min – 1 hour more than 1 hour watch tv listen to music read books, magazines, comics gamen youtube/sociale media 2. do you have any contact with people who speak english? yes / no if yes, where, when, with whom? a. on holiday? yes / no how often? ____________________________ b. at home? yes / no how often? ____________________________ c. in other situations? yes / no how often?_____________________________ 3. do you sometimes speak english? yes / no if yes, where, when, with whom? _________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________ 4. do you think english is a fun language? yes / no 5. do you sometimes look for opportunities to speak english? yes / no if yes, where, when, with whom? if no, why not? _________________________________________________________________________ vanessa de wilde, june eyckmans 692 general information: 1. what is you mother tongue? ________________________________ 2. which language(s) do you speak at home? ___________________________________________ 3. i am a ☐ boy. ☐ girl. game on! young learners’ incidental language learning of english prior to instruction 693 appendix b questionnaire for parents how much contact does your child have with english? 1. tick the box. how many minutes/hours does your child do the things from the list per day? in english 0-30 minutes 30 min – 1 hour more than 1 hour watch tv without subtitles watch tv with english subtitles watch tv with subtitles in the home language listen to english music read english books, magazines, comics game in english youtube/social media (in english) speak english in the home language 0-30 minutes 30 min – 1 hour more than 1 hour watch tv listen to music read books, magazines, comics gamen youtube/sociale media 2. does your child sometimes look for opportunities to speak english? yes / no if yes, where, when, with whom? if no, why not? _________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________ information parents 3. what is your mother tongue? mother: _____________________________________ father: ______________________________________ 4. which language(s) do you speak at home? ____________________________________________ vanessa de wilde, june eyckmans 694 5. which types of education did you do? mother father ☐ primary education ☐ primary education ☐ secondary education ☐ secondary education ☐ higher education ☐ higher education 6. what is your job? mother: _____________________________________ father: ______________________________________ language teacher education fo r a global society: a modular model fo r knowing, analyzing, recognizing, doing and seeing author: b. kumaravadivelu publisher: routledge, 2012 isbn: 978-0-415-87738-1 pages: 148 language teacher education for a global society: a modular model for know­ ing, analyzing, recognizing, doing, and seeing is another important contribution by professor b. kumaravadivelu from the department of linguistics and language de velopment at san jose state university's college of humanities and the arts. just like beyond methods: macrostrategies for language teaching (2003) or under standing language teaching: from method to postmethod (2006), this book is a state-of-the-art, perfect response to the call for providing language teacher educa­ tion models in the times of rapid economic, cultural, and educational globalization. the structure of the book is very clear. it consists of a preface, followed by sev en chapters. although not very long (148 pages), the book succinctly presents a skele ton for second/foreign language teacher education comprising five modules referred to by the acronym kards (knowing, analyzing, recognizing, doing, and seeing). in the first chapter, the author offers the rationale for his model, resorting to five global "post" perspectives (postnational, postmodern, postcolonial, posttransmission, and 449 postmethod) and three "p" principles (particularity, practicality, and possibility). the next five chapters explain in detail the particular modules of kards, which signify particular competencies in the contemporary language teacher's repertoire: "know­ ing" how to build a professional, personal, and procedural knowledge base (chapter 2), "analyzing" how to analyze learner needs, motivation, and autonomy (chapter 3), "recognizing" how to recognize one's own identities, beliefs, and values as a teacher (chapter 4), "doing" how to teach, theorize, and dialogize (chapter 5), and "seeing" how to see one's teaching from the perspectives of the learner, teacher, and observer (chapter 6). the final chapter provides the culmination of the model; kumaravadivelu discusses possible practical implications of conceiving and delivering language teaching models that are sensitive to local contexts, reminding the reader that his modular suggestion is only meant to provide guidelines that teacher educa­ tion programmers might take into account. there are a number of cogent reasons why kumaravadivelu's monograph makes an important addition to the literature on language teacher education. first of all, the book references current knowledge of other disciplines affecting language teacher education. the model presented does not favor any one particu­ lar module; for example, the teacher's knowledge about language, traditionally understood as supreme, is given equal footing with her ability to promote learner autonomy or recognize the values underlying her personal approach to language teaching. this makes the model extremely timely, since the positivist paradigm is still dominant in many an educational context, and despite numerous voices argu ing for revisiting the roles assumed by language teachers, the traditional role of the teacher as knowledge provider is, regrettably, still popular in school realities. it should also be added that few language acquisition-related books are so logically and comprehensively written. the language teacher preparation scaffold is very well presented, which makes it easy for the reader to grasp and retain. this advantage cannot be ignored as good understanding of the concept affects its implementation in the sense that what seems a vital element in the interdepend ent module model is more likely to be considered as realistic and doable, and thus transferred into practice. this is an important argument, because many otherwise viable contributions in the field are frequently regarded as too theoretical for practical application. this ability to write in such a comprehensible and logical way demonstrates the scholarly ingeniousness of kumaravadivelu, who is able to con vey so much in such a straightforward way. a feature contributing to the "friendly" aspect of the book for the teaching context is a set of tasks presented at the end of each module consisting of "rapid reader responses," "reflective tasks," and "exploratory projects." rapid reader responses are four questions demanding of the reader rapid answers about the contents of the chapters, and thanks to them the reader can immediately see what needs rereading or an innovative step to make readers think about the book what questions the chapter leaves unanswered. reflective tasks aim at 450 eliciting more reflective and less spontaneous responses, and can motivate the reader to look at the familiar issues in a new and more critical way. exploratory projects, in turn, can make students investigate their local contexts and even initi ate larger research studies. it can be said that this approach of presenting theoret­ ical input supplemented by activities prompting readers' responses at both deep er and more superficial levels is a very supportive modern approach to writing a book to serve students, in-service teachers, and teacher educators. thanks to such a layout, the book enables readers to, using the author's words, "theorize what they practice and practice what they theorize." the book seems so successful that finding its drawbacks is not an easy task. but however attracted to its content and structure as i am, i cannot resist the feel ing that at times all these diagrams, alliterating names of principles, symmetry, well balanced choices of terminology, and so forth, might be a product of coining the nomenclature for the sake of coining it or going for a good-looking textual structure rather than communicating a first-rate piece of the author's input, be it his knowledge or his experience. on the other hand, kumaravadivelu presents a modu­ lar model, and how can you discuss such a model in a way appealing to the reader without relying upon such devices as regularity, logicality, and symmetry? i very much recommend this book to all those involved in education who want to see language teacher education restructured in the face of accelerating globalization and the changing role of the teacher. as the awareness of these is­ sues grows, i would suggest that educators read b. kumaravadivelu's 2012 book, in which his response to these challenges in the form of a modular model of lan­ guage teacher education for a global society is introduced and presented in detail. reviewed by dorota werbińska pomeranian university, słupsk, poland werbinsk@pro.onet.pl 451 mailto:werbinsk@pro.onet.pl 555 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (4). 555-556 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl reviewers for volume 1/2011 the editors of studies in second language learning and teaching would like to thank the following people for reviewing one or more manuscripts submitted to be published in the 2011 volume: larissa aronin trinity college, dublin, ireland; university of hajfa, israel adriana biedro pomeranian university, s upsk piotr cap university of ód , poland anna cie licka adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland; a&m international university, texas, usa kata csizer eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary jean mark dewaele birbeck college, university of london, uk jelena mihaljevi djigunovi zagreb university, zagreb, croatia zoltan dörnyei university of nottingham, uk krystyna dro dzia -szelest adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland anna ewert adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland alan fortune king's college, london, uk danuta gabry -barker university of silesia, poland tammy gregersen university of northern iowa, usa rebecca hughes university of nottingham, uk hanna komorowska university of warsaw, poland; university of social sciences and humanitites, warsaw, poland diane larsen-freeman university of michigan, usa barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk university of ód , poland jan majer university of ód , poland paul meara swansea university, uk sarah mercer university of graz, austria anna micho ska-stadnik university of wroc aw, poland theophile munyangeyo leeds metropolitan university, uk anna ni egorodcew jagiellonian university, kraków, poland terrence odlin ohio state university, usa aneta pavlenko temple university, philadelphia, usa liliana piasecka university of ód , poland françois pichette university of quebec, montreal, canada ewa piechurska-kuciel university of opole, poland vera regan university college, dublin, ireland 556 heidemarie sarter university of potsdam, germany pawe scheffler adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland mike sharwood smith heriot-watt university, edingburgh, uk teresa siek-piskozub adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland david singleton trinity college, dublin, ireland odzimierz sobkowiak adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland ewa waniek-klimczak university of ód , poland maria wysocka university of silesia, poland 333 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (3). 333-348 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl what is your educational philosophy? modern and postmodern approaches to foreign language education levent uzun uludag university, bursa, turkey ulevent@uludag.edu.tr abstract the present study discusses the concepts of education and training, while also highlighting the paradigm wars of the positivistic and naturalistic views, beginning with the age of ancient philosophies and continuing to the latest era of postmodernism. additionally, language education is examined considering the linguistic and educational fundamentals which all need to be based on and combined by a philosophy. the research in foreign language (fl) education is evaluated from both the teaching and learning perspectives in order to reach conclusions concerning the current situation and the requisites of futuristic and innovative fl education. what is my educational philosophy? is proposed as a key question that not only fl teachers but also all educators should ask themselves; a question that will guide teachers throughout their entire lives and illuminate their minds throughout their teaching practice. teacher and learner roles are discussed in order to determine whether teachers or learners should come first in the process of education. it is emphasised that the philosophical perspectives of education urgently need to be built into the minds of educators prior to asking them to convey knowledge of any kind or to apply the materials of a specific teaching method. the study concludes with the observation that there exists a serious discrepancy between the needs, preferences and interests of the learners and the views held by educational decision makers, who seem to fail to catch up with the trends in technology and globalisation. keywords: philosophy of education, foreign language education, teaching versus learning, education versus training, postmodern approaches to education levent uzun 334 the authority of those who want to teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn. – cicero on-going and everlasting complaints, explanations, and debates in the world of education and training testify to the existence of serious problems or shortcomings concerning not only the processes but also the procedures, which are directly related to the philosophical perspectives of those who are involved. in the quest for a clearer view of the big picture, in the following an attempt will be made to delve into the concepts of education and training, and also highlight the paradigm wars of the positivistic and naturalistic views in the light of approaches adopted in education, beginning with the age of ancient philosophies and continuing to the latest era of postmodernism. additionally, foreign language (fl) education will be examined considering its linguistic and educational fundamentals, which all need to be based on and united by a philosophy. research in fl education will be evaluated from both the teaching and learning perspectives in order to gain an insight into the current situation and the requisites of futuristic and innovative approaches and applications in the teaching of english as a fl. what is my educational philosophy? what is my educational philosophy? is the key question that not only fl teachers but also all educators should ask themselves; a question that will guide teachers throughout their entire lives and illuminate their minds in the course of their careers. in order to find an answer to this question, it might be useful for each individual to comprehend the differences between some basic concepts such as education versus training, teaching versus learning, and the positivistic approach versus the naturalistic approach, as well as to decide about the value of each, which is a subjective matter indeed, and also to consider the roles of teachers and learners in the process of education. teacher candidates need to be encouraged to be creative and active thinkers in order to minimise their reliance on memorisation and passive implementations of foreordained methods, techniques, activities, materials, and so forth, that is, implementing directives that require following fixed procedures and actions, without much thinking, modification, or contribution by the practitioner. education versus training immanuel kant stressed that education differs from training in that the latter involves thinking, whereas the former does not. according to him, it was essential to address the development of character and teaching of moral val what is your educational philosophy? modern and postmodern approaches . . . 335 ues, which would be best realised through public education and learning by doing (cahn, 1997, p. 197). therefore, it seems that training should be considered superior to education because it produces high quality personalities initially spiritually but also intellectually. however, education encourages adoption and acquiescence of certain data, without much criticism or complaint. indeed, the differences between the concepts of education and training used to be stressed quite often in turkey, with the implication that training (the process of equipping individuals with moral values, skills, and creativity that does not necessarily have to be realised at a school, college, or university) should come to the fore and be more important than education (the process of equipping people with pure, fixed and absolute information as theoretical knowledge). nevertheless, the current criteria of qualification in turkey depend mostly on exam results rather than skills and personality. there are over twenty types of examinations and tests used for assessment and evaluation of education (e.g., sts, üds, ygs, jana, dus, tus, als, omss, todaie, ales, kpds, lys, yçs, pmyo, kpss, dgs, ugys, ydus, etc.; see the website of the centre for assessment, selection, and placement for further information: http://www.osym.gov.tr/ana-sayfa/1-0/20120920.html), but very few that concentrate on training. almost every member of the society is urged by the system to undergo these types of assessment throughout his/her life as this happens, for instance, when one applies to become a student, teacher, police officer, fireman, and so on. moreover, it is customary that a turkish person is granted their driving licence only if s/he knows the parts of the engine, has some theoretical knowledge about first aid, and so on; the knowledge is normally tested in the course of a pen and paper exam. by contrast, nobody would question the driver candidate’s psychological state, or ask him/her to apply a first aid procedure. in fact, this holds true almost about all evaluation procedures. for instance, a teacher candidate would be asked about theoretical knowledge of the field but not whether s/he loves children and/or teaching; a fireman candidate would most probably have to answer questions related to physics, mechanics, medicine, and so on, but would never be asked to demonstrate his/her practical skills. therefore, education versus training has been a controversial issue for some time, the fact which seems to have been forgotten or somehow simply ignored recently. in short, the turkish educational system highlights the value of training but functions in favour of education, which applies to both formative and summative aspects of testing. furthermore, it should be pointed out that evaluation in turkey is mostly summative rather than formative and relies mostly on multiple choice tests. the reason for adopting this stance or approach to training and education should be related to the behaviouristic, cognitive, and constructivist understandings levent uzun 336 of the modern, which define and standardise the aims and procedures of education with much focus on communal pragmatism rather than on individual benefit. in other words, the perspectives of the modern highlight the necessity and importance of “communal” behaviourism, constructivism, and cognitive processing, and tend to make judgements concerning the good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate, relevant and irrelevant, and so on, according to this fixed view of the world. therefore, the present mass education should be very natural and rational given this understanding of collectivism, which conceives of a common intellect, morals, habits, and so on, for everyone. on the other side of the coin, the same view recognizes and does not deny, but at the same time neglects the multiple intelligences, needs, and interests, as they would require individual or “differentiated instruction” (see tomlinson, 1999), and thus causes much difficulty and many problems in the system of mass education. therefore, this might be one basic reason why education has been consolidated more than training throughout human history. formal education seems to have replaced informal “person training” as it existed in the medieval times of less knowledge but more virtue. as mentioned before, modern systems urge people to learn and follow the common information, trends, and criteria to survive in the global society. however, in the past people were mostly treated as individual creatures that had to be illuminated from inside, that is, they would get to know themselves better, and begin to question and think about every behaviour, idea, reason, conclusion, and so on. each professional would question why s/he is doing the thing s/he is doing, and also how well, appropriately, or timely s/he is doing it. a teacher would question his/her knowledge and the messages s/he conveys to his/her students, and also the way s/he assesses his/her students. and students, on the other hand, would question the things they learn, why they learn them, and also make links with the virtues and values that they have learnt from their ancestors. in sum, what matters today seems to be the degree to which a person is close to the common knowledge, skills, values and the like of society, regardless of individual predispositions. education is provided to classrooms rather than to individuals who not only have to breathe the same air but who are also to absorb and internalise the same things, although this might happen in different ways and at different levels. training seems to have been a value of past ages which has lost its currency and value to a great extent and no longer “feeds” the individual. despite this, it is still carried out, if not as a global or governmental policy, as an individual pastime. teaching versus learning. teaching and learning are two crucial elements of a continuum that approach education from different perspectives. the differences between the concepts of this dichotomy are important because they are directly related to the philosophies, theories, processes, approaches and applications in education. what is done in schools and how it is what is your educational philosophy? modern and postmodern approaches . . . 337 carried out reveals from what perspective the whole action is approached or based on. table 1 sheds light on teaching and learning regardless of the cultural, geographical, or physical varieties that may occur. it exemplifies not only the continuum that begins with a philosophy and ends with a result but also the processes of teaching and learning. the table does not assert that the evolution should necessarily be as specified in the columns, but rather points out that the nature of the total action is directed more or less by the dichotomies mentioned above. these views or paths have actually resulted in a conflict, namely the paradigm wars, which will be explained in the following section. table 1 the nature of teaching and learning what philosophy? positivistic naturalistic what approach? teaching-based/ knowledge-centred learning-based/ person-centred what theory? deductive/ top-down inductive/ bottom-up what knowledge? declarative/ form focused procedural/ meaning focused what process? explicit/ learning (intentional) implicit/ acquisition (incidental) what subject/individual? teacher student (learner) what product? input output + intake what result? quantitative qualitative paradigm wars of the positivistic and naturalistic worlds. the term paradigm wars refers to the ontological and epistemological debates among those who possess a different view related to a particular problem, aim, or application. the sides of this war might be the “positivists,” “interpretivists,” and “critical theorists” (anderson & herr, 1999) or the “technologists,” “social pragmatists,” and “critical analysts” (chapelle, 2003, pp. 1-9), or even the teachers, students, and parents, and so on, depending on the subject matter or the field of action. it is of utmost importance to realize that any conscious effort of action depends on the thought and/or belief of the beholders (e.g., policy makers, professionals, practitioners, etc.) or of those in charge. respective points of view and perceptions of reality as well as an understanding of what is significant lay behind the means, definitions, and applications that will be preferred and used throughout the lives of human beings. for instance, while one mind levent uzun 338 set would concentrate on concrete acquisitions (i.e., specific information, behaviour related to the skills, etc.), the other would aim at abstract acquisitions (i.e., improvement of emotional feelings, satisfaction of the inner world, etc.). therefore, different views of the world lead to different paradigms (patterns or models) in action. this natural occurrence of differentiation might stem from either the variation of human minds or the influence of the two philosophers on these minds, namely plato and aristotle. although many philosophical views have been introduced so far, from the first day of humanity to the present, it is possible to divide them into two major groups which may be labelled positivistic and naturalistic. as it has been previously explained, these philosophies depend basically on how reality is perceived. therefore, while one approach argues that “reality is within us,” as in idealism, the other claims that “reality is external to us,” as in realism. recently, another approach has been emphasised more often, namely the one saying that “reality is socially constructed,” but again it is possible to postulate that the roots of this recent view would go back either to idealism or realism, or both. table 2 exemplifies the views of the positivistic and naturalistic worlds or mindsets, while also showing how the social-constructivist views might be embedded into these. table 2 positivistic and naturalistic views positivistic perception (reality is external to us) naturalistic perception (reality is within us) data that is derived from sensory experience is significant and valuable data does not necessarily need to be experienced by the senses logical and mathematical analysis of such data is crucial (statistics) spiritual and metaphysical detection of data is also possible and acceptable these would count as exclusive sources of authentic knowledge social constructivist perception (reality is socially constructed) as it can be seen in table 2, the knowledge that would be favoured by the positivistic perception (pp) would be the one that is based on the five senses and it would be consolidated by statistical measurements. consequently, what should be transmitted to or learned by others should be this kind of data and information as reliable realities. therefore, books, materials, or applications of this understanding would not teach things such as angels, fairies, conscience, love, dreams, and so on. on the other hand, naturalistic perception (np) seems to adopt a more flexible stance, and thus it would be tolerant of any idea, belief, or application. for instance, it would be even possible and probable to spend a whole semester dis what is your educational philosophy? modern and postmodern approaches . . . 339 cussing and debating the sixth sense (i.e., moral, spiritual, and metaphysical issues). as the third element of table 2, social constructivist perception (scp) will be bound to and will build on both of these perspectives, depending on the degree and weight of exposure (i.e., positivistic or naturalistic tenets) that is forwarded by the two channels (i.e., pp and np). to put it differently, the views of scp should be embedded both in pp and np depending on the tendencies, traditions, beliefs, and so on, of the adopted perspective. for instance, one might suggest that religion as a domain has followed mainly the np, and thus the scp of this domain should have built on the essentials of the np, while for the technology/science domain it would be the opposite. therefore, it would be natural to observe a kind of naturalistic social constructivism (nsc) in many of the domains of social systems, and positivistic social constructivism (psc) in most of the scientific systems. in short, information and knowledge would be constructed by the society, which would employ a naturalistic or positivistic perception of reality or of what is significant, and, thus, convert it to nsc or psc. however, this should not mean that these two types cannot be mixed in some cases. on the contrary, it is always suggested both by the pp and the np that there should be a kind of balance as, for instance, a human being cannot be a robot devoid of human feelings. this kind of triangulation or mixed approach to the world would certainly be valid and reliable in every case and domain. as a consequence of the above, it would not be naïve to postulate that the educational implications and materials as well as the concepts and definitions in these views (i.e., pp and np) will be highly influenced by the understanding or mindset that lies behind them. besides the educational philosophies, the functional approaches such as behaviourism, cognitivism, and constructivism have important effects on the total process and procedures. one simple example might be the definition of education by erturk (1985, p.6) as in the following: “istendik davran de ikli i” (desired behaviour alteration). this collocation has always been the best-known definition of education in turkish educational circles (e.g., cayci & ünal, 2007; demirel, 1999; deniz, avsaroglu, & fidan, 2006; dilekman, basci, & bektas, 2008). this definition of education represents an obvious behaviouristic approach which evokes strong feelings of a positivistic mindset. moreover, it is also implied that the most basic duty of teachers is to create behaviour alterations in the lives of people in accordance with the aims. at this specific point, it becomes unavoidable to ask two critical questions: whose aims are implied by this understanding? and is education only about disciplining the behaviours of people? additionally, pring (2004, p. 13) postulated that education is concerned with the life of the mind, and the job of the teacher is to facilitate this through putting the learner in contact with further experience or with what others have said. therefore, another question should occupy our minds: what is concerned with the life of the heart and the levent uzun 340 soul if education is going to concentrate purely on the life of the mind? and actually, is education just an intellectual process rather than full satisfaction of both the mind and the feelings? best and kahn (2006, p. 3) pointed out that human beings are the unique product of their creation and evolution. therefore, if we consider each human being as a different world, we should not deny the necessity of providing each individual with a unique exposure to information and experiences, so that s/he will be able to make progress in her/his development. otherwise, if the same knowledge and experiences were imposed on all individuals for the sake of a “mutual consensus,” then it would be hard to talk about some kind of uniqueness. therefore, the approaches to education seem to call for a careful reconsideration and revision in order for us to be able to adopt and adapt them successfully in our practices to meet the needs of each individual. table 3 is intended to shed further light on this matter. table 3 the philosophical views about and functional approaches to reality and action reality is external to us reality is within us reality is socially constructed behaviourism acting according to the natural rules acting according to the universal rules acting according to the communal rules cognitivism thinking according to the accumulated information of humanity thinking according to the universal data thinking according to exposure to communal agendas constructivism building on the norms and tendencies of the current time building on the norms and tendencies of the total existence building on the norms and tendencies of the day table 3 indicates that the functional approaches to education would not necessarily mean to be unique to some specific philosophical view, but rather that different philosophical understandings would require different actions. from ancient ages to the present time, human beings have been “naturally” and “unavoidably” in a process that has required them to behave, cogitate, and construct in some specific ways. moreover, these ways have always been directed or affected by wise men or authorities, or written materials, or more recently by audio and visual media, behind which similarly lies a person or group of persons. furthermore, these decision makers have had the right to create knowledge, implement procedures, and evaluate the outcomes of processes. in the following section, the issues presented and explained above will be discussed within the context of fl education, and the assumptions, implications, and applications will be evaluated from a postmodern perspective. what is your educational philosophy? modern and postmodern approaches . . . 341 foreign language education the literature and documentation of fl education indicates that, although the implications and application have shown alterations, the assumptions have not changed much at all. in other words, although different methods and techniques have been proposed during the last century, the tendency to view learners according to certain specific proficiency levels, and interpreting fl learning and teaching through the use and access of certain skills have remained the same or similar. globally, fl circles have shown much interest in the ways of teaching and transmitting the basics of a given language while also pointing to the necessity for learners to practise these crucial elements. however, little attention has been awarded to individual psychological matters and their reflections within fl classrooms. this might be because of the mass production tendency of the modern era, which has been based on consumption rather than critical thinking and production of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, and thus, has resulted in mass education that in practice has had to ignore individual needs, interests, and so on, although the same era has produced theoretical principles such as multiple intelligences or differentiated instruction. classrooms, full of people, have been treated with the same approach, method, and techniques as well as books, materials, and exercises. to put it differently, the general tendency of the “modern approach” works as follows: all the learners are put together in the same classroom and are given, for example, the same text to read and urged to follow the same activities afterwards, regardless of the interests or intelligence types of the individuals that form the group. therefore, it is possible to suggest that until very recently, regardless of what skill was valued more than others or who was in the centre (i.e., teachers or students), formal education, fixed programmes, subjects, time, place, and so on, have dominated the process to a great extent. learner dependency and standards-focused education have been like a virus that has been hard to get rid of. it is only recently, with the rising voices of postmodernism, that human beings have discovered new ways to deal with the task of learning a fl in the globalised world. the deconstructionism of postmodernism has resulted in the four a-isms (anyone-anywhere-anytime-anything-ism) that have become sensible to people. therefore, lifelong learning, learner autonomy, online education, distance education, and so on, have been pronounced more often recently. moreover, the latest developments in technology and the possible integration of technology in fl education have enhanced learner-centred applications that have become rivals and threat to teacher-centeredness. actually, a significant amount of criticism has been directed at teacher-centeredness, so levent uzun 342 that a serious incompatibility is rapidly emerging between the natural occurrences of the age, and the views of the educational authorities, who seem to fail in catching up with the trends in technology and globalisation, and the needs and interests of the youth. prensky (2001, p. 2) emphasised that the single biggest problem facing education today is that our “digital immigrant” instructors, who speak an outdated language, are struggling to teach a population of “digital natives” that speak a much different language. teacher and student roles in the traditional and innovative approaches differ significantly, a fact which also inevitably affects the very basic and essential assumptions, implications, and applications in fl education. table 4 shows the general differences. table 4 teacher and student roles in the traditional and innovative approaches traditional approaches innovative approaches teacher roles teaching searching and investigating adopting and adapting deciding evaluating guiding facilitating evaluating student roles learning (memorising) doing exercises and tasks following the teacher interacting with classmates comprehending searching and investigating adopting and adapting deciding the general tendency has been to talk about reflective teachers (e.g., farrell, 2007; hatton & smith, 1995; kocoglu, akyel, & ercetin, 2008; orr, 2011) with little attention to or interest in reflective learners (e.g. ahmad, britland, bull, & mabbott, 2010; chen, wei, & liu, 2011; hsieh, jang, hwang, & chen, 2011), which is an attitude quite open to criticism. the postmodern approaches to fl education would prefer to see the process from the learning side rather than from the teaching side. therefore, it becomes essential to talk about learner reflection before talking about teacher reflection because of the belief that learning is an individual process, and nobody can teach something to somebody without the consent of the receptor or the processor of information and practitioner of actions. to that end, one should question and discuss the meaning or value of concentrating so much on teacher reflectivity and neglecting learner reflectivity. after all, no matter how skilful or efficient a teacher is, each student will learn or understand in proportion to his/her capacity, will, or readiness, as the wise saying of mevlana (rumi) advises: “ne kadar bilirsen bil, söylediklerin karsindakilerin anlayabilecegi kadardir” (http://www.tr.wikiquote.org/wiki/mevlana_celaleddin-i_rumi). (no matter how well or much you know, the things you say are only in proportion to the vessel of your interlocutors). therefore, one might infer that the main duty what is your educational philosophy? modern and postmodern approaches . . . 343 and responsibility in training or education is on the shoulders of the students, and thus, it might be reasonable to put more effort into the improvement of learner qualifications and experience rather than those of the teachers’. the same idea offers itself when considering the present age of postmodernity, which has led towards the shift in the roles of the two sides. today, learners have a lot to teach or share with their friends or teachers, as in the example of the social media (e.g., weblogs, facebook, twitter, etc.). people have the power to raise topics to discuss, put new points of view on the agenda, and share written, visual, and audio information that can easily attract or catch the interest of others and can thus increase cognitive and emotional stimulation. foreign language learning and teaching the promotion of intercultural communication as a result of the improvement in technology, and more specifically, the opportunities that the internet provides people with, have accelerated fl learning and gradually put learning one step ahead of teaching. today, autonomous fl learners have the opportunity to find plenty of different types of materials of their own interest and choice on the internet in contrast to the formal fl programmes that are mostly dependent on fixed materials and curricula. therefore, there is a need to reconsider the multiple abilities, interests and needs of the learners, to seek for ways to implement differentiated instruction in the classroom in order to satisfy individuals, and to help learners proceed more fruitfully in their individual learning. unfortunately, the modern educational system has focused more than is necessary on teaching rather than learning, and so there has been a tendency to see individuals as a single large entity that has come to the classroom and to whom the same materials, methods or techniques can be applied at the same time. this tradition might depend on the theory of john locke about the human mind, and follow the view of tabula rasa, which explains that human minds are blank slates or empty vessels that need to be filled in. nevertheless, this view has been opposed and criticised by some authors claiming that the authoritarian, strict, pre-ordained knowledge approach of modern traditional education was too concerned with delivering knowledge, and not enough with understanding students’ actual experiences (e.g., dewey, 1938; freire, 1970; neil, 2005). the “banking concept of education” of freire (1970) criticised this approach, which saw individuals as empty containers who have to be filled with information, and blamed it for being an instrument of oppression that leads to the teacher-student contradiction. therefore, it might be wiser and more beneficial to teach learners the ways of accessing and acquiring information rather than giving it directly, as taught by the following chinese proverb: “give me a fish and i eat for a day. teach me to fish and i eat for a lifetime.” to put it differently, a fl teacher levent uzun 344 might, for example, try to present the topic of passive voice by asking his/her students to connect to the internet (and he/she might specify a few websites), to read and do exercises, and to come and share their knowledge with their classmates instead of teaching all of these things and creating teacher dependency and a passive attitude. in this case, teachers should step aside and be ready to adopt the role of facilitator or guide. moreover, vygotsky’s (1986) research on human psychology and metacognition is in support of this, as in the following: “if you want to learn something, teach it to someone; the one who does the talking, does the learning” (http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/lev_vygotsky). while on the one hand, the modern fl circles are aware of all this, on the other hand, they are lacking in improving these principles and producing learner-centred theories. the literature has accumulated a considerable amount of information that is intended to support teachers with paths and techniques (e.g., the grammar-translation method, audiolingual method, tpr, communicative language teaching, content-based approach, context-based approach, etc.) to teach a fl, but there are not any well-established paths for learners. although some learning strategies have been suggested by professionals, it would be hard to say that these will be suitable for all learner types. moreover, these strategies usually provide local solutions for the learning of specific topics or skills such as vocabulary or listening. nevertheless, fl learners might need and benefit from more general solutions that will support all-around learning, as in the fl teaching methods. this fact is clear evidence of what the dominant philosophy of the fl world has been. in other words, the data produced and accumulated in the fl literature show from what view the nature of fl education has been approached. despite this, there have also been attempts to create more learnercentred approaches such as the “ldl method” (grzega & schöner, 2008), which has the potential to trigger learner reflectivity and creation of individual paths and techniques. the nature of fl education might be approached and investigated from both the teaching side and the learning side, but the age of postmodernity would require dealing with matters mostly from a bottom-up perspective rather than from a top-down view. therefore, it should be remembered that classrooms are not places for teacher satisfaction, but places where learners come with particular purposes, and teachers attend the classes because students are there. simply said, teachers in the current world exist because learners exist, which means that without the learners, teachers would not exist. this should not imply that teachers or teacher education can be underestimated but rather that teachers principally exist for students, and students will continue to learn whether or not teachers exist in the current age of technology and globalisation. figure 1 is an example of how the nature of fl education can be viewed in the age of postmodernity, which in return can cultivate results that will enhance learner success and satisfaction. what is your educational philosophy? modern and postmodern approaches . . . 345 teaching fl vs. learning fl how to teach what to learn/how to learn methods, techniques, approaches individual strategies, needs, interests (input) (intake) formaltraditional informalcall integrativeautonomous mixed course type pre-determined course type all skills together skills learned separately figure 1 the nature of fl education in the age of postmodernity although not in detail, figure 1 shows the current state of fl education from the learning perspective and student-centred approach. a fl learner might follow either a formal or informal education, where it seems that the informal one will allow for more flexibility and opportunities for individual modification or adaptation. on the informal path learners will have an opportunity to learn language skills together or separately depending on their choice, and also from multiple sources. this should be something good because variation in input can help the learners to deal with richer opportunities, both practically and intellectually. summary and conclusions to sum up, in order to make progress not only in education but also in any other field, there are some very basic and essential things to realise, among which philosophy is probably the one that comes first. it is of utmost importance that the parties involved in or related to education should have an idea about the whole process, including its philosophy and human psychology, and in this particular case the psychology of teaching and learning a fl. the world of change should constantly and routinely remind us that the only thing that would not change is the change itself. therefore, the educational authorities always need to question, observe and follow the innovations, development, and tendencies in technology and learner profiles. it would be helpful to levent uzun 346 suggest that fl education circles need to work more on autonomous learner and learning theories in the future in order to keep pace with the instantaneous and rapid lifestyle changes and improvements of technology. there is also a need to comprehend that the big picture will depend on what we base education on: ethics versus profit, individual satisfaction versus societal satisfaction, theology versus empiricism/experientialism, and so on. consequently, everything in education is about and for human beings. therefore, if principles such as multiple intelligences, differentiated instruction, lifelong learning, and so on, sound truly humanistic, it would be worth struggling for these, regardless of how difficult or problematic their implications might be. therefore, it would be beneficial to consider training more often and to set a balance between education and training, and pp and np, regardless of the theoretical and/or practical difficulties and handicaps. no thing worth trying is easy, and sometimes the most valuable things are achieved after a fierce struggle. so, as in the following: “… remember, when days are forlorn; it always is darkest before the dawn” (from: pictures by katherine mansfield; http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/mansfield/bliss/pictures.html). what is your educational philosophy? modern and postmodern approaches . . . 347 references ahmad, n., britland, m., bull, s., & mabbott, a. 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(1999). the differentiated classroom: responding to the needs of all learners. alexandria, va: ascd. vygotsky, l. s. 1986. thought and language. cambridge, ma: mit press. 349 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (3). 349-366 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl a call for a multifaceted approach to language learning motivation research: combining complexity, humanistic, and critical perspectives julian pigott university of warwick, coventry, uk julianpigott@gmail.com abstract in this paper i give an overview of recent developments in the l2 motivation field, in particular the movement away from quantitative, questionnaire-based methodologies toward smaller-scale qualitative studies incorporating concepts from complexity theory. while complexity theory provides useful concepts for exploring motivation in new ways, it has nothing to say about ethics, morality, ideology, politics, power or educational purpose. furthermore, calls for its use come primarily from researchers from the quantitative tradition whose aim in importing this paradigm from the physical sciences appears to be to conceptualize and model motivation more accurately. the endeavor therefore remains a fundamentally positivist one. rather than being embraced as a self-contained methodology, i argue that complexity theory should be used cautiously and prudently alongside methods grounded in other philosophical traditions. possibilities abound, but here i suggest one possible multifaceted approach combining complexity theory, a humanistic conception of motivation, and a critical perspective. keywords: motivation, positivist research, reductionist research, complex systems, humanistic perspective the problem with reductionism half a century ago, in a commentary on contemporary psychological research, allport (1962) noted that: julian pigott 350 we focus our attention chiefly . . . upon . . . commonalities for example, upon common traits of achievement, anxiety, extraversion . . . we spend scarcely one per cent of our research time discovering whether these common dimensions are in reality relevant to bill’s personality, and if so, how they are patterned together to compose the billian quality of bill. ideally, research should explore both horizontal and vertical dimensions. (1962, p. 409) allport’s observation could conceivably be made of research in the l2 motivation field, at least until very recently. a great deal of this research follows a well-trodden path which can be characterised as a process of data extraction and abstraction: motivation is regarded, in positivist1 terms, as a “measurable individual difference variable[s] implicated in second language learning” (ushioda, 2001, p. 95); a questionnaire is designed to measure certain aspects of it; this instrument is distributed to a sizable, carefully screened sample of people; through the use of likert items, the opinions, feelings and perceptions of these people are converted into numerical form; the numbers are processed to conform to a normal distribution; statistics are run on these numbers, and the patterns discovered in the data are used to produce – or reproduce – abstract models of motivation such as gardner and lambert’s (1972) integrative motive or dörnyei’s (2005) ideal l2 self. all of this is reported in a tightly prescribed, stylized form of objective discourse. the resulting models are cognitive maps of the motivation of the universal learner. they constitute a theoretical and methodological reductionist ideal that sociological phenomena, like their physical counterparts, can best be understood by being reduced to their component parts. the resulting models should, in turn, be reduced to a universal model. thus, one justification for dörnyei’s l2 motivational self model (2005) is that it is more universal than gardner’s (1972) socio-educational model. models such as these lie at an extreme end of a cline between universality and comprehensiveness, and they hold a completely different type of explanatory power to the understanding of an individual’s motivation that we may, for example, gain from sitting in conversation with him/her for a couple of hours over a bottle of wine.2 they represent the motivation of an average learner who corresponds to no actual 1 by positivist, i mean a philosophical position that there is a reality “out there” that the objective researcher, using the right tools, can measure and represent. this is seen as naive by those who view meaning in the social and psychological realm as being socially constructed to an extent (to give a glib example: people who have been married may agree that two diametrically opposed “facts” may be equally impervious to “evidence” or “objective” mediation). 2 interestingly, a methodological procedure proposed (albeit in an off-the-cuff remark) by a pioneer of the aggregate approach to measuring motivation, and phd supervisor of robert gardner, wallace lambert (spolsky, 2000, p. 160). a call for a multifaceted approach to language learning motivation research: combining . . . 351 person in the real world, in the same way that there is no actual american family with the national average of 1.86 children. the reduction of data and concepts to the point of universality inevitably ignores the idiosyncrasies of the individual. further, it under-theorises the power of individual agency and the reflexive nature of the relationship between the individual and context. although the quantitative approach is of undeniable value in understanding the characteristics of learners en masse, a problem with it is that it has garnered an aura of scientific objectivity sine qua non. midgely’s (2011) critique of behaviorism touches on this issue: behaviourists dismissed attention to the subjective angle as an irrelevant extravagance, a sentimental luxury that ought to be renounced in the name of science. but this high opinion of its scientific status was not itself a piece of science. it was a propaganda exercise on behalf of a special moral position. the position itself was never defended in the appropriate moral terms, but always as being in some mysterious sense ‘scientific’. the preference for the outside angle remains a dangerous piece of dogma, which has the most unfortunately outlasted the official demise of behaviourism . . . when the question is about how a particular person is to be treated, then that person's own viewpoint on the matter has a quite peculiar importance. psychological theories, such as behaviourism, which exclusively exalt the objective standpoint, cannot possibly do justice to that importance. indeed, they exist to bypass it. (p. 60) like behaviorism, we can argue that motivation theory has undervalued the viewpoint of the individual and isolated itself theoretically from social context. the alternative to a reductionist view of motivation is to adopt a comprehensive, or holistic view. for example – if we draw back from a universal view to a country-specific level – the fact that the majority of japanese people have relatively little need for english in everyday life presumably explains, in part, the lack of enthusiasm on display in some compulsory classrooms. yet even this is by no means a comprehensive enough explanation of motivation for the individual teacher, concerned with day-to-day management of the classroom and with the unique individuals and emergent group dynamics of the class. ultimately, a teacher’s knowledge that a student is being bullied, for example, might be more useful in explaining his low motivation than deriving a reason from the latest theory. it is perhaps no surprise that ushioda (2009) concludes that “individual difference research3 can tell us very little about particular students sitting in our classroom, about how they are (un)motivated and why” (p. 213), and dörnyei (2009a) claims that the individual difference paradigm “has by and large failed” (p. 4). 3 it should be noted that within individual difference research motivation has tended to be situated theoretically, along with aptitude, personality, and the like. julian pigott 352 challenges to reductionist conceptualizations of motivation have naturally tended to come from researchers working in the qualitative tradition. ames (as cited in ushioda, 2001), for example, argues that motivation ought to be defined “not in terms of observable and measurable activity, but rather in terms of what patterns of thinking and belief underlie such activity and shape students’ engagement in the learning process” (p. 96). norton (1997), working with immigrant learners of english in canada, also emphasizes the learner’s perspective, as well as the wider context: central questions in my own work are not “is the learner motivated to learn the target language?” and “what kind of personality does the learner have?” instead, my questions are framed as follows: “what is the learner’s investment in the target language? how is the learner’s relationship to the target language socially and historically constructed?” (p. 411) norton invites us to ask whether motivation is, in and of itself, necessarily a legitimate target of investigation. ushioda (2009), in her call for a person-in-context, relational view of motivation, proposes that real people in the real world, without recourse to excessive abstraction, are the appropriate targets of research attention, emphasising the human capability for self-reflection and the reflexive causality between learner and context. more so than norton, ushioda sees utility in motivation as a theoretical concept, but she views it not in positivist terms as an individual variable, but as “emergent from relations between real persons, with particular social identities, and the unfolding cultural context of activity” (p. 215). to be fair to the quantitative paradigm, telling us about individuals, or being turned around into prescriptive strategies for motivating students, is not what correlation research is designed to do. regardless, it seems fair to say that it has had more than its fair share of the limelight. furthermore, the type of reductionism typical of individual difference research is now viewed as untenable even in the physical sciences, due to the emergent nature of the behavior of complex systems (see below). it is this fundamental limitation of a reductionist view that has led even long-time quantitative researchers to complexity theory. complexity theory and motivation recent years have seen growing interest in using complexity theory in applied linguistics (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008; richards, ross, & seedhouse, 2011; van geert, 2007). complexity theory originates from the mathematical and physical sciences. the rationale for its use in the social sciences is that social phenomena are sufficiently analogous to their physical counterparts for a complexity interpretation to be of explanatory utility. for exama call for a multifaceted approach to language learning motivation research: combining . . . 353 ple, complex systems are complex in that they consist of “multiple interactions between many different components” (rind, 1999, p. 105), each variable being a more or less significant player in an interconnected web of interacting influences. they are nonlinear in the sense that a perturbation to the system may cause a disproportionately significant effect (the butterfly effect), a proportionate effect, or a disproportionately insignificant effect. these characteristics can be seen in the l2 learner’s motivational system too: there are obviously multiple factors – upbringing, nature, nurture, society, the textbook, bureaucrats she has never met, the classroom, peers, the teacher, and so on – upon which motivation is potentially contingent. it is, in principle at least, impossible to arbitrarily discount any influence from consideration. in terms of linearity, my own ongoing research suggests that intercultural encounters at an early age may exert a disproportionately significant effect on motivation for some japanese learners of english, while eight years of test-focused compulsory english classes may exert a disproportionately insignificant influence (pigott, in press), even being deemed largely irrelevant to the motivation to learn english. complexity theory accounts for the fact that quantitative researchers tend to have to settle for correlation scores of 0.40, or only 16% of variance between factors (ellis & larsen-freeman, 2006). however, as it is a mathematical theory, complexity theory does not supply us with a ready-made means of studying psycho-social phenomena in complexity terms. there are no established methodological templates available and traditional methods are based on investigating linear relations between isolated variables in the context of aggregate data. as dörnyei (2012) explains: . . . aggregated scores from a sample are often meaningless when one tries to understand the intricate dynamics of a complex system . . . the central tendency observed in a group may not be true of any particular person in the participant sample. yet the most prestigious research methodology in the social sciences – quantitative research – is almost entirely based on group averages and thus irons out idiosyncratic details that are at the heart of understanding development in dynamic systems. (2012, p. 4) rather than focusing on correlations between motivational factors, a complexity approach requires us to focus on tendencies, patterns and contingencies (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). the researcher looking to research motivation in complexity terms is at risk of being caught in something of a catch-22 situation. should she isolate the object of research carefully, theoretically and operationally, and conduct systematic observation of the phenomenon, she risks being accused of conducting research in a reductionist vein; if she tries to take a holistic view of the phenomena, she is likely to be accused of being vague and unsystematic as judged by accepted convenjulian pigott 354 tions within quantitative modes of inquiry. this perhaps goes some way to explaining the paucity of convincing research using a complexity approach. in the following section i introduce two sets of guidelines that have been published with the intention of helping researchers navigate this unexplored territory. complexity thought modeling larsen-freeman and cameron’s (2008) 16-step complexity thought modeling (ctm) procedure is designed to offer a systematic guide to conducting dynamic description (describing a phenomenon in complexity terms). it involves identifying the components of the system and their associated timescales, levels of social and human organization, and describing the relations between components and how the system changes over time in terms of emergence and self-organization. the aim is to make as simple a model as possible to help the researcher to understand the situation, or the extent to which it can be applied to other situations. in a recent paper (pigott, 2013), i used ctm to investigate the motivation of four university english learners. the analysis suggested that there was certainly some utility to viewing motivation in complexity terms. in line with a complex systems view, i found that: an individual’s motivation can only be understood as something grounded in context. aspects of motivation appear to operate over multiple timescales, including those dwarfing the ones we generally associate with the classroom (task, lesson, curriculum, etc.). perturbations to the motivational “system” often play a disproportionate role in affecting motivation. while i certainly came nowhere near modeling the motivation of the participants, i found the procedure useful as a conceptual toolkit. my own experience, therefore, supports mercer’s (2012) conclusion that the key contribution of complexity theory may lie in its potential as an alternative way of thinking. this need not be considered disappointing. mason (2008) reminds us that: . . . nobody in the social sciences has been able to describe, let alone predict, what degree of mass is sufficient to be critical, when a phase transition will occur, what will be the characteristics – described in more than just general terms – of the emergent phenomena. these would be useful things to know, but even to ask after them is in some ways to misunderstand complexity. (p. 16) a call for a multifaceted approach to language learning motivation research: combining . . . 355 more research utilizing ctm is eagerly awaited. it will be interesting to see whether it can be used as designed – as an analytic procedure rather than simply a conceptual toolkit. retrodictive qualitative modeling dörnyei (2012) suggests three ways to research motivation in complexity terms: (a) focusing on strong attractor-governed phenomena using traditional methods; (b) focusing on identifying typical attractor conglomerates; and (c) focusing on identifying and analyzing typical dynamic outcome patterns. the first approach is – as i understand it – a way of conducting conventional quantitative research with the understanding that it is only feasible as a consequence of complex systems’ tendency to exhibit states of stability (so-called attractor states). the second approach – again, as i understand it – is a more tightly prescribed form of ctm (see above). as an example of his own thought modeling, dörnyei (2009a) argues that concepts such as interest and motivation can be viewed as emergent from the interaction of lower level phenomena of cognition, affect, and motivation, which are phenomenologically distinct, yet impossible to separate in anything but abstract theoretical terms. this unity of the combination of factors has, he argues, been aptly recognized in everyday speech by referring to it with a single word, interest. to my mind, an implication of dörnyei’s observation is that there may be a case for exploring folk understandings (see seargeant, 2012) of motivation, that is, those expressed in everyday speech. this would provide a welcome contrast to the research in which the theorizing and conceptualizing is left solely to the expert researcher. dörnyei’s third suggestion, and the one to which he devotes most of his attention in a recent paper on complexity approaches (2012) is called retrodictive4 qualitative modeling (rqm). it is a procedure designed to clarify the way that “complex systems display a few well-recognizable outcomes or behavioral patterns rather than the unlimited variation that we could, in theory, anticipate in an erratic system” (pp. 5-6). dörnyei gives the example of unpublished research being undertaken as part of the doctorate studies of one of his students in which salient student types were identified, and students typical of these established prototypes found. the final, key, stage of the research, in which the most salient system components and the signature dynamics (i.e., typical patterns of change) of each system are described, has yet to be completed at the time of writing. while ctm can perhaps be seen as intimidatingly ambitious in scope, rqm appears to be more accessible. it remains, however, a tentative suggestion rather than an established procedure, and some of the procedural examples dörnyei 4 as opposed to predictive. julian pigott 356 gives may raise eyebrows among qualitative researchers: guiding group interview participants toward certain representations of students would typically be considered a no-no in a qualitative interview (the job of establishing themes would typically belong to the researcher postinterview); detecting and defining “higherorder patterns that are systematic within and across certain classes of complex systems [emphasis added]” (p. 10) appears similar to the aim of conventional quantitative research; and the aim of generating abstraction “without reducing those systems to simplistic representations [emphasis added]” (p. 10) is problematic, since abstraction is a form of simplification. dörnyei (2012) claims that “the ultimate goal of any research – whether qualitative or quantitative – is to go beyond a merely descriptive analysis of the particular research sample . . . and offer results that have more general relevance” (p. 9). yet complexity theory is, according to some, primarily a descriptive theory (morrison, 2008), and, in the qualitative realm, the value of research may take the form of usefulness, understanding, trustworthiness, resonance, plausibility, and authenticity, through means such as contextualization and the presentation of salient narratives (sikes, 2010). interim conclusion: the need for supplementary perspectives “the standards of clarity that we manage to impose in our well-lit scientific workplaces are designed to suit the preselected problems that we take in there with us, not the larger tangles from which those problems were abstracted” (midgely, 2011, p. 194). it appears that complexity researchers will have to seek a philosophical basis to their work if they are to negotiate the relationship between the selected problem and midgely’s larger tangle. as morrison (2008) notes with reference to the relevance of the theory to education: complexity theory alone cannot provide a sufficient account of education, as education is a moral enterprise requiring moral debate and moral choices. complexity theory does not rule out discussions of good or bad, desirable and undesirable; it simply regards them as irrelevant. (p. 29) he also states that “its comments on autocatalysis and self-organization fit poorly to systems of schooling whose hidden curricula . . . comprise obedience, compliance, passivity and conformity, unequal power, delay, denial, rules, rituals and routines” (p. 33). one cannot help thinking that the “strong attractor” is a rather impoverished metaphor for power and the interpersonal, political and ideological connotations that it holds. how, then, can a complexity theory approach be complemented? presumably with paradigms which have something to say about ethics and power. i will introduce two such paradigms shortly. first, an interlude. a call for a multifaceted approach to language learning motivation research: combining . . . 357 my own paradigm shift at this juncture, i would like to present an anecdotal account of my own shift from a statistical, to a more humanistic understanding of motivation. i do this in order to give some narrative support to the technical arguments i have made in preceding sections. my ma dissertation (pigott, 2009) was a by-the-book study in which i designed a questionnaire to measure various aspects of motivation, processed the data, and wrote up the results. upon its completion i began to feel that the value in having completed this study did not lie in the ostensible results, but the opportunity to get to know my students better, and to be compelled to reflect carefully about motivation-related issues and the epistemological foundations of my research. at around this time i married, had children, and realized that my long-term future lay in teaching english in japan. i was making an effort to improve my japanese and gain more knowledge of japan, her culture, and her people. i also began to question the conventional ideology of the english teaching industry – both the test-based lessons on the japanese side, and the postcolonial attitudes of the native-speaker side (phillipson, 1992). i felt that i stood on more solid ground in wishing my students well in their lives in general rather than trying, idealistically, to motivate (or manipulate) them into liking english, given the complicated political and ideological grounds underlying english in japan (seargeant, 2009, 2012). i began to find technical accounts of motivation (i.e., those expressed mathematically, through jargon, or through unnecessarily abstract concepts) as pointlessly abstract, and removed from my own experience of motivation as a phenomenological experience. it was as though the motivation written about in journals, while based on reality, was at the same time removed from it – extracted, filtered, pounded, diluted, standardized, roasted, and shipped out to the journals for appropriate packaging (so to speak). it is therefore no surprise that i began to find qualitative, narrative approaches to research more appealing (bolster, 2009; kubanyiova, 2009; lamb, 2009; ushioda, 2001). in summary, my experience of motivation and what it means to motivate was, and continues to be a human experience. if i were a poet i might more effectively express the essence in poetry; if i were a writer, i might explain it through more effective use of metaphor. if i were able to do either, the results would, i feel, be more effective in communicating the essence of motivation than the ritualized prose of the academic. it is my contention that thinking, talking and theorizing motivation are best done, at least some of the time, in human terms. it is to a more detailed description of how this may be done while retaining empirical rigor to which i now turn. julian pigott 358 humanistic motivation theory a humanistic view of motivation is most commonly associated with the work of abraham maslow. his hierarchy of needs (1943) was based on clinical observation as well as influences as diverse as james, dewey, wertheimer, goldstein, freud and adler. he called this fusion or synthesis a general-dynamic theory. according to maslow, human motivation can be organized hierarchically. after one’s “lower” physiological needs are satisfied, one inevitably feels the need for self-actualization (a term borrowed from kurt goldstein): . . . the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, the tendency . . . to become actualized in what [one] is potentially. this tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming . . . a musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. what a man can be, he must be. (p. 383) this special variety of motivation, unique to humans, “asserts itself in the study of people who are attempting to be creative and maximize their capabilities and potential” (shunk, pintrich, & meece, 2007, p. 35). it is the motivation sine qua non, the one which subsumes all other higher forms of motivation. if the language classroom is restricting students’ freedom to exercise this form of motivation, we should ask why. varieties of this important quality of motivation manifest themselves in diverse writings on education. rogers (1961), for example, states that the ultimate goal of the educational process was to achieve a person-centered way of being: . . . something into which one grows. it is a set of values, not easy to achieve, that places emphasis on the dignity of the individual, the importance of personal choice, the significance of responsibility, the joy of creativity. it is a philosophy, built upon a foundation of the democratic way that empowers each individual. (rogers & freiberg, 1994, p. 123) to theorise l2 motivation in humanistic terms we must take it out of isolation as an abstract construct and examine its place within education and life. a humanistic interpretation of motivation can also supply researchers/practitioners with a moral compass to guide the practical application of motivation theory. it is likely to necessitate critical evaluation of the commonplace idea that it is the teacher’s ethical duty to motivate their students to learn, or want to learn, english. it also leads us to pay more attention to the distinction between motivation and manipulation. this leads us naturally to a critical perspective on motivation. a call for a multifaceted approach to language learning motivation research: combining . . . 359 a critical perspective on motivation and the l2 motivation field a critical perspective within applied linguistics entails questioning its depiction as an impartial discipline that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language learning issues, in so doing enriching education. with regards to l2 motivation, it may lead us to consider whether the practical ends to which l2 motivation theory is employed tend not to be driven principally by the best intentions of students but by the epistemological and political formation of english education as a panacea which promotes compulsory english education in efl contexts (seargeant, 2009, 2012). it also compels us to ask whether motivational strategies offer the teacher, the school, and the society a value-neutral repository of techniques of psychological and social manipulation to be utilized towards the achievement of “higher” pedagogical, political, or ideological aims. there is a need to see how motivation fits in with education as a political site of struggle where “knowledge is often constructed by and reinforces a dominant discourse or ideology which privileges some and oppresses others” (kubota, 1998, p. 303). we might also ask ourselves why, for example, writers on motivation do not oppose forcing students sick and tired of english into the classroom on the grounds that it is unethical (or at least counterproductive), or why their support for student autonomy does not extend to the autonomy to say “no” to english. the extent to which motivation theory and practice should be at the service of those in charge, or whether it should have its own internal moral compass is also an issue worthy of critical attention. a critical perspective might also ask whether iconoclastic ideas are in danger of being kept at bay in favor of “research by numbers” in which the philosophical, ethical, and ideological tenets upon which principled education ought to be based are side-lined (of course this is not unique to the motivation field). we might also turn an eye to the motivator’s motivation, whether this is the motivator in the classroom, or the academic motivator. what is our justification for acting to motivate our students to learn english? to what extent do we assume we know what is best for students, or trundle along – just doing our jobs – without sparing much thought for such questions? do we have principles upon which we base our actions as motivators? dörnyei (2009b), for example, appears to view motivating students as doing god’s work: “i do not believe that it is accidental that the portentous spread of english coincides with the contemporary christian revival. and neither am i surprised, therefore, that teaching english and teaching about jesus appear to fit so comfortably together” (p. 165). whether or not we share dörnyei’s religious conviction, the way in which quantitative researchers in general separate their real selves from their researcher identities is problematic from a critical perspective, julian pigott 360 which involves asking not just what is happening, but why, and for the purposes of whom. motivating and morality are separable only in theory. combining complexity, humanistic and critical perspectives humanistic and complexity perspectives share much in common. like a complexity perspective, it is a humanistic principle that the study of humans should be holistic (shunk et al., 2007), and that humans supersede the sum of their parts. the tenets of maslow’s (1945) propositions governing valid theorization on motivation could feasibly come from the contemporary complexity literature: the integrated wholeness of the organism must be one of the foundation stones of motivation theory. . . . any motivated behaviour, either preparatory or consummatory, must be understood to be a channel through which many basic needs may be simultaneously expressed or satisfied. typically an act has more than one motivation. (maslow, 1945, pp. 1-2) where the theories diverge is in terms of research focus and the underlying reasons for undertaking it in the first place. unlike a complexity approach, the choice of what to study within a humanistic/critical approach is determined by the problem’s importance to the people most intimately connected to the phenomena; it is therefore preferable “to study an important problem with a less-refined methodology than a trivial problem with a complex methodology” (shunk et al., 2007, p. 35). complexity and humanistic/critical approaches also differ in the potential resources they can draw on. complexity theory is a self-contained theory, mathematical in the physical sciences, by necessity metaphorical in the social sciences. by contrast, humanistic/critical perspectives draw on the whole gamut of human experience. the humanities have, throughout history, been the main arena for a discussion of the human condition, and are essential in understanding how language learners are acted upon by, and in turn shape institutions, society and culture. perhaps a multifaceted approach to l2 motivation could take the following form. first, an analysis is performed in complexity terms. next, the researcher asks, from a humanistic standpoint, how the motivation relates to a path to selfactualization. if, the motivation is instead aligned with the selfish interests of others, or the amoral runnings of a bureaucracy, a consequent critical perspective will prove especially revealing. the researcher can ask who holds power over the learner’s motivation, what we can say about this power, whether it is openly wielded and submitted to, or whether it is subtly subversive. the researcher can then ask how such findings relate to convention and folk-understanding. starting with a complexity view – or even with a reductionist view, research could travel through a call for a multifaceted approach to language learning motivation research: combining . . . 361 these three or four stages from a reductionist to holistic understanding, the product being a commentary on motivation as a multifaceted, socially, culturally and historically contextualized concept/phenomenon (see figure 1). figure 1 a multifaceted approach to l2 motivation research i am in no way suggesting that this would provide an optimum way of researching motivation, but i am confident that the process would be rewarding. incidentally there is no reason why the resulting commentary might not make use of more expressive language than usual. ziman (as cited in gaddis, 2002) reminds us that insights in the physical sciences often arise from realizations such as “the random configuration of the long chain of atoms in a polymer module is ‘like’ the motion of a drunkard across a village green” (p. 2); in the humanistic field, rogers (1961) writes (in language reminiscent of complexity terminology) that a person is “a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits” (p. 122). metaphor can be used to crystalize meaning rather than obfuscate it. likewise, principled use of narrative is not necessarily inferior to numbers simply because it is nonnumerical (a circular argument to start with). as gaddis (2002) wryly observes on a craft which is conducted through narrative, “historians are . . . in much less demand than social scientists when it comes to makjulian pigott 362 ing recommendations for future policy. we have the consolation in contrast to them, though, of more often getting things right” (p. 58). theory, mcdonough (2002) suggests, must meet the criterion test of applicability, “an ability to relate to real situations” (p. 24). a multifaceted approach would offer an alternative to generalizable predictions about the connection between learning behavior, motivation and pedagogical intervention (ushioda, 2012), seeing it instead in terms of the need for flexibility, engagement and understanding – what prabhu (1990) refers to as the teacher’s sense of plausibility. it is likely to challenge convention while at the same time accepting that we teach and learn in contexts that are inherently contradictory and in which meaning, right and wrong are likely to depend, at least to a degree, on one’s standpoint. in closing, it is worth mentioning that there are more than the three paradigms which hold potential in understanding and theorizing motivation. ushioda (2009), for example, suggests the as yet undiscovered potential of vygotskian sociocultural theory (lantolf & thorne, 2006), ecological perspectives (van lier, 2004), theories of situated learning and communities of practice (toohey, 2000), and sociocognitive approaches (atkinson, 2002). diversity appears to be key in understanding such a diverse phenomenon as motivation. conclusion more than a decade ago, dörnyei (2001) wrote (playing devil’s advocate) that “there is no such thing as ‘motivation.’ . . . [it is] an abstract, hypothetical concept that we use to explain why people think and behave as they do [emphasis original]” (p. 1). but of course, motivation is more than a hypothetical concept: it is a phenomenological experience. the idea that it is only a theoretical construct could only be a reductionist projection onto reality. as maslow (1966) put it, “i suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail” (p. 15). in complexity theory we have a new-fangled tool that nobody really understands how to use yet. the point is not whether motivation can be seen as a complex system (quite clearly it can), but how it can best be utilized. this involves recognizing its limitations as well as its advantages. while it is not much of a guide to ethical motivation theory and practice, complexity theory might, for example, act as a bridge between the quantitative and qualitative research communities, and it also supplies an internally consistent conceptual framework for the description of motivation. a humanistic view, on the other hand, reminds us that there is a certain type of motivation which deserves to be cherished and nurtured – what hesse (2000) described as a striving towards one’s own destiny, maslow (1943) as self-actualization, and rogers (1961) as self-discovered or self-appropriated learna call for a multifaceted approach to language learning motivation research: combining . . . 363 ing. finally, a critical perspective might encourage us to question what contemporary compulsory english education is doing to uphold learners’ rights to exercise their higher types of motivation, and how these rights are supported or suppressed by institutional, political or ideological influences. complexity theory, humanistic principles, and a critical perspective offer three lenses through which to observe motivation. each has its own particular coloration, imperfections, and blind spots. together, they offer a useful combination of conceptual, ethical, and antidogmatic lenses through which to view motivation anew. julian pigott 364 references allport, g. w. 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(2004). the ecology and semiotics of language learning: a sociocultural perspective. massachusetts, ma: kluwer academic publishers. 89 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (1). 2016. 89-110 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.1.5 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the effectiveness of visual input enhancement on the noticing and l2 development of the spanish past tense shawn loewen michigan state university, east lansing, usa loewens@msu.edu solène inceoglu rochester institute of technology, rochester, usa inceoglu.solene@gmail.com abstract textual manipulation is a common pedagogic tool used to emphasize specific features of a second language (l2) text, thereby facilitating noticing and, ideally, second language development. visual input enhancement has been used to investigate the effects of highlighting specific grammatical structures in a text. the current study uses a quasi-experimental design to determine the extent to which textual manipulation increase (a) learners’ perception of targeted forms and (b) their knowledge of the forms. input enhancement was used to highlight the spanish preterit and imperfect verb forms and an eye tracker measured the frequency and duration of participants’ fixation on the targeted items. in addition, pretests and posttests of the spanish past tense provided information about participants’ knowledge of the targeted forms. results indicate that learners were aware of the highlighted grammatical forms in the text; however, there was no difference in the amount of attention between the enhanced and unenhanced groups. in addition, both groups improved in their knowledge of the l2 forms; however, again, there was no differential improvement between the two groups. keywords: input enhancement; eye tracking; attention; l2 reading; l2 spanish shawn loewen, solène inceoglu 90 1. introduction multiple pedagogic techniques are used in focus on form instruction, in which attention is drawn briefly to linguistic items while learners are engaged in larger, meaning-focused activities (doughty & williams, 1998; ellis, 2001; loewen, 2011; long, 1991, 1996; long & robinson, 1998; williams, 2005). as such, focus on form is argued to combine necessary components for second language (l2) learning, including input and learners’ psychological processes, such as attention (long, 1996). some focus on form techniques, such as metalinguistic corrective feedback (e.g., ellis, basturkmen & loewen, 2006) and dictogloss (e.g., swain & lapkin, 1998), are relatively explicit in how they draw attention to form. other techniques such as recasts (e.g., loewen & philp, 2006; nicholas, lightbown & spada, 2001) and input flood (e.g., loewen, erlam & ellis, 2009) are less explicit. indeed, one of the debates regarding focus on form concerns the optimal level of explicitness (loewen, 2011; norris & ortega, 2000, among others). regardless of the outcome of such debates, it is generally agreed that the visual manipulation of written input is a relatively implicit type of focus on form. however, rather than theorizing about the level of explicitness of a focus on form technique, it is preferable to explore the issue empirically by employing various measures of attention, noticing, and/or awareness. furthermore, it is important to investigate the effects of such techniques on l2 development. 2. the case for text manipulation given the importance of attention and awareness for second language acquisition, studies within the focus on form framework have explored different ways of drawing learners’ attention to l2 linguistic forms, with methods varying in their degree of explicitness. one implicit focus on form technique is input enhancement which involves manipulating the input, either oral or written, in subtle ways. visual input enhancement is carried out through modifying the physical appearance of specific elements within a text with typographical cues such as bolding, underlining, capitalizing, italicizing, coloring, using different fonts, and different sizes, or a combination of these features (lee & huang, 2008; sharwood smith, 1993; simard, 2008). additionally, it should be noted that while it is possible to enhance both grammatical and lexical structures in a text, it is grammatical features that have received the majority of attention in sla studies of visual input enhancement (lee & huang, 2008). textual modifications have the potential to enhance the saliency of the targeted linguistic forms, which may increase the likelihood of learners attending to the form, which in turn may result in l2 development. however, as sharwood smith (1991) noted “whether the effectiveness of visual input enhancement on the noticing and l2 development of the spanish. . . 91 the enhanced input will ultimately trigger the relevant mental representation is . . . an empirical question” (p. 120). a number of studies have been conducted on the effects of visual input enhancement (cf. han, park, & combs, 2008 and lee & huang, 2008 for reviews), focusing on a wide range of constructs such as comprehension, recall, noticing, intake, production, and learning. overall, results concerning the benefits of input enhancement have been inconclusive, with some studies finding positive effects, others finding negative effects, and yet others finding no effect at all. however, lee and huang’s (2008) meta-analysis of 16 input enhancement studies found only a small effect for l2 learning when comparing input enhancement with input flood, suggesting that enhancing linguistic items may be of minimal benefit when the text is already seeded with numerous exemplars of the target structure. nevertheless, a brief review of the findings of individual studies is necessary to further explore the effects of input enhancement. 3. positive effects of textual enhancement various studies have found positive effects of input enhancement on constructs such as recall (jourdenais, ota, stauffer, boyson, & doughty, 1995; lee, 2007), noticing (izumi, 2002; jourdenais et al., 1995; winke, 2013), production (shook, 1994, white, 1996), and learning (lee, 2007; shook, 1994; white, 1996, 1998). for instance, jourdenais et al. (1995) examined the effect of reading a visually enhanced text on second semester spanish l2 learners’ noticing of the spanish preterit and imperfect verb forms. their data consisted of think-aloud protocols produced while participants were writing a picture-based narrative after the reading task. as for their results, although their sample size was small (n =14), the authors noted that participants in the enhanced group produced more preterit and imperfect forms than the other group and that, therefore, input enhancement “promotes noticing of target l2 form and has an effect on learners’ subsequent output” (jourdenais et al., 1995, p. 208). in another study, shook (1994) investigated the effect of input enhancement on l2 spanish learners’ intake of the present perfect and the relative pronouns using two written production tasks and two written recognition tasks (one task focusing on the present perfect and the other on the relative pronouns). the participants were divided into three conditions, unenhanced, enhanced, and enhanced with the explicit instruction focusing on the targeted forms. shook’s results suggested that the two groups that were exposed to input enhancement performed significantly better than the control group but that there were no differences between the two enhanced groups. shawn loewen, solène inceoglu 92 4. negative effects of textual enhancement to date, only two published studies have shown negative effects of textual enhancement on comprehension. under the assumption that learners may have difficulty focusing on linguistic form as well as meaning (cf. vanpatten, 1990), these studies compared input enhancement using texts that contained either familiar or unfamiliar content for the learners. overstreet (1998) investigated the issue of text content familiarity in relation to learners’ knowledge and use of spanish preterit and imperfect forms. the participants were 50 adult english speakers in a third semester spanish class, who were divided into four groups of a combination of [+/-] enhancement and [+/-] text familiarity. the two texts were a spanish version of “little red riding hood” (familiar topic) and a condensed version of a spanish short story (unfamiliar topic). for the textual enhancement, overstreet used a larger font size and underlining for both preterit and imperfect verbs; however, the preterit verbs were also shadowed while the imperfect ones were bolded. the assessment comprised circle-the-verb pretest/posttest tasks, a written narration task and a comprehension quiz. no main effects of enhancement or text familiarity were found for l2 development, but the results suggested that textual enhancement had a negative impact on comprehension. overstreet concluded that learners could not focus their attentional resources on both content and form at the same time and that textual enhancement directed their attention away from comprehension. in another study, lee (2007) examined the effects of textual enhancement and content familiarity on learners’ attention to forms. the results indicated that there were significant differences between the enhancement and the baseline conditions but that topic familiarity had a negligible effect. lee’s interpretation was that textual enhancement aided learning of the target forms but had an unfavorable effect on comprehension. conversely, topic familiarity aided comprehension but was ineffective in terms of learning of the passive form. 5. no effect of textual enhancement finally, a number of studies have found no effect of textual enhancement on intake (leow, 1997b, 2001; leow, egi, nuevo, & tsai, 2003; overstreet, 1998), acquisition (izumi, 2002; winke, 2013; wong, 2000, 2003), noticing (leow, 2001) or comprehension (alanen, 1995; jourdenais, 1998; leow, 1997b, 2001; leow et al., 2003; winke, 2013; wong, 2000, 2003). for instance, leow (1997b) investigated the effects of textual enhancement and text length on l2 learners’ comprehension and intake of the spanish formal imperative. he found a main effect for text length on comprehension but no significant differences in comprehension and intake between the enhanced and unenhanced groups. the effectiveness of visual input enhancement on the noticing and l2 development of the spanish. . . 93 in an effort to measure noticing of enhanced forms, some studies have used concurrent (e.g., leow, 2001) or subsequent (jourdenais et al., 1995) thinkaloud methods, in which participants verbalized their thoughts either online (i.e., during the reading task) or off-line (i.e., after the reading task). leow’s (2001) results revealed that the amounts of reported noticing were statistically similar for the participants who read an enhanced text and those who read an unenhanced version, suggesting that enhanced input did not significantly promote comments on targeted forms compared to unenhanced input. moreover, there were also no significant benefits of written input enhancement for either the readers’ comprehension or the readers’ intake. interestingly, a qualitative analysis revealed that only two participants were aware of the grammatical targeted forms at the level of understanding, making explicit reflective metalinguistic references to those forms. the results of a study on the effects of textual enhancement on the acquisition of spanish preterit and imperfect led jourdenais (1998) to suggest that input enhancement’s lack of effectiveness for acquisition may be due to the complexity of the targeted forms, the lack of saliency of the enhancement, and the learners’ stages of aspectual development. finally, a recent study by winke (2013) further investigated the effects of textual enhancement on grammar learning and comprehension. she examined how input enhancement (coloring and underlining) affected 55 intermediate esl learners’ use of the passive construction after reading a text flooded with the passive voice. half of the participants read the text with input enhancement and the second half served as controls. the results showed that the participants in the enhancement group looked longer at the passive forms but did not improve more on a form correction posttest than the control group did. in fact, neither group showed significant improvement from pretest to posttest, indicating that although textual enhancement may attract attention, it might not be sufficient for immediate acquisition to take place. one other possible explanation given by winke to account for the lack of learning is that the participants might not have been developmentally ready to learn the passive construction. finally, in line with previous research (e.g., leow, 1997b, 2001, but see overstreet, 1998 for exception), winke’s data revealed that textual enhancement did not affect comprehension, as measured by a free-recall test. 6. noticing and attention although the perception of external stimuli is argued to be a necessary precursor for l2 learning, the exact characteristics of noticing, attention and awareness in l2 learning remain controversial (godfroid, boers, & housen, 2013; leow, 1997a, shawn loewen, solène inceoglu 94 2000, 2001; robinson, 1995, 2003; schmidt, 1990, 2001; simard & wong, 2001; tomlin & villa, 1994; wong, 2001, among others). in its original form, schmidt’s (1990) noticing hypothesis claims that learners must consciously notice forms in the input for acquisition to take place. it is argued, however, that the term noticing conflates two different constructs, namely attention and awareness. robinson (1995, 2003) describes attention as detection plus rehearsal in working memory. the implication of this definition is that attention is a continuous construct that can be maintained for various amounts of time, that is to say, people can pay more or less attention to stimuli (godfroid et al., 2013). awareness, on the other hand, involves conscious recognition of the stimuli that has been attended to; consequently, awareness can be viewed as a dichotomous construct according to which people either are or are not aware of the stimuli. a variety of measures have been used in sla research to measure schmidt’s construct of noticing, although most have investigated it at the level of awareness. for example, concurrent or retrospective verbal reports involve individuals voicing their thoughts either while or after they conduct an activity. however, there is some concern about the reactivity of concurrent measures and the veridicality of retrospective measures (bowles, 2010). in addition, verbal reports generally measure awareness rather than attention due to need for participants to comment on their thought processes (godfroid et al., 2013). a method of measuring attention that is gaining popularity in sla is eye tracking, which involves capturing participants’ eye movements as they read a text or look at an object (cf. frenck-mestre, 2005 for an overview). eye-tracking assumes a mind-eye link in which it is argued that the object that holds the eye’s gaze is being cognitively attended to (frazier & rayner, 1982; godfroid et al., 2013; leow, grey, marijuan & moorman, 2014; rayner, 1998). therefore, for example, the longer individuals look at a word in a text, the more attention they are paying to that word. this attention, then, can potentially facilitate the acquisition of new linguistic items or the restructuring of existing knowledge. for example, godfroid et al. (2013) investigated the relationship between l2 learners’ fixation duration on pseudowords in a text and subsequent vocabulary recognition. results indicated that learners spent more time looking at pseudowords than their matched real-word counterparts, a phenomenon that godfroid et al. equated with increased learner attention to those pseudowords. furthermore, increased reading time was associated with better posttreatment vocabulary recall, underscoring the positive effects of increased attention on l2 learning. one added benefit of eye tracking as a method for investigating attention is that it does not interfere with the reading process by taxing the learner with additional activities (such as thinking aloud), and it does not rely on posttask measures which do not measure attentional focus in real time (leow et al., 2014). the effectiveness of visual input enhancement on the noticing and l2 development of the spanish. . . 95 building on previous research of focus on form and noticing, the current study addresses the following research questions (rq), with rq 1 addressing attention and rq 2 addressing awareness: 1. do participants reading a text with visually enhanced preterit and imperfect spanish verbs look longer at those verbs than do learners reading an unenhanced version of the text? 2. do learners self-report greater levels of awareness of the target structure after reading a visually enhanced text than do learners reading an unenhanced version of the text? 3. does visual input enhancement affect learners’ subsequent accurate use of the targeted structures in cloze tests and spontaneous oral production? 7. method 7.1. participants a total of 30 college-level students (26 females and 5 males) enrolled in secondsemester spanish courses at a large midwestern university participated in the experiment. they were all native speakers of american english, ranging from 18 to 25 years old (m = 19.7). in addition, 16 native spanish speakers participated in the study and served as controls. of the 30 l2 learners, 15 were randomly assigned to the experimental group (enhanced) and 15 to the comparison group (unenhanced). similarly, 8 native speakers were exposed to an enhanced text and eight read the same text without textual enhancement. 7.2. targeted linguistic forms the targeted grammatical structure for this study, the spanish preterit and imperfect past tense, was chosen for several reasons. from a general sla point of view, these forms have received considerable attention from researchers and educators due to the difficulty they can pose for learners of spanish with an l1 that does not mark the past tense and aspect simultaneously (montrul & salaberry, 2003). spanish, as other romance languages, has two forms, preterit and imperfect, which correspond to the aspectual distinction of perfective versus imperfective. all verbs possess “lexical aspect,” where aspect is inherent in the meaning of the verb and its telicity (vendler, 1967); in contrast, “grammatical aspect” is marked by inflectional morphology (montrul, 2004). while the preterit, which is bolded in the example in (1), is typically used with telic verbs (representing events with an endpoint, such as verbs of accomplishment and shawn loewen, solène inceoglu 96 achievement), the imperfect, which is underlined in (1), is more often associated with atelic verbs (representing activities and states) (ayoun & salaberry, 2005). (1) un cazador que pasaba cerca escuchó los gritos de caperucita. ‘a hunter, who was passing by, heard little red riding hood’s screams.’ a more specific motivation for the use of the spanish imperfect and preterit was that these forms had previously been used in other textual enhancement studies (jourdenais, 1998; jourdenais et al., 1995; overstreet, 1998), allowing a partial replication of these studies. (see porte, 2012 for a discussion of the importance of replication in sla.) finally, at the time of the experiment, namely towards the end of their second semester of spanish, learners had been exposed to the forms and had received explicit information about them (spanish language program coordinator, personal communication). in the course textbook, aventuras (donley, benacides, & blanco, 2006), the preterit tense is presented in chapters 6-9 and 11; the imperfect tense is presented in chapters 10 and 11. there are a total of 16 chapters. finally, an additional rationale for using the preterit/imperfect tenses was that it is a developmental structure which could show room for improvement, especially for lower proficiency learners. choosing a structure totally novel to the learners might have prevented them from making sense of the reading. 7.3. instruments in addition to a general language background questionnaire, the following instruments were used: a reading task, a cloze test, an oral production task, and an exit questionnaire. 7.3.1. reading task the treatment task consisted of a lexically slightly simplified version of overstreet’s (1998) text entitled „caperucita roja,” a spanish version of „little red riding hood” (both the spanish text and its english equivalent are included in appendix a). this text had the advantage of having been used in previous studies, allowing for replication; in addition, students’ knowledge of this common fairy tale was hypothesized to facilitate comprehension (lee, 2007) although learners might not necessarily have used this advantage to reallocate attentional resources to linguistic forms (leeser, 2004; vanpatten, 1990). the text contained 211 words and a total of 28 past tense forms, 18 preterit and 10 imperfect. in general, reading passages in visually enhanced input studies are presented as the effectiveness of visual input enhancement on the noticing and l2 development of the spanish. . . 97 whole texts; however, in order for the eye tracker to provide accurate information about learners’ gaze at the word level, it was necessary to divide the text into three sections, with an average of 69 words per section. the sections were presented consecutively on a 20-inch computer screen, with the participants using a game controller to advance to the next section of the text. the words in the text appeared in black, calibri, size 24 font against a light blue background. the lines of the text were double-spaced. in the enhanced version, all imperfect verbs were highlighted in red and all preterit in green. even though simard (2008) found significant effects for a combination of highlighting techniques, no other enhancements were used in this study because any difference in the size of the enhanced items would create confounding differences in the eye tracking data (dussias, 2010). five glossed words, containing the spanish form and the english translation, appeared in a word bank at the bottom of each slide. although the same glosses were included on all three slides, the target words did not necessarily appear in each slide, as seen in appendix a. the glossed words appeared in both the enhanced and unenhanced conditions, meaning that all participants experienced the same lexical input. 7.3.2. cloze test to assess participants’ knowledge of the past tense forms, a modified version of overstreet’s (1998) cloze test was designed, which is included in appendix b. in the original version, learners were provided both the preterit and imperfect form of each verb and were asked to circle the correct form. in the current test, learners were provided with the infinitive form of the verb and were asked to write down the correct form. a total of 18 verbs (9 preterit and 9 imperfect) were used in each test. two versions of the test were used. both tests contained the same number of targeted verbs; however, one version was slightly longer than the other (166 versus 145 words). to rate the tests, the responses of the 16 spanish native speakers were used as the answer key. participants were given one point for each correct verb, and half a point for responses with the correct tense but errors in the person and number of the verb. a total of 18 points was possible to be scored. the reliability scores for the cloze tests using cronbach’s alpha were α = .819 for pretest a, α = .924 for posttest a, α = .891 for pretest b, and α = .731 for posttest b. 7.3.3. oral production test a series of six picture cards depicting various scenes from „little red riding hood” was used to elicit an oral narrative from the participants. the first card shawn loewen, solène inceoglu 98 contained the phrase había una vez una chica que se llamaba caperucita roja ‘once upon a time, there was a girl called little red riding hood’ in order to establish an obligatory past tense context. the same six pictures were used for the pretest and posttest, and the narrations were video-recorded for subsequent analysis. for the grammatical structure, a target-like use analysis (pica, 1983) was conducted to obtain the percentage of past tense verbs used correctly. on average, there were fifteen obligatory occasions to use past tense forms during the narration 7.3.4. exit questionnaire because of the suitability of verbal reports as a measure of awareness (godfroid et al., 2013), an exit questionnaire was used to investigate learners’ awareness of the targeted forms. two similar questionnaires were developed. the enhanced group was asked if they noticed that some words were highlighted, and if so, what the highlighted forms were. they were also asked to self-report whether they had paid more attention to the highlighted words while reading the text. the unenhanced group was asked if they noticed any recurring grammatical forms in the text. the learners’ responses were coded for their level of awareness of the target structure: · no awareness: the target structure was not identified or identified incorrectly (e.g., “they clarified definitions, particularly of those of main characters” or “subject first, then verb, then direct object or other action”), · partial awareness: the target structure was partially identified (e.g., “they were all conjugated verbs”), · full awareness: the target structure was fully identified (e.g., “they were all verbs conjugated in preterit and imperfect”). 7.4. procedures the researchers visited four spanish 102 classes during the middle of the semester to invite students to participate. students came individually to an eye tracking laboratory where they underwent the following activities in the following order: (a) language background questionnaire, (b) cloze pretest, (c) oral production pretest, (d) treatment reading passage, (e) cloze posttest, (f) oral production posttest, and (g) exit questionnaire. the entire procedure took approximately 30 to 45 minutes, with the text reading portion taking about 15 minutes. participants were paid ten us dollars for completing the study. the eye tracker used for the experiment was a sr research ltd. eyelink 1000 system. the participants sat approximately 60 centimeters from the screen with their head on a chinrest. after calibrating the eye tracker, the researcher the effectiveness of visual input enhancement on the noticing and l2 development of the spanish. . . 99 provided the following instructions: “now you will read the story of caperucita roja on the computer. please pay attention to see if there are any differences between the written text and the story you told [i.e., on the pretest]. don’t read the story aloud. take as much time as you need to read each slide.” in order to capture the focus of learners’ attention, the movements of the left eye were recorded for the whole duration of the experiment (godfroid et al., 2013; leow et al., 2014). then, the researchers extracted (a) the number of fixations for each targeted item, (b) the amount of time, in milliseconds, that participants spent looking at each targeted item, and (c) the duration of the first fixation. the average total time for each of the targeted verbs was calculated; however, only the overall average total times are reported. 7.5. analysis a series of t tests and mixed design anovas was conducted, with the test scores and eye tracking data serving as the dependent variables, and enhancement condition (enhanced versus unenhanced) and l1 status (native speaker of spanish versus learner of spanish) as the independent variables. in order to run parametric statistics, the assumptions of normal distribution and homogeneity of variance were investigated using kolmogorov-smirnov and levene’s tests, respectively. these assumptions were met in most instances. if an assumption was violated, an appropriate nonparametric test was conducted if available. 8. results the first research question investigated the effects of text manipulation on the length of reading time. table 1 shows that the l2 spanish readers in the enhanced condition had an average verb total time of 712 milliseconds, meaning that on average participants spent slightly over half a second looking at each verb. the l2 spanish readers in the unenhanced condition averaged 639 milliseconds per verb. in contrast, the l1 spanish readers averaged 375 and 282 milliseconds in the enhanced and unenhanced conditions, respectively. a one-way anova indicated statistical differences among the groups, f(3, 42) = 13.217, p < .001, partial eta squared = .48, and a bonferroni post hoc test revealed that the statistical differences were between the l1 and l2 spanish groups (p < .001). however, there were no statistical differences within each language group between the enhanced and unenhanced conditions. these results indicate that overall, the spanish l1 readers spent less time attending to the verbs than did the l2 readers, but the presence of highlighted verbs did not result in either language group reading for statistically significantly longer total times. shawn loewen, solène inceoglu 100 table 1 average total time (in ms) spanish l2 spanish l1 enhanced (n = 15) unenhanced (n = 15) enhanced (n = 8) unenhanced (n = 8) m sd m sd m sd m sd total verbs 712 544 639 459 375 320 282 179 the second question investigated learners’ self-reported awareness of the target structures. in the enhanced condition, all 15 participants reported being aware that there were visually enhanced items in the text. however, not all of them were able to identify the nature of the enhanced items. four participants (26.5%) did not report being aware that the past tense was the enhanced structure, 7 (47%) described partial awareness (e.g., commenting that the enhanced forms were all verbs), and 4 participants (26.5%) identified the enhanced structure correctly. in the unenhanced reading condition, participants were asked if they noticed any repeatedly used grammatical structures in the text. two of the participants (13%) said that they were not aware of any recurring grammatical structure. in contrast, nine participants (56%) indicated that they were aware of the targeted structure, while five (31%) reported other grammatical structures such as conjugated verbs. due to the categorical nature of the data and the slightly altered wording of the questions due to the enhanced and unenhanced conditions, no inferential statistics were computed on these data. nevertheless, more than half of the participants in the unenhanced group identified the target structure correctly, while only a quarter of those in the enhanced condition did so. to see if text enhancement affected learners’ subsequent ability to accurately mark the preterit and imperfect tenses, the results of the past tense cloze test, shown in table 2, were examined using a mixed design anova. the pretest scores show that the enhanced group’s scores were somewhat higher than the unenhanced group’s pretest scores; however, this difference was not statistically significant. both groups had higher posttest scores, with the enhanced group averaging 7 correct verbs out of 18, while the unenhanced group was slightly lower at an average of 6 correct answers. an anova revealed a significant main effect for test time, f(1, 28) = 5.790, p = .023, partial eta squared = .171, observed power = .642. however, the main effect for treatment condition was not significant, f(1,28) = 1.727, p = .245, partial eta squared = .058, observed power = .245. the interaction effect between treatment and test time was also nonsignificant, f(1, 28) = 1.566, p = .221, partial eta squared = .053, observed power = .227. thus, the anova results indicate that there were no overall differences between the two groups’ cloze test performance and that both groups improved statistically equally from the pretest to the posttest. the effectiveness of visual input enhancement on the noticing and l2 development of the spanish. . . 101 table 2 cloze test scores (max.: 18) enhanced (n = 15) unenhanced (n = 15) m sd m sd pretest 7.4 4.24 4.8 4.10 posttest 7.9 4.57 6.7 4.29 to see if reading the visually enhanced text affected learners’ subsequent accurate use of the past tense in spontaneous oral productions, the results of the oral narration pretest and posttest were examined using a mixed design anova. the pretest scores in table 3 show that the enhanced group’s scores were somewhat higher than the unenhanced pretest scores; however, this initial difference was not statistically significant. both groups had higher posttest scores, with the enhanced group using correct verb forms 31% of the time, while the unenhanced group was lower at an average of 17%. an anova revealed a significant main effect for test time, f(1, 28) = 5.669, p = .024, partial eta squared = .168, observed power = .633. however, the main effect for treatment condition was not significant, f(1,28) = 3.041, p = .092, partial eta squared = .098, observed power = .391. the interaction effect between treatment and test time was also nonsignificant, f(1, 28) = .885, p = .355, partial eta squared = .031, observed power = .149. thus, the anova results indicate that, again, there were no overall differences between the two groups, although both groups improved from the pretest to the posttest. table 3 oral production accuracy scores (percentage of target-like use) enhanced (n = 15) unenhanced (n = 15) m sd m sd pretest .20 .16 .13 .15 posttest .31 .24 .17 .19 9. discussion and conclusions to summarize the findings, the comparison of the enhanced and unenhanced groups show that enhancement did not induce learners to look at the verbs longer, nor did it result in greater gains on the cloze test or production task. furthermore, enhancement was not accompanied by higher levels of self-reported awareness of the targeted structure. indeed, more participants in the unenhanced condition were able to identify the target structures correctly. shawn loewen, solène inceoglu 102 the results of this study suggest several things. first, similar to overstreet’s (1998) results, the current study found no effect for input enhancement, suggesting that the effects of input enhancement may not be that different from input flood in terms of attention and l2 development, as suggested by han et al. (2008). the enhanced group did not look at the enhanced words longer, nor did they outperform the unenhanced group on the posttests. if, as researchers claim (e.g., godfroid et al., 2013; leow et al., 2014), eye tracking provides an effective measurement of attention, then the learners in this study did not pay more attention to the visually enhanced words. this lack of attention is at odds with the very purpose of input enhancement, which is to draw learners’ attention to specific linguistic targets. the current study’s results are similar to leow’s (2001) study, in which he did not find differences in noticing levels between the enhanced and unenhanced groups. a possible explanation to account for the lack of attention to the enhanced forms is that the participants in our study were not explicitly told to focus on these forms. as winke (2013) pointed out, not providing participants with explicit directions might affect their reading behaviors. in our study, participants were asked to compare the story on the screen to the story they had previously narrated during the oral pretest, but no specific direction was given regarding the enhanced form, which may differ from pedagogical practices in which teachers might explain the purpose of textual enhancement. nevertheless, in the current study, both groups improved from the pretest to the posttest, suggesting that the input flood, regardless of enhancement, was sufficient to induce short-term improvement in the target structures. additional support for this conclusion comes from the self-reported awareness data in which more than 50% of the participants in the unenhanced condition reported awareness of the recurrence of preterit and imperfect verbs in the text. these results stand in contrast to leow’s (2001) study, in which most participants did not report noticing the targeted forms. the current results suggests that input flood may be just as salient, and just as beneficial, as input enhancement, at least for this type of short, simplified text. as with any study, ours contains limitations. as is often the case with sla studies, the small sample size is a limitation. it should be noted that the sample of 30 l2 participants is less than the median sample size of 48.5 for input enhancement studies (lee & huang, 2008), but greater than the average sla sample size of 19 (plonsky, 2011). nevertheless, a larger sample size would have been desirable. another limitation regards the constraints of using the eye tracking methodology. for example, previous research suggests that not all input enhancement has the same effect on learners. in a study with french speaking learners of english, simard (2008) found that enhancement with capital letters the effectiveness of visual input enhancement on the noticing and l2 development of the spanish. . . 103 and a combination of three cues (capitalizing, bolding and underlining) promoted better test scores than other types of enhancement (including coloring) did. in the current study, we did not manipulate the type of enhancement, and furthermore, we were limited in our choice of enhancement because of the need for the words to be the same size in both conditions. it would be worthwhile exploring the possibilities and effects of other types of enhancement with the eye tracker. finally, it is acknowledged that the study did not include a delayed posttest to measure the long term effects of the treatment. in the end, however, this study has shown that the use of eye tracking methodology can provide useful insights into the amount of attention that is given to targeted structures in focus on form activities. indeed, in this study we discovered that the enhancement we had intended to make the target structure more salient did not do so, as measured by the amount of time participants looked at the words. additional eye tracking studies of input enhancement can further add to our knowledge of what participants do with the texts that they are provided. furthermore, the current study adds to our understanding of the effects of visual input enhancement on l2 development. in line with previous studies and research syntheses, we found that the difference between input flood and input enhancement may not be statistically or practically significant. researchers, and especially l2 teachers, may therefore wish to consider if, and how, they would like to incorporate this focus on form technique into the l2 classroom. shawn loewen, solène inceoglu 104 references alanen, r. 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(2003). textual enhancement and simplified input: effects on l2 comprehension and acquisition of non-meaningful grammatical form. applied language learning, 13, 17-45. shawn loewen, solène inceoglu 108 appendix a “caperucita roja” and its english equivalent once upon a time there was a girl who lived in the woods. little red riding hood was her name because she always wore a red hood. she visited her grandmother on the weekends. one day, her mother said to her, “little red riding hood, go and visit your grandmother who is sick and take this basket of food”. on the way, little red riding hood met a wolf, and the wolf said, “hello little girl, where are you going?” the effectiveness of visual input enhancement on the noticing and l2 development of the spanish. . . 109 “i’m going to my grandmother’s house. she is sick," replied little red riding hood, and she continued on her way. the wolf wanted to eat little red riding hood. so the wolf walked to grandma's house and ate her first. the wolf put on grandma's clothes and went to bed. when little red riding hood arrived, the wolf imitated the grandmother’s voice. little red riding hood asked the wolf why he had those big eyes and those big ears. the wolf replied that they were to see her and hear her better. then, little red riding hood asked why his mouth was so big. the wolf replied, "to eat you better!" a hunter who was passing by heard the screams of little red riding hood. the hunter shot the wolf and saved the girl and her grandmother who was still alive in the wolf's stomach. shawn loewen, solène inceoglu 110 appendix b proficiency tests version a please write the correct form of each verb in the blank that follows. the first two have been done for you. cuando yo (tener) tenía doce años, (vivir) vivía con mis dos hermanas y mis padres en chicago, donde yo (asistir) _______________ a una escuela privada. mi papá (trabajar) ________________ en el banco de américa y mi mamá se (quedar) ___________________ en casa. una de mis hermanas (estudiar) ______________ en la escuela secundaria, y la otra no (estudiar) __________________ en la escuela todavía. no me (gustar) ________________ ir a la escuela, pero lo (hacer) _______________ . una vez, mis padres (viajar) ____________________ a europa. mis hermanas y yo nos (quedar) _____________________ con mi abuela. todo (ir) ________________ bien hasta que un sábado por la tarde mi hermana menor se (romper) _________________ la nariz. cuando mis padres (saber) ___________________ del accidente, (querer) ____________________ volver, pero mi abuela les (asegurar) ____________________ que no era necesario porque mi hermana (estar) ________________ bien. nosotros (ir) _______________ al hospital, y el médico le (dar) _____________ una inyección a mi hermana para ayudar con el dolor. después, ella (comer) ________________ helado para relajarse. version b please write the correct form of each verb in the blank that follows. the first two have been done for you. jorge no (dormir) dormía muy bien durante la noche del domingo pasado porque le (doler) dolía el pecho. el lunes, cuando se (levantar) ______________ jorge todavía no se (sentir) ______________ bien. inmediatamente, él (hacer) _________________ una cita con el médico. él se (preocupar) ______________________ porque (temer) ______________ algo serio, como un ataque al corazón. jorge (ir) ________________ al consultorio del médico, y mientras (esperar) _______________, (leer) _________________ un libro. después de esperar un rato, le (tocar) _________________ a él. el doctor lo (examinar) _________________ y le (sacar) ______________________ unas radiografías. después de revisar toda la información, el médico le (decir) _______________ que no (ser) _________________ nada grave, que solamente (estar) _________________ muy cansado, que (deber) __________________ dormir más y comer mejor. el doctor le (dar) ______________________ unas vitaminas y pastillas para dormir. y cuando jorge (llegar) __________________ a casa ya se (sentir) ___________________ mucho mejor. 581 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (4). 2013. 581-619 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar: an empirical study jakub bielak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state school of higher professional education, konin, poland kubabogu@amu.edu.pl miros aw pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state school of higher professional education, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl anna mystkowska-wiertelak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state school of higher professional education, konin, poland mystkows@amu.edu.pl abstract functionally-oriented linguistic theories, such as cognitive grammar (cg), offer nuanced descriptions of the meanings and uses of grammatical features. a simplified characterization of the semantics of the english active and passive voice grounded in cg terms and based on the reference point model is presented, as it is the basis of the instructional treatment offered to one of the groups in the quasiexperimental study reported in the paper. the study compares the effects of feature-focused grammatical instruction covering the form and meaning/use of the english voices based on cg with those of teaching based on standard pedagogical grammar rules. the results point to relatively high effectiveness of both instructional options in fostering the use of the target structures in both more controlled and more spontaneous performance, with traditional instruction being more successful than that based on cg with respect to the latter. a possible explanation of this superiority is that the subset of the participants (n = 27) exposed to the tradijakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 582 tional explanations found them simple and easy to apply, contrary to the situation in the other group. keywords: pedagogical application of cognitive grammar, active and passive voice, reference point model, subject, topic the exact nature of both the immediate and ultimate effects of grammar instruction as well as the mental processes stimulated by it are issues of considerable controversy in sla and related areas of study. however, most contemporary researchers do agree that such instruction may be of at least limited value for the development of linguistic knowledge, especially of the explicit, conscious kind, and perhaps also for its implicit, unconscious counterpart (e.g., de graaff & housen, 2009; dekeyser, 2000; doughty, 2003; larsen-freeman, 2003; nassaji & fotos, 2011). this view is reflected in the fact that most language education programs include some kind of form-focused instruction, which in turn prompts most language teachers to attend to grammatical issues in their classrooms. they may teach grammar in a variety of ways, of which those that involve at least some explicit focus on grammatical form and/or meaning must by necessity make use of descriptions of grammatical elements which are taught. even though those descriptions are often directly taken from pedagogical grammars, their ultimate origin is in the field of linguistics. in the majority of cases, the grammatical descriptions informing formfocused instruction derive from the traditional structuralist paradigm, which often neglects the semantic side of grammar by dealing with it only in general terms or ignoring important aspects thereof (bielak & pawlak, 2013). recent years, however, have seen some renewed interest in the insights and pedagogical use of more meaning-oriented theories of language, such as systemic functional linguistics (halliday & matthiessen, 2004) or cognitive linguistics (geeraerts, 2006; janssen & redeker, 1999). the contribution to language teaching of the views of language they offer, and, especially, of their descriptions of particular grammatical features, may be particularly valuable when it comes to elucidating the nuances of their meanings and the semantic differences between competing grammatical structures suitable for use in a given situation (cf. larsen-freeman, 2002). the general case for the employment in language teaching of what may be referred to as functional, as opposed to formal, approaches to language has been made elsewhere (achard, 2004, 2008; bielak, 2012; bielak & pawlak, 2011, 2013; liamkina & ryshina-pankova, 2012; niemeier & reif, 2008; turewicz, 2000; tyler, 2008; tyler & evans, 2001; williams, abraham, & negueruela teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 583 azarola, 2013) and it will not be presented here in detail. it will suffice to say here that the descriptions of grammatical phenomena grounded in these approaches focus on their meaningfulness and its conceptual motivation, that is, the reasons for/explanations of grammatical meaning in terms of language user cognitions. these may in turn incorporate a variety of factors governing the use of grammatical features including both linguistic and extralinguistic context and the perspective of the speaker. the potential usefulness of pointing such elements of the semantics of grammar to learners has frequently been endorsed in recent years (see e.g., larsen-freeman, 2003 and most of the sources listed earlier in this paragraph), but the practical efficacy of doing so has been tackled and tested much less frequently (some recent examples are bielak & pawlak, 2013; król-markefka, 2010; tyler, mueller, & ho, 2010; white, 2012). in the cases in which it has been done, the researchers have exposed participants to relatively detailed semantic descriptions of selected grammatical items with the hope of improving and strengthening particular form-meaning mappings making up their linguistic knowledge. although the results of this research are far from conclusive, it seems that teaching guided by meaning-oriented views of language and its grammar has a certain potential to be effective. the present paper reports and discusses the findings of a study which tested the pedagogic effectiveness of relatively detailed semantic descriptions of the english active and passive voice offered by cognitive grammar (cg; langacker, 1987, 1991, 2008), which is one of the leading theories within the broader meaning-focused movement of cognitive linguistics. before the actual findings are considered, the cg characterization of the target structures is provided and the methodology of the study is elucidated, including the nature of the instructional treatments used, one of which drew heavily on the cg descriptions in question. cognitive grammar characterization of the english voice what distinguishes the theory of cg from other linguistic theories and what will be presently demonstrated is that it seeks to explain language structures and processing in terms of general human cognition. at the outset, it also needs to be noted that the cg characterization of the relevant grammatical items provided here is greatly simplified and includes only these details which are absolutely necessary for the reader to appreciate the nature of the treatment offered to one of the groups which took part in the study reported below. the simplification is primarily dictated by limitations of space (the cg descriptions in their full complexity are offered by langacker, 1991, 2008). it is, however, also important to acknowledge that as this well-developed theory offers highly detailed, comprehensive analyses of a wide range of grammatical structures of english which make jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 584 use of often highly abstract concepts as well as theory-specific terminology and diagrammatic representations, any use of its insights for pedagogic purposes must involve a considerable degree of simplification and modification. in fact, the relatively high degree of the complexity and abstractness of the descriptions the theory produces seems to be one of the major potential drawbacks of cg as a basis of pedagogical grammar (bielak & pawlak, 2013). it is necessary to precede the cg description of the meanings of the english active and passive voice with the presentation of one of the basic cognitive models that the theory evokes to account for different linguistic phenomena, including the two notions which will be of special interest in the present discussion, namely the subject and topic. in cognitive linguistics, idealized cognitive models (lakoff, 1997) are taken to be mental representations which form on the basis of recurrent patterns of human experience. one of them, schematically depicted in figure 1, is the so-called reference point model (langacker, 1991). it includes the conceptualizer (c; the speaker, the listener) who achieves “mental contact” with the target of conception (t), which generally means that the speaker/listener’s attention is being turned to the target (the mental path is symbolized by the dashed arrows). as the figure shows, however, this mental contact is not achieved directly. the essence of the model is that the conceptualizer traces a mental path to a relatively nonsalient entity, the target, with the mediation of a relatively salient element, the reference point (r). the target is to be found in a conceptual area referred to as the reference point’s dominion (d), which is a range of knowledge associated with the reference point and which may be relatively freely accessed once the reference point itself is conceptualized. in other words, the reference point constitutes a kind of an access point to a certain realm of knowledge called its dominion. the relationship between the reference point and its target is asymmetrical, because in a given situation/context only the former is salient enough to facilitate the establishment of mental contact with the less salient target, while an inverted process is less plausible due to the low salience of the target. as already mentioned, the reference point model, which makes use of our ability to “invoke the conception of one entity in order to establish ‘mental contact’ with another” (langacker, 2008, p. 83) is evoked in cg to insightfully explain a number of diverse grammatical phenomena such as possessive constructions or pronominal anaphora, but here its usefulness for characterizing two notions of special interest in the present discussion will be presently demonstrated. teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 585 figure 1 the reference point model (langacker, 1999, p. 174) the cg description of the meanings of the two voices needs to include its characterization of a basic grammatical relation or function, namely the subject. the reason for this should be obvious: the noun phrases which express the basic “participants” of a situation perform different functions in active and passive sentences, with the active object going to the subject position in the passive and the active subject being moved to the agent phrase introduced by by or removed altogether. the subject is seen in cg as a primary relational figure (langacker, 1991). this means that it is construed as the most salient entity in the conceptualization of the relation between two major participants, this relation being the semantic core of the whole situation coded by a clause. the other elements of the relation, including the object(s) and the process, are some kind of background against which the subject is initially conceived as a figure. although it will not be of direct relevance for the ensuing discussion, it may be parenthetically mentioned here that the object, which normally expresses the second major participant in a clausal relation, is viewed in cg as a secondary clausal figure (langacker, 1991). this characterization of the subject clearly foregrounds its affinity with the reference point in the cognitive model introduced earlier, which rests on the fact that both are relatively salient entities easily and strongly attracting the speaker/listener’s attention. for this reason, cg puts some kind of an equation mark between them, claiming that the subject is in fact a reference point facilitating the establishment of mental contact with the whole of the relational situation portrayed by the entire clause (langacker, 2008). besides the description of the subject, the present discussion also requires reference to the cg view of the general notion of linguistic topic. in cg, there is a close similarity between the subject and the topic. the former, just as the latter, is claimed to be a reference point understood in terms of the reference point model (langacker, 1991, 2008). it may be a supraclausal reference d r c t jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 586 point in terms of which a stretch of discourse longer that a clause or a sentence is interpreted because the reference point facilitates mental contact with the form and content of this portion of discourse. for our immediate purposes, it is more important that, with both the subject and the topic being characterized as salient reference points, there is a tendency for the two roles to conflate, with the effect that in many clauses the entity designated by the subject is the discourse topic, or, at the very least, when there is a different active supraclausal topic, it may be considered as a kind of a local subtopic in an individual clause. in either case, the subject, by virtue of its salience, is the entity which constitutes an access point to the whole situation depicted by the clause, in which it is also a participant. the above discussion sheds light on the cg view of the function of the grammatical category of voice in general and on its understanding of the difference between the english active and passive voice as well as their use. according to cg, the function of voice is simply the reflection of different configurations of salience (langacker, 1991, 2008). if focal prominence associated with topicality and reference points falls on the agent, the agent appears in the subject position, also associated with extra salience in comparison with the object and the rest of the clause, which renders an active sentence. such sentences are the default option in english, because its speakers tend to associate focal prominence with agency. however, if special circumstances such as the status of being highly topical make the patient more salient than the agent, the former appears in the subject position associated with increased focal prominence and the status of a reference point, which gives rise to the construction and use of a passive sentence. in sum, cg evokes the relative salience of situational participants as a factor explaining and governing the use of the active and passive voice in english. the uses of the two voices are illustrated in figures 2 and 3, which concern two example sentences taken from eastwood (1999, p. 132). the first one is bell invented the telephone and is part of an imaginary encyclopedia entry about the inventor alexander graham bell, some other facts about whom were given earlier in it. the second one is the telephone was invented by bell and is part of another conceived encyclopedia entry about one particular device invented by bell, the telephone, which has also been characterized to a certain extent earlier in the entry. in figure 2 the conceptualizer first achieves mental contact (symbolized by the thick arrows) with, or turns attention to, bell, the inventor, who is a reference point due to the salience he has achieved by virtue of being discussed in the preceding part of the entry. this in turn enables the shift of attention to the whole of the situation portrayed by the sentence, which is schematically represented within the ellipse symbolizing the dominion of bell, with the thin arrow representing the interaction between the two major participants of the situation. one of them, bell, is included within a heavy-line box, which highlights the extra salience it ini teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 587 tially enjoys, in comparison to the other participant and the situation as a whole, by virtue of being the topic and the subject. figure 3 is quite similar, the major difference being that mental contact is first achieved with the telephone, which replaces the inventor in the capacity of the reference point and subject thanks to the focal prominence given to it by its being the topic. attention is then turned to the whole situation, which is part of the dominion of the telephone. the linguistic symbol of the device, the word telephone, is included within a heavy-line box to reflect its salience and reference point status. let us signal at his point that figures 2 and 3 and their somewhat simplified descriptions based on the ones just presented were used in the treatment offered to one group of participants in the course of the study described in detail later in the paper. figure 2 the cg view of the use of reference point model in bell invented the telephone figure 3 the cg view of the use of reference point model in the telephone was invented by bell jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 588 this also pertains to figure 4, which illustrates the use of the passive voice in sentences such as our money was stolen, which do not include the agent phrase. the speaker may want to forego referring to the agent of the situation for many different reasons (cf. the discussion in the treatment section below) while still talking about the other participant and the situation as a whole, and, among other options, passive sentences such as the one just mentioned make it possible. assuming the descriptive apparatus of cg, we may explain this use of the passive by claiming that even though a schematic conception of the agent is evoked as part of the conceptualization associated with such sentences (cf. langacker, 2008), the lack of a more detailed specification concerning its nature and identity make it necessarily less salient not only than the patient, enjoying the status of the primary focal participant, but perhaps also than the relation and interaction between the agent and the patient symbolized by an arrow. this is the reason why the agent fails to be mentioned in the sentence. it also explains why in figure 4 the box representing the thief (someone) as well as the caption within it are rendered in a pale shade of grey rather than in black. despite the absence from the figure of the arrows representing the path of mental contact, it goes without saying that the reference point analysis pertains also to the sentence under discussion, a visual trace of it being the heavy-line box around our money, standing for the reference point, which is darker than the arrow symbolizing the interaction between the participants. like every schematic representation, the figure does not explicitly show every nuance of meaning, but it should be remembered that the reference point analysis pertains to and provides insights concerning every instance of the use of the english active and passive voice. figure 4 the cg view of the meaning of our money was stolen research questions and hypotheses the research project described below took the form of a quasiexperimental study with a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design, and it was intended to determine the effectiveness of teaching the english passive and active voice on the basis of grammatical descriptions drawing upon cg and compare it with the effectiveness of teaching based on standard descriptions teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 589 of the same grammatical features. more specifically, it was aimed to seek answers to the following two research questions: 1. does grammar teaching based on descriptions of grammatical features grounded in cg produce significant learning gains in both the short and long run? 2. is there a difference between the effects of cg-inspired form-focused instruction and the same kind of instruction based on standard pedagogical descriptions in both the short and the long run? on the basis of the literature and previous research concerning the applicability of functionally-oriented linguistic paradigms to language teaching mentioned earlier in the paper, we came up with two hypotheses which were subject to investigation in the present study. first, we hypothesized that cgbased teaching of the english voices will give rise to significant learner gains in both the short and long run. the second hypothesis was that cg-inspired grammatical instruction will be as or more effective than that employing standard pedagogical descriptions in both the long and the short run. method as can be seen from table 1, which presents the research schedule, the pretest, carried out in week 1, was followed by the treatment, about 100 min in length, undertaken in two experimental groups in week 2, an immediate posttest in week 3, and a delayed posttest and a background questionnaire in week 4. no control group was involved and only two distinct types of treatment were compared, even though it was initially the intention of the researchers to include a control group. table 1 research procedure week procedure week 1 pretest week 2 treatment in the traditional and cognitive (100 min) week 3 posttest week 4 delayed posttest followed by a background questionnaire participants the participants were 27 female students of elementary education with extended instruction in english. they were all in their early 20s, all of polish nationality with polish as their l1 and were studying at a university in a midjakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 590 size town in central poland. in particular, the participants were enrolled in year two of a 3-year ba program, where the primary focus was laid on classes related to various aspects of pedagogy, but the students also had the benefit of numerous classes devoted to english grammar, conversation, writing or integrated skills. they attended two intact groups which were taught a speaking and vocabulary course by one of the present researchers, who also focused on the english passive and active voice during two classes for the purposes of the research project described here. one of the groups was provided with explanations of the target grammar based on cg and was thus called the cognitive group (cog; n = 14), and the other had the targeted structures explained in a more standard manner and was thus labeled stan (stan; n = 13).1 despite certain inevitable differences, the students in the cognitive and standard groups were comparable in terms of their proficiency in english as well as experience in learning the target language, which amounted to 10.62 years for all the participants, ranging from 7 to 14 years. in the case of cog, it stood at 10.14 years (between 7 and 14 years), while in stan it equaled 11.15 years (between 8 and 14). the mean number of hours of english instruction the participants had received throughout this relatively long period per week was 1.59, 2.63 and 3.73 at the levels of elementary school, junior high school and high school respectively, this data being very similar for both groups. in addition, along with their school education, some participants had attended out-of-school english courses for periods from 1 to 4 years. in cog 6 participants had received some instruction of this sort (4 of them for 1 year, 1 for 2 years, and 2 for 4 years), while in stan 8 members (3 for 1 year, 4 for 2 years, and 2 for 3 years). when it comes to other forms of extra-curricular exposure to english at the time of the study, 9 participants in cog and 12 in stan declared they experienced some of it, while 5 participants in cog and only 1 in stan declared they did not. this exposure was mostly through the media and 1 one of the anonymous reviewers pointed out that the fact of assigning two intact classes to the two experimental conditions justifies the assumption that the results have been influenced by such intervening variables as group dynamics and group cohesiveness and that this problem should have been eliminated by subjecting different halves of the two intact groups to different treatments. the present authors did not even entertain such an idea because the whole study and its instructional interventions were conducted during regularly scheduled university classes and it was not feasible to expect one half of each of the two groups to attend their classes outside of the schedule. it should also be mentioned that, despite certain obvious drawbacks, as mackey and gass (2005) write, using intact classes is common in second language research and “may have the advantage of enhancing the face validity of certain types of classroom research. for example, if the effects of a particular instructional method are investigated, an existing classroom may be the most ecologically sound setting for the research” (p. 143). teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 591 consisted in listening to and translating english songs and watching english movies and tv. in addition, 1 participant in cog and 1 in stan said they corresponded in english with people from abroad and 1 participant in cog and 4 in stan claimed they sometimes talked to english-speaking people (family members, friends and acquaintances) during their stays in poland. in sum, it seems that the members of stan had slightly more experience learning and using english than those in cog, but the two groups can still be regarded as comparable in this respect. it should also be pointed out that there was much individual variation in the two groups with respect to the command of english, with some students being much more advanced than others. the motivation to learn english displayed by the participants was mostly instrumental, with the vast majority mentioning the usefulness of the language when it comes to international communication, job prospects, and their possible emigration as the reasons for learning it. only 1 participant in cog and 3 in stan linked their learning of english to their desire to teach it, a somewhat surprising fact given that the university course they were completing was preparing them to become early school teachers qualified to teach english among other subjects. in addition, several participants in both groups declared they simply found english interesting and likable and its learning fun. instructional treatment the treatment was delivered (and the whole study conducted) during normally scheduled efl classes the participants attended as part of their university education by one of the present authors, who was the course instructor.2 an important piece of information is that all the metalinguistic talk during the treatment in both groups including the metalinguistic parts of corrective feedback, to be mentioned later in the paper, was done in polish. another im 2 as pointed out by one of the anonymous reviewers, the fact that one of the investigators was also an experimenter delivering the treatment may have led to experimenter bias. despite this drawback, and in particular despite the possibility that the investigatorinstructor might have inadvertently favored one of the treatment conditions or groups, the conflation of the investigator and instructor roles in the present study was prompted by its practicality. it must also be added that as the investigator in question was a relatively experienced one, care was taken to conduct the treatment sessions in as impartial a manner as possible with respect to the instructor’s attitude towards the treatments as well as towards the two groups of participants. therefore, the possible effects of experimenter bias may be hypothesized to have been subtle indeed, if at all present. the results of future replication studies involving other experimenters may show if the results of the present study were seriously flawed by experimenter bias (cf. ryan, 2012). jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 592 portant fact is that the participants in both groups were provided with specially prepared handouts including both the tasks done and information discussed in the course of the treatment, with considerable parts of the latter also displayed by means of a power point presentation. to use the terminology employed by ellis (1997), the treatment in both cog and stan was feature-focused, in the sense that it was concentrated on a specific grammatical structure (i.e., the english passive and active voice) and the same language data were used, the only difference being the nature of the explanations with which the participants were supplied. in both groups, the students were exposed to and encouraged to analyze passive sentences, reminded of the passive verb forms required by different grammatical tenses (present simple, present progressive, past simple, present perfect), and then provided with the relevant rules concerning the use of active and passive sentences (see appendices a and b for samples of the materials used). these rules concerned selected reasons for which the speaker or writer may opt for the use of one voice rather than the other in a particular utterance or sentence. the principles discussed with the two groups concerned two general uses of the english passive (and active), which will become apparent in the following discussion of the rules used with stan. the rules and the examples used here and in the treatment are taken from the pedagogical grammar by eastwood (1999, p. 132-134). the presentation of the first principle was done with reference to each of the last sentences in the following two example encyclopedia entries and included the line of reasoning presented below them. (1) alexander graham bell a british inventor who went to live in canada and then the usa. bell invented the telephone. (2) telephone an apparatus with which people can talk to each other over long distances. the telephone was invented by alexander graham bell. it is quite obvious that the two sentences have different topics in the sense that they are about different things: the one in the first entry is about the inventor, while that in the second entry is about the invention. an english sentence usually begins with the (grammatical) subject, which normally expresses the topic, that is, what the sentence is about. if the topic is the agent, the active voice is used. if, alternatively, the agent is not the topic, this status being instead conferred on the patient, that is, someone/something undergoing an action, the passive voice is used. these two claims may be considered as two subcomponents of the first rule used with stan. teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 593 the second rule concerned other reasons which prompt the use of the passive rather than active voice, exemplified by the following: (3) all our money and passports were stolen. (4) a man was arrested last night. (5) the streets are cleaned every day. (6) oil has been discovered at the north pole. (7) this kind of jacket is considered very fashionable these days. (8) a lot of attempts have been made to find the loch ness monster. the rule explaining why the passive is used in all the examples is that this voice is employed when the speaker does not want to mention the agent of the action. some specific reasons for the unwillingness to include the agent are that it does not add any new information (examples (3)-(4)), it is not important ((5)(6)) or it is unknown or hard to determine ((7)-(8)). before specific reasons why one or the other of the two voices may be selected in a particular situation were discussed with cog, the group was familiarized with the basics of the reference point model. it was done in a way very similar to that described in detail in bielak (2007), which dispensed with most of the technical cg terminology used when the model was introduced earlier in the present paper with the exception of the term reference point. the fine details of the procedure may be found in the aforementioned publication, and here we will just say that the model was introduced with reference to the way one may turn somebody else’s attention to particular stars visible in the nighttime sky by first referring to other, more salient (larger, brighter) stars in their vicinity. this part of the treatment in cog made use of a number of pictorial representations, which is also true of the discussion of the relevant rules concerning the use of the voices. while the pictures related to the principles of use were exactly the ones already presented earlier in the paper (figures 2, 3 and 4), the rules were considerably simplified versions of the cg characterization of the english voice accompanying these pictures. the essence of the metalinguistic instruction given to cog was the order in which we focus attention on the respective participants of a clausal situation as well as the situation as a whole, including the reasons for particular attentional sequences related to topicality and reference point organization, because these are responsible for the use of either active or passive sentences in particular situations. the rules which were discussed with cog in the treatment will not be described here in greater detail, because their expanded versions were already presented in considerable detail in the section including the cg characterization of the english voice. as already mentioned, the treatment in both groups relied on the same language material and methodological options, with the difference having to jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 594 do with the choice of the pedagogical rules provided. it should be noted that in addition to the differences between them transpiring from the above descriptions, the general difference was that while the cg-based treatment attempted to explain why subjects were topics and occurred in sentence-initial positions, the standard treatment made no such attempt. rather than providing some kind of semantic motivation for the existing state of affairs in a way similar to the cg treatment, it only established a link between subjects and topics and did not provide any justification for it. in both conditions, the activities described earlier in the present section, which included the presentation of and reflection on the relevant rules, were partially interspersed with and partially followed by a practice phase, in which the participants were first invited to attend to the form-meaning mappings with the help of input-based activities (i.e., input-flood, input enhancement and structured input referential activities) and then to engage in the performance of outputoriented activities, both those involving text-manipulation (i.e., controlled, traditional exercises such as paraphrasing) and text-creation activities (i.e., such that were semi-communicative in the sense that students were encouraged to produce their own sentences with the use of the targeted features (see appendices a and b, for samples of the materials used). at all stages, the students were also provided with corrective feedback which was both input-based, taking the form of recasts (i.e., corrective reformulations of incorrect utterances which preserve the communicative intention of the speaker, and do not get in the way of meaning and message conveyance), and output-based, in the form of clarification requests and elicitations that prompted the students to attempt self-corrections, often with the assistance of metalinguistic comments and discussions of the correct answers. therefore, with the exception of the explanations which were given to the participants (i.e., couched in standard or cg terms), the intervention in both conditions can be said to have by and large implemented the ppp (presentation–practice– production) format, with explicit instruction in the form of deduction and induction being followed by controlled practice, both comprehension-based and production-oriented in nature, and relatively free practice, which involved the production of the passive and active voice in real time. the amount of time devoted to the treatment was comparable in both groups and amounted to about 100 min (i.e., one entire 90-min class as well as the beginning of another). data collection and analysis in order to assess the impact of the treatment on the participants’ ability to use the targeted structures in different context, a written and an oral test were administered as pretests, immediate and delayed posttests, with a split block teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 595 technique being used (i.e., the test that was used as a pretest in one group was used as a posttest in the other and then, yet again, as the delayed posttest).3 the written test was mostly aimed to tap into the participants’ explicit or declarative knowledge, or such that is conscious in nature and can be drawn upon when there is sufficient time (ellis 2009).4 it required the students to come up with a description of a house located in a major city in the usa, and consisted of 7 sentences that were to remain in the original form (e.g., the house i want to describe is very interesting) and 25 prompts which the participants were supposed to use as a basis for producing sentences in the active and passive voice (e.g., buy / a young couple from boston / the house / two months ago; see appendix c for the sample test form). even though the students were allowed 30 min to complete the task, two of them were given an additional 10 min to perform it. one of the researchers also answered questions regarding unknown vocabulary, the need to produce a continuous text or separate sentences, the order of words in the sentences as well as the possibility of adding words that were not included in the script. the texts that the participants produced were scored in two different ways to reflect the possibly different degrees of the participants’ mastery of the form and meaning/use dimensions of the target structures. the reason for focusing on the form, meaning and use in the tests was that the treatment in both groups concerned primarily meaningful use of active and passive voice, but it also focused on the form of the two voices in several tenses. two distinct scoring schemes were used, which amounted to the effective creation and use of two different tests in both modes giving different weights to the knowledge of the meaning/use of the target structures, on the one hand, and their form on the other. the first test, which was called the form, and meaning/use test put much more emphasis on the form than on the meaning/use of the english passive and active voice. the second one, called the thematic structure test, focused primarily on the meaning/use dimension rather than on form. the numbers of points awarded per one test item under the two scoring schemes were as follows: 3 the design and nature of the data collection instruments used in this study, as well as the scoring schemes that may be used, are described in great detail in bielak, pawlak, and mystkowskawiertelak (in press). the present section includes only the most important information. 4 the authors are fully aware of the fact that the concepts of explicit and implicit knowledge may not be synonymous with the notions of declarative and procedural knowledge (dekeyser, 2007, 2009) as well as of the fact that the development of implicit knowledge may be constrained by the impact of age or the instructional context, with the effect that, in the case of postpubescent learners struggling to acquire the target language in a foreign language context, it is perhaps more warranted to talk about highly automatized declarative knowledge that can be employed under real-operating conditions (dekeyser, 2009; dekeyser & juffs, 2003). jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 596 1. the form and meaning/use test: 3 points if obligatory occasion was created5 and passive form (the correct form in the correct tense) and meaning/use (the correct voice) were provided; 2 points if obligatory occasion was created and a single inaccuracy with respect to form, tense, or meaning/use occurred, for example the garden was designed ø japanese gardeners (form), the house was rebuilded … (form), the house was built by builders in 1989 (meaning/use);6 1 point if obligatory occasion was created and two inaccuracies of the above sort were present, for example the house was rebuilded by builders in 1989 (form and meaning/use); 0 points if no obligatory occasion was created or if more than two inaccuracies of the above sort occurred. 2. the thematic structure test (in contrast to the previous scheme, neither the use of a wrong tense nor any other problems with form, as long as it was clear which voice was used, was penalized; the right thematic structure, i.e., the presence or otherwise and the order of noun phrases and the verb was assessed): 2 points if obligatory occasion was created, which was tantamount to the presence of a verb, and if the order of noun phrases and the verb was correct, for example a few builders killed during construction; 1 point if obligatory occasion was created and a single inaccuracy with respect to thematic structure occurred, or if a lexical verb was absent, for example during construction a few builders killed something (thematic structure), saw the house 20 people (thematic structure), the house was in 1989 (lexical verb absent); 0 points if no obligatory occasion was created, or if obligatory occasion was created but two or more inaccuracies with respect to thematic structure occurred, for example two months ago a young couple from boston bought the house. 5 the use of the term obligatory occasion should not be taken to mean that obligatory occasion analysis of the sort used by brown (1973) was employed. two major differences between obligatory occasion analysis and the scoring used here is that the former analyzes spontaneous utterances and does not penalize participants for not creating obligatory occasions, while the latter concerns relatively highly constrained utterances and does penalize for not creating obligatory contexts. 6 here and in the remaining examples of erroneous responses the errors are underlined. teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 597 the two schemes were intended to be used in scoring both the written and the oral test, but, ultimately, only the written test was scored by means of both. for the oral test, only the first scheme was used because it seemed that in this test, possibly under the influence of the treatment, and particularly its linguistic examples, which included many more instances of passive sentences in comparison with active ones, numerous participants employed a special guessing strategy which made them use only or mostly the passive in their responses.7 this guessing-like behavior resulted in unduly inflated scores for these participants on the posttests in the case of the thematic structure test, where the mere decision to use one voice rather than another might have earned one a large number of points for a given test item. in contrast to the written test, the aim of the oral one was to tap the participants’ implicit, or highly automatized, explicit knowledge, or such that is available for use when striving to attain communicative goals under real operating conditions. the task was similar to the one on the written measure but it was a little shorter, there was a short training session before it, a time limit was imposed, the students were given 1.5 min to familiarize themselves with the requisite lexis and to ask questions about unknown vocabulary items, and they were requested to complete the task in 6 min, with most of them finishing the task after about 5 min. the performance of the task was audio-recorded with the help of voice recorders placed before the participants and subsequently the transcripts of their performance were used in the scoring phase. in both tasks, the means were calculated and the statistical significance of the observed differences was determined by means of performing independent (for betweengroup comparisons) and paired samples (for within-group comparisons) t tests, a statistical procedure that appears to be appropriate in cases where only two groups are involved. in addition, effect sizes were calculated and expressed in etas squared for all the differences which were investigated. findings as can be seen from figure 5 and tables 2 and 3, which present the means and t-test values for the written form and use pretest, immediate and delayed posttests, not only was stan better than cog at the very beginning (a difference of 3.09), but this initial advantage was maintained on the immediate (a difference of 6.24) and the delayed posttest (a difference of 5.21), with the caveat that none of these divergences turned out to be statistically significant 7 for details of the issue of guessing and the possible preventive and corrective measures, see bielak, pawlak and mystkowska-wiertelak (in press). jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 598 (p > .05; their magnitudes were moderate, as indicated by the eta squared effect size values ranging between .06 and .12).8 far more conclusive are the results of the analysis of the progress that the students in both groups made over the course of the treatment and the pattern is almost identical. to be more specific, the mean in stan increased by 19.15 from the pretest to the immediate posttest and then decreased by 10.62 on the delayed posttest, with the pretest-delayed posttest difference amounting to 8.53, which indicates that some of the instructional gains were maintained over time. the mean in cog rose by 16.00 from the pretest to the immediate posttest, only to drop by 9.57 on the delayed posttest, with part of the initial advantage being carried over to the last test, as is evident in the difference of 8.53 between the pretest and the delayed posttest. it should also be emphasized that all of these differences reached statistical significance and their magnitudes were very large (all etas squared were much higher than .14, ranging between .40 and .82). figure 5 the results of the written form and meaning/use test table 2 the means and independent samples t tests for the written form and meaning/use test (between groups) test cog (n = 14) stan (n = 13) effect size (eta squared) m sd m sd t p pretest 11.14 7.20 14.23 4.72 -1.30 .20 .06 posttest 27.14 8.30 33.38 9.18 -1.85 .07 .12 delayed posttest 17.57 9.18 22.76 9.45 -1.44 .16 .08 8 cohen’s (1988) guidelines were used for the interpretation of eta squared effect sizes according to which .01 = small effect, .06 = medium effect, and .14 = large effect. 11.14 27.14 17.57 14.23 33.38 22.76 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 pretest posttest delayed posttest cog stan teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 599 table 3 the means and paired samples t tests for the written form and meaning/use test (within groups) as illustrated in figure 6 and tables 4 and 5, the patterns observed on the written form and meaning/use test were to a large extent mirrored on the written thematic structure test, with the caveat that the differences between stan and cog were much smaller throughout the study. given that, it is not surprising that no one of them proved to be statistically significant and that they were all of small or very small magnitudes (etas squared ranged between .0007 and .01). more precisely, the mean for cog was mere 0.66 higher than for stan and the difference deviated much from this value neither on the immediate nor the delayed posttest, amounting to 0.39 on the former and 1.16 on the latter. the pattern for the improvement of the participants in the two groups is also almost identical to that which could be observed on the written form and meaning/use test. for one thing, the means in both stan and cog increased from the pretest to the immediate posttest, by 6.84 and 6.57, respectively, with both of these gains being significant and of large magnitude (etas squared amounting to .35 and .46 respectively). this was followed by a slight drop in both stan (2.84) and cog (2.07), with the difference between the posttest and delayed posttest scores reaching significance and being of large magnitude (eta squared = .33) in cog, but not in stan (no significance and the magnitude was moderate; eta squared = .10). importantly, in both groups some of the instructional gains were retained, as evidenced by the pretest-delayed posttests differences of 4.00 in stan and 4.50 in cog, both of which were significant and of large magnitude (etas squared amounting to .35 and .32, respectively). group pretest posttest delayed posttest test pair effect size (eta squared) m sd m sd m sd t cog (n = 14) 11.14 7.20 27.14 8.30 17.57 9.18 pre-post post-del pre-del -7.36*** -7.83*** -2.98*** .80 .82 .40 stan (n = 13) 14.23 4.72 33.38 9.18 22.76 9.45 pre-post post-de pre-del -7.18*** -4.57*** -3.47*** .81 .63 .50 *p < .05 **p < .01 ***p < .001 jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 600 figure 6 the results of the written thematic structure test table 4 the means and independent samples t tests for the written thematic structure test (between groups) test cog (n = 14) stan (n = 13) effect size (eta squared) m sd m sd t p pretest 13.35 4.48 12.69 3.61 0.42 .67 .007 posttest 19.92 6.25 19.53 7.78 0.14 .88 .0007 delayed posttest 17.85 5.73 16.69 6.34 0.50 .62 .01 table 5 the means and paired samples t tests for the written thematic structure test (within groups) group pretest posttest delayed posttest test pair effect size (eta squared) m sd m sd m sd t cog (n = 14) 13.35 4.48 19.92 6.25 17.85 5.73 pre-post post-del pre-del -3.38** -2.56** -2.49** .46 .33 .32 stan (n = 13) 12.69 3.61 19.53 7.78 16.69 6.34 pre-post post-del pre-del -2.59** -1.19** -2.56** .35 .10 .35 *p < .05 **p < .01 an interesting finding is that although all the effect sizes for the progress of both groups on the two written measures were similar in that they pointed to very large magnitudes of the learning gains, the ones for the form and mean13.35 19.92 17.85 12.69 19.53 16.69 0 5 10 15 20 25 pretest posttest delayed posttest cog stan teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 601 ing/use test were much higher than those for the thematic structure test. in particular, the treatment explained as much as 80% of the variance in the immediate posttest scores in cog and 81% in stan on the form and meaning/use measure, but only 46% and 35%, respectively, on the thematic structure test. similarly, the intervention conditions accounted for 40% of the variance in the delayed posttest scores in cog and 50% in stan on the form and meaning/use test, but considerably less, namely 32% and 35%, respectively, on the thematic structure test. from these figures it transpires that the magnitude of the gains on the test focusing mostly on the accurate form of the target structures was sometimes approximately double that on the test focusing primarily on the meaning and use dimension, and it was larger by at least 8 percentage points. as can be seen from figure 7 and tables 6 and 7, the situation on the oral test, which for the most part can be regarded as a form and meaning/use test, does not mirror that on the written tests because the differences between the two groups did reach significance in the course of the study. even though stan was superior to cog at the very outset, the difference of 2.46 did not reach statistical significance and was of small magnitude (eta squared = .04). however, it rose to 8.21 on the immediate posttest and decreased only marginally to 6.72 on the delayed posttest, with both of these values reaching statistical significance and being of large magnitude (etas squared = .15 in both cases). at the same time, the participants in both groups did make headway after the treatment and the initial gains were, at least in part, maintained over time, with all the differences between the three tests being significant and of large or even very large magnitude (etas squared ranged between .33 and .69). in the case of stan, the mean rose by 14.39 from the pretest to the immediate posttest, then it decreased by 4.85 on the last test, but the improvement from the pretest to the delayed posttest was still considerable and significant, amounting to 9.54. as to cog, the initial increase in the mean equaled 8.64, which was followed by a drop of 3.36, with the effect that the pretest-delayed posttest difference stood at 5.28 and was as well significant. apart from the self-evident difference in performance between stan and cog, what is also interesting is the large magnitude of the gains in both groups, which is surprising in view of the fact that the task was expected to place great demands on the participants by tapping primarily their implicit knowledge of the targeted structure. jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 602 figure 7 the results of the oral form and use test table 6 the means and independent samples t tests for the oral form and meaning/use test (between groups) test cog (n = 14) stan (n = 13) effect size (eta squared) m sd m sd t p pretest 6.07 5.48 8.53 6.21 1.09 .28 .04 posttest 14.71 9.98 22.92 9.29 -2.07 .04 .15 delayed posttest 11.35 8.17 18.07 8.19 -2.13 .04 .15 table 7 the means and paired samples t tests for the oral form and meaning/use test (within groups) group pretest posttest delayed posttest test pair t effect size (eta squared) m sd m sd m sd cog (n = 14) 6.07 5.48 14.71 9.98 11.35 8.17 pre-post post-del pre-del -4.83*** -2.57*** -3.60*** .64 .33 .49 stan (n = 13) 8.53 6.21 22.92 9.29 18.07 8.19 pre-post post-del pre-del -5.18*** -4.18*** -3.87*** .69 .59 .55 *p < .05 **p < .01 ***p < .001 6.07 14.71 11.35 8.53 22.92 18.07 0 5 10 15 20 25 pretest posttest delayed posttest cog stan teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 603 discussion although the results of the study have to be regarded with considerable circumspection, particularly in view of the fact that it suffers from rather serious limitations, they still provide a basis for an attempt to address the research questions and to shed light on the contribution of instruction drawing upon standard descriptions of grammar structures and those grounded in cg to the development of learners’ linguistic knowledge. when it comes to the first research question, concerning the effectiveness of grammar teaching which draws on cg-based descriptions, it appears that instruction of this kind was beneficial for the growth of both explicit and implicit knowledge. this is because the cog participants’ pretest-immediate posttest gains turned out to be statistically significant, with much of the advantage being retained over time and the differences in means between the pretest and the delayed posttest reaching significance, which testifies to the durability of the intervention. this conclusion is supported by the fact that for all of these gains the effect sizes were large or very large, with the treatment accounting for between 32% and 80% of the variance in scores. thus, it seems that the results of the study do not provide grounds for the rejection of the hypothesis established on the basis of the relevant literature that cg-based grammatical instruction produces significant learner gains in both the short and long run. the conclusions are perhaps somewhat less optimistic for the proponents of the use of cg-grounded descriptions in language pedagogy in the case of the second research question, which concerned the comparison of the effects of such a pedagogic intervention with those of treatment relying upon explanations of grammar structures found in popular, standard pedagogical grammars. this is related to the fact that although the results of stan and cog were comparable on the two written tests, both in the short and long run, with none of the differences being significant, the students in stan outperformed those in cog on the oral test, both on the immediate and the delayed posttest, with the differences reaching statistical significance and being of large magnitude. it could thus be argued that the two types of intervention were by and large equally efficacious when it comes to the development of explicit knowledge, but standard descriptions could be regarded as offering a better foundation for the growth of implicit knowledge, or, perhaps, as dekeyser (2007, 2009) would have it, the automatization of explicit, declarative knowledge, in this case of passive and active constructions. thus, in the light of the present results, the second hypothesis we put forward, that cg-inspired instruction is as least as effective as that based on standard pedagogical descriptions in both the long and the short run, cannot be rejected when it jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 604 comes to explicit grammatical knowledge, but must be discarded with reference to implicit (or highly automatized explicit) knowledge. the findings under discussion may also be taken to indicate that the ways in which grammar structures are presented to learners may not be of crucial significance, particularly when it comes to the mastery of relevant rules and the ability to employ them in controlled processing in situations when there is ample time to contemplate the responses. while instruction based on cg may, as suggested by its supporters, be more meaningful and therefore induce deeper levels of processing, drawing upon more widespread, standard descriptions may be more appealing to learners because it is in many cases simpler, less convoluted, more concrete in terms of rules of thumb, and, what may be especially relevant, familiar to learners. in consequence, what matters more is perhaps the entire instructional sequence, which, apart from the appropriate initial explanations, has to provide students with sufficient practice opportunities as well as carefully targeted, timely and properly supplied corrective feedback.9 if this is indeed the case, then a question arises why the participants in stan did better than those in cog on the oral test, intended as a measure of implicit knowledge, particularly in view of the fact that the practice phase was identical in both cases. a plausible, although clearly not fully satisfactory, explanation could be that the standard descriptions and rules, despite being somewhat more restricted in scope, were easier to apply in controlled and later more communicative practice, thereby leading to superior use of the targeted structures in a task that emulated real-operating conditions to some extent. a related explanation, also offered in the study by bielak and pawlak (2013) in which the pedagogical usefulness of cg and standard explanations was also compared, is that the participants, given their long history of previous english instruction, were already familiar with (large parts of) the standard rules.10 therefore, the treatment offered to stan may have consolidated that prior knowledge among its members, while the novel cg treatment may have constituted an extra challenge to cog, may have confused them, or may have been perceived as unnecessary. what is more, these negative outcomes may have been especially potent during oral performance, with no time to ponder the full significance of the cg treatment. the fact that there was a lot of individual variation among the participants with respect to their level of 9 this is related to the remark by one of the anonymous reviewers that any type of instruction might have resulted in satisfying results. the present authors take it to mean that roughly any type of high quality explanations followed by the practice phase used in this study might have been effective. this possibility has just been suggested in the course of the discussion and it is obviously an empirical issue that should be investigated, as claimed in the conclusion section. 10 this explanation was also suggested by one of the anonymous reviewers. teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 605 advancement is also important in this context. the reason is that the relatively high complexity and novelty of the cg treatment may have been especially detrimental to the progress of less advanced learners in cog, with lower level learners in stan not affected in the same way by their rather simple and perhaps even already familiar treatment. what may also lend credence to the tentative explanation offered above making reference to the relative simplicity of the standard treatment is the fact that the descriptions and rules utilized in it were also to a certain extent meaning-oriented. after all, they referred to the notion of linguistic topic, even if, contrary to the cg-based rules, they did not attempt to explain the link between topics and subjects. this is what makes these standard rules different from the standard pedagogic descriptions which are usually contrasted with those offered by functional/cognitive linguistics with the aim of testing the pedagogic effectiveness of both. a tentative conclusion then may be that we might expect some superiority of descriptions based on functional linguistics over standard ones specifically if the latter are devoid of semantic considerations to an especially high degree. an example of such a grammatical principle is the standard prescription offered by most pedagogical grammars to use infinitives after certain verbs and gerunds (-ing participles) after others, which is not accompanied by any semantic rationale. one more possible explanation for the comparative ineffectiveness of the cg treatment when it comes to the oral measure suggested is the layout of the reference point illustrations in figures 3 and 4.11 they display the entity corresponding to the subject of the passive sentence on the right and the agent on the left, and this configuration obviously does not reflect the actual word order of passive sentences. visually representing the passive as a reference point phenomenon in this way may thus confuse learners with respect to word order. as it is possible that pictorial representations are evoked by learners as mnemonic devices especially frequently in more spontaneous language use because there is no time for drawing upon more sophisticated knowledge structures, this would explain why the possible negative influence of the pictures manifested itself on the oral test and not on the written ones. an intriguing issue concerns the reasons why the students in both stan and cog should have made such spectacular progress on the oral test, even though the intervention focused on their understanding of the use of the two voices, thus, presumably, catering to the development of explicit rather than implicit knowledge. while it could be said that this is the effect of the format of practice that followed the standard and cg-based explanations, this is highly 11 this explanation was suggested by one of the anonymous reviewers. jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 606 unlikely given that the entire treatment was confined to about 100 min in both cases. this phenomenon is perhaps better explained in terms of the practice effect since, even though the prompts in the oral task were different from those in the written task, the operations to be performed were essentially the same, with the exception that time pressure constituted an important factor in the former. in addition, some of the phrases which appeared in the exercises or on the written tests could have been memorized as entire chunks (e.g., the university was surrounded, the house was located) rather than rule-based, and used as such in spontaneous performance. another plausible explanation is the use of the guessing strategy mentioned earlier, which, even though not employed to such a great extent in the form and meaning/use oral test as in the thematic structure test, may still have played a significant role and inflated some participants’ scores on the oral test. what also deserves a brief explanation is the relatively large difference between the magnitudes of the learning gains of both groups on the form and meaning/use test on the one hand and the thematic structure test on the other. what may account for this finding is the possibility that the participants benefited more from the practice phase of the treatment than from the presentation of the semantics and pragmatics of the target structures. this explanation would then be compatible with our earlier remark that what may be more important than the nature of grammatical principles used in formfocused instruction is the whole pedagogical sequence with enough opportunities for practice and suitable feedback. conclusions what surely has to be kept in mind when attempting to account for the findings reported above are the limitations of the study, some of which are quite serious and may have impacted its validity. the most obvious is the failure to include a control group, which, in spite of the initial intentions of the researchers, proved to be impossible for logistical reasons, and makes it difficult to unambiguously attribute the gains observed to the presence and nature of the pedagogic intervention rather than some extraneous variables. although the magnitude of the instructional gains in both groups is such that it would be unreasonable to deny the positive role of the treatment, and although the study was relatively short (4 weeks) and conducted in a foreign rather than second language setting so that the likelihood of much incidental learning seems rather low, the design is clearly a weakness which calls for considerable caution when interpreting the data. a related problem, which, however, can be observed in many similar studies, is the brevity of the treatment teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 607 (ca. 100 min), a shortcoming which has to be taken into account, for example, when elucidating the causes of the unexpected progress of the participants in stan and cog on the oral task. while, without doubt, the results would have been more credible had the intervention lasted much longer, this is the price to be paid for doing research in real classrooms where time is a precious commodity and unexpected scheduling problems are bound to occur, and, perhaps, the ecological validity ensured by such conditions is invaluable in and of itself. finally, what could be questioned is the extent to which the tests used in the present study are indeed appropriate measures of explicit and implicit knowledge, particularly in view of the claims that specially designed batteries of tests should be employed for this purpose (cf. ellis et al., 2009). as was demonstrated by some of the authors (e.g., mystkowska-wiertelak & pawlak, 2012), however, some of those tests are not free from flaws and it would seem that operationalizing the two types of language knowledge in terms of the presence of time pressure and the need for spontaneous use of a specific structures is justifiable (cf. pawlak, 2012). although the results of the study do not suggest that the meaningoriented rules based on cg, with their focus on the conceptual motivation behind and the nuanced descriptions of the meanings of the english active and passive voice, are superior to standard structuralist descriptions, they do show that cg descriptions may be at least as effective, particularly when it comes to the use of the target structures in a controlled manner. and even in the case of more spontaneous oral performance, although the gains of the learners exposed to cg-inspired instruction turned out to be lower than those of the learners taught in a standard manner, the effectiveness of the former option cannot be questioned. a question then arises whether teaching based on cg is a viable option to be used in the language classroom. our response would be that uncritically embracing this kind of teaching would be premature, but that some teachers at least might judiciously select certain of its elements and try to use them in their classrooms in order to complement the standard rules, especially if they do not seem to be effective in a particular situation, or to introduce variety. what supports this is the possibility implied by the preset study that the nature of grammatical explanations may be less important than practice and corrective feedback. given the general case for meaning-focused grammatical instruction, let us speculate, however, that the effectiveness of cg-based rules might benefit from their more widespread use in language pedagogy. if they were to be used to introduce to learners the meaning and use of a wider range of grammatical features, this would surely make students more comfortable with certain concepts and descriptive tools recurring in cg such as the reference point model, jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 608 which might in turn favorably affect the pedagogic utility of the theory and its descriptions. obviously, this is just an assumption which should be subject to rigorous empirical examination. as the effectiveness of the cg-inspired formulations tested in this study has turned out to be to a large extent comparable to the effectiveness of those usually employed, the results may be taken as rationale for this kind of research, which should additionally focus on learners at different levels of advancement as well as on the teaching and learning of different grammatical structures. what should also be investigated in future research is how form-focused instruction which does not include any explicit explanation of the semantics of grammatical features and is based mostly on practice and corrective feedback compares to teaching utilizing grammatical explanations, including those inspired by cg. an example of such research would be a study similar to the present one, but the design of which would include, in addition to cog and stan, another experimental group exposed only to the practice/feedback phase of the treatment, as well as a control group exposed to no instruction at all. research experimenting with the nature of cg descriptions used would also be welcome, including investigating the impact of reversing the order of the agent and patient in figures 3 and 4 so that they mimic the word order of passive sentences. in addition, recalling the tentative conclusion that cg descriptions might turn out to produce better gains than standard ones if the latter are such that they blatantly neglect semantic considerations, it seems that studies involving such standard rules are needed. teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 609 references achard, m. 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(2013). using conceptbased instruction in the l2 classroom: perspectives from current and future language teachers. language teaching research, 17, 363-381. doi: 10.1177/1362168813482950 jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 612 appendix a sample materials used in the treatment offered to stan passive voice: form the teacher explains the problem. to be + 3 forma czasownika [3rd verb form] the problem is explained (by the teacher). the problems are explained (by the teacher). the problem was explained (by the teacher). the problems were explained (by the teacher). the problem has been explained (by the teacher). the problems have been explained (by the teacher). the problem is being explained (by the teacher). the problems are being explained (by the teacher). passive voice: use (1) alexander graham bell a british inventor who went to live in canada and then the usa. bell invented the telephone. active bell invented the telephone. bell invented the telephone. subject and agent the subject (bell) is the agent. telephone an apparatus with which people can talk to each other over long distances. the telephone was invented by alexander graham bell. passive the telephone was invented by bell. the telephone was invented by bell. subject agent the subject (the telephone) is not the agent. it is the thing that the action is directed at. ........................................................................................................................................... ........................................................................................................................................... ........................................................................................................................................... ........................................................................................................................................... passive voice: use (2) all our money and passports were stolen. a man was arrested last night. the streets are cleaned every day. oil has been discovered at the north pole. this kind of jacket is considered very fashionable these days. a lot of attempts have been made to find the loch ness monster. teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 613 furry dance – a spring festival the helston ‘furry (floral) dance’ is one of the oldest festivals in england. it is held in helston, an old cornish town. it celebrates the coming of spring. the ‘dance’ is a procession through the narrow streets of the town. the men wear top hats and suits, the women wear their best dresses and children are dressed in white. at the time of the festival the streets are decorated with beautiful flowers. at present preparations are being made for this year’s event. a large truck of flowers has already been bought and the clothes have already been prepared. halloween – a winter festival the celebration of halloween on october 31st was begun by the celts over 2000 years ago and it has been practiced ever since. their festival of the dead marked the beginning of winter. people believed that ghosts and witches came out on that night. these beliefs were not encouraged by the church but the festival was not abandoned. during the festival lanterns and candles were lit to keep the ghosts away and costumes and masks were worn to frighten them. people traveled from village to village and asked for food. it was believed that any village that didn’t give food would have bad luck. these customs were brought to the usa in the nineteenth century by irish immigrants. today in the usa and uk, children wear costumes and go from door to door saying ‘trick or treat’ and they are given sweets to take home. adapted from opportunities pre-intermediate by michael harris, david mower and anna sikorzy ska i. correct the following statements about the festivals and then compare your answers with a partner: 1. the helston 'furry dance' is held to celebrate the end of spring. 2. all the inhabitants are dressed in white during the helston festival. 3. the clothes for the helston festival have not been prepared yet. 4. the celebration of halloween was begun by the anglo-saxons. 5. the festival was abandoned for a while because it was not encouraged by the church. 6. children are taken inside the houses they visit at all times. ii. fill in the blanks using appropriate forms of the verbs in brackets: the little town of rockwell (consider) ____________ by many people to be the most interesting place in the state of arizona. rockwell (build) ____________ in the middle of the 19th century by a group of german colonists. soon afterwards most of those colonists (kill) ____________ by local indians. their graves (often, visit) ____________ by their relatives, who do not have enough money to renovate the cemetery. however, they say that money (now, collect) ____________ to do this and to buy flowers from time to time. in fact, at jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 614 least once a month flowers (bring) ____________ to the graves by the inhabitants of the town. lately, the inhabitants (portray) ____________ in a documentary film about rockwell. the film (make) ____________ by a very young director, robert clark. rockwell is known for its holidays and festivals. at the moment a state holiday (celebrate) ____________ and the streets are full of tourists and people who live nearby. two months ago two new hotels (open) ____________ in the center of rockwell because more and more people are coming to visit this historic location. usually constructors (give) ____________ at least a year to build a hotel like that but this time they had to do it in six months. iii. the sentences form a story. fill in the blanks with appropriate passive verbs. 1. the puppy was ______________ on the street a few days ago. 2. later it ______________ to our house. 3. when my son noticed that it was very dirty, it ______________ by my wife. 4. since that time the little dog ______________ always ______________ in the house because my son wants to play with it all the time. 5. last week it even ______________ to the zoo because mark refused to leave home without it. 6. since the time it was found on the street, the puppy ______________ a lot of new tricks by my children. 7. at present it ______________ how to open the door with its paw ( apa). 8. my wife ______________ by different dogs a few times in her life so she is afraid of our new pet. iv. using the cues below describe how thanksgiving day is celebrated in the usa (do not change the underlined part). be prepared to tell the rest of the class about the holiday: 1. thanksgiving/celebrate/fourth thursday in november. this is related to the colonization of america. 2. first american colonists/give food/by native american indians/in 1620. 3. they/show how to grow own food/by native american indians. 4. in 1621/first thanksgiving festival/celebrate/by the colonists. 5. it/make a holiday/by president lincoln/in 1864/and/it celebrate/by american people since then. 6. now/turkey and pumpkin pie/eat/at family dinners 7. cranberry sauce/also use 8. on this day/family members reunite/even if they separate/by thousands of kilometers v. using the cues below tell your partner about the hotel where you stayed at the weekend (do not change the underlined sentences). a 1. the hotel i stayed at is a very good one. 2. locate / somebody / the hotel / next to central park 3. see / people / the hotel / from far away / because it is very tall teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 615 4. construct / builders / the hotel / in the 1920s 5. use / somebody / the hotel / as a government office / during the war 6. often / visit / important people / the hotel 7. one of them is george michael. 8. often / organize / george michael / parties / at the hotel 9. at the moment / prepare / somebody / a room / for donald tusk b 1. the hotel i stayed at is very beautiful. 2. situate / somebody / the hotel / close to the sea. this is beautiful, but [to jest pocz tek nast pnego zdania] 3. so far / destroy / the sea / 5 buildings close to the hotel 4. construct / builders / the hotel / at the end of the 19th century 5. later / use / somebody / the hotel / as a police station 6. make / somebody / some changes / two years ago 7. add / somebody / a new swimming pool 8. buy / somebody / new furniture 9. at the moment / somebody / plant / trees / in front of the hotel jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 616 appendix b sample materials used in the treatment offered to cog passive voice: form the teacher explains the problem. to be + 3 forma czasownika [3rd verb form] the problem is explained (by the teacher). the problems are explained (by the teacher). the problem was explained (by the teacher). the problems were explained (by the teacher). the problem has been explained (by the teacher). the problems have been explained (by the teacher). the problem is being explained (by the teacher). the problems are being explained (by the teacher). passive voice: use (1) alexander graham bell a british inventor who went to live in canada and then the usa. bell invented the telephone. active bell invented the telephone. bell invented the telephone. telephonebell bell telephonebell telephone the telephone was invented by bell. subject topic subject topic telephone an apparatus with which people can talk to each other over long distances. the telephone was invented by alexander graham bell. passive the telephone was invented by bell. .................................................................. .................................................................. .................................................................. .................................................................. .................................................................. .................................................................. .................................................................. .................................................................. .................................................................. .................................................................. passive voice: use (2) all our money and passports were stolen. a man was arrested last night. the streets are cleaned every day. oil has been discovered at the north pole. this kind of jacket is considered very fashionable these days. a lot of attempts have been made to find the loch ness monster. teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 617 our money was stolen. a thief (someone) our money (practice materials and tasks were exactly the same as those in appendix a.) jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak, anna mystkowska-wiertelak 618 appendix c sample test form nazwisko i imi : …………………………..…………. grupa: ……………... data: ………….. [name: …………………………..…………………… group: ……………... date: …………..] zadanie pisemne 1 [written task 1] przygotuj opis domu w nowym jorku. ka da z poni szych numerowanych wskazówek powinna odpowiada jednemu zdaniu w twoim opisie, który nie mo e zawiera wi cej zda . kolejno zda powinna odpowiada kolejno ci wskazówek. zdania podkre lone nale y wstawi do opisu w niezmienionej formie. opis powinien zawiera wszystkie podane informacje, ale niektóre rzeczowniki mog zosta zamienione na zaimki (he, they, it, itp.) lub pomini te. w poszczególnych zdaniach postaraj si zastosowa odpowiednie czasy oraz odpowiedni stron : czynn lub biern . [write a description of a new york house. each numbered prompt below should correspond to one sentence in your description, which must not include more sentences. the order of sentences should follow the order of the prompts. the underlined sentences must appear in the description in an unaltered form. your description should include all the information given in the prompts, but some nouns may be replaced with pronouns (he, they, it, etc.) or left out. try to use the right tenses and the right voice, either active or passive, in different sentences of the description.] 1. the house i want to describe is very interesting. 2. locate / somebody / the house / in the suburbs / near a beautiful lake and park 3. protect / a high fence / the house / and / surround / an oriental garden / the house 4. design / japanese gardeners / this garden 5. later / learn / these gardeners / a new job 6. attend / these gardeners / many golf courses taught by the best golfers 7. eventually, the gardeners became golf instructors. 8. teach / these gardeners / many media personalities / in the 1930s 9. surprisingly / win / a lot of these personalities / important amateur golf competitions. 10. build / builders / the house / at the beginning of the 20th century 11. design / a famous american architect / the house 12. the architect’s name was henry howard. 13. also / design / henry howard / seven beautiful palaces in europe 14. damage / a flood / the house / in 1930 15. cause / heavy rainfalls / this flood 16. in addition / destroy / this flood / a lot of buildings in many villages around new york 17. rebuild / builders / the house / a year later 18. regard / most people / the house / as one of the most beautiful houses in the area / for a long time teaching the english active and passive voice with the help of cognitive grammar… 619 19. the area surrounding the house is very clean. garbage cans are small and no garbage is visible around them. this is because [to jest pocz tek nast pnego zdania] 20. pick up / somebody / garbage / three times a week 21. the area is also very safe. 22. patrol / the police and detectives / the area / very often 23. in fact / probably / patrol / somebody / the area / at this moment 24. the house has five rooms and two bathrooms. 25. see / twenty potential buyers / the house / in recent years 26. buy / a young couple from boston / the house / two months ago 27. their names are jerry and jane. 28. add / already / jerry and jane / a garage 29. build / an experienced engineer, carl smith / the garage 30. also / design / carl smith / jerry’s mother’s house / five years ago 31. also / buy / jerry and jane / two other houses / in new york / recently 32. plan / jerry and jane / currently / another purchase 377 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (3). 2017. 377-396 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.3.2 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the role of input and output tasks in grammar instruction: theoretical, empirical and pedagogical considerations alessandro benati university of portsmouth, uk alessandro.benati@port.ac.uk abstract in this paper, a review of the role of input, output and instruction in second language acquisition is provided. several pedagogical interventions in grammar instruction (e.g., processing instruction, input enhancement, structured output and collaborative output tasks) are presented and their effectiveness reviewed. a final and overall evaluation is provided at the end of the paper. keywords: input; input enhancement; output; processing instruction; collaborative output tasks; structured output tasks 1. introduction the role of input and output tasks in grammar instruction has been investigated from different research perspectives using various pedagogical interventions (for recent reviews see larsen-freeman, 2015; mystkowska-wiertelak & pawlak, 2012). the aim of this paper is to examine the characteristics of these pedagogical treatments and to discuss the implications for second language acquisition (sla) and language teaching. alessandro benati 378 the paper offers an overview on the current theoretical and pedagogical debate around the role of input, output and instruction in sla and language teaching. four inputand output-based instructional interventions in grammar instruction will be reviewed. these pedagogical options will be introduced (description and theoretical background), the main empirical findings briefly presented, and implications for sla and language teaching highlighted. a final assessment of the role of grammar tasks (the necessity to move from grammar input to grammar output tasks) in sla and language teaching will be provided. 2. the role of input input is the raw language data (carroll, 2001) that learners hear or read and entails a specific communicative intent. corder (1967) makes a distinction between input and intake. he defines input as what is available to the learner, whereas intake refers to what is actually internalized by the learner and eventually becomes part of the interlanguage system. in all contemporary sla theories input plays a key role. for universal grammar (ug) theory for example, input interacts with ug principles and internal mechanisms (see whong, gil, & marsden, 2013). in krashen’s (1982, 2009) monitor theory input is a key factor, and acquisition requires first and foremost exposure to comprehensible input (input that is easily processed). according to krashen’s input hypothesis, acquisition takes place when the learner understands input that contains grammatical forms that are at a higher level than the current state of the learner’s interlanguage. for sla to take place, learners must be exposed to comprehensible and message-oriented input. input is the primary data base on which learners build a linguistic system. in vanpatten’s (1996, 2004, 2015a) model of input processing, only part of the input is filtered through intake into the developing system and eventually becomes available to the learner for output purposes. changing the way learners process input and enriching their intake might have an effect on the developing system that subsequently should have an impact on how learners produce the target language. input processing is concerned with those psycholinguistic strategies and mechanisms by which learners derive intake from input. in vanpatten’s theory, when learners attend or notice input and process the message, a form-meaning connection is made. developing the learners’ ability to map one form to one meaning is therefore essential for acquisition. in emergentism (ellis, 2007; ellis & wulff, 2015), the learner is like a human computer that processes and tallies linguistic information in the input. in this theory, input plays an even more important role as, according to this theory, there are no special internal mechanisms that contain pre-existing linguistic information. the role of input and output tasks in grammar instruction: theoretical, empirical and pedagogical. . . 379 in the interaction hypothesis (gass 2003; gass & mackey, 2006, 2015), input is seen as a significant element/factor for acquisition without which learners cannot acquire a language. ellis (1997) distinguishes two types of input: interactional and non-interactional. in the case of interactional input (cf. also long, 2007; pica, 1994) he refers to input received during interaction where there is some kind of communicative exchange involving the learner and at least one other person (e.g., conversation, classroom interactions). in the case of non-interactional input, he refers to the kind of input that occurs in the context of nonreciprocal discourse where learners are not part of an interaction (e.g., announcements). in the former case, learners have the advantage of being able to negotiate meaning and make some conversational adjustments. this means that conversation and interaction make linguistic features salient to the learner. on the whole, input is absolutely necessary and there is no theory or approach to sla that does not recognize the importance of input. however, the question is: is input sufficient for language acquisition? white (2003, 2015) has argued that some forms or structures are more difficult to be acquired through positive evidence alone. this is particularly the case of a structure that is not part of the ug system. collins and ellis (2009) have suggested that there are a number of factors which affect the acquisition of linguistic constructions: the frequency and saliency of features of forms in oral input, their functional interpretations, and the reliabilities of their form-function mappings. overall, language teachers should consider the use of tasks devised in a way that, on one hand, enhance the grammatical features in the input, and on the other hand, provide learners with opportunities to focus on meaning (making correct form-meaning mappings). 3. the role of output output is the language that l2 learners produce, and it can be both written and oral. output is the ability to express a particular meaning by retrieving a particular form or structure and the ability to string structures and forms together. for monitor theory output plays little role in acquisition as the key ingredient is input. universal grammar maintains that a good deal of competence cannot come from learner production and can only come from input triggering universal mechanisms. the interaction hypothesis has examined interactions with and between non-natives to explore what kinds of modifications are made during conversations and how this might impact learner development. output causes changes in the input learners receive. feedback could also act as a signal that pushes alessandro benati 380 learners to scan the input so that language is better comprehended. thus, there seems to be an indirect causal link between output and acquisition, with input appearing again as a major and critical intervening factor. swain (1985, 1995) has developed a hypothesis called the comprehensible output hypothesis, according to which language production (oral and written) can help learners to generate new knowledge and consolidate or modify their existing knowledge. swain (1995) assigns several roles to output: · output practice helps learners to improve fluency. · output practice helps learners to check comprehension and linguistic correctness. · output practice helps learners to focus on form. · output helps learners to realize that the developing system is faulty and therefore notice a gap in their system. swain has pointed out that comprehensible input might not be sufficient to develop native-like grammatical competence and learners also need comprehensible output. learners need “pushed output,” that is speech or writing that will force learners to produce language correctly, precisely and appropriately. according to swain (1995, p. 249) “producing the language might be the trigger that forces the learner to pay attention to the means of expression needed in order to successfully convey his or her own intended meaning.” to summarize, the four functions of output in sla based on swain’s ideas are: (a) testing hypotheses about the structures and meanings of the target language, (b) receiving crucial feedback for the verification of these hypotheses, (c) forcing a shift from more meaning-based processing of the second language to a more syntactic mode, and (d) developing fluency and automaticity in interlanguage production. according to processability theory (pienemann & lenzing, 2015), l2 learners draw upon our vast network of connections (access) to retrieve words (access a word) and forms (e.g., access morphological inflections) to express meaning. there is a series of production procedures learners follow: lemma access (retrieving words), category procedure (e.g., use of inflections), phrasal procedure (use of inflections in a phrase), simplified s-procedure (exchange information from inside the sentence), s-procedure (exchange information between internal constituents) and subordinate clause procedure (exchange information across clauses). the last significant function of output is to create greater automaticity, which is one pedagogical goal in sla. little effort is required to execute an automatic process, when the learner carries out the task without awareness or attention, as it has become routinized and automatized just as the steps involved in walking towards a bike, getting out the key, unlocking it, pushing it, getting on it and riding it, requiring little thought and less time. skehan (1996) has proposed a series of possible contributions for output: output generates the role of input and output tasks in grammar instruction: theoretical, empirical and pedagogical. . . 381 better input (learners have the opportunity to negotiate meaning and provide input for somebody else); output promotes syntactic processing (learners have the opportunity to pay attention to the means by which meaning is expressed); output helps learners in their hypotheses about grammar (learners have the opportunity to try out hypotheses); and output helps the development of discourse skills (learners have the opportunity to move from sentence to discourse production). according to vanpatten, the ability to produce forms and structures in output does not necessarily mean that forms and structures have been acquired. we need to distinguish between output as interaction with others and output as practice of forms and structures. in vanpatten’s (2003) view, learners’ implicit system develops as learners process the input they receive. output promotes noticing of linguistic features in the input and conscious awareness of language and language use. it can also provide additional input to learners so that they can consolidate or modify their existing knowledge. in van patten’s (2003) view, the role of output is important as it promotes awareness and interaction with other learners, but it does not play a direct role in the creation of the internal linguistic system. van patten (2004, p. 42) has maintained that “we have little if any experimental data that clearly show that acquisition is somehow output dependent.” vanpatten (2003, p. 20) makes also a clear distinction between skill acquisition and the creation of an implicit system. conscious presentation and manipulation of forms through drills and output practice might help learners to develop certain skills to use certain forms/structures correctly and accurately in controlled tasks, but it has very little impact on the development of the implicit system (mental representation) responsible for acquisition. overall language teachers should consider grammar output tasks which are meaning-based. during effective grammar output tasks learners must make output that encodes a specific message. 4. the role of instruction is second language acquisition theories monitor theory (krashen, 1982, 2009) argues that instruction plays a limited role in sla. krashen suggests that l2 learners acquire language mainly through exposure to comprehensible and meaning-bearing input. learners internalize grammar by being exposed to samples of language in a specific communicative context. the acquisition of the grammatical system of another language is driven by exposure to the input and not by practicing grammatical rules. monitor theory also indicates that grammar instruction is constrained by the acquisition of some linguistic features in a fixed and predicted order. morphological features such as the progressive -ing in english are acquired (no matter the learner’s l1) before the regular past tense -ed, or irregular past tense forms, which are acquired before third-person singular -s. instruction alessandro benati 382 is therefore constrained by a universal and predictable order of acquisition based on ug assumptions. universal grammar theory (white, 2003, 2015) views language as an abstract and complex system. although many aspects of language are acquired by interaction with input (e.g., syntax, morphology, lexicon), one exception are those aspects of language that are universal and built in prior to exposure to the input language. all humans have universal features of language which constrain the acquisition of grammar. for example, sentences have underlying hierarchical structure consisting of phrases (e.g., noun phrase, verb phrase) which require a “head” and a “complement.” this information is built into l2 learners’ internal system and learners make use of the input to process any possible variations in the target language. instruction has no effect on this subconscious knowledge. chomsky (2005) has once again highlighted the crucial role that input plays in language acquisition. o’grady, lee and kwak (2009) have emphasized the role of the frequency of form-meaning connections for sla. montrul (2009) argued that high quality linguistic input is essential for successful language acquisition. processability theory (pienemann, 1998; pienemann & lenzing, 2015) argues that l2 learners acquire single structures (i.e., negation, question formation) through predictable stages. according to this theory, instruction is constrained by these developmental stages (there is a sequence of acquisition of particular features), and l2 learners follow a very rigid route in the acquisition of grammatical structures. the main implication of this view is that the role of instruction is limited and constrained by l2 learners’ readiness to acquire a particular structure. instruction might be detrimental to acquisition if it does not consider learners’ current developmental stage (teachability hypothesis). instruction must consider learners’ psycholinguistic readiness for it to be effective. input processing theory (vanpatten, 1996, 2004, 2015a) refers to how learners initially perceive formal features of language input, and the strategies or mechanisms that might guide learners in processing them. learners seem to process input for meaning (words) before they process it for form (grammatical features). learners seem to parse sentences by assigning subject or agent status to the first noun or pronoun they encounter in a sentence. these default strategies cause a delay in the acquisition of formal properties of the target language. according to this theory, instruction is effective and beneficial if it manipulates input so that learners process grammar more efficiently and accurately. the pedagogical intervention derived from this theory is called processing instruction. learners should be exposed to meaningful input that contains many instances of the same grammatical meaning-form relationship (e.g., verb ending in -ed encodes a past event). grammar instruction should be designed to circumvent false default processing strategies and replace them with appropriate ones. the role of input and output tasks in grammar instruction: theoretical, empirical and pedagogical. . . 383 skill-learning theory (dekeyser, 2015) views sla as a process which entails moving from the controlled mode (declarative knowledge) to automatic mode (procedural knowledge) through repeated practice. learners need to be taught explicitly and need to practice the various grammatical features and skills until they are well established (fluency). instruction is beneficial when it helps explicit knowledge to become proceduralized. for emergentism and usage-based theories (ellis & wulff, 2015), sla is mainly implicit and frequency in the input language plays a key role. language and its properties emerge over time and are the result of cognitive mechanisms interacting with input. although the role of instruction is limited and it is not always effective, it can have a facilitative role in developing “noticing” of target forms which might not be salient in the input language. attention to language forms is necessary; however, instruction is not always effective, and this is due to a number of factors (e.g., instruction is sometimes provided when learners are not psycholinguistically ready to acquire the next structure or form, there is a mismatch between explicit knowledge and implicit mental representation). for the interaction hypothesis (gass & mackey, 2015), comprehensible input might not be sufficient to develop native-like grammatical competence and l2 learners also need comprehensible output. learners should be involved in meaningful learning tasks where they have opportunities to communicate and negotiate meaning. instruction might be beneficial if it is provided by enhancing the input through the use of different techniques (e.g., input enhancement, textual enhancement). it might have a facilitative role in helping learners pay attention to the formal properties of a target language without the need of metalinguistic discussion. sociocultural theory (lantolf, thorne, & poehner, 2015) regards instruction as crucial to l2 development in the classroom; it should be geared to the zone of proximal development that is beyond learners’ actual development level. the theory suggests that during instruction (metalinguistic and explicit in nature), awareness of the structure and function of language is developed by using it socially. the environment provides the context and assists in the understanding of grammatical properties of the language. a review of contemporary theories on the role of instruction in the field of sla leads to the following conclusions: · grammar instruction does not alter the route of acquisition (i.e., acquisition orders and developmental sequences). · grammar instruction may have some beneficial effects on speeding up the rate of acquisition. · grammar instruction as input manipulation can facilitate language processing. alessandro benati 384 · grammar instruction might be able to foster explicit and implicit knowledge. · grammar instruction can foster learners’ attention to language forms in the course of meaningful task interaction. as a result of these findings a number of pedagogical interventions have been proposed and researched as alternatives to traditional grammar instruction which consists of paradigmatic explanation followed by mechanical practice (the drilling of forms and structures of the target language). these findings indicate that: (a) grammar instruction might facilitate sla if it is provided in combination with a focus on meaning, and that (b) grammar instruction should move from input only (manipulating input) to output practice. grammar tasks should ensure that learners first process input language correctly and efficiently and then develop the competence to access the information about target features in their internal systems to create output. 5. pedagogical interventions in l2 grammar instruction one of the key issues in sla concerns the role of grammar instruction. does grammar instruction make a difference? is there an effective pedagogy to teach grammar that is better than others? these are some of the questions that scholars in this field have addressed in their attempts to find the most appropriate and effective way to learn grammar (cf. nassaji & fotos, 2011). while many scholars address some of these questions to develop a better understanding of how people acquire grammar, language instructors and teachers are in search of the most effective way to approach the teaching of grammar in the language classroom. in this section, four pedagogical interventions in l2 grammar instruction will be reviewed. 5.1. processing instruction processing instruction aims at changing the way input is perceived and processed by l2 learners. processing instruction is an input-based approach to grammar instruction predicated on input processing theory (vanpatten, 1996, 2004, 2015a; vanpatten & jegerski, 2010). input processing refers to the fact that language learners are exposed to input which contains linguistic forms. when l2 learners process input, they have limited resources to ensure that they make correct formmeaning connections. when they hear a sentence such as i talked to my teacher and understand that talked means that the action is in the past, a form-meaning connection is made. they cannot just notice the form as they need to comprehend the meaning that the particular form encodes. vanpatten (2015b) has identified two main processing strategies learners might use when they are exposed the role of input and output tasks in grammar instruction: theoretical, empirical and pedagogical. . . 385 to language input. according to the primacy of meaning principle, learners will first process input for meaning before they process the linguistic form. the result of this will be that learners will not make natural connections between forms in the input and their meanings (e.g., tense markers, aspectual markers, subjectverb agreement, subjunctive mood). according to the first noun principle, learners will tend to process the first noun or pronoun they encounter in a sentence as the subject or agent. the result of this will be that learners will misinterpret sentences in which the first element in a sentence is not the subject or agent (e.g., word order, passive constructions, case marker, object pronouns). empirical research investigating the effects of processing instruction (benati & lee, 2015) has demonstrated that it is a more effective pedagogical intervention than traditional instruction and other more output-based instructional treatments in developing learners’ ability to process input (e.g., first noun principle, lexical preference principle) in various languages (french, italian, spanish, english, russian, japanese, german, and arabic among others) and linguistic forms (e.g., spanish past tense, italian future tense, copular verbs in spanish [ser and estar], english causative forms, english past simple tense, english present simple tense, japanese passive constructions, arabic gender agreement, and french faire causative). these positive results are also measurable on l2 learners’ ability to produce the target linguistic features during output practice. through processing instruction, l2 learners with different l1s (e.g., english, italian, chinese, japanese, korean, and german among others) gain the ability to interpret and produce target items in sentence and discourse level tasks (benati & lee, 2010), and they seem to be able to transfer this processing training into the processing and producing of another form (with similar processing problems) on which they have received no instruction (benati & lee, 2008). processing instruction is a durable, long-lasting and effective pedagogical intervention no matter the age (angelovska & benati, 2013; benati & angelovska, 2015), aptitude and motivation of the learners (benati & farhat, 2017). a meta-analysis of the effects of processing instruction is under way (cf. leeser, 2017). processing instruction aims to alter the processing strategies/principles “learners take to the task of comprehension and to encourage them to make better form-meaning connections than they would if left to their own devices” (van patten, 1996, p. 60). processing instruction is an input-based option in grammar instruction which guides l2 learners to focus on small parts/features of the targeted language when they process the input. its characteristics have been described in detail in previous literature (benati & lee, 2008, 2010; farley, 2005; lee & benati, 2007a, 2007b, 2009; lee & vanpatten, 2003; vanpatten, 1996, 2015b; wong, 2004, 2005). alessandro benati 386 processing instruction consists of two main components: explicit information and structured input practice. the first component is the explicit information component. learners are given explicit information about a linguistic structure or form. forms or structures are presented one at a time (e.g., regular past forms, passive constructions). the explicit information is used to alert l2 learners of possible processing problems. it is not traditional explicit information. l2 learners are given information on a particular processing principle that may negatively affect their picking up the form or structure during comprehension. the explicit information provided should help l2 learners to be aware of this processing problem when they process input. the second component is the structured input practice component. after receiving explicit information, learners are pushed to process the form or structure through structured input activities. in structured input activities, the input is manipulated in particular ways to make learners become dependent on form and structure to get meaning. as outlined by wong (2004, p. 35), processing instruction “pushes learners to abandon their inefficient processing strategies for more optimal ones so that better form-meaning connections are made.” van patten and sanz (1995) have originally produced the following guidelines for developing structured input activities: · present one thing at a time. · keep meaning in focus. · move from sentences to connected discourse. · use both oral and written input. · have the learner do something with the input. · keep the learner’s processing strategies in mind. wong (2004, p. 37) has emphasized that “for an activity to be a structured input activity, that activity must somehow push learners to circumvent an inefficient processing strategy.” identifying the processing problem in a target language is the most important step in developing structured input activities. structured input activities are of two types: referential and affective. referential activities are those for which there is a right or wrong answer and for which the learner must rely on the targeted grammatical form to get meaning. affective structured input activities are those in which learners express an opinion, belief, or some other affective response and are engaged in processing information about the real world. learners might be asked to express an opinion or view about something. learners must be engaged in processing the input sentences and must respond to the input sentence in some way through referential and affective types of structured input activities. processing instruction is a pedagogical intervention that through the manipulation and restructuring of the input might help learners to acquire grammatical and syntactic features of a target language. the role of input and output tasks in grammar instruction: theoretical, empirical and pedagogical. . . 387 5.2. input enhancement pedagogical treatments (textual enhancement and input flood) scholars in sla have agreed that l2 learners must be exposed to input and that input must be comprehensible and meaning-oriented in order to facilitate sla. krashen (1982) has argued that conscious learning has no effects on the ability of l2 learners to acquire and use an l2 in spontaneous communication. schmidt (1990) has suggested that l2 learners require attention in order to successfully process forms in the input. learners must first notice a form in the input for that form to be processed. given the importance of “noticing” a form in the input, the question is: how can we best facilitate the noticing (noticing is different than processing where learners have to make a connection between one form and its meaning) of a certain form in the input? input enhancement has been defined by sharwood smith (1991) as a process by which linguistic data will become more salient for l2 learners. this form of intervention (enhancing the input to allow learners to notice some specific forms in the input) should effect changes in learners’ linguistic competence. sharwood smith (1991, 1993) has proposed various techniques to enhance the input which vary in terms of explicitness and elaboration. a practical example would be to underline or to capitalize a specific grammatical item in a text to help learners notice that particular grammatical feature (textual enhancement). a different technique would be to modify a text so that a particular target item would appear over and over again so that the text will contain many more exemplars of the same feature (input flood). input enhancement is a pedagogical intervention in grammar instruction through which input is made more noticeable to the l2 learner. the results of the empirical research investigating the effects of textual enhancements are quite mixed. overall, findings have shown that textual enhancement has positive effects (benati, 2016). lee and huang (2008) conducted a meta-analysis of existing research on the effects of textual enhancement. despite showing smallsize effects for textual enhancement, their analysis has indicated that input enhancement is an effective instructional tool and it is better than no enhancement of forms. however, a number of variables might constitute a constraint (e.g., proficiency level, the developmental stage and the degree of readiness of the learner, the type of linguistic feature chosen, and treatment intensity). input enhancement techniques help teachers to expose learners to comprehensible input and positive evidence while at the same time drawing learners’ attention to some linguistic properties of the target language. in order to help l2 learners notice a particular feature, we might want to provide learners with typographical cues such as bolding and italics to draw their attention to grammatical forms in the text. this technique is called textual enhancement and alessandro benati 388 it is used to make particular features of written input more salient with the intention to help learners notice these forms and make form-meaning connections. the target form is enhanced by visually altering its appearance in the text (italicized, bolded, underlined). oral input enhancement can also be provided by using special stress, intonation and gestures in spoken input. designing input enhancement tasks will involve following these guidelines: · choose a grammatical feature learners need to notice. · highlight the feature in the text using a textual enhancement technique (e.g., bolding, underlying). · keep learners’ attention on meaning. · do not provide any metalinguistic explanation. the form should be highlighted in the dialogue with the use of a textual enhancement technique with the hope that learners will notice it. the advantages of this textual enhancement activity are listed as follows (wong, 2005, p. 56): · learners can be exposed to more instances of the target form; there are more chances that they will notice the form. · learners will be exposed to meaning-bearing input from this type of tasks. · it is a form of input enhancement that can be easily integrated and it is easy to use. a review of the main empirical studies measuring the relative effects of input flood has showed that this instructional treatment (benati, 2016) is effective in increasing learners’ knowledge of what is possible in the target language. its effectiveness is determined by factors such as the length of the treatment and the nature of the linguistic feature. as wong (2005) has affirmed, in input flood the input learners received is saturated with the form that we hope learners will notice and possibly acquire. we do not usually highlight the form in any way to draw attention to it nor do we tell learners to pay attention to the form. we merely saturate the input with the form. (p. 37) when we design input flood activities instructors should follow these guidelines (wong, 2005, p. 44): · grammatical tasks using input flood should either be used in written or oral input. · the input learners receive must be modified so that it contains many instances of the same form/structure. · input flood must be meaningful and learners must be doing something with the input (i.e., reconstruct a story, draw a picture). the main purpose of designing input flood activities is to help learners be exposed to a greater amount of input (through this technique) containing the target form, the role of input and output tasks in grammar instruction: theoretical, empirical and pedagogical. . . 389 which will allow learners to notice and subsequently acquire this form. as pointed out by wong (2005, p. 43), the overall advantages for input flood are the following: · input flood material can be used in texts and content that are familiar to l2 learners and in which learners are interested. · the instructor can simply manipulate any materials so that this input contains many uses of a particular target form. the main advantage of input flood is that it provides comprehensible meaningbearing input. it is also effective as it does not disrupt the flow of communication (wong, 2005, p. 42). however, as underscored by wong (2005, p. 43), “because this technique is so implicit, it is difficult for instructors to know whether learners are actually learning anything through the flood.” 5.3. collaborative output tasks considering the various roles that output can have in sla, we need to look at various collaborative output tasks (e.g., dictogloss and jigsaw tasks) that might help learners in acquiring the grammatical properties of a target language. pushing learners to produce output through collaborative tasks might facilitate the accurate and appropriate use of language forms and structures. dictogloss is a type of task-based collaborative output activity which aims at helping learners to use their grammar resources to reconstruct a text and become aware of their own shortcomings and needs. it consists of a listening phase and a reconstruction phase when learners are asked to reconstruct a text rather than write down the exact words that are dictated. as the text is read at a natural speed, students cannot write down every word but only key words, and they have to understand the meaning and use their knowledge of grammar in order to reconstruct it. wajnryb (1990) has stated that the dictogloss procedure consists of four stages: · preparation, when learners are informed about the topic of the text and through a series of warm-up discussions they are given the necessary vocabulary to cope with the task. it is at this stage that they are also organized into groups. · dictation, when learners hear the text for the first time at natural speed. the first time they do not take any notes. the second time, learners are asked to note down key words to help them remember the content and reconstruct the text. · reconstruction, when learners work together in small groups and they need to reconstruct the text with correct grammar and content. · analysis and correction, when learners analyze, compare and correct their texts. this is achieved with the help of the teacher and the other groups. alessandro benati 390 dictogloss is a very effective technique for a number of reasons: (a) learners are encouraged to focus their attention on form and meaning and all four language skills are practiced, (b) learners develop a need for communication and for group work, (c) learners can monitor and adjust their interlanguage, and (d) learners have ample opportunity for discussion and negotiation. in a jigsaw collaborative output task, learners can work in pairs or in small groups. each pair or group has different information and they have to exchange their information to complete the task. jigsaw tasks consist of the following procedure: · each learner in a pair or group is given a partially completed text/chart/ passage. the text includes a cloze component. · one grammatical form is removed from the text (learners’ version). · learners will all have to ask the instructor to supply the missing information in order to complete the task. this type of task provides learners with an opportunity to direct their attention to the target form. it also provides a great amount of negotiation as all participants have to speak and understand each other to complete the task. in a typical jigsaw task, learners are asked to work in pairs. they each have different information, and they have to give and receive information to complete the task. each pair is given a partially completed chart containing different pieces of information about four people (paul, john, sarah, joanne). the information might be about where they come from, how many other people live in their house, how many pets they have, what their favourite sports are, and what music they like best. learners take turns to ask and answer questions regarding the four people without looking at their partner’s chart. both partners must request and supply the missing information in order to complete all the details concerning the four people. several studies have empirically examined (cf. nassaji, 2016) the role of collaborative output tasks (dictogloss and jigsaw collaborative output tasks). the overall findings showed that when learners are involved in the co-production of language through such tasks, they notice gaps in their knowledge and they make links between one form and one meaning. these collaborative output tasks also promote opportunities for attention to form and corrective feedback. 5.4. structured output tasks structured output tasks are an effective alternative to mechanical output practice. as stated by lee and vanpatten (2003), structured output activities have two main characteristics: (a) they involve the exchange of previously unknown information, and (b) they require learners to access a particular form or structure in order to process meaning. the guidelines to produce structured output tasks are the following: the role of input and output tasks in grammar instruction: theoretical, empirical and pedagogical. . . 391 · present one thing at a time. · keep meaning in focus. · move from sentences to connected discourse. · use both oral and written output. · others must respond to the content of the output. · the learner must have some knowledge of the form or structure. the overall results (cf. benati & batziou, 2017) of empirical studies investigating the effects of structured output tasks versus structured input tasks have indicated that structured input practice is more effective at altering input processing problems (primacy of meaning and first noun principles) and subsequently has an impact on learners’ developing system and what learners can access under controlled situations. however, structured output practice is effective if it follows structured input practice. research investigating the role of input and output tasks reaffirms the importance of input-based practice as a key pedagogical tool and make a contribution to the view that this practice should precede output practice (structured-input grammar tasks should precede structured-output grammar tasks). 6. an evaluation traditional grammar instruction is not an effective pedagogical intervention in grammar instruction. paradigms are not the way information is organized and processed in our mind/brain. despite the fact that the effects of grammar instruction are limited and constrained, there are pedagogical interventions that in certain conditions enhance and speed up the way languages are learned, and are an effective way to provide grammar instruction (cf. benati, 2013). processing instruction helps learners to process input correctly and efficiently and therefore increases learners’ intake of the target language. input enhancement treatments provide language learners with access to comprehensible input and positive evidence. input enhancement helps learners to pay attention to grammatical forms in the input. collaborative output grammar tasks promote the opportunity for negotiation of form and at the same time develop learners’ linguistic skills (noticing). structured output tasks should follow structured input tasks to ensure learners develop the abilities to interpret and produce sentences and discourse containing a target linguistic feature. grammar instruction should move from input to output practice. language learners create an abstract system similarly to the way in which l1 learners do. mental representation of a language bears no resemblance to what is traditionally taught and practiced (paradigms + drill practice). mental representation builds up over time due to consistent and constant exposure to alessandro benati 392 input data and interaction with universal properties (vanpatten & rothman, 2014). therefore, paradigms lacking psycholinguistic validity and drill practice do nothing to foster the development of representation, but instead might develop a learning-like behavior (learning how to do something but not developing the underlying competence about something). knowing this clearly indicates that grammar tasks should initially be designed and used to facilitate learners’ noticing and processing forms in the input and help them to make correct form-mapping connections. output grammar tasks (e.g., collaborative tasks and structured output tasks) should therefore follow input grammar tasks (e.g., structured input tasks and input enhancement treatments) and should be used to promote language production and the development of grammatical skills. structured output tasks for example enable learners to access forms or structures in learners’ developing system to communicate ideas (message). a coherent grammar lesson is one that takes students from noticing and processing a grammatical feature in the 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(2005). input enhancement: from theory and research to the classroom. new york: mcgraw-hill 775 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (4). 2018. 775-794 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.4.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt a study of taiwanese university students’ english use, learning goals and attitudes toward english as a lingua franca wen-hsing luo national tsing hua university, hsinchu, taiwan wluo@mail.nd.nthu.edu.tw abstract this study investigates taiwanese university students’ experience of english use, aims of learning english and attitudes toward english as a lingua franca (elf). the notion of elf has been researched in the field of english language teaching. however, english teaching practice targeting native-speaker (ns) norms is still prevailing in english classrooms. to better respond to learner needs of using english in the age of globalization, this study explores learners’ english learning and use in relation to their attitudes toward elf. research methods including interviewing and questionnaire survey were employed to collect data from english majors at a university in taiwan. the study finds that the learners were aware of the communicative value of elf and actually used elf in intercultural communication. the learners’ use of english in context affected their attitudes toward elf and aims of learning english. it is found that the learners preferred english conforming to ns norms; yet, they wished to learn local variation of english concerning accents and word use. in light of the findings, the author suggests that english teachers incorporate an elf perspective into english instruction and help learners develop intercultural awareness and competencies. keywords: english as a lingua franca; language attitude; language learning wen-hsing luo 776 1. introduction in the past decade, the notion of english as a lingua franca (elf) has been discussed and researched (e.g., baker, 2012; cogo, 2012; jenkins, 2009, 2012; jenkins, cogo, & dewey, 2011; murray, 2012; park & wee, 2011; sowden, 2012). due to the global spread of english, the majority of users of english for international communication are non-native speakers (non-nss) (crystal, 1997; graddol, 1997; 2006). in the global context, english learners will mostly encounter non-nss whose “englishes” might deviate from ns english usage. therefore, english teaching practices which privilege ns norms may not “adequately prepare” english learners for using english with people “from other english-speaking contexts” (matsuda & friedrich, 2011, p. 332). in taiwan, english has been traditionally taught in schools as a foreign language conforming to native norms, mostly american english. although the importance of english for international communication has been widely recognized, the majority of english learners in taiwan rarely use the target language outside the classroom. the notion of elf for communication, of which the primary concern is english users’ intelligibility among nss and non-nss alike, has not as yet received due attention in taiwan. as global realizations of english can only emerge from understandings of local contexts achieved by and for “the teachers and learners who constitute that context” (young & walsh, 2010, p. 136), it is important to examine the notion of elf from the teacher and learner perspectives in the local context. furthermore, to better respond to learner needs for english learning and use in the age of globalization and therefore to develop curricula and teaching materials accordingly, it is worthwhile exploring learners’ english learning and use in relation to their attitudes toward elf. to meet this end, through interviews and a questionnaire survey, the present study investigated: (1) taiwanese university students’ use of elf for intercultural communication, (2) the students’ attitudes toward elf, and (3) the students’ aims of learning english. in light of the findings, the author makes suggestions on english pedagogy and curriculum design. 2. literature review studies investigating elf from various perspectives have been published during the past decade (e.g., burns, 2005; jenkins, 2002, 2007a; kirkpatrick & sussex, 2012; matsuda, 2012; mauranen & ranta, 2009; seidlhofer, 2004, 2011; sharifian, 2009), while a few studies have explored possible pedagogical approaches to elf (e.g., dewey, 2012; galloway, 2013; hino & oda, 2015). in the present study, elf is defined as “english being used as a lingua franca, the common language of choice, among speakers who come from different linguacultural backgrounds” a study of taiwanese university students’ english use, learning goals and attitudes toward english. . . 777 (jenkins, 2009, p. 200). according to jenkins (2009), elf involves common ground, local variation and accommodation skills. she defined the common ground of elf as linguistic forms shared with english as a native language (enl) and forms that differ from enl but have arisen through contact between elf users. although a definition of the common ground of elf has been put forward, it is argued that elf cannot be easily defined in terms of linguistic features and should not be viewed as a variety of english. elf, like english for academic/specific purposes (eap/esp), should be realized as a functionally defined term (cf. matsuda & friedrich, 2011) or one perspective of english use (luo, 2017). in addition to common ground and local variation, elf involves “substantial potential for accommodation” (jenkins 2009, p. 201). the accommodation strategies frequently used in an elf context include repetition, paraphrasing, code-switching, clarification, self-repair, the avoidance of localized vocabulary and idioms, and “let it pass” strategy (see studies by cogo, 2009; cogo & dewey, 2006; firth, 1996; kaur, 2009; kirkpatrick, 2008; mauranen, 2006). some studies have explored elf teaching from non-ns teachers’ perspective and have revealed that while the teachers find the concept of elf attractive, they are not clear about its nature (e.g., luo, 2017; sifakis, 2009; sifakis & sougari, 2005; suzuki, 2011; young & walsh, 2010). although english teachers acknowledge the use of elf for intercultural communication, they consider it challenging to give elf instruction in the local context (luo, 2017). echoing the previous research on teacher perceptions of elf, suzuki (2011) reported that student teachers in japan were unwilling to include english varieties other than standard american or british english in their future teaching, even though they were aware of the importance of english language diversity. the above discussion indicates that non-native english teachers are ambivalent toward the teaching of elf regardless of the fact that learners of english will likely become users of elf for intercultural communication in the future. to better prepare learners of english to effectively communicate with other english speakers in the global context, the author argues that english curricula with an elf perspective need to be in place for the learners. as previous research has suggested, english teachers should prepare learners for realistic situations, i.e., communication involving non-nss (sifakis, 2009) and take responsibility for developing content and methods that are appropriate to the local context (mckay, 2003). additionally, to transform student teachers’ view of elf, teacher educators need to convey information on elf in teacher preparation courses (suzuki, 2011) and to raise student teachers’ awareness of elf. a few studies have investigated elf from university students’ perspective (e.g., borghetti & beaven, 2017; csizér & kontra, 2012; erling, 2007; ke, 2009), and there seems to be a contradiction between the learners’ attitudes and beliefs wen-hsing luo 778 regarding elf (borghetti & beaven, 2017). the studies have found that while those who have used english in lingua franca situations are aware of the global use of english, most learners still consider english as a foreign language belonging to native speakers of english (ke, 2009). native norms have a strong effect on the learners regarding their beliefs toward english and their learning goals, even if the learners are aware of the need for elf for intercultural communication with non-nss (csizér & kontra, 2012). the previous studies show that english teachers and learners are aware of the value of elf for intercultural communication in the global context; yet, elt approaches and learner beliefs toward learning english are still affected by a native-language paradigm. it has been argued that teaching materials, teachers and testing practices are the reasons why ns norms continue to “exert a strong effect” on english learners (csizér & kontra, 2012, p. 7), and the current approaches to elt ought to be re-examined to incorporate an elf perspective (dewey, 2012). in view of these findings, the author pondered on the following questions: (1) how do taiwanese learners of english use elf for intercultural communication in context? (2) what are the learners’ attitudes toward using elf for intercultural communication, and (3) what “kind of english(es)” do the learners wish to learn in order to communicate effectively with their interlocutors in context? to answer these questions, the author was prompted to conduct the present study. although this study focused on english learners at the university level in taiwan, it is hoped that the findings may shed light on the understanding of elf learners/users in general. 3. research methods in this study, the author employed research instruments consisting of a questionnaire survey and interviews, which allowed data triangulation and enabled the author to cast light on the conceptualization of elf from the learner perspective (johnson, 1992). the questionnaire survey was conducted to document learners’ use of english in relation to their learning goals and perceptions of elf for communication, while interviews provided a detailed description of the issues being addressed. this study was conducted in a university located in the northern part of taiwan. the students at this university, like most english learners in taiwan, learned english as a school subject and rarely used english outside the classroom. a total of 140 undergraduate students of english major at this university, including 119 females (85%) and 21 males (15%), participated in the survey. the survey participants’ ages ranged from 19 to 21 years. it is argued that, compared to students of other majors, english-major students are more knowledgeable and informed about issues related to english. as well, it is likely that they have more opportunities to use elf for communication in context, and therefore could be appropriate informants for the present study. a study of taiwanese university students’ english use, learning goals and attitudes toward english. . . 779 the questionnaire survey was conducted to obtain general information about the participants’ experiences of english learning and use and their perceptions of elf. in addition to demographic data, the questionnaire included 13 items using a 5-likert scale (5 – strongly agree; 1 – strongly disagree) and two openended questions (see the questionnaire in appendix a). the survey was administered after class time and it took approximately 10 minutes to complete the questionnaire. before taking the survey, the participants were asked to read an article written by jenkins (2007b) addressing issues concerning the use of english in lingua franca contexts. through reading this article and discussing its content, the participants were able to get a basic idea about elf before they answered the questions on the survey (cf. young & walsh, 2010). to explore the participants’ experiences of english learning and use in relation to their attitudes toward elf more in detail, group interviews were conducted following the survey. the author invited the survey participants to interview (see the interview protocol in appendix b) and 15 students (ten females and five males) agreed to participate in the interviews on a voluntary basis. the interviews were conducted in groups to alleviate the stress which the students might otherwise have experienced if they were at an individual interview (greenbaum, 1988). there were a total of three group interviews, in each of which five students participated. each of the group interviews lasted approximately one-and-a-half to two hours. all of the interviews were tape-recorded, transcribed and translated to english by the author. data collection included qualitative data (i.e., interview transcripts and comments written by the surveyed students) and quantitative survey data (i.e., the students’ responses to the 13 items on the survey using a 5-likert scale). the interviewed students were labeled from s1 to s15 and the survey questionnaires were numbered from r1 to r140 for the purpose of data analysis. grounded theory method (glaser, 1998) was employed in analyzing the qualitative data. the author began the qualitative analysis with scrutinizing the data in an iterative and comparing process for themes that emerged. next, the author compared these themes to arrive at a set of focused codes, which then were used in synthesizing, integrating, organizing and conceptualizing the large segments of the qualitative data (charmaz, 2014). finally, findings, which were grounded in the data and accounted for the data, were developed. descriptive statistics and t-test analysis were used for analyzing the quantitative data. while data analysis of this study mainly focused on the qualitative information supplemented by the quantitative data, the author managed to compare and synthesize the qualitative and quantitative findings to gain a holistic understanding about the issues being studied (cf. ke & cahyani, 2014). wen-hsing luo 780 4. findings and discussion in this section, the findings are discussed in view of the research questions: (1) taiwanese university students’ experiences of using elf for intercultural communication, (2) the students’ attitudes toward elf, and (3) the students’ aims of learning english(es). 4.1. students’ use of elf for intercultural communication the survey (see table 1) shows that 78.6% of the students had experiences of using english with foreigners (non-taiwanese). the interview data and the comments written by the surveyed students reveal the contexts where they used elf for intercultural communication. these contexts include: (1) on-line communication (e.g., on facebook and in on-line chat rooms), (2) on trips abroad (e.g., asking local people for information), (3) in the workplace (e.g., working in a restaurant where there are many international customers), (4) on a short-term study abroad (e.g., attending a summer school in canada), (5) on a working holiday program overseas (e.g., on a short-term working holiday program in australia), (6) on a short-term visit to sister schools abroad (e.g., visiting a sister school in korea), (7) talking with friends (e.g., talking with friends who do not speak chinese), and (8) in classrooms (e.g., talking with foreign teachers in english). the examples listed above were taken from the comments written by the surveyed students when they described their experiences of using elf for communication. table 1 demographic characteristics of participants (n = 140) item n %* sex male female 21 119 15 85 years of learning english less than 6 years 6-8 years 9-12 years more than 12 years 2 15 88 35 1.4 10.7 62.9 25 experiences of using english with foreigners yes no 110 30 78.6 21.4 experiences of being abroad yes no 54 86 38.6 61.4 note. *the percentage was rounded up from the second decimal point. a study of taiwanese university students’ english use, learning goals and attitudes toward english. . . 781 while the survey data reveals the contexts where the students used elf for intercultural communication, the in-depth interviews provided details about how they used elf in these contexts. two major themes emerged from the interview data: (1) english use varied: oral communication vs. written form and nss vs. non-nss; and (2) using accommodation strategies. the interview data reveals that the students’ use of english for intercultural communication varied depending on whether they were using the language for written or oral communication. namely, the students focused on the accuracy of language use (e.g., grammar correctness) in writing but cared less in oral communication. for instance, s2 and s6 thought spoken language was different from written language. with the former, they focused on information exchange, while with the latter on spelling and grammar. it is also found that the students were concerned about the accuracy of their use of english for communication when their interlocutors were native speakers or highly proficient english users. they would try to speak english as accurately as possible to indicate that they were as proficient in english as their interlocutors. in contrast, when talking with less proficient users of english, the students cared less about standards and rules and focused on getting their meaning across. as s3 commented, if she spoke english too fast or in standard forms, her interlocutors (who were less proficient) would probably not understand what she said. the study finds that the students attended to english standards concerning grammar and pronunciation when using english for communication in an elf context. yet, the degree of attention they paid to the standard language norms varied depending on the forms of language use (i.e., written or oral) and the native-likeness of the interlocutors (cf. ke & cahyani, 2014). the students (e.g., s2, s3 and s6) changed their use of lexis and grammar for the efficiency of communication (cf. cogo & dewey, 2006). the english language used by the students for communication with their interlocutors was arising through contact between the students and their interlocutors and was part of “the common ground” of elf for the users (jenkins, 2009). the students’ report on how they used english in elf interaction indicates that the use of elf is not “the deployment of a particular set of language norms,” but rather “a continually renewed, co-operatively modified, somewhat hybridised linguistic resource” (jenkins, cogo & dewey, 2011, p. 303). the students said that they employed various accommodation strategies, such as guessing, repetition, avoidance of difficult vocabulary and adjustment of speech speed, to make their speech intelligible for their interlocutors. the following excerpts from the students’ comments during the interviews are some of the examples: wen-hsing luo 782 “當我用英文和外國人溝通時，如果我不確定他們的意思，我會用猜的或是重 複他 們所說的或是問清楚他們所說的事情。(when i use english for communication with foreigners...i will guess or repeat what they are saying or ask for clarification of what they are saying if i am not certain.)” (s2) “….我用簡單的方式。對方可能不懂很難的字彙，所以我會用簡單的字去表達 意思， 我會用簡短的句子…. (...i used english in simple ways. my interlocutors may not be able to understand difficult vocabulary, so i used simple words to express myself...i used short sentences....)” (s4) the students did not consider that it was necessary to speak like nss when using elf. they were less bounded by grammar rules and word use as long as they could communicate with their interlocutors effectively. they would adjust their english use, employing accommodation strategies at their disposal, in order to make themselves comprehensible to the interlocutors (cf. cogo & dewey, 2006; kirkpatrick, 2008). 4.2. students’ attitudes toward elf the quantitative data (see table 2) shows that 91.4% of the students agreed (i.e., 31.4% strongly agreed and 60% agreed) that english teaching should emphasize the strengths of the communicative use of english (survey item 1; m = 4.16, sd = 0.73). table 2 also shows that 60.7% of the students were aware of the notion of elf for intercultural communication (item 3; m = 3.64, sd = 0.78), and 77.2% of them were aware of the communicative value of elf (item 6; m = 3.80, sd = 0.67). it appears that the majority of the surveyed students acknowledged the notion of elf and its value for intercultural communication, although less than one-third (i.e., 29.3%) of the students considered themselves as communicators of elf (item 12; m = 3.01, sd = 0.80). table 2 participants’ opinions (n = 140) survey items strongly disagree n (%)* disagree n (%)* not applicable n (%)* agree n (%)* strongly agree n (%)* m sd emphasize communicative value of elf. 2 (1.4) 2 (1.4) 8 (5.7) 84 (60.0) 44 (31.4) 4.16 .73 be aware of english varieties. 1 (.7) 11 (7.9) 43 (30.7) 66 (47.1) 19 (13.6) 3.65 .84 be aware of elf notion. 0 (0) 11 (7.9) 44 (31.4) 70 (50.0) 15 (10.7) 3.64 .78 used to learn english ns norms. 3 (2.1) 37 (26.4) 46 (32.9) 48 (34.3) 6 (4.3) 3.12 .93 want to learn standard english. 1 (.7) 48 (34.3) 49 (35.0) 36 (25.7) 6 (4.3) 2.99 .90 be aware of communicative value of elf. 0 (0) 8 (5.7) 24 (17.1) 96 (68.6) 12 (8.6) 3.80 .67 useful to learn elf. 0 (0) 3 (2.1) 24 (17.1) 92 (65.7) 21 (15.0) 3.94 .64 plausible to learn elf. 1 (.7) 5 (3.6) 66 (47.1) 59 (42.1) 9 (6.4) 3.50 .70 necessary to learn elf. 0 (0) 9 (6.4) 34 (24.3) 78 (55.7) 19 (13.6) 3.76 .76 want to learn elf. 0 (0) 8 (5.7) 21 (15.0) 89 (63.6) 22 (15.7) 3.89 .73 challenge to learn elf. 1 (.7) 17 (12.1) 90 (64.3) 27 (19.3) 5 (3.6) 3.13 .69 a study of taiwanese university students’ english use, learning goals and attitudes toward english. . . 783 consider yourself as elf users. 4 (2.9) 32 (22.9) 63 (45.0) 41 (29.3) 0 (0) 3.01 .80 english owned by nss. 0 (0) 25 (17.9) 54 (38.6) 60 (42.9) 1 (.7) 3.26 .75 note. *the percentage was rounded up from the second decimal point. as shown in table 2, 80.7% of the surveyed students agreed (i.e., 15% strongly agreed and 65.7% agreed) that learning elf for intercultural communication was useful (item 7; m = 3.94, sd = 0.64), and 69.3% of them (13.6% strongly agreed and 55.7% agreed) agreed that it was necessary to learn about elf for intercultural communication (item 9; m = 3.76, sd = 0.76). in this study, learning elf is defined as learning about the use of english for communication in lingua franca contexts. further t-test analysis (see table 3) shows that the students’ experiences of using elf for intercultural communication had an impact on (a) their attitudes toward english teaching emphasizing the strengths of the communicative use of elf (item 1; t(138) = 2.78, p = 0.01); (b) their awareness of the notion of elf for intercultural communication (item 3; t(138) = 2.16, p = 0.03); and (c) their perceptions of “the usefulness” and “the plausibility” of learning elf for intercultural communication (item 7; t(138) = 2.67, p = 0.01 and item 8; t(138) = 2.51, p = 0.04). a significant difference (see table 4) is also noticed on the students’ perceptions of “the necessity of learning elf for intercultural communication” and their general “attitudes toward elf” for groups which did or did not have experiences of going abroad (item 9; t(138) = 2.73, p = 0.01 and item 10; t(138) = 2.13, p = 0.04). the quantitative results suggest that the students’ experiences of using english in an elf context and spending some time abroad had an influence on their perceptions of and attitudes toward elf for intercultural communication. table 3 perception differences for groups that did or did not have experiences of using english with foreigners (n = 140) survey items with experience without experience t df p cohen’s d m sd m sd emphasize communicative value of elf. 4.27 .72 3.87 .68 2.78 138 .01** .57 be aware of english varieties. 3.77 .83 3.23 .73 3.17 138 .00** .69 be aware of elf notion. 3.71 .77 3.37 .76 2.16 138 .03* .44 used to learn english ns norms. 3.16 .94 2.97 .85 1.10 50.25 .28 .21 want to learn standard english. 2.98 .91 3.00 .87 -.10 138 .92 -.02 be aware of communicative value of elf. 3.82 .65 3.73 .74 .61 138 .54 .13 useful to learn elf. 4.01 .66 3.67 .48 2.67 138 .01** .59 plausible to learn elf. 3.56 .74 3.27 .52 2.51 64.14 .04* .45 necessary to learn elf. 3.81 .81 3.60 .56 1.33 138 .19 .30 want to learn elf. 3.96 .73 3.67 .66 1.94 138 .05 .42 challenge to learn elf. 3.10 .70 3.23 .63 -.94 138 .35 -.16 consider yourself as elf users. 2.97 .81 3.13 .78 -.97 138 .33 -.20 english owned by nss. 3.20 .76 3.50 .68 -1.95 138 .05 -.42 average 3.56 .35 3.40 .32 2.25 138 .02* .48 note. * p < .05 ** p < .01 wen-hsing luo 784 table 4 perception differences for groups that did or did not have experience of being abroad (n = 140) survey items have been abroad never t(138) p cohen’s d m sd m sd emphasize communicative value of elf. 4.26 .73 4.14 .72 .95 .34 .16 be aware of english varieties. 3.78 .88 3.57 .80 1.43 .15 .25 be aware of elf notion. 3.68 .82 3.60 .76 .59 .55 .10 used to learn english ns norms. 3.37 .90 2.97 .91 2.58 .01* .44 want to learn standard english. 3.06 .90 2.94 .90 .73 .47 .13 be aware of communicative value of elf. 3.93 .61 3.72 .70 1.78 .08 .32 useful to learn elf. 4.00 .70 3.90 .59 .95 .35 .15 plausible to learn elf. 3.59 .69 3.44 .71 1.23 .22 .23 necessary to learn elf. 3.98 .74 3.63 .75 2.73 .01* .48 want to learn elf. 4.06 .66 3.79 .75 2.13 .04* .38 challenge to learn elf. 3.13 .78 3.13 .63 .01 .99 .00 consider yourself as elf users. 3.02 .86 3.00 .77 .13 .90 .01 english owned by nss. 3.30 .77 3.24 .75 .40 .69 .08 average 3.63 .33 3.47 .35 2.68 .01* .47 note. * p < .05 corroborating the quantitative findings, the interview participants acknowledged the importance of raising english learners’ awareness of elf for intercultural communication. s7 commented that if english learners were aware of elf and realized that there was no so called right or wrong way of using english for communication, learners, even if with limited english, could try to communicate with foreigners in english. as well, s10 reported that the notion of elf for intercultural communication should be promoted because, using english as a tool, elf users could learn about other countries and cultures and view the world from a different perspective. this study shows that the students recognized the communicative value of elf and considered that it was worthwhile raising english users’ awareness of the notion of elf, which might in turn encourage english learners to use the language for communication with people from other countries. the above data analysis indicates that the majority of the students perceived it as useful and necessary to learn about elf, whereas the interview data and the written comments from the survey reveal the challenges of learning about elf. at the interviews, the students mentioned the challenges accompanying learning elf for intercultural communication, such as difficulties of learning english variation concerning accents and word use, lack of intercultural understanding and lack of exposure to a context where english is used as a lingua franca. the comments written by the surveyed students also show the challenges that english learners might face when learning about elf for intercultural communication; most of the learning challenges concerned accents/pronunciation, word use/forms and cultural understanding. the following written comments were some of the examples and were listed according to the types of learning challenges (the a study of taiwanese university students’ english use, learning goals and attitudes toward english. . . 785 comments were written in english by the survey participants and are reported here as they were): learning challenges concerning accents/pronunciation: you have to be familiar with different accents from all over the world. it’s hard to understand when you have little time experiencing. (r20) you have to own the ability to recognize different accent and stress of english. (r45) because the variation of the pronunciation, sometime it is hard to understand the meaning people try to convey. (r68) learning challenges concerning word use/forms: sometimes there are some gaps. it is hard to understand some phrases or words. (r48) there are too many different forms to study. it requires a lot of time and effort to study well. (r58) learning challenges concerning cultural understanding: there are a lot of culture differences between asia world and western world. (r32) it is hard to describe some cultural things in english within different norms. (r127) 4.3. students’ aims of learning english it is shown that 38.6% of the surveyed students agreed that “the english language” they had learned was based on ns norms (see table 2), while 28.5% of the students did not agree (item 4; m = 3.12, sd = 0.93). as shown in table 2, 30% of the students thought that they would like to learn standard english against 35% of the students who expressed a different opinion (item 5; m = 2.99, sd = 0.90). intriguingly, a much higher percentage (i.e., 79.3%) of the students would like to learn elf for intercultural communication (item 10; m = 3.89, sd = 0.73). while the quantitative data seems to indicate a contradiction in the students’ attitudes toward standard english and elf, the interviews revealed indepth information on the students’ beliefs toward learning english. two major themes emerged from the interview data: (1) learning standard english and local variation, and (2) learning different accents and word use. when asked what kind of english(es) they would like to learn, all of the interview participants unanimously reported that they preferred to learn standard english, conforming to ns norms. s9 stated that he wanted to learn standard english and to sound like a native speaker. s1 was in line with s9 and wanted to learn standard english with the aim of achieving native-like competence in writing as well as in pronunciation. she said that it would be fine to be aware of local variation of english, and she added that the use of english variation was limited to the local context. similarly, s2 commented that it was fine for english learners wen-hsing luo 786 to understand varieties of english because they might encounter people speaking in different kinds of english. nevertheless, she aimed to learn english conforming to a norm that was understood by all of the english speakers. the interview participants stated that english learners could learn local variation at a later stage depending on their levels of english. s6 made comments that english learners should learn standards or basics of english at the beginning and then they could move on to learn local variation of english use after becoming more proficient in english. s8 also remarked that teachers could help students to become aware of varieties of english other than american/british english by introducing the notion of elf for intercultural communication in classes. in comparison, s12 reported that she would like to learn english conforming to ns models, but might learn english variation in the future if she needed to communicate with international co-workers in the workplace. the study indicates that the students aimed to acquire standard english before they considered learning local variation of english (cf. galloway, 2013). it shows that the english language that the students would like to learn at a later stage is in accord with jenkins’ definition of elf, which involves common ground and local variation (jenkins, 2009). in other words, standard english serves as common ground for the learners when they communicate in elf contexts, whereas knowledge about local variation of english seems to become secondary. the interview data shows that the students wished to learn local variation of english concerning different accents and word use. for instance, s7 remarked that due to globalization, english users would encounter people speaking english in different accents, and they might be able to communicate more efficiently if they could understand their interlocutors’ accents. differently, s11 and s13 reported that english learners needed to be aware of language use in relation to culture and they could learn different uses of words such as ways of greetings and slang used in the local context. 5. conclusions and implications the study reveals that although the students did not consider themselves as intercultural communicators of elf, they in practice used elf for communication outside classrooms (e.g., on-line communication) and declared to employ accommodation skills to make their use of english comprehensible to their interlocutors. furthermore, the students who had experiences of using english in an elf context were better aware of the concept of elf. this is also true with the students who had been abroad. as a result of the rapid development of internet communication and globalization, taiwanese learners of english are likely to have increasing opportunities to use elf for intercultural communication in the global context. a study of taiwanese university students’ english use, learning goals and attitudes toward english. . . 787 it is important that these learners develop intercultural awareness and competences, which may enable them to successfully negotiate and mediate between “culturally and contextually grounded communication modes” in an elf context (baker, 2011, p. 203). although the discussion of developing intercultural competences in english learners is beyond the scope of this study, the author suggests that elf pedagogy should be developed to account for learners’ language use (cf. erling, 2007). with elf pedagogy, elt practitioners engage learners in meaningful use of english in contexts where they communicate with nss and non-nss alike. for instance, english teachers may create an on-line discussion forum, in which the learners exchange their opinions and experiences with their counterparts in other countries in real time (e.g., ke & cahyani, 2014; kohn, 2015; kohn & hoffstaedter, 2015). through encouraging english use for intercultural communication with nss and non-nss, teachers can promote intercultural awareness among the learners as well as help them to develop intercultural competences. it is argued that elf-oriented pedagogy, which exposes english learners to a range of englishes and focuses on communicative practices and strategies, would better prepare the learners to use english in intercultural communication (see ke, 2009; kirkpatrick, 2008). concerning the aims of learning english, the study shows that there seemed to be a contradiction of the learners’ attitudes toward standard english and elf (cf. borghetti & beaven, 2017). it also indicates that the learners’ use of english for intercultural communication varied depending on language forms (written or oral) and the native-likeness of the interlocutors. the students in this study would like to learn about elf for intercultural communication on the one hand. on the other hand, they preferred standard english, and local variation of english (such as different accents) became secondary. it is understandable that the students cared less about accuracy and standard forms when they used english in verbal communication or when their interlocutors were less proficient because they were in pressing needs of communicating and negotiating meaning. as jenkins (2012) states, the decision about “whether/to what extent elf is relevant” to the learners in context should be made by elt practitioners, while the learners’ choice is endorsed regarding “which kind of english to aim for” (p. 492). the learners’ choice should be “made in full knowledge of the sociolinguistic facts and without pressure from the dominant ns community” (jenkins, 2006, p. 155). to enable english learners to make informed choices as such and to meet their needs as future users of elf, the author suggests that english teachers design an elf-oriented curriculum including instruction on ns norms, which can be regarded as common ground of elf for the learners. as well, teachers could introduce varieties of english and accommodation skills using elf-oriented materials, which might enhance english learners’ intelligibility among their interlocutors in intercultural communication (cf. hino and oda, 2015). wen-hsing luo 788 when considering the challenges of learning about elf, the students in this study mainly focused on difficulties of learning accents and use of lexical items and did not include accommodation skills in their learning agenda. however, the communicative value of accommodation skills related to elf, which could increase english users’ intelligibility for their interlocutors, should be emphasized (sifakis, 2009). to shed light on how elf users employ accommodation strategies to effectively communicate and negotiate meaning in context, the author suggests future research on english learners’ development of the repertoire of accommodation strategies related to elf. furthermore, it is worthwhile exploring possible instruction of these accommodation strategies for the learners. finally, given the small scale of the study, the research findings might not be fairly generalized to a larger student population. to better present students’ perspective on the notion of elf in relation to their aims of learning english, large-scale studies (for instance, involving multiple research settings) are suggested. research into students of various academic majors is also proposed for future investigation. the author wishes to call for more data-based studies of elf-related issues such as those mentioned above. in conclusion, this study explored taiwanese university students’ english use, learning goals and perceptions of elf for intercultural communication. the findings show that the students were aware of the communicative value of elf and in practice used elf for intercultural communication. additionally, the challenges of learning elf were revealed. due to the development of globalization, english learners will likely become elf users in the future; an elf-oriented curriculum is believed to better prepare the learners for the tasks of becoming competent elf users. the focus of an elf-oriented curriculum in taiwan should be on helping english learners to acknowledge the strengths of english as used by intercultural communities without compromising learners’ aims of learning standard english as chosen by them. as oanh (2012) suggested, english as a lingua franca in asia “should ensure a high level of comprehension and a standard form” and “be responsive to the context of use” in individual countries (p. 128). although the scope of this study focuses on taiwan, the findings may carry possible implications for inquiries into elf in other similar contexts. it is hoped that through this study the author has managed to shed light on the conceptualization of elf for intercultural communication from the learner perspective. a study of taiwanese university students’ english use, learning goals and attitudes toward english. . . 789 references baker, w. 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(2010). which english? whose english? an investigation of ‘non-native’ teachers’ beliefs about target varieties. language, culture and curriculum, 3(2), 123-137. https://doi.org/10.1080/07908311003797627 a study of taiwanese university students’ english use, learning goals and attitudes toward english. . . 793 appendix a questionnaire i. demographic data. please circle the following items that apply to you. a. i am male female b. years of learning english less than 6 years 6-8 years 9-12 years more than 12 years c. experiences of using english with foreigners: yes no if your answer is ‘yes,’ please describe the experience(s): d. experiences of being abroad: yes no if your answer is ‘yes,’ please describe the experience(s): ii. please circle the number that most applies to you in the following statements and answer the questions provided. 5-strongly agree 4-agree 3-not applicable 2-disagree 1-strongly disagree ns= native speaker elf= english as a lingua franca efl= english as a foreign language source: question items 1, 6, 12 and 13 are adapted from sifakis, n. (2009). challenges in teaching elf in the periphery: the greek context. elt journal, 63(3), 230-237. 1. english teaching should emphasize the strengths of the communicative use of english. 5 4 3 2 1 2. you are aware of different varieties of english other than american english and british english. 5 4 3 2 1 3. you are aware of the notion of elf for intercultural communication. 5 4 3 2 1 4. the “english” you learned as a learner was based on ns norms, i.e., learning a standard that would conform to ns norms. 5 4 3 2 1 5. you would like to learn standard english that conforms to ns norms. 5 4 3 2 1 6. you are aware of the communicative value of elf. 5 4 3 2 1 7. learning elf for intercultural communication is useful. 5 4 3 2 1 8. learning elf for intercultural communication is plausible. 5 4 3 2 1 9. learning elf for intercultural communication is necessary. 5 4 3 2 1 10. you would like to learn elf for intercultural communication. 5 4 3 2 1 11. learning elf for intercultural communication is challenging. 5 4 3 2 1 if you circle 5 or 4, please describe the challenges: 12. you consider yourself as an intercultural communicator of elf. 5 4 3 2 1 13. you consider efl learners as users of english that is owned by its native speakers. 5 4 3 2 1 please write down any comments on the teaching and learning of elf for intercultural communication: wen-hsing luo 794 appendix b interview protocol 1. please describe your experience of learning english. 2. please describe your experience of using english for intercultural communication. 3. please describe the kind of english you would like to learn. 4. do you think learning elf for intercultural communication useful? why or why not? please give examples. 5. do you think learning elf for intercultural communication plausible? why or why not? please give examples. 6. do you think learning elf for intercultural communication necessary? why or why not? please give examples. 7. do you think learning elf for intercultural communication challenging? why or why not? please give examples. 337 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (3). 2013. 337-341 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial why the imagination? much of the foreign language learning experience appears to involve the imagination: imagining other ways of life, other ways of viewing the world and talking about it, imagining unfamiliar places, meeting new people there and making new friends. however, as teachers and researchers, we know very little about how learners employ their imaginations to do any of these things nor do we know how to best utilize learners’ imaginations to facilitate their language learning. in this special issue of studies in second language learning and teaching, we hope to highlight the growing scholarly interest in the role of imagination in foreign language learning and bring together diverse strands of research with a view to stimulating a future research agenda. our own experiences as researchers and teachers have convinced us of the power of imagination in learning processes and it is our hope that this collection of papers will offer a forum for the sharing of ideas and promoting interest in what we believe to be a central aspect of the language learning experience. why now? perhaps the first question we need to address is why there has been so little research to date into the links between the imagination and learning. drawing on the work of kieran egan, garold murray’s paper in this collection discusses the “bad reputation” the imagination has had among educators. he explains how, set against the backdrop of frameworks which value rationality and objectivity, the imagination is perceived as not only inferior to rational, objective thought but also as a threat. in a world in which the primary function of education is the transmission of “objective” reality or knowledge, the intangible, subjective and emotionally laden imagination has been regarded as an unwelcome intruder in the classroom. 338 however, in recent years, both theoretical and empirical frameworks have become more open to understandings of how affect and subjectivity contribute to learning. in the field of foreign language education a good example of this development is zoltán dörnyei’s l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2005, 2009), a framework for understanding language learner motivation based around the motivational power of learner visions and mental imagery. further, general interest in complexity perspectives within sla has broadened the research agenda and has led to a greater awareness of the need for methodological innovation and a willingness to employ research methods from outside conventional paradigms in order to meet the challenges posed by complexity studies. together these developments mean that researchers are now better equipped for the challenge of developing a more complete understanding of the role of the imagination in language learning. the imagination and learning a pioneering voice in raising awareness of the crucial role of the imagination in learning has been that of kieran egan. over the years, egan’s lively writings have made a powerful case for regarding the imagination as more than an optional luxury for teachers to consider; instead, he positions the imagination as the “workhorse” of learning, an indispensable drive behind learning behaviours and motivation. in this collection of papers, he teams up with gillian judson to show how what they term cognitive tools or learning toolkits can be employed by learners to connect emotions, imagination and learning. their contribution to this special issue suggests that we should not be discussing the mere possibility of a role for the imagination in education, but rather we need to be urgently considering whether we can afford to further ignore the negative impacts on learning that occur when we disregard it. as researchers at the forefront of imagination research in general education, their contribution here is invaluable in offering a fresh perspective on foreign language education from outside the world of second language education and research. theorizing the imagination in foreign language learning theories concerned with how the imagination relates to approaches to language learning have been so thin on the ground as to be virtually nonexistent. however, recent developments in sla have focused more notably on the role of factors such as affect, identity and self-realization in the language learning process, thereby moving imagination to the foreground. perhaps the best known attempt to link the imagination to foreign language learning is bon 339 ny norton’s (norton, 2001; norton & kamal, 2003; pavlenko & norton, 2007) adaptation of the concept of an imagined community. norton—along with various colleagues—explored how feelings of membership or belonging to imagined communities may affect learners’ motivation, investment or resistance to learning a language. however, norton’s concern has been very much with identity at a macro level, with issues such as ethnic or gendered identity, and little has been said about how the visions and mental imagery of individual learners in actual language classrooms impact on their learning behaviour. our interest in this collection is with the role of the imagination at the classroom level, with how individuals employ their imaginations when learning or teaching a foreign language. as discussed earlier, a key figure in introducing theories of the imagination to the field of foreign language education and research has been zoltán dörnyei. in this special issue, he and christine muir discuss a new concept they refer to as directed motivational currents. these directed motivational currents integrate several established theoretical strands to show how a powerful vision combined with a highly structured behavioural sequence may energize long-term, sustained learning behaviour. their conceptualization of how learners make the transition from vision to action is one that is firmly grounded both in cutting-edge theories of psychology and the realities of the language classroom. researching the imagination one possible reason for the dearth of research in sla on the role of the imagination is the inherent, unique set of problems and challenges that researching the imagination poses. by definition, events occurring in the imaginations of individuals are not observable to the researcher; therefore, the capacity to research and understand them depends on a person's willingness and ability to self-report. of course, self-reporting is an issue facing almost all research into learner psychology; however, researching the imagination can be especially problematic as the contents of our imaginations are often highly personal or private, making individuals reluctant to share them with others. these challenges require researchers to be creative and innovative in their approach to researching the imagination. an interesting and highly pragmatic approach is that taken by garold murray, who revisits existing data and examines it through a new lens, with the aim of identifying pedagogical practices that may support the use of the imagination in foreign language learning. his article connects to and builds upon his previous work by identifying elements in the learning environment which appear to support the role of imagination in language learning. he makes a further 340 important contribution in linking research on imagination to actual classrooms by providing a valuable set of guidelines for pedagogical practice. in her contribution, letty chan reports on a study which looked at how mental imagery was employed by phd candidates in both their doctoral research and their l2 learning. one of the advantages of data obtained from such participants is that they have the maturity and sensitivity to reflect upon and articulate the mental images that they create and the ways in which they use them. through her analysis of these data, chan proposes a conceptual framework of types, functions, and conditions of imagery in academic and professional achievements. this framework systematically describes an intriguing array of imagery types, functions, and conditions, which shape the achievement of the individuals’ goals. it marks an important step in imagination research in sla by seeking to understand some of the factors involved in and typologies of imagination. in a very different educational context, ewa guz and ma gorzata tetiurka consider the role of the imagination for trainee teachers learning to teach young language learners. their paper shows how imagination not only plays a vital role for learners, but is absolutely essential for empathetic and thoughtful teaching. naturally, teachers see the world through adult eyes, yet in order to be effective educators, they need to create a mental image or concept of a young learner and “imagine” how these young learners see and experience the world. such imagery then needs to be translated into pedagogical practices and behaviours in their interactions in the language classroom. in their study of pre-service teachers in poland, guz and tetiurka identify key areas in which teachers may experience difficulty integrating their working images of the child’s developmental characteristics with actual classroom practice. their work is important in highlighting the role of imagination for teachers and particularly in the context of teacher training. future directions in this special issue of studies in second language learning and teaching, we have introduced a broad range of theoretical perspectives from general educational and sla motivational theory, as well as research from a variety of educational settings, including phd candidates in a british university, trainee teachers of young learners in poland, and efl learners in japan. we believe that this diverse collection of papers reveals a healthy level of interest in the role of the imagination in language learning, but we also realize that this represents only the beginning. as tammy gregersen points out in her review of zoltán dörnyei and magdalena kubanyiova’s motivating learners, motivating teachers: building the vision in the language classroom, efforts are now being made to connect theories of the imagination with actual teaching and learning, and both 341 teachers and researchers are keen to find out more. our greatest hope as editors is that the thought-provoking papers in this special issue may inspire others to get involved in what promises to be a lively and exciting area of research. stephen ryan senshu university, japan ryan@isc.senshu-u.ac.jp sarah mercer university of graz, austria sarah.mercer@uni-graz.at references dörnyei, z. (2005). the psychology of the language learner: individual differences in second language acquisition. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. dörnyei, z. (2009). the psychology of second language acquisition. oxford: oxford university press. norton, b. (2001). non-participation, imagined communities, and the language classroom. in m. breen (ed.), learner contributions to language learning: new directions in research (pp. 156171). harlow: pearson education. norton, b., & kamal, f. (2003). the imagined communities of english language learners in a pakistani school. journal of language, identity & education, 2(4), 301-317. doi:10.1207/s15327701jlie0204_5 pavlenko, a., & norton, b. (2007). imagined communities, identity, and english language learning. in j. cummins & c. davison (eds.), international handbook of english (pp. 669-680). new york: springer. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: miros aw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: mariusz kruk (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) vol. 1 no. 1 april 2011 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (trinity college, dublin) simon borg (university of leeds) piotr cap (university of ód ) anna cie licka (texas a&m international university) kata csizer (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) krystyna dro dzia -szelest (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabry -barker (university of silesia) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of ód ) jan majer (university of ód ) anna micho ska-stadnik (university of wroc aw) anna ni egorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) terrence odlin (ohio state university) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) pawe scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) david singleton (trinity college, dublin) odzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, pozna ) merrill swain (university of toronto) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of ód ) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – pozna 2011 editor: miros aw pawlak assistants to the editor: mariusz kruk anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydzia pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam pozna proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print and online, with the print edition being the original version. published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts in kalisz adam mickiewicz university in pozna contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy wiat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. wierzawska 1, 60-321 pozna studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 1, number 1, april 2011 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors ....................................................................... 5 editorial ............................................................................................ 9 articles: 1. anna b. cie licka – suppression of literal meanings in l2 idiom processing: does context help? .................................................. 13 2. andrea nava, luciana pedrazzini – investigating l2 spoken english through the role play learner corpus ........................................... 37 3. sarah mercer – the self as a complex dynamic system ............. 57 4. ewa piechurska-kuciel – perceived teacher support and language anxiety in polish secondary school efl learners .......................... 83 5. effie dracopoulos, françois pichette – second language writing anxiety, computer anxiety, and performance in a classroom versus a web-based environment ............................................................ 101 6. anna mystkowska-wiertelak, agnieszka pietrzykowska – l2 willingness to communicate (wtc) and international posture in the polish educational context ........................................................ 119 7. edit h. kontra, kata csizér – “they can achieve their aims without native skills in the field of work or studies”: hungarian students’ views on english as a lingua franca ........................................... 135 8. richard kiely – understanding clil as an innovation .............. 153 book reviews ................................................................................. 173 notes to contributors ..................................................................... 177 5 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors anna b. cie licka is currently employed as assistant professor at the department of behavioral sciences at texas a&m international university in laredo, texas. her research interests include the second language mental lexicon, lexical acquisition and processing, figurative language, bilingual lexical access and cerebral asymmetries in bilingual idiomatic language processing. portions of the data were presented at the xvii international conference on foreign/second language acquisition, may 2005, szczyrk, poland. contact details: department of behavioral sciences, texas a&m international university, 5201 university boulevard, laredo, texas 78041-1900, phone: (956) 326-2611, facsimile: (956) 326-2474 (e-mail: anna.cieslicka@tamiu.edu) kata csizér is an assistant professor at the department of english applied linguistics of eötvös loránd university, budapest. her main research interests include the social psychological aspects of language learning, second language learning motivation as well as learner autonomy. she has been involved in several large scale survey studies on hungarian learners of english and other languages. currently she is co-researching a nationwide study on the relationships among individual difference variables and discourse production variables. contact details: (e-mail: weinkata@yahoo.com) effie dracopoulos is a program coordinator and faculty lecturer at mcgill university. her teaching and research interests include second language instruction through distance learning, english for professional communication, affect in second language acquisition, and customized language training for professional development. in recent years, she has been engaged in studies, research and instructional design focusing on the production and delivery of online esl courses. this article is the result of a study she conducted, under 6 the supervision of dr. francois pichette, as part of her masters program in distance education at téluq/universite du quebec a montreal. contact details: (e-mail: effie.dracopoulos@mcgill.ca) richard kiely leads the centre for international language teacher education (cilte) at university college plymouth st mark & st john. he currently teaches on the bed tesl and ma in tesol programmes, and supervises phd study in teacher education, language programme evaluation and classroom interaction analysis. he has published articles in elt journal, language teaching research, studies in educational evaluation, language awareness, modern language journal, and journal of english for academic purposes. he is also the author (with pauline rea-dickins) of programme evaluation in language education (palgrave). he led the evaluation team for the proclil project 2006-2010. contact details: (e-mail: rkiely@marjon.ac.uk) edit h. kontra is associate professor at the department of english applied linguistics of eötvös loránd university, budapest. her main research interest lies in individual differences, language learners with special needs, as well as language testing. most recently she has been involved in various projects that investigated the language learning processes of dyslexic and deaf learners in hungary. contact details: (e-mail: kontra.h.edit@btk.elte.hu) sarah mercer teaches english at the university of graz, austria where she has been working for over ten years. her phd completed at the university of lancaster investigated the self-concept of tertiary-level efl learners. her research interests include all aspects of the psychology surrounding the foreign language learning experience. she is particularly interested in learner beliefs, selfconcept, motivation, attributions and mindsets. contact details: institut für anglistik, heinrichstr. 36/ii, a-8010 graz, austria, (e-mail: sarah.mercer@uni-graz.at) anna mystkowska-wiertelak received her doctoral degree in applied linguistics from adam mickiewicz university in pozna . she is a teacher and a teacher educator working at the english department of the faculty of pedagogy and fine arts of adam mickiewicz university in kalisz as well as the institute of modern languages of the state school of higher professional education in konin. her main interests comprise, apart from teacher education, second language acquisition theory and research, language learning strategies, learner autonomy, form-focused instruction and motivation. 7 contact details: wpa uam, ul. nowy wiat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland, (email: mystkows@amu.edu.pl) andrea nava is a lecturer at the university of milan, where he teaches english language and linguistics. he holds postgraduate qualifications from the universities of edinburgh, lancaster and milan. his main research interests are in the areas of grammar, grammaticography (grammar by the book. the passive in pedagogical grammars for efl/esl teachers, 2008), second language acquisition and the history of language teaching. contact details: università degli studi dip. scienze del linguaggio e letterature straniere comparate, piazza s. alessandro 1, 20123 milano (italy), phone: 39 02 50313560, (e-mail: andrea.nava@unimi.it) luciana pedrazzini is a lecturer at the university of milan, where she teaches english language and second language acquisition. her main research interests are in the areas of lexis, second language acquisition, learner corpora and teacher education. her most recent publications include: “la ricerca sull’acquisizione di una seconda lingua: implicazioni e applicazioni per l’insegnamento” (2010) and “the elf of english language teachers” (with andrea nava, 2010). contact details: università degli studi dip. scienze del linguaggio e letterature straniere comparate, piazza s. alessandro 1, 20123 milano (italy), phone: 39 02 50313560, (e-mail: luciana.pedrazzini@unimi.it) francois pichette is a professor of linguistics at teluq/universite du quebec a montreal. his teaching and research interests include language acquisition and development, reading and writing, and second-language vocabulary acquisition. dr. pichette has also taught spanish and french in universities in mexico and the united states, and has published in several peer-reviewed journals such as the modern language journal, the canadian modern language review, the canadian journal of applied linguistics and foreign language annals. contact details: uer shlc téluq (uqàm) 455, rue du parvis québec (qc) g1k 9h6 canada, phone: (418) 657-2747, x5426, fecsimile: (418) 657-2094, (email: pichette.francois@teluq.uqam.ca) ewa piechurska-kuciel teaches efl methodology and sla courses at opole university, poland. she specializes in the role of affect in the foreign language acquisition process (language anxiety, willingness to communicate or personality). her interests also concern special educational needs (e.g., developmental dyslexia or autism). 8 contact details: institute of english, opole university, poland. 45-040 opole, pl. kopernika 11, (e-mail: epiech@uni.opole.pl) agnieszka pietrzykowska is a lecturer working at the english department of the faculty of pedagogy and fine arts of adam mickiewicz university in kalisz. she is currently working on her doctoral thesis concerning ways of teaching grammar with a special emphasis on textual enhancement. contact details: wpa uam, ul. nowy wiat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland, (email: anieszkapietrzykowska@wp.pl) 313 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (2). 2019. 313-349 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.2.4 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language learning context richard labontee gothenburg university, sweden https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5180-7005 richard.la.bontee@svenska.gu.se abstract this article reports on the final round of piloting for a questionnaire instrument created and designed with the intention of collecting self-report data on adult, beginner swedish l2 learners’ use of vocabulary learning strategies. the swedish vocabulary learning strategy survey (svlss) version 1.2 is distributed to 182 participants studying swedish at institutes of higher learning in sweden. the collected data set is subject to exploratory factor analysis to explore initial interpretations of the underlying constructs of the instrument, and analyzed for content validity and internal consistency. readability and accessibility of the instrument is also addressed. initial findings and interpretations are used to guide the development of a preliminary vls taxonomy for the svlss, as well as suggest and perform revisions that will result in the svlss 2.0. keywords: second language acquisition; vocabulary learning strategies; swedish language; questionnaire instrumentation 1. introduction in studying reported vocabulary learning strategy (vls) use in second language (l2) learning contexts, questionnaire instruments are often employed to collect richard labontee 314 wide amounts of data in relatively short time frames. these questionnaires have resulted in vls lists and taxonomy that help to organize the strategies that learners use. collected data can be interpreted using these classifications in order to examine vls use patterns for research and diagnostic purposes. however, as pointed out recently by gu (2018), vls questionnaires seem to lack in explicit reporting on their creation, design, instrumentation, and validation practices. as a means of exercising transparency in questionnaire instrumentation and taxonomy development, this study aims to perform validation analyses on the swedish vocabulary learning strategy survey (svlss) instrument (labontee, 2016) using collected data from adult, beginner, swedish l2 learners. results and analyses provide guidance towards the proposal of a tentative vls taxonomy that is, in turn, used to inform revision of the questionnaire item pool and to motivate an updated taxonomy for the next iteration of the svlss. 2. literature review 2.1. language learning strategies rubin (1975) described language learning strategies (lls) as the “techniques or devices which a learner may use to acquire knowledge” (p. 43) in reference to observed behaviors that “good language learners” exhibited during their language learning. oxford (1990) offered a classification system for lls that distinguished between “direct” strategies which included memorization, cognitive and compensatory strategies, and “indirect” strategies that reflected strategic social and affective approaches, as well as meta-cognitive planning of language learning. more recently, oxford (2011, 2017) has departed from her six-category lls taxonomy, instead offering a model that more strongly integrates a self-regulative model of language learning (i.e., tseng, dörnyei & schmitt, 2006). the model classifies lls into three dimensions, cognitive, affective and socio-cultural interactive, that operate interconnectedly on two levels: as meta-strategies that are performed to regulate planning, feelings and strategy use, and as the specific strategies performed with the intention of improving learning or completing a task. oxford (2017) has attempted a holistic definition of lls according to a meta-review of lls research, describing them as diverse in form, purposeful, conscious, flexible in use, occurring situated in the contexts they are used in, and as teachable actions or learning behaviors (p. 48). considering the actual use of lls, gu (2018) stresses that strategic learning should be viewed essentially as a problem-solving process that operates in a cyclical fashion as new tasks arise. we analyze the task at hand, analyze our own resources for learning, analyze the context of learning to come up with a questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language. . . 315 plan of action, then monitor effectiveness of the plan while adjusting if needed, and then evaluating whether or not our efforts were successful when completing the plan (gu, 2018, p. 326). 2.2. vocabulary knowledge if lls reflect actions intended to help one facilitate learning any aspect of language, vls are used to help facilitate the learning of vocabulary knowledge in a target language (tl). vocabulary knowledge encompasses a many-faceted and complex system of word-related features that learners attend to when learning and using languages. in order to approach strategy use for learning vocabulary knowledge, some models used to classify l2 word knowledge will be introduced to illustrate what kinds of knowledge strategies can be used to help acquire. oxford and scarcella (1994) investigated the schemata development for vocabulary knowledge storage in l2 learners, laying out an outline of “essential knowledge” for knowing a word. their list illustrates a functional perspective of word knowledge as related to the learner. they list: form (pronunciation, spelling, word parts, morphology), grammatical use (plurality, pre-/affix, sentence construction), collocations (syntax of co-occurring words), discourse function in particular situations and contexts, shades of meaning (connotations), and receptive and productive uses. henriksen (1999) presents a more theoretically-anchored lexical knowledge model that occurs on three mutually interactive dimensions: partial-to-precise knowledge, depth of knowledge, and receptive-to-productive use ability. partialto-precise knowledge encapsulates a non-ordinal continuum referring to various registers of use for a lexical item, comprehension of that item, associations to that items, and forms that may be available to a language user. depth of knowledge refers to the extent in which singular or stringed lexical units are linked in the lexicon via cognitive networks. depth accounts for knowledge regarding a word’s morphological, syntactic, and collocational profile, and its potential to carry meaning. the receptive-productive dimension assumes that lexical knowledge commonly moves along a continuum beginning with receptive knowledge (e.g., recognition/comprehension), gradually progressing to productive (e.g., spontaneous use). however, the receptive-productive dimension should be regarded as existing on a non-precise continuum rather than in dichotomous categories – one can retain lexical knowledge that can be used receptively and/or productively, and that knowledge may increase or decrease in either regard over time. on a functional level, schmitt (2010) explains the dichotomy by stating that receptive knowledge contains meaning recognition and meaning recall, where productive knowledge contains form recognition and form recall. richard labontee 316 table 1 nation’s (2013, p. 49) word knowledge taxonomy receptive productive fo rm spoken what does the word sound like? how is the word pronounced? written what does the word look like? how is the word written and spelled? word parts what parts are recognizable in this word? what word parts are needed to express the meaning? m ea n in g form and meaning what meaning does this word form signal? what word form can be used to express this meaning? concepts and referents what is included in the concept? what items can the concept refer to? associations what other words does this make us think of? what other words could we use instead of this one? u se grammatical functions in what patterns does the word occur? in what patterns must we use this word? collocations what words or types of words occur with this one? what words or types of words must we use with this one? constraints on use where, when, and how often would we expect to meet this word? where, when and how often can we use this word? nation (2013) organizes word knowledge into three major categories: form, meaning and use (see table 1). form refers to lexical features of spoken knowledge (i.e., phonetics), written knowledge (i.e., orthography), and word parts. meaning refers to form and meaning (i.e., what does the word form inform about meaning), concept and referents, and associations (i.e., to related words, to synonyms). use refers to grammatical functions (i.e., what patterns govern this word), collocations (i.e., words that tend to occur with or near each other), and constraints on use (i.e., register, frequency). the three dimensions of lexical knowledge are fluidly accessed during language learning and use, and are inextricably interconnected. form, meaning and use knowledge features are expressed in nation’s model through both receptive and productive examples. 2.3. vocabulary learning strategies second language vocabulary learning is a crucial factor for language acquisition at every level of proficiency, but is particularly important for beginner learners who must acquire large amounts of words quickly in order to access their new language. the difficulty and complexity of learning vocabulary requires the choice, and appropriate use of strategies that help and enhance the learning process. gu (2003) notes that vocabulary learning strategies (vls) should serve two purposes: to get more knowledge about words, and to be able to use that word knowledge productively. oxford (2017) defines vls as “teachable, dynamic thoughts and behaviors that learners consciously select and employ in specific contexts to improve their self-regulated, autonomous l2 vocabulary development” (p. 244). exploratory research into language learners’ vls use has resulted in a variety of taxonomy intending to classify different kinds of vls. these taxonomy questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language. . . 317 are realized as strategy lists that have been purposed as questionnaire items to collect data on learners’ reported frequency of vls use. gu and johnson (1996) divided vls into metacognitive regulation strategies and cognitive strategies on their 108-item likert-scale vocabulary learning questionnaire (vlq). metacognitive regulation represented strategic planning and self-regulation of learning, where cognitive strategies were further divided into guessing strategies, dictionary strategies, note-taking strategies, and memory strategies for both rehearsal and encoding. the vlq also included a section of items probing learners’ vocabulary beliefs regarding their learning situation, experience, and motivations. recently, the vlq taxonomy organization was updated, grouping components of the cognitive strategy category into initial handling strategies (strategies for establishing new word knowledge), reinforcement strategies, and activation (use) strategies (gu, 2013). also, the vlq item list and construct structure have been revisited with the intention of evaluating and adjusting accessibility to non-english l1 participants, construct validity, and item list appropriateness (gu, 2018). stoffer (1995) surveyed learners and colleagues for different kinds of vls, populating a list that comprised her vocabulary strategy inventory (volsi), a 53item likert-scale questionnaire. unlike many other vls lists she performed factor analysis on a data set collected from university-level english speakers learning a variety of l2s in order to investigate the underlying vls constructs of the volsi, rather than presuming categories beforehand. her taxonomy reflected vls categories of: authentic language use, creative activities, self-motivation, creating mental linkages, memory strategies, visual/auditory, physical actions, overcoming anxiety, and organizing words. other questionnaires have sought to collect data on learners’ perceived usefulness of vls. schmitt (1997) created a 58-item questionnaire that divides vls into two categories based on whether or not the strategies were used to discover the meaning of a new word, or to consolidate a word after it had been encountered. discovery strategies included determination and social strategies, and consolidation strategies included social strategies, memory strategies, cognitive strategies, and meta-cognitive strategies. fan (2003) designed a questionnaire that would be used to collect both frequency of vls use data and learners’ perceived vls usefulness data. fan’s 56-item likert-scale vocabulary learning strategies questionnaire (vlsq) closely resembled the vlq (gu, 2018; gu & johnson, 1996) with regards to overall taxonomy. the vlsq involved meta-cognitive management strategies, source strategies, guessing strategies, dictionary strategies, repetition strategies, association strategies, grouping strategies, analysis strategies and known word strategies. richard labontee 318 table 2 a taxonomy of vocabulary-learning strategies (nation, 2013, p. 328) general class of strategies types of strategies planning: choosing what to focus on and when to focus on it choosing words choosing the aspects of word knowledge choosing strategies sources: finding information about words analyzing words using context consulting a reference source in l1 or l2 processes: establishing knowledge noticing retrieving generating (creative use) skill in use: enriching knowledge gaining in coping with input through listening and speaking gaining in coping with output through reading and writing developing fluency across the four skills nation (2013) provides a three-category classification of different types of vls: planning strategies, source strategies, and processing strategies (see table 2). a fourth dimension, skill in use, encompasses strategy use but is concerned with the use of vocabulary input and output for both the enrichment of vocabulary as well as the development of the four skills – reading, writing, speaking, and listening. planning strategies are used to choose what to focus on and when to focus on it, for example, choosing words, aspects of word knowledge, and strategies. source strategies are used to find information about words, for example, using a dictionary, guessing meaning from surrounding context, or using background knowledge to guess meaning. processing strategies are used to reinforce acquired knowledge through the use of noticing, retrieval and generation (productive activation). these vls classifications are considered fluid depending on the actual use of a strategy according to the task being approached, context in which it occurs, and individual using the strategy. 2.4. questionnaire validation the use of questionnaire instruments as elicitation tools offers up a relatively quick and efficient method for collecting large scale self-report data on learners’ lls use (o’malley & chamot, 1990). these data can then be used to examine strategy use patterns amongst groups of learners through a variety of analytical approaches (e.g., gu & johnson, 1996; fan, 2003). however, the most popular vls taxonomies offered through vls lists or questionnaires have not reported (published) validation procedures, as pointed out by gu (2018) in a recent update to the vlq. gu (2018) explains that questionnaires used to collect vls use data assume that “strategies are latent sets and episodes of behavior that can be observed and described” (p. 328), and are represented by item statements on the questionnaire. a likert-scale style questionnaire asks participants to respond to these questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language. . . 319 statements with how often they perform the represented strategic behaviors, then in turn uses collected responses to illustrate strategy use by individuals or groups of learners. although perfect representation of the construct reflected by a questionnaire is near impossible, best representation of the intended vls constructs with the statements presented on a questionnaire should be a goal of validation procedures. gu (2018) points out that systematic review of statements in the item pool should be performed to ensure relevance and representativeness of the target construct(s), items constituting a single scale should represent consistency amongst themselves, and interpretation of collected scores should be used appropriately and with the intended population (p. 328-329). dörnyei and csizér’s (2012) chapter on questionnaire creation, use, and validation offers some guidance on approaching validity and reliability evaluation. they caution that item generation and/or sampling should be considered carefully with regard to the constructs that are intended for investigation. this requires a particular attention to the way statements are crafted, as “the wording of the questions assumes an unexpected amount of importance . . . [and] can produce radically different levels of agreement or disagreement” (p. 76). when generating questionnaire items, dörnyei and csizér (2012) suggest the use of exploratory data gathered from respondents using qualitative methods to generate item pools, or borrowing questions from other established questionnaires. when writing and revising the item pool, short, simple, unambiguous, single-question items that reflect the core construct studied are best. further, following data collection, factor analysis and calculation of a cronbach’s alpha coefficient are suggested as methods for exploring and interpreting potential underlying factors that influence the interrelated correlations between items on an instrument, and for determining item homogeneity and reliability in a supposed thematic group, respectively (p. 85). 2.5. swedish vls context most studies exploring vls use in the swedish l2 context have done so in the context of public primary and secondary school swedish l2 programs. for example, the strims-projektet, a swedish research initiative during the 1980’s and 90’s was concerned with performing exploratory research into the lls used by students in classroom contexts at primary and secondary school levels (tornberg, öman, bergström, & håkanson, 2000). other studies have gathered data concerning lls or vls use by young-to-adolescent-aged students in the swedish school system as a component of establishing group or individual learning profiles of students (allestam, 2007; magnusson & öggesjö, 2013; malmberg, 2000; wareborn, 2004). findings of these studies suggest that younger swedish l2 learners prefer richard labontee 320 the use of memorization strategies over more creative (production-based) strategies, and that the use of strategies is influenced by contextual factors related to interest and relevance for word learning (i.e., multimedia, social media). in the adult swedish l2 learner context, granberg (2001) used oxford’s (1990) 50-item strategy inventory for language learning (sill) coupled with interviews to collect lls use data from a single learner as part of a longitudinal, qualitative case study illustrating the swedish language learning experience of the adult immigrant to sweden. sandh (2013) also used the sill to investigate the vls use of two groups of adult, mixed-proficiency swedish l2 learners. the sill is intended for exploring lls, but was adapted by sandh to investigate vls use. collecting data with an instrument that was not designed to collect a certain type of data, and in a context that was not originally intended for that instrument, can result in unreliable, misrepresented data (dörnyei & csizér, 2012). her findings suggested that metacognitive and social strategies were most popular for vocabulary learning, while affective strategies were not often used. learning profiles were proposed according to collected data that divided learners into expert vs. novice language learners, groups according to time spent studying, l1s and motivations. 3. the study to the knowledge of this author, no large-scale research efforts have been undertaken to explicitly explore what vls are used by adult, beginner swedish l2 learners studying at swedish institutes of higher education. findings from such research would help to establish a starting point for better understanding learner groups in the adult swedish l2 learner context, and could be used to develop reflective and diagnostic tools for educators in the field. in order to facilitate such research, a new instrument, the swedish vocabulary learning strategy survey (svlss), has been created with the explicit intention of being developed for use and distribution with adult, beginner swedish l2 learners. as a final part of an ongoing pilot process for the svlss (labontee, 2016; labontee, 2018), this study represents efforts to evaluate the svlss (version 1.2) with regard to accessibility, construct validity, and content validity. the primary question raised in this study is: 1. what vls constructs seem to be represented by the svlss instrument? this question will be addressed through the use of exploratory factor analysis and subsequent interpretation of any factor groups found. a vls taxonomy for the svlss will be proposed from these findings. using this proposed model, a critical examination of the questionnaire items as related to their respective vls groups will be performed: questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language. . . 321 2. are all items on the svlss instrument relevant to and representative of the proposed vls taxonomy? 3. is the svlss instrument accessible to a range of english l2 users? any issues arising from investigation of the above questions will be addressed and adjustments will be made to the svlss instrument. the findings of this study, alongside instrumentation considerations related to vls taxonomy occurring in the literature (labontee, in press), are applied to the svlss instrument, resulting in adjustments to its conceived vls taxonomy and item pool. 3.1. the svlss (version 1.2) creation and development of the svlss were originally driven by the lack of an instrument designed explicitly to collect self-report data on adult, swedish l2 learners’1 vls use. creating an instrument for specific use in the planned context (rather than adapting another instrument) can help to better ensure that the data collected is the data intended to be collected, and that the instrument content is relevant to the surveyed demographic (dörnyei & csizér, 2012). the vls use data collected by the svlss will be used to explore vocabulary learning patterns for groups and individuals learning swedish as a l2. this information is intended to be used both in research contexts and for pedagogic purposes. the svlss instrument used in this study represents the third iteration of the piloting process. the initial svlss 1.0 was the result of item pool generation based on content-analysis of qualitative data collected from the target audience that used semi-structured interviews paired with a vocabulary learning task (labontee, 2016). the svlss 1.0 was piloted for general accessibility regarding reading ease and item pool appropriateness, and was adjusted according to participant response data, and one-on-one feedback, resulting in the svlss 1.1. this iteration was piloted again using the same approach, and further refined for readability and item fit, resulting in the iteration used in the study at hand, the svlss 1.2. the svlss 1.2 was distributed online using the google forms™ survey platform. the instrument uses likert-scale response to statements ranging from 1 = not true of me, to 5 = true of me. the svlss 1.2 contains 74 item statements written in english. all items were written with the intention of eliciting self-report data from swedish l2 learners on their strategic vocabulary learning behaviors. in the current and previous iterations of the svlss, items were separated into 7 sections. each section represented initial grouping themes during the content mapping of strategic behaviors as part of the item pool generation process 1 heretofore referred to as “the target audience” or “target demographic.” richard labontee 322 for the svlss 1.0. these arrangements were used to organize the svlss with the intention of contributing to ease-of-use and content comprehension for participants by grouping similar items into sections. the groupings were thematic according to their perceived vls types: production strategies, investigation strategies, lexical-associative strategies, memory strategies, and motivation/planning strategies. though these groupings were used to guide item list arrangement on the svlss 1.0, they were not displayed on the actual questionnaire. a detailed list of items listed on the svlss 1.2 can be found in appendix a. english language was used for this questionnaire due to its status as lingua franca, and due to its use in sweden as a functional language of higher education. as all participants of this study were studying at swedish institutes of higher education, they were all required to have (and reported having) intermediate-to-high levels of proficiency in their command of english language, and all felt comfortable with it as a mediating language with which to complete the svlss. distribution of the survey to participants was administered by teachers of swedish as a l2, language learning program leaders, administrators at the various institutes, and by the author, in-person. students were asked to fill out the svlss outside of class and at their own pace. 3.2. participants and collected data participants in this study were adults over age 18, living in sweden, and studying swedish as a second language at various institutes of higher education2. participants were recruited from a1, a2 and b1 swedish language classrooms, and all identified as “beginner learners” when taking part in the study. all participants volunteered their time to fill in the questionnaire, establishing a convenience sample for the study. the final number of participants who responded to the svlss 1.2 after data cleaning was 182. a demographic survey preceded the svlss 1.2 instrument, probing participants for background and individual differences information. participants’ levels of education, their degree of multilingualism, their age, the time they have spent learning swedish, the time they have spent living in a swedish language dominant environment, and their native and other languages spoken were all surveyed. collected demographic information for the participant sample is outlined in table 3. 2 sixteen institutions of higher education with swedish as a second language instruction programs across sweden. for privacy purposes, the institution names are not listed. questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language. . . 323 table 3 participant demographics information age group* time spent studying swedish time spent in swedish language environment education 18-23 63 0-3 months 96 0-6 months 93 high school diploma 39 24-29 65 4-6 months 22 7-12 months 45 bachelor’s 66 30+ 54 7-12 months 32 13+ months 43 master’s 50 13+ months 30 phd 27 multilingualism native languages monolingual 7 germanic 72 (english, german, dutch, swiss) 1 additional language 75 romance 40 (italian, spanish, portuguese, french, catalan, romanian, basque) 2 additional languages 52 slavic 24 (russian, ukrainian, polish, czech, serbian, slovenian, bosnian, bulgarian, croatian) 3+ additional languages 48 other 46 (persian, urdu, dari, finnish, hungarian, greek, cantonese, chinese, thai, latvian, lithuanian, japanese, thai, vietnamese, turkish, indonesian, arabic) note. total sample n = 182. participants were mostly younger adult learners (under age 30), and the majority of them spent less than 12 months learning swedish or living in a swedish-language-dominant environment. participants exhibited a wide range of multilingualism where, in fact, monolingual speakers were the overwhelming minority. native languages reported were mostly germanic or romance languages, but were considerably diverse across the entire sample. 4. analyses and findings 4.1. factor analysis and interpretations exploratory factor analysis (efa) is a statistical tool that is often used to explore the dimensionality of underlying constructs in questionnaire item lists. in l2 strategy research, it has been used to evaluate construct validity for several instruments such as oxford’s (1990) sill (park, 2011), the volsi (stoffer, 1995), and the vlq (gu, 2018). efa is explicitly used for exploratory investigations into underlying instrument constructs. as osborne (2014) puts it, “efa is an exploratory technique. as such, it should not be used, as many researchers do, in an attempt to confirm hypotheses or test competing models” (p. 6). efa is used3 here to provide guidance for two facets of instrumentation. first, it is used to examine the relationships between items on the svlss to help determine and interpret the dimensionality of vls constructs that they represent. second, the statistical relationships revealed by the efa will be used to initially inform and guide revisions to the svlss 1.2 item pool. 3 efa was performed using the statistical package for the social sciences (spss) program. richard labontee 324 a kaiser-meyer-olkin measure of sampling adequacy returned a result of 0.749, indicating that the sample size for this study holds “middling” acceptability for factor analysis (cerny & kaiser, 1977). efa is performed here using principal axes factor extraction with a varimax rotation. principal axes factor extraction allows for a choice of initial estimate of communality, and varimax rotation maximizes the variance within an extracted factor, making larger loading scores larger, and smaller scores smaller (osborne, 2014). a total of 22 factors were found with initial eigenvalues greater than 1, accounting for 69.50% of the variance. a table outlining the initial total variance explained for the svlss 1.2 can be viewed in appendix b. as the returned 22 factors failed to display clear breaks in explanation of factor variance, scree plotting was consulted to provide further guidance. the number of data points above the “elbow” in which the slope of the scree plot curve changes markedly can provide a good estimate of the ideal number of factors to retain (osborne, 2014, p. 18). the scree plot elbow-bends found in figure 1 suggest testing for either a 3or 6-factor level solution for extraction and analysis. figure 1 scree plot rotating component matrices can be read to evaluate loading values in order to assess questionnaire items with regard to their contribution(s) to the factor constructs. rotated component matrices were run to assess vls item questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language. . . 325 loading scores. at the six-factor level, common features between items with adequately high loading scores were observed more clearly than at the three-factor level, leading to acceptance of the six-factor extraction. factor loadings were cut off at the 0.3 level in order to control for initial fit. the six-factor rotated factor pattern can be viewed in appendix c. all items were grouped together according to the factor they scored highest on, though it should be noted that cross-loading was observed for most items. some items did not necessarily fit the conceptual “theme” of the factor group that they scored highest on. this result was somewhat expected due to the still-nascent organization of the svlss item pool, and exploratory nature of efa. those items that did not obviously fit are discussed in connection with their respective factor groups below. it bears repeating that the purpose of the efa here is not to confirm previously established questionnaire constructs, but to explore possible interpretations of the constructs emerging from analysis. table 4 six-factor extraction interpretation factors and titles rotated eigenvalue % of variance # of items 1. memorization strategies 6.143 8.301% 17 2. depth enhancing strategies (use) 4.929 6.661% 12 3. association-based strategies 4.926 6.657% 14 4. depth enhancing strategies (sources) 4.297 5.806% 12 5. self-regulation and reflection strategies 4.257 5.752% 11 6. lexical information strategies 3.923 5.301% 8 initial evaluation of item groupings offered six thematic categories related to similarities between the types of vls that clustered onto each factor. these item groupings were titled according to their core characterizations: memorization strategies, depth enhancing strategies through use, association-based strategies, depth enhancing strategies through sources, self-regulation and reflection strategies, and strategies that use lexical information (see table 4 above for categories). item lists4 for each factor and interpretations for preliminary item grouping themes are reasoned below following corresponding tables that present the items included in each list (see tables 5-10). factor one accounted for 8.3% of the variance with 17 items loading onto it. many of the higher scoring items grouped on this factor reflected strategies that demonstrate the use of repetition to better retain already acquired or encountered word knowledge (item 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 58). less obvious repetition-based vls items may have been interpreted by participants as repetition strategies, such as quizzing oneself [repeatedly] (item 48), labeling items with 4 svlss item statements listed in tables 5-10 have been paraphrased for display convenience. richard labontee 326 l2 words [to view repeatedly] (item 51), or organizing words into groups or lists [to review] (item 61). items also may have been interpreted through the statements’ use of the word review, which potentially evokes repetition through study (item 39, 43, 49, 58), and curiously does not appear in item statements that loaded onto the other factors. issues of misrepresentation of item statements will be addressed in a following section regarding revision and adjustment of item statements. table 5 factor one item list “memorization strategies” item vls loading score 45 write words down over and over. 0.678 43 review words repeatedly over time. 0.613 46 writing lists of words over and over. 0.597 48 quiz self with word lists 0.579 58 plan to review words in spaced intervals 0.574 61 organizing words into groups/lists 0.538 63 reflect on vocabulary learning in swedish 0.53 44 read words out loud over and over. 0.514 49 review words or with others. 0.508 50 use flashcards 0.502 57 plan individual learning before/during/after study. 0.486 39 mix up the order of words during review 0.463 47 listen to recordings of words over and over 0.456 51 labeling items (in home, workplace) 0.456 59 plan to use free time to casually practice vocabulary 0.433 62 paying attention to difficult swedish vocabulary 0.429 strategic word learning, in perhaps its most shallow but oft-practiced form, includes repetitive engagement with a word through viewing, hearing or verbalization in order to better remember it. this engagement is usually coupled with related information (e.g., a learner’s l1 translation of the l2 word). repetition-based strategies have been referred to as “repetition,” “memory” or “memorization strategies” in lls and vls taxonomy (e.g., fan, 2003; gu & johnson, 1996; oxford, 1990; schmitt, 1997). in nation’s (2013) taxonomy they fit into his processing category of vls that involve noticing, retrieving and generating vocabulary knowledge. other items that loaded onto this factor that do not fit the theme in a more obvious way reference reflection or regulation of one’s vocabulary learning (item 57, 58, 59, 62, 63). one item did not score over 0.3 (item 41), indicating a very weak correlation, although the item cross-loaded similarly onto several other factors. these items (and other instances of item-construct fit issues found in this section) are addressed in the following section regarding crossloading of items across factors and item pool adjustments. questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language. . . 327 table 6 factor two item list “depth enhancing strategies (use)” item loading score 13 listen carefully for lexical information 0.643 1 speak or write as much as possible 0.635 2 using words in casual speech 0.622 15 watch tv/film in swedish/with subtitles 0.559 16 watch tv/film without subtitles 0.533 14 pay attention to useful/interesting words in everyday life 0.503 12 read text to find new words 0.491 56 use known words even though uncomfortable 0.49 6 use words in familiar situations 0.479 3 describe word meaning without saying the word itself 0.394 53 motivation comes from natural interest in the language. 0.342 40 remember words through common expressions/idioms 0.301 factor two accounted for 6.66% of the variance and 12 items loaded onto it. the vls that loaded onto factor two reflected strategies used for both finding new word information through attending to aural or visual target language input (item 12, 13, 14, 15, 16), as well as the production of words to strengthen retention of vocabulary knowledge (item 1, 2, 3, 6, 56). strategies for finding and retaining new word knowledge are also seen in factor four, but lean more towards the use of context clues and previous knowledge for facilitation. “word depth” as related to the factor two and four vls lists refers to the extent of which vocabulary knowledge units (which may occur in a variety of forms – morphological, syntactic, collocational, semantic, etc.) are linked to each other in the lexicon, and within one’s cognitive network (i.e., henriksen, 1999). vls that reflect the expansion of word knowledge depth require complex, effortful networking of word knowledge features that can be facilitated through the production of vocabulary as a means of learning said vocabulary. strategies of this kind have been classified as “authentic language use” and “creative activities” in the volsi (stoffer, 1995), as “activation strategies” in the vlq (gu & johnson, 1996), or as “social strategies” in schmitt’s (1997) taxonomy. the factor two vls list also contains strategies that are used to engage one’s linguistic environment in order to find and learn new vocabulary knowledge, which also contributes to extending one’s depth of vocabulary knowledge. these kinds of strategies are seen as “determination strategies” in schmitt (1997), and “source strategies” in the vlsq (fan, 2003). the vlq (gu & johnson, 1996) divides them into “dictionary strategies” and “note-taking strategies,” as well as “using background knowledge or the wider context” and “using linguistic cues or the immediate context.” the two lowest scoring items in this list did not seem to fit the theme in an obvious way. item 53 deals with an intrinsic motivation for learning words, while item 40 considers the use of colloquial language for word retention. richard labontee 328 table 7 factor three item list “association-based strategies” item loading score 38 associate word with time-related information 0.673 25 associate word with key-words 0.589 37 associate word with location word found 0.544 36 associate tone or music to word 0.526 29 connect other related tl/nl words to new/learned word 0.514 35 connect images or pictures to word 0.506 34 associate salient contexts (story/action/emotion) to word 0.493 31 remember context word found in 0.45 17 use pictures/gestures for comprehension of unknown words 0.445 32 connect sentence context to words found in them 0.42 4 create mnemonic phrases using word 0.406 5 make up new sentences with word 0.397 30 connect word to translation/opposite meaning 0.384 18 connect word with its phonetics 0.336 fourteen items loaded onto factor three, which accounted for 6.66% of the variance. the characterizing feature for most strategies in this group was that they operated through associating word knowledge with some kind of other information. this information involved time (item 38), other words (item 25, 29, 30), sound (item 18, 36), imagery (item 17, 25, 35), text (item 4, 5, 32), location (item 37), or a general sense of context (item 31, 34). building associations between words and other kinds of information is another form of encoding word information for retention and future recall. these associations are intended to connect word knowledge to varied memory nodes, hopefully resulting in faster, more regular and more primed activation. associations might involve linking new words to related words, concepts, grammaticality, visual/audio information, notes, kinesthetic actions, or tactile sense impressions such as musicality or tone (gu, 2003; oxford, 1990). association strategies have been represented by other vls taxonomy as “creating mental linkages through visualauditory means, physical action and organizing words” by stoffer (1995), “memory strategies for encoding” by gu and johnson (1996), and “association strategies,” “grouping strategies” and “analysis strategies” by fan (2003). these kinds of vls, like memorization strategies in factor one, fall into nation’s (2013) category of vls for processing information through noticing, retrieving and generating. although all items in this group could be fitted into the interpreted theme, some statements seemed to be pointing towards other strategy types, though may have been misinterpreted by participants. for example, item 17 represents a strategy for finding new word knowledge, but may have been construed by participants as a strategy for associating picture/gesture information to known information for better retention. this class of ambiguity is discussed in the later section on item pool adjustments. questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language. . . 329 table 8 factor four item list “depth enhancing strategies (sources)” item loading score 7 note common/important words for later look-up 0.566 8 use dictionary to look-up meaning 0.563 65 reflect on error/accuracy of word use 0.495 11 guess word meaning/pronunciation/spelling based on previous knowledge 0.485 9 look-up words found in everyday life. 0.481 54 motivation from other interests than the language. 0.478 42 write down vocabulary notes 0.47 24 use cognates 0.425 10 ask others about word knowledge 0.389 33 use previous exposure/knowledge of words 0.384 28 connect swedish words to nl words 0.359 60 use technology to assist learning 0.32 twelve items loaded onto factor four, which accounted for 5.80% of the variance. this item list seems to represent a kind of extension of the depth enhancing strategy types found in factor two, but with a focus on such strategies as those represented as “linguistic cues,” “the immediate context,” “dictionary strategies,” and “note-taking strategies” as seen in gu and johnson’s (1996) vlq. the lion’s share of vls that loaded onto factor four represented strategies performed to establish new vocabulary knowledge through the use of note-taking (item 7, 42), look-up strategies (item 8, 9, 10), using previous knowledge (item 11, 24, 28, 33). table 9 factor five item list “self-regulation and reflection strategies” item loading score 66 reflect on stress/anxiety from vocabulary use 0.62 71 reflect on socio-cultural impact of word knowledge 0.57 72 reflect on feeling from knowing words 0.518 69 reflect on comparing tl to other known languages 0.509 67 reflect on using vls and their impact on learning 0.502 52 stare at words to remember visually 0.49 74 reflect on the sound of tl when learning words 0.463 64 reflect on learning style/strengths/weaknesses of learning 0.433 68 reflect on importance of word knowledge on language learning 0.423 70 think about direction of translation for word knowledge 0.421 55 skip difficult/unknown words 0.37 items that were not obviously connected to the central factor theme included reflecting on errors (item 65), using extrinsic motivation (item 54), and the use of technology to assist in learning (item 60). it is possible that participants may have perceived error correction and use of technology as continued means of finding new word knowledge, which would place those strategies more meaningfully within the central theme of the item group. however, this richard labontee 330 remains conjecture as the wording of the vls item statements may have been misleading or overly vague for the participant audience, resulting in misrepresentation. misleading and vague item statements in the item pool will be addressed in the following section. eleven items loaded onto factor five, which explained 5.75% of the variance. the majority feature that vls in this item group possessed was the use of reflection on and regulation of their vocabulary learning experience. these reflections were characterized by affective considerations and self-regulation (item 55, 66, 72), considering the impacts of word learning (item 67, 68, 71), considering personal learning style (item 64), and considering the nature of the target language (item 69, 70, 74). meta-strategies are strategies used to regulate one’s learning with regards to motivation, emotions, planning, strategy choice, and how to use those strategies. these kinds of strategies have been represented in other vls taxonomy as “self-motivation” and “overcoming anxiety” strategies by stoffer (1995), “metacognitive strategies” by schmitt (1997), “management strategies” in fan (2003), and “selective attention” and “self-initiation” strategies in gu and johnson (1996). gu and johnson also included a section in their vlq on “beliefs about vocabulary learning” that perhaps most closely resembles the reflective statements that loaded onto factor five. nation’s (2013) taxonomy includes an entire classification of strategies used for planning what vocabulary knowledge to learn, how to learn it, and when to learn it. an item that did not obviously fit into the central item group theme was “staring at words to help remember them visually” (item 52), a statement that seems to reflect a more rehearsal-based approach to word learning. however, the extent to which this statement reflects an actual strategy is suspect due to its perceived lack of a clear goal besides retention of a word’s orthographic form, which has been covered elsewhere more explicitly (item 19, factor six). issues related to the core strategic concepts and redundancy of item statements will be covered in the following revisions section. table 10 factor six item list “lexical information strategies” item loading score 26 organize words by word-type 0.727 20 pay attention to how words change with grammar 0.699 21 pay attention to en/ett word distinction 0.573 22 pay attention to words inside compound words 0.562 27 organize words into semantically similar groups 0.538 23 organize words using language rules 0.537 73 pay attention to morphology of words 0.531 19 pay attention to orthography 0.451 questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language. . . 331 the final item grouping, factor six, accounted for 5.30% of the variance with eight items loading onto it. the items in this group, while including vls that represented association-making techniques (item 23, 26, 27) as well as analytical techniques (item 20, 21, 22, 73, 19), all shared the core characteristic of being concerned with the strategic use of lexical information to better understand and retain related vocabulary knowledge. the lexical information occurring in vls items here include representations of the form (item 22, 73, 19), meaning (item 27) and use (item 26, 20, 21, 23) dimensions of word knowledge. the wording of the item statements clustered onto this factor may have had an influence on loading scores due to their nearly uniform use of “i pay attention to” or, “i organize” when describing each represented vls. this grouping could result in misinterpretation of items as being related to learners who are simply “attentive to lexical information” when word learning, rather than actually representing methods of strategic learning. steps to combat such issues are discussed in the revisions section. table 11 cronbach alpha per factor group construct cronbach alpha total items 1. memorization strategies 0.856 17 2. depth enhancing strategies (use) 0.795 12 3. contextand association-based strategies 0.832 14 4. depth enhancing strategies (sources) 0.743 12 5. self-regulation and reflection strategies 0.753 11 6. lexical information strategies 0.812 8 a cronbach’s alpha measurement was obtained for each factor group in order to evaluate the internal consistency of item lists (see table 11). alpha coefficients between 0.743 and 0.856 for all factor groupings suggest an adequate reliability of item stability per construct (nunnally & bernstein, 1994), though may also have been influenced by the relatively high number of items per group. 4.2. item deletion, retention and revision the efa performed using data collected by the svlss 1.2 was intended to guide interpretation of the underlying theoretical vls categories represented by the items included on the instrument. the six-factor solution rotated factor pattern values, however, highlight issues with the item pool for the svlss in terms of possible redundancy of items and conceptual accuracy related to strategic learning. furthermore, a careful review of the six-factor vls model in comparison to other vls taxonomy (labontee, in press) indicates a need for careful consideration of what kinds of vls information the svlss stands to collect, and what kinds of vls information it richard labontee 332 does not. concerns regarding readability and accessibility are also raised and addressed in order to facilitate further revisions aimed at improving the instrument. the remainder of this paper will present adjustments made to the item pool of the svlss 1.2 in relation to item-construct fit, accuracy of strategic concept intended for representation, taxonomical revisions, and overall readability and accessibility. 4.2.1. efa results as a means of examining the item pool it should be noted at the outset that although efa has commonly been used to help facilitate questionnaire validation and design, it remains only an interpretive tool that does not offer a concrete formula for instrument refinement (osborne, 2014). that said, although the exploratory nature of efa may result in misleading and non-generalizable conclusions (i.e., petrić & czárl, 2003), it can also be used as a tool to help to point towards potential hazards that may exist for nascent instrument designs. as such, efa results were revisited in order to help guide attention towards potentially problematic items in the svlss. the purpose of this examination was to operationalize the deletion or revision of inappropriate items in the item pool by seeking out problematic patterns suggested by efa results. low and diffuse scores for individual items were examined with regard to their fit within the chosen vls construct mapped onto factor groupings. score ratings (high, moderate, low) were applied to the rotated 6-factor pattern matrix values in order to establish thresholds used to examine issues with cross-loaded items. a survey of all scores resulted in labels of low if they were between 0.20.299, medium between 0.3-0.399, and high over 0.4, and shown in table 12 below. scores below 0.2 were removed for visual clarity. three types of cross-loading arose from an examination of scores: items that scored high on one factor but also cross-loaded onto other factors with moderate or low scores, items that cross-loaded with similarly moderate scores across several factors, and items that cross-loaded with similarly low scores across factors. these cross-loaded items were then subject to a review that considered where the diffuse loading may have originated from. looking primarily at the vls text statements representing each item, three patterns of issues emerged related to item-construct fit, over-specificity of vls representation, or conversely, overly vague representation of vls. first, several items that returned low or cross-loaded scores seemed to all share a feature that their representative vls did not “fit” into a single one of the six factor groups but could ostensibly represent aspects of several groups. for example, item41, “i try to memorize words however i can” reflects use of memorization strategy for word learning, but the vague wording of “however i can” is worded in a way that is highly susceptible to a variety of interpretations by participants. questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language. . . 333 similarly, item59, “i plan to use my free time to casually practice swedish vocabulary” and item42, “i write down vocabulary notes” are perhaps worded in ways that are far too open to interpretation to be reliable representations of vls groups. table 12 rotated factor pattern for 6-factor solution (cross-loading scores only) si ng le -f ac to rh ig hsc or e (w ith m ed an d lo w ) 1 2 3 4 5 6 item04 0.318*** * 0.406*** item14 -0.078*** 0.503*** 0.065*** 0.382*** 0.266*** item15 -0.1*** 0.559*** 0.334*** item21 0.227*** 0.323*** -0.085*** 0.077*** 0.018*** 0.573*** item27 0.139*** -0.073*** 0.348*** 0.026*** 0.094*** 0.538*** item28 -0.152*** -0.019*** 0.255*** 0.359*** -0.024*** 0.085*** item32 0.017*** 0.317*** 0.42*** -0.02*** 0.339*** 0.289*** item43 0.613*** 0.061*** -0.062*** 0.316*** -0.047*** 0.108*** item49 0.508*** -0.162*** 0.343*** -0.104*** 0.043*** 0.06*** item59 0.433*** 0.322*** -0.095*** 0.251*** 0.207*** 0.033*** item60 0.15*** 0.077*** 0.168*** 0.32*** 0.092*** 0.099*** item61 0.538*** -0.07*** 0.3*** 0.068*** 0.011*** 0.112*** item64 0.273*** 0.358*** 0.01*** 0.235*** 0.433*** 0.005*** item65 0.065*** 0.223*** 0.019*** 0.495*** 0.381*** 0.056*** item67 0.302*** 0.159*** 0.12*** 0.132*** 0.502*** 0.084*** item68 0.245*** 0.195*** -0.09*** 0.331*** 0.423*** -0.071*** item69 -0.01*** 0.041*** 0.089*** 0.425*** 0.509*** -0.039*** item73 0.147*** 0.192*** -0.14*** 0.143*** 0.362*** 0.531*** m ul tip le fa ct or hi gh /m ed (w ith lo w ) sc or e item03 0.146*** 0.394*** 0.354*** -0.162*** -0.038*** -0.134*** item05 0.165*** 0.374*** 0.397*** 0.071*** -0.073*** 0.096*** item10 -0.193*** 0.218*** 0.243*** 0.389*** 0.09*** 0.084*** item18 0.201*** 0.032*** 0.336*** 0.296*** 0.01*** 0.157*** item30 0.108*** 0.042*** 0.384*** 0.006*** 0.372*** 0.232*** item33 -0.082*** 0.1*** 0.32*** 0.384*** 0.135*** 0.29*** item40 -0.017*** 0.301*** 0.242*** 0.238*** 0.065*** 0.139*** item42 0.451*** -0.058*** -0.009*** 0.47*** 0.024*** 0.045*** multiple factor (low only) score item41 0.269*** 0.186 0.155 0.248*** 0.134*** 0.227*** *** high ** medium * low note. scores > 0.2 filtered from table. a second problem was observed in overly contextually-niche vls items that may have been too specific to load onto a specific construct, instead cross-loading onto several factors, or not finding adequate representation within the factor solution extracted. for example, item03, “i practice vocabulary by describing the meaning of words in swedish without saying them,” item04, “i create new mnemonic phrases to help me remember swedish words,” and item15, “i watch tv or film [in swedish or with swedish subtitles] to try and find or practice swedish words” may richard labontee 334 not have been strategies that are readily comprehensible or may have been misinterpreted by participants due to non-exposure to such specific practices. the third problem was characterized by high-scoring items that seemed to fit the factor group they loaded onto (item05, item10, item14, item32, item40, item61), but suffered from vague or imprecise wording (e.g., item05, “i make up my own sentences to help me remember specific words”), or represented multiple or clustered iterations of vls in a single statement (e.g., item10, “i ask others (teachers, friends, natives) about swedish word knowledge”). these and the above issues with the ambiguity, overly-contextual nature, or interpretability of item-statement wording have potentially contributed to the collection of “unclean data,” or responses that do not necessarily link up with the constructs thought to be represented by the instrument (osbourne, 2014). this potential for misrepresentation likely contributed to low scoring and cross-loading issues found in the rotated component matrix. the above issues with the items listed were detected through the guidance of efa results, but will be consulted during revisions made to the entirety of the svlss 1.2 item pool. table 13 examples of unclear vls representation in item statements item original text complication revised text 51 i label items (i.e., in my home, workplace) in order to review them often over time. multiple vls in single item statement. i label items (furniture, utensils, etc.) to help me remember the swedish words for them. 19 [i] try to remember how to spell words. does not reflect strategic behavior. i try to learn spelling of words letter by letter. adjustments to statements revised to clarify the vls concept represented by the item (item 43, 46, 48, 39, 47, 51, 1, 2, 15, 16, 6, 17, 32, 11, 9, 55, 26, 22) reconsidered the core strategic element of the intended vls, then revised the text according to that element. for example, item32, “i remember the sentence context for words i found in those sentences” became, “i connect words to the sentence, phrase or story i find them in” (see more examples in table 13). as the strategy in question sought to determine if participants encode word information using associated textual context, the overly vague wording was replaced with a concrete statement exemplifying the core vls. additionally, it was observed that some items loaded onto factors potentially due to the influence of similarly worded item statements. for example, items in factor six (lexical information strategies) nearly all included wording formulations using “i pay attention to” or “i organize.” the item statements included in this factor group were differentiated from their original uniformity in wording choices as a means of avoiding item-factor clustering due to statement wording rather than the vls intended to be represented by the item. questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language. . . 335 there were a significant number of statements that were problematic with regard to their underlying conceptual representativeness of strategic behavior. these complications were identified as: items that did not actually represent strategic behavior, but rather, seemed to represent reflections on individual learning beliefs or individual learning style(s); items that were overly vague and non-representative of any clear vls group(s); and items that were redundantly representative of other vls items already included in the item pool. examples of complicating items are shown in table 14 below. table 14 examples of other issues with item statements item text complication construct not strategic belief 53 my motivation for swedish word learning comes from my natural interest in the language. motivational belief. non-strategic. 2 68 i reflect on the importance of learning swedish vocabulary in terms of my overall language learning. reflective practice. non-strategic. 5 not strategic – l. style 60 i use technology as a means of learning. modality of study. non-strategic in itself. 4 vague 41 i memorize words however i can. does not represent any specific vls. 1 redundant 58 i plan to review [specific amounts of] vocabulary over specific time periods. reflects same core vls as #43. 1 43 i will review words or my own notes repeatedly over time. 1 the above complications led to the deletion of 28 items from the svlss 1.2 instrument. nearly the entire item group of “self-regulation and reflection strategies” was deleted as, after consideration of what strategic behavior is, these items did not, in fact, reflect planned, conscious, goal-oriented strategies. rather, they represented reflective practices related to vocabulary learning, which are important for self-regulation of learning, but non-strategic as stated. deleted items were classified as reflecting preferred learning styles and self-regulative, but not strategic, behavior (item 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72), items reflecting learning beliefs and motivations (item 53, 54, 56, 74), and items that were too vague to reflect any concrete vls concept (item 3, 13, 14, 18, 41, 52, 57, 62, 70, 73). items reflecting already included vls concepts (item 40, 42, 58, 61) were also removed. two of these problematic items were retained and revised for use (item 19, 20). for example, item19, “i try to remember how to spell words” is not inherently strategic – the statement does not indicate purpose or goal-orientation, it simply asks participants to rate how salient a word’s orthographic form is to them. this item was revised as, “i try to learn words spelling letter by letter” in order to reflect a strategic plan-of-action for retaining vocabulary knowledge. richard labontee 336 4.2.2. readability and accessibility the original text5 used in the svlss 1.2 was measured for readability using the flesch reading ease (fre) test. the fre test uses a formula for determining readability of a text with mathematical comparisons between sentence length and total amounts of words, and between total syllable count and the total amount of words (flesch, 1948). the fre measurement for the svlss 1.2 was 65, considered to reflect a reading difficulty of “plain english” easily understood by age 13-to-15-year-old native english speakers. following efa and resulting item list adjustments, item statements were scrutinized with regard to their readability for a wide audience of english-userproficiencies. accessibility was revised through adjusting statements to reflect simple, concise language that avoids the use of jargon wherever possible (see table 15 for examples). table 15 examples of item statement adjustments for readability item original text complication revised text 25 i make use of pictures (in text) or gestures (in speech) to help me understand swedish vocabulary that i find in that context. overly complicated, unclear use of understand, use of difficult words. when i see pictures nearby or related to swedish text, i use them to help me guess the meaning of swedish words there. 50 ... use flashcards/index cards (or similar study tools) to help me review words. jargon use. i write words on one side of a card, and the meaning on the other side to help me review words. forty-three item statements were adjusted in order to address concerns with the wording of text. most changes to item statements that were revised for language simplicity (item 45, 44, 49, 12, 38, 37, 36, 29, 35, 34, 31, 4, 5, 24, 10, 33, 21) were minor adjustments intended to direct participants more towards the particular vls in question. for example, item29, “i try to connect other related swedish (or native language) words to the word being learned” became “i connect other related swedish words to the one i am learning.” “trying” is inherent in all vls use due to their being effortful by definition, but using the word acts to weakens the statement (i.e., trying does not necessarily reflect doing), and connecting tl words to l1/additional language translations is a somewhat natural function of language learning that does not need to be included in the item statement, risking further confusion of the vls being represented. item statements revised for use of jargon (item 50, 25, 7, 8, 28, 27) generally were overly verbose, or used inappropriately academic terminology for participants. 5 all item statements, demographic survey questions, introductory instructions, and openended questions. questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language. . . 337 for example, item27, “i try to put swedish words into groups that have similar meaning or themes to help me remember them” became “i group words into categories (e.g., animals, utensils).” providing a simple example better explains the core vls concept of the item than using a moderately complex text explanation. these adjustments to item statements, in combination with deletion of items according to efa findings and vls taxonomy concerns, as well as addition of items from other vls taxonomy (labontee, in press) resulted in an fre score of 72.5 for the svlss 2.0, a marked improvement from the 65 score received the svlss 1.2. this score indicates a level of readability that should be easily understood by 13to 14-year-old native speakers of english. although the questionnaire is used by english l2 users, they are adults who use english at the university level in sweden, suggesting that the evaluated level of readability for the svlss should be accessible to its target audience. 5. discussion the main thrusts of this study have centered on the importance of a transparent instrumentation process, as well as the development of a context-specific vls taxonomy from the ground-up. transparency, here, is conceived of as the act of reporting on the steps taken to create, evaluate, revise and utilize a research instrument, all while keeping in mind the intended use of said instrument. as past survey-driven research into learners’ vls use has suffered from a lack of clear reporting on instrumentation practices, the findings from that research can be somewhat difficult to interpret in connection with how they were obtained. the findings emergent from the analyses performed on the svlss 1.2 indicate that even with carefully planned steps regarding design, piloting and revision, discrepancies and issues can still arise during instrument development. as data sets are restricted by the scope of the instruments and practices used to collect them, first obtaining a transparent illustration of what conceptual structures underlie those instruments and practices is paramount to be able to interpret principal data sets in valid and reliable ways. although other surveys used in research may have undergone similar development regimens, the lack of clear reporting on these processes obscures the reasons for why certain items or concepts are included (or excluded), and how certain findings are arrived at through the type of data that is actually collected. however, svlss development has not gone without its own limitations. the svlss 1.2 item pool was generated through a data collection and analysis process that used interviews and learning tasks to elicit and observe strategy use for vocabulary learning in swedish as a l2. representativeness of the svlss 1.2 item pool should thus be considered restrained to data gathered during that richard labontee 338 initial investigation, and to feedback collected from pilot participants who contributed to the revision of the svlss version 1.0 and 1.1. a benefit of this process, however, lies in the instrument being contextually situated in and by its target audience. this supports one of the main purposes of the instrument, as it is intended to represent strategic learning specific to the adult, swedish l2 learning context (e.g., item 21, “pay attention to en/ett word distinction”)6. the instrumentation process reported on here allows for a transparent understanding of how this instrument has been contextually situated, and how it has arrived at the underlying taxonomies that govern further development. the next step in the revision and adjustment process for the svlss will focus on a comparison of other vls taxonomy and how the svlss item list compares to them in terms of vls representativeness. this will allow for the illustration of possible gaps (or inappropriateness of items) in the svlss instrument, and help situate what kind of representativeness it holds for vls constructs as compared to other instruments. such a comparison can better demonstrate what kinds of vls information the svlss aims to (and does not aim to) collect from participants. in labontee (in press), the six-category vls model that emerged from interpreted efa results here is compared to vls taxonomy appearing in stoffer’s (1995) volsi, gu and johnson’s (1996) vlq, schmitt’s (1997) vls questionnaire, and nation’s (2013) vls taxonomy. this comparison results in the six-category vls model being altered to better integrate elements from the other vls taxonomy reviewed, centered on theoretical scaffolding from nation’s vls taxonomy. the resulting model encompasses a four-category model that classifies vls as: strategies for improving word knowledge (using rehearsal and encoding), productive activation strategies, strategies for establishing new word knowledge (using sources and contexts), and self-regulative strategies. as a means of supporting this updated vls taxonomy with regards to construct representation, the revised item pool from the svlss version 1.2 is adjusted further through the addition of items found in other vls taxonomy. a visual representation of the changes made from the six-category model (svlss 1.2) to the four-category model (svlss 2.0) is provided in table 16. for an indepth discussion concerning the adoption of the four-category vls taxonomy and the changes made to the svlss item pool related to this shift, see labontee’s (in press) vls list meta-analysis. 6 swedish nouns are gendered into common (en) words and neuter (ett) words, commonly learned with their associated article: e.g., en katt (a cat), ett äpple (an apple). questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language. . . 339 figure 2 side-by-side comparison of vls taxonomy for svlss 1.0 and 2.0 the updated svlss 2.0 is being used and evaluated in a study investigating patterns and possible profiles of adult, swedish l2 learners’ vls use related to individual differences between learner groups in labontee (2018). 6. summary this study has focused on providing a transparent report on the methods used and decision-making that has facilitated initial interpretations of a vls questionnaire that was developed through data-driven item pool generation, and thus without a priori assumption of its underlying construct make-up. this method of instrumentation was chosen explicitly, as to avoid simply adapting an instrument that was created for use with another target audience than the one intended. rather, this method was employed with the intention of creating a questionnaire that is driven by data collected from the target audience (adult, beginner swedish l2 learners), built in a ground-up fashion, and then ready for distribution to the same population. however, as mentioned earlier, this resulted in the initial item pool being representative of only the data collected to create it, not necessarily representative of a wider range of vls available to those learners. as a response to this, this study sought to first better understand what the item pool did represent, and then once thus informed, explore what else the item pool could represent. understanding the svlss 1.0 # items svlss 2.0 # items influences total 72 total 69 nation's vls taxonomy pr oc es se s: n ot ic in g, r et ri ev in g, g en er at in g so ur ce s: fi nd in g in fo rm at io n ab ou tw or ds pl an ni ng : w ha tt o fo cu s on an d w he n sk ill in us e: e nr ic hi ng k no w le dg e vlq, nation: rehearsal & encoding strategy distinction vlq: 4 items schmitt: establishing new word knowledge distinction schmitt: 1 item vlq: 3 items volsi: 2 items nation: generating/skill in use volsi: 2 items volsi: 4 items vlq: 2 items vlq, nation: rehearsal & encoding distinction vlq: 3 items schmitt: 3 items volsi: 1 item 8 15 8 14 12 9 24 8 13 7 depth increasing strategies (via sources) strategies for establishing new word knowledge (sources) strategies for establishing new word knowledge (contexts) self-regulation & reflection strategic selfregulation 12 11 depth increasing strategies (via use) productive activation memorization strategies strategies for imrpoving word knowledge (rehearsal) (lexical information strategies) strategies for improving word knowledge (encoding)(context & association based strategies) richard labontee 340 item pool representation was operationalized through efa and scaffolded through comparisons to other vls taxonomy. the efa performed on collected data from the svlss resulted in the proposal of a six-category vls taxonomy used to explain the constructs represented by the svlss item pool. this taxonomy was interpreted and described through the use of comparisons to vls classifications found in other vls lists and vocabulary knowledge taxonomy. these comparisons also acted as a means of examining representativeness of items included (and not included) in the svlss. alongside these comparisons, the svlss item pool was reviewed using efa findings as a guide that suggested possible issues with item statement wording as related to redundancy and representation of vls concepts. revisions to item statements as well as inclusion (or exclusion) of items in the item pool were made on the basis of the core strategic behavior represented (or not represented) by statements in relation to the six-category vls model interpreted from efa results. other revisions to the item pool were made in response to issues regarding statement clarity and readability of item statements included in the svlss, resulting in an overall improvement to readability measures for the next iteration of the instrument, the svlss 2.0. of course, continued development of the svlss will never produce a “perfect instrument.” rather, revision is performed with the intention of new iterations of the instrument that reflect an increasingly clearer construct structure represented by the items that are included on it. also, the instrument will hopefully become more accessible to a wider range of english users that may engage with it. further revalidation procedures for the svlss must be performed reiteratively with a variety of samples in order to develop the instrument further. finally, establishing suggested practices for the svlss’s use by researchers and instructors should also be addressed in order to extend accessibility and application of the instrument. 7. conclusion the findings observed in this study suggest that the item list for the svlss 1.2 has shown some level of representation regarding several key conceptual areas connected to different types of vls that appear elsewhere in l2 vocabulary acquisition research. comparing instruments created to operate in similar fields provides a measure of reliability in establishing which strategic learning behaviors exist and can be catalogued, but also provides insight into which strategies are more (or less) relevant to a specific context. this comparison occurs using other taxonomy as a lens for iterative evaluation, leading to a synthesis of concepts that establish a new taxonomy. reporting on this connection-making is an important step in establishing a transparent instrumentation process, as it allows questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language. . . 341 the reader to see why an instrument was developed, for what purpose, and to more clearly understand what kinds of data it might actually collect. the organization and arrangement of vls concepts into a taxonomy is done so for the benefit of future research as well as learners who engage in the classification of learning strategies. future vls research in the swedish l2 learning context will be able to draw from this and future versions of the taxonomy proffered here, hopefully expediting expansion into the area. the clarity of vls categorizations can lead to smoother strategy instruction, improving learners’ vocabulary acquisition and reflective learning processes. richard labontee 342 references allestam, c. 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(2004). minst 100 nya ord i veckan ska läras in: vem har motivation och uthållighet för det? andraspråksinlärares strategianvändning i ordinlärning (unpublished doctoral dissertation). gothenburg: göteborgs universitet. questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language. . . 345 appendix a swedish vocabulary learning strategy survey (version 1.2) pr od uc ti on ba se d (6 it em s) item1 i speak or write in swedish as much as i can to practice vocabulary. item2 i use vocabulary words in casual speech to help me remember them better. item3 i practice vocabulary by describing the meaning of words in swedish without saying the word out loud. item4 i create new mnemonic phrases [sentence used to assist memory] to help me remember vocabulary. item5 i make up my own sentences to help me remember specific words. item6 i will use words over and over in similar situations to help me remember them. in ve st ig at io n ba se d (1 1 it em s) item7 i take note of common/important words i don't know so i can review them later. item8 i look up word meaning or details by using some kind of dictionary. item9 i look up swedish words that i find in everyday life. item10 i ask others (teachers, friends, natives) about swedish word knowledge. item11 i try to guess word meaning, pronunciation, or spelling based on what i already know about the word or where i find it. item12 i try to read swedish texts to find new vocabulary. item13 i try to listen carefully for swedish vocabulary information. item14 i try to pay attention to useful or interesting swedish language that i find in everyday life. item15 i watch tv or film [in swedish, or with swedish subtitles] to try and find or practice vocabulary. item16 i watch swedish tv or film specifically without subtitles on to try and learn vocabulary from context. item17 i make use of pictures (in text) or gestures (in speech) to help me understand swedish vocabulary that i find in that context. le xi ca l-a ss oc ia ti ve (1 3 it em s) when learning swedish vocabulary, i… item18 … try to remember words by the way they sound. item19 … try to remember how to spell words. item20 … try to remember how words change with grammar in swedish. item21 … try to remember if a word is an ‘ett ord’ [ett word] or ‘en ord’ [en word]. item22 … try to remember compound words (words made up of 2 or more words) by paying attention to the different words inside them. item23 … try to remember words by making language rules to connect them. item24 … use cognates (similar words across languages) to help remember words. item25 … try to use key-words (words used to help us recall other words) to help learn or remember words. item26 … try to organize words [or groups of words] by word types to help me remember them. item27 … try to put swedish words into groups that have similar meanings or themes to help me remember them. item28 … try to connect swedish words to words i already know in my native language. item29 … try to connect other related swedish (or native language) words to the word being learned. item30 … try to connect swedish words to their opposite meaning or translation to help me remember. co nt ex ta ss oc ia ti ve (1 0 it em s) when learning or remembering swedish vocabulary, i… item31 ... remember the context i find words in to help me remember them. item32 ... remember the sentence context for words i found in those sentences. item33 ... remember previous times that i saw or read a word to help me remember it better. item34 ... use interesting contexts (e.g., a story, action, emotion) to help me remember words. item35 ... connect images or pictures in my mind with words to help me remember them. item36 ... connect tone or music to words to help me remember them. item37 ... remember the location i saw certain words to help me remember them. item38 ... use time-related information to help me remember words. item39 ... mix up the order of words i am learning to help train myself learn them in a different way. item40 ... will remember words through common expressions or idioms that they are found in. richard labontee 346 m em or y ba se d (1 2 it em s) when learning or remembering swedish vocabulary, i… item41 ... memorize words however i can. item42 ... write down vocabulary notes (when i study alone, in class, etc.). item43 ... will review words or my own notes repeatedly over time. item44 ... read words out loud [or quietly to myself] over and over. item45 ... write individual words down over and over. item46 ... write down lists of grouped words over and over. item47 ... listen to recordings of vocabulary words i want to remember over and over. item48 ... use lists of words that i write down to give myself quizzes. item49 ... review words in study groups or with others. item50 ... use flashcards/index cards (or similar study tools) to help me review words. item51 ... label items (i.e., in my home, workplace) in order to review them often over time. item52 ... stare at words to help me remember them visually. m ot iv at io n an d pl an ni ng of le ar nin g (1 0 it em s) item53 my motivation for swedish word learning comes from my natural interest in the language. item54 my motivation for swedish word learning comes from other reasons than my interest in the language. item55 i skip difficult/unknown words that i come across in order to read/listen for overall meaning. item56 i am willing to use swedish vocabulary even if i might make mistakes or it makes me feel uncomfortable. item57 i plan my own learning before, during, or after i study. item58 i plan to review [specific amounts of] vocabulary over specific time periods. item59 i plan to use my free time to casually practice swedish vocabulary. item60 i use technology as a means of learning. item61 i put words into different kinds of groups or lists so i can keep myself organized while i learn. item62 i pay attention to swedish vocabulary that is especially difficult for me to remember. a w ar en es s of le ar ni ng si tu at io n (1 2 it em s) item63 i reflect on vocabulary learning in swedish in general. item64 i reflect on my personal learning style, strengths, and/or weaknesses when studying swedish vocabulary. item65 i reflect on errors i make and my accuracy when using my swedish vocabulary. item66 i reflect on my stress and anxiety from using swedish vocabulary. item67 i reflect on how using different vocabulary learning strategies affects my learning of swedish vocabulary. item68 i reflect on the importance of learning swedish vocabulary in terms of my overall language learning. item69 i reflect on comparing swedish to other languages i know or speak when learning swedish vocabulary. item70 i think about my direction of translation when studying swedish words. item71 i reflect on the socio-cultural impact of my learning swedish vocabulary. item72 i reflect on the feeling i get from swedish words that i find. item73 i notice grammar associated with how swedish words change in different situations to help me learn them better. item74 i reflect on the nature of the sound of swedish language when learning and recalling words. questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language. . . 347 appendix b initial total variance explained for svlss 1.2 factor total % of variance cumulative % 1 12.655 17.102 17.102 2 4.804 6.492 23.593 3 3.381 4.57 28.163 4 2.596 3.508 31.671 5 2.576 3.481 35.152 6 2.462 3.327 38.479 7 1.984 2.681 41.16 8 1.883 2.545 43.705 9 1.816 2.454 46.16 10 1.669 2.255 48.415 11 1.568 2.119 50.534 12 1.518 2.051 52.586 13 1.483 2.004 54.59 14 1.447 1.956 56.545 15 1.411 1.906 58.452 16 1.298 1.754 60.205 17 1.27 1.716 61.922 18 1.233 1.666 63.588 19 1.188 1.605 65.193 20 1.118 1.511 66.704 21 1.069 1.444 68.148 22 1.004 1.356 69.504 note. factors 23-74, below eigenvalue 1 suppressed. richard labontee 348 appendix c rotated factor pattern for 6-factor solution factor 1 2 3 4 5 6 item1 0.635 item2 0.622 item3 0.394 0.354 item4 0.318 0.406 item5 0.374 0.397 item6 0.479 item7 0.355 0.566 item8 0.563 item9 0.481 item10 0.389 item11 0.485 item12 0.491 item13 0.643 item14 0.503 0.382 item15 0.559 0.334 item16 0.533 item17 0.445 item18 0.336 item19 0.451 item20 0.699 item21 0.323 0.573 item22 0.562 item23 0.537 item24 0.425 item25 0.589 item26 0.727 item27 0.348 0.538 item28 0.359 item29 0.514 item30 0.384 0.372 item31 0.45 item32 0.317 0.42 0.339 item33 0.32 0.384 item34 0.493 item35 0.506 item36 0.526 item37 0.544 item38 0.673 item39 0.463 item40 0.301 item41 item42 0.451 0.47 item43 0.613 0.316 item44 0.514 item45 0.678 questionnaire instrumentation for strategic vocabulary learning in the swedish as a second language. . . 349 item46 0.597 item47 0.456 item48 0.579 item49 0.508 0.343 item50 0.502 item51 0.456 item52 0.49 item53 0.342 item54 0.478 item55 0.37 item56 0.49 item57 0.486 item58 0.574 item59 0.433 0.322 item60 0.32 item61 0.538 item62 0.429 item63 0.53 item64 0.358 0.433 item65 0.495 0.381 item66 0.62 item67 0.302 0.502 item68 0.331 0.423 item69 0.425 0.509 item70 0.421 item71 0.57 item72 0.518 item73 0.362 0.531 item74 0.463 557 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (4). 2015. 557-581 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.4.3 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl proficiency effect on l2 pragmatic competence feng xiao pomona college, calaremont, usa feng.xiao@pomona.edu abstract this paper synthesizes cross-sectional studies of the effect of proficiency on second language (l2) pragmatics to answer the synthesis question: does proficiency affect adult learners’ pragmatic competence? findings have revealed an overall positive proficiency effect on pragmatic competence, and in most cases higher proficiency learners have higher pragmatic competence. however, increased proficiency does not guarantee a native-like pragmatic performance because proficiency effect varies depending on the nature of target pragmatic features such as types of speech acts (degrees of directness and conventionality) (e.g., cook & liddicoat, 2002; félix-brasdefer, 2007), modalities of pragmatic performance (comprehension and production) (e.g., bradovi-harlig, 2008, 2009), social variables involved in task situations, such as social status (e.g., allami & naeimi, 2011), social distance (e.g., maeshiba, yoshinaga, kasper, & ross, 1996), and power relationship (e.g., al-gahtani & roever, 2012). moreover, proficiency effect is mediated by contextual variables such as length of stay in the target language community (e.g., shardakova, 2005; taguchi, 2011, 2013; xu, case, & wang, 2009). keywords: proficiency effect; l2 pragmatic competence 1. introduction originated in hymes (1972), the ability to use language appropriately in communication is regarded as important as knowledge of grammatical rules in all feng xiao 558 theoretical models of communicative competence (e.g., bachman & palmer, 1996, 2010; canale & swain, 1980). pragmatic competence, namely the ability to understand and use linguistic forms appropriately according to different situations, is accepted as a vital component of language ability (e.g., bachman & palmer, 1996, 2010). along with the emergence of theoretical models of communicative competence, pragmatic competence and development have captured a growing interest in l2 pragmatics research (for a review, see kasper & rose, 1999, 2002; kasper & roever, 2005). one focus of these studies is to investigate factors affecting pragmatic competence, and general language proficiency is the single most widely examined factor in previous research on l2 pragmatics. the interest in proficiency effect partially stems from the assumption that general proficiency is a precondition of pragmatic competence. in other words, l2 pragmatic acquisition requires learners to achieve a threshold level of proficiency, suggesting a positive proficiency effect on l2 pragmatic competence (for a review, see bardovi-harlig, 1999, 2001, 2013; kasper & rose, 1999, 2002). this assumption has been supported by many empirical studies with a cross-sectional design across different proficiency levels or a comparison between l2 learners and native speakers (nss) (e.g., al-gahtani& roever, 2012; bardovi-harlig & dörnyei, 1998; dalmau & gotor, 2007; garcia, 2004; geyer, 2007; maeshilba, yoshinaga, kasper, & ross, 1996). interestingly, however, previous studies comparing l2 learners and nss have found that increased proficiency does not guarantee native-like pragmatic performance (e.g., allami & naeimi, 2011; cook & liddicoat, 2002; hoffmanhicks, 1992; shardakova, 2005; taguchi, 2011; takahashi, 1996). therefore, in service of attaining a more comprehensive picture of how proficiency affects l2 pragmatics, this synthesis study addresses the following research question: does l2 proficiency affect adult learners’ pragmatic competence? 2. terminology since the present synthesis paper focuses on proficiency effect on l2 pragmatic competence, key terms, l2 proficiency and pragmatic competence, are defined in this section. 2.1. l2 proficiency in the present study, l2 proficiency is defined as overall l2 competence, which includes organizational knowledge and pragmatic knowledge. the former refers to the knowledge of organizing utterances or sentences and texts such as lexical and grammatical knowledge, while the latter refers to the knowledge of using proficiency effect on l2 pragmatic competence 559 sentences and texts appropriately in situations (bachman & palmer, 1996, 2010). in previous studies, levels of l2 proficiency were determined by standardized test scores (e.g., allami & naeimi, 2011; garcia, 2004; nguyen, 2008; taguchi, 2005, 2006; takahashi, 1996; xu, case, & wang, 2009 ), course or grade levels (e.g., bardovi-harlig, 2008, 2009, 2011; félix-brasdefer, 2007; koike, 1996; pinto, 2005), length of formal instruction (e.g., bonganets, kellerman, & bentlage, 1987), and duration of residence in the target language community (e.g., blum-kulka & olshtain, 1986; decapua & dunham, 2007). among these proficiency determinants, standardized test scores and course or grade levels are considered to be more reliable indicators of proficiency because standardized test scores allow for comparison across test takers, and course/grade levels are usually determined by a systematic evaluation within a course or program, including placement tests, teacher assessment and oral interviews. in contrast, length of formal instruction and residence in the target language community are less reliable ways of determining proficiency due to the large variability in amount and quality of l2 exposure and instruction that cannot be accounted for by such measures. therefore, the present study synthesized studies in which levels of l2 proficiency were indicated by standardized test scores and course/grade levels. 2.2. pragmatic competence pragmatic competence consists of pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics (leech, 1983; thomas, 1983). according to thomas (1983), pragmatic failure can be broken down into two types: pragmalingusitc and sociopragmatic failure. pragmalinguistic failure is fundamentally a linguistic problem, “caused by differences in the linguistic encoding of pragmatic force” (thomas, 1983, p. 99), whereas sociopragmatic failure results from “different perceptions of what constitutes appropriate linguistic behavior” (thomas, 1983, p. 99). the distinction between these two types of failure parallels the dichotomy between pragmalinguistics (functional aspect of pragmatic competence) and sociopragmatics (social aspect of pragmatic competence), which can be found in the definition of pragmatic knowledge of bachman and palmer’s (2010) model of communicative competence. according to bachman and palmer (2010), pragmatic knowledge includes functional and sociolinguistic knowledge. functional knowledge represents the knowledge of using linguistic forms to realize pragmatic functions, such as using would you to make a request, while sociolinguistic knowledge is the knowledge of using linguistic forms appropriately according to different situational variables (e.g., social status, familiarity, power relationship, and degree of imposition), such as choosing polite forms when speaking to people of higher social status (for a review, see kasper & rose, 2002; taguchi, 2015). feng xiao 560 the present study adopts bachman and palmer’s (2010) definition of pragmatic knowledge, which includes functional (pragmalinguistics) and sociolinguistic knowledge (sociopragmatics) and is reflected in the knowledge of different target pragmatic features such as speech acts, routines, implicatures, address forms and discourse markers. 3. method the following steps were taken to locate relevant studies in the online academic databases. first, key words were chosen and sorted into two groups. group 1 comprised words related to pragmatic competence, including pragmatic competence, sociocultural competence, interlanguage pragmatics, sociolinguistic competence, sociopragmatic competence, interactional competence, speech acts, routines, and implicatures. group 2 consisted of words related to general l2 proficiency, such as l2 proficiency, l2 competence, and l2 grammatical competence. second, all word combinations, created by mixing each word in group 1 with each word in group 2, were searched for in multiple databases, including education resources information center (eric), linguistics and language behavior abstracts (llba), journal storage (jstor), modern language association bibliography (mla), and sage journals. this search process yielded 421 studies, of which irrelevant studies were eliminated based on the criteria listed below. at the end, 28 studies (marked with an * in references) were included. the following inclusion and exclusion criteria were used: 1. l2 proficiency was one of the independent variables investigated. 2. the study was a data-driven empirical study of l2 pragmatic competence. 3. the study had a cross-sectional design, and learners’ groups in the study were determined by different l2 proficiency levels. 4. participants’ l2 proficiency levels were determined by standardized test scores or course/grade levels. 5. studies using a sample of children were excluded. 6. studies with a longitudinal design were excluded. 7. studies of instructional effects on l2 pragmatic competence were excluded.1 following norris and ortega (2006), the 28 studies selected were coded for two types of study features: substantive and methodological features. therefore, 1 instructional studies were excluded because they controlled other factors to examine effects of treatments across groups. the scope of the present synthesis was narrowed to the relationship between general language proficiency and pragmatic competence. proficiency effect on l2 pragmatic competence 561 my coding scheme to profile each study (see appendix a) included the following features: author and publishing date, research question(s), target language, target pragmatic feature(s), modality (comprehension, production or awareness of target pragmatic features), instrument/data source, sample size, groups (l2 proficiency levels), proficiency measure(s), and findings (see appendix b for the table of the study profiles). i also coded each study for the findings in order to answer my synthesis question. 4. review of studies of proficiency effect on pragmatic competence findings of selected studies can be categorized into three groups: (a) positive effects; (b) almost no effect; and (c) mixed effects that vary depending on the nature of pragmatic features considered. 4.1. positive proficiency effects on pragmatic competence 13 out of the 28 selected studies revealed an overall increase in pragmatic performance from low to high proficiency levels (al-gahtani & roever, 2012; bardovi & dörnyei, 1998; cook & liddicoat, 2002; dalmau & gotor, 2007; garcia, 2004; geyer, 2007; hoffman-hicks, 1992; koike, 1996; maeshilba, yoshinaga, kasper, & ross, 1996; pinto, 2005; trosborg, 1995; wannaruk, 2008; yamanaka, 2003), showing a positive proficiency effect on pragmatic competence. first, the positive role of l2 proficiency was documented in three studies of pragmatic transfer (koike, 1996; maeshilba, yoshinaga, kasper, & ross, 1996; wannaruk, 2008). for example, maeshilba et al. (1996) investigated transfer of apology strategies from l1 japanese to l2 english. participants were 30 japanese efl learners with intermediate english proficiency (toefl scores from 400 to 500), 30 with advanced english proficiency (toefl scores from 510 to 627), 30 english nss, and 30 japanese nss. the instrument was a dialogue construction questionnaire with items representing different social variables such as gender, social distance and relative social status, and degrees of severity of the committed offense. the following is an example (p. 182): at a friend’s home ann and bill are both 35 years old and are good friends. ann borrowed a computer magazine from bill. unfortunately, ann spilled coffee on the magazine and damaged it. she is now returning it to bill. bill: what happened to my magazine? ann: bill: feng xiao 562 all participants completed the dialogues and rated situations on a 5-point scale for five contextual factors: severity of offense, offender’s obligation to apologize, likelihood for the apology to be accepted, offenders’ face loss, offended party’s face loss, and social distance and dominance. findings showed that in situations where japanese and american apology patterns were the same, learners had positive transfer from japanese apologies, but there was no significant difference between advanced and intermediate learners. however, in the situations where japanese and american apology patterns differed, advanced learners transferred their apology behavior from japanese to english in only two instances, whereas intermediate learners did the same in six instances. in essence, more advanced learners had a better ability to minimize negative l1 transfer. wannaruk (2008) also found a positive proficiency effect on negative l2 pragmatic transfer. she used a discourse completion task (dct) to examine 40 thai efl learners’ pragmatic transfer in refusals to invitations, suggestions, offers and requests. participants were assigned to three groups: lower intermediate, intermediate and upper intermediate groups based on their scores on the university’s graduate english test (no details about the test). in addition, 40 american and 40 thai nss participated. data from each group were compared in terms of frequency of refusal strategies. consistent with the findings of maeshilba et al.’s (1996) study, lower proficiency learners had more negative l1 transfer in l2 refusals than their higher proficiency counterparts. these findings suggest that increased proficiency can improve l2 learners’ ability to control negative l1 transfer. similarly to transfer of pragmatic performance, the positive proficiency effect on comprehension and identification of speech acts was reported in two studies (cook & liddicoat, 2002; garcia, 2004). cook and liddicoat (2002) investigated l2 english learners’ comprehension of three types of requests: direct, conventional indirect and nonconventional indirect. a direct request delivers the intention of the request in grammatical, lexical or semantic forms specialized for this pragmatic function such as imperatives (e.g., please) and want statements. a conventional indirect request expresses the intention of the request by using fixed linguistic conventions such as would/could you + verb phrase. a nonconventional indirect request (e.g., hinting), on the other hand, is not realized in fixed linguistic forms or conventional expressions, so the interpretation of this type of request requires the hearer to comprehend intention behind the utterance by using contextual information. a multiple-choice questionnaire consisting of five scenarios per request type was administered to 100 esl learners in austria and 50 austrian english nss. the esl learners were divided into low and high proficiency groups according to their ielts (international english language test system) or toefl scores. findings revealed that nss comprehended proficiency effect on l2 pragmatic competence 563 significantly more requests than high-proficiency group. high proficiency learners outperformed low proficiency learners on all three types of requests, but the difference was smaller for direct and conventional indirect requests than that for unconventional indirect requests. in other words, there was a positive proficiency effect on comprehension of requests, but the effect was mediated by degrees of directness and conventionality of speech acts. garcia (2004) found a positive proficiency effect on identification of speech acts. she designed a speech act identification task that consisted of four types of nonconventional indirect speech acts: requests, suggestions, corrections and offers. in the task, participants chose the right speech act according to the dialogue. 56 esl learners formed high and low proficiency groups (proficiency determined by toefl scores). 19 english nss also participated. consistent with cook and liddicoat’s (2002) study, nss and high proficiency learners had significantly higher identification scores of target speech acts than low proficiency learners. however, there was no significant difference between nss and high proficiency learners, suggesting that high proficiency learners can become native-like in identification of speech acts. the positive proficiency effect was also documented in five studies of pragmatic production, with three of them investigating production of speech acts (dalmau & gotor, 2007; pinto, 2005; trosborg, 1995), and the other two examining pragmatic production at discourse level (al-gahtani & roever, 2012; geyer, 2007). for example, pinto (2005) used a 4-item dct to examined l2 spanish learners’ production of requests. he first identified similarities and differences in request strategies between english and spanish nss and then compared these strategies with those used by l2 learners. participants included 20 american learners of spanish whose general l2 proficiency levels were determined by their course levels from group 1 to group 4. he found that the learners moved towards target spanish norms from lower-level (group 1 & 2) to higher-level proficiency (group 3 & 4) regarding the token frequency of request strategies. lowerlevel learners were more pragmatically ambiguous than higher-level learners. for example, they were more likely to transfer the pseudo permission strategy in english (e.g., can i + verb phase) to l2 spanish request. this negative transfer caused ambiguity because spanish nss did not know whether the function of this sentence pattern was to ask for permission or a favor. this ambiguity may be due to lower-level learners’ limited knowledge of l2 pragmalinguistic forms. the positive proficiency effect on speech act production was also evident in dalmau and gotor’s (2007) study of l2 english apologies. they used an 8-item dct to examine the production of apologies of 78 catalan learners of english across three different proficiency levels (intermediate, advanced and proficient). participants’ proficiency levels were determined by their scores on the feng xiao 564 university’s placement test that included oral and written parts (p. 312; no details provided). in addition, 26 english nss were recruited to make a comparison with english learners. they found that learners with higher proficiency had a greater range of apology strategies and were less likely to use nontarget-like apology expressions. moreover, more proficient learners used more lexical intensifiers (e.g., very, really, so), but their overall token frequency of intensifiers was still significantly lower than that of nss, and they still had problems producing accurate pragmalinguistic forms (e.g., i’m sorried; p. 307). aside from speech act production at the sentential level, two studies showed that proficiency affected l2 learners’ pragmatic production at discourse level (al-gahtani & roever, 2012; geyer, 2007). geyer (2007) used the japanese oral proficiency interview (opi) to investigate l2 learners’ production of selfqualification segments in japanese. self-qualification segments were defined as “parenthetical statements within a discursive unit” (p. 339), which were used to mitigate previous statements. japanese self-qualifications were frequently introduced with contrastive markers, such as demo, kedo, and ga, each of which is equal to but, though or although in english. participants were divided into four levels: superior, advanced, intermediate and novice. findings showed that lower proficiency learners were able to produce self-qualifications, but they often did not use contrastive markers. intermediate and advanced learners employed contrastive expressions in self-qualifications, but not always appropriately. compared to lower proficiency learners, higher proficiency learners had a larger repertoire of lexical and grammatical markers to qualify their utterances. moreover, higher proficiency learners were able to use contrastive expressions in conjunction with other discourse features such as foregrounding main points of the utterance and putting the qualification segments in the background. in other words, learners’ increased l2 discourse knowledge led to more native-like production of self-qualification segments. al-gahtani and roever (2012), on the other hand, used a role-play task to examine sequential organization of requests. participants were 26 male saudi learners of australian english who were divided into beginning, lowerand upper-intermediate, and advanced groups (proficiency determined by course levels). moreover, a cloze test was administered to upper-intermediate and advanced participants, and their self-reported ielts scores were also collected to ensure that these two groups represented different proficiency levels. all participants completed three request-making role-play tasks, each of which required a long conversation that varied in the power relationship between interlocutors (equal, less and more powerful). for example, situation 1 (p. 49; equal interlocutor relationship) required participants to ask his housemate to buy some bread from a supermarket when the housemate was watching tv and proficiency effect on l2 pragmatic competence 565 wanted to stay home. three role-play tasks were conducted individually and audio-taped. findings showed that there was a positive proficiency effect on learners’ sequential organization of requests. compared to lower proficiency learners, higher proficiency learners produced more preexpansions (e.g., greetings, summons prior to request) and insert expansions (e.g., negation about timing and other details of the request). however, only four out of the eight higher proficiency learners included justifications or reasons in the request turn in the situation where they were in a higher status position, but lower proficiency learners had the same performance regardless of the power relationship. in other words, higher proficiency learners had better pragmatic performance at discourse level, but their sensitivity to the power relationship in target situations was not significantly better than that of lower proficiency learners. 4.2. almost no proficiency effect on pragmatic competence in contrast to the studies summarized above, four studies reported almost no proficiency effect2 on pragmatic competence (allami & naeimi, 2011; niezgoda & roever, 2001; shardakova, 2005; takahashi, 1996). for example, niezgoda and roever (2001) investigated awareness of grammatical and pragmatic errors in 48 esl and 124 efl learners. participants were divided into high and low proficiency groups based on their scores on the placement and achievement tests. the instrument was a 20-item video-and-questionnaire task originally designed by bardovi-harlig and dörnyei (1998). in the task, participants watched each scenario twice and read the written description of the scenario, then indicated the appropriateness/correctness of the last utterance (target speech act utterance) in each scenario by checking yes or no. the following is an example (p. 71): the teacher asks peter to help with the plans for the class trip. t: ok, so we’ll go by bus. who lives near the bus station? peter, could you check the bus times for us on the way home tonight? p: #no, i can’t tonight. sorry. was the last part appropriate/correct? yes no if there was a problem, how bad do you think it was? not bad at all___:___:___:___:___:___very bad and, how would you revise it? as displayed above, the target speech act utterance for each scenario was in bold, and there were two questions next to it: the first question asked about 2 “almost no proficiency effect” means no significant positive correlation between proficiency and pragmatic competence. feng xiao 566 the appropriateness and correctness of the utterance, and the second asked about the perceived severity of the error, if any. if the answer to the first question was yes, the participants proceeded to the next scenario. findings showed that low proficiency learners recognized significantly more pragmatic than grammatical errors, whereas high proficiency learners identified slightly more grammatical than pragmatic errors. in other words, high proficiency learners’ awareness of pragmatic errors was lower than low proficiency learners’. allami and naeimi (2011), on the other hand, used a dct to investigate iranian efl learners’ production of refusals. in this study, 30 iranian efl learners were divided into three groups: lower-intermediate (toefl scores lower than 400), intermediate (toefl scores from 400 to 530) and upper-intermediate proficiency (toefl scores higher than 530). in addition, 31 iranian nss also participated. all participants completed a 12-item dct representing four different refusals: refusals to requests, invitations, offers and suggestions. within each type of refusals, three situations differed in social status (higher, equal or lower). comparison between iranian and american nss showed that american patterns of refusals were less subject to the impact of social status. in other words, american nss did not change the use of refusal formulas according to social status. the reverse was true for iranian nss, showing that iranians were more sensitive to social status. this perception of social status was transferred to l2 english by iranian learners. compared with lower intermediate and intermediate learners, upper intermediate learners transferred more l1 social norms to l2 request, leading to more pragmatic failures. 4.3. mixed proficiency effects on pragmatic competence several other studies revealed that proficiency effect on pragmatic competence was mediated by other factors, which led to mixed effects on pragmatic competence. (bardovi-harlig, 2008, 2009; bardovi-harlig & bastos, 2011; félix-brasdefer, 2007; nguyen, 2008; taguchi, 2006, 2007, 2011, 2013; takenoya, 2003; xu, case, & wang, 2008). for example, takenoya (2003) investigated l2 learners’ production of address forms and awareness of social factors underlying their choices of address forms. participants were 52 american learners of japanese and 85 japanese nss (53 males and 43 females). the learners formed three proficiency groups: beginning, intermediate, and advanced (proficiency determined by placement test scores). the instrument was a questionnaire with five tasks: (a) a dct, (b) a conversation completion task, (c) an inference task, (d) a ranking task, and (e) a rating task. in the dct, participants chose appropriate address forms from a list of 12 address forms. in the conversation completion task, the learners completed proficiency effect on l2 pragmatic competence 567 a dialogue with appropriate address forms. the inference task required the learners to read short dialogues between two japanese speakers and to infer their relationship according to address terms used by the interlocutors. findings showed that the learners in all three proficiency groups were able to produce native-like address forms. higher proficiency learners performed better than lower proficiency learners, but there was no significant difference across proficiency levels. in terms of awareness of social variables, higher proficiency learners had better awareness of the gender factor in task situations than lower proficiency learners, but they did not have better awareness of closeness between interlocutors or addressee’s social status than lower proficiency learners. put differently, proficiency had different effects on l2 learners’ awareness of different social variables involved in the use of address forms (e.g., addressee’s gender, social status, and closeness between interlocutors). similarly, taguchi (2006) revealed different proficiency effects according to social factors involved in task request-making situations. she used a role-play task to examine japanese learners’ production of requests in two types of situations. in one situation type, the power relationship between interlocutors was equal, the social distance between interlocutors was small, and the degree of imposition was low (pdr-low); in the other situation type, the listener had greater power, the social distance between interlocutors was large, and the degree of imposition was high (pdr-high). 20 english nss and 59 japanese learners of english took part in the study. l2 learners were divided into high and low proficiency groups based on their toefl scores and teacher ratings of their oral proficiency. all participants completed the 4-scenario role-play task, and their overall appropriateness was evaluated with a 6-point scale by six experienced esl instructors. findings revealed that high proficiency learners had higher overall appropriateness scores than low proficiency learners, but the difference for pdr-low situations was smaller than that for pdr-high situations. in terms of request expressions, both groups underused mitigated-preparatory expressions (e.g., i’m wondering if + verb phrase), and overused hinting expressions in pdrhigh situations, but this deviation from native speaker pattern was greater for lower proficiency group. in pdr-low situations, on the other hand, both groups used more direct expressions, and there was no significant difference between the two proficiency groups. in other words, proficiency effects on l2 learners’ production of requests varied according to social variables involved in task situations. félix-brasdefer (2007), on the other hand, examined l2 learners’ production of three types of requests in spanish: direct, conventional indirect and unconventional indirect in formal (learner-native speaker interactions) and informal (learner-learner interactions). indirect requests were divided into two types: conventional indirect requests (query preparatory) and unconventional feng xiao 568 indirect requests (hinting). participants were three groups of l2 spanish learners in the usa: beginning, intermediate, advanced (15 students in each group). l2 proficiency was decided by course levels: learners in the beginning group were taking second-semester spanish courses; those in intermediate groups were taking sixth-semester spanish courses; and advanced participants were taking eighth-semester spanish courses. participants provided their oral responses in seven request-making role-play situations. findings showed that beginning learners used the highest percentage of direct requests in all situations, followed by the intermediate and advanced groups. in contrast, advanced learners used the highest percentage of conventional indirect requests, followed by the intermediate and beginning learners. however, there was no significant difference in production of unconventional indirect requests across proficiency levels (beginning with 6%, intermediate with 5%, advanced with 3%). these findings suggest that proficiency effects depend on the types of pragmalinguistic forms (degree of directness and conventionality) that learners are required to produce. aside from different types of pragmalinguistic forms, l2 proficiency also had different effects according to modalities of pragmatic performance (bardovi-harlig, 2008, 2009; bardovi-harlig & bastos, 2011). for example, bardoviharlig (2008) investigated the relationship between recognition and production of formulaic expressions in l2 pragmatics. participants were 61 intermediate to advanced esl learners (proficiency determined by course levels). four tasks were administered to the participants: a self-reported recognition task, a context identification task, a dct and a modified vocabulary knowledge scale (developed by wesche & paribakht, 1996). in the self-reported recognition task, learners circled all the formulaic expressions that they knew from the given list of 63 items. in the context identification task, learners chose the situation in which they were likely to hear the target expressions. the dct consisted of six scenarios that elicited the target formulaic expressions used in the recognition task. in the dct task, participants read each situation and wrote their answers according to the situation. in the modified vocabulary knowledge scale task, learners gave their recognition of six expressions. the following is an example (p. 211): instructions: choose the one answer that best describes your knowledge. circle the letter. example: a piece of cake (a) i don’t remember having heard this expression before. (b) i have heard this expression before, but i don’t know what it means. (c) i have heard this expression before, and i think it means (d) i know this expression. it means something is easy (e) i can use this expression in a conversation. give an example: i can do that. it’s a piece of cake. proficiency effect on l2 pragmatic competence 569 results showed that all learners reported high recognition scores, but much lower production scores. proficiency had a positive effect on the self-reported recognition task: higher proficiency learners had higher recognition scores than lower proficiency learners. in contrast, there was not a significant increase in production scores across proficiency levels. these findings revealed that proficiency had different effects on recognition and production of formulaic expressions. finally, five studies revealed that the proficiency effect on pragmatic competence was mediated by length of stay in the target language community (bardovi-harlig & bastos, 2011; shardakova, 2005; taguchi, 2011; 2013; xu, case, & wang, 2009). for example, shardakova (2005) investigated effects of proficiency and length of stay in the target language community on l2 learners’ production of apologies. participants formed five groups: (a) 23 low proficiency american learners of russian without in-country experience, (b) eight high proficiency learners of russian without in-country experience, (c) 24 low proficiency learners of russian with in-country experience, (d) 35 high proficiency learners of russian with in-country experience, and (e) 41 nss of russian. low proficiency was defined as opi levels ranging from novice-high to intermediate-mid, while high proficiency was defined as opi levels ranging from intermediate-high to advanced-mid. all participants completed a 21-item written dct and an assessment questionnaire that required learners to rate interlocutors’ power relationship and social distance in task situations as well as severity of the offense and obligation to apologize on a 3-point scale. it was found that more proficient learners employed a slightly greater number of apologies. however, increase in proficiency without study-abroad experience often resulted in overuse of polite strategies of apology. moreover, increased proficiency had no effect on learners’ perception of target social factors, but exposure to the target culture had a positive effect on learners’ perception of target social factors involved in task situations. these findings suggest that compared with length of stay in the target language community, proficiency had a smaller effect on l2 learners’ production of apologies and awareness of social factors involved in task situations. in contrast, xu, case and wang (2009) found that compared to length of stay in the target language community, proficiency had a more significant effect on l2 learners’ awareness of pragmatic and grammatical errors. in their study, 126 esl learners in the usa were first divided into high proficiency group (toefl scores above 550, n = 62) and low proficiency group (toefl scores below or equal to 550, n = 64). then, each group was further divided into two subgroups according to length of residence (lor): long lor (more than 1 year) and short lor (fewer or equal to 1 year). therefore, there were four groups of participants: high proficiency with long lor, high proficiency with short lor, low proficiency with long lor and low proficiency with short lor. the instrument was feng xiao 570 a 20-senario questionnaire adopted from bardovi-harlig and dörnyei (1998, see p. 13 for a sample item). findings revealed that proficiency and length of stay in the target language community both played an important role in learners’ awareness of pragmatic and grammatical errors. compared to length of stay in the target language community, proficiency had a larger effect on l2 learners’ awareness of pragmatic and grammatical errors, because the higher proficiency group may have more pragmalinguistic knowledge and be more sensitive to linguistic forms and their pragmatic functions. 5. summary of findings and discussion the synthesis question asks whether l2 proficiency affects adult learners’ pragmatic competence. findings from previous studies support an overall positive proficiency effect on l2 pragmatic performance. in particular, the existing literature has found that compared to lower proficiency learners, higher proficiency learners are better at minimizing negative l1 transfer in situations where l1 and l2 patterns differ (e.g., maeshilba, yoshinaga, kasper, & ross, 1996; wannaruk, 2008). moreover, more proficient learners are better at comprehending requests (cook & liddicoat, 2002) and identifying different types of speech acts (i.e., request, suggestion, correction and offer) (garcia, 2004). with regard to pragmatic production, more competent learners have a larger repertoire of strategies to realize speech acts (e.g., dalmau & gotor, 2007; trosborg, 1995), and are able to use more target-like pragmalinguistic forms such as intensifiers (e.g., dalmau & gotor, 2007), downgraders (e.g., pinto, 2005) and contrastive markers (e.g., geyer, 2007). however, high l2 proficiency does not guarantee a native-like pragmatic performance. the positive role of proficiency in l2 pragmatics is mediated by pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics aspects of pragmatic competence. pragmalinguistics involves knowledge of linguistic forms and their social functions. therefore, it can be improved by increased proficiency which includes increased lexical, grammatical and discourse knowledge. in other words, proficiency has positive effects on l2 pragmalinguistics. this claim was supported by previous studies. for example, dalmau and gotor’s (2007) study revealed that unlike lower proficiency learners, higher proficiency learners produced a greater range of apology strategies, more lexical intensifiers, and fewer nontarget-like apology expressions. these findings suggest that increased proficiency grants learners a wider range of pragmalinguistic forms to realize pragmatic functions. also, geyer (2007) found that more proficient learners employed a greater number of lexical and grammatical markers to qualify their utterances when they had to adjust their previous opinions, and they were capable of using contrastive proficiency effect on l2 pragmatic competence 571 expressions in conjunction with other discourse features, such as foregrounding main points of the utterance and putting the qualification segments in the background. these findings support the notion that higher proficiency learners have more lexical, grammatical and discourse knowledge, which allows them to outperform lower proficiency learners on pragmatic production at discourse level. however, proficiency effects vary depending on different types of target pragmalinguistic forms, such as speech acts of different degrees of directness and conventionality. for example, félix-brasdefer (2007) showed a decline in the production of direct requests but an increase in the production of conventional indirect requests, and no significant difference in the production of unconventional indirect requests from lower to higher proficiency learners. one possible reason is that higher proficiency learners have more knowledge of fixed pragmalinguistic forms to perform conventional indirect requests, whereas lower proficiency learners have limited knowledge of pragmalinguistic forms; as a result, they overuse direct requests which only require simple pragmalinguistic forms. on the contrary, increased proficiency cannot improve production of unconventional indirect requests, which are not associated with fixed pragmalinguistic forms. aside from types of pragmalinguistic forms, different modalities of pragmatic performance can also mediate proficiency effect. for example, bardoviharlig (2008) showed that proficiency only had a positive effect on recognition but not on production of formulaic expressions. formulaic expressions are fixed or semifixed lexical strings that can serve pragmatic functions in situations. therefore, the acquisition of formulaic expressions is similar to that of vocabulary knowledge, showing a gap between comprehension and production. these findings suggest that modalities of pragmatic performance should be taken into account when we discuss proficiency effect on l2 pragmatics. in summary, proficiency has positive effects on l2 pragmalinguistics, but these positive effects depend on the nature of target pragmatic features such as different types of speech acts (e.g., cook & liddicoat, 2002; félix-brasdefer, 2007), and modalities of pragmatic performance (i.e., comprehension and production) (e.g., bradovi-harlig, 2008, 2009). the other aspect of pragmatic competence, namely, sociopragmatics, on the other hand, refers to the social aspect of pragmatic competence, which involves evaluation of social factors embedded in task situations such as interlocutors’ social status, social distance and power relationship. it seems that compared to pragmalinguistics, sociopragmatics is less susceptible to the influence of proficiency because it does not directly focus on particular linguistic forms. for example, takenoya (2003) showed that there was no significant difference in the production of address forms across proficiency levels, because higher proficiency learners did not have more native-like awareness of social variables reflected in feng xiao 572 task situations (e.g., addresses’ social status and social distance between interlocutors). similarly, niezgoda and roever (2001) found that high proficiency l2 english learners’ awareness of pragmatic errors was lower than low proficiency learners’. the almost no effect of proficiency was also showed in allami and naeimi’s (2011) study where iranian learners with higher l2 proficiency transferred more l1 perception of social status to l2 english requests, leading to more pragmatic failures. these findings suggest that increased proficiency does not necessarily improve l2 learners’ sociopragmatics. one possible reason is that l2 learners may need more time to realize differences between l1 and l2 sociopragmatic norms and make their decisions to conform to or resist the target norms. l2 learners may consciously choose to diverge from the target norms because they may want to maintain their foreign identity (e.g., davis, 2007; kim, 2014) or because the target norms do not match their perceived self-image as a second language speaker (e.g., locastro, 2001, 2012). in summary, previous studies have found that more proficient learners have more l2 pragmalinguistc forms to perform pragmatic functions, but proficiency effects vary depending on the nature of target pragmatic features. with regards to sociopragmatics, higher proficiency learners do not necessarily have better knowledge of target social norms, which is essential to a native-like pragmatic performance. in other words, l2 pragmalinguistcs and sociopragmatics are not equally influenced by proficiency levels. increased proficiency can expand l2 learners’ linguistic repertoire of pragmatic performance, but linguistic readiness does not directly lead to native-like pragmatic performance. it is learners’ awareness of target sociopragmatic norms and their willingness to apply these norms to their language use that decide the degree of appropriateness of their l2 pragmatic performance. 6. conclusion and future research directions this synthesis study has found that there is an overall positive effect of proficiency on l2 pragmatic performance. however, the proficiency effects vary depending on the two aspects of pragmatic competence. a native-like pragmatic performance requires sufficient knowledge of both l2 pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics, and these two aspects of pragmatic competence are reflected differently in various target pragmatic features. therefore, future studies should compare proficiency effects on different target pragmatic features, which would give insight into how different aspects of pragmatic competence are affected by l2 general proficiency. data from these studies may also shed light on the threshold proficiency required to achieve targetlike pragmatic performance, because the threshold proficiency should include fundamental knowledge of linguistic forms to perform basic pragmatic functions. proficiency effect on l2 pragmatic competence 573 future studies should also investigate the interplay between proficiency and different social factors involved in task situations as this would elucidate what social factors can mediate the effect of proficiency on l2 pragmatic performance. research in this domain will also enrich our understanding of which variables are more influential in performing a particular pragmatic feature. another direction for future studies is to investigate the interplay between proficiency and learner-related variables such as the learning context (e.g., shardakova, 2005; xue, case, & wang, 2009), length of formal instruction, and attitude toward target culture. such research would help explain the extent to which proficiency effects on l2 pragmatic competence are mediated by learnerrelated factors (i.e., individual differences). learners’ individual traits such as motivation, willingness to conform to the target norms and identity, and their personal learning experiences may affect the relationship between proficiency and different aspects of pragmatic competence (i.e., pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics). for example, future research may want to investigate why some l2 learners with high proficiency choose to diverge from the native sociopragmatic norms. finally, most of the studies investigated examined pragmatic performance at the monologic level such as production of speech acts (e.g., wannaruk, 2008), which could not represent pragmatic competence at the dialogic level such as sequential organization (e.g., al-gahtani & roever, 2012). future studies should examine the magnitude of proficiency effect on l2 learners’ ability to act adaptively in interaction (i.e., pragmatic adaptability), because sufficient knowledge of pragmalinguistic forms and the functions performed by those forms in different situations could provide l2 learners with the foundation of pragmatic knowledge, while pragmatic adaptability determines the actual quality of their pragmatic performance in the sequential context of conversations. acknowledgments i sincerely appreciate the two reviewers’ comments. any remaining errors are all my own. feng xiao 574 references *al-gahtani, s., & roever, c. 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(2003). effects of proficiency and length of residence on the pragmatic comprehension of japanese esl learners. second language studies, 22, 107-175. feng xiao 578 appendix a study coding scheme author and publication date research question(s) target language target pragmatic feature(s) modality (comprehension/production/awareness of target pragmatic features) instrument/data source sample size groups (l2 proficiency levels) proficiency measure(s) findings proficiency effect on l2 pragmatic competence 579 appendix b table of the study profiles acronyms: c = comprehension c/g = course/grade levels copt = cartoon oral production task dct = discourse completion task ietls = international english language testing system ns = native speakers nns = nonnative speakers mcq = multiple-choice questionnaire opi = oral proficiency interview p = production p/a = perception/awareness toefl = test of english as a foreign language study target language pragmatic feature modality instrument/data sample size groups proficiency measure al-gahtani & roever 2012 english sequential organization of request p role-play 26 nns 4 placement test c-test ielts beginning intermediate low intermediate high advanced allami & naeimi 2011 english refusals p dct 30 nns 37 ns 3 toefl < 400 400-530 > 530 bardovi & dörnyei 1998 english pragmatic errors p/a video-and-questionnaire 543 nns multiple placement test self-assessment bardovi 2008 english routines c & p aural recognition dct 61 nns 4 c/g level 4-7 bardovi 2009 english routines c & p aural recognition audio-visual production task 122 nns 49 ns 4 c/g level 3-6 bardovi & bastos 2011 english routines c & p aural recognition audio-visual production task language contact questionnaire 122 nns 49 ns 4 c/g level 3-6 cook & liddicoat 2002 english requests c mcq 100 nns 50 ns 2 ielts 6.5/ toefl 550 dalmau & gotor 2007 english apologies p dct 78 nns 3 placement test superior advanced intermedate feng xiao 580 study target language pragmatic feature modality instrument/data sample size groups proficiency measure félix-brasdefer 2007 spanish requests p role-play 45 nns 3 c/g beginning intermediate advanced garcia 2004 english requests, suggestions, offers and corrections p/a mcq 35 nns 21 ns 2 toefl < 550 > 550 geyer 2007 japanese contrastive markers p opi corpus 30 nns 4 opi superior advanced intermediate novice hoffmanhicks 1992 french speech acts c & p mcq dct 14 nns 9 ns multiple 100-point linguistic competence test (37-65) koike 1996 spanish speech acts c & p video-questionnaire-production task 114 nns 3 c/g beginning intermediate advanced nguyen 2008 english criticism p writing task speaking task writing questionnaire interview 36 nns 3 ielts (1-9) =< 5.0 high-beginning 5.5-6.0 intermediate >= 6.5 advanced niezgoda & roever 2001 english pragmatic errors p/a video-and-questionnaire 172 nns multiple c/g maeshiba, yoshinaga, kasper, & ross 1996 english apologies c & p dct questionnaire 60 nns 30 american ns 30 japanese ns 2 toefl 400-500 510-627 pinto 2005 spanish requests p dct 20 nns 44 ns 4 c/g level 1-4 shardakova 2005 russian apologies p & p/a dct assessment questionnaire 90 nns 41 ns 2 opi novice-high to intermediate-mid intermediate-high to advanced-mid takahashi 1996 english requests p/a transferability judgment questionnaire 142 nns 2 secondary level english proficiency test taguchi 2006 english requests p role-play 59 nns 20 ns 2 toefl 330-457 480-590 proficiency effect on l2 pragmatic competence 581 study target language pragmatic feature modality instrument/data sample size groups proficiency measure taguchi 2007 english requests and refusals p role-play 59 nns 20 ns 2 toefl 330-457 480-590 taguchi 2011 english implicatures c mcq 64 nns 25 ns 3 toefl 413-457 520-580 520-583 taguchi 2013 english routines p oral dct 64 nns 3 toefl takenoya 2003 japanese address forms p & p/a dct conversation completion task inference task ranking task rating task 52 nns 85 ns 3 placement test beginning intermediate advanced trosborg 1995 english requests, apologies and complaints p role-play n/a 3 c/g beginning intermediate advanced wannaruk 2008 english refusals p dct 40 nns 40 american ns 40 thai ns 3 graduate english test intermediate-low intermediate-mid intermediate-high xu, case, & wang 2009 english pragmatic errors p/a video-questionnaire task 126 nns 2 toefl <= 550 > 550 yamanaka 2003 english implicatures c video-questionnaire task 43 nns 13 ns 4 close test < 25% correct 25-49% 50-74% 75-100% studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: edyta olejarczuk (poznań university of technology) language editor: melanie ellis (language teacher training college, zabrze) vol. 6 no. 1 march 2016 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, university of new south wales, sydney) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo) kata csizér (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) robert dekeyser (university of maryland) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) carol griffiths (fatih university, istanbul) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) sarah mercer (university of graz) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) bonny norton (university of british columbia) terrence odlin (ohio state university) rebecca oxford (university of maryland) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (university of pannonia, trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto) elaine tarone (university of minnesota) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2016 editor: mirosław pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak anna mystkowska-wiertelak edyta olejarczuk © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · infobaseindex · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the thomson reuters master journal list. special issue: recent advances in instructed second language acquisition guest editor: hossein nassaji studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 6, number 1, march 2016 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors ....................................................................... 9 editorial .......................................................................................... 13 articles: laura hawkes, hossein nassaji – the role of extensive recasts in error detection and correction by adult esl students .................................. 19 ronald p. leow, luis cerezo – deconstructing the i and sla in isla: one curricular approach ........................................................................... 43 alessandro benati – input manipulation, enhancement and processing: theoretical views and empirical research .................................................. 65 shawn loewen, solene inceoglu – the effectiveness of visual input enhancement on the noticing and l2 development of spanish past tense .. 89 rhonda oliver, shahreen young – improving reading fluency and comprehension in adult esl learners using bottom-up and top-down vocabulary training ......................................................................... 111 michael zuniga, daphnée simard – observing the interactive qualities of l2 instructional practices in esl and fsl classrooms .................. 135 tingfeng fu, hossein nassaji – corrective feedback, learner uptake, and feedback perception in a chinese as a foreign language classroom ....159 book reviews: mirosław pawlak – review of shawn loewen’s introduction to instructed second language acquisition ............................................................ 183 notes to contributors .....................................................................189 9 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors alessandro benati is director of carole (centre for applied research and outreach in language education) and professor of applied linguistics and second language studies at the university of greenwich in the uk. he has researched and taught in the area of second language acquisition and processing instruction. he is coauthor with james lee of various books on the processing instruction model. contact data: department of literature, language and theatre, greenwich campus, se10 9ls, greenwich, london, uk (a.benati@greenwich.ac.uk) luis cerezo is assistant professor of spanish linguistics and director of the spanish language program at american university in washington, dc, usa. published in various specialized journals, his research focuses on the development, implementation, and evaluation of hybrid and online programs for second language learning and translation. he is the author of talking to avatars, an e-tutor that allows students to interact with prefilmed actors to learn spanish in real-life situations. contact data: department of world languages and cultures, american university, 4400 massachusetts ave., nw, washington, dc 20016, usa (luis.cerezo@american.edu) tingfeng fu has a master's degree in applied linguistics from the university of victoria, canada. she is a skilled language instructor of both english and mandarin chinese. she currently works as an item development and research coordinator for the canadian english language proficiency index program (celpip) test. contact data: paragon testing enterprises inc., suite 110, 2925 virtual way, vancouver, bc, canada, v5m 4x5 (jill.suzhou@gmail.com) laura hawkes is currently a french language curriculum and exam coordinator at the british columbia ministry of education. prior to beginning work at the ministry of education in 2007, she taught english as a second language at a number of educational institutions. she completed her ma in applied linguistics at the university of victoria, canada, with a focus on second language instruction. she is extremely 10 passionate about language education and currently speaks three languages (english, french, and mandarin), with the desire to add a fourth in the near future. contact data: british columbia ministry of education, po box 9183, stn prov govt, victoria bc v8w 9h1, canada (laura.hawkes@gov.bc.ca) solène inceoglu is an assistant professor in french linguistics at rochester institute of technology where she teaches french language and french linguistics courses. her research interests include second language speech perception and production, psycholinguistics, and classroom interaction, with a particular focus on cospeech gesture and audiovisual information. contact data: department of modern languages and cultures, 92 lomb memorial drive, rochester institute of technology, rochester, ny 14623 usa (inceoglu. solene@gmail.com) ronald p. leow is professor of applied linguistics and director of spanish language instruction in the department of spanish and portuguese at georgetown university in washington, dc, usa. his areas of expertise include language curriculum development, teacher education, instructed language learning, psycholinguistics, cognitive processes in language learning, research methodology, and call. professor leow has published extensively in prestigious journals that include studies in second language acquisition, language learning, applied psycholinguistics, hispania, second language research, and the modern language journal. coauthor of several books, his single-authored book titled explicit learning in the l2 classroom: a student centered approach (routledge) recently appeared in 2015. contact data: department of spanish and portuguese, icc 411, georgetown university, 37th & o sts, nw, washington, dc 20057, usa (leowr@georgetown.edu) shawn loewen, phd, is an associate professor in the second language studies and matesol program at michigan state university, usa. his research interests include instructed second language acquisition and research methods. his latest books include introduction to instructed second language acquisition and an a-z of applied linguistics research methods. contact data: michigan state university, department of linguistics and languages, b255 wells hall, 619 red cedar road, east lansing, mi 48824, usa (loewens@msu.edu) hossein nassaji is professor of applied linguistics in the department of linguistics at the university of victoria, victoria, bc, and currently the department chair. he has authored numerous articles in the areas of second language acquisition, corrective feedback, form-focused instruction, grammar instruction, and 11 task-based teaching. his most recent book is interactional feedback dimension in instructed second language learning. website: http://www.uvic.ca/humanities/linguistics/people/faculty/nassajihossein.php contact data: department of linguistics, university of victoria, p.o. box 1700 stn csc, victoria, bc, v8w 2y2, canada (nassaji@uvic.ca) rhonda oliver is a professor at curtin university, director of research in the school of education and an active researcher. she has a strong track record in language and educational research and her work appears in a number of national and international journals. her research focuses on second language acquisition and aboriginal education including large scale studies on international and indigenous university students, and on migrant and aboriginal children acquiring english as a second language/dialect. contact data: curtin university, kent street, bentley, western australia, 6845 (rhonda.oliver@curtin.edu.au) mirosław pawlak is professor of english in the english department at the faculty of pedagogy and fine arts of adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland. his main areas of interest are sla theory and research, form-focused instruction, classroom discourse, learner autonomy, communication and learning strategies, individual learner differences and pronunciation teaching. his recent publications include error correction in the foreign language classroom. reconsidering the issues (2012, adam mickiewicz university press) and several edited collections on learner autonomy, language policies of the council of europe, form-focused instruction, speaking in a foreign language and individual learner differences. contact data: department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, nowy świat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (pawlakmi@ amu.edu.pl) daphnée simard is a full professor of second language acquisition at the université du québec à montréal and currently the director of the institute of cognitive sciences at uqam. her research interests are twofold. first, she investigates the relationship between metalinguistic reflection and second language acquisition. she is also interested in the role played by individual variables such as attentional capacity and memory in second language acquisition. her work has appeared in bilingualism, language and cognition and language learning among others. contact data: institute of cognitive science, université du québec à montréal, c.p. 8888 succursale centre-ville, montréal, québec, canada, h3c-3p8 (simard. daphnee@uqam.ca) 12 shahreen young has been teaching english as a second language at a tertiary level for more than 15 years and is currently teaching at curtin university, bentley, australia. she has a keen interest in issues faced by english language learners and specifically in vocabulary acquisition and retention. contact data: curtin university, kent street, bentley, western australia, 6845 (shahreen.young@curtin.edu.au) michael zuniga is an adjunct professor of second language acquisition at the université du québec à montréal. his research interests are centred around the relationships between cognitive variables such as attention and memory, emotional variables such as anxiety and self-confidence and second language speech production. his work has appeared in journal of french language studies and journal of psycholinguistic research. contact data: département de linguistique, université du québec à montréal, case postale 8888, succursale centre-ville, montréal (québec) h3c 3p8 canada (zuniga.michael_j@uqam.ca) 463 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (4). 2013. 463-482 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl multilingualism: its open and hidden agendas hanna komorowska university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw, poland university of warsaw, poland hannakomo@data.pl abstract the author analyses tendencies presented in recently launched eu reports claiming that newly published data reveal a need to rethink approaches to individual and social multilingualism. in the first part of the article approaches to individual as well as to societal multilingualism are discussed from a historical perspective. in the second part meanings ascribed to the promotion of multilingualism are analysed from the language perspective together with the use made of them in the field of social and political activity. promoting multilingualism is then looked at from the perspectives of the learner and the teacher. implications are finally sought for teaching, learning and assessment in language education. keywords: european language policy, plurilingualism, multilingualism, second language teaching, multilingual teacher, language learning, assessment the aims of the present article are to present those aspects of today’s language teaching landscape which are in need of rethinking in light of recently launched european documents and reports, to look at the promotion of multilingualism from a new point of view, hanna komorowska 464 to analyse various approaches to multilingualism in the european language policy, to uncover a hidden agenda in the promotion of multilingualism, and to reflect on what multilingualism means for the teacher, the learner and the evaluation process. stirring the waves both the council of europe and the european union consider not only multilingual regions to be an asset to every member state, but also individual multilingualism (the so called plurilingualism) to be an asset to every citizen. teachers, therefore, are expected to successfully promote multilingualism in various forms and in various ways. the recently launched eu document entitled first european survey on language competences. final report (2012), often referred to as surveylang, presenting data on the language proficiency of 15-year-olds in 16 school systems of 13 countries confirms some of our well rooted convictions about efficient ways to promote multilingualism and about factors correlating with success in language learning. surveylang demonstrates that factors such as an early start, amount of curriculum time for languages, exposure to foreign languages, the use of the target language during lessons, but also learners’ perception of the language as useful and not very difficult are all highly correlated with fl test scores. yet, there are surprises in store for the teaching profession. the greatest shock comes with computers. new technologies, so far considered crucial, have not been found to correlate with test results. “whether schools have access to a multimedia lab does not show clear effects on the average school scores on the language tests. this is true for all skills” (first european survey, 2012, p. 83). there is no clear effect of virtual learning environment (vle) on reading or the communicative aspect of writing. although the presence of vle has a positive effect on listening and the language aspect of writing, positive effects are not statistically significant. moreover, both time spent on preparing for tests and time spent on homework are factors related to a lower score on the language tests (pp. 78-79). a surprise also comes with data related to the emphasis on similarities between languages: “teachers’ pointing out similarities to students goes with lower scores on the language tests” (p. 87). one more unexpected result tells us that perception of the lesson, the teacher and materials show no correlation with test scores (p. 89). there also comes a statement which might even be considered as a conclusion not quite politically correct, although it should be stressed that it is related to foreign languages and not to the language of schooling: “whether immigrant students received help in mastering the host language or whether they received formal education in their language(s) of multilingualism: its open and hidden agendas 465 origin does not show clear effects on immigrant students’ scores on the language tests” (p. 86). all these astonishing results show that there is a fundamental need to reconsider our approaches to language education and rethink ways to support language learning in schools. in view of the growing significance of english which can be seen in another document recently launched by the eurydice office of the european union, that is, key data on teaching languages at school in europe (2012), we also need to reconsider the issue of motivation to learn more than one foreign language. the report states that 73% of primary and more than 90% of secondary school students choose english and, what is more, they consider this language the most useful, sufficient as an instrument of international communication and, furthermore, relatively easy to learn (p. 11). this has been demonstrated not only in verbal declarations, but also in high performance levels: b1 level has been found to be achieved by more than half of the 15-year-olds compared to 20% for french and german and 10% for spanish (first european survey, 2012, p. 98). in order to take rational educational decisions, we need, therefore, to rethink the concept of social and individual multilingualism, ways of understanding it, reasons for its promotion, strategies required for the purpose and the role of teachers in this process. attitudes towards multilingualism the value of linguistic and cultural diversity is an idea consequently emphasized both by the council of europe and the european union (eu). the lisbon strategy and barcelona declaration (european council, 2002a, 2002b, 2002c) resulted in launching a promotion campaign for multilingualism in all eu member states. educational policy is based on the conviction that, although identity has so far been understood in both ethnic-linguistic and civic categories (smith, 2000, 2006), peaceful coexistence can only be achieved if we look at identity based on civil rights and at the same time develop an understanding of diversity. yet teenagers, as has been pointed out in surveylang, seem to be satisfied with the idea of learning just one international language, while frequent instances of their xenophobic behaviour surfacing in many countries of europe warn us that the value of diversity is far from being widely understood. the question arises whether attitudes of teenagers result from a generation gap or perhaps reflect some overt or covert attitudes in the world of adults. let us, therefore, look at various approaches to both individual and social multilingualism. hanna komorowska 466 approaches to individual multilingualism times when bilingualism, let alone individual multilingualism, was considered a low status symbol or even a harmful phenomenon are gone; not long gone, however, if we take a broader perspective on the development of applied linguistics and language teaching. almost a hundred years ago jespersen maintained that bilingualism is an extra burden causing detrimental effects, delayed development and reduced intelligence, therefore should be considered “an advantage purchased too dear” (jespersen, 1922). macnamara’s (1966) balance theory, formulated four decades later and claiming that in the learning process one language increases at the expense of another, cannot be considered favourable, either. the change of perspective came with canadian research on bilingualism (cummins, 1976; peal & lambert, 1962) and became well consolidated with ringbom’s (1987) research on bilingual finnish-swedish children undertaken no more than 25 years ago. it is practically the 21st century that brought us full understanding of the benefits of second and foreign language learning. research shows that the learning of more than one language has distinct linguistic advantages as it correlates with linguistic awareness (jessner, 2006; wolff, 2006), sociolinguistic sensitivity (goetz, 2003), verbal intelligence and originality (korminouri et al., 2008; lazaruk, 2007), better reading strategies (hong & leavell, 2006), transfer of strategies from l2 to l1 in the process of developing transferable competences (garfinkel & tabor, 1991) and contributes to the development of multilingual competence (gabry -barker, 2005; jessner, 2006). research also shows nonlinguistic advantages as language learning has a positive effect on concept formation; rule discovery and problem-solving (grosjean, 2010); critical, divergent and creative thinking (kharkhurin, 2008); attention, working memory and cognitive control (bialystok, craik, klein, & viswanathan, 2004); episodic and semantic memory; and higher self-esteem (dumas, 1999). it has even been found to reduce effects of adhd (toppelberg et al., 2002) and to delay the appearance of symptoms of senile dementia (bialystok, craik, klein, & viswanathan, 2004; bialystok, craik, & freedman, 2007), although the threshold level hypothesis has to be taken into consideration stating that at least a b1 level needs to be achieved if manifestations of any of those benefits are to be expected (cummins, 1979, 2000; lasagabaster, 1998). recent data presented in europeans and their languages report (2012), usually referred to as eurobarometer 2012, show that a great majority of adult european citizens understand the significance of languages: 88% consider language learning useful and 98% consider it useful for the future of their children (p. 7). action aimed at raising the awareness of the value of language learning has, therefore, been successful; attitudes towards individual multilingualism multilingualism: its open and hidden agendas 467 have definitely changed from strongly negative to extremely positive. there are, however, no clear data which would give insight into the level of parental aspirations measured by the expected number of languages in the educational offer. teenagers’ tendencies to learn one international language do not, therefore, have to run against expectations of their parents. approaches to multilingualism in the community positive attitudes vis-à-vis multilingualism in the community (often referred to as social multilingualism) were first found to be manifested much earlier than those towards plurilingualism. as early as at the council of constance (1414-1418) the number of languages in the kingdom was presented as a key argument by the english delegation who at that time claimed a status of a natio, at that time granted only to france, germany, italy and spain. the english clergy argued that five languages which were mutually incomprehensible functioned in their territories and considered this phenomenon a sufficient reason for their kingdom’s promotion (komorowska, 2014; mundy & woody, 1961, p. 344; smith, 2006, p. 148). this line of thinking, however, was not at all followed in the centuries to come. power was often turned in various places of the world against minority languages or languages of occupied territories. the case of the austro-hungarian empire, where the national anthem was sung in many languages, was not at all typical. power often led to crushing identities and wiping away cultures, but sometimes, also, to bringing in education and technological progress. the two were not mutually exclusive, hence ambivalence which often accompanied the process. how strongly today’s linguistic landscapes are rooted in history tends to be forgotten. europeans and their languages report (2012), for example, lists countries where a relatively high percentage of citizens declare skills in understanding or even speaking another language without commenting on the often dubious roots of multilingualism. apart from traditionally multilingual regions, such as luxembourg, parts of europe where citizens declare higher second or foreign language proficiency are often those where, as in the baltic republics, language skills are historically linked to foreign dominance and to painful memories of exile, expulsion, dispersion and forced settlement. language education is a way to achieve, promote and protect multilingualism in a peaceful way, but in order to design appropriate pedagogic approaches and methods we need to fully understand the situation. this is, however, difficult due to confusion springing from the fact that promoting multilingualism has become an umbrella term to embrace a huge number of diverse issues. let us try to disentangle this knot looking at it from three different perspectives: the socio-political perspective focusing on language, hanna komorowska 468 the educational perspective focusing on the learner, and the professional perspective focusing on the teacher. promoting multilingualism: focus on language the term promoting multilingualism is used and understood today in a number of ways. below, we will, therefore, try to list and analyse the most common meanings of the term with their implications for social, political and educational activity. protecting languages. one of the main meanings of the term promoting multilingualism is related to language protection aimed at endangered languages, that is, languages with very few native speakers and codes which are likely to disappear from the surface of our linguistic map. the idea of protection does not seem to evoke controversy, though differences of opinion can be expected when it comes to deciding on the budgetary provision for the purpose. the economic issue is even more complicated if we try to take social, political and economic measures in response to warnings by both david crystal (2000) and michael krauss (1992) that this century will see the death of 90% of the world’s languages. promoting minority, ethnic and regional languages. the term promoting multilingualism is also used to describe activities aiming at the promotion of minority, ethnic and regional languages. in order to successfully promote, or, at least, successfully protect them, we need reliable knowledge of the situation; yet arriving at an objective and reliable picture is often an almost impossible task as statistics coming from a variety of sources prove to be a confusing source of information. in poland, for instance, the 2012 report by the central statistical office (census bureau; gus is the polish acronym), estimates the percentage of ethnic minorities in the population to range from 2 to 4%, with the top of the margin doubling its bottom value (gus, 2012). striking differences, sometimes reaching even a ratio of 1 to 10, can be noticed between official statistics and informal estimates, especially those offered in the media by representatives of ethnic minorities. on an individual plane such differences can be explained either by fear of stigmatization or by expectations of career benefits coming with majority affiliation. sometimes, especially in the case of regional languages, multiple identities might also be at play; for example, 52,000 citizens declared themselves as kashubian speakers, but as many as 220,000 people described themselves as polish kashubians or kashubian-poles. it can be assumed that on a political plane official sources tend to downplay the numbers of national minorimultilingualism: its open and hidden agendas 469 ties, often for socio-economic reasons, while minority groups are interested in projecting a heavier presence at home and abroad. in this conflict of interests, arriving at precise statistics and in consequence taking, for example, welljustified financial decisions gets more and more difficult. protecting language varieties. one more meaning of the term promoting multilingualism has to do with protecting or reviving language varieties, which depends on their status and spread. certain varieties are considered as more representative or even straightforwardly better than others by insiders, though their perception by outsiders is not always the same. this evaluative approach is sometimes politically forced, and sometimes promoted through education; therefore, it usually leads to social stigmatisation or results in an underground status of a given variety of the language which then enters the field of self-censorship surfacing only in family circles and childhood landscapes. in a less oppressive context, depending on the political or local situation, some of those varieties are revived and gain new impetus, while some have to accept the status of a local attraction. examples of two different kinds of revival can be seen in poland today. silesian, treated as politically suspicious and educationally inadequate half a century ago, has now gained strength as a language with a television channel of its own, dozens of publications, festivals and competitions. the traditional warsaw dialect, almost lost under the ruins of the city, is now being revived by wit ywych muzyków, a group of university graduates who walk the surviving streets of the right bank of the river singing and giving performances in the yards of forgotten houses, reaching those who still remember having heard or having spoken it. we can describe it as language variety protection as well as language variety revival. the former is usually the responsibility of official institutions, yet individual attitudes are always crucial for the success of each official campaign. the latter is more often a result of personal motivations and initiatives. securing language rights of regional and minority speakers. another meaning of the term multilingualism, although often referred to as language protection, is very different in kind from the concept discussed above as in fact it has to do with the speakers and not with the languages. european charter of regional and minority languages (1992), a document worked out by the council of europe, offers ways to protect the language rights of the speakers. yet particular countries and even particular regions show various degrees of readiness to take this responsibility. at the same time national or ethnic minorities show various degrees of readiness to engage in securing those rights for themselves. according to country report. poland (2006) as well as to the reports prepared by regional associations (zrzeszenie kaszubsko-pomorskie, 2011) and hanna komorowska 470 the national audit office (najwy sza izba kontroli, 2004), in making use of educational benefits in poland, huge differences can be noticed between national and ethnic minorities, although no demographic differences or administrative regulations can be held accountable for these discrepancies. huge engagement can be, for instance, noticed on the part of kashubians, who under communism had been denied the right to schooling through the medium of their language and since the memorable 1989 have managed to build a very large network of educational institutions today boasting 71 primary, 17 lower secondary and 3 upper secondary schools (country report. poland, 2006; zrzeszenie kaszubsko-pomorskie, 2011). byelorussians, on the other hand, do not aspire to establish schooling through the medium of their language and consider the teaching of their language at 3 hours per week a satisfactory solution. moreover, in the period 1990-2004 the number of their schools shrank from 50 to 38 (country report. poland, 2006; najwy sza izba kontroli, 2004). what is more, engagement in promoting bilingual schooling varies depending on the school level, showing that identity factors are at play at lower educational levels, while career prospects determine choices at secondary and postsecondary levels. in consequence, an educational pyramid, narrowing at secondary stages, is formed. national statistics show 601 primary schools for ethnic minorities staffed by 70% of all ethnic minority teachers. yet the number of lower secondary schools as well as the percentage of teachers there is almost three times smaller (27 schools with 25% of teachers), while the number of upper secondary schools for all minorities and the percentage of teachers employed there is twenty times smaller (27 schools with 5% of all ethnic minority teachers). numbers of students are even more informative: 8,000, 1,000 and 200 pupils respectively, for all the ethnic minorities. a question arises here: should activeness of ethnic minorities be encouraged in a top-down way or should bottom-up processes, however uneven across minorities, be left unchanged? (komorowska, 2005) approaches to defining and analysing multilingualism help to show and explain ways of using this concept in international and national promotion campaigns, as there is no single agenda in the promotion of multilingualism and, what is more, various aims seem to be less openly addressed than others. let us look at some of these aims. a hidden agenda to maintain the language status of formerly powerful languages. quite often, and this is probably a disturbing truth, multilingualism as an idea is used in a hidden agenda to maintain status for the so-called conference languages. when the popularity of languages that had been widely used in europe and beyond started decreasing, two directions of language policy multilingualism: its open and hidden agendas 471 emerged: one in relation to the language regime of powerful european institutions, the council of europe and the european union, and another in relation to the number of languages offered in the school systems of their member states. in its interinstitutional policy the council of europe decided to use two official languages, english and french, which was an obvious way to boost the status of french. a similar intention, this time including also other conference languages, seems to have been underlying the decision to add one more foreign language to the school curriculum in the famous formula of the mother tongue + 2 (european council, 2002a, 2002b, 2002c) as the fear that one foreign language would eliminate most of the conference languages was not ill-founded. the fact that french, german and spanish as l1 are spoken by more than half of eu citizens guaranteed that the second foreign language selected by european learners would be one of the three. in fact, according to key data on teaching languages (2012, p. 11), less than 5% of the learners choose a second foreign language from outside this group. this ties up with another way of using the concept of multilingualism to which we will now turn our attention. a hidden agenda to stop english as a lingua franca. the strategy for maintaining the status of formerly powerful languages, mainly by introducing the barcelona l1 + 2 formula (european council, 2002c) is at its core identical with the hidden agenda of stopping english from being a lingua franca in europe or at least slowing down the process of its spread. this hidden strategy has not proved very successful considering the fact which has already been mentioned that 73% of european learners take up english as their first foreign language in the primary school and 90% take it up in the upper-secondary school (key data on teaching languages, 2012, p. 11). these percentages as well as the fact that they are constantly rising speak for themselves, especially when we keep in mind that the students’ proficiency in their second foreign language, mostly prea1 or a1, leaves a lot to be desired (first european survey, 2012, pp. 43-44). the problem of a universal language that would not lead to linguistic imperialism arises here again. in 1885 dr. ludwik zamenhof, brought up in the milieu of polish and yiddish and educated to become a medical doctor through the medium of russian in moscow and german in vienna, came to the conclusion that languages form barriers difficult for many people to overcome. working on this assumption he presented a well-designed offer of esperanto as a universal language, which was relatively easy to master and free from links to any dominant culture or political power. unfortunately, his idea, although attractive to many, never fully took off the ground with most probably around no more than a million speakers. english has evidently become today’s version of a universal language which, as we can see, produces new frustrations and new barriers. hanna komorowska 472 an open agenda to empower less widely spoken languages. the last way of using the concept of multilingualism to be discussed here is an open agenda of certain ethnic minorities, such as for instance catalan, to gain a higher status for their languages. action of this type is undertaken in the hope that the minority language belonging to the group of less widely used languages, the so-called lwuls, would then attract attention and gain the recognition it had often been unfairly denied in the past. endeavours for their languages to be granted eu conference status, although not always successful, are fuelled by the generally accepted policy of multilingualism accompanied by the formerly discussed hidden agenda of changing the ratio of english to other languages (european commission, 2005, 2007, 2008). difficulty here consists in the fact that the two agendas, that is, the hidden one aimed at stopping english and the open one aimed at promoting ethnic minority languages and/or the so-called lwuls, although seemingly sharing the same goal, are in fact mutually exclusive. this happens, because english becomes increasingly used by interpreters as a relay language at conferences where very many languages are spoken, which paradoxically leads to an unexpected effect of “the more languages, the more english” (de swaan, 2004, 2007). difficulties also spring from organisational contexts as translation and interpretation services take up a constantly increasing part of the eu personnel as well as an increasing portion of the eu budget and will continue to do so with the accession of new countries and with more successful endeavours of lwuls to gain a conference status (king, 2012). promoting multilingualism: focus on the learner deciding to promote multilingualism in education with a view to individual learners we immediately fall into the terminology trap again. in the european union the term individual multilingualism is used more often, while the council of europe prefers the term plurilingualism. moreover, both terms tend to be used with a variety of meanings. this is also true of the term bilingualism: some authors claim that any degree of proficiency in a language other than the first language of the learner makes the learner plurilingual, some use the term for more than two languages, while some use the criterion of a threshold level of proficiency in two or more languages. focus on the learner, unlike focus on the language, attracts considerably less attention of decision-makers in the sociopolitical area and significantly more attention of decision-makers in the field of educational policy. here are some basic types of agenda. multilingualism: its open and hidden agendas 473 broadening the language offer. the main tendency in the promotion of individual multilingualism (plurilingualism) can be described as an aim to increase the number of languages learned by individual learners to two or even three, and at the same time to diversify school language offers, which would lead to more diversified constellations of languages acquired by individual students. the official agenda here, as presented in most country reports prepared jointly by particular member states of the council of europe and the language policy unit of the council, is to promote the learning of less widely learned languages, the so-called lwuls, and among them especially the languages of neighbouring countries. the suggestion related to the promotion of the neighbouring languages is, however, feasible to be implemented only if they happen to function as high status, conference languages. it proves highly unrealistic in the case of lwuls, as again shown across the recent key data on teaching languages (2012). this document, launched in september 2012, shows that the most common language constellation is: the student’s mother tongue + the language of schooling (if not the same as the mother tongue) + english + another conference language. a highly informative quote from the document reads: “the percentage of pupils learning languages other than english, french, spanish, german or russian was below 5% in most countries and in a significant number the percentage was less than 1%” (p. 11). in school contexts, an ethnic minority language enters a constellation almost only as the student’s l1, and, except for bilingual regions, almost never as a foreign language. the polish context shows that it is more than difficult to convince a polish student to start learning slovak or lithuanian even as their second foreign language in the school system as suggested by the experts from the language policy unit in the country report. poland (2006). adding slovak or lithuanian to the individual language constellation takes place extremely rarely, usually in adulthood either for family or for professional mobility reasons. empowering the student by giving status to their l1. another type of agenda in the promotion of multilingualism, in line with that of protecting languages and securing language rights of their speakers, is to boost the selfesteem of learners for whom the language of schooling is not their mother tongue. valuing languages and cultures can help to raise self-efficacy of immigrant learners, it can at the same time prove educationally useful for other students. the whole class and not only the individual student can develop linguistic and intercultural competence by using l1 as a learning resource, which has been powerfully demonstrated in a number of projects of the european centre for modern languages (ecml) such as for instance the valeur project – valuing all languages in europe (mcpake et al., 2007). the same institution hanna komorowska 474 provides teachers with a vast array of tools and materials that help them to deal with increasing educational mobility and to successfully teach plurilingual and multicultural classrooms (boeckmann, 2011). promoting multilingualism: focus on the teacher in analyzing the role of the teacher in the promotion of multilingualism no terminological problems arise other than the exchangeable use of the terms plurilingualism and individual multilingualism, which has already been discussed above. the main question asked within the educational perspective of promoting multilingualism is: should teachers who promote multilingualism be themselves multilingual? there is a vast array of opinions available. some sources do not insist on practical language skills of teachers, but point to the need for their awareness of educational policy lines in this area and to contextual factors, as presented, for example, in the document by the australian council of tesol associations (2006). some advocate knowledge and skills to manage multilingual and multicultural classrooms (penczek-zapa a, 2010). some go further, following the 2007 council of europe recommendations, and expect teachers (a) to be aware of plurilingual and intercultural aims of education, (b) to understand concepts such as plurilingual competence, (c) to be able to implement teaching approaches based on individualization, as well as (d) to constantly enrich their own linguistic repertoires (huber, 2011). some do not postulate the teacher’s multilingual competence, but point to the value of insights springing from the teachers’ personal engagement in language learning, presented for example as structured language learning experience (slle), for their overall understanding of the learning process or, to use the term introduced by ellis (2012), for their language learning awareness. some go very far in their expectations vis-à-vis the teaching profession and voice an opinion that in order to promote individual multilingualism, teachers’ own multilingual competence is indispensable (country report. poland, 2006). the choice of one of the approaches discussed above depends on the meaning ascribed to mutilingualism. tolerance, the need for conflict prevention and for securing human and language rights of ethnic minorities can be promoted even by monolingual teachers. promoting individual multilingualism is, however, more likely to prove successful when undertaken by teachers who are themselves multilingual and can, therefore, embody a model to be followed. as research results demonstrate, teachers choose languages they learn according to their utility and importance, and only sometimes because of some emotional bonds (vetter, 2012). this means that teachers as language learners mainly take multilingualism: its open and hidden agendas 475 up “big” languages. though educationally valuable, exemplary behaviour manifesting teachers’ own second or foreign language learning, does not guarantee any enrichment of their didactic repertoires, especially those related to dealing with multilingual and multicultural classes as students’ home languages tend to be other than conference languages the teacher is likely to learn. promotion of individual multilingualism among teachers aims predominantly at encouraging them to try out new paths of thinking, to find other ways of approaching facts and ideas and in consequence to develop understanding and tolerance of otherness. the question arises whether learning many foreign languages is the only way to broaden horizons and open up new perspectives, in other words, whether plurilingualism is the sole path to encouraging new ways of thinking. what actually seems crucial is the ability to decentre and change perspective. this, however, can be done in a number of ways; alain de botton (2002) in his philosophical writings, for example, postulates travels which, as he puts it, are “midwives of thought.” plurilingualism is certainly a wonderful solution, but by no means the only one. another question asked within the educational perspective of promoting multilingualism is: should teachers working in multilingual and/or multicultural classrooms be able to speak all the languages of their students? considering the diversity of individual language choices and, in consequence, the diversity of language constellations, it is highly unrealistic to expect every teacher to be competent in his or her students’ home languages. the conclusion is clear when we look at the data obtained in the cilt valeur project – valuing all languages in europe coordinated by joanna mcpake within the frames of the ecml in graz, where as many as 458 home languages spoken by school students were identified in 22 of the eu member countries in which the project was conducted (mcpake et al., 2007). school teachers can understandably be expected to learn the language of their immigrant students only in the case where there is one dominant immigrant or ethnic majority language in the class they teach. otherwise, teachers can afford to do no more than learn a few phrases of the learners’ languages to show that they respect their students and value their home languages. conclusions: looking into the future general aims presented so far in the documents of the council of europe (beacco & byram, 2002; council of europe, 2000, 2001, 2003; kelly & grenfell, 2004; little & perclová, 2001; newby et al., 2007), the european union (cf. european commission, 2005, 2007, 2008; european council, 2002a, 2008b, 2008c; moore & hagen, 2006) and the oecd (dumont, istance, & benavides, hanna komorowska 476 2010; oecd, 2007a, 2007b, 2008) include postulates of promoting multilingualism through a broader language offer in schools, encouraging the attainment of higher proficiency levels, and a higher quality of teaching. it therefore seems worthwhile to look at what it practically means for language education. let us start with the field of teaching. in the affective domain, which is of crucial importance here, we need to value languages, promote the understanding of benefits springing from learning them, but also develop teachers’ own intercultural competence and sensitivity when it comes to understanding students and their problems. in the cognitive domain, what seems to be important is getting students acquainted with a range of possibilities in making choices and helping them to decide on and construct their own language constellations. in the domain of didactic skills, teachers need the ability to develop transversal and transferable skills through language, for example, reading comprehension or a range of the so-called soft competencies, as well as the ability to identify and employ effective methods of coping with multicultural classrooms, remembering that more and more often monolingual classes can in fact prove to be multicultural. in the area of supporting learning, teachers need skills to introduce students to autonomous learning by helping them to identify their communicative needs, broad aims, learning styles and strategies; skills to develop partial competences in accordance with learners’ autonomous choices, such as, for example, intercomprehension; skills to enhance learners’ concentration and attention often weakened by multitasking. in the field of assessment, teachers need skills to introduce and promote nontest assessment, that is, formative and alternative assessment techniques based on logs, portfolios and project work; multilingualism: its open and hidden agendas 477 skills to adjust evaluation to the dual focus teaching in the new context of integrating languages with nonlanguage education within the frames of clil. there are, however, traps and obstacles on the way to promoting multilingualism in language education. they often lead to no more than lip service paid to learner-centredness, autonomy, communicative needs of the speaker and modularization, as true changes in these areas would considerably complicate the life of examination boards, publishers, schools and other educational institutions. the situation is likely to change only if teachers get a real chance to work on tailor-made curricula, cross-curricular topics and whole-school projects as well as to concentrate on individualisation, which is only possible if useless and time-consuming corporate-style school bureaucracy is taken away from the teaching profession. hanna komorowska 478 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(2006, may). bilingualism and foreign language learning: some reflections on a neglected topic. paper delivered at the 18th international conference on foreign / second language acquisition, szczyrk, poland. zrzeszenie kaszubsko-pomorskie. (2011). raport: nauczanie jezyka kaszubskiego w szko ach [report on the teaching of kashubian in schools]. zkp: gda sk. 67 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (1). 67-86 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the effect of emotional intelligence awareness-raising activities on l2 motivation reza barzegar azad university of damavand, iran barzegar72@yahoo.com sajjad aref sadr iran university of science and technology s.arefsadr@gmail.com abstract this article reports a study investigating the effect of emotional intelligence (ei) awareness-raising on iranian university students’ overall as well as variable-specific l2 motivation. the 136 participants (107 males, 29 females) were divided into a control group and an experimental group, both of which completed the same motivation questionnaire at the beginning and end of the study, with the latter receiving ei awareness-raising in seven sessions over a seven-week period. the results of paired and independent sample t tests showed that ei awareness-raising did not have any statistically significant positive effect on iranian university students’ overall l2 motivation, but they had a statistically significant positive effect on the instrumentality-prevention aspect of l2 motivation. the study highlights the importance of becoming familiar with and applying three motivational strategies which may be considered as universal motivational strategies. keywords: emotional intelligence, l2 motivation, universal motivational strategies reza barzegar, sajjad aref sadr 68 emotional intelligence the term emotional intelligence (ei), first propounded by salovey and mayer (1990), has now lost the appeal of novelty and has in fact enjoyed the status of a buzzword among psychologists, especially after the publication of goleman’s (1995) book, emotional intelligence. based on the works of many scholars (inter alia, bar-on, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2006; gardner, 1983, 1985; goleman, 1995; markus & nurius, 1986; mayer, caruso, & salovey, 2000; salovey & mayer, 1990; thorndike, 1920), it is now evident that ei can play a decisive role in occupational and educational success. bar-on (2006), who believes that the term emotional-social intelligence (esi) can better represent the construct because the term emotional intelligence fails to sufficiently focus on the social aspect of this construct, defines ei or esi as “a cross-section of interrelated emotional and social competencies, skills and facilitators that determine how effectively we understand and express ourselves, understand others and relate with them, and cope with daily demands” (p. 3). for ease of understanding, in this study, competencies, skills, and facilitators have been considered as the same concepts under the name of skills. similarly, esi and ei have been considered as the same concepts under the name of emotional intelligence. in bar-on’s (2006) model of ei, there are fifteen skills which are categorized according to five main macro-skills or components. the five macro-skills of this model on the basis of which micro-skills have been conceptualized are intrapersonal emotional quotient (eq), interpersonal eq, stress management eq, adaptability eq, and general mood eq. table1 (taken and adapted from bar-on, 2006, p. 21) summarizes the components and their corresponding skills as well as what they assess. table 1 the eq inventory (eq-i) scales and what they assess eq-i scales the ei skills assessed by each scale intrapersonal self-awareness and self-expression 1. self-regard to accurately perceive, understand and accept oneself 2. emotional self-awareness to be aware of and understand one’s emotions 3. assertiveness to effectively and constructively express one’s emotions and oneself 4. independence to be self-reliant and free of emotional dependency on others 5. self-actualization to strive to achieve personal goals and actualize one’s potential interpersonal social awareness and interpersonal relationships 6. empathy to be aware of and understand how others feel 7. social responsibility to identify with one’s social group and cooperate with others 8. interpersonal relationships to establish mutually satisfying relationships and relate well with others stress management emotional management and regulation 9. stress tolerance to effectively and constructively manage emotions 10. impulse control to effectively and constructively control emotions the effect of emotional intelligence awareness-raising activities on l2 motivation 69 adaptability change management 11. reality-testing to objectively validate one’s feelings and thinking with external reality 12. flexibility to adapt and adjust one’s feelings and thinking to new situations 13. problem-solving to effectively solve problems of a personal and interpersonal nature general mood self-motivation 14. optimism to be positive and look at the brighter side of life 15. happiness to feel content with oneself, others and life in general emotional intelligence and learning it is to be expected that ei can affect learning because emotions can affect learning in a variety of ways. for example, oatly and nundy (1996) found that when learners feel secure and excited, their learning is facilitated. this is probably because learning can better take place in an anxiety-free environment. on the other hand, if learners feel anxious about, say, their homework, it may be difficult for them to benefit from doing their homework because they may not be able to concentrate (ellis, ottaway, varner, becker, & moore, 1997). therefore, the way we feel about different aspects of learning a particular skill may influence the way and the extent to which we learn it. more specifically, according to garrison, anderson, and archer (2000), learning has three main aspects, namely, “cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence” (p. 88). they stated that emotional expression is inherent in social presence in the sense that learning often involves interaction with peers and this interaction by itself often involves influencing our peers and also being influenced by them emotionally. furthermore, goleman (1995, p. 27) portrayed the connection between emotion and cognition as a battle in which, as joseph ledoux (1996, p. 243) put it, “sometimes stress helps in formation of explicit memories but it can also devastate explicit memory.” in other words, stress may serve learners’ memory negatively or positively. consequently, stress can be both beneficial and debilitating and, therefore, distinguishing the debilitative kinds of stress from the beneficial ones can be of paramount importance. this suggests the need for studies investigating ei in order to have a better understanding of our emotions (such as stress), intensify the beneficial ones (such as beneficial kinds of stress) and weaken or decrease the debilitative ones (such as debilitative kinds of stress). because stress is an emotion which can be common among language learners, any motivational strategy which deals with stress may be used in a variety of contexts. therefore, the present authors assume that diminishing language anxiety which, according to dörnyei (2001), is one motivational strategy, can be considered as a universal motivational strategy. it deals with debilitative anxiety or stress and focuses on the ways we can decrease this kind of anxiety (for elaboration on this see dörnyei, 2001). reza barzegar, sajjad aref sadr 70 emotional intelligence and language learning many people who have experienced learning a new language may recall times when they felt particular emotions during different periods of language learning such as excitement, disappointment, desperation, disenchantment, motivation or demotivation. since ei is concerned with emotions and the central role of emotions in success has already been highlighted, it is worth exploring the role of ei in l2 learning. fortunately, this has already been investigated in part by some scholars such as fahim and pishghadam (2007) and also pishghadam (2009), who found that there is a positive correlation between having higher levels of some ei skills (such as stress tolerance) and success in language learning. however, an under-researched area is the interaction between ei and other emotional aspects of language learning. in other words, although it is worthwhile to find out that there is a positive relationship between some aspects of ei and language learning, simply highlighting this relationship may not be as important as knowing the way in which ei is related to and can influence language learning. moreover, the term language learning is so general that it may be impossible to investigate the relevance of ei to all of the aspects of language learning in one study. therefore, in the present study, the relevance of ei to only one aspect of language learning, namely l2 motivation, has been addressed. this is mainly because some of the aspects of l2 motivation may be emotion-based and therefore related to emotional intelligence. l2 motivation success in language learning depends on and is influenced by numerous factors, one of which is motivation. motivation can be among the most important prerequisites of successful language learning. there are numerous theories propounded during different periods of the history of l2 motivation research (for a comprehensive account of the periods of l2 motivation see dörnyei, 2005 and also dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). however, in order to motivate language learners, the theories of motivation may not be of practical use if they are not accompanied with practical suggestions, which can be called motivational strategies. in this regard, dörnyei (2001) has provided the most comprehensive account of motivational strategies yet developed, many of which can be related to the emotional aspects of language learning. motivational strategies according to dörnyei (2001, p. 28) “motivational strategies refer to those motivational influences that are consciously exerted to achieve some the effect of emotional intelligence awareness-raising activities on l2 motivation 71 systematic and enduring positive effect.” dörnyei (2001) presents a framework for motivational strategies which consists of four facets: creating the basic motivational conditions, generating motivation, maintaining and protecting motivation, and finally, encouraging positive self-evaluation (for a discussion of these categories see dörnyei, 2001 and also dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). for a number of reasons, language learners’ emotions may play a determining role in each of these four phases. for example, creating the basic motivational conditions may necessitate successful interpersonal relationships (between the teacher and learners, and among learners themselves); generating motivation may require self-confidence; maintaining and protecting motivation may need perseverance and patience; and finally encouraging positive selfevaluation may require a language learner to be optimistic. as interpersonal relationships, self-confidence, perseverance, patience, and optimism are prevalent emotions discussed in the area of ei and as they can be influential in l2 motivation, it is worth investigating the relationship between ei and l2 motivation in order to establish emotion-based universal motivational strategies. universal motivational strategies. the “how” of motivating language learners can vary from context to context and a particular motivational strategy which can be suitable for some learners may not be so for some other learners. dörnyei (2001) claimed that it is not a logical practice to try and apply all kinds of motivational strategies because many of them may not work for us and may not be appropriate for particular language learners. when a motivational strategy is context-specific, it is suitable for a limited number of contexts and not for all contexts. on the other hand, if a motivational strategy is universal, it can be used in a variety of contexts successfully. the difficult choice of suitable motivational strategies is a problem for some teachers who are not sure whether a particular motivational strategy is applicable to their context or not. in other words, some language teachers search for and have difficulty in finding some cure-all motivational strategies suitable for almost any context. finding universal motivational strategies necessitates an investigation of what is common between language learners. since humans are emotional beings and as emotions can be universal and common between people, there are probably a number of universal motivational strategies dealing with the emotions of language learners. therefore, in this study the researchers tried to propound a number of universal motivational strategies based on the links between ei and l2 motivation. reza barzegar, sajjad aref sadr 72 the relationships between ei and l2 motivation learning in general and language learning in particular can be emotionbased (garrison, anderson, & archer, 2000; goleman, 1995; oatly & nundy, 1996). knowing the way we can comprehend and take notice of our emotions (such as knowing when we are happy, angry, satisfied, jealous, disenchanted, jaded, disappointed, and so on), diminish debilitating emotions (such as insecurity, and feeling that we cannot reach a goal, say, in language learning) and intensify beneficial emotions (such as patience, perseverance, persistence, and self-confidence) can be of great significance for learning in general. this can be more important in language learning because language learning can be a long process, necessitating long-term motivation and persistence which can be supported by encouraging positive attitudes and beneficial emotions, and fighting debilitative emotions. consequently, l2 motivation should be maintained over a long period of time, and one of the criteria that can keep l2 motivation high is successfully dealing with emotional aspects of it. it is worth highlighting that l2 motivation can be emotion-based (for example, intrinsic motivation can be about likes and dislikes), and generating and maintaining l2 motivation may be influenced by beneficial and debilitating emotions. therefore, it is logical to postulate that ei and l2 motivation can be related to each other in the sense that both of them are among the prerequisites of successful l2 learning and both of them are related to emotions. for this reason, by investigating the relationship between ei and l2 motivation, we may be able to have a better understanding of those aspects of l2 motivation that can be emotion-based such as the way language learners feel about their teachers, the way they control their debilitating emotions such as stress, and the way they evaluate their own successes and failures. ei and emotion-based motivational strategies: the interrelated links motivational strategies can be so diverse that it may not be feasible to investigate the relationship between ei and all the possible motivational strategies in one study. therefore, in this study three interrelated links between the skills of ei (based on bar-on’s 2006 model) and a selection of motivational strategies (based on dörnyei’s 2001 work) have been investigated. three particular motivational strategies were selected as the focus of this study because the present researchers, based on their own personal experience, believed that these were the most emotion-based. however, it should be noted that the relationships between ei and motivational strategies are not limited to these three strategies the effect of emotional intelligence awareness-raising activities on l2 motivation 73 and, consequently, the area of research in this regard is open and the relationship between ei and other motivational strategies is worth exploring. developing a personal relationship with your students. one important emotional aspect of language learning can be the way language learners feel about their teachers. in this regard, dörnyei (2001) elaborates on the strategy of developing a personal relationship with students: “show students that you accept and care about them, pay attention and listen to each of them, and indicate your mental and physical availability” (p. 39). dörnyei (2001), who underlines the ability to listen to students and show that we care about them, gives some examples of the behavior that can show this caring and listening: greeting students and remembering their names, smiling at them, noticing interesting features of their appearance (e.g., new haircut), showing interest in their hobbies, expressing in our comments that we’ve thought about them and that their individual effort is recognised, moving around in class, and sending notes/homework to absent students. (pp. 37-38) what this strategy involves is comparable to the skills of empathy, and interpersonal relationships in the context of ei. one of the skills involved in empathy is the ability to listen to others attentively. moreover, showing that we care about our addressee is of paramount importance for having satisfying interpersonal relationships. therefore, interpersonal relationships in bar-on’s (2006) model of ei and “developing a personal relationship with students” in dörnyei’s (2001) list of motivational strategies are comparable and can be considered as dealing with overlapping concepts. diminishing language anxiety. this strategy involves, among other things, avoiding social comparison and promoting cooperation instead of competition (dörnyei, 2001, p. 94). it can be a good idea to ask language learners to compare themselves with themselves and not with other language learners. moreover, there is a considerable body of knowledge about the benefits of cooperation (for a summary of these benefits see dörnyei, 2001, pp. 99-102). the link between this strategy and ei skills is more tangible when we think of social responsibility, interpersonal relationships and stress tolerance. as hughes, patterson, and terrell (2005, p. 73) state, for competition, iq can be very beneficial, but for cooperation, it is eq that plays the decisive role. competition by nature can be anxiety-provoking and stressful because it is like struggling for existence, but cooperation is like progressing and making headway based on the factor of help. language learners who are good at the skills of social responsibility and interpersonal relationships are able to cooperate well with their peers and therefore reza barzegar, sajjad aref sadr 74 can learn a new language in an anxiety-free environment. this can be complemented by considering the skill of stress tolerance. when language learners’ stress tolerance increases and when cooperation is encouraged, language learners will be more motivated to learn a new language because it does not involve being continuously exposed to stressful situations. promoting effort attributions. “promoting effort attributions in language learners” involves “encouraging learners to explain their failures by the lack of effort and appropriate strategies applied rather than by their insufficient ability, refusing to accept ability attributions, and emphasizing that the curriculum is within the learners’ ability range” (dörnyei, 2001, p. 108). this strategy is based on attribution theory, first propounded by heider (1944, 1958) and later developed by weiner (1992). according to williams and burden (1997, p. 104), “a central aspect of heider’s theory was that it was how people perceived events rather than the events in themselves that influenced behaviour.” similarly, covington (1998, p. 75), when talking about the underlying assumption of attribution training, maintains that “it is not so much the event of failure that disrupts academic achievement as it is the meaning of failure.” concerning academic achievement, weiner’s (1992) conceptualization of attribution theory has been very influential in the field of motivation. he maintained that people attribute the reasons for their successes and failures to four main sets of attribution: ability, effort, luck, and the perceived difficulty of the task they went through. in this regard, two well-known terms are locus of control and locus of causality, both of which refer to the internal and external factors that attributions belong to. on the whole, ability and effort have been considered as the internal factors, and luck, and the perceived difficulty of the task have been considered as external factors. from another perspective, attributions can be related to particular emotions. for example, people generally tend to attribute the causes of their failures to external factors, and their success to internal factors as means of protecting their self-esteem (williams & burden, 1997). this can be similar to the skill of self-regard in bar-on’s model of ei, which requires people to value their success in order to increase their self-regard. moreover, specific emotions can often accompany internal and external attributions. for instance, pride, shame, and guilt can be prevalent in controllable, internal attributions (such as effort) because people generally feel proud when they succeed, and they may feel shameful and guilty when they fail (williams & burden, 1997). the link between attribution theory and ei is stronger when we think of optimism. optimism is related not only to what we think about the future, but also to our understanding of the present and what we attribute the current the effect of emotional intelligence awareness-raising activities on l2 motivation 75 situations and experiences to. martin seligman’s (1990) ideas of permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization are comparable to heider’s (1958) attribution theory. in martin seligman’s discussion of optimism, permanence refers to the fact that we think of the causes of events to be either permanent or temporary and knowing the causes of unpleasant events as temporary is, in most cases, based on emotionally intelligent behavior. in a similar vein, in attribution theory, when we attribute failures to temporary and controllable factors, such as effort, we avoid considering those failures permanent. personalization refers to whether we attribute the causes of failures to external factors or to internal factors. emotionally intelligent behavior is to attribute them to external factors as long as it is based on reality testing. reality testing is important here because when we fail in a task due to insufficient effort and we know this, reality testing prevents us from fooling ourselves by attributing our failures to external factors (see hughes, patterson, & terrell, 2005 for a discussion of the relationship between reality testing and optimism). optimism is also postulated in attribution theory since without being optimistic, how can one hope that effort will pay off? valuing and emphasizing effort and perseverance while refusing to play down aptitude (but not focusing on it in the case of failure) can be compatible with both attribution theory in the field of l2 motivation and optimism in the field of ei. emotional intelligence awareness-raising: a new motivational strategy? for a number of reasons, ei awareness-raising activities may be considered as new motivational strategies. this is because some aspects of l2 motivation can be emotion-based such as the way language learners feel about their teachers (requiring successful interpersonal relationships), the way they control their debilitating emotions like stress (requiring stress tolerance), and the way they evaluate their own successes and failures (requiring positive attributions). this calls for a study in which both ei awareness-raising and l2 motivation are addressed. however, there are very few studies, if any, especially in the iranian context, which have dealt with ei and l2 motivation at the same time. therefore, in this study, this relationship has been addressed by conducting ei awareness-raising and investigating its effects on l2 motivation. more specifically, the purpose of the present study was to investigate whether ei awareness-raising has any statistically significant effect on iranian university students’ overall as well as variable-specific l2 motivation (for an explanation of overall and variable-specific, see the instrumentation section). reza barzegar, sajjad aref sadr 76 method participants the participants of this study were 136 students at the iran university of science and technology who were studying english as either english for general purposes (egp) or english for specific purposes (esp). the students of the egp course (comprising four groups) were mainly sophomores who were studying different majors, and the students of esp course (comprising the other four groups) were mainly seniors. every one of the four esp classes included the students of the same major: computer engineering, mechanic engineering, ceramic, and railroad. the participants were of both genders (107 males and 29 females) and their ages ranged from 19 to 26 years with a mean of 21. the number of participants at the beginning of the study was 208 (160 males and 48 females), but the study had an attrition of about 34 percent (30 participants in the experimental group and 42 participants in the control group were absent from the second data collection), and, at the end of the study, 136 participants took part in the study. instrumentation the instrument of this study was the same questionnaire that taguchi, magid, and papi (2009) used in their study, that is, the persian-translated iranian version of the motivation questionnaire designed by dörnyei and taguchi (see dörnyei 2010). the original questionnaire was designed in the japanese language and was later adapted for use in china and iran. all the three versions of the questionnaire (japanese, chinese and iranian) use likert scales and the total number of items in the iranian version of the questionnaire is 76. the iranian version of the motivation questionnaire includes fourteen variables or aspects. in this study, the researchers considered every one of these aspects as a variable-specific motivation, and all the fourteen variablespecific kinds of motivation together are considered as the overall motivation. the fourteen variables and their abbreviations are as follows (see dörnyei 2010, p. 126 for their cronbach alpha reliability): 1. attitudes toward l2 community (atc), measuring interest in communicating with l2 native speakers and knowing their culture. 2. attitudes toward learning english (atl), measuring interest in the english language itself and also english classrooms/courses. the effect of emotional intelligence awareness-raising activities on l2 motivation 77 3. criterion measures (cm), measuring the learners’ intended endeavor to learn l2 and the effort put into this learning. 4. ideal l2 self (il2s), measuring the attributes related to language learning that one likes and desires to possess. 5. ought-to l2 self (ol2s), measuring the attributes related to language learning that one thinks one must possess to live up to expectations and to avoid possible negative outcomes. 6. instrumentality-promotion (ipro), measuring the postulated reason for l2 learning as a means for occupational and educational advancement. 7. instrumentality-prevention (ipre), measuring the motive for learning l2 to avoid negative outcomes of not learning it (such as failing an exam or being considered as a weak learner). 8. cultural interest (ci), measuring the learner’s interest in the l2 culture and its manifestations in the media (english-speaking films or tv programs) as well as english books, magazines and so on. 9. integrativeness (int), measuring the desire to become similar to the valued members of l2 community and generally having a positive attitude towards l2 native speakers. 10. english anxiety (ea), measuring how anxious or nervous one gets in language learning classrooms or when talking with native speakers (which can be a demotivating factor for language learning). 11. ethnocentrism (eth), measuring the viewpoint that one’s race, nation, group, language, and the like is better than any others (which can be a demotivating factor for language learning). 12. fear of assimilation (fa), measuring the idea that learning a new language and becoming an accepted member of the new community cause devaluing and forgetting one’s own culture and values (which can be a demotivating factor for language learning). 13. parental encouragement/family influence (par), measuring the encouragement and/or pressure exerted by parents or family. 14. travel orientation (tor), measuring the necessity of knowing l2 for travelling abroad. procedure at the beginning of the study, the researchers included eight university groups in their study. as these eight groups were the only groups the researchers had easy access to, the study is based on convenience sampling. four of these groups were considered as the experimental group and the other four groups as the control group, with each of these two groups consisting reza barzegar, sajjad aref sadr 78 of two egp classes and two esp classes (mechanics and computer for the experimental group, and ceramics and railroad for the control group). then, the motivation questionnaire was administered to all the participants in both the experimental and control groups so as to determine the quality and extent as well as the homogeneity of the participants’ l2 motivation at the outset. the control group participants did not receive any treatment and they studied their general english textbook in egp classes and an english-for-students-ofengineering textbook in esp classes. although the textbooks used in egp and esp classes of the experimental group were the same as the textbooks used by the control group, the participants of the experimental group received the treatment of ei awareness-raising in seven sessions during seven weeks (one session every week). in the first six sessions two ei skills were subject to treatment and in the last session three ei skills were presented (overall fifteen ei skills). this awareness-raising was presented by one of the researchers of this study who was not the teacher of any of the participants. it was not possible for the researchers to be the teachers of the university students who participated in study and also it was not feasible for them to conduct the study at private language institutes. therefore, the researchers were limited to the presentation of the ei awareness-raising in the manner outlined below. by awareness-raising we mean providing a technical definition for every one of the fifteen skills of bar-on’s model of ei, explaining what they involve, elaborating on their definitions and explanations, providing some examples of the manifestations of these skills in real life, and, finally, talking of and suggesting the ways by which one can learn and internalize these skills. therefore, the treatment was mainly input, and although ei skills were also discussed by the participants at times, the treatment did not involve any kind of practice. the allotted time for presenting and discussing every one of these skills was around 10-15 min and therefore approximately the last 20-30 minutes of every class were allocated to this aim. finally, all the participants were given the same motivation questionnaire again at the end of the study so as to determine whether or not ei awareness-raising may have any statistically significant positive effect on overall as well as variable-specific l2 motivation. results as the aim of the study was to investigate the effect of ei awarenessraising on l2 motivation by comparing two groups (experimental and control) at the beginning and at the end of the study, t tests were applied. one paired samples t test was used to compare the l2 motivation of the experimental group at the beginning and at the end of the study, and another paired samthe effect of emotional intelligence awareness-raising activities on l2 motivation 79 ples t-test was used to compare the l2 motivation of the control group at the beginning and at the end of the study. moreover, one independent samples t test was used to compare the l2 motivation of the experimental group with that of the control group at the beginning of the study so as to determine the homogeneity of the participants’ l2 motivation, and another independent samples t test was used at the end of the study to compare the l2 motivation of the experimental group with that of the control group. in the data analysis procedure, first of all the motivation questionnaire was unscrambled and sorted for data analysis purposes so that all the questions related to any variable could be seen and scored together. however, for data collection, the questionnaire was administered in its original version whose items concerning every motivation variable were scrambled and randomly distributed. then, every likert scale item was given a mathematical value, and the items related to english anxiety, ethnocentrism, and fear of assimilation were scored reversely because the more fear of assimilation and anxiety about l2 learning language learners have and the more ethnocentric they are, the less l2 motivation they have. for the purpose of working with percentages, final scores were proportioned to one hundred. these percentages were then used to conduct t tests. the first paired samples t test was conducted to compare the experimental group participants’ variable-specific (atc, atl, etc.) and overall l2 motivation at the beginning and end of the study (before and after receiving the treatment). for the experimental group, there was not a statistically significant difference between the scores for overall l2 motivation at the beginning of the study (m = 69.15, sd = 0.89) and at the end of the study (m = 67.20, sd = 2.70), with t(3) = 1.63, p = .202. therefore, ei awareness-raising probably does not have any statistically significant positive effect on iranian university students’ overall l2 motivation. however, in regard to variable-specific l2 motivation, the results show that none of the variables reached the .05 point of significance except for instrumentality-prevention motivation, which, as it was said previously in the instrumentation section, measures the motive for learning l2 to avoid negative outcomes of not learning it. for instrumentality-prevention motivation of the experimental group, there was a statistically significant difference between the scores for ipre at the beginning of the study (m = 56.41, sd = 1.89) and at the end of the study (m = 60.48, sd = 3.06), with t(3) = 4.01, p = .028. this result can be compared with the instrumentality-prevention aspect of motivation in the control group, which was not significantly higher (p = .293). although there can be many reasons for this increase, such as course materials, the interaction between the teacher and students, group dynamics reza barzegar, sajjad aref sadr 80 and so on, ei awareness-raising may also be considered as an influential factor. in other words, it may not be far-fetched to consider that the experimental group participants’ instrumentality-prevention aspect of l2 motivation increased partly because of the probable effect of the ei awareness-raising. the second paired samples t test was conducted to compare the control group participants’ variable-specific and overall l2 motivation at the beginning and end of the study. the results show that for the control group there was not a statistically significant difference between the scores for overall l2 motivation at the beginning of the study (m = 69.40, sd = 1.69) and at the end of the study (m = 68.49, sd = 2.77), with t(2) = 0.815, p = .501. concerning variable-specific kinds of l2 motivation, the results showed that the scores for the variables of fear of assimilation and integrativeness were significantly decreased. first, there was a statistically significant difference between the scores for fear of assimilation at the beginning of the study (m = 75.77, sd = 2.71) and at the end of the study (m = 73.51, sd = 3.18), with t(2) = 5.003, p = .038. secondly, there was a statistically significant difference between the scores for integrativeness at the beginning of the study (m = 76.20, sd = 2.53) and at the end of the study (m = 75.32, sd = 2.65), with t(2) = 7.79, p = .016. the differences for other variablespecific kinds of l2 motivation for the control group at the beginning and end of the study were not statistically significant. table 2 constitutes a summary of the paired samples t tests and includes only their p values. table 2 significance (p) values for paired samples t test for the experimental group and the control group experimental group control group atc .115 .583 atl .317 .548 cm .522 .478 ci .148 .308 ea .374 .871 eth .275 .175 fa .258 -.038* il2s .816 .641 ol2s .509 .469 ipre .028* .293 ipro .077 .688 int .201 -.016* par .323 .570 tor .376 .582 overall .202 .501 * p < .05 the effect of emotional intelligence awareness-raising activities on l2 motivation 81 in regard to independent samples t tests, the first one was conducted to compare the experimental group participants’ variable-specific and overall l2 motivation with that of the control group at the beginning of the study. there was not a statistically significant difference between the experimental group participants’ overall l2 motivation (m = 69.15, sd = .89) and the control group participants’ overall l2 motivation (m = 69.24, sd = 1.42), with t(6) = 0.113, p = .914. concerning variable-specific kinds of l2 motivation, there was not a statistically significant difference between the experimental group participants’ variable-specific kinds of l2 motivation and those of the control group participants’ at the beginning of the study. the results of the first independent samples t test showed that the control group and the experimental group participants were homogeneous in relation to their l2 motivation. the second independent samples t-test was conducted to compare the experimental group participants’ variable-specific and overall l2 motivation with those of the control group at the end of the study. there was not a statistically significant difference between the experimental group participants’ overall l2 motivation (m = 67.20, sd = 2.70) and control group participants’ overall l2 motivation (m = 68.49, sd = 2.77) at the end of the study, with t(5) = 0.617, p = .564. concerning variable-specific kinds of motivation, the results show that there was not a statistically significant difference between the experimental group participants’ variable-specific kinds of l2 motivation and those of the control group participants’ at the end of the study. discussion concerning the first finding of the study, which was that ei awarenessraising did not have any statistically significant positive effect on iranian university students’ overall l2 motivation, a number of issues can be highlighted. first of all, a word of caution should be mentioned when dealing with psychological and emotional functioning of human beings because these kinds of functioning can be under the influence of so many factors that it is difficult to confidently ascribe any emotional change to any one particular factor. consequently, although the l2 motivation of the participants of this study did not improve, it may not be logical to completely question the value of ei awareness-raising. in a similar vein, if, hypothetically, the participants’ overall l2 motivation had increased, it would not have been logical and scientific to claim ei awareness-raising as the sole reason for it. although metacognition and awareness-raising are worthwhile, they are not devoid of weaknesses. one undeniable weakness of awareness-raising is that, as its name suggests, it is aimed at increasing the participants’ awareness reza barzegar, sajjad aref sadr 82 of a particular issue. this is a weakness because becoming aware of something may not necessarily be enough to ensure dealing with it in a successful manner. for example, if a person becomes aware that one of the techniques of anger management is to count to five before reacting to the anger-provoking stimulus, it does not necessarily mean that this person will be able to control his/her anger in this way. what is necessary in addition to awareness-raising is practicing what we have become aware of. this may ultimately lead to the development of what is under practice. mathematically speaking, awareness plus practice equals development. regarding this, hughes, patterson, and terrell (2005, p. 116) state that “it takes concrete experience to make change. . . . behavioral change is based on a repeatedly reinforced experiential process.” similarly, panju (2008, p. 56) lays emphasis on practice by stating that “learners cannot learn ei skills by hearing lectures about them; they acquire them by repeatedly practicing these skills in the supportive environment of the classroom.” since becoming motivated to learn a new language can be an emotional change and since change, in most cases, cannot happen without practice, it is of vital importance to lengthen the period of the treatment of ei awareness-raising and to accompany it with practice. the difficult part is that effective practice, which can take the form of life experience, can mainly be gained in real life situations and therefore researchers may not be able to achieve what they desire by accompanying awareness-raising activities with superficial simulation of real life situations. however, if awareness-raising is not enough and practice is also needed, it does not mean that awareness-raising should not be done if there is no or little chance of practice. in other words, although the present researchers were able to predict that awareness-raising may not be enough, they deemed it rational that awareness-raising may be worthwhile by itself even if there is no chance of practice, since the chance of practicing ei skills may occur in the future lives of the participants. additionally, the quality of awareness-raising is of vital importance. one of the greatest limitations of this study was that ei awareness-raising was presented by one of the researchers who was not the teacher of the participants and who was their peer. these two factors could have reduced the receptivity of the participants because awareness-raising, however skillfully and eloquently it may be presented, takes the form of lectures and participants may feel that they are being sermonized. moreover, young people (such as the participants of this study) may be more receptive to the ideas of their teachers because (in many cases) they consider their teachers as more experienced and mature than someone who is their peer. thus, the quality and effectiveness of the awareness-raising in this the effect of emotional intelligence awareness-raising activities on l2 motivation 83 study may not be comparable to the quality and effectiveness of similar teaching presented by actual teachers of particular language learners. concerning ei lectures and workshops, another factor which may cause iranian university students to be less receptive can be the fact that most of them may be under pressure to struggle to provide for their basic economic needs (especially in iran’s today economic crisis and political chaos). when someone’s basic needs are not met, they may be less receptive to any talk related to abstract concepts (such as ei skills) and they may be more interested in money-making ideas or whatever that leads to improving his or her financial or economic situation. however, as the participants’ socio-economic background and status were not controlled, this must remain a mere speculation at present. in relation to the second finding of the study, which was that the instrumentality-prevention aspect of the participants’ l2 motivation was statistically significantly increased, two issues are worthy of discussing. the first one is that ei awareness-raising may be effective in positively influencing only some of the aspects of l2 motivation (such as the probable positive effect of ei awarenessraising on the instrumentality-prevention aspect of l2 motivation in this study). the second issue becomes clearer and more tangible if one considers the social milieu in which iranian university students have to live. by considering the questionnaire items related to the instrumentality-prevention aspect of l2 motivation, most of which measure the motive for learning l2 to avoid negative outcomes of not learning it, such as failing an exam or being considered as a weak learner, one can understand that although gaining higher scores for this factor means that university students are motivated in this way, it can also show that these students are increasingly pressurized by external forces and social pressures. thus, it is possible that the participants’ increased instrumentalityprevention aspect of l2 motivation may not be a desirable kind of l2 motivation and, in the eyes of university students, may be seen even as an imposed kind of l2 motivation. the question of whether the instrumentality-prevention aspect of l2 motivation is an imposed and undesirable kind of l2 motivation calls for further research. in other words, it is worth investigating whether or not iranian university students wish to be forced to study english and like this external force or not, and if so, whether pressuring them to study english can positively contribute to their language learning. all in all, if ei awareness-raising may not be considered as a motivational strategy, as this study suggests, it may be considered as the foundation and precondition for promoting ei. reza barzegar, sajjad aref sadr 84 conclusion the first conclusion of this study is that ei awareness-raising alone is not enough to increase the overall l2 motivation of iranian university students and therefore exposure to the situations in which ei skills can be practiced and actualized is probably required to successfully increase these learners’ overall l2 motivation. however, as this awareness-raising has been effective in having a statistically significant positive effect on the instrumentality-prevention aspect of l2 motivation, it is possible that ei awareness-raising can be effective with respect to only one aspect of l2 motivation or some of the other aspects. however, allotting a considerable amount of class time to ei awareness-raising may not be reasonable because teachers already have enough work to do trying to cover their pre-specified (usually integrative) syllabuses. finding the time for talking and discussing ei skills in language classes depends on teachers’ ability to await, notice and create this opportune time. similarly to the concepts of focus on form and focus on forms, which, concisely put, refer to whether the focus on a structure is incidental (focus on form) or pre-planned (focus on forms), the present researchers suggest that language teachers practice ei awareness-raising in a focus-on-form manner, when, for example, the situation, topic of a discussion activity and the topic of a unit or lesson are pertinent to any of ei skills. in this way and by explaining to learners how ei skills are relevant to language learning (see the section “ei and emotion-based motivational strategies: the interrelated links”), teachers may be able to arouse their learners’ curiosity and enthusiasm as well as their l2 motivation. the effect of emotional intelligence awareness-raising 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(1997). psychology for language teachers: a social constructivist approach. cambridge: cambridge university press. 19 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (1). 2016. 19-41 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.1.2 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the role of extensive recasts in error detection and correction by adult esl students laura hawkes british columbia ministry of education, victoria, bc, canada laura.hawkes@gov.bc.ca hossein nassaji university of victoria, victoria, bc, canada nassaji@uvic.ca abstract most of the laboratory studies on recasts have examined the role of intensive recasts provided repeatedly on the same target structure. this is different from the original definition of recasts as the reformulation of learner errors as they occur naturally and spontaneously in the course of communicative interaction. using a within-group research design and a new testing methodology (video-based stimulated correction posttest), this laboratory study examined whether extensive and spontaneous recasts provided during smallgroup work were beneficial to adult l2 learners. participants were 26 esl learners, who were divided into seven small groups (3-5 students per group), and each group participated in an oral activity with a teacher. during the activity, the students received incidental and extensive recasts to half of their errors; the other half of their errors received no feedback. students’ ability to detect and correct their errors in the three types of episodes was assessed using two types of tests: a stimulated correction test (a video-based computer test) and a written test. students’ reaction time on the error detection portion of the stimulated correction task was also measured. the results showed that students were able to detect more errors in error+recast (error followed by the provision of a recast) episodes than in error-recast (error and no recast provided) episodes (though this difference did not reach statistical significance). laura hawkes, hossein nassaji 20 they were also able to successfully and partially successfully correct more errors in error+recast episodes than in error-recast episodes, and this difference was statistically significant on the written test. the reaction time results also point towards a benefit from recasts, as students were able to complete the task (slightly) more quickly for error+recast episodes than for error-recast episodes. keywords: error detection; error correction; recast; corrective feedback; grammaticality 1. introduction and literature review within the field of second language acquisition (sla) research, corrective feedback, a response by a teacher or other interlocutor that attempts to signal to a nonnative speaker (nns) the incorrectness/ungrammaticality of the nns’s utterance, has received a great deal of attention in recent years. among corrective feedback types, recasts have received the most attention from researchers. early observation classroom studies have found that recasts occur more often than any other type of corrective feedback in natural l2 classrooms; this observation was found in esl classrooms (havranek, 1999; panova & lyster, 2002), french immersion classrooms (lyster, 1998; lyster & ranta, 1997), a german l2 classroom (lochtman, 2002), and in ns-nns dyadic interaction (iwashita, 2003; nassaji, 2007, 2009). recasts are generally considered to be a form of implicit correction in that they do not interrupt the flow of meaningful interaction (see doughty & varela, 1998; goo & mackey, 2013; nicholas, lightbown, & spada, 2001), and teachers may use recasts because they do not slow down the flow of communication as much as some other types of corrective feedback. theoretically, recasts have been assumed to be beneficial for language learning because they provide positive evidence: they supply the learner with the correct form (ellis & sheen, 2006; nicholas et al., 2001). it has also been claimed that recasts provide negative evidence, which has been considered necessary for adults l2 learners. recasts may also increase the perceptual saliency of the target form as the juxtaposition of the learner’s utterance and the teacher’s recast highlight the error (farrar, 1990; saxton, 1997). finally, it has been proposed that recasts promote interaction. long’s interaction hypothesis states that in addition to input, participation in interaction is needed for second language learning to occur (long, 1981, 1983, 1996). closely related to the idea of interaction is swain’s (1985) concept of pushed output, which proposes that learners must be pushed to produce modified output in order for l2 learning to occur; recasts are proposed to push learners to change their output. the role of extensive recasts in error detection and correction by adult esl students 21 given the theoretical benefits for recasts, many studies have examined the beneficial effects of recasts (ammar & spada, 2006; dilans, 2010; ellis, loewen, & erlam, 2006; iwashita, 2003; loewen & philp, 2006; lyster, 2004; lyster & ranta, 1997; lyster, saito, & sato, 2012; mackey & philp, 1998; nabei & swain, 2002; nasssaji, 2007, 2009; panova & lyster, 2002; saito, 2013 among others). these studies, the results of which have also been summarised in a number of recent reviews and meta-analyses (e.g., li, 2010; lyster & saito, 2010; lyster, saito & sato, 2012; nassaji, 2015; sheen, 2011), have reported positive effects for recasts in general. however, most of such studies have provided recasts intensively and repeatedly on the same target structure, which can be different from the definition of recasts as reformulation of the learner errors as they occur incidentally in the course of interaction. of course, some early studies on recasts were conducted in natural second language classrooms and were observational in nature (ellis, basturkmen, & loewen, 2001; lochtman, 2002; lyster, 1998; lyster & ranta, 1997; panova & lyster, 2002). however, these studies used uptake, with uptake being defined as a learner’s production of the correct form following the corrective feedback, to see how effective the various types of corrective feedback were. the results of these studies showed that recasts might not be as effective as other types of feedback as they tended to produce less uptake than, for example, clarification requests. however, despite such studies, a number of researchers have questioned whether uptake and other measures of noticing can be used as valid measures of the beneficial role of recasts (see loewen, 2005; loewen & philp, 2006; mackey & philp, 1998; nicholas et al., 2001). the use of uptake is perhaps most often linked to schmidt’s noticing hypothesis (schmidt, 1990, 1995), which proposed that attention is necessary for language learning to occur. however, as mackey and philp (1998) point out, while uptake can signal the presence of noticing, no uptake does not necessarily indicate the absence of noticing. in the movement away from uptake as the sole measure of the effectiveness of recasts, a number of researchers turned to pre-/posttest designs. with the introduction of pre-/posttests also came the increased use of preselected target linguistic forms. the need for such targets is clear: it is nearly impossible to pretest linguistic forms when you do not know on which forms the learner will produce errors and receive spontaneous recasts. table 1 summarizes a number of pre-/posttest studies that have examined recasts. laura hawkes, hossein nassaji 22 table 1 summary of a sample of pre-/posttest recast studies study measure of l2 learning feedback types examined context preselected target form intensive/ extensive mackey & philp (1998) pre-/posttests recasts dyads english questions intensive mcdonough & mackey (2006) pre-/posttests and uptake recasts dyads english questions intensive iwashita (2003) pre-/posttests naturally arising* dyads japansese locative-initial construction & teverb extensive leeman (2003) pre-/posttests recasts vs. negative evidence vs. enhanced saliency dyads spanish noun-adjective agreement intensive han (2002) pre-/posttests recasts small group tense consistency intensive lyster (2004) pre-/posttests recasts vs. prompts classroom french noun gender intensive ammar & spada (2006) pre-/posttests recasts vs. prompts classroom 3rd person singular determiners intensive ellis, loewen, & erlam (2006) pre-/posttests recasts vs. metalinguistic feedback classroom past tense –ed intensive ishida (2004) pre-/posttests recasts dyads japanese –te i-(ru) extensive nassaji (2006) pre-/posttests recasts vs. elicitations dyads extensive loewen & philp (2006) posttests and uptake naturally arising,* with a focus on reporting recasts classroom extensive * note. in studies labeled as examining naturally arising feedback, no types of feedback were preselected for study and the researchers examined all feedback types that arose naturally during the interaction. while the above studies have found some benefits for recasts, most of them employed intensive recasts directed at preselected target linguistic forms. therefore, it is not clear whether their findings were due to the recasts themselves or the intensity of the feedback. a few of those studies have examined the effects of extensive recasts. ishida (2004) attempted to lessen the unnatural situation of providing intensive recasts by providing recasts “whenever [the researcher] felt the need to confirm the meaning of the message” (p. 340). while caution should be employed due to the small number of students involved (n = 4), the results of ishida’s study showed a positive correlation between the number of recasts a learner received and their accurate use of –te i-(ru). nassaji (2006) went one step further than ishida by examining truly extensive recasts using an innovative pre-/posttest design with no preselected target form. each of 42 learners was asked to write a description based on a series of pictures; the descriptions were then collected and the nns was asked to orally describe the story. during this oral interaction, corrective feedback was provided whenever the ns felt it was appropriate. after the oral interaction, the written story was returned to the student and he/she was asked to make corrections. a similar delayed posttest was given two weeks later. results showed that learners successfully corrected more of the errors that had received recasts than the errors that had received elicitations. loewen (2005) conducted a classroom study on the role of extensive recasts in error detection and correction by adult esl students 23 the effectiveness of spontaneous focus-on-form (both reactive and preemptive) on l2 learning. although his study did not single out recasts for examination, the data was reexamined in loewen and philp (2006) with a close focus on recasts. individualized immediate and delayed posttests were created for each student based on focus-on-form episodes (ffes) that had occurred in the classroom interaction. the posttests consisted of oral suppliance, correction, and pronunciation tasks. as the feedback was spontaneous and the researchers did not know ahead of time which forms would receive feedback, no pretests could be administered. instead, the initial errors made by the students served as a type of pretest (i.e., if the student made the error, it indicated that their knowledge of that form was to some degree incomplete). the above findings suggest that recasts, even when provided incidentally and extensively, may be beneficial to l2 students, both in dyadic interaction and in classroom interaction. however, more research is needed in this area, especially in the area of nondyadic interaction. in addition, there are some methodological concerns with these studies. first, there is concern over the naturalness of dyadic studies. in dyadic studies, learners receive undivided individual attention from a ns over an extended period of time, which is not the norm in a typical l2 classroom. as such, it is possible that students pay more attention in dyadic interaction. ellis and sheen (2006), lyster (2004), and nicholas, lightbown, and spada (2001) have pointed out that dyadic interaction may produce different results than larger-group interaction. second, there is the concern that studies that use preselected target linguistic forms and/or intensive recasts may increase learners’ attention to recasts and the forms targeted by the recasts more than natural l2 classrooms (see ellis & sheen, 2006; nicholas et al., 2001). since the pretest, tasks during treatment sessions, and posttests were all designed to elicit the target form, the students may have picked up on this and directed their attention to that form. third, there is the concern that studies that examine the effectiveness of providing intensive recasts in response to errors in the target form while ignoring all other types of errors may have little value when discussing the effectiveness of recasts in real l2 classrooms, which are generally provided extensively. examples of recasts from observational studies have shown that recasts provided in l2 classrooms are generally provided in response to a wide range of errors (loewen & philp, 2006; nassaji & hawkes, 2006; sabbagh, 1998; sheen, 2006). thus, as ellis and sheen (2006) pointed out, “the claim that recasts are most effective when they are focused and intensive (i.e., directed repeatedly at a single linguistic feature) is of little practical significance to teachers” (p. 597). an additional problem that needs to be overcome in the use of posttests when examining spontaneous, extensive recasts is the matter of to what the laura hawkes, hossein nassaji 24 results of the posttest should be compared. since it is not possible to give a pretest when you do not know what forms students will receive recasts on, how can we know whether the accuracy on posttests reveals something? we need to find something meaningful with which to compare it before we can make any claims about the beneficial role of recasts. the above review has demonstrated that there are unresolved issues with previous studies surrounding varying results and methodological concerns. the concerns with previous recast studies are neither few nor trivial, and they make a strong call for further study of recasts, and in particular for new methodology in the study of extensive recasts. the purpose of the present study is to examine the effectiveness of spontaneous, extensive recasts in small-group interaction by employing a new testing methodology: stimulated correction. the stimulated correction testing method was designed to have the following advantages over previous measures of the effectiveness of recasts: · it is a timed, oral test (both stimuli and response); this is designed to put the student in a situation similar to the situation in which they initially made the error. · the context of the errors is provided during the testing phase. · students view and listen to their errors exactly as they made them during the initial interaction, not spoken by a ns examiner. · it allows for comparisons between each student’s performance on those errors that received recasts and those errors that did not receive recasts. · it measures students’ ability to detect and correct errors separately; this avoids the “all or nothing” view of effectiveness in l2 learning and provides more fine-tuned testing. · it allows for the measure of reaction times when students are detecting errors in video clips of their speech. the study addressed the following research questions: 1. are errors that receive recasts detected more often than errors that do not receive recasts? 2. are errors that receive recasts corrected more often than errors that do not receive recasts? 3. are there any differences in students’ reaction times in detecting errors for episodes that receive recasts and those that do not? 4. does the type of test make a difference in the results (i.e., stimulated correction vs. written test)? the role of extensive recasts in error detection and correction by adult esl students 25 2. method the current study employed an experimental within-subject research design. small groups of adult esl students participated in an oral task with a teacher (the researcher) in which some of each student’s errors received recasts and some of their errors received no feedback (were ignored). 2.1. participants in total, 26 adult esl students participated in the study; three of the students did not complete day two of the study and their data were excluded from the analysis. the students were all enrolled in intermediate-level classes at the english language centre at the university of victoria, canada at the time of the study. the 23 students who completed the study had a mean age of 25.2 years, had been living in canada for an average of 4.2 months at the time of the study, and came from seven different l1 backgrounds. students were assigned to one of seven small groups on a first-come, first-serve basis, and the number of students in each group ranged from three to five students. the use of small groups in the present study was designed to mimic the way in which a small group would operate within a classroom. in this way, the present study could avoid the individualized attention that students receive in dyadic studies. 2.2. procedure data collection took place over two days for each group. on day one, the small group of students met with the researcher in a small classroom. the students filled out a background questionnaire and then participated in an oral small-group activity, which was captured using a digital video camera and an external microphone. the small-group activity consisted of one task involving two parts: jigsaw (see crookes & gass, 1993; johnson, 1981) and decision making (see crookes & gass, 1993; doughty & pica, 1986). the average time the groups took to complete the task was 38 minutes. during the activity, the researcher took on the role of the teacher and provided recasts following roughly half of each student’s erroneous utterances. the remaining errors received no feedback (were ignored). in total, there were 141 erroneous utterances that received recasts and 150 erroneous utterances that received no feedback, leading to a ratio of 1.06 to 1.00. the recasts in the present study were provided extensively. the recasts provided during the interaction had the following characteristics: (a) immediately followed a student’s erroneous utterance, (b) repeated all or part of the student’s utterance while reformulating the error(s), (c) did not change or add any information to the learner’s target-like portion of the utterance, and (d) employed a rising intonation. laura hawkes, hossein nassaji 26 some of these characteristics are illustrated in the following example, which uses (as all the other examples) the transcription conventions provided in the appendix: example 1 s1: they should look the your eye. t: look you in the eye? s1: in the eye. each student was tested both orally (stimulated correction task) and in written form (written test). in order to create the tests, three types of episodes were identified in the video recordings: error+recast, error-recast, and correct. error+recast episodes involved exchanges in which a student made an error and then received a recast; in error-recast episodes, the student produced an erroneous utterance but did not receive any feedback; correct episodes were those in which the student produced a grammatically correct utterance. in total, 402 episodes were identified. 333 of these episodes (111 of each type) were randomly selected to serve as testing episodes and 69 episodes (3 per student) were selected to serve as practice episodes. the episodes were then edited using imovie to create the short video clips, as in examples 2, 3 and 4 below. the clips were edited to end with a student’s utterance, and the student was required to judge the grammaticality of their final utterance in the stimulated correction task. in examples 2, 3 and 4, the boxes around the utterances indicate which utterances were included in the edited clips; the symbol¯ indicates an auditory cue, a “beep” that was inserted to direct the student’s attention to the utterance of which they would be required to judge the grammaticality. example 2: an error+recast episode t: well, what do you guys think? s1: i think if, if, uh lisa can speak another language, she understands another student things ¯ so she can teach very well that country students. t: students from that country? s1: yeah. example 3: an error-recast episode s2: yeah, i think so. t: you all agree! for the same reasons or different ones? s1: uh, i think uh philip is more academic than lisa, but he has enoughhe te¯ he didn’t have enough experience to teach to the student. t: mm hmm. s1: so just uh he teahe taught reading and writingthe role of extensive recasts in error detection and correction by adult esl students 27 example 4: a correct episode t: mm hmm. okay. so whose work experience do you like the best? do you think? s4: i think lisa. t: okay, why? s4: ¯ because she has uh lots of experience teaching esl. because three years she teach english and lisa also uh it is relative in researching. t: mm hmm. the day after the small-group interaction, each student completed first the stimulated correction task and then the written test individually in a quiet room. for the stimulated correction task, which was presented using superlab 4.0, the student was seated in front of a computer with headphones and a microphone. the procedure was as follows: (1) a screen with the words “the video will begin in 3 seconds,” which was displayed for three seconds, (2) the playing of a video clip, (3) a screen with the words “press error or no error,” which was displayed until the student pressed either the “error” key or the “no error” key on the keyboard, which students were instructed to do as quickly as possible, and optionally (4) a screen with the words “now correct it,” which was displayed for 8 seconds and prompted the student to orally correct their error(s) (screen 4 would appear only if the student had pressed the error key). each student was tested only on those clips which involved their own utterances. each student viewed an average of 14.5 video clips (the range was from 7 to 21). reaction time was measured between the end of the video clip and the time at which the student pressed the error or the no-error key. a written test was also created for each student. each test question consisted of one written sentence (the utterance after the ¯ in the video clips). students were instructed to read each sentence, indicate if there were any errors, and correct any errors. sentences were presented in random order and students were allowed as much time as they needed to complete the written test. 3. data analysis the coding of the error correction responses involved comparing the student’s utterance in the interaction with the student’s modification of their utterance during the stimulated correction task and the written test. students’ modifications were coded as successful modification (the student corrected all the error(s)), partially successful modification (the student corrected only one/some of the error(s)), unsuccessful modification (the student failed to correct any errors), or no modification (no attempt to correct). for correct episodes only, the coding successful meant that the student had changed the (already correct) utterance laura hawkes, hossein nassaji 28 in such a way that it could also be considered grammatically correct and unsuccessful meant the student changed the correct utterance into an incorrect one. student modification of error+recast episodes were further coded to allow a more detailed analysis of how recasts may have influenced students’ ability to modify their errors: successful modifications were subcoded as either successful/same as recast or successful/different than recast. partially successful modifications were subcoded as either partial/same as recast or partial/different than recast. 4. results 4.1. error detection results as shown in table 2, on the error detection task students indicated there were errors in error+recast and error-recast episodes significantly more often than in correct episodes on both the stimulated correction task and the written test, which was expected. encouragingly, students detected the majority of the errors in their speech. on both the stimulated correction task and the written test, there was a trend for students to detect more errors on the error+recast episodes than on the error-recast episodes. on the stimulated correction task, students detected 76.6% of the errors in the error+recast episodes versus 71.2% in the error-recast episodes. however, chi-square analysis showed that the difference did not reach statistical significance [c2 (1, n = 222) = .840, p =.359]. on the written test, students detected 83.8% of the errors on the error+recast episodes and 82.0% of the errors on the error-recast episodes. a chi-square analysis found that the difference was not significant [c2 (1, n = 222) = .127, p = .722]. table 2 students’ error detection responses episode type errors detected errors not detected n % n % stimulated correction task error+recast 85 76.6 26 23.4 error-recast 79 71.2 32 28.8 correct 53 47.7 58 52.3 total 217 65.2 116 34.8 c2 (2, n = 333) = 15.10, p = .001 written test error+recast 93 83.8 18 16.2 error-recast 91 82.0 20 18.0 correct 59 53.2 52 46.8 total 184 82.9 38 17.1 c2 (2, n = 333) = 46.636, p = .000 the role of extensive recasts in error detection and correction by adult esl students 29 4.2. error correction results: stimulated correction task as shown in table 3, when the modification patterns for error+recast and errorrecast episodes on the stimulated correction task were compared, the results showed a trend for a greater percentage of successful modifications on error+recast episodes (25.9%) than of error-recast episodes (17.7%); the same trend, but to a lesser degree, was found for partially successful modifications. students also made more modification attempts for error+recast episodes (85.9%) than error-recast episodes (78.5%), suggesting that the recasts may have assisted them with some of their modifications. although the differences in modification patterns in table 3 show a benefit from recasts, a chi-square analysis found that this difference between error+recast and error-recast episodes was not significant [c2 (3, n = 164) = 2.681, p = .443]. table 3 error modification patterns (stimulated correction task) total successful partial unsuccessful not modified n % n % n % n % error+recast 85 22 25.9 19 22.4 32 37.6 12 14.1 error-recast 79 14 17.7 16 20.3 32 40.5 17 21.5 correct 53 21 39.6 na na 21 39.6 11 20.8 total 217 57 26.3 35 16.1 85 39.2 40 18.4 c2 (6, n = 217) = 18.73, p = .005 note. percentages represent percentage of those episodes in which errors were detected. students’ successful and partially successful modifications for error+recast episodes were also examined to see if the utterances were modified in the same way as the teacher-provided recast had modified their utterance. as table 4 shows, when students successfully modified their errors, they were much more likely to do so in the same way as the recast had done (81.9%) than in a different way than the recast had done (18.1%). this difference was found to be significant (c2 [1, n = 41] = 4.011, p = .045). table 4 same as recast vs. different than recast successful and partially successful modifications on error+recast episodes (stimulated correction task) same as recast different than recast n % n % successful 18 81.9 4 18.1 partially successful 10 52.6 9 47.4 total 28 68.3 13 31.7 c2 (1, n = 41) = 4.011, p = .045 laura hawkes, hossein nassaji 30 4.3. error correction results: written test the error modification results for the written test are presented in table 5. when the results of the three types of episodes were compared, a chi-square found a significant difference [c2 (6, n = 333) = 38.415, p = .000]. the most noticeable difference between the modification patterns was found in successful modifications, with correct episodes resulting in significantly more successful modifications than error+recast and error-recast episodes. table 5 error modification patterns (written test) total successful partial unsuccessful not modified n % n % n % 3 3.3 error+recast 93 34 36.6 33 35.5 23 24.7 3 3.2 error-recast 91 21 23.1 29 31.9 38 41.8 1 1.7 correct 59 36 61.0 na na 22 37.3 7 2.9 total 243 91 37.4 62 25.5 83 34.2 3 3.3 c2 (6, n = 333) = 38.415, p = .000 note. percentages represent percentage of those episodes in which errors were detected. as for the comparison between the results of the error+recast and errorrecast episodes, it was found that students successfully modified more of their errors from error+recast episodes (36.6%) than from error-recast episodes (23.1%). they also partially successfully modified more errors from error+recast episodes (35.5%) than from error-recast episodes (31.9%). as for unsuccessful modifications, error+recast episodes led to far fewer (24.7%) of these than errorrecast episodes (41.8%). the percentage of detected errors left unmodified was similar for error+recast and error-recast episodes (3.3% and 3.2% respectively). thus, the error modification results for error+recast and error-recast episodes show that students performed better on the error+recast episodes than on the error-recast episodes, but when a chi-square was performed to see if the differences in modification patterns between error+recast and error-recast episodes were significant, it was found that they were not [c2 (3, n = 222) = 6.998, p = .072]. as with the results from the stimulated correction task, the modification patterns of error+recast and error-recast episodes on the written test were examined in more detail. table 6 presents the results of combining successful with partially successful modifications and unsuccessful with not modified responses. as can be seen, error+recast episodes resulted in many more successful and partially successful modifications than error-recast episodes (72.0% vs. 54.9%), and this difference was found to be significant [c2 (1, n = 222) = 5.807, p = .016]. the role of extensive recasts in error detection and correction by adult esl students 31 table 6 combined error modification patterns, error+recast and error-recast episodes (written test) successful & partial unsuccessful & not modified n % n % error+recast 67 72.0 26 28.0 error-recast 50 54.9 41 45.1 total 117 63.6 67 36.4 c2 (1, n = 222) = 5.807, p = .016 note. percentages represent percentage of episodes in which errors were detected. student modifications on error+recast episodes were also examined in greater detail. table 7 displays the frequency of students’ successful and partially successful modifications according to whether they were done in the same way as the recast which had been provided or in a different way than the recast which had been provided. it was found that for both successful and partially successful modifications, students were more likely to modify their utterance in the same way as in the recast (82.4% of successful modifications and 66.7% of partially successful modifications). however, a chi-square showed that these differences did not reach significance [c2 (1, n = 67) = 2.176, p = .140]. table 7 same as recast vs. different than recast successful and partially successful modifications on error+recast episodes (written test) same as recast different than recast n % n % successful 28 82.4 6 17.6 partially successful 22 66.7 11 33.3 total 50 74.6 17 25.4 c2 (1, n = 67) = 2.176, p = .140 thus, in response to the question of whether errors that received recasts would be accurately corrected by students more often than errors that did not receive recasts, the results of the written test showed that students’ modifications of their errors on error+recast and error-recast episodes were significantly different. specifically, when successful was combined with partially successful and unsuccessful was combined with not modified, it was found that error+recast episodes lead to significantly more successful and partially successful modifications than error-recast episodes. laura hawkes, hossein nassaji 32 4.4. comparison between stimulated correction and written test table 8 shows the differences in error modification between the stimulated correction task and the written test. positive numbers indicate the students had more of that type of modification on the written test than on the stimulated correction task; negative numbers indicate that the students had fewer of that type of modification on the written test than on the stimulated correction task. table 8 gains/losses in modifications from stimulated correction task to written test successful partial unsuccessful not modified n % n % n % n % error+recast +12 +10.7 +14 +13.1 -9 -12.9 -9 -10.8 error-recast +7 +5.4 +13 +11.6 +6 +1.3 -14 -18.3 correct +15 +21.4 na na +1 -2.3 -10 -19.1 in general, we see a trend for students to perform more favourably on the written test than on the stimulated correction task. however, the effect was not even across the three episode types. for example, while error+recast episodes had 12.9% fewer unsuccessful answers on the written test than on the stimulated correction task, for error-recast and correct episodes the number of unsuccessful modifications actually increased on the written test (+1.3% and +2.3% respectively). 4.5. reaction time results reaction time (i.e., time between the end of the video and when the student pressed the error or the no-error key) results, which are presented in table 9, show that students were fastest on the correct episodes (2.16076 sec.); students were slightly faster on the error+recast episodes (2.24956 sec.) than on the error-recast episodes (2.28148 sec.). however, a one-way anova found that the differences in reaction times were not significant [f(2, 330) = .903, p = .406]. there was quite a bit of variation in reaction times within each episode type, and this may explain why the differences in reaction times between the three types of episodes were not significant. table 9 reaction times in error detection on the stimulated correction task m (seconds) sd minimum value maximum value error+recast 2.24956 0.66770 0.96560 4.65070 error-recast 2.28148 0.70665 1.20420 5.40670 correct 2.16076 0.70545 0.91940 4.90460 p = ns note. ns = nonsignificant the role of extensive recasts in error detection and correction by adult esl students 33 reaction times for error+recast and error-recast episodes were examined in relation to students’ modifications of their errors, as shown in table 10. the reaction times for error+recast and error-recast episodes were very similar when the student produced unsuccessful modification or no modification (2.24476 sec. and 2.24373 sec. respectively), but were faster on error+recast episodes when students modified their utterance in the same way as in the recast. these results suggest that the recasts may have led to faster reaction times for some of the episodes, namely those in which the students used the information from the recast to modify their utterance during the error correction task. however, a oneway anova revealed that the differences in reaction times for error+recast/same as recast, error+recast/different than recast, and error-recast episodes were not statistically significant [f(2, 68) = 1.141, p = .326]. table 10 mean reaction times by nature of modification for error+recast and error-recast episodes successful & partial unsuccessful & not modified same as recast different than recast error+recast 2.14991 2.51741 2.24476 error-recast 2.40696 2.24373 p = ns note. ns = nonsignificant 5. discussion the aim of the present study was to investigate whether incidental, extensive recasts provided by a teacher in a small group outside a classroom were beneficial to adult esl learners. the results of the error detection task showed a trend for students to detect more errors in the error+recast episodes than in the error-recast episodes; this may point to a benefit from recasts in terms of students’ ability to perceive errors in their own speech. however, the difference between error detection rates on error+recast and error-recast episodes failed to reach statistical significance on either the stimulated correction task or the written test. one possible explanation for this was that there seemed to be an overall bias for students to think that their speech contained errors, and this bias was found across all three episode types, including correct episodes. this bias may have been partially responsible for the high error detection rates on the error+recast and errorrecast episodes. these high rates, all over 70%, may have been close to ceiling, thus muting any beneficial effect from the recasts and leading to the nonsignificant difference between the error+recast and error-recast episodes. it was also found that on both the stimulated correction task and the written test, students were able to successfully and partially successfully modify laura hawkes, hossein nassaji 34 more of their errors from the error+recast episodes than from the error-recast episodes. while the difference in modification patterns was a trend in the stimulated correction task, it produced a statistically significant difference on the written test. these findings show that recasts seemed to benefit students’ ability to correct errors in their own speech. in addition, there is evidence that the specific content of the recasts may have assisted students in the modifications of their errors. these results are especially encouraging given that the recasts that students received in the present study were spontaneous and extensive. as for the students’ reaction times, the results show that students responded slightly more quickly to error+recast episodes than to error-recasts, but this difference was not significant. the fact that students were able to respond more quickly indicates that students were possibly more confident (either consciously or unconsciously) in their answers to error+recast episodes than to error-recast episodes. while this trend did not reach significance, this was likely due at least in part to the great amount of variability in reaction times between students. there was also a trend for students to respond more quickly in the error detection task if they later went on to provide a successful or partially successful modification that was the same as the recast they had been given during the interaction. it is possible that the recast provided the day before was stored in a location that was “easily accessible,” at least for a short period of time after it was provided. the study also examined how students responded to correct episodes and how these responses compared to the error+recast and error-recast episodes. the data from the correct episodes showed that students perceived a considerable portion of their correct episodes as containing errors. on the stimulated correction task, students indicated that 47.7% of the correct episodes contained errors, while the rate for the written test was even higher, at 53.2%. these results indicate that students are often wrong in the assessment of the grammaticality of their own utterances, with a tendency to think that their utterances are less grammatical than they are. results also showed that students often modified their grammatical utterances in correct episodes in such a way that they became ungrammatical. it is also possible that the provision of recasts during the interaction may have increased students’ belief that they were frequently producing erroneous utterances. since all of the students received a number of recasts during the interaction, they may have assumed that they were producing quite a few errors in their speech. this may be particularly true if the students were from classrooms where corrective feedback is used infrequently. if this was the case, it could explain why students answered “error” so frequently on the error detection task. it would also signify that recasts might produce effects on students the role of extensive recasts in error detection and correction by adult esl students 35 beyond the error targeted by the recast. specifically, the provision of recasts may also push students to question the grammaticality of their utterances that did not receive recasts. this possibility has yet to be examined by other researchers. in general, recast studies have only examined the effect of recasts on those individual erroneous utterances that received recasts (loewen, 2005; loewen & philp, 2006; nassaji, 2006, 2007) or on a target linguistic form (ammar & spada, 2006; dilans, 2010; ellis et al., 2006; ishida, 2004; lyster, 2004; mackey & philp, 1998; saito, 2013). all of the results of the present study, including those that reached significance and those that did not, point in the same direction: recasts were of benefit to students in terms of their ability to detect and correct errors in their own speech. specifically, when presented with errors in their own speech in video clips and in written form, students were able to detect, as well as successfully and partially successfully modify, more of the errors that had received recasts during the interaction than those that had not received recasts. in addition, there is some evidence that recasts may have allowed students to detect and correct their errors more quickly. thus, overall, it can be concluded that the recasts in the present study were beneficial to students. the positive results of this study are particularly noteworthy in two respects. first, the recasts were beneficial even though they were provided in small-group (rather than dyadic) interaction. this indicates that recasts can be beneficial even when the teacher’s attention is divided between several students. secondly, the results of the present study show that recasts can be beneficial to students even when they are provided incidentally and extensively. thus, while previous studies have demonstrated a benefit from intensive recasts (ammar & spada, 2006; doughty & varela, 1998; ellis at al., 2006; leeman, 2003; lyster, 2004; mackey, 2006; mackey & philp, 1998; mcdonough & mackey, 2006; philp, 2003; saito, 2013, among others), the findings of the present study demonstrate that recasts do not necessarily need to be provided intensively to be effective; even a single recast can be of benefit to students. these results confirm loewen and philp’s (2006) and nassaji’s (2009) findings that spontaneous and extensive recasts can benefit students. as teachers often naturally provide incidental, extensive recasts in their classes, these results should be seen as especially encouraging for both researchers and teachers. previous studies that have examined intensive recasts may have made teachers feel that recasts could only be beneficial if they were provided intensively. the present study shows that recasts can be effective when provided in response to a wide range of linguistic errors, even if some linguistic forms receive only one recast. as such, teachers should not be discouraged from incorporating spontaneous, extensive recasts into communicative-based oral interaction with their students. laura hawkes, hossein nassaji 36 6. conclusions and implications the present study has incorporated a number of innovative methodological features. first, in this study each student was tested on episodes that involved errors in their speech that did receive recasts, episodes that involved errors that did not receive any type of feedback, and episodes that did not involve any student errors. while a within-subject design may not be necessary for studies of recasts directed towards preselected target forms, such methodology might be very important in the study of spontaneous, extensive recasts. previous posttest studies of spontaneous, extensive recasts (loewen, 2005; loewen & philp, 2006) have not compared their test scores for errors that received recasts with anything. the present study, on the other hand, addresses the need for a control. a second innovation of the present study is the use of stimulated correction as an instrument to measure learning. stimulated correction was designed by the researchers and, to the best of our knowledge, is the first individualized posttest to make use of video clips in the assessment of learning following corrective feedback. stimulated correction has several advantages over traditional written posttests, such as allowing students to see and hear the exact context in which the errors were made, and forcing students to make their judgments quickly, which may increase the chances that students are making use of their implicit knowledge to complete the task. this may be important given that it is often assumed that recasts are an implicit form of corrective feedback (goo & mackey, 2013). a final significant contribution of the present study is that it was the first study in the area of recasts to examine student reaction time when completing posttests. while the reaction time results of the present study did not produce significant findings, it does not mean that the measurement of reaction time is not relevant to the study of corrective feedback. the measurement of reaction time has led to significant advancements in knowledge in fields such as psycholinguistics and will likely lead to important advancements in knowledge in sla in the future. despite the contributions of the present study to the field of recast research, there are a number of limitations to the present study. first, the number of students who participated in the study was relatively small, and these small numbers may have been (at least partially) responsible for the lack of significant findings on some of the measures despite clear trends for a benefit from recasts on all of the measures. another limitation of this study is that it was conducted in a small-group environment (as opposed to a classroom environment). while this likely reflected a much more natural situation than that of dyadic studies, we must keep in mind that the results cannot necessarily be applied to a whole-class situation. this the role of extensive recasts in error detection and correction by adult esl students 37 being said, within l2 classrooms, teachers often divide students into small groups to complete tasks, projects, etc. another limitation of the study was the fact that all the students completed the stimulated correction task before the written test. the primary goal of this study was to examine students’ responses on the new methodology, stimulated correction. since the number of students in the present study was not large, it was decided not to further divide the students into two groups to receive the stimulated correction task and the written test in a cross-balanced manner. while a practice effect could have been in place on the written test, it should be remembered that the purpose of the test was not to see how accurate students were on error+recast episodes alone but to compare how accurate they were on error+recast and error-recast episodes. it was assumed that any practice effect would equally affect the error+recast, error-recast, and correct episodes. in addition, since the recasts were cut out of the video clips, the possibility that students would learn from hearing the recasts a second time was avoided. the present study has answered the research questions it set out to address, but, as can be seen, it has also initiated the discussion of several new questions. therefore, a great deal more of research is still needed in this area. acknowledgments this study is based on the first author's ma thesis (hawkes, 2007) completed at the university of victoria, victoria, bc. we would like to thank the students who participated in this study and also the manuscript reviewers for their useful comments. this research was supported by a research grant from the social sciences and humanities research council of canada (sshrc) to the first author. laura hawkes, hossein nassaji 38 references ammar, a., & spada, n. 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(1985). communicative competence: some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. in s. gass & c. madden (eds.), input in second language acquisition (pp. 235-253). rowley, ma: newbury. the role of extensive recasts in error detection and correction by adult esl students 41 appendix transcription conventions t teacher s student + pause false start << >> extra-lingual information (such as laughing) ¯ auditory cue underlined erroneous student utterance bold recast italics correct student utterance bold-italics student modification 535 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (3). 2017. 535-556 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.3.9 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl l2 irregular verb morphology: exploring behavioral data from intermediate english learners of german as a foreign language using generalized mixed effects models thomas wagner university college of education, linz, austria thomas.wagner@ph-ooe.at abstract this paper examines possible psycholinguistic mechanisms governing stem vowel changes of irregular verbs in intermediate english learners of german as a foreign language (gfl). in experiment 1, nonce-infinitives embedded in an authentic fictional text had to be inflected for german preterite, thus testing possible analogy-driven pattern associations. experiment 2 explored the psycholinguistic reality of the so-called apophonic path by prompting two inflections for one given nonce-word. data were analyzed using generalized mixed effects models accounting for within-subject as well as within-item variance. the results of experiment 1 and 2 support the notion of a pattern associator and yield only scarce evidence for the psycholinguistic reality of a universal apophonic path. therefore, the organization of irregular verb morphology in the mental lexicon of intermediate gfl learners might best be captured by the linguistic notion of structured lexical entries as well as the psycholinguistic mechanism of an analogy-based pattern associator. keywords: mental lexicon; irregular verb morphology; analogy; pattern associator; apophony thomas wagner 536 1. introduction after around 130 years of research into the human mental lexicon (whitaker, 2006), the semi-regular paradigm of german irregular verbs, combining rule-like as well as idiosyncratic processes, has become the fruit fly in psycholinguistic research. it is thought to offer invaluable insights into storage and retrieval of words in the human mental lexicon. in fact, these insights promise to shed light on the nature of human cognition in general. over the last two decades, german irregular verb morphology has been explored from various perspectives. data come from behavioral l1 studies of both children and adult speakers (clahsen, hadler, & weyerts, 2004; smolka, zwitserlood, & rösler, 2007), impaired speakers studies (marusch, von der malsburg, bastiaanse, & burchert, 2012; penke, wimmer, hennies, hess, & rothweiler, 2014), electrophysiological studies (smolka, khader, wiese, zwitserlood, & rösler, 2013), neuroimaging (lück, hahne, & clahsen, 2006), constructivist neural network modelling (ruh & westermann, 2008) and corpus studies (köpcke, 1998). the above studies focus on processing differences, reporting and discussing possible evidence for qualitatively distinct mechanisms of inflection. while some findings suggest that all german verbs are inflected by the same psycholinguistic mechanism, there is evidence pointing towards two qualitatively distinct processing routes in the speakers’ mental lexicon. overall, current findings appear to remain inconclusive in this respect. most studies concur, though, that some sort of patternand analogy-driven mechanisms would be necessary to handle a key component of german verb inflection, namely vowel change, a systematic stem vowel alternation in verbal inflection. like in english, a lot of irregular german verbs exhibit such stem vowel alternations when inflected for the german past tense and past participle, such as singen-sang-gesungen ‘sing-sang-sung.’ modern single-route approaches model vowel change through analogical or connectionist networks, while the dual-route model accounts for vowel change by means of a so-called pattern associator. the psycholinguistic reality of such a pattern associator has been explored in l1 speakers in a number of studies (bybee & moder, 1983; bybee & slobin, 1982; prasada & pinker, 1993), but, unlike english, german as a foreign language (gfl) behavioral evidence is scarce. while recent studies focus on processing differences (hahne, müller, & clahsen, 2006; neubauer & clahsen, 2009; pliatsikas & marinis, 2013; strobach & schönpflug, 2011), the intricacies of german vowel change remains largely unexplored. in a similar vein, strobach and schönpflug (2011) concluded that prior behavioral evidence appears inconclusive at best, suggesting further research was needed especially with regard to l2. l2 irregular verb morphology: exploring behavioral data from intermediate english learners of. . . 537 the present study tries to fill this gap. it reports findings from two well-established nonce-word research designs in which 82 intermediate english gfl learners provided preterite, participle, and infinitive formations to given german nonce-words. the rationale behind this study was to test in how far gfl vowel change was governed by a pattern associator, operating on prototypical schemas (bybee & slobin, 1982; köpcke, 1998; pinker, 1999), or by the so-called universal apophonic path (ségéral & scheer, 1998). if universal apophony were psycholinguistically real, gfl interlanguage patterns could not be attributed to transfer phenomena but would instead be the result of universal developmental effects. 2. german irregular verb morphology and models of inflection there are about 160 simplex irregular verbs in modern german, although, depending on the choice of reference corpora, counts vary considerably. while middle high german exhibited about 400 irregulars, the number decreased steadily, yielding today’s moderate type-frequency of roughly 4% of all verbs (köpcke, 1998; bittner, 1996). their token-frequency, however, is remarkable, and roughly resembles that of the regulars (clahsen, 1997; clahsen, eisenbeiß, & sonnenstuhl-henning, 1997). the verbal paradigm in german is traditionally categorized as consisting of regular (weak) and irregular (strong) forms, combining rule-based affixation with irregular stem vowel changes. german participles, for instance, involve three morphological processes: a prosodically constrained geprefixation, optional stem vowel allomorphy, as well as -(e)n or -t suffixation, both occurring with roughly the same token frequency in adult and child corpora (clahsen, 1997). recently, however, analyses have become more complex with regard to form and function of stem vowel change or apophony within the paradigm (trompelt, bordag, & pechmann, 2013; wiese, 2008), resulting in regular, hybrid, and irregular classes. table 1 illustrates the most common inflectional patterns. table 1 german vowel change patterns regular, one stem vowel only hybrid, change in participle and preterite irregular, change in present, preterite, and participle mixed, vowel change + suffix infinitive spiel-en ‘to play’ trink-en ‘to drink’ sprech-en ‘to speak’ renn-en ‘to run’ present tense 3rd person spiel-t ‘plays’ trink-t ‘drinks’ sprich-t ‘speaks’ renn-t ‘runs’ preterite 3rd person spiel-te ‘played’ trank ‘drank’ sprach ‘spoke’ rann-te ‘ran’ participle ge-spiel-t ‘played’ ge-trunk-en ‘drunk’ ge-sproch-en ‘spoken’ ge-rann-t ‘run’ german stem vowel alternations for preterite and participle inflection form a patterned semi-regular paradigm. from a diachronic perspective, these patterns are a mere artefact of older variants (bybee & newman, 1995) and appear opaque thomas wagner 538 and unpredictable (nübling, dammel, duke, & szczepaniak, 2006), once even apostrophized as “one of the classic chestnuts of morphological analysis” (anderson, 1988, p. 157). due to this unpredictability, german irregular verbs exhibit restricted generalization properties, and there is little consensus about the distinctiveness of attested vowel change classes. the phonological patterns, for example, are neither necessary nor sufficient to predict to which class a verb should conform. a verb such as sinken ‘to sink,’ for instance, readily joins the irregular pattern displayed by trinken ‘drink’ (trinken : trank : getrunken :: sinken : sank : gesunken), while winken ‘to wave’ and blinken ‘to blink’ do not. accordingly, attempts to define vowel change categories vary considerably, ultimately treating almost each and every variant of vowel change as a class of its own. german verb morphology has been a controversial object of enquiry in psycholinguistics. studies throughout the last 30 years have resulted in the long-standing past-tense-debate (pinker & ullman, 2002; wagner, 2010). from this debate, two approaches emerged. single-route models suggest one mechanism to account for storage and retrieval of both regular and irregular forms in the mental lexicon. such mechanisms are either symbolic or non-symbolic in nature. symbolic models (albright & hayes, 2003; bittner, 1996) are inherently rule-based and deterministic, which creates a number of disadvantages: they are not, for instance, convincing in capturing vowel change as a concatenative process, they do not allow for a gradual transition between regular and irregular mechanisms, and they often lack the psycholinguistic underpinning from behavioral data (becker, 1990). analogical learners and connectionist networks, in contrast, model both regular and irregular verbal inflection entirely rule-free, conceiving linguistic representations in the mental lexicon as graded and domain-general phenomena (eddington, 2000; goebel & indefrey, 2000; westermann, willshaw, & penke, 1999). connectionist models do this by cyclically building and relating weighted connections of parallelly distributed phonological and semantic information about verb infinitives and their inflections. analogical learners store huge databases of individual exemplars and calculate generalization properties among these on the basis of near-neighbourhood similarities. trying to synthesize symbolic and associationist processing, the dual-route model assigns different mechanisms to regular and irregular morphology. regular verbs would be processed by abstract symbolic rules, while irregular and thus lexicalized german verbs would be stored undercomposed in memory and processed by associative patterning, not unlike what ullman (2001) called declarative knowledge. such an architecture would, as proponents of this approach claim, represent the two core characteristics of human cognition (clahsen, 1999; lück, hahne, & clahsen, 2006; pinker, 1999). l2 irregular verb morphology: exploring behavioral data from intermediate english learners of. . . 539 3. german irregular verb morphology in l2 acquisition german verb morphology has not only been controversial in psycholinguistics, but it has also been the bane of countless language learners (neubauer & clahsen, 2009; pinker, 1999). in order to trace possible difficulties in the acquisition of german irregular verb morphology, studies looked at processing differences. however, as with l1 speakers, there is conflicting evidence. advanced greek learners of german, for instance, employed two different mechanisms for regular and irregular inflection (pliatsikas & marinis, 2013), while polish learners relied more on lexical storage and retrieval compared to german l1 speakers (neubauer & clahsen 2009). and strobach and schönpflug (2011) report that their data from english learners of german were consistent with a single-route connectionist account. gfl vowel change, however, has not been examined in detail yet. for english l2, there is evidence in favour of an analogical or prototypical organization in the mental lexicon of advanced german learners of english (wagner, 2010). at the heart of such prototype models are output-oriented morphophonological schemas, governing each vowel change class. such classes emerge through exemplars sharing various morphophonological properties to varying degrees, thus following the principles of family resemblance (rosch, 1975). for german l1, prototypical schemas have been suggested, too (bybee, 1995; wagner, 2010), but there is evidence that, contrary to english, analogical formations in german rely almost exclusively on a verb’s rhyme (penke, 2006). an intriguing alternative to prototypical schemas comes from ségéral and scheer’s (1998) universal apophonic path. they claim that apophony across all types of languages followed a unidirectional five-part vowel change sequence [øàiàaàuàu], providing all the necessary information in order to predict german stem alternations. this is possible only because the authors sophisticatedly reanalyze the german verb paradigm as consisting of an infra-segmental level. the alleged universality of their path is challenging, though, especially since both english and german provide additional supportive evidence from children’s nursery rhymes, onomatopoeic expressions, and expletives. amongst these, apophonic vowel changes such as [ɪ-ʌ] are remarkably frequent. the pattern [ɪ-a-ʊ] is, in fact, the most frequent type of a three-vowel-change pattern in german. if this apophonic path were to be psycholinguistically real, it would seriously challenge both singleand dual-route-models. the two nonce-word elicitation experiments reported in this paper are supposed to test these competing approaches. if a universal vowel change mechanism were psycholinguistically real, we should see learners of german (a) predominantly, or even exclusively, use vowel changes faithful to the apophonic path, and (b) adhere to its mono-directionality, thus rejecting vowel-changes thomas wagner 540 prompted in the reverse direction. if german verb morphology were governed by prototypical schemas, we should expect (a) a strong influence of the verb’s constituents on vowel change, (b) a complete overlap of the prototypical test item with the statistically most effective constituents, and (c) an insensitivity towards directionality effects. 4. general method 4.1. overview both experiments employed a repeated measure elicitation task, using noncewords either embedded in an authentic fictional text or as part of a sentence completion frame. although nonce-word elicitation cannot be controlled as thoroughly as, for instance, priming, lexical decision or eye-movement experiments, this research paradigm was used because of its natural setting and its long history in psycholinguistics (berko, 1958; bybee & moder, 1983; lemhöfer & radach, 2009). in experiment 1, 34 participants inflected 28 nonce infinitives and 15 distractors for preterite. in experiment 2, 48 participants inflected either 28 irregular nonce-infinitives for preterite and participle, or 28 nonce preterites for infinitive and participle. the order in which items were presented varied across the test questionnaires in both experiments, thus helping counterbalance possible sequence effects (prasada & pinker, 1993; ramscar, 2002). 4.2. stimuli based on the lexical statistics reported in köpcke (1998), the 28 most prototypical vowel change triggering nonces were filtered out of 344 phonotactically wellformed constituent combinations. a subset of experiment 2 used preterite forms by transposing the infinitive stems [i:] and [ɪ] into [a]-, [o:]-, or [ɔ]-vowel-change preterites, depending on the most frequent analogies to existing verbs. thus, a nonce like strießen would result in stross by analogy to schließen ‘to close, to lock;’ schloss ‘closed, locked.’ in both experiments, test items’ constituent variants included onset structures c, cc, [ʃ], [ʃ]c, and [ʃ]cc, as well as coda variants [g], [m/m], [ŋ], [ŋk], and [s/ç]. all stimuli can be found in the appendix to this paper. 4.3. participants data for experiment 1 came from randomly recruited gfl speakers of the university of maynooth, university of edinburgh, and university of leicester (n = 34). data for experiment 2 were randomly sampled among glf speakers from l2 irregular verb morphology: exploring behavioral data from intermediate english learners of. . . 541 dublin city university, trinity college dublin, the university of manchester, and university of hull (n = 48). random sampling was done within one cohort of the respective study programs involving german, and participants were not nested within classes. the test questionnaires were administered in small groups. among the 82 participants, there were 42 females and 40 males. they were all irish or british citizens, their l1 was english, there were no bilinguals, and they had been residents in their respective countries from birth. the mean age of the participants was 19 years (sd = 1.19), with a range from 17 to 21 years. they all had been learning german in instructional settings as part of their school curricula for more than 4 years and approached intermediate level b1 (council of europe, 2001). they all studied german as part of their respective undergraduate degree programs. all subjects were unimpaired speakers. they did not receive any remuneration for their participation. 4.4. procedure for experiment 1, participants were told that their data would feed into a new translation of burgess’ classic novel a clockwork orange (burgess, 1962). the introduction pretended that the learners’ intuition was deemed instrumental in finding adequate translations of the notorious nadsat-slang verbs. using such a real novel extract, riddled with artificial slang, was meant to avoid unwanted semantic associations and distract the attention away from the linguistic details. overall, great care was taken to leave subjects in experiment 1 deliberately naïve to the real purpose of the experiment. after two items for practice, an audio cd provided the text with the intended pronunciation of the nonces as well as the timing for the gap-filling. contrary to prasada and pinker (1993), and following orsolini and marslen-wilson (1997), it was deemed appropriate to present the stimuli only once and elicit only one response to a particular test item in both experiments. this was supposed to discourage strategic approaches and tap into retrieval processes as directly as possible. the questionnaire of experiment 2 informed participants that they were taking part in a genuine linguistic experiment about how german verbs are stored and organised in the mental lexicon. then they were told that, in order to make the experiment more interesting, they would be asked to creatively inflect non-existing forms; thus, they were encouraged to rely on their linguistic intuition about the appropriate sound of the inflection. one subset of the participants in experiment 2 were asked to inflect given infinitives for preterite and participle, while the other one was prompted to inflect given preterite forms for infinitive and participle. prompting one subset to inflect backward was supposed to test directionality effects. recall that the apophonic path defines rule-like input-output derivations of one vowel quality out of another. such derivations are assumed to be directional, and hence they are not expected to thomas wagner 542 work in the reverse order. in other words, if the apophonic path was real, english learners of german should prove to be able to complement a fragmentary apophonic path such as [iàx] with ease, whereas the reverse direction such as in [xßa] should prevent speakers from systematic vowel change inflections. using nonce participles for testing the apophonic path’s directionality proved inadequate since, contrary to english, in german the choice of possible preterite inflections from a given participle in a reverse order is rather restricted. a given [ʊ] as a participle stem, for instance, would almost automatically elicit [a] in the preterite, since [i-a-ʊ] is the by far the most predominant german pattern. in order to test possible learners’ preferences, german preterites and not participles were given. after two items for practice, a cd provided all sentence frames, thereby timing the filling of the gaps and controlling potential confusion about the pronunciation of a verb (like [ɔ] or [o:] in an item such as plog). 4.5. data coding and analysis test items in both experiments were coded for onset, nucleus, and coda variants, covering onset structures c, cc, [ʃ], [ʃ]c, and [ʃ]cc, two nuclei, [i:] and [ɪ], as well as codas [g], [m/n], [ŋ], [ŋk], and [s/ç]. after inspection of frequency tables, onset was collapsed into [ʃ] with optional consonant versus consonant only, and coda into consonant, velar, and fricative. responses in experiment 1 were coded for vowel changes in [a], [o], and [u], mixed inflections, and the residual category others. wherever atr contrasts were irrelevant for the present analyses, vowel variants such as [a:] versus [a], [i:] versus [ɪ], [o:] versus [ɔ], and [u:] versus [ʊ] were collapsed into [a], [i], [o], and [u] (wiese, 2000). responses in experiment 2 were coded according to the type of vowel change series they produced as well as their well-formedness. data were analyzed using generalized mixed regression models as well as non-parametric, conditional inference trees built through recursive partitioning. both analyses were done using the statistical software r, version 3.3.1 (r core team, 2016). mixed modelling was done using the package lme4 (bates, maechler, bolker, & walker, 2015), and recursive partitioning employed the party package (hothorn, hornik, & zeileis, 2006). although multifactorial anovas appear to have been the predominant tool of choice in numerous l1 and l2 studies related to the past tense debate, mixed models are much more suited to the present data (cunnings & finlayson, 2015; cunnings & linck, 2015; gries, 2015; jaeger, 2008). they can, for instance, handle non-orthogonal, unbalanced, and nested designs, typical of repeated measure experiments. they can also directly model dichotomous dependent variables and avoid unwarranted assumptions about sphericity, and they simultaneously incorporate random variance of test item and subject (baayen, davidson, & bates, 2008). l2 irregular verb morphology: exploring behavioral data from intermediate english learners of. . . 543 5. results and discussion of experiment 1 in experiment 1, participants produced, apart from regular inflections (41%), three vowel change patterns. the most prominent one was [i-a], with more than 28%, followed by [i-o] with around 15%, and vowel changes in [u] with 4%. mixed inflections also covered around 4%. overall, less than 50% of the responses follow the default, and only 7% of the responses are random. both the high amount of non-default responses and the high amount of attested vowel changes are remarkable. the nonces spingen, stingen, and schingen attracted the highest vowel change response frequencies, producing predominantly [a]-vowel-change. this could be taken as a first indication of a schema with the form [ʃ (c)_ɪ_ŋ] being prototypical for the most productive vowel change class. in order to investigate whether this overall schema did in fact contain the most prototypical constituents, we first looked at the influence of each constituent on the choice between regular and vowel-changing preterites (excluding the residual others). the mosaic plot in figure 1 illustrates the distribution of all preterites by constituents. figure 1 mosaic plots of two log-linear independence models illustrating the choice of preterite by onset and coda (left panel), and preterite by nucleus and coda (right panel) in the mosaic diagrams, both horizontal and vertical asymmetries indicate significant partial effects of the constituents on the type of preterite formation (p < .001). size and shading of each tile in the diagrams represent frequencies as well as direction and significance of effects. the darkest grey shade indicates more observations than expected. in the left panel, the dark tiles in the middle and topright illustrate significant effects for the schemas [ʃc_ŋ(k)] and [c_fricative]. onset thomas wagner 544 has almost no effect. in the right panel, effects for [#_i:_ ŋ(k)] and [#_ɪ_fricative] are visible (middle and top-right dark tiles). in order to explore the above effects in more detail, we performed a general linear mixed effects analysis of the relationship between the constituent variants and the binary choice of preterite. to estimate parameters, restricted maximum likelihood was used instead of penalized quasi-likelihood since the latter is reported to produce biased estimates with binary response variables (thiele & markussen, 2012). as fixed effects, we entered nucleus and coda without interaction term into the model. their factor levels were treatment-coded, so coefficients in the model correspond to simple effects. nucleus and coda were not crossed since some combinations, due to phonotactic reasons, were not represented with data points. as random effects, we included intercepts for subjects and items as well as by-subject and by-item random slopes for coda since the effect of coda seemed to significantly vary across subjects and items, too. moreover, including random slopes renders mixed models conservative and minimises α-errors. the dependent variable was coded binary (regular vs. irregular). main effect p values were obtained by likelihood ratio tests (all p values < .005). it was also tested if both fixed and random effects were highly correlated, and if the model was overdispersed; neither was the case. scaled residuals were distributed fairly symmetrically. table 2 table of coefficients of the final model, estimated using laplace approximation as well as the optimiser bound by quadratic approximation (bobyqua) instead of the heuristic default nelder-mead method logits se z p intercept 0.19 0.35 0.52 .60*** nucleus (effect size = 0.06) i: -0.25 0.30 -0.82 .41*** codas (effect size = 0.28) ŋ(k) -1.04 0.31 -3.39 < .001*** s/ç -0.59 0.43 -1.36 .17*** note. logits are the log-odds of the parameter estimations; se is the standard error; z-values come from the corresponding wald statistics. when building the final model, we first followed barr, levy, scheepers, and tilly (2013) and therefore tried to include all fixed effects with their interactions as well as all random intercepts and slopes. however, adding interactions and random slopes other than coda prevented models from converging, most likely because there were too little data for the number of parameters to be estimated. given that there still is little consensus as to how to deal with convergence problems (barr et al., 2013; cunnings & finlayson, 2015), these terms were dropped again. table 2 summarises the partial main effects of the constituents’ variants of the final model with a pseudo conditional r2 of 0.62. l2 irregular verb morphology: exploring behavioral data from intermediate english learners of. . . 545 table 2 illustrates a highly significant main effect for coda (χ2(2) = 14.28, p < .001), and a significant partial effect for codas with the velar nasal plus optional obstruent. in other words, [ŋ(k)] significantly affects the choice of preterite formations, decreasing the log odds for regulars by -1.04 (se = 0.31), resulting in a decreased probability for regular responses of p = .30. compared to nucleus, coda has a substantial effect size (range) of 0.28. other than that, there are no significant partial effects. however, if we plot nucleus and coda as interactions, we can see the results presented in figure 2. when looking at the simple main effects (left panel), we can see that the probability of regulars slightly decreases when we go from short (0.41) to long (0.35) nucleus. as for codas, probabilities of regulars decrease for velars (0.28) and fricatives (0.37) compared to other consonants (0.52). note, though, the overlap of the error bars in both panels, indicating that we are dealing with merely mild effects. in the right panel we can see a substantial decline in probability for regulars (down to 0.30) for short nucleus [ɪ] followed by velars (solid line). similar, but less pronounced, is the decline for long nucleus [i:] followed by fricatives (0.34, dashed line). in sum, the mixed effects analysis revealed effects for [#_ɪ_ŋ(k)] as well as [#_i:_fricative]. figure 2 effects plots for the individual partial effects in the final model (left panel) and the interaction of nucleus and coda (right panel) the choice between the different vowel changes in the preterites the learners produced was modelled using conditional inference trees built through recursive partitioning. figure 3 shows such a tree model for the different types of vowel change by onset, nucleus, and coda. the tree in figure 3 is the result of a split algorithm. unlike traditional classification and regression tree modelling, however, in which algorithms attempt to increase information gain measures, conditional inference tree modelling uses inferential test statistics in order to retain significant predictors only. as a consequence, the above tree model does not contain any covariates that are independent of the choice of vowel change patterns. tree growth is thus based on statistical stopping rules, so that neither pruning nor cross-validation are required, and the data cannot be overfitted. thomas wagner 546 figure 3 conditional inference tree for the types of vowel change by onset, nucleus, and coda the algorithm finds only one significant predictor, namely coda (topmost split in the tree, node 1). this is in line with the mixed model above, where the only significant main effect occurred with coda, too. in the tree diagram, we can see that the distinction between nasal coda structures on the one hand (node 2 on the left) and the fricatives and the velar obstruent on the other is highly significant (p < .001). the final level of the tree provides the proportional frequencies for the four kinds of vowel change. we find the highest proportion of regular responses for fricatives and the velar obstruent (node 7) as well as codas [m] and [n] (node 3). in contrast, most of the vowel change responses can be found for [ŋ(k)], favoring [a] (node 4), and [s/ç], favoring [o] (node 6). overall, the tree model suggests a highly significant influence for coda on the choice between different vowel changes, with velar nasals favoring [a], and fricatives favoring [o]. to sum up, the nonces producing most vowel changes had the schema [ʃ(c)_ɪ_ŋ ]. for vowel change versus the default, an independence model showed significant effects for [ʃc_ŋ(k)], [c_fricative], [#_i:_ŋ(k)] and [#_ɪ_fricative], while the generalized mixed model yielded a significant effect for the rhymes [#_ɪ_ŋ(k)] and [#_i:_s/ç]. when predicting the types of vowel change, coda was the only significant predictor, with [ŋ(k)] favoring vowel changes in [a] and fricatives favoring [o]. 6. results and discussion of experiment 2 in experiment 2, conditional inference trees modelling the type of vowel change also showed effects for coda, with [ŋ(k)] favoring [i-a-u] patterns, and fricatives favoring [i-o-o]. recall, though, that experiment 2 was supposed to test whether the participants’ vowel changes were faithful to the predictions made by the coda p < 0.001 1 {m,n, ng, nk} {g, s,ch} coda p < 0.001 2 m,n {ng, nk} node 3 (n = 198) a mix o reg u 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 node 4 (n = 291) a mix o reg u 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 coda p = 0.034 5 s,ch g node 6 (n = 296) a mix o reg u 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 node 7 (n = 96) a mix o reg u 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 l2 irregular verb morphology: exploring behavioral data from intermediate english learners of. . . 547 apophonic path. although there is a good deal of consistency between expected and elicited patterns (χ2 (10) = 146.27, p < .001 for given infinitives, χ2 (10) = 270.43, p < .001 for given preterites), there are quite a few inconsistencies. 1st response vowel change preterite 2nd response vowel change participle 1st response vowel change infinitive 2nd response vowel change participle [a] (231) ö [a-o] (59) [i-a-o] (144) ö others (20) ò ò [a-u] (62) ò ò regular (60) ò [a-a] (48) ò [e-a] (36) ø others (62) ø [i-a] (28) mixed (14) ò ò various (15) [i-a-u] (216) ò ö others (13) [o] (85) ò ò [o-o] (57) ò regular (72) ò others (33) ò [e-a] (44) [u] (21) ò ö [u-u] (16) ø [i-a] (87) ò [i:-ɔ-ɔ] (240) ò ö others (25) ò regular (71) ò [i-o] (81) ò [e-o] (58) ø [a-u] (5) [i:-o:-o:] (72) ò various (72) figure 4 interaction between preterite and participle response (left) and infinitive and participle responses (right), excluding regular first responses, with arrows marking the various paths of inflectional combinations first, the learners produced 38% unattested vowel changes. for responses starting from a given infinitive, this is evidence against the apophonic path. moreover, 32% of the responses to given nonce preterites were regular. while it is understandable for given infinitives to prompt learners to apply the default and not inflect it by analogy to a phonologically nearest neighbor, it is surprising when it comes to the nonce preterites. those preterites, such as schoch, stang, or schnoss obviously lack regular suffixes. the 32% regular responses indicate either that the nonce’s obvious irregular phonological shape must have been inaccessible to quite a few learners, or that the directionality of the apophonic path rules out reverse ablaut. however, more than 50% of the responses to a given nonce preterite show vowel change commensurate with attested patterns. this, in turn, is evidence against a directional apophonic path since, clearly, a lot of learners developed grammatical vowel change sequences starting backwards from a given nonce preterite. figure 4 illustrates inconsistencies in further detail. what we can see in figure 4, left panel, is an erosion from [a]-vowel-changing patterns in the first (preterite) to the second (participle) response. 231 preterites branch out to four different participle patterns. and both [a]and [o]-vowelchanges create unorthodox forms in the participle (others). on the right, we can see that given preterites prompted four different infinitive patterns, which, too, branch out heavily into various attested and unattested vowel changes (others). thomas wagner 548 in sum, evidence against the apophonic path lies in the inconsistencies when producing vowel change from nonce infinitive to preterite and participles, as well as in the analogically formed irregular infinitives from given nonce preterites. in order to model the relationship between the nonce given, the two responses, and the overall grammaticality of the vowel change series, generalized mixed models with restricted maximum likelihood were fitted to the data. in all models, random intercepts were included for subject and items. factor levels of predictors were treatment-coded. a maximal random-effects-structure with all random slopes as well as interactions of fixed effects prevented models from converging, so terms were dropped whenever this happened. first of all, the tense given turned out to be a significant predictor for the first (χ2 (1) = 9.57, p < .005) and second response (χ2 (1) = 4.76, p < .03), but, interestingly, not for the grammaticality of the overall vowel change pattern (χ2 (1) = 0.04, p = .84). in contrast, in a model with the two responses as fixed effects, both are highly significant (p < .001). it thus appears as though it was not the given nonce verb as such that predicted the grammaticality of the overall patterns, but the interplay between the two inflections the learners produced. this is again evidence against the apophonic path since the stimulus represented the directionality dimension of the apophonic path and should have resulted in well-formed vowel change patterns for given infinitives only. the final model included both the tense given and the two responses as fixed effects. fixed and random effects were tested for multicollinearity. the predictors’ inflation factor was below 2.5, and the model was not overdispersed. scaled residuals were distributed fairly symmetrically. table 3 summarises the final model, with a pseudo conditional r2 of 0.78. table 3 table of coefficients of the final model, estimated using laplace approximation as well as the optimizer bound by quadratic approximation (bobyqua) instead of the heuristic default nelder-mead method logits se z p intercept -3.25 0.41 -7.96 < .001*** nonce given (effect size = 0.13) preterite 0.63 0.48 1.31 .19*** 1st response (effect size = 0.85) ungrammatical 2.65 0.39 6.85 < .001*** 1st response (effect size = 0.01) regular -3.76 0.45 -8.41 < .001*** 2nd response (effect size = 0.80) ungrammatical 5.60 0.44 12.66 < .001*** 2nd response (effect size = 0.02) grammatical 0.28 0.95 0.29 .077*** note. logits are the log-odds of the parameter estimations; se is the standard error; z-values come from the corresponding wald statistics; *** p < .001. table 3 shows that the given tense is again insignificant. ungrammatical first responses, compared to grammatical ones (mapped onto the intercept), result, however, in a significant increase of log odds by 2.65, and thus in a probability for l2 irregular verb morphology: exploring behavioral data from intermediate english learners of. . . 549 ungrammatical patterns of 0.93. likewise, ungrammatical second responses show an increase in log odds by 5.6 and a probability of 0.99 for ungrammatical overall patterns. the ungrammatical second response has the largest effect size in this model. in sum, the faithfulness to attested patterns is the result of the interplay between first and second response and not of the directionality prompted by the nonce verbs. it can therefore be concluded that the apophonic path cannot convincingly account for the present data. 7. conclusion how far do the data of the two experiments support a schema-based or universal apophonic organization of vowel change in gfl speakers? first of all, we do see certain constituent combinations, such as [ʃc_ŋ(k)] and [c_fricative], triggering non-default inflections. this observation is by no means trivial since apparently even a restricted, classroom-based exposure to german makes analogical formations possible already in intermediate learners (murphy, 2004; gor & chernigovskaya, 2005 for similar results for learners of russian). the learners’ l1 could, though, have a positive effect, since english and german irregular verb morphology are not all that different (clahsen, felser, neubauer, sato, & silva, 2010). second, there is an almost complete overlap between the nonces producing most of the attested vowel changes in experiment 1 (spingen, stingen, and schingen) and the most effective constituent combinations, thus having the cuevalidity one would expect from a prototype (rosch & mervis, 1975). however, contrary to english (bybee & moder, 1983; bybee & slobin, 1982), it is predominantly the verbs’ rhymes, such as [#_ɪ_ŋ(k)] and [#_i:_s/ç], which account for vowel change patterns. so far, these findings are only partly in line with prototypical schemas. instead, as penke (2006) already suggested, the internal organization of irregular german verb schemata might rely solely on the rhyme. third, the double inflections in experiment 2 illustrate processes incompatible with the apophonic path. instead, they reveal a certain analogical productivity in a reverse fashion (becker, 1990). it remains unclear, though, why there were so many default responses to given irregular nonce preterites. this is indeed surprising since both beginning and advanced learners are reported to pay considerable attention to stem-changes (godfroid & uggen, 2013), are less sensitive to a verb’s morphological structure (neubauer & clahsen, 2009), and prefer declarative memory over symbolic processing. overall, the present german l2 data support the notion of an analogical pattern associator, either as part of a dual-route model or as an analogy-based single mechanism. from a theoretical point of view, it seems as though structured lexical entries from minimalist morphology might best provide a theoretical account for german thomas wagner 550 l2 vowel change (clahsen, 1999; wunderlich, 1996; wunderlich & fabri, 1995). structured lexical entries are organized as hierarchical trees, with nodes and subnodes relating underspecified grammatical features to each other. however, those trees might not just organise individual underspecified entries, but the entire paradigm, or verb classes, as such. therefore, inflectional classes, and even regular verb morphology, would have a psycholinguistic reality and would not merely be the by-product of their members (trompelt, bordag, & pechmann, 2013). from a processing point of view, promising avenues for further research could lie in micro-rules, analogical learners, connectionist networks, and probabilistic models. the efficiency of so-called micro-rules has been proven for english past tense (albright & hayes, 2003). they argue for a model inductively creating microrules for both regular and irregular verbs. it is difficult, though, to qualitatively distinguish instance-based input-output rules and analogical formations. both processes might ultimately be just the two sides of the same coin. on the one hand, the entirety of exemplars and their related forms create patterns and thus facilitate new analogical formations, but, on the other hand, provide the basis for abstract micro-level subregularities and thus facilitate deterministic rules with the extent of one exemplar (becker, 1990). in other words, rules could be interpreted as highly reinforced representational patterns and schemas (bybee, 1988). appropriate alternatives to such symbolic approaches might lie in analogical learners (aha, kibler, & albert, 1991; daelemans, zavrel, van der sloot, & van den bosch, 1999; eddington, 2004, skousen, 1989), connectionist networks (westermann, willshaw, & penke, 1999) or probabilistic models (albright, 2009; baayen, 2003; baayen & hay, 2005; gor & chernigovskaya, 2005). probabilistic models might, in fact, turn out to be particularly suited since they can incorporate gradience and learning experience. from an acquisitional perspective, the most important finding in this study is probably that verb inflections by analogy to existing patterns appear to be possible even at an intermediate learner level. the present gfl learners have, despite limited classroom-based exposure to the foreign language, accumulated enough exemplars of the verbal paradigm in their mental lexicons to generalise patterns, enabling them to productively handle new linguistic experiences. what, however, does this mean for the acquisition of german in instructional settings? on the one hand, if learners generally turned out to prefer lexical retrieval by means of analogical generalization, instructions revolving around morphological analyses of verb forms would be of little help; instead, massive exposure facilitating analogical inference would be called for. in that respect, further research should look into possible constraints and threshold levels for such generalization properties. on the other hand, english speaking learners of german, in particular, could benefit from a crosslinguistic focus on forms in order to make them aware of both the similarities and differences between the two verbal paradigms. l2 irregular verb morphology: exploring behavioral data from intermediate english learners of. . . 551 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(1996). minimalist morphology: the role of paradigms. in g. booij & j. van marle (eds.), yearbook of morphology 1995 (pp. 93-114). dodrecht: kluwer academic. wunderlich, d., & fabri, r. (1995). minimalist morphology: an approach to inflection. zeitschrift für sprachwissenschaft, 14(2), 236-294. doi: 10.1515/ zfsw.1995.14.2.236 thomas wagner 556 appendix table of test items and distractors of experiment 1 and 2 no. experiments 1 2a 2b test items distractors test items distractors test items distractors 1. knießen knießen knoss 2. schrimmen schrimmen schramm 3. luschen nisseln nisselte 4. spinken spinken spank 5. grießen grießen gross 6. rabotten pieben piebte 7. stinnen stinnen stann 8. biechen biechen boch 9. govoriten witten wittete 10. strinken strinken strank 11. vidden stiemen stiemte 12. loviten stitzen stitzte 13. schiechen schiechen schoch 14. schringen schringen schrang 15. sotteln miegeln miegelte 16. stiechen stiechen stoch 17. schmatten hitteln hittelte 18. strimmen strimmen stramm 19. spingen spingen spang 20. pitschen sicken sickte 21. schliegen schliegen schlog 22. kritschen pitschen pitschte 23. schingen schingen schang 24. fießen fießen foss 25. sprinken lichsen lichste 26. boppen liepen liepte 27. schlippen sprinken sprank 28. fiechen fiechen foch 29. stingen stingen stang 30. triechen triechen troch 31. krasen bristen bristete 32. strießen strießen stross 33. schinnen schinnen schann 34. pliegen pliegen plog 35. dengen fritteln frittelte 36. kingen kingen kang 37. friegen friegen frog 38. wetschen krietschen krietschte 39. linnen linnen lann 40. schnießen schnießen schnoss 41. harrken fietzen fietzte 42. schminnen schminnen schmann 43. frinken frinken frank 467 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (4). 467-489 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl personality factors as predictors of foreign language aptitude1 adriana biedro pomeranian academy in s upsk biedron@apsl.edu.pl abstract the study addresses a problem which is inadequately investigated in second language acquisition research, that is, personality predictors of foreign language aptitude. specifically, it focuses on the five factor model which includes openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (costa & mccrae, 1992) as traits differentiating gifted and nongifted foreign language learners and predicting results of foreign language aptitude tests. although contemporary researchers generally agree that affect is an important variable in second language acquisition, most empirical studies demonstrate that personality factors are weakly correlated with cognitive abilities and that their contribution to the ultimate attainment is minor (cf. robinson & ellis, 2008). on the other hand, these factors constitute an integral part of cognitive ability development (cf. dörnyei, 2009); therefore, neglecting them in research on foreign language aptitude would be unjustified. the following study is an attempt to analyze the five factors in two groups of learners: gifted and nongifted. in order to answer the question as to which and to what extent personality factors have a predictive effect on foreign language aptitude, the results were subjected to a multiple regression analysis. the findings of the study are presented and discussed in a wider context of research on cognitive abilities. keywords: the five factors, personality, foreign language aptitude, gifted foreign language learners 1 preparation of this research project was supported by the polish ministry of science and higher education in 2009-2011. project no. 1231/b/ho3/2009/37 adriana biedro 468 for several decades the issue of personality effects on second language acquisition (sla) has been high on the agenda of many second language acquisition researchers. its major focus has been on selected personality characteristics, for example anxiety (cf. dewaele, petrides, & furnham, 2008; piechurskakuciel, 2008) or motivation, which is considered a cognitive rather than affective factor in contemporary motivation theories (dörnyei, 2001, 2010), whereas other factors have received very little attention or have been completely omitted (cf. pawlak, 2009, p. 8). in particular, personality traits have been consistently neglected in many research studies as well as literature reviews, also those which focused specifically on individual differences and affect in sla (cf. arnold, 1999; griffiths, 2008). the most popular instrument to measure personality used in sla studies has been the myers-briggs type indicator (myers, mccaulley, quenk, & hammer, 1998), which categorizes personality according to four dichotomous scales (cf. ehrman, 1996, 2008). however, recently, other personality scales adopted from the field of psychology have become increasingly popular. one of the paradigms gaining interest in individual difference research in sla is costa and mccrae’s (1992) five factor model of personality (ffm; also referred to as the big five). the five factors include: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism and comprise the most comprehensive empirical model of personality. as dörnyei (2005) has it: “at present the big five is gaining momentum to the extent that it seems almost ubiquitous in the current literature” (pp. 12-13). costa and mccrae’s model as well as their famous revised neo personality inventory (neo-pi-r; costa & mccrae, 1992) have been applied in a few studies on multilingualism (cf. deweale, 2002, 2009; dewaele & furnham, 2000) and gifted foreign language learners (cf. hu & reiterer, 2009). nevertheless, there is very little research on the relationship between foreign language aptitude and personality traits, possibly due to the disappointing correlations between success in a foreign language and personality dimensions (cf. dörnyei, 2005, 2009) and, consequently, their lower status in research on predictors of learning outcomes. as ellis and robinson (2008) argue: “learners’ aptitude, attitude and motivation are all systematically related to rate of progress and ultimate attainment, but affective factors are subordinate to more powerful cognitive developmental and maturational factors” (p. 7). on the other hand, some researchers being aware of the potential of personality factors in the development of foreign language aptitude call for research in this neglected field (cf. bongaerts, planken, & schils, 1995; dörnyei, 2009, 2010; hu & reiterer, 2009; hyltenstam & abrahamsson, 2003; moyer, 1999, 2007). the following study was designed to measure the predictive effect of the five factors on foreign language aptitude in two groups of learners: gifted personality factors as predictors of foreign language aptitude 469 and nongifted. the first sections of the article present the theoretical background of the ffm, a brief overview of foreign language aptitude models and the theoretical and empirical perspective on the role of personality traits in foreign language aptitude. then, the study is presented and discussed in the context of research on foreign language aptitude. the analyses applied in the study included descriptive statistics, the pearson product-moment correlation, t test of differences and regression analysis. the article closes with some concluding remarks and suggestions for further research. the five factors personality factors are relatively stable styles of thinking, feeling and acting. personality research has gained much popularity in the past decades thanks to the recognition that personality predicts a large part of behavior and variety of social and academic outcomes (bouchard & mcgue, 2002). cross-cultural studies of personality have provided cumulative evidence that personality factors are universal and replicable, which means that they can be found in all societies and cultures of the world (mccrae & costa, 1997). because no significant differences in traits and trait structures were found in various cultures, a conclusion was drawn that traits are not generated by the specificity of a culture but are general and attributed to biological bases and psychological consequences of the shared human experience of living in society. there has been much controversy on how many factors create personality: three (eysenck & eysenck, 1964; tellegen, 1982), five (costa & mccrae, 1992), eight (comrey, 1970), or 16 (cattell, eber, & tatsuoka, 1970). the number of higher-order traits and their hierarchical structure is also disputable. eysenck’s traditional threefactor theory, which became a point of reference for many researchers, includes neuroticism, psychoticism and extraversion. the factor of psychoticism connected with aggressiveness and hostility is the most controversial one. tellegen’s threefactor model replaced extraversion with positive emotionality (the tendency to be positively and actively engaged with one’s environment), neuroticism with negative emotionality (the tendency to experience negative emotions) and introduced the factor of constraint (the ability to inhibit impulses). nowadays, most psychologists agree that the best representation of human personality is provided by the ffm (costa & mccrae, 1992). according to this model, there are five basic dimensions of personality: openness to experience or intellect, conscientiousness or will to achieve, extraversion or surgency, agreeableness versus antagonism and neuroticism versus emotional stability. each of these five factors represents the common variance among a set of more specific traits. in 1992 costa and mccrae designed a tool for measuring personality, the neo-pi-r, which operationalized the ffm by adriana biedro 470 assessing 30 specific traits (six for each factor). factor analyses conducted on different groups have consistently generated a five-factor structure of personality irrespective of gender, ethnic group, age or culture. behavioral genetic findings (bouchard & mcgue, 2002) provided convincing evidence that the five factors are moderately to substantially heritable. in their review of literature, bouchard and mcgue (2002) suggested that genetic influence on personality trait variation ranges from 40 to 55%. moreover, there is a strong case for the hypothesis that shared family environment exerts basically no influence on personality traits. estimates of genetic and environmental influences on personality are based on animal studies (gosling, 2001), and on twin, adoption and family studies (bouchard, 1997; bouchard & loehlin, 2001). interestingly, no gender differences in heritability of the five factors were found in studies on big populations (n = 30 000; eaves et al., 1999). according to bouchard and mcgue (2002), analyses of twin, adoption and family studies provide strong and consistent evidence for both genetic and environmental contributions to personality; however, the latter are far more difficult to detect and measure. all these studies were consistent in indicating that the environmental sources of influence have effects in personality differences (nonshared) rather than in personality similarities (shared) between children raised in the same family. these nonshared factors, that is, factors which differentiate relatives, are very complex and difficult to identify. longitudinal studies over the period of six years confirmed that the five factors are relatively stable. what is more, they perform an important role in adaptation to the environment. openness is a predictor of career choice, conscientiousness is the best predictor of the quality of professional activity as well as academic achievement, and all of the factors except for openness are connected with life satisfaction (strelau, 2000, p. 555). each of the five factors constitutes a continuum with two extremes: openness to experience denotes an appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity and variety of experience. people characterized by high levels of openness to experience are intellectually curious, sensitive to beauty, creative and aware of their feelings. they tend to be unconventional, independent in their judgment and willing to question authority and discover new political, social and aesthetic ideas. people gaining low scores on openness tend to be more conventional and conservative and have traditional interests. they appreciate traditional values, have pragmatic interests and prefer socially accepted ways of acting. the six specific traits of openness to experience include: fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, actions, ideas and values. conscientiousness is a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully and aim for achievement. this factor affects our control and regulation of impersonality factors as predictors of foreign language aptitude 471 pulses. high scorers exhibit a strong will, are motivated and persistent in their endeavors. they are thorough, dutiful, punctual, thoughtful and reliable at work. they display a preference for planned rather than spontaneous behavior. they can have high academic and professional achievements. a high degree of conscientiousness can indicate perfectionism and workaholism. low scorers are rather sloppy at work and display low achievement motivation as well as hedonistic attitude towards life, lack of clear life goals, laziness, impulsivity and spontaneity in making decisions. the six specific traits of conscientiousness include: competence, selfdiscipline, achievement-striving, dutifulness, order and deliberation. extraversion is connected with positive emotions, surgency and the tendency to seek out stimulation and the company of others. this trait manifests itself by evident engagement with the external world. people scoring high on this trait are friendly and warmhearted, full of energy, prone to play and search for stimulation. extraverts enjoy being with people and tend to dominate in social situations. they are active, enthusiastic, vigorous, optimistic and talkative. introverts are less socially active than extraverts. they treat others with reserve, are less optimistic and tend to stay lonely and withdrawn. introverts seem quiet, modest and thoughtful. their lack of social involvement should not be interpreted as shyness or depression; they simply need less stimulation than extraverts. the six specific traits of extraversion include: warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity, excitement-seeking, and positive emotions. agreeableness reflects individual differences in general concern for social harmony. it denotes the tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others. agreeable individuals are friendly and helpful and generally assume that other people represent similar virtues. they optimistically believe that people are honest, decent and trustworthy. they appreciate good relationships with other people. they can be described as straightforward, ingenuous, sincere, considerate, generous, altruistic, helpful and willing to compromise their interests with others. people who score low on agreeableness are egocentric, skeptical about others’ motives, competitive rather than cooperative, suspicious, aggressive and hard-faced. they are not interested in others’ well-being. the six specific traits of agreeableness include: trust, modesty, compliance, altruism, straightforwardness and tender-mindedness. neuroticism (emotional instability) is the tendency to experience negative emotions, for example anger, anxiety or depression. high scorers are susceptible to irrational ideas, less able to control their impulses and manage stress. they react to stress with fear, tension, tend to worry themselves sick adriana biedro 472 and interpret ordinary situations as threatening. they often experience hostility and anger, get discouraged and depressed in difficult situations. their self-esteem is low and they can be embarrassed in social situations. their negative emotional reactions tend to continue for long periods of time, which means they are often in a bad mood. low scorers are more emotionally stable, quiet, relaxed, less easily upset and less emotionally reactive. they manage stress more effectively and do not experience frustration and irritation as often as neurotics. the six specific traits of neuroticism include: anxiety, hostility, depression, self-consciousness, impulsiveness and vulnerability (costa & mccrae, 1992; mccrae & costa, 2003; nosal, 1999). according to watson and clark (1994), the trait negative affect is a defining feature of neuroticism. individuals who are high in neuroticism experience an array of such negative states as episodes of anxiety, depression and hostility. negative affectivity is also associated with introspection and rumination, negativistic cognitive style and a focus on negative aspects of a person and life in general. consequently, it is characterized by a low self-concept and a high level of stress, accompanied by poor coping potential. in contrast, individuals with a low neuroticism trait tend to be content, secure and self-assured. negative affect correlates positively with introversion, whereas positive affect with extraversion. foreign language aptitude the contemporary concept of foreign language aptitude is based on the definition proposed by carroll (1981), who termed it as “the individual's initial state of readiness and capacity for learning a foreign language, and probable degree of facility in doing so . . .” (p. 85). in terms of structure, carroll described foreign language aptitude as consisting of four relatively independent subcomponents: phonetic coding ability, grammatical sensitivity, inductive language learning ability, and associative memory (carroll, 1981, p. 105). carroll’s theory as well as his famous modern language aptitude test (mlat; carroll & sapon, 2002) have become the most often referred to paradigm in all subsequent studies on foreign language aptitude (cf. dörnyei, 2005). the most influential contemporary models of foreign language aptitude are skehan’s processing stage model (2002) and robinson’s aptitude complex model (2002), which include psycholinguistic and cognitive-science research findings on human cognitive abilities. skehan’s model refers stages of sla to foreign language aptitude components, whereas robinson’s model relates cognitive profiles of foreign language learners to different types of instruction demanding different levels of awareness. both models involve the factor of personality factors as predictors of foreign language aptitude 473 working memory, which reconceptualizes the original, that is, carroll’s model. in the light of contemporary research, foreign language aptitude is viewed not as a monolith, but as a conglomerate of a number of cognitive variables (cf. dörnyei & skehan, 2003). the only foreign language aptitude theory that takes into account personality and motivational (conative) characteristics is snow’s (1987) cognitive-affective-conative triad of foreign language aptitude, further extended by corno et al. (2002). in this model, aptitude is not limited to abilities but includes aspects of personality such as achievement motivation, freedom from anxiety, positive self-concept and control of impulses, temperament and moods. this paradigm also involves the five factors. other classic foreign language aptitude theories (cf. carroll, 1993; robinson, 2002; skehan, 2002) include only purely cognitive factors, which, consequently, affected empirical research on foreign language aptitude. the five factors in foreign language aptitude research despite many controversies surrounding the role of noncognitive factors in foreign language learning outcomes, contemporary sla researchers generally agree that cognitive and affective factors are related in the field of language learning (cf. dewaele et al., 2008; dörnyei, 2010; griffiths, 2008; hu & reiterer, 2009; laever, ehrman, & shekhtman, 2005). success in learning a foreign language is associated with personality variables (cf. dörnyei, 2005; ehrman, 2008; ehrman & oxford, 1995). nevertheless, personality factors are on the sidelines of research on foreign language aptitude and despite the declared need for such analysis, the researchers usually resign from it in their studies (cf. abrahamsson & hyltenstam, 2008; bongaerts, van summeren, planken, & schils, 1997; ioup, boustagui, el tigi, & moselle, 1994; morgan, smith, tsimpli, & woll, 2007; moyer, 1999, 2007; obler, 1989; sawyer & ranta, 2001; schneiderman & desmarais, 1988; skehan, 1998; van boxtel, bongaerts, & coppen, 2003). consequently, instruments designed to measure this construct usually include only cognitive tests. an innovative foreign language aptitude test under development by doughty et al. (2010), the high-level language aptitude battery (hi-lab), designed with a view to predicting high-level attainment in post-critical sla, included three tolerance-of-ambiguity measures. eventually, after factor and reliability analyses, the authors decided to eliminate all three measures from the battery until a reliable behavioral measure is developed. what is more, the researchers declared that they decided to limit their tool to purely cognitive factors (p. 28). this decision accords with the often voiced opinion that the adriana biedro 474 role of personality factors in foreign language aptitude is far from straightforward (cf. corno et al., 2002; dörnyei, 2005). a few studies devoted some attention to personality factors in foreign language aptitude. bongaerts et al. (1995), bongaerts et al. (1997), bongaerts, mennen, and van der silk (2000), and moyer (1999, 2007), in reports of their studies on highly motivated and advanced foreign language learners, suggested that some specific personality factors might, in connection with exceptional aptitude, affect exceptional success. the researchers emphasized the need for research on not only cognitive, but also affective factors in exceptional foreign language learners, which are capable of compensating for the late start (cf. hu & reiterer, 2009; hyltenstam & abrahamsson, 2003). personality traits have been measured in studies on multilingual foreign language learners. a study that fits in with this line of research was conducted by ramirez-esparza, gosling, benet-martínez, potter, and pennebaker (2006) on 79 spanish-english bilinguals. the researchers found that the bilinguals displayed slightly different personality profiles while speaking different languages. they were more extraverted, agreeable and conscientious in english than in spanish, whereas their neuroticism and openness remained unchanged. o ska-ponikwia’s study (as cited in dewaele, 2011) on 137 polishenglish bilinguals revealed that agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness are positively correlated with “feeling different” in an l2. dewaele and furnham (2000) found that extraversion correlates positively with oral fluency measures in an l2, especially in stressful situations. moreover, extraverts, due to their risk-taking ability, are more willing to use colloquial and emotion words than introverts. dewaele (2002) discovered that extraversion and neuroticism predicted levels of foreign language anxiety in english l3 production, explaining 20% of the total variance. high levels of extraversion and low levels of neuroticism were linked to lower levels of anxiety in english. the same author (2009) presented evidence that psychological studies have consistently shown extraverts’ superiority over introverts at short-term and working memory. finally, dewaele found negative, but statistically insignificant, correlations between extraversion and foreign language course marks (2009). young (as cited in dewaele, 2009) discovered that openmindedness (a concept similar to openness to experience) is a good predictor of foreign language learning outcomes. openness to experience is the factor the most strongly related to intellectual functioning. its correlation with verbal intelligence was estimated by mccrae (as cited in nosal, 1999, p. 256) at .30. openness is a relatively stable factor that is believed to have a strong genetic component; the influence of genetic factors on openness is estimated at .61 (nosal, 1999). it also correlates with creativity and personality factors as predictors of foreign language aptitude 475 divergent thinking, which are factors characterizing gifted individuals (mccrae, 1987). summing up, this factor is the strongest potential predictor of success in foreign language learning (cf. dörnyei, 2005). the question whether it can also be a predictor of foreign language aptitude is yet to be answered. an ongoing study on phonetically talented l2 learners conducted by hu and reiterer (2009) has provided interesting insights into the correlation between phonetic abilities and personality factors. the researchers found no correlation between pronunciation talent and extraversion, openness to experience or neuroticism, whilst a moderate positive correlation was found for conscientiousness and agreeableness. they attributed this observation to the separateness of phonetic aptitude, which does not require social capability, from other aptitudes affecting oral language (hu & reiterer, 2009). finally, biedro (2010) investigated differences in personality factors between two groups of learners: 44 gifted l2 learners (highly proficient multilinguals) and 37 nongifted l2 learners (year-one english philology students). only one of the five factors, namely openness to experience, was found to be significantly higher in the gifted l2 learners than in the nongifted l2 learners. the other factors did not reveal statistically significant differences between the samples. the same author (biedro , 2012) reported on a study conducted on gifted l2 learners (n = 44) in which personality factors were correlated with cognitive factors (foreign language aptitude tests results). the results showed that personality and cognitive factors were not correlated, which means that in this sample of learners there was no relationship between these factors. to sum up, there is no direct evidence that openness is a predictor of success in learning a foreign language or foreign language aptitude tests but the results of empirical studies suggest such a correlation. method the aim of the study presented in this article was to examine the level of the five factors in two groups of learners: gifted and nongifted, and to test whether personality traits are predictors of foreign language aptitude as measured by two foreign language aptitude tests. two hypotheses proposed for the purpose of this study are the following: h1. there will be significant differences between the gifted and the nongifted learners in the five factors. the gifted l2 learners will score higher on openness and conscientiousness than the nongifted learners. h2. personality factors will explain some variance in foreign language aptitude. openness and conscientiousness will have a positive effect on adriana biedro 476 foreign language aptitude, whereas neuroticism will have a negative effect on foreign language aptitude. as has already been stated, the relationship between foreign language aptitude and personality traits is poorly investigated; therefore, great caution must be exercised when interpreting the results. participants there were two groups of participants: gifted (n = 44) and nongifted (n = 46). the first group included 44 (31 female and 13 male) accomplished multilinguals (termed as gifted l2 learners). participants from this group were identified as gifted based on proficiency scores, the number of languages they had learned, language learning history, recommendation of their teachers, the mlat (carroll and sapon, 2002) score and the language ability test (pol. test zdolno ci j zykowych [tzj]; wojtowicz, 2006) score. they were appointed by their teachers or encouraged by coworkers or class-mates to participate; some responded to an invitation to participate in the study sent via e-mail. all of the participants were native speakers of polish. they were mainly philology students from polish universities, but there were also teachers in foreign language departments at university, school teachers of english and a few other professionals; six were doctoral students. in line with the previous research results (cf. abrahamsson & hyltenstam, 2008; bongaerts, 1999; dekeyser, 2000), most of the participants of the study were students of languages or professional linguists, which, according to dekeyser (2000, p. 507), implies high verbal aptitude. their age varied from 20 to 35 years; the mean was 24.5. all the participants were experienced language learners. the level of proficiency of the sample in at least one foreign language was advanced (c1/c2). all the participants were highly advanced in english. fourteen (32%) were highly advanced in one foreign language, 19 (43%) in two languages, eight (18%) in three, two (4%) in four, and one (2%) in five languages. if they spoke more than two foreign languages, their level of proficiency in the additional languages was usually elementary/intermediate (a2/b1+). the number of languages they were learning varied from one to 11 (four and a half average) and included european and non-european languages. all the achievements were formally confirmed by official documents: certificates acknowledged in poland and diplomas from universities in the case of advanced levels of a language. if an elementary/intermediate level was declared, end-of-course grades were accepted as a proof of the level of advancement. only participants whose general mlat score placed them within at least the 95th percentile and who scored at least 80% in the tzj were accepted for the research. personality factors as predictors of foreign language aptitude 477 the nongifted sample consisted of 46 year-one english philology students. there were 39 females and seven males in the sample. their age varied from 20 to 23 years; the mean was 22. they were monolingual polish learners of english as a foreign language. at the time the study was conducted, they had been learning english for seven-ten years. most of them had private lessons in addition to their regular course at school. ninety percent of them did not practice english in a natural setting. their proficiency level was generally assessed as intermediate (b1/b2). however, individual learners varied with respect to the levels of proficiency at particular skills from intermediate to advanced. their speaking and listening abilities were higher than their reading and writing skills, while grammar was the weakest point of the majority of the learners. their mastery of english was sufficient to complete only parts 1 (number learning), 2 (phonetic script) and 5 (paired associates) of the mlat, which do not require advanced english. the information about their level was based on end-of-semester grades. instruments the following instruments were used in this study: 1. the modern language aptitude test (carroll & sapon, 2002): the mlat is a language aptitude test that is useful for predicting success in learning a foreign language (skehan, 1998). it measures aptitude traits by five scores (carroll & sapon, 2002, p.7): a. number learning, which measures verbal memory; b. phonetic script, which measures the ability to associate sounds with symbols; c. spelling clues, which partly measures the examinee’s native vocabulary knowledge and partly the ability to associate sounds with symbols; d. words in sentences, which measures grammar sensitivity; e. paired associates, which measures rote memory. split-half reliabilities for the mlat were .92-97, depending on the grade or age. for college students, the validity coefficients (correlations with course marks) provided in the mlat manual (carroll & sapon, 2002) were .18-69. 2. the language ability test (pol. test zdolno ci j zykowych) by wojtowicz (2006): the tzj was constructed to diagnose foreign language learning abilities. it includes three scales: discourse, vocabulary and grammar. the discourse scale includes gap filling with a phrase or word and a choice of the best summary of a text, which are all in the polish language. the vocabulary scale comprises recognizing prefixes and suffixes, finding synonyms and antonyms and guessing the meaning of phrases in adriana biedro 478 a foreign language. the grammar scale includes translation of an artificial language, analysis and modifying reproduction of a conjugation in a foreign language and constructing an analogical grammatical form in the polish language. the test reliability was .90; the validity coefficient (correlation with foreign language school grades) was .49. 3. the revised neo-five factor inventory (costa & mccrae, 1992): the polish adaptation of neo-pi-r by zawadzki, strelau, szczepaniak, and liwi ska (1998) is a psychological personality inventory; a 60-question measure of the ffm. there are twelve statements per factor answered on a 5-point scale. the subject can score from 0 to 4 points for each answer and for some questions the scoring order is reversed. the raw results range from 0 to 48 points per scale. the raw results are converted into stens. results from 1 to 3 are considered low, from 4 to 7 average and from 8 to 10 high. the cronbach alpha for the reliability of internal consistency for conscientiousness was .82, for neuroticism .80, for extraversion .77, for openness to experience .68 and for agreeableness .68. the validity coefficients (correlation with a description by two persons and a self-description) were between .40 and .60. results in order to find out if personality factors have an effect on foreign language aptitude, the following factors were investigated: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (the ffm). table 1 shows descriptive data for personality factors in the gifted l2 sample and table 2 shows descriptive data for the nongifted sample. table 1 descriptive statistics for the gifted l2 learners: personality factors (n = 44) variable m minimum maximum sd neuroticism 4.568 1.000 10.000 2.245 extraversion 5.227 1.000 10.000 2.165 openness 6.159 2.000 9.000 1.627 agreeableness 4.954 1.000 10.000 2.271 conscientiousness 5.818 1.000 10.000 2.489 table 2 descriptive statistics for the nongifted l2 learners: personality factors (n = 46) variable m minimum maximum sd neuroticism 4.457 1.000 10.000 2.258 extraversion 5.804 1.000 10.000 2.207 openness 5.565 1.000 9.000 2.287 agreeableness 5.500 1.000 9.000 2.041 conscientiousness 5.326 1.000 10.000 2.386 personality factors as predictors of foreign language aptitude 479 both groups of learners fell within the average range of scores. openness and conscientiousness were the factors on which the gifted participants scored the highest, whereas the nongifted sample scored the highest on extraversion. nevertheless, on the basis of the results we cannot say that either of the samples scored very high or very low on personality factors. differences between the gifted and the nongifted l2 learners in order to test whether there were statistically significant differences between the two samples, the results of the neo-pi-r of the gifted l2 learners were compared with the results of the nongifted l2 learners. the results of a series of t tests are presented in table 3. table 3 t tests of differences between the gifted l2 learners and the nongifted l2 learners variable m t df p n sd gifted nongifted gifted nongifted gifted nongifted neuroticism 4.568 4.457 0.24 88 0.815 44 46 2.245 2.258 extraversion 5.227 5.804 -1.25 88 0.214 44 46 2.166 2.207 openness 6.159 5.565 1.41 88 0.161 44 46 1.627 2.287 agreeableness 4.955 5.500 -1.20 88 0.234 44 46 2.272 2.041 conscientiousness 5.818 5.326 0.96 88 0.341 44 46 2.490 2.386 no statistically significant differences in personality factors between the gifted and nongifted l2 learners were recognized; therefore, it was evident that these factors did not differentiate the subjects. however, some tendencies were observed, for example, a higher level of openness to experience and conscientiousness and lower level of extraversion and agreeableness in the gifted l2 learners than in the nongifted l2 learners. correlation between the five factors and foreign language aptitude the parametric correlation (the pearson product-moment correlation coefficient) analysis was applied to measure the correlation between two foreign language aptitude tests (the mlat and the tzj) and personality factors in both samples. the correlation analysis revealed that foreign language aptitude factors did not correlate with personality factors in the gifted group (cf. biedro , 2012), but there was a number of significant correlations between foreign language aptitude and personality factors in the group of the nongifted l2 learners. for example, mlat 1 (number learning) and mlat 5 (paired associates) correlated negatively with neuroticism, (r = -.32) and (r = -.34), respectively; mlat 2 adriana biedro 480 (phonetic script) correlated negatively with extraversion (r = -.29), whereas mlat 5 (paired associates) correlated positively with conscientiousness (r = .39). the tzj and its subtests, grammar and vocabulary, correlated positively with openness to experience: vocabulary (r = .50), grammar (r = .32), the tzj (r = .45). grammar correlated negatively with neuroticism (r = -.35). the five factors as predictors of foreign language aptitude in order to answer the question as to what extent personality factors have a predictive effect on the mlat and the tzj scores, the results obtained in the correlation matrix were subjected to a multiple regression analysis. both groups’ scores, that is those of the gifted and nongifted participants, were included in the analysis. the independent variables were personality factors from the ffm introduced in a cluster, whereas the dependent variables were the mlat scales and the tzj scales. the group of the gifted l2 learners was small and carefully selected; therefore, the results of the foreign language aptitude tests were not normally distributed. consequently, great caution must be exercised when interpreting the results. effects of personality factors on the mlat and the tzj are presented in tables 4-10. table 4 effect of the five factors on mlat 1 (number learning) mlat 1 beta t(84) p neuroticism -0.217 -1.90 .061 extraversion -0.083 -0.70 .483 openness 0.231 2.21 .030* agreeableness -0.101 -0.93 .353 conscientiousness 0.067 0.61 .542 r2 = .108, adjusted r2 = .055, f(5.84) = 2.036 * p < .05 table 5 effect of the five factors on mlat 2 (phonetic script) mlat 2 beta t(84) p neuroticism -0.185 -1.670 .098 extraversion -0.361 -3.158 .002* openness 0.198 1.945 .055 agreeableness -0.056 -0.535 .594 conscientiousness 0.138 1.303 .196 r2 = .156, adjusted r2 = .106, f(5.84) = 3.119 * p < .05 personality factors as predictors of foreign language aptitude 481 table 6 effect of the five factors on mlat 5 (paired associates) mlat 5 beta t(84) p neuroticism -0.229 -2.06 .043* extraversion -0.162 -1.41 .163 openness 0.166 1.62 .109 agreeableness -0.004 -0.04 .972 conscientiousness 0.275 2.58 .012* r2 = .150, adjusted r2 = .099, f(5.84)= 2.966 * p < .05 table 7 effect of the five factors on tzj (discourse) discourse beta t(84) p neuroticism -0.102 -0.89 .375 extraversion -0.245 -2.07 .042* openness 0.192 1.83 .072 agreeableness 0.129 1.19 .237 conscientiousness -0.078 -0.71 .479 r2 = .096, adjusted r2 = .042, f(5.84) = 1.786 * p < .05 table 8 effect of the five factors on tzj (vocabulary) vocabulary beta t(84) p neuroticism -0.043 -0.40 .691 extraversion -0.205 -1.83 .071 openness 0.387 3.88 .000* agreeableness -0.023 -0.22 .826 conscientiousness 0.069 0.66 .511 r2 = .186, adjusted r2 = .137, f(5.84) = 3.841 * p < .05 table 9 effect of the five factors on tzj (grammar) grammar beta t(84) p neuroticism -0.215 -1.93 .057 extraversion -0.191 -1.66 .100 openness 0.287 2.82 .006* agreeableness -0.011 -0.11 .917 conscientiousness 0.173 1.63 .108 r2 = .153, adjusted r2 = .102, f(5.84) = 3.036 * p < .05 table 10 effect of the five factors on tzj (general) general tzj beta t(84) p neuroticism -0.142 -1.29 .200 extraversion -0.241 -2.13 .036* openness 0.363 3.60 .001* adriana biedro 482 agreeableness 0.013 0.12 .904 conscientiousness 0.095 0.91 .368 r2 = .175, adjusted r2 = .126, f(5.84) = 3.567 * p < .05 two personality factors had the strongest effect on foreign language aptitude: openness to experience and extraversion. openness had a positive effect on foreign language aptitude, whereas extraversion affected foreign language aptitude negatively. openness had a positive effect on mlat 1 (number learning), vocabulary, grammar and the tzj. its effect on mlat 2 (phonetic script) was close to significant. extraversion had a consistently negative effect on foreign language aptitude. it affected mlat 2 (phonetic script), discourse and the tzj and its effect on vocabulary was close to significant. other factors that turned out to be significant predictors of the aptitude scores were neuroticism and conscientiousness. neuroticism negatively affected mlat 5 (paired associates) and its effect on mlat 1 (number learning), mlat 2 (phonetic script) and grammar were close to significant. conscientiousness had a positive effect on mlat 5 (paired associates). discussion hypothesis 1 was partly confirmed. although the gifted l2 learners scored the highest on openness and conscientiousness, these variables placed them in the average rank. a high score on openness means that the subjects can be creative, imaginative, curious, flexible, novelty seeking, untraditional and interested in art, whereas a high score on conscientiousness indicates that they can be systematic, efficient, organized, responsible, reliable, persevering and self-disciplined. all these characteristics were likely to exist in the gifted l2 learners, but their level was moderately high. what is more, no statistically significant differences in personality factors between the gifted and the nongifted l2 learners were observed, although both openness and conscientiousness were lower in the nongifted sample. the previous study by the present author (cf. biedro , 2010), on a partly different sample of nongifted learners, produced a statistically significant difference in openness to experience between the groups. therefore, it was suggested that this factor can modify foreign language aptitude. this hypothesis was confirmed by the regression analysis in which openness turned out to explain a small, but statistically significant part of variance in foreign language aptitude. summing up, no strong evidence was found that linguistically gifted people are more conscientious than less gifted individuals, which suggests that motivation, effort and good organization of work cannot compete with natural giftedness. a variable personality factors as predictors of foreign language aptitude 483 much more promising for further investigation is openness to experience, connected with intellectual curiosity and flexibility, which are likely to foster strategy development and autonomous behavior. hypothesis 2 was corroborated. owing to the inclusion of the nongifted learners’ scores on personality tests in the regression analyses, the number of observations increased and some interesting tendencies were observed. openness to experience turned out to be quite a good predictor of foreign language aptitude explaining from 5.5% of variance in mlat 1 (number learning) to 12.6% of variance in the tzj. the other personality factor which positively affected foreign language aptitude was conscientiousness (effect on mlat 5 [paired associates]). extraversion and neuroticism negatively affected foreign language aptitude. the subtests including the memory component (mlat 1 and 5) and grammar were negatively affected by neuroticism. the negative effect of extraversion on foreign language aptitude accords with the line of research which interprets it as a factor rather negatively correlated with the learning outcomes (cf. dewaele, 2009; dörnyei, 2005). an interesting tendency occurred in the correlation analyses. it turned out that in the case of the gifted l2 learners there were no correlations between cognitive and personality factors, whilst a number of such correlations was observed in the case of the nongifted learners. a plausible interpretation is that, unlike foreign language aptitude in the gifted l2 learners, foreign language aptitude in the nongifted l2 learners is affected more by noncognitive factors. it seems that the level of performance on a test task in this sample is mediated by some personality characteristics. the subtests including the memory component (mlat 1 and 5) and grammar were negatively affected by neuroticism, which is connected with negative affectivity. anxiety involved in neuroticism produces negative learning outcomes (cf. corno et al., 2002; dewaele, 2002). on the other hand, it seems that openness to experience and conscientiousness have a positive effect on the ‘mainstream’ learners’ performance. conclusion the purpose of the study presented in this article was to examine the level of the five factors in two groups of learners, gifted and nongifted, and to find out whether personality factors are predictors of foreign language aptitude. the analysis generally confirmed the weak role of personality traits in predicting foreign language aptitude. the coefficients in multiple regressions were low, which indicates that the independent variables introduced in the equations are not very good predictors of foreign language aptitude tests scores. among the five factors of personality proposed by mccrae and costa adriana biedro 484 (1992), openness to experience, due to its relationship to intellectual functioning and high dependence on genetic factors, seems to be the most powerful modifying personality variable that affects foreign language aptitude. on the other hand, conscientiousness, related to impulse inhibition, selfdiscipline and motivation (cf. corno et al., 2002; dörnyei, 2005), is intuitively ascribed to successful language learners. nonetheless, the evidence that it influences foreign language aptitude is insufficient. as has already been stated, the relationship between foreign language aptitude and personality factors is poorly investigated; therefore, their impact on the development of foreign language aptitude is still tentative. what makes the matter even more complex, personality factors measured in this study are nonlanguage specific, which might have affected the results. finally, it is possible that certain factors appear with greater intensity in particular groups of individuals, for example, university students or language professionals. in this case, they would depend on other variables, independent of foreign language aptitude. in order to analyze these complicated relationships further research on larger samples of participants from various backgrounds and with normal distribution of foreign language aptitude is needed. although the relationship between personality factors and foreign language aptitude is weakly investigated, it emerges that they are significantly implicated in sla. even if personality factors do not directly influence the outcomes of learning a foreign language, “they certainly shape the way people 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(1998). test osobowo ci neo ffi: podr cznik. warszawa: pracownia testów psychologicznych ptp. 247 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (2). 247-266 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl native-speaker and english as a lingua franca pronunciation norms: english majors’ views aleksandra wach adam mickiewicz university waleks@ifa.amu.edu.pl abstract within the communicative approach to english as a foreign language (efl) teaching, the aims of instruction are primarily to enable learners to communicate; hence, functional and communicative intelligibility has become the goal of pronunciation training. on the other hand, contemporary approaches to efl teaching leave sufficient room for accommodating the individual learner and contextual factors which largely influence the choice of the target pronunciation models. moreover, in a globalized world, where english has become a contemporary lingua franca for intercultural communication, the pronunciation norms of english as a lingua franca (elf) appear to meet the needs and expectations of learners of english in international settings, coexisting with or replacing nativespeaker pronunciation models as the target of instruction. the elf approach and the lingua franca core elaborated by jenkins (2000, 2002) have aroused controversy among both researchers and efl teachers. the paper presents the findings of a questionnaire study involving 234 polish students, english majors, which aimed to determine their preferences and opinions concerning nativespeaker and elf norms as pronunciation instruction targets. the findings revealed a strong preference for native-like pronunciation models in the subjects’ own language development and a less strong preference for such models in pronunciation teaching at all levels of proficiency. moreover, the results pointed to the significant role played by the intensity of pronunciation training and the level of awareness of native-speaker pronunciation models in shaping the subjects’ attitudes toward native-like and elf pronunciation norms. keywords: english as a lingua franca (elf); teaching pronunciation; lingua franca core (lfc); native-speaker pronunciation norms aleksandra wach 248 the emergence of english as lingua franca (elf) has been a result of the globalization of english and the increasing need for a tool for intercultural and international communication (cogo, 2012; graddol, 2006; jenkins, 2005a, 2009; kirkpatrick, 2011; seidlhofer, 2004, 2005). hence, in the field of pronunciation teaching, elf offers an instructional paradigm that highlights achieving communicative intelligibility in interactions between non-native speakers (nnss), and which does not view native-speaker (ns) pronunciation norms as the target of pronunciation instruction. jenkins’s (2000, 2002) lingua franca core (lfc), which is a suggestion for a research-based, systematic syllabus for teaching english pronunciation for elf contexts, has sparked a heated debate among researchers (e.g., dauer, 2005; dziubalska-ko aczyk, 2005; scheuer, 2005, 2010; seidlhofer, 2005; sobkowiak, 2005; sowden, 2012; trudgill, 2005, and many others) regarding the relevance and place of elf and ns pronunciation norms in the contemporary teaching of english pronunciation. the present article aims to investigate the attitudes of polish majors in english toward ns and elf pronunciation norms as the targets of their own language development as well as in their future work as teachers of english. first, however, a brief overview of issues related to pronunciation instruction in contemporary english as a foreign language (efl) didactics will be provided. the aims and position of pronunciation teaching in contemporary elt the role and aims of pronunciation teaching have differed according to trends set by the approaches and foreign language teaching methods which were influential at a given time (jones, 2002). in contrast with previous, more traditional, bottom-up approaches concentrated on accuracy achieved through practicing individual sounds, today, pronunciation instruction focuses on a top-down approach and emphasizes fluency, with a major focus on practicing suprasegmental features, such as stress, intonation and rhythm (goodwin, 2001; jones, 2002). this change in instructional focus resulted from the adoption of the communicative approach to foreign language teaching, the main aim of which is the development of communicative competence. therefore, as many researchers (e.g., celce-murcia, brinton, & goodwin, 1996; goodwin, 2001) stress, a major aim of pronunciation instruction nowadays is to develop functional and communicative intelligibility in learners which will allow them to take part in oral interactions, and not necessarily to make them sound like nss of english. this broad aim of pronunciation teaching appears to be in line with the didactic rationale behind the elf approach. it is grounded on the premise that since nowadays non-native users of english outnumber its nss, the application native-speaker and english as a lingua franca pronunciation norms: english majors’ views 249 of ns norms in teaching english is less justified, being both unnecessary and unrealistic (jenkins, 2000). therefore, kopperoinen (2011) finds it surprising that most contemporary finnish textbook tapes promote ns pronunciation models, largely neglecting nns accents. wells (2005) makes the point that in setting goals for pronunciation teaching one needs to take into account several factors, such as the context in which instruction takes place, the reasons for teaching english, the communicative needs of the learners, and the learners’ motivations and aspirations. summing up the goals of pronunciation teaching, levis (2005) highlights two contradictory principles: the nativeness principle (which sets achieving ns pronunciation as the aim of teaching) and the intelligibility principle. the proponents of elf believe in the intelligibility principle, assuming that learners of english need phonetic norms which will prepare them to function in international communication. jenkins (2000, 2002) compiled a research-based lfc, which provides a description of those elements of the phonetic system of english which are indispensible in communication among nnss. the description is based on research which investigated intelligibility problems and the use of phonological accommodation (jenkins, cogo, & dewey, 2011). however, although it largely addresses the communicative needs of non-native users of english, lfc does not incorporate such pronunciation features as rhythm, intonation and phonostylistics, despite the significant role that they play in communication (dziubalska-ko aczyk, 2005). the idea of lfc has aroused considerable controversy among researchers. some are in favor, highlighting its merits for intelligibility and usefulness for international communication as well as its learnability (graddol, 2006; jenkins, 2000; seidlhofer, 2005). seidlhofer (2004, p. 214) stresses the fact that lfc excludes sounds which are considered “particularly english”, and hence difficult to master for nnss, and sees “the relative manageability of its features” as a significant trait of lfc. matsumoto (2011) discusses the benefits of lfc in fostering negotiation among learners and serving as a basis for a relevant pronunciation syllabus. others express a more balanced view, pointing out the strong and weak points of the elf approach to pronunciation teaching. dauer (2005), for example, examines the features of lfc and concludes that they do not lower the learnability burden considerably enough. on the other hand, she values the positive influence of the lfc on the perception of nns identity. still others object very strongly to the idea of lfc. dziubalska-ko aczyk (2005) stresses the production/perception conflict apparently overlooked by lfc (i.e., even if learners are not expected to be able to produce certain sounds, they still need to perceive them in order to understand native speakers) and the problem with accommodating lfc to speakers with different l1s. similarly, scheuer (2005, p. 113) notes that the features of lfc do not really reflect nns intelligibility, as aleksandra wach 250 they are “heavily biased towards the phonetic preferences of l1 speakers of english.” sobkowiak (2005) argues that all the sounds of english are important for communication, and limiting the sound system to “core” features makes it artificial and unnatural. furthermore, he claims that the positive “self-image” of learners results mainly from the acquisition of native-like pronunciation and imposing elf norms may be demotivating for them. in trudgill’s (2005) opinion, the lfc proposal is unnecessary, as ns speech is not necessarily less intelligible to nnss (although some studies reveal opposite findings, as jenkins et al. 2011 note). moreover, he questions the validity of the ns/nns division, crucial to the idea of elf. van den doel (2010) points out that the application of some of the lfc recommendations may put nnss at a communicative disadvantage, as they may be stigmatized by other users of english as less competent. addressing much of the criticism of lfc, jenkins (2005b) makes the point that most of the arguments against her proposal result from confusing elf with efl pronunciation teaching goals. another current dimension of pronunciation teaching concerns the problem of empowerment and identity-related issues. the acquisition of foreign language pronunciation may affect one’s identity and perceptions by others; therefore, the issues of native-like and foreign accents from the social and ideological perspectives within both ns and elf contexts are discussed by several researchers (cogo, 2010; gatbonton, trofimovich, & magid, 2005; golombek & jordan, 2005; jenkins, 2005a; momenian, 2011; rivers, 2011). research on attitudes toward ns and elf pronunciation norms in learning and teaching english a comprehensive account of studies on attitudes toward ns and englishas-an-international-language norms in the learning and teaching of english (including its pronunciation) is presented in jenkins (2007); moreover, more recent studies are referred to by jenkins et al. (2011). research into learners’ and teachers’ attitudes toward ns or english-asan-international-language pronunciation standards at different levels indicates, on the whole, a preference for ns norms, although some variation is evident. timmis (2002) investigated over 400 learners and 180 ns and nns teachers from different countries to see whether the learners wanted to conform to ns pronunciation norms. the majority of the learner-respondents (67%) expressed their preference to sound like nss, which shows that they “saw native-speaker pronunciation as a benchmark of achievement” (timmis, 2002, p. 242). in contrast, 39% of the teacher-respondents stated that their students would opt for being intelligible in international interactions rather than sounding native-like, native-speaker and english as a lingua franca pronunciation norms: english majors’ views 251 and 27% of them thought the learners would like to reach ns standards. sifakis and sougari (2005) conducted a study on 421 primary and secondary school efl teachers in greece. the subjects clearly associated their own high levels of competence in pronunciation with ns standards. paradoxically, although communicative intelligibility was considered a significant aim of instruction, few of them viewed elf norms as relevant targets. sifakis and sougari (2005) concluded that this “reflects a strong norm-bound perspective that conflicts with the stated views of some teachers that they should promote intelligibility rather than accuracy when teaching accent” (p. 481). in he and zhang’s (2010) study, involving 1030 subjects, 820 non-english major uiversity students and 210 college teachers of english in china, for the majority (55.4%) of the respondents it was acceptable for nnss of english to retain their l1 accent as long as it did not impede communication. however, the subjects associated native-like english with positive characteristics more often than china english. the researchers concluded that ns english norms still need to be the basic model for teaching english in china, but it should be complemented with carefully selected forms of china english to meet the needs of chinese efl learners. another group of studies were conducted on english majors (most of whom were prospective teachers of english) with the aim of exploring their attitudes toward ns and/or elf pronunciation norms as the target of instruction. dziubalska-ko aczyk et al. (2006) provided an account of several universitybased studies focused on english majors’ attitudes toward ns accents. waniekklimczak and klimczak (2005) compared two groups of university students: english majors and non-english majors (students of economics and sociology). for both groups, pronunciation training was high on the list of learning priorities and both expressed a preference for british english as the variety they would like to speak, although the groups differed regarding their belief in their abilities to achieve ns pronunciation standards (82% of english majors and 44% of nonenglish majors considered this as an attainable target). the researchers highlighted the role of phonetic awareness as a factor contributing to more confidence in setting achievement goals. margi and širola (2009) investigated 45 english majors in croatia. eighty percent of ba and 50% of ma students stated that they wanted to sound like nss of english, and 60% and 45% of them, respectively, would only teach ns norms to their students. the researchers pointed out that knowledge about elf concepts contributed to increased awareness levels and an openness to non-native english standards, as the ma students had some training and appeared more tolerant toward elf forms. the conclusions that sobkowiak (2002) drew from a study conducted on 645 english majors, all of whom had intensive training in ns pronunciation, indicate that pronunciation is a very important area for english majors, that they are willing to practice it on aleksandra wach 252 their own, and that they would appreciate even more training offered by their institution. janicka, kul, & weckwerth’s (2005) findings from a study conducted on 240 polish majors in english point to their very strong preference for ns (either british or american) models in their own pronunciation training. moreover, attaining ns pronunciation standards was of utmost importance to the subjects. finally, as prospective teachers, they thought that ns norms should also be the target of pronunciation instruction at lower levels of proficiency. the study the main aim of the study was to investigate polish english majors’ attitudes towards ns and elf pronunciation norms in learning and teaching english. in order to meet this primary aim, four specific questions were addressed: 1. how important is it for the participants to sound like nss of english? 2. what is their opinion on the usefulness of non-native pronunciation norms for the purpose of international communication? 3. do they evaluate ns or elf pronunciation norms as appropriate for teaching english as a foreign language? 4. are there differences in the attitudes toward pronunciation norms between the participants with more focus on pronunciation training in their course of study and the ones with less of such a focus? method this section provides information about the participants of the study and describes the data collection tool which yielded information about the students’ attitudes. participants. the participants of this study were 234 polish majors of english, enrolled in years 1 to 3 in the ba program. it needs to be mentioned here that in english philology studies in poland pronunciation is taught as a separate course; the intensity of pronunciation instruction may, however, depend on a given institution. the participants of the present study studied at two different universities, where the length, intensity and scope of pronunciation training differed, and therefore, here they are treated as two separate groups, group a and group b. group a consisted of 132 subjects and received pronunciation training for the three initial semesters of the study, with 60 hours in each of the first two semesters and 30 hours in the third one. moreover, group a students were trained either in received pronunciation (89 of the subjects) or general american (43 of them) pronunciation according to their native-speaker and english as a lingua franca pronunciation norms: english majors’ views 253 choice. group b students (n = 102), on the other hand, had 60 hours of pronunciation instruction limited to the first year of study, and they had no choice of the pronunciation model: all the students in this group received training in rp. moreover, in group a’s institution pronunciation training was considered one of the priorities of instruction, and students frequently failed their yearfinal oral exams because their pronunciation was deficient (i.e., not native-like enough). taking into account this background information about the pronunciation instruction received by both groups, an assumption is formulated for the interpretation of the study results that group a students focused more on their own pronunciation and were more aware of different pronunciation standards and norms than group b students. procedure. the instrument employed in the study was a two-part questionnaire. in the first part, the respondents answered 7 open-ended questions about their own motivations to study a given variety of english and to sound native-like, and about their opinions about the lfc. this part of the questionnaire yielded qualitative findings. the other part of the questionnaire consisted of 13 statements, to which the subjects responded using a 5-point scale: 1 (i strongly disagree), 2 (i somewhat disagree), 3 (i have no opinion), 4 (i somewhat agree), and 5 (i strongly agree). the respondents’ answers provided quantitative data. the statistical procedures utilized in the study were run by means of the statistical package for social sciences (spss) version 19.0 windows, including descriptive statistics and independent-samples t test. the required statistical significance was set at the level of .05. results. the findings obtained from the two parts of the questionnaire will be presented and analyzed in this section. qualitative findings. two of the initial questions concerned the subjects’ motivations behind choosing a given variety of english or their preferences if they had such a choice (since it was known to the researcher that group b students could only study british english). a number of responses were collected, which were subsequently broken down into four groups of reasons: the attractiveness or aesthetic value of a given accent, the usefulness of a particular variety of english (mostly arguments connected with the geographical location were mentioned, but also the availability of input), culturerelated reasons (personal, highly subjective associations, such as favorite artists) and, finally, the subjects’ previous teachers who spoke a given accent. selected responses to these questions are provided in table 1. aleksandra wach 254 table 1 the respondents’ reasons for the preference of british or american english as a target model of instruction attractiveness usefulness associations with culture previous teachers bre/ame is nicer to the ear/ it sounds better. bre is more frequently used in europe. i adore british culture. my teacher at high school was a native speaker of bre. bre is more sophisticated/posh/ aristocratic/prestigious. more chances to visit gb than usa. my favorite music band is american. my teachers at school spoke bre. british english – the english/proper english. friends/family in gb or usa. i want to speak like hugh grant. american english is less snobbish/more “userfriendly.” more exposure to bre (teaching materials)/ ame (movies). i love books by tolkien. it needs to be noted here that most of the justifications provided by the respondents had a very personal and emotional character. a similar observation was recorded by janicka et al. (2005). it seems, therefore, that the study participants developed strong feelings for and some kind of identity with the target pronunciation varieties. it was evident, among other things, in the upgrading of one’s chosen variety and at the same time downgrading of the other one. interestingly, such highly emotional responses were much more frequent among group a than among group b students. another question asked whether the respondents had ever been taken for nss of english and, if they had, how it made them feel. sixty-three out of the 132 group a and 18 out of the 102 group b participants stated that they had been taken for nss of english, although some of them made a reservation that this was by other nnss. all of them recalled it as a highly rewarding, extremely flattering experience. the most frequent comments provided by the study participants were similar to these examples: “i was surprised and pleased,” “it felt so gooood!;” other comments pointed to native-like pronunciation being considered a sign of achieving goals: “my effort paid off,” “it was my personal victory” or high proficiency levels: “i felt as if i were a more educated person.” these results are similar to the reactions expressed by the participants in jenkins’s (2005a) study. another question that the respondents answered was: “do you think you speak english with a polish/non-native accent? if you do, is it a problem for you?” in group b, 5 students evaluated themselves as speaking like nss, for 24 out of the remaining 97 speaking with a polish accent constituted a native-speaker and english as a lingua franca pronunciation norms: english majors’ views 255 problem, and 73 stated it was not a problem. those students mentioned functional intelligibility (“i don’t mind sounding polish because others can understand me”) and the hope for further improvement in the course of the study (“i am still learning”). the following comment made by a group b student is an apt summary of the views expressed: “of course i speak polish english. it’s not a problem for me because my speech is comprehensible and i have no intention in pretending someone else. it would be nice to sound more british, but it doesn’t bother me.” in group a, 34 students said they sounded (almost) like nss, while the remaining 98 acknowledged that they spoke with a polish accent. out of these, only 13 stated it was not a major problem, as they focused on the communicative aspect of learning english; for the rest of the respondents (85 out of 132), however, speaking with a non-native accent was a problem. the responses indicated very clearly that getting rid of the foreign accent was a desired goal (“i do my best to sound native-like”) and that speaking with a polish accent was a source of great discomfort. a number of the respondents expressed their frustration resulting from the inability to master native-like pronunciation: “i realize that to achieve native-like pronunciation i’d have to spend hours daily, and i’d still be unsuccessful . . .” the responses stimulated by this question made it very clear that native-like pronunciation generally was a priority for the students, and accomplishing it was perceived as a sign of proficiency, while retaining the l1 accent was considered a deficiency. however, a difference between the two groups was noticeable, with group b being less determined to reach native-like pronunciation standards and more comfortable with retaining their l1 accent. the final questions in this part of the questionnaire pertained to the participants’ familiarity and evaluation of the lfc as a model for teaching english pronunciation. it was expected that some of the students might have heard about the lfc in their courses in linguistics. only the ones who were familiar with the concept were asked to evaluate it. their selected opinions are presented in table 2. table 2 the respondents’ opinions about the concept of the lingua franca core positive comments about lfc negative comments about lfc very useful for non-native speakers. it deforms the language/it is artificial/hybrid english. a universal code for learning pronunciation. a wrong idea – there will be l1-derived differences anyway. not everybody needs to master nativelike pronunciation. english is a living language with its rules, which should be respected by nnss. easier and less frustrating for learners. native-speaker accents, with all the varieties, are very precious and should be protected. aleksandra wach 256 it turned out that only 31 out of the 234 respondents had heard about the concept of lfc and provided their comments. the positive opinions highlighted the usefulness of lfc for international communication, as well as the clarity and easiness of teaching pronunciation on the basis of the lfc. negative opinions, however, outnumbered positive ones and focused on the presence of ‘deformed’ forms in lfc, the insufficiency of lfc as a basis for mastering the language, or the value of ns accents, which should be protected, according to the respondents. quantitative findings. the likert-type statements fall into three broad thematic categories: the participants’ preferences for pronunciation models, their opinions about the appropriateness of elf pronunciation norms in communicative contexts, and their attitudes toward the application of ns and elf norms in learning/teaching contexts; the findings will be presented under such headings. moreover, the numerical and percentage values for selected statements are included in table 6 in the appendix. preference for pronunciation models. as can be seen in table 3, scores for the statement concerning the willingness to sound like nss represent the highest mean values (above 4 on a 5-point scale) in the study overall for both groups, which highlights the participants’ very positive attitudes toward ns norms in their own pronunciation development. in fact, as table 6 indicates, as many as 117 (88%) of the 132 group a and 57 (58%) of the 102 group b students opted for the strongly agree answer to this statement. only 2 group b (and no group a) students somewhat disagreed with the statement. t-test results indicate very significant differences between the two groups (p = .000). similarly, as table 3 indicates, statistically significant differences were found for the following statement: “it’s ok for me to retain my polish accent.” the mean scores indicate more negative reactions to this statement expressed by group a students. as table 6 shows, 59% of group a and 22% of group b subjects strongly disagreed with this statement. moreover, the high standard deviation value for group b indicates considerable variation among the opinions within this group, while group a answers were definitely more homogenous and more definitely negative. another statement, which posed the question of whether there is too much focus on native-like pronunciation in the university program, did not yield statistically significant differences between the groups. as the mean values indicate (table 3), the participants did not agree with the statement, which may be interpreted as their willingness to practice even more to achieve native-like pronunciation (a similar observation was recorded by sobkowiak, 2002). signifinative-speaker and english as a lingua franca pronunciation norms: english majors’ views 257 cant differences were found, however, for the last statement: more group a subjects expressed their belief that their native-like accent in english would contribute to better future career prospects. it needs to be highlighted, however, that both groups’ mean values point to positive answers. table 3 descriptive statistics and independent samples t-test results for statements concerning the participants’ preferences for target pronunciation models (*p < .05, **p < .01) statement group mean sd levene’s test sig. (2-tailed) f sig. i would like to sound like a ns of english. a 4.88 .350 89.332 .000 .000** b 4.47 .699 it’s ok for me to retain my polish accent when i speak english. a 1.59 .847 31.759 .000 .000** b 2.67 1.237 at my university, there is too much focus on ns pronunciation. a 1.77 1.069 .007 .934 .294 b 1.91 1.045 i will have better career prospects because of my ns accent. a 3.98 1.056 5.525 .020 .001** relevance of elf pronunciation norms in l2 communication. table 4 shows group means, standard deviations and statistical significance levels for statements concerning the relevance of elf norms in communication. table 4 descriptive statistics and independent samples t-test results for statements concerning the relevance of ns and elf pronunciation norms in l2 communication (*p < .05, **p < .01) statement group mean sd levene’s test sig. (2-tailed) f sig. it is acceptable to sound like a nns, as long as you are understood by others. a 3.42 1.099 1.947 .164 .004** b 3.83 1.100 in international communication it’s better to sound like a nns, because people understand you more easily. a 2.94 1.246 1.323 .251 .765 b 2.89 1.125 if you speak with a perfect ns accent, you are perceived as a more intelligent, knowledgeable person. a 4.08 1.074 31.443 .000 .000** b 3.32 1.436 ns pronunciation standards are not important when you communicate mostly with other nnss. a 2.77 1.264 2.404 .122 .029* b 3.13 1.166 if you achieve very high standards of ns pronunciation, your identity as a polish person suffers. a 1.53 .869 1.272 .261 .639 aleksandra wach 258 one of the statements claimed that nns pronunciation is acceptable on condition that it is intelligible. the mean values suggest rather positive answers; yet it needs to be noted that there were statistically significant differences between the two groups (p = .004). the data in table 6 show that 29% of group a and 17% of group b participants disagreed with the statement, while 63% and 72%, respectively, agreed with it. group b seemed to value functional intelligibility over sounding native-like. surprisingly, though, more group a participants (41% versus 36%) agreed that nns accents are more intelligible in international communication, while more group b participants (43% versus 39%) appeared to disagree with this statement. these differences, however, were not statistically significant. very high significance levels (p = .000), however, were recorded for the statement concerning the perception of a person who sounds native-like as being more intelligent and knowledgeable. as the data in table 6 show, considerably more group a students (82% versus 55% of group b students) agreed with this claim, which is another indication of these participants’ high appreciation of ns pronunciation norms. similarly, as the mean values in table 4 show, group a’s opinions concerning whether ns norms are not important in communication with other nnss were less favorable than group b’s. these differences were statistically significant (p = .029), which again points to a difference between the two groups in their perception of the relevance of elf norms in international communication. the final statement in this topic area concerned one’s l1 identity faced with the acquisition of native-like l2 pronunciation. statistically significant differences were not revealed here (p = .639) and, as the mean values suggest, the respondents largely did not agree with this statement. as the data show, the participants apparently did not associate the acquisition of l2 ns pronunciation with a threat to one’s l1 identity. pronunciation learning/teaching-related issues. table 5 includes statistics of the participants’ responses to the four statements concerning the application of ns and elf norms as targets in learning and teaching pronunciation. as the data in table 5 show, the mean values for the statement concerning the acceptability of teaching elf norms to learners of english are at a level below 3, which reveals rather negative opinions being voiced by the respondents. however, the differences between the groups turned out to be significant (p = .009). according to table 6, while 56% of group a participants disagreed and only 17% of them agreed with the statement, the percentage values for negative and positive opinions were more or less equal for group b (36% and 37%, respectively). this clearly indicates that for group a students the application of ns norms in teaching efl is significantly more crucial than for group b students. both groups, native-speaker and english as a lingua franca pronunciation norms: english majors’ views 259 however, seemed to have similar opinions about the differences in setting pronunciation goals for philology students and learners at lower educational levels. here, the differences between the answers’ of the groups were not statistically significant (p = .276). it may thus be inferred that while the participants as a whole did agree that for english majors (though not necessarily for other learners) acquiring native-like pronunciation is a priority, group a still viewed ns pronunciation norms as the target in teaching english to learners regardless of their level. this was further confirmed by the participants’ responses to another statement, which concerned the relevance of teaching native-like pronunciation to learners from the very beginning. the differences between the responses provided by both groups were statistically significant (p = .021). finally, as the mean values above a level of 4 (table 5) show, both groups seemed to agree that teachers of english should have very good, native-like pronunciation. however, the responses of group a participants were again more positive (almost all of them, 98%, and 85% of group b participants agreed or strongly agreed with the statement) and the standard deviation levels were smaller, which indicates that there was more agreement among group a students. the differences between the groups were significant (p = .000). table 5 descriptive statistics and independent samples t-test results for statements concerning pronunciation norms in l2 learning and teaching (*p < .05, **p < .01). statement group mean sd levene’s test sig. (2-tailed) f sig. it is acceptable to teach ‘international’ pronunciation norms to learners of english. a 2.45 1.066 1.240 .267 .009** b 2.84 1.192 ns pronunciation norms are important in english philology institutes, but not at lower levels of education. a 3.10 1.271 .431 .512 .276 b 3.28 1.315 learners of english should be taught proper, ns pronunciation from the very beginning. a 4.58 .752 6.331 .013 .021* b 4.33 .894 teachers of english should have ns pronunciation. a 4.70 .549 6.209 .013 .000** discussion the findings obtained in the present study clearly indicate that the studied population of english majors, as a whole, expressed a strong preference for acquiring ns pronunciation as opposed to elf pronunciation levels. this finding aleksandra wach 260 largely corroborates the outcomes of other research projects (e.g., janicka et al., 2005; jenkins, 2005a; sifakis & sigouri, 2005; waniek-klimczak & klimczak, 2005). moreover, taken as a whole, the participants voiced positive opinions about the relevance of ns pronunciation norms in learning and teaching pronunciation at lower levels of proficiency. they were, however, less convinced about the relevance of ns pronunciation standards in the context of international communication, admitting that sounding like a non-native speaker may have some advantages, one of them being functional intelligibility. however, the differences between the responses provided by the respondents from the two groups lead to interesting conclusions. first of all, they show the significance of the intensity of pronunciation training for raising awareness levels of ns pronunciation standards and, subsequently, for attitudes toward ns and elf pronunciation norms. group a students, who received more intensive instruction in pronunciation and who were expected to achieve native-like standards to a greater extent than group b students, consistently expressed more favorable opinions about ns pronunciation norms as the target for learning and teaching, largely undermining the value and applicability of elf pronunciation norms. their responses displayed highly emotional, personal evaluations of their preferred ns standards and their willingness to achieve them. such attitudes were less evident in group b, whose opinions, although primarily very positive about ns pronunciation standards, appeared to be more balanced. generally, group b participants expressed more sensitivity towards acknowledging the value of elf pronunciation norms in learning and teaching english, including their own language development. while for group a respondents achieving native-like pronunciation was the ultimate aim of instruction, group b respondents seemed to view it as a welcome sign of language development, yet not necessarily the major indication of proficiency. therefore, it appears that a more balanced approach manifested by group b reflects more closely the contemporary trend in foreign language pronunciation training, which highlights the primacy of communicative intelligibility over achieving ns standards as the aim of teaching. moreover, the role of the educational context, so essential in setting the aims of pronunciation teaching, needs to be mentioned as a factor which influenced the findings of the present study. since the participants of the study were english majors, for whom english will be a tool for pursuing professional careers, and most of whom will become teachers of english, their strong motivation to attain native-like pronunciation standards should be viewed as a very positive indication of their involvement in their university work. both ns and nns teachers of english are, after all, their learners’ pronunciation models and pronunciation instructors; hence, efl teachers’ own awareness of english pronative-speaker and english as a lingua franca pronunciation norms: english majors’ views 261 nunciation norms and their phonetic competence (derwing & munro, 2005; dziubalska-ko aczyk, 2002) will always be beneficial to the learners, regardless of whether the learners themselves will be motivated to sound like nss or merely be able to communicate with other nnss in international contexts. conclusions and suggestions for further research the results of the study may serve as a basis for conclusions regarding the position of pronunciation instruction in teacher training courses. the application of the nativeness principle (levis, 2005) in setting the goals for pronunciation instruction seems well grounded in such contexts. first of all, l2 teachers are their learners’ pronunciation models; moreover, such goals appeared to be a source of satisfaction and intrinsic motivation for the study participants. on the other hand, although achieving native-like levels of competence in all areas of english by teacher-trainees is justified and welcome, they need to be well acquainted with the concept of elf and its implications for teaching in order to be fully prepared for the challenges of teaching in the contemporary l2 classroom. as previous research shows, ns pronunciation is often unnecessary and unattainable for many l2 learners, while it may still be a priority for others. a well prepared l2 teacher needs to be aware of different options in pronunciation instruction and sensitive enough to embrace them. the main limitation of the study is its lack of generalizability because of the limited number of study participants and settings (two polish universities). as research on elf attitudes is a relatively new and fast developing area, more studies, conducted in a number of educational settings, will be necessary to draw broader conclusions. moreover, it would be interesting to investigate in more detail a correlation between english majors’ acquaintance with the elf concept and their willingness to set ns or elf norms as targets in teaching. another point worth further investigation is a correlation between teachers’ or teacher trainees’ proficiency levels in english with their readiness to pursue ns or elf standards in learning and teaching. aleksandra wach 262 references celce-murcia, m., brinton, d., & goodwin, j. (1996). teaching pronunciation: a reference for teachers of english to speakers of other languages. cambridge: cambridge university press. cogo, a. (2010). strategic use and perceptions of english as a lingua franca. pozna studies in contemporary linguistics, 46(3), 295-312. doi:10.2478/ v10010-010-0013-7 cogo, a. (2012). english as a lingua franca: concepts, use, and implications. elt journal 66(1), 97-105. doi:10.1093/elt/ccr069 dauer, r. (2005). the lingua franca core: a new model for pronunciation instruction? tesol quarterly, 39(3), 543-550. derwing, t., & munro, m. (2005). second language accent and pronunciation teaching: a research-based approach. tesol quarterly, 39(3), 378-397. dziubalska-ko aczyk, k. (2002). conscious competence of performance as a key to teaching english. in e. waniek-klimczak & p. j. melia (eds.), accents and speech in teaching english phonetics and phonology (pp. 97105). frankfurt/mein: peter lang publishing. dziubalska-ko aczyk k. (2005). native or non-native? this is the question: which english to teach in the globalizing world? in proceedings of ptlc 2005 [cdrom]. london: department of phonetics and linguistics, ucl. retrieved from http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/johnm/ptlc2005/pdf/ptlcp67.pdf dziubalska-ko aczyk, k., janicka, k., kul, m., scheuer, s., weckwerth, j, & romanowska, d. (2006). native standards or non-native elf: which english to teach in the 21st century? in k. dziubalska-ko aczyk (ed.), ifatuation: a life in ifa. a festschrift for professor jacek fisiak on the occasion of his 70th birthday (pp. 235-259). pozna : wydawnictwo naukowe uam. gatbonton, p., trofimovich, p., & magid, m. (2005). learners’ ethnic group affiliation and l2 pronunciation accuracy: a sociolinguistic investigation. tesol quarterly, 39(3), 489-511. golombek, p., & jordan, s. r. (2005). becoming “black lambs” not “parrots”: a poststructuralist orientation to intelligibility and identity. tesol quarterly, 39(3), 513-533. goodwin, j. (2001). teaching pronunciation. in m. celce-murcia (ed.), teaching english as a second or foreign language (3rd ed.; pp. 117-137). boston, ma: heinle & heinle. graddol, d. (2006). english next: why global english may mean the end of english as a foreign language. london: british council. native-speaker and english as a lingua franca pronunciation norms: english majors’ views 263 he, d., & zhang, q. (2010). native speaker norms and china english: from the perspective of learners and teachers in china. tesol quarterly, 44(4), 769-789. doi:105054/tq.2010.235995 janicka, k., kul, m., & weckwerth, j. (2005). polish students’ attitudes to native english accents as models for efl pronunciation. in k. dziubalskako aczyk & j. przedlacka (eds.), english pronunciation models: a changing scene (pp. 251-292). bern: peter lang. jenkins, j. (2000). the phonology of english as an international language. oxford: oxford university press. jenkins, j. (2002). a sociolinguistically based, empirically researched pronunciation syllabus for english as an international language. applied linguistics, 23(1), 83-103. doi:10.1093/applin/23.1.83 jenkins, j. (2005a). implementing an international approach to english pronunciation: the role of teacher attitudes and identity. tesol quarterly, 39(3), 535-543. jenkins, j. (2005b). misinterpretation, bias, and resistance to change: the case of the lingua franca core. in k. dziubalska-ko aczyk & j. przedlacka (eds.), english pronunciation models: a changing scene (pp. 199-210). bern: peter lang. jenkins, j. (2006). current perspectives on teaching world englishes and english as a lingua franca. tesol quarterly, 40(1), 157-181. jenkins, j. (2007). english as a lingua franca: attitude and identity. oxford: oxford university press. jenkins, j. (2009). english as a lingua franca: interpretations and attitudes. world englishes, 28(2), 200-207. doi:10.1111/j.1467-971x.2009.01582.x jenkins, j., cogo, a., & dewey, m. (2011). review of developments in research into english as a lingua franca. language teaching, 44(3), 281-315. doi:10.1017/s0261444811000115 jones, r. (2002). beyond ‘listen and repeat:’ pronunciation teaching materials and theories of second language acquisition. in j. c. richards and w. a. renandya (eds.), methodology in language teaching. an anthology of current practice (pp. 179-187). cambridge: cambridge university press. kirkpatrick, a. (2011). english as an asian lingua franca and the multilingual model of elt. language teaching, 44(2), 212-224. doi:10.1017/s026144 4810000145 kopperoinen, a. (2011). accents of english as a lingua franca: a study of finnish textbooks. international journal of applied linguistics, 21, 71-93. doi:10 .1111/ j.14734192.2010.00263.x levis, j. (2005). changing contexts and shifting paradigms in pronunciation teaching. tesol quarterly, 39(3), 369-377. aleksandra wach 264 margi , b., & širola, d. (2009). (teaching) english as an international language and native speaker norms: attitudes of croatian ma and ba students of english. journal of english as an international language, 5, 129-136. retrieved from http://www.eilj.com/2009 conference-edition.pdf matsumoto, y. (2011). successful elf communications and implications for elt: sequential analysis of elf pronunciation negotiation strategies. modern language journal, 95, 97-114. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.2011.01172.x momenian, m. (2011). the identity and l2 accent from an eil angle. journal of language and culture, 2(1), 1-5. retrieved from http://www.academic journals.org/jlc rivers, d. (2011). intercultural processes in accented english. world englishes, 30(3), 375-391. doi:10.1111/j.1467-971x.2011.01707.x scheuer, s. (2005). why native speakers are (still) relevant. in k. dziubalskako aczyk & j. przedlacka (eds.), english pronunciation models: a changing scene (pp. 111-130). bern: peter lang. scheuer, s. (2010). can (an) elf have a life of its own? pozna studies in contemporary linguistics, 46(3), 331-347. doi:10.2478/v10010-010-0014-6 seidlhofer, b. (2004). research perspectives on teaching english as a lingua franca. annual review of applied linguistics, 24, 209-239. doi:10.1017/ s0267190504000145 seidlhofer, b. (2005). language variation and change: the case of english as a lingua franca. in k. dziubalska-ko aczyk & j. przedlacka (eds.), english pronunciation models: a changing scene (pp. 59-75). bern: peter lang. sifakis, n. & sougari, a. (2005). pronunciation issues and eil pedagogy in the periphery: a survey of greek state school teachers’ beliefs. tesol quarterly, 39(3), 467-488. sobkowiak, w. (2002). english speech in polish eyes: what university students think about english pronunciation teaching and learning. in e. waniekklimczak and p. j. melia (eds.), accents and speech in teaching english phonetics and phonology (pp. 177-193). frankfurt/mein: peter lang publishing. sobkowiak, w. (2005). why not lfc? in k. dziubalska-ko aczyk & j. przedlacka (eds.), english pronunciation models: a changing scene (pp. 131-149). bern: peter lang. sowden, c. (2012). elf on a mushroom: the overnight growth in english as a lingua franca. elt journal, 66(1), 89-96. doi:10.1093/elt/ccr024 timmis, i. (2002). native-speaker norms and international english: a classroom view. elt journal, 56(3), 240-249. doi:10.1093/elt/56.3.240 trudgill, p. (2005). native-speaker segmental phonological models and the english lingua franca core. in k. dziubalska-ko aczyk & j. przedlacka (eds.), english pronunciation models: a changing scene (pp. 77-98). bern: peter lang. native-speaker and english as a lingua franca pronunciation norms: english majors’ views 265 van den doel, r. (2010). native and non-native models in elt: advantages, disadvantages, and the implications of accent parallelism. pozna studies in contemporary linguistics, 46(3), 349-365. doi:10.2478/v10010010-0018-2 waniek-klimczak, e., & klimczak, k. (2005). target in speech development: learners’ views. in k. dziubalska-ko aczyk & j. przedlacka (eds.), english pronunciation models: a changing scene (pp. 229-249). bern: peter lang. wells, j. c. (2005). goals in teaching english pronunciation. in k. dziubalskako aczyk & j. przedlacka (eds.), english pronunciation models: a changing scene (pp. 101-110). bern: peter lang. aleksandra wach 266 appendix table 6 numbers and percentages of the subjects’ responses to selected statements strongly disagree somewhat disagree no opinion somewhat agree strongly agree i would like to sound like a native speaker of english. group a (n = 132) 0% (0) 0% (0) 1% (1) 11% (14) 88% (117) group b (n = 102) 0% (0) 2% (2) 6% (6) 35% (36) 57% (58) it’s ok for me to retain my polish accent when i speak english. group a (n = 132) 59% (77) 30% (40) 5% (7) 6% (8) 0% (0) group b (n = 102) 22% (22) 27% (28) 20% (20) 25% (26) 6% (6) at my university, there is too much focus on correct native-like pronunciation. group a (n = 132) 57% (75) 23% (30) 9% (12) 9% (13) 2% (2) group b (n = 102) 48% (49) 22% (23) 21% (21) 8% (8) 1% (1) it is acceptable to sound like a nns, as long as you are understood by others. group a (n = 132) 4% (5) 25% (33) 8% (11) 52% (68) 11% (15) group b (n = 102) 3% (3) 14% (14) 11% (11) 42% (43) 30% (31) in international communication it’s better to sound like a nns, because people understand you more easily. group a (n = 132) 17% (22) 22% (29) 20% (27) 33% (43) 8% (11) group b (n = 102) 10% (10) 33% (34) 21% (21) 30% (31) 6% (6) if you speak with a perfect native-like accent, you are perceived as a more intelligent, knowledgeable person than when you speak with a non-native accent. group a (n = 132) 4% (5) 8% (11) 6% (8) 40% (53) 42% (55) group b (n = 102) 15% (15) 21% (21) 9% (9) 29% (30) 26% (27) it is acceptable to teach ‘international’, non-native-like pronunciation to learners of english. group a (n = 132) 20% (27) 36% (47) 23% (31) 19% (25) 2% (2) group b (n = 102) 20% (20) 16% (16) 27% (28) 32% (33) 5% (5) teachers of english should have native-like pronunciation. group a (n = 132) 0 2% (2) 0 25% (33) 73% (97) group b (n = 102) 2% (2) 8% (8) 7% (7) 52% (53) 31% (32) 173 swutiev in secont language learning ant teacuing meparwmenw of nnglivu swutievh ńaculwx of petagogx ant ńine arwvh atam mickiewicy univerviwxh oalivy ssllt 4 (2). 2014. 173-203 toij 10.14746ivvllw.2014.4.2.3 uwwpjiiwww.vvllw.amu.etu.pl posiwive psychology in cross-culwural narrawivesj mexican swutenws tiscover whemselves while learning chinese rebecca l. oxfort oxfort avvociawevh hunwvvilleh alh usa rebeccaoxfort@gmail.com lourtev cuéllar auwonomouv univerviwx of mexico (unam)h mexico ciwxh mexico cuellar.lourtev@gmail.com abvwracw uving wue principlev of poviwive pvxcuologx ant wue woolv of narrawive revearcuh wuiv arwicle focuvev on wue pvxcuologx of five language learnerv wuo crovvet culwural ant linguivwic borterv. all five were univerviwx vwutenwv learning cuineve in mexicoh ant wwo of wuem alvo vwutiet cuineve in cuina. tue grountet wueorx approacu wav uvet wo analxye ant inwerprew wue vwutenwv’ narrawivev. seligman’v (2011) pnrma motelh wue cenwerpiece of wue motern view of well-beingh provitet wue wueorewical framework. tue revulwv let wo wue concluvion wuaw language learning can be a major journex in velf-tivcoverxh ricu in poviwive emowionv wiet wo experiencev of engagemenwh relawionvuiph meaningh ant accomplivumenw. oexwortvj language learner narrawiveh pnrma motelh cuineve av a vecontiforeign language rebecca l. oxforth lourtev cuéllar 174 [p]uen xou gew a new motelh a new paratigmh a new wax of perceivingh . . . vuttenlxh xou uave an illuminawionh an inviguw. abrauam mavlow (1971h p. 168) 1. inwrotucwion in wuiv vwutxh mexican vwutenwv tivcoveret inner meaning ant gainet a large meavure of fulfillmenw wuile wuex learnet wue cuineve language ant culwure. tue principlev of poviwive pvxcuologxh wue empirical vwutx of wuriving ant flourivuing ant of wue virwuev ant vwrengwuv wuaw leat wo wue goot life (vee wuiv ivvue’v inwrotucworx arwicle)h untergirt wue revearcu reporwet uere. marwin seligman (2011)h a founter of wue poviwive pvxcuologx fielth creawet a motel in wuicu flourivuing iv viewet av wue golt vwantart for meavuring well-being. tue acronxm pnrma reflecwv five elemenwv of well-being. tueve elemenwv arej · poviwive emowionv · nngagemenw · relawionvuipv · meaning · accomplivumenw in a complex txnamic vxvwem involving flourivuing ant well-beingh “uigulevel menwal awwribuwev ant funcwionv are tewerminet bx a complex vew of inwerconnecwet componenwv wuaw conwinuouvlx evolve over wime” (mörnxeih 2009h pp. 195-196) in an organich uolivwich nonlinearh inweracwive favuion (mercerh 2011). in our revearcuh clear examplev of wue pnrma motel were reflecwet in wue rewrovpecwive narrawivev wriwwen bx five mexican vwutenwv abouw wueir learning of cuineve. tue narrawivev ulwimawelx reflecwet vignificanw pvxcuological inviguwv relawet wo seligman’v wueorxh albeiw wiwu a more obviouv inwerweaving of culwural facworv wuan fount in wuaw wueorx. 2. revearcu review tuiv review iv bavet on seligman’v (2011) pnrma motelh vwarwing wiwu poviwive emowionv ant enting wiwu accomplivumenw. pe relawe imporwanw variablev wo eacu avpecw of pnrma. 2.1. poviwive emowionv nmowionv are wue firvw avpecw of wue pnrma motel. nmowionv influence language learning (arnolth 1999; tuornburxh 2013) ant learning in general (mamavioh 1994; le mouxh 1998). language learning iv evpeciallx emowion-laten; iw iv “a profountlx unvewwling pvxcuological propoviwion” (guiorah 1983h p. 8)h largelx becauve of vuifwv poviwive pvxcuologx in crovv-culwural narrawivevj mexican vwutenwv tivcover wuemvelvev wuile . . . 175 in itenwiwiev. puile learning a languageh new or expantet pervonal itenwiwiev are bornh mitwifet bx emowionh wurougu “. . . puxvicallx ant vxmbolicallx crovv[ing] wue borter . . . bewween one wax of being ant anowuer” (pavlenko f lanwolfh 2000h p. 174). nmowion “funcwionv av an amplifierh proviting wue inwenviwxh urgencxh ant energx wo propel our beuavior” in “everxwuing we toh” ant emowion max be more bavic wuan cogniwion (macinwxreh 2002h p. 61). alwuougu mucu emowion-relawet revearcu in wue language learning fielt uav focuvet on anxiewx (horwiwyh 2007; horwiwy f qoungh 1991)h anxiewx iv now wue onlx language learning emowion wuaw uav been vwutiet. narrawivev of bilingual wriwerv wuo were once language learnerv vuow “an arrax of emowionvh” vucu av guilwh invecuriwxh anxiewxh angvwh vatnevvh ant confuvion (pavlenkoh 2006h p. 5). oxfort ant colleaguev (oxforth 1996h 2011ah 2013; oxforth nurmanh f lavineh 1991; oxforth lavineh ńelkinvh hollawaxh f saleuh 1996; oxforth mengh ruouh sungh f jainh 2007; oxforth mavvexh f ananth 2005; oxfort ew al.h 1998) alvo fount manx emowionv in learner narrawivevj anxiewxh angerh uumiliawion or vuameh obvevvionh confitenceh loveh pleavureh priteh conwenwmenwh ant jox. ńor bilingualvh emowion managemenw can occur bx meanv of uumor (vaith 2006)h ant vwutenwv can benefiw from uving uumor av wuex teal wiwu wue vwrevvev of language learning. how cogniwion iv relawet wo poviwive emowionv. pilliam jamev (1910i1987) tevcribet voliwion av wue “uow” merger of pervonal tevireh exciwemenwh willh ant wenvionh creawing a uiguer level of energx. łuilting on jamev’ workh pinwricuh marxh ant łoxle (1993) rejecwet a “colth” overlx rawionalh ant emowion-free vervion of learner cogniwion ant empuaviyet wue neet for uow cogniwionh wuaw ivh learning in wuicu mulwiple levelv of cogniwion are vparket bx emowionv ant mowivawion in livelx vocioculwural conwexwv. tuex fount wuaw wranvformawion of itenwiwxh velf-worwuh or awwiwute iv linket wo uow cogniwion (pinwricu ew al.h 1993). invwancev of uow cogniwion were itenwifiet in learner narrawivev (oxforth manielh peih f ricuwerh 2011; oxforth 2011a). alwuougu layaruv (2003) criwiciyet wue wentencx of poviwive pvxcuologx wo tevcribe emowionv av eiwuer poviwive or negawiveh wuiv ticuowomx iv powenwiallx verx imporwanw. accorting wo ńreterickvonh (2001h 2003)h negawive emowionv (e.g.h anxiewx) ant poviwive emowionv (e.g.h uappinevv) are wwo veparawe timenvionv. negawive emowionv convwricw wue intivitual’v focuvh buw poviwive emowionv broaten wue intivitual’v awarenevv; vwimulawe novelh creawiveh exploraworxh ant plaxful wuouguwv ant acwionv; ant built vkillv ant revourcev for wue fuwure (ńreterickvon’v broaten-ant-built wueorx). poviwive pvxcuologx toev now ignore negawive emowionv. in facwh seligman (2011) menwionet wuaw vwrong biological facworv uave pretivpovet cerwain people—cuurcuillh lincolnh ant manx owuerv—wo vatnevv ant owuer negawive emowionvh wuicu can onlx be ameliorawet rawuer wuan wowallx eliminawet. negawive emowionv can be aw leavw parwlx conwrollet bx uving rebecca l. oxforth lourtev cuéllar 176 wue ałcmn wecuniűueh in wuicu beliefv abouw atverviwx cauve conveűuenw feelingvh buw tivpuwawionh wuaw ivh prevenwing counwer-evitence wo negawive beliefvh revulwv in energiyawionh or poviwive moot ant beuavior cuange (seligmanh 2006). 2.2. nngagemenw nngagemenw iv wue vecont componenw in seligman’v pnrma motel. ńlow iv comprivet of complewe engagemenw in an acwiviwxh merging of acwion ant awarenevv wiwuouw tivwracwionh a vubjecwive venve of jox ant confitenceh inwrinvic mowivawion (auwowelivmh or wue tevire wo to wue wavk for iwv own vake)h balance bewween cuallengev ant compewence (wavk iv neiwuer woo eavx nor woo uart)h ueiguwenet conwrol (vecuriwx ant lack of worrx abouw failure)h efforwlevvnevvh lack of velf-convciouvnevvh ant an alweret percepwion of wime (vlowing town or vpeeting up) (cvíkvyenwmiuálxih 1990h 1996i2013h 1998h 2008; cvíkvyenwmiuálxi f cvíkvyenwmiuálxih 2006). cvíkvyenwmiuálxi (1990) tevcribet flow now av pavvive or relaxing buw av occurring “wuen a pervon’v botx or mint iv vwrewcuet wo iwv limiwv in a volunwarx efforw wo accomplivu vomewuing tifficulw ant worwuwuile” (p. 3). av noweth inwrinvic mowivawion iv parw of flow. inwrinvicallx mowivawet learnerv walk abouw learning a vecont language for wue enjoxmenw of finting ouw new wuingvh for wue pleavure experiencet wuen gravping vomewuing tifficulw in wue languageh or for wue “uigu” wuaw iv felw wuen learning or uving wue language (mcinwovu f noelvh 2004). oao ant oxfort (2014) nowet wue value of inwrinvic mowivawion for teveloping language proficiencx. accorting wo velf-tewerminawion wueorx (meci f rxanh 1985h 1991h 2000; rxan f mecih 2001)h inwrinvic mowivawion involvev a combinawion of inwerevwh enjoxmenwh novelwxh ant pervonal cuallengeh along wiwu a feeling of compewenceh relawetnevv wo owuervh ant auwonomx. 2.3. relawionvuipv seligman’v pnrma wueorx inclutev relawionvuipv. language learnerv are now ivolawet beingv buw are invweat in convwanw relawionvuip wiwu owuerv. uvuiota’v (2009) “pervon-in-conwexw relawional view” empuaviyev relawionvuipv av parw of wue learning conwexw. tuiv view cenwerv on “wue inweracwion bewween wuiv velf-reflecwive inwenwional agenw [wue learner]h ant wue fluit ant complex vxvwem of vocial relawionvh acwiviwievh experiencev ant mulwiple microant macro-conwexwv in wuicu wue pervon iv embettet . . .” (p. 220). av nowet earlierh velf-tewerminawion wueorx empuaviyev wuaw inwrinvic mowivawion involvevh among owuer wuingvh relawionvuipv wiwu owuer people. alwuougu wue pnrma motel toev now overlx empuaviye culwureh relawionvuipv alwaxv occur in wue conwexw of culwureh wuicu iv a complex txnamic vxvwem. in vucu a vxvwemh wue conwexw iv now a vwawic backtrop buw invweat a “tepoviwive pvxcuologx in crovv-culwural narrawivevj mexican vwutenwv tivcover wuemvelvev wuile . . . 177 veloping procevv” (mörnxei f uvuiotah 2011h p. 32). culwure iv “wue vuaret wax of life of a group of peopleh incluting wueir arwifacwv (vucu av vocial invwiwuwionv ant wecunologx) ant wueir vxmbolv (vucu av communicawionv ant mxwuv)” (łerrxh poorwingah segallh f mavenh 2002h p. 477). iw iv alvo “wue vuaret knowletge ant vcuemev creawet bx a vew of people for perceivingh inwerprewingh exprevvingh ant revponting wo wue vocial realiwiev arount wuem” (leteracuh 1995h p. 9). tue mexican learnerv in our vwutx ofwen menwionet culwure av a crucial facwor in wueir learning of wue cuineve languageh ant vome of wueve learnerv mate convciouv comparivonv bewween mexico ant cuina. hofvwete’v mulwitimenvional motel comparev ant conwravwv wue culwurev of cuina (hofvweteh 2014a) ant mexico (hofvweteh 2014b). in hofvwete’v pervpecwiveh bowu cuina ant mexico are collecwivivwh wuaw ivh inwertepentence-orienweth ant mavculineh focuving on vuccevv ant compewiwion. neverwuelevvh mexico vcoret uigu on wue intulgence timenvionh reflecwing opwimivm ant a tevire wo relaxh uave funh ant enjox lifeh wuile cuina uat a low vcoreh inticawing greawer pevvimivm ant revwrainw. cuina uat a low vcore on uncerwainwx avoitanceh reflecwing comforw wiwu ambiguiwxh wuile mexico wav uigu on wuiv timenvionh vuggevwing mainwenance of rigit cotev of belief ant beuavior. sucu obvervawionv reflecw wue nawional cuaracwer approacuh wuicu avverwv wuaw iw iv povvible wo tevcribe wue pvxcuological űualiwiev or motal pervonaliwx of prevenw-tax nawion vwawev (łerrx ew al.h 2002)h buw intivitualv wiwuin a given nawion-vwawe max tiffer tramawicallx from wue motal pervonaliwx tevcribet. 2.4. meaning tue fourwu elemenw of pnrma iv meaning. tue learnerv in our vwutx vpoke of peak experiencevh wuicu are infuvet wiwu pervonal meaning. a peak experience iv “a greaw ant mxvwical experienceh a religiouv experience if xou wivu – an illuminawionh a revelawionh an inviguw . . . [leating wo] ‘wue cogniwion of beingh’ . . . wue cogniwion wuaw plawo ant socrawev were walking abouw; almovwh xou coult vaxh a wecunologx of uappinevvh of pure excellenceh pure wruwuh pure gootnevv” (mavlowh 1971h p. 169). peak experiencev are evpeciallx joxouvh exciwingh egowranvcenting momenwv in lifeh involving vutten feelingv of inwenve uappinevv or ecvwavxh creawiviwxh meaningh well-beingh wonterh aweh loveh uniwxh empawuxh ant wimelevvnevv. in peak experiencevh wue pervon feelv vimulwaneouvlx more powerful ant alvo more uelplevv wuan ever before (mavlowh 1970). mavlow’v revearcu inticawev wuaw “movw peopleh or peruapv all peopleh uave peak experiencevh or ecvwavievh” wuicu can be uncoveret bx avking vomeoneh “uave xou ever experiencet wranvcentenw ecvwavx?” (mavlowh 1971h p. 168). tuere are counwlevv wriggerv for peak experiencevh vucu av metiwawionh arwh muvich ant nawure (mavlowh rebecca l. oxforth lourtev cuéllar 178 1970h 1971). in wue prevenw vwutxh av will be temonvwraweth peak experiencev are wriggeret bx cerwain language learning viwuawionv ant invpiring weacuerv. meaning iv funtamenwallx wiet wo convciouvnevv ant can be enuancet bx invpirawion. in convciouvnevvh prevence—wue fielt of awwenwion—ant coprevence— wue influenwial valuevh avvumpwionvh beliefvh opinionvh ant viwuawional facworv wuaw are ouwvite of awwenwion—“configure wue image wuaw an intivitual uav of wue worlt” (siloh 2006ah p. 9). informawion in prevence iv “alwaxv guitet bx inwerevwv” (siloh 2006bh p. 61)h wuile coprevenw avpecwv are waken for granwet buw are ofwen more powerful wuan informawion in wue fielt of prevence (siloh 2006a). “tue inwenwionaliwx of wue convciouvnevv (wuiv tirecwing wue acwv of convciouvnevv wowart tewerminet objecwv) iv alwaxv launcuet wowart wue fuwure . . .h wuicu iv regivweret av wue wenvion of vearcuing” (siloh 2006bh p. 61). puen we veek a mivving objecwh vucu av a vew of kexvh our convciouvnevv vwarwv vearcuing. nven if we give up wue vearcuh wue inwenwion iv vwill wuere in coprevenceh ant convciouvnevv toev now give up unwil iw fintv iwv objecw (nowe wue objecw-acw bont). nven wuen we inwenwionallx evoke wue pavw bx vearcuing for a vpecific memorxh we are vwill “alwaxv atvancing” becauve of wue vearcu iwvelf (p. 61). invpiret convciouvnevv iv a perwurbawion or vuaking up of ortinarx convciouvnevv (siloh 2006c). iw iv “more wuan a vwaweh iw iv a global vwrucwure wuaw pavvev wurougu tifferenw vwawev ant wuaw can manifevw in tifferenw levelv” (siloh 2006ch p. 102). invpiret convciouvnevv can acuieve immetiawe inwuiwionv of realiwx ant flavuev of inviguw; iw can organiye groupv of experiencev wiwuouw tetucwive or tivcurvive wuouguw. mxvwicvh puilovopuervh poewvh novelivwvh arwivwvh muvicianvh ant even ortinarx people can experience invpiret convciouvnevv— “vuperior vwawev of convciouvnevv” (siloh 2006ch p. 95) vucu av ecvwavxh rapwureh ant recogniwion—wurougu treamvh vivionvh ant inwuiwionv. ncvwavx iv accompaniet bx movemenw ant generaliyet energxh rapwure iv market bx powerful poviwive emowionh ant recogniwion involvev a venve of compreuenting everxwuing in an invwanw (siloh 2006c). invpiret convciouvnevv can occur wuen ortinarx intivitualv uave vuccevvful uuncuevh fall in loveh vuttenlx untervwant a complex viwuawionh or invwanwaneouvlx volve a problem (siloh 2006c). learning uav vpecialh invpiret momenwvh wuicu occur wuen vwutenwv are movet bx rapwurouv inviguw or wuen vomewuing magicallx clickv ant mawcuev wuaw wue learner iv looking for. a feeling of cerwainwxh or “wuiv iv uow wuingv are” (siloh 2006ch p. 95)h accompaniev invpiret convciouvnevv. several language learnerv’ experiencev of vutten untervwantingvh inviguwvh ant inwuiwionv—wuaw miguw be callet invpiret convciouvnevv—were nowet bx oxfort (2011a). poviwive pvxcuologx in crovv-culwural narrawivevj mexican vwutenwv tivcover wuemvelvev wuile . . . 179 2.5. accomplivumenw seligman’v final pnrma componenwh accomplivumenwh iv eavilx relawet wo language proficiencx. in wue language learning fielth a vignificanw conwribuwor wo accomplivumenw iv learning vwrawegiev. learning vwrawegiev are “acwiviwiev convciouvlx cuoven bx learnerv for wue purpove of regulawing wueir own language learning” (griffiwuvh 2013h p. 36) ant for awwaining proficiencx (griffiwuvh 2013; gunning f oxforth 2014; oxforth 1990h 2011b). alwuougu unvuccevvful language learnerv alvo uve learning vwrawegievh wueve learnerv wxpicallx uve vwrawegiev inefficienwlx or emplox vwrawegiev wuaw are inappropriawe wo wue wavk or wargew language aw uant (oxforth 1990h). oxfort (2011b) prevenwet four major learning vwrawegx cawegorievj cogniwiveh affecwiveh vocioculwural-inweracwiveh ant wue mavwer cawegorx of “mewavwrawegievh” vucu av planningh organiyingh ant evaluawing. promiving approacuevh incluting wue cogniwive acatemic language learning approacu or calla (cuamowh 2007) ant vwxlev-ant-vwrawegiev-bavet invwrucwion or ssłi (couenh 2011)h uave ariven for weacuing vwrawegiev wo language learnerv. av we uave vuownh wue pnrma motel iv powenwiallx relevanw wo language learning in general. tuiv arwicle will avvevv iwv relevance wo five mexican learnerv vwutxing cuineve. 3. mewuot 3.1. tue narrawive pervpecwive narrawivev are immenvelx imporwanw for untervwanting pvxcuological ant vocioculwural ivvuev in language learning. narrawivev are pervaviveh venve-making woolv wo uelp uv untervwant our experiencev. “pe tream in narrawiveh taxtream in narrawiveh rememberh anwicipaweh uopeh tevpairh planh reviveh criwiciyeh govviph learnh uaweh ant love bx narrawive” (hartxh 1968h p. 5). “sworiev itenwifxh unifxh give meaning wo. juvw av muvic iv noive wuaw makev venveh a painwing iv color wuaw makev venveh vo a vworx iv life wuaw makev venve” (marwelh 2011h p. 15). puile learner narrawivev are vuapet bx experiencev of wue intivitual narraworvh wuex are alvo “collecwive vworiev” reflecwing mulwiple “voicevh” inwerprewet bx wuove wuo uear or reat wuem (łakuwinh 1986). puen learnerv narrawe wueir experiencevh wuex recogniye more teeplx wue vuifwv in velf-itenwiwiev over wime (mcatamvh jovvelvonh f lieblicuh 2006; pavlenkoh 2006; pavlenko f łlackletgeh 2004) ant link emowionallx fragmenwet elemenwv inwo a meaningful wuole (puiweh 2007). łecauve “narrawivev are an excellenw mewuot wo capwure wue evvence of uuman experience” (łarcelovh 2008h p. 37)h parwicularlx in a complex txnamic vxvwem (mörnxeih 2009)h narrawive revearcu in language learning iv gaining awwenwion (e.g.h łailex f nunanh 1996; łarkuuiyenh rebecca l. oxforth lourtev cuéllar 180 2011; łellh 2002; łenvon f nunanh 2004; cuéllarh 2012; oxforth 2011ah 2013). comparet wo wuirt-pervon obvervawionv of language learningh firvw-pervon learner narrawivev offer ricuerh more conwexwualiyet tawa ant greawer pvxcuological inviguwv (oxforth 2011a; pavlenko f lanwolfh 2000). 3.2. sewwing tue vewwing wav wue cenwer for wue teacuing of ńoreign languagev (spanivu acronxmh cnln) aw wue largevw auwonomouv univerviwx in mexico (unam)h wuicu convivwv of more wuan 300h000 vwutenwv. tuiv cenwer inclutev vwutenwv from all faculwiev ant vcuoolv of wue univerviwx ant even vome exwernal invwiwuwionv. cnln weacuev 16 tifferenw languagevh incluting cuineveh ant uav abouw 350 cuineve vwutenwv reprevenwing all proficiencx levelv. inwerevw in cuineve iv increavingh ant cnln cannow xew meew wue temant. tue learnerv of cuineve come from tiverve fieltvj puilovopuxh economicvh puxvicvh biologxh uivworxh inwernawional relawionvh ant manx owuerv. 3.3. parwicipanwv pe inviwet five vwutenwv of tifferenw agev wo parwicipawe in wue vwutx. all were teeplx inwerevwet in learning cuineve aw wue wime of wue vwutx. pe inwenwionallx inclutet parwicipanwv reprevenwing tifferenw acatemic areav ant inwerevwv. pe alvo envuret wuaw wue vample inclutet vome parwicipanwv wuo uat experience learning cuineve now onlx in mexico buw alvo in cuina. parwicipanwv gave informet convenw for wueir narrawivev wo be inclutet in wue vwutx. table 1 provitev informawion abouw eacu of wue parwicipanwv. table 1 tue parwicipanwv name age acatemic vpecialwxh in attiwion wo cuineve commenwv mariana 28 inwernawional relawionv mit uer mavwer’v vwutiev in cuina (abouw inwernawional relawionv) ant now workv av an inwerprewer for xinuua jové luiv 34 hivworx now workv av a cuineve weacuer in mexico clautia 44 nnglivu ant iwalian profevvor iv alvo a profevvional vinger jorge 25 puxvicv (aw wue wime ue wrowe uiv vworx) acupuncwure (aw wue wime of wue member cueck) recenwlx troppet puxvicv ant cuanget uiv empuaviv wo acupuncwure liyeww 26 atminivwrawion (aw wue wime vue wrowe uer vworx) cuineve empuaviv (aw wue wime of wue member cueck) mecitet wo cuange uer empuaviv wo vomewuing involving cuineve (weacuing or acupuncwure) poviwive pvxcuologx in crovv-culwural narrawivevj mexican vwutenwv tivcover wuemvelvev wuile . . . 181 3.4. mawa collecwion parwicipanwv receivet wue following invwrucwionvj “priwe xour language vworxh tevcribing wue movw vignificanw experiencev along xour pawu in vwutxing cuineve ant poinwing ouw wue movw emowional or exciwing momenwv (poviwive or negawive onev).” parwicipanwv were now vpecificallx avket wo tivcuvv culwure or learning vwrawegievh alwuougu all of wuem cuove wo to vo. all wrowe wueir vworiev in spanivuh ant we wranvlawet wue vworiev inwo nnglivu for wuiv arwicle. pe cuecket wue wranvlawionv wiwu eacu owuer ant wiwu wue parwicipanwvh all of wuom knew nnglivu. 3.5. mawa analxviv pe analxyet wueve vworiev uving a grountet wueorx approacuh wuicuh rawuer wuan beginning wiwu a uxpowueviv av wiwu wratiwional űuanwiwawive revearcuh beginv wiwu wue tawah wuicu are wuen analxyet inwo meaningful cawegoriev (glaver f swrauvvh 1967). grountet wueorx iv a general approacu wuaw iv uvet wo terive a wueorx from obvervet ant collecwet tawah wuicu are allowet wo vpeak for wuemvelvev (corbin f swrauvvh 2007). in owuer wortvh alwuougu we were inwerevwet in pnrma ant puenomena vucu av peak experiencevh flowh ant wue likeh wue analxviv tit now begin wiwu wueve; iw began wiwu wue tewailv of wue vworiev. in wue grountet wueorx approacuh wuere are wuree coting vwagev. aw wue open coting vwageh puenomena are itenwifiet ant rougulx cawegoriyet inwo preliminarx wuemevh wiwuouw pre-evwablivuet cawegorx namev (corbin f swrauvvh 2007). tue nexw vwageh axial cotingh makev connecwionv bewween cawegoriev bx proviting concepwual axev arount wuicu wue kex iteav revolve (corbin f swrauvvh 2007; swrauvv f corbinh 1998). tuiv vwage allowv wue wuemev wo emerge more tefiniwivelx ant wo become bewwer organiyet. aw wuiv vwageh vpecific wuemev are alvo contenvet inwo broater wuemevh wuile rewaining kex űuowawionv ant examplev (crevwellh 2007). tue final vwageh velecwive cotingh itenwifiev one wueme av wue movw imporwanw ant encompavving (corbin f swrauvvh 2007). turouguouw wuiv procevvh wue wuemev are conwinuallx comparet wiwu wue tawa (wue convwanw comparivon wecuniűue) wo envure wue bevw fiw. in attiwion wo applxing wue analxwic vwagevh we followet oxfort’v (2011a) recommentawionv for untervwanting wue vworiev. ńirvwh we uvet empawux bx wrxing wo gew inwo wue uearw ant mint of eacu parwicipanw (jovvelvon f lieblicuh 1995). seconth we analxyet cave elemenwvh vucu av rolev of wue learnerh rolev of owuer cuaracwervh locawionh evenwvh ant wue tegree of velf-awarenevv. tuirth we livwenet for mulwiple voicevh vucu av wue learner in wue pavwh learner av prevenw narraworh ant owuerv in wue vworx. ńourwuh we űueriet wue vworx or people in iw bx avking űuevwionv like “puo? puaw? puen? puere? pux? how?” rebecca l. oxforth lourtev cuéllar 182 afwer wranvlawing wue vworiev ant giving our profevvional analxviv bavet on wue grountet wueorx approacuh wue vecont auwuor conwacwet eacu parwicipanw wo fint ouw wuewuer ue or vue agreet wiwu our analxviv of wue vworx ant wo gawuer anx uptawev or attiwionv. tuiv procevv iv callet “member cueckingh” ant iw occurret approximawelx 4 monwuv afwer wue vworiev were originallx wriwwen. ńour of wue member cueckv occurret wurougu intivitual inwerviewvh wuicu were tigiwallx recortet in spanivuh wranvcribeth ant wranvlawet inwo nnglivu. tue fifwu member cueck (for mariana) wav tone wurougu email. member cuecking provet wo be verx valuable ant attet more tepwu. łavet on vome of wue parwicipanwv’ ricu attiwionvh we fount iw necevvarx wo att more wo wue analxvivh parwicularlx enuancing wue axial coting mawerial. a complewe vervion of wue narrawivev ant wue member cueckv iv available in wue appentix of wue online vupporwing informawion aw uwwpjiivvllw.amu.etu.plitown loatitocvissllt%204(2)%20oxforth%20cuellar%20appentix.ptf. 4. revulwv tuiv vecwion prevenwv wue revulwv of all wuree vwagev of analxviv. piwu reference wo wue axial coting revulwvh we tivwinguivu bewween wue original narrawivev ant wue attiwionv from wue member cueckv. 4.1. revulwv of swage 1j open coting swage 1h open cotingh involvet wue creawion of veveral wablev wiwu parwicipanwv’ namev linket wiwu variouv wuemev. twenwx wuemev arove in wuiv vwageh av followvj (a) number of xearv of learning cuineve in mexicoh if vwawet; (b) inwenviwx of cuineve vwutx in mexico; (c) wripv wo cuinah if anx; (t) inwenviwx of cuineve vwutx in cuina; (e) backgrount of wue parwicipanw; (f) invpirawion from a weacuer or clavv in mexico; (g) invpirawion from wue language ant culwure; (u) exwrinvic mowivawion; (i) inwrinvic mowivawionh wuicu overlappet vignificanwlx wiwu invpirawion; (j) peak experiencev; (k) flow; (l) emowionv; (m) uow cogniwion; (n) tifficulwiev in learning cuineve; (o) learning vwrawegiev wo attrevv tifficulwiev ant propel progrevv; (p) relawionvuipv wiwu owuer mexican learnerv; (ű) relawionvuipv wiwu cuineve people; (r) cuineve puilovopuxh vcienceh ant general culwureh vomewimev av conwravwet wiwu mexican or pevwern culwure; (v) velf-evaluawion; ant (w) general awwiwute. tue cellv of wue wable provitet evitence in wue form of relevanw pavvagev from wue narrawivev. http://ssllt.amu.edu.pl/download/docs/ssllt%204(2)%20oxford,%20cuellar%20appendix.pdf http://ssllt.amu.edu.pl/download/docs/ssllt%204(2)%20oxford,%20cuellar%20appendix.pdf poviwive pvxcuologx in crovv-culwural narrawivevj mexican vwutenwv tivcover wuemvelvev wuile . . . 183 4.2. revulwv of swage 2j axial coting in swage 2 of grountet wueorx analxvivh linkv are mate acrovv wue tawa elemenwvh ant wuemawic cawegoriev are convolitawet ant vupporwet. tue wuemev revulwing from wuiv vwage were clove buw now itenwical wo wue pnrma pawwern. tue wuemev werej (a) emowionvh (b) unificawion of engagemenw ant meaningh (c) relawionvuipv wiwuin ant acrovv culwurevh ant (t) accomplivumenw. 4.2.1. nmowionv tue firvw componenw of wue pnrma motel iv poviwive emowionv. howeverh now all wue emowionv in wue narrawivev were poviwive. łowu painful emowionv ant poviwive emowionv were exprevveth juvw av piagew (1981) tevcribet in regart wo all learning. ńor invwanceh mariana exprevvet a range of emowionv in uer narrawive. sue veemet exciwet wuen uer weacuer offeret invpiring invwrucwion ant wuen vue experiencet wue mxvwerx of wuiv vwrange language. puile wawcuing cuineve tv tramavh vue wav vomewimev wiret ant fruvwrawet buw vuowet a vwrong inwerevw. sue felw wuaw wue conwenw wav inviwing uer wo followh ant vue experiencet mucu vawivfacwion. nowe wue prevence of uow cogniwion in wue uniwing of poviwive emowionh mowivawionh ant wuouguw. in uer member cueckh mariana menwionet feeling “pavvionawe” abouw untervwanting a new wax of life wurougu learning cuineve. learning cuineve in mexicoh jové luiv wav aw firvw fruvwrawet ant vwruggling. in cuina ue wav fruvwrawet for wue firvw few taxv becauve of now untervwanting colloűuial vpeecu. howeverh afwer a wuile in cuinah once ue gow pavw wue cogniwive overloath ue felw űuiwe vawivfiet aw veeingh knowingh ant experiencing wue language in conwexw. hiv tevcripwion of going norwuh vouwuh eavwh ant wevw in uiv cuineve wravelv ant uiv vworx of wue funerarx paper uorve capwuret wue elemenwv of uow cogniwionh in wuicu poviwive emowionv ant mowivawion cawalxyet inwellecwual untervwanting. in uiv member cueckh jové luiv wav more objecwive wuan emowionalh wuougu ue tit menwion being “pavvionawe” abouw uiv cuineve weacuingh abouw alwaxv being in a “goot moot” in fronw of uiv vwutenwvh ant abouw uiv conwenwmenw wuen ue uelpv vwutenwv wo make a menwal “click” (uave an inviguw). afwer wwo xearv of vwutxing cuineveh clautia experiencet teep grief aw wue teawu of a frienth leating wo a lovv of inwerevw in everxwuing. sue tecitet wo űuiw vwutxing cuineve. lawer vue mivvet cuineve ant felw vue uat mate a mivwake in leaving iw. sue exprevvet a love of cuineve becauve of weacuervh vongvh fellow learnervh ant cuineve frientv. her emowional love of cuineveh wuen avvociawet wiwu mowivawion ant inwellecwh vwimulawet uow cogniwion. nven voh vue occavionallx felw invecure abouw wuewuer vue woult ever vpeakh untervwanth or wriwe cuineveh wuougu wuiv emowion timinivueth leaving uer uappx wo be learnrebecca l. oxforth lourtev cuéllar 184 ing wue language. her member cueck revealet wuaw clautia uat gone wurougu a greaw puxvicalh emowionalh ant vpiriwual wrial wuen vue uat an accitenw av a cuilth ant wuiv mate uer even more tewerminet wo overcome cuallengev. jorgeh wav exciwet wo learn cuineve becauve of wue relawionvuip bewween ancienw cuineve weacuingv ant motern puxvicv ant becauve of wue linkage bewween wue language ant puilovopuxh ant uiv main emowion wav pleavure aw learning cuineve. aw wueve momenwv uiv poviwive emowionv were merget wiwu mowivawion ant inwellecw wo creawe uow cogniwion. in attiwion wo feeling exciwemenw ant pleavureh ue alvo inticawet wuaw vomewimev ue felw wiret or upvewh nowet occavional fruvwrawion aw wue workingv of wue mint in forgewwing wuaw uav now been recenwlx pracwiceth ant atmiwwet wo being fearful of encounwering cuineve people on wue vwreew ant now untervwanting wuaw wuex were vaxing. hiv member cueck vuowet uiv tivilluvionmenw wiwu “tewerminivwic” pevwern vcience ant uiv love of “inwuiwive” cuineve vcience. liyeww’v emowionvh like clautia’vh were affecwet bx wue people arount uer. sue iniwiallx fearet ant avoitet wue tifficulw language of wue cuineve becauve uer frient űuiw vwutxing iwh buw vue regainet inwerevw wuen uer bovv ciwet buvinevv reavonv. mevpiwe feeling anxiewx abouw pronunciawion ant wrxing wo uite from wue weacuerh liyeww’v prite evenwuallx mate uer wrx uarterh vwimulawing greawer inwerevw ant perveverance. nvenwuallx vue fell in love wiwu wue languageh merging inwellecw wiwu emowion wo generawe wue briguwnevv of uow cogniwion. her member cueck tivclovet wuaw vue conwinuet wo be fulfillet in learning cuineve ant felw “onlx pleavure.” nmowionv plaxet a greaw role for uerj “mx feelingv abouw cuineve are vo vwrong wuaw i uave tecitet wo vwop mx atminivwrawive vwutiev ant focuv on cuineve.” 4.2.2. unificawion of engagemenw ant meaning wurougu inwrinvic mowivawionh flowh peak experiencevh ant invpirawion tue vecont ant fourwu componenwv of pnrmah engagemenw ant meaningh coult now be veparawet in our analxviv of wue five narrawivev. nngagemenwh wuicu wav vuown in flow ant inwrinvic mowivawionh wav ofwen wiet firmlx wo meaningh wuicu wav fount in peak experiencev ant invpirawion. all five parwicipanwv experiencet invpirawion antior vupporw from weacuerv ant invpirawion from wue language ant culwure. ńor wueve learnervh wue venve of invpirawion wav ofwen connecwet wiwu inwrinvic mowivawionh or toing vomewuing becauve iw iv funtamenwallx inwerevwingh enjoxableh novelh ant cuallenging ant becauve iw makev wue pervon experience compewenceh relawetnevvh ant auwonomx. av nowet earlierh a peak experience iv an ecvwawich wranvcentenw experience wuaw uav a low in common wiwu invpiret convciouvnevvh ant flow iv a vubjecwivelx poviwive pvxcuologx in crovv-culwural narrawivevj mexican vwutenwv tivcover wuemvelvev wuile . . . 185 felw combinawion of joxh inwrinvic mowivawionh cuallengeh compewenceh confitenceh ant acwive immervion in a wavk. łecauve of wue overlapv in wueve concepwvh we tivcuvv wuem wogewuer in relawion wo wue parwicipanwv’ narrawivev. mariana uvet wue wort “invpiring” av vue tevcribet profevvor xu’v clavvh wuicu “openet up new worltv” for wue vwutenwv. sue vwawet wuaw vue uat never before been wuiv clove wo a cuineve pervonh parwicularlx one wuo focuvet on velf-percepwion ant wranvmivvion of a tifferenw culwure. ńor uerh wue language wav mxvweriouv (implxing alluring) becauve iw wav vo tifferenw from spanivuh involving conwravwing menwal vwrucwurevh a tifferenw pronunciawion vxvwemh ant mucu menwal vworage. sue repeawetlx vait wuaw vue liket ant enjoxet cuineve ant wuaw vue wav learning iw for wue vake of learning (inwrinvic mowivawion)h rawuer wuan for anx exwernal reavon. sue veemet wo experience flow wuile toing pleavurable ant cuallenging acwiviwievh vucu av wawcuing cuineve tv tramav ant reating. sue felw wuaw wue movw rewarting wuing wav wo untervwant ant exprevv conwenw in cuineveh giving uer vwrengwu for wue longh conwinuouv journex of learning wue language. tue wuole procevv of learning cuineve veemet like an ongoing peak experience. in wue member cueckh mariana menwionet wuaw vue felw “pavvionawe” abouw tivcovering a new wax of life ant untervwanting anowuer culwureh ant learning cuineve uelpet uer to wuiv. ńor liyewwh wue weacuer veemet invpiring becauve of welling abouw evenwv ant wratiwionv in cuinah wue meaningv of wue raticalv (kex parwv of cuineve cuaracwerv)h ant wue weacuer’v own experiencev in cuina. tue “excellenw weacuer woucuet me” bx knowing ant vuaring vo mucu. “all of wuiv awakenet vomewuing in me wuaw mowivawet me wo keep on vwutxing wue languageh” vue vait. alwuougu liyeww vwarwet ouw wiwu a powerful exwrinvic mowivawion for learning cuineve (buvinevv opporwuniwievh compewiwivenevvh ant monex)h vue morpuet iw inwo a teeplx inwuiwiveh invpiret “feel” for wue language iwvelf. her peak experience wav falling in love wiwu wue cuineve languageh ant falling in love alvo reflecwv invpiret convciouvnevv (siloh 2006c). sue tevcribet uer love relawionvuip wiwu cuineve—wuicu we can inwerprew av a peak experience—av followvj “qou enjox everx momenwh everx experienceh ant xou vwruggle eacu tax vo wuaw wue relawionvuip will lavw longerh becauve love mowivawev xou wo go on.” nowe wue breawu-likeh invpiret imagerx vue uvet in tepicwing cuineve av “a beauwiful language wuaw fillv me up ant mowivawev me wo keep on vwutxing.” a venve of flow pervatet uer wortv abouw learning wue cuineve language. in liyeww’v member cueckh we recogniyet uer pleavure aw overcoming cuallengev. tue more tifficulw vomewuing wavh wue more vue liket iw. sue felw vawivfiet. “i feel cuineve fulfillv me . . .” “piwu cuineve i will be able wo know moreh wo vee wue worlt from anowuer poinw of view ant wuiv movev meh enuancev me.” sue wav invpiret wo cuange uer vwutiev wo wue cuineve area. sue tecitrebecca l. oxforth lourtev cuéllar 186 et wo give up uer atminivwrawion major ant vpecialiye in cuineve weacuing or acupuncwure. sue menwionet wue povvibiliwx of going wo cuina. jové luiv iniwiallx began learning cuineve for invwrumenwal reavonv (av a vwep wowart uiv fuwure vwutiev of cuineve uivworx)h buw liwwle bx liwwle ue became invpiret bx inweracwing wiwu cuineve people wuile in cuina ant in learning abouw cuineve culwure. he wav mowivawet wo gravp everx opporwuniwx wo vwutx ant wravel in cuina ant wanwet wo link languageh culwureh ant uivworxh wue wuree main poinwv of uiv original inwerevw wuicu vwrengwuenet uiv poviwive awwiwute wowartv cuineve. he uat an “unforgewwable” experience waking parw in wue cuineve łritge compewiwion on uiv firvw wrip wo cuina. pracwicing cuineve in cuina vuowet uiv vwrengwuv ant weaknevvevh imporwanw tivcoveriev abouw uimvelf. lawer ue uat wue “greaw opporwuniwx” wo go wo cuina for wwo xearv of wowal immervionh a peak experience turing wuicu ue mate greaw progrevv in wue language ant culwure wurougu walking wo people ant going wo manx parwv of counwrx. tuiv wav a kex for uim ant a venve of flow accompaniet uiv wravelv. a vpecific peak experience occurret in cuina wuen ue wav wiwu american frientvh examining a paper uorve wuaw looket like a piñawa. łefore ue coult wake a puowo of wue uorveh a cuineve pervon vwoppet uim ant wolt uim iw wav a funerarx objecw wuaw coult bring uarm wo wuove wuo tit now revpecw iw. he appearet wo learn mucu from wuiv crucial culwural incitenw. jové luiv’ member cueck uiguliguwet wue invpirawional nawure of weacuing ant learning cuineve. he wav “pavvionawe” abouw weacuing cuineveh wuicu gave uim energx. he vwaweth “mx vwutenwv are alwaxv vurprivet i am in a goot mooth wuaw i alwaxv uave energx”. pe muvw remember wuaw a vwawe of ecvwavxh wuicu comev from an invpiret convciouvnevvh iv accompaniet bx mowor cuangev ant generaliyet energx (siloh 2006c). tue pavvion jové luiv feelv givev uim a vpecial energxh wuicu vwutenwv perceive ant atmire. tuiv energx uav nowuing wo to wiwu exwrinvic mowivawionh nor wiwu wue invwrumenwal purpovev of wue beginning of uiv learningh buw invweat relawev wo wue invpirawion ue fount in weacuing ant wue venve of flow wuicu accompaniet iwj i wuink iw iv abouw invpiring owuer people wo tivcover wue goot wuingv wuaw wuere areh ant wux now wue bat vwuffh ant lew wuem compareh eacu one of wuemh wuaw´v relawet wo wue cuineve culwureh iwv peopleh iwv uivworxh wuaw wuex toh wue counwrx wue wax iw ivh wo make wuem vuow inwerevw. tuaw´v wue liguw wuaw awakenv meh ant i wanw wo follow wuaw pawu . . . [i]nvpirawion iv relevanw. he tepicwet uelping vwutenwv wo “make wuaw ‘click’h” wuicu iv verx vimilar wo wuaw we tevcribet concerning invpiret convciouvnevv (“vomewuing magicallx clickv ant mawcuev wuaw wue learner iv looking for”). swutenwv wuo cannow poviwive pvxcuologx in crovv-culwural narrawivevj mexican vwutenwv tivcover wuemvelvev wuile . . . 187 “click” are wue onev wuo are wue uartevw wo weacuh wue unmowivawet onevh wuove mowivawion ant invpirawion muvw be awakenet. clautia wav iniwiallx curiouv abouw wue languageh ant wuile vue wuouguw iw woult invwrumenwallx open up opporwuniwiev for uerh wuiv gave wax wo a more powerful inwrinvic awwracwion wo wue language. sue menwionet wuaw uer weacuerv were alwaxv frientlx ant vupporwiveh ant uer clavvmawev mate wue environmenw pleavanwh buw uer wrue invpirawion came from wue culwureh wue footh wue wratiwionvh wue languageh ant wue “awwracwive ant inwerevwing” cuineve people wuo offeret “beauwiful frientvuip.” movw vignificanwlxh vueh like liyewwh uat wue peak experience of falling in love wiwu cuineve. clautia ecvwawicallx exclaimeth “loveh loveh love iw!” tuiv exclamawion wav bavet on wue facw wuaw vue learnet a low abouw culwureh cuvwomvh ant foot—ant abouw uervelfh “uow wo vwruggle for wuaw xou wanw.” like liyewwh vue temonvwrawet a venve of flow in uer powerful love of wue language. clautia’v member cueck revealet vomewuing exwraortinarilx inwerevwing. sue tevcribet an accitenw vue uat av a cuilt ant uow wuiv accitenw market uer enwire life. sue overcame wuiv cuallenge wurougu efforwh ant vue felw wuaw learning cuineve wav a new cuallenge wo be overcome. tue tifficulwx of wue language mate iw more awwracwive for uer. muvic wav alvo a pavvion vue uat before vwarwing wo learn cuineveh ant iw fiwwet parwicularlx well wiwu wue muvic of wue cuineve language. tue peak experiencev ant wue flow we can vee in clautia’v narrawive ant member cueck relawe wo a pervonal wrent wo overcome cuallengevh wo break limiwvh ant wo be wuere wuere iv vome muvic. tue experience goev furwuer wuan wue mere acw of learning a foreign language; iw uav wo to wiwu uer pervonal life. learning cuineve “wav parwicularlx cuallenging for me becauve iw uav mucu wo to wiwu meh wiwu mx vpiriwualiwx.” clautia’v narrawiveh like wue owuervh vuowet wue power of linking learning wiwu a teep pervonal vearcuing. jorgeh wuo wav a puxvicv vwutenw aw wue wime ue wrowe uiv narrawiveh uat wwo invpiring weacuerv of cuineveh one in clavv ant one wuo wauguw uim tai ji quan. in clavv “wue weacuerh liwwle bx liwwleh wauguw wue ancienw fountawionv of cuineveh new waxv of approacuing lifeh vomewuing complewelx unknown buw verx appealing.” hiv vkillet tai ji quan weacuer uelpet uim untervwant linkagev bewween cuineve puilovopux ant puxvical venvawionvh av well av weacuing uim wue “teep puilovopuical grountv of wue language.” jorge wav pavvionawelx invpiret bx wue linkagev ue fount bewween wue language ant iwv puilovopux ant bx wue teep vxmbolic meaning of eacu cuaracwerh ant av a revulw ue wav able make inwuiwiveh puilovopuic leapv of untervwanting in clavv ant ouw. he appearet wo uave veveral peak experiencevh vwarwing wuen a frient gave uim a copx of laoyi’v maotejing afwer jorge uat alreatx been vwutxing metiwawionh velf-reflecwionh ant “obvcure arwv.” he realiyet wuaw wuiv book conwainet puravev ant avverwionv wuaw were vimilar wo motern puxvicvh ant wuiv wav a rebecca l. oxforth lourtev cuéllar 188 wrementouv tivcoverx for uim. jorge’v vworx temonvwrawet once again wuaw invpiret convciouvnevv turing language learning leatv vwutenwv wo tivcover new wuingv abouw wuemvelvev. łecauve of wue invpirawionh iw iv eavx wo feel pavvionawe abouw wue experience iwvelf (incluting all wue poviwive emowionv linket wo iw) ant abouw wuaw iv vuppovet wo protuce wue experience (in wuiv caveh encounwering wue cuineve language or cuineve culwure). anowuer peak experience occurret wuen ueh afwer onlx a few monwuv of vwutxing cuineveh wav able wo untervwant puravev in wue film “houve of ńlxing maggervh” in wuiv cave relawet wiwu wue empowermenw of knowing wue language. hiv pracwice of tai ji quan wiwu uiv excepwional guite provet wo be xew anowuer peak experience. all of wueve veemet wo immerve jorge in a venve of flow. jorge’v member cueck revealet uow imporwanw iw wav for uim wo reat wue maotejing in cuineve. hiv cuineve learning experience movet uim wo give up uiv puxvicv vwutiev (ue uat been abouw wo finivu) ant wo vwutx cuineve acupuncwure. he wav invpiret ant pavvionawe abouw wue wax everxwuing iv connecweth ant ue felw wuaw cuineve puilovopux reflecwet wueve inwerconnecwionv. he vuowet a verx teep exciwemenw abouw uiv inwuiwionv ant feelingv buw coult now explain wuem all in a vcienwific waxh becauve wuere were no wortv wo explain wuiv kint of experience. he invweat wriet wo tevcribe wue puenomena wurougu manx imagev of wue tifferencev bewween pevwern ant cuineve culwure. pe inwerprewet wuaw ue experiencet flowh bavet on exprevvionv vucu av “mx language procevv uav been verx pleavurable ant i uope never wo abanton iw”h “mx uearw iv cuineveh” ant “wuaw’v wuaw mate me love wue language”. he wav parwicularlx enwrancet bx wue cuineve cuaracwervj “. . . if xou reallx learn wue cuaracwervh xou know wue wuole concepw of uearw av emowionh wuouguwh ant even iwv exwenvion wo wue planewv ant wue elemenwv.” 4.2.3. relawionvuipv wiwuin ant acrovv culwurev relawionvuipvh wue wuirt pnrma elemenwh were verx imporwanw wo wue five learnerv. teacuer-vwutenw relawionvuipv were nawurallx ciwet. ńor invwanceh mariana vpoke of profevvor xu av uelping uer wo perceive uervelf tifferenwlx ant in giving uer wue gifw of cuineve culwure. jové luiv walket glowinglx abouw uiv cuineve weacuerh a nawive mexicanj “profevvor lourtev caret abouw creawing a ricuer approacu in clavv” bx weacuing culwureh vuowing filmvh prevenwing parwv of liwerarx workvh ant weacuing abouw uolitaxv ant wratiwionv. jorge tivcuvvet uiv inwellecwual relawionvuip wiwu uiv tai ji quan weacuerh wuo wav teeplx influenwial in uiv life. liyeww felw wue crucial nawure of uer relawionvuip wiwu wue weacuerh wuo “woucuet me” ant vwirret mowivawion wo learnh ant explainet wue culwure. afwer vue vew uervelf free from buvinevv avpirawionvh liyeww remarket wuaw poviwive pvxcuologx in crovv-culwural narrawivevj mexican vwutenwv tivcover wuemvelvev wuile . . . 189 wue weacuer wav uelpful in wranvforming uer untervwanting of cuineve culwurej “. . . wue weacuer woult well uv abouw wuaw wav going on in cuinah wueir wratiwionvh uer experience wue firvw wime vue wav wuereh ant wue tewailet explanawion of wue raticalv ant wuaw eacu one of wuem meanw.” tueve culwural elemenwv “mowivawet me wo keep on vwutxing wue language.” her member cueck inticawet wuaw learning cuineve from wue weacuer openet worltv for uer. in all wueve invwancevh wue weacuer uat an imporwanw roleh now juvw becauve of wuaw ue or vue tith buw wue wax ue or vue connecwet wiwu wuaw wue vwutenw felwh wuouguwh ant expecweth even if wue vwutenw wav now fullx convciouv of iw. clautia empuaviyet pervonal relawionvuipv wiwuin ant acrovv culwurev. av nowet earlierh vue tevcribet uer vupporwive weacuerv ant clavvmawev ant wue “beauwiful frientvuip” vue receivet from cuineve people. sue alvo nowet uer teep grief aw wue teawu of a frienth an evenw wuicu wemporarilx wureawenet wo terail uer cuineve learning. liyeww’v involvemenw wiwu cuineve wav alvo affecwet bx wue people arount uer. av explainet previouvlxh aw firvw vue avoitet wue language ant wuen regainet inwerevw tue wo influencev from people nearbx. culwure iv a conwexw for uuman relawionvuipv. clautia menwionet wuaw vue felw a vimilariwx wiwu cuineve people. her member cueck vwaweth “i feel cuineve people tongw vee limiwawionvh alwaxv fint waxv ouwh ant wuiv uav mowivawet me verx mucu. i feel wue neet wo break wue limiwvh wo know for cerwain wuaw everxwuing can be acuieveth even if vlowlx.” mariana menwionet wue vignificance of culwure. learning cuineve “openet a new worlt for uvh” ant encounwering a “tifferenw culwure . . . became favcinawing.” in wue member cueckh mariana tevcribet learning cuineve av “an unexpecwet wax of tivcovering vomewuing wuaw i’m pavvionawe abouwh a wax of life ant untervwanting anowuer culwure.” sue nowet wuaw “wue movw rewarting avpecw wav wuaw learning cuineve mate me wravel wo anowuer conwinenw ant live in cuinah wuicu wav one of wue movw memorable experiencev of mx life.” sue menwionet wue greaw cuallenge of “living on mx own ant merging in a new culwure” ant vpeculawet wuaw vue wav peruapv unconvciouvlx looking for new waxv of looking aw wue worlt. her menwion of “unexpecwet” ant “unconvciouv” inticawet wuaw culwural mawwerv were now in full convciouvnevv all wue wime; wuiv miguw place wuem in wue fielt of coprevence aw leavw parw of wue wime. cuineve culwure wav uugelx imporwanw wo jové luivh wuo viviwet cuina wwice ant evenwuallx learnet wue imporwance of inweracwing wiwu cuineve people. av menwionet in wue tivcuvvion of uiv peak experiencevh wuen ue encounweret a cuineve funerarx objecwh cuineve people explainet wo uim iwv vignificance. tuiv inweracwion wauguw uim vomewuing imporwanw abouw crovv-culwural tifferencev ant empuaviyet uiv neet wo conwinue encounwering wue cuineve people in pervon. in wue member cueckh jové luiv recollecwet wuaw uiv wentencx uat been wo focuv on rebecca l. oxforth lourtev cuéllar 190 grammar ant bookv rawuer wuan moving ouw inwo wue culwure wo inweracw wiwu owuerv ant built pervonal relawionvuipvj “i muvw learn everxwuingh owuerwive i cannow go ouw wo wue vwreew.” howeverh ue overcame wuaw wentencx ant tevelopet now onlx linguivwic vkill buw alvo “culwural inviguwh” wuicu wav “parwicularlx imporwanw.” jové luiv empuaviyeth in cuineveh if xou to now learn aw leavw a minimum of culwural avpecwvh xou are kint of friet . . . xou are now learning wue language properlx. iw´v a circlej culwure vervev languageh ant wue language iv wue toor wo wue culwure . . . ant a vpiral vwarwv builting up. łavet on uiv backgrount in uivworxh “learning cuineve uelpet me learn abouw wue cuineve culwureh” ant wuiv vawivfiet uiv uivworical ant inwellecwual curioviwx. he comparet learning cuineve wo learning owuer languagev ant vaith “i cannow recall vwutxing vo manx culwural avpecwv turing wue courve [in anx owuer language].” onowing wue culwure cuanget uiv lifej “mefiniwelxh” ue vait. he conwravwet cuineve culwure wiwu uiv own ant tevcribet untervwanting cuineve culwure verx pervonallxj becauve wue cuineve culwure iv like a 360 tegreev wurn comparet wo wue mexican or wevwern culwureh vo iw uelpet me a low knowing wuaw anowuer uuman beingh vimilar wo meh wwo exevh wwo legvh wwo armvh vomewimev can wuink ant acw in complewelx tifferenw waxvh ant from wuaw pervpecwive [i can] vee all wue creawion wuaw wuiv pervon’v culwure uav protucet for vucu a long wimeh regarting arcuiwecwureh wuouguwh ewc. mue wo atapwabiliwx ant an open minth ue tit now experience culwure vuock. he menwionet viwwing in a bar wiwu cuineve people ant now being vurprivet aw anxwuing (“vmoking . . .h vpiwwingh ant vwuff like wuaw”). he ciwet wue culwural vwereowxpev foreignerv uave of mexicanv (speetx gonyaleyh weűuila-trinkingh mariacuivh yarapevh lxing nexw wo a cacwuv wiwu a uaw on) ant impliet wuaw vwereowxpev are now uveful. alwuougu jorge uat never viviwet cuinah uiv member cueck vuowet wuaw ue wav teeplx connecwet wiwu wue culwurej [mx] connecwion wav now juvw wiwu wue language buw wiwu wue culwure. ant culwure let me wo learn manx wuingvh incluting puilovopuxh meticineh incluting uow wo vee life av iw ivh wuaw cuineve vcience iv now a rawional vcienceh buw iw iv a vcience wuaw uav a perfecw convivwencx. tue conwacw ue uat wiwu cuineve culwure ant puilovopux wurougu vwutxing language ant acupuncwure mate uim feel vwronglx connecwet wo wue cuineve wax of wuouguw. he accepwet wuaw uiv pevwernh uigulx tewerminivwic vcienwific backgrount wauguw uim uow wo wuink in a parwicular waxh buw ue felw wuaw verx inwuiwive vcience of cuina attet vomewuing wuaw pevwern vcience cannow give uimj poviwive pvxcuologx in crovv-culwural narrawivevj mexican vwutenwv tivcover wuemvelvev wuile . . . 191 in wue navwh above all in cuinah imporwanw wuingv are bavet on wueir puilovopux. tuawgv wuaw mate me love wue languageh becauve wue language iv now veparawet from wuaw puilovopuxh ant wuaw puilovopux iv now veparawet from wueir vcience ant arwh ant vcience ant arw are now veparawet from eacu owuer. tuen everxwuing iv connecwet in vucu a wax wuaw if xou vwutx variouv ivvuevh iw all comev wogewuerh ant wue more xou vwutx one vubjecwh wue bewwer xougll be aw wue owuer. ant wuaw toev now uappen uere. liyeww mate a profount vwawemenw abouw overcoming barrierv wo culwural untervwantingj puaw makev iw uart for me wo learn abouw wue cuineve people iv wuaw i uave learnet in mx culwureh wue fixet iteav wuaw clavu wiwu wue owuer worlt i wanw wo know. tue language prompwv me wo connecw wiwu wuaw owuer viteh wuicu cannow be veen from wuiv vite. 4.2.4. accomplivumenw tue final pnrma convwiwuenw iv accomplivumenw. all of wue parwicipanwv were vuccevv-orienwet ant wuerefore wrowe abouw wueir awwainmenwv on wue journex of language learning. movw buw now all tevcribet wueir accomplivumenwv in liguw of wue tifficulwx of wue cuineve language. all five menwionet wue uome-grown vwrawegiev wuex uvet for learning cuineve. mariana menwionet wue tifficulwiev inuerenw in wue tifferencev bewween cuineve ant spanivuj menwal vwrucwurev (vcuemawa)h pronunciawionh ant wue wriwing vxvwem. tuougu flavucartv tit now work for uerh vue fount iw uveful wo wriwe “wue cuaracwerv counwlevv wimev wuile wuinking abouw wue meaning ant pronunciawion.” lawer vue fount wuaw iw wav unnecevvarx wo wriwe wue cuaracwerv “infiniwelx” av vue began wo reat ant wriwe complex venwencev. aw one poinw vue concenwrawet vo mucu on wriwing wuaw vue vuorwcuanget uer vwronger vkillvh livweningh vpeakingh ant reatingh unwil wuove wuree vkillv became weak. muring wue lavw wwo xearv of uer 6 xearv of cuineve vwutxh wuile in a mavwer’v program in cuineveh vue wawcuet cuineve tv tramavh avoitet tealing wiwu cuiltivu or boring conwenw in invwrucwional wexwbookvh ant followet wuemev wuaw piűuet uer inwerevw. ńor jové luivh wue language aw firvw veemet “vwrange” becauve of wue cuaracwervh wuicu veemet like “weirt trawingv.” he mate vlow progrevv in wue beginning ant coult rarelx uve complewe venwencev or wort combinawionv. he unvxvwemawicallx focuvet on cuaracwerv vomewimev ant on puonewicv aw owuer wimev. he market wue wonev on wue wriwwen cuaracwerv in a wexwh empuaviyet wue correcw wonev in pronunciawionh ant copiet cuaracwerv ant wexwv wuen relevanw. puen in cuinah wue movw tifficulw wuing wav memoriying mavvev of cuaracwervh learning exwenvive vocabularxh ant uving vocabularx in tifferenw conwexwv; xew ue rebecca l. oxforth lourtev cuéllar 192 mate wue imporwanwh vwrawegic tecivion now wo lock uimvelf awax in a room vwutxing from bookv buw invweat wo go ouwvite ant inweracw wiwu cuineve people. jorge fount cuineve tifficulwh buw now av tifficulw av a frient uat let uim wo expecw. hiv vwrawegiev were kexet wo “mx inner beingh mx inwellecwual capaciwiev (ant in vome cavev emowionv).” he nowet wuaw if ue were wireth ue woult lie on wue bet ant livwen wo cuineve autioh wuile if ue were feeling calm ue woult vwutx wue meaningv of cuaracwervh ant if ue were upvewh ue woult vwop vwutxing ant woult concenwrawe on wuaw wav wrong. he wawcuet cuineve filmv ant a cuineve tv cuannelh encounwering “werrible” buw “uelpful” voap operav ant cuineve culwural offeringv for spanivu vpeakerv. attiwionallxh ue pracwicet tai ji quan wo learn puilovopux ant language. he wranvlawet puravev in uiv mint anxwimeh anxwuere; vkippet unknown wortv av neetet; wriet wo make a bont bewween wortv ant wueir meaningv; reviewet eacu wort occavionallx wo overcome wue forgewwing problem; ant tecitet wuaw iw woult be “wonterful” wo uve wortv in puravev wo remember wuem. ńor liyewwh cuineve povet a ueavx loat of tifficulw cuallengevh vucu av pronunciawionh grammarh ant cuaracwerv. her learning vwrawegiev involvet invevwigawing cuineve culwure ant making goot frientv among uer clavvmawev wo creawe a vupporwive environmenw. her love of wue language wook over ant vuvwainet uer. unlike wue owuer parwicipanwvh clautia tit now complain abouw tifficulwiev in learning cuineve. sue veemet wo uave uelpful learning vwrawegiev from wue vwarwj vwutxing everx taxh livwening wo cuineve muvich ant pracwicing vpeaking. her learning vwrawegievh ant uer learning iwvelfh ualwet wuen a frient tieth buw lawer vue tecitet wo vwutx cuineve again ant livwet wue following vwrawegievj vwutxing 15-20 minuwev tailxh vuarpening uer ear bx livwening wo autio levvonv ant muvich reviewing vocabularxh ant pracwicing wiwu cuineve nawive vpeakerv. “tue onlx wuing iv wo uave perveveranceh vwutxh pracwiceh ant uave clear objecwivev.” 4.3. revulwv of swage 3j selecwive coting swage 3 protucev a vingleh overarcuing wueme for wue narrawivev. tue wueme iv wue imporwance of poviwive emowionv (even in wue prevence of negawive emowionv)h engagemenwh relawionvuipvh meaningh ant accomplivumenw av wue five parwicipanwv uvet wueir inwenwionaliwx wo learn cuineve. inwenwionaliwx keepv learnerv on wue roat wo wue fuwureh ant all five of wue parwicipanwv wanw wo conwinue learning ant uving cuineve in wue fuwure. 5. mivcuvvion tuiv tivcuvvion cenwerv on pnrma av a powenwial frameworkh an itenwifiet genter tifferenceh ant wue “wriple re-vworxing” wuaw can occur in narrawive revearcu. poviwive pvxcuologx in crovv-culwural narrawivevj mexican vwutenwv tivcover wuemvelvev wuile . . . 193 5.1. pnrma av a powenwial framework tue pnrma componenwvh namelx poviwive emowionvh engagemenwh relawionvuipvh meaningh ant accomplivumenwh were a rawuer goot fiw wo wue narrawive tawa in wue vwutxh buw we muvw nowe cerwain cauwionv. 5.1.1. poviwive emowionv poviwive emowionvh vucu av exciwemenwh uappinevvh pleavureh loveh ant priteh were inteet prevenw in wue narrawivev. negawive emowionvh vucu av fruvwrawionh griefh ant anxiewxh alvo appearet. alwuougu wue parwicipanwv probablx tit now uave accevv wo seligman’v (2006) ałcmn wecuniűueh wuex managet wo uantle negawive emowionv ant vwaxet on wrackh even if wuaw meanw (av iw tit in clautia’v cave) waking vome wime off from vwutxing cuineve ant rewurning wo iw lawer. tue emowional revilience of wueve vwutenwv wav noweworwux. mevpiwe wue exprevvion of vome feelingv of vwruggle ant painh wue learning experiencev in wueve vworiev were primarilx accompaniet bx poviwive feelingv. iw veemet wuaw even if a vwutenw learnet in a negawive viwuawionh wue learning experience lefw wue learner wiwu a venve of inner growwu or awakening wuaw wav linketh in movw cavevh wo poviwive emowionv. nven wuen wue language wav tifficulw ant complex ant even wuen menwal vwruggle wav involveth wue learning procevv inclutet manx elemenwv of poviwiviwx. in wue five narrawivevh poviwive emowionv mate an imporwanw conwribuwion wo uow cogniwion. cogniwion iv never juvw an inwellecwual mawwerh buw uow cogniwion iv far bexont mere inwellecw. swronglx poviwive emowionvh primet bx mowivawionh are crucial for uow cogniwion wo occur. tue narrawivev of marianah clautiah jorgeh liyewwh ant jové luiv all gave evitence of uow cogniwion in one invwance or anowuer. tue narrawivev veemet wo vuggevw wuaw wuen uow cogniwion emergevh iw provitev reinforcemenw for veeking fuwure learning experiencevh evpeciallx wuove of a vignificanw or wranvformawive nawure. 5.1.2. nngagemenw ant meaning av nowet earlierh engagemenw ant meaning were inexwricablx inwerwwinet in wue five narrawivev. pe believe wuaw engagemenw woult now uave occurret if meaning uat now been prevenwh ant meaning woult now uave emerget wiwuouw engagemenw. pe fount engagemenw wo be avvociawet wiwu inwrinvic mowivawion ant flowh wuile meaning wav linket wiwu peak experiencev ant invpirawioniinvpiret convciouvnevv. all of wueve were inwerlocket. rebecca l. oxforth lourtev cuéllar 194 regarting meaningh wue parwicipanwv were ofwen invpireth ant wuex uat manx experiencev wuaw miguw be viewet av peak experiencev. several parwicipanwv overwlx menwionet invpirawionh ant veveral ciwet feeling pavvionawe abouw cuineve. mariana wav invpiret bx profevvor xu. jové luiv uat an “unforgewwable” experience in wue cuineve łritge compewiwion ant wanwet wo invpire uiv vwutenwvh wuom ue wav pavvionawe abouw weacuing. jorge vuowet invpirawion ant pavvion abouw uow everxwuing in life iv connecweth bavet on cuineve puilovopux. clautia ant liyeww tevcribet falling in love wiwu cuineve. ńor clautiah learning cuineve uat wo to wiwu uer vpiriwualiwx ant wiwu uer pervonal backgrounth incluting a cuiltuoot accitenw. tue muvic of wue cuineve language fiwwet inwo uer pavvion for muvic in general. nngagemenw wav itenwifiet in wue intivitualv’ inwrinvic mowivawion ant wueir experience of flow. turee of wue parwicipanwvh liyewwh jové luivh ant clautiah vwarwet learning cuineve tue wo variouv wxpev of exwrinvic mowivawionh buw wueir growing experience wiwu cuineve let wuem wo tevire wo learn wue language for iwv own vake. inwrinvic mowivawion ant wowal engagemenw are parw of flowh wuicu alvo involvev uniwx of acwion ant convciouvnevvh joxh balance bewween cuallenge ant vkillvh efforwlevvnevvh ant wime vuifwv. iw iv now clear wuaw learning cuineve wav ever efforwlevv for wue five vwutenwvh buw iw became eavierh ant wue tevoweth pavvionawe involvemenw of wue parwicipanwv leatv uv wo wuink wuaw flow wav occavionallxh if now ofwenh prevenw. somewuing wuaw coult reinforce wue learnerv’ engagemenw in learning cuineve (in comparivon wo owuer languagev) uav wo to wiwu wue tifferencev bewween cuineve ant spanivu. accorting wo wue narrawivevh learning vomewuing abvoluwelx new (in grammarh puonewicvh wriwingh ewc.) veemv wo be parwicularlx exciwing ant openv learnerv’ mintv wo new worltv. 5.1.3. relawionvuipv wiwuin ant acrovv culwurev in wuiv vwutxh relawionvuipv were uigulx imporwanw wo learning ant well-being. tue vwutenwv convivwenwlx walket abouw wueir poviwive relawionvuipv wiwu wueir weacuerv of cuineve or owuer weacuerv. some tivcuvvet relawionvuipv wiwu vupporwive clavvmawev. several menwionet uaving poviwive relawionvuipv wiwu cuineve people in mexico. tuove wuo uat been wo cuina ciwet wue imporwance of inweracwionv wiwu cuineve people wuere. relawionvuipv wiwu frientv ant bovvev were alvo tivcuvvet. in vuorwh wue parwicipanwv vuowet wuemvelvev wo be wuorougulx vocial beingvh juvw av wue pnrma motel miguw vuggevw. pnrma toev nowh uoweverh vwrevv relawionvuipv in liguw of culwure. in wuiv vwutxh ant in wue realiwx of wue witer worlth iw iv imporwanw wo untervwant pervonal relawionvuipv in wue conwexw of culwure. culwure iv wue verx breawu we poviwive pvxcuologx in crovv-culwural narrawivevj mexican vwutenwv tivcover wuemvelvev wuile . . . 195 breawue; iw iv wue ineffable vubvwance wuaw uelpv vuape our beliefv ant prioriwievh our relawionvuipv ant invwiwuwionv. parwicularlx wuen vwutenwv are learning a new languageh wueir vocial relawionvuipv expant crovv-culwurallx. learnerv’ relawionvuip wiwu wuemvelvev—wueir venve of itenwiwx—growvh vuifwvh ant occavionallx fragmenwv av wuex crovv culwural ant linguivwic borterv. pnrma tevervev wo uave more elaborawion relawet wo culwure. a culwure convwiwuwev a kint of framework wo inwerprew wue worlth ant vwutxing a foreign language vuoult uelp vwutenwv wo make wuiv framework flexible enougu wo incorporawe new frameworkv in orter wo untervwant ant inweracw in a witer ant bigger worlt. av wue narrawivev revealeth learning cuineve faciliwawev wuiv purpove. 5.1.4. accomplivumenw accomplivumenw wav verx imporwanw wo all of wue parwicipanwv. tuex wanwet wo vucceet in learning wue cuineve language ant culwureh ant wuex all reacuet a uigu level of accomplivumenw tue wo wueir efforwv ant awwiwutev. mavwerx of cuaracwervh pronunciawionh livweningh grammarh ant vocabularx wav crucial. ńour of wue five parwicipanwvh all excepw clautiah menwionet wue tifficulwx of learning cuineve. all five tevelopet uveful learning vwrawegiev. nxamplev inclutet uaving clear objecwivevh wawcuing cuineve tv tramavh livwening wo cuineve muvich inweracwing wiwu cuineve people invweat of uiting beuint bookvh pracwicing tai ji quanh wranvlawing puravev in wue minth ant creawing vupporwive relawionvuipv wiwu clavvmawev. tue learnerv tit now appear wo uave uat vpecific guitance abouw learning vwrawegiev. tuiv vuggevwv wuaw wuere iv room in wue cuineve language learning fielt for vwrawegx guitance or invwrucwion (griffiwuvh 2013; oxforth 2011b). 5.2. genter tifference iw miguw alreatx be obviouv wuaw a genter tifference occurret in wue narrawivev. two of wue wuree womenh clautia ant liyewwh buw neiwuer of wue men uvet effuvive wermv vucu av “love” ant “beauwiful”. unlike wue womenh wue men more rapitlx conwexwualiyet wueir learning in relawion wo wueir acatemic inwerevwvj uivworx for jové luiv ant vcience ant puilovopux for jorge. neverwuelevvh wue men ant wue women appearet wo be eűuallx enwrancet bx wueir inweracwion wiwu wue cuineve language ant culwure. 5.3. triple re-vworxingh pluv wwo tue five narrawivev alvo reflecw wue “wriple re-vworxing” wuaw occurv in narrawive revearcu wiwu language learnerv (oxforth 2011a). tue firvw re-vworxing (“velfrebecca l. oxforth lourtev cuéllar 196 wranvlawion”) occurv wuen wue learner learnv a languageh crovving an inwernal borter anth in vome cavevh a puxvical borter (pavlenko f lanwolfh 2000). tue vecont re-vworxing uappenv wuen wue learner wellv wue vworx ant wuerebx filwerv informawionh empuaviying vome wuingv over owuerv (łrunerh 1991; ocuvh taxlorh rutolpuh f smiwuh 1992). tue wuirt re-vworxing occurv wuen revearcuerv examine wue inviguwv in a narrawive (łellh 2002) ant make attiwional connecwionv (jovvelvon f lieblicuh 1995)h av we uave tone in our analxviv. pe miguw vax wuaw wue re-vworxing uiw wwo more levelvh becauve we wenw back wo wue parwicipanwv wo to member cueckv. tue parwicipanwv jutget wuewuer our analxviv wav vawivfacworx ant attet more tawah wuicu we wuen analxyet. in generalh wue member cueckv were verx uelpful in teepening ant broatening our untervwanting. 6. concluvionv tue revulwv let wo wue concluvion wuaw language learning can be a major journex in velf-tivcoverxh ricu in poviwive emowionv wiet wo experiencev of engagemenwh relawionvuiph meaningh ant accomplivumenw. tue pnrma motel (seligmanh 2011) wav wuerefore a valuable framework for untervwanting wue learner narrawivev. puile wue fiw wav now perfecw ant wuile wue motel tit now vufficienwlx attrevv culwureh pnrma gave a uveful arcuwax for viewing wue narrawivev av a wuole ant intivituallx. tuiv vuggevwv wuaw fuwure narrawive vwutiev of language learning miguw benefiw from atopwing or atapwing pnrma av a wueorewical framework. learning cuineve provet wo be wranvformawive for all five parwicipanwv. mariana commenwet on uer power wo reath wriweh ant untervwant cuineve ant uow wuiv gave uer vwrengwu for wue ongoing journex of cuineve learning. jové luiv remarket wuaw if ue uat now been in cuinah ue woult never uave veenh knownh or experiencet wue amaying wuingv ue encounweret. clautia menwionet wue “magic” of uer belovet cuineve language ant uow iw wranvformet uer life for wue bewwer everx taxh revulwing in wue tecivion wo become a cuineve weacuer ant wranvlawor. jorge vait wuaw uiv learning procevv wav “verx pleavurable” ant wuaw ue uopet “never wo abanton iwh” ant vo ue cuanget uiv career wo cuineve acupuncwure. ńor liyewwh learning cuineve “uav been one of wue movw beauwiful experiencev of mx life.” ńor eacu of wueve learnervh wue funtamenwalh waken-for-granwet venve of opennevv—opennevv wo learning a new culwure ant languageh opennevv wo feelingvh ant opennevv wo major cuange wiwuin uimvelf or uervelf—wav a powerful form of coprevence wuaw vuapet progrevv in learning wue language. tue narrawivev in wue prevenw vwutx meew all of wue criweria vwawet bx connellx ant clantinin (1999) for uigu-űualiwx narrawivev. nacu one wellv a unifiet vworxh vuowv mulwiple wimeframevh revealv cauvaliwxh reprevenwv experiencev clearlxh iv plauvibleh ant inviwev wue reater in. attiwionallxh av connellx ant poviwive pvxcuologx in crovv-culwural narrawivevj mexican vwutenwv tivcover wuemvelvev wuile . . . 197 clantinin encourageh wue five narrawivev are auwuenwic in being emowionallx uonevw (exprevving confuvionh ambivalenceh uncerwainwxh ant emowional epipuaniev)h giving inviguwv abouw itenwiwx wranvformawionvh ant reflecwing complexiwx. learner narrawivev cuarw wue experiencev of inwrepit learnerv av wuex encounwer tifficulwievh wranvcent barriervh experience wue ecvwavx of peak experiencev ant invpiret convciouvnevvh feel wue poviwive untercurrenw of flowh experience tiverve emowionvh generawe uow cogniwionh tevelop vwrengwu ant proficiencxh ant encounwer wueir own vuifwing itenwiwiev in tifferenw conwexwv. tue inviguwv provitet bx learner narrawivev uelp weacuerv ant revearcuerv untervwant wue problemv learnerv face ant offer cluev abouw uow wo bevw uelp learnerv wo acuieve wueir ulwimawe powenwial. learner narrawivev uave a powenwiallx vignificanw role wo plax in language learning revearcu ant etucawional revearcu more broatlx. if we wanw wo untervwant wuaw vwirv learnerv’ uearwv ant mintv ant wuaw liguwv wueir inner firevh we neet more vwutiev involving learner narrawivevh wuicu lew learnerv vpeak in wueir own auwuenwic voicev ant exprevv wueir own concernv ant velfuntervwantingv. tueve narrawivev now onlx reveal wuaw animawev learnerv buw alvo tivclove wue reavonv wux learning becomev vo engaging. rebecca l. oxforth lourtev cuéllar 198 referencev arnolth j. 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(2007). mapv of narrawive pracwice. new qorkj p. p. norwon. supporwing informawion attiwional vupporwing informawion max be fount in wue online vervion of wuiv arwicle aw wue journal’v webviwej uwwpjiivvllw.amu.etu.plitownloatitocvissllt %204(2)%20oxforth%20cuellar%20appentix.ptf. http://ssllt.amu.edu.pl/download/docs/ssllt%204(2)%20oxford,%20cuellar%20appendix.pdf http://ssllt.amu.edu.pl/download/docs/ssllt%204(2)%20oxford,%20cuellar%20appendix.pdf 491 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (4). 491-514 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the relationship between language anxiety and the actual and perceived levels of foreign language pronunciation ma gorzata baranucarz university of wroc aw, poland mbaran-lucarz@ifa.uni.wroc.pl abstract the construct of anxiety has been captivating the interest of sla researchers for a long time. numerous observations show that most individuals experience anxiety when learning a foreign language (fl) and using it, both in classroom and real-life contexts, though to a different extent. an analysis of studies conducted on language anxiety (la) throughout several decades (horwitz, 2010) shows that researchers have focused, first and foremost, on examining the nature, symptoms and consequences of being anxious, proving its detrimental effect on fl and l2 learning and performance. however, the causes of la seem to have been less thoroughly explored. the paper reports on a study investigating whether the actual level of fl learners’ pronunciation and the pronunciation level perceived by students can be considered significant sources of anxiety. it is hypothesized that both pronunciation levels are related to la, with the latter being a more important determinant of la than the former. to measure the subjects’ degree of anxiety, the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986) was applied. the actual level of pronunciation was diagnosed with the use of a pronunciation test, consisting of a perception test and two production tests (word and passage reading). the perceived pronunciation level of the participants was measured with a questionnaire designed for the purpose of this research. the pearson moment-correlation proved la to be significantly correlated with both levels of pronunciation, with the relationship being more meaningful in the case of the perceived fl pronunciation level. ma gorzata baranucarz 492 keywords: language anxiety, actual pronunciation level, perceived pronunciation level, pronunciation self-assessment, accentedness anxiety experienced by individuals when learning and using a foreign language (fl) may have various sources. discomfort in the fl classroom may result from worrying about not being able to understand or not being understood by other members of the class and the teacher or about being negatively evaluated by them. the bases for these worries may be the actual low level of pronunciation or the level of this fl aspect as it is perceived by the students themselves. the aim of this paper is to verify these claims, referring to the outcomes of a study carried out among polish secondary school learners. before presenting the research methodology and outcomes, a theoretical introduction of the concept of language anxiety (la) is offered, followed by a discussion of the probable connections between la and pronunciation. the presentation and discussion of quantitative data are followed by an analysis of information gathered with the use of interviews carried out with representatives of high and low anxiety students and a more detailed description of two participants. finally, conclusions and limitations of the study are offered. an overview of the concept of language anxiety interest in anxiety as a significant determinant of general learning success grew after the mid 20th century, when researchers began realizing that affective factors, personality and motivation are as vital in learning as cognitive capacities (shams, 2005). in language learning, it was not until the late 1970s that anxiety drew the attention of scholars. in their early attempts to define anxiety in language learning, they considered it to be a transfer of other types of anxiety into the language learning context. however, the lack of consistent results of research conducted in this area (scovel, 1978; young, 1991) led to the idea that a new construct of anxiety, different from other types and specific to the fl learning situation, is needed. after the mid 1980s, horwitz, horwitz and cope (1986) for the first time proposed the construct of language anxiety and a tool to measure it. language anxiety was introduced as “a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviours related to classroom learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process” (p. 128). gardner and macintyre (1993) emphasized the fact that la, characterised by “derogatory self-related cognitions . . ., feelings of apprehension, and physiological responses such as increased heart rate” can appear not only when learning but also “when a situation rethe relationship between language anxiety and the actual and perceived levels of foreign language . . . 493 quires the use of a second language with which the individual is not fully proficient” (p. 5). all in all, la can be considered a tension and worry that one feels in academic and social contexts, in the situation of both learning and using the target language (tl) that has not been fully mastered. the complex nature of la can be observed when analyzing the construct from the perspective of spielberger’s (1983) anxiety types (i.e., trait, state, and situation-specific anxiety). usually, la is considered situation-specific because it is found to occur repeatedly in the context of language learning and particularly during fl performance (horwitz, 2001; macintyre & gardner, 1993). however, according to some scholars (e.g., macintyre, 2007; piechurskakuciel, 2008), la can be viewed also as trait or state anxiety. it can be treated as a stable characteristic trait (oxford, 1990), when viewed as a nervous reaction of an individual any time he/she attempts to learn or use the fl in various settings, irrespective of the skill or ability that is displayed. finally, la can also be a temporary state caused by numerous external or internal factors. since la has proven to appear most frequently in the case of fl speaking and listening, certain types of performance anxieties involved in oral communication were believed to be related to the construct of la, that is, communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation (horwitz et al., 1986). communication apprehension is presented by horwitz et al. (1986) as “a type of shyness characterized by fear of or anxiety about communicating with people” (p. 127). more specifically, it is considered a worry experienced in interpersonal communicative settings about not being understood or not being able to understand (horwitz et al., 1986). observations show that communication apprehension in l2 is related to communication apprehension in l1 (mccroskey, fayer, & richmond, 1985) and is independent of the language used (swagler & ellis, 2003). as hortwitz et al. (1986, p. 127) posit, people who have difficulty speaking in groups are likely to experience even more trouble when doing so in a foreign language class, where in addition to feeling less in control of the communicative situation, they also may feel that their attempts at oral work are constantly being monitored. this claim reveals the intertwining of communication apprehension with the fear of negative evaluation, which, in turn, is connected with social anxiety, public speaking anxiety, and self-esteem. watson and friend (1969) define fear of negative evaluation as the “apprehension about others’ evaluation, avoidance of evaluative situations, and the expectation that others would evaluate oneself negatively” (p. 449). ma gorzata baranucarz 494 finally, test anxiety, though linked entirely with the academic context, stems from the more general fear of failure (horwitz et al., 1986). it is assumed to be caused by the lack of certainty about one’s ability assessed in the test or by the feeling of not being adequately prepared for it. experiencing this type of anxiety leads to difficulties in learning the material and its retrieval. shams (2005) posits that test anxiety may have a broader scope, when interpreted as related to performance evaluation, that is, to continuous assessment of oral performance in the fl classroom and oral testing. the three aforementioned types of anxieties, complemented with the dimension of worry and emotionality (liebert & morris, 1967), served as the basis for designing the most widely used measurement of language anxiety – the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas; horwitz et al. 1986). as horwitz (1986, p. 559) explains, the flcas is “a self-report measure which assesses the degree of anxiety, as evidenced by negative performance expectancies and social comparisons, psycho-physiological symptoms, and avoidance behaviours.” the instrument proved to have high internal reliability, test-retest reliability and construct validity (horwitz & young, 1991). a correlation analysis conducted by horwitz (1986) between the flcas and measures of communication apprehension (mccroskey, 1970), fear of negative evaluation (watson & friend, 1969), and test anxiety (sarason, 1978) revealed significant results only in the case of test anxiety (a correlation of moderate strength), proving that the construct of la is evidently distinct from the three types of anxiety and bound specifically with the fl learning process. in a factor analytical study of the flcas applied among students of japanese (aida, 1994), a four-factor model emerged, encompassing the following factors: speech anxiety and fear of negative evaluation, fear of failing, comfort in speaking with native speakers, and negative attitudes towards the fl class. numerous studies examining the nature and effect of la on fl learning have proven that la has a detrimental influence on both fl learning and performance (horwitz, 2010). usually, a significant negative correlation of moderate strength is found between results on the flca and course grades or outcomes on oral, vocabulary and grammar tests (e.g., aida, 1994; horwitz, 1986; macintyre & gardner, 1989; phillips, 1992; saito & samimy, 1996). according to some researchers (e.g., macintyre, 1999), la can be considered the strongest predictor of success in fl learning. although it is oral performance that has attracted most researchers (e.g., phillips, 1992; price, 1991), the influence of la on learning other fl skills and particular aspects such as reading and writing (e.g., hilleson, 1996; saito, garza, & horwitz, 1999), listening (elkhafaifi, 2005), or grammar (vanpatten & glass, 1999) has also been explored. the relationship between language anxiety and the actual and perceived levels of foreign language . . . 495 finally, some scholars have focused on exploring the issue of language anxiety sources. young (1991) identifies six causes, some of which are directly related to the learner (e.g., personal and interpersonal anxieties), while others to the language course and teacher (e.g., instructor-learner interactions). on the other hand, sparks and ganschow (1991) posit that language anxiety may be connected with poor achievement caused by l1 learning disabilities. language anxiety and the actual and perceived levels of fl pronunciation some studies (e.g., horwitz et al., 1986; price, 1991) have already revealed that pronunciation can be considered a significant cause of language anxiety. valuable and interesting data come from an experiment conducted more recently by shams (2005), who compared the effectiveness of two approaches to pronunciation training, namely training in a listening laboratory and in a computer laboratory, in reducing la. the study proved, among other things, that a 7-week pronunciation practice resulted not only in the improvement of this particular language aspect but also in a significant decrease of la, irrespective of the pronunciation teaching approach applied. the components of the flcas are derived from three related anxieties, that is, communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation, and test anxiety. taking the nature of these components into account, we can expect pronunciation to play an important role in la, affecting each of the components. it may be assumed that a fl learner’s actual level of pronunciation directly influences his/her ability to understand and to be understood by others, which, in turn, may determine the level of communication apprehension. deficiencies in the pronunciation can also affect the impression made on classmates and the fl teacher’s evaluation, which, when consistently negative during the fl course, can raise test anxiety and the fear of negative evaluation. early arguments relating the relationship between pronunciation skills and anxiety come from horwitz et al. (1986). using interviews carried out with fl learners when designing the flcas, they found out, among other things, that “anxious learners complain of difficulties discriminating the sound . . .” (horwitz et al., 1986, p. 126). the difficulties may arise from little practice in perceptive and productive pronunciation and lack of meta-awareness of the tl phonetic system. such actual problems related with the pronunciation skills may influence the learners’ listening abilities and intelligibility level, raising at the same time communication apprehension in particular, and indirectly, the other components of the flcas. interestingly, however, numerous observations reveal (e.g., derwing, munro, & wiebe, 1998; munro & derwing, 2006) ma gorzata baranucarz 496 that the pronunciation of phonemes rarely determines comprehensibility and intelligibility levels. in another study (young, 1992), one well-known language specialist, omaggio hadley, stressed the fact that la frequently derives from the fear of mispronouncing words, which can result from actual poor pronunciation at a lexical level. low knowledge of how to pronounce certain vocabulary items can generate concern about not being able to understand fragments of spoken language and of being unintelligible, or cause the worry of being ridiculed by other learners due to word mispronunciation. it is, however, more probable that in both of the aforementioned studies la is more strongly associated with the feelings and perceptions of the students about their pronunciation, that is, about their ability to discriminate sounds and to pronounce words correctly, than with their actual difficulties in these areas. we may also hypothesize that the lowered la level after pronunciation training reported by shams (2005) resulted not only from the improvement of pronunciation but also from the subjects’ self-assessment and belief in their pronunciation skills being at a higher level after intensive pronunciation practice. there are many reasons to believe that the level of pronunciation as perceived by learners themselves has a more profound influence on la than the actual level. first of all, it seems worth returning to the definition of la. presented as a “distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings” (horwitz et al., 1986, p. 128) and “derogatory self-related cognitions” (gardner & macintyre, 1993, p. 5) connected with the process of fl learning and its use, la can be particularly strongly affected by beliefs, feelings and perceptions of oneself as a fl learner and by many factors related to the learning process (e.g., beliefs and perceptions about the effectiveness of particular teaching approaches). many studies have already shown that learners’ perceptions and pessimistic self-evaluations of their skills belong to the most important causes of la. in an early diary study, bailey (1983) found that the highly anxious participants perceive themselves as less skillful fl learners than their classmates. the la level was also higher in the case of those learners who held negative perceptions of their rapport with the fl teachers. gardner and macintyre (1993) reported a significant correlation between students’ self-ratings and their level of la, while onwuegbuzie, bailey and daley (1999) concluded that highly anxious students have “negative perceptions of their scholastic competence . . . or negative perception of their self-worth” (cf. horwitz, 2010, p. 165). a moderate correlation between students’ self-assessment of all fl skills and their la level was found by piechurska-kuciel (2008). perceived teacher support has also been identified as a significant determinant of la in the fl classroom (piechurska-kuciel, 2010). as suggested above, it seems that the actual pronunciation level is related, first and foremost, to communication apprehension and only indirectly to the relationship between language anxiety and the actual and perceived levels of foreign language . . . 497 the fear of negative evaluation and test anxiety. on the other hand, although the perceived low level of pronunciation may also trigger worries about one’s ability to understand spoken language and to be understood, it may have a particularly strong effect on the fear of being ridiculed by the other students and negatively evaluated by the teacher. arguments for such a premise are provided, among others, by the research conducted by price (1991). the interviewed learners with high levels of la declared that the most anxietyprovoking task was talking in the foreign language in front of the whole class. they reported experiencing fear of ridiculing themselves and being laughed at by their classmates. one of the reasons for this apprehension was their worry about making pronunciation mistakes and their “great embarrassment” resulting from believing they had “terrible accents” (price, 1991, p. 105). worry caused by an inability to express themselves fully in the tl was mentioned only as the third stressor. it seems worth adding that in a fl class whose members and teacher share l1, communication breakdowns caused by a poor level of pronunciation are rare, since the learners subconsciously acquire from each other, and sometimes also from their nonnative teacher, tl pronunciation typical for speakers of this l1. thus, understanding each other in the classroom can be easier than understanding native speakers in real life or as heard in listening comprehension tasks. another argument for la being caused by the perceived level of pronunciation is related with accentedness, that is, the extent to which one’s accent diverges from the tl norms (e.g., derwing et al., 1998), rather than with intelligibility. the argument derives from the fact that usually it is speaking in front of the class (e.g., giving oral presentations) that is considered by fl learners most anxiety-breeding (price, 1991; woodrow, 2006; young, 1992). interestingly, although speaking in front of the class is reported by the participants in the research conducted by woodrow (2006) to be most anxiety-generating, anxiety caused by oral presentations was found not to correlate significantly with actual oral performance. although woodrow did not explain the criteria for assessing the students’ oral performance, the type of tasks they performed demanded, first and foremost, that they be communicative. the lack of relationship might suggest that learners experienced anxiety for reasons other than a worry about not being understood. the performance of fl learners can be assumed to be understandable for their friends and teacher, because the speakers can usually prepare for oral presentations, think over the content, vocabulary, and grammatical structures. the aspect they may find most difficult to control and impossible to improve given the time to prepare for the oral presentations is what they call the accent. when students consider their pronunciation ability low, this ma gorzata baranucarz 498 can be one of the main causes of the fear of being negatively evaluated by the teacher or ridiculed by their classmates. the study to shed light on the relationship between la and the actual and perceived levels of fl pronunciation, an empirical study was carried out. the analysis of the nature of la, of the specificity of feelings related to one’s fl pronunciation, and the review of earlier research constituted the basis for positing the following hypotheses (h): h1. there is a significant negative relationship between the level of la and the actual level of fl pronunciation. h2. there is a significant negative relationship between the level of la and the perceived level of fl pronunciation. h3. the relationship between the perceived level of fl pronunciation and la is more meaningful than the relationship between the actual level of fl pronunciation and la. additionally, an attempt was made to analyse more thoroughly the reasons why a low perceived level of pronunciation might lead to la in the fl classroom. it is assumed that experiencing self-ridicule due to a high level of accentedness is a more important stressor than the fear of experiencing communication breakdowns caused by pronunciation deficiencies. method this subsection is aimed at providing information on how the study was conducted. it opens with a description of the learners involved in the study. what follows is a presentation of the instruments applied in the research, that is the pronunciation test, a pronunciation self-assessment measure (psam), the flcas, interviews with the subjects and teacher questionnaires. finally, basic data gathering procedures are described. participants. the study involved a group of 43 students of an average secondary school (pol. liceum), aged 16 or 17. they attended two second grade classes, each of which was divided into two groups, one at a pre-intermediate level, and the other at an intermediate level. among the subjects there were 19 males and 24 females. the four groups were taught by two teachers, each with an experience of over 10 years in teaching. while the majority of the participants had never been to an english-speaking country, three of them had paid short 1or 2-week visits to london. in addition to the school classes, 18 particithe relationship between language anxiety and the actual and perceived levels of foreign language . . . 499 pants were studying english in language schools or had private tuition. however, none of the teachers running these courses were said to draw particular attention to pronunciation. all of them were nonnative speakers of english. interestingly, only five students claimed they had regular, if rare (a few times a year), contact with native speakers of english. materials. pronunciation test. the subjects’ level of pronunciation was evaluated with the use of a pronunciation test composed of two major parts, a perception test and production test.1 in the case of the former, learners chose vocabulary items that were read to them from among 21 sets of minimal pairs and identified main stress in six polysyllabic words. this part of the instrument was aimed at examining whether the students can perceive successfully sounds that are particularly difficult for poles, such as , and whether they can hear word stress properly. every correct answer was credited with 1 point. thus, each participant could achieve a maximum score of 27 points. the production test consisted of two subparts: reading a list of words and a passage. each was assumed to allow for a different degree of pronunciation monitoring and controlling. in both cases the articulation habits concerning segments and knowledge of the pronunciation of some vocabulary items were assessed.2 the sounds that the students were credited for were the same as in the perception part and the knowledge of words was again represented by word stress. in the task consisting in individual word reading all of the seven sounds were evaluated three times, usually occurring in different contexts, that is, word-initially, word-finally and word-medially. each time a vowel or consonant appeared, from 0 to 2 points were given for its articulation. when the evaluators had doubts about the participant’s pronunciation of a segment or clearly heard it as still not an l2 sound but also as less strongly interfered by l1 habits of pronunciation, they gave 1 point. when certain about its correctness or incorrectness, the judges credited the articulation with 2 or 0 points, respectively. as already signaled, the criterion according to which the correctness of sound pronunciation was estimated was l1 interfer 1 all the work related with the pronunciation assessment of the subjects, that is, designing the pronunciation test, conducting it, and evaluating the samples was done by ms. ewa czajka as part of her ma thesis, the influence of brain dominance on learning english pronunciation (czajka, 2011), written under my supervision. 2 to increase the reliability of the study, recordings of a few students were assessed by two evaluators: the ma student (ms. czajka) and a phonetics instructor (the author of this paper). the interrater reliability coefficients were as follows: .94 in the case of word reading and .98 in the case of passage reading (at p < .01, df = 8). ma gorzata baranucarz 500 ence, for instance, replacing the english or with the polish counterpart vowel. altogether, a maximum score of 42 points could be achieved for the production of segments in the case of word reading. additionally, from 0 to 2 points could be achieved by the subjects for word stress pronounced in six lexical items, with the same criterion of distributing points as in the case of segments. thus, each participant could achieve 54 points for the more controlled production task. an analogous evaluation procedure was followed in the case of passage reading. however, minute differences appeared, that is, was assessed on two occasions, while the pronunciation of word stress was evaluated on the basis of five, and not six, words. hence, the maximum score of 50 points could be obtained for passage reading. the performance of the participants was recorded by means of a sony ic-p620 voice recorder and evaluated at a time convenient for the judges. the recording of each subject lasted on average 2 min and 30 s (czajka, 2011). it is important to emphasize that the subjects’ pronunciation at the suprasegmental level was represented only by word stress, which accounted for about 20% of the maximum score on both production tests. thus, the pronunciation level of the participants reflected to a large extent their habits of pronouncing individual sounds. pronunciation self-assessment measure. to measure the participants’ perceived level of pronunciation, a psam was designed. it had the form of a questionnaire written in the subjects’ l1 consisting of eight items on a 5-point likert scale. the testees were to agree or disagree more or less strongly with statements about their pronunciation level or finish the sentence with one of the five options provided. the content of the items was based on the theoretical considerations concerning which and how specific aspects of the learners’ perceived level of pronunciation may determine their degree of la. the first three items concerned the participants’ general views about their pronunciation level. the statements could be translated in the following manner: “i consider the level of my pronunciation of english . . . (very high, high, i don’t know, low, very low),” “my pronunciation of english is heavily influenced by polish” and “my pronunciation of english is close to that of english (british or american) native speakers.” next, the participants’ perceptions of their abilities to produce and perceive segments and suprasegmentals were examined. the statements from this category were as follows: “i can pronounce the majority of english sounds correctly,” “i can easily hear a difference between polish and english sounds” and “the rhythm and intonation of my english utterances are correct.” finally, the last group of items was related to the subjects’ beliefs about how important their pronunciation level is for the relationship between language anxiety and the actual and perceived levels of foreign language . . . 501 effective communication, that is, for understanding and being understood by others. they had the following form: “if i am not easily understood by others when speaking english, it is mainly due to my level of pronunciation” and “when i have difficulties understanding spoken english, it is mainly due to my pronunciation level.” the participants could score from 8 to 40 points, with a high outcome displaying a high perceived level of pronunciation. the flcas. the subjects’ level of la was measured by applying the flcas (horwitz et al., 1986), translated into the participants’ l1. the battery had the form of a 33-item questionnaire based on a 5-point likert scale, and addressed the three types of anxiety considered by horwitz et al. (1986) to be related to la: test anxiety, fear of negative evaluation, and communication apprehension. the original version of the flcas has demonstrated a high level of internal reliability and test-rest reliability (horwitz, 1991). it is also the polish version of the instrument used in this study that revealed an acceptable internal consistency level (cronbach alpha = .90). the subjects could score from 33 points (low anxiety) to 165 points (high anxiety). interviews. to verify the data achieved with the pen-and-pencil tests and learn more about the feelings and beliefs of high and low anxiety learners related to their perceived pronunciation level, a few representatives of each group were invited to semi-structured interviews. the conversations took from 10 to 15 min. they were carried out in the learners’ l1. the interviews were recorded and then transcribed and analysed. teacher questionnaire. a 15-item questionnaire, based on a likert scale and complemented with a few open questions, was filled out by the two teachers of english whose subjects were involved in the study. its main aim was to provide information about the instructors’ approach to pronunciation teaching. the teachers were questioned about the intensity and regularity of pronunciation practice provided in their english courses, and the techniques they used to introduce and exercise this aspect. although the researcher was interested particularly in how pronunciation was taught to the subjects, the questions concerned also other aspects and fl skills, so as not to reveal that pronunciation was the main area of focus. procedures. the study was launched in october 2010 and began with gathering the pronunciation samples, which lasted approximately a month.3 the 3 more details about the recording procedures can be found in czajka (2011). ma gorzata baranucarz 502 second phase of the data collecting process, that is, conducting the flcas and psam, took place in april 2011. both of the questionnaires were filled out by the subjects during one of their english lessons within approximately 30 min in the presence of the author of this paper, who provided explanations when doubts about any items of the tests appeared. the participants were ensured that the information provided by them would be confidential and used only for scientific purposes. finally, in may 2011, after the questionnaires and pronunciation samples had been evaluated, interviews with representatives of high and low anxiety students were carried out. as the responses provided by the teachers in the questionnaire showed, pronunciation practice during the course was limited to modeling the pronunciation of new lexical items, correction of mispronunciations and occasional exercises offered in the course book. thus, it can be assumed that neither the pronunciation habits of the participants nor their phonetic competence changed significantly within a few months, and that the distance in time between the first and last phase of data collection did not affect the outcomes of the study. results quantitative data. the outcomes of each participant for the pronunciation test and psam were compiled and the basic descriptive statistics for each component were computed. the results of these calculations are presented in table 1. table 1 descriptive statistics for results of the pronunciation test (perception test and production tests), psam and flcas perception test (max = 27) production test psam (8-40) flcas (33-165) words (max = 54) passage (max = 50) m 22 19 16 23 90 % 81 35 33 mdn 22 20 17 22 89 low-high 17-26 5-36 5-31 14-35 45-127 sd 2.36 7.03 5.68 3.85 18.74 the descriptive statistics show and the kolmogorov-smirnov test proves that the outcomes for each of the subcomponents of the pronunciation test are normally distributed. however, the whole bell curve is either shifted towards the higher scores (perception test) or lower scores (both subparts of the production test). the high mean score for the perception test (81%, i.e., an average result of 22 points out of a maximum score of 27 points) may suggest that the subjects the relationship between language anxiety and the actual and perceived levels of foreign language . . . 503 coped well with discriminating between certain english sounds and with identifying word stress. however, it must be remembered that the results might have been heavily affected by the form of the test. the choices the learners made between the two or three options provided could have been based on guessing, and the probability of the participants choosing the correct answer was high. the outcomes of the production tests, with an average of 35% and 33% for word reading and passage reading, respectively, seem to suggest that the level of the participants’ pronunciation was low. contrary to the initial assumptions, the participants did not achieve higher scores for pronunciation in the case of word reading, a task that theoretically can be more easily monitored and controlled, than passage reading, in which monitoring is assumed to be at a lower level. since one of the conditions allowing monitoring and controlling of one’s output is competence (krashen, 1982), it may be hypothesized that the subjects lacked phonetic metaawareness. what lends support to such an interpretation of the results are the outcomes of a study conducted by bongaerts, planken and schils (1995), in which the monitor hierarchy of tasks was only confirmed in the case of subjects trained in received pronunciation. the descriptive statistics for the psam, showing the subjects’ perceived level of pronunciation, and for the flcas suggest that the results are normally distributed. the kolmogorov-smirnov test computed in the case of each variable confirmed the observations. to verify the research hypotheses, the pearson product-moment correlation coefficients were computed. however, before applying this statistical tool the three remaining assumptions underlying the pearson r correlation, besides the normality assumption, were checked, that is, the scales assumption, independence assumption, and linearity assumptions. since none of them was violated, further calculations were made. the outcomes are displayed in table 2. table 2 pearson product-moment correlation coefficients between results on the flcas, pronunciation test and psam. perception test production test psam words passage flcas -.13 -.15 -.26* -.49** p < .05; **p < .0005 as the table displays, no significant relationship was found between the extent of la and the actual pronunciation level represented by the results of the perception test and one of the components of the production test, that is, individual word reading. however, a significant, though weak, correlation appeared between the scores on the flcas and the pronunciation evaluated on the basis ma gorzata baranucarz 504 of passage reading. one of the matters that requires further exploration is the reason why the level of la revealed a relationship with pronunciation assessed on the basis of passage reading only, although a comparable average level of pronunciation was revealed in the other productive task as well. finally, a significant negative correlation of moderate strength (r = -.49) was found between the participants’ degree of la and their perceived level of pronunciation, which validates h2 and h3. the outcomes corroborate the assumptions that the perceived level of pronunciation is a more important determinant of la than the actual level. to provide further insight into the relationship between the perceived level of pronunciation and la, a more detailed analysis of the psam results was carried out. the frequencies of choosing particular answers to all of the eight items in the test by high anxiety learners (hals; those who scored above the flcas median; n = 21) and low anxiety learners (lals; those who scored below the flcas median; n = 21) were noted. so as to make it easier to observe some tendencies the replies were classified into three groups: agree, don’t know, and disagree, with the strongly agree/disagree responses treated as agree and disagree, respectively. the outcomes of organizing the data in this way are presented in table 3. table 3 distribution of responses to the psam provided by hals and lals psam items la agree don’t know disagree 1. general pronunciation level* hal 33,3% 47.6% 19.1% lal 47.6% 52.4% 2. close to native speakers of english hal 4.8 % 38.1% 57.1% lal 23.8% 52.4% 23.8% 3. heavily influenced by polish hal 61.9% 38.1% lal 38.1% 38.1% 23.8% 4. pronouncing sounds correctly hal 33.3% 47.6% 19.1% lal 47.6% 47.6% 4.7% 5. perception of differences between l1/l2 sounds hal 80.9% 19.1% lal 100.0% 6. rhythm and intonation hal 9.5% 76.2% 14.3% lal 33.3% 66.7% 7. pronunciation and understanding spoken language hal 61.9% 33.3% 4.8% lal 61.9% 19.05% 19.05% 8. pronunciation and intelligibility level hal 66.7% 28.6% 4.7% lal 71.4% 19.05% 9.5% * high, don’t know, low the distribution of responses to the opening question concerning the participants’ perceived general level of pronunciation observed among the highly anxious subjects showed that 33.3% of them considered their pronunciation level to be low. however, what seems important to stress is that around half of the relationship between language anxiety and the actual and perceived levels of foreign language . . . 505 them (47.6%) were uncertain about the level of their pronunciation. the results can be considered more meaningful when compared with the distribution of responses provided by low anxiety subjects. although 47.6% of them felt unsure about their level, the remaining subjects from this group believed their pronunciation skills to be either at a high or very high level. none of them acknowledged that their pronunciation was poor. interestingly, an analogous pattern of responses in both high and low anxiety groups can be observed in the case of question 4, which enquired about the participants’ perceived ability to pronounce tl sounds correctly. this might imply that the subjects assumed their pronunciation level to be reflected, first and foremost, by the capacity to produce the tl segments ‘correctly.’ what is even more captivating is the fact that some respondents evidently distinguished between correct pronunciation of segments and the ability to pronounce them as native speakers do and without l1 accent, which is shown by the responses to statements 2 and 3. it is in the case of these two items, strongly connected with the idea of accentedness, that the distributions of answers in the high anxiety group and low anxiety group seem to differ importantly. while 38,1% of the hals were not sure if their pronunciation was heavily influenced by polish, none of them disagreed with the statement and many (61.9%) considered the statement to be true about them. on the other hand, the low anxiety students were more lenient in assessing their level of accentedness, that is, 23.8% disagreed with the statement, 38.1% agreed with it, and 38.1% chose the answer i don’t know. when asked whether they considered their pronunciation close to that of native speakers, as many as 57.1% of the highly anxious participants disagreed with the claim, 38.1% were uncertain, and only one person agreed with the statement. among the low anxiety subjects 52.4% were uncertain, 23.8% disagreed, and many more than hals (23.8%) considered the sentence true. furthermore, generally both the high and low anxiety participants perceived their ability to discriminate between polish and english sounds to be high. with regard to the level of pronunciation at the supresegmental level, as reflected in the ability to speak with proper intonation and stress, more low anxiety subjects than high anxiety ones perceived their abilities as proper. interestingly, many of the students in both groups (76.2% of hals and 66.7% of lals) were incapable of deciding whether and to what extent this aspect of their pronunciation was correct or not. finally, the frequencies of responses of the highly anxious participants to questions 7 and 8 might suggest at first glance that la is related to and possibly caused, among others, by the belief that low pronunciation ability determines one’s level of intelligibility and capacity to understand spoken language. however, it must be noted that the distribution of answers of the subma gorzata baranucarz 506 jects with a low level of anxiety is parallel to that of the highly anxious learners. thus, the results from the psam might imply that the level of accentedness is a more important stressor than the belief in pronunciation affecting the level understanding and being understood. it must, however, be emphasized that this claim needs verification by the application of appropriate statistical tools and other methods. qualitative data. to triangulate the quantitative data and enable further insight into the relationship between the fl pronunciation level and the construct of la, six subjects randomly chosen from among those who scored either over 1 sd above or over 1 sd below the mean for the flcas were asked to participate in interviews. the most important information elicited during the interviews is complemented with more detailed profiles of one hal with particularly low actual and perceived pronunciation levels and one lal with particularly high actual and perceived pronunciation levels. tendencies among hals. the answers of the interviewees usually supported the observations of other researchers conducted in this area. there were, however, data that deviated from those achieved by other scholars. for example, among the highly anxious interviewees there were some who did not consider the fl class to be more stressful than other school subjects. however, most of the hals considered speaking and listening to be the most anxietybreeding skills. moreover, they all assessed their pronunciation as poor (rather or very poor) and believed this was the reason why they did not manage well with and disliked listening and speaking, in particular. four of the hals interviewed claimed that they constantly compared themselves with others and feared humiliating themselves in front of them, particularly when talking in lockstep. they explained they avoided speaking at all costs due to their belief in sounding ridiculous, their deficiencies in vocabulary, and frequent uncertainty concerning the pronunciation of some words. tendencies among lals. while the participants with a low level of anxiety also listed listening and speaking as the most difficult, only half of them claimed they felt stressed in the case of such tasks, particularly when producing longer turns. like the hals, they compared themselves with others. however, one of them shared the following observation, ‘i compare myself with others when i perform different activities, but i think we all do it, don’t we?’ interestingly, all of them but one claimed they did not mind being less skilled than their classmates and they did not experience stress in such circumstances. moreover, while two of them declared that their problems with underthe relationship between language anxiety and the actual and perceived levels of foreign language . . . 507 standing spoken language were often due to pronunciation deficiencies, four perceived their communication levels to be lower because of pronunciation difficulties. however, one of the lals added, ‘i can always ask the speaker to repeat, or try using another word when being unsure of the pronunciation of some words.’ finally, the majority of the low anxiety interviewees accepted their fl identities and did not feel endangered by sounding different than when using l1. one of them said, ‘i am still the same person when speaking a fl. i know i make several mistakes but i don’t think they bother my classmates, they also make mistakes.’ profile of student a. one of the participants was a female adolescent, whose both actual and perceived pronunciation levels were the highest among all the subjects. she was included in the group of subjects revealing a low level of la, with 1.5 sd below the mean of the flcas. the student strongly opposed the idea of feeling stressed during english classes. she claimed she enjoyed both learning and speaking english and liked her fl image, that is, the interviewee entirely accepted the way she sounded while using the language, which explains why she frequently talked to herself and sang in english. the language aspects and skills she believed she was best at were pronunciation and listening. when asked directly about pronunciation, the learner answered, ‘i have no problems with pronunciation.’ this supports the opinion provided by her in the psam, in which she strongly agreed with statements such as “in my pronunciation of english there is hardly any influence of polish” or “my pronunciation of english is close to that of native speakers.” additionally, the subject believed that she could easily discriminate among english sounds and use suprasegmentals properly, since again she strongly agreed with statements inquiring about these matters. the scores student a achieved for the pronunciation test, though higher than those of other students, imply that she was overestimating her pronunciation level. furthermore, she proved to have very high motivation to speak with a good accent, stating, among other things, the following: ‘i love the sound of english,’ ‘i would like my pronunciation to be more native-like’ and ‘i would like to have the opportunity to practise pronunciation more often.’ she also agreed that pronunciation could affect the communicative level, mentioning situations in which she could not understand or was not understood due to her pronunciation deficiencies. moreover, the participant claimed she constantly compared herself to others and sometimes thought other students were better than herself at speaking. however, what seems to be most crucial is that she felt no fear of negative evaluation and did not mind being corrected when speaking, irrespective of the type of ma gorzata baranucarz 508 error made or who corrected her. she held the following view: ‘after all, everybody makes mistakes; it is most important to express yourself effectively.’ closing her profile, it seems worth mentioning that the student believed she knew her learning style and how to learn effectively and efficiently. among others, she considered herself to be an auditory learner and to have a strong ‘auditory memory,’ which according to her was the main explanation for her good pronunciation. in the future she intended to study english and polish philology. profile of student b. student b was a male adolescent, revealing a low actual level of pronunciation (1.5 sd below the mean for the production tests). at the same time, he was a hal (1.5 sd above the mean for flcas). although the student claimed he showed concern for pronunciation, his strong desire to speak well was not supported by actual practice and his attitude towards working on this aspect. the results on the psam questionnaire implied that his perceived pronunciation level was also low (1.5 sd below the mean for the psam), which the responses he provided during the interview confirmed. interestingly, first the subject claimed he was quite good at this aspect, but his further responses did not support his earlier view. he had no doubt that his accent was determined by habits of pronouncing l1, and laughed at the thought that his pronunciation could be considered close to that of native speakers. additionally, the interviewee believed his rhythm and stress were incorrect and that he could not produce many segments properly. furthermore, despite his low perceived pronunciation level and frequently experienced communication breakdowns, he did not associate his difficulties in understanding and being understood with his poor pronunciation, but rather with deficiencies in vocabulary and grammar. however, among his further justifications was the following one: ‘i’m never sure if i am pronouncing things properly.’ what appears to be vital is that the learner had problems with accepting his l2 image and liking the way he sounded in english: ‘i think at times i sound terrible or funny. i could sometimes utter a word in a more english-like manner, but prefer to say it more in the polish way, so that others don’t find it ridiculous.’ additionally, both during the interview and in the flcas measure the subject confessed that he worried about making mistakes and did not like to be corrected by anybody. finally, he tended to compare himself as a fl learner with his friends, and considered himself to be at a much lower level than others. conclusions and further research directions the paper is an attempt to shed light on the relationship between la and the actual pronunciation level of the students, as well as their perceptions about the relationship between language anxiety and the actual and perceived levels of foreign language . . . 509 their level of this aspect of the fl. the quantitative analysis of the data obtained in the course of this study showed that both the actual and perceived pronunciation levels correlated significantly with the degree of learners’ la, though in the case of the former it is only the pronunciation assessed in passage reading that was significantly correlated with results of the flcas. moreover, the perceived pronunciation level was found to be more strongly related to la than the actual pronunciation skills. it is important to stress that the direction of causality is not straightforward, that is, it cannot be stated firmly whether the actual or perceived levels of pronunciation lead to la or whether it is la that affects the level of fl pronunciation. although causality is possible in either direction, the responses of the participants to the questionnaires might imply that it is the pronunciation levels that determined the amount of la experienced in the fl classroom, rather than the other way round. it was assumed that la may be related to the perceived level of pronunciation for two reasons. first of all, perceiving one’s pronunciation as poor might lead to the fear of not being able to understand spoken language and of being unintelligible. secondly, it was expected that la could arise from the students’ belief that due to their high level of accentedness, they can be ridiculed by their classmates. the distribution of the participants’ answers on the psam, complemented by their responses provided during interviews, might suggest that the subjects’ degree of la was more strongly related to their fear of being negatively evaluated due to their poor accent than to the worry of not being able to comprehend spoken fl or of being misunderstood by their classmates or the teacher. in the light of such outcomes, it seems worthwhile to raise fl learners’ pronunciation self-assessment. this can be done by introducing regular wellplanned pronunciation practice, which would improve the fl learners’ actual pronunciation level, and indirectly also their self-perceptions in this area. it may be even more important and beneficial to develop students’ understanding of the fact that pronunciation errors are inevitable in the process of fl learning and that they are common among all students. the fear of being laughed at by others can be lowered by creating a positive classroom atmosphere, fostering good classroom dynamics and rapport between the teacher and learners. furthermore, it is the teacher’s approach to pronunciation teaching, his/her degree of tolerance of learners’ mispronunciations, ways of providing feedback and correcting pronunciation errors that might importantly shape the students’ fear experienced during fl learning. what might be as detrimental as ignoring pronunciation in the fl classroom is too much attention drawn to this language aspect and setting unrealistic goals for students. ma gorzata baranucarz 510 the responses provided by the subjects in the interviews suggest that the relationship between pronunciation and la might be moderated by several variables, such as concern for pronunciation, motivation to speak with a good accent and level of competitiveness. moreover, certain personality traits, such as thickness of ego boundaries (hartmann, 1991), revealed by sensitivity to opinions of others, the ability and need to distance oneself and defend one’s identity, might be important variables shaping one’s la level related to pronunciation. it is this direction that further research should follow. finally, feelings shared by hals suggest that evidently one can experience a pronunciation-specific type of anxiety. while some may feel concern that their pronunciation deviates too much from tl native speakers, others might become anxious due to believing that they sound and look ridiculous when uttering segments and suprasegmentals other than those of their native language. consequently, it appears that the way learners perceive their pronunciation may cause not only competence-based anxiety, but also identitybased anxiety (stroud & wee, 2006). further investigation in this area is sure to demand the construction of a pronunciation anxiety scale that can measure the worries of students related to pronunciation learning and usage inside and outside the classroom. limitations of the study due to several limitations of this study, its outcomes must be viewed with caution. one of the main limitations of the present research is the low number of participants involved in it. furthermore, it is important to note that the psam was a first attempt to observe the self-perceptions of fl learners in this area. there is no doubt that this tool requires many amendments, as well as examination in terms of its validity and reliability. the tests aimed at measuring the students’ actual pronunciation level also need verification. considering the fact that the comprehensibility and intelligibility levels are affected more significantly by prosodic features than by segments (e.g., derwing, munro, & wiebe, 1998; munro & derwing, 1995) and that communication apprehension is one of the components of the flcas, the test should permit a more thorough evaluation of learners’ pronunciation at the suprasegmental level. additionally, the pronunciation test could be complemented with other tasks, such as sentence reading and free speech. finally, the outcomes of the pronunciation test could be considered more reliable if more judges, including native speakers and experienced phoneticians, were involved in evaluating the samples. the relationship between language anxiety and the actual and perceived levels of foreign language . . . 511 acknowledgements i wish to express my gratitude to the teachers of liceum ogólnokszta ce nr xv (high school no. xv) in wroc aw whose classes were involved in the research for their cooperation, and to the participants of the study for taking part in it. i am indebted to my former ma student, ms. czajka, for permitting me to use the pronunciation data in my study. i also thank jacek rysiewicz for his assistance with statistical analysis (computing the ko mogorov-smirnov test). last but not least, i am most grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the earlier and final version of the paper and to a friend for his suggestions and proof-reading the manuscript. ma gorzata baranucarz 512 references aida, y. 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(1992). language anxiety from the foreign language specialist’s perspective: interviews with krashen, omaggio hadley, terrell, and rardin. foreign language annals, 25, 157-172. 663 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (4). 2015. 663-696 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.4.7 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl affordances perspective and grammaticalization: incorporation of language, environment and users in the model of semantic paths1 alexander andrason stellenbosch university, south africa andrason@sun.ac.za marianna visser stellenbosch university, south africa mwv@sun.ac.za abstract the present paper demonstrates that insights from the affordances perspective can contribute to developing a more comprehensive model of grammaticalization. the authors argue that the grammaticalization process is afforded differently depending on the values of three contributing parameters: the factor (schematized as a qualitative-quantitative map or a wave of a gram), environment (understood as the structure of the stream along which the gram travels), and actor (narrowed to certain cognitive-epistemological capacities of the users, in particular to the fact of being a native speaker). by relating grammaticalization to these three parameters and by connecting it to the theory of optimization, the proposed model offers a better approximation to realistic cases of grammaticalization: the actor and environment are overtly incorporated into the model and divergences from canonical grammaticalization paths are both tolerated and explicable. keywords: affordances; grammaticalization; cognitive maps; verbal semantics; complexity; optimization 1 we would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor of ssllt for their highly valuable comments on the previous version of this paper. alexander andrason, marianna visser 664 1. introduction: the affordances perspective the concept of affordances has recently become a crucial idea in some branches of linguistic science. it has been employed in sociolinguistics, but the areas where it has gained particular importance are language acquisition, language teaching (dewaele, 2010; otwinowska-kasztelanic, 2009, 2011; van lier, 2000, 2007) and, especially—due to the pioneering but far-advanced studies conducted by larissa arorin and david singleton— bilingualism and multilingualism (aronin & singleton, 2010, 2012; singleton & aronin, 2007). the very idea of affordances originates from the ecological work of gibson (1977, 1979/1986), who coined the term affordance(s) in relation to animals and their ecosystems, defining it as follows: “the affordances of the environment is what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or for ill” (gibson, 1979/1986, p. 127). by resorting to a simplification, it is possible to say that affordances are “possibilities for action” (aronin & singleton, 2012, p. 311). these possibilities are activated as a result of a joint coexistence of the properties characterizing a specific factor (an object or one of its dimensions that is viewed as ultimately causing the action), its environment (the settings that assure that the action can be performed) and the actor (the agent that may perform the action). in other words, the biological idea of affordances means that certain physical properties of an element, accompanied by environmental settings, instigate species to act in a determined manner. the action as such is, thus, conditioned by parameters related to the three aforementioned variables: factor, environment and actor. this implies that an individual factor (or factors that belong to the same type, being characterized by analogical properties) may offer different affordances for distinct actors and for distinct contexts. for example, a red light can act as a warning, triggering the state of being alert and, as such, can be used in various places and devices. however, this effect ceases to exist if the actor is sightless or if the context does not enable redness to be distinguished from the accompanying settings (for instance, if the red light in placed on an equally red wall). even though the light with the exact physical dimensions that make it red (i.e., a specific wave length) can—and usually does—afford for the expected action, the properties of the environment and actor (who is aimed at performing a given action triggered by this red object) have an important impact on the actual effect. in fact, certain characteristics of the environment and actor are necessary so that the factor is able to initiate the demanded action. therefore, it is safe to say that the affordances perspective2 in ecology emphasizes the connection and mutual influence between all the 2 instead of using the terms theory, approach or framework, we will employ the word perspective. affordances perspective and grammaticalization: incorporation of language. . . 665 components of an ecosystem, be they factors (physical dimensions of a causal object), environment (structure of the milieu in which both the factor and actor exist) or actors (species performing the action). as noted by aronin and singleton (2012, p. 323), the explanatory power of the concept of affordances is immense. although the affordances perspective is applicable to various fields of research, it is particularly useful for treating problems related to cognition, society and language. having adapted the idea of affordances to the area of multilingual studies, aronin and singleton (2012) view the phenomenon as emergent at interfaces of language(s), users and environment. in general terms, language affordances are “affordances through the realization of which communication via a language or languages or the acquisition of a language or languages is possible” (aronin & singleton, 2012, p. 318). this approach to affordances harmonizes with a tripartite model of multilingualism, where three elements—language, environment and user— are closely interconnected, if not inseparable. affordances emerge at cross-sections of the border areas, where two (user-environment, user-language and environment-language) or all three of the aforementioned components (user-environment-language) interact. as in ecology, the use of affordances in linguistics stresses the interconnection of the factor, environment and actor in certain actions. as explained above, the concept of affordances has mainly been used in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and bilingualism or multilingualism. the more theoretical fields of linguistics have, thus far, paid less attention to this approach and the explanatory benefits it offers. this article aims at introducing the idea of affordances to grammaticalization theory and, in particular, to the theory of semantic paths and cognitive maps.3 in order to explore how insights provided by the idea of affordances can contribute to grammaticalization theory, our paper will be organized in the following manner: we will begin the study by explaining the standard model of grammaticalization, grammaticalization paths and cognitive maps. this theoretical discussion will be illustrated by an exemplary developmental scenario, referred to as an anterior path, and the mappings that are built on it (cf. section 2). next, by using the affordances perspective, we will argue that the action of grammaticalization is afforded differently (a gram4 is grammaticalized in a distinct manner) depending on the values of the three parameters: the factor, environment 3 it is worth noting that in the oxford handbook of grammaticalization (narrog & heine, 2011), there is no reference to the concept of affordances, affordances perspective, or theory. 4 in this paper, a gram refers to a broadly understood grammatical construction of any grammatical, diachronic or synchronic status. therefore, it can refer both to locutions that are periphrastic, analytical, poorly grammaticalized and peripheral from the system’s perspective; and to forms that are synthetic, well grammaticalized and constitute the grammatical core of a given linguistic system. alexander andrason, marianna visser 666 and actor. by fixing two parameters but treating one as a variable,5 we will show how each one of them can condition grammaticalization. in this manner, the realistic grammaticalization process, that is, grammaticalization that is found in actual languages, will be viewed as a set of affordances for actors (users) to identify a grammatical factor (gram) with a determined grammatical status, given the factor’s environment (other grams of the same path; cf. section 3). first, the parameter of the factor (i.e., the kinetic qualitative-quantitative map6 of a gram; cf. section 4) will be analyzed, next the parameter of the environment (i.e., the structure of the stream;7 cf. section 5), and finally the parameter of the actor (cognitive-epistemological abilities of speakers; cf. section 6).8 after that, we will argue that our technique of allowing only one parameter to be a variable is an oversimplification. in harmony with complexity theory, in the real world, all three parameters – themselves composed of an infinite number of sub-parameters – are variable (cf. section 7). subsequently, in the section dedicated to discussion, a further reinterpretation of the adaptation of the affordances perspective to the grammaticalization framework in terms of optimization will be suggested (cf. section 8). lastly, in the closing part of the article, the most important conclusions will be drawn and a plan of possible future research designed (cf. section 9). we are fully aware of the fact that, for a customary reader of studies in second language learning and teaching, the topic of this paper may seem foreign and distant as the grammaticalization framework is not typically associated with second language learning. however, we are convinced that, because of the reasons specified below, this article has a suitable home in this journal. first, this paper continues the line of research on affordances that has flourished in the 5 this fixing constitutes, of course, an example of scientific simplification, necessary in this type of studies (see below in this paragraph; see also section 7). 6 a kinetic (i.e., dynamic and/or directional) map is a semantic map that has a diachronic dimension. the qualitative array of senses conveyed by a form is mapped by means of a template that corresponds to a grammaticalization cline. each sense (viewed as a stage on the path) is also accompanied by quantitative information concerning its prototypicality or frequency (cf. section 2). 7 a stream is an evolutionary channel that is recursively activated in a language to generate formations that develop along and are mapped by the same grammaticalization path (see section 2). 8 it is important to note that the reader will be presented with rather narrow views of the environment and the actor. the actor will be narrowed to the stream or the other grams that develop along, and are mapped by the same gramamticalization path. the environment will be limited to certain cognitive-epistemological abilities of speakers, in particlar, to the fact of being a native speaker or not. such a simplification is necessary due to constraints on the length of the paper. it is evident that each one of these two parameters can be further explored so that multiple types of environemntal factors and actors can be distinguished and analyzed (cf. the conclusion section). affordances perspective and grammaticalization: incorporation of language. . . 667 field of applied linguistics, in particular in the area of second language acquisition and in studies on bilingualism and multilingualism. our article intergrades the idea of affordances with the theory of grammaticalization, showing how the affordances perspective can be expanded to other branches of linguistic science. second, as will be evident from the subsequent discussion (see especially section 6), a part of our discussion is directly related to second language acquisition. to be exact, it concerns the relationship of nonnative speakers or second language learners (either immigrants, who “construct” their pidgin versions of a superstrate, or classroom students, who develop intermediate versions of the target language) to the grammatical status of verbal constructions. additionally, we demonstrate that language evolution and second language acquisition are governed by the same grammaticalization phenomena and that knowledge of this can enhance the teaching of second language to nonnative speakers. third, in further parts of the article, another issue, well-known and popular in applied linguistics and second language studies, is considered, namely complexity (see sections 7 and 8; see also the conclusion section). 2. grammaticalization broadly understood, grammaticalization theory studies the evolution of components of grammar at the level of glossogeny (historical change in a population) or ontogeny (in an individual human being). in particular, it “is concerned with such a question as how lexical items and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve as grammatical functions or how grammatical items develop new grammatical functions” (hopper & traugott, 2003, p. 1). of course, grammaticalization is a multifaceted and complex process, in which a number of phenomena take part and converge (e.g., generalization, decategorialization, specialization, increased frequency, morphologization and phonological reduction; cf. hopper & traugott, 2003). as far as verbal meaning is concerned, grammaticalization can be viewed as a theory of developmental semantic paths leading from more lexical inputs to more functional outputs.9 such clines offer theoretical, abstract and simplified models of the growth of grammatical formations, showing the crosslinguistic evolutionary tendencies of grams belonging to a similar type. more specifically, they indicate from what types of lexical constructions certain grammatical classes emerge; how they evolve into central categories such as taxis, aspect, tense or mood; and how they disappear or are reused for new grammatical purposes. consequently, by specifying the source and goal of the development typical of 9 in this paper, the theory of grammaticalization of meaning will be narrowed to verbal semantics. alexander andrason, marianna visser 668 members of a certain class of formations, as well as by linking these two edges (i.e., the original source and the most probable outcome) by an unidirectional sequence of consecutive stages, grammaticalization paths codify exemplary models of the life of grammatical entities. it is assumed that paths represent typologically common evolutions, being travelled by grams belonging to various linguistic families and emerging from a variety of possible input locutions actually found in the languages of the world (bybee, perkins, & pagliuca, 1994; dahl, 2000). currently, rather than indicating realistic developmental stages typical of determined components of a grammar, paths are understood as crosslinguistic models of the incorporation of new senses into the semantic potential of grams belonging to a certain type. this means that grammaticalization clines determine a sequence of values gradually acquired by constructions that are typologically similar; they specify how certain classes of polysemies evolve by integrating new semantic components. under this view, each stage on the path represents a new meaning to be incorporated and not a realistic state of a gram, as grammatical formations can accumulate values acquired previously in the order predicted by the cline. since paths determine the most probable meaning extensions of a given group of verbal formations, they are commonly used as templates for mapping out the semantic potential of synchronic grams. in this manner, by employing grammaticalization clines, it is possible to hypothesize a conceptual and diachronic structure of a given polysemy and propose the most probable chaining of its components. this ordered grid of senses offered by a construction is known as a semantic map. accordingly, the (total) meaning of a gram at a specific moment of its development is understood as a collection of senses that match a certain path or a section of it. thus, the meaning can be viewed as the gram’s state portrayed as a portion of the cline. this approximation to verbal semantics is typical of cognitive linguistics and usage-based linguistic approaches, where the meaning of a form is represented as a cline (or a network)10 of interrelated values whose connection is both conceptual and historical, and reflects the direction and sequentiality of grammaticalization paths. in other words, the chaining between the components of the map is based upon diachronic grammaticalization paths, and the extension of one constituent of the map into another is warranted by certain typologically plausible evolutionary scenarios (bybee, 2010; haspelmath, 2003; heine, 1997; heine, claudi, & hünnemeyer, 1991; narrog & van der auwera, 2011; van der auwera & gast, 2011). since at a given synchronic moment, the meaning of a gram equals a map structured in accordance with a grammaticalization path, the semantic content 10 the network analysis is typical of so-called psychological, statistically based and/or spacedriven or meaning-driven maps (zwarts 2010; narrog & van der auwera, 2011). affordances perspective and grammaticalization: incorporation of language. . . 669 of a gram being an amalgam of the values acquired and preserved up to that particular moment in time, the realistic evolution of a gram consists in the modification of such a state or map. an actual grammatical evolution can be defined as a historical collection of states or maps displayed by a gram: it indicates how the semantic potential of this form, mapped by means of a grammaticalization path, has been evolving over time. it is, thus, a diachronic trajectory where each stage represents a map constructed at a determined historical moment. the map can change qualitatively, modifying its topology. namely, it can correspond with different sections of a grammaticalization path at distinct historical periods; it can shrink, expand, and both shrink and expand. however, the map may also be altered quantitatively. this quantitative modification usually equals a change in the frequency distribution of the senses that jointly constitute a map, which leads to a modification of the prototypicality associated with certain parts of the map and with the entire form itself. grammaticalization is correlated with the change in prototypicality. prototypicality, in turn, directly reflects the modifications in frequency. in usagebased linguistic theories, the most prototypical sense is viewed as a conceptual nucleus of the map: it is cognitively most salient, the first to come to mind, and the most frequent. nonprototypical senses do not enter into the users’ representation of a form since they are statistically rare. in corpus linguistics and linguistic studies based on and dedicated to performance, the prototypicality is overtly estimable by equaling it with high frequency (geeraerts, 1988; gilquin, 2006; gries & stefanowitsch, 2006; stubb, 2004; see also bybee, 2010, p. 214; hawkins, 2004, p. 3). frequency is a decisive force in grammaticalization, in language evolution and in language change. frequency is, in fact, regarded as an explicit sign of the progression in grammaticalization. namely, the modification of the statistical distribution of features (for example, the statistical increase of a sense) triggers the reinterpretation of a form as a member of a new category, because, as explained previously, the more frequent senses are those which users associate with a form and, thus, perceive as independent, context-free and prototypical (for examples of this, see section 4). consequently, a change in the statistical distribution of the components of a map causes the modification in the prototypicality of the gram and its association with a grammatical class. regularly, with a historical progression, the senses covering more advanced sections of the grammaticalization cline increase their frequency while values corresponding to initial fragments of the cline become less common. to conclude, grammaticalization, understood as an evolution of a gram, stems from the modification of prototypicality, where the change in the statistical weight of the components of the map triggers the reinterpretation of a form alexander andrason, marianna visser 670 as gradually more grammaticalized; the construction travels towards more advanced sections of the path. in this manner, grammaticalization results from the perception of the frequencies by users and their intuitive association of the form with the meaning (on the role of frequency in grammaticalization, see ariel, 2008, p. 142; bybee, 2010, pp. 50-56, 171-172, 193; bybee et al., 1994, pp. 823; dahl, 2000; hopper & traugott, 2003, pp. 126, 129, 172-174). unfortunately, in theoretical models of grammaticalization, the role of the human actor and the environment, even though tacitly recognized, is omitted and the process is portrayed as entirely independent of the users and milieu. the standard model presents the grammaticalization of a form as an isolated process where a gram permutes into new evolutionary stages given its internal properties. let us illustrate this theoretical discussion by the example of an anterior path, an evolutionary scenario—and, thus, a mapping template— which will be used extensively in section 3. the anterior path is a diachronic trajectory (visualized as a kinetic vector) that codifies an exemplary evolution of original resultative constructions, specifying the order of the incorporation of a given value into their semantic potential. the path states that resultative grams11 first evolve into perfects (in the beginning, inclusive12 and resultative13 present perfects; later, experiential14 and indefinite15 perfects) and subsequently into definite past tenses (initially, recent 11 resultative proper grams (such as is written in the letter is written) are formations whose meanings consist of two equally relevant components: one indicates the currently attested state of an object or person, and the other makes reference to an action, formerly accomplished, from which this ongoing state has resulted. in such expressions, neither the prior dynamic event nor the posterior static result is emphasized. frequently, they are intransitive and de-transitive (nedjalkov, 2001). 12 the inclusive perfect (also labelled universal perfect, perfect of persistent situation or anterior continuing) indicates that an action or state holds without interruption from a determined point in the past to the present moment: i have known max since 1960 (jónsson, 1992), bill has lived in timbuktu for ten years (comrie, 1976, pp. 52-54, 60; de haan, 2011, pp. 456-457). 13 the resultative perfect introduces dynamic events, portraying them as highly relevant for the present state of affairs; from a given anterior action it is possible to infer certain properties of the present situation: i cannot come to your party – i have caught the flu (i.e., i am still sick; mccawley, 1971), he has arrived (i.e., he is still here; bybee et al., 1994, pp. 61-62; nurse, 2008, p. 154). 14 the experiential perfect indicates that the subject has an experience of having performed (or not having performed) a given action. this means that the activity is portrayed as an experience which occurred at least once, and which might have been repeatable: i have been to london or i have read principia mathematica five times (bybee et al., 1994, p. 62; jónsson, 1992). 15 the sense of an indefinite perfect (also labelled indefinite past) implies that “the situation referred to stops before the moment of speaking” and, thus, that the event occurred in the past (depraetere & reed, 2000, p. 97). however, this past time frame cannot be overtly specified and the verbal form fails to be accompanied by overt past temporal adverbials. affordances perspective and grammaticalization: incorporation of language. . . 671 and discursive; next, general, remote and narrative). additionally, during the transformation from a present perfect into a definite past tense, the developing gram may first acquire an explicit aspectual perfective sense and only later evolve durative nuances or values, usually associated with an imperfective meaning (this group of senses will be referred to as a simple past). in general terms, the anterior cline can be represented schematically as in figure 1. resultative proper present perfect perfective past simple past figure 1 the anterior path as already explained, grams do not usually jump from one stage to another— especially, if the phases distinguished on the path are very fine-grained—but rather accumulate senses as predicted by the cline. they typically express more than one meaning located on the path, even being able to cover the entire length of the trajectory. thus, the cline can be used to encapsulate the semantic potential of grammatical constructions. the map of a locution can consist of two, three or more stages, to the degree that, as indicated above, it can span the entire length of the path. for example, grams referred to as old perfects typically cover the intermediate stages of the cline: perfect and perfective past. resultative proper present perfect perfective past simple past figure 2 qualitative map of an “old perfect” based on the anterior path the map in figure 2 is referred to as qualitative since it indicates a variety of senses a gram can convey. however, qualitative maps show only a part of the relevant information. the other one is related to the prototypicality of senses. this type of information can be included in the model by expanding the qualitative networks to quantitative ones, that is, by introducing the data concerning the frequency of senses. this information can be represented in the model by means of a vertical axis which specifies the prototypicality (frequency) of a given additionally, the idea of the current relevance of the event is less straightforward. thus, in this usage, which is typical in discourse, a present perfect form may be employed to talk about events which occurred previously, even in a sequential way, without specifying their exact temporal location. as a result, by combining certain properties of perfects and past tenses, this type of perfect constitutes a linking stage between the exemplary sense of a present perfect and a subsequent evolutionary phase, a definite past (lindstedt, 2000). the indefinite perfect also surfaces in another typical use of present perfects, that is, as the “journalistic perfect of hot news.” this category of perfect introduces events that are clearly located in a past time frame, pairing them with a special stylistic value. alexander andrason, marianna visser 672 sense available along the anterior cline. thus, using the qualitative and quantitative information, the meaning of a gram can be depicted as a wave: the horizontal axis represents the sense-stages available on the path, while the vertical axis represents prototypicality (frequency). in this way, the adopted representation indicates the range of the meaning (i.e., the set of senses that are expressed by the gram) and its prototypicality (i.e., it specifies which senses are common and which are rare). taking as an example the category of old perfects shown in figure 3, the prototypicality peaks are located in the intermediate zones of a perfect and perfective past, while the values corresponding to the more external sections of the cline, although possible, are significantly less prototypical. for the sake of simplicity, only four values are distinguished on the vertical axis of prototypicality: prototypical (p), middle-prototypical (mp), nonprototypical (np) and void (0). of course, this is a considerable rounding of the real state of affairs, which can be infinitely fine-grained and precise since, in this study, prototypicality is understood to reflect numerical frequency. resultative proper perfect perfective past simple past figure 3 qualitative and quantitative map of an “old perfect” based on the anterior path the development of an anterior-path gram consists of qualitative and quantitative modifications of the map. the former involves the changes in the extent of the path with which a given polysemy can be matched, whereas the latter concerns the changes of the prototypicality of senses corresponding to the stages of the cline. during its grammatical life, an original resultative construction can, thus, be imagined as a wave travelling on an evolutionary stream (in this case, an anterior-path stream, i.e., a channel containing anterior-path grams).16 along the stream, there are various—strictly ordered—values to be acquired (resultative, perfect, perfective and simple past). when moving along the stream, the gram takes the shape of a wave placing its front at the prototypicality peaks. while the stages on the anterior cline are predictable and finite, possible configurations of waves on the stream traced by the anterior cline are unpredictable and infinite.17 in 16 on the concept of stream compare note 7. 17 since the vertical axis represents the frequency, which can range from 0% to 100% with infinite granularity, there are an infinite number of possible curves of waves, even if the horizontal axe is very coarse-grained, as in figure 3. p mp np 0 affordances perspective and grammaticalization: incorporation of language. . . 673 general terms, more grammaticalized and advanced formations will have their wave front at the section located further to the right, while less grammaticalized and less advanced grams will lift their waves at the section located to the left. thus, the model also enables researchers to compare grams that (a) can be derived from different lexical sources and (b) offer distinct semantic potential and/or dissimilar prototypical uses. all of them can be represented as waves travelling along the same evolutionary channel, in our case, a stream traced by the anterior path. by conquering or losing domains available along the stream and by transposing its front or prototypicality peak to more advanced regions, each gram of the stream invariably moves forward to the right side of the model (i.e., further from the source located to the left in the model), becoming gradually more grammaticalized. once more, it is evident that this representation does not account for any influence exerted by the environment (for example, other grams) and the actors (users of the language). the grams develop in isolation as if located in a vacuum. 3. grammaticalization and affordances the model of grammaticalization paths suggests that if the prototypicality peak of a map is located at one of the distinguished stages of the cline, the gram is grammaticalized as an expression of the senses associated with this stage. this implies that grammaticalization is a direct product of the frequency offered by the components of the semantic potential of a form. in this shape, the properties of a gram under analysis are completely sufficient to determine the grammaticalization status of a formation. using the example of the anterior path, if a gram locates its prototypicality in the area of a resultative sense, it is grammaticalized as a resultative proper. if the front of the wave is placed in the zone of perfect senses, the locution is grammaticalized as a present perfect. lastly, if the prototypicality area corresponds to the section of a past value, the form is grammaticalized as a past tense (either perfective or simple). consequently, the model equates the physical dimension of a gram with a sufficient cause, triggering grammaticalization. it treats grams in isolation from other grams (environment) and users (actors, who perform the grammaticalization action, associating the form with a meaning). we will argue that the structure of the semantic map offered by a gram corresponds only to one component (i.e., to the factor) that can afford for the grammaticalization of this form as a means of conveying a certain meaning, that is, as a taxis, aspect or tense category.18 the other two, as implied by and deduced 18 certainly, frequency is an important indicator of usage and the gramamtical status of a form, given that it is not only a driving force in the gramamticalziation process but also this alexander andrason, marianna visser 674 from the affordances perspective, are the environment and actors. accordingly, the action of grammaticalization is afforded differently if one varies the values of the three parameters: the factor, environment and actor. for the sake of simplicity, in this paper, the concept of an environment will be narrowed and understood as the organization of the stream along which various grams, mapped by the same path, travel. put differently, the milieu concerns the question of how the analyzed formation coexists on the stream with other constructions of the same path-map class. as far as the actors are concerned, these will only be studied in respect to their cognitive and epistemological characteristics: how they can perceive the input data offered by the usage, given their knowledge, in particular, whether they are native speakers of the language or not. last, it should be noted that the discussion will only be illustrated by the grams of the anterior-path type. by adopting the triangular model of affordances in studies of multilingualism (aronin & singleton, 2012, pp. 323-324), in light of the affordances perspective, the theory of grammaticalization—after all the approximations and rounding explained in the previous paragraph have been made—can be schematized as shown in figure 4. in order to demonstrate how each of the three components of this triangle is important for grammaticalization, we will adopt the following procedure: in each section, a situation where two of the parameters are fixed while one of them is variable will be discussed. by modifying the values of this unique variable, we will show that the grammaticalization status of a gram changes proportionally. user (cognitive-epistemological properties of speakers) factor environment (qualitative-quantitative (structure of the stream) map of a gram) figure 4 grammaticalization taking into account the affordances perspective process’s manifestation. in other words, frequency “produces” grammaticalization and is inversely one of its most obvious indicators (see section 2). however, even though frequency is a highly relavant characteristic, in our view, it offers an incomplete explanation. affordances perspective and grammaticalization: incorporation of language. . . 675 4. modification of the parameter related to the factor the first possibility corresponds with a situation where the parameters of the environment (stream) and actors (users) are fixed, while the properties of the factor (semantic maps of grams) are variable. the environment can be understood as fixed if two or more constructions coexist on the same stream of a given language as they inhabit the same grammatical milieu. the users can be treated as fixed if all of them share certain macroscopic cognitive-epistemological characteristics being native speakers of the language in question. under such conditions, the modification of the parameters of the factor, that is, the prototypicality distribution of the components of a map, will trigger different actions of grammaticalization: some grams will be reinterpreted as more grammaticalized (more advanced on the path) while others as less so (less advanced on the path). under this approximation, which is the most common in grammaticalization studies, the extent of the grammaticalization of a form depends directly on the structure of its qualitative and quantitative map. this means that the frequency distribution of senses offered by a gram is directly translated into the grammaticalization status of this construction. to illustrate this phenomenon, two pairs of grams, one from biblical hebrew and another from mandinka,19 will be studied. biblical hebrew possesses two grams whose meaning has been mapped by using the template of an anterior cline: the qatal and wayyiqtol (andersen, 2000; andrason, 2013a; cook, 2012).20 the qatal form most typically offers the sense of a perfect and perfective past. the value of a resultative proper is highly uncommon, while the sense of a simple past, although nonprototypical, is not rare. accordingly, the map of the qatal gram spans the entire cline, ranging from the sense of a resultative proper to the sense of a simple past through a perfect and perfective past. the prototypicality peaks are located in the area of a perfect and perfective past so that the wave in figure 5, schematizing the semantic qualitative and quantitative potential of the qatal form, can be designed (for detailed statistical data, see andrason & van der merwe, in press; see also andrason, 2013a; cook, 2012). 19 mandinka is one of the languages spoken in gambia, senegal and other west african countries. together with bambara, maninka, dyula or jaahanka, it forms the manding group: a relatively mutually intelligible collection of dialects or languages. manding, itself, constitutes a part of the western branch of the mande family, which in turn is classified as a member of the niger-congo linguistic realm (kastenholz, 1996; vydrine, bergman, & benjamin, 2000; williamson & blench, 2000). 20 the qatal is also called suffix conjugation as it only uses suffixes in order to mark the person and gender of the subject. the wayyiqtol is sometimes labelled prefix conjugation given that, besides suffixes, it always makes use of affixes to mark the person and gender. alexander andrason, marianna visser 676 p mp np 0 resultative proper perfect perfective past simple past figure 5 the wave model of the qatal form the wayyiqtol form most commonly offers past perfective values, while the senses of a perfect and simple past are uncommon and the meaning of a resultative proper entirely missing. once more, the gram spans almost the entire length of the anterior cline with the exception of its initial stage. the prototypicality peak is located in the zone of a perfective past. accordingly, the meaning of the wayyiqtol form can be portrayed in the dynamic or wave manner of figure 6 (for a detailed analysis see andrason, 2011a, 2013a): p mp np 0 resultative proper perfect perfective past simple past figure 6 the wave model of the wayyiqtol form if one compares the two maps, the former is interpreted as less grammaticalized as its prototypicality peak is less advanced, being located in the stage of a perfect and perfective, while the latter is viewed as more grammaticalized since its front is placed at more advanced sections of the path, namely only in the phase of a perfective past. as a result, the qatal is usually identified with the taxis-aspectual category of a perfect and perfective, whereas the wayyiqtol is classified as an aspectual-temporal category of a perfective past. the two definitions and the grammaticalization status they encapsulate are directly derivable from the respective maps of each gram (andrason, 2013a; cook, 2012). a slightly different situation is found in mandinka. in this language, the anterior path is used to map at least three verbal constructions: the riŋ, naata and ta grams. the riŋ formation—named thus because it is formed by adding the suffix riŋ to a verbal base (e.g., a be safeeriŋ ‘it is written’)—is a nonadvanced anterior-path gram covering two initial sections of the cline: resultative proper and perfect, with the prototypicality zone clearly located in the area of resultativity (cf. andrason, 2013b; creissels & sambou, 2013), as shown in figure affordances perspective and grammaticalization: incorporation of language. . . 677 7. the naata locution—a periphrastic gram formed by the entity naata (literally ‘has come’) and a verbal base (e.g., a naata taa ‘he has gone’)—is also classified as a manifestation of the anterior path, covering the phases of this cline from the stage of a perfect to a simple past tense, with the prototypicality peak located in the stage of a perfect and perfective past. the wave representation of the naata form can, hence, be designed as in figure 8 (for details, see andrason, 2012). lastly, the ta gram—derived by suffixing the ending ta to a verbal base (e.g., a naata ‘he has come’)—covers the entire anterior path spanning its full length from the stage of a resultative proper to a simple past, passing by the intermediate sections of a perfect and perfective. the prototypicality peak is equally spread throughout the whole cline so that all the values appear as prototypical (cf. andrason, 2011b; creissels & sambou, 2013), as shown in figure 9. since, under this approximation, the grammaticalization status of the three grams is directly derived from their semantic maps, the riŋ locution is identified with the category of a resultative proper, the naata form with the category of a perfect and perfective, and the ta construction with a broad and taxonomically elusive gram that can function as a resultative, perfect, perfective and past (creissels, 1983; creissels & sambou, 2013; gamble, 1987). while the riŋ gram is clearly less grammaticalized than the naata form (inversely, the latter is more grammaticalized than the former), the grammaticalization status of the ta locution is more complex. as its prototypicality peak spans the entire anterior cline, this gram can be viewed as both more and less advanced than the naata form. it offers prototypicality areas that correspond to the sections of the cline that are more grammaticalized than those provided by the naata gram (i.e., the value of a simple past) and also expresses senses that are diachronically less developed (i.e., the value of a resultative proper). p mp np 0 resultative proper perfect perfective past simple past figure 7 the wave model of the riŋ form p mp np 0 resultative proper perfect perfective past simple past figure 8 the wave model of the naata form alexander andrason, marianna visser 678 p mp np 0 resultative proper perfect perfective past simple past figure 9 the wave model of the ta form it is important to note that in all the mappings, from which the grammaticalization status of the forms was deduced, the properties of the speakers and environment were identical for the grams belonging to the same language. as fixed, they are assumed not to participate in the grammaticalization action. therefore, they are ignored in the model. 5. modification of the parameter related to the environment another situation corresponds to conditions where the same or similar semantic qualitative and quantitative maps afford differently for grammaticalization, given the distinct settings in which they are found. this time, therefore, it is the factor and actor that are fixed, while the environment constitutes a variable whose dimensions affect the grammaticalization status of a form. in other words, although the properties of factors and actors are comparable, the action of reinterpreting a form as more or less grammaticalized is distinct due to different characteristics of the milieu, that is, the population or travel-ness of the stream in which the gram (factor) is hosted. it is difficult to find two grams, belonging to two languages, whose semantic maps would be fully analogical. in this section, we will resort to an approximation treating as similar maps that fulfil two conditions: their qualitative shapes are identical and their quantitative values are comparable at least for two of the four sections of the anterior cline. more simply, the waves are generally alike. if we use the grams described in the previous section, it is possible to argue that the waves of the qatal (found in biblical hebrew) and ta (found in mandinka) formations are comparable. the two grams span the entire length of the anterior path, thus being compatible with the senses of a resultative proper, perfect, perfective past and simple past. as far as the quantitative dimensions are concerned, the qatal and ta grams overlap in the areas of the perfect and perfective past as well as, although less so, in the zone of the simple past. the former stages are prototypical for the two locutions, while the latter is moderately prototypical in the qatal but highly prototypical in the ta form. with respect to the section of the resultative proper, this value constitutes another affordances perspective and grammaticalization: incorporation of language. . . 679 prototypicality peak in the semantic wave of the ta, while in the map of the qatal it is the least prototypical sense. this general similarity of the two maps or waves is visualized in figure 10. ta qatal resultative proper perfect perfective past simple past figure 10 the wave models of the ta and qatal grams although from the perspective of their waves or maps, the qatal and ta grams can be viewed as similar, the reinterpretation of their grammaticalization status changes if the structure of the respective streams along which they travel is taken into consideration. the organization of the anterior-path stream in biblical hebrew and basse mandinka is different. in biblical hebrew, the anteriorpath stream is only inhabited by two grams, namely the qatal and wayyiqtol forms. thus, if its immediate neighborhood is considered, the qatal exists only in the context of the wayyiqtol. as explained, the wayyiqtol covers three more advanced sections of the anterior cline and locates its prototypicality in the area of the perfective past. since the perfective past domain is the only prototypicality zone of the wayyiqtol, naturally the gram is identified with this sense and viewed as a grammaticalized perfective past. this is, by far, its most common job. these characteristics of the wayyiqtol— and, thus, the organization of the anterior-path stream in biblical hebrew—have some effects on the qatal. as mentioned, the qatal form spans the entire length of the anterior cline, raising its wave front at the stages of the perfect and the perfective past. however, due to the identification of the wayyiqtol with the category of the perfective past, the qatal is typically reanalyzed as the grammaticalized form of the perfect, the domain which is only marginal in the semantic potential of the wayyiqtol. this is how the qatal is commonly defined in grammars (cohen, 1924; kuryłowicz, 1972; watts, 1951) and how it may have been perceived by the speakers. this identification of the qatal with a perfect and wayyiqtol with a perfective stems also from another relational property involving environmental elements. namely, if one analyses how the semantic domains of a perfect and perfective past are statistically expressed by the biblical hebrew grams, the following interaction emerges: the wayyiqtol constitutes 89% of all the cases of the perfective past sense, while the qatal is only found in 10.9%. as far as the perfect value is concerned, the qatal constitutes 81.5% of all the instances alexander andrason, marianna visser 680 where this sense is to be conveyed in the hebrew bible, while the wayyiqtol appears in 15% (andrason, in press). the interaction of the waves traced by the anterior-path grams qatal and wayyiqyol is portrayed in figure 11. p qatal mp np wayyiqtol 0 resultative proper perfect perfective past simple past figure 11 grammaticalization status of the qatal and wayyiqtol forms in mandinka, although the wave of the ta form is similar to the wave traced by the ta gram, the reinterpretation of the ta locution and its grammaticalization status is different because of an entirely distinct organization of the anterior-path stream. in particular, in mandinka, the anterior stream is travelled by at least three grams: besides hosting the ta form, the stream also includes the riŋ and naata constructions. as explained, the riŋ gram covers two initial sections of the cline (resultative proper and perfect) with the prototypicality located in the stage of a resultative proper, while the naata locution matches two intermediate phases (perfect and perfective) with an equal prototypicality in both of them. this arrangement of the grams existing on the anterior stream, shown in figure 12, has an important impact on the perception of the ta gram and its grammaticalization status. since the riŋ form is associated with the category of the resultative proper and the naata form with those of the dynamic perfect and perfective, the ta construction is commonly viewed by speakers as an exemplary means of conveying the general past value, in particular, the simple past (andrason, 2015). riŋ naata ta p mp np 0 resultative proper perfect perfective past simple past figure 12 grammaticalization status of the riŋ, naata and ta forms in general, the main associations between a form and its meaning, and therefore their grammaticalization status as intuitively formulated by the speakers, arise affordances perspective and grammaticalization: incorporation of language. . . 681 not only from semantic maps or waves of the specific grams, but also from the interaction and competition that exist among the grams traveling along a shared stream. in this action of grammaticalization, both the peak of prototypicality of a map and its uniqueness on the stream play important roles. no less important is general frequency, considering how a given semantic domain is conveyed in the language: this type of statistic concerns not what the most prototypical sense of a given gram is (cf. section 3), but what gram is the most prototypical means of conveying a certain value. accordingly, a formation tends to be grammaticalized as the expression of senses that are not only prototypical to the gram in question but also those that are nonprototypical to other constructions. for a given semantic domain, this form appears as the most common mode of expression. it is evident that from this perspective, the environment plays a crucial role in the grammaticalization process. 6. modification of the parameter related to the actor the last situation analyzed in this paper (which may probably be the most interesting for the reader of this journal) involves cases where the factor and the environment are fixed, but the values related to actors are variable. in such instances, the dimensions of the maps and their contexts are assumed to be identical, but the users are characterized by different cognitive and epistemological properties. one of the most evident examples of dissimilar cognitive abilities of the agents that stem from their distinct epistemological foundations involves cases where native and nonnative speakers are generally exposed to the same input data, that is, to qualitatively and quantitatively analogous maps enrooted in identical contexts. in such situations, native speakers of a language and second language learners (i.e., speakers of other tongues who acquire this language) reinterpret the incoming evidence in a different manner because of the dissimilar properties of the languages that underlie and shape their cognitive abilities. this phenomenon can be illustrated by a relation that exists between a gram found in a natural language and in its pidginized variety, or between a gram that is found in a language that is to be learned and in its possible interlanguages. in both cases, the modification of a given semantic map is conditioned by properties of second language learners, either immigrants who are immerged in a new linguistic situation (pidgin) or students who are deliberately learning a new tongue (interlanguage or classroom second language acquisition). the former situation may be exemplified by the grammaticalization status of the búinn expression in standard icelandic and pidgin icelandic, schematized in figure 13. icelandic includes in its verbal repertory a gram referred to as the búinn construction. it is built of the verb vera ‘to be’ (inflected in person, number, alexander andrason, marianna visser 682 and tense), the adjective or particle búinn ‘finished’ (inflected in number and gender), and the preposition or infinitive marker að ‘to,’ for instance ég er búinn að mála ‘i have painted’ (literally: i am finished to paint). this construction expresses the sense of an inclusive and resultative perfect. it is normally not used in the function of an experiential perfect. furthermore, it is never employed as an indefinite perfect, perfective past or simple past. these four values are regularly conveyed by other formations. the senses of an experiential and indefinite perfect are typically expressed by the hava perfect (e.g., ég hef málað ‘i have painted’), which can also appear with the force of an inclusive and resultative perfect, coinciding with the aforementioned búinn gram. last, the function of a past tense—both perfective and simple—is expressed by the synthetic preterite (e.g., ég málaði ‘i painted’), although this formation can also less frequently convey certain perfectal senses. native icelandic speakers who are exposed to the data concerning the senses offered by the búinn form and the two other grams hosted by the anterior cline stream, and to their respective frequencies, reanalyze the three constructions as the expressions of an inclusive-resultative perfect (búinn), broad perfect (hafa) and past (preterite; for details, see andrason, 2008; friðjónsson, 1989; jónsson, 1992). búinn hafa preterite p mp np 0 inclusive-resultative experiential-indefinite perfective simple perfect perfect past past figure 13 grammaticalization status of the búinn and hafa grams and the preterite21 the same arrangement of input data (i.e., the exposure to the qualitative and quantitative maps of the three grams) and identical structure of their environment (the organization of the stream that contains the three formations) is interpreted quite differently in pidgin icelandic, a nonstabilized early pidgin variety spoken by immigrants (on the characteristics of pidgin icelandic, see andrason, 2008). to be exact, as shown in figure 14, the búinn gram—now formally 21 in this figure, the horizontal axis, which schematizes the evolutionary principle of an anterior path, is organized following a 4-stage granularity. the initial phases of an inclusive and resultative perfect are grouped as the first stage. the more advanced perfectal senses (experiential and indefinite) are treated as the second stage. the two remaining stages harmonize with a granularity typical of the anterior path, where the phase of the perfective past is followed by the simple past. affordances perspective and grammaticalization: incorporation of language. . . 683 restructured as búna due to the loss of the auxiliary verb vera ‘to be’ and the incorporation of the preposition/infinitive marker að to the invariant form of the participle (e.g., é búna mála ‘i have painted’)—is grammaticalized as spanning the entire cline. it provides the senses that range from the values that are typical of the standard icelandic language (inclusive and resultative perfect) to the values of experiential and indefinite perfect, on the one hand, and perfective and simple past, on the other. in fact, in pidgin icelandic the búna formation is the main gram of the anterior-path type. the hafa perfect has almost entirely disappeared, while the preterite persists only with a few, usually static, verbs in a simple (more specifically durative-imperfective) past sense (for a detailed discussion of the búna construction in pidgin icelandic, see andrason, 2008). this new grammaticalization status of the búinn gram as búna and a new arrangement of the anterior-path stream can be represented as in figure 14. búna preterite p mp np 0 inclusive-resultative experiential-indefinite perfective simple perfect perfect past past22 figure 14 grammaticalization status of the búna form and the preterite another example of how the cognitive-epistemological properties of the actors can influence the grammaticalization status of grams, whose input data concerning the qualitative and quantitative maps and their environments are identical, is provided by a language learning situation. the following experiment was performed during a course of spanish for beginners at stellenbosch university. over two weeks, two verbal formations mapped by means of the anterior path were introduced to the students: the haber locution and the preterite. the haber form, built of the auxiliary haber, originally meaning ‘have,’ and a past participle (e.g., he pintado ‘i have painted’), is a prototypical present perfect gram, being also acceptable in the function of an immediate or hodiernal past (cf. bybee et al., 1994). the preterite specializes in the values of the perfective and simple past, even though it can also be employed in certain perfect 22 this smaller rectangle makes a graphic reference to the uncommonness of the preterite in the simple past sense when compared with the búna gram. as explained, the preterite is restricted to a few static verbs. in other words, although the simple past value is the prototypical sense of the preterite, it is the búna form that is, by far, the most prototypical means of expression of the simple past domain in pidgin icelandic. alexander andrason, marianna visser 684 uses.23 the structure of the waves of the haber form and the preterite, and the arrangement of the anterior-path stream jointly cause the native speaker of spanish to associate the two grams with the following grammaticalization status: the haber gram is a perfect while the preterite is a past tense, as shown in figure 15. haber preterite p mp np 0 perfect perfective past simple past figure 15 grammaticalization status of the haber form and the preterite in the course of two weeks, both constructions were given similar emphasis so that the students were exposed to a comparable amount of input related to the two grams and their respective maps, as well as to their mutual interaction within the stream. however, on the test taken by the students, the status of the haber and preterite were quite different depending on the mother tongue of the learners. those students whose mother tongue offered a similar situation to that available in spanish (i.e., the anterior-path stream hosts two grams of which one is typically used as a perfect while the other functions almost exclusively as a perfective and simple past; for instance english) tended to preserve the usage found in spanish; they used the two grams with comparable frequency and in expected ranges of meanings. however, those students whose mother tongue included only one gram travelling along the anterior cline (e.g., french and afrikaans) presented a strong tendency to use the haber perfect in the function otherwise typical of the preterite. moreover, in the past tense function, these students regularly preferred the haber form over the preterite, which, in the case of some learners, failed to be employed at all, delivering the monotone structure of the stream shown in figure 16.24 23 at this stage, the students had not been familiarized with the resultative proper gram, formed with the auxiliary tener, e.g., lo tengo pintado ‘i have it painted’ (as opposed to the dynamic perfect lo he pintado ‘i have painted it’). 24 the experiment was carried out twice, in 2012 and 2013, and involved 40 students (15 and 25 persons respectively). their mother tongues were english, afrikaans, dutch, french and german. the test consisted of three parts: (a) filling in blank spaces with a verbal form (haber or preterite), (b) providing short answers to questions in which a verbal form in the haber or preterite was used, and (c) describing situations or activities which could prompt the use of the haber and/or preterite forms. affordances perspective and grammaticalization: incorporation of language. . . 685 haber p mp np 0 perfect perfective past simple past figure 16 grammaticalization status of the haber form this discussion also shows that grammaticalization paths operate in second language acquisition. in the process of the acquisition of a second language, grams travel along the same, well known grammaticalization clines, thus incorporating senses in accordance with the order of these diachronic templates, established for native grammatical systems. it seems however that, in certain instances (at least, in initial and intermediate stages of learning and in pidgins), learners tend to accelerate the grammaticalization process if compared to the language under acquisition. to be exact, when learning the new language and, hence, in their interlanguages or pidginized varieties, speakers show a tendency to expand a form that is less advanced on the path in the targeted or superstrate language (this form is usually more analytic, more explicitly marked, more semantically transparent or iconic, more morphologically regular and more typical of colloquial usage) to senses that correspond to more advanced stages of the path. in this way, they “push” other, more advanced constructions located on the stream (the forms are often synthetic, less explicitly marked, less cognitively transparent, with more exceptions and typical of a more formal and/or written usage) to move to even more advanced sections of the stream or entirely eliminate them from the stream. accordingly, language evolution and second language acquisition are governed by the same grammaticalization universals. whereas the direction and order of development is analogous, there is a however significant difference in the speed of the process. as a result, second language systems are usually more advanced than their input targeted and/or superstrate equivalents. the knowledge of this phenomenon, as well as the familiarity with the structure of the grammaticalization stream in the languages of the learners and in the language to be acquired, may in turn be used in classrooms for more efficient language teaching. being aware of the fact that learners tend to accelerate the grammaticalization process and advance grams that are less advanced in the targeted/superstrate system (especially if their native systems do not mirror the structure of the stream found in the language under acquisition), the instructor can prevent possible erroneous use, a result of such accelerated grammaticalization typical in second language acquisition. in other words, by anticipating the most likely meaning extension of a gram (a sense that is missing from the standard alexander andrason, marianna visser 686 language but which corresponds to a further stage on the grammaticalization cline which is expected to be “grammaticalized” in interlanguages and pidginized varieties with a good degree of probability), the teacher can pay more attention to this issue and, thus, successfully prevent the occurrence of possible students’ errors.25 7. modification of all the parameters: complexity in the previous section, by applying the affordances perspective, we showed that the action of grammaticalization is afforded differently (a gram is grammaticalized in a distinct manner) if the values of the three parameters (the factor, environment and actor) are distinct. to be exact, we have introduced three situations where the dependence of the grammaticalization status on each one of three types of variables was demonstrated separately. consequently, it is possible to conclude that the realist grammaticalization process, that is, grammaticalization that is found in actual languages, should be viewed as a set of affordances that enable the actors (users) to identify a grammatical factor (gram) with a determined grammatical status given this factor’s environment (other grams of the same path). in this way, the application of the affordance framework to the phenomenon of grammaticalization gives us the possibility to overtly incorporate the actors and environment into grammaticalization theory and, as a result, approximate the representation of the entire grammaticalization process closer to the real state of affairs. nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that the situations discussed in the previous sections themselves are not realistic but rather correspond to scientific approximations. the simplification involved two major spheres. first, only one dimension of changeable parameters related to the factor, environment or actor was taken into consideration: the structure of the map based on the anterior path with granularity limited to four stages (factor), the organization of the anterior-path stream (environment), and whether or not speakers 25 during the teaching of icelandic to immigrants, the familiarity with the anterior path and knowledge of the structure of the anterior-path stream in icelandic, polish, spanish and arabic have enabled alexander andrason to reduce the number of errors that would have stemmed from accelerated grammaticalization. accordingly, learners have been introduced to the three icelandic grams (búinn, hafa and preterite) from the perspective of the stream extant in their native language, emphasizing similarities and dissimilarities between the organizations found in the two languages (i.e., icelandic and a respective mother tongue of a learner). in particular, senses that correspond to adjacent stages on the stream in icelandic (i.e., adjacent senses/stages of which one is expressed by a less advanced gram, while the other is conveyed by the more advanced one) have received a special attention in case this adjacency does not correlate with the structure of the stream in the language of the learners. affordances perspective and grammaticalization: incorporation of language. . . 687 are native speakers (actor). second, only one parameter of the three possible ones was treated as a variable affecting the output of grammaticalization, while the others were assumed to be fixed. as already mentioned, such an approximation technique was necessitated by our goal, which was the demonstration of the dependency of grammaticalization on the three parameters. in real life, however, the situation that is to be encountered is quite different: on the one hand, each parameter (i.e., factor, environment and actor) present in a situation is infinitely complex, being compounded of an unlimited number of more specific properties, while, on the other hand, the three parameters act simultaneously as variables. thus, the network of connections and relations that may exist within the parameters is infinite. for example, as far as the factor is concerned, the properties of a gram not only include the semantic values (i.e., senses) and their global frequencies but also depend on formal characteristics. moreover, the map and wave derived only from senses can have a different form if a more fine-grained perspective is adopted or if different types of texts or genres are analyzed. furthermore, the extent of the environment is not limited to the shared stream travelled by the gram and its “neighbors” but should, if it aims to be complete, include the entire language. it should, at least, make reference to other verbal forms developing along other paths. last, in respect to the actor, the dissimilarities between users are far more complex than the distinction between native and nonnative speakers. in fact, if the approach is sufficiently microscopic, every agent’s cognitive and epistemological properties somehow differ from the properties of the other speakers. the complexity of emerging networks of affordances is overwhelming and fully harmonizes with the understanding of language in terms of a complex system (andrason, 2014; cilliers, 1998; culicover & nowak, 2003; dahl, 2011; ellis & larsen-freeman, 2009; larsen-freeman, 1997; lightfoot 1999; massip-bonet, 2013; mufwene, 2013; munné, 2013). in this manner, the model designed in this paper is again compatible with the affordances perspective developed by aronin and singleton (2008, 2012), for whom the idea of complexity is crucial and underlies language (see also aronin & jessner, 2015). it is due to this complexity that individual grammaticalization processes are unpredictable and may differ from the universal clines predicted by grammaticalization theory. given that the number of possible waves traced by grams travelling along an analogical stream is infinite, and given that the arrangement on a typologically common stream is uncontrollable and given, furthermore, that the variations in knowledge and cognition of speakers are unlimited, the number of components and relations affording grammaticalization is absolutely untreatable. as a result, the number of grammaticalization possibilities, which derive from these three parameters and relations existing among them, expands alexander andrason, marianna visser 688 exponentially into the infinitum rendering any exact long term prediction or reconstruction unviable. in this manner, even though grammaticalization paths can be viewed as universal, any realistic language evolution is unrepeatable and erratic. as a result, language fulfils one of the most typical characteristics of complex systems: it is deterministically chaotic, albeit governed by deterministic rules dictated by dynamic equations (such as theoretical universal grammaticalization paths), and it is nonlinearly sensitive to initial conditions and virtually unpredictable (andrason, 2014; massip-bonet, 2013; munné, 2013; smith, 1998). 8. from the affordances perspective to an optimization model the application of the affordances perspective to grammaticalization results in an additional property offered by such a model. that is to say, the affordances perspective as outlined above can relate the phenomenon of grammaticalization to the idea of optimization and optimality modelling and consequently offer a scientific representation of possible divergences from the canonical grammaticalization paths. to be optimal is a characteristic whereby a system maximizes or minimizes a certain function under determined constraints. in mathematics and related sciences, optimization involves the selection of a value from a set of possibilities which is the best with regard to given criteria. in more theoretical terminology, optimization consists of maximizing or minimizing a function by calculating the value of that function for the selected available input arguments. thus, given a function f such as a ® r (i.e., from a set a to the set of real numbers) one seeks an element x0 in a such that, for all x of the set a, any value of the function f is lower than the value of the selected element x0 (i.e., f(x0) ≤ f(x)); or such that for all x of the set a, any value of the function f is higher than the value of the selected element x0 (i.e., f(x0) ≥ f(x)). the former approach is known as minimization, while the latter is labelled maximization. the set a is referred to as the search space or the choice set, and the arguments of a as candidates or feasible solutions. the function f is denominated a fitness function (for maximization) or a cost function (for minimization). the best solution for the function f, called an optimal solution, is codified as max ∈ (x) (for maximization) or min ∈ (x) (for minimization). traditionally, optimization problems are formulated in terms of minimization, especially in behavioral models where the energy cost is in focus. the optimization has been extensively used in applied mathematics, computer science, physics, engineering, biology and economics. in behavioral sciences, closer to linguistics than pure mathematics, the optimization is typically envisaged in terms of energy minimization. in this view, the optimal solution corresponds to the most efficient energy use and, hence, to its minimal consumption affordances perspective and grammaticalization: incorporation of language. . . 689 to achieve a goal (cf. the theory of foraging strategy emlen, 1966; macarthur & pianka, 1966; schoener, 1971). transferring this mathematical terminology to linguistics, we could state the following: the incorporation of the affordances approach to grammaticalization theory opens this branch of linguistic enterprise to new areas of research in terms of optimization. in general terms, by “tuning” the values of the three arguments, that is, the parameters affording for the action of grammaticalization (factor, environment and actor), one may search for an optimal solution where grams behave and develop as predicted by theoretical grammaticalization clines. of course, in every optimization technique, the elements of the set a (i.e., properties of the factor, environment and actor) will be predetermined so that the optimization may involve testing the model for its behavior in respect of the set a of the preestablished input arguments. the output that approximates the most values that are the closest to those predicted by the grammaticalization cline could be viewed as optimal. inversely, the output that necessitates the least of energy to convert the sum of the input arguments into the output value could be regarded as the most efficient and, thus, again as the most optimal. in the problem discussed in this paper, which involves grams mapped by the anterior path and the situation where native speakers are contrasted with nonnative speakers, the optimization of the affordances for grammaticalization can be viewed in the following manner: given the input parameters related to the dimension of the map, its location in the stream and perception of the users, the function g determines which dimensions and arrangements of these three parameters can deliver a grammaticalization status that would be optimal, that is, the closest to the stages predicated by the anterior cline. ideally, the optimal solution for the problem discussed in this article would be if (a) the map of a gram under analysis were confined to one stage which would also constitute its prototypicality peak, (b) the stream were populated by grams that divide it sharply with no overlapping and in four distinguished types (resultative, perfect and past, possibly with two subtypes: perfective and simple), and (c) the users’ cognitive-epistemological abilities would be consistent with such a structure of the maps and the stream that hosts them (i.e., native speakers or speakers whose mother tongue has an identical organization). of course, this ideal scenario is far from realistic as grams are typically polysemous, qualitatively overlap and share sections of the hosting stream and, moreover, as cognitive-epistemological properties of the users, even though similar, at the ultimate fine-grained approximation are never identical. it is therefore possible that in realistic languages, the function g never reaches its optimum. however, the very fact of postulating the function g with its optimum and, thus, proposing the dimensions of the arguments that could satisfy it so that a alexander andrason, marianna visser 690 gram could match a given theoretical path, enables us to include the noise in the grammaticalization model instead of disregarding it, as has traditionally been done. the function g can thus be employed in order to explain why certain—or many—grammatical developments are only similar to that posited by the universal grammaticalization paths, while some can even display a diverging form. in this manner, the use of the affordances for the grammaticalization theory could approximate the latter to the real world, connecting the abstract model with a number of realistic situations and offering a scientific representation of possible discrepancies. as a final point, one should note that in the representation discussed above we have assumed only one optimum—the grammaticalization status coherent with the stages posited by a grammaticalization path. in the grammar of a language, all the grams can be viewed as seeking for their optima as predicted by the clines they travel. in some cases, such different optima can stand in conflict. the grammaticalization of one gram can slow down, disrupt or entirely hinder the grammaticalization of another. additionally, even for a single gram, the construction can be engaged in a quest for more than one optimum. sometimes, such two optimization processes aimed at by a single form can be conflicting. in general, in a realistic language, there are many objectives to be optimized which necessarily conflict: the optimum of one objective cannot be achieved without compromising the optimum of the other. this is what scholars refer to as multioptimization or multiobjective optimization, a type of optimization that involves a variety of fitness or cost functions, where an optimal solution can be made only from a more global system perspective as a result of trade-offs between various conflicting objectives or optima. in mathematics, for nontrivial cases of multioptimization (or multiobjective optimization problems), no single solution exists that could optimize all the specific functions at the same time. instead, there are a number of possible solutions (so-called pareto optimal solutions) that can all be viewed as equally satisfactory. similarly, in language, there may be no one optimum but a cloud of acceptable solutions with none of them able to solve optimally for all the fitness and cost functions. this impossibility of reaching a total global optimum, where all the local and microscopic optima are satisfied, may be the force responsible for the inherently dynamic character of language and its incessant evolution. 9. conclusion the present paper has demonstrated that the affordances perspective might contribute to a better understanding of grammaticalization theory. by incorporating the idea whereby ecological and/or linguistic phenomena are afforded affordances perspective and grammaticalization: incorporation of language. . . 691 differently because of dissimilar properties of three parameters of factor, environment and actor, we have argued that verbal grams are likewise grammaticalized in a distinct manner, depending on the values of the factor, environment and actor. since each one of these parameters has been shown to be able to determine the grammaticalization status of a form individually, we have proposed that the realistic grammaticalization process, that is, the process as it is found in actual languages, should be understood as a set of affordances exerted by the factor, environment and actor. in this approximation, the factor was made equal with a qualitative-quantitative map of a gram (graphically represented as its wave), the environment with the structure of the stream along which the gram travels, and the actor with users’ cognitive-epistemological capacities (i.e., their status as native or nonnative speakers). we have also explained that in the realistic process of grammaticalization, all the three parameters are not only equally relevant but also operate simultaneously and with infinite complexity. in this manner, the use of the affordances perspective has allowed us to overtly incorporate the actor and environment into grammaticalization theory. these have been thus far absent from theoretical models of grammaticalization, which is traditionally represented as if located in a vacuum. consequently, the theoretical representation of grammaticalization comes closer to the real state of affairs perceivable in our universe. in addition, the application of the affordances perspective has enabled us to relate grammaticalization to optimality modeling. accordingly, an explanatory model of divergences from the canonical grammaticalization paths, based on the idea of an optimizing function g, has been formulated. this function, which specifies the dimensions of the arguments that could satisfy the optimum, has made it possible to include the noise in the grammaticalization model. this could approximate the theory of grammaticalization yet closer to the real word, connecting it with realistic situations as discrepancies become tolerable in the model. our study shows that by using the theoretical perspective of affordances, the theories of grammaticalization, complexity and optimization relate to each other, yielding a more comprehensive model of language change. in this way, it demonstrates that scholars who conduct their research within different frameworks and “schools” of linguistics may communicate and collaborate if they work under an overarching umbrella of affordances. this also signifies that the model of grammaticalization analyzed from the affordances perspective should not be understood as nullifying the validity of grammaticalization theory in its standard version. it rather adds a new dimension to the recognized and fully legitimate grammaticalization paths; it connects them to the aspects (actors and environment) whose relevance in the standard theory is strongly marginal. it is evident that in our study we have only investigated a microscopic portion of the problem. as explained, the factor was narrowed to the kinetic semantic alexander andrason, marianna visser 692 map, the environment to the structure of the stream along which the factor evolves, and the actor to the fact of being a native speaker (or not). there are a great number of other approaches to factors, environments and actors. it is obvious that these should be researched in depth. furthermore, the representation of a simultaneous interaction of the three parameters, missing from our article, where only one parameter was treated as a variable at once, should be given a more formulaic expression. last, more research on the optimization issue, the incorporation of the function g into the model of grammaticalization, and the expansion of such a representation to a variety of competing functions gn is also necessitated since our paper has only proposed the connection between grammaticalization and optimization, without specifying its detailed modelling and application. the substantiation of all and each one of these deficiencies will constitute one of the future research activities of the authors. lastly, we believe that our study, which has benefited from certain ideas developed in the field of applied linguistics and studies dedicated to second language acquisition, may inversely contribute to these two branches. first, it shows that the knowledge of grammaticalization paths and the concept of a stream are applicable to studies on second language acquisition and teaching. in their interlanguages and/or pidgins, learners usually accelerate the grammaticalization process restructuring the composition of the stream in the way that less advanced grams advance, while those that are already advanced are either further advanced or removed from the stream. the familiarity with this can be used in preventing this phenomenon from happening, thus reducing possible errors in the usage of grams in the language to be acquired. second, our approach suggests a possible more theoretical and more formal approach to affordances, in general. to be exact, the optimal function g or a cloud of such functions, conditioned by the three types of variables hypothesized by affordances perspective 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(2010). semantic map geometry: two approaches. linguistic discovery, 8, 377-395. 297 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (3). 297-309 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the emancipation of the language learner1 diane larsen-freeman university of michigan, ann arbor, usa dianelf@umich.edu abstract the general trend in language education over the years has been to ascribe to language learners increasing power and responsibility for their own learning. while this is commendable, the autonomy of learners is still constrained by views of language that see learners as being mere “hosts” of another’s language. such views restrict learners to roles as language learners who make errors not language users who innovate. this article argues for a more enlightened view of language and of learners, one inspired by a complexity theory perspective. it also proposes that such a perspective is respectful of learner agency. keywords: human agency, complexity theory, learner autonomy, errors/innovations i will begin with an account of the evolution of views of the language learner. it is a personal account, drawing upon my experience in the field of second language acquisition (sla), or, what i prefer to call these days, second language development. i will suggest that over the last 50 years or so, the view of the language learner has changed considerably. the general trend has been towards increasing empowerment of the learner. however, i will point to one obstacle that prevents the full emancipation of the language learner – and that is, ironically, a disenfranchising view of language. i will recommend an alternative view of language, one inspired by complexity theory, and i will conclude by asserting that complexity theory respects human agency, a point that is often misunderstood. 1 this article is a revised version of a special distinguished scholarship and service award lecture, delivered at the american association for applied linguists, march 2011. diane larsen-freeman 298 an evolutionary view of the language learner fifty years ago was the time at which our understanding of learning was influenced by behaviorism. according to behaviorist accounts of second language development, the learners’ role was limited to repeating sentence patterns after the teacher, mimicking the teacher’s model. in addition, it was seen to be important for the teacher to prevent learners from committing errors, which might result in the establishment of habits that would be difficult to overcome. one way to prevent errors was to control learners’ production. this was accomplished through drilling, during which teachers corrected and reinforced learners’ performance. in short, the learners followed the teacher’s lead, taking little initiative, responding to environmental stimuli, and developing l2 habits by overcoming l1 habits through restricted practice. during the second half of the 20th century, the cognitive revolution was launched. the relevance of behaviorist psychology for language was disputed, most famously in chomsky's review of b. f. skinner’s verbal behavior (1957) in 1959. it was at this time that the field of sla in its modern form came into being. it was founded on the revolutionary idea that learners were not passive, but rather were actively involved in their own learning – inducing rules from the input data, generating and testing hypotheses, corroborating, modifying, or refuting them. it was a revolution, indeed, one that is still very much with us. most sla researchers point to the genesis of its influence in corder’s (1967) suggestion that there was a “built-in” syllabus in learners, an idea presumably influenced by chomsky’s notion of an innate universal grammar. to this, selinker (1972) added the construct of interlanguage, a transitional linguistic system, activated by a "psychological structure latent in the brain.” also highly influential at this time was a longitudinal study conducted by first language acquisition researcher roger brown (1973). his study of the developing language of three children learning english as their native language found that there was a highly regular acquisition order for 14 english grammatical morphemes. building on this finding, sla researchers soon claimed that there was an acquisition order common to all english language learners, despite the fact that they spoke different native languages (dulay & burt, 1973). this was revolutionary at a time when heretofore most l2 behavior was thought to be shaped by the l1. at the same time, there were other developments that expanded on the view of the learner as a cognitive being. certainly one of them was the effect of affect, most famously, perhaps, in the work of schumann (1978), who argued that social factors and affective variables cluster into a single variable, which was the major causal variable in sla. such research continues to this the emancipation of the language learner 299 day, inspired by the second major question in sla:2 the question of differential success. researchers tackling this question seek to account for the observation that not all learners are uniformly successful in acquiring a second language. research on individual differences appeals to learner traits such as motivation, attitude, aptitude, personality, and age. cognitivism and individual difference research continue to remain influential in sla, contributing to our understanding of the active role played by learners and their dispositions. further, it has inspired much research within an interactional approach, whereby researchers look for connections between the input that learners are exposed to and their output, or the language that learners produce. researchers study how learners process input and how their interlanguage develops as a consequence. seliger (1977) was perhaps the first sla researcher to imbue learners with agency in this regard. learners could generate their own input, he claimed, not merely passively receive it from others. seliger’s distinction between high input generators and low input generators was an important addition to the list of individual differences. what has been called “the social turn” (after block, 2003) followed from the recognition that sla researchers need to concern themselves not only with language learning as an individual and primarily cognitive process, but also as a sociohistorically situated phenomenon. socioculturalists, conversational analysts, and ethnomethodologists took the lead in arguing that individual cognition follows from social interaction. lantolf and thorne (2007) noted that sociocultural theory does not separate the individual from the social. instead, sociocultural theory holds that “the individual emerges from social interaction and as such is always fundamentally a social being” (p. 213). other important offshoots of the awareness of learner as a social being came from research on the structure of conversation and pragmatic competence, among others. another development, whereby the language learner is seen as a political being, has been with us for some time – certainly since paolo freire’s (1970) groundbreaking work on teaching literacy to occupants of brazil’s favelas. the political dimension of the language learner has been more recently boosted by work on critical pedagogy (e.g., norton & toohey, 2004), where learners who have been perceived to be disenfranchised are taught to think critically about their problems and experiences and the social context in which they are embedded. most recently in sla, there is work dedicated to understanding embodied cognition. cognitive linguistics sees the functional imperative of meaningmaking as structured by the nature of our perceptual processes (e.g., lakoff, 2 evelyn hatch (1974) gave us two – leading to a bifurcated research agenda. diane larsen-freeman 300 1987; langacker, 1987). since these processes shape experience, and experience is a function of how our bodies interact with the world, the meanings that cognition develops are also embodied (holme, 2010). in sla, atkinson, churchill, nishino, & okada (2007) have contributed to this area with their understanding of how physical alignment plays a role. then, too, sla researchers, such as schumann (1999), have suggested that there is an important physiological dimension to the learner that has not been given its due. schumann and his students have been studying the neurobiology of sla. they have proposed that the orbitofrontal cortex, the amygdala, and the body itself are involved in making personal and social decisions in normal conversational interaction and that these subserve decision-making in language use. making a case for “symbolic competence,” kramsch (2006, p. 251) offers a useful summation (and then some) of what i have written: language learners are not just communicators and problem solvers, but whole persons with hearts, bodies, and minds, with memories, fantasies, loyalties, identities. symbolic forms are not just items of vocabulary or communication strategies, but embodied experiences, emotional resonances, and moral imaginings. what i have been proposing in this cursory treatment of the evolution of views of the language learner is that language learners have come to be characterized by more complete, more robust, more empowered profiles. where once the environment was seen to be solely critical to learning success, with the learner having only a passive role, over the years, there has been a shift to seeing the language learner as a more cognitive, affective, interactional, social, political, embodied, neural, and symbolically competent person. despite these advances, one obstacle remains before we can fully appreciate learner autonomy. this obstacle is a failure to appreciate the true nature of the explanandum, that is, language. a remaining obstacle to learner emancipation kroskrity (2004) pointed out that underlying prevailing language ideologies, speakers of a given language were not seen as capable of being agents of linguistic change: “rather than being viewed as partially aware or as potentially agentive, speakers – in chomskyan models – were merely hosts for language” (p. 499). this was even truer of language learners. indeed, when language was perceived to be a closed system, a fixed target, then no matter what they did, language learners were disadvantaged to a certain extent. for example, a new linguistic form that a learner created might be considered an error, rather than an innovation. the goal of language instruction, although the emancipation of the language learner 301 never explicitly stated, was conformity to uniformity. but, such a goal, even if it is desirable, is not achievable (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). thus, perhaps the last barrier to learner emancipation is to recognize that learners have the capacity to create their own patterns with meanings and uses (morphogenesis, following larsen-freeman, 1997) and to expand the meaning potential of a given language, not just to internalize a ready-made system. such a view, of course, is compatible with my current theoretical commitment – to complexity theory as a metatheory, one which helps us to reframe our thinking. complex dynamic systems very briefly, i will introduce a complexity theory perspective on language. from such a perspective, language is a complex adaptive system. it is a system in which complexity is emergent, one in which language grows and organizes itself from the bottom up in an organic way. using their language resources, speakers “soft-assemble” (thelen & smith, 1994) language patterns on a given occasion. they cobble together their language resources, responding to the contingent demands and pressures of the communicative situation. they adapt their speech for the sake of their interlocutors. through a process of coadaptation between and among interlocutors, language patterns emerge. they self-organize: “self-organization refers to any set of processes in which order emerges from the interaction of the components of system without direction from external factors and without a plan of the order embedded in an individual component” (mitchell, 2003, p. 6) the patterns become stable through use, and are transformed with further usage. in this sense, we can see that language is constantly in flux. certain patterns become preferred and stabilized; but the system is never static. furthermore, there is “massive variation in all features at all times” (de bot, lowie, & verspoor, 2007; kretzschmar, 2009). this is true even of mature speakers, whose grammars have the potential to change as their experience changes (ellis & larsen-freeman, 2009). thus, linguistic signs are not “autonomous objects of any kind, either social or psychological,” but are “contextualized products of the integration of various activities by individuals in particular communicative situations. it logically follows that they are continually created to meet new needs and circumstances . . .” (toolan, 2003, p. 125). it follows then that when it comes to language “there is no end and there is no state” (larsen-freeman, 2006). again, i turn to kramsch (2009, p. 247), who notes that complexity theory offers an ecological perspective on language education: diane larsen-freeman 302 an ecological approach to language education does not seek dialectical unity, or bounded analyses of discrete events, but on the contrary open-endedness and unfinalizability . . . it problematizes the notion of bounded speech communities and focuses our attention on open-ended, deterritorialized communicative practices rather than on the ‘territorial boundedness’ posited by the ‘one language – one culture’ assumption (blommaert, 2005, p. 216). error or innovation? kramsch’s words make us wonder about the difference between an innovation and an error. from a complexity theory perspective, errors and innovations are both nonconforming productions. both are responsible for language change. the difference between the two is that the latter is socially sanctioned. what follows are three examples of errors…or are they innovations? (1) refudiate sarah palin, the 2008 republican candidate for vice president of the u.s., likely inadvertently coined a new word refudiate to bridge the gap between refuse and repudiate. she used it in a fox news television interview on july 19, 2010. while it may well have been an unintentional slip, it is interesting to note that the new oxford american dictionary named it “the 2010 word of the year” (the los angeles times, november 15, 2010). clearly, the acceptability, or at least the attention given to a new form, depends on the perception of the social prominence of the speaker. (2) watchale according to wolfram (as cited in cullinan, 2011), watchale means ‘watch out.’ it combines english watch and spanish mirale. such words, the product of contact between two languages, are said to be an example of linguistic hybridity. however a problem with the concept of hybridity, which makoni and makoni (2010) note, is that hybridity is predicated upon and privileges the notion of languages as discrete entities. this implies that one can deterermine where one language ends and the other begins. in contrast, makoni and makoni propose the term “vague linguistique,” which acknowledges that speakers have access to diverse linguistic resources and use them in unpredictable ways. their approach accords speakers agency in using “bits and pieces” of languages, even, or especially, when they have uneven proficiencies in these languages (makoni & makoni, 2010). garcia (2009) refers to a similar practice as “translanguaging.” translanguaging is an act performed by bilinguals who access different linguistic the emancipation of the language learner 303 features from “autonomous languages” in order to maximize their communicative potential. while traditional analyses of this practice might call it “codeswitching,” garcia claims that translanguaging goes beyond it in its creativity. a related point made by wolfram, kohn, and callahan-price (2011) is that accommodations that speakers make to new forms are often continuous and incremental, not a discrete occurrence. for instance, research by wolfram, carter, and moriello (2004) found that production of the /ai/ diphthong among adolescents in two hispanic communities in north carolina, a state in the southeastern region of the united states, accommodated to the diphthong, but did so in a gradient fashion, one that was both variable and sensitive to individual lexical items. (3) informations informations is a form attributed to english as a lingua franca (elf) speakers, in “violation” of the noncount nature of the noun in standard english. but, is it an error? instead, it could be taken as evidence in support of the agency of elf speakers who develop a shared repertoire to suit their particular purposes. elf users exploit the potential of the language, they are fully involved in the interactions, whether for work or play. they are focused on the purpose of the talk and on their interlocutors as people . . . absorbed in the ad hoc, situated negotiation of meaning. (seidlhofer, 2009, p. 242) a language, reagan (as cited in makoni & pennycook, 2005, pp. 137-138) suggests, “is ultimately a collection of idiolects which have been determined to belong together for what are ultimately nonand extra-linguistic reasons.” there is thus a need to “reject the positivist objectification of language in favour of a more complex, sophisticated and nuanced view of language” (pp. 137-138). i have offered three examples of errors/innovations. in each case, one would be hard-pressed to distinguish in any formal way an error from an innovation. of course, there are three points worth making in this regard: 1. a new form may not be immediately acceptable. if it is to reshape the system at all, it may take time. 2. the acceptability of a new form is interlocutor dependent (based on their perception of who the speaker is). 3. it is not the case that anything goes. for instance, there are impossible sequences in a given language, ones that, for instance, violate phonotactic constraints. in english, for example, the following sequences are not acceptable: ftik, tsaim, feh, pkig, rcang. in addition, diane larsen-freeman 304 unconventional forms must not impede intelligibility. furthermore, not everything goes anywhere. there are pragmatic conventions that do not prevent, but do constrain to some extent, whether or not the use of a form is deemed appropriate to the situation. moreover, to be fair, learners do want feedback on how what they have produced stacks up against the idealized system. clearly, though, learners set their own goals, and pursue them, charting their own paths (larsen-freeman, 2006). what they do to accomplish their goals might not, then, be seen to be successful from the perspective of the idealized system. errors, on the other hand, are always defined from the perspective of the norms of the idealized system. language norms are monolingual, but the learners are not (p. herdina, personal communication). on creativity in language use thus, learner productions might seem to be erroneous; yet, what learners do is purposeful. but this, of course, is true of us all. the language we use is an approximation of an ideal type. the learner’s system is based on the unique language background and the unique language learning path of the individual speaker. it never matches the ideal type, and it will never be identical with the system of another speaker. thus, the difference between learner language and nonlearner language is just a matter of degree. learning is not just the discovery of patterns inherent in an invariable object. it involves changes in the learner. i have given only three examples of errors/innovations, but, of course, this same creative drive to exploit the meaing potential of language occurs at all levels. canarajah (2007, p. 94) recognizes that language use is a social process, constantly reconstructed in sensitivity to environmental factors. of course, chomsky was concerned with creativity in language use. however, chomsky’s notion of creativity was predicated on variation within a fixed, closed system. sentences can be novel, but the rules of language that produce them do not vary from a chomskyan point of view. shanker and king (as cited in de bot, lowie, & verspoor, 2007) contrast this information-processing view of creativity with one informed by complex dynamic systems: “whereas the information processing paradigm sees creativity as a property of the language system itself, . . . dynamic systems theory views creativity as a property of agents’ behavior in co-regulated interactions”. i am fond of quoting gleick’s (1987) depiction of the dynamic of complex systems – “the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules” (p. 24). true innovation actually changes the rules of the game – changes the system. in the case of language, it is an an open system, one that is emergent, continually self-modifying. it is said that the area of the greatest biological diversity is an area of liminality – of in-betweenness. this is the case where the meadow meets the forthe emancipation of the language learner 305 est and one where one temperature zone in the ocean meets another. this may also be true of human languages. in fact, multilingual, multicultural contexts may favor creativity (carter, 2004). carter points to rampton’s (1995) “crossing” (a feature of cross-lingual transfers and creative mixing) adopted by urban adolescents in the south midlands of britain, which concerns the use of creole by adolescents of asian and anglo descent, the use of panjabi by anglos and afrocaribbeans and the use of stylized indian english by all three groups. it may be the case, then, that human creativity is also fostered in areas of liminality. in this article, i have tried to make a case for a complex dynamic view of language offering us a richer, more complete, and more empowering view of the language learner. i have argued that seeing language as a complex system invites all speakers to use language in a way that is purposeful, which in turn changes the rules of language. as the game is played, language changes. the logic of freedom my remaining objective in writing this article is to defend complexity theory from those who criticize it for being apolitical – for denying learners agency to act according to their own wills and purposes. i would like to counter this criticism by proposing a different interpretation of what is on offer. osberg (2007) contrasts “a logic of determinism” with “a logic of freedom.” the former invokes a linear concept of cause and effect, where a cause has predictable consequences. deterministic processes follow immutable laws. since outcomes are fully determined, there is no room for anything else to happen. as osberg says, in such processes freedom simply does not exist. however, in a logic associated with complex dynamic or emergent processes, what osberg terms “a logic of freedom,” the system has the freedom to develop along alternative trajectories.” as osberg (2007) says, “since emergent processes are not fully determined – they contain within themselves the possibility of freedom” (p. 10). thus, for complex systems, while a system’s potential might be constrained by its history, it is not fully determined by it. innovation emerges in open systems, the systems of complexity theory. “knowing how to negotiate our way through a world that is not fixed and pregiven but that is continually shaped by the types of actions in which we engage” (varela, thompson, & rosch, 1991, p. 144) is a challenge of being human. conclusion i have suggested in this article that in the field of language teaching and learning, there has been a continuous move over the years to perceive the diane larsen-freeman 306 learner as being ever more complete and empowered. i have also proposed that the remaining barrier to full empowerment resides in reconceptualizing language as an open, complex, dynamic system. in so doing, the creativity of all language users, including language learners, is respected. this does not mean that learners’ performances are identical to the idealized system, nor that they are identical to the system of proficient users of the language, but it does call into question the difference between an innovation and an error. after all, innovations often meet with social disapproval at first, just as the great pole, copernicus, was initially criticized for proposing a heliocentric view of the solar system. what will learner emancipation take? it will take a shift of attitude, similar to what ensued when the sla researchers no longer regarded the l1 exclusively as a source of interference in l2 learning, but rather as a resource to be drawn on by l2 learners. of course, changing attitudes is no small feat. still, learner agency is not fully appreciated when learners are seen to be mere hosts of another language. in actuality, learners actively transform their linguistic world; 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(2011). southern-bred hispanic english: an emerging variety. in j. michnowitz & r. dodsworth (eds.), cascadilla: selected proceedings of the 5th workshop on spanish sociolinguistics, 5, 1-13. 459 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (4). 2013. 459-461 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial the present issue of studies in second language learning and teaching marks exactly three years of existence of the journal. on the one hand, this has not been a very easy time, mainly because of the fact that, as is the case with any startup publication, it has been extremely difficult to obtain papers that would satisfy the stringent criteria of high-quality academic research, with the effect that the rejection rate has been extremely high, and finding the right reviewers has also often constituted a major challenge. on the other hand, the three years have also witnessed the rise of ssllt in the field, as we have been privileged to publish papers by prominent scholars in the area of second language acquisition, well-known researchers have consented to act in the capacity of editors of special issues of the journal, and eminent figures have also agreed to review many of the submissions we have received. equally importantly, there has been increasing interest in the papers we publish, which is evidenced in the growing numbers of downloads and citations, a clear advantage of having both a printed and an online version, the latter of which is accessible to everyone free of charge. i would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who have been involved in the production of the journal over these three years and have spent countless hours to make sure that the final product is each time up to standard. in particular, my sincere thanks go to assistants to the editor anna mystkowska-wiertelak, jakub bielak, mariusz kruk and krzysztof kwiatkowski, our typesetter piotr bajak, as well as the authors and anonymous reviewers. had it not been for their attention to detail, dedication, hard work and support, ssllt would surely not have gained the position in the field it enjoys today. this last 2013 issue brings together seven papers, most of which report the findings of original research projects. it opens, however, with a thoughtprovoking contribution by hanna komorowska, who points to the need to reconsider current approaches to the development of multilingualism in the light 460 of reports recently launched by the european union, and offers a number of specific guidelines in this respect, both in the area of teaching and supporting the learning process. in the next paper, paola vettorel and lucilla lopriore report the results of a study which aimed to determine the extent to which the recommendations of the proponents of the english as a lingua franca movement have made their way into teaching materials in italy, concluding that, apart from the promotion of intercultural awareness, such a shift has not yet taken place. subsequently, wei cai, xiangrong li and meihua liu provide evidence for the efficacy of study-abroad programs, demonstrating with the help of data collected by means of surveys and interviews that their chinese participants majoring in english benefitted both linguistically and academically from a semester-long sojourn in english speaking countries. in the next research-based contribution, katalin piniel and kata csizér employ structural equation modeling to gain insights into the relationships between second language learning motivation, self-efficacy beliefs and anxiety manifested by hungarian secondary school learners. having found that these concepts are interrelated in rather intricate ways, an outcome that may serve as a basis for concrete pedagogical implications, they make the important point that our understanding of the processes of language learning is likely to benefit more from the investigation of clusters of individual difference variables rather than looking into such variables in isolation. the last three papers included in this issue report the findings of empirical studies dealing with the acquisition of second language subsystems, both such that is uninstructed and the result of pedagogical intervention. in the first of these, eugen zaretsky, benjamin p. lange, harald a. euler and katrin neumann look into the acquisition of pluralization rules in german by monolingual and multilingual 4-year-old children and conclude that, although there are some diverging tendencies with respect to overgeneralization of specific linguistic features, the two groups do not differ qualitatively when it comes to the pluralization strategies applied. subsequently, jakub bielak, miros aw pawlak and anna mystkowska-wiertelak compare the effectiveness of grammar instruction focusing on english active and passive voice based on traditional explanations and cognitive grammar, providing evidence that although both types of intervention are equally effective for the development of explicit knowledge, it is the former that is more likely to have a positive effect on the growth of implicit knowledge, as revealed in more spontaneous use of the targeted structure. finally, mehmet kanik demonstrates that what he calls a reversed discourse completion task can be a useful tool in assessing language learners’ intercultural communicative competence as well as pragmatic competence. as always, i am hopeful that all of these contributions will be a source of inspiration for second language acquisition researchers, thereby paving the way for further empirical 461 studies that will help us better understand the puzzle of how people learn foreign languages and what practitioners can do to facilitate this process. miros aw pawlak adam mickiewicz university, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl 443 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (3). 2017. 443-469 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.3.5 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl transitional woes: on the impact of l2 input continuity from primary to secondary school simone e. pfenninger university of salzburg, austria simone.pfenninger@sbg.ac.at johanna lendl university of zurich, switzerland johanna.lendl@bluewin.ch abstract in this paper, we discuss the problem of articulation between levels in the educational system, as the transition from a rather more communicative, contentbased and holistic approach to english as a foreign language (efl) teaching at primary level to more formal and explicit ways of foreign language (fl) teaching at secondary is often experienced as problematic by students and teachers alike (see, e.g., muñoz, tragant, & camuñas, 2015). the results of a mixed methods analysis are presented, in which we analyzed, through a questionnaire and language experience essays, perceived continuity between input received in primary school and secondary school, as well as learners’ beliefs, attitudes and self-efficacy before and after they transitioned to secondary school. twelve primary schools and six secondary schools in switzerland participated in the study, with a total of 280 early learners of efl (biological age 12-13 years, age of onset 8 years). we will argue that one of the main reasons why early fl instruction seems not to bear fruit later in secondary school is that, on the one hand, coherence in curriculum design and practice vary in a few—but crucial—aspects within and between primary schools. on the other hand, the fact that secondary education becomes a meeting point for mixed ability classes also seems to mitigate the potential advantages of an earlier start. keywords: efl; primary school; age factor; young learners simone e. pfenninger, johanna lendl 444 1. introduction continuity has been a recurring challenge since the very first early foreign language (fl) programs at primary school level were launched (johnstone, 2009). yet despite observations of what look like negative consequences of a suboptimal primary-secondary transition in different parts of the world, the issue of this transition has not yet been given the attention it deserves as a possible major factor in students’ levels of attainment (see muñoz, tragant, & camuñas, 2015). the fact that the transition from elementary school into secondary education has often been described as a ubiquitous fragile moment in students’ early educational career (blondin et al., 1998) has been largely ignored. in switzerland, as in many european countries, “implicit” approaches are the norm in early foreign language (fl) instruction in the primary school classroom; in other words, young children under the age of 10 or so are for the most part typically taught in a playful way via songs, games, and so on, with a focus on oral use of the l2. metalanguage builds rather slowly during the elementary school years in regard to students’ l1 for literacy, and thus students cannot yet really benefit from a transfer from this process to the l2 (jaekel, schurig, merle, & ritter, 2017). secondary school, by contrast, is characterized by more explicit focus on form. this transition from a rather more communicative and holistic approach to efl at the primary level to more formal and consciousness-engaging ways of fl learning at the secondary level is often experienced as problematic by students and teachers alike (see muñoz et al., 2015). this seriously and urgently calls for research into the transition from fl instruction in primary school to fl instruction in secondary school. according to housen and pierrard (2005), the efficaciousness of instruction affects not only the route of acquisition and rate of language learning, but also ultimate levels of attainment. in the process of early fl learning, the sustaining of high levels of motivation and continuous development of language proficiency may crucially hinge upon a successful transition from elementary to secondary education (jaekel et al., 2017). students should have a voice in this discussion. the breaks or transitions in the school system are not always easy for them to understand or manage (see jones, 2016, p. 79). it is thus particularly important to enquire about their perspectives on the dis/continuity of their language journey and their experiences with classroom management and fl input and teaching methodologies in primary versus secondary school. in this study we aim to analyze the degree of continuity between input received in primary school and secondary school, as well as learners’ beliefs, attitudes and self-efficacy before and after they transition to secondary school. twelve primary schools and six secondary schools in switzerland participated in the study, with a total of 280 early learners of efl (age of onset, ao, 8 transitional woes: on the impact of l2 input continuity from primary to secondary school 445 years) who were tested at the end of primary school and at the beginning of secondary school, respectively. three students were followed longitudinally. the results show that one of the reasons why early fl instruction seems not to bear fruit later in secondary school appears to be that coherence in curriculum design and practice varies tremendously within and between primary schools. 2. on the explicit-implicit dichotomy it has been argued that young learners rely primarily on implicit learning, while learners who are more (or fully) cognitively mature can make better use of explicit knowledge and learning (garcía mayo, 2003; larson-hall, 2008; muñoz, 2009). the precise meaning of implicit and explicit in this context and the nature of their differentiation cannot be said to be universally agreed upon (cf. mitchell, myles, & marsden, 2013, pp. 136-137), but implicit learning is generally thought of as an automatic, non-conscious and powerful mechanism that results in knowledge which can be accessed quickly and without effort (dörnyei, 2009; ellis, 1994). it is claimed to enable “learners to infer rules without awareness” and “internalize the underlying rule/pattern without their attention being explicitly focused on it” (ellis, 2009, p. 16). however, implicit learning is also seen as a slow process that relies on intensive exposure to input over a prolonged period of time (tellier & roehr-brackin, 2017). by contrast, explicit learning is characterized as involving “conscious awareness on the part of the learner as they attempt to understand material, seek to analyze input, or try to solve production or comprehension problems, e.g. via deliberate hypothesis-testing” (tellier & roehr-brackin, 2017, p. 24; see also dörnyei, 2009; schmidt, 2001). however, explicit learning is portrayed as resource-intensive, requiring attention and relying on the processing and maintenance of information in working memory (jaekel et al., 2017). it is for this reason that (more) mature learners have been considered to be better able to learn explicitly (jaekel et al., 2017). to turn the argument around, younger children’s poorer performance in classroom settings when compared with older children, adolescents and adults is normally attributed to a combination of their relative lack of cognitive maturity, exposure to minimal input, coupled with young children’s predominant reliance on implicit learning, which, as indicated above, is purportedly a slow process that requires considerable input to be maximally effective (tellier & roehr-brackin, 2017). a limited-input situation that relies on so-called implicit fl learning is currently perceived as the norm at primary-school level in switzerland and elsewhere in europe. however, the general assumption that the focus of early fl programs is merely on “playful-like acquisition of the l2” is a bit of a myth; particularly at the upper primary level, the nature of some of the exercises in the simone e. pfenninger, johanna lendl 446 course books (e.g., word lists, rules, translations, error correction) is indicative of more explicit attention to accuracy. research with young fl learners suggests that even though “implicit” learning appears to be the default, children aged around 7 may already begin to draw on explicit knowledge and learning (barton & bragg, 2010; milton & alexiou, 2006; tellier & roehr-brackin, 2017). children may well be able to learn explicitly, especially if they are exposed to explicit instruction (lichtman, 2013). tellier and roehr-brackin (2017) hypothesized that if children’s explicit learning capacity could be enhanced, they might derive greater benefit from even minimal l2 exposure. they investigated whether and to what extent instruction in esperanto as a “starter language” could help foster 8to 9year old primary-school children’s development of metalinguistic awareness and, by extension, their ability to engage in successful l2 learning in a minimal-input setting. their results suggest that explicit instruction in a constructed, transparent l2 that comprises deductive, form-focused activities may be effective in a minimal-input environment, not just for cognitively mature learners but also for young learners. nevertheless, it has been informally reported by learners, teachers and parents that teaching methodology in primary school is significantly different from fl methodology employed in secondary education (see muñoz et al., 2015; pfenninger & singleton, 2017). successful introduction of an l2 in elementary school needs to take into account students’ level of cognitive development as well as other learner factors such as l1 proficiency level and degree of motivation (jaekel et al., 2017). the goals of early fl instruction in primary school range from developing favorable attitudes towards languages and language learning, through raising awareness of other cultures and identities, to the enlargement of the linguistic repertoire and cultural horizons of many different communities, among many others (nikolov & mihaljevic djigunovic, 2011; prabhu, 2009). in other words, the main goal is not necessarily an increase in fl proficiency. early fl education is thus best characterized by an absence of metalanguage and a focus on oracy (for a discussion of l2 oracy, see tarone, bigelow, & hansen, 2009), contextualized l2, and communicative language learning, which aims to provide ample exposure and opportunities to use the l2 (housen & pierrard, 2005). in secondary school, by contrast, grammar is awarded more prominence through teachers’ explanations, exercises in course books, teaching materials, charts on the blackboard, the study of word lists and rules, language-focused compositions, and the use of notebooks, among others (tellier & roehr-brackin, 2017). transitioning to secondary school methodology thus shifts from a stronger emphasis on what is seen as implicit to one focused on what is seen as explicit learning and teaching, that is, the overt teaching and learning of the l2 such as grammar or vocabulary and the use of metalinguistic skills (housen & pierrard, 2005). we are going to have a closer look at this in the next section. transitional woes: on the impact of l2 input continuity from primary to secondary school 447 3. problems of articulation between levels in the educational system several critical issues in relation to the transition from fl instruction in primary to secondary school have been identified in the recent literature (chambers, 2014; courtney et al., 2015; graham et al., 2016; jaekel et al., 2017; muñoz et al., 2015; nikolov & mihaljevic djigunovic, 2011; pfenninger & singleton, 2017): 1. an abrupt shift from student-centered, “implicit” methodology to more teacher-directed and faster-paced lessons may impact young learners. 2. there is a potential mismatch of student-teacher expectations regarding fl teaching methods used in class, which may cause a decrease in motivation, particularly if students do not receive input that is adjusted to their l2 proficiency level. 3. a lack of coordination and communication between primary school teachers and secondary school teachers, such that often teachers of different levels never meet, observe each other, exchange materials, or attend further training together. 4. teaching outcomes from elementary schools varying to a great extent, depending on when the language learning programs start, how much time they allocate to early language learning, what type of curriculum they apply, who the teachers are, and how the programs are implemented; thus, as secondary schools welcome students from several elementary schools, teachers are required to be particularly thorough in assessing initial language skills that students in their class have already attained. 5. fl teachers at the elementary school level are sometimes not being trained extensively (yet), as these programs are still relatively new to primary education in some countries in europe. a number of transition studies have been conducted in europe (e.g., courtney, 2014; graham et al., 2016), discussing one or several of the points mentioned under 1-5, thereby predominantly relying on questionnaire data and/or interviews. the picture that emerges demonstrates that the issue of transition is by no means limited to the teaching of efl and it affects the teaching of various target languages. in the hungarian context, nikolov (2017, p. 251) points out that what children actually learn in their l2 in the first years will be forgotten unless it is revised and built on in a regular fashion in later years. she emphasizes that raising children’s interest is easy, yet maintaining their motivation over years often poses a challenge, as their initial enthusiasm tends to decline in the long run (see also pfenninger & singleton, 2017). nikolov (2017) speculates that this loss of motivation is simone e. pfenninger, johanna lendl 448 often caused by test results: “tasks have to be tuned to their interests and abilities, and teachers have to be able to diagnose where children are in their progress.” the problem with the disconnection between primary schools and secondary schools (point c above) has often been observed. muñoz et al. (2015) gathered evidence with respect to the transition process from primary to secondary school in five primary schools and eight secondary schools in the barcelona area. most of what secondary school teachers knew about english in primary school came from what they saw or were told from their first-year students and from their own children. they were used to administering a diagnostic test at the beginning of secondary school that targeted explicit knowledge of english grammar, which students found challenging and demotivating, coming from primary classroom with limited explicit focus on form. according to jaekel et al. (2017) the transition in germany is characterized by an abrupt shift from an oracy-focused curriculum, including assessments, to one that builds on literacy and steep grammatical progression. not only does methodology shift from relying mostly on implicit learning to explicit teaching and learning that requires metalinguistic knowledge, but a lack of communication between elementary and secondary schools has been identified as a crucial problem. referring to a variety of previous studies (e.g., börner, engel, & grootwilken, 2013; graham et al., 2016), jaekel et al. (2017) emphasize that this is particularly important in harmonizing methodology and content in secondary education and providing language teachers with an idea of what levels of l2 proficiency they can expect at the end of elementary school. thus, classroom experiences may also have an effect on motivation if they influence learners’ perceptions of progress and competence especially around the time of primary-secondary transition, at a point when such a sense of competence becomes especially important for learners (graham et al., 2016). it is chaudron’s (2001) view that classroom processes are heavily influenced by the structure of classroom organization, in which different patterns of teacher-student interaction, group work, degrees of learners’ control over their learning, and variations in tasks and their sequencing play a significant role in the quantity and quality of learners’ production and interaction with the target language. as a consequence of classroom effects, individuals are hypothesized to accommodate to the normative environment within their class setting, which leads to cohort effects. with the objective of contributing to this line of research, the present study explores the following questions: 1. how do learners of efl perceive the frequency and usefulness of different classroom activities at the end of primary schooling and at the start of secondary school? does their perception change across transition? transitional woes: on the impact of l2 input continuity from primary to secondary school 449 2. to what extent are learners’ beliefs and opinions related to classroom environmental conditions and the activities they experience? 4. methodology 4.1. learner participants 280 participants had been selected for this paper, who were part of three studies. the main reason for these three studies is that we feel that understanding the complex nature of the transition under investigation requires a complementary approach that combines quantitative and qualitative analyses as well as different student populations. all of the participants had started being instructed in english in early childhood (grade level 2, ao 8 years), where they had received two hours of english instruction a week, followed by three hours per week in secondary school. the participants were controlled for l1 (swiss german), additional fls learned (six years of standard german and two years of french in primary school), socio-economic status, teaching method and weekly hours of efl instruction received.in switzerland, the total compulsory school period amounts to eleven years. primary level—including two years of kindergarten or a first learning cycle—comprises eight years. secondary level in academically-oriented high schools takes six years. 4.1.1. study 1 the sample that formed the basis for our quantitative analysis consisted of 91 primary school students (43 m, 48 f) and 89 secondary school students (46 m, 43 f) from the canton of zurich in switzerland. the primary school group was tested during their last semester in primary school (grade level 6), when they were between 12 and 13 years old (mean age 12;1). they attended 18 different classes in 12 primary schools. all the primary school participants were planning to proceed to an academically oriented secondary school in the following academic year, as in switzerland students are streamed into different branches of secondary school after grade 6. we employed a cross-sectional design to create a pseudo-longitudinal study (see gass & selinker, 2008) by comparing the primary school group data with the data collected from the 89 secondary school students 5-6 months into secondary school. learners in this group were slightly older (mean age 13;1, range 12-13) than the participants in the primary school group. the 89 participants were nested within 10 classes that were nested within five secondary schools. simone e. pfenninger, johanna lendl 450 4.1.2. study 2 for the qualitative analyses we selected 100 secondary school students (41 m, 59 f) also from the zurich area of switzerland, who were part of an 8-year longitudinal project called beyond age effects (see pfenninger & singleton, 2017), in which we analyzed the effects of age of onset vis-à-vis the learning of english that manifest themselves in the course of secondary schooling in the context of a multilingual educational model. the participants in this group were tested six months after they began academically oriented high school when they were 13 years old (mean age 13;8, range 13-14). the 100 learners were nested within six classes that were nested within five schools. one out of the five schools was in a suburban area, while the others were in urban school districts. 4.1.3. study 3 due to organizational reasons, it was impossible to follow all the students in their transition to secondary school. therefore, we created a focal group that comprised three learners—two boys and a girl, who we shall refer to in the following as noah, tobias and laura—who were included in both data collections and whose results were analyzed quantitatively as well as qualitatively. the three participants were in the same classes as the primary school children in study 1 and shared the same characteristics. this group enabled us to obtain a true longitudinal perspective of the transition from primary to secondary school. 4.2. tasks and procedure in the context of the quantitative approach, we focused on the students’ perspectives on the different teaching methodologies, the distinct tasks in the classroom as well as on the input they received in primary or secondary school respectively. to this end, a questionnaire consisting of 34 closed-ended items was administered to the primary and secondary school groups in the pseudo-longitudinal design (study 1). multi-item scales were created for eight dimensions of classroom activities (cf. dörnyei, 2010, p. 23). the eight dimensions were aimed at exploring the teaching approaches practiced on primary versus secondary school level (see table 1) and their orientation towards implicit or explicit learning. the items in the first two dimensions refer to the communicative and meaning-oriented approach that is typically associated with primary school teaching and designed to promote implicit learning (cf. edk-ost, 2009, pp. 6-7; muñoz et al., 2015), transitional woes: on the impact of l2 input continuity from primary to secondary school 451 table 1 information about the multi-item scales dimension variables no. of items sample item 1 implicit: production 4 we sing songs in english. 2 implicit: input 4 we watch movies in english. 3 explicit: vocabulary 6 we learn how to spell words. 4 explicit: grammar rules 4 we conjugate verbs or learn tenses. 5 explicit: strategies 5 i look up words in a(n) (online) dictionary. 6 use of german 4 our teacher uses german in english class. 7 classroom material 4 we work with a course book. 8 socio-cultural awareness. 3 we learn facts about people in english-speaking countries. the items in the first dimension focused on exercises calling for language production, such as for example role-playing, whereas the second dimension was aimed at different types of input in the classroom, such as listening to audio texts or watching video clips in english. three dimensions (3-5) referred to items enquiring about tasks that direct learners’ attention to l2 form, either deductively (e.g., through the presentation of grammar rules) or inductively (e.g., by asking learners to look for or work out patterns). these approaches are typically associated with fl instruction in secondary schools. however, they are not particularly unusual either towards the end of primary school in switzerland. moreover, the use of german in the efl classroom constituted a separate dimension that tapped into teacher or student use of the local language(s) (swiss german or standard german), as it has been suggested (e.g., in pfenninger & singleton, 2017) that there is frequent use of the l1 in the efl classrooms in swiss primary schools. in the seventh dimension, we decided to investigate the employment of different teaching materials such as course books, worksheets, or authentic materials as different materials might contribute to perceived difficulties when transitioning from primary to secondary school. finally, our last category focused on aspects of learning that enhance the examination of cultural or social circumstances in the english-speaking world and strengthen the link between language and culture. it was deemed important to incorporate such items, as awareness-raising of different cultures and societies constitutes one of the principal aims of early fl instruction (edk-ost, 2009, p. 11, european commission, 2004, p. 16). the individual categories were allotted between three and six items that each targeted a specific classroom activity. for every item, frequency of use and perceived usefulness were elicited: for the former, a five-point likert-type scale was used, which provided absolute frequency indications (every lesson – once a week – once a month – less often – never) to minimize subjective interpretation of the scale and to present enough possibilities for a precise answer (cf. dörnyei, 2010, p. 29). to ascertain the perceived usefulness, the participants had to rate the activity on a 3-point scale, ranging from very useful to not useful. finally, the list of items was randomized and translated into german. the participants were given 20 minutes to complete the questionnaire. the questionnaire was piloted with a simone e. pfenninger, johanna lendl 452 group of primary and secondary school students (n = 7, mean age 12;5) and subsequently revised in order to increase validity and reliability. importantly, what is meaningful is not necessarily the observed or perceived change from primary to secondary school, but rather how individuals relate to it. as jones (2016, p. 80) rightly points out, it is important to ask for and listen to the views of students in all that affects them directly. children are well able to give revealing and honest views about their learning, and students of all ages can show a remarkable capacity to discuss their learning in a considered and insightful way. accordingly, in order to give a better account of the nature of the transition as perceived by learners and (often hidden) variables such as motivation, attitudes and beliefs, we used language experience essays in our qualitative group and in the focal group, which we hoped would elicit: (a) the participants’ personal reflections on their experience of fl learning in primary versus secondary school in general, and the transition in particular; (b) the participants’ affect in respect of fls, and english in particular; and (c) the participants’ beliefs about the age factor and early fl programs. the use of these essays was based on the idea that, on the one hand, learners’ beliefs are— consciously or unconsciously—gleaned from past experience, and that, on the other, learners’ beliefs have an influential role in respect of learning outcomes (see, e.g., gregersen & macintyre, 2014). we provided loose guidelines for the writing. these stated: “you should write about your feelings, thoughts, opinion, motivation as well as any experiences with regard to the early or late introduction of multiple foreign languages.” no specific length was set, but the participants were asked to write these essays in their l1 (german); students wrote between 203 and 475 words in 45 minutes. these essays provided the basis for our qualitative analysis. 4.3. method and statistical analyses 4.3.1. study 1 since the sampled students were nested in a hierarchical fashion within classes within schools, we used r (r development core team, 2016) and lme4 (bates, maechler, & bolker, 2008) to perform a linear mixed-effects regression analysis (multi-level analysis) of the self-reported (attitudes to) classroom activities and input in primary versus secondary school (see pfenninger & singleton, 2017 for a discussion of the benefits of such models for age-related research). as fixed effects, we entered school level (primary, secondary) into the model and recoded them to use contrast coding (-.5 = primary, .5 = secondary). contrast coding is recommended in the case of two-level factors, as it can prevent some convergence issues by reducing multicollinearity among the predictors (see, e.g., linck & cunnings, 2015). frequency of use of activity (on a five-point scale), and perceived transitional woes: on the impact of l2 input continuity from primary to secondary school 453 usefulness of activity (on a three-point scale) were dependent variables. the final models had random effects (intercepts) to provide an account of class-toclass and school-to-school differences that induce correlation among scores for students within a school and within a class. in other words, the hierarchical structure of the data on all skills tested consisted of three levels: student (level 1), class (level 2), and school (level 3). the scores on the tests were added to the model at the student level. since the same items in the questionnaire were presented to both groups of participants (i.e., primary and secondary students), we included a random slope in the model, which allows the school level effect to vary by item (by-item random slopes). visual inspection of residual plots did not reveal any obvious deviations from homoscedasticity or normality. models were fit using a maximum likelihood technique. p-values were obtained by likelihood ratio tests of the full model with the effect in question against the model without the effect in question. all models reported were fitted using laplace estimation with the r software. also, all models were first evaluated with likelihood ratio tests (test model vs. null model with only the control variables). if the full model versus null model comparison reached significance, we present p-values based on likelihood ratio tests. given the lack of degrees of freedom with mixed models, we refrain from reporting df. 4.3.2. study 2 in the qualitative analysis we pursued a predominantly deductive approach (see ellis & barkhuizen, 2005), concentrating specifically on issues related to the transition from efl in primary to efl in secondary school. as mentioned in the literature review above, various factors seem to contribute to student disengagement and may be responsible for the observed lack of enthusiasm to engage with english in school. accordingly the following codes were developed: · change from primary to secondary [cha] — welcoming the change [wel] — criticizing the change [crit] — no change [nocha] — repetition [rep] — differences in learning style [lstyle] — differences in teaching style [tstyle] — explicit versus implicit [expl] [impl] · learning effect [eff] — perceived efficiency of efl learning in primary [effprim] — perceived efficiency of efl learning in secondary [effsec] simone e. pfenninger, johanna lendl 454 · input [inp] — teacher [teach] — materials [mat] it has to be mentioned, however, that while some of these codes were created before engagement with the data began, some changed once the analysis got underway, and codes got deleted and others were added (inductive coding, see ellis & barkhuizen, 2005, for a discussion of this). in the inductive, bottom-up approach we proceeded trough the traditional steps from open coding (finding all possible themes that emerge) via axial coding (finding relationships between themes) to selective coding (finding the overarching theme) (see corbin & strauss, 2007). 5. results 5.1. quantitative analyses (study 1) table 2 shows the descriptive statistics of our quantitative analysis (questionnaire data) while the results of the final best-fitting models for each dependent variable are reported in table 3. as tables 2 and 3 show, results indicate that there is a significant main effect for “level” (primary vs. secondary school) for half of the dimensions in terms of frequency of use (implicit input, explicit strategies, use of german and socio-cultural awareness), but for only one dimension in terms of perceived usefulness (socio-cultural awareness). primary school students reported significantly more often that they engaged in receptive—but not productive—activities that are typically deemed “implicit” (e.g., watching movies, listening to music, etc.) and that they and their teacher used german in the english classroom in various situations. on the other hand, secondary school students mentioned a more frequent use of fl learning strategies such as crosslinguistic comparison, dictionary use, and repetition, and they more frequently reported being engaged in activities that raised their socio-cultural awareness. table 2 descriptive statistics of questionnaire data (means and sds) primary (n = 91) secondary (n = 89) implicit: production frequency 2.56 (0.50) 2.52 (0.61) usefulness 1.95 (0.50) 1.94 (0.39) implicit: input frequency 3.15 (0.54) 2.77 (0.53) usefulness 2.24 (0.25) 2.13 (0.33) explicit: vocabulary frequency 3.58 (0.69) 3.66 (0.71) usefulness 2.48 (0.37) 2.45 (0.32) explicit: grammar rules frequency 3.29 (0.55) 3.37 (0.44) usefulness 2.49 (0.29) 2.45 (0.32) explicit: strategies frequency 2.91 (0.69) 3.17 (0.58) usefulness 2.22 (0.27) 2.27 (0.35) transitional woes: on the impact of l2 input continuity from primary to secondary school 455 use of german frequency 3.76 (0.62) 3.29 (0.58) usefulness 1.83 (0.39) 1.81 (0.28) classroom material frequency 3.14 (0.58) 3.16 (0.44) usefulness 2.10 (0.34) 2.11 (0.30) socio-cultural awareness frequency 2.59 (0.72) 2.91 (0.86) usefulness 2.10 (0.50) 1.86 (0.49) note. values in bold indicate significantly higher values. table 3 fixed effect estimates for school level (primary vs. secondary) estimate b±se t main effect p implicit: production frequency -0.05±0.16 -0.32 .748* usefulness -0.01±0.15 -0.08 .924* implicit: input frequency -0.38±0.10 -3.63 .001* usefulness -0.09±0.06 -1.67 .099* explicit: vocabulary frequency 0.09±0.15 0.61 .519* usefulness -0.03±0.06 -0.60 .525* explicit: grammar rules frequency 0.08±0.07 1.04 .297* usefulness -0.04±0.05 -0.91 .363* explicit: strategies frequency 0.26±0.15 2.01 .049* usefulness 0.07±0.06 1.06 .275* use of german frequency -0.48±0.19 -2.54 .022* usefulness -0.02±0.06 -0.30 .704* classroom material frequency -0.00±0.16 -0.02 .992* usefulness 0.01±0.05 0.17 .867* socio-cultural awareness frequency 0.34±017 2.05 .048* usefulness -0.23±0.11 -2.18 .033* note. * statistically significant at α < .05. figure 1 implicit input by level primary secondary 1. 5 2. 0 2. 5 3. 0 3. 5 4. 0 level im pl ic it in pu t( fre qu en cy of us e) simone e. pfenninger, johanna lendl 456 figure 1 illustrates these differences for implicit input. there seems to be no difference between end of primary and beginning of secondary level in terms of typical “explicit,” language-focused activities such as the learning and testing of explicit grammar and spelling rules, the use of exercises such as cloze-tests, focus on forms (e.g., inflections) and the conscious study of vocabulary. what is more, most (i.e., 31) of the 34 questions relating to teaching methodologies, classroom tasks and types of input were considered equally useful/beneficial by primary and secondary school students. however, it needs to be mentioned that there was substantial macroand micro-contextual variation in the data, particularly at primary school level. as can be seen in figures 2 and 3, there are significant cohort effects at level 2 (class) and level 3 (school), that is, significant random class effects with estimated intraclass correlation coefficients (icc) between 0.15 and 0.41. class effects, therefore, explained 15%-41% of the variability in the responses of the participants, while school effects explained 5%-11%. figures 2 and 3 show the differences between the 18 primary school classes in terms of frequency of activities targeting implicit production and their perceived usefulness. figure 2 variation across primary school classes for frequency of implicit production tasks 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 1. 5 2. 0 2. 5 3. 0 3. 5 primary school classes (n=18) im pl ic it pr od uc tio n (fr eq ue nc y of us e) primary school classes (n = 18) transitional woes: on the impact of l2 input continuity from primary to secondary school 457 figure 3 variation across primary school classes for perceived usefulness of implicit production tasks by contrast, the cohort effects were not as pronounced in the secondary school data, which admittedly might be due to the smaller sample size at the group level (fewer schools and classes with more students per class, see figures 4 and 5). figure 4 variation across secondary school classes for frequency of implicit production tasks 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 1. 0 1. 5 2. 0 2. 5 primary school classes (n=18) im pl ic it pr od uc tio n (p er ce iv ed us ef ul ne ss ) 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 1. 5 2. 0 2. 5 3. 0 3. 5 secondary school classes (n=10) im pl ic it pr od uc tio n (f re qu en cy of us e) primary school classes (n = 18) secondary school classes (n = 10) simone e. pfenninger, johanna lendl 458 figure 5 variation across secondary school classes for perceived usefulness of implicit production tasks the same holds true at school level, where we find more between-school variability at primary school level than at secondary school level (see figures 6-7 for implicit production). figure 6 variation across primary schools for frequency of implicit production tasks 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 1. 5 2. 0 2. 5 3. 0 secondary school classes (n=10) im pl ic it pr od uc tio n (p er ce iv ed us ef ul ne ss ) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1. 5 2. 0 2. 5 3. 0 3. 5 primary schools (n=12) im pl ic it pr od uc tio n (fr eq ue nc y of us e) secondary school classes (n = 10) primary school classes (n = 12) transitional woes: on the impact of l2 input continuity from primary to secondary school 459 figure 7 variation across secondary schools for frequency of implicit production tasks apart from group-level differences, it is important to also look into individual variation within classes, this time from a qualitative perspective, using data from study 2. this is insofar important as it gives students a voice in this discussion, as mentioned in our introduction above. 5.2. qualitative results of the language learning experience essays (study 2) in this section we explore the qualitative data from the language learning experience essays to obtain information about how early learners view the matter of transition from efl in primary to efl in secondary school, what the learners themselves would recommend, and about the way they perceive the discrepancy between the two levels. table 4 lists the categories of responses. table 4 results of the qualitative coding (quantified) categories % of responses (out of 100) change from primary to secondary [cha] welcoming the change [wel] criticizing the change [crit] 18% 45% no change [nocha] 5% repetition [rep] 41% differences in learning style [lstyle] 23% differences in teaching style [tstyle] 60% 13 14 15 16 17 18 1. 5 2. 0 2. 5 3. 0 3. 5 secondary schools (n=5) im pl ic it pr od uc tio n (f re qu en cy of us e) secondary school classes (n = 5) simone e. pfenninger, johanna lendl 460 explicit vs. implicit [expl] [impl] 78% learning effect [eff] perceived efficiency of efl learning in primary [effprim] 72% perceived efficiency of efl learning in secondary [effsec] 45% input [inp] teacher [teach] 69% materials [mat] 14% most participants noticed a change from efl in primary to efl in secondary school, either welcoming the change (18%) or criticizing it (45%). as observed elsewhere (see, e.g., graham et al., 2016), there was widespread comment on apparent repetition by secondary teachers of work already covered in primary schools. as table 4 shows, 41% of the 100 students in the qualitative sample mentioned that the type of knowledge they had acquired in primary school was not fully acknowledged by teachers in secondary school (see examples (1) and (2)): (1) but i remember, how the learning in the early years was unfocused and slow. at the higher level it then progressed really fast. on top of this it must be added, that early acquired knowledge has anyway got to be reviewed again in subsequent schooling. after five years of learning english and two years of learning french, i had to start again. (12_elh9_m_ger) (2) i’m so glad that we are going over a couple of things again in both subjects [english and french]; e.g. i’m overjoyed that we are especially revising conjugation. (07_ell9_f_ger) 23% noticed a difference in learning style and strategy use, as illustrated by the comment in (3): (3) at primary school i didn’t learn the technique of learning in english. but now at secondary school i have to learn most of it, because i have to catch up with everything, above all i must learn to learn! (07_elb55_f_ger) similarly, in the “strategies” dimension of the questionnaire, the item enquiring about repetition yielded one of the biggest differences between primary and secondary level. while 72% commented on the in/efficiency of efl learning in primary (see examples (4)-(5) below), the most noticeable change in teaching style was the use of classroom language: 56% mentioned a change in the choice of language of instruction from that used at primary school (see (6)-(7)), which confirms the picture that emerged from the quantitative analysis: (4) yes, i had difficulties. but i think this was because of my former teacher, she taught us the same stuff again and again and we somehow stayed where we were. for that reason i was very much at a loss when i got to secondary. (07_elb13_f_ger) (5) i think it’s good that i had english as early as 2nd class because actually i didn’t feel it as a burden. it was very easy too that we only learned things like “hello, how are you” and transitional woes: on the impact of l2 input continuity from primary to secondary school 461 general standard things. we learned colors, numbers and animals until finally we were able to make sentences. there were basic rules of a kind that i didn’t find tremendously easy but with time you find it easier. i had a good teacher for this too. (07_elh9_m_ger) (6) at primary school our teacher even continued to speak german, but here at xxx the teacher only speaks english. this is confusing. (07_el91_f_ger) (7) i find it cool that our [english] teacher speaks english to us. we are ready for this now, but in primary school it was good that we could still use german [in english class] (07_el55_m_ger) what is also noteworthy about examples (1)-(7) is the discrepancy in perceptions within—rather than between—levels. for instance, as examples (2), (5) and (7) above illustrate, a slow pace and frequent incorporation of the l1 (german) in primary, and repeated content in secondary can be perceived as helpful (particularly by low-achievement students), while other learners—especially high-achievement learners—find it unnecessary and boring (see also pfenninger & singleton, 2017). the same holds true for the perceived change from “implicit” to “explicit” learning, which was mentioned by 78% of the participants: (8) at primary school we had “play-english” (never anything but singing, playing, watching films). today i still sing the songs from that time in “double dutch”. the real learning of language in this system too begins only at secondary level when you learn sentence construction and basic grammar. (07_elh1_m_ger) however, opinions supportive of this type of approach in primary were also in evidence: (9) when children at an early age are already confronted with foreign languages, they learn to get involved with other languages earlier. with the help of simple games and songs in a foreign language a small vocabulary can be built up. (07_elh9_m_ger) as a matter of fact, 58% of the participants were conscious of the gap between high achievers and low achievers, as well as the conflicting views within one classroom (as reflected in figures 2-7 above). the comments in examples (10)-(13) illustrate their awareness of both macro-variation (differences between classes) and micro-variation (individual variation within classes): (10) according to my experiences, it’s heavily dependent too on the person whether they benefit from the early learning of foreign languages. you have to be aware that at primary school the iq range is very wide. so for one child french or english instruction may be a trifling thing, for another a hugely excessive demand. (12_elh7_f_ger) (11) there are huge differences between children in my class. some cannot speak a word of english, but it’s not their fault; they did not learn it well in primary school. (07_el19_f_ger) simone e. pfenninger, johanna lendl 462 (12) so actually the teaching should be suited to each child because children learn foreign languages so differently. (12_elh3_f_ger) (13) i had no difficulty with the transition. but i was also in a very good class with very good peers in primary school! (07_el27_m_ger) finally, when it came to the importance of the teacher, the 69% of students who referred to the role of the teacher came out fairly uniformly with sentiments like the following: (14) i think it’s a great opportunity to build upon, because wherever you are you can make very good use of languages. but unfortunately the school material is not communicated equally well by all teachers. some teachers almost make you look like a fool when you don’t know something or when you quite simply don’t understand the stuff. it’s partly a matter for the teacher whether he is friendly or rather unfriendly; because my old french teacher was not open and sincere, i then felt i didn’t so much like going to class. with our english teacher at that time i was always pleased to come to class, and english i find more fun; our teacher is open, friendly and very sincere. she communicates a good feeling so that even before a test i don’t get as anxious as is usually the case with me. (07_lll3_f_ger) 5.3. qualitative analysis of the longitudinal case study (study 3) finally, let us zoom in on the language learning experience essays written by each of the three members of the focal group (laura, tobias and noah). similarly to the majority of the participants in the qualitative group, all three participants in the case study perceived the shift of focus from “implicit” to “explicit” learning as well as a difference in the language of communication as important changes that the transition entailed. according to them, while they had watched films, played games and read texts in primary school, in secondary school the main emphasis was placed on problem-solving exercises in the lessons – or in laura’s words “we do more grammar stuff now, like question formation etc.” (ss2_llee_2). moreover, all three learners perceived the different use of the target language as one of the most striking differences between primary and secondary school. although tobias had indicated before the transition that the primary school teacher spoke english “70% of the lesson” (ps6_llee_1), as opposed to the “99% english” that his secondary school teacher uses, in retrospect he perceived the change as rather dramatic: he mentions a shift from the primary teacher “speaking virtually only german” to the “current teacher speaking solely english” (ss1_llee_2). he welcomed this change, mentioning target language use as a positive quality of his new english teacher. noah argued along the same lines: transitional woes: on the impact of l2 input continuity from primary to secondary school 463 (15) the teacher speaks almost exclusively english now, i think this is very helpful. . . . the students should speak english more often in primary school and the teachers should speak english more often as well. (ss3_llee_2) in addition to the lack of target language use, noah also criticized the fact that his english instruction in primary school did not follow a communicative, oral-based approach, as the students did not have to speak much in comparison to his current english lessons. by contrast, in laura’s primary school class the use of different languages for communication seemed to have been a central component of the learning experience, as the following excerpt from her essay at the first data collection time shows: (16) i like the lessons, because we talk in english very often. . . . sometimes [the teacher] tells us that now it’s english only and we have to give all our answers in english. [apart from that] we often reply in german. . . . in my opinion, the students should speak english more consistently when talking to the teacher. i think we should also do more role-plays, so we improve our spoken english. (ps14_llee_1) in line with the results from the quantitative analysis, this illustrates: (1) the variety in the implementation of primary school curricula and (2) the difficulty of establishing an increased use of the target language in primary school, perhaps also due to the mixed ability levels of the learners. consequently, for laura, one of the main changes that the transition involved was that more emphasis came to be placed on pronunciation. in her opinion, the teachers and consequently also the students speak more “authentic english” in secondary school. she had already indicated before the transition that she wished for her teacher to improve her own pronunciation and she reiterated at time 2 that it was important to her to pay more attention to how words are pronounced from the beginning. considering that young learners’ alleged relative ease in acquiring the sounds of a fl is often cited as an argument for early fl programs (see johnstone, 2009), these observations are highly relevant. overall, the two boys commented favorably on the topics that were explored in the english primary school classroom—particularly content and language integrated lessons—which seemed to influence their perception of efl instruction to a great extent (examples (17)-(18)). these remarks highlight the importance of intrinsically motivating content for a favorable learning experience for young learners. (17) what i like about the english lessons is that we learn english and simultaneously also learn about a specific topic. (ps6_llee_1) (18) the topics are usually fascinating and i learn new things. i don’t like it that much if i don’t find the topic interesting. then [english] is sometimes a bit boring. (ps1_llee_1) simone e. pfenninger, johanna lendl 464 in learners’ hindsight, aspects of primary instruction that were perceived as most helpful for a smooth transition by the three learners were acquiring a basic grammatical knowledge (tobias and laura), accumulating useful vocabulary (laura and noah), developing pronunciation skills (tobias) and certain activities that provided extensive input, such as watching films (noah). with respect to the transition, tobias also commented on macro-variation on primary school level and micro-variation on secondary school level: (19) what i learned about pronunciation is also useful now, when i compare myself to some of my peers from other primary schools who don’t even know how to pronounce “but”. our primary school teacher was good in this regard. . . . i didn’t have any difficulties in the transition, as we are now repeating the contents from grades 5 and 6. for some students this is new, but for me it’s repetition and consolidation. (ss1_llee_2) 6. discussion and conclusion several observations in the quantitative and qualitative parts of this study have highlighted problems of articulation between levels in the educational system that might be problematic for the progression of english instruction in secondary school. most importantly, the quantitative analysis has revealed that there does not seem to be a general problem with the transition from a rather more communicative and holistic approach at primary level to more formal ways of fl learning at the secondary one, as has been suggested before in the literature (see the review above). rather, there are specific problem areas, notably the use of implicit input activities (e.g., singing songs and playing), which creates the impression among learners that a new start in a secondary school involves the risk of leaving behind what students learned in primary school. muñoz et al. (2015) caution that if students are not made aware of their implicit knowledge in primary school, then they perceive that what they have learned until transition has not prepared them for the “new” classroom activities. this results in some learners (but not all of them!) undervaluing what l2 knowledge they brought with them. muñoz and colleagues reason that the lack of recognition on the students’ part of what they have learned in primary school may lead them to perceive efl in secondary school as a new start, just as their teachers do. another noteworthy result in both the quantitative and the qualitative analyses was the repetitive nature of efl in secondary school. at first glance, the students’ responses raise the question as to whether the skills that are acquired at primary school are adequately accredited at secondary school. as mentioned above, many authors (see e.g., muñoz et al., 2015) have previously suggested that repeating content and activities may have implications for learners’ sense of progress. ushioda (2014, p. 135) points out that social-environmental conditions that transitional woes: on the impact of l2 input continuity from primary to secondary school 465 undermine learners’ sense of competence will generate forms of motivation that are less internalized, less integrated into the self or aligned with its values, and more externally regulated by environmental influences, pressures and controls. in the words of jones (2016, p. 83), “it is a huge disappointment for learners to be told that their previous learning counts for nothing, a bit like losing a suitcase or other valued item on a journey that becomes lost forever.” compared to these previous observations, our study painted a more complex picture, suggesting that there are also a good number of learners who report similarly high levels of enjoyment for english at the start of secondary school than at the end of primary, particularly owing to repeated content in secondary and a clear disjuncture from primary. this is in line with previous work in england by courtney et al. (2015), who found that their learners of french did not object to covering familiar content when they reached the first year of secondary school, as it enhanced their sense of making progress by consolidating their knowledge and skills. graham et al. (2016), in a similar context, found that total motivation scores increased at significant levels across the immediate point of transition, and by the end of year 7 (first year of secondary), levels were still significantly higher than in year 6 (last year of primary). in the qualitative analysis of the 100 learner essays in our study there was also a strong sense of the relevance of this discrepancy to the entire class—a finding which is reminiscent of lamb’s (2007) study, in which learners of efl grew increasingly more focused on, and critical of, the classroom experience over the first 20 months of english learning at junior high school in indonesia. besides individual variation, school and class diversity also played a significant role, particularly in our primary school data. while differences in sampling at the group level may be responsible for this phenomenon, as mentioned above, it is a well-known problem that the level of primary school groups can be very heterogeneous. when the primary school students enter secondary school, they frequently do not share the same level of competence, which leads to socalled “mixed ability classes.” this can lead to frustration and boredom on the part of the higher-proficiency learners and to feelings of being overwhelmed and overtaxed in lower-proficiency students. pfenninger and singleton (2017) discussed in detail how the fact that secondary education becomes a meeting point for mixed ability classes also seems to strongly mitigate the potential advantages of an earlier start in terms of progress made in the target language. thus, the phenomenon of experiencing difficulty with the move into secondary school may arguably arise from the variability in the amount and quality of fl teaching learners experience at primary school which then leads to some secondary schools feeling obliged to start language instruction from scratch with all learners, regardless of what they have learnt previously. the following lessons can be learned from our findings and observations: simone e. pfenninger, johanna lendl 466 1. the problems surrounding the early teaching and learning of fls are not only concerned with questions of maturation (e.g., are young children cognitively able to learn a fl in a formal, instructional setting?) or intensity of instruction (e.g., are 1-2 hours of fl instruction per week enough?) but with broader macro-institutional factors that hamper or render impossible the goal of offering several years of continued fl instruction. 2. the transition from fl learning in primary to fl learning in secondary has to be given more attention as a major factor in students’ levels of attainment. 3. we need to establish effective and appropriate liaison between schools including transfer of information. 4. students must feel that the work they are doing in primary school is appropriate to their needs. the use of self-reported language learning beliefs as the unique measure of language ability can be viewed as a methodological limitation of the study, as there might be discrepancies in students’ self-reports and teachers’ actual practices. another delimitation of the study is focusing only on an analysis of learners’ perceptions, and only at two times (at the end of primary and the beginning of secondary school). the transition process is complex and dynamic, changes occur across many interconnected dimensions of learners’ situations, and experiences are certainly marked by other objective or subjective changes. in a next step it would be vital to explore primary and secondary school teachers’ attitudes towards early fl instruction. in addition to individual and contextual factors, another important force in educational innovations such as early fl programs is the teachers themselves. as we have discussed in this paper, a potential mismatch of student-teacher expectations regarding fl teaching methods used in class may cause a decrease in motivation, for example, when students do not receive input that addresses their l2 proficiency level (graham et al., 2016). it seems to be particularly important that secondary school teachers are thorough in assessing initial language skills that students in their class have already attained. this calls for research on teachers’ beliefs about, and attitudes to, the early instruction of fls. transitional woes: on the impact of l2 input continuity from primary to secondary school 467 references barton, a., & bragg, j. 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(2014). motivational perspectives on the self in sla: a developmental view. in s. mercer & m. williams (eds.), multiple perspectives on the self in sla. second language acquisition (pp. 127-141). bristol: multilingual matters. 109 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (1). 2014. 109-125 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.1.6 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl topic prominence in chinese efl learners’ interlanguage shaopeng li shanghai international studies university, shanghai, china lishaopeng99@126.com lianrui yang ocean university of china, qingdao, china larryyang@126.com abstract the present study aims to investigate the general characteristics of topicprominent typological interlanguage development of chinese learners of english in terms of acquiring subject-prominent english structures from a discourse perspective. topic structures mainly appear in chinese discourse in the form of topic chains (wang, 2002; 2004). the research target are the topic chain, which is the main topic-prominent structure in chinese discourse, and zero anaphora, which is the most common topic anaphora in the topic chain. two important findings emerged from the present study. first, the characteristics of chinese topic chains are transferrable to the interlanguage of chinese efl learners, thus resulting in overgeneralization of the zero anaphora. second, the interlanguage discourse of chinese efl learners reflects a change of the second language acquisition process from topic-prominence to subject-prominence, thus lending support to the discourse transfer hypothesis. keywords: topic prominence, subject prominence, topic chain, zero anaphora, discourse transfer, english shaopeng li, lianrui yang 110 1. introduction in terms of information structure in discourse, english and chinese are typologically different languages. chinese is a topic-prominent language in which the topic plays an important role in the formation of a sentence, whereas english belongs to the group of subject-prominent languages in which the subject is an indispensable element that determines the english sentence pattern (li & thompson, 1976). in second language acquisition research, quite a number of empirical studies have been conducted based on the language typological classification of subject-prominence (sp) and topic-prominence (tp) (cai, 1998a, 1998b; givón, 1983; jung, 2004; sasaki, 1990; shi, 1989; yang, 2008). however, previous studies usually explored the tp/sp issue from a syntactic perspective, ignoring the discourse function of the chinese topic, as well as the influence of the key topic structure in chinese discourse. consequently, the topic chain in interlanguage discourse of chinese learners has scarcely been investigated. a topic chain is “a set of clauses linked by a topic in the form of zero anaphora” (chu, 1998, p. 324). a good example of a topic chain will be provided later in the paper. the present study attempts to move beyond syntax to investigate tp in the interlanguage of chinese efl learners from a discourse perspective. the research target for this chapter is the topic chain, which is the main tp structure in chinese discourse, and zero anaphora, which is the most common topic anaphora in the topic chain. topic structures mainly appear in chinese discourse in the form of topic chains (wang, 2002, 2004). zero anaphora can be used in a discourse which contains at least two clauses, and this is the reason why we have chosen it as our research target. we hope that the findings of the present study will shed light on the change of chinese efl learners’ interlanguage from tp to sp from a discourse perspective. 2. background 2.1. topic and topic chain the topic in a topic-prominent language is characterized by a continuity of the referent in discourse which represents the availability or identifiability of the referent for the speakers and listeners involved (givón, 1983). the topic explicitly establishes a point of reference for the ensuing discourse for introducing new information, that is, information that is not recoverable from the preceding text. a topic chain has always been considered as a self-contained unit, either on the syntactic level or on the discourse level. in previous studies, however, it was shown that this unit does not always correspond to the traditional notion of topic prominence in chinese efl learners’ interlanguage 111 a sentence. in addition, the domain or scope of a topic chain can cross not only sentence boundaries but also paragraph boundaries. this seems to suggest that a topic chain can be a unit larger than a sentence or even a paragraph. topic chains are a common phenomenon in chinese. referring expressions that can be deduced contextually by the reader are frequently omitted in chinese discourse (yeh & chen, 2003). the referring expressions have enough topic continuity and thus enough cohesion for readers or listeners to find the particular stretch of discourse coherent. tsao (1979) is believed to have been the first researcher to use the term topic chain. he stated that a topic chain is a stretch of actual discourse composed of one or more than one clause, headed by a topic which serves as a common link among all the clauses. it actually functions as “a discourse unit in chinese” (p. vii; also see tsao, 1990, p.63). chu (1998) presented a more restricted view. he contended that, because topic is mainly a discourse notion, it can be identified only on the level of discourse where it serves as an inter-clausal link. consequently, he defined a topic chain as “a set of clauses linked by a topic in the form of zero anaphora” (p. 324). to him, there is no point in talking about a topic within a single clause/sentence. according to li (2005), a topic chain is a chain of clauses sharing an identical topic that occurs overtly once in one of the clauses. all the other clauses are linked to the chain by zero nps (zero nps are marked as ø in (1)) coreferential anaphorically or cataphorically with the topic. in the following example, the overt np that car is the topic in the topic chain which contains six clauses: (1) na liang che np/ jiaqian tai gui, ønp yanse ye buhao, wo bu that classifier car price too expensive color either not good i not xihuan ønp, bu xiangmai ønp. zuotian qu kan le yixia ønp like not want buy yesterday go look hai kai le yihuier ønp, haishi bu xihuan ønp. also drive a while still not like ‘that car is too expensive, and its color is not good. i don’t like it and don’t want to buy it. i went to see it yesterday and i drove it for a short time, but i still dislike it.’ as we can see, six unspecified nps are identified in (1). the clauses with the unspecified nps and the one with the overt coreferential np (‘that car’) are considered to form a chain with the overt np being the topic of the chain. the topic is usually mentioned once at the beginning of a chain in the first clause, and the following chain of clauses shares one single topic. shaopeng li, lianrui yang 112 2.2. zero anaphora anaphora in chinese can be classified into three categories, which are zero, pronominal and nominal forms respectively (chen, 1987). the example in (2) is quoted from chen (1987): (2) tang mingde jinghuang de wang wai pao, ø zhuang dao yi ge dahan de tang mingde in panic out ran bumped into a big guy’s shenshang, ta kan qing le naren de meiyan, ø renchu naren shi shui. body he saw clearly that guy’s eyes recognized that guy was who ‘tang mingde ran out in panic and bumped into a big guy. he saw that guy’s eyes clearly and recognized who that guy was.’ in this example, ø and ta co-refer with tang mingde, and na ren co-refers with yi ge da han. ø, ta and na ren represent three kinds of anaphora in chinese: a zero, a pronoun and a full noun phrase respectively. in chinese discourse, the anaphora is frequently in the form of a zero morpheme, due to its prominence in discourse (li & thompson, 1981), which is termed zero anaphora (hereafter za). zero anaphora is generally understood from the context and left unspecified. zero anaphoras occur much more frequently in chinese than in english. in english, even when the intended referent can be easily understood from the context, the presence of pronouns is still required to complete a clause in a discourse. in fact, the structural completion of a sentence is so important in english that the language has to resort to a suppositional pronoun it to fill in the slot of the grammatical subject. the za is such a common linguistic device in mandarin that it may occur in almost any syntactic position in the sentence where a noun or a pronoun could appear. li and thompson (1981, p. 657) asserted that “a salient feature of mandarin grammar is the fact that noun phrases that are understood from context do not need to be specified.” 2.3. language typology: topic-prominent languages and subject-prominent languages when the relation between topic and subject in languages is invoked at the typological level, topic-prominent (tp) and subject-prominent (sp) relations are the two basic relations in the structures of languages (li & thompson, 1976). subject-prominent languages are those languages in which “the structure of topic prominence in chinese efl learners’ interlanguage 113 sentences favors a description in which the grammatical relation of subjectpredicate plays a major role” (li & thompson, 1976, p. 459). by contrast, tp languages are those in which “the basic structure of sentences favors a description in which the grammatical relation of topic-comment plays a major role” (li & thompson, 1976, p. 459). it was li & thompson (1976) who first categorized world languages into four basic types: languages that are sp, languages that are tp, languages that are both sp and tp, and languages that are neither sp nor tp. according to this typological classification, chinese is a tp language and english belongs to sp languages. the typological analysis above accordingly provides guidelines for identifying characteristic patterns in the study of any language and for analysis of interlanguage in terms of the acquisition of these patterns. 3. literature review 3.1. typological transfer and discourse transfer topic-prominent chinese and sp english, as two typologically salient languages, share some similarities but retain more differences. consequently, when a chinese learner of english makes an attempt to acquire sp english, both his previous knowledge of l1 and his present knowledge of l2 are adopted to decide whether tp features are available in english. research has shown two contradictory claims about the role of topic/subject prominence typology in l2 acquisition. one claim is that irrespective of the learners’ l1, the process of l2 acquisition is characterized by an early universal tp stage and that the typology of topic/subject prominence is not transferable. the opposing view on the role of topic/subject prominence typology in l2 acquisition is that the learners’ l1 plays a role in their l2 learning and that as their l2 proficiency increases, native speakers of tp languages gradually increase the use of sp features in their l2 production. discourse transfer refers to the use of some of the discourse patterns of the learner’s l2 in the same way in which they are employed in the learner’s l1 (see kasper & schmidt, 1996; kellerman, 1995; wu, 2001). discourse transfer is operationally defined in the present study as the transfer that happens when the language learner transfers l1-based discourse patterns to the l2 context. discourse transfer studies focus on an l1 discourse strategy that is negatively transferred to l2 contexts, and demonstrates how learners transfer the l1 criteria of discourse processing. along this line, discourse transfer studies look at the structure of l2 learners’ output to see how it is organized. some previous studies (kasper, 1992; kellerman, 1983) view discourse transfer as a cognitive activity in that it reflects the selection of some discourse patterns in the learner’s l2 to be shaopeng li, lianrui yang 114 used in the same way in which they are employed in the learner’s l1, and focus on the learner’s cognitive contribution in selecting and producing l1-based discourse patterns in l2 contexts. the cognitive view emphasizes the relationship between l2 input, learner internal processing, and learner output in order to discover how the existing knowledge of the l1 influences the acquisition of l2. following this research tradition, bartelt (1992) states that “discourse transfer is a rule-governed cognitive process” (p. 113), in which the known rules of the native language are used as hypotheses in mastering the l2. as a tp language, chinese is characterized basically as a highly context-dependent language, which stresses semantic coherence rather than formal cohesion, whereas english is an sp language (wang, hsu, & chen, 1998). chinese is called a discourse-oriented language (huang, 1984, 1989; shi, 1989) with a rule of topic np deletion, which operates across discourse to delete the topic of a sentence under identity with a topic in a preceding sentence. the present study will focus on the discourse patterns of the learners’ l2 to see how they are organized and try to explore whether chinese efl learners will actively select and produce l1-based discourse patterns in l2 contexts due to the difference between chinese and english discourse mentioned above. 3.2. previous studies on topic prominence in interlanguage the introduction of the notion of tp by schachter and rutherford (1979) and rutherford (1983) into the research field of sla has triggered quite a number of studies concerned with this issue. fuller and gundel’s (1987) study suggests that tp/sp is not a transferable typology and that l2 learners of different language backgrounds may go through a similar stage of universal tp. the reason why fuller and gundel obtain such results might be the students recruited for their study. perhaps they were so advanced that any l1 effects would wash out. in contrast, our cross-sectional study may offer counterevidence against such a washout, since the low proficiency students do show what we would expect if transfer is at work. however, in recent years it is commonly accepted that learners’ l1 plays a role in their l2 learning. in his longitudinal study of a hmong (a tp language) adult learner of english, heubner (1983) found that the learner’s interlanguage was found to progress from the initial tp to the sp stage through morphological syntactization. rutherford (1983) detected evidence of overproduction of tp structures by tp speakers, especially chinese speakers whose language has typical tp features. jin (1994) found that when learning chinese, the english learners go through a process of systematically transferring english sp features to chinese until they reach a requisite proficiency when the concept of topic emerges, thus supporting rutherford’s (1983) claim on typological transfer. one of the present authors (yang, 2008) showed that chinese students at the topic prominence in chinese efl learners’ interlanguage 115 preliminary level are strongly influenced by their native language and transfer their chinese form/function to english directly. however, there is a general tendency that the frequency of using tp features in the interlanguage decreases and that the use of sp structures increases with higher english proficiency levels. in sum, two conflicting claims have emerged from the studies reviewed above. one is that the process of l2 acquisition is characterized by an early universal topic-comment stage, independent of a learner’s native language; the other is that the early tp stage is evidence of typological transfer from l1 to l2. such conflicting conclusions may arise from the fact that the studies above were based only on the learning of english, which is an sp language. although the previous findings lent support to typological transfer by examining interlanguage, the role of topic/subject prominence typology in l2 acquisition is still not clear, as these studies have explored this issue in a purely syntactic way. the exact status of typology in l2 acquisition cannot be fully accounted for until more studies are carried out to investigate sp interlanguages of tp l1 learners. it remains to be seen whether previous findings can be substantiated from a discourse perspective. it is not clear whether some l2 sentence-level discourse features will show similarity to the learner’s l1, that is, whether language learners will transfer l1-based discourse patterns to the l2 context. accordingly, the present study will look at the structure of l2 learners’ output to see how it is organized. consequently, the present study attempts to provide additional cross-linguistic examination by looking at how learners perform on a translation task, with the belief that the findings obtained from english learners of chinese may represent a useful contribution, enabling us to better understand the role of typology in l2 learning. 4. research questions and hypotheses the study reported here attempts to determine whether the tp features in chinese discourse exist in the interlanguage of chinese learners of english. in order to deepen our understanding of tp features of chinese learners of english at different proficiency levels, we pose the following research questions: 1. do learners use fewer tp structures and more sp structures at higher proficiency levels than at lower ones? 2. are zero anaphoras transferable in connected written discourse? based on the evidence of some previous studies (cai, 1998a, 1998b; givón, 1983; jin, 1994; sasaki, 1990; shi, 1989; yang, 2008; yip, 1995), we put forward the following two hypotheses: shaopeng li, lianrui yang 116 1. the characteristics of the chinese topic chain will be transferred to the interlanguage of chinese efl learners, thus resulting in the overgeneralization of zas. 2. the development of interlanguage discourse of chinese efl learners undergoes the process of discourse transfer. 5. method 5.1. participants the participants of this study were 90 chinese students of english in china. group 1 consisted of 30 high school first year students (15-16 years old), group 2 consisted of 30 first-year undergraduate english majors (19-20 years old) and group 3 consisted of 30 first-year postgraduate english majors (24-26 years old). groups 2 and 3 included students educated at the same university. since there was a 3or 4-year difference in the length of formal schooling between each of the groups, it was assumed that they represented three proficiency levels: beginning (a2 of cefr1), intermediate (b1) and beginning advanced (b2). of course, the dividing lines are by no means absolute. 5.2. instrument and procedure a task was designed to compare the english of chinese university students with english passages from textbooks, with the passages being translated into chinese as the source texts for the task given to the students. the task was a translation of two pieces of chinese discourse into english, each of which consisted of two paragraphs that were characterized by typical chinese tp features, namely, topic chains and zas. these two pieces of chinese discourse were translated from two pieces of english discourse, which were excerpted from primary school textbooks go for it (book 3; nunan, 2002) and essential english for foreign students (book 1; eckersley, 1955). this task was designed to elicit the learners’ production of anaphoras. there were 6 topic chains in which 26 anaphoras including zero, pronominal and nominal anaphoras were identified in the two pieces of chinese discourse. we can refer to example (1) in 2.2, which is the second piece of chinese discourse, for more information. that piece of discourse is made up of two topic chains. in the first topic chain, which contains 6 zas, the overt np na liang che (‘that car’) is the topic. the difficult english words were provided to the participants in order to 1 cefr = common european framework of reference for languages topic prominence in chinese efl learners’ interlanguage 117 ensure that these words would not prevent them from completing the task successfully. after reading the instructions and making sure they understood them, the participants proceeded with the task. a maximum of 20 min was allowed for this task. it is possible that some students had used the books as course texts, but it is assumed they did not remember all the details. and even if they did remember some, the results suggest that less proficient students were much more influenced by zas than the more proficient ones. data for this investigation were collected in the participants’ regular classes. all the participants were asked to perform the task independently. 5.3. data analysis raw data in the task were classified, calculated and tabulated into various tables for data analysis. the frequencies of various types of anaphora employed in the task by the participants were counted. the following provides an example of data analysis for the second piece of chinese discourse: 1. group 1: that car is too expensive, the color is not good. i don’t like ø and don’t want to buy ø. i went to see ø yesterday and i drove ø a little time, but still dislike ø. (number of zas: 5; other: 0) 2. group 2: that car is too expensive, the color is not good. i don’t like ø and don’t want to buy ø. i went to see it yesterday and i drove it a little time, but i still dislike it. (number of zas: 2; other: 3) 3. group 3: that car is too expensive, the color is not good. i don’t like it and don’t want to buy it. i went to see it yesterday and i drove it a little time, but i still dislike it. (number of zas: 0; other: 5) data analysis was conducted to examine the number and proportion of zas used by the three participant groups when performing the translation task. it focused on the inappropriate use of zas in discourse. for the translation production, every piece of discourse produced by the participants was compared with its original version in the textbook to identify the zas produced by the participants, and the total number of wrong zas was computed. for example, in the sample above a participant at the beginning level (group 1) employed 5 zas in the translation of the second piece of chinese discourse where pronominal anaphoras were necessary. however, a participant at the intermediate level (group 2) employed 2 zas wrongly and 3 pronominal anaphoras properly, and a participant at the advanced level (group 3) made no mistake in employing anaphoras. in the analysis, the results of the three groups were compared in order to reveal whether there were comparable tendencies among beginning, shaopeng li, lianrui yang 118 intermediate and advanced learners in the production of tp constructions. with respect to data analysis, descriptive statistics such as percentages were employed to describe relative proportions and tendencies, and at times the data were assessed with the help of the spss package. a one-way anova was employed to measure significant differences between each level. 6. results 6.1. distributions of different types of anaphora in the test among the three groups the distribution of types of anaphora used by the three participant groups is graphically represented in figure 1. the figure shows that groups 1 and 2 used the za more extensively than the group 3, who in turn used the pronominal and nominal anaphora more frequently. figure 1 numbers and percentages of different types of anaphora 6.2. specific distributions of za in the test among the three groups figure 1 also shows the percentage of zas in the test. for example, 373 zas altogether were identified in the interlanguage of the 30 beginner learners (m = 12.43, sd = 2.81) and the percentage of zas was 373/30*26 (number of all types of anaphora in the test), which equalled 47.80%. for the intermediate learners (m = 10.67, sd = 1.69) the percentage was 41.03% and for the advanced ones (m = 6.87, sd = 1.38) it was 26.41%. from the figure we learn that the 373 47.82% 320 41.03% 206 26.41% 241 30.90% 280 35.90% 325 41.67% 166 21.28% 180 23.08% 249 31.92% 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 beginning intermediate advanced n um be rs a nd p er ce nt ag es o f d iff er en t ty pe s of a na ph or a proficiency groups zero anaphora pronominal anaphora nominal anaphora topic prominence in chinese efl learners’ interlanguage 119 participants at lower levels demonstrated the tendency to produce more zas in the test. as the learners' l2 proficiency increased, such a tendency gradually became weaker. although all the participants had learned english for 3 up to 10 years, they still displayed a tendency to rely on chinese tp structures. 6.3. multiple comparisons between proficiency levels a one way anova was conducted to measure differences between levels and their level of significance. the results are given in table 1, which demonstrates significant difference in the use of zas across the three proficiency groups (f = 57.466, p = .000). table 1 difference in the use of zas across proficiency levels (anova) sum of squares df mean square f p between groups 485.489 2 242.744 57.466 .000 within groups 367.500 87 4.224 total 852.989 89 since the anova only shows that at least one mean is different from all the other means, to be specific, a further lsd post hoc analysis was undertaken and the result of multiple comparisons between proficiency levels is shown in table 2. it shows that the difference between every two proficiency levels was significant (p < .05), with the level of significance being especially meaningful with respect to the difference between group 1 and group 3 (p < .01). table 2 difference in za means across proficiency levels beginning intermediate advanced beginning – 1.767* 5.567** intermediate – – 3.800* advanced – – – * the mean difference is significant at the .05 level ** the mean difference is significant at the .01 level at the beginning level, many zas were produced by all participants. at the intermediate level, relatively fewer zas were produced by the participants than at the beginning level, but the percentage is also very high: up to about 50%. generally speaking, the zas produced by advanced participants were obviously less numerous than those of the other two groups. the proportion of such structures decreased by almost one-third in comparison to the intermediate level, demonstrating that the participants were less influenced by their native language when using the l2. shaopeng li, lianrui yang 120 7. discussion 7.1. research question 1 to summarize the results of the current study, the beginning learners showed predominant use of tp features, and the use of such features gradually decreased, in accordance with the learners’ l2 proficiency, across the group of learners as a whole. the results of the test have demonstrated a general shift from the use of zero to pronominal to nominal anaphoras in the interlanguage of chinese learners at the discourse level as their proficiency level increased. the results show that the interlanguage discourse of the chinese students of the three proficiency levels is characterized by tp constructions. even the advanced learners are still subject to the influence of the chinese tp feature. it clearly suggests that l1 transfer effect in the form of the tp feature of interlanguage production prevails over a relatively long period of time for learners with a tp l1 background such as the chinese students in this study. the present findings do not support the findings of fuller and gundel’s (1987) study regarding an early universal stage of tp in l2 acquisition, but rather support the argument put forward by others that learners transfer their l1 features to l2 learning and that, with growing l2 proficiency, learners gradually become sensitive to the characteristics of the target language, approximating its norms (cai, 1998a, 1998b; givón, 1983; jin, 1994; sasaki, 1990; shi, 1989; yang, 2008; yip, 1995). schachter (1983) argues that “it is not likely to be the case that the process of l2 acquisition will prove to be the same process as in the first language acquisition case” (p. 256). she points out that one obvious source of difference is the learner’s l1 and the facilitating and interfering effects it produces: “it is clear to anyone who takes the trouble to look at the production of a non-native speaker of a language that there is a first language, or transfer effect” (schachter, 1983, p. 105). actually the reliance on the knowledge of the native language, especially the native-language-related typological differences, is a universal learning strategy, which is obvious in the process of l2 acquisition. 7.2. research question 2 in discussing discourse transfer, odlin (1989) dealt with it in terms of structural factors and nonstructural factors. this is because discourse involves a wide array of nonstructural as well as structural characteristics. if many tp structures are present in the text, the impression conveyed to the native-speaker reader of english will be of disjointed and fragmented development of the messages embodied in the discourse. topic prominence in chinese efl learners’ interlanguage 121 the non-native-like english discourse produced by chinese learners could be related to the absence of adequate cohesive ties. this is not surprising if, in the deep structure, the learner conceives his tl (english) surface coding in a tp manner. in a tp native language, a topic stands at the head of the discourse and the ensuing discourse is taken by the producer and the receiver to be related to it until a new topical referent is introduced. subject-prominent languages such as english, however, undergo a complicated process of textualization to achieve a tightly-spun surface structure. as discussed earlier, discourse transfer is the use of some of the discourse patterns in the learner’s l2 in the same way in which they are employed in the learner’s l1. it then follows that the learners are likely to negatively transfer the norms from their l1 to their l2 production largely due to their knowledge gaps about the l2 discourse norms. first, if learners are unaware of the l2 norms in particular contexts, they will be unable to produce the equivalent grammatical forms; in other words, a mismatch arises between their grammatical knowledge and the demands of particular discourse contexts. therefore, they may resort to the simpler grammatical forms they are more confident about but may not be grammatically appropriate. second, learners may have acquired the grammatical structures of certain utterances in the discourse. however, they may not understand or be aware of their discursive meanings in different contexts. even in the data of advanced learners, discourse transfer still occurs, as they have not yet acquired the equivalent l2 forms of discourse in some contexts. in order to play safe, they tend to fall back on l1 literal translation when their “linguistic resilience” falls short. transferring their l1 discourse norms in the form of literal translation and direct form-meaning mapping appears to be a safe strategy to help them finish the task. 8. conclusion the present study has provided some preliminary evidence that in the process of chinese learners’ acquisittion of english, discourse structures may be influenced by l1-l2 typological differences. some conclusions can be drawn from this study. first of all, tp properties in the interlanguage of chinese students are evident. second, zas occur pervasively in the interlanguage of chinese students of english at different proficiency levels. these zas are likely to be motivated by native-language-related typological transfer and discourse transfer. third, the interlanguage discourse of chinese efl learners also reflects a change of the l2 acquisition process from topic-prominence to subjectprominence. han (2010) has conducted longitudinal studies on fossilization and a similar longitudinal study should be carried out to examine the developmental sequences of sp features in english l2 acquisition by speakers of tp languages. shaopeng li, lianrui yang 122 furthermore, research needs to investigate the acquisition of a sp language as an l2 by comparing l2 learners from both tp and sp l1 backgrounds, which will enable us to better understand typological influence on l2 learning. acknowledgments special thanks are due to dr henriëtte hendriks at the university of cambridge and liming yu at shanghai jiaotong university who helped to revise the manuscript. topic prominence in chinese efl learners’ 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(1995). interlanguage and typology: the case of topicprominence. in l. eubank., l. selinker, & m. s. smith (eds.), the current state of interlanguage (pp. 17-30). amsterdam: john benjamins. 327 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (2). 2014. 327-353 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.2.8 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl examining emotional intelligence within the context of positive psychology interventions tammy gregersen university of northern iowa, cedar falls, usa tammy.gregersen@uni.edu peter d. macintyre cape breton university, canada peter_macintyre@cbu.ca kate hein finegan university of northern iowa, cedar falls, usa kate-finegan@uiowa.edu kyle talbot university of northern iowa, cedar falls, usa talbotk@uni.edu shelby claman university of northern iowa, cedar falls, usa shelbyc@uni.edu abstract emotional intelligence has not been widely studied in second language acquisition and studies published to date have been questionnaire-based. in this study we take a qualitative approach to focus on how emotional intelligence is used by two participants, one a learner and the other a pre-service teacher. the two focal participants were selected because they showed the most positive movement toward attaining their possible future l2 selves among a larger sample. analysis shows the ways in which four branches of emotional intelligence intertammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, kate hein finegan, kyle talbot, shelby claman 328 acted as respondents worked with three activities adapted from the literature on positive psychology: savouring, three good things, and learned optimism. this paper shows how both the learner and teacher employed emotional intelligence to understand and integrate their experiences inside and outside the classroom as part of the language learning and teaching process. keywords: emotional intelligence, positive psychology, l2 self, learned optimism 1. introduction positive emotion is one of the three foundational interest areas of positive psychology (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000), but the ways in which emotion influences second language acquisition (sla) have been vastly underestimated (macintyre, 2002; dewaele, 2013). in the sla literature, a handful of recent studies have introduced the concept of emotional intelligence, which is defined by the ability to think about and think with emotions (dewaele, petrides, & furnham, 2008; salovey, mayer, caruso, & yoo, 2002). understanding how emotions work is relevant to both teachers and learners alike (arnold, 1999; dewaele, 2013). in the literature on emotion, tomkins (1970) argued that emotion is the principal driver of human behaviour. tomkins reasoned that the perpetual presence of emotions, its pervasiveness across situations, and the different action tendencies associated with specific emotions make them the prime source of motivation. motivation has been well studied in the sla literature, but emotions have not been as widely studied. in recent years motivation has been studied extensively from the perspective of the l2 self system, with the ideal future self as a consistent, powerful element of motivation (dörnyei, 2005; dörnyei & ushioda, 2009). there is a need to explore, in more detail, the role of emotion in the development of the l2 self system. this qualitative study will examine the facilitating role of emotional intelligence (ei) for persons who experience positive l2 self development. in this study, we adapted three empirically supported positive psychology exercises—identifying three good things, savouring positive experience, and learned optimism—for the language learning context. using ei as a theoretical lens (salovey et al., 2002), we sought to examine how individuals respond in emotional terms to these tools designed to harness the positive-broadening power of positive emotion (macintyre & gregersen, 2013). the three activities were implemented in two separate groups, students and pre-service teachers, and we focus in-depth on the respondent from each group who reported the greatest gains in moving toward their individual l2 possible selves. the written examining emotional intelligence within the context of positive psychology interventions 329 responses to the positive psychology exercises form the basis of our examination of ei in action, with the goal of better understanding the ways in which participants were responding to the interventions. it is important to note, from the outset, that this study is not designed to produce causal statements of the effects of these three exercises on development of the l2 self. rather, we are using the interventions as exercises to explore in detail what respondents tell us they do when they undertake the positive psychology activities, and how emotions come into play when they react to the activities. 2. emotion and the l2 self in recent emotion theory, perhaps the most important development has been differentiating the functions and effects of positive and negative emotions (fredrickson, 2001, 2006, 2013). rather than conceptualizing positive as just the absence of negative emotion or treating them as two opposing ends of the same continuum, positive and negative emotions are best understood along two interacting dimensions of experience. macintyre and gregersen (2013, p. 193), drawing on fredrickson’s (2006) theory, describe the properties of positive emotions in language learning: “positive emotion facilitates the building of resources because positive emotion tends to broaden a person’s perspective, opening the individual to absorb the language.” it opens up learners’ thinking in an active way, counteracts the effect of debilitating emotion, builds personal resources and generates contentment. it is important to note that it is necessary to find a balance between positive and negative emotion; both are required to function effectively (fredrickson, 2001, 2013). if positive emotion is like the wind in a ship’s sails, negative emotion is like the rudder keeping a ship on course. it is not the presence of positive emotion but the ratio of positive to negative emotion that is especially important for wellbeing (dewaele & macintyre, this volume; fredrickson, 2013). for both teachers and students, emotions can be a powerful tool to facilitate language learning; enquiring about emotions provides a window into the unfolding process of language development. recent research highlighting ways in which future states can be envisioned is one specific way in which teachers and students can work with emotion (see dörnyei & kubanyiova, 2014). classroom and task conditions can tap into the power of learners’ imaginations to both provoke positive emotion and enhance the cognition that goes along with it. macintyre and gregersen (2013) draw on dörnyei ‘s l2 self system (2005) to propose that when teachers activate learners’ future states by having them elaborate about future self-guides, they arouse two types of emotion support: anticipatory and anticipated emotion (baumgartner, pieters, & bagozzi, 2008). anticipatory tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, kate hein finegan, kyle talbot, shelby claman 330 emotions are created in the present by actively working with possible selves and might be phrased as follows: “i am happy (now) when i think that someday i will talk comfortably with a native speaker!” anticipated emotions draw attention to emotions that will be experienced in future states, as in the phrase “i will be so excited (in the future) when i speak only the target language in class!” anticipated states are also at the centre of dörnyei ‘s (2005, p. 99) l2 self system, which includes “. . . specific representations of one’s self in future states, involving thoughts, images and senses, and are in many ways the manifestations, or personalized carriers, of one’s goals and aspirations.” the more clearly one envisions his or her possible future selves, the more detailed the guide to the future can be (erikson, 2007). when future self-guides are expressed and converted into action, detailed possible selves offer a sort of roadmap—a clear forward-propelling vision that motivates specific performance (macintyre, mackinnon, & clément, 2009). an important caveat is that for possible selves to be effective, they must be invoked frequently, be accurate depictions of the present, and be perceived as potentially attainable in the future. a future self-guide that lacks clarity, specificity and emotional engagement will have little to do with motivation (macintyre et al., 2009). taking advantage of the facilitating motivational effects of anticipatory and anticipated emotion and integrating those emotions with specific, vivid and rich future l2 self-guides, would likely be easier for learners who have higher levels of ei, a topic just beginning to be explored in the sla literature. 3. emotional intelligence according to salovey, mayer, and caruso (2002, p. 160), ei refers to “the ability to process emotion-laden information competently and to use it to guide cognitive activities like problem solving and to focus energy on required behaviors.” emotional intelligence reflects the ability to reason non-cognitively, essentially thinking with and about emotion, using an array of skills (bar-on, 1997; conte, 2005). a comprehensive review of the various competing schools of thought surrounding the conceptualization and measurement of ei are beyond the scope of the present paper (see petrides, furnham, & mavroveli, 2007). rather, we chose to use the salovey et al. (2002) ei model as the theoretical lens through which we analyse the learner and teacher narratives. this model identifies four interconnected branches of ei, each of which may be relevant to l2 learning and self-development, both inside and outside the classroom. the branches of ei are described as follows: branch 1: emotional perception and expression. this branch includes using facial expression, intonation and cultural artefacts to notice and examining emotional intelligence within the context of positive psychology interventions 331 interpret emotional messages. for example, a language learner who hears hesitation in the voice of her interlocutor in response to an invitation to coffee understands much more about that person’s emotions and thoughts than an individual who misses that vocal cue. branch 2: emotional facilitation of thought (using emotional intelligence). this branch involves using emotions to influence cognition in order to solve problems, reason, and make decisions more effectively and creatively. for example, emotions can modify the way a person understands events, making thoughts positive if the person is happy, or negative if the person is sad. a teacher who can generate empathy to facilitate her judgments about why her newcomer to class is shy and reserved is able to entertain multiple viewpoints and therefore use emotion to facilitate reasoning that is deeper and more creative. branch 3: emotional understanding. this branch consists of understanding emotions, what they mean, how they interact, and how they evolve over time. most fundamentally, this means labelling emotions with words and recognizing their relationships. for example, an emotionally intelligent first-grade english language teacher would deduce that the annoyance and irritation of her spanish-speaking student over his inability to open his lunch box will escalate to anger if she does not help him with the latch. branch 4: emotional management. this branch addresses the delicate balancing act of emotion regulation. in terms of self-regulation, too much control, minimization or complete elimination of emotion stifles ei, and in regulating emotion in others, harnessing emotions is much healthier than attempts at suppression. for example, a persuasive language learner speaking about the genocide in his native country does not want to deaden the emotions of his audience but rather move the listeners to a deeper understanding of his culture. thayer, newman, and mcclain (1994) discuss several techniques (used alone or in combination) that individuals use to regulate their moods, some more effective and others less so. we have summarized their findings in table 1. within the narratives provided by the participants presented in the results section below, we will identify instances of the four branches of ei in action. table 1 summary of more effective and less effective mood regulating strategies more effective less effective physical exercise passive mood management (i.e., tv, sleep, food) listening to music direct tension reduction (i.e., drugs, alcohol) social interaction spending time alone cognitive self-management (i.e., “pep talk”) avoiding person or thing that caused the bad mood pleasant distractions (i.e., hobbies, shopping) tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, kate hein finegan, kyle talbot, shelby claman 332 in sla, there have been only a few studies of ei (sucaromana, 2012). aki (2006) outlines what might be a controversial argument in which he suggests that ei is more influential in sla success than the traditional idea of mental intelligence. he argues, “success in foreign language teaching depends on the instructor’s knowledge of the field, experience, ability to establish communication and intimacy on the basis of ei as well as on the learner’s emotional mood, his/her ability to comprehend the language and the level and purpose for which he [or she] learns the language” (p. 69). there is some research showing a strong relationship between ei and language learning processes, such as listening comprehension (valizadeh & alavinia, 2012). other data show a small but significant correlation between ei and both language learning strategy use and english proficiency among iranian students (zarafshan & ardeshiri, 2012). there are also data available that show a strong correlation between ei and affective experiences such as teacher self-efficacy (moafian & ghanizadeh, 2009) and language anxiety (shao, yu, & ji, 2013). finally, in a large scale study, dewaele, petrides and furnham (2008) used an internet survey of over 450 multilingual learners to show that those higher in ei consistently reported less language anxiety than those with lower ei scores. the pattern of results obtained showed “significant and consistent trait ei effects across the various conditions” (dewaele, et al., 2008, p. 947). these studies support the need for further investigations of ei in sla. 4. ei and positive psychology exercises like researchers and practitioners in applied linguistics, positive psychologists are concerned with creating evidence-based practices that incorporate interventions to increase individual happiness, well-being and satisfaction. peterson (2006, p. 30) suggests that happiness is not reserved “only for the lucky and the strong” but results from a conscious effort and thoughtful action that can be awkward, embarrassing or even uncool at times. a myriad of different activities to increase individuals’ sense of fulfilment are found in the positive psychology literature (peterson, 2006; seligman, ernst, gillham, reivich, & linkins, 2009), many of which have been put to the test empirically (seligman, steen, park, & peterson, 2005). three specific activities whose effectiveness has received support were adapted for use in the present study. the exercises include identifying “three good things” (seligman, et al. 2005), “savoring” positive experiences (peterson, 2006), and developing “learned optimism” (seligman, 2006). although these are separate, stand-alone positive psychology interventions, we implemented a scaffolding approach that began with identifying positive things, savouring them, and then anticipating the future with optimism. in this way, we examining emotional intelligence within the context of positive psychology interventions 333 are attempting to understand specific instances of positive emotion (macintyre & gregersen, 2013), using ei as a theoretical lens (see figure 1). the three activities were implemented in two separate groups, language students and preservice teachers in an english language teacher education program. we focus indepth on one respondent from each group who reported changes in the hopedfor l2 self (see dörnyei, 2005). rather than producing causal statements of the effects of the exercises on development of the l2 self, we use the interventions to examine what respondents tell us they do when they undertake the activities, and how they react emotionally to them, as figure 1 illustrates. figure 1 positive psychology activities tap into the connection between emotions and l2 self the three good things exercise is based on research that suggests that positive outcomes arise when individuals contemplate those things for which they feel the most gratitude. according to peterson (2006, p. 38), “counting your blessings on a regular basis makes you happier and more content with life.” in this intervention, participants are asked to jot down three things that went well during the day and then briefly describe the reason each event was good. the description step is important because it requires participants to reflect more deeply than they would by simply listing positive noteworthy events. seligman et al. (2005) discovered that being grateful for three good things each day increases happiness and decreases depression for up to 6 months. the second activity, savoring, refers to being aware of pleasant experiences and making a deliberate attempt to make them last as long as possible, to remember them, and to re-live them in as much detail as possible (peterson, 2006). a more familiar process comparable in some ways to savouring is coping—that is, where an unpleasant event engenders undesirable emotions that individuals deal with by attempting to change the event itself, its consequences, or themselves in order to decrease the negative impact as quickly as possible. emotion l2 self positive psychology activities tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, kate hein finegan, kyle talbot, shelby claman 334 coping strategies in language learning, such as dealing with error correction or seeking extra help from the teacher, are often taught explicitly in the classroom. compared to coping, however, savoring strategies such as anticipating positive events in the future, relishing them in the moment and reminiscing about those in the past seem to be taught less frequently. according to peterson (2006, p. 70), “those who habitually savor are indeed happier and more satisfied in general with life, more optimistic, and less depressed than those who do not savor.” to develop savouring skills, students are asked to stop and notice something enjoyable and to share it with others. they are encouraged to take something away from the event that will later allow reminiscing (such as a photo or a memento) and indulge in self-congratulatory thinking. savouring might mean focusing intently on a specific experience, event, or achievement while blocking out everything else to become totally immersed in the pleasure of the moment. the third activity in the present study is learned optimism, an adaptation of one created by gregersen and macintyre (2014, p. 222). drawing on the work of seligman (2006), they encouraged teachers to “shift the focus away from permanent, pervasive and personal explanations for difficulties toward more temporary, specific and hopeful explanations.” too often, it seems, people give advice to each other with the intent of creating optimism that ironically has the opposite effect. the 1989-grammy award winning song of the year, “don’t worry, be happy” by bobby mcferrin is a fine piece of pop music but is terrible advice, impractical at best and frustratingly discouraging at worst (ehrenreich, 2009). simply urging people to be more hopeful, to “get over it” or “look on the bright side” is often an exercise in futility. a more productive approach would be interrupting instantaneous negative reactions to a setback and replacing them with a positive sequence of realistic thoughts. for example, a learner who habitually ruminates in pessimism might react to error correction with automatic thoughts such as these: “the teacher doesn’t like me . . . i am stupid . . . i am going to flunk this class . . . everybody else knows what they are doing except me . . . i will never learn this language.” but if this learner has shown the ability to communicate in the target language in the past, then a more optimistic set of cognitions are available, and can be accessed more easily with practice. the idea is to head-off negative cycles of thought before they spiral out of control, and do so as quickly as possible. peterson (2006) refers to “learning optimism on the hot seat.” for example, the negative thoughts that occur following harsh error correction might be countered by deliberate thoughts such as the following: “teacher is having a bad day . . . she was in a hurry to give feedback and move the class along . . i made a mistake but that’s part of learning . . . with just a little more practice, i will get this . . . it was a silly mistake, i know the proper verb tense” and so on. the key to the exercise is to rapidly counter the pessimistic thought with an optimistic one that better suits the examining emotional intelligence within the context of positive psychology interventions 335 situation, until it becomes a habit of mind. naturally, learners who are prone to pessimistic thought will benefit more from these activities than those who already have a tendency toward optimism. what needs to be kept in mind is that the purpose of these activities is to focus on positive emotions such as enjoyment (see dewaele & macintyre, this volume). learners predisposed toward optimism might not need as much instruction or practice in shifting automatic thinking toward encouraging self-talk as more pessimistic learners. gregersen and macintyre’s (2014) variation on the learned optimism activity is meant to give language learners practice in rapidly disputing pessimistic thoughts, avoiding the over-generalization of beliefs and thinking of alternative explanations. it is based on seligman’s process of learning optimism abc-style. that is to say, when an individual is faced with an adverse event, they maintain a belief about how that adversity is construed, and consequences ensue that are formed by the feelings and actions that stem from the beliefs. it is important to emphasize that those globally pessimistic thoughts that occur quickly and spontaneously for pessimistic learners are often exaggerated and can be reinterpreted through the provision of counter-evidence that is both more reasonable and encouraging within the situation. with practice, thinking optimistically becomes a learned, routine pattern. although each of the three interventions named above (three good things, savoring, and learned optimism) have been shown to be effective, an important question that has not yet been addressed is whether there is an optimal sequence to the exercises and interventions (seligman, et al., 2005) and what impact they might have in the language learning domain. the three activities used in this study have not yet been examined as a structured progression. as shown in the text of the intervention instructions (in the results section below), we used a scaffolding approach to create a strategy whereby we asked participants to move from acknowledging and sharing good things, to savouring and reflecting more deeply upon them, and then use experiences gained to explain setbacks in a more optimistic way. our thinking is that if learners and teachers experience greater satisfaction, contentment and optimism, then positive growth would be reflected in their self-reported visualization of possible future selves. relatively little is known about classroom activities or techniques that increase positive emotion in language learners and language teachers, and how positive emotion might facilitate development of possible future selves. our qualitative method complements the quantitative approaches more typically taken in the few sla studies of ei that are available in the literature. we are seeking to address what shao, yu, and ji (2013, p. 924) suggested is needed in the study of ei in sla, that is to “reveal the real situations and experiences of learners.” we seek to accomplish this goal using two case studies. we explore three questions: tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, kate hein finegan, kyle talbot, shelby claman 336 1. how do language learners and teachers, who have shown an increase in the attainability of their possible selves, reflect on three good things, savour positive experiences, and attempt to learn optimism? 2. what do the case studies reveal about the strategic sequencing of activities and language learners’ ei? 3. what do the narratives of participants tell us about ways in which they use ei in positive psychology activities? 5. method 5.1. participants our two case study participants were drawn from two larger groups—a learner group and a teacher group—who participated in an initial phase of this study. once selected for in-depth analysis here, the choice of specific participant became secondary to the task of describing her experiences. using qualitative analysis implies that the specific data generated and the interpretation of the data are not generalizable or replicable, but stand on their own as a glimpse into the detailed and situated affective reactions of the specific participants. the learner group was composed of the 10 english language learners enrolled in an advanced speaking and listening class in an intensive english for academic purposes program in a small midwestern university in the united states. this multicultural group, ranging in age from 18 to 40, consisted of 4 females and 6 males, and came from a variety of countries, including saudi arabia, china and japan. all of them had successfully completed six of seven levels, and were one class away from enrolling in credit-bearing university programs. the teacher group was composed of 9 pre-service and in-service teachers enrolled in the teaching english to speakers of other languages (tesol) program at the same university as the first group and who accepted our invitation to participate. four were final-year undergraduate pre-service teachers from the united states, 3 female and 1 male, ranging in ages from 21 to 24. the other 5 participants, all female and ranging in age from 25 to 32, were tesol graduate students with teaching experience that ranged from 1 to 5 years. three were from the us while the other 2 were from chile and armenia. 5.2. procedures and instruments the language learner group participated in this study as part of their english language class; some of the activities were conducted in class while others were assigned as homework and collected by the classroom teacher (the third examining emotional intelligence within the context of positive psychology interventions 337 author). given that there was a relationship between participants and the researchers, care was taken to ensure that respondents were treated ethically. to facilitate free and informed consent among the learners, responses from all individuals were sealed until after their course was over and the grades submitted. the teacher participants responded to prompts exclusively via e-mail sent as private correspondence to the fourth author, who was a colleague in their pre-service teacher training course. after consenting to take part in this study, participants in both groups filled out an instrument called the perceived attainability of possible selves (paps) that we created in order to determine the visions each language learner or teacher had for him/herself and the strength with which they believed they could be achieved. participants were asked to close their eyes and imagine themselves as language learners/teachers in 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, a year, and beyond, and to write down 10 “possible selves” that represent who they would like to become. once participants finished their lists, they rated how likely each goal was to be achieved on a scale of 1 (impossible) to 5 (certain). this created an individualized list of relevant possible selves. during the next 3 weeks, individuals in both groups participated in three positive psychology activities (three good things, savoring, and learned optimism), focusing on one intervention per week. each activity generated a written account that was collected for later analysis. upon completion of the 3-week activity period, the research team returned a clean copy of each participant’s original paps (where they had created a list of their visions for their possible selves) but with the ranking of their perceived attainability left blank. as the final step of their participation, learner and teacher respondents again closed their eyes, imagined who they would like to become, and re-ranked how possible these selves were on a scale of 1 (impossible) to 5 (certain). the detailed instructions for the three activities were as follows (in figure 2 there is a table accompanying the instruction for activity 3): activity 1: three good things. three times this week write three positive experiences that have happened during the day. these things should be related to language teaching or learning. also write down the rationale for why these three experiences were positive and/or why they occurred. activity 2: savoring. stop and notice the next time something good occurs. keep a log of one positive experience each day of the activity. the positive experience could have to do with tesol, language teaching, language learning, or education, but could also be a more general experience. write about how you felt, what made the experience positive, and how you may be able to have another similar positive experience in the future. afterwards take the time to share these experienctammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, kate hein finegan, kyle talbot, shelby claman 338 es with another individual. for each day you document a savory experience, you also need to document the reaction from another individual and note how you felt about sharing the experience. activity 3: learned optimism. use the following chart. write down three adverse experiences that you had during your day. what are your beliefs about the event? how do you interpret it? what are the consequences, or results, of your beliefs? how do these beliefs affect you and others? finally, brainstorm a list of counter-evidence to the negative beliefs, the causes of the event, or the consequences. for example, if you failed a test, your counter-evidence could be: “i was watching tv the night before instead of studying. i know the information on the test, but i didn’t take the time to study.” write an example of counterevidence for each item from the table above in the lines below. write down adverse experiences. what are your beliefs about the event? how do you interpret it? what are the consequences, or results, of your beliefs? how do these beliefs affect you and others? response response response figure 2 table accompanying the instruction for activity 3 after data collection was complete, the net gains and losses from the paps were tabulated for all participants. the learner and teacher with the greatest gains were selected to be the case study participants. we chose this approach because we thought that individuals with the largest gains in attainability of l2 self might have responses that would be especially helpful in understanding how ei can be seen in narratives generated in the context of the positive psychology interventions. limiting the analysis to two complete sets of responses (1 teacher and 1 learner), followed from the beginning to the end of the study, provides the depth and richness of data that the purpose of this study requires. both sets of narratives were analysed independently by three raters who were familiar with the literature on ei and positive psychology. the raters were asked to code only those commentaries associated with the four ei branches outlined above. each of the branches was assigned a different colour for coding. only those sections that appeared on two or more raters’ scripts are included in the analysis. to preserve the authenticity of the participants’ voices, we inserted the excerpts exactly as they had been written, with no grammatical or spelling changes. 6. results and interpretations our first research question asks about perceived gains in the attainability of the possible selves of the learners and teachers following the task intervention. ta examining emotional intelligence within the context of positive psychology interventions 339 ble 2 shows both the language learners and teachers in separate lists. the pseudonym for each participant is accompanied by his/her net gain or loss from the paps. this was calculated by comparing pre-activity ratings with the post-ratings and calculating the total difference across all of the individual’s items. table 2 net gains on the paps measure of l2 self learner group participants possible self net gain/loss pre-service teacher group participants possible self net gain/loss awatif +7 amy +14 gharam +5 zachary +7 sameh +2 catherine +7 katsumi +2 emma +4 abbus +2 olga +3 jamal +2 sally +2 kenzo +1 sofia 0 marid -3 morgan -1 akilah -5 misty -4 rose -7 overall, the participants increased in the perception of attainability of possible selves although there was a range of values for gains and losses (from +7 to -7 for learners; and from +14 to 4 for teachers). a majority of persons in both groups showed increased attainability of their possible selves, but there also were some who suffered losses (3 learners and 2 teachers). awatif and amy (a learner and teacher, respectively) each reported the greatest gains in their group for the perceptions of the attainability of their possible selves. table 3 lists their data in detail. an o denotes their rankings in the pre-activity rendering of the measure while an x indicates how they ranked the attainability of their envisioned possible selves after completing the three positive psychology activities. table 3 learner and teacher preand post-activity ratings in their paps awatif (learner) 1 2 3 4 5 amy (teacher) 1 2 3 4 5 i wanna be a good speaker in one month. o x improve my own language ability in spanish (language) o x i wanna be able to writ with out any grammar mestiks in 3 months. o x improve native-like intonation (in spanish) o x in six months i wanna be able to understand and give expression about what i hear. o x be able to better code-switch between “guatemalan dialect” and a more formal, general spanish (language goal) o x in one year i wanna be perfect speaker in front of people. o x improved ability to simplify grammatical explanations (teaching) o x i wanna have high grades in all my class in 2 years. o x improved “comprehensible input” in tl (teaching) o x tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, kate hein finegan, kyle talbot, shelby claman 340 in 5 years i wanna have good relationships with native speaker. o x not rely on l1 when teaching o x in 6 years i wanna have good job about the english skills i had learn. o x plan better: be able to foresee good class activities & flow o x in 7 years i wanna be a good write as native speaker. o x better able to connect with students while maintaining professional/appropriate distance o x in 10 years i wanna be perfect in speaking presentation. o x involve students in tl community culture o x in 20 years i wanna be perfect english speaker. o x enthusiastic, well-prepared, organized, calm, expert—favorite words to describe “ideal” self o x in the following subsections we present the instructions for each activity and then highlight excerpts from participants’ narratives that provide insight into their ei whilst completing these activities. 6.1. positive psychology activity 1: three good things instructions: “three times this week write three positive experiences that have happened during the day. these things should be related to language teaching or learning. also write down the rationale for why these three experiences were positive and/or why they occurred.” although it is expected that the roles of learners and teachers would influence the content of their narratives (“i think i did really good in my listening test” vs. “my students were 100% engaged in the activities today . . .”), it is interesting that both participants made several comments about how their good things made them feel, even though the instructions to this activity did not include directions to report specific emotions or feelings. awatif ’s narrative on the second day of the activity contained more emotion-laden language than on other occasions (roman font emphasizes emotion words): good thing #1: my writing teacher offered help to me, she asked me if she can pic me to the hospital to see my son because he was sick. i was so happy that she asked me and help me reason: because i sent an email to my teacher about my son and then she asked me about my son in the class good thing #2: i felt confedent in my reading class, all my answers were right. reason: i studied yesterday and fineshed my homework amy’s most emotional narrative also occurred on the second day of the activity, but unlike awatif, amy’s feelings came through in her attributions of cause: examining emotional intelligence within the context of positive psychology interventions 341 good thing #1: students did a role play & they were fantastic! they were so creative and used the language they had to create really interesting stories reason: i finally realized that my students would love this kind of activity, and they did! i planned the whole chapter (2 weeks) as a unit and the whole week went better (for the most part. good thing #2: i brought props to class—i never remember/plan ahead enough to do this. reason: it’s embarrassing, but so many aspects of teaching takes so much effort and planning and can often overwhelm me into inaction, but his week i gave myself a figurative kick in the rear and did real teacher stuff. according to salovey et al. (2002), gains cannot be made in other branches of ei without first being competent in perceiving the presence of emotion and expressing it (ei branch 1 above). awatif and amy both identify their emotions: awatif was “happy” and “confident” while amy was “embarrassed” and “overwhelmed.” amy, however, brought her perception to another level by also being able to identify emotions in other people, in this case, her students—they loved (caps were used by amy for added emphasis) the role play activity that she had planned for them. the narratives of awatif and amy also demonstrate that their ei encompasses more than perception and expression. awatif moved beyond simple identification of emotion to understanding it (ei branch 2) when she was able to attribute the cause of her happiness to her teacher’s kindness and the reasons for her confidence in reading class to the fact that she had studied. furthermore, an examination of awatif ’s various three-good-things narratives establishes that she consistently engaged in effective mood regulating strategies like distracting herself by taking a shopping trip to a big city and interacting with classmates and teachers both in and out of class (ei branch 4). amy’s narratives demonstrated both emotional management (ei branch 4) and the emotional facilitation of thought (ei branch 2). her embarrassment and feelings of being overwhelmed led to a “figurative kick in the rear!” that functioned as a self-management technique, indicating a move beyond the simple identification of feelings toward effectively managing those feelings. like awatif, amy mentions engaging in a lot of interaction—mostly with her students. furthermore, the “figurative kick in the rear” led her to bring props to class, positively reinforcing her identity by doing “real teacher stuff.” this narrative illustrates the difference between the function of positive and negative emotion, and also the effect of coordinating different types of emotions. the negative emotional kick narrowed amy’s focus toward a specific action (a thoughtful process that led to bringing props to class) that later produced positive emotional results for the teacher and students alike. tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, kate hein finegan, kyle talbot, shelby claman 342 6.2. positive psychology activity 2: savoring instructions: “stop and notice the next time something good occurs. keep a log of one positive experience each day of the activity. the positive experience could have to do with tesol, language teaching, language learning, or education, but could also be a more general experience. write about how you felt, what made the experience positive, and how you may be able to have another similar positive experience in the future. afterwards take the time to share these experiences with another individual. for each day you document a savouring experience, you also need to document the reaction from another individual and note how you felt about sharing the experience.” awatif’s savouring experiences as a language learner were more effective in producing well-being than those of other participants. unlike the other respondents, awatif started with an adverse event that she was able to turn around. savouring is usually intended as an opportunity for reflection on a positive event, as opposed to coping with a problem and then moving on to something else. in awatif’s case, she capitalized on the savouring opportunities to detach herself from negative events from the language class through distractive regulation strategies: my angle this morning, i woke up and brushed my teeth. my mind start thinking about my home work and what i have to do in all of my classes; i was despert. then i went to my room and i saw my son sleeping; i looked at hem and smile, he is like an angel. everytime i look at his face, i forget every thing make me nurves. my son woke up and smiled, he wanted to play so we went to the bathroom and my son had the best shower in the world. these moments are joyful to me. wall mart today after i fineshed classes, i went to wallmart with my family. i was despointed because i tok d+ in my grammar test, i don’t want to fail in this class. as soon we arrived to wallmart, i saw people their starting to get ready to the halween; they were so excited and happy. i started to look at the stuff of the haloween, tey were amaizing. the funiest part that my husband weared 3 different masks, and everyone was funny. he made me laugh today, i forgot about the test; some time people need to have something exiting to change their mood and do better for the next time. enga today i was upset because my reading test was hard and i didn’t like it. then in my lestining class, we met elga she isa survivor from the war that hetler caused. she talked about her chiled hood and how she still remember every detallse in this war. she want to teach the world that everyone is equel and there is no need to hate. we had a great discussion about how people love each other no mater what, it doesn’t matter what your religiouis. i forgot about my test and i start thinking about her , examining emotional intelligence within the context of positive psychology interventions 343 how she survived from the war and what happen to her family, and how people died from hunger auddespas in this war. it is realy amayzing that she is talking about her childhood and that people should love each other. in all three instances, awatif first identified experiencing a negative emotion: in the first example, she was “desperate” thinking about all the homework she had to do; in the second she was “disappointed” because of her grade on a grammar test; and in the third, she was “upset” at the difficulty of her reading test. however, these adverse emotions were momentary as she immersed herself in things she evaluated as more important to her well-being: her son’s smile, her husband’s comical walmart antics, and meeting a concentration camp survivor who advocated loving others. this approach is consistent with salovey et al.’s (2002) ei branch 4, and also provides a compelling example of fredrickson’s (2006, 2013) recommendation to find a balance between positive and negative emotion. awatif uses effective positive-broadening emotional management strategies that focus on human interaction and pleasant, loving feelings. at the end of her second narrative, she comments, “i forgot about the test; some time people need to have something exiting to change their mood . . .” at this point, there was no remediation for the d+ on the grammar test—only, to quote her directly—“. . . to do better the next time.” savouring something good on the heels of identifying adverse emotion seemed to work optimally for awatif, and shows the interaction among all four ei branches. amy’s savouring experiences demonstrate how important ei is for language teachers. in her narratives, she focuses on the emotional well-being of her learners, and draws positive emotion from their success (emotion words are in roman font in the following excerpt). by being aware of her students’ progress, affective states, and engagement, she is able to match her work with her learners’ needs, reasoning with/about emotion to adjust the exercises used in class (ei branch 2). the cooking show: mood rating = 5 my students presented a “cooking show.” i was so proud of them. i am so happy to see them use spanish in real ways. they are so creative and don't see language as limiting. they made jokes, and left their comfort zones if only for a few minutes. i saw that they needed more revision and practice time to really do their best, so i implemented those in current exercises. my friend [amanda] also teaches the same level, and did the same activity. we talked about it, and we were both glad we did it and were happy to see our students at work. i'm always glad to talk with her about our class and it really helps me plan more effectively. delighted: mood = 10 my class polished their family compositions today in lab time. they're looking great! what i liked best about today was giving my students a lab-work day. they could tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, kate hein finegan, kyle talbot, shelby claman 344 choose what assignments or resources they need to do most, and then they were free to work. i had lots of opportunities to interact, and students seemed visibly relieved to have finished some of the work load. i spoke a lot of english, but i see these days as relationship-building, check-in, support days more than “language days.” i had high attendance—which was a miracle for fridays @ 8 am. in the first excerpt, we have put the words indicative of emotion that demonstrate that amy perceived and identified her positive affect in roman script. these emotions sprang from her realization that her learners were using the target language in real ways, such as exercising creativity, making jokes and taking risks. it appears that ei facilitated her judgment and the students benefited from the teacher’s efforts (ei branch 2). she modified her instructional strategies to include more time for practice and revision. in finding opportunities for sharing her experience with a fellow teacher, their mutual reflection on their emotions can be seen as a form of ei management (ei branch 4). the second excerpt from amy’s savoring narrative reveals how she once again paid attention to her learners’ nonverbal communication of affect. in this case, their visible relief at getting work done justified her decision to not have a “language day.” she reasoned that her decision to interact with students and to concentrate on relationship-building was a positive change to her normal teaching routine. not only did her decision result in students’ feeling relief, but in greater learner engagement in a difficult time slot (friday at 8:00 am), evidence of managing emotions effectively (ei branch 4). 6.3. positive psychology activity 3: learned optimism instructions: “use the following chart. write down three adverse experiences that you had during your day. what are your beliefs about the event? how do you interpret it? what are the consequences, or results, of your beliefs? how do these beliefs affect you and others? finally, brainstorm a list of counterevidence to the negative beliefs, the causes of the event, or the consequences. for example, if you failed a test, your counter-evidence could be ‘i was watching tv the night before instead of studying. i know the information on the test, but i didn’t take the time to study.’ write an example of counter-evidence for each item from the table above in the lines below.” the purpose of this intervention was to provide experience in transferring participants’ justifications for difficulties away from enduring, generalized reasons toward more transitory, particular and hopeful ones. in this activity, “adverse” is somewhat relative. for learners who have a natural predisposition toward optimism, finding an “adverse experience” may be difficult. figure 3 and figure 4 provide narratives from this activity. examining emotional intelligence within the context of positive psychology interventions 345 write down adverse experiences. what are your beliefs about the event? how do you interpret it? what are the consequences, or results, of your beliefs? how do these beliefs affect you and others? i met my conversation partner, she asked me about things that we cant do if in islam. i explain to her every thing we dont do in islam and i gave her reasons. she said that some of what we do in islam make science. islam is interesting a friend asked me to go with her in a picnic today she was insest [upset] but i bolojys [apologize] because i was busy. she understand why i can’t go w/ her then she went to the picnic. counter-evidence: 1. i was glad to explain to my conversation partner about islam some people don’t know about islam and they might have a wrong image about it. 2. my classmate asked me to go with her to a party in the campus, i apologize to her that i can’t go, i was busy. i fet that she was despointed. the next day i asked her about the party, she said that the party was not good. i felt relief because the party is not worth to go. figure 3 awatif ’s learned optimism narrative the first adverse event for awatif, experienced on her second day of the learned optimism activity, was a discussion with her conversation partner about islam and the things that believers are not permitted to do. because awatif chose to categorize this incident as something adverse (as per the instructions), we believe that she might have been feeling defensive, consistent with the idea that other people have the wrong image about her religion. in her interpretation of the event, awatif believes that she gave a reasonable explanation and as a consequence her partner found sense in it. by dealing with the question with a positive tone, a potentially aversive situation seems to have been transformed into something hopeful. this narrative is most consistent with ei branch 1, simply labelling emotions occurring in the situation. the second event awatif mentioned was refusing an invitation to a picnic. her narrative recognizes that she disappointed her friend, but she perceives that her friend understood her reasons not to attend. although awatif believes that the friend understood that she had other things to do, there seems to have been a lingering sense of disappointment. it was not until the friend told her that the party was not good that awatif felt relief. this excerpt demonstrates the perception and expression of emotion both within herself (feeling “relief”) and another (her friend felt “disappointed” and “upset”), again corresponding to ei branch 1. tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, kate hein finegan, kyle talbot, shelby claman 346 amy’s learned optimism narratives are taken from the third day of the activity. figure 2 contains her three adverse experiences, what she believed about them, the consequences that arose, and the counter-evidence she created. write down adverse experiences. what are your beliefs about the event? how do you interpret it? what are the consequences, or results, of your beliefs? how do these beliefs affect you and others? student missed apt for quiz, i addressed this with him and he got upset. i thought i needed to be firm because i felt he was taking advantage of my flexible approach. i was kind, but firm. then he almost cried and i felt terrible. i later reflected on this event and felt i had done the right thing. the student stopped attending class. i decided that in the future i should be firm from the beginning to avoid this problem. student was looking at a peer’s paper in class. i was at first personally offended. she had been a very good student, then i wondered if i had missed previous cheating because of bias or favoritism. i dealt with the student, and made a mental note to be very aware of preconceived notions. i was so stressed about everything (class, trip . . .) felt very unprepared for a test and also a paper. i felt i was doing poor work. i know it was situation-based, but still i thought my work was poor. i felt physically sick, had trouble focusing and generally became very upset and nervous. counter-evidence: 1.i made a student cry, but i felt justified because of the situation, and my words were carefully chosen and kind. 2.the student cheated. even though it was a surprise and disappointing, it is not my fault. 3.the week was probably the most stressful i’ve had. the work i had done the rest of the semester had given me enough support to carry me to the end (through the rough spots). figure 4 amy’s learned optimism narrative the first two adverse events that amy discussed both involved a student’s violations of rules or ethics. in both cases, amy decided to be firm and hold them accountable, but this approach takes an emotional toll on her. she identified the first individual as being “upset” and when he almost started to cry, she felt “terrible.” her response to the second individual was to feel personally offended. amy’s ei moved beyond simple identification of these emotions to higher levels when she described how her future approach to the class would differ in order to prevent similar problems. these are hard lessons for a pre-service teacher to learn but part of an ongoing process of working out the examining emotional intelligence within the context of positive psychology interventions 347 interaction among classroom policies, student actions, and teacher’s emotions. developing the conditions that create a synergy among policies, students and the teacher is a specific example of ei branch 4—being an emotionally intelligent teacher who manages the balancing act in a classroom. amy’s third adverse circumstance was self-focused and referred to high levels of stress that made her believe that she was doing poorly in her schoolwork, thus resulting in feeling physically sick, nervous and upset. in the counter-evidence section, she recognized that although the week was stressful, she had performed well throughout the semester. she seems to imply that this idea mitigated her stress, a line of thinking that is consistent with the “build” side of fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotion. the more optimistic frame of mind allows that previous investment in classroom social capital can pay off during stressful times later in the semester. in this one example, we see elements of all four ei branches, (a) perceiving emotions, (b) effectively using ei knowledge, (c) understanding how emotions work, and (d) managing the balance among competing emotional trajectories. 7. general discussion we asked three research questions in this study. the first concerned how the respondents who reported the highest increase in attainability of their possible selves reacted to the sequence of positive psychology interventions. an examination of the 19 original participants’ preand postpaps measure demonstrated that 13 of them (68%) increased perceived attainability. although this result suggests progress toward self-related goals among the majority of students, their narratives themselves tell a more cautionary tale. we found that a multitude of variables affecting the participants are related to other aspects of the respondents’ lives, and that thinking about future possible selves can generate a number of unanticipated influences. in terms of the complexity of the person, it is helpful to look through a dynamic systems lens (dörnyei, macintyre, & henry, in press). we have argued elsewhere (gregersen & macintyre, 2014, p. 243) that “the trajectory of the individual learner is an emergent pattern, a convergence of several moving parts, including the systems of the physical body (e.g., skeletal-muscular, neurological systems), the social system (native language groups, target language groups), and learning context (relationships with teachers and peers). all of these components interact to give learning its meaning, order and pattern. there is not a master plan or pre-set script for where the learning is going, but neither are these examples of completely random, disconnected acts.” in the present study, we found the learner and teacher exercise ei to understand ways in which a wide range tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, kate hein finegan, kyle talbot, shelby claman 348 of emotional experiences, inside and outside the classroom, affect the language learning and teaching process. there are a number of specific observations that can be made, both about the interventions and possible selves. a close comparison between the lists of participants’ possible selves and their corresponding narratives demonstrates an integration of thinking about gratitude, savouring and optimism. for example, when comparing amy’s list of possible selves in table 3 with the entirety of her narratives from the three-good-things intervention (not just the excerpts found in this article) many connections are evident. in two of her visions of possible selves, she mentions her goal to be a better planner and be more organized. similarly in her three-good-things narratives she says “i’m trying to create more continuity from day-to-day” and “i’ve been remembering to [place students in semi-circle] more often. i write notes in my lesson plan . . .” in the excerpt presented above, she pats herself on the back for being organized well enough to remember to bring props to class. she also envisions a possible self who is “better able to connect with students while maintaining professional/appropriate distance.” likewise, in her narratives she talks about “being kind but firm” with a student, and about being delighted to interact with students, and to have days for relationship-building. the connections between amy’s paps possible selves measure and her responses to the activities occurred frequently among respondents. a majority of the participants had tight connections between their specific possible selves and themes that were written in their narratives. it may be that the possible self visions help to guide what participants are grateful for, what they savour and what they write about in terms of negative experiences. understanding that emotional reactions, classroom activities, and language development are part of an integrated whole-person provides evidence for how the branches of ei theory work together and how ei might facilitate the link between specific (positive psychology) activities and l2 self-development. our second research question involved the sequencing of the positive psychology interventions. by examining two cases, we see that strategic ordering of activities encouraged participants to reflect upon those daily events for which they were grateful, savour them and then use them as springboards for learning optimism. we discovered that when participants hypothesized why their good things happened in the first activity, both awatif and amy used the opportunity to also create counter-evidence—a task that they were supposed to carry out only later, as part of the learned optimism intervention. awatif and amy used both activities to be grateful and generate optimism, reactions that seem to facilitate the perception that their possible selves were more attainable after the interventions. this also suggests a synergy among the activities and highlights the importance of integrating activities that optimize the positive emotional outcomes. examining emotional intelligence within the context of positive psychology interventions 349 our third research question concerned what the positive psychology narratives of language learners and teachers tell us about their ei, and how it is reflected in interventions such as the ones we used. both awatif and amy showed that they were continually moving within and among the four branches of ei. throughout the majority of their narratives they exhibited the ability to perceive, identify and express their emotions (branch 1)—a necessary first step to the other three branches. we also saw numerous instances where they were able to use their emotional awareness to facilitate their thinking and to understand their own emotions and those of people in their spheres of influence (branch 2). both awatif and amy used effective strategies to manage their emotions. we saw various examples of the more effective ei strategies such as using social interaction, cognitive self-regulation, and healthy distractions (see table 1) and little evidence of less effective strategies such as passive mood management, direct tension reduction, spending time alone, or avoiding the people or things that caused the adversity. we chose the two participants described in this study because they reported moving closer to their ideal self during their courses; our major conclusion is that the process of self-development is facilitated by using ei in effective ways. 8. limitations before concluding, we must note two of the limitations in this study. first, this study was a 3-week snapshot of learners’ and teachers’ experiences. there is as yet no way to know the optimal length of implementing interventions such as these, nor the optimal window to assess their effects. future research would benefit from data collection at intervals designed to determine whether ripple effects of the interventions induce a positive virtuous cycle or whether the gains from the interventions are short-lived and too easily buried under the weight of established habits. the element of time is important in any intervention study and can only be assessed as future studies of these (or similar) activities are reported. second, the spontaneous displays of ei shown by the learners suggest that we cannot ascribe the gains in possible selves simply to the effects of the three interventions. the participants have been engaged with language learning for a long time and have experience and habits that were not assessed in the present study. as would be the case with any real-world classroom intervention, it is possible, even likely, that the interventions complemented, supplemented, or coordinated the emotion regulation strategies the learners had already been using. future studies might also want to consider how the specific ei skills (or lack thereof) that participants bring to the activities affect how those activities unfold over time so that the interventions can be planned for even greater outcomes. tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, kate hein finegan, kyle talbot, shelby claman 350 9. conclusions this is the first qualitative study to examine how ei is manifest in a progression of positive psychology interventions for participants who perceived growth in the attainment of l2 possible selves. there has not been much prior work on ei in the sla area and those studies that do exist have used survey research. this study followed one learner (awatif) and one pre-service teacher (amy), selected based on their gains in the attainability of their possible future selves, through a progression of positive psychology interventions. we were able to show specific examples of ei in action. with the present data, we contribute to an explanation of the process. when awatif was disappointed by her grades in school, she was consoled and encouraged by her angelic son and comedic husband; her story was about trying harder the next time, with her family in mind. when amy encountered stressful situations at the end of the course, she did not focus on her frustrations and anxieties, but rather the support from her students that she had cultivated throughout the course; she understood that her students could be counted on to ease her worried mind. the examples presented above show evidence of specific ways in which positive psychology interventions can prompt reflection and a positive focus with accompanying positive emotions that ultimately facilitate movement toward attaining desired possible future selves. in conclusion, we return to the purpose of positive psychology as articulated by seligman et. al. (2005): the intent is to have a more complete and balanced scientific understanding of the human experience—the peaks, the valleys, and everything in between. we believe that a complete science and a complete practice of psychology should include an understanding of suffering and happiness, as well as their interaction, and validated interventions that both relieve suffering and increase happiness—two separate endeavors. (p. 410) as we move to increase the optimism and well-being of the persons in the language learning classroom, while at the same time combating the negative effects of debilitating affect, a two-pronged approach seems most reasonable. as gratitude, savouring and optimism put wind in the sails, inevitable negative emotions can be reduced to manageable levels where they function as rudders keeping the ship on course. within the larger systems of their cultures, schools, and classrooms, emotionally intelligent teachers and learners work together to move toward who they dream themselves to be. examining emotional intelligence within the context of positive psychology interventions 351 references aki, o. (2006). is emotional intelligence or mental intelligence more important in language learning? journal of applied sciences, 6(1), 66-70. arnold, j. (1999). affect in language learning. cambridge: cambridge university press. bar-on, r. 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(2012). contribution to language teaching and learning: a review of emotional intelligence. english language teaching, 6(12), 54-58. examining emotional intelligence within the context of positive psychology interventions 353 thayer, r. e., newman, j. r., & mcclain, t. m. (1994). self-regulation of mood: strategies for changing a bad mood, raising energy, and reducing tension. journal of personality and social psychology, 67(5), 910-925. tomkins, s. s. (1970). affect as the primary motivational system. in m.b. arnold (ed.), feelings and emotions: the loyola symposium (pp. 101-110). new york: academic press. valizadeh, m.r. & alavinia, p. (2012). listening comprehension performance viewed in the light of emotional intelligence and foreign language listening anxiety. english language teaching, 6(12), 11-26. zarafshan, m., & ardeshiri, m. (2012). the relationship between emotional intelligence, language learning strategies and english proficiency among iranian efl university students. the journal of educational and instructional studies in the world, 2(3), 105-114. 465 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (4). 465-466 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial this last 2011 issue of studies in second language learning and teaching brings together four papers dealing with the role of affective factors and different aspects of the knowledge of grammar. in the first of these, adriana biedro reports the results of a study which explored the personality predictors of foreign language aptitude, adopting as a point of reference the big five model proposed by costa and mccrae (1992) and using multiple regression to tap the impact of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. subsequently, ma gorzata baranucarz investigates the relationship between perceived and actual levels of secondary school learners’ command of foreign language pronunciation and their level of classroom anxiety, drawing upon a combination of quantitative and qualitative data for this purpose. in the next contribution, mojgan rashtchi and mahnaz afzali seek to determine whether the use of activities aimed at raising the awareness of advanced learners of english of the features of spoken grammar aids their comprehension of real-life conversation, as well as to examine their attitudes towards such activities. finally, marcin jaroszek describes the findings of a longitudinal study which focused on the use of conjunctions by advanced learners of english over a three-year period, investigated in relation to the reference level (i.e., native-speaker discourse and teacher talk in english as a foreign language classes), the type of exposure and instructional procedures. the production of the first four issues of the journal was indeed an arduous task which would not have been possible without the assistance of my friends and colleagues acting in the capacity of assistants to the editor. special thanks go to jakub bielak, who has made sure that linguistic and technical problems would not go unnoticed, anna mystkowska-wiertelak, who has engaged in repeated cycles of painstaking proofreading, mariusz kruk, who has taken care of processing the submissions and has maintained the journal website, and piotr bajak, who has made a truly amazing job speedily typesetting 466 the issues so that they could be part of the 2011 volume. i would also like to take this opportunity to thank the members of the editorial board for their advice and encouragement, the reviewers for their thoughtful and stimulating comments, as well as the authors, who have placed their trust in this undertaking by submitting their papers. i remain hopeful that studies in second language learning and teaching will be equally successful in 2012 and will continue to grow in the near future to ultimately become one of the leading journals in the field. miros aw pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references costa, p. t. jr., & mccrae, r. r. (1992). revised neo personality inventory (neo-pi-r) and neo five-factor inventory (neo-ffi). manual. odessa, fl: psychological assessment resources. 315 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (3). 315-334 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl correcting students’ written grammatical errors: the effects of negotiated versus nonnegotiated feedback hossein nassaji university of victoria, canada nassaji@uvic.ca abstract a substantial number of studies have examined the effects of grammar correction on second language (l2) written errors. however, most of the existing research has involved unidirectional written feedback. this classroom-based study examined the effects of oral negotiation in addressing l2 written errors. data were collected in two intermediate adult english as a second language classes. three types of feedback were compared: nonnegotiated direct reformulation, feedback with limited negotiation (i.e., prompt + reformulation) and feedback with negotiation. the linguistic targets chosen were the two most common grammatical errors in english: articles and prepositions. the effects of feedback were measured by means of learner-specific error identification/correction tasks administered three days, and again ten days, after the treatment. the results showed an overall advantage for feedback that involved negotiation. however, a comparison of data per error types showed that the differential effects of feedback types were mainly apparent for article errors rather than preposition errors. these results suggest that while negotiated feedback may play an important role in addressing l2 written errors, the degree of its effects may differ for different linguistic targets. keywords: error correction, written errors, feedback, oral negotiation hossein nassaji 316 dealing with second language (l2) learner errors is an important aspect of classroom pedagogy. however, there is a considerable controversy surrounding the effectiveness of grammar feedback for improving l2 accuracy. in particular, the role feedback in correcting l2 written errors has been the subject of an extensive debate in the second language acquisition (sla) literature. many may be familiar with the debate that began with truscott’s (1996)’s paper “the case against grammar correction in l2 writing classes” in which (and also in subsequent papers) truscott questioned the value of grammar feedback. truscott (1996) argued that “substantial research shows it [grammar correction] to be ineffective and none shows it to be helpful in any interesting sense” (p. 327). he believed that correcting grammar errors is a waste of time and teachers should attempt to use their instructional time in a more constructive way. providing a number of reasons for his argument, he concluded that, “grammar correction has no place in writing courses and should be abandoned” (p. 328). many writing and sla researchers have strongly reacted to truscott’s remarks, expressing their disagreement with his critiques (chandler, 2003, 2004; ferris, 1999, 2004; ferris & helt, 2000; lyster, lightbown, & spada, 1999). ferris (1999, 2004), for example, described truscott’s conclusion as “premature” and based on inadequate database. she argued that, although truscott’s observation regarding the complexity of corrective feedback, and the practical problems associated with it, should be taken into consideration, his dismissal of grammar correction is unfounded. other researchers such as lyster, lightbown, and spada (1999) and chandler (2003, 2004) have argued that grammar correction is essential for l2 acquisition, and therefore, it must remain an important component of l2 instruction. however, despite the above observations, it is quite obvious that grammar correction is not a simple issue and there is no simple solution to it. even if there is more agreement among researchers that corrective feedback is useful in general, there is much less disagreement on how and when it should be provided to be effective. as for research, a considerable number of studies have examined the effectiveness of corrective feedback on l2 writing in both past and present (e.g., ashwell, 2000; bitchener, 2003, 2008, 2009; bitchener & knoch, 2009; chandler, 2003; fathman & whalley, 1990; ferris, 1995; ferris & roberts, 2001; frantzen, 1995; kepner, 1991; lalande, 1982; robb, ross, & shortreed, 1986; sachs & polio, 2007; semke, 1984; sheppard, 1992). however, the results of these studies are mixed. among the studies, those that have compared feedback with no feedback conditions have reported a positive effect for feedback (chandler, 2003; fathman & whalley, 1990; ferris, 2006; ferris & roberts, 2001). nevertheless, those that have compared different types of correcting students' written grammatical errors: the effects of negotiated versus . . . 317 feedback have reported inconsistent results. for example, whereas some have found a positive effect for more indirect feedback strategies (such as error coding or underlining) (ferris & helt, 2000; lalande, 1982; lee, 1997), others have reported no significant differences between coded and not coded feedback (ferris & robert, 2001; robb et al., 1986). similarly, while some have found a major effect for feedback that identifies the errors (chandler, 2003; ferris, 2006; ferris, chaney, komura, roberts, & mckee, 2000), others have reported a similar effect (e.g., frantzen, 1995) or a more positive effect for feedback that both identifies and provides the correct form (bitchener, 2008; bitchener & knoch, 2008; sheen, 2007). a number of reasons have been suggested for these discrepancies in results. one is inconsistencies in research methodologies used in different studies (ferris, 2004; guenette, 2007). for example, after reviewing a number of written feedback studies, guenette (2007) concluded that no comparison could be made because studies have used different populations, research designs, elicitation tasks, and feedback measures. guenette (2007) also attributed part of the discrepancies to the lack of adequate control for a number of extraneous variables that can affect the role of feedback in l2 learning. another reason is that feedback has not often been provided in a focused manner, and that in most studies, the feedback has targeted a range of errors rather than particular errors (bitchener & knoch, 2008). in such cases, inconsistencies are expected because different types of errors do not react equally even to the same feedback treatment. however, in addition to the above reasons, most studies of feedback on written errors have focused on unidirectional feedback without any studentteacher interaction or negotiation. in such cases, the teacher has always been the provider of the feedback and the learner the receiver. such feedback may not be necessarily informative, for although the feedback is provided, since it is not reciprocal, it does not take into account learner needs and responses to feedback. it is possible that if the feedback is provided in a negotiated and interactive manner, it may become more effective because in such cases the feedback can become more fine-tuned and adjusted to the learner’s level of interlanguage through negotiation. indeed, many studies that have examined the role of negotiation have shown positive effects for this kind of feedback strategy (e.g., braidi, 2002; ellis, tanaka, & yamazaki, 1994; lyster, 1998, 2002; mackey & philp, 1998; nassaji, 2007a, 2009; ohta, 2000, 2001; oliver, 1995; pica, 1994; van den branden, 1997). however, they have been mainly in the context of addressing oral errors. fewer studies have examined the potential effectiveness of negotiation for addressing written errors. negotiation is a process that takes place through the back and forth in hossein nassaji 318 teractional strategies used to reach a solution to a problem in the course of communication. it can be of two types: form negotiation and meaning negotiation. meaning negotiation refers to the side sequences to the conversational interaction in order to deal with communication problems and to make input more comprehensible (pica, 1988, 1994; van den branden, 1997). form negotiation, on the other hand, is trigged by an attention to form and occurs when “one interlocutor tries to ‘push’ the other towards producing a formally more correct and/or appropriate utterance” (van den branden, 1997, p. 592). interactional feedback during conversational interaction can result from both negotiation of meaning and negotiation of form. however, interactional feedback on written errors can be considered to be a kind of negotiation of form. theoretical support for negotiation comes from various interactionist perspectives on l2 acquisition. one such perspective is long’s (1996) interaction hypothesis, which emphasizes that negotiated interaction is an important source of l2 learning (gass, mackey, & pica, 1998; gass & varonis, 1994; long, 2006). in this framework negotiation refers to the processes whereby interlocutors attempt to clarify the content of their message through the use of various interactional adjustments and modifications that occur in the course of interaction. such strategies are assumed to contribute to l2 development by enhancing message comprehensibility and encouraging attention to form (pica, 1994). the value of negotiation also links closely with the theoretical importance attributed to the notion of focus on form in sla and the idea that the effectiveness of corrective feedback largely depends on the degree to which it is integrated with meaningful communication in l2 classrooms (doughty, 2001; long, 1991; long & robinson, 1998). furthermore, negotiation provides students with opportunities to identify and detect their errors themselves. this would provide a discovery-based approach to error correction, which has been described as not only motivating but also helping “students to make inferences and formulate concepts about the target language and to help them fix this information in their long term memories” (hendrickson, 1978, p. 393). a further perspective comes from socio-cultural framework, including vygotskian sociocultural theory (e.g., aljaafreh & lantolf, 1994; donato, 1994; lantolf & thorne, 2006; nassaji & cumming, 2000; nassaji & swain, 2000). in a socio-cultural view, language learning is essentially seen as a socially mediated process, and one which is highly “dependent on face to face interaction and shared processes, such as joint problem solving and discussion” (mitchell & myles, 2004, p. 195). central to the sociocultural theory is the notion of the zone of proximal development (zpd), which refers to “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solvcorrecting students' written grammatical errors: the effects of negotiated versus . . . 319 ing under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers” (vygotsky 1978, p. 86). the notion of the zpd highlights the importance of negotiation in language learning because it is believed that joint negotiation within the zpd helps learners use their existing linguistic knowledge to develop what they have not yet mastered independently (donato, 1994; lantolf & appel, 1994a, 1994b; nassaji & cumming, 2000; nassaji & swain, 2000). the sociocultural perspective places particular emphasis on social and dialogic nature of feedback (aljaafreh & lantolf, 1994). it considers that the effectiveness of feedback depends to a large degree on the degree of negotiation and meaningful transactions between the learner and the teacher (nassaji & swain, 2000). it is through negotiation that the teacher is able to discover the learner’s developmental level or zpd, and then to provide appropriate feedback as needed. also, negotiation provides an environment for scaffolding, which enables the learner to reach a cognitive level that he or she may not be able to achieve alone (nassaji & cumming, 2000). although many studies have examined the role of negotiation in addressing oral errors, to date only very few studies have investigated its role in addressing l2 written errors. one such study is that by aljaafreh and lantolf (1994), which, within a socio-cultural perspective, examined negotiated feedback as it occurred in oral interactions between three english as a second language (esl) writers and one tutor. the researchers operationalized negotiated feedback in terms of a “regulatory scale” consisting of a number of feedback strategies, beginning with broad implicit feedback and gradually moving toward more specific direct/explicit help in a scaffolding manner. the results showed that when feedback was negotiated, it facilitated students’ learning of new forms and also increased learners’ control over already known forms. nassaji and swain (2000) compared the effectiveness of negotiation in a case study of two adult esl learners. using aljaafreh and lantolf’s regulatory scale, the study compared negotiated feedback within the learners’ zpd versus nonnegotiated random feedback. the results of qualitative and quantitative analyses showed that negotiated feedback was more effective than random feedback in not only promoting learner accuracy as measured in subsequent error correction posttests, but also in accelerating development by making learners able to correct similar linguistic errors on subsequent occasions with much less assistance. both of the above studies were conducted in tutorial sessions outside the classroom. therefore, their results cannot be generalized to classroom contexts. in a recent study (nassaji, 2007), i attempted to investigate the role of negotiation in feedback in response to written errors in an adult esl classroom. the feedback occurred in the context of a routine classroom activity, in which students wrote weekly journals. the study first documented the occur hossein nassaji 320 rence of such feedback, and then examined its effect on learners’ ability to identify and correct the same errors after interaction. the findings of this study confirmed the importance of negotiated feedback on written errors by providing evidence for its effectiveness inside an l2 classroom. the results showed that when the feedback involved negotiation, it resulted in more successful correction of the same error by the learners than feedback that involved no, or limited, negotiation. however, the study was small scale, observational, and the feedback occurred on any errors. the present study is an extension of the above study. it sought to explore the role of negotiation further by examining not only whether negotiated feedback had any effects on learners’ ability to correct their errors, but also whether the effect of negotiation differed depending on the nature of the target form. the study compared three types of oral feedback: nonnegotiated reformulation, feedback with limited negotiation (i.e., prompt + reformulation), and feedback with extended negotiation. two most commonly used linguistic forms were also selected as feedback targets: prepositions and articles. the study addressed the following research questions: 1. what is the effect of oral feedback on leaner’s ability to correct their written errors? 2. are learners more likely to benefit from feedback that involves negotiation than feedback that involves limited or no negotiation? 3. do the advantages of negotiated feedback, if any, depend on the type of linguistic target? method participants the study was conducted in two intermediate adult esl classrooms in an intensive esl program in a university context (henceforth class a and class b). learners attended these classes five days a week, receiving 20 hours of instruction each week. the students had been placed at this level based on a language placement test administered by the program. there were 15 students in class a and 16 students in class b (n = 31). of the 15 students in class a, nine were female and six were male. their ages ranged from 18 to 48 (m = 24, sd = 8.44). their first language included: japanese (n = 8), korean (n = 3), spanish (n = 3), and turkish (n = 1). of the 16 students in class b, ten were female and six were male. their ages ranged from 19 to 29 (m = 22.62, sd = 2.9). they were from a variety of language backgrounds including chinese (n = 2), japanese (n = 7), kocorrecting students' written grammatical errors: the effects of negotiated versus . . . 321 rean (n = 5), and spanish (n = 2). by the time of the study, the participants had been in canada for 1 to 10 months, and had been in the program for 1 to 6 months. the same instructor, who was a male native speaker of english, taught the two classes. he had 16 years of esl and efl teaching experience, and had been teaching in that program for about 10 years. his method of instruction was primarily communicative, and his method of error correction involved a combination of form-focused feedback and explanation. linguistic targets prepositions and articles were selected as linguistic targets. this selection was based on a number of reasons. first, both features have been described as among the most difficult grammatical forms for l2 learners to master (celce-murcia & larsen-freeman, 1999). even students at fairly advanced levels of language proficiency have difficulty with these forms. second, these errors were found to represent a large number of grammatical errors learners made in their written journals during the present study. therefore, the teacher recommended them as good candidates for corrective feedback. another reason comes from a recent study by bitchener, young, and cameron (2005), which compared the effect of direct written feedback versus feedback in combination with oral feedback on three types of written errors (prepositions, the past simple tense, and the definite article). the study found that written feedback in combination with oral feedback had a significant effect on learners’ accuracy of past tense and definite articles but not on prepositions. the researchers explained these differences in terms of ferris’ (1999) distinction between treatable and less treatable errors. ferris (1999) defined treatable errors as those that occur in a patterned, rule-governed manner and untreatable as those that do not follow certain rules such as the choice of lexical forms. bitchener et al. (2005) argued that feedback on prepositions was less effective because prepositions are less treatable than past tense and articles. focusing on prepositions and articles in the present study can allow a comparison with their study, and also an examination of whether different degrees of negotiation have any differential effects on these two types of errors. research design and procedures the study used a research design involving four phases: a journal writing phase, a feedback phase, an immediate posttest phase and a delayed posttest phase. the data collection procedures for both class a and b were the same, except for the fact that in class a the feedback focused on article errors and in class hossein nassaji 322 b it focused on preposition errors. in each class, three feedback sessions were conducted over a three-week period, with each week focusing on a particular type of feedback. the procedure was as follows. during each of the three weeks, students wrote journals on topics of their own interest. the teacher reviewed the journals and selected samples of students’ sentences that contained the target errors. he then conducted a feedback session on those erroneous sentences the last day of the week. in week 1 of the treatment in each class, the teacher provided nonnegotiated direct reformulation of instances of the target form students had produced during that week. in week 2, the feedback involved prompt + reformulation, and in week 3, the feedback involved negotiation. after each feedback session, and before the next one, students received a learner-specific test on the errors that they had received feedback on in that session (see the next section for detail). figure 1 shows a schematic representation of the research design for one of the classes (in the figure, feedback treatment 1, 2, and 3 refer to nonnegotiated direct reformulation, prompt + reformulation, and feedback with negotiation, respectively). the same procedure was followed for the other class. figure 1 a schematic representation of the research design a description of feedback types this section describes the three feedback types compared. nonnegotiated direct reformulation. this was a feedback strategy in which the teacher provided a direct correction of the error with no negotiation and interaction with the student. to this end, the teacher first read the erroneous sentence and then corrected the target error immediately: after 3 days: posttest 1 after 10 days: posttest 2 week 2 monday-thursday: journal writings friday: feedback treatment 2 after 3 days: posttest 1 after 10 days: posttest 2 posttests after 3 days: posttest 1 after 10 days: posttest 2 posttests week 3 monday-thursday: journal writings friday: feedback treatment 3 week 1 monday-thursday: journal writings friday: feedback treatment 1 posttests correcting students' written grammatical errors: the effects of negotiated versus . . . 323 example 1 trigger “i had a class at uvic downtown campus.” teacher i had a class at the uvic downtown campus. prompt + reformulation. this feedback involved an initial prompt plus reformulation. in this strategy, the teacher first asked the learner who had made the target error to correct it. if the error was corrected, the teacher confirmed the correction. if not, the teacher provided the correction without any further negotiation. the difference between this feedback type and the previous one was that it allowed the learner to self-correct. thus, it involved some negotiation. however, the negotiation was limited because the teacher immediately provided the correction upon the learner’s initial failure. thus, it did not provide the learner with any further guidance or assistance: example 2 trigger “i am aware that my mother went through varieties of experience when she brought me up.” teacher nemar,1 what’s your suggestion? student just thinking . . . it includes “the”, through the teacher went through a variety . . . feedback with negotiation. in this feedback, the teacher addressed the target error through negotiation. the difference between this type of feedback and the previous feedback type was that, in the former, as noted earlier, the teacher corrected the learner’s error upon the learner’s initial failure. however, in this feedback type, the teacher encouraged and pushed the learner further to discover and correct the error, using a step-by-step guided help and scaffolding. the feedback followed the procedure used in nassaji and swain (2002), beginning with indirect and implicit feedback and moving progressively toward more direct and more explicit help as needed until the error was resolved (example 3). in this feedback type (and also and the previous one), the teacher nominated the learner who had made the error to correct it. thus, the negotiation was between the teacher and that learner. the amount of negotiation in the negotiated feedback strategy varied depending on the degree of assistance needed, with some negotiations being more extended than others. 1 names are pseudonyms. hossein nassaji 324 example 3 trigger “when i was a kindergarten student, i went to international school.” teacher harnak? can you try and give solutions, corrections, for this sentence? student “when i was a kindergarten student, i went to the international schools.” teacher you went to the international school. so, you added the, article “the”? student “a”? teacher what’s that? student ah no. teacher i went to, which one sounds better? “the” or “an” student the teacher now, you could “the international school,” if you give more information, “in my hometown.” student oh teacher then you can use it because it’s a definite article, but because you don’t give more information, what would you say? instead of the? haruka what do you think? student “an” teacher “an” the whole table agrees, everyone agrees. “an” you say, “an” because it’s indefinite. your not giving us specifics, so “an.” testing the test was a learner-specific error identification/correction test, in which each learner was asked to identify and correct his or her own errors on which they had received feedback (see nassaji, 2007b, 2009). for that purpose, after each feedback session, each learner’s erroneous sentences were collected. these erroneous sentences were typed and given back to the same students for correction. the students were asked to go over the sentences and identify any errors and make any corrections needed. the instruction was as follows: “read the following sentences and see if there are any errors. locate the errors by underlying them, and then correct them if you can.” learners were tested twice: three days after each feedback session (and before the next feedback session), and then again ten days after. the purpose of the second posttest was to determine whether the learners were able to remember correcting students' written grammatical errors: the effects of negotiated versus . . . 325 the corrections made to their errors in the first posttest. for the second posttest, the same erroneous sentences used in the first posttest were retyped with a different order and given to the students. the instruction was the same as in the immediate testing. that is, learners were asked to find any errors and then correct them if they could. since there were three feedback sessions, each learner received three immediate and three delayed posttests. scoring the tests. to score learners’ responses to the test items, a strict coding criterion was adopted, in which responses were scored as either correct or incorrect. they were scored as correct if the learner had identified and corrected the error. incorrect responses included those that involved wrong identification of the error or no response. since the data consisted of frequency of counts of categorical data, chi-square tests were used to determine the relationship between feedback types and learner test performances. furthermore, because the analysis involved a comparison between three types of feedback, whenever the overall chi-square test was statistically significant, adjusted standardized residuals were used to determine where the difference lied. standardized residuals of greater than 2 or -2 were considered to show significantly large contribution to the overall difference. results altogether, 162 target errors that learners had made in their journals received feedback. of these errors, 89 (55%) were article errors and 73 (45%) were preposition errors. of the total number of article errors, 38% had received direct reformulation with no negotiation, 26% had received prompt + reformulation, and 36% had received negotiation. of the total number of preposition errors, 34%, 32%, and 34% had received direct reformulation, prompt + reformulation, and feedback with negotiation, respectively. altogether, about one third of each of the two target forms had received one of the three feedback types. the first analysis examined whether there was any relationship between feedback types and learners’ ability to successfully identify and correct the target errors. to this end, the frequency and percentages of learners’ correct test scores in each of the feedback conditions were calculated and compared. overall, learners were able to correct more than half (54%) of the errors (articles and prepositions) on which they had received feedback in the first immediate testing (table 1). a comparison of the three feedback types showed that the percentages of correct test scores varied across feedback conditions. of the total number of errors that had received direct reformulations with no negotiation, learn hossein nassaji 326 ers corrected 41% of them in the first testing. however, of the total number of errors that had received prompt + reformulation and negotiation, learners corrected higher percentages: 56% and 65%, respectively. a chi-square test indicated that the difference among the three feedback types was statistically significant (2, n = 162) = 7.05, p < .05. the residual analysis, shown in table 1, further indicated that of the three feedback types, feedback with negotiation led to a significantly higher percentage, and reformulation with no negotiation led to a significantly lower percentage, of correct test scores. table 1 accuracy of learner responses in the first posttest for different feedback conditions total n correct % correct residual total number of errors 162 87 54% a) nonnegotiated reformulation 59 24 41% -2.5 b) prompt + reformulation 46 26 56% .5 c) feedback with negotiation 57 37 65% 2.1 table 2 displays the results of the delayed testing. as can be seen, there was a decrease in the overall rate of correction from the immediate to the delayed posttest. however, the decrease is greater for reformulation with no negotiation (41% vs. 30%) than feedback with negotiation (65% vs. 60%). this suggests that learners were more likely to remember their corrections when they had received feedback with negotiation. as for the difference among feedback types, the pattern was similar to that in the immediate testing. that is, the percentage of correct test scores remained to be significantly different across different feedback conditions (2, n = 162) = 10.59, p < .01. an examination of their residuals further showed that feedback with negotiation led to a significantly higher percentage of correct test scores, and that reformulation with no negotiation led to a significantly lower percentage. table 2 accuracy of learner responses in the delayed posttest for different feedback conditions total n correct % correct residual total number of errors 162 76 47% a) nonnegotiated reformulation 59 18 30% -3.2 b) prompt + reformulation 46 24 52% .8 c) feedback with negotiation 57 34 60% 2.4 the analyses then examined whether there was any relationship between feedback types and error types. to this end, the frequency and percorrecting students' written grammatical errors: the effects of negotiated versus . . . 327 centages of learners’ correct test scores for preposition and article errors across the three feedback conditions were compared. the results showed that although negotiated feedback led to significantly greater percentages of correct test scores overall, this difference was mainly apparent for feedback on article errors rather than on preposition errors (table 3). when the target form was prepositions, the chi-square test showed no statistically significant difference across the three feedback conditions in the first posttest. however, when the target form was articles, the chi-square result was statistically significant (2, n = 89) = 9.04, p < .01. their residuals, shown in table 3, further indicated that, of the three feedback types, direct reformulation with no negotiation led to a significantly lower percentage of correct test scores (32%, residual = -2.9), and feedback with negotiation led to a significantly higher percentage of correction (69%, residual = 2.4). this finding suggests that the effects of feedback types depended on the type of linguistic targets. table 3 accuracy of the first posttest scores for different feedback types in response to prepositions and articles nonnegotiated reformulation prompt + reformulation feedback with negotiation total prepositions total 25 23 25 73 n correct 13 13 15 41 % correct 52% 56% 60% 56% residual -.5 .0 .5 articles total 34 23 32 89 n correct 11 13 22 46 % correct 32% 56% 69% 52% residual -2.9 .5 2.4 in the delayed testing, there was a similar pattern (table 4). when the target form was prepositions, the chi-square test did not show a statistically significant difference among different feedback types. however, when it was articles, it did show a difference (2, n = 89) = 9.48, p < .01. furthermore, a comparison of the effects of reformulation and negotiation across error types showed that while negotiation led to a similar percentage of correction in the case of both preposition and article errors, reformulation led to a noticeably higher percentage of correction in the case of prepositions (40%) than articles (24%). hossein nassaji 328 table 4 accuracy of delayed posttest scores for different feedback types in response to prepositions and articles nonnegotiated reformulation prompt + reformulation feedback with negotiation total prepositions total 25 23 25 73 n correct 10 12 15 37 % correct 40% 52% 60% 51% residual -1.3 .2 1.1 articles total 34 23 32 89 n correct 8 12 19 39 % correct 24% 52% 59% 44% residual -3.0 .9 2.2 discussion previous studies of corrective feedback on written errors have examined the effectiveness of various types of written feedback. the present study examined the effects of oral feedback, particularly feedback that involved negotiation, in addressing l2 written errors. data were collected in two adult esl classes. three types of feedback were compared: direct reformulation with no negotiation, prompt + reformulation, and feedback with negotiation. the linguistic targets were english articles and prepositions. the effects of feedback were measured by means of tailor-made learner specific error identification/correction tasks that asked learners to identify and correct their erroneous sentences on which they had received feedback three days, and again ten days, after the treatment. the results showed a clear advantage for negotiated feedback when the data for the two types of errors were combined. however, a comparison of data per error types showed that the differential effects of feedback types were mainly apparent for article errors rather than for preposition errors. when the target form was prepositions, the three types of feedback led to comparable degrees of post-interaction correction. however, when the target form was articles, reformulation with no negotiation led to a significantly lower degree of correction as compared to feedback with negotiation, which led to a significantly higher percentage of correction. the findings regarding the overall efficacy of negotiation can be explained in terms of the opportunities that it provides for scaffolding and guided help learners obtained as a result of interacting with the teacher (nassaji & swain, 2000). the finding pertaining to the greater effect of negotiation on article errors also echoes those of bitchener et al. (2005) who found a significorrecting students' written grammatical errors: the effects of negotiated versus . . . 329 cant effect for feedback (when combined with oral conferencing) on the accuracy of the definite article but not on the accuracy of preposition errors. bitchener et al. (2005) explained the difference in terms of ferris’ distinction between treatable and less treatable errors. according to bitchener et al. (2005), since the use of articles is more rule-governed, feedback with oral negotiation is more effective because it can provide opportunities for explaining and illustrating those rules. this is not true for prepositions that have many meanings and whose application is more idiosyncratic. however, in the present study, direct reformulation also led to a noticeably high percentage of correction in the case of preposition errors, but not article errors. although variations in the effectiveness of negotiated feedback on article errors may be explained in terms of the degree of error treatability, the findings regarding the relative ineffectiveness of direct reformulation for articles and its effectiveness for prepositions need further explanation. one explanation, although speculative, may come from the type of rules involved in article errors, on the one hand, and the more lexical nature of prepositions, on the other. grammatical rules can be classified into two types: ‘transparent’ and ‘opaque’ (kiparsky, 1971). transparent rules are easy to explain and teach (an example could be plural -s.). opaque rules are not simple, and therefore, are harder to explain and grasp. although article errors are relatively rule-oriented, these rules are not straightforward and can be considered to be more opaque. in the case of such errors, negotiation was helpful possibly because it provided the necessary time to explain and treat the error. direct reformulation was not very helpful because it did not provide such opportunities. prepositions, on the other hand, responded effectively to direct reformulations possibly because learners may have simply stored the reformulations in the memory and then remembered them in the posttests. this could have been because of the more lexical nature of prepositions (e.g., crystal, 1992). because of that, prepositions are also more salient than articles. this characteristic may then make them also more likely to be noticed when they become the target of reformulation. there is some research evidence from feedback on oral errors that seems to support this latter explanation. mackey, gass, and mcdonough (2000), for example, found that learners perceived the corrective nature of lexical reformulations (recasts) more accurately than morphosyntactic reformulations. conclusion in summary, this research explored the role of oral negotiation in response to written errors in l2 classrooms. the examination was motivated by l2 studies that have argued for the role of negotiated interaction in l2 learn hossein nassaji 330 ing. to date, most of the studies of feedback on l2 written errors have involved unidirectional written feedback. the results of this study suggest that oral feedback with negotiation can have positive effects on learners’ accuracy, but the differential effects of such feedback may also depend on the type and nature of the linguistic target. there are a few limitations of this study that should be considered. first, the results are based on data from only two esl classrooms. thus, the generalizability of the findings must be further examined in future research. second, in this study, learners were asked to review and correct their own previous errors. although such findings may provide evidence about the role of feedback in assisting learners to revise their errors, they do not provide evidence that learners would be able to use the forms productively in subsequent, or new pieces of, writings. we should also recognize that such effects may be short-term and may fade away over time. thus, there is a need for more research to examine whether negotiated feedback has any significant long-term benefits for writing development as compared to other types of feedback. finally, this study examined the effects of feedback on only two categories of errors, and only with intermediate esl learners. future studies should be carried out with other types of errors, other types of learners, and in different instructional settings. such studies are extremely necessary in order to determine what roles various learnerand context-specific factors may play in the effectiveness of feedback. this research was supported by a research grant from the social sciences and humanities research council of canada (sshrc). correcting students' written grammatical errors: the effects of negotiated versus . . . 331 references aljaafreh, a., & lantolf, j. 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(1997). effects of negotiation on language learners’ output. language learning, 47, 589-636. 377 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (3). 2013. 377-396 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl pedagogy of the possible: imagination, autonomy, and space garold murray okayama university, japan garold.murray@gmail.com abstract this paper explores pedagogical practices which can support the role of imagination in foreign language learning. over the past decade, work on self and identity in motivation research—most notably norton’s (2001) imagined communities and dörnyei’s (2009) l2 motivational self system—has suggested that teachers might foster students’ motivation by helping them imagine themselves as l2 speakers and envisage contexts or communities in which they might use the target language. if teachers are to help students create and sustain visions of l2 identities, they need to employ a pedagogy which incorporates and facilitates the work of the imagination. in order to provide guidelines for pedagogical practice, this paper examines the experiences of japanese university students studying english as a foreign language in a selfdirected learning course. prior analysis of the data revealed several affordances which supported the participants’ metacognitive development and the role of imagination in their learning. using these affordances as a conceptual framework, this paper builds on previous work by identifying elements in the learning environment which appear to support the role of imagination in the students’ language learning. the paper concludes by suggesting guidelines for pedagogical practice and considering the implications for further inquiry. keywords: imagination, self-directed learning, ecology, affordances, autonomy, space, metacognition garold murray 378 there are not many references to imagination in the second language acquisition literature. this could be because imagination has a bad reputation. egan (2007), who traced the history of imagination in western culture from ancient greece to the present day, notes that philosophers, such as plato and descartes, have characterized imagination as being not simply inferior to “reason” but as an actual threat to our ability to reason. johnson (1987) contends that present-day researchers deny imagination a central role in rationality because of a philosophical and cultural tradition which has inculcated the notion there is “one correct ‘god’s-eye-view’ about what the world really is like” (p. x), and the researcher’s task is to describe this reality. this “objectivist orientation” is based on the premise that “there is a rational structure to reality, independent of the beliefs of any particular people, and correct reason mirrors this rational structure” (p. x). such a perspective leaves little space for an exploration of imagination. however, the academic landscape has been changing and imagination is finding a place in both pedagogy and research. what johnson (1987) refers to as the objectivist orientation has been contested by poststructuralist and postmodern thinkers. moreover, advances in cognitive psychology and neuroscience have led theorists to hypothesize about the role of imagination. johnson (1987), who has explored the part imagination might play in a theory of meaning and rationality, contends, “without imagination, nothing in the world could be meaningful. without imagination, we could never make sense of our experience. without imagination, we could never reason toward knowledge of reality” (p. ix). more recently, damasio (2010), concluding his examination of the emergence of self from a neuroscience perspective, writes that “the ultimate gift of consciousness to humanity” is imagination, which enables us “to navigate the future” and “to invent the ways and means of achieving and magnifying” (pp. 296-297) our well-being. preparing people to navigate the future and ensure their well-being are the ultimate aims of education systems worldwide. to this end, liu and noppe-brandon (2009) promote imagination as an essential cognitive skill that can and should be taught. the importance now attributed to imagination in relation to cognitive and personal development has led egan (2005) to conclude that engaging students’ imaginations is essential to successful learning and teaching. however, he notes that making this “a routine part of the classroom experience has proven quite elusive” (p. xii). taking up this challenge, the aim of this paper is to identify pedagogical guidelines which can inform the work of teachers who would like to make engaging students’ imaginations a part of the routine in foreign language classrooms. it does this by reporting on a study exploring the english language learning experiences of japanese university students enrolled in a self-directed learning course. prior analysis of the data revealed several affordances which pedagogy of the possible: imagination, autonomy, and space 379 supported the participants’ metacognitive development (cotterall & murray, 2009) and pointed to the role of imagination in their learning (murray, 2011a, 2011b). whereas this earlier analysis focused on the experiences of the learners, in this paper, the data are reexamined from a pedagogical perspective. using the affordances identified in cotterall and murray (2009) as a conceptual framework, i build on previous work by identifying elements in the learning environment which appear to support the role of imagination in the students’ language learning. the paper concludes by suggesting guidelines for pedagogical practice and considering the implications for further inquiry. imagination and pedagogy work by norton (2001) and dörnyei (2009) in the area of language learning motivation has led to a focus on imagination in the field of applied linguistics (see murphey, falout, fukada, & fukuda, 2012; murray, 2011a, 2011b, 2012; pavlenko & norton, 2007; ryan, 2006; ryan & irie, 2014; yashima, 2013). norton (2001) introduced anderson’s (1991) construct of imagined communities to language learning. imagined communities are “groups of people, not immediately tangible and accessible, with whom we connect through the power of the imagination” (kanno & norton, 2003, p. 241). although we do not have immediate, physical, or actual access to these communities, we nonetheless experience a sense of belonging through our imagination. norton has used this notion to explore how learners’ sense of belonging to target language communities, which are not immediately accessible, can impact their identity construction and language learning. in another line of inquiry, dörnyei (2009) has proposed the l2 motivational self system. informed by work in the field of psychology—markus and nurius’s (1986) possible selves and most notably higgins’s (1987) selfdiscrepancy theory—dörnyei’s model has three components: the ideal self, the self learners would like to become; the ought-to-self, the self they feel they ought to become, or perhaps more to the point, the self that others feel they should become; and their language learning experience. the underlying premise is that having a vision of our ideal self as a foreign language speaker can be a powerful force motivating us to learn the language. both norton’s imagined communities and dörnyei’s l2 self system raise the issue of the role of imagination in language learning. furthermore, they present an interesting pedagogical challenge to teachers. how can teachers support the development of learners’ visions of ideal selves and the communities in which these selves might participate? dörnyei (2009) points out that having a vision of an l2 self is a process comprised of four steps: constructing the vision, strength garold murray 380 ening the vision, substantiating the vision, and activating the l2 self. to support this process, classroom practice will have to be guided by a pedagogy which facilitates the functioning of the imagination. in order to elaborate this pedagogy, educators need to have an understanding of what imagination is; however, concrete and cogent definitions of imagination are not easy to come by. egan (2007), whose work has focused on stimulating children’s imaginations through classroom practice, writes that we must not view “imagination as a thing, as a particular, distinct part of the mind” but rather as “a particular kind of flexibility, energy, and vividness that can imbue all mental functions, as a kind of mood of mind” (p. 19). in an earlier work, borrowing from white (1990), he characterizes imagination as “the capacity to think of things as possibly being so” (egan, 1992, p. 43), and contends, “it is by imagination . . . that we make ourselves, seeing the directions in which we might move and the possible selves we might inhabit” (p. 33). similarly, wenger (1998), who has explored imagination as a mode of belonging to communities of practice through which we develop our various identities, associates imagination with “a process of expanding our self by transcending time and space and creating new images of the world and ourselves” (p. 176). in the same vein, liu and noppe-brandon (2009) describe it as “the ability to conjure new realities and possibilities: in john dewey’s words, ‘to look at things as if they could be otherwise’” (p. 19). a common thread runs through these attempts to define imagination: possibility. imagination opens up a world of possibilities. in language learning, it is through the imagination that learners can come to see the possibility of one day being able to speak a foreign language and entertain the possibility of participating in target language communities. most learners will probably not have imagined a future self capable of conversing in a foreign language. for language teachers the challenge is to create learning environments and to devise tasks which will engage learners’ imaginations and enable them to develop and sustain such visions. to achieve this, teachers might consider an approach such as davis and sumara’s (2007) pedagogy of the not-yet-imaginable, which focuses on “that space of possibilities that is opened up through the exploration of the current space of the possible” (p. 58). the not-yet-imaginable “is not a realm of unthinkable thoughts but, rather, thoughts that cannot yet be triggered” (p. 58). the role of the teacher is to create the conditions for the emergence of the not-yetimaginable by orienting the attentions of learners and helping them to explore what is currently possible within and beyond the classroom. davis and sumara are using space in a metaphorical sense. however, educators will need to consider how this metaphorical space might map onto the physical space in which they find themselves with their students, and how this physical space can conpedagogy of the possible: imagination, autonomy, and space 381 tribute to—or, perhaps even hinder—finding tangible ways of accessing and manoeuvring within the metaphorical space. teachers are going to need concrete guidance and specific suggestions as to how they might open up this space of possibilities. this paper addresses this concern by suggesting features which would characterize a pedagogy aimed at encouraging students to engage their imagination in the exploration of the possible. the study in order to identify elements of a pedagogy fostering the imagination, i reexamine the qualitative data from a mixed-methods study which investigated the learning experiences of 269 japanese first-year university students enrolled in a self-directed learning (sdl) course. the course was offered as part of an english for academic purposes programme and delivered in a self-access centre. it had two main objectives: to help students improve their english language proficiency and develop their metacognitive knowledge (flavell, 1976) and skills (wenden, 1998). in addition to language learning activities, the course aimed to provide students with opportunities to expand their knowledge about themselves as language learners and to acquire skills enabling them to “manage, direct, regulate, [and] guide their learning” (wenden, 1998, p. 519). to this end, in accordance with holec’s (1981) model of learner autonomy, students created their own learning plans. they determined their goals, chose appropriate materials, decided how they were going to use these materials, monitored their progress, and assessed the outcomes. students learned the language through direct access to target language materials. rather than deliver language lessons, the teachers provided instruction in learning strategies and advised learners. the students documented their learning by making learning logs entries. their learning plans, log entries, and other evidence of learning were kept in portfolios, which played a key role in the management and assessment of learning. grades were determined through a process of collaborative evaluation (dickinson, 1987). (for a detailed description of the course, see murray, 2009, 2011a, 2011b). in order to investigate the extent to which the course was successful in meeting its objectives, a mixed-methods study was carried out over a three-year period. the methodology incorporated survey research into an ethnographic design with data coming from six sources: a language beliefs questionnaire in likert-scale format administered in pre-/post-test style, a language learning history, a course evaluation questionnaire, learners’ portfolios, interviews, and focus group discussions. a limitation of the study was that it was not specifically designed to explore the role of imagination in the learning process. a further garold murray 382 limitation is that gains in language proficiency cannot be solely attributed to work in the course; therefore, the focus is on the learners’ perceptions of how the course had helped them improve their english language skills. the data are, however, able to provide insights into the learners’ metacognitive development. an initial report on the study (cotterall & murray, 2009) provided an analysis of the quantitative data, which indicated that the sdl course was successful in supporting the students’ metacognitive development. a thematic analysis of the qualitative data at that time revealed several affordances (gibson, 1986), which facilitated the students’ metacognitive growth. subsequent analysis of qualitative data (murray, 2011a, 2011b) indicated that these affordances also supported the functioning of the imagination and pointed to the role imagination played in the learning process from goal setting to assessment. employing these affordances as a conceptual guide, the current paper reexamines this qualitative data in order to identify elements in the learning environment which might suggest pedagogical guidelines for teachers wishing to engage students’ imaginations in the learning process. affordances and imagination it could be argued that affordances are as much a product of the imagination as they are the environment. gibson (1986) characterized affordances as opportunities for action as they are perceived by individuals in the environment. johnson (1987) would contend that it is imagination which enables us to “see” these opportunities. however, as menezes (2011) cautions, we must be mindful that affordances are not properties of the environment, but rather they emerge through learners’ interaction with the environment. more specifically, “an affordance refers to the fit between an animal’s capabilities and the environmental supports and opportunities (both good and bad) that make possible a given activity” (gibson & pick, 2000, as cited in van lier, 2007, p. 54). johnson (1987) notes that “our experience and understanding partake of the reality of both our bodily organism and our environment, broadly conceived to include our history, culture, language, institutions, theories, and so forth” (p. 207). in other words, learners’ tendency to perceive opportunities for action are dependent on the identities they bring to the environment; or what barab and roth (2006) refer to as “effectivity sets,” which determine that an individual is “more likely to perceive and interact with the world in certain ways” (p. 6). in cotterall and murray (2009) we identified five affordances potentially available in the learning environment offered by the sdl course. we labelled these affordances personalization, engagement, experimentation, reflection, and support; and illustrated how they contributed to the participants’ metacognitive develpedagogy of the possible: imagination, autonomy, and space 383 opment. to these affordances i would add a sixth, autonomy, and argue that all six facilitated the role of imagination in the participants’ language learning. engagement because the affordances all work together to form what barab and roth (2006) refer to as a network of affordances, it is difficult to isolate them, arrange them linearly, and single one out as a place to begin. however, engagement lies at the heart of our understanding of the construct. van lier (2002) writes that “when we are active in a setting, affordances are created by our activity and the surrounding world” (p. 150). in the sdl course, the students played an active role in all aspects of their learning from goal setting to assessment. they designed and carried out their own learning experiences. when learners are engaged through action and emotions, the context is conducive to the functioning of the imagination (egan, 2005; liu & noppe-brandon, 2009). wenger (1998, p. 185) characterized “the work of imagination” as entailing engagement in a number of processes. these include the following: recognizing our experience in others, being able to put ourselves in someone else’s position (as we will see later, this was a key feature of students’ work with dvds of movies and television programmes); defining a trajectory that connects what we are doing now to who we would like to be in the future (a crucial process in the development of an l2 self); locating what we are doing now in broader systems in time and space; in other words, seeing the bigger picture (as the students did when they set immediate short-term learning goals and made the connection between their daily learning activities and their future self); sharing stories, explanations, and descriptions; creating models (or, in the case of the students in the sdl class, creating learning plans and discussing their learning with classmates); documenting historical developments, events and transitions (as the students did when they wrote their language learning histories and made learning log entries); generating scenarios, exploring other ways of doing what we are doing, other possible worlds, and other identities. imagination encompasses engagement in a variety of practices; and as the data from the study illustrate, these practices characterized the students’ participation in the sdl class (murray, 2011a, 2011b). in summary, wenger (1998) says that imagination “requires the ability [which i interpret to also mean the possibility] to explore, take risks, and create unlikely connections” (p. 185). garold murray 384 exploration in the sdl course, students were able to explore and experiment with different goals, materials, and learning strategies. in other words, they had the opportunity to try new things, as well as work with familiar things in new ways. for example, a number of the participants revealed that although they enjoyed watching english language movies in high school they did not realize this activity could be a valid means of improving their language skills. in the course, they were introduced to strategies for working with dvds of movies and television programmes. addressing this point on the course evaluation questionnaire in response to a question pertaining to changes in perception of how to best learn a language, one student wrote, “i didn’t think the movie [dvds] are enough to learn english because they are fun, so my image of study english was hard.” here, we have a glimpse of the role imagination can play in the learning process. the learner imagined learning english to be “hard,” thus preventing him or her from seeing that using something fun could be helpful. this also illustrates wenger’s (1998) point that when it comes to exploring and taking risks, imagination “demands some degree of playfulness” (p. 185). personalization exploration, risk-taking, and indulging in some fun were key elements of the process of personalizing the learning. in cotterall and murray (2009) we characterized personalization as an affordance which encompassed the dual process of enabling students to explore their identities as learners while at the same time enabling them to adapt the learning to suit their identities. on the course evaluation questionnaire, a student wrote, “i liked this course because there are discoveries of myself, the style of learning as a language learner.” this was made possible by features of the learning structure which enabled learners to set goals, that is, decide what they wanted to learn; select materials which interested them; and employ strategies and activities which corresponded with their learning styles. in murray (2011a) i illustrated this process by recounting the experiences of a student named hiro. hiro had a vision of his future self as an “international person . . . work[ing] in a foreign country using english.” this image suggested goals for his language learning; he decided he would need to work on his ability to participate in everyday conversations, acquire knowledge about the world, expand his outlook, and develop a worldview. once he had clearly identified goals, he then chose his materials: dvds of movies and television programmes with lots of everyday conversations and a news magazine especially designed pedagogy of the possible: imagination, autonomy, and space 385 for japanese efl learners. assessing the outcome, hiro said, “i can gain a broad vision and i could gain a lot of information in the world.” by helping him develop a worldview and providing information enabling him to visualize the communities he might participate in one day, his choice of content played a central role in the construction of his identity as an international person. underlying this process of identity construction was the functioning of the imagination. hiro’s imagination played an essential role in his planning by helping him determine his goals and subsequently choose materials to meet those goals. in other words, his imagination helped him see the path he had to take in order to make his possible self a reality. wenger (1998) supports this view, explaining that imagination helps us in “defining a trajectory that connects what we are doing to an extended identity, seeing ourselves in new ways” (p. 185). projecting into the future and seeing themselves participating in imagined english language communities provided the students in the course with a model of their english-speaking future self that they could aspire to. however, it is important to note that imagination was not operating in isolation. hiro and the other learners were working in an environment which supported the expansion of their metacognitive knowledge and skills through daily practice. this would suggest that in order to create a learning environment that facilitates the functioning of the imagination teachers should incorporate activities designed to enhance metacognitive development. in the same paper (murray, 2011a), i discussed the learning experiences of another student, mari. mari’s experiences are important to mention here because they provide further insight into the role pop culture can play in helping learners personalize their learning and develop an l2 self. in order to meet her goal of being able to participate in everyday conversations, mari chose to work with a dvd of her favourite american movie. her comments suggest this dvd presented an imagined community that she could engage with through the power of the imagination. writing about the power of media to draw us into the worlds they create, wenger (1998) says, “stories can transport our experience into the situations they relate and involve us in producing the meanings of those events as though we were participants” (p. 203). comments mari made in an interview indicate she was engaging in a meaning-making process similar to the one wenger discusses. when asked if she thought her work in the course helped her meet her goal of participating in everyday conversations, she replied, “i think so because dvds have daily conversation with daily phrases and if you listen carefully to the conversations maybe you can see it in yourself.” her phrase maybe you can see it in yourself suggests that mari is relating these expressions to who she is as a person— taking the words from “other people’s mouths” and making them her own garold murray 386 (bakhtin, 1981, p. 294). according to bakhtin, assimilating others’ discourse shapes our identity and how we view and interact with the world. word by word, mari appears to be constructing her target language identity. in addition to providing insight into the role pop culture can play in the development of an l2 identity, mari’s experience illustrates how it can feed the imagination. movies and television programmes can provide learners with models of target language speakers using words which can be appropriated. an important feature of this medium is that the words are available in a context. as bakhtin (1981) stresses, “the entire speaking situation is important: who is present during it [the discourse], with what expression or mimicry is it uttered, with what shades of intonation” (p. 341). similarly, lemke (2002) reminds us, “you cannot, neither materially nor psychologically nor culturally, make meaning only with the formal linguistic sign system; other modes of meaning-making are always functionally coupled with language use in real activity” (p. 72). dvds of movies and television programmes, through the power of the imagination, have the potential to immerse learners in countless contexts, enabling them to make meaning, to judge if the words are suitable for them, and to determine in which situations they might be able to put these words to use. reflection another affordance available in the learning environment was the opportunity for reflection. from the very first day of the course, students were encouraged to reflect on who they were as language learners by completing a language beliefs questionnaire and a learner profile. the profile required them to answer questions about what they had done to learn english in the past and to think about things they would like to be able to do in the target language in the future. during the first two weeks of the course, they wrote a language learning history, which they were encouraged to conclude by commenting on how they saw themselves using the target language in the future and what they intended to do at this point to improve their language skills. students were also required to monitor their learning on a daily basis. when they engaged in coursework both in and out of class, they made a learning log entry, in which they noted what they had done, a reflection on the experience, and what they planned to do when they resumed their language learning. as a final course activity, the students had to assess their overall learning by participating in the portfolio evaluation process. after reviewing their portfolio with the aid of a performance rubric, they completed an evaluation report in which they assigned themselves a grade and explained why it was appropriate in terms of the criteria. in retrospect, these and other classroom activities enpedagogy of the possible: imagination, autonomy, and space 387 couraged the students to not only think about their language learning but to focus on how they saw themselves as a language learner, in other words, to envisage their identity as a language learner. reflection, critical thinking, and, more specifically, the metacognitive capacity to reflect on one’s learning are closely associated with imagination. in their list of “capacities for imaginative learning,” liu and noppe-brandon (2009) note the importance of reflecting and assessing, which they qualify as “looking back on your learning to identify what challenges remain and to begin learning anew” (p. 38). on the sdl course evaluation questionnaire, students indicated that they appreciated the opportunities for reflection and recognized their importance. answering the question, “what did you like about the course?” students made comments similar to the following: “students have a chance to see themselves and find their weakness in learning english and they can improve and develop these things.” “i think this course gave us the opportunity to look at ourselves objectively and think deeply how we can improve our english skills.” these comments indicate that students were engaging in the process wenger (1998) refers to when he writes that “imagination requires the ability to disengage – to move back and look at our engagement through the eyes of an outsider” (p. 185). when we ask students to reflect, to monitor or assess their learning, we are asking them to stand back and look at their engagement in language learning practices. opportunities to reflect on learning provide an opening for imagination to do its work. in order to support the role of imagination in language learning, educators will need to rethink current assessment practices (egan, 1992, 2005, 2007; stout, 2007). wenger (1998) says, “[imagination] requires the ability to proceed without being too quick with the constraints of a specific form of accountability” (p. 185). this quotation speaks to our current assessment practices which rely heavily on testing. van lier (2007) notes that when “identical test packets are slapped onto each individual learner’s desk, the learner’s right to be different and the teacher’s ability to honour differences die a sudden death” (p. 47). so does imagination. a clear message is sent to learners that what matters is what is and not what if (liu & noppe-brandon, 2009). to support the work of the imagination, we need alternative assessment practices, such as the collaborative portfolio evaluation process used in the sdl course. promoting the imagination in learning means employing assessment activities that are open to possibility—that have the potential to acknowledge and value learning outcomes educators have not necessarily anticipated. garold murray 388 support another affordance that served to bolster both the students’ metacognitive development and their use of imagination was the support they received. two main sources of support were teachers and fellow classmates. on the course evaluation questionnaire, comments in response to the question concerning what the students liked about the course—such as, “i could get advice on my strategy or materials from my teacher and classmates”—showed students acknowledged and appreciated the support they received. periodic small group discussions, organized as a class activity, provided students with opportunities to talk about aspects of their learning and to exchange ideas concerning materials, assessment strategies, and the like. whether or not these formal discussions had an influence on out-of-class behaviour is difficult to say, but, as a teacher, one of the things i observed was that students had a tendency to come to class early, and during that time talked about their learning and recommended materials to each other. as for the support provided by the teachers, one student wrote on the course evaluation questionnaire, “the teacher gave us advice, but we did not necessarily have to follow it—so that was good.” this comment resonates because the important thing about advice is that there should be no obligation to follow it. in a pedagogy designed to foster the emergence of the not-yetimaginable, davis and sumara (2007) state that the role of the teacher is “to orient the attentions of learners and, in the process, to assist in the exploration of the space of the existing possible” (p. 64). effective advice should direct students’ attention to materials, strategies, activities, and goals, and also to imagination and possible future selves (cf. dörnyei, 2009; markus & nurius, 1986). in the sdl course, narrative played a key role in directing learners’ attention to their identities as language learners and their future selves through the language learning history activity. in fact, the data suggest that narrative fulfilled a number of support functions, such as facilitating the use of the imagination, helping learners relate to the emotional aspects of learning, encouraging them to explore their language learner identity, and aiding in the planning process. these points are illustrated by the experiences of one participant, nobu, whose language learning history recounted his transformation from a schoolboy, who hated studying english, into a young man in love (for an analysis of nobu’s experiences, see murray 2011b). fleeing from what he found to be an oppressive learning context designed to prepare students for university entrance examinations, nobu had a chance encounter with an international exchange student. this moment marked the beginning of the emergence of nobu’s l2 self. in order to communicate with this young woman and realize his sudden vision of an ideal pedagogy of the possible: imagination, autonomy, and space 389 self as her special friend, he needed english. nobu continued his language learning history by outlining what he did to learn the language from that point forward. in the sdl course, he built upon these strategies and activities. as egan (1992) notes, “if we wish to engage students’ imaginations we need to attend to engaging their emotions, and to engage their emotions we need to attend to story or narrative structuring” (p. 72). emotions are an integral aspect of both imagination (egan, 2005, 2007; harris, 2000) and cognition (damasio, 2003, 2010). therefore, it stands to reason that students will need emotional support. in a language classroom context students need to feel that they can trust their teacher and that the classroom is a safe place where they can take risks (canagarajah, 2004). for the most part, the first-year students who participated in this study came from learning environments in which the teacher was in charge. having to take on so much responsibility for their learning was, to say the least, a novel experience. in the sdl course, scaffolding provided by the materials enabled the students to proceed step-by-step, breaking down what might have first appeared to be an impossible challenge into do-able tasks. progressing in this way is especially important when it comes to working with the imagination. liu and noppe-brandon (2009) advise educators to “chunk it: show how small it all starts” (p. 108). they explain that because “open-endedness can be paralyzing” and “because we are socialized early to embrace what is rather than what if . . . it can help to break the process of imagining into chunks, to reveal each chunk as quite accessible, and thereby to demystify imagination” (p. 109). another crucial form of support that teachers can offer learners is to provide them with time in class to work on their learning plans. bakhtin’s (1981) work suggests that we cannot expect to open up the space of the not-yetimaginable without taking time into account. he used the term chronotope, which literally means ‘time space’ (p. 84), to explore the interconnectedness of the temporal and the spatial in language and literature. he borrowed the concept from relativity theory, which emphasizes the notion that time and space should be considered together and in relation to each other. discussing bakhtin’s construct in regard to language learning, lemke (2005) defines chronotopes as “typical movements from place to place with their associated times of passage and pacings of events” (p. 117). he goes on to say, chronotopes represent a kind of routinization of life on longer timescales than individual events or activities. they provide a measure of predictability and a sense of expectation about how long we should spend somewhere, how fast events should take in this setting vs. that one, what should come next. (p. 118) chronotopes are germane to our discussion of pedagogy because they capture garold murray 390 what educators have been doing in terms of classroom management and lesson planning. in institutional settings, learning is guided by the chronotope of “the well-managed classroom.” the pace and sequence of lessons bring together time and space. when interest starts to wane and energy flags, it is time to move on to the next activity. in the space of the language classroom, time can be regimented, a tool for managing learning activities and ultimately controlling them. in the study described in this paper, the learning was organized according to a different chronotope. within the physical space of the selfaccess centre and the metaphorical space of the lesson, time was for the students to use as they pleased, albeit within the confines of the social context. what is important for us concerning the chronotope is “the fact that it expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space)” (bakhtin, 1981, p. 84). if we wish to create a space which supports the functioning of the imagination, we need to give our students the gift of time. autonomy of course, “giving students time” is a metaphor. we cannot give our students time, anymore that we can give them autonomy. time is a resource which can be made available to learners along with other resources. van lier (2007), promoting an action-based curriculum informed by autonomy—defined as “being the agent of one’s own actions” (p. 48)—writes that the starting point has to be the “activities, needs and emergent purposes of the learner” who must be “an active, perceiving agent” (p. 53). describing how the curriculum would be organized, he explains, “on the basis of activities and emergent needs, the teacher makes resources available in the environment, and guides the learner’s perception and action towards arrays of affordances that can further his or her goals” (p. 53). in this sentence van lier captures the essence of the pedagogy underlying the sdl course. as the students exercised their agency by making use of the resources and taking advantage of the affordances, autonomy emerged. an emergent phenomenon, conceptualized as the possibility to exercise one’s agency, autonomy itself became an affordance. as an affordance, it facilitated acting on other possibilities within the learning environment. the possibility of exercising one’s agency by making choices concerning goals, materials, activities, and strategies enabled learners to personalize the learning. the students also exercised their agency through the extent to which they chose to engage in the learning process, explore its various aspects, and take advantage of the support features. the choices and decisions the learners made reflected their identities and were oriented toward the person they wanted to become. invoking a space metaphor, van lier (2007) contends “there must also pedagogy of the possible: imagination, autonomy, and space 391 be enough room to innovate and move in novel directions for learners to develop autonomy and fuel their intrinsic motivation” (p. 53). he suggests that imagination, as manifested by innovation and the new, is necessary for autonomy to flourish. however, i contend that the converse is also true: autonomy is necessary for the imagination to flourish. wenger (1998) supports this point when he says, “imagination needs an opening. it needs the willingness, freedom, energy, and time to expose ourselves to the exotic, move around, try new identities, and explore new relations” (p. 185). also employing a space metaphor, wenger points to imagination’s reliance on agency, autonomy, and time. he says imagination needs time to move around, making the connection between time and space, reminiscent of bakhtin’s construct of the chronotope. overall, wenger’s comment is suggestive of the connections that exist between imagination, identity, autonomy, time, and space. in our language classrooms, if we are to open up that space of possibilities which will enable learners to develop second language identities over time, we need to work with imagination and autonomy. conclusion the purpose of this paper has been to explore what might constitute a pedagogy in support of the imagination in the foreign language classroom. framed in davis and sumara’s (2007) terms, how might language educators open up that space of the not-yet-imaginable and help learners imagine a future self as a foreign language speaker? data from the study exploring the experiences of learners in a self-directed learning course suggest that affordances available in the learning environment enabled the participants to develop their metacognition (cotterall & murray, 2009) and employ their imagination. (murray, 2011a, 2011b). examining these affordances, this paper identified pedagogical elements which could be incorporated into a foreign language curriculum designed to foster the imagination. table 1 draws these elements together and presents them as a collection of pedagogical guidelines to inform the work of educators hoping to engage students’ imagination. an underlying principle of the pedagogy is to create an action-based learning environment (van lier, 2007) that holds the potential for affordances to emerge. for clarity of presentation, the affordances that provided the conceptual framework for this paper are used as a means of organizing the guidelines. it should be noted that the affordances and guidelines work together as a network with no particular hierarchy or linear order. furthermore, guidelines may support more than one affordance. for example, the guideline “make use of narrative” has been associated with reflection. however, when the garold murray 392 students were writing their language learning histories, they were not only reflecting on past experiences, they were also personalizing their learning and engaging in an exploration of self. therefore, given the multiple functions of the guidelines, their placement is somewhat arbitrary. working together as a dynamic system, these guidelines can provide the constituent elements of a pedagogy with the potential to engage students’ imaginations and open up the space of the not-yet-imaginable (davis & sumara, 2007). table 1 pedagogy of the possible: guidelines for practice affordances guidelines engagement think of imagination as a tool—something to work with. discuss imagination with students and the role it plays in our everyday lives and learning. facilitate learners’ active participation in all aspects of their learning from goal setting to assessment. exploration encourage learners to experiment: ask, “what if?” focus on what is possible as opposed to what (already) is. expose learners to new people, places, things, and ideas. facilitate small group discussions in which learners share ideas and talk about their learning. promote playfulness; make fun permissible. personalization make learners’ current needs and hopes for the future the starting point for learning. allow learners to set their own goals. enable learners to select materials they find interesting. introduce learners to a variety of learning strategies and activities so they can use those that suit their sense of self. reflection incorporate multiple and varied opportunities for reflection. encourage learners to monitor and assess their learning. make use of narrative. support feed the imagination through pop culture and media. direct learners’ attention. advise learners. help learners find the support they need, and encourage them to support each other. create an emotionally safe environment for risk-taking. make the possible do-able by “chunking” it. provide scaffolding. make time in class for students to explore, experiment, engage in learning activities they value, and reflect. autonomy enable learners to exercise their agency by making choices. let learners plan and manage their learning (e.g., organize their activities, keep records, etc.). make it possible for learners to proceed at their own pace. employ open-ended assessment practices. pedagogy of the possible: imagination, autonomy, and space 393 metaphors of space and place appear often in discussions on imagination. future inquiries and experimentation with instructional innovation designed to foster the imagination should not overlook this “coincidence.” in other words, they should take into account space and place, and the role they play in the processes of imagination, metacognition, and actual learning, which unfold across varying time scales (lemke, 2002). this study suggests that may mean adopting an ecological perspective in both curriculum design and subsequent inquiry. ecological perspectives, which view the learner as a component of the environment, facilitate the study of a learning space with a focus on its emergent properties and affordances. definitions of imagination that characterize it as “a particular kind of flexibility, energy and vividness” (egan, 2007, p. 19) suggest imagination might itself be an emergent phenomenon, a product of the interaction, or self-organization, of elements in the environment, including the learner’s cognitive systems. this would be in line with findings from this study, which point to several affordances working together to support the imagination and to create a learning environment conducive to the development of l2 identities. these affordances formed a pedagogy of the possible, enabling learners to conceive of doing things differently and to take steps toward the realization of their visions of a future self using the target language to fulfil their dreams. garold murray 394 references anderson, b. 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(2013). individuality, imagination and community in a globalizing world: an asian efl perspective. in p. benson & l. cooker (eds.), the applied linguistic individual: sociocultural approaches to identity, agency and autonomy (pp. 46-58). sheffield: equinox. 529 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (3). 2014. 529-556 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.3.8 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the misunderstood variable: age effects as a function of type of instruction simone e. pfenninger university of zurich, switzerland simone.pfenninger@es.uzh.ch abstract this study was designed to investigate the effects of age of onset and type of instruction on ultimate efl attainment at the end of the period of normal schooling in switzerland, measured in terms of written fluency, complexity, morphosyntactic accuracy, vocabulary size, and listening skills. data were gathered from four groups of 18-year-old swiss german learners of english: 50 were early starters who had attended an immersion (clil) program in elementary school and who continued clil in secondary school (early clil), 50 had followed the same elementary school program but then received traditional efl instruction after elementary school (early mix), 50 were late starters who began learning english immersively in secondary school, (late clil), while the other 50 attended a traditional efl program in secondary school (late non-clil). results show that age of onset alone does not seem to be the distinguishing variable since early introduction of english in elementary school did not result in a higher level of proficiency when exposure to the language was limited to a few hours of class per week. the performance of the early mix participants was equaled and in certain areas significantly surpassed by the other groups, despite the additional five years of english study they had had in elementary school. the best results were found when early clil instruction was followed up by the use of english as an additional language of instruction in secondary school (early clil group), which confirms the link between young starting age, implicit learning and long and massive exposure. keywords: second language learning, age effects in l2, input effects on l2, immersion, clil simone e. pfenninger 530 1. introduction fifteen years ago, harley (1998) lamented the fact that no explanation had been provided for why in school settings “the additional time associated with an early headstart has not been found to provide more substantial long-term proficiency benefits” (p. 27). despite the abundance of critical period studies, maturational state studies and ultimate attainment studies that have been carried out in the meantime, there are still unexplored issues regarding the amount and type of input needed for earlier starters to surpass later starters and be able to retain their learning advantages in the long term (e.g., muñoz & singleton, 2011). it is particularly important to revisit the achievements of prepuberty versus postpuberty learners of english as a foreign language (efl) in various types of foreign language (fl) programs, as numerous educational authorities in europe have recently brought forward the starting age of language instruction in elementary schools as a result of the “younger-is-better” view and the steady growth of english as a lingua franca. in switzerland, as in many other countries, this has led to small amounts of fl instruction stretched over a rather long period of time. interestingly, type of fl instruction was not matched to these new conditions and the new way individual learners learn after five years of clil instruction1 in elementary school. while it is true that many swiss secondary schools nowadays offer programs in which english is the language of instruction (socalled immersion programs), only a small percentage of the total number of swiss students are actually fortunate enough to attend these programs (2% in 2005 according to bürgi, 2007, p. 33). instead, there has been a tremendous over-reliance on, and blind trust in, the age factor and the amount of time spent learning an fl, at the expense of the conditions of learning. in light of their rather unimpressive impact, early fl programs are currently under scrutiny and the question has arisen as to how an earlier age of onset of acquisition (aoa) can be exploited more effectively. this is a question of considerable theoretical and practical significance since it is at the heart of the debates revolving around age as one of the most powerful and misunderstood variables in the research on fl learning and teaching, and it is integral to designing effective fl pedagogy (see, e.g., larson-hall, 2008). a major goal of this study, then, is to analyze learning outcomes in relation to aoa and instructional treatment by comparing 200 senior high school students with different constellations of fl learning. the issue at stake here is not to identify the ultimate attainment of fl learners but to analyze how the length of mandatory instructional time can be optimized for long-term benefits to unfold before the end of secondary education, given that we know today that “the necessary 1 for a definition of clil, see below. the misunderstood variable: age effects as a function of type of instruction 531 length of the relevant period of instruction [to reach native-likeness] is not within the bounds of possibility” (singleton & skrzypek, 2014, p. 6). such final state data are invaluable for ongoing studies in fl learning settings in that they afford unique perspectives on the limits of multiple language acquisition in a formal, instructional setting. the findings suggest that the devil seems to be in the continuity of type of instruction: if the education system does not provide continuity in the immersion program for students moving from primary to secondary levels, early starters cannot profit from the extended instructional period of five years. 2. overview of the theoretical landscape 2.1. age of onset of acquisition: a misunderstood variable while there seems to be abundant research as well as anecdotal evidence to show that, typically, there is a relationship between age and success in l2 learning in a naturalistic setting (for a recent review, see dekeyser & larson-hall, 2005), only few linguistic advantages have been found in beginning the study of an l2 earlier in a minimal input situation (e.g., cenoz, 2009; garcía-mayo & garcía-lecumberri, 2003; moyer, 2013; muñoz, 2006; singleton & ryan, 2004). indeed, recent findings have cast doubt on the overreliance on biological and strictly cognitive dimensions of sla in a formal instructional setting. even though there is a group of researchers who suggest that younger learners are at an advantage as regards ultimate levels of attainment (e.g., harley, 1986; patkowski, 1980), the results of most classroom studies in the literature suggest that while biological age is important, much of its effect is the consequence of its co-varying relationship with nonbiological factors (for a state-of-the-art review see muñoz & singleton, 2011). as a result, traditional approaches to the critical period hypothesis (cph) have been challenged on several fronts, notably in terms of the following insights: 1. the lack of a unitary critical period and the absence of a clear-cut endpoint (e.g., bialystok, 1997; birdsong & molis, 2001; dekeyser, alfi-shabtay, & ravid, 2010; singleton, 2005); 2. the relatively early onset of decline in l2 learning (possibly as early as age 6), which is subject to high variation among learners (e.g., dekeyser et al., 2010; singleton & ryan, 2004); 3. the learning rate advantage of late starters over very long periods of time, even when differences in cognitive development disappeared with age, for example, when early starters reached puberty and the older learners’ advantage was no longer due to their superior cognitive development (e.g., muñoz, 2008, 2011); simone e. pfenninger 532 4. the numerous accounts of late beginners who were able to reach nativelike proficiency (e.g., dörnyei, 2005; moyer, 1999; muñoz, 2006, 2008; muñoz & singleton, 2007); 5. the important roles of contextual factors (e.g., experience in the l2, type of instruction, quality of l2 input; see, e.g., flege, 2009; moyer, 2004) and individual factors such as l1 literacy skills, aptitude, motivation, sense of belonging, individual learning styles and strategies, self-efficacy, willingness to communicate, personality traits, knowledge of previous languages, and so on, and their interaction with age effects in sla (e.g., cummins & swain, 1986; dörnyei, 2005, 2009; dörnyei & ushioda, 2009; lightbown, 2003; moyer, 2004, 2013). this list illustrates nicely that the age notion is a micro-variable that cannot be isolated from other co-occurring factors and that the lack of success that has been reported for early-entry programs has to be attributed to a variety of factors. the focus of this study is to take the discussion mentioned in 5 above a step further by focusing on the role and impact of contextual factors in relation to aoa through a comparison of learners enrolled in formal learning settings who receive different amounts and types of input. 2.2. making the most of instructional time thus far, the l2 learning context has rarely been included as an important factor in the discussion of the cph (muñoz, 2006, p. 6), even though the type of instruction learners receive plays a decisive role in formal instructional settings since it determines, for instance, the quality and quantity of the input the students encounter and the variety and amount of practice opportunities they receive. it appears that age effects may not only differ according to whether the learning context provides learners with unlimited exposure to the target language (as in naturalistic language learning settings) but also whether exposure to the language is limited to a great extent (as in fl learning settings) or to some extent (as in school immersion settings) (llanes & muñoz, 2013). in immersion programs, a number of content subjects (e.g., maths) are taught through the fl (but see cenoz, genesee, & gorter, 2014 for a discussion of the wide scope of experiences encompassed by immersion type provision). due to the higher amount and intensity of exposure to the fl, on the one hand, and the opportunities for engaging in authentic and meaningful interaction in real-life contexts, on the other, immersion students have traditionally been found to be highly successful in comparison with students who have received regular fl instruction, that is, instruction that focuses primarily on language learning and is the misunderstood variable: age effects as a function of type of instruction 533 restricted to separate, limited periods of time or so-called “minimal input” of no more than four hours of instruction per week (larson-hall, 2008, p. 36). there is a general agreement in the immersion literature that students in concentrated programs generally acquire higher levels of proficiency in the l2 than students in programs with normally spaced l2 units of contact: “one or two hours a week – even for seven or eight years – will not produce advanced second language speakers,” write lightbown and spada (1993, p. 113). a large part of this problem is also the risk that students will have difficulty in seeing any progress over time, which might lead to frustration (pfenninger, 2012; tragant, 2006). thus, students who have intensive exposure to the fl appear to have an advantage over those whose instruction is thinly spread out over a longer period of time (muñoz, 2012; netten & germain, 2004; serrano & muñoz, 2007). in switzerland, the longitudinal studies by bürgi (2007) and elmiger, näf, oudot, and steffen (2010) uniformly found that late immersion students clearly outperform students in regular fl programs on a range of fl measures, while at the same time achieving the same levels of competence in academic domains, such as mathematics or science, as comparable students in l1 programs. however, while immersion students have been found to attain high levels of receptive skills, fluency and complexity in their fl (e.g., swain & lapkin, 2001), linguistic accuracy and lexical precision are said to cause more difficulties (e.g., de graaff & housen, 2009; netten & german, 2004). with regard to the age factor, there are studies that show that early immersion students obtain better results than late immersion students (e.g., wesche, toews-janzen, & macfarlane, 1996). however, the “older-is-better” trend has also been found in full immersion programs (genesee, 2004). for instance, lapkin, swain, kamin, and hanna’s (1980) results revealed that the only skill in which early immersion students outperformed late immersion students was listening comprehension, in contrast to reading and writing skills, and lexical and grammatical knowledge. according to genesee (2004), “bilingual programs that provide appropriate and continuous instruction can be effective with younger or older students; in other words, advanced levels of functional l2 proficiency can be acquired by students who begin bilingual education in the primary grades and by those who begin in higher grades” (p. 27). 2.3. the crux of implicit learning immersion programs and content and language integrated learning (clil) programs are known to foster so-called implicit learning2 (de graaff & housen, 2009). 2 according to r. ellis (2005), implicit knowledge “is procedural, is held unconsciously, and can be verbalized only if it is made explicit. it is accessed rapidly and easily and thus is available for simone e. pfenninger 534 in other words, just like (very young) children acquire their mother tongue rather unconsciously, unaware that they are actually learning it, immersion programs are designed to imitate this process by focusing on meaning and content rather than form (see hulstijn, 2002, p. 204ff.). whilst most studies agree that immersion students develop good comprehension, confidence and fluency in the target language (see discussion above), research supports the argument that an exclusive focus on meaning in comprehensible input, or language use, is not optimal when it comes to developing students’ linguistic competence or bringing them to high levels of accuracy in their l2 (genesee, 1987, 2004; lyster & ranta, 1997). in recent years, there has, thus, been an increased focus on the role of systematic language instruction along with a more explicit focus on linguistic forms (“focus on form,” see long & robinson, 1998; sharwood smith, 1993). for instance, in their meta-analysis of studies that have examined alternative types of l2 pedagogy, norris and ortega (2000) found that instruction with an explicit focus on form was more effective than instruction with an implicit focus on form. turnbull, hart, and lapkin (2003) suggest that the reason why initially early immersion students’ achievement lags behind the performance of comparable students in the regular english program is a lack of formal instruction in english: “once formal instruction begins, however, students show rapid gains in performance” (p. 8). there are other well-known issues with implicit learning in the classroom in connection with maturational effects. numerous researchers posit that earlier starters cannot gain the positive effects of an early start if there is insufficient input for the kind of implicit learning that is done by children while they are not cognitively ready yet for explicit methods of instruction (dörnyei, 2005). implicit learning occurs slowly and requires substantial exposure to l2 material, vastly more than a traditional input-impoverished classroom setting supplies (dekeyser, 2000; dekeyser & larson-hall, 2005; hulstijn, 2002). what is more, school-based fl learning is typically predominantly explicit in nature (singleton, 2005, p. 279). finally, many researchers (de graaff & housen, 2009; dekeyser & larsonhall, 2005; hulstijn, 2002) suggest that whereas younger learners learn implicitly, adults learn explicitly, that is, they have lost their ability to learn implicitly. for post-puberty l2 learners, dekeyser (2000) proposes that implicit and explicit knowledge interact, in contrast to child l2 learners. thus, the formula for the success of adolescent learners seems to be a combination of focus on form and focus on meaning, or explicit and implicit fl learning, respectively. use in rapid, fluent communication” (p. 214). by contrast, explicit knowledge “is conscious and declarative and can be verbalized. it is typically accessed through controlled processing when learners experience some kind of linguistic difficulty in the use of the second language” (p. 214). the misunderstood variable: age effects as a function of type of instruction 535 3. the study 3.1. research questions the main goal of this study is to examine what extent type of instruction (regular efl vs. clil) and aoa (early start vs. late start) have an effect on the absolute abilities of secondary school students at the end of the period of normal schooling, measured in terms of written fluency, complexity, morphosyntactic accuracy, and vocabulary size. participants are 50 early starters who attended an immersion (clil) program in elementary school and who continued clil in secondary school (early clil), 50 who followed the same elementary school program but then received regular efl instruction after elementary school (early mix), 50 who were late starters who began learning english immersively in secondary school (late clil), and 50 who attended a regular efl program in secondary school (late non-clil). the following four research questions will be addressed: 1. are the differences between the two age groups (early vs. late starters) significant at the end of secondary education in switzerland? 2. which age group benefits the most from which type of instruction (early clil vs. early mix and late clil vs. late non-clil)? 3. is the interaction between the two independent variables (aoa and clil) significant? 4. are the differences between the four learning constellations significant (early clil vs. early mix vs. late clil vs. late non-clil)? if yes, which constellation is most beneficial for the learning outcome of different starting age groups? the early clil group is expected to be at a learning advantage relative to the other three groups, owing to their early starting age in combination with long and intensive instruction and a combination of implicit and explicit instruction in secondary school: not only did they have efl classes (language classes) in secondary school, but also three school subjects which were taught in english. furthermore, in line with findings in studies that looked into the beneficial effects of different learning contexts and different types of instruction (e.g., llanes & muñoz, 2013), immersion instruction in secondary school is hypothesized to be more beneficial for efl acquisition than formal, explicit instruction. i would thus expect the groups who had clil in secondary school (early clil and late clil) to outperform the other two groups (early mix and late nonclil), while aoa has a neutral effect on the results. simone e. pfenninger 536 3.2. programs and participants in order to examine the interaction between aoa and type of instruction, test results from 200 learners of english in switzerland were obtained. i collected data in five schools in 12 english classes in the state system, ranging in size from 9 to 22 members. all the participants had similar characteristics: they were between 17 and 20 years old (mean 18;9), they came from similar socioeconomic backgrounds and did not take any private classes of english outside school. this design is supposed to ensure that no learner group can profit from cognitive advantages due to age (see muñoz, 2008, p. 587ff. for a discussion of the impact of learners’ chronological age). the participants are quite comparable to those in previous studies that analyzed age-related differences between early starters and late starters (e.g., larson-hall, 2008), in the sense that they represent an elite group.3 although some of the participants had different teachers, they followed a similar methodology and curriculum. four of the 10 teachers involved were native speakers of english, while the other six were near-native speakers. because there was essentially no variation in age for the participants, it was decided to divide them into four groups according to age of onset and learning constellation in primary and secondary school instead of using correlational analysis, as described above: 50 early clil, 50 early mix, 50 late clil, and 50 late non-clil. note that the early starters (early clil and early mix) and the late starters (late clil and late non-clil) had dissimilar amounts of exposure; due to their earlier start, the early clil and early mix had had access to greater instruction time. however, the early starters were not mixed in with late starters in the same class. in the german-speaking cantons of switzerland, all students are required to study standard german (the primary language of literacy) as an l2, english as an l3 and french as an l4 throughout the period of their primary schooling.4 the swiss conference of cantonal ministers of education promotes an implicit learning approach at primary school level called content and language integrated learning (clil). in the clil classroom, the accent is placed on efl sensitization, oral fluency, comprehension, cultural awareness, vocabulary and formulaic language, based on the hypothesis that younger children cannot attend to formal, explicit fl instruction to the same extent as older children because prepubertal learning is less reliant on analytic ability (e.g., n. ellis, 2002). strictly speaking, the clil program is not an immersion program. while activities are undertaken in english, these activities relate to the learning of the second language. as such this 3 students in switzerland are screened in grade 6, at which time they are placed in different school tracks based on their abilities. in order to attend an academically oriented high school (university preparatory school), they have to pass an entrance test. 4 note, however, that in certain cantons, french is taught before english. the misunderstood variable: age effects as a function of type of instruction 537 program is similar to the “intensive english programs” in canada (see, e.g., netten & german, 2004), albeit with considerably fewer hours of instruction a week (two 45-min lessons per week). however, the strong focus on meaning in comprehensible input and the communication of authentic messages resemble the main goal of immersion programs. the partial immersion programs that the early clil and late clil attended in secondary school consisted of three content subjects (mathematics, biology and history) taught through the fl (l3 english) in order to maximize the quantity of comprehensible input and purposeful use of english, in line with swain’s (1985) output hypothesis and long’s (1981) interaction hypothesis. additionally, english is taught formally as a separate school subject. thus, learners experience a combination of formal and informal learning, which offers them what seems to be an ideal opportunity to learn an fl in a classroom: a combination of explicit learning, or “focus on forms,” and implicit learning, or “focus on meaning,” to use long and robinson’s terms (1998). it is important to note that the swiss education system does not automatically provide continuity in the immersion program for students moving from primary to secondary levels. students voluntarily opt for immersion instruction. since the demand for a place in an immersion class is usually larger than the actual number of places available, a student’s average school grade functions as a criterion in deciding who can join the program and who cannot. in this study, the immersion students did not have significantly better grades in english before they entered the program, but they might have been significantly more motivated to study english than the students who did not sign up for an immersion program (see also bürgi, 2007, p. 79; elmiger et al., 2010, p. 70). finally, note that in this paper, the notion of clil will be used as a cover term for both clil and immersion, following mehisto, marsh and frigols (2008, chapter 1). overall, the early clil group spent an average of 1,770 hours learning english from grade 2 to grade 12, followed by the late clil with 1,330 hours, the early clil with 1,170 hours, and the late non-clil with 730 hours. other recent studies of maturational effects in a classroom have used shorter periods (from 600 to 800 hours) in their longest-term comparisons (e.g., garcía mayo & garcía lecumberri, 2003; larson-hall, 2008; muñoz, 2006). 3.3. measures and analyses in order to reliably determine the absolute abilities of the learners tested here, we need convergent evidence from multiple elicitation methods that have been proven to show age-related differences in previous research (e.g., llanes & muñoz, 2013; muñoz, 2006). it is also important to include measures that have been shown to be generally related to iq scores (e.g., literacy-related skills, see genesee, 1976) simone e. pfenninger 538 as well as others that have not (e.g., listening comprehension skills, see ekstrand, 1977). to attain the above-mentioned aims, the following skills are assessed: productive and receptive vocabulary size, grammaticality judgments, listening comprehension, written fluency, syntactic complexity, and morphosyntactic accuracy. measures of basic interpersonal communicative skills were not included since it was suggested that they were less sensitive to individual cognitive differences and to academic development (see, e.g., muñoz, 2006, p. 8). participants were asked to write one l2 english composition on the pros and cons of (reality tv) talent shows, a topic that was deemed suitable for adolescents and had been found to elicit different semantic and syntactic contexts (pfenninger, 2011, 2013a, 2013b). they were then subjected to a listening comprehension test, which had been standardized with a population of efl learners in switzerland. to measure receptive morphosyntactic knowledge, a written grammaticality judgment task (gjt) was administered, which has been found to be a reliable and valid instrument in critical period studies (e.g., dekeyser, 2000; garcía mayo, 2003; larson-hall, 2008; mcdonald, 2006). the gjt used here was a version of mcdonald’s (2006) test of basic english morphosyntax, adapted and used by pfenninger (2011, 2013a, 2013b), which included 49 items and 15 distracters designed to test judgments on word order in declarative sentences (4 items), adverb placement (8 items), negation (5 items), yes/no-questions (4 items), wh-questions (4 items), article usage (6 items), regular past tense (6 items), regular plural (6 items) and thirdperson singular marking (6 items). the reliability coefficient (kr-20) obtained was .90 for grammatical items and .95 for ungrammatical items. the main advantages of a gjt are the following: (a) since free production tasks (e.g., essays) involve the risk of avoidance of uncertain uses of linguistic forms, it is important to consult more controlled data sources; (b) the gjt is a response task designed to measure the (subconscious) knowledge of the linguistic rules that constitute the learner’s internal grammar (see, e.g., garcía mayo, 2003, p. 97); thus, in order for the participants not to draw on their explicit fl knowledge, the task was timed in this study, with the students having a maximum of 11 minutes to make their judgments (approximtely 10 seconds per sentence); (c) the gjt is more direct and economical than spontaneous speaking and writing (larson-hall, 2008, p. 42); (d) the judgments may reflect information about implicit knowledge (bialystok, 1981); (e) the correction of errors reflects explicit, analyzed knowledge that represents consciously held insights about language (bialystok, 1981); thus, the participants in this study were asked to correct any sentences they considered ungrammatical; and, finally (f) in naturalistic settings, late learners have been found to experience more difficulty in their grammaticality judgments than early learners, since “memory capacity, decoding ability and processing speed are deficient in late l2 learners” (mcdonald, 2006, p. 383; see also larson-hall, 2008). the misunderstood variable: age effects as a function of type of instruction 539 vocabulary size was assessed through the academic sections in schmitt, schmitt and clapham’s (2001) versions a and b of nation’s vocabulary levels test, which includes academic words from the academic word list (awl; coxhead, 2000), fitting in a broad range between the 2,000 level and the 10,000 level (schmitt et al., 2001, p. 68). since this test does not provide direct information about the ability to use the target words productively (schmitt et al., 2001, p. 62), it was decided to add the productive vocabulary size test by laufer and nation (1999), which gives some indication of size of productive mastery, as readers are required to supply the appropriate missing words in a cloze test with short contexts. muñoz (2006, p. 19) suggests that such tests are cognitively demanding since they require understanding of a text and readers have to draw on their pragmatic knowledge as well as grammatical, lexical and contextual knowledge. after the completion of the tasks, participants filled in a biodata questionnaire adapted from the language contact profile (lcp; freed, dewey, segalowitz, & halter, 2004). 3.4. method and procedure three testing sessions of 45 minutes each were conducted with each class during regular class time. the order in which the tests were administered varied so as to control for a possible lack of attention problems (see muñoz, 2006, p. 16). following llanes and muñoz (2013), written fluency was examined in terms of words per t-unit (w/tu), that is, one main clause and all of the dependent modifying clauses (see also r. ellis & barkhuizen, 2005), while syntactic complexity was examined using the clauses per t-unit (cl/tu) complexity ratio. accuracy was examined by counting the morphosyntactic errors per t-unit (err/tu), notably omission (e.g., he love singing), overuse (e.g., she cans again drives), substitution (e.g., many people singing), ir/regularization (e.g., he taked), misformation (e.g., he get’s), systematic and random misorderings5 (e.g., singer bad or john carefully rode his motorcycle), and “other” errors (e.g., agreement errors) (see mcdonald & roussel, 2010; pfenninger, 2011). unmarked forms were regarded as either present (omission of third person singular -s) or past (omission of regular or irregular past tense) depending on the tense used for other verbs in the sentence. if the target word was the only verb in the sentence then the tense of the previous sentence was considered. 3.5. results in the following, i will present the comparative analyses i performed for intergroup differences, inspected with analysis of variance (anova) and independent 5 for a discussion of random versus systematic misorderings, see r. ellis and barkhuizen (2005). simone e. pfenninger 540 samples t tests (a bonferroni adjustment was applied and an alpha level of .05 was set), and i will discuss the comparison with respect to the influence of aoa and type of instruction. in order to simultaneously test the effects of aoa and type of instruction as well as the interaction between these two independent variables, multivariate analysis of variance (manova) was applied. table 1 means (and standard deviations) and anova results for learning constellation early clil early mix late clil late non-clil f df p 2 favorable lc 18.56 (1.81) 12.7 (3.16) 15.86 (3.16) 12.4 (3.68) 46.39 3 < .001* .43 early mix pv 35.52 (7.06) 24.98 (7.16) 35.37 (7.64) 25.65 (7.52) 31.73 3 < .001* .35 early mix, late clil rv 56.42 (5.27) 49.85 (6.15) 55.44 (6.20) 48.84 (7.84) 17.84 3 < .001* .23 early mix, late clil w/tu 17.70 (3.43) 14.25 (2.32) 17.10 (4.47) 13.35 (2.57) 14.83 3 < .001* .27 early mix, late clil cl/tu 1.76 (0.37) 1.58 (0.22) 1.79 (0.30) 1.57 (0.25) 8.02 3 < .001* .12 early mix, late clil err/tu 0.51 (0.29) 0.53 (0.34) 0.50 (0.43) 0.54 (0.30) 0.10 3 .96* .00 n.s. gjt 42.83 (2.07) 42.84 (2.84) 42.92 (2.41) 43.10 (2.5) 0.13 3 .94* .00 n.s. note. lc = listening comprehension; pv = productive vocabulary; rv = receptive vocabulary; w/tu = written fluency; words per t-unit; cl/tu = written syntactic complexity: clauses per t-unit; err/tu = written accuracy: morphosyntactic errors per t-unit; gjt = grammaticality judgment task. *statistically significant at < .05. table 1 presents the mean scores, standard deviations and intergroup differences for the seven tests. it can be seen in table 1 that, generally, there were significant intergroup differences in listening comprehension (lc), productive vocabulary (pv), receptive vocabulary (rv), fluency (w/tu) and syntactic complexity (cl/tu), with rather high effects (between 2 = .12 and .43). to answer the first research question, which asks whether the differences between the two age groups (early vs. late starters) are significant, we have to have a closer look at the performances of the early starters (early clil and early mix) versus the late starters (late clil and late non-clil). table 2 t-test results for the two age groups (early vs. late) test t p favorable lc -2.75 .006* early pv 0.21 .837* n.s. rv -2.75 .789* n.s. w/tu -0.53 .600* n.s. the misunderstood variable: age effects as a function of type of instruction 541 cl/tu 0.16 .870* n.s. err/tu -0.01 .992* n.s. gjt 0.52 .605* n.s. note. *statistically significant at < .05. as shown in table 2, from among the seven measures, only the differences in scores in listening comprehension were significant. thus, late starters caught up with early starters’ achievements in all skill areas except for listening comprehension, for which an earlier aoa was more advantageous. as the sideby-side graphic comparison of the groups in figure 1 shows, however, this is due to the fact that the early starters in the immersion program (early clil) significantly outperformed all the other groups, including the late starters in the same program (late clil) (t = -5.25, p < .001). the stellar performance of the early clil clearly influenced the overall score of the early starters (early clil and early mix together) in this area. their superior performance on listening skills corroborates previous evaluations of programs with rich l2 exposure which have found that an implicit approach improves students’ receptive skills in their l2 (de graaff & housen, 2009, p. 735). there were no significant differences between the early mix and late non-clil in listening skills or any other measure (see table 7 in the appendix). furthermore, older starters did not show greater variation in their l2 performance, as table 1 above shows (see also pfenninger, 2011). figure 1 listening scores (lc) by group (actual data points are overlaid on the boxplot and median lines are in bold) early clil early mix late clil late non-clil 5 10 15 20 simone e. pfenninger 542 my second research question asked which age group benefits the most from which type of instruction. it can be seen at first glance in table 1 above that (a) immersion instruction was more beneficial than regular instruction alone, and (b) both early starters and late starters benefited from immersion. evaluating immersion students against students who had studied efl as a subject only, we find significant differences in receptive vocabulary knowledge (t = 4.99, p < .001), productive vocabulary knowledge (t = 9.79, p < .001), written complexity (t = 4.89, p < .001) and fluency scores (t = 6.64, p < .001) (see table 8 in the appendix). as expected and as shown in tables 3 and 4, the early clil and late clil participants had a significantly higher level of proficiency in english than the early mix and late non-clil participants respectively, as reflected in higher values in most of the measures examined. table 3 t-test results for early clil versus early mix test t p favorable lc 11.49 < .001* early clil pv 7.41 < .001* early clil rv 5.73 < .0001* early clil w/tu 10.30 < .0001* early clil cl/tu 2.91 .005* early clil err/tu -0.28 .781* n.s. gjt -0.04 .968* n.s. note. *statistically significant at < .05. table 4 t-test results for late clil versus late non-clil test t p favorable lc 5.05 < .0001* late clil pv 6.41 < .0001* late clil rv 4.67 < .0001* late clil w/tu 3.77 < .0001* late clil cl/tu 4.02 .0001* late clil err/tu -0.45 .652* n.s. gjt -0.37 .715* n.s. note. *statistically significant at < .05. in the case of fluency, immersion students produced longer sentences, that is to say, sentences with a higher number of words per t-unit (w/tu). with respect to complexity (cl/tu), the late clil had the highest scores, followed by the early clil, early mix, and late non-clil, respectively. immersion experiences are also beneficial for participants’ lexical improvement (receptive and productive vocabulary), as can be seen in figures 2 and 3. the misunderstood variable: age effects as a function of type of instruction 543 figure 2 productive vocabulary scores (pv) while there were no significant differences between the performances of the early mix and late non-clil (see table 7 in the appendix), the early clil outperformed the late clil on one variable, namely listening comprehension (t = -5.25, p < .001) (see figure 1 above). as can be seen in table 1 and figures 4 and 5, productive and receptive accuracy did not reach statistical significance. although the late non-clil perform slightly better on productive and receptive accuracy than the other groups, the differences are not statistically significant. to sum up, the anova and t-test results for type of instruction indicate that immersion instruction was more beneficial than regular instruction for the improvement of written fluency, complexity, vocabulary size, and listening skills, but not as much for improving accuracy, as measured in this study. figure 3 receptive vocabulary scores (rv) late clil n-late clil 20 30 40 50 late clil n-late clil 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 simone e. pfenninger 544 figure 4 productive accuracy scores (err/tu) the results of the manova tests concerning the impacts of aoa and type of instruction (the third research question) indicated that effects of instruction (i.e., late clil in secondary school) are significantly stronger than age effects for five of the seven dependent variables, as shown in table 5. the follow-up analyses shown in this table show that effects of instruction were significant for listening comprehension, productive and receptive vocabulary, fluency and syntactic complexity, all with a high effect size. with respect to the impact of age, only listening comprehension reached statistical significance, with a small effect size, for which an earlier start was more advantageous. concerning the interaction between aoa and type of instruction, manova also indicated that the interaction was significant for listening comprehension, with a rather small effect, but not for any of the other dependent variables. figure 5 receptive accuracy scores (gjt) early clil early mix late clil late non-clil 0. 0 0. 5 1. 0 1. 5 2. 0 2. 5 early clil early mix late clil late non-clil 36 38 40 42 44 46 48 the misunderstood variable: age effects as a function of type of instruction 545 table 5 impacts of aoa and late clil and interaction between them (manova) effects of aoa test f df p 2 lc 11.91 1 .001* .038 pv 0.06 1 .803 .000 rv 1.21 1 .273 .005 w/tu 0.33 1 .564 .001 cl/tu 0.03 1 .863 .000 err/tu 0.00 1 .992 .000 gjt 0.27 1 .607 .001 effects of late clil f df p 2 lc 114.95 1 < .001* .363 pv 94.98 1 < .001* .326 rv 52.30 1 < .001* .300 w/tu 43.58 1 < .001* .182 cl/tu 23.69 1 < .001* .108 err/tu 0.28 1 .600 .001 gjt 0.08 1 .775 .000 aoa by late clil (interaction) f df p 2 lc 7.89 1 .005* .024 pv 0.16 1 .694 .001 rv 0.00 1 .982 .000 w/tu 0.56 1 .454 .002 cl/tu 0.34 1 .563 .002 err/tu 0.03 1 .872 .001 gjt 0.05 1 .819 .000 note. *statistically significant at < .05. to answer the last research question, the early clil constellation seems to be more beneficial for learners in terms of the improvement of listening skills, but clil students generally presented the highest scores across most measures, irrespective of their starting age. this partly contradicts and partly supports the view that an early starting age produces long-term benefits when associated with greater time and massive exposure (e.g., muñoz, 2008, p. 582). 3.6. discussion the results contribute to the growing body of research showing the existence of very proficient older starters. both late-starting groups (late clil and late non-clil) caught up with the early clil group, who had benefited from longer exposure and therefore larger amounts of total input due to an earlier start. this supports the hypothesis that the initial advantage of older learners may last for several years in an input-impoverished environment and that it takes a simone e. pfenninger 546 substantial accumulation of input to see advantages for an early start begin to show (larson-hall, 2008; muñoz & singleton, 2011; singleton, 1995a, 1995b, 2005). the findings also support muñoz and singleton’s (2011) view that agerelated changes in language acquisition outcome might result from the impact of promotion factors other than a specifically language-focused critical period, such as deep and varied engagement with input in a classroom. even though early learners (such as the early clil and early mix in this study) may on average have greater potential than late starters due to their earlier aoa and the larger amount of cumulative input, this does not translate into better performance unless formal instruction in english in secondary school is supported by late immersion (see also cenoz & jessner, 2009, p. 132). thus, where success is concerned, it is not so much about the age of onset or the length of the exposure to the l2, as has been suggested before. this leads us to the other independent variable investigated here: type of instruction. several factors might explain the early clil participants’ advantage: on the one hand, they received many more hours of (formal and informal) efl instruction than any of the other groups. furthermore, the immersion context fosters implicit learning, which is known to be more efficient than explicit mechanisms (dekeyser, 2000). it could also be posited that the early clil participants benefited more than the early mix participants from the early age of onset and the extended learning period because there was no abrupt transition from implicit to explicit learning for the early clil group upon entrance into secondary school. it becomes apparent from the participants’ responses in the motivation and biodata questionnaires that the early mix group did not react favorably to the new formal, explicit pedagogical approach they were faced with at the beginning of secondary school, which might have led to a lag in achievement (see also pfenninger, 2011). by contrast, the early clil participants were able to continue clil in secondary school in addition to formal efl instruction. even more surprising than the early clil students outperforming students in nonimmersion programs (early mix and late non-clil) is the finding that the late clil group had made significant progress in a variety of skill areas, to the extent that they were able to catch up to the performance of the early clil group. thus, it seems to be access to late clil, regardless of early instruction, that makes the difference here. the oral-based, communicative pedagogical approach used in clil programs in secondary school could explain the significant differences in productive and receptive vocabulary knowledge and written complexity and fluency between the students who were immersively educated in secondary school (early clil and late clil) and the traditionally instructed participants (early mix and late non-clil), irrespective of their aoa. the success of the late clil is yet another indicator that instruction seems capable of overriding the the misunderstood variable: age effects as a function of type of instruction 547 age factor in a classroom setting. however, in the absence of a control group who would have merely received more intense formal instruction, it cannot be ascertained beyond doubt that the combination of instruction and communicative exposure constitutes the optimal mix, since type of instruction and intensity of instruction became confounded (see discussion below). the results also confirm the positive effects of form-focused instruction on acquisition (see studies cited in my review of the extant literature), that is, the effectiveness of explicit instruction on students’ acquisition and use of specific morphosyntactic features of english. the tests assessing productive and receptive morphosyntactic accuracy revealed that students in immersion programs with more exposure to the target language do not always outperform students with less exposure, suggesting that simply extending exposure to and functional use of the target language do not necessarily lead to increased linguistic competence (genesee, 1987, 2004). the lack of significant differences between all groups in relation to morphosyntactic accuracy might be due to the fact that the four groups practiced english grammar to the same extent. since all the participants attended formal, explicit efl instruction, they were required to read and write in english equally often and therefore paid great attention to accuracy. 4. conclusion this paper sought to measure the magnitude of the effects of initial age of learning and type of instruction on a variety of efl skills in an instructed setting. it has become clear in this study (and numerous earlier ones) that we cannot claim per se that the younger an l2 learner is when the l2 acquisition process begins, the more successful that process will be. the effect of additional instruction from an early age is only marginally seen in the learning constellation in which early clil instruction was followed up by the use of english as an additional language of instruction in secondary school (early mix group). on the one hand, this confirms previous observations that learners who experience intensive exposure to the fl in late immersion present similar levels of proficiency in the fl as children who have experienced more exposure to the fl in early immersion programs (see genesee, 1987; harley, 1986). on the other hand, it also shows that age matters in language learning, but only in the best-case scenario, that is, when it is “associated with enough significant exposure” (muñoz, 2008, p. 591, my emphasis) and students receive a combination of explicit fl instruction and communicative exposure (see graaff & housen, 2009, p. 730). thus, it was not my goal here to discuss whether there is a critical period or not, but rather to explore the factors, in addition to initial age of learning, that contribute to the high levels of proficiency achieved by some older starters. simone e. pfenninger 548 research on the interaction between age and type of instruction on the end point of acquisition of high school students has important implications for multilingual education when making decisions about (a) early instruction of different languages in elementary school and (b) later instruction through different languages in secondary school. given the increasing number of early fl programs in europe, state schools should consider offering more immersion programs or exchange programs at secondary level so that a larger number of students could actually profit from the earlier start of acquisition. the current swiss system of formal education does not provide enough exposure to learners of english in order for the early starters to profit from the extended learning period. in partial immersion situations, input and use of the target language may also be limited but to a much lesser extent. since immersion instruction appears to be effective with both elementary and secondary level students in most skill areas, irrespective of age of onset of acquisition, genesee (2004) therefore suggests that in communities such as germany (and i suggest also in communities that seek trilingual competence such as switzerland), where monolingualism is the norm and other languages have no official status and/or are only used in restricted settings, introduction of immersion instruction in higher grades may be sufficient. however, because of the diversity of clil programs in europe and the lack of conceptual clarity (see cenoz et al., 2014, p. 257), it is difficult for researchers to provide a clear and detailed description of the clil classrooms/programs. some of the issues and questions that have emerged in the present study and that need to be addressed and considered in future research are: 1. one obvious limitation in this study is that since the clil groups not only had efl classes (language classes), but also three school subjects which were taught in english, two variables were conflated at the same time in the clil groups: type of instruction and exposure (see bruton, 2011; cenoz et al., 2014). this is probably one of the most fundamental issues for clil researchers and will be difficult to resolve in the future. 2. one factor that can be—and has to be—controlled for in the future is aptitude, considering that “clil can attract a disproportionally large number of academically bright students” (mehisto, 2007, p. 63). 3. it is also important as a next step to control for affective variables such as motivation, or, alternatively, to factor in motivation as yet another independent variable and to measure the effect of different motivational dispositions on the learning outcome and the interaction of motivation with aoa and type of instruction (see lasagabaster, 2011; pfenninger, 2014). motivation is probably one of the most crucial factors in studies on the outcomes of clil, considering that in many european the misunderstood variable: age effects as a function of type of instruction 549 countries clil programs are often not available to all students, which leads to a selection of students for these programs “who will be academically motivated to succeed in the fl (foreign language), as in other subjects” (bruton, 2011, p. 524). 4. finally, it also seems interesting to analyze which other input measures (length of instruction in years, number of curricular and extracurricular lessons, amount of time spent in a naturalistic immersion situation abroad, current informal contact with the target language) are strongly associated with long-term l3 performance (see pfenninger & singleton, 2014). all these points call for further (critical) research that looks into the long-term learning benefits of early immersion instruction and the potential learning outcomes of children, adolescents, and adults in informal and formal l2 learning settings. clearly, for educators, teachers and policy-makers, as well as for theorists, it is of compelling interest to know more about the end state of fl instruction. despite the rich literature on maturational effects in formal instructional settings, which provides valuable clues to effective pedagogical practice, the interaction of age with other, contextual variables remains a controversial area of research. simone e. pfenninger 550 references bialystok, e. 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(1996). comparative outcomes and impacts of early, middle and late entry french immersion options: review of recent research and annotated bibliography. toronto: oise/ut press. simone e. pfenninger 556 appendix table 6 t-test results for early clil versus late clil test t p favorable lc -5.25 < .001* early clil gjt 0.22 .824* n.s. pv -0.10 .919* n.s. rv -0.85 .397* n.s. w/tu -0.76 .449* n.s. cl/tu 0.46 .645* n.s. err/tu -0.11 .909* n.s. note. *statistically significant at < .05. table 7 t-test results for early mix versus late non-clil test t p favorable lc 0.44 .661 n.s. gjt -0.49 .628 n.s. pv -0.46 .649 n.s. rv 0.72 .471 n.s. w/tu -0.2 .842 n.s. cl/tu 0.35 .727 n.s err/tu -0.11 .910 n.s. table 8 t-test results for the two instruction types (late clil vs. n-late clil) test t p favorable lc -2.75 .006* clil gjt -0.29 .774* n.s. pv 9.79 < .001* clil rv 4.99 < .001* clil w/tu 6.64 < .001* clil cl/tu 4.89 < .001* clil err/tu -0.53 .598* n.s. note. *statistically significant at < .05. 681 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (4). 2019. 681-710 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.4.6 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt the impact of studying abroad on students’ intercultural competence: an interview study paweł sobkowiak adam mickiewicz university, poznań, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4717-3956 pawelsob@amu.edu.pl abstract this paper presents qualitative research examining to what extent sojourns abroad engage their participants in intercultural interactions and whether or not such experience translates into students’ intercultural growth. the results of the study demonstrated that studying abroad did not provide students with ample opportunities to immerse into the local community and fully discover a new cultural environment. however, students surrounded by local and their fellow international students met foreign cultures, which motivated them to explore and interpret the encountered diversity, and thus equipped them with knowledge about foreign cultures, sensitizing them to cultural diversity. sometimes such contacts challenged students’ preconceived judgments and stereotypes of specific cultural groups, their ways of thinking, valuing and acting, and resulted, to a lesser or greater extent, in rethinking these, leading to changing attitudes and values. international experiences also stimulated students to self-analyze their own cultural identity, and thereby contributed to their growth in self-awareness in this respect. by offering opportunities for experiencing cultural differences and prompting students to develop coping strategies and to make references to the home culture, the sojourn is thus of significant importance for tertiary students, allowing for fostering their intercultural development to a certain degree. keywords: contact hypothesis; intercultural encounters; intercultural sensitivity; intercultural competence; study abroad paweł sobkowiak 682 1. introduction short-term study abroad programs have become increasingly popular among european students, polish ones included, creating cross-cultural learning opportunities for their participants. due to the erasmus+ program sponsored by the european union, students can spend a semester or two at a foreign university hoping not only to expand their professional knowledge but also to develop foreign language proficiency and to learn about the host country, its culture and people. in addition, surrounded by other erasmus students, it seems they will have ample opportunities to get involved in intercultural collaborations in class and interact with their international peers outside the classroom, talk across a range of diverse cultures and negotiate their particular identities. student mobility seems to be an excellent opportunity for students to fully immerse in foreign cultures on a daily basis, negotiate meanings and make their ways in this new reality, or even to reinvent themselves (simpson, 2008; liddicoat & scarino, 2013). intercultural experience from study abroad should help students raise their capabilities for observation, tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty, and successful adaptation to new cultural settings, that is, for unfamiliar settings attributable to cultural context, equipping them for grasping, reasoning and behaving appropriately and effectively in situations characterized by cultural diversity (ang et al., 2007; earley & ang, 2003). of course, these outcomes will not happen automatically and will depend on a range of factors, mainly on whether students themselves recognize and appreciate such opportunities for direct, meaningful participation and engagement. this article will present empirical research investigating whether and to what extent study abroad experience fosters students’ intercultural development, that is, whether and to what extent it helps them acquire “the ability to interact effectively with people of cultures other than one’s own” (byram, 2000, p. 297). in other words, the author will try to examine whether sojourns abroad affect students’ intercultural knowledge, their awareness of different values and behaviors of people from other cultures and social groups, as well as their attitudes toward otherness, and a willingness to accept differences and approach foreigners in a non-judgmental way. taking into consideration the current speed of globalization in almost every sphere of life and the increased internationalization of tertiary level education, cross-cultural contact appears to be inevitable for young people (cushner & brislin, 1996). consequently, students’ growth in intercultural competence is prerequisite for preparing them for diverse cultural settings, that is, to study with international students at their home universities, to attend lectures and seminars run by professors from different cultures, to communicate with foreigners while traveling, and in the long-run, to work with a culturally diverse workforce in a range of international the impact of studying abroad on students’ intercultural competence: an interview study 683 workplaces. since empirical research carried out in the european context does not unanimously confirm a positive impact of the sojourn on an individual’s intercultural growth, the current study seeks to provide more data on the erasmus experience and thus seems timely. 2. literature review there has been extensive research into students’ mobility experiences with various outcomes, such as increased language proficiency, reduction of ethnocentrism, awareness of other cultures and one’s own, and growth in intercultural communication skills and professional competence (cushner & karim, 2003; halse, 1996; hill & thomas, 2002; mccabe, 2001; wilson, 1983). however, conflicting results have been obtained from such studies concerning the impact of study abroad on students’ intercultural competence. whereas some researchers are convinced that optimal intercultural learning stems from direct contacts (czura, 2017; halualani, 2008; kormos & csizér, 2007; mak, brown, & wadey, 2014; mcallister, whiteford, hill, thomas, & fitzgerald, 2006), others claim that the results of student mobility are highly variable and students may return home more ethnocentric and less willing to interact with people who come from different linguistic and cultural environments (jackson, 2015; vande berg, 2007). it is noteworthy that there is empirical research supporting the claim that an increase in intercultural sensitivity can be achieved through education and training, without the need for staying abroad (altschuler, sussman, & kachur, 2003; bennett, bennett, & allen, 1999; paige, 1993). kelly (1963) maintains that an individual can witness an event without ever experiencing it. it has been evidenced that intercultural contact per se does not directly change attitudes, but what contributes to such a change is the mediation of the perceived importance of the contact experience (van dick, wagner, pettigrew, christ, & wolf, 2004). however, a plethora of studies have attempted to support the positive impact of study abroad programs. paige, cohen, and shively (2004) found that sojourns did show significant improvement in the participants’ intercultural sensitivity. in a similar vein, students investigated by engle and engle (2004) demonstrated growth in intercultural sensitivity following one semesteror two semester-long studying abroad. in addition, the latter group’s gains outnumbered intercultural sensitivity of the former. czerwionka, artamonowa, and barbosa (2015) demonstrated that student sojourners exhibited an increase in knowledge related to most intercultural knowledge types, and the greatest growth was noticed in knowledge themes of big c (culture and history), daily life, food and drink, and values and politics. since lussier (2007) claimed that intercultural knowledge is a basic component requisite for intercultural skills and attitudes, the researchers paweł sobkowiak 684 concluded that study abroad positively impacts the development of intercultural competence. fang and baker (2017) reported that short-term study abroad contributed to students’ change in both attitudes and behaviors, leading to their better understanding of other people and cultures, more openness to diversity, broadening the horizons and the development of a more inclusive mind toward the world. likewise, mitchell (2012) provided compelling evidence that student mobility results in attitudinal changes about europe and increases levels of support for the eu, as well as the extent of identifying as european. the study carried out by the author and discussed in the subsequent parts of this paper assumes that intercultural communicative competence (icc), “the ability to communicate effectively and appropriately in intercultural situations based on one’s intercultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (deardorff, 2006, pp. 247-248) is developmental in nature (i.e., it is a lifelong process with no final stage). icc shifts over time, increases with experiences in intercultural contacts and is context driven – contextual variables influence its development. another theoretical foundation underlying the study is bennett’s (1993) developmental model of intercultural sensitivity (dmis) describing individuals’ reactions to intercultural differences on a continuum ranging from ethnocentric to ethnorelative stages. as for a context-based perspective on icc, ting-toomey’s (1999) model has been adopted. the researcher assumes that the process of icc development does not occur in a vacuum but only through interactions with and in relation to persons from diverse backgrounds. thus, what is requisite for its growth is reflection and mindfulness – through critical analysis of experience individuals become aware of how they are intentionally developing specific aspects of icc. another theoretical framework the paper applies is contact theory, or the contact hypothesis (allport, 1954), which provides a means of understanding and designing programs aimed at improving intergroup relations (hean & dickinson, 2005; pettigrew & tropp, 2005; pettigrew, tropp, wagner, & christ, 2011). according to the intergroup contact hypothesis, bringing people from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds together does not naturally result in a sense of cultural tolerance and acceptance of others, nor does it make them engaged with “out-group” members, open-minded and non-prejudiced toward them. for direct interactions with foreigners to translate into enhanced icc, certain conditions have to be met, such as common goals, equal group status within the situation, intergroup cooperation, and authority or community support. a range of studies proved that the favorable circumstances outlined by allport, that is, meaningful international and intergroup contact, might have positive effects on intercultural attitudes and reduce intergroup bias, causing individuals to recategorize themselves as a single group (”we”) rather than as two separate groups (“us” and “them”; desforges et al., 1997; gaertner, dovidio, anastasio, bachman, the impact of studying abroad on students’ intercultural competence: an interview study 685 & rust, 1993; hamberger & hewstone, 1997; stangor, jonas, stroebe, & hewstone, 1996). recent research in community psychology has suggested a potential use of the contact theory as a tool for building intercultural relationships (townley, kloos, green, & franco, 2011). the contact hypothesis helped conceptualize erasmus+ study abroad program as linked with attitudinal and identity change because several of the contact hypothesis conditions are congruent with erasmus organizational values. equal status is provided by recommending participatory learning at host universities, that is, through pairand group work and engaging students in a range of projects. in addition, equal status is strengthened by the fact that erasmus participants are similar in age, life status and immediate activities they get involved in. the students have common goals, that is, they want to graduate with good marks and/or find a romantic partner and build a range of other meaningful relationships during the sojourn, thus seeking mutual understanding of human diversity is crucial for them. as for intergroup cooperation, it may be offered by the types of activities in which the students engage. for example, they could spend time together preparing meals together or doing sports. support of local authority is ensured through giving the participants permission to enter into the community of students at a given university. 3. the study 3.1. rationale, setting and aim the impetus for the study came from the author’s interest in intercultural foreign language (fl) education. poland, where the author is based, is a homogeneous country where students go through a largely mono-cultural socialization. they are taught english by polish graduates of fl departments and, consequently, at school have very limited intercultural input. classroom instruction offers them very few channels to experience and understand intercultural communication. likewise, the level of internationalization of polish universities is very low. although polish students travel for holidays abroad, use the internet and other media, and know people who take part in economic migration, it is difficult to determine the quality of such contacts, to what extent students experience the difference between their own perception of reality and that of people who are culturally different, and whether students reflect on their contacts with representatives of diverse cultures. this makes it requisite to investigate and evaluate alternatives for moving students to higher levels of intercultural sensitivity. the research project was meant to investigate students’ perception of the development of intercultural competence, that is, knowledge, skills and attitudes through exploring their experiences during staying abroad. the author wanted to paweł sobkowiak 686 assess whether and to what extent the students “transformed” in an international environment and became more open-minded and intercultural, that is, whether the sojourn abroad translated into their intercultural development. in the study, intercultural contact was perceived as personal, direct contact with native and non-native speakers of english as a lingua franca, that is, “any use of english among speakers of different first languages for whom english is the communicative medium of choice, and often the only option” (seidlhofer, 2011, p. 7). contact with cultural products, mainly different types of media, for example, tv, internet, books, movies and magazines, despite their high capacity as possible mediators of intercultural information, and also being available within poland, was outside the scope of the research. the study, exploratory in nature, was guided by the following three specific research questions: 1. to what extent did students engage in meaningful intercultural interactions? 2. to what extent did they reflect on their cross-cultural experiences and how did they interpret their interactions? 3. how did intercultural contacts, in students’ view, change them and their attitudes or preconceived notions about their culturally different peers? 3.2. method given the complex nature of both the phenomenon being studied and the research questions, a qualitative approach was adopted, which allowed for a more direct method of gauging the researched problem. 3.3. participants the participants were polish students who participated in the erasmus+ program the year preceding the study. an interview sample was chosen from the erasmus databases at one large and one middle-sized, flagship, public universities located in a large city with half a million inhabitants, in central-western poland. the student body at both universities is very homogeneous, including a very low number of international students (2.05% and 3.69% respectively). all students listed in both databases were e-mailed and invited to participate in the study. the response rate, though, was very small – only 13 of the students agreed to be interviewed. one student was excluded from the sample since he came from a bilingual family and the study focused on students raised and socialized in mono-cultural and mono-lingual settings. thus, the logic of purposive sampling to increase validity of the study was followed (corbin & strauss, 2007; silverman, 2013). ethics approval based upon informed consent procedures was followed. the impact of studying abroad on students’ intercultural competence: an interview study 687 the sample of 12 interview participants varied across the attributes of gender, class year (age) and level of studies. the demographics of the accessed participants included a close to equal gender split with 7 females and 5 males. there was also a diversified representation of age among the participants: from 20 to 25. almost half of the sample were graduate students (5), while the remaining participants were undergraduates (7). their majors ranged from law, through administration to management. all the participants spoke english at a fairly advanced level of proficiency, high enough to be able to participate in courses, lectures and seminars in english while they studied abroad. the majority knew another foreign language or even two others from school, private lessons and self-study. they studied in as many as 10 eu countries: belgium, croatia, great britain, finland, france, italy, the netherlands (2), portugal, slovenia and spain (2) in the span of either one (9 students) or two semesters (3 students). the majority of the participants were unfamiliar with the interviewer (3 interviewees were his current or former students). to make sure that the participants had no prior experience of extensive intercultural contacts, they were asked whether they had ever lived abroad for a longer period of time or had a relationship in poland with a foreign partner. no such experience was reported (one student worked in norway four consecutive summers but was surrounded by fellow polish workers). in addition, no interviewee participated in intercultural training prior to the sojourn. 3.4. data collection and procedures the author carried out semi-structured interviews with the participants of the study. the researcher not only asked a set of prepared questions but also followed the participants’ lead. to avoid response bias (students offering acceptable responses) and over-directiveness, the students were prompted to add their comments freely during the interviews and make digressions. the interview questions were piloted with one student from the target population to check for clarity, which resulted in a few changes in their wording to resolve the ambiguities. the interviews were conducted in polish, in the spring of 2017, by the author himself, recorded and transcribed verbatim. in order to keep the identity of the participants anonymous their names were replaced by symbols (from s1 to s12). recording allowed an in-depth analysis of the manner in which the students’ stories were told and the tone of the comments. the scripts were coded for units of meaning. such procedures were employed to follow rigor demanded in qualitative research and to achieve more valid findings. the interviews took place individually – three took place in a quiet room at the university venue where the author is employed, while the remaining ones were done via skype. paweł sobkowiak 688 the interviews took from 35 to 60 minutes, amounting to the total of 549 minutes (m = 45.75; sd = 8.44; cv = 18.45%). the interviewing protocol revolved around 15 closed and semi-structured questions related to four topics, which were supposed to guide both the interviewer and the students (see appendix). first, the biographical data were collected and the participants were asked about the country where they had studied, the reasons why they had decided to study abroad, and whether their objectives had been achieved. second, the students were asked about preparation before going abroad, namely whether or not they had tried to learn about the country, its inhabitants and culture where they were supposed to spend one semester or two. the interviewer was also interested in whether or not they had taken part in intercultural training. the interviewees were queried about their prior intercultural experience, whether they had traveled individually before participating in the erasmus+ program or had lived with or kept in touch on a regular basis with an individual from another culture. this question was designed to eliminate from the sample individuals with close and regular cross-cultural contacts prior to their sojourns. another question dealt with the length of time the interviewees spent with people from diverse cultures (both foreigners and locals), which was relevant to determine the potential effect of the sojourn on the students. seven questions about students’ experiences with contacting both locals and foreigners were meant to explore their intercultural awareness and notice to what extent it had changed (i.e., grew). the questions from this group also checked students’ intercultural learning and asked whether the students had experienced culture shock – the interviewees were prompted to discuss critical incidents they had experienced during their sojourns. the critical incident approach was utilized in this part of the study since it is considered a valuable research tool, especially with respect to understanding intercultural interactions and stimulating reflective thinking, which leads to reflective judgment, an important aspect of intercultural competence (mcallister et al., 2006). the interviewer ended each interview session by asking the students to selfreport in detail on the changes they had observed in themselves following the stay abroad. the researcher also asked the participants what they had learned about themselves and whether and to what extent they perceived themselves in a new way after the sojourn abroad. the final question concerned the changes which the respondents noticed in themselves and what, in their views, contributed to them. 3.5. data analysis coding allowed the researcher to identify the key categories and data were analyzed in several steps, following the principles of the constant comparative the impact of studying abroad on students’ intercultural competence: an interview study 689 analysis (rice & ezzy, 1999). these categories were then grouped into the following themes: 1) aspirations and expectations of the intercultural experience; 2) cultural knowledge and attitudes related to the lifestyles of various communities represented by the host country community and fellow erasmus students (housing, health, eating, drinking, clothing, festivities, safety); 3) similarities and differences between poland and the host country; 4) realizing and overcoming stereotypes associated with different nationalities; 5) experiencing cultural shock (critical incidents); 6) intercultural contact and personal coping strategies. 4. results and discussion the analysis of the interview data is presented according to the three research questions and the themes identified at the data analysis stage discussed earlier. 4.1. expectations a significant number of the participants declared that being exposed to a new culture, along with the desire to improve foreign language/s proficiency, had been the main reasons for them to study abroad (7 and 5 interviewees respectively). the former aim seems pertinent because the students wanted to fit into the new environment and communicate adequately and effectively (this outcome confirms the study by elola & oskoz, 2008). a number of students explicitly discussed the positive relationship between development of english use and proficiency, and their sojourns. they maintained that study abroad helped them lower their anxiety when speaking english and gain more confidence to use it: “at first i was reluctant to talk to local and other foreign students because of a language barrier, but step by step i managed to overcome it” (s5).1 the research participants did not perceive english as a threat to their national identity nor as a tool positioning them negatively, which echoes the outcome of fang and baker (2017). since community building is rooted in communication (deutsch, 1953), this finding demonstrates that the students were well equipped to get involved in meaningful interactions while abroad. this claim concerning the educational advantages of student mobility (i.e., an opportunity to learn the language and become familiar with its culture) was supported in a range of other studies (e.g., mitchell, 2012). in a similar vein, english language proficiency and confidence 1 all quotes were translated from polish into english by the author. paweł sobkowiak 690 seem to be related to the ability “to develop a sense of identity and intercultural citizenship through english” (fang & baker, 2017, p. 13). three of the students emphasized that they had wanted to live in “the erasmus bubble” (i.e., surrounded by other erasmus students from a range of different countries). six respondents wanted to establish new friendships. those answers showed that the participants felt curious about exploring diverse cultures, which indicates their developed motivational domain of culture intelligence (cq), a fundamental predisposition for becoming intercultural (ang & van dyne, 2008). the interviewees’ decisions to study abroad partially stemmed from cherished family traditions, that is, the majority acknowledged traveling abroad every summer before the sojourn (only 1 did not). this corroborates previous studies which show that students who are willing to study abroad constitute a particular subset (i.e., one with most cultural and economic capital; otero & mccoshan, 2006), self-identified as european and with the most european outlooks and attitudes (mitchell, 2012). 4.2. intercultural experience the interviewed students did not associate intercultural contact with merely being a student at a university attended by other international students. the collected narratives revealed that they did their best so that their stays abroad would go beyond mere presence in the proximity to local and other erasmus students. the participants were aware that learning about new cultures required active, direct forms, that is, their personal engagements – getting involved in meaningful communication with individuals who were raised in culturally different backgrounds. thus, they formed numerous acquaintances that yielded discussion of a range of issues, cultural differences included. in the interview sessions, the students declared they viewed their international erasmus peers, who constituted their primary social group in the sojourn, as representatives of diverse cultures (i.e., they realized that those new friendships were inseparable from and dependent upon culture). from the very beginning, the students did not treat them as strangers and very quickly integrated them into their everyday contact networks. the respondents perceived interaction with them as intercultural and realized that such encounters could create a range of impediments both sides would have to overcome. the interviewees demonstrated curiosity about novelty, genuine interest in students from other national groups and openness to their cultures. they sought and seized opportunities to spend most of the time with their study abroad counterparts and local students. in fact, in the interviews they reported socializing in an international, multi-national group, and only two students declared that they had the impact of studying abroad on students’ intercultural competence: an interview study 691 socialized primarily with host country students – they had a local boyfriend/girlfriend respectively. researchers investigating the contact hypothesis in the context of student mobility focused on the sojourners’ integrative experience with the host society (fligstein, 2008; stangor at al., 1996). this, however, was not reported by the students interviewed in the current study – their immersion in the host culture was limited to contacts with local students, and so they did not fully utilize the opportunity to become direct observers of local people and their cultures. such firsthand experience (i.e., participating in the host culture itself) could have piqued the participants’ curiosity into local culture, prompting them to explore it profoundly and consequently helping them achieve a greater level of awareness of the diversity among and within the host country (elola & oskoz, 2008). the data collected here confirm the findings by murphy-lejeune (2002) and mitchell (2012). the interviewed sample tried to limit the time spent with polish students to make good use of being exposed to foreign cultures and otherness; only 1 interviewee shared a room in a dorm with a polish student (6 had a single room, 5 had a roommate from a foreign country, and none shared a room with a student from the host country). all the interviewees had a lot of informal conversations in english. they made friends with local students who attended their classes, tried to spend considerable time with them in the afternoon, attending tourist attractions, hanging out, going to pubs or parties together, and thus they were immersed to a certain extent in the environment characterized by cultural diversity. their lives were inherently intertwined with intercultural interactions, which allowed for interpreting the situation, analyzing reactions of international students from other cultures and assessing critical incidents, together with their consequences. the following excerpts from the interviews illustrate this: most of the time i hung out and socialized with international students. (s3) i did not spend time with polish students at all since i wanted to practice my english. (s5) i went on several excursions for erasmus students organized by the program coordinators and visited a few places. (s10) i spent 99% of the time with foreign peers, both erasmus and local students. (s12) 4.3. cultural knowledge, diverse lifestyles, similarities and differences with poland as has already been mentioned, the students socialized primarily with their study abroad counterparts and, to a lesser degree, with local students. this lack of daily contact with host communities allowed for gaining only surface cultural knowledge of the countries where they studied. however, the sojourn provided the interviewees with sufficient spaces for critical discoveries about themselves paweł sobkowiak 692 and others. the students voiced rather conciliatory and level-headed opinions about life in a particular foreign culture. in addition, positive attitudes toward foreign cultures prevailed in their accounts. for example, in the interviewees’ views, the pace of life in belgium, croatia, the netherlands, france, italy, portugal, slovenia and spain was much slower and more stress-free than that of people in poland. keeping work-life balance seemed to be extremely important for local people there. however, they noticed that speed of life may differ within a particular country: “barcelona is faster than valencia” (s2). several of the countries have a completely different meals schedule, with dinner being the main meal, served in the evening (belgium, france, portugal, italy). in many countries there is a lunch break during the day; however, quite surprisingly, “in northern italy, which is more europeanized, there are no siestas” (s3). whereas healthy food is extremely popular in the netherlands (“there are a lot of vegans and vegetarians” [s9]), “semi-finished food products are widely purchased and consumed in finland. because of historical reasons, national cuisine has not developed there, with potatoes with onions and fish being extremely popular among the finns” (s11). coffee drinking has been ritualized in italy: “italians drink different coffee types at various times of the day, in a seated or standing position, depending on the circumstances. furthermore, wine is widely consumed at dinner, even by children, for whom it is served diluted” (s3). in belgium, “beer is loved and perceived as national heritage; diverse ranges have to be drunk in a specially designed glasses” (s12). in croatia, “wine is mixed with carbonated soft drinks” (s5). although in the students’ narratives the dress code seems to have standardized across the continent and the same brands are available in all countries (“i met in croatia a girl wearing the same jacket as the one i purchased in poland” [s5]), they recognized some distinguishing trends and features in this respect. for example, the dutch and the croats pay less attention than the poles to what they wear: “women in tracksuits and without make-up shopping in a mall are characteristic of the dutch landscape” (s9). one interview respondent was surprised that “women in croatia wear tracksuits at very formal occasions along with expensive jewelry” (s5). other students said that “the finns get dressed only to be warm and not to stand out” (s11), “the croats wear thick jackets in relatively high temperatures” (s5) and “the belgians wear extravagant and eccentric outfits; for example, males wear colorful socks” (s12). the participants noted unique, dressing traditions at some universities. for example, law students in portugal wear special coats resembling capes (“they were the prototypes for j. k. rowling’s characters in harry potter” [s1]) and finnish students can be distinguished by a special kind of trousers (overalls or dungarees): “each university has a different type” (s11). the impact of studying abroad on students’ intercultural competence: an interview study 693 it might be surprising that such a stereotypical view was so universal in the students’ narratives. this might have stemmed from the fact that their access to life of local people was limited to casual meetings in public places, allowing only for surface observations. in addition, the majority studied in large cities with a substantial flow of tourists, which also shaped, blurred and distorted the landscape. the interviews demonstrated that the participants had gained insight mostly into surface issues like dress and food; their observations seem quite simplistic and, as in many other studies, for example, anderson, lawton, rexeisen, and hubbard (2006) and czerwionka et al. (2015), show quite an “external” perspective on the part of the participants. the findings of the current study demonstrated that most of the students show propensity to minimize cultural differences, which is characteristic of the minimization phase in bennett’s dmis (1993). in this stage, individuals share the generalized belief that everyone is fundamentally the same, and differences are acknowledged but minimized and perceived as unimportant, compared to cultural similarities. however, some of the respondents were more mindful and noticed differences and peculiarities concerning the host country in many more domains: in holland people leave shoes outside while entering houses. (s9) spaniards spend a lot of time in cafes. this refers also to old people. (s10) finns value highly their personal zones, which is manifested by keeping a larger physical distance with an interlocutor. they seem to be very calm, self-oriented and never say “can i help you?” when they see something wrong is going on with you. (s11) in belgium people do not say thank you after meals. at first i found it irritating, because for me it is an expression of gratitude to a person who dedicated her/his time to prepare a meal. once i asked about this the local people i learned that cooking, in their opinion, is perceived as enjoyment on the part of the person who did the cooking. (s12) in two accounts the issue of safety was discussed. for example, finland seemed to be exceptionally safe for one respondent: “i was surprised there was no need to padlock bicycles. on trains passengers left their valuable laptops unattended and went to a dining car. in both cases nothing disappeared” (s11). in a similar vein, one student noted a strong, in her opinion, social trend: “i was surprised that in a liberal belgium still a patriarchal model of family dominates, i.e., it is a woman who cooks meals, the model is even duplicated among young couples, a great number of young women want to be housewives. in addition, ‘to be’ over ‘to have’ approach to life prevails” (s12). 4.4. national stereotyping although the interviewees reported that student mobility had made them more interested in other european countries, people and cultures, quite broad national paweł sobkowiak 694 stereotyping is evident in the respondents’ reports. their narratives revealed, for example, beliefs that people from belgium, france, slovenia and spain are very family-oriented: the dutch care about order around their home vicinity and foster the culture of transparency, manifested, among others, by houses with large, free-from-curtains windows. they leave their shoes outside before entering the house. furthermore, they are crazy about diy, probably due to bad weather. they are also nicer, much more sincere and more direct in contact than poles. generally, the dutch are more interested in their own lives than in other people’s affairs. (s4) the portuguese are often late and very loud. (s1) . . . and so are the spaniards, especially women. (s2) the slovenes like to be on the go and work out a lot. (s10) the spaniards love celebrating together and are very attached to their traditions. they even organize the birthday of the street’s patron. (s2) the belgians are quite reserved and withdrawn. i had to initiate interactions. (s12) the participants’ accounts evidenced how university education is organized in different countries. for example, “in france, the university infrastructure is well-developed and tons of handouts are distributed in classes/lectures” (s6). the interview data revealed that the majority of the students (11) got involved in pairor group-work with representatives from a range of countries. four of them claimed that although they still thought about their international peers in terms of nationalities they represented, they noticed no differences in the way they worked. the remaining seven reported quite a large diversity across cultures. their reports, however, were full of culture-specific generalizations and stereotyping. when the students reported some problems (e.g., with keeping the deadline for the project), they referred to nationality as if it seemed to be more relevant in the interpretation of the situation than the inappropriateness of the student’s behavior against universally accepted values or norms, such as lack of commitment or responsibility. this created the impression as if the country of a particular student’s origin contributed to high or bad quality of his/her performance more than their individual approach. the sample was not homogeneous in the accounts regarding the way their international peers worked in class. a few interviewees used national labels in their reports, explicitly showing disregard or bias toward the presented group, which confirms the findings of previous studies (e.g., fang & baker, 2017). for example, the italian students were presented as unmindful, scatterbrained and easy-going. neither did they want to get deeply involved in a project, nor did the impact of studying abroad on students’ intercultural competence: an interview study 695 they care for the deadlines. they wanted to do everything by means of social media: “they avoided face-to-face contacts outside the class” (s3). female students from slovenia wanted to cheat: “we were supposed to create our own start-up, they wanted to resort to the one already set up by somebody else” (s10). however, in the majority of the reports negative attitudes were well balanced with positive ones, and positive assessment prevailed. for example, one student reported that “a female student from finland stood out because of her high english proficiency and she approached every single task very seriously” (s6). another participant noted that “a male student from hong kong was always late but very conscientious” (s9). germans were perceived as very similar to polish people: “i liked working with germans most: we distributed subtasks, everybody did his/her share of the work, they met deadlines” (s11). some interviewees managed to go beyond national stereotyping in their descriptions, which is well illustrated by the following comment: “the experience of group-work with international students convinced me not to resort to national labels when assessing people – the way a person works depends on his/her individual characteristics and approach to work, and not on the country he/she originates from” (s10). in a similar vein, the collected narratives demonstrated marked discrepancy regarding how the study participants approached their international peers. the majority of the respondents claimed that they tried to be culturally conscious in interactions with international peers – they tried to be unprejudiced, rejected tokenizing and showed goodwill and sincerity toward their culturally diverse interlocutors. they tried to listen to people and their experiences; if confronted with something weird or incomprehensible, they resorted to observation, analysis and exploration. if they did not grasp something, they did research themselves or asked their interactants for explanation. however, a few reports revealed that the students viewed culture from a specific, country-related and nation-bound perspective (especially in reference to their muslim peers). the story of one male respondent showed that the sojourn had strengthened his stereotypical thinking concerning muslims. he believed his turkish peer was very patriarchal and demonstrated superiority toward women, who he believed accepted an inferior position: “i was shocked when i noticed he never shook hands with women while doing it with men, nor targeted them directly in a conversation” (s11). a few other respondents admitted that they were preemptive and “tried not to talk about religion so as not to provoke conflict” (s1). such nation-bound understanding of culture is perceived as a serious impediment to cross-cultural contacts. a great many stories evidenced in the study depicted contradictory behaviors of representatives of the same nationality confirming that people from the same culture can differ tremendously and the first-hand experience the interviewees had helped them realize this. for example, one student noticed inconsistency paweł sobkowiak 696 concerning how some muslim students approached their religion: “my turkish fellow student, on the one hand, practiced ramadan, but, on the other, did not abstain from toxic substances or alcohol, which his religion prohibits” (s4). what struck two other informants about their muslim peers was their religious commitment. their female muslim fellow students prayed five times a day, one had religious symbols on her desktop wallpaper and was eager to talk about her religion, and another had a special application on her mobile, which was to remind her of prayer times. one female muslim student wore a hijab even in the shower: “it never proved problematic for her; she perceived this as routine” (s9). thus, it seems safe to conclude that although a lot of national stereotyping was reported in the interviews, contact with international students increased the study participants’ awareness of diversity, which should be conducive to their becoming more sensitive to cultural differences in the future. 4.5. cultural shock and critical incidents the majority of the sample did not experience cultural shock probably because they all studied in european countries, which, as most of the interviewed students highlighted, are quite similar: “in contemporary, globalized europe there is not much diversity between countries” (s9). some of the participants were even surprised at this similarity of cultures: “i thought countries differ much more” (s11). only one female interviewee who had studied in spain mentioned being shocked at a job interview – she expressed discomfort relative to being kissed on both cheeks by the interviewer who was a complete stranger to her. according to tang and choi (2004), negative experiences with individuals from other cultures may turn valuable and promote intercultural development. however, the narratives of other students did not contain evidence of such huge cultural differences – although they noticed and reported quite a few differences between life in the country of their residence and life in poland, they were never confronted with inappropriate behaviors of people from other cultures which would violate their comfort zones. this corroborates previous studies (czura, 2017; zaykovskaya, rawal, & de costa, 2017). all but one interviewee reported witnessing no critical incidents during their sojourns. however, the narrative of the student who did encounter a situation he considered problematic and confusing because of a cultural clash was quite articulate: “i wanted to shake hands with a muslim girl from great britain i met, but she refused (stepped back), which i found rather surprising. but i apologized quickly. i didn’t know female muslims can’t shake hands with men” (s8). lack of such experience may have resulted from the fact that, as mentioned earlier, the participants spent most of the time abroad on campus, and even the impact of studying abroad on students’ intercultural competence: an interview study 697 when they attended social events outside, they were accompanied by other erasmus or local students. their contact with other locals was minute. 4.6. reflecting on intercultural experiences the interviewees appreciated the fact that study abroad provided them with ample opportunities to interact with culturally diverse students and viewed them as “bonuses” or “added value” of student mobility. they were eager to interact with foreigners because in poland meeting individuals from different cultures is not part of the daily experience. in addition, the participants stated that those direct, meaningful contacts with foreigners had prompted them to think reflectively not only about the situations they had found themselves in, but also about how they themselves thought, viewed and might act toward other cultures on a daily basis. analyzing various intercultural situations led the respondents to understand that cultural context affects different aspects of their lives. this finding confirms the outcomes of other research on study abroad in this respect, showing it as a positive experience leading ultimately to growth in participants’ icc development (e.g., anderson et al., 2006; elola & oskoz, 2008; fang & baker, 2017; mitchell, 2012). according to intercultural contact scholars, recognizing interlocutors as culturally different representatives of a specific cultural group is a precondition for an opportunity to rethink an individual’s attitudes toward otherness and reduce their prejudices and biases (hewstone, 1994). as evidenced from the collected data, the interviewed students utilized their sojourns in this respect by practicing reflective thinking, the capacity leading to reflective judgment, which appears to be critical for intercultural development: i tried to reflect on my intercultural experience on a daily basis and tried to refer my observations to my future decisions, situations. . . . at first same sex couples holding hands or kissing each other in public shocked me, but step by step i tried to understand why they did this. (s1) i tried not to assess people. instead i focused on careful observation, analysis and interpretation. (s2) i tried to understand their perspective, and asked a lot of questions. (s3) study abroad was an impulse to self-analyze. i developed a social instinct. (s4) the data demonstrated that in face to face contact with peers from other cultures the students were very mindful and paid attention to cultural differences and social nuances, which yielded helpful insights and deeper understanding of cultural differences: “in portugal dinner is eaten much later than in poland” (s1), “i witnessed how graduation is celebrated in italy among friends. flour and eggs paweł sobkowiak 698 are thrown at a graduating student, and finally he/she is forced into water fully dressed” (s3). simultaneously, direct interactions with students from a range of diverse cultures raised the respondents’ awareness of their own cultural identity. most of the interviewees tried to be ambassadors of their country, which was manifested, among others, by preparing polish national dishes for international fellow students, explaining polish customs to them, exhibiting the polish flag in a room or debunking the unfavorable myths surrounding poland and polish people: i am proud to be polish, especially of polish traditions, which, in my opinion, should be cherished. i was among the students who organized the independence day for the erasmus community, i even wore a traditional folk costume. (s2) when we organized a polish day i plaited my hair in a typical slavonic way and prepared a beetroot soup and dumplings. (s7) although i admired “perfect order” and planning in the netherlands, i realized that polish spontaneity suits me fine. i noticed that polish grocery products are of much higher quality. i tried to talk a lot about poland and encouraged my fellow international students to visit my homeland, simultaneously trying to reject the stereotype of poland as a worse, second-category eu country. (s8) the participants’ engagingly honest comments showed that they did not approach foreign cultures ethnocentrically. although they sustained some “home preferences,” for example, regarding eating and drinking, they did not compare foreign practices unfavorably with those with which they were familiar in poland, and they did not respond to cultural differences negatively. the students did not tend to perceive their home culture as superior as no patronizing or judgmental comments regarding foreign cultures were reported. they tried to be objective, which occasionally led even to reformulating some opinions and not favorable assessment of their own country and its inhabitants: “polish people are still very closed, full of prejudices and fears of all kinds, reluctant to start or meet anything new” (s6). the respondents treated other cultures with respect and held a realistic view of their homeland: “i like the dutch culture of transparency, manifested by leaving the windows open, which allows passers-by a full view of your living quarter and shows that you have nothing to hide” (s4). neither did they adopt a critical stance toward the countries where they stayed nor their inhabitants. this shows the students’ worldview development and their progress on bennett’s dmis ethnocentric/ethnorelative continuum. however, occasionally a reinforcement of their polish identity could be observed, especially when their fellow international students showed ignorance and complete lack of basic knowledge concerning poland: the impact of studying abroad on students’ intercultural competence: an interview study 699 it got on my nerves when they asked me if there were water parks in poland. (s2) i found it frustrating that the local students didn’t know their country’s history, such as the fact that in the second world war the netherlands was liberated by a polish general maczek. (s4) the students attempted to understand, contextualize and analyze the daily practices of the people from diverse cultures they met and observed (mainly other international students and local students). in the collected accounts of cross-cultural contacts where elements of criticism appeared, the respondents adopted the perspective of “general culture” – they resorted to cultural norms that are universal and applicable in a wide range of contexts, which is another indicator of intercultural development. for example, one female respondent expressed explicitly her dislike toward feminization of men, which, in her opinion, is a worldwide trend. although she noticed it in a specific national context (italy), her appeal to change the situation applied to all countries (i.e., a much wider context): in portugal men are obsessed with their look. a male friend of mine from italy kept taking photos of himself in different settings to exhibit it on the instagram, which i found irritating and unmanly. there is a need to start a crusade for maintaining masculinity. (s1) 4.7. developing personal coping strategies narratives of quite a few students demonstrated that contact with peers from other cultures prompted them to develop a range of strategies helpful in crosscultural situations, which mirrors the results of other research (e.g., czerwionka et al., 2015; fang & baker, 2017; mitchell, 2012; zaykovskaya et al., 2017). for example, one female informant said she realized that “dialog is the key to understand another individual and solve any problems in cross-cultural encounters” (s12). in addition, the study participants learned that preemptive judgment of people from different cultural backgrounds may lead to misunderstanding and thus to miscommunication. the students tried to limit assessment of their international peers (“i tried not to judge people, instead i tried to be mindful and observed them attentively” [s2]), and even if they evaluated them, they tried to “understand their perspective” (s3) or “to put themselves in their shoes and be empathetic toward them” (s12). one respondent admitted: “i became more mindful – i listen to people more attentively” (s4). a great number of respondents stated that if they had encountered an ambiguous and incomprehensible situation, they had asked their interlocutors questions to elicit explanation. this was in line with recommendations by experts in intercultural communication, for example, the ones expressed by ting-toomey paweł sobkowiak 700 (1999) in her o-d-i-s model encouraging individuals to observe, describe, interpret and suspend judgment when confronted with foreigners or, more recently, by berardo and deardorff (2012) in their o-s-e-e model (observe, state, explore and evaluate). a few respondents revealed that they tried to compare their foreign peers’ weird behaviors or views and find similarities with the ones typical of the polish culture. the students also had a proactive approach to cross-cultural conflicts – they tried to foresee them in advance and either used an avoidance strategy or adapted accordingly to the situation in order to sidestep any problems. 4.8. changes in attitudes, views and behavior this study, like previous research (e.g., czerwionka et al., 2015; elola & oskoz, 2008; fang & baker, 2017; mitchell, 2012; zaykovskaya et al., 2017), found that all the students reported changes in both attitudes, views and behavior, which supports the developmental and context-based nature of icc (bennett, 1993; tingtoomey, 1999). however, the extent of changes is not even, with some students reporting deeper transformation than others. stereotypes and an essentialist approach to culture were still present in some narratives. it is also not clear from the obtained data to what extent the interview participants developed a sense of inclusive, intercultural identity that goes beyond the national one (baker, 2015). five of the informants expressed explicitly that although they were biased against foreigners prior to the sojourn, they managed to learn and change their views: spaniards are more conscientious and hard-working than i used to think. they are not as self-confident as i imagined – i have never met a shy spaniard before. (s6) the dutch ride their bikes on a larger scale and use less toxic substances than i thought. (s4) a few respondents admitted that the stay abroad helped them reject some stereotypes: “contrary to what i thought before, the spaniards do not come late” (s6), “the finns are not cold and do not keep people at a distance; contrary to this, their mentality resembles polish one” (s11). two female interviewees admitted they had been prejudiced against muslims, whom they associated with terrorism and girls wearing headscarves. one of them was quite surprised that she had managed to establish her best relationship while abroad with turkish students: “in close contact they turned out to be the same: their views on many things, such as, women’s liberation, seem to be similar to mine. they are very tolerant toward homosexuals. now i perceive their diverse clothing patterns as something positive” (s5). the other student realized, after spending some time among a few muslim students from pakistan, that the picture of islam in the media in poland is biased: “i didn’t know that killing is forbidden the impact of studying abroad on students’ intercultural competence: an interview study 701 according to islam” (s1). the aforementioned narratives proved that critical reflection resulted in the respondents’ identifying assumptions that underpinned their stereotypical views, evaluating their validity and reconstituting their understandings. the following narratives evidence more examples of the changes reported explicitly by the respondents: i try to control assessing my interlocutors. i do it much less frequently now. (s1) i have learned to approach people unprejudiced, without categorizing or labeling them. i have realized it is necessary to listen to them first and explore before making any assessment. (s4) my truth used to be the most important. now i can take somebody else’s perspective. every individual contributes something valuable. i started considering otherness as “added value.” (s6) i approach another person with a lower number of assumptions concerning who they are. (s7) staying among people from diverse cultures was an ordeal; yet in the aftermath, my comfort zone has extended tremendously. (s8) contact with foreigners helps an individual distance himself/herself from his/her own culture. i have broadened my horizons and became more inclusive; i have learned how to grapple with communication problems with people from diverse cultures. (s10) i am more empathetic. i learned to listen to my interlocutors. i am more sensitive and open toward otherness, and find it much easier to cope with representatives of the multicultural world. whenever i find something strange or incomprehensible i keep asking questions. i became more liberal. (s11) i used to judge people in a very shallow and superficial way, often by forming snap judgments. having spent one semester abroad, i have come to a conclusion that my assessment can be completely invalid and inaccurate, generalizations are often useless, and each individual has to be evaluated separately, depending on a specific context. even if at the first glimpse something looks terrible, it does not necessarily mean bad intentions on the part of the interlocutor/s. i try to pay attention to nuances concerning what people are doing or saying. (s12) in the respondents’ views, the sojourn contributed to their personal development, especially with regard to their maturity and self-confidence. their declared enhanced open-mindedness, avoidance of evaluative adjectives and more profound tolerance toward differences exerted a positive influence on their social and interaction skills: it is not a problem for me anymore to start a conversation with a person from a different culture or to ask him/her a question. (s1) paweł sobkowiak 702 never before did i witness a couple of the same sex kissing each other in public. i got used to this with time. (s2) i find it much easier now to establish a contact with a muslim. (s4) it is much easier for me to find myself among people from other cultures. (s10) 5. conclusions and implications the interview-based study illustrated that the students attempted to be mindful in the rich, intercultural context and open-minded toward their international peers, and they eagerly engaged in meaningful contacts with them, regardless of the lack of formal preparation. the findings presented here are in line with other research on study abroad showing it as a largely positive experience for its participants, contributing to developing sensitivity to cultural differences, and a sense of intercultural awareness and competence (beaven & borghetti, 2015; byram, golubeva, han, & wagner, 2017; czerwionka et al., 2015; elola & oskoz, 2008; fang & baker, 2017; mitchell, 2012). sojourn abroad raised students’ surface knowledge about the host country and its citizens. the students took advantage of the ample opportunities to interact mainly with their international fellow students and if confronted with incomprehensible diversity they made commendable efforts to ask their interlocutors for explanations. however, since they did not have much access to local communities and did not fully immerse themselves in the host culture and language, they did not explore things on their own and did not have many opportunities to interpret the unique experiences they might have had otherwise. consequently, they learned only to a limited extent that intercultural communication requires a lot of care and effort, and practiced an application of considered, reflective strategies moderately. however, focusing on engagement with international peers, the interview sample tried not to bracket off cultural issues and adopted a reflexive stance toward cultural differences they faced. such an approach activated the respondents’ self-regulation and self-awareness, which resulted in their judgments and stereotypes of specific cultural groups or preconceived notions being challenged, processed and, in some cases, reviewed. although a lot of ongoing national stereotyping has been reported, the students’ narratives revealed that in the aftermath of the face-to face encounters with international peers some of their well-ingrained beliefs and views changed to a certain extent, making them more open-minded and inclusive toward diversity. the study implies that the sojourn as an opportunity for meaningful interactions with both domestic and international students has considerable potential to enhance participants’ global-mindedness, preparing them for variety, change and adaptation. although success of a mobility experience depends on the impact of studying abroad on students’ intercultural competence: an interview study 703 a number of factors, some of which may be difficult to predict, the findings of this research show pertinence of internationalizing study programs for students’ intercultural growth. thus, on a practical front, study abroad of at least one semester should become a mandatory element of university curricula. consequently, students would be exposed to foreign culture(s) and provided with opportunities to reflect on the experience and act accordingly in future cross-cultural encounters, contributing, in the long run, to growth in their icc. the results also demonstrate that student mobility does not by itself guarantee intercultural development and the potential value of intercultural training – it is vitally relevant to ensure that students are aware of what they might encounter ahead of time, and what measures might help enhance their studying abroad experience. such training could encourage students to immerse into the host country culture more eagerly and profoundly, and should contribute to sharpening their mindfulness and practicing reflection during the sojourn. likewise, appropriate support, evaluation and opportunities for reflection upon return home are crucial to successful student mobility. this, of course, should be combined with teaching english as a global lingua franca at all levels of education. some limitations of the present study should be addressed. first, the research was carried out when the students had returned home – consequently not much was known about their icc before the departure. a longitudinal study (i.e., data collected more periodically) in which the participants would be interviewed before departure, during and then after their stays abroad could be a source of valuable information by providing a greater opportunity for the analysis of students’ intercultural development. exploring the long-term results of student mobility would require examining the quality of students’ intercultural contacts and maintenance of the social networks established abroad upon their returning home, as well as their lifestyle choices and a degree of civic engagement in the future. critical reflection at all stages of the sojourn could deepen understanding of the experiences with cultural diversity and their impact on intercultural learning, allowing for validating possibly overly optimistic conclusions drawn in this study. second, the applied methodology (i.e., semistructured interviews) definitely limited and shaped to a large extent the participants’ narratives. it would be good to organize a focus group with a few of the interviewees to discuss the themes further. minimum involvement on the part of the researcher and lack of prompts would ensure that the participants could express their unbiased opinions and would yield helpful insights into the researched issues. third, the research was done on a small sample, who, in addition, self-elected to take part and probably were eager to report positively; thus the conclusions, as preliminary and tentative, cannot be generalized beyond the study group. to verify the results presented in this article, and to draw more reliable and valid conclusions, the study should be replicated on a larger, drawn sample of polish efl students at the tertiary paweł sobkowiak 704 level. fourth, more helpful insight could be gained by complementing the present retrospective, qualitative study with the data received from other sources than interview accounts (i.e., students’ diaries, journals, logs and e-portfolios). this would help validate the obtained data and, thereby, eventually increase the credibility of its findings and their interpretation. in addition, the research documented only the perspective of the participants – the effectiveness of the sojourn was measured retrospectively, from the students’ point of view, on the basis of their reports. future studies should attempt to garner additional data sources and utilize a multi-perspective approach that would help solicit evidence from both students and people with whom they interacted. the evidence would be stronger if field observations of student performance in intercultural contexts were made by instructors, host family members or community members. furthermore, the use of a control group could help bring considerable gains concerning to what extent the development of students’ icc can be attributed to student mobility itself and not to some other external factors that caused the changes. finally, additional studies with a broader multinational perspective, focusing on other european students sojourning abroad are needed. only triangulation of methods and sources will help us further pursue and investigate the matter thoroughly, and eventually allow for enhanced insight into the investigated topic, thus; giving reliable answers to the research questions. short-term study abroad has enormous capacity to increase participants icc, but their quality is contingent on a range of factors that are not yet fully understood. thus, much more effort is still needed to explore the potential of international educational experience for fostering students’ intercultural development and to analyze the correlation between both. acknowledgements i would like to offer my sincere thanks to the participants involved in this study for 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(2017). learner beliefs for successful study abroad experience: a case study. system, 71, 113-121. the impact of studying abroad on students’ intercultural competence: an interview study 709 appendix interview questions part i 1. where did you study? how long? 2. why did you want to participate in erasmus+ program? do you think you achieved your goals associated with studying abroad? 3. did you travel abroad a lot individually before erasmus+ program? how often? where? did you keep in touch on a regular basis with a person/people from different cultures before studying abroad? 4. did you prepare for study abroad? how? did you try to learn about the country, its inhabitants, culture, etc.? did you take part in intercultural training? 5. how much time did you spend with locals/foreigners while studying abroad? did you have a local/foreign roommate? what was his/her nationality? did you manage to become a friend with anybody or establish any meaningful contacts? part ii (all the following questions refer to your erasmus experience) 6. what did you learn about the country where you studied and a) its culture b) its daily life (e.g., the people, food and drink, meals, pace of life, nightlife habits, smoking, fashion specify) did the study abroad confirm the knowledge you had about the country, its inhabitants and the culture or help reject stereotypes and break down prejudices? 7. did you notice any differences between life in poland and in the country you stayed (e.g., social nuances of the host society, the way people dress or behave, what is acceptable/unacceptable). how did you feel about it? 8. were you given any assignments which required pairor group-work with (a) local or other foreign student(s)? did you notice any differences in the way they work or communicate? did you ever have problems understanding your interlocutor not because of your linguistic incompetence or language barrier, but because of culturally determined reasons? explain the nature of the problem/s and state how you tried to solve it/them? 9. did you ever witness something strange by your cultural standards, and thus incomprehensible for you to understand in the behavior of local people/other erasmus students? if you did, did you try to analyze what lay behind it? did you ever try to learn why they behave the way they do or react in certain ways? 10. did you ever encounter people whose norms, opinions, beliefs, conventions or values were completely different from yours (or which prevail in your culture)? were you ever surprised/shocked because of it? did this difference/these differences ever lead to a conflict? if yes, did you know how to deal with such conflicts? how did you try to solve them? 11. did you ever experience discomfort because of your interlocutor’s “strange” behavior, opinions, beliefs, conventions or values? paweł sobkowiak 710 12. how did you behave/react when you encountered such strange behavior (the one unacceptable by your cultural norms)? was contact with foreign/strange values, beliefs and norms an impulse to self-reflect and self-analyze, namely think about your own values, beliefs and norms by which you are guided and how they affect your perception of others? did you talk about this to anybody? while encountering something strange or incomprehensible, did you try to explore the interlocutor’s perspective to understand what was going on or did you look at them through your own cultural lenses? 13. while you were talking to locals/foreigners did you evaluate their look, values, beliefs and behavior as normal/abnormal, strange, weird, acceptable/not acceptable? 14. did contact with locals/foreigners change anything in how you feel and approach otherness, namely your openness, tolerance, respect, appreciation, e.g., people dressed unconventionally, same sex couples, people of other religious denominations than your own, people with completely different political orientation, etc.? 15. what did you learn about yourself? (did you identify new parts of yourself, did you find any discrepancies between what you claim to value versus what you do in practice). do you perceive yourself in a new way after studying abroad for one semester? did you change? if you changed, how did you change and why? what do you think mostly contributed to this? 391 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (3). 391-413 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the influence of pronunciation learning strategies on mastering english vowels katarzyna rokoszewska jan d ugosz university, cz stochowa, poland k.rokoszewska@ajd.czest.pl abstract the present paper focuses on the role of strategies in learning the pronunciation of the target language. first, an outline of various general classifications of language learning strategies is provided. next, pronunciation learning strategies are defined and their various taxonomies are presented. this is followed by the description of the study which investigated the influence of pronunciation learning strategies on the perception and production of english pure vowels and diphthongs by first-year students of an english department. the results of the study indicate that students of english, who on average use pronunciation learning strategies rather occasionally, should receive some strategy-based instruction as there exists a significant relationship between the investigated phenomena, especially between the use of pronunciation learning strategies and the production of english monophthongs and diphthongs. keywords: pronunciation learning strategies, vowels, diphthongs, monophthongs since the so called good language learner studies (rubin, 1975; stern, 1975), which revealed characteristics of successful language learners, the field of learner autonomy and learning strategies has received a lot of interest. language learning strategies were initially divided into learning strategies (o’malley, chamot, stewner-manzanares, kupper, & russo, 1985) and communication strategies (faerch & kasper, 1983). the former were divided into metacognitive, cognitive and socioaffective strategies, whereas the latter were katarzyna rokoszewska 392 divided into avoidance and compensatory strategies. on the ground that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between learning and communication strategies because language comprehension and production overlap in real communication, this division was later replaced with an alternative classification proposed by oxford (1990), who divided strategies into those that influence learning directly and indirectly. direct strategies were divided into memory, cognitive and compensation strategies whereas indirect strategies were divided into metacognitive, affective and social strategies. next, strategies were divided with respect to different skills, such as listening, speaking, reading and writing (cohen & macaro, 2007; oxford, 1990) and different language areas, such as vocabulary (schmitt, 1997), grammar (oxford, lee, & park, 2007) and pronunciation (eckstein, 2007; peterson, 2000). the present paper focuses on a very interesting and underresearched set of strategies, namely pronunciation learning strategies. next to age, aptitude, intelligence, motivation and personality, these strategies may have an effect on mastering the target language pronunciation. more specifically, they may influence the perception and production of english pure vowels and diphthongs. pronunciation learning strategies in line with oxford’s (1990) definition of language learning strategies, pronunciation learning strategies may be defined as “specific actions taken by the learner to make learning [pronunciation] easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective and more transferable to new situations” (p. 8). at present, at least two taxonomies of pronunciation learning strategies are described in sla literature. the first taxonomy, provided by peterson (2000) on the basis of her pioneering study, is based on oxford’s (1990) classification and consists of six strategy groups, 12 strategies and 43 tactics. the second taxonomy of pronunciation learning strategies was proposed by eckstein (2007). this taxonomy is different from other taxonomies of strategies in that it is not based on oxford’s (1990) work but on kolb’s (1984) learning construct. eckstein (2007) enumerated 28 pronunciation learning strategies and linked them to four stages of pronunciation acquisition and one additional category, namely motivation. at the first stage called concrete experience learners use pronunciation learning strategies concerned with input and practice. at the second stage called reflection on observation learners use strategies connected with noticing and feedback. at the third stage called abstract conceptualization learners form hypotheses about the pronunciation of the target language. at the fourth stage, which is called action based on new conceptualization, learners test the hypotheses formed at the previous stage. the last component, namely motiva the influence of pronunciation learning strategies on mastering english vowels 393 tional strategies, was added because research clearly indicates that motivation is a powerful factor in learning the target language pronunciation. studies on pronunciation learning strategies (pls) may be divided into the studies which focused on the identification and description of pls (dro dzia -szelest, 1997; naiman, frohlich, stern, & todesco, 1978; osborne, 2003; pawlak, 2006, 2008; wrembel, 2008), the studies which resulted in the classification of pls (eckstein, 2007; peterson, 2000) and the studies which involved pls training (bukowski, 2004; varasarin, 2007). the study presented in this paper focuses on the relationship between learning pronunciation and strategies used to master this aspect of the target language. method the aim of the present study was to find out which pls are used by the first-year students of an english department who completed their pronunciation course without any strategy-based instruction, and to establish whether there exists a positive relationship between the students’ use of pls and their learning of english pronunciation, in particular of english monophthongs and diphthongs. the following zero hypotheses with the corresponding alternative directional hypotheses were formulated: h01. there is no systematic relationship between the students’ use of pls and their perception of english pure vowels and diphthongs. ha1a. there is a positive relationship between the students’ use of pls and their perception of english pure vowels and diphthongs. ha1b. there is a negative relationship between the students’ use of pls and their perception of english pure vowels and diphthongs. h02. there is no systematic relationship between the students’ use of pls and their production of english pure vowels and diphthongs. ha2a. there is a positive relationship between the students’ use of pls and their production of english pure vowels and diphthongs. ha2b. there is a negative relationship between the students’ use of pls and their production of english pure vowels and diphthongs. in the present study, a number of variables have been identified. the dependent variable was defined as the students’ perception and production of english monophthongs and diphthongs operationalized as their scores on the pronunciation test. an interval scale was used for this variable. the independent variable was conceptualized as the students’ use of pls operationalized as the scores on the pls questionnaire, which was based on a likert-type scale (ca ka, 2011; see the appendix). the intervening variable may be described as the influence of language learning strategies on second language acquisition, katarzyna rokoszewska 394 the type of scale being interval. control variables include gender, nationality, the same pronunciation course and a longer stay in the target language country, all established by means of a nominal scale. finally, the moderator variable referred to age established by means of a nominal scale. the method of the study is focused description as the scope of the study is narrowed to a particular issue, namely the influence of pls on the ability to perceive and produce english pure vowels and diphthongs. the study is correlative in nature as the degree to which two selected phenomena are related is to be determined (larsen-freeman & long, 1992). the sample consisted of 66 first-year students of an english department, out of whom three subjects were excluded due to a longer stay in an english-speaking country. thus, the results of 63 students, 44 females and 19 males were taken into account. the subjects were on average 20 years old, the youngest subject was 19 whereas the oldest was 26 years old. the subjects declared that they had learnt english at school for about 10.87 years. the shortest period of english instruction at school was equal to 6 years whereas the longest was 15 years. on average, the subjects did not receive substantial instruction apart from school as it was equal to 2.37 years. the shortest period was 0.5 year but the longest was 15 years. it is interesting to notice that almost half of the subjects, namely 29, did not receive any english instruction apart from school at all. as already mentioned, three subjects reported on a longer stay in the target language country, more specifically from 0.5 to 1 year. nine other subjects reported on visits which lasted from 2 weeks to 1 month. what is more, nine subjects (14.3%) said that they had learnt english pronunciation prior to the course, 14 subjects (22.2%) maintained that they had learnt some, and 40 subjects (63%) said that they had not learnt it at all. at the english department, where the study was conducted, the subjects followed the pronunciation course which consisted of 30 hours and lasted one semester. they formed three groups, two of which were taught by the present author, whereas the third group was taught by another pronunciation teacher. the course was based on the coursebooks by baker (2006) and ponsonby (1992). due to a limited number of hours, the course focused mainly on the perception and production of english monophthongs, diphthongs and selected consonants. some typical activities included work with minimal pair words, minimal pair sentences, and dialogues. the course also involved short theoretical explanations and regular transcription practice. the instruments implemented in the present study include a questionnaire on pls and a pronunciation test. the pls questionnaire was composed by ca ka (2011) on the basis of oxford’s (1990) and peterson’s (2000) classifications (see the appendix). the questionnaire investigated 18 strategies and 64 tactics. it consisted of 65 statements with a likert-type scale from 1 to 5 where 1 stood for never or almost never, 2 for rarely, 3 for sometimes, 4 for usually and 5 for always the influence of pronunciation learning strategies on mastering english vowels 395 or almost always. the last question was an open one and referred to other tactics used by the respondents. the reliability of this instrument in the present study was measured by means of cronbach alpha which was equal to 0.89. the pronunciation test consisted of two parts, namely the perception test and the production test. the perception test was based on the material taken from baker (2006) and consisted of three tasks in which the students listened to the native speaker. the first task required the students to establish the order of single monophthongs and diphthongs they heard twice on the cd. for this task the students could obtain 19 points, one for each correct sound. the second task required the students, when exposed to word pairs which included both minimal pairs and identical words (each pure vowel and diphthong occured in both types), to decide if the two minimal pair words were the same or different and tick the right column accordingly. the students could obtain 41 points. in the third task, the students listened to minimal pair sentences and were to circle that one out of two minimal pair words which was included in a given sentence. for this task the students could obtain 20 points. in the first task of the production test the students were to produce single pure vowels and diphthongs, for which they could obtain 19 points. in the second task, they were to read minimal pair words, for which they could obtain 18 points. in the third task, they were to read an unknown text taken from ponsonby (1992), for which they could obtain 115 points, each point for one correct sound. the words that were repeated in the text were scored only when they appeared in the text for the first time, while their repetitions were not taken into account. altogether the students could obtain 80 points for perception, 152 points for production and 232 points for the whole test. the students were assessed by the present author, who is a nonnative speaker but who has considerable experience in teaching pronunciation as she has been conducting pronunciation classes for over 12 years now. next, the students’ results were reviewed by a native speaker, who dispelled some doubts the nonnative pronunciation teacher had. thus, it was the native speaker’s version that constituted the basis for the statistical analysis in the present study. in order to assess the students, a 2point scale was implemented for the perception tasks and a 3-point scale for the production tasks whereby 1 point was given for a correct answer, 0 for an incorrect one and 0.5 for the situation in which the evaluators had some doubts. results the use of pronunciation learning strategies the results of the questionnaire on the pls show that the students involved in the present study used a variety of strategies belonging to different strategy katarzyna rokoszewska 396 groups. in the group of memory strategies (see table 1), the-most-often-used tactic was repeating a word aloud or silently many times. the students reported that they usually used this rote learning tactic (m = 4.13). the students also reported that they sometimes created visual-auditory associations, like linking the pronunciation of a word or sound with a situation in which they have heard it (m = 3.56), as well as visual associations, like linking the pronunciation of a word with the place where they have seen its transcription (m = 3.16), visualising the transcription of words (m = 2.90) and linking sounds with mental or actual pictures (m = 2.78). purely auditory associations, like linking the pronunciation of a word or sound with words or sounds existing in other languages or nature (m = 2.41), were less common. other tactics used from time to time included using phonetic symbols or one’s own code (m = 3.19), revising the pronunciation of new words regularly (m = 3.08) and making up songs, rhymes and sentences to memorise pronunciation (m = 2.65). according to the results, the students rarely made notes, highlighted important information (m = 2.40) and grouped words (m = 2.37). the tactics that were the least often used included listening to a recorded list of words several times (m = 1.70) and using mechanical techniques such as flash cards (m = 1.57). table 1 direct pls – memory strategies memory strategies tactics (questionnaire item) m sd a. representing sounds in memory 1. grouping (3) 2.37 1.13 2. making up songs, rhymes, sentences, etc. to memorise pronunciation (11) 2.65 1.11 3. making associations: a) visual – associating the pronunciation of a word with the place where one has seen its transcription (7) 3.16 1.17 – associating sounds with mental or actual pictures (2) 2.78 1.28 – visualising the transcription of a given word (6) 2.90 1.15 b) auditory associating the pronunciation of a word or sound with words or sounds existing in other languages or nature (1) 2.41 1.13 c) visual-auditory associating the pronunciation of a word or sound with a situation in which one has heard it (8) 3.56 1.03 4. using phonetic symbols or one’s own code (5) 3.19 1.40 b. reviewing well 1.regular revisions of the pronunciation of new words (12) 3.08 0.96 c. employing action 1. using mechanical techniques, e.g. using flash cards (13) 1.57 1.10 2. making notes: creating posters, vocabulary lists with transcription, highlighting, etc. (4) 2.40 1.30 d. rote learning 1. repeating a word (aloud or silently) several times over (9) 4.13 1.02 2. listening to a recorded list of words several times over to memorise their pronunciation (10) 1.70 1.13 the influence of pronunciation learning strategies on mastering english vowels 397 the group of cognitive strategies and tactics was the most numerous in the questionnaire (see table 2). in order to practice pronunciation in a formal way, the students usually used such tactics as reading aloud paying attention to pronunciation (m = 4.0), talking to oneself in the target language (m = 4.0), doing transcription exercises (m = 3.75), and listening to recordings to identify the pronunciation of new words (m = 3.52). they sometimes repeated after target language speakers (m = 3.29), did phonetic drills (m = 3.24) and recited and/or acted out dialogues (m = 2.97). rarely did they practice articulation through whispering (m = 2.52) or completing various phonetic exercises (m = 2.40). equally seldom did they repeat simultaneously with native speakers (m = 2.40) imitating their mouth movements (m = 2.11), voice and gestures (m = 1.84). the least-often-used tactics in formal pronunciation practice consisted of exercising speech organs (m = 1.48) and observing them in the mirror (m = 1.83). in order to practice pronunciation in a naturalistic way, the students usually used media (m = 3.78) and sometimes talked to foreigners in the target language (m = 2.96). in order to receive and send messages on pronunciation, the students often looked up the pronunciation of new words in dictionaries, especially the electronic ones (m = 4.30), but they did not often look for information on phonetics and phonology in books or in the internet (m = 2.63). while analysing and reasoning, the students usually resorted to deductive reasoning concerned with forming and using pronunciation rules and hypotheses (m = 3.71). sometimes they resorted to contrastive analysis in that they compared english sounds with sounds existing in other languages (m = 2.92) and looked at mistakes made by target language native speakers who spoke the students’ mother tongue (m = 3.05), but they did not imitate these speakers to feel the differences between the languages (m = 1.97). while taking notes, the students said that they usually used phonetic symbols or their own code to write down the pronunciation of new words (m = 3.75), but rarely noted down pronunciation rules and information on phonetics and phonology (m = 2.19). table 2 direct pls – cognitive strategies cognitive strategies tactics (questionnaire item) m sd a. practising pronunciation 1. formally practising with sounds a) phonetic drills (14) 3.24 1.27 b) repeating after target language (tl) speakers (15) 3.29 1.20 c) repeating simultaneously with tl speakers (16) 2.40 1.21 d) repeating simultaneously with tl speakers, imitating their voice, gestures, etc. (17) 1.84 0.92 e) imitating mouth movements made by tl speakers (20) 2.11 1.23 f) listening to recordings to identify the pronunciation of new words (practising perception) (34) 3.52 1.08 katarzyna rokoszewska 398 g) reciting and/or acting out dialogues (25) 2.97 1.19 h) reading aloud paying attention to pronunciation (26) 4.00 1.06 i) whispering in order to “feel” articulation better (27) 2.52 1.23 j) exercising speech organs (22) 1.48 0.78 k) observing speech organs in the mirror when speaking the tl (21) 1.83 1.14 l) talking to oneself in the tl (24) 4.00 1.03 m) rehearsing (23) 3.08 1.38 n) completing various phonetic exercises (32) 2.40 0.96 o) doing transcription exercises (33) 3.75 1.02 2. practising naturalistically with a clear communicative aim a) using media (18) 3.78 1.04 b) speaking with foreigners in the tl (19) 2.96 1.25 b. receiving and sending messages on pronunciation 1. using resources a) checking the pronunciation of new words in dictionaries (28) 4.30 0.99 b) looking for information on phonetics and phonology in books and in the internet (29) 2.63 1.04 c. analysing and reasoning 1. reasoning deductively: forming and using pronunciation rules and testing hypotheses (30) 3.71 0.92 2. analysing contrastively a) comparing tl sounds with sounds existing in other languages (31) 2.92 1.21 b) imitating tl native speakers speaking the learner’s mother tongue in order to feel the differences between the languages (36) 1.92 1.00 c) analyzing mistakes made by tl native speakers while speaking the learner’s mother tongue (37) 3.05 1.34 d. creating structure for input and output taking notes a) using phonetic symbols or one’s own code to write down the pronunciation of new words (33) 3.75 1.02 b) noting down pronunciation rules and information on phonetics and phonology (35) 2.19 1.05 the results also show that when the students compensated for the lack of knowledge in the area of the pronunciation of the target language, they quite often used proximal articulation (m = 3.62; see table 3). sometimes they guessed the pronunciation of new words, for instance on the basis of spelling (m = 3.22). rarely did they avoid words whose pronunciation they did not know or used l1 pronunciation if the word in the l2 and l1 was spelled in a similar way (m = 1.90). table 3 direct pls – compensation strategies compensation strategies tactics (questionnaire item) m sd a. guessing intelligently 1. guessing the pronunciation of new words (e.g., on the basis of spelling) (38) 3.22 1.24 b. overcoming limitations in pronunciation 1. using l1 pronunciation if the word in the tl and l1 is spelled in a similar way (40) 1.90 1.00 2. using proximal articulation (41) 3.62 1.05 3. avoiding words whose pronunciation one does not know (39) 2.48 1.28 the influence of pronunciation learning strategies on mastering english vowels 399 in the group of metacognitive strategies (see table 4), the tactics most often used by the students included planning for a language task (m = 4.57), paying attention to pronunciation in general (m = 4.44), monitoring oneself (m = 4.41), looking for information on pronunciation learning (m = 4.02), organising one’s own learning (m = 3.89) and seeking practice opportunities (m = 3.70). the tactic used the least often was evaluating one’s own pronunciation on the basis of the recording (m = 1.87). other tactics involved setting shortand long-term goals (m = 3.25), revising theoretical knowledge on phonetics before doing a pronunciation task (m = 3.00), concentrating on a single phonetic feature (m = 2.87) and planning pronunciation learning by selecting materials, exercises and strategies (m = 2.68). table 4 indirect pls – metacognitive strategies metacognitive strategies tactics (questionnaire item) m sd a. centring one’s learning 1. revising theoretical knowledge on phonetics before doing a pronunciation task (47) 3.00 1.19 2. paying attention to pronunciation a) in general (directed attention) (43) 4.44 0.71 b) concentrating on a given phonetic feature (selective attention) (44) 2.87 1.30 b. arranging and planning one’s learning 1. searching for information on pronunciation learning (45) 4.02 0.83 2. organising learning (46) 3.89 1.08 3. setting shortand long-term goals (49) 3.25 1.31 4. planning for a language task (50) 4.57 0.80 5. seeking practice opportunities (42) 3.70 1.06 6. planning pronunciation learning (selecting materials, exercises, strategies, etc.) (48) 2.68 1.37 c. evaluating one’s learning 1. self-monitoring (51) 4.41 0.69 2. self-evaluation (recording oneself to evaluate one’s pronunciation) (52) 1.87 1.08 in the group of affective strategies (see table 5), the students quite often used relaxation techniques such as breathing, laughter and music (m = 3.89), and encouraged themselves to speak in the target language (m = 3.87), to work on their pronunciation (m = 3.65) as well as maintain a sense of humour about their own mispronunciations (m = 3.68). in addition, the students sometimes used the tactic of listening to one’s body (m = 3.27). they rarely analysed their own feelings about learning pronunciation (m = 2.48) or discussed them with others (m = 2.03). equally seldom did they reward themselves for success or effort put in learning pronunciation (m = 2.32). katarzyna rokoszewska 400 table 5 indirect pls – affective strategies affective strategies tactics (questionnaire item) m sd a. reducing your anxiety 1.using relaxation techniques, e.g., breathing, laughter, and music (53) 3.89 1.21 b. encouraging yourself 1. encouraging oneself to work on one’s pronunciation (55) 3.65 1.12 2. encouraging oneself to speak in the tl (54) 3.87 1.02 3. rewarding oneself for success or effort put in pronunciation learning (56) 2.32 1.18 c. taking one’s emotional temperature 1. listening to one’s body (57) 3.27 1.44 2. having a sense of humour about one’s mispronunciations (58) 3.68 1.19 3. analysing one’s feelings connected with pronunciation learning (59) 2.48 1.06 4. discussing feelings with others (60) 2.03 1.23 finally, as far as the group of social strategies is concerned (see table 6), the students indicated that they quite often asked others for help (m = 3.83) and that they sometimes asked for correction (m = 3.33), cooperated with others (m = 3.33) or were involved in peer tutoring (m = 3.19). table 6 indirect pls – social strategies social strategies tactics (questionnaire item) m sd a. asking questions 1. asking for help (62) 3.83 1.19 2. asking for correction (61) 3.33 1.40 b. cooperating with others 1. cooperating with peers and/ or advanced users of the tl (63) 3.33 1.28 2. peer tutoring (64) 3.19 1.12 in general, the students used pls at the level of 60.81% (see table 7 and figure 1). the mean frequency of use was equal to 3.04, which indicates that on average they used the strategies only sometimes. standard deviation was equal to 0.40, which means that the use of pls was rather homogenous in the sample. what is more, the students made a greater use of indirect than direct pls. more specifically, they used the former at the level of 67.44%, whereas the latter at the level of 57.09%. the mean frequency of use for the former was 3.37, whereas for the latter it was 2.85. still, it is important to point out that the number of direct strategies measured by the questionnaire was higher than the number of the indirect ones. in addition, sds in the two strategy groups were low, which indicates that the students’ use of the strategies was rather similar. the influence of pronunciation learning strategies on mastering english vowels 401 table 7 the use of pls data direct indirect total percentage 57.09 67.44 60.81 mean frequency of use 2.85 3.37 3.04 sd 0.38 0.52 0.40 figure 1 the use of pls as far as direct pls are concerned (see table 8 and figure 2), the students used the three strategy subgroups at a similar level, that is, memory strategies at the 55.21% level, cognitive strategies at 58.27% and compensation strategies at 56.11%. however, the number of cognitive tactics measured by the questionnaire was higher than the number of tactics in the other groups. what is more, the mean frequency of use for memory strategies was equal to 2.76, for cognitive strategies to 2.91 and for compensation strategies to 2.81. bearing in mind that on the likert-type scale used in the questionnaire in the present study 2 stands for rarely and 3 for sometimes, these results do not indicate regular and frequent but rather occasional use of the three direct strategy groups. in addition, sds were low for all three strategy groups, which means that their use was rather similar among the students involved in the present study. table 8 the use of direct pls data memory cognitive compensation total percentage 55.21 58.27 56.11 57.09 mean frequency of use 2.76 2.91 2.81 2.85 sd 0.53 0.48 0.71 0.38 0,00 20,00 40,00 60,00 80,00 100,00 direct indirect total katarzyna rokoszewska 402 figure 2 the use of direct pls as far as indirect pls are concerned (see table 9 and figure 3), the students made a greater use of metacognitive strategies (70.39%) than of affective (62.98%) and social (68.25%) strategies. it is important to notice that in general the use of metacognitive strategies was the highest of all the direct and indirect groups of pls. however, as already mentioned, the number of cognitive tactics measured in the questionnaire was higher than the number of metacognitive tactics. the mean frequency of use for metacognitive strategies equalled 3.52, for affective strategies – 3.15 and for social strategies – 3.41. these results show that the use of indirect strategies was more frequent than the use of direct strategies. however, bearing in mind that on the likert-type scale, 3 stands for sometimes while 4 for usually, the use of these strategies is still occasional rather than regular. in addition, the values of sds indicate a rather homogenous use of these strategy groups. table 9 the use of indirect pls data metacognitive affective social total percentage 70.39 62.98 68.25 67.44 mean frequency of use 3.52 3.15 3.41 3.37 sd 0.61 0.62 0.90 0.52 figure 3 the use of indirect pronunciation strategies 0,00 20,00 40,00 60,00 80,00 100,00 memory cognitive compensatory 0,00 20,00 40,00 60,00 80,00 100,00 metacognitive affective social the influence of pronunciation learning strategies on mastering english vowels 403 the results of the pronunciation test the results of the pronunciation test show that on average the students obtained 75.25 points out of the total of 80, that is, 94.07%, on the first part of the test, which measured the perception of english monophthongs and diphthongs (see table 10 and figure 4). more specifically, for the first task, which required the students to identify the monophthongs and diphthongs, the students scored 17.46 out of 19 points, that is, 91.90%. for the second task, which involved the recognition of identical pairs, the students scored 39.10 out of 41 points, that is, 95.35%. for the third task, which was based on the recognition of minimal pair sentences, the students obtained 18.70 out of 20 points, that is, 93.49%. standard deviations for single tasks varied from 1.23 to 2.05, which indicates homogenous group performance. however, sd for the whole perception test was higher, namely 3.09, which does indicate some minor differences among the subjects’ general performance. the results of the second part of the test, which measured the production of english monophthongs and diphthongs, show that on average the students obtained 118.94 points out of the total of 152, that is, 78.25%. for the first task, which consisted of the production of single pure vowels and diphthongs, the students were given 16.08 out of 19 points, that is, 84.63%. for the second task, which entailed reading minimal pair words, the students obtained 13.81 out of 20 points, that is, 76.72%. for the third task, which involved reading the text, the students scored 89.05 out of 115 points, that is, 77.43%. standard deviations were rather low for the first and second task. however, sds for the third task and for the whole production part of the test was high, namely 6.24 and 8.57 respectively, which means that some considerable differences among the subjects’ performance were observed. on average the students obtained 194.19 out of 232 points on the whole pronunciation test, which yields the general result of 83.70%. the median was equal to 194 while the lowest score was equal to 174 and the highest to 215. standard deviation for the whole pronunciation test was equal to 9.37, which indicates some substantial variations in the students’ performance on the test. table 10 the results of the pronunciation test data vowel perception vowel production total task 1 task 2 task 3 total task 1 task 2 task 3 total % 91.90 95.35 93.49 94.07 84.63 76.72 77.43 78.25 83.70 m 17.46 39.10 18.70 75.25 16.08 13.81 89.05 118.94 194.19 mdn 18 40 19 76 17 14 89 118 194 low-high 14-19 33-41 14-20 67-80 11-19 7-18 73-103 103-136 173-215 sd 1.78 2.05 1.23 3.09 2.02 2.75 6.24 8.57 9.37 katarzyna rokoszewska 404 figure 4 the results of the pronunciation test the relationship between strategy use and pronunciation the correlation coefficient (see table 11) between the students’ use of pls and their results on the pronunciation test was calculated on the basis of spearman’s rho for one-tailed hypothesis with the level of significance equal to p < .05. the results show that the correlation coefficient between pls and the perception of english vowels and diphthongs is equal to .06, and for task 1 it is equal to .13, for task 2 it is -.04 and for task 3 it is .01. the correlation coefficient between direct pls and the perception of english vowels and diphthongs is equal to .06 while the correlation between indirect pls and the perception of english pure vowels and diphthongs is equal to .05. these results show correlation coefficients close to 0 and as such do not provide a sound basis for the rejection of the first zero hypothesis (h01), which states that there is no systematic relationship between the students’ use of pls and their perception of english vowels and diphthongs. furthermore, the correlation coefficient between pls and the production of english vowels and diphthongs is equal to .68, and for task 1 it is .40, for task to it is .48 and for task 3 it is .59. in addition, the correlation coefficient between direct pls and the production of english monophthongs and diphthongs is equal to .63, while the correlation between indirect pls and the production of english vowels and diphthongs is equal to .62. these results are statistically significant and show a positive but weak correlation between the two variables. thus, on the basis of these results the second zero hypothesis 91.90 95.35 93.49 94.07 84.63 76.72 77.43 78.25 83.70 0,00 10,00 20,00 30,00 40,00 50,00 60,00 70,00 80,00 90,00 100,00 task 1 task 2 task 3 total task 1 task 2 task 3 total perception production total the influence of pronunciation learning strategies on mastering english vowels 405 (h02) may be rejected in favour of the alternative hypothesis (ha2a), which states that there exists a significant positive relationship between the students’ use of pls and their production of english vowels and diphthongs. it is important to add that in spite of the fact that the correlation coefficient for the perception part of the test is close to zero, the correlation for the whole test is positive. more specifically, the correlation coefficient for pls and the scores on the pronunciation test equals .64, that for direct strategies and the test equals .63, and that for indirect strategies amounts to .62. table 11 correlations of strategies and pronunciation strategies pronunciation test vowel perception vowel production total task 1 task 2 task 3 total task 1 task 2 task 3 total pls .13 -.04 .01 .06 .40* .48* .59* .68* .64* direct pls .06 .63* .63* indirect pls .05 .62* .62* *p < .05 discussion firstly, the results of the study indicate that the first-year students of the english department use pls rather occasionally. they use more of the indirect strategies than direct ones. in the group of direct strategies, the use of cognitive strategies is the highest, whereas in the group of indirect strategies, the use of metacognitive strategies is the highest. however, as far as tactics are concerned, cognitive tactics measured by the questionnaire outnumber the metacognitive ones. the fact that the students use pls only sometimes is hardly surprising since most students did not learn pronunciation in a formal way prior to the study and did not receive any strategy training. it seems that the students rely to a great extent on some cognitive tactics, such as reading aloud, phonetic drills and transcription exercises, which were indirectly taught through different formal activities during their classes. high use of these tactics contrasts sharply with low use of tactics for naturalistic practice, especially talking to foreigners. this indicates that the students are rather dependent on the teacher and that they may not be aware of the fact that formal classroom practice is not sufficient to succeed in learning not only pronunciation but any other aspect of the target language as well. as far as the affective factors are concerned, it seems that the students try to reduce their anxiety, encourage themselves and use some sense of humour, but they do not analyse their feelings or share them with others. they do not cooperate much with others, either. it is very imporkatarzyna rokoszewska 406 tant to add that the students do not pay much attention to setting their own reasonable goals in learning pronunciation. knowing what one would like to achieve, even if it is not authentic pronunciation, is a very important element of motivation, which in turn is a powerful factor in learning pronunciation. secondly, the study reveals that the students obtained good results on the test measuring the perception of english monophthongs and diphthongs but no systematic relationship between pls and such perception has been found. high scores on the perception test irrespective of the average use of pls might be attributed to different factors. the test measuring the perception of english monophthongs and diphthongs used in the present study was based on an intermediate pronunciation course. the test focused on single sounds and on one-syllable words used in minimal pair words and minimal pair sentences. it was congruent with the content of the course but it might not have fully measured the learners’ ability to perceive english vowels. in other words, a test based on more advanced language might have yielded different results. still, it may also be the case that the perception of english vowels is not so troublesome for polish learners of english. furthermore, the instrument used to measure pls includes fewer strategies which refer to perception than those related to production. hence, despite sufficient reliability of the instrument in the present study, further calibration of this test might help to keep the balance between the strategies responsible for perception and those responsible for production. in addition, the use of the questionnaire in any study involves the so called self-flattery syndrome which accounts for the fact that the respondents may provide data which present them in a favourable way but which may not be fully accurate. one way of dealing with this problem is reducing the time limit for filling in the questionnaire. in the present study, the students did the questionnaire in around 15 minutes. thirdly, the study shows that the students obtained quite good results on the test measuring the production of english monophthongs and diphthongs but their performance was not homogenous. the study has also revealed a positive relationship between pls and the production of english vowels. the relationship is significant but weak, which indicates that other important factors, besides pls, influence the complex process of mastering target language pronunciation. furthermore, measuring the production of english vowels is a challenging task. although in the present study the students’ performance was assessed by quite an experienced pronunciation teacher and a native speaker, a more accurate assessment would have been possible if a more advanced computer-based analysis used in the field of acoustic phonetics had been conducted. still, it must be noticed that on everyday basis teachers assess their students’ pronunciation on their own in the classroom and not the influence of pronunciation learning strategies on mastering english vowels 407 in a computer laboratory. it is also important to add that all the production tasks included in the pronunciation test were highly controlled and as such did not tap the students’ pronunciation in authentic communication. this issue requires further study planned as the second part of the research project of which the present study is a part. in general, the study suggests that the students might benefit from strategy-based instruction as part of their pronunciation course. however, for the reasons discussed above it must be clearly stated that the role of pls in learning english vowels requires further detailed study and attention. katarzyna rokoszewska 408 references baker, a. (2006). ship or sheep? an intermediate pronunciation course. cambridge: cambridge university press. bukowski, d. (2004). on the training of metacognitive and socio-affective strategies – some implications for teaching and learning english phonetics. in w. sobkowiak & e. waniek-klimczak (eds.), dydaktyka fonetyki j zyka obcego w polsce (pp. 20-27). konin: wydawnictwo pa stwowej wy szej szko y zawodowej w koninie. ca ka, a. (2011). pronunciation learning strategies – identification and classification. in m. pawlak, e. waniek-klimczak, & j. majer (eds.), speaking and instructed foreign language acquisition (pp. 149-168). clevedon: multilingual matters. cohen, a., & macaro, e. (eds.). (2007). language learner strategies. oxford: oxford university press. dro dzia -szelest, k. (1997). language learning strategies in the process of acquiring a foreign language. pozna : motivex. eckstein, g. t. (2007). a correlation of pronunciation learning strategies with spontaneous english pronunciation of adult esl learners (ma thesis, brigham young university, provo, ut). retrieved from http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu /cdm/ref/collection/etd/id/1096 faerch, c., & kasper, g. (eds.). (1983). strategies in interlanguage communication. london: longman. kolb, d. a. (1984). experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. larsen-freeman, d., & long, m. (1991). an introduction to second language acquisition research. new york: longman. naiman, n., frohlich, m., stern h., & todesco, a. (1978). the good language learner: a report. ontario: ontario institute for studies in education. o’malley, j. m., chamot, a. u., stewner-manzanares, g., kupper, l., & russo. r. p. (1985). learning strategies used by beginning and intermediate students. language learning, 35(1), 21-46. osborne, a. (2003). pronunciation strategies of advanced esol learners. iral 41, 131-143. oxford, r. (1990). language learning strategies: what every teacher should know. new york: newbury house. oxford, r., lee, k. r., & park, g. (2007). l2 grammar strategies: the second cinderella and beyond. in a. cohen & e. macaro (eds.), language learner strategies (pp. 117-140). oxford: oxford university press. pawlak, m. (2006). on the use of pronunciation learning strategies by polish foreign language learners. in w. sobkowiak & e. waniek-klimczak (eds.), the influence of pronunciation learning strategies on mastering english vowels 409 dydaktyka fonetyki j zyka obcego w polsce (pp. 121-135). konin: wydawnictwo pa stwowej wy szej szko y zawodowej w koninie. pawlak, m. (2008). another look at the use of pronunciation learning strategies: an advanced learner’s perspective. in e. waniek-klimczak (ed.). issues in accents of english (pp. 304-322). newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing. peterson, s. 2000. pronunciation learning strategies: a first look (ed 450 599, fl 026 618). retrieved from eric database. ponsonby, m. (1992). how now brown cow? a course in the pronunciation of english. hemel hempstead: prentice hall europe elt. rubin, j. (1975). what the “good language learner” can teach us. tesol quaterly, 9, 41-51. schmitt, n. (1997). vocabulary learning strategies. in n. schmitt & m. mccarthy (eds.), vocabulary description, acquisition and pedagogy (pp. 199-228). cambridge: cambridge university press. stern, h. (1975). what can we learn from the good language learner? canadian modern language review, 34, 304-318. varasarin, p. 2007. an action research study on pronunciation training, language learning strategies and speaking confidence (doctoral dissertation, victoria university, melbourne). retrieved from http://vuir.vu.edu.au/15513/1/songprakun.pdf wrembel, m. (2008). in search of effective strategies for l2 pronunciation teaching and learning. in m. pawlak (ed.), investigating english language learning and teaching (pp. 179-196). pozna : faculty of pedagogy and fine arts in kalisz, adam mickiewicz university in pozna . katarzyna rokoszewska 410 appendix the pls questionnaire (ca ka, 2011, pp. 162-167) read the statements below and circle the response which indicates how often you use a given way of learning english pronunciation according to the following scale: 1 – never or almost never, 2 – rarely, 3 – sometimes, 4 – usually, 5 – always or almost always part a 1. in order to memorise the pronunciation of a given word i try to associate it with the pronunciation of a different word (in another language i know) or with some sounds (e.g. animals sounds, sounds of machines, devices). 1 2 3 4 5 2. i memorise the pronunciation of a given word by associating it with an image or a picture (in mind or in actual drawing). 1 2 3 4 5 3. i group words that sound similar in order to memorise their pronunciation. 1 2 3 4 5 4. i use visual aids to memorise the pronunciation of new words (e.g. posters with transcription of new words, and marking phonetic symbols with various colours). 1 2 3 4 5 5. in order to memorise the pronunciation of a given word i use phonetic symbols or my own code to write down its pronunciation. 1 2 3 4 5 6. i memorise the pronunciation of a given word by visualizing its transcription. 1 2 3 4 5 7. i memorise the pronunciation of new words by remembering the location of their transcription on the page, board etc. 1 2 3 4 5 8. i memorise the pronunciation of new words when i associate them with a situation in which i have heard them. 1 2 3 4 5 9. i repeat a word several times over (aloud or in my mouth) to memorise its pronunciation. 1 2 3 4 5 10. i record words whose pronunciation i want to memorise and listen to the recording several times over. 1 2 3 4 5 11. i memorise the pronunciation of a given word by putting it in a context (a sentence, a story, a rhyme, etc.) 1 2 3 4 5 12. i review the pronunciation of recently learnt words regularly. 1 2 3 4 5 13. i use flash cards which i put from ‘i want to learn’ pile to ‘i haven’t learnt’ pile. 1 2 3 4 5 the influence of pronunciation learning strategies on mastering english vowels 411 part b 14. i practise pronunciation by repeating sounds, words, sentences, etc., several times in the same way or in different ways (changing speed, dividing words into syllables, etc.) 1 2 3 4 5 15. i repeat sounds, words, sentences, etc., after english speakers. 1 2 3 4 5 16. i repeat sounds, words, sentences, etc., simultaneously with english speakers. 1 2 3 4 5 17. i repeat sounds, words, sentences, etc., simultaneously with english speakers, imitating their gestures and facial expressions. 1 2 3 4 5 18. i listen to the radio and/ or watch tv in english. 1 2 3 4 5 19. i speak to foreigners in english. 1 2 3 4 5 20. i imitate mouth movements made by english speakers. 1 2 3 4 5 21. i observe the movements of articulators in the mirror when speaking english. 1 2 3 4 5 22. i do exercises recommended by speech therapists in order to make my tongue, lips and jaw more flexible. 1 2 3 4 5 23. before i say something aloud, i practise saying a given word, sentence, etc., in my mind. 1 2 3 4 5 24. i practise my pronunciation by speaking to myself in english. 1 2 3 4 5 25. i practise my pronunciation by reciting texts and/ or acting out dialogues. 1 2 3 4 5 26. i practise reading aloud, paying particular attention to my pronunciation. 1 2 3 4 5 27. i practise whispering to focus on the feeling of articulation. 1 2 3 4 5 28. i look up the pronunciation of unknown words in a dictionary. 1 2 3 4 5 29. i search for information on phonetics and phonology in books, on the internet, etc. 1 2 3 4 5 30. i try to identify and use pronunciation rules. 1 2 3 4 5 31. i analyse the differences between english pronunciation and the pronunciation of other languages. 1 2 3 4 5 32. i complete various phonetic exercises which i find in course-books, computer programs and on internet sites. 1 2 3 4 5 katarzyna rokoszewska 412 33. i use phonetic symbols. 1 2 3 4 5 34. i listen to recordings several times in order to identify the pronunciation of unknown words (perception practice). 1 2 3 4 5 35. i make notes on interesting phonetic problems. 1 2 3 4 5 36. i imitate native speakers of english, speaking polish in order to feel the difference between the two languages better. 1 2 3 4 5 37. i pay attention to pronunciation errors made by native speakers of english speaking polish. 1 2 3 4 5 part c 38. if i do not know how to pronounce a given word, i guess its pronunciation. 1 2 3 4 5 39. if i do not know how to pronounce a given word, i avoid using it. 1 2 3 4 5 40. if i do not know how to pronounce a given word and its spelling is similar to a polish word, i use polish pronunciation hoping that i will be understood. 1 2 3 4 5 41. if i cannot produce a given english sound, i produce a sound as similar to it as possible. 1 2 3 4 5 part d 42. i try to find as many different ways of practising my pronunciation as i can. 1 2 3 4 5 43. i pay attention to pronunciation when someone is speaking english. 1 2 3 4 5 44. i choose a phonetic problem (e.g. a given sound, word stress, intonation, etc.) and pay attention to it when someone is speaking english. 1 2 3 4 5 45. i try to find out how to improve my pronunciation. 1 2 3 4 5 46. i care for appropriate learning conditions so that my work on pronunciation is as efficient as possible. 1 2 3 4 5 47. before practising a given pronunciation feature i revise appropriate theoretical knowledge. 1 2 3 4 5 48. i plan pronunciation learning – i set the time of learning, select materials, strategies, etc. 1 2 3 4 5 49. i have clear goals for improving my pronunciation. 1 2 3 4 5 50. when i prepare a talk in english, i look up the pronunciation of new words in a 1 2 3 4 5 the influence of pronunciation learning strategies on mastering english vowels 413 dictionary and practise their pronunciation. 51. i notice my pronunciation problems and i try to overcome them. 1 2 3 4 5 52. i evaluate my progress in pronunciation by recording myself and comparing my pronunciation to the pronunciation of native speakers. 1 2 3 4 5 part e 53. i try to relax whenever i feel afraid of reading aloud or speaking in english. 1 2 3 4 5 54. i encourage myself to speak english even when i am afraid that my pronunciation is not good. 1 2 3 4 5 55. i encourage myself to work on pronunciation even when i think that something is too difficult for me or when i do not feel like learning. 1 2 3 4 5 56. i give myself a reward or treat when i have worked hard on pronunciation. 1 2 3 4 5 57. i notice if i am tense or nervous when i am learning english pronunciation or speaking english and i try to relax. 1 2 3 4 5 58. i use a sense of humour about my mispronunciations. 1 2 3 4 5 59. i analyse my feelings connected with learning pronunciation. 1 2 3 4 5 60. i talk to someone else about how i feel when i am learning pronunciation. 1 2 3 4 5 part f 61. i ask english speakers to correct my pronunciation when i speak. 1 2 3 4 5 62. i ask others for help if i do not know how to pronounce a given sound or word. 1 2 3 4 5 63. i learn pronunciation with other students, friends. 1 2 3 4 5 64. i help others in learning pronunciation. 1 2 3 4 5 other 65. i use other way(s) of learning pronunciation (explain what you do) 1 2 3 4 5 465 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (3). 2014. 465-484 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.3.5 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl starting age and other influential factors: insights from learner interviews carmen muñoz university of barcelona, spain munoz@ub.edu abstract the present study uses oral interviews with foreign language learners in search of influential factors in their language learning histories. the sample for the study was drawn from a larger sample of intermediate/advanced learners of english as a foreign language with a minimum of 10 years of exposure/instruction. the sample includes 6 early learners (range of starting age: 3.2-6.5) and 6 late learners (starting age: 11+). half of them in each group were among those with the highest scores on two english language tests in the larger sample and half among those with the lowest scores on those same tests. a qualitative analysis of the interviews of these learners yields insights into their experience of foreign language learning and the role played in it by starting age and other significant factors, such as motivation and intensive contact with the language. keywords: starting age, individual differences, interviews, language learning histories, motivation 1. introduction after decades of research focusing on starting age as the sole main determinant of success in second language (l2) learning, age is increasingly seen as a complex variable that holds intricate interactions with a large number of other factors (see muñoz & singleton, 2011). this complex nature of age distinguishes it carmen muñoz 466 from other learner characteristics. for example, ellis (2004, p. 529) excludes age from his grouping of individual differences into abilities (e.g., aptitude), propensities (e.g., motivation), cognitions (e.g., beliefs), and actions (e.g., learning strategies). according to ellis, age does not belong to any of these categories but rather potentially affects all of them as do other factors such as previous learning experiences and the learning situation. in addition, due to these multiple associations that age holds with other factors its effects cannot be isolated from the effects of other (often hidden) variables. an illustration is flege’s (2009, p. 184) discussion of starting age in l2 phonology acquisition as a “macrovariable” that is associated with the state of neurological and cognitive development as well as the state of development of l1 phonetic category representations when l2 learning begins, l1 proficiency, language dominance, frequency of l2/l1 use, and kind of l2 input (native speaker vs. foreign accented). in the area of l2 speech acquisition as well, moyer (2009) highlights the importance of quantity and quality of input and the multiple related influences between starting age, cognitive, social and psychological factors. the present study takes the view that a multi-factor approach can better account for learners’ long-term outcomes than an approach solely focusing on starting age. 2. background starting age of learning may be defined as the age at which significant exposure to the target language begins (birdsong, 2006), and a common proxy has been age of immigration in naturalistic learning studies. this is the most relevant variable for maturational constraints studies for which starting age is the determining factor of ultimate attainment. in foreign language learning studies, starting age of learning is usually considered the age at which instruction begins, although learners may not have access to significant exposure until much later (for example, through an intensive exposure experience in-country or abroad). on the other hand, learners’ chronological age may differ widely in studies of longterm or ultimate attainment, and it may become confounded with cognitive factors, education and other background variables (bialystok & hakuta, 1999; birdsong, 2006; hakuta, bialystok, & wiley, 2003; stevens, 2006). research on the impact of age in naturalistic language learning settings has consistently shown an older learners’ short-term advantage (or initial faster learning rate) but a younger learners’ long-term advantage (or higher ultimate attainment) (krashen, long, & scarcella, 1979). in contrast with such findings, research in the last decade in a foreign language context has shown that early starting age and other influential factors: insights from learner interviews 467 starters do not outperform late starters when the amount of instruction or exposure is controlled for, even after many years of study. rather, in such situations, older school learners are observed to outperform younger school learners after the same number of hours of instruction (see the collection of studies in garcía-mayo & garcía-lecumberri, 2003; muñoz, 2006a). the older starters’ rate superiority has been at least partly attributed to the fact that their higher cognitive abilities give them an advantage at explicit learning (muñoz, 2006b, 2008). on the other hand, it has been argued that younger starters do not benefit from their potential superiority at implicit learning in input-limited foreign language programmes because such a context does not provide young learners with the massive amounts of exposure to the language needed for implicit learning (dekeyser, 2000; muñoz, 2006b, 2008). because the amount of exposure or hours of instruction in a foreign language context is so low compared to a naturalistic language context, these findings could be interpreted as referring to rate (short term), rather than to ultimate attainment (long term). only a few recent studies have looked at results in the long term in a foreign language setting and they have shown that starting age is not necessarily associated with superior long-term outcomes either, in contrast to the findings above from naturalistic settings (al-thubaiti, 2010; harada, 2014; muñoz, 2011, 2014; but see larson-hall, 2008). moreover, two studies by muñoz (2011, 2014) have shown that several measures of input (e.g., cumulative hours of instruction, hours in stays abroad or frequency of contact with target language) are significantly associated with foreign language learners’ proficiency and oral performance. similar results were obtained by harada (2014) for l2 speech learning. the significance of intensive input for foreign language learners was also observed in a study by muñoz (2012) that focused on the identification of a turning point in their process of language learning by learners themselves. on the basis of those findings, it may be argued that age effects are mediated by learning context and that starting age may play a less influential role in input-limited foreign language settings than in naturalistic settings. in such a case the exploration of the factors that have a prominent role and their interaction with age may shed more light on foreign language learning and on l2 learning, generally. the natural candidate factors to explore are contextual and socio-affective factors that have already been highlighted by research carried out in naturalistic settings with a multi-factor perspective (for a review see muñoz & singleton, 2011). the contextual factors found to be significant include amounts and intensity of input (e.g., jia & aaronson, 2003), high-quality input (e.g., flege & liu, 2001; winitz, gillespie, & starcev, 1995), range of contexts of l2 use (e.g., moyer, 2004), and co-habitation with native speakers (e.g., kinsella & singleton, 2014; marinova-todd, 2003; muñoz & singleton, 2007). socio-affective factors found to carmen muñoz 468 be significant include, among others, strong intrinsic motivation (see the review in moyer, 2014), sense of belonging to the target language community (e.g., kinsella & singleton, 2014), and engagement with the target language (e.g., kinsella & singleton, 2014; moyer, 2004; muñoz & singleton, 2007). the study of foreign accent by moyer (2004) is a good illustration of this line of research. on the basis of an examination of 20 late learners of german, moyer (2004, p. 140) argued that the socio-cultural context inherently brings to bear multiple influences on the learning process that coincide with age. specifically, early exposure predisposes the learner to a greater variety of contact sources (formal and informal, personal and professional domains) as well as being associated with greater consistency and frequency of personal contact. all of this results in more opportunities to use the l2 and greater confidence and sense of self in the language, which ultimately lead to more practice opportunities and increased fluency in the language. another good illustration is the recent study by kinsella and singleton (2014), which examined how multiple factors impact on late learners of french. the study showed that there was no significant correlation between age of onset and achievement in french, and that three participants out of the 20 anglophone late learners scored within the native speaker range on two language tests. the results of a linguistic background questionnaire showed that a number of factors, including length of residence, self-rating of spoken french, frequency of contact with native french speakers and intention to reside in france, correlated positively with the language test results. in the case of the three most successful participants, kinsella and singleton highlighted their full immersion in the french language (they all had french spouses) and their engagement with the target language: they felt part of the french-speaking community and intended to reside permanently in france. the study by lahmann (2014) also shows the impact of experiential variables on l2 proficiency. lahmann analysed spontaneous speech from oral history interviews in english of 102 former german-l1 child refugees. specifically, lahmann examined the effects of age of onset or emigration and other chronological and socio-psychological variables on grammatical and lexical complexity, phonological accuracy (foreign accent), and fluency. informants’ average age at emigration was 12.15 and the average chronological age was 73.59. lahmann’s findings are that age of emigration had significant effects only on foreign accent, but with several exceptions (mainly in the us); foreign accent was also stronger in these informants if the spouse was german. on the other hand, it was chronological age that significantly affected fluency, which revealed aging effects. finally, whilst age of emigration did not have an effect on grammatical complexity and lexical complexity, level of education and gender did (participants with high starting age and other influential factors: insights from learner interviews 469 education and males had higher scores generally), which lahmann attributed to the important role played by l2 input and l2 use. the use of interviews in the studies above has allowed researchers to collect biographical information and insights into participants’ experience with language learning. in that respect, on the one hand they come close to the individual differences research tradition which uses interviews to identify differences among learners to establish why and how these differences may lead to differential linguistic attainment (dörnyei, 2005). on the other hand, these interviews also share some traits with the language experience interview, which is designed to elicit the student’s reflections on his or her own internalized experience of language learning (e.g., benson & lor, 1999). for example, in the study by polat (2013) the use of language experience interviews with beginner students revealed qualitative differences in how high performing and low performing students approached language learning. the present study uses oral interviews with foreign language learners in search of the factors that may be influential in their language learning histories.1 on the basis of evidence from recent research that starting age is not a strong determinant of foreign language learners’ achievement (muñoz, 2011, 2014), this study examines oral interviews with learners that vary in starting age and long-term attainment with the aim of identifying distinctive factors that may ultimately explain why some early and late language learners are more successful than others. 3. method 3.1. participants participants in this study were 12 undergraduate students majoring in english, 2 males and 10 females, who were drawn from a larger sample of intermediate/advanced learners with a minimum of 10 years of exposure/instruction in english. the majority of them (n = 10) were students at a university in catalonia (eight of them initially bilingual catalan-spanish, and two of them born in south america) and the two remaining were students at a different spanish university in a monolingual region of spain (one of them was born in russia). the two universities are publicly funded with socially mixed intake. their experience as learners of 1 the term language learning histories is used here in a broad sense as a synonym of language learning trajectories, process, or experience. see mercer (2013) for an insightful account of language learning histories as written autobiographic narratives used to facilitate insight into how learners conceptualise themselves, their experiences and the process of language learning. carmen muñoz 470 english was very diverse, having had many different teachers favouring different teaching methodologies during their long language learning trajectory. the sample includes six early learners who started english in early childhood (range of starting age: 3.2-6.5) and six learners who started english at puberty or later (range of starting age: 11.1-17.8). the latter is considered the late learner group in this study. early and late learners were also divided into highachievement and low-achievement groups on the basis of their very high or very low scores, on two proficiency tests (see table 1 below).2 3.2. instruments and procedure the language tests that were used to select students into the high achievement or low achievement groups, had been previously administered to the larger sample from which the participants had been drawn. they were a general proficiency test (the oxford placement test; henceforth opt) and a receptive vocabulary test (x-lex for up to 5,000 words, meara & milton 2003; and ylex for up to 10,000 words, meara & miralpeix, 2006; henceforth x_lex/y_lex). the criteria for selection into the high achievement groups (early or late start) were to score in the 75th percentile on both tests: a score of 51 or above on the opt (the highest score attainable on this test is 60), and 6,975 or above on the x_lex/y_lex (the highest score attainable is 10,000). the criteria for selection into the low achievement groups (early or late start) were to score in the 25th percentile on both tests: a score of 39 or below on the opt and 5,525 or below on the x_lex/y_lex. an online questionnaire was used to collect personal information (e.g., parents’ level of education) and quantifiable information concerning participants’ language learning experience (e.g., starting age, number of instructional hours in school, frequency of contact with l2 speakers, time spent abroad). an oral interview was used to elicit: (a) the participant’s language learning history (e.g., when s/he began to learn english; what other languages s/he learned, for how long, and a self-rating of proficiency for speaking, listening, reading and writing in each language), (b) the participant’s reflections on his or her experience of language learning (e.g., what factors were most influential in their learning of english, was there a turning point in the process), (c) the participant’s affect for languages and english in particular (e.g., how much they like languages), and (d) the participant’s reflections on what is most effective for learning a foreign language (e.g., what recommendations they might give to a friend who started to learn a foreign language). 2 although they had not all taken the same number of university courses it was found that participants with shorter and longer university experience were similarly distributed into the four groups. starting age and other influential factors: insights from learner interviews 471 the interviews were conducted by a team of five researchers who used the same interview guide (see the appendix for the interview questions selected for this study). however, the questions were open-ended and participants were encouraged to talk about other aspects of their language learning experience not directly probed by the interview questions; in those cases the interviewer could introduce new follow-up questions. the interview was a part of a larger set of instruments used to elicit linguistic and cognitive data and participants were given course credits for their participation. anonymity was assured to learners in their consent form and, consequently, names have been changed to protect learners’ identities. the interview was generally conducted in english, which is a common language of communication with students in their university departments. although the use of a nonnative language may have reduced the data quality at some points, it ensured the naturalness of the communication in that context. at the beginning of the interview the researcher explained that the purpose of the interview was to learn more about the students’ experience of language learning. participants often expressed their satisfaction with having been able to converse on topics that touch on their lives and experiences beyond the bounds of the classroom (mercer, 2013: 166); the interview did not include questions concerning their courses at the university so that participants were at ease. the oral interviews were orthographically transcribed using the clan subprogram of childes. the qualitative software n-vivo 10 was used in the analysis of the interviews and the codes were predetermined by interview questions that were the foci of the study (e.g., influential factors in participants’ language learning process). each participant’s response to the same question was compared side by side for similarities within each of the four groups. these responses were later compared across groups to find further similarities or differences. 4. results 4.1. participants’ characteristics table 1 displays the characteristics of the learners: gender (m = male, f = female), starting age or age of onset (ao) and chronological age or age at testing (at). the next column reflects the participants’ self-rating of proficiency in their different languages after averages have been calculated of the scores for listening, speaking, reading and writing (from 0 to 10) in each language; the number of languages appears next to the score. the two right-most columns show participants’ scores on the general proficiency test and the receptive vocabulary test. carmen muñoz 472 as seen above, starting age and scores on the two language tests are the participants’ grouping variables: early start and high achievement (eh); late start and high achievement (lh); early start and low achievement (el); and late start and low achievement (ll). the high achievers’ scores on the opt ranged between 53 and 57 and the low achievers’ scores between 26 and 39. the high achievers’ range of scores on the x_lex/y_lex was between 6975 and 8500, and the low achievers’ range was between 3350 and 5500. table 1 participants’ characteristics code gender ao at self-rating / no. of languages opt x_lex/y_lex early & high (eh) ester f 5.3 21.8 8.8/5 54 8500 enric m 4.1 20.6 8.6/5 54 8400 emma f 3.2 18.7 * 53 6975 early & low (el) elena f 5.2 18.7 6.4/4 31 5000 elisenda f 6.2 24.7 7.5/4 39 4600 eleonor f 6.5 21.5 6.5/3 26 3350 late & high (lh) laia f 11.8 41.1 8.1/6 57 7350 lorena m 13.1 43.4 8.5/4 53 8100 llorenç m 17.8 47.1 8.7/4 53 8250 late & low (ll) lola f 11.6 29.1 6.6/4 38 5500 luisa f 15.5 28.1 6.6/5 38 3400 lidiya f 11.1 27.7 6.6/4 39 5000 * not available 4.2. group and individual profiles in this section group and individual profiles of the participants are portrayed in the order eh, el, lh and ll. first of all, the analysis is presented of the participants’ reflections on their experience of language learning based on their interview answers concerning the factors that were most influential in their learning of english and the existence or not of a turning point in the process; then the analysis of the participants’ answers to the question of how much they like languages; and finally the analysis of the participants’ reflections on what is most effective for learning a foreign language, based on their recommendations to a friend who started to learn a foreign language. 4.2.1. the early start and high achievement group (eh) the three participants in the eh group are in their early twenties or younger. they have an advanced level of english and are all rather balanced bilingual in starting age and other influential factors: insights from learner interviews 473 catalan and spanish (except for emma, who declares to be catalan dominant). their self-ratings of their languages are very high, and the language repertoire of ester includes chinese and german. these participants are quite homogeneous in some of their answers. because they all started at a very early age it was their parents’ decision to enrol them in private language schools to learn english (emma and enric mention that one of their parents is a teacher); hence parents have been an influential factor: my parents involved me in a language school when i was seven, because i think for me that was the key moment from all my learning experience, because if i had stayed at school i think i wouldn’t have improved as much. (ester) teachers are mentioned by emma, but their influence comes at a later time: “i thought next year i’m going to give up english, but eventually when i was twelve i realized english was important and i came to love it, maybe because of the teachers too.” emma spent some weeks in england every summer with her mother, an english teacher, since she was 3, but it is not until adolescence that her experience abroad made a difference in terms of listening and speaking skills. ester spent a month in an english-speaking country when she was 16 and then she gained self-confidence: i had more confidence in myself in speaking the language because i didn’t have that much practice, because at the language school it came to the point in which it was all grammar so we didn’t actually communicate, so i needed to go abroad to be able to practice. (ester) enric perceived a turning point in his learning history when english became an “obsession” and he exposed himself to english through audio and written materials and studied with the intention to pass a difficult exam. the three participants in this group love (not just like) learning languages: “i have enjoyed it (learning languages) very much. it’s my passion. i love everything related to languages” (enric). their recommendations to a friend who just started learning a foreign language are also similar. they advise the fictitious friend to maximize the contact with the target language, either abroad (after reaching a basic level before departure is emma’s advice), watching films and having a linguistic exchange partner (ester’s advice); only enric, the male participant, recommends enrolling in an academically demanding language school. carmen muñoz 474 4.2.2. the early start and low achievement group (el) the participants in this group started learning english in early childhood as well, but they have reached a comparatively poor achievement level. they are in their early twenties or younger. on the basis of their self-ratings, elena appears as being slightly dominant in spanish and elisenda appears as catalan dominant. eleonor belongs to the initially monolingual sample (from outside catalonia). their self-ratings of languages are slightly lower than those of the previous group and the language repertoire of these learners, in addition to their l1s and english, includes only romance languages (french and italian). their reflections concerning influential factors in their english language learning experience indicate that they are a more diverse group than the high achievement group above. elisenda mentions her older sister who encouraged her to go to ireland and supported her emotionally while she was there as well as one of her teachers at high school. for elena the most important factor is her own motivation to travel and visit foreign countries. for eleonor, travelling abroad and watching undubbed movies were crucial in her english language improvement. eleonor had not been abroad to study english and did not identify a turning point in her trajectory, either. elena and elisenda had been abroad in ireland for a summer course and stayed with a family, but only elisenda identified the summer abroad in ireland, when she was 14, as a turning point. before that time she failed english exams at school and hated english. willingness to communicate with an english-speaking friend was a turning point in her relation to english: because i spent a lot of time with a girl that was the same age as my age and she tried to explain me things and i tried to communicate with her . . . when i finally could explain what i wanted then i got things you know it was amazing because i then realized that it’s real important to communicate to have the ability to communicate with other people. feelings towards languages are also more varied than those of the eh group, and sometimes not all languages are equally liked. elisenda hated english when she was a child, as we saw above. eleonor does not like learning languages in general: she has tried german, french and italian and has not liked them. she says she likes english because many people speak it and it is an important language. elena does not directly answer the question of whether she likes learning languages (affect) and instead she refers to easiness and cultural interest. their recommendations to a friend who just started learning a foreign language highlight exposure and motivation together with hard work. the three participants recommend exposure to lots of authentic input (watching movies, listening to songs, speaking with native speakers, travelling abroad); eleonor starting age and other influential factors: insights from learner interviews 475 recommends writing a lot of essays, too. elena speaks of motivation and hard work and she highlights intentional learning: “motivation the first of all, i mean study hard and work because it’s hard to do it, and watch films in the original version, it helps a lot, or listening to songs, pay attention, i think is good.” 4.2.3. the late start and high achievement group (lh) the participants in this group started to learn english after the age of 11 and reached high levels of attainment in english, comparable to those of the eh group. they are in their forties and thus the oldest participants. obviously this means that though they did not start in childhood they may have been in contact with english for a long period of time. laia is a balanced bilingual who has been a teacher of three different languages (english incorporated recently). llorenç is also a balanced bilingual, and lorena is slightly dominant in spanish. their self-ratings of proficiency in their languages are among the highest as is their range of languages (4-6). these participants mention a variety of important factors. laia’s motivation was towards english through music. llorenç refers to his instrumental motivation towards english. lorena highlights exposure to undubbed films in her home country (venezuela) and to songs, as well as a motivating teacher: there is no escape in venezuela or any country like that, you have to face the language from the beginning . . . there was only one teacher that influenced me i mean i wanted to do everything for her, . . . i just wanted to be the best i wanted her appreciation. laia and lorena lived in england for some months and llorenç for a summer. for llorenç that was a turning point in his english language learning history: “i went to england and stood there for a summer period and when i came back i noticed that my english had improved a lot because there i had to live every day at every moment in english.” an even more important event for laia was her decision to change her career and make what she loved (english) her profession. for lorena the turning point was to join an english teaching-learning chat, which provides daily meaningful contact with the english language: i have been doing that for seven years so i mean i’ve been involved in that atmosphere of every day going to that chat and . . . i feel more confident and say well maybe i can go for it and i can try to express myself very freely. laia highlights her liking of english music and of english. after a change of career she is now a language teacher, with experience of teaching portuguese, french and english (“i’m living the dream of my life”): “i like to listen to sounds and then looking carmen muñoz 476 for the lyrics and singing and so it was an aesthetic issue for me. i liked english before i knew what the words meant.” lorena likes learning languages, too (“i think it came from birth with me”) and she expresses a preference for english over her native language (“i found in english a better expression of my feelings”). in consonance with his instrumental motivation, when llorenç is prompted to say why he likes english, he refers to the global status of english as a lingua franca allowing people to communicate. at the same time, one of his recommendations to a beginner language learner is to love the language: first of all to love the language to be very persistent in learning this language, never to give up . . . be a kind of explorer in order to find out new words and make this language a part of his or her life as he wanted to succeed in the language but if he or she came across some difficulties never to give up because the language is difficult but then the reward is good. this extract illustrates the affective component in the recommendations of the successful late learners; other participants’ recommendations are associated with enjoyment of learning. lorena advises starting with songs the learner likes and work on the lyrics and pronunciation, as well as joining an english teaching-learning chat. laia recommends to a (fictitious) younger sibling to study at school and to enjoy it (“otherwise you learn languages as if they were mathematics or history”). 4.2.4. the late start and low achievement group (ll) the group of late learners with low attainment includes lola, luisa, and lidiya. they are all in their late twenties. although lola started at the age of 11.6 (compulsory secondary) she reports having “really” begun at the age of 14.6 (optional secondary) and not having made real progress with english until university. she is catalan dominant. luisa was born in peru and moved to spain at the age of 19. her knowledge of catalan is basic. lidiya gives her spanish the same score as her native russian. in general, as can be seen in table 1, these participants give lower scores to their proficiency in their languages than the other groups (besides their l1s and romance languages, only lola adds a low level of german). as for influential factors, lola mentions a particularly enthusiastic teacher in high school, as well as her motivation to travel abroad. when asked to identify a turning point in her learning history she talks about her erasmus exchange year in poland when she lived in a residence where everybody spoke english. for luisa the most important factor is her motivation to speak other languages because she loves languages. she spent eight months in an english-speaking country, which helped her english language (though she disliked the weather and life style starting age and other influential factors: insights from learner interviews 477 and went back to spain). however, studying english at the university was the turning point in her language learning history. for lidiya watching films in english has been a very important factor, and she also mentions motivating teachers in her current degree in english studies which she values over her experience at secondary school. when asked about a turning point she reports an event in which she was unable to engage in spontaneous conversation in english, probably the realization of her not yet good enough competence in this language. the three participants have distinct attitudes towards english and languages. lola likes languages a lot and in addition to english she has learnt german, french, italian and portuguese. she has found learning english “very funny and entertaining”. luisa loves learning languages (though she disliked her experience in an english-speaking town, as seen above); she has learned some french and portuguese (the latter language only informally). lidiya says that she likes learning languages because she does not like studying other subjects (e.g., biology); she chose english because she was good at it at school and she likes listening to english because it is a very practical and useful language. with regard to recommendations for a beginner learner, they are also varied. lola seems to associate learning languages with an extrovert type of personality and finds the use of english as a lingua franca particularly helpful: “it’s very easy if you are not afraid of talking and expressing yourself and when you’re in a group of people that they’re not native speakers but you are using english as a lingua franca for me it’s great.” luisa’s advice is to go to a foreign bar, for example an irish pub, to interact with people. she thinks this is easier than going abroad, though she also recommends going abroad and studying hard. lidiya recommends doing more exercises and listening practice in order to get used to authentic english: “doing more exercises and listen much more to distinguish words and what the native speaker want to speak because in everyday life nobody will ask you some very simple questions.” 5. final discussion and conclusion this study aimed at gaining insights into the factors that may be more influential in learners’ english language learning trajectories and may ultimately explain why some early and late learners are more successful than others. the comparison of the profiles of the four participant groups reveals certain distinctive characteristics that differentiate the high-achievers (eh and lh) from the low-achievers (el and ll). to begin with, all the participants in the two high-achievement groups, both early and late starters, express an intense love for english and languages in general as shown by the choice of words such as “passion” (enric) or “dream” (laia). this characteristic is shared by the high performers in the study by polat carmen muñoz 478 (2013, p. 77) who “consistently expressed their love of french or their enjoyment of studying language.” researchers of language learning motivation identify these feelings of enjoyment as characteristic of intrinsic motivation. this is considered the optimal kind of motivation, that which comes from within: “doing something . . . for its own self-sustaining pleasurable rewards of enjoyment, interest, challenge, or skill and knowledge development.” (ushioda, 2008, p. 21). in contrast, the comments of the low-achievement participants in the present study are more varied. two of them, lola and luisa, also like learning languages a lot, but their comments (e.g., lola finds english “very funny and entertaining”) do not match the affective strength and consistency of the higher achievers. there is a far greater tendency for them to refer to english as a means to an end (to travel, to access cultural goods, to communicate, etc.), showing an instrumental kind of motivation. while this kind of motivation may be highly effective if it is internalized and self-determined (ushioda, 2008), many of these participants’ comments do not speak of an unconditional love for languages or of the pleasure derived from the learning process. indeed, in the above-mentioned study by polat (2013), the low performers did not mention any feelings of enjoyment. the affective dimension of language learning is also reflected in the participants’ recommendations to a prospective learner. the high-achievers emphasize the importance of exposure to the target language, particularly through enjoyable activities like watching films, talking to target language speakers, and spending time abroad; two of the participants, one female and one male, also recommend formal learning, but whereas the female participant (in the lh group) highlights the need to study and enjoy it, the male participant (in the eh group) recommends enrolment in an academically demanding language school. it is noteworthy that these successful participants’ views on what factors lead to successful l2 acquisition coincide with those mentioned by the group of “good language learners” that were asked a similar question in the study by naiman, frochlich, stern, and todesco (1978); the most common answers in that study were immersion and motivation. the low-achievement groups also recommend exposure to the target language but not always in a target-language country, since this may be overwhelming (it is “easier” in a pub or with nonnative speakers). they also recommend motivation, but accompanied with hard work or effort. in contrast, none of the participants in the two highachievement groups associate learning languages with hard work. thus, it can be concluded that the high-achievement and the low-achievement groups differ in their attitudes to languages and in particular in their liking and enjoyment. furthermore, the participants’ answers also indicate that the high-achievers find it easier to learn languages than the low-achievers (who often give lower starting age and other influential factors: insights from learner interviews 479 rates to their foreign languages skills), and thus their perceptions seem to result from the interaction between cognitive and affective factors. as regards the influence of starting age of learning among other influential factors, it has been seen that two participants in the eh group acknowledge the importance of their early experience in a private language school. however, for a larger number of participants staying abroad and having a real contact with the language at an older age seems to have had a much more prominent role in their language learning history. the fundamental role that these experienced participants ascribe to the language learning environment is in line with larsen-freeman and cameron’s (2008) view that the language learning environment is responsible for much of the learning that takes place. the variability in these learners’ outcomes supports the view that it is not just the amount of time the individual spends inside or outside of class learning that matters, but also how the individual reacts to the learning environment. for experienced learners, the cumulative effect of the learner’s actions in the social environment may be greater than for learners at more initial stages in their learning trajectory (winke, 2013). in other words, the examination of experienced learners reveals the cumulative effect of learners’ orientation and engagement with the language, which have determined what they have done with the input (moyer, 2004). although the characteristics of the sample preclude making generalizations about gender differences, it is interesting to note that some of the answers offered by the male participants are slightly different from the answers given by the female participants. for example, alongside his passion for languages the male participant in the lh group highlights the interest of english as a lingua franca, and the male participant in the eh group recommends enrolling in a demanding formal course. it would be interesting to examine possible gender-related orientations towards english and foreign languages with a larger sample. likewise, the homogeneity of the sample in terms of career focus limits the generalizability of the findings to other learner types, though the variation within the sample is not insignificant. another limitation of the study may be the lack of in-depth information concerning the participants’ family context. although parents’ level of education seemed to be similarly distributed in the four groups in this study, not all children from middle-class families with educated parents receive frequent and early parental encouragement to the same degree (lamb, 2011). in this respect it is interesting to note that at least two of the eh participants came from families where one of the parents was a teacher. the family background may also have determined whether participants attended courses in private language institutes, from what age, and the choice of course (although more than 40% of students attend such courses in the region, some may carmen muñoz 480 be more easily affordable than others). as well, the status of the foreign language, english, has obviously had an impact on the factors that have influenced participants’ learning and perceptions, and probably in different ways for the younger participants and the older ones (particularly the lh participants, who started learning english three decades ago when english did not yet operate so often as the lingua franca of the globalized new economy as it does today). in sum, the exploration of learners’ language learning histories and the factors highlighted by them in this study contribute interesting insights into their diverse degrees of success in foreign language attainment. an early starting age may have had a significant impact for some learners but not for others, supporting the view that learner’s long-term attainment in a foreign language is the result of the interaction of a multiplicity of factors, among which aptitude, motivation, and intensive language contact have been highlighted by the present study. acknowledgments this study was supported by research grants sgr1089 and ffi2013-47616-p. i would also like to thank a reviewer’s inspiring comments. starting age and other influential factors: insights from learner interviews 481 references al-thubaiti, k. a. 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(1995). the development of english speech patterns of a 7-year-old polish-speaking child. journal of psycholinguistic research, 24(2), 117-143. winke, p. (2013). an investigation into second language aptitude for advanced chinese language learning. the modern language journal, 97(1), 109-130. carmen muñoz 484 appendix selected interview questions what were some of the most important factors that influenced your learning of english? and was there any moment in the past that you thought you had really improved your level of english? why did you think so? what happened? (any particular experience?) do you like learning languages? from 1 to 10, how would you grade your competence in each of the languages you speak (including your first language/s): reading, writing, listening, talking? if you had a friend that just started learning a foreign language, what would you recommend him/her to do? 397 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (3). 2017. 397-417 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.3.3 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl beyond instructed l2 grammar acquisition: theoretical insights and pedagogical considerations about the role of prior language knowledge tanja angelovska university of salzburg, austria tanja.angelovska@sbg.ac.at abstract the prior language knowledge of learners for whom the target language is not the first foreign language poses a different starting learning situation that should merit pedagogical attention. the present paper seeks to contribute to the question of which pedagogical considerations can be made in regard to the role of prior language knowledge beyond instructed l2 grammar acquisition. moreover, it fills a significant gap expanding the limited existing pedagogical options that instructors have at their disposal when it comes to teaching in classrooms where one foreign language is simultaneously chronologically first to some and second to others. starting with (combinations of) existing theoretical accounts and associated pedagogical aspects (such as explicit information, negative evidence, metalinguistic explanations, grammar consciousness raising, and input enhancement), a recently developed method (hahn & angelovska, 2017) is discussed. the method acknowledges equally the three phases of input, practice and output and is applicable in instructed l2 grammar acquisition and beyond. keywords: prior language knowledge; input; practice; output; enhancement; grammar instruction tanja angelovska 398 1. introduction the role of prior language knowledge has been a point of endless discussion in both applied and generative linguistics (weinreich, 1953; zobl, 1980) and in the field of second language acquisition, resulting in various theoretical accounts about transfer as a constant characteristic of interlanguage (selinker, 1972). the prior language knowledge of learners for whom the target language is not the first foreign language poses a different starting learning situation, which should merit pedagogical attention. however, it is still not clear why the pedagogical treatment of this issue has generated relatively little attention among researchers and practitioners. 2. review of existing theoretical insights the recent research results point to general lack of robust evidence (as assessed through performance measures and acceptability judgment tests) for any benefits of prior language learning experience and knowledge. the available research points out that prior language experience and knowledge could be beneficial only at certain stages in the l3 acquisition (henceforth l3a) process (dewaele, 2010; peyer, kaiser & berthele, 2010). moreover, the level of additional language proficiency was found to influence the benefits in l3 outcomes resulting in greater benefits (e.g., cenoz, 2003). in a more recent study testing l3 learners at the early stage, grey, williams and rebuschat (2014) found weak effects for the potential benefits of prior language knowledge in l3a. they concluded that the proficiency level has not been reached so as to contribute to l3a and that the role of prior language knowledge is still fuzzy when it comes to incidental learning of an additional language. they did not include any control group with truly novice learners with no prior language learning experience. the influence of prior linguistic knowledge on the l3a process has dominated the field recently resulting in explanations based on numerous influential factors such as the l1 factor, the l2 factor, typology, psychotypology, recency of use, proficiency levels in all languages of the multilingual individual’s repertoire, the characteristics of the universal language processor, length of exposure to the target language, and order of acquisition, among many (see de angelis, 2007 for a more detailed review). the existing transfer models are based on explaining which of the prior languages will take over the leading role in l3a. similarly, some studies concluded that only one language (l1, e.g., the l1 factor; hermas, 2010, 2014a, 2014b, or the l2, e.g., the l2 status factor; bardel & falk, 2007, 2012; falk, 2011; falk & bardel, 2010) can have a privileged role in l3a. on the other hand, some consider the possibility that both the l1 and the l2 are the source of transfer in l3a (e.g., the cumulative enhancement model [cem]; flynn, beyond instructed l2 grammar acquisition: theoretical insights and pedagogical considerations. . . 399 foley, & vinnitskaya, 2004; berkes & flynn, 2012; the typological proximity model [tpm]; cabrelli amaro & rothman, 2015; rothman, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015). what these studies have in common is the position that acquiring a third language in adulthood is constrained by universal principles and that the type and point at which transfer will happen is determined not only by linguistic, but also by cognitive factors. the predictions of these models rest around explanations of cognitive and structural linguistic nature. they all mainly account for the mental representation of the prior languages in l3a by using interpretation or production data (either spoken or written data) with a focus on either elementary or intermediate learners. taking into consideration the relevance of the prior language knowledge in l3a, research focused on pedagogical approaches resulting from its results is surprisingly scant. though the term prior language knowledge itself is self-explanatory and recognized as a possible predicting factor for transfer in language acquisition, it seems relevant to acknowledge the importance of its link to linguistic experience. the latter has been defined as “the timing, type, modality, frequency and amount of exposure to relevant input and use of the language” (montrul, de la fuente, davidson, & foote, 2012, p. 88). all these components mentioned in the definition are important when contemplating practical considerations of the role of prior language knowledge in instructed l2 grammar acquisition and beyond. related questions of practical importance are for example the following: when do we focus on tackling what type of prior language knowledge in instruction? what modality do we choose for its pedagogical treatment? what is the role of frequency in the pedagogical treatment of certain transfer phenomena? what type of input evidence (positive and/or negative) do we need to tackle transfer in instructed grammar acquisition? the answers to these questions are closely related to the amount and quality of prior language use on a daily basis. more precisely, the dominant language used daily, also called “the language of communication,” has been defined as “the spoken language used more frequently by the participants at home (with their parents and siblings), at schools (in the classroom and in the playground) and in social contexts (with friends, relatives and other people)” (fallah, jabbari, & fazilatfar, 2016, p. 262). clearly, there is a need for teachers to explore these realities about which languages are the dominant languages of their learners and to ensure that these realities find their reflection in instruction. in this line of research, it is important to acknowledge that teachers’ beliefs about the role of prior language knowledge in language learning (de angelis, 2012) were given full attention, or as wright (2002) put it: “a linguistically aware teacher not only understands how language works, but understands the student’s struggle with language and is sensitive to errors and other interlanguage features” (p. 115). given the fact that knowledge of teachers’ beliefs is crucial to understanding teachers’ actions and choices in the classroom, tanja angelovska 400 haukås (2016) explored norwegian language teachers’ beliefs about multilingualism and the use of a multilingual pedagogical approach in the l3 classroom. the study included data (interviews) collected from 12 teachers of french (n = 4), german (n = 2) and spanish (n = 6) analyzed by using qualitative content analysis. one of the main themes that emerged from the analysis as most relevant referred to the collaboration across languages. teachers believed that it could enhance students’ language learning; however, no such collaboration was reported. similarly, the aspect seems even more complex because “a learner’s linguistic background matters, much more so in the case of l3 learners (l3ers), who start the acquisition process with a larger amount of linguistic experience and mental representations to draw from” (gonzález alonso & rothman, 2017, p. 281). not surprisingly, the relatively new field of instructed l3a has developed within the recent years as a field on its own covering different lines of research and theories explaining the acquisition of languages beyond the first foreign or second language. however, what remained on the to-do lists of many of us is the need to offer plausible implications for teaching. after having gained some highly interesting results about transfer in l3 acquisition, one very important challenge for researchers is the question of how to apply these highly interesting research results in pedagogy. in both fields of instructed sla and l3a1 teachers are left alone, knowing neither how to predict possible transfer phenomena nor how to deal with negative transfer phenomena. unarguably, enhancing facilitative transfer is helpful for learners. but as it happens irrespectively of whether one does or does not have the metalinguistic awareness to realize it, no specific typologically tailored interventions are needed. in this line of research, the trend which started a while ago focusing on creating synergies in l3 learning is worth pursuing further (hufeisen & neuner, 2003). however, we should not stop here and neglect the problems which follow from negative transfer. moreover, from a cognitive point of view, it is less problematic for learners and teachers to establish links based on positive transfer between the languages than it is to overcome negative transfer phenomena. relatively less research exists about how to deal with negative transfer from a pedagogical point of view. 3. existing pedagogical considerations for understandable reasons, a relatively unexplored topic within a relatively new field of research does not offer a lot of possibilities for situating it within an extensive literature review or even building upon existing pedagogical suggestions. 1 the term l3 refers to the current target language (of instruction) being acquired by persons who already have knowledge of at least one other l2 and whose l1 acquisition is already completed, i.e., subsequent acquisition in a formal setting. beyond instructed l2 grammar acquisition: theoretical insights and pedagogical considerations. . . 401 understanding the reasons for choosing one certain pedagogical suggestion requires an understanding of the distinction between the types of knowledge about/in an l2. regardless of the l2 acquisition theory, l2 researchers distinguish between a conscious, controlled type of knowledge (i.e., learned and explicit) and intuitive, automatic knowledge (i.e., acquired and implicit) (ellis, 2005; wong, gil, & marsden, 2014). what is less known, however, is the relationship between these two types of knowledge. mainly, the existing pedagogical suggestions rest upon such views that either support the no-interface position, the weak-interface position or the strong-interface position. linking these to the usefulness of negative evidence (i.e., explicit information), the following directions can be stated: explicit instruction about language cannot affect linguistic competence (no-interface position), both “acquired” and “learned” knowledge (though different) are inherent in l2 grammar (weak-interface position), and explicit instruction about language can affect linguistic competence (strong-interface position). in what follows, pedagogical choices deemed relevant for handling prior language knowledge within both explicit (e.g., metalinguistic knowledge, negative evidence, explicit information, etc.) and implicit grammar instruction (input enhancement) will be reviewed. metalinguistic knowledge, when verbalized, rests upon language aspects expressed by using language means, such as metalinguistic explanations, metalinguistic awareness-raising, metalinguistic terminology, and metalinguistic comments. elaborating on the role of metalinguistic knowledge in grammar acquisition and likewise the role of raising metalinguistic awareness in grammar instruction presupposes a discussion about the benefits of tackling negative evidence in l2 grammar acquisition and instruction and beyond. negative evidence is the information about what is not possible in a language; clearly, this type of information is explicit information. as expected, we need to discuss its usefulness as accounted for in theory and research. according to larsen-freeman (2014), “negative evidence gives students the feedback they need to reject or modify their hypotheses about how the target language is formed or functions” (p. 262). hence, this implies that negative evidence would be needed for restructuring in learners’ minds to happen (white, 1991). nevertheless, in the case of the study by schwartz and gubala-ryzak (1992), the proof that negative evidence would contribute to restructuring and, in their case, unlearning the verb-movement, was not found. more recent accounts regarding verb movement (more precisely adverb placement) were offered by rankin (2013), who argues for an insufficient role of positive evidence in the case of english word order as it is “not robust enough to force grammar restructuring” (p. 74). the reasoning he offers for this is attributed to the limited input (both quantitatively and qualitatively) in instructed english as a foreign language context in comparison to tanja angelovska 402 immersion contexts. similarly, westergaard (2003) investigated the verb-second2 (v2) in english by norwegian children and attributed the problems to “the frequency of occurrence of certain structures in english and the controlled input in a pedagogical setting” (p. 84). the insufficiency of the input in such cases leads to a situation where learners even at higher proficiency levels exhibit complex constraints. thus, for v2 in the case of english acquisition by l1 german learners, robertson and sorace (1999) showed that even the grammar of very advanced learners of english can still exhibit the v2 constraint. obviously, the problem arising from such complex constraints poses further difficulties for its pedagogical treatment, and such complex constraints in grammar “do not lend themselves to an accurate and simple pedagogical treatment that learners can subsequently draw upon” (rankin, 2013, p. 74). as a result, rankin (2013) suggests that word order should be explicitly taught, advocating for grammatical enquiry skills through grammaring. grammaring is a term introduced by larsen-freeman (2003) and it refers to students’ analysis of the target language structure with the aim to build hypotheses about the form, use and meaning of those structures. another pedagogical approach similar to grammaring is grammar consciousness-raising (gcr). it was first introduced by rutherford and sharwood smith (1985) and it refers to increasing learners’ awareness through interactive components and opportunities to engage in meaningful interaction and to negotiate meaning with the idea that interaction is essential to language acquisition (e.g., ellis, 1997; nunan, 1993). gcr was defined by ellis (1997) as a pedagogic activity where the learners are provided with l2 data in some form and required to perform some operation on or with it, the purpose of which is to arrive at an explicit understanding of some linguistic property or properties of the target language. (p. 160) the focus in a gcr task is the grammar feature/structure; at the same time, it is also the material about which interaction is developed, so learners are not pushed to produce the target feature/structure but only to exchange information about 2 v2 is probably the most studied phenomenon in germanic languages, both old and modern. it has been mostly studied within generative grammar from a theoretical perspective (for a comprehensive review see haider, 2010; holmberg, 2012; westergaard, 2009). apart from english, all germanic languages are v2 languages. v2 refers to the phenomenon where the finite verb is required to appear in the second position of a declarative main clause preceded by a single arbitrary constituent. the sentence initial, arbitrary constituent is not (necessarily) the subject. v2 is considered as a parameter of universal grammar and refers to the differentiation of languages according to movement and distance of thematic verbs. hence, the complexity of english in the movement of auxiliaries and non-movement of thematic verbs poses a further difference in addition to the continuous v2 occurrence in german. beyond instructed l2 grammar acquisition: theoretical insights and pedagogical considerations. . . 403 it, which usually happens through the employment of metalinguistic comments and explanations. the original gcr task was readapted later by simard and wong (2004) beyond an l2 situation. more precisely, they required learners to use their prior language knowledge in a pair work activity in which each person was given a set of sentences to read aloud to the other without showing the written sentences. the word order of the sentences could be correct or wrong, and learners had to negotiate and to come to a mutual decision. fotos (1993) compared the effects on noticing3 as generated by three different tasks (gcr, teacher-fronted instruction and a communicative task) and reported better effects for noticing over time for the gcr group. a more recent study, related to the concept of gcr, was conducted by angelovska and hahn (2014). they provide implications for the teaching and learning of l3 grammar based on analyses of language reflection sessions between a foreign language teacher and an l3 learner of english. the data they use is based on two sources: learners’ written assignments, corrected by native speakers of english, and the corresponding language reflection sessions with the language teacher. the participants in the language reflection sessions have no professional linguistic background, are of different mother tongues (l1s) and of different levels of l3 proficiency, and have the same acquisition sequence of l2 (german) and l3 (english) languages. they have learned english as part of a flipped classroom course at the language centre of the university of munich, germany. this course includes home self-study, face-to-face language reflection sessions with a language teacher, face-to-face group communication sessions and an online participation in the moodle learning platform. the aim of the “language reflection” session is to make learners aware of language problems they encountered during the l3 writing process and foster grammar learning by raising their language awareness through exploration (cf. angelovska & hahn, 2014). raising learners’ language awareness is a great challenge for the l3 language teacher. angelovska and hahn (2014) analyzed the performance of the language teachers by identifying concrete instances when opportunities to raise language awareness were met and/or missed and looked at l3 learners’ ways of reflecting on grammar. some of the questions they addressed are who of the l3 learners “notices” what kind of gaps in l3 grammar knowledge they have; and if yes, how do they do this. their central analysis was based on face-to-face reflection sessions in which one language teacher focuses the whole session on providing opportunities for language awareness-raising for one l3 language learner. there is still a lack of a framework entailing plausible suggestions of how 3 only those linguistic elements that are salient can be noticed, and if unnoticed, they are unlikely to be learned (williams, 2005, p. 673). tanja angelovska 404 to handle the classroom situations with many l3 learners who do not necessarily share one and the same language repertoire. as mentioned, the prior language knowledge in the l3a process seems to pose differing starting conditions for this l3a process. sanz (2000) compared monolinguals (spanish) and bilinguals (spanish/catalan) acquiring english and found that bilinguals’ heightened metalinguistic awareness is a result of the exposure to literacy in their two other languages, which was explained as focusing on form and attending to the relevant features in the input. when investigating the relationship between factors of biliteracy and l3 proficiency, rausch, naumann, and jude (2011) showed that bilingual biliterate turkish-german secondary school students achieved better results than german secondary school students on l3 reading proficiency and metalinguistic awareness. clearly, metalinguistic explanations and metalinguistic awareness are considered important aspects in all three pedagogical approaches of explicit instruction, grammaring and gcr. however, it is another question whether metalinguistic explanations (i.e., explicit information) contribute to acquisition. this question takes us back again to the interface debate. from a generative perspective, as articulated by schwartz (1993) and more recent accounts (gonzález alonso & rothman, 2017), learned knowledge (metalinguistic information) cannot serve as input within the grammar acquisition process and cannot contribute to the development of acquired knowledge. whong, marsden, and gil (2013) further clarify this by explaining that although exploration based on metalinguistic information such as this sentence [in the context] is ungrammatical may result in learning a concrete fact about the functioning of the l2, the hypothesised language module cannot use the content of this fact as a trigger for change to happen to the underlying grammar. (p. 204) clearly, obtaining more reliable results about the type of training (explicit versus implicit) would be needed to account for the type of knowledge that is being processed and acquired in the acquisition process. there is a large database of studies in the field of second language acquisition primarily making use of only offline measures to investigate how learners comprehend and process input. however, benati (2016) calls for the use of online measures (within the processing instruction framework) to obtain more direct results about the acquisition of implicit knowledge with the argument that while behavioral studies can track down only the automatization of second language knowledge, online measures (eye tracking, eeg and fnirs) would track the online processing, internalization and proceduralization of this knowledge. similarly, morgan-short, finger, and ullman (2012) in an event-related potentials (erps) study examined the effects of no exposure to a target language and compared two different beyond instructed l2 grammar acquisition: theoretical insights and pedagogical considerations. . . 405 groups (explicitly and implicitly trained). on the one hand, their results showed that the explicitly and implicitly trained groups did not differ in their performances.4 in terms of electrophysiological signature, the implicitly trained group showed more native-speaker’s performance. these findings clearly justify whong et al.’s (2014) call for measures of implicit knowledge. hence, without doubt all researchers and practitioners are interested in fostering implicit rather than explicit knowledge. it seems reasonable that drawing learners’ attention to relevant input elements must happen within an implicit intervention,5 technique or method. one such technique is input enhancement. input enhancement (sharwood smith, 1991) refers to making certain input elements salient so that l2 learners can notice a feature. for that purpose, the input features entail typographical cues so that the target form is enhanced and its visual appearance in the text is altered (italicized, bolded, underlined). the aim of the typographical change of the target form is to “enhance its perceptual salience” (wong, 2005, p. 49). in the meta-analysis of the effects of textual enhancement, lee and huang (2008) concluded that enhancement is effective and better than no enhancement at all. it seems important here to stress that although the aim of input enhancement techniques is to make learners notice the target features, it does not necessarily require the learner to connect form and meaning or function (cf. vanpatten, 2012). based on the above discussion of the role of explicit information, it seems that even if learners were explicitly told to pay attention to the enhanced part, it would not make any difference (as found by shook, 1994); however, this needs further investigation. even things such as the level of input (sentence or discourse) may impact the effects of textual enhancement. for example, wong (2003) found out that learners direct their attentional resources to the enhanced elements when the task entails sentence-level input, a condition in which comprehension is less demanding than it is the case with discourse level. what still seems unobserved is the role of the prior language knowledge in relation to decisions as to what needs to be enhanced in the input provided—a pedagogical question relevant for practitioners. taking into consideration findings from the accounts discussed in this section, it seems important to convert (aspects of) these theoretical accounts into concrete practical suggestions of pedagogical importance. 4 note, however, that their findings refer to the processing of syntactic violations. 5 for a recent review of various pedagogical interventions that consider the role of input and output in grammar instruction see larsen-freeman (2015), and mystkowska-wiertelak and pawlak (2012). tanja angelovska 406 4. opening new windows: the input-practice-output method (hahn & angelovska, 2017) incorporating aspects of the above-mentioned theoretical accounts into a concrete method that equally acknowledges the three phases of input, practice and output thereby taking into consideration the associated factors poses a real challenge. complexities and overlapping interactions of these associated factors need to be considered to further derive meaningful teaching implications. although we acknowledge the importance of heterogeneity in a language classroom, the starting point of this section is neither to find a solution to the diversity in current language classrooms nor show how to handle it better. we rather present a recently developed method (hahn & angelovska, 2017) that approached the topic of negative syntactic transfer and is applicable both in instructed l2 grammar acquisition and in l3a. the starting point in this method is acknowledging the typological differences within one learner’s linguistic repertoire and the emphasis on raising teachers’ awareness of what triggers negative syntactic transfer when english is l3 and german l2 (or german is l1 and english l2), irrespective of learners’ individual differences. starting with the existing results and non-results on l3a (transfer), their propositions and explanations and based on data from the study by angelovska (2017), hahn and angelovska (2017) concentrated on the importance of raising teachers’ linguistic awareness of phonologically and/or semantically similar adverbs in l2 and l3 (i.e., triggers for verb placement transfer) and proposed an integrative method. they integrated existing theoretical accounts and results from an instructed l3a scenario with l1 russian-l2 german-l3 english (focusing on v2) into a specific teaching framework thereby developing practical applications as part of the input-practice-output (ipo) method.6 they show that a combination of these three phases allows for an individual, learner-centered and teacher’s awareness-based framework for instructed grammar acquisition. 4.1. target feature in the ipo method: the v2 (verb second) phenomenon apart from english, all germanic languages are v2. v2 refers to the phenomenon where the finite verb is required to appear in the second position of a declarative main clause preceded by a single arbitrary constituent. the initial sentence 6 method can be defined as “a coherent set of learning/teaching principles rooted in clearly articulated theories of what language is and how it is learnt, which is implemented through specified types of classroom procedures” (ur, 2013, p. 468). beyond instructed l2 grammar acquisition: theoretical insights and pedagogical considerations. . . 407 arbitrary constituent is not (necessarily) the subject. for example, german will require the verb element to be the second constituent in the main clause when the sentence initial constituent is an adverb (german with english glosses): (1) zuerst dachte ich er hat interesse. at first thought i he is interested adv. v s o it is obvious that german requires that the subject be preceded by a verb in main declarative clauses if the initial constituent is an adverb (xvs order); thus, the sentence takes the order of adverb-verb-subject (advvso). in contrast, in english a main declarative sentence with a fronted constituent, such as an adverb, will not result in subject-verb inversion, that is, the english sentence will keep its rigid svo order, as illustrated in (2): (2) yesterday i kissed him. adv. s v o unlike german but like english, russian does not allow either vso or xvso orders, though the xvos order is possible. in russian, if the subject is preceded by a verb, the subject must appear in sentence final position (see erechko, 2003). see examples (3)-(5) for an illustration of possible word orders in russian in relation to which a constituent is stressed and thus meaning-carrying (i.e., the final constituent in the sentence is always stressed): (3) в прошлом году мой друг построил дом возле озера. last year my friend built a house near a lake adv s v o (4) дом возле озера мой друг построил в прошлом году. a house near a lake my friend built last year o s v adv. (5) в прошлом году построил дом возле озера мой друг. last year built a house near a lake my friend adv. v o s it is obvious from the presented examples that russian and english share the same word order in declarative main clauses with an adverb as a sentence-initial constituent in contrast to german, where subject-verb inversion is required. these contrasting scenarios pose a challenge in terms to l2 transfer of v2 in l3 topicalised main declarative clauses. tanja angelovska 408 4.2. the components of the ipo method the proposed pedagogical method incorporates the phases of input, practice and output. the input phase is the most important phase of the ipo method. during this phase learners are exposed to meaningful input, which is specifically tailored to their linguistic backgrounds. in addition, the triggers for syntactic transfer, that is, the phonological similarities, are the key component according to which the teacher is guided when creating the input material. let us look at a transfer example where it is very difficult to distinguish whether it is the semantics or/and the phonetics that triggers negative syntactic transfer: (6) in the morning went (v) she (s) to school. one could assume that the phonetic similarity of the onset syllables in morning and the german morgen triggers transfer from german, and thus the learner realizes this transfer on the syntactic level by producing a v2 structure. however, it is hard to distinguish whether the phonetic similarity triggered the transfer on the syntactic level directly or indirectly, that is, via a much more complex process. for example, the phonetic similarity triggers semantic concepts from the l2 german, and then the semantic concepts trigger the syntactic transfer. as it is not always easy to distinguish clearly what the trigger is, the latter solution seems to be quite plausible in cases where there is an overlap of phonological and semantic similarity, or at least it cannot be simply ignored as a possible explanation. therefore, hahn and angelovska (2017) propose enhancement of these features of the input that are relevant to the respective syntactic transfer. in our case, the phonetic similarity of adverbs between the languages in one’s language repertoire triggers the wrong choice of verb placement in the l3. thus, an illustration of a phonetic rule system in which an enhanced input is shown through parallels and differences between l1 and l3, as well as l2 and l3 plus the respective combinations with semantic concepts is needed as a starting point. taking this into consideration, in the following we offer suggestions for developing materials for both the practice and input phase. first, teachers need to start with finding examples. in our case, situations where phonological resemblance of preceding sentence constituent triggers negative syntactic transfer on the word order level, that is, v2-constraints in l3 english. the next step will be to present an analysis of the structure of the sentences in the two different languages and point out differences or similarities. after having found the appropriate examples, the triggers must be enhanced according to principles in line with the mogul (modular on-line growth and use beyond instructed l2 grammar acquisition: theoretical insights and pedagogical considerations. . . 409 of language) framework (sharwood smith, 2009; truscott & sharwood smith, 2004). the mogul framework with a weak-interface position implicates that both “acquired” and “learned” knowledge (though different) are inherent in l2 grammar. it shows that linking accounts of online processing with accounts of consciousness shows whether and how making input salient plays a role in triggering language acquisition. in the case of input enhancement (where the perceptual, conceptual and affective modules can be directly affected), strong perceptual representation should have a better chance of triggering phonological and syntactical growth using textual enhancement (boldface, colour), oral enhancement (stress, volume, length, intonation, pauses, gestures, facial expressions) and input flooding, that is, increasing the number of occurrences rather than altering the salience of an individual instance (sharwood smith & truscott, 2014). besides enhancement in a written text, an oral enhancement for our case can also be used, either in isolation or even in combination with textual enhancement. for example, the teacher can stress the intonation of the subject preceded by an adverbial phrase in an english sentence: (7) at the moment they are busy. this sentence can be accompanied by a german sentence in which the intonation is put on the verb preceded by an adverb, and not on the subject preceded by the verb. for example: (8) am morgen sind sie beschäftigt. the pedagogical intervention of processing instruction (benati & lee, 2015; lee & vanpatten, 2003) has demonstrated that it is a more effective pedagogical intervention than traditional instruction and output-based instructional treatments when it comes to form-meaning mapping. thus, such phonological enhancement would seem applicable in this phase of the ipo method. however, due to a lack of concrete suggestions as to what modifications would be needed in a context where the prior language knowledge plays a role and where the l3 and l2 may rely on lexical or conceptual links to access the meaning of words in the trilingual mental lexicon (benati & schwieter, 2017), such a pedagogical consideration cannot be discussed at present. the second phase of the ipo method is the practice phase, which has the aim to accelerate the process of turning meaningful input into output, that is, enabling longer-term effects of what is processed (intake). in the mogul framework, the metalinguistic knowledge plays a role in the discussion of enhancement of perceptual representations as it forms a part of the knowledge used to tanja angelovska 410 enhance the representations (sharwood smith & truscott, 2014, p. 272). an example given in hahn and angelovska (2017) is a scrambled sentence constituents interactive activity in which learners are required to put the elements into the right order. although learners are not producing output directly during this phase, they are practicing, and through the collaborative exchange of metalinguistic information and teacher’s feedback they are exposed to “grammatically improved enhanced input” (sharwood smith & truscott, 2014, p. 272). finally, in the output phase of the ipo method, learners are actively engaged in producing output. 4.3. implications of the ipo method the insights from the ipo method should find their voices into the development of language teaching materials. these should entail specific input-based activities and materials which sensitize learners to using the correct word order. for this purpose, precisely these similar adverbs should be pro-actively used in the input phase. although the focus so far has predominantly been on l1 transfer, it seems relevant that teachers should be made aware of the cases where l2 transfer comes into play and overrides l1 transfer. furthermore, it is important to acknowledge the planning time teachers need when considering the preparation of the materials for all three ipo phases. for example, the enhancement of the input needs to be based on a previous analysis or categorization of specific cases of negative syntactic transfer. similarly, teachers should carefully plan the enhanced input flooding, as a component of the input phase. similarly, various modes of input enhancement (colors, sizes, blurbs, underlining, fonts, intonation, etc.) should be used in the design of the materials. seeing teachers only as transmitters of content should not be the mere aim of language instruction. the role of teachers for research becomes even more important when teachers are given the responsibility for trying out their materials and contributing to the research theories by reporting on studies conducted within the action-research framework. one suggestion coming out of this paper could be to try out different combinations of the given activities from the three phases of the ipo method with different amounts of input and to report on the results of the effectiveness of these activities in overriding negative l1 and/or l2 transfer. such questions as whether the importance of the one or other mode and/or sequence and/or amount is effective can only be given by teachers, who have the opportunity of observing and including different sequences of these elements in their real classrooms. so, they should have their voices heard. only such reports could help in the refinement of the existing theories and pedagogical models of negative language transfer in instructed l2 grammar acquisition and beyond. beyond instructed l2 grammar acquisition: theoretical insights and pedagogical considerations. . . 411 5. conclusion to merit pedagogical attention to the role of the prior language knowledge, which poses complexities within instructed l2 grammar acquisition and beyond, this paper contributed to the existing gap through reviewing available pedagogical options and opening new windows to a relatively unexplored topic. it filled a significant gap expanding the small number of pedagogical options that instructors have at their disposal when it comes to teaching in classrooms where one foreign language is simultaneously chronologically first to some and second to others. we started with a state-of-the-art review of the existing theoretical accounts and associated pedagogical aspects, such as explicit information, negative evidence, metalinguistic explanations, grammar consciousness raising, and input enhancement. then, we presented a recently developed method (hahn & angelovska, 2017) that equally incorporates three phases (input, practice and output) and illustrated its implementation in instructed l2 grammar acquisition and beyond. ultimately, we proposed that the implications of the method are of three interrelated natures: for the development of teaching materials, for lesson planning and for classroom research. the multilingualism situation in today’s world encompasses linguistic facets of individual, cultural, sociological, educational, and psychological dimensions. its dynamics are rooted in its conceptualization and in the complexity and diversity of the factors involved in the acquisition, processing and use of the language repertoire from diverse perspectives. although the integration of the four skills (speaking, writing, reading and listening) should be aimed at when designing materials and activities for the three ipo phases, teachers need to consider learners’ age (angelovska & benati, 2013; benati & angelovska, 2015; muñoz, 2011; muñoz & singleton, 2011) and its relation to their cognitive abilities and cognitive task demands (benati & angelovska, 2015). sanz, lin, lado, stafford, and bowden (2016) rightly draw attention to “the importance of interactions between pedagogical tools and individual differences in explaining language development” (p. 1). similarly, investigating the role of working memory capacity, which might play a role in such contexts where metalinguistic information is limited, seems desirable. ultimately, it seems most relevant to remember that even within quite a homogenous group of learners “there are intriguing new findings on differential learnability of properties within the same groups of learners” (slabakova, 2016, p. 7). thus, it seems relevant that such factors should receive detailed treatment in future pedagogical accounts and resulting classroom research studies. the first attempt has been made: a solution for bridging the existing gap between results from linguistic research and language teaching has been offered. tanja angelovska 412 references angelovska, t. 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(1980). the formal and developmental selectivity of l1 influence on l2 acquisition. language learning, 30, 43-57. 697 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (4). 2015. 697-713 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.4.8 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book reviews working memory in second language acquisition and processing editors: zhisheng (edward) wen, mailce borges mota and arthur mcneill publisher: multilingual matters, 2015 isbn: 9781783093588 pages: 344 the book working memory in second language acquisition and processing edited by zhisheng (edward) wen, mailce borges mota and arthur mcneill presents a review of theory and empirical research referring to the relationship between working memory (wm) and second language acquisition (sla). this volume fits in with the cognitive perspective on individual differences research which has been high on the agenda of sla researchers for the last two decades as one of the most promising and still poorly investigated areas. in the words of wen, a major proponent of research into the role of wm in sla, and the other book editors, the enormous value of the volume lies in the fact that it comprises joint efforts of both cognitive psychologists and sla researchers “to address major theoretical and methodological issues concerning the ‘wm-sla nexus’ (wen, 2012). in so doing, we hope that this current volume can serve as an interactive forum to bridge dialogues from both fields so that wm theories can be further integrated into sla theories” (p. 2). it has to be emphasized that despite a number 698 of various studies on this topic, there are still many controversies concerning research methodology, terminology and the general approach, and the results are often inconsistent and contradictory. although this book does not give ultimate answers to the questions, nor does it provide any definite solutions to the problems, at times even raising more doubt and controversy, it constitutes a significant contribution to the discussion of the role of wm in sla. another aspect that makes it so interesting and valuable is the involvement of such big names as alan baddeley, nelson cowan, alan juffs, randall engle, peter skehan and john williams, among others, who present the current view of both the theory and research. therefore, this book is very useful for sla undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students, as well as researchers interested in this fascinating and challenging topic. the volume consists of a foreword, an introduction, four parts: one theoretical and three empirical, and a final commentary. the last chapter in each part is a commentary as well. in the foreword, michael bunting and randall engle introduce the concept of wm, its functions in human cognition and its impact on first and second language acquisition. moreover, they present the cognitive psychology perspective on the role of lowand high-level cognitive processes involved in learning a language. primary sources of individual differences on cognitive tasks, such as wm capacity, declarative knowledge, procedural memory and processing speed are operationalized in order to clarify research terminology, with emphasis placed on wm as the central component of the memory model: “working memory capacity is thought to be the central factor in this model and is therefore considered to have the greatest influence on an individual’s performance on cognitive and learning tasks" (p. xix). what is more, the authors comprehensibly describe the most important models of wm, that is baddeley and hitch’s (1974) and cowan’s (1995), highlight basic conceptual differences between them as well as provide an overview of both classic and the most up-to-date research endeavors in the field. this section is extremely useful and suitable even for an inexperienced reader as it explains complicated matters in a reader-friendly way with the help of everyday-life examples. the authors finish their review with a conclusion that although there is strong evidence that wm is involved in sla, it is yet to be answered how it affects this process. the first part, “theoretical perspectives and models,” comprises four chapters which constitute the foundation of the volume. the first two chapters were written by leading cognitive psychologists: alan baddeley and nelson cowan, respectively. both researchers present the origins and evolution of their models, as well as a review of research conducted by cognitive psychologists in the field of wm that has investigated the role of its components in various fields 699 of sla. both researchers compare and contrast their models and present possible directions for future research that will elucidate the wm-sla relationships. whereas baddeley, whose model is the most often referred to throughout the book, focuses more on the role of the phonological loop and central executive in various aspects of sla, cowan lays more emphasis on the role of the focus of attention in storing and recombining information. chapter three, written by the book editor and sla researcher, zhisheng (edward) wen, in contrast, presents an integrated framework for the wm-sla nexus. to quote the author, “the third chapter . . . sets out to integrate the rather well-defined and seemingly disparate research paradigms of wm in cognitive psychology into nuanced sla research” (p. 3). in order to accomplish his goal, wen presents three unifying characteristics of the wm construct, namely limited capacity, multiplicity of mechanisms and executive functions, and integrity with long-term memory. then, he presents a review of the most important studies on the role of wm in first and second language acquisition. based on research findings, wen relates the phonological component of wm (pwm) and the executive component (ewm) to specific sla domains and processes. his proposed [p/e] model postulates that pwm underlies acquisitional and developmental aspects of sla in the domains of lexis, formulaic sequences and morphosyntactic constructions, whereas ewm affects monitoring and attention-related processes, such as comprehension, interaction and production. this chapter is of particular importance to sla researchers interested in sla-wm research. the fourth chapter by yanping dong and rendong cai includes remarks on the theoretical models of wm and the complex relationship between wm and simultaneous interpreting training and performance. part 2, “wm in l2 processing,” which explores the relationship between wm and second language processing, includes two empirical chapters and one commentary. in chapter five sun-a kim, kiel christianson, and jerome packard investigate the effects of wm on learning to read l2 chinese characters under two conditions: one employing visual wm and one requiring pwm. the study presents evidence that the better the wm, the better the abilities to read the characters. besides, different kinds of wm, that is those involving more visual wm versus more verbal wm, contributed differently to reading different kinds of characters. chapter six presents a study aimed at an analysis of strategies employed in sentence processing in an l2. yuncai dai investigated the processing strategies used by chinese learners of english and the impact of their wm capacity on resolving the ambiguities of relative clause attachment with the use of a reading span test in two experiments and two offline questionnaires. the researcher concludes that wm plays a substantial role in l2, but not l1 sentence processing. in fact, the results of the study are ambiguous and suggest that the processing of l2 sentences involves a variety of factors interacting 700 with each other and including both structural information and contextual cues (p. 122). these ambiguities are addressed too by alan juffs in chapter seven including final remarks. at first, the author refers to the studies which involve the most frequently investigated structures and then comments on inconsistent findings regarding the wm effects in sentence-level processing in an l2. he also presents the results of his own pilot study (juffs & rodríguez, 2014) investigating the effect of relative clauses on pronoun-antecedent links in paragraph-length texts, and, consequently, urges for research investigating the role of wm in discourse processing to complement the for-the-most-part inconclusive research into sentence-level processing. part 3, “working memory in l2 interaction and performance,” addresses theoretical and empirical issues concentrating on the role of wm in interaction and production. it includes three empirical chapters and one commentary. in chapter eight, shaofeng li presents the results of a study examining the relationship between one component of foreign language aptitude, that is, analytical ability (see the modern language aptitude test, mlat; carroll & sapon, 1959/2002) and wm as measured by listening span, and implicit and explicit feedback in two groups of learners: lowversus advanced-level. the conclusion is that wm and analytical ability are sensitive to the proficiency of l2 learners and feedback type, to the effect that low-proficiency learners rely more on analytical ability, whereas advanced ones draw more on wm to benefit from feedback. in chapter nine mohammad javad ahmadian provides evidence for a positive correlation between wm capacity, as measured by listening span, and selfrepair behavior in an oral narrative task under the online planning condition. yanbin lu, in chapter ten, reports a study investigating the relationship between wm and l2 written performance. in this case, wm was measured by a nonverbal test—an operation span. no correlation was found between the investigated factors, which led the researcher to conclude that wm does not affect writing performance in l2 argumentative essays. finally, peter skehan comments on the research in speech planning and offers suggestions for further research directions in chapter eleven. skehan presents his view of the role of wm in speech production within the framework of levelt’s (1989) classic speech production model. according to the researcher, a body of empirical evidence confirms that task performance depends on attention capacity limitations, thus conforming to the trade-off hypothesis (skehan, 2012), “which assumes working memory limitations and then explores how these limitations can be minimized or circumvented” (p. 200), and contradicting robinson’s (2011) cognition hypothesis. the last part of the book, “working memory in l2 instruction and development,” includes four empirical and one theoretical chapter pertaining to developmental and pedagogical issues in the wm-sla relationship. this part begins 701 with three reports of research studies which share one common denominator, namely the lack of the expected relationship between wm and the studied variables. in chapter twelve by kindra santamaria and gretchen sunderman, the effect of wm, as measured by reading span, in processing instruction of l2 french direct object pronouns is investigated. although no correlation was found between wm capacity and l2 instruction effectiveness, wm differentiated how lowand high-span participants performed on grammar posttests, which led the researchers to conclude that wm is likely to have long-term effects. interesting and controversial results are presented in chapter thirteen by kaitlyn tagarelli, mailce borges mota and patrick rebuschat, who investigated the relationship between wm and two different learning conditions, incidental and intentional. wm as measured by two nonverbal complex tests did not correlate with a grammaticality judgment test in either condition; however, it correlated with performance in the intentional group. these results indicate that the impact of wm on grammar learning is complex and relevant mainly under explicit conditions. as the authors conclude, “the analyses of individual differences suggest that wmc does affect an individual’s ability to learn l2 syntax, but this effect is apparent only in certain conditions and for particular items” (p. 242). a study of the relationship between wm, cognitive complexity and l2 recasts in online language teaching is reported by melissa baralt in chapter fourteen. specifically, the researcher intended to test the hypothesis that wm would affect feedback efficacy during task-based computerized chat interaction. as no correlation was found, the author conclude that wm does not affect written feedback efficacy in online language communication. chapter fifteen by anne mitchell, scott jarvis, michelle o’malley and irina konstantinova, in turn, touches upon one of the most significant problems in the studied domain, that is, the reliability of tools and measurement criteria. the chapter opens with a discussion of how the findings of wm-sla studies could have been affected by reliance on psychological, instead of sla, tasks. in conclusion, they suggest that language-independent wm tasks, such as simple digit span or complex operation span, as well as verbal tests in an l1 will be more accurate. to illustrate this claim, they present the results of their own study which makes it evident that wm performance is affected by the proficiency level in the l2. moreover, the authors suggest that the components of wm affect the learning process differently depending on levels of proficiency. in a similar vein, clare wright in chapter sixteen discusses the relationship between wm and the longitudinal development in an l2. in particular, she presents studies to confirm or contradict the claim that pwm is relevant for less proficient earlier-stage learners, whilst ewm plays a more important role for more proficient learners. her conclusion, namely that “it has been seen that the evidence of support for the effects of wm remains 702 contradictory, largely due to the lack of comparability in methodology in research design" (p. 293), seems to be the best summary of the empirical part of the book. the book ends with the final commentary by john williams, who summarizes the theoretical and empirical considerations presented in the volume together with doubts and controversies raised by the studies and perspectives for further research. evidently, the relationship between sla and wm is very complex and, although the knowledge obtained from the research is accumulating, there still seem to be more questions than answers. even if some readers may feel dissatisfaction or even frustration, especially those who expected more uniform results and ultimate answers, this does not in the least affect the unique value of the book. the editors have done an impressive job of gathering the biggest names from the fields of cognitive psychology and sla to present a comprehensive review of the state of the art in this field, as well as have created a discussion forum on the 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(2012). researching tasks: performance, assessment, pedagogy. shanghai: shanghai foreign language education press/de gruyter. 4324-8388-1-sm_part1 4324-8388-1-sm_part2 4324-8388-1-sm_part3 4324-8388-1-sm_part4 4324-8388-1-sm_part5 4324-8388-1-sm_part6 111 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (1). 2016. 111-133 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.1.6 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl improving reading fluency and comprehension in adult esl learners using bottom-up and top-down vocabulary training rhonda oliver curtin university, bentley, australia rhonda.oliver@curtin.edu.au shahreen young curtin university, bentley, australia shahreen.young@curtin.edu.au abstract the current research examines the effect of two methods of vocabulary training on reading fluency and comprehension of adult english as second language (esl) tertiary-bound students. the methods used were isolated vocabulary training (bottom-up reading) and vocabulary training in context (topdown reading). the current exploratory and quasi-experimental study examines the effectiveness of these methods in two intact classes using preand posttest measures of students’ reading fluency and comprehension. the results show that bottom-up training had a negative impact on fluency and comprehension. in contrast, top-down training positively affected fluency but had no impact on comprehension. further, the results do suggest that fast-paced reading may potentially lead to improved comprehension. these findings have implications for the type of language instruction used in classrooms and, therefore, for teachers of adult esl learners. keywords: reading fluency; comprehension; isolated word training; bottom-up strategy; context word training; top-down strategy rhonda oliver, shahreen young 112 1. background for tertiary-bound students who are learners of english as a second language (esl), developing an appropriate level of reading skills, particularly comprehension, is essential for academic success (akinwumiju, 2010; august, 2011; iwai, 2009; lukhele, 2013; pretlow, 2009). as reading is an active process requiring word recognition and language comprehension (foss, 2009; gough, 1996; jiang, sawaki & sabatini, 2012), developing a sufficient level of learner vocabulary seems to be key to achieving this. despite studying english for a number of years, many esl students continue to have limited word knowledge and this impacts both on their reading and on their education in general. for example, when mokhtar et al. (2010) conducted a study with malaysian tertiary students to assess their knowledge of high frequency words, they found that most had a less than an adequate vocabulary for academic success. pointing to the close relationship between vocabulary and the development of reading, moktar et al., (2010) suggest that “in terms of vocabulary development . . . poor readers read less, become poorer readers, and learn few words” (p. 78). the converse is that as competent readers read more, they learn more words and have better comprehension (brantmeier, 2005; foss, 2009). in addition, reading is a highly self-motivational activity and the inability to read well may lead to a loss of motivation and increased levels of frustration which, in turn, may also result in students reading less (ahmad, 2011; mokhtar et al., 2010; rochecouste, oliver, & mulligan, 2012). thus the effects of poor reading skills appear to be cumulative. this claim is supported by longitudinal research undertaken in the first language (l1) context where readers who demonstrate difficulties with vocabulary recognition and understanding have been found to be troubled by this in an ongoing and academic way (baumann, kame’enui, & ash, 2003; hart & risley, 2003). there is an additional flow-on effect of poor reading skills for university-bound students, namely a reduced quality in their writing skills, which are also essential for university success (mokhtar et al., 2010). it does appear that there is a need for more research into the ways that reading can be developed, especially for adult second language (l2) learners (nation, 2002; tze-ming chou, 2012; zimmerman, 1997). in particular, and relevant to the current study, there are calls for research into different methods of instruction that may improve reading fluency and comprehension (mokhtar et al., 2010). although martin-chang and levy (2005) sound a cautionary note about how such research might translate into common teaching practice, there is no doubt that further investigations are needed about how best to improve reading skills, particularly of l2 adult learners seeking to study at university. improving reading fluency and comprehension in adult esl learners using bottom-up and. . . 113 given the integral role they play in the reading process, it is not surprising that methods used to improve reading have included vocabulary instruction, specifically word recognition practices, and training to develop both fluency and reading comprehension (august, 2011; lipka & siegel, 2012; national reading panel, 2000; nisbet, 2010; yu-han & wen-ying, 2015). other researchers provide support for using reading methods that bring together these skills to assist esl learners with their reading (e.g., lipka & siegel, 2012). one early quasi-experimental instruction study was conducted by zimmerman (1997). she compared the effectiveness of more traditional word skill development practices to interactive vocabulary instruction with 35 l2 adult high intermediate level learners from preparatory english courses held at two u.s. university campuses over a 10 week period. the training was based on high-frequency general academic vocabulary selected from the university word list (uwl; xue & nation, 1984) with 10% being nonwords. these same words were used in randomised lists for preand posttesting. zimmerman (1997) found that meaningful repetitious use of words in interactive learning did have a positive impact on vocabulary acquisition and on reading development more generally. she does caution about interpretation of the results because of the small size of the study, and it must be noted that there were a number of uncontrolled factors in the research design. however, the results do seem to suggest that vocabulary instruction may have a role to play in reading instruction in the classroom. 2. word recognition, reading fluency and comprehension for l2 learners word recognition is “the knowledge of words and word meanings” (diamond & gutlohn, 2006, para. 1), but it also extends beyond this, involving “the ability to recall meaning, infer meaning, comprehend a text and communicate orally” (zimmerman, 1997, p. 123). further, it is an integral part of learners’ l2 vocabulary development. in the context of reading, word recognition involves linguistic, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic components (zimmerman, 1997). in order to process written words, phonological and orthographical decoding is a prerequisite (breznitz & berman, 2003) or, as drucker (2003) expresses it, “reading is the phonological decoding of written text” (p. 23) and for esl learners these skills need to be developed in their l2. related to word recognition is reading fluency. this is precise and fast reading, including word recognition, accompanied by comprehension (levy, abello, & lysynchuk, 1997; martin-chang & levy, 2006). from this it can be seen that vocabulary knowledge contributes to the development of reading fluency and comprehension in l2 learners. this is reflected in the research methodology of a number of studies in which fluency has been measured as fast and accurate vocabulary recognition. rhonda oliver, shahreen young 114 according to breznitz and berman (2003), fluency can be evaluated in two ways. the first way is by determining efficient word recognition and comprehension (carver 1990; gough & tunmer, 1986). for example, breznitz (1997) in a study of accelerated and controlled paced reading with dyslexic readers found fewer reading errors and higher comprehension at accelerated reading rates, and fewer errors, but a considerable decrease in comprehension at the slowest paced reading rates. the second way of measuring fluency is by simply calculating word reading rate, and this has been done in research which has tested word reading fluency of school-aged children (e.g., swanson & o'connor, 2009; zumeta, compton, & fuchs, 2012). using this method, a high reading rate or fast-paced reading, equates to fluency. pointing to the relationship between fluency and comprehension, a study by breznitz and share (1992) found that both self-paced and fast-paced reading conditions resulted in high levels of comprehension in young children. later studies confirmed these findings (breznitz, 1997a; breznitz & berman, 2003). however, when pressed to accelerate their reading rate, young readers read 20% faster than at self-paced rate, fourth graders 15% faster and college students 10% with all producing fewer decoding errors and improved comprehension with variances for age and reading efficiency noted. despite the ever increasing numbers of l2 learners engaging in adult education, there are relatively few such studies of reading rates, fluency, comprehension and the efficacy of different reading methods for this cohort. 3. reading methods studies aimed at improving reading rate and comprehension especially in the l1 context have included the use of two related training methods. the first is based on the isolated word or “bottom-up model” and the second is the “in-context” or top-down method. 3.1. bottom-up the bottom-up model involves readers employing decoding strategies. zhang (2008) describes it in the following way: “learners should be made aware that the use of reading strategies is essential to successful reading and some socalled bottom-up strategies such as ‘re-reading’ and ’checking the exact meaning of words’ are important” (p. 112). specifically, this bottom-up and linguistically oriented approach involves recognition and recall (breznitz & share, 1992) with readers breaking words into syllables, using sentence syntax, matching synonyms or phrases, paraphrasing, and using a dictionary while reading (abbott, improving reading fluency and comprehension in adult esl learners using bottom-up and. . . 115 2005). thus, this approach is based on the cognitive processes of perception, short term memory, judgment, and reasoning, which results in improved comprehension (jiang et al., 2012). various alternative forms of isolated word training have been described in the literature and, as a consequence, have been the focus of other studies. as described earlier, zimmerman (1997) combined various forms of vocabulary training with reading instruction. based on the premise that most classroom vocabulary knowledge is gained through the receptive methods (i.e., reading and listening), webb (2005) undertook two experiments to test whether receptive or productive learning can facilitate vocabulary knowledge development. the first was conducted with two groups of first year university esl japanese speakers (n = 66) and the second with 49 japanese students at kyushu university, japan. in the second study, which followed the same procedure, twice as many words (20) were chosen as target words. these words were unknown to the participants and some were nonwords created to represent english words both phonetically and orthographically. they were presented differently to the receptive group and productive group. for the receptive group the target english words were presented with their meaning in japanese and then glossed in three english sentences with the only instruction being to learn the meaning of the target words (vocabulary in context). the second, productive group received the same word pairs, english with japanese explanation (vocabulary in isolation), and was told to write a sentence using each target word and also to learn the meaning. each group was given 12 minutes to complete the test in the first experiment and the second experiment was untimed. this was followed by a 10-part test with five parts measuring receptive and five parts productive word knowledge. contrasting results were revealed with the receptive group producing higher retention of vocabulary knowledge than the productive group in the first experiment. however, this was not the case in the second experiment when more words were used. although the study would have been enhanced with a delayed posttest, the results do suggest that gains in vocabulary knowledge are possible using both receptive and productive strategies. 3.2. top-down the top-down approach is based on the argument that reading comprehension requires more than simple linguistic knowledge, and that the use of schema theory is a key to unlocking comprehension, especially for l2 learners. the practical application of this involves drawing a connection between a readers’ background knowledge and the text (carrell & eisterhold, 1983). this model uses rhonda oliver, shahreen young 116 higher-level cues including such strategies as global background knowledge, skimming and locating main ideas, integration of information, recognition of inferences and prediction, and recognition of text structure (abbott, 2005). independent or self-reading, paired reading and listening while reading (li & nes, 2001; drucker 2003) are also promoted because “people learn to read, and to read better, by reading” (drucker, 2003, p.25). studies of learners from various ethnic groups have provided support for the positive impact on reading comprehension of this approach (drucker, 2003). despite this body of research, “while fluent reading is recognised as a primary goal of educational instruction, the methods that best promote the development of fluency remain unclear” (martin-chang & levy, 2005, p. 343). it is yet to be determined whether bottom-up or top-down approaches are best or, indeed, if they should be used in concert. it is the purpose of the current study to explore this. as such the current investigation employs both bottom-up and topdown training methods (marin-chang & levy, 2005, 2006) to determine if they can be used to improve fluency and comprehension in university aspiring students. specifically, bottom-up training was performed using isolated word training and top-down training was achieved using “in-context” word training. 4. isolated word training model isolated word training is when target words are read and coached in isolation of a text in preparation for reading (martin-chang, levy, & o’neil, 2007). research began with samuels in the 1960s and was replicated by other researchers in subsequent decades (e.g., ehri & wilce, 1980; singer, samuels, & spiroff, 1974) but then fell from favour. it has re-emerged as the focus of reading investigations beginning with the work of johnston (2000). underpinning this model is the belief that reading fluency requires sufficient word recognition. it is argued that intentional vocabulary training is useful for beginner readers with limited reading ability and vocabulary knowledge. the outcomes of studies using this method are generally positive (e.g., zimmerman, 1997). 5. context word training model the second model is based on the context or top-down approach. although the focus of this is meaning making, researchers have also suggested that vocabulary acquisition is a natural and incidental consequence as l2 learners listen and read with comprehension (hulstijn, 2001; hunt & beglar, 2002; knight, 1994; nagy, herman, & anderson, 1985; rieder, 2003; schmitt, 2008; zimmerman, 1997). as johnson (2000) indicates, the development of word understanding is improving reading fluency and comprehension in adult esl learners using bottom-up and. . . 117 assisted by continued exposure to words in meaningful context. according to ahmad (2011), incidental vocabulary learning not only promotes vocabulary learning, but, as he also suggests, it motivates learners to read more extensively than the alternative of intentional vocabulary training activities. initially this whole language approach, including the learning of vocabulary in context, rather than by word lists, was supported by an influential l1 study undertaken by goodman (1965), which was subsequently retested by alexander (1998) and then supported by others (e.g., archer & bryant, 2001; kim & goetz, 1994; nation & snowling, 1998). the basis of such research is that reading is schemata or context driven (alexander 1998; goodman, 1965; weaver, gillmeister-krause, & vento-zogby, 1996). more recent research supports this showing that children’s reading was faster and more accurate when words of a text were first introduced in context (martin-chang & levy, 2005). however, guessing meaning from context was only partially accepted as a means of learning vocabulary by hunt and beglar (2002), who suggested that proficient readers with a defined strategy for working out meaning become successful readers. hence a combined approach to recalling and inferring meaning is suggested as necessary because of the many skills required to effectively acquire vocabulary (alexander, 1998). in a series of studies undertaken in the l1 context martin-chang and levy (2005, 2006, 2007) compared the efficacy of isolated word training and context training. they had children read high frequency words aloud, trained the children using the two methods and then examined the results to see if the training transferred into their ability to read the same words in a new context. in their 2005 study they found isolated training was shown to improve reading rate and that poor readers (as determined by pretesting using achievement tests) learned more words in this condition whilst learning words through context training was found to result in faster reading and improved accuracy. in their next study, martin-chang and levy (2006) found that both poor and good readers who studied training words in isolation demonstrated improvements both in fluency and accuracy, and greater retention. in 2007, they used individualised training material and this time found children “could read more words following context training than following isolated training” (p. 45). they also read with greater accuracy; however, there were no significant differences in word retention between the two training methods. 6. adult l2 learners despite the desire of educators, many l2 adult students enter university illequipped for success in terms of academic achievement (rochecouste, oliver, & rhonda oliver, shahreen young 118 mulligan, 2012). it has been suggested that this is because even after many years of esl tuition, they lack the academic vocabulary necessary to achieve their educational goals (e.g., mokhtar et al., 2010). there has been increased interest in researching types of instruction that may help learners improve. this includes research on the impact of isolated word training, training of vocabulary in context and associated strategies for vocabulary development, the use of decoding strategies, and, how to improve reading fluency using self-paced and fast-paced reading rates. as discussed, such research includes the vocabulary studies by zimmerman (1997) and isolated word training and contextual word training by webb (2005). another study by jiang et al. (2012) concerned the development of phonological decoding and word recognition skills and their contribution to reading fluency and accuracy in adult chinese esl students. they found that speed and accuracy of word recognition are indicators of reading fluency, perhaps because the learners come from a logographic writing system and as such are slower at sounding out words (phonemic decoding) and at sight recognition of whole words than those who come from an alphabetic background (e.g., english). further, they found that l2 reading fluency positively impacts upon text comprehension. it is the aim of the current study to examine the generalisability of such findings to other cohorts of learners, specifically adult esl learners. it seeks to examine the effectiveness of (a) bottom-up, and (b) top-down methods of vocabulary training (specifically word recognition) on reading fluency and comprehension for adult esl tertiary-bound students. further, unlike previous laboratory-based research, the current study examines the effectiveness of these methods in authentic and intact classrooms. hence, the primary research question is: does type of vocabulary training (top-down vs. bottom-up) improve reading fluency and comprehension for adult learners in esl classrooms? 7. method this exploratory and quasi-experimental study was undertaken as an intervention study exploring the impact of isolated vocabulary (bottom-up) instruction (experiment 1) and context vocabulary (top-down) training (experiment 2) on reading fluency and comprehension. specifically, both experiments employ(ed) a mixed design where a set of words was taught in phase 1, and the transfer of learning was measured during the reading of a subsequent passage in phase 2. the critical difference between the experiments occurred during the training phase. however, unlike the work of martin-chang and levy (2005), this experiment is neither yoked nor laboratory-based, but it was rather undertaken in authentic and intact mixed level classrooms. improving reading fluency and comprehension in adult esl learners using bottom-up and. . . 119 7.1. setting data collection took place in two classes at a metropolitan tertiary institution, in western australia, and specifically at the english language centre of that university. this setting is familiar to the researchers, and the management provided full support for the investigation. 7.2. participants although 29 esl tertiary students volunteered to participate in this study, due to absenteeism and missed training sessions, only 20 participants from two esl classes completed the experiment. these adult students are from diverse cultural and language backgrounds. eight males and 12 females ranging in age from 18 to 44 years completed the study. it is acknowledged that this is a large age range, but it reflects the intact nature of the classroom data and the cohort enrolled at the time of the data collection. notably, the majority of these participants are graduates, many of whom have several years work experience, with about 20% being postgraduates and a minority, approximately 10%, having no degree. there is also an array of academic interests as indicated by their intended university studies which include three main areas of study: almost two thirds of the participants have a focus in the sciences including health and engineering, 30% are planning to undertake business studies, and the remaining 20% plan to enter humanities courses. prior formal english education shows 50% have studied english for a number of years, 20% for 1-3 years and almost one-third for a limited 6-month period. the participants’ overall ielts scores (or equivalent) on entry in this study ranged from 5.0 to 6.5, with a variation in the ielts reading band scores from 5 to 6.5. again, this large range reflects the reality of the cohort and classroom situation. they were all enrolled in classes that prepared them for graduate study classes (e.g., bachelor, masters or doctorate degrees). table 1 includes the demographic information about the participants. rhonda oliver, shahreen young 120 table 1 background, gender and age of participants country of origin gender age level of education work/study prior to course l1 entry level ielts reading score english study prior to course intended study at australian university class 1 south sudan f 35-44 g ft arabic/ muro 5 5 yrs+ geology china f 25-34 d ft chinese 6 5 yrs+ nursing china m 18-24 ug s chinese 5.5 5 yrs+ geospatial technology iran f 25-34 g ft persian 5 5 yrs+ international relations india f 25-34 g ft hindi/ punjabi 6.5 1-3 yrs business management china f 18-24 sc s chinese 6 5 yrs+ business management china f 18-24 g ft chinese 6.5 5 yrs+ geology thailand f 25-34 g ft thai 4.5* 6-12 mths nursing china m 25-34 g ft chinese 5.5 5 yrs+ engineering class 2 oman m 35-44 d ft arabic 3.5* <6 mths health information management turkey m 25-34 g s turkish ** 6 mths-1yr design & art india m 25-34 g ft punjabi 5.5 < 6 mths health administration thailand m 18-24 g ng thai 5 5 yrs communication iraq m 35-44 ma ft arabic 5.5 1-3 yrs engineering iraq m 35-44 ma ft arabic 5 < 6 mths engineering japan f 35-44 g ft japanese 5.5 1-3 yrs business management cambodia f 18-24 pg ft khmer 5 5 yrs+ accounting indonesia f 25-34 g ft indonesian 5 5 yrs+ science nepal f 25-34 g s nepali 5 < 6mths nursing china f 18-24 ug s chinese 5.5 3-5 yrs marketing note. f = female; m = male; s = student; gr = graduate; d = diploma; ug = undergraduate; sc = school; ma = masters; pg = postgraduate; ft = full-time employment; pt = part-time employment; * entry into the esl course through a pathway course to improve english language level; ** already has direct entry through pathway entry into university. 7.3. materials although this investigation was based on martin-chang and levy’s (2005) study, as that was conducted with children, the materials in this study were selected to be suitable for adult esl classes covering topics with which the participants were known to have some familiarity (based on their backgrounds and the course syllabus). some of these materials were chosen from suggested course texts; others were selected from related sources. therefore, in contrast to martin-chang and levy (2005), all texts used in both experiments were based on actual class texts which had been selected specifically for teaching purposes in this context. improving reading fluency and comprehension in adult esl learners using bottom-up and. . . 121 the materials consisted of a word training list, a transfer text and a control text for experiment 1, and, for experiment 2, another transfer text and a control text, as well as a training text. in order to test for fluency, the texts were selected to be of comparable length, containing on average 570 words. the word training list for experiment 1 consisted of 40 frequently used academic words. to develop this list, a course text was selected and the academic words within the text were chosen using the academic word list (awl) highlighter website (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/alzsh3/acvocab/awlhighlighter.htm). the selected words were used in the training and transfer assessment of all the participants. the transfer text “car glut threatens sustainability of cities” for experiment 1 was a novel course text and included all the 40 words taught. for experiment 2 a text was selected and modified to be used as the training text. it included the 32 target words that were thematically aligned with the course syllabus, again based on the awl list as indicated above and, therefore, providing some comparability. the selection of an authentic text with such words resulted in a set less numerous than the targeted 40 words. it is acknowledged that this is a limitation of the current design, but it was done because the text choice was seen to be a vital part of this study. the transfer text, also a novel text “australia’s climate change, wind farming, coal industry and the ‘big carbon plan’: mine coal, sell coal, repeat until rich” contained the same 32 contextually taught words. the control texts were also novel texts: “driven to despair in australia’s outer suburbs” for experiment 1 and “illicit drug use in regional australia, 19881998” for experiment 2. they did not contain any of the target words. 7.4. procedure once recruitment of the consenting participants was complete, as a first step in the study an individually structured survey was conducted to collect background information about the participants. then the two experiments were conducted sequentially and in two phases: phase 1 was the training phase and phase 2 the posttest assessment phase (see figure 1). as in martin-chang and levy (2005), for both investigations the training was quite different for each experiment. 7.4.1. experiment 1 phase 1 commenced with a pretest of the participants’ recognition of 40 training words. these individual assessments took no more than a few minutes of each student’s time between classes. during this assessment any errors that occurred while individual participants read the chosen lexical items to the investigator rhonda oliver, shahreen young 122 were noted. later that week after all participants for each class had been assessed, isolated vocabulary training for experiment 1 began. the participants received training in their respective classes with all members of the class participating regardless of their involvement in the study. to minimise disruption, this training occurred twice per lesson sometimes at the beginning of the lesson, towards the end or at an appropriate “focal change” interval during the lesson. the training involved each of the target words being presented in isolation. a microsoft office powerpoint had been produced for the training with one of the 40 target words appearing on each slide. these were projected onto a screen at the front of the class for the training. a training session involved the appearance of the target words for a maximum of 2-4 seconds. the words were read aloud by the investigator and then by the participants together as a class. this procedure was repeated a second time in the same lesson, again using a powerpoint with the target words in a different order each time. this was done for three days, resulting in a sum of six repetitions for each word. the 40 target words were randomized for each powerpoint and the duration of word appearance varied from 2-4 seconds per list. in phase 2, which occurred in week 2 of the investigation and after the training was complete, the participants were posttested individually in a quiet room using the transfer text and the control text. as with martin-chang and levy’s (2005) study, participants were informed that their reading rates would be recorded as they read aloud. they were also instructed to read for understanding as comprehension questions would follow the reading of each text. each student was allowed 20 minutes to read both the transfer text and control text. participants were then asked four comprehension questions to assess their understanding of each text, the results of which were recorded by the investigator. although using only four comprehension questions may be a limitation, pilot testing determined that, on balance, this was the most feasible number given the constraints of time, the individual nature of the testing procedure and the limited scope of the text. any errors or omissions were noted on a modified copy of the texts by the investigator. there was a break of one week between experiment 1 and experiment 2 and, therefore, no training occurred in week 3. 7.4.2. experiment 2 in phase 1 the training involved the presentation, in context, of 32 target words (see the note above in 7.3 about the number of words). the whole class training for experiment 2 began in week 4 and continued through to week 5. the training text was prepared in large type (size 24) as a microsoft office word document. the target words were highlighted and each appeared at least twice in improving reading fluency and comprehension in adult esl learners using bottom-up and. . . 123 the text in red print. this word document was projected onto a screen at the front of the classroom. for the training sessions the trainer read the text to the class while they followed and read the highlighted words aloud. if students had difficulty reading the target words or made mistakes, they were corrected. this training was completed twice per teaching session for three days, thus each target word was read six times by participants. phase 2 was conducted in the same way as in experiment 1, using the same 32 training words for the transfer text and none appearing in the control text. as with experiment 1, experiment 2 was conducted with the investigator meeting individual students on campus in the students own time between or after classes to listen to them read a transfer text and control text while timing them and then asking four comprehension questions. week experiment 1 experiment 2 mode 1 pre-interview participants individual pretest assessment: isolated word recognition + comprehension training begun (class 1) training completed (class 2) whole class 2 training completed (class 1) whole class posttest assessment: reading transfer text & control text (classes 1 & 2) individual 3 4 training begun (class 2) whole class 5 training begun (class 1) training completed (class 2) whole class 6 training completed (class 1) whole class posttest assessment begun: reading transfer text & control text (classes 1 & 2) individual posttest assessment completed: reading transfer text & control text (classes 1 & 2) individual figure 1 research design and timetable because of the intensive syllabus of the course in which the participants were enrolled, which was of seven weeks’ duration and included only two hours per day of face-to-face classes, and because of several public holidays, there was reduced contact time for training. also, the final week (week 7) of the course was fully focused on course assessments. even so, training was conducted over the majority of the course, namely five of the seven weeks. the posttraining individual assessments were conducted outside of class time. once again, this is an acknowledged limitation of the current study; however, it also reflects the constraints that occur when undertaking research in classrooms rather than laboratory settings. rhonda oliver, shahreen young 124 7.5. data analysis techniques as a first step, each of the student’s fluency and comprehension scores were calculated. the scores for experiment 1 and experiment 2 were then compared using a t test. thus, a causal-comparative technique was implemented to determine any differences that occurred. although such a technique provides inconclusive data, “causal-comparative studies are of value in identifying possible causes of observed variations in the behaviour patterns of students” (fraenkel, wallen, & hyun, 2012, p. 12). 8. results 8.1. experiment 1 the outcome of the pretest, presented in table 2, in which all participants individually read aloud 40 selected words, showed a range of errors from one student making only two mistakes to another reading more than half of the words incorrectly (i.e., 19 out of a possible 40). however, a comparison of the results indicates that there was no significant difference between the two classes with the mean for correctly read words in classes 1 and 2 being 29.25 and 29.82 respectively, with t = 0.20 and p = .841. nevertheless, these results also indicate that a significant number of words were unknown and, therefore, undertaking vocabulary training as part of learner instruction was deemed beneficial. table 2 comparisons of classes: correct words (max. 40) class 1 class 2 m 29.25 29.82 sd 7.05 5.12 comparison of classes: t = 0.20 p = .841 upon completion of the training the participants undertook a posttest by reading the transfer text (which contained the words taught) and the control text (which did not). reading times were then measured, both in seconds and words per minute, as the participants read the texts orally while being timed by the investigator. comprehension was measured as a score out of 4. an analysis of the results, shown in table 3, shows a significant difference between reading fluency of the transfer text and the control text for experiment 1. as can be seen, after training, the participants were significantly slower in terms of time taken in reading the transfer text (m = 391.40 seconds) than the control text (m = 365.55 seconds; p = .002) and according to the mean number improving reading fluency and comprehension in adult esl learners using bottom-up and. . . 125 of words read per minute (wpm) in the transfer text (m = 95.84 wpm, sd = 17.29) and the control text (m = 112.09 wpm, sd = 15.84, p < .0001). with respect to the participants’ comprehension, the mean score of the responses for the control text (m = 1.75, sd = 1.29) was also significantly higher (p > .05) than for the transfer text (m = 1.10, sd = 0.55). this suggests that bottom-up training had a negative impact on fluency and comprehension as the participants did significantly better on the control task than the transfer task. table 3 overall comparisons: experiment 1 m sd t p transfer text control text transfer text control text reading times (seconds) 391.40 365.55 54.58 53.07 3.62 .002 words per minute 95.84 112.09 17.29 15.84 8.70 .000 comprehension (max. 4) 1.10 1.75 0.55 1.29 2.16 .044 8.2. experiment 2 similar to experiment 1, after training the participants completed a posttest, the results of which are offered in table 4. once more the analysis was based on a comparison of the results for reading fluency and comprehension. the results show that the reading time for the transfer text was significantly faster (m = 324.24 seconds) than for the control text (m = 359.80 seconds; p < .0001), and the number of words read per minute was significantly higher for the transfer text (m = 99.38) than the control text (m = 91.61; p < .0001). however, the participants’ comprehension scores for the transfer (m = 1.00, sd = 0.92) and control texts (m = 1.60, sd = 1.10) were not significantly different. table 4 overall comparisons: experiment 2 m sd t p transfer text control text transfer text control text rreading times (seconds) 324.25 359.80 47.26 60.41 6.23 .000 words per minute 99.38 91.62 14.64 15.38 7.21 .000 comprehension (max. 4) 1.00 1.60 0.92 1.10 1.93 .069 it appears from these results that contextual training is linked to improved reading speed; however, it had no impact on understanding. it is possible that the increased saliency, by way of textual enhancement (i.e., large font and highlighting), may have contributed to the result, but only advantaging the learners’ fluency and not their comprehension. it is a methodological issue that needs to be considered in future research. rhonda oliver, shahreen young 126 it is also interesting to note that in experiment 2 there were significant differences in reading speed of the two classes with class 2 reading much faster (m = 305.36 seconds) than class 1 (m = 347.33 seconds; p = .045; see table 5). table 5 transfer text reading time (seconds) class 1 class 2 m 347.33 305.36 sd 36.49 48.02 comparison of classes: t = 2.158 p = .045 why such differences occurred is difficult to explain, particularly as this was not the case in experiment 1. there was a higher proportion of chinese participants coming from a logographic first language background in class 1. these students may have had more difficulty with word recognition and thus read less fluently than others from nonlogographic or alphabetic language backgrounds, as proposed by jiang et al., (2012), but why this would only affect the results in experiment 2 and not 1 is not clear. 9. discussion with respect to bottom up training, presenting training words first in a list did not transfer into the ability of the participants to read these words fluently and with comprehension when reading them next embedded in a text. therefore, the current findings are contrary to those of previous studies where isolated vocabulary training has been found to produce increased fluency and comprehension (e.g., breznitz & share, 1992; levy, abello, & lysynchuk, 1997; martin-chang & levy, 2006). it is possible that this result may reflect the participants’ limited english proficiency and also their minimal exposure in general to written english texts. according to jiang et al. (2012), a diversity of cognitive processes is required for a successful bottom-up learning process to successfully produce fluency of word recognition, and it is possible that limited proficiency of the participants in this study impacted on their ability to access such processes. it did seem that words taught in isolation were less readily retained in both short term and long term memory, and this may explain why it was more difficult for the participants to remember the same words when encountered in a new and embedded context. it is possible that more training and extended exposure to the target vocabulary may have led to improved results. modifying the methodology in this way needs to be considered in future investigations. at the same time, if these results do have any veracity at all, they do call into question some of the practices that are often used in adult classrooms. specifically, improving reading fluency and comprehension in adult esl learners using bottom-up and. . . 127 introducing lexis items in isolation (albeit accompanied by meaning explanation) before reading the same items in context is a quite common practice, particularly in esl classrooms in australia, yet on the basis of these results doing so may enhance neither students’ ability to read (aloud) these words any quicker when they are in context nor their comprehension. in fact, in this study it was found that the participants were able to read aloud the text with untrained words significantly faster (as measured by wpm) and with greater comprehension than the text containing the trained words. although these results do not provide support with regard to isolated word training used in this research, they do provide tentative support for previous research showing fast-paced reading results can increase reading comprehension (breznitz & share, 1992; martin-chang & levy, 2005). further research in this regard may provide some guidance for l2 instruction. for example, working with learners in class reading texts together at a slow pace may reduce rather than assist reading comprehension, and instead there seems to be a case for including fast-paced reading in classrooms. in contrast to the bottom-up findings, a slight increase in reading fluency was found after the top-down contextualized training. it must be acknowledged that the testing protocol of reading aloud (potentially a bottom-up strategy) may conflate the issues under investigation and therefore affect the results. however, the findings are similar to previous research where it has been found that poor readers read more fluently when trained this way (martin-chang & levy, 2006). it is proposed that the efficacy of this type of training lies with the semantic prompts or deep processing that becomes possible through context. thus the current results align with the context superiority hypothesis first proposed by craik and lockhart (1972) and later supported by others (e.g., archer & bryant, 2001) whereby vocabulary recognition is long term and thus easily recalled when semantic prompts are used, whereas fast memory loss occurs when the use of orthography or phonemes are employed to recall vocabulary. however, in the current study there was no significant difference in comprehension, which is somewhat surprising. it might be that, as nation (2002) suggests, while prior schemata knowledge may help readers to manage unknown vocabulary in context, the gain is in the short term only. even so, in terms of instruction it does seem that contextualized training may be more beneficial in the classroom than isolated training (i.e., having learners memorize lists of words), at least in terms of fluency. it also seems that this needs to be coupled with increased exposure to the target language as it appears that the retention of vocabulary items may only occur after numerous encounters. webb (2008), for example, suggests anywhere between six to 20 encounters of a word are required before meaning is acquired. however, it may rhonda oliver, shahreen young 128 also be the way the vocabulary is presented and subsequently processed by the learners, rather than the number of times they encounter the lexical items, that impacts on learning. although all the vocabulary taught was thematically compatible with the syllabus, the text containing none of the words taught in experiment 1 was possibly more familiar (i.e., it focused on transport), which might explain the fact that this text was read more fluently than the one containing the taught vocabulary. in contrast, in experiment 2 only the taught words and the text containing them may have been more closely aligned with the participant’s knowledge and understanding of the topic. this may be a weakness of the current investigation and is something that needs careful consideration in future studies. 10. conclusion the current study investigated vocabulary training in isolation (bottom-up) and in context (top-down) to see whether these approaches improve fluency. the cautious answer is that with adult esl learners the impact of using these reading strategies is small and supported only minimally in the latter case. of course, it is possible that the participants in the current study, who had limited english language proficiency, simply require more time to learn. it is also possible that it is necessary to use more than one type of learning strategy. the combination of exposure and time may explain why success in relation to the training (at least in terms of fluency), which was done sequentially, occurred in experiment 2. when taken together the results do highlight the difficulties faced by adult learners as they try to understand texts when prompted to read faster (breznitz & berman, 2003). they also show the complex interaction of a number of factors (e.g., level of proficiency, language background and orthographic representation of l1, text type, etc.) and reading processes, and how together these impact on fluency and comprehension. given the importance of these facets for university study, it is an area that requires much further investigation. improving reading fluency and comprehension in adult esl learners using bottom-up and. . . 129 references abbott, m. l. 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(2012). using word identification fluency to monitor first-grade reading development. exceptional children, 78(2), 201220. retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/916923335?accountid=10382 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: marek derenowski (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: anna mystkowska-wiertelak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) language editor: melanie ellis (language teacher training college, zabrze) vol. 5 no. 4 december 2015 editorial board: janusz arabski (university of silesia) larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, university of new south wales, sydney) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo) kata csizér (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) robert dekeyser (university of maryland) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) carol griffiths (fatih university, istanbul) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) sarah mercer (university of graz) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) bonny norton (university of british columbia) terrence odlin (ohio state university) rebecca oxford (university of maryland) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (university of pannonia, trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto) elaine tarone (university of minnesota) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2015 editor: mirosław pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak marek derenowski anna mystkowska-wiertelak © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · infobaseindex · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the thomson reuters master journal list. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 5, number 4, december 2015 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors ....................................................................509 editorial .........................................................................................515 articles: lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen – second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment ............................ 519 feng xiao – proficiency effect on l2 pragmatic competence .......... 557 csaba kálmán, esther gutierrez eugenio – successful learning in a corporate setting: the role of attribution theory and its relation to intrinsic and extrinsic motivation ........................................................................................ 583 awanui te huia – exploring goals and motivations of māori heritage language learners ............................................................................ 609 joseph siegel, aki siegel – getting to the bottom of l2 listening instruction: making a case for bottom-up activities........................................... 637 alexander andrason, marianna visser – affordances perspective and grammaticalization: incorporation of language, environment and users in the model of semantic paths ....................................................... 663 book reviews ................................................................................. 697 reviewers for volume 5/2015 ......................................................... 715 notes to contributors .....................................................................717 509 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors alexander andrason (phd in semitic languages, university complutense in madrid, spain, 2010) is an icelandic linguist currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at stellenbosch university (south africa), where he is also completing his second phd in african languages. his research focuses mainly on the areas of verbal systems, cognitive linguistics, semantics and morphosyntax, grammaticalization theory, typology, dynamic modelling of natural languages, language contact, complexity theory and physical anthropology. his language interests include the indo-european (germanic, slavic, romance and greek), afro-asiatic (semitic and egyptian) and nigercongo (mande, bantu and khoesan) families. he has also been engaged in the documentation and preservation of endangered and minority languages (vilamovicean). contact data: department of african languages, stellenbosch university; matieland 7602, south africa (andrason@sun.ac.za) adriana biedroń received her doctoral and postdoctoral degrees in applied linguistics from adam mickiewicz university in poznań, poland in 2003 and 2013, respectively. she is a professor in the english philology department at the pomeranian university in słupsk, poland. her fields of interest include applied psycholinguistics and second language acquisition theory. her research focuses on individual differences in sla, in particular, on foreign language aptitude and cognitive and personality factors in gifted l2 learners. her most important publications are “working memory and short-term memory abilities in accomplished multilinguals” (with anna szczepaniak, 2012, the modern language journal) and cognitive-affective profile of gifted adult foreign language learners (2012, wydawnictwo naukowe akademii pomorskiej w słupsku). contact data: english philology department pomeranian university in słupsk, arciszewskiego 22a, 76-200 słupsk, poland (adriana.biedron@apsl.edu.pl) andrew d. cohen was a peace corps volunteer in rural community development with the aymara indians on the high plains of bolivia (1965-68), taught 4 years at 510 ucla in the esl section of the english department, and 16 years in language education at the school of education, hebrew university of jerusalem, israel before 22 years in second language studies at the university of minnesota, usa. he is coeditor of language learning strategies (2007, oxford university press) along with ernesto macaro, author of strategies in learning and using a second language (2011, routledge), and coauthor of teaching and learning pragmatics: where language and culture meet (2014, routledge) along with noriko ishihara. the pragmatics textbook has just appeared in both a japanese and an arabic version. aside from articles and book chapters on research methods, language assessment, bilingual education, language learner strategies, and pragmatics, he has studied 12 languages, mandarin being the latest. for more information, see andrew d. cohen’s website: https://z.umn.edu/adcohen contact data: 1555 lakeside drive #182, oakland, ca 94612, usa. 510-2509205 (h), 612-747-4700 (c) (adcohen@umn.edu) kata csizér holds a phd in language pedagogy and works as an associate professor in the department of english applied linguistics at eötvös university, budapest, hungary, where she teaches various l2 motivation courses. her main field of research interest comprises socio-psychological aspects of l2 learning and teaching as well as second and foreign language motivation. she has published over 50 academic papers on various aspects of l2 motivation and has coauthored four books, including the impact of self-concept on language learning (2014, multilingual matters, coauthored with m. magid). contact data: eötvös university, school of english and american studies, department of english applied linguistics, budapest, rákóczi út 5, 1088, hungary (weinkata@yahoo.com) esther gutierrez eugenio holds an ma-level degree in translation and interpreting from the university of salamanca, spain, a bsc in international studies awarded by the open university, uk and a postgraduate diploma in education (pgde) modern languages: spanish with french from the university of glasgow, uk. she has also been certified as a sworn legal translator and interpreter by the spanish government. she has extensive experience working as a language teacher in different universities, language schools and secondary schools across spain, belgium, uk and hungary, and as an interpreter trainer in hungary. at the moment she is completing her phd in language pedagogy and, besides her main doctoral research project on l3 teachers’ beliefs about multilingualism, she is also working in several projects on motivation and on language learning strategies used by highly-multilingual students. contact data: language pedagogy phd programme, eötvös loránd university of sciences, budapest, hungary, 1088, rákóczi út 5. (egutierrezeugenio@gmail.com) 511 awanui te huia, phd is a lecturer at te kawa a māui, the māori studies department at victoria university of wellington in new zealand. she combines her interest in māori language revitalisation with her research background in psychology. she has also taught english as a second language in japan to both children, and adults. awanui has recently been awarded an emerging teaching award from victoria university for her diverse teaching methods, which include the use of technology and interactive language learning games to reduce language anxiety experienced by adult l2 learners of the māori language. contact data: te kawa a māui school of māori studies, victoria university of wellington, po box 600, wellington 6140 (awanui.tehuia@vuw.ac.nz) csaba kálmán holds an ma in english language and literature from eötvös loránd university of budapest, hungary. he has extensive experience as a language teacher of adult learners of english in different corporate settings. apart from general and business english courses, he specialises in esp with special focus on the language of the energy industry, business presentations and negotiations. he also advises companies on drawing up and implementing their language education policies, and supervises their on-site language courses. currently he is completing his phd in language pedagogy at eötvös loránd university, budapest. his main field of interest within motivation research is the teacher’s role in motivating adult language learners in a corporate environment. contact data: language pedagogy phd programme, eötvös loránd university of sciences, budapest, hungary, 1088, rákóczi út 5. (csabakalman73@gmail.com) mirosław pawlak is professor of english in the english department at the faculty of pedagogy and fine arts of adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland. his main areas of interest are sla theory and research, form-focused instruction, classroom discourse, learner autonomy, communication and learning strategies, individual learner differences and pronunciation teaching. his recent publications include error correction in the foreign language classroom. reconsidering the issues (2012, adam mickiewicz university press) and several edited collections on learner autonomy, language policies of the council of europe, form-focused instruction, speaking in a foreign language and individual learner differences. contact data: department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, nowy świat 28-30, 62-800 kalisz, poland (pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl) aki siegel is an assistant professor at rikkyo university in the department of intercultural communication in tokyo, japan. she has taught english at the university 512 level in japan, vietnam, and the us. her research interests include conversation analysis, pragmatics, and evidence-based language teaching. contact data: department of intercultural communication, rikkyo university, 334-1 nishi-ikebukuro, toshima-ku, tokyo japan 171-8501 (siegel@rikkyo.ac.jp) joseph siegel is associate professor in the department of international business at meiji gakuin university in tokyo, japan, where he teaches general and business english courses, as well as study abroad prep classes. he holds a phd in applied linguistics from aston university and recently published the book exploring listening strategy instruction through action research (2015, palgrave macmillian). other recent publications and presentations have explored l2 listening pedagogy and teaching trends, and pragmatic interaction. contact data: department of international business, meiji gakuin university, 1-237 shirokane-dai minato-ku, tokyo japan 108-8636 (siegel@eco.meijigakuin.ac.jp) marianna visser is professor in african languages at stellenbosch university, south africa. she has been involved in the teaching of isixhosa as an undergraduate subject, both in courses designed for students who have a first (home) language competence in isixhosa and for students who study the subject as second (or additional) language learners. at postgraduate level, she has been involved in the teaching and research supervision of honours, master’s and phd students specialising in the study of several african languages related to isixhosa, including isizulu, siswati, isindebele, sesotho, sepedi, setswana, tshivenda and xitsonga, and some other sub-saharan african languages. her research interests and publications include second language learning and teaching, genre-based literacy and language teaching relating particularly to lexical-semantic, grammatical and discourse-semantic properties of texts, discourse analysis focusing of argumentation and media genres, and theoretical morphosyntax from a generative perspective. contact data: department of african languages, stellenbosch university; matieland 7602, south africa (mwv@sun.ac.za) lauren wyner received her ba from vassar college and holds an ma in tesol from teachers college, columbia university, usa where she won the 2014 apple award for her thesis, second language pragmatic competence: individual differences in esl and efl environments. she has taught english as a second and foreign language at teachers college, columbia university in ho chi minh city, vietnam, and in cape town, south africa, as well as providing individualized business english tutorials for the korea finance corporation. she is currently the 513 academic manager at the brooklyn school of languages and is an edm candidate in the program in applied linguistics at teachers college. contact data: 172 west 107th street, apt. 4r, new york, ny 10025, 617-7977270 (laurenwyner@tc.columbia.edu) feng xiao is assistant professor of asian languages and literatures at pomona college, uas. his research interests are interlanguage and intercultural pragmatics, technology-enhanced learning, and statistical language learning. contact data: pomona college, asian languages and literatures, 550 n. harvard avenue, claremont, ca 91711, usa (feng.xiao@pomona.edu) 523 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (4). 2013. 523-550 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl l2 motivation, anxiety and self-efficacy: the interrelationship of individual variables in the secondary school context katalin piniel eötvös university, budapest, hungary brozik-piniel.katalin@btk.elte.hu kata csizér eötvös university, budapest, hungary weinkata@yahoo.com abstract our study describes the relationship of second language learning motivation, self-efficacy, and anxiety; that is, how motivation, cognition, and affect might interact during the process of second language learning. questionnaire data were collected from 236 hungarian students studying at various secondary schools. structural equation modeling was used to investigate the proposed circular relationship of students’ motivated learning behavior, language learning experience, self-efficacy beliefs, and both debilitating and facilitating anxiety. our results indicate that: (a) the process of motivation is complex and influenced by other individual difference (id) variables, and (b) the investigation of id variables in constellations rather than in isolation seems to be more fruitful in understanding language learner differences. keywords: anxiety, motivation, self-efficacy, individual variables, variable complex katalin piniel, kata csizér 524 individual difference (id) variables have been repeatedly shown to contribute to language learning success to a great degree (dörnyei, 2005). hence, studies in applied linguistics on individual variables have proliferated in the last decades, and as a result, an increasingly diverse picture is unfolding as to what accounts for differences in foreign language attainment. this diversity is apparent in the many studies that claim the ultimate importance of different id factors, for example, motivation (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011), language aptitude (skehan, 2012), personality (e.g., ehrman, 1996), and language anxiety (e.g., horwitz & young, 1991). second, the number of id variables seems to be growing continuously with the introduction of constructs such as willingness to communicate, creativity, and selfefficacy, among others, into applied linguistics research. by now it has been acknowledged that these id factors interact with other contextual factors (including other id variables) and that they indeed change over time; that is, they are no longer viewed as stable characteristics of the learner (dörnyei, 2010). however, research remains confined to the investigation of id variables in pairs or in relation to language learners’ achievement, and only very few studies have focused on a constellation of these learner factors and their interrelationship (for an exception see, for example, dörnyei & tseng, 2009). both dekeyser (2012) and dörnyei (2009, 2010) point this out and call for more research on the systematic interaction between id variables. more specifically, dörnyei (2009) outlines a tripartite framework of motivation, cognition, and affect, and suggests that a more meaningful way to study id variables could be through the identification of such relatively stable constellations of learner characteristics, which would provide further understanding as to how id factors affect language learning. the aim of the present study was to investigate the complex relationship among three of the abovementioned id variables, namely, language learning motivation in terms of two dimensions (motivated learner behavior and language learning experience; see csizér & dörnyei, 2005), cognition in terms of self-efficacy (bandura, 1997), and affect in terms of the facilitating and debilitating effect (eysenck, 1979; macintyre & gardner, 1989) of foreign language classroom anxiety (horwitz & young, 1991), as constituents of the motivationcognition-affect framework proposed by dörnyei (2009). the study was conducted in the context of hungarian secondary school students learning english as a foreign language with the hope of gaining a better insight as to the role of id factors in foreign language learning. l2 motivation, anxiety and self-efficacy: the interrelationship of individual variables… 525 background motivation second language motivation studies have been traditionally at the forefront of english applied linguistics research in the past decades, as motivation is considered to be one of the most important id variables contributing to the success of second language learning. l2 motivation is a complex construct; hence, several researchers have used slightly different definitions describing students’ motivated behavior. still, there is a common understanding that the definition of motivation should cover students’ choice, effort and persistence in second language learning (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). in terms of the exceptionally large number of empirical studies, there have been several easily identifiable trends in the field. first, gardner and his associates have been investigating the social-psychological aspect of l2 motivation in canadian as well as several european contexts, in order to find out how positive attitudes towards the language and its speakers will affect students’ motivation. their most important contribution to the field is the conceptualization of the notion of integrativeness, which describes to what extent students intend to integrate into, or more generally to identify with, the l2 community (gardner, 2006, 2012; masgoret & gardner, 2003). second, dörnyei, and subsequently his colleagues, have been known to link l2 motivation to self-related studies in psychology, in which the investigation of motivation is seen to be shaped by how students view their actual and possible selves as well as the relationship between these selves. several studies have been dedicated to students’ most important self, their ideal l2 self, to see how future guides contribute to students’ learning behavior (dörnyei & ushioda, 2009). third, it has been increasingly acknowledged that l2 motivation is a dynamically changing notion that ebbs and flows throughout the learning process (ushioda, 2011). as a result, an increasing number of longitudinal investigations have looked into how and why motivational changes happen (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). despite differences both in the research methods employed and the conceptualizations of the various motivation-related constructs, one common viewpoint in these studies is that they treat motivation as a dependent construct, which is in turn shaped by several antecedent variables. as a result, very few studies have researched how motivation will actually affect the learning process, and experience in general, and other id type variables in particular. taking l2 motivation as a starting point is especially important in language learning contexts such as hungary. first of all, english is increasingly seen as a compulsory language to be learnt, and students at primary and secondary levkatalin piniel, kata csizér 526 els often do not have a genuine choice of the second foreign language, either, as the language they study generally depends on whether the school employs teachers of the particular foreign language (vágó, 2007). in addition, students do not have a choice at all concerning who teaches them english, and teachers sometimes change even within a single school year (vágó, 2007). moreover, studies in the hungarian context have shown that teachers do not seem to be aware of the fact that they may be responsible for motivating their students; teachers often express the view that students are expected to come to l2 classes already motivated (mezei, 2007; nikolov, 1999a, 1999b). consequently, in the present study, students’ motivated learning behavior is conceptualized as part of a cyclical process affecting students’ perceived language learning experience and then their self-efficacy. self-efficacy the construct of self-efficacy has appeared in many guises in applied linguistics research. tremblay and gardner (1995) in their structural model of id variables describe an inverse relationship between language anxiety and self-efficacy, and claim that the former has a negative influence on the latter. in a revised version of their model gardner, tremblay, and masgoret (1997) abandon the use of the label self-efficacy with a cognitive referent and substitute it with a very similar social concept of self-confidence, which also enters into a reciprocal relationship with language anxiety: lower levels of self-confidence tend to co-occur with higher levels of language anxiety. self-confidence also appears in studies as linguistic self-confidence (clément, dörnyei, & noels, 1994; noels, pon, & clément, 1996), self-perceptions, or self-ratings (macintyre, noels, & clément, 1997). in the present study, in line with bandura’s (1986) definition, self-efficacy will be referred to as a cognitive construct which comprises “people’s judgments of their capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performances” (p. 391). wong (2005) in her research involving teacher trainees mentions “language self-efficacy beliefs” (p. 248) as a subtype of beliefs about language learning (see horwitz, 1988). thus, in the language learning context, self-efficacy beliefs can be said to refer to beliefs that one has the resources (a) in general, to learn a foreign language and reach a desired level of foreign language proficiency, and (b) more specifically, to perform foreign language related tasks successfully (bandura, 1986, 1988). this divide is also closely linked conceptually to achievement goal theory of mastery and performance goal orientations in motivation (see pintrich, 2000), where mastery goal orientation is associated with more general purposes and performance goals are linked to particular tasks. l2 motivation, anxiety and self-efficacy: the interrelationship of individual variables… 527 self-efficacy beliefs seem to have direct and indirect effect on different aspects of language learning. mills, pajares, and herron (2007) in their research found self-efficacy to be a strong predictor of language learning success among college students of intermediate french. at the same time zimmerman (2000) posits that self-efficacy beliefs influence motivation, more specifically learners’ persistence and intended effort invested in learning. furthermore, while tremblay and gardner (1995) suggest that language anxiety lowers learners’ self-efficacy, bandura (1988) postulates the opposite: self-efficacy influences anxiety, as self-judgment of ineptness to perform a task evokes negative feelings. either way, from the above it seems that self-efficacy, although not investigated to a large extent, plays an important role in the complex interaction of id variables relevant to language learning success. anxiety the final individual variable in the present study which has been demonstrated to influence foreign language learning success, and which generally seems to inhibit the language learning process, is foreign language classroom anxiety (horwitz & young, 1991). the psychological construct of anxiety is defined as “the subjective feeling of tension, apprehension, nervousness, and worry associated with an arousal of the autonomic nervous system” (spielberger, 1983, p. 1). horwitz, horwitz and cope (1991), along with macintyre and gardner (1991a, 1991b) and macintyre (1999), proposed that foreign language anxiety, or more precisely, foreign language classroom anxiety, is a situation-specific type of anxiety, which is experienced as recurring in the well-defined situation of the foreign language classroom. alpert and haber (1960) in their pioneering work on academic achievement and anxiety distinguished between facilitating and debilitating effects of anxiety: facilitating anxiety enhances performance, whereas debilitating anxiety inhibits it. test anxiety research has widely dealt with the two contrasting notions (sarason, 1980), and studies in sports psychology have also been published on the beneficial as well as the adverse effects of anxiety on performance (tenenbaum & eklund, 2007). interestingly, however, the facilitating aspect of language anxiety has been rarely investigated in applied linguistics; kleinmann’s (1977) seminal paper is one exception. this paucity may be due to the presumption that facilitating anxiety is more commonly associated with cognitively less demanding tasks, whereas language learning is generally viewed as a complex task where anxiety is more likely to inhibit the learning process. nonetheless, it must be noted that the findings of studies on language anxiety and its negative relationship with language proficiency (horwitz, katalin piniel, kata csizér 528 1995; macintyre & gardner, 1991a, 1991b; macintyre, noels, & clément, 1997), language learning motivation (csizér & dörnyei, 2005; dörnyei, 2005; dörnyei, csizér, & németh, 2006; macintyre, 2002), self-confidence (clément, gardner, & smythe, 1980), and self-efficacy (mills, pajares, & herron, 2007) have not produced straightforward results, as oftentimes they are based on interpretations of moderate correlations. this leads to the assumption that anxiety can indeed have a positive as well as a negative effect on language learning. treating the two poles as one in quantitative studies has generated ambiguous results in applied linguistics research. another area of theoretical uncertainty involves the issue of measuring foreign language classroom anxiety. the most widely used instrument that is currently available for measuring language anxiety is the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas; horwitz, 1991). the instrument purports to measure the constructs of communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation; however, validation studies have not been able to fully confirm this componential structure (e.g., aida, 1994; cheng, horwitz, & schallert, 1999; pérez-paredes & martínez-sanchez, 2001; tóth, 2008). another issue arising from the use of the flcas is that it focuses on measuring debilitating anxiety especially related to speaking in the foreign language classroom (horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1991; macintyre & gardner, 1989). thus, the debilitating-facilitating nature of anxiety is somewhat neglected and because cutoff scores have not been established as to who can be considered as an anxious language learner, researchers can only compare language learners to one another and discuss relatively high or low levels of foreign language classroom anxiety. due to these considerations, in the present study we opted for using an instrument that measured the constructs of facilitating and debilitating anxiety in connection with language learning rather than use the widespread flcas. relationship between motivation and anxiety via self-efficacy: the hypothesized model in psychology, the relationship between motivation, cognition, and affect is portrayed as a rather complex phenomenon. in the past years, the close interconnection of these variables has resurfaced as the object of social cognitive research (carver, 2006; dai & sternberg, 2004). advocates of this line of study suggest that cognitive functioning occurs in context, and thus it is more meaningful to investigate it in interaction with motivation and emotion. this interaction, however, is characterized by an array of intertwined and multidirectional relationships and, as a result, has been studied mainly from two different perspectives: (a) some studl2 motivation, anxiety and self-efficacy: the interrelationship of individual variables… 529 ies have focused on appraisal theory research and the role cognition plays in invoking emotion, whereas (b) other studies have explored the ways emotion affects cognitive processes (linnenbrink & pintrich, 2004). the present study, in line with the first perspective, subscribes to the notion that emotion is directly prompted by appraisal, the cognitive component responsible for the evaluation of particular events (lazarus, 1991; scherer, 2001). according to smith and kirby (2001), appraisal “as the elicitor of emotions, plays a central role in the generation and differentiation of emotion” (p. 212). emotion theorists further postulate that different types of appraisal evoke different emotions (smith & kirby, 2001); therefore, it is important to highlight here that the focus of the present study in terms of affect is restricted to investigating anxiety (namely, foreign language anxiety). according to lazarus’s (1991) transactional model of coping, the experienced situation (also called a stressor) prompts the process of cognitive appraisal to evaluate the stressor and elicits the emotion of anxiety accordingly. smith and kirby (2009), closely based on lazarus (1991), suggest that coping involves seven components, one of which is the notion of problem-solution coping potential (cf. lazarus, 1991), “an assessment of the individual’s ability to act on the situation” (smith & kirby, 2009, p. 123). this parallels the definition of selfefficacy cited above, and is in sync with what jerusalem and schwarzer (1992) also suggested earlier, namely that self-efficacy as described in social cognitive theory is present in the evaluative process of cognitive appraisal. bandura’s (1993) social cognitive theory of learning further posits that self-efficacy beliefs play a central role in initiating coping behavior, as well as the amount and the duration of effort invested in action, thus regulating motivation and behavior in terms of academic achievement. as a result, the present study treats selfefficacy as the cognitive determinant of anxiety as an affect. carver (2001) describes self-regulating feedback systems where goal pursuit (motivation), assessment of the distance of the goal (also part of appraisal; cf. smith & kirby, 2009), experience, and affect interact. pintrich (2000) suggests that in achievement contexts mastery and performance goal orientations can involve motivation that prompts either approach or avoidant behavior. according to elliot (2006), “approach motivation may be defined as the energization of behavior by, or the direction of behavior toward, positive stimuli (objects, events, possibilities), whereas avoidance motivation may be defined as the energization of behavior by, or the direction of behavior away from, negative stimuli (objects, events, possibilities)” (p. 112). carver (2006) demonstrates this point by describing discrepancy reducing and discrepancy enlarging feedback loops; in other words, if the goal, in terms of performance, is accessible with the help of available resources, emotion enhances approach katalin piniel, kata csizér 530 behavior and the discrepancy of the present and target state decreases, generating positive experience and a further enhanced level of self-efficacy. conversely, if the opposite is true, in other words, if the goal is inaccessible because of the unavailability of resources, negative emotion arises fostering avoidance behavior, and discrepancy between the present state and the desired state increases, which generates negative experiences and further fosters a low sense of self-efficacy (cf. elliot, 2006; higgins, 1997). in simpler terms, high self-efficacy influences the affect of anxiety (i.e., higher levels of self-efficacy will lower the levels of anxiety) and motivation (i.e., higher levels of self-efficacy will be linked to higher levels of approach motivation). this means that learners with high levels of self-efficacy are likely to have more positive experiences (cf. csíkszentmihályi’s, 1997 concept of the flow experience) of learning a language. on the other hand, a lower sense of self-efficacy is associated with higher levels of anxiety and avoidance motivation, which is often linked to lower levels of positive experience (or at times even negative experience) of performance. in light of this, dörnyei (2010) suggests that when investigating the mental processes and characteristics of language learners, the three dimensions of motivation, cognition, and affect should be treated as parts of one intertwined framework. within this general framework, dörnyei (2010) further claims that there may be relatively stable constellations that “would make the system of learner characteristics/behavior predictable and therefore researchable” (p. 263). hence, it is suggested that language learning motivation, foreign language anxiety, and self-efficacy readily lend themselves as such a variable complex, in spite of, or rather because of, the fact that empirical evidence so far has been ambiguous in terms of how these variables are interconnected (macintyre, clément, dörnyei, & noels, 1998; macintyre, macmaster, & baker, 2001). on the one hand, motivation intensity seems to affect the learner’s level of language anxiety (gardner, masgoret, & tremblay, 1999); on the other hand, lack of anxiety does not necessarily imply a high level of motivation (gardner, day, & macintyre, 1992). furthermore, motivation and anxiety have each been associated with self-efficacy, but again the relationships have not proved to be strong and straightforward. the reasons behind the mixed results may be manifold. first of all, as mentioned above, there seems to be an inconsistency in terms of the relationship of the constructs. oftentimes, language anxiety is subsumed as a component of language learning motivation (tremblay & gardner, 1995), and selfefficacy is sometimes confused with the more stable characteristic of selfconfidence, also frequently described in applied linguistics as the lack of anxiety (macintyre, macmaster, & baker, 2001). second, the inconsistent evidence of the relationship of these three variables may also stem from the fact that, in line with psychological theory, the link between these dimensions is most l2 motivation, anxiety and self-efficacy: the interrelationship of individual variables… 531 probably cyclical, with experience and self-efficacy acting as moderators between motivation and anxiety. finally, in applied linguistics research, with the exception of a few studies, investigations along the facilitating and debilitating divide of affect and its influence on motivation are scarce. in line with a current trend in applied linguistics to investigate variable complexes as opposed to variables in isolation (dekeyser, 2012; robinson, 2002), the present paper proposes the following: 1. self-efficacy and language anxiety are distinct from but closely linked with language learning motivation constructs. 2. dörnyei’s (2009) tripartite model of motivation-cognition-affect provides an adequate framework for understanding the cyclical relationship between the abovementioned three id variables: language learning motivation, self-efficacy and foreign language classroom anxiety. 3. the framework of motivation-cognition-affect is likely to show different results concerning facilitating and debilitating language anxiety. thus, the research question guiding the study was formulated as follows: how do various motivation, anxiety, and self-efficacy related variables explain students’ foreign language learning behavior? with a view to the schematic representation of the model presented in figure 1, the following five hypotheses were drawn up: 1. the perceived quality of the learning experience influences learners’ self-efficacy beliefs about language learning: more positive experiences will enhance learners’ sense of self-efficacy; negative experiences will lower learners’ levels of self-efficacy. 2. self-efficacy beliefs and cognition about the availability of resources influence the quality of the emotional experience: a. higher levels of self-efficacy are associated more closely with facilitating anxiety than debilitating anxiety. b. lower levels of self-efficacy are associated with higher levels of debilitating anxiety. 3. foreign language anxiety influences motivated language learning behavior: a. debilitating anxiety causes avoidance behavior, hence it is associated with lower levels of motivation. b. facilitating anxiety contributes to approach behavior and positively influences motivated language learning behavior. 4. motivated language learning behavior influences the quality of the language learning experience. katalin piniel, kata csizér 532 based on the theoretical considerations outlined above, we set out to test the interrelationships of the model detailed in figure 1. figure 1 the schematic representation of the hypothesized model method participants the study was conducted in the spring term of 2011 in hungary with secondary school students. the hungarian questionnaire was filled in by 236 participants (boys, n = 108; girls, n = 127; n = 1 without indication of gender) from 4 different secondary schools located in various parts of the hungarian capital city of budapest. we used stratified random sampling, which meant that we randomly selected secondary schools and in each school all year 10 students filled in the questionnaire. the age of the participants ranged from 14 to 17 with an average age of 15. all the students studied english as a foreign language at school and their average age of starting to learn the language was 9. these students had an average of 6 english lessons a week (ranging from 3 to 16). most of the students (n = 128) claimed to have an intermediate level of knowledge and the majority of them (n = 202) intended to choose english as one of the subjects for their school-leaving examination. instrument the four of the five scales adapted for the present study were drawn from two different previously standardized instruments (alpert & haber, 1960; learning experience selfefficacy facilitating/ debilitating anxiety motivated learning behavior l2 motivation, anxiety and self-efficacy: the interrelationship of individual variables… 533 ryan, 2005) and one, the self-efficacy scale, was compiled specifically for this study. the resulting tool was pre-piloted (for the procedures see below). a description of each scale and the scale items will be presented below (for the items themselves see appendix a). we have also calculated the cronbach alpha measures for each scale, which gives information on the internal consistency of the scales, that is, how reliably items contributing to the scales operationalize the proposed construct (dörnyei, 2007). motivated learning behavior. this scale was adapted from ryan (2005); it was piloted by gálik (2006) for the hungarian context, and was finalized by kormos and csizér (2008). five items on a 5-point likert-scale operationalized to what extent students were willing to work hard and persist to learn english (cronbach’s alpha = .81). this standardized scale is regularly used as the main dependent scale in empirical studies around the world to measure students’ intended behaviour (see dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). language learning experience. this scale was taken from ryan (2005); it was piloted by gálik (2006) for the hungarian context and finalized by kormos and csizér (2008). four items on a 5-point likert-scale operationalized how positively students relate to their language learning experiences (cronbach’s alpha = .85). we have decided to include this scale into the study because language learning experience is one of the key variables in dörnyei’s (2005) l2 motivational self system theory. self-efficacy. the scale measuring self-efficacy was drawn up for the purposes of the present study and was based on bandura’s conceptualizations of the construct and his guidelines for compiling such an instrument (bandura, 2006). the scale consisted of 9 items which measured language learners’ sense of self-efficacy in connection with the 4 language skills in and outside the classroom; in other words, it measured to what extent they felt they have the ability to successfully perform foreign language related tasks. instead of the suggested 10-point scale, the items were drawn up using a 5-point likert-scale (cronbach’s alpha = .92). facilitating anxiety. items of alpert and haber’s (1960) achievement anxiety test were adapted to measure facilitating experiences of foreign language classroom anxiety. we opted for this instrument instead of using the well-known flcas (horwitz, 1991) because we intended to distinguish the constructs of facilitating and debilitating anxiety, which the flcas does not explicitly set out to do. facilitating anxiety was operationalized as anxiety tied katalin piniel, kata csizér 534 to the language learning situation and as a result of which the learner invests more effort into language learning. five 5-point likert-scale items were included in the questionnaire. the cronbach’s alpha value for this scale was .60, which means that the scale’s reliability can be characterized as acceptable (cohen, manion, & morrison, 2007, p. 506). debilitating anxiety. items of alpert and haber’s (1960) achievement anxiety test were also adapted to measure debilitating experiences of foreign language classroom anxiety. debilitating anxiety was operationalized as anxiety tied to the language learning situation involving a feeling of inhibition and apprehension. five 5-point likert-scale items were included in the questionnaire (cronbach’s alpha = .86). procedure and data analysis the questionnaire was designed in hungarian and was piloted with the help of a think aloud protocol (dörnyei, 2005). based on the results of the think aloud interviews, potentially problematic items were reworded, and the instrument was finalized. the final version of the questionnaire was personally delivered to the secondary schools, where we oversaw the administration of the questionnaires. all the questionnaires were computer-coded and spss (statistical package for social sciences) 17.0 was used for pre-analyzing the data. as for the structural equation modeling, we used amos 20.0 to test the fit of the hypothesized model. concerning the modeling procedure a number of issues must be addressed at the onset. first, missing data was checked for each variable. there were exceptionally few cases of missing data (maximum of 3 cases for some variables); therefore, we decided to impute those missing cases with the mean value of the given variable (little & rubin, 1987). outliers, on the other hand, were not treated. second, the distribution of normality of the dataset was checked. all univariate distributions were normal, that is, both the skewness and kurtosis values were within the range of -1 to +1. as a result, maximum likelihood estimation was considered appropriate for the present data set. in analyzing our data, we followed the step-by-step requirements for structural equation modeling (sem) procedures (byrne, 2009). first, we established the reliability of our scales. next, we calculated the measurement models for each scale. then, in order to ensure construct validity, we carefully studied earlier research in order to draw up a full measurement model. once the measurement model was decided on, we ran the analysis twice: first, to calculate the initial fit indexes and review possible amendments suggested by the l2 motivation, anxiety and self-efficacy: the interrelationship of individual variables… 535 program; second, to confirm that the acceptability of the fit indexes and all relationships in the model were significant. in terms of the assessment of data-model fit, we used the most often advised indices in the sem literature (byrne, 2009), and along the chi-square statistics and the cmin/df (chi-square divided by the degrees of freedom), we report additional indices: comparative fit index (cfi) (fan, thomson, & wang, 1999; hu & bentler, 1999), the bentler-bonett normed fit index (nfi), the tucker-lewis coefficient (tli), the root mean square error of approximation (rmsea) (browne & cudeck, 1993; fan et al., 1999; hu & bentler, 1999), and the parsimony-adjusted comparative fit index (pcfi). results the measurement and final models as a first step in testing the model-fit, we set out to assess the five measurement models separately. the analysis indicated adequacy of the measurement models. the related results are shown in appendix b. the first evaluation of the hypothesized full model indicated a close-to-acceptable fit. in order to obtain higher fit indices, we have included additional paths between error terms. the final models are shown in figures 2 and 3. the fit indexes of the final models are presented in table 1. the correlated error terms are shown in appendix c. figure 2 the schematic representation of the final model with facilitating anxiety learning experience selfefficacy facilitating anxiety motivated learning behavior katalin piniel, kata csizér 536 figure 3 the schematic representation of the final model with debilitating anxiety table 1 fit indexes for the final structural models model chi square df p chi square/df rmsea srmr gfi nfi pnfi cfi pcfi 1 319.5 215 <.001 1.486 .046 .072 .894 .881 .749 .957 .813 2 362.84 216 <.001 1.680 .054 .069 .880 .884 .755 .949 .810 concerning the final models, the hypothesized relationships have been supported and the obtained results indicate a number of interesting issues. first, students’ motivated learning behavior will enhance their learning experiences; that is, the more motivated a student is, the more positively she or he will view the learning experience. positive learning experience then influences students’ self-efficacy in a positive way. in addition, a higher level of self-efficacy is in a positive relationship with facilitating anxiety, whereas it has a negative impact on debilitating anxiety. interestingly enough, the negative effects of debilitating anxiety seem to be counteracted by self-efficacy, influencing motivated learning behavior in a positive way. this relationship (self-efficacy motivated learning behavior) is missing from the model including facilitating anxiety. finally, both facilitating and debilitating anxiety have an impact on motivated learning behavior. discussion and implications with the help of structural equation modeling as a data analytical tool, we were able to demonstrate that dörnyei’s (2009) tripartite model of motivationcognition-affect is a viable framework to use when investigating the relationship learning experience selfefficacy debilitating anxiety motivated learning behavior .42 l2 motivation, anxiety and self-efficacy: the interrelationship of individual variables… 537 between language learning motivation, self-efficacy, and foreign language classroom anxiety. our results also showed that self-efficacy and language anxiety are indeed distinct from, but closely linked with, motivational constructs of motivated language learning behavior and language learning experience. using our data set, we have found support for the hypothetical circular relationships outlined in the schematic representation of the theoretical model. first and foremost, the effect of motivated learner behavior on the language learning experience has been confirmed. this means that, in line with csíkszentmihályi (1991), the quality of experience is the function of, among others, the learner’s motivation (clearly set proximal goals) to engage in and pursue a task or course of action based on previous subjective experiences and subjective judgment of capacities (self-efficacy). in other words, language learners who are more persistent and who are more likely to invest effort into language learning are also more likely to perceive their language learning classroom experience as positive. although the relationship between motivated language learning behavior and experience proved to be significant, the moderate degree implies that alongside motivated learner behavior, other factors also play an important role in the quality of the language learning experience (e.g., the teacher’s personality, the group, the language learning milieu, and others not included in the scope of this study). in both resulting models it is interesting to see that language learning experience influences self-efficacy beliefs to a very similar but moderate extent. according to zimmerman (2000), self-efficacy beliefs are influenced by four types of experience: enactive experience (based on the outcome of personal experiences), vicarious experiences (self-comparisons with a model), verbal persuasion (outcomes described by an outsider), and perceived physiological reactions. the scale directed at assessing learners’ experience in the present study closely resembles the idea of “enactive experience.” hence, although zimmerman (2000) posits that enactive experiences are the most influential in terms of self-efficacy beliefs, there are other types of experiences that we did not measure in the present study, and which thus could not appear as part of the relationship between experience and self-efficacy. an interesting difference between the two models with respect to the different types of anxiety under investigation was the direct relationship between self-efficacy and motivation, when the anxiety accounted for was debilitating. this is also supported by zimmerman (2000), who refers to selfefficacy as a direct as well as an indirect (through anxiety) antecedent to motivation. the reason why the direct link did not appear in the case of facilitating anxiety may be that the forces behind self-efficacy, anxiety, and motivation are qualitatively different. it may be the case that in terms of positive self-efficacy beliefs and facilitating anxiety we can speak more of approach motivation (elliot, 2006), which is enhanced through the facilitating nature of katalin piniel, kata csizér 538 anxiety, whereas in the case of debilitating anxiety, self-efficacy beliefs may still provide impetus for approach motivation (hence the positive relationship between debilitating anxiety and motivated learner behavior); nonetheless, debilitating anxiety can be charac-terized by an approach motivation type of response to a small extent. this is in line with bandura’s (1977) observation that expectations of personal efficacy determine whether coping behavior will be initiated, how much effort will be expended, and how long it will be sustained in the face of obstacles and aversive experiences. persistence in activities that are subjectively threatening but in fact relatively safe produces, through experiences of mastery, further enhancement of self-efficacy and corresponding reductions in defensive behavior (p. 191). according to the results presented here, facilitating anxiety, as opposed to debilitating anxiety, influences motivated language learning behavior to a larger extent. this is in line with what kleinmann (1977) has found on the task level: learners with higher levels of facilitating anxiety were found to experiment with more difficult language structures; thus, it can be said that they invested more effort into producing language than those who relied on using structures they had already mastered. this also parallels csíkszentmihályi’s (1997) concept of the flow experience. in other words, flow theory suggests that when the task at hand is neither too easy nor too difficult for the learner, and the state of arousal is adequate (not too high so as not to inhibit the learner, but higher than merely evoking boredom) the learner will experience flow (egbert, 2003). this optimal level of arousal is reminiscent of facilitating anxiety, where anxiety provokes an approach (problem-solving coping) response (see appraisal theory). not only is the relationship among these id variables worth mentioning, but also the notion that data analysis on the present dataset has yielded a circular model of experience, self-efficacy, anxiety, and motivation. thus far, many studies have focused on motivated language learning behavior as an end or a product of a process, but here it has been clearly shown to feed back to the quality of experience and further, to self-efficacy, anxiety, and greater motivation. the above results support the notions that (a) the process of motivation is complex and influenced by other id variables, and (b) the investigation of id variables in “constellations” rather than in isolation seems to be more fruitful in understanding language learner differences. conclusion in our study we set out to investigate how motivation, cognition and affect might interact in the l2 learning process of secondary school students studying english in a predominantly monolingual context. our results indicate a circular l2 motivation, anxiety and self-efficacy: the interrelationship of individual variables… 539 relationship, which implies a number of issues. despite the fact that l2 motivational literature usually sees motivated learning behavior as a key concept to shape students’ behavior (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011) and, therefore, teachers are constantly reminded to enhance students’ intended learning behavior (dörnyei, 2001), it seems that there are several intervention points in the process. for example, enhancing the learning experience by making the learning process more relevant and enjoyable for students will increase their self-efficacy, which will impact anxiety and intended behavior. alternatively, anxiety reducing training helps students increase the amount of energy they invest into learning and that will make the process more enjoyable and their experiences more rewarding. learning experience then affects students’ self-efficacy beliefs, which in turn has both a direct and indirect impact through debilitating and facilitating anxiety on students’ motivated learning behavior. these results imply that enhancing students’ motivated learning behavior can have an effect on the way they process the experience of language learning and the self-efficacy beliefs they develop. in terms of anxiety it is important to note that despite the fact that it is often seen as a factor hindering learning, it can also contribute to the learning process by positively influencing students’ learning behavior via its facilitating effect. the cyclical nature of the proposed structural model also implies that the constructs we investigated are interrelated and this allows for intervention (on the part of the teacher and/or the learner) at any point in the cycle. in other words, lowering the level of debilitating anxiety, or enhancing self-efficacy can increase the amount of effort invested in language learning, which in turn is likely to lead to positive experiences and further enhance learner’s self-efficacy. improving classroom experience can also lead to a higher sense of self-efficacy, or investing more effort which can result in more experiences of success, a heightened sense of self-efficacy and lower anxiety levels. thus, using our data we could demonstrate that studying an amalgam of id variables rather than investigating them in isolation can present a more complex view of their role in language learning. at this point we have to note the limitations of our study. it has to be pointed out that the study investigated one particular foreign language learning context; in other contexts the result might have been different. in addition, the inherent limitations of structural equation modeling indicate the possibility of the existence of competing models, which are never tested. in terms of further studies, we need to note that to understand the different processes concerning debilitating and facilitating anxiety further research is warranted. katalin piniel, kata csizér 540 references aida, y. 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(2000). self-efficacy: an essential motive to learn. contemporary educational psychology, 25, 82-91. katalin piniel, kata csizér 546 appendix a the items of the scales motivated learning behavior mlb1. i am willing to work hard at learning english. mlb2. learning english is one of the most important aspects in my life. mlb3. i am determined to push myself to learn english. mlb4. i can honestly say that i am really doing my best to learn english. mlb5. it is very important for me to learn english. language learning experience lle1: english lessons are always fun. lle2: i really like the tasks we do during english lessons. lle3: i never get bored during english lessons. lle4: i really like the english lessons. self-efficacy se1: i am confident that i can do the speaking tasks in the efl class. se2: i am confident that i can do the silent reading tasks in the efl class. se3: i am confident that i can do the writing tasks in the efl class. se4: i am confident that i can do the listening tasks in the efl class. se5: i am confident that i can understand what is said in english in the efl class. se6: i am confident that i can answer questions in english in the efl class. se7: i am confident that i can understand what is said in english outside the classroom. se8: i am confident that i can understand what i read in english outside the classroom. se9: i am confident that i can express myself in writing in english outside the classroom. facilitating anxiety fa1: i work best under pressure. fa2: in efl class, i do better when i’m a little anxious. fa3: in efl class, the more important the task, the better i seem to do. fa4: in efl class, i enjoy doing a difficult task more than an easy one. fa5: if i have started task during english class, nothing can keep from finishing it. debilitating anxiety da1: it is even more difficult to do a hard task when it is graded because i am afraid of getting a bad mark. da2: nervousness while taking doing a task in efl class hinders me from doing well. da3: the more important the task in the efl class, the less well i seem to do because i become nervous. l2 motivation, anxiety and self-efficacy: the interrelationship of individual variables… 547 da4: if the teacher calls on me in efl class, i often block on questions to which i know the answers, even though i might remember them later. da5: time pressure always seems to make me do worse than the others on language tasks in the efl class. katalin piniel, kata csizér 548 appendix b correlation matrixes and fit indexes for the measurement models measurement model of motivated learning behavior item mean sd mlb1 mlb2 mlb3 mlb4 mlb5 mlb1 3.87 .99 1.00 mlb2 2.85 1.15 .386** 1.00 mlb3 4.19 .99 .476** .285** 1.00 mlb4 3.64 1.06 .655** .483** .545** 1.00 mlb5 4.47 .75 .422** .454** .496** .410** 1.00 ** p < .01. measurement model of language learning experience item mean sd lle1 lle2 lle3 lle4 lle1 3.44 1.16 1.00 lle2 3.14 1.18 .727** 1.00 lle3 2.89 1.24 .501** .474** 1.00 lle4 3.28 1.28 .672** .706** .448** 1.00 ** p < .01. measurement model of self-efficacy item mean sd se1 se2 se3 se4 se5 se6 se7 se8 se1 3.64 .98 1.00 se2 4.09 .91 .548** 1.00 se3 3.86 .93 .564** .645** 1.00 se4 3.47 1.06 .713** .458** .508** 1.00 se5 3.56 .96 .575** .513** .495** .608** 1.00 se6 3.63 .97 .749** .556** .554** .656** .664** 1.00 se7 3.52 .96 .622** .459** .476** .571** .631** .682** 1.00 se8 3.76 .92 .451** .559** .513** .417** .491** .509** .614** 1.00 se9 3.63 .97 .573** .541** .618** .518** .589** .647** .549** .610** measurement model of facilitating anxiety item mean sd fa1 fa2 fa3 fa4 fa5 fa1 2.03 1.08 1.00 fa2 1.99 0.98 .286** 1.00 fa3 2.67 1.09 .226** .279** 1.00 fa4 2.67 1.13 .175** .215** .340** 1.00 fa5 2.61 1.04 ns ns .344** .378** 1.00 ** p < .01, ns (not significant) measurement model of debilitating anxiety item mean sd da1 da2 da3 da4 da5 da1 2.87 1.29 1.00 da2 2.51 1.30 .541** 1.00 da3 2.39 1.17 .612** .626** 1.00 l2 motivation, anxiety and self-efficacy: the interrelationship of individual variables… 549 da4 2.64 1.28 .483** .522** .510** 1.00 da5 2.20 1.14 .574** .587** .666** .528** 1.00 ** p < .01. fit indexes for the measurement models of the five latent dimensions chi square df p chi square/df rmsea srmr gfi nfi pnfi cfi pcfi mlb 5.222 3 .156 1.741 .056 .021 .991 .987 .296 .994 .298 lle 1.441 2 .486 .721 .001 .010 .997 .997 .332 .999 .333 se 28.979 20 .088 1.449 .044 .023 .974 .979 .544 .993 .552 fa 15.198 4 .004 3.800 .109 .058 .975 .887 .355 .910 .364 da 2.824 5 .727 .565 .001 .012 .995 .995 .497 .999 .500 katalin piniel, kata csizér 550 appendix c the correlated error terms in the final models final model 1 coefficient e_mlb2-e_mlb5 .275 e_mlb3-e_mlb5 .296 e_se1-e_se2 .063 e_se1-e_se4 .296 e_se1-e_se5 -.174 e_se1-e_se6 .150 e_se2-e_se3 .325 e_se2-e_se8 .232 e_se7-e_se8 .332 e_se8-e_se9 .314 e_fa2_efa5 -.302 final model 2 coefficient e_mlb2-e_mlb5 .266 e_mlb3-e_mlb5 .286 e_se1-e_se4 .291 e_se1-e_se5 -.171 e_se1-e_se6 .145 e_se2-e_se3 .305 e_se2-e_se8 .236 e_se7-e_se8 .338 e_se8-e_se9 .315 267 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 1 (2). 267-281 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl anxiety over efl speaking and writing: a view from language classrooms christina gkonou department of language and linguistics, university of essex cgkono@essex.ac.uk abstract the assumption that foreign language learners experience a high level of anxiety mainly when faced with speaking activities implies that research should focus on those learners prone to anxiety over that skill. despite not being widely investigated, foreign language writing anxiety also seems to be a concern for a large number of students. drawing on questionnaire findings, the study reported in this article examined the nature of, and the connection between the english language classroom speaking and writing anxiety of 128 greek efl learners in private language school settings. speaking anxiety was operationalised by horwitz, horwitz, and cope s (1986) foreign language classroom anxiety scale, and wri ng anxiety was measured by gungle and taylor s (1989) esl version of the daly and miller s (1975) writing apprehension test. interconstruct and intraconstruct associations between the two instruments were examined through principal components analysis with varimax rotation and correlations check. a significant and high correlation was found between classroom anxiety and speaking anxiety, thus indicating that the english language classroom context is a source of speaking anxiety. writing anxiety was found to load primarily on items relating to attitudes towards writing in english followed by self-derogation for the process and fear of negative evaluation by the teachers and/or by fellow students. on the basis of the findings, suggestions are made concerning the reassessment of the influence that writing anxiety exerts on classroom performance and the adoption of teaching techniques that promote topic-centred process writing. keywords: english language anxiety, teaching writing, sociolinguistics of language learning christina gkonou 268 the last three decades have seen a growing number of studies concerned with the interplay between individual differences and foreign or second language learning and teaching (dörnyei, 2005; ellis, 2008; gardner & lambert, 1972; skehan, 1989). those publications aimed at showing that learners differ upon certain dimensions and, therefore, achieve different levels of performance and success in second/foreign (l2) learning. individual differences research typically includes anxiety whose impact on language learning has been widely investigated by both practitioners and researchers (horwitz, 2001, 2010; horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986; macintyre, 1999; macintyre & gardner, 1991; young, 1990). horwitz, tallon, and luo (2010) argued that “approximately one-third of students studying a foreign language experience at least a moderate level of foreign language anxiety” (p. 99). to date, however, relatively few studies have explored the nature and effect of writing anxiety (wa) on english as a foreign language (efl) learning. by contrast, anxiety over speaking has received the most empirical attention in the literature to date (gregersen & horwitz, 2002; horwitz et al., 1986; phillips, 1991; woodrow, 2006). additionally, the number of studies examining the relationship between classroom anxiety and wa in instructed efl learning contexts is scarce. the current study was designed in order to address this gap. the paper begins with a brief theoretical overview of foreign language classroom anxiety (flca) with specific attention to anxiety over speaking and writing. the remainder of the present paper deals with an empirical investigation of the issue described above. speaking and writing anxiety from a classroom-oriented perspective flca is defined as “a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviours related to classroom language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process” (horwitz et al., 1986, p. 128). it occurs when students attempt to successfully use a second or foreign language which they have not yet adequately or fully mastered. hence, flca influences language achievement (gardner, 1985). macintyre and gardner (1991) have posited that “anxious individuals think about their own reaction to a task in addition to the demands of the task itself” (p. 297). negative self-related cognition intrudes on their task performance in class and, consequently, anxiety rises. this is what ultimately differentiates language anxiety from other forms of anxiety, suggesting therefore that second language contexts should be studied in isolation. macintyre and gardner (1991) further argued that “if anxious students could focus on positive experiences in the second language, rather than on negative ones, the debilitating effects of language anxiety could be reduced” (p. anxiety over efl speaking and writing: a view from language classrooms 269 297). thus, foreign language anxiety is a distinct variable in the language learning process and has detrimental effects on learning. language anxiety researchers have suggested considering language anxiety from a situation-specific perspective (ellis, 2008; horwitz, 2001; horwitz & young, 1991; macintyre, 1999). in other words, the fact that language anxiety manifests itself only in specific situations, in this case foreign language learning, should be taken into account. students who have it may not have difficulty in other classes and do not have poor study habits. on the contrary, they are very competent and resilient in most other contexts. the key assumption about flca refers to students’ immature second or foreign language attempts to communicate. according to horwitz et al. (1986), “as an individual’s communication attempts will be evaluated according to uncertain or even unknown linguistic or socio-cultural standards, second language communication entails risk-taking and is necessarily problematic” (p. 128). more recently, dörnyei (2001) argued that language classrooms are “inherently face threatening environments” where learners are expected to perform through the use of a “severely restricted language code” (p. 91). therefore, difficult or insufficient language input along with concerns about others’ evaluations in the efl setting result in the creation of flca. most anxiety research, however, has placed disproportionate emphasis on anxiety associated with second or foreign language speaking (horwitz, 2001; horwitz et al., 1986; kitano, 2001; phillips, 1992; woodrow, 2006), which has consequently led to the development of questionnaires dominated by speakingrelated items. this speaking-centred approach to flca raises certain theoretical and empirical questions regarding the (in)appropriateness of these instruments to identify students’ anxiety about performing writing, listening, or reading. this also rationalizes the fact that slightly different variables with other names recognized in applied linguistics research, such as l2 willingness to communicate, are speaking-oriented, thus precluding the possibility of discussing writing as a form of communication as well. current paradigms focusing on oral communicative competence in language teaching goals, though, could provide a powerful counter-argument to this insistence on l2 speaking. to return to writing anxiety, and given that “language educators tend to think about developing their students’ foreign language competence in four areas” (horwitz et al., 2010, p. 106), a shift of the research focus onto the neglected domain of writing is necessary. early research on communication apprehension (mccroskey, 1970) was the stepping stone to studying wa. the latter construct initially emerged in the literature under the term writing apprehension (daly & miller, 1975) to denote “the dysfunctional anxiety that many individuals suffer when confronted with writing tasks” (cheng, 2002, p. 647). by analogy with flca, writing apprehension appeared as a distinct type christina gkonou 270 of anxiety arising from the uniqueness of the written communication process. madigan, linton, and johnson (1996) argued that “distress associated with writing and a profound distaste for the process” constitute the two main effects of anxiety about writing on prospective writers (p. 295). with reference to wa about english, leki (1999) claimed that writing, albeit the most private and self-controlling of the four skills, causes efl learners to experience a kind of “writer’s block” (p. 65). additionally, through factor analytic procedures, cheng, horwitz, and schallert (1999) found a significant moderate correlation (r = .65) between second language classroom anxiety and second language wa proving that these two anxiety constructs are related but are not identical. cheng et al. (1999) concluded that “some anxious second language student writers may suffer chiefly from low writing-related selfesteem, some from negative affect toward the writing activity and some from fear of evaluation” (p. 436). the wa experience among l2 learners should, therefore, be studied by seeking sociolinguistic dimensions when tackling efl writing tasks, such as students’ relying heavily on others’ criticism of their work. it would be fair enough then to assume that, apart from speaking, efl writing also exhibits a considerable degree of learner self-exposure. finally, cheng et al. (1999) attributed a language-skill-specific character to wa because they found that it highly correlated with writing achievement. as a consequence, language anxiety researchers have proposed differentiating language-skill-specific anxiety from general classroom anxiety that seems to be more associated with speaking (cheng, 2004; cheng et al., 1999; horwitz, 2001). in particular, cheng et al. (1999) reported that: some language learners may feel particularly anxious about speaking in the second language, and some about writing. . . . the discrepancy between a learner’s first and second language competence in different skill areas, a language learner’s varied experiences in acquiring each of the four language skills, and his or her history of success and failure in performing each skill might lead to differentiated attitudes, emotions, and expectations about each of the language skills. language-skillspecific anxiety might well be one of the negative emotions and attitudes formed during the process of second language learning. (pp. 438-9) having provided an overview of writing and speaking anxiety, i will next deal with empirical evidence on the aforementioned topic. the present study: purpose and research questions conducted as a partial replication of cheng et al.’s (1999) study, the research goal of the current attempt was to examine the constructs of language anxiety over efl speaking and writing: a view from language classrooms 271 anxiety and wa, as well as their conceptual links, situating both in the same english language learning context, that is, efl learning in greece. an individual characteristic of the greek foreign language education system is “a thriving private sector of foreign language institutes providing intensive foreign language tuition . . . courses offered at private language institutes are not compulsory, are mostly exam-oriented and give the opportunity to students to sit for exams which will allow them, if successful, to obtain a language certificate” (mattheoudakis & alexiou, 2009, pp. 230-1). students’ anxiety levels, therefore, appear to intensify as a response to success-orientedness and long-term exam-orientedness imposed on them by the system. the researcher’s general objective led to the following research questions (rqs): 1. is greek efl learners’ speaking anxiety part of classroom anxiety? 2. which factors influence greek efl learners’ wa? 3. to what extent is greek efl learners’ wa related to classroom anxiety? methodology participants the participants of the study were 128 efl students enrolled in general english classes in two private language schools in greece. all informants were adults; the average age was 24.12. there were 44 male and 84 female students. all of them gave their consent to participating. the minimum length of exposure to english was two years with a maximum length of eight years. a few false beginners (n = 11) also took part in the project. the participating students’ proficiency level ranged from b1 to c2 (in cefr1 standards, from lower intermediate to upper advanced). a description of the band levels can be found in appendix a. instruments a background questionnaire to capture demographic data and two likert-type questionnaires to measure anxiety specific to the english language classroom, as well as to wa were administered to the students. classroom anxiety was operationalised by a modified version of the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas; horwitz et al., 1986) and wa was measured by an adapted version of the english as a second language writing apprehension test (eslwat; gungle & taylor, 1989). 1 common european framework of reference for languages (council of europe, 2001). christina gkonou 272 the adapted flcas contained 29 items. test anxiety items included in the original questionnaire were eliminated due to lack of consistency with the research purpose; the focal point of the study was to measure speaking and writing anxiety resulting from efl lessons as such and not from testing situations. moreover, items related to interaction with native speakers were also excluded, because they refer to hypothetical situations that do not occur in the participating english language classrooms. in this study, the term language used in the original flcas was replaced by english language. for instance, the original flcas item “i feel confident when i speak in my foreign language class” was modified to “i feel confident when i speak in my english language class.” the eslwat adapted questionnaire that was administered to the students consisted of 17 statements. the original instrument included 26 statements answered on a 6-point likert scale. the researcher decided to eliminate those items that were not congruent with the english language classroom context, such as “i would enjoy sending my english writing to magazines to be evaluated and published.” additionally, only one out of two or more tautological items that highly correlated during the piloting stage of the project, such as “i don’t like my english compositions to be evaluated” and “i am afraid of writing essays in english when i know they will be evaluated,” formed part of the eslwat final version. the double-barrelled item “i have no fear of my english writing’s being evaluated by my teacher and/or by my peers” was further split into two more specific items: “i have no fear of my english writing’s being evaluated by my teacher” and “i have no fear of my english writing’s being evaluated by my peers.” scoring method the two questionnaires were answered on a 5-point likert scale2, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). the total classroom anxiety score and the total wa score were derived by summing the students’ responses to respective items. positively worded items, such as “it wouldn’t bother me at all to take more english language classes” and “i look forward to writing down my ideas in english” were reversed and recoded. the descriptive statistics for both instruments are summarized in table 1. 2 the original eslwat questionnaire was designed on the basis of a 6-point likert scale. for the purposes of uniformity and coherence between the two instruments employed in the study, a 5-point likert scale was used here. anxiety over efl speaking and writing: a view from language classrooms 273 table 1 descriptive statistics for the flcas and the eslwat min. max. mean sd flcas 33 165 69.3 16.5 eslwat 17 85 39.2 9.4 procedure multivariate statistics, and in particular factor analysis, were applied to the classroom and wa questionnaires. principal components analysis with varimax rotation was selected for the intraconstruct examination of the flcas and the eslwat in order to identify those components that best define each of the two anxiety measures. further, correlation coefficients check was computed to examine the interconstruct relationships among the entire pool of items from the flcas and the eslwat. the data were entered into and analysed through spps version 16.0 for statistical analysis. findings rq1: is greek efl learners’ speaking anxiety part of classroom anxiety? to address this research question, the flcas was subjected to exploratory principal components analysis with varimax rotation. table 2 displays the item loadings on flcas1. the remaining two factors with their item loadings can be found in appendix b. table 2 item loadings on flcas1 speaking anxiety and fear of negative evaluation items factor loadings i can feel my heart pounding when i’m going to be called on in my english language class. .668 i always feel that the other students speak english better than i do. .664 i am afraid that the other students will laugh at me when i speak in english. .651 i feel more tense and nervous in my english language class than in my other classes. .644 i keep thinking that the other students are better at english than i am. .639 i tremble when i know that i’m going to be called on in my english language class. .602 i never feel quite sure of myself when i am speaking in my english language class. .599 i feel confident when i speak in my english language class. .529 it embarrasses me to volunteer answers in my english language class. .524 i worry about the consequences of failing my english language class. .482 i often feel like not going to my english language class. .407 i don’t worry about making mistakes in my english language class. .340 the number of components to be extracted was guided by the scree plot and a three-component solution, accounting for 42.51% of the total varichristina gkonou 274 ance, was selected. the first component (flcas1) consisted of twelve items accounting for 18.5% of the total variance. most of these items seem to share a feeling of speaking anxiety caused by low perceived self-efficacy and fear of negative evaluation by the peers, thereby signifying that anxiety about speaking in english forms an integral part of flca. this factor was labeled speaking anxiety and fear of negative evaluation. rq2: which factors influence greek efl learners’ wa? this research question was addressed by considering the eslwat intrastructure factor loadings examined through principal components analysis with varimax rotation. table 3 factor loadings for three-factor analysis on eslwat items items per factor factor loadings factor one. attitudes towards writing in english i like to write down my ideas in english. .716 writing in english is a lot of fun. .714 i enjoy writing in english. .712 i look forward to writing down my ideas in english. .711 i like seeing my thoughts on paper in english. .607 handing in a composition written in english makes me feel good. .582 factor two. self-derogation when writing in english when i hand in an english composition, i know i’m going to do poorly. .785 my mind seems to go blank when i start to work on a composition in english. .761 i have a terrible time organizing my ideas in an english composition course. .647 taking an english composition course is a very frightening experience. .574 it is easy for me to write good compositions in english. .573 factor three. fear of negative evaluation i have no fear of my english writing’s being evaluated by my teacher. .824 i have no fear of my english writing’s being evaluated by my peers. .653 as evidenced in table 3, a three-component solution, which accounted for 51.97% of the total variance, was also selected for the eslwat. the first factor (eslwat1) included six items addressing learners’ likes and dislikes with respect to writing in english. this factor was given the label attitudes towards writing in english to encompass both positive and negative student attitudes to writing. five eslwat items were selected to define the second component (eslwat2). here, the items refer to negative self-perceptions and concern anxiety over efl speaking and writing: a view from language classrooms 275 about potential failure in writing classes. therefore, this factor presents a selfderogation dimension of writing in english. the last eslwat component (eslwat3), consisting of two items, is characterized by a strong evaluation apprehension element either by the teacher or by the peers. this component was named fear of negative evaluation. rq3: to what extent is greek efl learners’ wa related to classroom anxiety? to address this research question, pearson correlations were computed between the overall flcas and eslwat, as well as their subcomponents (see table 4). a significant and moderate correlation (r = .54) was found between the flcas and the eslwat. in addition, the strongest correlation was between the overall flcas and eslwat2 (self-derogation when writing in english; r = .55) and between the overall eslwat and flcas1 (speaking anxiety and fear of negative evaluation; r = .47). table 4 correlations among overall flcas, overall eslwat, and their subcomponents ca3 ca1 ca2 ca3 wa4 wa1 wa2 wa3 ca 1.000 ca1 .913* 1.000 ca2 .731* .499* 1.000 ca3 .451* .291* .185* 1.000 wa .543* .477* .340* .362* 1.000 wa1 .393* .356* .175 .342* .823* 1.000 wa2 .553* .437* .425* .336* .815* .493* 1.000 wa3 .304* .300* .161 .154* .605* .327* .375* 1.000 * p < .05 the overall flcas was highly correlated (r = .91) with flcas1 (speaking anxiety and fear of negative evaluation), less highly correlated (r = .71) with flcas2 (teacher-related anxiety), and moderately correlated (r = .45) with flcas3 (comfortableness with taking english classes). as far as the wa correlations are concerned, there were significant and high correlations between the overall eslwat, eslwat1 (attitudes towards writing in english) and eslwat2 (self-derogation when writing in english; r = .82 and r = .81, respectively). lastly, a significant and moderate correlation (r = .60) was found between the overall eslwat and eslwat3 (fear of negative evaluation). table 4 presents the correlation matrix. 3 flcas. 4 eslwat. christina gkonou 276 discussion corroborating previous research (cheng et al., 1999), this study showed that flca and wa about english are two related but distinguishable variables. the factor analysis and the correlation coefficients check proved that flca consists of a strong speaking anxiety element, as opposed to wa, which depends on learners’ attitudes towards the writing class. with reference to the first research question, the classroom anxiety instrument loaded primarily on items related to speaking anxiety, thereby suggesting that speaking anxiety emanates from the broad english language classroom context. the strong association of the flcas with speaking anxiety is consistent with cheng et al.’s (1999) findings, as well as with aida’s (1994) conclusion that “the flcas appears to measure anxiety primarily related to speaking situations” (p. 163). statements, such as “i am afraid that the other students will laugh at me when i speak in english, “or” i never feel quite sure of myself when i am speaking in my english language class,” could pave the ground for a discussion of linguistic, as well as sociolinguistic factors associated with l2 speaking. on the one hand, efl speaking anxiety is caused by learners’ efforts to produce as accurate an utterance as possible in the classroom paying attention to both pronunciation and language choice and use. on the other hand, self-consciousness and anxiety about efl speaking could be defined as a state of ongoing social comparisons among learners and as a fear of negative evaluation and loss of face in the event of a mistake. the sociolinguistic dimension of speaking anxiety could thus reduce learners’ levels of intended effort when speaking in class and ultimately result in poor achievement. if we then hypothesise that speaking anxiety stems from fear of peer criticism, research is warranted to investigate the teacher’s role not only as a language educator, but also as a moderator of certain classroom events that could lead to personal feelings of inadequacy as a learner. macintyre, clément, dörnyei, and noels (1998) have indeed underlined the teachers’ responsibilities in connection with learners’ willingness to participate in communication events in class by saying that: the ultimate goal of the learning process should be to engender in language students the willingness to seek out communication opportunities and the willingness actually to communicate in them. a programme that fails to produce students who are willing to use the language is simply a failed programme. (p. 547) wa in turn was shown to relate to students’ attitudes to writing classes, self-derogation when writing in english, and fear of negative evaluation. the anxiety over efl speaking and writing: a view from language classrooms 277 emergence of attitudes as the first component of the eslwat indicates that teachers should implement writing teaching strategies that will grow enjoyment of efl writing. first of all, it is important to ease students’ fears about producing written work in the l2 that is below what they could have produced in their native language. adult learners are often hesitant to produce language that is below part their mother tongue (l1) skills. process writing could help students incorporate skills at a natural pace and encourage them to improve their understanding of writing as a task and of the materials covered. rather than focusing students on working on perfection in the first draft, various writing sessions could be set and writing tasks could be broken into smaller manageable units. further, rankin-brown (2006) suggested that teachers “assign papers that address topics students are already familiar with” (p. 5). through theme-centred modules, students develop critical thinking skills and writing strategies to implement with topics they already know and are willing to discuss. viewing wa as a whole, the three components that the factor analysis of the eslwat yielded seem to partially support cheng et al.’s (1999) claims about language-skill-specificity with regard to second language wa. despite the fact that no correlations have been calculated between wa and writing achievement, it could be presumed that the learners’ degree to which they have developed cognitive and linguistic abilities with regard to l1 writing, as well as the knowledge or potential lack of knowledge of strategies to tackle l2 writing could account for their wa, thus suggesting that wa be treated as a language-skill-specific type of anxiety. additionally, the findings call for a reevaluation of the role that wa plays in learners’ writing performance and consider both speaking and writing as involving an equal amount of self-exposure when practiced in class. developing practical writing skills, such as techniques for generating and expressing ideas, and having acquired the input needed to proceed with writing tasks would definitely make students feel psychologically secure in the efl classroom. nevertheless, wa is also dependent on a number of non-linguistic factors, the most prominent being students’ low self-confidence when writing in english due to one’s own evaluations and trepidation about being less competent than their peers and not having the right answer to a question set by the teacher. given that students may see the foreign language classroom as a place where any correction equals failure, teachers should make the classroom as non-threatening as possible. measures such as selective error correction, by taking into account the main foci of the writing activity and by accompanying it with comments that do not immediately accentuate the errors, could be taken by teachers to help students overcome their wa. however, teaching methodologies themselves could not contribute directly to allaying christina gkonou 278 flca and wa. the important role of other individual student traits in lessening language anxiety should be further addressed. future studies targeting interactions between anxiety, self-esteem, language learning strategies, and personality could supplement the above findings. conclusion taking into account that l2 writing anxiety is an under-researched topic in second language acquisition literature, this study aimed to shed light on this ostensibly innocuous construct. horwitz et al. (1986) have made a strong case for the role played by speaking in the creation of language anxiety. to date, however, writing anxiety has been less frequently addressed among language anxiety researchers. the current study constitutes a first attempt to examine issues pertaining to writing and classroom anxiety in the greek english language learning context. the suggestions for future studies made above can help us to increase even more our understanding of the dynamic and multifaceted construct of efl anxiety. anxiety over efl speaking and writing: a view from language classrooms 279 references aida, y. (1994). examination of horwitz, horwitz, and cope’s construct of foreign language anxiety: the case of students of japanese. the modern language journal, 78, 155-168. cheng, y. (2002). factors associated with foreign language anxiety. foreign language annals, 35, 647-656. cheng, y. 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(1990). an investigation of students’ perspectives on anxiety and speaking. foreign language annals, 23(6), 539-553. anxiety over efl speaking and writing: a view from language classrooms 281 appendix a cefr global scale: description of levels b1-c2. c2 can understand with ease virtually everything heard or read. can summarise information from different spoken and written sources, reconstructing arguments and accounts in a coherent presentation. can express him/herself spontaneously, very fluently and precisely, differentiating finer shades of meaning even in more complex situations. c1 can understand a wide range of demanding, longer texts, and recognise implicit meaning. can express him/herself fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions. can use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes. can produce clear, well-structured, detailed text on complex subjects, showing controlled use of organisational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices. b2 can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in his/her field of specialisation. can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party. can produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options. b1 can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc. can deal with most situations likely to arise whilst travelling in an area where the language is spoken. can produce simple connected text on topics which are familiar or of personal interest. can describe experiences and events, dreams, hopes & ambitions and briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans. appendix b table 5 factor loadings for factors two and three on flcas items items factor loadings factor two. anxiety towards the english teacher i get upset when i don’t understand what the english teacher is correcting. .837 it frightens me when i don’t understand what the teacher is saying in the english language. .790 i get nervous when i don’t understand every word the english teacher says. .735 i am afraid that my english teacher is ready to correct every mistake i make. .692 i get nervous when the english teacher asks questions which i haven’t prepared in advance. .687 factor three. comfortableness with taking english classes i don’t understand why some people get so upset over english language classes. .686 when i’m on my way to my english class, i feel very sure and relaxed. .627 it wouldn’t bother me at all to take more english language classes. .579 287 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (2). 2019. 287-311 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.2.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt “this language still motivates me!” advanced language students and their l2 motivation anne huhtala university of helsinki, finland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5046-8187 anne.huhtala@helsinki.fi anta kursiša university of helsinki, finland https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1423-0635 anta.kursisa@helsinki.fi marjo vesalainen university of helsinki, finland https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0055-0155 marjo.vesalainen@helsinki.fi abstract the article focuses on written narratives of 51 finnish university students who study german, swedish or french as their major or one of their minors at an advanced level. the study aims to find what keeps these students motivated to study their l2. the data have been analyzed using analysis of narratives (polkinghorne, 1995). dörnyei’s (2009a, 2009b, 2014) l2 motivational self system (l2mss), built around the concepts of ideal l2 self, ought-to l2 self and l2 learning experience, is used as the theoretical framework. the results indicate that perceived social pressure (ought-to l2 self) may be important when the study decision is made, but its importance diminishes during the studies. instead, a future l2-related vision (ideal l2 self) as well as peers, teachers, course contents, and learning atmosphere (l2 learning experience) become increasingly important during the studies. the role of the emotional dimension of possible selves seems to be central in developing and preserving study motivation. anne huhtala, anta kursiša, marjo vesalainen 288 at the end of the article, some implications of the results for higher education programs of languages other than english (lotes) are presented. keywords: advanced university students; l2 motivation; l2 motivational self system; languages other than english 1. introduction this article focuses on study motivation of finnish university students who chose to study a language other than english (lote) as their major or one of their minors, and have reached an advanced level in their studies. according to dörnyei and ushioda (2011, p. 4) “motivation is responsible for why people decide to do something, how long they are willing to sustain the activity, [and] how hard they are going to pursue it” (emphasis in original). the study was initially motivated by the current language situation in finland. the reality here and in several other countries in europe is that many schoolchildren – and their parents – see learning lotes as less important than learning english (see busse, 2017, pp. 568-569, 575). also, as henry (2015a) remarks, “english is now part of a basic social literacy and a medium of expression used extensively in day-to-day life, particularly among young people” (p. 319). as an important lingua franca (e.g., mauranen, 2005), english is a language that more or less everyone is supposed to know (about the global situation, see pennycook, 2017). for lotes the situation is very different. our research interest can be stated as follows: what keeps advanced university students of languages other than english motivated to study their l2 (german, swedish or french) as a major or a minor? the topic is examined by answering the following research questions: rq 1: how do students describe their decision to start studying their l2? rq 2: how do students describe their l2 motivation during their studies? in this study, a current theoretical framework, the l2 motivational self system (l2mss), has been used, with the intention of giving new insights into understanding l2 motivation in this unique setting. as the study focuses on l2 motivation to study german, swedish, and french, it contributes to the growing research field of lote motivation. the study fills a research gap concerning the population, the context of the study, as well as the target languages that are under-explored in this context. “this language still motivates me!” advanced language students and their l2 motivation 289 2. theoretical background there has been a lot of research on l2 motivation during its 60-year history (alhoorie, 2017), and the field has gone through several more or less distinct phases (boo, dörnyei, & ryan, 2015; dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). at the beginning of this century, from 2005 to 2014, there was “an unprecedented surge in the number of publications” on l2 motivation (boo et al., 2015, p. 145). as boo et al. (2015) state, this period witnessed an increasing interest in east asian l2 learners’ motivation, the dominance of tertiary students as participants, an increase in innovative methodologies, and more interest in research on motivational dynamics. whereas in most of the previous research on l2 motivation, the target language has been english (boo et al., 2015, p. 151), lately several studies have been published on lote motivation (see dörnyei & al-hoorie, 2017). when studying l2 motivation, it is central to take into consideration that there may be major differences between motivation to learn english as a global language and motivation to learn lotes (al-hoorie, 2017, p. 6), a matter that is receiving more and more attention in current l2 motivation research (ushioda & dörnyei, 2017). dörnyei and al-hoorie (2017) have listed some characteristics that separate learning lotes from learning global english. firstly, lotes are generally associated with a particular target language community; secondly, a learner’s high command of a lote is often connected with specific individual motives; thirdly, lote learners may develop a multilingual self image (ideal multilingual self; see henry, 2017) in addition to l2 specific self-guides; fourthly, lote learners may have a more varied pattern of conscious and unconscious motives; and fifthly, research on lote motivation also needs new kinds of methods. in addition, as stated by duff (2017, p. 605), research on lote motivation would benefit from studies in different contexts, using various theoretical frameworks, and utilizing interdisciplinary insights. while there is plenty of research on language learning motivation at tertiary level, the participants are often university students studying in other disciplines, not students who have a foreign language as their major or minor. in studies conducted in finland, the study motivation of finnish first-year university language students and student teachers has been examined (e.g., kalaja, 2015; kalaja, alanen, & dufva, 2008). concerning lotes, the interest has often been on the initial decision to start studying a certain language at university. on the whole, advanced l2 university students’ motivation for the study of lotes has not been examined to the same extent. presently, the most often used paradigm in l2 motivation research is the l2 motivational self system (dörnyei & al-hoorie, 2017, p. 456). according to the l2mss, there are three primary sources of motivation. the first two types, anne huhtala, anta kursiša, marjo vesalainen 290 the ideal l2 self and the ought-to l2 self, are associated with the two kinds of possible selves, which means imagined experiences, whereas the third one, the l2 learning experience, is based on past and present experiences as well as motives arising from the learning environment (dörnyei, 2009a, 2009b, 2014; dörnyei & ushioda, 2011; ushioda & dörnyei, 2009, 2012). the ideal l2 self has to do with personal dreams and hopes, and it refers to l2-related characteristics that a person would like to possess; for example, it can be a vivid and pleasant vision of oneself as a competent l2 user in the future. this kind of a vision is a strong motivator to study and “learn the l2 because we would like to reduce the gap between our actual and ideal selves” (dörnyei, 2014, p. 8). the ideal l2 self has a promotion focus, meaning that there is a strong internal desire to reach the goal. the ought-to l2 self, on the other hand, has a prevention focus (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011; higgins, 1998). it stems from perceived social pressure from the environment, such as other people’s opinions and expectations, and refers to characteristics that a person thinks s/he should possess in order to avoid potential unwanted outcomes (dörnyei, 2009a, 2009b). it is important to remember, as henry (2015b) remarked, that possible selves are not static constructs: even if they do not change easily, revisions may occur, for example as a result of positive learning experiences or engaging with the l2. the ideal l2 self is more resistant to change than the ought-to self, because of its greater level of internalization (piniel & csizér, 2015). dörnyei (2009a, 2009b) mentions certain conditions for the capacity of a future vision of oneself (self-guide) to motivate action: for example, there needs to be a future self-image; that image has to be detailed and vivid; it has to be different enough from the actual self; and the self-guide needs to be seen as feasible and realistic (see also dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). the third motivational component, the l2 learning experience, can stem from actual situation-specific learning experiences, like classroom dynamics, study success, peers, and teachers (dörnyei, 2009b). as dörnyei and ushioda (2011, p. 86) state, not all students are motivated by the self-guides, but get motivation “from successful engagement with the actual language learning process, for example because they discover that they are good at it.” it is worth pointing out that l2 experiences can be past and present. previous experiences are always remembered experiences, that is, memories and interpretations of what a person has done, felt and undergone in the past. in the light of new lote research, there has been discussion on whether the l2mss – as well as other theoretical frameworks based on studying global english – is suited for motivation research of lotes (boo et al., 2015, p. 156). as ushioda (2017, p. 478) states, sla theories have traditionally had a “’native speaker’ monolingual bias” (also boo et al., 2017, p. 151). the position of global english as a more or less mandatory subject is very different from that of lotes. in addition, “this language still motivates me!” advanced language students and their l2 motivation 291 researchers have started to question whether the individual focus of the l2mss, as well as its discrete l2-specific self-guides can account for the complex, dynamic reality of plurilingual learners (duff, 2017; henry, 2017; ushioda, 2017). it may be necessary to adjust the framework to the current situation (see dörnyei & al-hoorie, 2017, p. 457), but its fundamental ideas can be regarded as highly applicable concerning university language students of lotes, who study their l2 in order to become linguistic experts. furthermore, examining l2-specific self-guides does not mean that the existence of multilingual identities (henry, 2017) would be denied (also ushioda, 2017, p. 478). nor does the l2mss presuppose stability and inflexibility. in accordance with dörnyei (2009a, 2009b, 2014), motivation can be seen as a holistic, situated, and dynamic result of a complex interplay between personal dreams and hopes, perceived social pressure, learning experiences, and environmental factors. some minor modifications of the framework are suggested in the section conclusions and implications. 3. the present study 3.1. context of the study much like in the rest of the world, also in finland, lotes have lost much of their attraction among students in recent years (kangasvieri, 2019; vipunen, n.d.; also duff, 2017, p. 604), despite the fact that they are needed in working life and business contacts (european commission, 2015). finnish students’ english language proficiency at the end of basic education is usually very high; students see their language skills in a positive light, and they regard english, as well as studying it, as useful (härmälä, huhtanen, & puukko, 2014). the majority of students in finnish upper secondary schools study english as their syllabus a (advanced) language (vipunen, n.d.). the diminishing interest in lotes is visible also in many university language programs. as finnish students’ proficiency level in english is high compared to that in lotes (hildén et al., 2015), students at all levels often compare their lote skills with their english language skills. in that comparison, their lote skills can seem to develop too slowly and remain at a level that is too low. this may be experienced as frustrating and de-motivating by students (see also henry, 2015a, pp. 328-329). the decision to study a lote is a “marked” choice, often “perceived by others to be difficult, uncommon, not useful etc.” (duff, 2017, p. 600). in this study, conducted at the university of helsinki, the interest is on why students have chosen to study a lote, and particularly, what has kept them motivated in their studies. anne huhtala, anta kursiša, marjo vesalainen 292 3.2. participants the participants in this study were advanced university students who studied a lote as their major or one of their minors. the word “advanced” in this context has two meanings. firstly, these students had studied the language before applying to the university, and had achieved the required result in the university entrance exam (cefr-level a2-b1). secondly, they had reached an advanced level in their university studies, as they were in at least their third study year at the time of the data collection. in the ba study programs, writing the ba thesis is scheduled to take place during the third year. students who have come this far in their studies can be assumed to have the intention to get at least a bachelor’s degree, and probably also their master’s degree, based on the interpretation of the bologna agreement in finland. of the 51 participants, 9 studied swedish, 20 studied french, and 22 studied german. eleven participants were in their third year of university studies, 7 were in year four, 14 were in year five, 7 were in year six, and 12 were in their seventh year of study. in principle, seven years is the maximum study time permissible for a master’s exam. the great majority of finnish university language students of german, swedish, and french are female. therefore, for reasons of anonymity, participants’ gender was not asked in the questionnaire. in this paper, “she” is used to represent all participants. the participating students also discuss private matters in their narratives, which is why no personal information about them is revealed, and the data have also otherwise been analyzed and reported on in a respectful way and observing ethical principles. 3.3. research design and data collection the data for this study were collected in the form of written narrative reflections. autobiographical narratives can be seen as ways of constructing selves (bruner, 1987); when telling their stories, students “are performing themselves; they are doing their identities” (barkhuizen, 2011, p. 399). the idea was to investigate how students themselves describe their experiences and how they reflect on themselves as language learners and users. narratives were seen as an interesting possibility of studying “motivation-in-context” (ushioda & dörnyei, 2012, p. 402), in order to find out more about study motivation in this specific context and with this specific population. as piniel and csizér (2015, p. 185) state, “retrospective data can better account for overall change in time when students have the chance to reflect on their experience” (see also riemer, 2016). however, it is important to remember that these stories are told from the present, and the selves that are “this language still motivates me!” advanced language students and their l2 motivation 293 described in the narratives are remembered selves, constructed by the students as a response to the researchers’ questions. this may have affected what they wanted to tell – or omit – and how they described their experiences. it is, of course, never possible to access past experiences directly; it is only ever possible to talk about past experiences from the perspective of here and now. however, this need not be seen as a problem, as the focus is on the students’ own perspectives and interpretations of their past and present experiences. to increase the validity and reliability of the study, the research design was tested during a pilot study at the beginning of 2015. the data were collected on paper, and students were asked to reflect on two topics. the first topic had the title “me as a student of german/swedish/french. why?” students were to mark on a timeline events, matters, and persons that had been important for them concerning their l2 studies. they were also invited to write about these factors in a more detailed way on a separate page, by describing information like why and when they had initially chosen to study this l2 as their major or one of their minors, and how they believed their relationship to the language had changed during the studies. the second topic was entitled “me as a language user.” in that part, students could reflect on all the languages they knew, and describe how these languages were visible in their lives. a careful evaluation of the pilot study led to the decision to collect the data in a different way. the two parts of the first topic (the timeline and the accompanying description) seemed to be overlapping, which is why the timeline was omitted in this study. in addition, in order to make data collection more practical, as well as to ensure the anonymity of participants, all data were collected by using an anonymous electronic form. the two main topics used in the pilot study worked well, however, and were also used in the current study. data collection started in january 2016. in this article, we only concentrate on the first topic. participants were given quite a lot of freedom, concerning both the length and the contents of their narrative reflections. the aim was to give them an opportunity to express their “selves” freely and without too many limitations, but in a way which would provide sufficient information about factors connected to their l2 motivation. for this reason, a decision was made to collect the data using a semi-open questionnaire, in the students’ l1, finnish. students were given some questions as suggestions for what they could write about (the ones that were tested in the pilot study), but the decision of what and how much to write was theirs. these instructions resulted in very different narratives of different lengths (between 114 and 871 words). narrative data of this kind are often collected in connection with compulsory courses, and they may even be evaluated as a part of those courses (barkhuizen, benson, & chik, 2014, p. 34). in the present study, it was essential anne huhtala, anta kursiša, marjo vesalainen 294 for participation to be anonymous and completely voluntary, in order to let students express their opinions and describe their situation more freely. students of german, swedish, and french received information about the study via email lists and in connection with their lessons. in both cases, students received a link to the electronic questionnaire and were encouraged to participate. 3.4. data analysis in analyzing the data, a qualitative content analysis of the written reflections was used, a method that polkinghorne (1995) calls analysis of narratives. the method was chosen as it was seen as the most appropriate analysis method for these kinds of data, as it offered a possibility to examine how participants describe and construct their reality (barkhuizen, 2011; esin, fathi, & squire, 2014, p. 204). according to polkinghorne (1995), analysis of narratives “seeks to locate common themes or conceptual manifestations among the stories collected as data. . . . the researcher inspects the different stories to discover which notions appear across them” (p. 13). table 1 example of data analysis text extract aspect theme category “i experienced the teachers and other students as supportive . . . ” support from teachers and peers perception of study context l2 learning experience “after the exchange, my studies in finland seemed to proceed better, and i got more out of them . . . ” successful study exchange . . . . . . “at the moment, i participate in private lessons at [a language school] as a preparation for a [language] test . . . ” participation in extra language courses engaging with l2-related activities “i used the language with local people . . .” communicating with people outside of the university . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the analysis started inductively. each researcher read and coded the narratives individually, searching for motivation-related themes in the data (see also barkhuizen et al., 2014). the research group met on a regular basis during the coding, in order to discuss the process and validate the themes emerging from the analysis. this entailed comparing the themes proposed by each researcher, and, in cases where the individual interpretations differed from each other, the cases were discussed until a shared understanding was reached. through the coding process, several commonly occurring themes emerged which were seen as central to students’ motivation. when a shared understanding was “this language still motivates me!” advanced language students and their l2 motivation 295 reached concerning the themes, categories based on the theoretical framework, the l2mss, were formed (see table 1). in order to safeguard the reliability of the analysis, the original narratives were re-read and discussed by the researchers several times during the research process. the categorization process was not completely problem-free, as all the researchers saw a couple of themes as difficult to categorize. this matter is discussed in more detail in the section results and discussion. as narrative researchers, we are well aware of the fact that the analyses we have made are our own interpretations. however, they are based on many thorough readings of the data, as well as discussions at regularly occurring data sessions and research meetings by the researchers in different phases of the process. as the aim was not to compare students of the three languages, but to examine how students reflect on the lotes they are studying, a decision was made not to identify which language the students were studying as their l2. also, as the analysis is qualitative, there is no intention to generalize the results in quantitative terms. instead, the aim is to concentrate on the themes emerging from the data, and try to understand the phenomenon in all its variety and richness. as levitt et al. (2018) note, “qualitative researchers do not aim to seek natural laws that extend across time, place, and culture, but to develop findings that are bound to their contexts” (p. 29). however, the findings add to the growing pool of knowledge about the study motivation for lotes. 4. results and discussion in their narrative reflections, students describe themselves as l2 learners and users, and reflect on their life situation as well as their present and previous study contexts. they also comment on different motivational factors that they see as relevant regarding their l2 studies. it is worth remembering that students look at their decisions and their past experiences from today’s perspective. the past experiences that students describe are remembered experiences. students’ interpretations of what has happened in the past, as well as their present experiences, also affect how they see and describe their future. in the following paragraphs, the results of the analysis are presented. although the main focus is on students’ l2 motivation during their studies, a brief account is given about students’ (self-reported) l2 motivation at the onset of the studies. the findings are illustrated by presenting several text extracts from participants’ narrative reflections. anne huhtala, anta kursiša, marjo vesalainen 296 4.1. the decision to start studying an l2 as a major or a minor (rq 1) in their narratives, language students commented on their previous positive l2 learning experiences. they often stressed their long-term interest in languages and/or in a particular language as a reason for their l2 study decision. in the following example, a student described her longstanding affection for languages and gave it as a motive for starting her studies at the university (ex. 1). (1) i have always liked studying languages a lot, right from elementary school. . . . my eagerness to study languages also led me to study them after upper secondary school, at university. (1_9, 13-15)1 seeing oneself as a successful l2 learner (e.g., being “talented” or “gifted” in language studies) was given as a motivation for language studies (ex. 2). in these cases, students seemed to have a very positive perception of themselves as language learners. (2) i started to study [this language] as i love the language, and have always been talented in my language studies. (18_6-7) students sometimes mentioned that their l2 was the easiest way to get into university. this can be seen as natural as they already had the experience of being relatively skilled in their l2, and could expect to pass the entrance exam easily. there were also students, however, for whom their l2 was anything but the easiest pathway to university studies. on the contrary, they could write that they wanted to start studying the language because they needed more practice in it. one student described her dream about studying her favorite language at university, but knew she would not pass the entrance exam, as her l2 skills were not good enough. she then decided to study harder in order to pass the exam, and was finally accepted to study her l2 at three universities. different work-related aspects were also mentioned as influential factors (ex. 3). very often, teaching is the profession that seems to motivate students to study languages. (3) the choice of [this language] as a major was not entirely clear from the beginning . . . – however, i realized i was language-oriented and knew i had a calling that drew me towards working as a teacher. (15_1-5) 1 when analyzing the data, the original finnish texts were used. for this article, text extracts were translated from finnish to english. a numerical code (1-51) was used as the identifier of each narrative, followed by line numbers from the narratives. “this language still motivates me!” advanced language students and their l2 motivation 297 it seems that the ideal l2 self can have an impact from the time when the line of study is chosen. seeing oneself as a competent language professional in the future can be a strong motivator for the studies. the central role of the ideal l2 self can be also seen in cases when students use a lot of time and energy in order to acquire the language skills necessary for passing the university entrance exam, and in cases when students choose to study a certain language because they feel they need more practice in it. earlier stays abroad were mentioned as a reason for the l2 study decision. those who had been abroad felt that their language skills had improved during the stays or that their attitude towards the language had become more positive (ex. 4). (4) the year before, i had a summer job [in an l2-speaking country]. after that, i got interested in the language again and decided to apply to the university to study that language. (20_10-11) staying abroad, and in that way getting acquainted with the l2 and the community of l2 speakers, can act as a motivator, even at the beginning of the studies. dörnyei (2009b) points out that the ideal l2 self is tightly connected to the views on and attitudes towards l2 speakers, and remarks that “l2 speakers are the closest parallels to the idealized l2-speaking self” (p. 27). this is important concerning lote students for whom a connection to their specific l2 community may be essential (al-hoorie, 2017, p. 7; dörnyei & al-hoorie, 2017, p. 465). using the language with local l2 speakers can have an important impact on how lote students see themselves as language learners and users, and can also affect their attitudes toward learning when they come back (irie & ryan, 2015, p. 344). in the narratives, the role of students’ own teachers was also described as important (also busse, 2017, p. 574). in cases where students wrote about being uncertain about what to study, the influence of other people (mainly family members and friends) was depicted as important. one student wrote that she let her friends’ and relatives’ expectations affect her choice of what to study, and perhaps in that way wanted to show that she could become what “everyone” expects her to become (ex. 5). (5) besides, everyone in my nearest surroundings expected me to start studying languages, and for some reason i let it influence my decision very strongly. (13_4-6) the role of friends and relatives in most young people’s lives is important, also concerning their study decision. here we could talk about ought-to self, a perceived social pressure from the environment. as social beings, people feel a pressure to adhere to group norms, which leads to some level of internalization of external motives (i.e., ought-to selves) (dörnyei, 2009b, p. 14, with reference to boyatzis & akrivou, 2006). anne huhtala, anta kursiša, marjo vesalainen 298 when writing about reasons for their l2 study decision, students seldom mentioned only one reason. instead, different combinations of motives were brought up in the individual narratives (for more information concerning students of german, see kursiša, huhtala, & vesalainen, 2017). 4.2. l2 motivation during the studies (rq 2) during the studies, regardless of the l2 studied, motivation was connected to certain common themes that were visible in the narratives. these included perception of the study context, engaging with l2-related activities, existence or lack of an l2-related vision, focus of the studies, plans for completing the degree, and emotional involvement. on the basis of the analysis, these features appear interrelated. in this section, however, the above-mentioned themes are presented as themes within two categories: l2 learning experience and the ideal l2 self. the themes are illustrated through the aspects that were identified through the analysis (see table 1). also the third possible category (ought-to self) is discussed in relation to the data. 4.2.1. l2 learning experience perception of the study context. all students commented on their study context and study contents: they wrote about their teachers and peers, courses at the university, their own successes and failures, study exchange, as well as study atmosphere. students repeatedly stressed the importance of their teachers and fellow students as sources of support; they also experienced a sense of community in their study context, and saw the atmosphere as agreeable (ex. 6). (6) i saw studies in [this language] as relevant and motivating right from the beginning. . . . i experienced the teachers and other students as supportive and the study context also otherwise as pleasant. (38_68-71) getting support from peers and teachers, as well as experiencing the study context and study contents as pleasant, were central to students’ motivation. when the situation was seen as non-motivating, students started struggling with their studies. in the following text extract (ex. 7), we can see that the student’s selfreported learning experiences did not meet her expectations. (7) at the beginning, the studies and the study context seemed dynamic and stimulating. i was inspired and had plans for furthering my studies. gradually the situation changed. i am disappointed at the courses offered, as the range is not as diverse as i thought it would be. (26_5-9) “this language still motivates me!” advanced language students and their l2 motivation 299 it is notable, however, that this student kept studying the language. she had not given up, which probably had to do with other aspects that affected the situation and acted as a counterbalance. the only thing that was missing from her l2 exam was the master’s thesis, but she did not want to write her thesis in a hurry. as the study programs give students a lot of freedom in choosing what to include in their exam, she decided to study other subjects for a while, in order to get some positive variety, despite seeing herself as a student of her l2. the data show that students of the same language can experience the same course contents and learning contexts very differently, partly because of their different previous experiences, goals, and life situations. students wrote about cultural encounters, having contacts with other people, finding l2-speaking friends, and developing better l2 skills, as can be seen in the following text extract (ex. 8). (8) during my second study year i had my exchange period in [an l2-speaking country], and my language skills got much better. . . . my relationship to this language, as well as to l2-speaking countries and cultures has become more intimate, because i now have lots of l2-speaking friends and acquaintances both from [this l2 country] and from other countries. (7_17-22) all students who had an exchange period abroad saw it as a powerful motivator for l2 learning. staying abroad gave them a feeling of belonging to their l2 community (see dörnyei & al-hoorie, 2017, p. 465). students described the positive impact of study exchange on their self-confidence and study motivation. even the decision to apply for study exchange seemed to increase the l2 motivation (ex. 9). (9) my study motivation disappeared during the second year of study, because studying did not meet my expectations . . . i got interested in studying again when i decided to apply for study exchange. (22_5-10) engaging with l2-related activities. taking part in various l2-related activities was mentioned as an essential source of motivation (ex. 10). (10) my own activity towards this culture has been a strong motivation for keeping on with my studies. (24_10-11) engaging with l2-related activities seems to go hand in hand with better selfreported l2 skills, a higher level of self-confidence, and feelings of success. the experience of being a competent l2 user or learner can substantially increase students’ self-confidence in using the l2 and motivate them to continue their studies (ex. 11; dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, p. 86). anne huhtala, anta kursiša, marjo vesalainen 300 (11) during the studies, i got more and more interested in studying [this language], and i decided to continue my studies. . . . i do not really know what caused this change, but my language skills got better and i felt that my self-confidence as a language user got stronger. (48_6-11) students could describe exerting a lot of intraand extra-curricular effort to organize opportunities for developing themselves in different ways, and wrote about feeling efficient, successful and competent. this supported them in developing a plausible l2-related vision. on the other hand, an opposite scenario was possible: when a student’s trust in her own competence faltered, it could lead to a decreasing engagement and investment in the studies. the student kept studying, but the energy level was low (ex. 12). (12) i started to realize how many other things it would be possible to study, and how much energy and time studying even one single subject area would require. this observation made it more difficult for me to concentrate on my language studies, because i started thinking my capacities would not be sufficient for learning the language and using l2-related skills well enough in my work. (27_11-16) during the studies, motivation seems to be affected by several, even opposite, forces, many of which seem to arise from the l2 learning experience. good teachers, supportive fellow students, a successful study exchange or a positive study atmosphere appear to keep students motivated for their studies. conversely, perception of the study context as disappointing can diminish study motivation. an important learning experience for lote students is time spent in an l2-speaking country. all students who had experienced a study exchange described it as a significant motivational factor. this period could be a positive “motivational transformation episode” (ryan & dörnyei, 2013, p. 97) or a “key transformational episode” (waninge, dörnyei, & de bot, 2014, p. 708) that enhanced their study motivation and made their vision of themselves as l2 users stronger. the improved study motivation was also seen as increased emotional involvement in the studies. according to the data, lote students often have an attitude towards their l2 that can be called integrative: they want to be a part of their l2 community (see al-hoorie, 2017, p. 7; dörnyei & al-hoorie, 2017, p. 465). for this reason, study exchange can increase motivation considerably. 4.2.2. ideal l2 self l2-related vision. a strong l2-related vision, together with intense activity and an effort to develop oneself, is one of the key factors in preserving l2 motivation during the studies, also in demanding situations. the vision can be there from “this language still motivates me!” advanced language students and their l2 motivation 301 the beginning or develop during the studies. the different motivational features are not static and stable but changeable and interrelated. a powerful and attractive l2-related professional vision, like wanting to become a teacher, drives students further in their studies (dörnyei, 2014, p. 8). the future vision may also be more unfocussed, but nevertheless professionally l2-related, like wanting to use the l2 in one way or another at work (ex. 13). (13) in five years’ time, i wish to have a job in which i have the opportunity to use [this language], as well as the subjects i have studied as my minors, in many ways. (3_26-28) even at an advanced level, it is possible for students to keep searching for other l2-related opportunities. sometimes they ponder about the alternatives in which their l2 could be seen as a plus, instead of wanting to work solely with their l2. an l2-related vision clearly exists, but is more general in nature. motivation connected to clear and vivid future l2-related plans may even provide compensation for missing motivation for the studies (ex. 14). (14) having a part-time job as a teacher of [this language] in two schools has motivated me to go on. nowadays, i see myself more as a teacher than as a student. as a student, all my motivation has vanished, and studying feels like something that i am forced to do. i enjoy working as a teacher, and i know i have to finish my studies in order to keep on working. (13_11-17) in this case, a strong l2-related vision has made the student continue her studies, despite her not seeing herself as a student anymore. regarding this case, the three researchers reflected on the possibility of the ought-to self as a source of motivation, as the student seemed to feel “forced” to study in order to reach her goal. she had no real study motivation, but had no other alternative, as she needed a master’s degree in order to work as a qualified l2 teacher. however, it could be said that there was a strong internal desire to become a teacher, and a wish to reduce the gap between the present situation (being a student) and the future self-image as a qualified teacher (see dörnyei, 2014, p. 8). on the other hand, students can become unmotivated if there is no clear l2-related vision, or if the vision is ineffective. a vision has to be detailed, vivid and realistic enough in order to motivate action (dörnyei, 2009a, 2009b; dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). in the following text extract (ex. 15), a student described a situation she experienced as very challenging. (15) nowadays, i feel that i cannot become a good translator or teacher of [this language] because i do not keep up my language skills. . . . i experience the situation as problematic because, as it seems now, i will be graduating as a translator of [this anne huhtala, anta kursiša, marjo vesalainen 302 language], as some kind of an expert of [another language], and as a teacher of [two languages], but i do not know which of these would interest me the most, or if i could be competent enough in anything. (23_18-19, 22-25) the situation concerning an l2-related vision can be interpreted in at least two ways. one option is that the student did not really have an l2-related vision of herself in the future. she knew that graduation would give her formal documentation of her skills but she could not visualize herself as an “owner” of that qualification. another possibility is that she perhaps had a vague vision, but she did not see it as realistic or plausible (see dörnyei, 2009b, 2014; dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). the student knew she would have a chance to work as a teacher or a translator after graduation, but she thought she could not be a good one. the final goal, being an l2 professional, seemed to be too far away for her ever to reach it. at that point, there appeared to be no driving force to give her energy in this demanding situation. according to the analysis, l2 students whose future vision was somehow too patchy or inconsistent had difficulties in finding strength to develop their l2 skills. the mental conflict they experienced seemed to be connected to inactivity and feelings of being unsuccessful. quite clearly, the existence of a strong ideal l2 self is essential in preserving a strong motivation (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). having an l2-related vision gives the studies a purpose, a direction, and increases students’ persistence in reaching the goal. it can even help in overcoming temporal unexpected problems and obstacles during the studies, like disappointing learning experiences. focus of the studies. what students focus on in their studies has a lot to do with their l2-related vision. those who have decided to study an l2 at university level also often have other l2-related interests beyond studying the language itself. they may be interested in communicating with l2 speakers, in travelling and staying in l2-speaking countries, and in various cultural aspects. sometimes this wider cultural aspect is there from the beginning, sometimes it develops during the studies (ex. 16). (16) i am still equally interested in this language, but nowadays the interest is not only in the language but also in other elements: how the language reflects the culture, etc. this is why i am still studying [this language]. (19_8-11) having the language as the only focus of the studies was visible in different ways in the narratives. on the one hand, students’ involvement with the language could be very deep: there were students who were fascinated, for example, about general linguistics or the linguistics of a particular l2 (ex. 17). “this language still motivates me!” advanced language students and their l2 motivation 303 (17) during this journey, above all i have become more conscious as a language user: i have gained a lot from the versatility of the subject. . . . didactic applications interest me, but also stylistics, semantics and linguistics. i feel i have found my own place in this subject. (15_14-17, 24-27) the previous text extract shows that the l2 had already become a central part of the student’s identity. the gap between the actual self and the future selfimage had therefore become narrower, as there was a strong concentration on and fascination towards the l2 and everything connected to it. on the other hand, it was possible for students to be interested only in “the language itself”. this was perhaps the most striking element in the narrative of a student who seemed to have isolated her l2 from its cultural and social contexts (ex. 18). (18) especially practicing [this language] in my free time feels demanding, because i do not know any speakers of [this language] in finland, i cannot travel when i want to, and to be honest, i am not interested in l1 speakers of [this language]. (23_25-29) this student appeared to have no real interest in native l2 speakers, l2 culture(s) or staying in l2-speaking countries, and overall, seemed to be weighed down by the idea of having to get involved with l2-related activities. here it would even be possible to talk about amotivation, a term that dörnyei and ushioda (2011, p. 140, with reference to deci & ryan, 1985) describe as “a lack of motivation caused by the realisation that ‘there is no point...’ or ‘it’s beyond me’” (emphasis in original). the student described her studies as something completely overwhelming. plans for completing the degree. completing the degree is unmistakably an important motivational factor for l2 students. even though it was not mentioned explicitly in the questionnaire, students wrote about it and even emphasized it in their narratives. most often, completing the degree was a natural part of studying an l2 as a major (ex. 19). (19) [during my pedagogical studies] i clearly started developing a teacher identity, and started seeing my studies in relation to this goal (working as a teacher). . . . so, i will complete my studies in my major, [this language]. (38_87-97) the previous text extract illustrates the obvious connection between spatial and temporal aspects. in these kinds of cases, it was possible to see development in the self-perception of the students, a growing insight into how they saw themselves as persons and what they wanted to do in the future. anne huhtala, anta kursiša, marjo vesalainen 304 however, completing the degree could also be experienced as a necessity. the perceived necessity could be caused, for example, by not wanting to “waste” several years of study, or by the insight that having a master’s degree was important for getting the job they wanted. here the researchers discussed the possibility of ought-to self, but came to the conclusion that there seemed to be a strong internal need to reach the goal; these students wanted to complete the degree because of an inner aspiration, not as a reaction to external pressure (ex. 20; see also ex. 14). (20) i had to finish only a few more courses to complete my ba degree, so i could not let myself give up. i have now determinedly decided to fight my way out of this degree, so that these three years of work would not be wasted. (20_38-41) the degree could also have the main function of opening a door to working life in the future. this especially concerned those who planned to become teachers in the future. also those students who had experienced some kind of social pressure from the environment when making their study decision could see their studies as worthwhile and useful. in their narratives, there was sometimes a reflection of an attitude that could be described as endurance or perseverance; even students who did not know what they wanted to do in the future were prepared to go on and get a degree (ex. 21). (21) however, i don’t feel that i have wasted time during these studies, because language skills are always useful! i have the same attitude i had in upper secondary school: once begun, it has to be done. (8_28-30) the wish to get a degree is not at all necessarily connected to the l2 as such. instead, students may see university education as a way of getting a valued degree. as one student stated, she wanted to complete her studies in order to achieve “a fine title” (14_16-17). she envisaged her future self as someone successful, someone who has a university degree, a prospect that she apparently valued more than the contents of the studies. to become the person she saw herself to be in her future vision, she had decided to get a degree. emotional dimension of possible selves. the emotional dimension came up as a central and highly visible theme in the analysis. this can be seen as natural, as motivation is inherently emotional. the emotional bond to the l2 may be there from the beginning, it may come through a significant l2 learning experience, or it may develop gradually during the studies. in their narratives, students expressed many kinds of emotions. some narratives were predominantly positive, expressing joy or pride, for example (ex. 22). (22) i am proud to be a student of this language. (49_28-29) “this language still motivates me!” advanced language students and their l2 motivation 305 one student described her relationship to the l2 as love and talked about having an “addiction” to it (44_14, 18-19). however, there were also narratives that expressed frustration, anxiety or sadness (ex. 23). negative emotions connected to the future l2 self can decrease motivation substantially, especially if they are not counterbalanced by more positive emotions (see macintyre & vincze, 2017). (23) oral presentations caused anxiety, and i experienced many moments of desperation . . . . (20_37-39) when there was a strong emotional bond to the l2, the language seemed to have the most prominent place in the students’ ideal l2 self. this often had to do with their long stays and exchange periods in l2-speaking countries (ex. 24). (24) my relationship to the language has of course changed a lot, because i now have a quite different emotional bond to the language than earlier – the language and the culture have become a wonderful part of my everyday life, and that is why studying has become even more interesting, enriching and beautiful. (18_21-26) the emotional bond to the l2 could also be thinner and more detached, which was visible in the narratives where the l2 was described in a more distant and remote way. however, even in those cases there was often some development during the studies, as students got more involved emotionally in their l2 and the l2 community. even when the l2 was not the preferred choice from the beginning, the development of l2 skills, a better self-confidence, and an attitude of curiosity made these students continue their studies. the results of the study show clearly that positive l2 learning experiences and a realistic, powerful l2-related vision become more and more important for sustained motivation during the process of studying, and show a connection to a strong emotional involvement in the studies. ushioda and dörnyei (2012, p. 406) refer to “the dynamic relationship between language, learner, and the environment on the one hand, and motivation, emotion, and cognition on the other” (also dörnyei, 2010, pp. 261-262). macintyre, mackinnon, and clément (2009) also stress the emotional aspect of possible selves; if there is not a strong connection between possible selves and the learner’s emotional system, “possible selves exist as cold cognition, and therefore lack motivational potency” (p. 47). studying an l2 at the university is a long and dynamic process, and the journey may be difficult. however, what the narratives have shown is that most of the advanced students are still motivated in their studies. in addition, the more time and energy they have invested in their l2, the less likely they are to give up on it. even in cases when negative experiences and problems during the study process were mentioned, students described their determination to get a degree. anne huhtala, anta kursiša, marjo vesalainen 306 interestingly, the ought-to self (i.e., perceived social pressure) appears to be important for some students at the beginning of their studies, but not so much later. there is apparently a connection between the significance of the ought-to self and the lack of a future vision: the weaker the future vision, the more important the ought-to self. the data reveal that external motives change or their importance diminishes during the studies, as students become emotionally more involved in their studies and start developing a more detailed and realistic future vision of themselves. as piniel and csizér (2015, p. 185) state, the ought-to self is less internalized than the ideal l2 self, and may therefore change more easily. motivation emerges from the dynamic connection between a learner and her various spatial and temporal contexts (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, p. 32). students experience their studies in their own unique ways, but these experiences take place in relation to the special settings relating to where they live and study, the people they interact with, and their own life history. what they have experienced in their lives and what kinds of memories they have of their experiences, affect how they see and describe themselves in the present and how they imagine the future. it is important to see language students as whole persons, not only as learners (ryan & dörnyei, 2013, p. 91), and not to separate l2 motivation from the students’ individual learning context (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011, p. 32; waninge et al, 2014, p. 704). even for language students, university studies and their future profession are only one aspect of their lives: family, friends, fellow students, hobbies, etc., are often equally important for them. studies cannot be separated from the rest of their lives. 5. conclusions and implications during our research, we have seen the l2mss as a useful tool for analyzing language students’ motivation to study lotes at the university. on the basis of our study, however, we would like to suggest more emphasis on the emotional aspects of motivation in this theoretical framework (see also al-hoorie, 2017, p. 4; macintyre & vincze, 2017). we also see a need for more research on the role of the ought-to self/selves (dörnyei & al-hoorie, 2017, p. 461) during the studies, especially at university level. our study indicated that the impact of the ought-to l2 self diminished during the studies in our special context, but more research, both qualitative and quantitative, is needed. as motivation is essential for lote studies, it is important to support it also at program level. therefore, on the basis of the current study, some recommendations concerning higher education programs of lotes can be made. study exchange in an l2-speaking country is central for study motivation, in that students can be active participants in the everyday life of the l2 community. “this language still motivates me!” advanced language students and their l2 motivation 307 that is why students should be encouraged to travel abroad and use their l2 in natural surroundings, also in programs where study exchange is not obligatory. english as a lingua franca is seen, heard and used almost everywhere, whereas using a lote requires own activity on the part of the student. naturally, even if the l2 itself and related cultural aspects are significant reasons for studying the language, they are not enough for preserving students’ study motivation. it was seen in the data that students inevitably start thinking about their future at some point of their studies, often in terms of professional dreams and aspirations. it is at this point, at the latest, that a strong and detailed vision of the self, the ideal l2 self, becomes central. it would be important for lote students to be able to discuss their goals and dreams both with each other and with their teachers, as a part of their ordinary study planning sessions. the point is to support students in their identity construction, without putting pressure on them. another way of supporting identity formation would be portfolio work as a tool for reflection. being able to write about matters connected to l2 studies, right from the beginning, would hopefully give students new insights and more self-confidence, as well as help them to deal with all the emotional aspects connected to their l2 studies. this would also give them a chance to reflect on their multilingual selves (henry, 2017), and to see all their languages as valuable parts of their plurilingual repertoire. as mentioned earlier, the emotional aspect of l2 motivation is vital. would it perhaps contribute to successful learning if students were invited to discuss their l2-related emotions during supervision meetings, in order to reduce negative emotions (see piniel & albert, 2018, p. 143)? due to the dominance of global english, these kinds of discussions would be especially relevant in lote contexts, where students sometimes feel compelled to explain their choice of l2 not only to other people, but also to themselves. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal for their valuable remarks on earlier versions of this article. anne huhtala, anta kursiša, marjo vesalainen 308 references al-hoorie, a. h. 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(2014). motivational dynamics in language learning: change, stability, and context. modern language journal, 98(3), 704-723. 87 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (1). 87-107 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment: an investigation into iranian efl students’ attitudes zainab abolfazli khonbi urmia university, iran z.abolfazli1986@gmail.com karim sadeghi urmia university, iran ksadeghi03@gmail.com abstract student-directed teaching and assessment techniques are gradually dominating educational systems almost all over the world. this study investigated a cohort of male and female iranian efl students’ attitudes toward self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment experiences. sixty three students at urmia university and tabriz islamic azad university, in the form of three intact classes, experienced self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment activities for one academic semester (having taken a knowledge pretest, four assessment series, and a course achievement posttest). of all the participants, 38 completed a 5-point likert-scale attitude questionnaire. the application of anova, across and within group dependent samples t tests, as well as some qualitative analyses, indicated that the three experimental groups had positive attitudes toward their assessment experiences. while the peer-assessment group was the most positive in this regard, slight differences were found in the groups’ attitudes and beliefs. further findings and implications are discussed in the paper. keywords: course achievement, peer-assessment, self-assessment, teacherassessment, student attitudes zainab abolfazli khonbi, karim sadeghi 88 academic assessment serves several purposes. for example, boud (1990) argues that assessment of students “improve[s] the quality of learning . . . [and] the accreditation of knowledge or performance” (p. 102). these two purposes can be differentiated in terms of formative assessment, which serves students’ learning needs, and summative assessment, which serves the needs of the society to evaluate the end-result of schooling. many studies indicate that student learning is positively influenced by assessment (black & william, 1998; kennedy, chan, fok, & yu, 2008). however, over the past 50 years, the institutes producing and administering standardized tests have been enjoying a social, political, and organizational power leading to the so-called test driven curricula where educational materials are directed toward the content of the test rather than toward learning what the learners should be learning. this aspect of assessment, known as negative washback, has diminished the learning value of language instruction across the world (farhady, 2006). since it provides feedback, assessment informs students about their strengths and weaknesses and indicates the next steps to take in the learning process. one important condition for assessment to support student learning is the active involvement in the assessment process on the part of students themselves (black & william, 1998). alternative assessment methods, while associated with students’ learning approaches (scouller, 1998), include self and peer-assessment, and are designed to develop active, autonomous, responsible, and reflective learners (sambell & mcdowell, 1998). self-assessment (sa) is viewed as an individual’s own evaluation of their language ability, generally according to how good they are at particular language skills (e.g., reading and speaking), how well they are able to use the language in different domains or situations (e.g., at the office and at school), or how well they can use different styles of the language (e.g., a formal and an informal style) (mousavi, 2012). as a variant of sa (mousavi, 2012), peerassessment (pa) is defined as “an arrangement in which individuals consider the amount, level, worth, quality of success of the products or outcomes of learning of peers of similar status” (topping, 1998, p. 250). attitude is referred to as the degree of an individual’s like or dislike of an institution, situation, event, and the like. in other words, it is the tendency to react consistently favorably or unfavorably to a stimulus (persons, objects, or concepts). in the case of language testing, the stimulus is a language or speakers of a language. attitudes tend to be quite stable and less subject to factual input than are beliefs and opinions (mousavi, 2012). richards and schmidt (2002) speak of attitude as the language attitudes which speakers of different languages or language varieties have toward each other’s languages self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment: an investigation into iranian efl students’ attitudes 89 or towards their own language. expressions of positive and negative feelings towards a language may reflect impressions of linguistic complexity or simplicity, ease or difficulty of learning, degree of importance, elegance, social status, and so on (p. 286). in this study, by attitude we mean the attitude not toward a language and the people speaking that language, but the attitude toward the experience of a certain type of learning and assessment. oscarson (1989) briefly itemized the rationale of sa procedures in language learning (pp. 4-6): promotion of learning: sa gives learners training in evaluation, which, in itself, is beneficial to learning. raised level of awareness: training in self-assessment stimulates learners to consider course content and assessment principles in a more discerning way than is usually the case. improved goal-orientation: the practice of self-assessment further tends to enhance learners’ knowledge of the wide variety of possible goals in most language learning contexts. expansion of range of assessment: in certain respects, the learner’s own appreciation of his competence in the language is, for natural reasons, superior to that of an outside tester, namely in areas of affective learning (in turn contributing somehow to students’ attitudes toward learning and assessment). shared assessment burden: it has been pointed out that a further positive aspect of learner participation in assessment is the possibility that it may alleviate the assessment burden on the teacher (dickinson, 1987). beneficial postcourse effects: teaching students how to carry on learning the language autonomously after the course is universally considered an important objective in foreign language instruction. as regards pa, topping (1998) argued that given the many different types of pa, establishing a single overarching mechanism or model of the process seems likely to be difficult. in a literature review, he stated that the literature proposes many hypotheses about the mechanisms through which pa may create its effects. he categorized these mechanisms according to the following domains: cognition and metacognition: in a review of the wider literature on peer-assisted learning, topping and ehly (1998) noted that cognitively pa might create effects by increasing a number of variables for assessors, assessees, or both. these variables could include levels of time on task, engagement, and practice, coupled with a greater sense of accountability and responsibility. they argued that formative pa is likely to involve intelligent questioning, together with increased selfdisclosure and, thereby, assessment of understanding. furthermore, zainab abolfazli khonbi, karim sadeghi 90 they believe that pa could enable earlier error and misconception identification and analysis and could lead to the identification of knowledge gaps and to the engineering of their closure through explaining, simplifying, clarifying, summarizing, reorganizing, and cognitive restructuring. finally, they asserted that cognitive and metacognitive benefits might accrue before, during, or after pa. affect: both assessors and assesses might experience initial anxiety about the process. however, pa involves students directly in the learning process and may promote a sense of ownership, personal responsibility, and motivation. giving positive feedback first might reduce assessee anxiety and improve acceptance of negative feedback. pa might also increase variety and interest, activity and interactivity, identification and bonding, self-confidence, and empathy for others. social and transferable skills: pa can develop teamwork skills and promote active rather than passive learning. it can also develop verbal communication skills, negotiation skills, and diplomacy (riley, 1995). systemic benefits: pa can give students greater insight into institutional assessment processes (fry, 1990). students might thus develop more confidence in these processes and greater tolerance of the inevitable difficulties of discrimination at the margin. alternatively, if institutional assessment procedures are inadequate, greater awareness of this among students could generate a positive feeling toward improvement. studies concerned with pa show that students generally display a liking for pa activities because these activities provide an opportunity for comparison of student work, but, simultaneously, students are much less appreciative of criticism from peers (brindley & scoffield, 1998; smith, cooper, & lancaster, 2002; williams, 1992). however, studies also show a lack of self-confidence in students when they rate their peers (sullivan, hitchcock, & dunnington, 1999), and the need for a pre-existing guideline or rule for the assessment activity (orsmond & merry, 1996). clifford (1999) devised a learner-controlled learning environment and utilized both pa and sa techniques to help students develop autonomy. the researcher surveyed students’ attitudes toward pa and reported that students found pa activities educative, but they also felt frustrated when they had no clear frameworks and guidance. furthermore, these students viewed grading as the teacher’s responsibility because they wished to stay away from “the process of evaluating . . . peers’ performance where marks are concerned” (p. 122). davies (2000) investigated a group of undergraduate students after they participated in a computerized pa project and found that nonanonymous pa was negatively perceived by these students, and that this could be associated self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment: an investigation into iranian efl students’ attitudes 91 with the difficulty of criticizing or rating their peers. however, other research has suggested that anonymous assessment could provide more truthful and appropriate attitudes toward the assessment processes (ballantyne, hughes, & mylonas, 2002). nonetheless, students’ resistance to and negative perceptions of pa could discourage teachers from using such technological innovations (cohen, 1988; mcneil, 1988). the study conducted by bullock (2011) on teachers’ beliefs about learner sa looked at issues surrounding learner sa and teachers’ beliefs. his study was designed to explore teachers’ attitudes, beliefs, and behavior with regard to learner sa during the implementation of a revision of assessment procedures for teens aged 14-16 years. he used both quantitative and qualitative methods to discover what teachers understood by sa and in what ways, if any, they had implemented this. the relationship between attitudes, beliefs, and practices was also explored; accordingly, he identified some specific factors responsible for facilitating or obstructing implementation. the findings showed that teachers believed that (a) when supported, learners benefit from assessing their own work, (b) sa raises learners’ awareness of their strengths and weaknesses, and (c) sa stimulates motivation and involvement in the learning process. during the interviews with teachers, he identified some other favorable attitudes toward sa: (a) it is a good idea in theory, (b) it is better than tests, (c) it adds structure and context, (d) it works, (e) it helps students see their progress, and (f) it gives students greater ownership. for the student who receives peer review, studies report deepened subject matter knowledge (barak & rafaeli, 2004) and a more positive attitude toward it (katstra, tollefson, & gilbert, 1987). in his review of the pa research, topping (1998) noted that students’ acceptance of pa is quite independent of their knowledge about the demonstrated reliability and validity of that assessment. davies (2000) and liu and carless (2006) noted that some students who have negative perceptions of pa doubt the expertise of their fellow students (as compared to their instructors). researchers have also hypothesized that students’ discomfort and negativity can be traced to the problematic power relations that students associate with assessing their peers (liu & carless, 2006). these studies indicate that students may have trouble with the nontraditional idea of their peers assessing their work in place of an instructor. furthermore, variation in students’ attitudes about assessment may rely a great deal on how individual instructors introduce and plan sa and pa. studies have also advocated certain steps to alleviate students’ negative perceptions of pa, including more pa experience (wen & tsai, 2006), clarity about pa criteria (smith et al., 2002), and support and training in regard to the pa process (cheng & warren, 1997; falchikov, 2005, 2007). zainab abolfazli khonbi, karim sadeghi 92 beyond the need to know what attitudes students have about sa and pa in order to design better sa and pa processes, we also need more evidence about how sa and pa, and students’ perceptions of them impact the quality of their work, particularly in the realm of higher education where student satisfaction becomes increasingly important for course evaluation and class selection by students. studies indicate that students with positive perceptions of teaching and course goals often adopt a deep approach to studying, whereas students with negative perceptions about course workload and the appropriateness of assessment often adopt a surface approach to studying (crawford, gordon, nicholas, & prosser, 1998; lizzio, wilson, & simons, 2002). however, the studies in question are based solely on students’ self-reports and not empirical measures of students’ work. some investigations into students’ attitudes towards and beliefs about self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment have been conducted either previous to or after the experiments (richards & schmidt, 2002). in 38 control group studies measuring tutor achievement, tutors outperformed controls in 33 (topping, 1996). in addition, improved tutor attitudes and self-concept as a result of peer-tutoring have been reported (topping, 1996). as mentioned above, research studies carried out in the same areas as the present research have found that students may have different attitudes toward the practices of self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment, and that these differences in attitude may influence their performance (roskams, 1999; van zundert, sluijsmans, & van merri nboer, 2010). it should be added that students’ responses and attitudes toward sa also appear to differ depending on the cultural and educational contexts in which teaching and learning take place (oscarson, 1997). still, in the iranian context, regardless of the issue of learner-centered and individualistic approaches to teaching prevalent elsewhere, most of the evaluations and assessments in formal educational settings are exercised by teachers. to contribute to the thriving body of research in this field, this study sought to investigate undergraduate efl students’ attitudes toward self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment in the form of student-generated tests (brown, 2004), after they had experienced them for an academic semester in their teaching methods course. the pedagogical findings of the present research may be of interest to a variety of individuals as well as groups. they could be regarded as providing insight for curriculum developers, course designers as well as teachers and professors themselves. the following research question was the foundation of this research project: is there any statistically significant difference among iranian university efl students’ attitudes toward their self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment experiences? self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment: an investigation into iranian efl students’ attitudes 93 method participants the participants were 63 male and female efl students at urmia university and tabriz islamic azad university, west and east azarbaijan provinces, iran, working towards a ba in english language and literature. they were within the age range of 20 to 22 and had experienced self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment for an academic semester. however, not all the participants completed an attitude questionnaire, and this study is based on the performance of 38 participants (i.e., 11, 15, and 12 candidates in the self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment groups, respectively) who filled out the relevant questionnaires. instruments as was the case with similar investigations (e.g., bullock, 2011), the main material used for the present research was an attitude questionnaire which was distributed at the end of the semester to the students who had just completed their self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment treatments. the three questionnaires used for the purposes of gathering information on the students’ attitudes and beliefs were compiled on the basis of those used in some previous studies of a similar kind. they were checked for validity by scholars and were found to be valid to a satisfactory degree. their reliability was established by calculating cronbach’s alpha: for the sa group (with 11 cases and 22 items) r = .73, for the pa group (with 15 cases and 22 items) r = .78, and for the teacher-assessment (ta) group (with 12 cases and 20 items) r = .86. the questionnaires consisted of three parts and had 26 items in the self and peer-assessment groups, but only 24 items in the ta group. all of the items, except the last four, were answered by means of a 5-point likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree). the first 16 items in the case of the sa and pa groups, and the first 14 items in the case of the ta group, measured students’ attitude toward the practice and the process of assessment, while the next six items were meant to tap into the students’ beliefs about possible outcomes of these assessment methods. the last four were open-ended questions asking students for their justifications of their group’s performance. procedure originally, the study followed a semi-experimental intact group design in which the classes were randomly assigned to self-, peer-, and teacherzainab abolfazli khonbi, karim sadeghi 94 assessment groups. later on, a comparative design was used to compare the students’ attitudes toward their assessments and to examine if any significant differences existed among them. at the beginning of the term, all the groups took a pretest which measured the students’ existing knowledge of a specific course book. then, in the sa and pa groups, the students were trained on how to assess themselves as well as their peers, respectively. while in the sa group they were instructed to make, answer and mark their own papers, in the pa group the students were instructed to take tests made and marked by anonymous peers. in the ta group, however, the teacher was asked to design and mark the papers. implementing the procedures as described to them and having received an assessment every two units, the experimental groups took four assessment series during the term. at the end of the term, all the three groups received an end-of-the-course achievement posttest. when the treatment was finished, an investigation was carried out as to the extent to which the groups differed in terms of their attitudes toward the assessment types they had experienced. the students were required to respond to the likert scale questionnaire items and to give up to three main reasons for their performance. since the students needed to reflect upon their experiences during the relevant treatment, they were not required to complete the questionnaire within a certain time limit; however, it did not take more than 30 min. results quantitative analysis table 1 shows the descriptive statistics for the groups on the whole questionnaire (consisting of 22 items in the case of selfand peer-assessment groups and 20 items for the teacher-assessment group). in this table, n stands for the number of items in the questionnaires, and m shows the mean score (obtained from the values of 1 corresponding to strongly agree, 2 to agree, 3 to cannot decide, 4 to disagree, and 5 to strongly disagree). for instance, it can be inferred that in the pa group, the grand mean for all 22 questions was 2.27, that is, in this group students had an attitude somewhere between agree and cannot decide toward their pa. this was the most positive attitude, which was followed by ta and then sa groups. self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment: an investigation into iranian efl students’ attitudes 95 table 1 descriptive statistics for each group on the whole questionnaire n m sd se 95% confidence interval for mean minimum maximum lower bound upper bound pa 22 2.2791 0.40078 0.08545 2.1014 2.4568 1.33 3.13 sa 22 2.7686 0.34865 0.07433 2.6141 2.9232 2.30 3.55 ta 20 2.6480 0.39238 0.08774 2.4644 2.8316 1.90 3.33 total 64 2.5627 0.43093 0.05387 2.4550 2.6703 1.33 3.55 in order to analyze the data, a one-way analysis of variance (anova) was applied to compare the mean scores of the groups. table 1 showed that the groups had generally a more favourable attitude toward the assessments (the means were all below 3, which means cannot decide); however, the anova table that follows (table 2) shows that there were significant differences among the groups’ attitudes, with f(2, 61) = 9.81, p < .001. table 2 anova of the groups’ mean scores on the whole questionnaire sum of squares df mean square f sig. between groups 2.848 2 1.424 9.814 .000 within groups 8.851 61 .145 total 11.699 63 table 3 is a report of the post-hoc tests used to identify significant differences among the groups. it was found that the pa group (m = 2.27, sd = 0.40) differed significantly (p = .00) from both the sa (m = 2.76, sd = 0.34) and ta (m = 2.64, sd = 0.39) groups in being the most positively disposed towards the assessment experience. table 3 post-hoc tukey hsd test (multiple comparisons) for the groups’ mean scores on the whole questionnaire (i) group (j) group mean difference (i-j) se sig. 95% confidence interval lower bound upper bound pa sa -.48955* 0.11485 .000 -.7654 -.2136 ta -.36891* 0.11769 .007 -.6516 -.0862 sa pa .48955* 0.11485 .000 .2136 .7654 ta .12064 0.11769 .564 -.1621 .4033 ta pa .36891* 0.11769 .007 .0862 .6516 sa -.12064 0.11769 .564 -.4033 .1621 * the mean difference is significant at the .05 level based on the above analyses, it was found that the groups differed in terms of the level of positive or negative disposition toward the assessments. therefore, the null hypothesis was rejected. however, in order to get a general zainab abolfazli khonbi, karim sadeghi 96 view of the amount of agreement and disagreement across the three experimental groups, a paired samples t test was conducted to explore the difference between the students’ positive and negative attitudes toward their experiences of self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment. to this end, the average of strongly agree (sta) and agree (a) options (as an index of agreement) was compared with the average of disagree (da) and strongly disagree (stda) options (as an index of disagreement). tables 4 and 5 that follow show the results of this analysis. it was found that there was a statistically significant difference across the three groups between the mean scores of both sa and a options, that is, positive attitudes (m = 11.45, sd = 5.07) on the one hand and da and sda options, that is, negative attitudes (m = 4.32, sd = 3.63) on the other, in favor of sa and a options, with t(37) = 5.44, p < .00 (two-tailed). this indicated that the groups had more agreement toward the assessments (eta squared = .44). table 4 inferential statistics: paired samples t test for the sta and a vs. da and stda options across groups m n sd se mean pair 1 sta and a 11.45 38 5.076 0.823 da and stda 4.32 38 3.632 0.589 table 5 paired samples t test for the sta and a vs. da and stda options across groups paired differences t df sig. (2-tailed) m sd se mean 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper pair 1 sta and a – da and stda 7.132 8.081 1.311 4.475 9.788 5.440 37 .000 within groups, a paired samples t test was also applied to see what the story is as to the amount of agreement and disagreement within each group. the result for the sa group is presented in tables 6 and 7. based on these two tables, the sa group showed no significant difference (p = .12) between the positive attitudes (m = 10.91, sd = 4.74) and negative attitudes (m = 6.45, sd = 4.54), with t(10) = 1.65, p < .00, with the eta squared of .21. table 6 inferential statistics: paired samples t test for the sa and a vs. da and sda options in sa group m n sd se mean pair 1 sta and a 10.91 11 4.742 1.430 da and stda 6.45 11 4.547 1.371 self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment: an investigation into iranian efl students’ attitudes 97 table 7 paired samples t test for the sta and a vs. da and stda options in the sa group paired differences t df sig. (2tailed) m sd se mean 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper pair 1 sta and a – da and stda 4.455 8.904 2.685 -1.527 10.436 1.659 10 .128 within the pa group, a paired samples t test revealed significant difference (p = .00) in the mean of agreement options (m = 14.33, sd = 3.83) and disagreement options (m = 2.53, sd = 1.95), with t(14) = 8.46, p < .00., with the eta squared of .83. it can be concluded that the pa groups students expressed significantly more positive (than negative) attitudes toward pa. the results are presented in tables 8 and 9. table 8 inferential statistics: paired samples t test for the sta and a vs. da and stda options in the pa group m n sd se mean pair 1 sta and a 14.33 15 3.830 0.989 da and stda 2.53 15 1.959 0.506 table 9 paired samples t test for the sa and a vs. da and sda options in the pa group paired differences t df sig. (2tailed) m sd se mean 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper pair 1 sta and a – da and stda 11.800 5.401 1.395 8.809 14.791 8.462 14 .000 as for the amount of agreement and disagreement in the ta group, paired samples t test results yielded no significant difference (p = .12) between the means of agreement (m = 8.33, sd = 5.03) and disagreement options (m = 4.58, sd = 3.42), with t(11) = 1.66, p < .00, with the eta squared of .20. tables 10 and 11 show the results. table 10 inferential statistics: paired samples t test for the sta and a vs. da and stda options in the ta group m n sd se mean pair 1 sta and a 8.33 12 5.033 1.453 da and stda 4.58 12 3.423 0.988 zainab abolfazli khonbi, karim sadeghi 98 table 11 paired samples t test for the sta and a vs. da and stda options in the ta group paired differences t df sig. (2tailed) m sd se mean 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper pair 1 sa and a – da and sda 3.750 7.818 2.257 -1.217 8.717 1.662 11 .125 based on the above analyses, an across group paired samples t test found that all the three experimental groups showed more agreement toward the statements in the attitude questionnaires. however, a within group paired samples t test found that the difference as to the amount of agreement versus disagreement was significant only in the case of the pa group and not in the sa and ta groups. although the existence of limitations in the sample size, in the proficiency level of students among other things, reduces the generalizability of results, based on the students’ responses to the items in the questionnaires, some tentative conclusions may be drawn concerning students’ attitudes toward the assessments. the students agreed that self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment raise their awareness of their strengths and weaknesses, stimulate motivation and involvement in the learning process, produce independent (autonomous) learners, make them competent at recognizing areas needing further study, make them read more seriously about the subject matter, prepare them for the final examinations, improve the quality of their learning and achievement, provide them with an accurate and fair assessment of themselves, are beneficial to the learning process, facilitate learning, and help learning through enjoying feedback. students also agreed that these assessment methods are useful means for assessing achievement, and that none of them is a waste of teaching time. in the case of selfand peer-assessment, students also agreed that if they are trained and get experience in these assessment procedures, they can do the assessments effectively, and if given clear criteria for item construction and marking, they can undertake the assessments in a consistent fashion. students in the sa group also agreed that sa would lead to surface-level learning, memorization, not taking the task seriously, no study, designing easy items, and being lax in scoring. on the other hand, students in the pa group also agreed that pa may lead to real learning, in-depth study, stricter scoring of peers’ achievement, enjoying peer-feedback, feelings of competition, and fear of losing face in front of peers. students in the ta group agreed, to some extent, that ta can lead to surface-level learning, memorization, not taking the task seriously, no study, enjoying feedback, and feelings of competition. self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment: an investigation into iranian efl students’ attitudes 99 qualitative analysis in this section, the students’ answers to the four open-ended questionnaire items are briefly listed. the students were required to answer the questions in english; however, due to lexical and grammatical errors, their responses were first corrected, redundancies were omitted, and then the responses were summarized. tables 12, 13, and 14 list examples of the experimental groups’ attitudes toward and beliefs about their experience of self-, peer-, and teacherassessment, respectively. in the first column of the tables, the questions are provided and in the second column, the students’ responses are briefly stated. table 12 sa group’s attitudes toward self-assessment questionnaire items students’ responses sa group’s mean scores were higher than the pa group’s in all four series of assessments, because of: remembering the questions and answers designing easy items correcting the papers being lax in scoring sa group failed to outperform pa group on the final achievement test, because of: not valid with questions of little importance not getting used to other types of questions, not studying well not studying properly, no concern for the scores pa group’s having more study during the term to answer the questions not aware of content pa group’s having more practice recommend or reject; in other words, state the advantages and disadvantages of sa. a the opportunity to examine oneself; getting a new way of testing better understanding a vision of one’s skill in testing no stress da remembering the questions or also some answers; no guarantee for learning the material, just memorization correcting one’s own paper, not afraid of the scores; no serious study self-selecting parts to study; not studying in detail and completely if anything else was missing from this investigation of the effect of sa on iranian university efl students’ course achievement which you think you would like to add, mention it. desire to use pa, getting acquainted with many different kinds of questions a = advantages, da = disadvantages zainab abolfazli khonbi, karim sadeghi 100 table 13 pa group’s attitudes toward peer-assessment questionnaire items students’ responses pa group’s mean scores were lower than the sa group’s on all four series of assessments, because of: not anticipated questions, their type; not knowing how to study somehow strange questions, sometimes not standard, and difficult; problems understanding them prejudice in grading peers being very strict in scoring taking part in such activities for the first time sa group’s memorizing the answers sa group’s cheating, giving high scores to oneself pa group outperformed sa group on the final achievement test, because of: experiencing different tests, a variety of questions no knowledge of the questions, pa forcing study papers being assigned by peers; deep study the opportunity to be involved in a give and take practice; remembering the materials easily fear of a low score in final exam; more study having to study all the materials for designing questions; pa students’ being well prepared for the tests students’ studying the questions when tests finished; aware of weaknesses; trying to improve having to study alone, pa being an effective activity considering pa a final opportunity (for preparing for the final exam) recommend or reject; in other words, state the advantages and disadvantages of pa. a causing better study scoring peers each session; encouraging good and useful activity a kind of motivation for study review the course book to have a better performance familiarity with different kinds of questions having to study, strengthening knowledge; advantageous an effective and motivating activity helping more detailed study studying deeply; recognizing areas of weakness through groupwork so beneficial for students, stimulating motivation, preparing for final term examinations; doing better than the usual schedule da needing time if anything else was missing from this investigation of the effect of pa on iranian university efl students’ course achievement which you think you would like to add, mention it. good, happening in an intimate atmosphere a most effective criteria for evaluation purposes, if names shown; paying attention in giving scores a = advantages, da = disadvantages self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment: an investigation into iranian efl students’ attitudes 101 table 14 ta group’s attitudes toward teacher-assessment questionnaire items students’ responses ta group’s mean scores were lower than sa and pa group’s on all four series of assessments, because of: not having real study and enough practice not listening carefully to the teacher too difficult questions cooperation in sa and pa groups pa and sa groups’ taking the tasks seriously and studying harder very boring class, not getting the lesson well ta group failed to outperform sa and pa groups on the final achievement test, because of: having stress low motivation; not studying well recommend or reject; in other words, state the advantages and disadvantages of ta. having feedback, improving students’ knowledge continuous review if anything else was missing from this investigation of the effect of ta on iranian university efl students’ course achievement which you think you would like to add, mention it. perfect, excellent it was really complete a categorization of students’ attitudes toward the assessment type experiences in the tables above supported students’ positive attitudes established by quantitative analysis. generally speaking, students in the sa group justified their high performance on the assessment series by making easy items, memorization, being lax in scoring, and so on and stated that their low performance on the posttest was largely due to no in-depth and serious study. however, they recommended this type of assessment, for they believed it leads to better understanding, no stress, and an opportunity to gauge and improve their testing skills. they also showed a desire for pa in order to get acquainted with different kinds of questions. peer-assessment group members expressed the most beliefs and ideas about their assessment practice in comparison with the other two groups. they related their low performance on the series of assessments to not anticipated and difficult questions, and peers’ strictness in scoring. as their statements indicated, their good performance on the posttest would be a sign of deep and detailed study, receiving feedback, independent study, and review. they mentioned such benefits of pa as causing students to be familiar with different item types, bringing forth better study, an encouraging and beneficial activity, making students recognize their areas of strength and weakness, and a motivating and effective practice. although the students in the selfand peer-assessment attributed their performances more or less to the assessment types, students in the teacherassessment group, for the most part, identified individualistic reasons for their low performance both on the assessment series and on the posttest. they zainab abolfazli khonbi, karim sadeghi 102 claimed that not listening carefully to the teacher, not having enough study, having stress, too difficult items, and low motivation were the contributing factors. however, they expressed their positive attitudes by stating that ta leads to continuous review and feedback which improves students’ knowledge. they also provided some reasons for the better performance of students in the selfand peerassessment such as cooperation, taking the tasks seriously, and harder study. discussion in this study, undergraduate efl students experienced self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment exercises in the course of an academic semester in a teaching methods course and were investigated in terms of their attitudes toward their assessments at the end of the experiment. the study found that the sa group had the highest mean scores on the series of assessments followed by the pa group, and then the ta group, which gained the lowest mean scores. however, on the course achievement posttest, the pa group outperformed the others and the sa group obtained second best scores followed by the ta group. the analysis of attitude questionnaires indicated that the students in the three experimental groups had positive attitudes toward the associated assessment types. the pa group was found to have the most positive attitudes toward pa, although not differing significantly from the sa group. this finding may be related somehow to the better performance of the pa group on the posttest in comparison with the sa and ta groups and to the outperformance of the ta group by the sa and pa groups on the same test. it can be concluded that assessment types (sa vs. pa vs. ta) and students’ attitudes toward them and their perfomances might have affected each other. the assessments were found to positively affect students’ performances on the posttest; however, they may have affected students’ attitudes as well. in addition, students’ performances on the posttest could be regarded as an influential factor for students’ attitudes toward the assessments or the other way round. consistent with the findings of the present research regarding students’ attitudes, some studies have observed a positive connection between prior training, accurate pa, and a favorable attitude toward the notion of pa (williams, 1992). van zundert et al. (2010) found that the practice of pa improves students’ performances and positively affects their attitudes toward its practice. lupo (as cited in oscarson, 1989) reports positive effects, as a result of positive attitudes towards the practice of sa, on the basis of the results of a survey among 15 to 16-year-olds. as it was mentioned by the students in the sa and pa groups, because they involve both reflection and evaluation of one’s own performance, sa and pa were found to give students an opportuniself-, peer-, and teacher-assessment: an investigation into iranian efl students’ attitudes 103 ty to feel a sense of control over their own actions and to develop positive attitudes toward learning, thus increasing motivation (paris & paris, 2001). while some research in the context of higher education indicates that students’ satisfaction with school and positive perceptions of their learning environment influences their gpa (grade point average) (lizzio et al., 2002), studies specifically focused on pa have demonstrated that students’ discomfort with peer review does not correlate with their grades (simkin & ramarapu, 1997). wen and tsai (2006) in their study on university students’ perceptions of and attitudes toward (online) pa found that participating students had a positive attitude toward general pa activities and they thought that pa guidelines were helpful for their understanding of the pa activity. however, in contrast to our findings, the researchers found these students had neutral attitudes toward online pa, indicating that they, on average, were neither positive nor negative toward the use of online pa activities. similarly, they had neutral perceptions of the negative aspects of pa, demonstrating that these university students on average neither agreed nor disagreed with these negative aspects of pa. wen and tsai concluded that, on the one hand, the university students involved in the study thought that a major part, if not all, of the responsibility of grading should belong to the teacher/instructor. on the other hand, they also respected peers’ judgments about their own performance. their finding also concurs with many other studies (brindley & scoffield, 1998; clifford, 1999), suggesting that more effort needs to be placed on giving students responsibility for grading to develop a sense of learner control and ownership of their own learning, especially in higher education. also in contrast to this study’s findings, kaufman and shunn (2011) in their study on students’ “perceptions about peer assessment for writing” (p. 387) found that students sometimes regard pa as unfair and often believe that peers are unqualified to review and assess their work. furthermore, the researchers claimed that students’ perceptions about the fairness of pa drop significantly following students’ experience in doing pa. they concluded those students’ fairness perceptions, and drops in those perceptions, are most significantly associated with their perceptions about the extent to which peers’ feedback is useful and positive; however, students’ perceptions appear to be unrelated to the extent of their revision work. other studies on pa suggest that students’ continued exposure to pa (wen and tsai 2006) will help them to view that assessment more positively. the degree of care in preparing (often reluctant) students for sa and pa can yield very different effects. the generalizability threat to this research may be the small size and the gender balance that was skewed to females. no control over the proficiency levels of the students was exerted. zainab abolfazli khonbi, karim sadeghi 104 through the use of sa and pa in more classes, students may begin to regard such assessments as a normal part of their education and may also understand more clearly how their own and peers’ advice can contribute to their education. continued use of sa and pa may also encourage students to see themselves as legitimate audience for their own and peers’ work and thus a valuable source of feedback about that work. in addition, future research should examine the role that other individual differences play in student acceptance of peer feedback, such as motivational factors or resilience to critical feedback. some studies across settings and subjects could provide more information about how students’ perceptions influence the work they do and allow for some generalizations about how students’ attitudes affect their performance. future research could helpfully focus on how to assist students in providing useful feedback in the process of pa activities and how to enhance the validity of pa. such studies might also emphasize the instructor’s role in sa and pa and help teachers to carefully monitor and manage these processes. gender and proficiency may be two interesting factors to be investigated. miller and ng (1994) stated that proficient and highly motivated l2 learners are able to more realistically assess their peers’ language ability. finally, similar studies could be done with groups of participants of very different social, cultural, and disciplinary backgrounds and l2 proficiency levels for comparison purposes. however, to date, very little systematic investigation has been conducted on how the teaching or learning context interacts with students’ responses and attitudes towards sa, pa and ta (butler & lee, 2010). conclusion the research project reported here found that students show positive attitudes toward and beliefs about self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment practices, with the pa group expressing significantly more positive than negative attitudes in this regard. the results of this study can be used in all educational centers. they may have direct and indirect implications and applications in teaching, learning, materials development, syllabus design, and curriculum and test development. university professors can benefit from sa and pa techniques (with an eagle eye on the latter) in order to educate more active and autonomous students who are at the same time better communicators. self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment: an investigation into iranian efl students’ attitudes 105 references ballantyne, r., hughes, k., & mylonas, a. 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(1992). student attitudes towards approaches to learning and assessment. assessment and evaluation in higher education, 17, 45-58. 237 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (2). 2014. 237-274 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.2.5 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom jean-marc dewaele birkbeck college, university of london, uk j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk peter d. macintyre cape breton university, canada peter_macintyre@cbu.ca abstract the present study investigates foreign language enjoyment (fle) and foreign language classroom anxiety (flca) in the classroom. participants were 1746 current fl learners from around the world. we used a measure of fle, based on likert scale ratings of 21 items (dewaele & macintyre, 2014), and a measure of flca based on 8 items extracted from the flcas (horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986). statistical analyses revealed that levels of fle were significantly higher than those of flca. fle and flca were linked to a number of independent variables: participants’ perception of their relative level of proficiency within the fl classroom, number of languages known, education level, number of fls under study, age group and general level of the fl (ranging from lower-intermediate to advanced). female participants reported both more fle and more flca. cultural background of participants also had a significant effect on their scores. participants’ views on episodes of enjoyment in the fl class revealed the importance of teachers’ professional and emotional skills and of a supportive peer group. many participants mentioned the moment at which they realised that their long effort in mastering an aspect of the fl paid off. keywords: foreign language enjoyment, foreign language classroom anxiety, individual differences jean-marc dewaele, peter d. macintyre 238 1. introduction in roman mythology, janus is the god of beginnings and transitions. in ancient times, foreign language learners might have found great comfort in janus, as the learning of a foreign language (fl) often feels likes an endless beginning followed by a very long succession of transitions. janus is traditionally depicted with two faces, one looking to the future, the other to the past. in the present research we are concerned with both directions of the vision, as they reflect emotions in fl learning. for learners, having an anxious negative face is a common experience, but so is the face of positive enjoyment. it is fair to say that sla researchers have mostly focused on the negative face of emotion, with anxiety being the most studied topic (dewaele, 2007; horwitz, 2001; lu & liu, 2011; macintyre, 1999; macintyre & gardner, 1991c; saito, garza, & horwitz, 1999; scovel, 1978; and for a review, see horwitz’s (2010) research timeline). foreign language anxiety (fla) can be defined as “the worry and negative emotional reaction aroused when learning or using a second language” (macintyre, 1999, p. 27). fla has been linked to a number of learner variables. lower levels of fla have been linked to a younger age of onset of acquisition, authentic use of the fl during the learning phase, frequent current use of the fl, a high degree of fl socialisation, and a large network of people with whom the fl is used (dewaele, 2013b). dewaele (2013b) found minimal differences in fla linked to gender. however, older participants and more highly educated participants scored significantly lower on fla in their various languages. the number of languages previously learned tends to be associated with lower fla in native and fls (dewaele 2010, 2013b; dewaele, petrides, & furnham, 2008; thompson & lee, 2012). levels of fla have also been found to increase significantly, and linearly, from the l1 to the l5 of pentalinguals (dewaele, 2013b). in addition to the number of languages known, the typological distance between the target language and existing languages in the learner’s repertoire influences fla. if the target language belongs to a familiar linguistic family, anxiety tends to be significantly lower (dewaele, 2010). the effects of fla can be quite insidious. indeed, they can compromise the learning potential of the fl learner, wreck the best teaching techniques and render the most attractive material inadequate (arnold & brown, 1999, p. 2). not surprisingly, fla has been described as one of the strongest predictors of success or failures in fl learning (macintyre, 1999). fla can disrupt the optimal functioning of the prefrontal lobe of the brain, which affects memory and thus reduces learning capacity (arnold & brown, 1999, p. 2). macintyre and gardner (1994a, 1994b) demonstrated that anxiety can disrupt language acthe two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom 239 quisition and production at the input, processing and output stages of the learning process. studies have consistently shown that fla negatively affects learning and communication, and those effects are both complex and multidimensional (dewaele, 2002; gregersen & macintyre, 2014; horwitz, 2010). taking a micro-perspective, macintrye and serroul (2015) used a dynamic approach to link anxiety experiences to difficulties in vocabulary retrieval in real time during communication, resulting in spikes and dips in perceived competence and willingness to communicate. using a similar methodology, gregersen, macintyre and meza (2014) demonstrate links between perceived anxiety scores and fluctuations in heart rate in real time, showing the physiological responses that partially underlie the anxious state. although there has been some suggestion that a facilitating form of fla is possible (hewitt & stephenson, 2012; kleinmann, 1977), such effects have been inconsistent and difficult to find in the research literature (phillips, 1992) leading horwitz (1990) to question whether the facilitating effects of fla even exist. there is a long list of potential sources of fla, including harsh error correction (gregersen, 2003; young, 1991), self-presentation concerns (cohen & norst, 1989), competitiveness among learners (bailey, 1983), incompatibility between teacher and student (gregersen & macintyre, 2014), personality traits such as neuroticism (dewaele, 2002, 2013a), perfectionism (dewaele, finney, kubota & almutlaq, 2014; gregersen & horwitz, 2002), tolerance of ambiguity in the second language (dewaele & shan ip, 2013), and many other factors (horwitz, 2010). indeed, language learning is a process that is particularly prone to anxiety-arousal, in part because error correction is both an indispensible part of learning and a key source of anxiety (gregersen, 2003). it is therefore ironic that anxiety arousal tends to increase the number of errors a person is likely to make (macintyre & gardner, 1994a). the vicious cycle of anxiety-arousal will be familiar to teachers and learners alike. over repeated occurrences, the expectation of anxious feelings becomes firmly established in the learners’ minds; it is the expectation of similar future anxious episodes that are at the core of the worry component of fla (macintyre & gardner, 1989). fla most often has been defined and measured as a stable characteristic that a learner brings from one language learning situation to another (horwitz, 2010). measures of anxiety that are focussed on fl situations produced much more consistent and meaningful results than concepts such as manifest anxiety, test anxiety or trait anxiety (horwitz, 2010; macintyre & gardner, 1989, 1991c). the first measures of language-specific anxiety were contained in gardner’s (1985, 2010) attitude-motivation test battery (amtb) that included measures of french classroom and french use anxiety. although the data collected by gardner and associates often showed strong correlations between jean-marc dewaele, peter d. macintyre 240 language anxiety and second language proficiency, the concept of language anxiety was not as prominent in the socio-educational model as was the role of motivation, so the anxiety-related contributions have been underestimated over the years (macintyre & gardner, 1991c; macintyre 2010). other measures of language anxiety are available that focus on the stages of the learning process (macintyre & gardner, 1994b) and on specific skill areas, such as listening (elkhafaifi, 2005; rivers, 1981; scarcella & oxford, 1992), reading (saito et al., 1999) and writing (cheng, 2002; cheng, horwitz, & shallert, 1999). the most frequently used measure in research on fla is the well-established foreign language classroom anxiety scale (horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986). the scale includes 33 items such as “i get nervous and confused when i am speaking in my fl class” and tends to produce highly reliable scores that correlate well with other fla measures (macintyre & gardner, 1991b; pae, 2013). in approaching the present study, we wondered whether a focus on anxiety’s negative effects is dealing with only half of the issue. given the consistency of the negative correlations between anxiety and a variety of language-related factors, recommendations for dealing with language anxiety typically focus on reducing the negativity of the experience, dealing with the unpleasant feelings, and ameliorating its disruptive effects (gregersen & macintyre, 2014; young, 1991). the literature overwhelmingly has concentrated on negative emotion, with positive fl emotion not being as widely studied (bown & white, 2010; imai, 2010). arnold and brown (1999) already pointed out that “much more attention is given to the question of negative emotions . . . (one) should not lose sight of the importance of developing the positive” (p. 2). the existing research that has considered emotions has often been embedded in a broader study of motivation. for example, gardner (1985, 2010) proposed a collection of affective variables that define the motivated learner, including positive attitudes toward speakers of the target language and emotions such as interest in fls and desire to learn the fl. a related approach, clément’s (1980, 1986) socio-contextual model, proposed two key motivational processes, the second of which (self-confidence) reflects positive perceptions of competence and low levels of anxiety. both of these models emphasize positive affect, but with a focus on motivation. nevertheless, each model proposes a prominent role for positive emotions. there is good reason to believe that studying positive emotion in greater detail will produce a novel understanding of the processes involved, and interest in positive emotions has been increasing in recent years. the impetus for more detailed consideration of the role of positive emotion in second and foreign language acquisition has been supported by developments in positive psychology (see lake, 2013; macintyre & mercer, this volume; peterson, 2006; the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom 241 seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000). similar to the sla research on emotion, much of psychology has been focused on unpleasant, negative experiences: clinical depression, phobias, traumatic stress, prejudice, discrimination, personality disorders, and the like (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000). but times are changing in psychology, in particular when it comes to understanding the nature and function of positive emotions. leading the theoretical development in the area of positive emotion is barbara fredrickson, whose influential work on the broaden-and-build theory has argued for a clear differentiation between positive and negative emotions (fredrickson, 2001, 2003, 2006). according to fredrickson, specific negative emotions each tend to be associated with a specific action tendency, a compulsion toward a specific type of behavior (see reeve, 2005). for example, anger leads to the urge to destroy obstacles in one’s path, fear leads to protective behaviours, and disgust leads to rejection as in quickly spitting out spoiled food. fredrickson’s research proposes that positive emotions produce a different type of response. [the broaden and build] theory states that certain discrete positive emotions— including joy, interest, contentment, pride, and love—although phenomenologically distinct, all share the ability to broaden people's momentary thought-action repertoires and build their enduring personal resources, ranging from physical and intellectual resources to social and psychological resources. (fredrickson, 2003, p. 219) positive emotion can help dissipate the lingering effects of negative emotional arousal, helping to promote personal resiliency in the face of difficulties. positive emotions also facilitate exploration and play, leading to the opportunity to have new experiences and learn in an efficient way; this is the “broaden” side of fredrickson’s theory. the social dimension of positive emotions is closely connected with the “build” side of the theory. because people tend to be attracted to others with positive emotions, and positivity engenders both goodwill and social bonds, positive emotions help a person build resources that collectively might be considered social capital (adler & kwon, 2002). given the dependence that learners have on speakers of the language (parents, teachers, native speakers, advanced learners and near peers), the presence of other people offers numerous resources that facilitate learning (gardner, 1985; macintyre, baker, clément, & conrod, 2001). the differentiation of positive emotion from negative emotion in the psychology literature raises the interesting question of the relationship between positive and negative emotions in fl learning in particular: are they like the two faces of janus, or are they different gods/concepts altogether? macintyre and gregersen (2012) argued in favour of the latter position: “positive emotion has a different function from negative emotion; they are not opposite jean-marc dewaele, peter d. macintyre 242 ends of the same spectrum” (p. 193). they argue that learners’ imagination has positive-broadening power, a perspective that is consistent with fredrickson’s (2001) description of positive emotions as actively promoting health and well-being and not simply being the absence of negativity. research on several of the positive emotions has yet to be undertaken in sla. in the present study, we sought a positive emotion that was parallel to the well-studied negative emotion of fla. we decided to use enjoyment for several reasons. theoretically, enjoyment is a defining component of csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) concept of flow, a positive state where challenges and skills to meet them are aligned well. enjoyment is indicative of a state in which psychological needs are being met. most emotion theorists list joy as a basic emotion that arises in situations where people experience “. . . desirable outcomes related to personal success and interpersonal relatedness” (reeve, 2005, p. 316). enjoyment is a key part of the family of emotions that surround the core emotion of joy. csikszentmihalyi (1990) notes that experiencing enjoyment involves having a chance to complete a task, concentration, clear goals, and immediate feedback. language students often will comment on how much (or how little) they enjoyed a particular language learning activity, class session, and/or course. on a daily basis, the process of language learning will implicate the two key sources of enjoyment: developing interpersonal relationships and making progress toward a goal. in an early study of flow, csikszentmihalyi (1975) described how a challenging activity that well exceeds a person’s skill level can lead to worry and anxiety, but as skills come into line with the degree of challenge, enjoyment and flow experiences can emerge. if skill far exceeds the challenge, however, csikszentmihalyi would suggest apathy and boredom would set in. it is therefore important to know whether students are enjoying the course and its activities, whether they are feeling anxious, or whether they are not feeling much of anything. examining both positive and negative emotions in the same study is an advisable practice. the absence of emotion is more difficult to interpret. dewaele and macintyre (2014) have argued that a lack of enjoyment, by itself, can be ambiguous; does it reflect boredom, hating the subject, the perceived irrelevance of the teacher and the peers, or something else? in a similar way, the absence of fla might be ambiguous. does low anxiety reflect confidence in one’s ability to perform well or a lack of engagement in the learning process (csikszentmihalyi, 1990; egbert, 2004; tardy & snyder, 2004)? what seems clear is that positive emotions such as “interest-enjoyment” are associated with better learning, while negative emotions are negatively related to it (ryan‚ connell, & plant‚ 1990, p. 14). ryan et al. found that positive and negative emotions were related directly to text comprehension in the l1, which in turn directly predicted the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom 243 subsequent recall (p. 14). the effect of emotions was maintained even when variation in verbal ability was taken into account (p. 14). the present study investigates both foreign language enjoyment (fle) and flca, respectively a positive and negative emotion, using an internet-based survey. if fle and flca correlate to a large extent, it might be possible to claim that fle and fla are indeed a janus-faced concept. if they show clear separation, we will have support for the independence of positive and negative emotions. the use of an internet-based survey allowed for a wide variety of participants from all over the world. the sample was obtained by snowball sampling that involved sending email requests to various lists of language educators and asking them to forward the survey to interested colleagues. the software used allowed for data collection on both likert-scale and open-ended items. before beginning this project we developed a new fl enjoyment scale. we used ryan et al.’s (1990) interest/enjoyment subscale as the kernel of the new scale: their 7 items related to enjoyment, fun, interest, boredom were specifically adapted to the fl environment. they were rephrased so that they refer not to a single activity at one point in time but elicit a more global judgment of past fl classes. we added items relating to dealing with fl mistakes made in public, identity, improvement in using the fl, pride in one’s own performance, group membership, the social environment and cohesiveness, attitudes towards the learning of the fl, the presence of laughter, and judgments about peers and teachers. nine items were first-person singular (“i”), statements, 3 items were first person plural (“we”) statements and the remaining 9 statements were third person singular or plural statements (“it,” “the peers,” “the teacher”). the final scale contains 21 items reflecting various facets of fle (creativity, pride, interest, fun) and a positive environment in the fl class (teacher and peers). in addition, we chose to use 8 flcas items reflecting physical symptoms of anxiety, nervousness and lack of confidence (horwitz et al., 1986). the items were chosen to capture the reliability of the original scale without sacrificing the reliability of the measurement (macintyre, 1992). we then investigated whether the independent variables that are linked to fle have the same effect on flca. finally, we took an emic perspective (dewaele, 2009), looking at what participants had to say, in their own words, about episodes in their fl that they really enjoyed. the following were our research questions: 1. is there more enjoyment in fl classes than anxiety? 2. how strongly linked are fle and flca? jean-marc dewaele, peter d. macintyre 244 3. what is the effect of number of languages known, number of fls studied, mastery in the fl, relative standing in the group, education level, age group, gender and global-regional group on fle and flca? 4. what do respondents say characterizes positive episodes of enjoyment in the fl class? 2. method 2.1. gathering the sample the sample was obtained by convenience sampling. some data was collected by a volunteer who coordinated testing of the youngest participants. the majority of the data was collected through snowball sampling. 2.2. participants and demographics a total of 1,746 multilinguals filled out the web-based questionnaire. from the demographics section of the instrument, we extracted a series of independent variables that were used to create groups for data analysis. 2.2.1. sex the majority of the sample (n = 1287, 73.7%) was female; approximately one third of the respondents were male (n = 449). this sort of distribution, with a majority of female participants, is quite typical in web-based language questionnaires (wilson & dewaele, 2010). 2.2.2. age the average age of the participants was relatively young (m = 24 years, sd = 8.5), ranging from age 11 to 75. we created 7 age groups: preteens (n = 33), teens (n = 418), twenties (n = 1038), thirties (n = 141), forties (n = 69), fifties (n = 24) and sixties and older (n = 18). 2.2.3. education participants came from all levels of education, with 91 having an intermediate high school diploma, 113 a high school diploma, 994 a bachelor’s degree, 450 a master’s degree and 94 a phd. overall, the sample is well-educated. the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom 245 2.2.4. languages being studied close to half of the participants reported that they studied english as a fl (n = 855, 49%), followed by french (n = 276, 15.8%), spanish (n = 218, 12.5%), dutch (n = 157, 9%) and german (n = 139, 8%). the remaining 100 participants (5.7%) studied a variety of other languages. only a small minority (n = 34) was not currently involved in fl learning but reported recent fl experience. a majority (n = 1322) was studying one fl, with smaller numbers studying two (n = 215) or three (n = 37) fls. a quarter of participants had been studying a fl for 5 years or less, another quarter had studied it between 6 and 9 years, a third quarter had studied a fl between 10 and 12 years, with the remaining participants having studied a fl between 13 and 50 years. 2.2.5. fl mastery asked about how they would describe their mastery of the fl in general, 5 described themselves as beginners (0.3%), 243 as low intermediate (13.9%), 67 as intermediate (3.8%), 435 as high intermediate (24.9%) and 293 as advanced (16.8%).1 2.2.6. relative standing asked about how they would describe their relative standing in the group of fl learners, 42 described themselves as far below average (2.4%), 171 as below average (9.8%), 772 as average (44.2%), 638 as above average (36.5%) and 116 as far above average (6.6%). 2.2.7. nationality (global-regional groupings) the participants reported 90 different nationalities, including many participants with dual citizenship. the largest nationality groups were belgians (n = 365), british (n = 244), chinese (n = 174), and americans (n = 118) followed by many smaller groups (n < 80). based on the location of the respondents, broad global-regional groups were created: the largest group consisted of europeans (n = 1171, 86.2%), followed by asians (n = 229, 13.1%), north americans (n = 149, 8.5%), south americans (n = 92, 5.3%) and arabs (n = 87, 5%). 1 we decided to merge the category of beginners with that of lower-intermediate. jean-marc dewaele, peter d. macintyre 246 2.2.8. languages acquired based on self-reported data, the sample consists of 456 bilinguals (26.1%), 555 trilinguals (31.8%), 415 quadrilinguals (23.8%), 202 pentalinguals (11.6%), and 70 sextalinguals (4%). the 44 remaining participants (2.5%) reported knowledge of 7 to 10 languages. a single category was created including all participants with six or more languages. 2.3. the instrument the questionnaire started with a demographics section containing items as described immediately above. the next section asked participants to indicate the extent of their agreement with 29 items describing the fl class, of which 8 were extracted from the flcas and 21 items written to reflect fle. responses were given on standard 5-point likert scales with the anchors absolutely disagree = 1, disagree = 2, neither agree nor disagree = 3, agree = 4, strongly agree = 5. all items referring to fle were positively phrased. consistent with the original flcas, 2 items were phrased to indicate low anxiety and 6 items were phrased to reflect high anxiety (see appendix a and b). the two low anxiety items were reverse-coded so that high scores on this measure reflect high anxiety. a final open-ended question asked for a focussed essay (macintyre, burns, & jessome, 2011) on a specific event that the respondents enjoyed. the instructions were as follows: “describe one specific event or episode in your fl class that you really enjoyed, and describe your feeling in as much detail as possible.” the questionnaire was pilot-tested with 15 participants. this led to the deletion of some items and the reformulation of others. the research design and questionnaire obtained approval from the ethics committee of birkbeck college, university of london. the final version of the questionnaire was posted on-line using googledocs and an open call was addressed to multilinguals, including those who had participated in previous studies, asking them to forward the call to friends, teachers or students. 2.4. data analysis average scores on the 5-point scale were calculated for fle (n = 1746, m = 3.82, sd = .46). scores ranged from 1.29 to the maximum 5.0. internal consistency of the 21 items, as measured by cronbach alpha coefficient, was high (.86). a one-sample kolmorogov-smirnov test revealed that the distribution was not normal (z = 2.01, p < .05), but the z-result was low. a look at the distribution (figure 1) with a trendline reflecting moving averages shows a bell the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom 247 curve with a skew toward scores on the positive end of the distribution, with the tail in the low enjoyment section. average scores on the 5-point scale were calculated for flca items (n = 1746, m = 2.75, sd = .83). scores ranged from 1 to the maximum 5. internal consistency of the 8 items, as measured by cronbach alpha coefficient, was as high as for fle (.86). here again a one-sample kolmorogov-smirnov test revealed that the distribution was not normal (z = 2.84, p < .05), with a higher value for z than observed for the fle scale. a look at the distribution (figure 1) with a trendline reflecting moving averages shows a wider curve with a slight skew toward scores on the high end of the distribution. given the results of the normality tests, we exercised caution with the data analysis, testing the relationships reported below with both parametric and non-parametric approaches. the pattern of results showed no difference between the two approaches in the significance tests of the independent variables. one-way anovas and t tests tolerate moderate violations to their normality assumption (skewed distributions) rather well and allow for more detailed post hoc tests; therefore, we will present the parametric statistics (rosenkrantz, 2008, p. 478). results from the non-parametric analyses are available from the authors. figure 1 distribution of fle and flca scores one thousand and seventy-six participants (61% of the total number) answered the open question, producing 52,471 words; on average the responses approach 50 words in length (m = 48.8 words). dörnyei (2007, p. 243) points out that initial qualitative datasets can be messy and chaotic; ours is no exception. even though the internet survey questions were written in english and chinese, participants also responded in french, spanish, german and 0,0 2,0 4,0 6,0 8,0 10,0 12,0 1,0 1,5 2,0 2,5 3,0 3,5 4,0 4,5 5,0 score flca fle jean-marc dewaele, peter d. macintyre 248 dutch. the variety of languages used by the respondents made the use of nvivo software impossible; as a consequence the data was coded manually. some respondents chose to describe specific events (as the question requested) but others described a pattern of events or their perceptions of their experience rather than the experience itself. given the exploratory nature of this research, the coding process used all available data to generate the categories reported below. finally, the respondents spontaneously drew links between enjoyment and other positive emotions, such as pride and satisfaction. 3. results 3.1. quantitative data a paired t test revealed that our participants reported significantly more enjoyment than anxiety in their fl classes (df = 1745, t = -41.1, p < .0001). figure 2 shows also that there was almost twice as much dispersion around the mean for flca compared to fle. in other words, fle scores were distributed more tightly around the mean, compared with flca that had more variability in its scores, more fully covering the range of possible scores. figure 2 a comparison of mean fle and flca scores (with sd) a pearson correlation revealed a significant negative relationship between fle and flca (r(1746) = -.36, p < .0001). participants with higher scores on fle showed lower scores on flca. looking at the strength of this relation2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 fle flca the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom 249 ship, these two variables share only 12.9% of variance, which is considered a very small effect size (cohen, 1992).2 a series of one-way anovas were used to examine the effects of the independent (demographic) variables on fle and flca (see table 1). we found that those who knew more languages, had reached a higher level in the fl, felt that they were above average in their group of peers, were more advanced in their education and were older reported significantly less flca and scored significantly higher on fle. studying more fls was associated with more fle but not with flca. there was some variation in the strength of the effect: the number of languages known, the general and relative standing had a stronger effect on flca than on fle. number of fls under study, education level and age had a stronger effect on fle (see table 1). each of these independent variables will be examined in more detail below. table 1 the effect of number of languages acquired, number of fls studied, mastery in the fl, relative standing in the group, education level, and age group on fle and flca (anova) dependent variable languages acquired fls being studied mastery relative standing education level age group cultural group flca 14.1*** 2.1 38.0*** 63.9*** 3.8** 5.1*** 7.3*** fle 9.9*** 3.5* 22.7*** 27.2*** 7.3*** 7.7*** 8.6*** * p < .05 ** p < .01 *** p < .0001 3.1.1. number of languages acquired figure 3 shows that knowing more languages is associated with a linear increase in fle, and with a linear decrease in flca until the fifth language, after which it seemed to stabilise. although the effect is significant, the effect size is small (fle: eta2 = .022; flca: eta2 = .032). tukey post hoc tests revealed that the bilinguals reported significantly lower mean fle scores than all other groups, trilinguals to sextalinguals (p < .0001). further, the pentalinguals and sextalinguals showed mean enjoyment scores that were significantly higher than trilinguals (p < .05). as a general trend, fle tended to increase with the number of languages acquired. a similar pattern emerged for flca, with significant differences (p < .001) between the bilinguals and the other groups. the scores of trilinguals were significantly higher than those from the pentalinguals and sextalinguals 2 cohen (1988) suggests that a “small” effect size is .20, a “medium” effect size is .50, and a “large” effect size is .80. jean-marc dewaele, peter d. macintyre 250 (p < .001), and the scores of the quadrilinguals were significantly higher than those of the pentalinguals (p < .05). in general, anxiety scores decline with an increasing number of languages acquired. figure 3 effect of number of languages known on fle and flca 3.1.2. languages being studied figure 4 shows the effect of number of fls participants were studying on their fle and flca. the effect was significant on fle (p < .03, with a very small effect size: eta2 = .004) but not on flca (p = .11). the fle values for those studying one and two languages were very similar, and only the values for those studying three languages differed. tukey post hoc tests showed that the group studying three languages had significantly higher fle scores compared with those studying one (p < .023) or two languages (p < .034). although the flca scores appear to decline in the three-languages group, the difference was not statistically significant. 3.1.3. fl mastery the general level of mastery of fls, ranging from lower-intermediate to advanced, is significantly linked to both fle and flca (both p < .0001, with effect sizes of eta2 = .062 and eta2 = .099 respectively). interestingly the difference between lower-intermediate and intermediate was minimal, but at higher general levels we notice a surge in fle and a drop in flca (see figure 5). in other words, tukey post hoc tests showed that the high intermediate and advanced groups scored significantly higher than the lower-intermediate and intermediate groups on fle, and significantly lower on flca (all p < .0001). moreover, the advanced 2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 two three four five six+ number of languages known flca fle the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom 251 group scored significantly lower on flca than the high intermediate group (p < .016) and higher on fle (p < .004). the trend is for enjoyment to increase and anxiety to decrease in learners beyond the intermediate level. figure 4 effect of number of fls being studied figure 5 effect of fl mastery on fle and flca 3.1.4. relative standing a similar pattern emerged for the effect of relative standing in the group of fl learners (see figure 6). again, the effect is highly significant for both fle and flca (p < .0001, with effect sizes of eta2 = .059 and eta2 = .128 respectively). 2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 one fl two fls three fls number of fls being studied flca fle 2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 low intermediate intermediate high intermediate advanced general level flca fle jean-marc dewaele, peter d. macintyre 252 the values of fle and flca were very close among those who fell far below the average level in their peer group. these values diverged linearly for fle, and close to linearly for flca. tukey post hoc tests showed that there was no significant difference between the “far below average” and “below average” groups for both fle and flca, but there is significant difference between pairwise comparisons of the other groups (at least p < .003), with the exception of the difference between the “above average” and “far above average” groups. as respondents reported feeling higher in the hierarchy of their peer group, they also reported increasingly high levels of fle and lower levels of flca, with the slope somewhat stronger in the case of declining anxiety. figure 6 the effect of relative standing in a group of learners on fle and flca 3.1.5. education grouping the respondents according to their level of education produces a pattern with a shallow slope. as can be seen in figure 7, fle levels increase slightly but steadily and significantly across education levels (p < .0001, with eta2 = .017), but flca decreases only at the two highest levels of education (p < .005, with eta2 = .009). tukey post hoc tests showed no significant difference in fle between the mid high school and high school groups, but the mid high school group scored significantly lower than those with bas, mas and phds (all p < .0001). the differences in fle between the other groups are not significant, with only a marginally significant difference between the high school group and the phd group (p = .06). the pattern is slightly different for flca with a non-significant increase in values between the mid high school, high school and ba groups after which values start to fall, with the ma and phd groups 2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 far below average below average average above average far above average relative standing flca fle the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom 253 scoring significantly lower than the ba group (p < .033 and p < .022 respectively). the difference in flca between the ma and phd groups is not significant. figure 7 effect of education level on fle and flca 3.1.6. age the effect of age group is strong and significant both on fle and flca (p < .0001, with effect sizes of eta2 = .026 and eta2 = .017 respectively), but with differently shaped patterns. fle shows a steady increase from pre-teens to those in their thirties (see figure 8). tukey post hoc tests showed that teenagers scored significantly lower on fle than those in their twenties (p < .013), thirties (p < .0001) and forties (p < .0001). those in their forties have significantly higher fle scores than all younger groups, after which fle stabilises and does not further significantly increase. generally, enjoyment tends to rise for those in older learner groups (figure 8). the pattern is quite different for flca, where teenagers score the highest mean anxiety levels (significantly higher than those in their thirties and forties, both p < .004), followed by those in their twenties (who score significantly higher than those in their thirties and forties (p < .044 and p < .025 respectively), after which flca levels drop back to pre-teen levels and are no longer significantly different from each other. with this pattern, we see a bump in anxiety during the teens and twenties that drops off in older groups (figure 8). 2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 mid high school high school ba ma phd education level flca fle jean-marc dewaele, peter d. macintyre 254 figure 8 the effect of age group on fle and flca 3.1.7. global-regional differences global-regional group has a significant effect on fle and flca (both p < .0001 with effect sizes of eta2 = .024 and eta2 = .021 respectively). tukey post hoc tests showed that north american participants reported the highest levels of fle and lowest levels of flca while the asian participants had the lowest levels of fle and the highest levels of flca. the fle scores of the north americans were significantly higher than those of the arabs (p < .043), the asians (p < .0001), and the europeans (p < .0001). the south americans also scored significantly higher than the asians (p < .005) on fle. the differences in fle between south americans, arabs and europeans were not as pronounced (figure 9). the flca scores of the asian group were significantly higher (all p < .0001) than those of all other groups which did not differ among themselves. 3.1.8. sex finally, an independent t test revealed that the sex of the respondent had a significant effect on both fle and flca (t(1734) = 3.1, p < .002 and t(1734) = 2.8, p < .004 respectively). the female participants scored higher for both fle (females = 3.84; males = 3.77) and flca (females = 2.79; males = 2.65). 3.2. qualitative data: participants’ views on enjoyable episodes in the fl class the range of what participants understood to be enjoyable episodes in the fl classroom was vast. we thus focused on coding data into main themes. to do this, 2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 pre-teens teenagers twenties thirties forties fifties sixties+ age groups flca fle the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom 255 we used content analysis: “the qualitative categories used in content analysis are not predetermined but are derived inductively from the data analysed” (dörnyei, 2007, p. 245). the categories thus emerged through close reading of the responses to the open question. participants’ description of enjoyable episodes often included descriptions of specific fl classroom activities. some episodes were tales of personal triumph in the classroom, either because the teacher had publicly recognised the participant’s good performance or given them a high mark on some piece of work, or because the peers had shown appreciation for the performance through their interest or laughter. there could be a slight overlap between the appreciation of the teacher and that of the peers. other episodes dealt with instances of private personal triumph, such as the sudden realisation of having done something well and having progressed in the mastery of the fl. figure 9 the effect of global-regional group on fle and flca participants varied in their choice of temporal focus: while most chose a time frame ranging from a couple of minutes to an hour, some described episodes of enjoyment spread over a longer period of time. enjoyment over longer timescales could be linked to qualitatively different interpretations of enjoyment. a recurrent theme was the appreciation for the skills of good fl teachers. some episodes were situated outside the classroom and involved the authentic use of the fl as a tool for communication. finally, a category was created for all comments that did not fit any of the previous categories: these included observations about language learning in general, or hating fls, or the lack of appreciation of the fl teacher and peers, or anecdotes about some funny incident in the fl class that did not belong in any of the categories. 2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 namerican samerican arab european asian nationality group flca fle jean-marc dewaele, peter d. macintyre 256 the 1076 episodes were assigned to one of the following categories: (a) authentic use of fl, (b) classroom activity, (c) other, (d) peer recognition, (e) realisation of progress, (f) teacher recognition, and (g) teacher skills. major themes are presented in table 2, ranked in descending order of frequency and relative proportion. one category stands out, classroom activity, to which two fifths of episodes were assigned. the two most frequent activities were role-plays and debates. the other categories (peer recognition, other, teacher recognition, realisation of progress, teacher skills, authentic use of fl) each represent around 10% of the total number of episodes. we chose data extracts that were most representative of the category, most poignant and most interesting. we also included some extracts in other languages, to give voice to those who did not respond in english. the extracts give a good idea of the participant-in-context, with the enjoyment arising from a unique confluence of internal and external factors. table 2 the main themes in the feedback of 1076 participants on enjoyable episodes in the fl theme frequency % specific classroom activities 441 41.0 peer recognition 146 13.6 other 141 13.1 teacher recognition 116 10.8 realisation of progress 108 10.0 teacher skills 98 9.1 authentic use of fl 26 2.4 3.2.1. classroom activities we do not aim to report exhaustively on any of the sub-categories. space permits only a sampling of the responses that were offered. participants mentioned role-plays, debates, film-making, games, singing, preparing group presentations and other activities that they had enjoyed in the fl classroom. one learner, who we shall call xx,3 remembers an unusual activity involving group work that helped students’ understanding of prefixes and boosted her confidence: when working on prefixes which indicate the direction of movement (returning, just leaving, leaving) we used little people dolls and toy cars to create scenarios in which people moved by vehicle or by foot and then created sentences which used the pre 3 we report the initials of the participant—using x if they gave no name—their gender and their age. the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom 257 fixes and described what was going on. this was really effective because it was active and got us involved in something fun which mitigated some of the stress sometimes associated with plane verb conjugation. i made a lot of mistakes and that did make me a bit anxious (though there is less anxiety associated with small group/pair work rather than large group/full class exercises), but it was still fun and there was a lot of laughter at the juvenileness of the dolls. (xx, female, 24) another type of group activity, role plays, are appreciated as they allow a certain freedom in the exchange, as le experienced: es gracioso cuando tenemos que hacer diálogos con los compañeros, y más cuando uno el otro responde cosas equivocadas. o cuando en los diálogos una realmente imita a el personaje que le corresponde. [it’s nice when we have dialogues with our peers, and when the interlocutor answers something wrong, or when in the dialogues one can really imitate the corresponding character.] (le, female, 24) more serious group activities can be the source of enjoyment for other students. for example, debates can be intellectually stimulating in the fl class, as kx remembers: during one of my fl classes we organized a debate about different kinds of media manipulations. it was really stimulating as far as the topic and the language skills utilized are concerned. i really enjoyed myself and actually lost track of time. as both student and language teacher, i believe my teacher achieved the highest form of educational success possibleteach and let the students enjoy at the same time. (kx, female, 25) finally, activities that evoke creativity also are well received. students, as hx explained, love to be creative in the fl class, which boosts their fle: last year my classmate and i made a short french film about the dangers of too much partying in first year and it was hilarious to make and show to the class, i enjoyed the freedom and creative aspect of it. (hx, female, 19) it is important not to assume that classroom activities are universally enjoyed or anxiety-provoking. rather, a person-in-context approach suggests that it is the match between the challenge of the activity and the skill of the learner that form a foundation for enjoyment. 3.2.2. peer recognition some participants reported that activities such as speaking in front of peers can have a liberating, even cathartic effect on those who normally avoid being at the centre of attention: jean-marc dewaele, peter d. macintyre 258 i'm a really really shy person in general, but in the last few years, that has changed a lot, mostly because of fl classes where you are "forced" to speak. last week, we were asked to describe family relationships, which is a very hard question for me to answer. but since the atmosphere in the group is really nice, i thought for once i would try telling the truth, which is that my family and i don't get along because i'm gay and they don't like it (to put things mildly). i was surprised at the overall positive reaction i got from everyone. they were very encouraging which was really really nice. their reaction was so unexpectedly nice that i cried. (sv, female, 24) peer recognition can also result from clever teacher intervention. participants reported how lightening the mood in the fl class can help ward off flca by lessening the anxiety of peers’ reaction: my favorite fl class, intermediate german class, the teacher teased us so that we ended up laughing together when we made mistakes. once we had to describe art in class and there were some objects in the pictures that we didn't know. most people substituted english words with a german accent on them but i 100% of the time would substitute the french word. the teacher would scold me and at first it was embarrassing but it happened so often that it quickly became a joke. at the time, i couldn't really separate the two foreign languages in my mind, but every french joke in that german class replaced my anxiety with laughter. so i suppose this isn't really an episode, but a series of events that i enjoyed and that i feel cured some of my linguistic insecurity. (nm, female, 20) 3.2.3. teacher recognition this category contains extracts where participants mentioned public or private praise from the teacher. the praise could be in the form of a good mark for a piece of work or a compliment in front of the peers. mg was really happy with getting recognition from her teacher, especially because she had worked hard. i love it when i do a writing activity to the best of my ability, using time phrases and specialist vocabulary and i get a great comment and mark, it makes me feel like i’m good at a skill that i enjoy, which makes me very happy. i also love it when i can understand complex sentences. (mg, female, 16) encouragement by the teacher at the first steps was greatly appreciated by mj (female, 18): “being complimented on my pronunciation despite feeling as though i struggle slightly i felt encouraged.” 3.2.4. realisation of progress many participants, like xx2, mentioned the moment in their fl development where they suddenly realised how far they had progressed and how the inthe two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom 259 vestment of time and effort paid off. this realisation was usually a private moment, but in some cases it was triggered by some classroom activity: during my written class i realised i could write a lot more japanese than i initially thought, which was quite amazing. it was exciting to see that i ran out of pages. i felt surprised and accomplished, like my learning was paying off, and that i am actually able to use the language, finally, to express things. (xx2, female, 25) in the case of jo (female, 14) it was simply the sudden understanding of an interaction in the fl: “i was able to fully understand a learning assistant who was talking to my friend and i and i felt satisfied and proud.” both quotes show that brief episodes of enjoyment triggered a broader, long-lasting positive emotion. in other cases it’s simply the memory of having done something well in the fl, as xc (male, 24), a chinese participant, remembers wistfully: “the time i spoke fluently.” 3.2.5. teacher skills this category contains observations about how the participant’s teacher created an enjoyable atmosphere in the fl class. most of the episodes have a longer time-frame than those in the other categories, that is, they describe the behaviour of the teacher over a period of time rather than at any specific point. mf (female, 18) especially appreciated the kindness of her teacher and the respect she has for students: “i like my class of english . . . my teacher is really kind and she really help us and she respects the students.” some participants, like gb (female, 21), enjoy teachers who expect learners to be active and independent members of the class community: “i really like the participation part where the teacher is asking our opinion. being able to express our thoughts and making students active rather than passive members is going to aid the learning process.” a good teacher who can create a positive atmosphere boosts learners’ willingness to improve their skills and is greatly appreciated: i'd say that i really enjoyed my modern english classes in year one. we had the most amazing professor; we had everything organised, taught and assessed perfectly and we worked until the very last minute. i tend to get a bit lazy, but with this professor and the atmosphere that she had been creating, i never lost concentration even when we had 4 hours in a row (of the same subject). (sd, female, 20) participants mentioned both actions by teachers and their positive attitude: jean-marc dewaele, peter d. macintyre 260 i just generally liked the lessons because of the lesson slideshows and the teacher's happy attitude towards everything. she would make sure everyone is very involved all the time. i don't have a specific moment because i enjoy all of it. (tc, female, 13) enjoyment of the fl class can also depend on the organisation of the teaching, more specifically the number of students in class and the use of native speaker teachers: c'est une petite classe de 10 personnes, cela permet à tout le monde de se sentir à l'aise et ce que je trouve génial c'est que ce sont des personnes dont l'espagnol est la langue maternelle qui nous enseignent cette langue. [it’s a small class of 10 students, it allows us to feel comfortable, and i love it that the teachers are all native speakers of spanish.] (lm, female, 21) 2.4.6. authentic use of fl this is the category with the smallest frequency of episodes, possibly because authentic use of the fl typically happens outside the fl classroom. some participants pointed out that the authentic use of the fl can boost fle. ex enjoyed using her german on a game site away from the prying eyes of her peers and teacher. this use of the fl as a tool for communication can be crucial at all levels and ages: in french we pretended we were in a sandwich shop and had to order our own sandwich. i really enjoyed it as it was a good way to practice our skills. i felt really confident doing this and in the end i got a nice sandwich for my efforts! (sx, female, age 11) when we went on a german games site we could play games and really enjoyed playing a game with my friend where we could both join in at the same time. it was good because you were not being watched by the rest of the class and it was more fun because it didn’t matter if you got it wrong, you just learnt the correct answer and it was more of a joke than feeling embarrassed or shy. (ex, female, 11) cr (male, 20) seeks opportunities to use his fl out in the street in authentic interactions: “what i like is to use the language, to find someone in the street and to talk to him.” 2.4.7. other this category was quite heterogeneous. some participants, like fs, reported enjoying things in the fl class that were probably not intended by the teacher. for example, when class work is boring the only relief comes from chatting with peers. it is not clear if fs (female, 15) talks to her friends in the fl: “i usually only the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom 261 enjoy the lessons when i'm talking with friends. i find the topics very boring and repetitive and so don't really have an episode in the class that i really enjoyed.” 4. discussion the results of this study help to shed light on the different patterns of positive and negative emotions among fl learners. overall, participants reported significantly higher levels of fle than of flca. moreover, the distributions of scores for fle indicated consistently high levels of enjoyment with less variation around the mean than for flca, which showed a dispersion of scores across the full range of the scale. these results reveal that our fl learners tended to be consistent in enjoying fl classes but showed diversity in flca levels. although there was a significant negative correlation between fle and flca, they shared only 12.9% of their variance (a small effect size; cohen, 1992) and the two distributions of scores were quite different. we can therefore claim that these two dimensions are related but that enjoyment and anxiety appear to be independent emotions, and not opposite ends of the same dimension. this result indicates that the absence of enjoyment does not automatically imply a high level of flca, and an absence of flca does not mean a presence of fle. in terms of emotional dynamics, it is easy to imagine a person who is enjoying a language class or native speaker conversation and who experiences some anxiety from time to time (see macintyre & legatto, 2011), or a disinterested student with both low enjoyment and low anxiety. the excerpt from xx in which she mentions group work with toys describes anxiety and enjoyment occurring together. the pattern of the results, specifically the higher score for the positive emotion (enjoyment) and lower score for the negative emotion (anxiety), will be encouraging to many language professionals. in terms of the theory of positive emotion, enjoyment is associated with the urge to play, to be creative and to expand one’s limits (fredrickson, 2001). fredrickson’s ideas suggest that experiencing enjoyment and playfulness in language might be an especially facilitating experience for language learners, as play has been associated with fostering social bonds and brain development. even among adults, enjoyment and its associated playful behaviours offer a safe psychological base from which to explore an unfamiliar linguistic and cultural world. enjoyment might be the emotional key to unlocking the language learning potential of adults and children alike; if a teacher, parent, friend, or mentor creates an enjoyable context, they likely have gone a long way towards facilitating learning. as fredrickson (2001, 2013) suggests, the broadly-defined resources that are built during play, such as specific skills and relationship bonds, endure long after the joyful feeling has dissipated; therein lies the power of a positive-broadening emotion (macintyre & gregersen, 2012). jean-marc dewaele, peter d. macintyre 262 anxiety, on the other hand, always has had a somewhat conflicted status in the literature. the vast majority of studies show a consistent, negative correlation between language anxiety and fl proficiency scores, including course grades, standardized tests, and other measures (horwitz, 2010). in terms of emotional effects, strong anxiety feelings are no doubt disruptive to behaviour, interfering with interpersonal communication, cognition and learning (eysenck, 1979; gregersen & horwitz, 2002; macintyre & gardner, 1994a, 1994b). but consistent with the adaptive nature of emotion in general, and the narrowing effects of negative emotion and anxiety in particular, it is likely that enjoyment and anxiety will cooperate from time to time, enjoyment encouraging playful exploration and anxiety generating focus on the need to take specific action (arnold & brown, 1999). conceptualized as two separate dimensions, the question becomes one of describing a constructive balance between enjoyment and anxiety, rather than implicitly taking them as opposite ends of the same dimension. our data suggests that, among the active and successful learners in our sample, the balance is tipped in favour of enjoyment, with some anxiety present as part of the emotional mix. therefore, consistent with fredrickson’s (2013) updated thinking on positive emotion, the ratio of positive to negative emotion warrants close scrutiny. we do need to exercise some caution in interpreting these findings. although our sample is very large, it also is mostly well educated and self-selected. the sample likely does not represent the general population of fl learners, if such a sample actually could be defined in a meaningful way. a positive bias towards fl learning is likely to be present among our respondents: fl learners who really hate fls would probably not want to spend 15 minutes filling out an online questionnaire on fl learning, even if they were still taking a language course. moreover, it is probable that only the most enthusiastic fl learners keep studying fls until they graduate. nevertheless, the wide range of the present sample offers at least some protection in the sampling procedures. the third set of research questions dealt with the effect of a series of demographic, sociobiographical and fl-related variables. a series of anovas allowed us to calculate the effect of number of languages known, number of fls studied, mastery of the fl, relative standing in the group, education level, age group, gender and global-regional group on fle and flca. the findings probably will not surprise most readers: participants who already mastered several languages, who had reached a higher level in the fl, who felt more proficient than their peers, who had reached higher level of education and who were older reported significantly more fle and significantly lower levels of flca. in addition, those studying more fls also scored significantly higher on fle, where flca was not associated with studying more fls. the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom 263 significant cultural group differences emerged for fle and flca. north american participants seemed to have the most enjoyment and the lowest anxiety, while asians reported least joy and highest anxiety, with south americans, arabs and europeans scoring somewhere in the middle. it is crucial not to over-interpret or over-generalize these differences, given that the number of respondents in each of the groups differs greatly and there is considerable variation within groups as well. over four-fifths of the sample consists of europeans, which means more diversity in nationalities, age range, proficiency levels, teaching methods, exposure to the fl than in the smaller global-regional groups. among the smaller groups, a strong proportion of students in one school or university might affect the results for the whole region. of special note is that the sex of the respondent showed significant differences on both fle and flca: the female participants scored higher on flca and on fle. the female participants thus experienced both more negative and positive emotions in the fl class. indeed, stereotypically, females are often credited with being the better fl learners as well as more emotionally intense than males (chaplin & aldao, 2013). the fact that our female participants scored higher on both flca and fle is intriguing because it is consistent with the notion that stronger positive and negative emotions co-occurring in fl learning might be preferable to weaker emotions overall. if both positive and negative emotions are inherently adaptive, then stronger emotional experiences, if they occur at optimal times, have some potential to facilitate language learning, even if the emotions include ambivalent or negative feelings (macintyre, 2007). fredrickson (2013) has suggested that the ratio of positive to negative emotions might be more important than simply the absence of negative emotion. in figure 6 above, we see that the ratio of positive to negative emotion in the most advanced group of learners is approximately 2:1, then 1½:1 in the intermediate group, and finally 1:1 in the group self-described as performing far below average. this suggests the intriguing possibility that future research might examine not simply the scores for individual emotional responses but rather the ratio of positive to negative emotions. further, examining the ways in which emotions interact with each other, and with various other factors, dynamically as they occur, will help shape our understanding of this intriguing area of sla (gregersen et al., 2014; macintyre & serroul, 2015). the final research question dealt with the themes that emerged in episodes of enjoyment in the fl class. we used the qualitative data of the 1,076 participants who offered a response to the open-ended question on enjoyment to complement the previous studies that have examined learners’ descriptions of their experience with anxiety (cohen & norst, 1989; macintyre, burns & jessome, 2011; price, 1991). the responses showed that specific positive events can shape jean-marc dewaele, peter d. macintyre 264 the development of enjoyment in the fl.4 fl learners enjoyed novel activities, such as using dolls and toy cars, making a short video, or preparing a group presentation. these were typically activities that empowered student choice, such as a topic of discussion or debate that was relevant to their concerns and interests. learners described not wanting to be treated like passive recipients of knowledge, but enjoyed being allowed to have a sense of autonomy and to use their imagination to make progress in the fl (macintyre & gregersen, 2012). as arnold (2011) pointed out, in general, choice is motivating. teachers who build a comfortable degree of choice into their classes can motivate learners. group projects are particularly rich in potential choices because they can require different kinds of skills and offer a range of options (arnold, 2011). the classroom environment can facilitate enjoyment. in particular, teachers who were positive, humorous, happy, well-organised, respectful of students, and praised them for good performance were appreciated by their students. respondents forgave teachers for gentle teasing and for laughing together when they made mistakes. laughter that occurs when things do not go as planned can have a healthy effect on learners, taking the negative emotional tension out of the room. the qualitative data suggests that teachers are closely connected to the fle of their students (arnold, 2011). peers also can facilitate enjoyment. perhaps it helps not to have too many peers in the fl class: smaller groups are more conducive to closer social bonds, a positive informal atmosphere, and to more frequent use of the fl. our participants’ views confirmed arnold’s (2011) observation that experiencing real achievement is the surest route to self-esteem and enjoyment. the enjoyable events that participants described frequently were the result of a long period of hard work toward a goal, such as speaking fluently or communicating with native speakers (csikszentmihalyi, 1990). participants interpreted these events as recognition of their effort. of course, teachers need to deal with negative emotions and self-beliefs students may have, as these can inhibit their progress and encourage realistically positive views of themselves (arnold, 2011). side conversations with peers might be an enjoyable relief from monotonous lectures but can also be distracting in a classroom. ideally, the fl classroom is an environment that is both stimulating and non-threatening (arnold, 2011; dewaele, 2005, 2011; macintyre, 1999; nelson & murphey, 2011). it is difficult to over-estimate the impact of classroom dynamics. dörnyei and murphey (2003, pp. 3-4) pointed out that in “. . . a ‘good’ group, the l2 classroom can turn out to be such a pleasant and inspiring environment that the time spent there is a constant source of success and satisfaction for teachers and learners alike.” these 4 we acknowledge that negative events too can shape the fl journey. the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom 265 findings reflect many of the observations in gregersen and macintyre (2014) on ways for fl teachers to reduce flca and to boost enjoyment in the fl. as a caveat, it is important not to overgeneralize these descriptions or to prematurely fit them into “laws” of effective teaching and learning. each respondent is positioned within a unique context and found enjoyment in the activities above as they took place in that context. as macintyre et al. (2011) noted in their comparison of situations producing high and low willingness to communicate, the differences in situations that promote a positive or negative emotional reaction often are quite subtle, with the potential to go either way at any moment. teasing by the teacher is a clear example of an action that easily might be misinterpreted with only subtle variations in the classroom situation. we wish to emphasize that the same event might be enjoymentinducing or anxiety-provoking depending on how it is interpreted by the learner in the moment. this was nicely illustrated in the extract by nm where she explained how embarrassed she was by her teacher’s scolding but how this repeated scolding turned into a running joke as the year progressed. 5. conclusion can foreign language enjoyment and foreign language classroom anxiety be compared to the two faces of janus; are they the two sides of the same coin? although a significant negative correlation was found between fle and flca, the amount of shared variance is relatively small, allowing us to conclude that they cannot be compared to two faces of janus. perhaps it is better if we represent flca by phobus, the greek god of fear (that has no roman equivalent), and fle by laetitia, the roman goddess of joy (dillaway, 1833). it seems that fl learners turn away from phobus towards laetitia as they progress. this study presents statistical evidence to support the hypothesis that fle and flca are different dimensions and not two sides of the same coin. our participants reported significantly more fle than flca, a pattern that seemed more striking at higher levels of self-perceived general and relative standing in the fl. the pattern of results is consistent with the suggestion that the ratio of positive to negative emotion might be more important than the presence or absence of either type of emotion. self-selection bias in our large sample makes it difficult to generalize to all contexts and these results are part of an emerging series of studies on positive emotion in sla. narrative material on episodes of enjoyment in the fl class showed a diversity of elements that contributed to participants’ fle, ranging from teachers’ professional and emotional skills to a kind and supportive peer group. many participants seemed aware of the maxim “we have to learn to walk before we can run” and their episodes focused on their first sucjean-marc dewaele, peter d. macintyre 266 cessful steps or their first convincing run in the fl which filled them with pride and a sense of achievement. savouring small successes is good advice for the long term health of both teachers and learners (seligman, 2006). acknowledgments we would like to thank all our participants for having provided us with precious input and observations. special thanks also to dr. ruxandra comanaru and dr. ren wei, who managed the online questionnaire on googleforms and on a chinese website. we also want to thank the colleagues and friends who forwarded our call for participation, including dr. françoise masuy from the université catholique de louvain and miss amy botwright, headgirl at dr. challoner’s high school, who helped us recruit the youngest participants. the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom 267 references adler, p. s., & kwon, s.-w. 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(1991). creating a low-anxiety classroom environment: what does the anxiety research suggest? the modern language journal, 75, 426-39. the two faces of janus? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom 273 appendix a the fle scale to what extent do you agree with the following statements? strongly disagree/ disagree /undecided/ agree /strongly agree 1. i can be creative 2. i can laugh off embarrassing mistakes in the fl 3. i don’t get bored 4. i enjoy it 5. i feel as though i’m a different person during the fl class 6. i learnt to express myself better in the fl 7. i’m a worthy member of the fl class 8. i’ve learnt interesting things 9. in class, i feel proud of my accomplishments 10. it’s a positive environment 11. it’s cool to know a fl 12. it’s fun 13. making errors is part of the learning process 14. the peers are nice 15. the teacher is encouraging 16. the teacher is friendly 17. the teacher is supportive 18. there is a good atmosphere 19. we form a tight group 20. we have common “legends”, such as running jokes 21. we laugh a lot jean-marc dewaele, peter d. macintyre 274 appendix b the flca scale 1. even if i am well prepared for fl class, i feel anxious about it 2. i always feel that the other students speak the fl better than i do 3. i can feel my heart pounding when i'm going to be called on in fl class 4. i don't worry about making mistakes in fl class (reverse-coded) 5. i feel confident when i speak in fl class (reverse-coded) 6. i get nervous and confused when i am speaking in my fl class 7. i start to panic when i have to speak without preparation in fl class 8. it embarrasses me to volunteer answers in my fl class 583 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (4). 2015. 583-608 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.4.4 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl successful language learning in a corporate setting: the role of attribution theory and its relation to intrinsic and extrinsic motivation csaba kálmán eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary csabakalman73@gmail.com esther gutierrez eugenio eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary egutierrezeugenio@gmail.com abstract attribution theory (weiner, 1985) and self-determination theory (deci & ryan, 1985) have been explored as contributors to l2 motivation (cf. dörnyei, 2001) but have never been studied quantitatively in concert. in addition, students’ attributions for success in learning a foreign language have never been measured through the use of a questionnaire. the aim of this paper is therefore (a) to develop a questionnaire with reliable constructs that allows to measure adult learners’ attributions for their success in learning english in a corporate setting, (b) to investigate these learners’ attributions, and (c) to investigate the relationship between students’ attributions and the constructs of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation central to self-determination theory. our main results show that among the attributions measured, interest, effort and corporate culture seemed to be the main causes that students recognised as directly involved in their success in learning english. of all the attributional scales, interest and ability appeared to importantly contribute to intrinsic motivation, while corporate culture, encounters with foreign professionals and ability contributed to a lower extent to extrinsic motivation. it must be noted, however, that attributions for success to teacher and task were so consistently high that they could not be reliably measured with the questionnaire. csaba kálmán, esther gutierrez eugenio 584 keywords: attribution theory; self-determination theory; intrinsic motivation; extrinsic motivation; adult learners 1. introduction motivation has attracted a large amount of interest from researchers in the last few decades, arguably due to its potential to help understand the mysterious and intricate human behaviour. still, within the field of educational motivation, and most precisely in the context of foreign language (l2) learning, attribution theory (at) has not received sufficient attention. a few studies have explored the attributions to success and failure of foreign language students from a qualitative approach (e.g., gabillon, 2013; gonzalez, 2011; williams & burden, 1997, 1999; williams, burden, & al-baharna, 2001; williams, burden, & lanvers, 2002; williams, burden, poulet, & maun, 2004; yan & li, 2008), while a few others have attempted to measure these attributions quantitatively by using questionnaires that were not always properly designed, piloted and statistically validated to be fit for the study (gobel & mori, 2007; ishikawa, negi, & tajima, 2011; pishghadam & modarresi, 2008; pishghadam & zabihi, 2011; wu, 2011). another topic that has not received much attention in l2 motivation has been self-determination theory and its debated dichotomy of intrinsic/extrinsic motivation. although a number of studies have investigated the relationship between these two constructs and other salient concepts in l2 motivation such as autonomous learning and self-regulation (noels, 2001a, 2001b, 2003, 2009; noels, clement, & pelletier, 1999, 2001; noels, pelletier, clement, & vallerand, 2000), there are no studies that explore the relationships between self-determination and attribution in the context of l2 learning. similarly, a thorough examination of previous studies has confirmed the need to create a questionnaire with reliable and methodically built, validated and analysed constructs to measure adult learners’ attributions for their success in learning english. the aim of this paper is therefore double: on the one hand, to bridge this gap in the field of foreign language motivation research by providing such a questionnaire, and, on the other hand, to explore attributions for success in learning english as a foreign language in a corporate environment, and to study the relationships between attributions and the constructs of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. the results from this study will aim to enhance our understanding of motivation in foreign language learning, particularly the interrelationship between attribution and self-determination factors, and to offer a number of informed suggestions for further research and potential approaches to at in foreign language learning and teaching. successful language learning in a corporate setting: the role of attribution theory and its relation… 585 2. literature review 2.1. motivation: setting the conceptual framework motivation has been recognised as one of the most complex and difficult constructs to define in psychology (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011; walker & symons, 1997). motivation deals with the factors that influence human behaviour, which a priori may sound like a straightforward concept. however, the intricateness of the relationships between these factors and the actual behaviours is such that it has proved almost impossible to come up with a consistent, all-encompassing definition of motivation, let alone to capture all these factors in a single model or framework. throughout the years, there have been many attempts to identify, analyse and encompass these factors within different models of motivation in an effort to establish more clearly what motivation is and, most importantly, how it manifests itself through human behaviour (e.g., atkinson & raynor, 1974; bandura, 1979, 2001; covington, 1992; peterson, maier, & seligman, 1993; wigfield & eccles, 2000). although the concept of motivation was born in the field of psychology, experts in education have also found it useful to investigate learning phenomena from this new perspective and publications exploring motivation to learn a foreign language abound (e.g., clément, 1980, 1986; clément & noels, 1992; clément, gardner, & smythe, 1977a; clément, noels, & denault, 2001; dörnyei, 1994, 2000, 2001, 2005; dörnyei & csizér, 2002; dörnyei & ottó, 1998; dörnyei, csizér & németh, 2006; gardner, 1985; gardner & lambert, 1972; schumann, 1978, 1986; tremblay & gardner, 1995; ushioda, 1998; williams & burden, 1997). in second language acquisition (sla), the focus of studies on motivation has been to explore and understand the reasons that lead a student to start learning a foreign language and later on to sustain the effort throughout the long and sometimes painful learning process (dörnyei, 1998). according to gardner and lambert (1972), motivation is such an important factor in language learning that it may override the effect of other traditionally essential individual characteristics such as aptitude. it has been defined in a multitude of ways depending on the psychological paradigm that reined at the time. for the purpose of this study, the following definition of motivation by dörnyei and ottó (1998, p. 65) will be used: in a general sense, motivation can be defined as the dynamically changing cumulative arousal in a person that, once initiated, directs, co-ordinates, amplifies, terminates and evaluates the cognitive and motor processes whereby initial wishes and desires are selected, prioritised, operationalised and (successfully or unsuccessfully) acted out. csaba kálmán, esther gutierrez eugenio 586 according to this definition, motivation is adaptive in the sense that it is adjusted to the circumstances through the feedback received on the success of previous actions to achieve the established goal. the retroactivity of motivation and the fact that previous actions and the results produced by these actions necessarily influence future attitudes and behaviours will be explained in more detail below when discussing weiner’s (1985) at. 2.2. self-determination theory: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation the intrinsic/extrinsic dichotomy is one of the best-known issues in educational psychology. intrinsic motivation is meant to come from deep inside the individual when the behaviour is performed for its own sake. in contrast, extrinsic motivation occurs when the behaviour is performed as a means to an identifiable end (deci & ryan, 2000). there have been a number of attempts to overcome this dichotomy (vallerand, 1997; vallerand & ratelle, 2002), with deci and ryan’s (1985) self-determination theory being the most relevant example. self-determination in this context is defined as undertaking a task “with a full sense of wanting, choosing, and personal endorsement” (deci, 1992, p. 44). in their theory, deci and ryan (1985) suggest that extrinsic forms of motivation should rather be seen along a continuum where amotivation (complete lack of motivation) would be at one extreme and intrinsic motivation would be at the other extreme. according to deci and ryan (1985), the more supportive the social environment is, the more intrinsically motivated, and therefore the more self-determined the learner will be. both vallerand’s (1997) and deci and ryan’s (1985) work marked a significant milestone in the field of l2 motivation by arguing that the constructs of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation may not necessarily be unidimensional, as it was traditionally believed, but may actually be much more complex constructs in which a wider range of possibilities and dimensions are embedded. self-determination theory has inspired a fair amount of research in the field of sla, much of which has been conducted by noels and her colleagues (noels, 2001a, 2001b, 2003, 2009; noels et al., 1999, 2000, 2001). their research was based on deci and ryan’s (1985) continuum, and their findings have suggested that the personal value and importance of learning a foreign language may be more determining for sustained learning than merely intrinsic factors such as enjoyment and interest. they argue that enjoying the learning of a foreign language may actually be considered a simple “puzzle or a language game,” and that learning may only be sustained over time if the learner understands and interiorises language learning as something important and useful for themselves and for their everyday life (noels et al., 2000, p. 20). successful language learning in a corporate setting: the role of attribution theory and its relation… 587 2.3. attribution theory: exploring the reasons for success and failure attribution theory (at) has been recognised as the only motivational model that encompasses both the cognitive and affective aspects influencing human behaviour (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011). at was first presented by weiner (1985) and focuses on the analysis of the causes of success and failure; the way these causes are identified and interpreted determines individuals’ future attitudes and actions. as weiner (1985, p. 549) explains, “because of the apparent pan-cultural, timeless aspect of causal search and exploration, and because of the evident adaptive significance of this activity, causal ascriptions are proposed to provide the building blocks for the construction of a theory of motivation and emotion.” the main idea behind at is that human beings always seek to understand the reasons for their success or failure and, when faced with a similar situation again, their actions will be led by their understanding of the reasons that caused this success or failure. this does not mean that their perception about the reasons will be correct, but their personal belief of what these reasons were will guide their actions (heider, 1944, 1958). for example, if a student passes an exam he could attribute his success to a number of reasons, such as his higher ability in that subject, the easiness of the exam or simple luck with the reviewer. he may as well be convinced that the only reason for his success was his outstanding preparation for the exam, although in reality the exam was just very easy. according to at, based on his belief of what the reason for success was, the student will prepare for the next exam in exactly the same way in the hope to achieve the same results. considering that the previous exam was just easy, and that the student’s preparation did not play a remarkable role in the result, it is most probable that the student will fail the exam or at least that the results will not be as high. this may in turn lead the student to rethink the cause of his failure and maybe even to realise what the real reason for success was. attributions affect future learning processes insofar as they determine the expectancies for success in the future, the individuals’ affective state and, in consequence, their attitude and behaviour towards learning (mcloughlin, 2007). weiner (1985) identified four main causes of success and failure: ability, effort, task difficulty and luck. he described these causes from three different perspectives that he called “dimensions of causality”: locus (internal or external), stability (stable or unstable) and controllability (controllable or uncontrollable). each of the main four causes can be described along three dimensions: for example, ability is internal (inside the individual rather than outside, i.e., in the environment), stable (theoretically an individual’s ability is constant and does not vary through time), and uncontrollable (the individual has no control over his innate ability) (weiner, 1986). as many authors have noted (e.g., graham, csaba kálmán, esther gutierrez eugenio 588 1991; pishghadam & motakef, 2011; tse, 2000; williams, burden, & al-baharna, 2001; williams & burden, 1999; williams et al., 2002; williams et al., 2004), attributions of causality depend considerably on several factors such as the person, the culture, the social group, the family background, the learning context, the age, the gender or the task. at has importantly informed the way in which we understand l2 motivation. the reasons that students identify as responsible for their past success or failure in learning foreign languages have proved to have a significant impact on their attitude and motivation to keep learning (the) language(s) in the future (bandura, 1979; jarvis, 2005; schunk, 1991; smith, 2012; williams & burden, 1997). in her longitudinal research study, ushioda (1996, 1998, 2001) concluded that success in learning a foreign language was attributed mainly to internal factors such as ability, while failure to learn the language was rather attributed to external, unstable factors such as task difficulty. this could be explained by a student’s mechanism to keep their motivation to learn: admitting that failure to learn the language is due to, for example, lack of ability would hinder any existing motivation to try to keep learning the language. many studies have explored the causal attributions of foreign language students in different contexts (gabillon, 2013; gray, 2005; pishghadam & modarresi, 2008; pishghadam & motakef, 2011; tsi, 2000; williams & burden, 1997, 1999; williams, burden, & al-baharna, 2001; williams et al., 2002; williams et al., 2004; yan & li, 2008) and have looked into the relationship between attributions and other factors such as gender (wu, 2011), proficiency level (williams & burden, 1999), cultural background (gonzalez, 2011; williams, burden, & albaharna, 2001) and achievement (pishghadam & zabihi, 2011). these studies have shown that the attribution to effort is the best predictor of achievement in foreign language learning (pishghadam & zabihi, 2011), and that there do not seem to exist significant gender differences in the success and failure attributions of language learners (wu, 2011). furthermore, some authors (gonzalez, 2011; williams, burden, & al-baharna, 2001) have determined that attributions for success and failure in foreign language learning seem to be also dependent to an important extent on the cultural backgrounds and educational traditions in which learners are embedded, as shown by their case studies with students from africa, europe and asia. although most of the studies to date have taken a qualitative approach to the study of attributions for language learning success and failure, there have been some attempts to create a questionnaire with reliable constructs that allows us to systematically assess learners’ attributions. however, most of these studies do not provide enough information on the validation of the questionnaire and seem to follow procedures for the creation of the instrument and the successful language learning in a corporate setting: the role of attribution theory and its relation… 589 analysis of the results that do not abide by standard rules in questionnaire methodology (ishikawa, negi & tajima, 2011; gobel & mori, 2007; pishghadam & modarresi, 2008; pishghadam & zabihi, 2011; wu, 2011). given the lack of a questionnaire with reliable constructs to assess students’ attributions for success in language learning, this study aimed to both create such a questionnaire and to measure these attributions. furthermore, this study also aimed to relate these attributions to the constructs of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, which allows for a more comprehensive approach to understanding the interrelationship between attributional phenomena and motivation in the context of language learning. therefore, this paper would like to reach the three following goals: · to build a questionnaire with reliable constructs that allows measuring adult learners’ attributions for their success in learning english; · to investigate adult learners’ attributions for their success in learning english; and · to investigate the relationship between learners’ attributions for their success in learning english and the constructs of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. following from the previous research aims, the research questions that this study aims to answer are as follows: 1. can constructs be designed to reliably measure adult learners’ attributions for their success in learning english? 2. what are adult learners’ attributions for their success in learning english? 3. what are the correlational and regressional relationships between learners’ attributions for their success in learning english and the constructs of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation? 3. method 3.1. context the organisation where the research was carried out is a strategic holding and a key player in the power market in hungary, central and eastern europe, which in this study will be referred to as the group. while in the first half of the 2000s the employees’ goal was generally to pass the b2 level english language exam; since the middle of the last decade, their focus has shifted towards the c1 level and specialised language courses. today, having a b2 english language certificate is a prerequisite for new company entrants; therefore, the emphasis is placed csaba kálmán, esther gutierrez eugenio 590 on maintaining or enhancing this already existing knowledge, learning business english, specialising in the language of the electricity industry or attending skills courses that train attendees in english presentation or negotiation techniques. the activities of the group, as well as their back office administration, make it indispensable for the majority of the workforce to speak certain levels of english. this necessity ranges from online routine interface orders to fluent and effective negotiation, and the group encourages and enables the employees to participate in an english course as long as their knowledge of the language is not high or specialised enough for their job title. participation in the courses is optional, and attendees get 360 lessons to master one level or 240 lessons, if they only want to pass one part of the exam, that is, either the written or the oral part. this is a generous offer from the employer although it must be noted that the majority of the learners are hard-working adults with families and children; therefore, they cannot proceed at the rate of a teenager because of their occupational and family obligations. 3.2. participants our research investigated adult learners of english in a corporate environment in budapest, in may 2014. all of the participants are employees of the same stateowned hungarian strategic company group, whose core activities include electricity generation, electricity and natural gas distribution and trading, as well as providing telecommunications services. given the nature of the organisation, all of the employees questioned have university degrees, and their work entails creativity, which, in turn, necessitates applying advanced skills. in selecting the employees we paid attention to representing the various fields of activity within the organisation; therefore, we set out to build a purposive sample using the principle of maximum variation. we sought out people that represented the greatest differences in every possible sense within the organisation in the holding centre and two further subsidiaries of the group, all of which are based in the headquarters of the company in budapest, hungary. in total 127 employees, 57 males and 70 females filled in the paper-and-pen questionnaire. the average age of the participants was 39, ranging from 23 to 66 with an sd of 9.55 (for two learners the age data were missing). generally, they started learning languages at the age of 10 and for the majority of them, with the exception of 16 employees, english was the only language they were learning at the time the research was conducted. the most common second languages within the group of 16 were german and french. according to the participants’ selfreport and information from the human resources department of the group, the level of students’ proficiency in the investigated sample ranged from b1 to c1 in the common european framework of reference (cefr; council of europe, 2001). successful language learning in a corporate setting: the role of attribution theory and its relation… 591 3.3. instrument drawing on our literature review, we selected the attributional scales for the pilot questionnaire partly based on weiner’s (1985) at (effort, task difficulty, ability and luck), and partly on graham’s (1991), williams, burden, and al-baharna’s (2001), williams and burden’s (1999), williams et al.’s (2002) and williams et al.’s (2004) studies, which suggested that attributions of causality depend considerably on other factors as well such as culture, social group, family background, learning context, learning strategy or task. as a result, besides weiner’s (1985) scales in at, additional scales were created to measure attributions to the context (the corporate culture), the teacher (as a significant contributor to the learning environment), milieu (family and friends), strategy, time management (as presumably key skills in a corporate context), interest and anxiety. interest was included because it is central to deci and ryan’s (1985) selfdetermination theory, whereas anxiety was hypothesised to play an important role in failure attributions as it correlates negatively with both actual and perceived proficiency in the l2 (clément, gardner, & smythe, 1977 b; clément & kruidenier, 1985). in order to investigate the relationship between the above attributional factors and intrinsic and extrinsic motivation respectively, two further motivational scales were developed to explore the extrinsic and intrinsic motivation of the participants. due to the limitations in the length of the questionnaire, this study measured intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as unidimensional constructs. the items to measure these constructs were taken from teravainen’s (2014) study, which in turn were adapted from the scales used by noels et al. (2003), whereas for the attributional scales the items were developed by the authors based on dörnyei’s (2007) guidelines on multi-item questionnaire scales: “there is a general consensus among survey specialists that more than one item (usually 4-10) is needed to address each identified content area, all aimed at the same target but drawing upon slightly different aspects of it” (p. 91). our questionnaire originally contained 56 items (3 constructs with 6 items, 7 constructs with 5 items, 1 construct with 3 items) to measure attributional factors and 10 items to measure motivational factors. the reason why we used a relatively low number of items per scale is explained by dörnyei (2007) as follows: “l2 researchers typically want to measure many different areas in one questionnaire, and therefore cannot use very long scales, or the completion of the questionnaire would take several hours” (p. 183). after the pilot questionnaire, which was conducted with 20 participants, we found that in this particular context two variables (success attributed to the teacher and success attributed to tasks) had to be dropped as the data we obtained on these two variables were extremely homogenous and therefore impossible to csaba kálmán, esther gutierrez eugenio 592 analyse statistically; there was a bunching of scores at the highest value of the instrument (ceiling effect). on the other constructs, principal component analysis was carried out to gain information on how individual items load onto a particular dimension. as a result, the final number of dimensions was defined. the final questionnaire consisted of 44 items on attributional and 10 items on motivational factors. for items 1-44, participants had to indicate on a 5-point scale to what extent they attributed their successes to the ideas expressed in the statements. we considered including both negatively and positively worded items; however, following dörnyei’s (2007) advice to avoid negatively worded questions as “they can be problematic” (p. 95), in the end we decided against them. dörnyei (2007) warns against the use of double-barrelled questions, but we came to the conclusion that we would use them deliberately in our instrument because we wanted to measure causal attributions. this is the reason why all the items started with “i succeed in learning english because . . .” and intended to cover the following nine variables, in which sat stands for success attributed to: 1. sat effort (6 items): to what extent learners attribute their successes to the efforts exerted during language learning. example: “i succeed in learning english because i put a lot of effort into learning the language.” 2. sat time management (5 items): what role their time management skills play in being a successful language learner. example: “i succeed in learning english because i try to make myself spend as much time as possible learning the language.” 3. sat strategy (5 items): how important their own l2 learning strategies are in achieving success. example: “i succeed in learning english because i have my own learning tricks.” 4. sat milieu (5 items): what impact their immediate environment (family and friends) has on their perception of themselves as successful language learners. example: “i succeed in learning english because my friends have always encouraged me to learn the language.” 5. sat anxiety (5 positively coded items): what is the significance of the level of anxiety felt when using english in everyday life is. example: “i succeed in english learning because it does not embarrass me to speak english.” 6. sat context (5 items): to what extent they see their corporate environment and culture as a source of inspiration for their studies. example: “i succeed in learning english because my corporate culture supports continuous training.” 7. sat luck (3 items): how important they find luck in their successes. example: “i succeed in learning english because i am lucky as my workplace supports life-long learning.” successful language learning in a corporate setting: the role of attribution theory and its relation… 593 8. sat interest (5 items): what role their general interest towards the english language plays in their successes. example: “i succeed in learning english because i enjoy expressing my thoughts in another language.” 9. sat ability (5 items): how they rate themselves from the point of view of l2 learning aptitude. example: “i succeed in learning english because i am a talented language learner.” items 45-54 comprised noels, clement, & pelletier’s (2003) motivational scales consisting of questions to be answered on a 5-point likert scale where learners had to mark to what extent they agreed or disagreed with the statements. these items measured the following constructs: 10. intrinsic motivation (5 items): to what extent they enjoy learning english for its own sake. example: “i study english for the ‘high’ feeling i experience while speaking english.” 11. extrinsic motivation (5 items): how motivated they are from the point of view of integrativeness and instrumentality. example: “i study english in order to get a better job in the future.” in the last part of the questionnaire, background questions were asked concerning the participants’ age, gender, the time they had started learning languages, other languages they were learning at the time of the study and the section of the corporate organogram they were working in. 3.4. procedure the questionnaire was originally developed in english and then translated into hungarian. two adult learners of english were then asked to think aloud while completing it to make sure that the questions were interpreted the way they were meant to be. potentially problematic items were reworded before the instrument was piloted with 20 learners. following the reliability analysis of this pilot run, the unreliable items were reworded or omitted. the final version of the questionnaire was personally delivered to the employees of the organisation, and they were collected a week later. all of the completed questionnaires were computer coded and spss (statistical package for social sciences) 17.0 was used to analyse the data. 4. results and discussion this section of the paper presents the results and discussion of our findings. the section is organized in accordance with the three research questions. csaba kálmán, esther gutierrez eugenio 594 4.1. reliability of the scales in order to answer the first research question (can constructs be designed to reliably measure adult learners’ attributions for their success in learning english?), we checked the internal reliability of the 11 multi-item scales, and cronbach’s alpha internal consistency reliability coefficients were computed, which are shown in table 1. due to our circumspect preparatory phase and prudent piloting, all but two of the scales yielded favourable cronbach’s alphas. according to dörnyei (2007), because of the lower number of items per scale typically used in questionnaires related to l2 acquisition, “somewhat lower cronbach alpha coefficients are to be expected, but even with short scales of 34 items we should aim at reliability coefficients in excess of 0.70; if the cronbach alpha of a scale does not reach 0.60, this should sound warning bells” (p. 183). the data suggested that cronbach’s alphas for the latent dimensions of context and luck were low if we considered the above warning. with the help of factor analysis (maximum likelihood with varimax rotation), the dimensionality of the scales was determined and the results revealed that the context scale was in fact 2-dimensional. the 2-dimensionality of this variable can be explained by the fact that even though all of the items within this construct were related to the working environment of the participants, the statements described two aspects of their corporate setting: some items were found to have orientations towards how the ethos of the corporate culture affected their attributions (e.g., “i succeed in learning english because my corporate culture supports continuous learning”), whereas the others focused on the opportunities the participants have to meet foreign business partners or travel abroad (e.g., “i succeed in learning english because i have the opportunity to travel abroad on business”), which not many of the employees have a chance to do with the exception of the members of the management. consequently and accordingly, the sat context construct was divided into sat encounters (to denote real-life encounters with l2) and sat corporate culture (to describe the culture of the company). as far as the sat luck factor was concerned, even though it was one of weiner’s (1985) original variables, we had to exclude it from further analyses. the reasons for this might have been the low number of items originally intended to measure this construct and its partial overlap with two other variables: sat corporate culture (“i succeed in learning english because i’m lucky as my workplace supports life-long learning”) and milieu (“i succeed in learning english because i’m lucky with the feedback i’m given”). another reason for the lack of luck contributing reliably to this measure might be that luck is often associated with tests and exams in language learning and these might not be relevant in a corporate context. successful language learning in a corporate setting: the role of attribution theory and its relation… 595 table 1 reliability coefficients for the scales scale cronbach’s α sat effort .86 sat time management .72 sat strategy .72 sat milieu .76 sat anxiety .84 sat encounters .71 sat corporate culture .68 sat interest .71 sat ability .68 extrinsic motivation .76 intrinsic motivation .78 4.2. comparative analysis of the scales in order to answer the second research question (what are adult learners’ attributions for their success in learning english?), descriptive statistics for the scales are presented in table 2. we can see from the data that within the attributional scales, sat corporate culture, sat interest and sat effort showed the highest mean values, close to or over 3.5, which highlight several inferences. first of all, it can be observed that learners of english in this context regard their working environment as a determining factor in contributing to their successes in learning english. secondly, they seem to attribute their success in english to their genuine interest in learning the language. thirdly, they also put their success down to their hard work. table 2 descriptive statistics for the scales scale m sd sat effort 3.46 .72 sat time management 2.96 .63 sat strategy 3.17 .66 sat milieu 2.91 .81 sat anxiety 2.92 .86 sat encounters 2.66 .91 sat corporate culture 3.61 1.11 sat interest 3.60 .70 sat ability 3.19 .64 extrinsic motivation 3.74 .78 intrinsic motivation 3.78 .73 the high mean value for sat interest is probably due to the fact that learning english is voluntary in the organisation. for this reason, learners are intrinsically motivated (which was also borne out by the high mean values for intrinsic csaba kálmán, esther gutierrez eugenio 596 motivation). also, given the nature of the organisation, all the employees have a college or university degree, so probably they enjoy learning better than an average person and are also willing to exert more effort in learning english just as they have presumably done so in their previous studies whether they be related to their profession or to language learning. the findings seem to confirm deci and ryan’s (1985) self-determination theory, insomuch as the more supportive the social environment is, the more intrinsically motivated the learner will be. interestingly, however, they seem to refute noels et al.’s (2003) findings, according to which the personal value and importance of learning a foreign language may be more important for sustained learning than intrinsic factors such as enjoyment and interest. if we examine the mean values related to the intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation scales, we can see that the participants are highly motivated both intrinsically and extrinsically, approximately to the same extent (3.78 and 3.74 respectively). this again might be put down to the particularity of the context: the voluntary participation in english courses and the high qualifications of the workforce. on the other hand, the high mean value for extrinsic motivation highlights instrumental aspects of motivation that might be attributed to the prospects of a better job and/or a higher salary in a competitive corporate environment. 4.3. relationships among the scales in order to answer the third research question (what relationships might describe the obtained attributional scales?), we carried out correlational analyses. table 3 presents the significant correlations among the attributional scales, whereas table 4 shows the significant correlations between the attributional scales and the two criterion measure scales, extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation. in order to guarantee a much smaller likelihood of the events occurring simply by chance, only correlations where p < .01 are reported. table 3 significant correlations (p < .01) among the attributional scales 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1. sat effort ¾ 2. sat time management .749 ¾ 3. sat strategy .487 .522 ¾ 4. sat milieu ¾ 5. sat anxiety .244 .423 ¾ 6. sat encounters .233 .352 ¾ 7. sat corporate culture .283 ¾ 8. sat interest .438 .344 .446 .354 .433 .355 .237 ¾ 9. sat ability .502 .395 .499 .559 .470 ¾ successful language learning in a corporate setting: the role of attribution theory and its relation… 597 as can be seen in table 3, the strong correlation between the sat effort and sat time management variables (.749) indicates that the two latent dimensions tap into very similar domains in the investigated environment. on the one hand, time is always a prerequisite of exerting efforts. on the other hand, the reason for this strong correlation in this context might be that the survey was conducted among working adult learners of english who are especially likely to tend to equate time with effort as they are presumably constantly pressed for time, and finding time for learning represents a challenge for them. the second strongest correlation (moderate correlation at .559) can be observed between sat ability and sat anxiety, which demonstrates either that learners who consider themselves more able tend to worry less or that anxious learners tend to underestimate their ability (the sat anxiety items were coded positively). this finding echoes the results of several other studies (e.g., desbrisay, 1984; ferguson, 1978; holec, 1979) that have found that anxious individuals who have little faith in their capacities and their ability to control the environment systematically underestimate their abilities. interestingly, these are sat ability and sat interest that correlate moderately with the highest number of other constructs, 7 and 5 respectively. it might indicate that these two variables are more central to the concept of attribution in language learning in this particular environment than the other variables. the correlational analysis for the criterion measure scales yielded the highest, but only moderate, correlation values (.636 and .509) in the case of intrinsic motivation, and weak correlations (.342 and .345) in the case of extrinsic motivation in the same domains: sat interest and sat ability (see table 4). table 4 significant correlations (p < .01) between the attributional scales and the criterion measure scales sat effort sat time sat strategy sat milieu sat anxiety sat encounters sat corporate culture sat interest sat ability intrinsic motivation .330 .368 .332 .417 .304 .241 .636 .509 extrinsic motivation .302 .255 .315 .340 .304 .342 .345 in order to determine causality and to find out which attributional constructs act as predictor scales of the students’ motivated learning behaviour, we carried out linear regression analyses with a stepwise approach separately for the criterion variables of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. the results are summarised in tables 5 and 6. out of the 9 dimensions investigated, only two contributed significantly to intrinsic motivation: sat interest and sat ability (previously identified by weiner [1985] as one of the two main internal attributional factors) were the most important predictor variables; and three contributed significantly to extrinsic motivation: sat encounters, sat corporate culture, and sat ability. csaba kálmán, esther gutierrez eugenio 598 table 5 results of regression analysis of the attributional scales with intrinsic motivation as the criterion variable (significance level p < .01) variable β t p sat interest .51 6.81 < .001 sat ability .27 3.63 < .001 r2 .46 it can be seen from the data that the proportion of variance in intrinsic motivation that can be explained by the two independent variables is 46%, and that the impact of sat interest (.51) is almost twice as strong as the impact of sat ability (.27). given the fact that the key element of intrinsic motivation in general is the enjoyment of the activity in focus, it is not surprising that the sat interest variable also contributed highly to the value of 46% in the investigated context. on the other hand, it is more challenging to find an explanation for the sat ability variable being the second most important factor in line in this respect. it is possible that those respondents who feel that their successes can be attributed to their abilities feel more confident and enjoy language learning more than those who attribute them to other factors. also, because of the positive perception they have of their abilities, due to the joy they might possibly derive from solving problems related to language learning they gain more enjoyment from learning, which, again, in turn leads to a heightened level of intrinsic motivation. it is important to note here that, as we have already mentioned in the literature review section, heider (1944, 1958) emphasises that these are the learner’s personal beliefs in their ability that guide their action and not their actual ability. as a consequence, we might challenge weiner’s (1985) original classification in at: even though ability might be constant and, as such, may not change through time, it is not ability that matters in at but perceived ability, which is actually subject to change. by comparison, the data obtained from the regression analysis of the attributional scales with extrinsic motivation suggest a weaker causality between the two (see table 6). out of the nine dimensions, three contributed significantly to extrinsic motivation: sat ability, sat encounters and sat corporate culture. however, their overall effect (25%) on extrinsic motivation is almost half as weak as the effect of sat interest and sat ability on intrinsic motivation. here, the distribution of the strength of the three scales is even (their β values are .26, .26, and .23 respectively). the significance of two of the scales (sat encounters and sat corporate culture) can again be easily explained: the participants’ work environment is highly competitive, and, therefore, instrumentality, which is a core determinant of extrinsic motivation in general, plays an important role. the role of sat ability, however, is more puzzling. the explanation for this might be that those participants who attributed their successes to their self-perceived abilities more successful language learning in a corporate setting: the role of attribution theory and its relation… 599 than the average might fare better in general in life, not only when it comes to learning a language. they might be more competitive, might want to get higher positions on the corporate ladder or might want to earn more, which are all suggestive of the instrumental use of the learned language, that is, external motivation. table 6 results of regression analysis of the attributional scales with extrinsic motivation as the criterion variable (significance level p < .01) variable β t p sat ability .26 3.23 .002 sat encounters .26 3.20 .002 sat corporate culture .23 2.97 .004 r2 .25 5. implications and further research as it was already referred to in the method section of this paper, the pilot of the current study identified the role of the teacher and the nature of the tasks in the lessons as crucial factors in the investigated environment that learners attribute their successes to. the homogeneity in the data obtained in these two scales made it impossible for us to conduct statistical analyses; however, it must be noted that these two scales produced by far the highest mean values (over 4.7) compared to the other scales. consequently, further research is needed to analyse these two constructs by possibly breaking up both into analysable subscales to explore which subcomponents learners find vital in their attributions. nevertheless, the rich data yielded by the nine scales and the two criterion measure scales lend themselves to interpretation that has profound implications for teachers of adult learners of english in a corporate environment, as well as employers. starting with employers, we can see it ascertained by the data that adult learners of english attribute their successes to a great extent to their employer in as much as they acknowledge the significance of a corporate culture that supports continuous training and life-long learning, both of which promote employees’ professional development. this is confirmed by the high mean value for the sat corporate culture scale (3.61), as well as the answers given to 3 out of the 5 items with the highest mean values in the questionnaire: “i succeed in learning english as i’m lucky because my workplace supports lifelong learning” (4.13), “i succeed in learning english because i need it for my professional development” (3.88), and “i succeed in learning english because my corporate culture supports continuous learning” (3.83). most probably, the employees of this organisation are grateful for the opportunity they are given to learn english and appreciate the support they receive. it would be the subject csaba kálmán, esther gutierrez eugenio 600 of another study to investigate what role this appreciation plays in employee commitment and employment satisfaction in the organisation. whether an organisation decides to contribute to the linguistic development of its employees is a question of company policy. but once employees of similar organisations are given the opportunity to develop or maintain their linguistic knowledge, it is well worth considering what implications the study has for teachers of adult learners in similar settings. our research has shown that there are at least seven lessons teachers can learn from this study, which will be outlined in the following list: 1. minimise teacher talking time, maximise student talking time. the mean value for sat interest turned out to be as high (3.60) as that for sat corporate culture (i.e., the highest among the scales). additionally, if we take into account that item 12 of the questionnaire (“i succeed in learning english because i enjoy expressing my thoughts in another language”) had the second highest mean value falling short of the highest by merely 0.11, but with half of its sd, we can conclude that answers given to item 12 show a more even distribution. as a consequence, the respondents were more unanimous in the importance of the joy of expressing their thoughts in english as a contributor to their successes than any other notions expressed in the other items of the questionnaire. we must not forget that all the participants in this context speak english at b2 or a higher level; therefore, they have the linguistic ability to really express themselves and they should have the opportunity to do so. 2. create an enjoyable learning environment. in their answers to item 26, which is part of sat interest again, the participants suggested that they succeed in learning english because they enjoy language learning. the mean value of their answers is 3.83 here, which is, once again, one of the highest values in the whole questionnaire. apart from this, another reason why the items of sat interest deserve more attention is that the highest significant correlation between any of the attributional scales and either of the criterion measure scales was found between this construct and intrinsic motivation (.636). the data obtained from linear regression analysis also confirm that 46% of the intrinsic motivation of the participants can be explained by two independent variables, sat interest and sat ability, and the impact of sat interest (.51) is almost twice as strong as the impact of sat ability (.27). creating an enjoyable learning environment, which in turn might result in intrinsic motivation, is very much dependent on the teacher. successful language learning in a corporate setting: the role of attribution theory and its relation… 601 3. emphasise the joy of learning something new. both of the previous points were related to intrinsic motivation, and the third implication comes directly from the intrinsic motivation criterion measure scale as the participants valued the joy of learning something new very highly. the mean value for item 46 was 4.02, which shows that the english learners in this context like learning new things in general. teachers might possibly exploit this recommendation by raising awareness of the benefits of learning something new. beside the obvious rewards, in a corporate environment language learning can on the one hand break the monotony of the daily office routine, and on the other hand, it can present employees who already have a well-established career with new challenges. 4. emphasise professional networking around the globe. even though it turned out from the results that in the investigated context not many of the participants have the opportunity to travel abroad or meet foreign business partners, many of them regard the english language as a tool for their professional development and consider this aspect of learning english very important in their attributions for their successes. item 23 (“i succeed in english because i need it for my professional development”) yielded the third highest mean value in the survey (3.88). this can partly be explained by the fact that, despite the limited opportunities to travel abroad on business, the learners have access to professional literature and forums on the internet, and some of them might consider working abroad a future possibility. it is again awareness-raising that teachers can do by encouraging the learners to access online literature and mull over working in another country. also, more emphasis needs to be laid on personalised materials related to their field of work. 5. emphasise the role of english as a lingua franca. drawing on the previous point and justified by the high mean value (3.75) for item 38 (“i succeed in learning english because it inspires me that i can become a member of the english speaking global community”), it is necessary to talk to any learners of english about the unique nature of english as a global language. interestingly, the high mean value shows that the participants would like to become members of the global village, but in a corporate environment teachers might want to emphasise that the majority of foreign interaction takes place between nonnatives, thanks to which the anxiety level of learners can be reduced. 6. save time by personalising teaching materials. as evidenced by correlational analysis of the data, adult learners tend to equate effort and time. the strong correlation between the sat effort and sat time management variables (.749) indicates that the two latent dimensions tap into csaba kálmán, esther gutierrez eugenio 602 very similar domains in the investigated environment. working adult learners of english tend to equate time with effort as finding time for learning represents a challenge for them. it is therefore crucial that learning should take place as efficiently as possible. with a personalised way of teaching, the teacher can focus on those areas that need to be developed more and can ignore the ones in which the learners excel. 7. enhance learners’ perceptions of their language learning ability. sat ability correlated with seven of the scales and showed the highest correlation with sat anxiety (.559). also, the linear regression analyses have revealed that there is a causal relationship between sat ability and both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. as a consequence of these, it is not of minor importance how learners evaluate their language learning ability. based on the analyses of the data we can say that the more able learners perceive themselves, the less they worry, and the more intrinsically and extrinsically motivated they become. it therefore seems to be a good idea to boost learners’ self-confidence so that their perception of their abilities is more positive. 6. conclusion this study had three aims that have been successfully fulfilled. the first aim was to build a questionnaire with reliable constructs to measure adult learners’ attributions for their success in learning english in a corporate setting. this aim was met by creating and piloting the questionnaire, and by the reported cronbach’a alpha values obtained through statistical analyses. it must be noted, however, that the reliability of the instrument could be improved by adding more items to each of the scales. if we did so, because of the length of the questionnaire, it would necessitate either removing one or two scales or creating a separate questionnaire with those scales only. another important point is that two attributions that are traditionally considered as central in language learning had to be left out (teacher and task) due to the highly positive and homogeneous responses given by all the participants. this is a limitation of the questionnaire that needs to be considered if it is to be used in further studies, although it does not per se hinder the reliability and validity of the instrument. the second aim was to use this questionnaire to measure the attributions that adult learners make for their success in learning english. the questionnaire included a broad range of possibilities for potential attributions, among which interest, effort and corporate culture showed to be the strongest reasons why adult learners think they are successful in language learning. successful language learning in a corporate setting: the role of attribution theory and its relation… 603 the third aim was to investigate the relationship between students’ attributions and the constructs of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation central to selfdetermination theory. due to limitations in the length of the questionnaire, these last two constructs could not be operationalised as multidimensional scales as in noels et al. (2000). instead, a unidimensional version of the scales developed in this study was used. correlational and regression analyses showed that the scales sat ability and, particularly, sat interest seemed to contribute effectively towards intrinsic motivation. this has important implications for language teaching as it suggests that the joy of learning something new can on its own be a very strong intrinsic motivational factor. it also seems to suggest in line with numerous studies (e.g, anderson, manoogian, & reznick, 1976; deci, 1971; pittman, davey, alafat, wetherhill, & cramer, 1980) that ability is an important contributor to intrinsic motivation, arguably because of the retroactive motivational processes derived from previous successes that have been attributed to one’s own ability. regarding extrinsic motivation, the results from this study have shown that sat corporate culture, sat encounters with foreign professionals and sat ability may contribute to this construct although only to a limited degree. the importance of sat corporate culture and sat encounters with foreign professionals in relation to extrinsic motivation can be easily explained by the instrumentality of learning a language that is needed for professional reasons. however, the contribution of sat ability towards extrinsic motivation is a somewhat less clear and could benefit from further research in the future. this study hoped to provide a deeper understanding of adult learners’ attributions for success in learning english in a corporate setting and a new insight into the relationship between these attributions and intrinsic/extrinsic motivation. however enlightening the findings from this study may be, further research has been suggested throughout the paper in order to consider issues such as the difficulty to quantitatively measure central attributions in language learning such as task and teacher, or to consistently and confidently explain some of the results obtained from the statistical analyses. follow-up qualitative studies could help clarify these issues. finally, similar studies with learners of different ages, languages, cultural backgrounds and social or professional contexts could also be useful to identify differences in the language attributions and their contribution towards intrinsic/extrinsic motivation, which in turn could have a significant impact on teachers’ approach to enhancing their students’ motivation to learn the target foreign language. csaba kálmán, esther gutierrez eugenio 604 references anderson, r., manoogian, s. t., & reznick, s. j. 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(2011). an investigation and analysis of attribution preference and gender difference of non-english majors’ english learning based on investigation of non-english majors in tianjin polytechnic university. journal of language teaching and research, 2(2), 332-337. yan, h., & li, x. (2008). causal attribution and its conceptions by non-english major postgraduates in china: a case study. asian social science, 4(4), 77-80. 515 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (4). 2015. 515-517 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.4.1 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editorial the present edition of studies in second language leaning and teaching closes the fifth year of its existence, thus marking an important milestone for the journal, that is, the publication of the twentieth issue. reflecting on these five years, we can confidently say that the journal is a far cry from what it was five years ago. at that time, it virtually had to be built from the ground up, which generated numerous problems, ranging from convincing eminent scholars to agree to serve on the editorial board, to ensuring high-quality submissions, to finding suitable reviewers, to working very hard to ensure that the outcome looked as professional as possible. at present, ssllt is a recognized academic publication, we receive numerous submissions, many of which have to be rejected out of hand, and although, because of the growing number of incoming papers, seeking out reviewers sometimes poses an even more formidable challenge than it used to, we enjoy continued, heartfelt support of the most prominent figures in the field, many of whom we do not hesitate to call our friends. they never decline to evaluate papers we send them despite having piles and piles of outstanding assignments on their desks, and there are also those who take precious time out of their schedules to put together special, thematic issues of the journal, thus immensely increasing its standing in the field. while we are fully aware that much remains to be done to further enhance the quality of the journal and to make ssllt even more recognizable and influential than it has become, we are determined to work very hard to achieve these goals. this is because we consider the journal to be unique in many ways, to manifest the truth of the adage that where there is the will, there is the way, as well as to constitute the fruit of genuine dedication and passion. the current issue is composed of six papers, with a balance being preserved between those that are conceptual in nature and those that present the results of original empirical research. the first two contributions are examples of review papers, and they are devoted to the role of pragmatics in learning and 516 using a second or foreign language, an area that surely deserves considerably more attention than it is currently afforded. in the first of them, lauren wyner and andrew d. cohen focus on the role of the learning environment (i.e., second vs. foreign) in the development of target language pragmatic ability as well as the interplay of contextual factors of this kind and individual learner variables, concluding that the latter are often likely to trump the impact of the former. in the second, feng xiao offers a synthesis of research into the effect of proficiency on the acquisition of pragmatic competence, demonstrating that while more advanced learners are indeed likely to manifest greater mastery of pragmatic features, such an outcome is by no means guaranteed, it varies depending on the pragmatic features in question and may be mediated by contextual variables. these two overviews then speak to the complexities involved in gaining mastery of pragmatic features, primarily brought about by the dynamic interaction of different variables, which surely warrants more research in this area, particularly such that would offer a basis for sound and feasible pedagogical recommendations. the following two contributions represent empirical studies which seek to investigate the role of motivation in language learning. first, csaba kálmán and esther gutierrez eugenio explore the relationships between adult learners’ attributions and their intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in a corporate setting in hungary, providing evidence, among other things, that the former is fueled by ability and interest while the latter is driven, albeit to a smaller extent, by corporate culture, encounters with foreign professionals and, yet again, ability. second, awanui te huia presents the results of a qualitative study which explored the goals and motivations of the learners of the māori heritage language, showing that their efforts to master the language of their ancestors may be reflective of their valuing of that language as a cultural legacy, and their deeply ingrained connection to the past and present speakers of this language. in the next paper, joe siegel and aki siegel shift the focus of attention to the development of target language skills, focusing on the role of bottom-up activities in honing listening comprehension. they report the findings of a small-scale research project in which the students benefitting from the inclusion of such activities outdid the controls on dictation and listening proficiency tests, also manifesting positive attitudes towards instructional options of this kind. finally, the paper by alexander andrason and marianna visser represents an attempt, admittedly a highly successful one, to apply the affordances perspective (cf. aronin & singleton, 2012) to the concept of grammaticalization. they propose a model that rests upon the differential contribution of three influences, namely the factor, the parameter and the actor. also included in the present issue are three reviews of recently published edited collections dedicated to the interdisciplinary nature of applied linguistics, the role of working memory in language 517 learning and the dynamics of second language motivation by kata csizér, adriana biedroń and mirosław pawlak, respectively. we are hopeful that, as was the case with previous issues of the journal, all of these contributions will be an inspiration for the readers and provide an impulse for further empirical investigations in the areas they touch upon. mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references aronin, l., & singleton, d. (2012). affordances theory in multilingualism studies. studies in second language learning and teaching, 2, 311-331. 703 intersections: applied linguistics as a meeting place editor: elke stracke publisher: cambridge scholars publishing, 2015 isbn: 9781443866545 pages: 340 this volume, entitled rather modestly intersections, is devoted to applied linguistics in the broadest sense, illustrating the interdisciplinary nature of our field. it contains sixteen original empirical studies taking into account the ever extending boundaries of the field. as elke stracke points out in her introduction, the volume intends to focus “on the many junctions within applied linguistics and its intersections with other disciplines” (p. xiii). the volume grew out of a conference organised in canberra (apparently and aptly meaning ‘meeting place’ [p. xiv]) by the applied linguistics associations of australia and new zealand. despite this, the studies cover a range of other contexts as well, from the usa to japan. in order to make sense of the very different papers and orient readers, the edited volume contains three large subchapters centering around workplace contexts and communications, educational settings, and finally, on the role of advocacy devoted to endangered languages. part i includes five studies examining different aspects of workplace language. janet holmes investigates language samples from new zealand contexts originating from interactions between interns (skilled workers) and their mentors. 704 her results illustrate how implicit and explicit norms are conveyed when giving advice to newcomers. the next two chapters highlight different medical contexts. louisa willoughby, simon musgrave, marisa cordella and julie bradshaw analyse medical consultations in which apart from a doctor and a patient several other parties are present, such as family members and/or interpreters necessitated by the limited english knowledge of the patient. their results reflect on a wealth of discourse and highlight the possible roles different parties are playing in consultations. on a somewhat lighter note, suzanne eggins examines medical humor. based on interactional sociology and critical linguistics, she looks at patient-initiated humor and concludes that humor helps the patient to shift values and assumptions related to the medical discourse. from the hospital we move to the courtroom: kristen hanna sets out to research the practice of the crossexamination of children in new zealand, taking into account the testimony of 18 child witnesses. as a result, she proposes an interdisciplinary approach to questioning children and includes some roles for linguists and psychologists to help legal professionals to adjust to more children-friendly practices. part i is concluded by farzana gounder with a study on anniversary journalism. the study is centered around the fiji-indian community, and anniversary narratives, collective memory, and national culture are examined in concert. based on media discourse and the analysis of a radio documentary programme, the author shows examples of a narrative of a nation, continuity and tradition, as well as a foundational myth. part ii contains eight chapters dealing with educational contexts from various perspectives. the first study, carried out by stephen moore and hui ling xu, employs simulated role plays to study chinese-background undergraduate accounting students’ communication skills. differences between students’ and professional accountants’ performance concerning language proficiency, communication skills, as well as academic literacies have driven the authors to develop a unique self-access pedagogical tool to help students. the following two chapters investigate academic literacy. chapter 7, written by angela ardington, is on academic literacy concerning first year university students coming from diverse contexts attending an engineering program. both diagnostic tests and students’ views on writing are explored, and it is established that academic literacy programs need to be introduced to the core curriculum under investigation. chapter 8 explores the intersection between academic literacy and e-learning; more specifically how an email exchange project can contribute to the completion of a writing assignment. hiroyuki nemoto’s findings uncover what types of language management actions are taken to complete a writing task. this study also calls our attention to the way e-learning platforms can create authentic socio-cultural contexts for learners to communicate. e-learning is taken up as the topic of chapter 9, authored by carol hayes and yuki itani-adams, who discuss 705 the results of a digital storytelling project. the project concentrates on the development of some of the 21st century skills as well as on providing authentic tasks for students. wan-lun lee, in chapter 10, has designed a mixed-methods project to investigate in what ways non-english majors might benefit from being taught literature within the framework of cooperative learning. the author points out that the designed learning project has a positive impact on students’ language learning experiences as well as their motivation. in chapter 11, rosalie grant, rita macdonald, aek phakiti and h. gary cook investigate the interrelationship between mathematics achievement and academic language proficiency. they show how mathematics achievement is affected by reading and listening skills, which, in turn, are shaped by writing and speaking skills. these results enhance our understanding of what roles writing skills might be playing in influencing achievement in mathematics. the last two chapters in this part of the volume explore aboriginal language users. elizabeth m. ellis has designed a study to map how aboriginal children’s use of english can be described at home and at pre-school. based on discrepancies in language use at home and school, the author offers a number of recommendations to help both children and stakeholders. ian g. malcolm deals with aboriginal students and aboriginal english. he looks at both aboriginal english narratives as interpreted by non-aboriginal teachers as well as how students (aboriginal and non-aboriginal) interpret standard english texts. one of the most important results of this study is how teaching and education are inherently cross-cultural processes. part iii of the volume consists of three studies dealing with the rights of language minorities. denise angelo and sophie mcintosh use a case study approach to describe language use in remote australian communities. by looking at how census data categorises english, and indigenous and different contact languages, the authors manage to pinpoint problems concerning the measuring of the use of pidgins and creoles. in chapter 15, karen l. lillie takes us to arizona, us, to illustrate how language policies are implemented for language minority students in the educational system of a single american state. the author describes and analyses legal decisions against the backdrop of the multilingual setting of the usa, whose educational system often fails to reflect multilinguality. in the last chapter, molly townes o’brien and peter bailey investigate the right for mother tongue education of indigenous children in australia. they provide a summary of the teaching of traditional languages and expand on the relationship between language use and identity also writing about historical experience around the world. from this very short summary, in which i certainly cannot do justice to the rich tapestry of the volume, a number of issues emerge resulting in making me want to read the book further. maybe a final chapter summarising the most important implications and offering possible research directions might have 706 helped the reader obtain a closure. i think the authors of this volume successfully show that an intersection is not only a metaphor for a meeting place for people, such as a conference, but that it can also create a space for a large variety of interdisciplinary research projects. creating and filling this research niche is the biggest contribution of this book to the field of applied linguistics, especially given the fact that interdisciplinary studies are often difficult to publish in mainstream academic journals. another highlight is the rich variety of empirical methods employed in the various studies: large-scale investigations and multi-variate statistical analyses, interaction and discourse analyses, the analyses of different learning projects as well as qualitative ethnographic studies all contribute to our understanding of applied linguistics better. the methodological variety provides an additional value to the book: it reads like a research methodology handbook, as well. this strength, however, sometimes turns into a weakness: many studies fail to follow mainstream academic traditions in their write-up, which makes it difficult to address quality-control issues. another advantage of the book is that despite the fact that most of the studies look at various non-european contexts, the detailed contextual information makes it easy to transfer knowledge gained in these studies to other contexts, such as europe. this means that the book is not only relevant but potentially eye-opening for the readers of studies of second language learning and teaching. finally, one small but surprisingly delightful detail that is usually not characteristic of academic publications in our field: the book contains coloured pictures! reviewed by kata csizér eötvös loránd university, budapest, hungary weinkata@yakoo.com 4324-8388-1-sm_part7 4324-8388-1-sm_part8 4324-8388-1-sm_part9 4324-8388-1-sm_part10 471 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (3). 2017. 471-487 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.3.6 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl noticing grammar in l2 writing and problem-solving strategies monika geist ludwig-maximilians university, munich, germany monika.geist@lmu.de abstract noticing plays an important role for second language acquisition. since the formulation of the output hypothesis (swain, 1985), it has been proven that producing output can lead to noticing. studies on noticing have revealed little focus on grammar, and an in-depth investigation of grammar noticing has not been conducted so far. studies into problemsolving strategies applied to resolve noticing in writing have provided differing classifications. the current study investigates the noticing of ten young learners (15 to 16 years) of l2 english while performing a writing task, with a special focus on grammar. the problem-solving strategies these learners applied are analyzed. with regard to the linguistic areas, results suggest that verb forms, especially the use of modals, and the choice of prepositions, are the main issues encountered in morphology. in syntax, learners mainly dealt with the length of sentences and the ways of connecting clauses. learners relied on their intuition and existing knowledge, common sense and rephrasing as grammar problem-solving strategies. these results open a new area of study into noticing grammar and suggest some implications for teaching. keywords: l2 writing; noticing; output; problem-solving strategies; grammar monika geist 472 1. introduction since the 1980s and early 1990s, the concept of noticing linguistic features in second language (l2) input and output has been investigated by a number of researchers (for a summary concerning noticing the gap while writing, see williams, 2012). due to its potential to facilitate second language acquisition (sla), noticing and related concepts have found their way into sla studies as well as pedagogically oriented research. the nature of noticing as well as possible ways to promote noticing l2 features have been investigated (e.g., hanaoka, 2007; qi & lapkin, 2001; williams, 2001). the studies so far have revealed a strong focus on lexical issues and much less focus on morphosyntactical features of the l2 (e.g., hanaoka & izumi, 2012; williams, 1999). encountering a linguistic problem while producing l2 output may stimulate noticing when the learner is supplied with the respective l2 input (e.g., qi & lapkin, 2001). one of the possibilities to generate input is using problem-solving strategies such as dictionary search. other problem-solving strategies which do not require external input are also available to learners. so far, not many studies have investigated noticing in l2 writing in connection with the application of problem-solving strategies. the current study has set out to analyze the linguistic problems learners encounter while producing a text in their l2 english and the problem-solving strategies they use in order to deal with their problems. the focus in the present study is on morphosyntactic issues which have so far received little attention in related research. an in-depth qualitative analysis of the nature of learners’ focus on grammar is provided in a small-scale study with ten german teenage learners of english. 2. noticing and related concepts learners’ ability to reflect upon language and their own language use has been discussed and investigated using different concepts such as language and metalinguistic awareness, noticing, or learner-initiated focus on form. the concept of noticing dates back to schmidt (1990), who pointed out the role of noticing in second language (l2) input for second language acquisition. swain (1985) formulated the output hypothesis in which she states that noticing can also happen when learners produce output, which indicates that output also has a noticing/triggering function (see also izumi & bigelow, 2000, p. 244). according to the output hypothesis, noticing in output production can be triggered by external feedback (coming from an interlocutor) or internal feedback (initiated by the learners themselves). as a reaction to noticing, learners analyze the problem and either come up with a solution which leads to modified output, or they turn noticing grammar in l2 writing and problem-solving strategies 473 to additional input in order to find a solution to their problem. a number of studies have been conducted which have attempted to verify the output hypothesis by testing the effect of noticing in output on second language acquisition (adams, 2003; hanaoka, 2007; izumi, 2002; izumi & bigelow, 2000; izumi, bigelow, fujiwara, & fearnow, 1999; uggen, 2012). although much research still has to be done to prove the hypothesis that noticing in the output leads to acquisition, the research conducted so far has at least confirmed that noticing can facilitate the process of second language acquisition (williams, 2012). this insight stresses the importance of investigating the nature of noticing in producing l2 output. in a large body of research on noticing in l2 writing, the output hypothesis is tested by using external corrective feedback as linguistic input and investigating the learners’ reaction to it. the point of interest is whether learners will notice the gap between their own formulations and some kind of input or feedback (implicit or explicit), be it error correction (ellis, sheen, murakami, & takashima, 2008; heift & rimrott, 2008; varnosfadrani & basturkmen, 2009), a native speaker reformulation of the learner text (adams, 2003; lázaro ibarolla, 2009; qi & lapkin, 2001), or a text written by a native speaker of the target language on the same topic, but independently of the learner text (hanaoka, 2007), and how this noticing will influence subsequent output and language acquisition. another approach to investigating noticing after output production is presenting learners with input in the form of a reading text containing a certain target structure (uggen, 2012). the possibility of consulting reference materials to resolve linguistic problems is mentioned by williams (2012), but research so far has not investigated this option. the present study attempts to fill this gap by having learners deal with their noticing in the process of writing without teacher intervention and by using problem-solving strategies to generate additional linguistic input, including external resources such as dictionaries and the internet. a pedagogical approach related to the notion of noticing and language awareness is focus on form (e.g., doughty & williams, 1998), which is investigated as teacher-initiated and learner-initiated focus on form. studies into learner-initiated focus on form in communicative tasks and its possible effects on sla were conducted by williams (1999, 2001). williams (1999) analyzed the linguistic focus of learner-initiated attention to form (lexis or grammar), the ways learners draw attention to form, the activity types during which learners attend to form, and the influence of proficiency on learner-initiated focus on form. williams (2001) investigated the effectiveness of spontaneous attention to form by using tailored tests and spontaneous production. in addition, she compared the effects of learnerinitiated and teacher-initiated attention to form. various methodologies have been used to measure noticing or linguistic awareness. in quasi-experimental studies with a pretest-posttest design, quantitative monika geist 474 measures such as grammaticality judgments or correction tasks are used (e.g., ammar, lightbown, & spada, 2010; masny, 1997). more qualitative and descriptive measures include think-aloud protocols while conducting a task (armengol & cots, 2009; swain & lapkin, 1995), recorded interaction (kiely, 2009; kormos, 1999), learners’ written notes about noticing (edstrom, 2006; hanaoka, 2007), or qualitative or retrospective interviews (dégi, 2010). each of these methods has its strengths and drawbacks concerning the completeness and quality of the collected data (for some discussion, see bowles, 2010; hanaoka, 2007). noticing and related concepts are often operationalized as language related episodes (lres) (see, e.g., qi & lapkin, 2001; shekary & tahririan, 2006; swain & lapkin, 1995). swain and lapkin (1995, p. 378) identify a language related episode as “any segment of the protocol in which a learner either spoke about a language problem he/she encountered while writing and solved it either correctly . . . or incorrectly . . ., or simply solved it (again, either correctly or incorrectly) without having explicitly identified it as a problem.” some studies use different terminology such as, for example, hypothesis-testing episodes (shehadeh, 2003), form-focused episodes (zhao & bitchener, 2007) and awareness episodes (armengol & cots, 2009). the classifications of lres offered by the studies strongly differ, ranging from a distinction between form, lexical and discourse lres (qi & lapkin, 2001) to various differentiations of linguistic levels such as orthography, punctuation, morphology, and so on (e.g., armengol & cots, 2009; whalen & ménard, 1995). 3. noticing grammar studies into noticing linguistic features in the output so far have revealed that learners mostly focus on lexical and other surface levels of linguistic processing, with little focus on grammar (hanaoka & izumi, 2012; qi & lapkin, 2001; swain & lapkin, 1995; whalen & ménard, 1995; williams, 1999). they also suggest that with increasing proficiency, the frequency of morphosyntactic lres increases (williams, 1999). an in-depth analysis of which grammar-related features learners spontaneously attend to has not been conducted so far. the current study aims to offer some insights into the nature and quality of morphosyntactic lres and shed light on the problem-solving strategies learners employ to resolve these lres in the process of writing. in order to investigate noticing grammar forms by learners, communicative tasks such as the dictogloss are used to push the learners towards the use of a specific grammatical item (nassaji & fotos, 2004). the focus of studies into noticing grammar or grammar teaching is often on a discrete grammar point such as conditionals, past tense, questions, the plural, or the use of articles (e.g., izumi & bigelow, 2000; mackey, 2006; song & suh, 2008). the interest of the noticing grammar in l2 writing and problem-solving strategies 475 current study was to find out which grammatical features learners notice if they are confronted with a spontaneous written production task without selecting an explicit target form. thus, it is possible to see which forms learners actually notice, and these can be compared with the forms used in studies on grammar. 4. problem-solving strategies strategies have been classified in various ways in l2 research. cohen (1996, p. 2) distinguishes between language learning and language use strategies. in contrast to language learning strategies, language use strategies do not have learning as their primary goal, but they can still lead to learning. in the area of spoken language use or communication strategies, reduction and achievement strategies are distinguished (færch & kasper, 1983). when using reduction strategies, a learner changes the communicative goal (functional reduction) or the structure of the utterance (formal reduction) in order to avoid the problematic linguistic feature. when using achievement strategies, learners solve their problems by expanding their communicative resources (færch & kasper, 1983, p. 45). a similar distinction is provided by uzawa and cumming (1989) for writing, who distinguish between keep-up-the-standard strategies (as compared to l1 writing) and lower-the-standard-strategies. to my knowledge, there have been two attempts to qualitatively classify problem-solving strategies used by l2 writers. cumming (1989) distinguishes between knowledge-telling, which does not involve any problem-solving processes, and heuristic search strategies, which are applied when a problem has been encountered by the learner. the heuristic search strategies are further divided into the following strategies: engaging a search routine; directed translation or codeswitching; generating and assessing alternatives; assessing in relation to a criterion, standard, explanation, or rule; relating parts to whole; and setting or adhering to a goal. swain and lapkin (1995) identified the following problem-solving behaviors in their qualitative study of young l2 writers: sounds right/doesn’t sound right; makes sense/doesn’t make sense; lexical search (via l2); lexical search (via l1 or both l1 and l2); translation (phrase or greater); and applying a grammatical rule. some of the strategies identified in the two studies correspond to each other, but the differences in the classification, in the terminology as well as the fact that there are just two studies of this sort, suggest that some further research into the use of strategies in the l2 writing process is needed. the current study is an attempt to connect the above-mentioned areas of research, investigating grammar noticing in writing and, at the same time, linking it with the problem-solving strategies learners apply to resolve their problems. monika geist 476 5. research questions the aim of this study is to offer a qualitative investigation of how learners reflect on grammatical phenomena when asked to compose a text. through an indepth analysis of learner-initiated noticing in a writing task with a given topic, it can be seen which phenomena are noticed by the learners. the strategies learners use to deal with their grammar-related queries are investigated to see how they deal with their problems if there is no intervention, but sufficient linguistic resources (i.e., dictionaries, internet access) are available. the analysis is based on the following two research questions: 1. which grammar-related features do young (15to 16-year-old) l2 learners notice when writing in english? 2. which problem-solving strategies do young (15to 16-year-old) l2 learners of english use to deal with their grammar-related noticing in english? 6. research design 6.1. participants the participants were ten 15to 16-year-old learners of english at german schools who all shared german as their mother tongue. two of the participants were growing up bilingually (german plus another language) and the number of foreign languages learned ranged from two to five. most of the participants attended german secondary school (called gymnasium),1 and two of them the german realschule.2 the participants’ grades in english ranged from 1 to 4 (1 being the best grade, 6 the worst). considering the expected proficiency level in this age group at german schools, the learners were at the b1 level of the common european framework of reference for languages (council of europe, 2001). there were five male and five female participants. the objective of the research study was explained to all participants and their parents, and they were asked to sign an informed consent form. 6.2. think-aloud protocols and stimulated recall interviews an individual data collection session was conducted with each participant. in order to acquire rich data on noticing in the process of writing and problem-solving 1 a type of school which covers school grades 5 to 12 and ends with a maturity examination which enables a person to start university studies. 2 a type of school which covers school grades 5 to 10 and ends with a school leaving certificate which enables a person to take up vocational education. noticing grammar in l2 writing and problem-solving strategies 477 strategies, a combination of two data collection methods was used. first, the participants were asked to think aloud while composing a paragraph on the following topic: “if you could restrict the school subjects to two, which would you choose and why?” they were allowed to choose the language in which they verbalized or to switch between the two languages. they were provided with bilingual and monolingual dictionaries as well as a computer with internet access to use for any type of query. there was no time limit to the tasks and the participants were asked to write a paragraph which they would also hand in at school for grading. the think-aloud session was recorded on video which captured the task sheet. the video recording allowed the researcher to determine whether the participants were only verbalizing or also writing at the same time, and whether they were writing without verbalizing. any nonverbal behavior which was not captured on the video recording (this was mainly dictionary and internet search and the retrieved results) was noted by the researcher and later included in the transcripts. the think-aloud protocols were chosen among the methods mentioned above because they have been the most widely used method to capture learners’ mental processes (uggen, 2012, p. 509). as recommended by ericsson and simon (1993), the concurrent thinkaloud protocols were combined with retrospective reports to counter the issue of incompleteness of the reports. for this reason, a stimulated recall interview took place immediately after the think-aloud session in which the video recording of the think-aloud session was used as a stimulus. the researcher stopped the video at points where the participant stopped verbalizing (suggesting that some thinking took place at this point which could be recalled and verbalized in the stimulated recall interview) and at points where some noticing was obvious, but it was not clear what was noticed and how the participant arrived at a specific decision. the participant was then asked to recall and verbalize their thoughts at that moment of the recording. the participants were also explicitly allowed to stop the recording at any time and comment on their thoughts. the stimulated recall interviews took place in german and they were audio-recorded. as there was no time limit set for the writing task to account for the fact that thinking aloud may slow down the execution of a task (bowles, 2010), the duration of each session varied between 24 and 101 minutes (with 7 to 34 minutes for writing and 16 to 67 minutes for the stimulated recall interview), depending on the time the participants needed for writing. 6.3. transcription and coding the data was transcribed based on the voice transcription conventions (voice project, 2007) which were adapted according to the requirements posed by the monika geist 478 particular types of data. the coding procedure roughly corresponds to the grounded theory coding (glaser & strauss, 1967) and was conducted according to the recommendations specified by kelle and kluge (2010). starting with open, data-driven coding, a system of categories was developed and a hierarchy created. the developed categories were compared with existing research and adapted to it to ensure comparability. in the think-aloud protocols, the coding unit was a language related episode (lre) in line with most of the previous studies (see above). the stimulated recall interviews did not receive their own codings but served to identify the lre types and problem-solving strategies in the think-aloud protocols. 7. results 7.1. grammar lres this section presents results with regard to research question 1 (which grammar-related features do young [15 to 16-year-old] l2 learners notice when writing in english?). among the lres identified in the think-aloud protocols, morphological and syntactical lres were selected for the analysis of grammar-related lres, corresponding to the grammar or morphosyntactic episodes mentioned in the existing literature (hanaoka, 2007; swain & lapkin, 1995; williams, 1999). pure lexical and spelling lres were not considered as they involve only word choice (not word forms) decisions and lres above the sentence level were also excluded due to the missing link to what is commonly subsumed under the term grammar. of the 188 lres produced by the ten participants, the majority (119) were related to lexis whereas only 36 were related to grammar. morphological lres were defined as lres in which the participant looks for the right form of a word. the following example from a think-aloud protocol illustrates a morphological lre: which is spoken spoke (.) spoken all over the world (.) speaken nein spoken english translation: which is spoken spoke (.) spoken all over the world (.) speaken no spoken there were altogether twelve morphological lres in the whole data set. these were produced by five of the ten participants of the study, with two participants (m7 and f10) producing four morphological lres each. the word classes which were the focus of the morphological lres were verbs, nouns, prepositions, word class choice and one article. a list of the morphological lres including precise information about the focus is shown in table 1. as evident from the table, the forms and uses of modal verbs occurred three times. other lres which dealt with verbs concerned tense choice and the correct form of a past participle. prepositions used together with specific nouns also were a matter of interest. noticing grammar in l2 writing and problem-solving strategies 479 table 1 focus of morphological lres and the strategies used to resolve them broad focus narrow focus example/s from ta protocols problem-solving strategies verb forms (5) modality/modals (3) can vs. could is vs. would be alternatives to the use of can after infinitive particle to reasoning (3) and/or applying rules/explicit knowledge (3) re-phrasing (avoidance strategy) (1) tense choice (1) use of past simple for finished events (we learned) past participle (1) past participle of speak prepositions (3) prepositions needed with school, street, shower intuition or automatic application of knowledge (2) re-phrasing (avoidance strategy) (1) nouns (2) plural/singular choice (1) one of the most important + plural or singular reasoning (1) with applying rules/explicit knowledge (1) plural/singular form (1) spelling of ability (confused by plural abilities) word class choice (1) adjective vs. adverb (1) normal lesson vs. normally lesson intuition (1) article choice (1) indefinite a vs. an intuition (1) note. the strategies relate to the broad focus of the lres, not to the narrow focus or specific examples. the number of occurrences is shown in brackets. syntactical lres were defined as questions of word order, sentence length, and punctuation. the following example from a think-aloud protocol illustrates a syntactical lre: because i think that it’s er late (.) necessary later (.) i think it’s (2) later necessary erm (1) i think that it’s (5) later necessary (.) necessary later (4) because i think that it’s necessa(.) later {adds “later” between “it’s” and “necessary” } in the data set, 24 syntactical lres were identified. most participants produced between one and four syntactical lres, but participant f10 produced eight syntactical lres. the focus of the syntactical lres was mainly on sentence length and connecting clauses. some of these issues were also combined in one lre (e.g., a learner decided to make his or her sentence longer, which is why he encountered the issue of how to link the new clause to the existing one). in addition, three lres were concerned with word order and four lres with other syntactical issues. for an overview, see table 2. monika geist 480 table 2 focus of syntactical lres and the strategies used to resolve them broad focus narrow focus example/s from ta protocols problem-solving strategies sentence length (9) avoiding long sentences (5) splitting a complex sentence into two separate sentences re-phrasing (7) applying rules/explicit knowledge (2) creating long sentences (4) adding a new clause to a sentence which was already finished (connecting it with because or and) connecting clauses (7) choosing conjunction or punctuation (5) deciding between using a comma, using a conjunction, finishing a sentence because not at the sentence beginning re-phrasing (3) re-phrasing (avoidance strategy) (2) applying rules/explicit knowledge (1) with reasoning (1) intuition/automatic application of knowledge (1) choice finite vs. non-finite construction (2) . . . we learned much about german history and this is one of the most important things . . . vs. . . . we learned much about german history, one of the most important things . . . spanish is a language which is spoken . . . vs. spanish is a language spoken . . . word order (3) position of adverbs (1) it’s necessary later vs. it’s later necessary intuition (2) re-phrasing (avoidance strategy) (1) phrasal verb + object (1) carry out experiments vs. carry experiments out position numeral and possessive pronoun (1) my two favorite subjects vs. my favorite two subjects adapting sentence structure to the lexis used (1) using the word duty and building the sentence around it (choosing another word would have led to changing the whole sentence) intuition (1) checking reference of a pronoun (1) i also don’t write much tests and they are not always so boring. the learner is aware that they could be wrongly related to tests which was not intended re-phrasing (specifying what is meant by they) (1) checking the sentence flow (1) missing a word for a sentence to sound good intuition (adding the filler even) (1) clause structure (1) repeating subject in the second clause of a sentence reasoning (1) note. the strategies relate to the broad focus of the lres, not to the narrow focus or specific examples. the number of occurrences is shown in brackets. 7.2. problem-solving strategies this section presents results with regard to research question 2 (which problem-solving strategies do young [15 to 16-year-old] l2 learners of english use to deal with their grammar-related noticing in english?). the strategies used to resolve morphological lres are listed in table 1. for the lres related to verb forms and nouns, reasoning was the preferred strategy in which learners used their common sense, background knowledge and their intended message to decide about the solution. alternatively, or in addition to reasoning, the learners applied noticing grammar in l2 writing and problem-solving strategies 481 their explicit knowledge of rules, for example the knowledge of the infinitive, past, and past participle in verbs which are often learned together, or the knowledge about when a specific tense or verb form should be used. the questions about prepositions were solved either intuitively or the prepositional phrase was avoided and an alternative formulation was chosen (instead of opting for one out of several possible prepositions used with the word shower, the learner opted for the formulation take a shower). the strategies used to resolve syntactical lres are listed in table 2. the main strategy used to solve issues of sentence length was rephrasing which, in these specific cases, meant that the learner either finished a sentence and started a new one instead of using a conjunction to connect a new clause, or that they added a new clause to a sentence which they originally intended to finish. in one case, a learner applied explicit knowledge stating that long sentences are criticized at school. the rephrasing strategy was used in two different ways to deal with connecting clauses. the first way corresponds to the rephrasing strategy as used for the issues of sentence length. the second way is using rephrasing as functional reduction strategy, hereby changing the content of the utterance. for example, one participant wanted to say that it is important to read books, especially german literature, but he was not able to put all the information into one sentence. as a solution, he decided to leave out the information about german literature, finished the sentence and mentioned the skipped information later in his text. applying a rule (e.g., that the word because should not be used at the beginning of a sentence) was another problemsolving strategy used to solve issues of connecting clauses. two questions of word order were solved intuitively, one by using rephrasing as a functional reduction strategy (writing my favorite subjects and leaving out the numeral two, because the participant was not sure about its position in the sentence). 8. discussion 8.1. the role of noticing in producing l2 output the finding that lexical issues are the most frequent ones corresponds to previous findings (swain & lapkin, 1995; whalen & ménard, 1995; williams, 1999). however, as also noted in previous studies, noticing in other areas including grammar does take place. based on the limited data gathered in the current study, it seems that learners are concerned more about syntax than about morphology. in addition, all learners encountered syntactical issues whereas just five learners encountered issues of morphology. a reason for this difference may lie in individual learner differences (e.g., their focus on fluency, accuracy or complexity, or their communicative confidence) which could be an area of future research. monika geist 482 the current study has demonstrated the issues which were relevant to learners when they composed in l2 english. in the area of morphology, the choice of correct verb forms was an issue which occurred five times (out of twelve), with the main focus on the use of modal verbs. interestingly, the choice of a correct tense was an issue that occurred just once in the whole data set. there are two possible reasons for this finding: (1) the task prompted the learners to use mostly the present simple tense or modals (with sentences such as “i would choose subject xy, because it is easy and i could concentrate on my hobbies”); (2) the learners have mastered the tenses to an extent which they perceive as sufficient, which enabled them to notice other issues such as the forms and meanings of modals. another issue was the choice of the correct preposition. even though it did not occur very often (three times in the whole data set), the fact that different participants encountered this issue speaks to its relevance. in two cases, the learners decided intuitively which preposition to use. in one case, the learner decided to choose a different phrasing in order to avoid using a preposition altogether. as the learners had dictionaries and the internet at their disposal, it is notable that they did not use them to clarify their problems, even though there was no time limit to the task. one reason can be that they were very confident about the solution they had come up with and another can be that the correct preposition was not so relevant for them. the prevailing focus of syntactical lres was on sentence length and the ways clauses can be connected. basically, the learners who encountered these issues decided to use either a comma or the conjunctions and, but and because to connect clauses. two participants decided to use a non-finite construction instead of a finite one. the lres the participants encountered did not prompt them to look for other possible ways to connect clauses. comparing the findings with the foci of the studies into grammar noticing reveals that there was not much correspondence between the issues learners in this study spontaneously focused on while writing and the foci selected in studies into grammar noticing and into teaching grammar such as the use of articles (bitchener, 2008; ellis et al., 2008), questions, plurals, or past tense forms (mackey, 2006). the only slight correspondence is the use of modals by the learners in this study and the use of conditionals in some studies (izumi & bigelow, 2000; song & suh, 2008). regarding the use of problem-solving strategies, the data revealed that learners did not turn to additional resources to deal with their grammar lres even though these would have been available and there was no time limit. rather, they solved their problems intuitively, rephrased their utterances, or applied logical reasoning. the reason why grammar-related lres are solved using the learner’s own resources may lie in time management (finding a solution for a grammar issue may take longer than for a lexical issue), or in previous instruction (it cannot be excluded that the main focus in teaching how to use a dictionary is on finding single words). noticing grammar in l2 writing and problem-solving strategies 483 explicit knowledge was used seven times to find a solution. this provides insights into some of the rules apparently taught at school, such as “do not use because at the beginning of a sentence” or “avoid long sentences.” in morphological as well as in syntactical lres, rephrasing occurred as avoidance strategy. in morphological lres, it could be specified as formal reduction strategy where the content is kept, but a different formulation is chosen. in syntactical lres, it was the functional reduction strategy where the originally planned utterance was not put on paper. however, the intended message was kept for later and used in a different sentence. a comparison to the strategies identified by cumming (1989), and swain and lapkin (1995) reveals that using intuition and applying rules occurred in the current study as well as in the two previous studies on problem-solving strategies in writing. rephrasing and reasoning are strategies unique to the current study. 8.2. limitations even though the current study has been able to offer some new insights into grammar-related noticing and problem-solving strategies, it has got a number of limitations. first, the number of participants was too low to allow for any generalizations. also the number of grammar-related lres was very small due to the number of participants and due to the fact that the majority of the lres were lexical. thus, the detailed analysis only revealed tentative tendencies regarding the focus of grammar-related lres and the problem-solving strategies. in addition, the methodology does not capture all mental processes and even though care was taken to elicit as much data as possible, some relevant lres may have been missed due to them not being verbalized. although caution was taken in the stimulated recall interviews to ask only about the thoughts at the time of writing, it cannot be ruled out completely that the participants also reported some new thoughts which only occurred to them during the stimulated recall interview and not during the writing process. 9. conclusions, further research and possible implications for instruction the current study has been able to open a small window onto the grammar focus of 15to 16-year-old writers. it has revealed linguistic areas these learners were concerned with when writing in l2 english and shown that some of these areas are not yet represented in research on grammar noticing and teaching. the analysis of problem-solving strategies has shown that these learners relied mainly on their own resources when trying to resolve their grammar-related problems, not using the external resources available. the strategies identified in this study complement the strategies identified in the previous studies. monika geist 484 the qualitative character of the current study with a low number of participants suggests that further research is needed to identify which grammatical features learners notice in a writing task. in addition, it would be interesting to see whether teaching the issues which the learners have encountered would bring about any change in their noticing and in their writing. in addition, some phenomena may be grounded in individual learner differences (for a study into the link between self-correction behaviors in speaking and individual learner differences, see kormos, 1999). kormos (2012) stresses the importance of investigating the role of individual differences in l2 writing. therefore, further research is needed to see how individual learner differences influence noticing and self-correction behavior in writing. in instruction, finding out which problems learners are concerned with in written language production may be a first step towards instruction which considers the learners’ developmental stage (see the processability theory by pienemann, 1998) and therefore is likely to be fruitful. as pointed out by williams (2012), the relatively new approach of writing to learn looks at l2 writing as a possible instrument for l2 development. a grammar teaching approach which takes the learners’ written output as the starting point for explaining grammar is the method of intelligent guessing (mig) proposed by angelovska and hahn (2014). focusing on the problems learners notice while writing, the teacher may provide them with strategies to deal with these problems, such as more sophisticated ways of connecting sentences or explicit instruction in the use of modals. as noted above, further 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(2007). incidental focus on form in teacher-learner and learner-learner interactions. system, 35(4), 431-447. 43 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (1). 2016. 43-63 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.1.3 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl deconstructing the i and sla in isla: one curricular approach ronald p. leow georgetown university, washington, dc, usa leowr@georgetown.edu luis cerezo american university, washington, dc, usa luis.cerezo@american.edu abstract instructed second language acquisition (isla) has been referenced in the larger field of the sla literature for over two and a half decades. currently, there are several theoretical underpinnings accounting for processes assumed to play a role in isla and quite an impressive number of studies have empirically addressed some aspect(s) of isla. recently, a lengthy and relatively cohesive treatise of this substrand of sla research in relation to both theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical perspectives has been published in two books (cf. leow, 2015a; loewen, 2015), and a new model of the l2 learning process in isla has been proposed (leow, 2015a). these publications are timely and important given that the concept of isla not only needs to be clearly defined but also situated contextually. to this end, this article (a) revisits current definitions of isla in the sla literature with the aim of identifying specific features of isla that underlie such definitions, (b) deconstructs isla by probing deeper into what comprises the terms instructed and sla in isla, (c) provides a brief summary of the cognitive processes and variables postulated by the theoretical underpinnings of isla and pertinent empirical research, (d) recommends that isla be observed from one curricular approach together with its empirical and pedagogical ramifications, and (e) provides some measure of direction future isla research may follow. keywords: cognitive processes; learning; acquisition; concurrent procedures; language curriculum; call ronald p. leow, luis cerezo 44 1. introduction the phrase instructed second language acquisition (isla) has been around for over two and a half decades and has been typically subsumed within the field of sla, in itself a subdisciple of the general area of applied linguistics. recently, a lengthy and relatively cohesive treatise of this substrand of sla research in relation to both theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical perspectives has been published in two books (cf. leow, 2015a; loewen, 2015), and a new model of the l2 learning process in isla has been proposed (leow, 2015a). in addition, while current definitions (e.g., housen & pierrard, 2005; loewen, 2015) have underscored two major features of isla that focus on the learning mechanisms and the instructional manipulations of these mechanisms or learning conditions to promote l2 development, the concept of isla may also need to address the broader picture in which isla lies, that is, the language curriculum, and whether such scholarly inquiries have pedagogical ramifications for the formal l2 environment. to address these issues, this article takes a critical look at the current strand of isla research within the broader field of sla by (a) revisiting current definitions of isla in the sla literature with the aim of identifying specific features of isla that underlie such definitions, (b) deconstructing isla by probing deeper into what comprises the terms instructed and sla in isla, (c) providing a brief summary of the cognitive processes and variables postulated by the theoretical underpinnings of isla and pertinent empirical research, (d) recommending that isla be observed from one curricular approach together with its empirical and pedagogical ramifications, and (e) providing some measure of direction future isla research may follow. 2. definitions of isla early definitions of isla, viewed from a cognitive perspective, provided a fairly general scope of isla as “research that concentrates on how [emphasis added] classroom [emphasis original] second language acquisition takes place” (r. ellis, 1990, p. vii) with the role of instruction as an intervention into the l2 learning process (e.g., r. ellis, 2005). however, more recent definitions reflect a more purposeful role on the part of the instructor or via instructional materials (e.g., loewen, 2013) and this includes, especially from an empirical perspective, “any systematic attempt to enable or facilitate language learning by manipulating the mechanisms of learning and/or the conditions under which these occur” (e.g., housen & pierrard, 2005, p. 2; see also loewen, 2015). indeed, loewen (2015) points out that, overall, little effort has been expended in previous literature to define and identify the specific characteristics that embody what comprises isla. to this end, he encompasses previous definitions in his broader definition of isla as deconstructing the i and sla in isla: one curricular approach 45 a theoretically and empirically based field of academic inquiry that aims to understand how (our italics) the systematic manipulation of the mechanisms of learning and/or the conditions under which they occur enable or facilitate the development and acquisition of a language other than one’s own. (p. 2) what appear to underscore all these definitions are (a) the focus on the “mechanisms of learning” (cognitive processes) employed in an instructed setting, that is, how l2 learners process l2 data in this setting, and (b) the question whether such processes can be manipulated by instructional intervention with the assumption that superior or faster l2 development will result. however, missing from all these definitions are two additional important features, namely, (a) the broader picture in which isla lies, that is, the language curriculum, and (b) whether such scholarly inquiries do hold pedagogical implications, ideally robust, for the formal l2 environment. to address these current issues, it is necessary to deconstruct the i and sla in isla by identifying minimally three aspects that may be useful in categorizing current and future research within this strand of academic inquiry: (a) the i or the where (context), (b) the sla or the how (theoretical perspectives on learner processes) and, based on these two aspects, (c) one curricular approach to isla together with its empirical and pedagogical ramifications. 3. the i (instructed) or the where (context) isla is viewed as a substrand within the sla field of research and the obvious distinction between isla and sla lies primarily in whether the process of l2 learning, often conflated with that of acquisition, is instructed or uninstructed. the term instructed may be a misnomer given that it denotes some form of instruction by someone (usually an instructor or researcher) whereas isla also refers to exposure to some kind of external manipulation of the l2 data (e.g., textual enhancement, computerized feedback, etc.) or learning conditions that do not actually involve the presence of the instructor. perhaps exposure is a more appropriate term to use, given that, viewed from a psycholinguistic perspective, “learners may be exposed to, and not necessarily instructed on, grammatical information with the expectation that they will somehow ‘attend to,’ ‘notice,’ ‘take in,’ or ‘detect’ targeted l2 forms or structures during exposure” (leow, 1998, p. 63). what is undeniable is that the typical context in which isla research is perceived to be situated is the formal l2 environment (classroom) taught by an instructor, be it face-to-face (ftf), hybrid or online (via the internet). this may explain r. ellis’s (1990) bolding of the word classroom in his early definition in an effort to differentiate this context as opposed to, for example, immersion, study abroad, or naturalistic settings. however, the use of technology over the ronald p. leow, luis cerezo 46 last decade has made huge inroads into the way instruction or exposure is provided in language curricula (e.g., computer-assisted language learning or call). this is clearly evident in the increasing number of students in hybrid/blended courses (allen, seaman, & garrett, 2007) and online learning courses (allen & seaman, 2014). given this broader scope of contexts for language instruction or exposure, loewen (2015) suggests that instead of viewing isla as situated in the classroom setting, it should be contextually linked to two prerequisites or conditions, namely, instruction and acquisition, or what he calls “attempted acquisition.” more specifically, this suggestion replaces any emphasis on the location of instruction and places it more on the manipulation of the l2 learning process and/or the conditions under which such learning takes place (cf. also housen & pierrard, 2005). to this end, isla research may incorporate learners who, according to loewen (2015), “are participating in study abroad programs or are using textbooks or computer-assisted language learning materials for self-selected, individual study program” (p. 4). however, it may be necessary to take a closer look at these and other nonclassroom environments in relation to the criteria of purposeful external manipulation of the l2 data, learning conditions and/or focus on the cognitive processes employed by l2 learners as they process the instructed l2. one nonclassroom context that easily fits within definitional isla research in relation to how l2 learners process the l2 and external material manipulation by the researcher or teacher is the use of technology to promote l2 learning or development, be it via call tasks or activities or manipulated synchronous computer-mediated communication (scmc) in which some target form or structure underlies the practice or communication being promoted. both strands of technology-based contexts are premised on the construct of minimal attention paid to target or manipulated data in the l2 that are designed to promote l2 development (see for example, baralt, 2013 for scmc and cerezo, caras, and leow, in press for call) and, especially in the case of several call tasks, to also elicit information on the role of learner cognitive processes employed during exposure (e.g., bowles, 2008; calderón, 2013; cerezo et al., in press; hsieh, moreno & leow, 2015; leow, 2001; rosa & leow, 2004; rosa & o’neill, 1999). on the other hand, there has been an explosion of studies addressing the use of various technology-based tasks or activities that include 3d gaming environments in which students enter the virtual world as avatars to interact in the l2 (e.g., liou, 2012; peterson, 2012) or play games (e.g., thorne, black, & sykes, 2009) and autonomous tele-collaboration in which students have technologybased access to l2 speakers (e.g., via skype or zoom) inside or outside the formal classroom setting (e.g., teletandem; telles, 2015). the theoretical underpinning of many of these studies appears to be noncognitive and socially oriented. for example, these studies typically situated themselves within the sociocultural deconstructing the i and sla in isla: one curricular approach 47 theory (lantoff & thorne, 2007) that views language as a socially mediated construct embedded in communication. however, given the open-endedness of these tasks, games, and interaction, there is no controlled instruction, exposure, or manipulated l2 input, and l2 development is, for the most part, anecdotally discussed based on selective participant samples but rarely addressed empirically. in other words, these studies do not report tangible evidence of whether such exposure to or interaction with the l2 or l1 speaker led to some beneficial gain in l2 development, and the autonomy and potential learning process do not fall under any aspect of the isla definitions. to this end, it is quite challenging to include these studies within the isla field of inquiry, as currently defined.1 in addition to the classroom setting, other contexts that may potentially fall within the research strand of isla have been proposed, namely, immersion and study abroad programs (collentine & freed, 2004; loewen, 2015). however, like the gaming and tele-collaboration contexts, whether isla research may be conducted within these settings will depend heavily on the degree of purposeful manipulation of specific target l2 items or learning conditions or even the learning process. the findings would contribute to a better understanding of robust learning within these contexts. as discussed above, simply allowing l2 learners to be exposed to the l2 without empirically manipulating the l2 data or learning condition in relation to l2 development or addressing learners’ cognitive processes employed during the learning process may not qualify for membership in the isla strand of research. to this end, the experimental designs to be employed in isla research need to include minimally methodological procedures to address the effects of intervention on l2 development and/or learners’ internal processes and their effects on or relationships with such development. 4. the sla in isla or the how: learning vs. acquisition if we are to view the formal l2 environment (ftf, hybrid/blended, or online) as the context for isla research, whether l2 learners acquire or learn the l2 needs to be seriously discussed. given that these two terms (and processes) have been conflated or used synonymously in the (i)sla literature, which may potentially shape one’s perception of the kind of processing that takes place in the isla context, it may be useful to revisit the period when these two terms became 1 one reviewer suggested that such exposure to the l2 can serve as a fluency building component of a given curriculum, a point well taken when viewed from a curricular perspective. from an isla research perspective, however, like study abroad and immersion programs, some purposeful manipulation of this kind of exposure and documentation of its promotion of l2 fluency is required given the open-endedness of these exposures or interactions. ronald p. leow, luis cerezo 48 prominently salient in the sla literature. krashen (1982) proposed his monitor model that was premised on child l1 acquisition and was the first theoretical underpinning in sla to raise the issue of the role played by the construct of consciousness (or awareness) in the l2 learning process. among his hypotheses was his acquisition-learning distinction in which he distinguished between acquiring (without consciousness) resulting in acquired/implicit knowledge and learning (with consciousness) resulting in learned/explicit knowledge. viewed from a processing perspective, acquisition is effortless or, as krashen (1982) put it, like “picking up” a language (p. 10) and occurs in an l1 environment in which exposure to and interaction with the l1 is prominent. krashen also argued that there was no interface (connection) between implicit (acquired) and explicit (learned) knowledge, which led to a discussion of whether there exists in isla a weak interface (e.g., n. ellis, 2005), a strong interface (e.g., dekeyser, 2007), or support for krashen’s noninterface position (paradis, 2009). dörnyei (2009), on the other hand, proposed moving away from whether krashen was right or wrong in making this distinction and focusing more on the mechanisms and processes that underlie learning. however, the key distinctions between acquisition and learning lie precisely in how l1 and l2 learners process the l1 and l2 data (e.g., depth of processing, level of awareness, cognitive effort) and where exposure to the l1 and l2 occurs, together with the amount of time (and, as an extension, the amount of target features) learners are exposed to and interacting with the l1 or l2. viewed from this processing perspective and the context in which l2 learners are typically exposed to and interact with the l2, two major distinctions between acquisition and learning are clearly based on type of processing (explicit vs. implicit) and type of context (naturalistic vs. formal environment). it appears to be more appropriate to employ the term learning when referring to the formal environment and acquisition for conditions in which the language is usually acquired such as naturalist settings and the more formal immersion and extended study abroad settings. more specifically, the typical formal setting situated within a language curriculum is designed to promote more explicit and intentional learning than implicit and incidental learning and acquisition. this does not negate any instance(s) of implicit or incidental learning taking place in the formal instructed setting but, as leow (2015a) cautions, this kind of processing depends heavily on many factors that include the provision of large amounts of exemplars in meaningful contexts and quite a long period of time to process, internalize the exemplars, and have the knowledge available for subsequent usage. (p. 244) based on the discussion above, it may be observed that instructed language learning (ill) provides a more precise description of what comprises isla. deconstructing the i and sla in isla: one curricular approach 49 to view the l2 learning process globally, let us now discuss a theoretical framework for the l2 learning process in isla followed by a summary of the cognitive processes and variables postulated by several theoretical underpinnings to account for this formal learning process. 5. a theoretical framework of the l2 learning process in isla a theoretical framework of the l2 learning process postulated for isla may be represented by both stages of processes and resultant products as exemplified in figure 1 (leow, 2015b, p. 49). in this framework, several stages are postulated to occur along the learning process that begins with exposure to the l2 (input), some of which is attended to and taken in by the learner (intake). a subset of this intake may be further processed and integrated as l2 knowledge into the internal system. such knowledge then becomes available for output production, which in itself is assumed to be representative of the l2 knowledge learned implicitly or explicitly. leow differentiates between learning as a process, which occurs internally at stages 1 (input processing), 3 (intake processing), and 5 (l2 knowledge/output processing), and learning as a product (what is learned), which is presented internally at stage 4 (l2 knowledge), and externally (output) as representative l2 knowledge, which may or may not reflect what is actually stored in learners’ developing l2 grammar. stage 2 represents intake as an initial product kept in working memory but has yet to be further processed and internalized or learned and may disappear from working memory if not further processed (cf. leow, 2012 for further elaboration on the concept of intake). input { > intake > internal system > } output stage 1 stage 2 stage 3 stage 4 stage 5 (product) (process) (product) (process) (product) (process) (product) (input) (input) (intake) (intake) (l2 knowledge) (l2 knowledge/ output) (representative l2 knowledge) figure 1 stages of the learning process in sla: of processes and products 6. theoretical underpinnings in isla the sla literature is littered with several theoretical underpinnings postulated to address the learning process (as in stages) or product (as in knowledge) from different perspectives (e.g., generative chomskyan linguistic, see carroll’s autonomous induction theory; social, see lantolf and thorne’s vygotskian sociocultural theory; cognitive neuroscience-based, see ullman’s declarative/procedural model of memory; psychology-based, see ellis’s associative-cognitive creed framework, pienemann’s processability theory, truscott and sharwood’s ronald p. leow, luis cerezo 50 mogul (modular online growth and use of language), and tomlin and villa’s cognitive science-based model of input processing). at the same time, there are several underpinnings that are more pedagogically based and are (a) premised on the role of cognitive processes (e.g., attention and/or awareness) such as gass’s (1997) model of sla, leow’s (2015a) model of the l2 learning process in isla, mclaughlin’s (1987) cognitive theory, robinson’s (1995) model of the relationship between attention and memory, schmidt’s (1990 and elsewhere) noticing hypothesis, swain’s (2005) output hypothesis, and vanpatten’s (2007) input processing theory or (b) associated with some form of instruction or exposure designed to promote the l2 development of procedural knowledge such as dekeyser’s (2007) skill acquisition theory. unlike the other theoretical underpinnings, skill acquisition theory skips the early stages of the learning process (input and intake processing) and targets the role of instruction in converting one type of knowledge (explicit or declarative) into another type of knowledge (implicit or procedural) through practice. this position, reflective of the strong interface position, is strongly rooted in cognitive psychology models of skill acquisition and in theories of controlled and automatic processing (e.g., shiffrin & schneider, 1977) and is best represented by anderson’s adaptive control of thought (act) model (updated in anderson, bothell, byrne, douglass, lebiere, & qin, 2004). a concise synopsis of the cognitive processes and variables postulated by these theoretical underpinnings to play important roles in the l2 learning process (from input to intake to output), based on leow (2015a), is presented in figure 2. if we look carefully at all these theoretical postulations concerning the stages of the learning process, it is evident that there is no shared perspective to account for the l2 learning process. however, we can easily identify the principal cognitive processes and variables shared by over half of the different theoretical underpinnings to account for the preliminary exposure to l2 input and learners’ eventual output. as can be seen, we have working memory, attention, awareness, depth or levels of processing, and prior knowledge. input output wm attention awareness levels of awareness levels of processing prior knowledge mclaughlin (1987) no yes no n/a yes *(yes) schmidt (1990) no yes yes yes (yes) no robinson (1995) yes yes yes yes yes yes gass (1997) (yes) yes yes (no) yes yes swain (2005) n/a yes yes no (yes) yes vanpatten (2007) yes yes yes no yes (yes) dekeyser (2007) n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a yes leow (2015) yes yes yes yes yes yes * = not clear figure 2 theory-based cognitive processes and variables important in the l2 learning process deconstructing the i and sla in isla: one curricular approach 51 leow’s (2015a) recent model of the l2 learning process in isla incorporates all of these processes and variables and provides a more fine-tuned perspective of the several stages postulated to occur throughout the entire l2 learning process. more importantly, while the model is theoretically derived from cognitive psychology, it is based on previous empirical studies that have explored l2 learners’ cognitive processes employed while exposed to or interacting with the l2. like vanpatten’s and gass’s models, leow posits three major processing stages, namely, the input processing stage, the intake processing stage, and the knowledge processing stage. the first stage (input processing) is largely dependent upon the level of attention (peripheral, selective, or focal) paid to some information by the learner, which may be accompanied by depth of processing, cognitive registration, and level of awareness.2 dependent upon these variables, intake may be categorized as either being attended intake (peripheral), detected intake (selective), or noticed intake (focal). according to leow, while both detected and noticed intake, and to a substantially lesser extent, attended intake, may be lodged in working memory and made available for subsequent recognition by l2 learners, they can all be discarded if not minimally processed further. the intake processing stage of his model underscores how l2 learners further process the preliminary intake and how such processing depends on depth of processing, potential levels of awareness, and activation of old or new prior knowledge. on the one hand, linguistic data may be processed with a low level of cognitive effort (e.g., data-driven processing, cf. robinson, 1995), which allows the data to be entered into learners’ l2 developing system encoded as nonsystemized chunks of language (cf. gass, 1997). subsequent exemplars not accompanied by higher levels of processing may follow this path forming a collection of encoded discrete data or entities lodged in learners’ l2 developing system. a low level of processing may potentially lead, if necessary, to implicit restructuring of subsequent l2 information and implicit systemized knowledge. on the other hand, with a higher depth of processing, such as consciously encoding and decoding the linguistic information and conceptually-driven processing (e.g., activation of prior knowledge), learning may be accompanied by 2 depth of processing is defined as “the relative amount of cognitive effort, level of analysis, elaboration of intake together with the usage of prior knowledge, hypothesis testing and rule formation employed in decoding and encoding some grammatical or lexical item in the input” (leow, 2015a, p. 204). cognitive registration is the detection of some stimuli in the input. “detection is the process that selects, or engages, a particular or specific bit of information” (tomlin & villa, 1994, p. 192). awareness is “a particular state of mind in which an individual has undergone a specific subjective experience of some cognitive content or external stimulus” (tomlin & villa, 1994, p. 193). ronald p. leow, luis cerezo 52 higher levels of awareness thus facilitating the potential entry and incorporation of intake into the learner’s systemized grammatical system. the combination of prior knowledge activation, depth of processing, and potentially higher levels of awareness allows the linguistic data to be explicitly restructured if necessary and stored as explicit systemized knowledge. what is stored in the l2 developing system, then, are two kinds of product (stored linguistic knowledge) of what has been processed up to this point in the learning process, namely, unsystemized (discrete linguistic data) and systemized (internalized or learned) data. this separation of internalized data in the system is reminiscent of gass’s (1997) postulation and accounts for item versus system learning. accuracy of the product is not of importance at this point given that one’s knowledge may be accurate or inaccurate. the third and final process occurs at stage 5 between the l2 developing system and what is produced by the learner (knowledge processing such as assigning syntactic and morpho-phonological features to the l2 in oral production, monitoring production in relation to learned grammar, etc.). depth of processing and potential level of awareness may also play a role at this stage together with the ability to activate (appropriate) knowledge. unlike gass, leow views this stage as a part of the learning process given that at this stage learners monitor their own output or use potential feedback based on what they have just produced as confirmation or disconfirmation of their l2 output.3 dependent upon depth of processing or level of awareness, they may reinforce their current knowledge or restructure their current interlanguage. leow (2015a), who situates isla within the l2 language curriculum, suggests that “sla research that seeks to probe into learner cognition, then, needs to focus on the identification and explanation of the cognitive processes employed by l2 learners as they learn the l2 in these two settings” (p. 2).4 7. empirical research on l2 cognitive processes many studies have addressed l2 learners’ cognitive processes as they interacted with l2 data but have used research designs that only permit assumptions or 3 one reviewer questioned whether practice to promote l2 development forms part of this model at the knowledge processing stage. the answer is affirmative given the active role of the learner and the potential for proceduralization of declarative or explicit knowledge through practice. 4 the two settings refer to either one in which the l2 is either viewed as a foreign language (as in english speakers taking the foreign language requirement in an l1 environment) or as a second language (as in japanese speakers taking english classes in an l2 environment, for example, in the usa). deconstructing the i and sla in isla: one curricular approach 53 interpretations of offline data to address how learners actually processed said data (e.g., n. ellis & sagarra, 2010; morgan-short & bowden, 2006). other studies have created experimental tasks or conditions in which learner cognitive processes are directly addressed by employing concurrent data elicitation procedures such as concurrent verbal reports or think aloud protocols (tas), eye-tracking, and response times in an effort to glean information on these internal mechanisms in l2 processing (cf. leow, grey, marijuan, & moorman, 2014 for a critical report of these procedures). concurrent data are gathered to provide an improved understanding of the mechanisms that contribute to more robust learning, that is, the roles these cognitive processes play do make a substantial difference in mostly explicit learning outcomes. these procedures have provided a tremendous amount of insights into l2 learners’ processing (e.g., where, when and for how long attention is paid via eye-tracking) and the use of specific processes (e.g., awareness, activation of prior knowledge via tas) while interacting with the l2 data. for example, studies employing eye-tracking (e.g., godfroid, housen, & boers, 2013) and concurrent verbal reports (e.g., leow, 2001) have reported that mere attention to or even noticing information in the l2 input may not lead to this information being internalized into students’ learning system without further processing. this information has led some researchers to ensure that learners are indeed cognitively engaged in attending to and processing the l2 information during instructional exposure by carefully designing learning activities or tasks that promote students’ usage of identified beneficial cognitive processes such as hypothesis testing, rule formulation, level of awareness, and activation of prior knowledge, together with feedback (e.g., bowles, 2008; cerezo et al., in press; hsieh, moreno, & leow, 2015; leow, 2001; rosa & leow, 2004; rosa & o’neill, 1999). interestingly, even though processes such as attention and awareness have been investigated since the mid-90s (e.g., alanen, 1995; leow, 1997, 1998) via tas, there has been (and perhaps still exists) some mistrust of its use. major critiques of this concurrent procedure include its intrusiveness and the potential for reactivity, that is, “whether thinking aloud could have affected participants’ primary cognitive processes while engaging with the l2 or even add an additional processing load or secondary task on participants, which would not reflect a pure measure of their thoughts” (leow, 2015a, p. 142). rosa and o’neill (1999) also noted that tas may be affected by individual differences while leow et al. (2014) pointed out that the level of intrusiveness may depend on type of protocol employed (nonmetacognitive vs. metacognitive) and type of experimental task employed (e.g., problem-solving vs. reading). other variables may include working memory, language of report, and proficiency level. the reactivity strand of research grew exponentially after leow and morgan-short’s (2004) first reported failure to find a reactive effect on l2 participants’ ronald p. leow, luis cerezo 54 performances after a reading exposure when compared to a control group. several studies (e.g., bowles, 2008; bowles & leow, 2005; morgan-short, heil, botero-moriarty, & ebert, 2012; rossomondo, 2007; sanz, lin, lado, bowden, & stafford, 2009; yanguas & lado, 2012; yoshida, 2008) subsequently addressed the issue of reactivity in relation to various variables while a recent meta-analysis (bowles, 2010) reported an effect size value that “is not significantly different from zero” (p. 138), that is, it is not a reliable effect. many current ta studies follow leow and morgan-short’s (2004) suggestion that “studies employing concurrent data-elicitation procedures include a control group that does not perform verbal reports as one way of addressing this issue” (p. 50). the introduction of the eye-tracking procedure (e.g., godfroid, housen, & boers, 2010; smith, 2010) to the field of sla to methodologically address the process of attention was typically accompanied by a critique of the validity of tas as proponents of this procedure sought to present the eye-tracking procedure as a valid replacement of these concurrent verbal protocols. it is only recently that researchers (e.g., leow, 2013; leow et al., 2014; winke, 2013) appear to agree that the use of these procedures is differential and they are both crucial for a better understanding of, for example, how l2 learners process the l2 data (tas), and what, where, and for how long they pay attention to such data (eyetracking) (cf. leow et al., 2014 for further elaboration of the strengths and limitations of these procedures). from a psycholinguistic perspective, it is clear that a solid understanding of the cognitive processes l2 learners employ during the learning process is required before appropriate intervention to impact the mechanisms of learning or learning conditions in isla can take place. 8. isla: one curricular approach if it is accepted that isla research is situated within an instructed environment, then there is an obvious need to seriously consider this context not only in relation to a noninstructional setting but also within the larger language curriculum. first of all, the different types of affordances offered by type of context (e.g., extended study abroad vs. formal environment) in relation to the number of hours of exposure to and type of interaction with the l2, amount of practice, and so on are undoubtedly substantial. secondly, a typical curriculum provides information that may include, for example, specific learning outcomes for some or all four skills, kinds of evaluation to take place, and there is inevitably a syllabus that provides some kind of guideline for each class session. homework and a prescribed textbook are two staples, and activities and tasks associated with the curriculum are performed both inside and outside the formal instructed setting. different language programs vary in the amount of time spent in this formal deconstructing the i and sla in isla: one curricular approach 55 setting (e.g., 1 hour either daily for intensive classes or three or four times a week for nonintensive classes with lesser times allocated per session). curricula may involve different levels (e.g., 2 years, 3 years, etc.) that may range from 150200 formal hours in a two year program and so on. ideally, informal activities or tasks such as technology-based contexts are logically linked to the overall curriculum with regard to its objectives or learning outcomes, its classroom activities, and its evaluation component (cf. leow, 1994 for a model of coherent language curriculum development). this link, in turn, would allow researchers to address whether their findings hold potential for pedagogical extrapolation to the formal instructed environment in relation to its curricular components or whether further research is needed before such extrapolation can be made. acknowledging the where (formal instructed environment) and how (explicit learning) of isla, a curricular perspective of isla research requires that we consider very closely the potential pedagogical ramification of isla studies, that is, whether the findings can be extrapolated to this instructed setting with some confidence of robust l2 development taking place. this perspective places a premium on isla studies to demonstrate such robust l2 development after the experimental learning condition, instruction, or exposure or after some methodological manipulation of learner cognitive processes during the l2 treatment. however, as observed by leow (2015a), while the sla (and isla) field is now several decades old, it is categorically challenging to state that we know the best way, based on research, to teach the l2 or promote l2 learning in the l2 classroom: there is no question that sla research has come a very long way in illuminating and increasing our understanding of many aspects of the l2 learning process yet there still appears to be a disconnect between what we researchers report and publish and what we teachers find relevant to our classrooms. perhaps we teachers are not entirely sure what the research is all about given the many variables that contribute to both language learning and teaching. in other words, sla research, divided into its many strands, may only address one partial aspect of what really takes place in the formal classroom setting given all the variables involved in this context. (p. 271) seeking robust l2 development from a curricular approach necessitates a critical focus not only on statistical differences between experimental groups in previously published or future studies but also whether the gain scores obtained from the pretests to posttests are indeed substantial. for example, a study investigating the effects of type of instruction reports that two experimental instructional conditions (a and b) improved statistically better when compared to a control group (c) that did not receive any exposure to the target structure in the input. however, the gain scores are minimal and the highest score after instruction was 44/100. while improvement is statistical, overall gain scores are relatively low ronald p. leow, luis cerezo 56 in relation to what is rated as satisfactory performance in a typical instructed language classroom. consequently, it may be better to fine-tune the design or probe deeper into how the l2 learners processed the l2 data, especially those who performed well above average, before any pedagogical extrapolation can be made. 9. where does isla research go from here? the insights that concurrent data provide cannot be understated and probing deeper into learner cognitive processing and processes, as underscored in recent definitions of isla, not only clearly warrants future research but also explicates other isla studies that have not employed concurrent data elicitation procedures. for example, one popular strand of isla research (exposure) addresses the relative benefits of enhancing textual l2 input, premised on drawing learner attention to target items in the l2 data. to date, it may be argued that the results appear to be inconclusive (cf. leow, 2009 for one plausible explanation based on type of experimental design employed), but a deeper probe into this strand of research that employed tas and eye-tracking reveals that it may not be the actual textual enhancement that differentiates performances but how l2 readers process the l2 text. leow (2001) and bowles (2003) gathered concurrent verbal reports during text processing and both reported nonsignificant differences in performance between their respective enhanced and unenhanced groups on a comprehension, a recognition and a written production assessment task. a review of their concurrent data revealed that while the majority of participants reported a low level of processing or awareness of the target items in the text, a few outliers in both experimental groups scored very high on the assessment tasks. given that their protocols clearly revealed a higher depth of processing and level of awareness of the target items when compared to the rest of the participant population, leow and bowles postulated that while enhancement does not appear to contribute to superior performances when compared to an unenhanced condition, concurrent data may contribute to understanding how such enhancement is processed. winke (2013) employed the eye-tracking procedure to address the effect of textual enhancement and reported that while the enhanced group did demonstrate a statistically greater amount of attention paid to the target items (based on amount of eye gazes), her findings supported similar nonsignificant results reported in previous studies between the two experimental groups. it still remains to be empirically addressed whether depth of processing accounts for the nonsignificant performances between enhanced and unenhanced texts before pedagogical extrapolations can be made. another example is the popular processing instruction (pi) strand of isla research, in which the typical research design is the classic pretest-instructiondeconstructing the i and sla in isla: one curricular approach 57 posttest format in which researchers assume that some kind of altering or restructuring of an l1 strategy took place in the pi condition during the experimental instructional phase of the study. it is also assumed that this kind of processing did not occur in the traditional output condition. results from almost two dozen studies in this strand provide relatively similar statistical performances between these two experimental groups, leading to the question of how specifically or differentially the l2 data were processed in the two groups? theoretically, pi targets the early stages of the l2 learning process while traditional instruction targets the output stage of this process. once again, isla research needs to address whether type of processing was differential between these two experimental groups (e.g., did awareness of the incorrect strategy play a role in only one or both groups?) before pedagogical implications can be made. the role of technology in the l2 instructed setting also needs to be seriously considered in future isla research given that this role is becoming increasingly important in language curricula and its use in this context needs to be theoretically-driven and empirically supported. indeed, it is suggested that isla research guide the successful migration of content from the instructed setting to the computer setting (cerezo et al., in press). concurrent data gathered from call studies (e.g., bowles, 2008; hsieh, moreno, & leow, 2015; leow, 2001; rosa & leow, 2004; rosa & o’neill, 1999; sachs & suh, 2007) have revealed consistent use of high depth of processing, potential levels of awareness that include hypothesis and rule formulations, and activation of prior knowledge, which all appear to play important roles in learning targeted difficult l2 structures (e.g., english back-shifting of verbs in the past tense to the past perfect tense, spanish gustar with its five substructures, spanish past subjunctive). these processes align with those of explicit learning of new information postulated in the intake processing stage of leow’s (2015a) model of the l2 learning process in isla. as pointed out by leow et al. (in press), well-designed call materials hold the potential to (a) promote the use of such cognitive processes by ensuring that learners are cognitively engaged in attending to and processing the l2 information, (b) maximize practice opportunities by unit of available time, (c) manipulate the amount of examples in the input to be processed, and (d) provide timely feedback and prompts to promote deeper processing. to maximize the role of technology in the instructed setting, several researchers have suggested shifting the formal teacher-centered instruction of several difficult grammatical points to an online component (e.g., bowles, 2008; hsieh, 2008; leow, 2007, 2015a), thereby creating a hybrid curriculum. such call materials hold the potential to free up important time in the classroom spent on formally teaching these difficult grammatical points and will ultimately maximize students’ exposure to and interaction with the l2 in the formal instructed setting. ronald p. leow, luis cerezo 58 10. conclusion this paper has taken a critical look at the current strand of isla research within the broader field of sla in an attempt to provide some measure of direction future isla research may follow. it is relatively strongly accepted that some empirical manipulation of both instructional conditions and learner internal mechanisms need to underscore the focus of isla research in an effort to promote robust l2 development in the formal instructed setting. in addition, it is recommended that we seriously acknowledge the kinds of affordances or lack thereof inherent in a typical and formal l2 environment for l2 development and view isla from one curricular approach. in turn, this curricular approach to isla research places a premium on researchers to seriously consider (a) the context under which isla research occurs, (b) the type of processing, namely, explicit learning, that predominates in this context, and (c) whether the findings can be extrapolated to this formal environment with a high level of confidence in relation to robust l2 development. additionally, there is no doubt that the more we understand about cognitive processes the more we can as both researchers and teachers manipulate the l2 data and learning conditions to promote more robust learning on the part of our students within the limited confines of the formal l2 environment. the research on learners’ internal mechanisms and the empirical investigations of their manipulated use during l2 processing, especially within the call strand of research, appear to hold much promise toward not only achieving this better understanding of l2 processes but also their potential contribution to more robust learning in the l2 classroom. probing deeper into how l2 learners process l2 data should be one of the premium areas of future isla research. deconstructing the i and sla in isla: one curricular approach 59 references alanen, r. 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(2008). think-aloud protocols and type of reading task: the issue of reactivity in l2 reading research. in m. bowles, r. foote, s. perpiñán, & r. bhatt (eds.), selected proceedings of the 2007 second language research forum (pp. 109-209). somerville, ma: cascadilla. 557 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (3). 2014. 557-571 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.3.9 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl apt to change: the problematic of language awareness and language aptitude in age-related research david singleton trinity college dublin, ireland university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary state school of higher professional education in konin, poland dsnglton@tcd.ie abstract language awareness and language aptitude often crop up in discussion of various second language acquisition phenomena, including age-related phenomena. there is a troublesome and ongoing definitional and theoretical problem in this connection: different researchers have different perspectives on what is to be included in the respective notions; on how do to measure language awareness, on the one hand, and language aptitude, on the other; and on how or whether to differentiate the two constructs in terms of innateness versus experience. this article begins by addressing the entire problematic of the conceptualization of language awareness and language aptitude. the language awareness/aptitude issue features in the maturational debate in connection with two claims. first, it is discussed in relation to the view that second-language (l2) learning of older individuals is explicit (whereas that of younger individuals is implicit). second, it is referred to in regard to the notion that there are older l2 learners who appear to be able to “beat” the critical period thanks to high levels of language aptitude. the article critically explores both these propositions and concludes that neither is particularly safe, especially given the uncertain state of the relevant research context. keywords: language awareness, language aptitude, explicit learning, implicit learning, critical period david singleton 558 1. introduction the constructs language awareness and language aptitude are very frequently referred to in current discussion of a range of second language acquisition phenomena. they surface in the context of age-related research, and particularly in regard to the critical period debate, under at least two headings. first, they feature in discussion of the proposition that older l2 learners proceed explicitly, whereas younger l2 learners proceed implicitly. second, they connect to the notion that those older l2 learners who appear not to be subject to maturational constraints, or not so subject to maturational constraints, are able to “beat” the critical period, or to diminish its effects, thanks to high levels of language ability and language awareness. the present article begins with a discussion of the ways in which the concepts of language awareness and language aptitude are understood. there is, in fact, a constant definitional problem in this connection, in the sense that different researchers have different perspectives on what is to be included in (and excluded from) these respective notions. overlapping with this is the problem of measurement: how do we quantitatively gauge language awareness, on the one hand, and language aptitude, on the other? another problem, perhaps the most important problem, relates to differentiation between awareness and aptitude in terms of the role of experience and training. whereas language awareness is usually thought of as the fruit of particular kinds of language experience, language aptitude has traditionally been put in the category of individual trait, part of what a given learner brings innately to the task of language learning. it appears that this view of the matter may be over-simplistic as aptitude seems to be at least to some extent trainable, at least in some degree in fact, to flow from increasing language awareness. the article will go on to relate the concepts in question to the above claims, which will be explored and appraised. 2. language awareness/aptitude: definitions, measurement and differentiation with regard to views of the notion of language awareness, we could do worse than start at the association for language awareness website, where language awareness is defined as “explicit knowledge about language, and conscious perception and sensitivity in language learning, language teaching and language use” (language awareness defined, n.d.). for james (1996, pp. 139-140), one of the founders of the language awareness movement in britain, and a celebrated language awareness “activist,” language awareness signifies metacognitions about language in general, some component of language or a specific language in which one already has some skilled control and a coherent set of intuitions. apt to change: the problematic of language awareness and language aptitude in age-related. . . 559 van lier is another name worth a mention in this connection. he, for his part, has consistently seen language awareness as “a crucial aspect of language learning” (1996, p. 12), his perspective on the matter being that “to learn something new one must first notice it . . . pointing one’s perceptional powers in the right direction and making ‘mental energy’ available for processing.” interestingly, these kinds of characterization overlap with traditional definitions of “verbal aptitude,” which relate to, for example, being sensitive to the meanings of words and the ideas associated with them (verbal aptitude, n.d.). they also relate, to take another instance, to some elements of language aptitude as operationalized by carroll (1981) for the modern language aptitude test (mlat), which include, for example, the capacity of an individual to pick out grammatical functions and generalize patterns from one sentence to another. the link between language awareness and language aptitude, one should note, has long been referred to in the language awareness literature (e.g., hawkins, 1999; mariani, 1992). turning now specifically to the related question of measurement, obviously if predictions about the impact of language awareness and language aptitude are to be explored meaningfully with appropriate rigour, their measurement requires an approach which covers the relevant constructs and commands consensual respect. the difficulty with the concept of language awareness is that there has really been no attempt to test it rigorously. thus, for example, regarding language awareness in teachers, the literature is full of statements to the effect that “a linguistically-aware teacher will be in a strong and secure position to accomplish various tasks – preparing lessons; evaluating, adapting, and writing materials; understanding, interpreting, and ultimately designing a syllabus or curriculum; testing and assessing learners’ performance; and contributing to . . . language work across the curriculum” (wright & bolitho, 1993, p. 292; cf. andrews, 2007). the problem lies in identifying such teachers in a manner that is agreed on and reliable. with regard to l2 learner language awareness, various devices have been suggested for testing various aspects of this: tests of mother tongue grammar awareness (e.g., hassanzadeh & nabifar, 2011), tests of cognate awareness (e.g., malabonga, kenyon, carlo, august, & louguit, 2008), tests of phonological awareness (venkatagiri & levis, 2007), and so on. there are some tests which purport to test language awareness in a more comprehensive kind of way, for example the tests developed by pinto and titone (1995; cf. pinto, titone, & trusso, 1999), which have been deployed, for instance, by lasagabaster (2001). these tests are comprised of series of components. for example, the second of them, mat-2 (the one used by lasagabaster) is composed of four parts: a grammatical synonymy test, a semantico-grammatical acceptability test, an ambiguity test, and a phonemic segmentation test. how far david singleton 560 this batch of tests represents a consensual view of the language awareness construct is impossible to say. with regard to the instruments deployed in recent language aptitude research in the context of age-related studies, these have tended either simply to make use of parts of carroll’s modern language aptitude tests (e.g., carroll, 1973; carroll & sapon, 1959; see e.g., muñoz, 2014) or to utilize meara’s llama suite of language aptitude tests (meara, 2005; see e.g., abrahamsson & hyltenstam, 2008; granena, 2013), which is, according to their creator, “largely based on the mlat tests . . . adapted to a more snazzy presentation style” (meara, n.d.). the mlat tests have thus been widely used, and essentially they are still being used. some would say they have proved their value, but it is worth pointing out that they fall within the ambit of stansfield’s critique of language aptitude tests which he made in 1989, and which, to my knowledge, has never been satisfactorily answered: the aptitude tests currently in use . . . do not take into account new insights . . . on the human learning process in general and on the language learning process in particular. nor do they take into account . . . the relation of attitudes, motivation, personality, and other emotional characteristics and predispositions to second language learning. (stansfield, 1989, pp. 3-4; cf. parry & stansfield, 1990) also worthy of note in this context of laying out the deficiencies of the mlat are the reviews by sawyer and ranta (2001) and skehan (2002, 2012). the main point to emerge from the above discussion is disappointingly simple, clear and stark. it can be summed up thus. it is not at all evident that instruments purporting to measure language awareness and language aptitude respectively consensually cover the constructs in question, nor that they genuinely measure consistently different constructs. we now turn more broadly to the point of the differentiation of the two constructs in terms of the role of experience. contrary to the traditional view of language aptitude, there are increasingly indications and claims that aptitude is not innate and unalterable, or not just something which is innate and unalterable. the indications are that, at least to an extent, the awareness that derives from experience and training impacts on it, or may indeed be consubstantial with it (cf. robinson, 2002). for example, the metalinguistic awareness that has been observed to be one of the fruits of the experience of multilinguality seems to very much associated with certain cognitive advantages, in other words with particular kinds of language aptitude. jessner (2006), in her exploration of this topic, very definitely, posits a strong connection between the aptitude exhibited by multilinguals under certain circumstances and their heightened experience-induced language awareness: “the cognitive advantages which have apt to change: the problematic of language awareness and language aptitude in age-related. . . 561 been seen to develop in multilinguals have been related to an enhanced level on metalinguistic awareness” (p. 65; cf. jessner, 2014). schmidt’s work on “noticing,” which is comparable to van lier’s (1996) conception, also makes the connection between awareness and aptitude, namely aptitude to learn: “attention and noticing . . . are crucial concepts for understanding second and foreign language learning. as baars (1997) puts it, ‘paying attention – becoming conscious of some material – seems to be the sovereign remedy for learning anything. . .’” (schmidt, 2012, p. 44). on this view, awareness is an important dimension of the capacity to learn not just language but whatever presents itself as requiring mastering. kormos (2013) sums up the way thinking on this matter is moving with admirable succinctness: although language-learning aptitude might seem to be a relatively stable individual characteristic when compared with other factors, such as motivational orientation and action control mechanisms, there seems to be some converging evidence that certain components of aptitude . . . might improve in the course of language learning. (pp. 145-146) she goes on to refer to the cognitive advantages of bilingualism and multilingualism (citing bialystok & majumder, 1998), concluding that “previous language-learning experience and knowledge of their languages might be an important dimension of ultimate attainment” (p. 146). she sees this as happening “both directly and indirectly, through the mediation of aptitude constructs.” a particular instance of the notion that aptitude results from experience relates to the case of working memory (cf. chan, skehan, & gong, 2011), which is thought of as a mechanism responsible for the temporary manipulation and maintenance of relevant information during cognitive operations such as language comprehension. working memory capacity has been shown to have an impact on language learning (see e.g., wen, 2012), and thus, although its scope extends well beyond the language learning area, a high working memory capacity can be thought of as contributing to an aptitude for learning languages. it is indeed included by a number of researchers as a component of language aptitude (see, e.g., dekeyser & koeth, 2011; ellis & shintani, 2013; wen & skehan, 2011). as mitchell, myles, and marsden (2013) point out, working memory “has traditionally been thought of as a ‘trait’ – a relatively fixed capacity that increases in a predictable, maturationally constrained way as children grow” (p. 155). as has already been indicated, there is robust evidence that higher working memory capacity is associated with higher language learning performance. given this, the trait view of working memory seems in tune with the trait conception of language aptitude and seems to point to the integration of higher david singleton 562 working memory capacity into the trait understanding of language aptitude. in recent years, however, the view has been formed that working memory is, in fact, amenable to modification through relevant experience and training (eysenck, 2012; holmes, gathercole, & dunning, 2009; klingberg, 2010). in relation to situations where more than one language is involved, morales, calvo, and bialystok (2013) found that children with experience of bilingualism performed better than monolingual children on working memory tasks. indeed, the more complex the tasks the better their performance. the results of this study suggest to the researchers that bilingualism not only improves working memory in an isolated way, but affects the global development of executive functions. another study (gass & lee, 2011) reveals that two different l2 groups at different stages in their university l2 study (first and third year respectively) evinced significantly different l2 working memory scores, which, again, points to a shaping, changing role for experience with regard to working memory capacity. earlier macdonald and christiansen (2002) had illustrated that there is a correlation between working memory capacity, practice and experience. thus, while high working memory capacity has been seen as compatible with the trait view of language aptitude, current research is increasingly portraying it as a fruit of training and experience. this dimension of aptitude is coming to be viewed in a rather similar way to some other dimensions of the traditional language aptitude package and to those linguistic attributes which have been traditionally been described as dimensions of language awareness (cf. also dörnyei, 2009; skehan, 1989; sparks, 2012; sparks & ganschow, 1991). all in all, it is clear that the language awareness/language aptitude discussion requires a great deal more research and reflection at a definitional and theoretical level than it to date has been accorded. we have seen that the interaction between the concepts and realities of language “aptitude” and language “awareness” is such that we are obliged to see them as at least related, with more than a degree of intimacy. a particular question, in the light, for example, of recent research on working memory, is the extent to which language aptitude is innate and to what degree the result of experience. it is not impossible that language “aptitude” and language “awareness” will turn out to be to a large extent coterminous. 3. language awareness/aptitude and the question of maturational constraints moving now to the topic of language awareness/aptitude and maturational constraints, some research findings have been interpreted as suggesting that different mechanisms subserve language learning in later years and that evidence relating to language aptitude may be relevant to this notion. thus, some years ago harley and hart (1997) found that the early beginners’ l2 outcomes apt to change: the problematic of language awareness and language aptitude in age-related. . . 563 “were much more likely to be associated with a memory measure than with a measure of language ability” (p. 395), whereas the reverse was true of the later beginners. these researchers were not inclined to interpret their findings in terms of a strong maturational constraint or critical period line. they pointed rather to the possible influence of the different instructional styles experienced by younger and older learners. dekeyser, on the other hand, discussing similar results which he himself obtained, does relate them to the critical period hypothesis. in his much-cited (2000) study, the adult beginners who scored within the range of the child beginners purportedly manifested high levels of verbal analytical ability, an ability which seemed to play no role in the performance of the child beginners. one might perhaps note ortega’s (2009, p. 158) methodological point that the younger beginners presented very little variation in their linguistic performance, and hence correlations with anything at all were unlikely. dekeyser (2000, 2003a, 2003b, 2006, 2012), however, interprets the differences he found between younger and older l2 beginners as important and as deriving precisely from the effects of the critical period for language. his reading of them is that maturational constraints apply only to implicit language learning mechanisms. a further possibility is that such results reflect general cognitive changes which impact on language learning but on other areas of development, too. in fact, this is not necessarily an idea that dekeyser would find objectionable (dekeyser, 2003b), but he would presumably want to insist on a radical, “elbowshaped” development (which is not the usual way with age-related cognitive development). we might note, before leaving dekeyser’s claim, that the very notion of implicit learning is far from universally accepted. shanks (2005, p. 216), for example, comments that “it has yet to be proved beyond reasonable doubt that there exists a form of learning that proceeds both unintentionally and unconsciously.” one can also refer back in this context to the remarks cited from van lier’s and schmidt’s commentaries. interestingly, recent work by granena and long (2013) takes issue with dekeyser’s (2000) conclusions. on the basis that they found no evidence of a role for aptitude in respect of morphology or syntax, but only in respect of lexis and collocations, they conclude that “adult naturalistic acquirers need not have a high level of language aptitude to reach near-native l2 abilities” (p. 336). actually, the above account is less than accurate, because aptitude also emerged in granena and long’s results as a relevant factor in relation to pronunciation. granena and long explain this away in terms of the means used to measure pronunciation proficiency, a monitorable reading-aloud task. their claim is that the more analytic acquirers would have been able to monitor their pronunciation while reading. clearly, more research on this topic is required, to say the least of the matter (as david singleton 564 granena and long allow), but these seem to be challenging findings for the suggestion that only more apt l2 acquirers can resist the depredations of age. we turn now to abrahamsson and hyltenstam’s (2008) conclusions, based on their report of having found high levels of language aptitude to be associated with late l2 learners of swedish judged to be native-like by native speakers of swedish. their claim is that a high degree of language aptitude is the absolutely indispensable prerequisite for native-like attainment in late second language acquisition, and they suggest that the possession of such aptitude by a few individuals “does not justify a rejection of the [critical period hypothesis]” (p. 503). they propose a research agenda which would look into the way in which nativelike late learners attain their nativelikeness – for example, through the use of unique psychological processes and an unusual sensitivity to language structure or even through continued access to the innate, implicit language acquisition mechanism that, for some reason, has remained unaffected by maturation. (p. 503) they make the prediction that no adult learners should be found who are entirely nativelike in the l2 without having a high level of language aptitude and – we may add – without having worked professionally and successfully with the target language for a significant period of their lives. (pp. 503-504) this latter point is interesting in that it could readily be related to what was said earlier about l2 language aptitude being (at least in part) a fruit of l2 experience and awareness, even though abrahamsson and hyltenstam’s general line seems to be more in accord with the trait conception of language aptitude. with regard to the detail of the above claim, it is perhaps worth commenting on the notion of the innateness of language. this constitutes an underlying axiom in respect of one aspect of abrahamsson and hyltenstam’s claim, whereas in fact, certainly in the sense in which it appears to be deployed by abrahamsson and hyltenstam, it can hardly be regarded as empirically proven (cf. sampson, 2005). on the other hand, the suggestion that highly successful late l2 learners (indeed all highly successful l2 learners) require considerable amounts of input and experience in the target language is not at all controversial, although it would clearly be unwarranted to suggest that only cases of native-like late learners without such abundant input and experience could be considered candidates for casting doubt on the critical period hypothesis. in relation to the question of language aptitude, there is certainly evidence that this may play a role in successful second language acquisition (but cf. granena & long’s earlier-cited finding). bylund and colleagues (bylund, 2009; apt to change: the problematic of language awareness and language aptitude in age-related. . . 565 bylund, abrahamsson, & hyltenstam, 2010) have also proposed that high levels of language aptitude may act as a prophylactic against language attrition. clearly, one may be sympathetic to this proposition without necessarily accepting the above authors’ claim that there is a critical period for attrition ending at puberty. in order to test detailed predictions in these matters with appropriate rigour, however, as has been argued earlier, one would need a more satisfactory definition of the construct of language aptitude than the fact of doing well on a specific language aptitude test. the widely shared intuition of language professionals is that language aptitude (admittedly rather variously and/or vaguely understood) is likely to contribute to successful l2 attainment at any age. it is noteworthy that abrahamsson and hyltemstam (2008) themselves find “small yet significant aptitude effects in child sla” (p. 481). it is of interest to refer in this connection to a very recent study conducted by muñoz (2014), which used a version of the mlat adapted for children and validated for spanish (mlat-es). muñoz found a significant, but moderate, correlational relationship between young learners’ mlat-es scores and their outcomes on a speaking test. she found stronger correlations, however, in respect of other domains of proficiency: “learners’ aptitude seems less strongly associated to speaking than to reading, listening, and writing (accuracy particularly), in order of increasing strength” (p. 62). whatever about the details, it is clear that aptitude as measured by the mlat seems to emerge as a factor amongst younger learners. to repeat the point yet again, however, the construct of language aptitude needs a more satisfactory characterization than simply a given score on a given test. in the present context, more to the point, though, is that the exclusion as counter-examples to the critical period hypothesis of cases of highattaining adult beginners who are claimed to be possessed of a good measure of language aptitude radically changes the whole critical period concept. in the biological sciences, a critical period is conceived of as species-wide, as transcending individual attributes (with the exception, perhaps, of cases of very highly exceptional outliers, which is not what has been under discussion here). 4. concluding remarks in sum, before discussion of the interaction in sla research between the language awareness/aptitude question and the critical period question is likely to shed any real light, a great deal more work will need to be done at the definitional level, at the level of measurement of the phenomena which are supposed to be in question and at the level of differentiation of the phenomena concerned. such issues david singleton 566 will require some serious theoretical contemplation and also the development at the methodological level of a transparently motivated modus operandi. a very great deal more clarity will be required about (at least) the following: the interaction between the conceptualization and the concrete manifestations of language awareness and language aptitude; 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(1993). language awareness: a missing link in language teacher education? elt journal, 47(4), 292-304. doi: 10.1093/elt/47.4.292 367 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 2 (3). 367-389 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl computer-mediated communication as an autonomy-enhancement tool for advanced learners of english aleksandra wach adam mickiewicz university, pozna , poland waleks@wa.amu.edu.pl abstract this article examines the relevance of modern technology for the development of learner autonomy in the process of learning english as a foreign language. computer-assisted language learning and computer-mediated communication (cmc) appear to be particularly conducive to fostering autonomous learning, as they naturally incorporate many elements of autonomy that give learners control over and responsibility for their own learning, such as choosing the materials used, managing their contact with various genres and types of interaction, often in authentic contexts, and evaluating their own progress, measured through their success in understanding and conveying meanings. however, providing access to language resources does not automatically lead to the development of autonomy, as much depends on other factors, such as the learners’ level or previous experience in learner training. the present study investigated whether advanced learners of english made use of out-of-class cmc engagement for the purpose of learning english autonomously. the results indicate that most of the participants were eager to use cmc opportunities to deliberately practice their english, although, quite naturally, leisure and social reasons for using cmc predominated. the expressed willingness to deliberately focus on practicing english during beyond-theclassroom meaning-oriented online interactions confirms the great potential of cmc as an autonomy-enhancement tool. keywords: computer-mediated communication (cmc), computer-assisted language learning (call), learner autonomy, learning beyond the classroom aleksandra wach 368 in the last three decades, the development of learner autonomy has continued to be a major aim of language learning and teaching influenced by the learner-centered paradigm in education (little, 2000; reinders, 2011; williams & burden, 1997). although numerous definitions of the concept of learner autonomy have been offered, most of them focus on the control and responsibility that learners have in managing and evaluating their own learning. increasingly, the social dimension of autonomy has been highlighted in recent literature on the subject, which stresses that autonomous learning needs to incorporate elements of interaction, with the teacher, with other learners, or other users of l2, to prepare learners to function in communicative environments. one way of promoting autonomous behavior in foreign language learners is through the application of different forms of computer-assisted language learning (call), and, in particular, computer-mediated communication (cmc) in the process of language learning (godwin-jones, 2011; kaur, singh, & embi, 2006; lee, 2011). involvement in cmc provides learners with many core features of autonomous learning, such as management and evaluation of their own learning progress, making decisions on when and how they will engage in cmc, managing interaction in the l2, independence as language learners, and interdependence among cmc participants (benson, 2001, 2006, 2011; blin, 2004; jarvis, 2012; reinders & white, 2011). the question remains, however, whether, by providing ample access to autonomous learning opportunities, cmc engagement actually fosters learner autonomy development (benson, 2011a; blin, 2004). previous research into the relationship between call environments and learner autonomy points to the potential of computer-enhanced learning resources as a contributor to l2 learners’ autonomous learning. nevertheless, limitations and problems have often been voiced, such as the interplay of individual factors and autonomy capacities, or learners’ inability to use the available resources effectively without a teacher’s assistance. more research is definitely needed to verify the benefits of participating in technology-based learning for the development of learner autonomy. therefore, the study described in this article aimed to investigate whether beyond-the-classroom participation in cmc in english was perceived by the study participants (201 advanced learners of english) as an opportunity to practice english on their own and to foster their management of their own learning processes; in other words, the study aimed to investigate the link between outof-class involvement in different forms of cmc and autonomous language learning. the results indicate that cmc engagement was pursued primarily for leisure and social reasons, but at the same time the participants attended to the language forms and deliberately practiced their vocabulary, grammar and communicative skills in the course of their online interaction. this reveals the huge potential of cmc for fostering autonomous language learning. the teaching impli computer-mediated communication as an autonomy-enhancement tool . . . 369 cations, however, include the need to offer guidance and help learners monitor their own autonomous learning experience to exploit its full potential. autonomy in today’s l2 learning the concept of autonomy in language learning and teaching has stemmed from the general paradigm of learner-centered instruction, which was influenced by humanistic psychology (little, 2000; ushioda, 2011b; williams & burden, 1997). as noted by benson (2001, p. 8), the concept was first introduced in 1971, and was later explored and popularized by henri holec’s (1981) seminal work autonomy and foreign language learning. autonomy, defined broadly as “the capacity to take charge of one’s own learning” (holec, 1981, p. 3), involves several components and capacities on the part of learners. one of them is the skill of self-directed learning, in which “the objectives, progress and evaluation of learning are determined by learners themselves” (benson, 2001, p. 8). benson (2006, p. 22) further explains that taking responsibility for one’s learning involves planning abilities, the ability and readiness to select appropriate learning materials, constant monitoring of one’s learning progress, and the ability to evaluate the outcomes of learning. little (2000, pp. 69-70) lists critical reflection, decision making and independent action as basic components of autonomous learning, through which learners become managers of their own learning according to their needs and available learning options. moreover, autonomous learners are able to transfer their learning to new learning environments and try to use their knowledge in various contexts of autonomous target language use. this often entails affective engagement and positive motivation. gao and zhang (2011) add agency, metacognition and learning strategies as prerequisites for autonomous learning, as these enable learners to understand the nature of learning processes and help support their learning efforts. therefore, training learners in the use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies is an important step in leading them toward autonomy (darasawang & reinders, 2010). moreover, recently researchers have highlighted the social dimension of autonomous learning. little (2009, p. 223) summarizes the social dimension of autonomy by saying: “autonomous learners always do things for themselves, but they may or may not do things on their own.” as stated by benson (2011a, p. 16), “autonomy is a social construct that implies interdependence rather than independence.” lee (2011, p. 88) adds that “through social interactions, learners develop a capacity to analyze, reflect upon and synthesize information to create new perspectives.” taking into account the social context of learning raises the question of learner identity, which is another notion embedded in the contemporary aleksandra wach 370 understanding of the concept of autonomy; autonomous learning embraces expressing one’s identity through the target language (ushioda, 2011a). the link between computer-mediated communication and l2 learners’ autonomy according to benson (2006, 2011a, 2011b), recently there has been increased interest in autonomy promoted by out-of-class learning contexts, technology-mediated communicative situations being part of them. drawing upon the use of technology for promoting autonomy stems from the constructionist, or the social-constructivist view on language learning (hafner & miller, 2011; luzón & ruiz-madrid, 2008; sadik, 2008; villanueva, ruiz-madrid, & luzón, 2010), as it incorporates learners’ creativity, problem solving abilities, critical thinking and the social context of learning. benson (2001) emphasizes that technology has the potential to foster autonomous behavior in learners because it facilitates self-access in learning, and gives learners many valuable opportunities to self-direct their learning and take control over it. using technology-based materials gives students more responsibility for learning and can enhance their intrinsic motivation (darasawang & reinders, 2010). reinders and white (2011) highlight increased interaction opportunities and fostering situated learning in beyondthe-classroom contexts as benefits derived from technology-based learning, while collentine (2011, p. 51) claims that call “can help learners modify input, gauge learning, monitor progress, reflect on and prioritize their learning,” and, in this way, promote autonomous learning and positively affect learners’ linguistic awareness. markiewicz (2008) stresses the individualized character of instruction, easily adaptable to individual learners’ needs and capacities, as a feature of distance learning which makes it particularly suitable for fostering learners’ autonomy. according to blin (2004), call naturally allows learners to control some aspects of learning, while cmc additionally gives them some control over interaction in l2. alm (2006) states that web 2.0 tools constitute new learning environments which offer valuable opportunities for learners at various levels and with specific needs, while reinders and white (2011, p. 2) perceive the ability to navigate different learning environments as a vital component of autonomous learning as the term is currently understood. moreover, learners’ engagement in cmc has revealed the great potential of the social domain of technology-based learning, which can contribute to autonomy development in the sense of interdependence among l2 users rather than autonomy as learner independence (eneau & develotte, 2012; reinders & white, 2011). according to villanueva et al. (2010), the potential of computer-mediated communication as an autonomy-enhancement tool . . . 371 technology-mediated language learning for autonomy development lies in that it involves a number of authentic resources, genres and forms of interaction in both pedagogical and nonpedagogical contexts. kaur et al. (2006), kaur and sidhu (2010), and abraham and williams (2011), focusing on the application of cmc by students at institutions of higher education, stress the lifelong learning dimension of autonomy development that is particularly relevant in the case of adult language learners. hyland (2004) makes a similar point, stressing the relevance of autonomy enhancement for lifelong learning among university students through the pursuit of offline and online out-of-class learning opportunities. ng, confessore, yusoff, aziz, and lajiz (2011), apart from discussing the link between autonomy and adult learners’ capacity for lifelong learning, highlight the correlation between levels of autonomy and academic success. however, as noted by reinders and white (2011, p. 1), the relationship between technology-based teaching and autonomy development may not be very clear, as “unrestricted access to information, without proper guidance and feedback, can in fact inhibit learners from taking more responsibility.” benson (2001, 2006, 2011a) notes that although new technology involves autonomous learning, it is still not clear whether and to what extent it fosters such learning. the effectiveness of technology-based approaches depends largely on the way in which technology is applied, the level of interaction that is stimulated, and the degree of control that learners themselves have in manipulating the content. therefore, luzón and ruiz-madrid (2008, p. 28) point to the role of instructors in helping learners become autonomous through technology-based resources: “in order to help students harness the potential of ict for the development of an autonomising competence, it is necessary to carefully design learning environments or learning tasks that promote the active use of metacognitive strategies, that is, that prompt students to plan, monitor and evaluate their own learning.” similarly, reinders (2011) points out the need for learner training and ongoing teacher support as a supplement to providing access to autonomy-building resources. blin (2004) and esch and zähner (2000) maintain that some level of autonomy is probably required in order to allow learners to take full advantage of the use of computer applications in learning. therefore, more research is needed to verify the potential of technology on learners’ autonomy development. some studies, however, have attempted to investigate the relationship between using different forms of call and cmc and learner autonomy. these studies indicate that while engaging in computer-based learning activities, apart from developing language skills, learners have a chance to discover ways of approaching linguistic and interactive tasks to a large extent independently aleksandra wach 372 of the teacher and hence the metacognitive and affective sides of their learning are involved. for example, ushioda (2000) focused on the affective dimension of technology-based learning, concluding that tandem email exchanges by l2 german learners increased their intrinsic motivation and may have fostered learner autonomy. arikan and bakla (2011) conducted a study on a group of turkish university students and found that experience with blogging contributed to their developing autonomy. in shucart, mishina, takahashi, and enokizono’s (2008) study, a blended learning tool fostered learner autonomy in classroom-based and out-of-class learning among their study participants through promoting collaboration among learners and increasing their intrinsic motivation and positive attitudes toward learning situations. jarvis (2012) observed in his study that the application of technology impacted considerably the study participants’ autonomous learning in self-study centers. some studies, however, while indicating the promises of call environments for fostering autonomy, also point to some of the limitations or problems associated with them. their findings confirm reinder and white’s (2011) concern that computer-based learner involvement does not necessarily lead to increased responsibility for managing learning. for example, kaur and sidhu (2010) found that asynchronous online interactions through email had the potential to stimulate autonomy development in malaysian university students, but some training in the application of optimal learning tools was needed to make the experience more effective. eneau and develotte (2012), who explored the effects of a distance learning project on adult l2 french learners’ autonomy, concluded that numerous factors are interrelated in this form of learning, influencing the degree of autonomy development. these factors included the strategies used by learners to overcome distance learning problems and the social and emotional dimension of learner collaboration. hafner and miller (2011) recorded enhanced autonomous learning capacities in hong kong university students of science as a result of their taking part in a digital video project. they noted, however, that some features of informal learning incorporated in the project helped achieve this aim. lee’s (2011) study explored the effects of self-reflection and social processes engendered by a blogging-based project on the development of autonomy in u.s. students studying abroad. she found out that autonomy development was dependent on the task type and proper application of metacognitive and cognitive skills. luke (2006), who investigated the effects of a technology-based, learner-centered course for l2 spanish learners on their autonomy development and attitudes toward the innovations in teaching, recorded mixed opinions on the part of the participants, from very positive to rather negative. he concluded that novel solutions need careful implementation and constant support from educators, as computer-mediated communication as an autonomy-enhancement tool . . . 373 the assumption of new responsibilities by learners is not easy. in a study conducted on l2 french learners by raby (2007), motivation and autonomy were fostered through a technology-based task. the researcher concluded that being given control over the way the task was completed, incorporating the learners’ own preferences, was appreciated by the participants; however, the technological dimension turned out to be less important than the pedagogical dimension of the activity. wolski (2008) explored polish university students’ use of internet resources as part of their autonomous independent self-study; concluding that although the participants reported frequently resorting to computer-based resources, he felt that a tutor’s help was needed to demonstrate how to find the most valuable materials and how to make effective use of them. to conclude, research in the area of tracing the links between the use of new technology and fostering learner autonomy has indicated a great potential of various call applications for pursuing autonomous behaviors on the part of l2 learners. on the other hand, it has also revealed that despite this potential, engaging in technology-based activities may not contribute much to the development of autonomy, as a variety of learner and contextual factors appear to influence considerably the levels of autonomy development in learners. furthermore, the reasons why learners get involved in call or online interactions seem to be an important factor influencing the degree to which such activities foster autonomous learning or are signs of autonomous behavior. while all of the studies presented above focused on the use of technology for promoting autonomy in formal educational l2 settings, usually through educational projects set up by teachers, the present study investigates efl learners’ engagement in cmc in naturalistic settings, in their own time, beyond the classroom, and for any reason (including both leisure and academic activity). the study aims of the study the main aim of the study was to investigate whether out-of-class involvement in cmc fostered autonomous learning in the study participants according to their own estimations. within the scope of this study, autonomy is understood as taking responsibility for managing and regulating one’s own learning, which involves using various opportunities to learn and practice l2, consciously attending to the form and use of l2, and the ability to reflect on learning processes, which stimulates the “generally proactive approach” (little 2009) toward learning. in order to achieve this primary aim, several additional aims were formulated. one of them was to find out the frequency of the participants’ inaleksandra wach 374 volvement in different forms of cmc in their own time, as a beyond-theclassroom activity, and the languages used during cmc. moreover, the study investigated whether the participants evaluated themselves as autonomous learners of english, and, finally, whether there were differences between regular and part-time students with regard to their self-evaluated learner autonomy and their perceptions of cmc as an autonomy-enhancement tool. participants in total, 201 participants took part in the study, all of whom were adult advanced learners of english as a foreign language. they were majoring in english in years 1-3 of the ba program at adam mickiewicz university in pozna . a majority of the participants (195) were polish, while 6 were of other nationalities. for the purposes of the study, the participants were divided into two groups: group a (n = 149) included regular students, and group b (n = 52) included part-time students. the median age of the group a students was 21 (min. 19, max. 28), and the median age in group b was 23.5 (min. 20, max. 41). the differences between both groups of the study participants were considered important within the scope of the study for a few reasons. while the regular students (group a) had classes during the week and studying was their main occupation, part-time students (group b) attended classes on saturday and sunday every second week and worked during the remaining days of the week. as a result, it may be assumed that, while for the majority of group a students academic activity was their main occupation, the majority of group b students were occupied with their full-time jobs, family duties, and academic activity. as a result, group b students might have had less time and energy both for academic activity and for engaging in cmc; moreover, considerably less frequent contact with english during classes and other university-based activities might have necessitated more autonomous learning behaviors in this group. moreover, while a course in information technology was offered to regular students in the first year of their ba studies, there was no such a course in the parttime students’ syllabus. the university has an e-learning platform, but whether and to what extent it was used for courses depended on particular teachers. data collection one data collection tool used in the study was questionnaire 1 consisting of 6 closed-ended questions which elicited answers connected with the participants’ internet use habits, and 16 closed-ended likert-type items focusing specifically on autonomy-related issues in which the participants marked computer-mediated communication as an autonomy-enhancement tool . . . 375 the best-matching answer on a 5-point scale, where 1 meant i strongly disagree, and 5 meant i strongly agree. cronbach’s alpha for the likert-type items was .802, suggesting a high degree of internal reliability. t-test values were calculated for the items and statistical significance was set at the level of .10. another data collection tool, questionnaire 2, consisted of two open-ended cues: “do you consider yourself an autonomous learner of english? please justify your answer briefly,” and: “if/when you take part in computer-mediated communication (through e-mails, instant messaging, blogging, etc.) in english, do you do it just for pleasure or social reasons, or do you ever intentionally plan to improve your english through cmc?” the cues were sent to the study participants via email two weeks after the administration of the closed-ended questionnaire; however, the response rate was very poor, as only 12 out of the 201 participants sent back their answers. the forms of both research tools are enclosed in the appendix. results questionnaire 1. the initial questions concerned the participants’ internet use habits. according to the responses, the average time spent on cmc was 2.5 hours daily on weekdays and 3.2 hours daily at weekends. figures 1, 2 and 3 present the percentages of responses concerning using particular forms of cmc and the languages in which they were used: figure 1 illustrates the participants’ engagement in these cmc forms in l1, figure 2 – in english, and figure 3 – in other languages. figure 1 the participants’ account of using different cmc forms in the native language 0,0% 10,0% 20,0% 30,0% 40,0% 50,0% 60,0% 70,0% 80,0% 90,0% 100,0% group a (n = 149) group b (n = 52) group a (n = 149) group b (n = 52) aleksandra wach 376 figure 2 the participants’ account of using different cmc forms in english figure 3 the participants’ account of using different cmc forms in other languages as can be seen in figures 1, 2 and 3, all forms of cmc were used by the participants, email being the most popular one, at least in l1 and in english, participation in virtual worlds being the least popular activity. the high percentages of participation in different forms of cmc in english (figure 2) are worth mentioning, as this points to the respondents’ having additional, out-of-class contact with english. more than 80% of the respondents in each group wrote emails in english, and participation in other cmc forms (blogging, discussion forums, and social networking sites) was almost as popular in english as it was in 0,0% 10,0% 20,0% 30,0% 40,0% 50,0% 60,0% 70,0% 80,0% 90,0% 100,0% group a (n = 149) group b (n = 52) 0,0% 2,0% 4,0% 6,0% 8,0% 10,0% 12,0% 14,0% 16,0% 18,0% 20,0% group a (n = 149) group b (n = 52) group a (n = 149) group b (n = 52) group a (n = 149) group b (n = 52) computer-mediated communication as an autonomy-enhancement tool . . . 377 polish, and sometimes it was even more popular in english than in polish (in the case of group b’s chatting, and wikis for both groups). generally, as the data in the figures indicate, more regular (group a) students participated in different forms of cmc, in l1, in english and in other languages (such as german, spanish, russian, and even japanese), than did part-time (group b) students. further on, figure 4 illustrates the frequency of participation in cmc in general, and figure 5 presents data concerning the frequency of the participants’ use of english in cmc. as can be seen in figure 4, most of the respondents in both groups took part in cmc every day, while very few of them participated in cmc once a week or less frequently. figure 4 frequency of engagement in cmc according to the data in figure 5, sometimes was the most frequently marked answer concerning the frequency of using english while engaging in cmc, although the often and very often options were also frequently indicated. the results appear to be similar in the case of both groups. figure 5 frequency of engagement in cmc in english tables 1, 2, 3 and 4 present the participants’ responses to the likerttype items connected with their autonomous learning behavior. the items 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% less than once a week once a week 2-3 times a week more than 3 times a week every day group a (n = 149) group b (n = 52) 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% never rarely sometimes often very often group a (n = 149) group b (n = 52) group a (n = 149) group b (n = 52) group a (n = 149) group b (n = 52) aleksandra wach 378 have been grouped under four headings: the respondents’ planning abilities, their self-evaluation abilities, their learning strategy use and their perception of cmc as an autonomy development tool. table 1 presents the participants’ answers to four items connected with their planning abilities in the process of l2 learning. as can be seen, more parttime (group b) than regular (group a) students admitted having well-defined objectives in learning english. however, although for the remaining items the differences between the groups appeared not to be statistically significant, a similar pattern was revealed: part-time students’ responses pointed to higher levels of planning and organizing their learning processes. table 1 the participants’ perceptions about their abilities to plan their learning (strongly) disagree no opinion (strongly) agree m sd sig. (twotailed) i have well defined objectives in learning english. group a 8.7% 26.2% 65.1% 3.44 .961 .036 group b 1.9% 13.5% 84.4% 4.08 .763 i learn english regularly, according to my own plan. group a 18.1% 13.5% 68.4% 3.68 1.048 .510 group b 17.3% 5.8% 77.0% 3.79 1.016 i know how to look for appropriate materials for improving my english. group a 9.4% 10.7% 79.9% 3.95 .853 .179 group b 9.6% 5.8% 84.7% 4.13 .908 i know what helps me learn most effectively. group a 6.7% 15.4% 77.8% 4.00 .870 .681 group b 7.7% 11.5% 80.8% 4.06 .873 table 2 presents the participants’ opinions about their ability to evaluate themselves in the process of learning. apparently, the respondents in both groups expressed a strong belief in their evaluation abilities, although this belief was shared by more part-time than regular students, and, moreover, significantly more part-time than regular students evaluated themselves as independent learners. most of the respondents in both groups, however, admitted that they still needed regular feedback from their teachers. it can be seen in table 3 that the respondents admitted to using other materials of their own choice; similarly, a majority of the respondents in both groups stated that they took any opportunity to have contact with english. again, the responses were more positive among part-time students. looking for communication opportunities with native speakers of english was also marked as common practice by respondents in both groups. computer-mediated communication as an autonomy-enhancement tool . . . 379 table 2 the participants’ perceptions about their abilities to evaluate their own progress (strongly) disagree no opinion (strongly) agree m sd sig. (twotailed) i know how to evaluate my own progress in english. group a 10.7% 32.2% 57.1% 3.59 .892 .022 group b 9.6% 15.4% 84.6% 3.92 .904 i need regular feedback from teachers on how well i perform. group a 27.5% 18.1% 54.3% 3.29 1.153 .835 group b 30.8% 19.2% 50.0% 3.25 1.135 i am an independent learner. group a 20.8% 23.5% 55.7% 3.47 1.112 .007 group b 15.4% 5.8% 78.9% 3.94 .998 table 3 the participants’ perceptions about the learning strategies they use to improve their english (strongly) disagree no opinion (strongly) agree m sd sig. (twotailed) apart from the materials given by my teachers, i use other materials of my own choice. group a 8.0% 14.1% 77.8% 3.94 .887 .077 group b 7.7% 5.8% 86.6% 4.19 .864 i take any opportunity to have contact with english. group a 8.7% 17.4% 73.9% 3.93 .938 .081 group b 9.6% 7.7% 82.7% 4.19 .931 i look for opportunities to communicate in english with native speakers. group a 14.8% 20.8% 64.4% 3.68 1.007 .702 group b 23.1% 11.5% 65.4% 3.75 1.203 as can be seen in table 4, considerably more part-time than regular students declared participating in cmc in order to improve their english; however, interestingly, high percentages of the respondents were not sure whether their use of cmc was aimed at improving their english. a majority of the respondents (but more part-time students) admitted to deliberately focus on the linguistic forms that appear in cmc through, for example, looking up the vocabulary items they came across while communicating through the internet, or paying attention to the forms used by other cmc users. in addition, a majority of the respondents in both groups stated that they deliberately practiced their reading skills through cmc, while the answers with regard to practicing listening skills differed significantly between the groups (with more part-time students agreeing with the statement). using cmc for communicating with tutors did not appear to be common practice for the respondents. aleksandra wach 380 table 4 the participants’ perceptions about their involvement in cmc with the aim of improving their english (strongly) disagree no opinion (strongly) agree m sd sig. (twotailed) i deliberately take part in cmc in order to improve my english. group a 26.1% 30.9% 42.9% 3.21 1.075 .033 group b 17.3% 23.1% 59.6% 3.58 .957 i look up new vocabulary items which i come across through cmc. group a 11.1% 12.1% 75.9% 3.85 1.042 .047 group b 5.8% 11.5% 82.7% 4.17 .857 i pay attention to the language forms which other cmc users use. group a 9.4% 14.1% 76.5% 3.97 .989 .400 group b 5.7% 7.7% 86.6% 4.10 .846 i deliberately practice my reading skills through cmc. group a 16.7% 28.2% 55.1% 3.47 1.063 .204 group b 19.2% 21.2% 59.6% 3.69 1.147 i deliberately practice my listening skills through cmc. group a 27.5% 26.8% 45.6% 3.21 1.193 .030 group b 21.2% 17.3% 61.6% 3.62 1.051 i communicate through cmc in english with my tutors. group a 45.0% 18.1% 36.6% 2.73 1.282 .575 group b 53.8% 9.6% 36.5% 2.62 1.286 questionnaire 2. the descriptive accounts provided by the participants in the follow-up open-ended questionnaire gave a more explanatory, in-depth perspective on the quantitative data described above. the responses provided to the question concerning the respondents’ autonomy as foreign language learners mainly highlighted their involvement in self-study, which does not include having to do a task assigned by a teacher. the following quotes given by two participants illustrate this approach: “i consider myself an autonomous learner because i study even when nobody forces me to do so or even if i don't have any exam at the end;” “i feel that i could be considered as an autonomous learner as my learning of english is not limited to attending and preparing to the university classes. i regularly extend my knowledge on my own accord by self-study.” although undertaking self-study may characterize autonomous learners, being autonomous involves much more than that. other characteristics of autonomous learners, such as the ability to take responsibility for one’s learning and to manage the learning process, or the ability to reflect upon one’s learning, were not mentioned by the study participants. on the contrary, some quotes indicated an incomplete understanding of the concept, for example, by differentiating among areas of language study where a student is or is not autonomous. this is illustrated by the following example: “i am not fully autonomous because it depends on the area of learning. i feel computer-mediated communication as an autonomy-enhancement tool . . . 381 autonomous in learning vocabulary and phonetics, as i study on my own, but in the case of grammar i need some guidance from teachers.” this example shows that the respondent associated autonomy in learning solely with independence of teachers rather than with an ability to refer to and effectively use various available resources in the process of learning. further comments shed more light on the respondents’ understanding of the concept of autonomy. apart from mentioning the effort put in self-study, one respondent wrote about asking for assistance as a learning strategy which he/she employed: “i try to understand the material and search on my own, but if i don't understand something or have problems, i ask others (e.g. teachers) for help.” it is important to note that the comment about asking for help was meant to be an apology for not being independent enough, and hence, not autonomous enough. still another respondent focused on the affective side of being an autonomous learner by writing: “i am an autonomous learner because i don’t treat learning the language as a duty, i do it for my personal benefits, due to my willingness, remaining in accordance with my initial choice of my studies. final exams are only an incentive for meticulous preparation and thorough study, but not an ultimate goal.” apparently, this quote points to high levels of intrinsic motivation, which may, in fact, contribute to learner autonomy. it also stresses the ability of setting his/her own goals on the part of the student, a feature typically associated with autonomous behavior. the clue concerning the respondents’ applications of cmc for the purpose of learning english generated some responses which highlighted the purely leisure and social dimension of cmc engagement, as exemplified by the following quote: “usually i participate in cmc just for pleasure and social reasons.” however, most of the responses revealed a balanced approach, in which both social and linguistic aims were evident. conscious and deliberate focusing on the language in cmc and using cmc opportunities for learning purposes may be viewed as evidence of autonomous behavior and may enhance such behavior on the part of foreign language learners. as stated by researchers, looking for and applying various, often original, sources of input for language practice and using any opportunity to improve and test one’s language competence are important traits of autonomous learners. the following quotes seem to illustrate such an approach: “generally, i take part in cmc for pleasure and social reasons, but i also signed up intentionally to some websites to improve my english;” “starting and maintaining such communication (cmc) is always pleasure-driven. i’ve never chatted with a foreigner solely to brush up on my language skills. nevertheless, i’ve always considered cmc as a perfect occasion to do it. as a consequence, i’m always doing my level best to create exhaustive and clearly understandable messages;” “although in cmc aleksandra wach 382 personal reasons are always in the foreground for me, improvement of my english is an anticipated side-effect.” finally, one response made by a study participant clearly suggests that his/her cmc engagement was associated only with improving his/her language skills: “my participation in cmc is strongly connected with improving my english – i decided to take part in it in order to have more contact with english.” this statement may be an indication of the respondent’s autonomous approach toward learning english as it suggests an attempt to control and regulate learning processes; in other words, this and the previously quoted comments reveal a certain level of metacognitive behavior which underlies learner autonomy. discussion and implications on the basis of the study participants’ responses presented in the previous section, it can be concluded that they largely claimed to be autonomous foreign language learners; most of them stated that they knew what helped them learn effectively, they looked for appropriate materials on their own, knew why they learned and what they wanted to achieve. moreover, they admitted to look for opportunities to have contact with english and practice opportunities, which included seeking contacts with native speakers. the relatively high level of autonomy declared in the researched sample is hardly surprising, as the participants were adults and advanced learners, with considerable experience in learning a foreign language. on the other hand, it needs to be stressed that although the majority of the participants declared being independent learners aware of the learning processes and able to manage their own learning, some of them did not express a strong belief in their own autonomy as learners. apparently, autonomy does not automatically come with age or learning experience. moreover, it needs to be stressed that part-time students’ independence as learners and their autonomous involvement in learning appeared to be greater than those of regular students, at least according to their own estimations. part-time students’ motivation may have been better defined; they had to pay tuition, unlike regular students, and often needed a university diploma to improve their qualifications at a workplace. moreover, since they attended classes only every second weekend, they may have been forced to devote more time to self-study and develop more autonomous learning behaviors. as a result, they claimed to have more clearly specified learning goals, better developed planning and self-evaluation abilities, and to be more conscious learning strategy users. similarly, although part-time students generally participated in all forms of cmc less frequently than did regular students, the study revealed that part computer-mediated communication as an autonomy-enhancement tool . . . 383 time students deliberately took more advantage of participating in cmc with the aim of practicing their english, apart from regular students’ primary focus on the social and pastime dimension of interacting online. this was clearly highlighted in the comments that the regular students made about their involvement in cmc: language development was considered as a by-product of engagement in meaningful interactions. the accounts provided by the participants point to three basic features of autonomous learning, namely “learner involvement,” “learner reflection” and “target language use” (little 2007, p. 7), present in their cmc-related behavior. while engaging in different forms of cmc, learners chose what to do, when, and to what extent, in this way learning to manage their contacts with the foreign language. while the participants admitted the main focus of their cmc was on conveying meaning, at the same time they also appreciated it as a source of valuable language input and an opportunity to practice communication skills. moreover, they were apparently able to exercise control over their learning during cmc engagement, which is a vital condition of autonomous learning according to many researchers (e.g., benson 2001, p. 141). their use of cmc also enabled and encouraged them to manage and monitor their l2 use and learning. however, the study also revealed that the participants’ awareness of what constitutes learner autonomy was rather limited and mainly associated with selfstudy or learning without help from a teacher. although, in the light of the study findings, participating in cmc as part of out-of-class contact with english appeared to contribute to enhanced learner autonomy among the study participants, it may be concluded that this influence was only partly conceptualized by them. therefore, the main teaching implication emerging from the study is the constant need to guide the students toward understanding what autonomous learning really is and to try to develop fully reflective attitudes in them, thanks to which they are better prepared to evaluate themselves as autonomous learners. this can be done through a variety of instructional techniques, for example, through classroom-based discussions of the nature of autonomous learning, small-scale research-oriented team projects investigating their levels of autonomy or self-evaluation tasks fostered or followed by teacher-student dialogs. offering guidance and suggestions concerning optimal learning tools and strategies is the primary role of a teacher in stimulating autonomous learning, both offline and online (e.g., godwin-jones, 2011). if learners can have sufficient hands-on experience with using various cmc forms within instructional settings, monitored by the tutor and provided with relevant feedback concerning its usefulness for effective learning, perhaps such strategies could be transferred to other, beyond-the-classroom, contexts. even at an advanced level of language proficiency, some of the students still did not have aleksandra wach 384 well-defined learning objectives and felt they did not know how to learn. awareness of how to make use of readily available cmc opportunities should be a part of learner development, so that they can be better appreciated by learners as a tool for fostering autonomy. conclusions first of all, it needs to be stated that the study has a number of limitations. some are connected with the fact that it relied exclusively on self-report data. as a consequence, the adequacy of the participants’ accounts of what they do may be easily questioned. in addition, a limitation in the design of this study is the impossibility of examining what the students really did as part of their outof-class cmc engagement. moreover, the generalizability of the study findings is limited, because, despite the relatively big sample size, the group was largely homogenous, as the participants came from the same cultural and educational background and studied at the same institution. finally, the study participants studied at the same university at which the researcher was employed, and although only some of them (about 30) were taught by the researcher, being aware that she was involved in the organization of some courses might have influenced the way in which they responded to the questionnaires. finally, the study findings allow for the formulation of some conclusions concerning the potential of cmc environments to foster autonomous learning in advanced learners of english. the intensity of their cmc engagement in english can be interpreted as offering ample opportunities for authentic, meaningful interactions in english, which can contribute to the development of various components of the learners’ communicative competence. by choosing to access internet resources, both pedagogical and non-pedagogical in nature, in their own time and for their own purposes, learners demonstrate autonomous learning behavior and take responsibility over managing their learning through online interactions. it cannot be concluded, however, that all cmc situations lead to learning or to autonomy enhancement. some cmc contacts are incidental or irrelevant enough not to have any impact on learning at all. therefore, implicit or explicit guidance from teachers, through which learners will learn how to make their cmc contacts with english beneficial for their competence building, seems to be an appropriate idea. computer-mediated communication as an autonomy-enhancement tool . . . 385 references abraham, l. b., & williams, l. 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(pp. 219-232). pozna : wydzia pedagogiczno-artystyczny uam w poznaniu and pa stwowa wy sza szko a zawodowa w koninie. aleksandra wach 388 appendix the data elicitation tools used in the study questionnaire 1 dear students, i will be grateful for your filling in the questionnaire below. it serves research purposes and is anonymous. thanks! age: …………………… years note: cmc is “communication between humans that is mediated by computer technology” (levy and stockwell 2006: 24) 1. how much time on average do you spend on computer-mediated communication (cmc)? ………………… hours a day on week days ………………… hours a day at weekends 2. do you use the following forms of computer-mediated communication? if you do, in which language(s) do you communicate in these ways? tick the ones that you use and the language of communication. cmc form in l1 in english in another language email blogs discussion forums chats wikis instant messaging social networking sites virtual worlds skype other: 3. how many times a week do you take part in cmc? a. less than once a week b. once a week c. 2-3 times a week d. more than 3 times a week e. every day 4. how often do you use english while engaging in cmc? never – rarely – sometimes – often – very often computer-mediated communication as an autonomy-enhancement tool . . . 389 5. please mark the best-matching answers to the following statements according to the following key: 1 – i strongly disagree, 2 – i disagree, 3 – i have no opinion, 4 – i agree, 5 – i strongly agree. 1. i have well defined objectives in learning english 1 2 3 4 5 2. i learn english regularly, according to my own plan 1 2 3 4 5 3. i know how to evaluate my own progress in english 1 2 3 4 5 4. i know how to look for appropriate materials for improving my english 1 2 3 4 5 5. apart from the materials given by my teachers, i use other materials of my own choice 1 2 3 4 5 6. i know what helps me learn most effectively 1 2 3 4 5 7. i take any opportunity to have contact with english 1 2 3 4 5 8. i look for opportunities to communicate in english with native speakers 1 2 3 4 5 9. i need regular feedback from teachers on how well i perform 1 2 3 4 5 10. i am an independent learner 1 2 3 4 5 11. i deliberately take part in cmc in order to improve my english 1 2 3 4 5 12. i look up new vocabulary items which i came across through cmc 1 2 3 4 5 13. i pay attention to the language forms which other cmc users use 1 2 3 4 5 14. i deliberately practice my reading skills through cmc 1 2 3 4 5 15. i deliberately practice my listening skills through cmc 1 2 3 4 5 16. i communicate through cmc with my english tutors 1 2 3 4 5 questionnaire 2 dear students, please provide answers to the following two questions. your responses should be spontaneous and honest; they don’t have to be very long or particularly well organized, so don’t worry that they will be evaluated in any way. i will be extremely grateful for your contribution. 1. do you consider yourself an autonomous learner of english? please justify your answer briefly. 2. if/when you take part in computer-mediated communication (through emails, instant messaging, blogging, etc.) in english, do you do it just for pleasure or social reasons, or do you ever intentionally plan to improve your english through cmc? 707 motivational dynamics in language learning editors: zoltán dörnyei, peter d. macintyre and alastair henry publisher: multilingual matters, 2015 isbn: 978-1-78309-255-0 pages: 430 the anthology motivational dynamics in language learning, edited by zoltán dörnyei, peter d. macintyre and alastair henry, constitutes an attempt, admittedly a very successful one, to apply the tenets of complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) (de bot & larsen-freeman, 2011; de bot, lowie, thorne, & verspoor, 2013; de bot, lowie, & verspoor, 2007; larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008) to empirical investigations into the role played by motivation in the process of learning second or foreign languages (l2). the editors elucidate in the introduction to the volume that the decision to embark on the project was dictated by the virtual absence of second language acquisition (sla) research that would venture beyond examining cause-and-effect relationships and seek to explore instead the dynamic and complex nature of this enterprise. as they comment in justification of tackling this challenge, we believed that the topic of l2 motivation was an ideal content area for such an endeavor, partly because motivation, with its ups and downs and ebbs and flows, was an sla phenomenon that seemed to lend itself to the application of dynamically 708 informed research designs, and partly because the currently most established constructs in the field – the various l2 self-guides – are by nature inherently dynamic and would therefore be well-suited targets for investigation using dynamic approaches. (p. 5) bounded by the introduction, where the rationale for the entire undertaking is outlined, and a conclusion, in which an attempt is made to spell out the criteria for high-quality research carried out within the dynamic systems perspective as well as the contributions of this stance to the study of second language motivation, the book has been divided into two main parts. the first, titled “conceptual issues” and comprising nine contributions, is intended to offer a succinct overview of key constructs related to cdst and illuminate how these relate to the study of motivation in second language learning. consequently, the reader will find here papers dealing with such issues as the defining tenets of cdst (diane larsen-freeman), attractor states (phil hiver), the importance of timescales in examining second language development (kees de bot), the contribution of initial conditions (marjolijn verspoor), the role of contextual factors (ema ushioda), the extent to which humans are capable of exercising agency (ali h. al-hoorie), the application of social network analysis to the investigation of foreign language learning (sarah mercer), the constantly evolving nature of possible selves, as conceptualized in dörnyei’s (2009a) l2 motivational self-system (alastair henry), and the notion of directed motivational currents as a groundbreaking framework in the study of l2 motivation (zoltán dörnyei, zana ibrahim and christine muir). the second part, “empirical studies,” includes twelve papers, all of which serve the purpose of illustrating how an investigation of various aspects of second language learning motivation can be handled from the perspective of cdst. the aspects that are touched upon include: (a) fluctuations in approach and avoidance motivation in the course of task performance, captured on a second-by-second timescale, as a manifestation of the intricate interplay between motivation, emotion and cognition (peter d. macintyre and alicia serous), (b) the multi-level character of the l2 self, as measured in terms of months, weeks, minutes and seconds (sarah mercer), (c) changes in motivation, anxiety and self-efficacy, representing a conglomerate of cognitive, affective and motivational factors (cf. dörnyei, 2009b), in the course of an academic writing seminar spanning the period of one semester (katalin piniel and kata csizér), (d) factors impacting l2 learning experience, that is engagement, interest, anxiety and boredom, together with combinations thereof (frea waninge), (e) the gradual development of language teacher immunity as an integral part of evolving motivational dispositions (phil hiver), (f) the identification of language learner archetypes with respect to motivational trajectories (letty chan, zoltán dörnyei and alastair henry), (g) the interaction of learner and teacher motivation within 709 an individual (tammy gregersen and peter d. macintyre), (h) fluctuations in motivation in nonmandatory foreign language courses (tomoko yashima and kumiko arano), (i) motivational dynamics in learning a third language (alastair henry), (j) the development of learner l2 self-concept as a result of participation in a study abroad program (kay irie and stephen ryan), (k) the interplay between self-regulation, as manifested in the execution of writing tasks, and the growth of the ideal l2 self (ryo nitta and kyoko baba), and, finally, (l) the impact of imagery in second language learning on the evolution of future self-guides (chenjing [julia] you and letty chan). what is of paramount importance, these diverse aspects of the dynamic character of l2 motivation are in many cases explored with the help of innovative methodological procedures that have thus far rarely or even never been employed in the study of motivational processes, let alone other facets of sla, a huge contribution that is repeatedly emphasized throughout the review. the value of this anthology should be obvious to anyone involved in research into various aspects of sla, especially those related to the contribution of individual difference factors in general and motivational processes in particular, although opinions about what constitutes its primary strength are likely to vary. for the editors as well as the authors of some of the chapters, the main contribution of the volume is without doubt its firm and consistent grounding in the selected theoretical perspective, namely cdst, and the inclusion of practical guidelines on how research within this perspective should beneficially be conducted. this assumption is closely tied to the deep conviction that the espousal of such a stance allows obtaining insights that would otherwise elude us and thus researchers in fact have no choice but to follow this path and do so with as much dedication, persistence and rigor as possible. for instance, the editors confidently state in the conclusion that “adopting complex, dynamic system principles is integral to the language processes we study and therefore cannot remain optional” (pp. 420-421), whereas yashima and arano note that “dstinformed motivation research has tremendous potential for helping us understand why people do what they do” (p. 314). henry, in turn, comments that many of the motivational shifts identified here would have surfaced even if the data had been analyzed without the benefit of a cds lens. however, by adopting a complexity approach . . . it means that we conceptualize the objects of our enquiry – the classroom, the students and their motivation – as systems that are by nature dynamic [emphasis original]. (p. 339) indeed, these benefits can hardly be denied and the immense consistency in applying the tenets of cdst is truly commendable, which makes the collection an invaluable resource for those who wish to investigate second language learning 710 motivation from this perspective. this should not be interpreted as indicating that the long-term contributions of cdst approaches to investigating l2 motivation should be taken for granted or, for that matter, that its benefits will ever lead to or should even result in the abandonment of traditional methodologies tapping static relationships and focusing upon groups rather than individuals. this is evident in the words of mercer, who insightfully points out that “no single research method or theoretical framework can answer all the complex questions posed by the field of sla” (p. 80), but also the editors themselves, who admit that just as they have not supplanted traditional longitudinal studies in developmental psychology, cds methods are unlikely to replace other approaches to research in our field. correlations, analysis of variance, interviews, classroom observation schemes and other methods will continue to have their place in the literature for the foreseeable future. (p. 428) the obvious merits mentioned above notwithstanding, to me, personally, the true value of the volume does not lie in the rigorous, if in some cases perhaps somewhat exaggerated while at the same time entirely understandable, efforts to cast the discussion of the applied research procedures and the obtained findings in relation to such notions as initial conditions, attractor states, perturbations, self-organization, coadaptation, timescales or signature dynamics, to name but a few. rather, in my view, the main contribution of this edited collection is its clear success in raising our awareness of the multifarious ways in which the dynamic nature of second language learning motivation can be explored, both with respect to the foci of investigation and the methodological choices made, irrespective of allegiance to one theoretical stance or another. it is truly fascinating and engrossing, for example, to get familiarized with conceptualizations, contexts and issues that are only emerging as fruitful lines of inquiry in motivational research, such as the dynamics of possible selves (chapters 9, 20 and 22), directed motivational currents (chapter 10), the intricate character of l2 learning experience (chapter 14), motivation to learn a third language (chapter 19), study abroad situations (chapter 20), teacher immunity (chapter 15), or the tensions between teacher and learner motivation (chapter 17). on the other hand, it is hugely instructive and inspiring to become acquainted with the nuts and bolts of such entirely novel or still budding research procedures as idiodynamic methodology (chapters 11 and 12), a nested systems approach (chapter 12), latent growth curve models and longitudinal clustering (chapter 13), retrodictive qualitative modeling (chapter 16), or q methodology (chapter 20). all of these developments bode well for the future of research into language learning motivation as they hold the promise of allowing scholars to stake out 711 little known territories, gaining fresh insights in this respect, and disclosing influences or amalgams of influences that have thus far been hidden from view. perhaps with the notable exception of the contribution by mercer (chapter 12), somewhat conspicuously missing from the volume are examples of studies that would tap the peaks and valleys in motivational intensity, however operationalized, as they transpire during naturally-occurring, regularly-scheduled classes, such as the one carried out by waninge, dörnyei, and de bot (2014). such an omission is surprising and unfortunate since research projects of this kind do not only enable examining motivational fluctuations on a minute-byminute basis but are also characterized by high ecological validity, a quality that experimental research employing the idiodynamic method (e.g., macintyre and serroul) can never be expected to possess. for this reason, their findings are much more likely to resonate with practitioners and provide a more sound basis for implications for what happens in real classrooms on an everyday basis. clearly, research of this kind also has the potential to reflect the fundamental tenets of cdst, and therefore there is every reason why this line of inquiry should be vigorously pursued by those opting to pledge their allegiance to this theoretical framework. in light of all the contributions of the volume, this, however, is a relatively minor shortcoming, one that testifies to the fact that research reflecting cdts principles is still in its infancy and that an attempt to explore real-time changes in motivation in classroom conditions poses a formidable challenge. it is also a limitation that can be viewed as more than likely to be rectified in the near future as existing data collection tools are refined and new research procedures are developed. all things considered, the collection of papers represents a valuable and at the same time much-needed addition to the field of research into second language learning motivation and in particular its temporal dimension. this is not only because it constitutes a highly successful attempt to situate the study of motivation within the framework of complex dynamic systems, as reflected in the use of relevant terminology, acceptance of a set of well-articulated principles or adherence to rigid guidelines on how such empirical investigations should be conducted, but also, or maybe even primarily, because the contributions included therein open up new avenues in research on motivational dynamics, both in terms of its directions, scope and methodological approaches. as a result, the edited volume is bound to become a recognized source of reference, inspiration, insight, reflection and self-education for all those who set their sights on uncovering the intricate nature of motivation to learn additional languages, whether with respect to its causes, intensity or the factors responsible for shaping it. its merits will undoubtedly be appreciated by undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students, experienced scholars who feel the need to apply a wider 712 lens to their research, one that is more focused on the individual, context or interactions between the two, as well as teachers who are determined to gain a greater understanding of the factors impinging upon motivation in the hope of devising efficacious motivational strategies. it is my stance that these benefits are by no means confined to those who elect to comply with cdst principles and are best viewed as theory-neutral, which, somewhat paradoxically, offers evidence for yet another strength of the anthology, even if such an outcome may not have been anticipated by the editors. it is fitting to end this review with the words of john h. schumann, who declares in the foreword that “this volume marks an exciting new beginning” (p. xviii). while this comment is meant to refer to cdst and the methodology it embraces, it should, to my mind, be interpreted more broadly and be taken to suggest that the edited collection is bound to give an impetus to a spate of studies on the dynamic nature of l2 motivation, such that will reflect innovative designs, utilize new data collection tools and avail themselves of ingenious methods of analysis, the theoretical persuasions of scholars conducting these studies being a far less significant issue. even though the jury is still out on whether insights gained in this way will indeed translate into more effective ways of motivating language learners, there are strong grounds to assume that adding this nascent micro-perspective to the well-established macro-perspective will considerably enhance the chances that this crucial goal will be attained. reviewed by mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz, poland state university of applied sciences, konin, poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl references de bot, k. & larsen-freeman, d. (2011). researching second language development from a dynamic systems theory perspective. in m. h. verspoor, k. de bot, & w. lowie (eds.), a dynamic approach to second language development: methods and techniques (pp. 5-23). amsterdam: john benjamins. de bot, k., lowie, w., thorne, s. l., & verspoor, m. h. (2013). dynamic systems theory as a theory of second language development. in m. mayo, m. gutierrez-mangado, & m. adrián (eds.), contemporary approaches to second language acquisition (pp. 199-220). amsterdam: john benjamins. 713 de bot, k., lowie, w., & verspoor, m. h. (2007). a dynamic systems theory approach to second language acquisition. bilingualism: language and cognition, 10(1), 7-21. dörnyei, z. (2009a). the l2 motivational self system. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 9-42). bristol: multilingual matters. dörnyei, z. (2009b). the psychology f second language acquisition. oxford: oxford university press. larsen-freeman, d., & cameron, l. (2008). complex dynamic systems and applied linguistics. oxford: oxford university press. waninge, f., dörnyei, z., & de bot, k. (2014). motivational dynamics in language learning: change, stability, and context. modern language journal, 98(3), 704-723. 4324-8388-1-sm_part11 4324-8388-1-sm_part12 4324-8388-1-sm_part13 4324-8388-1-sm_part14 4324-8388-1-sm_part15 4324-8388-1-sm_part16 4324-8388-1-sm_part17 13 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (1). 13-45 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl affective variables, parental involvement and competence among south korean high school learners of english annie morris la capitale school board, quebec, canada morris.annie@educ.cscapitale.qc.ca marc lafontaine université laval, canada marc.lafontaine@lli.ulaval.ca françois pichette teluq/université du québec a montreal, canada pichette.francois@teluq.uqam.ca linda de serres université du québec à trois-rivières, canada linda.de.serres@uqtr.ca abstract this study investigated the relationships between various affective variables and two measures of competence in english, for 190 south korean high school students. a 55-item questionnaire was used to measure attitudes (attitudes toward english speakers and their communities and attitudes toward the english-speaking culture), motivation (motivational intensity, desire to learn and attitudes toward the learning of english), amotivation, parental involvement (active parental encouragement, passive parental encouragement and parental pressure), parental disinterest and students’ competence in l2 (englishexam and english-self). pearson product-moment coefficients indicate that active and passive forms of parental encouragement correlate with motivation annie morris, marc lafontaine, françois pichette, linda de serres 14 to learn, as conceptualized by gardner (1985, 2010), as well as with parental pressure, which suggests that south korean students report undergoing forms of pressure when their parents actively or passively encourage them. furthermore, the obtained correlations of the active and passive forms of encouragement with different variables suggest that the two forms represent two distinct concepts. while parental disinterest correlated negatively with motivational variables, parental pressure correlated only with motivational intensity, and only weakly. therefore, parental pressure seems not to interact significantly with participants’ attitudes, motivation and competence. multiple linear regression analyses confirm the importance of motivation to learn for students' l2 competence. keywords: parental involvement, parental disinterest, motivation, amotivation, l2 competence english is currently the most common language employed worldwide for various means of communication. in many asian countries, the learning of english as a second language (l2) has become an important educational topic (nunan, 2005). in order to describe the situation in south korea, park (2009) uses the term “english fever,” which clearly expresses how important the learning of english has become. in south korea and several other countries, competence in english is of great importance for success in life since it provides access to prestigious universities and to higher employment positions (park, 2009; sorensen, 1994; stevens, kinam, & hyun, 2006). in cases where parents rely on their youth to care for them in their elderly years, the financial success of their children through education becomes paramount to their own future (sorensen, 1994). korean mothers are willing, even for an extended period of time, to emigrate with their children to english-speaking countries in order to help them learn the target language (park, 2009). surprisingly, while parents’ involvement in their children’s education is recognized as substantial, student motivation is known to be low (niederhauser, 1997). many studies have focused on several aspects related to south korea’s educational issues (hwang, 2001; park, 2009; stevens, kinam, & hyun, 2006) as well as on direct or indirect ways to improve students’ english competence (han, 2003; kim & kim, 2011; pae, 2008; park, 2009; stevens, kinam, & hyun, 2006). however, no researcher seems to have investigated south korean students’ perceptions of their parents’ support. this lack of research interest is surprising, given the fact that many authors (csizér & kormos, 2009; dörnyei, 2009; gardner, 2001) have identified parents’ role as a variable that can affect students’ attitudes and motivation to learn an l2. gonzalez-dehass, willems, and holbein affective variables, parental involvement and competence among south korean high school . . . 15 (2005), hung and marjoribanks (2005), spera (2005), and wang (2004) have recognized parental involvement as a significant predictor of young learners’ academic competence. however, few researchers have investigated the possible relationships between parental involvement, affective variables and students’ competence. masgoret and gardner (2003), through a meta-analysis, sought to identify which of the various affective variables, except parental involvement, correlated the most with students’ competence. when considering contexts where a second language such as english has become important for social promotion, thus making parents and children interact in a way that favours the learning of the l2, it would be pertinent to investigate relationships between parental involvement1 or their disinterest and other affective variables. the purpose of this study is to investigate possible relationships between parental involvement, parental disinterest and different affective variables among south korean learners of english. by doing so, we will attempt to answer three questions: 1. how do south korean students perceive the role their parents play in their learning of english? 2. is there a relationship between parental involvement or parental disinterest and various affective variables? 3. do parental involvement and parental disinterest correlate with students’ competence in a second language? literature review numerous studies in l2 acquisition have focused on the role of a variety of affective variables. among those variables, attitudes and motivation have been widely studied (dörnyei, 2005; gardner, 1985, 2010; gardner & lambert, 1959, 1972; macintyre & gardner, 1989; masgoret & gardner, 2003). gardner (1985) defined motivation as the learner’s effort to learn an l2, the effort being the consequence of a desire to reach a given goal: “motivation to learn a second language is seen as referring to the extent to which the individual works or strives to learn the language because of a desire to do so and the satisfaction experienced in this activity” (p. 10). gardner and lambert (1972) suggested two distinct types of motivation: integrative and instrumental. “integrative motivation refer[s] to positive attitudes and feelings toward the target language group” 1 parental involvement refers to parents’ different forms of encouragement. it could consist of active or passive forms of encouragement, as well as forms of strong parental interest or of strong parental encouragement which can be perceived as forms of pressure by the participants. annie morris, marc lafontaine, françois pichette, linda de serres 16 (matsuzaki carreira, 2005, p. 39), while instrumental motivation refers to practical gains from l2 proficiency, for example to obtain a better working position or a higher salary (matsuzaki carreira, 2005). integrativeness which “reflects a genuine interest in learning the second language in order to come closer psychologically to the other language community” (gardner, 2001, p. 15) does not apply to all foreign language learning contexts, especially where learners have no contact with the target languages and people (dörnyei, 1990; matsuzaki carreira, 2005). according to matsuzaki carreira (2005), this constitutes the reason why some researchers started to incorporate notions from psychological motivation research, such as extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. vallerand (1997) reports that extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation had been discussed in over 800 psychology publications. intrinsic motivation refers to the “motivation [to] engage in an activity for its own sake;” extrinsic motivation refers to the “motivation [to] engage in an activity as a means to an end” (pintrich & schunk, 2002, p. 245). when a learner has neither intrinsic nor extrinsic motivational goals, amotivation is said to be present in the language learner (noels, pelletier, clément, & vallerand, 2000). therefore, conceptually speaking, amotivation is not a negative form of motivation, but rather represents a lack or an absence of motivation. motivation is known to be one of the most important variables for predicting competence (masgoret & gardner, 2003), while amotivation characterizes students who tend to abandon their studies of the l2. most students are brought up by parents whose own views and goals toward the learning of an l2 can influence their own children’s goals, or lack thereof, to learn an l2. when parents outwardly demonstrate their disinterest toward the learning of an l2, this can negatively shape their children’s own attitudes and motivation to learn this l2. parents’ role or implication have been identified by many authors (csizér & kormos, 2009; dörnyei, 2005; gardner, 2001) as an element that can affect students’ attitudes and motivation to learn an l2. gardner (1985) categorized parental involvement according to active and passive forms of encouragement. the active form refers to positive or negative parental behaviour toward their children's learning of a language. parents who encourage and reward their children’s learning of a language can be viewed as adopting an active and positive role, whereas parents who discourage l2 learning by emphasizing other subjects or by criticizing the language and its speakers play an active role, with a negative impact. parents’ passive role relates to their disposition toward the l2 community, which influences their children's desire to align with the speakers of the language, and this behaviour, according to gardner (1985), reflects an integrative orientation (bartram, 2006). a negative parental attitude toward the l2 speaking community would affect their children’s attitude and not allow motivation to develop. in affective variables, parental involvement and competence among south korean high school . . . 17 gardner and smythe’s summary on the development of the attitude/motivation test battery (1981), parental encouragement significantly contributed to the students’ integrative motive factors (gardner & smythe, 1981). parents have also been identified as having a significant influence on the general attitudes of their children (barton, 1997; phillips & filmer-sankey, 1993). different forms of parental encouragement are among the many ways parents exert their attitudinal influence (young, 1994). through a qualitative survey, bartram (2006) studied the influence of parents on the attitudes toward the language learning of 411 learners of french, english and german. the researcher investigated the different ways that parents try to influence their children’s learning of a foreign language. the german students’ positive attitudes, and the more negative attitudes of the english students, corresponded with their parents’ attitudes. results from this study provide evidence of a relationship between students’ attitudes and those of their parents. as gardner (1985) suggested, the fact that parents contribute to the language learning of their children affects their children’s attitudes. in 2005, dörnyei proposed the l2 motivation self-system, which focuses on learners’ self-identity, on their self-visualization or image of themselves as l2 learners, and on their desire to attain their future self-image, which consequently affects their motivational behaviour. in the l2 motivation self-system, parents are considered an influential factor. at least two subsequent studies (csizér & kormos, 2009; taguchi, magid, & papi, 2009) identified parental influence as being either internalized or correlating with one of the three components of dörnyei’s motivational system. in csizér and kormos (2009), parental influence became an internalized part of the ideal l2 self component, which represents the learner’s idealistic self-image (dörnyei, 2005). in taguchi, magid and papi (2009), parental influence correlated with the learner’s ought-to l2 self, which is what a learner believes he or she should possess or ought to be in order to avoid negative outcomes, such as disappointing one’s parents (dörnyei, 2005). therefore, parents are identified as forms of influence that can differently affect their children’s attitudes and motivation toward the learning of an l2. studies conducted in south korea have focused on how to improve students’ performance and competence in english by improving teaching (han, 2003) or by motivating students to learn english (kim & kim, 2011; pae, 2008). suggestions to parents could be made if we knew more precisely how their involvement interacts with their children’s affective variables. in their aforementioned meta-analysis, masgoret and gardner (2003) found the highest correlation between measures of achievement and motivation to learn an l2. in gardner’s work, three scales are commonly used to evaluate motivation: motivational intensity, desire to learn the target language, and attitudes to annie morris, marc lafontaine, françois pichette, linda de serres 18 ward learning the target language. masgoret and gardner consider these three scales to be the most representative components of motivation as a variable in the learning of an l2. in light of the first question of the present study, and according to the important role parents play in south korea in their children’s learning of english, it is hypothesized that active or passive forms of parental involvement will correspond with forms of pressure. since parents are considered a touchstone that can affect, in many ways, l2 students’ attitudes and motivation, and since motivational variables correlate with students’ competence in l2, it is legitimate to hypothesize, in regards to the second question, that parental variables may be expected to correlate with students’ attitudes and motivation to learn english. the same is also legitimate in regards to the third question of the present study, that parental variables are expected to correlate with students’ competence in an l2. the goal of the present study is to investigate, among a south korean high school population, the interaction between parental involvement as perceived by students, as well as parental disinterest, affective variables and competence in english. this study will therefore provide data on parental involvement in south korea and extend the body of research in l2 acquisition on attitudinal and motivational affective variables, including parental variables. it will also extend, within the l2 acquisition research agenda, the possible role that parental variables play on students’ motivation and english l2 competence. method participants the sample consisted of 190 participants, ranging from 16 to 18 years of age, all native south koreans attending private high schools located in seoul and incheon. the capital city of seoul with its metropolitan area (incheon) is known to have the best south korean universities and therefore is considered to be an excellent pool of participants, that is, students, especially those in their final years of high school, undergoing pressure to take their university entrance exams. the study was conducted during students’ regular summer classes at two different high schools. participants were from seven classes in their last two years of high school. participants were asked, in their respective classrooms, to answer a questionnaire on a volunteer basis. they took 10 to 15 minutes to complete it. in three of the seven classes, it was the teacher who explained the guidelines for each section of the questionnaire, the main author not being allowed to be present. this situation could be due in part to the competitiveness of south korea’s educational system. affective variables, parental involvement and competence among south korean high school . . . 19 material the questionnaire comprises 55 items (see the appendix) covering 10 different independent variables. the questionnaire contains items from gardner’s (1985) attitude/motivation test battery (amtb) scales, which are widely used and shown to be reliable for evaluating various affective variables (gardner, 2010; masgoret & gardner, 2003). items from taguchi, magid and papi’s (2009) family influence and ought-to l2 self scales were borrowed in order to estimate forms of parental pressure that could correspond to the south korean context. other items from the same authors, which relate to opportunities to interact with native english speakers or their communities, were adapted to measure participants’ desire to interact with native english speakers, in view of the limited possibilities offered in the south korean context. some items were shortened and also transformed from questions to statements to better fit a likert scale. items from csizér and kormos (2009), which relate to parents’ active forms of encouragement, were also used. noels, pelletier, clément and vallerand’s (2000) amotivation scale, which is perhaps the most widely used scale of amotivation for l2 studies, was included in the present study to verify whether, within the south korean education-centered context, participants could show significant levels of amotivation. finally, additional items were created to better suit the south korean context. for example, the emigration situation for the learning of english and parental demands for students to attend extra english classes were among those items. since no scale for parental pressure and disinterest seems to exist, a series of items were created anew, or the aforementioned scales were used to build them. items from the questionnaire were translated into the official south korean hangumal language. the following section provides detailed information on the number and nature of these items. most of the affective variable items were rated on a 7-point likert scale ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (7). items in the negative form were used to insure reliability of the instrument; data from these items were transformed for reverse scoring before computation. two scales, motivational intensity (mi) and desire to learn (dl), were in the form of multiple-choice items, as found in gardner’s (1985) questionnaire. values were given once questionnaires were filled out, according to the chosen answer. as an example, for the item measuring participants’ desire to learn: “if there were english-speaking families in my neighbourhood, i would,” a value of 3 was given to answer a (“speak english with them as much as possible”), a value of 2 to answer b (“speak english with them sometimes”), and a value of 1 to answer c (“never speak english with them”). answer choices were not always associated with the same scores. using spss, cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficients were computed for each scale to verify their internal consistency and to provide an indicator of their reliability value annie morris, marc lafontaine, françois pichette, linda de serres 20 within the instrument. even though an acceptable value for an alpha is said to be higher than .70 (bland & altman, 1997; nunnally & bernstein, 1994), one must bear in mind for interpreting our data that alpha coefficients are influenced by the number of items on a test: they tend to be low for a very low number of items and tend to be artificially inflated by a high number of items (cortina, 1993). factorial analyses were beyond the scope of the present study. independent variables parental involvement (pi). of the 55 items, a total of 16 addressed parental involvement, either in the form of encouragement (active or passive), or pressure. the item numbers provided in this section are those that were used in our instrument, and not in the questionnaires from which they were borrowed. three scales were used to investigate parental involvement. the active parental encouragement (p_act; = .75) scale contains six items: four borrowed from gardner’s (1985) amtb (items 4, 10, 34, & 40) and two from csizér and kormos’ (2009) questionnaire (items 18 & 21). for example, item 4 (“my parents try to help me with my english”) represents an active form of parental encouragement. a high score reveals a strong active form of parental encouragement, as perceived by the participants. table 1 gives an overview of the nature and number of items used for each scale and for each independent variable. the number in parenthesis indicates the number of items included in the category. table 1 details of the scales and items used independent variable scales item numbers parental involvement (16) p_act/active encouragement (6) 4, 10, 18, 21, 34, 40 p_pas/passive encouragement (5) 9, 14, 37, 38, 42 p_pres/pressure (5) 12, 17, 26, 27, 30 parental disinterest (5) p_dis/disinterest (5) 2, 19, 22, 33, 36 attitudes t. english (12) acom/attitudes toward english speakers and their communities (9) 1, 5, 11, 13, 23, 28, 31, 32, 44 acul/attitudes toward the english-speaking culture (3) 6, 15, 20 motivation (19) mi/motivational intensity (5) 46, 49, 51, 52, 54 dl/desire to learn (6) 45, 47, 48, 50, 53, 55 ale/attitudes toward the learning of english (8) 3, 7, 16, 24, 29, 35, 39, 43 amotivation (3) amot/amotivation scale (3) 8, 25, 41 the passive parental encouragement (p_pas; = .85) scale contains five items taken from gardner’s (1985) amtb (9, 14, 37, 38, 42). some of these have been adapted to better express south korean parents’ thoughts rather than their hopes, their feelings or their expectations, as was the case in gardaffective variables, parental involvement and competence among south korean high school . . . 21 ner’s (1985) amtb. here is an example: “my parents think that i should continue studying english all through school” (item 14). high scores show a strong passive form of parental encouragement. the parental pressure (p_pres; = .78) scale consists of five items (12, 17, 26, 27, 30) and represents parents' strong interest in their children's learning of english, which can eventually be perceived negatively by the learners, as a form of pressure. such is the case with item 26, created for this study: “my parents require that i take additional english classes, aside from my regular classes.” four items were borrowed from taguchi, magid and papi (2009). two of them (12 & 30) measure family influence (e.g., item 30: “my parents put a lot of pressure on me to study english”) while the other two (17 & 27) are used to estimate the “ought-to l2” self-concept. for the purpose of the present study, these four items were transformed in order to represent forms of strong parental interest that could eventually correspond to forms of pressure. for instance, parents can be slightly disappointed if their child does not study english seriously, but a high level of disappointment can be associated with negative resentment, leading the child to take it as pressure to work or study differently (e.g., 17: “my parents have great expectations toward my learning of english” or 27: “my parents would be disappointed if i did not study english seriously”). a high score reflects high levels of pressure from parents, as perceived by the participants. parental disinterest (p_dis). the five items for parental disinterest (p_dis; = .72; items 2, 19, 22, 33, 36) were created expressly for the purpose of this study. these items represent parents’ lack of interest in their children’s learning of english. for example: “my parents think that english is useless” (item 2). a high score therefore reflects the parental disinterest in the learning of english, as perceived by the participants. parental disinterest (p_dis) is related to the idea that english is useless or unnecessary and that the learning of it is not valued by parents. parental pressure (p_pres), on the contrary, is a form of interest that, once expressed on a high level, can be interpreted or felt as a form of pressure. as for the passive parental encouragement (p_pas) scale, it is expressed in the form of thoughts, while the active parental encouragement (p_act) scale corresponds to actions. attitudes toward english (att). this variable was measured using a total of 12 items. two scales were used to measure the participants' attitudes toward the english-speaking community and culture in general. attitudes toward english speakers and their communities (acom; = .87) consists of nine items. three items were borrowed from gardner’s (1985) scale measuring attitudes toward english speakers (items 5, 13, 32) and two from ta annie morris, marc lafontaine, françois pichette, linda de serres 22 guchi, magid, and papi’s (2009) questionnaire (items 1 and 28) were used to measure attitudes toward the l2 community. these last two were transformed from questions to statements to better fit a likert scale. four items were created by the authors in order to question participants on the possibility of having english speakers as friends, or for traveling or living in english-speaking communities (11, 23, 31 & 44). “i agree with the possibility that one day i may choose to live in an english speaking country” (item 44) is an example of one of these created items. the attitudes toward the english-speaking culture (acul; = .52) scale consists of three items (6, 15, 20) borrowed from taguchi, magid, and papi (2009), which were modified as previously explained. these items are related to culture in general such as music, movies and magazines. the following is one example: “i think that english magazines, newspapers and books are really interesting” (item 15). both scales were used to evaluate the participants’ level of integrativeness, which for the present study will focus on students’ attitudes toward english speakers and their communities, as well as their attitudes toward the english-speaking culture. a high score reflects participants’ strong positive attitudes toward english speakers and their communities (acom) or their strong positive attitudes toward the english-speaking culture (acul). motivation (mot). three scales were borrowed from gardner’s (1985) amtb in order to estimate participants' levels of motivation: motivational intensity (mi; = .65), desire to learn (dl; = .65) and attitudes toward the learning of english (ale; = .88). a total of 19 items cover this variable: the attitudes toward the learning of english (ale) scale consists of eight items (3, 7, 16, 24, 29, 35, 39, 43), the motivational intensity (mi) consists of five items (46, 49, 51, 52, 54), and the desire to learn (dl) consists of six items (45, 47, 48, 50, 53, 55). these scales are considered by masgoret and gardner (2003) to be pivotal in defining motivation. high scores on motivational intensity (mi) items such as “i actively think about what i have learned in my english class” (item 51) reflect participants’ considerable efforts to learn english. motivational intensity (mi) and desire to learn (dl) items are in the form of multiple choice questions (see the appendix), and high scores on desire to learn (dl) items reflect participants’ strong desire to learn english. one question from the motivational intensity (mi) and desire to learn (dl) items was adapted to better represent the south korean educational context, as in the following: “if english class were not required for my graduate studies, i would ...” (item 53). “learning english is really great” (item 24), and “learning english is a waste of time” (item 35) are two examples of questions used to investigate participants’ positive and negative attitudes towards the learning of english. a high score reflects participants’ positive attitudes toward the learning of english (ale). affective variables, parental involvement and competence among south korean high school . . . 23 amotivation (amot). the amotivation (amot; = .69) scale was used to evaluate participants' absence of motivation. three items, retrieved from noels, clément, and pelletier’s (2000) study on amotivation, have been included for measuring this variable (8, 25, 41). the questions were shortened from the original version and the colloquial aspect of the questions was also taken out in consideration of the south korean social formalities; for example: “i learn english without really wanting to” (item 25). a high score reflects a high level of amotivation to learn english. dependent variables two measures were used to estimate participants’ competence in english. the first measure (english-exam) consisted of an inquiry about the score that students obtained for the last exam taken. participants chose their last corresponding score from seven ranges of marks: 0 to 30, 31 to 50, 51 to 60, 61 to 70, 71 to 80, 81 to 90, and 91 to 100. the second measure of competence (englishself) consisted of participants’ self-perception of their ability to read, write, listen and speak in english. participants were required to evaluate their competence for each skill on a 5-point likert scale ranging from very insufficient (1) to very satisfactory (5). an average of the ratings for the four skills was calculated. a number of authors (leblanc & painchaud, 1985; tannenbaum, rosenfeld, breyer, & wilson, 2000; wilson, 1999; see roever & powers, 2005) agree on the fact that self-ratings for language competence tend to be accurate, since correlations with competence scores on standardized tests range from moderate to high. as previously mentioned, the whole questionnaire was translated into the official south korean language. roever and powers (2005), who studied the effect of administering a self-assessment in english versus in the participants’ first language (l1), confirm the validity of self-assessment in the l1. results and analysis pearson correlations between variables a first series of pearson product-moment correlation analysis was performed to examine relationships between computed variables. three scales were aggregated to assess parental involvement (pi): active parental encouragement (p_act), passive parental encouragement (p_pas) and parental pressure (p_pres). as in gardner’s work, motivational intensity (mi), desire to learn (dl) and attitudes toward the learning of english (ale) were computed to assess motivation to learn a second language (mot). also, attitudes to annie morris, marc lafontaine, françois pichette, linda de serres 24 ward english (att) is the result of computing the two scales assessing attitudes toward english speakers and their communities (acom) and attitudes toward the english-speaking culture (acul). all other measures were also used in this first sequence of correlations: parental disinterest (p_dis), amotivation (amot), english-exam and english-self. correlation coefficients between all variables are presented in table 2; results are examined in light of the three study questions. in the present study, given the large number of variables involved when investigating this type of socio-psychological behaviour (see cohen, 1988), correlations will be considered weak below .20, moderate between .20 and .50, and strong above .50. table 2 correlations between variables scales (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (1) parental involvement –– -.62** .27** .27** -.08** .21** .12** (2) parental disinterest ––** -.30** -.29** .30** -.26** -.15** (3) attitudes ––** .61** -.57** .17** .26** (4) motivation ––** -.79** .40** .46** (5) amotivation ––** -.32** -.37** (6) english-exam ––** .45** (7) english-self ––** *p < .05 ** p < .01 research question 1: how do south korean students perceive the role their parents play in their learning of english? this question requires examining correlations between parental involvement (pi) and parental disinterest (p_dis), which yielded a strong negative coefficient (r(190) = -.62, p < .01). this correlation suggests that when south korean parents are involved (actively, passively or by putting a form of pressure on their children) students tend to report that their parents are not disinterested in their learning. more details concerning the role parents play in their children’s learning of english will be provided through the second sequence of correlation analysis. research question 2: is there a relationship between parental involvement or parental disinterest and various affective variables? as evidenced in table 2, parental involvement (pi) correlates with attitudes toward english (att) (r(190) = .27, p < .01) the same way it correlates with motivation to learn a second language (mot) (r(190) = .27, p < .01). even though the correlations are not strong, parental involvement (pi) nonetheless expresses a positive relationship with students’ attitudes and motivation. with almost similar coefficients, parental disinterest (p_dis) negatively correlates with attiaffective variables, parental involvement and competence among south korean high school . . . 25 tudes toward english (att) (r(190) = -.30, p < .01) and with motivation to learn a second language (mot) (r(190) = -.29, p < .01). therefore, parental disinterest also expresses a moderate relationship with students’ attitude and motivation. a strong correlation was obtained between motivation to learn a second language (mot) and attitudes toward english (att) (r(190) = .61, p < .01). this last result is consistent with what is found in the literature (masgoret & gardner, 2003), for it suggests that the participants’ motivation seems to be intertwined in an important manner with students’ integrative forms of motivation, which are present in the attitudes toward english (att) scales. while the parental involvement (pi) variable does not correlate significantly with amotivation (amot), parental disinterest (p_dis) does correlate moderately with amotivation (amot) (r(190) = .30, p < .01). students’ attitudes toward english (att) obtained a high negative correlation with amotivation (amot) (r(190) = -.57, p < .01) and students’ motivation to learn a second language (mot) obtained a higher negative correlation with amotivation (amot) (r(190) = -.79, p < .01). thus, the more a student is motivated to learn a second language or the more he or she presents levels of integrativeness, that is, levels of interest toward english-speaking people, their culture and their communities, the less he or she expresses signs of amotivation. research question 3: do parental involvement and parental disinterest correlate with students’ competence in a second language? parental involvement (pi) correlates moderately with english-exam (r(190) = .21, p < .01), but not with english-self, while parental disinterest (p_dis) correlates negatively with both measures of competence, that is with english-exam (r(190) = -.26, p < .01) and with english-self (r(190) = -.15, p < .05). coefficients show a relatively moderate relationship. motivation to learn a second language (mot) correlates with both measures of competence in english: english-exam (r(190) = .40, p < .01) and english-self (r(190) = .46, p < .01). the results obtained for motivation to learn a second language (mot) and the two measures of competence are consistent with what is found in the literature (gardner, 2010; masgoret & gardner, 2003). since amotivation (amot) is said to represent students’ lack or absence of motivation, it is logical that it also correlated negatively with both measures of competence, that is with english-exam (r(190) = -.32, p < .01) and with english-self (r(190) = -.37, p < .01). in the case of attitudes toward english (att), it correlates with both measures of competence: with english-exam (r(190) = .17, p < .05) and with english-self (r(190) = .26, p < .01). these correlations are similar to those noted between both measures of competence and parental involvement (pi), as well as annie morris, marc lafontaine, françois pichette, linda de serres 26 between parental disinterest (p_dis) and both measures of competence. therefore, parental involvement (pi) and parental disinterest (p_dis), as well as attitudes toward english (att), only moderately correlate with competence. pearson correlations between scales in order to further detail the previous correlations, a second series of pearson product-moment correlation coefficients were computed to assess relationships between all scales, that is, all variables broken down into their components, including the two competence measures (see table 1, second column). table 3 displays the various correlations. as in the first sequence of correlations, all of the obtained data will be examined in light of the three study questions. table 3 correlations between scales scales (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (1) p_act –– .72** .56** -.55** .30** .34** .37** .35** .27** -.22** .26** .20** (2) p_pas ––* .61** -.69** .23** .26** .24** .21** .15** -.12** .15** .03** (3) p_pres ––** -.40** .09** .06** .06** .17** -.04** .11** .14** .08** (4) p_dis ––** -.28** -.25** -.30** -.18** -.18** .30** -. -.26** -.15** (5) acom ––** .59** .63** .29** .50** -.57** .17** .24** (6) acul ––** .52** .23** .40** -.46** .11** .22** (7) ale ––** .48** .73** -.81** .32** .41** (8) mi ––** .48** -.39** .43** .39** (9) dl ––** -.66** .26** .41** (10) amot ––** -.32** -.37** (11) exam ––** .45** (12) self ––** *p < .05 ** p < .01 research question 1: how do south korean students perceive the role their parents play in their learning of english? analysis shows a strong correlation between active parental encouragement (p_act) and passive parental encouragement (p_pas) scales (r(190) = .72, p < .01), suggesting that south korean parents are perceived as encouraging in both forms, active and passive. both active and passive forms of encouragement (p_act and p_pas) correlate with the parental pressure (p_pres) scale; coefficients are high between active parental encouragement (p_act) and parental pressure (p_pres) (r(190) = .56, p < .01) and between passive parental encouragement (p_pas) and parental pressure (p_pres) (r(190) = .61, p < .01). thus, the more south korean parents are reported as encouraging their children, actively and passively, the more their children report undergoing pressure to perform. affective variables, parental involvement and competence among south korean high school . . . 27 parental disinterest (p_dis) yielded negative correlations with all three scales used to estimate parental involvement (pi). therefore, the less students reported that their parents were disinterested in their learning of english, the more they estimated that their parents encouraged them passively (r(190) = .69, p < .01), actively (r(190) = -.55, p < .01), or by putting forms of pressure on them (r(190) = -.40, p < .01). south korean parents’ role is to be further examined through the two other questions of the present study. research question 2: is there a relationship between parental involvement or parental disinterest and various affective variables? this second question is to be looked upon with the obtained correlations between the three parental involvement (pi) scales (active parental encouragement, passive parental encouragement, parental pressure) and the three motivation to learn a second language (mot) scales (attitudes toward the learning of english, motivational intensity, desire to learn), as well as with the parental disinterest (p_dis) scale and the motivation to learn a second language (mot) scales. parents’ active (p_act) and passive (p_pas) forms of encouragement both moderately correlate with the three motivation to learn a second language (mot) scales. correlations between the active parental encouragement (p_act) and the three motivation to learn a second language (mot) scales range from .27 to .37 (p < .01), and from .15 (p < .05) to .24 (p < .01) between the passive parental encouragement (p_pas) and the three motivation to learn a second language (mot) scales. the interaction between motivation and parental encouragement seems to be more important in the case of the active form. furthermore, the more students report being motivated to learn, the more they report that their parents are providing them with active and passive forms of encouragement. among the four parental scales, parental pressure (p_pres) is the only one that correlates with only one of the other affective variables, that is, with motivational intensity (mi). the coefficient shows a positive but weak relationship between the two variables (r(190) = .17, p < .05). as previously mentioned, motivational intensity (mi) is estimated with items reflecting participants’ efforts to learn the language. thus, the more parents are reported to apply pressure on their child, the more efforts students estimate that they put into their work. the first sequence of correlations expressed a negative correlation between parental disinterest (p_dis) and the aggregated score for motivation to learn a second language (mot). in this second sequence, parental disinterest (p_dis) negatively correlates with all three scales used to estimate motivation to learn a second language (mot). from these three scales, attitudes toward the learning of english (ale) obtained a negative correlation of -.30 (p < .01) with parental disinterest (p_dis). the two other scales, motivational intensity annie morris, marc lafontaine, françois pichette, linda de serres 28 (mi) and desire to learn (dl), both obtained the same coefficient of -.18 (p < .05), suggesting a weak relationship. thus, parents’ disinterest is on some level related to their children’s levels of motivation. in the first sequence, correlations were obtained between parental involvement (pi) and attitudes toward english (att), as well as between parental disinterest (p_dis) and attitudes toward english (att). in this second sequence, each parental involvement (pi) scale (active parental encouragement, passive parental encouragement, and parental pressure) as well as parental disinterest (p_dis) will now be examined in terms of their relationships with the two attitudes toward english (att) scales. attitudes toward english speakers and their communities (acom) and attitudes toward the english-speaking culture (acul), the two scales of attitudes toward english (att), significantly correlated with one another (r(190) = .59, p < .01). they also yield significant correlations with both active and passive forms of parental encouragement (p_act and p_pas). coefficients range from .23 to .34 (p < .01). thus, this could be expressed as follows: the more parents are reported to show both forms of encouragement, the higher the students’ attitudes, or the higher the students’ attitudes, the more they report their parents as showing both active and passive forms of encouragement. while active parental encouragement (p_act) correlated with the two attitudes toward english (att) scales (attitudes toward english speakers and their communities (acom), and attitudes toward the english-speaking culture (acul)) with scores that ranged from .30 to .34 (p < .01), the passive parental encouragement (p_pas) and the attitudes toward english (att) scales obtained scores that ranged only from .23 to .26 (p < .01). gardner (1985) suggested that it was the parental passive role that was more effective to influence learners’ integrative orientation, but the present results suggest that the active parental role may be as effective as the passive role, if not more, for triggering participant’s integrativeness, at least in the south korean context. no correlation was found between parental pressure (p_pres) and the two attitudes toward english (att) scales (attitudes toward english speakers and their communities (acom), and attitudes toward the english-speaking culture (acul)), suggesting that there is no connection between the fact that participants perceive their parents as showing forms of pressure and their own levels of integrativeness. moderate but significant negative correlations are present between parental disinterest (p_dis) and the two attitudes toward english (att) scales, that is attitudes toward english speakers and their communities (acom) (r(190) = -.25, p < .01) and attitudes toward the english-speaking culture (acul) (r(190) = -.28, p < .01). these last correlations suggest that the more parents are reported as showing disinterest toward the learning of english, the less positive the students’ attitudes are toward the english speakers, their community and their culture. a correaffective variables, parental involvement and competence among south korean high school . . . 29 lation does not indicate a causal relationship; however, the opposite, namely a low level of negative attitudes on the part of the students that would cause parents’ disinterest, would be surprising. this, however, remains to be confirmed. although active parental encouragement (p_act), passive parental encouragement (p_pas) and parental disinterest (p_dis) all correlated with the two attitudes toward english (att) scales (attitudes toward english speakers and their communities and attitudes toward the english-speaking culture), it is the motivation to learn a second language scales (mot) that yielded high correlations with the attitudes toward english (att) scales. the three scales used to evaluate participants’ motivation, that is, motivational intensity (mi), desire to learn (dl) and attitudes toward the learning of english (ale), also all positively correlated with one another, and a strong relationship (r(190) = .73, p < .01) was found between attitudes toward the learning of english (ale) and desire to learn (dl). an identical coefficient (r(190) = .48, p < .01) was obtained between attitudes toward the learning of english (ale) and motivational intensity (mi), and between desire to learn (dl) and motivational intensity (mi). correlations between the three motivation scales and the two attitude scales ranged from .23 to .63 (p < .01). it is the attitudes toward the learning of english (ale) scale that showed high correlations with attitudes toward english speakers and their communities (acom) (r(190) = .63, p < .01) and with attitudes toward the english-speaking culture (acul) (r(190) = .52, p < .01). these strong correlations suggest that students’ attitudes toward the learning of english (ale) are related to their own level of integrativeness, that is, their own attitudes toward the english speakers, their communities and their culture. desire to learn (dl) also correlates significantly with attitudes toward english speakers and their communities (acom) (r(190) = .50, p < .01) and attitudes toward the english-speaking culture (acul) (r(190) = .40, p < .01). thus, desire to learn (dl) can also be related to students’ integrativeness. in light of the second question, the correlations between the three parental involvement (pi) scales, as well as parental disinterest (p_dis) and amotivation (amot) will now be further examined. first, amotivation (amot) and parental disinterest (p_dis) scores correlate significantly and moderately. second, not surprisingly, the amotivation (amot) scores yield highly significant negative relationships with most other variables except passive parental encouragement (p_pas) and parental pressure (p_pres), which did not correlate at all with amotivation (amot). the south korean parental pressure is therefore not related to students’ levels of amotivation. in the first correlation sequence, parental involvement (pi) did not correlate with amotivation (amot), and in the second sequence, only active parental encouragement (p_act), out of the three other parental involvement (pi) scales, correlates with amotivation (amot). however, the negative correlation annie morris, marc lafontaine, françois pichette, linda de serres 30 is not strong. while amotivation (amot) negatively correlates with active parental encouragement (p_act) (r(190) = -.22, p < .01), it also positively correlates with parental disinterest (p_dis) (r(190) = .30, p < .01). therefore, the more students report that they are amotivated (e.g., studying english without knowing why), the less they report that their parents show active forms of encouragement and the more they report that their parents show disinterest. also, the more students report that their parents are actively involved and interested in their learning, the less they report being amotivated. the only positive correlation, which was obtained between amotivation (amot) and parental disinterest (p_dis), suggests that when levels of parental disinterest are reported, levels of amotivation are also reported. thus, the fact that parents show no interest in their children’s learning could also be related to the absence of goals being set by their children. while active parental encouragement (p_act) and parental disinterest (p_dis) both moderately correlate with amotivation (amot), the three motivation to learn a second language scales (mot) strongly correlate with amotivation (amot). from the motivation to learn a second language (mot) scales, attitudes toward the learning of english (ale) strongly correlates with amotivation (amot) (r(190) = -.81, p < .01) and desire to learn (dl) strongly correlates with amotivation (amot) (r(190) = -.66, p < .01). correlations are also significant between the two attitudes toward english (att) scales and amotivation (amot), attitudes toward english speakers and their communities (acom) (r(190) = -.57, p < .01), and attitudes toward the english-speaking culture (acul) (r(190) = -.46, p < .01). generally speaking, the higher the participants’ levels of attitudes and motivation, the lower they report to be amotivated. research question 3: do parental involvement and parental disinterest correlate with students’ competence in a second language? the two measures assessing participants’ competence are students’ last exam score (english-exam) and students’ self-evaluation (english-self). the first sequence of correlations indicated that parental involvement (pi) correlated with only one of the two measures assessing participants’ competence: english-exam. this last correlation is nonetheless moderate. out of the second sequence of correlations, where all of the three parental involvement (pi) scales were observed, only active parental encouragement (p_act) correlates with both measures: englishexam (r(190) = .26, p < .01) and english-self (r(190) = .20, p < .01). passive parental encouragement (p_pas) only correlates with english-exam but with a low coefficient (r(190) = .15, p < .05), and parental pressure (p_pres) does not correlate with either measure of competence. the moderate correlations between active parental encouragement (p_act) and both measures of competence tend affective variables, parental involvement and competence among south korean high school . . . 31 to suggest that parents’ active forms of encouragement may have a connection to their children’s levels of competence. moreover, and from a broader perspective, parental involvement (pi) may uphold a relationship with students’ englishexam, that is, with their graded performance rather than with their selfevaluated competence. these last results tend to contradict gardner’s claim, in his early work (1985), about the absence of a relationship between the parental role and students’ in-class performance. gardner (1985) suggested that the parental roles were closely related to one another. mueller (1986) suggested that the active and passive parental roles could simply be measuring the same concept. however, in the present study, it is the active parental forms of encouragement (p_act) that yield significant correlations with the competence measures, as well as with amotivation (amot), while the passive parental forms of encouragement (p_pas) showed few significant correlations with the two competence measures and amotivation. therefore, the parental active form of encouragement tends to represent a concept that is distinct from the passive form. parental disinterest (p_dis) correlates negatively with both measures of competence. the correlation with english-self (r(190) = -.15, p < .05) is weak, while it is moderate with english-exam (r(190) = -.26, p < .01), as was observed within the first sequence of correlations. moreover, the parental disinterest (p_dis) and english-exam’s correlation is similar to the one obtained between active parental encouragement (p_act) and english-exam, which tends to suggest that parents’ disinterest as well as parents’ active encouragement may both be related to their children’s in-class performances. the two measures of competence show systematic correlations with the three scales used to assess motivation to learn a second language (mot), and coefficients are moderate, ranging from .26 to .43 (p < .01). for instance, motivational intensity (mi) correlates with last exam score (english-exam) (r(190) = .43, p < .01) and with participants’ self-evaluation (english-self) (r(190) = .39, p < .01). these three motivation to learn a second language (mot) scales, considered by masgoret and gardner (2003) as the most representative components of motivation, were expected, according to the literature, to correlate with the two competence scales. however, it is interesting to note that desire to learn (dl) showed the same correlation coefficient as active parental encouragement (p_act) with english-exam (r(190) = .26, p < .01). these results could suggest that active parental forms of encouragement (p_act) and participants’ desire to learn (dl) may both be related to participants’ in-class performance, that is, participants’ english-exam. as for the correlations obtained between the two competence scales and the two attitudes toward english (att) scales, only english-self correlates moder annie morris, marc lafontaine, françois pichette, linda de serres 32 ately with both attitude scales: attitudes toward english speakers and their communities (acom) (r(190) = .24, p < .01) and attitudes toward the english-speaking culture (acul) (r(190) = .22, p < .01). english-exam shows one low correlation with attitudes toward english speakers and their communities (acom) (r(190) = .17, p < .05). therefore, as in the first sequence of correlations, attitudes toward english (att) scales do not seem to have any significant relationship with englishexam, while it has a moderately weak one with participants’ english-self. amotivation (amot) correlated with both measures of competence (english-exam and english-self), with coefficients ranging from -.32 to -.37 (p < .01). since amotivation (amot) represents students’ lack or absence of motivation, it is only logical that it negatively correlates with both measures of competence, as observed in the first sequence of correlations. linear regressions in order to better answer the third question, two multiple linear regressions were performed, one with english-exam as the dependent variable and the other with english-self (see tables 4 and 5). the adjusted r2 values indicate that the tested model accounts for 17.2% of the variance in english-exam (f 5,184 = 8,872, p < .0005, adjusted r2 = .172) and for 19.5% in english-self (f 5,184=10,182, p < .0005, adjusted r2 = .195). one significant variable is underlined in both models, that is motivation to learn a second language (mot). the standardized beta coefficients confirm that motivation to learn a second language (mot) constitutes a significant predictor of english-exam (beta = .399, p = .001) and of english-self (beta = .493, p < .0005). both regression analyses indicate that only one affective variable plays a role for english-exam and for english-self. we can only speculate that the other variables, such as the parental variables, are intertwined with the “motivational process” while not being directly involved in the outcomes, that is, with students’ competence. table 4 linear regression coefficients, with score on final english exam (english-exam) as the dependent variable model non standardized coefficients standardized coefficients t sig. a std error beta (constant) 2.064 1.895 1.089 .278 p_involvement .095 .193 .046 .491 .624 p_disinterest -.319 .192 -.151 -1.662 .098 mot 1.469 .446 .399 3.294 .001 att -.368 .188 -.169 -1.950 .053 amot -.084 .197 -.051 -.424 .672 affective variables, parental involvement and competence among south korean high school . . . 33 table 5 linear regression coefficients, with self-evaluated english competence (english-self) as the dependent variable model non standardized coefficients standardized coefficients t sig. a std error beta (constant) .577 .704 .819 .414 p_ involvement -.018 .072 -.023 -.255 .799 p_disinterest -.029 .071 -.036 -.406 .685 mot .684 .166 .493 4.129 .000 att -.038 .070 -.046 -.537 .592 amot .005 .073 .007 .062 .950 discussion this study was conducted in order to investigate possible relationships between parental involvement, parental disinterest, various affective variables, and l2 competence among south korean high school learners of english. considering the south korean context, three hypotheses were made. first, that the active or passive forms of parental involvement would correspond to forms of pressure; second, that parental variables were expected to correlate with students’ attitudes and motivation to learn an l2; and last, that parental variables would correlate with students’ competence in english. three questions led our research. the first question was about the role south korean parents play in their children’s learning of english. by examining correlations between all the parental scales, active and passive forms of encouragement (p_act, p_pas), pressure (p_pres) and disinterest (p_dis), as well as the aggregated scores (parental involvement (pi) and parental disinterest (p_dis)), it was found that south korean students perceive their parents as encouraging them in both ways, actively and passively, but their parents’ encouragement was also reported, as hypothesized, as a form of pressure. other data allowed for the conceptual observation that forms of parental disinterest were nonetheless present in that education-centered society. in other words, some parents were perceived by their children as not being interested in their learning of english. thus, as previously mentioned, the fact that parents show little or no interest in their children’s learning could also be related to the absence of goals being set by their children, for the conceptual observation of data also allowed the observation of levels of amotivation among the south korean participants. two sets of correlational analysis were performed in order to examine and answer the second question concerning possible relationships between parental involvement (active parental encouragement (p_act), passive paren annie morris, marc lafontaine, françois pichette, linda de serres 34 tal encouragement (p_pas) and parental pressure (p_pres)), or parental disinterest (p_dis), and the various affective variables under study. as mentioned by many authors (e.g., csizér & kormos, 2009; dörnyei, 2005; gardner, 2001), parents have been identified as having an effect on students’ attitudes and motivation to learn an l2. moreover, the passive parental form of encouragement is thought to be more effective than the active form of parental encouragement to influence learners’ integrative orientation (gardner, 1985). in the present study, the participants’ perceptions of active and passive forms of parental encouragement show significant correlations with scores on the three motivation scales, which confirms data from previous research. however, coefficients in the case of active forms of parental encouragement (p_act) tend to show a sustained relationship, while correlations in the case of passive forms of parental encouragement (p_pas) are relatively weak. as mentioned earlier, south korean parents may be very active through various forms of sacrifice not common, for instance, in north america. while south korean parents may pay for extracurricular activities, they can also spend money on special surgery in order to favour a more precise pronunciation (park, 2009). therefore, the results obtained could be limited to the specific context of this so-called english fever. however, it is important to keep in mind that the active parental form of encouragement (p_act) did correlate with students’ levels of motivation, and that when students report higher levels of motivation to learn a second language (mot), they also report that their parents are providing them with active forms of encouragement. therefore, parents’ actions for their children’s learning are not totally inefficient, according to the obtained moderate correlations, and may be considered as one of the many possible forms of motivation for students’ learning of an l2. as for parental pressure (p_pres), this variable only expressed a weak correlation with motivational intensity (mi). this result tends to suggest that the more participants perceive “pressure,” in other words an “extreme” interest from their parents, the more efforts they report putting forth to learn english. this result could hypothetically be related to the confucian heritage culture widespread in asia (han, 2003), in which students are known to be silent participants, accepting quietly the different forms of pressure. no educator would suggest that parents place great amounts of pressure on their children to learn, for this would most probably negatively affect students in many ways. however, aside from the correlations parental pressure (p_pres) obtained with the parental active and passive forms of encouragement, it surprisingly did not correlate with any other affective variables aside motivational intensity (mi). parental disinterest (p_dis ), a scale entirely created by the authors for the present study, yielded data suggesting that parents’ disinterest may be affective variables, parental involvement and competence among south korean high school . . . 35 related to their children’s levels of motivation, that is, to their children’s motivational intensity (mi), desire to learn (dl) and, more importantly, to their children’s attitudes toward the learning of english (ale). since students’ motivation to learn may be influenced, in part, by their parents’ disinterest, teachers should try, at least, to get the parents interested in their children’s work. thus, in many countries, different educational systems actively seek parents’ involvement in their children’s school work (corter & pelletier, 2004). parental disinterest (p_dis) also yielded data that suggests that parents’ disinterest may be reflected through students’ less positive attitudes toward english speakers and their communities (acom) and less positive attitudes toward the englishspeaking culture (acul), which represents students’ levels of integrativeness. this new scale parental disinterest (p_dis) as well as the active parental encouragement (p_act) and the passive parental encouragement (p_pas) scales correlated with students’ attitudes toward english (att) and motivation to learn a second language (mot). their correlations confirm the second hypothesis of the present study that parental variables correlate with students’ attitudes and motivation. although active parental encouragement (p_act), passive parental encouragement (p_pas) and parental disinterest (p_dis) all correlated with the two attitudes toward english (att) scales, which represent the students’ level of integrativeness, it is the three motivation to learn a second language (mot) scales that obtained strong correlations with the two attitudes toward english (att) scales. therefore, it is the participants’ motivation that upholds a strong relationship with their own levels of integrativeness. since the south korean society allows few possibilities for interaction with native english speakers and their community, the several significant correlations observed between the attitudes toward english speakers and their communities (acom) and attitudes toward the english-speaking culture (acul) scales and the three motivation scales (attitudes toward the learning of english, motivational intensity, desire to learn), as well as with the parental encouragement scales, may express what dörnyei (2005) identified as a “world english identity.” this term is useful to describe our era of globalization, where english is widely spread as a global lingua franca (crystal, 2003) rather than as a specific english speaking community. in south korea many reasons exist for learning english, so the integrative goal of getting closer to the english community could be multidimensional. in this south korean educational context, where parents are greatly involved in their children’s learning, it is interesting that parental disinterest (p_dis) was identifiable and moreover that it correlated moderately with amotivation (amot). while parental pressure (p_pres) did not correlate with amotivation (amot) and therefore does not affect students’ levels of amotivation in any way, parental disin annie morris, marc lafontaine, françois pichette, linda de serres 36 terest (p_dis), with its correlations with amotivation (amot), rather seems to be related to students’ levels of amotivation. therefore, it seems to be more harmful to students when parents show disinterest, for it may affect students’ levels of amotivation much more than when parents put pressure on them to learn english. parents’ active forms of encouragement also need to be considered in light of amotivation, since active parental encouragement (p_act) negatively correlated with amotivation (amot). therefore, parents’ active forms of encouragement and their disinterest also carry a certain weight on students’ levels of amotivation. while the second question of the present study concerned the possible relationships between parental involvement or parental disinterest, and the various affective variables under study, the third question was about the possible relationships between parental involvement, parental disinterest and students’ competence in english as an l2. results from the two different sequences of correlations, as well as from the two linear regressions, were used for this purpose. of the parental variables, there were mainly active parental encouragement (p_act) and parental disinterest (p_dis) that correlated with students’ in-class performance (english-exam) and with students’ self-evaluation of their own competence in english (english-self). however, the two linear regressions indicate that the aggregated measure of motivation to learn (mot) is the only significant predictor for students’ competence in english. consequently, all the other variables, such as the parental variables, may simply be intertwined in the “motivational process” while not being directly involved in the outcomes, that is, in students’ competence. moreover, even if correlations were found between parental variables and students’ attitudes and motivation to learn an l2, as well as between the various affective variables and students’ competence, motivation remains the important factor in the process of learning. conclusion while students’ own motivation is the only strong predictor of students’ levels of competence, and while parents’ roles seem to be minimal within the whole scope of their children’s learning, their involvement or disinterest nonetheless presents some link with students’ levels of attitude, motivation and amotivation and therefore their role should not be ignored, even though it seems limited among the wide range of affective variables intertwined with students’ learning of english. other studies would be needed to fully understand the interrelationship between what parents think and do, perceptions of students, and competence. in the meantime, practitioners may look for ways to involve parents in their children’s learning, at least to avoid parents’ disinterest, which seems to be negatively related to various affective variables. affective variables, parental involvement and competence among south korean high school . . . 37 in the south korean educational context, parents’ active forms of encouragement seem to present a certain relationship with students’ levels of attitude, motivation and amotivation. this is not surprising, since south korea is an education-centered society in which parents are actively involved in their children’s learning. also, because the obtained coefficients between active parental encouragement (p_act) and various variables were sustained and different from the ones obtained between the passive parental encouragement (p_pas) and other variables, the present study concludes that the active and passive forms of encouragement tend to measure two distinct concepts. parental disinterest (p_dis) and parental pressure (p_pres) provide new data regarding the parental variables and their interrelationships with various affective variables. it would be interesting to see whether in other countries parental pressure relates to more variables, if there are levels of pressure. parental disinterest is a new variable that should be considered, especially by educators who not only need to arouse interest in their students, but also need not neglect the possible disinterest of their students’ parents, which seems to have a certain negative weight on their students’ levels of motivation, attitude and amotivation. this last variable seems to outweigh parental pressure. involving parents in their children’s learning is indeed a positive step towards lowering parents’ levels of disinterest. results therefore support the many different governmental concerns regarding the importance of involving parents in their children’s learning. this also further suggests that teachers need to continue to try and work, as much as possible, with their students’ parents, for they could become another asset in their students’ learning of an l2. they should also, and more importantly, try to motivate their students, for it is the students’ motivation that is a strong predictor of their competence to learn an l2. few studies have focused mainly on the possible relationship parental variables may have with learners’ affective variables and their competence when learning english as an l2. such research was therefore needed. however, by reproducing this study in other countries, very different results might be obtained which would either confirm or refute the impact of the different parental scales on students’ learning of english as an l2. it would also, as the present study does within the larger scope of affective variables studies, provide more data on the parental variables, including the two new variables, all the better to help educators understand parents’ relationships with their students’ learning of an l2. given the pressure south korean students undergo and the few correlations the parental pressure scale yielded with the other affective variables, further investigation into south korean students’ perceptions of parental pres annie morris, marc lafontaine, françois pichette, linda de serres 38 sure would be more than warranted, at least to understand the ways in which it can affect south korean students. in order to 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(unpublished doctoral dissertation). aston university, birmingham, united kingdom. annie morris, marc lafontaine, françois pichette, linda de serres 42 appendix questionnaire used and statistics (val: score value for each answer in the multiple choice section; cat: category of the item; ave: average score; sd: standard deviation; +: maximum score observed; -: minimum score observed; mod: most often choice selected (between 1 and 7 or between 1 and 3 for the multiple choice section); and med: score that separates the sample of participants in half (50% chose a higher or lower value)) questionnaire following are statements that people could agree or disagree with. there are no right or wrong answers; everyone is entitled to his own opinions. for each statement, please provide us with your first reaction. read each statement and answer spontaneously. use the numbers from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). circle the number corresponding to your opinion. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 …………… …………… …………… …………… …………… …………… …………… strongly disagree disagree slightly disagree neither disagree nor agree slightly agree agree strongly agree cat ave sd + mod med 1 i would like to travel to english-speaking countries. acom 6.21 1.09 7 1 7 7 2 my parents think that english is useless. p_dis 2.15 1.31 7 1 1 2 3 when i will leave school, i shall give up the study of english entirely because i am not interest in it. ale 5.71 1.3 7 1 7 6 4 my parents try to help me with my english. (ex.: they pay me extra lessons in english or they help me out with my homework.) p_act 5.12 1.73 7 1 6 6 5 i like people who speak english. acom 5.36 1.23 7 2 4 5 6 i enjoy listening to the music of english-speaking countries (ex: pop music, rock, etc.). acul 5.57 1.32 7 1 7 6 7 i hate english. ale 4.87 1.62 7 1 4 5 8 i am learning english, but i think i'm wasting my time. amot 2.25 1.18 7 1 2 2 9 my parents think that i should practice my english as much as possible. p_pas 5 1.47 7 1 4 5 10 my parents show considerable interest in anything to do with my english courses. p_act 4.81 1.47 7 1 5 5 11 if it were possible, i would like to have many englishspeaking friends. acom 5.58 1.25 7 2 7 6 12 my parents could go as far as punishing me if i do not get good grades in english. p_pres 4.28 1.69 7 1 5 5 13 i think english-speaking people are social and friendly. acom 4.6 1.22 7 1 4 4 14 my parents think that i should continue studying english all through school. p_pas 5.85 1.12 7 1 6 6 15 i think that english magazines, newspapers and books are really interesting. acul 4.15 1.56 7 1 4 4 16 i plan to learn as much english as possible. ale 6.69 0.65 7 4 7 7 affective variables, parental involvement and competence among south korean high school . . . 43 17 my parents have great expectations for my learning of english. p_pres 5 1.23 7 1 4 5 18 my parents encourage me to practice my english as much as possible. p_act 3.71 1.54 7 1 4 4 19 my parents prefer that english would not be provided in school. p_dis 1.72 1.07 7 1 1 1 20 if i were able to better understand english i would watch more english movies. acul 6.05 1.46 7 1 7 7 21 my parents have stressed the importance english will have for me in my future. p_act 5.84 1.28 7 1 7 6 22 my parents don’t think it’s necessary that i practice my english. p_dis 2.35 1.38 7 1 1 2 23 living in an english speaking country for a while, in order to improve my english, appears to me a good idea. acom 5.95 1.29 7 1 7 6 24 learning english is really great. ale 4.73 1.49 7 1 4 5 25 i am studying english, but without being interested in it. amot 3.56 1.71 7 1 4 4 26 my parents require that i take additional english classes, aside from my regular classes. p_pres 3.43 1.69 7 1 4 4 27 my parents would be disappointed if i did not study english seriously. p_pres 4.48 1.66 7 1 6 5 28 i think that people from english-speaking countries are generally nice people. acom 4.39 1.27 7 1 4 4 29 i love learning english. ale 4.12 1.49 7 1 4 4 30 my parents put a lot of pressure on me to study english. p_pres 3.94 1.57 7 1 4 4 31 i would like to travel to a place where you can communicate in english. acom 5.71 1.31 7 2 7 6 32 i would like to meet english-speaking people and get to know them better. acom 5.83 1.27 7 1 7 6 33 my parents do not have any expectations regarding my learning of english. p_dis 2.81 1.35 7 1 2 3 34 my parents really encourage me to study english. p_act 4.59 1.34 7 1 4 4 35 learning english is a waste of time. ale 5.95 1.13 7 2 7 6 36 my parents do not believe that i need to learn english. p_dis 2.53 1.35 7 1 2 2 37 my parents think that, nowadays, it is important to learn english. p_pas 5.95 1.14 7 1 7 6 38 my parents think i should really try to learn english. p_pas 5.72 1.2 7 1 6 6 39 i think that learning english is dull. ale 4.58 1.55 7 1 4 4 40 my parents urge me to seek help from my teacher when i am having problems with my english. p_act 4.88 1.66 7 1 6 5 41 i could not explain why learning english is useful. amot 2.65 1.43 7 1 2 2 42 my parents think i should devote more time to my english studies. p_pas 4.86 1.33 7 1 4 5 43 i really enjoy learning english. ale 4.19 1.49 7 1 4 4 44 i agree with the possibility that one day i may choose to live in an english speaking country. acom 5.29 1.66 7 1 7 6 instructions for multiple-choice questions the goal of this part of the questionnaire is to answer each of the following statements by circling the letter of the alternative which appears most applicable to you. keep in mind annie morris, marc lafontaine, françois pichette, linda de serres 44 that none of your teachers or parents will have access to this questionnaire or any other pieces of information provided under your name in this questionnaire. since the success of the present study depends on your honesty, we insist that you answer as honestly and as spontaneously as possible. val cat ave sd + mod med 45 3 2 1 during english class, i would like: a. to have only english spoken. b. to have a combination of hangumal and english spoken. c. to have as much hangumal as possible spoken. dl 1.98 0.41 3 1 2 2 46 1 2 3 when it comes to english homework, i : a. just skim overt it. b. put some effort, but not as much as i could. c. work very carefully, making sure i understand everything. mi 2.43 0.57 3 1 2 2 47 1 3 2 if there were an english club in my school, i would: a. definitely not join. b. be most interested in joining. c. attend meetings once in a while. dl 2.24 0.57 3 1 2 2 48 3 2 1 if there were english-speaking families in my neighbourhood, i would : a. speak english with them as much as possible. b. speak english with them sometimes. c. never speak english with them. dl 1.68 0.69 3 1 1 2 49 1 2 3 after i get my english assignments back, i: a. just throw them in my desk and forget them. b. look them over. c. take the time to understand my mistakes. mi 2.47 0.51 3 1 2 2 50 1 2 3 if i had the opportunity to speak english outside of school, i would: a. never speak it. b. speak it occasionally, using hangumal whenever possible. c. speak english most of the time, using hangumal only if really necessary. dl 2.33 0.61 3 1 2 2 51 1 2 3 i actively think about what i have learned in my english class. a. hardly ever. b. once in a while. c. very frequently. mi 1.56 0.59 3 1 1 2 52 1 3 2 considering how i study english, i can honestly say that: a. i will pass on the basis of sheer luck or intelligence because i do very little work. b. i really try to learn english. c. i do just enough work to get along. mi 2.12 0.63 3 1 2 2 affective variables, parental involvement and competence among south korean high school . . . 45 53 2 3 1 if english class were not required for my graduate studies, i: a. don’t know whether i would take it or not. b. would definitely take it. c. would drop it. dl 2.00 0.49 3 1 2 2 54 1 3 2 when i have a problem understanding something that we are learning in english class, i: a. just forget about it. b. immediately ask the teacher for help. c. only seek help just before the exam. mi 1.91 0.74 3 1 2 2 55 3 2 1 i find studying english: a. very interesting. b. no more interesting than most subjects. c. not interesting at all. dl 2.17 0.61 3 1 2 2 last part of the questionnaire please circle the numbers corresponding to your last english exam score. 0 to 30 31 to 50 51 to 60 61 to 70 71 to 80 81 to 90 91 to 95 96 to 100 please circle your gender female male please enter your date of birth ____________________________ evaluate your level of english competence. indicate your response with a check mark ( ). very insufficient average satisfactory very insufficient satisfactory 1. w r i t i n g …………… : …………… : …………… : …………… : …………… 2. reading …………… : …………… : …………… : …………… : …………… 3. listening …………… : …………… : …………… : …………… : …………… 4. speaking …………… : …………… : …………… : …………… : …………… write down your nationality and the city you live in. (ex: korean, seoul) thank you very much for your participation! 485 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (3). 2014. 485-506 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.3.6 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl input or intimacy judit navracsics university of pannonia, veszprém, hungary navju@yahoo.co.uk abstract according to the critical period hypothesis, the earlier the acquisition of a second language starts, the better. owing to the plasticity of the brain, up until a certain age a second language can be acquired successfully according to this view. early second language learners are commonly said to have an advantage over later ones especially in phonetic/phonological acquisition. native-like pronunciation is said to be most likely to be achieved by young learners. however, there is evidence of accentfree speech in second languages learnt after puberty as well. occasionally, on the other hand, a nonnative accent may appear even in early second (or third) language acquisition. cross-linguistic influences are natural in multilingual development, and we would expect the dominant language to have an impact on the weaker one(s). the dominant language is usually the one that provides the largest amount of input for the child. but is it always the amount that counts? perhaps sometimes other factors, such as emotions, come into play? in this paper, data obtained from an englishpersian-hungarian trilingual pair of siblings (under age 4 and 3 respectively) is analyzed, with a special focus on cross-linguistic influences at the phonetic/phonological levels. it will be shown that beyond the amount of input there are more important factors that trigger interference in multilingual development. keywords: multilingual acquisition, general language effort, input, emotionality judit navracsics 486 1. introduction in the course of multilingual development, the immediate linguistic environment substantially influences the speaker’s language repertoire and linguistic configuration. the main factor facilitating the development of the multilingual system, the general language effort, is determined by the speaker’s recognition of his/her communicative needs. during childhood, it is the parents’ responsibility to support the child’s language development and make it possible for him/her to meet his/her communicative needs in all the languages being acquired. multilingual acquisition is more complex than bilingual acquisition because the number of languages and their acquisition order increase the complexity encountered in bilingual systems. it is assumed that bilingualism is the simplest form of multilingualism since important changes occur in the learner of a language as soon as the number of languages involved is more than two. this can be attributed to the fact that acquiring two languages leads to the development of specific meta-skills, concerning the acquisition of language systems as a whole that certainly affects the nature of the language acquisition process (herdina & jessner, 2002). mastering three or more languages creates a more comprehensive and heavier language load for the relevant speaker, which has an influence on language stability and language maintenance effort, the effort required to maintain a working multilingual system. de houwer (2001) carried out a large scale study of data collected in flanders on trilingual families to try to find out what proportion of the families concerned provided a realistic chance for their children to become trilingual. the findings of the study, as the author outlines, are quite disappointing: only about two fifths of the children in the survey, who could have been speaking three languages, actually did. this says a great deal about how difficult it is to maintain and transmit all three languages in a family. as far as children are concerned, de houwer believes that the likelihood of becoming trilingual is affected by the parental input patterns, that is, whether dutch (the language of the external environment) is spoken at home, and also whether the parents’ language use overlaps entirely, partially or not at all. the presence of dutch may be an inhibiting factor since, being the language of the environment, its deployment in the home too seriously erodes the communicative need for the use of the other two languages. the most important criterion determining language growth is the general language effort (gle), which comprises language acquisition effort (lae) and language maintenance effort (lme) (herdina & jessner, 2002). there is an inversely proportional relationship between lae and lme. the acquisition of a third language, as a rule, places new demands on the gle of the speaker. if the speaker cannot increase the amount of gle, the speaker has to reconsider gle to meet input or intimacy 487 the demands of the new system. if the speaker’s overall gle does not suffice to underpin the coexistence of the three language systems, transitional trilingualism may be observed, that is, one language system, following a period of transition, may overwhelm and completely replace the other two language systems. it appears likely that the existence of a motivational effect is one of the determining factors that leads to the increase of gle. according to the dynamic model of multilingualism (herdina & jessner, 2002), the key to the development of gle is the multilingual person’s communicative needs, which determine positive or negative growth. the greater the (multilingual) communicative needs as perceived by the speaker, the greater the (general language) effort of the speaker to meet these requirements. herdina and jessner outline two types of communicative needs: effective and perceived communicative needs. effective needs, according to the authors, are determined by the actual communicative requirements of the speaker. perceived communicative needs relate to the fact that a speaker learning a language will anticipate a situation in which his/her language requirements will change; that is, he or she will be required to communicate with speakers of an l2 or l3 to a greater extent than has been the case heretofore. communicative needs are comprised of personal and social factors. personal factors refer to the individual circumstances of the speaker, whilst the social factors refer to the speaker’s external language environment. the personal environment can be seen as embedded in the social environment. factors determining language acquisition progress, that is, the rate of change in terms of positive or negative language growth, can be subdivided into age factors, motivational factors, perceptional factors and anxiety. the age factor in second language acquisition has been both supported and rejected. supporters of the critical period hypothesis (cf. lenneberg, 1967) believe in the age-related benefits and constraints of language development both in l1 and in additional languages. they believe that the age of language acquisition has an effect on bilingual or multilingual development, especially at the phonetic level. it is suggested that, owing to the early plasticity of the brain, in early childhood, the articulatory base adapts more easily to the sounds of the acquired language(s), which is less successful at later ages. räsänen and pine (2014) claim that proficiency is expected to be greater if a language is acquired early in life in multiple social contexts. however, there are also reports (e.g., ioup, 1995) of adult language learners who attained a native-like accent and proficiency in their new languages. dekeyser (2000) found differences between infant and late l2 learners in terms of language learning mechanisms. according to him, children rely on implicit learning while adults can employ explicit learning. however, at this point, another factor comes into play: the manner of language acquisition. judit navracsics 488 in instructional learning, more conscious learning mechanisms are activated while under natural language acquisition circumstances, general cognitive changes are more reflected. becoming bilingual or multilingual has a tremendously positive effect on cognitive development (bialystok, 2001; barac & bialystok, 2012) in general. bialystok also underlines that children exposed to two or more languages in their early childhood must acquire and apply different strategies while developing their languages. this improves brain activity, and impacts not only on the acquisition of a new language but also on any sort of learning (marian & shook, 2012) and mental activity. learning through instruction or in a naturalistic setting not only enhances different brain and mental activities, but also determines the degree of emotionality of the languages in speakers of more than one language (räsänen & pine, 2014). singleton (2014) believes in the key role of motivation in multilingual development and claims that good results in second language learning can be achieved at any age as long as the person has perseverance. motivation is mentioned mostly in educational research (cf. dörnyei, 2001). however, the notion of integrative orientation also has an impact on the developing multilingual, which may efficiently influence the language acquisition process and its outcome. a positive attitude and motivation to learn additional languages and a desire to fulfil the effective and perceived communicative needs will make multilingual development successful. many researchers claim that the quality and quantity of input from the target languages play a crucial role in the configuration and proficiency levels of the languages in the multilingual mind. some infant bilingualism researchers (e.g., deuchar & quay, 2000) discuss the situational framework of linguistic exposure for bilingual families, which may create a more balanced amount of input in the two or more languages. while the one parent – one language strategy works excellently in most cases, if either parent has significantly less chance to provide input for the child in their language, the resultant bilingual development does not lead to a quasi-balanced state of the languages in the mind. it is also known, however, that language dominance is natural (grosjean & li, 2013) and can be partly related to the complementarity principle, which suggests that a bilingual or multilingual person uses his or her languages in different domains of life, respectively. grosjean also claims that there are hardly any “balanced” or “true” bilinguals (grosjean, 2010). still, for the developing bilingual or multilingual child, equal or relatively equal amounts of exposure to each language are desirable if the goal is the fostering of functional multilingualism. a number of studies deal with how parental input relates to children’s language development and what strategies bilingual parents use to socialize their children’s use of two (or more) languages (lanza, 2007; quay, 2008). tare and gelman input or intimacy 489 (2011) analysed english-marathi bilingual families’ dyadic conversations, and they highlight the importance of pragmatic differentiation, metalinguistic strategies and sociolinguistic factors in the language choices of the children. in their study, in the presence of a third (monolingual) party, the children did not show pragmatic sensitivity, which reflects the children’s knowledge of the limitations of the monolingual speaker. metalinguistic strategies used by the parents clearly help the children develop their metalinguistic awareness through discussing language differences, asking the children to give translation equivalents, and so on. emotionality is an interesting issue. one might suggest that the degree of emotionality is related to language dominance: the more comfortable one feels in a language, that is, the higher the proficiency level in that language compared to the other language(s) spoken by the person, the more intimate one’s relation to that language. one would think that emotions may best be expressed and articulated in the language that provides comfort for the speaker. räsänen and pine (2014) in their study found support for the relevance of starting age and proficiency for language and the emotions, but aycicegi and harris (2004) came to the conclusion that a nonnative language may have the same, or even stronger emotional connotations than the native language. there is also a presumption that a graded emotionality exists across the languages spoken by a person. these contradictory results indicate that further research is needed to uncover the determining factors in respect of degree of emotionality. in what follows, on the basis of my study carried out with two children in the process of becoming trilingual, i will present 1. the manner of becoming trilingual; 2. the functional distribution of languages in the childhood trilingualism in question and, in relation to this, the role of the motivational factor and the degree of emotionality in multilingual language growth; 3. the gle employed by trilingual children and especially by their parents with the goal of encouraging the children to develop their lae; 4. the struggle against transitional trilingualism in trying to maintain the existence and development of all three languages; 5. the cross-linguistic influences in developing multilingualism. 2. participants, methods the girl and the boy are siblings born in canada in a family where the mother is a persian-english bilingual and the father is a monolingual english canadian. the children were raised bilingually since their birth. they were exposed to both english and persian, though the mother was not aware of it. the parents did not judit navracsics 490 follow the one parent – one language principle and spoke consciously in english to the children and between themselves. however, the mother unconsciously used persian as well, mostly when the father was away. in this respect, we can speak about something similar to bilingual first language acquisition (de houwer, 1995) in terms of english and persian, though the amount of input in persian was so limited that the mother was not even aware of it. the parents spoke in english at home so english became the language of the family. the mother’s first language was persian, and the father also acquired it to a certain extent. however, unlike the mother, the father never used it at the production level with the children. later on, when the family moved to hungary, the mother claimed that the children were being raised monolingually in english, and that she never taught them persian. the acquisition of the third language, that is, hungarian, for the children started when the family arrived in hungary, when the girl was aged 2;11 and the boy was aged 1;10. the children started attending a hungarian monolingual nursery school, and the parents started working at the university of veszprém, hungary. the acquisition of the third language was going on in natural settings for the whole family though the motivation was much more intense on the side of the children since they had no choice but to adjust both culturally and linguistically to the hungarian monolingual environment. the parents, on the other hand, had no such drive as they were teaching english or other subjects in english for english major students at the department of english. i visited the family fortnightly and observed the children’s language growth mainly in the third language. at the same time, it was inevitable for me to follow the parents’ attitude towards the languages and especially towards the new language that was available in the immediate linguistic environment. in the first year, i recorded dyadic conversations with the mother, playing sessions when the children were alone and playing sessions with an interlocutor. after a year the family moved to another town; thus in the second, third and fourth years of the observation the visits became less frequent. i recorded the children on audiotape every three months. the recordings were transcribed and the transcripts were included in the childes database (navracsics, 2004). 2.1. language use in the family at the beginning of the investigation the family used english at home, and so the dominant language for the children was english. however, when the children were alone with their mother, they were exposed to some persian as well. this language usage was, though, very restricted, according to the mother. hungarian was the language of the immediate environment, and the nursery school input or intimacy 491 the children attended, as others in the whole country, was monolingual. the mother had an instinctive responsibility for promoting the children’s ability to acquire all three languages, and she used many different approaches. among them she used the strategy of requesting a label for a picture or a word in all three languages. in this way she helped the children with laes and lmes. in all the excerpts, the base language is either english or hungarian, and words typed in italics are code-switches belonging to the language indicated in parentheses. (1) mother: what is chay (persian) in hungarian? girl: tea, teja (hungarian). tea mother: good. what is seer (persian)? girl: tej. tej (hungarian). milk mother: what is sabz (persian)? girl: ződ (hungarian). green mother: good, and what is it in english? girl: green. mother: very good. how about meez (persian)? girl: asztal (hungarian). table mother: very good. in english? girl: table. mother: what is ghermez (persian)? girl: (whispers to boy) piros (hungarian). red boy: ződ. piros (hungarian). green. red mother: piros. and in english? boy: red. mother: what is yellow in hungarian? boy: fehér (hungarian). white mother: yellow. boy: that’s fehér (hungarian). white mother: fehér (hungarian) is white. figure 1 describes the manner of acquisition of the three languages and the effective communicative needs of the children. in this connection, english and hungarian are acquired in a natural fashion. the acquisition of persian is going on in an instructed way, according to the mother. all three languages serve both the effective and perceived communicative needs for the children. judit navracsics 492 english is used in child to child communication, that is, when the children speak between themselves, and also in child to adult communication, that is, when they speak with their parents or, very rarely, with some relatives or englishspeaking friends of the family. hungarian is used when they talk to each other, when they play and also in the nursery school with hungarian monolingual children and with their nursery school teachers. it is also used with the hungarian adult friends of the family and with the interlocutors during the observation period. however, persian is not used between themselves so there is no child to child communication in persian. they use it only with their mother. figure 1 the effective communicative needs of the children and the ways of acquisition of the three languages as for the perceived communicative needs of the children, the family was not sure how long they were intending to stay in hungary. on their arrival, the parents’ intention was to stay until the children started school. 2.2. becoming trilingual according to cenoz (2000, p. 40-41), there are at least four possible acquisition orders in multilingual acquisition: the three language systems may be acquired consecutively; the third system may be acquired after the simultaneous acquisition of the first two; the first language system may be acquired before the simultaneous acquisition of the other two languages; or three languages may be acquired simultaneously. in my subjects’ case, we can speak about early third input or intimacy 493 language acquisition when the first two languages are under development but are far from being mastered. the acquisition of the first two languages is still going on and the lme needs to be very strong in order to maintain the first two languages and avoid transitional trilingualism. back in canada, english used to serve as the base language in the family. before coming to hungary, the parents’ main goal for the children was the development of english. language acquisition effort was dominant in the monolingual english environment; no maintenance effort was needed. the mother was not consciously trying to bring the children up bilingually. being an immigrant mother in an english-speaking environment, she did not see the necessity of passing on her first language, persian, to the children. however, as it turned out later, without her deliberate intention, the children had a significant amount of exposure to persian, especially in emotionally dense situations. there is evidence in the later recordings that during emotionally filled moments or when special treatment was needed, the mother used persian with the children. during this period, in terms of persian, neither lae nor lme had a role in the language development of the children. however, they picked up a fair amount of persian, and, as a result, quite a few times the children would not obey the mother until she spoke in persian. they somehow felt that real happiness or a real threat only existed when the mother was using persian. in one of the recordings, for example, the children got out of control, went into the parents’ bedroom and started jumping on the double bed. some time later they remembered how much fun they had had previously and decided to repeat this experience. the mother asked them in english not to do so, but they would not obey. then i tried to dissuade them in hungarian—with no success. finally, the mother said something in persian, and the children understood that their mother did not want them to go into the bedroom so they started a different game. in another recording, the children were each given a different gift. they started to fight over each other’s toys; they each wanted the other’s one, as usually happens with children. they were screaming, shouting and crying, and the use of neither english nor hungarian helped. not until their mother asked them in persian to share the toys and apologize to each other did the quarrel end. and then they apologized to each other in english. at that point, the mother explained that she was not teaching the children; she just read bedtime stories to them in persian, they said prayers in persian before falling asleep, and sometimes she named objects in picture books in persian. this was apparently enough for the children to acquire persian to some extent. and since the occasions when the mother used persian were quite intimate, this language gained a more special importance in their lives than the mother would have expected. judit navracsics 494 the appearance and acquisition of hungarian changed the whole gle. in the new extensive environment, hungarian became vital and inevitable for the children. it was a must for them to acquire hungarian to survive, to make friends, to have contacts with the social environment. so motivation and sociolinguistic factors came into play. their personal communicative needs were extended to their social communicative needs. at the time of their arrival the children were normally developed english-dominant bilingual children. their language competence in english was equal to that of english monolingual children. their persian was, however, far behind their persian monolingual peers, as they had little exposure to it. the onset of hungarian as a third language changed the linguistic situation in the family. hungarian being the language of the environment might have caused a serious threat to the other two languages since the children spent more and more time with their hungarian monolingual peers either in the nursery school or in the playground. figure 2 displays the percentage of time devoted to the three languages in the first year of the family’s stay in hungary. the children spent their days from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. (6 hours) in the monolingual hungarian nursery school, where they were exposed to hungarian. in the mornings and in the afternoons (about 7 hours), they used english as a means of communication with their parents and also with english-speaking visitors. before going to bed, they spent some time (0.5 or 1 hour) with their mother communicating in persian. figure 2 time devoted per day to the three languages in the first year in hungary in 1.5 years the children made good their deficiency in hungarian, and their hungarian language proficiency became identical to that of their hungarian monolingual peers. they could communicate in their community as successfully as their hungarian peers. with the development of hungarian it was normal for the children to communicate only in hungarian, and hungarian became the language of their games together. they only switched to english when their english 50% persian 8% hungarian 42% input or intimacy 495 parents appeared and started interacting with them. sometimes they had visitors from canada or their grandmother came over from england, with whom the children could only talk in english. at mealtimes and in the afternoons and evenings when the parents talked to the children, english still remained the family language; however, there are recordings where the children, on addressing a message to each other, switch to hungarian even in the presence of the parents. apart from the annual weekly or fortnightly visits by the maternal uncle, the mother was the only source of persian; therefore, the children’s amount of exposure to persian remained the same or even decreased as a result of spending less time with their parents and more time with their friends in the playground, at their neighbours’, and so on. figure 3 shows how time was shared among the exposures to the three languages in the second and third years of their stay in hungary. the children went to kindergarten, where only hungarian was spoken. in the afternoons, after kindergarten they usually went to the playground, where they kept on playing with their monolingual hungarian peers. very often, a next door neighbour nanny baby-sat for the children, when the parents were occupied. so the time spent using only hungarian was prolonged, the time devoted to english was shortened, but time devoted to persian remained as previously. figure 3 time devoted per day to the three languages in the second and third years in hungary at that time the parents realised that they had to do something actively for their children’s trilingual development, and so the mother started to pay attention to the development and maintenance of their english for fear that the children would lose it. this was the time when, under the influence of hungarian language development, the mother realised that she was responsible for her children’s persian development, too. she started to teach them words, prayers, songs, fairy tales, and so on. up to this point she had not been consciously involved in any activities english 34% persian 8% hungarian 58% judit navracsics 496 of this kind. now she started playing “language lessons” with them. the parents started to realize that by not speaking the hungarian language, they might be excluded from many things in their children’s lives. so they started to learn hungarian in order to understand their children when they were communicating with one another. however, it was easy for them at that time, as they had moved to a more monolingual environment in a smaller town in hungary where they had only hungarian-speaking friends. the mother started to train and practise with the children in the three languages even more intensely so that their pragmatic differentiation and awareness of the languages would be successful and sufficient. in this context, it can be claimed that hungarian played a role of a certain type of catalyst in the development of the other two languages for the children. since it was the language of the social environment, in the beginning, the most motivating thing for the parents was to facilitate the acquisition effort, to help the children with questions, and to place them into the hungarian context as is shown in excerpts 2-4 taken from the protocols of the first week of hungarian acquisition. (2) mother: what did she (i.e. the hungarian nursery school teacher) say? boy: she said tenti (hungarian). sleep mother: tenti? boy: yeah, tenti. sleep. (3) mother: what did you say to magdi (the nursery school teacher) when the soup was nice? girl: finom (hungarian). delicious (4) mother: what do you eat in the nursery? girl: in the nursery, er, kumplilevis, kumpiebíd (hungarian). potato soup, potato lunch mother: what’s that? girl: it has hús (hungarian), and kumpi (hungarian). meat, potatoes this activity soon resulted in the children developing a very good metalinguistic awareness. excerpt 5 shows to what extent cultural adjustment and realities determine the choice of language. in the excerpt, we can see that the tea in the nursery school is not like the tea at home, so when the girl speaks about the tea in the nursery school, she uses hungarian, and when she speaks about the tea at home, she uses english. (5) mother: did you have tea? input or intimacy 497 girl: no, it’s teja (hungarian) not tea. mother: tea (hungarian) is tea (english)? girl: no, not tea (english). just teja (hungarian). mother: just teja. girl: yes ... i liked teja. the use of metalinguistic strategies by the mother in the interactions resulted in the children’s developed pragmatic and metalinguistic awareness, and, in the second year spent in hungary, they could enumerate what they could say in the different languages (see excerpt 6). (6) interlocutor: és perzsául tudsz valamit mondani? can you say something in persian? boy: perzsául? csak számolni. in persian? i can only count. interocutor: és mit tudsz te még perzsául? and what else do you know in persian? boy: csak állatokat. only animals. boy: csak ezeket tanútam meg anyától. i learnt only these from mum. interlocutor: hogy köszönünk perzsául? how do we greet each other in persian? boy: köszöntheni? (thinks hard) anya nem mondta ezt. to greet? mum didn’t say that. as the children were making progress in the acquisition of hungarian, they tended to use this third language more and more often. very soon (in 6 months) it became the language of games and activities between the two children. the parents felt more and more often awkward and sometimes confused because their children would use only hungarian when together. the end of the first year created a new situation. as a result of the strong acquisition effort, the children became quite fluent in hungarian, and hungarian seemed to be the strongest and dominant language in their trilingualism. 2.3. gle and the functional distribution of the three languages by the end of the third year, the functional distribution of the three languages was the following: on a daily basis, the children would always use hungarian between themselves and more and more often with their parents, thus forcing them to learn hungarian so that they could understand what their children were talking about. however hard the parents tried to maintain english as a family language, they realised judit navracsics 498 that something had to be urgently done in order for the children not to lose it. persian served as the language of nurturing and expressing emotions, and as such became less and less used. it seemed almost impossible to uphold either lae or lme so the parents started to arrange a visit to iran. unfortunately, for administrative reasons, they could not travel. this failure made the parents undertake more ardent efforts for the maintenance and development of the persian language. the mother went on teaching the children, as evidenced by excerpt 7: (7) girl: mi most számolunk. we are counting now. interlocutor: hogyan? milyen nyelven? how? in what language? girl: hát minden nyelven. magyarul meg angolul meg perzsául. well, in each language. in hungarian and in english and in persian. interlocutor: és te is tudsz számolni perzsául? and can you also count in persian? girl: ühm. (nods) interlocutor: és még mit tudsz? and what else can you do? girl: hát mindent, hát … ötig számoltam. minden nyelven ötig. well, everything. well … i counted to five. in each language to five. interlocutor: és mit tudtok még? (they don’t reply) beszélgetni szoktatok anyával perzsául vagy csak tanulni? and what else do you know? do you talk with mom in persian or you just learn? boy: csak anya thud pherzsául. only mother speaks persian. girl: anya tanít meg bennünket pherzsául. mother teaches us persian. interlocutor: de hogyan? leültök… but how? you sit down.. boy: ő má thü thud. she already knows (i.e. the language). girl: nem, hanem mindig, mindig, mindig úgy beszélünk, mikor reggel – meg este. no, we always speak like that in the morning and in the evening. boy: mi csak angolul tudunk. we can speak only english. interlocutor: akkor anya nagyon okos, ugye? then mother is very smart, isn’t she? boy: anya szokott tanítaníthani pherzsául. mother teaches us persian. input or intimacy 499 as opposed to the first two languages, hungarian did not need any lme on the part of the children. they were more and more motivated to use it; what is more, they were even able to make their parents use this language more and more often in the family. hungarian became more than the language of playing sessions; it became the only link to the outer world, to the external monolingual environment. the personal factor of communicative needs got embedded in the social factor. in the sixth year the family managed to travel to canada for three months. the lae in english became very strong, and as a result, by the end of the third month the children’s command of english was equivalent to that of their canadian english monolingual peers, according to the parents’ report. now they had to become balanced english-hungarian bilinguals, but their persian was still behind that of their persian monolingual peers due to the small amount of input. more and more gle was needed for them in order not to lose this language. 2.4. the struggle against transitional trilingualism the gle, that is, the composition of lae and lme concerning the three languages can be described in the following way: in the first five years in hungary there was a large proportion of lae in terms of hungarian, and a very little proportion of lae in terms of the other two languages, whereas the lme was relatively great in relation to both english and persian. the enormous amount of hungarian input threatened the possibility of maintaining their english and persian. the lme in hungarian could be observed only at the beginning when the mother wanted the children to repeat at home whatever they had learnt in the nursery school. these proportions are displayed in figure 4. figure 4 the proportion of lae and lme in the three languages in the first five years in hungary lae hungarian lme lae lme english laelme persian judit navracsics 500 in the sixth year in hungary (after the visit to canada) the proportions of lme and lae did not change. however, their progress in english made them balanced bilinguals or at least much more balanced than they used to be. their gle is about the same in english and hungarian, but the respective proportions of lae and lme are inversely related. the dominant process in hungarian is lae, but in english, lme. in persian it is also lme that dominates over lae, but in this instance the whole gle can be perceived as having a much lesser extent as compared to the other two languages. figure 5 illustrated these observations. figure 5 the proportion of lae and lme in the three languages in the sixth year and onwards in hungary for a while i had no correspondence with the family, but i met them in the eighth year of the family’s stay in hungary. both children were at that time at a hungarian school where they were performing very successfully. i accompanied the parents to the school and i heard the children play with their classmates in hungarian. when they noticed their parents, they ran up to their mother and asked her, in english, to let them go home a bit later than usual. the mother told me that they had already learnt to read and write in english, and they were learning these skills in persian as well. the responsibility for the children being able to engage in these activities in all three languages was rather on the shoulders of the parents; however, it required a lot of acquisition effort on the part of the children, too. all these efforts were worth it. now the girl studies at a university in canada and is married to a man of iranian origin. the boy and the parents are still in hungary. 2.5. cross-linguistic influences in trilingual language development in the acquisition process, there is a dynamic interaction between the languages of the bilingual (li, 2013), and this interaction is even more complex across the multilingual person’s languages. in developing bilingualism, according to the dual hypothesis model (paradis & genesee, 1996), the child separates the two lae hungarian lme lme english l ae lme persian lae input or intimacy 501 systems, but there are some features of each language that may influence the other one. this interdependence may include transfer when features of the dominant language appear in the weaker language at any linguistic level such as phonology, morphology syntax, and so on. in multilingualism, there is an interaction of more than two systems involving continually changing influences that might emerge from the mix of languages acquired at different stages and under different circumstances (aronin & singleton, 2012). when we study multilingual phonological acquisition, we suppose that the phonemic inventories are established for the child in each language, but there are certain elements that may have abnormal features in a given language, owing to cross-linguistic interference. watson (1991) believes that bilinguals, like monolinguals, simplify their phonological processes but do so cross-linguistically in each language separately: “any attempt to define patterns or rules in what they do is inevitably hampered by the problem of dominance – the condition of the child being more capable in one language than in the other” (p. 34). according to fantini (1985), the developing bilingual has to learn processing skills that are unnecessary for the monolingual. bilinguals have to recognize that a sound system is entirely arbitrary in that it is possible to use more than one to communicate. they must therefore learn to assign similar physical events to different systems of oppositions according to the linguistic context. however, each phonological system is not necessarily acquired in a way analogous to monolingual acquisition. fantini also finds that one system will dominate the other so that the child will fail to make some opposition in one language, or at least produce some sounds in a foreign way, due to interference. english, persian and hungarian differ in their prosodic properties (keshavarz & ingram, 2002). english has variable stress, persian and hungarian have fixed stress: persian on the final syllable, hungarian on the initial. the children under observation never had problems with stress differentiation. the consonant systems of the three languages are relatively similar. however, there are some language-specific phonemes that do not exist in the other languages, which never caused any problems for the children. on the other hand, at the phonetic level, certain sounds that exist in all three languages were related to the influences across languages. from among the allophones of the phonemes /p/, /t/ and /k/ it was the aspirated ones that occurred the most frequently in the children’s hungarian speech despite the fact that hungarian has no such aspirations, except for highly emotional and emphatic expressions. on the other hand, there is aspiration in voiceless plosives word initially in english and in all positions in persian (jeremiás, 1986). aspiration, therefore, must have a crosslinguistic character and is not limited to the language in which it is appropriate but is also extended to another language or other languages. judit navracsics 502 studies of voice onset time (vot) show that bilingual and multilingual children may have vot values different from the normal monolingual range. johnson and wilson (2002), whilst studying vot data from two japanese-english bilingual children, found that the children could differentiate their two languages in their speech production lexically and pragmatically, and that they both sounded like adult native-like speakers of both languages. i experienced the same with my observed children in most cases. however, there were occasions when the otherwise normally pronounced sounds sounded strange to the hungarian ear. i carried out an acoustic analysis of the critical words and measured the vot values of the voiceless plosives. some examples can be seen in tables 1 and 2. in the right hand columns, the average vot values characteristic of the hungarian plosives (gósy, 2001) are given so that they could be compared with the results of the children. aspiration did not concern only word initial positions (table 1), but it was also perceivable in invocalic positions as well (table 2). in addition, there are cases when affricates were aspirated as well (e.g., [kitò hi]). table 1 vot measurements of voiceless plosives in the word initial position in the children’s hungarian speech phoneme word vot (ms) norm (ms) boy girl /t/ teja 38 35 26.59 túl 73 26.59 tudom 92 26.59 /k/ kicsi 47 58 35.31 kell 42 35.31 kérsz 60 35.31 kacsa 68 35.31 /p/ persze 109 18.51 table 2 vot measurements of voiceless plosives in invocalic position in the children’s hungarian speech phoneme word vot (ms) norm (ms) boy girl /t/ rajta 166 26.59 /k/ akkor 42 131 35.31 on the basis of the findings concerning word initial and invocalic aspirated plosives and even affricates, we might surprisingly propose that persian, that is, the weakest language, is the language that dominates over the other two languages’ sound systems. the vowel systems of english, persian and hungarian differ in size and phonetic quality. studying the vowel sound development of the children and input or intimacy 503 considering the results of the hungarian phoneme discrimination tests that were applied, we can observe some persian influence again since the children tend to pronounce the sound /e:/ as /i:/, which is characteristic of colloquial persian (jeremiás, 1986). this tendency can be observed in their english speech as well, as they say words like teddy bear and get up as [ti:di beə] and [git ʌp]. they also have problems with the quantitative features of the hungarian sounds. this phenomenon is entirely new to them, since vowel length opposition does not exist in their remaining two languages. in hungarian, short and long vowels make semantic differences in the words. excerpt 8 demonstrates that the boy, after three years in hungary, could still not make a difference between the two vowel sounds. (8) interlocutor: hogy van az, hogy örült? how do you say ‘was happy’? boy: i was happy. interlocutor: ühm és mi az, hogy őrült? őrült voltam. yes. and what is crazy? i was crazy? boy: i was, i was, i was happy. kehoe (2002) in her study of german and spanish monolingual and bilingual children also found that bilingual children were lagging behind monolingual children in the acquisition of vowel length contrasts. hungarian monolingual children develop the ability to discriminate between long and short vowel sounds a little earlier than age 5, but experts dealing with speech impairment claim that at ages 3 and 6 it is often the semantics and context that help them figure out which meaning of these word pairs are to be used. 3. concluding remarks becoming multilingual is an extremely complex process that requires very consistent and clear-cut personor situation-related language use. raising multilingual children is a great responsibility as the parents or caretakers need to take several considerations into account in order to ensure the smooth development of the children. detecting the actual and perceived communicative needs is easy in adulthood, but in childhood it is also the parents’ responsibility. once the parents find it beneficial to raise their children in a multilingual context, they must do their best to provide a balance between laes and lmes to make the gle complete and successful for their children. from the development described above it became clear that one of the languages of the multilingual person will always be dominant, but this is not necessarily the one that provides the greatest amount of input. implicit learning is very important in childhood, and judit navracsics 504 as in the case of the children discussed, sometimes the least frequently used language may gain such an importance that it is the one that has the greatest influence on the other, more frequently used languages. what we learn implicitly is related to emotions. as observed, especially at the beginning, persian was used in emotionally dense situations (either negative or positive), most of the time even without the mother’s awareness. this is the highest level of intimacy that can exist in parent-child communication. and this intimacy resulted in persian being the language that influenced english and hungarian at the phonetic level. input or intimacy 505 references aronin, l., & singleton, d. 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(1991). phonological processing in two languages. in e. bialystok (ed.), language processing in bilingual children (pp. 25-48). cambridge: cambridge university press. 355 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (2). 2014. 355-387 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.2.9 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl learning from authoritarian teachers: controlling the situation or controlling yourself can sustain motivation kathryn e. chaffee university of alberta, edmonton, canada kathryn.chaffee@ualberta.ca kimberly a. noels university of alberta, edmonton, canada knoels@ualberta.ca maya sugita mceown university of alberta, edmonton, canada msugita@ualberta.ca abstract positive psychology encompasses the study of positive outcomes, optimal functioning, and resilience in difficult circumstances. in the context of language learning, positive outcomes include academic engagement, self-determined motivation, persistence in language learning, and eventually becoming a proficient user of the language. these questionnaire studies extend previous research by addressing how these positive outcomes can be achieved even in adverse circumstances. in study 1, the primary and secondary control scales of interest were validated using 2468 students at a canadian university. study 2 examined the capacity of 100 canadian language learners to adjust themselves to fit in with their environment, termed secondary control, and how it was related to their motivation for and engagement in language learning and their feelings of anxiety speaking in the classroom. secondary control in the form of adjusting one’s attitude towards language learning challenges through positive reappraisals was positively associated with self-determined motivation, need satisfaction, and engagement. in regression kathryn e. chaffee, kimberly a. noels, maya sugita mceown 356 analyses, positive reappraisals were also found to buffer the negative effects of having a controlling instructor on students’ engagement and anxiety. these findings suggest that personal characteristics interact with the learning environment to allow students to function optimally in their language courses even when the teacher is controlling. keywords: primary control, secondary control, positive reappraisal, motivation, controlling instructor 1. introduction in order for students to acquire communicative competence in a new language, they must actively engage in the learning process, devoting intense effort and persistence to what can be a difficult and time-consuming challenge (masgoret & gardner, 2003). unfortunately, language learning circumstances are sometimes not ideal for promoting students’ engagement. factors that cause students to feel controlled have been shown to negatively affect motivation (e.g., deci, eghrari, patrick, & leone, 1994). in light of this finding, the fact that language study is often compulsory at north american and european schools, as is the study of english as a foreign language (efl) in many asian countries, is potentially problematic. having a language instructor with an authoritarian teaching style is also likely to make students feel controlled, possibly decreasing their motivation for language learning (deci & ryan, 2000). for these reasons, the question of how students can maintain their motivation under such environmental constraints is important. positive psychology concerns itself in part with questions of resilience, or how students can function optimally and achieve positive outcomes even in adverse circumstances; students react to instructor behaviors in different ways, and students with greater resiliency can react in positive ways to negative classroom conditions. the current study addresses language learners’ resilience, focusing on how students maintain motivation and positive affect in the face of controlling instructors. in this paper, we examine secondary control, or the sense that one can change oneself to adapt to the environment, as a strategy to mitigate the negative effects of having a controlling instructor in a university language class. while many studies have focused on either how aspects of the language learning context affect learners or how individual differences among learners relate to motivation, few have looked at how individual characteristics of language learners interact with the learning context. we begin by outlining our motivational framework and describing past literature on academic learning from authoritarian teachers: controlling the situation or controlling yourself . . . 357 resilience, then defining primary and secondary control. we consider how these control strategies might support motivation in the language classroom. 2. motivation the present studies use self-determination theory (sdt; deci & ryan, 1985, 2000; see noels, 2001, 2009, for discussions of sdt applied in the language learning context) as a framework to look at motivation. according to deci and vansteenkiste (2004), sdt is fundamentally linked to positive psychology because it involves the prediction of optimal human functioning. chirkov, sheldon, and ryan (2011) position self-determination as central to the achievement of human happiness. the sdt perspective on academic motivation describes a way to encourage love of learning, which is one of the character strengths identified by peterson and seligman (2004) as central to human wellbeing. this perspective implies that sdt is concerned with some of the central interests of positive psychology and a good starting point for addressing questions of motivation and resilience. one subtheory of sdt describes different types of motivational orientations, or classes of reasons for engaging in an activity or task. these orientations represent a continuum of increasingly self-endorsed types of reasons, as well as amotivation, in which an individual cannot see any reason or value for the activity. these types of motivation are sometimes dichotomized into “controlled” and “self-determined” types of reasons (deci & ryan, 2000). external regulation involves external rewards or punishments as the reason for behavior and is considered the most controlled motivational orientation. introjected regulation is still classified as a “controlled” orientation, but it is slightly more internalized in that the motivating reward or punishment is an internal one such as pride, guilt, or self-esteem maintenance. identified regulation, which involves seeing personal value in the activity, but as a means to achieve an important goal rather than for the sake of the activity itself, is relatively internalised and is considered a “self-determined” orientation. finally, intrinsic motivation, in which an activity is pursued out of interest in or enjoyment of the activity itself, is considered fully self-determined (deci & ryan, 2000). self-determination theory also describes how three fundamental psychological needs, namely relatedness, competence, and autonomy, contribute to our capacity to experience a more self-determined orientation and lead to general well-being. relatedness is a feeling of warmth and connectedness to others. competence describes the ability to perform well at the given task. autonomy refers to the degree to which a person's actions are self-endorsed and consistent with his or her values, beliefs, and desires (deci & ryan, 2000). fulfilling these three needs kathryn e. chaffee, kimberly a. noels, maya sugita mceown 358 contributes to the experience of self-determined motivation (i.e., intrinsic motivation and identified regulation). if these needs are infringed upon, individuals tend to feel more controlled and therefore experience greater introjected or external regulation, and they may even become amotivated (deci & ryan, 2000). according to sdt, more self-determined forms of motivation should be associated with positive academic outcomes. high intrinsic motivation predicts higher grades and higher standardized test scores for children, while controlled motivation, and especially amotivation, have been associated with lower test scores and grades (e.g., boiché & stephan, 2013; cerasoli, nicklin, & ford, 2014; lepper, corpus, & iyengar, 2005). intrinsic motivation is also associated with a preference for more challenging tasks (abuhamdeh & csikszentmihalyi, 2009). this type of orientation should in turn allow individuals to engage in the high-skill and optimally challenging activities required to experience the immersive, fulfilling, focused motivational state known as flow (csikszentmihalyi, 1997). in language classes, self-determined motivation has been associated with high self-evaluations of language competence, greater intention to continue language studies, higher motivational intensity, and lower classroom anxiety (comanaru & noels, 2009; noels, 2005; noels, clément, & pelletier, 1999; noels, pelletier, clément, & vallerand, 2000; sugita mceown, noels, & saumure, in press). in sum, intrinsic motivation is linked to more effective learning, higher effort, and more challenge-seeking behavior. the behavior of teachers can support or undermine students’ experience of autonomy and self-determined motivation in the classroom. autonomy-supportive behaviors such as providing choice and emphasizing how course materials are relevant to students’ lives have been associated with students’ self-determined motivation, positive feelings, and engagement in learning, while controlling behaviours such as pressuring or being intrusive may have the opposite effect (e.g. assor, kaplan, & roth, 2002; black & deci, 2000; chirkov & ryan, 2001). a teaching style that is high in controllingness and low in autonomy-support has been found to be detrimental to students’ feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, which in turn is related to diminished engagement, achievement, and intrinsic motivation and greater negative affect (jang, reeve, ryan, & kim, 2009). this type of teaching style can be referred to as authoritarian, following walker’s (2008) definition, which states that an authoritarian teacher is highly demanding and unresponsive to students’ needs. since autonomy and relatedness tend to be positively interrelated (ryan & deci, 2011), sdt measures of autonomy support capture the ideas of both responsiveness and demandingness; a controlling, nonautonomy-supportive teaching style should involve both controllingness, which is an important aspect of demandingness, and failure to adapt to students’ needs and interest, which is indicative of low responsiveness. learning from authoritarian teachers: controlling the situation or controlling yourself . . . 359 3. primary and secondary control not all students who encounter an authoritarian instructor necessarily become demotivated. depending on students’ personal feelings of control, they may be more or less resilient. the construct of control has been a focus of considerable attention for researchers interested in motivation. rotter (1966) defined an internal locus of control as reflecting the belief that the outcome of a given event is contingent on a person’s own characteristics or actions. this can be differentiated from external locus of control, which is the belief that the outcome of an event is contingent on something outside the self, such as luck or a powerful other person. deci and ryan introduced the notion of “locus of causality” to refer to beliefs about where the control over the individual’s behavior resides. notions of control vs. autonomy in sdt emphasize a person’s feelings of agency or their beliefs that they are self-regulating versus being regulated by external forces. in contrast with these beliefs about who or what controls the outcome of a given situation, other researchers have proposed that people can use different strategies to exercise agency. rothbaum, weisz, and snyder (1982) note that the idea of “control” has traditionally referred to “the individual’s ability to change the environment to fit the self ’s needs” (p. 8), and they refer to such externally-targeted control striving as “primary control.” rothbaum et al. argue that control can also be exercised by changing the self. this internally-targeted control striving is termed “secondary control,”1 and reflects the degree to which individuals express agency by adapting the self to “fit in” with the environment. according to morling and evered (2006), secondary control includes both accepting the situation as it is and adjusting the self to fit that situation. tweed, white, and lehman (2004) describe secondary control as “internallytargeted,” while primary control is “externally-targeted” because secondary control involves managing the self, while primary control involves influencing the environment outside the individual. both secondary and primary control are consistent with lay usage of the word control in the sense that they involve exerting influence—over something external in the case of primary control, and over something internal in the case of secondary control. these two strat 1 there is some disagreement about the use of the term secondary control to refer to this type of action, since this behavior is not necessarily “secondary” to or less adaptive than primary control. some researchers have suggested a switch to such terms as accommodation (skinner, 2007), adjustment (morling, kitayama, & miyamoto, 2002; tsai, miao, seppala, fung, & yeung, 2007), or internally targeted control (tweed, white, & lehman, 2004). in the interest of consistency with most of the prior research dealing with this concept, we will use the term secondary control in this paper. kathryn e. chaffee, kimberly a. noels, maya sugita mceown 360 egies are not necessarily at odds; some evidence suggests that it may be most adaptive to use both primary and secondary control together (e.g., hall, perry, ruthig, hladkyj, & chipperfield, 2006). both types of control strategies can be contrasted with the notion of helplessness, in which a person is unable to control any aspect of his or her circumstances. rothbaum et al. (1982) initially posited several subtypes of secondary control, and these were later refined by weisz and colleagues (1984). in our research, we will focus on three subtypes (table 1; adapted from weisz et al., 1984). secondary control via positive reappraisals involves efforts to adjust one’s attitude towards a situation by trying to derive meaning from the experience or focus on the benefits of it. secondary control via lowering aspirations, which functions to help the individual avoid uncertainty or disappointment, is achieved by accepting the probable outcome of a situation and adjusting one’s expectations to fit that outcome. individuals can also engage in vicarious secondary control by aligning themselves with an in-group, institution, or individual in order to psychologically benefit from others’ successes. these subtypes are roughly analogous to interpretive control, predictive control, and vicarious control, respectively, as described by weisz et al. (1984), and they involve elements of accepting situations as well as adjustment of the self, although some subtypes may lean more towards one or the other of these aspects (morling & evered, 2006). table 1 secondary control subtypes our term weisz et al.’s (1984) term definition (from weisz et al., 1984) example item positive reappraisal interpretive attempts to understand or construe existing realities so as to derive a sense of meaning or purpose from them and thereby enhance one's satisfaction with them when i am faced with a bad situation in my studies, it helps to find a different way of looking at things. lowering aspirations predictive attempts to accurately predict events and conditions so as to control their impact on self (e.g., to avoid uncertainty, anxiety, or future disappointment) when my expectations are not being met in my studies, i lower my expectations. vicarious vicarious attempts to associate or closely align oneself with other individuals, groups, or institutions so as to participate psychologically in the control they exert knowing that other students have the same grades as i do gives me a comforting feeling of having something in common with others. learning from authoritarian teachers: controlling the situation or controlling yourself . . . 361 4. role of secondary control: linking secondary control, academic motivation, and resilience when forces in the environment limit an individual's choices and opportunities to act freely, we might expect a negative impact on feelings of autonomy and self-determined motivation (ryan & deci, 2000). in north america, having unconstrained choices has long been considered an important aspect of the definition of autonomy. the chance to make even unimportant choices leads to increases in both motivation and task performance for euro-north american children (iyengar & lepper, 2002), but even a simple reward can decrease north americans’ intrinsic motivation and make them feel less autonomous (deci, koestner, & ryan, 1999; noels et al., 1999). thus, north americans’ feelings of autonomy predict positive outcomes but are sensitive to perceived constraints. resilience in the context of self-determined academic motivation can refer to achieving positive learning outcomes despite a controlling environment. in a review by waxman, padron, and gray (2003) motivation and autonomy were linked to students’ resilience. additionally, resilient students tended to be more satisfied with their classroom environments than non-resilient students, even in schools where the teachers were generally perceived as non-supportive. confidence, self-efficacy, and a sense of personal control have all been found to be associated with students’ sense of being able to overcome academic challenges (i.e., “academic resilience;” cappella & weinstein, 2001; martin & marsh, 2006). a sense of autonomy encourages intrinsic motivation, so it is not unreasonable to expect that if secondary control is a way of expressing agency, it might have a similar relation to motivation. hladkyj and colleagues (as cited in perry, hall, & ruthig, 2005) found weak positive correlations between secondary control and intrinsic motivation. secondary control involves adjusting oneself to one’s circumstances, and resilience has been described as successful adaptation to difficult circumstances, so it also makes sense that secondary control might promote resilience (waxman et al., 2003). indeed, hall et al. (2006) found that among students who failed their first test in a university class, being high in both primary and secondary control (e.g., reappraising the situation as a learning experience and also seeking extra help in office hours) was associated with the highest gpa and lowest dropout rates. secondary control seems to be an adaptive strategy for resilience to initial failure, at least when paired with primary control. secondary control may promote students’ resilience by increasing both autonomy and relatedness. the fact that secondary control can involve adjusting the self to accommodate to others in the social context may indicate a link to relatedness and interdependence as well as autonomy. ashman, shiomura, and levy (2006) found high levels of interdependence predicted high levels of adjusting the kathryn e. chaffee, kimberly a. noels, maya sugita mceown 362 self to fit with others via secondary control. additionally, situations in which students had engaged in primary control were found to boost feelings of efficacy, and therefore under an sdt framework we would expect primary control to promote autonomy and competence. stories about instances when students had engaged in secondary control promoted feelings of relatedness (morling et al., 2002). 5. objectives of study 1 and 2 despite these probable links to autonomy, relatedness, and intrinsic motivation, little work has been done to clarify how secondary control complements the sdt framework. with this goal in mind, the present studies seek to assess the psychometric properties of a scale for measuring primary and secondary control strategies in university classrooms, then use this scale to investigate how these strategies may support students’ language learning. motivation, learning outcomes, and resilience to controlling classrooms are considered. the objective of study 1 is to establish whether survey measures of primary and secondary control are applicable in academic contexts, and whether they show interrelations between secondary control subtypes that indicate that these are aspects of the same larger concept. because the research reported in this article is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to empirically examine resilience in the language learning classroom through the theoretical lens of primary and secondary control (but see ryan & dörnyei, 2013 for a theoretical discussion of secondary control in older adults), it is critical that we establish the validity and reliability of measures of these constructs. study 2 has two broad objectives. the first is to establish how secondary control is related to students’ feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, orientations to learning the target language (tl; i.e., relatively selfdetermined or controlled), and learning outcomes. the second objective is to examine whether students who report greater secondary control are more resilient to the negative effect of having a controlling instructor. 6. study 1: psychometric examination of primary and secondary control we conducted a psychometric study to determine whether the items chosen to represent primary control and three secondary control subtypes (positive reappraisals, lowering aspirations, and vicarious) reflect four statistically distinct dimensions and to establish the internal consistency of each of these subscales. we expected to find four internally consistent factors, including three secondary control subscales, which, according to rothbaum et al. (1982), should be positively related to one another. learning from authoritarian teachers: controlling the situation or controlling yourself . . . 363 6.1. participants and procedure participants were 2468 undergraduates who completed a questionnaire as part of an introductory psychology class at a canadian university. the sample consisted of 60.9% females, 37.7% males, and 35 individuals who did not specify their sex. this is typical of the gender distribution in introductory psychology classes. participants’ ages ranged from 16 to 46 with a mean of 19.0 years (sd = 2.33). of the participants, 67.7% reported speaking only english as their native language, and an additional 18.7% indicated that they had been raised bilingually in english and another language. the relevant materials were part of a larger questionnaire, which all students in introductory psychology courses were given the opportunity to complete online for partial course credit. 6.2. materials participants responded to a questionnaire that included 18 items related to primary and secondary control strategies. the 14 items from wrosch, heckhausen, and lachman (2000) measured primary control (5 items) and two subscales of secondary control (lowering aspirations, 5 items, and positive reappraisals, 4 items). the 4 items from hall et al. (2006; = .57) measured vicarious secondary control. the items were rated on a 7-point scale where 1 corresponded to not at all and 7 to a lot. not all participants were language learners, so the items were worded to refer to a generic academic setting rather than to a language course in particular. 6.3. results the responses were analyzed through principal axis factoring with oblimin rotation. the scree plot and the kaiser criterion both indicated a 4-factor solution (gorsuch, 1983; see table 2). the items loaded onto the hypothesized subscales measuring primary control (factor 1; eigenvalue = 4.39, 24.37% of variance explained), secondary control via lowering aspirations (factor 2; eigenvalue = 2.91, 16.17% of variance explained), secondary control through positive reappraisals (factor 3; eigenvalue = 1.57, 8.72% of variance explained), and vicarious secondary control (factor 4; eigenvalue = 1.02, 5.66% of variance explained). thus the factorial validity of the scales was supported. the internal consistency of each of the subscales was assessed with cronbach alpha indices. these generally indicated good internal consistency (mean = .71; see table 3), although the index for vicarious secondary control was unsatisfactorily low (.57). kathryn e. chaffee, kimberly a. noels, maya sugita mceown 364 table 2 study 1: pattern matrix for exploratory factor analysis (efa) of primary and secondary control scale items factor 1 2 3 4 in my studies, i rarely give up on something i am doing, even when things get tough. .83 when i encounter problems in my studies, i don’t give up until i solve them. .80 when it comes to my studies, even when i feel i have too much to do, i find a way to get it all done. .65 when faced with a bad situation in my studies, i do what i can do to change it for the better. .60 when things don’t go according to my plans in my studies, my motto is, “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” .48 when my expectations are not being met in my studies, i lower my expectations. .77 to avoid disappointments in my studies, i don’t set my goals too high. .68 when i can’t get what i want in my studies, i assume my goals must be unrealistic. .61 when it comes to my studies, i often remind myself that i can’t do everything. .38 i have found that talking with other students who have had the same academic experiences gives me a better sense that i can manage my life. .63 i try to make friends with other students in my class who are ‘‘in the same boat’’ as i am. .54 knowing that other students have the same grades as i do gives me a comforting feeling of having something in common with others. .52 when test grades are posted in my class, i make a point of seeing how many other students got the same mark as i did. .34 i feel relieved when i let go of some of my responsibilities in my studies. in my studies, i can find something positive, even in the worst situations. -.82 even when everything seems to be going wrong in my studies, i can usually find a bright side to the situation. -.62 when i am faced with a bad situation in my studies, it helps to find a different way of looking at things. -.61 i find i usually learn something meaningful from a difficult situation in my studies. -.34 note. suggested factor names: 1 primary control; 2 secondary control via lowering aspirations; 3 vicarious secondary control; 4 secondary control via positive reappraisals a repeated measures analysis of variance revealed significant differences in students’ mean levels of the four control strategies (f(3, 7332) = 778.70, p < .001, = .24). students reported fairly high use of primary control, moderate use of vicarious secondary control and secondary control via positive reappraisals, and mean use of secondary control via lowering aspirations was the lowest, falling below the midpoint of the scale (see table 3).2 2 there were mean gender differences on the secondary control subscales. females reported higher vicarious control (t(2415) = -4.77, p < .001) and lowering aspirations (t(2415) = -2.14, p = .033) than males, while males reported more positive reappraisals (t(2414) = 5.00, p < .001). however, the magnitude of these differences was very small, with the largest effect size being ² = .01. the factor structure was not substantially altered by learning from authoritarian teachers: controlling the situation or controlling yourself . . . 365 table 3 study 1: factor correlation matrix with means, standard deviations, and cronbach alpha indices of internal consistency (in parentheses on the diagonal) factor m sd 1 2 3 4 primary control 5.00 1.10 (.84) lowering aspirations 3.64 1.11 -.42 (.71) vicarious 4.68 1.10 .14 .30 (.57) positive reappraisals 4.38 1.11 -.44 -.05 -.15 (.73) note. correlations greater than or equal to .05 are statistically significant at p < .05. primary control showed the strongest associations with other factors, being positively associated with positive reappraisals (because the factor loadings for positive reappraisals were negative, negative correlations between this construct and the other three factors represent positive relationships), and negatively related to lowering aspirations. intercorrelations between the three secondary control subtypes, though positive, tended to be low, with the strongest association being between vicarious control and lowering aspirations. this pattern calls into question whether vicarious control and lowering aspirations should be considered control strategies, since we would expect positive relationships between these four constructs, but these relationships tend to be small or even negative. in sum, study 1 supports the distinctiveness and the internal consistency of the four subscales of primary and secondary control. however, given the unexpected correlations between factors that suggest that vicarious control and lowering aspirations might not be control constructs, the subscales merit further exploration in study 2. 7. study 2 the purpose of study 2 is to further examine the control strategy subscales in the language learning context and to consider whether and how primary and secondary control moderate the negative impact of an authoritarian instructor. the following hypotheses were formulated for the study: 1. hypothesis 1: the interrelation between the secondary control subscales, and also the relations with primary control, will be similar to study 1. specifically, the secondary control subscales will again show small positive correlations, and primary control will be positively related to secondary control via positive reappraisals and negatively related to secondary control via lowering aspirations. performing the analysis separately for males and females, except that one primary control item showed a small cross-loading with positive reappraisals for males only. because of the minimal gender differences, analyses are reported collapsed across gender. kathryn e. chaffee, kimberly a. noels, maya sugita mceown 366 2. hypothesis 2: both primary and secondary control will show positive associations with fundamental need satisfaction. consistent with morling et al. (2002), primary control will have a strong positive correlation with feelings of autonomy and competence. secondary control will be positively correlated with feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. 3. hypothesis 3: both primary and secondary control measures will be positively correlated with self-determined motivational orientations (intrinsic motivation and identified regulation) and negatively correlated with controlled orientations (introjected and external regulations) and amotivation. 4. hypothesis 4: primary and secondary control will be associated with positive learning outcomes, specifically high self-evaluated and comparative language competence, high academic engagement (energy, dedication, and absorption), low language class anxiety, and a strong intention to continue language studies. 5. hypothesis 5a: we predict that secondary control will moderate the effect of a controlling language instructor on language learning motivation, intention to continue studying the target language (tl), language use anxiety, the intensity of academic engagement, and language competence. specifically, students high in secondary control will experience more positive outcomes than those low in secondary control when the teacher is seen as controlling, but when the teacher is autonomysupportive, all students will experience relatively positive outcomes regardless of their level of secondary control. 6. hypothesis 5b: we expect that secondary control will be distinct from primary control in such a way that although the two will be associated with the same positive outcomes, primary control will not interact with instructor perception. in other words, we expect that primary control should be associated with positive motivational profiles and learning outcomes, but that these relations will not be any different with an autonomy-supportive teacher than a controlling one. 7.1. method 7.1.1. participants and procedure the participants included 100 students (75% female)3 enrolled in a foreign language class at a western canadian university who were studying diverse 3 this gender disparity in the distribution is not surprising given that more females than males tend to take both psychology classes and language classes. males reported slightly higher learning from authoritarian teachers: controlling the situation or controlling yourself . . . 367 languages, including french (29% ), spanish (29%), german (9%), japanese (7%), latin (5%), chinese, italian, american sign language, cree, swedish, ukrainian, korean, norwegian, portuguese, and russian (each < 5%). the participants ranged from 17 to 51 years old with a mean age of 19.68 years (sd = 3.92), and were native english-speaking canadian citizens or permanent residents. most (72%) were in their first year of university studies. students had been studying the tl for between 3 weeks and 15 years with an average length of study of 4.29 years (sd = 4.90). the participants were recruited from the university’s psychology subject pool. they completed an online questionnaire during group testing sessions. the questionnaire was electronically tailored to reflect the tl being studied by each participant (e.g., “how long have you been studying [the tl]?”). the students received partial course credit in their psychology course for their participation. 7.1.2. materials the online questionnaire assessed students’ language learning motivation, perceptions of their current instructor, and learning outcomes. negatively worded items were reverse-scored so that a high mean score on each scale indicated a high degree of endorsement of that construct. a description of each of the instruments follows, along with cronbach alpha indices of internal consistency ( ). primary and secondary control: as in study 1, wrosch et al.’s (2000) scale was used to measure primary control (5 items; = .79) and two subscales of secondary control (lowering aspirations, 5 items, = .70; and positive reappraisals, 4 items, = .62). three items from hall et al. (2006; = .62) measured vicarious secondary control. these items were rated on a 5-point scale with 1 being not at all and 5 being a lot. wording of the items was changed to refer to the student’s language studies rather than to their studies in general (e.g., “in my [tl] studies”). motivation for language learning: reasons for learning a second language along the sdt continuum were assessed using the language learning orientation scale (llos; adapted from noels, et al., 2000). this scale measures amotivation (“offhand, i can’t think of any good reason for why i study [the tl];” = .87), as well as external regulation (1 item; “because i want to pass this course and get the course credits”) and introjected regulation (5 items; “because i would feel guilty if i didn’t know a second language;” = .82), identified regulation (5 items; “because amotivation than females (t(98) = 2.12, p = .037) and slightly less sense of relatedness with classmates in the language class (t(98) = 2.14, p = .034), but otherwise there were no mean gender differences on any of the variables of interest. moreover, including gender as a covariate did not change the nature or statistical significance of the interaction effects. given the minimal differences between genders, the analyses were computed collapsed across gender. kathryn e. chaffee, kimberly a. noels, maya sugita mceown 368 it helps me to achieve goals that are important to me;” = .88) tl, and intrinsic motivation (4 items; “for the enjoyment i experience when i grasp a difficult construct in [tl];” = .91). participants rated how closely each reason corresponded to their reasons for studying the tl from 1 (not at all) to 7 (exactly). fundamental need satisfaction: nineteen items adapted from the basic need satisfaction at work scale (kasser, davey, & ryan, 1992) assessed satisfaction of the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness in the language classroom. these were rated along a 7-point scale from 1 (not at all true) to 7 (very true). four items were used to assess autonomy (e.g., “i feel like i can make a lot of inputs to deciding how i learn [the tl];” = .65), 5 to assess competence (e.g., “i have been able to learn interesting new skills in my [tl] class;” = .66), and 7 to assess relatedness in the language class (e.g., “i really like the people in my [tl] class;” = .88). relatedness to the tl community: feelings of relatedness to the tlspeaking community were measured using three items from noels (2001; e.g., “i feel a certain ‘connection’ with [the tl] and the [tl]-speaking world;” = .77). these were rated along a 7-point scale from not at all true (1) to very true (7). relatedness to the instructor: satisfaction of the need for relatedness in the student's relationship with the instructor were assessed using 10 items from richer and vallerand (1998), (e.g., “in my relationship with my [tl] instructor, i feel understood;” = .91). classroom language use anxiety. ten items adapted from gardner's (2010) amtb were rated on a 5-point scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) as a measure of anxiousness about using the tl in the classroom (e.g., “i get nervous when i am speaking in my [tl] class;” = .89). academic engagement: academic engagement was assessed using 9 items adapted from salmela-aro and upadaya’s (2012) schoolwork engagement inventory, which includes three 3-item subscales: energy (e.g., “i am enthusiastic about my [tl] studies;” = .70), absorption (“time flies when i am studying [the tl];” = .80), and dedication (“i find my [tl] coursework full of meaning and purpose;” = .78). items were rated along a 5-point scale from never (1) to always (5). intention to continue: intention to continue learning the tl was measured using 5 items adapted from noels, clément, and pelletier (1999; “i want to continue to learn [the tl] after i finish this course;” = .94). participants answered along a 5-point scale with 5 being always and 1 being never. self-assessment of language competence: participants evaluated their ability to read, write, speak, and understand the tl on a 5-point scale adapted from clément and baker (2001), with 1 being not at all and 5 being very well. previous research has shown that self-evaluation measures correlate positively with language proficiency test results (macintyre, noels, & clément, 1997; learning from authoritarian teachers: controlling the situation or controlling yourself . . . 369 kondo-brown, 2005). respondents also reported how many years they had been studying the tl and rated how they felt their proficiency compared to the other students in their class (comparative self-evaluation) on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (below average) to 5 (above average). perceptions of the teacher: using 23 items adapted from the learning climate questionnaire (lcq; williams, wiener, markakis, reeve, & deci, 1994), and assor, kaplan, and roth (2002), students rated their perception of their tl instructor as autonomy-supportive (high score) or controlling (low score) on a 7-point scale with 1 being strongly disagree and 7 being strongly agree (e.g., “i feel that my [tl] instructor provides me choices and options;” “my [tl] instructor tells me what to do all the time” [reversed]). this scale had an of .90. 7.2. results and discussion 7.2.1. correlational analyses 7.2.1.1. hypothesis 1: relations between control subscales correlational analyses were conducted to determine the interrelations between primary control and the three subtypes of secondary control. results showed that the three subtypes of secondary control were not related to one another quite as expected (hypothesis 1; table 4). as in study 1, vicarious secondary control and secondary control via lowering aspirations were positively correlated, and secondary control via positive reappraisals was more strongly associated with primary control than with either vicarious secondary control or secondary control through lowering aspirations. unlike in study 1, positive reappraisal was negatively associated with lowering aspirations, while vicarious control showed a trend towards being positively associated with reappraisals that did not reach statistical significance (p = .095). these results raise further doubts about whether the three subscales actually reflect different subtypes of the same concept. table 4 study 2: intercorrelations among primary control and secondary control subscales primary control reappraisal vicarious reappraisal .61** vicarious -.02 .17 lowering aspirations -.50** -.34** .31** ** = p < .01 * = p < .05 n = 100 kathryn e. chaffee, kimberly a. noels, maya sugita mceown 370 7.2.1.2. hypothesis 2: relations of autonomy, competence, and relatedness with control next, the relationships between the different types of control and autonomy, competence, and relatedness were examined (hypothesis 2; table 5). primary control was positively associated with feelings of autonomy and competence, as hypothesized, and, to a lesser extent, with feelings of relatedness with the instructor. positive reappraisals showed the predicted positive associations with autonomy and feelings of relatedness to the instructor and the tl community. vicarious control was significantly correlated with relatedness to classmates and to the instructor, but it was unrelated to autonomy or competence. lowering of aspirations was negatively correlated with satisfaction of all of the fundamental needs except for relatedness in the classroom. table 5 study 2: control with need satisfaction primary control reappraisal vicarious lowering aspirations autonomy .34** .32** .02 -.42** competence .49** .58** .04 -.45** relatedness: classroom .03 .19† .36** -.23* relatedness: community .12 .32** .13 -.03 relatedness: instructor .20* .38** .12 -.29** ** p < .01 * p < .05 †p < .10 n = 100 the fact that primary control and secondary control via positive reappraisals were both positively related to students’ feelings of autonomy and competence in their language studies suggests that both strategies may be associated with feelings of agency and efficacy, consistent with the idea of “control.” positive reappraisals also showed the hypothesized positive associations with feelings of relatedness. the correlation between positive reappraisals and relatedness in the classroom did not reach significance, but a trend in the predicted direction was observed (p = .059) and all other forms of relatedness were significant. the relations between autonomy and the other two secondary control subscales, vicarious and lowering aspirations, were not consistent with the concept of control. indeed, students who lowered their aspirations felt less autonomous, less competent, and perceived poorer relationships with their classmates and instructor than students who did not. although vicarious secondary control was associated with feelings of relatedness in the classroom and with the instructor, it was unlike other forms of control because it was unrelated to autonomy and competence. learning from authoritarian teachers: controlling the situation or controlling yourself . . . 371 7.2.1.3. hypothesis 3: relations of motivational orientation and control orientation as predicted, primary control was positively correlated with intrinsic motivation and identified regulation and negatively associated with amotivation (table 6). positive reappraisals also showed relationships consistent with the hypothesis, being negatively correlated with amotivation and positively correlated with the self-determined motivational orientations. vicarious secondary control was positively correlated with these latter orientations as well, but it was not significantly associated with amotivation. lowering aspiration showed a positive relationship with amotivation and a negative correlation with external regulation but was not significantly associated with any other motivational orientation. table 6 study 2: control with orientations primary control reappraisal vicarious lowering aspirations amotivation -.31** -.28** -.16 .21* external regulation -.07 -.11 .18 .07 introjected regulation .11 .22* .22* .11 identified regulation .24** .50** .25* -.10 intrinsic motivation .42** .48** .23* -.13 ** p < .01 * p < .05 n = 100 primary control and positive reappraisals largely conformed to the expected patterns and appeared to be moderately strong correlates of a selfdetermined, autonomous motivational orientation. vicarious control could also be said to be associated with such an orientation, though to a lesser extent, while lowering aspirations did not show an adaptive pattern. primary and secondary control were uncorrelated with students’ external regulation, while introjected regulation was uncorrelated with primary control and showed a small positive correlation with positive reappraisals. this did not support the hypothesis, but may be explained by the fact that the external regulation item used in this study referred to passing the course and getting the course credits; this is a goal all students are likely to endorse, and the item was not phrased in a particularly “controlling” way, so this item may not have reflected an external orientation well. furthermore, although these correlations were small and nonsignificant, they did tend towards the expected direction. introjected regulation, though considered a “controlled” orientation, is nonetheless at least slightly internalized, so nonsignificant or small positive correlations between control orientations and this variable are not too concerning. kathryn e. chaffee, kimberly a. noels, maya sugita mceown 372 7.2.1.4. hypothesis 4: relations of learning outcomes with control primary control was related to the outcome variables as expected; it was positively correlated with academic engagement, intention to continue tl study, and how proficient students felt they were in the tl compared to their classmates. it was also negatively correlated with language use anxiety (table 7). positive reappraisals showed the same pattern of associations with an additional positive correlation with self-evaluated language competence. vicarious control was unrelated to learning outcomes. lowering aspirations showed significant correlations with all learning outcomes, but these correlations were in the opposite direction from what was hypothesized, further indicating that this strategy is maladaptive for language learners. table 7 study 2: control with outcomes primary control reappraisal vicarious lowering aspirations self evaluation .16 .26** .04 -.26* comparative evaluation .39** .33** -.08 -.34** energy .49** .60** .18† -.29** dedication .49** .65** .18† -.26** absorption .56** .61** .07 -.19† anxiety -.38** -.28** .15 .49** continue .28** .38** .12 -.28** **p < .01 *p < .05 †p < .10 n = 100 striving for control over the language learning situation was related to adaptive language learning motivation and positive language learning outcomes, but internally-targeted control striving in terms of controlling one’s attitude towards the learning situation via positive reappraisals was at least equally important. unlike primary control, positive reappraisals were associated with both feeling good at the tl compared to classmates and feeling generally good at reading, writing, speaking and understanding the tl. 7.2.1.5. summary of correlational results in the correlational analyses, primary control and secondary control via positive reappraisals tended to show the hypothesized relationships with motivational and outcome variables. moreover, these relationships tended to be as strong or stronger with positive reappraisals than with primary control. vicarious secondary control and secondary control via lowering aspirations, howev learning from authoritarian teachers: controlling the situation or controlling yourself . . . 373 er, largely failed to show the hypothesized associations with the motivational and outcome variables. lowering aspirations appears to be quite maladaptive for language learners, while vicarious control did not appear to be particularly important for supporting students’ motivation. this was not entirely surprising given that north american academic culture encourages independence rather than relying on others and ambition rather than setting realistic goals (markus & kitayama, 1991; reynolds, stewart, macdonald, & sischo, 2006). vicarious control may still be a positive strategy for students to use in the classroom because this strategy was tied to relatedness (but not autonomy or competence), and increasing students’ feelings of relatedness should promote selfdetermined motivation. however, primary control and positive reappraisals were unquestionably the best predictors of optimal language learning. 7.2.2. moderation analyses 7.2.2.1. hypothesis 5: secondary control (but not primary control) as a buffer for teacher controllingness hypotheses 5a and 5b stated that that secondary control would change or moderate the relationship between perception of the instructor as controlling (vs. autonomy-supportive)4 and learning outcomes and motivational factors such that secondary control would promote resiliency, while primary control would not. a series of hierarchical regression analyses were computed to test for moderation effects following the procedures outlined by aiken and west (1991). to do this, instructor perception and secondary control were centered around their respective means. to center scores, the group mean is subtracted from each individual’s score. this procedure is done in order to reduce multicollinearity. next, the centered scores were entered as predictor variables in the first step, and then the interaction of both terms (i.e., instructor perception × secondary control) was entered as a predictor variable on the second step. this analysis was done with each of the motivational orientations and linguistic variables as criterion (or dependent) variables. a significant interaction term in this analysis means that the relationship between perception of the instructor and outcomes depends upon the level of secondary control. because positive reappraisals was the only secondary control subscale that consistently predicted the outcome variables in the manner hypothesized, moderation analyses focused on this subscale. 4 consistent with definitions of authoritarian teachers, our instructor perception measure was correlated with relatedness (acceptance: r = .62, p < .001; intimacy: r = .55, p < .001). thus teachers who were demanding and intrusive tended to be perceived as uninvolved and uncaring towards their students. kathryn e. chaffee, kimberly a. noels, maya sugita mceown 374 7.2.2.2. reappraisals and language class anxiety the main effect of positive reappraisals on anxiety was significant ( = .11, f(2, 96) = 5.83, p = .004; = -.25, t = -2.09, p = .039), as was the interaction ( = .04, f = 3.97, = .19, t = 1.99, p = .049). the interaction may be accounted for by noting that the relationship between perception of the instructor and anxiety was different for students who tended to positively reappraise and those who did not. students who reported strong endorsement of secondary control via positive reappraisals reported uniformly moderate anxiety (simple slope: = .00, t = .01, p = .99), while for students low in positive reappraising, anxiety depended on their perception of the instructor. students reported high anxiety with a controlling instructor, but only moderate anxiety with an autonomy-supportive instructor (simple slope: = -.32, t = -2.91, p = .004). figure 1 shows the interaction effect of instructor controllingness and positive reappraisals on anxiety, with the solid grey line representing students at least 1 sd above the mean on positive reappraisals and the dark dotted line showing students at least 1 sd below the sample mean. the y-axis represents increasing levels of language class anxiety. figure 1 study 2: interaction of language class anxiety and teaching style by positive reappraisals 7.2.2.3. reappraisals and engagement there were significant main effects of both reappraisals and instructor perception on the energy subscale ( = .43, f(2, 95) = 36.14, p < .001), so that both use of positive reappraisals and perceiving the instructor as autonomy1 1,5 2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 5 controlling instructor autonomy-supportive instructor a nx ie ty low reappraisal (-1 sd) high reappraisal (+1 sd) learning from authoritarian teachers: controlling the situation or controlling yourself . . . 375 supportive predicted higher energy towards language studies (reappraisals, = .67, t = 6.99, p < .001; instructor, = .20, t = 2.60, p = .011). again, these effects were qualified by a significant moderation effect; reappraisals moderated the effect of perception of the instructor on students’ self-reported level of energy ( = .03, f = 4.54, = -.23, t = -2.13, p = .036). students low in positive reappraisals reported low energy towards their language studies when they saw their language instructor as controlling, but moderate energy when the instructor was autonomy-supportive (figure 2; simple slope: = .33, t = 3.77 p < .001). students high in positive reappraisals showed a nonsignificant slope and reported energy levels consistently above the midpoint of the scale (figure 3; simple slope: = .06, t = .52 p = .60). a nonsignificant trend in this direction was also observed for dedication ( = .46, = .19, t = 1.99, p = .053). figure 2 interaction of energy towards the language class and teaching style by positive reappraisals 7.2.2.4. reappraisals and self-determined motivation there was a significant main effect of positive reappraisals such that positive reappraisals predicted higher self-determined motivation (intrinsic motivation: = .25, f(2, 96) = 15.57, = 1.23, t = 5.75 p < .001; identified regulation = .27, f(2, 96) = 18.00, = 1.15, t = 6.23, p < .001). this relation was qualified by significant interaction effects (intrinsic motivation: = .03, f = 4.22, = -.18, t = -2.05 p = .043; identified regulation: = .05, f= 7.14, = -.23, t = -2.67, p = .009). students high in positive reappraisals were high in these orientations when they perceived the instructor as not being autonomy supportive, but these students 1 1,5 2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 5 controlling instructor autonomy-supportive instructor en er gy low reappraisal (-1 sd) high reappraisal (+1 sd) kathryn e. chaffee, kimberly a. noels, maya sugita mceown 376 showed a negative slope such that they were actually higher in these orientations when the instructor was controlling than when perceived autonomy-support was high (figure 3; simple slopes: intrinsic motivation, = -.53, t = -2.16, p = .033; identified regulation, = -.52, t = -2.49, p = .015). for students low in positive reappraisals, endorsement of these orientations was uniformly low with a nonsignificant slope (simple slopes: intrinsic motivation, = .07, t = .36, p = .79; identified regulation, = .15, t = .88, p = .38). figure 4 presents the interaction from another perspective; the more students used positive reappraisals, the greater self-determined motivation they experienced. this relationship was stronger for people who had a controlling teacher (simple slopes: intrinsic motivation, = 1.61, t = 5.53, p < .001; identified regulation, = 1.58, t = 6.30, p < .001) than people with an autonomy-supportive instructor (simple slopes: intrinsic motivation, = .84, t = 2.99, p = .004; identified regulation, = .71, t = 2.95, p = .004). stated otherwise, reappraisals are particularly effective in supporting selfdetermined motivation when instructors are perceived as authoritarian. figure 3 study 2: interaction of intrinsic motivation and teaching style by positive reappraisals positive reappraisals moderated the relationship between perceptions of the instructor and self-determined reasons for language learning, but not quite in the way expected. students who strongly endorsed the use of positive reappraisals received a boost to their intrinsic and identified reasons for language learning when they perceived their instructor to be relatively controlling, but when the instructor was seen as autonomy supportive, these students were 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 controlling instructor autonomy-supportive instructor in tr in si c m ot iv at io n low reappraisal (-1 sd) high reappraisal (+1 sd) learning from authoritarian teachers: controlling the situation or controlling yourself . . . 377 actually less motivated than otherwise. one possible explanation for this finding is that these students compensated for a negative impression of the instructor by mentally emphasizing their own personally important reasons for language study. alternatively, if these students were reappraising their instructor’s controlling behaviors, they may have experienced these behaviors as supportive rather than feeling coerced (e.g., zhou, lam, & chan, 2012). having an autonomy-supportive instructor did not appear to increase the self-determined motivation of students low in positive reappraisal. however, as primary control and positive reappraisals were moderately related, it may be that these students were demotivated by a low overall sense of control and feelings of helplessness. figure 4 study 2: interaction of intrinsic motivation and positive reappraisals by teaching style reappraisals did not significantly moderate the effect of the instructor on intention to continue studying the tl, absorption in language studies, selfevaluated language competence, comparative language competence, amotivation, or controlled motivational orientations. except for the controlled orientations, all of these motivational variables and outcomes showed a main effect of reappraisal such that more use of positive reappraisal was associated with better functioning (i.e., lower amotivation and higher everything else). intention to continue studying the tl showed a similar main effect of perception of the instructor as well. thus, use of positive reappraisals was especially beneficial for some motivational factors and outcomes when the instructor was controlling, while it positively affected others regardless of the instructor’s style. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 low reappraisal (-1 sd) high reappraisal (+1 sd) in tr in si c m ot iv at io n controlling instructor autonomysupportive instructor kathryn e. chaffee, kimberly a. noels, maya sugita mceown 378 primary control was correlated with positive reappraisal (r = .61, p < .01), but it did not significantly moderate any relationships between the instructor’s style and motivational orientations or learning outcomes. instead primary control had overall positive effects on all of these variables except introjected and external regulations. therefore positive reappraisal was distinct from primary control in that it was especially adaptive when students saw their language instructor as controlling. when the instructor was autonomy supportive, students experienced fairly positive outcomes regardless of whether they used positive reappraisals or not, but when the instructor was seen as relatively controlling, students who did not positively reappraise had high language use anxiety and low energy towards their language studies, while high-reappraisers did not experience these negative effects. in other words, being able to positively reappraise seems to be important in allowing students with controlling instructors to achieve self-determined motivation, high energy towards the language class, and low language class anxiety, while when the instructor is autonomysupportive, reappraisals are less helpful in terms of these outcomes. 8. general discussion the present studies clarified how secondary control and academic motivation may be related in university language classrooms and established positive reappraisals as a strategy to support language learners’ resilience. these data provides evidence that positive reappraisals may be an effective method for helping language students to cope with a controlling instructor. such resilience is an important process by which students can learn and thrive in a new language and achieve the many benefits it affords. study 1 supported the distinctiveness of the primary control and secondary control via positive reappraisal subscales as measures of control strategies that can be used in language learning settings. it also called into question whether vicarious control and especially lowering one’s aspirations were control strategies in the same sense as primary control and positive reappraisals. at least as framed by the items used in the present study, our psychometric results suggest that these types of behaviors may not function as secondary control strategies. this interpretation was further supported in study 2, when these strategies did not relate to the sdt motivational variables as expected. these findings highlight the importance of establishing the psychometric properties of newly developed instruments when examining new constructs in the language learning context. they suggest that researchers who wish to examine secondary control in language learning might best focus on positive reappraisals, and if they are interested in other forms of secondary control, then they should consider alternative concep learning from authoritarian teachers: controlling the situation or controlling yourself . . . 379 tualizations of secondary control and develop alternative instruments to those used in the present study (e.g., reframing vicarious control and/or lowering aspirations as downward social comparisons; see ryan & dörnyei, 2013). the present research also established the role of primary control and positive reappraisals in supporting language learning motivation and outcomes. as predicted, both primary control and positive reappraisals were associated with autonomy and competence, and positive reappraisals were also linked to relatedness. both primary control and positive reappraisals were related to a selfdetermined motivational profile and positive learning outcomes. it should be noted that these two control strategies tended to be used together. for students, exercising agency in mastering the challenges in their learning environment was important, but exercising control over their own attitudes was at least as, if not more important for achieving positive language learning outcomes, particularly in difficult circumstances. these results highlight the importance of both the learning context and the learner for optimal motivation and learning, as well as how the two interact in predicting optimal language learning. it may be worthwhile to encourage language learners to adjust their attitudes in the face of language learning difficulties and look at them instead as learning opportunities. the 3-step intervention described by gregersen, macintyre, hein, talbot, and claman (this issue) could be helpful in promoting positive attitudes among both learners and teachers. this intervention involves a series of writing activities designed to scaffold emotional intelligence by first asking participants to identify three good things that have happened to them each day, then later, to savor these positive experiences, and finally to reflect on adverse events and pessimistic cognitions and then brainstorm ways these experiences can be re-examined in a less negative way (i.e., learned optimism). this same intervention, particularly the third step of learned optimism, might also be used to increase positive reappraising because it involves teaching students to reframe adverse events in a more positive, optimistic way. previous literature on coping suggests a few additional ways positive reappraisals might be fostered in the classroom. sentence-completion tasks in which people fill in missing letters to finish a positive sentence have been shown to increase positive reappraising (woud, holmes, postma, dalgleish, & mackintosh, 2012). as sentence writing is one of the four central skills involved in language learning, word-completion tasks very similar to the ones used by woud et al. (2011) could potentially be included as part of writing or vocabulary activities in lower-level language classes to encourage students’ positive reappraisal. in more advanced classes, journal-writing activities could be used to promote positive reappraisals; students could be instructed to reflect on the things they have kathryn e. chaffee, kimberly a. noels, maya sugita mceown 380 learned recently, including anything they have found difficult, but then encouraged to end each journal entry on a positive note. supporting students’ use of primary control may be a more straightforward route by which teachers can stimulate student motivation. autonomysupportive teaching strategies such as being open to students’ input and tailoring course material to students’ interests are likely to encourage students to engage in primary control (see noels, 2013, for a discussion of autonomysupportive teaching style in the language learning context). students who feel listened to may be more likely to express their interests and preferences, ask questions, or visit during office hours, and pursuing such strategies should support students’ feelings of autonomy and competence. responsibility for learning outcomes should not be placed solely on teachers, however. students who take responsibility for their own language learning and endeavor to both influence their environments and control their attitudes are likely to experience language learning in a way that is both successful and enjoyable. students who use these strategies are likely to feel autonomous, competent, and intrinsically motivated. students who manage their attitudes and reactions to language learning setbacks may also cope effectively with adverse learning conditions. although of course the use of autonomy-supportive teaching strategies should be encouraged, it is heartening to know that even when such strategies are not employed, resilient students may still be able to self-motivate and achieve if they strive to maintain a positive attitude. 9. limitations a limitation of our instructor measurement is that the study used students’ self-reports to measure teachers’ autonomy-supportive and controlling behavior. this research is a first step in looking at how instructional factors and secondary control interact to affect students, but it important to note that because of the nature of our teacher assessment, we can only say how students perceived the instructor’s autonomy-support and controllingness, which may or may not be related to how the teacher actually behaved or the teacher’s intended instructional style. past research (e.g., bernaus & gardner, 2008) has shown that student perceptions of the teacher are not always strongly related to the teacher’s reported style, so it is possible that students’ ratings in the present study were influenced by their liking for the teacher. such tendencies are unlikely to undermine the present results, however, as it is the student’s subjective experience of external control that should be the most demotivating. if anything, feeling controlled by a teacher who exhibits objectively controlling behaviors might lead to even stronger relationships than the ones learning from authoritarian teachers: controlling the situation or controlling yourself . . . 381 found here. studies measuring teaching style and teacher controllingness using a combination of individual students’ perceptions, aggregated student ratings, and observer ratings of teacher controllingness could help to tease apart how secondary control interacts with instructional practices and styles. our study results also showed limited variability on the teacher controllingness scale—the low end of students’ ratings was near the midpoint of the scale. this is to be expected in a university setting, where students are adults and typically experience a fair amount of autonomy. it is worth noting that the means show that the “controlling” teachers in this sample were moderately autonomysupportive, yet despite this limited variability we were able to find effects with positive reappraisals. future studies in high school or middle school classroom settings might yield a greater variability of teaching style and allow us to see how students react to teachers who are extremely controlling. we expect these effects could be even stronger than those reported in the present research. 10. conclusion the results of the present research have implications for positive psychology because they help us understand how students can come away from even a difficult language class with a love of the language and a thirst to learn more, which has implications for which students eventually become proficient users of the languages they are studying. both primary and secondary control striving may promote positive language learning experiences, suggesting that students should focus on managing both external realities in their language studies and internal ones. our results also demonstrate how students’ individual characteristics can interact with the learning environment, enabling resilience in the face of negative environmental factors; students can enjoy language learning even in spite of a controlling teacher if they use positive reappraisals. the question of exactly how this strategy can be fostered among language learners remains an open one, but it seems clear that language learners have the power to overcome the difficulties associated with an unsupportive teacher by managing their own attitude through positive reappraisals. acknowledgements portions of this paper were previously presented in a master’s thesis for the university of alberta, edmonton, alberta, canada (chaffee, 2013). funding for this project was provided by a social sciences and humanities research council of canada standard research grant to the second author. the authors would like to thank liman li for her statistical guidance, zoey zhang for editorial assistance, kathryn e. chaffee, kimberly a. noels, maya sugita mceown 382 and joy peng, katie fung, melanie chow, and levi bilton for their research assistance throughout this project. correspondence regarding this study can be directed to kathryn.chaffee@ualberta.ca or knoels@ualberta.ca learning from authoritarian teachers: controlling the situation or controlling yourself . . . 383 references abuhamdeh, s., & csikszentmihalyi, m. 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(2012). the chinese classroom paradox: a cross-cultural comparison of teacher controlling behaviors. journal of educational psychology, 104(4), 1162-1174. doi:10.1037/a0027609. 795 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (4). 2018. 795-843 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.4.5 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project luca botturi scuola universitaria professionale della svizzera italiana (supsi), locarno, switzerland luca.botturi@supsi.ch daniela kappler scuola universitaria professionale della svizzera italiana (supsi), locarno, switzerland daniela.kappler@supsi.ch lucio negrini scuola universitaria professionale della svizzera italiana (supsi), locarno, switzerland lucio.negrini@supsi.ch abstract this article presents the design, implementation and outcomes of alpconnectar, a swiss project that exploits technologies for digitally-supported language exchange (le) in primary schools. launched in 2013, the project involves three swiss cantons where different languages are spoken (namely german, french and italian) and respectively taught as foreign languages since the third grade of primary school. in the first section of the paper the linguistic composition of switzerland is briefly presented and the current methodologies and approaches in foreign language teaching in the country are introduced. after a literature review of online le practices, the alpconnectar project is presented, along with a le example to illustrate how it works. the final sections present the results of the project, based on data collected from both pupils and teachers. the results seem to suggest that while digital technologies offer significant benefits for les, they are no silver bullet, and their impact depends on a number of contextual variables. keywords: digital technologies; language exchange; primary school luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 796 1. introduction switzerland is a multilingual country in which four main linguistic communities (german-, french-, italianand romansh-speaking) have a strong territorial basis. the need to keep national cohesion led to the development of a shared language learning policy, which is currently being discussed because of the perceived importance of english and the growing presence of other languages in the country. alpconnectar is a joint project of three swiss universities of teacher education and swisscom, the leading national telecom provider. its main goals are (a) the mutual linguistic understanding and learning among pupils from different regions, (b) the reduction of inhibition in communicating in a foreign language, (c) the improvement of language skills and (d) the fostering of motivation and awareness of linguistic and cultural differences and analogies, thanks to authentic learning experiences. alpconnectar’s key feature lies in the combination of components of multilingual didactics (see troncy & goletto, 2014; the swiss passepartout project), of transcurricular learning of foreign languages (dausend, 2014) and of the pedagogy of exchange (saudan, 2003), as well as in differentiating and expanding the contact with the other language to optimize more conventional foreign language teaching as well. the next two sections present the linguistic situation in switzerland and the key features of foreign language learning in primary education, with a focus on language exchanges. the third section introduces some key elements of the relationship between digital technologies and language exchange (le) practices, just before the alpconnectar project is presented and illustrated with some examples in the fourth section. the fifth section of the paper presents the design and results of an impact study conducted on the project, and then some conclusions are drawn. 2. languages and cultures in switzerland the federal republic of switzerland recognizes four national languages, as illustrated in figure 1: german (spoken by 63% of the population, either hochdeutsch or a variant of swiss-german dialects; 2015 census), french (23%), italian (8%) and romansh (or rhaeto-romanic; less than 1%). they are spoken in quite homogeneous and geographically separated regions: switzerland is indeed a multilingual country with a strong territorial structure. most swiss tend to live in their home-language region and consume media from that linguistic region. digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 797 figure 1 languages in switzerland (tschubby, 2010; cc-by-sa-3.0) what are the plurilingual practices associated with such a linguistic situation? the federal statistical office (ust, n.d.) discloses that in 2014 about 64% of the population use more than one language once a week, 38% use two languages, about 19% use three and 7% four or more (ust, 2017b). what actually challenges the territoriality principle the most is the national/internal mobility as well as the international incoming mobility. multilingualism and individual plurilingualism are therefore a “spread and scattered” reality in the country. moreover, in 2015 citizens of foreign origin with permanent residency were almost one fourth of the population (24.6%; ust, 2017c), without taking into account the high rate of incoming temporary (daily, seasonal) foreign workers. foreigners’ mother tongues become more and more similar, in terms of proportions of residents, to national languages: for example, portuguese makes out 3.7% of the population and albanian 3%, while all the “other languages” in switzerland add up to 21.5%, that is, more than the proportion of italianand romansh-speaking residents (ust, 2017a). while swiss people were never unified by one language, english turns out to be more and more consistent; 4.6% of the population considers it their main language (ust, 2017a), and about 800,000 residents use it regularly in their profession. where a second or third national language learned in school is soon forgotten or not taught (like italian in most german-speaking cantons), for better or for worse english is handy. luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 798 3. language education: curricular models and approaches to “foreign” languages in switzerland, each canton is responsible for schooling within its borders, so that there is no single unified swiss school system, but rather many different cantonal systems. in order to coordinate language teaching, which is a key issue in a multilingual country, the swiss confederation developed a policy for language integration, entrusted to the cantons for implementation. according to the national language education concept (edk, 2012), during their 11 years in compulsory education, the pupils should learn one or two other national languages and english in addition to the local language. 3.1. the 3/5 model currently 23 cantons out of 26 have agreed on an organization model defined as 3/5: the first foreign language (meant as a national language or english) begins in primary school in grade 3 and the second foreign language (national or english) in grade 5. each canton decides which language to introduce in those grades (details can be found in edk, 2016). teachers usually teach foreign languages with the support of textbooks. not all of them though are aligned with the actual needs, goals and approaches and some aim mainly at lexical and grammatical knowledge and/or simple and simulated linguistic situations. in such teaching aids, authentic communication opportunities or contacts with the linguistic culture of the target language are not explicitly foreseen. consequently, debates also address foreign language teaching approaches and methodologies as the “traditional” teaching and learning of grammar rules does not seem to match with nor cover the needs of interactive, taskor content-based and authentic language use. however, it has been noted that this assumption is made on a language policy level rather than based on empirical results (schoenenberger, 2016). 3.2. learning languages in authentic situations of course, the learning of languages occurs outside as much as inside of school. the national language policy aims to include out-of-school learning settings and exchange situations not only in (junior) high school/professional schools, but also at the primary school level. swiss compulsory schools’ task is also to contribute to the exchange, understanding and cohesion between the four linguistic and cultural regions. digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 799 the three actual regional curricula (lehrplan 21; plan d’études romand; piano di studio della scuola dell’obbligo ticinese) underline the following aspects of foreign language learning: 1. more opportunities to use and develop communicative skills and pragmatic learning strategies in authentic situations, where the linguistic input (verbal and non-verbal) and a wide range of semantic fields and language registers are essential requirements. 2. positive attitudes towards different languages, which includes the mother tongues of foreign classmates, and a reflective attitude towards the functions of languages, making comparisons and analogies between language and cultural elements to enhance functional plurilingualism. within this approach, the role of foreign language teachers grows into that of language experts who know how to guide the pupils to encounter and learn new languages and cultures, to become autonomous in their learning and gain experience with target language speakers in formal and informal settings. 3.3. language exchanges in switzerland language exchange (le) offers the opportunity to connect all these aspects, and it is a well-known practice in switzerland as well. its composite linguistic distribution makes it possible to enjoy a fully immersive le within the national borders, thus making it simpler and cheaper than in an international setting. data from the 2015/16 school year (the latest available; ch stiftung, 2016) report over 23,000 regional exchanges in the country, over 3,000 exchanges in europe and around 800 outside europe. 53% of the exchanges in switzerland were class visits of a few days, 22% included letter-based exchanges, 9% holiday camps, and 8% class exchanges (that is, when each class visits the other, with a total of two mobilities). the large majority of the exchanges (53%) took place in the german-speaking part of switzerland, 43% the french-speaking part and only 4% the italian-speaking part. in europe the countries most often chosen for the exchanges were germany, great britain, france and italy. outside of europe however the students have mostly chosen the usa, canada and india. up to now typical regional le therefore consists of a visit of a few days to another region, meeting another class and (in most cases) being hosted by their families. the preparation is usually based on sending and receiving letters or emails with pupils from another linguistic region, which makes it difficult for primary school classes to participate as their focus is mainly on oral skills. luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 800 4. language exchanges and digital technologies 4.1. technological affordances over the last three decades, digital technologies have deeply changed the way we communicate both in the professions and in everyday life. if we agree on the idea that language learning is situated in social interactions (mondada & pekarek-doehler, 2004), we can assume that the online world also offers new opportunities to le practices. from a technical point of view, online communications have allowed more frequent and smoother contacts between classes of all grades, blending both asynchronous and synchronous tools, so that if a letter exchange could take several weeks, an email can take a few hours. this provides new venues for peer and native-speaker interactions (lee, 2004). at the micro-level, the diffusion of social media and messaging apps has led to an evolution of the “pen-pal,” introducing a potentially infinite number of message formats: from email to pictures to whatsapp to blogs, and so on, including oral communication. the arrival of tablets, more flexible and cheap instruments, has expanded such opportunities (bastian & aufenanger, 2017). new trends for older students also include the use of virtual worlds and different social media apps (luo & yang, 2018). o’dowd’s (2016) review indicated that videoconferencing is emerging as an affordable and effective tool for intercultural online interactions. at the institutional level, online les are becoming a common practice. in europe, this is fostered by the etwinning program, launched and managed by the european commission in 2005 and still ongoing, which illustrates how a digital platform can also facilitate partnering with other institutions at an institutional level (gilleran & kearney, 2014; velea, 2011). unfortunately, switzerland has no access to this program. the tila project (http://www.tilaproject.eu/) also provides useful resources and instruction for teachers willing to start an online le project. 4.2. models and designs depending on the grades involved, the technologies available, goals, time, and many other factors, online le can take many forms. o’dowd (2016) distinguishes two basic models of telecollaboration: the e-tandem model, where students are paired and mostly work on language competences (a.k.a. teletandem; el-hariri, 2016; telles, 2009), and the intercultural model, where the focus is on getting in touch with a different culture through meaningful personal interactions. alpconnectar tries to blend the two approaches in a consistent program. in his review, o’dowd (2016) identified a trend, which is also strongly present in alpconnectar: the rise of cross-disciplinary approaches in which the telecollaboration digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 801 becomes a means to foster collaboration in different subject areas, moving beyond the borders of foreign language learning. the ease in establishing a communication has indeed allowed for more attention to interdisciplinary work, combining foreign language learning practices with subject-matter learning, along the lines of content and language integrated learning (clil; mehisto, marsh, & frigols, 2008). tasks design also seems to be a key feature in online les, which require different designs than face-to-face language learning (guth & helm, 2011; hauck & youngs, 2008). based on a literature review on task design in online intercultural exchange, o’dowd and ware (2009) identified three main task categories: information exchange, comparison and analysis, and collaboration. in alpconnectar, this dimension was embedded into a more holistic interdisciplinary project-based approach. 4.3. challenges and teachers’ competences the introduction of online le should also take into consideration potential obstacles. luo and yang (2018), in their review of the literature, include intercultural issues among teachers, language teaching traditions, technological problems, proficiency mismatch among the participants, uneven class sizes and, in case synchronous communication is foreseen with far away classes, time-lag issues. more relevant and challenging than the above-mentioned issues is the development of teachers’ competences for online le, which develops in three interrelated dimensions: organizational, pedagogical, and digital, and would be supported by positive attitudes and beliefs (dooly, 2008; o’dowd, 2013). vinagre (2017) suggests that teacher training through modeling and exploratory practice may help teachers acquire the required competences. this suggested an approach for the design of the initial teacher training that happens in the first project phase (see below). 4.4. impact of online le the reported benefits that online le potentially brings to language education are manifold. some studies emphasize that direct contact with native speakers improves language competences in all areas, especially in communicative uses (belz & thorne, 2006; chun, 2008). cappellini (2016) has observed that some conversational actions occur online more often than offline, thus supporting the idea that this new format might offer new affordances for language learning (cf. jianqi & yuping, 2010). many researchers view the internet as an effective tool for supporting the development of cultural awareness and of intercultural competences (o’ dowd, 2005; thorne, 2003; ware & kramsch, 2005). indeed, intercultural learning and luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 802 awareness seem to be enhanced as computer-mediated communication provides an opportunity to actually meet other cultures and develop a more dense concept of “the other” (helm, 2016; lomicka, 2006). this brings thorne (2006) to claim that telecollaboration has acquired a central role in foreign language learning seen from an intercultural perspective. finally, online les also provide opportunities for the development of digital competences, which belong together with language competences in the eu key competences for the xxi century (eu council, 2006). alpconnectar focused on all three competence domains, which were considered both in planning and design, and in project evaluation. 4.5. online le in primary education the vast majority of the impact studies available on online le refer to upper secondary and higher education. this is likely due to the fact that students in that age group already have high linguistic proficiency, better digital skills and more autonomy, which consequently makes the implementation on online le easier. nevertheless, much activity also seems to be occurring in the lower grades. the activities proposed within the etwinning project (gilleran & kearney, 2014) provide many examples. recently, thanks to videoconferencing and cost-free online calls, orality has become a part of distance exchange, thus also potentially including children from kindergarten or primary school (freixas, cortada, & bomburé, 2013). other authors argue that access to online resources also represent a new opportunity for (foreign) language learning that could also enrich or enhance le (lombardi, 2009). impact studies in online le in primary education come more in the form of case studies. they mostly suggest that online les offer real benefits in the development of intercultural understanding and motivation and has interesting implications for language learning processes (macrory, chrétien, & ortega-martín, 2012). one recent interesting study focused on the improvements in oral reading fluency achieved through peer-assisted reading via telecollaboration (lin, 2016). 5. the alpconnectar project in 2013 the impulse phase of the initiative schule ans internet (schools in the net) of the swiss leading telecommunications company swisscom was coming to an end. started in 2002, it had brought a free internet connection to over 6,000 schools and over 54,000 classes across the nation (swisscom, n.d.). nonetheless, data suggested that the availability of an internet connection only had a minor effect on teaching and learning activities. in many cases, the internet digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 803 access remained in the teachers’ room, and only in few cases was it diffused with a wi-fi or cable connection to the classrooms. during a meeting with representatives of the universities of teacher education (ute) of ticino, valais and grisons in the alps region, this issue was raised, and interpreted as an opportunity to develop innovative teaching methods for foreign language learning within a multilingual country, the original challenge developed into a joint project called alpconnectar. despite being in a multilingual country, the rather isolated situation of many small villages across the alps represents a challenge for language learning. people from small villages are usually not motivated to learn a foreign language, including national languages, as this is neither necessary nor required in their immediate environment. moreover, the cultural tensions and prejudices towards the other linguistic regions and towards neighboring countries contribute to such demotivation. finally, for those classes a traditional linguistic exchange is also difficult to organize because most of them are far from the main connection routes. could digital technologies enable the development of a learning environment that allows authentic contact with other national languages and cultures for primary school classes anywhere in the swiss alps? alpconnectar (www.alpconnectar.ch) officially started in september 2013 and launched its field experimentation with primary school classes in january 2014. the project activities spread over four school years (2013/14 to 2016/17), involving 9 primary school classes and collecting a large amount of data. 5.1. the alpconnectar models alpconnectar devised two models for transforming linguistic and cultural barries across the alps into learning opportunities, leveraging on digital technology: a bilateral model, and a trilateral model. both models involved classes in grades 4 to 6, that is, from the second to the fourth year of foreign language learning in primary schools. as depicted in figure 2, the bilateral model connects two school classes of two different linguistic regions, or of two regions in bilingual cantons, such as in valais (german and french) and in grisons (german and italian). each class experiences at the same time the learning of a second language from the peers and the teaching of its own language to peers. the trilateral model, also illustrated in figure 2, connects three classes from three different linguistic regions. in this model each class learns the foreign language from another class of peers, and teaches its first language to a third class, thus creating a sort of learning triangle. luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 804 figure 2 alpconnectar bilateral and trilateral models (elaboration on the original map by tschubby, 2010; cc-by-sa-3.0; the colors in each dot indicate the schooling language of the pupils [the largest share] and the second language they were learning in the exchange) 5.2. a lightweight digital integrated approach the integration of digital tools within a novel le setting is at the core of the project. the focus on small alpine schools made it a priority that, whatever the system, it should not cause any additional economic or organizational hurdles. alpconnectar tried to develop a system that is: · financially sustainable for all classes, even those in small villages. · easy to manage, so that it does not require frequent interventions from it staff (often not present in small schools). · easy to use for teachers, that is, similar to tools that they already use professionally or privately. · scalable, that is, it should start with a minimal investment but could be progressively expanded through the integration of additional devices or services. the alpconnectar project team chose a rather simple hardware configuration: · a wi-fi router placed in the classroom and under teacher control, thanks to an on/off button. · a set of tablets, either android or ios, ideally one for every four pupils plus one for the teacher. all tablets are connected to the class or school wi-fi and have a limited set of available apps. digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 805 · one overhead projector that can be connected to one tablet for wholeclass videoconference sessions. · a bluetooth loudspeaker. · a set of headsets (one per pupil, plus a y-connection to attach multiple headsets to a single source), to be used when pupils connect in small groups or work with audio. after the first year of experimentation, the configuration of this set was integrated with: · a better performing laptop computer for teachers (to replace the tablet), which supported higher-quality whole-class videoconferences and faster app interactions. · an external ambient microphone, with the purpose of enhancing the audio quality of videoconferences. the cost of such devices is around 3,000 chf, representing a reasonable investment for schools. moreover, this is not dedicated hardware, but rather a set of tools that could be used (and have been actually used) for other activities besides the project. tablets are also easy to move from one room to another. the reduced number of tablets, lower than 1:1, was determined both for easier class management and for allowing pupils to work collaboratively on the screen, which is, in this case, not a private space. the software configuration included a videoconferencing tool (originally vidia, a custom swisscom product, then replaced with skype for business), and the storebox cloud service. choosing swisscom apps had the advantage of keeping all traffic within switzerland, avoiding data theft risks and complying with the swiss data protection law. moreover, swisscom was the unique technical support provider, simplifying the procedures. nonetheless, it would be easy to replicate the alpconnectar model with other similar (and free) software. other simple apps were also installed on the tablets (camera, internet browser, etc.) and controlled through a screen-lock system that helped teachers to control what apps pupils were allowed to use. teachers also received supporting didactic materials, including a teachers’ handbook, a teaching guide and an illustrated set of strategies for effective communication with speakers of another language, along with some examples of learning activities with the alpconnectar system. 5.3. teaching patterns despite the simple hardware and software configuration, the alpconnectar system allows for a wide variety of teaching and learning designs. luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 806 on the one hand, the cloud system supports asynchronous multimedia file sharing, including texts, pictures, video and audio recordings. on the other, videoconferencing brings in synchronous communication, including not only words, but also pictures, gestures and any object that can fit the camera. tablets also allow to rearrange the class in different modes, blending full-class moments with group, pair or even individual activities. for example, the presentation of the pupil’s house can be achieved through a written text, but more often with a video. full-class videoconferences were used to introduce the classes to each other and for discussions, and even for remote sing-along. small group videoconference sessions were used for presentations and exchanges of recipes, riddles, and so on. other learning materials, such as discovering switzerland, a book available in all three national languages, integrated the landscape, for example by providing the source material for developing quiz questions for the other classes. in all cases, both teachers and pupils asked for a face-to-face gathering in order to finally “meet.” such get-togethers were extremely lively and effective as they were not about creating a group from scratch but living a new act in the one-year-long collaboration history.1 5.4. an example alpconnectar language exchange the alpconnectar bilateral model can be illustrated through the example of the exchange between felsberg (in the german-speaking part of the canton of grisons) and poschiavo (in the italian-speaking part of the same canton). it is one of the bilateral projects that involves two grade 5 classes. thanks to alpconnectar, the two classes can interact in a variety of modes throughout an entire school year, creating an authentic communication situation, overcoming the limitations of more conventional language lessons (cf. balboni, 2012), and introducing the perspective of multilingual didactics. during their language learning classes, pupils do not engage in “rote exercise” but meaningfully interact with native-speaker peers. the language lessons in the weekly program are not abandoned, but, thanks to alpconnectar, the teachers have the possibility to open up their teaching in a transdisciplinary fashion to new communication situations (dausend, 2014). by using a communicative, action-oriented and authentic approach, the teacher prepares the pupils for a communicative situation that sees them interacting with peers. this transforms the use of the foreign language from an academic performance to a communicative 1 the story of three classes in the alpconnectar project was told in a short tv report by the swiss national television, available in german at http://www.srf.ch/sendungen/myschool/3-sprachen3-schulklassen-1-ziel-2 digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 807 necessity. moreover, all this takes place in view of a concrete get-together that will take place at the end of the school year. the use of the foreign languages is also possible thanks to activities that pupils carry out in other subjects. in this case teachers decided to work in the curricular domain nature, humanity and society, which allows to broaden the scope of the language lesson and find linguistic inputs also outside of the class context (diadori, palermo, & troncarelli, 2015). 5.5. a year-long exchange the online exchange extends throughout an entire school year and starts with a face-to-face teacher training session. consistently with recent findings (vinagre, 2017), the training not only provides basic technical knowledge but also offers an opportunity to let teachers create bonds and promote explorative learning, suggesting to try out possible online collaboration forms among teachers. also, starting from the second project year, we promoted modeling, asking “veteran” teachers to present and discuss their experience and to interact with “novice” teachers. in its implementation, the project involves three progressive phases, as illustrated in figure 3: · phase 1, a preparatory stage that serves to establish contact between the classes. this already happens in the foreign language and lasts two months (october/november). in this case study, both classes produced a video featuring their own class and school. in a second video, the pupils introduced themselves individually and talked about what they do during their free time. in this context, the activity of “introducing oneself” (very common also in grammar-oriented textbooks) takes on a more authentic dimension as it responds to a communicative reality: it is no longer an artificial activity, but it is necessary to talk to these peers who do not know me/us. · phase 2, in which interchange activities start with small projects. this phase lasts three months (december/february, including the christmas holiday). the didactical material developed during phase 1 is used in the activities that take place in phase 2. now the pupils see each other on the screen, present to each other, ask questions and try to find answers. everyone speaks in the respective foreign language. to do this, pupils have previously prepared “standard phrases/chunks,” which make the interaction somehow schematic and predictable. this is certainly a limit on this didactic action, but it is still more authentic than repetitive exercises during more traditional classes. when the presentation is over, students move on to other activities, such as preparing typical local recipes, which they will then have to explain to the other class. in this case study, luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 808 bye exploiting the lessons of nature, humanity and society, pupils used their tablets to create a video featuring certain aspects of their village (e.g., the square, buildings, monuments, etc.) and their daily lives. they did all this using the foreign language. · phase 3 involves more complex interchange activity with more emphasis on the use of the foreign language and lasts until the end of the school year. it is about working on a more demanding project, both from the point of view of content and language. the topic chosen, great predators, actually came from the news. through a research process, felsberg’s children created posters for presenting the wolf, while poschiavo’s ones did the same about the bear. the outcome of the research project was then translated into the foreign language and presented to the peer class through a video. figure 3 phases of the didactic intervention and examples 5.6. insights from the trilateral model while the overall dynamic remained the same, the peculiar structure of the trilateral model offered the opportunity for a different activity design. a teacher had proposed to work with die schweiz in einem buch: sprachen und kantone (alli, 2006), a book published in italian, french and german. the classes were divided into groups and roles distributed so that the class hours in the mother tongue (e.g., italian in ticino) were used to prepare questions on the history, geography and languages of switzerland for the peer class. for example ticino children prepared their questions in italian, which were to be asked their german-speaking peers from castiel during the quiz sessions. digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 809 since each class had to play the role of the quiz-maker, all pupils had to deal with the (interdisciplinary) contents of the book, and therefore they also knew where to find the different topics and possible solutions in the book. in the videoconferencing sessions the questions were then asked in such a way that the respondent pupils had to answer in the foreign language, and the solutions had to be searched for in the foreign language edition of the book. points were distributed for correct answers, which was a gamified learning experience. 6. the study: assessing the impact of alpconnectar alpconnectar uses rather simple technologies in order to bring an innovative le method to primary education. but is it worth the effort? 6.1. research questions in order to evaluate the participants’ appreciation and the actual impact of digitally supported le activities on motivational, intercultural, linguistic and technological aspects a study with the following research questions was conducted: 1. what are the strengths and the weakness of alpconnectar? 2. what impact does alpconnectar have on (a) motivational aspects, (b) intercultural aspects, (c) linguistic competences, and (d) digital skills? 6.2. sample and research design overall, alpconnectar has allowed 9 primary school classes to engage in digitally-supported le from 2013 until now. table 1 shows the profiles of the 7 classes that participated in the project in the 2015/16 school year and whose data were used for the analysis presented in this paper. table 1 class profiles in the 2015/16 school year town model linguistic region grade birth year of the pupils number of pupils (n) gender female male castiel trilateral german 5-6 2003-2004 12 4 (30%) 8 (70%) felsberg bilateral german 6 2003 17 7 (41%) 10 (59%) poschiavo bilateral italian 6 2003 15 6 (40%) 9 (60%) naters bilateral german 5 2004 19 10 (53%) 9 (47%) flanthey bilateral french 5-6 2004 17 11 (65%) 6 (35%) monthey trilateral french 5 2004-2005 17 8 (47%) 9 (53%) sonvico trilateral italian 4 2006 16 9 (56%) 7 (44%) luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 810 pupils attended different grades (4th to 6th grade) and had different years of birth (from 2003 to 2006). the differences in the age of the pupils were not a problem for the exchanges: as teachers reported, at the beginning the younger children were intimidated, but after a while they started forgetting the age difference. nonetheless, as the age difference can have an impact on the language competences, it was taken into account in the analysis. also the gender of the pupils differs according to the classes: castiel, for example, has only 30% of female pupils while flanthey has 65%. the teacher sample consisted of three women and four men. they are generalist teachers (i.e., they teach all subjects in their grade). five of them have more than 10 years of professional experience, one between 5 and 10 years and one less than 5 years. the research study is based on the approach of the methodological triangulation (flick, 2004) and combines quantitative and qualitative data as well as data from both the teachers and the pupils. qualitative data about the previous alpconnectar year was collected in a focus group with the teachers at the end of the 2014/15 school year. the focus group was attended in person by the three teachers of the trilateral model and one teacher of the bilateral model of the canton of grisons, while teachers of the bilateral model of valais provided written feedback. the information collected here was used to define the dimensions and working hypotheses for the qualitative part of the study. the quantitative survey, which was characterised by a longitudinal design, involved both teachers and pupils. two data collections were conducted, the former in november 2015 and the latter in june 2016, each time with 7 teachers and 113 pupils. teachers filled in their questionnaire digitally and sent it back by email; then, they distributed the pupil questionnaires in class in paper format, collected them and a researcher compiled the data for the analysis. 6.3. instruments and methods of analysis the questionnaires used include pupils’ pre-questionnaire, pupils’ post-questionnaire and teachers’ survey. they were developed in-house and were based on the literature, taking inspiration for example from instruments developed in previous studies (abendroth-timmer, 2007; chen & starosta, 2000; schlak et al., 2002), among which there are the desi study (wagner, helmke, & rösner, 2009) and the swiss “lingualevel” instrument for the assessment of linguistic competences (lenz & studer, 2008). the questionnaires included open question items as well as 4-point likert scale ones (e.g., 1 = i completely agree, 4 = i completely disagree). different language versions of the questionnaires/surveys were used depending on the region. the german versions, however, were the original digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 811 ones, and they were translated to create the other versions. the original german versions are included in appendices a, b and c. the dimensions covered in the questionnaire for students are: personal information, family information (origin and socioeconomic status), school subjects and languages they like, foreign language learning (perceived usefulness, competence level, etc.), cultural awareness (knowledge of the culture of the other language regions), technologies (level of competence) and the perception of the project in general. teachers were surveyed with respect to their expectations and their attitudes towards the project. teachers also indicated their pupils’ language skills in the foreign language (last evaluation in the foreign language in the previous year, level of skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing), interest in languages as a whole, participation in foreign language lessons and some transversal skills, like teamwork or communication. the quantitative data were analyzed following two steps. first, descriptive statistics of the motivational, intercultural, linguistic and technological aspects have been generated. second, a logistic regression has been conducted. to estimate the coefficient of determination that indicated the amount of explained variance, naglekerke’s r squared has been used. naglekerke’s r squared has been chosen since this measure adjusts the scale of the statistic to cover the full range from 0 to 1 and therefore enables a better interpretation of the results (backhaus, erichson, plinke, & weiber, 2008). qualitative data were analyzed by clustering and reordering clusters on a swot analysis framework. 6.4. results the following subsections present first the results obtained in the focus group meeting with the teachers on the 23rd of june 2015, and second the results obtained from the analysis of the questionnaires collected during the 2015/16 school year. quantitative results are presented following the research questions, namely the impact on (a) motivational aspects, (b) intercultural aspects, (c) linguistic aspects, and (d) technological aspects. 6.4.1. what teachers say the first insights on the overall advantages and disadvantages of alpconnectar (our first research question) come from teachers, who identified the following strengths of alpconnectar: luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 812 1. enrichment of foreign language lessons thanks to the context of authentic communication. 2. development of the ability to communicate, for example when standing in front of the camera. 3. development of technical expertise in the use of digital devices. 4. improvement of group work abilities. 5. improvement of linguistic competences. 6. awareness of personal linguistic limits. 7. great increase of foreign language learning motivation. 8. the ability to identify learning objectives (e.g., expansion of vocabulary) and improve learning strategies. teachers also noticed that alpconnectar can be complementary to the “usual” textbooks, rather than an alternative; for example, the work on the book supports the acquisition of vocabulary useful for the exchange activities. in most cases, however, the textbook was somewhat set aside halfway through the year, but this was not felt as a problem: it was offset by the fact that the pupils acquired in-depth skills in other areas of language learning such as oral skills. reported project weaknesses were mainly related to technological issues. for example, teachers claimed, in relation to the quality of videoconferencing, that they “need better working conditions – even from the point of view of the pupils, who are likely to lose motivation if the quality is too low.” this point has in fact several implications, including (a) the need for a larger bandwidth, (b) the need to check and adapt all aspects (devices, connections, etc.) at the beginning of the project before starting the activities, and (c) the need for quick technical support when specific problems arise. an issue for teachers was also evaluation, as usual assessments (mainly written tests) did not seem adequate to actually assess what pupils learned from the online le. this remained indeed an open issue. finally, teachers agreed that alpconnectar requires flexible time management in order to realize the exchanges. this was not problematic in the classes involved but could be an issue if the schools have stricter timetables (like in secondary schools). in the following sections, we present quantitative data which address our second research question, namely: what impact does alpconnectar have on (a) motivational aspects, (b) intercultural aspects, (c) linguistic competences, and (d) digital skills? 6.4.2. motivational aspects pupils’ motivation to learn the foreign language has been measured before starting the project (t1) and after (t2). figure 4 shows that the variation in motivation digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 813 depends on the classes analyzed. we note for example that in sonvico and monthey students were in general more likely to learn a foreign language (french or german respectively) than in castiel (where they learned italian). in castiel not only was the motivation to learn lower, but it also dropped during the school year. in monthey on the contrary, it increased during the school year, while there were no major changes in sonvico. figure 4 results of the trilateral model: i am motivated to learn a foreign language if we take a look at the bilateral model, we can see that also in this case there were differences among the classes. pupils in poschiavo were the most motivated, followed by felsberg and flanthey, the least motivated being those in naters. against our expectations, the motivation to learn a second language decreased during the school year, except in poschiavo, where it increased, as shown in figure 5. figure 5 results of the bilateral model: i am motivated to learn a foreign language in order to better understand which pupils most appreciate the second language, a logistic regression has been calculated with the dependent variable of 16,7% 9,1% 50,0% 23,5% 62,5% 62,5% 18,2% 43,8% 58,8% 31,3% 31,3% 50,0% 27,3% 6,3% 11,8% 6,3% 33,3% 45,5% 5,9% 6,3% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% cas tiel t2 cas tiel t1 monthey t2 monthey t1 sonvico t2 sonvico t1 1= i completely ag ree 2= i rather agree 3= i rather disag ree 4= i completely disagree 5,6% 33,3% 18,8% 20,0% 6,3% 5,9% 29,4% 50,0% 44,4% 68,8% 53,3% 18,8% 27,8% 47,1% 29,4% 38,9% 22,2% 12,5% 20,0% 37,5% 38,9% 29,4% 23,5% 5,6% 6,7% 37,5% 33,3% 17,6% 17,6% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% felsberg t2 felsberg t1 poschiavo t2 poschiavo t1 naters t2 naters t1 flanthey t2 flanthey t1 1= i comple tely agree 2= i rather agree 3= i rather disagree 4= i completely disagree luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 814 “how much do you like the foreign language” and independent variables of gender, socioeconomic status of the family (measured based on the isei index), region of class (latin, i.e., french or italian; or german switzerland), family language background (multilingual or monolingual) and prolonged stay in the foreign language region (it was assumed that if the pupil has already spent a period in that region, s/he might be more interested in learning the language). the results presented in table 2 indicate that girls, as well as pupils coming from italian-speaking or french-speaking regions of switzerland, pupils with multilingual backgrounds and those who had already spent a prolonged stay in the second language region were significantly more likely to enjoy learning the foreign language. the model explains 26.2% of the variance. table 2 how much do you like the foreign language? (nagelkerke’s r squared = .262) variable exp (b) sig. gender (girl vs. boy) socioeconomic status of the family (high vs. low) region of class (latin switzerland vs. german switzerland) family language background (multilingual vs. monolingual) prolonged stay in the second language region (yes vs. no) 2.431 2.127 2.530 2.708 4.458 .048* .104 .046* .047* .005* note. * p < .05; exp (b) is an odds ratio that expresses the likelihood of an event occurring relative to the likelihood of an event not occurring. in this case girls are for example 2.431 times more likely to like a foreign language than boys. to the open question “if you compare your situation at the beginning of the school year with the situation at the end of the school year, what has changed?” the majority of the pupils affirmed to be more motivated to learn the foreign language compared to the beginning of the school year, stating for example that “a project like alpconnectar stimulates learning the german language” (boy in poschiavo) or “yes, i think it was a cool change. it makes much more fun to learn” (boy in felsberg). a girl in flanthey even wrote: “i started to love german,” and a boy in sonvico: “they motivated me and made me understand that french is the most beautiful language there is!” nonetheless, as the quantitative data show, some pupils were less motivated after the project. this was justified by a general negative attitude towards foreign languages: “i do not need to learn other languages” (boy in castiel), “i do not like other languages, i prefer to speak german" (girl in naters); or by the complexity of the foreign language itself: “i do not like french, is it too difficult and complicated” (girl in naters). in the three german-speaking classes, several pupils indicated that they prefer english compared to a national language (french or italian). interestingly, this preference was not found in the italian-speaking and french-speaking classes. digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 815 6.4.3. intercultural aspects a second objective of the project was to let pupils meet another culture and linguistic region and raise awareness of intercultural issues. figure 6 shows the results related to the question: “it is enough to know only my own language.” it should be noticed that the results as well vary depending on the class analyzed. in monthey, the pupils disagreed with this statement, whereas there was more consensus in sonvico and in castiel. it should be mentioned that the class in monthey had a strong presence of children from migrant families. in the bilateral model, whose results are shown in figure 7, felsberg’s pupils disagreed more strongly with the statement, followed by poschiavo and later by the two valais classes. figure 6 results of the trilateral model: it is enough to know only their own language figure 7 results of the bilateral model: it is enough to know only their own language to see if the attitude toward the second language region changed positively after experiencing alpconnectar activities and to trace a profile of who 16,7% 25,0% 12,5% 25,0% 25,0% 12,5% 6,3% 41,7% 33,3% 6,3% 5,9% 12,5% 37,5% 16,7% 16,7% 93,8% 94,1% 62,5% 56,3% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% castiel t2 castiel t1 monthey t2 monthey t1 sonvico t2 sonvico t1 1= i completely agree 2= i rather agree 3= i rather disagree 4= i completely disa gree 6,3% 6,7% 15,8% 5,9% 11,8% 5,6% 13,3% 12,5% 26,3% 11,8% 17,6% 66,7% 52,9% 37,5% 20,0% 62,5% 31,6% 29,4% 41,2% 27,8% 47,1% 56,3% 60,0% 25,0% 26,3% 52,9% 29,4% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% felsberg t2 felsberg t1 poschiavo t2 poschiavo t1 naters t2 naters t1 fla nthey t2 fla nthey t1 1= i completely ag ree 2= i rather agree 3= i ra ther disag ree 4= i completely disa gree luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 816 has changed its attitude, a logistic regression with the dependent variable of “has your attitude towards the foreign language region changed positively?” was conducted. the results, which are included in table 3, show that pupils from the french-speaking and italian-speaking regions of switzerland have mainly positively changed their attitudes. the model explains 13.1% of the variance. table 3 has your attitude towards the foreign language region changed positively? (nagelkerke’s r squared= .131) variable exp (b) sig. gender (girl vs. boy) socioeconomic status of the family (high vs. low) region of class (latin switzerland vs. german switzerland) family language background (multilingual vs. monolingual) prolonged stay in the second language region (yes vs. no) 1.063 2.084 3.533 .604 1.154 .887 .096 .006* .285 .767 note. * p < .05; exp (b) is an odds ratio that expresses the likelihood of an event occurring relative to the likelihood of an event not occurring. if we analyze the answers to the open question, we can see that pupils mainly appreciated the opportunity to make new friends. in some cases these friendships continued also outside of school (they exchanged the telephone numbers and remained in contact). thanks to the exchanges with the other classes, the pupils also discovered new cultures and traditions (e.g., typical recipes, school structures, local animals, etc.). however, also in this case some students said that their knowledge about the partner region had not changed and their previous impressions had confirmed by the project: “i know nothing new. it is as i expected” (boy in castiel), “it is just like i have imagined” (girl in flanthey). 6.4.4. linguistics competences one central objective of the project was to improve the pupils’ language skills. a 10item self-evaluation scale that addressed both oral and written comprehension and production was used. children were asked to answer whether they had improved or not in ten different aspects (e.g., “i can understand simple questions that concern me directly,” “i understand if someone asks me for my name or address”). figure 8 shows that only 6.3% of the pupils in sonvico and 8.3% in castiel had the impression that their language skills had not improved, while the majority of the pupils affirmed that their language skills had indeed improved. in the classes of the bilateral model, whose results are presented in figure 9, we find a negative result in poschiavo, where more than half of the pupils responded that they had not improved, while the other three classes had the impression they had improved. digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 817 figure 8 results of the trilateral model: did your language skills improve during the project? figure 9 results of the bilateral model: did your language skills improve during the project? in general, even if the study design does not allow to make the claim that the students learned during the year only as a result of the alpconnectar project (as other language learning activities were also going on at the same time), the majority of the pupils reported that they had made progress during the year. reported learning effects relate to vocabulary and to the ability to communicate. 8,3% 37,5% 6,3% 58,3% 62,5% 25,0% 25,0% 62,5% 8,3% 6,3% 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% cas tiel t2 monthey t2 sonvico t2 1= i have greatly improved 2= i have improved 3= i have improved a little 4= i have not improved 27,8% 5,6% 5,9% 38,9% 61,1% 58,8% 33,3% 43,8% 27,8% 35,3% 56,3% 5,6% 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% felsberg t2 poschiavo t2 naters t2 flanthey t2 1= i have greatly improved 2= i have improved 3= i have improved a little 4= i have not improved luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 818 they also stated that they had developed strategies to communicate with their peers, despite the limited linguistic resources, as one girl in monthey wrote: “i have learned that even if i make mistakes, i should not stop. of course it’s a pleasure to talk with them;” a girl from sonvico echoed: “i noticed that when i started i did not know how to speak french, but now i can speak much better.” data on the pupils’ self-perception was triangulated with the teachers’ assessment of their pupils’ skills. both at the beginning of the project and at its end, teachers were asked to report the last evaluation by a foreign language test and to indicate their assessment of the pupils’ level of skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing. teachers’ data provided a positive view on pupils’ learning, indicating a general improvement over the course of the year. a logistic regression was also calculated to analyze to whom the teachers attribute the best skills. table 4 shows that teachers attributed the best language skills to children from families with a higher socioeconomic status. this is a well-known effect in the field of education (see for example felouzis & charmillot, 2017). the model explains 23.5% of the variance. table 4 to whom are better language skills attributed? (nagelkerke’s r squared= .235) variable exp (b) sig. gender (girl vs. boy) socioeconomic status of the family (high vs. low) region of class (latin switzerland vs. german switzerland) family language background (multilingual vs. monolingual) prolonged stay in the second language region (yes vs. no) .796 8.135 1.185 .689 .665 .640 .000* .740 .467 .446 note. * p < .05; exp (b) is an odds ratio that expresses the likelihood of an event occurring relative to the likelihood of an event not occurring. 6.4.5. digital skills using tablets and online communications pupils should also have the chance to enhance their digital skills. figure 10 shows that all pupils in the trilateral model thought they had made some improvements in the use of technologies; on the other hand, figure 11 presents the same results for the bilateral model, where we see some pupils affirming that they had not improved, especially in poschiavo and naters. according to what they reported in the questionnaires, during the project pupils felt, for example, to have learned how to use computers and tablets, to have improved their internet-research strategies, and learned how to create presentations and videos. in addition, some adopted a more critical approach toward the internet. the ones who had not improved affirmed that they had already known how to use digital technologies. digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 819 figure 10 results of the trilateral model: did your digital skills improve during the project? figure 11 results of the bilateral model: did your digital skills improve during the project? 6.5. summary and discussion this paper has presented the alpconnectar project as an example of digitally supported le for primary schools and had a twofold aim. first, we wanted to explore its strengths and weaknesses, and second, to measure what impact alpconnectar had on motivational, intercultural, linguistic and digital literacy aspects. 16,7% 81,3% 43,8% 8,3% 18,7% 50,0% 75,0% 6,2% 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% cas tiel t2 monthey t2 sonvico t2 1= i have greatly improved 2= i have improved 3= i have improved a little 4= i have not improved 22,2% 11,1% 70,6% 44,4% 6,3% 27,8% 29,4% 27,8% 31,3% 44,4% 5,6% 62,5% 16,7% 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% felsberg t2 poschiavo t2 naters t2 flanthey t2 1= i have grea tly improved 2= i have improved 3= i have im proved a little 4= i have not improved luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 820 we can affirm that alpconnectar was well received by teachers: they emphasized its impact in motivating pupils to learn the foreign language and in enriching the language class through opportunities of authentic communication. another positive point is that alpconnectar allowed pupils to improve both their technological skills and transversal skills such as group work. only technology-related issues were seen sometimes as problematic (e.g., too slow or unstable internet-connection). these issues were largely solved during the second year of experimentation, not reported in this paper. the pupils liked the project as well, indicating how it allowed them not only to improve their language skills but also to get to know other regions of switzerland and to make new friends. their enthusiasm throughout all project activities confirmed their positive experience. on the other hand, the quantitative data analyzed here provided a more nuanced picture, in some respects even in contradiction to the statements gathered during the focus groups or in open items. first of all, there seemed to be a significant variation across classes from the different linguistic regions, for example, concerning the motivation to study the foreign language: pupils in the french-speaking and italian-speaking regions of switzerland seemed more motivated than those in the german-speaking regions, where motivation even decreased during the project. moreover, the results indicated that girls, pupils with multilingual background and those who had already had a prolonged stay in the foreign language region were more likely to enjoy learning a foreign language. a similar picture was also found in relation to intercultural aspects: pupils from the italian-speaking and french-speaking regions had positively changed their attitude towards the foreign language region, and they more consistently declared that “it is not enough to know how to speak only one language.” these first two results make us ponder on the status of national foreign languages in the various language regions in switzerland and seem to suggest that speakers of linguistic minorities (like french and italian) are more motivated to learn the other languages and are more open to the exchange. on a general level, these results suggest that (a) the actual impact of (digital) le heavily depend on the perceived status and desirability of foreign language learning in the reference community, and that (b) micro-variables related to class composition and possibly teaching style play a major role. as for language skills, the results indicated that in general these had improved, even if there were differences between the classes, especially considering the results of poschiavo, which stood out in a negative way, as more than half of the pupils said that they had not improved. the results obtained from the teachers showed how they tend to attribute better language skills to students coming from families with a higher socioeconomic status. while this result is not surprising, it clearly indicates that the introduction of digital technologies in language learning does not automatically bring a democratization of learning. digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 821 finally, the results suggested that in general the project had brought about an improvement of digital skills. also in this case, however, we found classes with small perceived improvement, like poschiavo, and others with greater improvement. this suggests that the availability and use of digital devices is not enough to influence the development of digital self-efficacy and that local variables (e.g., the in-class teacher’s procedures or pupils’ attitude in general) are also important. the results presented in this paper were based on a limited number of classes which were not randomly selected and do not therefore support any generalization. further data should be collected in the future years of the project to provide a stronger analysis base and to allow a better understanding of the impact of alpconnectar. nonetheless, evidence so far suggests that alpconnectar provides an interesting model of engaging primary school classes in digitally-supported les: they allow to increase the motivation to learn a foreign language, to improve the language and digital skills and to encounter the various regions and cultures of switzerland. 7. conclusions alpconnectar can be considered a positive case where the two approaches described by o’dowd (2016) are blended, namely the e-tandem model to foster language competences and the intercultural model, and where the focus is on getting in touch with a different culture. furthermore, with the alpconnectar activities teachers and pupils moved beyond the borders of foreign language learning embracing a cross-disciplinary approaches along the lines of clil (mehisto, marsh, & frigols, 2008). on the other hand, our data clearly dispels any temptation of a grand narrative. alpconnectar, and possibly online le in general, is no single silver bullet for language and intercultural education. the alpconnectar experience emphasizes the importance of the contextual elements for a successful le, which emerge in the form of important differences across school classes. differently from most other studies referenced in this paper, our data suggest that the introduction of technology-enhanced learning methodologies in language learning does not overcome, but rather depends heavily on, a variety of contextual elements, including the socio-economic context in which the school is located, the cultural environment and attitude towards foreign languages, the socio-economic status of the family, previous experiences in a different linguistic region, and also the teacher. from this perspective, digital technologies should be understood as a single positive element in a more complex environment, and no ground-breaking improvement can be expected through the use of technologies alone (this is also supported by the findings of oecd, 2015). luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 822 acknowledgments the alpconnectar project was sponsored by the universities of teacher education of ticino, valais and graubünden, and by swisscom. the authors wish to thank vincenzo todisco, marco trezzini and leci flepp of the pädagogische hochschule graubünden, edmund steiner and alain metry of the haute école pedagogique valais, and michael inalbon of swisscom for their 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(2009). deutsch englisch schülerleistungen international. dokumentation der erhebungsinstrumente für schülerinnen und schüler, eltern und lehrkräfte. frankfurt am main: gfpf dipf. ware, p. d., & kramsch, c. (2005). toward an intercultural stance: teaching german and english through telecollaboration. modern language journal, 89, 190-205. digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 827 appendix a pupils’ pre-questionnaire (german version) liebe schülerin, lieber schüler · wie gut magst du die sprachenfächer und andere fächer? · wie denkst du über die fremdsprache „italienisch“? · wie schätzest du deine italienisch-kenntnisse ein? · welche sprache(n) sprichst du zu hause? über diese und andere fragen möchten wir mehr von dir erfahren. dieser fragebogen ist keine prüfung. beim antworten kannst du also nichts falsch machen. hauptsache, du antwortest ehrlich und spontan. der fragebogen ist anonym. das heisst, niemand kann hinterher wissen, welche antworten von dir und den anderen klassenkameraden und -kameradinnen stammen. wenn dir noch etwas unklar ist, dann frage bitte noch einmal nach. wenn alles klar ist, beginne bitte mit der beantwortung. deine antworten sind uns wichtig. vielen dank für deine mitarbeit. die forschungsgruppe des projekts alpconnectar hinweise 1. bitte beantworte jede frage (ankreuzen oder etwas schreiben). 2. manche aussagen sind ähnlich. das ist bei befragungen oft so. 3. für das ausfüllen des fragebogens benötigst du ca. 25 minuten. los geht’s! luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 828 digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 829 luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 830 d zum italienisch d1 wenn du dir deine ansichten über italienisch überlegst: wie sehr stimmst du den folgenden aussagen zu? (bitte kreuze in jeder zeile jeweils nur ein kästchen an.) stimme völlig zu stimme eher zu stimme eher nicht zu stimme überhau pt nicht zu d1a es reicht, wenn man seine eigene sprache sprechen kann o o o o d1b italienisch werde ich auch nach meiner schulzeit oft brauchen. o o o o d1c wenn man die grammatik beherrscht, kann man sich problemlos verständigen o o o o d1e ich habe spass an der sprache italienisch. o o o o d1f die wichtigste funktion von sprache ist die verständigung o o o o d1g es reicht, wenn man seine eigene sprache sprechen kann o o o o d2 wenn du dir deine ansichten über italienisch überlegst: wie sehr stimmst du den folgenden aussagen zu? (bitte kreuze in jeder zeile jeweils nur ein kästchen an.) stimme völlig zu stimme eher zu stimme eher nicht zu stimme überhau pt nicht zu d2a ich lerne italienisch, weil ich dadurch später bessere chancen im beruf/studium habe. / o o o o d2b ich lerne italienisch, weil ich diese sprache brauche, um im urlaub oder mit bekannten und freunden zu sprechen. o o o o d2c ich lerne italienisch, weil ich eine gute note bekommen will. o o o o d2d ich lerne italienisch, weil mir das italienisch-lernen freude bereitet. o o o o d2e ich lerne italienisch, weil ich möchte, dass mein lehrperson mit mir zufrieden ist o o o o d2f ich habe angst ausgelacht zu werden, wenn ich italienisch rede. o o o o d2g ich habe angst, fehler zu machen, wenn ich italienisch rede. o o o o d2h ich habe keine schwierigkeiten, italienisch zu verstehen. o o o o d2i ich denke oft darüber nach, wie ich besser italienisch lernen kann. o o o o digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 831 luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 832 digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 833 f – ich und «italienisch» (fortsetzung) f3 bitte markiere bei jeder aussage das antwortfeld, das deine einschätzung am besten verdeutlicht. (bitte kreuze in jeder zeile jeweils nur ein kästchen an.) das kann ich sehr gut. das kann ich gut. das kann ich einigermassen. das kann ich gar nicht. f3a ich kann einfache fragen verstehen, die mich direkt betreffen; ich verstehe z.b., wenn mich jemand nach dem namen oder der adresse fragt. o o o o f3b ich kann z.b. in einem geschäft verstehen, was etwas kostet, wenn sich der verkäufer darum bemüht, dass ich ihn verstehe. o o o o f3c ich kann einige ganz alltägliche esswaren und getränke nennen, um sie z.b. zu kaufen oder zu bestellen. o o o o f3d ich kann die namen der wichtigsten körperteile sagen (z.b. um anderen mitzuteilen, wo mir etwas weh tut). o o o o f3e ich kann in gesprächen im alltag einfache zahlen gebrauchen und verstehen. o o o o f3f ich kann den wochentag, das datum und die uhrzeit sagen und ich kann auch jemanden nach tag, datum und uhrzeit fragen. o o o o f3g ich kann wörter und ausdrücke auf schildern verstehen, denen man im alltag oft begegnet (z.b. "bahnhof", "ausgang", o o o o f3h ich kann ein einfaches kochrezept befolgen, besonders, wenn es zu den wichtigsten schritten zeichnungen gibt. o o o o f3i ich kann in kurzen, einfachen sätzen schreiben, wer ich bin und wo ich wohne. o o o o f3j ich kann für freunde eine kurze notiz (oder z.b. eine sms) schreiben, um sie zu informieren oder ihnen ein frage zu stellen. o o o o f4 nachfolgend geht es um aktivitäten im fremdsprachenunterricht. gib bitte an, wie sehr du die einzelne aktivität magst. (bitte kreuze in jeder zeile jeweils nur ein kästchen an. falls du nicht weisst, was damit gemeint ist, kreuze "weiss nicht / kenne das nicht" an.) das mag ich besonde rs. das mag ich mehrheitlich. das mag ich wenig. ich weiss nicht. / ich kenne das nicht f4a einen hörtext von der kassette anhören o o o o f4b mitschülern beim vorlesen der hausaufgaben oder anderen texten zuhören o o o o f4c fremdsprachige lieder anhören o o o o f4d rollenspiele oder kleine szenen spielen o o o o f4e etwas in italienisch vortragen o o o o f4f die aussprache üben o o o o f4g auf fragen des/der lehrer/in antworten o o o o f4h geschichten, gedicht, witze lesen o o o o luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 834 digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 835 appendix b pupils’ post-questionnaire (german version) liebe schülerin, lieber schüler du hast zu beginn des schuljahres bereits einmal einen fragebogen ausgefüllt. nun möchten wir dir gegen ende dieses schuljahres noch einmal verschiedene fragen stellen, wie etwa · hat sich deine meinung zur fremdsprache „italienisch“ im verlaufe des projektes alpconnectar verändert? · was hast du neues über die region deiner austauschklasse gelernt? über diese und andere fragen möchten wir mehr von dir erfahren. dieser fragebogen ist keine prüfung. beim antworten kannst du also nichts falsch machen. hauptsache, du antwortest ehrlich und spontan. der fragebogen ist anonym. das heisst, niemand kann hinterher wissen, welche antworten von dir und den anderen klassenkameraden und -kameradinnen stammen. wenn dir noch etwas unklar ist, dann frage bitte noch einmal nach. wenn alles klar ist, beginne bitte mit der beantwortung. deine antworten sind uns wichtig. vielen dank für deine mitarbeit. die forschungsgruppe des projekts alpconnectar hinweise 4. bitte beantworte jede frage (ankreuzen oder etwas schreiben). 5. manche aussagen sind ähnlich. das ist bei befragungen oft so. 6. für das ausfüllen des fragebogens benötigst du ca. 20 minuten. ... und los geht’s! luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 836 a – zu deiner person b – über sprachen c zum italienisch a1 1. persönlicher code: bitte trage den code ein, den du von der lehrperson erhalten hast. c2 wie magst du die folgenden sprachen? sehr gut gut ein bisschen (es geht so) wenig gar nicht c2a deutsch o o o o ¡ c2b französisch o o o o ¡ c2c italienisch o o o o ¡ c2d rätoromanisch o o o o ¡ c2e englisch o o o o ¡ c2f andere, nämlich ..................................... o o o o ¡ d1 wenn du dir deine ansichten über italienisch überlegst: wie sehr stimmst du den folgenden aussagen zu? (bitte kreuze in jeder zeile jeweils nur ein kästchen an.) stimme völlig zu stimme eher zu stimme eher nicht zu stimme überhau pt nicht zu d1a es reicht, wenn man seine eigene sprache sprechen kann. o o o o d1b italienisch werde ich auch nach meiner schulzeit oft brauchen. o o o o d1c wenn man die grammatik beherrscht, kann man sich problemlos verständigen. o o o o d1e ich habe spass an der sprache italienisch. o o o o d1f die wichtigste funktion von sprache ist die verständigung o o o o d2a ich lerne italienisch, weil ich dadurch später bessere chancen im beruf/studium habe. o o o o d2b ich lerne italienisch, weil ich diese sprache brauche, um im urlaub oder mit bekannten und freunden zu sprechen. o o o o d2c ich lerne italienisch, weil ich eine gute note bekommen will. o o o o d2d ich lerne italienisch, weil mir das italienisch-lernen freude bereitet. o o o o digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 837 luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 838 e – ich und «italienisch» f – ich und meine fortschritte in «italienisch» f1 1 wenn du dir deine ansichten über italienisch überlegst: wie sehr stimmst du den folgenden aussagen zu? (bitte kreuze in jeder zeile jeweils nur ein kästchen an.) stimme völlig zu stimme eher zu stimme eher nicht zu stimme überhaupt nicht zu f1a im fach italienisch bin ich ein hoffnungsloser fall o o o o f1b im fach italienisch lerne ich schnell o o o o f1c im fach italienisch bekomme ich gute noten o o o o f1d in italienisch-prüfungen schneide ich gut ab o o o o f1e wenn ich mir in italienisch mühe gebe, dann kann ich es auch o o o o f1f mich mit italienisch zu beschäftigen, ist für mich das widerlichste, was es gibt o o o o f1g ich bin in italienisch ganz gut o o o o f1h italienisch macht mir spass o o o o f3 wenn du dir deine entwicklung in den italienischkenntnissen überlegst: bitte markiere bei jeder aussage das antwortfeld, das deine einschätzung am besten verdeutlicht. (bitte kreuze in jeder zeile jeweils nur ein kästchen an.) hier habe ich mich sehr stark verbessert. hier habe ich mich um einiges verbessert. hier habe ich mich ein wenig verbessert. hier habe ich mich gar nicht verbessert. f3a ich kann einfache fragen verstehen, die mich direkt betreffen; ich verstehe z.b., wenn mich jemand nach dem namen oder der adresse fragt. o o o o f3b ich kann z.b. in einem geschäft verstehen, was etwas kostet, wenn sich der verkäufer darum bemüht, dass ich ihn verstehe. o o o o f3c ich kann einige ganz alltägliche esswaren und getränke nennen, um sie z.b. zu kaufen oder zu bestellen. o o o o f3d ich kann die namen der wichtigsten körperteile sagen (z.b. um anderen mitzuteilen, wo mir etwas weh tut). o o o o f3e ich kann in gesprächen im alltag einfache zahlen gebrauchen und verstehen. o o o o f3f ich kann den wochentag, das datum und die uhrzeit sagen und ich kann auch jemanden nach tag, datum und uhrzeit fragen. o o o o f3g ich kann wörter und ausdrücke auf schildern verstehen, denen man im alltag oft begegnet (z.b. "bahnhof", "ausgang". o o o o digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 839 g – ich und ict f3 wenn du dir deine entwicklung in den italienischkenntnissen überlegst: bitte markiere bei jeder aussage das antwortfeld, das deine einschätzung am besten verdeutlicht. (bitte kreuze in jeder zeile jeweils nur ein kästchen an.) hier habe ich mich sehr stark verbessert. hier habe ich mich um einiges verbessert. hier habe ich mich ein wenig verbessert. hier habe ich mich gar nicht verbessert. f3h ich kann ein einfaches kochrezept befolgen, besonders, wenn es zu den wichtigsten schritten zeichnungen gibt. o o o o f3i ich kann in kurzen, einfachen sätzen schreiben, wer ich bin und wo ich wohne. o o o o f3j ich kann für freunde eine kurze notiz (oder z.b. eine sms) schreiben, um sie zu informieren oder ihnen ein frage zu stellen. o o o o g1 1 wenn du dir deine entwicklung in den ict-kenntnissen überlegst: bitte markiere bei jeder aussage das antwortfeld, das deine einschätzung am besten verdeutlicht. (bitte kreuze in jeder zeile jeweils nur ein kästchen an.) hier habe ich mich sehr stark verbessert. hier habe ich mich um einiges verbessert. hier habe ich mich ein wenig verbessert. hier habe ich mich gar nicht verbessert. g1a a e-mail in der schule benutzen. o o o o g1b b für schulaufgaben im internet surfen und recherchieren. o o o o g1c c von der website/internetseite der schule etwas herunterladen bzw. hinaufladen oder die website/ internetseite durchsuchen (z.b. intranet). o o o o g1d d üben, z.b. für fremdsprachen (z.b. englisch, italienisch) oder mathematik. o o o o g1e e deine hausaufgaben auf einem schulcomputer machen o o o o g1f f teilnahme an sozialen netzwerken (z.b. facebook, myspace) bzw. chatten im internet. o o o o g1g g zum vergnügen im internet surfen (wie etwa zum videoschauen, z.b. auf youtube). o o o o luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 840 digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 841 appendix c teachers’ survey (german version) brig/chur/locarno, oktober 2015 befragung lehrpersonen die vorliegende befragung soll · das praekonzept der lehrperson im projekt acs1+ (alpconnectar scola) erfassen (teil i), · als testmodell der lehrpersonenbefragung für die weiteren erprobungen (acs2) dienen – darum sind einige fragen u.u. sehr selbstverständlich, da die meisten lehrkräften das projekt schon durchgeführt haben und kennen · eine einschätzung der schülerinnensprachkompetenzen ermöglichen (teil ii, tabelle excel) eine zweite (eventuell eine dritte – wir werden das mit euch lehrpersonen noch diskutieren) befragung wird am ende von acs1+ (bzw. gegen projektmitte) folgen. vielen dank für die mitarbeit. luca botturi, daniela kappler, lucio negrini 842 befragung lehrperson allgemeine fragen l1 1. schule: ________________________________ l2 2. seit wann als lehrperson tätig (insgesamt)? ¨ seit einem jahr ¨ weniger als 5 jahre ¨ zwischen 5 und 10 jahre ¨ mehr als 10 jahren a3 3. seit wann als lehrperson an der jetzigen schule? ¨ seit einem jahr ¨ weniger als 5 jahre ¨ zwischen 5 und 10 jahre ¨ mehr als 10 jahren a4 4. schulgrösse ¨ 20 – 50 schülerinnen ¨ 51 – 150 schülerinnen ¨ mehr als 150 schülerinnen a5 5. schulgemeinde: einwohner ¨ weniger als 100 ¨ 100 – 500 ¨ 500 – 1000 ¨ mehr als 1000 a6 6. gibt es an der schule eine schulinterne kompetente itperson (z.b. lehrperson)? (kompetent i.s.,, dass er/sie „gewöhnliche“ probleme in der it-technik erkennen und beheben kann) ¨ ja ¨ nein technische ebene a7 7. wie gut fühlen sie sich als lp selber im umgang mit den technischen medien im projekt vorbereitet? ¨ sehr gut ¨ gut ¨ es geht ¨ nicht besonders ¨ sehr schlecht a8 8. wie beurteilen sie den aufwand, um die technik in den griff zu bekommen? ¨ sehr geringer aufwand ¨ wenig aufwand ¨ es geht ¨ ziemlicher aufwand ¨ sehr viel aufwand a9 9. wo sehen sie handlungsbedarf in der technischen ausrüstung? ¨ telekonferenz (vidia) ¨ plattform für dokumentenaustausch (storebox) ¨ videotools ¨ digitale arbeitsgeräte für die schülerinnen ¨ audiotools ¨ weiteres:_______________________ digitally-supported language exchanges in primary school: the alpconnectar project 843 haltungen/einstellungen zum projekt ac im allgemeinen finde ich, dass das projekt ac, von den lernvoraussetzungen im fremdsprachenbereich her… ¨ … die einzige alternative zum jetzigen l2-unterricht darstellt ¨ … eine voreilhafte ergänzung zum l2unterricht darstellt ¨ … sich zuerst noch bewähren muss ¨ eigene zusätzliche anmerkungen: _________________________________ ____________________________________ zu beginn dieses projekts, ist meine motivation mitzumachen … ¨ … sehr gross ¨ … gross ¨ … mittel ¨ … gering ¨ … sehr gering ich erwarte, dass meine schülerinnen durch das austauschprojekt ihre formale fremdsprachenkompetenzen (lesen, hören, reden, schreiben) … ¨ … sehr stark verbessern ¨ … etwas verbessern ¨ … zumindest auf ihrem bisherig erworbenem niveau bleiben ¨ … leicht verschlechtern ¨ … sehr stark verschlechtern ich erwarte, dass die schülerinnen durch den sprachaustausch lernen, eine situationsangemessene kommunikative kompetenz aufzubauen. (passende antwort ankreuzen, bitte) ¨ stimme zu ¨ verändert sich kaum ¨ stimme nicht zu ich erwarte, dass die attraktivität des fremdsprachenunterrichts für die schülerinnen durch das austauschprojekt … ¨ … zunimmt ¨ … etwa gleich bleibt ¨ … abnimmt ich denke, dass ich in diesem projekt die fremdsprache immersiv verwenden kann – d.h. mit anderen fachbereichen verknüpfen kann. ¨ stimme zu ¨ stimme nicht zu ich erwarte, dass die schülerinnen durch das projekt die anderen landesund sprachkulturen besser kennenlernen als durch den konventionellen l2unterricht. ¨ stimme zu ¨ verändert sich kaum ¨ stimme nicht zu was erwarte ich für mich als lehrperson? _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ 573 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 4 (3). 2014. 573-578 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.3.10 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl book reviews sensitive periods, language aptitude, and ultimate l2 attainment editors: gisela granena and mike long publisher: john benjamins, 2013 isbn: 978-9027213129 pages: 295 the volume sensitive periods, language aptitude, and ultimate l2 attainment (eds. g. granena and m. long) focuses on the individual characteristics involved in second language acquisition (sla). when discussing sla, we usually take into consideration various factors which might account for ultimate attainment, or lack thereof, in second language (l2). these factors are usually classified into three main categories: the language learner’s individual characteristics, setting and input, and typological proximity/distance between l1 and l2. the first category includes age of onset, language aptitude, intelligence, beliefs and expectations, personality and motivation. it is this group of factors that the chapters in this volume focus on. the book comprises eleven chapters organized into four sections: part i, “age differences and maturational constraints”; part ii, “aptitude constructs and measures”; part iii, “age, aptitude and ultimate attainment”; and part iv, “implications for educational policy and language teaching.” each chapter follows a 574 similar pattern: it opens with a short abstract presenting rationale, purpose, and conclusions of the researcher, and ends with a concluding section which reiterates these elements and adds implications for future research. this makes the volume very accessible and reader-friendly. part i: “age differences and maturational constraints” the volume opens, quite appropriately, with long’s chapter on maturational constraints on child and adult sla. it is an appropriate first chapter as it presents the long-standing debate over the critical period hypothesis (cph). first, long explains why it is preferable to use sensitive periods (sps) rather than critical periods and then suggests eight reasons for the lack of consensus, which boil down to either methodological flaws or confusion of terms and explanations. the chapter is comprehensive and its arguments are clear, sound and convincing. the chapter ends by listing ten positive developments in understanding maturational constraints such as the “emerging consensus as to the criteria of sp” (p. 30), specifying the linguistic features subject to sp, refining research methods, the use of bilinguals as a control group instead of native speakers, and so on. both researchers and practitioners stand to profit from these developments as the findings researchers come up with will provide a solid foundation for the practitioners’ decisions in the field. spadaro’s chapter 2 presents an empirical study focusing on the effects of sensitive periods in one linguistic domain; lexical and collocational knowledge in l2. the study compares the associative webs, word discrimination and multi-word units of native speakers (nss) and nonnative speakers (nnss). variables like age of onset (ao), length of residence and education level are all accounted for. the test materials used in the research are all well-known tests but adapted for the purposes of the specific study. the results indicate that patterns of associations of very advanced nnss and nss are quite similar, showing a preference for paradigmatic associations. in the other tasks nss outscored nnss, but the difference was smaller when the ao of the nnss was between 0 and 6 years of age. not surprisingly, in all seven tasks nss outperformed nnss. an even more important finding, which provides support for the author’s claim of sp, is that in each case the learners with the 0-6 ao outperformed the learners who started later. yet the degree of success with the lexicon of the late starters was quite impressive and would seem to undermine the importance of sps. despite this, the author believes that the issue of sps remains quite important, first, as there are many more unsuccessful l2 learners, and, second, as this might set more realistic and attainable goals in the language learning program. this is quite true and makes the author’s line of argumentation convincing. the chapter ends by suggesting lines of enquiry to be researched. the review of literature would have 575 benefitted from a choice of more recent articles. unfortunately, only four of the 50 references were published after 2000. in addition, there are minor discrepancies such as the following: in table 1, page 56, group 1 with the 0–6 ao apparently includes only one member, whereas on page 50 the number given is 13; on page 65 we read that “syntagmatic and collocational links [are an] important feature of mature nativelike linguistic competence,” but on page 47 we read that “normal adults have a marked preference for paradigmatic responses . . .” some clarification would be in order. chapter 3, contributed by bylund, abrahamsson and hylstenstam, explores the role of bilingualism and its effect on l2 ultimate attainment. the chapter opens by discussing the “frameworks, arguments and empirical findings that directly or indirectly address the question of the effect of bilingualism on ultimate attainment” (p. 71). the frameworks discussed are cook’s multicompetence framework, flege’s speech learning model, macwhinney’s competition model, and, finally, the interference hypothesis. what these four frameworks share is the fact that the difference in ultimate attainment may be the result of “l1 entrenchment.” the writers present empirical evidence validating each of these frameworks. the chapter does not ignore the counter-evidence for the bilingualism effects: native-like l2 ultimate attainment, positive relationship between l1 and l2 proficiency, ultimate attainment in simultaneous bilinguals and low l2 proficiency of international adoptees if adopted after age 2. part ii: “aptitude constructs and measures” in chapter 4, granena reports a validation study of one of the most popular language aptitude test, namely the llama (meara, 2005). this is extremely important in light of the wide use of llama in various studies involving language aptitude and ultimate attainment. the study aims at evaluating the reliability of the test and examining its structure. after describing the llama test, granena reviews 11 studies in which the test has been used and concludes that they all point to a correlation between llama and l2 measures “that call for the use of analytical, metalinguistic abilities and with l2 learning under explicit instructional treatments or feedback conditions” (p. 112). then she sets out to assess the reliability of the test by examining the internal consistency and test-retest reliability. the results for both components were moderate but acceptable. the analysis of the structure of the llama showed that the test measures two types of ability: analytical, which is essential in explicit language learning, and sequence learning ability required for implicit language learning. granena concludes by suggesting further research into the relationship between implicit processes and individual differences in language acquisition. 576 chapter 5 by kormos provides a logical continuation of the examination of language aptitude and other cognitive abilities like working memory and phonological short-term memory, both of which might explain ultimate attainment. the chapter opens with a critical discussion of language aptitude and endorses the latest view that language aptitude is not a unitary construct but consists of a number of “cognitive abilities that can assist in the different stages of language learning” (p. 141). the author proceeds by discussing the role of multiple cognitive individual difference factors in language-learning processes. the graphic organizer, figure 2, p. 142, presents the material in a clear, succinct way. it shows that, whereas in the initial stage of language learning (input processing) the cognitive abilities required are working memory, phonological short-termmemory, phonological sensitivity, inductive ability, and metalinguistic awareness, at the final stage of language learning (automatization) the two major sine qua non are working memory and perceptual speed. no less important is the issue of the stability of language aptitude. on the basis of evidence from numerous studies (one of them her own, conducted in 2008), kormos comes to the conclusion that certain components of language aptitude such as phonological sensitivity and metalinguistic awareness are subject to change with intensive l2 instruction. the chapter ends with the reservation that even though cognitive characteristics might be important in l2 ultimate attainment, affective and conative characteristics as well as previous language learning experience “might be more significant contributors” (p. 147). chapter 6 by doughty presents a new language aptitude test, the highlevel language aptitude battery (hi-lab) designed specifically to measure the aptitude of more advanced l2 learners. it differs from other language aptitude tests in that it aims at predicting ultimate attainment for late post-critical-period learners, that is, identifying individuals with exceptional learning potential. the conclusions in the chapter are somewhat different from the conclusions in chapter 5, as doughty asserts that language aptitude (cognitive abilities) determines ultimate attainment in late starters. however, doughty shares with kormos the view that aptitude is a composite construct and therefore her aptitude test produces aptitude profiles consisting of multiple components. as the validity and reliability tests proved the hi-lab to be quite accurate, the profiles it generates can be used for diagnostic purposes when choosing trainees for language learning. more importantly, intervention programs for struggling l2 learners might be developed based on this test. “the fundamental goal is to reduce the time, effort and cost of learning languages” (p. 173). in my opinion, this might also serve to reduce teacher and student demotivation in the process of teaching/learning a language by setting attainable goals. 577 part iii: “age, aptitude and ultimate attainment” this part of the volume presents three empirical studies that demonstrate the relationship between age of onset, language aptitude and ultimate attainment. granena’s study was prompted by the lack of research on long-term l2 achievement in naturalistic settings. it aimed at finding out the relationship between adult l2 ultimate morphosyntactic attainment and language aptitude. for this purpose, the researcher used auditory and written grammaticality judgment tests (gjts) as well as sentences with different levels of syntactic complexity. the results of the study showed that aptitude was a factor in only one of these tests, namely the written gjt. the researcher explains this result by pointing out that the gjt task allowed the l2 subjects enough time to reflect on language errors/structures and correct what they considered erroneous statements. test modality was, however, irrelevant for the native speaker control group. granena is well aware of the fact that the results are contingent on how language aptitude is defined and measured. therefore, she recommends further research using different aptitude components, as well as l2 learners with different aos. bolibaugh and foster’s study is similar to granena’s study in that it examines late acquirers of l2 immersed in the target language. however, here, receptive knowledge of collocations, or as the researchers call them, “conventional word combinations” (p. 205) represents the measure of attainment. the factor studied is phonological short-term memory. however, amount of exposure to the target language and motivation to interact with native speakers are also accounted for. the authors conclude that exposure to the target language, phonological shortterm memory and motivation can explain a large proportion of individual differences in attainment but certain questions such as “will there be a difference between the receptive and productive knowledge of the subjects who scored within the ns range?” remain unanswered and deserve further examination. chapter 9 presents forsberg and sandgren’s empirical study on high-level proficiency in late l2 acquisition. like the previous two studies in this part it uses the llama to measure participants’ language aptitude, and the participants are all late l2 (french) acquirers living in france. the study uses both collocations and grammaticality judgments as indicators of attainment. furthermore, the study investigates personality dimensions that might account for differences in proficiency levels. the results show that collocational competence is correlated with language aptitude as measured by section d (sound recognition) of the llama. subjects who exhibited strong cultural empathy and open-mindedness were the ones with superior collocational competence. interestingly enough, the study found a correlation between llama d scores and these same personality characteristics. the researchers are quick to point out that the results of their study are 578 not generalizable as the sample was very small and homogeneous, that is, it included well-educated, socially and professionally integrated female subjects only. part iv: “implications for educational policy and language teaching” practitioners would expect this part to bring together theory and practice and to help decide on various language policies like the optimal time to start efl programs, the use of immersion programs or bilingual education, the most effective methods of teaching efl or esl to younger or later starters in formal or informal settings, and so on. however, the two chapters in the last part leave the reader somewhat disappointed. once again, we are presented with research, comprehensive as it may be, but no practical advice for those struggling in the field. vatz, tare, jackson and doughty actually state that “findings are often complex and difficult to interpret, thereby limiting applicability” (p. 291). the reader is presented with conflicting evidence from methodologically flawed research and has to decide for himself/herself what works best in his/her classroom. at the end of his chapter, long expresses his hope that efl programs start at the age-appropriate time (which for him is 0-6 years of age) and that it will have a beneficial effect not only on oral skills but on other language domains as well. but this is still somewhat vague and unsatisfactory as a conclusion as some of the chapters in the volume found that sensitive periods can vary for different language domains and different language aptitude, working memory, and other individual characteristics. the volume sensitive periods, language aptitude, and ultimate l2 attainment presents research into second language acquisition and provides readers with a comprehensive review of the state of the art in this important area of applied linguistics. it examines critically different research findings in an attempt to come up with more reliable answers as to the optimal age of onset, language aptitude and its relation to ultimate attainment and other factors that may account for achieving native or near-native proficiency in a second or target language. a major asset of the volume is its accessibility and coherence. the editors have done a wonderful job trying to keep to a consistent pattern of presentation and a very logical organization of the chapters within the different sections. the systematic and comprehensive review of research on the topics of interest is illuminating and helpful to both researchers and practitioners; it actually makes it possible to follow the main arguments even if the reader is not up-to-date on all the latest research in the field. reviewed by jacqueline haimov oranim academic college of education, tivon, israel jhsl1990@gmail.com 135 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (1). 2016. 135-158 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.1.7 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl observing the interactive qualities of l2 instructional practices in esl and fsl classrooms michael zuniga university of quebec, montreal, canada zuniga.michael_j@uqam.ca daphnée simard university of quebec, montreal, canada simard.daphnee@uqam.ca abstract discourse features that promote the generation of interactionally modified input and output, such as negotiation for meaning, have been shown to significantly enhance second language acquisition. research has also identified several characteristics of instructional practices that render them more or less propitious to the generation of these discourse features. while various classroom observation studies have successfully measured the communicative orientation of classroom environments, most of the indicators of interactivity analyzed in those studies were obtained through micro-level discourse analyses and not through macro-level analyses of task-related factors shown to directly influence the interactivity of instructional practices. such a macro-level scale has potential practical implications for teachers and administrators seeking an efficient tool for assessing and improving the interactivity afforded by a given curriculum. the objective of the present study was therefore to develop macro-level scale to determine the extent to which teachers of french and english as a second language use interaction-friendly instructional practices. using an observation scheme designed to code data on factors shown to influence interactivity, 63 hours of fsl and esl classes from secondary schools in the montreal area were observed and analyzed. results indicate clear differences between the two groups. while both esl and fsl classes were less teacher-centered than those observed in previous studies, they were still rated as not-very-interactive. target language differences showed that the fsl michael zuniga, daphnée simard 136 classes were more teacher-centered and characterized by fewer interactionfriendly tasks and activities than the esl classes. task characteristics, reasons for esl and fsl differences and recommendations for improvement are discussed. keywords: classroom observation; interaction; negotiation for meaning; pedagogical practices 1. introduction since the 1980s, research on the role of interaction in second language acquisition (sla) has isolated several features in second language (l2) learner discourse shown to facilitate acquisition (e.g., gass, mackey, & pica, 1998; long, 1983a, 1983b; mackey, 1999; pica, 1996; pica, doughty, & young, 1986; polio & gass, 1998; sato, 1986). one such feature is negotiation for meaning, a conversational process in which learners work collaboratively to achieve mutual understanding (gass, 1997; gass & varonis, 1985; long, 1996; pica, 1987, 1994; varonis & gass, 1985). through such discourse features, learners increase exposition to comprehensible input and obtain immediate feedback on output, allowing them to test hypotheses and notice gaps in their interlanguage, the result of which becomes intake which is then available for further processing and integration into learners’ developing interlanguage (gass, 1997; gass & mackey, 2015). the product of such negotiation is commonly referred to as interactionally modified input and output, whose positive effect on learning outcomes has indeed been welldocumented in the sla literature by studies showing that interactional feedback of any kind is beneficial to the acquisition of both grammar (e.g., mackey, 1999; mcdonough, 2005, 2007; loewen & nabei, 2007; pica, 1994; takashima & ellis, 1999) and vocabulary (e.g., ellis & he, 1999; ellis, tanaka, & yamazaki, 1994). the objective of the present observational study was to determine the extent to which french and english second language teachers (fsl, esl) in a public secondary school setting use interaction-friendly instructional practices, wherein instructional practices has a macro-level definition referring to the interactive characteristics of the instructional segments (i.e., tasks and activities) organized and used by teachers. 2. interaction-friendly instructional practices research examining the characteristics of instructional practices with regard to their impact on the generation of interactionally modified input and output (e.g., antón, 1999; long, 1981; gass & varonis, 1985; pica & doughty, 1985, observing the interactive qualities of l2 instructional practices in esl and fsl classrooms 137 among others) can be defined along five dimensions: (a) the general focus of attention in the classroom (i.e., student-centered, teacher-centered), (b) the interactional dynamics within a given activity (e.g., collaborative tasks, individual seat work, dialogic and traditional teaching), (c) the information flow between participants (e.g., required or optional information-exchange), (d) the goal orientation created by the activity (i.e., convergent or divergent) and (e) the number of active participants in a given instructional segment (e.g., individual, pair, group, class). the first dimension refers to the general collective focus of attention in the classroom. in teacher-centered contexts there is, in principle, one teacherdirected interactional focal point between the teacher and the students, while student-centered contexts are composed of multiple self-directed interactional focal points. it is within the crux of such focal points that interactionally modified input and output are generated. not surprisingly, early interactionist research (doughty & pica, 1986) found that student-centered contexts generate significantly more negotiation moves (i.e., clarification requests, confirmation checks, confirmation checks) than teacher-centered ones. the authors argued that the student-centered setting offers learners more opportunities to interact. the second dimension, interactivity, indicates whether or not the structure of a given activity encourages interaction in the target language. in the teacher-centered context, for example, interactivity distinguishes traditional teaching, characterized by the unilateral transmission of knowledge from teachers to passive learners, and dialogic teaching, which is characterized by responsive dialogue that assists students in hypothesis construction (antón, 1999, p. 304). within such a dialogic approach, teachers “integrate given explanations with demonstration while placing a central role in the learner’s participation in the instructional activity” (antón, 1999, p. 308). antón (1999) analyzed the teacher-centered discourse produced in a traditional and dialogic setting, and found that the interactive nature of dialogic instruction generated significantly more self-repairs, negotiation moves and turn allocations than traditional teacher-fronted instruction. in the student-centered context, interactivity distinguishes individual and collaborative tasks. not surprisingly, collaborative tasks are regarded as the best way to create conditions favorable to interaction (doughty & pica, 1986; lee, 2000; long, 1981; garcia mayo & lazaro ibarrola, 2015). researchers specifically interested in studying the effect of tasks on interactional modifications, such as negotiation, have focused on the third dimension, that is, the information flow of tasks (e.g., doughy & pica, 1986, foster, 1998; gass, mackey, & ross-feldman, 2005; gass & varonis, 1985; long, 1983b), which refers to how the information necessary for task execution is distributed among participants and how that information flows during task completion. for example, during optional informationmichael zuniga, daphnée simard 138 exchange tasks, all participants have access to the necessary information, while during required information-exchange tasks, key bits of information are distributed unevenly to participants, making it necessary to exchange information for task completion (doughty & pica, 1986). required-exchange tasks further vary according to how the information is distributed among participants: during one-way tasks, one participant holds all the necessary information necessary and must transmit it to the others (e.g., listen-and-draw, 20 questions), while through twoway tasks, different bits of key information are allocated to participants, so that they all must communicate to complete the task (e.g., spot-the-difference). data from numerous studies investigating the influence of information flow on negotiation (e.g., doughy & pica, 1986, gass, mackey, & ross-feldman, 2005; gass & varonis, 1985; long, 1983a, 1983b; nakahama, tyler, & van lier, 2001) offer solid evidence that tasks requiring an information exchange generate significantly more of the benefits associated with interaction than optional exchange tasks. with regard to the directionality of this exchange, the results are somewhat less clear-cut. some studies (e.g., pica & doughty, 1985; doughty & pica, 1986; gass, mackey, & ross-feldman, 2005; long, 1983a, 1983b) have shown that two-way tasks are more effective at promoting negotiation than one-way tasks, while others (e.g., foster, 1998; foster & ohta, 2005; eckerth, 2009) have shown no significant differences and have called for a broadening of the definition of negotiation to include a more socio-constructivist view of the phenomenon (foster & ohta, 2005). the fourth dimension is related to the goal-orientation of a given task, that is, whether or not task completion involves the attainment of some common goal. duff (1986) distinguished between tasks such as oral presentations or debates, where participants’ goals diverge, and tasks such as projects and information-gap activities, where their goals converge. she studied the effects of such divergent and convergent tasks on nonnative speaker-nonnative speaker (nns-nns) dyadic interaction and found that, while the two types of tasks produced about the same number of total words during the activity, the convergent tasks generated about twice as many negotiation moves (duff, 1986). she argued that, due to their collaborative nature, convergent tasks create more opportunities for negotiation than divergent tasks, making them useful vehicles of instruction and language practice in second language classrooms. the fifth and final dimension concerns the number of active participants, that is, whether the tasks are carried out in pairs, in groups or as a class. results from studies examining this variable (i.e., foster, 1988; pica & doughty, 1985; doughty & pica, 1986) suggest that the smaller groups generate more negotiation for each individual learner. doughty and pica (1986) showed that studentcentered participation patterns (e.g., during pair and group work) create more observing the interactive qualities of l2 instructional practices in esl and fsl classrooms 139 opportunities for negotiation than those generated by teacher-fronted activity, and foster (1998) revealed that the dyadic condition created more negotiation than the group condition. statistically speaking, the smaller the group the more opportunities students have to actively participate. while these discourse analysis studies offer a coherent portrait of the types of environments most likely to favor interactionally modified input and output, they do not offer insight into the range and frequency of interactionfriendly instructional practices that teachers use in classrooms. for this, classroom observational studies shed additional light on the topic. 3. classroom observational studies mackey and gass (2011) distinguish between observational studies in which discourse-level events constitute the unit of analysis (interactionist studies) and those whose unit of analysis includes tasks and instructional practices (instructional segment studies). the interactionist studies have resulted in the creation of various observation schemes used to identify and characterize critical features in classroom discourse such as corrective feedback (e.g., chaudron, 1977; lyster & ranta, 1997), form-focused pedagogical episodes (e.g., ellis, basturkmen, & loewen, 2001; loewen, 2003; simard & jean, 2011; yuqin zhao & bitchener, 2007; zyzik & polio, 2008), question types (long & sato, 1983), turn allocation (seliger, 1977), and l1 and l2 language use (duff & polio, 1990; polio & duff, 1994). the objective of the studies observing instructional segments, on the other hand, has been to elaborate observation instruments used to create a coherent and rational portrait of the complexities of the l2 classroom (e.g., allen, fröhlich, & spada, 1984; fanselow, 1977; mitchell, parkinson, & johnstone, 1981; ullman & geva, 1984). of the resulting observation instruments, none have been as extensively used and validated as the communicative orientation of language teaching (colt) observation scheme (allen, fröhlich, & spada, 1984; fröhlich, spada, & allen, 1985; spada & fröhlich, 1995), which was elaborated to determine the extent to which classrooms conform to the principles of communicative language teaching. it has been used to develop experiential-analytical scales (see stern, 1990), whereby instruction in experiential classrooms tends to focus on meaning while the practices in analytical classrooms are more oriented toward form. the colt is divided into two parts: a macro level part (part a) and a micro level part (part b). “part a describes classroom instruction in terms of the types of activities that take place; part b describes the verbal interactions which take place within activities” (fröhlich, spada, & allen, 1985, p. 29). while only one part a category is directly related to the task interactivity research outlined above (i.e., participant organization), most of the part b categories were intended to detect michael zuniga, daphnée simard 140 discourse features favoring communication (i.e., information gap, sustained speech, reaction to form/message, incorporation of utterances). indeed, the colt has been used to detect communicative differences between classes with regard to target language and program type. an early pilot study for the colt (allen, fröhlich, & spada, 1984) revealed differences between esl and fsl classes in ontario, canada. while both classes were mostly teacher-centered and form-focused, the input of the esl class appeared to be more varied, containing a higher level of information gap, more instances of sustained speech, and a greater number of expansion and elaborations than the fsl input. similarly, the students’ output in the esl class appeared to be more varied, containing fewer restrictions in terms of form, a higher level of information gap, and more instances of sustained speech than in the fsl data. (allen, fröhlich, & spada, 1984, p. 17) these profiles depicted an esl class with experiential tendencies and an fsl class that was more analytic in nature. the following year, fröhlich, spada, and allen (1985) published the results of a study comparing the communicative orientation of 13 classes in four different fsl and esl language programs. their observations showed that the esl and the french core classes were more teacher-controlled and form-focused and less communicative than the french immersion classes. in a subsequent study, allen and carroll (1988) found similar results using the colt to observe eight core fsl classes (four observations of 40-70 minutes). their results depicted classes falling into the middle of the experiential-analytical continuum, of which 50% of the class time was teacher-centered and 54% was explicitly form-focused. in general, students in these observations did not initiate discourse and there was very little collaborative work. in a slightly more recent study, fazio and lyster (1998) used the colt to compare the learning environments of elementary school children learning french in submersion (minority-language students attending classes designed for native speakers of french) and immersion (english-speaking students attending a french immersion programme in an english-language school) contexts in montreal, canada. their corpus was composed of 28.4 hours of submersion and 30.5 hours immersion observation. results indicate clear differences between the two learning environments. instruction in the submersion setting was mainly focused on language form with minimal discourse practice, while that of the immersion classrooms appeared to be more balanced in terms of language form teaching and discourse practice. these finding are in line with previous research (allen, swain, harley, & cummins, 1990) suggesting that immersion classes (swain & carroll, 1987) are more experiential than core french classes (allen & carroll, 1988). observing the interactive qualities of l2 instructional practices in esl and fsl classrooms 141 these observational studies conducted using the colt have revealed that target language (i.e., esl, fsl) and program type (i.e., core, immersion) appear to have an impact on the communicative orientation of classrooms. the results indeed show that esl classes in general and fsl immersion classes tend to be more experiential than core fsl classes. while such findings offer insight into the general communicative orientation of classrooms, they do not provide evidence of the range and frequency of macro-level interaction-friendly instructional practices that teachers use in classrooms. in light of research showing the benefits of interactionally modified input and output on sla (e.g., ellis & he, 1999; ellis, tanaka, & yamazaki, 1994; mackey, 1999; mcdonough, 2005, 2007; loewen & nabei, 2007; pica, 1994; takashima & ellis, 1999) and results from studies revealing factors shown to render instructional segments more amenable to the generation of interactionally modified input and output (e.g., doughy & pica, 1986, gass, mackey, & ross-feldman, 2005; gass & varonis, 1985; long, 1983a, 1983b; nakahama, tyler, & van lier, 2001), we formulate the following research question: to what extent do esl and fsl teachers in a public secondary school setting use interaction-friendly instructional practices? 4. method in order to answer our research question, an observational study was designed. we first created a macro-level observation scheme allowing for the coding of interaction-friendly tasks. then, we coded the instructional practices of 8 teachers occurring during 63.8 hours of live classroom activity using our grid. finally, the coded observations were further analyzed according to the “interaction-favorability index” we devised based on previous study results. 4.1. the corpus the corpus consisted of about 63.8 hours of video-recorded fsl (31.3 hours) and esl (32.5 hours) high school classes from secondary 2 to secondary 5 (grade 9 to grade 12 classes).1 the students were between 11 and 16 years old. eight language teachers (4 esl, 4 fsl), each one from a different public secondary school in the montreal area of quebec, canada, participated in the study. seven of them were women and all had at least 5 years of experience as l2 instructors. they all had been formally trained and certified in university programs validated by the ministry of education. they taught regular and enriched programs. students in the enriched classes are generally more advanced than students in the 1 the corpus was taken from simard and jean (2011). michael zuniga, daphnée simard 142 core and regular classes. among the teachers, two taught regular classes, four taught enriched and one taught one class of each. both the esl and fsl teachers taught according to guidelines provided by the quebec ministry of education, which privilege a communicative language teaching (clt) approach (mels, 2006). as shown in table 1, each teacher was observed for approximately 8 hours using a camera positioned in a discreet part of the classroom. a research assistant was instructed to train the camera on the teachers as they moved throughout the classroom. audio data was captured by two microphones; one worn by the teacher and the other located near the camera. finally, to collect data on a wider variety of instructional practices, the 60to 90-minute observations were spread out over the course of the semester. additionally, no information was provided to the participants (teachers and students) concerning the study’s objectives and nothing was done to influence the teachers’ instructional practices. table 1 breakdown of teachers and classes observed abbreviated teacher’s name time observed sex language j l c p b d s f 7.5 hours 6.3 hours 8.75 hours 8.75 hours 8.75 hours 8.75 hours 7.5 hours 7.5 hours f f f f f f f m fsl fsl fsl fsl esl esl esl esl note. f = female; m = male; fsl = french as a second language; esl = english as a second language. 4.2. observation grid since our research question was related to the observation of practices used to promote interaction in the l2 classroom, we decided to create a macro-level observation scheme using the five dimensions organizing the negotiation studies presented above (i.e., general focus of attention, interactivity, information flow, goals, participant organization). recall that the colt, although allowing for the coding of interaction-friendly “environments,” does not specifically focus on task favorability to interaction. the unit of analysis for the present study is, therefore, an instructional segment, that is, a time segment with a definable beginning and end allotted to a given classroom activity (i.e., tasks, activities, class business). as suggested by cone and foster (2006) and quivy and campenhoudt (1988), the creation of an observation grid should include the establishment of the pertinent parts, followed by a pilot period, and an interrater validation. the components of the grid are illustrated in table 2. observing the interactive qualities of l2 instructional practices in esl and fsl classrooms 143 table 2 observation grid: task favorability to negotiation general focus of attention interactivity information flow goals participant organization duration in minutes student-centered activity collaborative tasks required information-exchange convergent pairs group class optional information-exchange convergent pairs group class divergent pairs group class individual tasks questions divergent individual no question divergent individual teacher-centered activity dialogic teaching bilateral divergent class traditional teaching unilateral divergent class the first dimension concerns the general focus of attention, that is, whether students interact with each other (student-centered activity) or whether the teacher is the center of attention (teacher-centered activity). the second characteristic concerns the segments’ interactivity, that is, whether student-centered activity is individual or collaborative and whether teacher-centered activity is traditional or dialogic. traditional teaching is defined as events where information flows unilaterally from the teacher to the students (e.g., a lecture or a dictation), and where students’ questions are answered directly and explicitly, without the engagement of scaffolding functions. dialogic teaching,2 on the other hand, is characterized by a bidirectional flow of information, whereby teachers engage students in a conversation through which they are ultimately led to create their own hypotheses about given language features or topics. the remaining variables are linked to the quality of interaction that the activities generate. for example, information flow refers to whether or not collaborative tasks require an exchange of information, or whether or not students can ask questions during individual work, or whether or not information flows unilaterally or bilaterally during teacher-centered activity. with regard to goal orientation, tasks create situations where participants’ goals either converge or diverge. for example, problem-solving tasks create convergent goals while debates generate divergent ones. finally, as for participant organization, classroom activity can either be conducted in the individual, pair, group or class setting. in general, the level of interactivity for each individual participant increases as the number of participants in the setting decreases. as for the classroom time that was not pedagogic in nature, we coded segments that were teacher-directed as 2 wood, bruner, and ross’s (1976) six scaffolding functions were used to identify evidence of dialogic teaching events in the data: (a) recruitment, (b) reducing the degrees of freedom, (c) maintaining direction, (d) marking critical features, (e) controlling frustration, and (f) demonstration. michael zuniga, daphnée simard 144 classroom management, and undirected segments, typically occurring at the beginning and end of class and between activities, as down time. piloting of the grid and interrater coding were performed. following recommendations outlined in cone and foster (2006), 20% of filmed data was double scored using the observation grid. therefore, the first 90-minute observation for each individual teacher was viewed and coded separately and then compared. 95% of the observed events were coded identically by both raters. after validating the grid, the researcher coded the remaining 52 hours of observation. 4.3. data analysis since our study is descriptive in nature, the data were calculated as the percentage of time attributable to the task categories presented in table 2 (e.g., fazio & lyster, 1998; spada & fröhlich, 1995).3 in order to investigate more specifically the extent to which the esl and fsl groups use interaction-friendly instructional practices, we created an interaction favorability index, using the binary system presented in table 3. table 3 values used to create the interaction favorability index general focus of attention interaction information flow goals setting score rank student-centered (+) collaborative (+) required (+) convergent (+) pairs (+) 5 4 group (=) 4 4 class (–) 3 3 optional (–) convergent (+) pairs (+) 3 3 group (=) 2 3 class (–) 1 3 divergent (–) pairs (+) 1 3 group (=) 0 2 class (–) -1 2 individual (–) questions (+) divergent (–) (–) -1 2 no question (–) divergent (–) (–) -3 1 teacher-centered (–) dialogic (+) bilateral (+) divergent (–) class (–) -1 2 traditional (–) unilateral (–) divergent (–) class (–) -5 1 as shown in the table, each task characteristic was assigned a weight according to whether it creates a condition that is favorable (+1) or unfavorable (1) to the generation of interactionally modified input and output (e.g., student3 as rightfully mentioned by loewen (2004), the independence of observation assumption is often violated in sla studies, “which can lead to type i errors, overestimating significant differences in the data” (p. 171). the nature of the data analyzed in our study, like in other observational studies, does not meet assumptions for statistical tests commonly used to determine group independence. we therefore do not make claims about the statistical significance of our findings and keep our interpretation strictly as descriptive. observing the interactive qualities of l2 instructional practices in esl and fsl classrooms 145 centered activity (+1), teacher-centered activity (-1)). for participant structure, a neutral weight (= 0) was assigned to the “group” setting, placing its value between that of pair and class work. the scores were calculated and the following ranks were assigned: category 1 (not interactive) was assigned to scores of -5 to -4. category 2 (not very interactive) represents scores between -3 and -1. category 3 (interactive) includes scores falling between 0 and 2. and finally, category 4 (very interactive) was assigned to scores above 3. the higher categories are more favorable to the generation of interactionally modified input and output. finally, in order to obtain a general indicator of the level of interactivity of the esl and fls corpora, an interaction favorability index was then calculated as the weighted average of the negotiation categories using the following formula, where n represents the total number of minutes allocated to tasks and activities from each category: ((4 x n) + (3 x n) + (2 x n) + (1 x n)) total number of minutes of observation scores in this interactivity index can range from 1 to 4, whereby a sore of 1 indicates a class composed exclusively of traditional teaching and individual seat-work allowing for little or no interaction; and a score of 4 signals a class entirely characterized by tasks and activities requiring an exchange of information in the pair or group setting. scores falling at the extremes of such a scale depict an unlikely scenario. one would rather expect most classes to fall somewhere in between the two, with increasing scores indicating passage from divergent, noncollaborative environments to convergent, interactive environments facilitating information exchange in smaller group and pair settings. 5. results we first present the results obtained for total classroom time and then per target language. we then provide the results for the interaction favorability index. 5.1. global results to gain a global portrait of class time usage, we initially broke down the 63.8 hours (3828 minutes) of total fsl and esl classroom observation into minutes and percentage of total observation time dedicated to student-centered activity time (sat), teacher-centered activity time (tat), class business and down time. those results are presented in table 4. overall, the table shows that 47% of classroom time was devoted to student-centered activity as opposed to the 30% michael zuniga, daphnée simard 146 devoted to teacher-centered activity. class management and downtime respectively accounted for 16 % and 8% of total classroom time. table 4 global breakdown of classroom activity activity minutes % of total class time student-centered activity 1777 47 teacher-center activity 1135 30 class management 608 16 downtime 303 8 total class time 3823 100 next, we wanted to obtain information regarding each language teaching context. the results are presented in table 5. while the data show that the teachers in our study gave preference to student-centered activity when planning their courses, the esl classes (52%) were nearly 20% more student-centered that then fsl sections (41%). teacher-centered activity was the second most common activity, with fsl classes (38%) coming in at 72% more teachercentered than esl classes (22%). esl classes spent about 20% of class time on class management, while only 14% of fsl class time was spent on such activity. finally, both settings lost about 8% of the class to down time. table 5 global breakdown of classroom activity according to target language activity esl fsl minutes percentage minutes percentage student-centered activity 1008 52 769 41 teacher-centered activity 427 22 708 38 class management 350 20 258 14 down time 165 8 143 8 total class time 1950 100 1878 100 note. fsl = french as a second language; esl = english as a second language to create a portrait of the 29.3 hours of observed student-centered activity, we first broke the events down according to the four variables shown to influence interactivity and negotiation: participant distribution, information flow, goal orientation, setting. those data are displayed in table 6. its inspection shows that collaborative tasks (67%) were used by the teachers in the corpus about twice as frequently as individual ones (33%). among the collaborative tasks, only a minority required an exchange of information (13%). of those information-gap activities, 20% were conducted in pairs, 59% in small groups and 21% with the entire class. optional-exchange tasks were the most common observing the interactive qualities of l2 instructional practices in esl and fsl classrooms 147 type, occupying 57% of the student-centered activity time. among these tasks, a clear majority (81%) were convergent, that is, tasks where students work collaboratively to solve a problem or reach a common goal. convergent optional-exchange tasks were most commonly conducted in a group setting (84%), followed by the pair setting (15%). convergent tasks conducted at the level of the class were almost nonexistent. only a slim 19% of the optional-exchange tasks were divergent in nature. unlike its convergent counterpart, divergent tasks (62%) tended to be conducted in the “whole class” setting (e.g., oral presentations), with only a minority conducted in groups (37%) and pairs (1%). as for individual tasks, almost all events (90%) allowed students to seek help and ask questions. table 6 breakdown of student-centered activity participant distribution information flow goals setting minutes % of sat individual (611 min.) questions divergent individual 571 32.1 no questions divergent individual 40 1.0 collective (1166 min.) required (154 min.) convergent pairs 28 1.6 group 91 5.1 class 35 2.0 optional (1012 min.) convergent (822 min.) pairs 129 7.2 group 687 38.17 class 6 0.3 divergent (190 min.) pairs 2 0.1 group 70 4.0 class 118 6.7 total 1777 100 note. sat = student-centered activity time. we then broke down the same 29.3 hours of student-centered class time according to the language teaching context, that is, esl and fsl. those data are displayed in table 7. the data show that, among the student-centered activity, fsl classes (45%) had about 70% more individual work than the esl classes (26%). during most of the esl and all of the fsl individual activities, students were allowed to seek assistance. nearly three quarters of the esl sat (74%) and half of the fls sat (55%) were collaborative in nature. recall that convergent, required-exchange tasks were among the most favorable to interaction. only about 13% of esl sat and 3% of fsl sat fit into this category. among the interaction-friendly required-exchange tasks, most (63%) were conducted in the group setting in both languages. convergent optional-exchange tasks were the most common task type for both esl (52%) and fsl (38%), and among those task, 83% of the esl and 84% of the fsl were conducted in groups. finally, the divergent optional-exchange tasks were the least common collaborative task for michael zuniga, daphnée simard 148 the esl group, occupying about 9% of the sat, and the second least common in fsl at 13%. unlike the other collaborative segments, these activities were typically conducted in the class setting. table 7 breakdown of student-centered activity according to target language (%) interactivity information flow goals participant distribution esl sat fsl sat individual questions divergent individual 22 45 no questions divergent individual 4 0 total individual 26 45 collaborative required convergent pairs 3 0 group 7 3 class 3 0 optional convergent pairs 9 5 group 43 33 class 0 1 divergent pairs 0 0 group 4 4 class 5 9 total collaborative 74 55 grand total 100 100 note. sat = student-centered activity time; fsl = french as a second language; esl = english as a second language. recall that teacher-centered activity characterized about 22% of the esl and 38% of the fsl total observation time. to gain an indication of the quality of this time with regard to interaction, we classified events as either traditional or dialogic. table 8 offers a breakdown of this activity for total time and for each target language context. a clear majority (88%) of teacher-centered activity was collaborative and dialogic in nature, while traditional teaching approaches, whose discourse is characterized by a unilateral flow of information, were rather uncommon (12%) within the corpus. with regard to language context, the dialogic approach was more common in the fsl (93%) than the esl (80%) setting. unexpectedly, while there was less teacher-fronted activity in the esl settings, those esl interventions were more traditional than the fsl ones. table 8 breakdown of teacher-centered activity according to target language type discourse pattern minutes % of tat % of esl tat % of fsl tat teacher-centered (1087 min.) traditional 137 12 20 7 dialogic 998 88 80 93 total 1135 100 100 100 note. tat= teacher-centered activity time; fsl = french as a second language; esl = english as a second language. observing the interactive qualities of l2 instructional practices in esl and fsl classrooms 149 5.2. interaction favorability index results following the procedure presented in the methodology section, the task types were regrouped according to the interaction favorability rankings, then the number of minutes and the percentage of the total teaching time dedicated to each category were calculated, as presented in table 9. only a small minority of the total teaching time (4%) was considered very interactive, that is, dedicated to tasks considered most favorable to negotiation. about a third of the teaching time (29%) was interactive, and therefore moderately favorable, while a majority was coded as not very interactive (60%) and not very favorable to negotiation. finally, only a small portion of the teaching time (6%) was characterized as noninteractive. table 9 interaction favorability index for combined esl and fsl groups category task types minutes % of teaching time 4 very interactive: required-exchange in pairs, groups 119 4% 3 interactive: required-exchange as a class, convergent optional-exchange in pairs and groups and as a class, and divergent optional exchange in pairs 859 29% 2 not very interactive: divergent optional exchange in groups and as a class, individual tasks with questions, dialogic teaching 1757 60% 1 not interactive: individual tasks without questions, traditional teaching 177 6% index 2.29 2912 100% using the formula presented in the methodology section, the weighted average of the negotiation-favorability categories was calculated, with a resulting score of 2.29/4. the index allows us to compare the global interactivity of the observed esl and fsl groups, whose results are displayed in table 10. a couple of interesting trends emerge from the data presented in the table. first, while category 4 activity (very interactive) was rather uncommon for both groups, esl classes benefitted from somewhat more interaction-friendly tasks (7%) than did their fsl counterparts (1%). the gap was more pronounced for the interactive category 3 activities, which were nearly twice a frequent in esl (39%) than in fsl (20%). another stark contrast was observed within the notvery-interactive category 2 activities. the fsl classes tended to be much more teacher-centered, with nearly twice as much time dedicated to teacher-centered dialogic teaching (44%) than in esl classes (24%). the same was true for individual tasks with questions, which were about 50% more frequent in fsl (24%) than esl (15%). among the category 1 activities, however, the esl data had about 60% more traditional teaching than that of fsl. additionally, while there were no fsl individual task events without questions, about 3% of the esl michael zuniga, daphnée simard 150 data was characterized by such activity. the results offer an interaction favorability index score of 2.44 for the esl classes and 2.19 for the fsl classes, suggesting that, while both classes fall into the middle of the interactive continuum, the esl classes we observed were about 8.3% more favorable to interaction and the resulting modified input and output. recall that according to our index interpretation, a sore of 1 would indicate a class characterized by exclusive use of traditional teaching and individual seat-work allowing for little or no interaction, while a score of 4 would point to exclusive use of tasks and activities requiring an exchange of information in the pair or group setting. inspection of the index distribution (see table 10) shows that the .25 difference can be explained by a greater frequency of student-centered, convergent tasks in the esl setting and a heavier reliance on teacher-centered practices and individual work in the fsl classes. table 10 interaction favorability index according to target language category and task type esl fsl % % 4 required-exchange tasks (pairs) 2 0 required-exchange tasks (groups) 5 1 total 7 1 3 required-exchange tasks (class) 2 0 convergent optional-exchange tasks 37 20 divergent tasks (pairs) 0 0 total 39 20 2 divergent optional-exchange tasks (group) 3 2 divergent optional-exchange tasks (class) 3 5 individual task with questions 15 24 dialogic teaching 24 44 total 45 75 1 individual task no questions 3 0 traditional teaching 6 4 total 9 4 grand total 100 100 negotiation index 2.44 2.19 note. fsl = french as a second language; esl = english as a second language. 6. discussion the objective of the present study was to gain insight into the types of instructional practices that are being exploited in contemporary esl and fsl classrooms, with regard to their favorability to the generation of interactionally modified input and output. we formulated the following research question: to what extent do esl and fsl second language teachers in a public secondary school setting use instructional practices believed to promote interactionally modified input and output? observing the interactive qualities of l2 instructional practices in esl and fsl classrooms 151 in order to answer our research question, we created an observation tool allowing us to rank 63.8 hours of observed esl and fsl classroom activity according to a set of empirically tested factors shown to promote interactionally modified input and output, that is, general direction of attention, interactivity, information flow, goal structure and setting. this tool allowed us to rank tasks according to what we called an interaction favorability index containing four categories: not interactive, not very interactive, interactive, very interactive. globally the results showed that there was about 60% more student-centered contexts (47%) than teacher-centered contexts (30%), with almost a quarter (24%) of the class time lost to class management and down time. this stands in contrast with fazio and lyster (1998), who found that 78% of french submersion classes and 62% of french immersion classes (from the same montreal region context as the present study) were characterized by teacher-centered activity. such differences signal a trend toward increased student-centered activity in l2 classrooms. with regard to target language, student-centered and teachercentered activity for the fsl classes were more evenly distributed, with 41% for student-centered and 38% for teacher-centered activity, while in the esl classes 52% of classroom time was devoted to student-centered activity and only 22% to teacher-centered activity. examination of the distribution of practices according to the interaction favorability index showed that only a slim minority of teaching time (4%) was dedicated to the most interactive tasks, (i.e., collaborative information-exchange tasks in pairs and groups), and nearly 85% of that category 4 activity occurred in the esl context. only 1% of the fsl data was characterized as very interactive. among the observed required information-exchange tasks were interviews and various versions of the game 20 questions, where learners had to ask questions and guess the word or expression that another learner had in mind. let us recall the one-way-two-way information-gap distinction. the tasks we observed were are all characterized by a one-way exchange in that the target information flowed unilaterally from participant a to participant b. we did not observe a single two-way information-gap task, the most interactive of activities, in either the esl or fsl corpora (e.g., spot-the-differences). interactive (category 3) tasks (e.g., convergent optional-exchange tasks) occupied about a third (29%) of the total teaching time. while these tasks do not require an exchange of information, they are interactive because the convergent nature of their goal structures push interaction and favor communication more than divergent ones (duff, 1986). the category 3 tasks we observed include written comprehension and production tasks, brainstorming, role-plays, reading dialogues, arranging and illustrating images, and creating a brochure. the collaborative nature of such tasks was apparent in our data, as nearly 85% michael zuniga, daphnée simard 152 were conducted in the group setting. with regard to target language differences, these interactive types of tasks were favored by the esl classes, whose learners benefitted from 75% more of such activity than did fsl learners. the not-very-interactive (category 2) tasks characterized the majority (60%) of the classroom activity we observed, among which about one third (30%) was individual tasks with questions and nearly two thirds (60%) was teacher-centered dialogic teaching. in contrast with categories 3 and 4, the fsl group accounted for the majority (63%) of the category 2 activity. additionally, 61% of the individual tasks with questions and 66% of the teacher-centered dialogic activity occurred within the fsl setting. the most commonly observed individual activities included written comprehension and production, listening comprehension and sentence diagramming. dialogic teaching was roughly divided between class discussions, explicit presentation of form, correction of written production and structural exercises, and comprehension activities. the dialogic approach used during these activities led students with varying degree of explicitness to create hypotheses using scaffolding functions, which added an element of interactivity to activities that would otherwise fit squarely into the description of traditional teaching approaches. finally, only about 6% of the observed practices were categorized as not interactive (category 1), and a majority (70%) of this observation was attributed to esl classes. the traditional-teaching practices consisted of correction, explicit presentation of form, and oral and written comprehension activities. similar in nature to the practices observed in the dialogic context, these traditional practices differed in that the students were not invited to participate in the interaction. their role was simply to take notes. our decision to create a new observation tool rather than use a previously validated instrument such as the colt was motivated by pragmatic reasons: in addition to finding an answer to our research questions, our objective was to create a macro-level scale of classroom interactivity based on empirically tested variables, with instructional segments as the unit of analysis. such a tool—not requiring the formal training in discourse analysis needed for the colt—could be useful to esl and fsl teachers and curriculum advisors as a relatively simple, valid procedure for assessing the interactivity of current classroom practices and increasing the interactivity of current or future curriculum. no other published classroom observation tool responds to this need. however, from a research perspective, one of the consequences of creating such a tool is that the results are not directly comparable to those of previous studies using validated instruments. we therefore must determine whether our results reflect the trends observed in the previous studies. the sample of esl and fsl classrooms observed for the current study scored 2.29/4 on the interaction favourability index (i.e., esl and fsl), suggesting that observing the interactive qualities of l2 instructional practices in esl and fsl classrooms 153 the classes were not very interactive. these results seem to corroborate previous findings using the colt, which placed most observed classes in the middle of the experiential-analytical continuum (e.g., allen & carroll, 1988; allen, swain, harley, & cummins, 1990; dicks, 1992; fazio & lyster, 1998). by the same token, the current results suggest that language classes, albeit not very interactive, are becoming more student-centered than those observed in pervious research (i.e., fazio & lyster, 1998). comparison of the target language contexts showed that the esl classes were about 8% more interactive (2.44/4) than their fsl counterparts (2.19/4). these results seem to contradict those from frölich, spada, and allen (1985), who, observing schools in the toronto area, found that teachers of esl, the dominant language outside the classroom, offered fewer of the most highly interactive learning situations. they reasoned that toronto esl teachers might focus more on form in the classroom because students have ample opportunity to benefit from a richly communicative environment outside the classroom. in the case of our observations, french is the dominant language outside the classroom. for the same reasons, this might suggest that fsl teachers tend to focus more on language code in the classroom than esl teachers. from this perspective, our results would seem to be in line with those from the frölich, spada and allen study. analyses of the index categories suggest that globally the observed language classes would benefit from reducing the 60% of time dedicated to weak interactive practices (i.e., category 2: divergent optional exchange in groups and as a class, individual tasks with questions, dialogic teaching) and increasing the 29% dedicated to interactive (i.e., category 3: required-exchange as a class, convergent optional-exchange in pairs and groups and as a class, and divergent optional exchange in pairs) and the 4% dedicated to very interactive (i.e., category 4: required-exchange in pairs and groups) practices. these recommendations would be even more beneficial to the observed fsl classes, which allocated a generous 75% of class time to not very interactive practices and only 20% and 1% to interactive and very interactive practices respectively. 7. conclusion the objective of this observational study was to compare the interactive nature of the instructional practices observed in esl and fsl classrooms. unlike previous classroom observation research, this study examined the instructional sequences used by eight teachers during 60 hours of recorded classroom activity according to five empirically tested factors shown to influence the generation of interactionally modified input and output. while the result show that the esl classes were more student-centered and offered conditions that were more favorable to sla michael zuniga, daphnée simard 154 through interaction than did the fsl classes, the global results suggest that both the esl and fsl classes were generally not very interactive. indeed, nearly 70% of the total observed classroom practices was dedicated to individual seat-work and teacher-centered activity. such a lack of interactivity more than a quarter century after the advent of the communicative language teaching approaches suggests that further research is needed to probe practitioners’ knowledge of task characteristics related to sla through interaction. for example, what are practitioners’ perceptions of collaborative tasks exploiting the gap principle? are they perceived as valuable, difficult to elaborate, unauthentic, unwieldy in the classroom setting? answers to such questions would offer insight into how one might go about increasing the level interactivity of l2 classrooms. another avenue for future research would be to determine whether the five macro-factors investigated in the present study can predict the outcomes of the micro-factors in part b of the colt. the existence of such a relationship 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(2008). incidental focus on form in spanish literature courses. the modern language journal, 92, 50-73. 109 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (1). 109-130 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the development of cohesion in a learner corpus colleen a. neary-sundquist purdue university, usa cnearysu@purdue.edu abstract this study examines the use of cohesive devices (pragmatic markers and conjunctions) in a 24,000-word corpus of transcribed oral data from 47 learners and native speakers of english. both of these cohesive devices increase with proficiency level, but not in the same way. conjunction use seems to increase steadily, and only the differences between the highest and lowest proficiency levels were found to be statistically significant. pragmatic marker use, however, remains fairly stable across the three lowest proficiency levels and rises drastically for the two highest proficiency levels, and the two higher proficiency levels are significantly different from the two lower levels in their use of pragmatic markers. the results are compared to native speaker rates of cohesive device use for the same tasks and under the same conditions. keywords: cohesive device, pragmatic marker, conjunction, cohesion, proficiency level the production of coherent speech is an important part of the development of second language competence. it facilitates the act of communication, making it easier for the listener and speaker to understand and to be understood. one of the ways in which a coherent discourse is achieved is through the use of cohesive devices such as pragmatic markers (expressions such as so, colleen a. neary-sundquist 110 i think, kind of) and conjunctions.1 these devices indicate the relationships (logical or interpersonal) between clauses or supra-clausal units of discourse. these expressions are so important for communication that crossley, salsbury, and mcnamara (2010) found that nonnative-like use or nonuse of lexical cohesive devices resulted in negotiation for meaning in conversations in the same way that other errors or misunderstandings would. this study will examine the use of two types of cohesive devices, that is pragmatic markers and conjunctions, in oral data from second language learners of english. these data will also be compared with those of native speakers’ of english performing the same task. previous research that has looked at the use of cohesive devices has not divided them into the categories of pragmatic markers and conjunctions. but this division is supported by recent corpusbased grammars of english (biber, johansson, leech, conrad, & finegan, 1999; and carter & mccarthy, 2006). the fact that previous research has examined all cohesive devices together has possibly obscured the fact that they are acquired and used differently by language learners. background cohesive devices according to halliday and hasan (1976) and halliday and matthiessen (2004), expressions such as pragmatic markers and conjunctions facilitate the construction of cohesive discourse. halliday and hasan argue that the fundamental property of a text (which can be either written or spoken) is cohesion, a semantic property which “refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text” (p. 4). cohesion is achieved through the use of cohesive relations. halliday and hasan outline four such relations: reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. conjunction as a cohesive relation works through the use of conjunctions but also through various other “conjunctive items.” the conjunctive items that halliday and hasan discuss include classic discourse markers such as now, well, and i mean. halliday and hasan therefore consider both pragmatic markers and conjunctions to be important vehicles for the construction of cohesion in discourse. since halliday and hasan’s (1976) study, a variety of further research has explored how pragmat 1 terminology for these types of expressions varies greatly and will be discussed below. the term cohesive devices will be used to refer to pragmatic markers and conjunctions together. in this study, the term pragmatic markers will be used instead of the (also common) term discourse markers. the development of cohesion in a learner corpus 111 ic markers in particular establish connectivity between different units of discourse (fraser, 1996; knott and dale, 1994; redeker, 1991; schiffrin, 1987). another view of the importance of cohesive devices such as pragmatic markers and conjunctions can be found from the perspective of second language learning, in the american council on the teaching of foreign languages (actfl) guidelines for conducting oral proficiency interviews (opi) (swender 1999). these guidelines incorporate the creation of discourse into their rating criteria under the rubric of discourse competence. one of the aspects of the progression from the novice through to superior level is the ability to generate discourse at various levels: word-level discourse at the novice level, sentence-level discourse at the intermediate level, paragraph-level discourse at the advanced level, and multiparagraph discourse at the superior level. the actfl thus considers the development of discourse to be intrinsically connected to the development of language proficiency. but the question of how learners accomplish this developmental progression remains. certainly this issue is complex and involves the overall development of language proficiency. however, it is equally clear that in order to move from the sentence to the multi-paragraph level of discourse, learners must also be able to control a range of expressions and devices for linking their utterances into a coherent discourse. such expressions can be broadly called cohesive devices, and they also form part of the actfl guidelines. the actfl opi training manual (swender 1999) defines cohesive devices in the following way: words and phrases that link ideas and move forward the action in some form of logical narrative order, whether the “narrative” is a story, a description, or a set of instructions. adverbs and conjunctions serve most frequently as cohesive devices (words and phrases such as: and, but, because, suddenly, in the first place, however). they permit logical sequencing; they establish time-frames for actions and events; they create structures of meaning by establishing principal and supporting language units; they help create and sustain comparisons; they provide an oppositional linguistic framework for debate. (p. 100) the actfl guidelines consider the correct usage of cohesive devices to be a hallmark of the advanced and superior levels. therefore, an examination of the use of pragmatic markers and conjunctions, which are some of the vehicles which provide the means for linking ideas together, should show that more advanced learners use more cohesive devices. cohesion and coherence halliday and hasan (1976) and halliday and matthiessen (2004) discuss how cohesion is realized in texts (both written and spoken). it is important to note, colleen a. neary-sundquist 112 however, that cohesion is only one way in which texts are coherent, and that it alone does not guarantee coherence. as tanskanen (2006) points out, it is possible to construct a cohesive text that is not coherent and a coherent text that does not display any overt cohesive elements. widdowson (1979, p. 138) offers the following example of an exchange that is coherent without being cohesive: a: that’s the telephone. b: i’m in the bath. a: ok. this text can be understood as a coherent exchange, even though none of halliday and hasan’s cohesive relations are specified. similarly, a text can also be overtly cohesive without being coherent. another example, taken from enkvist (1978), illustrates this point: the discussions ended last week. a week has seven days. every day i feed my cat. cats have four legs. the cat is on the mat. mat has three letters. the sentences above show strong cohesion in that each sentence contains the same noun as the previous sentence. despite these connections, however, this text is not coherent: the connection between the sentences is entirely on the surface, and they are not otherwise joined together in any meaningful way. although cohesion and coherence are not interchangeable, this does not mean that they are not both important for language use. that is, although a text can possibly be coherent without being cohesive for the purposes of definition, this does not mean that coherence is not generally realized through the use of cohesive ties in most texts. for this reason, exploring the various ways in which cohesion is manifested is still important for understanding how coherence operates. there are two noticeable limitations in the research on cohesive devices to date that might lead to confusion over terminology and apparently contradictory results. first of all, there is a great deal of terminological overlap and varying definitions of the expressions in question. what one researcher might label a discourse marker might be listed by another researcher as a linking adverbial or vice versa. to take one example, however appears in halliday and hasan’s (1976) list of adversative conjunctive items (p. 242), in fung and carter’s (2007) study as a discourse marker, and in murray (1997) as a connective. to give some idea of the diversity of terms, one need only consider research on second language production of these expressions. they have been examined as smallwords (hasselgreen, 2005), discourse markers (fuller, 2003; fung & carter, 2007; hellerman & vergun, 2007; redeker, 1990; romero-trillo, 2002), cohesive devices (hinkel, 2001; liu & braine, 2005), cohesive features the development of cohesion in a learner corpus 113 (zhang, 2000), logical connectors (green, christopher, & mei, 2000), lexical bundles (nesi & basturkmen, 2006), connectors (bolton, nelson, & hung, 2003; granger & tyson, 1996), and connectives (ozono & ito, 2003; yeung, 2009). it is worth noting that some of the differences in terminology in these investigations stem from whether they focus on cohesion in speech or writing. studies that have investigated speech have more generally looked at discourse markers, while those that have looked at writing have more often focused on connectives. the writing-speaking distinction is not hard and fast; for example, siepmann (2005) examines discourse markers in writing. it is not clear that such a division between cohesive devices in speech and writing is warranted. to the extent that these studies relate in some way to halliday and hasan’s (1976) work on cohesion, such a division between written and spoken modalities is also unfounded. on the contrary, halliday and hasan emphasize that their use of the word texts refers to both written and spoken language. moving beyond halliday and hasan, it is also difficult to justify any absolute distinction between speech and writing. this can be illustrated by considering the case of kind of, a common pragmatic marker that could be assumed to be infrequent in writing. a search of the corpus of contemporary american english shows that kind of is indeed much more frequent in the spoken register (844 occurrences per million words) than in the written registers (295 per million in fiction, 224 per million in magazines, 233 per million in newspapers, and 153 per million in academic writing), but it is still clearly present in the latter. the second limitation apparent in previous research is that cohesive devices have not been separated into different categories according to their grammatical function. this is to some extent not surprising since halliday and hasan (1976) do not separate them (except of course, into additive, adversative, causal, and temporal functions). however, recent comprehensive corpusbased grammars of english do separate them (see below). the question of whether looking at all cohesive devices together might obscure important differences in their acquisition and use remains unanswered. this study aims to address the limitations of previous research by looking at conjunctions and pragmatic markers separately, following the terminology and identification of expressions of carter and mccarthy (2006). separation of pragmatic markers and conjunctions there are both theoretical and empirical grounds for separating these two types of expressions. first of all, recent corpus-based grammars of english colleen a. neary-sundquist 114 have separated these items into different categories (biber, johansson, leech, conrad, & finegan, 1999; and carter & mccarthy, 2006). carter and mccarthy (2006) distinguish between conjunctions and pragmatic markers. they define conjunctions as “items used to mark logical relationships between words, phrases, clauses and sentences” (p. 897). they subdivide the category of conjunctions into subordinating (such as although, after, as, because, before, since, and when) and coordinating conjunctions (and, but, and or). carter and mccarthy (2006) define pragmatic markers as “a class of items which operate outside the structural limits of the clause and encode speakers’ intentions and interpersonal meanings” (p. 208). they subdivide pragmatic markers into discourse markers, stance markers, hedges, and interjections. the fact that some influential theoretical sources separate pragmatic markers and conjunctions, while the research literature does not, indicates a disconnect between the theoretical and empirical approaches to discourse cohesion. it is of course possible that this disconnect is of little consequence, and that both types of expressions are acquired in much the same way. but it is also possible that the grouping of these two types has masked important differences in how pragmatic markers and conjunctions are acquired and used by second language learners. in order to see whether this is the case, this study will subdivide cohesive devices into the categories of pragmatic markers and conjunctions. carter and mccarthy’s (2006) definition was chosen for use in this study based on several factors. the first, and most important of these, is that this definition was generated from a corpus-based investigation of actual language use. the corpusbased nature of the definition makes it particularly appropriate for this study since it likewise investigates a corpus of native and nonnative speech. carter and mccarthy’s definition is also a good choice for a working definition of pragmatic markers because the corpus it is based on encompasses both spoken and written data from different varieties of english. since the definition was derived from actual uses and explained with a number of examples, it is also well suited for use in identifying expressions from a corpus of language in context. the study aim and methodology the aim of this study is to examine the use of cohesive devices in spoken english by learners at varying proficiency levels in comparison with native speakers. in order to examine the use of cohesive devices, this study utilizes a corpus of transcribed speech. a learner corpus such as this one is valid for the the development of cohesion in a learner corpus 115 investigation of phenomena such as the expression of cohesion in second language research because it captures continuous discourse in context (cobb, 2003; granger, 2009). the continuous stretches of learner speech allow us to examine the various devices that learners may be using (or not using) to create cohesive ties in their language. the corpus used in this study includes data from learners at multiple proficiency levels as well as native speakers. all of the subjects are performing the same tasks under the same conditions. previous research that has examined cohesion with multiple proficiency levels and native speaker comparison data is scant. hasselgreen’s (2005) work on norwegian learners of english is one exception. her focus, however, was not cohesion, but fluency, and she was examining something she termed smallwords, which are similar to pragmatic markers. hasselgreen found statistically significant differences among native speakers and nonnative speakers at two different proficiency levels, with the native speakers using the most smallwords, and the lower proficiency group using the fewest smallwords. the current study expands upon hasselgreen’s work by including subjects at a wider range of proficiency levels (four nonnative speaker groups), different language backgrounds (korean and chinese instead of norwegian), and different types of tasks (monologic instead of dialogic tasks in hasselgreen’s study). research question the research question posed in this study, along with its corresponding hypotheses, is as follows: research question 1: how are cohesive devices related to proficiency level? hypothesis 1: learners at higher proficiency levels will use more conjunctions than learners at lower proficiency levels. hypothesis 2: learners at higher proficiency levels will use more pragmatic markers than learners at lower proficiency levels. as discussed in the review of the literature, pragmatic markers and conjunctions can both be considered to belong to the category of cohesive devices, which function to create connections in oral discourse. since we can assume that the speech of learners at higher proficiency levels will be more complex and require more connecting devices, the hypotheses above argue that both pragmatic marker and conjunction use will be higher at higher proficiency levels. there are several additional reasons to argue that pragmatic markers in particular would be more frequent in the speech of learners at higher proficiency levels. pragmatic markers are not usually taught in the classroom, and high proficiency level learners, who have colleen a. neary-sundquist 116 probably had some experience in the country where the language is spoken, will have already acquired them. furthermore, lower-proficiency level learners presumably have to allocate much more attention to formulating their basic message and do not have any resources to spare to indicate additional interpersonal meaning or interpretive information. participants data from 47 subjects were analyzed. the nonnative speaker examinees were all graduate students and prospective teaching assistants at an american university. the nonnative speakers were grouped into four different proficiency levels, numbered 3-6. there were 10 participants at level 3, 10 at level 4, 10 at level 5, 7 at level 6, and 10 native speakers. all of the nonnative speaker examinees came from either a chinese or korean language background.2 a table showing the language background and scores of each of the participants can be found in appendix a. the data for each level were evenly split between examinees with a chinese and korean l1 background; that is, there were 5 examinees with l1 chinese and five examinees with l1 korean in each group of 10 examinees. the group of 7 examinees at level 6 was made up of 3 native chinese speakers and 4 native korean speakers. level 6 had only 7 examinees because that number was the total available in the testing records. the examinees all had some previous training in english and took the test to be certified to teach at the university level. no further information about the examinees’ previous exposure to or study of english is available. design and procedure the data examined in this study come from a corpus collected from a semidirect test of oral proficiency (hereafter opt) that is administered to prospective international teaching assistants. the opt is composed of naturalistic tasks that the examinees are asked to perform which are computer-recorded. this data elicitation technique has several advantages for the present study. first of all, the fact that the conditions under which the data are gathered are 2 these two language backgrounds were chosen based on several criteria. the first was that enough speakers of these languages take the exam in order to provide a range of subjects at every proficiency level. the second consideration was that these groups learned english as a foreign language, but their schooling did not take place in english, which might be the case for indian learners of english. two language groups, rather than one, were chosen in order to counterbalance the results against the possibility of transfer effects from the l1. the development of cohesion in a learner corpus 117 held constant enhances the comparability of the responses. the context is the same for all of the examinees, which allows the discourse they produce to be compared. secondly, since the data are part of an oral proficiency exam, the samples have already been classified into different proficiency levels by trained raters. this allows for the comparison of learners at different proficiency levels, as well as comparison with native speakers who have also taken the exam for comparison purposes. lastly, the naturalistic tasks allow for the examination of longer runs of speech in context, which is well-suited for examining cohesion. there are ten tasks on the opt. for this study, i selected four of the ten tasks for transcription and coding. the four tasks selected were “news,” “personal,” “passing information,” and “telephone.” these four tasks were chosen out of the ten available in order to provide a range of task types and levels of structure. in the news task, the examinees are asked to give their opinion about a news item they have read. in the personal task, the examinees give a response to an open-ended audio question about their personal experience such as how they learned english, or who their favorite teacher is. in the passinginformation task, the examinees relate some information that they have read to someone who has no knowledge of it, such as describing a job notice to someone they think might like to apply for the job. in the telephone task, the examinees leave a short message that they have heard for one of their office mates on that person’s home answering machine. the particular questions used in the different tasks from the opt were not identical; rather, they came from several different forms of the test that are given regularly. although one version of the test is no more difficult than another, this does not mean that they were identical for the purposes of this study. since using different versions of the test allowed for access to a greater variety of data, the benefits outweighed the potential downside of this approach. the exams are rated by two trained raters. when the two raters disagree, the exam is sent to a third rater to break the tie. the exams are given scores from 2 to 6. a set of descriptors for each level can be found in appendix b. for the purposes of the program, a score of 5 or 6 is considered sufficient for the examinee to be certified to teach undergraduates as a teaching assistant. if an examinee receives a score of 3 or 4, they must enroll in a course in oral english for teaching assistants. at the end of this course they may either be certified to teach in the classroom or asked to repeat the course. a score of 2 indicates that the examinee’s oral proficiency skills are not developed enough for them to benefit from the oral english course. scores of 2 or 6 are rare. scores of 2 are generally given only when the examinee is clearly overwhelmed by the demands of the task and gives little or no response. scores of colleen a. neary-sundquist 118 6 are given primarily to examinees whose second language proficiency approaches native or near-native competence. the oral exam responses were transcribed by the present author. the responses were then coded for discourse markers and conjunctions by the author and a colleague, who is also a native speaker of english and an experienced instructor of second languages. in order to identify discourse markers and conjunctions, the definition and lists of discourse markers from carter and mccarthy (2006) were used as a guide (see an earlier section for a discussion of this definition). interrater reliability was .94. in the case of a discrepancy in the identification of the cohesive devices, the two coders discussed the example in question and came to an agreement. results and findings table 1 gives a summary of the data collected. the mean number of words, pragmatic markers, and conjunctions produced by the examinees at each level are presented, along with the corresponding standard deviations, minimums, and maximums. the mean number of total words, pragmatic markers, and conjunctions rose from level 3 through to 6. for each category, level 6 had the highest mean values. the native speaker (ns) group produced fewer mean total words, pragmatic markers, and conjunctions than the level 6 group, but more than the level 5 group. table 1 descriptive statistics for pragmatic marker and conjunction use level n mean no. of words (sd) min/max mean no. of pragmatic markers (sd) min/max mean no. of conjunctions (sd) min/max 3 10 421 (79) 320/359 9 (5) 1 / 17 20 (7) 11/30 4 10 525 (144) 296/823 13 (10) 2 / 36 26 (12) 11/49 5 10 579 (122) 320/718 18 (10) 7 / 41 31 (12) 11/50 6 7 743 (116) 592/901 40 (21) 23 / 85 45 (12) 27/63 native speakers 10 584 (215) 326/1008 31 (13) 8 / 48 42 (17) 21/75 figure 1 shows the average percentages of pragmatic markers and conjunctions used by speakers at different proficiency levels. the rates of pragmatic marker and conjunction usage were calculated by dividing the total number of pragmatic markers or conjunctions used by a speaker by the total number of words. figure 1 shows that the rate of conjunction use rose with proficiency level, with the native speaker group using conjunctions at the the development of cohesion in a learner corpus 119 highest rate. pragmatic marker use also rose with proficiency level, with level 6 and the native speaker group using pragmatic markers at the highest rate. figure 1 pragmatic marker and conjunction use by proficiency level the results above indicate that pragmatic marker and conjunction use rose with proficiency level. the question remains whether the differences in the use of pragmatic markers and conjunctions at different proficiency levels were statistically significant. in order to answer this question, two mixed-model anovas were conducted, one on the pragmatic marker data and one on the conjunction data. the results show that proficiency level was a significant factor (p = .0001) in pragmatic marker use (f = 7.42). after proficiency level was found to be significant for the rate of pragmatic marker use, tukey-kramer pairwise comparisons were conducted to locate the source of the significance. as tables 2 and 3 show, proficiency levels 3 and 6, 3 and ns, 4 and 6, 4 and ns, and 5 and ns were significantly different from each other in their pragmatic marker use. the results of the post-hoc analysis show that the two lowest proficiency levels (3 and 4) were significantly different from the two highest proficiency levels (6 and the native speakers). in addition to this difference, the level 5 group was also significantly different from the native speakers. 2,1 2 3,1 5,2 5,2 4,8 5,1 5,3 6,1 7,3 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 level 3 level 4 level 5 level 6 ns a vg . % to ta l w or ds pragmatic markers conjunctions colleen a. neary-sundquist 120 table 2 significant differences in pragmatic marker use proficiency level level 3 level 4 level 5 level 6 native speakers level 3 * * level 4 * * level 5 * level 6 * * native speakers * * * * p < .05 table 3 the post-hoc results for pragmatic marker use proficiency level proficiency level adjusted p value 3 6 .0023 3 ns .0007 4 6 .0281 4 ns .0119 5 ns .0480 ns = native speakers a separate anova was conducted on the conjunction data to determine if the different proficiency levels differed significantly in their conjunction use. table 4 below shows the results of the anova, which indicate that proficiency level was a significant factor (p=0.0380) in conjunction use. after the anova showed that proficiency level was a significant factor in the speakers’ conjunction use, tukey-kramer pairwise comparisons were then conducted to locate the source of the significance. this post-hoc test showed that only two proficiency levels were significantly different from each other, namely, level 3 and the group of native speakers. table 4 significant differences in conjunction use proficiency level level 3 level 4 level 5 level 6 native speakers level 3 * level 4 level 5 level 6 native speakers * * p < .05 table 5 the post-hoc results for pragmatic marker use proficiency level proficiency level adjusted p value 3 ns .0357 ns = native speakers the development of cohesion in a learner corpus 121 discussion the first point to note is that the examinees used more conjunctions than pragmatic markers at every proficiency level. for the lower levels, this gap is large, but it then narrows at level 6, at which only a percentage point separates them. the gap then starts to widen again for the native speakers, as their use of conjunctions continues to rise in comparison with the nonnative speakers while the number of pragmatic markers remains flat. the trend for conjunction use rises as the proficiency level goes up, although the gain from level 3, at 4.8%, to level 5, at 5.3%, is small. a much more dramatic gain can be seen after level 5; the level 6 usage jumps almost a full percentage point from level 5, and the native speaker group is more than a percentage point above the level 6 group. thus the overall pattern is that conjunction use rises with proficiency level, with the greatest gain occurring at the two highest proficiency levels. this confirms hypothesis 1. the pattern of pragmatic marker use also rises with proficiency level. pragmatic marker use rises slightly from level 3 to level 4. the sharpest gain in pragmatic marker use occurs between levels 5 and 6, with a jump of 2%. but pragmatic marker usage does not continue to rise for the native speakers; instead, their usage is identical to that of the level 6 group. the pattern can be summarized as follows: the two highest and the two lowest proficiency groups are very alike in their pragmatic marker use, but that the middle level shows a dramatic rise in pragmatic marker use. this confirms hypothesis 2. the results presented above have showed that pragmatic marker and conjunction use rise with proficiency level. this result is not surprising, given that it is expected that pragmatic marker use would rise with proficiency level. the use of pragmatic markers shows that the speakers are able to provide additional information about their message, in addition to its basic meaning. this implies that they do not have to allocate as much attention to formulating their basic message and can instead give some attention to how they would like it to be interpreted. this is reflected in increased pragmatic marker use at higher proficiency levels. what is interesting about these results is the fact that the different proficiency levels are more alike in their conjunction use than in their use of pragmatic markers. that is, there is less of a difference between the highest and lowest proficiency groups in the average rate of conjunction use than there is in pragmatic marker use. furthermore, pragmatic marker use rises more suddenly as proficiency level rises, while conjunction use rises more gradually. this indicates that pragmatic marker use may be a more useful factor in discriminating between different proficiency levels. colleen a. neary-sundquist 122 the results have shown that the use of pragmatic markers distinguishes among learners at different proficiency levels to an extent that conjunction use does not. at this point, it is instructive to consider how this difference is manifested in two samples from the data, one from a nonnative speaker who was classified at level 3, and one from a native speaker of english. in these samples, both subjects complete the same task, in which they were asked to pass on information about a flyer they saw advertising a french class to a friend of theirs who they knew was interested in learning french: example 1, level 3 examinee: hello, my friend. i know you are looking for an elementary level french course. but, i found, the french course in x university, so, i want to let you know about that. ah, x university will have the beginning french course…it is scheduled to start next week. the admission is on the first-come, first-served basis. no prior knowledge of french is required. and this class will be held every thursday, from 1pm to 2pm, just one hour. but, this course will require regular attendance and participation, and the late registration fee is 25 dollars. you can pay by check or cash. if you wanna pay by check, you can mail your check to international center, x street, town, state the zip code is xxxxx. and you have to include your name, and address, and contact information. if you wanta get further information, you can call xxx-xxx-xxxx. good luck. example 2, native speaker examinee hey jill i know that you were ah looking to take a french class because you’re moving to canada in a few months and looking for a job there. i just saw this bulletin ah i thought you might be interested in in ah this international center giving a french class. ah, enrollment’s beginning soon, and actually they’re starting next week, so you might wanna come f--. it’s on a first served, first come first served basis, but the neat thing about it is, you don’t have any prior knowledge in french. and classes are held every thursday from 1 to 2. and they do ask that you attend regularly, obviously if you don’t you’re not going to learn so much french. the fee is a little bit steep, 25 dollars, but that’s not bad because it includes the materials that you’ll need. so, ah if you’re interested maybe, i don’t know if you’re interested in this particular class or not, but if you are, ah, you might want to check the international center on x street, or write to them, on r—123 x street, town. and ah, you know, find some more information about it. if you want ah more information, you eve-ev-even call them. i think ah i have their number written down here. i think it’s xxx-xxxx. so, it’s it’s an interesting thing. i think you might enjoy it and it, ‘ll give you at least a beginning level of french, and you’ll find it’s helpful when you get to canada. wish i could do it too. the development of cohesion in a learner corpus 123 the examples above show that while the two speakers are relaying the same information, the ways in which they indicate their knowledge of it and attitudes towards it varies. table 6 compiles all of the information that both speakers presented and lists the wording that they used to introduce it or that they used while explaining it. note that not all of these expressions were counted as pragmatic markers for the purposes of this study. if an expression was counted as a pragmatic marker, it is underlined in the transcripts above and in the table. table 6 information presented and the wording used by a native speaker and a learner no. information related wording used by the native speaker to introduce or nuance information wording used by the learner to introduce or nuance the information 1. you’ve been looking for a french course i know i know 2. this french course is scheduled to start next week. actually 3. first-come, first-served admissions 4. no prior knowledge of french is required. but the neat thing about it is… 5. it meets every thursday from 1-2. and and 6. regular attendance is required. and…obviously but 7. the fee is $25. a little bit and 8. contact the international center for information. even…i think although the comparison of only two samples of discourse from two speakers is limited in its generalizability, several interesting differences can be observed in the examples. the native speaker uses pragmatic markers or other expressions in communicating at several points where the learner uses nothing (items 2, 4, and 8 in table 6). at two different points, both the learner and the native speaker use the same devices to introduce the information (items 1 and 5). what is particularly interesting is item 6, where the native speaker uses and to introduce the information that the course requires regular attendance and obviously to indicate that they think that this is a reasonable requirement: “and they do ask that you attend regularly, obviously if you don’t you’re not going to learn so much french.” it may be that obviously is also inserted here to soften the existence of a requirement in a discourse that is generally meant to put the course in a positive light. the nonnative speaker chooses the conjunction but to introduce the same information: “but, this course will require regular attendance and participation, and the late registration fee is 25 dollars.” in this sentence, the nonnative speaker subject uses but to introduce what could be considered the negative aspects of the course, or at least the points that do not in any way serve as inducements to the imagined interlocutor. the course costs colleen a. neary-sundquist 124 money and you cannnot just drop in whenever you want. as we have already seen, the native speaker attempted to soften this information with the use of pragmatic markers obviously and a little bit. the nonnative speaker may possibly also be attempting to use a softener in their use of but to introduce this information. this is not an incorrect use of but; however, its use here seems, at least to the present author, to lack some additional wording, such as this course should be perfect for what you need, but you should know that attendance is required/ but it does have an attendance requirement. this task of passing on supposedly relevant information requires not only that the speaker relay the information, but also that the speaker explain why they think or know the information to be relevant to the person in question. thus, there is a good deal of justification that usually goes into this response. both speakers in the example above may have felt the same pragmatic need to relay information that might be perceived negatively by his interlocutor. but where the native speaker used a pragmatic marker, the nonnative speaker used a conjunction which is possibly the cohesive device that is closest in function to the meaning they would like to relay. this is an interesting possibility for further research into the relationship between these two cohesive devices. conclusions limitations there are a number of important limitations to the current study. the first limitation is lack of agreement concerning the definition and identification of pragmatic markers. this study attempted to mitigate this difficulty by relying on a standardized list of pragmatic markers (carter & mccarthy, 2006). however, it is important to note that other studies might find different results using a different definition and list of pragmatic markers. a different issue comes up when we consider the identification of conjunctions. although conjunctions do not present the same difficulties in identification as discourse markers do, neither are they a homogenous class. but distinctions within conjunctions, such as coordinating versus subordinating, could be important, especially when considering their role in creating cohesion between two utterances, and the extent to which particular tasks (narrating, describing) might favor the use of either type of conjunction. a final limitation of this study is the testing context from which the data are drawn. some previous research mentioned above was conducted using classroom data. the data used in this study comes from a semidirect oral proficiency test made up of discrete tasks with a few minutes of planning time. the development of cohesion in a learner corpus 125 the importance of the context of the data used in this study should not be underestimated. shohamy (1994) found important differences in the language performance of learners on different types of oral proficiency interviews. therefore, the testing context of the data in this study might have an effect on the language produced by the examinees. the effect of the context from which language learner data is gathered is often overlooked and offers a promising direction for future research. summary and directions of future research the results discussed above indicate that speakers at different proficiency levels are more easily and clearly distinguished by their pragmatic marker use than their conjunction use. that is, there are more significant differences between different proficiency levels involving pragmatic marker use than conjunction use. even pragmatic marker use, however, does not appear to distinguish between speakers who are grouped into adjacent proficiency levels. in one respect, this is not surprising; we would expect that speakers who are close in proficiency level would also be close in other, more specific measures, such as the use of pragmatic markers. but this raises the question of what, if any, significant differences exist in their speech and, in turn, whether some of the finer distinctions that are made between different levels of speakers are in fact valid. the results for conjunction use are more modest. conjunction use rose with proficiency level, but there were fewer significant differences in conjunction use between proficiency levels. only the difference between the highest and lowest proficiency groups was significant. this indicates that conjunction use is not as robust an indicator of differences in proficiency level as pragmatic marker use. these results show that it is instructive to distinguish between pragmatic markers and conjunctions when investigating the use of cohesive devices by learners. when the two types of cohesive devices are examined together, this difference is obscured. why do pragmatic markers and conjunctions pattern so differently, if they are both types of cohesive devices? this could be due to a number of different factors. one possible contributing factor is instruction. anecdotal reports indicate that pragmatic markers are not commonly taught or emphasized in the way that conjunctions are in esl classrooms. this lack of attention to pragmatic markers leaves learners to notice and acquire them incidentally entirely from the input. more input or more contact with native speakers is then likely needed before these types of expressions are acquired. another possible factor is the wider scope of pragmatic markers. since pragmatic markers are understood to operate at a multiclause or sentence level and to encode interpersonal meancolleen a. neary-sundquist 126 ings and the speakers’ intentions, their use is both more complex and more optional than conjunctions, which mark logical relationships up to the sentence level. encoding this additional pragmatic meaning is a luxury which lowerproficiency learners do not have, which would explain why there were more significant differences in discourse marker use among levels. moreover, the results reported here were made possible by the use of a corpus of learner speech, which highlights the efficacy of using computer learner corpora to generate and investigate research questions in the area of second language acquisition. together, these factors offer several benefits in examining second language learner discourse. especially in the area of discourse competence, more research into longer stretches of learner production is necessary to further refine the possible differences between the roles that pragmatic markers and conjunctions play in the development of learner competence. the development of cohesion in a learner corpus 127 references biber, d., johansson, s., leech, g., conrad, s., & finegan, e. 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(2000). cohesive features in the expository writing of undergraduates in two chinese universities. relc journal, 31(1), 61-95. the development of cohesion in a learner corpus 129 appendix a list of participants native language native country overall score chinese china 3 chinese china 3 korean korea 3 korean korea 3 korean korea 3 korean korea 3 korean korea 3 chinese china 3 chinese china 3 chinese china 3 chinese china 4 chinese china 4 chinese china 4 chinese china 4 chinese china 4 korean korea 4 korean korea 4 korean korea 4 korean korea 4 korean korea 4 chinese china 5 chinese china 5 chinese china 5 chinese china 5 chinese china 5 korean korea 5 korean korea 5 korean korea 5 korean korea 5 korean korea 5 chinese china 6 chinese china 6 chinese china 6 korean korea 6 korean korea 6 korean korea 6 korean korea 6 u.s. u.s. u.s. u.s. u.s. u.s. u.s. u.s. u.s. u.s. colleen a. neary-sundquist 130 appendix b descriptors for the levels of the oral proficiency test level 6 content delivery wide range of vocabulary complexity of sentence structure interpretative/summary statements some non-native usage meaning clearly expressed provision of a frame economy of expression smooth delivery almost no pauses/ hesitations/ choppiness thought expressed in one utterance no problems with articulation use of varied intonation and tone level 5 content delivery somewhat unconventional words listener effort needed at times simple sentence construction well organized and coherent meaning clear clearly non-native like delivery some pauses and choppiness, but comprehension unobstructed some sound substitutions listener effort required at points level 4 content delivery dependence on the prompt ineffective/abrupt transitions omission of function words systematic problems with bound morphology topic shifts lack of coherence weak organization repetition interferes with coherence intended meaning unclear lack of elaboration ineffective repetition of words/phrases pauses/hesitations are more frequent flat intonation many identifiable articulation/pronunciation/ stress problems pace interferes with comprehension close listener attention required level 3 content delivery misuse of particular words problems with bound morphology frequent attempts to re-start/re-phrase without clarification unintended meaning misunderstands prompt deliberate/ ineffective delivery frequent pauses/hesitations within phrasal boundaries ineffective attempts of interpretative statements limitation of vocabulary 575 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 8 (3). 2018. 575-598 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.3.3 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt using q methodology to investigate pre-service efl teachers’ mindsets about teaching competences kay irie gakushuin university, kyoto, japan kay.irie@gakushuin.ac.jp stephen ryan waseda univeristy, tokyo, japan stephen.ryan@waseda.jp sarah mercer university of graz, austria sarah.mercer@uni-graz.at abstract this paper reports on a study investigating the mindsets of 51 pre-service teachers at an austrian university using q methodology. despite the recent growth in interest in the concept of mindsets, little research has addressed the mindsets of teachers – most of it focusing on the mindsets of learners – and the research that does investigate teachers tends to focus on beliefs about learning or intelligence. this study offers a new perspective by focusing on teachers’ beliefs about their own teaching competences. a further aim of the study is to expand the methodological repertoire in language education researchers. this study considers the potential of q methodology, a research approach used widely in social sciences and education, but, as yet, rare in this field. the data indicate that the most common mindset among the pre-service teachers is one based around a strong belief in the learnability of the more technical aspects of teaching, while interpersonal skills tend to be regarded as more of a natural talent fixed within the individual. one practical implication of this finding is that teacher education programmes may need to pay more attention to explicitly developing the interpersonal side of kay irie, stephen ryan, sarah mercer 576 teaching. a further finding was that teacher mindsets are constructed through individuals’ management of various sets of implicit theories and tend not to conform to the established dichotomous model of mindsets. keywords: mindsets; q methodology; pre-service teachers; efl teachers; teacher beliefs 1. introduction the concept of mindsets has received considerable attention in education in recent years. what is notable about this attention is that discussions of, and interest in, mindsets have broken out of the narrow confines of academic inquiry to reach a broader, popular audience. the scale of this interest is reflected in kohn’s (2015) observation that the concept of mindsets “has approached the status of a cultural meme and is repeated with uncritical enthusiasm by educators and a growing number of parents.” in this paper, we examine the concept of mindsets, at times with a critical eye, and consider its role in foreign language education. we hope to contribute to a small but growing body of research investigating mindsets in foreign language education and specifically teacher mindsets. we aim to do so by offering a fresh perspective investigating pre-service english as a foreign language (efl) teachers and their views about the learnability of various core teaching competences. a parallel concern running through our study is a methodological one. the psychological dimension of language education has become a key area of interest (dörnyei & ryan 2015; macintyre, gregersen, & mercer, 2016; swain, 2013; williams, mercer, & ryan, 2015) and with this, there has also been a broadening of the field in methodological terms moving away from the traditional quantitative paradigm inspired by an individual differences approach (dörnyei & ryan, 2015). one contributory factor to the diversification of methodological approaches in the field stems from recent thinking about the psychology of language learning, which eschews linear, cause-effect relationships in favour of more complex, dynamic explanations (atkinson, 2011; dörnyei, macintyre, & henry, 2015; gkonou, tatzl, & mercer, 2016). in our study, we turn to q methodology to explore the perceptions of pre-service language teachers in the hope that it may generate insights, which are in turn more nuanced and complex than would be the case with other approaches. at the same time, we hope that drawing attention to this particular methodological approach can also contribute to the expansion of the methodological repertoire available to researchers in the field of foreign language education, in particular, in psychology of language learning. using q methodology to investigate pre-service efl teachers’ mindsets about teaching competences 577 2. what are mindsets? the term mindsets is a recent articulation of the longstanding interest within psychology in the impact of people’s everyday beliefs on how they think and act. an early example of this interest was kelly’s (1955) influential concept of personal constructs. kelly examined how everyday beliefs shaped perceptions of the self and of others, and this line of inquiry was subsequently pursued within educational psychology through the work of carol dweck and numerous colleagues (blackwell, trzesniewski, & dweck, 2007; chiu, hong, & dweck, 1997; dweck, 2000, 2012; dweck, chiu, & hong, 1995; dweck & molden, 2005). much of this work has revolved around the concept of implicit theories and how they affect approaches to learning. implicit theories represent deeply held beliefs that people often find difficult to explain and, at times, may not even be aware of. in respect to learning and intelligence, two types of implicit theories were identified by dweck (1999), entity theories and incremental theories. individuals holding an entity theory view intelligence as a fixed, determined quantity within individuals, while those holding an incremental theory regard it as malleable in the sense that it can be developed and nurtured through effort. in a highly influential paper (dweck et al., 1995), these two sets of implicit theories were referred to as “a world from two perspectives.” this description powerfully captures the magnitude of implicit theories and how they can shape our whole world view, but in another sense, it is a somewhat unhelpful portrayal in that it suggests a harsh dichotomy. fortunately, more recent research into mindsets is moving away from simplistic dichotomous models. nevertheless, some of language employed when describing newer, more complex conceptualizations of mindsets, can still imply a dichotomy; for example, burnette, o’boyle, vanepps, pollack, and finkel (2012, p. 659) in an authoritative review of the field refer to “beliefs about the malleable versus fixed nature of human ability.” perhaps the roots of the dichotomous approach can be partially explained by some of the methods initially employed to research implicit beliefs. early studies (dweck et al., 1995; dweck & leggett, 1988) were based around selfreport questionnaire instruments that were analysed by excluding those participants who scored neutrally on the scales, in other words, those not strongly subscribing to either set of theories. although this excluded only 15% of the population, in effect, these methods and instruments assumed and looked for a dichotomy. however, it is fair to say that much of the early academic interest in implicit theories, and certainly the subsequent popular acclaim for the concept of mindsets, has come from the intuitive appeal of a clearly defined dichotomy. in this study, we aim to examine this apparent dichotomy and consider how useful it is to frame mindsets in such a way. we would like to explore some of the kay irie, stephen ryan, sarah mercer 578 nuances between the two extreme viewpoints, to reintegrate the lost 15%, and to think about whether it is possible to do so without losing the power and intuitive appeal of the original model. at this point, we should take care not to misrepresent dweck’s work and imply that she offers nothing more than a simplistic dichotomy. one of the most intriguing findings of the implicit theories research has been that people tend not to subscribe to a single overarching global set of implicit theories, but they hold independent theories for different domains. for example, it is entirely plausible for somebody to hold strong entity theories relating to athletic ability, essentially believing that some people are naturally more athletically gifted than others and success in athletic pursuits is dependent on these natural gifts, while subscribing to strong incremental theories in the area of, say, personal morality, believing that even the most evil people are capable of change if they make the effort. according to dweck et al. (1995), . . . people need not have one sweeping theory that cuts across all human attributes. indeed, our research shows that although some people do have one very generalized theory, others have different theories of different attributes. (p. 269) from an educational perspective, this means that people may hold one set of theories in one academic domain, say science, and a different set in another, for example learning foreign languages. it is even possible that these theories may differ at the sub-domain level, so it is conceivable that someone could be an entity theorist when it comes to learning to speak in a foreign language, but an incremental theorist regarding learning to read that language (mercer & ryan, 2010). since the publication of the highly successful book, mindsets (dweck, 2006), the term ‘implicit theories’ has been overtaken by the more accessible term ‘mindsets’ (burnette et al., 2012). in our view, this is a welcome development representing something more substantial than a mere superficial terminological makeover. the term ‘mindsets’ seems to be more intuitively appealing to a non-academic audience, better capturing the powerful, all-encompassing nature of mindsets and how deeply held beliefs interact other aspects of our psychology. within the mindsets framework, a fixed mindset corresponds to an entity theory, while a growth mindset equates to an incremental theory. the importance of mindsets for academic success has been evinced in a multitude of studies which have found mindsets to be connected to many other key psychological concepts, such as self-regulation (kray & haselhuhn, 2007; nussbaum & dweck, 2008), persistence (yeager & dweck, 2012), as well as goal orientations, and learning strategies (dweck, 2012; dweck & molden, 2005). robins and pals (2002) propose that the interconnections between these variables using q methodology to investigate pre-service efl teachers’ mindsets about teaching competences 579 suggest that mindsets might be best thought of as an overall framework of interconnected beliefs and self-regulatory processes. it is this central, connecting role that makes mindsets so exciting to investigate at a time when researchers are looking for ways to understand how various aspects of psychology work together, as opposed to the more familiar tendency to isolate individual aspects of psychology and measure them in isolation. 3. mindsets in foreign language learning the most influential research into mindsets has taken place in domains where natural ability is believed to play a big part in successful outcomes, such as sport and music (ommundsen, 2003; scripp, 2013), or in academic fields that are believed to require some form of brilliance or genius (leslie, cimpian, meyer, & freeland, 2015). however, as we briefly mentioned in our introduction, there is a growing body of work looking at mindsets in foreign language learning (lou & noels, 2016; mercer & ryan, 2010; ryan & mercer, 2012). given the widespread belief in some form of natural aptitude or “gift” for languages, it is somewhat surprising that research in this area has been slow to take off. nevertheless, it was this split between language learning success as a product of innate talent or the result of sustained, purposeful effort that inspired the first, slightly simplistic, accounts of language learning mindsets. subsequent research found the picture to be more complex, and more interesting, involving other factors, such as the nature of language learning (are languages consciously ‘learned’ or naturally ‘picked up’?), the site of language learning (are languages better learned in classrooms or acquired in naturalistic settings without formal study?), and personality (are some personalities better suited to learning languages than others?), and if so is personality something that can be consciously changed? in the latest, most ambitious research into mindsets in foreign language learning, lou and noels (2017) explore the connections between mindsets and goals but, most importantly, they introduce an exciting, sophisticated research tool entitled language mindsets inventory (lmi), which promises to make a strong contribution to the field. however, one feature that all of the research into language learning mindsets to date shares is, quite understandably, a focus on the mindsets of language learners. it is our belief that the time is now right to expand that agenda in order to provide a more complete picture by switching our attention to the mindsets of language teachers. in education more broadly, in comparison to the vast body of work on learner mindsets, there has been relatively little research about teacher mindsets. typically, the studies that do exist most often look at teachers’ mindsets about their learners’ subject abilities or intelligence more generally (e.g., gutshall, kay irie, stephen ryan, sarah mercer 580 2013; jones, bryant, snyder, & malone, 2012; jonsson, beach, korp, & erlandson, 2012; leroy, bressoux, sarrazin, & trouilloud, 2007; lynott & woolfolk, 1994; pretzlik, olsson, nabuco, & cruz, 2003). in some rare instances, they may examine teachers’ mindset about their own subject competence (asbury, klassen, bowyercrane, kyriacou, & nash, 2016) or look at, for example, how their mindsets affect the kind of feedback, praise or comfort they offer their students (rattan, good, & dweck, 2012). however, to the best of our knowledge, there seem to be virtually no studies examining teacher mindsets about the competences of being a teacher. given popular discourse about ‘natural-born’ teachers, we might suspect that teaching competences are also a domain susceptible to more fixed mindsets. referring to a thesis by gero (2013), dweck (2014) explains the potentially central role played by pre-service teachers’ mindsets about teaching. gero’s study examined teachers’ mindsets about whether they believed that teaching was simply a deep-seated natural ability or it was more an ability that could be improved over time. looking at how their beliefs combined with their practices, his findings were similar to those in the area of learning, in that he too found teachers with fixed mindsets less willing to take risks in their teaching and less likely to tackle problems head on. dweck reflects on the implications for pre-service teachers and concludes that if they hold a fixed mindset, then difficulties in their training and challenges in their praxis experiences can threaten their sense of self, leading them to give up and drop out. in other words, they may conclude they are not ‘natural-born’ teachers and therefore not suited to the profession after all. clearly, the potential implications for teacher education programmes are considerable. 4. researching mindsets researching people’s beliefs is beset with challenges. self-report instruments risk requiring participants to make judgements on matters that may not be of any interest or relevance to them, and possibly ignoring other issues that may be of great significance. by nature of their construction, participants’ beliefs as expressed through questionnaire data largely reflect the understandings and interests of the researcher who designed the instrument. to overcome some of these limitations, qualitative research approaches have been adopted (see barcelos & kalaja, 2011; kalaja, barcelos, aro, & ruohotie-lyhty, 2015), although here too there are potential challenges for researchers in terms of the quality of the data, interpretation and boundaries of data collection. a particular problem in respect to mindsets is that people are often not aware of or find it difficult to articulate these deeply rooted beliefs. as such in a qualitative study, there is a strong possibility that the data obtained from participants may have serious omissions preventing any meaningful evaluation of the individual’s mindsets. using q methodology to investigate pre-service efl teachers’ mindsets about teaching competences 581 the challenge therefore facing mindset researchers is how can we ask people in a systematic and principled way about things they may struggle to articulate without spoon-feeding them a narrow range of fixed beliefs? our partial solution to this has been to turn to q methodology, ultimately a qualitative approach, but one that bears many of the traits of quantitative research. a particular appeal of the q approach is that it allows participants to express their views in a way that does not impose a dichotomy and explores how different views relate to each other within an individual. in our view, this makes it an ideal tool for investigating mindsets in a nuanced way. 5. q methodology q methodology is a research approach used in psychology and health studies, among others, and is designed to explore and explain the subjective viewpoints of a group of people in a specific context. its use within education and educational psychology is growing and it has been used to investigate the beliefs of teachers (rimm-kaufman, storm, sawyer, pianta, & laparo, 2006), the focus of our study. so far, its use in foreign language education studies has been limited but there are signs of a burgeoning interest (collins & angelova, 2015; irie, 2014; irie & ryan, 2015; mäntysaari, 2013; pemberton & cooker, 2012). one of the problems inherent in writing up a q study for a language education audience is that, at present, a considerable amount of space is required to explain the assumptions and techniques involved; some of the fundamental principles of q can seem counter-intuitive to people more familiar with conventional research approaches. since space is limited, we will avoid an overly detailed description (for brief accounts, see irie & ryan, 2015) and confine our discussion to an outline of some of the principal features of a q study and their relevance to our current research. (limited space is also a major factor in our decision to restrict the current discussion to an interpretation of the numerical data obtained from our study, reluctantly leaving out in this paper the potentially rich but spaceconsuming interview data associated with a q study.) the term q is used in contrast to r, which represents the conventional, more familiar form of correlational analysis that identifies general tendencies within a population by averaging out differences that exist between specific individuals. instead, q switches focus to the whole person and the feelings or views they have on a given topic, without attempting to break that individual down into a set of variables. the distinguishing features of q research are: 1) data collection based on an activity that requires participants to sort items according to some subjective criterion; 2) statistical analysis of the data based on a by-person factor analysis technique; 3) a qualitative interpretation of that data kay irie, stephen ryan, sarah mercer 582 through a narrative account of each factor found in the analysis at the second stage. for us, the initial attraction of q is that it is “primarily an exploratory technique” (watts & stenner, 2005, p. 89) that allows for an active, interpretative role on the part of the researchers and, in our view, this active interpretative role is essential for investigating mindsets and understand the complexities of participants’ psychology. when investigating mindsets, we are essentially asking participants to express their views on something they may not be fully aware of and perhaps have not consciously considered in much detail. this suggests that researchers need to find a way to first heighten participants’ awareness of some of the issues under investigation and, second, to provide the opportunity to think about these issues at length. q offers both of these. the success of a q study is largely dependent on the set of items being sorted. this usually means a collection of statements that covers the topic under investigation as widely as possible, and this almost invariably means including statements from sources other than representative of the participants. a further advantage of a q approach is that it enables participants to think about and make sense of these statements as they proceed with the activity. in sorting a set of statements, they are required to think about those statements and the degree to which the statements resonate with them; throughout the sorting activity, they have the opportunity to change their minds and move things around in relation to the other statements. in fact, it is not unusual to observe participants move items around to places completely different to where they initially placed them, the equivalent to switching from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’ in a likert-type scale, something very rare in a questionnaire study but unremarkable in a q project. in fact, one of our key motives for adopting a q approach was the belief that q offers something concrete back to participants. in our case, we believe it gave the pre-service teachers a valuable opportunity to think about themselves, their learning and their teaching in a productive manner. 6. the study 6.1. participants 51 pre-service teachers at an austrian university were asked to sort the q statements in march, 2016. the mean age of the participants was 21.4 years of age, ranging between 19 and 32 with a standard deviation of 2.66. thirty-four of the participants were female, 15 were male, while two did not provide gender information. this gender distribution is typical for the students studying to become efl teachers in this setting. using q methodology to investigate pre-service efl teachers’ mindsets about teaching competences 583 6.2. method the central component of a q study is the collection of data in the form of a sorting activity. participants are required to sort a collection of items, usually statements relating to the topic under investigation, according to some subjective criterion such as “agree/disagree.” in most q studies, participants are forced to sort these statements according to a set pattern determined by a sorting grid (see figure 1). this forced choice aspect of a q study can be difficult for both participants and readers to understand as it can appear to be coercing participants to say things they do not wish to say. in a likert-type questionnaire, it is possible – and very common – for a participant to respond in a neutral way to every item on the question but a q study does not allow this. this is because in a q study, we are not looking at responses to individual items but at the whole picture which emerges, taking into account the connections and relations between the statements being sorted. in the current study, the final set of statements was constructed by first referring to a collection of narrative accounts on the topic of what makes a good language teacher written by pre-service language teachers from the same population although not the same students who sorted the q statements. the idea behind this approach is that it would elicit a wide range of views common to the discourse of the population under investigation. the data obtained from these narratives were then supplemented by reference to the academic literature and popular texts, such as newspaper articles, on what makes a good teacher generally. the aim at this stage is to build as wide a coverage as possible of the discourse relating to the topic under investigation. an initial set of 140 items was compiled and this pool was then examined for repetition, relevance and overall coverage by a panel of five experts in the field. this process reduced the initial set to 58 items, which were then employed in an extensive pilot study conducted with a purposive sample of pre-service language teachers judged likely to offer strong opinions. after piloting, two statements, which were found not to make sense, were eliminated from the initial set, leaving a total of 56 and the pilot also study proved invaluable as a means of refining and adjusting the final presentation of the q sort in several other respects. the pilot study was based around the following condition of instruction: here is a set of statements about what makes a good language teacher. please rate these statements according to whether you think this is something you can learn and develop, or something you think that cannot be learned but rather something more innate. those qualities/characteristics you think can be developed should be rated 0-5 (learnable). those you feel are innate and cannot be learned should be given 0-5 (not learnable). kay irie, stephen ryan, sarah mercer 584 however, follow-up interviews revealed that our initial approach was problematic in that it was asking sorters to make two separate judgements: one regarding the learnability of the statements and a second one concerning the value or importance attached to the statement, whether this was something a “good language teacher” would do. so, for example, if we pick a statement at random – good language teachers are confident – the condition of instruction used in the pilot study was simultaneously asking whether confidence is a quality that could be learned and if it was something desirable or essential for being a language teacher. in response to the interview feedback, we rephrased the statements in order to eliminate any reference to “good teachers” so as to allow participants to focus solely on the issue of learnability. shifting to the term “learnable” was a strategic decision. although dweck’s original conceptualization refers to malleability, in our judgement “learnable” represented an adequate synonym for “malleable” in this context, given the practical demands of designing the research instrument – in english – for participants for whom english was not a first language. data from the pilot interviews supported our view that participants were interpreting the term “learnable” in a way consistent with our research aims. a further significant revision prompted by the pilot study related to the final presentation of the q-sort grid. in the pilot study, each column on the grid was headed by a numerical value, ranging from 5 (learnable) to -5 (innate), with 0 as a neutral middle value. the follow-up interviews revealed that sorters felt the positive and negative numerical values, in combination with the neutral 0, were forcing them into a stark dichotomous choice; for example, going back to the earlier confidence statement, placing the statement in the column headed by -5 was a clear expression that this was something not learnable, as opposed to being less learnable than other items in the set. this was a key discovery, leading to a major improvement in the research design. this can also be problematic in the interpretation of a q study, so it is worth spending a little time explaining this change. our remedy was to remove all numerical values from the grid, placing the term “learnable” at the centre of the heading, and placing the choices on a continuum of “most likely” to be learnable and “least likely” to be learnable to the right and left of the grid (see figure 1). removing the numerical values reduced the sense of being forced into a false dichotomy on the part of participants. it is possible for people to believe that everything is learnable, but even in such a case they are unlikely to be considered learnable to the same degree; some things are easier to learn than others and q explores how these views relate to each other. for people used to conventional likert-type questionnaires – both participants and readers of articles – it is easy to assume that statements placed to the left of the grid represent a belief that something is not learnable while something to the right is learnable. using q methodology to investigate pre-service efl teachers’ mindsets about teaching competences 585 this is not the case at all; the position of the card on the grid represents its learnability in relation other cards in the view of the participant. the changes in the research design were reinforced by a revision to the condition of instruction: please arrange the statements on the cards according to how likely you believe trainee teachers would be able to learn them. when you feel that the statement on a card describes something that is likely to be learnable, place the card on the right side of the grid. you should place those that you feel are most likely to be learnable at the far right gradually moving towards the left with statements you believe are less likely to be learnable. figure 1 the final q-sort grid 6.3. data analysis in order to identify patterns of shared viewpoints, each of the 51 q sorts were converted into numerical form with each item given ranking values ranging from -5 to +5 according to the forced distribution pattern shown in figure 1. as discussed earlier, forced distribution is the element of a q study that requires participants to sort the statements according to a predetermined pattern. even if this pattern is not immediately appealing to participants, the act of accommodating their thoughts to the predetermined pattern requires them to think carefully about how the items relate to each other, and not just look at each item in isolation. the ranking values, shown in table 1 range from 5, the extreme right of the grid shown in figure 1 and expressing a view that the statement is most likely to be learnable, to -5, the left side of the grid kay irie, stephen ryan, sarah mercer 586 and expressing the view that the statement is least likely to be learnable. it should be reiterated that these numerical values were not available to the participants at the time of the sort but were applied at a later stage solely for the purposes of statistical analysis. the numerical data of q sorts were intercorrelated and subjected to a byperson factor analysis using the pqmethod dedicated software package (schmolck, 2014). the factor analysis revealed three key factors, which were rotated and accounted for the total of 57% of the variance, with 50 out of the 51 sorts loading significantly on at least one of the factors at p < .01 level, with loadings in excess of +/.34. we chose the three-factor solution not solely based on eigenvalues (above 1.00), the volume of the variance, but also on the number of sorts covered. table 1 forced-choice frequency distribution ranking value -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3 +4 +5 number of items 2 4 5 6 7 8 7 6 5 4 2 6.4. results table 2 shows z-scores which were calculated for each statement using the average of all the individual q sorts that loaded significantly and exclusively on that factor. since not all of these q sorts contribute equally to define the factor, the technique of weighted average is used (see brown, 1980 for details). this score lets us compare how each statement is valued across the factors. for example, z-scores of statement 4 are -2.08 for factor 1, 1.04 for factor 2, and 1.90 for factor 3. this means that those who loaded significantly on factor 1 feel that being warm-hearted with learners is much less learnable or difficult to learn than those who share the views that emerged in factor 2 and 3 do. table 2 z-score for each statement no statement f1 f2 f3 1 being enthusiastic about teaching. 1.00 1.00 -0.38 2 acting as a mentor to learners. 1.42 -0.68 1.52 3 being confident in a classroom. -0.42 0.65 -0.76 4 being warm-hearted with learners. -2.08 1.04 1.90 5 creating useful handouts for one’s learners. -0.73 -0.77 0.38 6 having a good sense of humour in class. 0.82 -1.28 1.52 7 creating good student-teacher-relationships. 1.90 0.90 1.52 8 having clear objectives for each lesson. 1.57 0.21 1.52 9 assigning effective homework. 1.15 0.39 -1.14 10 serving as an inspiration for one’s learners. -1.70 0.76 1.14 11 explaining language in more than one way. -0.85 1.41 0.38 12 engaging actively with the professional literature. -0.45 0.38 -0.38 13 having a deep love of the language. 0.13 -0.99 0.00 using q methodology to investigate pre-service efl teachers’ mindsets about teaching competences 587 14 helping one’s learners to love the subject. -0.55 1.13 0.76 15 being flexible in one’s teaching. -0.36 2.15 0.38 16 remembering the names of learners. -2.11 -0.03 1.14 17 providing challenge for one’s learners. 1.44 1.26 0.76 18 being patient with learners. -1.21 -1.63 0.38 19 monitoring learners’ progress effectively. -0.20 0.26 -1.14 20 reflecting on one’s own teaching. -0.61 -1.42 0.38 21 using the target language throughout the lesson. -1.92 0.67 1.90 22 focusing on practising speaking skills. 0.32 0.21 -1.14 23 giving constructive feedback. 0.62 0.15 0.00 24 encouraging learners to speak without worrying about mistakes. 0.47 -0.99 -1.52 25 smiling in the classroom. 1.00 0.21 0.00 26 having good classroom management skills. 1.00 0.32 -1.52 27 promoting critical thinking skills in one’s learners. -0.96 -2.02 -0.76 28 praising learners appropriately. -0.85 1.61 0.76 29 staying in control of one’s emotions in the classroom. 0.62 -0.66 -0.38 30 being well organized in one’s professional work. 1.11 -0.90 -1.52 31 understanding individual learners’ needs. -1.51 1.77 0.76 32 loving one’s job. 0.19 0.61 -1.90 33 caring about one’s learners. -0.54 -0.87 -0.38 34 being aware of different learning styles. -0.08 -0.43 0.00 35 being kind to learners. -0.32 -1.62 0.76 36 having good pronunciation. 1.54 0.98 -1.52 37 having an understanding of the details of language and grammar. 0.51 -1.49 0.38 38 serving as positive role models. -0.11 1.13 0.00 39 being highly proficient in the target language. -0.47 0.44 -0.38 40 treating all learners equally. 0.54 -0.72 -1.14 41 finding the right balance between being strict and friendly. -0.24 -0.30 0.00 42 developing materials to supplement the textbook. 0.96 1.94 0.76 43 providing an insight into the target language culture. 1.22 -0.46 -1.90 44 being approachable for learners. -1.48 -0.09 1.14 45 taking learners’ concerns seriously. -1.43 1.41 1.14 46 being able to focus on meaning rather than grammatical form. -0.31 -0.75 0.00 47 expressing clearly what one expects from one’s learners. -0.83 0.16 -0.76 48 being able to control one’s classes. 0.58 -0.98 1.14 49 having a passion for teaching. 0.68 -0.30 -0.76 50 creating an entertaining atmosphere to carry out class activities. -0.50 -0.37 -0.76 51 being on time for classes. 1.03 -0.29 0.00 52 designing entertaining classroom activities. 0.47 -1.26 -0.76 53 being imaginative in one’s teaching. 0.15 0.15 -1.14 54 motivating one’s learners. 0.80 -0.45 0.38 55 encouraging one’s learners to use their skills beyond the classroom. 0.02 -0.60 -0.38 56 persevering with weaker learners. -0.47 -0.98 -0.38 eigenvalues 24.98 2.47 1.62 variance explained 49% 5% 3% 6.5. interpreting the factors now we will describe and explain these three factors in a way that transforms the raw numerical data into recognizable individuals. to prepare the results of kay irie, stephen ryan, sarah mercer 588 the factor analysis for interpretation, the statements were also rank-ordered according to the z-scores from the most learnable (+5) to least learnable (-5) within each factor and to fit the distribution used in the q-sort grid (table 1). this step transforms the shared views emerged in the factor analysis, back to the hypothetical q sorts by the people who have the exact views. this allows the researcher to see the relative importance of all the statements within each factor to gain the overall sense of the viewpoint and identify the statements which distinctively contribute to the shaping of the particular view. for the purposes of illustration, we will include the top and bottom ranking statements for each factor (table 3, 4, and 5), but we should point out that our interpretations were based on an analysis of all the sorted statements. a key consideration in the interpretation of the three factors was to remain aware that participants were expressing a view as to what extent something was learnable and not the degree to which it was desirable or important. there was a constant danger of interpreting these sorts as expressions of the participants’ goals as teachers, but this was not the purpose of the sorting activity. nevertheless, q requires the researcher to take an active interpretative role at this stage, and in our view, it was impossible to dismiss the likelihood that teachers at the earliest stages of their careers will have a greater interest in those qualities or abilities that seem possible to them. in our interpretation, we walked a fine line between focusing on learnability, while not ignoring the relevance of learnability to individuals in a learning situation. 6.5.1. factor 1: the developing professional table 3 factor 1: the top and bottom ranking statements ranking item # statement top 6 5 7 creating good student-teacher-relationships. 5 8 having clear objectives for each lesson. 4 36 having good pronunciation. 4 17 providing challenge for one’s learners. 4 2 acting as a mentor to learners. 4 43 providing an insight into the target language culture. bottom 6 -4 44 being approachable for learners. -4 31 understanding individual learners’ needs. -4 10 serving as an inspiration for one’s learners. -4 21 using the target language throughout the lesson. -5 4 being warm-hearted with learners. -5 16 remembering the names of learners. using q methodology to investigate pre-service efl teachers’ mindsets about teaching competences 589 this is someone who sees the “technical” side of teaching as eminently learnable. when we say the “technical side”, we are referring to areas such as classroom management and language proficiency, skills such as developing clear goals for each lesson (8) and having good pronunciation (36). however, what is intriguing about this view is that certain interpersonal skills, such as creating good relationships and acting as a mentor to students are seen as learnable, while other interpersonal skills, perhaps those seen as closer to personality traits, such as being warm-hearted (21) or approachable (44), are seen as the least learnable aspects of being a teacher. the appearance of remembering the names of learners (16) as the least learnable skill offers further insights. this suggests a view that certain cognitive capacities and personality traits are seen as fixed – this was supported by other items in the sort – while other interpersonal skills connected to teaching are possible without a fundamental change in personality; if a change in personality is not possible, then those qualities that require sincerity, such as warm-heartedness or empathy, can never be genuinely learned, maybe faked but never truly learned. perhaps the most revealing contrast comes in the view that teachers can learn to be good mentors (2) but they can never learn to be inspirational; mentoring is regarded as a skill that can be taught and learned but the capacity to inspire is a gift that these participants view some people as having, while others do not. 6.5.2. factor 2: the adaptable classroom practitioner table 4 factor 2: the top and bottom ranking statements ranking item # statement top 6 5 15 being flexible in one’s teaching. 5 42 developing materials to supplement the textbook. 4 31 understanding individual learners’ needs. 4 28 praising learners appropriately. 4 11 explaining language in more than one way. 4 45 taking learners’ concerns seriously. bottom 6 -4 6 having a good sense of humour in class. -4 20 reflecting on one’s own teaching. -4 37 having an understanding of the details of language. -4 35 being kind to learners. -5 18 being patient with learners. -5 27 promoting critical thinking skills in one’s learner kay irie, stephen ryan, sarah mercer 590 this is someone who can learn to adapt and offer variety. all of the most learnable qualities are connected to responding to classroom situations. teachers can be flexible in their teaching (15) by understanding individual student needs (31) and taking their concerns seriously (45). they can learn to provide variety by explaining language in different ways (11), perhaps in response to their developing understanding of learner needs and concerns, and develop their own original materials (42). this is someone who regards adaptability and responsiveness to situational needs as qualities that can be learned but, in contrast to the developing professional, regards some of the technical side of teaching as far less learnable. it is particularly interesting that items such as understanding the details of language (37) are not regarded as learnable. however, this individual does share the view that certain personality traits related to teaching cannot be changed, such as having a sense of humour (6), being kind to (35), and patient with (18) students. both the developing professional and the adaptable classroom practitioner share a reasonably optimistic outlook regarding the learnability of most aspects of becoming a language teacher. however, they also seemed to share the view that this learnability is to a great degree restricted by fixed personality traits. 6.5.3. factor 3: the caring-sharing teacher table 5 factor 3: the top and bottom ranking statements ranking item # statement top 6 5 4 being warm-hearted with learners. 5 21 using the target language throughout the lesson. 4 6 having a good sense of humour in class. 4 7 creating good student-teacher-relationships. 4 8 having clear objectives for each lesson. 4 2 acting as a mentor to learners. bottom 6 -4 30 being well organized in one’s professional work. -4 36 having good pronunciation. -4 24 encouraging learners to speak without worrying about mistakes. -4 26 having good classroom management skills. -5 43 providing an insight into the target language culture. -5 32 loving one’s job. this is someone, who in contrast to the two earlier examples, has great optimism about the learnability of interpersonal skills required for teaching. teachers can learn to create good student-teacher-relationships as they can be their mentors (2), they can learn to be warm-hearted (4) and they can learn to have using q methodology to investigate pre-service efl teachers’ mindsets about teaching competences 591 a sense of humour (6). however, here it is the more technical side of teaching that is difficult to learn. good pronunciation (36) and insight into the target language culture (43) are thought to be difficult to master even with effort, as are being organized at work (30) and having good classroom management skills (26). it seems like the latter two are behavioural manifestations of certain personality traits, and disorganized people can never learn to overcome this aspect of this personality, but are perhaps able to compensate through learning to develop the interpersonal side of teaching. 7. discussion the first point to note is that the majority of participants loaded on to the developing professional factor. this was the overwhelmingly dominant view and perhaps this should not be so surprising given the population being investigated. in fact, it is difficult to conceive of group of people likely to be more favourably disposed to an optimistic view of learnability than a group of pre-service teachers in the early stages of their professional development. however, this raises an interesting question about the nature of mindsets and the extent to which they are situationally dependent. it may be that people with an already growthoriented mindset tend to be attracted to teaching, but it is also conceivable that being in a growth-oriented environment, such as a teacher training course, promotes a growth mindset. further questions as to the role of situational factors in shaping the development of mindsets arise when we consider the connections between the pre-service teachers’ views on learnability and the existing curriculum. the dominant view of the participants in our study was that the more technical aspects of teaching, such as classroom management and language awareness could be learned, while the more interpersonal dimension could not. this is a view that neatly reflects the existing curriculum and it is worth speculating as to what extent their views of what is learnable and what is not have been influenced by the contents of their current curriculum. it may well be that views of what is learnable are being shaped by what is on the curriculum, that there is a kind of circularity based on an assumption that what is on the curriculum is there by virtue of the fact that it is learnable and the interpersonal skills are not on the curriculum because they are not learnable. from a more general theoretical perspective, we found no evidence of the clear dichotomy posited in much of the mindsets literature. in fact, we had to significantly redesign our research after our pilot study found participants reluctant to engage with any items assuming this kind of dichotomy. we have already speculated that one reason for this could be the nature of the participants and kay irie, stephen ryan, sarah mercer 592 the fact that pre-service teachers are a special group likely to tend towards a growth mindset. however, it is worth considering if the study tells us anything else about the mindsets theory. some of the early mindset theories (implicit theories) were built around somewhat decontextualized data that asked about learning in an abstract way. however, when we consider learning in context, such as learning to become a language teacher, the picture becomes infinitely more complex. for example, if we had conceptualized becoming a language teacher as being based around acquiring a specific single set of skills, such as classroom management techniques, then it is highly possible that we would have obtained a clearer, more dichotomous picture consistent with the existing literature. a long-term undertaking such as becoming a language teacher, and learning a foreign language for that matter, involves the development of multiple skills and competences and thus implies various sets of implicit theories. prominent in our study were theories about the ability to learn a language, the ability to learn classroom techniques, the ability to develop the appropriate interpersonal skills, and individual personality. none of these single sets of theories were important in isolation, it was the ways in which they interconnected relative to each other that informed the overall view. the three narratives constructed from our data suggest a process of balancing or managing the various aspects of becoming a teacher. for example, our caring-sharing teacher seemed to be accepting that certain personality-based aspects of becoming a teacher, such as being well organized, could never be learned but perhaps the effects of this “natural” lack of organization could be offset by the ability to learn more about the interpersonal side of teaching, such as being warm-hearted. our research suggests that in language teaching – and learning – it is not really feasible to construct mindsets around any single set of implicit theories and that we need to focus more on how people manage the various competing implicit and explicit theories. as a result, we conclude that it may be more productive to conceive of mindsets in terms of prototypes, rather than a simple dichotomy. 8. limitations our study was intentionally designed to focus on a specific situation: pre-service efl teachers in austria. as such, it is difficult to apply any generalizations from our study to other contexts, given specificities of local concerns. however, the question of generalization was an issue in the actual collection of data. the statements in our research instrument asked about the learnability of the core competences associated with becoming a teacher in a general, abstract fashion; in effect, we were asking how learnable the various skills were for pre-service teachers generally. however, it is difficult to be certain as to how the participants using q methodology to investigate pre-service efl teachers’ mindsets about teaching competences 593 were interpreting the statements. especially in the case of unfamiliar, unexpected items, one way of assessing a statement is to use oneself as an example and in the current study this meant asking “is this learnable for me?” a risk inherent in instruments that require individuals to offer an evaluation of the general case is that they mix up assessments that refer to the broader context with those referring to themselves as a specific individual. looking back, it may have been more productive to focus on statements deliberately referring to the specific individual to eliminate the possibility of confusion and to perhaps offer a more accurate account of personal mindsets. a fundamental challenge connected with investigating mindsets is connecting views on learnability with some measure of value. it is possible, for example, for an individual to believe that learning how to set challenging tasks for learners is impossible, yet an important part of becoming a good teacher, or on the other hand, that changing fundamental aspects of personality is possible but just not worth the effort, as maintaining one’s essential personality is more important than the demands of a job. research that connects assessments of learnability and the value individuals assign to those skills is now required as a next step. 9. implications for practice the clearest practical issue identified by our research concerns the role of interpersonal skills in teacher development programmes. the overwhelming view of our participants was that the various interpersonal skills required to be a good teacher are unlikely to be learned. however, the research also raised questions about whether individual beliefs were being influenced by the setting. at the moment, we have a situation where pre-service teachers tend to believe that the interpersonal skills required to become a good teacher are difficult, or impossible, to learn and these skills are not included in the current curriculum. it is highly possible that the young teachers at the beginning of their careers are influenced into believing that these skills are not really learnable because they are not on the curriculum. if this is the case, then it is conceivable that by including a greater focus on the interpersonal side of teaching on teacher development programmes, we may encourage a more optimistic, more positive view of learning these skills, which are especially important in language education (gkonou & mercer, 2017). 10. conclusion we began this paper by commenting on the current popularity of the concept of mindsets and the uncritical enthusiasm with which it is being received in some quarters. our own enthusiasm springs from the potential of mindsets to kay irie, stephen ryan, sarah mercer 594 serve as framework for understanding how diverse aspects of psychology connect and work together. the word set is key here, as it implies a collection of various elements, indeed, “mindsystems” might be a more accurate reflection of our interest in exploring how these psychological components fit and how they work together. understanding any system requires looking at how the various components connect and not focusing on any single part in isolation. our study suggests that in a long-term, multi-dimensional undertaking, such as becoming a teacher, mindsets are constructed through individuals’ management of various sets of implicit theories for different competences within a domain, with no single ability or skill entirely dominant. this is consistent with a trend within mindsets to research that is moving away from familiar, established dichotomous models towards multi-layered and multi-polar accounts. we believe such perspectives offer a much richer, more complex and more accurate view of mindsets in context. whether such a view will be as popular as the dichotomous view in practice is a different question. acknowledgments we thank dr. achilleas kostoulas for assistance with data collection. using q methodology to investigate pre-service efl teachers’ mindsets about teaching competences 595 references asbury, k., klassen, r., bowyer-crane, c., kyriacou, c., & nash, p. 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(2012). mindsets that promote resilience: when students believe that personal characteristics can be developed. educational psychologist, 47(4), 302-314. 65 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (1). 2016. 65-88 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.1.4 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl input manipulation, enhancement and processing: theoretical views and empirical research alessandro benati university of greenwich, uk a.benati@gre.ac.uk abstract researchers in the field of instructed second language acquisition have been examining the issue of how learners interact with input by conducting research measuring particular kinds of instructional interventions (input-oriented and meaning-based). these interventions include such things as input flood, textual enhancement and processing instruction. although the findings are not completely conclusive on whether these instructional interventions have an impact on acquisition, it is clear that we have witnessed a shift in the field from the original question “does instruction make a difference?” to the more specific question “does manipulating input make a difference?” in this article, the key classroom-based research conducted to measure the relative effects of different types of enhancement and manipulation is reviewed. three main research foci are considered: (a) research measuring the effects of saturating the input with the target form (input flood), (b) research measuring the effects of different types of textual enhancements to draw learners’ attention to the target form, and (c) research measuring input restructuring to improve interpretation and processing of target forms or structures (processing instruction). keywords: input enhancement; input flood; textual enhancement; processing instruction alessandro benati 66 1. introduction the role of instruction in second language acquisition (sla henceforth) has been one of the key issues in this field. scholars have been debating whether instruction makes a difference in the acquisition of language properties such as morphology and syntax. vanpatten and benati (2015) have provided a succinct review of the role of instruction in sla. two main positions around the role of instruction can be identified: the first position is that instruction has a limited and constrained role; the second position asserts that instruction might have beneficial role under certain conditions. 1.1. instruction is limited and constrained krashen (1982, 2009) argues that instruction plays an extremely limited role in sla. he suggests that l2 learners acquire the target language mainly through exposure to comprehensible and meaning-bearing input. the acquisition of the grammatical system of a target language is driven by the exposure to the input and not by the practicing of grammatical rules. in one of the five hypotheses of monitor theory, krashen indicates that instruction is constrained by natural and predictable orders of acquisition. for example, a morphological feature such as the progressive -ing in english is acquired (no matter the learner l1) before the regular past tense -ed, or irregular past tense forms, which subsequently is acquired before the third-person singular -s. white (2015) views language as an abstract and complex system. although many aspects of language are acquired by interaction with input (e.g., syntax, morphology, lexicon), one exception are those aspects of language that are universal and built in prior to exposure to the input language. these language universals features constrain the acquisition of grammar. pienemann and lenzing (2015) argue that l2 learners acquire single structures (i.e., negation, question formation) through predictable stages. according to processability theory, instruction is constrained by these developmental stages as l2 learners follow a very rigid route in the acquisition of grammatical structures. the role of instruction is therefore limited and constrained by l2 learner’s readiness to acquire a particular structure. instruction might even be detrimental to acquisition if it does not consider learners’ current developmental stage. 1.2. instruction might be beneficial vanpatten (2015a) assigns a more positive role to instruction. it is effective and beneficial if it manipulates input so that learners process grammar more efficiently and accurately. according to his theoretical framework (input processing), l2 input manipulation, enhancement and processing: theoretical views and empirical research 67 learners seem to skip grammatical features in the input as they process input for meaning (words) before they process it for forms. learners make use of a number of internal strategies when they comprehend and process input. these strategies might cause a delay in the acquisition of formal properties of the target language as learners systematically fail to make form-meaning mappings. instruction has a beneficial role if it exposes l2 learners to meaningful input that contains many instances of the same grammatical meaning-form relationship and forces learners to focus on form to get the meaning. gass and mackey (2015) consider the possibility that comprehensible input might not be sufficient to develop native-like grammatical competence. instruction might be beneficial if it is provided through the enhancement of the input and the use of techniques such as textual enhancement. instruction might have a facilitative role in helping learners pay attention to the formal properties of a targeted language without the need of metalinguistic explanation and/or discussion. ellis and wulff (2015) assert that the role of instruction is limited. it can have a facilitative role in developing “noticing” of target forms which might not be salient in the input language learners are exposed to. however, due to a number of factors (e.g., instruction is sometimes provided when learners are not psycholinguistically ready, there is a mismatch between explicit knowledge and implicit mental representation, etc.), it is not always effective. a close review of contemporary views on the role of instruction in sla would lead to the following conclusions: · instruction does not alter the route of acquisition (i.e., acquisition orders and developmental sequences). · instruction might speed up the rate of acquisition. · instruction in the form of “input manipulation,” under certain conditions, might facilitate the noticing and the processing of linguistics features. the goal of this paper is twofold: a) to briefly review the main findings from research manipulating the way l2 learners interact with input; b) to highlight some limitations of the existing research and provide suggestions for further research. in the remainder of this paper, the main empirical studies which have investigated whether instruction as “input manipulation” might have a facilitative role in grammar acquisition will be briefly reviewed. in particular, three main research foci will be considered: (a) research measuring the effects of saturating the input with the target form (input flood), (b) research measuring the effects of different types of textual enhancements to draw learners’ attention to the alessandro benati 68 target form, and (c) research measuring input restructuring to improve interpretation and processing of target forms or structures (processing instruction). 2. classroom-based research on the effects of input enhancement sharwood smith (1993) introduced the concept of input enhancement for the first time with reference to the role of grammar in l2 instruction. input enhancement is a pedagogical intervention that aims at helping l2 learners to notice specific forms in the input. leow (2001) defines enhanced input as input that has been altered typologically to enhance the saliency of target forms. input enhancement varies in terms of explicitness and elaboration. one input enhancement technique consists of modifying a text so that a particular target item would appear over and over again. in this way, the text will contain many exemplars of the same feature (input flood). a different technique would consist of underlying or capitalizing a specific grammatical item (providing typographical cues) in a text (textual enhancement). input enhancement techniques (wong, 2005) expose learners to comprehensible input and positive evidence while at the same time drawing their attention to specific linguistic properties of the target language. 2.1. research measuring the effects of input flood input flood is an instructional intervention consisting in flooding the input language with a particular linguistic feature. trahey and white (1993) examined the effects of input flood on the acquisition of adverb placement in english. english allows the subject-adverb-verb word order but does not allow the french subject-verb-adverb-object word order. participants (french native speakers) were esl school-age learners. the population was divided into three instructional groups and a control group: the first group received input flood where adverbs were embedded in the instructional material (e.g., stories, games) and no explicit instruction on adverbs or placement was provided; the second group received explicit instruction in adverb placement in addition to input flood with adverbs; the third group received explicit instruction only; the control group received no instruction. immediately after instruction and again three weeks later, learners performed a number of assessment measures: a grammatical judgment test, a contextualized preference test, sentence manipulation, and an oral production test with an adverb prompt. the overall results from this study showed that input flood alone had an effect on learning what adverb placement positions were possible, but not what is not possible. williams and evans (1998) examined the possible effects of input flood on the acquisition of participial adjectives and passives in english. participants were input manipulation, enhancement and processing: theoretical views and empirical research 69 adults of different first languages and were enrolled in an intermediate university-level esl composition class. they were grouped into three instructional treatments: input flood-only, input flood plus explicit instruction on the target forms, and a control group. a preand posttest procedure was used with a grammaticality judgment test, a sentence completion test, a pictured-based sentence completion test and a picture narration test. the overall results were mixed. in the case of the participial adjective forms, the input flood plus explicit instruction was the most effective combination. in the case of the passives, there were no significant differences between the two instructional groups. reinders and ellis (2009) investigated the acquisition of negative adverbials with subject-verb inversion. subjects were esl learners and were assigned to two groups: an enriched condition (tasks flooded with the target feature), and an enhanced condition where the target feature had been enhanced. a grammaticality judgment test was designed to assess students’ performance. the results showed no difference in noticing in both groups. the enriched and enhanced input did not help learners notice the target structure, and this might have been caused by the complexity of the target structure itself. hernàndez (2011) investigated the combined effect of explicit instruction and input flood versus input flood alone on learners’ use of discourse markers to narrate past events. participants were english-speaking adults enrolled in fourth-semester college spanish courses. three groups were formed: an explicit information plus input flood group, an input flood-only group, and a control group. the main findings from a speaking task administered as a pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest indicated that both instructional treatments had a similar positive effect on students’ use of discourse markers. learners in the input flood treatment received a longer and more intense treatment (60 discourse markers) compared to the previous studies. zyzik and marqués pascual (2012) examined the impact of instruction on l2 learners’ ability to recognize and produce differential object marking in spanish. participants were english-speaking learners and were assigned to one of three groups: an input flood group, an enhanced input flood group, and an explicit grammar group. three written tasks were used to assess learners: a grammatical preference task, a cued sentence production task, and a discourse-length narrative task. the results from this study indicate a significant advantage for the explicit grammar group on the preference task and the cued sentence production task compared to the other two groups. the input flood and the enhanced input flood group showed modest improvement after the treatment. a review of the main studies measuring the relative effects of input flood provides the following insights: alessandro benati 70 · input flood might be effective in increasing learners’ knowledge of what is possible in the target language. · input flood might be an effective instructional technique subject to factors such as the length of the treatment and the nature of the linguistic feature. · input flood might not be effective in increasing learners’ knowledge of what is not possible in the target language. vanpatten (1996) state that while input flood could increase the chances that an l2 learner would notice a specific target form, it did not guarantee noticing. 2.2. research measuring the effects of different types of textual enhancements textual enhancement is an instructional intervention carried out to enhance the saliency of input in written or oral texts with a view to facilitating learners’ noticing of targeted forms and thereby enhancing their acquisition (sharwood smith, 1993). textual enhancement makes use of typographical cues (e.g., boldfacing, italicizing, underlining, coloring, enlarging the font size, etc.) to draw learners’ attention to particular forms in a text. researchers have used textual enhancements under a variety of conditions and with a variety of intentions. shook (1994) examined the effects of textual enhancement on the acquisition of the spanish present perfect tense and relative pronouns (que/quien). participants were first year and second year english l1 university learners of spanish. the population was divided into three groups: the first group read the passages without enhancements; the second group received the passages with textual enhancements; and the third group received the enhanced passage plus a focus on form. a preand posttest design was used and the assessment procedures were a multiple choice form recognition test and a cloze form production test. the overall findings from this classroom study showed that the two groups that read the enhanced texts performed better than the group that read the unenhanced texts on all the assessment tests. alanen (1995) carried out a study measuring the acquisition of locative suffixes and consonant changes by native speakers of english reading a semiartificial language resembling finnish. alanen used four groups: the first group read the unenhanced passages; the second group read the passages with the target forms enhanced (they were italicized in order to enhance their perceptual saliency); the third group was provided explicit information regarding the target forms and read the unenhanced passages; the fourth group received the same explicit information as the third group, but they read the enhanced passages. the assessments measured used were a sentence completion test, a grammaticality judgment task, and a think-aloud protocol. the overall findings of this study indicated that textual enhancement alone was not a significant input manipulation, enhancement and processing: theoretical views and empirical research 71 factor affecting performance (production). however, on the think-aloud protocol, the results showed that those who read the enhanced texts noticed more of the target forms than those who read unenhanced texts. jourdenais et al. (1995) investigated the relative effects of textual enhancement on noticing and producing spanish preterit and imperfect past tense forms. participants were english native speakers, and they were studying spanish at university (second semester university-level course). two groups were formed: group one received an enhanced version of the text (character size was increased, and colors were used); the second group received an unenhanced version. learners read the passage silently, and then they were instructed to think aloud while they wrote a narrative based on a number of drawings depicting various christmas-related events. the analysis of the think aloud protocols showed no overall significant difference between the two groups. however, in the written narratives the enhancement group produced significantly more accurate preterit and imperfect forms than the other group. overstreet (1998) carried out a conceptual replication of this study targeting the preterit/imperfect aspectual distinction in spanish. participants were enrolled in a third-semester university-level spanish course. he used the spanish version of “little red riding hood” (“caperucita roja”) and a short version unknown to the subjects of “una carta a dios” (“a letter to god”). one version was enhanced (underlining, bolding, using a larger character size in the imperfect forms and the preterit forms); the other one not. he assessed performance through a written narration and a true/false comprehension test in a preand posttest design. he found a significant but negative effect for textual enhancement on comprehension. he hypothesized that the enhancements were too numerous and might have negatively interfered with learners’ comprehension of the texts. leow (1997) measured the effects of textual enhancement and text length on learners’ comprehension and intake of spanish informal imperative verb forms. participants were english native speakers enrolled in a second-semester spanish course. leow used four passage conditions in his study: enhanced (the target form was underlined and bolded), unenhanced, long, and short. comprehension was assessed using a multiple choice comprehension test. the results showed no effects for textual enhancements on comprehension. a second similar study (leow, 2001) was conducted on the effects of textual enhancement on the acquisition of the spanish formal imperative. learners (first year university-level spanish course) were asked to perform a think-aloud as they read the assigned text. the results of this study showed that learners who encountered enhanced forms did not notice more forms than learners who encountered unenhanced forms. white (1998) examined the acquisition of english possessive determiners (his, her) by primary school-level francophone children. three groups were alessandro benati 72 formed: the first group received input flood plus textual enhancements; the second group received, in addition to the instructional treatment just described, extensive reading and listening during the treatment period; the third group received only input flooding with no enhancement of the target forms. an oral picture description test as a pretest, immediate posttest and delayed posttest was the measure used to tap the effects of instruction. the main findings of this study indicated that all three groups improved in their ability to use the target forms in an oral communication task. leow, egi, nuevo, and tsai (2003) examined the effects of textual enhancement on comprehending and noticing the spanish present perfect tense and spanish present subjunctive mood. subjects were enrolled in a first year university-level spanish course. leow et al. created enhanced and unenhanced versions of two passages, one for each target form. in the enhanced versions, they bolded the tense/mood morpheme, underlined the word containing the morpheme, and increased the character size of the underlined words. learners performed a think-aloud as they read the passage. subsequently they performed a multiple choice comprehension test and a multiple choice form recognition test. the analysis of the think aloud protocols showed that textual enhancement had very little effect on the noticing of forms in the input. wong (2002) examined the question whether the level of input (sentence vs. discourse) has an impact on textual enhancement. the target structure was the use of prepositions for geographical locations in french. subjects were enrolled in the first year university-level french course. four groups were created: the first group read the text (discourse-level input) with the prepositions enhanced (bolding and italics); the second group received the same text but no enhancement; the third group received sentence-level input with visually enhanced the target forms; the fourth group read the same set of sentences as the third group but did not get the enhancement. overall, the results showed that the two groups who received textual enhancement performed better on a paper-and-pencil test of the target structures. lee (2007) conducted an experimental study among korean efl learners to measure four different treatments involving textual enhancement and topic familiarity conditions. the responses of the participants were compared with respect to their ability to identify and correct english passive errors and their degree of reading comprehension. the main findings from this study revealed that textual enhancement aided the learning of the target forms while having unfavorable effects on meaning comprehension. topic familiarity, by contrast, aided the students’ comprehension but was ineffective in terms of their learning of form. lee’s study (2007) was partially replicated by winke (2013) using eye-movement data. this study aimed at assessing whether english passive construction input manipulation, enhancement and processing: theoretical views and empirical research 73 enhancement affects english language learners in terms of learning the form and improving text comprehension. the main findings of this study are different from lee’s (2007). winke (2013) found that enhancement did not have an effect on learning the target forms. however, it did have a significant impact on the ability of learners to notice the passive forms in the text. in a meta-analytic review of 16 previous textual enhancement studies, lee and huang (2008) explored the overall magnitude of textual enhancement on grammar learning. the authors found a very small effect size for textual enhancement. however, they argued that the mixed results and variations obtained in research investigating the effects of textual enhancement might be the result of a number of factors: different designs adopted, different collection tools and procedures, the difference in the type and number of enhanced cues in the materials, and different objectives pursued in each study. simard (2009) investigated the effects of textual enhancement on learners’ intake of english third person singular possessive determiners. participants were grade eight native speakers of french. they were exposed to different textual enhancement versions of the same text. a control group received an unenhanced version of the same text. an information transfer test and a multiple choice recognition test were used. overall, the results showed positive effects for textual enhancement. different formats had different effects on learners’ intake. labrozzi (2014) examined how different types of textual enhancement affect l2 form recognition and reading comprehension. participants were english speakers learning the spanish preterit tense. two groups were used: the first group read a passage where the target structure was enhanced; a control group read the same passage without any type of enhancement. assessments consisted of a second language to first language translation tas, and a multiple choice test with questions focusing on form or meaning from the reading. results revealed positive effects for the enhancement treatment on both measures. the results of the research on the effects of textual enhancements are quite mixed. a review of the main studies measuring the relative effects of textual enhancement provide the following insights: · a number of textual enhancement studies measuring l2 development provided evidence for the favorable effects of textual enhancement (e.g., jourdandenais et al., 1995; labrozzi, 2014; shook, 1994; simard, 2009; wong, 2003); · others studies found no significant effect for textual enhancement (e.g., alanen, 1995; leow, 1997, 2001; leow, 2003; overstreet, 1998); · lee and huang (2008) conducted a meta-analysis of the previous research on the effects of textual enhancement. the meta-analysis showed that overall input enhancement groups did not outperform the alessandro benati 74 other unenhanced groups. however, they found out that learners who were exposed to enhancement-embedded texts showed slight improvement from before to after the treatment. · overall, the existing empirical research measuring the effects of textual enhancement has shown a small-sized positive effect. however, different researchers have come to different conclusions on the efficacy of input enhancement. a number of factors might constrain the effects of input enhancement on the acquisition of grammar: proficiency level, the developmental stage and the degree of readiness of the learner, the type of linguistic feature chosen, and the intensity of the treatment. 3. research measuring the effects of processing instruction processing instruction is a pedagogical intervention in grammar instruction based on the sla theoretical model called input processing (vanpatten, 1996, 2004, 2015a). the main goal of processing instruction is to alter the processing strategies that learners use when interpreting and processing input language and help learners in making correct form-meaning connections and computing sentence structure. the scope of processing instruction is not to make a form salient in the input (as in the case of textual enhancement) but to ensure that l2 learners make form-meaning mappings during real time comprehension. noticing and processing are different in nature. noticing is when l2 learners become aware of something in the input. processing is when l2 learners make a form-meaning connection. data must be processed (linked to meaning) during comprehension (e.g., a past tense marker such as –ed has to be tagged as meaning <+past> <-present> for it to be acquired). vanpatten’s (2015a) theory of input processing directly informs the practices of processing instruction. processing instruction is useful only if addresses a processing problem, steers learners away from nonoptimal processing strategies (e.g., primacy of meaning principle, first noun principle) and ensures that learners engage in correct and appropriate processing of forms and sentences. vanpatten (2015a) has identified two main processing strategies learners might use when they are exposed to language input. according to the primacy of meaning principle (and subprinciples such as the lexical preference principle), learners will first process input for meaning before they process the linguistic form. the result of this will be that learners will not make natural connections between forms in the input and their meanings (e.g., past tense forms and the concept that the action took place in the past). according to the first noun principle, learners will tend to process the first noun or pronoun they encounter in a sentence as the subject or agent. the result input manipulation, enhancement and processing: theoretical views and empirical research 75 of this will be that learners will misinterpret sentences in which the first element in a sentence is not the subject or agent (e.g., passive constructions, causatives, object pronouns in certain languages). as argued by vanpatten (2015b, p. 104), ‘‘pi is not focused on rule internalization but the acquisition of underlying formal features. by definition, such acquisition will be implicit in nature.’’ processing instruction consists of two main components: (a) explanation of the processing strategy, and (b) structured-input practice (lee & benati, 2009; lee & vanpatten, 2003). 3.1. studies measuring the effects of processing instruction versus traditional instruction van patten and cadierno (1993) investigated the relative effects of processing instruction on the acquisition of spanish direct object pronouns (this structure is affected by the first noun principle). three groups of english native speakers of spanish at the intermediate level received different instructional treatments: one group received traditional instruction which emphasized grammar explanation and oral-written production; the second group received processing instruction; the third group was used as a control receiving no instruction. a pretest\posttest design was used to measure the possible effects of instruction through an interpretation and a sentence-level written test. the results of the statistical analyses showed that processing instruction was superior to traditional instruction as learners receiving processing instruction improved in their ability at interpreting object pronouns in spanish correctly; furthermore, the study demonstrated that processing instruction was also effective in improving learners’ production. cadierno (1995) carried out an experimental study measuring the effects of processing instruction on the spanish preterit tense (this feature is affected by the lexical preference principle). this study was a partial replication of vanpatten and cadierno’s study (1993) in terms of the design used (pretest\posttest) and the overall aims. the participants of this study were english native speakers studying intermediate spanish at university. processing instruction was compared with traditional instruction and a control group for the acquisition of this grammatical feature, and two tests were used (sentence-level interpretation and written production test). the results showed that the group who received processing instruction outperformed the group exposed to traditional instruction and the control group on the interpretation task. the results of the production task were the same as the results of the original study (van patten & cadierno, 1993). both the processing instruction group and the traditional group improved from the pretest to the posttest on the production task. alessandro benati 76 interpretation and production effects have been subsequently supported by other research comparing processing instruction and traditional instruction (e.g., benati 2001; cheng, 2004; lee & benati 2007b; vanpatten & wong, 2004). all these studies addressed the fundamental question of the effectiveness of processing instruction as a type of intervention and took vanpatten and cadierno (1993) and cadierno (1995) as their point of departure. the results of the studies comparing processing instruction and traditional instruction have suggested the following conclusions: · processing instruction is a more effective pedagogical intervention than traditional instruction as it seems to have a direct effect on learners’ ability to process input (various processing strategies, e.g., first noun principle, lexical preference principle), various linguistic forms in different languages (e.g., spanish past tense, italian future tense, copular verbs in spanish [ser and estar], french faire causative). · l2 learners have gained the ability to interpret sentences efficiently and correctly. processing instruction is responsible for learners’ increased rate of processing. · l2 learners have gained the ability to produce the target linguistic features during output practice. processing instruction is responsible for the increased rate of accuracy in production. 3.2. studies measuring the effects of processing instruction versus meaning-based output instruction farley (2001a, 2004) compared the effects of processing instruction versus meaning output-based instruction on the acquisition of the spanish subjunctive in two consecutive studies. participants were english native speakers learning spanish in a university-level course. processing instruction was compared with a meaning-based output instructional treatment (structured-output tasks), and the activities learners were exposed to did not contain any mechanical drills. the effects of the two instructional treatments were measured on the acquisition of the spanish subjunctive (this feature is affected by the sentence location principle). a preand posttest design was adopted with an interpretation and production sentence-level tests. the results were mixed. in the first study (2001a), the processing instruction group outperformed the output-based group on the interpretation test, and both groups were similar on the production test. in the second study (2004), both groups made equal and significant improvements on both the interpretation and production tests. farley attributed the equal performance of the two treatments to one main factor. the meaning output-based treatment is different from traditional instruction practice input manipulation, enhancement and processing: theoretical views and empirical research 77 as it does not contain mechanical drills practice, and its communicative and interactive nature might have resulted in incidental input. benati (2005) investigated the effects of processing instruction, traditional instruction and meaning output-based instruction on the acquisition of english past simple tense (a feature affected by the lexical preference principle). the subjects were chinese and greek school-age learners of english. the participants in both schools were divided into three groups: the first group received processing instruction; the second group was exposed to traditional instruction; the third group received meaning output-based instruction. one interpretation and one production measure were used in a preand posttest design. the results were very consistent in both studies and clearly indicated that processing instruction had positive effects on the processing and acquisition of the target feature. in both studies the processing instruction group performed better than the traditional and meaning output-based groups on the interpretation task, and the three groups made equal gains on the production task. the effects of processing instruction have been compared with the effects of meaning-based output instruction in other studies (lee & benati, 2007a; morgan-short & bowden, 2006), and with other interventions such as dictogloss (uludag & vanpatten, 2012; vanpatten et al., 2009). the results of these studies confirmed the effectiveness of processing instruction in improving learners’ performance on both interpretation and production sentence-level tests. based on the findings measuring primary effects for processing instruction compared with other instructional interventions, we conclude the following: · processing instruction is an effective approach to alter a variety of l2 learners’ processing strategies in different languages and with native speakers of a variety of l1s (e.g., greek and chinese). · processing instruction is overall more effective than output-based instruction (e.g., meaning output-based instruction). 3.3. studies measuring the causative variable in processing instruction van patten and oikkenon (1996) investigated the relative effects of the two main components in processing instruction. the linguistic feature chosen was the object pronouns in spanish, and the processing principle under investigation was the first noun principle. english native speakers studying spanish at university participated in this classroom experiment. three groups were formed: one receiving only the explicit information component, the second only the structured input practice component, and the third both components (full processing instruction). preand posttest design was used and instruction was measured through an interpretation and production test. results showed that the processing alessandro benati 78 instruction and the structured input only group made similar gains whereas the explicit information only group did not. the main outcome of this study was that structured input activities were found responsible for learners’ gains. learners who carried out structured input activities in the absence of explicit information performed just as well as learners who carried out structured input activities after having received explicit information about the target form. this main finding has been subsequently supported by other research on the italian future tense (benati, 2004a), italian noun-adjective agreement (benati, 2004b), french negative plus indefinite article (wong, 2004), spanish object pronoun (sanz, 2004), japanese past forms and affirmative versus negative present forms (lee & benati, 2007a) and russian case marking, german case marking and spanish direct object pronouns (vanpatten collopy, price, borst, & qualin, 2013). based on the findings measuring the causative factor in processing the following conclusion can be reached: · the causative variable in processing instruction is performing structured input tasks. 3.4. studies measuring processing instruction and discourse vanpatten and sanz (1995) set out to investigate whether the effects of processing instruction, observed at the sentence level, could be obtained on discourse-level production tasks. participants consisted of english native speaker students of spanish in their third year of a university programme. the subjects were assigned to two processing instruction groups and two control groups. the focus of instruction was the preverbal objects pronoun in spanish. the effects of instruction were measured on three different tests: a sentence-level test, a structured question-answer interview, and a video narration test. the study showed that processing instruction is still effective even when measured on less controlled and discourse type of tasks. altering the processing strategies used by l2 learners when they are processing input leads to a change in knowledge, which is available for use in different types and modes of production tests. the effects of processing instruction were more significant in more controlled oral tests (completion test) rather than less controlled ones (video narration test). benati, lee, and hikima (2010) and benati (2015) have measured the effects of processing instruction on discourse-level interpretation tests. they measured the relative effects of processing instruction on the acquisition of japanese passive forms (affected by a combination of principles such as the first noun principle, sentence location principle and primacy of content words principle). participants were english native speakers learning japanese at university. a pretest and a postest procedure was used. a processing instruction group and input manipulation, enhancement and processing: theoretical views and empirical research 79 a control group were used. the assessment tasks consisted of sentenceand discourse-level interpretation tests and sentenceand discourse-level production tests. the discourse-level interpretation tests consisted of a dialogue and a story. the findings indicate that the processing instruction group made measurable gains not only on the interpretation sentence-level test but also on the interpretation discourse-level test. these main findings on the effects of processing instruction on discourse production and discourse interpretation have been subsequently supported by other research. sanz (1997) showed that processing instruction on spanish direct object pronouns led to an improvement in scores on oral and written videobased retellings and oral and written structured interviews. sanz (2004) and sanz and morgan-short (2004), again with processing instruction on spanish direct object pronouns, found positive effects on oral video retellings. cheng (2002, 2004) found positive effects for processing instruction on spanish copular verbs using a picture-based guided composition. benati and lee with mcnulty (2010) used a guided composition and found a positive effect for processing instruction on the spanish subjunctive after cuando. benati and lee (2010) extended the interpretation of discourse-level findings for processing instruction on the english past tense. based on the findings measuring the effects of processing on discourse-level tests (interpretation and production), the following conclusions can be made: · processing instruction has a positive effect on discourse-level interpretation measures. · processing instruction has a positive effect on discourse-level production measures. 3.5. studies measuring processing instruction and long-term effects vanpatten and cadierno (1993) and cadierno (1995) demonstrated that the effects of processing were sustained one month after instruction. many subsequent processing instruction studies have included delayed posttests to measure whether learners retain the benefits of processing instruction one week after processing instruction (lee & benati, 2007b; lee and benati with aguilarsánchez and mcnulty, 2007; morgan-short & bowden, 2006), two weeks after processing instruction (farley 2001a, 2001b, 2004), three weeks after processing instruction (benati 2001; cheng, 2002, 2004), four weeks after processing instruction (benati, 2004a; keating & farley, 2008), six weeks after processing instruction (vanpatten, farmer, & clardy, 2009; vanpatten, inclezan, salazar, & farley, 2009), and eight months after processing instruction (vanpatten & fernández, 2004). alessandro benati 80 based on the findings measuring the short and long term effects of processing instruction, the following conclusions can be drawn: · the effects of processing instruction are durable. processing instruction has been found to be an effective intervention the effects of which endure one week, two weeks, three weeks, and even eight months after immediate posttesting. · the long lasting effect of processing instruction can be measured using a variety of tasks including aural interpretation (sentence and discourse), oral production and written production (sentence and discourse). 3.6. studies measuring processing instruction and transfer of training effects l2 learners receiving processing instruction can transfer their training on one linguistic feature to other forms or linguistic features affected by a similar processing problem without further instruction on the other forms. benati and lee (2008) provided processing instruction training to learners on italian noun-adjective gender agreement and found that it transferred to the future tense. they measured the transfer effects on both interpretation and production sentencelevel tasks. benati and lee with houghton (2008) found that processing instruction training on the english past tense marker –ed transferred to the third-person singular present tense marker –s. the transfer was measured through interpretation and form production tasks. benati and lee with laval (2008) trained learners to process imperfective verb morphology in french and found that it transferred to subjunctive forms. statistically significant transfer effects were found on both interpretation and production tasks. further research on transfer of training effects has supported benati and lee’s findings (leeser & demil, 2013; white & demil, 2013a, 2013b). based on the findings measuring transfer of training effects for processing instruction, the following conclusion can be drawn: · processing instruction has secondary effects as learners who received processing instruction are able to transfer that training to processing and producing another form on which they had received no instruction. 3.7. studies measuring processing instruction and individual differences (the age factor) processing instruction research has examined the possible “age factor.” benati (2013) has compared the performance of children and older school-age learners who received processing instruction on the english passive construction. data were collected among native speakers of turkish. performance was measured input manipulation, enhancement and processing: theoretical views and empirical research 81 with interpretation and sentence completion form production tests. the results showed that both groups improved significantly and equally as a result of receiving processing instruction. no effect for age group was found on either the interpretation or production sentence-level test. mavrantoni and benati (2013) have also explored the effect of age on the results of processing instruction and traditional instruction by examining two different age groups of children (preand postpuberty). the target of instruction was the english third person singular –s. the participants were all native speakers of greek. their performance was measured with interpretation and production sentence-level tests. in this parallel experiment, both processing instruction groups significantly outperformed the traditional groups on the interpretation task and equally improved on the production task. results on the effects of processing instruction on age suggest the following: · age does not seem to play a role in the results generated by processing instruction. processing instruction is an effective pedagogical intervention no matter the age of the learners. 4. discussion and conclusion in this paper, three main research foci investigating input manipulation and input enhancement interventions have been considered. the main findings from research measuring the effects of input flood indicate that it might be an effective instructional intervention in increasing learners’ knowledge of what is possible. however, input flood does not increase their knowledge about what is not possible in the target language. in addition, input flood might have a facilitative role in helping l2 learners notice a specific target form. however, there is no guarantee that learners actually notice the form under input flood conditions. because of the implicit nature of this pedagogical intervention, it is difficult to measure actual learning. future research should continue to investigate the use of input flood in combination with explicit instruction (hernández, 2011). it should also continue to measure the possible success of this pedagogical intervention in relation to such factors as the length of the treatment and exposure to the target feature (zyzik & marqués pascual, 2012), and the nature of the target structure (reinders & ellis, 2009; zyzik & marqués pascual, 2012) overall, the results of research measuring the effects of different types of textual enhancements to draw learners’ attention to the target form are not consistent. the effectiveness of textual enhancement is variable and the specific conditions under which textual enhancement might be an effective instructional intervention are not transparent. despite the fact that a number of textual enhancement studies provide support for the positive effects of this pedagogical alessandro benati 82 intervention, there is also empirical evidence showing very limited or no effects (see the meta-analytic review in lee & hung, 2008; and han, park, & combs, 2008). one of the possible reasons for the differences in the outcomes of these studies is that the targeted forms varied with regard to their semantic value and communicative function. another reason is that most of these studies measuring textual enhancement adopted only a single exposure to enhanced input. from a methodological perspective, previous research measuring the effects of different types of textual enhancement have a number of shortcomings. only white’s (1998) and leow’s studies (2001) administered delayed posttests. only simard (2009) included both experimental and control groups. it is therefore difficult to establish whether any gains between pretests and posttests might be attributed to instructional effects or learning taking place in performing the assessment tasks. future research within this framework should take into account these shortcomings and also make use of online data to investigate cognitive processes involved in noticing the targeted forms and processing input. the findings of research measuring the input restructuring to improve interpretation and processing of target forms or structures has revealed that processing instruction is an effective pedagogical intervention. learners from different first languages and backgrounds (lee & benati, 2013) make consistent gains in interpretation and production tests at the sentence and discourse levels. the effects of processing instruction are consistent, durable, and measurable for different languages and different linguistics features affected by processing problems, with learners of different ages; and the positive effects are transferable (see the full reviews in lee & benati, 2009; benati & lee, 2015). structured input practice is an effective form of input enhancement. despite the large database, research within this research framework has primarily made use of listening and reading measures (so-called offline measures) to elicit how learners comprehend and process sentences. online measurements such as eye tracking, self-paced reading and erps (event-related potentials) should now be incorporated into processing instruction future research to measure more directly implicit knowledge. input manipulation, enhancement and processing: theoretical views and empirical research 83 references alanen, r. 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(2012). spanish differential object marking: an empirical study of implicit and explicit instruction. studies in hispanic and lusophone linguistics, 12, 387-421. 609 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (4). 2015. 609-635 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.4.5 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl exploring goals and motivations of māori heritage language learners awanui te huia victoria university of wellington, new zealand awanui.tehuia@vuw.ac.nz abstract motivations of māori heritage language learners are explored within this qualitative study. te reo māori (the māori language) is currently classed as endangered (reedy et al., 2011), which calls for the exploration of the motivational experiences of māori heritage language learners. a total of 19 interviews with beginner, intermediate and advanced level learners were conducted. results demonstrated how māori heritage learners were motivated to learn due to their cultural heritage connection to the language and to other ingroup members. this study explores some of the motivations why māori heritage language learners learn te reo māori. for this group of indigenous language learners, cultural and language revitalisation are tied to language motivation. furthermore, the ability to participate in cultural practices was central to language motivations. keywords: motivation; heritage language; te reo māori; indigenous language revitalization 1. introduction there is a pressing global necessity to understand ways in which minority and indigenous languages can be retained and maintained for future generations (simons & lewis, 2011). krauss (1992) predicted that “the coming century will see either the death or doom of 90% of mankind’s languages” (p. 7). unfortunately, krauss’s predictions made over twenty years ago appear to be coming true. using awanui te huia 610 longitudinal data, harmon and loh (2010) found that from a sample of 1,500 languages globally, 20% of those languages had declined between 1970 and 2005. one possible way of assisting the process of language revitalisation is through understanding the motivations of individuals who hold an ancestral connection to the language. te reo māori is the indigenous language of new zealand with 21.3% of māori indicating that they are able to hold a conversation in te reo māori (statistics new zealand, 2014a). this figure has declined by 3.7% since the 1996 census data was collected. although research about motivations of second language learners of globally dominant languages is plentiful, very few studies explore the motivations of indigenous people who are attempting to learn their heritage language. the motivations of māori heritage language (hl2) learners will be the focus of the current study. 2. heritage language learners second language learners of globally dominant/colonial languages, such as english, spanish, and french have been the predominant set of learners that research has focused on to date (noels, 2001; noels, pelletier, clement, & vallerand, 2003). hl2 learners are distinguishable from learners of other languages by the birthright connection that they have with the language (wiley, 2001). there are many varying descriptions of what encompasses a hl2 learner. for instance, fishman (2001) explains that those individuals with a family connection to a language (including immigrant, indigenous and colonial languages) are equally defined as hl2 learners. in comparison, schmidt and watanabe (2001) discuss hl2 learners as being those students who are studying their first language in a school setting, such as learners of japanese who have japanese ancestry. heritage learners may include second or even fourth generation immigrants who still refer to their nationality as being tied to their ethnic heritage. similarly, valdes (2005) discusses the complexities of how the term is applied, where definitions of heritage language include the learner’s mother tongue, her first language, second language, and dominant language in the home. heritage language learner has been applied to linguistic minorities whose languages are often endangered, where a key concern is the pressure for cultural maintenance (fishman, 2001). authors have suggested that it is possible for the term heritage language learner to include both those who have some level of proficiency in the hl2 as well as those who want to learn their ancestral language (wiley, 2001). for the purposes of this study, the term heritage language learner will be applied to māori, indigenous to new zealand, who are in the process of learning te reo māori as their second language. exploring goals and motivations of māori heritage language learners 611 3. the position of māori as heritage language learners indigenous people who are also hl2 learners are likely to be coping with the intergenerational impacts of colonisation. new zealand is unique among other colonial nations due to the treaty of waitangi, which established equal legal status between the crown and māori (orange, 2004). although the treaty of waitangi provides new zealand with the foundation for an equal bicultural relationship, māori continue to experience the detrimental effects of colonisation and disproportionate levels of negative social value (pratto, sidanius, & levin, 2006; robson & purdie, 2007). pratto and colleagues (2006) explain that “negative social value is disproportionately left to or forced upon members of subordinate groups in the form of substandard housing, disease, underemployment, dangerous and distasteful work, disproportionate punishment, stigmatisation, and vilification” (p. 272). each of the factors above are experienced disproportionately by māori in new zealand (borell, gregory, mccreanor, jensen, & barnes, 2009; department of corrections, 2007; education counts, 2011; robson & purdie, 2007). being in a position of social and economic disadvantage has a negative impact on language revitalisation. memmi (1965) indicates that members of the colonised group who are complicit in the process may begin to despise cultural markers (including language) that associate them with their cultural group. furthermore, having high proportions of negative social value can be linked to the availability of time and resources to commit to hl2 learning. the current state of the māori language decline and the devaluation of the language can be directly linked to a series of systemic practices of colonisation enforced by the crown. such practices included the psychological and physical abuse forced upon māori children in state funded schools (waitangi tribunal, 1986), and the refusal of the government to fund schools where english was not the language of instruction (yensen & mccreanor, 1989). fishman (1996) has also linked confiscation of land, which māori suffered immensely from, to the loss of minority languages. given the historical context of the māori language loss, hl2 learner experiences and motivations are likely to differ from language learners of globally dominant languages. the motivation for wanting to engage in hl2 learning is likely to be tied to the obligation to maintain the language for future generations, which is not a pressure experienced by learners of globally dominant languages. furthermore, indigenous hl2 learners firstly need to overcome the social devaluation of the language and the identity complexities associated with being a second language learner of a language that has personal and cultural significance. awanui te huia 612 4. motivation due to a desire to access a māori cultural worldview māori are currently in the process of revitalising te reo māori. the processes of language revitalisation are likely to contribute to māori hl2 learner motivations. language is a means of providing individuals with a window into the culture of their ancestors (wa thiong'o, 1986). in situations where access to cultural knowledge is limited, there may be a heightened desire by members of a culture who are attempting to access this knowledge to do so via the language. māori knowledge and language are not currently forms of knowledge that are widely understood by, or accessible to, all māori in new zealand (statistics new zealand, 2014a). the cultural values and language that dominate the majority of new zealand public domains are those that belong to the pākehā (new zealand europeans). māori who engage in learning their hl2 may be motivated due to the emotional connection that they feel toward the speakers of the language (including those living and deceased). this heritage form of motivation differs perhaps from standard integrative motivation in the sense that māori learners maybe aiming to learn more about themselves through accessing a view of the world through the eyes of their ancestors. similar to the concept of investment (norton, 1997), māori may be motivated to invest in the process of language learning in order to achieve a set of cultural resources, including access to a worldview that reflects the cultural ideologies of their ancestors as well as those of the contemporary māori culture. a potential added bonus of learning their hl2 is the improved ability to engage in cultural frame-switching (benet-martinez, leu, lee, & morris, 2002). just over half of all māori identify as being of dual ethnicity (statistics new zealand, 2013) with pākehā (or new zealand european) being the most common dual identity. the process of negotiating multiple identity pressures is complex and requires a great deal of cognitive resources (phinney, 1989; ting-toomey, 2005). those who view their dual identities as integrated have reported more positive psychological adaptation (benet-martinez & hariatatos, 2005). integration of both cultural frameworks is measured by assessing how much an individual sees the two cultures as compatible versus oppositional. in a study of bicultural participants, benet-martinez and hariatatos (2005) found that low levels of proficiency in either of the languages contributed to individuals reporting that the two cultures were distant or oppositional from/towards each other. as the demands of cultural frame-switching are expected of nearly half of all those who identify as māori, being bilingual may assist māori in the process of identity negotiation between specifically māori and mainstream governed environments. māori are regularly forced to engage in mainstream domains that are dominated by pākehā cultural values and norms. engaging in pākehā dominant exploring goals and motivations of māori heritage language learners 613 spaces maybe thought of as normative for many of māori. due to processes of colonisation, not all māori have equal access to māori governed domains (durie, 2001). māori may need to learn to reengage in māori spaces, and the language could potentially provide the grounds for such reengagement. part of cultural revitalisation includes the continuation of cultural practices that require te reo māori as a means of maintaining such practices. many of these responsibilities fall on kaumātua (respected elders) (waldon, 2004). however, with the success of māori language teaching initiatives, there are a number of māori hl2 learners who have begun taking on such roles (gloyne, 2014). the responsibilities of hl2 learners are likely to differ substantially from the responsibilities of l2 learners of globally dominant languages, or languages where the pressures associated with language decline and revitalisation are not central concerns. the desire to fulfill cultural roles that require high levels of language proficiency are likely to motivate some of māori to improve their māori language skills. the roles that parents play in the process of language revitalisation are also thought to contribute positively, particularly when parents use the language as a main means of communication (fishman, 1989). simons and lewis (2011) found that of 7,103 current living languages globally, 19% are not being learned by children. the breakdown of intergenerational transmission is a major sign of language endangerment (fishman, 1989). members of endangered language communities who are parents may be motivated to improve their language skills in order to transfer their language to their children, which is likely to be the case for māori hl2 learners as found by chrisp (2005). one in three māori are currently under the age of 15, and, at the other end of the spectrum, merely 5.6% are aged over 65 (statistics new zealand, 2013). as most of the native māori language speakers are aged over 65 years, these statistics highlight the need for intergenerational transmission of te reo māori. in addition to the cultural transmission motivations noted above, an aspect of social identity theory (tajfel & turner, 1986) may provide insight into why parents may be motivated to be part of a group who use te reo māori as a main means of communication. social identity theory posits that individuals are motivated to view themselves positively in comparison to other groups. if māori parents wish to be thought of as valued members of their cultural ingroup, they may wish to use their decision to speak te reo māori within the home as a means of providing positive distinction (brewer, 1991) from parents within the community who may not use te reo māori with their children. on the other hand, nonspeaking members (including parents) of a māori family some members of which do speak the language may be motivated to learn te reo māori as a means of enhancing positive ingroup relationships by reducing ingroup difference and promoting shared values. awanui te huia 614 although past language policies have focused on promoting the collective desire to improve language revitalisation at a national or tribal level (o'regan, 2014), king (2007) suggests that māori language learners are more likely to be motivated by factors that are more closely linked to the learner. māori hl2 learners may be more likely to be motivated by their immediate environment, including the desire to up-skill due to the expectations of their social relationships. for instance, if being a member of a social group includes being a target language speaker, the individual may be motivated to meet the expectations of their significant others. supplementary to motivations outlined above, māori hl2 learners may see instrumental value in learning te reo māori. for instance, knowledge of te reo māori may assist individuals to gain employment, particularly in the public service sector. jackson and fisher's (2007) research, which involved the dissemination of filler cvs to employers, supported the assumption that employers place value on the knowledge of te reo māori. findings indicated that māori high-merit cvs (for instance, a māori who had achieved well academically) were preferred over non-māori high-merit performers. the preference for high-merit māori over high-merit non-māori was attributed to the ability of māori to undertake culturally specific roles in the workplace, and, in particular, their ability to communicate in te reo māori. conversely, māori with low academic merit were less likely to be preferred for employment over low merit non-māori irrespective of the level of māori language proficiency. these results indicate that although employers place value on te reo māori, organisations are unlikely to prioritise abilities in te reo māori over academic credentials. employers' preferences for high-merit māori with māori language abilities is likely to benefit māori who have achieved within the tertiary education environment. this research aims to explore the goals and motivations of learners of te reo māori and has been designed to be exploratory. while specific hypotheses cannot be tested, given that te reo māori is endangered, māori hl2 learners are likely to be motivated by cultural preservation reasons, for instance, decisions to use te reo māori with their children. furthermore, as there are a great number of māori cultural roles that require the use of te reo māori and a relatively small group of highly proficient māori language speakers available, it is possible that these role responsibilities will contribute to advanced level learners being motivated to improve their language skills. primarily, the main aim of this study is to better understand the motivations of māori language learners who have a range of levels of language proficiency. exploring goals and motivations of māori heritage language learners 615 5. method all participants were second language learners rather than native speakers and were of māori descent. participants’ proficiency ranged from beginner-intermediate level through to advanced level. they had a variety of tribal affiliations and only two participants were living in their tribal region at the time interviews were held. participants were also asked to choose a pseudonym. having a pseudonym, rather than a participant number, was thought to provide the reader with greater connection to the participant quotes. beginner to intermediate level learners (n = 11; 5 females and 6 males) were undergraduate students at victoria university of wellington, new zealand in either 100 level (n = 5), 200 level (n = 3), or 300 level (n = 3) courses. the mean age of beginner level learners was 26.8 years. although two participants in this group were professionals, the majority were students with incomes typical of a student population. advanced level learners (n = 8; 5 females, 3 males) were graduates of te panekiretanga o te reo māori, a course designed to enhance the language abilities of already proficient speakers. these participants had a higher mean age of 37.1 and were all working professionals. participants were also asked whether they would like to be interviewed in te reo māori or english. all advanced level participants chose to use te reo māori intermittently during interviews; however, only one participant solely spoke te reo māori throughout the whole interview. in contrast, beginner to intermediate level learners very rarely used te reo māori during the interviews. the author provided the translations of the interviews, which were checked by the participants to ensure that the intended meaning was captured correctly. the translations of māori language texts are noted as footnotes. historically, māori communities’ experienced adverse effects in response to participating in western scientific research that vilified, misrepresented, or plainly ignored māori people and their knowledge systems (jackson, 1998; kingi, 2005). due to these problematic research practices, māori researchers have become increasingly encouraged to undertake research in a manner that is consistent with māori cultural expectations. having meaningful relationships with participants is congruent with the kaupapa māori methodology principle of kanohi kitea (smith, 1989), which literally translates as ‘a face that is seen.’ participants were engaged with the view that the relationship would be maintained after the completion of this study. it was important to ensure that the participants were not made to feel pressure to participate, and standard ethical guidelines were followed. the school of psychology human ethics committee at victoria university of wellington provided ethical approval for this study. awanui te huia 616 students opted to participate in the study after being informed about the nature of the research during their regular class times. interviews with undergraduate participants were held on campus in culturally appropriate spaces (such as māori language tutorial rooms or an an indigenous psychology research area) where positive student directed interactions had taken place. one participant was interviewed at their work place due to convenience. as the author was a member of the māori studies department, given the relatively small number of students in the school, undergraduate students who chose to participate were fairly familiar with the interviewer. students were made aware that their participation in this study was not at all linked to grades that they might receive in māori studies courses that they were enrolled in. advanced students were also familiar with the interviewer due to shared interests te reo māori language education. the interviewer had been involved with māori language training where many of these participants were also in attendance or were teachers. relationships with the advanced learners may have positively impacted on the data as participants may have been more open during their discussions with the interviewer than with someone who they were less familiar with. in contrast, the relationship between the interviewer and the beginner to intermediate level participants may have led to participants sheltering some of their experiences for self-preservation reasons. furthermore, some participants may have responded in a way that they thought was pleasing to the interviewer given that the researcher was a member of the hl2 speaking community. for instance, they may have focused more attention on aspects of their motivations that highlighted their ingroup commitment rather than motivations that were less socially redeemable. although this was not obvious within the data, it is a possible research limitation. initially, it was thought that data from both sets of learners would be analysed separately. therefore, the interview schedule that was used for interviews with advanced level participants included a number of added questions. they were questions about whether these participants had experienced changes in motivation throughout their learning process. during the data analysis phase, it was clear that there were common elements that overlapped both sets of learners. interview schedules were developed using a review of literature as well as informal discussions with māori language learners, teachers and experts. the semistructured interview schedules were designed to explore factors relating to language motivation and to investigate how social relationships influenced participants’ choices to continue learning te reo māori to high stages of fluency. generally, interviews were 58.40 minutes in duration, with an average of 7032 words per transcript. interviews were recorded using an olympus voicetrek v-51 digital voice recorder. transcripts were coded with nvivo software. exploring goals and motivations of māori heritage language learners 617 each interview recording was first listened to once, where the main points were written down. the recording was then transcribed where additional points that emerged from the recordings were also noted. the transcript was then checked for accuracy and imported into the nvivo software programme, which assists in the management of large quantities of qualitative data. the interviewer was fairly familiar with the transcripts prior to coding. the transcripts were analysed individually. individual sematic nodes were created; for example “desire to improve communication” or “desire to adequately fulfill cultural roles.” semantic nodes were created from observing meaningful patterns from within the data. once there were a large number of semantic nodes, nodes that captured similar concepts and were specifically related to the aim of the present research were then grouped together. these clusters were combined to create an overarching theme, consistent with thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006). the themes that have been highlighted in this study include those that were commonly reported, as well as being relevant to the overall research aim. within each of the themes, clusters were reviewed to ensure that codes within a theme fit well together. furthermore, the multiple themes were reviewed once more to ensure that they fit well together to answer the overarching research aim. themes were also crossexamined for distinctiveness. on a few occasions, the clusters within a theme were distinct enough to justify subthemes within a larger theme. finally, themes were defined and labeled to identify the essence of the theme as a whole. although many of the experiences discussed by each of the participants were unique to their personal lives, there was generally an idea or concept that tied the quotes within a theme or subtheme together. the quotes that have been selected highlight a point prominent idea that was communicated within the data. 6. results the results were grouped into three major themes. these included māramatanga:1 cultural enlightenment and understanding, followed by ngā takohanga: responsibilities of māori hl2 speakers and learners, and, finally, whaia te ara: exploring hl2 motivations of māori with advanced levels of māori language abilities. nodes for the theme māramatanga were largely made up of participants’ desires to connect with whakapapa (both living and departed), the role that language plays as a platform for developing relationships with te reo māori speakers, and the enhanced understanding of the culture. 1 ‘enlightenment, insight, understanding, light, meaning, significance,’ and ‘brainwave’ are the meanings provided by māramatanga (n.d.). awanui te huia 618 the theme ngā takohanga literally translates into english as the ‘multiple responsibilities.’ parental responsibilities were discussed by participants as being a major consideration given the endangered nature of te reo māori. participants were motivated to improve their language skills in order to provide sound support to their children (or imagined children). leadership responsibilities in cultural contexts were substantial for both undergraduate and advanced levels of language learners; however, pressure to undertake cultural roles was especially prolific for those who had reached high levels of proficiency. the final theme whaia te ara literally translates into english as ‘pursuing the path.’ despite the fact that many of the learners had reached high levels of language proficiency, they continued to be motivated to improve their skills. this theme was also divided into two subthemes: instrumental and relational motivations, and language specific motivations. instrumental and relational motivations were largely tied together. in an environment where te reo māori is being revitalised, those who have skills are sought after professionally (jackson & fischer, 2007) but also by their communities in order to fulfill cultural roles. the subtheme language specific motivations largely consisted of learners wanting to gain a level of understanding of the language that is comparable to native speakers. the desire to learn new vocabulary, idioms, and proverbial sayings was high amongst those with high levels of proficiency. each of these themes will be discussed in detail as follows. 6.1. theme 1, māramatanga: cultural enlightenment and understanding the theme māramatanga includes discussions about how an increase in knowledge contributed to hl2 learners’ overall sense of belonging and identity. the word māramatanga was chosen as māori hl2 learners commonly described its multiple meanings. the language provided participants with both a greater feeling of connectedness between speakers of te reo māori and cultural awareness. these feelings were described in the following excerpt: “it was a whole opening, and the more the world opens to you, the more better you feel” (mahinaarangi, advanced). language also provided learners with the tools to engage with others at a relational and cultural level. an example of this is explained in the following excerpt: i’d love to be fluent. i’d love to be able to just be really comfortable to just enter into a room and just chat really easily . . . i just want to be able to really communicate and understand people, because i think that there’s more to a language than just words, . . . the concepts behind it, so if you communicate with someone in that language you understand them in a deeper level as well. (ana, undergraduate) exploring goals and motivations of māori heritage language learners 619 similar to the quote above, hong, benet-martinez, chiu, and morris’s (2003) research indicated that developing skills in multiple languages provides individuals with enhanced cognition to perceive information from multiple cultural viewpoints. some māori learners within this study appear to be developing a greater depth of understanding about the hl2 speaker community and the culture more broadly. a positive aspect of learning te reo māori was that learners were able to communicate with greater cultural intimacy. the knowledge of te reo māori allowed them to understand what was being said, which at a practical level enhanced emotional security. our grandparents and great grandmother had a house there and their house was a reo māori house . . . as kids running around and playing amongst that i think there was an invisible motivation that came through. i call it like a spiritual tie between . . . i wanted to unlock the māramatanga to know . . . why they were laughing or swearing, or whatever, or getting heated. . . . so that was a high motivation for me i think. i may not have understood it back then, but now i definitely can relate to that. (pānia, advanced) for those participants who were exposed to te reo māori in the home, their desire to learn te reo māori came through indirect exposure to the language. positive role models who spoke the language contributed to motivation. furthermore, the deep connection participants have with te reo speakers was highlighted. the intimacy of the relationship between the term mother tongue and a hl2 has been emphasised by padilla and borsato (2010), which is most definitely the case for many māori learners of te reo māori who participated in this study. for some māori language learners in this study, te reo māori provided them with the ability to connect with their ancestors and significant others through the use of imagery that the language provided. my grandfather . . . when i used to hear him speak on the marae,2 he blows me away, . . . and there’s the motivation right there, i want reo like my grandfather’s. i want to know how he feels when he speaks. i want to know the thought processes he goes through in order to create a world within his words. i want to know why he does it. you know all of those things. i want to know how he feels when he gets up and speaks on his marae. (puawai, advanced) there is an element of pride in being able to speak on one’s own marae. the cultural significance of being able to understand the internal thought processes of older generations is also embedded within this quote. furthemore, being able to fulfil the role and expectations in a cultural sense is also likely to be a motivational driver at this higher stage of proficiency. 2 marae is used here to refer to a customary māori communal space. awanui te huia 620 6.2. theme 2, ngā takohanga: responsibilities of hl2 speakers and learners the second theme, ngā takohanga, was broken into two subthemes, parental responsibilities and leadership responsibilities. those with leadership and/or parental responsibilities often reported that these specific roles were tied to their motivation to become more proficient in te reo māori. 6.2.1. theme 2, subtheme 1: parental responsibilities participants reported feeling responsible for the language choices they made when raising their children. notably, seven female participants reported that children contributed to their language motivation irrespective of whether or not they were mothers at the time of the interview. three males also signaled that their children and families motivated them to improve their language, but only in cases where the male was already a father at the time of the interview. perhaps the social expectations placed on women to be the cultural providers for their children enhanced this gender divide (syed, 2001). i think ultimately too, i want to know that my reo is correct, that i’m not making any mistakes, ‘cause when i use it when i have kids or anything and i want to use it with them, or i want to speak to them in te reo, i don’t want to screw them over or anything. (te rina, undergraduate) participants’ heritage connection to te reo māori meant that their language responsibilities to their children were high. being able to correct their children was consistent with “good parenting.” hēni explains: when i spoke poorly [in english], my father would always correct me, no matter how many people were there. . . . once my daughter engaged in this [māori language] environment, and the more we committed to speaking māori to her, i thought, oh gosh, i don’t want to get a stage where she’s speaking really poorly and a) i don’t know she’s speaking poorly, and b) wouldn’t have a clue as to how to correct her, because if she’d done that in english, i’d know and correct her straight away. . . . i thought oh good grief, i can’t let her become an experiment, i’ve got to engage, learn and always keep a step ahead of her, otherwise if i can’t do that, then i’ve failed her of sorts. (hēni, advanced) speakers without children understood how having children benefited the language outcomes of fellow students. exploring goals and motivations of māori heritage language learners 621 [my friend] could kōrero te reo ki te kāinga ki tāna tama, i taua wā hoki, i whānau mai tāna tama.3 and i was thinking, that’s more of a motivation for yourself as a parent as well. you’re wanting to nurture your child in this language. and you’ve got to have more, and be more fluent. (mahinaarangi, advanced) it was well understood by participants that the goal of the parent was to nurture their child. while participants varied in the level of active support that they received by their parents, most participants described that their parents influenced their decision to learn te reo māori in some way. some participants recalled not having the ability to communicate with their parents in te reo māori, while others had parents who were native speakers. however, generally te reo māori was not the main language of communication. hoani describes a childhood memory: maumahara tonu au i hoki atu au ki te kāinga, e kite atu au i taku pāpa e tunu kai ana, kātahi ka mea atu au ki taku pāpa “e pāpa, he tangata kōrero māori koe?” nā te mea ko tētahi o āku tino kaupapa i te kura tino pai ki ahau ko te reo māori. kātahi, ka whakaatu atu tāku mahi, mahi kāinga ki a ia, i te kimi āwhina kia tutuki pai taku mahi kāinga. engari, kite atu au te kūare, te kore mōhio, te matakohore, i a ia e whakaaro atu ana, i reira i toko ake te whakaaro, e kī, kāore taku pāpa e tino mōhio ana ki te kōrero māori. i kite atu hoki te pōuri i roto i a ia i taua wā tonu. nā, mai i aua wā, tae noa ki ēnei rangi tonu, kua kī ake au ki ahau anō, kia kore rawa āku tamariki e tupu ake pērā ana.4 (hoani, advanced) the interaction described above is highly emotional for those māori hl2 learners who can relate to similar experiences. it is the perspective of a child seeing his father’s anguish as he reveals to his son that he cannot speak his hl2. for participants who were parents, being unable to engage with their child in te reo māori was an uncomfortable experience. timothy explains how he felt about not being able to communicate basic concepts or instructions to his children using te reo māori prior to learning: i think it’s just ‘cause te reo māori is a strong language. you know, it’s my own language, it’s my family’s language, and for me to not be in the mix, it’s just sort of heart breaking really. . . . to be outside the bubble you know. everyone starts having 3 ‘speak the language at home to her son at that time, when her son was born’ 4 ‘i still remember returning home and seeing my father cooking dinner, i asked him “dad, do you speak māori?” because one of my favourite topics at school was the māori language. then i showed him my work, i was looking for guidance to complete my homework properly. however, i saw then as he was trying to work it out that he didn’t really understand, at that point i realised, oh, my father doesn’t really know how to speak māori. i also saw the sadness that resided in him at that time. so, from that point in time till now, i’ve said to myself, my children will never grow up that way.’ awanui te huia 622 a big kōrero,5 and you’re just outside the bubble. you don’t even know what’s going on. (timothy, undergraduate) being ‘outside the bubble’ is an image that is easy to conjure. not being able to communicate in one’s own hl2 is likely to be highly damaging for individuals who feel unable to change their situation. for instance, mcintosh (2005) explains, for many māori, the inability to converse in te reo also works to exclude them in different fora. this lack of ability is heightened in an environment where the language is being revitalised. the sense of shame experienced by those who are non-speakers is very real. (p. 45) however, of note is that the participants of this study all had access to languagelearning facilities and were engaged with language learning. participants were motivated by a desire to continue their cultural heritage through using the language with their children. i guess for me it’s very personal, being māori and being able to converse in my mother tongue. you know, and not just for me, but for my children, and i want to be able to develop that that desire within my own family, with my cousins and their kids[.] (hori, undergraduate) māori parents who choose to learn te reo māori are likely to be doing so due to reasons related to cultural preservation or maintenance. responsibilities that many māori hl2 learners, who are also parents, feel toward their children significantly contribute to māori language motivation. 6.2.2. theme 2, subtheme 2: leadership responsibilities the second subtheme concerns the leadership responsibilities that came with being an hl2 learner in a situation where the health of the language was at risk. participants who had been placed in leadership positions reported experiencing significant pressure to take on roles, particularly as the language was a necessary skill required in order to feel adequate in such roles. some of those responsibilities within my cousins, and within my generation are directed towards me as well. having um, having achieved within my whānau6 some of the things i’ve done, people sort of naturally look up to you, but um, you know i look at that as being part of the pākehā7 world and so on. but i need to, for my own um, 5 ‘discussion’ 6 ‘family’ 7 ‘new zealand european/mainstream new zealand’ exploring goals and motivations of māori heritage language learners 623 um identity and peace of mind, i have to expand my māori knowledge of tikanga8 and te reo, so that in the future i just don’t have half of it, i have the whole package. (hori, undergraduate) language achievements the hl2 learners made were shared by significant others. the performance-based roles that participants were asked to enact were roles that held mana.9 because of the honour that hl2 learners felt toward performing such roles, the roles were also very stressful for many hl2 learners especially when the hl2 learner’s language skills were limited. [i thought] i won’t have to do it, then one day, my tutor came up to me [and said] “i want you to do the mihi,10 i want you to do the whaikōrero,”11 i said to him, “i don’t want to do it. i’m not capable of doing it and i’m not going to do it in front of them.” (timothy, undergraduate) the public performance aspects of formal māori cultural roles were difficult for beginner level speakers to take on. with little formal training in the art of whaikōrero, it was common for participants to describe feeling daunted by the challenge. many beginner-level participants, particularly males, reported how formal cultural roles contributed to them wanting to improve their language skills. aotea says: i want to be able to stand up on any marae, introduce myself properly, whakapapa12 myself appropriately . . . i just don’t want to get up and say tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou13 this is why i’m here and sit down, i want to be able to pay the right respects. (aotea, undergraduate) the ability to connect with others through relationships (including whakapapa14 relationships) is a central feature discussed by participants. having the ability to achieve this successfully is not only reliant on the knowledge of such relationships but also on having the language to accurately articulate how parties are connected. these values are linked to durie’s (2001) observations that māori preferences for collectivism are still active within māori language speaking domains. there were pressures to perform in formal situations for both genders’ roles. the pressure of having to speak during formal occasions motivated some participants. 8 ‘customary protocols’ 9 ‘prestige’ 10 introductions or greetings 11 formal speech making 12 ‘ancestry’ 13 a basic formal greeting 14 ‘ancestral’ awanui te huia 624 my husband would have been [motivated by] the death of his father, and that happened two years before our daughter was born. . . . births and deaths are triggers in a cultural context. most people arrive at a tangi15 and yeah, surprised to find, i can’t mihi, i can’t haka,16 i can’t really engage in the formalities or a process of sorts. (hēni, advanced) having the ability to farewell the dead in culturally appropriate ways is likely to incite motivation. those who do not have the language skills to engage in these contexts can feel excluded and unable to participate during these intensely emotional times (edge, nikora, & rua, 2011). many advanced level māori hl2 learners in this study, who had been selected as leaders within their group, explained that as they began to gain higher levels of proficiency they also began to feel the pressure associated with their role responsibilities. the responsibilities that accompanied higher levels of language proficiency meant that advanced learners were taking on roles as a result of their language progress: “here [as my language skills increased], the motivation started to change a little bit because it was more about trying to take a lead role in my whānau, my extended whānau on my mum’s side” (herewini, advanced). the more proficiency individuals had, the greater their responsibilities became. they were often singled out for the language skills they had acquired. especially when the older you get, the more responsibility does fall on your shoulders and when we did te panekiretanga, it came as a real shock as how little fluent speakers, kaikaranga,17 kaiwhaikōrero18 there are out there, ‘cause we had to research your own marae, hapū,19 whatever. and go around, who actually knows how to karanga20 in every situation, ahakoa te kaupapa.21 whakapapa,22 ngā pao23 and all of that kind of stuff, you could really count them on one hand. it never used to be like that, it’s more of a responsibility, your reo is a huge responsibility. (mahinaarangi, advanced) as a result of becoming hl2 learners and the fact that they were exposed to a number of people who worked in the area of māori language revitalisation, 15 a formal māori funeral ceremony 16 ceremonial cultural dance 17 literally translated as “caller the woman (or women) who has the role of making the ceremonial call to visitors onto a marae, or equivalent venue, at the start of a pōwhiri (ceremonial welcome)” (kaikaranga, n.d.). 18 the person tasked with “formal speech-making formal speeches usually made by men during a pōwhiri and other gatherings” (kaiwhaikōrero, n.d.). 19 ‘subtribe’ 20 ‘to call or summon, used in the context of pōwhiri’ 21 ‘irrespective of the occasion’ 22 ‘ancestry’ 23 ngā is a plural version of ‘the,’ and pao in this case describes “a short, impromptu topical song” that is sung in response to a given occasion (pao, n.d.). exploring goals and motivations of māori heritage language learners 625 some participants noted that they had a heightened sense of awareness about the dire state of the language. for many speakers, they were one of few within their immediate family, or wider community, who could conduct particular cultural roles using te reo māori. moreover, as advanced learners became more proficient in te reo, the number of native speakers who could guide or mentor them became more limited. being made aware of the health of the māori language meant that many advanced-level speakers were left with an immense sense of responsibility for the maintenance and revitalisation of the language. 6.3. theme 3, whaia te ara: exploring hl2 motivations of māori with advanced levels of māori language abilities the third theme was divided into two subthemes, instrumental motivations and language-specific motivations. instrumental motivations were commonly coupled with relationally based motivations whereby individuals were able to use their skills in order to support others to learn te reo māori. the second subtheme was the commonly discussed desire to be “more native” in language delivery. these are discussed in the following two subsections. 6.3.1. theme 3, subtheme 1: instrumental and relational motivations a positive outcome for many participants who had advanced levels of proficiency was that they were able to gain employment opportunities that supported their language development. reo opportunities, learning is earning [laugh] . . . because it can provide you with good money. . . . educational opportunities. numerous opportunities. just so much, and that’s filtered down to my own kids who are teachers as well. (riria, advanced) many participants in this study were educators or involved with education. given that there are so few highly fluent te reo māori speakers, their skills are in high demand in the community but also from employers, as demonstrated by jackson and fischer (2007). employers emphasized in this study that the ability of māori to use te reo māori was a key reason for the prioritisation of selecting high-merit māori over non-māori. mahinaarangi explains a benefit of her language proficiency: “higher pay cheque [laugh] and more access to other speakers, that would be the hugest [benefit]” (mahinaarangi, advanced). humour was often a means of explaining that pay was a motivation to continue to improve language abilities. having access to other speakers not only motivated individuals to improve, but it also enabled them to increase their proficiency. awanui te huia 626 the types of careers participants were employed in were “other” focused roles. for instance, pānia explains how her self-improvement in the language is directly linked to her relational connection with other learners: now that i’m more proficient and fluent in te reo, my motivation is to be the best that i can, to continue to be the best that i can be with te reo and then pass on that reo knowledge to others who are willing to learn. i understand the power that you feel as a person because you’ve unlocked a door to your cultural heritage. (pānia, advanced) advanced learners had often chosen teachingor education-based vocations as a way of sharing their knowledge with others. 6.3.2. theme 3, subtheme 2: language-specific motivations increasing language competence through increased knowledge about language features such as kīwaha, 24 whakataukī,25 and dialectal differences were raised as aspects that sustained motivation at higher levels of proficiency. that basic [motivation] is still with me now. how can i communicate better, and i still use those techniques they taught me . . . when i’ve got to prep to do a whaikōrero, hopefully, like i say, my vocabulary is improving and my ability to select my appropriate whakataukī are improving over time. so my basic core motivation is to be, get better, and to be a better practitioner and also to be a better teacher. (matiu, advanced) there was a view that hl2 learning was continuous, and that there was no end to improving their language skills. wanting to sound as much like a native speaker as possible was a key component of mastering language fluency. so native, as close to native delivery of te reo as possible. saying things like, tutuki26 as opposed to tūtuki,27 the stress on the word can make a big difference. knowing several words for one thing. (pānia, advanced) when you become more fluent, you are looking for better ways of saying the same thing. you’re always listening out for how more native speakers say it and a more figurative way of saying something rather than your black and white stuff. that’s my motivation now is how i’m going to get better and trying to aim to be more eloquent. (mahinaarangi, advanced) 24 ‘colloquialisms’ 25 ‘proverbial sayings’ 26 ‘to be finished or complete’ 27 ‘to collide or stumble’ exploring goals and motivations of māori heritage language learners 627 7. discussion this study was designed to explore the range of factors that contributed to māori hl2 learner motivations. the results of this study confirmed that some māori hl2 learners hold a number of cultural roles and responsibilities, and that the language is central to many māori hl2 learners’ ability to successfully enact such roles. unlike learners of globally dominant languages, māori hl2 learners have an immense sense of obligation toward maintaining the language for future generations. the fact that māori learners are aware of the possibility of language death is unavoidably linked to their motivation to initiate language learning behaviour and to improve their language abilities even if they are already proficient. in cultures where the language is endangered it becomes much more than a means of communication. as padilla and borsato (2010) explain, “not only does language serve as a means of interpersonal communication between members of the group but also it can be used to effectively establish boundaries between the in-group and out-group” (p. 12). motivations to learn te reo māori also come from a desire to be considered a valid and valued ingroup member of the language speaking community, as observed in similar research by vedder and virta (2005). those who are supported to achieve higher levels of proficiency are likely to experience some of the positive emotions associated with ingroup membership status and feelings of belonging. furthermore, the language abilities of proficient māori hl2 may allow them to participate in cultural engagements where te reo māori is the main form of communication. being able to participate meaningfully in māori language environments is likely to enhance the degree to which māori hl2 members feel that they have a right to their ingroup membership. through repeated contact with the target language group, it is likely that learners’ decision to improve their language abilities is reaffirmed and positively rewarded. similar to the concept of language investment (norton, 1997), māori hl2 learners receive a set of symbolic and material resources as a result of their personal decision to learn the hl2. the capacity of already proficient learners to accumulate resources due to their language abilities could account for why some māori hl2 learners continue to improve their language skills despite being already competent language speakers. in contrast to the experiences of highly proficient māori hl2 learners is the fear and anxiety experienced by māori hl2 learners with limited language abilities. a difficulty for māori hl2 learners with limited language skills is the fear and anxiety attached to being in spaces where they are expected to know the language. as māori language abilities are commonly associated with ingroup membership (for instance, being able to claim a māori identity) (kāretu, 1993; awanui te huia 628 mcintosh, 2005), when individuals do not possess functional levels of māori language, they may equate such linguistic limitations with an inability to claim a māori identity. for instance, those with low māori language skills may presume that others may view them as inauthentic members of the cultural group (mcintosh, 2005). heightened levels of anxiety in language speaking contexts are likely to prevent māori with limited or no māori language skills from being positively engaged with the culture due to a perceived threat to their identity (penetito, 2011). future research could perhaps investigate the perspectives of māori who choose to withdraw from language domains to contribute to a better understanding of these experiences. the goal of cultural and language revitalisation is something which is commonly acknowledged by language planners and those involved with language revitalisation. as, kāretu (2008) explains, “for fear that our ancestors exclaim: ‘the language was completely thriving during our time, what on earth did you do to it?,’ what might you say in response to your ancestors, or your own descendants when their time comes?” (p. 2).28 māori hl2 learners’ goals for language revitalisation were motivating for some participants in this study. however, the desire to satisfy their immediate identity needs and the shared goals of their language-learner community were more urgent (or pertinent) than the larger goal of language revitalisation. there appeared to be a bi-directional relationship between language revitalisation and individual-level motivations in that by using the language revitalisation is also being implemented, which is consistent with king’s (2007) findings. the results of this study were similar to hl2 studies that have indicated that women take on additional cultural maintenance responsibilities (syed, 2001). new zealand census data showed that 12% of māori women are able to converse to a high degree about everyday events at a high level of proficiency, while only 9% of māori males are able to do the same (statistics new zealand, 2014b). the gender difference may be related to findings from the previous research (kalafatelis, 2010) signifying that child-rearing responsibilities are considerable languagelearner motivations for māori women. if women are motivated to use the language for functional purposes, including day-to-day integenerational transmission, this could contribute to the gender discrepancy in hl2 acquisition. those with even minimal language skills reported that the language proficiency they had acquired provided them with an alternative worldview. this study affirms that language abilities enhance new forms of holistic thought 28 the translation is the present author’s. the original quotation is as follows: “kei kī hoki ō tātou tīpuna ā taua wā rā, ‘i te ora rawa atu te reo i te wā i a mātou i aha kētia e koutou?’ he aha tāu ka urupare atu ki a rātou, ki ō uri rānei ā te wā ki a rātou?” (kāretu, 2008, p. 2). exploring goals and motivations of māori heritage language learners 629 (nisbett, peng, choi, & norenzayan, 2001) that resounded with traditional māori concepts to a considerable degree (durie, 2001). the ability to switch cultural frames (hong et al., 2003) effectively was perhaps an outcome for māori hl2 learners as they internalised the cultural values of their māori community. as most participants were already familiar with pākehā behavioural norms, the ability to adapt in māori contexts was positive for both psychological adaption and for relationship building. similar to identity negotiation theory put forward by ting-toomey (2005), research could explore whether māori hl2 learners develop skills to engage in identity negotiation more readily than monolingual māori speakers of english. furthermore, māori hl2 learners may enhance their ability to negotiate cultural orientations dependent on the cultural values prioritised in their varying language environments. a limitation of this research was that the experiences of those who had perhaps attempted to learn te reo māori and had withdrawn from the process of learning were not included in this study. the views of these individuals may help to provide insights as to why some māori disengage from the learning process. it is possible that māori who are not supported through having strong relational ties with the culture may find it difficult to sustain the motivation to continue. taking into account the concept of investment (norton, 1997; norton & toohey, 2001), it is likely that those who are highly invested in being viewed as culturally mandated ingroup members of the language speaking community would have more to gain from improving their language skills. this study does not assume that language motivations of māori are directly transferable to the motivations of other indigenous populations or to hl2 learners globally. the experiences of colonisation that indigenous peoples have been subjected to are likely to influence language learning motivation in a number of distinct ways. however, what indigenous hl2 communities have in common (as observed by fishman, 2001) is the low numbers of speakers. for indigenous hl2 learners to progress in becoming proficient target language speakers, it is necessary to develop relationships with the speaker population outside of the classroom. for some learners, this process may inadvertently assist in the process of cultural knowledge sharing and thus contribute to the wider goal of indigenous cultural maintenance and/or revitalisation. 8. conclusion research findings from this study can be linked to universal experiences of second language learners in the sense that learners may develop increased levels of motivation due to the current or future rewards that they receive from the target language community. however, what distinguishes māori hl2 learners, indigenous to awanui te huia 630 aotearoa, new zealand, is their cultural and spiritual connection with both the language and the past and present speakers of that language. the history of colonisation that has directly influenced the current state of te reo māori is one which has contemporary consequences for māori hl2 learners and the future of the language as a whole. the process of reclaiming a māori identity is also deeply entrenched in the politics surrounding language motivation. in order for māori hl2 motivations to be better understood, it is vital that the historical colonial context of language oppression, and that the contemporary efforts of revitalization, be considered. when exploring hl2 learner motivations more broadly, perhaps what many hl2 learners globally share in common is the ability to use the hl2 as a vehicle for informing its language speakers about the values of hl2 communities (both living and deceased). furthermore, the personal nature of language learning for hl2 learners may have implications for social identity at an individual level and the confidence to claim ingroup membership at a collective level. those who are able to connect with their identity and heritage culture through the act of language learning are likely to be empowered to create further bonds with the target culture. these questions could be explored further in future research that focuses specifically on the role of hl2 learners’ cultural identity processes at both the group and individual level. acknowledgements he mihi nui tēnei ki ngā kaiuiui kua whai wāhi mai ki tēnei kaupapa rangahau. ko te tūmanako ia kua tika taku whakamāramatanga atu i ngā wheako kua tohua mai ki ahau. he mihi hoki tēnei ki ōku kaiarahi arā ko rawinia higgins, rāua ko james liu, tēnā rawa atu kōrua i ngā kupu akiaki me ngā tohutohu. tēnā anō hoki koe e taku hoa a arama rata i te āhua o tō tautoko mai ki ahau me āku tuhituhinga. tēnā koutou katoa. exploring goals and motivations of māori heritage language learners 631 references benet-martinez, v., & haritatos, j. 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(1989). honouring the treaty: an introduction for pākehā to the treaty of waitangi. auckland: penguin. 489 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 7 (3). 2017. 489-515 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.3.7 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl l1 french learning of l2 spanish past tenses: l1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues josé amenós-pons complutense university of madrid, spain s.gamir@leedsbeckett.ac.uk aoife ahern complutense university of madrid, spain aoife.k.ahern@gmail.com pedro guijarro-fuentes university of the balearic islands, spain p.guijarro@uib.es abstract this paper examines the process of acquiring l2s that are closely related to the l1 through data on how adult french speakers learning l2 spanish in a formal setting develop knowledge and use of past tenses in this l2. we consider the role of transfer and simplification in acquiring mental representations of the l2 grammar, specifically in the area of tense and aspect, and how learners deal with integrating grammatically encoded, lexical and discursive information, including mismatching feature combinations leading to particular inferential effects on interpretation. data is presented on the spanish past tenses (simple and compound past, pluperfect, imperfect and progressive forms) from two tasks, an oral production filmretell and a multiple-choice interpretation task, completed by learners at a2, b1, b2 and c1 cefr levels (n = 20-24 per level). l1 influence is progressively attenuated as proficiency increases. difficulties were not always due to negative l1 transfer, but related also to grammar-discourse interface issues when integrating linguistic and pragmatic information in the interpretation process. this has clear implications for the teaching of closely related languages: instruction should not only josé amenós-pons, aoife ahern, pedro guijarro-fuentes 490 focus on crosslinguistic contrasts, but also prioritize uses requiring complex interface integration, which are harder to process. keywords: instructed sla; tense; aspect; closely-related languages; language transfer 1. introduction: past tenses in french and spanish in this paper we report empirical data on the acquisition, by instructed adult l1 french speakers learning spanish (at a2, b1, b2 and c1 cefr levels), of the ability to use l2 tense-aspect morphology: simple past (sp), compound past (cp), imperfect (imp), pluperfect (plp) and progressive (prog) forms. the acquisition of the past tense morphology of l2 spanish (as well as other romance languages such as french, italian and portuguese) has received a great deal of attention, but most studies concentrate exclusively on the sp/imp contrast, especially in groups of learners whose l1 does not have such aspectual contrast (mainly l1 english speakers). little has been said, however, about closely related language pairings, and very few studies have included other tenses than sp and imp. spanish and french share with the rest of the romance languages the distinction between perfective and imperfective tenses, and the use of imp is generally assumed to be similar in these two languages, although in fact some differences are found in modal contexts (amenós-pons, 2015; escandell-vidal & leonetti, 2003), such as (1) and (2) below: (1) a. sp. si tuviera (imp-subj) dinero, daría (cond) la vuelta al mundo. b. fr. si j’avais (imp-ind) de l’argent, je ferais (cond) le tour du monde. if i had money, i would travel around the world. (2) a. sp. se acostaron (sp) temprano, porque salían (imp-ind) de viaje a las ocho de la mañana. b. fr. ils se sont couchés (cp) de bonne heure, parce qu’ils devaient partir (modal auxiliary in imp + infinitive) a huit heures du matin. they went to bed early, because they had to leave at 8.00 in the morning. on the one hand, as seen in (1), the imperfect subjunctive is generally the standard form in the antecedent of spanish irrealis if-conditional clauses, while the indicative is compulsory in contemporary french.1 on the other hand, as depicted 1 overall, the use of the subjunctive is more restricted in contemporary french than in spanish: in french, the subjunctive appears in fewer environments, and has only two productive forms: the present and the compound past, while spanish uses also the imperfect and the pluperfect forms (de mulder, 2010; laca, 2010). l1 french learning of l2 spanish past tenses: l1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues 491 in (2), the spanish imp is prone to prospective uses; they are not entirely ruled out in french, but the contexts allowing them are more restricted than in spanish, and an auxiliary verb (in imp) is often required in french (azzopardi, 2011; gosselin, 1999). these contrasts do not necessarily imply a crosslinguistic difference in the semantics of the imp, but may rather be seen as a consequence of the overall diverging possibilities offered by the tense-aspect systems of each language (amenós-pons, 2015). besides, both languages have simple and compound past tenses, but, as shown in (2) above, they are used differently. in spanish, the cp can be a perfect and a hodiernal past, but not a general narrative tense, since the sp is required for that purpose (real academia española, 2009).2 as for french, the sp is only found in written, mostly literary texts. in oral use, as well as in informal written language, the cp is the main narrative tense. the french cp can also be a perfect, both in oral and written usage (corblin & de swart, 2003). crosslinguistic variation in the use of cp/sp in romance is generally considered to reflect successive stages in the evolution of a common compound form, from its original resultative meaning towards a fully perfective tense-like function; the french cp is further along that journey than its spanish counterpart (lindstedt, 2000). finally, the prog (not a tense, but a progressive operator) is found in spanish and french, although its nature is different in each language: prog is a morphosyntactic marker in spanish, but a lexicosyntactic device in french. the mapping of prog over the grammatical tense-aspect system also varies across the two languages, as in spanish, prog may be combined with perfective and imperfective tenses, while the french perfective tenses do not allow the use of prog. in fact, even in imperfective contexts, the frequency of prog is much lower in french than in spanish. this may be related to the fact that the french construction is an innovation dating back only to the 18th century, and its use as a progressive device is not fully grammaticalized (bertinetto, 2000): (3) a. sp. cuando juan llegó (sp), ana todavía estaba (imp + prog) trabajando. b. fr. quand jean est arrive (cp), anne travaillait (imp) encore (? était en train de travailler (imp + prog)). when john arrived, anne was still working. (4) a. sp. ayer, pedro estuvo leyendo (sp + prog) durante dos horas. b. fr. hier, pierre a lu (cp) pendant deux heures. yesterday, peter spent two hours reading. 2 in spanish, there is substantial diatopic variation in the cp/sp alternation. the above description refers only to standard european spanish, which is the variety learned by the participants in the study; in most american varieties of spanish, the cp can only be a perfect, and not a hodiernal past tense. josé amenós-pons, aoife ahern, pedro guijarro-fuentes 492 within the syntactic framework of the minimalist program (chomsky, 1995), tense and aspect are regarded as interpretable features, that is, elements that make a semantic contribution to the interpretation of utterances, apart from having a syntactic function. similar features can be bundled in different ways, depending on the language. this is indeed the case of french and spanish, as both have grammaticalized tense and aspect, and perfective and imperfective aspects may be combined, in turn, with all predicate types, telic and atelic. still, as pointed out above, the uses of past tenses and aspectual operators (such as prog) differ between french and spanish. this implies that each of the two languages deploys these features in particular ways, and that the task of a french speaker learning spanish will consist of appropriately re-assembling bundles of features, such as the tense-aspect ones, in the l2 lexicon, and determining the specific conditions under which their properties are morphophonologically expressed (lardiere, 2008, 2009). the type of difficulties that this should cause and their permanent or transitory status are controversial issues within current generative approaches (see ayoun & rothman, 2013 and references therein), and upon which our study intends to shed new light. however, as is widely acknowledged, language use is not only a matter of syntax, but an interface phenomenon, where information from different systems (syntax, semantics and pragmatics) must be combined. when processing utterances, integrating linguistic and non-linguistic information has a cognitive cost, particularly in an l2, and this has often been reported as a source of variability (sharwood smith & truscott, 2014; sorace, 2011; sorace & filiaci, 2006). thus, our study will also enquire into the specific complexities of the syntax/pragmatics interface for l2 acquisition of tense and aspect in closely related language pairings. the paper is organized as follows: firstly, in section 2, an overview of the empirical studies on the acquisition of l1 spanish past tenses is offered; in section 3, an introduction to the fundamental aspects of our own study is provided; in section 4, we report on and discuss our results, finishing up with conclusions, limitations and suggestions for further research in section 5, linking the experimental data with current theories on l2 acquisition by processing (sharwood smith & truscott, 2014) and language/discourse-pragmatics interface issues. 2. previous studies on l2 spanish past tense acquisition researchers from different theoretical backgrounds tend to agree on certain core findings (comajoan, 2014): (a) before the emergence of tense-aspect morphology, learners make use of lexical and pragmatic devices to refer to past events (dietrich, klein, & noyau, 1995); (b) in production studies, the sp tends to appear before the imp (bardovi-harlig, 2000; salaberry, 2011); (c) verbal forms are (at l1 french learning of l2 spanish past tenses: l1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues 493 least partially) learned before their uses are mastered (bardovi-harlig, 2000; dietrich, klein, & noyau, 1995; montrul, 2004; montrul & slabakova, 2002); (d) the ability to use sp and imp appropriately develops in stages, marked by prototypical associations of lexical aspect, discourse grounding and grammatical aspect (andersen & shirai, 1996; bardovi-harlig, 2000); this implies that (e) the use of sp in narrative discourses tends to be linked initially to telic predicates in the discourse foreground, while the imp is related to atelic predicates in the background. therefore, acquiring the use of past tenses may be described as learning to relate the tenses to the shifting needs of discourse, rather than prototypically relating verb forms to predicate types. in an l2, this can only be done at higher levels of proficiency, because it requires the ability to process and harmonize linguistic and extralinguistic cues (comajoan, 2014 and references therein). among the studies mentioned in the previous paragraphs, however, only dietrich, klein, and noyau’s (1995) include the french-spanish language pair, although they concentrate on naturalistic l2 learners and, compared to our own study, the language order is reversed (l1 spanish/l2 french). conversely, instructed french learners of spanish were involved in a study carried out by lorenzo (2002). taking a discourse approach, the author studied the information structure of the narratives produced by advanced l1 french speakers of l2 spanish; she claimed that the l1 habits strongly influence the way learners organize information, even at higher proficiency levels. in fact, as the author points out, due to the type of task (an orally told children’s story), most of the participants chose to tell the story in the present tense (as often done in french), and not many past tense forms were produced. within the generative tradition, diaz, bel, and bekiou (2007) investigated the acquisition of sp and imp by different groups of l2 learners, including l1 greek and also other romance language speakers, whose languages encode the [± perfective] feature. it was found that the presence of this feature in the l1 helped those two groups of learners, compared with other l1 groups (from chinese, japanese and slavic backgrounds), whose native languages do not specify that feature. after reviewing numerous generative studies on the acquisition of l2 english, spanish, french and portuguese by learners of diverse language backgrounds, ayoun and rothman (2013, p. 144) concluded that: (a) instructed l2 learners tend to gradually improve, and eventually acquire, the ability to use the l2 tense-aspect-mood morphology, while at the same time, (b) interface-conditioned properties at the syntax-discourse interface are “more subject to vulnerability.” the authors relate their claim to sorace’s interface hypothesis, whose “most current instantiation maintains that internal interfaces [i.e., syntax-semantics interfaces] should be less problematic than external ones [i.e., grammardiscourse pragmatics] for l2 convergence, due to differences in the attentional josé amenós-pons, aoife ahern, pedro guijarro-fuentes 494 (processing) resource assignment needed (sorace & serratrice, 2009; sorace, 2011).” yet, only one of the tense-aspect studies described by ayoun and rothman (namely, diaz, bel, & bekiou, 2007) included l1 romance speakers. therefore, as anticipated in the introduction, much remains to be done in the study of the acquisition of past tenses within close languages, and of the acquisition of tense-aspect devices other than the sp and imp. these are the issues that will be the focus of the remainder of this paper. 3. research aims and methodology 3.1. research questions and hypotheses three research questions form the basis of our study, namely: (1) how do sp, cp, imp, plp and prog develop? (2) what is the effect of transfer from l1?, and (3) how or when do l2 learners acquire and use, if at all, non-prototypical associations (e.g., cases of aspectual coercion, non-focalized prog, or pragmatically based temporal reference)? in relation to these questions, two alternative hypotheses were considered. firstly, that l1 transfer could be the main force guiding acquisition of closely related languages, or, alternatively, that l1 transfer could be complemented and counterbalanced by the need to reduce the cognitive burden when processing and producing l2 utterances. if the first possibility is correct, it would be expected that, for l1 french speakers, variability would appear in the use of cp/sp and in the use of prog, especially with perfective tenses; in contrast, the uses of imp and plp would not pose substantial challenges, except (in the case of imp) in specific modal contexts. however, if the need to avoid cognitive overload significantly influences language processing across closely related languages, input and output simplification could come about as an attempt to reduce such overload. sticking to prototypical aspectual associations could be an effect of that tendency; difficulty in integrating semantic, syntactic and pragmatic information (e.g., discourse relations) would also be expected, especially at lower levels of proficiency. 3.2. task design originally, the study included three tasks: (1) an oral film retell task, in which the participants were asked to tell the story from the point of view of the main character, using the first person (as a personal experience); (2) a written narrative task (“what was your most memorable birthday?”); (3) a written error correction task, based on a short narrative sequence. the tasks were performed by 33 l1 french speakers (university background, age 20-70), learning spanish at a formal l1 french learning of l2 spanish past tenses: l1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues 495 setting (instituto cervantes in paris, a2, b1, b2 and c1; between 8-9 informants per level).3 a control group of 9 l1 speakers of european spanish also did the tasks. due to space limitations, only the first task will be reported here; it will be henceforth referred to as task 1. task 1 (as well as the two non-reported tasks) was aimed at gathering information on the participants’ general ability to use past tenses at different stages of the l2 learning process. at a later stage, two successive follow-up tasks were added in order to gather information on specific tense uses that were infrequent or nonexistent in the production data. these tasks targeted only potentially difficult uses of the tenses, namely: (a) imp with telic predicates and in non-prototypical uses; (b) the use of prog with perfective tenses; (c) the choice between cp/sp with interval localizing expressions; and (d) the choice of tenses based on discourse relations. the first follow-up task was a multiple choice, paper-and-pencil task, with 30 multiple choice items (three options per item), integrated into narrative text. the second one was performed on line, and it consisted of 50 independent multiple choice items. the common goal of those two tasks was to enquire more deeply into l2 learners’ language competence than was possible with the production task, and to find out whether l1 speakers and l2 learners (at different proficiency levels) have diverse tendencies when trying to make sense of complex language combinations, whose interpretation normally requires taking into account a substantial amount of contextual data. additionally, the second followup task was meant to confirm the tendencies found in the previous one. due to space limitations, only the second follow-up task (henceforth referred to as task 2) will be considered here, along with the production task (task 1). 4. results and findings 4.1. task 1 (film retell task) each participant individually watched a 7-minute film, with sound and music, but virtually no dialogues.4 the participants were previously informed that, just afterwards, they would be required to tell the story taking the role of the main character. each participant told the story in front of the researcher, answering his initial question “what happened to you on the bus?” during the performances, researcher participation was restricted to back-channeling. 3 all the participants stated that french was their only l1. declared bilinguals were excluded of the study. however, most of the participants had previously studied a variety of foreign languages (with different levels of achievement); english and german were the most frequently mentioned languages. 4 in the film (pasajera & jorge villalobos, 1996), only two short utterances are exchanged; french subtitles were provided. josé amenós-pons, aoife ahern, pedro guijarro-fuentes 496 the performances were video recorded and transcribed; non-verbal behavior related to chronological relations was included in the transcripts. the total amount of tense forms was then computed, and the predicate types connected to each tense were classified. the data on predicate types are assembled here in two broad categories due to space limitations: atelics (including states and activities) and telics (including accomplishments and achievements). additionally, the functions performed by each tense used in the stories were categorized using the following tags: “discourse foreground” (i.e., clauses describing temporally sequenced events, which constitute the backbone of the narrative discourse), “discourse background” (clauses providing information on causes, reasons, motivation or descriptive details that help the reader understand the story), “current relevance”, “hodiernal past events” and “backshifting” (events in reverse order). discourse functions foreground background current relevance/hodiernal past backshifting main tense(s) used pres/cp pres/imp no cp/pres figure 1 a2 results results per l2 level are summarized in figures 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. in each case, the following details are given: (1) number and percentage of tokens per tense; (2) discourse functions performed by each tense, at the corresponding l2 level;5 and (3) predicate types (telics/atelics) used with each tense. 5 tenses are reported following its frequency in the data; the word “no” is included in some functions, to account for the fact that, in some of the stories produced, such functions were not included. 5; 2% 170; 71% 40; 17% 13; 6% 7; 3% 3; 1% inf pres cp sp imp plp task 1 a2 verb forms used (n = 238) 24 9 1 3 16 4 6 0 0 10 20 30 cp sp imp plp telics atelics task 1 a2 predicate types l1 french learning of l2 spanish past tenses: l1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues 497 discourse functions foreground background current relevance/hodiernal past backshifting main tense(s) used pres/cp/sp imp no/cp plp/cp figure 2 b1 results 2; 1% 100; 36% 39; 14% 67; 24% 66; 23% 6; 2% inf pres cp sp imp plp task 1 b1 verb forms used (n = 280) 33 44 1 56 20 65 1 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 cp sp imp plp telics atelics task 1 b1 predicate types 0; 0% 164; 47% 14; 4% 98; 28% 64; 18% 11; 3% inf pres cp sp imp plp task 1 b2 verb forms used (n = 351) josé amenós-pons, aoife ahern, pedro guijarro-fuentes 498 discourse functions foreground background current relevance/hodiernal past backshifting main tense(s) used sp/pres/cp imp/imp + prog no/cp plp/sp figure 3 b2 results discourse functions foreground background current relevance/hodiernal past backshifting main tense(s) used sp/pres/cp imp/imp + prog no/cp plp figure 4 c1 results 9 73 7 11 5 25 57 0 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 cp sp imp plp telics atelics task 1 b2 predicate types 1; 0% 57; 18% 8; 3% 138; 42% 100; 31% 21; 6% inf pres cp sp imp plp task 1 c1 verb forms used (n = 325) 7 106 6 17 1 30 94 4 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 cp sp imp plp telics atelics task 1 c1 predicate types l1 french learning of l2 spanish past tenses: l1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues 499 discourse functions foreground background current relevance/hodiernal past backshifting main tense(s) used sp/pres/sp + prog imp/imp + prog cp/no plp figure 5 control group results 4.1.1. a2 results at a2, all learners use the present indicative (pres) as the main verbal device to tell the story (71% of the verb forms used are pres), for every discourse function. in most productions, however, pres occasionally alternates with cp (17%) to represent foregrounded events; cp is also used to express temporal backward shifting. the cp is correctly used both with telics and with atelics, although telics predominate significantly (p < .005 in the one-way anovas). sp use is rare (only 6% of verb forms) and it never becomes the main narrative tense. its appearances, however, always correspond to foregrounded events, and its use does not entail any chronological contrast with events in the pres and in the cp. as in the case of the cp, the sp is correctly used with telic and (occasionally) with atelics. 1; 0% 125; 22% 8; 2% 229; 40% 179; 31% 30; 5% inf pres cp sp imp plp task 1 control verb forms used (n = 572) 6 173 2 23 2 56 168 7 0 50 100 150 200 cp sp imp plp telics atelics task 1 control predicate types josé amenós-pons, aoife ahern, pedro guijarro-fuentes 500 the occurrence of imp at a2 is almost nonexistent (3% of the total verb forms), and its correct use is only found with atelic predicates in the discourse background.6 likewise, the plp is never found in the a2 productions: depending on discourse needs, the participants make gestures, or occasionally resort to the cp (contrasted with the pres), when they intend to include events in reversed chronological order.7 however, this is hardly a surprise, since the plp has not been explicitly taught at this level, even though the learners have frequently encountered it in written texts. 4.1.2. b1 results at b1, learners produce longer stories, with a wider array of tenses. the pres (36% of the total amount of verb forms) is still the most frequent tense in the foreground, but its relative weight diminishes, and the sp (24%) is already second, ahead of the cp (14%), whose occurrence also decreases. still, most b1 learners do not consistently differentiate the uses of these three tenses: only one participant told the story in the sp; another one chose to pres to do so; in the rest of the productions, the alternation of pres, cp and sp in the foreground did not parallel any meaningful contextual effect. besides, the b1 productions showed a dramatic increase in the use of the imp (23% of the total verb forms), always linked to atelic predicates (both states and activities);8 the imp is, from that level on, the main tense for backgrounded events. activities in imp (33% of the total amount) are often inflected in the prog (at b1, prog is used with 59% of the activities in the imp). the prog form never extends to other predicate types. the plp is still infrequent (3%) at b1, but it is nevertheless the main form used for backwards shifting purposes. among the six occurrences of the plp found in the b1 narratives, five come with telic predicates, and only one is with an atelic predicate; this is not surprising, since the plp is a perfective tense. as for sp and cp, telic predicates also predominate, but atelics are found as well. 4.1.3. b2 results compared to the previous levels, participants at b2 show two main differences: on the one hand, stories are longer, and the accounts tend to be more detailed; 6 the only case of telic + imp at that level is in fact a mistake: being a foregrounded event, the correct form would be an sp. 7 the fact that many learners feel the need to alter the chronological order of the events when telling the story is not surprising here, since the film includes two flashbacks. 8 as in the previous level, there is only a single case of telic + imp, but it is a mistake (an sp would be required in that environment). l1 french learning of l2 spanish past tenses: l1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues 501 on the other, the use of the sp to depict mainly telic, foregrounded events, keeps increasing (28%), while the occurrence of the cp radically decreases (4%). however, the pres is still the most frequent tense (47%), and it always occurs in the foreground. the frequent amalgamation of pres and sp (and occasional cp forms) in many productions does not seem a deliberate choice, as no clear connection to particular meaning effects is shown. to denote backgrounded events, the imp (18% of the verb forms) appears systematically, and participants make use of prog + imp, combined with activities (26,66% of the imp forms with activities are inflected in the prog) or, less frequently, with accomplishments (16.66%). the prog form, however, never occurs with perfective tenses. finally, a slight increase is shown in the use of plp (3% of the verb forms), always in relation with events in reverse order. 4.1.4. c1 results at c1, the use of the tenses in the narratives change substantially. the percentages are in fact very close to those found in the control group, with no significant (p > .05) differences between them. the sp is the most common tense (42%), and it has become the main form in the foreground. the pres is now only the third form (18%), below the sp and the imp (31%). however, in all the productions but two, foregrounded events in sp occasionally alternate with isolated pres and cp forms, with no apparent expressive intention. c1 learners often provide more background details than in previous levels. as a result, a considerable increase in the use of the imp is found (31% of the total verb forms); 48.85% of the activities and 33.33% of the accomplishments in the imp are inflected in the prog. in addition, events in reverse order are also more frequent, with a relative increase in the presence of the plp (6%). in the c1 data, all tenses appear both with telic and atelic predicates, although the percentage of telics, as expected, is substantially higher for the perfective tenses, and atelics are more frequent with the imp. 4.1.5. control group results in the control group, the relative percentage of each tense is similar to the percentages found at c1: the sp is the most abundant tense (40%), followed by the imp (31%) and the prs (22%). the plp is scarce (5%), and so is the cp (2%). all native speakers consistently employed the sp as the main foreground tense. the pres was also used to refer to past events in two native speaker narratives, but not in the same way as the l2 speakers, even at c1. in the narratives of the control group, the pres forms did not appear in isolation. on the contrary, josé amenós-pons, aoife ahern, pedro guijarro-fuentes 502 they were concentrated at certain parts of the narratives to create a dramatic effect of immediacy, which was never found in the non-native speaker narratives. also, three (out of nine) native speakers made occasional use of sp forms inflected in prog, a combination that was never detected in the productions of the l2 groups. the imp was always used in the control group (mainly with atelic predicates) to signal events in the background; 24.39% of the activities and 15.38% of the accomplishments in the imp were inflected in the prog. as in the c1 data, in the native speaker narratives all tenses appear both with telic and atelic predicates, although the percentage of telics is substantially higher for the perfective tenses, while atelics in the imp are more widespread. 4.1.6. task 1: conclusions according to our data, the a2 and b1 learner participants generally use the pres as the main narrative tense, while they make an undifferentiated use of occasional cp/sp forms to convey the idea that the events are located in the past. the use of sp as the main foreground tense starts at b2 and consolidates at c1.9 the imp appears later than the perfective tenses, although at b1 it has become the main device to signal backgrounded events. as for the plp, even though its morphology and use can be directly transferred from french, it is not frequent before b1. in fact, the plp is a relatively marginal form in the productions of all groups, including the control group, since natives and non-natives alike show a clear preference for events presented in chronological order. the overuse of the pres at a2, b1 and (to a lesser degree) b2 may be seen as a single effect caused by several factors. the pres is often described in the literature as a base form, used in l2 narratives, especially at lower levels, with no specific temporal meaning (bardovi-harlig, 2000). at intermediate and higher levels, however, it can also be an avoidance strategy (learners use the pres to avoid conjugating past tense forms that may be difficult for them).10 additionally, l1 discourse habits (lorenzo, 2002) may influence the preferences of the french speakers when choosing a main tense to tell stories.11 at all levels, perfective tenses attract telic predicates, and the imp attracts atelics. aspectual restrictions seem to be stronger in the imp: (correctly used) 9 however, these are general trends that are not evenly distributed in all the productions within a single level; individual variability exists at all levels. 10 in the written production task (“what was your most memorable birthday?”), at b1, the sp was already the main narrative tense. this strongly suggests that some degree of avoidance of the sp in the oral narratives is a fact. 11 according to lorenzo (2002), french speakers often use the pres to tell children’s stories; still, personal reports do not necessarily show the same tendency (amenós-pons, 2010). l1 french learning of l2 spanish past tenses: l1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues 503 telic predicates in imp are not found until b2. however, this almost exclusive association of atelics and the imp, in this task, is not rare in the productions of the native speakers; thus, there seems to be an effect of the task in the type of predicates used in the narratives.12 overall, cases of incorrect use of the sp instead of the imp, or the reverse, are only occasional in the data, and practically non-existent at b2 and c1. therefore, at lower levels, avoidance of past morphology is more frequent than incorrect use. a potential, as well as extreme, case of avoidance is found in the complete absence of the prog form associated to perfective tenses; it never appears in the l2 productions (unlike in the native speaker narratives). indeed, the impossibility of such combination in french may be a crucial fact. generally speaking, the evidence does not show l1 french speakers directly transferring the use of the past tenses from their native language. however, there is indeed an l1 effect, in that the tense uses that do not coincide in l1 and l2 are a source of variability. this is in line with the prediction of feature accounts on l2 acquisition (especially, lardiere’s [2009] feature reassembly hypothesis). output simplification also plays a role, as some non-prototypical combinations of tense and aspect (particularly prog + sp/cp) tend to be avoided, principally at lower levels. nevertheless, the fact that perfective tenses are employed, already at a2, with all types of predicates, is not compatible with the predictions of those hypotheses that highlight the primacy of aspect in the development of l2 past tense use (andersen & shirai, 1996). conversely, our findings are compatible with those hypotheses that emphasize the role of discourse functions (bardoviharlig, 1994; salaberry, 1999): verbs representing foregrounded events are the first to be inflected in perfective forms, especially (but not exclusively) if they are telic; the imp appears later, related to atelic predicates in the background. in the case of l1 french speakers, the inflected form in the foreground is not always the sp, but the cp and the sp in undifferentiated alternation. on the whole, task 1 shows that the l2 learners improve gradually, and eventually acquire the tense/aspect system of spanish (as postulated by ayoun & rothman, 2013), even though some degree of variability persists at c1 level. however, since task 1 relies only on production data, a fundamental question remains: the omission of some forms (e.g., prog + sp) and the variability found in others (e.g., sp/cp), are just performance effects due to communicative pressure or, on the contrary, do those trends stem from a deep representation of meaning and use that is different from that of native speakers? to shed light on those issues, we will now present the results of task 2. 12 the task effect is confirmed when we consider the data obtained from the written production task: in that task, at b1, three telic predicates are correctly used in the imp. josé amenós-pons, aoife ahern, pedro guijarro-fuentes 504 4.2. task 2 (online multiple choice task) as mentioned above, the purpose of task 2, an online multiple-choice interpretation task, consisted in exploring the process of tense and aspect acquisition from the perspective of the learners’ ability to interpret discursive and linguistic elements that determine the appropriacy of certain verb tenses in potentially complex, non-prototypical environments. the task design eliminated the element of communicative pressure that was present for task 1, thereby providing a possibly more accurate insight into the learners’ mental representations of spanish tense and aspect grammar and usage. furthermore, this task developed an inquiry which honed in on forms that the results of task 1 suggested were more challenging for the l2 learners. the 70 native speakers of french who participated were learning spanish in the formal setting of the instituto cervantes in paris or toulouse, and had been placed by a standardized placement test at levels a2 (n = 15), b1 (n = 20), b2 (n = 16) or c1 (n = 19); and additionally, a control group of 25 peninsular spanish l1 speakers also did the task. none of these participants had taken part in the previously mentioned stages of the study.13 however, the tendencies shown in task 1 were assumed to be generalizable to the l1 french learners of spanish as a whole, and thus formed the basis for the design and choice of items of task 2. the task format consisted of an online questionnaire which began with a brief text providing instructions, followed by 50 randomized gap-fill items. 8 of these were distractors offering choices of various verb tenses, and the 42 remaining items were the target ones in which, for a given sentence in spanish, participants chose between 3 tenses provided in the same order for each verb, namely, cp, sp or imp. response time was measured in seconds for all 50 items. finally, an ethnolinguistic questionnaire was presented, requesting information on the participants’ age range, first and other languages spoken, and spanish languagelearning experience, in terms of whether this included any experience of study, or any periods visiting or living in a spanish-speaking country and for how long.14 among the tense uses seldom produced, or totally absent, in the narratives of task 1, those involving certain kinds of interpretations of sp and imp with different predicate types, and combinations of these tenses with certain temporal adverbials, were focused on in this task, as well as prog with sp. thus, the item conditions were as shown in the following chart, with 6 items for each condition set. three sets of conditions fall under the umbrella of interpretations connected to the perfect (dahl & hedin, 2000), in items 1 to 18; the following sets covered the hodiernal cp, progressive readings of imp, echoic interpretations of 13 this was due to the fact that as task 2 was developed as an extension to, and development of, the preliminary findings, at a time when the original participants were no longer available. 14 the ethnolinguistic data collected will not be reported herein due to space limitations. l1 french learning of l2 spanish past tenses: l1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues 505 imp, and finally, prog with the auxiliary (estar) in cp. in general, the response options include one which is identified as more expectable given the sentential and/or discourse context provided; however, for the cp items, as is reflected by the control group results, a degree of flexibility is present regarding what an individual participant may find to be the best option, depending for instance on factors like diatopic variation or the way the situation is conceptualized by each individual (e.g., more or less currently relevant, or whether the event has finished or not). item numbers 1-6 resultative cp (ya ‘already’ + telic predicates). 3) tengo noticias de juana: ya ______________ a su nuevo destino. ahora busca casa. ha llegado/llegó/llegaba i’ve heard from juana: she ______________ already to her new post. now she’s looking for an apartment. (arrive) ha llegado/llegó/llegaba 7-12 experiential cp (ya ‘already’ + telic predicates) 4) esto no puede continuar así. pedro ya ___________________ tarde al trabajo tres veces esta semana. ha llegado/llegó/llegaba this cannot continue. pedro _______________ already to work three times this week. (arrive) ha llegado/llegó/llegaba 13-18 universal cp (atelic predicates) 5) estoy en crisis. ______________________ en esta oficina muchos años, pero ahora es el momento de cambiar de vida. he trabajado/trabajé/trabajaba i’m having a crisis. ______________________ in this office for many years, but now it’s time for a change. (work) he trabajado/trabajé/trabajaba 19-24 hodiernal cp (interval adverbials + telic predicates) 6) este trimestre, laura __________________ su tesis doctoral. ¡está contentísima! ha terminado/terminó/terminaba this term, laura __________________ her phd thesis. she’s delighted! (finish) ha terminado/terminó/terminaba 25-30 progressive reading of imp (telic predicates) 7) juan ____________________ la cena en la cocina, pero tuvo que salir urgentemente y no pudo terminar. ha preparado/preparó/preparaba juan ____________________ dinner in the kitchen, but he had to go out suddenly and didn’t manage to finish making it. (make) ha preparado/preparó/preparaba 31-36 quotative reading of imp (telic predicates) + ¿qué tal está pedro? muy ocupado, creo. dijo que _______________ del permiso de conducir la semana que viene. se ha examinado/se examinó/se examinaba + how’s pedro? very busy i think. he said_______________ for his licence next week. (sit the exam) se ha examinado/se examinó/se examinaba josé amenós-pons, aoife ahern, pedro guijarro-fuentes 506 37-42 prog + sp (atelic predicates) 9) julián ________________ trabajando en esa empresa unos años, pero al final decidió irse. ha estado/estuvo/estaba julián ________________ working in that firm for a few years, but decided to leave in the end. (be) ha estado/estuvo/estaba figure 6 classification and examples of items by conditions in task 2 4.2.1. task 2 results: accuracy and progress across general proficiency levels the general overview of the results of this task can be summed up as follows. to begin with, unsurprisingly, the learner groups were significantly (p < .05) less accurate than the control group in the great majority of their responses; however, for certain sets of items, specifically for readings of cp that are obtained in both french and spanish under similar discourse conditions—resultative cp and experiential cp (1-6 and 7-12, respectively)—the difference in accuracy between learners and controls was not significant. as to the other item conditions, upon contrasting and comparing the results obtained, some general patterns are observable. firstly, in relation to choosing perfective tenses, as required in items 1 to 24, probably as a result from l1 transfer, learners at a2 often preferred the cp, which was an advantage for them since the cp was in fact the expected answer. at b1, however, the effect of positive transfer was attenuated, and more participants (incorrectly) chose the sp. overall, little, if any, progress takes place across the general proficiency levels. likewise, the ability to adequately identify and respond to discourse contexts where prog with sp, a combination that the learners lack in their l1, did not increase significantly across proficiency levels either. and, finally, an area in which the learners did show progression was identified when they were required to choose between perfective and imperfective tenses. these three patterns are explained in further detail below. regarding the choice of perfective tenses, as just mentioned, the results show that the learners make no significant progress towards convergence with the native speakers’ responses, despite managing to respond with fairly high accuracy to these items from the elementary level of a2. in fact, in one group of items (items 19 to 24), whose most appropriate response was the cp with a hodiernal interpretation, learners tended to respond differently to the native speaker group more often as general proficiency increased (see figure 7).15 15 interval adverbials connected to speech time allow both sp and cp use, depending on the type of event location the speaker chooses to represent: the interval as a whole (with the cp) or some inner point within that interval (with the sp). unanimity was neither expected l1 french learning of l2 spanish past tenses: l1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues 507 figure 7 learner and control group results for items 19 to 24, hodiernal cp (interval adverbials + telic predicates) for the prog with sp items (37-42), the difference in accuracy between the learners and the control group remained more constant than in cases like those just shown, where an initial advantage in choosing sp for the hodiernal interpretation was lost as learners gained in general proficiency. thus, in items 37-42, a stable and significant (p < .05) difference was detected between the learner groups across the four levels of general proficiency, on the one hand, and the control group, on the other (figure 8). a slight increase in accuracy of the learner groups across proficiency levels is shown, but does not reach significance. figure 8 learner and control group results for items 37 to 42, prog with sp as to the learners’ performance in the use of the imp, the results suggest that as their proficiency increases, learners do manage to improve their ability, even in the complex conditions tested, for choosing between imp and perfective tenses, in contrast with what was observed for the item conditions seen above. a significant increase in accurate tense choice is observed across the proficiency nor found within the control group, but native speakers (of european spanish) clearly favored interval location (with the cp). 0 0,2 0,4 0,6 0,8 1 a2 b1 b2 c1 control items 19 to 24 0 0,2 0,4 0,6 0,8 1 a2 b1 b2 c1 control items 37 to 42 josé amenós-pons, aoife ahern, pedro guijarro-fuentes 508 levels for items 25 to 30, where the imp (combined with telic predicates) has a progressive interpretation, although at c1 there is still a significant difference between the learners’ accuracy and that of the control group, which chose the expected tense more frequently. but the tendency to improve in tense use as general proficiency is gained does not apply to all of the imp uses tested. the items in which this tense was elicited in a context that provokes a quotative/echoic interpretation16 proved particularly challenging for the participants, regardless of their general proficiency level; and the learner groups’ accuracy was markedly, and of course statistically significantly, lower than that of the control group. in contrast, the control group was practically unanimous in its—predicted—preference for the imp in these items (see figure 9). the difficulty for those items may be due to the combination of two facts: (a) the environments in which such readings are possible do not coincide in french and spanish; and (b) the recognition of those readings largely depends on the hearer’s ability to recognized complex sets of contextual cues, both linguistic and pragmatic (amenós-pons, 2015; escandell-vidal & leonetti, 2003). figure 9 learner and control group results for items 31 to 36, imp with quotative readings 4.2.2. task 2 response time data the data on the participants’ response time in task 2, briefly described in this section, may provide some interesting insights into the levels of challenge it presented to each group. one of the main facts observed in this respect was that the control group consistently responded with significantly (p < .05) greater 16 in quotative/echoic interpretations of the imp, the tense is understood as reporting words or thoughts from someone who is not the speaker (or, alternatively, from the speaker at a time different from that of the main utterance). 0 0,2 0,4 0,6 0,8 1 1,2 a2 b1 b2 c1 control items 31 to 36 items 31-36 l1 french learning of l2 spanish past tenses: l1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues 509 speed than the learner groups, regardless of whether the learners are considered as separate groups by proficiency level, or collectively as a whole.17 figure 10 (below) illustrates this difference in relation to an item group in which it was more marked. as to the learner groups, separated from one another according to their general proficiency, there were no statistically significant differences among them in response time. additionally, the results show that response time was not significantly related to accuracy for any of the participant groups. figure 10 response time mean (in seconds) by participant group for items 31-36 4.2.3. task 2: conclusions the intended focus of task 2, consisting of offering more direct evidence of the acquisition of certain tense, morphological and lexical aspect combinations that were suggested to be more problematic for the learners by the results of task 1, led to the prediction that their interpretation would prove challenging in general for these participants. what the data seems to indicate, besides corroborating the generalized difficulty for learners in aligning with the control group in their choice of the most appropriate form for each sentential context, is: (a) that the challenge is more prevalent for certain item conditions, and (b) that these learners’ initial advantage in certain tense-aspect uses is lost as progress in general proficiency is gained. in connection with the variation according to the different conditions tested in each set of items, that is, depending on the tenses and interpretations that were elicited, it is worth highlighting that mixed results were obtained. so, as 17 this was so for every set of conditions except that of items 19-24, in which the controls were still faster but the difference with respect to the learner groups’ times was not statistically significant. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 a2 b1 b2 c1 control items 31 to 36 items 31 36 josé amenós-pons, aoife ahern, pedro guijarro-fuentes 510 shown in the previous section, progression in accuracy was observed as statistically significant only for the choice between perfective and imperfective tenses (items 25 to 30). on the other hand, certain items were less challenging for all the proficiency levels, and the learner groups equaled the accuracy—in statistical terms—of the control group, specifically, those with current relevance readings of the cp. this difference in the relative ease or difficulty of the acquisition process according to the item conditions is related to the learners’ l1 grammar, as also suggested in connection with the task 1 results (section 4.1.6). thus, it can be assumed that the learners’ tense and aspectual parameters have been set for french; this language is characterized by its many features in common with those of spanish. developing familiarity with the specific conditions under which each of these properties are expressed in the l2 becomes, thereby, the main obstacle in the acquisition process, as in lardiere’s (2009) feature reassembly hypothesis. clearly, the need to integrate grammar and discourse-pragmatic cues is a central element of this challenge at upper intermediate and advanced levels. for instance, the items with imp where a quotative interpretation was obtained show a case in which the learners could take advantage of similarities between french and spanish, since the same kind of interpretation is obtainable in french when imp appears under certain discourse conditions. however, that advantage is not found in the results, since the learner groups still showed a significantly lower accuracy rate even at c1 level, while at lower levels, the kind of transfer effects found, for instance, in the cp uses of items 1 to 17 were not shown. these differences should be seen in light of the fact that french quotative interpretations of imp are much less frequently found and take place under more highly restricted conditions (amenós-pons, 2015). the data obtained from task 2 provide clear evidence for the positive effect of learners’ transferring knowledge of cp into the l2. however, taking into account the lack of improvement in the ability to use and interpret some of the tense/aspect combinations tested in this task among learners at increasing levels of general proficiency, the conclusion in this respect highlights the limitations of transfer. it may be that increasing knowledge of the range of tense morphology and usage weakens the possible effects of direct transfer. considered from an acquisition-by-processing perspective of sla, such as those put forth in work by sharwood smith and truscott (2014, and references therein), this may be due to learners’ increasing metalinguistic knowledge of the l2 tense and aspect system. that is, learners take into account a wider range of tense and aspect options as they acquire more of the l2, and therefore also develop awareness of the lexical and discourse conditions that affect appropriateness or grammaticality of a tense/aspect choice. in some cases, this may result in obstructing the efficiency of the learners in those conditions common to both french and spanish. 5. general conclusions and implications for l2 teaching l1 french learning of l2 spanish past tenses: l1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues 511 in this paper, two different tasks have been discussed: an open production task (task 1) and a controlled interpretation task focusing on complex tense and aspect combinations (task 2). three research questions were asked, namely: (1) how do sp, cp, imp, plp and prog develop? (2) what is the effect of transfer from l1?, and (3) how or when do l2 learners acquire and use, if at all, nonprototypical associations? relevant data on the first question was gathered by means of task 1. it was found that, at a2, the learners made little use of past morphology. only occasional, functionally undifferentiated cp and sp forms were found to signal foregrounded events, alternating with pervasive pres morphology. perfective past morphology increased its presence at b1, but only at b2 did the learners make consistent, clearly differentiated use of the two forms. at all of the general proficiency levels, perfective tense was mainly, but not exclusively, used with telic predicates. the imp was seldom used at a2, but it became the main form in the discourse background from b1 onwards. telic events in imp were also infrequent, but this was mainly found to be an effect of the task. plp forms were not detected at a2, but it was coherently used by the learners from b1 onwards to report events on reversed chronological order. however, the production of plp forms did not increase with general proficiency, since native and non-native speakers alike showed a clear tendency to report the events respecting their chronology. finally, prog was first seen with activities in imp at b1, and later on, from b2 onwards, its use extended to accomplishments in imp. combinations of prog with perfective tenses, which are possible in spanish but not in french, were never detected in the l2 productions. overall, the results from t1 are compatible with hypotheses that emphasize the role of discourse functions in the development of tense-aspect morphology (bardovi-harlig, 1994; salaberry, 1999). in task 1, no systematic transfer from l1 was found at any proficiency level. there was, however, an l1 effect, which may have both positive and negative consequences. on the one hand, l1 french speakers at a2 were already able to differentiate perfectivity and imperfectivity; they were also capable of combining tense morphology with different predicate types, telic and atelic. on the other hand, the tense uses that do not coincide in french and spanish remained a source of difficulty, suggesting, therefore, that feature reassembly leads to variability at all levels, although at higher proficiency levels it decreased substantially. further effects of l1 transfer were found in task 2: it was seen that, in complex combinations of tense, aspect and discourse environments, the a2 learners were strongly reliant on l1 knowledge when deciding the appropriateness of a tense. yet as participants’ proficiency increased, l1 transfer was less prevalent, possibly counterbalanced josé amenós-pons, aoife ahern, pedro guijarro-fuentes 512 by increasing reliance on metalinguistic knowledge. paradoxically, this did not systematically result in increasing accuracy. in relation to the third research question, our research offers mixed results. in task 2, progress was found for some conditions, but not others. in particular, no significant progression was seen in those items requiring complex integration of syntactic, lexical and discourse-pragmatic cues. this can be seen as indirectly related to the claims of sorace’s interface hypothesis (sorace, 2011; sorace & filiaci, 2006)—although this hypothesis is primarily related to ultimate attainment, not to developing l2 grammars—that variability stems from the complexity of processing at the syntax-pragmatics interface. overall, task 1 and task 2 offer complementary results. this clearly implies that, in order to investigate the relationship between active use and mental representations, the combination of open production and controlled interpretation tasks is required. the way learners use tenses as a discursive device is clearly seen only in production tasks, but in these tasks, learners use forms that are contextually accessible for them. still, the absence of a form does not necessarily mean lack of knowledge. therefore, only controlled interpretation tasks can effectively test specific hypotheses on learners’ representations of tense-aspect relations. as a final point, some implications of our research for l2 teaching could be emphasized. the idea that our data show that feature reassembly is a source of variability highlights the need for attention to those uses that differ in l1 and l2. however, interface integration is also a source of variability, so working on l2 vocabulary building and discourse structuring are paramount to ensure l2 grammar proficiency. in teaching l2 at higher levels, tense uses requiring complex interface integration should be given priority. finally, it is clear that discourse processing is a demanding task at all levels of l2 proficiency. a fundamental symptom of the evolution of l2 competence is the increasing ability to take into account global discourse relations when interpreting and producing utterances (comajoan, 2014). thus, in teaching closely related l2s, grammar instruction should not merely rely on lists of convergences and divergences in isolated sentences; it should also include extensive practice, both receptive and productive, based on increasingly complex discourse sequences. l1 french learning of l2 spanish past tenses: l1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues 513 references amenós-pons, j. 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(1996). input processing and grammar instruction: theory and research. nordwood, nj: ablex. studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl editors: editor: mirosław pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: jakub bielak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz) assistant to the editor: edyta olejarczuk (poznań university of technology) language editor: melanie ellis (pedagogical university of kraków) vol. 7 no. 3 september 2017 editorial board: larissa aronin (oranim academic college of education, trinity college, dublin) helen basturkmen (university of auckland) adriana biedroń (pomeranian university, słupsk) simon borg (university of leeds) anne burns (aston university, birmingham, university of new south wales, sydney) anna cieślicka (texas a&m international university, laredo) kata csizér (eötvös university, budapest) maria dakowska (university of warsaw) robert dekeyser (university of maryland) jean-marc dewaele (birkbeck college, university of london) zoltán dörnyei (university of nottingham) krystyna droździał-szelest (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) rod ellis (university of auckland) danuta gabryś-barker (university of silesia) carol griffiths (fatih university, istanbul) rebecca hughes (university of sheffield) hanna komorowska (university of warsaw, swps) diane larsen-freeman (university of michigan) barbara lewandowska-tomaszczyk (university of łódź) jan majer (university of łódź) paul meara (swansea university) sarah mercer (university of graz) anna michońska-stadnik (university of wrocław) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, kraków) bonny norton (university of british columbia) terrence odlin (ohio state university) rebecca oxford (university of maryland) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) françois pichette (university of quebec) ewa piechurska-kuciel (opole university) vera regan (university college, dublin) heidemarie sarter (university of potsdam) paweł scheffler (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) norbert schmitt (university of nottingham) michael sharwood smith (heriot-watt university, edinburgh) linda shockey (university of reading) teresa siek-piskozub (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) david singleton (university of pannonia, trinity college, dublin) włodzimierz sobkowiak (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) merrill swain (ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto) elaine tarone (university of minnesota) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź) stuart webb (university of western ontario) maria wysocka (university of silesia) kalisz – poznań 2017 editor: mirosław pawlak assistants to the editor: jakub bielak edyta olejarczuk © copyright by wydział pedagogiczno-artystyczny, uam poznań proofreading: melanie ellis cover design: joanna dudek typesetting: piotr bajak issn 2083-5205 eissn 2084-1965 published by: department of english studies faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, kalisz adam mickiewicz university, poznań contact information: 62-800 kalisz, ul. nowy świat 28-30 tel. +48 62 7670730 fax +48 62 7645721 printing and binding: perfekt gaul i wspólnicy sp. j., ul. świerzawska 1, 60-321 poznań print and online editions studies in second language learning and teaching is published both in print (issn 2083-5205) and online (eissn 2084-1965), with the print edition being the original version. indexing and abstracting studies in second language learning and teaching is currently indexed and/or abstracted in the following databases: · scopus · web of science emerging sources citation index (esci) · european reference index for the humanities (erih plus) · education resources information center (eric) · index copernicus · central and eastern european online library (ceeol) · the central european journal of social sciences and humanities (cejsh) · the mla international bibliography · the mla directory of periodicals · ebsco · linguistic abstracts · infobaseindex · worldcat (oclc) efforts are being made to have studies in second language learning and teaching listed by the clarivate analytics (formerly thomson reuters) master journal list. special issue: instructed l2 grammar acquisition and beyond guest editor: tanja angelovska studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz volume 7, number 3, september 2017 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl contents notes on contributors ....................................................................365 editorial .........................................................................................371 articles: alessandro benati – the role of input and output tasks in grammar instruction: theoretical, empirical and pedagogical considerations ....377 tanja angelovska – beyond instructed l2 grammar acquisition: theoretical insights and pedagogical considerations about the role of prior language knowledge..........................................................................................................397 anja k. steinlen – the development of english grammar and reading comprehension by majority and minority language children in a bilingual primary school .................................................................................................. 419 simone e. pfenninger, johanna lendl – transitional woes: on the impact of l2 input continuity from primary to secondary school................ 443 monika geist – noticing grammar in l2 writing and problem-solving strategies ......................................................................................... 471 josé amenós-pons, aoife ahern and pedro guijarro-fuentes – l1 french learning of l2 spanish past tenses: l1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues ............................................................................................... 489 m. ángeles escobar-álvarez – l2 acquisition of spanish dative clitics by english and dutch learners ....................................................................517 thomas wagner – l2 irregular verb morphology: exploring behavioral data from intermediate english learners of german as a foreign language using generalized mixed effects models ..............................................535 notes to contributors .....................................................................557 365 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl notes on contributors guest editor tanja angelovska is assistant professor of english linguistics, sla and language education at the university of salzburg, austria. prior to this position she had worked at the university of munich (lmu), germany and at the university of greenwich, uk. her research interests are in sla and psycholinguistics, more precisely input processing in second and third language acquisition of english, processing instruction, transfer phenomena and research-informed classroom implications. her work includes the monograph second language pronunciation: attainment and assessment (2012, peter lang), volume co-edited with angela hahn on l3 syntactic transfer models: new developments and implications (2017, john benjamins), a textbook with alessandro benati entitled second language acquisition: a theoretical introduction to real world applications (2016, bloomsbury) as well as journal articles and book sections. contact details: department for english and american studies, unipark nonntal, büro 3.237, universität salzburg, erzabt-klotz-straße 1, 020 salzburg, austria (tanja.angelovska@sbg.ac.at) contributors aoife ahern is senior lecturer in the department of language and literature pedagogy, faculty of education, complutense university of madrid, spain, where she teaches courses on english as a second language teaching and acquisition, and on literacy teaching in efl. her research interests include second and foreign language acquisition and teaching, and pragmatics, all connected to her participation in numerous internationally funded research projects exploring the interrelations between pragmatics, semantics and grammar, the results of which have been published in journal articles, book chapters and books related to these areas. 366 contact details: department of language and literature pedagogy, faculty of education, complutense university of madrid, c/ rector royo villanova, 1, madrid 28040, spain (akahern@ucm.es) josé amenós-pons holds a phd in hispanic philology (universidad nacional de educación a distancia, madrid, spain) and an ma in teaching spanish as a foreign language (universidad de barcelona, spain). currently, he teaches grammar, discourse analysis and related subjects at the universidad complutense de madrid, spain as well as graduate courses on second language acquisition, grammar, pragmatics and l2 teacher training courses in different institutions. his research interests cover various topics in cognitive pragmatics, second language acquisition and l2 teaching methodology. he is a member of the research group the relationship between grammar and the lexicon in spanish (facultad de filología, universidad complutense, spain), of the excellency network siggram (meaning and grammar) and of the research project spirim (the semantics/pragmatics interface and the resolution of interpretive mismatches), funded by the spanish ministry of economy, industry and competitiveness. he has published several book chapters and journal articles on descriptive issues and l2 acquisition of mood, tense and aspect. additionally, he has co-authored several language teaching textbooks. contact details: facultad de filología, universidad complutense de madrid, campus de moncloa, plaza menéndez pelayo s/n, madrid 28040, spain (jamenos@ucm.es) m. ángeles escobar-álvarez holds a phd in linguistics from the university of utrecht, the netherlands and works as associate professor of english studies and linguistics at the the national distance education university (uned), madrid, spain. prior to this position she has been visiting scholar at the university of south california (usc), los angeles, usa, at the university of massachusetts (umas), boston, usa and at the universidad autonoma de barcelona (uab), spain. her research interests are in first language acquisition (spanish l1), second language acquisition (english l2 and spanish l2) and bilingualism (english/spanish; catalan/spanish). her recent work includes the volumes co-edited with vicens torrens the acquisition of syntax of romance languages (2006, john benjamins) and the processing of lexicon and morphosyntax (2014, cambridge scholars), and the articles co-authored with ivan teomiro “the acquisition of dative ‘se’ in l1 spanish and its implications for the weak continuity hypothesis of acquisition of functional categories” (2013, resla) and “the gradual acquisition of clitic ‘se’ in spanish l2” (2016, topics in linguistics). contact details: department of foreign languages, universidad nacional de educación a distancia, po. senda del rey-7, 28040 madrid, spain (maescobar@flog.uned.es) 367 alessandro benati is head of school of languages and area studies and professor of second language acquisition at the university of portsmouth, uk. he is internationally known for his research in second language learning and teaching, with special emphasis on processing instruction. he has published groundbreaking research with james lee on processing instruction. he is a pioneering researcher in the area of second language acquisition (sla) and in the more specific field of instructed sla, where he has investigated the effects of instruction on the acquisition of grammatical properties by second language learners. contact details: university of portsmouth, school of languages and area studies, park building, king henry 1st street, portsmouth, po1 2dz, united kingdom (alessandro.benati@port.ac.uk) monika geist is research assistant in applied linguistics and media in elt at ludwig-maximilians-universität münchen, germany. she completed her phd degree in english language teaching and english linguistics at ludwig-maximilians-universität münchen in 2013. her research interests include noticing, strategies in l2 learning and writing, and individual learner differences. she has taught undergraduate courses in various areas of english linguistics, english language teaching and research methodology. contact details: institut für englische philologie, ludwig-maximilians-universität münchen, schellingstr. 3, 80799 münchen, germany (monika.geist@lmu.de) pedro guijarro fuentes is professor in the department of spanish philology, modern and classic at the university of the balearic islands, spain. his main research interests revolve around the interdisciplinary field of applied spanish linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and bilingualism. he has authored and co-authored numerous articles, book chapters and books, all published by various international publishers among which are john benjamins and de gruyter. his research has also been presented at different international forums with more than 100 papers, many of them by invitation, and published in journals such as language learning, bilingualism: language and cognition, cognition, studies in second language acquisition, applied linguistics, applied psycholinguistics, first language, and applied linguistic review, among others. he has also organized many professional meetings. contact details: departamento de filología española, moderna y clásica, universidad de las islas baleares, edifici ramon llull, campus universitari, km. 7.5, 07122 palma de mallorca (islas baleares), españa (p.guijarro@uib.es) 368 johanna lendl received her ma degree in english linguistics and literature and spanish linguistics from the university of zurich. she is currently on a teacher training program and hopes to become a teacher of english and spanish as foreign languages. her research interests lie within the fields of second language acquisition and foreign language learning with a focus on classroom contexts and the age factor. contact details: english department, university of zurich, plattenstrasse 47, 8032 zürich, switzerland (johanna.lendl@bluewin.ch) simone e. pfenninger is associate professor at the university of salzburg. her principal research areas are multilingualism, psycholinguistics and individual differences (e.g. the age factor) in second language acquisition, especially in regard to quantitative approaches and statistical methods and techniques for language application in education. her work is published in several books, edited volumes and in journals such as second language research and the international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism. recent books include beyond age effects in instructional l2 learning: revisiting the age factor (co-authored, 2017, multilingual matters), the changing english language: psycholinguistic perspectives (co-edited, 2017, cup), and future research directions for applied linguistics (co-edited, 2017, multilingual matters). she is co-editor of the second language acquisition book series for multilingual matters and statistical advisor to the eurosla studies book series. contact details: department of english and american studies, university of salzburg, erzabt-klotz-straße 1, 5020 salzburg, austria (simone.pfenninger@sbg.ac.at) anja k. steinlen, phd, a linguist, is assistant professor at the department for foreign language teaching at the friedrich-alexander-university erlangennürnberg, germany. her research interests include first, second and third language acquisition in bilingual institutions (preschools and schools) with a special focus on at-risk children. anja k. steinlen received her phd from the university of århus, denmark) on a topic related to l2 speech learning. contact details: department of foreign language teaching, friedrich-alexander-university erlangen-nuernberg, glueckstr. 5, 91054 erlangen, germany (anja.steinlen@fau.de) thomas wagner is assistant professor in sla and applied linguistics at the university college of education upper austria. he holds a phd in second language acquisition from the university of siegen, germany, and has worked as a school teacher and university lecturer in english in the uk, ireland, germany, and austria. 369 his research areas include morphology in second language acquisition, the mental lexicon, foreign language aptitude, as well as variation theory in learning studies. contact details: department of english, institute of secondary school education, university college of education upper austria, kaplanhofstrasse 40, a-4020 linz, austria (thomas.wagner@ph-ooe.at) 47 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 3 (1). 47-66 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl the link between foreign language classroom anxiety, second language tolerance of ambiguity and self-rated english proficiency among chinese learners jean-marc dewaele birbeck college, university of london, uk j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk tsui shan ip birkbeck college, university of london, uk tsip@ied.edu.hk abstract previous research has suggested that high levels of foreign language classroom anxiety (flca) have a negative effect on foreign language learning (horwitz, 2001; lu & liu, 2011) while moderate levels of second language tolerance of ambiguity (slta) are believed to boost foreign language learning (ely, 1995). there is prima facie evidence that both dimensions are inversely related as foreign language learning contexts are full of ambiguities which may contribute to anxiety. however, the relationship between flca and slta has been under-researched. the present study is an attempt to fill this gap by investigating the link between slta and flca in english of 73 secondary school students in hong kong. they filled out an online questionnaire consisting of the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986) and the second language tolerance of ambiguity scale (ely, 1995). statistical analyses revealed that flca, slta and self-rated english proficiency predict half of the variance in each other; in other words, students who were more tolerant of second language ambiguity were less anxious in their efl classes and they also felt more proficient. keywords: foreign language anxiety, tolerance of ambiguity, english as a foreign language, foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas), second language tolerance of ambiguity scale (sltas), self-rated proficiency jean-marc dewaele, tsui shan ip 48 research on foreign language anxiety (fla) and foreign language classroom anxiety (flca) has been abundant in the last few decades (ellis, 2008). it has focused mainly on the link between fla/flca and outcome variables in foreign language learning (fll) (lu & liu, 2011). some research has also investigated the relationship between fla/flca and personality traits (dewaele, in press; dewaele, petrides, & furnham, 2008; macintyre & charos, 1996). much less research has considered the effect of second language tolerance of ambiguity (slta) on fll achievement. researchers such as ely (1995) and ehrman (1998) have pointed out that the fl learner faces ambiguity, having to build up an interlanguage from scratch, with doubts about the exact pronunciation or meaning of words, with temporary hypotheses about the grammar of the fl, all of which can be anxiety-provoking. it seems to us that those who can deal with ambiguity in a fl better might also be less anxious in the fl classroom. we are not aware of any study looking explicitly at a link between slta and fla/flca. the existence of an inverse link between tolerance of ambiguity and communicative anxiety has been posited in the anxiety/uncertainty management (aum) theory (gudykunst, 2005, p. 298). gudykunst (2005) argues that interlocutors from different cultural backgrounds who are more tolerant of ambiguity will manage their uncertainty and anxiety better. the objective of the present study is thus to fill in the gap in sla research by investigating the link between flca and slta in the chinese english foreign language (efl) setting. firstly, we will define the concepts and the possible relationship between flca and slta. the design and methodology of the research will be introduced in the following section. the results will be presented next, followed by a detailed discussion and possible pedagogical implications of the findings. we will then draw some conclusions from our findings. foreign language classroom anxiety horwitz, horwitz and cope (1986) suggested that flca is a unique form of anxiety distinct from other general types of anxiety and specific to foreign language learning contexts. the authors describe flca as a feeling of worry “associated with an arousal of the autonomic nervous system” (p. 125), which can negatively affect the classroom performance of fl learners. they define flca as “a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings and behaviors related to classroom learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process” (p. 128). horwitz et al. (1986) conceive flca as a situation-specific anxiety consisting of three dimensions: (a) communication apprehension, (b) test anxiety, and (c) fear of negative evaluation. foreign language classroom anxiety is linked to any activity in the fl, but it is typically most acute for speaking (horwitz et al., 1986). high levels of flca seem to have a negative effect on fll and fl performance the link between foreign language classroom anxiety, second language tolerance . . . 49 (horwitz, 2001; lu & liu, 2011; macintyre, 1999; macintyre & gregersen, 2012b). students with high levels of flca have been found to be more likely to abandon the study of foreign languages (dewaele & thirtle, 2009). macintyre (1994, p. 27) defined fla as “the worry and negative emotional reaction aroused when learning or using a second language.” macintyre and gardner (1989) reported that general anxiety and language anxiety are two orthogonal, that is independent, dimensions of anxiety. they suggested the following genesis of fla: assuming a learner encounters difficulties in fll in the early stage and becomes anxious and uncomfortable about the feeling of incompetence and making mistakes, then, this leads to state anxiety. if the occurrence of the state anxiety is repeated and an association is formed between the anxiety arousal and fll, then fla emerges (macintyre & gardner, 1989). dewaele (in press) has contested the view that flca and general anxiety are independent of each other.1 he has found that flca was significantly correlated with a basic personality trait reflecting anxiety (neuroticism) among fl learners in a catalan and a british university. foreign language learners who scored high on flca were found to score significantly higher on neuroticism, with both variables sharing up to 25% of variance. dewaele, petrides, and furnham (2008) have also linked a lower-order personality trait, trait emotional intelligence, to communicative anxiety (ca) in the l1, and fla in the l2, l3 and l4 of adult multilinguals. a significant negative relationship was found between levels of fla in the different languages of the participants and their scores on trait emotional intelligence. the authors speculated that emotionally intelligent individuals are better able to judge the emotional state of their interlocutor, better able to regulate their emotions, more capable of withstanding pressure, and are more self-confident about their ability to communicate effectively. levels of fla were also found to be linked to a number of sociobiographical variables: age of onset of learning (with early starters reporting lower levels of fla); mode of instruction of the fl (participants who had learnt a language solely through classroom instruction suffered more from fla than those who had also used their language outside the classroom); number of languages known (the more languages known, the lower the fla across languages, which is a pattern already reported in dewaele, 2007). fla was also inversely linked to frequency of use of the fl, socialization in the fl, self-perceived proficiency in the fl (dewaele, 2010; 1 macintyre (personal communication) pointed out that the 1989 paper used a varimax rotation to show that the dimension of language anxiety can be separated from general anxiety at the factor level. it is quite possible that the concepts are related when scales are correlated with each other. jean-marc dewaele, tsui shan ip 50 dewaele et al., 2008). dewaele (2010b) found that knowing more languages, and more specifically, knowing more languages typologically related to a particular fl (french) increased participants’ self-perceived communicative competence and lowered their fla. flca has also been linked to perfectionism. gregersen and horwitz (2002) found that anxious learners were more perfectionist: they set themselves higher personal performance standards, procrastinated more, were more fearful of evaluation, and were more concerned about errors. while there has been abundant research on flca in western countries, especially in north america, fewer studies have been carried out in fll settings in asia, and china in particular (horwitz & yan, 2008, p. 153). the study by lu and liu (2011) stands out in this respect. the authors looked at flca and strategy use in relation to their interactive effect on 934 chinese first year undergraduate students’ performance in english. the results showed that nearly one-third of the students experienced flca. interestingly, flca was negatively correlated with the students’ performance in english (ranging from r = -.25 to -.32, all p < .05) (p. 14). a strong negative correlation was found between flca and both cognitive strategy use, and metacognitive strategy use (ranging from r = -.21 to .42, all p < .01 and ranging from r = -.30 to -.43, all p < .01 respectively) (p. 14). a regression analysis showed that flca was the strongest (negative) predictor of performance in english (beta = -.44, t = -5.3) (p. 16). tolerance of ambiguity budner (1962) defined tolerance of ambiguity (ta) as the “tendency to perceive ambiguous situations as desirable” (p. 29). tolerance of ambiguity, according to furnham and ribchester (1995), “refers to the way an individual (or group) perceives and processes information about ambiguous situations when confronted by an array of unfamiliar, complex or incongruent cues . . . the person with low tolerance of ambiguity experiences stress, reacts prematurely, and avoids ambiguous stimuli. at the other extreme of the scale, however, a person with high tolerance of ambiguity perceives ambiguous situations/stimuli as desirable, challenging, and interesting and neither denies nor distorts their complexity of incongruity” (p. 179). tolerance of ambiguity is negatively correlated with measures of rigidity, authoritarianism, machiavellianism, and dogmatism (furnham & ribchester, 1995). bochner (1965), a psychologist who regarded ta as a personality trait, categorized primary and secondary characteristics of ta, in which “being anxious” was considered as one of the characteristics of ta belonging to the secondary category (together with dogmatic, rigid, closed minded, aggressive). in addition, the link between foreign language classroom anxiety, second language tolerance . . . 51 smock’s (1955) study was also believed to be consistent with the hypothesis that anxiety is a behavioural correlate of ta as a trait, namely that people feel anxious in uncertain and ambiguous situations, and that the level of anxiety aroused depends on their ta. the relationship between uncertainty and anxiety lies at the heart of william gudykunst’s (2005) anxiety/uncertainty management (aum) theory. gudykunst focuses on what makes up effective communication between cultural in-groups and strangers, in other words, “situations where differences between interlocutors spawn doubts and fears” (griffin, 2011, p. 427). anxiety and uncertainty need to be managed by being mindful for communication to be effective. in one of his 47 axioms, he posits that: “an increase in our tolerance for ambiguity will produce a decrease in our anxiety. this axiom holds only when our anxiety and uncertainty are between our minimum and maximum thresholds” (gudykunst, 2005, p. 298). the minimum threshold of anxiety is “the least amount we can feel while still having enough adrenaline running through our veins to prod us to communicate effectively. in like manner, the minimum threshold of uncertainty is the lowest amount of uncertainty we can have and not feel bored or overconfident about our predictions of strangers’ behavior” (griffin, 2011, p. 431). the maximum threshold of anxiety is reached when people become paralyzed with fear: “they no longer can concentrate on the message or the messenger, they fall back on negative stereotypes or simply withdraw from the conversation” (griffin, 2011, p. 431). when people reach the maximum threshold of uncertainty “they lose all confidence that they can predict others’ behavior, and communication no longer seems worthwhile” (griffin, 2011, p. 431). anxiety/uncertainty management theory postulates that “effective communication is possible only when participants’ levels of anxiety and uncertainty fall somewhere between those upper and lower thresholds” (griffin, 2011, p. 431). thompson and lee (2012) used factor analysis of the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas) data collected from korean efl students to identify a factor they labelled as “fear of ambiguity in english.” the authors point out that this factor had been undetected in previous research involving the flcas (p. 18). the factor has “11 items indicating a panicked feeling when not everything is understood in english as well as a general dislike and nervousness about english and english courses, explaining 3.33% of the variance” (p. 10). dewaele and li wei (2013) investigated the link between multilingualism and ta among 2158 mono-, biand multilinguals. monolinguals and bilinguals scored significantly lower on ta compared to participants knowing three or more languages. participants with high levels of proficiency in various languages scored higher on ta. a stay abroad of more than 3 months was also linked to higher ta although the effect levelled off after one year abroad. the authors jean-marc dewaele, tsui shan ip 52 argue that their findings show that a high level of multilingualism makes individuals more at ease in dealing with ambiguity, while acknowledging that the causal pathway could be multidirectional, namely that a higher level of ta can also strengthen an individual’s inclination to become multilingual. second language tolerance of ambiguity (slta) has been described as a characteristic of the “good language learner” because such a learner is “comfortable with uncertainty . . . and willing to try out his guesses” (rubin, 1975, p. 45). rubin (2008) argued that learners who are more comfortable with uncertainty have an advantage as “change is an integral part of the language learning process” (p. 11). one could argue, referring to gudykunst’s aum, that these learners are also better equipped to handle intercultural communication. ely (1989) defined slta as a cognitive style and a possible antecedent of strategy use. ehrman and oxford (1990) also define slta as a cognitive style: “tolerance for ambiguity is another important style dimension; those who can more readily tolerate ambiguity often show better language learning performance than those with less such tolerance” (p. 311). the authors suggest that learners with specific personality profiles may be more or less likely to score high on slta. using the myers-briggs type inventory, they suggested that sensers, judgers and thinkers have less slta than intuitive, perceiving and feeling types respectively (p. 319). the last dimension may be particularly important: “feeling students may tolerate certain kinds of ambiguity, e.g., about grammatical structure, more than their thinking classmates” (ehrman, 1993, p. 337). however, grace (1998) found no differences between personality types in an experiment to establish the effects of ambiguity on vocabulary retention in an l2. doughty et al. (2010) suggest that the benefits of slta for the fl learner may be linked to the ability to retain incongruous fragments of input in memory: “tolerance of ambiguity is the ability to keep contradictory or incomplete input in memory. this ability may be important for language learning because input that is meaningless or seems contradictory at an early point in language learning may become important later on in the learning process” (p. 18). macintyre (personal communication) pointed out that this raises the question of the engagement of the emotion systems and their interaction with on-going cognition. if we accept m. w. eysenck’s attentional control theory (derakshan & eysenck, 2009), which posits that trait anxiety creates a sort of divided attention task, consuming cognitive resources, then engagement of anxiety due to low slta seems likely to have negative effects on cognitively demanding tasks requiring efficient cognitive processing such as l2 production. high slta might not engage the emotion systems in the same way but can be associated with poorer outcomes because of impoverished (unquestioning, unaware) processing. the link between foreign language classroom anxiety, second language tolerance . . . 53 foreign language learning researchers have suggested that moderate levels of slta might be preferable to both low and high levels, thus echoing gudykunst’s (2005) observation about the extremes of the uncertainty and anxiety dimensions being detrimental to effective communication. learners with a moderate level of slta are likely to persist comparatively longer in fll than those with low level of slta (ely, 1989). ely (1995) pointed out that a learner listening to an l2 perceives ambiguous input because of lack of familiarity with accent, pronunciation, unknown words or grammar. the ideal learner “is neither inhibited by low tolerance of ambiguity nor oblivious to linguistic subtleties. the student who is aware of, but not threatened by, linguistic differentiation, and who treats it as an occasion for introspection, experimentation and, ultimately, learning, is the one for whom tolerance of ambiguity will be a help, not a hindrance” (p. 93). however, too much slta may cause negative effects such as unquestioning acceptance and cognitive passivity (oxford & ehrman, 1992). second language tolerance of ambiguity could also affect fl achievement in a more indirect way. oxford and ehrman (1992) argue that learners who have lower slta often suffer reduced risk-taking ability, while taking intelligent risks adequately, for example, meaning guessing based on background knowledge, is useful and helpful in fll (p. 195). risk-avoiding behaviour may result from anticipated criticism from others or from self-criticism, which may make language practice become restricted (ehrman & oxford, 1995, p. 69). wen and johnson (1996) established that tolerating ambiguity (risk-taking) was a strategy cluster that had a positive effect on l2 english achievement of chinese university students. liu (2012) also found that chinese students’ (n = 934) levels of language class risk-taking were significantly positively correlated with their performance in english. neuroticism was negatively correlated with performance in english (p. 42). surprisingly, the direct relationship between fla/flca and slta has not been the object of any empirical research in sla so far (as far as we could establish). a small number of researchers have suggested that flca and slta may be inversely related. oxford (1999) notes that: “tolerance of ambiguity is the acceptance of confusing situations. second language learning has a great deal of ambiguity about meanings, referents and pronunciation, and this can often raise language anxiety. therefore, a degree of ambiguity-tolerance is essential for language learners” (p. 62). a similar view is presented in matsuura (2007): “listeners’ tolerance of ambiguity possibly contributed to lowering their anxiety level when listening to unfamiliar speakers and novel speech content. anxieties as well as ambiguity tolerance seem to play a crucial role in facilitating or impeding the comprehensibility levels of listeners” (p. 295). jean-marc dewaele, tsui shan ip 54 clément and wen (2003) also mentioned in their study of chinese esl learners that higher level of slta might lead to less anxiety, but the authors’ focus was more on slta and the eagerness of engaging in communication (p. 31). a close look at the flcas shows that some items resemble those in the second language tolerance of ambiguity scale (sltas) (e.g., “it frightens me when i don’t understand what the teacher is saying in the foreign language;” and “i get nervous when i don’t understand every word the language teacher says”). horwitz et al. (1986) might thus have assumed that slta is a component of flca. it is not surprising then that thompson and lee (2012) found that fear of ambiguity emerged as a fourth dimension in their factor analysis of fcla data collected from korean efl students. research questions the present study will focus on the following two research questions: 1. is there a relationship between flca, slta and self-rated proficiency? 2. are flca and slta linked to sociobiographical and educational variables (age, gender, number of languages known, status of english in the school)? method participants seventy-three secondary school students (33 males and 40 females) participated in the study. they were older teenagers and young adults in forms 4 to 7, aged from 16 to 20 (mean age = 18, sd = 1), enrolled in six different secondary schools in hong kong. a minority of students went to a school where english was the medium of instruction (n = 20), and the remaining 53 students went to chinese medium schools. all of them could speak chinese (cantonese), and because english is the main and compulsory subject in primary and secondary education, all participants had studied english for more than 9 years by the time they took part in the survey. thirty-six students could also speak putonghua (mandarin chinese) and many spoke one or two chinese dialects (including hakka and yue). considering all of the languages a student speaks, we had seven students who reported knowing 2 languages/dialects, 26 reported knowing 3 languages/dialects, 36 reported knowing 4 languages/dialects. an additional 4 students reported knowing 5, 6 and 8 languages/dialects respectively. we created three groups based on language/dialect knowledge, corresponding to 2, 3, and 4+ languages/dialects (with those knowing more than four languages/dialects all integrated to the latter group). no student had ever lived outside hong kong. the link between foreign language classroom anxiety, second language tolerance . . . 55 instruments in the present research, the two main dependent variables fla and slta were measured with the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas) developed by horwitz et al. (1986) and the second language tolerance of ambiguity scale (sltas) developed by ely (1995). these instruments were preceded by some personal background questions related to gender, age, school, form (year), medium of instruction, knowledge of languages, self-rated english proficiency, and experience of living abroad. the responses to the two scales were in a 5-point likert-scale format, ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. in order to make sure all the items were understood, the questionnaire was bilingual with both an english and chinese version of every item side-by-side. the flcas (horwitz et al., 1986) was chosen because it is well-established, well-developed, widely used in different countries with learners of various target languages and l1s. the only adaptation we made to the flcas was the substitution of the words language and foreign language by the word english. the sltas (ely, 1995) was selected because it was suitable for the type of participants selected in the present study. no changes were made in the formulation of items. data collection procedures the teachers of six schools helped identify and invite suitable learners who met the age requirement (16 or above), and then briefly introduced and passed them the link and the closing date of the online survey. seventy-three students from the six schools filled out the questionnaire and the instruments. scores on both scales were normally distributed (one-sample kolmogorovsmirnov tests were nonsignificant). cronbach alpha analyses showed that both scales had very high internal consistence (flcas = .95, sltas = .89) (dörnyei, 2007). the flca scores varied between 41 and 158 (m = 99.7, sd = 24.3). the slta scores varied between 13 and 49 (m = 30.7, sd = 8.7). results pearson correlation analyses revealed that flca and slta are significantly and negatively correlated (r(72) = -.711, p < .0001) with high levels of flca corresponding to lower levels of slta, that is, the more tolerant of ambiguity the respondents were, the less anxious they reported being in their english classes (see figure 1). jean-marc dewaele, tsui shan ip 56 figure 1 the correlation between flca and slta a significant correlation was found between self-rated proficiency and both flca (r(72) = -.684, p < .0001) and slta (r(72) = .684, p < .0001) (see figures 2 and 3). figure 2 the correlation between self-rated proficiency and flca 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 40 60 80 100 120 140 sl ta flca 1 2 3 4 5 20 70 120 170 le ve l o f e ng lis h flca the link between foreign language classroom anxiety, second language tolerance . . . 57 figure 3 the correlation between self-rated proficiency and slta a pearson correlation analysis showed that age is unrelated to either flca (r(72) = .19, p = ns) or slta (r(72) = -.15, p = ns). an independent t test showed that there are no gender differences for flca scores (t(72) = -.45, p = ns) nor for slta scores (t(72) = .21, p = ns). a one-way anova revealed that language/dialect knowledge is unrelated to either slta (f = .16, df = 2, p = ns) or flca (f = .006, df = 2, p = ns). a t test showed unsurprisingly that the 20 students who went to a school where english was the medium of instruction scored significantly lower on flca (m = 78.9, sd = 15.2; t(72) = 5.25, p < .0001) and higher on slta (t(72) = -3.82, p < .0001) compared to the 53 students in chinese medium schools (flca m = 107.5, sd = 22.5 and slta m = 36.5, sd = 7.3 respectively). multiple stepwise linear regressions were performed individually for flca, slta and self-rated proficiency in order to determine the unique amount of variance explained by the variables. the in/dependent variables included were self-rated proficiency (which also reflects the difference in english use linked to the school’s medium of instruction) and flca or/and slta. because we use the three variables alternatively as independent and then as dependent variables, we expect the statistical results to be very similar. foreign language classroom anxiety (flca). model 1 with slta as predictor is significant (f(1, 71) = 72.4, p < .0001). the adjusted r2 shows that the slta explains 50% of variance in flca (beta = -.711, t = -8.5, p < .0001). model 2, with self-rated proficiency added as a predictor variable, is also significant (f(2, 70) = 48.0, p < .0001) and explains a further 6.6% of variance 1 2 3 4 5 10 20 30 40 50 le ve l o f e ng lis h slta jean-marc dewaele, tsui shan ip 58 (adjusted r2 = 56.6). slta makes the largest unique contribution to explaining flca in model 2 (beta = -.457, t = -4.3, p < .0001), followed by self-rated proficiency (beta = -.371, t = -3.5 p < .001). second language tolerance of ambiguity (slta). model 1 with flca as predictor is significant (f(1, 71) = 72.4, p < .0001), explaining 50% of variance in slta (beta = -.711, t = -8.5, p < .0001), model 2, with self-rated proficiency added as a predictor variable, is also significant (f(2, 70) = 48.0, p < .0001), explaining an extra 6.7% of variance (adjusted r2 = 56.7). flca makes the largest unique contribution to explaining slta in model 2 (beta = -.456, t = -4.3, p < .0001), followed by self-rated proficiency (beta = .372, t = 3.5, p < .001). self-rated proficiency. model 1 with slta as predictor is significant (f(1, 71) = 62.3, p < .0001), explaining 47% of variance in self-rated proficiency (adjusted r2). slta is a significant predictor (beta = .684, t = 7.9, p < .0001). model 2, with flca added as a predictor variable, is also significant (f(2, 70) = 42.2, p < .0001), explaining an extra 7.9% of variance (adjusted r2 = 53.3). the contribution of slta and flca is almost identical in model 2, with slta (beta = .400, t = 3.5, p < .001), and flca (beta = -.399, t = 3.5, p < .001) respectively. the results in the regression models show that flca and slta are the best predictors of each other explaining half the variance, with self-rated proficiency explaining a further 7% of variance. moreover, slta and flca explain over half the variance in self-rated proficiency. discussion the statistical analyses of the present study confirmed the hypothesis that a strong link exists between self-perceived proficiency, flca and slta though causality remains elusive due to the inherent limitations of the statistical analyses. yet, these results confirm findings in related studies in the field of intercultural communication studies (gudykunst’s axiom 13 positing that tolerance for ambiguity is inversely related to anxiety) and personality psychology, for example, bochner (1965), and smock (1955), which regard ta as a trait, and anxiety as one of the ta’s behavioural characteristics or correlates. anxiety was perceived as a behavioural characteristic of people in uncertain and ambiguous situations (bochner, 1965), particularly those who are less tolerant of ambiguity. in other words, people feel anxious when there is ambiguity, and the level of anxiety is related to the individual’s level of ta. since fll learners have to deal with ambiguity in the input, uncertainty about exact meaning, and difficulty in recognising unfamiliar phonemes or idioms, they the link between foreign language classroom anxiety, second language tolerance . . . 59 tend to feel more anxious when using the fl compared to their l1. learners with lower levels of slta tend to be more anxious when using a fl. thompson and lee’s (2012) fourth factor, labelled fear of ambiguity in english, in their factor analysis of flcas data from korean efl learners, is a clear indication of the proximity between flca and slta. it could thus be argued that slta predicts flca. however, flca, being commonly considered to be a situation-specific anxiety, may be less likely to affect a comparatively more permanent trait such as slta, even though it is imaginable that when people are anxious they probably prefer certainty and their slta may be temporarily lowered. however, as discussed previously, different researchers have different views on the exact nature of slta (e.g., trait, strategy, and cognitive style), and it is also possible that slta could be similar to flca so that there are two kinds (or more) of slta: trait and situational. it is possible, for instance, that slta refers to ta especially in efl classrooms; therefore, even people who generally have high ta could be less tolerant in a fll context or the other way round. then, from this perspective, slta not only could be more likely to be affected, for example by flca, but could also be manipulated. teachers could help students boost their slta, which could lead to a reduction of flca, a boost in proficiency and more overall enjoyment of the fll class. finally, it is equally probable that flca and slta are linked to personality traits higher up in the hierarchy, such as neuroticism and openness. the proficiency ratings were equally linked to both slta and flca; in other words, participants who were more tolerant of ambiguity in english and less anxious in using the language reported higher levels of english proficiency. it is also difficult to pinpoint the direction of the causality in the link between self-rated proficiency and both flca and slta in english. schrauf (in press) considered the relationship between bilingual proficiency and both psychological and social factors. he argued that the causal pathway is multidirectional, where proficiency is both a cause and an effect. indeed, our study showed that a higher level of slta and a lower level of flca were linked to higher levels of self-perceived proficiency. these specific personality traits might thus strengthen students’ confidence, curiosity and interest in english resulting in higher levels of proficiency. similarly, it could be argued that the students who had become more proficient in english, especially those in an english-medium school, had become less anxious and more tolerant of ambiguity as a result. the finding of a significant relationship between self-rated proficiency and both flca and slta reflects findings previously reported in the literature (chapelle & roberts, 1986; kim, 2000; liu, 2006; macintyre, clément, & noels, 1997). the absence of an effect of gender and age can only be noted, as no indication exists in the literature that an effect was to be expected on flca nor slta. the fact that those knowing more languages/dialects did not score lower on flca and jean-marc dewaele, tsui shan ip 60 higher on slta is somewhat surprising, considering that such a relationship was found in much larger and more heterogeneous samples of adult multilinguals (dewaele et al., 2008, dewaele & li wei, 2013). this might be due to local effects, namely how the respondents perceived the concept of "knowing a language" and their self-conception of their ability. in hong kong many people start to learn english and putonghua when they are three or earlier in the kindergarten or playgroup, yet many participants claimed not to know these two languages. the decision to claim knowledge of a language may or may not be related to proficiency. sia and dewaele (2006) found that participants who self-rated as being more proficient in their l2 were more likely to consider themselves bilingual. the decision to claim to be bilingual was also linked to currently living or having recently lived in the l2 community, and not currently studying the l2. as all our hong kong participants were still studying, many may have decided that claiming english as one of their languages was premature. it is also possible that the effects of knowing more languages only appear once the learners become adult authentic l2 users having to function in a completely new environment. in other words, our hong kong participants lived in a relatively homogeneous cultural context, had not yet lived outside hong kong and had therefore not yet encountered the swim or sink situations that immigrants or adult l2 users find themselves in, where social survival depends completely on the use of an l2. it is this shock that has lasting psychological effects. dewaele and li wei (2013) found that a bilingual upbringing was not linked to higher ta scores, but that having lived abroad had a strong positive effect on ta. finally, it is not entirely clear to what extent various chinese dialects can be equalled with different chinese languages, as there is a certain amount of intercomprehension between dialects. this independent variable is therefore slightly problematic. the effect of school’s medium of instruction on flca and slta is interesting. more frequent use of a fl has been linked with lower levels of fla/flca (dewaele, 2007; dewaele et al., 2008) and it is therefore not surprising that the chinese learners in schools where english was used outside the fl class felt less anxious using the language. indeed, housen et al. (2011) found that learners studying a target language widely used outside the language classroom (a typical l2 context) outperform learners in contexts where the target language is less prominent (a typical fl context). however, the higher values of slta in the english medium school suggests that more regular contact with a fl, and possibly with slightly different cultural practices, makes students more tolerant of second language ambiguity. the students in the english medium schools had to function in another language, in other words; they were more than passive recipients of the language within the walls of the fl class. it would be interesting to see whether the same pattern occurs with different fls in different l1 settings. the link between foreign language classroom anxiety, second language tolerance . . . 61 implications teachers need to identify anxious learners (gregersen, 2007; macintyre and gregersen, 2012a). this is not too hard as flca is readily observable without using any instrument. there are obvious symptoms, namely anxious behaviour and signs (e.g., general avoidance, stuttering or stammering, silence) that can be recognised by teachers in their classrooms, though some of them might be culturespecific, requiring teachers to use their own sense and judgement (oxford, 1999, p. 66). teachers can lower flca by establishing a positive emotional atmosphere in the classroom (arnold & fonseca, 2007; macintyre & gregersen, 2012b). when learners realise that they do not risk being the object of ridicule for making errors, that the teacher may have suffered similar fears, and that the teacher will appreciate them trying something new in the fl, their levels of flca will drop. dewaele (2011) argued that “language teachers could use their own emotions and feelings, their own multilingual subjectivity by presenting the target language not just as a tool for communication, but as an opportunity for learners to expand their symbolic selves, get emotionally and cognitively involved in the foreign language process and develop tertiary socialisation” (p. 37). macintyre and gregersen (2012a) point out that positive emotion is the key to fll as it “facilitates the building of resources . . . tends to broaden a person’s perspective, opening the individual to absorb the language” (p. 193). whereas it is relatively simple to create a low-anxiety classroom environment, it is probably harder to create a low-uncertainty fl class. as researchers have pointed out, everything in a new fl is potentially ambiguous, which can also contribute to the sense of challenge to learners. teachers can help reduce uncertainty in their classrooms by setting out clear rules about their expectations, and that their primary role is that of a helper rather than that of a judge. judicious use of l1 in monolingual efl contexts can have positive effects for l2 development (kramsch, 2009; ni egorodcew, 1997). thus, teachers should not feel guilty to code-switch to l1 sometimes, indeed, they should abandon the traditional monolingual perspective and embrace a multilingual perspective (kramsch, 2009, p. 188). teachers can also try to boost students’ slta by deliberately talking about it, stressing the importance of flexibility, of the inevitable process of trial and error in fll, along with introducing strategies to deal with ambiguity. we are aware of the limitations in the study. firstly, this was a small-scale survey in a very specific context. it would be interesting to see whether the relationship between flca and slta exists for other populations and other fls. secondly, we used self-rated proficiency scores rather than measures of actual proficiency. we have argued before that self-perceived proficiency is an acceptable measure when the aim is to establish relationships with other variables and when participants have jean-marc dewaele, tsui shan ip 62 nothing to gain from exaggerating their level of proficiency, which was the case in the present anonymous survey (dewaele et al., 2008). finally, our research design was purely quantitative, which was a deliberate choice because we see this study as a first step to establish possible relationship between the variables. further research adopting a qualitative perspective could shed more light on the actual experience of learners in dealing with ambiguous input and their flca. conclusion the present study had a main objective: investigating the relationship between flca, slta and self-rated proficiency. our findings are congruent with gudykunst’s aum, and, more specifically, with the axiom that more tolerance of ambiguity is linked to less anxiety. we did find that flca and slta are inversely related and share over half of their variance. hong kong efl learners who were more tolerant of ambiguity were significantly less anxious during their english classes. moreover, the self-perceived level of proficiency was significantly predicted by slta and flca. whereas sociobiographical factors such as age, gender and number of languages/dialects known had no effect on the flca and slta, the use of english as medium of instruction and the resulting self-perceived level of proficiency was found to have a strong effect on both flca and slta, that is, it lowered flca and boosted slta. we explained that our statistical techniques do not allow us to decide on the causality, but that it could be argued both ways, namely that flca affects slta or vice versa and that self-rated proficiency is simultaneously affected by flca and slta and affecting it (schrauf, in press). we have argued that these findings have pedagogical implications: language teachers should do what they can to lower flca and boost slta by creating the right atmosphere in their classes, and also by tackling what seems to be an important source of anxiety, namely dealing with ambiguity. if learners can be made more comfortable in dealing with ambiguous fl input, they will probably become more self-confident, more flexible, less anxious, and this will boost their proficiency in english. acknowledgments we would like to thank our colleagues and the reviewers for their excellent suggestions. the link between foreign language classroom anxiety, second language tolerance . . . 63 references arnold, j. & fonseca, c. 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(1997). l2 learner variables and english achievement: a study of tertiary-level english majors in china. applied linguistics, 18, 27-45. 711 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 9 (4). 2019. 711-736 http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2019.9.4.7 http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt using drama activities to teach beginner’s french to chinese students at a tertiary institution in hong kong: an exploratory case study zarina marie krystle m. abenoja the education university of hong kong https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9276-5697 zabenoja@twc.edu.hk matthew decoursey the education university of hong kong https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5250-306x matthew@eduhk.hk abstract the exam-oriented education system in hong kong has created a language learning environment that is largely confined to traditional classroom settings, which may not take best advantage of students’ abilities to relate what they have learnt in class to real-life scenarios. such learning environments may have implications for the way second language learners learn a new language. numerous studies suggest that drama activities used in language classrooms can enhance second language learning. these studies put forward tasks that generate pleasant and rewarding experiences, enhance confidence and subsequently increase motivation to learn a language. by focusing on students studying in a beginning french course at a tertiary institution in hong kong, this article reports on how drama activities make a target language more enjoyable and easier to recall. classroom observations and interviews with students (n = 30) revealed that learning french via drama had a number of positive effects on second language learners especially in terms of their confidence. the learning of french through drama may provide a language learning environment that enables students to apply their french language skills more effectively in real-life situations. keywords: language teaching; drama activities for l2 learning; teaching french zarina marie krystle m. abenoja, matthew decoursey 712 1. introduction traditional foreign language classrooms typically use conventional teaching and learning methods with students sitting at their desks facing towards their teacher who stands at the front of the classroom drilling and repeating textbook exercises (richards & rodgers, 2014). this paper uses the term traditional language classroom to refer to historical methods and approaches to foreign language teaching. one example of a historical method is the grammar-translation method that is discussed by richards and rodgers (2014) where the focus of language learning is on memorizing grammar rules, translation of sentences, vocabulary and accuracy. in today’s language classrooms there is the presence of more dynamic and collaborative teaching approaches that use less traditional methods and more realistic scenarios (carless, 2004; littlewood, 2007). an offshoot to this type of instruction is the use of drama techniques and activities that help students learn the target language (dalziel, santucci, & spedo 2011; ryan-scheutz, 2011; winston, 2012). in the present study, the use of drama activities for learning the french language was investigated via classroom observations and interviews in hong kong, whose educational context tends to focus on summative assessment (davison & hamp-lyons, 2009). the characteristics of an exam-driven education system have been researched by carless (2011), who labeled exam oriented environments confucian-heritage cultures (chc). in addition, biggs (1996) has also popularized the term chc to refer to educational systems or countries within asian societies that have been influenced by confucianism such as china, south korea, japan, taiwan, singapore and hong kong. this suggests that the assessment practices in hong kong may be influenced by society and culture (kennedy, chan, fok, & yu, 2008). the debate about whether students’ learning behaviors are culture-based has been challenged by shi (2006), who found that the chinese culture of english language learning is shifting from a traditional, confucian one to a modern, individualistic one. the findings from shi’s study also suggest that students’ learning strategies and attitudes are subject to change under different educational and social circumstances. even though there are some studies on drama-oriented language classes in hong kong (hui, cheung, wong & he, 2011; hui & lau, 2006; to, chan, lam, & tsang, 2011) to date, there is little research that focuses on learning a third language using drama approaches in hong kong. thus, this study investigates the use of drama activities for learning french as a third language and may provide valuable insights into alternative teaching methods for second or third language learners. using drama activities to teach beginner’s french to chinese students at a tertiary institution in. . . 713 2. brief background of hong kong’s educational context english and chinese are considered the official written languages in hong kong. the official spoken languages are cantonese, putonghua and english. however, the mother tongue of the majority of the population is cantonese, which is the modern standard dialect of chinese. the medium of instruction (moi) in primary schools is chinese (excluding some schools such as international schools), and english is learnt as a separate subject. the situation in secondary schools is more complex. they are classified as either english medium of instruction (emi) or chinese medium of instruction (cmi). there are also schools that have developed curricula incorporating both modes of instruction. these classifications regarding the moi were a result of the hong kong government guidelines to adopt cmi for secondary school students after the handover in 1997. when schools could decide whether to adopt emi or cmi, the figures showed 91.7% of the schools in 1990 adopted emi as the moi (lee, 1997, p. 166). according to kan and adamson (2010), the government was reluctant to take a strong commitment to force schools to be cmi in order to avoid conflict with various sectors of the community. in 2009, the hong kong education bureau allowed certain cmi schools to adopt different moi for certain subjects, groups or according to the needs and abilities of the students and teachers. furthermore, it was found that parents favored emi primary and secondary schools because they believed that this would provide better employment opportunities and better education (poon, 2010). the moi in tertiary institutions in hong kong is english for all subjects except for language subjects such as chinese, german and french and other subjects that require chinese instruction such as chinese medicine. this study examined chinese students enrolled in a beginner’s french elective course called french i at a hong kong tertiary level institution. thus, the moi was english and the lessons were conducted predominantly in english and at times in french. the participants (n = 30) ranged from first to fourth year students who studied various subjects. their first language was chinese, english was their second, and french was their third. the type of pedagogy used by the teacher was of particular interest as drama activities were implemented in the lessons. the area of drama education is discussed in the next section. 3. drama education drama education is not a new phenomenon. in the 1970s, drama educators dorothy heathcote and gavin bolton were known for their dominant methods of learning through doing. heathcote believed in taking on an actual role in order to manipulate the learning process. bolton also advocated the process of experiencing zarina marie krystle m. abenoja, matthew decoursey 714 through drama. he emphasized recognizing the magic that occurs when creating something that is not really happening. together, heathcote and bolton inspired new practices of drama education such as acting out, acting in classroom drama, drama behaviors, drama for learning and mantle of the expert. the idea of process drama was pioneered by heathcote and was originally coined as drama in education but is now referred to as process drama. the use of drama has been found in various academic fields such as the social sciences, literature, history, and language arts (kao & o’neill, 1998). wagner (1988) is a key figure who conducted research promoting the positive impact that drama experiences have on first language acquisition. wagner (1988) reported that experiences in drama can improve fluency, articulation, vocabulary and grammar as well as autonomy and motivation. other renowned scholars that have recognized drama for its pedagogical contributions in learning were o’toole (1992), o’neill (1995), ackroyd (2007), neelands and goode (2015), nicholson (2010) and anderson (2012). however, the focus of the present study is on one sub-sector of drama education, namely drama and learning a third language. 3.1. drama and second language learning (l2) research regarding the use of drama for second language learning is rather limited but has increasingly become popular. this section provides an overview of the international literature in the area of drama and second language learning. numerous scholars have examined the concept of drama education for second language learning and have shed light on its advantages in the language classroom. these studies and key findings are briefly summarized below. what is particularly interesting about drama is that it manipulates the traditional classroom context and creates a new and innovative context for learning. for instance, the teacher may take on a role and act out an interesting character like an animal. students may take on roles and act like monsters. this in turn changes the dynamics of a typical classroom as the teacher may no longer be seen as an authoritative person but someone who creates a new form of relationship between the teacher and student that is worth investigating. students are also given the opportunity to communicate with other students (in a second and third language) and consequently learn from one another. according to snyman and dekock (1991), drama is the negotiation of meaning in which students are actively interacting with each other. the occurrence of communication between students is a vital process for effective learning in drama as it allows students to clarify new concepts with their peers. this active interaction could be beneficial for students who are learning a second or third language as they are able to check the meanings of particular vocabulary or phrases with their peers during interaction. using drama activities to teach beginner’s french to chinese students at a tertiary institution in. . . 715 di pietro’s (1987) work focused on facilitating students through role-play scenarios and getting them to resolve problems through interaction within the target language. this field of research was rejuvenated by kao and o’neill (1998) in the book words into worlds: learning a second language through process drama, which discussed the use of process drama in second language teaching. kao and o’neill (1998) claimed that drama and language share commonalities in terms of the influence of context on communication, the social nature of language and drama and the importance of active participation. a case study conducted by miccoli (2003) explored the use of drama in helping 37 english as a foreign language (efl) students develop their oral skills. the students prepared a theatrical production and wrote reflective journals in order to document their learning. findings reveal that students improved in their oral skills and had an increase in confidence to speak the target language. miccoli (2003) states that drama created a context that was purposeful and meaningful for understanding the cultural and linguistic analysis of characters. drama in second language learning has been applied in various contexts and has not been restricted to efl classrooms. studies conducted in canada showed students who dramatized picture book stories in french to french-speaking children generated positive outcomes (early & yeung, 2009). another study collected observational data of university students learning german by rehearsing and performing a german novel. participants stated they enjoyed drama-based learning and claimed that their language abilities improved (lauer, 2008). there is also research documenting the value of drama education and its effects on developing confidence in second language learners and also reducing learner anxiety. a study conducted by piazzoli (2011) revealed that affective space generated by process drama could benefit language learners in terms of reducing language anxiety. as a result of this, drama had positive effects on the participants’ confidence and ability to communicate orally. overall, the studies suggest that the outcome of drama and second language learning incurs numerous benefits. drama has also been applied in task-based learning approaches. a study conducted by carson (2012) investigated the role of drama in task-based learning and suggested that drama fosters both interactional and situational authenticity of language use. interactional and situational authenticity refers to learning a language in a more natural way that is closer to how language is used in day-to-day life. she referred to dougill (1987, pp. 6-8) to help illustrate her point of view: “drama activities help to bridge the gap between the cozy and controlled world of the classroom and seemingly chaotic composition of language in the world outside.” the quote suggests that drama is useful in helping students learn language in a more natural sense as opposed to a traditional rigid structure of learning a language. her study examined postgraduate students taking an english for academic purposes (eap) program, which used zarina marie krystle m. abenoja, matthew decoursey 716 drama in the curriculum. the course followed a task-based learning approach that promoted the use of authentic academic resources during real-life academic tasks, both oral and written. carson’s study suggested that the authentic tasks enabled student interactions not only to improve in their second language learning but also to enhance their perceptions of learning and development of their l2 identities as natural language users. carson (2012, p. 55) reflected: “drama seems to be a powerful way of drawing learners into a task unlike other traditional language learning tasks.” a recent study by galante and thomson (2017) involved a pretest-posttest design including two groups. one group received a 4-month drama-based english program; the other group received four months of instruction in a traditional communicative efl classroom. results showed that the drama group had significantly higher gains in l2 oral fluency than the traditional efl group. comprehensibility scores were affected to a lesser extent and differences in accentedness did not change in either group. it is evident that over the past three decades there has been considerable interest in how drama can be an effective contributor to language learning. however, it is not clear whether the situation is the same in hong kong. the next section reviews studies that were conducted in hong kong. 3.2. drama education among l2 learners in hong kong a number of scholars such as hui have been particularly interested in researching creativity in young children. hui has conducted several studies where she discusses the impact of drama education in kindergarten and primary schools in hong kong. one study (hui & lau, 2006) compared language learning in an experimental group, with students who participated in lessons with drama elements, and a control group, with students who participated in extra-curricular activities. the findings revealed that students who participated in drama-infused classes scored significantly higher in creativity than students who participated in unstructured extra-curricular activities. another study by hui and colleagues (2011) revealed that students who displayed more creativity and dramatic characteristics performed better in story telling compared to students in a control group, who were less verbal. furthermore, hui and lau (2006) highlighted the psychosocial development of children’s generic skills, which was enabled through arts education. these generic skills are recommended by the curriculum development council (cdc), an advisory body responsible for developing teaching syllabuses for primary and secondary schools in hong kong. among the nine generic skills, verbal communication, critical thinking, collaboration and creativity are reinforced through arts education. however, it is worth noting that these studies did not mention or reveal in-depth information regarding the students’ language skills. using drama activities to teach beginner’s french to chinese students at a tertiary institution in. . . 717 to et al. (2011) documented reflections on a teacher professional development program where process drama approaches were introduced and carried out at 38 hong kong primary schools. there were two phases of the program: phase one was an 18-hour teacher development course to provide teachers with fundamental skills and knowledge on using process drama; phase two was an 18-20-hour on-site support where teachers designed and applied a unit of english process drama. the teachers’ reflections and students’ experiences were documented. interviews were conducted with the teachers in order to understand the potential of drama as a form of pedagogy in hong kong. to and colleagues stated: we observed that some teachers who were reluctant to join the programme in the first place demonstrated remarkable changes upon seeing their students’ learning in process drama. their hearts were ‘melted’ as they noticed their positive responses from passive to motivated, from silent to lively, from bored to interested, and from regarding learning as impossible to possible. (p. 522) teachers perceived process drama as a method of providing authentic learning experiences in which the four language skills were organically integrated. other benefits reported were that students were motivated, confident in speaking, engaged, more active and that the relationship between teachers and students had improved. although interviews with the participants yielded positive outcomes, teachers did say that they were concerned about how to continue using drama in their classrooms when they experience challenges in managing large class sizes, crammed curriculums, heavy workloads and diverse language proficiency amongst the students. the study also suggested that further research is needed in order to understand how teachers’ perceive drama pedagogy and its implementation in hong kong in the long run (to et al., 2011). another study conducted in hong kong by decoursey (2012) recorded the experiences of teacher trainees and their perceptions of using a three-part model implementing aspects of aesthetics, emotion and imagination in their drama lesson plans. results show that teacher trainees doubted the practicality of drama as an approach to learning as lesson planning was challenging and time-consuming. despite this, the teacher trainees developed an improved understanding of teaching drama and were able to receive instant feedback from their students regarding the use of drama in the classroom. this implies that the success of implementing drama in the classroom does not solely depend on the effects that it has on the learners but also on how the language teacher facilitates and administers their lessons. furthermore, cultural differences in learning styles and preferences concerning specific learning activities should also be taken into account. these studies showed that there was an interest in the use of drama as a method of language learning in hong kong. however, there has been little exploration zarina marie krystle m. abenoja, matthew decoursey 718 of using drama for learning a third language. the present study could help to reveal the importance and benefits of using drama activities in the language classroom that have not yet been explored. in addition, there is yet to be extensive research reflecting a framework that incorporates drama and the learning of a third language at the beginner level in an asian context. 4. aims and research questions the present study aims to explore students’ learning of french as a third language via drama activities and the questions of whether such activities benefit students’ language learning and how they perceive this approach. based on the literature, there is also a need to establish whether the same or similar positive effects from previous studies occur with l3. the study addresses the following questions: 1. how do drama activities benefit students learning a third language in the language classroom? 2. how do students perceive drama activities as an approach to learning french as a third language? 5. methodology 5.1. the context the study examined chinese students enrolled in a beginner’s french elective course at a hong kong tertiary institution in 2014. the institution’s medium of instruction is english and thus the class was conducted mainly in english and at times in french. the teacher used drama as an approach to teaching french and applied a variety of techniques to help these students learn french effectively. for this study, drama is defined by activities that include role-plays or short dialogues in addition to the more conventional meaning of the word. activities such as script writing and performing these scripts were also incorporated into the lessons. the teacher’s approach to teaching french with such activities was observed throughout the course. 5.2. participants the participants were tertiary level students ranging from first to fourth year who majored in various subject areas. the course called french i was an elective, which ran for a semester (13 academic weeks). a total of 30 students were observed in their natural learning environment. their first language was chinese (either cantonese or mandarin), english was their second, and french was their using drama activities to teach beginner’s french to chinese students at a tertiary institution in. . . 719 third. most of the students did not have any prior knowledge of french. the teacher conducting the french course, the second author, was also a participant in the study and was interviewed by the first author. 5.3. data collection and sampling the period of data collection lasted for a semester from september to december 2014. data were collected through observations, interviews, student reflection journals and their written assignments. normal ethical procedures were followed. combination or mixed purposeful sampling was used in this study. purposeful sampling is also known as purposive sampling (palys, 2008). this form of sampling allows the researcher to select the times, individuals and settings that can provide the information to answer the proposed research questions. the first author conducted five student interviews in english after the course was completed. table 1 shows that four students were from hong kong and one student from mainland china. all the participants who were interviewed were of chinese descent. table 1 participant profiles student initial major year mother tongue region cmi/emi secondary school i global & environmental studies year 3 putonghua mainland china n/a j social science major in greater china year 4 cantonese hong kong cmi r psychology year 3 cantonese hong kong emi s music education & performance pedagogy year 3 cantonese hong kong cmi w greater china studies year 4 cantonese hong kong emi & cmi note. cmi = chinese medium of instruction, emi = english medium of instruction, n/a = the student’s secondary school did not specify the medium of instruction. 5.4. procedure of interviews, lesson observations and student reflective journals the interviews were conducted one week after the end of the program and lasted approximately 30 minutes. all semi-structured interviews were conducted individually with each student and were audio recorded and transcribed. a technique called stimulated recall (gass & mackey, 2000) was used in order to gain insight into the teaching and learning occurring in the classroom. in this approach, the researcher transcribes sections of the lesson that include potentially interesting phenomena and then seeks clarification and confirmation with the interviewees. this allows the participant to comment on what is happening in the process of teaching and learning. zarina marie krystle m. abenoja, matthew decoursey 720 the observations of the participants took place in their natural setting, the language classroom. during the observations the first author took written field notes on the behavior and impromptu interactions of the students during each french lesson, which lasted for three hours. the observation notes also included possible follow up questions to be asked during interviews and information related to the development of a phenomenon and its relation to theory. in order to limit disruptiveness, the researcher did not interfere or interact with the students or teacher during the lessons. there were occasional interactions in which the researcher helped students clarify the meaning of french words and instructions given by the teacher, but these interactions were limited. for this study, 13 lesson observations were conducted throughout the whole length of the course (i.e., one semester). sloan (2007) asserts that data from interviews and observations can complement each other. the benefit of observational data is that the researcher is able to directly see what participants do rather than relying on what they say. the observer’s presence in the classroom was not disruptive as there was minimal interference and interaction with the students and teacher during the lessons. in addition to the lesson observations, students were asked to write reflections after each lesson, and these extracts were kept in individual book journals. student reflective journals, also known as diary studies, are a popular method of natural inquiry in second language learning research. according to bailey (1991), diary studies are written by language learners and are records of their language learning experience over a period of time. the students were asked to write their names on the covers of their journals, which were collected at the end of the lesson. students spent approximately ten minutes reflecting after each lesson and answering two to three different questions (see the appendix) relating to their experience during the lesson. all written reflections were then typed out and analyzed. 5.5. data analysis the first author separately coded the data that was collected from the three instruments (i.e., observations, student interviews and journals). the first author also categorized and coded the teacher’s practices, pedagogical choices as well as student perceptions of the impact of using drama activities in the lessons. student reflective journals were further examined to understand their concerns, needs and other perceptions of the course. for example, students’ positive or negative reactions were coded. the codes for student interviews and student reflective journals were categorized according to positive and negative responses, as illustrated in table 2. the codes for observations were categorized according to the type of activity such as role-play. using drama activities to teach beginner’s french to chinese students at a tertiary institution in. . . 721 table 2 instruments and codes observations student interviews student reflective journals warm up pronunciation drills drama games role-play/dialogues dictation student/student interaction student/teacher interaction +positive relax fun/funnier enjoy/enjoyment interesting -negative not enough grammar difficult +positive memorize easily confidence -negative boring 6. findings sections 6.1-6.3 give an overview of the observations, which includes the general format and description of the activities conducted during the lessons. in addition, the findings are further supplemented with concise descriptions from students’ reflective journals and interviews relating to the observed incidents described below. each lesson included elements of drama in various forms. the most common elements were dialogues and role-plays that formed natural instances of interactions in french as opposed to mechanical drills in traditional language classrooms. the activities presented below are illustrated with short extracts and quotations from students in order to understand how the participants perceived the specific activity observed. 6.1. warm up each lesson began with a physical warm up which was conducted purely in french. students were instructed to stand up, breathe in and out and relax their neck and shoulder muscles. during the warm up, the teacher instructed the students to repeat out loud in french the body parts that were being stretched. it was observed that the response from students was generally quite positive as they actively responded to the instructions without hesitation. the following are the objectives of the first lesson as an example: · to introduce a dramatic warm-up and associated pronunciation practice. · to introduce elements of french: être – present tense, first, second, third person; pronouns, first, second, third person; negation with être; some vocabulary – official functions. · to begin to create a dramatic situation, using nonverbal methods and perhaps some english. · to use the elements of french learned today in a dramatically significant situation. zarina marie krystle m. abenoja, matthew decoursey 722 the majority of these objectives stress the importance of being “dramatic,” which illustrates that the lessons will involve the students being active. the warm up at the beginning of the lesson is described as a “dramatic warm-up.” warming up before a lesson begins is a common activity before any drama rehearsal or lesson. drama involves movement, which implies students are active rather than passive learners. in a traditional language classroom, warming up would not be common. a student wrote in her reflective journal: “firstly, the warm-up activities relax me and make it easy to follow the professor. it is this reason that encourage me to carry on learning french.” the warm ups are also used in drama to help actors perform better. this briefly introduces how drama can benefit students and how it can help them not only in terms of dramatic performance but also in terms of implicitly learning the language. another student wrote in her reflective journal: i like the warm-up exercise in the beginning of the class. it cheers me up at 8:30 in the morning. i used to guess the meaning of the instruction in the beginning, but then i think i understood most of them in the last few lessons. it is a nice start of the class. here the student stated how she tried to guess the vocabulary as opposed to the teacher repeating and drilling vocabulary. positive reflections regarding the warm-up exercises at the beginning of the class were evident. another student further supported this claim in an individual interview and also mentioned the use of role-plays in the lessons: i enjoyed the strategy that [teacher’s name] used for making the class enjoyable. due to 8:30 early lesson, it was good to have some exercises for waking up the brain. also, the role-play makes the class much funnier. “learning by acting.” although there were a number of positive comments about drama, some students gave negative comments, and these are discussed in a later section. 6.2. classroom layout for interaction the results gathered from the classroom observations showed that moving the desks and chairs to the sides of the classroom created the opportunity for students to communicate and interact with each other easily. this is opposed to a traditional classroom set up which deploys non-communicative activities such as pronunciation drills. the second objective in the first lesson was related to introducing elements of french and was implemented in several activities during the first lesson. some of the activities are described briefly in table 3. using drama activities to teach beginner’s french to chinese students at a tertiary institution in. . . 723 table 3 procedure of lesson 1 activity teacher student introduction introduces french name and bonjour ‘hello’ attempts to pronounce their english name in french warm-up instructs via body movements and french levez-vous ‘stand up’ stretching of neck and back muscles follows teacher pronunciation of the french alphabet voice repetition instructs students to pronounce alphabet in french instructs students to practice pronunciation of french alphabet for homework by listening to the sound file provided online repeats after teacher to practice french alphabet for homework qui êtes-vous? ‘who are you’ je suis un/une . . . ‘i am a . . .’ stresses importance of pronunciation and form provides masculine and feminine forms with examples repeats after teacher to understand the concept of male and female form by introducing themselves with un/une menteur ‘liar’ instructs students to call each other liar emotion and body language walks around classroom and practices calling classmates liar 6.2.1. traditional classroom layout figure 1 shows a common traditional classroom layout where the students are facing the teacher and the classroom projector. since students are seated facing the teacher, this often dictates who the authoritative figure is and the direction of communication. metaphorically, the teacher is seen as the performer and the students as the audience. this kind of classroom setting limits the frequency of interaction between students and their teacher as there seems to be an expectation that the teacher should be the speaker and that the students should be the listeners. the first three activities (i.e., introduction, warm-up and the pronunciation of the french alphabet) were conducted with the classroom layout shown in figure 1. figure 1 classroom layout door teacher’s desk pc projector zarina marie krystle m. abenoja, matthew decoursey 724 figure 2 proposed classroom layout for drama 6.2.2. proposed classroom layout for drama to form the layout shown in figure 2, the students were asked to move and stack their chairs to the side of the classroom in order for an open space to be cleared in the middle. this way activities 4 and 5 (see table 3) could be conducted since they required interaction and movement around the classroom. this is a common strategy used by drama language teachers such as almond (2005) in order to allow movement and interaction. figure 2 shows how space enabled the teacher to interact with each student during group or pair activities. this allowed collaboration and interaction for effective language learning. one student wrote in their reflective journal: in today’s lesson, we have moved around the class to speak and practice what we have learnt. i think this is a more fun and effective way to learn a new language. it is because this provides me with opportunities to speak more. also, this would be a chance for me to review whether i speak right or wrong, e.g. others could correct my pronunciation. as shown in the reflection, the student commented on a pronounced difference between traditional and drama learning by stating the latter is “more fun and effective” because she is allowed to “speak more” and given the opportunity to check her pronunciation not only with the teacher but also with her peers. being able to learn collaboratively with classmates is a core strategy in the language learning process and the classroom layout displayed in figure 2 facilitated this process. 6.3. role-plays and dialogues conducting role-plays is a common activity in the language classroom as researched by kao and o’neill (1998) and miccoli (2003). this technique was observed door teacher’s desk pc projector key: student teacher t using drama activities to teach beginner’s french to chinese students at a tertiary institution in. . . 725 throughout the course and is also represented as short dialogues. students reflected that drama helps them memorize french words easily. the code used during analysis was “memorize easily.” the first dialogue given to the students was activity 4 (see table 3), which was named qui êtes-vous? students were to practice the following dialogue and take turns playing different characters, as illustrated in table 4. the vocabulary for responding to the questions which was used in the activity is listed in table 5. table 4 dialogue example in lesson 1 french phrase english translation student a: qui êtes-vous? student b: c’est le/la président. student c: menteur(euse)! vous n’êtes pas le/la président. student d: je suis un étudiant/une étudiante. ‘who are you?’ ‘it’s the president.’ ‘liar!” “you are not the president.’ ‘i am a student.’ table 5 vocabulary used in activity 4 masculine feminine english translation emotion c’est le president. c’est la présidente ‘it’s the president.’ shock c’est un étudiant. c’est une étudiante ‘this is a student.’ blasé menteur menteuse ‘liar’ anger/confusion the instructor planned this activity with the idea of enabling the students to be in a “dramatic situation,” as stated in the lesson objectives. the instructor illustrated a dialogue as an example to the class and the expressions and emotions were indirectly portrayed through body gestures. for example, student c points a finger at student d for lying, which is naturally accompanied with an emotion of anger or confusion. this creates an opportunity for the student to act in accordance with their character and produces a sense of involvement whilst applying the vocabulary in interaction. the activity created a chance for students to interact and practice speaking french with classmates. it also allowed students to use the new vocabulary and clarify the meanings of the phrases with their peers. students also checked the meanings of the phrases in english and confirmed their understanding of the french terms in chinese. students’ notes also had chinese characters written next to the french words in order to help them remember the meanings. it was apparent the students enjoyed the activity as they often laughed and smiled. in addition, it also encouraged the students to gain a conscious understanding of the french language as opposed to remembering individual vocabulary and the pronunciation. one student during an interview claimed the dialogue helped her remember the word menteur: zarina marie krystle m. abenoja, matthew decoursey 726 writing a dialogue can help me to know more about the daily greetings and the conversation on french since the grammar is different from english also. and playing dramas can let me help me to speak the words correctly and with emotion. in my opinion, acting a drama can help to memorize the words easily like menteur! i need to act with anger and i will remember this word means liar as well. the student made a clear statement that drama, and in this case the use of a dialogue helped her remember certain vocabulary. this may be because of the emotion of anger tied to the meaning of the word ‘liar.’ another student during an interview also emphasized that the use of dialogues helped her to remember sentences: the class has learned about the pronunciation of alphabets and some simple sentences. standing up to practice was good for our voice projection. also, having dialogues with others gave us chances to repeat the sentences in context and helped us to remember those sentences easily. the usefulness of drama in language classrooms for increasing confidence has been found evident in other studies conducted by kao and o’neill (1998), miccoli (2003) and to et al. (2011). another short dialogue that was presented in lesson 4 is shown in table 6. this particular dialogue created a lot of laughter and excitement as student a was confessing his/her love for student b. students perceptions regarding learning french via drama are presented in the next section. table 6 short dialogue presented in lesson 4 french phrase english translation student a: viens ici! j’ai un secret. student b: un secret? student a: oui. je t’aime student b: tu m’aimes? student a: oui. je t’aime student b: je suis désolé(e). je ne t’aime pas. ‘come here! i have a secret.’ ‘a secret?’ ‘yes, i love you.’ ‘you love me?’ ‘yes, i love you.’ ‘i’m sorry. i don’t love you.’ 6.4. perceptions of learning french via drama activities a number of students perceived the lessons as relaxing, useful, interactive and fun. students also said that they found homework easier than their usual traditional approach to studying. in a sense studying was no longer tedious but actually “fun and entertaining.” other perceptions that arose during the interviews were “interesting,” and “motivated.” students generally had a positive perception of learning french through drama activities. in addition to the data collected from the interview, one participant also reiterated the same perceptions in her written reflection: using drama activities to teach beginner’s french to chinese students at a tertiary institution in. . . 727 i like that the learning has incorporated with drama. in a drama context, everyone plays a role by speaking a dialogue in french with emotion. i have noticed that the heightened emotion has in fact reinforces our learning process by making it more vividly memorable. whenever more feelings are involved in a conversation, memory is easier to retrieve . . . it also makes the learning takes place in a fun way and more enjoyable. the reflection strengthens the concept that drama activities are effective in helping the students remember what they have learnt because of emotions that are tied to the phrases they speak out during the lesson. another student wrote in her written reflection: “playing drama makes the learning process for grammar patterns and new words less boring compared with the traditional language lessons, which always focus students to remember all the vocabulary and grammar structure without enough practices.” in addition to practicing dialogues students also had to create their own dialogues. a student commented on the usefulness of the activity: “he asks us to write a few dialogue and then perform it and we can be very creative about the dialogue and i think that’s very interesting and it keep me motivated to learn it.” however, what is largely scarce in the literature are negative perceptions of drama. they are presented in the next subsection. 6.5. drawbacks of drama for l3 and students’ negative perceptions this section discusses the drawbacks of using drama for l3 learning and the students’ negative perceptions of this method of learning. the analysis helps to answer research question 2 in further detail. one of the drawbacks of using drama activities in the language classroom was the increased opportunity for students to communicate in chinese rather than french. a student commented: “in the french class, the students are native chinese, they always speak cantonese or english. they seldom speak french. the environment is not quite good to stimulate us to use more french.” this poses as a potential drawback as some students may prefer to use their mother tongue when the teacher is preoccupied with other students during the lesson. a possible method to alleviate negative reactions is to encourage students to only use french or english during a drama activity. complete elimination of using chinese in the classroom would probably not be a realistic situation as students are habitually used to speaking in their mother tongue. 6.5.1. individual student expectations and needs there is evidence to suggest that the use of some drama activities may not fully facilitate the achievement of individual student’s goals. one student commented: zarina marie krystle m. abenoja, matthew decoursey 728 actually i think it’s quite good to have a role-play because it give us a chance to use the french to communicate with other classmates but it little bit bored because every lesson we do the same thing. i would like to know more about the words or sentence related to daily life. for example, if i travel to french, i want to buy something, i would ask how much is it but we didn’t learn in the courses and just… just know that… we learnt a lot of words or vocabulary but i may not use it when i travel to france. each individual student had specific individual goals. student s remarked that the lessons were “a little bit boring.” this may be because the students had to repeat the same dialogue several times but with different partners. this may have become a tedious activity for some students. student s further explained that the teacher did not cover specific vocabulary that he could use if he ever travelled to france. two other students who were interviewed both mentioned that the teacher did not spend enough time talking about the french grammatical system: i think it’s good and it’s interesting but i just think that the grammar is not enough because the teacher was just using the dialogue but he didn’t teach about the grammar so if people… if the other students they want to form a sentence by themselves, i am not sure if they could do that. student w reiterates: um… i think… if you want to know more about the dialogue and the grammatical system of french and the vocabulary of french, you need to find some reference books outside the class or in the library. that will help with improvement. but if you only hear or listen to the teacher’s instructions, that may not lead to great improvement. the student responses imply that drama at times may not be able to satisfy all the individual needs of each student. since students may be used to learning grammar explicitly in traditional methods of language learning they may not be ready to learn grammar by reading the grammatical structures in the drama dialogues. in addition, the drama activities incorporated pair or group work and therefore the individual needs of each student may have not been entirely met. furthermore, explicit grammatical instructions were limited to a minimum during the lesson, which also made it difficult for students to do activities that required improvisation in french. this suggests that if language teachers decide to incorporate drama activities into their language classrooms they may need to spend some time explaining the grammatical structures of the sentences presented in the dialogues. nonetheless, it is important to remember that the students were learning a third language by using their knowledge of their second language (english). in order to resolve these drawbacks, the teacher could have dedicated some time to explaining the grammatical structures of the dialogues before practicing them. using drama activities to teach beginner’s french to chinese students at a tertiary institution in. . . 729 7. discussion 7.1. benefits of drama for l3 learning the findings will be discussed in this section in relation to the research questions. the first research question was: how do drama activities benefit students learning a third language in the language classroom? as shown by the data, the responses to the drama activities were mostly positive. students viewed the dramatic warm-ups as an enjoyable beginning to their french lessons because they were active and able to move around. the classroom layout for interaction (as shown previously in figure 2) illustrated how students could move around freely during the drama activities. this factor was also a benefit because students were able to communicate and practice the language with their peers more freely as opposed to being unable to move in a traditional classroom layout (as shown previously in figure 1). this aligns with views by other researchers in the field such as snyman and de kock (1991), who stated that drama is the negotiation of meaning in which students are actively interacting with each other. the communication between students was an important element of effective learning because this allowed students to clarify new concepts or meanings with their peers. furthermore, data gathered from individual interviews and reflective journals demonstrated that the role-plays and dialogues helped students remember french vocabulary, especially when the teacher required them to speak with emotions such as anger. in addition, results from interviews and reflective journals also indicated that correct pronunciation of french words was also easier to remember. drama provided the context for students to use the language in a way that is close to the social nature of language. this is reiterated by kao and o’neil (1998), who suggested that drama and language do share commonalities in terms of the influence of context on communication. research by miccoli (2003) also supports the view that interaction between students is more meaningful and purposeful especially when students are given characters to play. this implies that drama activities were beneficial for students because they were provided with the context to use the language authentically. the second research question was: how do students perceive drama activities as a method of learning french as a third language? the results suggest that students perceived drama activities as generally positive, as the drama activities were reported to be interesting and enjoyable. the students also liked interacting with their peers and thought that it was a good method of maintaining a level of motivation to learn french. students also perceived the drama activities as an effective method to learn because they allowed them to check their pronunciation and meaning of french vocabulary more easily with their peers zarina marie krystle m. abenoja, matthew decoursey 730 as opposed to practicing alone. this suggests that students seem to be more willing to speak french during drama activities. the findings show that the positive benefits of using drama for second language learning can also be found in learning a third language. the method of learning through drama activities generates a collaborative learning environment that sustains students’ interest and motivation to learn a third language. drama activities simulate the authentic use of the target language and enable students to use the language more proficiently and more confidently. these results concur with other studies that show that students who undergo drama-based programs have significantly higher gains in oral fluency than those who receive traditional efl instructions (galante & thomson, 2017; piazzoli, 2011). while the majority of the research suggests the positive benefits of using drama for language learning, the negative perceptions should not be ignored. one of the main negative perceptions mentioned by students was the limited instruction given towards the french grammatical system used in the drama dialogues. this suggest the need to train teachers in balancing the instructions given for drama activities and explanation of grammatical structures used in drama dialogues. 7.2. teacher expectations it is also important to note other factors that the teacher (second author) had discovered. for instance, the teacher considered the different programs and subject majors of the students. due to a range of subject majors it may be possible to develop a curriculum with a range of activities that suit the characteristics of the class. in previous semesters the teacher stated there were more students who majored in psychology and there were instances where students from certain majors did better than others. this suggests that certain drama activities may be more effective for certain types of students as it may depend on their subject major. this may be related to the english level requirements that different majors have before the student is admitted into the program. this implies that the level of english could reflect how students may perceive their experience in learning french via drama activities. the proficiency level of the students’ english and prior exposure to the french language affects their progress in learning the third language. given that english is their second language, learning french would be considered a challenge for these students. for one of their assignments for this course students were asked to write their own dialogues. at the end of the course, they managed to write their own dialogues in french and perform them in front of their teacher, which was evidence that learning a language through drama activities is possible. even with little to no experience in drama, the process of creating using drama activities to teach beginner’s french to chinese students at a tertiary institution in. . . 731 their own scripts enabled them to remember their lines because of the meanings and feelings attached to their character. although the dialogues created were short, the students learned french via the process of reading the vocabulary and writing their own dialogue. the speaking skills are also practiced when they deliver their dialogues and concurrently their listening skills. thus, all four language skills are utilized in drama in a natural manner, which helps the students remember what they have learnt. it may therefore be concluded that drama activities do benefit students learning a third language. 7.3. cultural implications for learning languages in hong kong students have an entrenched negative view of language learning due to the exam-oriented education system in hong kong. all the five participants who were interviewed stressed the need to achieve good grades in order to get into university. although choosing to take french may have only been a way of fulfilling the elective requirements, the learning environment created by the drama activities may have provided them with a fresh approach to language learning and a new motivation to continue studying french. the approach to learning a language through drama is new to many students in hong kong and this may imply the need for more language teachers in hong kong to consider alternative teaching methods and approaches to language learning. 8. conclusion in conclusion, this exploratory case study has provided insights into a promising teaching approach in examination-driven education systems. the use of drama activities has been shown to benefit students learning a third language in the language classroom because there was more interaction amongst peers as well as with the language teacher. the layout of the classroom during the drama activities enabled students to communicate and practice the language more freely as opposed to a traditional classroom layout. therefore, direct feedback and correction of pronunciation was instant. students largely perceived drama activities as relaxing, fun and interesting, which makes learning the third language more memorable. as a result, this dynamic and collaborative teaching approach prepares students for using a third language more confidently in real life interactions. however, there are possible drawbacks to using drama activities in language learning. some students stated a preference for explicitly learning french via its grammatical system. in addition, a lack of vocabulary and mastery in their second language (i.e., english) also caused hindrances in language learning as students frequently communicated in chinese rather than the target language. zarina marie krystle m. abenoja, matthew decoursey 732 this suggests potential areas for future research into understanding the importance of balancing traditional approaches such as the grammar translation method (richards & rodgers, 2014) with methods in drama education. furthermore, specialized teacher training in drama and language is an area for further exploration. this may minimize negative perceptions from students that found learning a third language through drama challenging. the drawbacks of drama found in the study imply that future research is necessary into discovering a more customized teaching approach that adheres to cultural expectations in education systems that are exam-oriented. further research in the area of drama education and learning a third language should be carried out. using drama activities to teach beginner’s french to chinese students at a tertiary institution in. . . 733 references ackroyd, j. 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(1991). problem solving and creative thinking in structured second language teaching. journal of creative behavior, 25(3), 228-40. to, l. d., chan, y. p., lam, y. k., & tsang, s. y. (2011). reflections on a primary school teacher professional development programme on learning english through process drama. research in drama education: the journal of applied theatre and performance, 16(4), 517-539. wagner, b. j. (1988). research currents: does classroom drama affect the arts of language? language arts, 65(1), 46-55. winston, j., (2012). second language learning through drama: practical techniques and applications (1st ed.). london: routledge. zarina marie krystle m. abenoja, matthew decoursey 736 appendix student reflective journals 1. why did you decide to learn french? 2. how well do these lessons suit your purpose? 3. what motivated you to learn in today’s lesson? 4. what do you want to achieve by the end of the course? 5. describe your learning experience in today’s class. 6. how is your learning experience in this course different from your experience in other language courses? 519 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (4). 2015. 519-556 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.4.2 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment lauren wyner teachers college, columbia, usa laurenwyner@tc.columbia.edu andrew d. cohen professor emeritus, university of minnesota, usa adcohen@umn.edu usa abstract the aims of this paper are to review research literature on the role that the second language (l2) and foreign language (fl) environments actually play in the development of learners’ target language (tl) pragmatic ability, and also to speculate as to the extent to which individual factors can offset the advantages that learners may have by being in the l2 context while they are learning. the paper starts by defining pragmatics and by problematizing this definition. then, attention is given to research literature dealing with the learning of pragmatics in an l2 context compared to an fl context. next, studies on the role of pragmatic transfer are considered, with subsequent attention given to the literature on the incidence of pragmatic transfer in fl as opposed to l2 contexts. finally, selected studies on the role of motivation in the development of pragmatic ability are examined. in the discussion section, a number of pedagogical suggestions are offered: the inclusion of pragmatics in teacher development, the use of authentic pragmatics materials, motivating learners to be more savvy about pragmatics, and supporting learners in accepting or challenging native-speaker norms. suggestions as to further research in the field are also offered. keywords: l2 vs. fl pragmatics; pragmalinguistics; sociopragmatics; pragmatic transfer; motivation; dct lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen 520 1. introduction this article is intended to be a think piece regarding factors in the development of target language (tl) pragmatic ability with an eye to how nonnatives (nnss) can best attain it. no effort here is made to provide a comprehensive review of literature on second language (l2) versus foreign language (fl) pragmatics since that can be found elsewhere (e.g., cohen, in press). rather, some of the more seminal works involving language transfer and motivation as regards pragmatic development are cited in an effort to better understand the factors that actually determine pragmatic ability. after defining pragmatics, the article considers the factors involved in the learning of pragmatics in an l2 context as compared to an fl context. research on the transfer of pragmatic knowledge across languages and on motivation to improve pragmatic ability are then addressed. the discussion section provides pedagogical suggestions such as that of including pragmatics in teacher development, the use of authentic pragmatics materials, motivating learners to be more savvy about pragmatics, and supporting learners in accepting or challenging native speaker (ns) norms. suggestions as to further research in the field are also offered. 2. defining pragmatics in recent decades, the goal of most l2 learning has been to become communicatively competent and to use the language necessary for a given social context (hymes, 1972). the construct of pragmatics has been recognized as an essential aspect of communicative competence (canale & swain, 1980; canale, 1983), especially as it is tied to grammatical knowledge (bachman & palmer, 1996). only recently, however, has pragmatic ability been recognized as a distinct construct worthy of research and assessment in its own right to discover implied meaning through the use of contextual, sociolinguistic, sociocultural, psychological, and rhetorical factors (purpura, 2004). attempts to define pragmatic ability require a definition of pragmatics as a whole, a task that has been difficult given the inherently fluid nature of this construct—namely, the fact that pragmatics manifests itself in context-dependent ways (grabowski, 2009). perhaps the clearest and most concise is an oft-cited definition from crystal (1985) that focuses on the interactional nature of this construct: pragmatics is the study of language from the point of view of users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction and the effects their use of language has on other participants in the act of communication. (p. 240) second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment 521 so, pragmatic ability can be defined as knowledge of how to use language to achieve goals in language interaction, or rather, competence at handling language interaction in a sociocultural context (kasper, 1997). pragmatic ability entails knowing the extent to which an utterance is acceptable and appropriate to other users of the language in conveying the speaker’s intended meaning. but here is where the definitional problems start. whose pragmatics serve as the benchmark? what pragmatics are appropriate for what has now become the typical u.s. k-12 public school classroom with english native-language (l1) instructors, where both the more traditional and the more alternative classroom environments are increasingly multiethnic? and what if the teachers are highly competent nnss of english? to what extent would their pragmatics be mainstream? and is the preservation of mainstream pragmatics (whatever that might be from an academic or sociocultural perspective) even a value worthy of promoting, in the face of pressures to promote diversity and to respect students’ wishes to express their own self-identity? there are always likely to be subcultures according to region of the usa, the age of the instructor and of the students, the socioeconomic status of those involved, and the domains of language and cultural interaction (e.g., hobbies, sports, schooling, and religion; cf. boxer, 2002). in addition, the intellectual and emotional mindset and aspirations of the individuals play a role. certain students may, for example, desire to adopt a new or different identity, perhaps because of peer pressure, or because of the frustration inherent in language learning. for example, some students who constantly compare themselves to nss or more advanced nnss may have the feeling that if only they were so-and-so, then they could perform this or the other function without problems. the concordia language villages in minnesota intensive summer courses give students the option when they design their wooden nameplate to change their name to whatever tl name they would like, partly to have this new persona be learning the language. many efl programs around the world adopt a similar system, allowing students to pick an english name for the class. this practice is not without criticism, however. when the first author worked at a private english language school in vietnam, many fellow teachers felt the adoption of english names within a classroom was more for the benefit of a teacher unschooled in the pronunciation of vietnamese tones, rather than to aid learners in adopting a tl persona. it is therefore evident that the real purposes of such practices should be relayed to the students who are meant to benefit from their adoption. in addition to variations in l1 pragmatics according to subgroup, there are the situations where l2 speakers of american english need to interact without any l1 speakers around. as english is no longer the sole property of anglophone countries (rossner, 1990), nss of british and american english are currently a lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen 522 minority compared to l2 speakers of english. whose pragmatics should be used in such situations? this is clearly an important issue for consideration. for the purpose of simplicity in this article, we will assume that we are talking about learners of the mainstream variety of the tl, and that this is the variety upon which norms for pragmatic appropriateness are based. these then are the norms relied upon in the instructional materials and popular media both for learners studying in the community where the language is spoken (i.e., l2 learners) and for learners studying outside of this community (i.e., fl learners), presumably at some distance, in another country. certain pragmatic behaviors have been further categorized in the research literature into pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic components, a distinction which may be familiar to some readers of this article and not to others. according to leech (1983) and thomas (1983), pragmalinguistics refers to the linguistic resources needed for communicative acts or speech acts (e.g., requests, apologies, compliments, and complaints) involving pragmatics, and pragmalinguistic failure may occur when interlocutors use inappropriate linguistic forms. it may seem trivial but use of a given language form may be what irks an ns. so, for example, the nns of english accidentally bumps into another holiday shopper causing the other person some physical discomfort. taking a line from the textbook, the nns says, “i’m very sorry.” the disgruntled shopper is not assuaged by the apology because she would expect at least “i’m really sorry,” if not an offer for repair since it conveys more concern. the problem is pragmalinguistic since it is a question of choosing appropriate intensifiers for expressing the apology (see cohen, olshtain, & rosenstein, 1986, p. 69). sociopragmatics, on the other hand, refers to the sociological realm of pragmatics—to appropriate social behavior in the tl community. sociopragmatic failure takes place when the language user, say, chooses to employ a speech act such as complimenting someone in a context where it is inappropriate within the given culture to do so. for example, complimenting israeli secretaries for doing a perfunctory job well is not necessarily positively received since the implication is that the other work that they do is not up to par. this is a challenging area both because what is sociopragmatically problematic is not necessarily easy for learners (and sometimes even nss) to identify. it was perceived as a sociopragmatic violation in november of 2014 when a republican staffer criticized president obama’s daughters for their dress and their expressions of boredom at a white house turkey pardoning ceremony. even the staffer’s fellow republicans felt that she was treading on dangerous ground since the children of a sitting president are considered “off limits” when it comes to criticism. the backlash from this pragmatic failure resulted in her resignation. second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment 523 in addition, the conditions of what is sociopragmatically appropriate are not static. this is not necessarily just because of normal changes in societal discourse but also due to the mode in which such communication takes place. for example, it is interesting to note that the republican staffer mentioned above chose facebook as her platform to vent. while this internet tool allows for asynchronous communication, it lacks the anonymity of other internet arenas (e.g., youtube comments), and so her diatribe and the inevitable fallout were visible to the general public in a way that previous sociopragmatic failures would not have been. thus, the consequences of sociopragmatic failure can often seem to be or become much larger than they are depending on the mode of communication used. an obvious area for sociopragmatic investigation would be taboo topics, but this can vary depending on the subgroup within a culture. for example, in a given subculture can you ask someone how much they make a month or how much their new car costs? whether or not it is acceptable could depend in part on the age of the interlocutors, the closeness of their relationship, their gender, and the context in which the question was asked. while these questions are asked all the time in the middle east, they are asked sparingly in the us as money is often a taboo topic. another example of a culturally sensitive topic is in vitro fertilization (ivf), as it may well be considered inappropriate to ask a married couple in the us whether they are trying to have a baby and whether they are using in ivf to do so. this question would be sociopragmatically acceptable, however, if asked in israel, especially since the government pays all expenses for ivf, and it is therefore part of a larger public discourse. then there are the speech acts that have to be performed indirectly if at all. for instance, public complaints are rarely used in japanese culture. performance of the speech act calls for an awareness of the sociopragmatic norms regarding its use in the given context (e.g., do you complain in a restaurant in tokyo about the soup not being hot enough?) and also the pragmalinguistic norms regarding the acceptable language structures to use if a complaint is possible in that context. it may be necessary to perform the speech act in a most obsequious, indirect manner (e.g., “i am so, so sorry to trouble you, but do you think it be possible to heat my soup up just a little more? i would be so appreciative.”). in such situations it can be crucial to have a good handle on pragmalinguistic forms because only with the proper use of them, coupled with the proper intonation, can you make a speech act such as a complaint work in a sociopragmatically delicate situation. a friend of the second author requested from two different waiters at a trendy restaurant in palo alto, ca that they turn the overly-loud music down a little so he could visit. neither request was acted upon, so it may have been seen as an unreasonable request. the waiters and the other patrons were probably quite happy with the somewhat raucous music. lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen 524 3. learning pragmatics in an l2 compared to an fl environment the consequences of pragmatic failure (both sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic) can be serious in a variety of domains, from formal international politics (e.g., translation errors that impede diplomacy) to interpersonal interaction among friends (takahashi & beebe, 1987, p. 133). if pragmatic ability is essential to successful communicative language ability, what is the effect of the environment on the development of this pragmatic ability? in particular, do levels of pragmatic ability differ between l2 and fl learners? to date, most studies have shown greater pragmatic awareness among l2 students than fl students (e.g., bardovi-harlig & dörnyei, 1998; schauer, 2006; tagashira, yamato, & isoda, 2011), thus indicating that the tl environment has a positive influence on the appropriate use of sociopragmatics. l2 learners invariably receive more pragmatic input in their daily lives if they are motivated to interact with the tl community and have positive social interactions. the classroom also provides a setting for learning about pragmatics to the extent that teachers usually model and demonstrate how to perform tasks in a pragmatically appropriate way. in addition, questions about language use in context naturally arise in a safe l2 classroom environment when students bring in their outside experiences, for example, and ask why something happened to them in a particular way when communicating with an ns, or if a word or phrase could be used to convey alternative meanings. some studies have yielded findings that not only challenge previous research but defy the common sense assumption that living in the tl environment with exposure to authentic input would better help pragmatic ability develop in l2 learners than in their fl peers (e.g., niezgoda & röver, 2001; taguchi, 2008). these studies shed light on the notion of individual differences in motivation and in the willingness to use pragmatic transfer, both positive and possibly negative—individual differences which can result in successful learning of pragmatics despite the fact that the learning is taking place in an fl rather than in an l2 context (schumann, 1986). these conflicting research results may also suggest that in the hybrid world that is rapidly unfolding in front of us, the l2-fl distinction may be overly simplistic. is it not the case that some l2 students lack the pragmatic awareness that they presumably were to have acquired from being in that tl setting? and could it not be the case that fl learners do, in fact, acquire pragmatic awareness without having direct contact with l2 contexts? the goal of this article is to investigate the role that the l2 and fl environments actually play in l2 learners’ pragmatic ability and whether individual differences can have a more effective influence than the constraints of the language learning environment itself. first, the effect of the environment on developing pragmatic ability second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment 525 will be addressed with regards to the role of pragmatic transfer. the effect of motivation on pragmatic knowledge will then be discussed, followed by a discussion of the findings and methodological issues in measuring pragmatic ability in l2 and fl settings. finally, recommendations for future research as well as important sociological considerations with regards to ns norms will be addressed. a caveat for the descriptions of research in this paper has to do with study abroad context. not all abroad situations are equal. we need to be cautious about generalizing from the experiences of irish students in an abroad program in germany to that of u.s. students in spain, israel, or jordan. there are most likely going to be major differences. 4. the role of pragmatic transfer one factor which is both a positive and a negative force in the development of pragmatic ability in an l2 is pragmatic transfer, the “influence of the learners’ knowledge of other languages and cultures on their pragmatic use and development on the use of the l2” (ishihara & cohen, 2014, pp. 78-79). there are cases where some sociopragmatic behavior is more or less universal (ochs, 1996), such as conveying condolences to someone on the loss of a loved one. the pragmalinguistics may vary—that is, how the condolence is conveyed, both verbally and nonverbally—but usually the speech act is performed. the qualifier usually is added since, for example, when sitting shiva as a way to mourn with the family of a deceased at their home in israel, while words of condolence may be appreciated, it is not necessary to say anything. the second author found from personal experience that being present was enough of a (nonverbal) statement. then there are numerous instances where sociopragmatic behavior transfers nicely between two or more language and cultural communities. this would be an instance of positive transfer from the l1 (kasper, 1997). this may just be the result of commonality across the two groups, such as in the example of a request that a friend babysit in the usa or in israel. the two societies clearly share numerous pragmatic commonalities, while they differ strikingly in other areas. in this instance of babysitting, such a request to arrange for a babysitter would likely still be seen in japan as shockingly countercultural in numerous families since some family members (say, a grandparent) would most likely be expected to provide the child care. there are also those sociopragmatic instances that are associated with one language and culture more than with another. for example, in japanese culture, it may be totally inappropriate to compliment professors by saying that they gave a good talk since who are you to evaluate the quality of their talk?1 1 refer to http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/japanese/compliments/feedbackex1.htm for a summary of compliments to a professor in japanese and for references as to the sources. lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen 526 performing this type of compliment (instead of “i got a lot from your talk”) would be an example of negative transfer from u.s. culture where professors would be pleased to get such a compliment. depending on the particular professors, they could either be annoyed, amused, or dismiss the behavior since after all it was performed by a naïve gaijin (‘westerner’), since the popular press in japan makes it clear that westerners are treated differently from locals.2 the tricky thing about positive and negative transfer is that it is not a given that differences between two languages and cultures in the area of pragmatics will lead to difficulty. it depends on numerous factors. the nnss may have been explicitly taught the pragmatics and consequently are mindful of the differences. likewise, while they may not have been taught the differences, they may have somehow figured them out for themselves, whether through the use of media or by way of extreme motivation. there can be other reasons as well for why the nnss’ pragmatic behavior does not infringe upon ns norms. in addition, the specific pragmatic behavior may infringe upon local norms, but the nss allow a wide margin of pragmatic inappropriateness given that the behavior is generated by an nns. on the other hand, there are the numerous cases where violations of the norm are both noticed and negatively received, resulting in pragmatic failure. in those cases, it is then a matter of what the ns response will be—whether to dismiss the behavior as understandable and trivial, or irksome, annoying, and a cause for social friction. the main issue in such cases is that the nss do not necessarily share their annoyance with the nnss. 5. the incidence of pragmatic transfer in fl situations as compared to l2 situations one of the earliest investigations into the differences in pragmatic awareness between esl and efl populations was takahashi and beebe’s (1987) qualitative study with japanese l2 learners of english. the researchers sought to find evidence of pragmatic transfer while investigating the effects of l2 proficiency levels and environments. the researchers analyzed the written refusals of japanese esl and efl learners, compared to japanese and american nss’ respective refusals. all of the participants completed a discourse completion task (dct) where participants had to insert a refusal to interlocutors of different statuses in the following categories: requests, invitations, offers, and suggestions.3 after examining the typical order of formulas for japanese nss and american english nss, takahashi and beebe (1987) compared the refusal data of the 2 see, for example, http://www.japantoday.com/category/lifestyle/view/5-reasons-foreigners-find-it-hard-to-become-friends-with-japanese-people 3 comments will be made in the limitations section below as to possible drawbacks associated with dct data. second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment 527 esl and efl participants, finding evidence of pragmatic transfer in both the esl and efl contexts, as well as at both proficiency levels. in particular, there was more evidence of pragmatic transfer in the efl context than in the esl context, despite the efl learners’ higher average proficiency. the tendency toward pragmatic transfer was explained by the fact that the efl learners had fewer opportunities for authentic input, causing them to rely more heavily on their l1. alternatively, the esl respondents’ greater directness in their refusals (which was more tl-like) was seen as a function of their lower proficiency and lack of knowledge of less direct and more complicated expressions. nonetheless, the efl learners appeared to have less pragmatic ability than their esl peers because they used their more advanced l2 skills to convey l1 expressions and sentiments. while this study has historical value since it was seminal at the time, it was conducted almost thirty years ago. the hybrid, globalized world we are now in might mean that japanese efl students are receiving more esl-like exposure, given access to the internet and to u.s. sitcoms. another study of negative transfer in the performance of refusals was conducted with nine esl learners (yamagashira, 2001). a dct and a follow-up interview were used to study how participants reacted to refusals and to determine whether pragmatic transfer occurred when japanese speakers refused in english, whether time spent in the tl community affected pragmatic transfer, and whether explicit metapragmatic instruction had an effect as well. as in the takahashi and beebe (1987) study, lower proficiency participants tended to transfer more often than their higher proficiency peers. however, results also indicated that increased time spent in the tl environment caused participants to respond in a more tl-like fashion, thus indicating that the length of exposure in the environment had an effect on transfer. in addition, explicit instruction in pragmatics—whether in the formal classroom setting or through interactions with nss where attention was directed to pragmatic norms and their violation—allowed participants who took advantage of such instruction to become more pragmatically competent. since most study abroad research uses a single semester as the time frame, a study involving two semesters such as the one by barron (2003) added the dimension of a prolonged stay in the tl community to the development of l2 pragmatic ability. the researcher focused on a group of 33 advanced irish l2 learners of german over a 10-month study abroad period in germany. she performed a quantitative analysis in the form of production questionnaires administered before and after the study abroad experience, as well as a qualitative analysis focusing on retrospective interviews. data were elicited three times over the year abroad and comparison was made to responses from 34 german nss. the study showed that exposure to l2 input helped many participants achieve more tl-like pragmatic ability. the irish learners’ increased use of pragmatic routines lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen 528 indicated an increase in fluency, efficiency in communication, and an increased potential for gaining membership into the l2 speech community. the ns norm, however, was rarely reached. data revealed that many of the learners “associate(d) language use with an individual’s personality and identity rather than with the foreign language itself” (barron, 2003, p. 349). given that the participants reportedly felt secure in their own personalities, they did not see any reason to change their l1 language use patterns as they transferred (either consciously or not) their l1 sentiments into the l2. therefore, pragmatic transfer had a mostly negative effect on these participants, who, in addition, may not have taken full advantage of the study abroad experience by not establishing deep relationships with nss (schmidt, 1993), thus failing to either notice or be motivated to change their speech behavior. like barron (2003), shimizu (2009) chose to study the development of l2 pragmatic ability in a language other than english. he investigated compliment responses produced by learners of japanese as an fl (jfl) and as an l2 (jsl) when administered an oral dct. he opted for the oral version of the dct because he felt that it generated more natural and spontaneous speech production than written dcts. the oral dcts were analyzed for compliment response strategies, patterns of semantic formulas, and lexical/phrasal characteristics to determine adherence to japanese pragmatic norms. he found that although jsl and jfl participants differed from japanese nss in their use of positive and negative strategies, the jsl group used responses that were more tl-like. only the jsl participants used tllike avoidance strategies, and they used more pragmatically appropriate and tllike avoidances in compliment responses, while jfl learners at three different proficiency levels favored the strategy of denying the compliment. interestingly, shimizu (2009) found that unlike in takahashi and beebe’s (1987) japanese esl and efl data, his jsl and jfl responses differed significantly from the american nss responses, thus implying that l1 transfer alone does not account for the divergences in japanese. instead, he implied that it was the effect of instruction and instructional materials that could account for the emphasis on denial strategies (see ishihara & cohen, 2014, pp. 84-85). the researcher contended that the teachers and textbooks encouraged learners to overuse the response strategy of denial, consistent with the modesty maxim in japanese culture (shimizu, 2009, p. 182). follow-up participant interviews confirmed his assumption that it was more the influence of the textbooks that led to the overuse of the denial strategy than simply transfer from l1 sociocultural norms, though this influence would certainly give the learners a predisposition to favor modesty. importantly, it is possible that the jsl learners’ interactions with nss gave them opportunities to modify the knowledge gained from textbooks. in line with both the interaction hypothesis (long, 1996) and the noticing hypothesis second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment 529 (schmidt, 1993), the jsl participants noticed that japanese nss used the strategies of either agreeing with the compliment or avoiding comment about it more frequently than had been taught in jsl classes. this finding would speak in favor of having teachers use more authentic, real life examples of language use and not rely on textbooks to provide accurate pragmatic instruction, given that textbooks often include gross oversimplifications in terms of pragmatic instruction (ishihara & cohen, 2014; vellenga, 2004). shimizu added that this conclusion would be especially relevant to efl learners who have “little opportunity to engage in authentic interaction and revise their hypothesis about the target pragmatic norms formed through transfer of training” (p. 187). the finding that the context had a definite but complex role to play in the acquisition of pragmatic ability led taguchi (2008) to investigate whether there were differences in the development of speedy and accurate comprehension of implied speaker intentions between learners in esl versus efl contexts. her study included 60 japanese efl learners in japan and 57 esl learners in the usa, all enrolled in college and between the ages of 18-28. importantly, three of the efl students had 9-11 months prior residency in a tl country, thus making them unique in comparison to the efl participants in previous comparison studies. nonetheless, both participant groups had beginning level proficiency based on toefl scores obtained at the start of the study, thereby eliminating proficiency as a factor. the researcher administered a computerized listening task that measured the ability to comprehend indirect refusals (e.g., providing an excuse for not honoring a request without explicitly rejecting the request) and indirect opinions (e.g., expressing a negative opinion of a movie by saying, “i’m glad the movie is over.”), and analyzed the results for speed and accuracy to provide a developmental account of pragmatic comprehension. the task was administered to each group twice, before and after approximately 120-130 hours of classroom instruction. results indicated that the efl learners made many more gains in accuracy than speed, while the esl learners greatly improved their speed, but only minimally improved their accuracy. in particular, the efl group made significantly greater improvement than the esl group in the accurate comprehension of indirect refusals, but not indirect opinions. taguchi provided two interpretations for the efl-group findings: the first was that refusals tend to be learned before the giving of opinions, and the second was that it might have been an instance of pragmatic transfer. both japanese and english share certain patterns for making refusals (e.g., providing a reason for refusing an invitation), but not for stating indirect opinions. based on the efl learners’ wide gains over their esl peers in the realm of indirect refusals, it seems that pragmatic transfer had more of an effect on the development of pragmatic ability than context in this instance. as taguchi put lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen 530 it, “[t]he actual environment of learning may thus be of secondary importance as long as it affords sufficient instruction and practice to promote general listening skills” (taguchi, 2008, p. 443). taguchi speculated that it may not have been the context (esl vs. efl) that had an effect on pragmatic competence in this study, but rather what she referred to as “depth of interaction” that led either to the development of pragmatic ability or to an awareness of the importance and relevancy of transfer. consequently, taguchi argued that length of residency alone was not necessarily a deciding factor in the development of pragmatic ability. in addition, as there were greater pragmatic gains among the efl participants, it is important to note that these students were studying in an english immersion program in japan, a rather unique efl scenario. these particular efl students expressly chose their institution because of their strong motivation to study english at an advanced level. the results of these studies that investigate the effect of transfer on pragmatic ability demonstrate that failure to acquire l2 pragmatic ability cannot be fully accounted for by proficiency or by length of stay alone. while the studies reviewed in this section tended to support the view that l1 transfer plays a significant role in tl pragmatic performance, especially for fl learners, it leaves the door open to the view that interactions both in class and beyond can offset this pattern and may provide clues to the nature of how pragmatic ability actually develops. the next section will focus directly on the role of motivation in developing pragmatic ability in l2 and fl contexts. 6. the role of motivation in the development of pragmatic ability l2 classroom evidence attests to the fact that motivation is a key factor in successfully learning a language (brown, 2001). it is no surprise then that many studies in the last few decades have focused on the relationship between l2 language learning contexts and motivation, with special attention to pragmatic ability. bardovi-harlig and dörnyei’s (1998) seminal study showed the advantage of the esl over the efl environment in attaining pragmatic ability, particularly in terms of the motivation that positive experiences in the tl community gave to the esl learners. their two participant samples contained a total of 708 participants. the primary sample consisted of 173 mixed proficiency esl students in the usa and 370 efl students in hungary. in addition, 28 ns esl teachers and 25 hungarian efl teachers participated in the study. the second sample consisted of 112 italian efl teachers. the authors developed a video with contextualized grammatical and pragmatic judgment tasks to measure sentences that were pragmatically appropriate but ungrammatical, sentences that were grammatical but pragmatically inappropriate, and sentences that were both grammatical and pragmatically appropriate. the speech acts included were apologies, second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment 531 refusals, requests, and suggestions. participants also completed a questionnaire on their language learning background and proficiency. in terms of the findings, both the efl learners and their teachers identified and ranked grammatical errors as more serious than pragmatic errors, while esl learners and their teachers did the opposite, ranking pragmatic errors as more serious. the hungarian and italian efl students both rated the grammatical errors significantly higher than the pragmatic ones, and as the two groups had different language backgrounds but were both in an efl environment, their ratings were attributed to their environment. one reason for the difference in reaction between the esl learners and the efl learners both in hungary and italy may be the nature of efl tests, which often focus on form rather than communicative ability (hudson, detmer, & brown, 1992). nonetheless, the bardoviharlig and dörnyei (1998) study provided evidence that esl and efl learners differ in the development of pragmatic knowledge. one obvious factor is proficiency, as a learner with limited grammatical knowledge would not have the resources to select alternative utterances. on the other hand, even with a sufficient command of l2 grammatical and lexical knowledge, adult fl learners often are incapable of producing pragmatically appropriate language (koike, 1989). put humorously some years ago by takahashi and beebe (1987), they alluded to the dangers of having high proficiency without pragmatic ability: “. . . their fluency gave them ‘the rope to hang themselves with’ – i.e., the control over english vocabulary to express japanese sentiments” (p. 151). another issue raised by bardovi-harlig and dörnyei (1998) is residency, as the length of stay in an english speaking country has been seen in numerous cases to have at least some impact on the perception of pragmatic appropriateness. the authors found that the longer an esl student lived in the usa, the higher their awareness of pragmatic errors. this finding was interpreted as a function of time spent outside of the classroom in english speaking contexts interacting in the tl, as well as the result of more hours spent in the classroom with ns teachers of the tl and having to deal with administrative tasks for successful residency in the tl community. most importantly, bardovi-harlig and dörnyei’s (1998) results underscored schmidt’s (1993) noticing hypothesis that in addition to salient input, the motivational factor of wanting to establish relationships seemed to lead to pragmatic awareness. according to schmidt, “those who are concerned with establishing relationships with the tl speakers are more likely to pay close attention to the pragmatic aspects of input and to struggle to understand than those who are not so motivated” (p. 36). a replication of the bardovi-harlig and dörnyei’s (1998) esl-efl comparison study was conducted with esl learners in hawaii and efl learners in the lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen 532 czech republic (niezgoda & röver, 2001). specifically, the authors wanted to test bardovi-harlig and dörnyei’s results by discovering if the handicapping effects of the efl were context-inevitable, or if a group of particularly advanced students could “overcome” these effects (niezgoda & röver, 2001, p. 63). the esl participants comprised 48 l2 learners of various proficiency levels studying english at a private language school in hawaii. participants came from six different countries and had been living in the usa for an average of 4.7 months, close to the 5.3 months’ residence average for bardovi-harlig and dörnyei’s esl participants. the 124 czech efl learners, however, represented a particularly advanced group of students studying to become english teachers who all received 14-20 hours of monolingual english instruction weekly for the duration of their 5-year program, providing them with a more esl-like input environment than in the traditional efl scenario. using bardovi-harlig and dörnyei’s (1998) video instrument and questionnaire, niezgoda and röver (2001) reached contradictory results as compared to the original study. the efl participants in this second study recognized more pragmatic errors than the esl learners and rated those errors as more severe than their esl counterparts. in addition, the low proficiency learners in both esl and efl environments recognized more pragmatic than grammatical errors and rated the pragmatic infelicities as more severe than the grammatical ones. niezgoda and röver did, however, observe one important similarity when compared to bardovi-harlig and dörnyei’s original results: the esl participants also rated pragmatic errors as more severe than grammatical errors. based on their results, niezgoda and röver (2001) concluded that environment “may not be the most important factor accounting for learner’s pragmatic awareness” (p. 76), given that pragmatic ability was acquired in their czech efl setting. furthermore, they asserted that their findings could be attributed to “an interaction between exposure to grammatical and pragmatic input and individual learner characteristics, specifically the degree to which learners actively attend to input” (p. 77). the authors pointed out that the czech efl students, as future english teachers in training, were highly motivated to gain pragmatic awareness, and they speculated that this motivation may have accounted for their increased sensitivity to pragmatic errors. that same year, another pragmatics study appeared that used different degrees of input enhancement to determine japanese efl learners’ development of the ability to make requests (takahashi, 2001). while there were four different treatment groups, only one received metapragmatic instruction. all groups completed preand posttest dcts, engaged in communicative practice, supplied written retrospectives, and responded to follow-up questionnaires measuring motivation. the group receiving metapragmatic instruction outperformed all others in second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment 533 the development of pragmatic ability. the self-reports, however, revealed that the more motivated learners noticed and readily adopted tl norms, thereby gaining confidence in their accuracy, while less motivated learners were more resistant to abiding by these norms. the lack of motivation then caused the input enhancements themselves to be less effective teaching tools in the development of pragmatic ability. takahashi’s findings thus took niezgoda and röver’s (2001) belief that motivation had a crucial role to play in directing learner attention to pragmatic input one step further by suggesting that motivation was perhaps the most significant variable in directing learner attention to tl cultural perspectives. in addition, her study revealed the potentially positive value of explicit metapragmatic instruction. takahashi (2005) went on in a subsequent study to corroborate these findings. a group of japanese college students first completed a motivation questionnaire and a proficiency test. they then took part in a noticing-the-gap activity as the treatment task. the degree of the learners’ awareness of the target pragmalinguistic features was assessed through a retrospective awareness questionnaire administered immediately after the treatment. the results indicated that the learners differentially noticed the target pragmalinguistic features and that the learners’ awareness of the target features was correlated with motivation subscales but not with their proficiency. in particular, the learners’ intrinsic motivation was found to be closely related to their pragmatic awareness. in another replication of bardovi-harlig and dörnyei’s (1998) efl versus esl study, schauer (2006) allowed participants to correct errors in post hoc interviews, thereby providing a link between pragmatic awareness and pragmatic production, or proof of ability. she used bardovi-harlig and dörnyei’s videotape instrument and questionnaire, and, unlike bardovi-harlig and dörnyei or niezgoda and röver’s (2001) replication, she conducted original post hoc interviews. there were 53 university participants in total: 16 german esl students studying in the uk, 17 german efl students studying in germany to become interpreters and translators—none of whom had ever lived in an english speaking country, and 20 british nss. however, unlike bardovi-harlig and dörnyei’s study yet similar to that of niezgoda and röver, the efl students received much more classroom-based input because of their accelerated language program. thus, schauer sought to determine if mixed proficiency esl students exhibited more pragmatic awareness than their advanced efl counterparts. schauer’s (2006) interview component was an important addition because it allowed her to discover whether the participants had selected a true error or a “false error” (p. 272), as well as to shed light on their decision-making process and their experiences interacting with nss. these interviews were recorded in the participants’ l1 and were later translated. her data, as further corroborated lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen 534 by qualitative interviews, confirmed bardovi-harlig and dörnyei’s (1998) original findings and did not support niezgoda and röver’s (2001) opposite results, as the efl participants were less aware of pragmatic errors than their esl counterparts, and efl students perceived grammatical errors to be more salient than did the esl students. schauer found the efl results disturbing because “it means that individuals who are studying to explicitly help people to be effective in intercultural communication are less aware of one of the central building blocks of successful communication – pragmatic rules and regulations” (p. 307), echoing takahashi and beebe’s (1987) fears about the severity of pragmatic failure. lastly and most importantly, the length of residency in the uk had a positive impact on pragmatic awareness for the esl students because of exposure to authentic input, as indicated by bardovi-harlig and dörnyei (1998). schauer (2006) found that her participants’ pragmatic awareness continued to improve during their time in the tl community, particularly because they had rich opportunities to observe everyday ns interactions and become aware of their own output, thus allowing them to modify their language. motivation not only to become aware of their language use, but also to try to adapt it to the tl norm appeared in this study to contribute to her esl participants’ development of more tl-like pragmatic ability. a study that was primarily looking at sociolinguistic variation in french among study abroad students to france also produced results that bore on the issue of motivation (kinginger, 2008). the researcher studied 24 american learners of french over the course of one semester and assessed gains through a preand postsemester interview that attempted to measure learner knowledge of address forms, colloquialisms, and other speech acts (e.g., leave-taking expressions). while the tl context allowed all participants to gain significant pragmatic knowledge, qualitative data revealed that the learners who were most motivated to interact in the tl and with nss made the most gains. interestingly, while access to nss and therefore the theoretical potential to establish relationships was available to all participants, those who were lucky enough to have engaging host families, for example, developed much more pragmatic knowledge than their peers who were not so lucky and maintained their closest home relationships with friends and family over the internet. while positive interactions with nss are surely a motivating factor to engage in more interactions, kinginger’s findings are important in that they reveal the potential to “become discouraged” (p. 608) and not to take full advantage of the study abroad context as a constant learning environment in which to develop ns-like pragmatic ability. yet another study taking as its departure point the work by bardovi-harlig and dörnyei (1998) focused its attention solely on the relationship between motivation and pragmatic awareness among japanese efl learners (tagashira et al., second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment 535 2011). this study set out to take a close look at just how motivation related to pragmatic development. the large participant group was comprised of 162 japanese university efl learners who were all at an intermediate proficiency level in english. participants completed a questionnaire that helped to group them according to four motivational levels: · moderate motivation (e.g., such as the average efl student might have), · self-determined (e.g., intrinsic) motivation, · lack of motivation (e.g., when learners are simply fulfilling a course requirement), · externally regulated motivation (e.g., extrinsic motivation, such as when motivation is more for a grade than for acquisition of knowledge). the researchers also used bardovi-harlig and dörnyei’s (1998) original questionnaire, although, for practical purposes, they did not employ bardoviharlig and dörnyei’s video format and instead converted it into a written questionnaire. in addition, they changed part of the original answer sheet to separate items for pragmatic and grammatical appropriateness to overcome the vagueness that schauer (2006) reasoned might account for a “false error” (p. 272). the results showed that motivation accounted for differences in recognition of pragmatic errors, but not grammatical errors. additionally, the self-determined or more intrinsically motivated learners showed the keenest perception of appropriateness of the utterances once they had decided an error was present (tagashira et al., 2011, p. 19). while it is not exactly clear how motivation has an effect on learners, the researchers believe that it may be motivation’s effect on “selective attention,” as more motivated learners “will value pragmatic aspects of language use, and they will be inclined to detect the stimuli containing pragmatic information and utilize this information for more elaborate analysis” (tagashira et al., 2011, p. 20). their study thus confirms previous assumptions (niezgoda & röver, 2001; takahashi, 2001) of the effects of motivation on pragmatic awareness. another study of pragmatic development and its relationship to motivation was conducted by taguchi (2011), who looked at requests and opinions in a study abroad context. the participants were 48 japanese efl students in an english immersion program who were tested on their ability to produce requests and opinions three times over an academic year using a computerized oral dct. a subset of 12 participants also provided qualitative analyses in their l1 three times during the second semester. the qualitative data revealed that variation in the quantitative results was closely linked to the students’ motivation to interact in the tl. as all participants were part of the immersion program with ample access to tl input, every participant made some gains in pragmatic ability. however, in line with schmidt’s (1993) reasoning on the importance of developing lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen 536 relationships in the tl, it was the participants who actively sought tl contact and experiences (e.g., through email with ns teachers who provided explicit feedback) who saw the most consistent quantitative gains. a more recent study sought to determine if familiarity with the cultural features of the tl environment and an interest in learning those features were the main factors in determining how well learners understand the pragmatics of the given culture (rafieyan, majid, & eng, 2013). the researchers collected data through a likert scale attitude questionnaire and two pragmatic comprehension tests adapted from taguchi (2008)—a pretest and a posttest after 48 hours of instruction that included authentic videos. the subjects were 32 intermediate level learners from seven countries at a language academy in malaysia. results indicated that a positive attitude toward learning the tl culture led to better understanding of pragmatics. there was a strong statistical correlation between interest/motivation in learning about the tl culture and success on the pragmatic comprehension tasks. the l2 learners who had a “neutral” attitude toward learning about the tl culture scored in the middle range of the implicature tasks, while those who expressed positive or highly positive attitudes performed much better. interestingly, the majority of the l2 learners agreed or strongly agreed that some cultural components should be part of every language class, and they felt encouraged to take classes in american culture. these findings suggest that not only should learners be exposed to positive features of the tl culture, but that those features should also be included in language textbooks, which are often the only direct access efl learners have to the mainstream tl culture. this section has demonstrated the pervasive nature of motivation with regard to pragmatic development among both fl and l2 learners of a tl. this and other critical issues will now be synthesized in a discussion of the above studies that also addresses limitations of the research. 7. discussion 7.1. a summary of the issues kasper (1996) describes three conditions to attain pragmatic knowledge: “there must be pertinent input, the input has to be noticed, and learners need ample opportunity to develop a high level of control” (p. 148). the studies reviewed in this paper demonstrate that input alone is insufficient for the development of pragmatic ability. rather, learners must notice how the pragmalinguistic forms are used, an activity that is easier to engage in when learners are living and functioning in an l2 rather than an fl context. however, while most studies indicate that length of stay in the tl environment has a greater effect on pragmatic ability second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment 537 than proficiency, a rigorous analysis of research results suggests that individual factors—such as learner willingness to engage in positive pragmatic transfer from the l1 and strong motivation to learn the tl—can offset the handicap from being in an fl context. a purpose for this in-depth analysis of the l2 as opposed to the fl environment was to gain insights as to why learners in one or another context are more savvy about tl pragmatics. one obvious factor is the access to authentic input, and, in principle, it is greater in an l2 environment, but not necessarily. so if an fl learner has greater intensity of interaction with nss, whether live or over the internet, this can lead to the kind of noticing that results in pragmatic awareness. the temporal factor of an extended stay in the tl community is an insufficient variable in developing pragmatic competence (bardovi-harlig, 1996; taguchi, 2008). instead, it creates more opportunities for relationships with nss to develop, thus making more salient the pragmatic aspects of the tl language. the first author found when living in vietnam that primarily only the male efl teachers who wanted to date vietnamese women made an effort to fully learn the language. nearly everyone else, even those who wished to form deep friendships, just coasted by. the second author saw in israel that numerous efl teachers who had lived there for many years mostly tended to interact with other english speakers and did not develop good hebrew skills. when the first author was a student at the university of cape town, she remembers a dean addressing all the international students at orientation and explicitly recommending that they fall in love with a south african to actually be able to experience the culture firsthand and come to recognize the values and pragmatic norms of the culture. she wondered whether in an american context an administrator would ever say such a thing. these examples, then, underscore how the establishment of personal relationships can both heighten pragmatic awareness and potentially lead to increased language ability. a second major determiner of pragmatic development was seen to be the motivation to learn the tl and keen interest in its mainstream culture(s). high motivation was shown to help a learner to overcome the obstacle of being in an efl environment with scarce opportunities for authentic tl interaction (niezgoda and röver, 2001; rafieyan et al., 2013; tagashira et al., 2011; taguchi, 2011; takahashi, 2001). a third major determiner of pragmatic development was seen to be either positive or negative transfer from the l1 language and culture (barron, 2003; takahashi & beebe, 1987; yamagashira, 2001). so, the learner can successfully carry over patterns that also work in the tl and culture (taguchi, 2008), or use patterns that are inappropriate for the tl situation. sometimes, what presents itself as negative transfer is the willful use of material that is counter to the norm lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen 538 because the learner is exercising agency and resisting the ns norms out of an effort to maintain his/her own l1 identity. another possible detractor to tl pragmatic development is the transfer of classroom instruction or course materials to the tl situation, usually involving some overgeneralization/overuse of a given form. especially in fl learning situations, learners are likely to have less of an opportunity to notice their overgeneralizations because of their limited interaction in the tl environment (shimizu, 2009). in addition, when the majority of interaction takes place over the internet, learners can never be certain that their interlocutor is actually an ns, despite what s/he may say or write. the second author can think of an example from his classroom learning of japanese where he learned that ano was the pause filler to use with persons of higher status and eto was the form to use for filling pauses when in discussion with those of equal or lower status. he used both extensively, especially the latter, until an ns informed him that he was filling his pauses too much—that nss did so far less. neither the textbook nor the teacher had warned him of this possibility. 7.2. limitations in the studies reviewed the studies cited above contained various methodological shortcomings, more with regard to the issue of the l2-fl contrast than to that of motivation. in some of the studies one could question the comparability of the l2 and fl learners as to their backgrounds, l1, gender, proficiency level, number of classroom hours, institutional goals, pedagogical approaches, teacher training, and the students’ familiarity with the pragmatics tasks that they were asked to perform. in some studies the designated proficiency levels were probably only a gross, rather inaccurate measure of the actual performance levels of the learners, depending on how these levels were determined. one factor that can blur the line between the l2/fl distinction is the case of the fl learners who have studied abroad for varying lengths of time and have returned home. as observed in a study on l2 spanish refusals (félix-brasdefer, 2004), the perceptions about tl norms and social status may be the products of observations after they have returned home and have had the opportunity to compare and reflect. with regard to the relationship between grammar and pragmatic ability, perhaps it is circular, but if grammatical proficiency is a major determiner in proficiency level, then it has already been demonstrated over the years that grammatical ability does not directly equate to pragmatic ability, as research on speech acts in efl settings has indicated (bouton, 1988; boxer & pickering, 1995; kasper, 1997; kasper & rose, 2002; yamagashira, 2001). even grammatically proficient or advanced learners are likely to encounter pragmatic failure. we have seen that the fl learners are prime targets for this because they may have second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment 539 learned their grammar rules very well in class but may not have had ample opportunity to try out their language performance in high-stakes pragmatic situations. but even l2 learners can get the grammar right and the pragmatics wrong. one possibility is that just as grammar errors may fossilize, so might inappropriate pragmatic choices. l2 learners may not have been corrected on their error, the correction may not have taken, or they may have been given an insufficient correction from an inexperienced teacher. the result is a pragmatic fossilization, especially with respect to pragmalinguistics. so, for example, the learner says, “i’m very sorry” after smashing into someone at the grocery store—a situation in which a u.s. l1 speaker would say, “i’m really (awfully, terribly, so) sorry.” another methodological limitation of these studies concerns the structure of the research task itself. written dcts often assess pragmatic comprehension or awareness, while oral dcts assess pragmatic production. some studies indicated that higher pragmatic awareness did not correspond directly with production (bardovi-harlig & dörnyei, 1998; taguchi, 2008). importantly, awareness and ability are often conflated in the studies, even though the former is a necessary condition for the latter. much of the research does not address this issue. nor is it clear from these studies if comprehension and production occur simultaneously or if there is even a directional or linear relationship between the two worth researching. while both comprehension and production tasks assess pragmatic knowledge, a direct comparison cannot therefore be made so easily between the responses elicited through the two kinds of measures. the relationship between pragmatic awareness and production among l2 learners has thus not been addressed in these studies. there is the further problem that written answers often serve as an indirect, projected measure of oral production, disregarding the relatively common variation across language skills, as well as the potential for writing fatigue or, worse, that the respondents perceive the tasks as a form of test-taking. over the years the dct format has been utilized by many researchers because of its relative ease of construction, the ease with which it can be administered to large samples at the same time, and the relative ease with which the results can be analyzed and compared to those of others using the same or similar dct situations. in addition, if researchers just want a rough sense of whether respondents have familiarity with, say, an idealized speech act interaction in terms of what is basic to the interaction, then the dct fulfills expectations. yet dcts have also been criticized for not being sufficiently authentic. the written format gives participants extra time to plan what they would like to say, rather than what they would actually do in an online scenario (takahashi & beebe, 1987; yamagashira, 2001). while this may relate more directly to the types of pragmatic interaction that occur through asynchronous communicative activities lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen 540 such as email, face-to-face aspects of pragmatic knowledge that can be decoded through gesture, discourse, and sequential features are lost (taguchi, 2008, p. 445). furthermore, dcts employ traditional writing formats that do not include the intonation and tone markers (e.g., capital letters, excessive exclamation points, vowel repetitions) that have evolved in internet-based communication to link it to more mainstream oral behavior. in addition, whereas multiple-choice tasks and dcts could measure the effect of input and receptive knowledge, it is likely that only role plays and other forms of language production can actually measure those aspects of pragmatic knowledge that come to the fore when learners are called upon to perform their knowledge (grabowski, 2009; tsutagawa, 2012). needless to say, even oral role plays are not necessarily problem free. in oral dcts or post hoc interviews, for instance, participants may still provide what they believe is expected of them (shimizu, 2009; taguchi, 2011), rather than behaving as they normally would if they were not having their pragmatic performance measured and assessed by an external researcher. in addition, the acting ability of the individual may come into play, as well as any emotional issues tied to one’s performance history. ultimately, some tasks really would benefit from the kinds of instructions and stage directions that accompany scripts for plays, namely, just how the given speech act or other pragmatic material is to be delivered (e.g., lovingly, happily, angrily, happily, teasingly, cynically, or sarcastically). another problem with perhaps any elicited measure of pragmatic ability is that of agency. respondents may deliberately choose to avoid approximating ns norms (ishihara & cohen, 2014). as noted in the studies where l2 learners used the l2 to express l1 sentiments (barron, 2003; takahashi & beebe, 1987), the refusal to give up aspects of one’s linguistic identity may make an l2 learner appear less pragmatically competent than may objectively be true. any study that compares l2 speakers to nss assumes that the l2 speakers wish to emulate their ns peers, and that this is the group whose pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic choices they should adopt. l2 learners, however, may deliberately diverge from the norm so as not to identify with the l2 community and instead retain their l1 identity (ishihara & cohen, 2014, p. 86). studies situated in a controlled research scenario that lacks the authenticity of online, real-world interaction often ignore the conflicting concepts of respondents’ differential willingness to adhere to another group’s norms (e.g., adopting slang). on the other hand, there is the real possibility that the ns interlocutors may hold negative views of the learners’ l2 pragmatic ability. for example, janicki (1985) has shown that nss often dislike l2 learners’ use of in-group membership speaking styles, such as slang, obscenities, or very informal speech. so, given that the nss may harbor negative attitudes towards nnss trying to sound second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment 541 too much like the in-group, it may paradoxically be to the learners’ benefit not to sound too native-like and hence not to attempt to get the pragmatics right. thus, ironically, not sounding too much like members of the tl group may work to the benefit of learners. this is an issue that obviously extends to nss where a black woman may not appreciate a white woman’s use of african-american vernacular english because it is not perceived as hers to use. lastly, as students do not always make use of potential positive pragmatic transfer (kasper, 1997), the studies that were reviewed characteristically lacked detailed interviews or think-aloud protocols to allow the researchers to find out just why the participants employed a particular strategy, or if they were even cognizant of their choices. since some of the measures used in the reviewed studies called for responding to online or videotaped measures, it is important to note that in responding to an off-line questionnaire, learners have more time to think about their answers and are not overloaded by stress or other factors that tend to hinder on-line data collection (barron, 2003). nevertheless, what remains unclear is what effect the off-line questionnaire itself has on the measurement of pragmatic knowledge and the extent to which the results from it are comparable to those of an on-line one. 7.3. pedagogical suggestions thinking practically, how can the research findings presented in this article regarding the accessibility of the tl, pragmatic transfer, and motivation to learn the pragmatics of the tl be translated into actual recommendations to the classroom teacher? perhaps catering to the differential success of learners depending on their proficiency level and the nature of the task, a graded approach to teaching pragmatics should be developed, with the knowledge that lower level learners may simply not have the grammatical ability to produce the range of options considered pragmatically appropriate. however, learners with high motivation to learn and to interact with the tl community can be identified at the outset so that teachers have a better sense of whether inability to develop pragmatic ability is due to low proficiency, to a high sense of agency and a resistance to tl norms, or whether it is more an artifact of the challenges all learners face in getting the tl pragmatics right. the variables at play are both the sophistication of the pragmatics information and the amount that is accessed at any one time. also, learners may have differing needs as to what they are called upon to do pragmatically in the given tl, depending on their uses for the language. for example, one learner may need the language of the office, while another exclusively needs some familiarity with the pragmatics of peer-based social interaction. lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen 542 let us now consider issues of including pragmatics in teacher development with regard to pragmatics, motivating learners to be more savvy about pragmatics, using authentic materials, and relating to ns norms. 7.3.1. including pragmatics in teacher development it is encouraging that models guiding l2/fl teaching and assessment such as the standards for foreign language learning/proficiency guidelines (actfl) do, in fact, endorse instruction in pragmatics (see, for instance, dykstra, 2009 for a discussion about the potential role of pragmatics instruction to educate learners to be truly competent users of the tl). since research indicates that l2 learners improve as a direct result of pragmatic instruction within the classroom environment (e.g., ishihara & cohen, 2014), it is then imperative that fl teachers also incorporate pragmatics in their instruction, particularly if student motivation is lacking to pay attention to the subtleties associated with this construct. however, while many l2/fl teacher development courses stress a theoretical knowledge of pragmatics, few provide practical techniques for teachers to integrate into their respective classrooms (with regard to esl/efl, see vásquez & sharpless, 2009). therefore, if pragmatic knowledge is indeed essential for any language teacher, l2/fl teacher development courses should mandate coursework in pragmatics and its instruction, not necessarily to provide “learners with new information but to make them aware of what they know already and encourage them to use their universal or transferable l1 pragmatic knowledge in l2 contexts” (kasper, 1997, p. 4). a demonstrated proficiency in this area should be a requirement for a certificate or diploma for any future l2/fl teacher (see ishihara, 2011). an assumption is usually made that teachers are aware of the pragmatics themselves and just need to pass this information and these insights on to their students. but in fact, fl teachers who themselves are nnss and are not necessarily highly competent in the tl may not understand the importance of teaching pragmatics, let alone know much about pragmatics in the tl context. even if the teachers make some effort to teach pragmatics, they may shy away from assessing it, despite the fact that pragmatic ability is measured in the actfl standards. they may feel incapable of judging whether one pragmalinguistic form or another is more consistent with the norms that are being used as the benchmark than is some other form. in addition, ns l2 teachers may never have studied pragmatics in their course work, and so they inadvertently pass on this lack of knowledge to students who may view it as a silent acknowledgement that pragmatics is either unimportant or does not exist. based on the results of the bardovi-harlig and dörnyei (1998) study, one might advocate a survey that teachers take to realize where they stand on pragmatic awareness, followed by second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment 543 a course of action that they could take to help their students engage more in the tl community. that there are the somewhat subtle pragmalinguistic differences that could take years to simply acquire in the l2 context suggests that explicit instruction is the way to go. this presupposes that the requisite knowledge is available to be taught, and that there are teachers or websites that can provide this information. for example, the second author spent over 16 years in israel but did not acquire the continuum of phrases for how to apologize in hebrew according to the severity of the infraction. it was not until he conducted formal research on apologizing in hebrew and english that he became acutely aware of the pragmalinguistic distinctions from s’licha ‘sorry’ (at one end) to ani nora mitztaer ‘i am really sorry’ (in the middle) to ani mitnatzel ‘i apologize’ (at the other extreme), with various other forms in between. this continuum can be taught to learners relatively easily. so, perhaps teachers can present to their students the possible continua in pragmatics behavior. l2 students are used to learning grammatical rules for their own sake and often in an isolated fashion. they may not be at all sure as to when to use one or another form in order to achieve the desired pragmatic effect. providing teachers with ways of presenting material on a continuum may make it easier for them to relay these ideas to students. for example, the first author has used continua and other visual enhancements for students to respond to the pragmatic appropriateness of email requests to their professors. by allowing the students to mark on a scale the level of seriousness of the infraction, the students are reminded that pragmatic knowledge is not simply about learning right from wrong, but investigating the degrees of rightness and wrongness in assessing one’s linguistic behavior, as well as all the factors that may have an effect. if the teachers are nnss and not sure, they can verify the continua with nss or have their students do so as part of a homework assignment. 7.3.2. using authentic pragmatics materials because of the dearth of pragmatic information in many textbooks, the responsibility of conveying pragmatic awareness usually falls on the teacher (vellenga, 2004). this is not, however, guaranteed—especially in fl environments where the teachers may not be knowledgeable themselves about the tl pragmatics as indicated above. thus, learners need authentic materials and exposure to the tl culture because these unfamiliar aspects may not be salient enough to be noticed (bardovi-harlig, 1996). one source of this information is websites like the one created at the center for advanced research on language acquisition (carla) at the university of minnesota. with funding from the office of international education lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen 544 to carla, a project was initiated in 2001 to provide self-access internet sites for the learning and performance of l2 pragmatics. a website was constructed for teachers, curriculum writers, and learners, pragmatics and speech acts, with information about 6 speech acts: requests, refusals, apologies, complaints, compliments, and thanking, in as many as ten different languages.4 the website is replete with suggested strategies for teaching the particular speech acts and sample teaching materials are provided, along with an annotated bibliography (updated in 2012) which includes information on other areas of pragmatics as well. in addition, teachers should push their learners not to engage only with materials developed for l2 learners but also with those for nss. internet sites such as blogs, comments sections, and message boards, provide authentic examples of how nss interact with texts and where and how they share their opinions in the back-and-forth exchanges that inevitably accompany any original publication. by participating online, l2 learners can receive feedback on their communicative efforts from those already in the tl environment with or without accompanying metalinguistic feedback. simply put, they can forge their own relationships, but because of the relative anonymity of many websites, learners are free to disengage from any interactions that may become uncomfortable, an option not open to those whose only interactions with nss occur face-to-face. several summers ago at teachers college, columbia, usa as the first author was helping her students learn how to write reviews, she had them put all their reviews on yelp.com for the various places they had visited. while the activity did not represent direct face-to-face contact, the learners mentioned that they started to feel part of the new york city community by being allowed to offer their opinions and watch people respond to them, and then engage with the responses. because there was a “real” component of actually visiting restaurants based on reviews they had read, they felt motivated to communicate in an online thread. writing effective reviews undoubtedly has a pragmatics component to it. the writer needs to be mindful of the element of tact involved in review writing, for example, coupled with the desire to communicate feelings and tell the truth to one’s peers, even if one is a nns in the tl community. in teaching pragmatics workshops for esl students at baruch college in nyc, the first author has used video clips found in everything from mean girls to the joy luck club. while still definitely inauthentic in that they are rehearsed and often exaggerated for comedic effect, these sources are perhaps better than written text because they include intonation and gesture. for this reason, a valuable source of authentic material are anecdotes from the teacher’s own experiences. for example, the first author made a pragmalinguistic error by using je 4 see http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/index.html. second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment 545 suis plein, which can be interpreted to mean ‘i am pregnant’ in french, when she meant to say she had had enough to eat (j’ai mangé assez) while studying abroad in france. she found that sharing her pragmatic goof was a good stimulus to get students talking in groups and with the whole class about their own experiences. then, once the students generated their own scenarios, they had a rich pool to analyze. the students noted that these exercises were useful not just because they became aware of something new, but because they were then motivated to incorporate the cultural and linguistic knowledge into their l2 systems, all the while having learned that perception will precede production and that they need to be patient. the second author had a resounding language experience when he failed to initiate a conversation with a french ns by means of a greeting. he was unaware of the illocutionary force or pragmatic function of bonjour in a frenchspeaking community. the pragmatics of this apparently simple greeting may have a subtle function attached to it, namely, to establish contact politely, which the less savvy nns may miss. several years ago, he approached a man on the street in martinique and launched directly into a request for help in interpreting a confusing parking slip issued by a machine and intended to be put on the dashboard of the car. instead of responding to the author’s question (asked in fluent french), the man on the street said with a decisive tone, “bonjour.” so an l2 speaker of french needs to know what that bonjour means, most likely “i was put off by your focusing immediately and exclusively on the parking slip, without going through the courtesy of extending a morning greeting.” a strategic approach to dealing with the pragmatics of greetings is to have a classroom teacher or other highly competent speakers of the language provide guidance as to the function of such greetings in the given language. it is not enough just to memorize the various greetings for different times of day. it is crucial to know the when, how, and why of using them. in the above example, the author was operating from a us-based pragmatics mode and simply transferring this approach to this parking slip situation.5 one of the tricky factors in perceiving the pragmatics of an interaction is that of tone or attitude (beebe & waring, 2002, 2004). nnss may not understand whether an utterance is delivered straight or whether the speaker is being facetious, sarcastic, cynical, angry, or whatever, especially in asynchronous internet-based communication where there is no facial expression or gesture to reference. aside from that, learners need to check out their own attitude toward the situation, given the role of agency in pragmatics. they may not be so receptive 5 this anecdote is taken from an article (cohen, 2012) which provides numerous examples of pragmatic inappropriateness in various languages. lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen 546 to what it is they are being asked to respond to or engage in. this may be an opportunity to look at the continuum from openness to the speech act on the one end to a more closed and negative response to it on the other. 7.3.3. motivating learners to be more savvy about pragmatics once teachers themselves recognize the importance of pragmatics instruction and have taken steps to include it in their teaching, they then encounter the challenge of motivating their students to actively notice the role of pragmatics in communication. teachers could encourage students to obtain a tandem partner locally or in the tl country (e.g., through skype). consistent with the taguchi (2011) study, which underscored the value of the students contacting their teacher by email, there is value in having a ns or highly competent nns who students can contact whenever they have questions. for numerous learners, asking questions through email or through the chat mode can help avoid any embarrassment associated with the face-to-face asking of a question which they feel they should know the answer to, regardless of whether it was taught or not. the second author has sent many emails to his mandarin-english tandem partner to clarify semantic distinctions.6 he is amazed at just how unhelpful dictionaries can be—since, like many textbooks that lack pragmatics, they tend not to give sample sentences to help get the usage right. maybe this type of pen pal situation could be accessed on an internet message board. the teacher might want to help moderate the flow of information, stepping in from time to time to comment on language issues. it may be especially helpful to develop tools for teachers to use in this endeavor. since something as basic as how to request something from teachers (and others) may result in pragmatic failure, teachers could have a “requests” tool kit ready for student use. the onus is on teachers and teacher developers to figure out a way to enhance learners’ pragmatic awareness so that added proficiency is not just providing them more rope with which to hang themselves (using the metaphor from takahashi and beebe, 1987). the issue of ns norms and motivating learners to be aware of them, as well as avoiding l1 transfer,7 deserves more attention. indeed, “the choice of an l2 norm involves consideration of regional, gender, social class, and age-based variation” (barron, 2003, p. 75). two points could be made here, namely, that in the real world there are no teachers around 6 she is now studying for an ma in the teaching of chinese, as a consequence of 3 years of english-chinese tandem exchanges. 7 while the reference is made here to l1 transfer, the reality is that at times the learners’ dominant language may not be the l1. also, in the case of multilinguals, the transfer may be from some other language that they know well or at least better than the tl. second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment 547 to help direct traffic—so all the more reason to get the most mileage from teachers while it is still possible. and secondly, while it is true that using ns norms as a benchmark for behavior may not be so crucial in an fl situation, it can still be valuable for learners to at least have some familiarity with what these norms are, regardless of whether they attempt to adhere to them and continue to seek out tl relationships after their final language class. by sharing personal examples of pragmatic failure with students, a teacher can help push learners to figure out not only what went wrong but also ways in which such pragmatic failures could be avoided in future interactions. another motivating option would be to have a pragmatics show-and-tell where each day different students are responsible for bringing in an aspect of language that they heard or saw in print. ideally, they then take the initiative to figure out for themselves what the pragmalinguistic and/or sociopragmatic ramifications of the language behavior are, such as thorough checking it with an available ns of the language (possibly through an internet contact). the student then gives a short presentation to the rest of the class and, in a sense, becomes the expert on this behavior. in an fl context, this type of activity, while possible, is more of a challenge. it may call for an assiduous use of the internet, such as through chat rooms. in addition to specific activities, it is also important for teachers to help students to get in touch with what they do not know about tl pragmatics and to become more independent at finding out about it by themselves. 7.3.4. supporting learners in relating to ns norms relating to ns norms starts with the realization that nss tend to do things that nnss do not simply acquire. here is an example: knowing how to respond to the proprietress upon leaving a restaurant in japan, after being thanked for having eaten there. the second author was oblivious to the limitations of doo itashimashite ‘you’re welcome’ until using it upon leaving a restaurant and learning from colleagues that this was totally inappropriate. he was to say nothing, perform a slight bow, or say domo ‘thanks.’ and he had exited restaurants in japan many times before without paying attention to what nss did. so, armed with this new information, students of japanese could, in fact, try to sit at a table near the door to the restaurant so that they can overhear what nss say and/or do in the restaurant-leaving exchange. especially in an fl context, language teachers could help learners develop pragmatic awareness by having them compare their performance with that of an ns. students could be asked to reflect on two questions: 1. what do you think a native-like response would be? lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen 548 2. how do you think your own l2 pragmatic performance might depart from the ns norms if you are unwilling to do it the way nss would? here is where the teachers’ expertise may be crucial in evening the playing field since some learners are bound to be more self-aware and critical than their peers. some may have a more refined grammatical proficiency, which may be crucial in understanding what may be subtle grammatical distinctions that have an important pragmalinguistic role to play. the teachers then need to coach learners in being more astute observers of the target culture and to make clear to them that such observation can increase their motivation to improve their tl pragmatics. this presupposes that the teachers already have this fine-tuned pragmatic knowledge of the target culture. if they do not, then all the more reason to rely on ns or near-ns informants, whether in the local environment or through the worldwide web. it might be valuable to make an observation toolkit for learners as a way of instilling within learners the importance of observation. the problem is that learners can only attend to so much information at a time. how will they know which stimuli to focus on in terms of pragmatic information? they may be highly motivated but not good at determining where the key pragmatic information lies. teachers could, for example, design a type of jigsaw activity where the students are each assigned to observe different aspects of spoken discourse and report back to the group to create a larger observation report. for example, the first author has used such an activity to accompany a video clip from the joy luck club where, in groups, some students are responsible for observing nonverbal behavior while others are focused only on what a given actor said. rather than attempting to notice everything at once, the students focus their observations on, say, a single aspect of an interaction that leads to pragmatic failure. then, they come together as a group to see and analyze the interaction as a whole. teachers can also play a relatively untapped role in heightening student awareness as to similarities and differences in both sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic behavior across cultural groups. especially having nns teachers let students get feedback from nss with regard to pragmalinguistic niceties and sociopragmatic realities can be an effective way to go. it does not put the teachers on the spot. teachers can ensure that students act as data gatherers and that they bring those experiences into the classroom for analysis. kasper and rose (2001) define pragmatics “as interpersonal rhetoric – the way speakers and writers accomplish goals as social actors who do not just need to get things done but must attend to their interpersonal relationships with other participants at the same time” (p. 2). the challenge then for the learners is to be both actors and data gatherers at the same time. the way shively (2011) did this with u.s. second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment 549 study-abroad students in toledo, spain was to have the students use a hidden tape recorder to gather data from interactions with their host family, with friends, and in service encounters. while in this case the data were collected so that after the study-abroad ended the researcher could chart the students’ progress in their use of pragmatics, it might be possible to determine a means by which students could meaningfully access these data along the way. considering the global spread of english, conceptions of ns norms vary widely across and within countries (e.g., african-american vernacular english), cultures (e.g., afrikaans-english in south africa), and across formats (e.g., internet english). as english has become a lingua franca, many l2 speakers have not found it necessary to reach optimal levels of ns interactional behavior. in addition, nss often do not expect tl-like english from nnss, and by accepting deviations from the norm, they make non-tl speech acceptable (house & kasper, 2000, p. 111). in fact, non-tl use can elicit positive responses from nss, especially when it is considered “innovative, creative, or even charming” (ishihara & cohen, 2014, p. 76). for example, let us say that, in the given tl culture, female coworkers often send emojis to one another in emails but do not do that with male coworkers, regardless of age. it would be important to point out this behavior explicitly to learners and to find authentic examples to present so that they feel comfortable with a range of communicative options and can pick and choose successfully. it can be the role of the teacher to instill a sense of reflection and responsibility for word choice so that learners do not accidentally hurt their chances to develop deep relationships by inadvertently annoying their interlocutors or even making enemies. many learners get their tl input from internet media and so are exposed to songs and tv shows where they may be oblivious to the fact that a speaker’s particular linguistic choices are not necessarily normative ones, but are tied specifically to an individual or to a subculture. it can be the teacher’s role to bring this to light for the learners by delving into cursing and other forms of off-colored language. it then becomes the learners’ option to determine whether they wish to use such language in their own interactions. but at least they are aware of what the language means and presumably how to use it. as pointed out above, it may not just be an issue of whether the nns wants to be like nss by using certain slang, obscenities, or very informal speech. rather, it may be the case that nss may harbor negative attitudes towards nnss who try to sound too much like the in-group (janicki, 1985). 7.4. further research one area of research would be to survey both l2 and fl teachers regarding not just their knowledge of the tl pragmatics, but also their perceptions and beliefs— lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen 550 investigating what teachers’ views are with regard both to l1 pragmatic transfer and to the teachers’ role in motivating learners to become more pragmatically aware. fl teachers may not necessarily view the pragmatics of language interaction as important since it occurs infrequently for them. the responsibility for word choice may in numerous cases be left to the textbook, rather than the teacher. the survey could also explore the case of teachers who shy away from both teaching and assessment of pragmatics—why this is and what to do about it. such a survey could be conducted exclusively to improve pedagogy, but it could also be conducted as a research study. the level of learner motivation to actively notice their own pragmatic transfer (whether positive or negative) or to take full advantage of explicit instruction in pragmatics is an issue in need of research with a robust number of subjects over a prolonged period of time. a researchable issue, for example, is the development of motivation to perceive and produce ns interactions in fl scenarios. more studies are also needed to investigate the specific relationship between learner motivation and pragmatic acquisition. specifically, it would be helpful to the field to have more research like that of tagashira et al. (2011) that investigates the intersection of pragmatic awareness, cognitive processes associated with noticing, and motivation in order to account for learners’ transition from simply noticing to actually comprehending pragmatic inappropriateness. in addition, more attention could be given to the role of pragmatic transfer in both l2 and fl contexts to determine how it is related to awareness, and the pedagogical implications of helping students become aware of universal transfer. this is of particular importance in an fl context where students may also draw on preconceived cultural stereotypes (ishihara & cohen, 2014), which can be further reinforced by lack of authentic interaction in the tl with nss (barron, 2003). rafieyan et al. (2013) have shown that the problem of negative transfer can be mitigated when learners are familiarized with and motivated to learn about the l2 culture. research on the distance between l1 and l2 cultures may have a greater effect on nns familiarity with tl pragmatic norms (kecskes, 2003) and inform classroom approaches to making input salient. furthermore, additional research is needed to account for how much of learners’ positive transfer is intentional, how much is luck, and how much relates to the learners’ desire to adapt to the ns norm, to express an l1 identity in the l2, or to adopt a new l2 identity solely for l2 communication. we could look both at structured responses, as on a dct, and at real-time interaction. sometimes, people just parrot what they have heard and always have a chance of it being correct. it can be difficult if not impossible to measure if they have actually learned anything or are just mimicking what they hope is correct. so this calls for systematic follow-up over a prolonged period of time to determine how well the learners have control over this pragmatic behavior. second language pragmatic ability: individual differences according to environment 551 perhaps it may be possible with a large scale study to better identify, describe, and predict which learners are likely to gain greater pragmatic awareness than others. this research could ideally give us the tools for gaining further insights into the learning process than we currently have. it really means having a better handle on proficiency at the more advanced levels. these data could potentially reveal nuances about the nature of pragmatic transfer. the question is how best to conduct such research. it would probably call for online surveys, rather than completion of real-time production tasks, but perhaps a combination of the two. the motivational factor requires closer attention since it relates to how aware learners are about the sociopragmatics associated with the given tl. furthermore, goals and motivation for learning an l2 differ widely among individuals. some l2 learners, particularly in an fl setting, may learn the tl only for a specific purpose, such as reading trade articles, thus rendering the bulk of pragmatic knowledge “superfluous” (barron, 2003, p. 77). since pragmatic ability “containing cultural aspects and features of social context and conventions cannot be conceptualized without a target language and culture in mind” (timpe, 2012, p. 171), future research should also make explicit how the tl features to be measured are tied to the tl culture at hand, and what effect deviations from the pragmatic norm have on overall communicative ability, as well as their relationship to both pragmatic transfer and motivation. iranian researchers, for example, observed that their efl learners are highly motivated to acquire how to use language appropriately, and that their high pragmatic motivation can be a strong impetus for their noticing ability (tajeddin & zand moghadam, 2012, p. 367). another research concern is that most current research is cross-sectional rather than longitudinal. more longitudinal studies are needed to measure pragmatic awareness and production prior to, during, and after residence in an l2 context (barron, 2003), and to study the evolution of the l2 learners’ attitudes toward the ns norms. especially amenable to longitudinal study would be case study research, such as that looking at specific interactions between nns and ns colleagues where the ns is a mentor to the more junior nns colleague. this research could track the junior colleague’s efforts to use appropriate tl norms in email exchanges, the type of help offered by the mentor, and the consequences of getting the behavior wrong from time to time, especially as compared to that of a ns junior and a ns mentor. 8. conclusion the aims of this paper have been to review research literature on the role that the l2 and fl environments actually play in l2 learners’ pragmatic ability, and lauren wyner, andrew d. cohen 552 also to speculate as to the extent to which individual factors can offset the advantages that learners may have by being in the l2 context while they are learning. the paper started by defining pragmatics and by problematizing this definition. then, attention was given to research literature dealing with the learning of pragmatics in l2 and fl contexts, pragmatic transfer and its incidence in fl as opposed to l2 contexts, and the role of motivation in the development of pragmatic ability. a number of pedagogical suggestions were offered, such as including pragmatics in teacher development, using authentic pragmatics materials, motivating learners to be more savvy about pragmatics, and supporting learners in confronting, challenging, and accepting ns norms. suggestions as to further research in the field were also offered. while l2 contexts generally afford more opportunities for pragmatic development than fl settings, 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(2001). pragmatic transfer in japanese esl refusals. bulletin akademi kagoshima, 31, 259-275. 159 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 6 (1). 2016. 159-181 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.1.8 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl corrective feedback, learner uptake, and feedback perception in a chinese as a foreign language classroom tingfeng fu paragon testing enterprises, canada jill.suzhou@gmail.com hossein nassaji the university of victoria, canada nassaji@uvic.ca abstract the role of corrective feedback in second language classrooms has received considerable research attention in the past few decades. however, most of this research has been conducted in english-teaching settings, either esl or efl. this study examined teacher feedback, learner uptake as well as learner and teacher perception of feedback in an adult chinese as a foreign language classroom. ten hours of classroom interactions were videotaped, transcribed and coded for analysis. lyster and ranta’s (1997) coding system involving six types of feedback was initially used to identify feedback frequency and learner uptake. however, the teacher was found to use a number of additional feedback types. altogether, 12 types of feedback were identified: recasts, delayed recasts, clarification requests, translation, metalinguistic feedback, elicitation, explicit correction, asking a direct question, repetition, directing question to other students, re-asks, and using l1-english. differences were noted in the frequency of some of the feedback types as well as learner uptake compared to what had been reported in some previous esl and efl studies. with respect to the new feedback types, some led to noticeable uptake. as for the students’ and teacher’s perceptions, they did not match and both the teacher and the students were generally not accurate in perceiving the frequency of each feedback type. the findings are discussed in terms of the role of context tingfeng fu, hossein nassaji 160 in affecting the provision and effectiveness of feedback and its relationship to student and teacher perception of feedback. keywords: corrective feedback; uptake; feedback perception; second language classroom 1. introduction in recent years, the role of interactional feedback in second language classrooms has received considerable research attention. interactional feedback refers to feedback that learners receive on their erroneous utterance in the course of communicative interaction (nassaji, 2009). a number of descriptive and experimental studies have examined both the provision and usefulness of such feedback in classroom settings (e.g., ellis, basturkmen, & loewen, 2001; loewen & philp, 2006; lyster & ranta, 1997; panova & lyster, 2002; sheen, 2006; suzuki, 2004; williams, 2005; zhao & bitchener, 2007). this research has provided substantial information about the various types of feedback teachers use and also the extent to which such feedback contributes to language development. however, most of this research has been conducted in english teaching settings. many researchers have argued that context of interaction may make a difference in how feedback is used and assists l2 learning. the goal of the present study was to extend research in this area by examining teacher feedback and learner uptake in an adult chinese as a foreign language (cfl) context. the study also examined learner and teacher perception of feedback types and feedback frequency in this context. this question was motivated by a scarce number of studies of interactional feedback on feedback perception and in particular the extent to which teacher and student perception affect feedback effectiveness. 2. previous descriptive studies of classroom feedback when learners make an error in the classroom, the teacher may decide to correct the error, and he or she may have many options. classroom feedback studies have identified a number of these feedback types and have also examined what kind of effects they have on students’ uptake and learning. as for the effect of feedback, they have shown positive effects for feedback in general, but they have also found different results for the distribution of different feedback types and their effects on learner uptake and learning in different instructional contexts. one of the first studies that provided a detailed account of classroom feedback is lyster and ranta (1997), which investigated four communicative corrective feedback, learner uptake, and feedback perception in a chinese as a foreign language. . . 161 french immersion classes of grade 4 and 5 students. among the six identified feedback types—recast, elicitation, clarification request, metalinguistic feedback, explicit correction, and repetition—recasts were the most frequent, making up 55% of all six feedback types, followed by elicitation, accounting for 14%, followed by clarification request (11%). the other three types of feedback— metalinguistic feedback, explicit correction, and repetition—each achieved less than 10% of the frequency. panova and lyster (2002) conducted a similar study in an esl context. their study found similar results. recasts accounted for 55% of all feedback instances, which is the same percentage as that found in the 1997 study, and they found the same percentage for clarification request, which accounted for 11%. one difference was that elicitation only accounted for 4% of feedback occurrences compared to 14% of the original study. metalinguistic feedback, explicit correction, and repetition were similarly low in frequency. suzuki (2004) examined esl classes with intermediate level adult learners and three teachers. recasts were the most frequent feedback type (60%), followed by clarification requests. however, the percentage of clarification requests was 30%, which was much higher than the other two studies (11%). the other feedback types found were metalinguistic feedback, elicitation, explicit correction, and repetition, which occurred rather infrequently, not more than 5% each. what is significant in this study is the uptake rate; students tended to respond to teacher feedback almost all the time (97%), and recasts led to much more repair (66%) than those in lyster and ranta’s study (18%). the successful repair rate (54%) was much higher than those cases that were still in need of repair (43%). jimenez’s (2006) study examined feedback in two italian efl classrooms at two different levels of language proficiency. this study found a high level of peer interaction with recasts being the most frequently used (37.8% and 38.3% in each class). these rates for recasts are relatively low compared to previous studies. yoshida (2010) examined feedback in a second-year university level japanese language course. results showed that recast was the number one feedback move, which occurred 47 times and accounted for 51% of all moves. studies have also compared feedback in different contexts and have found an important effect for context. lyster and mori (2006), for example, examined teachers’ feedback in two different immersion contexts: a japanese and a french immersion context. the results showed differences in the distribution of learner uptake in the two contexts, showing a higher rate of uptake following recasts in the japanese context but a higher rate of uptake following prompts in the french immersion context. sheen (2006) also found differences related to context, comparing four observational studies of classroom feedback (a french immersion class, esl classrooms in new zealand, esl classrooms in canada, and tingfeng fu, hossein nassaji 162 an efl classrooms in korea). sheen found less effect for recasts to generate uptake in the canadian esl and the french immersion contexts than in the korean efl contexts. meta-linguistic studies of feedback have also shown a significant effect for context. mackey and goo (2007) for example found a larger effect for recasts in efl contexts than esl contexts. these findings suggest that context plays an important mediating role in the effect of feedback. as can be seen, the focus of studies has been more on english language learning, and fewer studies have examined feedback in other language classrooms. thus, more research on feedback is needed in non-english language teaching contexts. 3. studies of feedback perception in recent years, in addition to provision and effectiveness of interactional feedback, studies have also begun to investigate learners’ perception of feedback. this issue is important because if learners do not perceive the corrective nature of feedback and if their perception differs from their teachers’ intention, they may not benefit from feedback (amhrein & nassaji, 2010). due to the ambiguity of recasts, some researchers have suggested that recasts may not be very effective because learners may not perceive them as feedback on form but on content (e.g., lyster, 1998; lyster & ranta, 1997). thus, a number of studies have looked in particular at learners’ perception of recasts. one of these studies is egi (2007a), which examined perception of recasts and its relationship with error types and feedback characteristics. learners noticed 60% of morphosyntactic recasts and 57% of lexical recasts. this indicated that learners were fairly accurate in perceiving the target of recasts. this of course was different from the findings of some other studies that have shown that recasts targeting lexical errors were more easily noticed than morphosyntactic errors (mackey, gass, & mcdonough, 2000). the author attributed the high rate of noticing of morphosyntactic recasts to the intensity of recasts in this study; in fact, recasts focused on only two morphosyntactic items. the learners were more successful in noticing shorter recasts with fewer changes. the author attributed this finding to learners’ limited attention. it was concluded that different degrees of saliency of recast can challenge learners on different cognitive levels, leading to different learner perceptions. with the same participants and a similar methodology, egi (2007b) examined learners’ l2 development in relationship with their perceptions of recast. the performance in l2 development was measured by tailor-made tests that specifically targeted learners’ errors during the treatment. both immediate and delayed posttests showed that learners obtained most gains when they perceived recast as a combination of positive and negative evidence. this might corrective feedback, learner uptake, and feedback perception in a chinese as a foreign language. . . 163 indicate that the positive evidence of recasts for lexical errors may cause interlanguage changes more effectively than the evidence for morphosyntactic errors. carpenter, jeon, macgregor, and mackey (2006) examined whether learners could tell recasts from repetitions. video clips captured task-based dyadic activities when recast or repetition was provided to advanced esl learners. the results showed that learners who saw the initiating erroneous utterances were more successful in identifying recasts, but they showed no advantage in distinguishing between recast and repetition. this suggested that the utterance-response context might have enhanced the salience of a recast, but recasts remained ambiguous in their corrective nature and therefore were frequently perceived as mere repetition. kim and han (2007) examined teachers’ intention, learners’ perceptions, and learners’ accuracy of perceiving recasts as corrective or communicative. a high level of recast awareness was explained by the consistency of providing recasts as the only kind of corrective feedback. however, whether recasts were self-directed or other-directed did not have any effect on learners’ perceptions. what we can learn from this study and other studies discussed above is that aspects of feedback such as length, intensity, error types and the context in which feedback is provided can affect learners’ perception and subsequently feedback effectiveness. 4. the present study the above research has provided substantial information about the use of various types of feedback, learner uptake, and teacher and learner perception of feedback. however, as noted earlier, most of this research has been conducted in english teaching settings. the goal of the present study was to extend research in this area by examining teacher feedback in an adult cfl context. as can be noted from the above studies, research seems to suggest that learners’ and teachers’ perception of feedback is also a factor contributing to feedback effectiveness. thus, the study also investigated the perceptions of feedback frequency and feedback types to see whether there is any relationship between learner and teacher perceptions of feedback and the actual occurrence of the feedback. the study addresses the following research questions: 1. how often does the teacher provide feedback in an adult cfl classroom? 2. what types of feedback does the teacher use and what is their relationship with learner uptake? 3. how do the students and the teacher perceive the use and nature of each feedback type, and to what extent does their perception correspond to the actual use of feedback? tingfeng fu, hossein nassaji 164 4.1. method 4.1.1. teaching context and participants this study was conducted in an intermediate level cfl class in a university context. the teaching method used by the teacher was a combination of task-based learning and form-focused instruction. the average age of the students was 20. the students were of varying first language backgrounds: english (8), japanese (1), thai (1), mandarin chinese (1), both french and english as first languages (1), and both cantonese and english as first languages (1). students were largely female and the gender ratio was 10 (female) to 3 (male). on average, eight students were present at each lesson. classes were held three times a week. they were 50-minute long each, and data were collected through both video-taping and surveys. the teacher was a native-speaker of mandarin with eight years of mandarin-teaching experience. she had also taught other courses including chinese linguistics and sla teaching methodology. at the beginning of the course, the teacher and the students were not informed of the research focus being teacher feedback and learner uptake. 4.1.2. procedures the data regarding feedback were collected through video and audio recordings of classroom interaction. altogether, thirteen 50-minute sessions (10 hours) of classroom interaction were recorded. a questionnaire contained 10 questions asking both the teacher and the learners about the use and frequency of each feedback was used. the questionnaire was administered immediately after classroom observations. in order not to make the participants aware of the focus of the study, the questionnaire was not administered in the first seven classes. for the students, the question was about their perceptions of feedback they had received; for the teacher, it was about the perceptions of feedback she had given. 4.1.3. analysis the video recording was fully transcribed. both english and chinese were used in the transcription. for example, when the teacher was explaining sentence structures or making comparisons between l1 and l2, she used english to make the explanation more accessible to the students. when she was providing sample sentences or relating the current content to previous learning, she used chinese to “push” the students to process the target language before she explained further. when transcribing chinese, pinyin was used for mispronounced words. an example of a feedback episode is shown here: corrective feedback, learner uptake, and feedback perception in a chinese as a foreign language. . . 165 example 1 original interaction translation elliot: uh, 办了, 很多, 培训 (pēi shūn) 班 elliot: uh, opened, many, training courses t: 培训 (péi xùn) 班 t: training courses à recast elliot: 班 elliot: course 4.1.4. coding feedback types a feedback move is issued by the teacher and starts immediately after the student(s) made an error in their target language use, and the move ends when the teacher finishes her explanation. a move can be a simple phrase (e.g., recast) or an extended explanation (e.g., metalinguistic feedback). to code the feedback types, the study initially used panova and lyster’s (2002) model of seven feedback types, which includes recast, clarification request, translation, metalinguistic feedback, elicitation, explicit correction, and repetition. however, an initial analysis of the classroom interaction revealed that the teacher used a number of new corrective feedback moves. based on the initial analysis, a framework consisting of 12 feedback types was developed and used. the framework is shown in table 1, followed by a brief description of each of the feedback types and an example (with english translation). table 1 the framework used to code the feedback types feedback types 1. immediate recasts 2. delayed recasts 3. clarification requests 4. metalinguistic feedback 5. elicitation 6. explicit correction 7. repetition 8. re-asks 9. translation 10. asking a direct question 11. directing question to other students 12. using l1-english 4.1.4.1. immediate recasts one of the feedback types that was identified was recast, which was an immediate reformulation of the learner’s erroneous utterance: tingfeng fu, hossein nassaji 166 example 2 original interaction translation pepper: 假装 (jià zhuāng) pepper: to pretend (jià zhuāng) teacher: 假装 (jiǎ zhuāng) teacher: to pretend (jiǎ zhuāng) à immediate recast 4.1.4.2. delayed recasts in addition to immediate recasts, the teacher was also found to use another type of rcasts (delayed recast), which was defined as the teacher’s reformulation that occurred with some delay after a learner’s erroneous utterance: example 3 original interaction translation pepper: 才找到一个比较，tíng, 不错的公司。 pepper: (until quite late he) found a quite (tíng) good company. t: yeah! 很好。这一次好不容易，好不容易 is a fixed structure to indicate it’s very difficult. same as 不容易. 才找到一家挺 (tǐng) 不错的公司。 t: yeah! very good. this time, quite not easy, quite not easy is a fixed structure to indicate it’s very difficult. same as not easy. (until quite late he) found a quite (tǐng) good company. à delayed recast 4.1.4.3. clarification requests the teacher also used clarification requests, which was defined as a feedback move that requested clarification when the teacher sought meaningor formrelated clarification after a student made an error: example 4 original interaction translation emma: 桌 (zhuō) 着？ emma: (zhuō) zhe? t: 坐 (zuò). is that what you want to say? t: (zuò). is that what you want to say? à clarification request emma: uh, zhuō … emma: uh, zhuō … 4.1.4.4. metalinguistic feedback this referred to a feedback type that involved the teacher’s comments or brief analyses of a student’s erroneous utterance, without explicitly providing the correct form: corrective feedback, learner uptake, and feedback perception in a chinese as a foreign language. . . 167 example 5 original interaction translation alex: 丈夫 (zhàng fū) alex: husband (zhàng fū) t: yeah, 丈夫 (zhàng fu)。neutral tone for the second one. 丈夫 (zhàng fu). t: yeah, husband (zhàng fu). neutral tone for the second one. husband (zhàng fu). à metalinguistic feedback 4.1.4.5. elicitation a feedback move was coded as elicitation when the teacher intended to give the students a chance to self-correct the error without asking a direct question: example 6 original interaction translation ron: 对不起 (duì bù chǐ) ron: sorry (duì bù chǐ) t: 对不——— t: duì bù ———à elicitation ron: 起(qǐ) ron: (qǐ) 4.1.4.6. explicit correction a feedback move was coded as explicit correction when the teacher used explicit correction to signal to the student that he/she had made an error. the following shows an example: example 7 original interaction translation t: 然后第四个是——— t: then the forth one is ——— emma: ⽶饭 emma: rice t: 啊？米饭。not this one. "米饭" is without this radical. t: ah? rice. not this one. “rice” is without this radical. à explicit correction here, the student made an error on a chinese character. the teacher then explicitly pointed out that the student missed a radical in the character. 4.1.4.7. repetition the teacher sometimes repeated the student’s erroneous utterance with a raising intonation to highlight the error: tingfeng fu, hossein nassaji 168 example 8 original interaction translation elliot: 他爱自己的国家，uh, something. elliot: he loves his country, uh, something. t: something? t: something? à repetition 4.1.4.8. re-asks in addition to repeating the learner utterance, the teacher was also found to repeat a question in a heightened tone after the student produced an erroneous utterance following feedback (e.g., yoshida, 2010). re-asks was different from repetition or asking a direct question in that re-ask is a repetition of the teacher’s question after an initial feedback turn. the purpose of a re-ask is to repeat the original question as sometimes the students might miss the point of a question while they were in fact capable of answering the question: example 9 original interaction translation t: how would you say the, “three times a year”? t: how would you say the, “three times a year”? ss: 三年… ss: three years… t: “three times a year!” t: “three times a year!”à re-ask elliot: oh, ⼀年三次. elliot: oh, a year three times. 4.1.4.9. translation the teacher occasionally translated students’ l1 utterance into the target language, highlighting the comparison between the two languages and encouraging the students to use the target language for the expression’s future use: example 10 original interaction translation emma: no i did half of it. emma: no i did half of it. t: did half, yeah, 做了⼀半⼉。 t: did half, yeah, did half. à translation emma: 做了⼀半⼉。 emma: did half. 4.1.4.10. asking a direct question the teacher can ask a direct question about how to form a specific expression in the target language (e.g., “how do you say that in french?”). similar to elicitation, the aim is to elicit the correct form and ask the students to re-try, adopting an explicit approach: corrective feedback, learner uptake, and feedback perception in a chinese as a foreign language. . . 169 example 11 original interaction translation teacher: oh, you want to travel all over the world. teacher: oh, you want to travel all over the world. eveline: and help other people. eveline: and help other people. teacher: 或者帮助别人，或者说，how to say “travel all over the world”? teacher: or help other people, or to say, how to say “travel all over the world?” à asking a direction question eveline: 去… eveline: go … 4.1.4.11. directing question to other students when a student made an error, the teacher sometimes sought a correct response from other students: example 12 original interaction translation emma: actually i want to say, old man would be “⽼伙⼦”? emma: actually i want to say, old man would be “old fellow”? t: how do you say “old man”? (looking toward elliot) t: how do you say “old man”? (looking toward elliot) à direction question to other student elliot: (instantly) ⽼⼈。 elliot: (instantly) old person. 4.1.4.12. using l1-english “using l1-english” was used when the teacher felt that it would be easier for the students to understand a certain structure if it was explained in english: example 13 original interaction translation pinky: uh, jīn chán? pinky: uh, jīn chán? t: yeah, ⾦⼭ temple, yeah⾦ ⼭寺. t: yeah, golden mountain temple, yeah golden mountain temple. à using l1-english pinky: ⾦⼭寺。 pinky: golden mountain temple. this type of feedback was different from “translation,” where the teacher translates the student’s english into the target language. when the students were tired or overwhelmed, the teacher used english to lighten up the cognitive load. in example 13 pinky mispronounced the name of a temple. the teacher corrected her pronunciation and at the same time provided the translation of the word “temple” in english to facilitate understanding. tingfeng fu, hossein nassaji 170 4.1.5. coding uptake to code uptake, we used the definition by lyster and ranta (1997) and ellis et al. (2001). we categorized uptake into successful and unsuccessful uptake. an uptake was thus defined as “a student’s utterance that immediately follows the teacher’s feedback and that constitutes a reaction in some way to the teacher’s intention to draw attention to some aspect of the student’s initial utterance” (lyster & ranta, 1997, p. 49). successful uptake referred to a student’s successful correction of the error after teacher feedback. unsuccessful uptake referred to a student’s partial or off-target correction of an error after receiving teacher feedback. the following episode is an example of successful uptake: example 14 original interaction translation emma: no i did half of it. emma: no i did half of it. t: did half, yeah, 做了⼀半⼉。 t: did half, yeah, did half. à recast emma: 做了⼀半⼉。 emma: did half. à successful uptake as shown in this episode, the teacher provided the correct phrase in the target language, and emma successfully repeated the teacher’s utterance. the following is an example of unsuccessful uptake: example 15 original interaction translation t: 在维多利亚还是在温哥华？ t: is it in victoria or in vancouver? alex: 温哥华 easier. alex: vancouver is easier. t: 温哥华容易一些。 t: vancouver is easier. alex: 对。 alex: right. à unsuccessful uptake no uptake referred to the instances when the students did not produce any verbal response to the teacher’s feedback: example 16 original interaction translation alex: 像只⼤蛇 (sé)。 alex: like a big snake. t: 像只⼤蛇(shé)。 t: like a big snake. à recast, no uptake inter-rater reliability was checked for coding both feedback and uptake. forty randomly selected feedback episodes (20% of all feedback episodes) were corrective feedback, learner uptake, and feedback perception in a chinese as a foreign language. . . 171 coded by another coder and there was 97.5% agreement on feedback types, 100% on uptake, and 100% on uptake types. 5. results 5.1. feedback and uptake frequency the first research question investigated the frequency of teacher feedback. a total of 192 feedback episodes were observed during the 10 hours of classroom interaction. a total of 245 feedback moves were identified to have occurred in these episodes. students made a total of 285 errors of which 194 received teacher feedback. thus, the teacher provided corrective feedback to 68.1% of the students’ errors. as noted earlier, 12 feedback types were identified. table 2 shows these feedback types and their percentages. table 2 frequency of each feedback type feedback types numbers percentages 1. recasts 139 56.7% 2. delayed recasts 5 2.0% 3. clarification requests 3 1.2% 4. metalinguistic feedback 26 10.6% 5. elicitation 17 6.9% 6. explicit correction 17 6.9% 7. repetition 5 2.0% 8. re-asks 2 1.0% 9. translation 18 7.3% 10. asking a direct question 8 3.3% 11. directing question to other students 3 1.2% 12. using l1-english 1 0.4% total 245 100% recast was the most frequent feedback type, accounting for 56.7% of all feedback moves. the second most commonly used feedback type was metalinguistic feedback (10.6%) followed by translation and explicit correction, which together accounted for 7.3% of all feedback moves. the remaining seven types—delayed recast, clarification request, asking a direct question, repetition, directing question to other students, re-asks, and using l1-english—ranged from 0.4% to 3.3%, accounting for 11.1% of all feedback moves. table 3 shows learners’ uptake following each feedback type. in general, 59% of all feedback moves led to student uptake, and 45.3% of teacher feedback led to successful repair. the uptake rate and the repair rate were much higher than that of panova and lyster’s study, where only 47% of feedback resulted in student uptake, and only 16% of feedback resulted in learner repair. tingfeng fu, hossein nassaji 172 table 3 general student uptake following each feedback type feedback type quantity types of uptake totalsuccessful uptake unsuccessful uptake uptake no uptake recast count 63 6 69 70 139 % 45.3% 4.3% 49.6% 50.4% 100.0% delayed recast count 3 0 3 2 5 % 60.0% 0.0% 60.0% 40.0% 100.0% clarification request count 2 1 3 0 3 % 66.7% 33.3% 100.0% 0.0% 100.0% translation count 6 3 9 9 18 % 33.3% 16.7% 50.0% 50.0% 100.0% metalinguistic feedback count 5 9 14 12 26 % 19.2% 34.6% 53.8% 46.2% 100.0% elicitation count 11 5 16 1 17 % 64.7% 29.4% 94.1% 5.9% 100.0% explicit correction count 11 5 16 2 18 % 61.1% 27.8% 88.9% 11.1% 100.0% asking a direct question count 3 3 6 2 8 % 37.5% 37.5% 75.0% 25.0% 100.0% repetition count 2 1 3 2 5 % 40.0% 20.0% 60.0% 40.0% 100.0% directing question to other students count 3 0 3 0 3 % 100.0% 0.0% 100.0% 0.0% 100.0% re-asks count 1 1 2 0 2 % 50.0% 50.0% 100.0% 0.0% 100.0% using l1-english count 1 0 1 0 1 % 100.0% 0.0% 100.0% 0.0% 100.0% total count 111 34 145 100 245 % 45.3% 13.8% 59.15% 40.8% 100.0% due to the great number of recasts, it is not surprising that recasts resulted in the greatest number of learner uptake and repair. however, if we look at the percentage of learner uptake and repair resulting from recasts, it was not the highest. 49.6% of all recasts led to learner uptake, whereas 45.3% of all recasts led to successful uptake. elicitation achieved the highest percentage of learner uptake (94.1%). of all 17 elicitation moves, 16 resulted in student uptake, and 64.7% (11 out of 17) led to successful uptake. following elicitation, explicit correction ranked second in facilitating student uptake: 88.9% (16 out of 18) resulted in student uptake, and 61.1% (11 out of 18) led to successful uptake. metalinguistic feedback was the next best technique. 53.8% (14 out of 26) of metalinguistic feedback moves resulted in student uptake, but only 19.2% (5 out of 26) led to successful uptake. translation had a 50% (9 out of 18) uptake rate, and 33.3% (6 out of 18) resulted in successful uptake. due to the small numbers of occurrence (1 time to 8 times) of the remaining feedback types, their uptake and repair rates were not as informative. corrective feedback, learner uptake, and feedback perception in a chinese as a foreign language. . . 173 5.2. students’ and teacher’s perceptions of feedback frequency another research question concerned the students’ and the teacher’s perception of the use and frequency of feedback. to answer this question, the survey asked the students to indicate their level of agreement with answers to questions such as “how often do you think the teacher provided feedback to your/peers’ errors?” each option was assigned a number to indicate the frequency that the students perceived (e.g., 5 means “always used this feedback type,” 4 means “used this type 75% of the time,” etc.). the options with their corresponding numbers are listed in table 4. table 4 options for rating feedback frequency number frequency 5 100% 4 75% 3 50% 2 25% 1 0% table 5 the students’ and the teacher’s perceptions of feedback frequency (means) and the actual feedback frequency (percentage) students teacher actual feedback frequency 4.7 4 64.9% the results of the students’ mean, the teacher’s mean, as well as the actual feedback frequency for lesson 10 to lesson 13 are presented in table 5. from the table, we can see that feedback was provided to 64.9% of all student errors. the average of the teacher’s perception rating of feedback frequency was 4. in other words, the teacher believed that she had given feedback to 75% of all student errors. the students’ mean was 4.7, which corresponded to roughly 92.5%. the students thought that the teacher had given them feedback on a very frequent basis. in comparison, the teacher’s perception of feedback frequency was much closer to the actual frequency. the results were obtained from question 3 to question 9 of the survey that asked how often the teacher provided each type of feedback (e.g., “did the teacher say the correct form after you/your peer made an error?”). table 6 gives an overview of the actual frequency of seven feedback types, and the students’ rating and the teacher’s ratings of feedback frequency. the actual frequency rank of each feedback type, together with the students’ and the teacher’s perception ranking, are presented in table 7. tingfeng fu, hossein nassaji 174 table 6 the students’ and the teacher’s perceptions, and the actual frequency of seven feedback types lesson 10-lesson 13 # of moves actual frequency mean students’ rating mean teacher’s rating recast 65 64.4% 3.9 3.3 clarification request 0 0.0% 3.4 2.5 translation 11 10.9% 3.2 1.8 metalinguistic feedback 5 5.0% 3.8 2.8 elicitation 13 12.9% 2.8 3 explicit correction 5 5.0% 3.4 3.5 repetition 2 2.0% 3 3 total 101 100% --table 7 rankings of the seven feedback types ranking type ranking the actual frequency rank recast ＞ elicitation ＞ translation ＞ metalinguistic feedback & explicit correction ＞ repetition ＞ clarification request teacher’s perception explicit correction ＞ recast ＞ elicitation & repetition ＞ metalinguistic feedback ＞ clarification request ＞ translation students’ perception recast ＞ metalinguistic feedback ＞ clarification request & explicit correction ＞ translation ＞ repetition ＞ elicitation from the rankings, we can see that explicit correction was perceived by the teacher to be the most frequently used feedback type. in actual teaching, explicit correction and metalinguistic feedback ranked fourth. following explicit correction, the teacher perceived recast to be the second most frequently used type. the teacher was quite accurate in perceiving recast, elicitation, metalinguistic feedback, and clarification request, but not so accurate in perceiving explicit correction, repetition, and translation. the students perceived recast to be the most common type of feedback. following recast, metalinguistic feedback was perceived to be the second most frequent type. however, in actual teaching, metalinguistic feedback ranked fourth. students were quite accurate in perceiving recast, explicit correction, and repetition, but not so accurate in perceiving metalinguistic feedback, clarification request, translation, and elicitation. 6. discussion this study investigated the provision of teacher feedback and learner uptake in an adult cfl context. the study also examined learner and teacher perception of feedback. initially, lyster and ranta’s coding system for feedback moves which involves six types of feedback was used in indentifying the type of corrective feedback, learner uptake, and feedback perception in a chinese as a foreign language. . . 175 teacher’s feedback and learner uptake, however, the study also identified additional feedback types used by the teacher. altogether, it identified 12 types of feedback used by the teacher in this instructional setting: recast, delayed recast, clarification request, translation, metalinguistic feedback, elicitation, explicit correction, asking a direct question, repetition, directing question to other students, re-asks, and using l1-english. many instances of multiple feedback episodes were also observed, including recast + metalinguistic feedback and metalinguistic feedback + explicit correction. the taxonomy of feedback types identified in this study adds to those identified in previous research on classroom corrective feedback (e.g., lyster & ranta, 1997; panova & lyster, 2002) and thus can be used as an extended framework to examine feedback in l2 classrooms. it also suggests that teachers have more options to correct learners’ errors than what has been frequently discussed in previous studies. the frequency of the feedback types and learner uptake will now be discussed and compared with previous studies. the results of this study showed that throughout the 10 hours of recorded classroom interaction the teacher made a feedback move every two and a half minutes. comparing this rate with panova and lyster’s (2002) result of 48%, this percentage of correction was 20% higher. one reason for this difference could be learners’ level of language proficiency. as panova and lyster mentioned, their students were at the beginner level. therefore, the lower level of proficiency might have caused less frequent interaction between the teacher and the students. in the present study, the students were more advanced and hence had already possessed adequate speaking and reading skills. this difference then points to the role of language proficiency in the provision of feedback in l2 classrooms. another reason could be the teacher’s teaching style and the fact that the classroom was a foreign language classroom. when observing the classes, it was found that the teacher frequently called on certain students to either do a quick comprehension check or to ask them to read a paragraph out loud. this could have generated more opportunities for the students to produce errors and therefore more chances of correcting them. as for the provision of feedback types, out of 245 feedback moves that occurred in 10 hours of recorded interaction, recasts occurred 139 times, accounting for 56.7% of all moves. following recast, metalinguistic feedback accounted for 10.6% of all feedback moves. translation and explicit correction each occurred 18 times, ranking third with the frequency of 7.3%. explicit correction was much more favored in the current study. when looking at the multiple feedback episodes, the most common combination for multiple feedback was recast + metalinguistic feedback. the second most common was metalinguistic feedback + explicit correction, which occurred three times. single explicit correction occurred 18 times. these results show that the teacher tended to use a more explicit feedback style in her tingfeng fu, hossein nassaji 176 teaching in this chinese l2 classroom. this might be attributed to the nature and the goal of the course and also the textbook used. the lessons were more grammarfocused and the teacher closely followed the textbook chapters. the students were told that they would be tested on the grammar points in the chapters. therefore, the teacher could have felt obligated to devote class time to analyze morphosyntactic structures as well as to overtly correct students’ nontargetlike utterances. the least used feedback type in the current study was clarification requests, which occurred only 3 times. clarification requests were often used when the teacher intended to give the student a second try or when the teacher did not understand the meaning that the student tried to convey (lyster & mori, 2006; lyster & ranta, 1997; panova & lyster, 2002). therefore, clarification request seemed to be less needed in this intermediate level course where the chances for the teacher not understanding the students’ meaning were slimmer. moreover, there was not as much student-initiated meaning-focused discussion, which would have probably generated more communication breakdowns. with respect to uptake, as presented in table 3, two of the three new feedback types unique to this study had promising successful uptake rates even though their occurrences were few: directing question to other students (100% successful uptake in 3 instances) and using l1-english (100% successful uptake in 1 instance). this result is not surprising given the explicit nature of instruction and the classroom focus on grammar. of all other feedback types, the feedback type that led to the highest successful uptake rate was clarification request (66.7%). elicitation was the next most successful move, with a successful uptake rate of 64.7%. following elicitation, explicit correction led to 61.1% of successful uptake. in lyster and ranta’s (1997) study, the top three feedback types that generated the most amount of successful uptake were elicitation (46%), metalinguistic feedback (45%) and explicit correction (36%). panova and lyster’s (2002) top three were recast (29%), elicitation (11%) and clarification requests (10%). the current study differed from panova and lyster’s study the most in that the successful uptake rates were much higher and occurred with the more explicit feedback types. one reason could be that the teacher laid overt emphasis on forms in question, especially when the student engagement level was low. however, the relatively high uptake rate following explicit types of feedback agreed with previous studies (ellis, 2011; lyster & saito, 2010). this suggests that teachers could consider more explicit techniques when correcting students’ errors, especially when the purpose is to raise the level of participation and learner attention. also, the mismatch between the students’ expectation and the actual focus of a language course could be discouraging for the students. one of the research questions was about learners’ and teacher’s perception of feedback. the results showed that the biggest difference in frequency was in corrective feedback, learner uptake, and feedback perception in a chinese as a foreign language. . . 177 elicitation and asking a direct question. elicitation occurred 4 times and 13 times before and after the survey, increasing from 23.5% to 76.5%. asking a direct question had a bigger increase from 0% to 100% (0 to 8 times); all of its instances occurred after the survey began. this might be due to the possibility that the teacher started to pay more attention to her error correction strategies. on the contrary, delayed recast, clarification request, metalinguistic feedback, explicit correction, repetition, directing question to other students, and using l1-english, all decreased in frequency after the survey began. we do need to keep in mind that the occurrences were very few. metalinguistic feedback and explicit correction were the two types that both decreased by 30%. both types were explicit and, as mentioned before, both types might have created opportunities for the teacher to elaborate on certain grammar points. it could be true that the teacher had begun to cut back on feedback that would lead to teacher-centered grammar explanations; instead, she called on students to elicit more student-centered discussions. also, the teacher had a much more accurate perception of feedback frequency than the students. the teacher provided corrective feedback to the students’ errors 64.9% of the time. while the teacher perceived the frequency to be 75%, the students thought it was much more frequent (92.5%). this might be due to the salient nature of the more explicit feedback types. also, the teacher often called on students, promoting noticing when a mistake was made. similarly, other students might have been watching and engaging in a similar way while their peers were struggling with a certain question. even though the teacher’s perception of feedback frequency was more accurate than that of the students, her perceived frequency was still higher than the actual frequency. this could have also been due of the focus of the lesson, which was for the most part on grammar. this could have affected the teacher’s perception of feedback and its frequency. among the different feedback types, both the teacher and the students were quite accurate in perceiving recast, which accounted for more than half of the teacher’s feedback moves. this may be attributed to the fairly explicit nature of recasts. this result is important as it shows that the students’ and the teachers’ perception of recasts depends on the nature and the context of recasts. 7. conclusions in this study, the focus of grammar teaching could have potentially contributed to the high amount of explicit feedback. students’ proficiency level could have been another factor contributing to a high feedback rate. more proficient students were more capable of producing target language forms and reacting to teacher tingfeng fu, hossein nassaji 178 feedback, which in turn facilitated more teacher feedback. in addition, more explicit feedback types led to the highest amount of learner uptake, and the three newly identified feedback types—asking a direct question, directing question to other students, and using l1 english—had promising uptake and successful uptake rates. elicitation, metalinguistic feedback, and explicit correction were often used along with recasts to draw students’ attention to an error, especially when the level of classroom participation was low. overall, the students produced uptake following 59.1% of teacher correction. we can conclude that the corrective nature of teacher feedback was frequently noticed by the students. in perceiving the frequency of providing feedback, the teacher was more accurate than the students. however, the actual frequency was lower than what the teacher and the students perceived. this could have been due to a large number of errors that passed without being noticed or were noticed but were not corrected. in perceiving the frequency of each of the seven feedback types, neither the teacher nor the students were accurate. this could be partially explained by the cognitive demand that the survey had imposed on the teacher and the students. it might have been difficult for them to recall how the correction was made while they were concentrating on correcting the errors. finally, the three new types of corrective feedback identified in this study: asking a direct question, directing question to other students, and using l1-english, are all explicit types of feedback. although the new types occurred only a few times, the uptake rate was promising. this indicates that the explicitness of feedback types might be related to certain classroom dynamics: quieter classrooms might need more overt corrective techniques. teachers should consider these techniques or develop new explicit forms of feedback in their classrooms. there are a few limitations of this study that should be considered when interpreting the results. the first limitation is that the data came from one class. future research can examine the same questions in other cfl classes. another limitation is that although one of the questions in this study was about the learners’ and the teacher’s perception of feedback, this was more about the frequency of the different feedback types and not about how participants interpreted a particular feedback type. to have evidence for the interpretation of feedback, studies with a stimulated recall design are needed (carpenter et al., 2006; egi, 2007a, 2007b). in this study, the students’ uptake was coded to be either successful uptake, unsuccessful uptake, or no uptake. however, as observed in the data, there were also some instances when the students were not given enough time after teacher feedback. very often, the teacher corrected several errors in one turn, making it difficult for the students to identify and repair each error. the opportunities were not captured using this coding scheme and thus a more fine-tuned coding scheme for uptake instances is needed. corrective feedback, learner uptake, and feedback perception in a chinese as a foreign language. . . 179 acknowledgments this study is based on the first author’s ma thesis (fu, 2012) completed at the university of victoria, victoria, bc. we would like to thank the students and the teacher who participated in this study and also the manuscript reviewers for their useful comments. tingfeng fu, hossein nassaji 180 references amhrein, h., & nassaji, h. 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(2005). form-focused instruction. in e. hinkel (ed.), handbook on research in second language teaching and learning (pp. 673-691). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. yoshida, r. (2010). teachers’ choice and learners’ preference of corrective feedback types. language awareness, 17(1), 78-93. doi:10.2167/la429.0 zhao, s., & bitchener, j. (2007). incidental focus on form in teacher-learner and learner-learner interactions. system, 35, 431-447. 637 studies in second language learning and teaching department of english studies, faculty of pedagogy and fine arts, adam mickiewicz university, kalisz ssllt 5 (4). 2015. 637-662 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2015.5.4.6 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl getting to the bottom of l2 listening instruction: making a case for bottom-up activities joseph siegel meiji gakuin university, tokyo, japan siegel@eco.meijigakuin.ac.jp aki siegel rikkyo university, tokyo, japan siegel@rikkyo.ac.jp abstract this paper argues for the incorporation of bottom-up activities for english as a foreign language (efl) listening. it discusses theoretical concepts and pedagogic options for addressing bottom-up aural processing in the efl classroom as well as how and why teachers may wish to include such activities in lessons. this discussion is augmented by a small-scale classroom-based research project that investigated six activities targeting learners’ bottom-up listening abilities. learners studying at the lower-intermediate level of a compulsory efl university course were divided into a treatment group (n = 21) and a contrast group (n = 32). each group listened to the same audio material and completed listening activities from an assigned textbook. the treatment group also engaged in a set of six bottom-up listening activities using the same material. this quasi-experimental study used dictation and listening proficiency tests before and after the course. between-group comparisons of t-test results of dictation and listening proficiency tests indicated that improvements for the treatment group were probably due to the bu intervention. in addition, results from a posttreatment survey suggested that learners value explicit bottom-up listening instruction. keywords: listening pedagogy; bottom-up listening activities; dictation; listening proficiency joseph siegel, aki siegel 638 1. introduction among the four main language skills (i.e., listening, speaking, reading, and writing), listening may be the most important skill for second language (l2) users. listening in an l2 is the main way in which learners expand their understanding of spoken input and therefore is an essential element of language learning (field, 2008a). according to dunkel (1991), “[aural comprehension] is very possibly of more use to most learners of foreign languages than is speaking competence” (p. 436). what is more, the importance attributed to l2 listening continues to increase in international communication, business, testing, and englishas-a-lingua-franca interactions (richards & burns, 2012; rost, 2014). despite the importance of listening, teachers may be unfamiliar with a range of activities that effectively develop the necessary subskills and strategies that lead to competent listening (nemtchinova, 2013). moreover, based on findings from questionnaires, class observations, and teacher interviews, language educators are often lacking in practical approaches, techniques and activities that they can apply in their classrooms (graham, santos, & francis-brophy, 2014; graham, santos, & vanderplank, 2011). further, teachers who turn to textbook teacher manuals for help may find little support for listening (field, 2012). like their teachers, students also struggle with listening in the classroom, and they usually identify listening as the most difficult skill to acquire (e.g., field, 2008a; renandya & farrell, 2011). 2. literature review 2.1. understanding speech until the late 1980’s, listening was generally viewed as a receptive ability in which the listener played a passive role. however, more recent perspectives on l2 listening comprehension recognize that the listener engages actively in interpreting a speaker’s messages and plays a pivotal role in the communication process (e.g., anderson & lynch, 1988). an ordinary belief about listening may be that it is a single process, but this stance would be overly simplistic. a more accurate and refined understanding defines listening not as a single process but as a series of integrated processes that must combine for successful listening comprehension (lynch, 2009). this series of operations includes distinguishing speech from nonspeech, perceiving phonemes and individual sounds, parsing the speech stream into individual words and meaningful chunks, recognizing grammatical patterns and discourse structure, inferring a speaker’s intentions, incorporating one’s knowledge of the topic and situation, and understanding all getting to the bottom of l2 listening instruction: making a case for bottom-up activities 639 of these within the context of speech (e.g., brown, 2011; buck, 2001; field, 2003). represented in this list of processes are psychological skills, schematic knowledge, interpretational abilities, as well as linguistic, general, and contextual knowledge (e.g., lynch, 2009; rost, 2002; wu, 1998). thus, to achieve overall listening comprehension in real time, a listener needs to draw on myriad capabilities, each at least to some degree. these processes can be categorized into the bottom-up (bu) and topdown (td) views of listening, two notions that are recurrent in the literature. bu processes are essentially “stimulus-driven” (howard, 1983, p. 291); that is, an acoustic signal must enter the ear before they can begin. in contrast, td processes are “conceptually-driven” (howard, 1983, p. 292) and include the listener’s background knowledge and contextual understanding. these notions are summarized below and represented in figure 1, which reflects the perceptual processing, parsing, and utilization stages of anderson’s (2005) model of aural comprehension. the arrows in figure 1 represent the directionality of processing and are double-ended to demonstrate that these cognitive operations may overlap or occur (nearly) simultaneously. note. * = these are the bu aspects the present study is concerned with. figure 1 directionality of td and bu processing td processing involves the breaking down of a whole message into individual parts. listeners draw on prediction, inference, and contextual skills, among others, to interpret the speaker’s meaning (lynch & mendelsohn, 2002). td processing also comprises prior knowledge, including topic, genre, and cultural understanding (vandergrift, 2004). each listener’s td processing is distinct and dependent on context, individual knowledge, and life experience, which present themselves through predictions, hypotheses and expectations. at the higher end of figure 1, notions of schema activation and script top-down processing (conceptually-driven; moving towards bu) schema (underlying structure that links parts of the text) script (a sequence of events or discrete parts of the text) concept (a mental representation of the text) meaningful chunks and phrases* parsing speech stream* phoneme recognition* bottom-up processing (stimulus driven; moving towards td) joseph siegel, aki siegel 640 knowledge are similar to anderson’s (2005) concept of utilization in that listeners take what they hear and apply it to their background knowledge and life experience. because concepts such as utilization, schema, and background knowledge are distinct for each listener, td processing operations and outcomes likely vary. while td processing receives considerable attention in listening pedagogy and textbooks in the forms of predictive exercises and activation of background knowledge, relying solely on td listening can result in misunderstandings (e.g., lynch, 2009). therefore, this paper argues for the benefits of directly addressing the bu skills, shown at the lower part of figure 1. at the lowest level of figure 1 is phoneme recognition, which is related to anderson’s notion of perceptual processing, as both concepts focus on individual sounds and sound combinations. perceptual processing is also required for parsing the speech stream into words and chunks, for listeners need to recognize word beginnings and endings. recognition of phonemes and parsing of the speech stream can only occur once a stimulus (i.e., aural input) is recognized. in contrast to td processing, bu processing involves “perceiving and parsing the speech stream at increasingly larger levels beginning with auditory-phonetic, phonemic, syllabic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, propositional, pragmatic and interpretive” (field, 2003, p. 326). listeners build meaning in a cumulative way whereby individual phonemes combine to form more substantial meaningcarrying expressions (vandergrift, 2004). bu processing acts on incoming speech to decipher message content through the auditory signals the speaker sends. it is generally agreed that listeners do not exclusively employ either of these approaches; rather, an interactive combination of the two is ideal (e.g., lynch & mendelsohn, 2002; yeldham & gruba, 2014). contextual guesswork (i.e., td) needs to be combined with acoustic and linguistic perception and interpretation (i.e., bu; lynch, 2009). as lynch and mendelsohn (2002) point out, every listener needs to attend to acoustic input in order to aid their td processing and to confirm, reject, or revise any hypotheses they have formed. while bu and td are common views of the listening process, several other factors are also involved in and impact listening competence. these factors include the context of the listening event, the listening task or purpose, affective elements that are distinct for each listener, social abilities that may include requests for clarification or tolerance for misunderstandings, and cultural expectations for oral and aural communication (flowerdew & miller, 2005). all of these components (e.g., bu, td, social and contextual factors) integrate and contribute to listening competency. based on the conceptualization of listening discussed above, several different elements are involved in aural comprehension. these include td, bu, and getting to the bottom of l2 listening instruction: making a case for bottom-up activities 641 the ability to demonstrate successful comprehension in real time (i.e., by responding appropriately to a speaker or task). therefore, a logical expectation would be that these areas of listening would all be addressed in l2 listening lessons. the current state of affairs, however, indicates a pedagogic imbalance (e.g., field, 2008a; siegel, 2014; vandergrift, 2010). 2.2. common practices much of l2 listening pedagogy involves extensive focus on td elements or considerable emphasis on answering comprehension questions (e.g., multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, etc.), or a combination of both. these approaches often overlook the “nuts and bolts that [enable] the listening process to take place” (field, 2008a, p. 30). in other words, teaching approaches often place importance on what the listener brings to the listening event (i.e., aspects near the td portion of figure 1, such as background knowledge, personal experience, etc.) or on students’ ability to demonstrate comprehension by correctly answering discrete item questions. these points of emphasis overshadow, in particular, phoneme recognition and parsing capabilities, the elements represented near the bu position in figure 1. furthermore, as pointed out by several recent publications (e.g., siegel & siegel, 2013; vandergrift & goh, 2012; yeldham & gruba, 2014), research into listening pedagogy has typically overlooked studies on bu pedagogy. 2.3. pedagogic suggestions recently, pedagogic literature on l2 listening has begun to promote bu activities that explicitly and directly focus learner attention on the phonological properties and segmentation of the speech stream (e.g., al-jasser, 2008; siegel & siegel, 2013; field, 2008a; vandergrift & goh, 2012). however, recent studies of l2 listening instruction have revealed that many teachers rarely incorporate bu processing in their listening lessons (e.g., graham, santos, & francis-brophy, 2014; siegel, 2014). an expansion in pedagogic practices to include more bu techniques is needed as this area is typically overlooked and because many of the listening difficulties l2 learners experience have been attributed to bu obstacles. these difficulties include an inability to notice spoken forms of words learners know in print and trouble segmenting the speech stream into manageable chunks and phrases (goh, 2000). beyond these are issues related the speed of l2 speech and the often challenging phonological blending of sounds that occur during fluent speech (vandergrift & goh, 2012). in response to these challenges, commentators have called for more attention to be given to bu processing as a crucial element for developing l2 listening skills (e.g., field, 2003). joseph siegel, aki siegel 642 pedagogic techniques for the classroom include focusing on phoneme perception by accounting for aspects such as segmental and suprasegmental features, intonation patterns and phonetic clustering (e.g., al-jasser, 2008; yeldham & gruba, 2014). also recommended are activities that target segmenting the speech stream into chunks, recognizing where words begin and end, and building up lexical predictions based on the previous words in an utterance (e.g., field, 2008a). while these and other bu activities have been marketed in l2 teaching and learning literature, the extent to which they aid the development of learners’ bu abilities in the classroom remains an area in need of further investigation. intuitively, many of these exercises would seem to be valuable additions to any teacher’s listening instruction repertoire. however, they need to shift from the conceptual level of the literature to the practical classroom context. 2.3.1. the importance of bu processing for l2 listeners first language (l1) users develop phonetic recognition and word segmentation skills early in life and without conscious attention (e.g., vandergrift & goh, 2012). while this development occurs naturally in the l1, direct instruction and practice for similar skills (e.g., phonetic clustering norms, lexical segmentation) in the l2 may be beneficial. field (2008a) points out that the objective of teaching learners how to manage the speech stream centers on learners being able to more closely approximate the automatic decoding processes employed by skilled listeners. the crucial importance of the acoustic signal needs to be acknowledged in l2 listening as equally (or perhaps more) important than td and contextual knowledge (field, 2003), and in order to do so instructors may need to specifically target those skills that allow learners access to the messages coded within the speech stream. by including bu activities in their classrooms, l2 teachers can help students overcome phoneme, word recognition and segmentation problems that frustrate many learners, particularly at lower levels (goh, 2000). in addition, learners need accurate bu abilities in order to compare incoming input with the hypotheses and expectations they develop through td processing (lynch & mendelsohn, 2002). moreover, perception and parsing activities can raise learners’ awareness of acoustic pronunciation connections and variations of spoken language (vandergrift & goh, 2012). likewise, field (2008a) observes that improving learners’ ability to analyze the speech stream brings them closer to being skilled listeners who can accurately and automatically decode incoming speech, understand and utilize cotext (what has been said previously in a text), and free up valuable cognitive resources. the fundamental nature of listening involves proficiency in perceiving and parsing the speech stream; therefore, the benefits mentioned above warrant exploration of direct bu instruction techniques in l2 classrooms. getting to the bottom of l2 listening instruction: making a case for bottom-up activities 643 2.3.2. studies of aural bu processing from a psycholinguistic perspective, several studies have increased our understanding of bu processes and the important role they play in l2 listening. these studies have attempted to isolate bu processes such as phoneme discrimination and lexical parsing, as well as to focus on relationships between both td and bu processing and l1 and l2 phonotactics. field (2003) conducted a study concentrating on problems of lexical segmentation and word boundary identification, which highlighted the importance of accurately parsing the speech stream. field (2004) also investigated the potential conflict between td and bu approaches in order to determine which was more influential. using three separate experiments, learners were tested as to whether td processes would override bu evidence from the input. the experiments consisted of word lists, sentences with high frequency words missing, and sentences with low frequency words. results were mixed, but the word list experiment, which focused exclusively on phonetic perception, suggested that many learners attended closely to bu evidence. field (2008b) continued this line of research by investigating whether learners differentiate between function and content words as they deal with the incoming speech stream and found that the latter receive much more recognition than the former. this was in spite of the fact that function words appeared with more frequency in the texts used in the experiment. while content words typically carry more meaning, and therefore warrant significant attention, there are times when function words are important; for example, “compare i’m looking at the photos with i’m looking for the photos” (field, 2008b, p. 429). to draw attention to function words, the author suggests brief awareness raising exercises targeting the problematic words or sounds. these controlled studies are valuable in their advancement of our understanding of l2 aural processing and serve to highlight the need for attention to bu processing in the l2 classroom. research on bu activities has gradually moved from more controlled experiments to the practical context of the classroom. using a quasi-experimental pretest-treatment-posttest design, al-jasser (2008) investigated the possible transfer of l1 phonotactic conventions to an l2. the treatment group received additional bu instruction compared to the contrast group (see appendix a for a summary of the bu instruction). to assess phonetic clustering awareness and lexical segmentation, a word spotting task in which participants were asked to identify words embedded in nonsense sequences was employed. findings showed that l1 phonotactic conventions transferred to the l2, suggesting that explicit bu instruction for l2 conventions is needed and that learners can be taught to utilize certain english-specific phonotactic cues. joseph siegel, aki siegel 644 using a case study approach, yeldham and gruba (2014) followed six taiwanese learners in order to monitor their development during a course that emphasized bu skills. after first establishing learner preference as either predominantly td or bu, students received a coordinated sequence of bu instruction (see appendix a). although individual students benefitted from some aspects of the instruction, overall findings showed little improvement for most of the students, with some students expressing boredom with bu rules and conventions. the authors concluded that a more interactive instructional style that incorporates bu and td listening strategies would be preferable. as this study focused on only six participants, individual learner characteristics and preferences may have affected the findings. 2.4. bu activities as classroom practice the previously mentioned studies have identified important stages of bu processing and attest to the mounting evidence that suggests bu processes are crucial for learners. in other words, studies suggest that teachers can teach learners “how to” listen and that such instruction would be beneficial (nation & newton, 2009). a shift in the literature from comprehension-based approaches and td emphasis toward more attention to bu processing, highlighted by works such as field (2008a) and vandergrift (2010), has the potential to affect the way listening is taught in l2 classrooms. in theory, before accurate comprehension of fluent speech can be attained, learners need to develop bu skills that will help them decode input and need guidance to develop phonotactic and segmentation skills in the l2 (al-jasser, 2008). as bu evolves, overall comprehension of meaning and the ability to compare hypotheses generated from td with actual acoustic input will improve. while the authors of this paper believe the pedagogic suggestions and activities related to bu processing expressed in the literature have pedagogic value, they need to be trialed more extensively in classrooms to determine the effects they may have on l2 listener development, both in terms of bu abilities and overall comprehension. therefore, the present study was designed to determine whether explicit bu processing activities help learners’ l2 listening ability and how learners perceive such activities. 3. the study in the initial stage of this project, siegel and siegel (2013) explored the use of a group of bu activities with two separate university listening classes in japan. while that study demonstrated significant increases on dictation tests and getting to the bottom of l2 listening instruction: making a case for bottom-up activities 645 learners’ positive perceptions of the activities, the research design did not include a contrast group. as such, the study did not specifically show that learners’ dictation test scores improved as a direct result of the bu activities. a second shortcoming was that the study did not employ a test of overall listening proficiency. thus, additional research was designed to negate the conditions that left the previous study open to criticism. 3.1. research design and aims the present study aims to build on the study by siegel and siegel (2013) by refining the research design while incorporating the same set of bu activities. although the skill of listening is complex and multifaceted, the focus of the present study was specifically on bu processing instruction and its role in facilitating listening competency. in order to investigate the effects of bu activities on university efl learners’ ability to understand aural input, this small-scale classroombased research adopted a quasi-experimental research design targeting the following research questions (rqs): 1. does explicit bu instruction affect japanese university efl learners’ listening ability as demonstrated by dictation tests in betweengroup comparisons? 2. does explicit bu instruction affect japanese university efl learners’ listening ability as demonstrated on the listening section of a language proficiency test (casec; for more detail see below) in between-group comparisons? 3. what are japanese university efl learners’ perceptions of bu activities? null hypotheses of nonsignificant mean differences were constructed and tested for rqs 1 and 2. the dependent variables in the study were the dictation tests and the computerized assessment system for english communication (casec) listening test scores, and the independent variable was the type of instruction. a posttreatment questionnaire was administered to address rq 3. details of these procedures are discussed below. 3.2. participants participants in the study were enrolled in a compulsory efl program at a university in japan. all had similar cultural backgrounds and had received approximately six years of efl education at the junior high and high school levels. based on their scores on an english language proficiency test (casec), these students joseph siegel, aki siegel 646 were assigned to classes at the lower intermediate level of the efl program (approximately a2 cefr level), which consisted of a listening/speaking and reading/writing course. the present research focused on the listening/speaking course, in which the textbook let’s talk 1 (jones, 2008) was used for all classes involved in the study. the listening component of this course consisted of textbook listening exercises, interactive activities and weekly quizzes. as it was not possible to control for incidental out-of-class english listening opportunities (e.g., internet use, conversations with english speakers on campus), it is likely that student exposure to oral english outside the classroom varied. three classes, totaling 53 students, took part in the study. the contrast group (cg) included 32 students in two different classes taught by two separate teachers. the cg teachers followed set class materials and activities, which included assigned textbook and audio materials, and administered preand postcourse dictation and casec tests. they taught the listening component of their classes without a special bu intervention. postsemester discussions between the cg teachers and the authors indicated that the cg teachers followed the set textbook listening activities, which included ticking boxes, table completion, gap-fill, and matching exercises. the textbook did not include any listening strategy advice or explicit focus on spoken english (such as blends, contractions, etc.). the cg teachers used a variety of other activities, including self-made information-gap listening exercises, work with audio scripts, and use of additional audio/video materials, which varied by teacher. the treatment group (tg) was taught by a third teacher (one of the authors) and included 21 students. students in the tg practiced listening through the same assigned textbook as the cg, but instruction also included specific bu activities. each listening/speaking class (for both the cg and tg) met twice a week for 90 minutes during the semester, for a total of 30 class periods. 3.3. procedure and tools for this study, the construct of the effects of explicit bu instruction was operationalized through student performance on dictation tests and the casec test, and student perceptions were measured by a questionnaire. due to the pedagogic orientation of this paper, the authors felt it appropriate to include both empirical test results in conjunction with self-reported learner perspectives. the research design presented in figure 2 consisted of the following stages: (a) precourse dictation test for both the cg and tg; (b) standard textbook listening activities for both the cg and tg; (c) explicit bu activities, according to a set weekly schedule, for the tg; (d) postcourse dictation test for both groups; (e) postcourse questionnaire for the tg. getting to the bottom of l2 listening instruction: making a case for bottom-up activities 647 figure 2 research procedure 3.3.1. the dictation test the main rationale for using a dictation test in this study was its capacity to provide evidence of students’ bu processes, specifically their phonological perception and lexical segmentation skills. flowerdew and miller (2005) point out that dictation is an integrative testing technique and is a “synthesis of the speech perception process at the phonological, syntactic, and semantic levels” (p. 199). for that reason, dictation would seem to correspond with the definition of bottomup processes, which includes auditory-phonetic, phonemic, and syntactic aspects (e.g., field, 2003). thus, dictation is one way of investigating the decoding skill (buck, 2001; field, 2008b). though their use is debatable due to concerns about scoring procedures, equal emphasis on all words, decontextualization, and lack of “real world” application, dictation tests were used because they provide visual evidence of perceptual processing and parsing skills and matched the bu instructional focus of the research. that is, they require listeners to exercise and provide visual evidence of phoneme perception and parsing abilities that are not explicitly evident when other instruments such as tests of overall listening comprehension are used. the 100-word dictation test was on the topic of daily routines, which was believed to be a concrete and relatable topic for the participants. the dictation script (see appendix b) contained several features of spoken english, such as elision (e.g., going to, gonna; at about, adabout), and collocations common to the textbook used by the tg and the cg (e.g., go to school; use the train). a digital recording of the dictation script was made by a native-speaking teacher who had no other involvement in the project. this was done to negate any student exposure to the voice on the recording. the script was read twice: once with a 10-second pause between sentences and then once at natural speed without extended pauses. the students listened to the recording in class and were instructed to write down as many words as they could in english. the same dictation task was used for both the preand postdictation test. both the preand postcourse dictation tests were scored by one of the authors and two trained raters who had no other involvement in the project. dictation papers were compared to the original script and the total number of words was counted. each word was worth one point, for a total of 100 points. both cg and tg: pre-course dictation and casec tests both cg and tg: textbook listening activities tg only: treatment of explicit bu activities both cg and tg: post-course dication and casec tests tg only: post-course questionnaire joseph siegel, aki siegel 648 minor spelling mistakes (such as “tost” for “toast”) were counted as correct when students had correct lexical segmentation and a close phonetic approximation of the target word (as suggested in buck, 2001; field, 2008b). the pearson correlation coefficient for interrater reliability was 0.993. 3.3.2. the casec listening test the casec test is an english language proficiency test developed by the society for teaching english proficiency inc. (step), the largest testing institution in japan. the test is completed online and consists of four sections: vocabulary, phrasal expression and usage, listening for main idea, and listening for specific information. each test section is worth 250 points, with the maximum overall score of 1000. the first three sections are multiple choice, and the final section is typed dictation (see nogami & hayashi, 2010 for more details on the test). this test was used because it contains both a global listening comprehension component (part 3, a listening comprehension section where students are required to answer 17 multiple choice main idea questions) as well as a section that focuses on bu processing and specific information (part 4, an 11-item cloze test section where students listen for details and fill in missing words of a sentence or dialogue). scores for parts 3 and 4 were combined (hereafter referred to as the casec listening test), with a maximum point total of 500, and this overall listening section score was used for analysis. 3.3.3. the questionnaire to determine student perceptions of the bu activities, a posttreatment questionnaire was given to the tg. this bilingual survey was presented in students’ l1 and english. students were asked about their confidence in listening and about which bu activities may have helped their listening ability. this survey also contained likert scale options (agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, and disagree) pertaining to learners’ perceived listening improvement as a result of each bu activity and their enjoyment thereof. 3.4. bu instructional treatment the following bu activities were chosen because they address different levels of bu (e.g., phoneme recognition, lexical segmentation and chunking), which correspond to anderson’s (2005) notions of perceptual processing and parsing, as well as to the elements of bu processing identified earlier in figure 1. the activities included in this study were: getting to the bottom of l2 listening instruction: making a case for bottom-up activities 649 · counting words: based on a source text (e.g., textbook audio material or authentic video), the instructor selects sentences. then, the teacher either reads or plays the sentences one at a time. learners count the number of words they hear, typically counting on their fingers. students can then compare their answer with classmates and the teacher. because of contractions and connected speech, a range of answers may be acceptable. this can be a fun and functional technique for introducing various aspects of connected speech, and it emphasizes the phonetic perception of word beginnings and endings, a key skill in parsing the speech stream. · identifying lexical differences: the teacher selects sentences from a source text that include potentially problematic sound combinations or that exemplify some language feature. the original sentence from the text is designated “sentence 1.” the teacher also creates a variation on the sentence and labels the second sentence “sentence 2.” the teacher reads the two sentences and learners listen for any lexical differences. for instance, the teacher says: “1: i want to go to the supermarket. 2: i went to the supermarket.” learners report on the lexical difference. this activity can help learners’ listening accuracy by focusing their attention at the acoustic phonetic level, where important grammatical and semantic information (e.g., tense, pluralization) is communicated. it can also be a useful method for reinforcing or recycling any recent grammar points covered in class through aural practice. · syntactic predicting: the instructor splits sentences from the source text either into single words or into common chunks. students hear or see (on a blackboard or slide) one or two words at a time. the teacher encourages learners to guess the subsequent words or chunks through sentence syntax or semantic meaning. for example, students hear or see “i _______” and call out word candidates for the next space. learners can also write down and compare their ideas before proceeding. possibilities in this case should be limited to verbs. the teacher can give feedback on word candidates offered by students. the activity continues with the teacher adding the next word or phrase: “i have to __________.” the teacher repeats the process of eliciting student ideas and continues: “i have to help _______”, “i have to help my parents with _________”, “i have to help my parents with the laundry.” this activity can stimulate grammatical and syntactic knowledge that students may already have but have not linked to the predictive aspects of listening. further, it draws learners’ attention to parsing the speech stream as well as to listening for and creating chunks of language. · highlighting connected speech: using the source text, the teacher chooses sentences with common sets of connected speech. first, a sentence is written on the board and students are encouraged to predict how the joseph siegel, aki siegel 650 sentence might sound in spoken form. then they hear the sentence spoken aloud (either spoken by the teacher or via a recording). students can then participate in listen and repeat activities with the featured connected speech. this activity aids the development of phonetic perception and parsing of the speech stream, and it helps learners understand the differences between written and spoken language. · fill-in-the-blanks: this is a rather traditional way of focusing on specific words in a text. the written support provided, along with the listeners’ syntactic and semantic knowledge, may help them complete the task. such activities are often featured in listening textbooks but can also be created by teachers. they typically draw on phoneme perception and parsing skills, particularly when filling in a single-word gap. when the gap consists of more than one word, then the activity may also encourage accurate aural chunking. during this kind of bu instruction, students completed both single-word and multiword gap fills. · short transcriptions (adapted from siegel & siegel, 2013): students listen to short stretches of spoken language, either read or played by the teacher, and attempt to write what they hear. they can then discuss their work with classmates and the teacher. for the purposes of this study, short transcriptions consisted of brief question and answer combinations (e.g., “how are you today? i’m absolutely fantastic. today’s going to be a great day!”). these combinations were between 15-25 words and, although significantly shorter than the 100-word dictation test, the short transcription activity may have affected the dictation test results due to task familiarity. each activity was employed for approximately 10 minutes during three classes throughout the semester (e.g., the counting words activity was used for 10 minutes on three separate occasions for an approximate total of 30 minutes during the semester). when developing the activities for the tg class, the same assigned textbook audio used by the cg was utilized. thus, the material covered by the cg and tg was the same; however, the tg also incorporated the additional bu activities. for approximately 10 minutes per class, cg teachers incorporated a variety of other activities, including self-made information gap listening exercises, work with audio scripts, and use of additional audio/video materials selected by the teachers. therefore, the time spent on listening between the tg and cg was approximately the same. 3.5. analysis the overall alpha level was set at .05 and the statistical analysis was completed using spss version 21. students with missing dictation or casec listening test getting to the bottom of l2 listening instruction: making a case for bottom-up activities 651 scores were omitted from the data set. consequently, the cg had 26 students and the tg had 18. to determine whether the listening abilities of the cg and tg differed, t tests were conducted on the pretest scores for both the dictation and casec instruments. the results showed no significant differences between the two groups on either the dictation test (t(42) = 1.26, p = .216) or on the casec listening test (t(42) = 1.76, p = .086). in other words, at the beginning of the semester, and prior to the treatment, the listening abilities of the two groups were similar. the following section will present the descriptive statistics and the results for the dictation and casec listening tests. 4. results 4.1. the dictation test descriptive statistics for the dictation test are presented in table 1. two notable results are evident: the differences in the m increases and the change in the sd between the two groups. the increase in the m for the tg (10.44) is noticeably higher than that for the cg (2.33), which may suggest that the bu instruction had at least some effect. as illustrated in figure 3, the tg showed a sharp increase in their scores while the cg showed only a slight improvement. a paired samples t test for the tg showed a significant increase in the mean score (t(17) = -4.703, p < .001) while the cg showed no significant differences (t(25) = -1.228, p = 0.231). therefore, the increase in the test scores of the tg was not by chance. furthermore, the changes in sd values show that whereas students in the cg were similarly dispersed on both the preand postcourse dictation, those in the tg moved closer together and had more uniform scores on the posttest than on the precourse test. this suggests that the bu instruction had a positive effect on most of the students, and not just a small portion of the students. table 1 descriptive statistics for the dictation test statistic pretest posttest treatment (n = 18) contrast (n = 26) treatment (n = 18) contrast (n = 26) m 32.78 36.00 43.22 39.33 sd 11.39 10.68 9.07 10.37 skewedness -0.05 -0.44 0.55 0.26 joseph siegel, aki siegel 652 figure 3 the dictation test results 4.2. the casec listening test results from the casec listening test provided data related to students’ overall listening comprehension, which a dictation test may not be able to measure. the descriptive statistics for the student performance on the casec listening test are presented in table 2. as table 2 shows, despite starting with a lower mean score, the tg outperformed the cg on the casec listening test. as shown in table 2 and figure 4, the cg scores slightly decreased while the tg increased significantly. similar to the dictation test results, the effect of the bu instruction based on a paired samples t test was statistically significant (t(17) = -2.172, p < .05), while the cg showed no significant differences (t(25) = 1.019, p = 0.318). again, this finding indicates that the score increases were not only by chance. table 2 descriptive statistics for the casec listening test statistic pretest posttest treatment (n = 18) contrast (n = 26) treatment (n = 18) contrast (n = 26) m 229.22 244.58 248.83 238.69 sd 31.28 26.48 45.74 34.53 skewedness -0.26 0.45 1.05 0.13 getting to the bottom of l2 listening instruction: making a case for bottom-up activities 653 figure 4 the casec listening test results 4.3. the posttreatment survey responses to the posttreatment survey (tg, n = 21) showed overall positive attitudes toward the bu activities, with 67% (14) of students indicating that their confidence in listening had increased as a result of the bu exercises. the remaining 33% of students felt their listening ability had stayed the same. each activity received an individual score (1, strongly disagree; 4, strongly agree) relating to enjoyment and perceived improvement stimulated by the activity. the average ratings for each activity were 3.33 and 3.28, respectively, demonstrating that learners had overall positive perceptions of the bu activities. 5. discussion findings from this study provide some justification for more pedagogic attention to bu processes, as promoted in the literature (e.g., field, 2008a; siegel & siegel, 2013; vandergrift & goh, 2012). statistical analyses showed no significant difference in listening ability between the cg and the tg at the beginning of the study. therefore, gains on the dictation and listening proficiency tests suggest that the bu activities helped the tg students deal with the speech stream and improve their listening competency. explicit practice for phonological and parsing skills are likely to have contributed to overall listening comprehension, as measured by the casec listening test. student perceptions from the posttreatment survey served to augment the empirical gains, as the learners in the tg expressed positive opinions about the bu activities. however, we must exercise caution in finding any direct causal relationship due to the small number of participants. joseph siegel, aki siegel 654 both the empirical and survey findings are in line with those in siegel and siegel (2013), and the addition of a listening proficiency instrument (i.e., the casec listening test) provided further insights. results from the present study demonstrate that bu activities may be effective in increasing learners’ aural processing, are possibly related to improvements in overall listening comprehension to some degree, and were viewed as a valuable use of class time by most learners. 5.1. research question 1: dictation results rq1 focused on the effects bu instruction might have on dictation test scores, and the null hypothesis for this question was rejected. the analysis demonstrated that the explicit bu activities positively affected listener ability as displayed on the dictation test. this positive effect is evidenced by the relatively large gains made by the tg (10.44) compared to those of the cg (2.33). in addition, the sd of the tg scores decreased more than that of the cg. based on these results, it can be said that the tg in this study improved more and did so more uniformly than the cg. furthermore, the data from the t test showed statistically significant score increases on the part of the tg, indicating that their gains were not by chance but rather due to the bu intervention. these results suggest that bu instruction may be effective in significantly improving l2 listening ability as measured by the dictation test. taken as a whole, the statistical data indicate that the incorporation of explicit bu attention, along with standard textbook listening activities, can increase learners’ phoneme perception and parsing abilities more than the standard textbook activities alone. therefore, we tentatively argue that bu skills such as perception, parsing, and chunking need direct and explicit attention in listening lessons, and more attention from l2 researchers, as these skills may not be acquired inherently and their acquisition may be accelerated by explicit activities. for example, activities such as those used in this study can help draw attention to spoken forms of the words students may already know in print but struggle to understand in the rapidly-incoming speech stream. as field (2008a) points out, bu processing and the decoding of the speech stream allow listeners to access the nuts and bolts that are crucial for listening. without such a capacity, listeners will be rendered unable to compare the actual acoustic input they hear with the hypotheses and expectations they might build up through td processing. as such, bu processing of aural language is essential, and the activities employed here seemed to aid learners in improving their perception and parsing abilities as demonstrated on the dictation tests. getting to the bottom of l2 listening instruction: making a case for bottom-up activities 655 5.2. research question 2: the casec listening test results regarding rq 2, the bu instruction seemed to have some positive effect on the tg’s listening proficiency test scores. although there were no significant between-group differences prior to the course, when considering the noticeable gains by the tg and the decreasing scores by the cg on the casec listening test, these results may signal a need for more explicit bu instruction. furthermore, the results may indicate the effect of bu instruction on overall listening comprehension. despite starting lower than the cg, the tg outperformed the cg by more than 10 points on the posttest. additional corroboration of this claim was provided by the t-test results, which also showed statistically significant gains by the tg, indicating that their gains were probably due to some specific pedagogic feature rather than to chance. the null hypothesis for rq 2 was rejected as results showed that the bu instruction had a positive effect on overall listening proficiency for the tg in this study. 5.3. research question 3: student perceptions of bu activities student responses toward all six bu activities were generally positive, indicating that, from students’ perspective, these exercises have a place in the l2 classroom. learners not only thought that all of the activities were valuable in terms of their listening development, but they also reported that they were enjoyable. this notion of enjoyment should not be overlooked as many students traditionally view listening as the most difficult l2 skill to acquire (e.g., field, 2008a; renandya & farrell, 2011). thus, to help motivation and to avoid repetitive, monotonous listening routines, these and similar activities may be welcome additions to lesson plans. positive survey findings related to student perceptions of bu activities should be viewed as important learner feedback on listening instruction, which is often absent from the pedagogic literature. 6. pedagogic implications these findings are particularly important because they suggest that overall listening competency, not simply the ability to complete a dictation activity, can be bolstered by bu activities. it would seem that students with developed bu processing skills are able to access main ideas and specific details on the casec listening test more accurately than those whose bu processing abilities were not explicitly developed through the bu activities described earlier. the focus on bu properties of the l2 may have aided the tg learners in recognizing individual phonemes, segmenting the speech stream, and comparing their listening expectations with the joseph siegel, aki siegel 656 actual aural input, which in turn may have manifested itself in higher scores on the global comprehension questions and more specific detail focused items. as such, these findings may be valuable for many in the l2 teaching and learning community for a variety of purposes, including listening assessments and more general communication. the listening portions of tests such as the casec, as well as ielts, toefl, and, toeic often require students to demonstrate their listening competency through both global and detail questions. findings from this study suggest that teachers aiming to help their students to achieve high scores on these instruments may wish to include some explicit focus on bu processing, whether in the form of the activities used in this study or in different ways. moreover, conversational listening competency requires the ability to identify discrete items of information, such as names, dates, options, and reasons, in order to respond appropriately. based on these findings, it appears that direct bu instruction may benefit learners who need to identify such details, whether on listening assessments or potentially during interpersonal communication. such merits would not be limited to university efl learners such as those in this study but could also extend to other educational contexts, including secondary school and/or compulsory l2 education. for example, given the interactive characteristics of several of these activities (e.g., physically counting words on one’s fingers, seeing visual representations of spoken language, being prompted to predict upcoming words, comparing one’s own written work or guesses with classmates), they may be particularly useful with younger learners or those who learn through active participation. while listening may be perceived as an individual, isolated, or passive portion of language classes, the straightforward activities described here can trigger an active and inquisitive atmosphere during listening instruction. based on this classroom-based research, we would tentatively argue that teachers can incorporate activities for aural bu processing that address the “how to” element of listening. the six activities discussed in this article are applicable to any listening text, from textbooks to semiauthentic materials to content aimed at native-level listeners. furthermore, since these listening exercises are focused on the phoneme, parsing, and chunking levels, they are achievable for a range of proficiency levels, meaning the task expectations can be adjusted to give confidence to lower level learners and to challenge more advanced students. they also stimulate conversations about what learners believe they heard and provide opportunities for learners to discuss among themselves and with teachers their listening successes and challenges, which gives rise to valuable classroom dialogues linking to portions of vandergrift and goh’s (2012) metacognitive pedagogic sequence. getting to the bottom of l2 listening instruction: making a case for bottom-up activities 657 7. conclusion this paper described the use of a set of six bu activities from an empirical perspective and through student perceptions. results showed that the tg outperformed the cg on both the dictation test and the casec listening test. thus, the null hypotheses was rejected for rqs 1 and 2. findings from the survey addressed rq 3, indicating positive learner perceptions of explicit bu listening practice. viewed as a whole, these results indicate that, even for the courses more concerned with global understanding and meaning-based aural comprehension, class work targeting phoneme, word, and chunk-level processing can be advantageous and provide a valuable supplement to other types of listening practice. findings from the present study correspond to those found in the initial research phase (siegel & siegel, 2013) in that dictation scores improved and survey results about the bu activities were positive. the present second phase of the study provided more insights by including a listening proficiency test and a contrast group, both of which highlighted gains made by learners in the tg. despite these positive findings, a number of weaknesses of the research must be acknowledged. first, the six bu activities were used as a collective set. this was done in order to address different levels of bu processing, such as phoneme recognition, lexical segmentation, and chunking, and to meet practical needs of class planning and delivery. however, due to this pedagogic decision, it was not possible to determine whether one particular activity is more beneficial than another. future research may seek to focus specifically on individual bu activities to determine their merits. in addition, the short transcription activity may have affected the dictation test (though not the casec listening test) results through task familiarity. either eliminating this activity or choosing an alternative evaluation method may improve future research. thirdly, the research design did not strictly control for the listening component of the cg classes. therefore, some activities and instruction experienced by the cg may have overlapped with the bu exercises used with the tg. to better account for classroom and teacher variables, similar research may be conducted with the same teacher planning and teaching both a cg and a tg. this design was not possible in the present research due to teaching assignments but would be an improvement in research design. given the lenient research design and the limited sample size of the participant groups in this classroom-based research, the impact of the study should be taken as suggestive rather than definitive. however, based on the increasing test results, the positive learner feedback, and our own pedagogic experiences, we believe the exercises presented in this paper should be added to other approaches (i.e., tdor strategically-oriented) in order to provide more holistic, balanced, and integrated listening instruction (e.g., joseph siegel, aki siegel 658 yeldham & gruba, 2014). still, even authors who promote a bu view of listening instruction (e.g., goh, 2008; vandergrift & goh, 2012) are aware of potential caveats, which teachers and researchers should consider. according to goh (2008), when focusing on discrete phonemes, words, word combinations, or sentences, there is a danger of decontextualizing learning. furthermore, vandergrift and goh (2012) point out that a lack of contextual support during listening can disadvantage learners. a third caveat comes from bu activities such as dictation, which may place equal prominence on each word and encourage word for word processing (vandergrift & goh, 2012), neither of which are characteristic of listening in the real world. while there are some words of caution to heed, bu activities may be advantageous, yet currently underrepresented, in today’s l2 classrooms. the purpose of this study has been to determine whether bu activities promoted in the literature are effective and viable for the l2 classroom. findings from dictation tests, a listening proficiency test, and a posttreatment survey suggest that they are, and that teachers aiming to help their students develop listening comprehension skills can do so by incorporating a variety of listening practice, including the bu activities described here along with more global listening exercises (already in regular use in many contexts) such as identifying main ideas, understanding speech as it relates to context, and utilizing background knowledge to facilitate comprehension. therefore, we would tentatively argue for the incorporation of bu activities in conjunction with other pedagogic approaches to help learners feel that they have some command over rapidly incoming input, which they often feel is beyond their control. by isolating parts of the speech stream, learners can begin to see how the aural l2 can be managed systematically. while this study included only a selection of possible exercises to address bu processing, many other activities may prove equally or more valuable. it is hoped that this paper promotes additional descriptions of and investigations into l2 listening pedagogy. getting to the bottom of l2 listening instruction: making a case for bottom-up activities 659 references al-jasser, f. 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(2014). toward an instructional approach to developing interactive second language listening. language teaching research, 18, 33-53. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1362168813505395 getting to the bottom of l2 listening instruction: making a case for bottom-up activities 661 appendix a summary of recent bu intervention studies study aim research design experimental bu processing treatment al-jasser (2008) to investigate the effect of english phonotactic instruction on lexical segmentation pretest-treatment-posttest 1. use of top-up listening 3 textbook with listening clinic sections 2. assigned transcription tasks 3. explanation and memorization of consonant cluster patterns 4. focus on illegal clusters 5. recognize and indicate illegal clusters yeldham and gruba (2014) to detail bu processing development of six learners longitudinal multi-case studies 1. identify aspects of reduced/connected speech through transcription exercises 2. lexical segmentation practice, particularly for parsing difficulties common to chinese learners of english 3. recognize intonational cues joseph siegel, aki siegel 662 appendix b dictation transcript every day, i wake up at about 6 in the morning. i usually have coffee and toast for breakfast. i watch the news on tv a little and go to school. i use the train every day. i don’t like taking the train. it takes about 90 minutes to get there. at school, i have lots of fun with my classmates, but our teacher gives us so much homework. yesterday, i studied for 2 hours and i still wasn’t finished. i hope the teacher doesn’t get angry at me. tonight, i’m going to work hard and finish my english report.